introduction: ornamental lyricism - harvard...

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Introduction: Ornamental Lyricism

In a 1927 anthology of Tang (618– 907) and Song (960– 1279) poetry, Hu Shi (1891– 1962) comments scathingly on the dense style of Wu Wenying , a thirteenth- century poet. Hu quotes Zhang Yan , a contemporary of Wu, as saying, “Wu Mengchuang’s [Wenying] song lyrics are like a seven- tiered trea sure pagoda that dazzles the eyes, but when broken apart, the fragments cannot be formed into a coherent whole” . Despite the tremendous popularity of Wu Wenying among the lyric poets of the late Qing era (1840– 1911), only two short simple poems of his appeared in Hu Shi’s anthology. Wu’s controversial lyric style, marked by fi gurative density, ambiguity, and ornamentation, had experienced a peculiar re-surgence of interest from the early nineteenth century onward. Hu Shi, the standard- bearer of the New Culture Movement, took a dim view of the extent of Wu’s infl uence: “During the past fi fty years, poets have been poisoned by Wu’s song lyrics, making a living out of relying on

1. Hu Shi , Hu Shi xuan Tang Song ci sanbaishou , 283. For recent discussion of Wu Wenying in Chinese, see Yeh Chia- ying [Ye Jiaying] , “Chaisui qibao loutai” , in Jialing lunci conggao , 58– 121; in En glish, see Fong, Wu Wenying.

2. For more discussion of this anthology and the politics of canon formation of clas-sical literature in the early twentieth century, see Owen, “Th e End of the Past,” 167– 92, esp. 183– 86; for a discussion in En glish of the revived interest in Wu Wenying in the late Qing era, see Shengqing Wu, “Classical Lyric Modernities,” 114– 24.

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2 Introduction

clichés and classicism, without emotion and artistic conception.” Hu Shi was infl uential in casting Wu as an aesthete-hedonist who created linguistic mazes and sensory experiences. In his view, Wu’s poetry was like jewel boxes or carved screens, overwrought and burdened with vocabulary from a curio- fi lled lexical cabinet of the past.

I invoke this image of “the destroyed seven- tiered trea sure pagoda” (chaisui qibao loutai ) to epitomize some of the distinctions of song lyrics (ci ) and to further generalize classical- style poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century. Th e image of the trea sure pagoda epitomizes sumptuous aesthetics, exacting craftsmanship, and unabashed elitism. Th is poetic style, vigorously condemned by Hu Shi, aff orded late Qing poets an aesthetic model. Th e image of the shat-tered pagoda captures the characteristics that I refer to in this study as “ornamental lyricism,” which is used in the broad but well- defi ned sense of an expression of intensifi ed emotion with heightened formal consciousness and rhetorical execution, encompassing a range of attri-butes that were manifested in the lyric poetry and poetics of the late Qing and Republican eras. Th e word “ornament” is conceived of as being based partially on the compound word xiushi (embellish-ment) and partially on the use of wen in its belletristic sense. To be more specifi c, “ornamental lyricism” designates the extensive use of literary conventions, allusions, tropes, and the rhetorics of bi (meta phorical comparison) and xing (aff ective images), thereby conveying a feeling of excessiveness or overdecoration. Further, I con-ceive of it not only as this formal aesthetic, but more broadly as a social practice, an elegant lifestyle, and a concomitant cultural and intellec-tual ideal.

Treated in a modern context, the rhymed writing and its intricate, meticulous stylization were readily aligned with negative values, such as superfi ciality, garishness, and social irrelevance. To use an analogy made by Chen Duxiu (1879– 1942), an infl uential fi gure in the May

3. Hu Shi, Hu Shi xuan Tang Song ci sanbaishou, 284.4. Th is image is indebted to Chia- ying Yeh’s Chinese essay titled “Chaisui qibao

loutai.”


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Introduction 3

Fourth Movement, ornate classical literature is “a clay doll prettied up with makeup” . Rejecting such vilifi cations, in this book I will address some key issues surrounding the literary trend of ornamentation and the role it played in the development of classical lit-erature in the modern context. How, for example, as a growing need developed for a new vocabulary and aestheticism to express the unpre ce-dented turmoil of the time and to introduce new ideas, did this par tic u-lar style of ornamented lyrics come into vogue? How did the style’s superfi cial surface, formal concern, and femininized beauty relate to the substance— that is, aff ective content, subjectivity, and cultural ideology— and become the carrier of profound meaning? Finally, what role did the style play in contemporary literati life? I argue that this shared aes-thetic style, ideological commitment, and social practice were one prom-inent reaction to the po liti cal, cultural, and historical necessities that came to bear on early twentieth- century poetry. With a more or less coherent poetic ideology, this revealing trend was part of poets’ ex-traordinary quest for meaning as the world around them was falling apart. At the same time, the privileged status and power of this style and the whole wen culture associated with it were challenged, exposing the unresolved tensions between the ornamental surface and deeper cultural signifi cations.

On a meta phorical level, the “destroyed trea sure pagoda” of Chinese literati culture and the fractures that pervaded its de cadent beauty cap-tured the soul and sentiment of the poets of the era. Th eir works con-tinued to glow like shards of broken jewels in the rubble, even when an accelerating modernization swept them into the dustbin or relegated them to the curio shelf. Th ese fi ssures, fragments, anachronisms, and muffl ed voices are refl ected or refracted in the shattering mirror of moder-nity. Th ese poets’ extraordinary eff orts and the resulting contradictory eff ects constitute the stories of this book.

5. Chen Duxiu, “Wenxue geming lun” , in Duxiu wencun , 96. For an En glish translation, see Timothy Wong, “On Literary Revolution,” in Modern Chinese Literary Th ought, ed. Denton, 140– 45.


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4 Introduction

On TraditionIt is commonplace among contemporary scholars to emphasize a radical break with— or negation of— tradition as a central characteristic of mo-dernity. Th e concept of modernity, characterized by its originality, is premised on a fi xed, stable notion of the entity called tradition. Tradi-tion, however, has been “brought into being by modernity’s own imaginary.” In this conceptual framework, tradition did not exist until it was defi ned in opposition to modernity. Tradition is thus a concept formulated with the bipolar structure of tradition versus modernity; this presupposes an assumption of two self- contained and confl icting enti-ties, that is, new and old, progressive and conservative, all within clear- cut boundaries. If modernity is cast as a temporal, progressive movement and marks an absolute new beginning, tradition as a totality is subject to an ending that the modern condition can be mea sured against and break away from. Revisiting this long- established binary paradigm re-minds us that the fabrication of a monolithic image of tradition and the subsequent radical attack on it are in a broad sense modern projects and self- conscious articulations of both an epistemological and a histori-cal break.

Th e reifi ed notion of tradition that is central to modernity has domi-nated our understanding of twentieth- century Chinese literature since its self- proclaimed date of origin. China’s May Fourth literature, through its “performative declaration of modernity,” invested its project with absolute newness and epoch- making signifi cance. Many writers who participated in the May Fourth Movement (1917– 23) engaged in heated, iconoclastic attacks on the authority of tradition while embracing Western ideas and cultural practices wholesale. It has become a widespread assumption in the

6. For thoughtful critiques of the key concept of modernity, see Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 113– 49; Punter, Modernity.

7. Jacobs, “Tradition Is (Not) Modern,” 29– 44, esp. 31.8. Owen, “Th e End of the Past,” 171. See also Leo Lee, “Incomplete Modernity,” 31–

65. Shu- mei Shih gives an elaborate account of the Hegelian perspective in May Fourth thinking of modernity and tradition and its radical and totalistic terms in Th e Lure of the Modern, esp. 49– 68. See also Susan Daruvala’s helpful discussion of Zhou Zuoren’s

(1885– 1967) alternative response to modernity in Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Response to Modernity, esp. 1– 58.


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Introduction 5

twentieth century that the Chinese literary and cultural tradition was in a kind of stasis: inert, ideologically backward, and serving as an im-pediment to the implementation of a universalizing modernization. As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes in a diff erent cultural context, “Th e picture of a changeless or static past is usually itself a construction of early- modern Eu ro pe an historical or so cio log i cal thinking. It has seldom been a non- western society’s way of describing itself until recent times.” Th is reveals that it was only when non- Western intellectuals subscribed to Eu ro pe an modes of modern thought that they came to view their tradi-tions as lagging behind in historical time. In the same vein, the darkly perceived, static image of the Chinese literary tradition in the late Qing era was to a great extent the result of a rhetorical gesture and an ideologi-cal construction set in motion by the desire to pave the way for literary and po liti cal revolution. In historical hindsight, we are aware that an illustrious literary high culture did not grind to a halt overnight when revolutionary rhetoric proclaimed that it was dead. Underlying the fail-ure to chart the territory of the classical genres of the late Qing and Republican eras is the hitherto- unexamined critical stance of contempo-rary scholars, who subscribe to the May Fourth view that the literary language and its writing were ossifi ed. In recent de cades, scholars have made admirable eff orts to problematize this unquestioning ac cep tance of the May Fourth paradigm in both Chinese and En glish scholarship, engaging in a wide-ranging, polemical examination of the complexity of the writings of the era, with recuperative endeavors to bring pop u lar narrative genres into the modern canon. It is now a shared sentiment that there is critical ignorance or a repression of historical complexity in the disjuncture between the rhetorical claim of the stagnation of tra-dition by radicals and the continually transforming substantive aspect

9. Chakrabarty, “Afterword: Revisiting the Tradition/Modern Binary,” 285– 96, esp. 286.

10. See Gregory Jusdanis’s discussion of “belated modernity” in the Greek context in Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture.

11. A few well- known works in En glish are Doleželová- Velingerová, ed., Th e Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century; Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterfl ies; Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity; David Wang, Fin- de- siècle Splendor; Hockx, Questions of Style; and Huters, Bringing the World Home.


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6 Introduction

of tradition in practice. Although contemporary scholars all seem to agree on a conceptual level that a textual “Chinese tradition” appeared formidable and energetic in a modern context, questions remain about what exactly happened to the high genres of traditional literature in his-torical terms and how to account for the seemingly anomalous phenom-enon of the fl ourishing of classical poetry.

In an important article that revisits some debates on language from the late Qing to the Republican era, Th eodore Huters brings critical at-tention to the range of possibilities available to linguistic changes and argues that the broad rubric of wenyan wen (classical Chinese) was diverse, fl exible, and far from ossifi ed. His revealing discussion of the concession by some intellectuals, such as Yan Fu (1854– 1921), in the linguistic battle shows that although writers of the era might have admitted defeat in their eff orts to keep classical Chinese as the vehicle for discursive prose, they consolidated their fi rm belief in the classical language used for poetry. Th is new, reconciliatory stance not only left poetry as the one viable place to show the full range of expression of clas-sical language but also entrusted it with more profound meaning and signifi cance. Although the poets studied in this book exhibited diff erent degrees of openness to modern culture and made adjustments accord-ingly, they all shared a linguistic and cultural position: a faith or confi -dence in the expressive power of classical poetry. In the opposite camp, even Hu Shi confessed during the heyday of the literary revolution that poetry was the most formidable castle waiting to be conquered. My intent here is not to argue for the exceptionalism of classical poetry, but I do believe that poetry deserves special, nuanced treatment among the classical writing genres. Th ese poets’ confi dence in the importance of classical- style poetry does not stem primarily from habit, vanity, or emo-tional attachment but rather from intellectual reasoning and aesthetic

12. Scholars have begun to explore this fi eld, and exciting new scholarship has emerged. A few works in En glish are Kowallis, Th e Subtle Revolution; Fong, Qian, and Zurndorfer, eds., Beyond Tradition and Modernity; and Tian, “Muffl ed Dialect Spoken by Green Fruit.” A good amount of Chinese scholarship has become available in recent years and will be cited throughout this book.

