Abstract
Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” has been read as a predominant essay for establishing the fundamental feature of the May Fourth Movement, namely a claim for literary individualism. A deconstructive reading of the essay, however, indicates that Zhou’s argument is hinged on a paradoxical definition of humanity which inclusively excludes animality. “Human Literature” seems to depend on the discourse of evolutionism, but in fact it cannot do without an enthronement of modern Western literature, which functions as a Derridean supplement. Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” somewhat forestalls Zhou’s Darwinian individual through a self-stultifying teaching of evolution. But the madman eventually leaves a possibility for a new configuration of the individual that evades evolutionism, which waits to be unfolded.
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- 1.
See Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales, trans. Julia Lovell (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), p. 28. Quotations from this text will be given paginations hereafter.
- 2.
Wu Yu, “Chiren’ yu lijiao” [Cannibalism and Traditional Rituals], in Xin Qingnian, Vol. 6, No. 6 (1919).
- 3.
Cicero, On Moral Ends, 1.7; quoted from Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Babara Cassin, trans. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 1142. To mention in passing, the meaning of the Greek word metaphorein is “to move over,” “to put something from one place to another,” and the German word for “translation,” übersetzen, means “metaphor.”
- 4.
See Dictionary of Untranslatables, ibid.
- 5.
Ibid. In this regard, translation can be defined as “a true creation.”
- 6.
See Chen Sihe, “Xiandai zhishifenzi de qimeng nahan” [Enlightenment and Outcry of Modern Intellectuals], in Hangzhou shifan xueyuan xuebao [Journal of Hangzhou Normal School], No. 4 (2003).
- 7.
See Xue Yi and Qian Liqun, “‘Kuangren riji’ xidu” [A Close Reading of “Diary of a Madman”], in Luxun yanjiu yuekan [Monthly Studies on Lu Xun], No. 11 (1994), p. 11.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 9.
See Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” in Social Text, No. 15 (1986), p. 71.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
See Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 88.
- 12.
Chen Yong, “Lu Xun yu wusi wenxue yishu zuopin de xianshizhuyi wenti” [Problems of Realism in Lu Xun and Literature and Artworks of the May Fourth], in Lu Xun lun [On Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984), p. 200. To mention in passing, “the dark old world” is in itself a metaphor frequently used by other interpreters.
- 13.
Among the studies that have contributed to explaining the influence of evolutionism during that period, especially Yan Fu’s (mis)translation of Huxley, see for example Benjamin Schwartz, Search for Wealth and Power: Yan Fu and the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), in which Schwartz examines meticulously Yan Fu’s renderings of Huxley and his attempts, somewhat against Huxley’s argument, to introduce evolutionism into China. See also James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) for a detailed delineation of the relationship between Darwinism and the theories of revolution in early modern China; Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). See also Wang Hui, “Geren guannian de qiyuan yu zhongguo de xiandai rentong” [The Origins of the Idea of Individual and the Modern Identification of China], where the author argues that from the late Qing dynasty to the May Fourth Movement, “the most important character in the Chinese intellectual realm was the discussion on ideas of society and individual in terms of social evolution. The idea of evolution provides society with the motivation and goal towards a future, which constitutes the theoretical foundation for the temporal conception of ‘modernity’ in China.” See Wanghui zixuanji [Selected Writings of Wang Hui] (Guangxi: Guangxi shifandaxue chubanshe, 1997), p. 41.
- 14.
Yan Fu, Andrew Jones stresses, “reframed national history in terms of natural history, casting China as an actor in the unfolding of a vast and tumultuous world- historical drama, one in which species, races, and nations alike were caught up in a relentless struggle for survival”; as a result, Yan Fu “offered Chinese readers and writers not only new terminology, but a new narrative mode, a way of telling stories about the growth and progress of nations and national subjects in their relation to other nations and the natural world” (See Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales, op. cit., p. 7). While Jones tend to emphasize Yan Fu’s work as providing a “new narrative mode” by means of which international relationships between China and other, especially Western, states can be recounted, I tend to rewrite this “narrative mode” as “discursive apparatus” in order to emphasize the way in which the discourse of evolutionism operates to articulate different social spheres and elements that would otherwise seem heterogeneous to each other. An apparatus, according to Giorgio Agamben, always “has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation” to the extent that “it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge.” Therefore, the term “apparatus” “designates that in which, and through which, one realizes a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being” (See Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus” and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009], pp. 3, 11).
- 15.
With regard to the complicated relationship between the May Fourth Movement and the New Cultural Movement, see Wang Hui’s detailed and meticulous discussion in “Wenhua yu zhengzhi de bianzou: ‘yizhan’ yu 1910 niandai de ‘sixiangzhan’” [Variations Between Culture and Politics: World War I and the Intellectual War in 1910s], in Zhongguo shehui kexue [Social Sciences in China], No. 4 (2009). I cannot cut deep into the relationship between the two movements; suffice it to say here that, although some students tend to argue for the task of cultural-political enlightenment embodied by the New Cultural Movement in contradistinction to the “nationalist” tone of the May Fourth Movement, it is necessary to keep in mind that a retrospective configuration of the appeals of “cultural enlightenment” is always already predetermined, even contaminated, by a liberal insistence upon the freedom of the individual against the state, which is probably foreign to the intellectuals in the 1910s who could hardly distinguish the task of cultural enlightenment from the task of nationalism because of, not despite, the discursive apparatus of evolutionism.
