Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13

Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature

10.1057/9780230117044 - Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature, Gang Zhou

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13 10.1057/9780230117044 - Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature, Gang Zhou

9780230109391_01_prexii.indd ii

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Gang Zhou


Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature


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PLACING THE MODERN CHINESE VERNACULAR IN TRANSNATIONAL LITERATURE

Copyright © Gang Zhou 2011. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10939–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zhou, Gang, 1966– Placing the modern Chinese vernacular in transnational literature / Gang Zhou. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978–0–230–10939–1 (alk. paper) 1. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Chinese literature—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Comparative literature—Chinese and foreign. 4. Comparative literature—Foreign and Chinese. I. Title. PL2274.Z56 2011 895.1⬘09005—dc22

2010023413

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


All rights reserved.


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To my father


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Insula civitates habet quattuor et quinquaginta spatiosas omnes ac magnificas, linga, moribus, insitutis, legibus prorsus eisdem. —Thomas More, Utopia (1518) In 1551, More’s Latin text was translated into English: There be in the Ilande .liiii. large and faire cities or shiere townes, agreyng all together in one tonge, in lyke maners, institucions, and lawes. —Ralph Robynson’s vernacular translation (1551) In 1995, More’s Latin text was translated in a bilingual text as such: There are fifty-four cities on the island, all spacious and magnificent, entirely identical in language, customs, institutions and laws. —Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation (1995)


In 1518, Tomas More wrote:


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Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

One

The Language of Utopia

15

Two

The Chinese Renaissance

45

Three The Shaky House Four

73

The “Vernacular Only” Writing Mode

105

Epilogue

135

Notes

141

Bibliography

159

Index

173


CON T E N T S


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The fact that this book would take on this specific final form, just like many things in human life, is in many ways subject to the law of serendipity. No one would deny that years of hard work are expected in the birth of an academic book, but one tends to downplay how significant are these chance meetings, both with the right books and with the right people in this long and arduous process. I guess it is this kind of understanding that makes me humbled and more grateful, cherishing the connections I have made, even more so the connections I made and then lost. I would first like to thank Michelle Yeh, who has directed my dissertation, the previous incarnation of this book, in many important ways. My special thanks go to Brenda Schildgen, who has been a devoted teacher, giving me steady intellectual guidance and unstinting moral support throughout the years. The other three members from my dissertation committee, Juliana Schiesari, Georges Van Den Abbeele and Sheldon Lu, also deserve every bit of my gratitude for giving me insightful suggestions and warm encouragement. Others who have read individual chapters of my dissertation are Michel Hockx, Sophie Volpp, Edward Gunn, Don Price, Sander Gilman, Margaret Ferguson, Susan Mann, Larry Greer, and Julia Klimek. I thank all of them for being extremely generous with their time and help. My dissertation writing also benefited greatly from the seminar I took with Doris Sommer at the SCT (School of Criticism and Theory) at Cornell University in summer 2002. I thank Doris Sommer, Dominick Lacapra, Sander Gilman, Edward Gunn, Connie Anderson, and Nina Sakun for


AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S


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Acknowledgments

making that summer in Ithaca extremely rewarding and exciting. As it stands, this book took on a new life from the dissertation I completed in summer 2003. The “new” book has given me the opportunity to explore and learn to express my true identity as a comparatist and a scholar of world literature. In this sense, Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature not only demonstrates my years of thinking and writing of a particular academic subject matter, but also concludes a journey of self-understanding and self-recognition in terms of my professional life. Here I would like to thank in particular the American Comparative Literature Association. A number of scholars associated with ACLA (Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Eugene Ouyang, David Damrosch, and others) have over the years greatly encouraged and inspired my scholarly work. They help me to see how my work can indeed reach out to a wide range of scholars outside Chinese literature. I am also grateful to a number of research institutions that have funded this project at different stages, and am pleased to acknowledge the following: UC Pacific Rim Research Program, Humanities Institute at UC Davis, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, LSU Council on Research, NEH Summer Stipend Program, and the Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS Fellowship Program. The final revising and rewriting would have not been possible without an ATLAS grant I received for the academic year 2008–2009, which released me from teaching duties and enabled me to concentrate on completing the manuscript. That year, many good colleagues and friends contributed greatly to both my thinking and writing processes. These include: Sander Gilman, Brenda Schildgen, Michelle Yeh, Edward Gunn, Alex Huang, Indra Levy, Eric Hayot, Sheldon Lu, Nick Kaldis, John Henderson, Qiancheng Li, Wolfgang Kubin, Jon Kowallis, Sam Liang, Julia Klimek, Meriel Wisotsky, Andrew Majeske, Rivi Handler-Spitz, and Bob Schildgen. I also received invaluable help from a number of scholars in China and Taiwan. They are: Chen Sihe, Zhang Yesong, Xiong Yuezhi, Huang Min, Huang Mei-e, and Robin Cai. In addition, I would like to thank my colleagues at LSU, John Henderson, Qiancheng Li, Irene Di Maio, John Pizer, Addie Russo, John Lowe, Laura Martins, Andrea Morris, Jeremy King, Mark Wagner, Margaret Parker, Ann Whitmer, Greg Stone, Laura Mullen,


x


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Katie Henninger, and my department chair, Emily Batinski, for making LSU a very nurturing environment for my professional growth. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family and all my best friends, who have accompanied me every step of this journey. I thank Roger for his great understanding and gracious support. It is with this utter sense of humility and gratitude that I send off my book to the world, hoping the law of serendipity will continue to guide her to the places she should go and the people she should meet, hopefully at peace and at ease.


Acknowledgments


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Not even Dante, whose De vulgari eloquentia is the best known defense of the vernacular, forgot to tell the story of Babel. In fact, Dante, who did not hesitate to assert the nobility of the vernacular over Greek and Latin, elaborated on the tale of Babel in a very emotional way: O human nature ever prone to sin, wicked from the beginning and unceasingly! Was it not sufficient punishment that you were by your first disobedience deprived of light and exiled from paradise, our first home? . . . See, reader, how mankind, forgetting or scorning previous corrections and ignoring the marks left by earlier blows, rose up and a third time asked for a beating, in his presumption and proud folly. Thus incorrigible man, persuaded by the giant Nembroth, presumed in his heart to surpass by his skill not only nature, but even nature’s maker, who is God: and began to build the tower in Sennaar which was later called Babel, meaning confusion, and by this tower hoped to ascend to heaven, proposing in his folly not only to equal but to surpass his Creator … Virtually all the human race had joined together in this wicked enterprise: some were giving orders, some were planning, some raising walls, some making straight with rule and line, some smoothing with trowels, some concentrated on cutting stone and others on transporting it over land and sea; different groups were intent upon different tasks, when they were struck with such confusion from heaven that those who had all been using one and the same language in their work, were made strangers by


Introduction


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Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature this difference of tongues and abandoned the work, and never again worked together. Each group that had been working on one particular task kept one language: the architects all spoke in the same way, all the stone-shifters in another, all the stone-dressers in another, and so on with every trade. And as many types of work as there were, so many different languages now separated the human race; and the more excellent their trade before, the more rough and barbarous became their speech now.1

So even in Dante’s account, the difference in tongues is presented negatively, and associated with mythical themes such as human pride, punishment from God, alienation from God, and alienation from one another. The fact that we humans have so many different languages and vernaculars [as Dante himself ref lects, “If we count up the primary and secondary and subsecondary variations of the Italian vernacular, even in this small corner of the world, we shall find that the different varieties of speech not only reach but exceed a thousand”2] had to be strong evidence of how much we have sinned and how far we have traveled from our native paradise. In other words, the vernacular, a concept that presumably indicates linguistic variety and diversity, was actually born united with this guilt over the multiplicity of tongues as well as an anxious longing towards the pre-Babel linguistic unity. Umberto Eco is correct in this sense to read Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia as the first systematic project for a perfect language.3 “Dante’s goal was to reinstate these original conditions in a modern invention,” writes Eco, and “an illustrious vernacular . . . was to Dante, the only way in which a modern poet might heal the wound of Babel.”4 Dante started by defining the vernacular as what “infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds,” and what “we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses,”5 in contrast to the artificial languages such as Greek and Latin. But the vernacular illustre Dante ardently imagined and pursued was nothing “simple” and “natural”, but the one and only perfect language that “belongs to every city but seems to belong to none, and by which all the municipal vernaculars are weighed, measured and compared.”6


2


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Many centuries have gone by since Dante wrote his treatise on the vernacular. Dante’s biblical view of history and language must sound obsolete for modern people living in a disenchanted world. The vernacular that Dante promoted so earnestly has already become a national language, with its humble origin as a vernacular relevant only to certain groups of scholars. The language in which Dante wrote his De vulgari eloquentia has already ceased to exist as a living language, surviving only in educational curricula or religious ceremonies. In a world that has changed so much, what more has been said about the subject matter that Dante set out to explore and promote centuries ago? One has to admit that Dante’s vernacular project has grown into a transnational phenomenon. Since Dante’s time, the legitimization of a vulgar tongue, the ascendance of a vulgar tongue into a position of power, and the search for a perfect language by transforming the vernacular have occurred again and again in different geo-political contexts far beyond Europe. Not all these vernacular projects might have been carried out to heal the wound of Babel, but they were consciously advanced and socially engineered to achieve certain political goals. Benedict Anderson’s widely acclaimed book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism discusses the emergence of vernacular languages around the world and the ideological and political functions that these languages served in the formation of the modern nation- state. Anderson paints a neat picture of the spread of the vernacular movement and nationalism. According to him, the first wave of nation- states to make conscious use of the vernacular as the emblem of modernity and nationality emerged in Europe between 1820 and 1920. The second wave constitutes those dynasties that were forced to respond to the new conception of the nation. The “last wave” of this nationalism occurred mostly in the colonized territories of Asia and Africa, originating in a response to global imperialism. In short, the model of nation, vernacular, and modernity was copied, adapted, and enthusiastically aspired to by numerous countries, which made the vernacular movement a transnational phenomenon.7


Introduction


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Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature

As a political scientist, Anderson concerns himself little with what this transnational vernacular movement meant to world literature. His observation and discussion, however, prompt us to rethink the origin of modern literatures. If we look up how national literatures are marked as “modern” and “pre-modern” in many countries around the world, we will very likely find that the triumph of the nation, the triumph of the vernacular, and the birth of modern literature are closely interrelated. This fact alone suggests a reevaluation of what we mean by “modern literature” and to what extent modern literature in its origin may have been a socially engineered project and institution in the service of specific political needs. To ask more questions in a literary fashion, we literary scholars would want to know what those vernacular movements meant to those writers who were both blessed and cursed to have lived through times of linguistic upheaval. If we say that human identity is shaped by language, as modern philosophers have convinced us, then in what way did such language revolution affect those writers’ identity formation, given that writers are presumably most sensitive to language? Furthermore, if many analogous historical junctures in world literature have witnessed the rise of a vulgar tongue and the creation of literary texts replete with heightened linguistic sensitivity, wouldn’t a specific approach to those texts provide us with a better understanding of the nature of those literatures? Shouldn’t a new “genre” be called upon to describe the kinship of those tension-ridden vernacular writings that can be found in many of the world’s national literatures? Last but not least, in what way does the investigation of this transnational vernacular movement help us to achieve a better understanding of world literature as a system, or more precisely, as a system of variations?8 *

*

*

This book is dedicated to one specific episode in this transnational vernacular movement, although it will also touch upon some parallel cases. The study focuses on a crucial phase in Chinese literary history (roughly from 1895 to 1925) when China witnessed a dramatic linguistic upheaval—the rise of baihua (literally “plain speech,” also called the vernacular) and the fall of wenyan (literally “refined


4


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language” also called classical Chinese). The Chinese vernacular project—the search for an ideal language (in this case, the national language of modern China) by transforming the vernacular—was earnestly carried out by Chinese intellectuals as part of their modernity and nation-building enterprise, following the leads of foreign nations. Instead of seeing the rise of the vernacular (from the center or from a transcendental space) as a wave of diffusion that reached the peripheries or the marginal space, I tell the story of the rise of the vernacular in modern China first as a Chinese story then as a story within a system, a story that makes more sense when seen in light of those analogies and parallel stories in the context of world literature, a story that also illuminates the general problem of the transnational vernacular movement. In recent years, two major scholarly works in the English language have tackled the problem of language at this tense historical juncture: Edward Gunn’s Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth- Century Chinese Prose, and Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in China, 1900– 1937. Gunn’s study focuses on changes and innovations in the formal features of Chinese writing in the early twentieth century. His book provides detailed documentation and analysis of a variety of linguistic and stylistic innovations ref lected in modern Chinese prose writing. Gunn examines grammar, rhetoric invention, and sentence cohesion in order to demonstrate the exact changes that took place in twentieth- century Chinese writing. In contrast to Gunn’s formal linguistic approach, my study belongs more to the category that is conventionally called “history of ideas.” 9 I am interested in recording and analyzing changes in ideas or attitudes towards language that took place during the period under investigation. One of the goals of chapter 1 is to examine the dramatic changes in language attitude, as ref lected in the late Qing intellectual discourse and the May Fourth discourse of the vernacular emerging in the 1910s. The perfect language as imagined by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) in his ideal World of Great Unity was very different from the perfect language imagined by Hu Shi (1891–1962) in his making of the national language of modern China. In fact, the difference was so fundamental that


Introduction


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one has to acknowledge that a sea change had taken place between these two generations of intellectuals, which, I argue, accounts for the intensity of the linguistic upheaval these two generations of writers had to experience, whether willingly or not. Chapter 1 also tries to present a comprehensive spectrum of language attitudes during the early phase of the May Fourth vernacular movement, which eventually gave way to the dominance of Hu Shi’s discourse of the vernacular. Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice takes translation as its point of departure for her inquiry about the language problem in early twentiethcentury China. By now, it is beyond question that Chinese literary modernity begins with translation, adaptation, appropriation, and other interlingual practices related to the West. It is only natural that “translation” should play such a central role in the period under investigation. While not interested in the history of translation, much less the technical aspects of translation, Liu’s study of translingual practice focuses on “the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy within the host language (in this case, the Chinese language) due to, or in spite of, the latter’s contact/collision with the guest language (in this case, Japanese and various Western languages).”10 Her discussion of the journey of neologism or neologistic constructions—the Japanese used kanji (Chinese characters) to translate European terms, which were then imported back in the Chinese language—offers a refreshing perspective to examine “translingual practice” as the very site where the irreducible differences between languages are fought out, authorities invoked or challenged, and ambiguities dissolved or created, until new words and meanings emerge. Different from Liu’s approach, my study takes vernacularization as its point of departure. While ample discussions have been undertaken about the significant contributions that translation had made to the emergence of the vernacular in modern China, I would argue that the relationship between translation and vernacularization is far more intriguing and complicated than this. In a way, a discussion of the origin of modern Chinese literature cannot be complete without mentioning both translation and vernacularization. If Chinese


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literary modernity starts with translation, adaptation, and appropriation, it is dramatically furthered by vernacularization, the willingness to restructure and remodel the host language (in this case, the diglossic structure of wenyan versus baihua), and the determination to search for and create an ideal language (in this case, the national language of modern China) by promoting and transforming the vernacular. This decision was first made among a group of elite writers and intellectuals, but then became a very powerful linguistic practice, both interlingual and intralingual, to which everyone in the society had to respond, whether enthusiastically or reluctantly. My discussion on “vernacularization” focuses on what I call the condition of vernacularization. By that, I do not mean the imbalanced power relationship between the host and guest languages that probably prompted the collective desire toward vernacularization. By using this term, I try to shed light on two points: (1) I want to call attention to the precarious linguistic, existential and emotional conditions within which the first modern Chinese vernacular writers took on the vernacular as the writing medium; (2) I want to highlight the ways in which the “vernacular only” writing mode, a rather militant and monolingual idea implemented and institutionalized by the May Fourth vernacular movement, was pressed upon more conservative writers and groups, who were forced to make difficult choices to readjust to a new linguisticcultural landscape in the early 1920s. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 are dedicated to these observations and arguments. In chapter 3, I detail what writing in the vernacular meant to those May Fourth progressive writers who actively promoted and embraced vernacularization. I look at their complex linguistic background and emotional attachment to different languages as well as their emotional responses and even traumatic experiences about the “vernacular only” writing mode. Martin Heidegger once wrote that “if it is true that man finds the proper abode of his existence in language—whether he is aware of it or not—then an experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our existence.”11 In the case of that generation of May Fourth writers, who were ordained to experience a dramatic language change, their proper abode must have been shaky and precarious. Their sense


Introduction


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of alienation and their uncertainty towards the linguistic medium they were writing and creating distinguish them sharply from both the previous and following generations. The generation before them was still struggling with a familiar linguistic medium that was on its way to becoming unfamiliar, and for the generation after, vernacular writing had already achieved its status as a spontaneous form of expression. I argue that in the kind of linguistic tension and unfamiliarity these May Fourth vernacular writers experienced in their writing, they more closely resemble bilingual writers and translators, whose proper abodes are also shaky, although for reasons other than a historical language change. The term “Shaky House” is, therefore, evoked to describe the vernacular writing experiences of those May Fourth vernacular authors. The “Shaky House” experience also links the vernacular writings produced by Chinese May Fourth writers to the literatures produced at similar tension-ridden historical junctures of a language change. The European Renaissance, being one of those analogous case scenarios, for instance, also witnessed “an intense interorientation, interaction, and mutual clarification of languages”12 and produced literary texts replete with linguistic tensions and complexities. Meiji Japan (1867–1912) was another such crucial historical period when genbun itchi, the Japanese modern vernacular, emerged as the accepted literary medium for modern Japanese literature. The “Shaky House” in my study of the Chinese vernacularization in the context of world literature, therefore, also refers to this specific kind of vernacular literature, whose writing begins with a revolutionary language choice, and whose literary medium manifests dramatic language change and is replete with linguistic tension and precariousness. Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–1321) and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918) are certainly two of the kind. Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo, (1887–1889) which ushered in the birth of genbun itchi, is another well-known example. The first Yiddish novel, The Little Man, (1863) by S.Y. Abramovitsh, features serious linguistic play between classical Hebrew and the Yiddish vernacular, which also places it into this “Shaky House” family. These texts are certainly


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from very different literary traditions, and were written in very different historical contexts. But here I follow Wai Chee Dimock, who considers genre not just a theory of classification but, more crucially, a theory of interconnection. As Dimock observes, “Kin is every bit as important as kind. And by kin, what I have in mind is not necessarily a genealogical connection, but just as often, a broad spectrum of affinities, interesting when seen in conjunction, but not themselves organically linked.”13 It is through the recognition of the kinship of these texts, as well as this new “genre” of “Shaky House” writing, that we are enabled to see the Chinese case from a comparative perspective and to locate the Chinese vernacular project within a system of world literature. The triumph of the vernacular that gave birth to modern Chinese literature has often been discussed as something sufficient unto itself, following a nation-based model in literary studies. As the above discussion has demonstrated, my study of the Chinese vernacular project is, however, also told through Other literatures. Situated at the intersection of modern Chinese literary studies and world literature studies, this book intends to concentrate not only on the “triumph” of the vernacular in modern China but also on the critical role that the rise of the vernacular plays in the context of world literature. It identifies the vernacular problem as the important thread that leads us out of modern Chinese literature and into other geographies, other languages and literatures, and finally back to the central case study, China, with new insights and observations. Indeed it is only in light of those “parallel” stories that took place in other geographies that one can realize that it was not uncommon that Chinese educated elites were once very serious about romanizing the Chinese language, and it was exceptional that modern China launched such a devastating war against its classical language. In fact, the intensity and devastation of such a language war can only be matched by what happened in modern Turkey. Modern Turkish intellectuals in the late 1920s and 1930s went even further in their vernacularization project, which included “abolition of the Ottoman Turkish Arabo-Persian alphabet and its replacement with Latin phonetic orthography as well as the purging of Arabic and Persian words.”14


Introduction


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One concept that often seems to be circulated alongside the idea of the vernacular, especially in historical contexts beyond Europe, is that of “renaissance.” Chapter 2, therefore, traces the ways in which the renaissance and language problem intersected in modern China and some other geo-political contexts. In 1918, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, one of the significant intellectual leaders in modern India, published a treatise entitled The Renaissance in India; in that same year, Hu Shi was publicizing his European Renaissance model for the May Fourth vernacular movement in modern China. Recasting Dante as an anti-Latin hero, Hu managed to justify the intolerant and militant stance of the modern Chinese vernacular, which would be institutionalized by the May Fourth vernacular movement. Emphasizing “synthesis,” Aurobindo’s text embodied a more harmonious relationship among different languages. In his paradigm, the revival of the Sanskrit tradition, the further development of Bengali literature, and the embrace of the English language all worked together to produce a unique Renaissance in India. The chapter also touches on how the “renaissance” was appropriated in the context of the modern Arab world. The inclusion of the Arab story questions the often self-proclaimed “naturalness” and “inevitability” attributed to the progression toward vernacularization in the modern world, which the transnational vernacular movement as observed by Benedict Anderson has so plausibly argued. In contrast to that trend, modern Arab intellectuals chose to continue to use the classical language; most of them believed—and still believe—that only classical Arabic has the possibility of modernity and the future of the Arabic world. A similar scenario can be found in early twentieth- century Jerusalem, where classical Hebrew was chosen as the basis for the one and only literary medium and the spoken language in modern Jewish society. While the revival of the two classical languages challenges the “naturalness” associated with the triumph of vernacular languages, it nevertheless celebrates the same kind of willpower, the same kind of social- engineering mechanism, and the same kind of earnest search for the ideal language for one’s nation that characterize the transnational vernacular movement. It is in this sense that we see the problem of “vernacularization” in


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the modern world not as a vernacular problem but rather as a problem of the perfect language. It is also in this sense that we see a variety of searches carried out by intellectuals in different geo-political contexts, among which the Chinese intellectuals sought their versions of the language of utopia. *

*

*

There is a dark and powerful scene in Lu Xun’s 1918 short story “Diary of a Madman,” arguably the first textual performance of the literary medium of modern Chinese literature, the new vernacular. “Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words—‘Eat people.’ ”15 The passage stages a madman who reads intently, reads between the lines, and transforms what he reads. “Eat people,” Lu Xun’s madman cried out his indictment of the book written in classical Chinese, attacking the “cannibalistic” nature of traditional Confucian morality. At the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy, there is also a dark and powerful scene: Dante the pilgrim came to himself in a dark wood. He reached the foot of a hill, and, filled with fear and anguish, the first word he uttered was “Miserere (have mercy)” in the Latin language to Virgil, the quintessential emblem of Latin culture.16 Both “Diary of a Madman” and Divine Comedy were written as a political statement, a statement that pronounced the dignity of the vernacular, the uprising of the vernacular. Both Lu Xun and Dante were operating in uncharted territories and in forbidden arenas, which I argue explains the fear and anguish that both Lu Xun’s madman and Dante the pilgrim experienced respectively in the reading and on the journey. But here comes the variation: whereas Lu Xun’s madman violently attacks classical Chinese, Dante the pilgrim begs his Latin master for help. No wonder Ernst Robert Curtius sees Dante’s famous defense of the vernacular, De vulgari eloquentia, as an impressive testimony to Dante’s Latinism and asks, “Is the vernacular emancipated and urged to full development by Dante’s treatise? Is it not rather intolerably shackled?”17 Although Hu Shi and other proponents of the Chinese


Introduction


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May Fourth vernacular movement honored Dante as their perfect universal model, they did so by reconfiguring Dante to make him an anti-Latin hero. The Florentine poet himself would never have condemned Latin as a “dead” language the way Chinese intellectuals condemned classical Chinese. If we assert that Dante’s vernacular project and the modern Chinese vernacular project both belong to the same system of world literature, this is certainly a system of variations. Another important instance in this system is, Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo, the first textual performance of the literary medium of modern Japanese literature. It is interesting to notice that Ukigumo centers on the complex romantic relationship between Bunzo, a progressive intellectual of the Meiji era, and Osei, an alluring “Westernesque” female figure who is ethnically Japanese but evokes the West in her physical appearance, life style, and her use of language.18 According to Indra Levy’s convincing reading of the novel, Bunzo at first idolized Osei as a bearer of Truth, but eventually he felt betrayed and disillusioned by what turned out to be a siren song. Compared to Lu Xun, Futabatei Shimei resembled Dante more in the sense that he invoked a muse rather than a war for his vernacular writing, although his muse was an ambivalent and engendered “Westernesque” siren rather than a grand master from the past. While Lu Xun’s madman suffered schizophrenia as he fought a self-destructive battle, Futabatei’s Bunzo was eventually lost and paralyzed by his keen awareness of a fundamentally irresolvable “discord” between multiple and heterogeneous languages. The list is certainly longer, including more crucial instances in the transnational vernacular movement, more variations, which constituted and significantly shaped the landscape of world literature. But the key here is the awareness of world literature as a “systemic” construct and “vernacularization” as a particular drive that both generates and is generated by the system of world literature, a system that is also constantly remaking itself diachronically and dialectically.19 My understanding of such a system shall not follow the world-system school of economic history, which sees the system as simultaneously one and unequal: with a center and a periphery that are bound together in a relationship of profound inequality.20 While the collective desire for “vernacularization”


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might indicate foreign debts or the diffusion of certain idea from the center to the periphery, the main story of this world drama has to be in the concrete and unique conditions of “vernacularization” that played out in each specific locale. Whereas maps, trees, and graphs reveal quantitative patterns and variations, I believe in the end it is a symphony that we are looking for, a collaborative version of multiple voices of variations.21


Introduction


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ON E


“There are fifty-four cities on the island, all large and well built, and with the same language, custom, institutions and laws.”1 Thus Thomas More envisioned his ideal commonwealth in his early sixteenth-century work Utopia (1516). In More’s imagination, all Utopians speak one language, the same language used in all fifty-four cities and everywhere on the island. Moreover, those sites that generate linguistic differentiation in the real world seem to only create similarity in More’s Utopia. For instance, while in the real-world people in rural areas and those in the city speak distinct varieties of language, in More’s Utopia it was a totally different story: [Utopians] have built houses all over the countryside, well designed and furnished with farm equipment. These houses are inhabited by citizens who come to the country by turns to dwell in them . . . Every year, twenty from each household move back to the city, after completing a two-year turn in the country. In their place, twenty others are sent out from town.2 Clearly there is no difference between the farmer and the town resident in Utopia, for they are the same people. As we read further, we discover that there are only five kinds of trade in Utopia, the minimum variety of crafts one can imagine for a community. Even these professional occupations promise no linguistic vitality. It is very hard to imagine a lively language variety associated with the manufacture of wool or


CH A P T E R


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linen, because all Utopians wear the same sort of clothes (except for the distinctions that mark the difference between the married and the unmarried); fashion itself never changes. In a word, More’s ideal society is a monolingual community with extremely little linguistic differentiation. Almost four centuries later, around the turn of the twentieth century, when Kang Youwei , one of the most prominent Chinese political reformers in the late Qing period, described his ideal world in The Book of Great Unity (1902), he created another imagined monolingual community in which all of humanity lived under a single government. In Kang’s Utopia, there is no private property, no class boundary, no racial difference, no gender discrimination, and, of course, no linguistic differentiation. “National languages must be abolished as being one of the major barriers which perpetuates disunity in the world.”3 “Spoken and written language should be the same for the whole world. It will not be permitted to have different words and different writing.”4 While Kang shared More’s vision of linguistic unity, he also exhibited an extraordinary fascination with the “making” of the ideal language. In a way, More’s Utopia is a discovery. It was a world that had been discovered and narrated by Hythloday, a sea traveler, and evocative of the explorations of the New World in sixteenth-century Europe. More’s Utopia might also be seen as a humanist declaration, “a truly just commonwealth is possible anywhere or at any time here on earth,”5 opposed to the medieval and Augustinian idea of The City of God that could only exist in heaven. In More’s text, the “island” is thus positioned as an alternative human condition co-existing with a corrupt sixteenth-century England. In contrast, Kang Youwei’s world of Great Unity is located in the future, at the end of a long process of social progress. Like most of his generation of progressive compatriots, who were inf luenced by the Darwinian theory of evolution in some ways, Kang believed in the progress of history. But a more immediate source for Kang’s utopian vision was probably Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), which was translated by Timothy Richard and an unnamed Chinese assistant into classical Chinese in 1891. Bellamy’s novel was circulated widely around 1895, and his utopia is set in the future (2000). As Patrick Hanan observes, the Bellamy novel’s projection into the year


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2000 greatly inf luenced the establishing of the subgenre of utopian fiction in China, including Kang Youwei’s The Book of Great Unity and Liang Qichao’s The Future of New China.6 A leading political reformer and activist, Kang concerned himself with both the grand vision of a universal and egalitarian society and the specific ways of creating this ideal world. In making the ideal language, Kang presented a rather elaborate proposal. He suggested constructing a “global sounds room,” gathering native speakers of every language spoken on earth, and then having philosophers who understand music and language join to study these languages. These philosophers would then select “the lightest, clearest, roundest, and easiest for the tongue as the sounds of the new World language.” 7 As for the words, Kang seems to advocate the adoption of the Chinese language, with the addition of an alphabet, some new European and American terms, and a simplified script. He claims: “In simplicity of language, Chinese exceeds India, Europe, and America by several times. Thus, the same book or letter can be written several times as fast in Chinese as in the languages of Europe, America, or India.”8 Although Kang’s proposal may sound absurd today, his language attitude and his concerns and fascinations, actually ref lected the language reform that was going on in late- Qing China. What makes Kang’s vision particularly compelling is that the kind of pride he held for the Chinese language would soon give way to a completely different sentiment. “The Chinese language” imagined by Chinese intellectuals two decades later would be drastically different from the one in Kang’s mind. Sometimes one wonders whether Kang’s longing for an extreme linguistic unity was actually a reaction or response to all the linguistic and cultural upheaval he had witnessed in his lifetime. After all, his work was produced on the verge of a language revolution, the verge of a breakdown of a long-lasting diglossic situation, just as was Thomas More’s Utopia. Diglossia and Its Implications



“Diglossia” is a term coined by Charles Ferguson in an important essay published in 1959. Ferguson defines “diglossia” as “two varieties of a language exist side by side throughout the community, with


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each having a definite role to play.”9 This definition later became the classic reference for “diglossia” and initiated much discussion among social linguists.10 Ferguson examines the diglossic situation under nine rubrics, the most crucial of which is function. In other words, the clearly defined functional distinctions between two language varieties, one called the High language and the other the Low language, are what characterize “diglossia.” The domains served by the High language are formal and official, and those associated with the Low language are informal and homey. With some appropriation, Ferguson’s model is very instructive in delineating the social linguistic landscape in pre-modern China, which witnessed two written languages, wenyan (classical Chinese) and baihua (the vernacular), existing side by side, each having a clearly defined role to play.11 What is commonly conceived of as classical Chinese took its form in the Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 B.C.) based on prose classics such as the Analects of Confucius and Mencius. Initially, the language of these texts was probably not very far from cultured contemporary speech.12 But centuries later, as authors continued to model their writings on Confucian classics, the gap between the written medium and the spoken vernacular began to widen. By the Song Dynasty (960–1279), the vernacular as a full-blown medium started to emerge. In a way, one cannot find a text purely in classical Chinese; many texts in classical Chinese display the clear inf luence of the contemporary vernacular. On the other hand, it is impossible to find a pure vernacular literary work. Vernacular texts are usually permeated with elements of classical Chinese. But Chinese men of letters were certainly aware of the distinction between classical Chinese and the vernacular, and they used these two language varieties for different purposes. To put it simply, throughout the history of premodern China, classical Chinese remained the language of high culture, while the vernacular was the language of popular culture, used only for certain low literary genres such as fiction and drama. The co-existence of classical Chinese and the vernacular, which has been compared to the co-existence of Latin and vernacular languages in Europe, lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century, when Chinese intellectuals called for a literary revolution and ushered in a dramatic change in this long-established linguistic convention.


