University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Reconfiguring Chinese modernism: the poetics of temporality in 1940s fiction and poetry

(USC Thesis Other)

Reconfiguring Chinese modernism: the poetics of temporality in 1940s fiction and poetry

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content
RECONFIGURING CHINESE MODERNISM: THE POETICS OF TEMPORALITY
IN 1940S FICTION AND POETRY

by

Yanhong Zhu

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Yanhong Zhu

ii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Life as a Beautiful Trajectory: Time and the Moment
of Self-Revelation in Feng Zhi’s The Sonnets and Wu Zixu 63
Representations of Temporality in The Sonnets 72
Embracing Solitude 74
Confronting Death 85
Vertical Time 93
The Moment of Self-Revelation in Wu Zixu 103
Chapter Two: Transience, Abstraction, and the Space of Transcend-
ence: Shen Congwen’s Essays and Fiction 127
The Fleeting Moment: Modernist Aesthetics of Instantaneity 135
Spatialized Instantaneity: Shen Congwen’s Aesthetics 140
The Problematics of Language: Shen Congwen’s Transcendental
Space of Writing 149
Chapter Three: Drama-tic Synthesis: Theories and Practices of the
Nine Leaves Poets Represented by Yuan Kejia and Mu Dan 187
Drama-tic Synthesis and Dramatization in Poetry 193
Dramatic Rethinking of History 221
Mu Dan: History as Cyclical 243
Conclusion 258
Bibliography 289

iii

Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to thank all those who supported me throughout the writing of this
dissertation. I would like to first express my deepest appreciation to Professor Dominic
Cheung, my academic advisor and the chair of my dissertation committee, who
encouraged, supported, and guided me throughout this project, carefully read every
chapter of my dissertation, and gave me many valuable and constructive suggestions.
Without his support and guidance, this dissertation would not have been possible.
I would also like to thank my committee members, Professor George Hayden and
Professor Stanley Rosen, who gave me their time and expertise and offered me critical
feedback that helped to improve the quality of this dissertation.
In addition, I would like to thank Professor Audrey Li, Professor Xiaobing Tang,
Professor Bettine Birge, Professor Edward Slingerland, and Professor Akira Lippit for
their support and help at various stages of my graduate studies.
I am also grateful to Professor Jiang Dengke of Southwest University and
Professor Wang Shengsi of East China Normal University who supported my research
and kindly mailed me their books which were hard to get in the States from China.
Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for their continued support
and constant encourgement. I would especially like to thank my mother and my late
father for their unconditional love and for believing in me and pushing me to always
move forward.
iv
Abstract

This dissertation aims at delineating the reconfiguration of modernism in China
during the war and ideology-ridden years through the examination of the notions of
temporality and the implied spatial logic in the works of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and
the Nine Leaves Poets represented by Yuan Kejia and Mu Dan. Modernist sensibility in
the West can be located in the very conception of time. Modernism’s preoccupation with
formal experimentation, its depiction of the modern experience as being disoriented and
fragmented, its pursuit of a certain aesthetics that is independent of material reality, and
its distrust in the external world and preference for the inward exploration of the mind,
are closely related to the cultural crisis brought out by the disillusionment with the once
firmly held belief in linear temporality. The works of the modernist writers during the
war years in China reflect a similar sense of disillusionment. Therefore, through the
examination of notions of temporality represented in the works of these Chinese
modernist writers, I argue that Chinese modernism at this particular historical juncture
should be seen as an effort that resists the literary and political demands of the time, and
interacts with its Western counterparts on a global level.
In response to the devastating conditions of war, social instability, and the
wartime experience of displacement, anxiety and despair, Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and
the Nine Leaves Poets express in their writing a heightened awareness of time. Exploring
particularly the ways in which the temporal notion of the moment, and the temporal
orders of past, present and future are represented in their texts, I argue that these Chinese
v
modernist writers in the 1940s express in their works a preference for non-linearity,
spatial form, as well as psychological exploration. Their works also reflect a shared
contemplation of existential concerns, manifested in metaphysical inquiries, searches for
the possibility of transcendence, self-reflexivity, and a rethinking of the relationship
between individual and society.
1

INTRODUCTION

The War of Resistance against Japan forced the writers to get closer to reality
under the new circumstances, as they entered into a new life during the war and
saw a broader and more realistic prospect for the future. Writers were no longer
restricted to their own small world and no longer just stared out the window,
observing the sky and the clouds. Instead, they were liberated from their studios,
attics, saloons, cafés, and walked into the battle fields and the places for common
people; breaking away from their familiar cities, they entered the countryside and
small towns; from the International Settlement, they went into the hinterland…
1

This is an observation made by the famous literary critic Luo Sun (1912-1996) in
1940. What he emphasizes in this statement is the contrast between the experiences of
writers before and after the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937 –
1945). Writers of the pre-war era are described as being disassociated from reality,
submerged in their own personal worlds, isolated from the majority of the common
people, and while accustomed to westernized and urban lifestyles unfamiliar with the
countryside and the common people. The forced geographical relocation after the
outbreak of the War of Resistance, according to Luo Sun, provided an opportunity for the
writers to be reconnected to reality, to familiarize themselves with the lifestyles of the
hinterlands, and to infuse into their literary creation the consciousness of the masses.
The contrast between the disassociation from and the reconnection to the masses
before and after the outbreak of the war that Luo Sun delineates in the above quote
reflects the central issues of modern Chinese literature in the decade of 1940s. The 1940s

1
Luo Sun, “Kangzhan wenyi yundong niaokan” (The Bird’s-eye View of the Literary and Artistic Works during
the War of Resistance), Wenxue yuebao 1, no. 1 (January 1940). Quoted from Fan Zhihong, Shibian yuanchang:
sishi niandai xiaoshuo lun (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2002), 10-11.
2
was a decade of war, atrocity, and social instability, as China went through the War of
Resistance Against Japan and then civil war almost immediately after the defeat of Japan.
In response to the social instability and the urgent need for national salvation, many
writers and critics departed from the May Fourth enlightenment agenda and considered
literature as a weapon to arouse revolutionary consciousness and mobilize the masses.
What concerned these writers and literary critics most during the turbulent war years of
the 1940s are mainly three issues: What purpose and function should literature serve?
Who should be the targeted audience? What form of artistic expression should literature
adopt? With the surge of nationalistic fervor, leftist writers and critics dominated the
literary scene and put great emphasis on the socio-political function of literature and art,
calling for literary collectivism, revolutionary romanticism and heroism, and promoting
national forms and popular literature for the masses. Art and literature, they insisted,
should be at the service of politics and life and it should fulfill a utilitarian function rather
than being an artistic medium for self-expression.
Despite the dominance of leftist ideology and its call for a revolutionary literature
for the masses, the literary scene of the 1940s China was far from homogeneous. Literary
historians used to overlook the complexity and multiplicity of art and literature of the
1940s. Some argue that the decade of the 1940s is an unproductive or “withering period”
of modern Chinese literature
2
, while others believe that if modern Chinese literary history
could be seen as a constant negotiation between two discourses, the discourse of
enlightenment of the May Fourth and the discourse of national salvation, then the decade

2
Sima Changfeng, Zhongguo xinwenxue shi (Hongkong: Zhaoming chubanshe, 1976), 1: 285.
3
of 1940s is a period when national salvation completely overpowered the enlightenment
project.
3
However, to view the 1940s as a period in which writers willingly gave up their
personal voices and wrote for the purpose of national salvation for the masses is to
dismiss the heterogeneous nature of the literary scene of this tumultuous decade.
4
During
the War of Resistance against Japan, China was divided into three regions, the
Communist-controlled area around Yan’an, the Guomindang (KMT)-controlled area in
the southwest, and the “Orphan Island” Shanghai along with the Japanese-occupied areas.
For the writers from these different regions, their artistic visions and sensibilities varied
greatly as did their writing environments. Thus, as Yi Zhuxian observes, the literary
scene of the 1940s is in fact as rich, varied, and heterogeneous as the May Fourth period,
because various types of literature coexist at the same time. He further argues that along
with the mainstream literature that depicts war and revolution, there exists also non-
mainstream literature that deals with the memory of the past, with rural China, as well as
“trivial things between men and women”. In terms of literary and artistic expression, one
finds in the literature of this period revolutionary realism, psychological realism,
romanticism, as well as modernism.
5

This study seeks to discuss one particular aspect of the multi-faceted literary
scene of the 1940s: namely, the reconfiguration of Chinese modernism through the
examination of the works of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets.

3
Li Zehou, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1987), 7.
4
Joshua S. Mostow, ed. The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), 295.
5
Yi Zhuxian, “Preface,” in Sun Pingping, Jicheng yu chaoyue: sishi niandai xiaoshuo yu wusi xiaoshuo (Wuhan:
Wuhan chubanshe, 2002), 3.
4
Writing in response to the increasingly hegemonic discourse of politically charged
collectivism, these writers remained outside of the mainstream literary scene and
struggled to separate literature and art from political control and were committed to the
experimentation of new modes of writing. They were situated in a period in which the
May Fourth legacy of Westernization and individuality was heatedly debated and
questioned. However, they stayed indebted to their May Fourth predecessors, as they
refused to sacrifice their individuality for the sake of the masses and, as in the case of
Feng Zhi and the Nine Leaves Poets, Western literary practices continued to be their
source of inspiration. Thus, I argue that Chinese modernism at this particular historical
juncture should be seen as an effort that resists the literary and political demands of the
time, and interacts with its Western counterparts on a global level.
Aiming at extending and continuing the discussion of the landscape of Chinese
modernism since the May Fourth generation and delineating how Chinese modernism
changed as history unfolded into the 1940s, I will give an overview of the scholarship on
Chinese modernism in the latter part of this introduction and argue that Chinese
modernism in the war years departs from the previous forms explored and discussed in
current scholarship on this period. I argue that various forms of Chinese modernism
represented by the May Fourth generation, the Beijing School, and the Shanghai School
became rather untenable in the particular context of the 1940s when war, atrocity, and
social instability made the familiar practices of literature and art impossible. If Western
modernism can be seen as a response to the atrocity of the First World War and a reaction
to the cultural crisis that resulted from the disillusionment of the idea of positive progress,
5
then the works of the modernist writers of the war years in the 1940s China reflect a
similar sense of disillusionment and despair. The perpetual instability of the outside
world forced the writers to reflect upon the transitory nature of experience and the
contingency of life, to explore their inner world as well as issues that question the
conditions and meaning of human experience and existence, and to rethink their relation
to their past and future, the course of history, and their position in the history and society.
Modernist sensibility in the West can be located in the very conception of time.
The rejection of linear temporality, the loss of faith in historical progressivism and an
acute awareness of the futility and contingency of life became the defining features of
modernist sensibility. Therefore, the modernist preoccupation with formal
experimentation, its depiction of the modern experience as being disoriented and
fragmented, its pursuit of a certain aesthetics that is independent of material reality, and
its distrust in the external world and preference for the inward exploration of the mind,
are closely related to the cultural crisis brought about by the disillusionment with the
once firmly held belief in linear temporality. In the Chinese context, the conception of
time is also a key issue for the understanding of Chinese modernism, as it emerged at the
birth of modern Chinese literature in the writings of the May Fourth generation. I will
argue that the conception of time as non-linear and the understanding of time not as
teleological and abstract units but as a dynamic flux in which past, present, and future are
ultimately mingled together can be detected in the writings of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen,
and the Nine Leaves Poets. Through an examination of the notions of temporality and the
implied spatial logic in their work and particularly through an exploration on the way in
6
which temporal notions of the moment and the temporal orders of past, present, and
future are represented in their texts, I will argue that modernist writers in the 1940s
express in their works a shared contemplation on existential concerns, manifested in
metaphysical inquiries, psychological exploration, searches for the possibility of
transcendence or self-transformation, and a rethinking of the relationship between
individual and society, memory and history.

Literary Collectivism and the Re-evaluation of May Fourth Literature
To understand the modernist pursuit of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine
Leaves Poets, it is essential to understand the literary scene of the 1940s in general and
especially the dominant leftist discourse that they were writing against. As I have already
discussed earlier, the central issues of modern Chinese literature in the decade of the
1940s revolve around the question of its function and the audience of literature it
envisions. The leftist literary discourse urged a shifting of attention away from
individualistic expression to mass mobilization and from elitist and Westernized forms to
popular and national forms. The legacy of May Fourth literature was heatedly debated,
especially around the question of “national forms” (minzu xingshi) that was promoted by
the leftist camp for the purpose of bridging the gap between literature and the masses.
At the heart of this debate was May Fourth literature’s close relation to Western
influences and its elitist status. Aimed at conducting social, political and cultural
transformation via new forms of literary production, May Fourth writers made concerted
efforts to reject the traditional literary language (wenyan) and promoted instead the use of
7
modern vernacular language (baihua). The revolution of language during the May Fourth
period started out as a rejection of the elitism inherent in the classical literature. However,
the May Fourth vernacular language soon became a language that was greatly influenced
by the West, heavily burdened by a large vocabulary of Western words; it was even
influenced greatly by the Western syntax. The language revolution can be seen
eventually as a Westernization of the Chinese language, and the recuperated vernacular
language became the language of intellectuals and was further distanced from the
language of the masses.
6
May Fourth literature, although it aimed at collapsing the gap
between intellectual elites and the masses, ended up reinforcing this gap as its language
was indeed further estranged from the masses. Another issue arising from the debate was
the celebration of individualism as the core tenet of the May Fourth enlightenment
project. Holding the Confucian patriarchal social system responsible for enslaving the
individual within society, May Fourth intellectuals advocated a full development of
individualism, which would in turn fulfill the objective of transforming the national
character of the nation. Mao Dun (1896-1981) once commented in his “Guanyu
‘chuangzuo’” (On Literary Creation) that “the discovery of individuality, that is, the
development of individual or in other words, individualism, was the primary objective of
the May Fourth New Literature Movement. The literary criticism and creation at that time
all consciously or unconsciously aimed at this goal.”
7

6
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), 70.
7
Mao Dun, “Guanyu ‘chuangzuo’” (On Literary Creation), in Beidou (Big Dipper) 1 (September 1931). Quoted
from Xu Daoming, ed., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue pipingshi xinbian (The New Edition of the History of Literary
Criticism of Modern Chinese Literature) (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2002), 15.
8
May Fourth intellectuals’ obsession with antitraditional iconoclasm and social
transformation through Westernization and its celebration of individualism, however, are
nonetheless complicated by the central paradox of the May Fourth movement, which can
be defined as the conflict between nationalism and cultural critique, or in other words,
between the external imperatives of national salvation (jiuguo) and internal prerequisites
of enlightenment (qimeng).
8
The violent encounter with the Western imperialist forces
made the wholesale acceptance of western liberal thoughts and the complete iconoclastic
rejection of traditional values almost impossible. Thus, the May Fourth and the years that
followed witnessed two intertwined discourses, one of enlightenment that advocated
individualism and antitraditionalism and emphasized on Westernization, and the other of
national salvation that required literary collectivism and resisted the assertion of complete
Westernization and called for re-incorporation of national forms. This tension increased
when the patriotic fervor started to build up in the late 1920s and 1930s with the failure
of the cooperation between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party after the
Shanghai Massacre (April 12, 1927) and with the growing threat to the nation’s
sovereignty imposed by Japanese imperialism. The enlightenment agenda of the May
Fourth movement was soon under attack and the rhetoric of individual aspiration gave
way to a gradually growing rhetoric of revolutionary literature. The discourse of
individualism became marginalized, and a new rhetoric, under the influence of Marxist
theories and leftist thought, rose to be the main discourse for literary creation and
criticism that stressed the importance of class-consciousness and social collectivism.

8
Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919
(Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), 1.
9
Promoting the so-called “revolutionary literature” (geming wenxue), “art for the masses”
(dazhong wenyi), and proletarian literature (puluo wenxue), the leftist critics urged the
writers to abandon individualism and get familiar with the language of the workers and
peasants.
With the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan in July 1937, China’s
national integrity and existence came under Japan’s imperialist threat. As Japan expanded
their occupational area, many people were forced to relocate and the extreme violence
and atrocity of the war produced in them a sense of destruction and devastation, thereby
releasing a surge of anti-Japanese sentiment and nationalistic fervor. The urgent need for
national salvation against the imperialist invasion made the Western-oriented
enlightenment project of the May Fourth seem more and more problematic, as the
imminent threat of war and national disintegration seemed to make it necessary for
literature to serve the function of mass mobilization and political propaganda. The May
Fourth Occidentalism, cosmopolitism, intellectual elitism and May Fourth literature’s
emphasis on individualistic expression and its estrangement from the audience of the
masses, thus, invited a re-evaluation of the legacy of the May Fourth movement during
the 1940s.
The debate over “National Forms” from the late 1930s to the early 1940s pushed
the tension between the Western borrowed artistic forms and the native popular forms to
the forefront. Mao Zedong’s 1938 article “The Position of the Chinese Communists in the
National War” initiated this debate of the issues of national forms. Mao claimed that it
was essential to internalize Marxist-Leninism with Chinese characteristics and combine
10
internationalism with national forms, so that “all foreign eight-legged practices have to be
discarded; hollow, abstract tunes have to be sung less; dogmatism has to retire.” Writers,
therefore, needed to be conscious of their own national origins and find expressions that
represent “the vivid, resilient Chinese style and character, which the masses are happy to
see and hear.”
9
Mao Zedong’s discussion of national forms incurred a nationwide debate
among literary critics as they got into heated discussions over the relationship between
literature and politics, literature and the masses, and the tension between traditional,
national artistic forms and foreign forms brought in through the May Fourth movement.
Xiang Linbing was the representative voice of those who went to extremes and
completely denied the importance of May Fourth literature to the current project of the
creation of national forms. In a series of articles, Xiang Linbing argued that the creation
of national forms should base on the indigenous popular forms instead of the imported
ones. The artistic forms created since May Fourth period were in fact the “abnormally
developed city products” as they were used only by “university professors, bankers,
ballroom dancers, politicians and petty bourgeoisie” and lacked the essential colloquial
elements that could cater to the needs of the uneducated masses. Therefore, Xiang
claimed that in order to overcome the inherent defect of the new artistic and literary

9
Mao Zedong, “Zhongguo gongchandang zai minzu zhanzheng zhong de diwei” (The Position of the Chinese
Communists in the National War), in Mao Zedong xuanji (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1991), 2: 534. The
translation of Mao’s text is quoted from Dominic Cheung, Feng Chih (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 21.
11
forms, writers had to learn from the popular forms that were of Chinese style and
characteristics and were welcomed by the common people.
10

Xiang Linbing’s outright negation of the legacy of May Fourth movement
immediately provoked a series of defense of May Fourth literature from critics, among
them were Ge Yihong, Zhou Yang, Guo Moruo, and Hu Feng. Zhou Yang pointed out
that even though May Fourth literature was greatly influenced by the West it was
unnecessary to put the Westernized May Fourth artistic forms and the national popular
forms in strictly antagonistic terms. The “Westernization” reflected in the May Fourth
literature could be referred to as a certain “self-consciousness of an individual” and it was
indeed of great importance to the “self-consciousness of the people” and national
consciousness that our nation greatly needed at this particular moment in history. The
new vocabulary, new syntax, and new forms and techniques in literary works were not
merely the result of Occidentalism. They met the practical needs of China at that
historical juncture, and when they were used in China’s particular situation, they became
an organic part of our own national form.
11
Hu Feng further pointed out that it would
only turn out to be hollow slogans if the use of colloquial forms from the masses were
stressed without emphasizing the importance of the viewpoints of the writers. The

10
Xiang Linbing wrote a series of articles concerning the issue of national forms. They include “Lun ‘Minzu
xingshi’ de zhongxin yuanquan” (On National Form and Its Main Source), “ ‘Guocui zhuyi’ jianshi” (A Simple
Interpretation of “National Essence”), “Zai lun minzu xingshi de zhongxin yuanquan” (A Second Article on
National Form and its Main Source), and “Guanyu minzu xingshi wenti jingzhi Guo moruo xiansheng” (A
Respectful Response to Guo Moruo on the Issue of National Form). These articles are collected in Hu Feng, ed.,
Minzu xingshi taolun ji (Collected Essays on National Forms) (Chongqing: Huazhong tushu gongsi, 1941). For a
detailed discussion of this debate in English, see Dominic Cheung, 20-22.
11
Zhou Yang, “Dui jiuxingshi liyong zai wenxue shang de yige kanfa” (Opinion on the Use of Old Forms in
Literature), originally published on Zhongguo wenhua (Chinese Culture), vol. 1 (February 1940). Reprinted in
Hu Feng, ed., Minzu xingshi taolun ji, 18.
12
vernacular language of May Fourth literature was ultimately different from spoken
language because spoken language was merely the material base for literary creation.
Therefore, it would only turn into artistic forms when it was infused with the
enlightenment spirit from the May Fourth movement that advocated science and
democracy.
12

However, even though many critics defended the May Fourth legacy and found it
outrageous to completely devalue the May Fourth enlightenment agenda, the issue of
national forms was brought up for discussion essentially due to the awareness of the
elitism implicit in May Fourth literature and of May Fourth intellectuals’ alienation from
the masses. Feng Xuefeng once commented that the term “national forms” was put
forward as an equivalent term for “popular forms” for the masses.
13
With the rise of
Marxist historical materialism as a critical methodology in the 1930s, the masses are no
longer represented as the traditional feudal forces that need to be awakened by the
intellectual but rather as “the driving force of History, the very source of power from
which the intellectual must draw in order to participate in social transformation.”
14
Thus,
when China’s national integrity was under attack by the Japanese imperialists, the
discourse of enlightenment became gradually overpowered by the discourse of national

12
Hu Feng, “Duiyu wusi geming wenyi chuantong and yi lijie” (An Interpretation on the May Fourth
Revolutionary Literary Tradition), in Lun minzu xingshi wenti (On the Issue of National Forms) (Shanghai:
Haiyan shudian, 1949), 38. Lun minzu xingshi wenti is reprinted in Hu Feng quanji (Wuhan: Hubei renmin
chubanshe, 1999), vol. 2. For a more detailed discussion of Hu Feng’s role in the debate of national forms, see
Kirk Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 85.
13
Feng Xuefeng, “Xingshi wenti zaji” (Miscellaneous Notes on the Issue of Forms) in Guolai de shidai
(Shanghai: Xinzhi shudian, 1946). Quoted from Xu Daoming, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue pipingshi xinbian
(Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2002), 250.
14
Kirk Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 61.
13
salvation, and the masses as the determinative social forces that could save the nation
became not only the source of literary inspiration but also main targeted audience. The
debate over national forms from the late 1930s to early 1940s and the concurrent re-
evaluation of May Fourth literature pushed the leftist call for literary collectivism and
popularization of literature to a new height as the May Fourth advocacy of individualism
and Westernization was constantly questioned and challenged. There was a shift of
attention from the external Western resources to the internal and national resources for
the possibility of social transformation and national salvation, so that the May Fourth
agenda of learning from the West became subordinated to the growing discourse of
learning from the masses and indigenous popular forms.
Mao Zedong’s discussion of literature and art at the Yan’an Forum in 1942 drew
this nationwide debate to a conclusion and set the basic principle of Communist’s policy
on literature and art for the next four decades. In an earlier article “Wusi yundong” (May
Fourth Movement), Mao Zedong argued that workers and peasants were the main social
forces that China could rely on for her democratic revolution. Therefore, even though
intellectuals were always the first to be enlightened, as the May Fourth movement had
shown, they would not be able to achieve anything without the support of the masses. An
intellectual’s willingness to be in contact with the masses became a criterion for
determining whether he was revolutionary, non-revolutionary or even anti-revolutionary
despite his political stance.
15
Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature
and Art” further explored the issue of literary and artistic audience and argued that

15
Mao Zedong, “Wusi yundong” (May Fourth Movement), in Mao Zedong xuanji, 2: 559-60.
14
literature and art should first and foremost serve workers, peasants and soldiers. Mao also
drew a clear line between the proletarian stance and the petty bourgeois stance for the
writers, and claimed that writers who insisted on the petty bourgeois’ individualism
would fail to serve the revolutionary masses. Demanding the popularization of literature
and art, denouncing intellectuals’ detachment from the masses, and placing political
demands over artistic requirements for all literary and artistic creation, Mao’s Yan’an talk
marked the triumph of the discourse of revolutionary collectivism over enlightenment
individualism and redefined the power relation between the intellectuals and the
masses.
16
The exaltation of the masses and the demand for literature’s social and political
function for the purpose of national salvation and social transformation by educating the
masses and inciting resistance sentiment, therefore, dominated the literary scene of late
1930s and early 1940s and the discourse of literary collectivism and re-appropriation of
national forms problematized the May Fourth values of enlightenment and
Westernization and made it almost imperative for the writers to reconsider their sources
of literary and artistic inspiration and seek to replace the individualistic expression with
the representation of the collective.

The Discourse of Revolutionary Romanticism and Heroism
Along with the call for the popularization of literature and the creation of
literature and art for the mass, the literary scene during the war years also witnessed the
canonization of realism. Mao Dun in his “Haishi xianshi zhuyi” (Still Is Realism) pointed

16
Mao Zedong, “Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shangde jianghua” (Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and
Art), in Mao Zedong xuanji, 4: 847-79.
15
out that literature produced during the War of Resistance against Japan should be realistic
works that represented the anti-imperialistic and national defensive fights that Chinese
people were undertaking.
17
Xuan Zhu further pointed out that this was an epoch that
demanded freedom and liberation of our nation and realism as a literary method was what
this epoch needed. Realism, therefore, became the dominant mode of literary
representation.
18

Realism as a literary mode had always been favored by modern Chinese writers as
it was regarded as a proper mode for literary representation that could lead to social and
cultural transformation. Just as Rene Wellek writes, realism aims at the objective
representation of contemporary social reality and it is didactic, moralistic and reformist.
19

Modern Chinese literature at its very inception, as C. T. Hsia points out, was burdened
with a moral contemplation – an obsession with China as a nation afflicted with a
spiritual disease.
20
This “obsession with China” and the anti-traditional stance of modern
Chinese literature are derived not from the aesthetic concern but rather socio-political
concerns, so that modern Chinese literature rose as a reaction to the increasing disparity
between state and society and literature was used as a medium for the expression of
discontent and as a tool for social transformation. Even greater emphasis was placed on

17
Mao Dun, “Haishi xianshi zhuyi” (Still Is Realism), in Zhanshi lianhe xunkan 3 (Sept. 21, 1937); reprinted in
Mao Dun, Mao Dun wenyi zalun ji (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1981), 2: 681-83.
18
Xuan Zhu, “Langman de yu xieshi de” (The Romantic and the Realistic), Wenyi zhendi (Literary Front) 1. 2
(May 1938). Quoted from Jin Mingquan and Song Jiayang, “Lun zhongguo kangzhan wenlun zhongde xianshi
zhuyi zhi shenhua,” in Wenxue pinglun 3 (2005): 34.
19
Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 252-53.
20
C. T. Hsia, “Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature” in C. T. Hsia, A History
of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 533.
16
literature’s socio-political function once the War of Resistance broke out. During the first
few years of the war, the first and foremost task for literature was to arouse nationalistic
and anti-imperialistic sentiment among the people, so that for many writers and critics the
practical function of literature was stressed and its aesthetic values were further
downplayed. Xia Yan comments that the literature during the War of Resistance “has
become the tool for organizing and educating the masses. People who agree with this new
definition of literature are effectively performing the function of this tool. Those who do
not agree with this new definition and only believe in aesthetics, then, have become a
type of traitor in the eyes of the masses.”
21
Literature and literary criticism during the
War of Resistance, therefore, were motivated by a strong desire to elevate the importance
of writers’ political consciousness and the socio-political implication of their works. The
aesthetic value of the work was set in direct opposition to its practical function, and
literature and literary theories had to be simplified and popularized for the purpose of
fulfilling the function of political propaganda and mass mobilization.
The emphasis on realism was also greatly influenced by a prevailing sense of
historical optimism and idealism, which made it imperative for literature to truthfully
reflect the inevitable trajectory of the war, and to “consciously capture the intrinsic nature
of all matters and disregard the superficial and incidental phenomena”.
22
According to

21
Guo Moruo, et al., “Kangzhan yilai wenyi de zhanwang” (The Overview of Literature and Art Since the War of
Resistance), Ziyou zhongguo 1. 2 (May 10, 1938). Quoted from Jin Mingquan and Song Jiayang, “Lun Zhongguo
kangzhan wenlun zhong de xianshi zhuyi zhi shenhua” (On the Intensification of Realism in the Literary
Theories of China During the War of Resistance), Wenxue pinglun 3 (2005), 32.
22
He Qifang, “Guanyu ‘Keguan zhuyi’ de tongxin” (About the Exchanges on “Objectivism”), Mengya 1. 4
(November 1946), quoted from Qian Liqun, ed., Duihua yu manyou: sishi niandai xiaoshuo yandu (Shanghai:
Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1999), 12.
17
Qian Liqun, the “inevitable trajectory of the war” and the “intrinsic nature of all matters”
for the writers of the 1940s were defined, in light of historical determinism that was
optimistic and idealistic, as a firm belief in the eventual victory of the oppressed nation
and her people over the seemingly powerful yet essentially weak invaders.
23
This
historical deterministic view of the war and reality lead to a series of dialectic ideas on
reality and literature, so that there was a clear distinction between the oppressor and the
oppressed, the righteous and the non-righteous, the enemy and the friend, and no
compromise or cross-definition was allowed. Writers, in order to represent the positive
projection of reality in their fictional creation, had to focus on characters that could
represent this essentially optimistic course of history and evoke in the readers the positive
battling spirits. Thus, there emerged a call for “heroic figures” in the literary scene of the
1940s and the mainstream literature and literary criticism of the decade were based on
“neo-idealism and neo-heroism on the basis of revolutionary romanticism”.
24
Sun Li, a
famous literary critic of the 1940s, pointed out in his “Lun zhanshi de yingxiong zhuyi”
(On Wartime Heroism) that it was an “battling epoch” and an “heroic epoch”, so that it
was important to create “wartime heroic literature”, which focused on depicting a
stereotypical romantic heroic figure that represented the collective or individual
heroism.
25
Lin Huanping further points out, “the basic content and characteristics of

23
Qian Liqun, “Manhua sishi niandai xiaoshuo sichao” (Leisure Talk on the Fictional Trend of the 1940s), in
Duihua yu manyou: sishi niandai xiaoshuo yandu, 13.
24
Qian Liqun, 14.
25
Sun Li, “Lun zhanshi de yingxiong zhuyi” (On Wartime Heroism), Jinchaji ribao, December 16, 1941;
reprinted in Chen Pingyuan, ed., Er shi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe,
1997), 4: 79.
18
literature and art during the War of Resistance should be about combating the Japanese
and the traitors. This combat is indeed the most heroic and sanguinary battle. Therefore,
literature and art during the War of Resistance should employ ‘anti-Japanese realism and
revolutionary romanticism’. This creative method is the most correct, most appropriate,
and most positive.”
26
Critic Shangguan Zheng also declared that “neo-heroism and neo-
romanticism” was the basis for new literature, and the new heroes should not only be “the
reasonable representative of the healthy and normal life” but could also be “mystified or
idolized” when necessary.
27
Mao Zedong’s “Talk at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and
Art” further confirmed the romantic optimism toward the future and insisted on the
importance of portraying the bright side of the matter. It was argued that revolutionary
writers and artists should solve the problem of whether to extol or to expose, and the
“targets for exposure can never be the masses, but only the aggressors, exploiters, and
oppressors and the evil influence they have on the people”, yet “all the revolutionary
struggles of the masses of the people must be extolled” and the exposure of the negative
characters could only serve “as a contrast to bring out the brightness of the whole
picture”.
28
Thus, literature, as the ultimate tool for representing the dynamics of the
historical movement of the epoch and for mobilizing the masses and encouraging
collective action, should always paint a bright picture of the future and create “a third

26
Lin Huanping, “Kangri de xianshi zhuyi yu geming de langman zhuyi” (Anti-Japanese Realism and
Revolutionary Romanticism), Wenxue yuebao 2. 1-2 (15 Sept. 1940).
27
Shangguan Zheng, “Xin yingxiong zhuyi, xin langman zhuyi he xinwenxue zhi jiankang de yaoqiu” (Neo-
heroism, Neo-romanticism and the Demand for the Healthy Growth of New Literature), Zhongguo gongbao 8. 5
(Feburary 1943); reprinted in Er shi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao, 4: 177.
28
Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” in Mao Zedong xuanji, 4: 847-79. Translation
is taken from Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996), 458-84.
19
type of reality” that reflects “the inevitable direction of history”, and only in this way,
could one avoid falling into the trap of pessimistic outlook of naturalism.
29

The call for revolutionary romanticism and neo-heroism within the larger tradition
of realism in literary and artistic creation during the late 1930s and early 1940s was
motivated by the similar teleological view of history that influenced the May Fourth
generation, which saw historical progress following a unilinear and forward moving
trajectory. However, while the May Fourth generation was obsessed with the idea of
“belated modernity” as they tried to put China in the global arena and hoped to catch up
with the West through modernization and progress, the mainstream literary critics during
the war decade were deeply entrenched in the belief in historical determinism with a
romantic aura that was mostly localized and greatly influenced by Maoist ideology and
collectivism. May Fourth enlightenment project’s focus on the appropriation of the West
for the progress of our own nation was replaced by the belief in the power of the
indigenous and popular literary and art forms and the collective force of the masses in
shaping and transforming the society. The linear progress of history was seen to be
marching into a pre-determined futurity, which was defined by the final glorious victory
of the Chinese over the imperialist powers, the popularization of literature and art that
absorbed the national forms and practices rather than borrowing from the West, and the
submission of the private and individual self to the greater cause of the collective.
Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum” as the literary and artistic manifesto
for the mainstream literary scene of the 1940s prescribed political criteria as the basis of

29
Shi Huaichi, “Dongping xiaolun” (On Dongping), in Er shi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao, 4: 373.
20
all literary and artistic creation, stripped literature and art of its autonomous status, and
made it subordinate to the state ideology and serve the function of political propaganda
and mass mobilization. It served as the guideline for the mainstream literary and artistic
creation and criticism for China both during and after the War of Resistance. Immediately
after the victory of the war, Zhou Yang set the rules that stipulated the relationship
between political policy and art following the Maoist guideline, as he declared:

Ever since the “Talks on Literature and Art”, the prominent feature of artistic
activities is that they have started to be associated with various kinds of practical
policies at the present time, and this is one of the most important indications of
the new literary and artistic trend. Art reflects politics, and in the liberated area, it
means that it reflects the process and result of the implementation of various
policies among the people… In the new social system, realist movement is no
longer a blind, uncontrollable, and non-purposive movement. It has become a
conscious, purposeful and planned project.
30

In another article on literature and art, Zhou Yang further defined the only
acceptable theme for all artistic creation:

Literature and art workers should and can only write on the themes that are related
to the struggle of workers, peasants and soldiers. The things that literature and art
workers are familiar with and interested in have to be in accordance with those of
the workers, peasants and soldiers. … Literature and art reflect politics, serve
politics, and this means that they should be able to absorb and digest the abundant
experience that the masses accumulated through practical struggle and
implementation of the policies. They should then vividly describe such experience
in their works, so that such experience could get disseminated back to the masses,
and with the assistance of literature and art, it could exert an imperceptible
influence on the thinking of the masses.
31

30
Zhou Yang, “Guanyu zhengce yu yishu – ‘Tongzhi, ni zoucuo le lu’ xuyan” (On Policy and Art – the
Introduction for Comrade, You took the Wrong Path), Zhou Yang wenji (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe,
1984), 1: 475-76.
31
Zhou Yang, “Tan wenyi wenti” (On the issue of literature and art), Zhou Yang wenji, 1: 501.
21
Zhou Yang’s above two statements emphasized the subordination of literature and
art to state policies, the restriction on the literary and artistic themes and content, and the
socio-political function of literature and art. This leftist mainstream literary and artistic
discourse that dominated the 1940s and even decades afterwards elevated the status of the
masses and completely reversed the earnest endeavors of the May Fourth generation who
strived to modernize China and Chinese literature through Westernization and to rescue
the “self” from the Confucian discourse through the discovery of individuality.
Collectivism and political consciousness, therefore, became the main criteria for all
literature and art.

Different Voices and Literary Modernism
It is in this particular social and historical environment that writers like Feng Zhi,
Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets struggled to remain outside of the dominant
leftist discourse and pursue a voice of their own. They were certainly not alone. The
literary scene of the 1940s appeared rather heterogeneous as writers from different
backgrounds strived to write about what they were concerned about most despite the call
for revolutionary literature and the demand from leftist literary policy. The persistent
insistence on social realism and leftist literature and art, in fact, failed to regulate the
thought and works of all intellectuals and writers. Even within the realist camp, critics
and writers voiced their concerns of the growing force of Maoist ideology of national
salvation, class struggle and revolutionary collectivism. The most representative voice
came from Hu Feng, who put great emphasis on the “subjective fighting spirit” (zhuguan
22
zhandou jingshen) in realism and argued that subjectivity was essential to realist
representation. Promoting a “critical realism”, Hu Feng repeatedly evoked the spirit of Lu
Xun and the May Fourth enlightenment project and stressed on the creative power of the
writers to perform cultural critique and social transformation. In response to the
prevailing discourse of revolutionary romanticism and heroism that focused on optimism
and eulogy instead of the exposure of darkness, Hu Feng hailed the writers’ role of
overcoming the darkness through the very means of exposing it and ridiculed the blind
insistence on lofty visions.
32

Another writer, Ding Ling, the famous female writer who was first recognized for
her subjective narratives on women’s psychological and emotional torment and later
became an influential left-wing writer, also found it important to keep up the critical
spirit of the May Fourth instead of subscribing to the grand narrative of heroic eulogies.
Despite her efforts in conforming to the Maoist ideology at Yan’an, Ding Ling wrote two
stories, “Wozai xiacun de shihou” (When I was in Xia Village) and “Zai yiyuan zhong”
(In the Hospital) in 1941, and raised the issue of the treatment and position of women
within the revolutionary community, aiming at exposing the dark side of the
revolutionary camp that had been glossed over by other narratives. Her belief that
literature should take a critical stance and embody criticism so that it would not be
restricted to the function of propaganda also led her to the publication of an essay “Sanba
jie yougan” (Thoughts on March 8) on the literary pages of the party newspaper Jiefang
ribao (Liberation Daily). This essay openly criticizes the incongruence of policy and its

32
For a detailed discussion on Hu Feng’s theory of “critical realism” and “subjectivism”, see Kirk Denton, The
Problematic of Self, chapter 2.
23
implementation at the liberated area as women are unequally treated and in a subordinate
status even though men and women should be equal according to party policy. Her
critique of the inequality of women under the new Maoist regime incurred serious
criticism, along with Wang Shiwei’s “Yebaihe hua” (Wild Lilies), prompted Mao
Zedong’s Yan’an Talks that laid down the restrictive principles for the creation of
literature and art for the next four decades.
33

The above delineated difference within the leftist Maoist camp already made the
literary scene of the 1940s not as simple and unified as the mainstream discourse might
have wanted it to be. The situation was further complicated by the endeavors of a good
number of intellectuals, writers, and critics who remained outside of the leftist discourse
and were committed to a type of writing that would break free from the prescribed and
normative literary mode. Among them many were modernists or at least shared with their
fellow writers a modernist sensibility. Despite the leftist call for national forms and the
constant criticism of Western literary practices, many writers continued to translate and
introduce Western modernist works. Their theories on and promotion of a new mode of
modern fiction or a new type of modernist poetry, their writings on the particular
temporal, spatial experiences of the modern man, and their ultimate concern of the human
conditions in the chaotic, fragmented and absurd world make us believe that they not
only were contemporaneous with their Western counterparts, but also made significant
contribution to the literary development of modern China. They firmly refused to

33
For a study of Ding Ling’s works, see Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in
Modern Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). For a selection of Ding Ling’s works
with an excellent introduction, see Tani E. Barlow and Gary J. Bjorge, eds., I Myself Am a Woman: Selected
Writings of Ding Ling (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
24
subscribe to the leftist Maoist literary and artistic discourse and pursued instead literary
modernism that privileged aesthetic values, emphasized on the exploration of
individuality and interiority, and expressed in their writings modernist concerns through
their exploration and rethinking of the concepts of time and space, the meaning of
existence, and the interplay between memory and history, aesthetics and politics, which
contributed to the multiplicity and complexity of the literary scene of the 1940s.
34

The translation and introduction of Western modernist works during the 1940s
were published mostly in several literary journals, among which were Xiyang wenxue
(Western Literature) established in 1940, Shi yu chao wenyi (Time and Tide Literature
and Art) established in 1943, Shijie wenyi jikan (World Literature Tri-monthly)
established in 1945, as well as the liberal newspaper Da gongbao just to name a few.
With regard to fiction, translators and critics focused most of their attention on modernist
writers such as André Gide (1869-1951), Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941), James Joyce (1882-1941), and Franz Kafka (1883-1924).
What interested the translators and the critics most was modernist literature’s
break from the conventional narrative teleology and its innovations in formal
experimentation and psychological exploration. Sheng Chenghua gave a very detailed
discussion on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past),
and called it an epic for recording the process of both “forgetting” and “remembering”.
He went on to say, “But Proust does not use the conventional realistic mode of writing,

34
By setting this tradition of literary modernism apart from the criticism and works of the “Qi Yue” school,
represented by the above mentioned critic Hu Feng and the fiction writer Lu Ling, I am not denying that the
works of the “Qi Yue” school also contain certain modernist elements. However, as they remained committed to
the Marxism theory and realist tradition, I would prefer not to include them in the discussion of the literary
modernism here.
25
because this would only faintly delineate the superficial structure of the matter without
getting deep into the essential aspect, a much more affluent world of interiority.
Therefore, Proust invented his own writing style, a style that closely follows the rhythm
of his thoughts and the rhythm of his life.”
35
Studies on Virginia Woolf’s works also
focus on her innovation in literary presentation. Xie Qingyao points out that the main
reason for the obscurity of Woolf’s writing was that she employed the method of stream
of consciousness in her writing, and that she focused on the exploration of the human
psyche and dismissed the element of plot in her works.
36
Xiao Qian’s writing on
psychological fiction also aimed at emphasizing modernist literature’s shift from the
depiction of exteriority to interiority, from plot to emotion. Xiao Qian pointed out that the
contemporary English novel dismissed the dramatic aspect of structuring the plot but
brought the narrative mode of writing toward psychological fiction which started writing
from inside out. What this type of writing wanted to capture was not life per se, but rather
the “the shadow of life that is shed on the heart of human beings”. Therefore, this new
narrative mode provided the writing of the fiction with detail and depth and shifted the
attention from plot to emotion, from drama to lyricism.
37
Sun Jinsan’s essay on Kafka’s
writing argues for a type of writing that could step out of the confines of the sensory
world and surpass the psychological writing that stops short at the depiction of

35
Sheng Chenghua, “Xin Falanxi zazhi yu faguo xiandai wenxue” (Nouvelle Revue Francaise and French
Modernist Literature), Wenyi fuxing 3. 3 (May 1947).
36
Xie Qingyao, “Yingguo nü zuojia Wu Er Fu furen” (British Women Writer Ms. Woolf), Shi yu chao wenyi 2. 1
(Sept. 1943).
37
Xiao Qian, “Zhan mu shi de sijiezuo: jianlun xinli xiaoshuo zhi duanchang” (Jame’s Four Masterpieces: On the
Strength and Shortcomings of Psychological Novel), Wenxue zazhi 1. 1 (June 1947).
26
unconsciousness. He writes, “Kafka’s fiction seems to be rather plain. What he writes
about is nothing mysterious, but the reality of human life. However, the readers always
find the meaning of the text unfathomable, as if it is covered by a mysterious
atmosphere… and discover that there are layers of symbols and layers of metaphors, so
that it is always impossible to deduce the ultimate meaning of the text. Kafka’s fiction is
detached from the immediate reality, but brings us into the mystery of the cosmic and
human world.”
38

The efforts that these literary translators and critics made in introducing Western
modernist literature, as Fan Zhihong argues, indicate that these writers were greatly
sensitive to the development of fiction in world literature and were starting to think
critically about the possibility of new development in China. Their particular interests in
Western writers’ break from the centrality of plot in fiction, their exploration of the
interiority of the subject and their readiness to depict the condition of human existence in
general demonstrate that modern Chinese literature in the 1940s welcomed the unique
opportunity to develop contemporaneously with the rest of the world.
39
This study,
through the discussion of Sheng Congwen and Feng Zhi’s fictional works during the
1940s, aims at presenting how modernist writers in China strived to invent a new mode of
representation that would be on par with the latest development of modernist literature in
the West. I argue that both Shen Congwen and Feng Zhi made conscious efforts in their
writings to shift away from the centrality of the plot to the exploration of the psyche and

38
Sun Jinsan, “Cong Ka Fu Ka shuoqi” (Starting from Kafka), Shi yu chao wenyi 4. 3 (November 1944). Quoted
from Fan Zhihong, Shibian yuanchang: sishi niandai xiaoshuo lun, 33.
39
Fan Zhihong, 25.
27
to break away from the chronological narrative in order to emphasize the importance of
the moment, and this moment means a moment of transcendence for Shen Congwen and
a moment of self-transformation for Feng Zhi.
In the aspect of poetry, many Chinese poets during the 1940s decided to write
more socially committed poems in response to the surging fervor of nationalism as well
as the leftist emphasis on the social-political function of literature. Ai Qing, Tian Jian,
and Zang Kejia, for instance, served as the representative poets among those who took up
a more realistic stance and vigorous tone in their poetic creation. However, many poets
were unsatisfied with the dominant trend of New Poetry in the 1940s, which, in Yuan
Kejia’s words, was characterized as “the sentimental and the didactic”
40
and became
formulaic and mechanical rather than poetic. Thus, poets like Feng Zhi and the Nine
Leaves Poets that I will discuss in this study made significant efforts to construct a new
poetic tradition in their own terms while keeping the Western modernist poetry’s
aesthetic value that they treasured in their poetic works at the same time. Western
modernist poets, such as R. M. Rilke (1875-1926), T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), and W. H.
Auden (1907-1973), inspired not only their formal and thematic explorations in their own
poetic diction but also their rethinking of the meaning of life, their position in time and
their relation to history. Feng Zhi first encountered Rilke’s works in 1926 when he read
The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke by chance. Ever since then Rilke
remained Feng Zhi’s main source of inspiration. As for the Nine Leaves Poets, especially

40
Yuan Kejia, “Xinshi xiju hua” (Dramatization in New Poetry), Shi chuangzao (Poetry Creation) 12 (June 1948).
Reprinted in Yuan Kejia, Bange Shiji de Jiaoyin – Yuan Kejia Shiwen Xuan (Footprints of Half a Century:
Selected Poems and Prose of Yuan Kejia) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1994), 65-72.
28
for those who studied at Southwest Associated University (Xinan lianhe daxue) in
Kunming, the study of modernist poetic tradition in the West was integrated into their
education. The arrival of the British poet and critic William Empson (1906-1984) also
greatly promoted the modernist fervor among the young poets. According to Zhao
Ruihong, Empson’s lectures on Shakespeare and English poetry were attended by all
students from the Department of English Literature and it was he who exerted great
influence on their modernist poetic pursuit.
41
Wang Zuoliang described the interests of
the young poets in modernist literature at Southwest Associated University as the
following:

The library was even smaller in the early years of the war, but what few books it
had, especially the precious new books from abroad, had been devoured with the
hunger…But the young poets of Lianda have not read their Eliot and Auden in
vain. Perhaps the western world will find its own ignorance of the cultural East
shocking when the truth is told of how, with what gusto and what dreamy eyes,
these two poets are being read in distant China.
42

Thus, Western modernist poetry and poetic theories that they came into contacts
with at Southwest Associated University shed great influence on the poetic theories and
practices of the Nine Leaves Poets. Focusing on the discussion of the theories and
practices of Feng Zhi, and the Nine Leaves Poets represented by Yuan Kejia and Mu Dan
in relation to the writings of R. M. Rilke and T. S. Eliot, this study intends to delineate

41
Zhao Ruihong, “Nanyue shanzhong, Mengzi hupan – huainian Mu Dan, bing yi xinan lianda” (At the Nanyue
Mountain and Mengzi River: Remembering Mu Dan and Southwest Associated University), in Xin Wenxue
Shiliao, 3 (1997): 164.
42
Wang Zuoliang, “Yi ge zhongguo xin shiren” in Wang Shengsi ed., “Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliao xuan (Selected
Critical Essays on the Nine Leaves Poets) (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1995), 306-307. The
English translation was quoted from Leung Ping-kwan, Aesthetic Oppositions: A Study of the Modernist
Generation of Chinese Poets, 1936-1949, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1984, 70.
29
the innovations that Modernist poets of the 1940s made in constructing a new poetic
tradition of New Poetry. I argue that Feng Zhi excels in employing the Western sonnet
form for his poetic expression and his collection of sonnets reflects his contemplation of
the ultimate meaning of human existence, of solitude, of life and death, and of the
possibility of poetry as an artistic form to give shape and form to the otherwise
ungraspable experience of human life. In contrast to the rather existential concerns
represented by Feng Zhi’s sonnets, what we see in the writing of the Nine Leaves Poets
are not only poems of self and introspection but also poems that respond to the particular
social and political situation and reflect their rethinking of the past and history.