- 16.
It is this discursive apparatus of evolutionism, I tend to argue, which distinguishes the modern Chinese intellectuals’ “nationalism” (especially in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century) from the ancient Chinese intellectuals’ attempt to transform the society. In an discerning essay discussing the paradoxical relationship between the learning of modern Western culture and the attachment to traditional Confucian teaching in the May Fourth Movement, between the claim of individuality and the nostalgia for a unified community, Kirk Denton writes that “the optimistic promise of science and social progress does not lead the May Fourth intellectual away from a traditional concern with consciousness. The May Fourth understanding of the concept of science implies a continuing allegiance to the goal of linkage. Rather than merely a practical means for the transformation of the external world, science was understood by the May Fourth in largely psychological and cultural terms” (See Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking’,” in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Vol. 14 [1992], p. 121; see also Lin Yu-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979] and Thomas Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-confucianism and China’s Evolving Political Cultural [New York: Columbia University Press, 1977]).
However, it is one thing to argue that science, especially the theory of evolution, from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century in China, caused a change in consciousness and science thereby cannot not be detached from its politico-metaphysical implications, whereas it is another thing to conclude that “beneath May Fourth pronouncements on mind and nation lies an essential continuity with the Neo-Confucian paradigm of the Great Learning and the goal of linkage” (ibid., 122). To translate the newly articulated relationship between the political individual and the state back to the discourse of Confucian personal learning may run the risk of dismissing the pivotal role that the discursive apparatus of evolutionism played in ushering in a particular configuration of individuality.
In this sense, what is at stake, I think, is not the fact that the theory of evolution replaces Confucianism in its content while keeping its social function intact; on the contrary, the important issue is the articulation of a naturalized, substantial relationship between the individual and the state that cannot be explained by terms such as “iconoclasm” or “democratization.” Through the politico-biologico-ontologico-cultural apparatus that, to borrow Agamben’s famous notion, “inclusively excludes” the living human being, and through the translation of modern Western legal and political theories via the Japanese translation, a particular configuration of individuality becomes the starting point for all the intellectuals from different camps to argue for or against it. Because of the naturalized and substantialized articulation of the individual, and because of its relationship with the state, “nationalism” for the intellectuals around the May Fourth Movement can no longer be easily equated with the “nationalism” for traditional Chinese intellectuals. The contrast, for example, between the people (min), the emperor (jun), and the heaven (tian), a triple-structure that had been frequently appropriated by traditional Chinese intellectuals to justify their diverse political appeals, was given way to an unmediated relationship between the individual and the state, whether the relationship itself is predicated as organic or contractual. It is of course possible that the modern self around the May Fourth Movement “continues to be caught between empowerment and victimization, a tension inherent within mainstream Confucian thought well before the impact of the West” (ibid., 122), but abstractions such as “empowerment” and “victimization” are too broad to specify what kind of configuration of individual(ity) surfaces due to the discursive apparatus of evolutionism. What is to be addressed, I think, is precisely the characteristic of the “metaphysical linkage” embodied in this discursive apparatus and the way in which it may be rendered inoperative.
- 17.
See Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 85. See also Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales, op. cit., p. 29, where he argues that the evolutionary thinking “involves understanding and the social and cultural realms in terms derived from evolutionary biology.” Inseparable from this particular discursive apparatus (or what Jones terms as the developmental “narrative mode”) is nothing other than the “organicist notion that societies and bodies are best understood in terms of one another.” Yet what is complicated in the discursive apparatus of evolutionism is the fact that it is not only a translation or application of the knowledge of evolutionary biology to social and cultural realms, but an Agambenian “ban-structure,” where an inclusive exclusion (or exclusive inclusion) (dis)articulates science with other social realms.
- 18.
See for example Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, Guaninianshi yanjiu, op. cit., p. 145.
- 19.
Cang Fu (Du Yaquan), “Jingshen jiuguo lun” [On Spiritual Salvation of the State], in Dongfang zazhi, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1913), p. 5.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 21.
For a brief account of the change of emphasis from “social conflict” to “social cooperation” among Chinese intellectuals during the New Cultural Movement, see Xu Jilin, “Xiandaixing de qilu: qingmo minchu de shehui da’erwen zhuyi sichao” [Alternatives of Modernity: Reflections on Social Darwinism in Late Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic of China], in Shixue yuekan [Montly Studies on History], No. 2 (2010).
- 22.
Particularly suggestive in this regard is an essay titled “Geweizhuyi” [Individualism], which was published in Dongfang zazhi in 1916. “Individualism,” wrote the author, by translating the English term with an emphasis on the individual as a “basis,” “is the foundation of new civilizations in modernity. […] It is a doctrine of personality in psychology, a self-realization in ethics, and a doctrine of individual unit (sic.) in sociology.” He criticized the Chinese for lack of knowledge of individualism. As a result, the knowledge of Chinese people about society is similarly ambiguous, as they could only have in mind “family, society, state, and other states, without any idea of the individual. […] In this state we have infinite parasites of which no one has independent personality. This is why our nation has not evolved for thousands of years” (See Dongfang zazhi, Vol. 13, No. 2 [1916]; emphasis added). We might say that the author is not introducing or stressing the discourse of evolutionism and its relationship with a modern idea of individuality so much as taking the evolutionary individual as a given truth.