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The co-existence of classical Chinese and the vernacular was not a static phenomenon but rather a diachronic process in which two linguistic varieties complemented each other while developing along different paths. In a way, the intrinsic versatility of classical Chinese is impressive. It generated an almost limitless variety of poetic forms as well as different schools of prose writing. Some conceptions of language and writing deeply rooted in Chinese culture also determined that classical Chinese, a language far removed from everyday speech, would enjoy great prestige for many centuries. As Liangyan Ge astutely points out, “In Chinese classical literature, wenyan’s [classical Chinese] divorce from speech was not only accepted as a necessity but also acclaimed as a blessing,” for literary writings were believed “to represent patterned forms of configuration or embellishment in the universe.”13 In his Wenxin diaolong (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) generally considered the most important work of literary theory in ancient China, Liu Hsieh (5th century) termed “wenyan” the “pattern/ configuration/embellishment” of words. As the sole legitimate literary language, wenyan was believed to have derived its potency not from ties to speech but from its affinity to the patterns of the cosmos. It was without question that the gap between everyday speech and literary writing had to be carefully maintained and that only “patterned words” were qualified for serious literature. On the other hand, there were historical events and social circumstances in pre-modern Chinese history that helped advance the usage of the vernacular. The vernacular as a writing medium came into use in the Tang Dynasty (618–907) and became very popular in the Song Dynasty. It was first associated with Zen Buddhism, which invented yulu, a written genre that recorded conversations between a Zen master and his disciples. There were also vernacular texts associated with popular genres such as public storytelling, which was f lourishing at the time. Some manuscripts (known as bianwen, transformation texts) discovered in the early twentieth century in a cave near Dunhuang were such texts from the Tang period. They were scripts and formulas written by and for popular performers, and in a language that approached the written vernacular.14 A big boost for vernacularization came under the Mongol rule in the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368); when the civil




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service exams were suspended, educated Chinese men of letters turned to the writing of novels and plays, often in the vernacular. During the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) Dynasties, the vernacular firmly established itself as a full-f ledged literary medium for popular genres such as the novel and drama. The appearance of great novels in the vernacular including Journey to the West, Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Dream of the Red Chamber testified to the maturation of vernacular prose and the culmination of the long process of vernacularization in pre-modern China. There is little doubt that “diglossia”—classical Chinese vs. the vernacular—helps explain the social linguistic situation in pre-modern China. But what I want to emphasize here is the social and psychological implications of the diglossic situation. “Diglossia” should not be regarded merely as a descriptive term representing a particular linguistic structure; it is also normative, in the sense that it implies certain principles essential to the social behavior of a language user. Ferguson observes in his article that in a diglossic community, “the importance of using the right variety in the right situation can hardly be overestimated.”15 Being required to switch from one language to another, a language user in a diglossic community is trained to be sensitive to the social context that a certain language evokes, because an inappropriate language choice can be mercilessly censured by social ridicule. In this sense, every language choice made by a language user is a socially bounded act, ref lecting his or her understanding of the rules, as well as the social context. A good illustration of how a pre-modern Chinese writer dealt with the co-existence of classical Chinese and the vernacular may be found in the following discussion on Wu Cheng-en (1505–1580), the author of the important vernacular novel, Journey to the West: The literary evolution of Wu Cheng-en is typical of many an author of Chinese novels. He loved the vulgar novels in his boyhood; he went through his classical education and training and became ashamed of his boyish delights; he wrote his imitative poetry and prose in the classical style; he tried to write his stories in imitation of the story-writers of Tang and Song; finally, in his


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Without doubt, Wu Cheng-en had a clear sense of what was the language for serious literature and what was the language for entertainment. He never escaped his sense of shame about his delight in the vulgar language. Despite his bold achievement in producing a masterpiece in the vulgar language, he nevertheless chose to publish it anonymously. It is safe to say that when writing Journey to the West in the vernacular, Wu was well aware of the difference between this book and the imitative poetry and prose he had written in classical Chinese. For him, and the majority of pre-modern Chinese men of letters, classical Chinese and the vernacular had distinct codes, targeting different audiences, and were supposed to be written with different concerns and emotions. A conscious attempt to subvert this conventional hierarchy between classical Chinese and the vernacular took place around Wu Cheng-en’s time, the late Ming period. Apart from the maturation of the vernacular as a literary medium, many other political, economic, and social factors contributed to the “empowering” of vernacular literature at the time. Against the archaists who advocated strict adherence to formal models established by earlier writers, Li Zhi (1527–1602) and some other writers promoted freedom and following one’s natural inclinations. Li states in his most inf luential essay “On the Child-Mind,” that, “Free from all falseness and entirely genuine, the child-mind is the original mind of one’s very first thought. Loss of the child-mind means loss of the genuine mind, and a loss of the genuine mind means loss of the genuine person.” What is associated with the child-mind is authentic rather than imitative language. Li thus questions imitative literature in the same essay:


mellow old age, he took the bold step of producing his masterpiece in the language of the street and the market-place and published it anonymously.16

Why should poems have to be like those in the ancient Anthology? Why should prose have to be like that of the pre- Qin period? Writing continued to change after those periods, turning into the Six dynasties style and then turning into regulated poetry.


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It changed again and turned into classical tales; it changed and turned into the early play-scripts and variety plays. It turned into The Western Parlor; it turned into the novel Water Margin; it turned into the formal essays that people practice today for the examination. Every time a person of great virtue speaks of the Way of the Sages, it is perfect writing, in times gone by as well as now—it cannot be judged in its historical relation to the tendencies of the age. This is the reason I feel moved by the inherent literary quality of anyone who has the child-mind—who cares about the Six Classics or the Analects or the Mencius?17 A number of points may be made from the above paragraph. First, the foundation of Li Zhi’s advocacy of “the inherent literary quality of anyone who has the child-mind” can be traced back to the inf luential Neo- Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), known for his theory that self-cultivation exists in the mind alone and does not depend on study of external forms of things and principles.18 Second, in Li Zhi’s discourse, vernacular texts such as The Western Parlor and Water Margin are treated equally with poetry and prose in classical Chinese. This was virtually the first time in the history of Chinese literature that “literature” expanded to include popular genres such as drama and the novel. Third, as an eccentric and heterodox intellectual who entitled his book Fen Shu (Books to Be Burned), Li Zhi was well aware of the shocking effect his iconoclastic statement would provoke. His outcry against the Six Classics or the Analects was a staged performance that testified to the suffocating power of the Confucian orthodoxy in his time. Finally, in Li’s discourse, the vernacular was made a symbol of spontaneity and authenticity—representing the alternative voice to the Confucian orthodoxy. Since Confucius’ time, the Chinese tradition had had two complementary views of literature: “literature conveys the Dao” and “literature as expressions of feelings.” It is not surprising that vernacular writing was championed for its spontaneity and naturalness, deriving power from the alternative tradition. While the late Ming intellectual discourse on the vernacular mainly ref lects the internal conf lict between the orthodox and alternative voice within Chinese culture, the vernacular movement in the late Qing


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The Late- Qing Language Reform In his 1959 essay on “diglossia,” Charles Ferguson points out that the diglossic situation may remain stable for a very long period of time until certain trends appear in the community. “These include trends toward: (1) more widespread literacy (whether for economic, ideological or other reasons); (2) broader communication among different regional and social segments of the community (e.g., for economic, administrative, military, or ideological reasons); and (3) desire for a full-f ledged standard ‘national’ language as an attribute of autonomy or of sovereignty.”19 In the history of England, this moment came in the first half of the sixteenth century, around the time of the publication of Utopia.20 The fact that More’s Utopia was written in Latin (not in English) manifested More’s understanding of the particular diglossic situation that shaped the linguistic structure of his England, a community with two language varieties: Latin (the High language) and English (the Low language), each with a clearly defined role. By choosing Latin as the linguistic medium for his utopian imagination, More stamped a grand “H” on his text and placed his Utopia into a noble and prestigious social context. Echoing his language choice, More dedicated his book to Peter Giles, a humanist in Antwerp, an important figure in the circle of continental scholars. Designating Giles as the ideal reader of his book, More again proclaimed his book’s social orientation. Interestingly enough, when Utopia was first printed in 1516, it included quite a few additional pieces: a Utopian quatrain “translated” by Peter Giles; verses by Gerhard Noviomagus, Cornelius Grapheus, and John Paludamus; finally letters of Giles to Jerome Busleiden, Busleiden to More, Paludanus to Giles, and More to Giles. These were all famous names among More’s contemporaries, and they were the ones who shared with More the access to Utopia, and possessed the


period took on a global dimension. From then on, the discourse of the vernacular in China became inseparable from concepts imported from Japan and the West, especially the ideas of the nation-state and modernity, which formed a whole new set of rhetoric of the vernacular.


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means to chart and interpret Utopia. An average reader first had to pass through the labyrinth constructed by this prestigious group in order to get a glimpse of Utopia. In this sense, the 1516 edition of More’s Utopia was a perfect embodiment of the book’s nature as a socially bounded performance, a performance that could only be completed by the collaboration between the performer and the designated viewers.21 Ironically, shortly after the publication of Utopia, the diglossic relationship between Latin and English would break down: the Latin language would decline in prominence, while the English language would rise to become the national language with dignity and power.22 When another great utopian text appeared in England in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), the work was certainly written in the English language. In the history of China, the breakdown of that long-lasting diglossic situation took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Kang Youwei wrote The Book of Great Unity, the Chinese language in his mind was without doubt “classical Chinese”—the language of Confucian Classics, the single most important symbol of Chinese ethnicity and the international language in East Asia. As he praised the “simplicity” of the Chinese language, “Chinese has one term for one thing, one character for one term, one sound for one character,”23 the “vernacular” must have been the last thing on his mind. But only a few years later, “classical Chinese” would be violently attacked, while the “vernacular” would become the national language of modern China. Two decades after the publication of The Book of Great Unity, the “vernacular” would officially become the one and only right medium for Chinese literature. Looking at Kang’s proposal for the ideal language, one can easily notice how drastically it differs from the late Ming discourse on language. While Li Zhi in his text struggles to fight for some space for vernacular literature in the suffocating world of Confucian Classics, Kang Youwei envisions an ideal language emerging from a linguistic comparison and competition between Chinese and foreign languages. The disorientation experienced by Kang’s generation of educated elites must have been overwhelming.24 Not long before that generation, in the early nineteenth century, a gentleman-scholar would still


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confidently claim, “I have traveled widely . . . The only places under heaven I have never been to are Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan [southwest China].”25 Tianxia or places “under heaven” still unambiguously meant China or the Qing Empire. But to Kang Youwei’s generation, active in the late nineteenth century, the world was a vastly different place. What Kang’s generation of educated elites experienced was what the historian Joseph Levenson once described as “the contraction of China from a world to a nation in the world.”26 It is from here that we shall understand Kang Youwei’s conceptualization of the ideal language. With limited knowledge of foreign languages and cultures, Kang Youwei nevertheless passionately compares Chinese with the language of India, Europe, and America. He praises the beauty of the vowels of French and Italian, and seems fascinated with the sounds of the language. Kang has a peculiar theory about the sounds of the people who live near the equator, and those who live near the arctic seas. He reasons that the ideal sounds for the new world language should be mostly adopted from the sounds of the people who live in the 40th to 50th latitudes. After selecting the lightest, clearest, and roundest sounds, Kang thinks that an alphabet should be formed to represent these sounds. He then recommends the Chinese language as one of the best choices for the words of the ideal world language. Acknowledging that Chinese lacks certain new vocabulary, Kang suggests adopting the new European and American terms to rectify this. The new language should be written in a simplified new script. Once the system of the new language is decided upon, Kang writes, “We then make up books written in such language, and send them to schools; then after several decades, the whole world will use the new language.”27 Although what Kang provides here is an imaginary picture of the “making” of the ideal language, many of his discussions echo the language reform that took place in the late Qing and early Republican periods. Kang’s fascination with “sounds” and the alphabet system was not uncommon; there was increasing interest in adopting a phonetic system of writing for the Chinese language in the late Qing period. The attempts at phonetic transcription of Chinese may be traced back to the Jesuit missionaries who went to China in the late Ming period. In




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1598, the celebrated Matteo Ricci, joined by Lazzaro Cattaneo, known as a good musician with a good ear for tones, and by Chung Ming-jen, a native Chinese, compiled a dictionary, which was the first systematic application of the Roman alphabet to Chinese. Later in 1616, Nicolas Trigault published The Ear and Eye Assistant to Foreign Scholars, in which he analyzed Chinese sounds in terms of Roman letters.28 All these romanization activities had very little impact on the Chinese educated elite.29 It was not until the late Qing period that the significance of such attempts became more visible. The Protestant missionaries who arrived in China in the nineteenth century continued to work on alphabetizing the Chinese language, which helped them not only to replace a difficult script but also to reach out to their Chinese audiences, who were often both illiterate and spoke only local dialect. According to John De Francis, alphabetic writing was widely taken up by the missionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century. From 1890 to 1904, the total output of romanized Bibles or Bible portions for all dialects amounted to 133,870 pieces.30 For Chinese educated elites, their interest in the phonetic system lay first in improving literacy and, hence, the production of useful citizens for the modern nation-state. After China’s devastating defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, literacy became identified as one of the key issues crucial to the survival of the Chinese “nation.” Between 1896 and 1897, four Chinese-made phonetic schemes appeared, all of which used shorthand symbols, aiming for the quickest ways to master the language.31 Liang Qichao, a prominent late- Qing reformer and disciple of Kang Youwei, enthusiastically endorsed one of the schemes created by Shen Xue, who claimed that his scheme could be learned in half a day and was the easiest in the world. For late- Qing reformers, the phonetic system was also essential to developing a unified national language. The Mandarin Alphabet compiled by Wang Zhao in 1900 was thus strongly advocated by Wu Rulun, one of the foremost scholars of the time, who was convinced after his tour of inspection to Japan that China should imitate Japan to develop a unified national language through the Mandarin Alphabet. The “national language movement” became more relevant and urgent after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. In 1912, the Ministry of Education of the newly


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established Chinese Republic announced plans to hold a conference on the Unification of Pronunciation. The agenda was “to establish a standard national pronunciation for the characters, to analyze the national pronunciation in terms of its basic sounds, and to adopt a set of phonetic symbols to represent these basic sounds.”32 At the conference, delegates from various regions of China engaged in a heated argument over what sounds should be adopted as the standard. Delegates from the north proposed Guanhua (Mandarin), which, they pointed out, had long served as an informal lingua franca throughout China, especially for Imperial administrative purposes. The southerners countered that this was not acceptable, as the Mandarin Alphabet had not preserved many of the older, Tang-period distinctions that could still be found in the south. After three months of bickering, the northerners gained the upper hand. The conference adopted the sounds of Mandarin as the national standard, but the phonetic symbols being adopted still ref lected many ancient features preserved in those southern dialects. One cannot help but notice the interesting ways in which Kang Youwei’s “global sounds room” found its materialization in a smaller scale a decade later in the reality of China. This conference on the Unification of Pronunciation functioned like a “national sounds room” where the ideal sounds of the national language were decided upon as the result of a competition among various regional dialects. Like other progressive educated elites of the time, Kang Youwei must have been inf luenced by the Japanese Meiji language reform known as the genbun itchi (the unification of spoken and written language) movement. It is not surprising that his proposal for the ideal language starts with “spoken and written language should be the same for the whole world.” In the late 1880s, following the Japanese model, Chinese reformers such as Huang Zunxian and Liang Qichao publicized the need to close the gap between spoken and written language. They also experimented with their poetry and prose writing, creating important stylistic innovations that would have a long-lasting impact on future generations. But conceptually, Huang, Liang, and Kang still believed in the fundamental competency of “classical Chinese.” They understood that the referential capacity of classical Chinese in relation to the ever-changing world was hampered because the language was




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out of contact with everyday speech. To rectify this, Liang Qichao’s prose writing deliberately fostered the use of new Japanese and other foreign loanwords and grammatical constructions. The “new style,” or the Liang Qichao’s style, was in a way a brilliant performance in the last trial of “classical Chinese.” For these late-Qing reformers, no matter how strongly they promoted alphabet systems or the vernacular, their hero in this upsetting linguistic drama remained “classical Chinese,” a troubled language that needed to be reformed and cherished. Kang’s proposal of the ideal language also manifests his acute awareness of how much the government and the education system can do for language reform. The late-Qing language reform was in many ways closely connected with education reform. Many language reform activities carried out in late Qing and early Republican China were government-backed programs. In fact, in 1898, when Kang Youwei was forty-one, he rose to great power as his ideas finally convinced the young Guangxu Emperor that the reforms were the only means to save the empire. Unfortunately, the reform only lasted one hundred days and was brought to a tragic end by the Empress Dowager. The young emperor was deposed, and some of Kang’s colleagues, including Kang’s younger brother, executed. Kang Youwei himself, along with Liang Qichao, was able to escape from Beijing, and eventually to Japan. For the next fifteen years, Kang Youwei would be in exile; he would not be able to set foot on the soil of his native land until 1913, when he was fifty-six. During his exile in India, Kang completed The Book of Great Unity. Kang’s tragic experience was in a way typical. Because the Imperial court and later the young Republican government were weak and unstable, attempts at political reform often failed to produce powerful results. What is missing from Kang’s proposal is actually the important role that the vernacular was already playing in the late- Qing language reform. By the end of the nineteenth century, the linguistic domain of the vernacular had expanded rapidly with the development of modern print culture in China. Along with alphabet systems, the vernacular was also taken up by the missionaries to publish religious materials. A considerable number of vernacular journals, magazines, and newspapers also appeared in and around urban centers. When the famous Shen


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bao (Shanghai News) began its publication in 1872, the editors decided that the newspaper would write not only for the educated but also for “peasants, laborers, businessmen, and merchants.” To achieve this goal, a supplement, Min bao (People’s News) appeared in 1876, which was probably the first newspaper written in the vernacular.33 The education reform further changed people’s perception of language and learning. In 1905, the Civil Service Examination system was abolished, meaning classical Chinese at long last had lost its institutional power. At the same time, the English language became increasingly popular in the modern school curriculum. Having realized the power of the vernacular in increasing literacy and in communicating and transmitting new ideas, political reformers consciously promoted the vernacular. In 1898, at the peak of the Hundred Days’ Reform led by Kang Youwei, Qiu Tingliang coined a slogan, “Honor the vernacular, discard classical Chinese.” In his essay “On Vernacular as the Basis for the Reform,” Qiu argues: “Classical Chinese is the best means for keeping the nation in ignorance. The vernacular is the best means for giving knowledge to the nation . . . To sum up: if classical Chinese f lourishes, learning will perish; if the vernacular expands, learning will thrive. If learning does not thrive, there will be no nation.”34 Here the vernacular is perceived as indispensable to China’s nation building and reform, and classical Chinese the formidable obstacle to progress. Qiu’s argument is already extremely close to the later May Fourth rhetoric of the vernacular that calls for the adoption of the vernacular as the national language. But one has to remember that Qiu’s essay was published in a vernacular local newspaper, which located his audiences in a very specific social context. Just as the vernacular Min bao was intended to educate and entertain “peasants, laborers, businessmen, and merchants,” the vernacular newspaper in which Qiu published his essay also limited the inf luence of his ideas. For the majority of writers at the time, the vernacular was only a tool for easy communication and mass education. Classical Chinese remained the sole literary medium for serious genres and literary works. That probably also explains why the vernacular was missing from Kang Youwei’s imagination of the ideal language. In a word, the diglossic situation that had lasted for several centuries in China had persisted in the late Qing period, although it was constantly




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under threat as classical Chinese lost power in various domains and the vernacular grew stronger. The instability of the diglossic situation can also be detected from another unique feature of the late Qing and early Republican period. Studies have shown that a wide range of styles prevailed on the literary scene prior to the May Fourth period, which, I argue, is a perfect indication of an extremely volatile linguistic environment that preceded the final breakdown of the diglossic structure. Edward Gunn identifies two kinds of linguistic transaction that accounted for the great range of styles in the beginning of the Republican era: the innovative use of style and the innovation in style.35 By “the innovative use of style,” he means, for instance, Lin Shu’s translation of foreign novels in classical Chinese. Given that the novel was supposed to be written in the vernacular, Lin’s use of classical Chinese was obviously an innovation. Making a deliberate choice of translating western novels into classical Chinese, Lin Shu must have contributed a great deal to the recognition of fiction as a serious genre, a point that Liang Qichao had to elaborate in a series of articles on fiction and modernity. On the other hand, Lin’s use of classical Chinese also made the language vulnerable. Not only did foreign narratives challenge the medium of classical Chinese, but also notably undermined the common image of classical Chinese and its conventional uses. Lin’s great success only confirmed how classical Chinese was ready to be seen in other lights, to be rendered in other ways in the late 1890s. Another example of the innovative use of style was the parallel prose novel in the four-six style that was increasingly popular by the end of the Qing and in the early Republican period. Here again, an old style was innovatively used in a new context, which not only reshaped the image of the style but also remolded the new context. As for the innovation in style, Gunn uses Liang Qichao’s “new style” as a perfect example. Unlike Lin Shu, who engaged in an innovative (subversive?) use of language codes, Liang Qichao forged a new style and created a new language code. The overwhelming characteristic of the “new style” was its hybridity, its “use of vocabulary coined by Meiji-era Japanese to translate Western texts and a set of grammatical phrases and rhetorical devices, also largely derived from Japanese.”


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The fact that Liang’s “new style” was rapidly adopted in the press was more evidence of the contemporary readers’ receptiveness to new language reforms. Other hybrid forms enjoyed similar popularity, including semi-vernacular, which mixed classical Chinese with Mandarin vernacular, and made use of Japanese loanwords. Writing fiction in Wu dialect became a fashion in the 1890s and continued onwards. This mixture and fusion of language codes prepared both writers and readers for the final conceptual overthrow of the conventional language norm in the May Fourth period. To be sure, when innovatively using or abusing classical Chinese to translate foreign novels, Lin Shu must have been very proud of his Tongcheng- style classical Chinese, which not only elevated the status of fiction but also enabled him to establish his fame. Similarly, no matter how many Japanese loanwords Liang Qichao employed in his “new style” prose, both he and his readers knew that it was his exquisite classical Chinese that made him the most important essayist of the time. The point is that no matter how pluralistic the wide range of styles in the late Qing and early Republican period seemed to be at first sight, and how complicated the linguistic tapestry of those early Republican texts were, the overarching hierarchy of classical Chinese and the vernacular remained intact. In other words, the conventional principle of diglossia was still the norm that guided people’s conception of and attitude about language. Not until the May Fourth literary revolution was this conventional norm radically attacked and the antithesis of classical Chinese and the vernacular discarded. Some scholars tend to consider the new vernacular promoted by Hu Shi and other May Fourth intellectuals just another style among many others practiced in the early Republican period. Perry Link, for instance, argues that the contribution of May Fourth writers was “the fashioning of a new form for the vernacular”: “They created a style which appeared to most readers as a strange new language strongly associated with the West and with the new Westernized elite.”36 Given that there were so many different styles in the period, and that the vernacular had been promoted by late- Qing political reformers as well as popular writers such as Bao Tianxiao, Link questions the generally




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held assertion that May Fourth writers established the vernacular as the modern Chinese literary language. While I agree with Link’s observation that the predecessors of the May Fourth generation had made a significant contribution to the vernacular movement, I think that at the same time he underestimates the importance of the May Fourth practices. What May Fourth writers created was not merely a literary style but rather a brand new social tone that transformed the old vernacular. The new vernacular is a new language, a new language associated with a different audience, different speakers, and different codes—a new language free from a binary linguistic hierarchy that had lasted in China for centuries. It was those May Fourth intellectuals who ushered in the final breakdown of the diglossic structure, which completely changed the established language attitude and language status. Although Lu Xun’s classical Chinese helped him to become the first master of the modern vernacular, it was, after all, his extraordinary ability to maneuver in this new linguistic medium that earned him acclaim. In fact, many May Fourth writers, ashamed of their impure linguistic background, made a strong effort to seek a pure modern vernacular free from the inf luence of classical Chinese. One has to admit that such an attitude toward language marked a sea change in the history of Chinese literature.

The Triumph of the Vernacular In The Triumph of the English Language, Richard Foster Jones records meticulously the process by which the English language emerged from “the uneloquent language” and “the inadequate language” to “the eloquent language” and “the ruled language.” One realizes that the struggles of the English language to prevail over the classical languages were mainly stylistic and philological. First, the Elizabethans had to demonstrate all the artistic power of the vernacular so that the English writers might be freed from a crippling sense of inferiority.37 Second, grammars and dictionaries of the English language had to be compiled and developed to render the English language a regulated and ruled tongue.38 The battles that the vernacular in modern China had


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to fight to triumph over classical Chinese were in some ways stylistic and philological, but mainly, they were ideological. While the first modern Chinese vernacular writers had to exhibit the artistic capacities of the vernacular in various literary genres, especially in poetry (the most prestigious genre in Chinese literary tradition, which was reserved only for classical Chinese), and while grammars and dictionaries had to be compiled, the most important thing for the triumph of the vernacular in modern China was the triumph of the modernist ideology that rendered the vernacular as the one and only language for a progressive utopian future, and classical Chinese the language for a ghostly past. The beginning of the May Fourth literary revolution is by now a familiar story. In January 1917, New Youth, a leading progressive journal, published an essay titled “A Modest Proposal for Literary Reform,” by Hu Shi, an overseas student who would soon become the main architect of the Chinese vernacular movement. In that essay, Hu championed the vernacular as the right medium for Chinese literature. Chen Duxiu, the chief-editor of New Youth, responded to Hu’s article with great enthusiasm, and in the very next issue, Chen himself opened fire in an essay entitled “On the Literary Revolution.” Literary revolution has been fermenting for quite some time. The immediate pioneer who first raised the f lag is my friend Hu Shi. I’m willing to be the enemy of the nation’s scholars and raise high the banner of the “Army of Literary Revolution,” in vocal support of my friend. On the banner will be written large the three great ideological tenets of our revolutionary army: 1) Down with the ornate, sycophantic literature of the aristocracy; up with the plain, expressive literature of the people! 2) Down with stale, pompous classical literature; up with fresh, sincere realist literature! 3) Down with obscure, abstruse eremitic literature; up with comprehensible, popularized social literature!39



This essay launched an unprecedented literary revolution. A word of explanation about the “May Fourth” may be in order here. The name derives from the date in 1919 when students from Beijing


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University gathered at Tian’an Men Square to protest the humiliating Treaty of Versailles that would cede to Japan territorial rights over the Chinese province of Shandong. The incident led to a series of nationwide protests against Japanese imperialism and the corruption of the Chinese government.40 With the 1919 incident as a pivot, the “May Fourth” is conventionally associated with a broader cultural movement “originating in 1915 with the founding of the journal New Youth, the leading forum for a new generation of Western-trained intellectuals, and ending roughly with the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, when many intellectuals began to move decidedly toward Marxism.”41 As discussed by Kirk Denton, “The break with tradition proposed by May Fourth intellectuals is perhaps unparalleled in world intellectual history in its radicalness. Writers like Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Wu Yu, Gao Yihan, Yi Baisha, Zhou Zuoren, and Lu Xun filled the pages of New Youth with calls for an end to oppressive social practices such as footbinding, concubinage, filial piety, and prescribed social ritual, as well as to the Confucian ethical system that seemed to legitimize them.”42 Denton’s remark demonstrates how the May Fourth period was a time of dramatic change, full of intense intellectual excitement and upheaval.43 At the time when Hu and Chen’s literary reform proposal came out, Chen Duxiu was newly appointed as the dean of the School of Letters at Beijing University, the most prestigious institution of higher education in the country. Under the leadership of Cai Yuanpei, who took over the chancellorship at the end of 1916, Beijing University was in the process of undergoing a great change. Chen and many others with new progressive ideas were invited to join the faculty. In summer 1917, Hu Shi, who had just returned from the United States, joined the faculty, teaching courses on the history of Chinese philosophy. Zhou Zuoren, another important player in the 1917 literary revolution, started his teaching at Beijing University in April 1917. In 1920, Lu Xun joined the faculty. Beijing University, thus, became a rallying point for an alliance of new intellectuals, who immediately embraced Chen’s call for a literary revolution. By the end of 1917, the literary revolution had gained enthusiastic support from a group of students at Beijing University including Fu Sinian, Gu Jiegang, Luo Jialun, Kang Baiqing,


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and others. The student magazine New Tide (with the English subtitle “Renaissance”) came into existence in 1918 to advance the idea of literary reform among students. Hu Shi’s generation of Chinese intellectuals assumed a drastically rhetoric than those late- Qing reformers such as Kang Youwei, Huang Zunxian, and Liang Qichao, who still believed in the “competency” of the Chinese language, meaning, classical Chinese. Between 1917 and 1918, Qian Xuantong, a known philologist and proponent of the 1917 literary revolution, wrote a series of letters to Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi, expressing a radical indictment of the Chinese language. In a letter dated March 14, 1918, Qian wrote: You, sir, have exerted yourself in the cause of overthrowing Confucianism, of reforming Ethics. You believe that, if the problem of ethics is not dealt with in a fundamental way, this country of ours doesn’t have much hope at all . . . I personally, have this to add: If you want to get rid of Confucianism, you cannot but get rid of the Chinese language. If you want to get rid of the naïve, crude, rigid mentality of ordinary people, you cannot but first get rid of the Chinese language.44 Here the Chinese language was deemed the repository of Confucian morality and Taoist superstition that had to be annihilated. The abandonment of the Chinese language became a prerequisite for Chinese people’s awakening to the modern world. As to what medium should be used after the Chinese language was abolished, Qian suggested Esperanto.45 Since Esperanto was still a work in progress, Qian proposed that the English language or the French language be used in the meantime. Such a condemnation of Chinese—or any language—sounds appalling to most people today, but it was certainly not that shocking to most Chinese progressive intellectuals at the time. Both Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi’s responses were also radical. Chen argued, “In the period of transition (before the Chinese language is abandoned), we need to first abolish the Chinese script. The Chinese language may be maintained for the time being, but should be written




