A New Way of Writing: The Possibilities for Literature in Late Qing China, 1895-1908
Author(s): Theodore Huters
Source: Modern China, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Jul., 1988), pp. 243-276
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/189319
Accessed: 09-04-2017 21:18 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern
China
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
A New Way of Writing
The Possibilities for Literature
in Late Qing China, 1895-1908
THEODORE HUTERS
Queens College of
the City University of New York
The term wenxue in modern China, which can be appropriately
translated only as "literature," has had a range of meaning that is,
paradoxically, at once both broader and more limited than that
implied in its ordinary English usage. On the one hand, wenxue
has been called to service in a remarkably wide variety of social
and political situations-its position as the locus of the intellectual
purges that constituted the proximate cause of the Cultural Revo-
lution is only the most spectacular example. On the other hand,
the full range of creative autonomy and presumed independence
of policy issues of the day, taken for granted in discussion of literature in the West, is a realm wenxue has never seemed to achieve,
however much individual practitioners have devoutly wished it.
Most scholarly treatment of this issue looks back no farther than
the May Fourth movement, taking at face value the claims of the
young iconoclasts of that time that all cultural matters begin anew
at that point. This article will attempt to demonstrate, however,
that these particular qualities of modern Chinese literature can be
traced back to cultural theories developed in the years immediately after 1895 (when the term wenxue took on its current meaning). I
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The research and writing of this article was supported by a research
grant from the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the American Council of Learned
Societies and the Social Science Research Council, funded in part by the Ford Founda-
tion, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the
Humanities. I would like to thank Peter Bolfor his pertinent comments and Mary Erbaugh
for her fine editorial advice on earlier versions of this article.
MODERN CHINA, Vol. 14, No. 3, July 1988 243-276
? 1988 Sage Publications, Inc.
243
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
244 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
Some understanding of those theories is thus indispensable to full
appreciation of the vicissitudes that the realm of Chinese belleslettres has undergone since that time.
The flurry of cultural theorizing that arose in the 1890s was itself the outcome of a complex series of historical events. Expres-
sions of discontent with Manchu rule in China had been bubbling
up from below throughout most of the nineteenth century, even as
individual scholars had been very much aware not only of the critical weakness of the Chinese state during that time, but also increasingly cognizant of the efficiency of Western ways and the
remarkable effort of the Meiji restoration in adapting to the challenge from the "Western Ocean." The general framework of Neo-
Confucian political discourse, however, remained intact, and the
central government's ability to bind its existence to key tenets of
the system of moral and political thought firmly embedded in the
mentality of the educated elite had prevented the emergence of any
successful global challenge to imperial authority. Zeng Guofan's
(1811-1872) mobilization of traditional loyalties and beliefs on be-
half of the state in opposition to the extraordinary strength represented by the Taiping rebellion provides the best index of the
perdurance of the system. The 1895 defeat at the hands of Japan,
always regarded as an inferior, tributary state, coming as it did on
top of decades of governmental decline and increasing encroachment by the West, provides an appropriate symbol of the culmina-
tion of a train of blows to that system that finally shook it to its
roots. It was not, then, until the 1890s that what Hao Chang (1987:
8) has called "a crisis of orientational order" occurred in Chinese
political and social thought. The profundity of this crisis was
marked by the fact that not only did particulars of the old order
come into question, but the very syntax that had held those particulars in place lost its authority to set the terms by which people
built a comprehensive pattern of understanding the world.
This "orientational crisis" brought about a rapid metamorphosis of Chinese thought in the years after 1895. By then a new
and rebellious generation of youth educated in a tradition that had
ceased to make sense on its own terms was trapped between con-
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 245
tempt for the government and for the current state of affairs in
China on the one hand and, on the other, a desire to reconstruct
in some way the worldview that had been torn apart by the collapse of the traditional conceptual order. Customary assumptions
within Confucian thought about a close link between things as
they actually were and things as they ought to be rendered this
desire to maintain orientational stability in these uprecedentedly
troubled times intensely problematic: The additional stress that
the need to repudiate the government brought to a conceptual system already straining under the burden of repositioning its most
fundamental notions of state and society revealed a whole series
of contradictions within the consciousness of the intellectual elite.
The example of the West, with its apparent success at solving most
of the practical difficulties now confronting China, could not help
but complicate the situation by providing a vision of the possibility
of successful social and intellectual transformation that clashed
dramatically with the perceptual chaos confronting the Chinese
intellectual elite (Metzger, 1977: 14-18).
A variety of notions was immediately put forward to counter
the shattering effect of these new currents of thought and to at-
tempt to reestablish a unified conceptual order. The most spectacular attempt at holding the center of the rapidly dispersing
intellectual horizon was no doubt Kang Youwei's attempt to put
state Confucianism on a religious footing (Hsiao, 1975: 97-122).
What Schneider (1976: 57-59) has identified as the "discovery of
culture," however, was perhaps more significant in the long run.
The new theory of "national essence" or guocui, an attempt at both
guaranteeing continuity with the past and separating culture from
an earlier and demonstrably unsuccessful political realm, was the
practical result. One of the most important vehicles for this essence
came to be a more unified concept of belletristic writing than had
existed before, encapsulated within the old term wenxue, which
had now come to be used for literature in the Western sense of the
term. The tensions inhering in the guocui ideal of trying to separate historical context from transhistorical significance are nowhere more apparent than in this "new" and highly ideological
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
246 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
field of wenxue. Literature became, above all, an arena of tension
between utopianism and the hopes for real departure from old concerns projected onto it and the enduring influence of traditional
patterns of thought that resided in the intellectual environment out
of which the new category had grown. In other words, wenxue of-
fered everyone who cared to think about it a realm of potential in
which traditional preoccupations could be resituated and, or at
least such was the hope, transfigured, more, or less, depending
upon the individual viewpoint. The almost bewildering variety of
views set forth on the subject in the years after 1895 is at once
emblematic of its importance to the overall cultural enterprise and
of the tremendous frustrations involved in trying to construct that
enterprise itself.
Prior to 1895 the category of embellished written expression
was simply wen, a term that represented a palimpsest of related
meanings ranging from simple prose to decorative prose to decoration itself, on to the traditional ideal of personal and social cultivation in the broadest sense.2 Wen was thus a heavily freighted word,
as use of the term in any of its senses tended to carry along with it
overtones of other meanings. The ubiquity of these moral over-
tones helps to explain why advocacy of a particular type of wen,
guwen, or archaic prose, became one of the principal intellectual
vehicles of the court faction that sought to strengthen a weakening political order with a moral revival along orthodox NeoConfucian lines in the 1820s-1840s (Huters, 1987). Zeng Guofan
seized upon this idea of prose in the 1850s-1860s and further developed it as part of his effort to galvanize the morale of the intellectual elite against the Taipings. For our purposes, it is sufficient
to note that only the melding of esthetics with moral concern provided the occasion for a revival of guwen in particular and wen in
general during the course of the nineteenth century. This was perhaps to be the one constant among the various justifications for
wenxue that crowded the discursive ground in the final decade of
the dynasty.
After 1895 the process of elevating the role of writing continued
even as it was transformed by the sudden crumbling of the intel-
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 247
lectual assumptions that had provided the context for earlier dis-
cussion of the issue. The practical demands made on the new idea
of literature were a response to the need to use wenxue to fill a
variety of needs: It needed a theory powerful enough both to unify
and to privilege the theretofore disparate genres of writing, old
ideas concerning the utility of writing needed to be taken account
of, and, above all, literature needed to be given the authority it required to provide cultural significance in very difficult times. The
literary discourse that followed 1895 took a number of distinct
directions, some of which tried very hard to stay within traditional patterns and others that tried quite self-consciously to set forth
in new directions.
Each trend, however, was eventually moved in directions its
principal advocates could not foresee by residual influences from
preexisting modes of thought that no one ever seemed to be able
to account for. In a sense, the legacy of the earlier nineteenth cen-
tury, with its tendency to conflate utility and esthetics (or, more
accurately, a particularly Chinese "moral esthetics") provided a
hidden gravitational pull that no one seemed to be able to avoid.
