Long description
Returning Home and the Paradox of Modernity in Early Modern Chinese Literature. This study
will delve into the cultural complex of self, gender, nation, tradition and modernity
surrounding images of guxiang (hometown) in a range of cultural forms in early modern China
(1915-1930). Through a detailed analysis of literary representations of guxiang in short
stories, poetry, and drama, I will describe the paradoxical attraction and repulsion toward
home that is emblematic of the problematic of modernity in China. Lu Xun's first-person
"Guxiang" (My Old Home), "Zhufu" (New year's sacrifice) and "Zai jiulou shang" (Upstairs in
the wineshop) are prototypical, but literary representation of intellectuals returning to their
homes was undertaken by a host of writers who were Lu Xun's contemporaries (Yu Dafu, Bing Xin,
Guo Moruo, Feng Yuanjun, Ni Yide, Wang Luyan, etc.) and can be said to constitute a kind of
sub-genre.
The representations are most often in the form of intellectuals recollections of a return visit from the "metropolis" to their home villages in the countryside. Looking at the guxiang, hometown, its spatial representation and the self-representation of intellectuals relationship to it, will allow us to delve into certain questions concerning modernity in China. For example, the identification of intellectuals to their home (village or provincial orientations) versus their national affinities; how their representation of home was interconnected with the problem of subjectivity; their predicament between what they saw as an unchanging tradition and a largely foreign sense of modernity represented by the metropolis. My interest is primarily in the May Fourth period, loosely delineated as 1915-1930, for it is the period of the inception of modernity in China, when Western discourses were disseminated and clashed with more traditional discourse. It was the May Fourth intellectuals who crystallized the discourses of modernity and who in the process set in motion the problems and paradoxes of modernity in China that still have relevance for China today.
The study is organized thematically into chapters that will treat different concerns surrounding the representation of guxiang in early modern Chinese fiction. To contextualize the representation of guxiang in modern literature, I will in an introductory chapter describe the centrality of home (the despair of leaving it and the longing to return to it) in a wide variety of traditional literary texts from poetry to drama. Exile poetry especially expresses this longing to return home. Although home suggests certain allegiances (clan, region) that were potentially at odds with the imperial center, the home was also the site at which the official Confucian ideology was propagated; so home was instrumental in the formation of what Joseph Levenson has called traditional universal "culturalism." I want to stress that the centrality of guxiang to modern literature clearly has a lineage going back to traditional literature. (Dealing with traditional texts and modern texts in the same book is almost a taboo in my field, one that I am consciously trying to break so as to work against modernity's notion of its totalizing rupture with the past.) I will begin the book proper with a discussion of Lu Xun's "returning home" stories which set the parameters of the sub-genre and which embody many of the themes that will be developed in subsequent chapters. In a highly self-conscious way, these stories demonstrate the paradox of tradition and modernity as seen in the conflicted representation of guxiang, the dual attraction and repulsion of home. Interconnected with the representation of home in these stories is the problematic of self that is at the heart of Chinese modernity. The modern intellectual seeks to assert itself as a subject by leaving home (family, tradition, authority, selflessness) and yet is drawn inexorable back to it. The narrator in Lu Xun's "Zai jiulou shang" (Upstairs in the wineshop) is prototypical: his is caught in a homeless state between present and past, both homesick and sick of home.
Another chapter will delve into questions of the relationship between home and gender in stories of women writers of this period, particularly Feng Yuanjun and Bing Xin. The female representation of home seems less malign than that of their male counterparts. Home is for some of these writers represented as a domestic sphere of women and femininity (as opposed to the outer world of men), as a site for the possibility of a feminine subjectivity. In a variety of stories, home is represented as the source of "benevolent motherhood" (cimu) and in this sense offers a warm embrace to the homeless female intellectual who feels outside of the grand male discourses of nation and revolution. Yet, that embrace can also prove stifling and destructive to the female self. Ultimately, returning home for a woman was perhaps even more problematic than for a man in the May Fourth; idealized representations of home and motherhood on the part of daughters (see Bing Xin and Feng Yuanjun, et.al) reflects their paradoxical relationship with their mothers (at once a kind of resistance through female solidarity, and a mutual complicity in propagating patriarchal representations of femininity).
Still another chapter will look at the complex relationship between home and nation. Focussing on stories of the 1930s and 40s, I will look at the changing representation of home in this period of imperialist threat. Not surprisingly, representations of home became far more positive in this period. Home became a symbol of nation and the loss of home a spur for nationalist resistance. During the Sino-Japanese war, of course, home was a spatial sign of national unity, a symbolic center with which to combat aggression from the outside. Representations of home during the war sought a restoration of the more traditional view of home as a center of shared values. Yet some writers during this period rejected this form of simplistic patriotism and opposed to "home" the trope of the wilderness, a source of primal power that is amoral but ultimately regenerative and transformative. Nor is it simply that home in this period is just a metaphor for China, for home also may suggest regional, clan, family affiliations that are at odds with nationalism and the dominant discourse of nation.
This book will complement a recently published book by Zhang Yingjin (The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film) that looks at the place of the city and its representation in cultural forms of the Republican period. It will contribute to a growing body of scholarly work on home and homeland in Western critical studies.