Organizer: David Der wei Wang, Columbia University
Chair: Joseph S. M. Lau, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Howard Goldblatt, University of Colorado, Boulder
This proposed panel aims to investigate one of the less studied aspects of modern Chinese cultural history, the dialectic of revolution and decadence, and its literary manifestation. By looking into exemplary writings from four historical moments, the eve of the Republican Revolution, the Northern Expedition, the Communist seizure of mainland China, and the post Cultural Revolution decade, the panel will hypothesize that revolution and decadence form a unique discourse in modern Chinese literature, one that has underlined, and sometimes even contributed to, literature's formal, thematic, and ideological volatility.
In 1902, Liang Qichao advocated "new fiction" as the literary genre that would help renew the Chinese nation. Liang's trumpet call reverberated among the writers of the May Fourth era and the following years of the twentieth century. The close tie between revolution and literature both defined and was defined by the movements from the Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature, and to the Cultural Revolution.
This prominent discourse of revolution, however, is underlain by a discourse of decadence, one that has been overlooked by scholars, for various reasons. The discourse manifests itself in late Qing depravity fiction, in post-May Fourth romantic writings, in Neo Impressionism, and in Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction. More intriguing, it is ascribed to political and non political writings deemed subversive to the safety of some regime. Decadence versus revolution surfaces as decay versus reform, illicitness versus legitimacy, reaction versus progress.
But twentieth century Chinese (literary) history has shown us a more complex picture. While "a call to arms" that aims to rejuvenate China's political and poetic vitality may end in a corrupt struggle costing thousands of lives, a "symptom of degradation" that has no pretension of political and poetic significance may contain the seeds of real modernity. Just as "revolution" can describe both a progressive and a repetitive, circular movement, so "decadence" can mean both the "falling apart" of an established order and the "falling together" of things now torn out of their traditional contexts.
Revolution and decadence may undercut, supplement, and even secretly usurp each other's territories; here arise some of the most crucial dialogues in writers' pursuit of literary and political modernity. The four papers of the proposed panel will describe four such dialogues.
David Der wei Wang's paper will lay out the theoretical and historical circumstances from which the modern Chinese discourse of decadence and revolution arose. By examining the late Qing myths about Sai Jinhua, the legendary courtesan who allegedly changed China's history through her sexual adventures, he will analyze the ironic terms by which an old fashioned demimondaine was transformed into a new national heroine, and speculate on the rise of a new type of Chinese femme fatale along with the rise of the Republican Revolution.
Hsiao yen Peng's paper will discuss the sexual aesthetics and politics of the notorious Dr. Sex, Zhang Jingsheng, against the background of the Northern Expedition and the First Chinese Communist Revolution in the late twenties. With newly discovered first hand material, she will inquire into the fact that, while political revolutions were carrying on in the Chinese public space, a more radical sexual reform had already taken place in the Chinese private space. This "body" revolution, however, has been recognized only in negative terms.
Karen Kingsbury will pair off two of the most controversial modern Chinese women writers, Ding Ling and Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), and examine their transformations after the Chinese Communist takeover of mainland China. The early fifties saw Ding Ling re emerge to the prominent position as a most progressive revolutionary writer, only to fall even deeper in a few years as a most decadent anti-revolutionary writer. In the meantime, Eileen Chang wrote two anti-Communist fictions after she escaped from Shanghai, where she once was the princess of a (pre)mature fin-de-siècle cult.
Sabina Knight will look into the renewed dialectic of decadence and revolution in Chinese literature after the Cultural Revolution. Her focus is Su Tong, the talented writer who has fascinated and scandalized Chinese readers with a series of writings on sexual liaison, familial intrigues, and political conspiracies, all taking place in the remote revolutionary days from the twenties to the fifties. Mixing nostalgic lyricism with political parody, Su Tong's writings have driven home the ambiguities and ambivalence that inform the century long dialectic between decadence and revolution.
The panel chairperson will be Professor Joseph S. M. Lau of University of Wisconsin at Madison (Visiting Professor of Lingnan College of Hong Kong, 1994-1996); the panel discussant will be Professor Howard Goldblatt of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
David Der wei Wang, Columbia University
This paper deals with the dialectic of revolution and decadence as manifested in two late Qing novels, A Flower in the Sea of Sins (Niehai hua, 1907) by Zeng Pu (1872-1935), and the less well known Nine Tailed Tortoise (Jiuwei gui, 1910) by Zhang Chunfan (?-1935). The case in point is the formation of the myth of Sai Jinhua (1874-1936), the legendary courtesan who allegedly changed China's fate during the Boxer Rebellion through her liaison with the German marshal field Count Waldersee (1832-1904), who was in command of the allied occupying forces in Beijing. Zeng Pu's novel is known for its revolutionary tenor, while Zhang Chunfan's best represents the decadent trend of late Qing ''depravity fiction." Through narrating the legend of Sai Jinhua, the two writers develop an important dialogue about the politics of eros and the erotics of polis.
Zeng Pu uses Sai Jinhua's romantic adventures as a pivot of his novel about late Qing political upheavals. Sai Jinhua is described both as a femme fatale who "flirts" her way through the moral and political downfall of the Qing empire, and as a revered lady who turned the country's fate at the last minute. By making a notorious woman the center of his historical novel, Zeng Pu has subserved a revolutionary poetics. Sai Jinhua is a decadent, promiscuous woman. But who else is better qualified for ushering us into a world in which corruption and decadence prevail as normalcy, in which people meet and part, in a promiscuous mingling of groups, trades, professions, classes?
Zhang Chunfan's narrative about Sai Jinhua starts with Sai's return to her old profession as prostitute after the Boxer Rebellion. An aging woman, Sai Jinhua could draw clients not by recycling her body but by recycling her story of how she had lent her body to the cause of national salvation. In less than a decade, the national disaster that almost brought down an empire has degraded into a series of erotic anecdotes to be consumed in bed. Sai Jinhua's body has lost the magical power that permeates the world of A Flower in the Sea of Sins; it has become at best a corporeal monument that informs Chinese men's impotence and inertia. For all his intent to avoid "serious" subjects, Zhang Chunfan's novel inscribes history as a decadent force in Sai Jinhua's retelling of her story.
With her mercurial adaptability and inexhaustible energy, however, Sai Jinhua releases forces which run beyond the two male authors' presumably omnipotent control. She could appear to be a formidable character, threatening to laugh away not only the old moral/political canons but also the new, "revolutionary" ones yet to be established. It is in this sense that the legend of Sai Jinhua anticipates the rise of a new type of Chinese femme fatale along with the rise of the Republican Revolution in 1911.
Hsiao yen Peng, Academia Sinica, Taipei
It is common knowledge that in modern times the utopian yearning for a "new China" often took shape in violent forms: the Republican revolution that overthrew centuries of the "feudal" system; the Communist revolution that shattered the "bourgeois" foundation; and the Cultural Revolution that eliminated, in a literal as well as a cultural sense, the "elite" class. On the other hand another kind of revolution, without bloodshed and yet often dismissed as "breaching custom and decorum," has probably affected personal lives and thinking in an equally, if not more, drastic way. Since the late Qing, when the women's liberation movement became part of the nation building agenda, the way had long been paved for the sexual revolution triggered by Zhang Jingsheng (1888-1970), nicknamed "Dr. Sex," during the twenties in China. Besides his utopian works about a "society of beauty" based on sexual aesthetics and division of labor, he published Sex Histories (1926) and six issues of The New Culture (Jan.-June 1927). Though targets of censorship, they enjoyed a wide circulation because of their detailed treatment of taboo subject matter: the liberation of female sexuality. An aborted attempt perhaps, this "revolution" certainly played an important role in shaping the sexual discourse in literature as well as cultural context at the time.