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in Roman script.”46 Hu responded, “I completely agree with Mr. Chen Duxiu on his proposal to abolish the Chinese script while maintaining the Chinese language for the present. I believe China should have a phonetic writing system in the future.”47 It is well known that Lu Xun also mercilessly attacked the Chinese language and the Chinese script. “The Chinese script is certainly an effective tool of keeping the people ignorant . . . if we don’t get rid of these insidious germs, we will end up dead ourselves.”48 In 1919, Fu Sinian also expressed his indictment: “As the invention of ideograms was a matter of barbaric antiquity, the Chinese language used today has remained barbaric. Can one not be ashamed of its being in continuous use in the modern world?”49 All these violent attacks cried out the urgency for something new to come, something other than “classical Chinese.” Under such circumstances, the Japanese genbun itchi model for the language reform had to give way to something new. While the Japanese model advocated bridging the divide between the written and spoken language, it did not fundamentally deny the written language. What Chinese intellectuals needed at the time was a model that would describe both the destruction of “classical Chinese” and the birth of a new language. It was the European Renaissance model that captured their imagination at this particular historical juncture. While the vernacular has been perceived as the natural candidate for the “new language,” according to the conventional scholarship of modern Chinese literature, it was indeed only one among several solutions suggested by Chinese intellectuals at the early phase of the May Fourth literary revolution. In June 1918, Zhu Jingnong, one of Hu Shi’s overseas student friends, sent him a letter from the United States explaining his view of the ongoing literary revolution. Zhu wrote, These days there are four kinds of positions regarding the literary revolution: (first) reform classical Chinese, rather than abolishing classical Chinese; (second) discard classical Chinese, and reform the vernacular; (third) preserve the vernacular, and adopt a phonetic system to replace the character script; (fourth) abolish both classical Chinese and the vernacular, and adopt an alphabetic language as the national language.50


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Zhu’s observation captured the plurality of the language proposals existing at the time. Qian Xuantong’s dramatic call for the adoption of Esperanto (English or French in the meantime) to replace the Chinese language made him the representative of the fourth position. Hu Shi was certainly the spokesperson for the second position: discarding classical Chinese and reforming the vernacular. But he and Chen Duxiu would have also been sympathetic to the third position, since both of them believed that in the future the Chinese script would be replaced by a phonetic system. Considering how late- Qing reformers had been fascinated about the “sounds” and alphabetic systems, one wonders whether indeed a phonetic system could have been the new writing system that emerged from language reform. Zhu Jingnong himself represented the first position, the most conservative of the four revolutionary proposals. Although Zhu did not provide concrete suggestions on his position, his proposal to reform classical Chinese and maintain the co-existence of classical Chinese and the vernacular found its best elaboration in the writing of Liu Bannong, another important contributor to the New Youth magazine. In his important essay, “My View of Literary Reform,” Liu argues that classical Chinese and the vernacular both should be preserved, because each language has its advantages and disadvantages. The solution Liu proposes is to let the vernacular and classical Chinese exist side by side while reforming both. The reform of classical Chinese should aim at making it easier to understand and bringing it closer to the vernacular, and the reform of the vernacular should try to incorporate the eloquence of classical Chinese, while developing the vernacular’s own potential strength.51 Liu predicts that after a certain length of time, the vernacular will acquire the elegance and beauty of classical Chinese and finally obviate classical Chinese. The language reform that Liu preaches should be considered revolutionary because classical Chinese and the vernacular in his discourse are expected to be two language varieties competing equally with each other. But unlike Qian Xuantong, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi, who saw classical Chinese and the vernacular as symbols of two conf licting ideologies, Liu’s view of the language was certainly much more conservative and much less politicized. It was probably due to this conservative outlook that Liu’s essay was under-appreciated,




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both at the time and in scholars’ late recapitulation of that revolutionary period when the essay was produced. The essay has remarkable merits, both in raising a wide range of theoretical issues including the definition of literature, the classification of literature, the reform of prose literature, the reform of poetry, and in discussing a variety of technical matters including neologism, paragraphing, and punctuation. Shortly after the publication of Zhu Jingnong’s letter, a consensus had been reached in the circle of New Youth that the vernacular should be the only medium for modern Chinese literature. Hu Shi’s position (denounce classical Chinese, promote the vernacular) emerged as the dominant discourse of linguistic practice. From January 1918 on, New Youth published essays and creative writings in the vernacular. The real breakthrough, however, was the publication of Hu Shi’s essay “Toward a Constructive Theory of Literary Revolution,” which marked the point at which the May Fourth literary revolution reached a new stage: the stage of “construction.” In this essay, Hu wrote: My purpose in the “constructive revolution in Chinese literature” is simply to suggest the creation of “a literature in the national language and a national language suitable for literature.” Our aim in the literary revolution is merely to create in China a literature in the national language. A national language maybe established only after we have produced a literature in the national language; and the national language may be considered a genuine national language only after we have established a national language suitable for literature . . . Chinese literature produced by the men of letters during the last two millennia is a dead literature, written in dead language. A dead language cannot produce a living literature . . . If China needs a living literature, we must write in the vernacular, in the national language, and we must try to produce literary works in the national language.52


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The significance of these passages lies in the following aspects: (1) it reinforces the metaphor “dead vs. living language” as the guiding


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principle by which to understand the relationship between classical Chinese and the vernacular; (2) it names the “vernacular” as the “national language,” and helps to merge the “national language movement,” which started in the late Qing period and the May Fourth vernacular movement led by Hu Shi and other New Youth intellectuals; (3) different from the late- Qing reformers, who sought support from the government and education system, Hu Shi preaches a new model of promoting and engineering the vernacular language by creating a literature in the vernacular, producing a national literature in the national language. To Hu Shi, the history of Chinese literature had been an evolutionary progress of literary instruments. “The vitality of literature depends entirely upon its ability to express the sentiments and thoughts of a given period through a living medium. When the medium has become ossified, a new and vital one must be substituted for it: this is ‘literary revolution.’ ”53 Hu’s view of Chinese literature, which may be seen as “looking back with a historical, progressive perspective,” took shape in 1917, when he insisted, “Literature has changed from dynasty to dynasty, each dynasty having its own literature . . . This is not just a personal opinion held by me alone, but a truth of the progression of civilization.”54 Later this historical and progressive view was refined in Hu’s essays like “On the Evolutionary Concept of Literature” and in his important semi-scholarly work, A History of Vernacular Literature. The late- Qing reformers had applied the evolution theory to China’s language problem. Kang Youwei, on the one hand, placed his imagined ideal language at the very end of a long process of progression. Liang Qichao, on the other hand, placed phonetic languages at a more advanced stage in the evolution of human societies, and accordingly explained why countries using pictographic languages like China were backward while those using phonetic systems such as European nations made great progress. When launching a vernacular fiction magazine in 1917, Bao Tianxiao, a popular writer, used the model of evolution to promote the vernacular. However, Hu Shi was certainly the first to systematically present an evolutionist view of classical Chinese vs. the vernacular that was both powerful and persuasive. The compelling metaphor of “dead vs. living language” was reiterated in his discourse.




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Hu’s A History of Vernacular Literature starts with the shocking question: When did classical Chinese become a dead language? Hu’s answer is similarly shocking: classical Chinese became a dead language two thousand years before, in the Han dynasty. Burying classical Chinese in the grave from the very beginning, Hu recasts the history of Chinese literature as one of vernacularization, and argues that it is precisely this process of vernacularization that has periodically rejuvenated Chinese literature. Classical Chinese and the vernacular, by nature two linguistic varieties that functionally complemented each other in pre-modern China, are rendered by Hu Shi as languages of contrasting nature, one dead for two thousand years and the other living with an unlimited future. The significance of Hu’s formulation of “dead vs. living language” can never be overestimated. Up to that time, Chinese people’s conception and use of language had been shaped by the principle of diglossia. Even in the late Qing period, when the vernacular started to be recognized for its political and educational value, as a literary medium the vernacular was still deprecated. The question remained as to whether the vernacular was good enough, or useful enough, to become a wellrespected linguistic medium. By creating an evolutionary myth of the vernacular, Hu Shi replaced the conventional narrative of language with a new one. The question that his generation of intellectuals needed to address became how classical Chinese, a dead language, had haunted the present and might well murder the future in embryo. By elevating the vernacular from a vulgar tongue to a dignified but oppressed language, Hu not only invented a new “profile” for the vernacular but also redefined the linguistic-cultural landscape in which languages should be perceived and appreciated. The old distinctions associated with classical Chinese and the vernacular derived from the historical diglossic situation were, by Hu’s reinvention, transformed into a new set of binary oppositions—past/future, old/new, traditional/modern, dead/living, East/West. As a result, the vernacular became a loaded image, generating all the hope and passion for utopia, while classical Chinese took on all the guilt of the past. While pronouncing all literary works produced in classical Chinese dead literature, Hu Shi also bestowed a new name upon the vernacular:


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the “national language.” Initially the living language and now the “national language,” the vernacular was further politicized and became the literary medium one must use for the nation and for the future. When Hu Shi wrote his 1917 essay “Some Modest Suggestions for Literary Reform,” he used suyu (colloquial language) and baihua (the vernacular) interchangeably, targeting wenyan (classical Chinese, or refined language). Upon his return to China, a new term guoyu (the national language) caught his eye. In his 1918 essay “A Constructive Theory of Literary Revolution,” Hu coined his famous slogan, “A literature in the national language and a literary national language” while using baihua (the vernacular) and guoyu (the national language) interchangeably. This certainly helped the vernacular to get rid of its association with the vulgarity and the Low language derived from the historical diglossic situation. Named the “national language,” the vernacular accumulated more symbolic value and reached the peak of its reputation. Using baihua and guoyu interchangeably also gave Hu Shi the advantage of distancing the language he was promoting from the existing old vernacular, while not emphasizing such differentiation; after all, he had been fighting for the vernacular all along. Hu Shi was right in the sense that it was a brand new language that he and New Youth intellectuals were creating and experimenting with, a language different from the old existing vernacular, a language with a new social profile and a new audience, a language operated with different codes. In this sense, “national language” would be more accurate . The appearance of this “national language” marked the decisive breakdown of the conventional diglossic structure, because this language brought about a completely different linguistic landscape that replaced the conventional situation. Hu Shi’s reconfiguration of the vernacular as the “national language” also helped to bring together two groups of language and literary reformers and, thus, decisively advanced the May Fourth vernacular movement. The “national language movement” may be traced back to the late Qing period when Wu Rurun, inspired by his trip to Japan and Wang Zhao’s Mandarin Alphabet, proposed to the Imperial court to “unite the language of the Empire through Mandarin.” After the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the Ministry of Education of the




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newly established Chinese Republic continued to work on developing a unified national language, including establishing a standard national pronunciation (guoyin). In January 1917, when New Youth published Hu Shi’s essay “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature,” a National Language Study Society (Guoyu yanjiuhui) was formally set up by the Ministry of Education for the purpose of studying and promoting a standard national language. The membership of the society expanded rapidly from 1,500 in 1918, to 9,800 in 1919, to more than 12,000 in 1920.55 Hu Shi’s important 1918 essay, “A Constructive Theory of Literary Revolution,” helped to merge the vernacular proponents in the New Youth circle with those of the national language movement, thus creating a more powerful base for the 1917 literary revolution. Although bringing in the “national language movement,” Hu Shi’s discussion emphasizes a different way of promoting and engineering the national language, namely, by producing a new national literature in the national language. A strong believer in John Dewey’s experimentalism, Hu distinguished himself by his unwavering attempts to experiment and to create. His pronouncement, “we must produce literary work in the national language,” became an important call for experimenting with the vernacular in different genres of literature, which characterized the second phase of the literary revolution. After Hu Shi’s inauguration of the vernacular as the national language, how to write a new literature in the vernacular became hotly debated in New Youth and New Tide, which had been forums for exchanging views on theoretical and practical problems related to the language revolution. Two essays, one by Fu Sinian and the other by Zhou Zuoren, ref lected two main positions that the New Youth intellectuals adopted in the discussion. Fu Sinian’s essay, “How to Write in the Vernacular” presents in great detail his vision of the ideal vernacular. He argues that to write good vernacular prose one has to remember two things. First, authors must pay attention to everyday speech. They must listen to how people speak and then incorporate what they have learned into their writing. Second, authors must use a Europeanized national language. Fu writes, “My solution is to directly borrow foreign languages’ form, grammar, morphology, syntax, structure, figure of speech . . . every method in rhetoric, to create a superior national


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language, an Europeanized national language, and finally to make a Europeanized national literature.”56 As to why the ideal vernacular should be Europeanized vernacular, Fu explains it is because the ideal vernacular is logical, philosophical, and beautiful, and all these qualities have been achieved in the European languages. Fu’s naïve advocacy of Europeanization was highly acclaimed by his contemporaries, although a decade later the Europeanization of the modern vernacular would provoke much criticism from leftist writers who started the mass language movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Qu Qiubai, for instance, would say later that the May Fourth vernacular has become “dressed in European cloth and the academism of Oxford, Cambridge and Columbia,” and that the literature written in this “new wenyen” is “like an exotic banquet made for the Europeanized gentry in order to give them some exciting varieties . . . The common people cannot understand these new works just as they could not understand ancient texts and poems.”57 In his essay “Humane Literature,” Zhou Zuoren approached the same question about how to write vernacular literature from another angle, which enabled him to redefine the May Fourth literary revolution in more sophisticated terms. Claiming that all the literary revolutions in history have been revolutions in literary instruments, Hu Shi and his followers had paid almost exclusive attention to language problems. Showing that changes in literary instruments do not necessarily bring about changes in the content of literature, Zhou’s essay was the first effective attempt to question “instrumentalism” and to discuss what is beyond literary instruments. However, Zhou’s essay assumes the same highly politicized outlook that marks the other revolutionary pieces. It starts with a too-familiar shocking binary contrast: “The New Literature that we must now promote may be expressed in one simple term, ‘humane literature,’ and what we must reject is its opposite, ‘inhumane literature.’ ”58 Denouncing all traditional literature as “inhumane,” Zhou Zuoren preaches a New Literature that embodies humanity, modernity, and morality. If we say Hu Shi almost made the vernacular in modern China a language of utopia that one could and should program and pursue, Zhou Zuoren made the New Literature something similarly utopian and ideal in its content. No wonder C. T.




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Hsia would comment in his well-known A History of Modern Chinese Fiction that the basic weakness of modern Chinese literature “is its failure to engage in disinterested moral exploration.”59 Weakness or not, this was what made modern Chinese literature “modern” and “Chinese.” Modern Chinese literature was born with a highly charged political interest. On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing rallied at the Tian’an Men Square in protest against the Chinese government’s humiliating policy toward Japan.. As student demonstrations won sympathy from factory workers, merchants, and industrialists, a series of strikes took place in Beijing, Shanghai, and cities all over the country, which decisively expanded the vernacular movement beyond the major university campus in Beijing. To champion the May Fourth movement, numerous vernacular magazines and newspapers were published and circulated. In 1920, the Ministry of Education ordered that classical Chinese be replaced by the vernacular in all grades of primary schools. Later, the adoption of the vernacular also spread to the middle and high schools. By 1921, the vernacular was on its way to being both officially and popularly recognized as the “national language.”


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T WO


In June 1917, on his return trip to China from the United States, Hu Shi, who would soon become a major figure in China’s literary scene, read a small book, The Renaissance, by Edith Sichel (1862–1914). Sichel’s book, priced at a dollar, had been commissioned for the Home University Library and was intended to educate a mass American audience. Sichel was an academic, and her approach to the Renaissance was a product of centuries of knowledge transmission among elite thinkers, but her book had been written for the general public and is a good example of how ideas emerge from the academy and penetrate society.1 When Hu encountered Sichel’s book, the meeting created a “contact zone,” a space where people who are geographically and culturally separated come into contact and engage in meaning making.2 Sichel would likely never have expected her book on the European Renaissance to play a significant role in shaping a Chinese intellectual’s imagination of “vernacularization.” Hu Shi spent the seven years from 1910 to 1917 as an overseas student in the United States. He received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Cornell University in 1914, and then studied at Columbia University under the guidance of John Dewey. Hu’s understanding of renaissance would undoubtedly have been inf luenced by his years of formal education in the United States and by intimate and lively contact with American ideas and institutions. Although it is impossible to reconstruct the hermeneutic process by which Hu took in information,


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one can trace perceptions of the European Renaissance in scholarship and in the American popular imagination at the time; both of which were dominated by the Burckhardtian tradition. Peter Burke synthesizes Jacob Burckhardt’s (1818–1897) contribution to the popular and academic view of the Renaissance as follows: “[W]ith [Burckhardt], posterity associates the definition of the Renaissance in terms of the development of the individual and the discovery of the world and of man, and this is a fair verdict in the sense that it was [Burckhardt] who organized his whole essay around these ideas (together with that of ‘modernity’) rather than around the more conventional concept of the revival of antiquity.”3 In other words, Burckhardt brought about a paradigm shift and reshaped the conception of the Renaissance in Europe. While renaissance had once been confined to a rebirth of arts or of letters, Burckhardt broadened the notion by adding to it what he regarded as the essence of the period: individualism and the discovery of the world and of humanity.4 There is no evidence that Hu read Burckhardt during his years of study in the United States, but it is safe to assume that he would have learned about the Burckhardtian model by way of lectures and related reading. So, how does the Burckhardtian model play into Hu’s reading of Sichel? One might expect individualism and modernity to predominate in Hu’s understanding of renaissance, but as we shall see, Hu perceived the vernacular movement to be the major feature of the European Renaissance and the strongest basis for his invention of the Chinese Renaissance. Overall, Sichel’s small book The Renaissance follows the mainstream thought of the time, painting a Burckhardtian Renaissance slightly altered by John Addington Symonds’s version. To make the Renaissance more visual and more graspable, Sichel’s book opens with Michelangelo’s great painting of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The fresh image of Adam, “with a body naked and unashamed, and a strong arm, unimpaired by fasting, outstretched towards life and light,” presents to the reader a dramatic and even exaggerated picture of youth and emancipation. Sichel then argues that “two main things there were which the Renaissance of Western Europe signified: it signified Emancipation and Expression.”5 While Burckhardt pays great


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attention to the artistic expression, Sichel departs from him in emphasizing what she calls “a perfect passion for language.” Following the humanistic interpretative tradition, Sichel’s “passion for language” is nearly synonymous with “passion for the re-discovery of the classics, and the passion for the unearthing of manuscripts.” Only at the end of her account of this passion does she mention the vulgar tongue, “the growth of national speech and its gradual encroachment upon Latin.”6 However, it was precisely this story of emerging vernaculars that captured Hu Shi’s imagination. As Hu wrote in his diary on June 19, 1917, “[W]e can see from Sichel’s book that the national languages in Renaissance Europe all started as very small forces but ended up having wide-reaching and powerful inf luences. Hence, we who advocate vernacular literature today ought to be confident about a promising future.” 7 The problem of the vernacular was never highlighted by Burckhardt, and neither was it Sichel’s emphasis. But for Hu Shi, who for years had been occupied with the question of language reform in China, the rise of vernacular languages become the very episode that shone in the grand drama of the European Renaissance. Renaissance in China: Translation and Transculturation Hu Shi was certainly not the only person in modern China who was passionate about the Renaissance. Irene Eber, in “Thoughts on Renaissance in Modern China: Problems of Definition,” discusses how Chinese intellectuals from the late Qing and the May Fourth period understood and interpreted the term renaissance. Eber observes that earlier the notion of renaissance was loosely defined and that frequently f lowery metaphors were used in place of actual analysis. Only after the May Fourth incident in 1919 did the notion begin to crystallize, but there was still no agreement on its meaning. “Indeed, there was a variety of ideas: renaissance was freethinking and inquiry; renaissance was change in people’s attitude; renaissance was overthrow of medievalism; and renaissance was new language and literature.”8 Eber describes the volatility of the term as it moved across linguistic and cultural borders. As if opened up by the new circumstances, new needs, and new




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interests, renaissance suddenly blossomed, attracting new meanings and shedding old ones. The translation of the term renaissance in modern China is an intriguing story of transculturation.9 When renaissance first appeared in modern Chinese discourse, a number of almost identical phrases were used to translate the term, including wenyi fuxing shidai, wenyi fuxing, guxue fuxing, wenxue fugu, and wenxue fuxing. For instance, in 1904, the late- Qing reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) likened the contemporary scholarship to the Renaissance in Europe. He wrote, “It is like a growing organism that has now reached its blossom, with a f lourishing air of early spring. Hence I hold boundless hope for the future of our scholarship.”10 His use of renaissance is metaphorical, as was that of Vasari when he chose the term to describe the booming scene of fine arts in Italy. Liang uses guxue fuxing (restoration of antiquity) as the Chinese equivalent of renaissance, making no distinction between the European Renaissance and the restoration of antiquity. Zhang Taiyan (1868–1936), another important thinker in the late Qing period, also emphasizes restoration of antiquity in his translation of the concept: he uses wenxue fugu (revival of antiquity in literature), wenxue fuxing (restoration of antiquity in literature), and guxue fuxing (restoration of antiquity) interchangeably in his rhetoric of the Renaissance. In a 1906 speech given at a welcome party organized by Chinese overseas students in Tokyo, Zhang paired the revival of Han learning with the restoration of antiquity that took place in the European Renaissance, stating, “If the revival of Han learning can match what took place in the age of the revival of antiquity in literature [wenxue fugu de shihou], such a movement will certainly have the power to preserve the nation and the Han Chinese.”11 Here we actually see renaissance find its equivalent in spoken Chinese. Both Liang and Zhang use fuxing (restoration) and fugu (the restoration of antiquity) in their representation of the Renaissance. In classical Chinese, fuxing means the restoration of something—a political order, a custom, a practice—that has fallen into disuse. Zhang’s growing interest in the European Renaissance was closely tied to his anti-Manchu revolutionary cause, which championed returning to “authentically


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Chinese” culture and reviving Han learning. Similarly, Liang’s use of renaissance in relation to the Qing scholarship implied that Qing scholars had a vital role in reviving the past and infusing it with new life for the present. For both, the European Renaissance by way of its Chinese translations, fuxing and fugu, provided a perfect model that looked to the future but at the same time harked back to the past, to an essential Chinese culture. A considerable amount of resistance to the terms fuxing and fugu is visible in later generations of intellectuals, many of whom sought a better phrase to capture their understanding of renaissance. Hu Shi noted in his diary that the title of Sichel’s book The Renaissance should be translated as zaisheng shidai (the age of rebirth). He considered wenyi fuxing the Chinese equivalent of “a revival of literature and art.”12 By differentiating the Renaissance period from the revival of literature and art, Hu successfully debunked the equation that had been established in the late Qing discourse on the Renaissance. According to Hu, a revival of literature and art does not equal a Renaissance. The European Renaissance was an age of rebirth, the beginning of the use of vernacular literature, which was reborn during that period. Thus, what a renaissance is and what is to be revived received a new definition in Hu’s rhetoric: If anything is to be reborn, it is the vernacular, something far different from the essence of Chinese culture as perceived by Liang and Zhang. Other May Fourth thinkers preferred a more future-oriented word for the Chinese equivalent of renaissance. Xinchao, the Beijing University student magazine, began publication in the winter of 1918, and The Renaissance was its English subtitle. Fu Sinian (1896–1950), one of the main editors, claimed unhesitatingly that xinchao (new tide) and renaissance were exact translations of each other. For Fu and others, the Renaissance was a return to freethinking and inquiry. The essence of the term renaissance was therefore not the mere revival of antiquity but rather xinchan (new birth), xinchao (new tide) by way of free thought. From restoration of antiquity to the age of rebirth and finally to new birth and new tide, renaissance moved further and further away from its original connection with antiquity and transformed into a symbol of newness and progress.




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A renaissance as a period of liberation, a period when individuals are freed from the bondage of tradition, echoed perfectly the iconoclastic spirit of the New Cultural Movement. In June 1919, an article spoke of the European Renaissance as an “emancipating movement” and declared the May Fourth Movement a first step in this direction: “We are going to change our attitude towards life and bring about a Chinese Renaissance, emancipating emotions, emancipating thought, and demanding human rights.”13 The author’s assertion is made purely through analogy. Although what lies behind the analogy is unclear, the compelling and exciting sound of the rhetoric is what makes the idea of renaissance so readily adopted. Renaissance became a foreign concept not merely acquired by Chinese intellectuals but also substantially revised and reimagined to serve different purposes. Those who transformed it engaged in the exact kind of practice of doing things with words that transculturation describes.14 As the above discussion illustrates, the search for the right word to translate renaissance in China was always accompanied by a group’s or a cause’s claim to be creating the Chinese counterpart of the European Renaissance. The connection between the European Renaissance and the May Fourth literary revolution was consciously cultivated by May Fourth intellectuals from the beginning. The two articles that launched the May Fourth literary revolution in 1917 used the European Renaissance as a reference point to discuss the contemporary Chinese literary and cultural scene. While Hu Shi’s “Some Modest Suggestions for Literary Reform” drew on the linguistic transition that took place in the European Renaissance, Chen Duxiu’s “On Literary Revolution” emphasized the importance of the Renaissance period in the history of European civilization. Both declared that the literary revolution they called for paralleled the European Renaissance and marked that starting point of a new nation, a new China that someday would be as awe-inspiring and brilliant as its European counterpart. A decade later, when writings of May Fourth intellectuals were canonized and institutionalized, the similarity between the May Fourth literary revolution and the European Renaissance was again consciously emphasized. By then, wenyi fuxing (a revival of literature and


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art) had already become the standard Chinese equivalent of renaissance. Late Qing political reformers might have been happy that the word they chose remained in currency, but certainly not with what the term denoted in the new context. Restoration of antiquity was not in the picture: wenyi fuxing became an emblem of new birth and of many forward-looking features of modernity and progress.15 It was with this utopian definition, not the definition used by late Qing reformers that May Fourth intellectuals ref lected on their achievements in the first ten years. Their recapitulation was published in the 1930s as the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature, a ten-volume anthology of critical theory, literary debates, fiction, poetry, familiar essays, and drama produced between 1917 and 1927. The preface of the Compendium opens with the following paragraph: It has been almost two decades since the birth of the May Fourth literary movement, initiated in the 1917 New Youth magazine by Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu in Beijing. Compared to a four-thousandyear history of literature, two decades seem brief and not worthy of consideration. But in evaluating their significance for the future of Chinese culture, we realize the New Literature Movement is just like the European Renaissance, ushering in a brand new age. Although what the movement brought to the world may not be so miraculous and spectacular as what the European Renaissance produced, the adventurous spirit of these pioneers has provided a great model for our new youth, and the literary works they have created are immeasurable treasures in the history of the New Literature.16 While the Compendium authoritatively defines the New Literature through inclusion and exclusion, the preface defines the ways the New Literature should be read and interpreted through association. Readers are taught to connect the European Renaissance and the May Fourth literary movement at the beginning of their reading and understanding. Here the term renaissance is not merely a neologism that signifies some foreign period in a foreign culture, but rather a reinvented critical category used to legitimize and glorify certain literary values and practices.




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Although the term renaissance indisputably appealed both to May Fourth intellectuals and to their predecessors, later scholars have often expressed doubts about this Western-imported analogy.17 For instance, most recently Ying-shih Yu’s essay “Neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment: A Historian’s Ref lections on the May Fourth Movement” criticizes the attempts to identify the May Fourth Movement either as the “Chinese Enlightenment” or the “Chinese Renaissance.” Yu proposes discarding analogies such as “renaissance” or “enlightenment” in order to see the May Fourth Movement as it really was. In my opinion, “to see the May Fourth Movement as it really was” is to accept and respect the fact that the period was consciously and even obsessively identified as a Renaissance or an Enlightenment, by May Fourth intellectuals as well as later generations. All these terms and analogies played a significant role in May Fourth intellectuals’ self-identification and self-representation. In fact, only by closely analyzing these two analogies, “Chinese Renaissance” and “Chinese Enlightenment,” was Yu himself able to make the most important argument in his essay: that there were two contrasting projects in the May Fourth Movement, a “Renaissance” project and an “Enlightenment” project. Based on this interpretation, Yu concludes at the end of his essay that the May Fourth period was primarily one of cultural contradictions: “. . . not only were there several May Fourth projects constantly undergoing changes and often conf licting with one another, but each project also had different versions. Perhaps the safest generalization one can make about May Fourth is that it must always be understood in terms of its multidimensionality and multidirectionality.”18 Judging from this conclusion, one is tempted to rephrase the title of Yu’s essay to make it more inclusive: perhaps “Both Renaissance and Enlightenment and Yet More.” In sum, the problem of the Chinese Renaissance is not one of identifying the counterpart of the European Renaissance in a Chinese context, nor one of correcting misidentifications or misinterpretations. No “Other Renaissance” needs to be strictly analogous to the European one of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for this would only limit our understanding of the nuances of a particular (e.g., Chinese) story. Yet “renaissance” can serve as a critical term that helps us to pluralize our vision of a particular historical moment, as Ying-shih Yu’s essay


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demonstrates. It can also be one of those critical terms that help bridge China with Europe and other cultures and regions around the world, as argued above. Loose analogies to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment can be extremely helpful, after all, if we free ourselves from the old way of thinking that sees these as fixed Western “programs” superimposed on other cultures. It is true that these ideas had their origins in the West during certain historical periods, but it is also true that they were rethought and reimagined again and again in numerous non-Western contexts, and even appropriated from one non-Western context to another. The use of terms like renaissance and enlightenment in comparative studies can lead us to a truer sense of transcultural imagination and improved cross-cultural communication. The Chinese Renaissance: The Vernacular in the Making The multiple uses and interpretations of the idea of renaissance in modern China lead us to rethink renaissance as an open semiosis, subject to change, subject to redefinition and revision. The word renaissance (la rinascita) was coined in the sixteenth-century writings of the Italian artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574). In his long introduction to the Lives of the Great Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Vasari labeled the art of his time la rinascita, the rebirth, proposing that “these arts resemble nature as shown in our human bodies; and have their birth, growth, age, and death.” Vasari’s declaration of the existence of a Renaissance decisively shaped the ways in which later generations would understand his time. Both in describing a reality and in working toward creating that reality, Vasari’s speech act called into being a Renaissance both as a period and as an idea. Moving away from sixteenth-century Italy, the idea of renaissance has been reborn again and again as an act of naming and claiming in different geopolitical contexts for different purposes. When Hu Shi encounters renaissance in his deep thinking of the language problem in China, it is precisely this act of naming and claiming associated with the birth of renaissance that leads him to see the possibility of doing things with words, the possibility of promoting a Chinese renaissance that will fundamentally change the discourses of the vernacular in modern China.19




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Transculturation goes beyond translation, and, thus, the term renaissance not only operates in a translingual context but also performs in various concrete processes of verbal communication. In other words, the individual thinkers who encountered renaissance constitute only part of the story. The discussion about the reception of renaissance in the context of modern China must include some contact zones that can only be delineated by the intriguing negotiation among addresser, addressee, and the historical situation. The “hero” is, thus, a relation or an interaction, rather than an individual who uses the term renaissance in certain ways. Two of Hu Shi’s essays, each written at a critical moment in the May Fourth literary revolution, provide points of departure to examine the middle ground where we may locate the reception of renaissance at a particular moment in modern China. “Some Modest Suggestions for Literary Reform” was published in 1917 in New Youth, which launched the 1917 literary revolution. In this essay, Hu not only challenges the conventional linguistic hierarchy and champions vernacular literature as canonical, but he also forges a link between May Fourth China and Renaissance Europe. Ironically, Hu’s essay is composed in classical Chinese, the very language that he sought to overthrow. That the essay was written in classical Chinese was not surprising, since the classical language was still the common linguistic vehicle among literati at the time. Even a progressive journal like New Youth would have to wait another year and a half before publishing literary works written in the vernacular. Hu’s essay discussed a serious matter and was intended for well-educated intellectuals interested in literary reform. It was to them that Hu directed his plea: Those engaged in the present discourse on literary reform are myriad. How am I, unlearned, qualified to speak on the subject? Yet I have over the past few years, with the benefit of my friends’ argumentation, pondered and studied this matter a fair degree and the results achieved are perhaps not unworthy of discussion.20


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As a young overseas student, Hu Shi must have thought it appropriate to assume such a tone when discussing literary reform with learned scholars back home at the prestigious contemporary intellectual forum, New Youth.