13. Huters, “Legibility vs. the Fullness of Expression.”14. Hu Shi, “Bishang liangshan” , in Hu Shi lunzheng ji , vol. 1, 77.


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Introduction 7

commitment. Lyric poetry once enjoyed an elevated position in China’s cultural tradition and thus constitutes a particularly interesting and mean-ingful locale for investigating re sis tance to and negotiation with societal and cultural transformation.

Major Marxist scholars in the twentieth century have fruitfully dealt with the issue of tradition. Raymond Williams argues in his Marxism and Literature:

Th e concept of tradition has been radically neglected in Marxist cultural thought. It is usually seen as at best a secondary factor, which may at most modify other and more decisive historical pro cesses. Th is is not only because it is ordinarily diagnosed as superstructure, but also because “tradition” has been commonly understood as a relatively inert, histori-cized segment of a social structure: tradition as the surviving past. But this version of tradition is weak at the very point where the incorporating sense of tradition is strong: where it is seen, in fact, as an actively shaping force. For tradition is in practice the most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits. It is always more than an inert historicized segment; indeed it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation. What we have to see is not just “a tradition” but a selec-tive tradition: an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre- shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the pro cess of social and cultural defi nition and identifi cation.

Williams argues for the power of tradition, reading it as a shaping force that is simultaneously shaped by social structures. Tradition does not become a simple extension or “predisposed continuity” of heritages into the modern era but is deliberately selected and enlivened in diff er-ent ways. We must be cautious about modernity’s complicity in de-fi ning a static tradition, but more important, we must treat tradition as

15. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 115. In Keywords, Williams points out that tradition is a diffi cult concept because of its diverse pop u lar usages. Williams, Key-words, 318– 20.

16. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 116. Here I partially invoke Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s infl uential concept of “the invention of tradition.” I emphasize the aspect of “adaptation,” which involves old uses changing to fi t new conditions in a pro cess of “invention.” Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” 1– 14. For a useful discussion of the diff erent conceptualizations of tradition, see Vlastos, “Tradi-tion: Past/Present Culture and Modern Japa nese History,” 2– 9.


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8 Introduction

“eff ective formations” either to be incorporated into or used to resist modernity.

Collective eff orts initiated by scholars in the past several de cades to understand divergent traditions in non-Western contexts have debunked the determinist view of Western modernity as a universal project. Schol-ars have proposed such concepts as “multiple modernities,” “alternative modernity,” “repressed modernities,” or “the indigenization of moder-nity,” calling for engagement with “culture- specifi c and site- based reading(s).” Although these formulations are useful in accounting for distinctive features of modernity crystallized in diff erent locations, they still cannot circumvent the epistemological conundrum that replicates the pervading notion that tradition is an oppressive and static entity, the very notion modernity depends on. With the aim to think more

17. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 119. For an enlightening discussion of the vexed question of continuity and discontinuity between premodern and modern China, see Metzger, “Continuities between Modern and Premodern China,” esp. 281– 90.

18. Goankar provides an elaborate account of “alternative modernities,” a concept proposed by Appadurai, and calls for “cultural- specifi c and site- based reading(s)” (p. 15). Goankar, “On Alternative Modernities.” See also Appadurai, Modernity at Large. For the notion of “multiple modernities,” defi ned as “a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs” (p. 2), see Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” and also Göle, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities.” For a discussion of the “indigenization of modernity,” see Sahlins, “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes.” As Meltem Ahiska points out, these concepts are spatially oriented, treating the diff erent locales as productive constituents of modernity. Ahiska, “Occidentalism: Th e Historical Fantasy of the Modern,” 361. For a seminal discussion of the issue of modernity in modern Chi-nese literature, see Leo Lee, “In Search of Modernity.” Th e infl uential concept of “re-pressed modernities,” developed by David Wang, has signifi cantly expanded our knowledge of late Qing literature in terms of both theoretical reach and material bases. Wang urges us to “historicize the polemic of modernity” and to chart “the tortuous path by which modernity has come about” (p. 6). David Wang, Fin- de- siècle Splendor. For a discussion of the relationship between evolutionary thinking and modernity, see Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales, esp. 6– 22.

19. See Alexander Des Forges’s critique of the “fetishized” concept of modernity and its critical dilemma in the fi eld of modern Chinese literature. Des Forges, “Th e Rheto-rics of Modernity and the Logics of the Fetish,” 17– 31, esp. 23. Harry Harootunian points out that there is an “unstated presumption of exceptionalism and uniqueness” in the formulation of an “alternative modernity” and instead proposes a “coexisting or co- eval modernity.” Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, xvi. Fredric Jameson criti-cizes the ubiquitous replications of the concept of modernity in diff erent cultures or


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Introduction 9

fruitfully in and through this linked binary, cultural geographer Jane M. Jacobs proposes to treat it as “a vibrating couplet within which the terms are both codependent and mutually exclusive.” In a similar at-tempt to move beyond this dichotomy, I postulate a template that couples “modern” and “archaics” in order to emphasize the confl icted and contested nature of the formulation of modern culture while high-lighting each aspect’s mutually transformative power. To think in terms of modern archaics is to think dialectically without privileging the critical category of modernity or replicating the traditional/modern antithesis. Within this paradoxically codependent framework, I will treat tradition as a vibrant site and an exploratory device to detect dynamic reciprocity and dramatic confrontation between the modern and the archaic and, more specifi cally, to explore their realization in highly aestheticized forms and practices. Th roughout this book, I endeavor to demonstrate that various kinds of newness and innovations occurred in the old liter-ary forms and cultural practices; still, “modern” in this formula remains a descriptive category, a critical tool, and a desirable literary value, not a teleological goal.

Th e use of archaics is one feature that evolved in this modern context. While “archaic” is the rough approximation of the Chinese word “an-cient” ( gu ), the term “archaics” here refers to the poetics of adopting conventions and archaism, the revival of literary styles from the distant past, and, more broadly, the transformation of the Chinese lyric tradi-tion in the modern era. I argue that the Chinese lyric tradition in the early twentieth century was not something simply handed down from the past or defeated by literary revolution overnight but rather a living enter-prise that dynamically interacted with its historical moment. First, tradi-tion (including lyric tradition) is plural and diverse, functioning as a

contexts and their attempts to mark the diff erences from the hegemonic Western model. He argues that this approach ignores the fundamental meaning underlying modernity, that is, the standardization projected by capitalism worldwide. Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 12.

20. Jacobs, “Tradition Is (Not) Modern,” 33; italics in the original. With specifi c concerns about the pro cesses of deterritorialization and reterritorialization under glo-balization, Jacobs off ers this formula: “Tradition is (not) modern.”


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10 Introduction

pro cess of re/formation of the cultural imaginary. Selecting or reviving a par tic u lar strain of the past for a new purpose, then, becomes a con-scious choice and involves intellectual decision and labor. Second, recog-nizing tradition’s sheer plurality does not help us discern tradition as a powerful resource, nor does it lead to the ability to renew it. Under his-torical pressure, tradition has been revised, invigorated, or co- opted in many diff erent ways. Th e question arises of what adaptations and inno-vations were available in this new context. Th ird, even if we assume that writing in a certain form (regulated verse, for instance) persisted without much alteration, then for the tradition to maintain its vitality, one would expect shifting signifying positions and circumstances. Th is leads to questions about what changes occurred in the defi nition, social and ideological function, and cultural meaning of a “fi xed” form. Th is book attempts to sketch a preliminary picture of the writing of classical poetry during the fi rst three de cades of the twentieth century, with the belief that this period was a time of remarkable intellectual ferment and poetic energy. Th is is not to suggest that the burden of tradition could not be-come an overpowering or restrictive force; indeed, a number of May Fourth proponents vehemently reacted against its weight. However, works by many poets, a handful of whom are examined in this book, show that the lyric tradition itself was in transformation, and that this tradition off ered a rich vault of literary and cultural resources for a dis-tinctively new context. I attempt to take a closer look at the rift between the grand vision of modern literature and local practices, as well as at the historical contingencies, individual talent, and specifi c forms that inter-vened in the master narrative of literary evolution.

Used in a spatial sense, the phrase “modern archaics” describes the characteristics of a polyphonic juxtaposition of the multifarious and contending forces that were active in the formation of the Chinese literary fi eld at its early stage. Th e literary historiography produced in the twen-tieth century reveals that writers working within genres associated with the so- called old literature were either left out of historical accounts

21. See Yu Yingshi’s seminal remarks on the relationship between the May Fourth Movement and tradition. Yu Yingshi [Yu Ying- shih] , “Wusi yundong yu Zhong-guo chuantong” , in Shixue yu chuantong , 93– 107.


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Introduction 11

or treated as foils or reactionary forces to accentuate the supremacy of New Literature (xin wenxue ). Recent scholarship has signifi -cantly revised this view, describing diff erent literary trends interacting, competing, or simply coexisting with one another, from the traditional genres to the imported form of the short story, from elitist writing to pop u lar fi ction. To assert that the May Fourth discourse exercised a hegemonic power over other contemporary discourses during the prewar era is a misleading overstatement. Th e dominance of New Literature and the vernacular language movement is far more a self- propagating fi ction that relies on the symbolic power of literary theory than an objective description of the literary scene of the time. In the prewar era, this was a hybrid fi eld consisting of the modern and the archaic, the elitist and the pop u lar, and the Chinese and the foreign. In acknowledging a diver-sity of writings of the era, this book does not attempt simply to celebrate this diversity or enrich our knowledge through salvaged materials, although the latter is one of my goals. Rather, my intent is to dissect their interactions or noninteractions, and their sites of ideological con-fl ict with one another. Taking Western modernity as an expression of the Enlightenment and of a par tic u lar set of institutional reforms spread around the globe by imperial expansion, I aim to contribute to a larger understanding of how intellectuals in the indigenous cultures subscribed

22. A few literary histories written in the 1930s that narrate the success of New Lit-erature are Chen Bingkun’s Zuijin sanshinian Zhongguo wenxue shi

(1930), Lu Yongheng’s Zhongguo xinwenxue gailun (1932), Wang Zhefu’s Zhongguo xinwenxue yundong shi (1933), and Zhou Zuoren’s Zhongguo xinwenxue de yuanliu (1934). Th ere is one well- known exception, Qian Jibo’s Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi

(1933), which discusses the achievements of Chen Sanli, Zhu Zumou, and other classical poets in detail.

23. A growing body of scholarship shows that a variety of classical, new, and pop u lar forms coexisted with the formation of New Literature. As Michel Hockx points out, “Th e New Literature must be seen as but one style of modern Chinese writing, coexisting and competing with other styles throughout the pre- War de cades.” See Hockx, Questions of Style, 5.

24. Lydia Liu’s discussion shows that because of their concerted eff ort to promote theoretical discourses, May Fourth writers were able to name themselves the harbingers of modern literature and to gain an edge over rivals such as the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfl ies school in the 1930s. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, 214– 38, esp. 233.


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12 Introduction

to, responded to, complicated, or resisted both its model of linear prog-ress and the social upheaval left in its wake. Th ese poets engaged in ef-forts to create a textual and social space for subjective refl ection, literary imagination and stylistic innovation, even to the point of creating an ontological mooring in their historical moment. Th e transformation of specifi c features of indigenous literary culture was also informed by, in dialogue with and substantially mediated through Western modernity.

