Configurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literature

Qin Wang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789813296404
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book aims to demonstrate the multiplicity of configurations of the individual in modern Chinese literature through analyzing several classic texts written by Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun, Lao She, and Mu Shiying. It attempts to refresh our understanding of the history of modern Chinese literature and indirectly responds to the controversial issue of "individual rights" (or "human rights") in present-day China, showing that in modern Chinese literature, various configurations of the individual imply political possibilities that are not only irreconcilable with each other, but irreducible to the determination of the modern discourse of "individualism" introduced by the West. A groundbreaking work, it will give valuable context to political scientists and other scholars seeking to understand what "China" means in the 21st century.

© The Author(s) 2020

Q. WangConfigurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9640-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Translating the Individual—Why Literature Matters

Qin Wang¹

(1)

East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Qin Wang

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Das ächte Dividuum ist auch das ächte Individuum. (The true dividual is also the true individual.)

—Novalis, N. 952 of Das allgemeine Brouillon

Each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities.

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

I

No serious study on the problematic of individual and individuality in modern Chinese literature can dismiss Jaroslav Průšek’s pivotal essay in this regard, i.e., “Subjectivism and Individualism in Modern Chinese Literature” (1957). In this essay, Průšek takes the emergence of representations of individuality to be characteristic of modern Chinese literature. By “subjectivism and individualism,” Průšek refers to “an emphasis on the creator’s personality in art and a concentration of attention on the artist’s own life,” so that the artwork “does not document objective reality but rather reflects the author’s inner life and comprises descriptions of analysis of his own feelings, moods, visions and even dreams.”¹ Through a socio-political reading, Průšek draws the following conclusion, which is not unfamiliar to Chinese Marxists’ historical understanding of modern Chinese literature:

In my view, the growth of these features in the literature of a given period may serve as an important indication of certain changes in the social structure in which it arises and is not seldom the sign of the individual’s emancipation from traditional views in the sphere of philosophy, religion or ethics, or even of actual revolt against the inherited social order. In the case of Chinese literature of the period referred to above, I should say that the measure of these features is one of the symptoms of the emancipation of the individual from feudal traditions, the braking of all those fetters restricting the freedom of the individual in the old society, whether in family or in public life.²

Despite or because of Průšek’s focus on socio-political elements underlying modern Chinese literature against the backdrop of the drastic historical transition from the so-called ancient China to modern China, and, despite or because of his emphasis on the influence of social changes on literary writings, he points out that there is a close connection, a certain continuity in terms of literary history, between modern Chinese literature (epitomized by works during and after the May Fourth Movement) and some ancient Chinese literary works in the Qing dynasty. Průšek argues, for example, that Shen Fu (1763—1810)’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life (Fusheng Liuji) shares some features of subjectivism and individualism with modern Chinese writers, for we find in Shen Fu “the direct avowal of individuality—and of and individualist—almost without reservations, an avowal which links Shen Fu with the authors of that new revolutionary epoch” and “not with the old, strictly regulated spirit and literature of feudal times.”³

No matter whether Průšek’s effort to establish an implicit historical continuity between modern and ancient Chinese literature in terms of “subjectivism and individualism”⁴ might not be justifiable, what he means by “individuality” seems to indicate a transparent relation between the writer and the text, where the latter is understood as expressive of the former’s intentions, emotions, feelings, etc. In this reading, what is underestimated is the ways in which “individual(ity)” is configured in modern Chinese literary works, which is quite different from asking whether these writers tend to write on their alleged “inner self” or the “outside world.” By configuration of the individual, I refer to the literary practice—including rhetoric strategies, narrative forms, formalistic settings, etc., but not limited to what is usually called “literature”—through which an individual is constituted into an individual, with whose socio-political implications as a resulted effect of literature rather than its given or predetermined factor. Configuration is used thereby in contrast with representation, which entails a particular relationship between literature and the referent, namely that which supposed to be precede literature. Moreover, I use the term “configuration” in order to partly maintain Eric Auerbach’s explication of the term “figure,” etymologically derived from the Latin “figura,” which, in medieval literary texts such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, maintains the concreteness of a character while through itself pointing to something yet-to-come, something beyond wordliness: “Virgil in the Divine Comedy is the historical Virgil himself, but then again he is not; for the historical Virgil is only a figura of the fulfilled truth that the poem reveals, and this fulfillment is more real, more significant than the figura. With Dante, unlike modern poets, the more fully the figure is interpreted and the more closely it is integrated with the eternal plan of salvation, the more real it becomes.”⁵ Twisting Auerbach’s observation, we might say that, as the “historical reality” of “figure” in Dante is confirmed rather than annulled in this “vertical connection” with a divinity beyond this world, literary configurations of the individual in modern Chinese literature, against a cultural-historical backdrop in which those socio-political institutions that constitute the condition of possibility in Europe for the invention of the modern individual are yet to be realized, entail a reversed literary image, namely, that the concreteness of the individual is not supported or promised by a divine order that precedes it, but inspired and animated by an exploration of order, a societal, worldly order.

But as Lydia H. Liu argues, insofar as neologisms concerning “subjectivism and individualism”—such as “ziwo” (self), “geren” (individual), and “geren zhuyi” (individualism)—are often regarded as self-sufficient evidence for a general claim about the characteristic of modern Chinese literature, we must address the “translingual practice” between English and Japanese, between Japanese and Chinese, in order not to “foreclose” the concepts about “individual(ity)” as “an established fact or as one of those timeless motifs.”⁶

Let us look at an essay to which Průšek pays attention, an essay that is of utmost importance for the “literary revolution” during the New Culture Movement.⁷ In “Human Literature” [Ren de wenxue], Zhou Zuoren sheds some light on the importance of individual(ity) with a voice that might well remind the reader of the discourse of evolutionism prevalent during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.⁸ Published in 1918, “Human Literature” contains a paragraph where Zhou Zuoren makes use of the metaphor of “tree” to construe what he means by “humanism”:

What I call humanism is not charity as referred to in such common sayings as “have pity and commiserate with the people,” or “wide generosity and relief of distress among the masses.” It is rather an individualism of basing everything on man. The reasons are: First, within humanity, a man is just like one tree in a forest. If the forest thrives, the single tree in it will also thrive. But thriving of the forest depends on the thriving of each single tree. Second, the individual loves humanity because he is one unit of it and because of its relationship to him.⁹

According to Zhou Zuoren, humanism starts with the individual, and, “to be able to discuss humaneness, love of humanity, one must first have acquired the qualifications of man and stand in the position of man.”¹⁰ As we shall see, the metaphor appropriated here is nothing new for contemporary critics who debated on the relationship between the individual and the society (or the state) in modern China.

But it is precisely in the paragraph in question that we encounter that which cannot be easily reconciled with Průšek’s general claim on “subjectivism and individualism.” Without delving into the details of Zhou Zuoren’s argument, let us take a brief look at the metaphor that he uses. Indeed, as we shall see, the metaphor is a tricky, if not pervert, twist of the metaphor of organism frequently appropriated by discussants for explicating the relationship between the individual and the state, a way of thinking partly borrowed from the current German thoughts on the organic state. Not only does Zhou Zuoren substitute “humanism” or “humanity” for the state as what is contrasted with the individual, more importantly, he reorients the metaphor toward the direction of an individuality that is conceptually independent of its opposite, whether it was the state or humanity. Unlike the metaphor of organism, where the relationship between the individual and the state is often analogized with that between cell and organ, Zhou Zuoren’s metaphor implicitly but decisively destabilizes this organic relationship of interdetermination.

What this seemingly trivial twist of the metaphor of organism reveals for our concern is as follows: for the investigation of configurations of “individual(ity)” in modern Chinese literature, it is to beg the whole question if we only search for representations of “subjectivity” (in Průšek’s sense) or expressions of “personal feelings,” not because they are not representations of individuality, but because they become so thanks to the presupposition of a particular understanding of the individual that renders representation possible in the first place. Průšek’s approach, in this regard, for all its contributions to the study of modern Chinese literature studies, is insufficient for interpreting the twists and turns in Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature,” let alone other literary works. These are several crucial questions that Průšek’s argument fails to consider: by twisting the metaphor of organism, how does Zhou Zuoren associate the definition of the individual with the revolution of Chinese literature? What role does literature play as regards the relationship between humanity and individuality? These problems will function as the thread of thought for my reexamination of Zhou Zuoren’s essay in the next chapter.

But let us put aside Zhou Zuoren metaphor for a moment. In order to approach the problematic of individual(ity), first and foremost we have to take a look at the unstable relationship between the English term “individual” and its Chinese rendering, “geren.” In the following, I first focus on the implications of the term “individual” as it is used in the intellectual history of European thoughts, and then I discuss the particular ways in which Chinese critics in early modern China employed it as they deal with the problem of “geren.” My aim is not to show the (lack of) correspondence between the term “individual” and the term “geren,” but rather to delineate how elements of translatability and untranslatability in the process of stabilization and valorization of this correspondence may give rise to possibilities of approaching “individual(ity)” in literature in different ways.

II

Let us start, or start again, with the question that any reader stumbling upon this work may expect it to appear on the first page: What is “individual”? According to the definition in OED, the English term “individual” as a noun designates firstly “a single human being, as distinct from a particular group, or from society in general.”¹¹ But there is no apparent connection between “individuality” and human being in the logical definition of “individual,” according to which an individual refers to “a thing which possesses properties peculiar to itself and which cannot be subdivided into other things of the same kind; spec. any of the entities occupying the lowest level of a system of classification; a member of a class or species.” Indeed, the seemingly diversified meanings of “individual” are not independent from each other. Raymond Williams’s investigation here is quite important, who offers a meticulous historical account of the development of the term.

According to Williams, “Individual” is derived from the Latin word “individuus,” which, appeared first in the sixth century, is a negative form of the term “dividere”; in turn, “individuus” is a translation of the Greek word “atomos,” designating that which is not cuttable or divisible. Along with this Democritic doctrine of atomism, where “individual” is supposed to be a fundamental particle, is the strand of Platonism that emphasizes the indivisibility of being.¹² Among the earliest definitions of the term “individuus,” Boethius’s is worth mentioning: “something can be called individual in various ways: that is called individual which cannot be divided at all, as unity or spirit (i); that which cannot be divided because of its hardness, such as steel, is called individual (ii); something is called individual, the specific designation of which is not applicable to anything of the same kind, such as Socrates (iii).”¹³ The first meaning has a lot to do with the doctrine of trinity in Christianity, and is continued in the seventeenth century, when, for example, Milton wrote in 1641 on dividing “the individuall Catholicke Church into severall Republicks.”¹⁴ Relatedly, the third meaning has its theological implications as the problematic of “individuation” constitutes one of the most heated themes in scholasticism.¹⁵

The second meaning of “individuus,” which at first glance seems awkward, is associated with the “atom” in physics after the seventeenth century. “The decisive development of the singular noun [individual] was indeed not in social or political thought but in two special fields: logic, and, from C18, biology.”¹⁶ In the next century, Williams continues,

alike in biology and in political thought, there was a remarkable efflorescence of the word. In evolutionary biology there as Darwin’s recognition (Origin of Species, 1859) that “no one supposes that all the individuals of the same species are cast in the same actual mould.” Increasingly the phrase “an individual”—a single example of a group—was joined and overtaken by “the individual”—a fundamental ord...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Translating the Individual—Why Literature Matters
• 2. Literary Evolutionism and Its Discontents: Between Zhou Zuoren and Lu Xun
• 3. Individuality Contra “Homo Economicus”: A Reading of Lao She’s Camel-Xiangzi
• 4. Touch, Body, and the New Perceptionism: Mu Shiying’s Case
• 5. Lu Xun’s “Ah Jin” and the Politics of Exemplarity
• Back Matter