The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis by David Der-wei Wang (review)

In the winter of 1949, Hu Feng, one of the most acclaimed literary critics of the time, wrote a poem titled “Time Has Begun.” The reorientation of temporality reveals a messianic strain culminating in the birth of the new socialist regime. The content and form of this lyrical subjectivity speak to an “epic” era that is determined to build the future upon “the ruins of time.” The paradox is that the aspiring, dynamic, and grand narrative of socialist revolution involuntarily conjures up the extraordinary work of Chinese lyrical tradition at its most intense. David Der-wei Wang, professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University, attempts to illuminate the double bind of the lyrical through a comprehensive review of Sinophone literary and cultural productions during the political upheavals of the mid-20^th century.

Wang defines lyricism as “a poetics of selfhood that informs the historical moment and helps define Chinese modernity in a different light.” This definition derives from two different but not totally unrelated intellectual trajectories: contemporary Western theoretical interventions into the problem of modernity and modern Chinese contemplation on shuqing (), with both genealogical dimensions traceable to ancient time. On the one hand, Western literary theorists, including Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man, and Walter Benjamin, all “took up lyricism as a way to critique the perilous, epic time”; on the other hand, modern Chinese intellectual thinking, ranging from Chen Shih-hsing’s “lyrical tradition” to Li Zehou’s “lyrical ontology” ( qing-benti) and Shen Congwen’s “lyrical archeology” ( shuqing kaoguxue), ruminates on the problem of selfhood and artistic expressions in the time of Chinese national crisis.

Moreover, Wang uses this critical lyricism to question the dominant narrative of 20^th-century Chinese modernity emblematized by “revolution” and “enlightenment.” Current paradigms of Chinese literary discourse, from the May Fourth Movement to the postsocialist revolution, betray a fascination with macroscopic imageries, sublime subjects, and epic representations, all of which are motivated by a strong sense of political urgency. In the shadow of this epic grandeur, the lyrical seems to be “too weak and trivial to carry the weight of modernity’s demands.” Wang contends this view by arguing for a more nuanced understanding concerning the relation between “the lyrical” and “the epic” in Chinese modernity. He examines the intellectual trajectory of the renowned contemporary Chinese thinker Li Zehou to illustrate this point. Li Zehou’s pathbreaking essay on the interplay between “enlightenment” ( qimeng) and “national salvation” ( jiuwang) has been regarded as the zeitgeist of the postsocialist era. The 1980s intellectual politics sought to disarticulate itself from the political imperative of Maoism through a prioritization of “enlightenment” over “national salvation.” However, Wang contends that such epic impulse of political intervention tends to result in an introverted tendency, in which the grand narrative of political revolution persists in postsocialist subjectivity. In order to avoid this “involution,” Wang draws us to another dimension of Li Zehou’s thought: “affective and aesthetic sensibilities,” which serve as “a complement to and critique of the causes and consequences of enlightenment and revolution.” Instead of regarding Li’s emotive turn as a political ennui, Wang views it as a philosophical as well as historical development originating from Li’s stance in the “Great Debate over Aesthetics” with Zhu Guangqian and Cai Yi in the late 1950s. Thus, It is tempting to further argue that Li’s turn from politics into aesthetics reflects the intensification of Chinese modernity in the shifting practice from transforming exteriority (nation-building) into reengineering interiority (emotive subject formation).

After a theoretical discussion of lyricism, Wang turns to in-depth case studies on those artists and intellectuals who nevertheless speak out, with varying political beliefs and aesthetic tastes, on the impact of national crisis on lyrical selfhood. Drawing on examples in novels, poetry, music, film, painting, and calligraphy, Wang presents an extravaganza of lyrical heteroglossia...