- 23.
Chen Duxiu, “Benzhi xuanyan,” in The New Youth, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1919), pp. 3–4.
- 24.
See Li Zehou, “Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangchong bianzou” [The Double Variations Between Enlightenment and Salvation], in Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun [Historical Investigations into Modern Chinese Thought] (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2003), p. 27. Li Zehou’s judgment on the May Fourth Movement echoes distantly Chih-tsing Hsia’s general judgment on modern Chinese literature: “What distinguishes this ‘modern’ phase of Chinese literature alike from the traditional and Communist phases,” argues Hsia, is “its burden of moral contemplation: its obsessive concern with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity. All the major writers of the period—novelists, playwrights, poets, essayists—are enkindled with this patriotic passion” (See Chih-tsing Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999], pp. 533–34). By “moral contemplation” Hsia probably means “political consideration,” since his explanation of the “moral contemplation” directly refers to the modern Chinese writers’ strong concern with the task of socio-political reformation and cultural renovation, as well as the nationalist task of saving China from suppression and backwardness.
- 25.
Li Zehou’s argument can find its textual justifications in The New Youth. Partly under the guidance of its main editor, Chen Duxiu, The New Youth published essays in Marxism and articles about the life of Marx as early as in 1919. Although Marxism is often introduced together with anarchism at the time, we should not dismiss the fact that, from the eighth volume onwards, The New Youth becomes a semi-official propagandist journal for Chinese Marxism.
But it is one thing to delineate the development or change of The New Youth during and after the May Fourth Movement, while it is quite another to argue that there is a confrontation between the emergence of Marxism and the ebb of cultural enlightenment, a confrontation whose message would be that the task of saving the state sacrifices, silences the appeal for the development of individual rights and the fulfillment of one’s personality. Instead of opposing “Enlightenment” to the political task of saving the state, that is, instead of substantiating a hair-splitting distinction between the May Fourth Movement and the Cultural Movement (as Li Zehou and others tend to stress), I think it would be more productive if we regard the gradual rise of Marxism in the early 1920s (not to mention the triumphant wave of Chinese Marxism represented by the Creation Society during the 1920s [Chuangzao She, consisting of the cohort of writers who came back from Japan and claimed for a Marxist revolution of modern Chinese literature—the model of which, of course, is nothing other than the proletariat literature triumphant in Japan at the time]) as both a development and a variation of the political, social-contractual individual(ity). In other words, Li Zehou’s criticism of the May Fourth Movement and his attempt to make a clear-cut distinction between the May Fourth Movement, aiming at a political task, and the Cultural Movement, aiming at a cultural task of enlightenment, fails to hit the bull’s eye, precisely because the immanent split of the May Fourth Movement that he discerns is not specifically a split for that Movement, and it is not a split at all. On the contrary, the problematic yet operative articulation between individual and state, inasmuch as the May Fourth Movement is concerned, is something inherited from the discourse of evolutionism, which as we have said was no longer a heated issue of debate at that time.
Please note: I am not saying that Chinese Marxism is a straightforward product of the discourse of evolutionism; rather, my argument is that, thanks to the biological-political-cultural articulation of the individual worked out by evolutionism, Marxism (as its Chinese propagandists would have it) could easily be aligned with anarchism when the so-called “genuine” democracy that had promised modern ideals was betrayed by the Western powers during and after World War I. It is even arguable that, because the discourse of evolutionism was not thoroughly brought to reflection and criticism, in the early 1920s the (in)famous debate on “Science and Life-view” (“Kexue yu renshengguan”) between those who insisted on a scientific explanation of human life and the opposite camp who, by appeal to the philosophy of Henri Bergson and others, claimed that human life was beyond the scope of science, did nothing but continue to assume the given articulation of individuality. Since an examination of the debate itself may take us away from our focus, I will not go further into its details; suffice it to say that, despite the fact that the two camps of the debate hardly mentioned the discourse of evolutionism, the very motivation of the debate would nonetheless be relevant to the discourse of evolutionism and the role it had been playing in China from the late nineteenth century onwards. Without the articulation of a particular individuality, without the process of translation between different social spheres, and, without the discursive apparatus of evolutionism that functions to (over)determine humanity, the confrontation between science and human life would hardly be staged in such a sharp and conflictual way.
- 26.
Lu Xun, “Wenhua pianzhi lun” [On Cultural Inclinations], in Lu Xun Quanji, Vol. 1 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), p. 48.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 50.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 30.
Literature is no exception; or rather, as we shall see, literature is the realm where the verification of the necessity and validity of the discourse par excellence. Thus, as Theodore Huters argues, literary realism draws Chinese intellectuals’ attention because it was perceived as “a token of faith that Chinese literature was moving forward along the universal path pioneered by Western literary practice.” See Theodore Huters, “Ideologies of Realism in Modern China: The Hard Imperatives of Imported Theory,” in Politics, Ideology and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 154.
- 31.