Further, this book attempts to engage in conversation with the critical discourse of “lyric tradition” or “lyricism.” Th is discourse, fi rst outlined by Chen Shih- Hsiang (1912– 71), accounts for a range of aesthetic and formal attributes of China’s long, illustrious poetic tradition. Chen’s original formulation, conceived in the postwar American context, may sound ahistorical or essentialized to some degree, but it off ers a critical framework and vocabulary for scholars in the coming de cades to engage fruitfully in a discussion of aesthetic and formal aspects of Chi-nese lyrics. In a discussion of the aesthetic ideas of Chen Shih- Hsiang, Shen Congwen (1902– 88), and Jaroslav Průšek (1906– 80), David

25. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s distinctive practices of prose and poetry can be used as a parallel case here. He argues that for Tagore, “the function of the poetic was to create a caesura in historical time and transport us to a realm that transcended the historical” (p. 166). Chakrabarty, Provincializing Eu rope, 149– 79. Th ese Chinese and Indian poets’ revival of antiquity was diff erent from those of others, such as Western modernists’ borrowing of African sculpture, which in the view of some scholars “was simply appropriated in order to prove the universality of the mod-ern as form” (p. 9). Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World.”

26. An important public speech made by Chen Shih- Hsiang in 1971 and later pub-lished under the title “On Chinese Lyric Tradition” had a signifi cant infl uence on scholarly circles in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Chen Shih- Hsiang, “On Chinese Lyric Tradition.” See also Chen Shixiang [Chen Shih- Hsiang], Chen Shixiang wencun

. Chen uses lyricism to characterize the Chinese literary tradition. His eff orts were joined by Yu- kung Kao and a group of scholars who signifi cantly expanded the discus-sion into various issues, such as lyric form, self, time, and canon formation. A scholarly collection edited by Ke Qingming and Xiao Chi best represents this discourse on Chi-nese lyricism. Ke Qingming [K’o Ch’ing- ming] and Xiao Chi , eds., Zhong-guo shuqing chuantong de zaifaxian .

27. For an elaborate discussion of Chen Shih- Hsiang’s theory formulated in the context of American academia in order to engage in a comparative discussion of cross- cultural poetics, see Chen Guoqiu [Leonard K.K. Chan] , “Chen Shixiang lun Zhongguo wenxue” .


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Introduction 13

Wang argues that investigating Chinese lyricism will provide a multi-dimensional view of the extraordinary richness of the formation of modern Chinese subjectivity and will off er a way to engage in productive dialogues with Western aff ective discourses after the Enlightenment and Roman-ticism. Going beyond the two overarching themes of revolution (geming ) and enlightenment (qimeng ) in twentieth- century Chinese literature, Wang’s seminal article opens up new critical ground by calling for an examination of the cross- fertilization of lyricism across modern literary genres and their “aff ective histories” ( youqing de lishi ). While Průšek and Wang off er ingenious remarks on the cross- generic transplantation of lyricism into modern literature, this book limits its scope to classical poetry. Nonetheless, it makes contributions to this growing scholarship on Chinese lyricism in two respects. First, as the label “ornamental lyricism” suggests, I concentrate my study on the re-fashioning or reappropriation of the lyric tradition and its reifi cation in concrete, historical terms. Second, following Wang’s lead in character-izing lyricism not only as a literary attribute but also as “a structure of feeling,” I will pay critical attention to the aff ective content and poli-tics of “old” emotion, revealed in lyric poetry and poetics.

Raymond Williams’s infl uential concept of structures of feeling broadly designates the lived, social experiences of a generation in a par tic u lar historical moment. Art and literature have privileged positions, because for him, they respond to the social conditions of the time and provide evi-dence or recognizable forms to intangible “social experience in solution.”

28. Wang Dewei [David Wang] , “ ‘Youqing’ de lishi” , in Xiandai “shuqing chuantong” silun “ ” , 1– 83, esp. 6. Pioneer scholar Jaroslav Průšek makes the important point that the lyrical sensibility of literati culture had an enduring impact on May Fourth writers such as Yu Dafu (1896– 1954) and Lu Xun (1881– 1936). What he means by “lyrical” is subjective feelings and an evoca-tion of poetic mood, color, or imagery. Průšek, Th e Lyric and the Epic, esp. 1–28.

29. Wang Dewei, Xiandai “shuqing chuantong” silun, 6. Haiyan Lee uses Raymond Williams’s concept of structure of feelings in her insightful discussions of the discourse of love in modern literature and culture. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart, esp. 10– 11.

30. Th is elastic notion of structures of feeling refers to “a par tic u lar sense of life, a par tic u lar community of experience hardly needing expression, through which the characteristics of our way of life that an external analyst could describe are in some way passed, giving them a par tic u lar and characteristic colour.” Williams, Th e Long


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14 Introduction

I propose that ornamental lyricism is this kind of embodied structure of feeling, through which the shared perceptions, values, and lived experi-ences of the once dominant, now disintegrating class of Chinese literati were articulated. Further, the evocation of structures of feeling provides another theoretical lever to circumvent the dogmatic labeling of conser-vative versus progressive ideology and to somehow remedy the concep-tual quandary of the temporal framework off ered by modernity, leading me to the murky terrain of po liti cal and cultural contestation at a par tic-u lar point in history. Retrospectively identifying these now forgotten or obscured propensities, I attempt to unveil the aff ective, intellectual, and cultural dynamics inscribed in lyric poetry and its tragic encounter with history. Lyric poetry in tumultuous times becomes a profi table site for examining the interrelated thoughts and feelings of the era, or in Wil-liams’s phrase, “thought as felt and feeling as thought.” In doing so, this book aims to shed light on the role of the lyric tradition and its sensuous and sentimental elements as a force that shaped local relationships, as well as modern culture writ large.

Between History and Lyric FormIn 1923, Chen Yan (1856– 1937), the spokesperson for Tongguang- style poetry (Tongguang ti ), said of his contemporaries:

Since the Tongzhi [r. 1861– 75] and the Guangxu [r. 1875– 1908] reigns, poetry inherited from the masters of the Daoguang [r.1820– 50] and Xianfeng [r.1850– 61] eras has yearned for Du Fu [ , 712– 70] and Han Yu [ , 768– 824], using the poems of mutated feng and ya, and becom-ing more and more extreme. To express intense emotion, it often employs an abrupt, fi erce style to convey deep grieving and urgency.

Revolution, 64. In Marxism and Literature, Williams further points out that he chose the word “feeling” over “worldview” and “ideology” to emphasize a distinction. It des-ignates “aff ective elements of consciousness and relationships,” or, more broadly, “social experiences in solution.” Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132– 33; italics in the original.

31. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132.32. Chen Yan, “Xiaocaotang shiji xu” , in Chen Shiyi ji , vol. 1,

684– 85. “Mutated feng and ya” (bianfeng bianya) refers to the songs of the periods of decline.


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Introduction 15

Chen’s comments capture the momentous historical situation and the extent to which these poets produced works with great intensity, re-sulting in a distinctive style that diff ered signifi cantly from the conven-tional ideal of poetry as “gentle and morally upright” (wenrou dunhou

). What intellectuals at the time experienced was a “drastically changed situation unpre ce dented in the past three thousand years”

, in the words of Li Hongzhang (1823– 1901). Th ese changes occurred not only in the rapidly unraveling sociopo liti cal situation but also in the crumbling symbolic system. As these poets em-barked on the pro cess of marshaling their experiences into literary ex-pression, it is evident that their poetry became an expression of their shattered framework of meaning making and vision. Th ematically speak-ing, these po liti cally engaged poets enacted, represented, transfi gured, or aestheticized history, treating it as fi gures of rupture, shock, estrange-ment, or new promise. History was thus reifi ed in tension- fi lled poetic lines or in the disjuncture between a poem and its changing cultural environment. No matter whether their poetry expresses shock, mourns the ruins of the empire, or uses amorous emotion as po liti cal allegory, it reveals complex structures of feeling, all of which become indispensable aspects of the formation of modern subjectivity. Stylistically speaking, these poets, probably realizing that no image, meta phor, or word would truly suffi ce, went on to produce aff ective extremity or stylistic extrava-gance. Th e rich and contentious relationship between history, lyric vision,

33. As early as 1872, Li Hongzhang made this prediction in a memorandum submit-ted to the imperial court. Quoted in Liang Qichao , “Li Hongzhang zhuan”

, in Yinbingshi wenji dianjiao , vol. 3, 1962– 2020, esp. 1985.34. In his close reading of Yi Shunding and Chen Sanli’s poetry, Jon Kowallis treats

the articulations of “a profound sense of loss,” “shock,” or “personal alienation” as signs of literary modernity. Kowallis, Th e Subtle Revolution, 151, 202, 240. Using rich primary sources, Huang Mei- e shows the literati’s new poetic practices and literary imagina-tions under Japa nese colonial rule in Taiwan. Huang Mei- e , Chongceng xian-daixing jingxiang . Gao Jiaqian makes some compelling arguments that literary modernity can be found in the lyrics written by loyalists in cultural exile or dia-sporic dislocation. Gao Jiaqian [Ko Chia- Cian] , “Hanshi de yuejie yu xiandai-xing” .


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16 Introduction

and form, in conjunction with painstakingly wrought artifi ce, distin-guishes the poetry of this violent era from the rest of China’s literary his-tory. Primarily concerned with the transformation of classical poetry in the momentous era from 1900 to 1937, this book delves into the dynamics of history and form, two mutually implicated concepts. Although these po-ems bear testimony to catastrophic events, my focus is not to confi rm the traditional approach to reading poetry as “history in verse” (shishi ). Rather, I interpret these poets’ lyric poetry as a manifestation of their trau-matic losses and mournful nostalgia, as a constant struggle against repre-sen ta tional boundaries, and as a rhetorical medium connecting history and emotion.

Form, itself a slippery concept, primarily designates genre in a macro sense, but also style, conventions, and various formal features. To rehash briefl y, poetic form in this book refers to classical- style or old- style verse in the twentieth century ( jiuti shi ) in the shi [shih] and ci [tz’u]

forms. Shi refers mainly to ancient- style ( guti shi ) and recent- style ( jinti shi ) poetry, the latter including regulated verse (lüshi

), quatrains ( jueju ), and the extended form of regulated verse (pailü ). Th e fi ve- or seven- character ancient style, written without a fi xed tonal pattern or a prescribed central couplet of parallelism, allows for some formal fl exibility; regulated verse, consisting of eight lines of fi ve or seven characters, is written in accordance with fi xed tonal pat-terns, set end- rhyme schemes, and other poetic devices. Quatrains con-sist of four lines and follow the metrical rules of regulated verse. Th e beginning of the Tang dynasty witnessed the codifi cation of regulated

35. Th e connection between history and form has become a vexed question and the center of critical inquiry and theoretical innovation in the institutional history of literary studies beginning in the 1970s in the Anglo- American literary world. For an informative discussion of the oscillations between the literary discipline’s two mighty opposites, form and history, see Stephen Cohen’s “Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, 1– 27. In his study of form in Shakespearean literature, Douglas Bruster emphasizes form as a material thing and understands the term in the following senses: (1) “the immediately perceived shape of a work of literature and of its parts; a work’s appearance (form as material)”; (2) “kind, variety (form as materially produced)”; and (3) “the par tic u lar character, nature, structure, or constitution of a thing; its style (form as materially productive).” Bruster, “Th e Materiality of Shakespearean Form,” ibid., esp. 34– 36. For a critical study of shishi, see Yim, Th e Poet-historian Qian Qianyi, esp. 15–55.