Reconfiguring Chinese Modernism in the 1940s
Discussion of literature and art produced during the war-ridden and politically
charged decade of 1940s has often been tightly connected to its socio-political context so
that revolutionary realism has always been the center of attention and literary modernism
has only entered scattered discussions if not escaped from scholarly attention and
discussion completely. Yet the lack of discussion of modernism in the field of modern
Chinese literature is not limited to the war years only. Scholars tend to see modernism in
modern Chinese literature as a mode of literary experimentation that was practiced by a
few individual writers who were influenced by Western modernists and adopted
modernist techniques in their writings. Wendy Larson once commented, “The concept of
‘modernism’ is relatively new in China. In the late 1920s and 1930s, some poets such as
Li Jinfa and Dai Wangshu used modernist poetic techniques developed by Baudelaire and
30
others in Europe, but a complex set of conditions, including the rise of Marxism, the
redefinition of the intellectual, and the continuing wartime condition, prevented
modernism from becoming widespread and popular.”
43
What is implied in this statement
is that modernism has always been marginalized in the literary scene of modern China
and it is especially so during the war-ridden years when the discourse of revolutionary
realism and collectivism dominated the literary scene. Lingchei Letty Chen also notices
that the discussion of Chinese modernism is often narrowly confined within the Shanghai
school, with representative writers such as Shi Zhecun, Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying, Shao
Xunmei and Li Jinfa. She further points out that modernism tends to be absent from
discussions of Chinese modernity and argues that “the huge gap between the wide
implication of Chinese modernity and the narrow definition of Chinese modernism”
suggests that our very understanding of Chinese modernity is problematic as scholars
tend to blur the distinction between modernity and literary modernity and define Chinese
modernity in terms of the construction of a new subjectivity without a modern material
reality as its basis. The absence of modernism, therefore, could be interpreted as an
indicator of a weak material culture, and as Shanghai is the only modern city that
embodies material modernity the discussion of modernism thus becomes restricted
mostly to the literature of the Shanghai school.
44

However, to see Shanghai as the only metropolitan city that could be compared to
its Western counterpart and to locate modernism narrowly in the writings of the Shanghai

43
Wendy Larson, “Realism, Modernism, and the Anti-“Spiritual Pollution” Campaingn in China” in Modern
China 15 no. 1 (January 1989), 38.
44
Lingchei Letty Chen, “Reading Between Chinese Modernism and Modernity: A Methodological Reflection” in
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 24 (2002), 175-76.
31
school or in the works of those who focus on the depiction of experience of the city is
surely problematic. It reflects largely a deep-seated problem that is closely related to the
understanding of modernity and modernism in the Western context and the application of
such concepts to the interpretation of modern Chinese literature.
Calinescu in his Faces of Modernity defines modernity as “a stage in the history
of Western Civilization – a product of scientific and technological progress, the industrial
revolution, of the sweeping and social changes brought about by capitalism” and
modernism as an aesthetic response to those changes.
45
Thus, aesthetic modernism of
early twentieth century is at once part of the larger modern project of enlightenment,
emancipation and progress and a reaction against that project, as Michael North puts it.
This aesthetic modernism could be defined by its antagonism toward the elements of the
project of modernity, such as rationalism, material progress, and liberal democracy.
46

Modernism, henceforth, is a reflection of cultural crisis in response to the chaos brought
out by capitalistic acceleration of material growth and the destruction of Western
civilization by the First World War. Malcolm Bradbury further points out that as the
modern city has “appropriated most of the functions and communications of the society”
and “the furthest extremities of its technological, commercial, industrial and intellectual
experience”, modernism could be seen as a particularly urban art with a strong tendency

45
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 41.
46
Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 1-2. For discussions of aesthetic modernism, see Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism,
Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987); T. J. Jackson Lears,
No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New York:
Pantheon, 1981); and Russell A. Berman, “The Routinization of Charismatic Modernism and the Problem of
Post-modernity,” in Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 118-35.
32
to describe the experience within the city.
47
Interpreting modernism from this perspective
and applying it to the understanding of modernism in China generate a general anxiety
about the applicability of the concept of aesthetic modernism of the West to modern
Chinese literature, because China lacks a nation-wide material reality that serves as the
basis for Western modernity on the one hand, and reveals an Eurocentric tendency on the
other as Western modernist aesthetics become the standards that Chinese literature ought
to be judged upon. As Shu-mei Shih aptly puts it, the narrow use of the term
“modernism” in discussions of modern Chinese literature, especially in fiction, indicates
an essentially Eurocentric tendency to judge Chinese literature by the Western standards,
which renders modern Chinese literature inferior to the great modernist works of the
West and unworthy of the modernist title.
48

To discuss Chinese modernism, henceforth, we have to keep in mind the historical
specificity of Modern China, resist the configuration of hierarchical relationship between
China and the West, and see China not as a passive receiver of Western modernism, but
rather an active participator that absorbs, reconfigures and redefines modernism in her
own particular historical context. As Xiaobing Tang argues:

…to propose a modernism in a culture that has not gone through the Western style
of modernity and has in fact functioned as the other of this experience… we must
come to terms with a subject that is neither the radically different other of the

47
Malcolm Bradbury, “The Cities of Modernism,” in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism
1890-1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 96-100.
48
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), 42. Shih also notices that there has been much more openness to the
discussion of modernism in modern Chinese poetry in the United States and suggests that it is due to the fact that
fiction took upon the primary role for cultural transformation and imagination while poetry was pushed to the
secondary position.
33
Western subject nor a simple replica of the Western consciousness. What
produces and marks off this subaltern subject is, and can only be, its specific
history… a history of receiving the imperialist gaze, admiring the supernatural
power of industrial civilization, and finally of looking back at and interacting with
an imposing other. A modernism of the subaltern subject, therefore, is a historical
necessity grown out of this interactive coexistence that is marked by a
“nonsynchronous synchronicity”…
49

Shu-mei Shih’s work on modernism in semicolonial China is probably the only
book length study that aims at widening the scope of discussion on Chinese modernism
and breaking away from the traditional viewpoint that regards the writers from the New
Sensationalist School (xin ganjue pai) in Shanghai as the only authentic modernists.
Focusing on the global context of modern Chinese literature and linking modernism to
the discourse of literary modernity of almost the entire Republican era, Shih discerns
three types of modernism at work from the teens to the thirties in modern China.
The first type of modernism is located in the works of the writers of the May
Fourth generation, represented by Lu Xun (1881-1936), Guo Moruo (1892-1978), and Yu
Dafu (1896-1945), who celebrated Occidentalism as cultural mechanisms that could be
imported from the West to perform an iconoclastic rejection of tradition and graft the
Western universals to the newly transformed Chinese society in hope of accelerated
modernization through Westernization. The second type of modernism is found in the

49
Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham & London: Duke University Press,
2000), 53.
34
writings of the Beijing school
50
, represented by Fei Ming (1901-1967), Lin Huiyin (1904-
1955), and Ling Shuhua (1904-1990). Shih argues that literary theorists and writers from
the Beijing school took a similar position as the neotraditional philosophers and
expressed in their writings a sustained critique of the May Fourth Occidentalism and
totalistic rejection of tradition. In contrast to the Hegelian teleological progressivism
embraced by the May Fourth generation, the theorists and writers of the Beijing school
valorized space rather than time and saw space as “an interactive arena for East-West
encounters”. Juxtaposing traditional Chinese aesthetics and Western modernist aesthetics
in creative tensions with each other, writers of the Beijing school evoked locality not as a
site colored by nativist distinctiveness of the local but as a potential site on which
localism, traditionalism and globalism could be converged.
51
The third type of
modernism is typified in the works of the Shanghai school, represented by Liu Na’ou
(1900-1939), Mu Shiying (1912-1940), and Shi Zhecun (1905-2003). Leo Ou-fan Lee in
his Shanghai Modern examines the cultural industry of Shanghai that bred Shanghai

50
Jeffrey Kinkley finds it unsatisfactory and rather improper to use the term “Beijing School” or “Beijing
modernism,” as he argues that in his opinion there was never a “Beijing School” in modern Chinese literature
and that writers who are considered as part of the Beijing School in fact never formed any “school” or presented
any common writing style. Many of them either studied or taught in Beijing, but the forms of modernism
represented by their works do not necessarily have much to do with Beijing, or modern city. Therefore, Kinkley
argues further that due to the lack of a proper term, he will call the forms of modernism in the 1930s and 1940s
that are different from the Western Occidentalism and Shanghai modernism as “academic modernism,” which
can be located in the works of writers such as Shen Congwen, Fei Ming, Xiao Qian, Wang Zengqi, Lin Huiyin,
Ling Shuhua, as well as poets Bian Zhilin, He Qifang, Yuan Kejia. See Jeffrey Kinkley, “Shen Congwen yu
sanzhong leixing de xiandai zhuyi liupai” (Shen Congwen and Three Types of Modernism), in Journal of Jishou
University (Social Science Edition), 26 (October 2005) 4: 5. In mainland scholarship, the term “Beijing School”
is widely used and it includes roughly the same group of writers that Kinkley considers as academic modernists.
See Zhou Renzheng, Jingpai wenxue yu xiandai wenhua (Literature of the Beijing School and Modern Culture)
(Changsha: Hunan shifan daxue chubanshe, 2002). Therefore, despite the difference in terminology, scholars
seem to focus on more or less the same group of writers and do not differ greatly in their discussions of the
literary works of these writers. In this study, I choose to keep the term “Beijing School” mainly because my
discussion of the reconfiguration of Chinese modernism in the 1940s aims at continuing and extending Shu-mei
Shih’s book length study of Chinese modernism from May Fourth period to the 1930s.
51
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 151-89.
35
modernism during the 1930s and 1940s. Through his vivid account of the activities
associated with the saloons, clubs, cinemas, coffee shops, book stores and literary cliques,
Lee demonstrates that Shanghai modernism is distinctively tied to its cosmopolitanism
and urbanism.
52
Just as Shi Zhecun claims in Les Contemporains, Shanghai modernism is
“the expression of modern sentiments which modern man experience in contemporary
life” that consist of a variety of different aspects, such as “the harbors crowded with
steamers, the noisy factories, the subterranean mines, the squares ringing with jazz, the
department stores in the skyscrapers, battles of planes in the air, and spacious race
courses.”
53
Shanghai modernism is itself reflective of the city which is characterized by
eroticism, decadence and consumerism. Shih further points out that even though the
semi-colonial situation could potentially lead to nationalistic writing about the
humiliating experience, the New Sensationalist writers refused to let nationalism dictate
their writing and flaunted cultural cosmopolitism with passion, grounding their senses of
unreality and simulacra within the capitalist culture of consumption, desire and
commoditification.
54

Jeffrey Kinkley finds it unsatisfactory and rather improper to use the term
“Beijing School” or “Beijing modernism,” as he argues that in his opinion there was
never a “Beijing School” in modern Chinese literature and that writers who are
considered as part of the Beijing School in fact never formed any “school” or presented

52
For a detailed discussion of the social and cultural milieu of Shanghai, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern:
The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
53
Shi Zhicun, “Guanyu benkan de shi” (More About the Poems in This Magazine), Les Contemporains 4. 1
(1934): 6-7.
54
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 213-76.
36
any common writing style. Many of them either studied or taught in Beijing, but the
forms of modernism represented by their works do not necessarily have much to do with
Beijing, or modern city. Therefore, Kinkley argues further that due to the lack of a proper
term, he will call the forms of modernism in the 1930s and 1940s that are different from
the Western Occidentalism and Shanghai modernism as “academic modernism,” which
can be located in the works of writers such as Shen Congwen, Fei Ming, Xiao Qian,
Wang Zengqi, Lin Huiyin, Ling Shuhua, as well as poets Bian Zhilin, He Qifang, Yuan
Kejia.
55
Kinkley rightly points out that what the academic modernists care most is the
psychological space, yet he also argues that through the exploration of the psychological
world, these writers focus more on the sense of locality rather than the sense of time
which is the subject of interest for many modernist writers in the West.
56

If the West, the local spaces and Shanghai could be employed as distinctive sites
of modernist contention for writers of the May Fourth generation, the Beijing and
Shanghai Schools from the inception of Modern Chinese literature to the 1930s, these
sites became extremely unstable not only in geographical reality but also in cultural
imagination during the war decade. With the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against
Japan in 1937, as China became gradually disintegrated, the literary scene of China also
underwent significant changes. Geographically China was divided into three areas during
the War of Resistance, the Japanese occupied areas (lunxianqu), the Nationalist-
controlled areas (guotongqu), and the Communist-controlled areas (gengjudi or

55
Jeffrey Kinkley, “Shencongwen yu sanzhong leixing de xiandaizhuyi liupai” (Shen Congwen and Three Types
of Modernism), in Journal of Jishou University (Social Science Edition), 26 (October 2005) 4: 5.
56
Jeffrey Kinkley, “Shencongwen yu sanzhong leixing de xiandaizhuyi liupai,” 7.
37
jiefangqu). The two most prominent cultural and literary centers, Beijing and Shanghai,
fell to the Japanese consecutively. Beijing was occupied soon after the onset of the war
and Shanghai became an “Orphan Island” (gudao) fist when the foreign concessions were
surrounded by the Japanese and then fell completely into the hands of the Japanese once
the Pacific War broke out. As a result, many writers from these two cities moved to
inland cities such as Chongqing, Guilin, Kunming and even to Hongkong, while a good
number of leftist writers went to the Communist-controlled bases. There were also a
number of writers who chose to stay in the occupied areas, within which there also
emerged new writers such as Eileen Chang that I will discuss in conclusion. Thus, the
literary scene of the 1940s, shaken by the War of Resistance and the subsequent civil war,
witnessed a process of constant dispersion, migration, disintegration and reorganization
of the literary figures and cultural apparatuses. The social upheaval and chaos, the
extreme economic hardship, the forced experience of displacement and unrootedness,
and the upsurge of nationalism and revolutionary collectivism made it imperative for the
writers of the war years to reconsider and explore more attentively the relationship
between art and life, fiction and reality, memory and history.
As we have discussed in the above sections, the mainstream literary scene of the
1940s put great emphasis on the socio-political function of literature and art, called for
literary collectivism and revolutionary romanticism and heroism, and promoted national
forms and popular literature for the masses as they saw literature developed since the
May Fourth era as Westernized, elitist and disconnected from the masses. Art, therefore,
had to be at the service of politics and life and fulfill its utilitarian function. The gap
38
between fiction and reality had to be overcome so that art and literature could be truthful
representation of reality. The promotion of revolutionary romanticism and heroism
further defined art and literature’s referentiality to reality, as what needed to be eulogized
or criticized had to follow the rules set by the dominant ideology. Despite the continuing
leftist campaign for national forms and ideology-ridden art and literature, many writers,
as the ones that I will discuss in this study, remained outside of the mainstream literary
scene and pursued instead modernist literature. Even though they came from different
backgrounds and pursued literary modernism in their particular ways, what they shared in
common was an on-going struggle to separate literature and art from political control. In
response to the increasing hegemonic discourse of politically charged collectivism, they
were committed to the modes of writing that reflected their disillusionment of the
contemporary literary scene, their frustration with the overarching call for socially
engaged literature that subordinated aesthetic values to political imperatives, and their
disenchantment with the leftist policies and their implementation.
The modernist literary forms that these writers employed in their writing,
however, witnessed a continuation with and a departure from those employed by the May
Fourth generation and the post-May Fourth writers from the Beijing and Shanghai
schools in the 1930s. In the writings of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves
Poets, we can see that one of the main achievement in May Fourth literature, that is, the
discovery and exploration of individuality, continues to be the central theme of the works
of these modernist writers in the 1940s. However, what they are concerned about is not
just the self-awakening of individual autonomy in light of Enlightenment thinking like
39
the May Fourth writers, but more importantly they endeavor to explore the general
condition of human life and the hardship and struggle that the individual needs to go
through as well as the responsibility that one needs to take. Therefore, the self and
individuality that they explore and discover in their works is not only historical but also
transhistorical, because it is at once a self that is aware of and in response to the particular
social and historical situation and a self that transcends any social and historical
specificity.
May Fourth Occidentalism and its wholesale acceptance of the West were
already under criticism during the post-May Fourth period, and as we have discussed,
they encountered even greater resistance in the war decade during which the national and
indigenous artistic and literary forms were promoted for the purpose of bridging the gap
between the intellectual and the masses created by Western influenced works. Yet writers
like Feng Zhi and the Nine Leaves Poets remained enthusiastic about finding inspiration
and learning substantially from the Western modernist tradition. Their introduction and
adaptation of Western modernist poetics in their own writings aimed at constructing a
new modernist tradition in China that was infused with Western modernist techniques
and thematic exploration while at the same time retained its own Chinese flavor, or in
Yuan Kejia’s words, it was “modernism with Chinese characteristics.”
Shen Congwen, writing extensively about his hometown West Hunan in the 1930s,
was an active member of the Beijing School. His essays and fictions written in the 1940s,
however, can be seen as a departure from the modernist practices of the Beijing School in
the 1930s. The diverse localities evoked in the works of the writers of the Beijing School
40
remained relatively stable and functioned as sites for cultural imagination. Whether the
spatialization of the culture of a given locality aims at claiming its equal validity on the
global level, or at constructing a utopian wonderland that is atemporal and undisturbed by
the real world, or at constituting a writing space for imaginary nostalgia of the very
absence of such perfection in reality, the locality is regarded as a place or a space that
carries cultural capital and deserves to be appreciated and longed for.
57
The tumultuous
years of the War of Resistance and the subsequent civil war, however, made it impossible
for the writers even to project a contemporary Peach Blossom Spring in imagination that
could be completely isolated from the traumatic reality. Edward Gunn in his study of
Chinese literature during the war period examines Shi Tuo’s Shanghai Correspondence
and Orchard Town and argues that not only the urban world of China seems to have
degenerated, but the reassuring notions that the small town is stable, familiar and
restoring are demolished as well during the war years. Therefore, these works illustrate
Shi Tuo’s persistent pessimism throughout the war period and “raise disturbing questions
about the relationship of anyone in China to any portion of that society”. Following
Zbigniew Slupski’s argument, Gunn further points out that Shi Tuo’s fiction is
preoccupied with the theme of “an unknown and unknowable world” and explores the

57
For different interpretations on the function of locality, see Shu-mei Shih, 175-80; David Der-wei Wang,
Fictional Realism in Twnetieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992), 249-53. David Wang discusses native soil fiction in general and argues its fundamental
theme is imaginary nostalgia that “comes not as the effect but as the absent cause of native soil literature”.
Though Wang situates native soil fiction in realist tradition, I would like to point out that there is a close
connection between the writers of the Beijing school and the native soil writers. One of the most prominent
writers from the Beijing school, Fei Ming, whose modernist works are discussed in detail in Shu-mei Shih’s book,
is considered also as a native soil fiction writer. Another prominent Beijing School writer, Shen Congwen, to
whom I devote a chapter in this study, is widely known for his focus on regionalism and his depiction of his
hometown West Hunan (Xiangxi) in his works.
41
ironies of fate that is beyond the control of the individual.
58
Shen Congwen, who is well-
known for the depiction of West Hunan, revealed his changing attitude toward his
homeland during the war years in his writing. Comparing The Border Town and Long
River, we can see that the idyllic portrayal of the tranquility and timelessness of the town
life in the former introduces an enclosed place that is undisturbed by the outside world. In
Long River, however, after “witnessing the various changes that West Hunan
experienced” since the outbreak of the war, Shen Congwen wants to “use a small harbor
town on the Chen River as backdrop, and familiar things and people as raw material, to
write about the ‘changes’ and ‘continuities’ of the region as well as the joys and sorrows
of the people”.
59
As David Wang points out, Long River, as Shen Congwen himself
admits, discloses his “anxiety about the inevitable downfall of his homeland at the time
of an impending Japanese invasion.” Thus, while the “border town” could be seen as an
atemporal utopia, the “long river” brings everything back to the flux of time and the real
socio-political situation.
60
The experience of wartime atrocity, displacement and hardship,
therefore, forced the writers of the war years to confront reality and realize that the

58
Edward M. Gunn, JR., Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937-1945 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980), 78-83.
59
Shen Congwen, “Changhe tiji” (Preface to Long River), in Shen Congwen Quanji (Taiyuan: Beiyue wenyi
chubanshe, 2002), 10: 5-6.
60
David Der-wei Wang, 265. David Wang points out that the contrastive reading as such evades the nuances of
Shen Congwen’s imaginary nostalgia and argues that the contrast exists as much within each novel as between
them. Wang’s chapter on Shen Congwen investigates the implied meaning within each text and argues that these
texts confront the reader “with the endless interplay between myth and history, dream and reality”. My
discussion of the contrastive reading of The Border Town and Long River here is by no means a deliberate
disregard of Wang’s brilliant discussion on the complexity of Shen’s imaginary nostalgia. Yet I do want to draw
reader’s attention to the changing attitudes of the writer during different historical context. Despite the
complexity within each text, Shen Congwen in his “Preface to Long River” explains specifically the historical
motive behind the writing of this novel and implies that the depiction of the “continuities” is indeed to infer
“changes” under the changing historical condition.
42
various localities that once represented cultural constancy or mystic utopia were no
longer stable and were vulnerable to the prevailing social turmoil brought out by the war.
Through the discussion of Shen Congwen’s essays and fictions written during the war
time period, I argue that Shen Congwen as a member of the Beijing School himself
departs from its particular focus on the locality and demonstrates in his writing a shift of
attention from the physical space of West Hunan to the psychological space of the self, a
space that points to the eternity and transcendence as well as the innermost psychological
dynamics of the writer himself. It is also a space of writing that ultimately mediates
between the abstract and the material world.
The war shook everyone’s sense of stability and knocked writers out of their
imaginary world. Shanghai, without exception, also fell into the hands of the Japanese
after the outbreak of Pacific War. Writers of the Japanese occupied areas were burdened
with restriction on speech imposed by the Japanese who wanted to push through their
cultural policy. As Qian Liqun observes, these writers were not allowed to say what they
wanted to say and should say, yet were also forced to say what they did not want to say
and should not say.
61
Thus, the pressure on the choice between what to “say” and “not to
say” and the experience of the catastrophic war made the writers feel the need to “talk
about something that fits the eternal human nature, and something that is beneficial to the
daily life”.
62
The neglected details of everyday life now became the only tangible thing
that they could hold onto and the only source of stability that sustained their life and

61
Qian Liqun, “ ‘Yan’ yu ‘buyan’ zhijian –Zhongguo lunxianqu wenxue daxi zongxu” (Between “Talk” and
“Don’t Talk” - Preface to Grand Series of Chinese Literature of the Occupied Areas), in Zhongguo xiandai
wenxue yanjiu congkan 1 (1996): 26.
62
“Fakan xianci” (Opening Remarks), in Da Zhong 1 (Nov. 1942). Quoted from Qian Liqun, “Preface”, 28.
43
existence. The third type of modernism that has already been discussed by scholars,
Shanghai modernism, focuses on the representation of a cosmopolitan life-style and a
fantastic urban world that is filled with the sensation of shock, thrills and excitement.
However, as Leo Lee points out, even though Shanghai’s public spaces were exemplified
by the Westernized architectural spaces such as sky-scrapers, department stores, cinemas,
dancing halls, public parks and race clubs, most natives including the writers were living
in a rather different world of linong (alley compounds), consisting of simple and plain
residential units. Despite the discrepancy between their private spaces and the
Westernized public spaces in Shanghai, writers intentionally appropriated the Western
material culture of the public spaces and created in their writing an imaginary space
which allowed them not only to share the urban space with Shanghai’s foreign residents
but also to participate in an “imagined community” and be connected to the world at
large.
63
Shanghai modernism is henceforth the actualization in writing of this
appropriation and reflects mainly the sensibilities, concerns and experiences of the
literary elites. By flaunting the appropriated cosmopolitanism, the neo-sensational writers
created in their works a literary and imaginary world that was detached from the
everyday life of the common people and depicted mainly the high culture of the
Westernized urban space.
The impact of the war, however, made it almost impossible to construct such an
“imagined community” and Shanghai modernism also took a new form. In the conclusion
part of this study, I will discuss the works of Eileen Chang as a departure and argue that

63
Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 32-35.
44
Shanghai modernism in the 1940s witnesses a shift of attention from the appropriated
Western high culture to the fundamental concerns of everyday life. I argue that like Feng
Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets that we have discussed, Eileen Chang’s
writings reflect also a view of history not as linear progression, but in her own words, as
ruins and “desolation”. However, in contrast to the writers that we have already discussed
who seek exceptional moments, such as moment of transcendence in Shen Congwen or
moment of self-revelation and self-transformation in Feng Zhi, or who strive to reflect
upon the past and rethink the relationship between past, present, and future like the Nine
Leaves Poets, Eileen Chang, on the other hand, focuses on two distinct yet intertwined
temporal dimensions of human existence, the moment and the everyday. By focusing on
the quotidian details of the everyday, her writings reflect her view of the conditions of
human existence in general and woman’s situation in particular during the tumultuous
war years. Yet at the same time, by accentuating certain moments in her writing that are
out of the routines of everyday, Eileen Chang reveals in her writing the unbearable
discrepancy between the imaginary and the real world. These moments also complicate
the meaning of triviality and details that Eileen Chang originally intends to assign to the
temporality of everyday. If in the time of war and instability with the imminent danger of
destruction of human civilization, triviality and fragmented details of everyday are the
only things that are real and that we can hold onto, they also make us feel trapped in
desolate ruins. However, even though the sense of desolation prevails in Eileen Chang’s
works, what she seeks in her writing is also certain moments that will break free and
shine through the pale grayness of desolation.
45
Temporality in Modernist Literature
The discussion of the reconfiguration of Chinese modernism of the 1940s in this
study will focus on the examination of the sense of temporality and the implied spatial
logic in the works of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets. I will explore
particularly the temporal representations found in their works and argue that time, the
experience of temporal orders and disorders and the condition of human existence that is
closely linked to the experience of temporality become the center of inquiry of the
literary exploration of these writers.
Understanding the changing conceptions of temporality is central to the
understanding of modernist literature in the West as well as in China. Literary modernism
in the West is usually considered as a response to the cultural crisis experienced at the
turn of the century and especially in the wake of the Great War of 1914-1918, which
completely shattered people’s faith in technologies of science and material progress. Art
and literature produced after the First World War, as Susan Friedman argues, “recorded
the emotional aspect of this crisis: despair, hopelessness, paralysis, angst and a sense of
meaninglessness, chaos and the fragmentation of material reality.”
64
Art, therefore, is to
“redeem, essentially or existentially, the formless universe of contingency”.
65

Modernism’s preoccupation with formal experimentation and non-representationalism, its
depiction of the modern experience as being disoriented, disconnected, displaced and
fragmented, its pursuit of a certain aesthetics that is independent of and would transcend

64
Quoted from Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey (London and New York:
Routledge, 1999), 67.
65
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism 1890-1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 50.
46
the material reality, its distrust of the external world and preference for the inward
exploration of the mind and psychological dynamics, are related closely to the cultural
crisis brought out by the disillusionment with the once firmly held belief in the linear
temporality and the constant material progress promised by the advances of science and
technology. As a result, modernist works tend to be ordered “not on the sequence of
historical time or the evolving sequence of character”, but “to work spatially or through
layers of consciousness”.
66

The Enlightenment period witnessed extraordinary progress of natural science.
Building on principles of Newtonian mechanics, great advances were made in various
scientific fields and most scientists believed that there would finally come a time when
the physical world could be described accurately and definitively by the laws of
mechanics. The concrete world, therefore, seemed to be explainable through a series of
abstract principles. The concept of time prevalent during this Enlightenment period also
reflects this mentality that emphasized the valorization of abstract principles. Ronald
Schleifer in his book length study on the relationship between Modernism and time
argues that the Enlightenment understanding of temporality sees time as “absolute, true
and mathematical,” so that time exists in its own terms and “flows equably without
relation to anything external.”
67
Quoting from Habermas, Schleifer points out that the

66
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, 50.
67
Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-
1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37.
47
idea of homogeneous and empty time from Newtonian science implies “a stubborn belief
in progress” which is expressed in the metaphysical progressivism of Hegel.
68

However, at the turn of the twentieth century, with the enormous changes in
wealth, knowledge and experience, comprehensions of temporality also changed from the
belief in linear progression to the emphasis on the fluidity and indeterminacy between
past and present. As Calinescu points out, “modernity as an aesthetic concept” arose
exactly from the disillusionment with the doctrine of progress and can be seen as an
outright rejection of bourgeois modernity that places firm confidence in scientific and
technological progress.
69
The subsequent artistic and literary movements associated with
modernism all derived from the tension between these two types of modernity.
Modernism, therefore, can be defined as “a celebration of a technological age and a
condemnation of it; an excited acceptance of the belief that the old regimes of culture
were over, and a deep despairing in the face of that fear; a mixture of convictions that the
new forms were escapes from historicism and the pressures of the time with convictions
that they were precisely the living expressions of these things.”
70

This shift from the firm belief in teleological progressivism and absolute truth to
the disillusionment with progress and emphasis on non-linear temporality and
indeterminacy marks the major difference between Enlightenment and modernist

68
Ronald Schleifer, 37-40.
69
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, 41-
44. Also quoted in Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May Fourth
Movement,” in Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries ed. Kenneth Lieberthal (New York: M.E.
Sharpe, Inc., 1991), 166.
70
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane eds., Modernism 1890-1930, 46.
48
thinking and such difference lies precisely in the very conception of time. The rejection
of linear temporality, the loss of faith in historical progressivism and the acute awareness
of futility and contingency of life become the defining features of modernist sensibility.
Thus, the formal and technical experimentation, the fragmentation of modern experience,
the obsession with the transitoriness of experience and the quotidian aspects of life, and
the frequent employment of self-introspection and reflexivity that are usually associated
with modernist works are indeed the reflection of a new sense of temporality adopted by
the modernist writers.
If Western modernism could be seen as a response to the atrocity of the First
World War and a reaction to the cultural crisis resulting from the disillusionment of the
idea of positive progress, then the work of the modernist writers of the war years in China
reflects a similar sense of disillusionment and despair. When everything seemed to be
subjected to destruction and disintegration, modernist writers in China like the Western
modernists also shared a sense of disorientation and despair, as it is expressed in Yeat’s
famous line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
71
The perpetual instability of the
outside world forced the writers to reflect upon the transitory nature of experience and the
contingency of life, and to explore issues that question the conditions and meaning of
human experience and existence. Thus, in the 1940s China, writers also adopted a new
sense of temporality that was non-linear as opposed to the linear view of time and history
embraced by their May Fourth predecessors at the birth of modern Chinese literature. Leo
Ou-fan Lee argues that the iconoclastic antitraditional ideology of the May Fourth era

71
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in Later Poems (Forgotten Books, 2007), 289.
49
reflects “a new mode of historical consciousness,” which “began to emerge after the turn
of the century and became firmly anchored in the intellectual discourse of the May Fourth
era.”
72
By defining their own epoch as “new” (xin) as opposed to the previous decades as
“old” (jiu), these May Fourth intellectuals adopted a new conception of time and a new
structure of temporality that entailed an equation of newness with a new temporal
continuum from present to future. This new type of historical consciousness has its roots
in the late Qing intellectual discourse. With Yan Fu’s introduction of social Darwinism
through his effective interpretations of Spencer and Huxley, Chinese intellectuals
embraced the doctrine of evolutionism in their thinking and writings.
73
As Chang Hao
points out, late Qing intellectuals adopted a new vision of history, which departed greatly
from the traditional cyclical view but emphasized instead on the irreversibility of linear
evolutionary historical progress.
74

Chinese modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, in Leo Lee’s words, can be
loosely defined “as a mode of consciousness of time and history as unilinear progress”,
which marked present not only as an epoch that was qualitatively better than the previous
eras but also an epoch that would lead to a purposeful future.
75
The implication of this
linear temporal mode of historical consciousness is that past should always be noted as

72
Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May Fourth Movement,” 158-59.
73
For detailed discussion of Yan Fu’s writings, see Benjamin Schwartz’s classic study of Yan Fu: In Search of
Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1964).
74
Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890-1911 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987), 52.
75
Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Modernity and Its Discontents,” 164.
50
old and backward while present and future as modern and advanced. This linear
temporality operated in both the local and the global discursive contexts, as Shu-mei Shih
convincingly argues. On the local level, the linear temporality was used to legitimize the
enlightenment agenda that repudiated “tradition” as outdated and henceforth supported
the iconoclastic stance that advocated a complete break from China’s past. On the global
level, by constructing a linear trajectory of historical development transnationally in a
cross-cultural context, May Fourth intellectuals positioned China as the past of the West
and envisioned optimistically a future for China when it would become contemporary
with the West.
76
Thus, modernity, as a new mode of historical consciousness that
incorporated the linear temporality and the doctrine of progress, emerged in the May
Fourth era as a necessity for China’s national survival and as a response to the Western
imperialist threat. This ideology of linear temporality, which was Western in nature,
produced a binary opposition between past and present, tradition and modernity, and
entailed an anti-traditionalist mentality and an optimistic attitude toward historical
progress.
This study aims at demonstrating that the ideology of linear temporality and the
doctrine of historical progress that the May Fourth generation so enthusiastically
embraced could no longer be sustained in the 1940s when the entire nation of China was
geopolitically fragmented due to the War of Resistance and the civil war that followed
immediately afterwards. Therefore, the works of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, the Nine
Leaves Poets, as well as Eileen Chang, demonstrate a different conception of time and a

76
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 49-51.
51
different sense of historical consciousness that are non-linear. Feng Zhi and Shen
Congwen’s works in the 1940s reveal a prevailing sense of anxiety of modern experience
and extreme sensitivity to the fleeting and ephemeral nature of the present experience.
Feng Zhi’s collection of sonnets reflects not only his contemplation on the transitoriness
of experience and the impermanence of life, but also his endeavors to give form to the
otherwise fleeting and ungraspable experience of human life through the aesthetic form
of poetry. Shen Congwen’s essays and fiction written during his Kunming period
represent a similar sense of concern and a sense of urgency to capture the fleeting
moment of beauty in life and the innermost dynamic flux of emotions in writing. Eileen
Chang’s sense of history as ruins and desolation reveals her disillusionment in progress,
which also leads her to the exploration of the details of everyday experience that are
omitted in the dominant grand narrative of revolutionary literature. In the poems of the
Nine Leaves Poets we can also discern a sense of time and history that is non- linear as it
is indicated by their call for “dramatization in poetry” that demands a multi-layered rather
than linear poetic structure. Furthermore, reflecting upon their position in history and
time, the Nine Leaves Poets also demonstrate in their poems a more sophisticated
relationship to their past. The binary opposition between past and present, tradition and
modernity implied in the May Fourth belief in linear temporality becomes quite unstable
in the works of these younger poets.
In order to explore the ways in which modernist temporality is expressed and
represented in the works of the modernist writers in China during the 1940s, I will focus
my discussion on two particular notions of time, the moment and the everyday, that both
52
the Western modernist writers and their Chinese counterparts in the 1940s seem to be
preoccupied with. Furthermore, as the representation of these two notions of temporality
is also closely linked to the representation of space in modernist literature and especially
in modernist poetics, I will also discuss the employment of spatial form in both fiction
and poetry in the 1940s China.
In Western modernist literature, representation of the temporal experience of the
moment, and especially exceptional moments, is essential. Sanford Schwartz, in his
classical studies on the matrix of modernism, discusses modernism’s “awareness of time”
in terms of its emphasis on “immediate experience.”
77
Schwartz argues that at the turn of
the century, the assumption that the external world can be explained by the rational and
abstract laws of mechanics was greatly challenged and many philosophers were eager to
expose what Nietzsche called the “anthropomorphic error,” which believes that the
scientific constructs can reflect the essential order of external reality.
78
In order to
acknowledge the inadequacy of scientific constructs as the only method to represent
reality and truth and to debunk the scientific determinism that characterizes the
Enlightenment thinking, philosophers at the turn of the century “posited a sharp
distinction between conceptual abstraction and the flux of concrete sensations.”
79

Philosophers, as Schwartz observes, differ greatly in their description of the sensory flux,
as expressed through Bergson’s “real duration,” James’ “stream of consciousness,”

77
Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), 50.
78
Sanford Schwartz, 18.
79
Sanford Schwartz, 19
53
Bradley’s “immediate experience,” and Nietzsche’s “chaos of sensations.” However, they
all agree upon one point, an essential point that sees reality as something not reducible to
rational formulation. These expressions can be seen as an outright rejection of the static
scientific abstraction and a celebration of the dynamic dimension of experiences and flux
of sensations. By focusing on the concrete experiences and sensations, these expressions
also break away from the Enlightenment mode of thinking that regards time as
homogeneous and teleological and emphasize instead a new sense of temporality that
accentuates the “awareness of time” in instantaneity and rejects the conventional
temporal succession from past to present or from the beginning to the end.
In modernist art, music, theater and literature, following the same strain of
thought, tremendous efforts were made to seek to break down the teleological mode of
thinking that had governed artistic creation. The art critic Clement Greenberg defines the
early modernist mode of painting as “decentralized” and “polyphonic.”
80
He argues,
“This very uniformity, the dissolution of the picture into sheer texture, sheer sensation,
into the accumulation of similar units of sensation, seems to answer something deep-
seated in contemporary sensibility. It corresponds perhaps to the feeling that all
hierarchical distinctions have been exhausted,” therefore “there are no longer either first
or last things.”
81
The same modernist sensibility that is reflected in the experimentation in
new modes of painting is also echoed in the works of modernist literature. Modernist
literature witnesses a rejection of narrative teleology and shows special attention on

80
Clement Greenberg, “Art Chronicle,” Partisan Review (April 1948), 482. Quoted from David Sidorsky,
“Modernism and the Emancipation of Literature from Morality: Teleology and V ocation in Joyce, Ford, and
Proust,” New Literary History 15, No.1 (Autumn 1983), 143.
81
Quoted from David Sidorsky, 143.
54
concrete experiences and sensations. Virginia Woolf states her opposition to the
conventional teleological narrative mode straightforwardly in her famous essay “Modern
Fiction”:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a
myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness
of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and
as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the
accent falls different from the old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he
chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not
upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest
or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as
the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps
symmetrically arranged: life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
82

Through the rejection of narrative teleology, Woolf stresses the importance of
breaking away from conventions and delineating instead the inchoate and dynamic
sensations and experiences in modernist fiction. In order to capture the intensity of the
concrete yet dynamic sensations, modernist writers often resort to a particular temporal
concept – the “moment” – in writing. Heidrun Friese defines the “moment” as “a word
which addresses particular relations to time and temporality” and “a word that has
become a central concept in all attempts at questioning the idea of empty, homogeneous
and continuous time.”
83
Friese further points out, even though time is commonly regarded

82
Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” Modernism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Tim
Middleton (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 1: 112. This is a revised version of “Modern Novels”,
TLS, April 1919, in The Common Reader, reprinted in Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press,
1966), 2: 105-10.
83
Heidrun Friese, “Introduction” in The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2001), ed. Heidrun Friese, 1-2.
55
as serving the function of structure, continuity and regularity, in the strands of modern
philosophical thinking, the moment negates the empty continuum of time and emphasizes
instead discontinuity, interruption and caesura. The decisive and significant moment,
therefore, “demonstrates that neither the time of the singular human beings and their –
more or less determined – actions nor history, and within it, language unfolds within a
continuous and chronological measure of time, but in tremendous disruptions, leaps and
breaks”.
84
Tied to this movement in philosophical thinking, literary modernity, Friese
argues, also focuses on distinct and distinguished moments and refuses to see time as an
empty continuum that progresses from past to future in succession without interruption.
85

Modernist literature witnesses tremendous efforts in depicting exceptional, epiphanic, or
transcendent moment, as seen in the works of Baudelaire, Eliot, Proust, Woolf, etc.
Baudelaire hopes to capture the moment that is at once “transitory” and “eternal,” as he
defines modernity in his “The Painter of Modern Life” as “the transitory, the fleeting, the
contingent half of art, while the other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
86
The
moment in Eliot’s writing is a moment that exemplifies the transcendent moment of truth
but also bears historical meaning and significance, a moment which he describes in
“Tradition and Individual Talent” as being both “timeless” and “temporal” and
combining the sense “of the timeless and of the temporal together.”
87
Proust likewise is

84
Heidrun Friese, 2.
85
Heidrun Friese, 10.
86
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans.
Patrick E. Charvet (Cambridge, 1972), 403.
87
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
(London: Butler and Tanner Ltd., 1960), 49.
56
also deeply concerned with special moments, especially those that could bring back the
lost time and resurrect the past in the present through involuntary memory. This moment
is “a moment of the past” yet also “a fragment of time in the pure state,” or according to
Deleuze, it is a moment of past that is never present, or “a pure past…out of reach of the
present voluntary memory and of the past of conscious perception.”
88

Privileging and prioritizing exceptional moments in writing is, therefore, an
important aspect of modernist aesthetics. Leo Charney discusses the relationship between
modern life and the moment and modernist writers’ preoccupation with the moment in
his work and points out that this particular focus on depicting the moment reflects “the
modern aspiration to seize fleeting moments of sensation as a hedge against their
inexorable evisceration.”
89
Yet for some critics, the critical attention given to the
centrality of the moment in modernist works has led to a relative neglect of the
temporality of the everyday that is an equally important aspect of modernist aesthetics.
Bryony Randall argues that some modernist writers, such as H.D. and Virginia Woolf,
rather than struggling to fight against the transient experience of life and searching for
exceptional moments, find new ways of delineating and representing the present. These
new ways of representation involve literary techniques that are used particularly for the
purpose of conveying the everyday and its temporality and through which the otherwise
transient experience could be made visible and palpable.
90
Ben Highmore argues in his

88
Quoted from Keith Ansell-Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life
(London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 189.
89
Quoted from Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 7.
90
Bryony Randall, 7.
57
Everyday Life and Cultural Theory that “the non-everyday (the exceptional) is there to be
found in the heart of the everyday.”
91
For Highmore, the notion of “everyday life” refers
not only to the quantifiable meaning of it, which points to the “most repeated actions,”
“most traveled journeys,” “most inhabitated spaces,” in other words, “the landscape
closest to us, the world immediately met,” but also to the qualitative aspect of it, the
everydayness of everyday life, and this very aspect could refer to “the unnoticed, the
inconspicuous, the unobtrusive.”
92
Linking the ambivalence inherent in the notion of
everyday life with the effects of modernity, Highmore argues that in modernity the
everyday becomes a site for the manifestation of the dynamic process of social
transformation when the regularity of the everyday was disrupted and shattered by the
“shock of the new” brought out by modernity. It bears witness not only to the struggles to
get used to the social disruptions and incorporate the new but also to the frustrations,
disappointment and despair that came along with this process.
93
Modernist literature,
therefore, seeks to find ways of representation that can register the particular experiences
of everyday modernity. These experiences, Highmore points out, are characterized by
boredom and dullness with the introduction of institutionalized world of work and
standardized time, analogous to the practice of assembly line. While on the other hand,
what the modernist thinkers and writers demonstrate is their ability to “make strange”

91
Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002),
3.
92
Ben Highmore, 1.
93
Ben Highmore, 2.
58
within the routinized everyday life.
94
The everyday in modernity, henceforth, “offers its
self up as a problem, a contradiction, a paradox: both ordinary and extraordinary, self-
evident and opaque, known and unknown, obvious and enigmatic.”
95
Thus, the
paradoxical nature of the everyday also contributes to the paradox of modernist aesthetics.
It is an aesthetics that celebrates the exceptional, the strange and the unfamiliar. Yet at
the same time, it also pays meticulous attention to the trivial and inconsequential
quotidian aspects of reality. As Bryony Randall argues, the most ordinary and common
mundane everyday life is rendered exceptional and exemplary in the modernist texts in its
very mundanity.
96

The two temporal notions, the moment and the everyday, that modernist writers
tend to focus on in their description of the new temporal experiences of modernity,
although seeming to be strictly temporal, are in fact closely linked to another notion that
governs our experience in the world, that is, space. The implied meaning of space and
human place-relations, according to Wesley A. Kort, are two-sided, both physical and
spiritual.
97
The physical space refers to the physicality of places, such as locations in
nature, the urban space, or personal and intimate places. What give depth and meaning to
the physical space are the social, political and economic relations that define and govern
these places, which is indeed important to the understanding of modernity from the
material aspect of social reality. On the other hand, the spiritual aspect of space points to

94
Ben Highmore, 5-12.
95
Ben Highmore, 16.
96
Bryony Randall, 7.
97
Wesley A. Kort, Place and Space in Modern Fiction (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004), 20.
59
certain aesthetics of modernist literature that transcend time and history and arrive at the
point which alludes to an ideal and absolute state of art.
98
The literary form that
modernist literature employs for the depiction of exceptional moment and the
everydayness of everyday life that is at once ordinary and extraordinary, familiar and
unfamiliar, bespeaks its close relationship with the notion of space, and especially the
spiritual aspect of space.
Modernist literature’s rejection of linear temporality and teleological narrative
mode is clearly reflected in its depiction of the temporal experience of the moment and
the everyday. In modernist poetry as well as in modernist fiction, the linear and
sequential narrative gives way to juxtaposition, fragmentation, and non-linearity. This
new mode of literary representation that breaks away from the conventional temporal
structure of narrative teleology takes on the form which Joseph Frank calls “spatial form”
in his influential essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.”
99
Ezra Pound, the leading
theoretician of Imagism, defines image as this: “An Image is that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”
100
Joseph Frank argues that the
implication of this definition should be noted in that Pound advocates “a unification of
disparate ideas and emotions into a complex presented spatially in an instant of time.”
101

This moment of instantaneous representation is what gives “that sense of sudden

98
Wesley A. Kort, 173-82.
99
This essay is collected in Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968).
100
Ezra Pound, “Make It New” (London, 1934). Quoted from Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern
Literature,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, 9.
101
Joseph Frank, 9.
60
liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden
growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”
102
The space-
logic is further exemplified in Eliot’s ability to fuse seemingly different experiences into
a unity, as his most famous poem, The Waste Land, best demonstrates his ability to “form
new wholes” from the disconnected and disjunct material, in which the “syntactical
sequence is given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships between
disconnected word-groups.”
103

The predominance of spatial form can be discerned not only in modernist poetry
but also in modernist fiction. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses can be seen as a modernist text
that focuses particularly on the representation of the temporality of everyday life, of a
typical Dublin day. Yet Joseph Frank points out that the dailiness of this day is
represented not through the linear time logic but rather spatial logic as Joyce strives to
recreate the sights and sounds, the people and their actions, the life of the whole city,
simultaneously through the intricate weaving of fragments scattered throughout the
book.
104
Proust searches in his work for certain moments during which the physical
sensation of the past could be brought back to fuse with the present. These moments are,
in Proust’s words, “a fragment of time in its pure state,” “real without being of the
present moment, ideal but not abstract.”
105
This “pure time”, a moment which past and

102
Quoted from Joseph Frank, 10.
103
Joseph Frank, 12.
104
Joseph Frank, 16-18.
105
Quoted from Joseph Frank, 21.
61
present seem to fuse simultaneously, is not time at all according to Joseph Frank, but
“perception in a moment of time,” in other words, it is space.
106

Joseph Frank’s attempts to “outline the spiritual attitudes that have led to the
predominance of spatial form” in his influential essay “Spatial Form in Modern
Literature,” as Wesley A. Kort points out, depends on idealist philosophical beliefs that
“posit art as standing above the contingencies of history either by being itself
transcendent to them or by granting access to a noncontingent and stable moral and
spiritual world beyond temporality and physicality.”
107
Following Lessing’s aesthetic
agenda to “rise above history, to define the unalterable laws of aesthetic perception,”
Frank argues that modern literature through the employment of spatial form transforms
time into timelessness and transcends history. As Wesley Kort points out, Frank’s
analysis of spatial form in modern literature reveals a potentially idealistic understanding
of literature, which regards literature as being divorced from history and providing an
access to transcendence.
108

Modernist literature’s general preoccupation with temporal experiences of the
moment and the everyday as well as the spatial form in literary representation makes it
reasonable and productive to examine the literary works of the 1940s in China through
the discussion of the ways in which such temporal notions and spatial logic are
represented and employed in order to lay out at once the shared modernist sensibilities

106
Joseph Frank, 24.
107
Wesley A. Kort, 180.
108
Wesley A. Kort, 182.
62
between the Western and the Chinese writers and the specificity of Chinese modernism in
particular. I argue that Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, the Nine Leaves Poets, as well as Eileen
Chang discussed in the conclusion show in their works a similar preoccupation with the
temporal notions of the moment and the everyday and a preference for spatial logic in
their writings, which make them contemporaneous with their Western counterparts and
set them apart from the mainstream literary scene in China at the time that was governed
mainly by a blind belief in historical determinism, revolutionary romanticism and
heroism. The forms of Chinese modernism that their works take depart from the forms of
Chinese modernism explored and discussed so far in present scholarship. In response to
the devastating conditions of war, social instability, and the wartime experience of
displacement, anxiety and despair, modernist writers in the 1940s China express in their
works a shared contemplation on existential concerns. These concerns are manifested in
the metaphysical inquiries, psychological exploration, confrontation with the absurdity
and contingency of life, disillusionment and disenchantment with the present, and the
searches for the possibility of transcendence. Furthermore, I would argue that their
reconfiguration of modernist writing through their particular concerns of the moment, the
temporal structure of our experience, and the interplay between time and space, memory
and history problematize the binarisms, such as aesthetics and politics, interiority and
exteriority, high culture and popular culture, elitist meditation and quotidian concerns,
that have often governed our understanding of modernism in general and Chinese
modernism in particular.

63

CHAPTER ONE
Life as a Beautiful Trajectory: Time and the Moment of Self-Revelation
in Feng Zhi’s The Sonnets and Wu Zixu

We are ready to receive profoundly,
Unexpected mysteries,
In these prolix times; the sudden appearance
of a comet, the whirling, gusty wind:

- Feng Zhi, “Sonnet One”

The opening stanza of Feng Zhi (1905-1993)’s Shisihang ji (The Sonnets) brings
our attention immediately to the temporal parameters of the poem, a moment in the
present which anticipates the imminent future, “the sudden appearance of a comet, the
whirling, gusty wind.” Zhu Ziqing, a famous literary critic and Feng Zhi’s contemporary,
considered the Sonnets as a milestone work in the development of modern Chinese poetry
and argued that this collection “laid the foundation for sonnets in China and dispelled the
doubts about the survival of this foreign poetic form in Chinese poetry.”
109
Feng Zhi’s
contribution to modern Chinese literature, however, lies beyond the scope of his
successful implementation of the foreign sonnet form for his poetic expression. The
Sonnets as well as the historical novella Wu Zixu published during the 1940s demonstrate
the modernist consciousness in Feng Zhi, which can be located in his acute awareness of
time and his contemplation of temporality and its relation to human existence, already
revealed in the very first stanza of The Sonnets. In Feng Zhi’s poetics, the comet signifies

109
Zhu Ziqing, “Xinshi zahua – shi de xingshi” (Miscellaneous Comments on New Poetry – The Poetic Form), in
Feng Yaoping, ed., Feng Zhi yu tade shijie (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 31.
64
a moment that appears to change the nature of one’s experience of time. His image of the
comet, which appears suddenly to disrupt the temporal progression of ordinary life,
serves as a structuring principle for Feng Zhi’s poetry and fiction. Literature illustrates
the way in which life is transformed in a moment, and life is a constellation of such
moments. This chapter, therefore, aims at exploring the poetics of temporality in Feng
Zhi’s works, that is, his particular concept of time, its relationship to the theme of
solitude, death and subjectivity represented in his writings during the 1940s.
Feng Zhi is one of the most prominent poets in modern China. Called by Lu Xun
as “the most distinguished lyric poet of China,”
110
Feng Zhi excels in integrating Western
poetic practices with Chinese subjectivity. If we follow Feng Zhi’s own periodization and
say that his life and times can be divided into four periods, the 1920s, the 1940s, the
1950s and the 1980s,
111
then the first two periods of his literary career are marked by his
constant efforts to learn from the Western literary tradition and to bring Eastern and
Western forms of verse together.
Feng Zhi’s early literary activities were closely associated with two literary
groups, the short-lived Shallow Grass Society and the Sunken Bell Society, both of which
took interest in Western literature. Lu Xun’s comments on the literary endeavors of the

110
Zhao Jiabi ed., Zhonguo Xinwenxue Daxi (Modern Chinese Literature Compendium) (Shanghai: Liangyou
rushu yinshua gongsi, 1936), 4: 5.
111
Dominic Cheung in his searching analysis of Feng Zhi argues that his life and times can be divided into three
periods which coincide with three important stages of modern Chinese history: the prewar period (1921-1932),
the war period (1932-1946), and the postwar period (1946-present). See Dominic Cheung, Feng Chih (Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1979), 15. The periodization that I am following here is based on Feng Zhi’s own comment
made in response to Tong Wei’s interview for Shi shuangyue kan (Poetry Bimonthly) in Hong Kong in 1990,
published in July 1991’s Poetry Bimonthly – Special Issue on Feng Zhi. See “Tan shige chuangzuo” (On Poetry
Writing), in Feng Zhi quanji (The Complete Works of Feng Zhi) (Shijiazhuang: Heibei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999),
5: 244. Hereafter cited as FZQJ.
65
Shallow Grass Quarterly’s contributors could be used to describe both societies; he
pointed out that they were striving to “absorb foreign nutrients externally and to explore
the individual soul internally, an attempt to discover the inner vision to gaze at the
universe and the inner voice to sing to the lonely people with truth and beauty,” and that
the foreign nutrients that they absorbed were tinted with the flavor of fin de siècle
sentimentality exemplified in the works of Wilde, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Andreev.
112

After Shallow Grass Society folded in 1925, Feng Zhi founded the Sunken Bell Society
with his friends. Not only was the name adopted from Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Die
Versunkene Glocke, but the members of the society showed particular interest in German
romanticism as well, in particular the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, S. Kierkegaard, L.
Andreev, A. Strindberg, R. M. Rilke, among others.
113

In 1930, Feng Zhi left for Germany to pursue his doctorate in German literature,
with minors in history of art and philosophy, studying first at Humboldt University in
Berlin and then at Karl-Ruprecht University in Heidelberg.
114
During his five-year stay in
Germany, Feng Zhi was further exposed to modernist literature and art and to modern
philosophy, noting in his 1979 biography that at Heidelberg he “listened to Karl Jaspers’
lectures on existential philosophy, read works by S. Kierkegaard and F. Nietzsche,
enjoyed the paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, and read and recited

112
Zhonguo Xinwenxue Daxi, 4: 5-6. The translation is taken over from Dominic Cheung, Feng Chih (Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1979), 17.
113
Marián Gálik, Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation, 1898-1979 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1986), p. 180.
114
Feng Zhi, “Zizhuan” (Autobiography), in Feng Zhi xuanji (Selected Works of Feng Zhi) (Chengdu: Sichuan
wenyi chubanshe, 1985), 2: 502. Feng Zhi wrote four versions of autobiography. The one that is quoted here was
the first one, written in 1979.
66
Rilke’s poems with extreme enthusiasm.”
115
It was the constant absorption and sustained
study of modernist Western art and literature from the earliest stages of his literary career
that made Feng Zhi stand out as a leading writer who contributed greatly to the
development of modernist literature in China.
Feng Zhi was not a prolific writer and the decade of the 1930s was practically a
period of poetic silence after the publication of his long poem “Beiyou” (Journey to the
North) in 1928. He once recalled, “Even though I continued to write poetry and my
language and poetic skills became more mature, I could not at all create new poetic
terrain (jingjie). I felt as if both my creative work and emotion went into a crisis. I
realized that my foundation was not very solid and that my understanding of the world
was fairly shallow. Since the beginning of the 1930s, I almost stopped writing poetry
completely.”
116
Yet what came after the ten-year silence was a burst of creative energy
that made Feng Zhi’s next decade particularly productive. Feng Zhi wrote his most
important work Shisihang Ji (The Sonnets) in 1941 and published this poetry collection
the following year. The borrowed Western sonnet form became “a circumscribed arena”
that allowed unrestricted poetic imagination and self-expression, and this work represents
the culmination of Feng Zhi’s poetic craftsmanship and beauty.
117
In the mid 1940s, Feng

115
Feng Zhi, “Autobiography”, 502.
116
Feng Zhi, “Zai Lianbang deguo guoji jiaoliu zhongxin ‘wenxue yishu jiang’ banfa yishishang de daci (Speech
on the “Literature and Art Award” Ceremony at the International Cultural Exchange Center in Germany), in
FZQJ, 5: 198. This speech is made on June 4
th
1987 at the “Literature and Art Award” ceremony at the
International Cultural Exchange Center in Germany, in which Feng Zhi talked about his own literary career and
its close connection to the tradition of German literature represented especially by two writers that he admired
deeply, Goethe and Rilke.
117
Dominic Cheung, 41. Cheung points out that Feng Zhi’s sonnets demonstrate “even a denial altogether of a
conscious borrowing from the West” because except the formal division of octaves and sestets none of the poems
follow the rhyming patterns of the Shakespearean sonnet.
67
Zhi published his historical novella Wu Zixu and a collection of prose titled Shanshui
(Landscape). In addition to his creative work, Feng Zhi also did extensive research and
studies on the great Tang poet Du Fu (712-770) and the great German writer Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) during the 1940s and published extensively on these
two writers. His essays were later collected together and published in book form as Ge
De lunshu (Studies on Goethe) in 1948 and as Du Fu zhuan (A Biography of Du Fu) in
1952.
When many writers and poets enthusiastically participated in creating
revolutionary literature that appealed to the masses and focused mainly on fulfilling the
didactic function of literature during the 1940s, Feng Zhi set himself apart from the
mainstream. His collection of sonnets marks a major milestone in the development of
modern Chinese poetry, yet the poems in this collection concern not about war and
national salvation, but about the conditions of human existence and the struggles of
individual. These poems are “poetry of contemplation” (chensi de shi) as Li Guangtian,
an important literary critic of modern Chinese literature and poetry in particular, once
called them.
118
What Feng Zhi strives to express through his sonnets is his own
intellectual reflection and contemplation of certain ultimate concerns of human existence,
the loneliness of being, the themes of life and death, and his concern about the possible
space that creative art like the sonnets can open up for the pursuit of giving form to
intangible life.

118
Li Guangtian, “Chensi de Shi” (Poetry of Contemplation), in Feng Yaoping, ed., Feng Zhi yu tade shijie
(Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 25.
68
Wu Zixu, Feng Zhi’s historical novella, also deviates greatly from the mainstream
fiction of the time. Setting out to write about a historical figure, Feng Zhi seeks to
demonstrate through historical events “the agony of the person in modern society,
especially in China during the recent years” so that “the story of escape and exile from
two thousand years ago becomes a modern ‘Odyssey.’”
119
Yet the ways in which such
agony is described and captured in his novella do not at all conform to the conventions of
revolutionary literature that celebrate a stereotypical plot and the role of a heroic figure at
that time. Wu Zixu is not narrated through the unfolding of a central plot nor does it focus
on the heroic deeds of the main protagonist. Feng Zhi’s contemporary literary critic
Sheng Chenghua, comparing Feng Zhi’s novella to the works of Oscar Wilde and André
Gide, argues that if Wilde’s Salomé represents an emotional experience of life and Gide’s
Le Retour de l’Enfant Prodigue (The Return of the Prodigal Son) an intellectual
experience of life, then Feng Zhi’s Wu Zixu represents a poetic experience of life.
120

Bian Zhilin, a famous poet and Feng Zhi’s contemporary, comments that this novella is
written in the language of prose with rhythms of poetry and calls the climactic last
section of the novella a “symphonic prose poem” (sanwen jiaoxiang shi) which
incorporates multiple layers of images, moods, color and sounds. This artistic reworking
of the long-lasting legendary story, in Bian Zhilin’s opinion, unconsciously fits well into

119
Feng Zhi, “Houji” (Postscript of Wu Zixu), in FZQJ, 3: 427.
120
Sheng Chenghua, “Du Feng Zhi Wu Zixu,” in Dongfang yu xifang 1. 3 (June 1947). Quoted from Fang
Zhihong, 172.
69
the creative trend of modern fiction that poeticizes fiction or transforms fiction (xiaoshuo)
into prose essays (sanwen) and downplays the importance of plot.
121

Feng Zhi consciously kept a distance from the mainstream literary scene during
the 1940s. With the surge of nationalist fervor after the outbreak of War of Resistance
Against Japan in 1937, many writers strived to create new ways of expression that would
accommodate the needs of revolutionary literature. Writing in restrained diction and
contemplative tone, Feng Zhi paid less attention to outer reality but more to the
expression of his inner feelings. Dominic Cheung argues that his contemplative
revelation of his feelings was best expressed in the sonnet form, in which he managed to
demonstrate exceptional sobriety in his poetic creation, which led the development of
Chinese lyricism to its epitome.
122
Cheung further points out the close connection
between the distinguishing features of Feng Zhi’s sonnets and the Orphic myth used by
Rainer Maria Rilke in his Sonnets to Orpheus, arguing that the recurring images of trees,
themes of solitude and loneliness, life and death, and belief in the metamorphosis
demonstrated in Feng Zhi’s sonnets all conform to Orphism’s emphasis on the
confrontation with the inner self and the possibility of transforming the society indirectly
through the changes made from within.
123
Marián Gálik also stresses the influences of
German romanticism and especially Rilke’s works on Feng Zhi and argues that the
recurring theme in Feng Zhi’s poetry is “interhuman communication” and that his poetry

121
Bian Zhilin, “Shi yu xiaoshuo: du Feng Zhi chuangzuo Wu Zixu” (Poetry and Fiction: On Feng Zhi’s work Wu
Zixu), Zhongguo xiandai wenxue congkan (Modern Chinese Literature Studies) 2 (1994): 71.
122
Dominic Cheung, 25-40.
123
Dominic Cheung, 44-50.
70
probes the solution of the central question of “communication in the individualistically
split and alienated world.”
124
Discussion of Rilke’s impact on Feng Zhi’s poetic creation
is again the center of another important study of Feng Zhi’s works by Xie Zhixi and Xie
focuses mainly on demonstrating the connection between Feng Zhi’s works and the
modernist tradition in the West and existential philosophy in particular. Xie argues that
the writings of Feng Zhi during the 1940s clearly show the influences from “existential
philosophy and modernist literature” and that the essential issue that concerns Feng Zhi
most is the condition of human existence and the particular attitude that one should hold
toward his life in order to “properly live and die” (zhengdang de sisheng) and to
“earnestly live life” (renzhen de weiren).
125

Despite the compelling exploration of the thematic innovations of Feng Zhi’s
works and their close relation to Western literature and philosophy, scholars fail to notice
one important issue - the notion of time - in Feng Zhi’s writing. Both Rilke’s and Feng
Zhi’s works reflect a conception of time that is different from teleological and linear
notions of time. The rejection of linearity in favor of a non-linear conception of time in
their writing reveals the modernist consciousness in both writers. Feng Zhi’s non-linear
conception of time manifested in his works explains both the formal innovations in his
fictional writing exemplified in the novella Wu Zixu and the thematic explorations that
touch upon the theme of solitude, the Orphic myth, or the contemplations of existential

124
Marián Gálik, p. 181-90.
125
Xie Zhixi, Sheng de zhizhuo: cunzai zhuyi yu zhongguo xiandai wenxue (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe,
1999), 154.
71
matters, such as concerns about life and death, the conditions and meanings of human
existence, and the appropriate attitude that one should have toward one’s life.
Thus, this chapter will explore the representation of temporality in Feng Zhi’s The
Sonnets and Wu Zixu and delineate how it links closely to his formal and thematic
experimentation. As the change in the concept of time marks modernist literature’s break
from the linear and sequential representation of reality in realist literature, I would like to
argue that Feng Zhi’s particular notion of time and concept of the “moment” expressed in
his writings reconfigure modernism in China. Reading Feng Zhi’s works as testimony of
Chinese modernity during the 1940s, I would like to point out that Feng Zhi’s particular
notion of time, his celebration of the moment, his emphasis on the fluidity between past,
present and future, and the awareness of the immanence of death and its transformative
power demonstrate the traits of his modernist consciousness that are closely linked to
existential concerns. These existential concerns originate from an anguished feeling of
loneliness in an ultimately absurd and transient world. Therefore, Feng Zhi seeks to
confront the world from without with the power of poetry, creating a level of reality that
goes beyond the materiality of the world and transcends the temporal and spatial confines.
On the other hand, by retreating into his inner being and focusing on self-discovery and
self-revelation, Feng Zhi hopes to gain a sense of authenticity in existence and redefine
the relationship between the individual and the society.