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The essay revolves around eight points, termed “eight don’ts,” commonly cited as the most important principles of the May Fourth literary revolution. On each point, Hu provides some discussion and explanation. It is interesting to notice that Hu is constantly differentiating or clarifying himself. For instance, for his first point, Writing should have substance, Hu writes, “What I mean by (emphasis mine) substance is not the ‘literature conveys the Dao’ (wen yi zai dao) of the ancients. What I mean by substance are the following points.” His second point is Do not imitate the ancients. After arguing that literature has changed from dynasty to dynasty, he writes, “Since we now understand the principle of literary development, I can now proceed to a discussion of what I mean by ‘not imitating the ancients.’ ” The fourth point is Do not moan without an illness. Hu gives some examples and then writes, “This is what I mean by moaning without an illness.” Then in the section of the fifth point, Hu writes, “What I mean by the necessity of eliminating hackneyed and formulaic language can only be achieved through the creation of new phrases to describe and portray what people see and hear with their own eyes and ears or personally live through.” The sixth point is Do not use allusion. Hu writes, “Allusion in the broad sense is not what I mean by allusion.” It is remarkable that the structure of “what I mean by” is repeated so many times. The author must have believed that he needed to set the record straight and that he was keenly aware of possible misunderstandings or oppositions which his arguments might provoke. In addition, Hu tries very hard to explore the common ground between himself and his audience. For instance, on the first Don’t, Hu explains that what he means by substance are feeling and thought: A. Feeling. In the “Great Preface” to the Book of Songs it is written: “Feelings come from within and are shaped through language. If language is insufficient to express one’s feelings, then one may sigh; if sighing is insufficient, then one may chant or sing; if chanting or singing is insufficient, then one may dance with one’s hands and feet.” This is what I mean by feeling. Feeling is the soul of literature . . . B. Thought. By “thought” I mean one’s views, perceptions, and ideas. Thought need not depend on literature for transmission,




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Two points may be drawn from this paragraph. First, again we are impressed with Hu Shi’s “what I mean by” structure. Apparently it is very important for him to define (or defend) everything he writes. Second, Hu Shi is clarifying himself by resorting to a common warehouse shared by every man of letters in China. He is citing books and writers that are within the tradition, which will help connect him with his readers in the process of reading. Although Hu’s argument will move beyond the tradition later in the essay, at least at that moment his readers can be comfortable about a common basis for their communication. Near the end of the essay, Hu Shi raises the most provocative argument: that vernacular literature is truly canonical. He writes, “Today people still look down upon vernacular fiction as the lesser tradition and are not aware that Shi Nai’an, Cao Xueqin and Wu Woyao are the truly canonical and that parallel prose and regulated verse are the lesser tradition. I know that when you hear this there will certainly be some among you who simply cannot bear it.” Hu then presents the last of his “eight don’ts:” Do not avoid vulgar diction. Here, Hu Shi recapitulates the development of Chinese literature and argues that at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, Chinese literature came closest to a union of spoken and written languages and the vernacular itself had nearly become a literary language. Hu claims, “If this tendency had not been arrested, then a ‘living literature’ might have appeared in China and the great endeavor of Dante and Luther might have developed in old Cathay.” The significance of Hu Shi’s essay and the linguistic shaky ground that it embodies remind us of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, which, similarly, was composed in Latin, the classical language, and yet aimed to elevate the Florentine vernacular. Here, Hu offers Dante as a model for his countrymen. He writes a lengthy paragraph on the language


but literature is enriched by thought and thought is enriched by the value of literature. This is why the prose of Zhuangzi, the poetry of Tao Yuanming and Du Fu, the lyric meters of Xin Qiji, and the fictional narratives of Shi Nai’an are eternal.21


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(In the Middle Ages in Europe, each country had its own vulgar spoken language and Latin was the literary language. All written works used Latin, just as classical Chinese was used in China. Later, in Italy appeared Dante and other literary giants who first used their own vulgar language to write. Other countries followed suit, and national languages began to replace Latin . . . Hence, all contemporary literatures in the various European nations developed from the vulgar languages of the time. The rise of literary giants began with a “living literature” replacing a dead literature in Latin . . .)22 Here, Hu connects his cause of language reform with the European Renaissance. He implies that Europeans have set the example and that now it is time for China to follow suit—that in this universal path of progress, it is China’s turn to march forward. In a way, it is only appropriate for a person like Hu, someone well versed in Chinese and European literary history, to raise such a point. After negotiating back and forth with Chinese literary tradition and its scholarship, Hu distinguishes himself clearly as someone with access to foreign literary traditions. He places the paragraph in parentheses; if there is a center and periphery in this essay, the European Renaissance is at the periphery, while the grand Chinese literary tradition occupies the center. Renaissance in this context is a word of low profile, a word of periphery but also a word of subversion, of revolution. The author seems aware that some of his readers will be made uneasy by the association, some will be excited and welcome it, some will be ambivalent, and some might find the analogy completely out of place. But it is precisely in that unknown area, the territory where the authorial intention is tested, welcomed, defied, or revised that we locate the real reception of Hu’s discourse. Here we see the modest debut of renaissance associated with the vernacular movement on the May Fourth literary scene. The second essay, “Toward a Constructive Theory of Literary Revolution” was published in April 1918, exhorting the May Fourth


transition in the European Renaissance. Interestingly, the paragraph is in parenthesis.


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literary revolution to advance to a new stage, the stage of construction. A number of things should be noted before we examine the text. First, the essay is written in the vernacular. To put its call for literary revolution into action, New Youth started to publish serious creative works and theoretical articles written in the vernacular, Hu’s essay was among them. Second, the essay was written as a systematic and constructive theoretical guideline for the vernacular movement. By then, Hu was a professor at Beijing University—the most prominent university in China—and the most respected theorist in the circle of New Youth. The tone of the essay shows that the author was confident he would be taken seriously and embraced enthusiastically by the progressive youth. Third, the essay conveys a strong sense of being a “maker”—the maker of the national language, the maker of a new, resurrected China. The author seems intoxicated with the significance of the movement and the future it will bring to China as he extolls the differences that “we who promote the vernacular” can make in this exciting historical moment. The essay begins with a preamble in which Hu repeats his famous eight don’ts and then says he intends to continue with more positive thoughts. “I hope that we who advocate the literary revolution will exert our energies constructively, so that in the next thirty or fifty years we may create for China a school of new Chinese living literature.”23 But how to create a living literature? To answer the question, Hu coined a slogan: “A literature in the national language; a literary national language.” The main argument in his second section is that a living literature has to be written in a living language, which is the vernacular. In the third section, he explains how to create a national language, and here he repeats his story of the rise of national languages in the European Renaissance. This time, the European Renaissance is central to the essay, a powerful model to be emulated. The story is provided with more detail, and the author is now confident about the symbolic value the model embodies. However, the way in which he relates to the model he draws on becomes more problematic. Hu first claims that his argument is the result of many years’ study of the history of European languages. Having established himself as an expert, he uses Italy and England as two main examples and stresses


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that the history of the Italian national language is especially instructive for China’s current movement. According to Hu, Italy was the first country to enthrone the vernacular as the national language, and Dante was the first great master, who elevated the Italian language to replace Latin. Less than a century after Dante, Boccaccio and others wrote literary works in the vernacular and the national language of Italy was firmly established. What is striking and questionable here is the “readiness” Hu sees in his Italian model. A more factual account would show that it took much longer for the Florentine vernacular to replace Latin as the dominant written language in Italy. During this long transition, the relation between the classical language and the vernacular was complicated.24 I imagine it is Hu’s wish for a sweeping victory of the vernacular language over classical Chinese that underpins his oversimplified narrative of the Italian literary scene. His assessment of the linguistic shift in the Italian Renaissance says more about his vision of Chinese literature than it does about its Italian model. Hu’s “misrepresentation” of the Renaissance narrative can also be seen in the negativity projected onto Dante’s attitude toward Latin. Hu’s Dante sees Latin as dead and the vernacular as surpassing Latin in its beauty. It does not seem to have occurred to Hu that, although Dante’s promotion of the vernacular eventually led to its replacement of Latin, The Italian poet would never have condemned Latin as a dead language in the way Hu and his fellow May Fourth writers condemned classical Chinese. Dante had great reverence for Latin and the Latin literary tradition. It is Virgil, after all, who is chosen by Dante as the great mentor to guide the pilgrim through the journey in Inferno and Purgatory. Moreover, Dante says very little about the Latin language in his famous defense of the vernacular, De vulgari eloquentia; instead of denigrating Latin, he separates the vernacular from Latin (the artificial language), building up the vernacular as a new authority, which ultimately counterbalances the old authority. In contrast, for Hu Shi and his generation of Chinese intellectuals, the only way to establish the power of the vernacular was to dethrone and destroy classical Chinese. Hu’s reinvention of Dante as an anti-Latin hero, therefore, created a more fitting example for the Chinese vernacular movement, which could now be seen as following a respected, universal model.




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From its modest debut to this glorious staging, the European Renaissance was hence firmly established as a model for the Chinese vernacular movement. Hu’s position and intellectual inf luence, along with the symbolic value that was accorded any idea from the West, made renaissance an indispensable term. At the same time, the renaissance narrative consolidated Hu’s reputation as a great visionary leader and reaffirmed the vernacular movement as a grand project in pursuit of modernity and progress. Later May Fourth discussions of language, produced by participants such as Fu Sinian and Luo Jialun, readily accepted the analogy, and it was adopted to guide the reader through the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature in the 1930s. Moreover, as we saw in “Some Modest Suggestions for Literature Reform” and “Toward a Constructive Theory of Literary Revolution,” it is not a dictionary definition that tells us what a word signifies in a concrete historical verbal interaction, but the social tone of a word as well as the contact zone a word indicates. V.N. Volosinvov describes the phenomenon thus: “[I]n point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As a word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee . . . A word is a territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.”25 Indeed, it is in these concrete moments of historical interactions we see how renaissance decisively legitimized the May Fourth vernacular movement in modern China. The Language Problem in the Chinese Renaissance and Other Renaissances In his work on the Bengal Renaissance, David Kopf comments on a unique phenomenon that has only recently become the subject of a systematic scholarly analysis.26 The prototype of Renaissance that depicted a specific period in the history of Italian civilization and later the humanist movements of northern Europe has been appropriated after a fashion to include a cluster of people with a new consciousness of themselves as cultures. Works have appeared on Arab renaissance, social awakening in Iran,


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What Kopf has noticed is the pervasiveness of certain transcultural practices that made use of renaissance both in terms of declaration and creation. The powerful position that Western culture assumed in these times and spaces granted the term renaissance a certain aura that ideas from marginal spaces do not have. But there were an abundance of ideas from the West that could have been utilized to do things with words. Our attentions to these creative uses of renaissance in various geopolitical contexts, thus, should not be confined to the hierarchical relation forced by the power. The circulation of renaissance out of its historical origin shows the f luidity and mobility of the idea and reveals the power structure that directs the traffic, but, more importantly, it celebrates the transcultural imagination exercised by the people who participated in a complicated network of literary and cultural exchange. As shown in the above discussion, the term renaissance was creatively employed by Hu Shi to launch a new model for the May Fourth vernacular movement, inventing a new discourse of language that facilitated the triumph of the vernacular in modern China over classical Chinese and other alternative language solutions. The Renaissance model not only made the vernacular an invincible force that symbolized modernity and progress, but also justified a fatal language war between classical Chinese and the vernacular that characterized the 1917 literary revolution. Hu Shi once claimed that the mission of the Chinese Renaissance was to create “a new language, a new literature, a new outlook on life and society, and a new scholarship.”28 Apparently, the making of a new language and literature took the center stage in Hu’s imagination of a Chinese Renaissance. In fact, reforming and rebuilding a new language and literature also played a significant role in various “Other Renaissances” being declared and pronounced across the world. But how was renaissance imagined and appropriated in these other contexts? How did the idea of renaissance and language problem intertwine in these contexts, and how would this affect the formation of “modern literature” in these countries? Finally, in what way


Hebrew renaissance, the Black renaissance of colonial Africa, or Black renaissance in America, Turkish renaissance, Chinese renaissance, and of course, last but not the least, Bengal renaissance.27


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would a comparative study of the Chinese Renaissance and these Other Renaissances shed light on our understanding of literary modernity both in China and in world literature? In 1918, the year when Hu Shi pushed his Renaissance model to the center stage of the constructive theory of the May Fourth literary revolution, Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), one of the leading figures in India’s intellectual scene, wrote four essays, which appeared serially and were later published together as The Renaissance in India. In his treatise, Aurobindo starts by addressing the immense importance of this Renaissance, this new birth in India, both to India itself and to the world. To India, this Renaissance meant “the recovery or the change of her time-old spirit and national ideas”; and to the world it meant “the possibilities involved in the rearising of a force that is in many respects unlike any other and its genius very different from the mentality and spirit that have hitherto governed modern idea in mankind, although not so far away perhaps from that which is preparing to govern the future.”29 Aurobindo’s statement demonstrates a great pride in the “uniqueness” of the Indian spirit and expresses high expectations for the possibilities that await India as a nation because of such “uniqueness.” Although the treatise itself focuses on what the Renaissance meant to India itself, this “uniqueness,” which clearly refers to India’s relationship to the world, remains a centerpiece in Aurobindo’s imagination of the Indian Renaissance. While Hu Shi and his countrymen both in the late Qing and May Fourth periods searched for or imaginatively created cultural parallels between the European Renaissance and what they deemed the Chinese Renaissance, Aurobindo emphasized the difference between a unique Indian Renaissance and the European Renaissance. He saw the Renaissance that took place in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe as an overthrow of Christianized and feudalized Europe with the aid of the old Graeco-Latin spirit, which was radically different from what was happening in India at his time. It was in the recent Celtic revival in Ireland, which Aurobindo defines as “the attempt of a reawakened national spirit to find a new impulse of self-expression which shall give the spiritual force for a great reshaping and rebuilding,”30 that Aurobindo found the closest analogy. To some extent, The Renaissance in India may be read as Aurobindo’s attempt to define the “national


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spirit” that India was reawakening to as well as to map the scope and directions in which this “rebirth” will lead India. What strikes me most about Aurobindo’s treatise is its linguistic medium about which the author himself seemed to have no concern whatsoever. When describing the new literature that emerged with the Renaissance in India, Aurobindo turned to poetry and literature in Bengal. In other words, these new literary expressions in the Bengali language were what he considered as a main feature of the Indian Renaissance. However, Aurobindo’s treatise was written in the English language, a choice that he seemed to take for granted without the slightest hesitation. What role did the English language play in this “rebirth” in India? What role would it continue to play in this “Renaissance” that Aurobindo imagined for India? To that, Aurobindo offered no answer, because the question simply eluded him. As a Bengali, Aurobindo represents the Northern Indian, and specifically Bengali, notion of Renaissance.31 The Indian Renaissance he referred to started from the late eighteenth century and was promoted by both British Orientalists and Bengali intelligentsias. Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) was the first to use the word “renaissance” to describe India’s social and cultural transformation in the early nineteenth century. He claimed, “I began to think that something similar to the European renaissance might have taken place here in India.”32 An important part of this cultural transformation included the rediscovery of the Sanskrit language as well as the establishment of the vernacular language, the Bengali language, as a literary medium. I would contend that both the recovering of the old classical language and the establishing of the new vernacular language in India were narrated and mediated by a third language, the English language, the colonizer’s language. It is no secret that British Orientalists promoted the recovery of ancient Sanskrit culture, which then became the mythic and cultural roots that Indian intellectuals embraced and pursued in the Bengal Renaissance. Scholars have emphasized the “hybrid” nature of the inception of the Bengal Renaissance.33 But indeed if we say the Bengal Renaissance rediscovered the Sanskrit language as well as promoted the Bengali language, it was first and foremost a note of the triumph of the English language. Rammohan and other important Indian




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intellectuals embraced the English language as the sole language of education. Rammohan was distressed to find that the colonialist government had decided to support a new college for Sanskrit studies in 1823. In his famous letter to Lord Amherst (the Governor General), he argued against the establishment of such a school: We find that the government are establishing a Sanskrit school under Hindu pundits to impart such knowledge as is already current in India. This seminary . . . can only be expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practicable use to the possessors or to society. The pupils will there acquire what was known two thousand years ago, with the addition of vain and empty subtleties since produced by speculative men.34 Like Rammohan, many Indian intellectuals recognized the English language as an international language that was “necessary socially, politically and also culturally.”35 Such welcome of the English language also helped to promote the regional languages, such as the Bengali vernacular, since the initial English education would be conducted in the regional dialects. Aurobindo, in some ways a typical heir of the Bengal Renaissance, was raised speaking English in India and then sent to England to continue his studies both at Manchester Grammar School and at St. Paul’s in London. When he returned to India in 1893, he was multilingual in European languages and set out to further his studies in Bengali and Sanskrit. Aurobindo’s linguistic background helps explain both his language choice and his obliviousness to that choice. The linguistic medium he chose for The Renaissance in India also reveals to us that he thought of himself as an international writer producing work important not only to India but also to the world, echoing what he claims at the beginning of his treatise. But what is really interesting is this unique language attitude that was clear and powerful both in Rammohan’s openness toward the English language and in Aurobindo’s ease with the English language. There seemed to be a profound belief in the possibility of the harmonious co-existence of English, Sanskrit and Bengali. Clearly, such a language


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attitude renders the emergence of the vernaculars in India radically different from what took place in the context of modern China. Certainly, colonialism and the British occupation and linguistic invasion, shaped the specific course of the Indian situation. It is very tempting to perceive Rammohan and Aurobindo’s engagement with the English language as the complicity of indigenous intellectuals in the process of Western colonization, as Edward Said shrewdly points out in his critique of Orientalism.36 But there was probably also more to it. Indian’s openness to a foreign language was nothing new at the time of British invasion. In medieval times in Northern India, in places under Muslim rule, an educated Hindu child often learned three languages—Sanskrit, the vernacular, and Persian-Arabic. Like ancient China, ancient India was a diglossic community, with Sanskrit as the high language and various regional vernaculars as the low language co-existing, each with its particular function. The diglossic pattern changed in Northern India after the Muslim invasion, which resulted in a tri-glossia system with Sanskrit, the vernacular, and Persian-Arabic existing side by side. In Southern India, the diglossic structure remained, as a child would have brief instruction in the regional vernacular and then have gone on to study Sanskrit. These patterns again changed after the arrival of the British, as the new education system made English the sole medium of instruction and also the main subject of study.37 British colonialists, such as Macaulay (1800– 1859), who infamously stated, “A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,”38 were the main promulgators of the education in English in India. But Indian intellectuals like Rammohan Roy also wholeheartedly embraced such language policy. Their language choice must have been based on a profound belief in what the English language stood for and a deep faith in India’s power and capacity to appropriate and use a foreign language. The same kind of faith lies behind Aurobindo’s imagination of a unique Indian Renaissance. As he explains in The Renaissance in India, there may be three steps by which a transition is taking place, with the final result as a true birth and a renaissance in India.



The first step was the reception of the European contact, a radical reconsideration of many of the prominent elements and some


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revolutionary denial of the very principles of the old culture. The second was a reaction of the Indian spirit upon the European inf luence, sometimes with a total denial of what it offered and a stressing both of the essential and the strict letter of the national past, which yet masked a movement of assimilation. The third, only now beginning or recently begun, is rather a process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form, but so transmutes and indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms it entirely into itself that is foreign character disappears and it becomes another harmonious element in the characteristic working of the ancient goddess, the Shakti of India mastering and taking possession of the modern inf luence, no longer possessed or overcome by it.39 The third step that Aurobindo passionately elaborates echoes what he writes earlier in the treatise, where he defines the most difficult task of the Indian Renaissance as “an original dealing with modern problem in the light of Indian spirit and the endeavor to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritualized society.”40 The key word here is “synthesis.” Aurobindo not only believed in the revival of the Indian spiritual knowledge and experience in all its splendor, depth, and fullness, he also believed in the power and capacity of the Indian spirit to “accept” whatever it finds sound and true, to “transmute,” to “indianise,” to “absorb,” and to “transform.” It is this profound belief in “synthesis,” in the possibility of harmoniously blending different linguistic and cultural elements that marked Aurobindo’s transcultural imagination of a unique Indian Renaissance as well as his understanding of linguistic and literary modernization in India.41 Both Chinese and Indian linguistic and literary modernization emerged out of a breakdown of the conventional diglossic structure. The results were, however, strikingly different. Whereas Chinese intellectuals at that critical linguistic turn expressed an extremely negative view toward classical Chinese and the Chinese script, Indian intellectuals like Aurobindo, encouraged by British Orientalists who admired the ancient Sanskrit language, continued to possess a great sense of


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pride in their literary and cultural tradition. In modern China, Hu Shi’s discovery of the vernacular helped to establish something new, something positive that would lead to a Renaissance in China. But the triumph of the vernacular in modern China came with a deadly language war that was to ensure the demise of “classical Chinese” and the dominance of the “vernacular only” writing mode. Appropriating the European Renaissance model, Hu Shi managed to justify this completely intolerant and militant stance of the modern vernacular. Emphasizing “synthesis,” Aurobindo’s Renaissance in India embodied a more harmonious relationship with various languages that he encountered. In his paradigm, the revival of the Sanskrit tradition, the development of the Bengali literature as well as the embrace of the English language seemed to all work together to lead to a unique Renaissance in India.42 Moreover, Hu Shi’s discourse on the vernacular had always been nationalistic. Although the modern Chinese vernacular was based on Mandarin, it was never regional. The emergence of the Bengali language was, in contrast, both regional and national at the same time. The region came to prominence because of the British invasion. While the Bengal Renaissance tried to imagine an all “Indian” identity based on a regional culture, the vision was challenged later by the Tamilspeaking people in Southern India. The Tamil Renaissance promoted a separate cultural identity, with its roots in an ancient Dravidian civilization and its contemporary expressions in the Tamil vernacular. In other words, whereas the Chinese Renaissance imagined by Hu Shi envisioned a new modern China with the vernacular as its one and only official national language, the Indian Renaissance was more linguistically and culturally diversified. It might be helpful to bring into the discussion the Arab Renaissance, which took place in another widespread diglossic community. The pre-modern Arab diglossic situation was in some ways similar to the Chinese situation, although Arab intellectuals embarked on a completely different path for their linguistic and literary modernization. Al-Fusha (literally “the correct/ pure/eloquent language”) is the indigenous term for classical Arabic, the pan-Arab language, as distinct from local dialects. Fusha is the language of the Qur’an as well as of the entire canonical medieval Arabic literature. Many Arab intellectuals




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regard fusha as a sublime language. They believe that the original qualities of classical Arabic should be preserved and that it should never be contaminated by overtly foreign elements or by dialectal “vulgarisms.” Ammiyya is the Arabic term for local dialects, which are spoken languages, never having developed writing systems of their own, and regarded as inferior, homely language. There was a third type of literary material, including such masterpieces as the Thousand and One Nights, which also existed in the pre-modern Arab world. Occupying a middle ground between the oral and the written literature, these works were regarded as lowbrow literature and had earned little respectability among Arab writers.43 In China, the Mandarin vernacular, the linguistic medium of the lowbrow fiction, was transformed and became the elevated national language and the language of the future. In the Arab world, it was fusha, classical Arabic that was chosen to be the linguistic and literary agent for modernization. Such choice actually makes more sense when one realizes that there was no single Arab ammiyya dialect that was dominant enough to serve as a model for a modern pan-Arab standard language. By contrast, in China, the widespread use of the Mandarin vernacular for official and mercantile purposes in addition to literature, made it a practical, if not universally welcomed, choice in comparison to other dialects that lacked such a well-developed written form or such institutional practice. In contrast to Chinese intellectuals who condemned classical Chinese in an extremely radical way and perceived it as the obstacle to China’s modernization, Arab intellectuals extolled classical Arabic and viewed it as the Arab’s most enduring legacy, as well as the key to the Arab’s successful revival in modern times. In some respects, Arab intellectuals’ worship of their own language is nothing unique. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the glorification of a national language very frequently played significant roles in a nationalist movement. Germans, Italians, French, and other Europeans all claimed the superiority of their native tongue. Lomonosov (1711–1765), the famous Russian poet, once made the following pronouncement:


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Lord of many languages, the Russian tongue is far superior to all those of Europe, not only by the extent of the countries where


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it is dominant, but also by its own comprehensiveness and richness. Charles the Fifth, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, said that one ought to speak Spanish to the Deity, French to one’s friends, German to one’s enemies, and Italian to the fair sex. But had he been acquainted with Russian, he would assuredly have added that one could speak it with each and all; he would have discovered in it the majesty of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the strength of German, the sweetness of Italian, and in addition, energetic conciseness in its imagery, together with the richness of Greek and Latin.44 The uniqueness about the Arabs’ loyalty to their native tongue probably lies in their heightened awareness of the religious and historical dimensions of the language. Since its birth in the sixth century A.D. as an obscure dialect spoken by the Quraysh aristocracy to which the Prophet Muhammad belonged, classical Arabic evolved considerably to become this God-given language that accompanied the rise of the Arab Empire at the beginning of the eighth century and continued to serve as the major bond of kinship among the emerging Muslim states after the empire itself collapsed.45 The Arab Renaissance, Al-Nahdah, which took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, further romanticized classical Arabic, and firmly established the language as the sole literary language for the pan-Arab world. As one Syrian writer thus claimed in the 1920s: The language is the most precious treasure our forefathers left us. It lived with ancestors and outlived them. It had to contend with difficulties and proved to be stronger than they were . . . It is the soul of the Arabs . . . It is the homeland, nationalism, life and the esprit de corps. From the relationship between language and community, it appears to us quite evident that the regeneration of the community lies in the regeneration of the language in the same way that the soundness of the language is indicative of the soundness of the condition of the community that speaks it. It is so, because the language is the spirit of the vitality of the community and the sustenance of its nationalism. Can a body live without a soul, or can a soul hold on without a body?46




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Whereas the Chinese Renaissance and the Indian Renaissance emerged from the breakdown of a long-lasting conventional diglossic structure, the Arab Renaissance continued to uphold the traditional linguistic hierarchy. The various forms of vernaculars were still perceived among the Arabs as vulgar, deficient, and devoid of literary merits in the present day.47 The Western term “renaissance” was clearly appropriated in different ways in these three communities. While the European Renaissance model was reimagined to form a more fitting model for the May Fourth vernacular movement that initiated a vehement attack on classical Chinese, the term “renaissance” was appropriated in India both to encourage the revival of the classical language and to embrace the vernacular. Although the classical language, Sanskrit, was replaced by various regional languages in modern India, it remains revered as it holds the access to Indian’s past and tradition. In the Arab world, “renaissance” was only understood as the revival and the resurgence of the classical language. Their linguistic modernization has been solidly based on classical Arabic. Only in recent decades have there been more debates and practices that encouraged the literature in the vernacular or the increased presence of the vernacular in the writings in classical Arabic. Both the Chinese Renaissance and the Arab Renaissance established a highly intolerant and militant monolingual model for their modernized society. Since the 1920s, the vernacular has emerged as the dominant language on China’s literary scene. After 1949, the founding of the People’s Republic of China, such language policy became more forcefully and widely implemented under the Communist Party’s leadership.48 By contrast, in the Arab world, writers and linguists have displayed great passion for the “integrity” and “purity” of classical Arabic. With some awareness that classical Arabic might not be adequate to meet the requirements of the new literary genres and systems, a majority of the critics insist on the language’s great potential for adaptability to new situations. Foreign elements or “vulgarity” from local dialects continue to be regarded as the contamination of classical Arabic that need to be prevented. Differing from both China and Arabic-speaking countries, , modern India has become a bilingual society. It designated English as an “associate official language” that co-exists with Hindi and other literary languages (vernaculars) that represent various regional


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cultures and traditions.49 While vernacularization in the context of modern India encouraged localization, “a process of change by which universalistic orders, formations, and practices of the preceding millennium were supplemented and gradually replaced by localized forms,”50 vernacularization in modern China certainly didn’t intend to promote regional identities. In fact, Hu Shi’s nationalistic discourse of the vernacular was severely challenged when it was brought in the mid 1920s to Taiwan, a region in the process of forming its own local identity after almost three decades of Japanese colonization. In the Arab world, it was the very potential of localization that made vernacularization more unfavourable or impossible. The triumph of classical Arabic was above all the triumph of a transnational pan-Arab identity. In sum, a comparative study of the Chinese Renaissance, the Indian Renaissance, and the Arab Renaissance gives us the opportunity to see how the term “renaissance” was circulated and appropriated in various geopolitical contexts far beyond Europe, where the term originated. The juxtaposition of the Chinese Renaissance, the Indian Renaissance, and the Arab Renaissance also breaks the traditional nation-based framework of literary studies. As the study of literature has traditionally been attached to a particular territoriality—a culture, a language, a tradition—such a comparative study encourages literary practices that operate across and beyond well-established disciplines. Finally, by showing the different ways in which “modern literature” emerged from intralingual and translingual negotiation in these three communities, such a comparative study questions the often self-proclaimed “naturalness” and “inevitability” granted to certain linguistic modernity in a particular context. Perhaps the triumph of the vernacular in the context of world literature was after all not a historical necessity but rather a political choice. Perhaps a careful study of all these different forms of linguistic modernity and “modern literature” can lead us to a new understanding of world literature as a system of variations.