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Introduction 17

verse into its standard form. Ci (lyrics or song lyrics), also known as changduan ju (lines of varied lengths), came into existence during the Tang dynasty and fl ourished in the Song dynasty. To compose song lyrics, a poet fi rst selected a melody and then wrote words to the par tic-u lar tonal pattern and rhythmic scheme that the music dictated. Con-sidered an “epochal form” (to borrow a term from Anthony Easthope) in the Tang dynasty, regulated verse remained the crown jewel of Chi-nese literature, and its prestige was undiminished for a thousand years. Th is form, with its rigid metrical patterns, syntactic balance, and struc-tural integrity and its incorporation into the civil ser vice examination, is generally understood as a quintessential representative of a microcosm of yin- yang cosmic order and a unifi ed vision of the universe and the self. Lyric poetry, characterized by Yu- kung Kao with the canons of regulated verse in his mind, off ers “an ideal, or idealized, world of self- containment and self- contentment.” Th is lyric experience is doomed to face the pressures of the external world because the poet, as an individ-ual, cannot separate himself from “the existence of the temporal and spatial distance which intrudes in the form of two recurrent motifs: es-trangement from others and transience in time.” Th e lyric encounter, intimately mediated through the symmetrical form, is either “resolved as a harmonious whole, or turned into a tense confl ict.” Simply put, the modern experience shattered this holistic vision— more or less premised on a harmonious, integrated worldview— and produced an increasing estrangement from others and the world, as well as a heightened sense of temporality. Th is is not to suggest that the harmonious ideal cannot be achieved in a single experience, or that the broken vision could not be revealed in premodern poetry (for example, the late work of Du Fu), but

36. Other forms, such as qu , are not covered in this book. For more detailed dis-cussion of the auditory eff ects and formal aspects of shi and ci, see, for instance, James J.Y. Liu, Th e Art of Chinese Poetry; Zong- qi Cai, ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry.

37. Anthony Easthope describes iambic pentameter as “an epochal form,” funda-mental to En glish poetic discourse. Easthope, Poetry as Discourse, 75. He argues that the development of iambic pentameter in En glish poetry is complicit with a bourgeois, capitalistic society (pp. 51– 77).

38. Zong- qi Cai, “Recent- Style Shi Poetry,” in How to Read Chinese Poetry, esp. 173– 76.

39. Kao, “Lyric Vision in Chinese Narrative,” esp. 229– 30.


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18 Introduction

the lyric vision in its totality, epitomized in regulated verse, was not sim-ply eroding but falling apart. In the hands of most talented poets of the time, the shattered vision and the simultaneous necessity of communica-tion paradoxically imbued their poetry with new complexity, tension, and vigor, resulting not in self- contained, timeless wholes but in intense internal and external confl icts.

In the eyes of progressive intellectuals, venturing into the twentieth century when imperial culture was unmistakably in decline, the histori-cal moment that empowered regulated verse as a poetic discourse not only had waned but also had become a symbol of the backwardness of traditional culture. Regulated verse was regarded as complicit with con-servative or even reactionary ideologies and inimical to modernization, while vernacular poetry (or New Poetry, xinshi ), coming with the emergence of the New Culture Movement, was the hallmark of literary modernity for a new China. Th e idea of epochal inappropriateness or disjuncture created a pervading sentiment against the continued prac-tice of inherited classical forms in the modern era. Th e signifying posi-tion of a form may weaken over time, but the real peril of labeling classical poetry as reactionary is that it not only forges a kind of essentialist link between ideology and form, but also assumes that ideological function is singular or simple and fails to give attention to textual details and their production in a specifi c cultural milieu.

With regard to the ideological function of form, I reiterate some ma-jor points formulated by prominent Marxist theorists. In his Criticism and Ideology, Terry Ea gleton outlines the foundational framework for a discussion of ideology’s productive infl uence on literary form, diff erenti-ating three separate categories: “General Ideology,” “Authorial Ideology,”

40. For instance, Yu Dafu, a famous short- story writer, also composed more than four hundred classical poems and identifi ed himself with the Qing poet Huang Zhongze (1749– 83). Yu labeled himself “a man living in the wrong era” (shidai cuowu zhe ) and “a man infatuated with skeletons” (haigu milian zhe

). Yu Dafu, “Haigu milian zhe de duyu” , in Yu Dafu wenji , vol. 3, 122. A group of new writers, such as Lu Xun , Yu Dafu, and Tian Han (1898– 1968), were also excellent classical- style poets. For a detailed discussion of

the new writers’ classical- style poetry in Chinese, see Zhu Wenhua , Fengsao yuyun lun ; Li Yuchun , Zhongguo dangdai jiuti shici lungao

; and, in En glish, Haosheng Yang, “A Modernity in Pre- modern Tune.”


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Introduction 19

and “Aesthetic Ideology.” He advances the refl ectionist argument of Marxist criticism and establishes a more sophisticated model to demon-strate the multiple layers of ideologies as well as literary forms that are at play in producing a text. Th e relationship among ideology, form, and individual text is complex, asymmetrical, and never crudely refl ective of the overall category of General Ideology that relates to the dominant mode of production. Indeed, as Fredric Jameson elucidates, the individ-ual text or cultural artifact is a confl ictual “fi eld of forces in which the dynamics of sign systems of several distinct modes of production can be registered and apprehended.” Th ese dynamics constitute what he means by “the ideology of form,” namely, “the determinate contradiction of the specifi c messages emitted by the varied sign systems which coexist in a given artistic pro cess as well as in its general social formation.” An in-dividual text’s unique adaptation of form can have historically diff erent ideological functions and eff ects. As Jameson further elaborates in his interpretation of genre, the content of form (diff erent from the content of substance, meaning “social and historical raw material”), defi ned as “the semantic ‘meaning’ of a generic mode,” is an ideology that can be sedimented, reappropriated, or refashioned in diff erent social and his-torical contexts at later stages.

In light of these main ideas of the ideology of literary form, I high-light a few points underlining my understanding of lyric form in the late Qing. First, we must go beyond the entrenched way of thinking of form as having only one inevitable ideological eff ect as the refl ection of the material base of its time and labeling the poetic form either conservative or liberatory. As mentioned earlier, the vernacular (baihua ) has es-sentially come to represent modernity, and classical language and form

41. “General Ideology” designates “a dominant ideological formation [that] is con-stituted by a relatively coherent set of ‘discourse’ of values, repre sen ta tions and beliefs”; “Authorial Ideology” means “the author’s specifi c mode of biographical insertion into General Ideology”; and “Aesthetic Ideology” represents a subset of literary elements, including theories of literature, critical practices, literary traditions, genres, conven-tions, devices, and discourses. Ea gleton, Criticism and Ideology, 54, 58, 60. For a lucid account of the Marxist theory of literary form, see Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture.”

42. Jameson, Th e Po liti cal Unconscious, 98.43. Jameson, Th e Po liti cal Unconscious, 140– 50, esp. 147, 141.


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20 Introduction

have become stigmatized as culturally conservative or even reactionary. Th is simplistic understanding of ideology in literary texts and the result-ing critical blindness have made it more likely that scholars will fail to take into consideration the contingencies and contradictions involved with a given text, its formal signifi cance, and its function in relation to socially divided intellectual groups and readers. Second, using Jameson’s idea that the ideology of the form persists into later times through being sedimented, Xiao Chi proposes to construct the “genealogy” of Chinese lyrical tradition— the path launched by Chen Shih- Hsiang—to trace the continuous transformation and manifestation of lyricism across genres and historical eras. Here, I off er one such manifestation of the lyricism of an era, highlighting the confl icts or contradictory eff ects between the formal system and the drastically diff ering content in a modern context. Both Ea gleton and Jameson emphasize the participation of literary form in the production of meaning, which may result in varying degrees of complication of or contradiction with diff erent categories of ideology in a single text. Th us, although I situate the discussion in a broader histori-cal context to tackle a range of thematic issues relating to modernity and structures of feeling, I make a critical commitment to close reading and attention to the formal apparatus of poetry. Th is book does not intend simply to mine the cultural information inscribed in lyrics but to ana-lyze how these raw materials are mediated through complex structures and their resultant eff ects. Further, critical attention should also be paid to the ideological and cultural functions of form for lyric poetry’s practi-tioners and readers and the question of, as Jon Kowallis puts it, “how eff ectively they spoke, both emotionally and artistically, to their in-tended readership about the present.”

Although my survey is by no means comprehensive, I have selected a few poets as representative of “conservative” writing and wish to use their example to complicate as well as substantially revise the understanding of poetic writing and the modern literary canon. Th e fi rst generation dis-cussed in this book, born in the 1850s and 1860s, reached intellectual maturity before the widespread introduction of Western learning; members

44. Xiao Chi, Zhongguo shuqing chuantong , ix– xii.45. Kowallis, Th e Subtle Revolution, 36.


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Introduction 21

of the second generation, born in the 1880s or after, were contemporaries of the New Culture Movement’s players. Members of the later group were not only fully aware of the New Culture Movement but also con-sciously opposed to it, at least in their formal writing. I will explore what form meant to these two generations of poets, as well as pay attention to the complex, potentially contradictory interactions among ideology, autho-rial agency, conventions, and the aff ective content of individual poems.

Th e social function and cultural signifi cance of form varied for diff er-ent groups of poets. To put it reductively, for the older generation of poets in this book, Chen Yan, Zhu Zumou (1857– 1931), and Chen Sanli (1859– 1937) in par tic u lar, the validity and effi cacy of form itself were taken for granted. Part of the training of career bureaucrats or Confucian scholars, the ability to use these forms with ease was a basic requirement and a cultural and linguistic mandate. Form was not merely a set of rules or codes but an aesthetic ideal that these poets fully inter-nalized; therefore, forsaking form was beyond their imagination be-cause they were imbricated within this cultural system. Meanwhile, in confrontation with the increasingly bewildering reality after the late 1890s, poets began to reconceptualize poetry and their practice of it. Classical poetry was redefi ned by scholars such as Chen Yan as a lonely enterprise confi ned to “one person’s private words” ( yiren zhi siyan

), not a vehicle for public speech. Redefi ning poetry as a per-sonal, privileged arena not only off ered a potent means of reclaiming the legitimacy of lyric poetry when its accelerated marginalization was fore-seen, but also refl ected the new conceptualization of wenxue (litera-ture), diff erentiated from ordinary language for practical purposes. Fur-ther, with regard to formal constraint, this intellectual group responded to the sweeping historical forces by adhering even more rigidly to the traditional genres and relying heavily on allusions and tropes, pushing the form to its uttermost extreme. Th is generation’s historical and intel-lectual experiences—that is, mourning the death of a royal concubine, the

46. Th e generation division in this book is arbitrary and is made mainly for the sake of con ve nience. For instance, Lü Bicheng, born in 1883, is in a diff erent generation from that of Long Yusheng, born in 1902.