72
Representations of Temporality in The Sonnets
Feng Zhi was not the first to write sonnets in China, but his collection of twenty-
seven sonnets has been the most acclaimed.
126
In his “My Relationship with Sonnets”
Feng Zhi talked about the composition of his sonnets as the following:

During the War of Resistance Against Japan, our nation was under a severe test.
Glory and humiliation, nobility and despicability, heroic sacrifice and shameless
licentiousness… all these opposing things coexisted, which made one feel excited
as well as depressed, become encouraged yet also discouraged by dim prospects.
Being middle-aged at that time, though life was poor and harsh, my thoughts were
vibrant and spirits were high. I recalled with reverence the people I adored,
observed the growth of plants and the activities of animals, learned from the
books and tried to understand life through experiences in reality. Therefore, my
past experiences and the immediate emotions became mingled together on my
mind. This mingling was quite obscure at first, yet later it turned into visible and
tangible forms through linguistic arrangements and became sonnet poems upon
revision. This happened quite unexpectedly. I did not try to follow the strict
meters of the sonnets and only used its form. These poems were composed this
way because it was a direct reflection of my inner feelings on the one hand, and it
was inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus on the other.
127

The tide of poetry that surged in to drive Rilke to compose the Sonnets to
Orpheus was also unanticipated. For almost a decade Rilke had been struggling to write
the Duino Elegies, yet suddenly on 2 February 1922, the sonnets took form and within
three days Rilke composed twenty-five sonnets. Within a month before the end of
February, Rilke completed the ten Duino Elegies as well as all fifty-five of the Sonnets to

126
According to Qian Guangpei, the first sonnet composed in the history of modern Chinese poetry was
published under the pen name “Dong Shan”, entitled “For A Friend in Taiwan” on Shaonian Zhongguo, 2:2
(1920). It was in fact written by Zheng Boqi. Zhu Xiang, Sun Dayu, and others also attempted to use the sonnet
form to compose poetry. See “Foreword,” in Qian Guangpei, ed., Zhongguo shisihang shixuan, (Beijing:
Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1990), 6-7. See also Qian Guangpei & Xiang Yuan, eds., Xiandai shiren ji
liupai suotan (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1982), 72. This is quoted from Chen Sihe, “Tansuo shijiexing
yinsu de dianfan zhizuo: Shisihang Ji,” in Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 3 (2004): 5.
127
Feng Zhi, “Wo he shisihang de yinyuan” (My relationship with sonnets), in FZQJ, 5: 94.
73
Orpheus.
128
Like the poet that he admired throughout his literary career, Feng Zhi’s
experience of his poetic surge from within was also quite mysterious and enigmatic.
When the war broke out, Feng Zhi moved to Kunming and taught at Xinan lianhe daxue
(Southwest Associated University). He lived in a cottage away from the city center of
Kunming and he had to go twice a week to town to teach at the university. In the
“Foreword” to The Sonnets, Feng Zhi described the surge of his creative energy and the
birth of his sonnets:

It was a trip about fifteen Chinese miles, and walking forth and back was pleasant
exercise. A person alone on mountain paths and meadows cannot help but look
around and ruminate. At that particular point in my life, it seems as if I saw a
great deal more and thought more exuberantly than usual. I had not, in the years
between 1931-1940, written much poetry: I had penned no more than a score of
poems. Once, on a winter afternoon, when I was looking after a few silvery
airplanes, blue like crystals, hovering in the azure sky, I was reminded of the
“Peng bird dream” of the ancients. Following the rhythms of my footsteps, I
casually composed a rhymed poem. When I got home, I wrote the poem down and
found, quite incidentally, that it was a sonnet.
129

We may consider it quite coincidental that both Rilke and Feng Zhi had a mystical
burst of creative energy that propelled them to complete the significant works of their
lives, but we cannot deny that these two writers shared a fundamentally similar view
toward the conditions of human existence, that is, we as human beings are ultimately and
infinitely alone. In both Rilke and Feng Zhi’s works, the theme of solitude predominates.
What I would like to explore here is how this theme of solitude links directly to the

128
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, trans. & eds., In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (New York: Penguin group, 2005), 4-5.
129
Feng Zhi, “Preface to The Sonnets”, FZQJ, 1: 213. Translation is taken from Marian Galik, 191. For the
complete version of the translation of this Preface, see Dominic Cheung, 77-78.
74
modernist experience of temporality and the ways in which such an experience of
temporality led to Feng Zhi’s particular meditations on life and death, the individual’s
encounter with his mortality and finitude, and the possibility of transformation and
metamorphosis that would break away from the constraints of temporal experience.

Embracing Solitude
The Sonnets were composed and published during the War of Resistance Against
Japan, yet they rarely concern the social reality at the time. Li Guangtian praises Feng
Zhi as the best poet, as he points out, “Poetry can be found in common life and common
phenomena and does not have to be in blood and fire, tears and ocean, or in love and
death. The best poet is one who can find the deepest meaning in the most common
phenomena.”
130
Writing against the mainstream literary trend that calls for revolutionary
realism and heroism, Feng Zhi turns his attention away from the “blood and fire” and
focuses on the most common things in life. Feng Zhi’s approach to poetry through the
keenest observation is what he most appreciates in Rilke’s method of art, as he comments:

He began to observe: with the pure love he had within himself he watched
myriads of things in the universe. (He observed the petals of roses, the buds of
poppies, a panther, a rhinoceros, a swan, flamingos, a black cat; then prisoners, a
woman after an illness, an adult woman, a courtesan, lunatics, beggars, an old
woman, a blind man; he watched a mirror, beautiful lace, the fate of a woman,
childhood.) To all and everything he behaved in an open manner, with a heart full
of understanding, he calmly listened to their words or mute expression; together
with them he bore their fates that interested no one. He looked at every single

130
Li Guangtian, “Chensi de shi: Lun Feng Zhi de Shisihang Ji,” in Feng Yaoping, ed., Feng Zhi yu tade shijie, 5.
75
thing about him as if it had just come out of God’s hands. He deprived it of it
cultural dress and looked at it in an original vision.
131

What comes out of this observation “in an original vision” is the tenet that
“everything, as long as it truly exists, can be the subject of poetry”.
132
Yet this type of
poetry, which is referred to as the “poetry of contemplation” by Li Guangtian, is no
longer dominated by overflowing emotion. Feng Zhi’s sonnets present a particular sense
of sobriety because he believes, as Rilke does, that what we need for poetry is no longer
emotion or sentimentality but experience (jingyan). Only when the recollections,
memories and our experiences “turn within us into blood, look, gesture, become nameless
and unrecognizable by us it may happen that in a very rare, precious hour, the first word
of a poem will arise and come out from their midst.”
133

Yet it is only in solitude that one can gain this “original vision” and only in
solitude that true poetry will come out from within. Rilke believes that “ultimately, and
precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone.”
134

Solitude is difficult, yet one should “love [his] solitude and try to sing out with the pain it
causes [him].”
135
Solitude is at once a burden and a gift. It is a burden because it makes
one feel “an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless,”
136
yet it is also a

131
Feng Zhi, “Rilke: Wei shizhounian jiri zuo” (For Rilke: On the Tenth Anniversary), originally published on
New Poetry, 1:3 (December 1936), reprinted in FZQJ, 4: 84-85.
132
Feng Zhi, “Rilke,” in FZQJ, 4: 85-86.
133
Reng Zhi, “Rilke,” in FZQJ, 4: 86.
134
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 14.
135
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet, 41.
136
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet, 87.
76
gift, as it stops one from looking outside and encourages one to go into himself. Feng Zhi
especially appreciates Rilke’s view of human existence as ultimately solitary and his
view of solitude as the very foundation of an understanding of life, as he writes in his
forward to the translation of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:

To be in this world, a human being will ultimately be in hardship and be infinitely
alone. Individual beings are like the trees lined up in the garden. The branches and
the leaves are sometimes in contact, but their roots, which reach down underneath
the ground for nutrition, are completely separated from each other, silent and
lonely. Human beings often forget about the root of life and slide only through the
surface, unable to experience in loneliness the meaning of life through the
observation of plants and animals (who are also living beings like us).
137

Solitude expands the space around the individual and allows the noises of the
others to pass by into the far distance. Thus, as Rilke claims, “out of this immersion in
your own world, poems come.”
138
Solitude is intimately linked to the innermost self for
both Rilke and Feng Zhi. It, therefore, represents a sense of temporality unlike the
common sense of linear time. Philip Koch in his study on solitude and its philosophical
implications argues that in solitude the perceived temporality is subjective time as
opposed to the linear, regulated clock time. He puts this differently perceived temporality
in this way:

It is time which flows more from within than from without, time that is
conditioned by the subject’s unique constellation of interests, hopes, and anxieties
– subjective time, in one sense of that vague philosopher’s term. Objective time,
the time of most interpersonal activities but especially of science, technics, and
commerce, is clock time: it has a uniform and interpersonally repeatable metric,

137
Feng Zhi, “Foreword to the Translation of Letters to a Young Poet,” in FZQJ, 11: 282.
138
Rainer Maria Rilke, 8.
77
an invariant order and an irreversible direction… Subjective time, time as
experienced by the subject, is quite a different matter.
139

Koch goes on to argue that this subjective time defies any exact pinpointing of its
beginning or ending and resists the irreversible succession of past, present and future that
defines linear temporality. Quoting Bergson, Koch further argues that the subjective time
is “identical with the continuity of our inner life,” like “a melody to which we listen with
our eyes closed, heeding it alone,” and it is “the very fluidity of our inner life.”
140

Subjective temporality is an awareness of the interconnectedness of the past and future
with the present. The past is not irreversibly gone nor is future not yet relevant to the
present. Thus, as Koch claims, the subjective time “carries a weighting from memory,
and is, if Heidegger is correct, ever shadowed by anxiety over its ending in death.”
141
The
celebration of solitude, therefore, foregrounds the experience of subjective time, the
dynamics of the innermost self, the rejection of linear temporality, and calls for a certain
courage, “the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences
that can meet us,”
142
even death.
Yet for Rilke and Feng Zhi, solitude is also closely linked to another type of
temporal experience, a rather atemporal existence. In an essay entitled “Concerning
Landscape” which Feng Zhi translated and published as an appendix for his translation
collection of Letters to A Young Poet and expressed great appreciation of, Rilke describes

139
Philip Koch, Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1994), 22.
140
Philip Koch, Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter, 22.
141
Philip Koch, 22.
142
Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet, 89.
78
the awareness of the individual self in relation to the others in the modern world. The
presence of the modern self is described as being “placed amongst things like a thing,
infinitely alone.”
143
What the modern world offers the individual being is nothing but
“conventions, prejudices and false ideas,”
144
therefore, in this alienating world one is
ultimately disconnected to others and could only be utterly lonely. However, alienation
and solitude also provide the individual with a chance to really go into his inner self and
to achieve a better understanding of himself. Rilke believes that a better understanding of
Nature can only be gained when it is removed from us into a distance and becomes the
Other that is unknown and indifferent. And this same rule applies to the understanding of
self. It is only when one retreats into himself, when he no longer holds onto his
subjectivity, but allows it to be “placed under the deepest laws like a Thing,”
145
can one
finally be in contact with his truest existence, the primal force of life, as “all which is
common to them both has withdrawn from things and men into the common depth, where
the roots of all growth drink.”
146
Calvin O. Schrag in his study on Kierkegaard’s
reflection on time points out that the main difference between the self and an object of
Nature is the historicity of self, as “the self is indelibly historical” while nature is
“exempt from the temporal and historical becoming which characterizes the existing

143
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Concerning Landscape,” Selected Works, trans. Graig Houston (London: The Hogarth
Press, 1961), 1: 5.
144
Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet, 57.
145
Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet, 57.
146
Rilke, “Concerning Landscape,” 5.
79
self,” so that “Natural objects are in time; the human self has time.”
147
To allow the self
to be “placed under the deepest laws like a Thing” and to retrieve into the deepest roots
of all growth would then objectify the self and make it “in time” rather than “have time”.
Thus, in solitude, when one is completely immersed in the innermost self, one is
at once temporal and atemporal. Carrying the weight of the past and anticipating the
coming of the future, the individual in the present now is surely a historical being and is
fully conscious of his temporal experience. Yet at the same time, by objectifying the self
and taking upon the laws of Nature as the law of his existence, the individual also breaks
himself away from the temporal constraints and adopts an atemporal existence as a Thing
in Nature.
Feng Zhi develops the theme of solitude in many of the poems in The Sonnets.
Solitude marks Feng Zhi’s view of the basic condition of human existence and stands
also as a place where he can descend and gain a better understanding of himself. Like
Rilke, Feng Zhi believes that the individual in solitude enjoys a world for himself and
“must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.”
148

Things that exist outside of the self and Nature are never permanent and we cannot
expect to hold onto them forever. Everything is ephemeral, and “Nothing can be brought
from faraway places,/ Nothing can be taken away from here.”
149
Ultimately, nothing in

147
Calvin O. Schrag, “Kierkegaard’s Existential Reflections on Time,” in William L. McBride, ed., Existentialist
Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger (New York and London: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1997), 65.
148
Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet, 10.
149
Feng Zhi, “Sonnet Fifteen” of The Sonnets, in FZQJ, 1:230. The translations of the sonnets that I quote in this
chapter are taken from Dominic Cheung, “Appendix I: Translation of The Sonnets,” in Feng Chih, 77-89,
sometimes with minor variations.
80
this world is what we truly possess, and we are infinitely alone. Feng Zhi writes in
“Sonnet Fifteen”:

We have passed many mountains and rivers,
Now possessing them, now leaving them behind.

Like a bird, fluttering in the sky,
Ruling the airy void forever,
Forever feeling, ruling nothingness.
(Sonnet Fifteen)

In “Sonnet Twenty-one” he further describes the ultimate solitude that one is
subjected to, as he writes, “Listening to the storm in gusty winds,/ We appear so lonely
under the lamplight./ In this small cottage,/ Even between our utensils and us/ There
exists a vast distance.”
150
We as human beings are, therefore, infinitely lonely. There is
not only unsurpassable distance between one and other, but also distance that keeps us
and things around us apart. Everything in this world is fragile and life is absolutely
impermanent, as “The gale sweeps things up to the sky,/ The storm flushes things back to
earth./ Only this flimsy lamp/ proves our temporal existence.”
151
Life is transient and our
existence is temporal, yet if we dive into our solitude and our inner self, Feng Zhi
believes that we can possibly be able to break away from the limitation and the temporal
constraints of the outside world. He writes in “Sonnet Twenty-two”:

150
Feng Zhi, “Sonnet Twenty-one,” in FZQJ, 1: 236.
151
Feng Zhi, “Sonnet Twenty-one,” in FZQJ, 1: 236.
81
Deep night, deep mountain,
Listen to the heavy night rain.

Ten miles away, a mountain village,
Twenty miles away, a tumultuous city.

Do they still exist?
Rivers, mountains, ten years ago,
Dreams, fancies, twenty years ago
All buried in the rain.

Strait surroundings
A return to the womb
Deep in the night a prayer

Like a primal man:
Give my strait heart
A vast universe.

(Sonnet Twenty-two)

Setting the poem in the deep night and the deep mountain in the heavy night rain,
Feng Zhi paints a gloomy picture of human existence at the very beginning of his poem.
Invoking the image of a mountain village and a tumultuous city in the distance only to
question their very existence and claiming that all dreams and fancies were already
buried in the rain, Feng Zhi further confirms the possibility that everything in this world
could be subjected to destruction and that we would have to face it all alone. However,
turning away from the rather gloomy projection of the reality, Feng Zhi offers in the last
stanza of the poem a way of combating the impermanence of life, that is, to dive into his
heart and gain “a vast universe”. The outer world’s frailty and impermanence are now in
sharp contrast to the inner world of the heart. Even if everything in the real world is
82
completely shattered and disappears, the inner space of the individual is still infinitely
vast and resists the limitations of our temporal experiences.
The infinitely vast space of our inner self is also where our memory from the past
and our anticipation of the future merge with our experience in the present. Feng Zhi
compares the space in the heart to the plain in nature. While the “life-filled paths on the
plain” are “vivified by footsteps trodden by men without names,” our heart is also filled
with “tangled pathways” walked out by those who once put imprints on our life, though
their whereabouts are mostly unknown to us now:

Lonely children, white-haired couples,
Youth
And friends now dead.

All have walked out their paths;
Retread these steps
That the paths will not be left to the wilderness.

(Sonnet Seventeen)

The past is never gone forever as it is what defines who we are now, carving out
the pathways in our hearts. The future is also always already present, as we “retread” the
steps that have already been made we will build a future that is enabled by our memories
of the past and the endeavors of the present. Comparing our life again to the plains in
wilderness in another sonnet, Feng Zhi links the existence of our temporal being to that of
the objects in Nature:

Close your eyes! In our hearts
Let these intimate nights be woven
into unfamiliar places. Outside the window
83

Our lives are like the wilderness in which
Our eyes blurred with the sight of a tree, or a flash of the lake.
Its vastness holds the forgotten past, the implicit future.

(Sonnet Eighteen)

Here our temporal experiences are intimately connected to the wilderness in
Nature. “The intimate nights” are spent at the “unfamiliar places” whose appearance in
daytime we cannot tell, not to say their past and future. These nights are intimate yet
transient moments, and these places are unfamiliar yet dear places, even though
“Tomorrow we’ll leave, and will not return.” Our fleeting experience of intimacy at an
utterly unknown and unfamiliar place, however, can be rendered permanent by “the sight
of a tree, or a flash of the lake,” by everything in Nature and the vastness of Nature that
withstand time.
Nature played a significant role in the writings of Feng Zhi in the 1940s. In the
postscript of his prose collection Shanshui (Landscape), Feng Zhi highlights the spiritual
support he gained from Nature during the difficult war years:

The landscape in the vicinity of Kunming is simple and plain, devoid of any
historical burden or artificial embellishment. Without any adornment, the
mountains and waters present themselves in their original state. It was at that time
that I gained a better understanding of Nature, and Nature also taught me a great
deal. In those depressing years during the War of Resistance Against Japan, the
simple and unadorned plains gave me infinite spiritual support. When things in
the society gradually grew corrupted and rotten, any piece of grass in the field or
any tree on the mountain slope had once given me a tremendous amount of
inspiration. In solitude as well as in the situation where I felt there was no one to
turn to, I noticed that it was Nature that helped me maintain a positive spirit and it
made a greater impact on my life than any wise words and noble deeds. Through
the observation of Nature, I grasped the true meaning of growth and endurance.
152

152
Feng Zhi, “Shanshui houji” (Postscript to Landscape), in FZQJ, 3: 73.
84
What Nature offers Feng Zhi is a deeper understanding of solitude and its
relationship to life. In a letter to his friend, Feng Zhi celebrates the solitary perseverance
and endurance of the plants in nature and argues that their way of life should set the
example for us human beings. He writes:

What Rilke shows me (in his book) is that the plants are neither obsequious nor
supercilious. They endure the wind and snow, enjoy the sunshine, bloom in the
spring and bear fruit in the autumn; when their roots are firm, the branches
flourish. They never exaggerate nor do they ever feel shy… they set a good
example for us.
153

Like the plants in Nature which take upon the burden of life all by themselves, we
human beings are also ultimately lonely and have to endure our life and face our
problems by ourselves. Feng Zhi says, “If one wants to live authentically, one has to
separate himself from all the conventions, become an independent being and take on the
various problems of life himself.”
154
In “Sonnet Four,” Feng Zhi highly praises the
nobility of a common plant growing in the Alps, edelweiss, as it “exists apart from all
names,/ Lives a minute life,/ Never fails dignity and purity.” What strikes Feng Zhi most
is the attitude towards life this tiny white-hairy grass has, which can be summarized in
one word - “quietude”. In quietude, which also translates into solitude, it achieves the
great pride in “denial”. It denies “all description, all tumult” and separates itself from all
conventions, “quietly completing its life and death”.
155
Feng Zhi in another essay entitled

153
Feng Zhi, “A letter to Yang Hui, Fei Ming and Chen Xianghe on April 10, 1931,” in FZQJ, 12: 121.
154
Feng Zhi, “Forward to the translation of Letters to A Young Poet,” in FZQJ, 11: 283.
155
Feng Zhi, “Sonnet Four,” in FZQJ, 1: 219.
85
“An Extinct Mountain Village” further explains his admiration of the edelweiss. He
mentions that he appreciates its humbleness, its purity and its strong character. Upon the
observation of this grass, Feng Zhi admits that he realizes “how a tiny life gives up all
boastfulness and exaggeration and takes on a vast universe all by himself” so that “all
confusion and turmoil that comes with him earlier all change into yellow autumn leaves,
naturally falling off.
156
Living in quietude and dying in quietude, even if the life of
edelweiss seems so fragile and insignificant, it lives fully and authentically, as it takes
upon itself the responsibility and burden of life. Trusting in Nature, in what is simple and
“in the small Things that hardly anyone sees yet can so suddenly become huge and
immeasurable”
157
, Feng Zhi sees in this tiny grass a particular quality that he hopes that
all human individuals should have, that is, to embrace solitude, find a whole and
complete world in himself, and be always ready to accept the impermanence and fragility
of life, that is, to demonstrate a readiness to life or death.

Confronting Death
The theme of death is repeatedly evoked in Feng Zhi’s sonnets. Xie Zhixi argues
that the theme of death in Feng Zhi’s sonnets reflects his existentialist concerns. He
points out that these concerns conform to the existential understanding of being-unto-
death (proposed by Heidegger) and with this existential understanding the individual
being should “plan and arrange his present existence based on his awareness of the

156
Feng Zhi, “Yige xiaoshile de shancun” (An Extinct Mountain Village), in FZQJ, 3: 48.
157
Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet, 33-34.
86
coming of the inevitable death.”
158
Feng Zhi, however, made a point to differentiate
existential concerns and existential philosophy. In a letter to Xie Zhixi, Feng Zhi says that
he used to read the books by Jaspers and Rilke with great enthusiasm and some of the
points made in these books, such as moment of “resolute decision” (jueduan), solitude
and correlation, loneliness and communication, the fulfillment of death, have made a
great impact on his thinking. Yet even though these thoughts are revealed naturally in his
writing, his works do not necessarily coincide with existential philosophy.
159
Feng Zhi is
concerned more with the poetic representation of his thoughts and reflections than with
philosophical elaboration. Therefore, instead of comparing the theme of death and
temporality in Feng Zhi’s works to the philosophical reflection on death and temporality
by Western existentialists, our discussion here will focus on demonstrating the rather
universal existential attitude expressed in his sonnets that manifests itself as a
confrontation with the finitude of human existence and a search for eternity that will lift
our existence from the temporal confinement.
Feng Zhi’s contemplation of the finitude of our existence and the imminence of
death is expressed in the very first poem of the collection of his sonnets, which also sets
the tone of his collection. Privileging the moment in life that can be compared to the
“sudden appearance of a comet and the whirling gusty wind,” Feng Zhi not only

158
Xie Zhixi, “Jingshen de Feng Zhi yu boda de Ai Qing: Zhongguo xiandaishi liangdajia xulun,” in Qinghua
daxue xuebao (Journal of Qinghua University) 20. 4 (2005): 36. See also Xie Zhixi, “Shengmin de chensi yu
cunzai de juanduan: Lun Feng Zhi de chuangzuo yu cunzaizhuyi de guanxi,” in Waiguo wenxue (Journal of
Foreign literature) no. 3-4 (1990).
159
Feng Zhi, “Letter to Xie Zhixi (Feb. 8, 1990),” in FZQJ, 12: 492.
87
highlights the unpredictability of life but also emphasizes especially the finitude of our
existence and a certain readiness to death. He writes:

At this very moment, our lives
Are in the first embrace,
Joys and sorrows come quickly to our eyes
Solidifying into towering forms.

We praise tiny insects
Braving the conjugation;
Resisting imminent danger.

Their wondrous lives brought to an end.
Our sole lives conceive
The whirling wind, the coming of a comet.

(Sonnet One)

The moment (yi shunjian) that Feng Zhi celebrates here in the sonnet is a moment
in the present that again carries the weight from the past and anticipates the coming of the
imminent future. This moment becomes exceptional when the joys and sorrows in the
past suddenly reappear in front of our eyes and inform us of our own existence; when our
very existence is reconfirmed and reconfigured by the act of copulation or brave
resistance of imminent danger; when we become fully aware of the coming of our death
even in the very presence of the most exciting and wondrous experience of life, as we
understand that like those tiny insects our life will eventually be brought to an end and
the marvelous experiences of life will always only be momentary and transient. Thus, the
moment that our sole lives conceive is an instant that contains the ultimate exuberance of
life yet at the same time forebodes the imminent reality of death. Bearing in mind that the
temporality of life is undoubtedly moving toward death, we are nonetheless always ready
88
to embrace and accept our finitude, as Feng Zhi writes in the very beginning of the sonnet:
“We are ready to receive profoundly,/ Unexpected mysteries,/ In these prolix times; the
sudden appearance/ of a comet, the whirling, gusty wind.”
Death in Feng Zhi’s sonnets no longer lies in the distant future, and the futurity of
death is incorporated into the present and the immediate experience of now. In “Sonnet
Two,” Feng Zhi writes:

We arrange ourselves for that
Coming death, a passage of the song,

Falling from the corpus of music
And only the body remains,
Transformed, a series of silent mountains.

(Sonnet Two)

Death, though only coming in the future, is in Feng Zhi’s opinion what really
defines our immediate experience. By arranging ourselves for that coming death, we have
to always be prepared for its coming as well as to adjust our present experiences
accordingly. Embracing the finitude of our being and understanding that the temporality
of life is moving toward death, however, do not impede Feng Zhi from taking a flight
from time and finitude. Death takes on a transforming power of our fragility and life’s
impermanence in Feng Zhi’s sonnets. In “Sonnet Thirteen” that is addressed to Goethe,
Feng Zhi highly celebrates Goethe’s creed of “Death and metamorphosis” (si he bian),
using the example of moths plunging into glowing flames and snakes shedding their skins.
Dominic Cheung argues that death in Feng Zhi’s writing appears not as terminal, but as a
89
departure to a more profound internal world.
160
Marián Gálik also points out that Feng
Zhi’s reflection on death resonates with the Weltanschauung of Goethe and the
philosophical depth of his work, which regards death as “a means of preserving much
life.”
161
In several essays on the studies of Goethe’s life and works, Feng Zhi points out
that through the usage of metaphors such as the skin shedding of the snakes or the rebirth
of the phoenix upon self-incineration, death becomes “a process that leads life to its
higher status.”
162

The seemingly paradoxical ideas of death and rebirth, change and permanence,
temporality and eternity become the defining feature of the essence of life. The creed of
“death and metamorphosis”, therefore, opens up a way in which we as human beings can
overcome the impermanence of life and the finitude of our being. Human existence is no
longer only defined by the temporality of being unto death, but rather a possibility of
combining the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite. Feng Zhi in an essay
on Goethe’s Faust comments on the scene in which Homunculus, an artificial being
created through an alchemical act, smashes his glass sphere against the shell of Galatea to
seek a union with the sea. He argues that this scene represents perfectly the meaning of
Goethe’s creed of “death and metamorphosis” that regards death as a higher level of
existence of life, reflected in his famous poem “Selige Sehnsucht.”
163
Feng Zhi goes on to

160
Dominic Cheung, 48.
161
Marián Gálik, 199.
162
Feng Zhi, in FZQJ, 8: 7 & 55.
163
Feng Zhi, “Cong Fushide li de ‘ren zao ren’ luelun Ge De de ziran zhexue” (Discussion of Goethe’s Natural
Philosophy from the Figure of Homunculus in Faust), in FZQJ, 8: 55.
90
argue that Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis comes from his observation of Nature and
especially his Neptunist view of the origin of earth and life, as nothing in Nature is fixed
and everything in this world, like water, is in a state of constant flow and metamorphosis.
Feng Zhi writes, “From his theory on the metamorphosis of plants and animals, Goethe
deducts his theory of the metamorphosis of human beings,” which can be defined as a
“self-destructive yet self-creative” (zimie eryou zisheng) process.
164

Yet in Nature change and constancy always coexist. Behind the incessantly
changing phenomena there are the primordial phenomena that remain permanent. Feng
Zhi quotes from Goethe’s “Metamorphosis of Plants” and “Metamorphosis of Animals”
and says:

Every plant demonstrates to you the eternal laws of Nature.
And the rarest form mysteriously preserves the primitive pattern.
165

The order of Nature is therefore composed of both change and permanence and
Nature manifests itself as temporal and eternal at the same time. Being aware of the
temporal limitation of human existence yet hoping to seek a flight from the temporal to
the eternal, Feng Zhi relates his understanding of human existence to that of Nature. The
dual perspective of Nature, that is at once temporal and eternal, provides us human beings
with a possible arena to overcome the finitude of life and break free from the limitation of
the temporal constraints. Therefore, Feng Zhi hopes to emphasize in his writing a unique
relationship between human beings and Nature, which makes human existence a

164
Feng Zhi, “Cong Fushide li de ‘ren zao ren’ luelun Ge De de ziran zhexue,” in FZQJ, 8: 56-59.
165
Feng Zhi, in FZQJ, 8: 58.
91
synthesis of both the temporal and the eternal. In an essay entitled “A Couplet,” Feng Zhi
elaborates on his idea of this special relationship between human beings and Nature
through the explanation of a couplet by Tang poet Jia Dao, which goes “Walking alone,
shadow under the pond/ Resting for a few moments, body against the tree.”
166
Feng Zhi
writes:

Among the modern European poets, several of them write about Narcissus in
Greek mythology and describe how a young man observes his own reflection in
the water. Ancient Chinese always talk about understanding one’s own
disposition upon self-reflection (mingxin jianxing). Here this lonely individual is
definitely not observing his own reflection in the still mirror. Instead, he sees his
own inner world (xinxing) from the lively water. – As for the body leaning
against the tree, it is like a butterfly stopping on a flower so that the life of the
butterfly mingles with the color and scent of the flower. The body of the
individual and the body of the tree also seem to mix together and can no longer be
apart. From the circulation of our blood, we can feel how a tree absorbs its
nourishment from the soil and sends it to the branches and leaves, as if it is also
transfusing through our own blood. … This is not becoming one with Nature, but
rather arranging oneself in a position that is in close communication with Nature
as if one is following exactly the rhythm of life in Nature.

This couplet delineates the infinite realm that the solitary individual enjoys in
Nature and reveals the ultimate point of communication between human beings
and Nature, which can only be achieved by people like Jia Dao who understands
thoroughly the quietude of the mountains and forests.
167

The special relationship between human beings and Nature that Feng Zhi
elaborates in the above quoted passage focuses greatly on the communication between
the lonely individual and Nature. This deep communication is characterized by the
blurring of the boundary between the subject (the individual being/the butterfly) and the

166
The translation of the couplet is taken from Dominic Cheung, 45.
167
Feng Zhi, “Liang ju shi” (A Couplet), in FZQJ, 3: 24 .
92
object (the tree/the flower) and the permeability of the boundary between the interior
(xinxing) and the exterior (reflection in the water). Human existence, thus, also takes on
the temporality of the things in Nature which operate under the “eternal laws” and
becomes at once temporal and eternal. In “Sonnet Sixteen,” Feng Zhi vividly captures the
ultimate communication between human beings and Nature:

Side by side on a lofty peak
We stand, becoming
The vast plain before us
With its criss-crossing paths.

Which river or road is not connected?
Which wind or cloud does not call to the other?
Cities, mountains, rivers we have passed
Become our very lives.

Our growth, our griefs,
A pine tree on some distant slope,
Or thick mist over a city,

We follow the blast of the wind, the flow of water,
Becoming criss-crossing paths on the plain,
Becoming the lives of travelers on these paths.

(Sonnet Sixteen)

Through the constant use of the word “become/transform” (hua), Feng Zhi
reworks Goethe’s creed of metamorphosis. Instead of focusing on discarding the binary
opposition between life and death and regarding death as a way of leading life to a higher
stage, Feng Zhi finds a new form of metamorphosis, which involves overcoming a
different kind of binary opposition, the subject and the object, through artistic and poetic
imagination in which human beings merge their identities with the objects in Nature. The
93
life of human beings and the life of the mountains, plains, roads, rivers, or anything in
Nature are, therefore, deeply connected through our own identification with these objects
and our transformation into them. This unique way of communication with Nature offers
us a new understanding of our own existence. On the one hand, our existence is temporal,
and this temporal experience of our being and the understanding of the finitude of life
require a subject, who understands that our existence is ultimately personal, private, and
subjective. Yet on the other hand, once we put our subjectivity aside and transform
ourselves into the objects in Nature, the eternal perspective of nature enriches our lives
and helps us overcome our finitude. Feng Zhi strives to achieve in this sonnet exactly
what he praises in his prose essay on the Tang poet Jia Dao’s couplet, “arranging oneself
in a position that is in close communication with nature as if one is following exactly the
rhythm of life in Nature.” Matching with the rhythm of life in Nature, human existence
also becomes temporal and eternal simultaneously, because even though our life might
fade away, the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the entire landscape will forever preserve
the human imprints, our lives.

Vertical Time
Feng Zhi’s celebrated idea of special communication and connection between
human beings and Nature echoes the concept of “Weltinnenraum” (worldinnerspace) in
Rilke’s works, as Rilke writes in a poem from 1914: “Through every being goes a single
space:/ worldinnerspace. The birds fly silently/ through us. O, if I wish to grow apace,/ I
94
look outside, and in me grows the tree.”
168
This concept of worldinnerspace is, according
to Judith Ryan, “a way of representing the phenomenon of creative perception, or more
specifically, the complicated process of reciprocal projection and appropriation that
constitutes the creative art.”
169
Therefore, ultimately it is only within the poetic space that
we may overcome our finitude through the deepest communication and connection with
Nature. Poetry becomes a site in which the transient and impermanent can be transformed
into the permanent and stable. For Rilke as well as for Feng Zhi, poetry has an
overwhelmingly transformative power that can “give shape to that which is transitory and
evanescent”.
170

If the actualization of the reciprocal projection between human beings and Nature
within the poetic space is a way of charting a different type of temporality of human
existence that escapes the inevitable “being unto death,” then the very act of poetic
composition is the ultimate path towards merging the real and the imaginary, the concrete
and the abstract, and transforming intangible and impermanent life into tangible and
permanent art. Poetry, as the creative act, therefore, represents a type of temporality that
is in sharp contrast to the usual teleological and linear temporality that we are familiar
with. This temporality can be described as the “vertical time,” borrowing a phrase from
Gaston Bachelard. He says, “Every real poem, then, contains the element of time stopped,
time which does not obey the meter, time which we shall call vertical to distinguish it

168
Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163.
169
Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, 163.
170
Judith Ryan, 158.
95
from ordinary time which sweeps past horizontally along with the wind and waters of the
stream.”
171
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka reinterprets this phrase “vertical time” as “time
reoriented” rather than “time stopped” and points out that Bachelard’s use of “vertical
time” for the description of temporality in poetry echoes a phrase from Rilke, who
expresses a similar idea in a poem entitled “To Music”: “You language where all
language/ ends. You time/ standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.”
172
Judith
Ryan in her interpretation of the same poem “To Music” also argues that Rilke conceives
two temporal axes, one vertical and the other horizontal, so that even though our ordinary
experience of time seems to operate on the horizontal line as we gradually approach our
own decay, music “stands upright” and is endowed with permanence.
173
Ryan further
argues that when Rilke writes “O you transformation/ of feelings into what? –: into
audible landscape,” music functions less as sound than space and becomes the central
metaphor of the poem. Music enacts the projection of the interior human feelings outward
and transforms the subjective emotions into objective “audible landscape”. This
transference of sound into space is the metaphoric representation of the way in which “art
translates actuality into something simultaneously more ethereal and more permanent.”
174

Rilke’s idea of using poetry as a way to shape the otherwise intangible and
constantly changing emotions, the concept of vertical temporality in poetic representation,

171
Quoted from Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos (The
Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 190.
172
Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, 190.
173
Judith Ryan, 162.
174
Judith Ryan, 159-65.
96
and the use of the spatial metaphor for the transformation of music and sound into
landscape impressed Feng Zhi deeply. In his essay on Rilke, Feng Zhi talks specifically
about the transformative power of Rilke’s poetry. Commenting on the overt
sentimentality in 18
th
century romantic German poetry, Feng Zhi argues that it was tragic
that they “only owned youth but never maturity.” Rilke, on the other hand, presents in his
work the birth of a new type of volition. This new volition is, in Feng Zhi’s opinion, a
certain determination to “transform the musical into the sculpted, the fluid into the
crystallized, and the vase sea into the solemn mountain.”
175
Using also metaphors of the
landscape to describe the characteristics of Rilke’s poems, Feng Zhi agrees with Rilke
that poetry as the creative art creates a space in which the lines between the transient and
the permanent, the subjective and the objective are blurred through the very
representation of a rather different type of temporality and spatiality. Poetry allows the
constantly flushing and fleeting emotions to be shaped and spatialized in the moment in
time that somehow transcends the linear progression of time and stands upright and
vertically, a moment in which the outer space of reality and the inner space of our human
psyche merge together and the real and imaginary, the concrete and the abstract
ultimately converge.
Like Rilke, Feng Zhi also uses spatial metaphors for the description of the
innermost feelings. Reflecting upon the solitary condition of human existence and the
importance of communication, Feng Zhi writes:

175
Feng Zhi, “Rilke,” in FZQJ, 4: 84.
97
I shall never forget
That water city of the West,
Symbol of the human world,
Conglomerate of a thousand lonelinesses.

Each an island,
Each seeking a friend in another,
Your hand touches mine,
A bridge across the water.

You smile at me,
A window opens
From an island on the other side.

In the deep and silent night,
Windows close
And bridges empty.

(Sonnet Five)

Describing loneliness as an island that is seeking a friend and the communication
between human beings as a bridge that connects the islands or a window that opens up on
the other side of the island, Feng Zhi gives objective shape to the otherwise shapeless and
intangible feeling of loneliness. Given the permanence of the island, it is quite obvious
that Feng Zhi considers human existence as ultimately lonely and solitary. The last stanza
take this sense of permanent loneliness and solitude to a new height as he emphasizes that
even though there is possibility of communication and connection between human beings
as there could be bridges or open windows, we will eventually all remain lonely because
when the night falls everything becomes silent, all windows are closed and bridges empty.
Yet solitude and silence are the precondition for our understanding of life. Life is
never still, never permanent, as it is constantly changing and flushing forward. Rilke
writes: “Go,/ and if the earthly fades and has forgot/ you, whisper to the silent earth: I
98
flow./ To the onrushing water say: I am.”
176
For Rilke the best way to represent this
fluidity of life is through music, and the understanding of life is closely related to the
appreciation of the latent music in nature. Rilke’s opening poem of Sonnets to Orpheus
reworks the classical mythology about Orpheus charming the animals with his songs and
sets the emergence of the songs of Orpheus out of silence.
177
He writes:

A tree sprang into life. O clear transcendence!
O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear!
And all fell still. Yet even in that silence
a virgin start, and change was everywhere.
178

In this poem, music is transformed into the tall tree, a temple, which transcends
the constraints of time and space of ordinary life. On the one hand, music with its
melodious feature becomes the ultimate correspondence to the fluidity of life. While on
the one hand, as music is transformed into the upright tree, soaring into the sky and
becoming the temple in the ear, it also represents time as stopped, or reoriented, a
moment which is at once in and out of the flux of time. As Judith Ryan points out,
Rilke’s poems demonstrate that temples and monuments are the objective correlatives for
song and poetry and that “poetry and song metamorphose into architecture” in his poetic
representation.
179
Music also serves as the central metaphor for life in several of Feng

176
Willis Barnstone, “Introduction,” Sonnets to Orpheus (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2004), 72.
177
Judith Ryan, 167-69.
178
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Willis Barnstone, 103.
179
Judith Ryan, 158.
99
Zhi’s poems in The Sonnets. In “Sonnet Twenty-four” Feng Zhi presents music as a song
that serves as the prophecy of our life, as he writes:

Here, a thousand years ago
Everywhere, our lives seemed
to have been
Before we were born.

A song had already been sung
from the elusive sky,
From green grass and pines
about our fate.

(Sonnet Twenty-four)

Using music as the metaphor for life, the lives we have here and now are linked
not only closely to the lives thousand years ago but possibly also the lives that are yet to
come. The realization of the interconnectedness between music and life allows us to
transcend the finitude of our life and spot the existence of eternity in the most familiar
scenes in nature like what Feng Zhi writes in the same poem, “Look, the tiny insect/ in its
flight,/ It is eternity all the time.” In another sonnet, Feng Zhi again tries to describe the
intricate relationship between music and life, life and death, and finitude and eternity.
Comparing the coming of death to that of the passage of the song, Feng Zhi writes,

We arrange ourselves for that
Coming death, a passage of the song,

Falling from the corpus of music
And only the body remains,
Transformed, a series of silent mountains.

(Sonnet Two)

100
The passing of our life toward death is compared to the fading of the sound of
music. Yet when life reaches its end as silence takes over the sound, there emerges what
Rilke calls “a virgin start” in the opening poem of Sonnets to Orpheus and changes are
indeed everywhere. As sound is transformed into space, music and life into silent
mountains, the end of our life gives way to a newly gained eternity. Feng Zhi, like Rilke,
regards music as the ultimate representation of life. Music is endowed with permanence
because it can operate on the vertical temporal axis, transcend the linear temporality of
human experience, and be changed into landscape or architecture, gaining an objective
shape through the moment of transformation. In “Sonnet Three”, Feng Zhi uses an almost
identical image as Rilke employs in his opening poem of Sonnets to Orpheus. Music is
rightly given the form of a jade tree which serves as a temple of music and a sky-piercing
tower, as he writes,

You, soughing jade tree in the autumn wind,
Build a solemn temple of music
in my ears; let me
Enter reverently.

You, again, sky-piercing tower,
Rising, like the body
Of a saint before me,
Sanctify a clamorous city.

You, constantly shedding your bark,
I see you rise midst the withering season.
From intersecting meadow paths

I turn to you, my guide, and say
“Long live forever,” that I, by inches,
Wish to rot in earth, covered by your roots.

(Sonnet Three)
101

Two temporal axes, one vertical and one horizontal, are both at work in this poem.
Starting the poem with the pronoun “You” and setting it in contrast with the “I”, Feng
Zhi puts “I” on the horizontal temporal line that follows the ordinary temporal
progression and “You” on the vertical line that transcends the linear progression of time.
“You” are music, which gives up its temporal feature and adopts a spatial one as it is
transformed into a solemn temple; “You” are seen as a sky-piercing tower, transcending
all the clamor and restraints that “I” would otherwise be subjected to as it rises way up
vertically above the ground; and “You” are the jade tree, and contrasting to the fading
and withering of other things in the world, only “You” rise and grow. Thus, even though
everything in the world that “I” situate in, which is the real world, is inevitably vanishing
away or progressing towards its decay, music and poetry, by rising vertically in time,
could possibly reorient this process and rescue everything by reconfiguring it in the
imaginary or artistic world.
180
“You”, as the tree, the temple, and the tower, by rising
above this conventional world, overcome the finitude of existence in reality and achieve
eternity in the abstract structure. In the last stanza, as “I” hope to reach the
“worldinnerspace” proposed by Rilke and be transformed into the earth beneath the roots
of the tree so that “I” and “You” could finally be in a reciprocal and mutually beneficial
relationship, the line between the real and imaginary is ultimately crossed. If in the real
world “I” am bounded by my finitude and have come to my own death, in the poetic

180
Judith Ryan, 158.
102
space death is metamorphosed into another kind of existence, as “I” have broken free
from the temporal restraints and gained eternal life.
What Feng Zhi highly appreciates in poetry is indeed its transformative power. As
he praises Rilke’s ability to “transform the musical into the sculpted, the fluid into the
crystallized, and the vast sea into the solemn mountain,” Feng Zhi hopes also to give the
transitory and vanishing reality as well as his dynamic and intangible emotions a
permanent shape through the power of poetry and bring the real and the imaginary world,
the objective and subjective world together. The very last poem in the Sonnets best
represents his idea of the power of poetry:

From a flow of the shapeless water,
The water-carrier fills his oval pitcher,
Thus so much water possesses definite shape;
Look, how the vane flutters in the autumn wind

Holding an object that can’t be held,
And let the mind, the light,
the darkness, and the growth of woods faraway,
run towards the infinite,

And preserve something of this vane!
We have listened to a night’s wind,
And watched a day’s yellow grass and red leaves,

Where shall we dispose our ideas?
Hope these poems will hold like a vane –
some things that cannot be held.

(Sonnet Twenty-seven)

103
The Moment of Self-Revelation in Wu Zixu
In an essay entitled “Kunming Wangshi” (The Past Memories of Kunming), Feng
Zhi talks about the shift of his literary interest from the lyrical and idealistic poetic
writings to the more realistic essays. He says:

Since 1942 I have rarely written anything like those in the essay collection
Shanshui (Landscape). At that time in the cities of the rear area, unreasonable
things became common practices and reasonable things became rather exceptional
occurrences, as I saw how soldiers died in large numbers from corruption of their
superiors rather than on the battle field and how diligent workers struggled with
sickness, hunger and coldness while the licentious and shameless people seemed
to be in charge of everything. Therefore, my writing interest also shifted and I
started to write essays about the immediate reality.”
181

During those days of his life in the cottage away from the city Kunming, Feng Zhi
felt extremely close to Nature and rather removed from the war-time reality.
Contemplating on the meaning of solitude, the intricate and reciprocal relationship
between human beings and Nature, themes of life and death, Feng Zhi resorted to the
transformative power of poetry to give shape to the ungraspable and the transient, and
hoped to weave together in his sonnets the real and the imaginary world.
Yet the decade of 1940s was indeed a time of crisis as China’s national integrity
was under threat during the War of Resistance Against Japan and national salvation
became the most important task. It was impossible for anyone to be completely shielded
from reality in the time of national crisis. Feng Zhi, realizing that his own essays and
sonnets written during the first few years of his stay in Kunming were rather detached

181
Feng Zhi, “Kunming Wangshi” (The Past Memories of Kunming), in FZQJ, 4: 358-59. For a detailed study
on Feng Zhi’s shift in writing interest, see Yin Liyu, “Lun Feng Zhi sishi niandai de sixiang chuangzuo de
zhuanbian,” Wenxue lilun yanjiu, 3 (2003): 17-24.
104
from reality, pondered “if he was still asleep when Kunming was shaken awake by the
war” and determined that “in the awakened Kunming he would not fall asleep.”
182
This
awakening translates into the shift of his literary attention from artistic to realist writing
around the year 1943. Feng Zhi’s historical fiction Wu Zixu is the transitional work or the
“bridge” as he calls it himself that connects the two stages of his writing interests and
styles during the 1940s, as he writes, “Wu Zixu, written during the period from the winter
of 1942 to the spring of 1943, can be called a bridge, because on the one hand it still
retains the lyrical landscape while on the other hand it focuses more on reality.”
183

Despite the fact that Feng Zhi hopes to “use the past to disparage the present” (jiegu
fengjin) through the retelling of the historical figure Wu Zixu’s story, the text of Wu Zixu
demonstrates his distinctive writing style and his particular intellectual reflection which
make the work more lyrical and modernist than realistic. As a transitional piece of
writing, Wu Zixu clearly reflects Feng Zhi’s emotional struggle as a writer during the
time of national crisis. As Yin Liyu points out, the War of Resistance forced many
writers to give up the task of enlightenment and commit to the mission of national
salvation so that even those liberal writers who used to keep a distance between art and
life were deeply involved in the mainstream literary discourse. Therefore, for writers like
Feng Zhi, the very historical situation that they were in made them face an important yet
quite painful decision, that is, whether one should continue the pursuit of modernist art
under the protection of an “ivory tower” or turn their attention to the urgent issue of

182
Feng Zhi, “Kunming Wangshi,” in FZQJ, 4: 356.
183
Feng Zhi, “Kunming Wangshi,” in FZQJ, 4: 359.
105
national survival.
184
This internal emotional struggle is best captured in Feng Zhi’s poem
“Qilu” (Diverging Paths):

The further we walk,
The more paths lie ahead
That we cannot but give up
…
We,
In every single moment of our life,
Feel the pain of eternal separation.
185

Thus, every moment of our life implies a choice, a moment of decision, and it is a
moment that not only brings us the “pain of eternal separation” as we need to choose one
over the other, but also leads us to a moment of revelation in which we gain a better
understanding of our life and ourselves as we are forced to face our future possibility as
well as our past experiences. Not only in this poem, but in his historical fiction Wu Zixu
as well Feng Zhi explores the issue of making decisions in life. Many scholars have
noticed the frequent usage of the phrase “resolute decision” (jueduan) in Feng Zhi’s Wu
Zixu and other essays written during the 1940s. Noticing the philosophical implication of
this phrase, they argue that Wu Zixu demonstrates the influence of existentialism on Feng
Zhi and that what Feng Zhi tries to emphasize in this historical fiction is the importance
of living authentically by making resolute decisions and taking responsibilities for
oneself.
186
In order to illuminate the positive aspect of Feng Zhi’s writing, they

184
Yin Liyu, 21.
185
Feng Zhi, “Qi Lu”(Diverging Paths), in Appendix to The Sonnets, FZQJ, 1: 247.
186
Zhou Mian, Feng Zhi Zhuan (Nanjing: Jiansu wenyi chuban she, 1993), 222-29. See also Xie Zhixi, Sheng de
zhi zhuo: cunzai zhuyi yu zhongguo xiandai wenxue (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1999), 180-97.
106
emphasize the active and responsible attitude towards life that is implied in the elevation
of making resolute decisions and taking responsibilities for oneself. What they do not
explain, however, is how the transformation from inauthentic existence to authentic
existence in the moment of resolute decision relates to the individual’s understanding of
his temporal existence, the discovery of self and his awareness of his subjectivity.
Through the examination of Feng Zhi’s particular understanding of temporality and its
relation to his understanding of selfhood in Wu Zixu, we can see the modernist aspects of
Wu Zixu, which can be defined as a unique understanding of individual’s temporal
experiences, a heightened self-consciousness and a strong tendency towards introspection
and self-reflection.
Feng Zhi in the postscript of Wu Zixu vividly describes how the writing of this
historical fiction was first conceived and how the story finally took shape sixteen years
later. He comments that when he first read Rilke’s “The Lay of the Love and Death of
Cornets Christoph Rilke” about sixteen years before, he was deeply moved by the color
and rhythm of this prose poem. Therefore, at that time he wondered if the exile of Wu
Zixu could also be written in this genre. However, there were plenty of romantic elements
in his imagination, so that even though “the night of Zhaoguan, the dusk of Jiangshang
and the sunlight at Li River” have appeared on his mind many times like music, he did
not “grasp” them then. Sixteen years later, while he was forced to wander from place to
place due to the outbreak of the War of Resistance, he thought of writing about Wu Zixu
again, but this time as he writes in the postscript, “the once romantically imagined Wu
Zixu has gradually been stripped of the rose-colored glasses and become a real individual
107
who has to face the starker world”.
187
Upon reading Bian Zhilin’s revised translation of
Rilke’s “Cornets” in the winter of 1942, Feng Zhi wrote seven chapters of Wu Zixu,
which, as he says, “does not share anything in common with Rilke’s prose poem
anymore” but “reflects the pain of modern man, especially that of the modern Chinese”.
Therefore, “a story of exile from two thousand years ago has become a modern
Odyssey”.
188
On the one hand, Feng Zhi hopes to expose and censure the reality of his
times in the writing of Wu Zixu, as he breaks free from the constraints of the original
historical story and adds a lot of new contents that are closely related to his observations
of the social reality in the KMT controlled area during the wartime. On the other hand, he
also makes it clear that the main theme of this fiction is the individual and inner struggle
of Wu Zixu, who had to go into exile in order to overthrow the corrupted empire of
Chu.
189

Feng Zhi’s historical novella Wu Zixu is based on the legendary story of Wu Zixu
who went on a journey of exile in order to take revenge of the King of Chu who killed his
father and brother. According to the legend, King Ping of Chu, misled by Fei Wuji who
falsely claimed that Prince Jian was plotting a rebellion against the king, ordered to put
Wu She, the tutor of Prince Jian, in prison and sent a decree to summon both of Wu She’s
sons, Wu Shang and Wu Zixu, stating that should they disobey their father would be
executed. Wu Shang obeyed the order and was later executed along with his father. Wu

187
Feng Zhi, “Postscript to Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3: 426.
188
Feng Zhi, “Postscript to Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3: 426-27.
189
Feng Zhi, “Shiwen zixuan suoji,” in FZQJ, 2: 179.
108
Zixu, however, decided to flee to the State of Wu and take revenge. Wu Zixu eventually
led the army of Wu to defeat the State of Chu. By then King Ping already died, but Wu
Zixu had the body of King Ping disinterred and gave it three hundred lashes as a
symbolic act of revenge. The story of Wu Zixu appears in different forms in various
historical and literary texts, such as Zuozhuan (Commentary of Zuo), Guoyu
(Conversations of the States), Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), and Wu Yue
chunqiu (Wu and Yue Spring and Autumn Annals), in which some accounts are just
simple outline sketches of his life while others have more details. Feng Zhi focuses his
historical novella only on Wu Zixu’s journey of exile and ends when Wu Zixu reaches
the State of Wu. His life-long experience in the State of Wu, his success in defeating the
State of Chu, and his final suicide forced by Fuchai, the King of Wu, are not included in
Feng Zhi’s novella.
190

Even though the subject matter of Feng Zhi’s Wu Zixu is taken from an ancient
legendary story, the way in which Feng Zhi describes Wu Zixu’s journey of exile,
however, makes this piece of writing especially modern. Bian Zhilin has already pointed
out that by using the poetic prose for the writing of this historical fiction, Feng Zhi
poeticizes the writing of fiction and significantly reduces the role and importance of plot,

190
In the postscript, Feng Zhi mentions that because his account of this story from two thousand years ago
reflects “the pain of modern men, especially that of the Chinese in recent years,” he decided to deviate from
history and legends and add two more chapters to Wu Zixu’s journey of exile, Wanqiu and Yanlin. Therefore, for
Feng Zhi Wu Zixu takes a new form, as if “new sprouts have grown out of the old branches on the tree.” He also
mentions that when a friend asked if wanted to continue to write about Wu Zixu after he reached the State of Wu,
his response was no. However, if he did, he would write about the second “exile” of Wu Zixu - his death. See
“Postscript,” in FZQJ 3: 427.
109
which is in accordance with the trend of modernist fiction writing in the West.
191
This
de-emphasis on plot reveals Feng Zhi’s focus on turning inwards, retreating into the inner
being of Wu Zixu and exploring his self-discovery and self-revelation rather than giving
an objective account of the historical events. He expresses in this piece of writing the
heightened concern with the individual and the subjective consciousness. Therefore, the
narrative of Wu Zixu rejects the common linear chronology and traces the subjective time
and the experienced time of the character instead. Furthermore, by focusing on
exceptional moments, that is, the moment of resolute decision, Feng Zhi presents his
understanding of the transformation of the individual from inauthentic existence to
authentic existence through an intricate exploration of the relationship between the
temporal experience of the moment and the discovery of the self.
Feng Zhi once uses the metaphor of an arc or a curve to describe his conception of
human life. In the “Postscript” to Wu Zixu, Feng Zhi writes:

We often see someone pick up something, like a stone or a ball, and aimlessly
throw it into the distance. From being thrown to falling to the ground, it will form
a beautiful arc in the air. This arc disappears in an instant of moment, but there are
countless instants in between, and in every instant there is a stop, and in every
instant there is a fall. … If we use this arc to describe the elasticity of human life,
the beginning and ending of an ideal event, it would be a perfect image. Because
the course of a beautiful life, whether it is because of love or because of hate,
whether it is for life or for death, is not at all different from the throw like this:
there is persistence in every stop, and there is overcoming in every fall.
192

191
Bian Zhilin, “Shi yu xiaoshuo: du Feng Zhi chuang zuo Wu Zixu” (Poetry and Fiction: Upon Reading Feng
Zhi’s Wu Zixu) in Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan 2 (1994): 71.
192
Feng Zhi, “Houji” (Postscript to Wu Zixu), in FZQJ, 3: 425.
110
The historical fiction Wu Zixu represents exactly this view of life, which considers
the curve of the throw as the symbol of life. Using the poeticized episodes of Wu Zixu’s
life as the main body of the fiction and doing away with the thread of a central plot, Feng
Zhi compares every episode of Wu Zixu’s life to every instant or point on the curve of
the throw and the arc of life, so that every single point demonstrates Wu Zixu’s particular
internal struggle and psychological development as well as his persistence and
overcoming at each moment.
Among all these moments of importance in Wu Zixu’s life that form the beautiful
arc, the most prominent one is the moment in which he makes the resolute decision to go
into exile and take on this hard but necessary journey in order to take revenge and
overthrow the State of Chu. It sets the tone of the story and every episode of his life
afterwards represents his struggle to embrace this decision, to prepare for the possibilities
of the future, and to resist the temptation of other options. The idea of “resolute decision”
that dominates this story as well as some of his essays written during the 1940s is
borrowed from Kierkegaard. Feng Zhi wrote an essay entitled “Criticism of the Epoch” in
1941 on the writings and philosophical ideas of Kierkegaard. In this essay, Feng Zhi
points out that in Kierkegaard’s first and yet most important work Either/Or Kierkegaard
argues that one has to make “resolute decision” and it is only through “resolute decision”
that one experiences the “true meaning of life”.
193
A few years later, in another essay
entitled “Jueduan” (Resolute Decision), Feng Zhi further explains his understanding of

193
Feng Zhi, “Yige duiyu shidai de piping” (Criticism of the Epoch), in FZQJ, 8: 243.
111
the importance of the moment of “resolute decision” to the meaning of human life. He
writes:

At the moment of resolute decision, there lies in front of you an either/or question.
We often feel absolutely lonely, because at this moment no one would come to us
and tell us how to make the decision, nor would there be a revelation from god. …
Only one who can take the responsibility for one’s self will neither be blind-
folded nor rely on the revelation from god. He will make the resolute decision
himself. When one is facing two or more choices and solitarily contemplating on
which course to take, he will finally understand the meaning of the hardship of
human existence.
194

Here Feng Zhi points out that the moment of “resolute decision” involves the
solitary individual’s relation to one’s self and the very responsibility one has to take for
one’s self. Quoting Kierkegaard, Feng Zhi argues that Kierkegaard regards the moment
of “resolute decision” as a moment in which a solitary individual could be endowed with
the power of eternity as he “chooses himself” or “embraces himself” while keeping
himself as his sole companion in the world. Thus, Feng Zhi further comments that “in the
moment of resolute decision one gains the highest form of freedom yet at same time
realizes how difficult it is to use such freedom.”
195
The difficulty of exercising such
freedom lies in the solidarity of the self as we only have ourselves to resort to, yet at the
same time it also relies on this solitary self. Self is the only agent that mediates and
synthesizes the almost paradoxical aspects of human existence, as Kierkegaard says,
“Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of

194
Feng Zhi, “Jueduan” (Resolute Decision), in FZQJ, 4: 77. Originally published on Wenxue zazhi (Journal of
Literature) 2. 3 (Aug. 1947). Reprinted in FZQJ, vol. 2, with deletion.
195
This quote is based on the deleted part of the original version of the essay “Resolute Decision” published on
the Journal of Literature 2. 3 (Aug. 1947). Quoted from Xie Zhixi, Sheng de zhizhuo: Cunzai zhuyi yu zhongguo
xiandai wenxue, 187.
112
freedom and necessity,” and such synthesis is “unthinkable if the two are not united in a
third”, which is the spirit, or the self.
196

Mark C. Taylor in his excellent study of Kierkegaard’s understanding of
temporality gives a very clear account of the relationship between Kierkegaard’s concept
of selfhood and his understanding of temporality. Taylor argues that Kierkegaard’s
selfhood includes two opposing components. One is the real self that finds himself
historically situated and confronts him with necessity and finitude, while the other is the
ideal self that faces various alternative courses of action and presents him with possibility
and infinitude. The self “properly so-called”, therefore, presents a dialectical relationship
between the real and the ideal self, in which infinite/finite and possibility/necessity can be
brought together.
197
Furthermore, it is only in the moment of decision, a moment in
which “the individual is confronted with a choice”, that the temporal and eternal aspects
of selfhood can be brought together. The moment of resolute decision is, as Taylor argues,
a moment in which “one faces his possibilities in full recognition of his necessity (his
actuality) and with a complete awareness of his freedom (limited though it is) to act to
realize these possibilities.”
198
Based on this structure of selfhood, Kierkegaard sees the
three tenses of time, past, present and future, to be closely correlated with the different
components of the selfhood. Past refers to the necessity of the self, future the possibility,
and present the self properly so-called, who makes efforts to actualize the possibilities in

196
Quoted from Mark Taylor, Struggle with Space: Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Temporality,” 318.
197
Mark C. Taylor, “Time’s Struggle with Space: Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Temporality,” in The Harvard
Theological Review 66. 3 (July 1973): 322-23.
198
Mark Taylor, 325.
113
the historically situated condition.
199
Henceforth, as Taylor properly points out, for
Kierkegaard time is “a reality which grows out of, and is related to, the lives of selves in
the stance of purposeful activity.”
200
Time remains a “perpetual flux” with no
differentiation of past, present and future in the non-human world, while it is only in the
moment of resolute decision when freedom can be exercised and choice made that the
differentiation between past (one’s actuality) and future (one’s possibility) can be made.
Therefore, for Kierkegaard “temporality is the form of human existence.”
201

Feng Zhi in his essays on the moment of resolute decision never specifically
touches upon the issue of temporality. However, if we examine the implied
conceptualization of temporality in his historical fiction Wu Zixu, we will see that the
moment of resolute decision of Wu Zixu is not only the key to the understanding of his
journey of exile, but also to the understanding of his self-discovery, self-transformation
and his way of dealing with the relationship among the memory from the past, the
decision of the present, and the possibilities of future. Temporality, for Feng Zhi, is also
closely related to human existence, and especially to the self and to self’s purposeful and
responsible activity that is manifested in his confrontation with his past and his ability to
choose necessity and actualize his possibility.
Wu Zixu, as Feng Zhi says, is based on the life story of the real historical figure.
Feng Zhi chooses part of the exile journey of Wu Zixu from the city of Chengfu to the

199
Mark Taylor, 326.
200
Mark Taylor, 329.
201
Mark Taylor, 328-29.
114
city of Wu as the main body of his fiction. However, instead of following the historical
material religiously and writing about the various incidents and events, Feng Zhi focuses
on the internal and psychological journey of Wu Zixu. This journey starts with a critical
moment of Wu Zixu’s life, the moment of resolute decision, in which Wu Zixu has to
reflect upon his past experiences and his future possibilities and make a choice, a choice
that will allow him to have a full recognition of his self and his existence and to take full
responsibility of his life. Wu Zixu’s father has been imprisoned for three years in the city
of Ying of the State of Chu and now an envoy is dispatched from the city of Ying to the
city of Chengfu where Wu Zixu and his brother live. Everyone in the city of Chengfu is
excited about the coming of the envoy and guesses the purpose of the visit of the envoy.
Feng Zhi writes:

In the middle of the night, when the excitement in the city has not yet completely
diminished, the Wu brothers are sitting around an expiring candle. They are
facing a very serious problem and it requires their resolute decision…

(Wu Zixu) thinks that the time elapsed in the past three years seem to have all
gathered in this moment of decision. He cannot let go of this moment and he has
to transform this moment into eternity.