Because of the importance of the term “translation” for our study, it is indispensable to give a clarification of the way in which it is used in the context. Basically, by “translation” I refer to the particular process through which the scientific language of evolution is de- or re-coded and, in a rather loose sense, “applied” in the fields (for example) of political theory, social theory, literary study, and so forth. The process of translation entailed in “evolutionism” as a discursive apparatus, whose work is to render what is supposed to be a strictly limited account—the account of the evolution of animals, a “great chain of being” whose top point is now occupied by human being—into a “universal narrative.” To use “translation” to refer to such work of the discourse of evolutionism has to do with the original epistemological meaning of the term “to translate.”
“To translate” derives from the French adaptation of the Latin verb “traducere,” whose literal meaning is “to lead across” and whose applications are broader and vaguer than what we commonly mean by “to translate.” Thus, the “initial, indefinite vagueness attached to the verbs we translate as the verb ‘to translate’” shows that these verbs “always also designate something additional or something other than the passage from one language to another” (see Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Babara Cassin, trans. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood [New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014], p. 1139). Translation, in this sense, is never transparent. In Pierre Duhem’s work The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, “translation” is used in a way quite relevant to our examination:
The mathematical elaboration of a physical theory can be tied to observable facts only through a translation. In order to introduce experimental conditions into a calculation, one must make a version that replaces the language of concrete observation by the language of numbers; in order to make the results which the theory predicts into something observable, one needs a theme to transform a numerical value into an indication formulated in the language of experiment. (quoted from Dictionary of Untranslatables, ibid., p. 1151)
Duhem here is talking about the “translation” between two different discourses rather than two natural languages; precisely because of the work of translation, what is observable and what is numerical becomes incommensurable. As Sandra Laugier argues: “The interest of Duhem’s thesis lies in the fact that it affirms that the nontransparency and asymmetry inherent in each of these two translations is subject to indetermination” (ibid.). The asymmetry between theory and experiment, the very process of translation through which observable facts are “translated” into “data,” eventually gives rise to the famous Duhem-Quine thesis, according to which, as Laugier summarizes, “an experiment cannot apply to an isolated hypothesis because there is a work of symbolization between a fact and its theoretical translation that is part of the work of theory” (ibid., emphasis added). “A fact of practice,” argues Duhem, “does not translate into a single fact of theory,” whilst “an infinite number of theoretical facts can be taken as translations of the same fact of practice” (quoted from ibid.). In other words, Duhem’s examination of the nontransparency of the translations involved in scientific languages indicates not only that there is an asymmetry between theory and experiment, but more importantly that the stabilization of the two discursive systems, and the very possibility of “translating” between the observable fact and the numerical value determined by the physical theory, are not something given a priori, as if there were at the very beginning two well-established, clearly delimited systems and languages to be appropriated by a “translator,” namely a scientist. On the contrary, it is the same process of translation, the same work of theorization of the observable “data,” which produces as one of its effects the appearance of two isolated, independent discourses.
To turn back to our concern, we might say that the Duhem-Quine thesis about the nontransparency and asymmetry inherent in translation is not only concerned with the “indeterminacy” underlying each and every action of translation—be it a linguistic translation between natural languages or a theoretical and epistemological translation between “facts” and “theories”—but also concerned with the very principle by which the discursive apparatus of evolutionism is put into operation. Considering that the process of translation between different realms is in itself part of the very work of the discursive apparatus of evolutionism, what is at issue here is not the “felicity” of “applying” the scientific account of evolution to, say, the realms of politics, literature, the organization of society, etc., so much as the way in which, through an inclusive exclusion (or exclusive inclusion), the discourse of evolutionism valorizes “humanity,” “individuality,” and other terms through and in translations. To “translate” the discourse of evolutionism into political theory, for example, does not mean (merely) to appropriate scientific terms or claims when writing on politico-theoretical issues, as if there were an independent, innocent “scientific fact of evolution” to be contaminated by other discourses (and we will see that the early Lu Xun’s effort of challenging the discourse of evolutionism through an insistence on the objectivity of science missed the point precisely because of his mistaking the seemingly independence of the scientific language for something given a priori); rather, it means to establish and valorize an understanding of the account of evolution which anticipates the “appropriation” by and in politico-theoretical discourses. That is to say, what seems to be an innocent and objective account cannot be estimated “properly” if it were not “improperly” appropriated and thereby retrospectively established as something truly, unchangeably, and irresistibly “given.” And we will see, in our discussion of Zhou Zuoren, in the last analysis the groundless ground for this process of translation, for the self-operating discursive apparatus, speaks in the language of literature. Thus, our critical rereading of Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature,” along with Lu Xun’s “The Diary of a Madman,” is meant not only as a case study of two important figures during the May Fourth Movement opening a window through which we may glimpse some particular discussions on the issue of individual(ity) in the late 1910s, but also—and this is what I want to stress throughout the study—as a revelation of the complex apparatus of translation appearing in the discourse of evolution as it would appear in other discourses, by means of which the individual is predetermined and subjected to politico-socio-economic-ontologico-metaphysico-cultural parameters which politically articulate the individual with the state and other entities as if the articulation were natural, necessary, and immediate.
- 32.
