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Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-2597-0
Chapter One
Narrative Subjectivity and the Production of Social Space in Chinese Reportage Charles A. Laughlin
In a little-discussed 1932 work titled "Eventful Autumn" ("Duo shi zhi qiu"), Ding Ling illustrates the reaction of the people of Shanghai to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September of 1931. The text opens, as many Chinese short stories and novels of the time do, with a bustling city scene described with a rich palette of sounds, colors, and movements and observed from the midst of the action. The scene envisioned is a large intersection on Shanghai's main commercial artery, Nanjing Road, from the point of view of the narrator on an approaching trolley.
The trolleys' rumble mixed with the screeching of their wheels in the steel tracks, with a constant bell ringing on top of that, in the noisy clamor of the city, from the Jing'an Temple to Kade Road, the racetrack, finally coming to a rest on a wide avenue in front of Sincere Department store in the midst of a million even noisier city sounds converging. On the trolley platform countless people came forth, extending thin, blackened hands, and waving, calling out, wildly yelling unclear words, the sounds spewing forth from their dried throats wereshattered into pieces in the clamorous sea of sounds, while in their other hand they held piles of newspapers and extra editions, sheets of paper flew up in all directions. They flew into the hands of some people standing nearby, then flew on to other places. (Autumn, 84-85)
As the opening paragraphs continue to describe the passage of the news of Manchuria's loss from extra editions of the newspaper into the hearts and minds of the bustling throngs and their confused collective reactions to the news, the reader begins to realize that no central characters will emerge and that the work, in fact, does not appear to be a short story at all.
The work's relative obscurity may have to do with the fact that it is baogao wenxue (reportage literature), a genre whose existence in China before 1949 has only been mentioned in an offhand manner in English-language studies. Baogao wenxue, a translation of the French word reportage as adopted by the German proletarian literary movement, refers to consciously literary texts that narrate "real people and real events" (zhenren zhenshi) with a view to documenting social problems and momentous historical changes. Since the 1920s, reportage played a role in the international proletarian literary movement as a means of bringing intellectuals and the masses together through the investigation and documentary depiction of poverty and industrial working conditions. Reportage was thus introduced into China around 1930 via Japanese promoters of proletarian literature. Ding Ling was a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers from its inception, and her literary activities until her arrest in 1933 demonstrate enthusiastic identification with the goals and artistic premises of the proletarian literary movement.
"Eventful Autumn" is comprised of six sections, narrating a series of highly localized incidents that occur on the streets of Shanghai over a two- or three-week period after the fall of Manchuria. The incidents themselves are not causally related to one another but attain unity in historical and social themes that arise through their narration and the comments of dozens of anonymous persons involved in or observing these incidents. The four principal events-students' organization of speechmaking teams to indoctrinate the city crowds throughout Shanghai; the spontaneous overthrow of a government-organized municipal rally by workers; a mass exodus of students to Nanjing to petition the government to declare war; and a police chief (You Bolu) ordering his men to open fire on an unruly crowd, killing many-exemplify in embryo characteristics of many different types of reportage that emerged and developed throughout the 1930s and 1940s. After using these incidents to illustrate how spontaneous, collective attempts to respond to the Japanese invasion are thwarted by the government and indirectly by the Japanese, leading even to bloodshed and tragedy, "Eventful Autumn" closes pessimistically as the patriotic energy that had been released in the schools and on the streets is co-opted and absorbed by government-organized, pseudomilitary training programs.
One reason for the inattention to "Eventful Autumn," and reportage literature in general, is that it does not fit into the literary aesthetic we commonly bring to our reading of modern Chinese literature. It has been observed that modern Chinese narrative art is dominated by a discourse of realism adopted uneasily from European fiction. However, if formal realism is limited from the point of view of Chinese writers and critics because of its social neutrality, is this apparent neutrality not in itself ideological? Marston Anderson's study of modern Chinese "realism" reveals aspects of modern Chinese fiction that do not fit into the familiar realist paradigm, but it does not call our reading strategies themselves into question. If we understand fictional realism as a product of an Enlightenment confidence in the know ability and linguistic expressibility of the world and of human experience, realism should also be fundamentally complicit with that unassailable cornerstone of Enlightenment ideology, individualism.