“For three years, we have kept silent and have been submerged in this city. No
one in the State of Chu sees us as true human beings anymore. If we board the
cart sent from the city of Ying and enter the city in the company of the
hypocritically smiling envoy sent by Fei Wuji, after getting off the cart in the
morning, we will be imprisoned in the evening and be executed in public the next
morning. Wouldn’t this be so humiliating?”

Having thus spoken, Wu Zixu has made up his mind.
202

202
Feng Zhi, Wu Zixu, in FZQJ, 3: 372-73.
115
This moment of resolute decision is only an instant (shunjian) that will pass right
away, yet it carries the weight of the past as Wu Zixu sees it as the focal point of every
instant that has passed in the last three years. This moment is also an instant in which
future possibilities are opened up for Wu Zixu. He could probably choose to stay in the
status quo, find a place and continue to live in silence; he could probably go to the city of
Ying and be with his father yet it will lead to death; he could also choose to go into exile
and find a way to overthrow the government of Chu and take revenge. These are the
possibilities that are prescribed by his past, yet he is indeed free to make the choice. Fully
aware of his necessity and possibility, Wu Zixu recognizes the importance of this
moment in the present, the moment of resolute decision, as he wants to “transform this
moment into eternity (yongheng).” In order to bring temporality and eternity together in
the instant of time - the moment of resolute decision - Wu Zixu has never before been so
aware of his own existence and has never before gained such self-awareness and yearned
for a self-transformation. He has indeed made up his mind. He will not stay in the status
quo, nor will he easily give up his life. He decides to go into exile, to go far away, so that
one day he can come back. But to actualize this future possibility in this moment of
decision, Wu Zixu realizes that he needs to break away from his past, his past way of
existence, and to transform himself, a transformation that can be defined as a leap from
inauthentic existence to authentic existence.
The life that Wu Zixu has been living, which is also the life that everyone in the
city of Chengfu lives, is described as “un-rooted” and “unreal.” Feng Zhi writes:

116
The city of Chengfu, the newly built border town, has never been inquired about
by anyone for the past three years. Therefore, it is as if it has lost its core and has
become a constantly floating city. No matter which gate one takes to exit, if he
looks afar, he will see endless yellow plains. Not a single word can be heard from
outside… The residents… who originally hoped to experience the prosperity of
the newly built town, now find this dream gradually dying away and they feel
quite regretful. They are like a pile of gradually dried up soil, waiting to be
dispersed by the blow of a sudden wind. … They once hoped to take root here and
gain peace, but now this still shallow root has started to be shaken up and where
can they get peace? After all, in this unreal and confused city, everyone is missing
his hometown and no longer wants to live here anymore, yet still no one has other
plans.
203

The metaphorical description of the state of existence of the residents of the city
of Chengfu helps explain why Wu Zixu has to go through a self-transformation. As a
member of “the pile of gradually dried up soil, waiting to be dispersed by the blow of a
sudden wind,” Wu Zixu is not only living a life that is completely ungrounded, but also in
a status that is not self-conscious and is undifferentiated from others. This “lostness in
public”
204
is what makes Wu Zixu absorbed in the very life in this “unreal and confused
city,” like everyone else, without gaining awareness of his self, without being able to
confront his own existence, his necessity and possibility. The moment of resolute
decision, therefore, is not just a moment in which Wu Zixu gains full recognition of his
past and future and takes up the burden of responsibility of his life to make a choice
among the historically situated possibilities. It is first and foremost a moment in which

203
Feng Zhi, Wu Zixu, in FZQJ, 3: 369.
204
Peter Poellner, “Existential Moments,” in Heidrun Friese, ed., The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern
Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 65.
117
Wu Zixu chooses himself, a moment that brings him back to itself.
205
This self
transformation is again metaphorically described in Wu Zixu. Feng Zhi writes:

These two brothers do not have much to talk about when sitting facing each other
in great distress. If they think back to their childhood, they feel as if they are two
trees, which originally grew out from the fertile land but have now been
transplanted into a narrow and barren pot. If they want to continue to grow, they
will only hope for the breaking up of the pot.
206

The moment of resolute decision, therefore, becomes symbolized in the “breaking
of the pot” and marks as a transformative rupture from the original temporality, during
which Wu Zixu gains self-consciousness and self-revelation. This moment involves not
only a transformation from the inauthentic existence to authentic existence through the
full recognition of his self, but also a transformed self-identity when these two brothers,
Wu Shang and Wu Zixu, reach a deeper connection and can openly embrace both life and
death. Feng Zhi describes the self-revelation of the Wu brothers upon the making of the
resolute decision as the following:

At this moment, for these two brothers, one cannot tell if they have become one
person or one person has split into two: one will go back to his birth place, while
the other will go to a far away place; one will seek his death, and the other will
seek life. Suddenly everything brightens up in front of their eyes, and they are
liberated from this depressing city. For each one of them, there is death within as
well as life, as if the younger brother will take a part of his elder brother away
with him and the elder brother will also take a part of the younger brother.
Tonight the life that they shared in adversity for the past three years has reached
its sublimation and they can no longer tell each other apart.
207

205
This interpretation of Feng Zhi’s description of Wu Zixu’s moment of “resolute decision” is indebted to Peter
Poellner’s interpretation of Heidegger’s authentic moment. See Peter Poellner, “Existential Moments,” 64-66.
206
Feng Zhi, “Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3: 370.
207
Feng Zhi, “Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3: 373-74.
118

When each of the brothers embraces life and death at the same time, this moment
of resolute decision has become a sublime moment in which the opposing aspects of
human existence, the finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, can eventually be brought
together. Thus, the moment of resolute decision in Wu Zixu indicates at once continuity
from past to future and a radical discontinuity. Taking up the past and anticipating the
future, Wu Zixu has to choose the possibilities in the future that are pregiven and
determined by his past in the present moment, a moment that makes him understand his
own historicity yet allows him to exercise his freedom to choose and take the
responsibility for his life. However, at the same time, by choosing first and foremost his
self, Wu Zixu also completely breaks away from his past state of existence. This moment
of resolute decision becomes also a moment of self-discovery and self-revelation, a
moment that he can eventually bring together his possibility and necessity, temporality
and eternity, and achieve the transformation from inauthentic to authentic existence.
As we have already discussed, Feng Zhi describes his view of life as the beautiful
arc that an object makes when one throws it up in the air in the postscript to Wu Zixu and
appreciates especially the stop or fall of the object in every instant that together form this
curve. He considers this image of an arc as a perfect image for the description of the
beginning and ending of an ideal event as well as the process of life, because he believes
that any purposeful event in our life and any course of a purposeful life include moments
that are exactly like the instants on this curve, and within every single one of these
instants there is a stop and there is a fall and “there is persistence in every stop, and there
119
is overcoming in every fall.”
208
Human life, therefore, is ultimately comprised of the
numerous moments of persistence and overcoming. The episodes that Feng Zhi chooses
to write in this historical fiction are precisely these moments of persistence and
overcoming in the course of Wu Zixu’s exile. Passing of Zhaoguan is one weighty
moment, a moment that is not unlike the moment of resolute decision in which he has to
“break the narrow and barren pot” and perform a radical self-transformation. Now at
Zhaoguan Wu Zixu encounters another moment of radical transformation, a moment of
metamorphosis. Following Goethe’s creed of “Death and Metamorphosis” that he
particularly appreciates as he expresses such appreciation through his sonnet dedicated to
Goethe and his critical works on the writings of Goethe, Feng Zhi describes this
metamorphosis of Wu Zixu in the metaphor of a silkworm’s shedding of its skin.
Taking on the journey of exile solitarily, Wu Zixu travels at night and the feels the
overwhelming power of the feeling of loneliness. Hiding out in the daytime and
following the directions of the stars at night, Wu Zixu feels as if “he has changed into a
hibernating animal and has forgotten about time” and sometimes he wonders if his life
“will always forever be defined by the night traveling.”
209
The powerful feeling of
solitude and seemingly endless and countless lonely nights makes Wu Zixu feel as if he is
completely lost. One day as Wu Zixu reaches the forest at the foot of the mountain of
Zhaoguan, Feng Zhi describes his feeling as the following,

208
Feng Zhi, “Houji” (Postscript to Wu Zixu), in FZQJ, 3: 425.
209
Feng Zhi, “Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3: 398.
120
…suddenly the forest seems to have transformed into a fish net. He, like a fish in
the net, cannot at all find a way out. Winding around and round in the net, he feels
the net becomes tighter and tighter. He imagines that the other side of the forest
and the other side of the mountain should be a new and free world. Once he
crosses this forest and climbs over this mountain, he will feel as if he has shed a
thick layer of skin off his body. Wu Zixu understands deeply the pain that a
silkworm feels when it is in the process of shedding its skin. The old skin is no
longer deeply connected to the life of the body, yet it still latches on and will not
shed, while the new and fresh skin is constantly longing for the contact with the
air of the outside world. Wu Zixu can feel that the new skin is growing and
maturing, but when can he completely shed of his old skin?
210

The maturing process of the silkworm as it sheds its old skin and welcomes the
new is employed here by Feng Zhi as a metaphorical description of another moment of
self-transformation of Wu Zixu. The moment of shedding the skin signifies both life and
death, as the old skin dies and the new grows into life. The duality of life and death
implied in this process of maturity, therefore, becomes the defining feature of the
moment of transformation for Wu Zixu. At night when he is overwhelmed by the
unbearable solitude and hopes to shed off everything old and walk out of Zhaoguan with
an entirely new self, Wu Zixu undergoes his moment of transformation also in the dual
realm of life and death. Feng Zhi vividly describes the reaction of Wu Zixu upon hearing
the soul-summoning songs by the soldiers for their dead fellows and demonstrates the
collapsing of the boundaries between the realms of life and death in the experience of Wu
Zixu. Feng Zhi writes:

Their voice is so solemn and so desolate that when it reaches Wu Zixu, he could
not differentiate whether the place he is staying at is in the human world or if it
has already become the realm of the ghosts. …

210
Feng Zhi, “Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3: 398-99.
121
Zixu is about to set out for the East, but upon hearing these lines of poetry, he
feels as if everything has stiffened up and his heart that longs for the distant place
can no longer fly up. He has given his body up to this non-human realm. He no
longer thinks about tomorrow, nor does he think about the situation outside of
Shanguan. …

When his consciousness becomes obscure and unclear, Zixu’s soul in the dream
seems to have followed the souls of the dead and floated to the distant hometown,
with the sound of the creek as the only guide. The state of mind of Wu Zixu has
already become one with that of the dead and has reached the deepest and most
gloomy places.
211

If in the Sonnets Feng Zhi uses the Western Orphic myth for the description of the
moment of existence that occupies the double realm of life and death,
212
then in this
section Feng Zhi resorts to the poetic tradition of ancient China and borrows the theme of
summoning the soul from the Songs of Chu.
213
However, although the summons of the
soul invite the spirit of the dead back to the human world, Wu Zixu, like Orpheus,
wanders into the realm of the dead, into darkness, as he feels as if his state of mind “has
already become one with that of the dead.” The next morning, when Zixu muddles
through Zhaoguan among the group of peasants, he feels that the old skin has finally been
shed. “Looking at the landscape outside of Zhaoguan, the world seems to have changed
into a new outfit and Zixu finds himself truly gaining an authentic life.”
214
Thus, the self-
transformation of Wu Zixu at Zhaoguan operates in a rather extra-temporal framework,
an almost transcending moment that breaks away from the limits of time and finitude, in

211
Feng Zhi, “Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3, 401-2.
212
Dominic Cheung, 48.
213
Zhang Huiwen, “Wu Zixu de xifang ziyuan yu chuangbian,” in Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan 1
(2002): 199.
214
Feng Zhi, “Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3, 403.
122
which he could travel into the double realm of life and death, of darkness and light, and
of consciousness and unconsciousness.
The modern Odyssey of Wu Zixu is a record of the psychological journey of Wu
Zixu. It is not only about his self-discovery and self-transformation as we discussed
above, but also about the “persistence” and “overcoming” at different stages of his life,
like those points on the beautiful arc the object makes in the air. He Guimei argues that
the exile of Wu Zixu can be seen as a progressive journey from the “beautiful nature” to
the “dark society”. Therefore, one theme that runs through the fiction is the idea of
“abandoning”, that is, abandoning the yearning for “beauty”, which could also be
interpreted as Feng Zhi’s own personal determination to shift his attention from the
lyrical to the realistic.
215

This emphasis on the opposition between the lyrical and the realistic is based on
the assumption that the lyrical and artistic world functions ultimately only as a dream, an
illusion, and bears no value to the understanding of the tangible and real world or serves
only as a “Peach Blossom Spring,” a spiritual utopia, when one escapes from reality.
When China was undergoing great social and political turmoil and its national security
and integrity were threatened in the 1940s, the function of art and literature also became
the center of contention for writers and scholars. The mainstream literary scene urged the
writers to write realistic and propagandist works that could mobilize the people and instill
in them nationalistic fervor. To follow the collective voice of the mainstream and to
exercise the utilitarian function of art and literature became the responsibility of writers

215
He Guimei, Zhuanzhe de shidai: 40 – 50 niandai zuojia yanjiu (The Turning Epoch: A Study on the Writers of
the 1940s and 50s) (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), 181-82.
123
during the war-ridden years. Feng Zhi was not at all undisturbed by this call for collective
and realistic literature. His own acknowledgement of the shift in his literary attention
from the lyrical to the realistic confirms his awareness of the mainstream literary
discourse and his attempt to strike a balance between the individual and the collective,
the aesthetic and the realistic in his writings.
However, in an essay entitled “On the Status of the Individual,” Feng Zhi points
out that the era that he was in was considered as the “era for the collective,” but in the
name of the “collective” the voice of the individual was unjustly suppressed. He argues
that those who are unwilling to follow the slogans and focus instead on their own work or
hold their personal opinions could indeed be called “individualistic”, but there is nothing
wrong with being individualistic as they are also working for the benefit of the human
race.
216
What this argument indicates is Feng Zhi’s uncompromising attitude toward the
mainstream call as he still holds dearly the importance of the individual in the era of the
collective. Therefore, even when he shifts his attention to more realistic writings, he
remains in touch with his individualistic reflection and contemplation. The binary
opposition between individual and society, art and life that defines the mainstream
literary scene is exactly what Feng Zhi strives to discard.
From our discussion of Feng Zhi’s Sonnets, we notice that for Feng Zhi art and
life, aesthetics and reality are not at all antithetic, as art serves as the most telling and
most effective tool for the explanation of human existence and it is the only means for us
to give form to the otherwise ungraspable reality and give permanence to the otherwise

216
Feng Zhi, “Lun geren de diwei” (On the Status of the Individual), in FZQJ, 5: 288.
124
impermanent life. Thus, coming back to the idea of “abandoning” that Feng Zhi writes
about in the historical fiction Wu Zixu, I argue that it is not at all about turning away
from the artistic to the realistic or giving up his personal voice for the sake of the
collective. Emphasizing on “abandoning” certain ideas and choosing to be committed to
his choice and his fate, Feng Zhi demonstrates Wu Zixu’s willingness to choose necessity
and give affirmation to life despite the possible adversity ahead. He writes,

There are fish in the water, and there are birds in the sky. Seeing the bird fly
freely in the sky, no matter how jealous the fish gets and hope to become a bird,
destiny has it that the fish will always stay in the water and cannot even make a
sound… It feels as if he is abandoning the longing for the most precious thing in
his life. This is like those precious stone diggers who know exactly where they
can find the stones, or those spring diggers who know exactly where to find the
water, but because of the time limit or the lack of capacity to do so, they have to
sadly give up those places… (Wu Zixu) knows that he needs to take revenge, and
maybe it will cost his entire life. But whether what lies ahead of him is a chunk of
blood or a pile of dirt, he wants to embrace it with all his power.
217

The willingness to embrace life and commit to the necessity of life and the
willingness to give up fantasies of other possibilities for the purpose of accepting the
necessity in its entirety expressed in the above quotation indicates another moment of
self-revelation for Wu Zixu, a moment of understanding that points not towards the
outside world, but again towards the inner self, a discovery of the self’s commitment to
and responsibility for itself. This moment of self-revelation could probably be explained
best through the concept of amor fati, the love of fate, which Nietzsche uses to describe
his idea of “affirmation”, as he writes:

217
Feng Zhi, “Wu Zixu,” in FZQJ, 3: 416.
125
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to
be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what
is necessary, still less conceal it – all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of the
necessary – but love it.
218

The very act of “abandoning”, therefore, becomes an ultimate “affirmation” in the
moment of self-revelation, an affirmation of life. Feng Zhi’s idea of “abandoning” is not
at all meant to be a negation. It does not aim to force a choice between individual and
society, or between art and reality, and negate the importance of the individual and the
artistic world in favor of the collective and realistic world. What he really hopes to stress
is the importance of self-introspection and self-revelation and a positive and affirmative
approach toward life. Love it, even if it is dark and painful.

***
In this chapter, through the exploration of Feng Zhi’s particular concept of time,
its relationship to themes of solitude, death, and subjectivity represented in The Sonnets
and historical novella Wu Zixu written in the 1940s, I argue that Feng Zhi’s particular
notion of time, his celebration of the moment, his emphasis on the fluidity between past,
present and future, his acute awareness of the immanence of death and its transformative
power, and his focus on the examination of interiority mark him as a modernist writer
despite the mainstream literary scene’s interpellation for revolutionary romantic or
realistic literature. Feng Zhi’s works demonstrate the traits of existential modernity,
which originates from an anguished feeling of loneliness in a chaotic and absurd world.

218
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I Am So Clever,” in Ecce Homo, quoted from Peter Poellner, 59.
126
Reflecting upon the impermanence of life and the finitude of human existence, Feng Zhi
hopes to use the transformative power of art and literature to overcome the binary
opposition between temporality and eternity, life and death, impermanence and
permanence. His works reflect his meditations of existential concerns and his
confrontation with the world from without and the self from within in search of a sense of
authenticity in existence. Furthermore, by defending the importance of the individual in
the era of the collective and privileging self-revelation and self-discovery, Feng Zhi calls
for a positive and affirmative attitude toward life, a certain bravery to accept one’s
necessity on the one hand, and always ready to fulfill one’s possibility on the other. An
individual being, therefore, facing his finitude and embracing his ultimate solitude, is
always ready to say “Yes” to his reality that is determined by his necessity yet seek a
sense of transcendence through the power of art, the world of the imaginary, which
further confirms his affirmation toward life, the world of the real.
127

CHAPTER TWO
Transience, Abstraction, and the Space of Transcendence:
Shen Congwen’s Essays and Fiction

To seek the direction of life from the light of the stars and the shadow of the
rainbow (xingguang hongying) is like following the irreversible trail of time,
going further and further away, without being able to even find the way back.

--Shen Congwen, “Heiyan”

The images of star (xing) and rainbow (hong) are frequently evoked in Shen
Congwen’s (1902-1988) writings during the 1940s to represent his peculiar awareness of
time, not only of the irreversibility of the passage of time as the above quotation from
“Heiyan” (Black Dream) indicates, but also of the transitoriness of life and experience
that are exemplified in the fleeting beauty of the rainbow and meteor. His self-claimed
craziness about abstraction, which also frequently appears in his prose essays, can be
seen as a response to his acute temporal awareness as well as a reaction against it.
Understanding life as ephemeral, transient, and constantly changing, Shen Congwen
hopes to be able to capture in writing the instantaneous beauty and the dynamic aspects
of life. However, at the same time, dismayed by the corruption of the material world and
disconcerted by the transitoriness of beauty in life, Shen Congwen turns his attention to
abstraction, as he believes that only abstraction preserves the essence and purity of life,
untouched by the multiple entanglement and corruption of the material world and
removed from the temporal restrictions of reality. The struggle between the abstract
world and the material world, therefore, is a struggle between the temporal and the
128
eternal and it demonstrates Shen Congwen’s persistent effort to transform time into
timelessness through the pursuit of innovative ways of writing that could capture the
temporal dynamics of life on the one hand but also rise above the temporal restrictions of
the material world and arrive at the level of eternity and transcendence on the other.
As we have already discussed in the introduction, modernist literature’s
fascination with temporal notions is nonetheless closely linked to its employment of
spatial form in representation. To shift the critical attention from the temporal to the
spatial is to first understand space not as physical locations but as, metaphorically, the
sites, territories, or areas in which the artistic imagination and creation operate. This
space, thus, becomes the site in which art can break away from the matrix of the
constrictions of time and space, rise above the material confines and the contingencies of
history, and reach an absolute state that transcends materiality and temporality. If what
lies behind Joseph Frank’s theory of spatial form in modernist literature is his idealistic
understanding of literature that regards art and literature as standing above history and
time and granting access to transcendence,
219
Shen Congwen’s effort in pursuing
“abstract lyricism” in his writings during the 1940s can also be seen as driven by a
similar view of art and literature. In order to fixate or eternalize the otherwise transient
and fleeting aspects of life, Shen Congwen strives to spatialize the temporal by
establishing a lyrical space, a space in which he could focus on the dynamics of
representation rather than its closeness to reality, a space that points to eternity and

219
See Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern
Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). See also Joseph Frank, The Idea Of Spatial Form
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
129
transcendence as well as to the innermost psychological dynamics of the writer himself, a
space that ultimately mediates between the abstract and the material, the spiritual and the
sensational.
Before going deeper into our discussion of the lyrical space that Shen Congwen
strives to create in his works in the 1940s, it would be interesting to discuss first his
fascination with regionalism in his earlier works and see how he shifted his attention
from the physical space of West Hunan to abstract and lyrical space. Shen Congwen
wrote extensively on his provincial home West Hunan and is especially renowned for his
nostalgic and lyrical representation of the bucolic lives of the minority group and country
people in his fiction, autobiographies, and travelogues.
220
Scholars often consider Shen
Congwen as one of the most important native-soil writers because of the numerous
accounts of western Hunan in his writing, and focus most of their critical attention on
assessing and reassessing the importance of the idealized landscape to the meaning and
understanding of his works.
221

Native soil literature (xiangtu wenxue) is usually defined by its thematic emphasis
on the romanticized depiction of rural China as a lost paradise and the prevailing sense of

220
Shen Congwen was born in the Fenghuang county of West Hunan (also known as Xiangxi), a mountainous
frontier area inhabited by Han people, Miao minority tribes, and people of mixed ancestry. Much of his writing is
dedicated to West Hunan, in which he describes the obscure landscape and rivers as well as the local culture and
customs of the Miao minority group.
221
See for instance, C.T. Hsia, "Shen Ts'ung-wen," in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 2nd ed. (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1971), 189-211, 359-66; Jeffrey Kinkley, The Odyssey of Shen Congwen (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1987) as well as "Shen Congwen and the Uses of Regionalism in Modern Chinese Literature,"
Modern Chinese Literature 1, 2 (1985): 157-184; Nieh, Hua-ling, Shen Ts'ung-wen (Boston: Twayne, 1972);
Janet Ng, "A Moral Landscape: Reading Shen Congwen's Autobiography and Travelogues," in The Experience of
Modernity: Chinese Autobiography in the Early Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2003), 119-44; Peng Hsiao-yen, Antithesis Overcome: Shen Congwen's Avant-Gardism and Primitivism (Taipei:
Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academica Sinica, 1994); David Wang, Fictional Realism in
Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (NY: Columbia UP, 1992).
130
yearning for a pastoral ideal land. If May Fourth iconoclasm with its alleged totalistic
break with tradition and past can be seen as an obsession with unilinear temporality and a
teleological conception of history, native-soil literature’s evocations of the diversity and
multiplicity of localities replace this unilinear temporality with a non-teleological sense
of time and a valorization of space, place and locality in its cultural imagination.
222
The
West Hunan delineated in Shen Congwen’s fictional and nonfictional writings is,
therefore, considered by many critics as an atemporal and unhistorical landscape in which
the local people lead a life of undisturbed simplicity and purity. It becomes a place of
idyllic utopia, in which life and existence are defined by the state of timelessness and
romanticized innocence. The literary and historical significance of this particular place,
however, has been the focal point of scholarly contention and debate.
Jeffrey Kinkley in his studies on Shen Congwen’s use of regionalism argues that
Shen Congwen’s literary involvement with his region instills in him a double-sided vision
of West Hunan that is at once a “Peach Blossom Spring” (the most famous and prominent
imagined utopian world in Chinese literature) and a hell on earth. This seemingly self-
contradictory vision is intricately linked to Shen Congwen’s conscious effort to use
regional language, local color and primitive and spontaneous life style as “building
blocks for the New Culture, which would reinvigorate China through the cultures of all

222
For a detailed discussion on the new historical consciousness adopted by May Fourth intellectuals, see Leo
Ou-fan Lee, “Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May Fourth Movement,” in Kenneth
Lieberthal, ed., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991), 158-59.
Shu-mei Shih further discusses in detail May Fourth intellectuals’ eagerness to incorporate the ideology of linear
temporality into their discussion of literary modernity. However, she argues that the neotraditionalists and the
writers of the Beijing school in the post-May Fourth era rejected the unilinear Hegelian telos so that space rather
than time became prominent in their cultural theorization. See Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing
Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001),
chapters 1 and 6.
131
her people,” and his concerns about the constant military and political turmoil that his
home region undergoes, which in turn makes some of his works tinted with profound
senses of death, torture and atrocity.
223
Thus, the landscape that Shen Congwen focuses
on, in Kinkley’s opinion, is not at all atemporal and unhistorical, but rather closely tied to
its own historical and political background and Shen’s literary endeavor.
In a similar vein, Peng Hsiao-yen argues that through his depiction of rural life
and primitive culture in West Hunan, Shen Congwen brings readers’ attention to “the
other territory” of Chinese culture, which is what really represents the essence of Chinese
spirit. This preoccupation with primitivism and regionalism can also be seen as a direct
response to and negation of the vogue of westernization that was embraced by the
majority of his fellow writers and critics. It is this obsession and quest for the otherness in
primitive culture that characterizes him as an avant-gardist.
224

David Der-wei Wang also examines Shen Congwen’s work in the mode of
regionalism. However, though most critics treat the locality of West Hunan in Shen
Congwen’s work as an actual place evoked for the expression of nostalgia as well as
artistic or aesthetic nonconformity, David Wang questions the very material reality of this
interior landscape. Focusing specifically on the temporal and spatial schemes in native
soil literature in general and Shen Congwen’s work in particular, Wang argues that
anachronism and displacement as the two ideas at work behind the temporal and spatial

223
Jeffrey C. Kinkley, “Shen Congwen and the Uses of Regionalism in Modern Chinese Literature,” in Modern
Chinese Literature (1985) 1, 2: 157-178. For more detailed information on Shen Congwen’s life and work, see
Jeffrey Kinkley, The Odyssey of Shen Congwen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
224
Peng Hsiao-yen, Antithesis Overcome: Shen Congwen’s Avant-gardism and Primitivism (Taipei: Institute of
Chinese Literature & Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 1994), 33-34.
132
schemes in native soil literature make the literary representation of the homeland rely
extensively on memory, imagination and the act of writing, which ultimately makes
native soil literature “a rootless literature, a kind of literature whose meaning hinges on
the simultaneous (re)discovery and erasure of the treasured image of the homeland.”
Therefore, instead of nostalgia, Wang argues that it is “imaginary nostalgia” that defines
the fundamental theme of native soil literature, and that for Shen Congwen his attempt to
re-present the homeland only produces a simulacrum, an imaginary replacement and
displacement of the original.
225

The significance and material reality of western Hunan is again questioned and
examined in Janet Ng’s analyses of Shen Congwen’s autobiographies and travelogues.
Ng points out that previous interpretations of Shen Congwen’s work have overlooked the
political implication of writing and treated the landscape that Shen produces only as a
literary trope or site for imaginary yearning. Ng argues that Shen Congwen is fully aware
of the implication of his affiliation with the institutional power of language and culture.
As he transcribes all experiences into the language of textual culture, Shen’s landscape is
thus “inscribed within the gaze of the urban intellectual by the language and culture and
becomes the site of intellectual aesthetic sublime.” Furthermore, as he juxtaposes bucolic
scenes with violence and cruelty, Shen’s writings are highly political in nature. The
historical sites are aestheticized and problematized through “a language of unexpected
amorality”, which is indeed Shen’s way of confronting the moral status of the society and

225
David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 247-89.
133
his readers. Ng argues that Shen’s writings are indeed about the violence of
representation.
226

Previous scholarship on Shen Congwen’s work has thus focused mostly on Shen’s
writings about West Hunan. The places that he describes are seen as primitive locales that
are full of cultural legacy, as a literary trope that invites nostalgia and imagination of
cultural otherness, as imaginary landscape that is at once yearned for and forever lost, or
as historical and textual sites that problematize the moral implication of writing and
reading.
The strong presence of localism in Shen Congwen’s work makes most scholars
think of him more strictly as a regional writer. However, from 1938 to 1946, Shen
Congwen spent eight years in Kunming and wrote a series of essays and short stories that
did not touch upon the theme of regionalism and were characterized by what he later
called “abstract lyricism” (chouxiang de shuqing). Produced approximately during the
period of War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945), these essays and short stories
not only fall outside the mainstream literary scene that calls for propagandist literature
but also divert from his earlier work that is mostly engaged in the exploration of his
homeland West Hunan. In this chapter, I would like to shift the emphasis away from the
critical focus on West Hunan in Shen Congwen’s work, and to examine the ways in
which unique conceptions of temporality and spatiality are constructed in his works
produced during the Kunming period. I argue that in these essays and short stories, Shen
Congwen is particularly interested in expressing his anxiety of the ephemeral aspects of

226
Janet Ng, The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003), 119-43.
134
reality and the transitoriness of experience and beauty. This time consciousness – the
acute awareness of the present and the sensibilities to the fleeting moment, instantaneous
beauty and chance encounter – represents his modernist conception of temporality and it
also leads him to the exploration of space. Here the space is no longer the physical space
of his home region, but rather space in its spiritual sense, the lyrical space, in which his
literary and artistic imagination and creation operate and the dynamic ways of
representation explored. The exploration of the lyrical space aims not only at
transforming the fleeting into eternal, time into timelessness, but also at probing into the
innermost psychical spaces—dreams, daydreams, reveries- as a way of mobilizing his
writing as well as an approach to self-discovery. Actual spaces are replaced with the
abstract, lyrical spaces in which he wanders. I am interested also in the ways in which
Shen Congwen’s senses of time and space generate new relations to language, new ways
of conceiving of language as a tool, new understandings of the limitations of language,
and the new forms of lyricism that become possible during this period of his work. By
turning away from the depiction of his homeland and focusing instead on the exploration
of lyrical space, Shen Congwen shifts his attention from the material to the abstract, from
the exterior to the interior, and furthermore, to the question of language. I argue that Shen
Congwen sees language as the ultimate tool to bridge the gap between the real and the
imaginary through the very act of writing; at the same time, he also demonstrates his
deepest suspicion of the possibility of representation in writing.

135
The Fleeting Moment: Modernist Aesthetics of Instantaneity
Matei Calinescu in his Five Faces of Modernity describes modernist aesthetics in
terms of an awareness of the present and an eagerness to capture the immanent and
transitory experience, as he puts it:

From the point of view of modernity, an artist – whether he likes it or not – is cut
off from the normative past with its fixed criteria, and tradition has no legitimate
claim to offer him examples to imitate or directions to follow. At best, he invents
a private and essentially modifiable past. His own awareness of the present, seized
in its immediacy and irresistible transitoriness, appears as his main source of
inspiration and creativity. In this sense it may be said that for the modern artist the
past imitates the present far more than the present imitates the past. What we have
to deal with here is a major cultural shift from a time-honored aesthetics of
permanence, based on a belief in an unchanging and transcendent ideal of beauty,
to an aesthetics of transitoriness and immanence, whose central values are change
and novelty.
227

This cultural shift from the “aesthetics of permanence” to the “aesthetics of
transitoriness and immanence” is closely linked to the intellectual development that led to
significant changes in philosophy and art at the turn of the twentieth century. Sanford
Schwartz points out that philosophers posited sharp opposition between abstraction and
concrete sensations and claimed that reality lies not in the rational formulation and
abstract conception but in the pre-conceptual and immediate flux of sensory
appearances.
228
Our immediate experiences and stream of sensations are, therefore, the
very foundation of reality, which cannot be reduced to abstract formulations that are
beyond our sensory experiences. This focus on concrete experiences also leads to a

227
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 3.
228
Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), 12-20.
136
distinction between the external physical world and the internal psychical world, between
permanence and transitoriness. Bergson, in his Time and Free Will, points out that our
practical everyday life and habitual attention to the objects around us deceive us into
believing that all objects remain the same and sever us from our own immediate
experience. Things are in fact enveloped with our emotions and sensations, and as our
psychic state changes, the same object will never appear the same at each different state.
This ever-changing psychic experience is what Bergson refers to as “real duration”:

Now, if duration is what we say, deep-seated psychic states are radically
heterogeneous to each other, and it is impossible that any two of them should be
quite alike, since they are two different moments of a life-story. While the
external object does not bear the mark of the time that has elapsed and thus, in
spite of the difference of time, the physicist can again encounter identical
elementary conditions, duration is something real for the consciousness which
preserves the trace of it, and we cannot here speak of identical conditions, because
the same moment does not occur twice.
229

For Bergson, all existence is a constant flowing flux in which every state is
different from what comes before and no state is identical. This dynamic temporality of
psychic experience is what has been severed from us through our daily routines, as our
thoughts operate according to laws and regulations that govern the external things. The
prominent task for art is, therefore, to recover the immediate experience through the
agency of intuition, and to recapture and recreate such experience:

Now, if some bold novelist, tearing aside the cleverly woven curtain of our
conventional ego, shows us under this appearance of logic a fundamental
absurdity, under this juxtaposition of simple states an infinite permeation of a
thousand different impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they

229
Quoted from Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism, 23.
137
are named, we commend him for having known us better than we knew
ourselves.
230

The Bergsonian psychic experience and call for the representation of
instantaneous impressions are also echoed in the modernist art and literary pursuit of
capturing the ever-changing and ephemeral moments in artistic works. The impressionists
saw their work as recording the most delicate and evanescent moments, as Monet
describes his painting experiences:

I am working terribly hard, struggling with a series of different effects (haystacks),
but… the sun sets so fast that I cannot follow it… I am beginning to work so
slowly that I am desperate, but the more I continue, the more I see that a great
deal of work is necessary in order to succeed in rendering that which I seek:
“Instantaneity.”
231

Guy de Maupassant also recorded Monet’s search of impressions:

He was no longer a painter, in truth, but a hunter. He proceeded, followed by
children who carried his canvases, five or six canvases representing the same
subject at different times of day and with different effects.
…
I have seen him thus seize a glittering shower of light on the white cliff and fix it
in a flood of yellow tones that, strangely, rendered the surprising and fugitive
effect of the unseizable and dazzling brilliance.
232

The “instantaneity” and “unseizable” brilliance that Monet seeks in his painting is
similar to what Joyce calls the “epiphany”. In Stephen Hero, Joyce wrote:

230
Quoted from Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism, 30.
231
Erwin R. Steinberg, ed., The Stream of Consciousness Technique in the Modern Novel (Port Washington:
Kennikat Press Corp., 1979), 30.
232
Quoted from Erwin R. Steinberg, 30-31.
138

This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a
book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation,
whether in the vulgarity of speech or of a gesture or in a memorable phrase of the
mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these
epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate
and evanescent of moments.
233

Ezra Pound, a major figure who helped define and promote the modernist poetics
in the early twentieth century, also emphasizes on the instantaneous nature of the
experience in his definition of the image, as he says: “An Image is that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” and that “it is the
representation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden
liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden
growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”
234

What these philosophers, impressionist artists and modernist writers share in
common is their emphasis on rendering life in terms of individual subjective experience,
which can only be defined as being constantly flowing and ever-changing. The dynamic
temporality of subjective experience makes every moment unique yet evanescent. To
describe such experience relies greatly on the pursuit of capturing what is unseizable and
giving form to instantaneity that is forever slipping away the moment it is recorded. The
representation of reality is henceforth closely linked to the empirical and subjective
experience of the artist, and the main task of the artist is to uncover the immediate

233
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, eds. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions, 1963), 211.
Also quoted in Erwin R. Steinberg, 30.
234
Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 4. Also quoted in Erwin R.
Steinberg, 33.
139
experience that is veiled by our everyday awareness. Yet the twentieth-century
modernists are not satisfied with discovering and uncovering the dynamic temporality
alone. Joseph Frank argues that the implication of Pound’s definition of image is that
Pound advocates “a unification of disparate ideas and emotions into a complex presented
spatially in an instant of time.”
235
Therefore, the modernist aesthetics of instantaneity is
not so much an aesthetics of modernist temporality, but rather an aesthetics of modernist
spatialization of the temporal – to give the dynamic temporality new forms that reorder
and restructure the experience. T. E. Hulme describes artistic work as the following:

It is as if the surface of our mind was a sea in a continual state of motion, that
there were so many waves on it, their existence was so transient, and they
interfered so much with each other, that one was unable to perceive them. The
artist by making a fixed model of one of these transient waves enables you to
isolate it out and to perceive it in yourself.
236

Schwartz points out that by associating abstraction with movement and sensation
with fixity, Hulme grants priority to the spatial over the temporal as he is more interested
in giving form and fixity to the transient than recovering the temporal flux of experience.
Through the invention of new artistic abstractions, which are forms like the visual
metaphor of poetry that rise directly from fresh observation and are capable of
establishing a system of new relations previously undetected, Hulme believes that art can
restore us to the concrete experience that is otherwise concealed and remains

235
Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 11.
236
Quoted from Sanford Schwartz, 56.
140
unobserved.
237
This pursuit in new artistic abstractions is shared by most of the modernist
artists as they strive for a radical remaking of artistic forms and techniques of
representation to present a new order of experience that recognizes the artists’ emotional
dynamics and self-consciousness. Thus, the modernist aesthetics of instantaneity
represents not only an awareness of the lived experience of constant flux and of the
transitoriness of each moment within this free-flow, but also an eagerness to spatialize
this dynamic temporality of experience and reconstruct it via radically innovative forms
of representation. It also repositions the artistic work in relation to reality as it shifts the
attention from the external material world to the internal psychological spaces, so that
reality cannot be reduced to rational and analytical formulations, but is always linked to
interior spaces of emotional dynamics.

Spatialized Instantaneity: Shen Congwen’s Aesthetics
During the 1940s, Shen Congwen published a series of essays and short stories
that showed a significant departure from his previous writing. In August 1941, a
collection of essays entitled Zhuxu (The Candle Extinguished) was published in Shanghai.
From December 1943 to January 1944, Shen Congwen published “Lü · hei· hui” (Green,
Black, Grey) on the journal Dangdai pinglun (Contemporary Criticism) in three
installments, and republished the same article under another title “Lüyan” (Green
Nightmare) on Dangdai wenyi (Contemporary Literature and Art) in February. Later he
published “Baiyan” (White Nightmare) and “Heiyan” (Black Nightmare) in 1944 and

237
Sanford Schwartz, 61.
141
“Qingse yan” (Blue Nightmare) in 1946. This series of essays all with the word “yan”
(nightmare) in their titles are now put together with his long memoir-style essay
“Shuiyun” (Water and Clouds) in the collection Qiseyan ji (Seven-colored Nightmare) in
his complete works. In addition to these essays, Shen Congwen also wrote short stories
“Kanhong lu”(Gazing at Rainbows), “ Zhaixing lu” (Fetching the Stars) and “ Hongqiao”
(Rainbow Bridge) in a new experimental mode, published between the years of 1943-
1946. The work that Shen produced during his stay at Kunming differs greatly from his
previous writing on his homeland West Hunan as they are mostly concerned with the
depiction of the internal and psychological dynamics of the author himself. It is a
collection of introspective, reflective, and contemplative works that aim at capturing the
intricate flow of consciousness while at the same time releasing such consciousness from
the limits and confines of time and space and all forms of practicality in life in order to
recreate and set up a new space of meaning and reality. It is a space of thought,
imagination and dream, where the dynamic flow of experience and consciousness can be
rediscovered and the essence of life be contemplated, restored and preserved. In Shen
Congwen’s writings during this period, as in those of the modernist writers in the West,
there is a similar awareness of the transitoriness of experience, an attempt to capture the
instantaneity, and an effort to spatialize the temporal experience through new forms of
representation.
Reading through the essays and short stories that Shen Congwen wrote during his
Kunming period, we can see that he has an acute awareness of the transitoriness of
experience, as he writes:
142

At a certain time, certain place, a certain person feels the gentle breeze of the
wind, and sees the beautiful flowers on the mountain. The water of the river is a
little opaque but full of life, with some leaves floating on top of it. … Try to pick
a bunch of flowers, throw it to the river, and let it flow with the leaves along the
currents of the river. When tracing the history of the scent of these flowers, the
long hair, clear eyes, powdered face and cute feet all appear at once in one’s
impression. They seem to be unfamiliar yet familiar at the same time, and
suddenly form a complete totality though originally being loosely apart… Just a
short moment later, everything disappears without a trace, and one only feels that
a white pigeon is flying in a void. It is flying in the void of the heart that contains
no visions of others or objects, and a white light is flickering constantly.
238

This experience that Shen Congwen describes here is very close to the
“immediate experience” that Bergson urges the artists to uncover. The experience of the
individual in the external world is tightly intertwined with his psychological and
emotional response to his interaction with the world and can only be revealed through a
flux of consciousness and thoughts. Yet the dynamic characteristic of the internal
emotional status also makes the experience transient and evanescent. It is in this sense
that Shen Congwen writes “everything disappears without a trace” after a short moment.
The disappearance of everything, however, is only located in the psychic space of the
mind. By emphasizing the void of the mind which is filled with emotions and thoughts a
moment ago, Shen Congwen renders the transient temporality of experience in a
spatialized form.
Shen Congwen’s effort in spatializing the dynamic temporal experience of the
psyche is most prominently reflected in his conception of “shengming,” as he sets it up as

238
Shen Congwen, “Zhuxu” (The Candle Extinguished), in Shen Congwen quanji (Tai Yuan: Beiyue wenyi
chubanshe, 2002), 12: 25. Hereafter cited as SCWQJ.
143
a space where an individual can get in touch with his sensibilities and emotions that
reorder his experience of life.
In “Qianyuan,” Shen Congmen makes a distinction between the concept of
“shenghuo” (daily life or practical life) and the concept of “shengming” (life as such, or
life as being or existence that is divorced from all the practicality involved). He says:

Most people are not “mad”, as they know that they should make a living out of
the “practicality” of life, or make a living out of the “meaningfulness” or
“recognition or fame”. Catching mosquitoes and fleas, or playing cards and chess,
these people focus their attention on the trivial gains and losses of their lives, and
they can make through their lives simply in this way. As long as there is comfort
in life, they are contented. Living till the very end, they die and everything ends.
For most people, they only need “shenghuo”, and have no special understanding
of “shengming”, so that they are not interested in searching for a better usage of
life to make it more interesting and meaningful. Therefore, if there is a person
who can break through all conventions and customs, and possess a special
sensibility to beauty, he will naturally be called a mad person. If the behavior of
this mad person is in direct opposition to the vulgar utilitarian ideas of the
majority, he will become a criminal, a villain, a rebel. … But all the greatest
achievements in literature, art and human thoughts are made by these mad people,
rather than the majority... For some people, their emotions are castrated by the
worldly matters so that they are as numb as a living corpse; or they are disguised
as an intellectual, a gentleman, a righteous person, so that they are afraid to be
attacked by any form of beauty which will make them collapse.
239

By making such a distinction between “shenghuo” and “shengming”, Shen
Congwen points out that under the pressure of the utilitarian pursuit of life, the majority
of people are no longer in touch with “shengming”, as they have become absolutely
insensitive to their own emotions and live only according to their daily routines and
conventional rules. An artist, however, can and should break himself away from the
constrictions of the practicality of life, and be in touch with a form of existence that

239
Shen Congwen, “Qianyuan” (The Profound), in SCWQJ, 12: 31-32.
144
preserves the very sensibility to emotions and be specifically responsive to beauty. Shen
Congwen claims: “I am someone who has no faith in anything, but I believe in
‘shengming’. It should be the shortcoming of my entire life.” But what comes with this
“shortcoming” is “the frankness and honesty and the ultimate understanding of the
intricate sensations and emotions of human beings.”
240
Shen Congwen’s emphasis on
shengming’s resistance against a form of life that relies on utilitarian gains sets up a sharp
contrast between what he calls ‘the concrete” and “the abstract”, which also entails a
contrast between the material space of daily life and the abstract space of emotional
experience of life as such . He points out in his writing that “there isn’t a moment of my
life that I am not in a war, a war between the abstract and the practical”
241
and delineates
his mental state as such:

I am getting crazy; crazy about abstraction. I see some symbols, forms, lines,
music that is soundless, and poetry that is wordless. I see the most complete form
of life that exists perfectly well in abstraction, but it dissolves the instant it enters
the material world.
242

Therefore, it is only in the abstract space of “shengming” that our most intricate
sensibilities can be reserved and stay intact, and it is only then that we can rediscover our
dynamic flux of emotional experience of the world and give a complete form to life as
such. The divide between the material space of “shenghuo” and the abstract space of
“shengming” is further deepened when Shen Congwen introduces his idea of beauty. He

240
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun” (Water and Clouds), in SCWQJ, 12: 128.
241
Shen Congwen, “Chang Geng”(Venus), in SCWQJ, 12: 39.
242
Shen Congwen, “Sheng Ming,” in SCWQJ, 12: 43.
145
points out that the modern society that we live in is tainted with ugliness by the
bureaucrats, politicians, bank owners and hypocrites, hairdressers and tailors, as well as
the never-ending greediness. Everything in this world is circled around private benefits,
so that no higher form of pursuit is possible. But there has to be a higher standard for life,
and this standard is found in beauty.
243
Beauty is everywhere, Shen Congwen argues, but
the practical worldly matters have already stripped the majority of people of their
emotional sensibilities so that they are absolutely insensitive to “beauty” and to all kinds
of beautiful objects, beautiful behavior, beautiful things and beautiful ideas. To be able to
get in touch with this higher standard of life, we have to remove ourselves from the
material space of “shenghuo” and enter into the abstract space of “shengming”, where our
most sensitive emotional faculty can respond to and appreciate such beauty.
Beauty, in Shen Congwen’s opinion, becomes a manifestation of life, and lies in
every form of life, as he claims: “The fluidity of beauty cannot be stopped in the sunlight,
nor can the fluidity of life (shengming). … But my purpose is to let that unstoppable life
capture the unstoppable beauty.”
244
The experience of beauty for Shen Congwen is at
once temporal and spatial. It is temporal because the experience of beauty follows exactly
the dynamic flow of lived experiences in life. Yet Shen Congwen also believes that it is
the artist’s task to overcome the transitory temporality of beauty by fixing it in a
spatialized form, be it painting, music or language, as he says:

243
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12: 107.
244
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12: 92.
146
A meteor or lightning disappears the instant it flashes, but a state of great beauty
is presented. This is also true for human beings. A smile or a frown can also
represent the state of great beauty in the same way. …If such miraculous flashes
of beauty can be captured via the various sensory capacities that we possess, these
flashes can henceforth last in our lives eternally. Dante, Goethe, Cao Zhi, and Li
Yu are some of these writers who can preserve these flashes in linguistic forms.
Even though the works they produced are different, the revelations we get from
these works are universal. It is a feeling of being illuminated, being conquered,
and being educated by the instant flash of beauty.
245

By stabilizing and fixating beauty in an artistic form, the artist not only provides a
way of preserving the flashing instant of beauty that is otherwise constantly changing and
ephemeral, but also renders beauty as salvation, as it “illuminates, conquers and
educates” the readers who could otherwise be completely consumed by the practical
concerns of everyday life. The representation of beauty, henceforth, mediates between the
two spaces of experience, the material space of “shenghuo” and the abstract space of
“shengming”. It is defined by its ‘abstractness’ as it is the manifestation of “shengming”,
life as such or the essence of being, but it could only be accessed through our emotional
and psychical faculties, so that beauty for Shen Congwen is not completely a
metaphysical concept, nor is “shengming”. Shen Congwen writes that “Shengming has
the spirit of God, while shenghuo only stays in the human world”
246
so that once one “has
discovered beauty in all living beings, one has also discovered ‘God’.”
247
What he is

245
Shen Congwen, “Zhuxu,” in SCWQJ, 12: 24.
246
Shen Congwen, “Qianyuan,” in SCWQJ, 12: 34.
247
Shen Congwen, “Mei yu ai” (Beauty and Love), in SCWQJ, 17: 360.
147
trying to do in his writing, Shen Congwen claims, is to “praise again the grace of God in
the era when ‘God’ is dead.”
248

Shen Congwen never specifies whether the “God” he uses in various parts of his
writing is the Christian God. But as he suggests that the discovery of beauty would also
mean the discovery of “God”, he seems to equate “beauty” and “God” so that “God” is
not a theistic being but rather a term that stands for a type of faith, a faith in what he has
been promoting throughout his writing during this period - “shengming”. Beauty is Shen
Congwen’s God, “a God that is not dead”
249
but preserves the ultimate forms and essence
of life.
In his autobiographical memoir “Shuiyun,” Shen Congwen comments on how
everything in life is fleeting, transient, and ungraspable: “…I thought about how a pile of
hopes and a glimmer of craziness changed into a sheet of blue flame, a heap of white
cinder in an instant.” In Shen Congwen’s opinion, “the most extraordinary encounter”
and “the highest level of meaning” in life lie precisely in such instants, even though these
instants will not last or stay, leaving behind only “a heap of white cinder.”
250
The fleeting
flash of beauty of these instants, however, also points directly to the essence of existence.
To capture the fleeting beauty in the abstract realm of “shengming”, then, is to spatialize
these temporal instants and transform them into eternity in the space of writing, allowing
them to break completely away from the constraints of the material world and achieve

248
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12: 128.
249
Jeffrey Kinkley, ed., Imperfect Paradise (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 13.
250
Sheng Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12: 127.
148
godlike quality. Like Nietzsche, Shen Congwen considers the era that he is in as “an era
in which ‘God’ is dead” (‘shen’ zhi jieti de shidai), and even though he has no religious
faith, he claims that he has faith in “shengming”.
251

This faith in the abstract realm of “shengming” is a direct response to the
corruption of the material world in which “the driving force behind politics, philosophy,
literature and art is no other than utilitarian cause.”
252
Therefore, Shen Congwen hopes to
set up an oppositional space, an abstract space of “shengming” in which all worldly
conditions can be transcended and the sensibilities and emotional faculties that we have
long been deprived of can be recovered and restored. We will then be able to get in touch
with our deepest dynamic psychic experiences and reconstruct not only a sense of self but
also a sense of life as such. Only through the act of writing can we actualize this abstract
space of “shengming” and recreate a faith in beauty and in the essence of life, which
replaces God as our faith in an era when God no longer exists. Therefore, Shen Congwen
writes, “I am planning to create some pure poetry, poetry that is not attached to
shenghuo.”
253

The lyrical space of “shengming” that Shen Congwen strives to set up in his
writing transcends all worldly and mundane restrictions and reflects directly the
psychological space of the heart and mind. He believes that the flash of beauty in life is
even less stable than the “rainbow and star” and would probably never reappear. Once it

251
Sheng Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12: 128.
252
Shen Congwen, “Changgeng” (Venus), in SCWQJ, 12: 39.
253
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12:110.
149
disappears, it really disappears forever, leaving only “a trace on the heart.”
254
Yet this
heart is what he cares about most in writing, a heart that “beats for all the lights and
shadows of the world” and that “can dream about everything and fulfill everything.”
255

For Shen Congwen, what the artistic work does is not to fulfill utilitarian functions, but
rather to reveal to us the concealed beauty of all things in this world and the ultimate
manifestation of “shengming” through the exploration of the most inchoate dynamics of
the heart and mind. The act of writing sets up a space that rises above the material world
and transcends all the social, political and historical barriers and this reflects ultimately
Shen Congwen’s faith and belief in the sublimation of life through its aestheticization in
writing.

