Marxist literary thought and China : a conceptual framework

80 Pages·1980·4.457 MB·English

by  Paul Pickowicz

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Chinese Terminology
No. 18
are eee eRe RY: SSH Oates AN Deco heim
PomocGrer Ua ER AM EW ORK
BY
Peele le CyR OM TinGrZ
University of California
San Diego
Center for Chinese Studies
Institute of East Asian Studies
University of California
Berkeley, California
1980
THE CURRENT CHINESE LANGUAGE PROJECT,
under the joint chairmanship of
Cyril Birch and John C. Jamieson,
is a research project of the
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute
of East Asian eee ieee of the
University of California at Berkeley
© 1980 by the Regents of the University of California
ISBN 0-912966-22-x
Library of Congress Catalogue Number 79-620064
Printed in the United States of America
$350
FOREWORD
Paul Pickowicz's analysis of certain basic concepts in Marxist literary
thought will be of crucial value to the student of modern Chinese literature
because it was undertaken with him specifically in mind. It deals with
those thinkers who were translated and heatedly discussed in China during
the formative years of 1923-1935. The war against Japan, and Mao Zedong's
unambiguous imposition of party control over writers in 1942, greatly
changed the terms of reference. Yet these debates of half a century ago
have dominated the further evolution of China's modern literature, through
the burgeoning of the years around 1949 and the alternating freezes and
thaws, down to the present moment.
We who have witnessed the stultifying effects of party and state
control over the arts will have our problems with Marxism: how could so
utilitarian a philosophy find room for literature as one of the great
"moral activities" of mankind? But the ability to banish hindsight is a
hallmark of the good historian. Lenin, following Plekhanov, demanded a
large degree of freedom for the artist. Engels had denied the writer's
“obligation to offer to the reader the future historical solution of the
social conflicts he depicts" -- a position directly opposed to the de-
Picion of socialist realism which came to dictate Soviet writing in the
thirties. Paul Pickowicz recreates in this paper the vision of thinkers
who knew nothing yet of Stalin and Zhdanov, Mao Zedong and Zhou Yang.
Very soon after the May Fourth Movement of 1919 the young writers of
China began to group around poles labeled "romantic" 1 and "realist."
Romanticism offered the artist visions of rebellion and liberation and a
fam
‘ i jective
new conception of his own identity. Realism suggested techniques, obj
and "scientific," for the depicti»o n and analysisF of the flawed sociieettyy he
lived in. Both romantic and realist alike turned readily to Marxist thinkers
who labored to define the artist's proper role and standpoint, and who
proposed a specific method for understanding both history and the contemporary
world. The heritage of bourgeois art, the possibility of a proletarian art,
the revolutionary potential of futurism, all were issues that Marxism might
resolve.
Anyone who entertains the notion of Marxist literary theory as a monolithi
body of doctrine will find the present study full of surprises. Pickowicz
examines and carefully contrasts the arguments of three successive groups:
Marx and Engels themselves, the Russian populists such as Chernyshevsky, and
the Russian Marxists, especially Plekhanov and Lunacharsky. He suggests
that Lunacharsky, less closely studied in the West than some other Marxist
thinkers, was especially influential in China in his attempt to find a
middle ground between the extremes of idealism and materialism in Marxism.
Lunacharsky recognized the claim of the revolutionary intellectuals to an
art and literature which might be intelligible to their own class alone,
while at the same time he gave support to the efforts to create a culture
of and for the masses. In some ways this may be seen as a foreshadowing
of Mao's classic but question-begging formulation, "raise as you spread,
spread as you raise."
The contribution of Marxist thought to the development of Chinese
literature in this century has been more often commented on than thoroughly
understood. It is a privilege for the Center for Chinese Studies to assist
in publication of Professor Pickowicz's timely and illuminating study.
Cyril Birch
Department of Oriental Languages
Berkeley
January, 1980
Scholars interested in the literary history of modern China disagree
on many important issues. But few will deny that it was the Marxist
literary school, more than any other, that posed the sort of basic questions
about artistic culture and society that preoccupied modern Chinese literary
intellectuals during the Republican period. Virtually all the great writers
/
of the twentieth century,, including Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Guo Moruo, Ba Jin,
Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, Zhang Tianyi, Yeh Shengtao, Xiao Jun and many others,
were profoundly influenced by Marxist kiterary thought. For better or
worse (and clearly the record is mixed), Marxism has occupied center stage
in China's modern literary world for more than half a century.
Ironically, however, our understanding of Marxist aesthetics remains
rather fragmentary. T.A. Hsia, Leo Ou-fan Lee, C.T. Hsia, Marian Gdlik,
Merle Goldman and others have published outstanding studies of particular
aspects of the leftist literary scene, but as yet no systematic discussion
of fundamental Marxist ideas has appeared. On the contrary, it is often
assumed that Marxist literary thought is a known quantity. Thus, passing ref-
erences have been made to concepts such as "proletarian literature" and
the “materialist conception of art," but there have been few attempts to
define these terms or explain their historical evolution. One is thus left
with the impression that Marxist literary thought is a monolithic intellectual
tradition; or, to put it another way, that there exists a single ideologically