47. Chen Yan, “Shuoshishe shilu xu” , in Chen Yan shilun heji , vol. 2, 1070.


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22 Introduction

father, and the nation (in both literal and meta phorical terms), as well as a sense of estrangement from the modern world—captured the broader temporal crises in the aftermath of the crumbling nation and wen culture. Th ey reacted with a strong tendency toward archaism and formality. When “all that is solid melts into air,” a “stable” poetic form as human artifi ce becomes one of the few concrete things left for poets to grasp. In this sense, classical poetry, weighted with more importance, off ered the intelligentsia a miniature model of the world to which to entrust their lyric vision, however limited or fragmentary. In a diff erent context, American poet laureate Rita Dove once defi ned form as “a talisman against disintegration.” Th ese poets clung tenaciously to poetic form as a kind of talisman to help sustain a unifi ed worldview and a coherent sense of cultural self against the threats of chaos lurking at every corner. More than just keeping form alive or indulging in lyric reverie, these poets also decorated their poetry with all the ornaments and rhetorical devices they had at their disposal. Th is ornamental turn could thus be interpreted as a reaction to the impending sense of crisis and the exces-sive pressures piled on literary language at the time, when the instru-mentality of language aimed at mass education was widely debated and promoted by diff erent sectors of the society. Th ese virtuoso for-malists might as well employ what ever trea sures they had acquired to dazzle the world.

Th e poets dealt with in Chapters 4 to 6 viewed the prospect of the continued existence of traditional forms with great alarm but still chose to adhere to the poetic conventions. Lü Bicheng (1883– 1943), Su Manshu (1884– 1918), Wu Mei (1884– 1938), Wu Mi

(1894– 1978), and Long Yusheng (1902– 66) upheld poetic form as representative of national culture in an era of modern nation- state building, the mass introduction of Western cultures, and interna-tionalism. Archaism and formal lyricism, as complicated ideological and aesthetic choices, were reckoned to present specifi c ideological signifi ca-tions in a new era. At a time when the indigenous culture was facing a formidable challenge from an aggressive West, the strategy of privileging traditional form through modern institutions or domesticating foreign

48. Dove, Mother Love, 1.


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Introduction 23

literature in the pro cess of translation, in the cases of Long Yusheng and Wu Mi in par tic u lar, was intended to help construct a Chinese national culture. In their rejection of vernacular language, these poets shared with the New Culturalists a preoccupation with a new, modern culture. Th e complexity of the dilemmas they faced in many ways epitomizes the fundamental clashes between local particularities and modernity’s uni-versal ethos. If we believe that for the fi rst generation, form as a cul-tural given worked as a nearly last resort to restore their diminished hopes, then for the younger generation, form, loaded with a diff erent set of cultural signifi cances, served the explicit purpose of expressing their emergent experiential structures with regard to nationalist, cul-tural, and feminist consciousnesses. Th e fi rst generation to varying degrees mourned a bygone literati culture; members of the second gen-eration, as avid learners of foreign cultures, demonstrated how the ad-vent of modernity carried along with it the possibility of reinvigoration and renewal.

In this book, two historical moments— the invasion of foreign troops and the subsequent fl ight of the royal family in the year of Gengzi (1900) and the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and its aftermath— are “thickly described.” Th ese two major shifts became a wellspring of lit-erary creativity and precipitated a large body of writing on mourning. Th ese works bore witness to these shattering events, conveyed a sense of the corresponding po liti cal and cultural crises, and registered the trauma that accompanied these experiences. In 1912, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, a considerable number of scholar- offi cials (shi ) were forced into exile or voluntarily resigned from the court, shifting their professional identities, and this provided fertile social conditions for an intense revival of classical poetry and scholarship. Th e Chinese

49. In theorizing the development of culture, Raymond Williams classifi es three categories: the dominant, the residual, and the emergent. With respect to the emergent category, he notes that “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created.” Williams, Marxism and Litera-ture, 123. Th e cultural practices of Lü Bicheng, Long Yusheng, and Wu Mi in some ways emerged as new forms of collective consciousness, presenting diff erent trajectories to the modern vernacular movement.

50. Th e term is Cliff ord Geertz’s. Geertz, Th e Interpretation of Cultures, 14.


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24 Introduction

intelligentsia’s aff ective responses to the Gengzi incidents and the fall of the imperial system, along with the complex predicament of their con-frontation with powerful cultural changes, is a fundamental, illuminat-ing dimension of modern Chinese literature and culture. My examina-tion ends in 1937, the year that marks the beginning of the Second Sino- Japanese War, which fundamentally changed the literary and cul-tural landscape. Th is book does not attempt to examine classical- style writing after the beginning of the war, a complex topic that deserves a separate monograph. Nineteen thirty- seven also happens to be the year when both Chen Sanli and Chen Yan, whose work I discuss in detail, passed away. Zheng Xiaoxu (1860– 1938), another renowned Tongguang- style poet, died the following year. Th e death of the older generation marks the end of one signifi cant chapter of literary history. By this time, Lü Bicheng, Wu Mi, and Long Yusheng had all also reached or passed their creative peak.

Seemingly invariant, poetic form and style in a creative poet’s hand can result in diff erent reifi cations and eff ects, entailing complex interac-tions of ideological, cultural, and aesthetic forces in a given historical time. I would like to appropriate the famous image of the Chinese jar in T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”:

Only by the form, the pattern,Can words or music reachTh e stillness, as a Chinese jar stillMoves perpetually in its stillness.

Just as the jar takes on a kind of life in its stasis, the meaning and eff ect of a poem, arrested in an unmoving shape, move perpetually across his-torical time.

51. Contemporary scholars Liu Na and Hu Yingjian paint a rich picture of the fl our-ishing of old forms in war time China, but the concerns and content of the writing in war time diff ered signifi cantly from those of prewar writing. Liu Na , “Jiuxingshi de youhuo” ; Hu Yingjian , Minguo jiuti shi shigao , esp. 20– 38.

52. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in “Four Quartets,” in T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909– 1962, 180.


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Introduction 25

Attributes of the Ornamentation of LanguageTh is section provides some preliminary remarks on the characteristics of the classical poetry and poetics of the late Qing and the Republican era. Th e foundational works of late Qing poetry, as laid down by scholars Qian Zhonglian (1908– 2003), Kurata Sadayoshi (1908– 94), and Jon Kowallis in Chinese, Japa nese, and En glish, respectively, have off ered a rich picture of classical poetry that encompasses contend-ing styles and diff erent aesthetic emphases. To paint with broad strokes, scholars have identifi ed three prominent schools of shi in the late Qing era: the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties school (Han Wei Liuchao pai

), represented by Wang Kaiyun (1833– 1916) and Deng Fulun (1828– 93); the Late Tang school (Wan Tang pai ), represented by Fan Zengxiang (1846– 1931) and Yi Shunding

(1858– 1920); and the Tongguang- style school (Tongguang ti ), the most infl uential school of the late Qing. Th e Poetic Revolution school (Shijie geming pai ) was relatively minor and short- lived, but its theoretical formulations and innovative practices were infl uential in the twentieth century. After the fall of the Qing, the Southern Soci-ety (Nan she ) rose to compete with the dominant Tongguang- style school. For ci, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Changzhou lyric school (Changzhou ci pai ) was most infl uen-tial. I address the poetic tenets, practices, and history of the Tongguang- style school and the Changzhou lyric school in this book. In order to frame my discussion, I here outline some salient features to familiarize readers with the poetic writing of the era.

53. Qian Zhonglian almost single- handedly established the subfi eld of the study of Qing poetry in mainland China. I will cite his works throughout this study. Kurata Sadayoshi , Shinmatsu Minsho o chūshin to shita Chūgoku kindaishi no kenkyū

; Kowallis, Th e Subtle Revolution.54. Kowallis renders the fi rst two schools as the “Neo- Ancient” school (nigu pai ) and the late- Qing Allusionists (Wan Tang pai). For a detailed discussion of the two

schools, see Kowallis, Th e Subtle Revolution, 22– 152.55. For a discussion in En glish of the “poetic revolution” and the poetry of Huang

Zunxian, see Schmidt, Within the Human Realm.


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26 Introduction

Ornament and AntitransparenceOrnamentation is a long- standing rhetorical tradition that can be traced to early Chinese literary thought. Wen, in its broadest metaphysical and cosmological sense, refers to “patterns,” a splendid display of Heaven and Earth; in a narrower sense, it simply designates “writing.” Used in the Six Dynasties, wen referred to rhymed writing as opposed to un-rhymed writing (bi ) and its utilitarian functions and was “character-ized by an intense expression of emotion and an overriding aesthetic concern with musical and rhetorical eff ects.” Th is distinction between wen and bi was revived by the nineteenth- century parallel prose school of wenxuan and further elaborated by modern thinkers such as Liu Shipei (1884– 1919). Th eodore Huters contends that although Liu Shipei compromised and accepted the unembellished bi forms as lower forms of prose, he confl ated cultural signifi cance (referring here to dao ) with a par tic u lar literary style and a set of rhetorical rules, on which cultural continuity would depend. As Liu wrote in 1905, the embellished, outer appearance corresponds to the inner beauty or dao.

Th us wen, interpreted as “ornament,” refers to the external manifestation of the beautiful in an orderly fashion. Th erefore, dao manifested in the external realm becomes wen, events in order is wen, and language with embellishment is also called wen without exception.

56. Knechtges, “Introduction,” in Wen Xuan or Selections of Refi ned Literature, ed. Xiao Tong, vol. 1, 17. See also the “Yuandao” and “Qingcai” chapters in Liu Xie’s Wenxin diaolong and Owen’s translation and interpretations. Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Th ought, 186– 94, 239– 45. See also Wai- yee Li’s discussion of the self- conscious use of ornamentation in fu (rhapsody). Wai- yee Li, Enchant-ment and Disenchantment, 10– 46.

57. Zong- qi Cai comments on Xiao Yi’s diff erentiation between wen and bi (p. 23). Zong- qi Cai, “Wen and the Construction of a Critical System in Wenxin Di-aolong.” Wen, as a term with multiple meanings, in a broad sense refers to “cultural tradi-tion in toto,” while in its more specifi c sense it denotes “royal posthumous titles, ritual objects, rites and music, norms and statutes; dignifi ed deportment, the polite arts, graphic cosmic symbols, eloquent speech, writing, rhymed writing, and belles- lettres” (p. 1).

58. Huters, Bringing the World Home, 87– 93.59. Liu Shipei , “Lunwen zaji” , in Liu Shenshu xiansheng yishu

, vol. 2, 854. For some excerpts in En glish, see Huters, “Miscellaneous Notes on Literature (Excerpts),” in Modern Chinese Literary Th ought, 86– 89.


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Introduction 27

“ ” “ ”

Although wen can be an encompassing and elastic concept, here Liu defi ned it to mean “ornament,” the link between profound meaning and elegant surface. Liu’s reiteration of the signifi cance of literary style and rhetoric, in Huters’s view, came to serve as a legitimate discursive ground for promoting a newly formulated, more rarefi ed notion of wenxue that claimed its own autonomous territory. As Laurence A. Schneider points out in his study of the National Essence Movement (Guocui ) that took place during the fi rst de cade of the twentieth century, “One of the earliest symptoms of this disintegration was the ‘discovery of cul-ture’ by scholars who, in their attempt to grapple with China’s contem-porary crises, perceived native literature and art as a special, discrete en-tity, a thing- in- itself, in de pen dent of and even more fundamental than po liti cal and social institutions which until then had been intimately associated with it.” Th e Wenxue that emerged from this disintegrat-ing pro cess and “discovery of culture” as a hard- fought discursive site was given a prominent role as Chinese learning in the pro cess of insti-tutionalization in the late Qing era.