See Lu Xun quanji, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 8–25. Andrew Jones points out that the title of Lu Xun’s essay may come from Haeckel’s own treatise Anthropogeny, or the Development of Man, and that Lu Xun may well have read Haeckel’s Die Welträthsel in German or in Japanese translation. “Regardless of Lu Xun’s sources,” concludes Jones, “it is important to remember not only that his engagement with evolutionary thinking was sustained throughout his writing life (as many critics have documented), but that when he published this essay in 1907, he was the forefront of contemporary knowledge on the topic in China,” and this is because “biology as a scientific discipline was not institutionalized in China until the 1920s, and knowledge of evolutionary theory was disseminated in an unsystematic and piecemeal fashion” (See Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales, op. cit., pp. 70–71). Jones’s observation is succinct and informative; but we may not too hastily conclude that evolutionary thinking “was sustained throughout” Lu Xun’s “writing life” if by “evolutionary thinking” we refer to the discursive apparatus by means of which a political individuality is configured, if only because the familiarity with the knowledge of evolution, and the introduction of Haeckel’s scientific works into China, could be regarded as a signal of Lu Xun’s difficult gesture of struggling with the apparatus from within. It is an important task to point out the relationship between Haeckel’s scientific investigation and a particular ideology underlies it, but I think pointing out the ideological implications of Haeckel’s works against their historico-political background is quite different from comprehending Lu Xun’s strategic introduction of Haeckel into China.
- 33.
See Lu Xun quanji, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 8.
- 34.
Lydia H. Liu correctly mentions the motivation underlying Lu Xun’s change of his career from medicine to literature as follows: “Lu Xun was too much of a skeptic to dedicate himself to established religions or scientific doctrines, so he found his home in literature which allowed contradictory forces, doubts, ambiguities, and indeterminacy to play themselves out endlessly in the complex and ever-changing processes of life. These ambiguities suggest that literary figuration, including religious literature, is the place where a possible ‘elsewhere’ can be thought in the midst of a world dominated by moral and dogmatic certainties.” See Lydia H. Liu, “Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun,” in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 68, No. 1 (2009), p. 51. We might add that literature is not only one place where an “elsewhere” is made possible, but also a particular space where “moral and dogmatic certainties” as well as this “possible ‘elsewhere’” are put into new use. Only from here is it possible to work out a way out of the Mobius band that articulates the individual and its political opposite.
- 35.
Lu Xun, “Po esheng lun” [Refuting Malevolent Voices], in Lu Xun Quanji, Vol. 8, op. cit., p. 10.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
It is noteworthy that Ito Toramura’s interpretation of the young Lu Xun suggests another reading of the relationship between Lu Xun’s essays on science and his emphasis on the singular individual: “What I mean by ‘Lu Xun the scientist’ is that, through his knowledge of modern science in his youth, Lu Xun grasps the spiritual heterogeneity of Western modernity. After experiencing the frustrating event of the Xinhai Revolution, he manages to absorb modern scientism and modern scientific methodology as part of his identity of a novelist. ‘Science’ in this context is the science as thought or science as ethics, it is the science that Lu Xun grasps as ‘the spirit of the scientist’ and the ‘medicine’ for curing ‘intellectual disease,’ it is the science as spirit. The so-called ‘spirit’ is the spirit of freedom that Lu Xun takes as the ‘essence’ of Western modernity; it is the spirit = will of the authentic and positive subjectivity. In this sense, to call Lu Xun a ‘scientist’ is no different from calling him ‘the authentic individualist’.” See Ito Toramura, Lu Xun yu ribenren [Lu Xun and the Japanese], trans. Li Dongmu (Hebei: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000), pp. 126–27. Ito’s argument seems to be against my reading of Lu Xun’s essays on science. Indeed, in essays such as “The History of Mankind,” what Lu Xum aims at is not merely an introduction of modern Western science, and I agree that Lu Xun tries to grasp what underlies Western science instead of scientific knowledge per se, although I will not use the term “spirit,” partly because in saying so we may find it difficult to distinguish Lu Xun from others who would glad to embrace the “spirit” of Western modernity. Instead of reading Lu Xun’s treatment of the knowledge of modern science as the “medicine” for curing any disease, I think Lu Xun’s attempt is rather to halt the process of translation between social realms and between different disciplines where scientific knowledge can be quickly recognized as a given “medicine.”
But my disagreement with Ito lies at a more profound level. In the concluding part of his interpretation, Ito reveals what he means by “individual” that he takes Lu Xun as constantly arguing for: “The fact that ‘modern’ spiritual life and its products (modern thoughts and institutions) resulted from European intellectual as well as religious tradition indicates that ‘human being is made into self-consciousness as “individual”.’ That is to say, man is not derived from his consciousness of his identity (and responsibility) as one member of a family, a clan, a village, a party, or a state; on the contrary, he becomes self-conscious and responsible in face of the absolute (or the haughty death)” (ibid., pp. 181–82; emphasis added). Ito’s argument about the singular individual in Lu Xun’s thought is susceptible of a Hegelian sublation of death, where death is grasped as a work for individual’s being and his conscious.
- 38.
