The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis

The Lyrical in Epic Time

The Lyrical in Epic Time

Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists

Through the 1949 Crisis

David Der-wei Wang

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS   New York   

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the publication of this book.

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53857-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wang, Dewei, author.

The lyrical in epic time : modern Chinese intellectuals and artists through the 1949 crisis / David Der-wei Wang.

   pages   cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17046-8 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53857-2 (electronic)

1. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—China. 3. Music—China—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Painting, Chinese—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Calligraphy, Chinese—History—20th century. 6. Motion pictures—China—History—20th century. 7. Modernism (Literature)—China. 8. China—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.

PL2303.W275   2015

895.109'0052—dc23

2014008487

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

COVER IMAGE: Luhua feiyan 蘆花飛雁 (Reeds and geese, 1980s). Courtesy of Ms. Feng Yeh

COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction: Inventing the Lyrical Tradition

PART ONE

Chapter One

A History with Feeling

Chapter Two

The Three Epiphanies of Shen Congwen

Chapter Three

Of Dream and Snake: He Qifang, Feng Zhi, and Born-Again Lyricism

Chapter Four

A Lyricism of Betrayal: The Enigma of Hu Lancheng

PART TWO

Chapter Five

The Lyrical in Epic Time: The Music and Poetry of Jiang Wenye

Chapter Six

The Riddle of the Sphinx: Lin Fengmian and the Polemics of Realism in Modern Chinese Painting

Chapter Seven

A Spring That Brought Eternal Regret: Fei Mu, Mei Lanfang, and the Poetics of Screening China

Chapter Eight

And History Took a Calligraphic Turn: Tai Jingnong and the Art of Writing

Coda: Toward a Critical Lyricism

Notes

Glossary of Chinese Characters

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM MOST GRATEFUL to my colleagues in the Chinese, Sinophone, and Sinological worlds, particularly Professors Zong-qi Cai, Yu-yu Cheng, Suk-hueng Cheung, Susan Daruvala, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Olga Lomová, and Zhang Songjian, for their thoughts and comments throughout the process of writing this book. Above all, I am deeply indebted to Professors Kowk-kau Leonard Chan and Ko Ch’ing-ming, whose insights and encouragement have been an invaluable source of inspiration. I would also like to thank Professors Chen Pingyuan, Li Nan, Huang Ying-che, Ko Chia-cian, Tang Yonghua, William Tay, Wang Wenjuan, Xia Xiaohong, and Xu Qingping; and Dr. Liao Chao-heng, Madame Barbara Ming-yi Fei, Madame Liao Jingwen, Ms. Feng Yeh, Mr. Shen Longzhu, and Mr. Kamloon Woo for their research assistance and advice on earlier drafts of the book.

Professor C. T. Hsia (1921–2013) passed away as I was completing this book. I have the deepest respect for his erudition and for his and Mrs. Della Hsia’s guidance and friendship all these years. I cherish the many good times we shared during my tenure at Columbia University. My colleagues at Harvard—Wai-yee Li, Jie Li, Stephen Owen, Karen Thornber, Xiaofei Tian, and Eugene Wang—have always illuminated me with their thoughts and works. I could not have finished the book without the benefit of their scholarship and dialogue.

Specials thanks go to Professors Michael Berry, Andrew Rodekohr, Carlos Rojas, and Chien-hsin Tsai for reading the manuscript and offering critical suggestions, and to all my students involved in the project over the past years.

Ms. Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press has been extremely conscientious and insightful in helping me prepare the book. I thank her and her colleagues, Leslie Kriesel, Jonathan Fiedler, and Kathryn Schell, for their editorial expertise and professionalism. I thank National Taiwan University Press for publishing parts of chapters 4, 5, and 8 in Chinese and for granting the rights to reproduce the illustrations.

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Richard Kunst, Ms. Bibby Moore, Mr. Jesus Arias, Ms. Hilda Chagua, and my family members, Jennifer, Mike, Vivian, and Jonathan, for their support during a long and challenging period of writing.

This book is dedicated to my mentor, Professor Arthur E. Kunst (1934–2013).

PROLOGUE

THE LYRICAL IS PERHAPS one of the least likely terms to be associated with China in the mid-twentieth century. This period witnessed a succession of crises: the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Civil War, the national split in 1949 and the resulting exodus of millions of Chinese, and the campaigns in New China, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. The magnitude of the tumult was such that to focus on the lyrical in this period has been dismissed as anachronistic and self-indulgent.

However, I contend that precisely because the mid-twentieth century in China was characterized by national cataclysms and mass movements, all of which brought drastic changes to Chinese lives, this period helps bring into view the extraordinary work of Chinese lyricism at its most intense. Lyricism in Chinese literary culture has always implicated an interaction between the self and the world, and during this period there emerged waves of literary and artistic practices that sought to identify individual options in the face of the atrocities. Lyricism can be seen as a poetics of selfhood that informs the historical moment and helps define Chinese modernity in a different light.

The writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book could hardly be called a unified group: they were liberals, leftists, conservatives, revolutionaries, collaborators, ideological converts, and self-styled individualists. They expressed themselves in recourse to a variety of media forms such as poetry, fiction, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, cinema, theater, painting, calligraphy, and above all, music. For all their divergent backgrounds and commitments, they each invoked the lyrical as they came to ruminate on the stakes of selfhood vis-à-vis solidarity, pondering historical contingencies and poetic/artistic assertions and experimenting with forms that they believed best cast light on and responded to the time of crisis.

More significantly, the invocation of the lyrical did not happen merely in mid-twentieth-century China. Contemporary Western critics with different theoretical and ideological beliefs, ranging from Martin Heidegger to Theodor Adorno and from Cleanth Brooks to Paul de Man, all took up lyricism as a way to critique the perilous, epic time. The lyrical was treated alternately as a modernist malaise, a socialist virtue, a bourgeois sentiment, a metaphysical trope, and a revolutionary imaginary. The Chinese cases further intensify the permeable nature of this discourse.

Why did these literary and cultural figures feel impelled to address lyricism at a time when action at an epic scale seemed more urgently in order? What constituted the lyrical discourse of the time? More pertinently, what is the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time? These are the questions that this book intends to explore. Accordingly, the title, The Lyrical in Epic Time, takes me beyond the more predictable "the lyrical in an epic time to describe the overarching implications of the figures under discussion: their provocations and articulatory tonalities, their experimentations in reaction to historical tempos. Here the lyrical and the epic" are inspired by the way Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980) used them,¹ pointing to not only a genre or style that informed a literary culture² but also a set of values or a structure of feeling that registered a social episteme.³

Through a constellation of figures, genres, and approaches, I seek to map out the multiple strains of lyrical representation during this period, and contemplate their significances with regard to contemporary China. These chapters share two thematic interventions. First, the lyrical discourse helps me rethink the sufficiency of the extant paradigm of Chinese modernity, which is largely dominated by the double claims of revolution and enlightenment. I seek to triangulate the paradigm by arguing that revolution can be powered by both political action and poetic provocation, and that enlightenment can have an impact only when charged with creative sensibilities. Such a lyrical discourse, however, also carries the perfidious symptoms of its time. These include a cluster of tensions rarely touched on in traditional poetics: betrayal and brutality are seen as exchangeable with expressive sincerity, ideological fanaticism evokes an unlikely resonance with idyllic yearning. Above all, lyricism begets its own disavowal, in terms of self-abjuration, suicide, and silence.