Beyond this central issue of utility and esthetics, however, the
situation was complicated by other theoretical axes, such as faithfulness to traditional forms against willingness to experiment, and
fidelity to the traditional literary language as opposed to the
resolve to experiment with the vernacular. That none of the main
theoretical groupings ran quite parallel to what at least some
of them claimed as traditional antecedents again testifies to the
monumental transformation of literary discourse in these times.
I have divided the literary discussion of the 1895-1908 period
into five distinct areas, primarily on the basis of intellectual affinity
within each division. There is some overlap, but much of the overlap results from my attempt to account for the way the principal
theories of the earlier nineteenth century were continued in the new
era, as well as for how trends that would dominate post-1919
literature were brought into being at this time. The first two of
these main intellectual groupings represent continuations of traditional schools of prose (see Huters, 1987). The first of these, the
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
248 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
Tongcheng school of archaic prose-by far the most influential
voice concerning prose theory through most of the nineteenth cen-
tury-saw its position erode rather quickly after 1900. The second
traditional grouping, the so-called Wenxuan school, based itself
on the theories concerning the esthetic preeminence of parallel
prose as promulgated by the eminent scholar and official Ruan
Yuan (1764-1849) in the 1 820s. Since Ruan's ideas were conducive
both to the esthetic elevation of parallel prose and to the abstrac-
tion of that prose from quotidian concerns, it fit the newly exalted
idea of wenxue better than did Tongcheng theory. In addition, the
Wenxuan school sense that parallel prose partook of the essence
of Confucian thought was even more perfectly suited to the needs
of those searching for a national essence. Ruan Yuan's heirs thus
became more influential than those of Tongcheng's Yao Nai (17321815) in the waning years of the Qing.
The third group, one that sought to open up new paths of
expression, was led by Liang Qichao and his New Prose Style (xin
wen ti). While Liang's effort to create a more accessible style
that incorporated vernacular elements was eventually to create
reverberations that would shock Liang himself to the core, his willingness to write a prose that would break decisively with precedent
was perhaps more important in the short run. Liang was also a
pioneer among the fourth group, that large and varied company
that advocated the novel as a vital medium of social and political
reform. The general effort to valorize the novel is probably the best
remembered literary event in the final decade of Manchu rule, but
the extent of the links between the move to fiction and "orthodox"
literary thought has as yet only been tentatively explored.3 Finally, there were a number of prominent individual scholars who, on
first glance, can hardly be seen to constitute a group at all-they
seem to share only a mood of dissent from prevailing trends. They
are represented on the one extreme by Zhang Binglin, with his
resolute denial that prose could have any special, esthetic properties, and on the other extreme by Wang Guowei, who, by 19061907, had come to see esthetics as the defining feature of human
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 249
behavior. They had in common, however, a conscious denial of
any strictly utilitarian view of wenxue. The younger Zhou Shuren,
later to become famous as Lu Xun, influenced by both men, combined elements from each in such a way as to demonstrate both
the strengths and the limits of the traditional Chinese view of the
capacities of literature.
THE TONGCHENG SCHOOL
A primary concern of the so-called Tongcheng theory of prose
was to maintain a uniform, archaic style that was relatively accessible to all educated men. The moral qualities held to be the im-
manent core of archaic prose were seen as the key both to the
uniformity and the accessibility of proper composition. The moral
authority of prose thus to some degree required that no form of
writing become so specialized that it risked losing the essential
simplicity that all guwen was supposed to share. Indeed, many of
the late Qing calls for archaic prose rest specifically on a faith in a
clarity of diction that ostensibly guaranteed accuracy of expression. As Yan Fu wrote concerning the style he chose in his landmark translation of T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (Tianyan
lun in Chinese):
Confucius said: "The purpose of words is only to communicate"
and "Language without embellishment will not carry far." ...
[But my] wish is not simply to carry the words far; in fact, the essentials and subtleties [of the text] are more easily conveyed by
using pre-Han style and syntax. If one uses the vulgar language current today, it is difficult to get the point across: one always suppres-
ses the idea in favor of the expression and a tiny initial error leads
to an infinite error in the end [Yan Fu, 1980: 123; emphasis added].
In light of the May Fourth-inspired and subsequently widely
held view that guwen is perversely obscurantist, it is important to
recall that one of the principal Tongcheng claims was the precision
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
250 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
of archaic prose in conveying complex ideas. On the other hand,
however, Tongcheng theorists always acknowledged a stylistic
density to guwen that was an equally important characteristic. The
later Tongcheng master Wu Rulun's musings on translation, written in the late 1890s, bring out the contradictions between these
two views. In his 1898 preface to Yan's Tianyan lun, Wu (1980a:
144-145) dealt extensively, if finally indecisively, with the relationship between content and form.
After briefly summarizing Huxley's argument in the first third
of the preface, Wu devoted the rest of his discussion to analysis of
the stylistic elements of the Chinese translation. In the tripartite
taxonomy of writing that he then set forth, Wu also demonstrated
the extent to which orthodox Neo-Confucian moral philosophy
depended upon careful cultivation of written expression. His first
category consists of prose in which both the dao and the style are
superior; it will certainly last through the ages. In the second, the
dao is inferior but the prose is good enough to survive on its own,
while the third consists of inferior prose that will disappear regardless of the quality of the moral philosophy that the author is seeking to express. The weight Wu apportioned to each segment of his
argument-two-thirds being on matters of style-tellingly indicates the real locus of his concern. As if to underline this, Wu
noted that his understanding of Huxley was illuminated by Yan's
strength as a stylist.
Wu blamed the deficient literary climate in China for difficulties in successfully bringing Western ideas into China, denouncing
such forms as the eight-legged essay (bagu wen), and official documents and informal writing (shuo bu, a loose term that could mean
anything from fiction to diary jottings). Pragmatically, Wu was
concerned that foreign works translated into inferior Chinese will
earn only the contempt of "knowledgeable men." He believed that
writing as competent as that of Yan Fu is guaranteed to last-if,
and this seems to Wu to be a large if-the current trend of debased
writing can be overcome and people can recognize that Yan's writ-
ing is on a par with the Shiji and the great prose works of the Tang
and Song. Along with this magnified concern with style, however,
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 251
lies a certain ambivalence about a possible disharmony between
form and content, something that would not have come up in the
early days of the post-1800 guwen movement. Wu says that Yan
Fu makes Huxley's message all the clearer, but he admits to a cer-
tain ambivalence over the utility of that message. For, after rank-
ing Yan's prose with that of the traditional masters of guwen, he
allows that it is difficult to rank Huxley's original message on that
level.
In the somewhat more private forum of a letter written in reply
to Yan Fu, Wu is more open about his misgivings and the reasons
behind them. Much more explicitly than the Preface, Wu wonders
whether the vast differences between the Western languages and
Chinese do not require that a wholly new form of Chinese be
created to do justice to the ideas of the West, much as a new style
was required to translate the Buddhist canon from Sanskrit. But
he is also concerned lest the newly ascendant Western learning
begin to supplant the Chinese learning on which the native culture
is based. Since he views writing as the key to that culture, using
vernacular Chinese as the medium of translation is unacceptable,
as its widespread adoption would only hasten the demise of the
Chinese tradition. Wu, then, quite tentatively gives his approval
to Yan's transformation of Western texts into guwen, but evidently feels uncomfortable doing so. His misgivings ultimately oblige
him to come down firmly on the side of loyalty to style over accuracy in content by advising Yan that it is better "to sacrifice fidelity
[in your translations] than to do harm to the purity" that lies at
the heart of Yan's archaic prose (Wu Rulun, 1980b: 151). This still
does not satisfy Wu that the gap between the Chinese tradition and
Western ideas has been closed, so he adds the rather anticlimactic
suggestion that a curriculum of traditional Chinese prose texts be
added to the Western-style education at the new schools. Following the practice of the post-1820 Tongcheng school, Wu places the
writings of Yao Nai at the core of the body of work, basing himself now on a wish for clarity-older (and more profound) books
would simply be over the head of the novice.
