BOOK REVIEWS

Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937

In this remarkable work, one chapter of which has been published in French (1), Shih Shu-mei raises some fundamental questions: what, for Chinese intellectuals of the time, was at stake in the adoption of literary modernism? How can one explain the fact that this borrowing from the West met with such little resistance? Should the relation between the West and the East be necessarily thought of as a one-way street from the former to the latter? To answer these questions, the writer makes use of a conceptual framework taken from studies over the past three decades on colonialism and post-colonialism, critical thinking on orientalism and research carried out in other related fields, particularly on the status of women, the subject of that particular branch of knowledge constituted by Gender Studies. This is an approach whose value is, in the present case, incontestable. To Shih Shu-mei's way of thinking, China's cosmopolitanism in the early decades of the 20th century is related to its particular situation vis-à-vis the Western powers: its semi-colonial status, defined by the presence on its soil of an array of competing nations, confined to certain regions and exerting a loose control that was more economic than cultural in nature (a feature that brings semi-colonialism close to neocolonialism), opened up for it the possibility of choices besides the nativist resistance which, in colonised countries such as India, was the natural response to the threat posed by the imperialist powers. Concretely, Chinese intellectuals negotiated this difficult relation with the dominating states by having recourse to a “strategy of bifurcation” that enabled them to largely open up to influences from outside, namely those of the foreign, metropolitan power, at the same time as criticising it as a coloniser. Many of these intellectuals, tempted by Western modernity, saw its most complete expression in modernism. That is why, although very diverse trends (Realism, Romanticism) entered China during this period, Shih Shu-mei regards the infatuation with modernism as being the most typical expression of this desire to catch up with the West, at least from a chronological perspective. For, as she observes, the race to modernity meant that the spatial (the co-existence of heterogeneous cultures in space) was taken over by the temporal: literary history supposedly being laid out along a single axis, whose direction is given by the West and, for non-Western literatures, it is simply a matter of making up for their lag in development. The question that arises of course is whether the extent to which such universalism, or “supranationalism”, in whose name writers justified their rallying to a Western view of things, reflects the logic of imperialism. For the author, there is no doubt that the criticism or even the negation of their own culture by the May 4th 1919 actors is based in part on a submission to the Other, which brings her to relativise this liberating character with which the literary revolution at the start of the century is usually credited. Showing great insight, she notices the concordance between the analysis of the national character undertaken by the Chinese writers of the day, and what one can read in the works of foreign, particularly Japanese, observers. In fact, Japanese mediation played a leading role, Japan having acceded earlier than China to Western modernity, but being in other respects culturally (and racially) close to China. Shih Shu-mei puts forward a thoroughly convincing political reading of the masochism that clearly permeates the works of former students in Japan, like Yu Dafu, by situating it in the context of a relation between dominated and dominating (critics had already noted the importance of the national factor in the depressive syndrome from which Yu Dafu's characters suffer), even if such a masochistic attitude, revealing the individual's deep distress in a period of social and moral upheaval can manifest itself independently of any colonial context. One of the most worthwhile contributions of Shih Shu-mei's work is the way she relates particular forms of literary expression (such as the confession) to the identity crisis brought on by Western domination. The author points out, moreover, and quite rightly, that the question of power is twin-faced: Chinese intellectuals, in the position of dominated with respect to the West, took on a leadership role (endowed with “symbolic capital”) vis-à-vis the masses that they initiated into Western modernity. This reference to the Other is also found by Shih Shu-mei, with different implications, among the authors of the Peking School. They succeeded in achieving a “modernity without rupture” by building bridges between the two traditions, Oriental and Western, thereby giving its place back to the spatial (the local) faced with a linear conception of evolution that hitched Chinese literature to the wagon of the West. Western modernity thus finds its equivalent in certain practices of traditional writing, somehow modern before the fact. Taking Fei Ming as a case in point, Shih Shu-mei shows that the return to traditional writing occurred via Western literature and, somehow, with its endorsement: the Chinese authors took cognisance of the fact that they had available, in their own tradition, means of expression analogous to those of Western modernist writers whom they admired. This detour might be just another example of the allegiance of the Chinese to a Western view of things, if it did not contest, in other respects, the representation of East-West relations as being one-way traffic. What the approach of the jingpai writers intuitively confirmed, and that a purely Eurocentric vision of modernism had obscured, was the way in which Chinese writing had itself served as a source of inspiration for Western modernism (through writers like Ezra Pound or the imagist poets, for example). In this regard, Shih Shu-mei welcomes the Peking School as the example of a cosmopolitanism respectful of both cultures, whereas that of the Shanghai writers chose to ignore quite simply the challenges posed to Chinese identity by imperialism. Shih Shu-mei's work, a very stimulating contribution to theory, and indeed general debate, is at the same time of great documentary value. Eight of its dozen chapters are monographs which, through the prism of modernism, offer a holistic interpretation of a writer's work. In the first section, which deals with the Westernism of May 4th, Shih Shu-mei explains how, via the works of Lu Xun, Tao Jingsun, Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu and Teng Gu, the engagement with literary modernity took on two contradictory and tension-producing aspects: the teleological discourse of modernity ran up against an internal experience fed mainly by psychoanalysis and based upon painful introspection. The second part, devoted to the Peking School, analyses authors who have previously been little studied: Fei Ming, and his hybrid writing that has Western and Oriental cultures mirroring each other; Lin Huiyin and Ling Shuhua, whose status as women writers provides Shih Shu-mei with the opportunity to show how sexual identity and feminist consciousness complicate the relation to tradition, the re-appropriation of the latter necessarily having a parodying dimension (Ling Shuhua writes in the tradition of “boudoir” literature reserved for women, at the same time as she subverts it). The treatment of the three neo-sensationist authors (Liu Na'ou, Mu Shiying and Shi Zhecun) in the third and final part is particularly polished. With Liu Na'ou, Shih Shu-mei dwells on the image of “modern woman” and its Japanese model, itself derived from the exotic women of Paul Morand, and concludes that Liu Na'ou's denationalised cosmopolitanism is virtually the only place where the emancipation of women from patriarchal control is achieved. The case of Mu Shiying and his ideological straying from the straight and narrow serves as an illustration of the wavering consciousness of cosmopolitanist writers in the ambiguous context of semi-colonialism. Finally, after interpreting the recourse to psychoanalysis in the work of Shi Zhecun in the light of his apolitical prejudice, she comments on his return to “tradition” after 1936, under pressure from both the right and the left, as being the act that seals the death of Shanghai modernism. The manner in which the city wins over the neo-sensationist writers is constantly related to its colonial status, the importance of the gaze (“scopophilia”) being linked to the nature of this setting in which there is on display a profusion of foreign objects beyond reach. An appendix briefly evoking the situation during the war years and beyond (up until the Taiwanese modernist movement) completes this brilliant study that is, as things stand, one of the most interesting overviews of modern Chinese literature available.

Translated from the French original by Peter Brown