The Problematics of Language: Shen Congwen’s Transcendental Space of Writing
Reflecting on his own thoughts and writing interests, Shen Congwen wrote in the
early 1950s about how in the past twenty years he believed that his works belonged to
“the realm of thoughts” rather than “the realm of politics,” so that he could never adopt
“the supremacy of politics” in his writing although this slogan represented the dominant
trend in the literary scene.
256
He went on to say that he had been “sticking to the
exaggerated and isolated Nietzschean principle,” which could be defined as a belief that
“the delicate language could shake up this seemingly stubborn yet not so solid old world

254
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12:97.
255
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12:93.
256
Shen Congwen, “Wo de xuexi” (My Study), in SCWQJ, 12: 362-63.
150
as well as encourage the young generation to reconstruct a perfect and reasonable new
world.”
257
This belief in the power of language is also the driving force behind Shen
Congwen’s pursuit of the abstract space of “shengming” in writing. Language, for Shen
Congwen, serves as the ultimate tool for setting up the space of writing that transcends
the temporal and spatial constraints of the material world. While at the same time, hoping
to capture the fluidity of beauty and life and the dynamics of interiority, Shen Congwen
also realizes the inadequacy of language and turns his attention to language’s own
problematics. His essays and experimental fiction written during the 1940s, therefore,
represent his ambivalent attitude toward language and his search for new innovations in
language and in writing.
The issue of language was essential to the development of modern Chinese
literature at the very beginning of the May Fourth Period, as it started as a literary
revolution that is indeed a language revolution. With the publication of Hu Shi’s (1891-
1962) “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature) in
the January issue of The New Youth in 1917, which advocated the use of vernacular
language (baihua wen) in literature as opposed to the classical written language (wenyan
wen), and the followed up publication of Chen Duxiu’s (1879-1942) “Wenxue geming
lun” (On Literary Revolution) in the February issue, literature soon became the
foreground platform for May Fourth intellectuals to repudiate the traditional cultural and
value system through their new literary construction.
258
Calling for the creation of a lively

257
Shen Congwen, “Wo de xuexi,” in SCWQJ, 12: 366-67.
258
For more details on these two essays, please refer to Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought:
Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
151
vernacular literature, Hu and Chen promoted a literary revolution that would displace the
hegemony of the traditional literature that featured imitation, allusiveness, floweriness,
catering only to the readership of a small minority, and linked this linguistic-literary
reform directly to the sociopolitical reform of the Chinese society.
259
The May Fourth
intellectuals regarded classical language as a dividing line between the literati and the
masses and aimed at collapsing the division through the promotion of a new literature
that used vernacular and plainer language. Language reform became the central issue for
the May Fourth literary movement, as language was no longer merely a linguistic tool for
communication and literary composition, but also served a social-political function as it
was a device for the creation of “new literature” that would precipitate social
transformation and national salvation. Kirk Denton points out that May Fourth writers
endeavored to set up a new aesthetic realm for literature so that it could retain its
autonomy, yet the transformative role that literature undertook was inherently political,
ideological and moral. Therefore, May Fourth literature witnesses a constant struggle
between the pursuit of the social function of literature and the striving for an autonomous
realm for literary aesthetics that transcends all social-political concerns.
260

Shen Congwen recalled the influence of the May Fourth movement on his writing
career in “How Did I Start Writing Fiction”: “Because the problems that the new books
raised during the May Fourth period concerned new ideals for society and new attitudes
toward being an individual, I was greatly excited and encouraged. I started to understand

259
Kirk Denton, “Introduction,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945, 115-16.
260
Kirk Denton, 21-26.
152
further the relationship between the individual and the society, and the influence literary
revolution had on social transformation.”
261
Even though he entered the literary scene
upon the call to “shake the old society and establish new system,”
262
he always insisted
on retaining the autonomy of literature and resisted the overt utilitarian view. In “My
Study,” Shen Congwen summarized his writing of the past twenty years and claimed that
his work had always been in the margins:

In the past twenty years or so, I have never completely understood the essence of
language. Therefore, when it comes to the relationship between art, literature and
politics, from the viewpoint of a traditional liberal intellectual, I have always
thought that it is impossible and unnecessary to, and we definitely should not,
subordinate literature to politics. I have also thought that we should always fight
for freedom of writing and only in this way can we develop a critical view toward
the hegemonic power and allow the political system to make healthy development
and progress. …For this reason, my work has been gradually alienated from the
masses and the need of social revolution.
263

In the 1940s, the central struggle between literature for self-expression and artistic
autonomy and literature for political propaganda and revolutionary collectivism became
even more prominent, as the Chinese Communist Party made great efforts to impose their
cultural policy based on Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an forum on Literature and
Art” (1942), which promoted national forms in literary creation and required a literature
for the purpose of propaganda that catered to the tastes of the masses – the workers,
peasants, and soldiers. Commenting on the situation of literary production at the time,

261
Shen Congwen, “Wo zenme xieqi xiaoshuo lai” (How Did I Start Writing Fiction), in SCWQJ, 12: 414.
262
Shen Congwen, “Wo zenme xieqi xiaoshuo lai,” in SCWQJ, 12: 414.
263
Shen Congwen, “Wo de xuexi” (My Study), in SCWQJ, 12: 361-63.
153
Shen Congwen pointed out that since the 1930s literature had been closely linked to
commercial activities and consumerism in Shanghai on the one hand and political
movements on the other, so that it could not be compared at all to the “innocence and
bravery” expressed in the literature at the early May Fourth period, with the result that it
was inevitable for literature to degenerate.
264
His own linguistic style and the way of
treating sensations and thoughts in his writing were at odds with the contemporary model,
as he pointed out, “The present is a strange era. It is an era when the destiny of all human
race is given to ‘heroic leader’ and ‘fatalism’; it is an era when jazz has become popular;
it is an era when beauty and ugliness switch their roles; it is an era when simple and
empty slogans can control everything, so that thinkers are either acting as bystanders, or
kowtowing to the great leaders, or defending fatalism.”
265

As a writer who developed his writing career under the influence of May Fourth
literature, Shen Congwen knew clearly that language and literature had always been
serving a social function. Yet what he was concerned about during the 1940s was that
language as a tool had been wrongly used or abused, as he claimed: “Among the ‘truth’,
‘doctrines’, ‘plans’, and ‘ideals’ proposed in the current society, we can not find any
evidence to show that these are the production of the most brilliant intellectuals and out
of their true emotions,” so that “from ‘May Fourth’ till today, the misuse and abuse of the
tool of language can be clearly discerned in the denigration of the literati.”
266
Facing the

264
Shen Congwen, “Xinde wenxue yundong yu xinde wenxueguan,” (New Literary Movement and New Literary
Perspective), in SCWQJ, 12: 46.
265
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12: 129.
266
Shen Congwen, “Changgeng,” in SCWQJ, 12: 39.
154
disturbing reality that language and literature had been manipulated to serve either private
or political purpose, Shen Congwen pointed out: “The ‘meaning’ of life lies in the
combat against ignorance. What can be used as a tool is still language. The way in which
this tool can be used deserves our deep thinking.”
267
Even though Shen Congwen was
obviously frustrated and dismayed at the misuse and abuse of language in this piece
“Changgeng”, he still held a pretty optimistic view as he stated his belief in language as a
tool to destroy and reconstruct society and ideas.
The optimism toward the function of language in social transformation, however,
is greatly undermined by some of the concerns and questions he raised in a number of
other pieces of writing also published during the early 1940s. In these pieces, he
expressed his deep concern with the impossibility of using language as a representational
device for the description of the dynamic psychological experience or for capturing the
ephemeral and fleeting moments of beauty, the aestheticized manifestation of life
(shengming). What is revealed in the essays and prose during this period is a paradoxical
view toward language. Shen Congwen is burdened with the May Fourth enlightenment
idea of using language as a tool to fulfill social and moral functions, yet at the same time,
he is also interested in pursuing an aesthetics that would divorce art from all practical
concerns and socio-political entanglement and make art only the ultimate expression for
the essence of being.
As we have already discussed in the above section, for Shen Congwen beauty is
defined by its fluidity and instantaneity as it is closely tied not only to our dynamic

267
Shen Congwen, “Changgeng,” in SCWQJ, 12: 41.
155
sensory and emotional faculties, but also to our imagination. Because of his awareness of
the ever-changing and instantaneous nature of our interiority, Shen Congwen started to
question the inadequacy of language as an ideal tool for representing our interior
dynamics. He writes:

For the representation of an abstract impression of beauty, language isn’t as good
as painting, and painting isn’t as good as mathematics, and mathematics seems
less qualified than music. Because the majority of the “moving impressions”
come from our concrete sensory and emotional experiences, to preserve such an
impression with language is already pretty difficult. But the fluid beauty that
comes from our imagination can only be represented by music, either grand or
gentle. It moves in the form of abstractness, and only in music can it be preserved
and represented.
268

In the above statement, Shen Congwen seems to make a distinction between the
concrete emotional experiences and the abstractness of beauty. However, as we have
discussed in the previous section, for Shen Congwen, the abstract space of “shengming”,
in which beauty could become the sublimation of the manifestation of life as such, is
based fundamentally on the restoration of emotions and feelings that were suppressed by
the practicality of “shenghuo”. Therefore, what Shen Congwen is trying to express here is
his concern about the inadequacy of language for capturing the fluidity of beauty and
ultimately for representing “shengming”, and he gives priority to music as a better way
for representation in the realm of abstractness.
Shen Congwen never specifically explained why he would privilege music over
language, but the suspicion of language’s limitations and the promotion of music as the
best way of artistic expression that are noted in this previous passage come very close to

268
Shen Congwen, “Zhuxu,” in SCWQJ, 12: 25.
156
the Nietzschean view of language and music. In “My Study,” Shen Congwen mentioned
that he was influenced by all kinds of ideas and thoughts. But even though his own
thoughts could then by defined by its multiplicity, what became intimately tied to his own
emotional preferences was not “the rigorously ordered Marxist new plans for the human
society”, but rather “the fragmented individualistic impressions or thoughts that came
from writers or thinkers like Gide or Nietzsche.”
269

Nietzsche’s legitimation of the superiority of music comes from his argument that
music is a direct expression of human feelings while the degenerated language has
become incapable of expressing interior experiences:

Man can no longer express his needs and distress by means of language, thus he
can no longer really communicate at all: and under these dimly perceived
conditions language has everywhere become a power in its own right which now
embraces mankind with ghostly arms and impels it to where it does not really
want to go. …thus to all its other sufferings mankind adds suffering from
convention, that is to say from a mutual agreement as to words and actions
without a mutual agreement as to feelings.”
270

Jean-Marie Schaeffer points out that Nietzsche makes a distinction between
poetic language and prosaic language and replaces the former with music and the latter
with the current language that is void of feelings but subordinates to conventions.
According to Nietzsche, music, the pure Dionysian art, is the direct expression of “the
inmost ground of the world.” Yet pure music is not representational, therefore, it also
lacks cognitive activity which leads to the knowledge of what constitutes the essence of

269
Shen Congwen, “Wo de xuexi,” in SCWQJ, 12: 362.
270
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Holingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 214-15. Also quoted in Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the
Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 212.
157
being. Thus, on the one hand Nietzsche privileges music as the pure Dionysian art that
follows the sole principle of being, while on the other hand Nietzsche also resorts to
language, and lyrical poetry in particular, for the expression of the truth of beings.
Henceforth, Wagnerian opera is a musical ideal and Wagner becomes not only a
Dionysian musician, but also a “poet-musician who regenerates verbal language and
makes it recover its originary state – a state in which it was not yet conceptual language,
but indifferently poetry, image, and feeling.”
271

While for Nietzsche music stands for an ineffable expression of the “inchoate,
intangible reflection of the primordial pain” yet lacks representational value, for Shen
Congwen music is not only capable of describing the inexpressible dynamic and fluid
aspect of beauty, but is also apt for the representation of “shengming”, the essence of
being. However, neither Nietzsche nor Shen Congwen could do without language. If
Nietzsche seeks the “Apollonian figuration of the Dionysian truth” in tragedy through the
synthesis of music and dialogue, Shen Congwen as a writer has to make new innovations
in his use of language, as he is acutely aware of the limitations of language.
Shen Congwen’s question of language as an ideal way of representation of the
dynamic lived experiences is also shared by most of the modernist philosophers and
artists. Bergson was particularly interested in how living moments could be presented in
structured ways, and in literature this means an interest in language. In Time and Free
Will Bergson wrote about the nature of language:

271
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 213.
158
[The] influence of language on sensation is deeper than is usually thought. Not
only does language make us believe in the unchangeableness of our sensations,
but it will sometimes deceive us as to the nature of the sensation felt… In short,
the word with the well-defined outlines, the rough and ready word, which stores
up the stable, common, and consequently impersonal element in the impressions
of mankind, overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate and fugitive
impressions of our individual consciousness. To maintain the struggle on equal
terms, the latter ought to express themselves in precise words; but these words, as
soon as they were formed, would turn against the sensation which gave birth to
them, and invented to show that the sensation is unstable, they would impose in it
their own stability.
272

Language, therefore, cannot capture the flux of life, in Bergson’s opinion, as he
showed his deepest suspicion of language and its limitations in the above statement. For
modernist artists and writers, as the conventional language has become inadequate for the
expression of modernist sensibility and experiences, they would have to rely on linguistic
innovations. As Randy Malamud points out, language becomes “questioned, challenged,
dismissed, vilified, reshaped, when it is unable to say all it must for the modern age” in
the writings of the modernists. The fixation on language and on the challenge and
inadequacy of language united writers who were committed to an affirmation of novelty
and the creation of a new language as a fundamental aspect of modernist literature.
273

Like the modernist writers, Shen Congwen in the 1940s was also interested in
experimenting with a new language for his literary creation. In “Kanhong zhaixing lu
houji” (The Postscript of Records of Rainbow-Watching and Star-fetching), Shen
Congwen points out that he does not intend on having a large audience for his work, but

272
Quoted from Mary Ann Gilles, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1996), 22.
273
Randy Malamud, The Language of Modernism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 2-17.
159
only hopes that some readers might be able to detect the designs he made for the chance
experiences in “shengming” with language. The best audience for this collection, Shen
claims, would be the critic Liu Xiwei and musician Ma Sicong, as “they would be able to
transcend the moral judgments imposed by the conventional society” and detect in his
work “the bold experimentation he made in ‘composing a musical piece with heart and
emotional matters’.”
274
“Another kind of ideal reader”, Shen further notes, “should be a
psychologist, or an expert on sexual psychoanalysis, or a professor like Chen Xueping,
because this work could also be seen as a record of the process of “emotional
inflammation” (qinggan fayan).
275

The experimentation that Shen Congwen attempted in his writing during this
period is what he later referred to as “abstract lyricism”. Jaroslav Prusek in his pioneer
study on modern Chinese literature argues that modern Chinese literature witnesses a turn
toward subjectivity and individualism through a lyricization of narrative that could be
traced to the classical poetic tradition in Chinese literature.
276
David Der-wei Wang,
building upon the lyrical and subjective mode that Prusek proposes, argues that the lyrical
discourse in Shen Congwen’s work transgresses the lyrical conventions by combining
pastoral motifs with horror and pain in reality and juxtaposing fantasies and dreams with
historical chaos, love and desire with death and violence. This radicalization of the
canons of lyricism makes his work breach the boundary between realism and lyricism, so

274
Shen Congwen, “Kanhong zhaixing lu houji,” in SCWQJ, 16: 343.
275
Shen Congwen, “Kanhong zhaixing lu houji,” in SCWQJ, 16: 344.
276
Jaroslav Prusek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 1-28.
160
that his lyrical mode that is invested with ambiguity and irony should then be defined as
“critical lyricism”.
277
The “abstract lyricism” that Shen Congwen pursued in the 1940s
further breaks the limits and conventions of the lyrical mode. Describing his
experimentation with the writing mode at the time, Shen Congwen notes:

This is the first experimentation ever in China. I am an absolute layman to music.
But I think to represent the progression of a musical piece, in addition to the
musical notes, we could possibly also be able to use language to mediate here and
there. There are no “lessons” to be learned, nor are there any decayed traditional
“ideas” within the piece. There are only some honest emotions that belong to
human nature, soaked in controlled melancholy and mild craziness and are in
constant collisions and clashes. It might seem pretty calm on the surface, but
internally the clashes and collisions between these emotions are very violent.
Therefore, the politeness and gentleness, peacefulness and conservativeness that
decorate our human nature can now finally relax and release the control in the
process of internal struggle, and slowly loose balance. It is only when all balances
are lost that a new balance can be regained. When time goes by, shengming also
flows and changes with it. The author and the protagonist in the work are different
yet also interchangeable. They continue (the course of their shengming) either in
the imagination or in the progression of an event, going from a state of extreme
turmoil to complete calmness.
278

What Shen Congwen is concerned about most here is to break away from all
social and moral conditions and create a lyrical space that could uncover and recover the
essence of life and existence, what he calls “shengming”. By stressing the musicality of
his work and the internal struggle or the dynamics of our emotions, Shen Congwen wants
to release the exuberant and spontaneous Dionysian emotion and the truth of being from
the constraints of ethics and reason. In search of a representation of the essence of life
and existence, Shen Congwen sets up lyrical spaces of dream and imagination and strives

277
David Der-wei Wang, 203-206.
278
Shen Congwen, “Kanhong zhaixing lu houji,” in SCWQJ, 16: 343.
161
to divorce these spaces completely from the concrete and practical aspects of life. The
lyrical spaces, therefore, become transcendental or metaphysical spaces that are rendered
atemporal. While at the same time, by insisting on the exploration of the psychological
dynamics of the lyrical “I” and the protagonist, and especially by insisting on the
interchangeability of the “I” and the protagonist, the lyrical spaces in Shen’s writing are
also inherently experiential and psychological, and in other words, subjective and
personal. What further complicates the situation is that in Shen Congwen’s opinion,
“shengming” is dynamic, flowing and stream-like and cannot be reduced to successions
of stable or static elements. In “Abstract Lyricism,” an unfinished essay Shen Congwen
wrote in the early 1960s, he points out, “In the development of shengming, change is its
constant state, conflict is its constant state, and destruction is its constant state.
Shengming cannot be solidified. Once it is solidified, it is almost close to death or it is
dead.”
279
However, he is also very much interested in experimenting with language and
forms of representation so that he can recreate the dynamic and stream-like “shengming”
and preserve it in an artistic form. As he says: “It is only when shengming is transformed
into language, images, musical notes, rhythms can we finally be able to solidify a form or
a state of shengming which will develop into another type of existence or an extension of
life, which can be connected to those who are at another time and another space without
obstacles across time and space.”
280
Aware of the inadequate language at hand, Shen
Congwen endeavors to employ temporal disruptions, spatial transgressions, and

279
Shen Congwen, “Chouxiang de shuqing,” in SCWQJ, 16: 527.
280
Shen Congwen, “Chouxiang de shuqing,” in SCWQJ, 16: 527.
162
unconventional metaphors and flights of imagination in his lyrical narrative. These
experimentations with language make his “abstract lyricism” deviate greatly from the
conventional lyrical mode. If the lyricism that he employs in his writings on West Hunan
should be called “critical lyricism” that infuses the lyrical and idyllic depiction of the
native land with realistic depictions of terror and atrocity, the “abstract lyricism” that
Shen Congwen pursues in the 1940s opens up liminal spaces that are in between the
metaphysical and the experiential, the transcendental and the personal spaces, and waver
between the representational and the non-representational, in his eagerness to represent
the dynamic and fluid life as such with language and a frustration with the impossibility
of fixating the dynamics in a linguistic form.
Shen Congwen intended on collecting his experimental short stories in a
collection called Kanhong zhaixing lu (Records of Rainbow-Watching and Star-Fetching)
and published the postscript of this collection in the Tianjin Dagong bao on December 8
th

and 10
th
, 1945. But according to the most recent collection of his complete works,
Kanhong zhaixing lu was never published and the specific pieces that he wanted to put
under this collection were not identified either. Among the short stories that Shen
published during the Kunming period, “Kan honglu” (Gazing at Rainbows) and “Zhai
xinglu” (Fetching the Stars) seem to fit the experimental mode that he spelled out in the
postscript of Kanhong zhaixing lu very neatly. Both pieces break the temporal sequence
of the narrative, minimize the story’s plot and follow the spatialized trajectory of
interwoven texts. By introducing and juxtaposing multiple texts or thoughts within the
same piece, the narratives become multi-dimensional and multi-layered and resist any
163
single coherent meaning or interpretation. Thus, the texts seem to take on a poetics of
indeterminacy and undecidability.
“Zhai xinglu” explores the psychological struggle that a pretty young woman
undergoes in her love life.
281
She is described as vacillating between the dream world of
nineteenth-century romantic imagination and the current world of twentieth-century
practical needs. She has had many experiences with men, but somehow they all left her.
She is now dating a college student, a typical twentieth-century modern person, who
cares about appearances, entertainment, and all the practical necessities of the modern
society but not at all about the deeper meaning of life. She succumbs to her own practical
needs and stays with him, but yet at the same time she despises him and his mediocrity.
“To fight against the unbearably practical present,” she searches in her past for
consolation. The story, therefore, unfolds through a tapestry of interwoven poems, letters,
notes and dialogues. Constantly alternating between the description of the present and the
memories from the past, the narrative of the story collapses the then and the now and
emphasizes instead the clashes between two psychological spaces of thought, one
anchored in the practical present world and the other in the abstract lyrical world that is
unrestricted by worldly needs, which is indeed the lyrical space of “shengming” that Shen
Congwen was in search of persistently during his Kunming period.
What makes the spatialization of the narrative possible is the semi-epistolary form
that Shen Congwen employs. Robert Adams Day in his study on epistolary fiction
emphasizes the subjective and psychological dimension of the form as he argues “letters

281
This piece was originally published under the title “Xin zhaixing lu” in Dangdai pinglun in 1942. It was later
revised and published in Xin wenxue under the title “Zhaixing lu” in 1944.
164
would furnish the tale with an emotional dimension quite distinct from the bare recital of
events” as “in its letters fleeting emotional states or the most trivial events are dwelt upon,
amplified and intensified with the utmost resources of the author.”
282
Janet Gurkin
Altman further argues that the epistolary form “always reveal as much about the writer’s
esthetic values as they do about the form itself.”
283
Henceforth, in “Zhai xinglu,” the
poems, letters and notes not only serve as the narrative medium that explores the
emotional and psychological spaces of the protagonist but also establish a lyrical and
rhetorical space for Shen Congwen himself. It is a space in which Shen Congwen could
express his unique philosophical and aesthetic view toward “shengming” through the
writings of the protagonists.
The main protagonist of “Zhai xinglu” is the unnamed young woman “ta” (she).
She is constantly torn between the practical needs of daily life and the spiritual search for
a deeper meaning of life. The commonplace and practicality of daily life makes her take
flights of her imagination. She realizes that “the so-called concreteness of the present is
destroying everything that belongs to the ‘poetic’ part of shengming.” She wants to revolt,
so that “even though on the one hand she is accustomed to being close to the college
student,” her current boyfriend, “on the other hand her mind takes her further and further
away.” In her deeper thoughts, she discovers “some very solemn aspects of shengming
that go unnoticed in normal times” and understands what preserves the “classical” beauty

282
Robert Adams Day, Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1966), 115-45.
283
Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 188.
165
in life through the combination of poetry and fire and what vilifies human life through the
learned ways of living from the “modern” popular films.
284
Shen Congwen writes:

However, shengming is after all a very bazaar matter. It is precisely because the
practicality in shenghuo is ordinary and suffocating that it nurtures her
imagination in her soul… When she can single out the word “love” and pursue its
meaning, she starts to think about the contrast between the “classical” and the
“modern,” whose value and importance can be discerned based on her own
experiences. What allows the merging of poetry and fire and preserves the
classical beauty and elegance? What is the way of living that is learned from
modern popular films, whose artificiality reveals only hypocrisy and whose
vulgarity only vilifies life gradually?
285

She is consumed by this struggle between the “classical” and the “modern”, yet
she knows that in order to break the current life style she cannot rely on her thoughts and
imagination alone. She has to resort to language. Therefore, she searches for memories of
her past in the letters and poems that she has received, strives to record what she thinks
about now and hopes to communicate with her old friend through letters. Altman in her
studies on the epistolary form points out that letters are the “mediation with the
subconscious and with the past” as they frequently “serve as transitions to flashbacks”
and become the medium through which the past can be resurrected and reconstructed.
286

The letters and poems that she reads in this story serves not just as the medium for her to
get in contact with her past and to resurrect the past in order to resist the “unbearably
pragmatic present”. For her, the written words and the act of writing establish a space that

284
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 355.
285
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 355.
286
J. G. Altman, 42.
166
is between the real and the imaginary, a space through which she could try to “use
language to give a fixed form to her hope”
287
and to empower herself. This writing space
also becomes the medium for Shen Congwen to project his idea of “shengming” that is
romantic, poetic and undisturbed by all social forces. It is a lyrical space that can give
form to the dynamic and inchoate emotions and enable him to preserve the musicality and
fluidity of life in a set linguistic form.
Reading the poem that her old friend gave her three months ago, she feels that the
words have warmed her heart, as it reads:

The rose campion in the vase is as red as last year
This dusk is extremely quiet, extremely quiet
Think carefully about all the vicissitudes of life in the dusk
I see green grass spreading along the side of the pond
Let me ask you, shall I feel sad? Or shall I feel happy?
…
The world has completely changed. The world has completely changed.
Yes. Everything will change.
The rainbow over our heart will reappear after the rain

That which melts our character and soul is called love
How many times do we need our character and soul to be melted
Love is a strange word, as it burns one’s heart
Because of love, there are tens of thousands of stars in the sky,
and the Hesperus
In the quietness you stand, there is smile in your eyes
Your black hair and your pale face change into abstractness
288

This poem warms her heart, because it creates a poetic space that is about
intuition, passion and love by invoking images like the flower, the grass, the rainbow, the

287
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 361.
288
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 360.
167
stars, and the burning of the heart. By constantly calling upon the addressee “you”, the
poem starts off also as a private communication between the writer of the poem and
“you” and the poetic space is therefore personal and intimate. But towards the end of the
poem, when “your black hair and your pale face change into abstractness”, the personal
space is transformed into an abstract space in which “you” loses its specificity. The love
and beauty that are under discussion in the poem are no longer just between the writer
and the receiver of the poem, but develop into a form of existence that Shen Congwen
hopes to capture in his writing. This poem, therefore, serves at once as a medium for the
protagonist to break away from the immediate concerns of her life and get in touch with
her past and as a medium through which Shen Congwen as a writer can voice his own
opinion. It sets up a lyrical space that mediates between the private/personal and the
abstract/metaphysical.
What the letters and poems record, however, is not so much what happened in the
past between the senders of the letters and poems and the protagonist, but rather an ideal
of life, a projection of life, a dream. Writing the letters and poems, therefore, becomes a
way in which a virtual space could be set up to fill in the gap between reality and
imagination. One of the longer letters, numbered 71, reads:

Today I really entered a new world. Is it in reality or in dreams? I cannot tell at all,
nor do I want to tell the difference. …Everything is close to abstractness, even
more abstract than music. I am a little confused, and only feel as if something in
my life is dissolving in quietness, yet what is dissolved are just my senses…

Everything seems like a dream, and it is even more intangible than dreams,
leaving no traces.
289

289
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 368.
168
The act of writing, therefore, is to capture the amorphous and intangible thoughts,
emotions and dreams in a linguistic form. What cannot be experienced and realized in
reality yet has been constantly pursued and dreamed of is actualized through the act of
writing and within the linguistic space. This linguistic space is a poetic and lyrical space
in which the mechanistic words, images and facts are fused with intuitive feelings,
emotions and sensibilities. Thus, this space is characterized by its undecidability and
indeterminacy, a space that falls between reality and dream. In the same letter the writer
of the letter records in detail the dream he had, but his own categorization of the dream
emphasizes again the undecidability of such dream, as he says, “When I realized that this
could also be considered as a type of experience in life, I felt tears swell up in my eyes.
When I realized that this was just a type of abstractness, that it felt as if I just heard my
own sobbing, I lowered my head. This is what is called ‘life’ (rensheng).”
290
The almost
paradoxical sensibility to life that the lyrical “I” expresses here is also what Shen
Congwen wants to express through his works. It is a modern sensibility to life that sees
the experience of life as at once real and unreal, tangible and intangible. Yet one can only
access such emotional experience in a psychic space that is unbounded by all social
concerns, a state that is close to dream, as the lyrical “I” in the letter describes:

What flowers smelled so good and spread their scent in the lightly heated night?
There seemed to be a road in front me, which was so unfamiliar and so familiar at
the same time, and I wanted to take a walk. Following an unknown fruit tree, I
passed over two little hills, and walked toward a plain. Passing a slanted mountain
range, a few dried ponds, I walked slowly forward, and became very attentive to
every tree and grass along the road. - - I recognized everything clearly. There
were lilies on the side of the road. They were white with some bluish shade and

290
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 369.
169
waving in the gentle wind, lightly and quietly. There was also a sea of blue
flowers on the side of the valley, and they were so blue as if they were made to
imitate the color of the sky. They were so beautiful to the eyes that all human
languages appeared to be weak and powerless and lose their meanings in this
situation. I plucked a lily with dew. Just when I could not figure out how to
properly describe the magic of nature, I suddenly felt frightened. The fear that I
felt was similar to that the priest feels upon the enticement of a corporeal
phantasm described in the stories. Then I woke up. … The Songs of Solomon and
Songs of Chu are only a form of sorrowful dream. “All beautiful poems are in fact
a form of dream.”
291

The letter, for the protagonist of the story, Her, is a record of a dream, but she
believes that as dream is dreamed by human beings, what is dreamed is also a form of life
(shengming). It is only in this state can one see what goes unnoticed in life, appreciate the
wonders of nature and allow the instantaneous evocation of the deepest sensual and
emotional response. While at the same time, such experience and response can only be
ephemeral and transient, because as soon as one feels it, one wakes up and is brought
back to the real world. This particular form and experience of life is what she calls
“classical and lyrical” and does not fit the needs of the modern society. Her personal life
is exactly caught in the “struggle between the classical lyricism and modern practicality
and in the struggle between the needs of the soul and needs of daily life.”
292
She wants to
resort to language, which can solidify her dream, take her back to the “past” and help her
face the “future”, so she writes in a letter to her old friend. But once the letter is written,
she burns it. She is afraid that the letter will only incur unnecessary rumors and cause
more misunderstanding. Yet she also feels pitiful that the letter is burned, as “at current

291
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 369.
292
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 363.
170
times, this life that is filled with youthful dreams could not find anywhere in this world to
be settled.”
293
Not even in words, in language. After reading a number of letters from the
past, she realizes that “poetry and fire”, which are indeed recorded in those letters and
poems, have been further and further away from her life and cannot even be resurrected
after searching in her memory. She again wants to write letters to her old friends, but
when she takes up her pen she does not even know what to write. She hopes to use
language and writing to empower herself and reshape her life, but in the end, “she seems
to understand everything, but doesn’t really know in what way she can really have her
life reconstructed.”
294

The burning of the letter and the impossibility even to write reveal a similar
suspicion of language that Shen Congwen expresses in his prose essays. Language and
writing offer him a lyrical space in which he can explore the deep psyche of his
protagonist and himself and capture the most elusive and intangible emotional experience
of life that is not tainted by the larger social or political concerns, yet he also realizes the
impossibility of language to accurately represent the dynamic and inchoate emotional and
life experiences. Just as what Bergson argues, as soon as the words are formed and
written the meaning of the words will turn against the sensations that generate them. Thus,
Shen Congwen’s attitude toward language is ambivalent, if not paradoxical. He invests in
writing a power that would lift him from the mundane world and allow him to pursue
instead what he refers to as a form of shengming or the essential way of living in the

293
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 363.
294
Shen Congwen, “Zhaixing lu,” in SCWQJ, 10: 383.
171
linguistic space that is lyrical and is at once real and imaginary. It is a spatialization of
life that is rendered atemporal. Yet in the meantime, the realization of the limitation of
language and the limitation of Apollonian form and regulation makes him lament the
impossibility to represent in a set form the dynamic and Dionysian emotional,
psychological and sensational aspects of life, which are constantly moving, constantly
changing, and are defined not only by temporality but also and especially by the concept
of instantaneity and transitoriness.
If in “Zhai xinglu”, Shen Congwen resorts to the epistolary form to represent his
ideal of life, a form of shengming that can only be experienced and represented in a
lyrical and psychological space that occupies the liminal space between reality and
imagination, in “Kanhong lu” (Gazing at Rainbows)
295
, probably the most famous and
most representative story he wrote during his Kunming period, Shen Congwen further
blurs the boundary between real life and dream. In addition, by switching between the
first person narrative and the third person narrative and by introducing an innovative way
of communication between the protagonists Shen Congwen further complicates the ways
in which meaning is generated in the narrative.
When “Kanhong lu” was first published, because the work itself contains pretty
explicit sexual content, it incurred a lot of criticism. Even though it was published in the
journal Xin wenxue (New Literature), the editor of the journal pointed out, “The recent
writing style of Shen Congwen seems to start with an attempt to discuss issues in life, but
then adds his consistent pursuit of sexual desire, and ends with praise of the ‘poetry and

295
“Kanhong lu” was written in July 1941, and was revised in July 1943 and published in the first issue of the
journal Xin wenxue in Guilin.
172
fire in shengming.’ This is probably a reflection of Shen Congwen’s attitude to life.”
296

Other critics are more explicit and ruthless in their criticism. Xu Jie argued that
“Kanhong lu” was a piece of pornographic literature, because even though it used
psychoanalysis and symbolism in the narrative, it was in fact a eulogy to sexual desire.
Not only did it not fit the war time, Xu further argued, even if it were in peaceful times,
works like this would only contaminate the minds of the young generation.
297
Guo Moruo
went a step further. Besides calling Shen Congwen a pornographic writer, he linked the
piece directly to his political stand, and argued that Shen Congwen “has always been
consciously engaged in activities that would classify him as a counterrevolutionary.”
298

“Kanhong lu” is an exemplary work of Shen Congwen’s experimentation with language
and writing style during his Kunming period, however, it has been left out of most of the
collections of his works published after the 1980s. According to He Guimei, it was only
until September 1992 that “Kanhong lu” was finally republished in the 13
th
volume of
Jishou University Journal and started to receive more and more attention from the
literary critics.
299

What Shen Congwen strives to create in this piece of writing is an abstract world
of shengming that rises above the mundane world. This search for abstractness is derived

296
Quoted from He Guimei, “‘Kanhong lu’ de zhuiqiu yu mingyun” (The Pursuit and Fate of ‘Kanhong lu’), in
Qian Liqun, ed., Duihua yu manyou: sishi niandai xiaoshuo yanjiu (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chuban she,
1999), 134.
297
Quoted from He Guimei, 134-35.
298
Guo Moruo, “Chi fandong wenyi” (Reprimand ing Anti-Revolutionary Literature and Art), in Dazhong wenyi
congkan (March 1948). Quoted from He Guimei, 135.
299
He Guimei, 134.
173
from Shen Congwen’s obsession with the real world and his lyrical yearning for an
imaginary world. Such yearning often implies an escape from reality which socialist
critics would condemn as sensually decadent. It is only until recently that critics and
scholars can finally break away from the leftist critical mode that was concerned more
with the moral and political implication of the work than its artistic merit and objectively
evaluate this work without imposing any moral or political standard on it. He Guimei
argues that in his works during the Kunming period, Shen Congwen puts forward three
concepts, “shengming”, “beauty” and “love” and tries to suspend all cultural and social
phenomena and discover the abstract yet eternal essence of shengming from his own
personal experience.
300
Fan Zhihong in her study on Shen Congwen’s fiction in the 1940s
further emphasizes Shen’s pursuit of abstractness and argues that what Shen Congwen
wants to represent through his “music compositional method” and what his abstract
“beauty” refers to are nothing but a type of “abstractness”. In “Kanhong lu”, the “I” that
“gazes into the void” and “gets dizzy at the sight of such a void” travels from the “void”
back to reality only to recreate a world of this “void” with language.
301

Both critics and many others seem to regard this abstract world of Shen Congwen
as a stable and promising world in which Shen can separate himself completely from all
worldly concerns and pursue instead an abstract world of beauty and deeper meaning of
life. What they seem to miss is the ambivalent feeling that Shen has toward this world of
abstractness. For Shen Congwen, this world of abstractness seems to exist only in

300
He Guimei, 137.
301
Fan Zhihong, “‘Xiang xukong ningmou’: shijiu shiji sishi niandai Shen Congwen de xiaoshuo” (Gazing into
the Emptiness: A Study of Shen Congwen’s Fiction in the 1940s), in Jishou daxue xuebao (shehui kexueban), no.
22. 2 (2001): 80-83.
174
imagination and dream. In order to render such imagination or dream and bridge the gap
between the real and the imaginary, Shen Congwen has to use language to set up a
writing space that would allow him to explore the ultimate manifestation of life through
the description of beauty and the dynamic emotions. Yet, he also deeply suspects
language’s capacity to truthfully represent the essence of shengming, which is ultimately
indescribable as it is constantly changing and flowing. The fluidity of life is, therefore,
unrepresentational. Furthermore, wandering in the liminal space between reality and
dream, Shen Congwen is pulled at once by his urge to stay in his imagination and dream
and by the force of reality that brings him back to the real world. His anxiety of writing,
thus, is not just a sign of his suspicion of language, but also a sign of his uncertainty and
ambivalence toward his own life experience. He desires to escape into the “abstractness”,
the imaginary world, or the world of words, but he also finds it impossible really to
escape, as he is always awakened, always brought back to reality, and always aware that
the world that writing creates is not equivalent to his imagination or dream and will never
be. The act of writing becomes also a search for self, a self that is confused and lost in the
struggle between the real and the imaginary. The narrative form of the story “Kanhong
lu” exemplifies how Shen Congwen shifts back and forth between the real world and the
imaginary world and how his writing destabilizes the world of abstractness which he
constantly strives to create and stabilize.
“Kanhong Lu” is divided into three sections. The first section is written in first
person and starts off with the “I” coming home from another place in the evening and
passing by an old-fashioned house. In the vastness and quietness of the night, “I” feel that
175
“the vast empty space seemed to be broadening out my feelings, though the silence was
changing those “feelings” – formless, shapeless, and compressed into a block of time –
into something of substance.”
302
Upon the smell of the scent of plum blossom, “I” start to
gaze into the “emptiness” and slowly walk toward the “emptiness”. The physical location
that “I” stand at, the old-fashioned house, transforms into a mental and psychological
space, which takes on a physical form as “I” step into “a little courtyard, and then a plain
and simple little room, with a stove”
303
and start reading a strange book. Section two,
therefore, is the unfolding of this strange book, and a description of the psychological and
emotional space of “mine”. The intricate transition from the personal narrative from the
perspective of “I” to the supposedly impersonal narrative in the book that the “I” is
reading makes it possible for Shen Congwen to switch from first-person narrative in the
first section to the third-person narrative in the second, as if it were only a story from the
book. At the beginning of the third section, the narrative is switched back to the first
person as the book becomes a site of “blue flame, disappearing into emptiness”
304
and the
“I” has left that “room” and returned to the old-fashioned house. Sheng Congwen seems
to use the difference in the narrative mode, the division of sections, and the change of
locations to mark a clear division between the real world and the imaginary world. The
constant mentioning of time in the first and third section and the seemingly intentional
omission of time in the second further emphasizes the difference, as the real world seems

302
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” in Jeffrey Kinkley, ed., Imperfect Paradise, 464.
303
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” in Jeffrey Kinkley, ed., Imperfect Paradise, 464.
304
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” in Jeffrey Kinkley, ed., Imperfect Paradise, 477-78.
176
to be defined by temporality while the imaginary is atemporal. At the very beginning of
the text, Shen Congwen sets up the time frame of the story, as he writes, “the shape of
one person’s life in a twenty-four hour period.” We could, therefore, possibly assume
that the “I” of sections one and three and the third-person “guest” in section two are
indeed interchangeable, so that what is unfolded in the seemingly impersonal and
atemporal description of the “unique book” is indeed the psychological and emotional
responses of the “I”. If the “I” is constantly struggling between two worlds, the real and
the imaginary, as he is directed to the “emptiness” yet later brought back to the real world,
the acting of writing is not just to celebrate the abstract or the imaginary “emptiness” that
most critics seems to argue, but presents also the transitoriness and instability of such an
imaginary world and the impermeability of reality and dream in the existence of a human
being.
When the narrative mode changes from the first-person to the third-person, it
allows the author to shift from the personal and autobiographical space to an objective
space even if this space is also about the psychological dynamics of “I”. This shift also
makes it possible to for the suspension of all social and moral forces and creates instead a
space of abstractness, a space in which Shen can depict a form of beauty, which he refers
to as “godlike,” as if seeing this beauty is getting closer to God. It is ultimately a
manifestation of the beauty of life, the essential form of existence. Relating such beauty
to God is not to show his religious belief or tendency but rather to show that this beauty is
stately, and should not be subjected to any worldly judgment. In his long prose memoir
“Shuiyun,” Shen Congwen points out that the appreciation of perfection and delicacy of
177
the young female body produced by Nature that he records in “Kanhong Lu” is beyond
all social and moral judgments and is art that reflects a type of existence in life:

The strangest thing is that here there is no sexual desire, but only art. The stance
that I take is indeed a stance of an art connoisseur. What I care about is only a
form of existence in life, and a form of natural morality. There is no clash and it is
beyond all utilitarian concerns. From the body of a human being I get to know
God. Up till now, except in a short story “Kanhong Lu” I described such
experience, I have never used other methods to endanger such a godlike
impression.
305

This experience is described in the second section of “Kanhong Lu,” in which a
guest steps into a room heated by the stove in a cold winter night and meets the female
host. They chat verbally but also communicate through a deeper connection in thoughts.
The beauty and attraction of the female body are disclosed through the thoughts of the
guest, through the story that the guest has written and presented to the host in which the
body of a female deer is carefully described, and through the letter that the guest leaves
for the host in which the beauty of the body is compared to “a radiance, a bouquet of
flowers, a wondrous cloud,” as well as to wine, to delicate porcelain, to painting, to
sculpture, and to a lily.
306
Most critics have noticed the explicit depiction of the female
body in this section. Some like those in the 1940s call such description pornographic;
recent critics who are able to suspend their moral judgment and look at the work from an
artistic perspective regard such description as a representation of the ultimate beauty that
Shen Congwen pursues. Shen Congwen does hope to discover and uncover the ultimate

305
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12: 117.
306
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” in Imperfect Paradise, 476-77.
178
beauty and the essence of life through writing. For him writing is a way in which a
domain that is beyond all social forces can be established, a space that bridges the gap
between reality and dream can be created and the essential form of existence can be
explored. Yet at the same time, Shen Congwen is also fully aware of the inadequacy of
language, and the impossibility of language to fully represent the form of existence in life
that he hopes to pursue. He compares this form of existence to a photographic legend in
his memoir “Shuiyun”:

It can be called a book of photographic legend, whose color is simple and gentle,
whose line is clear and lofty, and within which there is not a single word. Because
it is like this, this legend is so solemn that I could not use ordinary language to
describe it. The only way to represent this sublime and beautiful feeling of mine is
via music. However, when it comes to representing a gentle sigh, a type of gaze
that comes from the tearing bright eyes, a sort of modest compromise that is
combined with love and complaint or a slight approach that comes from
thankfulness or trustful following, a whiteness that symbolizes extreme morality,
a shock that results from awe and admiration, even music loses its meaning
altogether.
307

Therefore, the intricate, delicate and dynamic emotion that a human being has is
ultimately unrepresentational in Shen Congwen’s opinion. But to render such emotional
dynamics, he will have to resort to language and he hopes to write in a way that can be
compared to composing music as he believes that music is better for the representation of
such emotion. Thus, when critics like He Guimei argue that Shen Congwen invests too
much thought and emotion in his writing that “breaks the completeness of the story,
makes the meaning of the story overpower the plot, and makes what is expressed in the

307
Shen Congwen, “Shuiyun,” in SCWQJ, 12: 117.
179
story fail to represent what he intends to express,”
308
they do not see that Shen Congwen
is fully aware that what he intends to express or represent through his writing is in fact
unrepresentational. Breaking away from the linear narrative and experimenting with a
narrative mode that is spatialized rather than linear by setting up multiple writing spaces
within the text, Shen Congwen hopes to reinvent in writing a representational power that
can be similar to that of music, which is not linear and fixed but rather fluid and
multidimensional. Thus, in “Kanhong lu,” we notice the constant change in the physical
locations of “I”, from the old-fashioned house, to the room of the female host, and then
back to the old-fashioned house and to the private study of “I”, and the changes in the
locations help set up in writing two different yet also mutually permeating spaces, the
space of reality and the space of dream. Even within the space of dream, the
spatialization of writing is prominent, which makes what is initially intended to be
expressed always be represented through reference and constant deferral.
In section two, the guest and the host have an intimate conversation. The
conversation is about love, about desire, about the deep psyche and the most intricate
emotional responses of these two protagonists. But in addition to recording the said
words, the real conversation, Shen Congwen also chooses other ways to record what has
not been said, but yet is indeed communicated between these two protagonists.
Sometimes he presents what is spoken, but then writes, “The real meaning is…”;
sometimes he records the conversation but then uses parentheses after each response to
present a secondary communication that is unsaid; sometimes, he even goes so far as to

308
He Guimei, 141.
180
write out a long “conversation” between the two protagonists, but writes afterwards,
“There are just the two of them inside, and outside it is quiet, with only the sound of
snowflakes floating down on the windowpane… The visitor thinks he can almost hear
this conversation between them, but what he really hears is only his own heartbeat.”
309

What is recorded in the “alternative meaning”, in the unvoiced conversation, and in the
parentheses is about desire and erotic desire in particular. The use of such methods to
render desire, particularly erotic desire, effects a spatialization of the writing itself. The
real conversation and the reserved expressions of the two characters are set apart from the
alternative “conversation” and the parenthetical text, which represent another space of
writing, a space in which the most intimate and erotic thought can be recorded. What is
unleashed in this particular writing space is the most natural and unhindered thought and
the most intricate and erotic desire, which are regarded as the essential form of existence,
a form of “shengming” by Shen Congwen. But the sharp contrast between these two
writing spaces, between what has been said and what has to be kept silent makes it clear
that this essential form of shengming is what ultimately cannot be verbalized and
represented in language. It is a series of constantly changing and evolving emotional and
psychological states, but once it is voiced or recorded, it will lose its original potency, the
power to be communicated and understood through our emotional mechanism rather than
words. There is, therefore, an intrinsically paradoxical feature to this writing space, as it
is a space in which Shen Congwen hopes to record via language what he believes firmly
cannot be rendered in language.

309
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” in Imperfect Paradise, 471.
181
The anxiety of writing that runs through most of the works that Shen Congwen
produced during this period reflects also his concern that once the thoughts and
imagination are transformed into the linguistic form, the text will always be subjected to
judgments and be restricted by the social norms. Writing, henceforth, has to be elusive
and indirect, so that what is intended to be expressed always has to be deferred in
representation as it is always referred to something else that is less explicit. Shen
Congwen comments on his writing in “Kanhong lu”: “The language is too obscure – not
in accord with ordinary usage” because if the way of thinking or behavior does not
conform to norms it will “run the risk of being seen as very dangerous, as leading to
anarchy.”
310
As a result, even though Shen Congwen hopes to use language to fill the gap
between reality and imagination and create a space of writing that can be unbounded by
all social forces and describe what he calls the essential form of life, he is always
conscious of the very impossibility of such task.
What he chooses to do is then to constantly set up new spaces of writing that will
redirect the attention and shift the weight of intensity from the real to the imaginary.
Therefore, the depiction of desire, of the natural emotional and physical responses
between a man and a woman, and of the delicate beauty of the female body become
perpetually delayed and dislocated (relocated) in the text. As the beginning of the text
says, the story is about the form of existence within twenty-four hours. It is, henceforth,
about the thoughts and imagination of “I”. Yet nothing is directly or explicitly expressed.
As “I” gazes into the emptiness, we are directed to a space of writing that is about his

310
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” in Imperfect Paradise, 470.
182
imagination and deeper thoughts, taking form in the writing space of the strange book
that the “I” reads, and it is within this space that we encounter the guest and the host. The
psychological and emotional dynamics of “I” are now transferred to those of the two
protagonists of this strange book. Then again, new spaces of writing are set up when the
communication between these two protagonists is divided into two interrelated yet also
distinctive modes, one voiced and one silent. The gap between what is verbally expressed
and what is left unsaid yet efficiently communicated produces again the dislocation of the
description of desire, as the internal dynamics of these two people cannot be sufficiently
represented by language, either by spoken conversation or by explicitly written words.
The expression of erotic desire is further deferred when the guest presents to the host a
piece of fiction that he recently composed in which the body of a female deer is carefully
and provocatively described, and later the next morning when the host starts reading a
letter that the guest leaves behind in which erotic experience is compared to a dream and
the beautiful body of the female host is compared to a series of sophisticated and delicate
works of art. The persistent reference to other sources of writing and other writing spaces
keeps the representation of desire and the intimate and emotional responses of the
protagonists perpetually delayed, redirected and dislocated. Through the employment of
this spatialized narrative mode in which new spaces of writing is constantly set up, Shen
Congwen shows persistence in creating a space of writing that could render the essential
form of existence and life that goes beyond all social and moral forces. However, he also
reveals the impossibility of a truthful representation of this form of life, as the vitality and
fluidity of such form is always lost when it is rendered in language. And even if a new
183
narrative mode can be employed to break the linear feature of the linguistic form through
setting up new spaces of writing, the representation of this form becomes continually
dislocated as it will always be located in the space that is set up “next”, not the present.
In section three of “Kanhong lu”, when the “I” finally come back to the real world
and return to the private study, even though “I have never fashioned the patterns I
understand of Life into language and forms that create a new model for Life and the
soul,” the “I” finally records the imaginary experience, and this five-thousand word story,
as Shen Congwen comments, “I know there is a place I can mail this little composition
where others will consider it “fiction” and try to ferret out the factual and the fictitious in
it. But to me – just a vestige of Life, the remnants of a dream.”
311
Though he is
“extremely stubborn” in trying to write a description of the essential form of shengming
and the experience of life, Shen Congwen is also aware that this form of existence is
often “lost in the sunlight and forgotten in time! All disappear, all are lost, and when you
search for them, all that is left is just as withered and charred.”
312
Thus, for the “I” of the
story, and for Shen Congwen, when the strange book that he is reading changes into blue
flame and disappears into the emptiness, he is brought back to the real world, and realizes,
“Only that blue flame was preserved within my Life. Preserved elsewhere must be a
small heap of ashes. The remnants of shengming, like a withered plum blossom that has
lost its color and scent during the time of my imaginings.”
313
Thus, in Shen Congwen’s

311
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” 479-80.
312
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” 479.
313
Shen Congwen, “Gazing at Rainbows,” 478, with some minor revisions.
184
works, there is an affirmation of the act of writing as a way in which the gap between the
real and the imaginary can be bridged and a space in which the most intimate and
inchoate thoughts and emotions can be expressed. While at the same time, there is also a
resistance to the act of writing, because what is thought and what is written can never be
equated. Shen Congwen’s deep suspicion of language leads to his conviction of the
inadequacy of language in its representational power. The essence of life and the essential
form of existence resist all forms of representation, as “when time goes by in life, it
passes without leaving anything behind,” so that the persistent pursuit in recording such
experience is itself a re-experience of “existence” (shengcun) and the fluidity of life,
while the language only records the residue, the trace, and the cinders of life and
imagination.

***
In “Heiyan” (Black Dream), Shen Congwen writes, “If you look above sea level,
you will see a handful of stars, blinking dim light. From the calm starlight, I see eternity,
certain power, and certain will.”
314
Claiming that great art originates from the inspiration
that the artist gains upon seeing such starlight, Shen Congwen compares the power of art
to the light of stars and celebrates its eternity, power, and will. It is this belief in the
power of art that drives him toward the pursuit of abstract lyricism during the 1940s,
hoping to reaffirm the capacity of art to capture the ephemeral and transitory yet rise
above the temporal into a transcendental space. He criticizes the material and utilitarian

314
Shen Congwen, “Heiyan” (Black Dream), in SCWQJ, 12: 172.
185
aspects of shenghuo because the indulgence in utilitarianism makes human beings the
same as animals.
315
The act of writing, therefore, represents the writers’ pursuit of
shengming, which is divorced from the corporeality and materiality of shenghuo so that it
points to eternity and preserves the otherwise ephemeral form of life.
316

However, despite the persistent efforts in thinking in abstract terms and pursuing
abstract lyricism, Shen Congwen was in fact constantly struck by the paradoxical aspects
of his own pursuits. Criticizing the corrupted forms of shenghuo and celebrating the
spiritual and transcendental aspect of shengming, Shen Congwen seems to favor
abstraction over materiality. Yet he also sees the interdependence between these two
terms, as he writes, “Because beauty is closer to ‘God’, then it is further away from
‘human’. Shenming has the spirit of God, and shenghuo stays in the human world…
Emotions are light so that they can fly high and break away from this world, yet the
corporeal body is heavy and should always stay close to earth.”
317
Thus, even though he
longs to break away from the constrictions of the material world and seek eternity and
transcendence in the spiritual and abstract space of shengming, Shen Congwen
nonetheless realizes the impossibility of a complete divorce from materiality, as our
corporeal body is forever bounded to earth, to this world. Furthermore, he resorts to
language for the purpose of setting up a lyrical space which mediates between the real
and the imaginary and grants access to the most inchoate and dynamic aspects of life, but

315
Shen Congwen, “Xiaoshuo zuozhe he duzhe” (The Writers and Readers of Fiction), in SCWQJ, 12: 70-71.
316
Shen Congwen, “Xiaoshuo zuozhe he duzhe,” 71.
317
Shen Congwen, “Qianyuan,” in SCWQJ, 12: 34.
186
he also notes the inadequacy of language in portraying the essence of life and existence
which in fact resist all forms of representation.
These paradoxical aspects of his pursuits lead to constant struggle and frustration.
He describes his state of mind as such, “[My] life and soul have both become broken and
fragmented, and I need to use a new viewpoint to stick the broken pieces back together,
or use another kind of light and heat of my character to bake them, in order to get a new
self.”
318
The new viewpoint or the new character can no longer be found in the abstract
space of his pursuit. When Shen Congwen claims, “I need quietness; I need to go to an
absolutely isolated environment to digest the concreteness and abstractness in
shengming… I have to be completely isolated from the outside world in order to get
closer to ‘myself’,” we see how quietness and solitude only draw him into deeper
contemplation and confusion. His only salvation comes from the smile of his wife and
children, and the sweet voice of his family that takes him out of his deep thinking, his
daydream, and his submersion in abstraction. As he writes, “From her smile, from the
warm atmosphere at home that is filled with children’s eagerness to play, I slowly
transform from a set of abstract thoughts into a concrete person.”
319
Shen Congwen’s
journey in the 1940s, therefore, can be captured in a trajectory in which he endeavors to
break free from the material world through the pursuit of the abstract and lyrical space
and then eventually is brought back to the corporeal, material, and the mundane world.

318
Shen Congwen, “Zhuxu,” in SCWQJ, 12: 27.
319
Shen Congwen, “Lüyan” (Green Dream), in SCWQJ, 12: 156.
187
CHAPTER THREE
Drama-tic Synthesis: Theories and Practices of the Nine Leaves Poets
Represented by Yuan Kejia and Mu Dan

We hope we can have a hope,
Then, humiliation, pain, struggle, and death,
Because there is courage rushing through our shining blood,
Yet in the middle of courage: bewilderment,

We hope we can have a hope,
It says: I am not beautiful, but I will no longer cheat,
Because we see in the eyes of the dead
The flames of tears flicker in our despair.
……
We only hope that we can have a hope as revenge.