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
252 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
The extraordinary vacillation with which Wu approaches the
whole question of the flexibility of wen demonstrates, I think, how
much more is at stake here than can be accommodated by any notion we have today of "mere" style. When he thinks of wen here,
Wu evidently has in mind at all times the overtones of the word
concerning the essence of the cultural tradition itself and the means
by which one gains access to it. His insistence on a punctilious
observation of formal detail is thus only natural. Without allowing for any stylistic distinctions among different sorts of writing,
however, Tongcheng writers were caught in the dilemma of how
to accommodate the new forms of writing growing in response to
the great social changes in the burgeoning cities of maritime China,
while at the same time holding steadfast to the integrity of their
own concerns.
In a new environment in which practical links between past and
present became almost impossible to maintain, the problems inhering in the literal approach to guwen, with its emphasis on a
direct line of succession from the Tang and Song, became increasingly obvious. That the most signiflcant prose produced after 1900
within this school is guwen translations of Western works demonstrates just how untenable were Tongcheng theories of fostering intellectual unity in their own time by maintaining a direct link
with the sages. The Tongcheng writers did take great pains to put
their own notions of style ahead of generic distinctions whenever
they ventured into an unfamiliar mode of writing. But their audi-
ences inevitably seemed to focus on the surface message rather
than on the cultural code so sedulously inscribed within the careful texture of the writing itself.
Lin Shu's attempt to colonize the previously taboo territory of
the novel for archaic prose provides the most striking example of
this, since the net result of his efforts to translate foreign novels
into archaic prose was augmented status for flction rather than any
long-term gain in the audience for guwen (Zheng Zhenduo, 1970:
229). If Lin's prefatory remarks to his translations are to be
believed, however, he was anything but condescending in his
approach to the Western novel. On the contrary, he appears deep-
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 253
ly impressed with what he finds there, particularly the elements of
formal composition, which he compares favorably with the guwen
style of the Shiji (Lin Shu, 1980a: 162). But what Lin seems to find
most remarkable is the sustained interest in the commonplace that
Dickens is able to maintain throughout the recounting of long
chains of events. In his introduction to his translation of David
Copperfield, for instance, Lin admits to not being able to find any
Chinese equivalent to Dickens's skill at narrative. After first dis-
missing the Shuihu zhuan for its sensationalism, as well as for not
being able to sustain the individuality of its characters over the full
course of the story, he says of Dickens's novel: "This book narrates
only the most scattered events of everyday life; if someone with a
skillful pen were not writing it, then of course it would be so placid
as to put one right to sleep. But Dickens is able to transform the
worn-out into the wonderful, to take the dispersed and organize it,
to take the five animals and myriad oddities and fuse them through
his spirit-his is truly a unique style" (Lin Shu, 1980b: 165).
But style was not the only thing that attracted Lin to Dickens.
The translator was equally interested in what he perceived as the
Western novel's profound capacity to inspire social reform. In his
preface to his translation of Oliver Twist, for instance, Lin goes so
far as to imply that England owed much of its position in the world
to its novels, which had engendered governmental and social
reform:
Without Dickens describing the situation, how would people know
about this nest of thieves persisting in their midst? England's ability
to be strong, therefore, lies in its ability to reform and follow the
good. If we in China attend to [this example] and transform ourselves, we will also easily be able to change. I regret only that we
have no Dickens capable of revealing accumulated social wrongs
by writing a novel and thus reporting these wrongs to the authori-
ties, perhaps with results similar [to those in England] [Lin Shu,
1980c: 166].
While Lin's ability to move so easily from considerations of the
esthetic to the utilitarian may strike the Western reader as odd, the
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
254 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
easy movement between the two shows just how close they were
in Tongcheng ideology in specific, and in theorizing about wen in
general. But in a time when specialization at all levels of society
was proceeding apace, Lin's attempt to embrace all facets of social
organization and expression within the confines of an archaic
prose style seems foredoomed to failure. That he settled on the
novel as the perfect genre for his instinct for synthesis, however, is
perhaps only natural, despite its traditionally low status-it would
seem to be the only form loose enough to hold all the elements he
demands.5 But embracing the novel meant admitting the very
heterogeneity of the form into orthodox literary discourse and
thereby running the risk of allowing the notoriously imprecise criteria for xiaoshuo to reshape that discourse drastically. The eventual supremacy of the novel in modern Chinese literature and the
almost complete disappearance of guwen shows the full extent
of the risk that Lin was running. The compromises involved in
trying to maintain a guwen style that would be all things to all
people contributed to the growth of prose genres that increasing-
ly marginalized the archaistic style the later Tongcheng writers had
tried so hard to infuse within such forms as the novel and the political essay. It is a mark of the eclipse of style by content that the
late Qing writer Li Xiang, in his 1908 (p. 3b) account of the
Tongchengs, held that the school was unable to generate any
writers of ability following the death of Wu Rulun in 1903.
THE WENXUAN SCHOOL
The Wenxuan school (named after the Six Dynasties anthology
that contained a significant amount of writing composed in parallel style) followed Ruan Yuan in defining wen as only that writing
composed of parallel couplets. Wen was thus easily distinguished
from purely utilitarian writing, called bi. In a sense, this separation offered a natural solution to the Tongcheng difficultly in
absorbing new forms of writing. By setting apart a body of writing said at once to contain the direct spirit of the ancients as well
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 255
as to be quite distinct from utilitarian concern, the Wenxuan
theory allowed for different styles, one that could maintain the
essence of the Chinese tradition, even as others could account for
the most recent contingency. The reasons the Wenxuan school was
able to maintain a vitality that the Tongchengs could not lay precisely in its abstraction of letters from quotidian affairs and from
recent history. In addition, Ruan claimed that Confucius had in-
itiated parallel prose, but that this fact had been obscured for
hundreds of years until Ruan's discovery of it. These intimations
of mystical significance with Confucius at the center accorded perfectly with the post-1895 temper. Wen as defined by Ruan thus became a natural resting place for the new concept of "national
essence."
At the center of the national essence movement was Liu Shipei,
a scholarly prodigy who, along with Zhang Binglin, was one of the
twin pillars of anti-Manchu revolutionary anarchism in the period
between 1903 and 1908. The term guocui had been borrowed from
Japan, where, as kokusui, it had been a concept developed in the
late 1880s to assert a sense of national singularity in the face of
pressing demands for increasing westernization (Bernal, 1976:
10 1-102). Revolutionary though he may have been, Liu clearly felt
a need to assert a sense of Chinese cultural identity and thus joined
Deng Shi and Huang Jie in January of 1905 in setting up the
Society for the Protection of National Studies (Guoxue baocun
hui), which within a month began publishing the National Essence
Journal (Guocui xuebao) (Bernal, 1976: 104). Liu wrote a treatise
on the idea of wen, and one of its central concerns was to verify
Ruan Yuan's conception of the term; he constructed elaborate historical "proofs" of what he regarded as the vital distinction between belletristic wen and the utilitarian style called bi by the
Wenxuan theorists. Much of the treatise is simply concerned with
textual questions, in which he did not go into the reasons he
believed wen to be so important.
But Liu occasionally offered impassioned explanations of the
source of his commitment, as in this passage analyzing the various
meanings of wen:
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
256 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
In China during the Three Dynasties [Xia, Shang, and Zhou] cultural works were taken as wen, elegance was taken as wen; rites,
music, law, etiquette and letters were all taken as belles-lettres
(wenzhang). From that the Classics came [to be called] wen, as did
writing (wenzi) and language (yanci). The use of wen in the belleslettristic sense began with the "wenyan" [commentary] of Con-
fucius. So wen is to be glossed as ornament, that is to say, a
beautiful and ordered display. Therefore, wen is the external manifestation of the dao as well as the sequential ordering of events. But
ornamented words also cannot fail to be called wen [Liu Shipei,
1934-1936a: 20.8a-b].
While Liu rigorously sets out the various meanings of wen
through most of this passage, he ends in a display of historical faith
by telescoping all the overtones of wen into a definition that is
much greater than the sum of its parts: Wen is not only "the external manifestation of the dao as well as the sequential ordering of
events," but at the same time a specific literary style. In other
words, the conflation of a particular writing style with the cultural
tradition as a whole urges the judgment that cultural continuity
depended upon certain clear rules of rhetoric as difficult to employ
successfully as they were easy to describe. It is not hard to see this
as a prospective lodging for the national essence, as well as the ultimate justification for the incipient promotion in status for a newly
defined concept of what was just then coming to be thought of as
wenxue. Liu's choice to focus upon restoring Ruan's notion of wen
implied a consequential reduction in value of other forms of writing to a position of mere utility, necessary for a host of general purposes but without the links to dao or cultural essence that Liu
defined as the very substance of wen. For Liu, as for many of the
English romantics analyzed by Raymond Williams in Culture and
Society (1966: 30-43), the "reach for control" over society described as perhaps the real function of culture required that literature retreat to more rarefied precincts, even as they asserted the
mystical preeminence and theoretical omnipotence of literature's
power.