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T H R E E

The Shaky House

I have heard that in ancient Rome only Latin was used, but because the spoken language of each country was different, the people were troubled by Latin’s complexities. Only when the French discarded Latin in favor of French and the English discarded Latin in favor of English did French and English literature begin to f lourish . . . Since the Zhou and Qin dynasties, the form of our language has changed a number of times . . . I know that in the future a literary style which is as suitable to its age and as current as the vulgar tongue will develop. Yes, I want all peasants, workers, merchants, women, and children to be able to enjoy the advantage of literacy, and for this it will be necessary to employ a simplified writing method.1 Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a late Qing reformer, wrote the passage above in the late 1870s—decades before Hu Shi advanced the European Renaissance as the model for the May Fourth vernacular movement. But apparently, the comparison that Huang put forth went unnoticed in his time. Along with Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Huang Zunxian was one of the most active literary reformers in late Qing China. Known as the initiator of the Late Qing Poetic Revolution, Huang has been identified as the predecessor of the May Fourth vernacular writers.2 However, scholars have also pointed out that only a few of Huang’s works are actually written in the vernacular style; the


CH A P T E R


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overwhelming majority of his poems are in classical Chinese.3 Huang typically composed classical poems on modern topics to express new ideas and new thoughts, a fact that is not surprising if we consider the late Qing intellectuals’ attitude toward the vernacular. As I have discussed in earlier chapters, for Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Huang Zunxian, and their generation of men of letters, classical Chinese remained the only respectable literary medium for high genres such as poetry. Their view was still largely regulated by the conventional principle of “diglossia,” which sees the vernacular as the Low language, the language of popular culture, although an increasingly needed political tool for mass education. Such language attitude probably also explains why Huang chose to exclude most of his vernacular poems when compiling his collective works in his later years. Paul Cohen uses an excellent metaphor to describe the distinction between the late Qing generation and the generation that followed, the May Fourth generation. To argue for the newness of the late Qing generation, Cohen states, “Every generation produces its new men. But the degree of newness can vary greatly from one generation to the next. It did not take very long for man to get from trains to airplanes, but it took him thousands of years to get to trains. In these relative terms, Wang T’ao’s generation [the late- Qing generation], with one foot in pre-revolutionary China, was newer than Sun Yat-sen’s [(the May Fourth generation].”4 For Cohen, what the late Qing generation experienced in terms of the amount of cultural change was similar to a world with no trains transforming to a world with trains. Indeed, this metaphor helps us to understand the revolutionary nature of these late Qing intellectuals. But at the same time, can we say that the changes the May Fourth generation experienced was similar to a world with trains transforming to a world with airplanes? My answer would be no. I think it is the kind of destructive force, rather than material advancement, that better describes the May Fourth generation experience, which made the “newness” of these intellectuals more precarious and shaky. When the Hundred Days’ Reform led by Kang Youwei failed in 1898, Huang Zunxian was ordered to return to his hometown of Jia Ying because of his association with Kang and the reform, an order


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The Shaky House

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He made sure the building had large windows with glass panes . . . In the sunny living room, he kept exotic plants brought from Singapore, and he furnished his study with Victorian furniture. The calligraphy for the tablet on the front door, saying Jen-chinglu, was contributed by a Japanese calligrapher friend in Tokyo. In the garden . . . there were roses from London, and chrysanthemums from Germany . . . He took pleasure in working in the garden or walking around the countryside clad in a short jacket.6 What we see in Huang’s studio is like an exhibition of foreign goods, including both natural plants and cultural products. More importantly, all these goods were displayed and employed by a Chinese master, who owned the studio and who had decided to live as a recluse after being mistreated by the imperial court, as had so many men of letters before him. This is the distinction between Huang Zunxian and the May Fourth generation that would follow: The “garden of human realm” would be shattered for the next generation, and there would be no such well-balanced and exquisite place to return to for that generation. The metaphors fitting for the May Fourth generation would be the iron house or the shaky house, which reveal to us the dark and precarious existential and emotional conditions that these intellectuals had to come to terms.7 The May Fourth Generation Shu-mei Shih makes an interesting comment on May Fourth vernacular writers: “A May Fourth writer writing in the vernacular was not someone who collected the ‘words from the street corners and alleyways’ ( jietou xiangyu), as in the xiaoshuo tradition, but rather was more of a double translator, translating Chinese vernacular into a more scientific and ‘modern’ language, while translating Western and Japanese languages into Chinese.”8 Her depiction of May Fourth writers as “double translators”


that ended his lifelong efforts to advance his career as a government official. After returning to Jia Ying, Huang purchased a piece of land adjacent his house and built a studio called Ren-jing-lu (or Jen-ching-lu, the garden of human realm).5


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illuminates the linguistic complexity of the moment. First, the May Fourth period was a time when translingual practices were extremely active. Most May Fourth writers first tried their hand at translation and then moved on to creative writing. Often, good writers were good translators. Second, reforming the old vernacular to create a new national language was among the greatest concerns of May Fourth writers. It was this generation that initiated a language revolution on an unprecedented scale, as writers setting out to experiment with vernacular writing in all genres. It is only fair to call their writing a “double translation” in this sense. However, Shu-mei Shih does not mention in her discussion another intralingual practice that also played a significant role in May Fourth writers’ vernacular writing—translating or transforming classical Chinese. The language revolution carried out by the May Fourth generation sought to overthrow classical Chinese and to drive it off the stage, but, first, classical Chinese had to be translated, deformed, transformed, or purged from the new vernacular. It is in this sense that I would call May Fourth writers “triple translators,” who constantly moved from language to language, and whose writing was a unique experience that was closely tied to reading, interpreting, and translating. The question that follows is what does their role as triple translators tell us about May Fourth writers? In her discussion, Shu-mei Shih observes that the act of double translating provided May Fourth writers with immediate access to cultural and symbolic capital that others did not possess. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, Shih highlights political aspects of the May Fourth language revolution, which made the vernacular a weapon with which to symbolically subvert the authority of the classical literary tradition, and to bring fame and prestige to the emerging May Fourth writers. Shih’s argument captures the power struggle behind many linguistic transactions in the May Fourth period. However, one wonders what more lay beyond this game of power. May Fourth writers were well aware of the revolutionary significance of their literary practices. As Hu Shi wrote in one of his poems:


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… Who can doubt the literary revolution! No, I am preparing to raise its banner and become its strong support,


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Wanting to do something never done before, to open a new millennium, to get rid of the stink of corruption, and return to our finest and best. To create a new literature for our great China—this is the task of our generation, and to whom would we wish to yield it? . . . Here we see an interesting shift from “I” to “we,” which textually qualifies the hero as the spokesman of his generation. We also see an intriguing parallelism that helps to stage the hero right at the center of the poem, between the centuries that had passed by and the new millennium to come, against all those who doubt the revolution, and those who may also want to claim the mission to create a new literature. Hu’s writing exudes great confidence, boldness, and youthful authority. A careful reader may also sense some uneasiness beneath this bombast, something often associated with an experimenting writer, a characteristic that Hu himself might not have wanted to acknowledge. As the founding generation of modern Chinese literature, May Fourth writers had been canonized for their great contributions to the making of the new vernacular, and then later were harshly criticized for their dominance over other “repressed modernities.”9 But the fact that these May Fourth vernacular writers might have written in doubt and uncertainty has never been a topic of critical inquiry. The fact that these creators of the new vernacular were dealing with an unfamiliar language, or a familiar language in an unfamiliar way, is less frequently discussed— not to mention that critics have never treated May Fourth writers as polyglots who were both blessed and cursed to have experienced a dramatic language change, and whose proper abode was extremely shaky and precarious. Here we recall Heidegger’s comments, “If it is true that man finds the proper abode of his existence in language— whether he is aware of it or not—then an experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our existence.”10 As the generation to initiate and endure a watershed change in language attitudes and language status, May Fourth writers had a complex relationship with different languages. The majority of them had received their childhood education in classical Chinese and they were at home with classical Chinese. Some of them then went to modern


The Shaky House


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schools and later received higher education abroad, which enriched their linguistic repertoire and prepared them for linguistic experimenting. We will focus for the moment on one important May Fourth writer, Yu Dafu (1896–1945), to see how his position between tradition and modernity makes him a writer of languages. Yu was born into a family from the gentry in 1896. He entered a private school to receive traditional education at age six. In 1905, after the civil service examination was abolished, Yu transferred to a modern school, where he was captivated by the English language. In early 1911, disillusioned with the modern missionary school he was attending, Yu quit school to study at home by himself. He would read English for one hour before breakfast and then study classical Chinese (Tang and Song poetry as well as some famous historical works) until noon. In the afternoon he would read science textbooks, written in the vernacular. He would end his day of studying with a walk in the countryside. In 1914, at 18, Yu went to Japan. According to his own estimate, he read about 1,000 titles in European and Japanese fiction during his first four years in Japan. Not only did he have an impressive command of Japanese, but he also read books in English and German; all three languages later appeared in the short story “Sinking,” Yu’s famous literary debut in 1921. Leo Lee portrays Yu Dafu as a loner, who in the first half of his life was constantly on the move, drifting “from one school to another, one job to another, from books to wine, from friends to foe, from one city to another city, from one day to another day, one year to another year.”11 What we add to this picture is another drifting that defines Yu’s life journey: from one language to another. Yu was certainly not alone in this regard. It was common among the May Fourth generation to have to deal with different languages and to read and write different languages with different levels of emotional attachment. While the biographic account of Yu Dafu demonstrates the complex linguistic makeup of May Fourth writers, some comments made by these writers reveal the difficulties of writing in the new vernacular. The famous metaphor Hu Shi uses when describing his experience of writing the poetry in the new vernacular is “a woman walking with her newly unbound feet.” Hu’s confession vividly describes the painful struggle, both physical and psychological, that he had to endure in his


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I started to use the vernacular to write poetry in the spring of 1918. It felt like a baby learning how to walk. Both the grammar and tone of my poetry were an embarrassment to me. At that time, new poetry just came into bud; there were no rules, neither were there many role models. Therefore I didn’t know what to follow in my poetry writing. But I am grateful for this opportunity, because I was able to free myself from all bondage to convention, and to reveal a naked self in my poetry. I believe good poetry sees no separation of object and subject. It merges subject with object. Unfortunately, I am not a writer of genius, only a person who has the will to learn to walk in that direction. Judging by the poems I have written lately, my writing still betrays the air and styles of the old poetry; and I did it unconsciously. I have to admit my inability.12 It is telling to see that both Hu Shi and Yu Pingbo uses metaphors showing that their writing selves were reduced to some state of confinement and sense of incompetence. Although Yu did celebrate the freedom to escape rules, his excitement was quickly overshadowed by his sincerely humble gesture of proclaiming his inferiority. This is not merely a modesty topos. Apparently, the lack of models and Yu’s unconscious attachment to the old poetry frustrated him as a new poetry author, even to the point that he doubted he would ever become a good poet. By the1930s, Yu would abandon writing vernacular poetry completely, while continuing to write poetry in classical Chinese. People may argue that both Hu and Yu’s remarks are more about the difficulties of writing new poetry than of writing in the vernacular, but writing in the vernacular at the time meant expanding the vernacular to new territories such as poetry. In other words, writing in the vernacular in early twentieth-century China was not merely about new words, new grammar constructions, and new styles, but rather about making the vernacular a national language that was suitable for all genres. In this sense, the tremendous difficulties these poets


linguistic experimentation. Yu Pingbo, another important May Fourth writer, uses a similar metaphor in his account of writing new poetry in the vernacular:


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found in writing their new poetry have particular significance. When Dante chose to write his Divine Comedy in the vulgar tongue, he did not need to justify the status of the vernacular as a poetic medium. In fact, vernacular languages had served as a literary medium for poetry in Europe long before Dante. What Dante needed to prove was that the vernacular was qualified to be the literary medium of epic and theody. These were the high genres that had been beyond the reach of vernacular languages. This also explains why the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages contributed greatly to the elevation of vernacular languages in Europe. It took centuries for vernacular languages to take over the territories that had been traditionally reserved for Latin. As late as the 1860s, some philosophical and medical works were still being composed in Latin.13 In China, the hierarchy of genres and the corresponding linguistic mediums were quite different. Since Confucius’ time, poetry had been the most prestigious genre in Chinese culture, reserved solely for classical Chinese.14 There were times when poetry was invaded by lyrics composed in the colloquial language. But as soon as those new genres were assimilated into poetry, they were again beyond the reach of the vernacular. It is therefore only natural that the making of new poetry, the proving of the vernacular as a well qualified poetic medium, should be the most arduous task for those May Fourth writers who promoted the vernacular as the modern Chinese literary language. In contrast to the poets, short story writers in the May Fourth period seem to say little about the difficulties of writing a new vernacular fiction. The maturity and virtuosity that Lu Xun shows in his first output in short story writing seems to demonstrate that the fiction front was different, which makes sense if one considers that, by modern times, the vernacular in China had been the literary medium of novels and fiction for several hundred years. However, other symptoms convince me that short story writers also had their share of problems. I am always baff led by Lu Xun’s almost obsessive need to denounce classical Chinese. In 1925, when asked to recommend a list of books for youth education, Lu Xun again took the opportunity to attack classical Chinese and declared that no one should ever read books written in the classical language. It is hard to believe that this same Lu Xun


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had actually immersed himself in classical literature for several years before joining the May Fourth literary revolution in 1918. Scholars have made efforts to explore Lu Xun’s psyche, seeing the phenomenon as a sign of his ambivalence toward tradition and classical literature.15 My sense is that his vehement rejection of classical Chinese may also have been caused by his sudden exclusive commitment to vernacular writing after joining the New Youth, which advanced the “vernacular only” writing mode. Like many other May Fourth story writers in that period, Lu Xun was trained as a traditional man of letters, who had been accustomed to practicing prose and poetry in classical Chinese. These writers might have delighted in reading vernacular novels in their childhood, but very few of them, as adults, would try their hand at such writing.16 After joining the New Youth camp in 1918, Lu Xun made himself a short story writer and an essayist who employed only the new vernacular in his public writing. So what about those sentiments meant to be expressed in classical Chinese, in old style poetry and prose? Would they just disappear or find themselves another perfect medium, the new vernacular? In his study of Lu Xun’s classical poetry, Jon Kowallis argues that “a side of Lu Xun’s personality which had gone unexposed in his more ‘public’ writings could be brought to light by a focus on the delicate interplay of tradition and modernity that was signified by his deliberate choice of these older literary forms for vent of ‘private’ emotions within the modern context.”17 What really strikes me here is that among approximately sixty classical-style verses that Lu Xun had written, about forty were written in the 1930s. It seems as if there was a surge of creativity in classical poetry writing for Lu Xun in his later life. Among the other poems, fourteen had been written before the May Fourth period, and three between 1925 and 1930, right after the May Fourth period. In other words, the May Fourth period was a barren time for Lu Xun in terms of old poetry writing. Given that old poetry was an important venue for Lu Xun’s private feelings, where did all his energy and sentiments go in the May Fourth period? Perhaps it is here that we see the repressed side of Lu Xun’s writing self, and we understand a troubled psyche that was obsessed with classical Chinese and terrified of the haunting power of classical Chinese. Perhaps the


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need to warn all youth to stay away from classical Chinese was, after all, some displaced attempt to convince himself. While “drifting” from one language to another describes how “naturally” and often Yu Dafu and other May Fourth writers encountered different languages, the word “drifting” fails to convey a sense of heaviness and struggle that we have by now discerned in Lu Xun’s love-hate relationship with classical Chinese. In fact, for many May Fourth writers, writing in the new vernacular was a serious political and social commitment, and a genuine self-cleansing process. A perfect case study may be seen in Michel Hockx’s essay on Liu Bannong.18 As Hockx makes clear in his essay, a commitment to the new vernacular was not just a linguistic switch, but also a social gesture. Liu Bannong’s transformation from an old-style writer in Shanghai into one of the most important new vernacular advocates in Beijing between 1916 and 1918 was a difficult process. As he wrote to his close friend and fellow literary reformer Qian Xuantong, the process was like “selfcleansing,” and his regular contribution to New Youth revealed the gradual changes that were taking place within him. Another similar case was Liu Dabai’s transformation from an old poetry writer into a new poetry writer. Liu Dabai was known as one of the three revolutionary “traitors” who attacked classical Chinese in the Zhejiang literary circle. Before he joined the New Literary revolution, he had been well known for his old poetry writing. Later, proclaiming that classical Chinese is the language of ghosts and the vernacular the language of humans, Liu vowed to abandon classical style poetry and only write new vernacular poetry. His new poetry writing became a means of self-cleansing: I myself know that because I had indulged myself in old style poetry for almost thirty years, my new poetry is heavily laced with elements of tradition. It is in a way inevitable for a transitional poet like me, coming from the old to the new. Only Mr. Zhou Zuoren is an exception. However, while traditional elements would gradually fade and eventually vanish in other people’s poetry, in my poetry traditional elements always reappear like an endless cycle. This perhaps is the most blameworthy part of my poetry.19


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In other words, for Liu Dabai, studying and writing new poetry was a process of purging himself from the contamination of tradition. It was an extremely arduous process of both conversion and deconversion. Full of anxiety and uncertainty, May Fourth authors’ writing in the vernacular was a complicated process of intralingual and translingual negotiation and manipulation. Their alienation from and uncertainty about the linguistic medium they were writing in and creating set them apart from the generation before and the generation after. Late Qing writers already sensed the importance of the vernacular, but their linguistic experimentation remained centered on “classical Chinese.” Both Huang Zunxian and Liang Qichao composed in classical Chinese, while introducing modern topics and neologisms from Japan and the West. The best translators in that generation, such as Yan Fu and Lin Shu, also wrote in classical Chinese. Translators like Lin Shu spoke no foreign languages; they relied on others for an oral translation, which they then rendered in elegant classical Chinese. In many ways, late Qing writers were struggling with a familiar linguistic medium that was becoming unfamiliar. For the generation after the May Fourth, vernacular writing had already achieved its spontaneity. The kind of linguistic alienation and unfamiliarity that May Fourth writers experienced would have never appeared in the works by the next generation of writers such as Ding Ling, Ba Jin, and Shen Congwen. In that generation, translators and writers were separate groups, a clear labor division between writing and translating having already been achieved. For the kind of heightened sense of linguistic tension and unfamiliarity, May Fourth writers were more like bilingual writers and translators, whose proper abodes were also shaky, although for reasons other than a historical language change. For such a “shaky house” experience, May Fourth writers also remind us more of their foreign kin who wrote in the vernacular at analogous historical junctures of language change. Between Bi-lingualism and Multi-glossia


The Shaky House

Wang Tongzhao, an aspiring young writer in the May Fourth period, writes, “I read Mr. Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘Kong Yiji,’ and was stunned. I was not by any means able to produce anything like


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this. I am afraid that even many young intellectuals at that time were not able to understand it.”20 Wang’s words attest to how unfamiliar Lu Xun’s short story must have looked to the eyes of his contemporaries. But what constituted this unfamiliarity that was so shocking? Critics have long noticed the intriguing construction that Lu Xun designs for his text: a preface written in classical Chinese and a main text that is composed of thirteen diary entries written in the modern vernacular.21 Some scholars have suggested that this structure resembles that of traditional vernacular novels. For instance, The Dream of the Red Chamber also starts with an overall narrative in classical Chinese and then moves on to the vernacular text. While the observation seems to be true on the surface, it nevertheless misses the revolutionary significance of Lu Xun’s innovation. The way Lu Xun employs classical Chinese and the vernacular in his writing is very different from what the old vernacular novel writers had done. For an old vernacular novel, a framing narrative in classical Chinese serves a number of functions. First, it is a symbol of cultural status. It proves that the author, who is going to write in the vernacular in the main text, has the ability to manipulate the high and refined medium, classical Chinese. Second, it helps elevate the vernacular text, giving more weight and deeper meaning to the vernacular writing. Since classical Chinese is the language more suitable for abstract philosophical discourse as well as serious moral teaching, and since the vernacular is after all a medium of entertainment, it makes sense for those writers to use classical Chinese to add some significant dimensions to their texts. Third, such a structure also embodies the traditional way of Chinese thinking about literature. “Traditional Chinese critics share a core belief in literature as a harmonizing process. This process arises in the heart (xin) of a composer or author when he responds to various external processes on physiological, psychological, moral, intellectual, or intuitive levels.”22 As human experiences are organized and delivered in language or linguistic varieties suitable for different levels of experiences, one would expect that such a harmonizing process also involves orchestrating different language varieties. An old vernacular novel, with a framing narrative in classical Chinese and the main text in the vernacular side-by-side and complementing each other, constitutes a harmonious entity.


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Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman,” however, has an exactly opposite dynamic. Instead of representing a harmonious diglossic picture, it embodies the breakdown of the conventional linguistic hierarchy and a deadly language war that emerges out of this breakdown. Here a preface in classical Chinese is not used to show off the author’s “cultural status,” but rather it is used as an ideological setup. It certainly is not intended to elevate the main body of the vernacular diary, but rather to negate it. Before the vernacular text even appears, the preface defines it as “most confused and incoherent.” It does not achieve this by preaching certain philosophical or moral principles, but rather by presenting a perspective, a normal and sane perspective, according to which the vernacular author is deemed insane. The whole text is nothing like a harmonizing process, but rather a battle between two languages, two positions, and two ideological viewpoints. It is this “internal splitting” that Lu Xun’s readers have to deal with at the threshold of their reading of “Diary of a Madman.”23 Finally, a shift from the framing narrative in classical Chinese to the vernacular text in the old vernacular novel indicates no change in the narrator. The narrator is always the same person, who uses two linguistic varieties for different purposes. But in Lu Xun’s story, the framing narrative and the vernacular proper are totally separated, like two unconnected worlds, each having its own narrator. Such a splitting of the narrative voice increases the disjunction, which challenges readers’ expectations and forces them to come up with new interpretative means. Lu Xun’s text was published in 1918 in the New Youth journal. The same issue published Hu Shi’s seminal theoretical article “Towards a Constructive Theory of Literary Revolution.” As Lu Xun himself recorded in his often-cited “Preface to Call to Arms,” he was invited to make contribution to the ongoing literary revolution. At the request of Qian Xuantong, an old friend of Lu Xun, and one of the most active proponents of the 1917 literary revolution, Lu Xun agreed to write something, and the result was “Diary of a Madman.” It is, therefore, not so farfetched to see Lu Xun’s work as a part of the project of inaugurating the vernacular. It is safe to say that Lu Xun must have had a clear conscience when he chose to use classical Chinese and the vernacular alternatively to write the preface and the diary proper. His text,


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split into two universes linked with two languages and two ideological viewpoints, perfectly echoed Hu Shi’s theorization that defines classical Chinese and the vernacular as symbols of two completely conf licting forces. The new set of binary oppositions—past/future, traditional/ modern, dead/living, East/West—that Hu Shi and other revolutionary thinkers associated with classical Chinese and the vernacular found its brilliant artistic representation in Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman.” In a way, one has to come up with a different name for Lu Xun and his generation of vernacular writers. Their psychology and experience with vernacular writing had to be very different from that of traditional vernacular writers. Traditional vernacular writers knew and followed the kind of code “diglossia” regulates, while Lu Xun’s generation attempted to create a new set of codes for the use of language. It might be instructive to compare Dante and Petrarch at this point. Both Dante and Petrarch wrote in Latin and the vernacular. Both of them made tremendous contributions to the emergence of the Florentine vernacular as the literary language in Italy. But Petrarch chose to honor Latin, while Dante claimed that the vernacular is the nobler than Greek and Latin. Because of such a drastic difference in their language attitude, Dante’s experience of writing in the vernacular had to be different from Petrarch’s. In a sense, Petrarch’s beautiful sonnets simply followed the conventional practice, while Dante’s grand epic was anything but conventional.24 Perhaps that’s why the pilgrim in Divine Comedy embarked on his journey with an extremely shaky mind.25 It was the “fear” (la paura) and so much “anguish” (tanta pieta) that pierced his heart. His first word was the Latin word “Miserere.” He was asking for mercy from a stranger, who turned out to be Virgil, the great teacher of Latin literature. This might well demonstrate Dante’s experience of writing in the vernacular, an act that was both bold and precarious. What marked Dante as a revolutionary vernacular writer was not only his ideas and positions about the vernacular, and his works in and experiments with the vernacular, but also his ambitious yet unsettling experiences in writing the vernacular. In the same vein, we may argue that what marked Lu Xun and May Fourth vernacular writers as sharply different from traditional vernacular writers and their contemporary popular vernacular writers was not only their views and


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ideas about the vernacular, their experimentations with the vernacular, but also their unique and precarious writing experiences. As Lu Xun’s madman cried out his alienation and frustration while launching a war against classical Chinese, another madman who appeared on China’s literary scene in 1921 staged himself through various intralingual and translingual performances. Published in 1921, Yu Dafu’s literary debut “Sinking” was another event that shook up the May Fourth literary scene. Like Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman,” Yu’s story also baff led his contemporaries. Yu himself later recalled: I showed “Sinking” to some friends who were in Tokyo at that time. After reading it, they did not say anything. But behind my back they laughed, saying, “Will this sort of thing ever be printed in China? How can there be a fiction like this in China?” At that time Chinese literature was a chaotic scene, and the magazine New Youth by Hu Shi and others won sympathy only among a small number of students. Nobody expected that such a drastic change could come in a few years.26 So what is “this sort of thing,” and what does Yu Dafu’s story really look like? “Sinking” opens on a pastoral landscape in Japan where Yu’s nameless hero is strolling with a pocket edition of Wordsworth. Admiring the timeless and eternal Mother Nature, our hero speaks his first sentence, which is in the English language, “Oh, you serene gossamer! you beautiful gossamer!” After uttering these English words, “for reasons unknown even to himself his eyes were suddenly filled with tears.”27 The sentimental hero then starts to read Wordsworth’s poem, “The Solitary Reaper,” aloud. Two stanzas of the poem are presented in the original. Then the hero decides to render Wordsworth’s poem in Chinese. The two stanzas are, therefore, presented again in the text, only this time in the vernacular Chinese. Dissatisfied with his translation, the hero suddenly feels that he has done something silly and starts to reproach himself: “What kind of translation is that? Isn’t it as insipid as the hymns sung in church? English poetry is English poetry and Chinese poetry is Chinese poetry; why bother to translate?”28


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This opening scene immediately draws our attention to the unique way in which Yu’s hero experiences both the world and himself. By reading a foreign text, the hero is able to find his own voice as well as find peace with his environment and his disturbed psyche. Identifying himself with the romantic poet, the hero makes his words, his stroll, his poetry-reciting all sound like a performance. It is hard to tell whether he is actually expressing his nature or acting out a certain culture, or whether his nature is so shaped by this culture that the separation itself becomes pointless. I would argue that the hero’s negative view of translation reveals his desire to experience and to perform. The act of translating only transplants meaning at the cost of foreign sounds, foreign images, and foreign sensibilities. While a direct encounter with a foreign text promises a whole range of experience, a translation apparently compromises such experience. No wonder our hero is so disappointed and dismisses his translation as meaningless. Many scholars have considered the translation of world literature into Chinese at the turn of the twentieth century as the most important factor in the birth of modern Chinese literature. Translation did provide a vital tool for the writers in that period to fashion a new language as well as a new literature. But by overemphasizing the power of translation, some scholars tend to forget other more concrete and comprehensive human experiences with foreign languages. Although the problem of translation is central to May Fourth literature, it can never replace other language problems that demand a sophisticated grasp of dynamic relations between human beings and the languages involved at the instance of a discourse. The opening scene of “Sinking” provides a perfect case study to show how it is not translation but rather mimicking the sound and feeling of a foreign language that helps our hero to reach a concrete foreign world he longs for. Yu’s nameless hero, who is also the narrator of the story, displays the constant need to describe himself and to explore his disturbed psyche. The whole story is a detailed account of what he feels, thinks, and suffers, especially in terms of his sexual desire and the clash between soul and f lesh. Although self-expression had always been an important element in Chinese classical literary theory and practice, it had been reserved


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only for some literati genres (e.g., poetry and belles letters). It did not even reach the literati narrative genres (chuanqi drama and literarylanguage fiction). For vernacular fiction, there was never a proposal for a self-expressive paradigm, because the genre was virtually never free from its communal subculturalness. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the conventional narrative mode began undergoing constant experimentation.29 Writers such as Wu Jianren experimented boldly with the position, nature, and identity of the narrator in his vernacular fiction. On the other hand, through the inf luence of foreign literature, a number of romance novels that were intensely self-expressive, albeit in classical Chinese, f lourished in the 1910s. Novels such as Su Manshu’s The Lone Swan, Chen Diexian’s Huangjin sui express the narrator’s thought, feeling, perplexity, and torment, especially in regard to love and affection, to the fullest. All these artistic innovations contributed to the establishment of the self-expressive narrative mode in May Fourth vernacular fiction. As Henry Zhao observes, in those May Fourth fictions, “the narrator no longer acts as a historiographer, nor poses as moralizer, but becomes something of a memoirist and autobiographer . . . No longer conventionally semi-implicit impersonal, [the narrator] ceases to be aloof above the narrated world but either sufficiently self-characterized to give himself a self to express, or sufficiently implicit so as to allow his character to be self-expressive.”30 In his work on Meiji literature, Karatani Kojin makes an interesting observation that “interiority” and self-expression did not appear until the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, when genbun itchi was solidly established. Karatani sees Japanese interiority as a product of the writing system known as genbun itchi, not the other way around. He argues that in Japan, “Interiority is brought into being through a sense of the presence of one’s own voice, to which one listens.”31 That addresses an important literary context in which a genre known as the I-novel had been the dominant mode of writing since the Meiji period. The Japanese I-novel never made much impact on China’s literary scene, which suggests that the modern Chinese vernacular movement is inherently different from the Japanese genbun itchi movement. If Karatani is correct, genbun itchi signified a paradigm shift that paralleled


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Western phonocentrism, in which spoken language was invested with originary status and writing was assumed to be its mere derivative; this shift never took place in China. Whereas late- Qing reformers and those proponents of “national language movement” were more interested in sounds and the phonetic aspects of language reform, the mainstream May Fourth vernacular proponents and writers became increasingly occupied by problems in literature and culture. But Karatani’s argument is valuable for our understanding of modern Chinese literature in the sense that he explains how a sense of interiority was brought into being by a reformed writing system. The particular path of the selfexpressive narrative mode in May Fourth fiction might well have been shaped by “vernacularization,” which brought out a sense of alienation from the violent rupture with communal classical Chinese and a sense of confusion in identities, while facing multiple linguistic options and choices. In Yu Dafu’s case, while the conventional narrative setup was dismantled, the conventional linguistic structure was also deformed and reformed to give our narrator/hero multiple languages and linguistic varieties to play with. In one scene, Yu’s hero describes how he, in the twentieth year of his life, takes a night train from Tokyo’s central station to N. City, where he will start his college education. As the train leaves the great metropolis in the black mists of the night, our hero is overwhelmed by a thousand melancholy thoughts. “Sentimental, too sentimental,” he says, as if only the English word can convey faithfully his feelings. He then scolds himself for being sentimental; his stream of consciousness is presented as direct speech in the plain vernacular, as if he is talking to himself: “You don’t have a single sweetheart, brother, or close friend in Tokyo—so for whom are you shedding your tears? Perhaps grieving for your past, or feeling sad because you have lived there for the last two years? But haven’t you been saying you don’t care for Tokyo?”32 Then this plain speech is disrupted by a couplet in classical Chinese:


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The orioles know me well because I have long lived here; When I am getting ready to leave, they keep crying, four or five sad notes at a time.33


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The couplet is taken from a quatrain in “Bidding Goodbye to the Pavilion on the Lake on the Occasion of Moving My Home,” by the Tang poet Rong Yu. Obviously, our hero is borrowing poetic expression from traditional Chinese poetry. His rambling thoughts lead him then to the Puritans who had embarked for America: “I imagine that those cross-bearing expatriates were no less grief-stricken than I am now when sailing off the coast of their old country.” It is amazing how swiftly our hero’s thoughts wander and his language shifts. After the train has passed Yokohama, he claims that his emotions begin to quiet down. He writes a postcard to a friend. The result is a poem in classical Chinese: The crescent barely rising above the willows, I again left home for a distant horizon, First pausing in a roadside tavern crowded with reveler, Then taking off in a carriage as the street lights receded. A youth inured to partings and sorrows has few tears to shed; The luggage from a poor home consists only of old books. At night the reeds find their roots stirred by autumn waters— May you get my message at South Bank!34 The postcard is placed on top of a volume of Heine’s poetry, so after completing his own poem, our hero starts to read Heine’s poetry under the light of a dim bulb: Lebet wohl, ihr glattern Sale, Glatte Herren, glatte Frauen! Auf die Berge will ich steigen, Lachen auf euch niederschauen!35 [Goodbye, you elegant halls, Elegant men, elegant women I shall climb the mountains And laughingly look down upon you!]


