Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-century China (review)

Unlike many dissertation-based books, which are customarily focused on a specific subject, this work is ambitious in both its scope and argumentation. As far as the coverage is concerned, it deals with not only literary writings, but also films and dramas in twentieth-century China. It hopes to offer a cross section of samplings of "modern Chinese literature," since, according to conventional wisdom, Chinese literary practice became "modern" only in the early days of the last century. However, the author, Yomi Braester, does not want to simply offer another modern Chinese literature survey; as indicated by its title, he hopes to discuss the "public discourse" in the period, although what he includes is no more than literary reviews. A more important and interesting goal the author wants to pursue with this book is something paradoxical; he discusses the ebb and flow of modern Chinese literature in the twentieth century, but his real intention is to question the very attribute many of his predecessors in the field assigned to these works, namely their "modern" characteristics. While in a different field, the author's intention is similar to that of Prasenjit Duara, a historian whom he mentions in the introduction, when the latter wrote the now well known Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (1995). They have both worked on the "modernization" of Chinese culture, including, of course, history and literature, but what they hope to accomplish is to interrogate and challenge the nature of this transformation. In his preface, Braester acknowledges that "it is with some irony that I set out to write the history of a literary corpus that questions historical narratives" (xii).

There seem to be ample reasons for the author to do so. Existing scholarship on modern Chinese literature, especially that of the PRC over the past few decades, has displayed a clear overtone that values the reflection of social reality and progress in the literary works; or in the author's word, how literary writings bear "witness for history." Entitling his book as "witness against history," Braester intends to discover and offer a different reading of the many important works in twentieth-century China that have been hitherto characterized by and large as mere mirrors and windows, or historical records disguised in literary form, for the social change the country witnessed in search for its modernity. Modernization in China, as anywhere else, began with the establishment of a nation-state based on the rising tide of nationalism at the turn of the early twentieth century, and was a major impetus for literary production. Whether all literary works produced in the century have comported with this seemingly dominant mode of thinking remains debatable. In C. T. Hsia's now classic History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961), we encountered many valuable works—ranging from the poems of the New Moon School (Xinyue) in mid 1920s Beijing, to Eileen Chang's sentimental and sensational stories in late 1930s Shanghai—that defied the nationalistic characterization. In writing this book, Braester attempts to go further; he hopes to call attention to the "strong anational consciousness" in the supposedly "nationalistic" works (18), because "many of these texts question their own capacity to change the nation's fate," hence becoming "a dysfunctional discourse" (x). Thus, at the outset of this book, the author deliberately chooses to question the image of Lu Xun as the father of modern Chinese (nationalistic) literature. In unfolding his critical narrative, he proceeds to select a few other works that were considered in the past as testimonies to the social changes in different historical periods, from the post-May Fourth era to the fin de siècle, or the post-Mao and post-Deng times, and casts them in a different light from their readily perceived status in modern Chinese literature.

This is a worthwhile and challenging task, whose completion probably will require more than a single volume. Yet...