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 257
The ability of parallel prose to split essence and practice perhaps accounts for its resurgence during the last years of the Qing.
Converts from guwen provided the larger part of this revival, illustrating the need to overcome the paradox of simultaneously maintaining a link to the past while at the same time allowing new forms
of writing to be used for less exalted purposes than purely asserting community with the tradition. The revolutionary and victim
of the September 1898 reaction, Tan Sitong, for instance, wrote in
his Sanshiziji(Memoirs at Thirty, 1954), that he had recently made
such a conversion:
When I was young I was very much in awe of the Tongcheng school
and for a number of years made a point of basing my writing on
theirs. Eventually I thought my writing came to resemble theirs and
other people thought so too. But by the time I had chanced to read
a good number of books and had come to know many of the learned
men of our age, I began to feel a bit ashamed of having no real way
to express myself. Someone showed me the [parallel prose] of the
Wei and Jin [dynasties], which made me very happy; I frequently
read it and became ever more fond of it [p. 204].
Tan's sense that guwen is somehow neither fine enough to allow
nuanced expression nor broad enough to accommodate a wide
range of learning is evident here.
Comparison between the two traditional schools of prose in
their final, late Qing manifestations reveals how the intellectual
crisis that precipitated the "discovery of culture" shattered the
hopes for a unified field of learned discourse that the notion of
wenxue had originally held out. The Tongcheng writers, with their
ideal of learning and expression all conducted within the same narrow frame of reference, concentrated on holding to the carefully
developed and deliberately plain guwen style, even when they ventured into new genres. In an age of increasing specialization on
the one hand and demands to extend the potential audience on
the other, however, advocates of archaic prose were doomed to
fighting a rearguard action to hold a steadily diminishing middle
ground of discourse.
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
258 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
Wenxuan school writers, for their part, were free to develop
writing for practical application in any direction they pleased as
long as they left a place at the top of their literary hierarchy for a
prose based on the parallel prose developed during the Six Dynas-
ties period. The highly allusive, complex prose written by leading
Chinese thinkers after 1895 is the embodiment of their efforts to
position their own writing on the highest possible cultural plane.
But since they admitted to a distinction between levels of dis-
course, more vulgar forms were permissible: Those who could not
comprehend the most refined level of writing could always tune
into some lower register. As a result, the Wenxuan theory shows
none of the utter intolerance toward what had always been seen as
unorthodox and hence somewhat dangerous "lower" forms of
prose, an intolerance still very much in evidence in Tongcheng
pronouncements.
While this new liberalism toward nonorthodox styles allowed
for a sense of freedom of manipulation that often had utopian
overtones, the consequent loss of a unified field of intellectual discourse, such a vital element in the Chinese tradition, was to have
a number of unforeseen results. One of the most important is
hinted at by Yan Fu's lament quoted above that "if one uses the
vulgar language current today, it is difflcult to get the point cross:
one always suppresses the idea in favor of the expression." In other
words, Yan feared the move away from a uniform writing style
would be the Tower of Babel for Chinese discourse: For all the dif-
ficulty of mastering a satisfactory style, guwen guaranteed for
words standard meanings within standard contexts. Any trifling
with established understanding threatened the onset of a terrible
opacity within the realm of letters.
THE NEW STYLE
Liang Qichao best illustrates the process by which one slipped
away from rigid orthodoxy in writing in a famous self-descriptio
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 259
written quite late in his life. He recounted his literary upbringing
as follows:
Liang never liked the ancient-style writing of the T'ung-ch'eng
school. His own early writing had been modeled after that of the
late Han, Wei, and Chin, [i.e., parallel prose] and it particularly attended to dignity and refinement, but at this point he liberated him-
self from it, and made it a rule to be plain and fluently expressive.
He interlarded his writings with colloquialisms, verses, and foreign
expressions fairly frequently, letting his pen flow freely and without restraint. Scholars hastened to imitate his style and it became
known as the New-Style Writing; however, the older generation
was resentful of it and slandered it as heretical. Nevertheless, his
style had a clear structure and the flow of his pen was often full of
feeling, with a special charm over the reader [Liang Qichao, 1963:
62; Hsu, 1959: 102].
Writing in the 1930s, Qian Jibo (1965: 337) showed that Liang
was not idly boasting when the former commented that "Even
now, when scholars under sixty and over forty write of politics or
academic matters, they never fail to display the hidden influence
of Liang."
Strikingly enough, the literary sources of Liang's liberation are
precisely those elements of classical and nonclassical prose that
both the traditional theories of Qing writing had proscribed as unorthodox. In a sense, Liang takes up those types of written expression abandoned by the Tongcheng and Wenxuan theorists but that
a comprehensive theory of literature needed to account for somehow. But while Liang claims to have broken free from the influ-
ence of both the orthodox schools, an argument of Liu Shipei's
will demonstrate how much easier it was to find justification for
working with unorthodox styles within Wenxuan theory than
within Tongcheng notions of the sanctity of the unified style of
guwen. Given Liu's exalted notion of wen, it would seem unlikely
that he could accept what he had to regard as the debased form of
the vernacular, no matter how much attention was devoted to its
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
260 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
composition. He not only accepted it, however, but embraced it
with some urgency, and refinement of language was farthest from
his mind.
The following discussion from his work Miscellaneous Notes
on Literature (Lun wen zaji) has several times been cited as evi-
dence that Liu supported the general use of the colloquial language, but the passage is more complex than it seems at first
glance. After establishing that the Chinese language has been in a
long process of decline, he allows that the use of the vernacular is
but the next logical step in the process:
Speaking of writing in terms of the general theory of evolution,
China upon coming into the modern age must reach the stage of allowing the common language to enter literature (wen)... . Uniting
speech and writing will lead to an increase in literacy and using the
vernacular to promote books and periodicals will allow those who
are even slightly literate to place [these publications] in their homes,
thereby aiding in the awakening of the people. This is indeed a
pressing task in today's China.
But after allowing baihua to exist with the one hand, he sets if
firmly in its place with the other: "How can we, however, then rush
to discard the ancient language? Contemporary writing should
thus be divided into two schools: One devoted to the common lan-
guage and used to enlighten the mass of people and one using the
ancient language and used to preserve the national learning" (Liu
Shipei, 1934-1936a: 20. lb; emphasis added).6
Liu thus always believed there to be a higher order to prose
backing permissible experiments in the vernacular, an assumption
of which Liang seems to be quite innocent. But they do share a
willingness to depart from sanctioned styles and construct new
types of prose in accord with ad hoc needs, most of which were
didactic and highly political. Liang simply was the more willing of
the two. The late Qing feeling that writing was obliged to be hortatory was in perfect congruence with Zhou Dunyi's (1017-1073)
injunction that "writing should convey the way" (wen yi zai dao),
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 261
a slogan that had been enthusiastically adopted by Zhu Xi (1 1301200) and had thus been the key Neo-Confucian dictum about
prose composition since the Song. Traditional notions of how to
construct prose were, however, also careful to stress the authority
of earlier works thought to embody that combination of morality
and practical guidance that constituted the dao. Although this may
have muted creativity, it did guarantee a continuity and gravity to
language by also limiting abuse of the accepted conventions of
meaning and usage. Liang and Liu now were each calling in his
own way for equally didactic writing, but without the built-in
limits of the need to appeal to precedent. Didacticism could, therefore, have free rein, with no practical limits to political manipulation. The trend toward linking politics with writing that had been
growing throughout the nineteenth century had now reached a
new high and the controls placed on implementation of the politi-
cal side of prose by the careful strictures contained within the
Tongcheng rhetoric were now off.