The Shaky House

After presenting Heine’s poem in German, he translates it into classical Chinese. With that done, our hero is slowly transported into a land of dreams. The whole scene takes almost two pages, but these are a very unusual two pages, with different languages interacting with each


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other in unique ways. Chinese typography is constantly disrupted by foreign languages, while classical Chinese and the vernacular assume different functions to express our hero’s disturbed self. Indeed, in what way are different languages related to different aspects of our hero? Is there ever a recognizable relationship? To answer these questions we may need to look at the whole text of “Sinking,” examining when and why Yu’s hero/narrator code-switches on certain occasions. When our hero writes a postcard to his friend on that night train to Tokyo, he composes a poem in classical Chinese. The theme is parting, which constitutes a big genre in classical poetry, in a way making our hero’s writing a performance. Isn’t he doing what a traditional man of letters is supposed to do on such an occasion? When writing his own poem, our hero is identifying himself with all those poets from the past who had experienced similar sorrow and sadness. Later when he gets drunk at the restaurant, feeling humiliated by the Japanese customers in the next room who are singing Japanese songs, he again resorts to classical Chinese to express his sentiment. By evoking several traditional poets whose talents only caused them misery, he transports himself safely to this land of talent. The poem ends on a strong patriotic note: “Looking homeward across the misted sea, / I too weep for my beloved country.”36 In discussing Yu’s autobiographic writing, Leo Lee argues that while scholars of Yu Dafu have all emphasized “his constant need to describe himself,” few have noticed his equally persistent need to describe himself beyond himself—to construct visions of himself.37 Here classical Chinese and classical poetry writing all become means to help Yu to reach the kind of visions he deems desirable. Along the same line, foreign languages also allow our hero to get closer to his visions of his self. In the opening scene, Wordsworth’s poem, indeed, the English language itself, helps to stage our hero in a romantic drama. Later, when describing the hero’s after-supper walk in the countryside, he writes, “After supper he would put on his black serge cloak (le manteau) and, a favorite book in hand, take a walk in the lingering glow of the setting sun. Most probably it was during these idyllic wanderings that he developed his passion for nature.”38 It is important for the narrator that the black serge cloak be spelled out, that it is le manteau, and that the idyllic wanderings appear the way it


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is, for these are the places that will transport both the hero and his viewers to the other world that is being envisioned. Here we can see, while some of our hero’s sentiments such as friendship, patriotism, and homesickness are reserved for classical Chinese, other sentiments like loneliness, melancholy, and sexual anxiety are expressed with foreign terms. When describing the hero’s pathologies, the narrator switches to English; “megalomania” and “hypochondria” are the two words used to describe him to the reader. “Hypochondria” later appears one more time with its Chinese equivalent. With its rich connotation, the English word “hypochondria” seems to perfectly characterize the otherness of our hero/narrator, who has been asserting and performing his differences throughout the text. There is no doubt that Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” displays a complex linguistic landscape, which may indeed be one of the reasons his friends in Tokyo referred to it as “this sort of thing.” But what is striking to me is that Yu Dafu’s use or abuse of different languages shows a very different pattern from what we see in Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman.” In his work, Lu Xun made every effort to transform classical Chinese and the vernacular (two language varieties) into two completely opposite languages. The paradigm shift we see from his text is what I call “from diglossia to bi-lingualism.” Classical Chinese and the vernacular, two complementary language varieties in the old diglossic structure, were approached bi-lingually in Lu Xun’s writing, presented as two languages, and as two ideological forces completely disconnected and in conf lict. In “Diary of a Madman,” when classical Chinese enters the vernacular diary, it is put into quotation marks and transformed. When the vernacular writer enters the preface written in classical Chinese, he recovers and becomes another normal person speaking in old wisdom. Readers at the threshold of their reading are asked to make cognitive, linguistic, perceptive, and political choices. They may identify with the narrator in the preface, who writes in classical Chinese and assumes the traditional voice associated with the Confucian moral system. Or they may choose to sympathize with the madman who writes in the vernacular and expresses uncompromising hatred for the old convention. There is hardly any middle road. In contrast, what we see in Yu Dafu’s text is different.


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Compared to Lu Xun’s drastic bi-lingual approach, Yu’s writing in the vernacular may be called “multi-glossic.” In Yu’s “Sinking,” classical Chinese, the vernacular, and foreign languages all exist harmoniously to serve the needs of our hero/narrator. As our hero/ narrator creates and performs various visions of his self according to different lingual/cultural traditions, those languages anchor him in his visionary world. Here, we readers are invited to a multilingual playing field, following and identifying with our hero’s multi- glossic self. To conclude, I argue that Lu Xun’s bi-lingual approach toward the vernacular and Yu Dafu’s multi-glossic manner of taking on the vernacular may be seen as the two extreme ends of the wide spectrum of language attitudes among May Fourth writers. For instance, Liu Dabai, who transformed himself from an old poetry writer into a new poetry writer in the late 1910s, shared with Lu Xun the violent bi-lingual approach as well as the obsessive need to condemn classical Chinese. Condemning classical Chinese as the language of ghosts, Liu discarded classical style poetry and limited himself exclusively to new vernacular poetry after joining the New Youth camp. Yu Pingbo, another May Fourth writer, made a different move. As one of the most important new-poetry writers in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Yu was perfectly comfortable switching between the two modes of writing, exploring the same theme both in classical Chinese and in the vernacular. He did not see writing in classical Chinese and in the vernacular as mutually exclusive political acts. His language choice drew him closer to Yu Dafu’s multi-glossic endorsement of the vernacular. From bi-lingually fighting the language war to multi-glossically playing with languages, May Fourth writers made their own individual choices while embarking on their writing in the vernacular. These choices were made unconsciously, or consciously, based on each writer’s political allegiance, personal characteristics, and literary temperament. It is safe to say that the more rooted in tradition the writer, the more likely he was to lean toward the bi-lingual way, in order to block out the interference of classical Chinese. Ultimately, these writers had to live with the profound psychological consequences of these choices for the rest of their lives.


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In his book on the origins of modern Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin discusses the “unfamiliarity” that Meiji writers such as Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) and Mori Ogai (1862–1922) experienced when they wrote in the new literary medium for the Japanese language. According to Karatani, as a writer “who wrote fiction in the morning and lost himself in a world of Chinese poetry and ink-brush painting in the afternoon,”39 Soseki must have retained a certain “unfamiliarity,” rejecting the new genbun itchi system which honored phonetic speech (Western phonocentrism) over the writing form, represented by the figurative Chinese characters. Citing Soseki’s discussion on “what is literature” in his Theory of Literature, Karatani explores the fear and anxiety that Soseki experienced under the inf luence of a new literary paradigm: As a child I enjoyed studying the Chinese classics. Although the time I spent in this kind of study was not long, it was from the Chinese classics that I learned, however vaguely and obscurely, what literature was. In my heart, I hoped that it would be the same way when I read English literature, and that I would not necessarily begrudge giving my whole life, if that were necessary, to its study. I had years ahead of me, I cannot say that I lacked the time to study English literature. But what I resent is that despite my study I never mastered it. When I graduated I was plagued by the fear that somehow I had been cheated by English literature.40 It is from Soseki’s doubt and fear that he had been “cheated” by English literature that Karatani sees in Soseki “the anxiety of a man who suddenly finds himself in the midst of a ‘landscape.’ ” In other words, Soseki discovered that his study of English literature brought him a new “epistemological constellation” that replaced the old familiar kanbungaku. Soseki’s attachment to Chinese Classics and his decision to study English—therefore, to be in a new “landscape”—led him to some understanding of the “ideological” nature of what is called “literature.” According to Karatani, “Soseki, while refusing to recognize


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the universality of the West, never attempted to idealize the universality of Asia. In this sense Soseki’s attitude may be described as ‘scientific’ . . . Soseki did not advocate anything positive. Rather he continued to think from the unstable position of one who finds himself ‘between’ East and West, seeking refuge in neither pole of the opposition.”41 Geographically speaking, the closest foreign kin of May Fourth writers were Japanese Meiji generation writers. But thinking about Lu Xun (1881–1936) in light of Natsume Soseki, one has to admit that the precariousness and shakiness that Soseki experienced was quite different from what Lu Xun experienced. It might be helpful to recount the comparison of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman,” the first textual performance of the literary medium of modern Chinese literature, and Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo, the first textual performance of the literary medium of modern Japanese literature, which I mentioned in the introduction. While Lu Xun’s text presents a madman crying out his indictment of classical Chinese and the Confucian tradition, Ukigumo centers on the relationship between Bunzo, a progressive intellectual of Meiji era, and Osei, a Westernesque femme fatale, who is ethnically Japanese but evokes the West in her physical appearance, lifestyle, and language use.42 To put it more precisely, Ukigumo is about Bunzo’s disillusion with Osei, who was first idolized as a bearer of Truth, but eventually perceived as a siren-song singer. While Lu Xun’s protagonist suffered schizophrenia as he fought a self-destructive battle, Futabatei’s protagonist was lost and paralyzed precisely because he was cheated and betrayed by his Westernesque muse. Bunzo’s painful discovery about “Osei” is in many ways reminiscent of Soseki’s anxiety over waking up in the midst of a “landscape.” Although the precariousness they experienced might differ or the conditions under which they wrote in the vernacular might vary, both the Chinese May Fourth generation and the Japanese Meiji generation were blessed and cursed at the same time by a tremendous linguistic upheaval that very few writers in world literary history have had to endure. The linguistic anxiety and uncertainty that these writers expressed in their writing in the vernacular, an unfamiliar literary medium that was taking shape as it was being written, clearly identify them as members of the “Shaky House” family. Here again, by the “Shaky House” family,


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I mean the specific kind of vernacular literature produced at certain historical junctures of linguistic upheaval, whose writing begins with a revolutionary language choice, and whose literary medium manifests dramatic language change and is replete with linguistic tension and precariousness. I have also considered Dante (1265–1321), another prominent figure in the “Shaky House” family, whose pilgrim in the Divine Comedy was filled with fear and anxiety at the outset of his journey, begging for help from his Latin master, Virgil. I have argued that Dante’s precarious language choice and his extreme awareness of the inarticulate and unfamiliar space in which he was operating reveal to us his existential and emotional condition of writing in the vernacular. Here we may include one more important figure in the “Shaky House” family, Martin Luther (1483–1546), whose Bible translation anticipated and brought about a language change that had profound impact on the becoming of the German language. Unlike these other writers, Luther was a translator, although not an ordinary translator, but a translator who aimed at Germanization (Verdeutschung).43 What Luther did in the process of his translation was to transform the Hochdeutsch, one among the multiplicity of Mundarten (dialects), into a lingua franca, making it into the medium of written German for later generations. “In the Lutheran translation, a first and decisive self-affirmation of literary German is played out. A great ‘reformer,’ Luther is henceforth considered a great writer, a creator of language.”44 In the same vein, we may also find “family resemblance” in Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560) in the French Renaissance, who wrote The Defense and Illustration of the French Language, and in Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), in the Italian Renaissance, whose generation engaged in serious debate over the questione della lingua and facilitated the emergence of Dante’s Italian as the literary language of Italy. In her recent study of American literature and world literature, Wai Chee Dimock proposes a new theorization of genre as a world system, considering genre not just a theory of classification but also a theory of interconnection. She states, “Kin is every bit as important as kind. And by kin, what I have in mind is not necessarily a genealogical connection, but just as often, a broad spectrum of affinities, interesting when seen in conjunction, but not themselves organically linked.”45 Lu Xun,


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Natsume Soseki, Dante, and Luther are certainly not genealogically connected, but to see them in conjunction, to consider in conjunction the precarious conditions these writers experienced in writing in the vernacular, does provide us with a new perspective from which to approach world literature, and to see world literature as a system with variations. In fact, geographically located between the Chinese May Fourth generation and the Japanese Meiji generation, another group of writers also belongs to the “Shaky House” family, who nevertheless represent another variation to the system: the first Taiwanese vernacular writers. Strongly inf luenced by the May Fourth vernacular movement on the mainland, Taiwanese intellectuals launched their New Literature Movement in the mid-1920s, promoting vernacular writing and literary modernity. In 1924, Zhang Wojun (1902–1955) published a series of articles attacking traditional poets in Taiwan’s literary circle. To provide basic concepts, terms, and arguments for the vernacular movement in Taiwan, Zhang introduced Hu Shi’s discourse on the vernacular, including Hu’s eight don’ts from “A Modest Proposal for Literary Reform” and the slogan “a literature in the national language and a literary national language” from Hu’s seminal article, “Toward a Constructive Theory of Literary Revolution.” By the mid-1920s, Taiwan had already been Japan’s colony for almost three decades, although the cultural identity of Taiwanese intellectuals at the time remained predominantly Chinese.46 The majority of the first generation of Taiwanese New Literature writers was well versed in classical Chinese, and most of them were also trained in Japanese and had received a modern education. Lai He, (1894–1943), regarded as the “father of Taiwanese New Literature,” knew the Japanese language well, although he never used it in his creative writing. Looking at the conditions under which that generation of Taiwanese writers took on the vernacular, one realizes that they struggled in very different areas from their mainland cousins. Whereas the May Fourth generation writers experienced a great deal of tension and anxiety in their break with the past, to cleanse their writing of the vestiges of tradition and classical Chinese, the first Taiwanese vernacular writers encountered huge difficulties in trying to master the right “vernacular” language for their


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writing. As the legend goes, Lai He usually wrote his fiction in classical Chinese first, translated it into the vernacular (Mandarin-based modern Chinese literary language), and then revised it to add more Taiwanese colloquialisms. It seems that in Taiwan, the tension between the local and the national inherent in the idea of the vernacular became fully developed and profoundly affected writers’ experiences in writing in the vernacular. Indeed, when the vernacular was introduced into Taiwan by Huang Chengcong and Huang Chaoqin in their 1923 essays, it was introduced as one kind of vernacular, the vernacular of China, a vernacular more widely used than “our” vernacular, namely, the vernacular of Taiwan.47 Instead of seeing the modern vernacular from China as the national language of China, these two Taiwanese authors perceived it as the vernacular of China, based on a dialect not their own, the Beijing dialect. In other words, as soon as the idea of the vernacular arrived in Taiwan from mainland China, its local counterpart, the vernacular of Taiwan, was also evoked as a significant counterpoint of reference. Since the modern vernacular from China was considered a vernacular rooted in the Beijing dialect, which most people in Taiwan did not know, and were not ashamed of not knowing, a natural reaction was that the true vernacular in Taiwan should be a vernacular based on the Taiwan dialect. Very quickly, the discourse of the vernacular in Taiwan became focused on creating local literature in the local vernacular. Nanyin (Sounds from the South) became one of the first magazines of the Taiwanese language movement in the early 1930s, publishing debates on the localization of literature. The second generation of Taiwanese New Literature Writers such as Huang Shihui declared that we should “write an essay in tai-oan-oe (Taiwanese), compose a poem in tai-oan-oe, and deal with things that happen in Taiwan.”48 In some way, to find the closer foreign kin to the My Fourth generation, one has to travel afar to a place geographically located between the East and West, the modern Republic of Turkey. In terms of its drastic iconoclasm, and its extreme obsession about “breaking with the past,” the May Fourth generation finds its counterpart in the Turkish intellectuals in the early twentieth century who launched a series of literary revolutions to create a new language, promoting a common


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Turkish speech while simplifying literary Ottoman by purging from it borrowed Arabic and Persian syntax and rooting out foreign lexical items which were not a part of common speech.49 In April 1911, in an essay titled “The New Language,” Omer Seyfettin, (1884–1920), one of the most prominent members of a progressive group called the “Young Pens,” asked the critical question, “Why have we no national literature?” Echoing the emerging new consciousness of being Turks rather than Ottoman subjects, Omer Seyfettin believed that the Turkish identity crisis could be resolved only by achieving an authentic national character and creating a pure tongue, a new language: “. . . not to blindly make dry imitations of yesterday’s language, but rather to set up and disseminate a brand new tongue.”50 Omer Seyfettin’s rationale eventually became the official language policy of Republican Turkey. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed and gave way to the new Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938), created a homogeneous nation-state, engaging modernization in all walks of life, including the language revolution, which was carried out with lightning speed in the late 1920s. The Arabic script, which the Turks had used for a millennium, was replaced by the Latin alphabet; and the vast amount of vocabulary borrowings from Arabic and Persian were purged from the Turkish language.51 The transformation of the language was so vast and profound that one can understand from these eloquent lines by a Turkish poet, which embodies the revolutionary experience, the disorientation as well as the precarious conditions under which he wrote: We are the novices of new life All our knowledge is transformed Our poetry, our love all over again Maybe we are living the last bad days Maybe we shall live the first good days, too There is something bitter in this air Between the past and the future Between suffering and joy Between anger and forgiveness52


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the May Fourth period certainly left a lasting imprint on the psyche of May Fourth writers. Scholars have long noticed a peculiar “mood” that accompanied the building of literary and cultural modernity in early twentieth-century China: kumen. Translated as “suffering,” “agony,” “mental anguish,” or “depression,” kumen was a very popular term in 1920s China. Using Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” as one of the earliest modern literary usage of kumen, Jing Tsu explores this suffering that permeated China’s political, social, cultural, and literary life: “No one would contest the fact that Chinese intellectuals and writers faced great uncertainty regarding their nation’s destiny and their own roles in it during these decades of transition. Even less would one cast doubt upon the degree of torment these individuals proclaimed in their struggle with the project of nation building.”53 My question, however, would be that to what degree this often-objectless cultural suffering might have also been closely related to the sudden change in a long-lasting linguistic landscape, and to the kind of semiotic and emotional disturbance that May Fourth writers had to come to terms with in their writing. What deserves special attention here is that both Lu Xun and Yu Dafu chose to explore a deeply disturbed psyche in their literary debuts in the modern vernacular. While Lu Xun’s text pictures a schizophrenic who is constantly reading, interpreting, and reasoning, despite extreme fear and anxiety, Yu Dafu’s hypochondriac hero staged his multi-lingual performances by reading, translating, crying, and daydreaming. Yu’s fascination with “hypochondria” has been attributed to Sato Haruo, one of the leading Japanese “I-novel” (shi-shosetsu) writers, in whose novels “hypochondria” is an essential feature of the romantic hero and thus a prevalent theme.54 But if we read carefully how Yu himself describes the genesis of his hero/narrator’s hypochondria, we might think otherwise: After he had returned home, he shut himself in his study all day and sought guidance and companionship in the library of his grandfather, father, and elder brother. The number of poems he wrote in his diary began to grow. On occasions he also wrote stories in an ornate style, featuring himself as a romantic knighterrant and the two daughters of the widow next door as children


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of nobility. Naturally, the scenic descriptions in these stories were simply idyllic pictures of his hometown. Sometimes, when the mood struck him, he would translate his own stories into some foreign language, employing the simple vocabulary at his command. In a word, he was more and more enveloped in a world of fantasy, and it was probably during this time that the seed of hypochondria were sown.55 Doesn’t this remind us of Don Quixote, who creates a fantasy world and gets lost in it? The difference is that our hero’s desire is so strong that he also translates his own stories into some foreign language, to get lost in a foreign land. Moving between languages and books, our hero is invited into a multiplicity of worlds, making these familiar and unfamiliar worlds his newly found playground. Suddenly, the signifiers multiplied, while the signified being challenged and redefined. Playing with languages and playing with identities underpins Yu Dafu’s idea of hypochondria and his linguistic madness, which brings to mind what could be considered yet another foreign kin of May Fourth writers: Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533). First published in 1521, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso came into being when the questione della lingua was heatedly debated in Italy. The book certainly came from a very different tradition. “I sing of knights and ladies, of love and arms, of courtly chivalry, of courageous deeds— all from the time when the Moors crossed the sea from Africa and wrought havoc in France.”56 While this opening of Orlando Furioso would definitely remind the sixteenth-century readers of the opening of classic epics, it also disassociates itself from them. Virgil starts the Aeneid with a very short phrase, “Arma virumque cano,” and compacts in it the theme of his epic, the war, and the man. But Ariosto’s poem starts with a list: “Le donne, I cavalier, l’arme, gli amori, le cortesie, l’audaci imprese ….” Even in these first two lines of Orlando Furioso, Ariosto already makes explicit what his readers will encounter in his textual world. Instead of one or two themes, Ariosto’s readers will encounter many events and characters that are not hierarchical by nature but rather gathered as equal entities.


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The central theme of Orlando Furioso is, of course, the quest. Even in Canto 1, this theme has already run multiple times. Ariosto’s readers are accustomed to meeting knights in quest of their charger, their helmet, and their lover. Naming the book after Orlando, Ariosto, nevertheless, has no intention of making Orlando’s quest for Angelica the one that overshadows the many variations; Orlando’s episode only occupies a very limited narrative space in Orlando Furioso. Ariosto’s text is by all means a world that “the many” showcases. Canto 23, the middle canto of Orlando Furioso, is where Orlando goes mad. On the brink of madness, he reads two sets of writing: the entwined names of Medoro and Angelica carved on the trees and the Arabian inscriptions on the wall of the cave where these two lovers shared the joy of love. Two factors make this mad scene truly overwhelming. First, at that moment, Orlando is forced to face the explosion of signs. Orlando sees inscriptions on many of the trees by the shady bank. He sees the names “Angelica” and “Medoro” in a hundred places, united by a hundred love knots. The pervasiveness of the Arabic calligraphy further makes the inscription seem to be endlessly proliferating written signs. Second, Ariosto carefully leads his readers to the variability of language. He gives a painstaking description of Orlando’s knowledge of Arabic and other languages, and of how his knowledge of many tongues now brings him unbearable pain. Five and six times, poor Orlando re-reads the Arabic script, trying in vain to wish it away, but it becomes clearer with each reading. In this sense, the “Furioso” Orlando takes on is not merely love madness, but also a semiotic confusion about the proliferation of signs, about a world of “the many.” In his illuminating article, “The Language of Madness in the Renaissance,” Paolo Valesio gives five reasons why in Renaissance Europe the representation of madness, especially in its verbal aspect, receives special attention. At the top of his list is “the heightened awareness of the vast number, and the structural diversity of human languages.” He writes, “Of course, it is not that during the Middle Ages there was no awareness of different languages. But the geographical explorations during this period (Renaissance) give a new impetus to this awareness of the difference among languages, especially


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because of contacts with ‘exotic’ languages.”57 I think Ariosto’s fascination about the proliferation of signs, about a world of “many,” and about the “furioso” quite possibly results from this heightened awareness of various languages, which again leads us back to Yu Dafu, whose multi-glossic endorsement of the vernacular ref lects the similar kind of heightened awareness of different languages and its attendant anxieties.


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FOU R


When looking back nearly two decades later, Liu Yazi (1887–1958), a late convert to the May Fourth vernacular movement, wrote about what he experienced in the late 1910s and early 1920s: When the New Cultural Movement first happened, the debate between classical Chinese and the vernacular was at its height. Initially, I assumed the traditional literary view and opposed the vernacular vehemently. Then I decided to stay away from it and let it be. Finally, I noticed that I shared more similar views with those people who promoted the vernacular, and on the other hand, there was a world of difference between me and those who promoted classical Chinese and attacked the vernacular. Therefore, I gradually shifted toward the camp of the vernacular. In the meantime, I also realized the difficulties in introducing the New Thoughts in classical Chinese, and came to terms with the necessity of adopting a new literary instrument. After that I became totally on the side of the New Cultural Movement.1 Several points in this passage deserve careful consideration. First, Liu clearly traces his conversion from an enemy of the vernacular, to an onlooker who stays on the sideline, to a sympathetic supporter who gradually shifts towards the camp of the vernacular, and finally to an active participant in and advocate of the vernacular movement. Although Liu didn’t specify the years during which this conversion took place,


CH A P T E R


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as I shall demonstrate later, his multi-phased position change took place within a relatively short period, roughly between 1918 and 1923. Undoubtedly, these turbulent years were very unsettling for writers like Liu Yazi, who started from a position opposite the New Cultural Movement but then tried very hard to accommodate themselves to a changing and much-changed social-linguistic landscape. Second, in Liu’s ref lection, the event was presented just like a military battle, with two opposing camps confronting each other. One step at a time, he moved from the classical Chinese camp to the vernacular camp. There must also have been people who stayed in the classical Chinese camp, or who left the old camp but somehow stopped before arriving at the new camp. In a way, Liu Yazi’s conversion to the vernacular side in 1923 was a timely one, because by then the outcome of the battle was clear: the New Cultural Movement had won. Third, Liu perceived the vernacular as a new literary instrument more useful than classical Chinese and much needed for the new culture. But he would soon realize that the adoption of the vernacular in replacement of classical Chinese was never quite like taking on a new tool while getting rid of an old one. Although an established poet in classical Chinese, Liu Yazi would never learn how to write poetry in the vernacular. In this sense, as a writer his conversion to the vernacular only meant the death of his writing career. All his life, Liu would continue to write classical poetry while ideologically advocating the vernacular and the New Cultural Movement. Liu Yazi and His Choices Mikhail Bakhtin commented on the two conf licting forces of language: the centripetal forces that strive to make one language rule and the centrifugal forces that work in the process of decentralization: Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval church, of “the one language of truth,” the Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism, the Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism, the abstract grammatical universalism of Leibniz . . . all these, whatever their differences in nuance, give expression on the same


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But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a “unitary language”: operate in the midst of heteroglossia . . . Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward.2 If the modern Chinese vernacular had embodied more the centrifugal forces that challenged and decentralized classical Chinese as the “one language of truth,” these forces definitely became centripetal once it was inaugurated as the official language. What emerged with the triumph of the vernacular in modern China was a recasting of the same old belief in a monolingual and powerful utopian language. It was in light of this “vernacular only” writing mode that was vigorously advanced and enforced by May Fourth progressive writers that the story of more conservative writers such as Liu Yazi became more meaningful. Liu Yazi’s conversion story in many ways attested to the empowered status of the vernacular, as well as to the complexities of the triumph of the vernacular in modern China. Born in 1887, Liu Yazi came from a wealthy gentry-scholar family in the Wujiang district of Suzhou. He began the study of the Confucian classics and Tang poetry when he was very young. By age eleven, he had begun to compose poetry and historical essays. At fifteen, he had already passed the sheng-yuan examination and earned the xiu-cai degree. He then went to Shanghai and came under the inf luence of the late Qing political reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. In 1903, he joined the Zhongguo jiaoyu hui (Chinese Education Society) organized by Zhang Binglin and Cai Yuanpei, and became a student at its new school, Aiguo xueshe (Patriotic Institute). In 1906, he joined Tonggmeng hui (Tongmeng Society), founded by Sun Yat-sen and was


centripetal forces in socio-linguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same project of centralizing and unifying the European languages.


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swept into the revolutionary movement. In the 1910s, Liu Yazi was a prolific journalist and writer in Shanghai, editing several newspapers while writing poems and essays. As the May Fourth literary revolution changed people’s opinion about what constituted literature and the literary language, Liu Yazi, who had distinguished himself through his classical poetry, had to adjust to a new linguistic-cultural landscape in which the vernacular had become the right medium for poetry. It had to have been a tough transition What convinces me of Liu’s difficult transition is not that I have found many accounts of his suffering and frustration, but the fact that I have found none. Because of its understandable political agenda, the extant biographical work on Liu Yazi only emphasizes his progressive side. Liu’s attachment to classical Chinese is viewed as his backwardness, while he is praised for his sincere switch to the New Literature camp and his wholehearted acceptance of the vernacular. Details of his conversion are obscured to protect the portrait of Liu Yazi as a progressive poet and writer free from any taint. Is it possible that Liu Yazi made a very smooth transformation from a traditional man of letters to “this advocate of the vernacular”? Reading the collections of his letters written in the late 1910s and early 1920s, I became suspicious. Again, it is not what he wrote in those letters, but the absence of certain topics that supports my skepticism. In 1983, to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Liu Yazi’s death, Shanghai Renmin Press published 330 letters written by Liu to his friends and his family.3 It was certainly a political event to pay tribute to Liu Yazi, who was acclaimed by the editor as a revolutionary pioneer and a renowned poet. These letters, written between 1908 and 1952, presumably offer unique access to Liu’s intellectual life and scholarly activity over a span of four decades. For our purposes here, two observations about these letters are useful. First, the linguistic medium of these letters went through an interesting change at the beginning of 1924. Before this time, Liu’s letters to friends had been written in classical Chinese while those to his family (his daughter and his son, as well as his sister) were in the vernacular. After that point, Liu wrote everything in the vernacular, and in several letters written in 1924 he enthusiastically supported the vernacular and the new vernacular


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poetry. That was clearly about the time of Liu’s conversion to the New Literature camp. Second, what I find fascinating is that the selection includes no letters written from 1918 to 1920. For 1921, there are two letters to Hu Pu’an which are brief thank-you notes. For 1922, it includes five letters, four to his sister Zhen Peiyi and one to his son Liu Wuji, all of them written in the vernacular, about details of daily life. In other words, from 1918 to 1922, a critical period of time, when we would expect to see Liu struggling to transform himself from this traditional poet to a believer in the vernacular, we actually do not have any material to gain access to his state of mind. Of course Liu wrote letters during these years; perhaps what he wrote went against his official status as a revolutionary poet, or the people to whom he wrote did not belong to the same camp. Maybe it was just a happy coincidence that no letters have been found for these years? While we may not be lucky enough to find these missing letters, we can certainly reconstruct Liu Yazi’s major activities in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Liu was not happy as the vernacular movement spread to Shanghai in 1919 and the New Literature started to take over Shanghai’s literary field. From 1920 to 1923, he left Shanghai and returned to his hometown. He lived his life as a traditional recluse poet, seeing his friends, drinking, and writing occasional classical poems to express his emotions. He also started to collect literary works of his native Wujiang district, another activity typical of a traditional Chinese man of letters.4 Liu Yazi assembled and copied hundreds of rare books and manuscripts during these years. A highly emotional essay dated at the end of 1920, however, reveals his extremely unsettled state of mind: How I wish I were born sixty years earlier, when the Western culture had not arrived in our Middle Kingdom, things under heaven were all simple and easy to manage. I might even have been able to discuss merit and achievement with people like Hong Xiuquan; or I wish I were born twenty years later, so I could inhale more fresh air from the world, and I might well be able to become Lenin in our agricultural country. Good heaven, why didn’t you allow me to come to this world earlier or later? What do you expect me to do?5




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What comes across in Liu’s lament over his unfortunate historical existence is his helplessness and powerlessness in a world with which he is so at odds. Apparently the life of a recluse offered him no escape from a fate of suffering. At the end of 1923, Liu Yazi decided to plunge into this everchanging society. He returned to Shanghai and organized the New Southern Society, claiming to be “one who advocates the vernacular.” In November 1923, in an essay in reply to some criticism of the New Southern Society’s position on promoting the New Literature, he writes, “The fundamental difference between the New Literature and the Old Literature, to simply put it, is to write in classical Chinese or in the vernacular. And I am one who advocates the vernacular.” Near the end of his essay, Liu pictures a utopian future for the world language and world literature: I recently have converted to socialism and believe that eventually all countries in the world will become one large union; all nations in the world will become one large nation. As long as we can keep up with the world trend, stay ahead of time, there is no need to worry that our nation and race might face extinction. As for the Chinese characters and the Chinese language, I see absolutely no reason for making efforts to preserve them. Someday Esperanto will f lourish all over the world; Chinese, with English, Russian, German, French and other languages will all perish, only some archeologists would be interested in doing research on them.6 Liu’s longing for this utopian world reminds us of Kang Youwei’s World of Great Unity. As the article completed an emotional ride that Liu Yazi had been taking since the coming of the New Literature in Shanghai’s literary field, it also seems to reveal to us that, deep down, Liu remained a man of letters shaped by the late Qing ideas and concepts. Perhaps it was ultimately this utopian imagination that made him comfortable enough to forsake classical Chinese and to switch to the vernacular camp. After 1924, Liu Yazi used the vernacular to write prose, but failed in his attempts to compose poetry in the vernacular. All his life he would continue to write classical poetry, while enthusiastically supporting the new vernacular poetry.