Second, I call attention to the fact that, Western inspirations aside, this lyrical discourse drew sources no less from its own heritage. For one thing, the lyrical, or shuqing 抒情 in Chinese, has entertained both spontaneous and figurative, both personal and political dimensions traceable to ancient China. The way shuqing evolved to become lyrical in modern times already suggests the tortuous routes of transculturation. I devote much discussion in each chapter to the modern interpretations of classical Chinese poetics, to trace the links that have long been obscured by more frequent references to figures from Schiller to Rilke, from Wordsworth to Auden, or from Pushkin to Mayakovsky. To that effect, I use both "shuqing and lyrical" so as to highlight the etymological and conceptual complexity of my discussion.

In view of the highly contested motivations and practices inherent in lyricism during this period, I am aware that I may have raised more questions than I can answer in one book. As a matter of fact, critical voices have already been heard from China and elsewhere. To the critics who worry that I am depoliticizing the Chinese revolutionary heart, I suggest that the depoliticized status quo results more from the entropy of the originary, lyrical momentum of revolution: Didn’t Marx suggest that revolution cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future?⁴ To critics who worry that I am deviating from the great lyrical tradition, I propose that we understand tradition not as a great chain of being but as a succession of inventions, anti-inventions, and reinventions. Above all, I am not promoting lyricism/shuqing as a new magic formula for modern Chinese literary and intellectual studies. Instead, I treat it as a critical interface through which more soundings about Chinese (post)modernity can be heard in reverberation.

TO FURTHER MY OBSERVATION, I would like to reflect more on the extant paradigm of modern Chinese literary and cultural studies. First, as suggested above, the master narrative of Chinese literary and cultural history of the past century has been dominated by revolution and enlightenment.⁵ This paradigm is charged with a strong sense of historical relevance and political urgency; its impact is evinced by an array of scholarship on subjects from the Literary Revolution to the Cultural Revolution, and then to the postsocialist revolution. But if revolution and enlightenment presuppose the agency of a modern subjectivity, the question of how such a subjectivity demonstrates its capacity to feel, and be felt about, with regard to either political action or epistemological pursuits should not be overlooked.

To be sure, modern Chinese literature and artworks of the past century are not short of representations of interior aspirations and turbulences. From ideological fanaticism to sentimental outpouring, from decadent self-abandon to cynical escapade, they are saturated with a wide variety of feelings and expressions. But we have yet to see a discourse about how subjectivity expresses, acquires, and critiques feelings and emotions as nuanced as that ascribed to the studies of either revolution or enlightenment.

That literary scholars and critics are shying away from the polemics of feeling/qing 情 may reflect a predilection toward what Yü-sheng Lin calls the cultural-intellectualistic approach, which favors a holistic understanding and solution of Chinese crisis merely at the level of intellectual deliberation.⁶ Above all, it betrays a conformism to the prevalent strong thought of modernity.⁷ This strong mode of thinking originated in the late Qing and May Fourth era and reached its apex during the Maoist regime, as illustrated by the mandate of nation building and the demands of volition, reason, collectivity, virility, and revolution. Rhetorically, it manifested in macroscopic (hongguan 宏觀) imagery, the sublime figure,⁸ and the epic representational system such as daguo 大國 (great nation) and tianxia 天下 (under heaven). By contrast, the lyrical comes across simply as too weak and trivial to carry the weight of modernity’s demands.⁹

But the accomplishments of Chinese writers and artists are not necessarily subject to such a critical assumption. For instance, Lu Xun’s 魯迅 call to arms or wandering does not bring out merely his revolutionary fervor; it touches readers’ hearts also because it unveils the master’s disturbed psyche resonating with works from the Chuci 楚辭 (Songs of the south) to Leonid Andryev’s fiction. Whereas Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) comes to terms with his treason by recourse to Japanese aesthetics and Chinese hermetism, Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 (1899–1935) acts out his martyrdom by recapitulating not only revolutionary altruism but also the Buddhist notion of self-annihilation.¹⁰ Even Mao Zedong 毛澤東 derives his charisma as much from his revolutionary feats as from his poetic provocations.¹¹ His lyrical bent brought him to express in classical-style Chinese song lyrics and poems his remembrances of personal loss, his musings on historical vicissitudes, and his ecstasy when likening all citizens under his rule to the ancient sage kings Shun and Yao immersed in the spring breeze.¹²

A truly strong mode of thinking is by logic resilient enough to embrace rather than reject the multiple expressions of humanity. At the core of a revolutionary action often resides a most tender yearning for a singular plural utopia.¹³ The renowned contemporary Chinese thinker Li Zehou 李澤厚 (b. 1929) pointed out in the 1980s that Chinese modernity is motivated by two causes, enlightenment (qimeng 啓蒙) and national salvation (jiuwang 救亡).¹⁴ Li’s observation has been regarded as most influential in reshaping the post-Mao discourse. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that Li at the same time urged the new generation of Chinese to resuscitate their ganxing 感性, or affective and aesthetic sensibilities, as a complement to and critique of the causes and consequences of enlightenment and revolution.¹⁵ At the turn of the new century, Li even proposed that the original substance of feeling or qingbenti 情本體 be the impetus for China’s continued search for postsocialist subjectivity.¹⁶ Li’s emotive turn may appear to be a retreat from the front line of the socialist project. But for someone whose ideology is grounded in Marxism and whose reputation arose from the Great Debate Over Aesthetics with the Crocean aesthetician Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛 (1897–1986) and dogmatic Marxist aesthetician Cai Yi 蔡儀 (1906–1992) in the late fifties,¹⁷ Li has come a long way to where he now stands.¹⁸ Li proclaims that, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, one must rethink the insufficiencies of revolution and enlightenment, and that without reflecting on and cultivating qing,¹⁹ Chinese subjectivity cannot be fashioned anew. Li’s theoretical eclecticism—including at least Marxian humanism, Kantian aesthetics, and Confucianism—has incited debates.²⁰ He nevertheless found an unlikely echo when the Chinese government made harmonious society (hexie shehui 和諧社會) its goal in 2005 and when President Xi Jinping called for a Chinese dream (zhongguo meng 中國夢) in 2013, as if even the socialist machine were trying to reconstitute its power through a lyrical evocation of (Confucian/socialist) harmony and dream.²¹

