by Tam King-fai
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China needed was strong structures that would withstand the onslaught
of desert storms, and daggers and pistols that would prove useful in
fighting. Yet, he did not rule out completely the need for rest and
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By contrast, Lin Yutang’s priorities seemed to be just the opposite.
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16
?PQTM 4] @]V KZQQKQbML PM ¹SVQKSSVIKS[aTMº WN xiaopin wen, Lin Yutang was quick, perhaps too quick, to point out categorically that modern xiaopin wen _I[ VW TQSM PI I ITT !K !!" ¹5WLMZV xiaopin wen is different from the kind of traditional knickknack-style writing that dwells on the art of brewing tea or drinking wine, but is also called xiaopin wen.... People of the past might withdraw to a ‘ xiao’ position because they were at odds with the literature of the establishment. The writing that they came up with belonged mostly to the
miscellaneous type recording the idle words of recluses, just so that they could avoid writing of a serious and worldly kind. Their behavior can be explained
by the fact that literature dealing with affairs of state was usually beset with taboos, and if one simply followed the safe, established formulas, there would not be too many original things one could say. As a result, biji literature became the major current in Chinese literature. In staying away from the path of the
establishment, modern xiaopin wen is the same as biji. However, the scope of xiaopin wen is much larger, and its usage and forms have also changed. It can no longer be encompassed by the bijiNWZUIº)TWWSI\PMM[[Ia[X]JTQ[PMLQV
the three journals Lin Yutang launched, Lunyu ( Analects), Renjianshi ( This Human World), and Yuzhou feng ( Cosmic Wind) , however, will show that some of them belonged squarely to the type that Lu Xun was satirizing.
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18
A Garden of One’s Own
PM _I[ VW Y]QM ZMILa W OW [W NIZ I[ W KPWW[M ¹LIOOMZ[ IVL XQ[WT[º
Xiaopin wen can be used to advance an argument, to express fully one’s
inner feelings, to depict human ways, to describe social customs, to record
PM ZQ^QIT IVL W LQ[KW]Z[M WV PM _WZTL I TIZOM 1[ [KWXM Q[ VW Å`ML
yet its core is made of the voice of the self, and its style is leisurely and disinterested ( xianshi).
(1934b,
89)
Later in the same article, he continues to harp on the theme of all-
inclusiveness, adding that Renjianshi would entertain submissions touching WVWXQK[¹I[MVWZUW][I[PM]VQ^MZ[MWZI[[UITTI[IÆaº
If at this point Lin Yutang appeared to be much more accepting
than Lu Xun of writing different from his own, one has to bear in mind
that he had included a restriction, namely, that essays had to be written
in a leisurely and disinterested style, which is inherently at odds with the
advancement of argument, one of the areas of writing that he seemed
to endorse.17 By June of the same year, when Lin Yutang published
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PMPILUILM[WUM[]JTMUWLQÅKIQWV[QVPQ[XW[QQWVWVQVOLW_VPM
use of xiaopin wen to advance an argument and instead devoting most of his time to elaborating the nature of a leisurely and disinterested style.
This he described as a kind of liberation, very similar to that afforded
by the use of vernacular language. More precisely, it was a kind of
conversational style, which would work well with any topic.
Meanwhile, one of Lin Yutang’s other remarks had given rise to
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in Lunyu, which he had edited two years before, the inclusive gesture
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the result he intended. The quality of the kind of humor that Lunyu had managed to attract was admittedly mixed and, as Mao Dun pointed
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Renjianshi was not doing much better.
Feeling beleaguered, Lin Yutang retreated further in his position,
17
The restrictiveness of Lunyu is further made clear by the submission guidelines X]JTQ[PMLQVPMÅZ[Q[[]M;MM+PIZTM[4I]OPTQV +PIXMZ
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Introduction 19
while at the same time appearing to take the offensive. Declaring that
Renjianshi would discuss what non- xiaopin wen journals avoided, and avoid what lofty and high-minded writings would discuss (1934c, 100), he had
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occasionally theorized on the extra-literary functions of xiaopin wen, he seemed to be more contented with doing what he was good at. As he
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emotions’ are just matters of style, and have nothing to do with such
things as social ideology, or strengthening or losing one’s country. That’s
why I have said before that Renjianshi may promote xiaopin wen as much as it wants, and our nation will neither be stronger nor weaker because
of it. All I want is to run a good magazine, and the most I can do is
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BPW] B]WZMV PIL ZMZMIML W I [QUQTIZ XW[QQWV MIZTQMZ QV PQ[ ¹)
/IZLMV WN 7VM¼[ 7_Vº ! 0Q[ [ZWVO XZMNMZMVKM NWZ xiaopin wen, however, led him to continue producing an impressive amount of
writing on xiaopin wen. Among this corpus, his book, Zhongguo xin wenxue di yuanliu ( The Origins of Modern Chinese Literature), deserves special mention not only because it boldly offered an overview of the development of
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may have been, he touched on an important aspect of the xiaopin essay often forgotten in the bitter exchanges of the critics.