Reportage literature, on the other hand, presupposes a critique of the principles that underlie standards for literature prevalent in capitalist countries since the industrial revolution. By virtue of its point of view, "Eventful Autumn" can be viewed as a conscious critique of individualism. Calling this alternative worldview "Marxist" might create the impression that it is produced by and under the control of Communist critics and theorists alone. In fact, it extends well beyond the activities and social networks we usually call "leftist circles." The critique of individualism finds partial expression in the theoretical works of Marxist literary critics, but it is also manifested in the literary works of socially involved writers with a variety of political persuasions. It was an aspect of the general intellectual context of Chinese culture of the 1930s that was much more prominent and prevalent than we usually acknowledge. Moreover, I am not treating the literary critique of individualism here as an articulated theory but rather as an ill-defined set of subject positions that underlay Chinese literary practice in the 1930s.
The method of reading I propose here attempts to do justice to the worldview from which "Eventful Autumn" is written by placing what appear to be two incompatible forms of subjectivity-the individualist rhetoric of interiority and the collectivist rhetoric of exteriority-on equal footing as alternative literary constructions of social space. The individual subject position expressed through interiority in literature already constitutes a form of literary space because its elaboration (beyond the level of internal dialogue) relies almost exclusively on spatial metaphors. Reportage works from these early years almost by definition do not elaborate interiority, yet they may be more "subjective" in that the author projects his or her emotions on the landscapes and events depicted. This is another approach to the elaboration of literary space, only it is no longer interior, no longer private, and as a result, I argue, no longer "universal" or "objective" in the sense these words are understood from the perspective of individualism.
There are, in fact, at least three standards working together in conventional readings of modern Chinese fiction: that "good," "progressive" literature supports individualist values, that strict opposition between subjective and objective is employed, and that the subjective is identified with the interior, that the individual as situated as literature's proper subject. From the individualist point of view, a work like "Eventful Autumn" is read not as literature but as a factual, documentary form of narrative. As a result, any emotionally charged or judgmental content (that would not draw attention in a work of fiction) is viewed as a flaw in a work that is supposed to be objective. "Eventful Autumn" was written at a time and place in which the very idea of what is literary was in flux, and reportage, with its claim to veracity and conspicuous unconcern with aesthetics, posed a particular challenge to prevailing notions of the literary.
Unlike those who make utilitarian apologies for socialist literature, attempting to excuse its poor artistic quality, I would prefer to view such works as embodying in their very modes of expression a critique of what their writers considered bourgeois ideology (individualism) in literature. It has been noted that the material and social condition of modernity in China never led, as in European modernism, to the artistic expression of alienation toward the modern, but rather to unbridled enthusiasm for it and an all-out critique of tradition. Apt as this observation is, it overlooks what perhaps is China's principal contribution to the artistic response to modernity: modern Chinese writers' construction of alternatives to individual subjectivity, perceptual centers that are not anchored in an individual person but exist in relation to groups engaged in public events and are explicitly situated in a particular physical environment. Certainly many writers wished to write in a European-style modernist mode and identified with individualism in literature, but this was only one among many alternatives, and we tend to assume erroneously that it must have been the most reasonable and progressive form of identity and creative intervention available at the time.
The Limits of Individualism
The most influential approaches to modern Chinese literary studies in Europe and North America fall into two main categories. The first views modern Chinese writing as a passive reaction to superior Western models; critics and historians of this category identify with the cultural goals of the liberal humanist camp of the May Fourth generation and view later developments through the lens of their values. In the second category, the primary motivation for the study of modern Chinese literature seems to be to examine and describe the ways in which creative minds are suppressed in China and to champion figures who resist such suppression. What both these approaches have in common is the individualist assumption that the self-realization of the individual subject is the ultimate focus of political and artistic endeavors.
Zhou Zuoren is often identified with "humanism" because of his famous article "Humane Literature" ("Ren dewenxue"), but on close inspection, humanism seems less important to him than individualism. In fact, what Zhou Zuoren promoted throughout his career was the literature of the individual, indifferent to saving the world, more attracted to "interesting" than "important" topics. The fusion of the individual with the human and the universalization of the individual's experience are the ideological gestures of the European Enlightenment, and Zhou Zuoren, along with Hu Shi (whose article on "Ibsenism" also promoted individualism), were perhaps the Enlightenment's most enthusiastic students in China. This legacy has not left us either; most humanists now would agree that universal values are the most important and that they should be centered upon the "natural rights" and desires of the individual.
But when we look at modern Chinese culture, it is not fair to uncritically identify humanism with individualism. The leftist critique of individualism also identifies with the humanist ideals of overcoming the spiritual dictatorships of religion and superstition, affirming the dignity of human life and faith in human progress. The individual is not natural or given, Marx and his followers say, but the instrument of bourgeois hegemony. The bourgeois use individualism not only to overthrow the aristocracy but to consolidate and strengthen their own dominance by concealing the historicity of their own values and the conflicts among classes in capitalist society. The Marxist critique of the Enlightenment (and, by extension, May Fourth liberal humanism) involves a redefinition of humanism, one that puts groups (the working class, minorities, women) rather than the individual at the center of attention. While Chinese writers may not have always been consciously concerned with critiquing the Enlightenment, their literary works often reveal a profound ambivalence about and even rejection of individualist values.
The view that the exploration of the individual soul is the proper trajectory of literature (particularly fiction) has contributed to the common perception of modern Chinese literature's inferiority, and particularly our puzzlement over the motivations behind Chinese leftist culture and its prominence in the 1930s. Despite the centrality of the individual personality within it, realism seems to demand "objectivity" from literary art as well: artistic exploration of the human and the social are only legitimate as far as they are dispassionate. But socially oriented Chinese writers rarely seek to be dispassionate or unbiased in their depiction of historical experience; this is most obvious in the case of reportage, which is supposed to depict actual people and events. More importantly, writers of such works do not locate the self in the individual ego but in the complex development of social events and human relationships. Since leftist fiction and reportage literature often tend toward the depiction of public historical experience from a deliberately emotional and subjective perspective, an individualist critic can perceive them only as immature and lacking in technical control.
Collective Identity in "Eventful Autumn"
What I am trying to circumvent here is neither the independence and autonomy of individual persons nor the assertion of individuality in society and art. What I refer to here as individualism is rather the raising of the private individual to the pinnacle of moral, political, and literary importance, his or her spiritual opposition to society, and the timeless universalization of the symbols, agonies, and ecstasies of his or her private world. Approaches to literature that are based on individualism require that a limited number of characters fill the narrative with their vivid personalities. Such characters must be "filled out" or "three-dimensional," which means that in addition to being behaviorally complex, they must be self-sufficient worlds unto themselves.
In "Eventful Autumn," however, even when characters are named, as occurs in the beginning of the student organization episode in section 2, they are not central to the narrated incidents. In fact, individual persons do not occupy the narrative spotlight even anonymously. Rather, the incidents are constructed of fragments of persons-voices, hands, collective movements-animated within specific scenes or environments that are brought together through the observing and participating consciousness of a narrator who herself is defined much less as an individual person than in terms of identification with a particular group (students and activist intellectuals) as a group.
The crowd began to thicken, most of them unschooled laborers and poor people, and children were also among them with wide open, curious eyes. They were all moved by these youthful, uncommonly pure, exuberantly patriotic hearts; limitless words and sentences, each word full of sincerity and excitement, becoming whole speeches, becoming forceful whips which fell upon the shoulders of the crowd, becoming fresh red blood raining down upon the hearts of the crowd. They wanted to cry out, they wouldn't leave, they wanted to hear more, know more. (Autumn, 89-90)
Moreover, the narrative focus is not limited exclusively to the actions of persons, even in groups. One of the most striking aspects of Ding Ling's text is its attention to the ways in which communications and transportation technology become extensions of human consciousness, particularly at times of historical crisis when such technology becomes essential to the achievement of goals of social intervention. "Eventful Autumn" opens dramatizing the process of distributing extra editions:
Countless hands also extended from the open windows of the trolley, and sheets of paper also found their way there. The trolley pulled away, and another pulled up. The paper unfolded in thousands, tens of thousands of hands, and the airplanes and mortars of Japanese Imperialism in Shenyang, the weeping under the slaughter of artillery fire far away in the Northeast was brought before our eyes and settled into our hearts. Once settled in the heart, the news exploded and everyone leapt to their feet, making a greater sound wave in the midst of all the noise, so that the sound of the frightening news and reactions to it were spreading in all directions. (Autumn, 85)
(Continues...)
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