Zhang's sexual utopia as mapped out in An Outlook on a Life of Beauty (1925) and The Organization of a Society of Beauty (1925), though no doubt developed in the tradition of Western as well as Chinese utopian thinking, constitutes a unique commune based on the idea of "gynecocentrism." In Zhang's utopian vision, women, considered the "flowers of society," should resort to their natural superiority and create a society in which beauty and harmony rule. Sexual gratification and work, the main factors that affect the mental and physical balance of human beings and therefore of society, are the central issues to be addressed. Children are considered the property of the state. All who have contributed to society because of their artistic talents or exemplary virtues should be enshrined as "gods" and "goddesses" in temples to be worshipped by people. In other words, a new "religion," based on beliefs not in supernatural powers but in talents and virtues, should be created to be the spiritual guide of the nation. Is it possible to make connections between Zhang's ideal of a national religion and Mao Zedong's "creating gods" movement (zaoshen yundong) in Communist China? Though never put into practice in his lifetime, Zhang's utopian thinking might have had a larger following than we have been able to assess so far.
Karen Kingsbury, Tunghai University
Taken as a pair, Ding Ling and Zhang Ailing look at first like mirror images that illustrate the opposition between revolution and decadence. Ding is the leftist feminist whose lover was killed by the Guomindang, an ardent young author of confessional and critical exposés, and eventually the politically vindicated winner of the 1951 Stalin Second Prize for Literature (for The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River). Zhang, on the other hand, is a nostalgic romance writer whose lover worked for the Japanese Occupation, a purveyor of sensuous, fine ironies, and then the escapee/exile whose 1950's novels (The Rice sprout Song and Naked Earth) are also among the classics of Cold War literature, but on the other side, of course.
When we look deeper into each writer's work, however, the mirror opposition buckles and bends, for in both women we can see a surprisingly similar search for the right relation between engagement and detachment, in writing as in life. True, they start out from opposite sides of this complex dialectic: Ding's earnest, critical engagement with feminist progressive issues leads both to the championing of the oppressed (as in "When I Was in Xia Village") and the revolutionary rewriting of her own subjective identity (as in Miss Sophie's Diary), while Zhang's ironic yet appreciative detachment leads her to judicious analysis of both oppressor and oppressed, and the rewriting of old discourses around a strongly female center of subjectivity-a kind of revolutionary rewriting that starts with social rather than personal consciousness. But the continuing growth and centralization of Communist power forced both Ding and Zhang to try new approaches to living and writing. After a series of struggles with the Party leadership, Ding's self positioning grew more subtle, more strategically detached, even if this ability to appropriate approved discourses could not, in the end, prevent attack on her earlier commitments. Zhang also tried to accommodate her style to the new genre imperatives, e.g. victim-championing (cf. Xiao Ai), but was not very successful even in the short term, largely because she doesn't really believe in the existence of villains-for her, depravity is but the sign of one's own suffering. And while she is detached as a narrator, she is as a person too committed to her own sensibilities to survive in a politically volatile environment. Hence her decision to flee the land of her deepest personal attachments; hence also, as this presentation's conclusion will show in brief, the resounding, defiant detachment that runs under the supposed political purposiveness of her 1950's fiction.
Deirdre Sabina Knight, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper will argue for the relevance of the notion of decadence to a discussion of both Su Tong's (b.1963) early meta-fictional experiments and his allegedly more commercially oriented, popular literature. By conveying the emotional anarchy and sense of apocalypse bred by the absence of any assured framework of political or social structure, Su Tong's writing partakes of a global literary aesthetic of disillusion with and protest against positivistic, materialistic culture. Focused on an obsessive rhetoric of sickness, degenerate heredity, sadistic iconoclasm, sexual perversions and a morbid fascination with grotesque details of torture, these works embody the decadent impulse to explore possibilities of existence beyond the usual bounds of experience.
In the early "family history" retrospectives, Opium Family and 1934 Escapes, self-reflexive meta-fictional gestures diminish the narrator's authority and underscore the difficulty of knowing the past. Flashbacks and inlay grafting techniques intensify this indeterminacy and deflect attention away from discrete historical incidents to a "side-shadowing" (Gary Saul Morson's term) of the multiple contingencies in the ordinary lives of those on the margins of revolutionary history. Su Tong's more straightforward, popular narratives Rice and My Career as an Emperor reveal another face of decadence: its rebellion against the empirical world and withdrawal into worlds of the author's creation. It will be argued that this time exoticism represents not only a disappointed escape from the present, but a means of discharging the historical memory of catastrophe which avoids the dangers of topical reference.
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