To return to Liu Shipei’s glossing of wen as “ornament,” in Liu’s for-mulation, “ornament” was mainly reifi ed stylistically in parallelism and the use of rhyme. Liu had high hopes for the genres of parallel prose and

60. Huters, Bringing the World Home, 90. Further, he has pointed out that Wang Guowei , in his “Desultory Remarks on Literature” (“Wenxue xiaoyan” ) in 1906, borrowed the Kantian notion of literary autonomy to distinguish wenxue from other practical writings, a move that resonates with the earlier distinction between wen and bi. Huters, “Legibility vs. the Fullness of Expression,” 89–90.

61. Schneider, “National Essence and the New Intelligentsia,” 57.62. In his careful examination of the diff erent draft proposals for the curriculum for

the Imperial Academy (the forerunner of Beijing University), Chen Guoqiu shows that the institutionalization of the new discipline of wenxue ironically resulted from the ef-forts of the “conservative” scholars, such as Zhang Zhidong . Chen Guoqiu, Wenxue shi shuxie xingtai yu wenhua zhengzhi , 1– 44. For a discussion of wenxue, which became an arena for confl ict, especially after 1895, see Hut-ers, Bringing the World Home, 76– 80. Th e term wenxue, a neologistic translation of the En glish “literature” by an American missionary, also has connections to the Japa nese bungaku. See Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, 35.


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28 Introduction

regulated verse, believing that these two genres, uniquely characteristic of the essence of national literature, could be employed in competition with Western literature. In his lecture notes on medieval Chinese literature, written in exuberant classical language and delivered at Beijing Univer-sity in 1919, Liu further wrote: “Ornamentation and intertextuality, in-terwoven with shared emotion, constitute the essence of rhymed verse, as distinct from direct speech”

. Undoubtedly, at diff erent points in history, the conceptualization and deployment of ornamentation varied, yet it was always the case that any genre, more or less ornamented, still showed some distinction from direct speech. Chen Yan, who suggested that poetry is the expression of private feeling, explicitly pronounced in the preface to his Th e Gist of Poetics (Shixue gaiyao ): “Direct speech is speech; but poetry is not the direct speech of the self ” .

In contrast, in the New Literature discourse, “ornament” has been highly contested, becoming such a dirty word that modern writers dis-tance themselves from it, while the value of plainness or transparency is lauded. In 1868, Huang Zunxian (1848– 1905) wrote in the poem “Mixed Emotions”: “My hand writes what I have said; / how can ancient texts constrain me?” ? Th is couplet, which is

63. Liu Shipei, “Zhongguo zhongu wenxueshi jiangyi” , in Liu Shenshu xiansheng yishu, vol. 4, 2663– 2705, esp. 2664. In this quote, ci refers to wen , which is defi ned as “parallel phrase and rhymed words” (p. 2664). Huwen , refers to meanings in diff erent sentences that correspond to or complement each other. Huwen has been used to translate the poststructuralist term “intertextuality” into Chi-nese, and here I use the En glish term to render huwen, although the concepts remain to some degree distinct.

64. Chen Yan, “Shixue gaiyao,” in Chen Yan shilun heji, vol. 2, 1028.65. Huang Zunxian , “Zagan” , no. 2, in Huang Zunxian quanji, vol. 1, 75. In its original context, Huang’s main objective is to revolt against the

previously described allusive poetics, calling for poets to seek inspiration in the world and not from text. Th e line “My hand writes what I have said,” written by Huang around the age of twenty- one, was promoted by Hu Shi as a major slogan of modern lit-erature. See Hu Shi, “Wushi nianlai Zhongguo wenxue zhi xianzhuang”

, in Hu Shi lunzheng ji, vol. 1, 98. Qian emphatically reminds us that the idea “My hand writes what I have said” should not be understood as the main tenet of Huang’s own poetic practice. Qian Zhonglian, Mengtiao’an shihua, 8. Schmidt de-scribes Huang Zunxian’s shifting position in his later years: “Long years of writing had


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Introduction 29

often quoted out of context, became a major slogan in the modern era. Qian Zhongshu (1910– 98), against general opinion, characterizes the famous line “My hand writes what I have said” as “self- satisfi ed over-blown words” (kuaiyi dayan ), challenging this simple formula-tion among words, the mind, and intended meaning. Qian argues that Huang neglects the dexterity of the fi ngers involved in the writing, the diff erent speeds and tones of speech, and the disparity between what is in the mind and what can be expressed; furthermore, it is hard to tell whether the “I” expressed in the text is the authorial “I” who articulates the words. In Qian’s opinion, written lines must be mediated through rhetoric, which diff ers from the recording of direct speech.

Th e contested relationship between the written and the spoken is key to understanding the modern vernacular movement, which aims to modernize literary discourse in favor of the imagined transparency and immediacy of speech. Th e vernacular movement is based on a belief in, and an aspiration to, the directness and effi ciency of the phonetic sys-tem, which is viewed as a transcription of living voices. Th e role of spoken language is accentuated; a famous example holds that any work should be capable of being understood when read aloud to an old woman. In a now- canonical essay, Hu Shi proposes that “writing poetry should be like writing essays” , and he dismisses “overly decorative and embellished poems” . He further explicates this idea of transparency: “What ever you have to say, just say it; however you say it, that’s how you say it” .

taught him that even the most inspired author cannot create great poetry from his in-ner thoughts without the assistance of tradition and that, although the universe may be a wonderful symphony of sound, it is impossible to mold the discrete phenomena of the external world into an artistic whole without the discipline of language and form be-queathed to us by earlier authors” (p. 54). Schmidt, Within the Human Realm.

66. Qian Zhongshu , Tanyi lu buding ben , 206.67. Hu Shi, Baihua wenxueshi , in Hu Shi quanji, vol. 11, 578.68. Hu Shi, “Bishang liangshan,” in Hu Shi lunzhengji, vol. 1, 67– 83; see esp. 70. On

another occasion, he further cites and appropriates Bai Juyi’s (772– 846) idea of “cutting superfl uous words and deleting beautiful diction” , promoting the so- called naturalism of Yuan Zhen’s (779– 831) and Bai Juyi’s poetry. Hu Shi, Baihua wenxueshi, in Hu Shi quanji, vol. 1, 572– 73.

69. Hu Shi, “Changshi ji zixu” , in Hushi lunzheng ji, vol. 1, 284.


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30 Introduction

Using the vernacular in his quest for de- ornamentation and the repres-sion of archaism, Hu attempts to establish direct, unambiguous links among intention, meaning, and expression, in which the eff ectiveness of communication and its functionality are foregrounded.

In the modern Japa nese context, defi ning the genbun itchi (unifi ca-tion of spoken and written language) movement as an institutionaliza-tion of a phonocentric conception of language, Karatani Kōjin argues that during the pro cess of the global formation of nation- states, there was no exception to the appearance of the phenomenon of phonocen-trism. In the case of China, the replacement of classical traditions with a supposedly uniform style of writing based on the pronunciation and vocabulary of a standard form of one spoken language may be under-stood as subordinating writing to speech. Th e unifi cation of speech and writing, however, never moved beyond the conceptual level. Th e vernacu-lar language movement, initiated in the late Qing, should be regarded more as one system of written language taking the place of another. Based on the historical imagination of a linear, progressive development, the formation of this “exclusively vernacular language” (paitaxing bai-huawen ), to use Lin Shaoyang’s term, sought to create one type of homogenous, singular, modern language that excluded classical language and dialects. Th e victory of the vernacular language movement was not a case of natural selection, as is commonly assumed; rather, it was the result of considerable institutional promotion of a national language

70. Karatani Kōjin , “Minzu zhuyi he shuxie yuyan” .71. Some scholars in the 1920s and 1930s (e.g., Hu Xiansu and Qu Qiubai

from diff erent camps) and in our contemporary time (e.g., Kiyama Hideo and Wang Hui ) have pointed out that the unifi cation of the written and the

spoken has never been realized. See Hu Xiansu, “Ping Hu Shi wushi nianlai Zhongguo zhi wenxue” , in Hu Xiansu wencun , 191– 213; Qu Qiubai, “Dazhong wenyi de wenti” , in Qu Qiubai wenji , vol. 3, 12– 21; Kiyama Hideo, “Cong wenyan dao kouyu” , in Wenxue fugu yu wenxue geming , 113– 25; and Wang Hui , “Difang xingshi, fang-yan tuyu yu kangri zhanzheng shiqi de minzu xingshi de lunzheng” ,

. For more on the issue of vernacular language in the late Qing, see Yuan Jin , Zhongguo wenxue de jindai biange , 59– 132; Ni Haishu , Qingmo hanyu pinyin yundong biannianshi .

72. Lin Shaoyang [Rin Shō- Yō] , Shūji to iu Shisō , esp. 15– 16.


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Introduction 31

( guoyu ) and modern nation building. I do not delve into the con-testations involved in vernacular language and politics (a topic that has been well explored by contemporary scholars), but I will problematize the privileged value of linguistic transparency in conceptualizing the vernacular. In addition to the dichotomies of vernacular versus classical, and speech versus writing, there were other vigorously contested values involved, such as pop u lar (su ) versus elegant ( ya ) and direct (zhi ) versus indirect (qu ).

Linguistic transparency— the idea that we can express what ever inner thoughts we have through language— is an ideological myth. Th is new understanding marks an epistemological shift in thinking about lan-guage and its function for mass education in modern society. Th e con-cept of transparency assumes that reality can be accessed directly and unproblematically through language. Th e vernacular writing style, pri-oritizing the communicative function, has always been characterized in contrast to stylistic or rhetorical artifi ces associated with older literature. Simply put, if the main attribute attached to the vernacular is bai (white, clear, plain, or straightforward), then the value stressed through the use of classical language in poetry, by contrast, is not direct speech (zhiyan ) at all, but yu (seeking a latent meaning hermetically sealed within a manifest one). As a long- established concept, yu in its original sense is captured in Wang Yi’s phrase “linking categorical cor-respondences and making comparisons” ( yinlei piyu ). Th is clas-sical quote theorizes images as external correlates of internal emotion and responses according to “categorical correspondences” (lei ) be-tween objects. Derived from this foundational concept, the theory of

73. For a well- documented study of the language reform, see Kaske, Th e Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895– 1919, esp. 323– 461. Her research shows that the institutional and curricular reforms in the educational sector in the 1910s “had a deci-sive infl uence on the occurrence of the ‘literary revolution’ ” (p. 392).

74. I hasten to add that the achievement of vernacular poetry in the twentieth cen-tury also greatly problematizes the conceptualization of transparency in poetic dis-course. Th is suggests that this bai exists primarily on a conceptual level, but as a widely promoted value, it also tilts modern language and literature in a new direction.

75. Wang Yi , “Lisao jing xu” , 2. See Pauline Yu’s book- length study of the issue of imagery in Chinese poetry, Th e Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition. Th e translation of lei as “categorical correspondences” is Yu’s. Categorical


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32 Introduction

“entrusting meaning to the words” (or allegory, jituo ) was later de-veloped and was actively deployed in the late Qing era, especially by the theorists of the Changzhou lyric school. If yu in the past mainly referred to the rhetorical act, that is, evoking preestablished categorical meanings through images, the late Qing critics emphasized that this evoked mean-ing was increasingly plural or nebulous, making the intent embedded in the words more subtle or indeterminable. What concerned the majority of late Qing ci poets was how to use poetic language to dissemble or reconstruct the correlations between a poetic image and its intended meanings, moving through the space “between the meta phorical and the nonmeta phorical” . Th e tumultuous time in question provided the conditions that may have helped destabilize the relation-ship between the image and its preconceived associations and perpetuate poets’ self- conscious use of fi gurative language. Th e desire for rich am-biguous meaning, intellectual sophistication, and lingering emotional power trumped concerns about comprehensibility and transparency.