eeehodas body of Marxist aesthetic theory. And it is sometimes further
assumed that this body of ideas is uniformly "radical."
Initially, I started this study for students enrolled in my colloquium
on Literature and Society in Republican China in the hope that it would
help them to envisage the possibility that the Western tradition of Marxist
literary thought is not as monolithic as we sometimes think, and considerably
more conservative than either its critics or staunch defenders tend to allow.
It does not pretend to treat the entire Marxist literary tradition. Instead
it seeks to discuss in a more or less systematic way the writings of only
those Western Marxist or socialist thinkers whose works on literature and
society were known in China in the period between 1923 and 1934, the period
during which Marxist ideas about art were first introduced. The best known
commentators were Marx, Engels, the nineteenth century Russian populists,
Plekhanov, the early twentieth century-Russian "proletarian" theorists,
Trotsky, Lenin, and Lunacharsky.
Because this study deals with a variety of Western thinkers, it
concerns itself with China in an indirect (but nevertheless important) way.
China is mentioned infrequently in the text, but it is my intention that
it should loom in the background throughout. In dealing only with those
works known in China, I assume that they were read, discussed, and translated
because Chinese intellectuals believed they were relevant to their most
immediate concerns. It is for this reason that I make no attempt to discuss
all the issues raised in these works, but rather those that seem to arise
time and again, or those that seem very obviously to have had a direct
bearing on the debates that we know were waged in leftist literary circles
in the post-May Fourth period. Thus, despite the fact that China is mentioned
only occasionally in the text, I have attempted to read and organize the
content of these documents from a Chinese point of view, and have singled
out issues with which I believe Chinese readers were most concerned. Those
who study the manner in which Marxist literary thought evolved in Europe
itself might not approve of the way in which I have structured this study.
My only purpose, however, is to provide the student of modern Chinese
literature with a clear conceptual framework for understanding some of the
reasons why Chinese writers were attracted to Marxist thought. The reader
is thus invited to reflect on the bearing these particular Western dis-
cussions might have had in China during the twenties and thirties.
The question arises as to precisely why it is important to have a more
multi-dimensional understanding of the Marxist literary ideas introduced
into China during the Republican period. The answer is deceptively simple.
Not until we understand that Western Marxists took diametrically opposed
positions on many of the basic issues under discussion in this study can we
begin genuinely to understand the sharp intellectual disputes that divided
China's leftist literary world into various contending factions. To con-
tinue to view leftist writers in China as having understood and interpreted
Marxist literary theory in a uniform way is to run the risk of badly mis-
understanding the intellectual origins of the debates that have racked the
Chinese literary world from the early twenties to the present day. This
is not to say that Marxist literary theory is the only context in which the
modern literary movement can be understood. But reason would appear to
dictate that in a case where virtually all important writers consciously
perceived of themselves as Marxists of one sort or another, the Marxist
intellectual context is an indispensable analytical framework for under-
standing their motivations and actions.
What I argue is that when the rather amorphous writings under review
are seen as a whole, a general conceptual framework begins to emerge. Al-
though Marx and Engels are ambiguous on many of the fundamental issues
raised in China, the Russian populists (who were non-Marxian socialists) took
clear positions on the same issues, positions that were based on a variety
of philosophically idealistic or voluntarist assumptions about history and
revolution. Plekhanov, on the other hand, represented an opposite trend
and based his ideas about art and society on decidedly more materialistic
or deterministic assumptions. The early twentieth century Russian "pro-
letarian" cultural thinkers tended, on the whole, to perpetuate the idea-
list tradition present in Marxist thought . But Trotsky and Lenin were
inclined to accept positions advanced by Plekhanov. lLunacharsky is pre-
sented here as a distinctive figure because his literary thought belongs
to neither the idealist nor the determinist extremes. Indeed, he consciously
Pete to clear some important middle ground between tendencies that he
regarded as intellectually suspect. It is my contention that Chinese
writers were conscious of the differences between these thinkers, and tended
to identify with those whose views corresponded most closely with their
own intellectual predispositions.
One final note of introduction is necessary.This survey of Western
Marxist writings known in China is confined to the 1923-1935 period for
several reasons. I stress this period because it is what I prefer to call
the formative period of Marxist literary development in China. The
starting point is clearly 1923 because Marxist aesthetic thought was first
introduced at that time by Qu Qiubai, Deng Zhongxia, and Yun Daiying.
The utopian socialist or populist literary views of Tolstoy and others were
known even earlier, during the height of the May Fourth Movement. I regard
1935 as the end of the formative period of introduction, experimentation,
and general discussion of Western Marxist literary thought for two reasons.
First, as the war approached, most writers, including leftists, were in-
clined to focus their attention on ways to unite the nation (and all the
social classes contained within it) against the external foe. In the