----------- Mu Dan, “Current Reflections”

In the war-ridden years of the 1940s, the city of Kunming served as a literary
haven for many writers. We already examined the works of Feng Zhi and Shen Congwen,
both of whom taught at the Southwest Associated University in Kunming, an associated
university of the three best higher education institutions of China, including Tsinghua
University, Peking University, and Nankai University. The Southwest Associated
University was also where four of the Nine Leaves Poets, a group of poets that we will
discuss in this chapter, attended college, came into contact with the Western modernist
tradition, and started to establish themselves as modernist poets. These four poets are Mu
Dan (1918-1977), Du Yunxie (1918-2002), Zheng Min (1920- ), and Yuan Kejia (1921-
2008). The other five members, Xin Di (1912-2004), Hang Yuehe (1917-1995), Chen
Jingrong (1917-1989), Tang Qi (1920-1990), and Tang Shi (1920-2005), started their
188
poetic career in different geographical locations first, but gathered in Shanghai in the late
1940s to start publishing poetic journals because of their shared poetic sensibilities.
These nine poets are later referred to as the Nine Leaves Poets, upon the publication of
their selective works under the title Jiuye ji (Nine Leaves Collection) in 1981. It is
generally believed that the Nine Leaves School was formed when the journal Shi
chuangzao (Poetry Creation) (July 1947 – June 1948) was published and that the school
matured during the publication of another journal Zhongguo xinshi (Chinese New Poetry)
(June 1948 – October 1948), which created an opportunity for the poets of the Southwest
Associated University to join their Shanghai counterparts in poetry writing and
publication.
The Nine Leaves Poets are a group of “self-conscious modernists,” representing
the “New-born Generation of Poets,” in the words of Tang Shi, a poet and literary critic
of the Nine Leaves School.
320
These poets emerged in the 1940s, the tumultuous years of
war and social instability, when the literary scene of China was dictated by the policy on
literature and art promoted by Mao Zedong at the Yan’an Forum in 1942, during which
Mao emphasized the importance of political demands over artistic requirements and
argued that literature and art should serve workers, peasants, and soldiers.
321
Reacting
against the contemporary prevailing trends of poetry, “the sentimental and the

320
Tang Shi, “Shi de xinshengdai” (The New-Born Generation of Poets), in Shi chuangzao (Poetry Creation) 8
(February 1948). Reprinted in Wang Shengsi, ed., “Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliaoxuan (Selected Critical Writings on
the Nine Leaves Poets) (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1995), 28-32.
321
Mao Zedong, “Zai yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shangde jianghua” (Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and
Art), Mao Zedong xuanji, 4:847-79.
189
didactic,”
322
the poets of the Nine Leaves School made a conscious effort to strike a
balance between aesthetic value and social commitment in their poetic diction, as they
employ Western modernist poetic devices in their writing while at the same time
expanding their poems’ thematic scope, from introspective and individualistic themes to
more socially engaged topics in order to respond to their particular social and historical
situation.
What makes this group of poets particularly valuable to our study of the
reconfiguration of modernism in China during the 1940s lies not only in their conscious
efforts in revolting against the dominant poetic trends of their time, but also, and
precisely, in their constant endeavor to construct a new poetic tradition. This new poetic
tradition is called by Yuan Kejia, a poet and literary critic of the Nine Leaves School, as
“Modernism with Chinese Characteristics” in the 1980s.
323
To be more specific, this new
poetic tradition can be described again in the words of Yuan Kejia as “a new synthetic
tradition of reality (xianshi), symbolism (xiangzheng), and metaphysics (xuanxue),” a

322
Yuan Kejia, “Xinshi xiju hua” (Dramatization in New Poetry), in Shi chuangzao 12 (June 1948). Reprinted in
Yuan Kejia, Bange shiji de jiaoyin – Yuan Kejia shiwenxuan (Footprints of Half a Century: Selected Poems and
Prose of Yuan Kejia) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1994), 65-72.
323
Yuan Kejia, “Zi Xu” (Preface), in Bange shiji de jiaoyin – Yuan Kejia shiwenxuan, 2. The term “zhongguo shi
xiandai zhuyi” (Modernism with Chinese Characteristics) has now been used by many critics. See Sun Yushi,
Zhongguo xiandai zhuyi shichao shilun (The History of Chinese Modernist Poetic Trend) (Bejing: University of
Beijing, 1999), Chapter 2-9. Also see Liu Qiang, “Zhongguoshi de xiandaipai yishu: dui Jiuye shipai jiqi
chuangzuo de yanjiu” (Modernist Art with Chinese Characteristics: A Study on The Nine Leaves School and
Their Works), in Dangdai zuojia pinglun (Critical Review of Contemporary Writers) 6 (1996):86-93.; Wang
Delu, “Jiuye shipai: Zhongguo xinshi lishi zonghe de jiebiao” (The Nine Leaves School: Milestone of Historical
Synthesis in Modern Chinese Poetry), in Guizhou shehui kexue 2 (1996): 51-70; Jiang Dengke, “Xifang xiandai
zhuyi shsige yu jiuye shipai de liupai tezheng” (The Characteristics of Western Modernist Poetry and the Nine
Leaves School), in Shehui kexue yanjiu (Social Science Studies) 1 (2000): 143-47.
190
path towards the modernization of Chinese New Poetry spelled out in a series of essay
written by Yuan Kejia in the 1940s.
324

Yet how does this “new synthetic tradition” differ from the dominant poetic
tradition at the time as well as the modernist tradition of the West to make it a “Modernist
Tradition with Chinese Characteristics”? To answer this question, I would like to direct
our attention again to the notions of temporality represented in the poems and poetic
criticism of the Nine Leaves Poets. I argue that this “new synthetic tradition” can be
called as “drama-tic synthesis,” and the word drama-tic carries two levels of meaning,
both of which reject linear temporality as the organizing frame for New Poetry.
On the one hand, “drama-tic synthesis” refers to a kind of synthesis that relates to
drama, or in Yuan Kejia’s words, the “dramatization in poetry.” In his series of essays on
the modernization of Chinese New Poetry, Yuan Kejia proposes that this modernization,
the synthesis of “reality, symbolism, and metaphysics,” can be achieved through the
“dramatization in poetry,” a poetic device that has been employed in the West and can
already be discerned in the works of his peers, the Nine Leaves Poets.
325
I argue that by
insisting on writing verse in the form of drama or with dramatic effect, Yuan envisions a
temporal logic for New Poetry that defies the linear temporal logic that dominates the
contemporary poetic scene and suggests the possibility of a multi-level structure for

324
Yuan Kejia, “Xinshi xiandaihua – xin chuantong de xunqiu” (Modernization of New Poetry – A Search for
New Tradition), Dagong bao – Xingqi wenyi (March 30), 1947. Reprinted in “Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliaoxuan,
13-19.
325
Yuan Kejia, “Xinshi xiju hua” (Dramatization in New Poetry), in Bangge shiji de jiaoyin – Yuan Kejia
shiwenxuan, 68.
191
poetry which is congruent with the Western modernist poetic tradition that assumes a
non-linear and spatial logic as suggested by Joseph Frank.
On the other hand, I argue that “drama-tic synthesis” of “reality, symbolism, and
metaphysics” implies a dramatic, or a rather spectacular and striking, re-thinking of time,
memory, and history. When Yuan Kejia states that modernist poetry demonstrates a
highly synthetic feature and that New Poetry should “be rooted in the fullest breath of
consciousness of modern men and embrace the influence of Western modernist poetry
represented by T. S. Eliot,”
326
what he has in mind are two modernists, I. A. Richards and
T. S. Eliot. Privileging Richards’ theory on the psychological process of consciousness
and Eliot’s proposition of the contact between past and present, tradition and
contemporaneity, Yuan Kejia as well as the other Nine Leaves Poets understand history
no longer as objective and scientific truth, or a constellation of events existing in the past
that have no bearing on the present. Insisting on drawing from the “Great Memory”
suggested by Yeats, and on the “permeation between tradition and contemporaneity,” the
Nine Leaves Poets see human life or history as ordered through multi-layers of
consciousness with no strict separation between past and present. This new historical
consciousness is different from that of their May-Fourth predecessors and many of their
contemporaries and takes the form of what Fredric Jameson calls “existential
historicism.”
327

326
Yuan Kejia, “Xinshi xiandaihua de zaifenxi – jishu zhu pingmian de toushi” (Further Analysis of the
Modernization of New Poetry – Perspective on Issues of Its Technical Aspect), Dagong bao ·Xingqi wenyi (May
18), 1947. Reprinted in “Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliaoxuan, 20-28.
327
Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), 156-57.
192
However, even though the Nine Leaves Poets, like their Western modernist idol
Eliot, believe that the past and present are ultimately mingled, their respective attitudes
toward the past are quite different. I argue that the Nine Leaves Poets demonstrate in their
works an ambivalent attitude toward the past. At times they regard the past as an
unbearable burden that has to be taken off, at other times they appreciate the continuity
between past and present and see history unfold in the present through the very quest of
the past. Unlike Eliot, who seeks to resurrect the past to piece together the fragmented
and disintegrated present in his writing, the Nine Leaves Poets are obsessed with the
present. The present, the “Now,” for the Nine Leaves Poets signifies at once disruption
and continuity. It is a moment that is constantly haunted by the past yet at the same it is
also a moment that is constantly enriched by the past. This obsession with the “Now” also
reveals ultimately in their writing a certain optimism toward the future not unlike that
shown by their May Fourth predecessors and their contemporaries, despite the fact that
they refuse to use linear temporality as the organizing frame for their poetic creation. I
would like to single out one poet, however, in the last part of this chapter, and argue that
in the poems of Mu Dan we can discern another type of historical sense, a vision of
history that is not linear but cyclical. I argue that many of Mu Dan’s poems reveal an
understanding of history as trapped in the eternal cycle of darkness, which is caused by
the prevailing violence present in human society that crushes all sorts of hope. Even
though in Mu Dan’s poems the future often seems to repeat the same pattern as the past,
as opposed to the progress and change that his fellow Nine Leaves Poets foresee, Mu Dan
is not pessimistic nor is he negative toward life and history. Bringing Nietzsche’s theory
193
of “eternal recurrence” into the discussion, I argue that Mu Dan, as he faces the
overwhelmingly powerful force of time and history that seems to put everything in
eternal and tragic cyclical movements, believes that the only thing he should and can do
is to affirm life and embrace even the hardship and atrocity. It is only through this
Nietzschean affirmation of life that we human beings can finally break away from the
eternal cycle of tragic history.

Drama-tic Synthesis and Dramatization in Poetry
When Yuan Kejia wrote his series of essays on the modernization of New Poetry,
he was writing in response to the prevailing literary trend at the time. In “Modernization
of New Poetry – A Search for New Tradition,” Yuan Kejia claims that the dominant
poetic trend at the time lacks the “power of imagination” essential to romanticism and the
“keen observation” essential to realism so that it can only be described by its three main
characteristics, that is, “formalism,” “collectivism,” and “backwardness.”
328
The failure
of these poems, according to Yuan, lies in the way in which poetry is composed, in “the
process of transforming intentions or emotions into poetic experience.” He writes,

The majority of the poems that we read at present fall into two categories: one
aims at stating one’s intentions or beliefs, hoping to effectively influence the
intentions or beliefs of others through poetry. Another aims to express one’s
strong emotion, also hoping to affect others through poetry. The first type, with
rather firm beliefs, often employs powerful language and fierce tones at the very
beginning of the poem: “I want…,” “We do not want…,” “We support…,” or
“We oppose….” The second, with clearly identified objects of love or hate, often
begins with naked statements or protests. There is nothing wrong with stating

328
Yuan Kejia, “Modernization of New Poetry – A Search for New Tradition,” in “Jiuye shiren” pinlun
ziliaoxuan, 13.
194
intentions or expressing emotions which are major parts of life, and no doubt,
major parts of poetry also, necessary and praiseworthy. But the common problem
with these two types of poetry, or in other words, their failure, lies not in their
beginning intention or in their result, but in the process of transforming intentions
or feelings into poetic experience.”
329

Yuan Kejia goes on to argue that because of the lack of this process, New Poetry
appears to have two parallel problems: the poems that aim at stating intentions become
didactic, while the ones that aim at expressing emotions fall into sentimentality, and none
of them can persuade their readers or affect others.
330
Yuan Kejia was not the only one
who is unsatisfied with the dominant trend of New Poetry at the time. Another poet from
the Nine Leaves School, Chen Jingrong, in her analytical essay on the works of three
other poets of the Nine Leaves School writes about her observation of New Poetry in the
same vein. She says,

Although new Chinese poetry has only a short history of twenty years, it has
already formed two traditions, i.e., two extremes! All that is done in one is: “O
Dreams! O Roses! O Tears!”; all that is done in the other is: “O Rage! O Blood!
O Bright Future!” The result is that the former takes leave of life, while the latter
takes leave of art, thus putting aside the sacred mission of combining life and art
into a meaningful whole.
331

Based on his observation of the problems with New Poetry, Yuan Kejia calls for a
“revolution of sensibility” (ganxing geming), arguing that poets such as Feng Zhi and

329
Yuan Kejia, “Dramatization in New Poetry,” in Bange shiji de jiaoyin, 67. The translation of this passage is
taken from Lyrics from Shelters: Modern Chinese Poetry 1930-1950, ed. Wai-lim Yip (New York: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1992) with some minor changes, 26-27.
330
Yuan Kejia, “Dramatization in New Poetry,” in Bange shiji de jiaoyin, 68.
331
Mo Gong (Chen Jingrong), “Zhencheng de shengyin” (Sincere V oices – On Zhen Min, Mu Dan, Du Yunxie),
in Shi Chuangzhao 12 (1948). Reprinted in “Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliao xuan, 61-68. Translation from Lyrics
from Shelters: Modern Chinese Poetry 1930-1950, 26.
195
Bian Zhilin have already made tremendous efforts in this aspect. This revolution is driven
by the belief that poetry should not be subordinated to politics and that although poetry
should reflect the “reality of life” its own “reality of poetry as art” should also be
respected.
332
Just as Chen Jingrong claims, poetry should combine life and art into a
meaningful whole.
Yuan Kejia’s proposal for the modernization of New Poetry is, therefore, a revolt
against the dominant trend of poetry that is politicized, formulaic, and propagandist. In
order to effectively carry out the “revolution of sensibility,” Yuan argues that New Poetry
has to be modernized and this modernization should be based first and foremost on the
understanding of the Western modernist poetic tradition. Yuan writes,

In terms of poetic criticism, thematic consciousness, and poetic representation,
modern poetry can be characterized as being highly synthetic. Modern poetic
criticism is represented by the works of I. A. Richards, in which the theory of the
“fullest breath of consciousness” has been put forward… The scientific findings
of psychoanalysis forbid any intention to restrict artistic activities. Art is
repositioned to be in a parallel relation to religion, morality, science, and politics,
and all sorts of master-subordinate relationships and entrenched old ideas are
negated. This is at the heart of synthetic criticism. On the other hand, in the works
of modern poets we can discern strong self-consciousness as well as strong social
consciousness. The realistic depiction of religious sentimentality, the connection
of the semicircles of life and death, the permeation between tradition and
contemporaneity, the effective use of “Great Memory,” the undifferentiation of
abstract thoughts and concrete sensibility, the mixed use of light-hearted and
serious language, the pervasive use of paradox, and the synthetic attempts toward
life and culture manifested in modern mythology and poetic drama indicate that
modern poetry is developing along the same line as critical theory… Modern
poetry is a new synthetic tradition of reality, symbolism, and metaphysics.
333

332
Yuan Kejia, “Modernization of New Poetry,” 15-16.
333
Yuan Kejia, “Modernization of New Poetry,” 14-15.
196
This new synthetic tradition is what Yuan Kejia believes to be the key to the
modernization of New Poetry in the 1940s. What lies behind the statement that poetry
should draw from “Great Memory,” connect life and death, and reflect the permeation
between past and present is a non-linear temporal logic that Yuan Kejia thinks is essential
to the organization of modernist poetry. In “Poetry and Democracy” Yuan Kejia explains
in detail his understanding of the difference between romantic tradition and modernist
tradition and argues that the change from romantic poetry to modernist poetry is indeed a
change from linear to non-linear expression. He writes:

The development of romantic poetry to modernist poetry is with a doubt a
development from lyricism to drama. This is not to say that lyricism is no longer
needed for modernist poets, but that the forms of lyricism, due to the pressure of
change in culture, have to give up the original linear expression and adopt cursive
and dramatic development. There are a lot of causes for such a change (for
instance, modern culture and modern life are increasingly more and more
complicated, so that linear progression is no longer fit for this strange modern
world), yet the most fundamental one is that modernist poets have discovered that
poetry is the transmission of experience rather than simply venting one’s
emotions… That poetry has to be dramatized, therefore, becomes the project for
modernist poets.

Lyrical poems aim at describing the emotional states of happiness or sadness so
that they stop short at linear progression… The dramatic poems at present are
exactly the opposite, as they focus on expressing complicated experience in an
organized way. Because every moment in our experience contains various
paradoxical aspects, these poems rely very much on discursive, indirect, and
winding forms of expression.
334

Thus, for Yuan Kejia the new synthetic tradition he strives to promote in his
poetic theory involves a shift from the linear to the non-linear temporal logic in the way
in which the poems are organized. To achieve such a change, Yuan argues, the intentions

334
Yuan Kejia, “Poetry and Democracy,” 88-89.
197
and emotions should be transformed into poetic experience through dramatization in
poetry, that is, to express the intensions and emotions in a dramatic way and avoid the
tendencies toward the didactic and the sentimental.
335
In the essay “On Dramaticism”
Yuan draws from the theories of I. A. Richards, Coleridge, Eliot, and Kenneth Burke, and
points out that the theory of dramatization in poetry is supported by the findings of
psychology, aesthetics, and philology. He writes:

The truth of dramaticism is: experience of life is itself dramatic (which means that
life demonstrates a dialectic in which there is a constant search for coherence
despite the contradictions); imagination as the motivation for poetry is capable of
synthesizing contradictory factors; and the language of poetry is symbolic and
active. Thus, isn’t poetry an outright performance of drama?
336

Poetry can be considered as “an outright performance of drama,” in Yuan Kejia’s
opinion, not only because it is the representation of life experience that is itself dramatic,
but also because poetry relies on imagination and symbolic language, both of which make
the linear and simple release of emotions impossible and make poetic expression non-
linear and indirect. In his 1947 essay “Further Analysis of the Modernization of New
Poetry,” Yuan argues that “with the discovery of the logic of imagination as a
replacement of the logic of concept,” modern poetry no longer expresses feeling and
emotions via one single logic or on one level, but makes it possible for a “multi-level”
representation and an expression of sensibilities in a “circuitous” way. He writes,

335
Yuan Kejia, “Dramatization in New Poetry,” 78.
336
Yuan Kejia, “On Dramaticism,” in Bange shiji de jiaoyin, 77.
198
For a sensitive writer who has a rich inner life, the development of his emotions at
any particular temporal-spatial point must be flexuous and constantly changing
and never follows a linear movement. Therefore, in order to be faithful to himself,
this type of writer will definitely rely on the controlled indirectness,
circuitousness, and suggestiveness of the poem as the ultimate way of poetic
expression.
337

There are several approaches that could contribute to the controlled “indirectness,
circuitousness, and suggestiveness” in poetry that will make poetic representation “multi-
level” and non-linear, Yuan Kejia claims. Three technical approaches are key to the
dramatization in poetry: the use of image, the employment of “objective correlative,” and
the “sense of structure through logic of imagination.”
338
These technical approaches are
heavily influenced by the poetic theory of Eliot. Unlike romantic poetry, which is a
direct expression of personal feelings, Yuan Kejia suggests that modern poetry should be
indirect and suggestive and make good use of “objective correlative,” borrowing Eliot’s
term. Eliot in his essay on Hamlet in the year 1919 writes:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective
correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts,
which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked.
339

337
Yuan Kejia, “Further Analysis of Modernization of New Poetry,” 25.
338
Yuan Kejia, “Further Analysis of the Modernization of New Poetry,” 25-27.
339
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Butler
and Tanner LTD, 1960), 100.
199
Yuan Kejia, following Eliot’s poetic criticism, argues that the New Poetry needs
to avoid “plain and linear narrative” but choose instead an internal dramatization. In his
“On the Expansion and Crystallization of Poetic Realm,” Yuan points out:

Since Eliot’s criticism on “objective correlative,” the development of poetry has
reached its climax. Eliot’s “objective correlative” denotes that if you want to
express a thought or a feeling in poetry, you have to avoid direct narration or
explanation. You need to be indirect and use concrete objects that correspond to
the thoughts and feelings, and evoke rich imagination. The achievement that Eliot
made in this aspect can be easily discerned in his The Waste Land.
340

In the same article, Yuan Kejia argues that the expansion of the poetic realm also
contributes to the dramatization in poetry, which breaks away from the traditional lyrical
mode that follows the linear development of personal feelings and allows poems to
incorporate a fusion of parallel or even contradictory feelings and to be organized by a
series of related sensory modes. Yuan points out:

The expansion of poetic realm enhances the dramatization in poetry and makes
human sensibility more complicated. In lyrical poems that feature linear narration
or in those that are filled with moaning and angry shouting, because of the
limitation of this particular poetic mode, we can only experience one mode of
sensibility and be moved by one type of feeling. “Objective correlative”
completely shatters this narrow and near suicidal mode, absorbs all possibly
related sensibilities, and fuses parallel or even opposite feelings. If one has the
ability to make this “fusion”, then the complexity of emotions and the depth and
density of dramatization in the modernist poetry, which is equivalent to the
complexity of human nature, will incomparably surpass those in the naïve
romantic poetry.
341

340
Yuan Kejia, “Lun shijing de kuozhan he jiejing” (On the Expansion and Crystallization of Poetic Realm), Jing
Shi Daily News · Literature Weekly (September 15), 1946. Reprinted in Yuan Kejia, Lun xinshi xiandaihua (On
the Modernization of New Poetry) (Beijing: Shenhuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1988), 127-33.
341
Yuan Kejia, “On the Expansion and Crystallization of Poetic Realm,” 131.
200
For Yuan Kejia, dramatization in poetry represents a fusion of all possibly related
sensibilities, either complementary or contradictory, and rejects completely the linear
mode of poetic diction. Thus, in response to the prevailing poetic trend that is dominated
by “moaning and angry shouting” and infested with excessive emotions, Yuan Kejia
proposes an “escape from emotion” in his theory of dramatization in poetry, following
Eliot’s call for “impersonality” in poetry in his famous essay “Tradition and Individual
Talent.” Eliot writes, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
342
The
“escape from emotion” and “escape from personality” that Eliot claims here implies not a
complete erasure of emotion or personality but rather a dramatized representation of
emotion and personality in poetry. As Eliot explains in this essay, the emotion in poetry
is very much different from the personal emotions of the poet. What is needed in poetry
is artistic emotion, created by the combination of the structural emotion provided by the
drama, for instance, “an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense
fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it,” and “a
number of floating feelings” that are related to this contrasted emotion.
343

The emphasis on the dramatic representation of emotions and feelings that Eliot
advocates is also what Yuan Kejia proposes for the modernization of Chinese New
Poetry. Drawing from Richards’ differentiation of “inclusive poetry” and “exclusive
poetry,” Yuan Kejia argues that there is no dramatic element in the exclusive didactic or

342
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 58.
343
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 57.
201
sentimental poems “because nothing that follows a linear progression can be dramatic,”
and that only Shakespearean tragedy, Donne’s metaphysical poetry, and the modernist
poetry since Eliot can be considered as “inclusive poetry” because they “include conflicts
and contradictions that ends in a higher level of harmony like tragedy.”
344
In his analysis
of Mu Dan’s poem “Shigan” (Current Reflections) that I quote partially at the very
beginning of this chapter, Yuan Kejia further highlights the importance of conflicts and
contradictions, which he calls “paradox,” in poetic diction for achieving the “synthetic
effect.” He writes:

The poem offers the most realistic expression of the heavy-hearted mood of any
Chinese with conscience in China today, but the poet does not use the popular
crying and howling format that leads to sentimental venting. Instead, he delivers a
condemnation of the society confidently through the reorganization of his thought
and sensory-experience. From further detailed analysis, we can see that two
paradoxical strains of thought, “awaiting hope in despair, and revealing despair in
hope” as the dominant themes of the poem, intertwine and interlock with each
other in every stanza. Almost in every stanza, there are two lines that express
“hope” while another two “despair”, so that “hope” seems more urgent, and
“despair” more realistic… The last line, “We only hope that we can have a hope
as revenge” seems to be the best line of the poem. It not only carries multi-levels
of meaning, but also has a synthetic effect, undoubtedly with a value of
“crystallization” that I mentioned elsewhere.
345

Thus, the modernization of New Poetry demands “inclusive poetry,” poetry like
Mu Dan’s “Current Reflection” that operates on multi-levels and is organized through a
fusion of contradictory emotions rather than following along the linear progression of one
kind of emotion. The theory of dramatization in poetry aims really at refuting the “blind

344
Yuan Kejia, “On Dramaticism,” 78.
345
Yuan Kejia, “Modernization of New Poetry,” 19.
202
belief that poetry is only outpouring of passion,” as Yuan Kejia believes that “no other
theory in poetry is more harmful than completely letting go of emotions,”
346
so that
poetry should exemplify a “fusion of feeling and thought,”
347
or in Eliot’s words, “a
direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling.”
348
This
is the kind of poetry Yuan Kejia thinks that best represents the effective synthesis of
“reality, symbolism, and metaphysics.”
This synthesis of “reality, symbolism, and metaphysics,” therefore, is dramatic
synthesis, because it entails a non-linear poetic structure, an indirect poetic expression
through the use of “objective correlative,” and a dramatic representation whose essence
lies precisely in the structuring of paradoxical emotions or fusing the multi-dimensional
feeling as well as thought into new wholes. Yuan Kejia points out that there are three
directions that dramatization in poetry can take, practiced by three different types of
writers: the “introverted” poets represented by Rilke, the “extroverted” poets represented
by Auden, and those who write in the form of poetic drama.
349
All three types ultimately
aim at “revealing and mediating contradictions and making the poem become a
harmonious and organic whole.”
350
This process of mediating contradictions or bringing
dissimilar things together to produce a unified whole determines that the structure of the

346
Yuan Kejia, “Dramatization of New Poetry,” 72.
347
Yuan Kejia, “Further Analysis of the Modernization of New Poetry,” 27.
348
T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poet,” in Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1932), 246.
349
Yuan Kejia, “”Dramatization of New Poetry,” 69-72.
350
Jiang Dengke, Jiuye shipai de hebi yishu (Chongqing: Xinan shifan daxue chubanshe, 2002), 233.
203
poems is never one-dimensional and entails an organizing logic that is non-linear, or in
Joseph Frank’s words, spatial.
Modern experience has always been described as incoherent and fragmented in
the West. Bradbury and McFarlane in Modernism 1890-1930 point out that inherent in
the greatest works of modernism there is a constant paradox, so that the city appears to be
“a new possibility and an unreal fragmentation,” the machine “a novel vortex of energy,
and a destructive implement,” and the apocalyptic moment itself is what “purges and
destroys” at the same time. Ultimately, the modernist works represent what is “potentially
a synthesis of all possible experience,” “the image of art holding transition and chaos,
creation and de-creation.”
351
Modernist poetry, therefore, should also represent the
fragmented modern experience yet at the same time create coherence out of incoherence.
T. S. Eliot, as the most prominent modernist poet, recorded the modern experience of
fragmentation and alienation in The Waste Land with jarring juxtapositions of seemingly
unrelated, disconnected scenes. Eliot explains this poetic practice in his essay “The
Metaphysical Poets” and writes:

… a poet’s mind is … constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary
man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love or
reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or
with the noise of the typewriter or smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these
experiences are always forming new wholes … poets in our civilization … must
be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, … The
poet must become more… comprehensive, … allusive, … indirect, in order to
force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.
352

351
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism 1890-1930 (New York: Penguin, 1976, 1991), 49.
352
T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays: 1917-1932, 246-47.
204
Thus for Eliot, the poetic sensibility is reflected in the poet’s ability to fuse
seemingly different experiences into a unity, and the way in which these different
experiences are put together and organized determines the structure of the poem. This
structure, as it is intentionally aimed to be elusive and indirect and “to dislocate if
necessary, language into his meaning” follows, as Joseph Frank argues, a spatial-logic
that is in conflict with the time-logic of language/narrative. Therefore, the aesthetic form
in modern poetry is “based on a space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in
reader’s attitude toward language.”
353
Yuan Kejia’s argument that “modern poetry is a
new synthetic tradition of reality, symbolism, and metaphysics” reveals a similar vision
toward poetry to that of Eliot. His vision of poetry as the dramatic synthesis of all modern
experiences also entails a spatial logic, which contributes to the dramatized poetic
expression as it fuses disparate experiences together. Yuan Kejia takes Du Yunxie’s
“Moon” as an example and explains why he thinks that this poem represents his theory of
dramatic synthesis. In Du Yunxie’s poem “Moon,” the moon is what ties the disparate
modern experiences together, which are described through the presentations of four
seemingly disconnected scenes, equally distributed in four different stanzas. The poem
reads:
A young couple, like flower pedals
Drift to the grassland at the riverbank, singing
Old melodies from Hollywood, reciting
Aphorisms in response to the scenery. The pale river water
Moves forward, glittering yet dragging along the rubbish

A foreign soldier, like withered leaves
Is blocked by the bridge and restricted to one side,

353
Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” 13.
205
Reading the lines of Li Bai, mulling over
“Lower my head and dream of home,” “dream of home,”
As if home is like a piece of chewing gum.

A shabby coolie, like rotten cloths,
Is tossed away at the roadside, lighting up a half-dead fire,
Staring at it in silence. From the tree
Flickers of golden light flutter about his face
Pacing back and force he searches for poetic lines in despair.

I, like a broken boat full of refugees
Have lost its helm, and on the asphalt road,
Am sailing. There is no home behind me,
Nor do I know if there will be beach ahead of me,
Looking at the sky, I ponder on the emotions behind the barks.
354

Yuan Kejia in his analysis of the poem puts great emphasis on the indirectness of
poetic expression, which he considers as essential to the modernization of New Poetry.
He argues that the indirectness of poetic expression is reflected in the use of image and
strengthened by the “metaphysical shock” the far-fetched images bring to the readers,
which in turn represent the characteristics of dramatic synthesis that exemplifies a “fusion
of feeling and thought.”
355
Furthermore, Yuan Kejia points out that the indirectness of
poetic expression is also reflected in the “sense of structure through logic of
imagination,” which represents the modern poets’ capacity to “bring together various
seemingly different yet possibly coherent experiences” to expand and deepen the
meaning of the poems.
356
The logic imagination, therefore, allows the juxtaposition of
different experiences and scenes and makes the poetic structure spatial rather than linear.

354
Du Yunxie, “Yue” (Moon), in Jiuye zhishu changqing, 75.
355
Yuan Kejia, “Further Analysis of the Modernization of New Poetry,” 26-27.
356
Yuan Kejia, “Further Analysis of the Modernization of New Poetry,” 27-28.
206
In the above quoted section of the poem, Du Yunxie weaves together four different
scenes: one about a young couple, another about a foreign soldier, then about a tattered
coolie, and finally about the “I”. Each one of these four scenes represents a different
aspect of modern life from different perspectives. Though seemingly unrelated, when
pieced together cleverly through the image of the moonlight, they represent a rather
panoramic picture of modern life. This method of juxtaposing unrelated or fragmented
scenes together in the poem to present a rather coherent poetic representation
demonstrates, in Yuan Kejia’s opinion, the circuitous representation of feelings from
several different perspectives or multiple levels,
357
and exemplifies the characteristics of
the dramatic synthesis that Yuan Kejia envisions for the modernization of New Poetry.
This dramatic synthesis determines that the poetic expression has to be indirect and
circuitous through the use of images and “objective correlative” as well as the logic of
imagination that can organize the similar, as well as different, or even contradictory
experiences and emotions into coherent structures. This structure rejects the linear mode
of poetic expression and appears to be multi-layered, non-linear and rather spatial. The
dramatic synthesis that synthesizes “reality, symbolism, and metaphysics” through the
use of image and “objective correlative” and organizes the poems in a spatial mode of
representation through the logic of imagination can be found in many of the poems of the
Nine Leaves Poets.
Zheng Min, one of the two female poets of the Nine Leaves Poets, is considered
as a poet that is concerned about the exploration of “the conflict and contradiction of life”

357
Yuan Kejia, “Further Analysis of the Modernization of New Poetry,” 25.
207
and hopes to reflect in her poetry the paradoxical themes of “life and death, love and hate,
sadness and happiness, and dream and reality.”
358
Her poem, “The Beauty of Life: Pain,
Struggle, Endurance” best captures her view of life. Yet her rather philosophical
contemplation of the essence of life is not expressed in a linear and direct mode, but
rather through the use of three different images, revealing three different aspects of life.
She writes:

Peck, peck, peck,
You are the woodpecker on that ancient tree,
Constantly circling on my silent heart,
Do you know how many timid worms are hiding here?
See how obediently I open up my limbs.

Pound, pound, pound,
Tsunami rapidly pushes up the tides,
Rushing down from the steep precipice,
Every indifferent refusal
Disturbs further the blood flow of the ocean.

Silence, silence, silence,
Like the trees that silently give up greenness,
Enduring the darkness and pressure underground,
Only when pain soaks through the entire body,
Can the soul burn, bursting out light and strength.

In this poem, the essence of life as Zheng Min understands is not expressed along
the linear line through a direct outpouring of the poet’s emotions, but rather, following
the logic of imagination, expressed through the juxtaposition of three seemingly
disconnected and unrelated images, the images of the woodpecker, tsunami, and trees, to
represent three distinctive aspects of life: its pain, its struggle, and its endurance.

358
Jiang Dengke, Jiuye shipai de hebi yishu, 125.
208
Locating the essence of life in the pecking of the woodpecker, the pounding of tsunami
waves, and the silence of trees, Zheng Min makes her poem unfold spatially through the
introduction of three independent descriptions of natural phenomena. The dramatic
synthesis this poem demonstrates lies precisely in her indirect and circuitous poetic
expression through the use of images and the mediation of dissimilar images to create
coherent understanding of life. Chen Jingrong’s poem “Li de qianzou” (Prelude to Force)
follows a similar structure. The poem reads:

The singer filled with her voice
Is rapt in an instant’s tremor

For one posture, the dancer
Has pulled together her whole life’s breath

The clouds in heaven and the oceans on earth
Before a great storm
Are awfully quiet

The passion of all mankind merges, mingles
And waits in painful struggle
For a universal dawn
359

This poem also unfolds spatially through the introduction of three independent
moments, and each one of these moments is described through the usage of a different
image. These images, the image of the singer, the dancer, and the storm, seem quite
unrelated on the surface level. However, they are nicely linked together through logic of
imagination that relates to the moment of anticipation, a moment or an instant in which

359
Chen Jingrong, “Lide qianzou” (Prelude to Force), in Xin Di, et al., Jiuye ji (The Nine Leaves) (Beijing:
Zuojia chubanshe, 2000), 57. The translation is taken from Shiu-Pang E Almberg, The Poetry of Chen Jingrong:
A Modern Chinese Woman Poet, diss., University of Stockholm, 1988, Skrifter utgivna av Föreningen för
orientaliska studier 21 (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1988), 132.
209
everything in the past comes together to form a forceful whole for the preparation of the
coming of an imminent future, a moment of “prelude to force,” as the title of the poem
suggests. All forms of voices, a whole life’s breath, and the entire power of the nature
from the “clouds in heaven” to the “oceans on earth” are gathered together for just one
moment, a moment of tremor in the voice, a moment of perfect posture, or the moment of
the eruption of a great storm. With the depiction of these three moments, Chen Jingrong
paves her way toward the depiction of the final moment of the poem, the moment of the
coming of “a universal dawn.” Written in 1947, the “universal dawn” that “the passion of
all mankind merges, mingles/And awaits in painful struggle” is comparable to the
particular historical moment that the Chinese people were waiting for. It is a moment of
change that signifies anticipation to a complete break from darkness in order to welcome
a positive and better future. What is implied in this poem is a positivist view toward
future, and a certain belief in the progress of history. However, this belief in the linear
progress of history is not at all presented in a direct way but rather through a spatial
unfolding of three independent images that seem to be completely unrelated to history or
to the idea of progress, yet all three of them eventually converge together to present this
final positive projection toward the future with a very powerful symbolic force.
Just as Yuan Kejia argues in his essays that the modernization of New Poetry
relies on “giving up the original linear expression and adopting cursive and dramatic
development” through the “discursive, indirect, and winding forms of expression,” both
Zheng Min’s and Chen Jingrong’s poems that we have discussed are organized in a
spatial structure via the juxtaposition of different images to avoid direct depiction of
210
emotions. The use of images enhances greatly the indirectness and suggestiveness of the
poem and demonstrates the possibility of a non-linear and “multi-level” representation of
poetic sensibilities. Tang Shi, another critic and poet of the Nine Leaves School, also
emphasizes the importance of images in poetic diction and argues that the images have
strong evocative power. He quotes part of Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondences” in his
essay “On Image” and writes,

Yes, poetry is exactly this kind of nature, this kind of temple, and those “living
pillars” and “forests of symbols” are images that correspond to each other and
form the entire sounds of nature. It is because of the “dark and profound
harmony” and the consistent lives that characterize this temple that here the long-
buried “echoes from afar”, the flow of unconsciousness as “vast as the dark of
night and the light of day,” are awakened by the images and the sounds from the
suggestiveness of consciousness. Images cannot be piled representations or the
medium for vague association. When the image jumps from the deep abyss of
unconsciousness, it is the representation of the basic instinct and impact of life,
yet it is also the disguised representation of the suppressed experience that
contains more life force and can possibly appear to be more realistic. However, it
should also have an aura, like what Rodin says, a mysterious aura around the
human body that carries profound meaning. It extends outward from the inner
truth to welcome the waves of external forces and presents itself as vibrations that
are caused by the impact of the inner world.
360

Thus, for Tang Shi as well as other Nine Leaves Poets, poetry is no longer “the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,”
361
but rather a paradoxical combination of
“an escape from emotion” yet at the same time the best representation of the inner truth
through the use of images. Quoting Rilke’s passage in The Notebook of Malte Laurids
Brigge, Tang Shi points out that the image is what “springs out from the deep psyche,”

360
Tang Shi, “Lun yixiang” (On Image), in Xin yidu ji (Beijing: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1989),
10-11.
361
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800, eds. James Butler and Karen Green
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 744.
211
when memory is reorganized through the process of forgetting, to re-present itself in the
form and speech of poetry. Image, therefore, is the ultimate link between the external and
the internal world, and what it represents is in fact, in Eliot’s words, the “unknown, dark
psychic material.”
Mu Dan’s poem “Restoration Effect” is an exploration of the inner struggle of
young people, whose dream is shattered, facing the impact of the society’s “restoration
effect” that eliminates all possible changes. This psychological struggle is again
expressed through the use of image, the image of a stranded pig that is forced to face the
futility of “metamorphosis”. Yet what makes this poem a good example of dramatic
synthesis lies not only in the use of image for the purpose of impersonal and indirect
expression and as a bridge between the external and the internal world, but also in the
repeated use of irony and contradictions that are present in almost every stanza. The
poem begins with the depiction of a pig in mud who dreams of having grown wings and
longs to fly high, yet it is soon brought back to reality when it wakes up, left to “scream
in pain,” as the poem reads:

The pig in the mud dreamed of having grown wings,
Born from heaven and longing to fly high.
When he woke up, he can only scream in pain.

This drastic incongruence between dream and reality sets the tone for the whole
poem. However, the poem becomes even more complicated and drama-tic when we see
multiple levels of meaning in the next three stanzas. The poem reads:

212
His heart is burning yet unable to get out of bed.
Fleas, mice, cling to him, asking:
Do you love me? I love you, he answers.

Eight hours of work later only an empty shell remains.
Swaying in the net of the real world, he is afraid to break the strings.
Spiders come to sniff, and know that he is of no use.

His only comfort comes from the school friends,
How in March the flowers bloom in the garden,
While communications link together a vast wasteland.
362

Mu Dan says of his poem, “Young people are like the pig stranded in mud
(though thinking of himself as the swan). He has to endure all the disgust he has toward
life to make a living, so that all his dreams are eventually shattered, and the imagined
garden eventually turns out to be a wasteland.”
363
Following this strain of thought, the
above-quoted stanzas become the further confirmation of the unsurpassable gap between
the real world and the dream world, as we witness the forced utterance of love toward the
disgusting fleas and mice, the stranded situation in the net of the world, and the
transformation of the imagined garden into the wasteland. Mu Dan brings in a polyphony
of symbols, the fleas, mice, net, spiders, flowers, and the wasteland, the majority of
which are either paradoxical or rather unpoetic, to intensify the “indirectness,
circuitousness, and suggestiveness” of the poem.
However, the clever use of the contrasts and contradictions implied in these
images also makes the meaning of the poem rather ambiguous. To interpret the above

362
Mu Dan, “Huanyuan zuoyong” (Restoration Effect), in Li Fang, ed., Mu Dan shi quanji (The Complete
Collection of Poems of Mu Dan) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenxue chubanshe, 1996), 85.
363
Quoted from Zhou Xiaoyan, “‘Fanpan zhe’ de neixin zixing – shixi mudan shi ‘Huanyuan zuoyong’ de
xiandaixing,” in Wenxue yanjiu 2 (April 2006):98.
213
quoted stanzas as the further confirmation of the clash between dream and reality is to
assume that the protagonist, either the pig or its human counterpart, understands
completely what kind of situation he is in and finds it unbearable and longs only to break
away from it. But if we read them more closely, we will see that there is also another kind
of tension, a tension that arises from the dramatic irony that is inherent in the poem. What
if our protagonist does not really fully understand the situation that he is in? When he
says “I love you” to the fleas and mice, what if he does enjoy their company? Although
he longs to grow wings and fly high and away from this world, he is afraid to break the
strings of the net of this world, finds comfort in the communication with others, which
allows him to see the world in a more positive tone as he sees blooming flowers in the
garden. Thus, he is ultimately closely tied to this world and cannot really let go despite
his dream of breaking free from it. Only the outsiders, like the spiders or us the audience,
know that the real world is what bonds him, suppresses him, and crushes his dreams and
that there is no blooming garden at all, but only a vast wasteland. This poem is, therefore,
not only about the irony of life characterized by the gap between dream and reality which
runs through the whole poem, but also about a certain blindness that everyone like our
protagonist the stranded pig has, the inability to see what the audience see, and the
dramatic irony of this poem lies precisely in the fact that he does not see or realize what
we as readers or audience see or understand.
The very last stanza of the poem ties the whole poem to the implied meaning of
the title “Restoration Effect” when our protagonist “realizes the futility of
214
metamorphosis”, and starts to learn to walk on land and gives up the dream of
transforming into the swan with wings. It reads:

There he sees the futility of metamorphosis
And starts to learn to walk on land,
Everything is infinite, infinite slowness.

If we bear in the mind the dramatic irony that we have discussed, then the
meaning of the “Restoration Effect” also becomes ambiguous. The “Restoration Effect”
could easily be referred to as the power of society, of reality, that crushes all dreams and
restores everything back to its original state. Yet, it could also be self-restoration, which
brings the self always back to reality from dream. If it is only because of that blindness,
the inability to see what the real situation is, then this self restoration effect is rather
depressing and becomes self-restraint, relentlessly crushing his own dreams. However, it
can also take another turn. The “there” where he sees the futility of metamorphosis is the
real world that he is unsatisfied with, yet it is also a world that he cannot completely
sever his tie with despite that he longs to break free. The decision to learn to walk on land
could be seen also as an affirmation of life, a conscious decision to leave the dream world
and live life in the real world even though it is a world of imperfection and pain. This
learning process will be infinitely slow. Slow, yet firmly grounded.
From the discussion of the above quoted poems, Zheng Min’s “The Beauty of
Life: Pain, Struggle, Endurance,” Chen Jingrong’s “Prelude to Force,” and Mu Dan’s
“Restoration Effect,” we see how Yuan Kejia’s theory of modernization of New Poetry in
the form of dramatic synthesis is realized in the works of Nine Leaves Poets through the
215
analysis of the use of images and “objective correlatives” and the employment of logic of
imagination that result in indirectness in poetic expression, non-linear and spatial poetic
structure, and even multiple levels of meaning.
This kind of dramatic synthesis and dramatization in poetry can also be seen in
the poems that describe the modern experience in the city, which is again characterized
by its non-linear structure that is organized through the juxtaposition of seemingly
disconnected or unrelated scenes, following a logic that is spatial rather than temporal.
Take part of Mu Dan’s “Gentlemen and Ladies” as an example:

Gentlemen and ladies, gentlemen and ladies,
They walk with a royal air and talk in a
Carefree manner, making the visitors comfortable at home
Or, they will be out, getting their spotless clothes dirty
Then come home to wash their fresh skin.
Gentlemen and ladies always live on soft chairs
Or exercise their legs, wave their beautiful
Hips, flying like the leaves of the willow;
Unlike you and me, who everyday get worried while thinking,
Hide away from people, and feel ashamed at luxurious places!
How can we compare? On these long streets,
Look at us, here and there, being evasive and nervous
Once the car stops, how many eyes salute you!
Skyscrapers, lights, wine, and meat: all are welcome, welcome!
The gentlemen decide: to have a meeting, start a business, or organize
a party
The wives and ladies, also come along with such great honor,
Their conversations only stop when the music starts.
We are, however, the unseen crowd, waiting in our own dark corners.
364

The above-quoted part of the poem depicts two kinds of city life, one represented
by the lifestyle of the gentlemen and ladies, the other by “we”. The organizing frame of

364
Mu Dan, “Shenshi he shunü” (Gentlemen and Ladies), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 267.
216
this poem rejects time logic and follows a spatial one by synthesizing fragmented scenes
together. The life of the gentlemen and ladies seems very lively and busy and is depicted
in an episodic manner as if several different scenes are pieced together. Sometimes they
host parties at home, at other times they go out and enjoy themselves; they are the ones
who have the power and win all the respect; they enjoy all sorts of luxury in life and have
the freedom to decide what they want to do with their lives, such as opening a business,
arranging a meeting, or hosting a party. In contrast to the spot-light life style of the
gentlemen and ladies, “we” are those living in the dark, shunning life and feeling
ashamed to be seen. “Our” life is depicted also in an episodic manner, as the poem reads:

Once you become the boss, we become your subordinates
Once you open a factory, we will fight to be your workers
Once you get married with hats and flowers in your hands, we will also
make our own contributions

Here in three different social settings, “we” are not only willing but also striving
to be the inferior party. Setting the whole poem in a sarcastic tone, Mu Dan is very
critical toward both kinds of life style. Yet his view of city life as fragmented and
irrational and his critical attitude toward it are revealed indirectly, not only through the
sarcastic tone of the poem, but also through the juxtaposition of different scenes or
episodes of the lives of the city dwellers in a parallel spatial frame to stress an
instantaneous representation of all aspects of city life.
From the conscious efforts that the Nine Leaves Poets made to reject the direct
and linear mode of poetic expression, we see that they share a similar vision of poetry
with their Western modernist counterparts. Believing that poetry should not be an
217
unbridled expression of emotion but rather an integration of intellect and emotion, the
Nine Leaves Poets put great emphasis on creating a non-linear, indirect, and dramatic
poetic structure through the use of imagery and the practice of juxtaposition of multiple
scenes, both techniques we have already discussed. The non-linear structure and dramatic
synthesis that the Nine Leaves Poets incorporate into their writing sometimes are
reinforced through the co-existence of multiple discourses or voices in the poems, which
are indeed the prominent characteristics of drama. Peter Childs in his essay on Eliot
argues that unlike most of the previous poetry that is distinctively “monologic” as it only
uses one style or voice, The Waste Land “moved toward novelistic” and can be
“characterized by what Bakhtin refers to as heteroglossia (multiple discourses), by
polyphony (many voices), and by contested meaning.
365
The shift from purely poetic to
novelistic that Peter Childs observes in Eliot’s The Waste Land can also be seen in some
of the poems of the Nine Leaves Poets, and what Childs terms as novelistic is very much
close to what Yuan Kejia terms as dramatic.
Zhang Yanquan in his article on the lyrical mode of the poems of the Nine Leaves
Poets argues that one particular form of lyricism that the Nine Leaves Poets use can be
called as “dramatic lyricism” in which we see not only descriptions of dramatic scenes
but also monologues or dialogues similar to those we see in the drama. Mu Dan’s poem
“The Lyric in the Air Raid Shelter” in particular, because of the existence of multiple
voices and dialogues, appears to be highly dramatic and can also be characterized by

365
Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey (London and New York: Routledge, 1999),
80-81.
218
heteroglossia and polyphony.
366
Setting the poem in the air raid shelter, Mu Dan naturally
introduces into his poem various characters who gather together in the shelter upon
hearing the air raid siren. The poem starts with the introduction of the character “he” who
asks “me” to “have fun” by reading the “colorful news” in the Shen Daily from Shanghai.
This immediately gives us readers an insight of the characteristics of “him”. It is during
the war, in the middle of an air raid, yet “he” cares only about having fun, about reading
the entertaining “colorful news” in the newspaper. This kind of mindset is shared by
“them”, who “like swarms of insects” squeezed into the shelter. The introduction of
“they”, the people who gathered from outside, is again through voices, through a series of
dialogues or exchanges:

Who knows what seeds farmers planted in this earth?
I was sleeping in the tall buildings, one said, I was taking a bath.
Do you expect the stock market to go up? You live at……?
Oh, Oh, I’ll drop by some other time; I’ve been terribly busy lately.
367

What is happening, it seems, has little relevance to them. They are still talking
about the trivial daily concerns, their interests in the stock market, and their social life. In
sharp contrast to voices of the “he” and the “they”, the poem also introduces the voice of
the “I” in the form of psychological exploration. Zhang Yanquan rightly argues that these
two types of voices demonstrate two completely opposite attitudes toward life. One is
represented by “him” and “them” who are concerned only with muddling through life and

366
Zhang Yanquan, “Lun ‘Jiuye shipai’ de shuqing biaoda fangshi” (On the Lyrical Mode of the Nine Leaves
Poets), in Hainan shifan xueyuan xuebao (renwen shehui kexue ban) (Journal of Hainan Normal University) 14.
6 (2001): 33-35.
367
Mu Dan, “Fangkongdong li de shuqingshi” (The Lyric in the Air Raid Shelter), in Mu Dan shi quan ji, 48-50.
The translation is taken from Lyrics from Shelters, 137.
219
care only about the trivial and mundane things, while the other is represented by “me”
who positions “myself” both in and out of the shelter, trying to think through all of the
bitter-sweet aspects of life.
368
In the eyes of “I”, “they” are “those cruel people,
threatened by death” with “black faces, black bodies, black hands.” The babble of their
voices sets the “I” even further apart from this crowd, as “I” take my mind outside of the
shelter, to the dark side of imagination, to the deepest psychological space. This space of
the psyche and the imagination is presented through two indented stanzas interweaved
into the body of the poem. The intentional indentation that Mu Dan inserts at the
beginning of these two stanzas reveals his conscious effort to make this part at once
integrate into and separate from the body of the poem and it further complicates the
structure of the poem.
Thus, through the introduction of multiple discourses and various voices, Mu Dan
utilizes heteroglossia to reveal the multiple attitudes toward life that people at that
particular historical juncture held. However, what makes this poem even more dramatic
and its structure non-linear is Mu Dan’s exploration of the psychological space of the “I”.
Looking at the “black faces, black bodies, black hands” of the crowd in the shelter, the
mind of the “I” slowly slips out of the shelter and wanders into the deepest possible space
of imagination. Mu Dan writes,

The alchemist lowered his heavy
Eyelids, fell unconsciously into dreams.
Countless spirits were out from hell,
Hid quietly, the fire burning, the skin yet to husk,
Listened to the tunes from the country of Ultimate Pleasure.

368
Zhang Yanquan, 35.
220
Oh, look, in the great forest of ancient times,
The vampire which had gradually frozen!

Here, beginning with the indentation, the stanza suggests change. There is not
only a change of spatial setting, from the shelter to the dream space of the alchemist, but
also a shift in temporal parameter, from the present to the distant ancient times.
Furthermore, while the shelter suggests life and hope as it is what protects people from
danger, this dream space is filled with symbols of the grotesque, of death, as we witness
“countless spirits” out from hell, the formidable scenes of fire burning, skin flaying, and
the image of the gradually frozen vampire.
Mu Dan then shifts his attention back to the shelter, where now “I” come to the
realization of something terrifying, that is, despite the difference, “I” may eventually
become “they”, become the countless people who are buried in the trivial concerns of
mundane life. “I” notice that “when you lowered your head, and raised it again,” you saw
“so many in front of your eyes” and “the countless people whom you didn’t see again,”
then, “you felt yourself stained in black, like all the others.” The society strips us of our
own individuality and makes everyone the same. To resist this force, one has to fight. Mu
Dan then shifts back to the space of imagination, which now serves as a prophecy:
“Destroy! Destroy!” a voice cried, and “Die in dream! Fall into pain!” This fight against
the force of conformity of the society, then, is ultimately a fight against the self, a fight
that can be violent, painful, and lead to self-destruction and even death. The last stanza of
the poem pulls our attention back to reality, to the end of the air raid. The poem reads,
“Who has won? He asked, and were several enemy planes shot down?/ I laughed and said:
221
I have.” This exchange brings us to the realization that the dramatic representation of
reality through multiple discourses and voices serves only as the basis for the dramatic
exploration of the self. This poem, although it is set in the war, concerns not so much the
war in the external world, but rather the war inside, the internal struggle of the individual.
That is why when he asked who had won the war, “I” answered “I have,” that I have won
the war of fighting against myself, the self that becomes “stained in black, like all the
others.” The dramatic effect of the poem reaches its highest moment in its last lines,
when people returned home to continue their lives as if nothing had happened, “I was
alone going up the stairs of the bombed building,” and in the ruins of war and destruction,
“I” discovered that “I was lying dead in there,/ stiffened, with a face of joy, tears and
sighs.”
The poems of the Nine Leaves Poets that we have examined so far demonstrate
quite convincingly the “dramatization in poetry” that Yuan Kejia envisions. Through the
use of imagery, irony, juxtaposition of multiple scenes, employment of heteroglossia and
polyphony, and all other possible methods to enhance the indirectness and circuitousness
of poetic expression, the Nine Leaves Poets resist the linear logic in poetic diction and
adopt a non-linear and multi-level structure that is more spatial than temporal.

Dramatic Rethinking of History
Yuan Kejia’s theory that Chinese New Poetry should be the synthesis of “reality,
symbolism, and metaphysics” not only celebrates “dramatization in poetry” as we have
already seen in his writing and some of the poems of the Nine Leaves Poets, but also
222
implies a new sense of temporality and a new type of historical sense. Arguing that “the
modernization of New Poetry should be rooted in the fullest breath of consciousness of
modern men, and accept the influence of Western modernist poetry led by Eliot,” Yuan
Kejia points out that modern writers are writing under considerable pressure to organize
the rather complex and disorienting experiences of the modern world. Therefore, the best
way to organize such experiences through the “logic of imagination” is either through
“extreme expansion” (jidu kuozhan) or “extreme condensation” (jidu nongsuo), “the
former represented by Joyce’s Ulysses that describes one day in two and a half million
words, the latter by Eliot’s The Waste Land that reflects the entire civilization, society,
and human life in four hundred lines.”
369
Both techniques aim at “effectively transmitting
the fullest amount of experience” in a new kind of synthesis, as Yuan Kejia writes,

The past is so multifaceted, the present is so complex, and the future is so full of
possibilities. History, memory, wit, religion, the sensibilities toward the present
world, the happiness and misery of all beings, and the love and hatred of any
individual, all of them need to be explored in one way or another in the new
synthetic structure. Leaving them behind is like giving up on life.
370

This “new synthetic structure” as proposed by Yuan Kejia is not only anchored in
the present as it reflects “the sensibilities toward the present world”, but also closely
linked to the past and future as it incorporates “history, memory, wit, religion” as well as
“the happiness and misery of all beings, and the love and hatred of any individual” across
the timeline. It reflects Yuan’s awareness of modern sensibilities that can only be

369
Yuan Kejia, “Further Analysis of the Modernization of New Poetry,” 21.
370
Yuan Kejia, “Further Analysis of the Modernization of New Poetry,” 21.
223
expressed through a new type of temporality that does not insist on the rupture between
past, present, and future and no longer follows the linear temporal progression. Stressing
the importance of unconsciousness, history, memory, and even religion in the
representation of the present, Yuan Kejia demonstrates in his writing a new sense of
temporality that rejects the notion of linear temporality and emphasizes instead the
fluidity of past, present, and future.
The view of time not as linear progression coincides with the sense of temporality
of Yuan’s Western modernist counterparts. As we have already discussed, at the turn of
the twentieth century, with the enormous changes in wealth, knowledge, and experiences,
comprehensions of temporality shifted away from the Enlightenment belief in linear
progression and the view of time as “absolute, true and mathematical” as suggested by
Newtonian science.
371
Western artistic and literary movements associated with
modernism arose in response to the tension between two types of modernity, one as “a
product of scientific and technological progress” and the other as “an aesthetic concept”,
as it is argued by Calinescu.
372
This tension between the scientific and the aesthetic
contributes greatly to the rethinking of the concept of time and temporality and
challenges the firm belief in the absoluteness and simplicity of reason and the confidence
in progress inherent in the Enlightenment mode of thinking. What is reflected in the
writings of the modernist writers, then, is indeed a new mode of thinking about time that
rejects the Newtonian concept of objective, progressive, and abstract time, time that can

371
Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-
1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37.
372
Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1977), 41-44.
224
be supposedly scientifically measured by the clock. The modernist writers, thus, explore
in their writings, as Virginia Woolf aptly puts it, “the discrepancy between time on the
clock and time in the mind” and favor “time in the mind” greatly over “time on the
clock.”
373
The difference between “time on the clock” and “time in the mind” lies exactly
in the understanding of time no longer as scientific time, the homogenous, abstract and
measurable units that flow irreversibly forward, but rather as real time, or what Bergson
calls durée, duration as flux that captures the dynamics and vitality of life in which past
and present permeate and melt into each other and allows no strict separation between
past, present, and future.
374

Along with the rethinking of the conceptions of time and temporality, modernist
writers and thinkers in the West also challenge the conceptions of history that were based
on the models of linear change and progress. Just as James Longenbach argues, what we
see in the writings of the twentieth century writers and thinkers is the rejection of the
positivist view of history and historical knowledge that makes it impossible to construct
any sort of teleological or linear history.
375
This modernist critique of positivistic
historiography takes on two forms, according to Longenbach. One follows the powerful
ideology of Nietzschean antihistoricism that reflects in modernist literature a state of
mind that Paul de Man defines as “a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope

373
Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Wordsworth Editions, Limited, 1995), 47. Quoted from Randall
Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992), 83.
374
Henri Bergson, Henri Bergson: Key Writings, Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey eds., (London and
New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002), 4.
375
James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987), 6.
225
of reaching at last a point that could be called a pure present, a point of origin that marks
a new departure” while at the same time the persistent effect of the past is ultimately
unavoidable. In opposition to the antihistoricist view of history as something to be
avoided or destroyed, Longenbach points out that there are other kinds of attitudes toward
history bound up in modernism that urge us to embrace our past rather than reject it.
Thinkers such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Croce, Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset, and Gadamer
emphasize in their writing that history “is a living part of the present and cannot be
destroyed.” Furthermore, modernist writers like Pound and Eliot reveal in their poems an
understanding of history in which history becomes the source of inspiration for writing in
the present. For Pound and Eliot, there is no strict rupture between past and present,
instead, “past and present are indistinguishably mingled.”
376
Eliot, in his famous essay
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” proposed his notion of temporality in the following
passage, which was later called in Four Quartets, the “intersection of the timeless with
time.” Eliot writes,

…the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation
in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from
Homer and within it the whole literature of his own country has a simultaneous
existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a
sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the
temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time
what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
contemporaneity…
377

376
James Longenbach, 5-13.
377
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London:
Butler and Tanner Ltd., 1960), 49.
226
Past and present, according to Eliot, are closely intertwined and intersected. In
promoting the “intersection of the timeless with time,” Eliot juxtaposes the forces that
persist from the past and those that are created from the present and insists on a new
historical consciousness that pursues “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity,” the “mythical method” he outlined in his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” on
Joyce’s work.
378
Peter Childs argues that in face of destruction of civilization at present
Eliot sees myth in the past as a way of giving contemporaneity shape and structure in
literature. Myth, thus, is evoked to “control.., order, give shape and significance” to
contemporary history.
379
This historical sense takes the form of what Longenbach calls
“existential historicism,” following Fredric Jameson. It is believed that historicism, in the
words of Jameson,

does not involve the construction of this or that linear or evolutionary or genetic
history, but rather designates something like a transhistorical event: the
experience, rather, by which historicity as such is manifested, by means of the
contact between the historian’s mind in the present and a given synchronic
cultural complex from the past.
380

Rejecting linear temporality and stressing the simultaneity and contemporaneity
of past and present, modernist poets like Pound and Eliot take an opposite stance towards
history from those who are influenced by Nietzschean antihistoricism, even though they
share a common skepticism of the possibility of scientific and objective historical

378
T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Frank Kermode, ed., The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London:
Faber & Faber, 1975), 177-78.
379
T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 177.
380
James Longenbach, 13.
227
knowledge. For Eliot, past is not at all a burden that needs to be taken off, but rather a
source of inspiration. The past exists as “monuments” of an “ideal order,” while on the
other hand, the past and the present are in constant interaction, as “the past should be
altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”
381

For the Nine Leaves Poets, especially Mu Dan, Du Yunxie, Zheng Min and Yuan
Kejia who attended Southwest Associated University in Kunming, Eliot is indeed their
idol. At Southwest Associated University, they studied Western modernist poetics with
great enthusiasm and were further exposed to the poetry and literary criticism of
modernist poets, such as Yeats, Eliot, and Auden, upon the arrival of the British poet and
critic William Empson (1906-1984). According to Zhou Yuliang, Mu Dan’s classmate,
they borrowed Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle and Eliot’s collected essays The Sacred
Wood from Empson and it was not until then that they knew what the modernist school
was.
382
Eliot’s writing, thus, sheds great influence on the writing of the Nine Leaves
Poets and especially on Yuan Kejia’s poetic theory. However, even though the Nine
Leaves poets, as Yuan Kejia argues, hope to modernize New Poetry following the
Western modernist tradition represented by Eliot, the nostalgia that Eliot feels for the past
and the weight that Eliot puts on the past as a source for inspiration and a force that
informs the present yet also gets altered by the present hardly resonates with the Nine
Leaves Poets. Although the Nine Leaves Poets draw heavily from Eliot’s poetics, their

381
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 50.
382
Zhou Yuliang, “Mu Dan de shi he yishi” (Mu Dan’s Poetry and Anecdotes), in Du Yunxie, ed., Yige minzu
yijing qilai (Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin chubanshe, 1987), 19-20.
228
own complex relationship to history and poetry marks a crucial distinction from that of
Eliot.
If Eliot, in his poems, performs “a transformation of the historical imagination
into myth” that aims at the “abolition of time”
383
, creating a “transhistorical event” in
which the “timeless” past and tradition could interact with the “temporal” present, the
Nine Leaves Poets find it almost impossible to completely abolish time and take this
transhistorical stance. As the new generation of poets writing during the wartime period,
they are very much aware of their own historicity, of their time and position in history. In
the “Preface” of their journal Chinese New Poetry, they start first and foremost with the
statement which indicates their acute awareness of time, as they write, “What we are
facing is a very serious moment.”
384
This “very serious moment” is a moment in the
present that stands between the past and the future, a moment that is very much similar to
the Nietzschean antihistorical moment that is characterized by the desire to break
completely away from the past in hope of taking a new departure from the present. They
describe this moment in the “Preface” in relation to the past,

The molded house that we used to live in is shaking, the dark and stagnant time
that we used to live in is collapsing, the white painted walls are crumbling down,
and the beams with carved patterns and paintings are breaking up loudly; the fire
underground that has been growing silently for tens and thousands of years has
broken through the earth of tradition. It is laughing, chewing on this world, as
well as giving forth the sacred light and fire for this world.
385

383
Joseph Frank, 64.
384
Tang Shi, “Wo men de huhuan (dai xu)” (Preface: Our Call), in Zhongguo xinshi 1, 1948. Reprinted in “Jiuye
shiren” pinglun ziliao xuan, 366.
385
Tang Shi, “Wo men de huhuan,” 366.
229
Tradition and the past here are considered as a burden that has to be shaken off.
This antihistorical and antitraditional stance can be traced back to their May Fourth
predecessors. As Lin Yusheng points out, the May Fourth movement can be defined as a
radical revolt against the traditional Chinese cultural heritage, which “reflected a
profound crisis of cultural identity in the consciousness of the twentieth-century Chinese
intelligentsia.” Furthermore, “it was an antitraditionalism so radical that it can justifiably
be described as totalistic.”
386
The May Fourth iconoclastic antitraditional ideology, as
Leo Ou-fan Lee argues, reflects a “new mode of historical consciousness” that departs
from the traditional cyclical view of history and emphasizes instead the linear progression
that entails an equation of newness with a new temporal continuum from present to
future.
387
The adoption of linear temporal progression of the May Fourth generation
reveals in their thinking a naïve belief that defining their own epoch as “new” and the
previous period as “old” makes it possible to progress from the old to the new and cut its
ties from the past.
388

However, in the writings of the Nine Leaves Poets, as we have already discussed,
time and history no longer follow the linear progressive logic. They have come to the
realization that the past constantly haunts the present and that past and present are
ultimately mingled together. Thus, their attitude toward the past is much more complex.

