The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity

4. Enjoying: Essays of the Analects Group

        Enjoying Essays of the Analects Group 103 This word “humor” has over ten different definitions in the dictionary. Let’s put the dictionary down and just chat about it. —Lao She,“Discussion of Humor,” Cosmic Wind The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected. —William Makepeace Thackeray, Sketches and Travels in London During the 1920s, when the White Horse Lake group were first writing essays and applying principles they had developed to compositional instruction, and Threads of Conversation was virtually the only publication devoted to literary prose, essayists in China were not generally considered as belonging to different schools. The achievements of the genre were credited to all those who made an impact through their essays in the early years of the development of New Literature. Hu Shi, Bing Xin, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Yu Pingbo, Zhu Ziqing, Xia Mianzun, and Liu Bannong—writers from across the political and literary spectrum—were heralded as influential practitioners of a form that had made perhaps the most impressive strides of any modern genre in the first decade after the May Fourth movement. Though Zhou Zuoren was already under attack in the late 1920s for his relatively extreme position of social and historical disengagement , and readers and critics began to perceive differences between individual writers in style and mode, these writers were all widely read and had no reason to suppose their relationship with one another or anyone else was adversarial . This spirit of unity in diversity was particularly evident in Threads of Conversation, as we have seen. However, the departure of many progres- sive intellectuals from Beijing in 1927 to escape political persecution, the Nationalist Party’s purge of Communists in the same year, the dissolution of virtually all leftist literary organizations and publications, the resulting fragmentation of the literary scene, and subsequent recuperation of literary leftism under the League of Leftwing Writers from 1930, cumulatively had the effect of isolating and stigmatizing certain kinds of essay writing. This led to a state of affairs in which groups and styles of essayists became more aware of themselves and their differences from others. Whatever their position in the literary field, editors, critics, and members of these groups increasingly defined themselves in contrast to others. Zhou Zuoren, beyond the salon of friends he had about him in the 1920s, drew an increasing cohort of adherents among the younger generation, and so in the early 1930s one could begin to conceive of Zhou’s “mild” (pingdan) mode of essay writing as a modern tradition one could adhere to or resist. The 1930s, moreover, was a heyday for the publishing industry. The variety and quality of literary publications greatly increased over those of the 1920s and, for some, magazines continued to be a way to define an aesthetic or get a message across, while for others, literary magazines became more diverse and professionalized than ever before. Lin Yutang and His Magazines Lin Yutang is one of those modern cultural figures who had a specific cultural agenda and was able to see it through largely through publishing enterprises . As Qian Suoqiao’s dissertation on the Analects group shows, Lin Yutang’s project, broadly speaking a liberal humanist one, began in the English -language magazine The China Critic (1928–1945), and in particular his column “The Little Critic,” which was later published in a series of books under the same title.1 Broadly speaking, Lin Yutang can be identified with what in English-language scholarship is called the Anglo-American group, in which Hu Shi was a central figure.2 The complexity of his connections can be gathered from the following quotation from an unpublished article by Qian Suoqiao: Because of his connection with Yusi members in the 1920s in Beijing, Lin was able to invite these old friends to contribute to his new journals. These include Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Yu Dafu, [Sun] Fuyuan, and so on. One of the most frequent contributors at this time was Zhou Zuoren, accompanied by his socalled Jingpai (Beijing School) group of writers. On the other hand, as a 104 Chapter 4 St. John’s graduate and with an MA from Harvard and PhD from Leipzig, Lin had wide connections with a group of Western-trained elites in Shanghai at this time...