Notes on the Chinese Modernism-Realism Debates

NOTES ON THE CIDNESE MODERNISM-REALISM DEBATES Wendy Larson University of Oregon The forms and techniques of western literary modernism came into Chinese intellectual culture during three main periods.! The first was in the 1920s and 1930s, when Li Jinfa, Liang Zongdai, Dai Wangshu, and others utilized the techniques of symbolist poetry to create a new Chinese poetry and some modernist western literature was translated in the journal Xiandai [Les Contemporaires]? The second was from the 1950s through the 1970s in Taiwan, when poets such as Yu Guangzhong and Wai-lim Yip wrote "modernist" style poetry, a group of students in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University began to introduce western modernist literature and theory through translations in their journal Xiandai wenxue [Modem literature], and eventually writers began using modernist techniques in novels. The third was in the immediate post-Mao period in China, when poets such as Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, and Shu Ting wrote "modernist" poetry and fiction writers such as Wang Meng, Zhang Xinxin, and others used modernist techniques in their stories and novels; these literary experiments were roundly criticized in the 1983 Anti- "Spiritual Pollution" Campaign. There are obvious difficulties in constructing a theory of Chinese modernism (xiandaipai wenxue or xiandaizhuyi wenxue) by investigating these three periods 1 My thanks to the Center for Chinese Studies at the Central Library and the Pacific Cultural Foundation, both in Taipei, for their support in this research. I would also like to thank the Oregon Committee for the Humanities for their support in the form of a summer research stipend in 1990. By form and technique, I refer mainly to emphasis on the psychological state of a character or narrator's mind, fragmented stories or plots and deemphasis of story or plot, dislocated temporal schemes, lack of reference to native literary forms, and deliberate attempts at producing an effect of estrangement or alienation. 2 In a dissertation on the early symbolist movement, Harry A. Kaplan denies that the writers working in the 1920s can be considered modernist, and locates the Chinese modernist movement with Dai Wangshu in the 1930s. See The Symbolist Movement in Modern Chinese Poetry, Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge: Harvard University, 1983, Chapter Five. CIllNOPERL Papers No. 20-22 (1997-99)© 1999 by the Conference on Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. CHINOPERL Papers No. 20-22 as somehow integrally linked. The historical and cultural issues that promoted the development of modernist techniques are radically different in all three cases, and while the language and culture involved are always Chinese, even these differ greatly from time to time and place to place. In the 1920s, Li Jinfa and Liang Zongdai must be regarded as working in relation to the May Fourth Movement and its literary and political debates, and in the 1930s Dai Wangshu's theories and work cannot be divorced from the politicized intellectual context of the Japanese invasion and developing ideas of socialist and nationalist literature. In 1983, the experience of writers during the Cultural Revolution and their interpretations of socialist literary policies, as well as the general critique of excessive leftism provided the background from which they created their modernist approach. In Taiwan throughout the contemporary period, the American support that sustained Taiwan's military stance and assisted its economic reconstruction was accompanied by a planned influx of cultural modes and ideas and increased exchange of students, faculty, and other personnel; this "cultural imperialism," along with new relations with the colonial occupier and Japan, formed the political environment that preceded the 1977 debate over xiangtu [regional] and modernist literature. However, considering how different the three situations are, it is even more striking how revealing the similarities between these three periods are in showing how issues concerning the formal elements of modernism became part of a local debate with global implications. The use of modernist techniques and their identification as modern is part of a general social construction of modernity in which this literature cum theory participate. Modernism in the west as a cause or effect of the rise of capitalism, science, and industry has been widely debated, as have consciousness-changing forms, institutions, and instruments of the times such as the modem...