386
Lin Yusheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitradtitionalism in the May Fourth Era
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 6.
387
Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May Fourth Movement,” in
Kenneth Lieberthal, ed., Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.,
1991), 158-159.
388
Lin Yusheng points out that while the May Fourth iconoclasts wanted to reject their tradition completely on
the ideological grounds, his study shows that their totalistic iconoclasm resulted in part from their inability to
reject the influence of tradition.
230
On the one hand, under the influence of their May Fourth predecessors, they desire to
create something new, and the past appears in their poems sometimes as a burden and a
dark force that they have to break away from. On the other hand, in some of their other
poems they acknowledge the persistent presence of the past and stress not only the
simultaneity of the past and present but also the function of the past in the present as a
defining and determining force. Unlike Eliot, who considers the past as “an ideal order,”
the Nine Leaves Poets view the past as at once a deadening and a nurturing force.
Understanding precisely the persistence of the past in the present, they situate themselves
firmly in the present and envision the coming of the future. Implicit in this anticipation of
the coming of a better future is a certain optimism that they share with their May Fourth
predecessors about the movement of history toward progress based on the assumption of
the possibility of change over time. Yet unlike the May Fourth generation, who think that
the present has to break completely and abruptly from the past in order to move forward,
the Nine Leaves Poets do not see the present as a moment in which the past has ceased to
be and the future has yet to come, but rather a moment that contains both the past and the
future. It is a moment that is as much oriented toward the future as it is created by the
past. The break from the past is not possible, thus, unless the present becomes the
moment of transformation that is directed and shaped by the foreseeable future as well as
prepared by the weight of the past for that very transformation.
It is indeed the Nine Leaves Poets’ awareness of their own time and position in
history and their definition of the present as “a serious moment” that drive them to focus
much of their attention on depicting the present yet at the same time adopt “a
231
transhistoric perspective” that allows them to surpass their own time and “seriously
contemplate on themselves, as well as their solemn connectedness to all historical life.”
389

The present that is revealed in their poems often appears to be stifling. In Mu Dan’s
“Love of Ocean”, the reality in the present is described as a brutal force that suppresses
everything. Mu Dan writes, “We have been tightly enclosed by the burdening reality,” in
which “Dreams that are more realistic than reality, thoughts/ That are more vital than
water, wither.”
390
The persistence of the past in the present is often considered as what
contributes to the brutality of the present reality. Thus, the reality of life is ultimately
painful, and the source of the pain is our past and history. In “Protest” Mu Dan writes,

What do we do? What do we do?
Life continuously tempts us
To desire, in miseries, the snare of happiness,
… …
This is death. Contradiction in history oppresses us,
Balances and poisons each of our impulses.
391

If Bertrand Russell’s statement that “all human activity springs from two sources:
impulse and desire”
392
is correct, then history in this poem is represented as a force that
obstructs all human activity because it “oppresses, balances, and poisons” both desire and

389
Tang Shi, “Women de huhuan,” 367. For a translation of an essential part of this preface, see Lyrics from
Shelters, 30.
390
Mu Dan, “Hailian” (Love of Ocean), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 186.
391
Mu Dan, “Kongsu” (Protest), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 131-33. Translation is taken from Lyrics from Shelters,
140-141.
392
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1997), 11.
232
impulse. It is this suppression that restricts us and brings us constant pain. Therefore,
Zheng Min writes in “Oh, China”,

Oh, China! Your ground is filled with weeds and wild vines,
In the canals history leaves its precipitation and waste.
……
… A minute of history is a period of restriction!
Transformed into various forms, this ghostly charm gives us continuous
torment,
Hidden in every corner, even in our own blood, the formidable
enemy!”
393

History, in this poem again, is considered as a burden, a force of restriction, like
our formidable enemy who gives us constant pain. However, if we read more carefully,
we also realize that although history is described as a source of oppression and restriction,
and the cause of our pain in many of the poems of the Nine Leaves Poets, they
understand that history as our past cannot be separated from the present. The past does
not ever pass, but remains present, like the “ghostly charm” that haunts us continuously,
“hidden in every corner” of the present world, as well as “in our own blood.” Thus, the
reality of the present is constantly being altered through the interaction between the past
and the present, through our struggle with this “formidable enemy”. It is this unavoidable
interaction between the past and the present that make our present reality ultimately filled
with all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes. Mu Dan’s “Departure” nicely captures the
various contradictory aspects of present life, in which “human beings” are transformed
into “animals”, future brings both despair and hope, and individual concerns are at once

393
Zheng Min, “Oh, Zhongguo” (Oh, China), in Wang, Shengsi, ed., Jiuye zhishu changing: “Jiuye shiren”
zuoping xuan (Forever Green: Selected Poems of the Nine Leaves Poets) (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue,
1994), 229.
233
encouraged and negated. Therefore, our life can only be characterized by “abundance,
and abundant pain.”
394
The phrase “abundance, and abundant pain” that Mu Dan uses to
describe life is itself paradoxical. Life is indeed painful as it is filled with “abundant
pain” (fengfu de tongku), but it is also this pain that makes our life less tedious and
monotonous, but rather richer and fuller. Therefore, using the same word “fengfu” in two
different senses, Mu Dan weaves in two opposing aspects of life in one statement. The
present reality is Janus-faced, as it is defined by its “abundance” as well as its “abundant
pain”. Furthermore, like the Roman god Janus, the present faces both the past and the
future and looks both backward and forward. The present, then, is a moment that contains
both the past and the future, and a moment that stands for new beginning, a moment on
the threshold.
The Nine Leaves Poets consider themselves as standing on the threshold of
history. Chen Jingrong, in a public letter in response to a reader’s unjust interpretation of
her poem “Fresh Thirst,” writes about the particular historical period that she finds
herself in. She writes:

We are in the midst of a grand epoch in which the old gives way to the new. We,
the young of this generation, suffer more and face more hardship than any
generation before us. Half of our bodies are buried in the tombs of the past, while
the other half are growing anew from the earth. There is not a moment that we
cease to dream of breaking away completely, like a cicada, from our old shells.

Therefore, we have fresh thirst.
395

394
Mu Dan, “Chufa” (Departure), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 150-51. This poem was originally entitled “Shi” (Poetry)
when it was published in Dagong bao on May 4, 1942. The title was later changed to “Departure” when the
poem was collected in Mudan shiji 1939-1945 (Poetry Collection of Mu Dan: 1939-1945), Xiandai shichao
(Collection of Modern Poetry), and Qi (Banner).
395
Chen Jingrong, “Dafu yige mosheng duzhe de gongkaixin” (A public letter in response to a letter from an
unknown reader), in “Jiuye shiren” pinglun ziliaoxuan, 225.
234

This “fresh thirst”, the thirst for things that are fresh and new, is primarily a
product of our era. Chen Jingrong presents this era as a threshold of history that is
defined by the coexistence of the past, present and future through the vivid image of a
body that is split in half, simultaneously residing in both the past and present and
foreseeing the future. Driven by the hope to break away from the past and venture into
the future, the “fresh thirst” that Chen Jingrong describes in this poem is similar to the
modernist state of mind that Paul de Man defines as “a desire to wipe out whatever came
earlier” in order to reach “a point of origin that marks a new departure.”
396
The thirst,
likewise, refreshes itself everyday in order to keep itself constantly anew and fresh. Chen
Jingrong writes,

I thirst. Through boundless joy and misery
My soul burns ill at ease.
I’m tired of today,
Tired of the moment just past-
I get tired even of my thirst
If it’s not fresh enough.
397

What Chen Jingrong terms as “fresh thirst” in this poem represents perfectly the
modernist desire to make everything new, as “I am tired of” almost everything that passes,
“today,” “the moment just past,” or even “my thirst” if it is no longer fresh. Implicit in
this desire to make everything new and fresh is the urge to wipe out everything that has

396
Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 148.
397
Chen Jingrong, “Xinxian de jiaoke” (Fresh Thirst), in Jiuye zhi shu changqing, 105-106. The translation is
taken from Shiu-Pang E. Almberg, The Poetry of Chen Jingrong, 82.
235
happened earlier, the past and history, in order to reach a point of new departure.
However, Paul de Man in “Literary History and Literary Modernity” points out, through
his reading of Nietzsche’s essay “Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life” that even
though the concept of modernity implies the denial of history, it is impossible to escape
history.
398
Quoting Nietzsche, de Man writes, “History itself must resolve the problem of
history,” therefore, despite the inherent contradiction between history and modernity, “to
achieve something truly new, powerful, life-giving, and original” and to reject history,
one must first understand the past and have thorough historical knowledge.
399

This paradoxical view toward history can also be detected in the poems of the
Nine Leaves Poets. Although in the poems that we have discussed above the past and
history are depicted as a force of suppression and restriction that they want to break away
from, in other poems the Nine Leaves Poets reveal their ties to the past and history.
History is no longer a deadening force, but rather what nurtures and creates the present.
Mu Dan writes in his “Charm of the Forest”: “No one knows that history has passed
here,/ Leaving behind the spirits of heroes, growing as they transform into trees.”
400
Du
Yunxie writes in a similar vein in “Anonymous Hero”: “Those who create history will be
buried more deeply/ In history, burning to bring warmth for the late comers.”
401
The past,
thus, enriches the present. Even if it is filled with pain and suffering, it is what makes life
more meaningful. Therefore, as Yuan Kejia writes in “Heavy Bell,” “Leave me silent in

398
Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight, 142-65.
399
Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 150.
400
Mu Dan, “Senglin zhi mei” (Charm of the Forest), in Mu Dan shi quan ji, 214.
401
Du Yunxie, “Wuming yingxiong” (Anonymous Hero), in Jiuye zhi shu changqing, 131.
236
Time and Space,/ Like a rustgreen bell in an ancient temple,/ Carrying three thousand
years of weight” because “Life fruits from miseries,”
402
the Nine Leaves Poets are willing
to take on the entire weight of the past on their shoulders. It is only through the emersion
in the past and in the pain that comes with it that life can truly bloom.
The Nine Leaves Poets regard themselves as being situated at a pivotal and
decisive moment in history, a moment of transition from the old to the new and from the
past to the future. Many of their poems demonstrate their awareness of their time and
position in history and their desire for a brighter future, which indicates, according to Sun
Yushi, “their strong will to rebel against and break away from the entire old tradition and
their earnest desire for the imminent new era.”
403
However, the Nine Leaves Poets
understand very well that to rebel against the past they have to first embrace it. Therefore,
the transitional moment they find themselves in is most importantly a moment in which
the past, present, and future coexist simultaneously and illuminate one another as the past
contains the potential of the present in preparation for the possibility of the future. Chen
Jingrong’s “The Pearl and the Pearl Hunter” is considered by Sun Yushi as “an oath
made by an awakened intellectual who is willing to devote his entire life to the new
era.”
404
The last few lines of the poem indeed suggest such a reading, as it reads, “When
the moment comes, it will lift the concealing veil/ And solemnly opening up to life/
Plunge into a world entirely new.” But the poem is not only about this final objective, to

402
Yuan Kejia, “Chen Zhong” (Heavy Bell), in Jiuye zhi shu changqing, 172. Translation is taken from Lyrics
from Shelters, 199.
403
Sun Yushi, Zhongguo xiandai zhuyi shichao shilun (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1999), 355.
404
Sun Yushi, Zhongguo xiandai zhuyi shichao shilun, 355.
237
“plunge into a world entirely new”, but also about the process through which the pearl
prepares itself. In the commentary of this poem, Shiu-Pang E. Almberg rightly points out
that Chen Jingrong in this poem elaborates on the image of the pearl “as an incubator by
which experiences are transformed and the result nurtured.”
405
Therefore, what this poem
stresses is how past experiences accumulate and how the departure from the present into
the future is made possible through the nurturing power of the past. The poem reads:

The pearl in the shell waits for something
It knows the highest happiness is
To give and not arduously to conceal in the deep
The sunshine of many days, the moonlight of many nights
And the wind and rain that heave up foamy waves from time to time
All this it has collected
In its growth and changed into its
Own. …
406

Like the pearl that is nurtured by “the sunshine of many days, the moonlight of
many nights” as well as “the wind and rain that heave up foamy waves,” we are also
nurtured by our past. What we need is not breaking away from the past, but rather
bringing all the past experiences to the present. It is this interaction between the past and
the present that makes who we are, and it is only through the accumulation of our past
that we can become prepared in the present for the coming of the moment, the right
moment in which, again like the pearl, we are willing to open up to life and plunge into
an entirely new world, the brighter future.

405
Shiu-Pang E Almberg, The Poetry of Chen Jingrong, 160.
406
Chen Jingrong, “Zhu he mizhuren” (The Pearl and the Pearl Hunter), in Jiuye zhi shu changqing, 273. The
translation is taken from Almberg, The Poetry of Chen Jingrong, 160.
238
Zheng Min in her poem “Upon Reading ‘Selige Sehnsucht’” also expresses a
similar idea. This poem, as a response to Goethe’s “Selige Sehnsucht” (Blessed
Yearning), not only follows Goethe’s creed of dying and becoming, but also explores the
reason behind it. Zheng Min writes, “Death and metamorphosis is extremely invaluable,
because/ they both belong to that constant ‘oneness’.” The “oneness” surpasses all
restraints of time and space, as “In tens and thousands of changes in time, as well as in
space,” this “oneness” remains the same and constant.
407
If the “oneness” is the essential
truth about the world and human life, then as the all inclusive “oneness”, the past, present,
and future also exist simultaneously and interact between each other. The poem reads:

Carrying its entire past, life can then
Progress forward like an endless river.
……
In the visible present there is
Every invisible past.
Only from the entire “past” can
The highest form of transcendence be metamorphosed
We stand high on the rock to watch the tides coming in:
Behind that moving line of whiteness
Is no other than the power of the entire ocean.
408

The past, even though it is no longer visible, stays with us. Every coming tide is a
new present and every present is possible only through the accumulation of the past. Past
and present are constantly intermingled and fused to create new future. It is only through

407
Zheng Min, “Du ‘Selige Sehnsucht’ hou” (Upon Reading ‘Selige Sehnsucht’ ), in Shiji: 1942-1947 (Poetry
Collection: 1942-1947) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1996), 15.
408
Zheng Min, “Du ‘Selige Sehnsucht’ hou,” 15-16.
239
the integration of the past in the present rather than the rejection of the past that life can
move on in a constant flux that features at once change and eternal “oneness”.
What we see in the poems of the Nine Leaves Poets is their particular sensibility
toward time as well as their reflection of time and history. They demonstrate in their
poems their acute awareness of their position in time and history. On the one hand, they
no longer think of time as linear, stress the simultaneity of past, present, and future, and
view the past and history at once something to reject and to embrace. On the other hand,
because of the particular historical period they find themselves in, which is the
transitional period from the old to the new in their own definition, many of these writers
still show a certain optimism about the movement of history toward progress. Tang Qi’s
“Time and the Banner” exemplifies very well the Nine Leaves Poets’ sophisticated
reflection of time and history.
“Time and the Banner” is a long poem that is indebted to T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt
Norton.” Leung Ping-kwan points out that Tang Qi, like the modernists, employs in this
poem fragmented images, elliptical language, and uncommon syntax, which emphasize
the temporal and rhetorical discontinuity of the poem. Comparing the treatment of time in
“Time and the Banner” and Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”, Leung argues further that the
difference between the perceptions of time in these two poems is that what Eliot seeks is
“the timeless transcendence beyond temporal reality” while the moments in Tang Qi’s
poem “show the impossibility of transcendence.” Thus, the time is “moving toward a
religious utopia of eternity” in “Burnt Norton”, while in Tang’s poem it is moving toward
240
“a political utopia which promises social change.”
409
What lies behind this difference in
the perceptions of time represented by these two poems is these two poets’ different
views toward time and history. As we have already discussed earlier, for Eliot, the past
exists as an “ideal order” and his call for the “intersection between the timeless and
temporal” aims at shaping and ordering the disintegrated present by bringing the
idealized timeless past to the temporal present. For Tang Qi, however, as well as other
Nine Leave Poets, under the influence of the May Fourth predecessors, it is almost
impossible for them to regard the past as an ideal order so that they turn their attention to
the future. Thus, with regard to the larger movement of history, Eliot seems to see history
as cyclical while the Nine Leaves Poets, because of their optimism toward future,
demonstrate in their poems a certain optimism toward future progress.
However, despite the optimism in the larger movement of history toward progress,
time in “Time and the Banner” is represented as absolutely non-linear. Leung Ping-kwan
has already pointed out that time in this poem is represented as fragmented and
disintegrated and the temporal elements are usually spatialized through the collage and
juxtaposition of images.
410
But the non-linearity of time in this poem, as well as in many
other poems of the Nine Leaves Poets, is reflected not only from the representation of
time as fragmented, but also, and more importantly, from the representation of time as
simultaneity, a conception of time where past, present, and future co-exist. What we
discern in this poem is an obsession with the present moment, a moment that can be

409
Leung Ping-kwan, Aesthetic Oppositions: A Study of the Modernist Generation of Chinese Poets, 1936-1949,
Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1984, 115-118.
410
Leung, Ping-kwan, 115.
241
called, borrowing the titles that Tang Qi gives to his other poems, “A Serious Moment”
or “The Last Moment”. This is a moment, as Jiang Dengke writes, in which “the past,
present, and future can be presented simultaneously on the same plane (tongyi
pingmian),” and in this poem, this plane could be represented through the image of the
“banner”.
411

The present is Janus-faced, facing at once the past and future. It carries the entire
weight of the past, as everything, “Remains here permanently from the time past/ In icy
flame, as well as the white light of fading years/ It is once again buried by the time of
snow.”
412
(Part 2, l.58-l.60) It also forebodes the future, as “At the last moment, taken
back to the remote/ territory where it belongs, it sees clearly/ The complete end that will
soon be coming.” (Part 4, l.77-l.79) Therefore, the present moment contains the unity of
the past and future:

Time past stays here, here is
Not entirely the past, the present is also expanding within
And is always the future, encompassing everything. (Part 1, l.8-l.10)

Thus, the present contains the unity of past and future. However, in addition to the
simultaneity of past, present, and future that Tang Qi demonstrates in the poem, we also
see an obvious privileging of the present. The present is a moment of transformation, an
explosive moment. Tang Qi writes, “The cruelty, atrocity, and dictatorship of thousands
of years will/ Explode at a decisive moment,/ The whole landscape will change,

411
Jiang Dengke, Jiuye shiren lungao (Chongqing: Xinan daxue chubanshe, 2006), 179.
412
Tang Qi, “Shijian yu qi” (Time and the Banner), in Jiuye zhishu changqing, 237-246.
242
emanating in blood the strongest flame/ Shining on the glorious life and death.” (Part 6,
l.8-l.11) It is this explosive and “decisive moment” that the entire poem is stressing and it
is in this moment that we can reflect upon our past and anticipate the future. In the
postscript of his poetry collection, Tang Qi writes, “Rilke says, ‘Time is shattered!’ I
heard his witty voice hidden on the streets, on the lawn of the city hall, in the life of
despair of any woman and child.”
413
The exclamation that “Time is shattered” is taken
from Rilke’s The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christophe Rilke, in which Rilke
also gives primacy to the present, as there is “no yesterday, no morrow; for time is
shattered. And they flower from its ruins.”
414
Tang Qi finds himself also facing the ruins
of time and history, which explains his claim that Rilke’s claim “Time is shattered” can
be heard in every hidden corner in the present reality. Yet it is also through the realization
that time is shattered and there is no yesterday or tomorrow that he wants to emphasize
the importance of the present and give primacy to the present. Only in the present can we
revitalize and reinvent the past through our memory, imagination, and reinterpretation.
And only in the present can we, by bringing the past back and integrating our past and
present, conceive the possibility of future. Therefore, the present is truly a moment of
transformation, in which we can flower from the ruins of time and history by
reconnecting ourselves to time, to our past through memory and re-imagination, and to
our future through anticipation. The past, present, and future form a unity in this very
moment, a moment that could be spatialized into the image of a banner, as Tang Qi writes,

413
Tang Qi, “Shi di yi ce: houji” (Postscript: First V olume of Poetry), quoted from Jiang Dengke, Jiuye shiren
lungao, 177.
414
R. M. Rilke, The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christophe Rilke, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1959), 55.
243
“The future develops from this grand process, cruel/ Yet benevolent time, gets fulfilled
in/ The banner of people.” (Part 7, l.2-l.4)

Mu Dan: History as Cyclical
The feeling that “time is shattered” that Tang Qi expresses in “Time and the
Banner” is echoed in Mu Dan’s poem “The Song of Roses.”
415
The poem is divided into
three parts and each part is given a subtitle that gives a hint of its theme. The first subtitle
reads, “A youth is standing on the bridge between reality and dream,” and the tone of part
I is positive and hopeful. Despite the prevailing feeling that everything is unreal and
meaningless, the youth still holds onto hope, longing for a different world, as “Through
the cracks of clouds, I see something rise up, like a dream.” (Part I, l.12) But part II of the
poem reveals that the gap between the real and the dream world is unsurpassable, and the
subtitle reads, “The current of reality has destroyed the bridge, and he is hiding in the
vacuum.” Comparing reality to vacuum, Mu Dan expresses in this poem a similar sense
of time and reality as that of Tang Qi. It is at the wake of time being shattered that one
realizes that he is living in the vacuum. Thus, Mu Dan writes, “Everything has obviously
faded, and everywhere is disease contaminated and void,/ …When I realize that my
memory will be blank, facing the fire of heater, I cannot feel any touch of warmth.” (Part
II, l.1 & l. 12) In this vacuum, there is nothing left except the vast void. Disconnected to
everything, one feels as if even the memory is fading and will be wiped out. There is “no
yesterday, no morrow” as Rilke writes.

415
Mu Dan, “Meigui zhi ge” (The Song of Roses), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 68-73.
244
With this overwhelming feeling that time is shattered, Tang Qi as well as other
Nine Leaves Poets, as we have already discussed, express in their poems an optimism
toward the general direction of historical movement even though they no longer conceive
of time as following the homogenous and empty linear logic of progress. Therefore, the
Nine Leaves Poets are very much invested in the present, the moment of transformation,
which resurrects the past in the present and carries the entire weight of the past on the one
hand while foreboding the coming of a brighter future on the other. Grounding
themselves in this transformative present, they are hopefully expecting a brighter future.
However, in Mu Dan’s poems, this optimism isn’t as strong. In the third part of “The
Song of Roses”, Mu Dan wants also to express his longing for change. The world the
youth is in has “no violent change in the air current, no reverse turning of the mountains
and sea” and people die in “boredom and exhaustion”. (Part III, l.6) Thus, Mu Dan writes,
“Stride forward! Because I see fresh grass blazing from the old roots,/ I want to board the
1940 train marching toward the hottest furnace,” and “A winter seed is expecting new
growth.” (Part III, l.7-8 and l.12) The image of new grass, the winter seed, and the call to
“stride forward” point to a certain optimistic anticipation of change and a better future.
But if we read the subtitle of part III, then we will realize that Mu Dan may have his own
reservations. Instead of firmly stating a belief in future changes, Mu Dan phrases the
subtitle in the form of a question, as it reads, “Fresh air has entered. Will he get
healthier?” It is hard to gauge what answer Mu Dan has in mind, but because it is in the
form of a question, there is always a possibility of a “Yes” and a “No”. This question,
245
then, also leads to a question that deserves our exploration, specifically regarding Mu
Dan’s view of history and historical movement.
In his long poem, “Appearing from Invisibility,”
416
Mu Dan uses the image of a
seed again in part III. However, in this poem, this seed is no longer the “winter seed” that
is “expecting new growth” as it is in “The Song of Roses.” Mu Dan writes:

Because even though we are living we have no center
We have many centers
Our centers clash against each other
Or we give up
Living becomes striving to live, our entire life is in the eternal
process of preparation
with no life at all,
Three thousand years of abundance wither and die in the seed
while we still continue…
(Part III, l. 32-37)

Here the seed shows no growth but only devastation and destruction. Life seems
to never move forward. “Three thousand years”, year after year, there is always a seed, a
seed that never grows. Therefore, as Mu Dan writes, “Three thousand years of abundance
wither and die in the seed.” And we, year after year, struggle to live, yet we are stuck
eternally in the process of preparing for life yet have no real life at all. It is this feeling
that “even though we are living we have no center” and we are lost forever in the process
of preparing for life yet “with no life at all” that we say, as Mu Dan writes in part I of this
poem, “We came from a completely lost path,/ …/ Unnamable, so we say we came from
a period of time.” (Part I, l.2 & l.4) In this poem time is not linear and not progressing
forward. Time is metaphorically conceptualized as a path, but this path is a lost and

416
Mu Dan, “Yinxian” (Appearing from Invisibility), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 234-44.
246
intangible path that is filled with “series of entangled and messy, dried-up illusions.”
(Part I, l.5) Thus, the poem reads:

In the direction that we cannot arrange, you
Give us mountain peaks at one time, grassland at another
Union at one time, separation at another
Bullying at one time, being bullied at another
Dense rain at one time, dry wind at another
Embracing at one time, getting tired at another
Beginning at one time, end at another
Belief at one time, despair at another

Lord, we waver between the two extremes of time
But we say: we are moving forward.
Because what we think is true, has now changed to be false,
What we used to cry over has now been forgotten.
(Part I, l.11-22)

In the above-quoted part of the poem, our life is defined by a series of paradoxical
experiences, such as union and separation, beginning and end, belief and despair.
Therefore, we are, according to Mu Dan, wavering “between the two extremes of time,”
even though we naively claim that “we are moving forward.” This wavering movement,
the almost cyclical and perpetual movement between the two extremes, is what Mu Dan
envisions as the movement of time and history. He writes further, “A generation passes,
and another comes, freshly turning back/ At the very spot where the previous one is
destroyed.” (Part I, l.30-31) Therefore,

What we had before we will have again, what we lost will be lost again,
Our hearts continuously grow, our hearts continuously shrink,
We will end at where we start.
(Part I, l.42-44)

247
What Mu Dan’s poems reflect, then, is a view of time and history that is quite
different from his fellow Nine Leaves Poets. His fellow Nine Leaves Poets, although they
reject a strict hierarchy or separation between past and present and the notion of time as a
homogeneous and empty flow, still anticipate some form of historical progress or forward
movement. Mu Dan, on the other hand, conceives time and history as following a circular
trajectory, as it is reflected in the line “We will end at where we start.” In another poem
“Thoughts on the 30
th
Birthday,” Mu Dan writes specifically about his opinion and
conception of time. Here time is described as a capricious force that is completely
unpredictable and constantly changing, and we as human beings are subjected to this
force. Mu Dan writes,

Now intense, now relaxed, flowing into this dust,
Time, it is stingy and jealous; it creates as well as destroys
Continuously subjected to its caprices, I come into being.
417

Because of his understanding of this capricious nature of time, Mu Dan, unlike his
fellow Nine Leaves Poets who regard the present as a moment of transformation that
anticipates a brighter future, Mu Dan considers any moment as a moment that anticipates
at once creation and destruction, hope and despair. The present, then, is a moment that is
“constantly dying out,” “between the two darkness of the past and future.”
418
In the poem
“Cracks,” Mu Dan describes why any progress is almost impossible. He writes:

417
Mu Dan, “Sanshi danchen yougan” (Thoughts on 30
th
Birthday), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 227-28.
418
Mu Dan, “Sanshi danchen yougan,” 228.
248
… He pursues, yet he falls into darkness
The four walls are tradition, and powerful
Daytime, sustaining all habits of winning.

New hopes are repressed, twisted,
It is only safe when all is crushed:
Young people learn to be clever, the older
Also continue in their folly.
Who values the future? No one will feel heart-wrenched:
What changes tomorrow has already been changed by today.
419

Tradition is depicted metaphorically as formidable four-sided walls, through
which it sustains its rule and its “habits of winning”. The winning that Mu Dan refers to
is ultimately the crushing and twisting of new hopes. These walls also serve as the
demarcation between brightness and darkness. Arguing that enclosed within these walls
is daytime and brightness, Mu Dan gives brightness and darkness a new definition. While
daytime and brightness stand for conformity and are linked to the violent tradition that
crushes hope, darkness points to unconformity and constant struggle. But what Mu Dan
has observed is that whether it is the young or the old generation, none of them will
embrace darkness but only succumb to the force of brightness, the force of tradition. Thus,
these walls are as strong as usual and we see no progress in history, because “what
changes tomorrow has already been changed by today.”
Tradition, however, is not the only force that crushes our hope. Mu Dan finds this
type of destructive force in the long history of human civilization. In “Four Poems” Mu
Dan takes up directly the issue of anticipation of a brighter future. He starts the first poem
with the line, “Welcome the arrival of a new century!” Yet he immediately challenges the

419
Mu Dan, “Liewen” (Cracks), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 169-70.
249
implied optimism in this line by saying “But only an inherited pair of hands exists in the
world.”
420
This pair of hands designs and directs the entire human history, and because
this pair of hands is inherited generation after generation, Mu Dan defines history as
being trapped in the design of these hands eternally, never being able to move forward.
He believes that history unfolds

In an image of mankind with its hands clasped
There are eternal repeated killing, ideals
Death at birth, and double personality: time flows from both sides
Carrying the you of today: as doubly extreme, wounded, twisted as ever!
(Poem I, l.5-l.8)

Human history, then, is filled with killing, conflicts, and despair, following the
same pattern generation after generation, and it is exactly like what Mu Dan writes, the
you of today is as “doubly extreme, wounded, twisted” as the you of the past. Therefore,
unlike his May Fourth predecessors who locate all social evils in the past and tradition
and believe that a clean break from the past can solve all problems, Mu Dan considers
history as following a cyclical path, and there is no break from the past nor is there a
brighter future breeding in the present. What contributes to this dark cyclical motion of
history is the prevailing violence inherent in human civilization. His poem “Violence”
reads:

From the rise of a nation
To the destruction of a land,
From the unfair beginning of history
To the ending of its perpetual and never-ending cycles
Every step is your flame.

420
Mu Dan, “Shi sishou” (Four Poems), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 269-72.
250

From the bare life of truth
To the hatred of men toward its lies
From the flower of smiles of love
To the declaration of its fruits:
Every mouth opening reveals your teeth.

From the forced collective stupidity
To the civilized accurate calculation,
From the overthrow of the value of life
To its establishment and reestablishment:
The most reliable still is your iron palm.

From our dream of today
To the heaven of tomorrow that is hard to carry out
From the first cry of the baby
To its unwilling death:
Everything inherits your image.
421

Thus, violence permeates every part of our life and every corner of the society. It
is exactly in the presence of this violence that history is trapped in the “perpetual and
never-ending cycles,” and “our dream of today” can hardly ever be fulfilled in “the
heaven of tomorrow”. Mu Dan thinks that “when human beings are born from the
bareness of nature,” they are subjected to “imprisonment”
422
and this imprisonment is
enforced precisely by this prevailing force of violence. Therefore, in contrast to the
optimism that most of his contemporary poets and writers have toward historical progress,
Mu Dan thinks of history as ruins, as he writes, “Our ancestors have fallen asleep,
sleeping not far away from us,/ All the stories have been told, only ruins remain.”
423

421
Mu Dan, “Baoli” (Violence), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 246-47.
422
Mu Dan, “Appearing from Invisibility,” 237.
423
Mu Dan, “Zai hanleng de layue de yeli” (At a Cold Winter Night in December), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 95.
251
Even though Mu Dan believes that upon birth we are thrown into this world of
imprisonment and that every endeavor we make, following our illusion of moving
forward, only leads us to “the summit of darkness” and “the peak of collapse,”
424
he
never shows any sign of pessimism in his writing. He seems to find support from God. In
the ending of the poem “Appearing from Invisibility”, Mu Dan writes,

…
Everything pushes us to paradoxical extremes, we should
Suddenly turn around, and see you

This is the time. Here is our twisted life
Please straighten it for us. Here are our dried-up hearts
Please gently rub them together,
Lord, the source of life, please let us hear the sound of your flow.
425

From these above-quoted lines, we can see how God (shangdi) is presented as a
savior, as a source of life that can bring us out of the abyss of darkness. Jiang Dengke
points out that in the complete chaos of the 1940s when all value systems were lost, Mu
Dan, as a writer who is influenced by the May Fourth iconoclasm, could not seek comfort
and support from tradition. On the other hand, many of the Western poets that Mu Dan
appreciates, such as Eliot, Yeats, and Auden, write extensively on the topic of God.
Therefore, it is natural for him to also touch upon the topic of God.
426
However, Jiang
Dengke argues further that Mu Dan’s attitude toward God is extremely ambivalent. This
ambivalence reflects an internal struggle that haunts all Chinese intellectuals, which is a

424
Mu Dan, “Appearing from Invisibility,” 238.
425
Mu Dan, “Appearing from Invisibility,” 244.
426
Jiang Dengke, Jiuye shiren lungao, 266-68.
252
struggle between two attitudes toward life, whether to “be detached from the world” (chu
shi) or to “be involved in the world” (ru shi). For Mu Dan, believing in God, to a great
extent, would mean that he has chosen to “be detached,” but he cannot and will not do so.
He is ultimately very much concerned with reality and with the people around him.
427

Facing the prevalence of violence that haunts human history and traps it in its
eternal vicious cycle that leaves behind only ruins and debris, how does Mu Dan cope
with it without being completely negative and pessimistic if turning to God is not really a
choice for him? Mu Dan has to make a decision, and the situation in which he decides is
quite similar to what Nietzsche writes at the end of the fourth book of the Gay Science:

The greatest weight – What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you
into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have
lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there
will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every sign and
everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in
the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between
the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is
turned upside down and again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would
you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who
spoke thus? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment when you would
have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’
If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or
perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, ‘Do you desire this once
more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest
weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to
crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate confirmation and seal?
428

427
Jiang Dengke, Jiuye shiren lungao, 268-69.
428
F. Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams and trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 194-95.
253
Bernd Magnus points out that Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence seems to
suggest that time is cyclical. Furthermore, “The image of eternal recurrence appears to
serves as a test” that determines the individual’s attitude toward life, whether it is
affirmation or negation.
429
Peter Poellner offers an alternative reading of this text and
argues that the confrontation with the idea of eternal recurrence reveals “the radically
transformative character of self-explication or self-transparency,” as it is about the
sudden acquisition of the truth of the self rather than of the world. This refers to,
ultimately, a moment of revelation and self-revelation that is presented as “polarization”
and “extremity”, and what Nietzsche favors, between the two poles of either/or, is
definitely what he calls “affirmation”.
430
What Nietzsche appreciates in life, then, is this
affirmative attitude toward life, even and especially in face of adversity.
Mu Dan faces a similar question. Knowing that history moves in a circular
motion and the prevailing violence that permeates every corner of our life and world will
always forever crush our dreams and yearning, should he fall into despair or should he
embrace and affirm everything? Mu Dan also chooses, between the two extremes of
either/or, the affirmative attitude toward life. In “Two Chapters of Poetry”, Mu Dan
describes our life as “living in terrifying dreams,/ everything is unreal, even our crying/
can only rebuild crying.” One is willing to give up anything in this unreal world, but only
one thing he holds onto, and this is to “walk/ Towards the vast desolation, and tragic

429
Bernd Magus and Kathleen Higgins, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge
Uinversity Press, 1996), 37.
430
Peter Poellner, “Existential Moments,” in Heidrun Friese ed., The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern
Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 57-58.
254
fate!”
431
This tragic fate and vast desolation of human life is what we have to embrace.
The same affirmative attitude is revealed in “Continue to Live,” as he writes: “Continue
to live, in this dangerous land,/ Living among the befallen crowds of death,/ … / Hope,
disillusion, hope, and continue to live.”
432

Yet even though Mu Dan and Nietzsche share a similar attitude toward life, which
is the brave choice of affirmation of life rather than despair, Mu Dan is still quite
different from Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s affirmation is what he calls amor fati, an existential
imperative that entails a total affirmation of everything in life and wants nothing different.
Mu Dan, on the other hand, remains firmly attached to the social reality of China that he
finds himself in, which compels him to strive to break away from the eternal vicious
cycle of history that brings people nothing but misery and despair. Thus, despite his view
of time and history as cyclical, he hopes for change, like his fellow Nine Leaves writers.
This hope to break from the cyclical movement of time and history is best captured in his
poem “The Besieged,” in which he claims that time, against our will, forms a “mediocre
eternal” circle:

A circle, that is many years of human efforts,
Our despair makes it complete.
Destroy it, friends! Let us
Be its incompleteness, worse than being mediocre:
Only then will lightning and rain, new temperature and earth
Come to disturb it, though it may get even colder.
Because we are the besieged group
Upon our disappearance, there emerges a non-human territory.
433

431
Mu Dan, “Shi erzhang” (Two Chapters of Poetry), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 163.
432
Mu Dan, “Huo xiaqu” (Continue to Live), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 172.
433
Mu Dan, “Bei weizhe” (The Besieged), in Mu Dan shi quanji, 179.
255

The circle of time and history that besieges us, according to Mu Dan, is our own
creation. It is created when we stop hoping and let despair take over once our dreams and
hopes are crushed and twisted. As he describes in “Cracks”, people tend to play safe and
let the power of violence take control, therefore, we see “young people learn to be clever,
the older/ Also continue in their folly.” It is this mentality, the lack of bravery to continue
to fight, continue to hope, and continue to say “Yes!” to the darkness and adversity that
their struggle puts them into, that creates the “mediocre eternity” and reinforces the
circle that traps us. Thus, with a short yet firm summon, “Destroy it, friends!”, Mu Dan
calls for action. Yet this action can only be carried out if one chooses to affirm life rather
than going into despair. The affirmation of life that Mu Dan proposes is first and
foremost the affirmation of the prevalence of violence and the cyclical motion of time
and history. To “be its incompleteness” can only happen when we confront the reality
instead of giving in. We have to bear in mind that, similar to the idea of “eternal return”,
our dreams will always be crushed and that we will always be sent to the abyss of
darkness or the peak of collapse if we struggle against this force of violence, yet we still
decide to “continue to live”, to fight, and to hope, despite the repeated defeats. Only then,
only when we “painfully,/ And dangerously, choose death and metamorphosis over and
over again,” may this circle be finally broken. We, as the besieged group, have to at once
affirm our besiegement and strive to break free from it.

256
***
The Nine Leaves Poets made tremendous efforts in the 1940s to revolt against the
dominant poetic trend that they defined as “the sentimental and the didactic,” and to
construct a new poetic tradition, which Yuan Kejia, the poet and literary critic of the
group, later characterized as “Modernism with Chinese Characteristics.” The phrase
“Modernism with Chinese Characteristics” immediately calls attention to the synthetic
nature of their poetic tradition. What they strive to achieve is, what I term as a “drama-tic
synthesis” in their poetic diction, aiming particularly at infusing the Western modernist
poetics and sensibilities into their own writing. The poetic theories and the poems of the
Nine Leaves Poets reflect, on the one hand, a certain modernist sensibility of time that
they share with their Western modernist counterparts and the way in which the non-linear
conception of time shapes their poetic representation and makes it indirect and circuitous,
multi-layered and polyphonic, like that of drama. On the other hand, if one aspect of this
“drama-tic synthesis”, that is, to make poetry akin to drama in their artistic representation,
can be seen as a Chinese implementation of Western poetics because Yuan Kejia derived
his theory of “dramatization in poetry” from T. S. Eliot’s poetic theory and practices, the
other aspect of the “drama-tic synthesis”, the dramatic re-thinking of time, memory, and
history, should be seen more as a response to their own position in time and history at the
particular historical juncture that they find themselves in. This is where they depart
significantly from their Western poetic idol Eliot, who regards past as an ideal order and
seeks to fulfill in his writing “the intersection between the timeless and the temporal” by
resurrecting the past in the present. The Nine Leaves Poets, however, demonstrate in their
257
poems a more ambivalent and sophisticated attitude toward past and history. Unlike their
May Fourth predecessors who strive to sever their ties to the past completely, the Nine
Leaves Poets understand very well that time does not follow the Enlightenment
homogenous linear logic that is marked by abrupt disconnection between past, present
and future. The past continues to live in the present. Therefore, in their poems, often we
see past, present, and future exist simultaneously. At times they hope to break away from
the past, at other times they show that future changes are only possibility when we
embrace our entire past. Concerned with the social reality of China at the time, they
express in their poems a certain optimism toward the future, hoping that China will
eventually march into a better and bright tomorrow.

258

CONCLUSION

The lives and times of Chinese writers in the 1940s can be described as distressed,
displaced, and disoriented by the war and social instability. At the very beginning of this
study, we discussed how the social reality changed drastically for the writers of the 1940s,
as the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan forced them to break away from
their familiar cities to enter the countryside and small towns and leave the International
Settlements to go into the hinterland.
434
This spatial displacement, in the leftist critics’
opinion, stands for a perfect opportunity for the writers to shift their attention away from
the individual self to the masses and adopt revolutionary realism and national forms for
their literary representation. In response to the urgent need for national salvation and the
dominant literary scene’s call for revolutionary literature for the masses, many writers in
the 1940s decided to change the direction of their literary pursuit. He Qifang’s poem
“Clouds” represents the true feelings of many writers at the time and “predicts”, to use
the title of his poetic collection, a critical change in their literary career. The poem reads:

“I love clouds… the clouds which pass by…”
I thought of myself as that man in Baudelaire’s prose poem
Who raised his neck melancholily
Looking into the distant sky.

I walked into the rural area.
Peasants lost their land because they were honest,
Their home reduced to a bundle of farming tools.
In the daytime, they went to the fields to find odd jobs.

434
Luo Sun, “Kangzhan wenyi yundong niaokan,” quoted from Fan Zhihong, Shi bian yuan chang: sishi
niandian xiaoshuo lun (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2002), 10-11.
259
At night, they slept on dry hard stone bridges.
I walked into the city by the sea.
Upon the tar streets of winter,
Rows and rows of apartments stand,
Like modern prostitutes of summer,
And pot-bellied lust and shamelessness.

From now on, I will make loud comments:

I’d rather have a thatched roof;
I don’t love clouds, nor moon,
Nor stars.
435

The gruesome social reality both in the countryside and the cities that writers like
He Qifang witnessed, as it is described in this poem “Clouds,” made many of them feel
the urgent need to fulfill the social function of literature and use it as a weapon to change
and transform the society. Thus, as He Qifang claims, “I’d rather have a thatched roof;/ I
don’t love clouds, nor moon,/ Nor stars,” they decided to write socially engaged and
politically charged works for the larger audience of the masses.
However, the imminent danger of the demise of the nation, the darkness and
brutality of reality, and the forced physical as well as cultural displacement did not make
all writers conform to the dominant leftist literary policy. The discourse of national
salvation, though prominent and dominant, nonetheless could not completely replace the
discourse of enlightenment, both of which were already present and in tension at the birth
of modern Chinese literature in the May Fourth era. Therefore, the 1940s literary scene of
China, in fact, appeared to be more heterogeneous than ever. Even though it was
advocated by the leftist critics and writers that literature at this critical historical juncture

435
He Qifang, “Yun” (Clouds), in He Qifang wenji (Beijing: renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1982), 1: 59-60. The
translation is taken from Wai-Lim Yip, Lyrics from Shelters: Modern Chinese Poetry, 29.
260
should not reflect the subjective and individualistic voices of the authors but rather
realistic and collective voices of the masses, a good number of writers remained outside
the dominant literary scene and pursued instead modernist literature. The writers, Feng
Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets represented by Yuan Kejia and Mu Dan,
that this study focuses on are representative modernist writers who struggled to separate
literature from politics, sustain the individual voices, continue the May Fourth
enlightenment project, and endeavor to reconstruct and reconfigure Chinese modernism
through their literary pursuits.
If social instability and spatial and cultural displacement brought out by the war
mean a reconnection to reality and a commitment to realistic and propagandist literature
for some writers, for others, like Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets,
they provide them with an opportunity to reflect upon the conditions of human existence,
the meaning of life, and the relationship between individual and society, memory and
history. Modern Chinese literature in its seminal stage aimed at breaking completely
away from classical literary tradition and creating instead a completely new tradition that
was informed by Western literary practices. Implicit in this mode of thinking of breaking
from the old and creating the new is the enlightenment conception of time and history as
linear progression that moves forward irreversibly from past to future. May Fourth
modernism, then, is defined precisely by this new historical consciousness that departs
from the traditional cyclical view of time and history and understands time as linear
progression. Yet this linear notion of temporality of the May Fourth Occidentalists was
greatly challenged by the subsequent generations of modernist writers in China.
261
Modernist writers of the Beijing School heavily criticized the May Fourth generation’s
iconoclastic rejection of tradition and strived to bring traditional Chinese aesthetics and
Western modernist aesthetics together through the valorization of space. The linear
progression of time was, therefore, replaced by the celebration of locality, a potential site
and space where the ultimate interaction between the East and West could happen.
Modernist writers of the Shanghai school in the 1930s, on the other hand, rejected the
linear temporality in their writing by focusing on describing modern experiences as
fragmented, transitory, and characterized by eroticism, decadence, and consumerism and
appropriated largely the Western modernist experiences for the purpose of creating a
modern urban space of their own that connected to the world at large.
The war altered everyone’s experience in time and space. Both the conception of
time and history as linear progression upheld by the May Fourth writers and the cultural
imagination of space practiced by the writers of the Beijing and Shanghai Schools
became almost impossible for the writers of the 1940s China. This study, thus, examines
particularly the ways in which the experience of time is represented in the writings of
Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets and points out that Chinese
modernism in the 1940s departs from the previous forms of modernism. Like the Western
modernists, their writings reflect a shift from the firm belief in teleological progressivism
to the disillusionment with progress by emphasizing on non-linear temporality in their
writing.
In response to the devastating conditions of war, social instability, and the
wartime experience of displacement, anxiety and despair, Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and
262
the Nine Leaves poets express in their writing a heightened awareness of time that is
closely linked to their experience of life as transient, fleeting, and intangible. Expressed
in their works, this awareness of time is presented and explored through the accentuation
of the moment. The moment in Feng Zhi’s The Sonnets is a moment when time becomes
vertical and when the inchoate, dynamic and ungraspable experience of human life could
be shaped and formed by the artistic representation of the sonnet. In his historical novella
Wu Zixu, the moment is represented as the moment of self-revelation and self-
transformation, when Zixu can make a choice and decision for life and for himself. With
the ultimate concern of human conditions and existence in the chaotic, fragmented, and
absurd world, Shen Congwen, like Feng Zhi, also considers life as constantly changing
and ungraspable. Therefore, in the essays as well as fiction that he wrote in the 1940s, we
see the frequent use of the image of rainbow. The fleeting beauty of rainbow is compared
to the transient moment of beauty in life, and what Shen Congwen strives to search and
record in his essays and fiction is indeed a moment in which the transient and fleeting
beauty of life can become permanent and eternal, a moment that breaks away from all
constraints of time and space. For the younger generation of poets, the Nine Leaves Poets,
unlike Feng Zhi and Shen Congwen who focus much of their attention on contemplating
the meaning of human existence and life during the tumultuous war years, are very much
concerned about representing social reality in their poetry. Yet at the same time they are
very particular about the way in which such social consciousness can be and should be
represented in their poetic diction. Arguing for “dramatization in poetry” and poetics of
impersonality following Eliot’s poetic theories, the Nine Leaves Poets insist on non-
263
linearity as the temporal framework for their writing and strive to create a multi-layered
structure of poetic expression. The moment with which they are concerned most is the
present moment, a moment in which past, present, and future exist simultaneously. The
obsession of the present moment represented in their poetry reflects their contemplation
of their relationship to the past and future, and their own position in time and history.
In addition to the rejection of linear temporality and teleological mode of
expression in favor of the exploration of the moment, modernist writers in the 1940s such
as Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets also employ in their writings a
spatial logic. Nine Leaves Poets’ implementation of “dramatization in poetry” and poetics
of impersonality aims first and foremost at refuting the prevailing trend of poetic diction,
the sentimental and the didactic, that is linear and one-dimensional and creating instead
an indirect, multi-layered, multi-dimensional poetic representation. Through the use of
juxtaposition, fragmentation, and non-linearity, the Nine Leaves Poets demonstrate in
their poetry what Joseph Frank calls the “spatial form” as their poems follow not the
linear progression of time, but are organized rather by a spatial logic. Even the moments
that Feng Zhi and Shen Congwen focus on in their writings imply a spatial logic, as the
moment they depict is an instant of time in which “a unification of disparate ideas and
emotions into a complex” could be represented spatially.
436
Apart from the non-linear
temporal framework and the implied spatial logic, modernist writers in the 1940s also
demonstrate in their writings a conscious effort to turn inward and explore the
psychological space of the self. Wesley A. Kort points out that the meaning of space and

436
Joseph Frank, 9.
264
human place-relations is two sided, both physical and spiritual.
437
If the writings of
modernist writers of the Beijing School and Shanghai School can be seen as exploration
of the physical side of space and human place-relations, then the writings of the
modernist writers in the 1940s this study focuses on present a shift from the physical
aspect to the spiritual aspect. Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, as well as the representative poet
of the Nine Leaves School Mu Dan all present their works, to a different extent, as
private and personal. What their writings demonstrate is an eagerness to come to terms
with the historical situation they find themselves in and to obtain a better understanding
of the self through psychological exploration. Thus, despite the leftist campaign for
collectivism at the time, these modernist writers continued their May Fourth
predecessors’ mission of individualism. However, the self that they explore is the self
after the “shell shock” experience of modernity and the turbulent and atrocious
experience of war. Therefore, their writings reflect on the one hand a sense of
disillusionment and despair, yet on the other hand, also a desire to rise above time and
history in search of a sense of permanence and eternity.
The features of non-linear temporality, spatial form, as well as psychological
exploration that we see in the writings of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves
Poets certainly resonate with the characteristics of Western modernist literature. However,
Chinese modernism in the 1940s also has its own characteristics that are distinctively
Chinese. Many years ago the pioneer literary critic in modern Chinese literature, Jaroslav
Pr ůšek, pointed out that modern Chinese literature demonstrated an overall tendency

437
Wesley A Kort, 20.
265
towards lyricism so that despite its claim to break away from the classical mode of
literary expression the traces of the past were never eradicated.
438
In a similar vein,
Dominic Cheung in his recent article on the development of modern Chinese poetry
argues that New Chinese Poetry has never achieved the so-called totalistic rejection of
the classical tradition, whether it is in the aspect of language experimentation or thematic
renovation. Therefore, even though literature’s social and political function was highly
emphasized in the 1940s, lyricism can be found in both the realist and modernist poems
composed by poets such as Bian Zhilin, He Qifang, Feng Zhi, Wang Xindi and Mu
Dan.
439
Even in the essays and fiction written during the wartime period, as Fan Zhihong
observes, we can unexpectedly find numerous poetic elements, even though the war itself
was destructive and traumatic.
440
Both Feng Zhi and Shen Congwen got much of their
inspiration from nature during their stay in Kunming, as Feng Zhi writes, even at the
darkest moments, “the scenery and people of the ‘landscape’ glitter in front of my eyes,
and help me grow and endure.”
441
In the modernist works of Feng Zhi and Shen
Congwen, then, we can also discern a certain tendency toward lyricism. The lyrical mode
that we find in the fiction and poetry of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves
Poets marks the specificity of Chinese modernism in the 1940s that departs from their

438
Jaroslav Pr ůšek, “Subjectivism and Individualism in Modern Chinese Literature,” in The Lyric and the Epic:
Studies of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 1-28.
439
Dominic Cheung, “Shuqing yu xieshi: zhongguo xinshi liangda fazhan luxian de hange, hudong yu tiaoshi,” in
Han Shanbi, ed., Zhongguo xinwenxue de lishi mingyun: Ershi shiji zhongguo wenxue de huigu yu ershiyi shiji de
zhanwang (Hongkong: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 251-55.
440
Fan Zhihong, Shibian yuanchang: sishi niandai xiaoshuo lun, 11.
441
Feng Zhi, “Shanshui ·houji,” (Postscript of Landscape), in FZQJ, 3: 73.
266
Western counterparts and brings them closer to the long lyrical tradition of Chinese
literature.
Chinese modernism in the 1940s, then, is multi-faceted in nature and exhibits
various features. On the local level, it resists the leftist discourse of national salvation and
revolutionary literature and continues to carry on the May Fourth enlightenment agenda
through self-reflection, self-exploration, and self-discovery. However, unlike the May
Fourth generation of writers who hope to radically break away from the past and tradition,
modernist writers in the 1940s demonstrate in their works a different view of history and
a different relationship to their past. The lyrical mode of literary representation that
defines classical Chinese literature, thus, is in fact prominent in many of their works. On
the other hand, the features of non-linear temporality, spatial form, emphasis on
exceptional moments, rethinking of the relationship between past, present and future, and
contemplation on existential concerns, which are present in the works of the modernist
writers in the 1940s, are very similar to the features of Western modernism and make the
modernist writers in China contemporary with their Western counterparts.
The heterogeneity of the literary scene of the 1940s China, however, is not only
represented by the coexistence of realist writers who follow the leftist discourse and
modernist writers who write in the marginal space, but also by the complexity and
multiplicity within both the realist and modernist groups. As we have mentioned in the
introduction, realist writers such as Hu Feng, Lu Ling, and Ding Ling never hesitated to
voice their concerns of the growing force of leftist discourse of revolutionary literature
and collectivism and argued for critical spirit in writing instead of subscribing to the
267
leftist grand narrative. Similarly, the modernist camp is not homogeneous either. The
writings of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets represent important and
essential forms of Chinese modernism in the 1940s, yet the forms of modernism that each
takes in his writings are also different despite their shared concerns and literary
endeavors. Furthermore, if we shift our attention from the intellectual literary circle to the
popular literary circle we will find other forms of Chinese modernism that deserve our
attention and further exploration. Popular writers, like Eileen Chang (1920-1995), Su
Qing (1914-1982), Wu Mingshi (1917-2002), and Xu Xu (1908-1980), present in their
works a different form of Chinese modernism that problematizes the binarism of high
culture and popular culture, elitist meditation and quotidian concerns that govern our
understanding of literary modernism in general and Chinese modernism in particular.
Using Eileen Chang’s essays and fiction as the representative works, I would like to
discuss some of the features of her writings that expand and complicate the forms of
Chinese modernism during the war-ridden years. The discussion of Eileen Chang’s works
here is intended as a departure point for further exploration of Chinese modernism in the
1940s.
Eileen Chang experienced firsthand war and social instability of the 1940s, as
Hong Kong was under attack by the Japanese while she was studying there and her native
Shanghai also fell consequently to Japan in 1941. However, despite her firsthand
experience of the war and the leftist call for revolutionary romanticism and heroism,
Eileen Chang remained rather skeptical toward the grand narrative of nation and history,
and focused her attention not on “writing the kind of work that people usually refer to as
268
a ‘monument to an era’”, but rather on writing about “some of the trivial things that
happen between men and women.”
442
Criticizing the prevailing literature of war and
revolution, Eileen Chang points out that the works of war and revolution often fail
precisely because they represent “more urgent demands of rationality than sensibility”
and “their technical prowess outstrips their artistry.”
443
What is essential to literature,
then, is first and foremost love and emotions, as Eileen Chang writes:

In contrast with the unguarded freedom of love (lian’ai de fangsi), war is
inexorably imposed on us from the outside, whereas revolution often forces the
individual to drive forward by dint of will alone. A real revolution or a
revolutionary war, I believe, should be as emotionally unguarded and as able to
penetrate into every aspect of one’s life as romantic love. And it should bring one
back into a state of harmony.
444

Eileen Chang, therefore, argues for the fundamental importance of love and
emotion in life as well as in war and revolution. This emphasis on love and emotion as
something that penetrates every aspect of human life and as the basis for literature
demonstrates a certain kinship to the long tradition of classical Chinese literature in
which the importance and function of qing (emotion) is highly emphasized. Even though
there always exists the tension between qing (emotion) and zhi (intention or aim) in
Confucian literary theories, qing nonetheless is essential to Chinese literary expression,
as it is clearly stated in the “Preface” to the Book of Odes of the Mao School: “Emotion
(qing) moves within and takes shape in words. Words are not enough, and so one sighs it.