NEW TERRITOR Y: THE NO VEL
That even Lin Shu, representing the most conservative literary
force in the China of his time, was enticed by the possibilities he
saw in fiction illustrates the appeal xiaoshuo held out to the various notions of literature that became current after 1895. The novel
was so important, in fact, that it is virtually the only form about
which all literary schools had something to say. The plasticity of
the form itself accounted for much of this new enthusiasm, offering the prospect of completely new departures in literary expressions.7 This combined with the lack of any firm characterization
of what the form should be in traditional Chinese literary thought
to allow a wide variety of definitions of the novel, making it that
much more malleable. But this very lack of specificity, extending
even to the question of whether it narrated true events or not, also
brought about considerable confusion in regard not only to what
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
262 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
the xiaoshuo could and could not do, but what it should and
should not do (see Cai Jingkang, 1979: 403421).
The disposition to treat fiction as a highly serious enterprise can
be traced back to Liang Qichao's, Yan Fu's, and Xia Zengyou's
earnest treatises on the subject, some of which date back as early
as 1896 and, like the modern sense of the word wenxue, owe their
currency to Japanese influence (Hsia, 1978: 221-257). But few of
the earlier apologists for the novel evince any respect for the
universality of the form, most being at pains to point out at the
very least the frivolity and inappropriateness of all earlier Chinese
fiction and its function simply as a tool of reform, primarily for
the semiliterate masses. Liang, for instance, is careful to call for "a
renewed novel" as the essential tool with which to "renew the
people," even while professing alarm at the deleterious effects on
popular morality of all Chinese fiction then extant (Liang Qichao,
1960: 4.6-9). Much of the discussion of xiaoshuo is in fact couched
in terms similar to those used by Liu Shipei in his analysis of the
value of the vernacular: The novel is preeminently a device for providing the lower orders with the moral instruction necessary for a
new age of increased mass participation in the Chinese polity.
The following passage from an anonymously written essay titled
"On the Educative Value of Fiction" (Lun xiaoshuo zhi jiaoyu)
illustrates this point. After reciting the standard litany of charges
against the bad influence of the old novels, the text explains how
this influence can be transformed:
[We should] begin to have beneficial things told to the masses, but
still not change people's habits of listening to story-telling. For
what has been told up until now is all baseless talk, but if that can
be changed to that which is useful to life and what people need to
know, then not only will it penetrate the streets and tea-houses, but
will be [tantamount] to establishing countless schools there. Will
there by any who do not hear and then come to exhort one another
[to the good]? [Anon., 1962: 1.263]
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 263
The didactic element of this declaration is of course not new.
The sense that the pedagogical effort is ultimately directed at an
entirely different group from the elite readers of the document itself, however, is a radical departure from past apologies for writing that, hortatory though they often were, were still directed at a
group of peers. One need only recall Lin Shu's prefaces, with their
utter lack of condescension and their determination to judge the
novel by the presumptively universal Tongcheng esthetic. As Hu
Shi (1891-1962) pointed out long ago, this sense of talking about
them rather than us introduced after 1895 was to become pervasive
in discussions of vernacular literature in the years that followed
1895 (Hu Shi, 1953:1.246). If traditional discussions of writing had
been inextricably linked to notions of self-cultivation, adding this
new dimension of taking responsibility for others quite different
from oneself contributed to the ongoing transformation of modern
Chinese letters. Literature moved decisively into a more public
sphere and thereby increasingly took on the coloration of manipulator of public opinion. The new way of discussing it made it less
personally compelling, even as its position in cultural discourse became more dominant; it became more distant even as it became
more socially imperative.
The confluence of national essence ideas with imported and
more democratic notions of literature created a heady mixture that
those with a less refined palate than Liu Shipei seemed to find irresistible. If Liu had maintained a strict distinction between what
he thought of as wenxue and the new vernacular forms he suffered
to exist, other contemporary writers were far less discriminate. The
critic Tao Zengyou, for instance, in 1906-1907 contributed a series
of articles with titles like "On the Power and Significance of Literature" (Lun wenxue zhi shiliji qi guanxi) to the fiction magazines
that flourished in Eastern Chinese cities during the first decade of
this century. His rich prose requires only a small sampling to show
the melange of ideas that coalesced into a concept of literature that
offered writer, reader, and nation alike the promise of a tool to
control their respective fates:
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
264 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
I have heard that to establish a country on this globe requires a particular spirit.... And for it to be strong for eternity, it requires
natural endowment for strength.... Ah! What is this particular
spirit? What is this natural endowment? It is literature! "When letters receive their proper treatment, the world will know a wave of
reform." Countrymen! Countrymen! Do you not know that this
literature is superior to other branches of learning? That it truly
possesses the greatest of power? That is should enjoy the most
beautiful of names? That it contains limitless significance? And that
it also should alone occupy the highest position in the world? [Tao
Zengyou, 1962a: 1.241]
While Liu Shipei would no doubt have been horrified by the
crudity of this, his expostulations on the power of wen contributed
to the ambience that encouraged such effusion. But Liu would
have been obliged resolutely to oppose another article of Tao's
from the same period in which the latter talked of fiction in precisely the same effusive terms.
Oh! There is a great monster at the heart of the twentieth century.
It walks without legs, flies without wings, sounds without speaking; it stimulates the mind, surprises the eye, opens one's mental
horizons and increases the intelligence; it can by turns be solemn,
facetious, lyrical, lacrimous, angry, hortatory, satirical or mocking. . . It has immense strength and attraction as well as un-
imaginable force; in the realm of literature it casts a particular
brilliance and indicates a special quality. What is this thing? It is
the novel.... The novel! It is truly the most noble vehicle in world
literature [Tao Zengyou, 1962b: 1.251].8
The mixture of enthusiasm, disdain, and condescension that
thinkers of the time directed toward the novel presents a case
study of the conflicting notions within Chinese intellectual circles
brought about by the new concept of literature. Placing fiction at
the heart of a sweeping transvaluation of the ideas of the function
and form of writing doubly complicated matters. In light of all that
has been written recently about the elite nature of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Chinese vernacular narrative, it is easy to for-
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 265
get that, at least in the less open atmosphere of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, fiction was frowned upon by the most
influential segments of literati opinion. One can, in fact, make a
convincing case that the contempt for the novel in the later period
extended even to those of the elite who devoted themselves to the
genre; the defensiveness evident when eighteenth-century authors
discussed the form in general points toward this conclusion.
The preface to Rulin waishi (The Scholars) written by "Xianzhai laoren" (often suspected to be none other than the novel's
author, Wu Jingzi, himself) is particularly notable, in that it takes
special pains to condemn what are universally agreed to be the
shining lights of traditional fiction. The preface begins: "Past and
present romances altogether must be numbered in the thousands,
but The Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, Water Margin and The Romance of Jin Ping Mei are universally regarded as
the 'four marvelous books.' Everyone is happy to be able to read
them, but I have my reservations." He then describes the qualities
attributed to each novel by its enthusiasts, even while keeping an
acerbic distance from their praise. He says of Water Margin and
Jin Ping Mei, for instance, that they "teach banditry and licentiousness and have long offended against censorship laws. Those
who speak for them, however, extravagantly extol the marvels of
their composition [and] the fineness of their style.... Alas! Have
they not read this Rulin waishi?" (Xianzhai laoren, 1980: 3.452).
While some of this may be attributed to the publicist's desire to
put his wares in a uniquely favorable position, the scarcely concealed contempt for the form as a whole does provide a broad hint
concerning the prejudices of the educated audience to which he is
appealing.
The condescending tone of most post-1895 treatises on the
novel, therefore, grew out of a tradition of hostility to the form it-
self by those who had held themselves up as guardians of high
seriousness. That hostility must be seen as one of the principal
sources of uncertainty about how to treat a genre that was viewed
above all as a way to educate the ignorant masses, something that
had long been a theoretical concern in Confucian writings. The
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
266 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
purely instrumental approach to fiction that resulted from this perception of its function has an antiseptic air to it that is quite foreign
to discussion of the traditional esthetic canon, even the practical
esthetics implicit in the writings of the activist Tongcheng school.