One of the oldest ideas in Chinese writing is that language is woefully insuffi cient to express intent and experience, as in the idiom “Language cannot exhaust meaning” ( yanbu jinyi ). Th e overwhelming sense of devastation that arose in the nineteenth century sharpened this linguistic quandary. Th e employment of encrypted images, an elliptical style, and painstaking artifi ce all came about as one solution, suggesting that the historical experiences these writers faced exceeded their existing frame of reference and shared vocabulary. On the eve of the new year of Xinchou (1901), Zhu Zumou wrote in a ci:

Wine- fi lled innards, the pointy sprouts sharp as a halberd,

correspondence involves “a symbolic correlation system” (in Joseph Needham’s words), fundamental to traditional Chinese thought and poetics. Quoted in Pauline Yu, Th e Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, 42. See also Zheng Yuyu’s extensive discussion of the concept of lei in Chinese culture. Zheng Yuyu [Cheng Yu- yu] , Yinpi lianlei , esp. 29– 60.

76. Chen Tingzhuo , Baiyuzai cihua , in Cihua congbian , vol. 4, 3917. For more discussion of yu , see Cai Yingjun [Tsai Ying- chun] , Zhongguo gudian shilun zhong de “Yuyan” yu “Yiyi” de lunti “ ” “ ” , esp. 198– 214.


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Introduction 33

Th e ink- brush frosted with ice, misery bears no fl owers.

Th is couplet addresses traumatic experiences that exert two contradic-tory forces: po liti cal and personal disasters give rise to physical agitation and emotional pain, which can signifi cantly enhance poetic creativity; alongside this, however, is a description of the poet’s diffi culty in de-scribing such experiences in language. Although poetry may delve most deeply into the meaning of pathos generated by historical experience, this experience also remains essentially incommunicable. Th is can be seen as a result of the limitations imposed by the par tic u lar conventions, such as the ci form Zhu adopted, as well as by classical language itself. Yet these poets remained enchanted by the ornamental style— its elabo-rate structure, allegorical mode, and lavish images— and worked to rep-resent their experience even as literary language or the archaic forms fell short. Poetry in this transitional era is fascinating and vital precisely be-cause it is ornate, confl icted, and opaque.

Th e Poetics of IntertexualityTh at poetic writing depends on prior conceptions, conventions, and al-lusions is a long- standing assumption in the Chinese literary tradition. Reading and personal experience have always been sources of inspiration for a poet, but the role that textual tradition played in poetic composi-tion intensifi ed in the Qing dynasty, refl ecting the intellectual milieu of the Qing era in general and evidential research in par tic u lar. Chen

77. Zhu Zumou [Zhu Xiaozang ], Qiangcun yuye jianzhu , 73. Line 1 echoes a couplet from Su Shi’s (1037– 1101) poem: “When my empty bowels fi ll with wine / pointed awn appears; / My wild liver and lungs / bear bamboo and stones” ; . Su Shi, “Drunkenly Painting Bamboo and Rocks at Guo Xiangzheng’s House” , in Su Shi , Su Shi shiji

, vol. 3, 1234– 35. Mangjiao (pointed awn) later has been commonly referred to as poetic inspiration. Line 2 alludes to the story that Li Bai (701– 62), one of China’s greatest poets, dreamed of being given a brush with fl owers on top. For this story, see Wang Renyu et al., Kaiyuan tianbao yishi shizhong , 86.

78. For a detailed social, cultural, and textual analysis of Confucian learning in the Qing era, see Elman, From Philosophy to Philology. For a seminal discussion of the rela-tionship between poetic trends and learning in the Qing era, see Qian Zhonglian,


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34 Introduction

Yan, the major critic who promoted the Tongguang- style school, pro-posed an infl uential concept of “poetry by scholars” (xueren zhi shi

), with par tic u lar emphases on the moral character and the intellec-tual bent of the poet, his indebtedness to literary tradition, and his po-etry being a venue for scholarly discussion. Th is learnedness and inter-textual density are also seen in “ci by scholars” (xueren zhi ci ) because the major ci poets in the Qing era were also distinguished schol-ars. Critics agree that the construction of poetic artifi ce through allu-sions, archaism, and erudition characterizes the poetic writing of the late Qing era. In the most standard account of Chinese lyricism, the outer world must correspond intuitively with a sensitive lyric mind. Intuitive cognition and spontaneity in expressing emotions are most valued in the creative pro cess, while learning and rhetorical ornaments deployed in poetry are considered somewhat counterintuitive. Poetry written by scholars or by poets became a site of hard-fought battles in the late Qing era, and the valorization of intertextual density and stylistic sophistication, represented by “poetry by scholars,” accounted for one prominent aspect of that era’s poetics, while an important goal was still the integration of the strengths of both sides. Th e following praise off ered by Tan Xian

(1832– 1901) in his appraisal of Zhang Huiyan’s (1761– 1802) work captures the idealistic combination of scholarly knowledge and poetic ingenuity: “Vision and learning, having fermented, burst forth; the hand and literary mind of this ci poet opens up a previously un-known world” . Truly inspired writing can communicate a depth of knowledge along

“Qingdai xuefeng yu shifeng de guanxi” , in Mengtiao’an lunji , 182– 95.

79. Chen makes the distinction between “poetry by scholars” and “poetry by poets” (shiren zhi shi ). For more discussion of Chen Yan’s ideas in En glish, see Rhew, “Ch’en Yen (1856– 1937) and the Th eory of T’ung- Kuang Style Poetry,” 164– 65.

80. Qian Zhonglian, “Quan Qing ci xu” , in Quan Qing ci Shunkang juan , 2. See also Sha Xianyi and Zhang Hui , Qing ci de chuancheng

yu kaituo , 38– 51.81. See, for instance, Qian Zhonglian’s seminal essay “Lun Tongguang ti” ,

in Mengtiao’an lunji, 415– 36.82. Tan Xian , Qiezhong ci , vol. 3, in Lidai shishi changbian ,

ed. Yang Jialuo , vol. 21, 167.


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Introduction 35

with a sincerity and profundity of emotion and thereby broaden what is poetically possible.

Th e demand to modernize cultural communication for the masses and the promotion of the “exclusively vernacular” are familiar stories, but there is also a parallel, less infl uential trend that twentieth- century scholars ignored, namely, an accentuated archaism and an intense use of intertextuality in the traditional genres. Th e poetry and prose of the era were augmented by layers of textual history, exhibited in par tic u lar in the writings of the Tongguang- style school and the Changzhou lyric school, as well as the work of some prominent scholars, such as Zhang Taiyan

(1869– 1936) and the above- mentioned Liu Shipei. Th e poets ex-amined in this book have customarily been criticized for their lack of concern with the role of inspiration and ingenuity and for their unwill-ingness to challenge the established rules and conventions. I instead argue that these poets in general consciously chose intertextuality as part of a strategy to consolidate an intimate, yet confl icted, relationship with tra-dition. I show that Chen Sanli’s innovative rearticulations of Song- style poetry (Songti shi ) and Zhu Zumou’s fondness for the ci poetry of the Southern Song led to a creative engagement and collaboration with tradition. Th us, this general tendency toward the archaic was not the result of the dictates of form or habit (although some mediocre poets did exemplify this) but rather a result of a self- conscious use of language and stylistic elements in an active search for new means of expression. Th e paradox lies in the fact that this search for innovation was built on the revival of literary techniques and styles of the distant past. Th e phenom-enon itself was not new; rather, literary, artistic and cultural reforms in the past had been undertaken in the guise of a “return to antiquity” ( fugu ). As Wu Hung succinctly put it, this fugu phenomenon as a

83. Gong Pengcheng points out that during the late Qing, there existed a trendy turn of “deepening and complicating the literary genres” and a parallel trend of promoting vernacular language for mass education. Gong Pengcheng , “Chuantong yu fan chuantong” , in Jindai sichao yu renwu , 90– 118, esp. 93– 96.

84. In his discussion of the Mid- Tang culture, Stephen Owen calls the fugu a “reac-tionary reform,” “the new born of an attempt to recapture the very old.” He notes: “Legitimized by the general ac cep tance of fugu [fugu] as a literary ideal, such poetry


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36 Introduction

recurring pattern and sustained desire involved “the basic conceptual/perceptual scheme of looking at the past from a present vantage point across a chronological gap” and was a concerted eff ort to use the past as a reference and resource for artistic revolution.

Consciously employing high- literary accretive techniques, both late Qing shi and ci poets identifi ed with these exalted historical moments and their associated prominent fi gures, moving toward a more allusive, mosaic intellectualism in poetry. Invoking allusions ( yongdian ) and past historical experiences ( yongshi ) allowed them to project a lyri-cal self- image into collective history and thus gave them a better under-standing of their immediate struggles. Briefl y put, the employment of allusion and intertextuality is not a simple matter of rhetorical strategy or scholarly erudition, but rather a mode of writing, a respectful gesture toward the past, and a sophisticated style of cultural expression. By echoing revered masters, referencing past experiences, or corresponding with each other in verse, they not only appropriated the tradition’s medi-ating power to cope with, and intervene in, the bedlam around them, but also to join in the collective psychology and appreciation of cultural memories.

Aff ective CommunitiesJohn Stuart Mill famously states that “poetry is not heard but over-heard.” Presuming the absence of the listener, the concept of lyric poetry in a Western context prioritized the lyric self, intimacy, and interiority. Although I do not mean to suggest that Chinese lyric poetry cannot be

could dare to be original despite the considerable demands of conformity to conven-tional poetic taste” (p. 9). Owen, Th e Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü.

85. Wu Hung, “Patterns of Returning to the Ancients in Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” in Reinventing the Past, ed. Wu Hung, 41– 42.

86. Th e method of expressing contemporary issues by invoking allusions culminated in Chen Yinke’s (1890– 1969) poetry written in the 1960s. See Yu Yingshi’s masterful analyses of Chen’s highly coded poetic system, Chen Yinke wannian shiwen shizheng

.87. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 249– 50. See also Jonathan Culler’s seminal essay

“Apostrophe,” in Th e Pursuit of Signs, 135– 54.


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Introduction 37

overheard, it carries a set of diff erent characteristics and practices. With regard to the issue of audience, as Stephen Owen notes, “In a basic way Chinese Poetry becomes a way to create community, both speaking to others in the present and creating a living community across time.” Th e social function and communal role of Chinese classical poetry in premodern times have been well understood, but what concerns me here is whether and how this aspect of forming communities via poetry ex-tended into the twentieth century. Using extensive archival research, I aim to delineate the literary gatherings, events, and clubs that fl ourished in major metropolises such as Shanghai and Beijing, places where a sub-stantial number of reform- minded intelligentsia in the late Qing and loyalists in the early Republican era gathered for poetry events. Classical poetry continued to serve a signifi cant communal function well into the Republican era, as it had done in other periods in history, with a large number of verses written to mark social occasions or festivals.

Although all the usual social functions of poetry clubs were a draw for poets in the Republican era, these gatherings must also be examined with regard to the par tic u lar emotional and psychological needs created by the po liti cal upheaval of the time. Th e poets underwent momentous historical changes collectively and culturally (as opposed to an individ-ual trauma), which had enduring eff ects on their group consciousness. Th e loss of the nation and the traditional values these groups collectively experienced were so fundamental that they became constitutive of a shared intellectual identity and structure of feeling. Th e intellectual and emo-tional need for group activity intensifi ed, especially after the downfall of

88. For recent works of comparative poetics, see Zong-qi Cai, Confi gurations of Comparative Poetics; and Longxi Zhang, Th e Tao and the Logos and Allegoresis.