My second point pertains to the extant model of critiquing interiority versus exteriority in modern Chinese literature and culture. More than half a century ago, C. T. Hsia described Chinese literature as marked by an obsession with China. Hsia holds that modern Chinese literati are so obsessed by national crises as to turn their repugnance for the status quo into a masochistic exercise; that is, they want to possess any given social and political malaise as something unique to China, thus grappling with Chinese modernity negatively by denouncing it.²² Hsia’s critique has been supplemented by critics from different angles. Rey Chow takes note of the primitive passions in Chinese textual and visual culture, by which she means that Chinese writers and filmmakers tend to invoke the human and natural imagery of the raw and underprivileged, thereby flaunting the deprived conditions of China’s encounter with the modern.²³ Jing Tsu simply names the complex of failure a paradoxical symptom of modern Chinese identity politics.²⁴ In contrast, whereas Marston Anderson and Eugenia Lean discuss sympathy in personal and popular domains respectively,²⁵ Haiyan Lee calls attention to the causes and effects of the revolution of the heart,²⁶ and Gloria Davies discovers among contemporary Chinese intellectuals, neoleftists, and neoliberals alike the syndrome of worrying about China.²⁷ More noticeable is Ban Wang’s study of the sublime figure as a discursive dynamic, a psychic mechanism, a stunning figure, a grand image of the body, or a crushing and uplifting experience from the lowest depression to the highest picture. By these processes and images, whatever smacks too much of the human creature—appetite, feeling, sensibility, sensuality, imagination, fear, passion, lust, self-interest, etc.—is purged and repressed so that the all-too-human is sublimated into the superhuman and even inhuman realms.²⁸

These analyses, observant and provocative as they are, derive their theoretical premises primarily from Western discourses on subjectivity, psychoanalysis, and affect. One can argue that, insofar as the discipline of modern Chinese literature came into existence as a mixture of foreign and indigenous sources, there is no need to solicit Chinese essentialism at the theoretical level. Still, it is impossible to overlook the uneven development of discursive agency, with Western theory taking precedence over Chinese subjects (and subjectivities), in academia. When speaking of the dynamics of the modern Chinese mindscape, it has become customary to refer to the theories developed by critics from Agamben to Zižek, chief among whom are Freud and Foucault. But how often have propositions such as Lu Xun’s Power of the Mara Poet (Moluo shili 摩羅詩力), Zhang Taiyan’s 章太炎 (1869–1936) grand individuality (dadu 大獨) and subjectivity under erasure (wuwo zhiwo 無我之我),²⁹ Zhu Guangqian’s serenity (jingmu 靜穆),³⁰ and Hu Feng’s 胡風 (1902–1985) subjective fighting spirit (zhuguan de zhandou jingshen 主觀的戰鬥精神) been brought up to facilitate a diacritical investigation? Whereas Benjaminian flâneurs are said to have roamed the Chinese land, Hu Lancheng’s 胡蘭成 (1906–1981) vagabond (dangzi 蕩子),³¹ however relevant to the Chinese circumstances, has gone into eclipse. Foucauldean archaeology has been widely welcomed over the past decades, but Shen Congwen’s 沈從文 (1902–1988) lyrical archaeology (shuqing kaoguxue 抒情考古學) remains obscure to most literature majors.³²

Contrary to the common wisdom that the May Fourth era was a period of total antitraditionalism, intellectuals and literati at the time appear to have been radical comparatists when analyzing modern foreign importations as well as traditional Chinese legacies. For example, his indebtedness to Nietzsche and Stirner aside, Lu Xun expresses his modernist angst by revisiting the abysmal pathos of both Qu Yuan 屈原 (340–278 B.C.) and Tao Qian 陶潛 (395–427).³³ Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927) strives to cope with his existential crisis in terms of not only Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophy but also the mental vista (jingjie 境界) originating with Buddhist thought. Zhu Guangqian’s career path takes him from Nietzsche to Croce, Marx, and Vico, all the while pondering how to modernize the time-honored concept fusion of feeling and scene (qingjing jiaorong 情景交融).³⁴ Once immersed in German Idealist philosophy, Zong Baihua 宗白華 (1897–1986) develops his own aesthetics by bridging Kantian and Hegelian premises with the tenets of the I-Jing, Chinese music, architecture, and landscape painting.³⁵ Others who engage with both the Chinese lyrical legacy and Western sources include critics such as Li Jianwu 李健吾 (1906–1982) and Li Changzhi 李長之 (1910–1978), fiction writers such as Fei Ming 廢名 (1901–1967) and Shen Congwen, and poets such as Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 (1910–2000) and Liang Zongdai 梁宗岱 (1903–1983).

Let there be no misunderstanding that twentieth-century Chinese lyrical poetics appeal only to cultural conservatives. In Lu Xun pipan 魯迅批判 (A critique of Lu Xun, 1936), arguably the first full-length book on Lu Xun criticism in modern China, Li Changzhi points out that Lu Xun is a poet by nature despite his revolutionary posture, and that he is most compelling and polemical when writing in a lyrical style.³⁶ Li’s critique exerted a profound impact on Takeuchi Yoshimi’s famous Lu Xun (1944), which holds that the core of Lu Xun’s revolutionary politics is his conversion to literature of the most amorphous and subtle kind.³⁷ Among the leftists, Hu Feng’s avant-garde undertaking is said to carry the imprint of both the Mencian thought of the Mind and György Lukács’ Hegelian/Marxian revolutionism;³⁸ Ai Qing’s 艾青 (1910–1996) treatise on poetry is substantiated by his admiration for the poetics of both Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846);³⁹ Lu Ling’s 路翎 (1923–1994) Caizhu di ernümen 財主底兒女們 (Children of the rich, 1946–1948) entertains a dialogue between revolutionary Bildungsroman and the Dream of the Red Chamber; Sun Li’s 孫犁 (1913–2002) portrait of revolutionary peasantry partakes of a pastoral style at its most tender. Nevertheless, how to modulate qing/feeling in a revolutionary context has always been a contentious subject within the leftist camp. Xu Chi 徐遲 (1914–1996), for instance, claimed in 1939 that a politically engaged poet should exile lyricism (fangzhu shuqing 放逐抒情) so as to forestall the demoralizing threat of sentiments. Interestingly, Xu came to celebrate political lyricism (zhengzhi shuqing 政治抒情) in 1959, likening it to the genre of ode (song 頌) in classics such the Classic of Poetry and the Songs of the South.⁴⁰

WITH THESE OBSERVATIONS, we turn to the structure of the book. The introduction lays out my thesis: that we need to develop a discourse that can truly speak to the complex trajectories of modern Chinese affections and sensibilities vis-à-vis a tumultuous time. I propose that, beyond the extant scholarship on the modern Chinese reception of Western lyricism, an inquiry into shuqing can provide a new prism through which to develop such a discourse. It highlights the interplay between classical Chinese poetics and modern theories, pointing to a conspicuous lacuna in current modern Chinese literary and cultural studies. I focus on three figures who each presented a lyrical theory in response to the mid-twentieth-century crisis in China: Chen Shih-hsiang 陳世驤 (1912–1971) in the United States, Shen Congwen in China, and Jaroslav Průšek in Czechoslovakia.

The following eight chapters are divided into two interrelated parts. Part I (chapters 1–4) focuses on the poetics of the lyrical, with reference to various literary genres, particularly poetry and prose. Part II (chapters 5–8) focuses on the aesthetics of the lyrical by drawing examples from music, film, theater, painting, and calligraphy. It is my intention to look at lyricism across disparate literary and artistic forms, treating it not merely as a literary genre but as a dynamics of intellectual and artistic culture in modern China. And it is my hope that this book can help us rethink the critical potential of the Chinese lyrical in cross-generic and interdisciplinary terms.

Chapter 1 provides a critical reflection on the genesis of modern Chinese lyrical poetics from the turn of the modern century to the first decade of the New China. I introduce a variety of enunciative endeavors, ranging from avant-garde experiments to ideological treatises, Western importations, and classical Chinese inspirations, that have informed the discourse of modern Chinese lyricism, and observe the historical factors affecting their interplay.

Chapter 2 deals with Shen Congwen’s pursuit of abstract lyricism through lyrical archaeology from the 1940s to the 1960s. By describing what I call his three epiphanies, I ask how Shen reconciled his lyrical vision with the mandate of socialist materialism. I also look into the motivations that compelled Shen to dedicate the last part of his career to Chinese costume history. Through examining thousands of pieces of classical Chinese fabrics and garments, Shen managed to weave his discoveries of abstraction and materiality, fabrication and history, into a unique narrative tapestry of qing/feeling.

Chapter 3 discusses the metamorphosis of Feng Zhi 馮至 (1905–1993) and He Qifeng 何其芳 (1912–1977), two of the most important modernist poets, during the 1940s and 1950s in terms of born-again lyricism. Its religious implications notwithstanding, born-again in this context projects the poets’ immanent search for self-renewal in the vein of both modernism and revolutionism. I suggest that for all their newfound belief, they could not resist a lyrical flight out of the set ideological trajectory. The rupture thus born (again) refers not only to the caesuras—pauses of a poetic utterance occasioned by metric and affective need—that punctuate their writing, but also to the aporias—unintended fissures that subvert the wholesomeness of a discourse or composition—that underlie their vocation.

Chapter 4 discusses the equivocal phenomenon Hu Lancheng, former husband of Eileen Chang 張愛玲 (1920–1995), and collaborator during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Despite his political and personal infidelity, Hu was able to excuse himself, even winning popularity, via recourse to lyricism, a mode most often suggesting truthful expression of one’s innermost feelings. Hu’s case is an opportunity to explore whether he brings lyrical power to the full or merely reveals the inherent performative, hence duplicitous, nature of lyricism. Did Hu Lancheng betray lyricism, or demonstrate a lyricism of betrayal that marks one of the most debatable features of Chinese literary culture?

Chapter 5 describes the journey of Jiang Wenye 江文也 (1910–1983), the legendary Taiwanese composer and poet, in search of his Chinese identity: the artistic choice Jiang made during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the political consequences he had to cope with. Through select musical pieces, poetic works, and theoretical treatises, I explore how Jiang’s modernist sensibility demonstrates his colonial and cosmopolitan bearings; how his engagement with Confucian musicology brings about an unlikely dialogue between Chinese cultural essentialism and Japanese pan-Asianism; and most important, how his lyrical vision was occasioned by, and confined to, historical contingencies.

Chapter 6 features two giants in modern Chinese painting, Lin Fengmian 林風眠 (1900–1991) and Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 (1895–1953). I describe how Lin Fengmian modernized Chinese painting through lyricization, as opposed to the realist campaign led by Xu Beihong, and investigate the discursive exchange between the two and its relevance to the literary field, in which a similar debate was taking place. Moreover, I look into the lyrical experimentation Lin undertook during the Second Sino-Japanese War and afterward, and suggest that his idiosyncratic pursuit brought a polemical thrust to Chinese art amid historical crisis. This change points to the dialectic between textual and visual re-form of reality and the political agency thus created.

Chapter 7 discusses the mutual illumination between Chinese opera and cinema on the eve of the Chinese Communist Revolution. I focus on two films made by the poet-director Fei Mu 費穆 (1906–1951) in 1948, Shengsihen 生死恨 (Eternal regret) and Xiaocheng zhichun 小城之春 (Spring in a small town). The former is an adaptation of the Peking opera of the same title, starring Mei Lanfang, 梅蘭芳 (1894–1961), the most popular female impersonator of traditional theater; the latter is a contemporary melodrama allegedly inspired by the song lyrics of Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101). The two movies cannot be more different in style and background. But the fact that they both deal with wartime romance and were produced back to back points to something more than a coincidence. It tells a compelling story of how Fei, with the inspiration of Mei, negotiated a new way of screening China and offered a radical manifestation of cinematic Chineseness where it was least expected.

Chapter 8 tells of the artistic transition made by Tai Jingnong 臺靜農 (1902–1990) from literature to calligraphy amid mid-century crisis. I argue that by turning to the graphic surface rather than the textual depth of writing, Tai came to a different understanding of artistic agency and historical representation. Where literature betrays its finitude, the performance of writing generates new configurations of history, nationhood, and Chinese identity. The chapter addresses three issues: the dissemination of modern Chinese writing in visual terms; calligraphy and its geopolitical implications; and the poetics of muted Sinophone articulations.

The book concludes with a coda reflecting on the consequences of these mid-twentieth-century lyrical undertakings from the vantage point of the new millennium. I argue for rethinking lyricism critically in the postsocialist Chinese context, citing the treatises of two contemporary critics, Li Zehou and Kao Yu-kung 高友工 (b. 1929), as points of departure. I point out the double bind embedded in the contemporary engagement with the lyrical imaginary, and contemplate the challenges and unsolved questions for any future exploration. The questions and possible answers may help us to map the paths already trodden and yet to be explored, and thus to anticipate the new horizons of critical lyricism.

INTRODUCTION

Inventing the Lyrical Tradition

Where history collapses, poetry arises.

—HUANG ZONGXI黃宗羲¹

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

—STÉPHANE MALLARMɲ

THIS BOOK AIMS TO DISCUSS the dialogic of lyricism and Chinese literary and artistic modernity during the mid-twentieth century. The term lyricism is used here to refer not only to a mode of poetry, the lyric,³ but also to a spectrum of articulations—ranging from narrative to film, from painting to calligraphy—whose formal inputs and affective outcomes are attributable to the lyrical effect. Above all, lyricism is invoked to describe a set of concepts, discourses, or values regarding the poetics of selfhood;⁴ it is made intelligible through sensory and imagistic data in such a way as to inform the intellectual and literary culture of a historical moment.

The English term lyricism or lyrical, however, may not fully explain what I would like to address in the Chinese context—shuqing or 抒情. Lyricism and shuqing share common ground, pointing to an intense personal quality expressive of feeling or emotion, an engagement with temporal caesura and self-reflexivity, or an exuberant manifestation of subjectivity in an art form such as music or poetry.⁵ But this serves only as an entry point to the critical trajectories of both. Shuqing is an old but not necessarily the most conspicuous concept in Chinese literary and cultural discourse; its etymological roots and its epistemological bearings comprise a genealogy far richer than we know about in modern times.⁶ Shuqing took on a new dimension during the May Fourth era, when it was cited as an equivalent to Western lyricism, defined in the vein of romanticism and revolutionism.⁷ How one generation of Chinese intellectuals, literati, and artists negotiated the multiple strains of shuqing and lyricism and brought forth a unique discourse of the Chinese modern is the focus of this study.

I have chosen a specific historical moment—China in the mid-twentieth century—that is often not associated with lyrical representations. The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Civil War (1947–1949), the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949), the exodus of millions of Chinese overseas in the aftermath of the Great Divide, and the incessant political campaigns in New China, culminating in the Great Cultural Revolution (1966), brought drastic changes to Chinese lives and mentalities. The magnitude and consequences of these changes were such that even a mere invocation of the lyrical would have sounded irrelevant or irreverent. As many would have it, mid-twentieth-century China was instead an era that witnessed History in the making, a time that should be described as epic.⁸

This is where my inquiry into lyricism and Chinese modernity starts. I contend that precisely because the mid-twentieth century was characterized by national cataclysms and mass movements, this period helps bring into sight the polemic of Chinese lyricism at its most intense. Common wisdom has it that lyricism is a rhapsodic flight from time and temporality, an indulgence in personal feelings, or in the leftist jargon, a petit bourgeois gesture in resistance to social engagement. However, a quick review of the term in either Chinese or Western tradition will already teach us something different. Whereas lyricism in Western literature was not taken as a token of solipsism until a rather late stage of its development,⁹ shuqing, as a core concept of the Chinese poetics of qing 情 (feeling), has always indicated an interaction between the self and the world and beyond.¹⁰ Moreover, the Western Romantic brand of lyricism was closely related to the revolutionary upheaval of late-eighteenth-century Europe,¹¹ and the Chinese expression of shuqing is traceable as far back as the polemical provocations of the Songs of the South. When Lu Xun claimed in 1926 that his writing was nothing but shifen shuqing 釋憤抒情 (to unleash wrath and express feelings), he was echoing the famous lines attributed to Qu Yuan that poetry was meant to fafen yi shuqing 發憤以抒情 (to vent wrath and express feelings), written more than two thousand years before.¹²

As will be discussed in the following chapters, despite the increasingly strident call to arms, the mid-twentieth century saw waves of literary and artistic practices that sought to identify individual options in the face of collective objectives and construe affective visions amid human atrocities. These practices demonstrate a complex of impulses and expressions that cast extant definitions of lyricism into question. For instance, on the eve of the founding of New China, when Shen Congwen, the leading voice of Chinese lyrical nativism, attempted suicide in order to safeguard a pure form of life he wished to espouse, Feng Zhi 馮至 (1905–1993), the best lyricist in modern China, in Lu Xun’s opinion,¹³ found it impossible to sustain his poetic conviction without pledging allegiance to the leftist Muse. At the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, whereas the film director Fei Mu 費穆 (1906–1951) projected onto the screen an aesthetics of feeling and fidelity inspired by the Confucian agenda of li 禮 (ritual) and yue 樂 (music),¹⁴ Hu Lancheng, a literatus cum collaborator, found in the same Confucian agenda a pretext for his politics and erotics of betrayal.¹⁵

To rediscover the lyrical at this epic moment, accordingly, means more than reiterating the conventional dichotomy of authentic interiority versus formal exteriority, aesthetic indulgence versus revolutionary engagement, or indigenous articulation versus Western Romantic calling. Rather, I have in mind a configuration of soundings that reverberate with one another in rendering the tenor of the time. Through a series of case studies, I argue that if selfhood appears to be a keyword to the writers and artists discussed, it represents a construct overdetermined by both individual and collective motivations, and that wherever shuqing is invoked, it is informed by both modern and premodern references. In particular, in cases where feeling generates its own disavowal or lyricality begets irony, I contemplate these embedded contentions against the historical backdrop. Studying this period brings to mind two of the greatest lyrical moments in premodern China, the Six Dynasties and the Late Ming,¹⁶ which arose respectively in the midst of sociopolitical chaos and axiological shakeups.

Despite ongoing national crises in the mid-twentieth century, there was a steady flow of lyrical discourses. It started with Ai Qing’s Shilun 詩論 (Treatise on poetry, 1941) and Zhu Guangqian’s Shilun 詩論 (Treatise on poetry, 1942), in which lyricism is treated from either a formalist or a revolutionary perspective; it culminated in Chen Shih-hsiang’s proclamation in On Chinese Lyrical Tradition in 1971 that Chinese literature as a whole is characterized by nothing but a lyrical tradition. In between came a wide range of undertakings, including at least Li Guangtian’s 李廣田 (1906–1968) Shide yishu 詩的藝術 (The art of poetry, 1943), Zang Kejia’s 臧克家 (1905–2004) Wode shishenghuo 我的詩生活 (My poetic life, 1943), Feng Wenbing’s 馮文炳 (Fei Ming 廢名, 1901–1967) Tan xinshi 談新詩 (On new poetry, 1944), Zhu Ziqing’s 朱自清 (1898–1948) Xinshi zahua 新詩雜話 (Random talks on new poetry, 1947), Zong Baihua’s Yijing 藝境 (The vista of art, 1948),¹⁷ Ah Long’s 阿壠 (1907–1967) Ren he shi 人和詩 (The human and poetry, 1949), Hu Feng’s essays on poetry and subjectivity, and Shen Congwen’s various writings in the 1940s and ’50s.

Lyrical criticism gained a robust momentum overseas in the aftermath of the 1949 national divide. In Hong Kong, Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909–1978) rethought his Neo-Confucian project in a tender, lyrical mentality during the fifties, and is described as a thinker writing in a poet’s style.¹⁸ In Taiwan, Xu Fuguan 徐復觀 (1904–1982) published Zhongguo yishu jingshen 中國藝術精神 (The spirit of Chinese art, 1965), ruminating on the philosophical foundations of Chinese painting, calligraphy, poetry, and art criticism.¹⁹ In Japan, Hu Lancheng finished his Shanhe suiyue 山河歲月 (China through time, 1954) and Jinsheng jinshi 今生今世 (This life, this time, 1959), reassessing Chinese history and personal life respectively with recourse to the wisdom of the Classic of Poetry, Zen Buddhism, Daoism, and the I-Jing. In the United States, Mei Tsu-lin 梅祖麟 and Kao Yu-kung 高友工 launched in 1968 a survey of the lyrical effect of Chinese poetry in terms of structuralism and analytical linguistics.²⁰ In the next decade, Kao Yu-kung proffered lyrical aesthetics (shuqing meidian 抒情美典) as that which constitutes Chinese culture at its most exquisite.²¹

These critics shared little ideological ground and were geographically far apart both before and after the 1949 divide. Nevertheless, they appear to be in unison when they call for lyricism as a way to help make sense of history and literature. This raises the question how they invoke—indeed, invent—the lyrical in response to the epic time, and how such a lyrical invocation can be understood against the broader backdrop of the mid-century crisis on a global scale. For this reason, I highlight in the rest of this chapter three figures: Chen Shih-hsiang, Shen Congwen, and Jaroslav Průšek. Chen Shih-hsiang left China in 1941 and became a professor of Chinese literature at the University of California at Berkeley in the late ’40s. A modernist by training, Chen nevertheless took greater interest in premodern Chinese literature after arriving in the States, to the point where he campaigned for the Chinese lyrical tradition. Shen Congwen was the most accomplished lyrical nativist before 1949, only to be thrown into eclipse for political reasons in the new regime. But he found a new commitment in art history as well as private forms of writings such as letters, jottings, and classical-style poems. These efforts led him to formulate abstract lyricism in the heyday of socialist realism. Finally, I move beyond the Chinese and Sinophone worlds by reassessing the contribution of Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980). A renowned Czech Sinologist and an aspiring Marxist, Průšek promoted an epic vision of the Chinese Communist Revolution and Cold War politics. Paradoxically, along the way he identified the lyrical—informed by classical Chinese poetic culture—as that which ultimately manifests Chinese revolutionary modernity. To facilitate my discussion of these three figures, a brief overview of the traditional discourse of shuqing is in order.

From Shuqing to the Lyrical: A Critical Genealogy

The Chinese expression of shuqing was first seen in the Songs of the South. In Xisong 惜誦 (Grieving I make my plaint),

Cherishing my plaint, I give sorrows free rein,

Venting rancor, I tell of pent-up feelings/thoughts.²²

惜誦以致愍兮，

發憤以抒情。

the poet seeks a way to express his wrath as his loyalty to his prince is ignored and his advice rejected. The political context serves as the foundation for understanding the ancient poet’s need to release his feeling. In a poem lamenting his own fate by remembering Qu Yuan, Ai shiming 哀時命 (Alas that my lot was not cast), the Han court poet Zhuang Ji 莊忌 (188?–105? B.C.) sighs:

Alone and ill at ease and full of bitterness:

How can I vent my anger and give my thoughts expression?²³

獨便悁而煩毒兮，

焉發憤而抒情。

This prompts rethinking the shu of shuqing. The Chinese character shu 抒 is etymologically related to 紓 (unravel) or 舒 (release, relieve). It has also been suggested that shu could refer to a process of easing and dissipating feeling, to the extent of doing away with it.²⁴ On the other hand, shu can be cross-referenced to zhu 杼, which refers to both the control device of a water container²⁵ and the loom of a weaving machine.²⁶ Whereas in the former context shu/zhu indicates a way to modulate the waterlike qing, in the latter context it indicates a way to organize—weave—the multiple threads of qing. Thus Zhuang Ji uses zhuzhongqing 杼中情 in the following lines:

My mind is full of resentment that finds no outlet.

Only in these verses can I [weave] my feelings.²⁷

志憾恨而不逞兮，

杼中情而屬詩。

Etymological research indicates that qing has been a fairly unstable concept throughout premodern history. The term is not found in the oracle bones or other ancient inscriptions, and it is referred to only once in the Classic of Poetry and twice in the Lunyu 論語 (The Analects).²⁸ Qing becomes a frequently cited word in the Zuozhuan 左傳 and other texts of the Warring States period, mostly referring to actual circumstances or consensual judgment.²⁹ Scholars have noted that, starting in pre-Han times, qing was described as an amorphous force impelled by sensory and mental faculties.³⁰ As the Liji 禮記 (Book of rites) observes, "What is meant by human qing? Pleasure, anger, sadness, fear, love, hate, and desire. These seven, men are capable of without having learned them."³¹ Xunzi 荀子 juxtaposes qing and yu 欲 (desire) in terms of xing 性 (one’s inborn nature), contending that "One’s inborn nature is the consequence of Heaven; qing is the substance of nature; yu is the response to qing."³² Qing took on a more ambiguous moral dimension in the Western Han dynasty, when Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 179–104 B.C.) allegedly set up the antithesis between xing and qing. Whereas xing is associated with the inborn nature of the good, qing is considered to be the part of humanity susceptible to temptations.³³ The following centuries saw a continuum of exegeses, debates, and deliberations regarding the nature of qing. It ranged from the Wei-Jin intellectuals’ valorization of qing as that which preconditions humanity to Song Neo-Confucians’ recommendation of li 理 (reason) over qing, which is compared to flowing water;³⁴ from the late Ming literati’s call for individual emancipation in the name of the cult of qing (qingjiao 情教)³⁵ to the late Qing reformers’ promotion of qing as the key to renewing Chinese citizenry.³⁶

The excavation of the Guodian Chu Bamboo Slips (Guodian chujian 郭店楚簡) in the late twentieth century has contributed an additional dimension to the exegesis of qing. In the segment Xingzi mingchu 性自命出 (Disposition arises from the Mandate), the character qing appears as many as nineteen times; particularly, the statement dao shiyu qing 道始於情 (The Way originates with feeling/circumstance) has induced various interpretations.³⁷ Scholars have argued that the statement greatly modifies the conventional (Confucian) wisdom that qing is something to be rectified by cultural institutions; instead, qing serves as the originary substance of those institutions. As such, qing facilitates the Way and imbues humanity with aesthetic sensibilities.³⁸

Besides denoting emotional faculties, qing has been referred to as a state or situation as it is or happens (shiqing 實情), related to meanings such as the factual and the real.³⁹ By extension, qing has also been associated with the authentic and the truthful.⁴⁰ A. C. Graham points out that in the pre-Han texts, qing as a noun means facts, and as an adjective, genuine or essential.⁴¹ Chad Hansen critiques the essentialist tendency of Graham’s argument, stressing instead that qing occurs where external reality and internal response converge. Hence qing is that which contains both passions and facts.⁴² Anthony Yu disagrees with Graham’s essentialist approach and Hanson’s realist approach, instead calling attention to the capacity of subjectivity to modulate the facts and passions. To that end, Yu revisits the notion of Xunzi (as quoted above) and argues for the continued negotiation of xing, qing, and yu.⁴³

The interaction between qing as sentiment/feeling and qing as facts/circumstances has led scholars to further investigate whether qing is an innate resource arising from human interiority or an omnipresent entity enacted by, and constituent of, natural and cosmic movements. Gong Pengcheng 龔鵬程, for instance, questions the concept of qing as a result only of internal expressivity. He refers instead to the belief in the Han dynasty and earlier that qing emanates from a circulation of material forces in the universe.⁴⁴ In his recent study, Ling-hon Lam debates the genesis of qing as an affective outburst in terms of exteriority. By associating qing with the trope feng 風 (wind, air) instead of the more conventional xing 興 (evocation or creation of feeling), Lam argues that the interiority of qing always presupposes the construct of exteriority as both an ontological condition and a historical grounding. With cases drawn from the Ming theater and other genres, he seeks to define the spatiality of qing, ranging from textual and material artifacts to theatrical action, which helps perform the subjectivity and inner awareness.⁴⁵

In literature, qing appeared in Shi daxu 詩大序 (Great preface to the Classic of Poetry), the most famous statement of Chinese poetics:

The poem is that to which what is intently on the mind goes. In the mind, it is being intent [zhi 志]; coming out in language, it is a poem. The sentiments [qing 情] are stirred within and take on form in words. If words alone are inadequate, we speak them out in sighs. If sighing is inadequate, we sing them. If singing them is inadequate, unconsciously our hands dance them and our feet tap them.⁴⁶

Although poetry expresses what is intended in the mind (shiyanzhi 詩言志) has ever been celebrated as the foundational concept of Chinese poetry, critics have pointed out that zhi and qing are not contradicting but complementary motivations.⁴⁷ In Pauline Yu’s words, the Preface can assume what is internal (emotion) will naturally find some externally correlative form or action, and that poetry can spontaneously reflect, affect, and effect political and cosmic order.⁴⁸

Qing became a keyword for literary undertakings first in the Wei-Jin period. As opposed to poetry expresses what is intended in the mind, Lu Ji 陸 機 (261–303) redefined poetry as that which "follows from qing " (shiyuanqing 詩 緣 情 ), thus inaugurating the lyrical tradition of Chinese poetics. ⁴⁹ While stressing sentiment and its expressive conduit, Lu’s conception of qing carries the double meaning of qing as zhi or vice versa. ⁵⁰ Moreover, he is mindful of the reciprocal circumstances of the internal and the external in the poetic expression of qing. In his translation of Lu Ji’s Wenfu 文賦 (Essay on literature), Stephen Owen renders the character qing in the context "meizi zhuwen, youjian qiqing 每自屬文，尤見其情 as both the state of mind and the situation: And whenever I myself compose a literary piece, I perceive full well ‘their state of mind (or the situation).’ ⁵¹ The poetic mind, the situation" under treatment, and their manifestation do not contradict but interact with each other. Lu Ji describes the poet’s expressive capacity in terms of zhu or a weaving device "working with ssu [si 絲] ‘threads’ or ssu [si 思] ‘thoughts’."

Even if the shuttle and loom were in my own feelings,

I must dread lest other have preceded me.⁵²

雖杼軸於予懷，

怵他人之我先。

Playing up the metaphor of the loom with which to weave (the fabric of) feeling, Lu Ji brings to mind the bifurcated faculty inherent in the invocation of shuqing in Jiuzhang, relieving and preserving, unraveling and fabricating.

This, however, does not mean that shuqing enjoyed a smooth generic and conceptual reappraisal in the following centuries. Zhu Ziqing, for example, contended in 1947 that "before Wang Guowei’s time, orthodox Chinese literati rarely used [the expression shuqing],"⁵³ "as a lexicon shuqing has a traditional heritage, but the meaning of shuqing as we understand it today comes from foreign sources."⁵⁴ Zhu has a point in light of modern Chinese writers’ and artists’ appropriation of shuqing as an equivalent to the Western Romantic vein of lyricism. But he overlooks the fact that Chinese moderns have never jettisoned their own heritage altogether. On the contrary, precisely because of the complexities resulting from the transcultural circulation of its Chinese and Western, modern and traditional sources, shuqing carries even more connotations in modern times.

Recent studies indicate that shuqing was undertaken by orthodox Chinese literati in premodern times in a multitude of ways. Leonard Chan (Chan Kwok-Kou) 陳國球 points out that, in the wake of the Songs of the South, references to and the exercise of shuqing are found in a wide range of articulations, from Ban Gu’s 班固 (32–92) Liangdu fu 兩都賦 (Rhapsody of two capitals) to Jiang Yan’s 江淹 (444–505) poems and Xiao Tong’s 蕭統 (501–531) Zhaoming wenxuan 昭明文選 (Selections of literature, 520).⁵⁵ As Chan and other scholars such as Cheng Yu-yu 鄭毓瑜 note, besides being associated with affection and selfhood, shuqing took on multiple social dimensions, as pedagogical methodology, social interlocution, and even therapeutic treatment, in the early and medieval periods.⁵⁶ Moreover, shuqing is often taken to motivate satiric analogy (fengyu 諷喻) or setting forth the full glory of great virtue (xingrong shengde 形容盛德), namely, political encomium.⁵⁷ In Tang and Song poetic cultures, it served broadly as a trope of both solitary musing and social exchange, thus demonstrating both the self-reflective and the performative capacity of feeling.⁵⁸

In resonance with the double meaning of qing as arising from the inner self as well as factual circumstances, shuqing is related to a subjectivity’s engagement with both sentiment and shi 事 (event). As such, the phrase may be extrapolated in terms of a poetic cum historical implication, best illustrated by the tradition of shishi 詩史 (poet-historian/poetry-history). The Tang literatus Meng Qi 孟棨 (?–?, ninth century) famously commented: When a poetic incantation is occasioned by an event, it is precisely where deep feelings concentrate (chushi xingyong, yousuo zhongqing 觸事興詠, 尤所鍾情).⁵⁹ Meng Qi considers both the circumstantial and emotive functions of qing, thus articulating the reciprocal relationship between historical experience and poetic mind. According to Zhang Hui 張暉, Meng Qi derives his notion of poet-historian from two origins, the historiographical discourse of Chunqiu 春秋 (Spring and autumn annals) that interweaves evidential record with moralistic commentary, and the medieval poetics of yuanqing and wuse 物色 (sensuous colors of physical things; the appearances of physical things) that contemplates a subject’s sensorial responses to both the inner and outer world.⁶⁰

Meng Qi’s engagement with poetry as history points to one important factor of poetic manifestation since ancient times, explained succinctly by Owen: the process of [poetic] manifestation must begin in the external world, which has priority without primacy. As a latent pattern follows its innate disposition to become manifest, passing from the world to mind to literature, a theory of sympathetic resonance is involved.⁶¹ Accordingly, when Du Fu 杜甫 is recognized as the arch-practitioner of poetry-history (shishi 詩史), this refers not merely to the poet’s historiographical and mimetic capacity but also to his vision, which makes his poetic mind resonate with historical and cosmic turbulences. As Owen puts it, Du Fu’s poetry is not supposed to be treated as a fiction: it is a unique factual account of an experience in historical time, a human consciousness encountering, interpreting, and responding to the world.⁶²

The deliberation and practice of poetry-history reached a climax in the late Ming and early Qing, coinciding with dynastic cataclysms. The most compelling case is that of the Ming loyalist Huang Zongxi. When Huang declares: Where history collapses, poetry arises (shiwang erhou shizuo 史亡而後詩作),⁶³ he is soliciting lyrical evocation not only as a testimony to dynastic catastrophe but also as a re-vision of both historical consciousness and the poetic mind.⁶⁴ Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 (1582–1664), on the other hand, is said to have valorized the lyrical bearing in the Ming loyalist discourse of poetry-history. Beyond the conventional wisdom of reflectionism, Qian treats poetry as immanent to the constitution of history, thus considering the mood, imagery, and tone of poetry not rhetorical gestures but a psychological—even ontological—index to the unrelieved expression of the poet’s historical bearing. As Lawrence Yim argues, "the shishi is the ideal kind of lyricism to bring poetry and history together."⁶⁵

Finally, studies have been undertaken to understand the poetic expression of shuqing by looking into the formation of a cognitive system in ancient China. Citing examples from the rhapsody of the Han, Cheng Yuyu suggests that qing is a repository of sensorial data as well as epistemological sources. The literary exercise of shuqing, accordingly, prevailed in ancient Chinese culture because it not only helped modulate sentiments in public and private spheres but also facilitated the production of knowledge. By evoking analogues and categorical associations (yinpi lianlei 引譬連類), shuqing incorporates sensory vibrations, metaphorical figures, and intellectual ruminations into a taxonomy of naming the world, thereby giving rise to knowledge.⁶⁶ On the other hand, with the rise of medieval poetry as his case in point, Xiao Chi 蕭馳 suggests that Chinese lyricism has to be understood as part and parcel of the changing paradigm of cosmological inquiry from the Han to the Wei and Jin eras.⁶⁷ Echoing Zhu Guangqian and Kao Yu-kung , Xiao holds that the lüshi 律詩 (regulated verse) of the Tang represents the perfect manifestation of a poetic form of the cosmic order.⁶⁸

The above description is by no means an exhaustive summary of the roots and ramifications of qing and shuqing. Nor does it implicate a coherent, causal linkage between the premodern legacy and its modern appropriations. I only intend to illuminate that Chinese lyricism had already developed a rich and contested discourse before encountering Western and Japanese sources. With this background in mind, we turn to Chen Shih-hsiang, Shen Congwen, and Jaroslav Průšek. These three critics, from the Sinophone diaspora, China, and the European Sinological circle, offer three distinct approaches to Chinese lyricism in the mid-twentieth century.

Inventing the Lyrical Tradition: Chen Shih-hsiang

In 1971, Chen Shih-hsiang presented On Chinese Lyrical Tradition at the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies. In the essay, Chen looks at Chinese literature from a comparative perspective and concludes that, whereas the epic and drama characterize Western literature, the lyrical tradition stands out in Chinese literature.⁶⁹ This lyrical tradition is said to have originated with the Classic of Poetry and the Songs of the South, flourished in subsequent centuries in forms such as fu 賦 (rhapsody) and yuefu 樂府 (songs of the music bureau style), and found the most exuberant expressions in the poetry of the Six Dynasties and the Tang. Moreover, when drama and the narrative art of the novel finally did make their amazingly late appearance on the scene, lyricism continued to dominate, infiltrate, or if you will, subvert them.⁷⁰ Chen suggests:

Song, or word-music, in formal structure, and subjectivity and self-expression in content or intent, are, by definition, the two basic components of the lyric. Shih Ching [The Classic of Poetry] and Ch’u Tz’u [The Songs of the South], as fountain-head for the Chinese literary tradition, combine the two, with one or the other dominating each. Thus the main course of all later Chinese literary activity was set, even as the tradition grew and expanded. It was henceforth foredoomed, so to say, to be predominantly lyrical.⁷¹

Chen later adds two points: that the lyrical, subjective expression is to be found in private or in public,⁷² and that lyricism as the essence of the Chinese, and perhaps much of several other Far Eastern literary traditions, may help explain many phenomena in matters of both traditional forms and value judgments, distinguishable and maybe sometimes at odds, between East and West.⁷³ Ultimately, Chen argues that "it is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to say that the Chinese literary tradition as a whole is a lyrical tradition … to that extent it may be variously representative of other Far Eastern traditions."⁷⁴

Chen indicates that his appraisal of Chinese literature presupposes his reflection on the Western canon, and that he proposes the lyrical tradition as a way to respond to the (Western) assumption that all literature originates with the epic and drama. Behind his postulation of the quintessential Chinese lyrical tradition, therefore, is a self-conscious effort to rectify the Occidental format of temporality: to the predominant Western literary tradition, there exists in China a distinct counterpart. Chen’s emphasis on the lyrical as the orthodoxy of Chinese (and even Far Eastern) literature nevertheless smacks of essentialism on its own terms. He verges on being excessively inclusive when enlisting the multiple forms of Chinese literary expressions in a monolithic lyrical tradition. Furthermore, by streamlining other East Asian literary traditions into one Chinese lyrical tradition, he displays a symptom of Sinocentrism similar to the Eurocentrism he sets out to critique. Chen never had an opportunity to elaborate on his essay, however; he passed away a few months after his AAS presentation.

Granting these debatable points, Chen Shih-shiang’s observation must be regarded as the crux of a series of studies on Chinese lyricism throughout the mid-twentieth century. By then, critics such as Tang Junyi in Hong Kong, Xu Fuguan in Taiwan, Shen Congwen on the mainland, and Hu Lancheng in Japan had each proposed a lyrical analysis of Chinese civilization. None, however, could have sounded as magisterial as Chen in making the case. The Chinese lyrical tradition has since traveled among overseas Chinese communities; interpretations and debates have proliferated in such a way as to generate a meta-tradition of the lyrical tradition.⁷⁵ Chinese scholars on the mainland have started to pay tribute to the lyrical tradition in recent years too. This fact leads one to reconsider Chen’s thesis and ponder its contribution to mid-twentieth-century poetics.

Chen Shih-hsiang started his inquiry into the lyrical tradition as early as 1949. In In Search of the Beginning of Chinese Literary Criticism,⁷⁶ he differentiates the origin of Chinese literature from its Western counterpart by highlighting the supremacy of poetry (shi 詩). He looks into the archaeological roots and etymological developments of shiyanzhi (poetry expresses what is intended in the mind), the predominant statement of Chinese poetics, suggesting that in its "ancient pictorial written form [shi] has three variants of meaning: ‘foot,’ ‘to stop,’ and ‘to go.’"⁷⁷ Chen proposes that shi 詩 and zhi 志 share the same root of ㄓ, which implies both move forward (zhi 之) and stop (zhi 止); by extension, that which stops with the mind is zhi 志, and that which moves forward and finds an outer expression is shi 詩. Chen refers to Wen Yiduo’s 聞一多 (1899–1946) analysis,⁷⁸ but he scores in his own right by stressing the rhythmic corporeal movement implied in the pictographic composition of ㄓ: ㄓ indicates not only the pause but also the directional movement and action of the elephant foot. That the foot moves and stops, stops and moves, points to the most natural trait of the primitive construct of rhythm.⁷⁹

Chen concludes that the riddle-like phrase of shiyanzhi has led to the advocacy of all kinds of moral, ethical and political purposes for literature. At the other extreme, it would be just as easy [to associate the word with] the feeling and the emotional experience of the individual, spontaneously expressed.⁸⁰ Chen brings in at this juncture another equally famous statement, shiyuanqing 詩緣情 (poetry follows from emotion) articulated by Lu Ji. Although the two statements point to the bifurcated development of Chinese literary thought, Chen observes, they are mutually implicated. Chen elaborates his argument in "The Shih-ching: Its Generic Significance in Chinese Literary History and Poetics (1969), in which he refers to the lyric as a generic term for describing Chinese poetry.⁸¹ Juxtaposed against the Platonic declaration that ‘all mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or to come,’ would have been the contemporary Chinese phrase shih yen chih [shiyanzhi] serving as a counter statement, that ‘poetry,’ as a generic term, ‘speaks the heart’s desire.’ Shih by nominalistic definition is a ‘song-word,’ hence ‘lyric’ in the fullest sense as a working term for our modern criticism."⁸²

Chen Shih-hsiang names xing 興—spontaneous outburst of feeling—as the core factor inspiring Chinese poetry. In "The Shih-ching," he takes up the conclusion of Shang Chengzuo’s 商承祚 and Guo Moruo’s oracle bone studies by describing xing as the primitive ‘heave-ho’ or ‘hurrah,’ ejaculation in joy and high spirits. This was probably done with a feeling of emotional and physical uplift by a group turning round a central object while joining hands in a dancing circle.⁸³ Chen believes that herein lies the primeval origin of the songs as shi, which was to become the name for all later Chinese poetry:

The primitive voices, transformed and refined into prosodic devices and conventions in their texts, still strike us,