But that the novel represented the most realistic avenue toward
awakening the common people in also an index of the utopian
hopes that were to be invested in it, base as its origins may have
been. For the example of the presumptively successful popular
participation in modern economic and social activities in the industrialized alizedlizedcountries, particularly Japan, set off a wave
of hope that the noblest impulses of Confucian idealism could be
brought to fruition.9 This complex amalgam of hangover from old
prejudices and hopes for social and intellectual breakthrough
characterized Chinese intellectual life in general in the decade and
a half after 1895. And if literature was often thought of as lying
close to the heart of the nest of contradictions making up Chinese
thought at the time, it was perhaps because it embodied this complexity more than any other intellectual institution in late Qing
China. In turn, the novel, representing as it did a potentially new
set of intellectual and social relations, was the most open and thus
most usable instrument of intellectual and social control within the
redefined concept of wenxue. Xiaoshuo thus at the same time came
to stand for both the highest ideals and the grimmest utility.
As such, it represented the essence of the new idea of literature.
That the novels produced in response to almost overwhelmingly
optimistic calls for reform represented an almost equally overwhelming pessimism is but another of the paradoxes brought into
existence by the overdetermination lying at the root of the call for
a new literature.'0
THE NONCONFORMISTS
Difficult as it was for them to swim against this strong tide, th
were those who dissented from the highly pragmatic side of late
Qing views of literature. But their very attempts to deny its ideo-
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 267
logical force ironically highlight just how difficult it was to sepa-
rate wenxue from the global concerns of the post-1895 reform
movement. Perhaps most influential was the brilliant scholar
Zhang Binglin, a major figure in the national essence movement
and a profound influence on the young intellectuals of the time.
Zhang's conception of wen could not have differed more dramatically from that of Liu Shipei, a young man otherwise much in
Zhang's debt. Whereas Liu had exalted wen, held it as the key to
the national essence, and even spoken of its incommensurability
with learning (xue) (Liu Shipei, 1934-1936b: 54.13.2b), Zhang
rejected any notion of a special status for writing of any sort. A
self-conscious adherent of the philological rigor of the great days
of the Han learning in the late eighteenth century, Zhang devoted
himself to arguing against what he regarded as the pernicious
effects of overembellished letters based on misperception of the
true meaning of the terms wen and wenzhang.
That belles-lettres should not be a primary vehicle for political
concern was virtually the only idea about literature that Wang
Guowei held in common with Zhang. But where Zhang attempted
to push literary expression aside, Wang sought to place it on a
completely different plane from ordinary discourse. Wang studied
the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer before entering the realm of
literary criticism with his famous 1904 essay on Hong lou meng
(The Story of the Stone). Soon after he completed his critique of
Hong lou meng, Wang Guowei moved away from the metaphysi-
cal sturm unddrang of Schopenhauer toward a Kantian definition
of art as that which has "purposiveness without purpose" and was
marked by a pure "disinterestedness." (See Galik, 1975, 22-23.) If
Liu Shipei's theories are collectively a call for raising the status of
esthetic writing, Wang in his Kantian phase sounds a completely
new note in Chinese criticism by raising the position of literature
while simultaneously placing it in a wholly separate ontological
category. The result was a more dispassionate analysis of the features needed to generate true art and less anxiety about the sup-
posed intellectual and moral failings of the Chinese people. The
principal idea to emerge out of Wang's writings of the next several
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
268 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
years built on the essential difference of art as he had described it
in his article on Hong lou meng to stress the essential autonomy
of esthetics from social and political concerns. His Remarks on
Literature (Wenxue xiaoyan), published in 1906, outlines his radical new theory. He holds that literature and philosophy are concerned with truth rather than utility and must therefore hold
themselves above the conflicts of interest that inhere in any social
or political analysis of things. He concludes his argument rather
starkly with the words that "literature produced for the sake of filling one's stomach simply cannot be literature" (Wang Guowei,
1980: 4.378).
On the surface, Wang's Kantian esthetic offers Chinese artists
a freedom from political involvement rare indeed within the NeoConfucian tradition. Closer examination, however, reveals that,
rather than having severed the relationship between literature and
politics and society, Wang's theory seems based instead on an inevitable relationship of opposition. The idea that the pursuit of
truth inherent in literature demands that literature take a critical
stance toward the society it describes can easily be read into both
Wang's critique of Hong lou meng and his later 1906 definition.
And his classification of literature in the same category as philosophy would seem to be a direct threat to maintaining esthetics as
a value transcendent in itself.
Indeed, Wang often admits of the close relationship between
literature and society almost in spite of himself. In discussing
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for instance, he avers that the two
"were alike in using their unparalleled literary talent to propagate
their thought" (Bonner, 1986: 92). Much as the thought would
probably have horrified Wang at the time, this statement of the
link between the world of ideas, even political ideas, and that of
literary style sounds more as if it belongs to Wu Rulun writing to
Yan Fu than to someone who thought of himself as the apostle of
literary autonomy. Wang made perhaps one of the most utilitarian
arguments for literature on record in the same year when he, in the
words of Bonner, declared: "There is no pastime in all of China
... that is more sinister than opium smoking, and it is as an alter-
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 269
native to that repellent habit that he proposes the lower classes
turn to religion and the upper classes to art." Indeed, he quite
straightforwardly calls art "the religion of the upper classes of
society" (p. 103). Wang's eventual abandonment of literary criticism to pursue a more specifically nationalistic agenda should thus
not be regarded as a complete about-face, since his ardent pursuit
of a distinct realm for writing in the years between 1904 and 1906
reveals the unconscious hold on him of certain key patterns of
traditional Chinese notions of writing.
The extent to which literature became the ideal vehicle for the
ideology of the reform period can clearly be seen in the first section of Lu Xun's famous 1908 essay, "On the Power of Mara
Poetry," when he writes that "of the culture passed down to later
ages, none is as powerful as the literary voice. The mind of the
ancients connects with the mysteries of nature and harmonizes
spiritually with all things; it gives expression to that which it can,
leading to poetry and song" (Lu Xun, 1981: 1.63). While there is a
lyricism to this that would have been foreign to Liu Shipei, Lu
Xun's basic message would have fit seamlessly into Liu's Lun wen
zaji. But whereas other critics ranging from the crude Tao Zengyou to the sophisticated Liu Shipei had seen in the literary heritage
a strength that transcended evident social weakness, Lu Xun interpreted the indicative value they all saw in literature in quite a different way.
Where the others saw a brilliant literary heritage signifying a
latent greatness and as the key to future recovery, Lu Xun saw the
recent decline of literature as an emblem of a withering away of
the social order: "When its literature shows weakness, then the fate
of people is used up; when the voice of the populace ceases, its glory
has vanished" (p. 63). Since the dominant trend of late Qing
literary thought was built on a theory of mutual implication between culture and society, Lu Xun saw the most ominous implications in his diagnosis of literary decline. He thus pursues
the national essence thesis from the opposite direction: If other
thinkers used it to salvage meaning from the chaos surrounding
them, Lu Xun reverses the ground of the argument to attribute the
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
270 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
chaos he perceived in letters to the social disarray he saw about
him. He agreed with the others on there being a greatness in the
past and that the existence of a rich literature was the surest indication of that greatness, but, following the logic of that idea, he
saw in the widely acknowledged recent decline of literature a necessarily ominous sign for the present and future of society. Lu Xun's
attitude in this recalls the pessimistic side of late-imperial Confucianism that Metzger (1977: 158-160) has described: The decline
from an ancient utopia is seen as permanent and irreversible. More
importantly, Lu Xun bases himself on a sense of cultural im-
manence that most of his contemporaries blithely ignored in their
euphoria at being released from the bonds of the traditional order.
Lu Xun, however, remained tied by the Chinese conservative ethos
that an idea cannot serve both as an indicator of a particular social
reality and at the same time as an abstraction from that reality.
However clearly Lu Xun saw this problem, he immediately became caught up in the dilemma of fervently wishing to find a way
for literature to transcend the dreary social reality in which it is
based. The latter portion of the essay thus inevitably opens up contradictions with the pessimistic early pages of the piece. He attempts to square these ideas by echoing Wang Guowei's view that
literature worthy of the name takes on a negative and destructive
attitude toward the society and the governing mentality of the
society from which it issues. Concerned to avoid a crass utilitarianism that fails to deal realistically with the links between
literature and the social system, Lu Xun must still find some way
to make literature at once abstract from society yet finally effective within it. His solution is to follow Wang in offering up a concept of "pure literature" (chun wenxue). While this literature is
"unrelated to personal or national survival, is totally separated
from practical affairs, has nothing of philosophy in it" and, in fact,
has no actual uses, it still has the power to make people content
(Lu Xun, 1981: 1.71). Lu Xun devotes some energy to describing
this power of affect and finally concludes that without it, people
would be spiritually dead.
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 271
Lu Xun thus defines literature with the very Kantian formula-
tion that it has a "use in its very uselessness (buyong zhi yong)."
From this, Lu Xun quickly moves on to describe its quintessential
nature:
The great [literary] works of the world never fail to open up the
secrets (biji) of life and to speak directly of its reality and its ways-
something that science cannot do. These so-called "secrets" are
none other than the truth of life. This truth is subtle and mysterious
and cannot be given voice by scholars. [To have them try] would
be like talking about ice to people from the tropics who have never
seen it: although you may use physics and biology to explain, until
you show it to them directly and have them feel it, [they will
not know what it is]. Literature is like this [direct experience]
[pp. 71-72].
The continuity in Lu Xun with earlier concepts of wen as
transcending the immediate concerns of the practical world even
as it encompasses them should probably not be surprising by now,
but he addresses the issue with a more forceful lyricism that Wang
Guowei; the hopes he invests in literature are unprecedented in
their scope. As the practical world has become almost infinitely
more mysterious because of the breakdown of the traditional
order, the "mysteries" and "truths" literature must explain multiply accordingly. So if the conservative reformers of the 1898
generation had asked a great deal of literature, Lu Xun almost
literally asks the impossible: Literature must somehow all at once
sum up the old, demolish it, and create the new. Lu Xun's prose
style speaks tellingly of this: It mimics the elaborate archaisms of
Zhang Binglin even as its cosmopolitan polemic points directly at
the May Fourth movement that was still 10 years away.
Looking at these writings as a whole one cannot but be struck
by the extent of their ambitions for literature. From one perspective, it would be easy to dismiss them: What little evidence we
have of their actual effect on the practice of writing suggests that
even when the calls were heeded the works actually produced in
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
272 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
response did not come anywhere near fulfilling the optimistic
demands of the critics. The preponderant view of literature as the
vital center of cultural renewal seems, if anything, even more unrealistic. But the theories presented in this article were produced
by people regarded both at the time and later as the most influential intellectual figures of the time, as small and peripheral to politi-
cal events as the whole group eventually proved to be. They thus
necessarily left a certain legacy, and the real question becomes a
matter of just how big that legacy was. While the days of guwen
and parallel prose were assuredly numbered, the disposition to see
writing and literature as active instruments at the core of culture
lay at the center of the New Culture movement that arose only a
few years later. And from that movement sprang the powerful
ideologies that were to vie for hegemony in China from 1919 on.
So if the theorists of the late Qing seem to speak in a collectively
weak voice, the social mobilization and technological advances in
years to come amplified the voices of those who were to be, quite
in spite of themselves, their intellectual heirs by orders of mag-
nitude almost out of counting. That two-Liu Binyan and Wang
Ruowang-of the three central figures recently purged from the
Communist Party were writers suggests that the interplay between
esthetics and politics that came to a head in 1895-1908 is both still
resonant and still unresolved.
NOTES
1. The traditional meaning of wenxue was humane letters in general, one of the four
categories of learning according to Confucius. The Tongcheng scholar Wu Rulun (18401903) used the term in this sense as late as 1898, but most writers adopted the new sense of
the word very soon after 1895. Raymond Williams (1976: 150-154) has traced the evolution
of the word literature in English and found a similar change of meaning from letters in
general to a more restricted application to "imaginative" or "creative" writing occurring
under the auspices of Romanticism.
2. Encompassing as the meaning of the word wen was, its additional use as the term
for prose (in contrast with shi, poetry) largely kept discussions of wen and shi separate, in
spite of the common esthetic vocabulary they shared. This carried over into the 1895-1908
period, when discussions of prose and poetry tended to remain distinct. For a variety of
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 273
reasons too complicated to go into here, prose and poetry developed along broadly different courses in this period as well (see below, Note 7). Thus, at the risk of doing some
violence to the overall profile of the concept of wenxue, this article will restrict itself to the
discussion of prose literature.
3. The connections between post-1895 xiaoshuo and earlier writing have been ex-
plored in greatest depth in the essays by Jaroslav Prusek collected in The Lyrical and the
Epic: Studies of Modern China Literature (1980). Huters (1984) discusses some of the
problems with Prusek's analyses.
4. These two phrases are almost invariably trotted out in any defense of the need for
embellished writing. The former can be found in Lun yu 15.41 and the latter in the Zuo
zhuan, "xianggong" 25.
5. For a Western view of the novel as similarly synoptic and capable of holding togeth-
er a rapidly unraveling world of discourse, see Luka'cs (1971). For a critique of Lukacs's
views of the novel that fully brings out the extent of his hopes, see de Man (1971: 51-59).
6. This passage is used most often to advance the mistaken idea that Liu Shipei supported a move toward vernacular literature that would efface the old differences between
high and popular culture. See, for instance, Dolezelova-Velingerova (1980: 6) and Wu
Wenqi (1969: 19). In any discussion of advocacy of the vernacular, it is worth noting the
opinion of Evelyn Rawski (1985: 40) that "Wen-yen novels were probably easier for less
educated readers than the vernacular novels." The notion of evolution embraced by Liu,
that of a continuous progression from simple to complex, was very common in c. 1900
China. For an almost identical view of the process by Liang Qichao, see Pusey (1983: 121).
7. The so-called "revolution in the realm of poetry" (shi jie geming)-an earlier effort
to invest poetry with the same sort of social concern later advocated for the novel-provides a stark contrast with the rise of fiction after 1895. In spite of its long history as a
respectable medium of expression and the fact that the "revolution" preceded the call for
the novel by a number of years, the consensus of scholarly opinion has it that the new trend
in poetry failed to survive its founder, Huang Zunxian (1848-1905). Prusek's theory (1980:
1-28) that the more highly developed the traditional form, the more inflexible it was to
transformation would seem to apply here. For an account of the theory behind the "revolution in poetry," see Chen Bingkun (1930: 15-76).
8. The alarm concerning the prevalence of such theories of salvation through fiction
registered by the highly cultivated Huang Ren, a man thoroughly opposed to the trend,
should allay doubts concerning whether Tao's extreme words were representative of the
times. (See Huang Ren, 1980: 4.246-47.)
9. This thesis is persuasively argued in Metzger (1977: esp. p. 214). He says:
What the West quite definitely did bring was not the concept of social and economic transformation per se but the belief that with modern technology, new techniques
of political participation (whether liberal or Communist), and new forms of knowledge, the "outer" realm of economic and political problems, regarded as largely intractable since the euphoria of Wang Anshi's "new policies," could in fact be
reformed.
10. The contrast between the high-minded calls for novels to salvage a shattered polity
and the often lurid (and generally highly pessimistic) works presumably created in response
to these calls mirrors the schizoid nature of the way fiction was perceived and has been
noted by Lee and Nathan (1985: 387-388). Another contrast-that between novels as a new
avenue of self-expression for their authors and as a simple device of social propaganda-
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
274 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
suggests itself. That latter contrast would become increasingly important after the May
Fourth movement and it is probably the greatest source of dispute between writers and the
literary authorities in China today.
REFERENCES
Anonymous (1962) "Lun xiaoshuo zhi jiaoyu" (On the educative value of fiction), 1: 262264 in Guo Shaoyu and Luo Genzi (eds.) Zhongguo jindai wenlun xuan (Selected
Modern Chinese Essays on Literature). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe.
BERNAL, M. (1976) "Liu Shih-p'ei and national essence," pp. 90-112 in C. Furth (ed.)
The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
BONNER, JOEY (1986) Wang Kuo-wei: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
CAI JINGKANG (1979) "Wan Qing xiaoshuo lilun chulun" (Preliminary remarks on late
Qing theory of fiction). Gudai wenxue lilun yanjiu 1: 403-421. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe.