89. Owen, “Poetry in the Chinese Tradition,” 296.90. In her discussion of the diff erence in readership between old poetry and new

poetry, Michelle Yeh illuminates the point that a mutual understanding, facilitated by a similar educational background and a set of writing and interpretative rules, existed between the classical poet and his reader, while the modern, vernacular poet approached this issue of readership in an individualistic manner. See Michelle Yeh, Modern Chinese Poetry, 14– 15.

91. Jeff rey Alexander defi nes cultural trauma as a terrible collective experience in which the memories and identities of the members of that group have been fundamen-tally altered. Alexander, “Toward a Th eory of Cultural Trauma,” 1.


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38 Introduction

the Qing, and mourning became a social practice and a recurring liter-ary theme. Hence, I borrow the phrase “aff ective communities,” coined by Maurice Halbwachs, to describe these groups. Th ese were not merely writing groups or clubs but fellowships formed in a time of crisis out of an emotional need for friendship made deeper by literary expression. Th e reenactment of the ritualistic aspect of the literati gatherings, the commu-nal practices of aff ect, and the energies generated at these occasions were means of unifying the poets and consolidating their collective po liti cal and cultural identities. Th e rhythmic patterning and formal rules in-trinsic to the poetic genres were conducive to creating an intersubjective network, resonating on both levels. In addition to investigating the literary clubs, I have gained the general impression, after reading through a sub-stantial amount of poetry collections, that an impressively large number of the corresponding (changhe ) shi and ci poems were composed and circulated among friends, a supposition that awaits further research. Th e emotions that emerged or were circulated at such occasions were emphati-cally social and interpersonal.

Literary communities should be understood as engaging in a set of practices, both real and imagined. Th rough replicating mourning as a social event and a textual act, the poets may be seen as entering a textual web across historical time. Th e poets invoked refi ned, idealized images of high literati fellowship— the famous gathering at the Orchid Pavilion, or ga nized by Wang Xizhi (303– 61), for instance— as a way to gain emotional and intellectual continuity with a disappearing culture and to

92. Th is term is borrowed from Maurice Halbwachs’s Th e Collective Memory, 30. In Holocaust studies, scholars argue that the formation of an “aff ective community” re-sulted from “the fraught interaction of witness and listener; the quest for words com-mensurate with experience; the creation of meta phors to compensate for the failure of language faced with the exorbitance of the literal; [and] the exposure of private suff er-ing to establish modes of negotiation between the intimate and public.” Miller and Tougaw, “Introduction,” in Extremities, 12.

93. In his well- researched book on the ci written by Qing loyalists in the Republican era, Lin Li elaborates on how mournful feelings, cultural memories and collective iden-tities are intricately expressed in these ci, many of which were composed at social gath-erings. Lin Li [Lam Lap] , Canghai yiyin .

94. In her discussion of Raymond Williams’s concept of structure of feelings, Sianne Ngai emphasizes that feelings are at their core “social.” Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 25.


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Introduction 39

fi nd inspiration and solace in collectivity. Th ese archaistic imaginations and literary fellowships provided comfort, a sense of cohesion, and fi gures for identifi cation and emulation. Further, the production and circulation of poetry also extended beyond the relatively exclusive literati coterie, thanks to the advent of modern media (newspapers, journals, and books), and the modern institution of colleges. Th e transplanting of the classical poetic form from literati banquets onto college campuses, as well as other public realms, attests to its abiding popularity, as well as to the draw of the lyrical ideal of “literary elegance” ( fengya ).

An aff ective community is an identity that establishes cultural be-longing. Such a community is a site to experience pathos, nostalgia, aesthetic joy, and mutual appreciation, through which the structures of feeling are embodied. Th e deployment of both concepts of aff ective communities and structures of feeling here intends to highlight the col-lectivity of writing and reading poetry and the sociality of “old” feeling, all of which mark another indispensable distinction of classical poetry and poetics in the early twentieth century.

To aid the reader in following my arguments, I present here a sum-mary of the six chapters of this book. Part I, “A Formal Feeling Comes,” is composed of two chapters that deal with an important group of intel-lectuals at the end of the Qing. Th e title comes from Emily Dickinson’s famous line “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” which high-lights a major concern underlying these chapters, namely, the complex relationship between historical trauma and the poetry of mourning. Th is group of intelligentsia sought, albeit cautiously and provisionally, literary strategies to frame, address, and cope with loss in a concrete and abstract sense. Chapter 1 focuses on ci writing on the aftermath of the catastrophic events of 1900. To establish the intellectual and literary context for ci, I fi rst discuss some of the critical views of the genre during the nineteenth century and then examine two case studies: literature mourning the death of Zhen Fei (1876– 1900) (also Lady Zhen, the Guangxu emperor’s royal concubine); and the anthology Song Lyrics of the Autumn of Gengzi (Gengzi qiu ci ), collectively written by

95. Emily Dickinson, Th e Poems of Emily Dickinson, no. 372, 170.


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40 Introduction

three poets in the besieged city of Beijing. I argue that the depiction of historical trauma and personal despair using the trope of the beauty and fragrance, as well as devices of ornamentation, became a defi ning char-acteristic of ci at the turn of the twentieth century. Th e emotional sub-text in the allegorization of the image of a lost beauty and the poets’ intense engagement with form should not be understood as aesthetic escapism but as a collective struggle to come to grips with the historical and repre sen ta tional crises.

Chapter 2 discusses the work of Chen Sanli, the acclaimed Tongguang- style poet, with a focus on the intellectual content, antiquarianism, and new perceptions found in his poetry. After giving a brief account of the poetics of the Tongguang- style school and Chen Sanli’s intellectual thought, I demonstrate how Chen Sanli turned the very constraints of the poetic form into an instrument of innovation with which to engage in inter-textual writing. Chen dealt with unpre ce dented marginalization as he attempted to negotiate po liti cal, cultural, and psychological boundaries in a period of rapid historical and cultural transition. From an aesthetic perspective, cultural trauma and the complex predicament of dealing with drastic change freed poets like Chen Sanli from conventionalized perceptions and helped foster new and improvisatory sensibilities in their work. Being innovative in meta phor, diction, allusion, and other stylistic dimensions, the Tongguang- style poets engaged in explorations of the potential of classical language and altered its aff ective and symbolic range, all with an eye to aiding the form’s regeneration.

Part II of the book uses a so cio log i cal approach to investigate the cul-tural dynamics of classical- style poetry and its practices by diff erent af-fective communities, ranging from loyalists and artists to modern- day college students. Chapter 3 explores the poetry events initiated by Liang Qichao (1873– 1929) in the spring of 1912, the shi and ci clubs of the old- fashioned literati in Shanghai, and the poetry bell game and use of riddles in pop u lar culture. Th ese ritualistic gatherings demonstrate a continuing enthusiasm for classical poetry, as well as the adaptability and resilience of the traditional literati culture in a modern environ-ment. By invoking the literary canon and iconic fi gures in it, the literati consciously forged a link to the past and garnered communal support. In the face of a linear progression of time and the new metropolis, they re- created a phantom of the empire in the closed space of their poetry,


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Introduction 41

casting painfully nostalgic looks at a disappearing culture. Th e chapter also explores how fengya, as an embodiment of the cultured lifestyle, was integrated into pop u lar culture in certain regions.

Chapter 4 carries on the agenda of the preceding chapter by situating the discussion of classical poetry in a broader fi eld of cultural produc-tion. By focusing on the individual intellectual or agent within the dynamics of literary criticism, publication, teaching, and social net-working, the chapter provides a fresh perspective on how members of this previously ignored or caricatured group of scholar- offi cials partici-pated in an increasingly divided social and cultural space and positioned themselves within the forming literary fi eld. It fi rst examines the literary career of Chen Yan, a major critical voice of Tongguang- style poetry, who represented the remarkable transformation from an old- fashioned literatus to a modern- day professor and scholar. Th rough his pop u lar works, poetry talks (shihua ) in par tic u lar, Chen fi ercely promoted classical poetry and established himself as the authority on this form in the Republican era. Th e chapter also discusses Chen’s new conceptual-ization of poetry as part of his attempt to argue for the legitimacy of poetry in a new era. Th e last section of the chapter presents a genealogy of the modern ci poets, with a focus on Long Yusheng and Wu Mei’s sustained institutional eff orts, and concludes with a brief discussion of the establishment of the study of ci as an academic discipline. Th rough the eff orts of two generations of poets and scholars, classical- style poetry was integrated into an institutional fi eld of cultural production, thereby establishing a protected, relatively autonomous area under the auspices of high national culture.

Part III of this book is titled “Lighting the Modern Torch with Ancient Fire.” Th e phrase, taken from André Chénier’s (1762– 94) “L’Invention,” was a favorite of Wu Mi and represented his lifelong dream and eff orts. Th is part deals with the traveling poets and their texts, with a focus on cross- fertilization through travel and translation, which opened up new horizons for poetic experimentation. Th ese intricately mixed geo graph i-cal and textual spaces off er a diff erent dimension that disrupts any appar-ently coherent narrative of linear progression in literary history. Chapter 5

96. See Wu Mi, Yuseng shiwen ji , title page.


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42 Introduction

centers on Lü Bicheng and her ci written overseas. Lü, an eminent lyric poet and feminist activist, reached the peak of her poetic creativity dur-ing her sojourn in Eu rope in the late 1920s. After a brief account of the generic features of ci and of Lü’s fascinating life trajectory, I examine how and to what degree Lü’s geographic and poetic border crossing, wide- ranging imagination and learning, and feminist consciousness re-shaped the repre sen ta tion of natural and cultural spaces in ci. Lü’s hy-bridizing mediation of Chinese and foreign spaces and the prospering of her lyric writing in foreign lands stand out as a particularly compelling case for reexamining commonly held ideological and linguistic assump-tions about literary modernity and suggest ways to rethink what has been a mainly masculinist, vernacular, and prose- centered characterization.

Chapter 6 examines a neglected practice, namely, the translating and rewriting of Western poetry using classical- style verse forms. Attention is paid to the role of poetic form in the meaning- making pro cess of translation, as well as to considerations of the possibilities and limits of poetic and cultural commensurability. I fi rst examine Su Manshu’s poetry in relation to his translations of Western Romantic poetry. Su appropriated a Romantic image and voice, fashioning himself as China’s Byron, while consciously staging a confl ict between Buddhism and mod-ern love. By doing so, he carved a new space in his poetry for emotional dynamics, introducing sentimental subjects and an intimate male fi rst- person voice that reached a wide audience. Another topic in this chapter is Wu Mi’s translation of the work of Christina Rossetti (1830– 94) and Matthew Arnold (1822– 88). Wu Mi found Rossetti and Arnold, as well as Irving Babbitt (1865– 1933), kindred spirits because of their elegiac vi-sion of modern societies, appreciation of the past, and steadfast defense of poetic form. Arnold and Babbitt’s humanistic vision stimulated Wu to delve into the pressing issues of the time and to grapple with the ma-terialism of modern life and the disintegration of traditional culture. Both Su Manshu and Wu Mi sought to transpose Western cultural ele-ments into their own literary practices and cultural visions. Th eir travel and translation practices, despite their defi ant gestures of defending tra-ditional form, show that they were ultimately open to the transforming power of the cultural Other.


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