442
Eileen Chang, “Ziji de wenzhang” (Writing of One’s Own), in Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 18.
443
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 18.
444
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 18.
269
Sighing it is not enough, and so one draws it out in song. Drawing it out in song is not
enough, and so all unawares one’s hands dance it and one’s feet tap it out.”
445
Chinese
literature at its earliest stage, then, already regards emotion as the basis and source of all
literary expressions. Writing in the 1940s China, although perhaps two thousand years
later, Eileen Chang continues this pursuit of qing in her works.
What brings Eileen Chang’s works even closer to the classical Chinese literary
tradition is her insistence on the importance of plot in writing fiction. The fiction of Feng
Zhi and Shen Congwen written in the 1940s that we have discussed in this study exhibits
a particular interest, like the Western modernist writers, in breaking away from the
centrality of plot in fiction through the exploration of the dynamic psychological
development of the subject. Whether in Shen Congwen’s experimental fiction or in Feng
Zhi’s poetic fiction, we notice that the interiority of the subject is of much more
importance than the plot. Eileen Chang, however, argues that “in writing fiction, one
ought to have a story.”
446
In addition, “If it is a story, it has to have some dramatic
elements.”
447
Fan Zhihong points out that the most prominent feature of classical Chinese
fiction is its art of storytelling, so that Eileen Chang’s emphasis on the centrality of plot
in writing fiction marks her indebtedness to the storytelling tradition of classical Chinese
fiction.
448

445
“The Great Preface,” in Victor H. Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 122.
446
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 19.
447
Eileen Chang, “Lun xiezuo” (On Writing), in Zhang Ailing wenji (Collected Works of Zhang Ailing) (Hefei:
Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1992), 4: 83.
448
Fan Zhihong, 46.
270
Focusing on describing the “trivial things between men and women” and
emphasizing the storytelling feature of fiction, Eileen Chang constantly keeps the readers
in her mind and takes into consideration readers’ possible reaction when she writes. She
points out, “In order to attract the majority of readers, one has to understand the limit and
scope of the interests of the masses.”
449
As we have discussed in the introduction, writers
in the 1940s were urged to give up Westernized forms of writing and adopt instead
national forms that catered to the interests of the masses. The modernist writers, such as
Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets that we have discussed, write very
much against this leftist discourse of “national form” and literary collectivism. Therefore,
they are concerned not so much about the interests of the readers or the masses as about
intellectual reflection of issues such as the meaning of life and human existence, the
relationship between the individual and the society, and their position in time and history.
Eileen Chang’s writings, on the other hand, are more akin to the “national form”
promoted by the leftist critics and writers in the sense that she always bears in mind the
interests of the readers and the masses. Yet Eileen Chang also understands that to be able
to attract and move the readers, the literary works have to be based on true emotions.
Comparing Dream of the Red Chamber and The Plum in the Golden Vase, Eileen Chang
further points out, “even though it is undeniable that there is lowbrow taste in the
masses,” what are most popular among the readers are not the pornographic stories but
rather “gentle and sentimental love stories of the petty urbanite (xiao shimin).”
450

449
Eileen Chang, “On Writing,” in Zhang Ailing wenji, 4: 82.
450
Eileen Chang, “On Writing,” 82.
271
Therefore, writings that only cater to the lowbrow tastes but lack honest emotions will
ultimately fail.
451

Eileen Chang’s writings, as we have discussed so far, represent much of the
popular culture of Shanghai in the 1940s and demonstrate a connection to the tradition of
classical Chinese literature. However, if we examine her writings further, we see that
Eileen Chang’s essays and fiction also reveal modernist sensibilities that are tightly
linked to the representation of time and temporal experiences. If the writings of modernist
writers like Feng Zhi and Shen Congwen demonstrate a particular interest in depicting
the moment in order to fight against the transient experience of life, Eileen Chang finds
new ways of delineating and representing life. Focusing on the temporal experience of
the everyday, Eileen Chang hopes to find a sense of stability and permanence in the
details of everyday experience. In “Writing of One’s Own,” Eileen Chang indicates that
she prefers to depict the “placid and static” aspects of life, because they have eternal
significance. What she is interested in is not stories of specific epochs, but rather stories
that reflect “the numinous essence of humanity” that exists in every epoch.
452
The epoch
that Eileen Chang found herself in is an era of destruction and disillusionment. She
comments:

In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being
born. But until this historical era reaches its culmination, all certainty will remain
an exception. People sense that everything about their everyday lives is a little out
of order, out of order to a terrifying degree. All of us must live within a certain

451
Eileen Chang, “On Writing,” 82.
452
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,”16.
272
historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have
been abandoned.
453

With this profound sense of uncertainty and abandonment, Eileen Chang foresees
only more destruction on its way, as she finds herself living in a time “already in the
midst of destruction, with a still-greater destruction yet to come,” and she feels that “there
will come a day when our civilization, whether sublime or frivolous, will be a thing of the
past.”
454
The experience of life and existence itself becomes uncertain in such traumatic
social conditions, just as Eileen Chang writes, “in order to confirm our own existence, we
need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental”.
455
And the real and
the most fundamental things that she or anyone can hold onto lie not in the “words of the
typical well-read intellectual” but in life’s essentials, “wood, rice, oil, salt, soap, water,
and sun”.
456
Therefore, when everything in the world seems to be crumbling and subject
to destruction, Eileen Chang hopes to turn her attention to the very basics of human
existence, to the fundamental aspects of life, and to the neglected details of everyday in
order to grope a sense of stability and understand the meaning of life. Thus, her writings
intend to depict not just this era, but rather the fundamental and eternal aspects of life in
all epochs.

453
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 17.
454
Eileen Chang, “Chuanqi zaiban xu” On the Second Edition of Romances), in Written on Water, 199.
455
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own”, 17-18.
456
Eileen Chang, “Biye zhengming hu” (What is Essential is That Names Be Right), in Written on Water, 38.
273
Time and history in the writings of Eileen Chang, as Nicole Huang rightly points
out, are “no longer presented as a linear progressive course.”
457
What Eileen Chang
strives to incorporate into her writings, then, is similar to Eliot’s idea of the intersection
of the temporal and the eternal. On the one hand, Eileen Chang understands very well the
transience of experience, as she writes: “… the dust of this world is piling ever higher, to
know that not only will hopes turn to ash, but anything and everything one touches will
ultimately crumble to nothingness.”
458
Therefore, with a sense of urgency, Eileen Chang
claims, “Ah! Make yourself famous as early as you can!... Hurry! Hurry! Otherwise it
will be too late! Too late!” Because in Chang’s opinion, “Even if I were able to wait, the
times rush impatiently forward – already in the midst of destruction, with a still-greater
destruction yet to come.”
459
This understanding of time and history as progressing not
into a better future but rather destruction and ruins makes Eileen Chang turn her attention
to the past and seek support from ancient memory. In contrast to the historical era we are
in that “sinks away from us like a shadow” and makes us feel abandoned, the ancient
memory, in Eileen Chang’s opinion, represents something “real” and “fundamental” that
we can grasp to “confirm our own existence.”
460
Thus she writes, “…we seek the help of
an ancient memory, the memory of a humanity that has lived through every era, a
memory clearer and closer to our hearts than anything we might see gazing far into the

457
Nicole Huang, Woman, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Leiden:
Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), 135.
458
Eileen Chang, “Zhongguo de riye” (Epilogue: Days and Nights of China), in Written on Water, 215.
459
Eileen Chang, “Chuanqi zaiban xu” (On the Second Edition of Romances), in Written on Water, 199.
460
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 17-18.
274
future.”
461
Eileen Chang’s works, therefore, aim at interweaving the temporal experiences
of the historical era and the eternal elements of human life and existence that are
transhistorical and exist in every era. What her writings depict is ultimately this
intersection of the temporal and the eternal, which in her words, “gives rise to a strange
apprehension about the reality surrounding us.” This reality is at once modern and ancient,
as “we begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, dark and bright at the
same time.”
462

Eileen Chang’s essays and fiction demonstrate precisely the interplay between
memory and reality and the coexistence of darkness and brightness. She points out that
“between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies, producing a solemn but
subtle agitation, an intense but as yet indefinable struggle.”
463
She focuses much of her
attention on depicting these “awkward discrepancies” and the “intense but as yet
indefinable” struggles through the employment of “the technique of equivocal contrast”
(cengci de duizhao). This technique is different from “the classicist manner in which
good and evil, spirit and flesh, are always posed against each other in stark conflict,”
464

because Eileen Chang believes that “There are very few people, after all, who are either
extremely perverse or extremely enlightened” so that she wants to focus on the
“equivocal characters” (buchedi de renwu) who are “not heroes” but are “of the majority

461
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 18.
462
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 18.
463
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 18.
464
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 19.
275
who actually bear the weight of the times.”
465
Writing against the leftist call for heroic
figures in revolutionary literature, Eileen Chang regards heroic figures as only historical
figures and “are born of specific epochs”, so that even though they may be powerful and
represent the “uplifting and dynamic aspects of human life”, without the grounding of the
“inherent placidity” represented by those equivocal characters, the uplifting aspects are
nothing but froth, transient and unreliable.
466
Therefore, through the representation of the
temporal as well as the eternal and the depiction of “the truth beneath the hypocrisy of
modern people and the simplicity underneath the frivolity”, Eileen Chang strives to
capture in her writing the transient, fleeting, and ungraspable experience of modernity on
the one hand, and the stable, placid, and truthful nature of humanity that survives
throughout human history on the other.
In “Shanghainese, After all”, Eileen Chang writes, “Shanghainese are traditional
Chinese people tempered by the high pressure of modern life. The misshapen products of
this fusion of old and new culture may not be entirely healthy, but they do embody a
strange and distinctive sort of wisdom.”
467
Eileen Chang, as a Shanghainese herself,
presents in her writings precisely “this fusion of old and new culture.” Her writings carry
many of the features of traditional Chinese literature, such as the emphasis on qing and
the art of storytelling. Yet at the same time, she lives in the modern age and is also
“tempered by the high pressure of modern life,” so that her writings reflect much of her

465
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 19.
466
Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 16.
467
Eileen Chang, “Daodi shi Shanghai ren” (Shanghainese, After all), in Written on Water, 54.
276
understanding of her era, of history, of the relationship between the individual and the
society, and ultimately of the meaning of life and existence in the time of war and
destruction. Straddling between old and new, Eileen Chang’s works represent a unique
form of Chinese modernism in the 1940s. Like the modernist writers, such as Feng Zhi,
Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets, Eileen Chang shows no trust in the linear
progression of history and presents time and history as non-linear in both her essays and
fictions. However, unlike Feng Zhi and Shen Congwen, who seek to give permanence to
the transient experience of modernity through art and aesthetics or through intellectual
contemplation on existence in search of a possible exit to transcendence, Eileen Chang
invents new ways to combat the transience of modern life and finds permanence and
eternity in the basic and fundamental aspects of life, in the details of everyday experience
of modernity. To be grounded in the “placid and static” aspects of life through the
depiction of the temporal experience of the everyday, however, does not mean that Eileen
Chang overlooks the transient and fleeting moments of modern experience in her writings.
On the contrary, Eileen Chang also depicts exceptional moments in her fiction, moments
that signify breaks from the everyday and sometimes even breaks from all constraints of
time and space. Yet, as she believes that “we are still unable to struggle free of the
nightmare of the era,”
468
these moments always vanish and often give way to
overpowering experience of the everyday. Therefore, two types of temporal experiences
of modernity, the experience of the moment and the experience of the everyday, are both
at work in Eileen Chang’s writings, and the interplay between these two types of

468
Eileen chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 18.
277
experiences demonstrates Eileen Chang’s particular modernist sensibilities and
distinctive writing style.
Eileen Chang’s short story “Fengsuo” (Sealed Off) serves as a perfect example for
demonstrating the ways in which temporal experiences are depicted in her fiction. The
opening paragraphs, with the description of the movement of the tramcar as well as the
“ding-ding-ding-ding” sound of the bell, set forth the specific temporal and spatial
framework of the story, as we now know that this story is set in the tramcar when the
streets were sealed off. Nicole Huang points out that the opening paragraphs not only
introduce the imminent danger of war and provide the reader with the spatial and
temporal frame to imagine the wartime experience in Shanghai but also demonstrate how
“the presence of war strengthens and intensifies one’s sense of the urban as well as of the
everyday.”
469
Even though the story is set in the war, as Nicole Huang suggests, “War
takes the form of the blockade, which functions as a device of isolation, creating a
specific moment in both time and space.”
470
What this story presents is, in Leo Lee’s
words, a “transposition of time into space: as time stands still, the halted tram becomes a
strange space removed from everyday reality.”
471
Therefore, at the very beginning of the
story, we see two types of temporal experiences already at work. One is the experience of
the everyday metaphorically depicted as the wriggling rails that are like “soft and
slippery, long old worms, slinking on and on and on,” and the other is the experience of

469
Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity, 23.
470
Nicole Huang, 23.
471
Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 290.
278
the moment represented by the period of blockade, a specific moment that seems to
suddenly freeze up the continuity of everyday life, become spatialized and removed from
reality.
472
These two kinds of temporal experiences are neatly interwoven into the plot, so
that the blockade represents a slice of life in everyday Shanghai during wartime as well
as an exceptional moment that breaks free from the routines and constraints of everyday
life.
Eileen Chang experienced the war firsthand in Hong Kong, but later in her essay
“From the Ashes” she writes, “My impressions of the battle of Hong Kong seem
nevertheless to be almost entirely restricted to a few irrelevant trivialities,” and claims
that “what’s usually called joie de vivre is to be found entirely in trivial things.”
473
This
particular interest in “trivial things” is clearly reflected in her portrayal of the everyday
experience in this story. Focusing much of her attention on trivial yet fundamental details,
Eileen Chang depicts the experience of the everyday at this rather exceptional moment of
the blockade through the introduction of the polyphony of voices at the very beginning.
The blockade seems to bring a moment in time that stands for temporal discontinuity, as
the city is described as “dozing in the sun” and growing quiet. The voice of a beggar,
however, breaks the silence, and it is followed by the voice of another beggar, then that
of the tram driver, and a few conversations among the passengers. These voices represent
various aspects of the everyday life in the modern city, yet this life is described as rather
disengaged from the war. The voiced concerns, from the beggars of the lowest class to

472
Eileen Chang, “Fengsuo” (Sealed Off), in Love in a Fallen City, trans. Karen S. Kingsbury (New York:
NYREV , Inc, 2007), 237.
473
Eileen Chang, “Jin yu lu” (From the Ashes), in Written on Water, 40.
279
the office workers of the middle class, are also about “a few irrelevant trivialities,”
whether it is about begging for money, gossiping about office colleagues, or complaining
about the high cost of dry-cleaning service.
474
Lu Zongzhen, the male protagonist of this
story, is introduced also through some seemingly trivial detail – tucked under his arm are
spinach buns wrapped in newspaper that his wife asked him to buy. Using the hot buns as
an essential part of the introduction of the main character and claiming that “eating, it
seems, is serious business; it turns everything else, by way of contrast, into a joke,”
475

Eileen Chang accentuates again the importance of the trivial yet fundamental details of
the everyday life in wartime in her story, because details like this represents the “placid
and static” aspect of human existence that is transhistorical and eternal. Eileen Chang
writes, “Once you dispose of all the specious ornaments of culture, what seems to remain
is merely ‘food and drink, man and woman’.”
476

The trivial details of life, however, represent only one aspect of the experience of
the everyday in Shanghai in the 1940s. This aspect is at once modern and traditional,
historical and transhistorical, temporal and eternal. The trivial details of everyday
experience, though seemingly irrelevant to the war or the particular historical era,
indicate precisely the historicity of experience, as they represent people’s response to this
era in which they find themselves abandoned. On the other hand, representing the real
and the fundamental things that are present in “ancient memory” as well as present reality,

474
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 238.
475
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 239.
476
Eileen Chang, “From the Ashes,” 51.
280
these details point to the eternal aspects of humanity that can be found in every epoch.
Yet Eileen Chang depicts another aspect of the experience of the everyday in the story
that is almost strictly modern. It is the experience of boredom and emptiness that is
introduced through a rather humorous description of newspaper reading:

… A piece of newspaper had stuck to a bun, and gravely he peeled it away; the
ink had transferred to the bun, and the writing was in reverse, as in a mirror. He
pored over the words till he could make them out: “Obituaries… Positions
Wanted… Stock Market Developments… Now Playing…” – all normal, useful
expressions, though funny, somehow, seen on a bun… He went from bun-print to
newsprint, but after pursuing half a page of old news, he had to stop: if he turned
the page, all the buns would fall out.

While Lu read his newspaper, the others did likewise. People who had
newspapers read newspapers; those who didn’t have newspapers read receipts, or
rules and regulations, or business cards. People who were stuck without a single
scrap of printed matter read shop signs along the street. They simply had to fill
this terrifying emptiness – otherwise, their brains might start working. Thinking is
painful business.
477

The experience of the everyday described in the previous passages is
characterized by the “terrifying emptiness” that everyone strives to fill by occupying
themselves with something or anything, and in this case, by reading. The act of reading
no longer aims at getting information or obtaining knowledge, but serves simply and only
as a means to kill time and drive away the anxiety of boredom and emptiness of the
modern everyday experience. Therefore, they read everything, from newspapers to
receipts or business cards, and if no print material is at hand, they resort to the shop signs.
This description of the experience of the everyday as boredom and emptiness also brings
up the issue of modern subjectivity and questions the meaning of human existence. Eileen

477
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 239.
281
Chang emphasizes that the act of reading aims precisely at preventing the brain from
working, because “thinking is painful business.” Modern subjectivity that relies heavily
on the presence of the mind now becomes problematic and the experience of the
everyday of modern men becomes comparable to that of the machine.
The problematic of subjectivity implied in the description of the experience of
boredom becomes not only the prologue to the introduction of the female protagonist Wu
Cuiyuan, but also the central issue that Eileen Chang explores in the rest of the story.
Working as an English instructor at the university, Wu Cuiyuan is said to be leading a
good life. Everything in her life is described by Eileen Chang as “good”, as she writes,
“She was a good daughter, a good student. All the people in her family were good
people.”
478
However, the goodness refers not so much to the moral integrity of these
people as to their complete submission to the socially accepted way of living. Eileen
Chang writes:

…The Wu household was a modern, model household, devout and serious. The
family had pushed their daughter to study hard, to climb upward step by step,
right to the very top… A girl in her twenties teaching at a university! It set a new
record for women’s professional achievement. …

She was a good daughter, a good student. All the people in her family were good
people. They took baths every day; they read the newspaper every day. When
they turned on the radio, they never listened to local folk opera, comic opera, that
sort of thing, just symphonies by Beethoven or Wagner; they didn’t understand
what they were listening to, but they listened anyway.
479

478
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 241.
479
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 241.
282
The Wu household is described as “a modern, model household” so that their
experience of the everyday is likewise the typical experience of modern life in Shanghai.
Yet this experience, like the experience of boredom and emptiness of those on the
tramcar who desperately searched for something to read in order to occupy themselves, is
also devoid of subjectivity. The modern experience of the everyday is represented only as
a commitment to a certain form of lifestyle. There is no room for individual desires or
needs, but only routine activities such as reading the newspaper, taking baths, listening to
the radio and Western symphonies. Whether they enjoy doing these activities or
understand the symphonies by Beethoven or Wagner does not matter. The only thing that
matters is that they follow this routine and stick to it. This good lifestyle, then, deprives
Cuiyuan of her individuality and subjectivity. “Cuiyuan wasn’t very happy,” Eileen
Chang writes, because in Cuiyuan’s opinion, “In this world, there are more good people
than real people.”
480

The opposition between the good and the real implied in this statement refers
ultimately to the opposition between two kinds of temporal experiences of modernity.
The temporal experience of the everyday represented by the modern and model
household of the Wu family is routine and mechanical. Although it may be referred to as
good, its normative force suppresses the self and individuality completely. In Cuiyuan’s
words, the modern everyday life is comparable to the translation of the Bible, as it is
“translated from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, from
English to Mandarin Chinese. When Cuiyuan read it, she translated the Mandarin into

480
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 241.
283
Shanghainese. Some things did not come through.”
481
The things that “did not come
through” are exactly the personal, the private, the individual aspects of life. The temporal
experience of the moment, however, stands for a break from the routine of the everyday
and gives the individual an opportunity to be in touch with the personal and private self.
The exceptional moment in this story is described as a moment in which the two
protagonists, Zongzhen and Cuiyuan, discover themselves as well as each other. Living
in this modern world and following the routines of everyday life, neither Zongzhen nor
Cuiyuan is happy and life seems meaningless and purposeless; as Zongzhen says, “I don’t
know why, every evening when the time rolls around, I go home. What home? I don’t
really have a home.”
482
They both have a home, yet it does not feel like home. Home
remains only as an idea, as a part of the routine of the everyday. Nothing in the
experience of the everyday life in this modern city allows them to express their personal
desires and needs. On the tramcar during the blockade, Zongzhen and Cuiyuan met. Even
though the original intention of Zongwen’s advance was mainly to avoid interaction with
his nephew Peizhi, they nevertheless start a conversation, and before long Cuiyuan
realizes that she has found “a real person! Not too honest, not too bright, but a real
person!”
483
When they stuck their heads out the window and “their faces were drawn into
sudden proximity,” the magic moment happens:

481
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 241.
482
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 246.
483
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 244.
284
Zongzhen and Cuiyuan suddenly felt they were seeing each other for the first time.
To his eyes, her face was the spare, simple peony of a watercolor sketch, and the
strands of hair fluttering at her temples were pistils ruffled by a breeze.
…
Zongzhen had never thought he could make a woman blush, make her smile,
make her turn her face away, then turn it back again. In this he was a man.
Usually Zongzhen was an accountant, a father, a head of household, a passenger
on the tram, a customer in the store, a local citizen. But to this woman who knew
nothing about him, he was only and entirely a man.

They were in love.
484

This is indeed an exceptional moment, when Zongzhen and Cuiyuan “felt they
were seeing each other for the first time.” At this moment, all the roles that they played in
life and all the routines that they committed themselves to were put aside. The experience
of the everyday that suppresses the individuality gives way to the experience of the
moment that brings the individual self back. Only in this moment life is transformed from
“good” to “real”. Zongzhen becomes “only and entirely a man” and Cuiyuan becomes “a
lovely woman.” The hidden desires and needs that have been suppressed are finally
exposed, and they finally become true to themselves and true to each other. This is the
moment of true existence.
However, soon “it’s over,” and “the world had gained one more good man.”
485

When the blockade was lifted, Cuiyuan found Zongzhen “sitting in his old seat, looking
remote.” Then she realized: “everything that had happened while the city was sealed off
was a nonoccurrence. The whole city of Shanghai had dozed off and dreamed an

484
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 247.
485
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 249.
285
unreasonable dream.”
486
No matter how real the experience of the moment is, it will
never last and will eventually be overpowered by the experience of the everyday. Life
continues on, like the tramcar tracks that extend forever into the distance, and like the
tramcar that resumes its journey after the temporary stop when the streets are shut down.
However, even though the experience of modernity seems to be dominated by the
experience of the unreal in the routine and mechanical everyday life and buried in the
concerns about nothing but trivial matters, the fleeting emergence of the experience of the
moment nonetheless confirms our true existence.
Eileen Chang regards the intersection of these two temporal experiences as the
ultimate representation of modern life. In the essay “From the Ashes,” Eileen Chang
describes her understanding of reality:

This thing we call reality is unsystematic, like seven or eight talking machines
playing all at once in a chaos of sound, each singing its own song. From within
that incomprehensible cacophony, however, there sometimes happens to emerge a
moment of sad and luminous clarity, when the musicality of a melody can be
heard, just before it is engulfed once more by layer after layer of darkness,
snuffing out this unexpected moment of lucidity.
487

The story “Sealed Off” portrays precisely this type of reality. The everyday
experience of modernity is “unsystematic”, chaotic, like the “incomprehensible
cacophony” represented perfectly by the polyphony of voices at the beginning of the
story. The exhaustion of subjectivity through the experience of boredom, dullness, and
mechanical routines further contributes to the incomprehensibility of modern experience.

486
Eileen Chang, “Sealed Off,” 250-51.
487
Eileen Chang, “From the Ashes,” in Written on Water, 39.
286
The blockade, in which the individual “dares act out fantasies of longing and escape,”
488

on the other hand, provides a perfect opportunity for the emergence of the “moment of
sad and luminous clarity,” which brings the cacophony of modernity into a moment of
harmonious melody. However, it appears only as a fleeting “moment of lucidity” that
eventually gets overpowered by “layer after layer of darkness” of reality. The double-
sidedness of reality and the implied intersection of two temporal experiences that we
have discussed so far can also be found in much of Eileen Chang’s fiction, for instance,
“Qingcheng zhi lian” (Love in a Fallen City), “Jinsuo ji” (Golden Cangue), “Se ·Jie”
(Lust, Caution) among others.
Chinese modernism represented by the writings of Eileen Chang as we have
discussed exhibit a certain affinity to the forms of modernism represented by the
modernist writers, such as Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets, that we
have covered in this study. However, it also takes its own distinctive form, different from
the forms reflected from the works of modernist writers of the Shanghai School in the
1930s as well as her contemporaries. From the previous analysis of her essays and her
1943 fiction “Sealed Off”, we understand that Eileen Chang’s view of the trajectory of
history is also non-linear. In contrast to the May Fourth generation of writers as well as
the leftist realist writers who hold a firm belief in the progress of history and the coming
of a brighter future, Eileen Chang sees the progression of history only as a gradual
process of destruction. Most of her writings, therefore, demonstrate clearly the
intersection of the temporal and the eternal, as they are written as a response to the

488
Edward M. Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking 1937-1945 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980), 213.
287
present historical era while at the same time they rely heavily on the fundamental aspects
of humanity that are transhistorical and eternal. In “Sealed Off”, this intersection of the
temporal and the eternal is represented through two intertwined yet different types of
modern experience, the experience of the everyday and the experience of the moment.
Reality, in Eileen Chang’s opinion, can be defined precisely by these two at once
opposing and complementary experiences of modernity.
There remains much more to explore in order to grasp a comprehensive and
panoramic picture of Chinese modernism in the 1940s. Being a popular and famous
female writer in the 1940s, Eileen Chang greatly challenged the boundary between urban
public space and domestic private space. She surely created “a room of her own”, a space
that is both physical and spiritual. The forms of Chinese modernism that have been
explored so far are mostly represented by male writers. Eileen Chang, however, offers a
perfect case for further exploration of the relationship between gender and Chinese
modernism and the forms of gendered modernism in modern Chinese literature.
Furthermore, there are writers like Wu Mingshi and Xu Xu who were also very active in
the literary circle in Shanghai during the 1940s. Their writings, like Eileen Chang’s, are
also popular and modern at the same time and blur the line between high culture and
popular culture. The ways in which Chinese modernism in the 1940s negotiates between
high culture and popular culture also deserves further exploration.
Finally, I would like to conclude with a quote from Eileen Chang’s essay “From
the Ashes”:

288
The vehicle of the times drives inexorably forward. We ride along, passing
through thoroughfares that are perhaps already quite familiar. Against a sky lit by
flames, they are capable nevertheless of shaking us to the core. What a shame that
we occupy ourselves instead searching for shadows of ourselves in the shop
windows that flit so quickly by – we see only our own faces, pallid and trivial. In
our selfishness and emptiness, in our smug and shameless ignorance, everyone of
us is like all the others. And each of us is alone.
489

All the issues that this passage touches upon, such as the progression of history,
the relationship between the individual and history, the obsession with the self and self-
reflection, the condition of human existence marked by loneliness and solidarity, are
issues that Chinese modernist writers in the 1940s strived to explore in their writings. The
examination of the literary representation of these issues in their works will certainly
serve as an entry point to understand the forms of Chinese modernism in the 1940s.

489
Eileen Chang, “From the Ashes,” 52.
289

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Almberg, Shiu-Pang E. The Poetry of Chen Jingrong: A Modern Chinese Woman Poet.
Diss. University of Stockholm, 1988. Skrifter utgivna av Föreningen för
orientaliska studier 21. Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1988.
Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbia: Ohio State
University Press, 1982.
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the
Time of Life. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Barlow, Tani E. and Gary J. Bjorge, eds. I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding
Ling. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
Barnstone Willis. Introduction. Sonnets to Orpheus. By R. M. Rilke. Boston: Shambhala
Publications, Inc., 2004. 72.
Barrows, Anita and Joanna Macy, trans. & eds. In Praise of Mortality: Selections from
Rainer Maria Rilke’ s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. New York: Penguin
group, 2005.
Baudelaire, Charles. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Trans. Patrick E.
Charvet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Bergson, Henri. Henri Bergson: Key Writings. Ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and John
Mullarkey. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group,
2002.
Berman, Russell A. Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics and the Legacy of
the Frankfurt School. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Bian, Zhilin. “Shi yu xiaoshuo: du Feng Zhi chuang zuo Wu Zixu” (Poetry and Fiction:
Upon Reading Feng Zhi’s Wu Zixu). Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan
(Series in Modern Chinese Literature) 2 (1994): 64-72.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism 1890-1930. London: Penguin
Books, 1991.
Calinescu, Matei. Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1977.
---. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987.
290
Chang, Eileen. Zhang Ailing wenji (Collected Works of Zhang Ailing). 4 vols. Hefei:
Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1992.
---. Written on Water. Trans. Andrew F. Jones. New York: Columbia University Press,
2005.
---. Love in a Fallen City. Trans. Karen S. Kingsbury. New York: NYREV , Inc, 2007.
Chang, Hao. Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890-1911.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Chen, Jingrong (Mo Gong). “Zhencheng de shengyin” (Sincere V oices – On Zhen Min,
Mu Dan, Du Yunxie).” Shi Chuangzhao 12 (1948). Rpt. in “Jiuye shiren” pinlun
ziliaoxuan. Ed. Wang Shengsi. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1995.
61-68.
---. “Dafu yige mosheng duzhe de gongkaixin” (A public letter in response to a letter
from an unknown reader). “Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliaoxuan. Ed. Wang Shengsi.
Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1995. 224-26.
Chen, Lingchei Letty. “Reading between Chinese Modernism and Modernity: A
Methodological Reflection.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 24
(2002). 175-88.
Chen, Pingyuan, ed. Er shi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao. V ol. 4. Beijing: Beijing
daxue chubanshe, 1997.
Chen, Sihe. “Tansuo shijiexing yinsu de dianfan zhizuo: Shisihang Ji.” (The Sonnets: A
Canonical Work that Searches for International Elements). Dangdai zuojia
pinglun (Critical Studies on Contemporary Writers) 3 (2004): 4-17; 4 (2004): 121-
40.
Chenug, Dominic. Feng Chih. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.
---. “Shuqing yu xieshi: zhongguo xinshi liangda fazhan luxian de hange, hudong yu
tiaoshi.” Zhongguo xinwenxue de lishi mingyun: Ershi shiji zhongguo wenxue de
huigu yu ershiyi shiji de zhanwang. Ed. Han Shanbi. Hongkong: zhonghua shuju,
2007. 251-65.
Childs, Peter. The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey. London and New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Day, Robert Adams. Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson. Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 1966.

291
De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Denton, Kirk. The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu
Ling. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
---, ed. Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays: 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932.
---. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Butler and Tanner Ltd.,
1960.
---. The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber & Faber, 1975.
Fan, Zhihong. “‘Xiang xukong ningmou’: shijiu shiji sishi niandai Shen Congwen de
xiaoshuo” (Gazing into the Emptiness: A Study of Shen Congwen’s Fiction in the
1940s). Jishou daxue xuebao (shehui kexueban) (Journal of Jishou University) 22.
2 (2001): 80-83.
---. Shibian yuanchang: sishi niandai xiaoshuo lun (Changing Worlds and Constant
Causes: Studies on Fiction of the 1940s). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe,
2002.
Feng, Xuefeng. Guolai de shidai. Shanghai: Xinzhi shudian, 1946.
Feng Zhi. Feng Zhi xuanji (Selected Works of Feng Zhi). V ol. 2. Chengdu: Sichuan
wenyi chubanshe, 1985.
---. Feng Zhi quanji (The Complete Works of Feng Zhi). 12 vols. Shijiazhuang: Heibei
jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999.
Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei. Ding Ling’ s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern Chinese
Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968.
---. The Idea of Spatial Form. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Friese, Heidrun, ed. The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2001.
---. Introduction. The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought. Ed. Heidrun Friese.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001.

292
Gálik, Marián. Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation, 1898-1979.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986.
Gilles, Mary Ann. Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1996.
Greenberg, Clement. “Art Chronicle.” Partisan Review Apr. 1948: 482.
Gunn, Edward M., Jr. Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking,
1937-1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Guo, Moruo, et al. “Kangzhan yilai wenyi de zhanwang” (The Overview of Literature
and Art Since the War of Resistance). Ziyou zhongguo (Free China) 1. 2 (10 May
1938).
He, Guimei. “‘Kanhong lu’ de zhuiqiu yu mingyun” (The Pursuit and Fate of “Kanhong
lu”). Dui Hua Yu Man You: Si Shi Nian Dai Xiaoshuo Yanjiu. Ed. Qian Liqun.
Shanghai: Shanghai Wen Yi Chu Ban She, 1999. 134-45.
---. Zhuanzhe de shidai: 40 – 50 niandai zuojia yanjiu (The Turning Epoch: A Study on
the Writers of the 1940s and 50s). Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003.
He, Qifang. “Guanyu ‘Keguan zhuyi’ de tongxin” (About the Exchanges on
‘Objectivism’). Mengya (Sprouts) 1. 4 (Nov. 1946).
---. He Qifang wenji. V ol. 1. Beijing: renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1982.
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London and New
York: Routledge, 2002.
Hsia, C. T. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999.
Hu, Feng, ed. Minzu xingshi taolun ji (Collected Essays on National Forms). Chongqing:
Huazhong tushu gongsi, 1941.
---. Lun minzu xingshi wenti (On the Issue of National Forms). Shanghai: Haiyan shudian,
1949.
Huang, Nicole. Introduction. Written on Water. By Eileen Chang. Trans. Andrew F. Jones.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
---. Woman, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s.
Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005.

293
Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988.
Jiang, Dengke. “Xifang xiandai zhuyi shsige yu jiuye shipai de liupai tezheng” (The
Characteristics of Western Modernist Poetry and the Nine Leaves School).
Shehui kexue yanjiu (Social Science Studies) 1 (2000): 143-47.
---. Jiuye shipai de hebi yishu (The Art of Harmonious Combination of the Nine Leaves
School). Chongqing: Xinan shifan daxue chubanshe, 2002.
---. Jiuye shiren lungao (Critical Essays on the Nine Leaves Poets). Chongqing: Xinan
daxue chubanshe, 2006.
Jin, Mingquan, and Song Jiayang, “Lun zhongguo kangzhan wenlun zhongde xianshi
zhuyi zhi shenhua” (On the Intensification of Realism in the Literary Theories of
China During the War of Resistance). Wenxue pinglun 3 (2005): 31-39.
Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. Eds. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New
Directions, 1963.
Kinkley, Jeffrey. "Shen Congwen and the Uses of Regionalism in Modern Chinese
Literature." Modern Chinese Literature 1. 2 (1985): 157-84.
---. The Odyssey of Shen Congwen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
---, ed. Imperfect Paradise. By Shen Congwen. Trans. Jeffrey Kinkley, et al. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995.
---. “Shen Congwen yu sanzhong leixing de xiandai zhuyi liupai (Shen Congwen and
Three Types of Modernism).” Jishou Daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) (Journal
of Jishou University) 26. 4 (Oct. 2005): 1-14.
Koch, Philip. Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter. Chicago: Open Court Publishing,
1994.
Kort, Wesley A. Place and Space in Modern Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida
Press, 2004.
Larson, Wendy. “Realism, Modernism, and the Anti-‘Spiritual Pollution’ Campaingn in
China.” Modern China 15. 1 (Jan. 1989): 37-71.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

294
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May
Fourth Movement.” Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversarie. Ed.
Kenneth Lieberthal. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991. 158-77.
---. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Leung, Ping-kwan. Aesthetic Oppositions: A Study of the Modernist Generation of
Chinese Poets, 1936-1949. Diss. University of California, San Diego, 1984.
---. “Literary Modernity in Chinese Poetry.” Lyrics from Shelters: Modern Chinese
Poetry 1930-1950. Ed. Wai-lim Yip. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.
Li, Guangtian. “Chensi de shi: Lun Feng Zhi de Shisihang Ji” (Poetry of Contemplation:
On Feng Zhi’s The Sonnets). Shi de yishu (The Art of Poetry). Kaiming shudian,
1943. Rpt. in Feng Zhi yu tade shijie (Feng Zhi and His World). Ed. Feng Yaoping.
Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001.
Li, Zehou. Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun (History of Modern Chinese Thought).
Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1987.
Lin, Huanping. “Kangri de xianshi zhuyi yu geming de langman zhuyi” (Anti-Japanese
Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism). Wenxue yuebao 2. 1-2 (15 Sept. 1940).
Lin, Y usheng. The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitradtitionalism in the
May Fourth Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
Liu, Qiang. “Zhongguoshi de xiandaipai yishu: dui Jiuye shipai jiqi chuangzuo de yanjiu”
(Modernist Art with Chinese Characteristics: A Study on the Nine Leaves School
and Their Works). Dangdai zuojia pinglun (Critical Studies on Contemporary
Writers) 6 (1996):86-93.
Longenbach, James. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the
Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Luo, Sun. “Kangzhan wenyi yundong niaokan” (The Bird’s-eye View of the Literary and
Artistic Works During the War of Resistance). Wenxue yuebao (Literary Monthly)
1. 1 (15 Jan. 1940).
Magus, Bernd, and Kathleen Higgins, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche.
Cambridge: Cambridge Uinversity Press, 1996.
Mair, Victor H., ed. The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

295
Malamud, Randy. The Language of Modernism. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.
Mao, Dun. “Guanyu ‘chuangzuo’” (On Literary Creation). Beidou (Big Dipper) 1 (Sep.
1931).
---. Mao Dun wenyi zalun ji. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1981.
Mao, Zedong. Mao Zedong xuanji. 4 vols. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1991.
Mostow, Joshua S., ed. The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Mu, Dan. Mu Dan shi quanji (The Complete Collection of Poems of Mu Dan). Ed. Li
Fang. Beijing: Zhongguo wenxue chubanshe, 1996.
Ng, Janet. The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography in the Early Twentieth
Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Nieh, Hua-ling. Shen Ts'ung-wen. Boston: Twayne, 1972.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche: The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams and trans.
Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Holingdale. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983.
North, Michael. The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Peng, Hsiao-yen. Antithesis Overcome: Shen Congwen's Avant-Gardism and Primitivism.
Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academica Sinica, 1994.
Poellner, Peter. “Existential Moments.” The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern
Thought. Ed. Heidrun Friese. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001.
Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays. Ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1954.
Pr ůšek, Jaroslav. The Lyric and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature. Ed. Leo
Ou-fan Lee. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Qian, Guangpei, and Xiang Yuan, eds. Xiandai shiren ji liupai suotan. Beijing: Renmin
wenxue chubanshe, 1982.
Qian, Guangpei. “Foreword.” Zhongguo shisihang shixuan. Ed. Qian Guangpei. Beijing:
Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1990.

296
Qian, Liqun. “‘Yan’ yu ‘buyan’ zhijian –Zhongguo lunxianqu wenxue daxi zongxu
(Between “Talk” and “Don’t Talk” - Preface to Grand Series of Chinese Literature
of the Occupied Areas).” Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan (Series in
Modern Chinese Literature) 1 (1996): 25-35.
Qian, Liqun, ed. Duihua yu manyou: sishi niandai xiaoshuo yandu. Shanghai: Shanghai
wenyi chubanshe, 1999.
---. “Manhua sishi niandai xiaoshuo sichao” (Talks on the Trend of Fiction in 1940s).
Duihua yu manyou: sishi niandai xiaoshuo yandu. Ed. Qian Liqun. Shanghai:
Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1999.
Randall, Bryony. Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Rilke, R. M. The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christophe Rilke. Trans. M.D.
Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1959.
---. “Concerning Landscape.” Selected Works. Trans. Graig Houston. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1961.
---. Letters to A Young Poet. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
---. Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. Willis Barnstone. Boston: Shambhala Publication, Inc.,
2004.
Russell, Bertrand. Principles of Social Reconstruction. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Ryan, Judith. Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Schleifer, Ronald. Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science,
and Culture, 1880-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Schrag, Calvin O. “Kierkegaard’s Existential Reflections on Time.” Existentialist
Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger. Ed.
William L. McBride. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997. 53-
68.
Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May
Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkley: University of California Press, 1986.

297
Schwartz, Benjamin. In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964.
Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century
Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Shangguan, Zheng. “Xin yingxiong zhuyi, xin langman zhuyi he xinwenxue zhi jiankang
de yaoqiu (Neo-heroism, Neo-romanticism and the Demand for the Healthy
Growth of New Literature).” Zhongguo gongbao 8. 5 (Feb. 1943). Rpt. in Er shi
shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao. V ol. 4. Ed. Chen, Pingyuan. Beijing: Beijing
daxue chubanshe, 1997.
Shen, Congwen. Shen Congwen quanji (The Complete Works of Shen Congwen). 32 vols.
Tai Yuan: Beiyue wenyi chubanshe, 2002.
Sheng, Chenghua. “Du Feng Zhi Wu Zixu.” Dongfang yu xifang (East and West) 1. 3
(June 1947).
---. “Xin Falanxi zazhi yu faguo xiandai wenxue” (Nouvelle Revue Francaise and French
Modernist Literature). Wenyi fuxing (Literary Renaissance) 3. 3 (1947).
Shi, Huaichi. “Dongping xiaolun” (On Dongping). Er shi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun
ziliao. V ol. 4. Ed. Chen, Pingyuan. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1997.
Shi, Zhicun. “Guanyu benkan de shi” (More About the Poems in This Magazine). Les
Contemporains 4.1 (1934): 6-7.
Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China,
1917-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Sidorsky, David. “Modernism and the Emancipation of Literature from Morality:
Teleology and V ocation in Joyce, Ford, and Proust.” New Literary History 15.1
(Autumn 1983): 137-53.
Sima, Changfeng. Zhongguo xinwenxue shi (History of Modern Chinese Literature). V ol.
1. Hongkong: Zhaoming chubanshe, 1976.
Steinberg, Erwin R., ed. The Stream of Consciousness Technique in the Modern Novel.
Port Washington: Kennikat Press Corp., 1979.
Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1992.
Sun, Jinsan. “Cong Ka Fu Ka shuoqi” (Starting from Kafka). Shi yu chao wenyi (Time
and Tide Literature and Art) 4. 3 (Nov. 1944).
298
Sun, Li. “Lun zhanshi de yingxiong zhuyi” (On Wartime Heroism). Jinchaji ribao 16
(Dec. 1941). Rpt. in Er shi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao. V ol. 4. Ed. Chen,
Pingyuan. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1997.
Sun, Pingping. Jicheng yu chaoyue: sishi niandai xiaoshuo yu wusi xiaoshuo (Inheritance
and Surpass: Fiction of the 1940s and May Fourth Fiction). Wuhan: Wuhan
chubanshe, 2002.
Sun, Y ushi. Zhongguo xiandai zhuyi shichao shilun (The History of Chinese Modernist
Poetic Trend). Bejing: University of Beijing, 1999.
Tang, Shi. Xinyidu ji. Beijing: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1989.
---. “Shi de xinshengdai” (The New-Born Generation of Poets). Shi chuangzao (Poetry
Creation) 8 (Febr. 1948). Rpt. in “Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliaoxuan (Selected
Critical Writings on the Nine Leaves Poets). Ed. Wang Shengsi. Shanghai:
Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1995. 28-32.
---. “Wo men de huhuan (dai xu)” (Preface: Our Call). Zhongguo xinshi 1 (1948). Rpt. in
“Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliaoxuan. Ed. Wang Shengsi. Shanghai: Huadong shifan
daxue chubanshe, 1995. 366-67.
Tang, Xiaobing. Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham & London:
Duke University Press, 2000.
Taylor, Mark C. “Time’s Struggle with Space: Kierkegaard’s Understanding of
Temporality.” The Harvard Theological Review 66.3 (July 1973): 311-29.
Tymieniecka Anna-Teresa. Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos.
The Netherlands: Springer, 2006.
Wang, David Der-wei. Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao, Dun, Lao
She, Shen Congwen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Wang, Delu. “Jiuye shipai: Zhongguo xinshi lishi zonghe de jiebiao” (The Nine Leaves
School: Milestone of Historical Synthesis in Modern Chinese Poetry). Guizhou
shehui kexue (Guizhou Social Science) 2 (1996): 51-70.
Wang, Shengsi, ed. “Jiuye shiren” pinlun ziliaoxuan (Selected Critical Writings on the
Nine Leaves Poets). Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1995.
---, ed. Jiuye zhishu changing: “Jiuye shiren” zuoping xuan (Forever Green: Selected
Poems of the Nine Leaves Poets). Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue, 1994.

299
Wang, Zuoliang. “Yi ge zhongguo xin shiren” (A New Chinese Poet). “Jiuye shiren”
pinlun ziliao xuan (Selected Critical Essays on the Nine Leaves Poets). Ed.Wang
Shengsi. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1995. 306-13.
Wellek, Rene. Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, Limited,
1995.
---. “Modern Fiction.” Modernism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies.
V ol. 1. Ed. Tim Middleton. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800. Eds. James Butler
and Karen Green. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Xiang, Linbing. “‘Guocui zhuyi’ jianshi” (A Simple Interpretation of ‘National Essence’).
Minzu xingshi taolun ji (Collected Essays on National Forms). Ed. Hu Feng.
Chongqing: Huazhong tushu gongsi, 1941. 103-5.
---. “Guanyu minzu xingshi wenti jingzhi Guo moruo xiansheng” (A Respectful Response
to Guo Moruo on the Issue of National Form). Minzu xingshi taolun ji (Collected
Essays on National Forms). Ed. Hu Feng. Chongqing: Huazhong tushu gongsi,
1941. 166-86.
---. “Lun ‘Minzu xingshi’ de zhongxin yuanquan” (On National Form and Its Main
Source). Minzu xingshi taolun ji (Collected Essays on National Forms). Ed. Hu
Feng. Chongqing: Huazhong tushu gongsi, 1941. 96-99.
---. “Zai lun minzu xingshi de zhongxin yuanquan” (A Second Article on National Form
and its Main Source). Minzu xingshi taolun ji (Collected Essays on National
Forms). Ed. Hu Feng. Chongqing: Huazhong tushu gongsi, 1941. 130-52.
Xiao, Qian. “Zhan mu shi de sijiezuo: jianlun xinli xiaoshuo zhi duanchang” (Jame’s
Four Masterpieces: On the Strength and Shortcomings of Psychological Novel).
Wenxue zazhi (Literature Magazine) 1. 1 (June 1947).
Xie, Qingyao. “Yingguo nü zuojia Wu Er Fu furen” (British Women Writer Ms. Woolf).
Shi yu chao wenyi (Time and Tide Literature and Art) 2. 1 (Sept. 1943).
Xie, Zhixi. “Shengmin de chensi yu cunzai de juanduan: Lun Feng Zhi de chuangzuo yu
cunzaizhuyi de guanxi” (Contemplation on Life and Existential Resolute Decision:
On the Relationship between Feng Zhi’s Writing and Existentialism). Waiguo
wenxue (Journal of Foreign literature) 3 (1990): 48-56; 4 (1990): 79-88.

300
Xie, Zhixi. Sheng de zhi zhuo: cunzai zhuyi yu zhongguo xiandai wenxue (The
Persistence of Life: Existentialism and Modern Chinese Literature). Beijing:
Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1999.
Xie, Zhixi. “Jingshen de Feng Zhi yu boda de Ai Qing: Zhongguo xiandaishi liangdajia
xulun” (The Profound Feng Zhi and the Broad Ai Qing: Case Studies of Two
Main Modern Chinese Poets). Qinghua daxue xuebao (Journal of Qinghua
University) 20. 4 (2005): 30-47.
Xin Di, et al. Jiuye ji (The Nine Leaves). Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2000.
Xu, Daoming, ed. Zhongguo xiandai wenxue pipingshi xinbian (The New Edition of the
History of Literary Criticism of Modern Chinese Literature). Shanghai: Fudan
daxue chubanshe, 2002.
Xuan Zhu. “Langman de yu xieshi de” (The Romantic and the Realistic). Wenyi zhendi
(Literary Front) 1. 2 (May 1938).
Yeats, William Butler. Later Poems. Forgotten Books, 2007.
Yi, Zhuxian. Preface. Jicheng yu chaoyue: sishi niandai xiaoshuo yu wusi xiaoshuo. By
Sun Pingping. Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 2002.
Yin, Liyu. “Lun Feng Zhi sishi niandai de sixiang chuangzuo de zhuanbian” (On the
Change in Feng Zhi’s Thoughts and Writings in the 1940s). Wenxue lilun yanjiu 3
(2002): 17-24.
Yip, Wai-lim, ed. Lyrics from Shelters: Modern Chinese Poetry 1930-1950. New York:
Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.
You, Youji. Jiuye shipai yanjiu (A Study on the Nine Leaves School). Fuzhou: Fujian
jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997.
Yuan, Kejia. Lun xinshi xiandaihua (On the Modernization of New Poetry). Beijing:
Sanlian shudian, 1988.
---. Bange Shiji de Jiaoyin – Yuan Kejia Shiwen Xuan (Footprints of Half a Century:
Selected Poems and Prose of Yuan Kejia). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe,
1994.
Zhang, Huiwen. “Wu Zixu de xifang ziyuan yu chuangbian” (Western Sources and
Personal Innovations in Wu Zixu). Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan
(Series in Modern Chinese Literature) 1 (2002): 192-221.

301
Zhang, Yanquan. “Lun ‘Jiuye shipai’ de shuqing biaoda fangshi” (On the Lyrical Mode of
the Nine Leaves Poets). Hainan shifan xueyuan xuebao (renwen shehui kexue ban)
(Journal of Hainan Normal University) 14. 6 (2001): 30-35.
Zhao, Jiabi, ed. Zhonguo Xinwenxue Daxi (Modern Chinese Literature Compendium).
V ol. 4. Shanghai: Liangyou rushu yinshua gongsi, 1936.
Zhao, Ruihong. “Nanyue shanzhong, Mengzi hupan – huainian Mu Dan, bing yi xinan
lianda (At the Nanyue Mountain and Mengzi River: Remembering Mu Dan and
Southwest Associated University).” Xin Wenxue Shiliao 3 (1997):160-75; 4 (1997)
103-8.
Zheng, Min. Shiji: 1942-1947 (Poetry Collection: 1942-1947). Beijing: Zhongguo
wenlian chuban gongsi, 1996.
Zhou, Mian. Feng Zhi Zhuan. Nanjing: Jiansu wenyi chuban she, 1993.
Zhou, Renzheng. Jingpai wenxue yu xiandai wenhua (Literature of the Beijing School
and Modern Culture). Changsha: Hunan shifan daxue chubanshe, 2002.
Zhou, Xiaoyan. “‘Fanpan zhe’ de neixin zixing – shixi mudan shi ‘Huanyuan zuoyong’ de
xiandaixing” (Inner Reflection of the Rebel: An Analysis of Mu Dan’s
“Restoration Effect”). Wenxue yanjiu (Literary Studies) 2 (April 2006):98-99.
Zhou, Yang. “Dui jiuxingshi liyong zai wenxue shang de yige kanfa” (Opinion on the Use
of Old Forms in Literature). Minzu xingshi taolun ji (Collected Essays on
National Forms). Ed. Hu Feng. Chongqing: Huazhong tushu gongsi, 1941. 14-23.
---. Zhou Yang wenji. V ol. 1. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984.
Zhou, Yuliang. “Mu Dan de shi he yishi” (Mu Dan’s Poetry and Anecdotes). Yige minzu
yijing qilai. Ed. Du Yunxie. Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin chubanshe, 1987.
Zhu, Ziqing. “Xinshi zahua – shi de xingshi” (Miscellaneous Comments on New Poetry –
The Poetic Form). Feng Zhi yu tade shijie. Ed. Feng Yaoping. Shijiazhuang:
Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Examining the representation of modern women in 20th century modern Chinese fiction: the search for self in comparison of works by women authors Ding Ling and Eileen Chang

PDF

Modernism's poetics of dislocation

PDF

Conditions of literary modernities: a conceptual history of Chinese literature, 1860-1925

PDF

The social life of nations: a comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction, 1888-1906

PDF

A grain of sand: Yingzao fashi and the miniaturization of Chinese architecture

PDF

The magic mirror: representations of monsters in Chinese classical tales

PDF

Tapestry and tableau: revival, reproduction, and the marketing of modernism

PDF

Romance rapscallions on the cusp of modern: male courtship in Eileen Chang stories

PDF

The many voices of the Lanting poems: society and seclusion in the Eastern Jin

PDF

Carnival in the birdcage: a study of the film and media industries' reforms in China after 1978 and its soft power

PDF

Blogging in China: individual agency, the production of CybUrban 'Spaces of Dissent' in Beijing, and societal transformation in China

PDF

The vicissitudes of postnational affects: visuality, temporality, and corporeality in global east Asian films

PDF

Dances of death: visual and verbal transformations of the body in Russian modernism

PDF

Mourning melancholia: modernist poetics and the refusal of solace

PDF

Fictions of representation: narrative and the politics of self-making in the interwar American novel

PDF

The poetics of disillusionment: the legacy of the eighteenth-century ceremonial ode in nineteenth-century Russian lyric poetry and pastoral prose

PDF

Clique modernism: coterie aesthetics in midcentury America

PDF

Status seeking in hierarchy: Korea and Vietnam under Chinese hegemony in early modern Asia

PDF

Refrains of memory: poetics of loss and the Korean diaspora

PDF

A place in the sun: Mexican Americans, race, and the suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1940-1980

Asset Metadata

Creator Zhu, Yanhong (author)

Core Title Reconfiguring Chinese modernism: the poetics of temporality in 1940s fiction and poetry

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 07/28/2009

Defense Date 06/16/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chinese modernism,Feng Zhi,Nine Leaves Poets,OAI-PMH Harvest,Shen Congwen,spatial form,temporality

Place Name China (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Cheung, Dominic (committee chair), Hayden, George (committee member), Rosen, Stanley (committee member)

Creator Email altazhu@gmail.com,yanhongz@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2403

Unique identifier UC1446389

Identifier etd-Zhu-3073 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-577455 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2403 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Zhu-3073.pdf

Dmrecord 577455

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Zhu, Yanhong

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu