The Romantic Generation of Chinese Writers PDF
Preview The Romantic Generation of Chinese Writers
The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers HARVARD EAST ASIAN SERIES 71 The East Asian Research Center at Harvard University administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and adjacent areas. Leo Ou-fan Lee The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, 1973 © Copyright 1973 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Preparation of this volume has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-75058 SBN 674-77930-4 Printed in the United States of America To my parents and their generation Preface More than fifty years have elapsed since the Chinese students in Peking unleashed what has come to be called the May Fourth move ment. Another shore and a time span of fifty years lend a different perspective to May Fourth. The distance reveals much about at least two generations of modern Chinese intellectuals, the May Fourth generation, now fathers, and a younger generation brought up by them in changed circumstances. For a member of this post-May Fourth generation, a study of the May Fourth movement is neces sarily burdened not only with the issue of historical objectivity but also with that perennial phenomenon, the generation gap. The original stimulus for this study in fact first came from my parents. As "emancipated" intellectuals fresh from college in the early thirties, my parents adopted a "modern" method in raising their first son, steeping him in Greek mythology and the music of Chopin. Western literature—Dumas, Lamartine, Byron, and Romain Rolland in Chinese translation—became the regular educational fare in my adolescent years in Taiwan. I can still recall with vivid immediacy how my father gave me special permission one night to read through La Dame aux Camelias until early dawn. And it did not take me vu PREFACE much time to find out that the initial letter in my father's European name stood for Annand. There must have been countless Armands and Werthers in the more "modern" sectors of China in the twenties and thirties. And my parents, who went to college in Nanking in the thirties, must have been typical of young intellectuals in the coastal cities. All these personal conjectures blended into my academic disciplines as I began the study of Chinese history in the United States some ten years ago. Memories of my upbringing predisposed me to modern Chinese literature and the May Fourth movement. For I am convinced that the student protest itself, on that memorable Sunday afternoon, May 4, 1919, would not have been so historic had it not been associated both by its metteurs en scene and by later scholars with what is broadly defined as the New Culture movement, in which New Literature played a central role. The importance of New Litera ture as a clue to modern Chinese social and intellectual history has been generally acknowledged but seldom seriously explored. An en deavor along this line thus becomes both an academic and a personal challenge, because my father, a musician by profession, was also a poet in his college years in Nanking. What are the legacies of this May Fourth generation? We have been informed that tradition was swept away, new currents of thought from the West were introduced, young girls in high schools and colleges were emancipated, and New Literature, written in the vernacular (pai-hua), became immensely popular. Aside from all these generalizations, which are by now no more than academic cliches, we have not learned anything from scholarly works as to how the para phernalia of New Culture made inroads into the personal lives of young Chinese intellectuals in the May Fourth period. How did the exhilaration of iconoclasm and Westernism affect their life-styles, fashion their personalities, and condition their general outlooks? In sofar as "Confucian personalities" have become standard fare in Chi nese studies in the West, can one perhaps suggest a new type of May Fourth personality? If so, what are its basic components? How is one to assess it in the context of its own time? And finally, to repeat, what are the legacies of the May Fourth movement in Chinese literature Vlll PREFACE and life? I shall attempt to explore some of the preceding questions by examining the lives and works of a few of the writers representa tive of the time. The source materials are literary, but the questions and answers are historical. My present approach has to be a combina tion of both. The conceptual category of the "generation" is not entirely out of place in a work like mine, but it must be flexible. The eminent French historian Marc Bloch has given the classic definition of a generation. "Men who are born into the same social environment about the same time necessarily come under analogous influences, particularly in their formative years. Experience proves that, by comparison with either considerably older or considerably younger groups, their behavior re veals certain distinctive characteristics which are ordinarily very clear. This is true even of their bitterest disagreements. To be excited by the same dispute, even on opposing sides, is still to be alike. This common stamp, deriving from common age, is what makes a generation."* The purpose of this study is to explore some of the "analogous influences" and "distinctive characteristics" of the May Fourth gen eration of literary intellectuals. I take the May Fourth generation to mean those who were born at the turn of the century, grew up with the demise of the Manchu empire and the founding of the Republic, and reached manhood in the 1920s or early 1930s. Thus they became active on the literary scene following the Literary Revolution of 1917 and the May Fourth demonstrations of 1919. The choice of represent ative figures, which is entirely my own, reflects in large measure the development of a central theme, on which I will elaborate in the con cluding part. For thematic purposes I have chosen to begin with two precursors—Lin Shu and Su Man-shu—who embarked upon their literary careers before the emergence of the May Fourth literary scene but who nevertheless had an enduring impact on the young men and women of the May Fourth generation. Yii Ta-fu and Hsu Chih-mo are the principal protagonists of my study, as is Kuo Mo-jo. I have not discussed Kuo in detail because of David Roy's recently published book on Kuo's early years.2 My treatment of this important figure is therefore more thematic than biographical. I discuss Kuo together with Chiang Kuang-tz'u and Hsiao Chiin as three prominent writers IX PREFACE whose individual lives epitomize the fate of the romantic turned leftist. The leftward drift of New Literature concludes my story and ushers in a new phase in the history of modern Chinese literature, which has been admirably studied in the West by, among others, the late T. A. Hsia and Merle Goldman.3 I include Hsiao Chun, who takes the story forward in time and somewhat beyond the scope of my study, in order to demonstrate certain continuities between my work and theirs. I would have liked to include a chapter on women writers in the May Fourth period. But some preliminary research has convinced me that the subject is much too vast and important to be treated sum marily. In view of the recent upsurge of movements for women's liberation in the Western world, a separate book devoted exclusively to women writers in modern China may well be a worthy subject for academic pursuit. Although the present study is not graced with women writers as central figures, the validity of my over-all theme is not, I hope, drastically hampered. For these men and women, living in the same historical milieu and practicing the same profession, were inevitably bound together by their shared experience. 1. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (New York, Knopf, 1953), p. 185. 2. David Tod Roy, Kuo Mo-jo: The Early Years (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Uni versity Press, 1971). 3. T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1968). Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967).
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