Nevertheless, I think Lu Xun’s attitude towards science and its (non-)relationship with socio-political discourses is not distant from his teacher, Zhang Taiyan’s understanding of the relationship between individuality and the state. It is not irrelevant to take a very brief look at Zhang Taiyan’s discussion of individual(ity) in his anarchist ontological theory. Arguing against the social Darwinian individuality, Zhang Taiyan writes, for example: “If [evolutionism] sets itself against the whole world in order to trample individual’s autonomy, it constrains people as greatly as those who insist on ‘the way of heaven.’ […] The alleged universal is not authentically universal, but a universal asserted by some doctrines.” Consequently, “I think that the discourse of evolution is only about the natural world. If one understands it as a doctrine, one would have to compel others to behavior as the doctrine determines. Holding both the appeal for freedom and the anticipation of evolution in hand, he would have to work out the following reasoning: ‘Labor is of man’s nature.’ In this way, we might well term it ‘the orthodox of evolution’.” See Zhang Taiyan quanji [Collected Works of Zhang Taiyan], Vol. 4 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2014), pp. 444, 451. Zhang Taiyan is not so much arguing against the doctrine of evolution itself as he is refuting the work of translation by means of which evolutionism becomes a political and moral imperative. “Natural laws in principle has nothing to do with the way of humanity,” and the doctrine of evolution belongs to “natural laws” (ibid., p. 457). Unlike Lu Xun, however, Zhang Taiyan does not turn to literature, but to Buddhism to further his discussion of individuality. For him, individual is superior and antagonistic to organizations such as society, state, and family, because individuality is closer to the foundational “ipseity” (“zixing”) which constitutes the very basis of individuation. This “ipseity,” argues Zhang Taiyan, “cannot be corrupted. Everything in the realm of sensibility can be corrupted; everything in the realm of materiality can be corrupted; this is why nothing has ‘ipseity’” (See Zhang Taiyan, Guogu lunheng [Critique of Our National Heritage], p. 148; quoted from Wang Hui, Wang Hui zixuanji, op. cit., p. 50). Thus, individuality is not determined by its relationship with society, state, family, or any other collective organization; rather, individuality is absolutely individual, is singular, only insofar as it is derived from the foundational “ipseity” which in itself has nothing to do with individuality or collectivity. As Wang Hui points out, Zhang Taiyan’s emphasis on the absoluteness of the individual is above all against the idea of state sovereignty proposed by Zou Rong, Chen Tianhua, Sun Zhongshan, Liang Qichao, Yan Fu, etc., “although Zhang Taiyan himself was a passionate nationalist (but not a statist)” (Wang Hui, Wang Hui zixuanji, op. cit., p. 59).
The problem with Zhang Taiyan’s effort to detach individuality from the relationship between individual and different organizations is at least two-fold: first, by locating the foundation of individuation at Buddhist Alayavijnana, Zhang Taiyan eventually appeals to a dimension of transcendence that is beyond the grasp of individual cognizance. It is hard to tell whether the “ipseity” embodied in and by Alayavijnana, which gives itself to individuation only momentarily, does not give rise to another form of totality. Here the Buddhist idea refers to that which “cannot be limited to individual,” it implies something that is “constant,” “insistent,” “incorruptible,” with a name of “self,” which is a grand self, a transcendental self in proximity with the foundation of the whole world. Then it seems that the door opened by Zhang Taiyan himself towards a finite relationship between individuals, a finitude irreducible to social relationships and social positions occupied by individuals accidentally, is again closed with a totalizing transcendental. “In Zhang Taiyan’s argument,” writes Wang Hui, “there is no medium between the individual and the ontological, especially no reference to the concept of society. His idea of freedom and equality involves neither the principle of individuality preceding social structure, nor the principle of social forms antecedent to individual phenomenon. Since the term ‘social’ implies an order, a name, a relative relationship, a universality, a possibility of tyranny and violence, Zhang Taiyan’s concept of the individual is concerned with its political and social applications, not with applications in politics and sociology” (Wang Hui, Wang Hui zixuanji, op. cit., p. 116). In other words, according to Wang Hui, Zhang Taiyan’s emphasis on individual(ity) aims at challenging the absoluteness and substantiality of social organizations, including the form of state. But the problem always is: how to avoid falling back to the trap of totalization and a transcendental immanentism, if the appeal to Alayavijnana is an appeal to something ungraspable by individual?
Relatedly, Zhang Taiyan’s idea of individual fails to take into account the very way in which the discourse of evolutionism is translated through and between different social realms. Although his configuration of individuality against the social Darwinian individual is culturally and politically radical, and radically against Liang Qichao and Yan Fu’s configuration of the organic relationship between individual and the state, Zhang Taiyan seems not to have fully noticed the fact that the articulation of the political individual entailed in the discursive apparatus is never strictly grounded on the knowledge of evolution, nor on the Hegelian philosophy of history, but rather on a nothingness which can be rendered as “something” only within and through the work of translation. In this regard, by opposing another foundation, a foundationless foundation, i.e., the Buddhist Alayavijnana, to the foundation of evolutionism, i.e., the irreducible atomic individual, Zhang Taiyan is still within the scope delimited by the same apparatus, where the cart is put before the horse: namely, an operative “foundation” is effectuated as the very foundation at the endpoint of a whole process of translation where nothing(ness) works as the foundation. As we shall see, Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” reveals illustratively that this work hinges on a supplementary element, i.e., literature.
Still, Zhang Taiyan’s annihilating critique of the connection between the individual and the state, together with his stress on the absolute individual, casted a very long shadow over the history of modern Chinese thought, echoing distantly the Marxist tenet according to which human history is created by man’s labor force. The proposition that labor force gives rise to man’s self-fulfillment and his transformation of an objective world, that man works in order to reconcile himself with the outside, is the core of Hegel’s philosophy as well as the starting point for Chinese revolution. A close reading of Zhang Taiyan with the thread of thought of “worklessness,” is worthwhile, but this work is beyond the scope of the current study.
- 39.
Lydia H. Liu, “Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun,” op. cit., p. 22.
- 40.
See Chen Duxiu, “Xinwenhua yundong shi shenme” [What Is the New Cultural Movement], in Xinqingnian, Vol. 7, No. 5 (1920).
- 41.
See Chen Duxiu, “Rensheng zhenyi” [Truths of Life], in Xinqingnian, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1918).
- 42.
See Hu Shi, “Yibusheng zhuyi” [Ibsenism], in Xinqingnian, Vol. 4, No. 6 (1918).
- 43.
See Fu Sinian, “Zenyang zuo baihuawen?” [How to Compose a Vernacular Essay?] in Xinchao, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1919).
- 44.
See Qian Liqun, et al., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue sanshinian, op. cit., pp. 21–22. For a detailed examination of Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature” as a predominant article for the whole Cultural Movement as well as for the discourse of humanism prevalent during the 1910s and 1920s, see Kuang Xinnian, “Ren de wenxue huayu de lishi kaocha” [A Historical Examination on the Discourse of “Human Literature”], in Zhongguo xiandai wenxue congkan, No. 1 (2004). According to Kuang Xinnian, it is in Zhou Zuoren’s essay that, for the first time in modern Chinese literature, we encounter the intellectual and theoretical articulation of the so-called “new literature” (p. 54).
- 45.
Qian Liqun, et al., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue sanshinian, op. cit., p. 22.
- 46.
It seems that Chih-tsing Hsia criticizes “Human Literature” precisely on this ground. “The basic weakness of modern Chinese literature,” argues Hsia, “is its failure to engage in disinterested moral exploration.” With regard to Zhou Zuoren, specifically, he writes that “even ‘Humane Literature,’ admirable as it is, gives the impression that it endorses a literature that is ethically conducive to a happier humanity rather than a literature that, irrespective of its ethical bias, is profoundly moral.” See Chih-tsing Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 20–21. Without any doubt, we need further clarifications on terms such as “ethical,” “profoundly moral,” and, insofar as “Human Literature” is concerned, “a happier humanity.” To be honest, for lack of a detailed discussion of the key terms and phrases used by Zhou Zuoren himself in the essay, when the problem comes to the relationship between literature and the task of socio-political reformation, we find it difficult to distinguish “Human Literature” from, say, Chen Duxiu’s arguments. I think what is to be addressed, then, is less the possibility of discovering the autonomous space of literature amidst the apparently socio-political orientation “imposed on” literature than the extent to which literature helps to open up, to re-treat (to borrow a term from Philip Lacou-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy) “politics” as a problem, an exigency. In this regard, I take Zhou Zuoren’s essay as well as Lu Xun’s story as an important contribution, even though I tend to emphasize the very tension concerning individuality between the two texts. Whether it is not possible to envision an “autonomy” of literature, or a literature that is “profoundly moral” “irrespective of its ethical bias” (if Hsia was not talking about a “happier humanity”) in opposition to politics is another issue.
- 47.
See Hu Shi’s introduction to Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi: lilun jianshe ji [Compilation of Chinese New Literature: the Volume of Theoretical Construction] (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1935), p. 30. See also Mao Dun’s remark on individualism during the May Fourth Movement: “The discovery of man, i.e. the development of one’s personality, or the development of individualism, was the main target of the May Fourth Movement. At the time literary criticism and literary practice, consciously or unconsciously, aimed at this goal. Individualism, whose euphoric term is the discovery of humanity and the development of personality, was originally an important ideology of bourgeoisie; therefore it is necessary that, during the period of the May Fourth Movement, when the struggle between the emergent bourgeois ideology and the feudalist thought was heated, individualism became the main attitude and process for literary practice.” See Mao Dun, “Guanyu chuangzuo” [On Composition], in Maodun wenyi zalun ji [Mao Dun’s Miscellaneous Essays on Literature and Art] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1981), p. 298. Although Mao Dun does not explicitly mention Zhou Zuoren’s essay, it is quite clear that “Human Literature” is a representative text in the tide of the May Fourth individualism.
- 48.
Zhou Zuoren, “Xiaoshuo yu shehui” [Novel and Society] (1914), see Zhou Zuoren sanwen quanji [Collected Proses of Zhou Zuoren], Vol. 1, ed. Zhong Shuhe (Guangxi: Guangxi shifandaxue chubanshe, 2009), p. 318.
- 49.
Zhou Zuoren, “Ren de wenxue,” in Zhou Zuoren sanwen quanji, Vol. 2, op. cit., p. 88. Quotations from this text will be given paginations in parentheses hereafter.
- 50.
Chen Duxiu, “Dongxi minzu genben sixiang zhi chayi” [Fundamental Intellectual Differences Between the East and the West], in Qingnian zazhi [Youth Journal], Vol. 1, No. 4 (1996).
- 51.
See Li Chun, “‘Ren de wenxue’: youlai yu zhongjie” [The Origin and End of “Human Literature”], in Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan, No. 9 (2009).
- 52.
See for example, Jiang Yuqin, “‘Ren’ yu wudu de ‘ren’: zailun Zhou Zuoren de ‘ren de wenxue’” [“Human” and the “Human” Misread: Reinterpreting Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature”], in Dongfang luntan [The Oriental Forum], No. 4 (2004).
- 53.
See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Discourse” and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 54.
Zhou Zuoren, “Xinwenxue de yaoqiu” [Requirements of the New Literature], in Zhou Zuoren sanwen quanji, Vol. 2, op. cit., p. 207.
- 55.
For example, according to Confucian teaching, an intellectual is supposed to follow the steps of self-cultivation whose starting point is the development of one’s personality and whose endpoint is the perfection of the whole world; besides, in Confucianism a harmonious relationship between human and nature is always an important issue for one’s condition of living in society. This problem about the relationship between humanity and animality, about the affinity of human with animal as well as the traits that distinguish the two, is furthered in later developments of Confucianism.
- 56.
Lydia Liu argues that the term “human” in “Human Literature” is, according to her coinage, a “supersign”: “In Zhou Zuoren’s manifesto, the translingual supersign ren/human has left the old Confucian signified of ren behind as it picks up a new signified in the evolutionary theory of life. The forging of this new supersign ren/human is as radical as the making of modern Chinese literature itself and signals the beginning of a new biomimetic technology that seeks to ground the truth of life in literary realism” (Liu, “Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun,” op. cit., pp. 26–27). In Liu’s argument, a sign becomes a supersign when it “designate[s] the invisible bonding of heterolinguistic elements caused by the act of translation. This process is usually observable in any familiar word, such as ren, whose signified is implicitly deferred to the signifier of a foreign word(s), thus transforming the familiar concept as ren/human without making the character ren undergo morphological changes as in the case of most neologisms” (ibid., p. 26). This helps to understand the difficulty in Zhou Zuoren’s definition of humanity.
- 57.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 29.
- 58.
Ibid., 92.
- 59.
Zhou Zuoren, “Gexing de wenxue” [Literature with Personalities], in Zhou Zuoren sanwen quanji, Vol. 2, op. cit., p. 290.
- 60.
Paul de Man, “Conclusion: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 90–91.
- 61.
We should note that the word chi-ren is a vernacular Chinese, whose correspondence in traditional Chinese could be shi-ren. The fact that the madman recognizes in the history of traditional China a vernacular Chinese term symbolically shows the complex relationship between the two linguistic systems during the May Fourth Movement: on one hand, vernacular Chinese must literally “replace” traditional Chinese, so much so that where traditional Chinese is expected to present itself, vernacular Chinese must repress it in terms of form and content; on the other hand, vernacular Chinese, which reveals the historical truth of China, can be recognized only under the condition of dismissing the “superficial meaning” of the text, which is written in traditional Chinese. Only by covering the texts, by rejecting the readability of the historical texts, does the madman recognizes between the lines the word chi-ren. In this sense, far from simply “discovering” a repressed “nature,” as Hu Shi and others tend to argue, the “invention” of a new linguistic system during the May Fourth Movement must be a violent activity: it strives for establishing the legitimacy of vernacular Chinese at the historical void, where all written traces left by the ancestors have to be covered by fiat.
- 62.
See Lu Xun’s introduction to Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi: xiaoshuo yi ji, op. cit., p. 6.
- 63.
See Lu Xun’s letter to Xu Shoushang, in Lu Xun quanji, Vol. 11, op. cit., p. 106.
- 64.
Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman,” in The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China, trans. Julia Lovell (Penguin Books, 2009), p. 21. Quotations from the story will be given paginations hereafter.
- 65.
See Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun xiaoshuo li de renwu [The Characters in Lu Xun’s Stories] (Hebei: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002), p. 55.
- 66.
See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House (Indiana University Press, 1987).
- 67.
Unlike Lee’s pessimistic conclusion, Ito gives another reading of the preface and the “ending” included in it: “Knowing that he himself is an afflicter, Lu Xun is able to emancipate himself from the ‘consciousness of the afflicted’ of a solitary fighter and from the hubris of ‘the spiritual fighter,’ so that he can finally return to the status of ‘normal people.’ That is, he can return to the society. This is not a loss of himself, but rather a self-salvation from the alienated consciousness, a comprehension of the authentic individuality. It is a discovery of one’s individuality, responsibility, and one’s work. For Lu Xun this discovery means nothing other than literature” (See Ito Toramaru, Lu Xun yu ribenren, op. cit., p. 122). Though revealing for the relationship between Lu Xun’s silence for a whole decade before writing “The Diary of a Madman” and his literary debut as a novelist, Ito’s reading is strongly based on a metaphorization of the text according to which not only the madman’s discourse is translated into a intellectual critique of traditional Chinese culture, but the madman himself is translated into a representation of Lu Xun himself. Considering the complicated setting of the story, where even the diary itself has been “edited” by a narrator who writes in traditional Chinese, we need to be extremely cautious when we draw conclusions about Lu Xun’s thought and position directly from the madman’s discourse and action.
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Wang, Q. (2020). Literary Evolutionism and Its Discontents: Between Zhou Zuoren and Lu Xun. In: Configurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9640-4_2
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