Zhou’s rather elaborate theory was delivered in five lectures at
Furen University in 1932. To him, the history of Chinese literature
was marked by the alternation of two literary trends: yanzhi and zaidao.
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as a vehicle for the Way ( daoº PM[M _W ZMVL[ IXXZW`QUIM _PI IZM
known in the West as the expressive theory and pragmatic theory of
literature, respectively. Zhou believed that the domination of one trend
over another was closely related to political and cultural conditions of
particular historical periods. Hence in the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and
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by Zhou’s account, the pragmatic theory prevailed and literature was
summoned to the service of the dominant state ideology of the time.
In periods that witnessed major political and social upheavals, however,
such as the late Zhou, Six Dynasties, Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms,
Yuan, and late Ming, the expressive theory raised its head, and
imagination was free to roam. The twentieth century, Zhou continued,
had so far been a period of instability for China; consequently, its
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20
A Garden of One’s Own
literature bore a striking resemblance to that of the unstable period
immediately previous to this one, namely, the late Ming of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when various progressive
schools of thought had indeed come into being, including the two
schools of writing mentioned above, Gongan and Jingling. Zhou’s main
contention was that essays written in these two periods were similar not
only formally, but also in their spirit of rebellion against the stultifying
cultural climate that preceded them. What made the modern period
different from the late Ming, however, was the presence of the West in
the twentieth century, a view that ultimately led Zhou Zuoren to arrive
at this equation:
Modern xiaopin essays = Essays of the Gongan and Jingling schools +
Western progressive ideas and sensibilities.18
The attacks on Zhou Zuoren that followed these lectures surprised
no one, but it is necessary to separate genuine intellectual disagreement
from thinly veiled personal vendettas. Zhou Zuoren had the combined
misfortune of having a reclusive nature and Lu Xun as an older brother.
Unlike his brother, Zhou Zuoren’s real interest was in Chinese and
Greek literature, and, after a brief period of total immersion in the
May Fourth Movement, he had decided to withdraw to a life of privacy.
This apolitical declaration angered many people who interpreted it as
an escapist gesture and a betrayal of much of what his brother—and
he himself during the heyday of the May Fourth period—had stood for.
That Lu Xun himself had come to speak openly against the implications
of Zhou’s theory only further compromised Zhou’s reputation. His effort
to establish the link between essays of the late Ming and the modern
xiaopin essay was seen as just another manifestation of his regressive and anachronistic thinking. Instead of looking forward and outward,
his critics charged, Zhou Zuoren would have us look backward. When,
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Japanese invasion, and later, in 1941, assumed the post of Minister of
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their conviction that he was not to be trusted. From this point on, their
18
This, apparently, was Zhou’s response to those critics who thought he had not
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Introduction 21
attacks on him became all the more vituperative.
Turning to more substantive criticism, there were some who held
a different view of history from Zhou. In arguing that periods of unity
alternate with those of disorder, Zhou of course was merely reiterating
the conventional cyclical view of history. Hence, while the disappearance
of an ideological center in the twentieth century had allowed Chinese
writers to express themselves freely, Zhou predicted that history would
swing back to another period of strict control. This, as he himself
admitted, was in direct contradiction to the assumptions that underlay
Baihua wenxue shi ( A History of Vernacular Literature) , published in 1928 by Hu Shi, who saw the course of Chinese literary history as a slow but
unswerving movement toward recognition and then canonization of
vernacular literature.
In a somewhat bastardized version of Hu’s approach, Chen Zizhan
argued that, ever since the May Fourth Movement, Chinese writers
had devoted themselves to the mission of propagating new ideas and
challenging the tradition, all in a concerted effort to bring China
into the modern age (1935, 215). They did not indulge, Chen held,
nor would they in the future, in the kind of idle mental introspection
characteristic of late Ming writing,19J]_W]TLIT_Ia[_WZSWN]TÅTTPM
sacrosanct function of literature as a vehicle of social engineering. Even
if, for the sake of argument, one were to concede the validity of the two
literary trends delineated by Zhou, the twentieth century, according to
Chen, had been overwhelmed by the zaidao trend. For this reason, Chen,
together with others of a similar persuasion, went so far as to contend
with Zhou Zuoren for the right to use the term xiaopin, which they
reserved for short essays with a pronounced social message, such as the
topical essay ( zawen) for which Lu Xun is famous.
It was the next two critics, Qian Zhongshu and Zhu Ziqing, both of
whom were respectable xiaopin writers in their own right, who managed
to detect an underlying theme in this concatenation of voices. Qian
Zhongshu (1934), in his review of Zhou’s Zhongguo xin wenxue di yuanliu,
directed his attention to the semantics of the two terms, yanzhi and
zaidao, pointing out that historically, the latter was used in reference 19
A secondary point of Chen Zizhan’s criticism is that the Gongan and Jingling
schools are in any case really famous only for poems. Zhou was simply too
desperate in his search for early models of xiaopin wen, and had overlooked this fundamental point, Chen asserts (see 1935).
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22
A Garden of One’s Own
to prose and the former, lyrical poetry, and that, therefore, they were
literary modes rather than trends. By summoning these two diverse
modes of writing to differentiate period styles, Qian believed that Zhou
had in effect ignored the restrictions of literary genres under which
all writers operate. It was a very common phenomenon in Chinese
history, for example, for the same writer to appear an ardent supporter
of the pragmatic theory in his prose, but a faithful proponent of the
expressive theory in his poetry. In Qian’s view, Zhou was being simplistic
in describing a historical period as completely dominated by one or the
other.
From a different angle, Zhu Ziqing, an admirer of Zhou Zuoren,
also questioned the use of yanzhi. Tracing the origin of this term to such classical texts as the Shijing ( The Book of Songs), Liji ( The Book of Rites), Zuo zhuan ( The Zuo Commentary), and Shi da xu ( The Great Preface to the Book of Poetry), Zhu duly noted the political use of poetry in antiquity (1947, 29–47). Hence, yanzhi, in his view, by no means suggested
the expressivism that Zhou had associated with the term, but rather,
denoted a state of mind that has more to do with the public domain
of diplomacy and political remonstration than with the telling of one’s
private preoccupations. In this sense, yanzhi is in fact not that different from zaidao, when the dao (the Way) of the latter has been more or less internalized as the zhi (the wishes) of the former.20 Consequently, Zhu held, what Zhou Zuoren called the yanzhi tradition of modern xiaopin wen should perhaps more appropriately be ascribed to the tradition of yuanqing (literature
emerging from human feelings) that began in the Six
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lyrical aesthetics in China. Zhu’s philological excursion should not be
taken as mere quibbling over words, for without explicitly saying so, he
had extended the genealogy of modern xiaopin wen further back than
Zhou Zuoren to the Six Dynasties.
Each in his own friendly or hostile way, then, Chen Zizhan, Qian
Zhongshu and Zhu Ziqing had led the discussion of what had been
regarded up to this point as predominantly a prose form to consideration
of the integration of poetic and prose elements in xiaopin wen. Zhou Zuoren’s own admission that he had indeed merged poetry and prose
20
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Introduction 23
together in his analysis21 further pointed to a potentially rich area for
exploration. This unfortunately produced no further repercussions in
the theoretical discussion, and one has to turn to the essays themselves
to understand the effect of xiaopin wen’s generic mixture of poetry and prose.
The Essays
I have always felt that there are only three kinds of writing in the world. The best kind is writing that comes from speaking to oneself; the second best, from speaking to one person [other than oneself]; and the third, from speaking to UIVaXMWXTM
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is to express what cannot remain unexpressed in his mind.... The second kind includes letters and conversations. Here, one is speaking to bosom friends who fully understand one and whom one fully understands. There is no need to
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correspondences and lecture notes, manifestos and even pieces such as “On the
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intention is to convert his readers to his viewpoint, or even to show off in front of them....
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