CHANG, HAO (1987) Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 18901911. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
CHEN BINGKUN (1930) Zuijin sanshi nian Zhongguo wenxue shi (A History of the Last
Thirty Years of Chinese Literature). Shanghai: Taiping yang shudian.
de MAN, PAUL (1971) "Georg Luka'c's Theory of the Novel," pp. 51-59 in Blindness and
Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford Univ.
Press.
DOLEZELOVA-VELINGEROVA, M. (1980)"Introduction,"pp. 3-17 in M. DolezelovaVelingerova (ed.) The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century. Toronto: Univ. of
Toronto Press.
FURTH, C. (1976) "The sage as rebel: the inner world of Chang Pinglin," pp. 113-150
in C. Furth (ed.) The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
GALIK, M. (1975) "Studies in modern Chinese intellectual history: 1. the world and China:
cultural impact and response in the 20th century." Asian and African Studies (Bratislava) 11: 11-56.
GUO SHAOYU and WANG WENSHENG [eds.] (1980) Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan
(Selected Chinese Essays on Literature Through the Ages). 4 vols. Shanghai: Guji
chubanshe.
HSIA, C. T. (1978) "Yen Fu and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao as advocates of new fiction," pp. 221257 in Adele Rickett (ed.) Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang
Ch'i-ch'ao. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
HSIAO, KUNG-CHUAN (1975) A Modern China and a New World: K'ang Yu-wei,
Reformer and Utopian, 1858-1927. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press.
HU S HI (1953) "Wushi nian lai Zhongguo zhi wenxue" (Chinese literature in the last fifty
years), pp. 180-261 in Hu Shi wencun (Collected Essays of Hu Shi). Vol. 1 of 2nd Collection. Taibei: Yuandong tushu gongsi.
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Huters / A NEW WA Y OF WRITING 275
HUANG REN (1980) "Xiaoshuo lin fakan ci" (Announcement on the initial publication
of Grove of Words), 4.246-248 in Guo Shaoyu and Wang Wensheng (eds.) Zhongguo
lidai wenlun xuan (Selected Chinese Essays on Literature Through the Ages). 4 vols.
Shanghai: Guji chubanshe.
HUTERS, T. (1984) "The difficult guest: May fourth revisits." Chinese Literature: Essays
Articles and Reviews 6: 125-149.
HUTERS, T. (1987) "From writing to literature: the development of late Qing theories of
prose." Harvard J. of Asiatic Studies 47, 1: 51-96.
LEE, LEO OU-FAN and A. NATHAN (1985) "The beginnings of mass culture: journalism
and fiction in the late Ch'ing period and beyond," pp. 360-395 in David Johnson, A. J.
Nathan, and E. S. Rawski (eds.) Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press.
LI XIANG (1908) "Lun Tongcheng pai" (On the Tongcheng school). Guocui xuebao (wen
pian) 49: 14.
LIANG QICHAO [Liang Ch'i-ch'ao] (1959) Intellectual Trends in the Ch'ing Period (Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
LIANG QICHAO (1960) "Xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi" (The relationship between the
novel and popular sovereignty), 4.6-9 in Yin bing shi wenji (Collected Writings from
the Ice-Drinker's Studio). Taibei: Zhonghua shuju.
LIANG QICHAO (1963) Qing dai xueshu gailun (Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period).
Taibei: Zhonghua shuju.
LIN SHU (1980a) "Sakesun jiehou yingxiong lue xu" (Preface to Ivanhoe), 4.162-163 in
Guo Shaoyu and Wang Wensheng (1980).
LIN SHU (1980b) "Kuai rou yusheng shu xu" (Preface to David Copperfield), 4. 164-165
in Guo Shaoyu and Wang Wensheng (1980).
LIN SHU (1980c) "Zei shi xu" (Preface to Oliver Twist), 4.165-166 in Guo Shaoyu and
Wang Wensheng (1980).
LIU SHIPEI (1934-1936a) "Lun wen zaji" (Miscellaneous notes on literature). Liu Shen-
shu xiansheng (Writings of Liu Shipei), Nan Peilan and Zheng Yufu (eds.). Vol. 20.
LIU SHIPEI (1934-1936b)"Lun jinshi wenxue zhi bianqian" (On the changes in recent Chinese literature). Zuoan waiji {Liu Shipei's] Second Collection). Juan 13 in Liu Shenshu
xiansheng yishu (Writings of Liu Shipei), Nan Peilan and Zheng Yufu (eds.). Vol. 53.
LU XUN (1981) "Moluo shili shuo" (On the power of Mara poetry), 1.63-115 in Lu Xun
quanji (Complete Works of Lu Xun). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe.
LUKACS, GEORG (1971) The Theory of the Novel (Anna Bostock, trans.), Cambridge:
MIT Press.
METZGER, THOMAS (1977) Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's
Evolving Political Culture. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
PRUSEK, JAROSLAV (1980) The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese
Literature, Leo Lee (ed.). Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
PUSEY, JAMES R. (1983) China and Charles Darwin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.
Council on East Asian Studies.
QIAN JIBO (1965) Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi (Literary History of Modern China).
Hong Kong: Longmen shudian.
RAWSKI, E. S. (1985) "Problems and prospects," pp. 399417 in David Johnson, A. J.
Nathan, and E. S. Rawski (eds.) Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press.
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
276 MODERN CHINA / July 1988
SCHNEIDER, L. A. (1976) "National essence and the new intelligentsia," pp. 57-89 in C.
Furth (ed.) The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican
China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
TAN SITONG (1954) "Sanshi ziji" (Memoirs at thirty) pp. 204-207 in Tan Sitong quanji
(Complete Works of Tan Sitong), Beijing: Sanlian shudian.
TAO ZENGYOU (1962a) "Zhongguo zhi wenxue gaiguan" (A general view of Chinese
literature), 1.241-245 in Guo Shaoyu and Luo Genzi (eds.) Zhongguo jindai wenlun
xuan (Selected Modern Chinese Essays on Literature). Beijing: Renmin wenxue
chubanshe.
TAO ZENGYOU (1962b) "Lun xiaoshuo zhi shili ji qi guanxi" (On the power and influ-
ence of fiction), 1.251-253 in Guo Shaoyu and Luo Genzi (eds.) Zhongguo jindai wenlun xuan (Selected Modern Chinese Essays on Literature). Beijing: Renmin wenxue
chubanshe.
WANG GUOWEI (1980) "Wenxue xiaoyan" (Remarks on literature) in 4.378-382 in Guo
Shaoyu and Wang Wensheng (1980).
WILLIAMS, RAYMOND (1966) Culture and Society, 1780-1950. New York: Harper &
Row.
WILLIAMS, RAYMOND (1976) Keywords. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
WU RULUN (1980a) "Tianyan lun xu" (Preface to Evolution and Ethics), 4. 144-145 in
Guo Shaoyu and Wang Wensheng (1980).
WU RULUN (1980b) "Da Yanjidao" (Reply to Yan Fu), 4.150-151 in Guo Shaoyu and
Wang Wensheng (1980).
WU WENQI (1969) Jin bai nian lai de Zhongguo wenxue sichao (Currents of Chinese
Literary Thought Over the Past Hundred Years). Hong Kong: Longmen shudian.
XIANZHAI LAOREN (1980) "Rulin waishi xu" (Preface to the Scholars), 3.452-453 in
Guo Shaoyu and Wang Wensheng (1980).
YAN FU (1980) "Yi Tianyan lun liyan" (Introduction to the translation of Evolution and
Ethics), 4.123-124 in Guo Shaoyu and Wang Wensheng (1980).
ZHENG ZHENDUO (1970) "Lin Qinnan xiansheng" (Mr. Lin [Shu]), 3.1214-1229 in
Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu (Studies of Chinese Literature). 3 vols. Hong Kong: Guwen
shuju.
Theodore Huters is Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of Classical
and Oriental Languages at Queens College of the City University of New York and
Adjunct Research Scholar at the East Asian Institute of Columbia University. He
is currently at work on a book examining the relationship between traditional and
modern ideas about literature in the late Qing period.
This content downloaded from 151.15.148.246 on Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:18:34 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms