|
China Literature
The corpus of premodern Chinese literature is dauntingly vast. Chinese aesthetic assumptions and principles are very different from those that shaped the developrnent of Western literature. For one thing, traditional Chinese definitions of "literature , include a number of works that would be classified as "philosophy" in the West. The Analects of Confucius were considered the foundation of any classical literary education, as were the philosophical writings of his follower Mencius and Laozi's Daoist classic, the Dao De Jing. The Daoist philosophical writings of Zhuangzi (or Chuang-tzu), which are filled with fanciful parables, anecdotes, and jokes, are especially entertaining and particularly easy to read as literature. While the drama is considered the prime canonical
genre in the classical Westem tradition, lyric poetry enjoys
a similar status in China. Accordingly, basic Chinese literary
thought emphasizes the power and integrity of the individual voice.
In early China, poetry was not considered an artistic exercise but
was instead supposed to represent the true feelings of the actual
poet at the moment of writing. All of classical poetry, like all
classical literature prior to the 20th century, is written in classical
Chinese (wenyan or guwen), a version of the language that was
standardized around the time of Han and that was markedly different
in grammar and vocabulary from the vernacular. The Tang dynasty is traditionally considered to be the high point in the history of Chinese poetry, and the era's poems are indeed remarkable for their subtlety and range of emotion. Works from the more famous poets of this period are widely available in English translation. Perhaps the best well-known are Li Be!, whose poems are colored with a bold and individualistic spirit, and Du Fu, whose works are informed by both broad historical and intimate personal concerns. Also noteworthy are the intensely visual landscape poems of Wang We!, the social and political commentary of Bal Juyi's works, and the sumptuous images of the supernatural that pepper the poems of Li He. In the Song dynasty, a new poetic genre developed. Cl (song lyrics) were designed to be set to popular musical tunes and, though virtually always the work of male writers, were usually written from an explicitly female perspective; these men would then have hired singing girls to sing the lyrics back to them. Not surprisingly, love and desire are the most common subjects. Huge quantities of these lyrics have survived, but very little of this vast corpus is available in translation. In premodern China, as in early Europe, fiction was for a long time regarded as low art, as entertainment rather than literature. In the Ming, however, an increasing number of intellectuals began to put down in writing versions of the vernacular narratives handed down by oral storytellers and, eventually, to compose original fiction. Short fiction, written in the vernacular language spoken in everyday life, often focused on the lives of people of lower social orders and enjoyed tremendous popularity. Writers like Feng Mengiong and Li Yu wrote a number of tales set in the urban demimonde, with prostitutes and poor students as heroines and heroes; many of these stories espouse a moral vision that values romantic sentiment and individual passion over the obligations of Confucian filial piety. The great novels of the Ming and Qing periods are justifiably famous worldwide. These are written in a combination of the classical and vernacular languages and tend toward epic lengths. The Romance of the 7Wree Kingdoms is a heroic tale set amidst the wars that followed the end of the Han. The Water Margin, also translated as Rebels of the Marsh, tells the story of a group of virtuous rebel- in the Song. Journey to the West, or Monkey, is based on the life of the Tang dynasty monk Xuan Zang, who journeyed to India to collect Buddhist scriptures; the novel gives him a number of spiritual and animal companions and is rich with comedy and adventure. Perhaps best-known in the West is Dream of Red Mansions, also translated as The Story of the Stone or Dream of the Red Chamber, by the Qing writer Cao Xueqin. This novel chronicles the romantic and personal intrigues of a large declining family in Beijing at the end of the Ming. The Chinese dramatic tradition has also produced several noteworthy works that can be read and appreciated apart from their original operatic context, These are written in the vernacular, but are rich with allusions and dotted with snippets of classical poetry, and they tend to be extraordinarily long. Many of these are still performed, usually in abridged versions, by classical opera troupes. Famous titles include Hong Sheng's The Palace of Lasting Life, which tells of the obsessive love affair that helped bring down the Tang emperor Xuanzong; Tang Xianzu's Peony Pavilion, a supernatural tale of young love; and Kong Shangren's The Peach Blossom Fan, a dark and satirical account of the fall of the Ming to the Manchus. MODERN By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, foreign works were widely available in translation in China, and Chinese writers began taking cues from the realism and social allegories of Western fiction writers of the era. In the second decade of the 20th century, anxious to create an accessible national literature, a group of intellectuals led by Hu Shi pioneered an effort to begin using the spoken vernacular, or balhua, in all literary writing. This movement enjoyed remarkable success, and writing in the classical language fell quickly out of fashion. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 spawned a veritable intellectual revolution, and writers associated with it began to produce fiction that was explicitly or implicitly critical of contemporary social and political situations. The most famous of the May Fourth writers is Lu Xun, whose works have been widely translated into English. @orn the grotesque and haunting imagery of "Diary of a Madman" to the plodding absurdity of "The Story of Ah Q," his short stories portray a China suffering terribly from its inability to modernize. Lao She wrote allegorical novels, most famously Rickshaw Boy, which document the social iwustices of his society. Ba Jin wrote Family, Spring, and Autumn, a trilogy of novels chronicling generational conflicts within a single family and, implicitly, the conflicts between premodem traditions and modem aspirations within China. The short stories of Eileen Chang, who wrote in 1930s and 1940s Hong Kong, provide a very different perspective on the tumult unfolding in China in the first half of the 20th century. Personal and romantic concerns tend to be at the forefront of her fiction, but her female characters feel the impact of historical change through in unique and often startling ways. Several of her stories have been translated into English and published in the Hong Kong journal Renditions. The literary flowering that characterized the first half of the century came to a standstill after the Communist victory in 1949. In 1942, Mao Zedong gave two key talks on literature and art in Yanan, in which he declared that all literature should serve the state and the revolutionary cause. During the first decades of Communist rule, all professional writers worked for state-run guilds, and most writing of this period shows the stifling effects of close government control and draconian limits on subject matter. From the end of the Cultural Revolution to the present, however, a number of authors have taken advantage of their slowly expanding freedom to experiment and criticize. Feng Jical and Su Tong have written satirical tales influenced by Magic Realism; the latter is the author of the novella "Raise the Red Lantern," which was made popular overseas by Zhang Yimou's film adaptation. The controversial Zhang Xianilang has written an account of his experiences in a government labor camp (Grass Soup) and a novel that attracted the authorities' suspicion for its explicit sexual content (Half of Man is Woman). Wang Shuo's novels portray the vices and disillusionment of young people in present-day China; his works have also been regarded with suspicion by the authorities but enjoy tremendous popularity. And, very recently, Li Dawel's novel Dream Collector is a postmortem narrative experiment of the sort that are currently so popular in the West.
|