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To put Liu Yazi’s story in perspective, some words on the Southern Society may be helpful. The Southern Society was originally an association of men of letters in the Suzhou-Shanghai-Hangzhou area, founded by Liu Yazi, Chen Qubing, and Gao Xu. The group held its first meeting in November 1909, and attracted many well-known writers; its membership grew from seventeen to more than 1,000,7 and many members were regular contributors to Shanghai’s major magazines and newspapers. As Liu recorded in his Brief Account of the Southern Society, the majority of the members maintained their traditional view of literature even after the New Literature made itself a very powerful force in Shanghai’s literary field. The New Southern Society, founded in 1923 by Liu Yazi, gathered only some of the group members. As late as the 1930s, some members of the Southern Society were still attacking the New Literature camp. When staging the “enemies” of the vernacular, the extant scholarship on the history of modern Chinese literature acknowledges three major battles.8 The first one took place in early 1919 when Lin Shu, most famous for his translation of foreign novels into elegant classical Chinese, published two short stories, ridiculing the leaders of New Cultural Movement: Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, and Qian Xuantong. Acting as the guardian of traditional morality and literature, Lin then wrote a letter to Cai Yuanpei, the chancellor of Beijing University at the time, urging Cai not to encourage his professors to denounce the Old classics as well as to promote the vernacular. Cai rejected Lin’s appeal, pointing out that the professors who were good at vernacular writing, such as Hu Shi, Qian Xuantong, and Zhou Zuoren, were equally excellent in their classical Chinese. Professors at Beijing University had liberty to write in whatever language they chose. Apparently, at this time the vernacular was the minor language, representing the centrifugal forces, fighting to challenge the “one language of truth,” classical Chinese. The second battle took place in 1922 when the vernacular had just been established as the national language, and the one and only legitimate medium for literary writing. This time, the opponents were a group of American-educated professors in Nanjing, mainly Mei Guangdi, Wu Mi, and Hu Xiansu, who founded the journal Critical Review to counter the May Fourth New Culture Movement. Inspired by Irving Babbitt,




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an American neo-humanist and a prominent Harvard professor who had taught both Mei Guangdi and Wu Mi, the Critical Review group voiced an alternative way of thinking about China versus the West, and tradition versus modernity. Instead of the idols of the New Culturalists such as Rousseau, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw, they honored ancient Greco-Roman and Judaeo- Christian traditions, which they considered as the true essence of the West. Challenging the evolutionist paradigm endorsed by the New Culturalists, they promoted a transnational humanistic model that blended the essential Greek tradition of the West with the essential Confucian background of the East.9 Based on this paradigm, they designated classical Chinese as the “one language of truth” that should be preserved. In this sense, the battle between the Critical Review group and the New Culturalists was one of competing narratives to define what should be the “one language of truth” for modern China. The third battle took place in 1925 when Zhang Shizhao, then Minister of Education, founded in Beijing the Tiger Weekly, which only published writings in classical Chinese. At the time, the vernacular was already well established as the dominant literary language, as we can see from Zhang’s article “Criticism of the New Culture Movement”: The boys and scholars are all writing in the vernacular. Nowadays, poets are as numerous as trees in forests, the writings have even choked the streets. Everyone thinks that he is either a Shi Nai-an or a Cao Xueqin. Everyone boasts as if he is a Maupassant or an Ibsen. The Literary world is thus “f lourishing” . . . but literature must be refined and artistic. They who write in vulgar language about the feelings of common people insult literature . . . they want to create a literary language but what they have really done is to write in the vulgar tongue. They are unknowingly leading the youths of the nation into a pit.10


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Fighting a losing battle, Zhang’s attack on the vernacular was described by C.T. Hsia as a “belated” and “foredoomed” struggle.11 But looking from a different perspective, one can’t help sympathizing with Zhang’s position. Zhang might come across as fighting for the dominance of


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classical Chinese, but in reality he was only fighting for the possibility of writing in classical Chinese. Hu Shi later wrote an essay countering Zhang Shizhao’s attack, in which he included a very interesting anecdote. Hu had run into Zhang at a restaurant in February that year. Zhang was scheduled to have his picture taken that day, and he invited Hu to join him and have them photographed together. After Zhang got the picture from the photo shop, he wrote the following playful vernacular poem on the back of the photo and sent it to Hu as a gift: Your surname is Hu and mine Zhang; You talk all the time about New Literature, When I open my mouth I still sing my old tune. You don’t attack and I don’t fight back, Let’s sit side by side, each having our own agenda. Three or five decades in the future, This picture could become a literary souvenir. Hah, Hah, I write to you this playful vernacular poem, You may say that I Old Zhang have surrendered.12 One can sense a great deal of frustration in Zhang’s poem. It is structured to strike some sort of balance between himself and Hu Shi; sitting side by side, each having his own surname, language, and agenda. Only the balance is so precarious that the last line speaks aloud the very imbalanced power relationship between Hu Shi and him. Although half joking and half serious, Zhang Shizhao must have been convinced that, as someone who chose to continue to write in classical Chinese, all he could do under the circumstance was to surrender, reluctantly, to the New Cultural Movement. So a few months later when he was appointed the Minister of Education and Justice in the Beijing Government, he took the chance and initiated the attack. In a way, Zhang Shizhao’s story is a perfect counter-example to Liu Yazi’s conversion. Both Zhang and Liu were extremely active on the literary scene in the 1910s. While Liu was well known for his classical poetry, Zhang was most famous for his prose writing in classical Chinese. His style, known for its clarity and conciseness, was emulated and very popular in the early 1910s. However, as the vernacular advanced to become the national language and the one and only writing mode for




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modern China in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Zhang’s writing fell quickly out of fashion. When Liu Yazi, after a period of soul-searching, converted to the vernacular camp in late 1923, Zhang Shizhao chose to remain in the camp of classical Chinese. In fact, as someone who continued to write in classical Chinese, he was under tremendous pressure, and complained in his writing that everyone was forced to follow the trend to write in the vernacular. Anyone who refused to do so would be ridiculed by thousands of people as “old-fashioned.” Anyone who dared to disagree would certainly be condemned “reactionary” and was liable to be “shot to death” by his compatriots.13 Apparently in this scenario, the vernacular had become the centripetal force that strove to make one language rule, and it had transformed itself into the “one language of truth” that suppressed other voices in order to achieve linguistic uniformity. Zhang’s struggle for the dominance of classical Chinese was, to some degree, a desperate response to the marginalization of classical Chinese. Of course, his was a “belated” and “foredoomed” struggle that did not have much impact on the restructured linguistic landscape in 1920s China. The Story of Dongfang zazhi What we see from the previous section are significant figures who clearly expressed their anxiety or dissent over the dramatic linguistic turn that took place in the late 1910s and early 1920s in modern China. But, what did average readers think? How did they come to terms with this profound language shift amid the other drastic changes at the time? Much of the reading public probably encountered the language revolution through the “surface” of newspapers and journals. By reconstructing their experiences with lines, words, and grammatical signals, we may come to a better understanding of their part in the vernacular movement of modern China. The story of an emerging national language as imagined by the average reader from the pages of newspapers and journals is important because a literary revolution is not only about the ideas and creations of a few thinkers, but also about the experiences of ordinary readers. The emergence of a modern print culture and its significance in terms of the construction of modernity and urbanity has attracted much


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attention from scholars. Leo Lee, for instance, has convincingly shown that the nation as an “imagined community” in China was made possible not only by elite intellectuals who proclaimed new concepts and values, but also, and more importantly, by the popular press. As he points out, it is not at all surprising that the large publishing companies such as the Commercial Press and China Bookstore predated the founding of the Republican nation-state in 1912, because the establishment of the nation-state only came after the idea of the nation-state had been vigorously disseminated by a network of printers and booksellers.14 Since the second half of the nineteenth century, newspapers, supplements, journals, and magazines of all kinds had appeared all over China. Most of them were concentrated in Shanghai, China’s largest cosmopolitan center. Major newspapers like Shenbao, Shibao, and magazines like Xiaoshuo yuebao, Dong fang zazhi became an important part of Shanghai’s city life. Large presses such as the Commercial Press and China Bookstore were instrumental in transmitting new knowledge and shaping public opinion. Here I will focus on one major journal, Dong fang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany), leafing through pages of the issues from 1919 to 1921, and tracing how the linguistic medium of this journal underwent changes during this critical time period of China’s literary history. Founded in 1904, Dong fang zazhi was the leading journal published by the Commercial Press, Shanghai’s largest publishing company. It targeted the average reader in Shanghai who wanted something that was beyond daily life, but also of immediate news and practical value. To live up to its title “Eastern Miscellany,” the journal published journalistic reports, political commentary, articles on science and technology, translations, and creative writings. Its political views were relatively moderate and conservative, consistent with its utilitarian outlook. In general, the journal attracted a considerable number of readers; sales of each issue reached as high as 15,000 copies at times.15 By 1919, the linguistic medium of Dong fang zazhi was still conventional. The April 1919 issue comprises general articles on politics, history, science, and society, complemented by wenyuan (literary section), serialized novels and translations, and a monthly summary of world and national events. The literary section is overwhelmingly conservative,




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featuring poetry in typical classical style. We see poems about falling leaves and sad departures, ref lecting the conventional topics and tastes that Hu Shi had criticized in his 1917 proposal. Translations of foreign novels are also in classical Chinese. The general articles at the front of the magazine are written in “half-classical-but-not-vernacular” (ban wen bu bai), a writing mode employed by the majority of journals and newspapers at the time. Almost half of the articles are on European wars and domestic and world politics, and we find that the linguistic medium of these articles tends toward the middle, while the linguistic medium of the articles introducing science and technology tends toward the vernacular. One article tackles the traditional Chinese discourse on knowledge, and its language, extremely archaic, occupies the other end of the spectrum. The writing mode of “half-classical-but-not-vernacular” was a direct continuation of the “new style” created by Liang Qichao earlier in the late Qing period. Liang once described his “new style” as “[interlarding] colloquialism, verses, and foreign expressions fairly frequently, letting [the] pen f low freely and without constraint.”16 Liang’s goal had been to forge a new style that would extend the narrow confines of classical Chinese and reach a larger audience than the literati class well educated in the classics. The rapid development of the modern press helped deliver Liang’s vision of a reformed and renewed classical Chinese. By the early twentieth century, this “half-classicalbut-not-vernacular” mode of writing was ideal for a general journal like Dong fang zazhi, which claimed its real function was like that of a grocery store, delivering goods that are diverse and mundane. Only very sporadically do we spot a vernacular essay taken from vernacular newspapers or journals. Foreign words pop up occasionally, but those alien elements coexist nicely with their Chinese counterpart, which is itself a linguistic hybridity. In the June 1919 issue, the editorial board of Dong fang zazhi made some changes in guidelines for submission. The updated guidelines claim that the purpose of the magazine has been to introduce new knowledge from around the world. Authors are encouraged to submit original writings, translations of foreign literature, as well as translations of/commentaries on foreign articles. This emphasis on the


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transmission of foreign knowledge is actually an innovation, because the previous guidelines only stressed the miscellaneous nature of the magazine. While the new guidelines divide submissions in terms of original composition and translations, the old guidelines categorized submissions in terms of genre. The kind of genres welcomed by the magazine had been political commentary, cultural criticism, learned articles, articles on science and technology, as well as biji (traditional miscellaneous accounts), poetry, fiction, etc. In January 1920, Dong fang zazhi once again revised its guidelines for submissions. In addition to reemphasizing the introduction of foreign knowledge, the new guidelines state explicitly that essays in either classical Chinese or the vernacular are welcome. This may be the moment at which the vernacular became recognized as a legitimate literary medium for this politically conservative journal, Dong fang zazhi. In just the six months that passed from June 1919 to January 1920, Dong fang zizhi revised its call for submission twice. One can’t help but wonder what lay behind this constant reformatting. Obviously, this was the first six months after the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which provided a big boost to the spread of the vernacular movement beyond the large university campuses in Beijing. The key incident relevant to the magazine management was the removal of the editor of Dong fang zazhi, Du Yaquan (1873–1933), in December 1919. Since assuming the editorship in March 1911, Du had turn Dong fang zazhi from an organ devoted to the news and reprinting official documents to a public forum of elite opinion on political, economic and cultural matters. At the same time, Du had also been attacked by Chen Duxiu and his comrades in the New Youth circle for his conservative outlook. Du’s replacement was a manifestation of the growing inf luence of the New Cultural Movement in Shanghai’s press.17 Du had strongly opposed the wholesale adoption of the vernacular promoted by the New Youth circle. His attitude towards the vernacular and New Literature suggested a uniquely moderate position that educated Chinese might have taken amid the linguistic and cultural upheaval in early twentieth century China. The article that best summarizes Du Yaquan’s view of the vernacular and the New Literature was published in the December 1919 issue of




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Dong fang zazhi, entitled “On the Common Language.”18 In that article, Du argues that one should make a distinction between the vernacular and the common language. The vernacular writing, making use of daily spoken language suited to people of different ages, genders, and professions, can truthfully and vividly represent various speech acts and, therefore, works best in writing the novel. In contrast, the common language is the language used by journalists when writing news reports, and by teachers when lecturing in the classroom. It is the more elegant form of the vernacular. According to Du, what should be promoted in the contemporary vernacular movement is the common language rather than vulgar spoken language, for only the former has the capacity to convey depth and complexity of thought and to achieve the task of cultural development. The concept of the “common language” proposed by Du Yaquan never elicited much response from his contemporaries, but it did ref lect Du’s interesting position. As shown in his discussion, Du still assumed the traditional diglossic view towards the vernacular. To him, the vernacular only meant the vulgar spoken language. At the same time, he seemed to promote a third language: the “common language,” the language of journalism and teachers, which breaks the law of “diglossia” that only acknowledges classical Chinese and the vernacular. In her book on print and politics in late Qing China, Joan Judge suggests a very interesting term: “the late- Qing middle realm.” She argues that the political press in the late Qing period, such as Shibao founded in 1904 by Liang Qichao and Di Baoxian, promoted a new mode of politics. Liang, Di, and the other journalists who worked for the newspaper saw themselves as negotiating between the dynasty “above” and the common people “below,” casting themselves as members of the “middle level of society” (zhongdeng shehui). “From this intermediate ground they struggled—as both publicists and activists—to shift the locus of authority downward and channel the abilities of the people upward. This intermediate ground, including both the metaphoric space that their journalistic writings occupied and the actual sphere of their social and political initiatives, constitutes the late-Qing middle realm.”19 Although Dong fang zazhi did not belong to the kind of political press that Judge defines, Du Yaquan and the journalists of Dong fang


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zazhi seemed to also write from this intermediate ground, viewing themselves as members of the “middle level of society.” The language that Liang Qichao had designed for his “late- Qing middle realm” was, of course, the “new style” classical Chinese. Fifteen years later, when Du Yaquan envisioned the language for the “Early Republican middle realm,” he seemed to have had on his mind the continuation of Liang’s “new style,” which he termed the “common language,” and perceived as the elegant form of the vernacular. While advocating the adoption of the “common language” as the language for the whole society, Du seemed to also recognize the value of the vernacular writing for literary works. For him, these two modes of writing should both be promoted in the areas where they worked the best. Du’s sensitivity to the multiplicity of the writing modes went directly against the “vernacular only” writing mode enforced by the New Cultural Movement. Du actually denounced the New Culturalists’ attempts to make a monopoly of the vernacular: Today’s advocates of the vernacular, however, invariably have a narrow view, and think that Chinese literature now and in the future should use only this mode of writing, and that all other modes should be abolished and eliminated from use. This opinion really does not suit the goal of furthering culture, for society and culture become more complex as they progress. Moreover, given the vast expanse of Chinese literature, it would be completely inappropriate to narrow it down by insisting on limiting it to only a single mode of writing.20 Du’s faith in multiplicity as well as his sensitivity to the language varieties may sound reasonable today, but they opposed the trend of vernacularization that seemed inevitable in the late 1910s and early 1920s. One wonders how the literary revolution at the time might have been different had Du’s voice been heard, but his conservative outlook determined that his viewpoints would be ignored. From June 1919 to January 1920, when the editorial board of Dong fang zazhi was struggling to decide what and which language to publish, the question of how to deal with the conf lict between the New and the




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Old became almost an obsession of the journal. A remarkable number of editorials and essays were devoted to the topic, exploring many viewpoints in order to help readers gain a grasp of the ever-changing society. In the July 1919 issue, a long editorial appeared, setting out the goals of today’s journalism: to keep up with world trends, to be adaptable to present circumstances, to be useful for practical life, and to prepare for the evolutionary future. One can sense from this editorial some sense of determination to change, to move forward, but also some anxiety and frustration. The September issue started with a lengthy essay by Du Yaquan, “A Compromise between the New and the Old.” It criticizes the simplistic understanding of the New and the Old, and points out that what constitutes the New and the Old changes with time. For instance, the New in the 1898 reform period might not be considered the New today. The author then argues that a compromise between the New and the Old is best suited to today’s transitional society. Echoing Du’s argument, another essay in the same issue, “The Conf lict between the New Literature and the Old Literature,” calls for a compromise. It proposes that both progressive and conservative writers find some middle ground, contending that the co-existence of the New and the Old is not impossible, if both parties can be sympathetic to different opinions. The essay also argues that the vernacular and classical Chinese should co-exist, since each linguistic medium has its own functions. To abolish either would cause serious damage to the future civilization. The debate over the Old and the New continued in the November issue, which published two essays devoted to the topic: “What Is the New Thought?” and “My View of a Compromise between the New and the Old.” Overall, the editors and the authors of the journal seemed eager to find a space between the Old and the New, while recognizing a society that was more receptive than ever to radical ideas. After Du Yaquan was removed from his post at the end of 1919, the position that Dongfang zazhi had been taking so far began to change. The January 1920 issue starts with an editorial announcing the new setup of the journal. Although the editorial still emphasizes that the magazine is not based on one particular school but rather on a synthesis of ideas and thoughts, it is not hard to see where the publication


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is headed. Towards the end of the essay, the author points out that, henceforth, all translations of foreign literature would be rendered in the vernacular, in order to convey the true sensibility of foreign work. Looking at that issue, one sees clear changes both in format and linguistic medium. The general article section is reduced to only one-third of the content. While this section is still dominated by the “half-classical-but-not-vernacular” mode, it carries one major essay on literary realism written in the vernacular. There are three translated works of fiction, and all of them are in the vernacular. The increasing use of the vernacular marked a new start in the journal’s history. In the meantime, Dong fang zazhi continued to publish essays devoted to the debate on the vernacular and the conf lict between the New and the Old, although a careful reader would not miss the shift in position. The January 1920 issue had two essays: “The Conf lict and Compromise between the New and the Old” and “What Are the Responsibilities of Today’s Writers?” The latter was clearly written from the perspective of New Literature. Related articles from the succeeding issues are “On the Censorship of the Vernacular,” “The New and the Old,” and “The Popular literature and the Vernacular Literature.” Clearly the journal was gradually reconciling itself to the growing inf luence of the New Cultural Movement. By January 1921, Dong fang zazhi would add one new section, New Culture and New Thoughts, and carry about half the general articles in the vernacular and half in classical Chinese. Dong fang zazhi was only one of these journals that struggled to come to terms with the linguistic and cultural transition in May Fourth China. During the critical period of 1919 to 1921, other journals under the banner of the Commercial Press also underwent dramatic changes. The best-known case was Mao Dun’s conversion of Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short Story Monthly), the only literary journal in the Commercial Press, into a major organ of the New Literature. After Mao Dun assumed the editorship of the magazine, Xiaoshuo yuebao started to carry only writings in the new vernacular and in the genres encompassed by the New Literature. Mao Dun and his comrades also attacked the dominant trends in Shanghai’s literary field. In his inf luential essay “What is Literature?” Mao Dun takes issue with the traditional view as ref lected by the majority writing on Shanghai’s literary scene, which considers




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literature to be amusement and entertainment. Mao Dun contends that literature should discuss serious social problems, and focus on the blood and tears of the oppressed. Mao Dun is right in the sense that many writers active in Shanghai at the time saw the main purpose of writing as to entertain and to amuse. The notorious “Remarks on the Publication of Saturday” spells out such an attitude. The essay, written by Wang Dungen, is a reply to the question of why the weekly magazine should be titled Saturday. It is hard to miss the playfulness in Wang’s answer: “On Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, people are preoccupied with their work. Only on Saturdays and Sundays can they rest and enjoy their leisure to read fiction.”21 The magazines are distributed on Saturday afternoon so that readers can have the earliest enjoyment. Then, in response to the question of why people should read when there were so many other pleasures available on Saturday afternoon, Wang writes, “Pleasure quarters are costly, drinking is unhealthy, and music and songs can be clamorous, unlike reading stories, which is economical and relaxing . . .” Listing the weekly magazine together with pleasure quarters, drinking, music, and songs, Wang shows us how Saturday was intended to be consumed and how writers of this magazine viewed their work. But on the other hand, Shanghai’s literary world in the early 1920s was hardly monolithic. Mao Dun’s trashing of almost all the writers in Shanghai was a problematic political gesture. In recent years, scholars have started to acknowledge the social and political role those popular writers played in encouraging social reform, a role which had not been acknowledged by the proponents of the New Cultural Movement. After the founding of the Wenxue yanjiu hui (the Literary Association) and Mao Dun’s reformation of Xiaoshuo yuebao in 1921, “within an amazingly short period of time, the producers of ‘new literature’ managed to create a new ‘sub-field,’ that quickly grew to become the dominant half of a literary field with a dualistic structure, which was outlined by the distinction made between wenren (men of letters), for whom literature was a serious business, and wengai (beggars of letters), for whom literature was merely writing for money.”22 All these “beggars of letters” were then given the all-encompassing label of Yuanyang


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hudie pai (Mandarin Duck and Butterf ly School) and identified as the “Old School” ( Jiupai). While there was a clear difference between how these Butterf ly writers and the New Culturalist writers viewed literature, the battle between the New Culturalists and Butterf ly writers was also linguistic. In his article “Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn: Literary Debates in Republican China, 1919–1949,” Jianhua Chen provides a detailed analysis of how Butterf ly writers fought back against the New Culturalists at the introduction of the vernacular into Shanghai’s literary field. “From the outset, the Butterf ly writers, alarmed by the attack of ‘new’ writers, felt pressed to respond. Probably underestimating their opponents, they reacted too aggressively and ultimately ended the debate in frustration and a strange silence. Their frustration and silence, in turn, helped to vindicate the ‘new’ writers in continuing their campaign to modernize Chinese literature and the Chinese language.” Chen argues, “It was through this reciprocal process of attack, response, and further attack that the ‘new’ and ‘old’ writers co-created the May Fourth canon.”23 In a way, it was not surprising to see that Butterf ly writers supported classical Chinese in this language war, although their position was rather different from all of the proponents of classical Chinese mentioned above. As a group that had been always relegated to the margin, even in the conventional diglossic structure, Butterf ly writers certainly didn’t see themselves as the guardians of traditional morality and literature like Lin Shu and Zhang Shizhao. Unlike the Critical Review School, they were not interested in competing with those New Culturalists to appoint the “one language of truth” for modern China, either. What aroused their opposition to the Vernacular Movement was their attachment to the things “familiar” and “comfortable.” Perry Link points out that Butterf ly writers’ fiction brought some “psychological comfort” to urban dwellers, who were struggling to cope with the stressful and hectic city life.24 In many ways, these Butterf ly writers identified themselves with the ordinary city dwellers, who sought “pleasure” and “comfort” in a harsh and ever-changing society. What also motivated Butterf ly writers was their “natural” inclination towards multiplicity and diversity. In this sense, they were not supporting




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“classical Chinese,” they were supporting the old system, the old way of doing things, which would allow them to write in a variety of different “styles,” be it the guwen style (stories fashioned after Tang fictions), or the pianli style (stories that employed parallel lines of four and six characters) or the traditional-style vernacular, or the tanci style (a form in which vernacular narrative alternates with verse sung to the accompaniment of pipa).25 In the conventional diglossic situation, “classical Chinese” writing and the vernacular writing (including a wide range of writing modes) each enjoyed their own space. But the New Cultural Movement advanced only the new vernacular. It also ushered in a new genre system from the West that redefined what literature should be, and how people should write. Little wonder Butterf ly writers would feel uncomfortable, because they were pressured to change their way of doing things. Although they chose to drop the linguistic/ literary debate after the new vernacular was elevated and established as the national language in the early 1920s, in practice they continued writing what they were comfortable with. Saturday was reissued in 1921 and lasted another hundred issues. Looking at the content of the magazine, one realizes that these writers were still using their habitual linguistic media, writing in the genres prescribed by the norm of traditional Chinese literature. Interestingly enough, even in the 1930s and 1940s, the popularity of such writing was still soaring. In other words, for many readers, who were the dedicated consumers for this kind of literature, the linguistic turn that inaugurated the new vernacular as the One and Only literary medium for modern China in the early 1920s remained something better kept outside of their reading habits for another two decades. Jianhua Chen’s essay praises Butterf ly writers’ linguistic f lexibility. He argues that “most of the Butterf ly writers never denied the value of the vernacular language; rather, they adopted a bilingual approach, publishing in both baihua (vernacular) and wenyan (classical Chinese) whenever needed.”26 The important point is that traditional vernacular writers also wrote or published in both the vernacular and classical Chinese. It was not a bilingual approach, but rather the conventional diglossic approach, that these Butterf ly writers adopted, or more precisely, continued to adopt towards the vernacular. Bao Tianxiao may


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claim that he founded the vernacular magazine Pictorial Story in early 1917, preceding the publication of vernacular works in New Youth, which initiated the May Fourth literary revolution. But the kind of alienation and unfamiliarity that marked those vernacular texts in the New Youth journal could have never been found in Bao’s magazine. In a way, the vernacular should be the “natural” medium for Bao’s magazine in the conventional sense, because the magazine targets lower class stratum of the society (factory workers, students, town dwellers), and it was a fiction (a low genre) magazine. This is not to claim that Butterf ly writers did not make contributions in spreading the vernacular, but their view of the vernacular was regulated by the conventional diglossic structure. Jianhua Chen himself acknowledges that Butterf ly writers’ use of the vernacular “was not the same as that of the ‘new’ writers, and was often mixed with their own grammar and tastes derived from wenyan (classical Chinese.)”27 But it was not the elements and tastes derived from classical Chinese that distinguished Butterf ly writers from May Fourth progressive writers, because the “new” writers like Lu Xun and Liu Dabai also had grammar and tastes derived from classical Chinese. The key difference here is the language attitude. While Butterf ly writers continued to adopt the conventional diglossic structure, using classical Chinese and vernacular whenever needed, the “new” writers were treading in an uncharted territory, trying to elevate the vernacular to be the respectful literary language for modern China, while pushing classical Chinese off the historical stage. In contrast to the monolingual nature of the May Fourth vernacular movement, these Butterf ly writers were more open-minded and linguistically f lexible. Their fight against the New Culturalists, especially after the vernacular had already been established as the One and Only legitimate writing mode for modern China, was in this sense a fight for linguistic and literary diversity. The May Fourth paradigm that privileges only the new vernacular writing produced by May Fourth progressive writers has come under critical scrutiny in recent decades.28 Scholars have made considerable efforts to rediscover “Mandarin Duck and Butterf ly” literature.29 Substantial work has also been done on women writers and other neglected New Literature writers and literary groups.30 While the former attempts prove that besides May Fourth progressive writing there




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were other co- existing and competing writing modes in May Fourth China, the latter demonstrates that “May Fourth” writing itself was not at all monolithic. At the same time, studies of the late Qing and early Republican period preceding the May Fourth era raise questions such as how much of the May Fourth factor existed before May Fourth, and how a plurality of alternative voices became “repressed modernities” as a result of the canonization of May Fourth literature.31 In many cases, “May Fourth” was criticized as a “project” of “appropriation of cultural capital” that needs to be critically rethought and re-assessed. What has been less addressed in this reevaluation of the May Fourth paradigm is the active endorsement of the movement as a monolingual idea, promulgated by an emerging nation- state and a group of emerging new literary elites. If we open a conventional anthology of the literature in early twentieth-century China, we would most likely encounter only works written in the new vernacular, although literary works in classical Chinese continued to be produced after the vernacular became inaugurated as the “national language.” From 1900 to 1949, there was definitely a sub-field of classical poetry writing in China. Liu Yazi commented in 1944 that since the late Qing period, classical poetry writing had been dominated by two schools: the School of Tongguang and the Southern Society.32 One category not mentioned by Liu is the classical poetry written by the May Fourth progressive intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Zedong. Moreover, one would not find any traces of the works of Butterf ly writers. What such a conventional anthology failed to show, I argue, is the complexity of multilingualism and modernity with which transitional May Fourth China struggled to come to terms. While the monolingual paradigm of the “Vernacular Only” writing mode was established as the dominant literary ideal in the early 1920s in China, in reality, China’s literary scene remained heterogeneous and diverse. To move away from the “shadow” of the “May Fourth” paradigm in this sense is to recover and rebuild a multilingual China at the beginning of modern Chinese literature, a literature that has been repressed and obscured by the monolingual agenda imposed by the May Fourth vernacular movement.33


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The vernacular, a concept that presumably indicates linguistic difference and diversity, often rather stages a monolingual and militant conquest. With its humble origins, the vernacular presumes the existence of at least two, if not multiple languages: a higher language (or higher languages) and peer vernacular languages. But the heightened awareness of linguistic plurality that comes with the emergence of the vernacular often only gives rise to the will to a new form of linguistic unity and hegemony. As we can see clearly from Dante’s famous debut of the defense of the vernacular, De vulgari eloquentia, it was the one and only volgare illustre that Dante was imagining and advocating. In his treatise, Dante takes his reader to an amazing encounter with all major Italian dialects, classified by regions and the people, including the Romans, the Milanese, and the Sicilians. One by one, Dante attacks and discards most of them. Even when Dante praises some dialects, he only finds other grounds on which to reject them. Finally, Dante finds the one language that “belongs to every Italian city yet seems to belong to none.”34 Dante’s vision of a literary conquest, this single ideal version of the vernacular that surpasses the numerous other vernaculars, found its continuation in the linguistic debate in sixteenth-century Renaissance Italy, commonly referred to as the questione della lingua. Thanks to the work of Pietro Bembo and his followers, the fourteenthcentury Florentine dialect of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio won the conquest and became the literary language in Italy. The inauguration of Dante’s vernacular was made official by the Accademia della Crusca, which published in 1612 its official Dizionario that honored the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The analogous literary conquest can also be seen in Renaissance France and England. In France, Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, the principal poets of the circle known as the Pleiade, contributed most to the debates on the French vernacular in the period. Du Bellay’s Defence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549) promoted a superior form of the vernacular created by contemporary French poets, including himself, intended to bring an end to the great confusion of languages and unify


Vernacularization and Monolingualism in the Context of World Literature


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the national tongue. In England, the “King’s English” triumphed over other alternative versions of the English language.35 In addition to the battles between Latin and various vernacular languages, the “linguistic battle,” or the “war of languages,” was also engaged among rival vernaculars in Renaissance Europe. Following Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, the praises of the vernacular became a genre in Renaissance Europe. Peter Burke’s recent book, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe, listed several defenses of the vernacular printed between 1529–1663, including J. de Barros’ Louvor de nossa linguatem (1540), S. Speroni’s Dialogo della lingua (1542), J. Du Bellay’s Deffense et illustration de la langue francaise (1549), M. Viziana’s Alabancas de las lengua . . castellana y valenciana (1574), H. Estienne’s Precellence de la langue francaise (1579), S. Stevin’s Weerdigheyt der duytsche tael (1586), and J. Rybinski’s De lingua polonica praestantia et utilitate (1589).36 While these praises tried to show that one’s own language was superior to Latin and Greek, they also denigrated rival vernacular languages. In fact, making negative comments about other languages was common practice in early modern Europe. Erasmus, for instance, described French as a “barbarous language with harsh sounds . . . which are scarcely within the realm of human speech.” A French novelist allowed his character to claim that, “The Chinese, and almost all the peoples of Asia, sing; the Germans rattle; the Spaniards declaim; the Italians sigh; the English whistle. To be exact, only the French speak.”37 The intensity with which these writers engaged with rival languages demonstrates the fierceness of these linguistic battles. For many writers in Renaissance Europe, choosing which language to employ was a question of audience. Burke describes two strategies adopted by writers to survive the increasing linguistic competitions— the horizontal and the vertical—represented by Erasmus (1466–1536) and Luther, respectively. The Erasmian solution preferred geographical breadth, while the Lutherian solution opted for social depth. Erasmus chose Latin so that his words could reach learned readers across Europe, from Portugal to Poland and from England to Hungary. Luther, in contrast, devoted more effort to the vernacular in order for his message to reach out to “the common man” (der gemeine Mann) in the Germanspeaking world. Scholars increasingly followed Luther’s example. For


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instance, Galileo Galilei began his career with a book in Latin, but then switched to Italian, in order to widen his domestic audience. By doing so, however, he frustrated his German admirers, because they could no longer read his work. Galileo’s Italian works were then translated into Latin so that they could continue to be read outside of Italy.38 Here, Latin and vernacular languages were not perceived as oppositional, but as optional. Pragmatic concerns rather than ideological opinions determined writers’ language choice. The discourse of the vernacular became increasingly political and ideological after the Renaissance. If Dante’s imagination of the vernacular had shaped the discourse of the vernacular in Early Modern Europe, some fundamental values firmly attached to the vernacular were subsequently added: the link between nationalism, modernity, and the vernacular, which initiated different forms of linguistic conquests and wars. According to Benedict Anderson, the European conception of nation-ness as linked to a particular language (often the vernacular language) was firmly established in the nineteenth century.39 The famous “One language, One nation” paradigm came from Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803): “Denn jedes Volk is Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache.” Not only did the vernacular become indispensable in narrating the nation or the narrative of the nation, it was also sincerely promoted as the One and Only language by nationalist enterprises. “One of the most overt demands of any group making a claim for itself as a nation in the nineteenth century was to claim a monoglot language and history as its own. The monoglot language had the function of marking off the nation’s citizens from all others and binding them together in a fictional national equality.”40 With its newly accrued symbolic values, the vernacular was transformed in many geo-political contexts and made the central part of a process of imagining modernity and nationality. However, the neat picture of the spread of the vernacular movement and nationalism provided by Anderson in his Imagined Communities presumes a wide-open space that was empty and waiting to be colonized or conquered by the European paradigm. On the contrary, I would argue that the actual literary conquests that took place at the very site of “vernacularization” in many non-European countries were much more complicated.




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The problem of the vernacular had posed different sets of arguments and challenges in many of these countries until the arrival of the grand Western discourse of nationality and modernity that fundamentally changed the rhetoric of the vernacular. For instance, in Japan and Korea, before the arrival of the Western discourse of the vernacular, the vernacular problem was a complicated negotiation between the indigenous languages in these two countries and classical Chinese, the lingua franca of East Asia, the language of bureaucracy and of high culture in both contexts. After the West made its presence known, the conventional linguistic landscape in these two locales changed significantly. The newly emerged (or engineered) Japanese vernacular, known as genbun itchi, was an intriguing combination of Chinese sign (the word is written with a four-character Chinese compound), Japanese signifier (it represents the vernacularization in modern Japan), and Western signified (it points to the phenomenon of vernacularization seen in Europe).41 What characterized the linguistic conquests in modern Japanese vernacular movement was by all means this tension-ridden triangular relationship. When discussing individual cases, Anderson himself acknowledges the complexities of the language problem in a particular geopolitical context. For instance, in Vietnam, there was a conscious attempt to use and promote quoc ngu, a romanized phonetic script originally devised by Jesuit missionaries in Vietnam, in order to break the long-standing ties between Vietnam and Chinese civilization. In other words, the linguistic conquests, the search for the one and only language that represents the “nation” in modern Vietnam, was very much shaped by the French colonization of this country. Indeed, “vernacularization” in those Asian countries that had previously been under the strong inf luence of Confucian China should be acknowledged for this complicated three-way interaction.42 China is conspicuously missing in Anderson’s discussion of the transnational emergence of the vernacular, but it seems safe to say that in Anderson’s scheme, China would be one of those countries that adopted the models set up by Europe and that participated in this transnational trend. As discussed before, vernacularization in China may be traced back as far as the tenth century. The ideology and rhetoric that promoted


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the vernacular in pre-modern China constituted an alternative discourse in response to the mainstream Confucian grand narrative. The vernacular movement in China then took on a global dimension in the late nineteenth century, as Chinese intellectuals became aware of what was going on in the world and began to participate in the international community. The late Qing reformers emulated the Japanese genbun itchi movement, while the May Fourth vernacular movement was modeled on the European Renaissance. Reconfiguring Dante as an anti-Latin hero, the May Fourth generation made the status of the vernacular versus classical Chinese their primary concern. Classical Chinese was violently attacked while the vernacular was advanced as the one and only literary language that should be practiced in modern China. The modern Chinese vernacular that emerged from this uncompromising language war marked itself as sharply different from the Japanese form of the modern vernacular. The modern Japanese vernacular genbun itchi was an intriguing embodiment of the China-Japan-West triangular relationship. The genbun itchi movement originated with a petition in 1866, “Reasons for Abolishing Chinese Characters.”43 But it was the “unification of the spoken and written language” that was used as the common name for the movement, instead of the confrontational proposal that Chinese characters be abolished. The result of the genbun itchi movement was the profound devaluation of Chinese writing, and the shift from the scripts to a phonocentric apprehension of language, but the change was never made confrontationally. In fact, Chinese words continued to be used as the primary medium for massive translation of Western concepts and ideas. Instead of oppositional battles, compromise and negotiation captured the essence of the modern Japanese vernacular movement. In this sense, the emergence of the modern Chinese vernacular was more painful and precarious, as it was meant to bring about not only the birth of a new language but also the destruction of an old language. Given the violent epistemic change it represented, the May Fourth vernacular movement reminds us more of the “catastrophic success” of the Turkish language reform of the late 1920s, which entailed a revolutionary and traumatic break with classical Ottoman language by adopting a Latin alphabet system and purging massive borrowings of




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Arabic and Persian words.44 While Japan, China, and Turkey might tell different stories of linguistic conquests, all these stories were much more political and ideological than were their early modern European counterparts. The transnational vernacular movement was in many ways a self-conscious, socially engineered transnational linguistic project. This search for the perfect language, one that embodied modernity and nationality, motivated these intellectuals who participated in this transnational enterprise. In this sense, the problem of the vernacular is really not a vernacular problem but a utopian problem, the problem of the one and only language that inspired Dante centuries ago. In this sense, we may say that the ultimate victory of this transnational vernacular movement, was actually the revival of two classical languages, especially the almost “miraculous” revival of the Hebrew language. When Arabic intellectuals chose classical Arabic to be the linguistic base for their literary modernity, vernacular languages were never even a meaningful competitive force in the process. But for Jewish intellectuals, the Yiddish vernacular language was considered a possible base for a new Jewish national society. In 1918, Rachel Katznelson, the Jewish literary critic and writer, wrote an article, “Language Insomnia,” in which she wrote about her soul-searching and what she called “our betrayal to Yiddish.”45 Katznelson starts with the intimacy that Jewish youth felt with the Yiddish language, “without seeking it, we found in Yiddish an expression for the totality of our inner lives. Then we felt proud and happy to hear in speech the music of every word, to know that only you and your people understood its tone and value and that, for everything that stirs in you, ‘somebody’ has prepared an expression and it is latent in your soul and responds to you whenever you call it.” But then came the choice of the Hebrew language: We had to betray Yiddish even though we paid for this as for any betrayal. And do we need to justify ourselves and explain how we could so quickly abandon what had become the substance of our lives? The fact that the Hebrew language was the language of our forefathers could not return us to it. Such facts could never compel people to desert their living language. Even the fact that there are Jews who never knew Yiddish, or that the language is gradually


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We can see Katznelson struggles to come to terms with this “betrayal” and the new language choice. She justifies this later in her article: “The essential thing was that, even though Yiddish is a living language, the language of the people and of democracy, there is a trend of thought, which for us was revolutionary, that expresses itself in Hebrew; whereas Yiddish literature is ruled by narrow-mindedness, mostly inert and reactionary in our eyes and, at best—only a weak echo of what was revealed in Hebrew. And we, in our situation and in the situation of our people, yearned for revolutionary thought.”47 The decision to choose Hebrew as the sole language base for the modern Jewish world was particularly painful because it involved reviving Hebrew as a spoken language. As one writer commented, “It cannot be appreciated how much it costs a man to go from speaking one language to another and especially to a language that is not yet a spoken language. How much breaking of the will it takes. And how many torments of the soul that wants to speak and has something to say—and is mute and stammering.”48 One writer later reminisced about the first time that she had been asked to speak in Hebrew: In the first days, I had a hard time with Hebrew. I had never spoken Hebrew in my life. As a matter of fact, I saw Hebrew speech as something unnatural, so much so that I had a teacher, a man who was very dear to me—and I caused him great grief. He spoke to me in Hebrew and I spoke to him in Yiddish because I thought Hebrew was not a spoken language. When I came to Eretz-Isrel, I couldn’t make a natural sentence in Hebrew and I didn’t want to talk a foreign language. I decided I wouldn’t utter a foreign word. And for ten days, I didn’t speak at all; when I was forced to answer—I would replay with some Biblical verse close to the issue.49


forgotten, could not be decisive. After all, many of our people do not know Hebrew either. And Yiddish is forgotten on the one hand and, on the other, is learned and loved.46

The “miraculous” transformation of the Hebrew language from a dead ancient language into a living spoken modern language is certainly not a triumphant story of the vernacular, but it celebrates the same kind


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of willpower, the same kind of social-engineering mechanism, and the same kind of search for the perfect language for one’s nation that characterize the transnational vernacular movement. What makes the Hebrew story particularly relevant to the Chinese vernacular movement is the “Hebrew only” language structure self-imposed on the modern Jewish world. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, (1858–1922), the father of the revival of the Hebrew language, once confessed: I speak Hebrew, only Hebrew, not only with the members of my family but also with every man and woman who I know understands Hebrew . . . And I think in Hebrew day and night, awake and in dreams, in sickness and in health, and even when I am tormented by harsh physical pain. And yet, I must admit again: sometimes, when my mind is steeped in thought, especially of days gone by, days of childhood and youth, and it frees itself for a moment, without my sensing it, from the Hebrew yoke I have forcibly imposed on it for so many years—I suddenly realize that I was thinking for a moment not in Hebrew, that, from under my thought in Hebrew words, surfaced a few words, in Ashkenazi (= Yiddish) and also in Russian and French!50 While Chinese May Fourth writers such as Yu Pingbo (1900–1990) and Liu Dabai (1880–1932) lamented the surfacing of the traditional elements and styles in their vernacular poetry writing, Ben-Yahuda tried hard to repress the Yiddish and foreign elements in his speech and thinking. For each of them, it was the dream of a pure and utopian language that they wanted so much to come true.


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The January 2008 issue of PMLA carried an essay entitled “The Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel.” According to the author, Jale Parla, a column devoted to language issues in the Radikal, a highbrow daily newspaper in Turkey, has the title “Dil Yaresi,” a play on the word dil, which means “heart” in Ottoman Turkish and “tongue” in modern, purified Turkish. The expression dil yaresi, therefore, means both “the wounded heart” and “the wounded tongue,” pointing to the ongoing controversy around the reformed modern Turkish, a language still unsettled and vulnerable.1 Since the late 1980s, there has also appeared in China a strong sense of nostalgia for classical Chinese, which has led some scholars to claim “wenyan (classical Chinese) is brought back to life after its burial almost a century ago.”2 In 1993, Zheng Min, a well-known professor and poet published in Wenxue pinglun, a prestigious journal of literary criticism in China, an essay entitled “A Fin-de-Siecle (French) Retrospect: The Transformation of the Chinese Language and the Creation of Chinese New Poetry.” Sharply critiquing Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and the May Fourth vernacular movement, Zheng claims that the “violent” acts these intellectuals imposed on classical Chinese and Chinese culture are largely responsible for the failure of new poetry.3 While Zheng’s negative view of Chinese new poetry written in the modern vernacular is by all means arguable, it is her reassessment of the May Fourth vernacular movement that I want to focus on here. Zheng’s criticism is insightful in the sense that it strikes right at the language war between classical Chinese and the vernacular that


Epilogue


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characterizes the May Fourth vernacular movement. Criticizing May Fourth writers’ determination to turn their back on classical Chinese, and to reject traditional literature written in classical Chinese, Zheng points out that it was a “dualistic” and “antagonistic” mode of thinking that lay behind such self-destructive behavior. What I find problematic about Zheng’s discussion is her similarly harsh attack on Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi. It is true that Chen Duxiu declared “there is no room for any discussion” at the early phase of the May Fourth literary revolution, which initiated the strictly monolingual “vernacular only” writing mode. It is also true that Hu Shi created and repeatedly emphasized the dead versus living language metaphor that rendered classical Chinese and the vernacular symbols of two completely oppositional ideologies. But to blame Hu and Chen entirely for the traumatic path the May Fourth vernacular movement took seems rather naïve, especially when taking into consideration that Zheng criticizes these two thinkers for not being sufficiently well versed in Ferdinand de Saussure’s language theory. If the message Zheng wants to deliver is that “Chinese must heal their cultural wound from the past and develop an answer to the global age,”4 then healing cannot be achieved by vilifying the May Fourth vernacular movement, or even more narrowly, by blaming Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu. I wonder if this is the same kind of “dualistic” and “antagonistic” mode of thinking that is at work here, only that in Zheng’s paradigm, it is the May Fourth vernacular movement that becomes the force that needs to be absolutely rejected. The need for healing has been revealed by the sustained longing for something lost in the past, but the first step towards real healing must start with understanding: to understand that the May Fourth vernacular movement was taking place “where intentions themselves are contradictory and consequences very often unintended; where movements follow winding and unpredictable paths; where choices are strategic and relative, not univocal and absolute.”5 One needs to understand the complex linguistic makeup and psychology of the first Chinese vernacular writers, to understand the traumatic and precarious conditions under which they took on the vernacular, and, thus, to understand that particular historical juncture of linguistic upheaval and the unique nature of their writing. Our understanding should also go beyond and see the May Fourth vernacular movement as one episode of the


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transnational vernacular movement, which reshaped the landscape of modern world literature. *

*

In one of her articles on American literature and world literature, Wai Chee Dimock questions the mainstream practice of literary studies in the United States that considers a national literature as an independent field and sufficient unto itself. Dimock asks, “But is this current practice justified, empirically as well as analytically? If it is not, how can we best modify it? What if we were to think of American literature as no more than a subset, not freestanding, not sovereign unto itself, and requiring a larger set—something like world literature—for its all contours to emerge? How would this set-and-subset relation change the questions that we ask and the archives that we use?”6 In many ways, this study of the linguistic upheaval in early twentieth-century China echoes exactly what Dimock argues. This book questions the conventional practice that considers the May Fourth vernacular movement as a Chinese phenomenon sufficient unto itself and explores the kind of contour that emerges when one sees the Chinese case as a subset within a larger set—world literature. In my discussion, the triumph of the vernacular in modern China, the bi-lingual and multi-glossic approaches in which China’s first vernacular writers took on the vernacular, were placed against the background of world literature as we glance through the Japanese genbun itchi movement, the first Taiwanese vernacular writers’ struggling with multiple forms of “vernacular,” modern Turkish writers’ relentless and multiple-time breaking with their linguistic past, and, finally, the semiotic and linguistic disturbance that permeated the European Renaissance literary scene. Interestingly, a few years ago, a debate in the prestigious journal Chinese Comparative Literature touched upon the similar set-and-subset relation that Dimock addresses in her study on American literature. In that debate, Chen Sihe coins a new phrase, “world elements in twentiethcentury Chinese literature,” to better examine literary relations between China and the world outside. Chen proposes a new comparative literature that focuses on these elements in twentieth-century Chinese literature, “which may be examined, compared, and analyzed against the


*


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background of world literature.”7 He argues that a study of such subject matter shows us: (1) how twentieth-century Chinese literature was part of a larger set—world literature; and (2) how being a unit of a vast system Chinese literature enriched the landscape of world literature in its own unique way. While Dimock relocates American literature in a larger set— world literature—Chen pushes the argument one step further, claiming that the most important focus is not the duality of World/China (set/ subset), but rather that the literature of China and the literatures of other countries belong to a complicated network of world literature and contribute together and equally to the development of world literature. Both Dimock and Chen aim to rewrite national literature, to explore new contours of national literature that emerge as it is placed in the context of world literature, but they come from different perspectives. Chen Sihe’s discussion targets the conventional influence studies, which have dominated the practice of comparative literature in contemporary China. While influence studies have focused extensively on “translation” and the reception of foreign ideas and schools, Chen argues, they do not necessarily clarify foreign literary relations in twentieth-century China as they claim to do. An alternative approach to the question is to focus on those “world elements in twentieth-century Chinese literature,” to investigate carefully how these “elements” were materialized in Chinese literature, and then to analyze such “materialization” against the world literature tradition. Conventional influence studies also presume an unequal relationship between who is influencing and who is being influenced, which positions China and those being influenced as “periphery” countries in an inferior place, fighting a losing battle from the very beginning. Rather than seeing literary influence as some wave from a European superior center being transmitted to the countries on the periphery, Chen envisions a world literature constituted by various subsets, including twentieth-century Chinese literature, each interacting on equal footing and each assuming its unique role in a complicated literary network of exchange. *

*


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*

It must be clear by now that the problem of national literature, world literature, and comparative literature is always in the background of


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this book. Whereas my examination of the triumph of the vernacular in modern China focuses on a specific and crucial moment in Chinese literary history, it places the Chinese case in a larger set—world literature—and highlights the co-existence as well as co-play between the Chinese story and other stories that together have shaped the landscape of world literature. Scholars in American academia have made attempts in recent years to rearticulate the relation between national literature, comparative literature, and world literature.8 Among these efforts, David Damrosch’s elegantly written book What Is World Literature? provides a refreshing paradigm to approach the problem. “For the past halfcentury, world literature in its North American guises has usually been opposed to national literature. A genial disregard, if not outright hostility, often obtained between the devotees of the two.” 9 Damrosch’s new definition of world literature, however, advances a new understanding of “world literature as an elliptical refraction of national literatures,” and, thus, clarifies the vital, yet also indirect, relation between the two. According to Damrosch, this refraction is double in nature: Works become world literature by being received into the space of a foreign culture, a space defined in many ways by the host culture’s national tradition and the present needs of its own writers . . . World literature is, thus, always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture; hence it is a double refraction, one that can be described through the figure of the ellipse, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate the elliptical space within which a work lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by neither alone.10 Perceiving world literature as a mode of reading and circulation, Damrosch explores an elliptical space that is not covered by any single national literature but rather is shared by multiple national literatures. It is in this elliptical space that work from national literatures was reborn as world literature, assuming features different in kind from work within a national tradition.


Epilogue


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It is in the same kind of elliptical space that I attempt in this book to capture the Chinese vernacular movement as well as the transnational vernacular movement, and my vision is similarly refractive rather than representative. As someone who received her B.A. degree in Chinese literature in China, and then acquired knowledge and professional skill in comparative literature in U.S. academia, and as someone who writes in English at an American institution, my vision of the Chinese vernacular movement is in a way refractive, as the texts and figures are presented in translation and in a space defined both by the Chinese source and by a very specific host culture’s national tradition. In my vision, the Chinese vernacular movement also responds to works from other literature traditions, which are also sharply refracted as these texts travel across space and time to be reborn into this specific ambient of world literature. Not surprisingly, Dante’s Divine Comedy, More’s Utopia, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, as showcased in this particular space, are dramatically different from what the specialists’ knowledge would normally present, since, here, these texts are brought up to engage with a very specific host culture’s tradition and a distant culture, the Chinese texts and cultural context. What we see here is indeed an elliptical space generated by triple foci and a multitude of texts having dialogue with each other. Moreover, a comparative analysis of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Lu Xun’s “Dairy of a Madman,” and Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo, and a comparative study of the Chinese Renaissance, the Indian Renaissance, and the Arab Renaissance and their language issues as presented in this particular space are also very much defined by the author herself, who both created and responded to this world literature space. As Damrosch points out, “A leading characteristic of world literature today is its variability: different readers will be obsessed by very different constellations of texts.” In this sense, here I present to my reader my world literature and my vision of transnational vernacular movement, a subject matter that remains under-represented and under-appreciated. Ref lecting a specific elliptical space, my book may also be viewed as a contribution to the many new world literature spaces that are emerging and developing.


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Introduction 1. Dante Alighieri, Literature in the Vernacular (De Vulgari Eloquentia), trans. Sally Purcell (Manchester: Carcanet New Press Limited, 1981), 21–22. 2. Ibid., 27. 3. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Blackwell, 1995), 34. 4. Ibid., 45–46. 5. Dante Alighieri, Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 67. In his discussion, Anderson places great emphasis on “piracy,” which I have found rather problematic. The word “piracy” vividly evokes the speed and pervasiveness of the emergence of the vernacular and the spread of nationalism. But it also has negative connotations of forgery, of knowledge as property. Is Anderson implying that that all the language revolutions in other countries are illegitimate copies, while the European one is the only original? One can’t help but think of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the “original” and the “copies” in his well-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Does the construction of the “original” and the “piracy” in Anderson’s paradigm also work to uphold the concept of authenticity, granting some kind of aura to the superior West, which in turn demands some ritualistic respect from the inferior “copies”? 8. In his article “Conjectures on World Literature” (in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast [New York: Verso, 2004], 148–162), Franco Moretti shows the findings of his ambitious research on the rise of the modern novel (roughly from 1750 to 1950) in four continents (Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa), more than twenty independent critical studies, as such: world literature was indeed a system—but a system of variations. While I agree with Moretti’s argument, readers will see that my vision of “system” differs considerably


NOT E S


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9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Notes

from Moretti’s political, economic, and scientific approach. As Emily Apter observes in her article “Literary World- Systems” (in Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch [The Modern Language Association of America, 2009], 44–60), Moretti drew heavily on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, for whom the world- system was market- driven with core centers of power, around which peripheral nations orbited. In his recent projects, The Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), an edited volume on the world history of the genre involving contributors from various national literatures, and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstracts for a Literary History (London and New York: Verso, 2005), Moretti further highlights the value of science (both natural science and social science) in his approach to understanding world literature. Two major works in this category of “history of ideas” regarding the rise of the vernacular are Richard Foster Jones’s The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953) and Eric Blackall’s The Emergence of German as a Literary Language: 1770–1775 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in China, 1900–37 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 26. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), 57. A perfect proof of this theory is Jacques Derrida’s recently published book Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), where he claims: “I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me. The monolingualism in which I draw my very breath is, for me, my element. Not a natural element, not the transparency of the ether, but an absolute Habitat” (1). What Derrida expresses here is obviously an experience he underwent with language that touched the innermost nexus of his existence. Although the struggle that Derrida had to come to terms with—“I only have one language; it is not mine”—was deeply connected with the “legacy of French in colonial Algeria,” the kind of obsessive and precarious emotional, linguistic, and existential condition that he explores and elaborates in his book is far more universal. See also Rey Chow’s interesting article “Reading Derrida on Being Monolingual,” New Literature History, vol. 39, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 217–31. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), 465. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 74. Nergis Erturk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpinar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy,” PMLA, vol. 123, ( January 2008) no. 1: 41–56. Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman,” in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Norton, 1977), 10. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford University Press, 1996), 29.


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17. Ernest Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 355. 18. Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 19. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 45. Also see, Apter, “Literary World- Systems.” 20. See Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 149. 21. See Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees.

One


1. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. H.V.S. Ogden (Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1949), 29. 2. Ibid., 29. 3. Kang Youwei, Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu- wei, trans. Laurence G. Thompson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1958), 99. 4. Ibid., 101. 5. Gerard Wegemer, “The City of God in Thomas More’s Utopia,” Renascence 44 (Winter 1992): 115–135; also see Zhang Longxi, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 167–173. 6. See Patrick Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: University of Columbia Press, 2004), 76. 7. Kang Youwei, 101. 8. Ibid.,101. 9. Charles Ferguson, “Diglossia,” Word 15 (1959): 325–40. 10. After Ferguson coined the term, “diglossia” became widely used in sociolinguistic literature and its meaning was further theorized and extended. The most important revision was provided by Joshua Fishman in his 1967 article, entitled “Bilingualism with and without diglossia, diglossia with and without bilingualism” (The Journal of Social Issue 23, 1967: 29–38). Defining the notion almost solely based on the principle of function, Fishman states that “diglossia” exists “not only in multilingual societies which officially recognize several ‘languages’ but also in societies which are multilingual in the sense that employ separate dialects, registers or functionally differentiated language varieties of whatever kind” (Fishman, 30). Fishman paints an ambitious blueprint for a new “broad diglossia,” which proved to be very appealing to later social linguists. 11. The appropriations are in two aspects. First, Ferguson’s model seems only to concern itself with the spoken language. Second, the picture of the linguistic structure of pre-modern China complicates itself by the presence of different dialects, which in a sense challenges the binary system proposed by Ferguson. But since what is at issue here is the written language of China, mainly the relationship between wenyan and


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12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

Notes

baihua, I allow myself to simplify the picture. I understand such simplification comes at the expense of 1) a more sophisticated view of baihua (the vernacular) as the linguistic medium in fiction and opera and as guanhua (Mandarin) required of almost everyone in or associated with the civil service, including manuals and guidebooks for how actually to carry out the tasks of being a magistrate, etc.; and 2) the relationship between baihua (the vernacular) and local dialects, the informal spoken language. Most recently, Edward Gunn has done substantial work on spoken languages in contemporary China. See, Edward Gunn, Rendering the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). As many scholars have acknowledged, it is extremely difficult to determine exactly when the writing script of ancient Chinese began to diverge form speech. Bernhard Karlgren estimated that Chinese writing and speech started to part ways roughly at the end of the Western Han period (206 B.C. to 22 A.D.). Some other scholars such as John DeFrancis believe that the divorce of writing from speech started much earlier, probably in the earliest stages of Chinese writing, the Shang period. Also see Liangyan Ge, Out of the Margin: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). As many scholars have acknowledged, it is extremely difficult to determine. Ge, 11. See Victor Mair’s research on Tun-huang Manuscripts: T’ang Transformation Texts (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1989). Ferguson, “Diglossia,” 328. Hu Shi, “Introduction to Monkey,” in Monkey, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 3. Li Zhi “On the Child-Mind,” in An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginning to 1911, ed. Stephen Owen (New York and London: Norton, 1996), 810. For more detail on Wang Yangming’s philosophy, see Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). Ferguson, “Diglossia,” 332. See Jones, The Triumph of the English Language. More’s Utopia was later translated into English and became accessible to mass readership. Keeping the story of “diglossia” in mind, we can easily understand why More was so outraged that he made it very clear that he preferred the book to be burned rather than have it translated into English. Indeed, More’s Utopia was born as a performance on a certain stage for a certain audience. If displaced into a different setting, the book was bound to suffer losses, although it would probably also gain things that More could never have imagined. The picture of the linguistic structure of early Modern England was very much a tri-glossic situation, with English, French and Latin each playing different roles. Since what is at issue here is only the relationship between Latin and English, I allow myself to simplify the picture. Kang Youwei, Ta T’ung Shu (Shanghai: shanghai guji chubanshe, 2005), 101. Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Women in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 21–25; also see Paul Cohen,


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25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

145

Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ing China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); and Chang Hao, Liang Ch’i- ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life, trans. Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui (Penguin Books, 1983), 101. Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Kang Youwei, Ta T’ung Shu, 102. For more detailed discussion on the early Jesuit missionaries’ attempts at romanization of the Chinese language, see DeFrances, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). As DeFrances states in his book, the inf luence of these romanization activities “was of limited significance, for little survives apart from a causal comment on the advantages of phonetic as against ideographic writing.” Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 17. Ibid., 23. See Wang Feng, “Wanqing pinyinhua yu baihuawen cuifa de gouyusichao,” (“The National Language Trends Advanced by the Romanization and Vernacularization in the Late Qing Period”), in Wenxue yuyan yu wenzhang tishi—cong wanqing dao “wusi” (Literary Language and Literature Style—from the late Qing to the May Fourth period), ed. Xia Xiaohong (Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2005), 23. See S. Robert Ramsey, The Language of China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), in which he gives a vivid account about what happened at the conference on the unification of pronunciation. See Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova, “The Origins of Modern Chinese Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–35. Ibid., 22. Edward Gunn, “The Language of Early Republican Fiction in the Context of Print Media,” Comparative Literature: East & West, vol. 4, no.1 (Summer 2002): 37–57. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early TwentiethCentury Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 19. As recorded by Richard Foster Jones, throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century there were innumerable examples of self- depreciation in English vernacular writers. For instance, scattered through Caxton’s prologues and epilogues are many apologies for his simple and rude style and his rude and common English. He speaks of translating a Dutch tale “in to this rude and comyn englyshe,” and apologizes for reducing the original of Blanchardyn and Eglantine (1489) “to rude and comyn englyshe.” In a work begun in 1477, Thomas Norton finds it necessary to defend his use of “plaine and common speache” on the ground that he is writing for the unlearned multitude. No wise man, he says, should despise it, because it is “here set out in English blunt and rude” to please “Ten Thousand


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38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Notes

Layman” rather than “ten able Clerkes.” The use of English, free from classical expressions, requires an apology. See Jones, 4–5. Also according to Richard Foster Jones, many dictionaries were compiled in the early seventeenth century, which laid the basis for the triumph of the English language. These dictionaries were: Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall . . . (1604), Henry Cockeram, The English Dictioonarie . . . (1623), Thomas Blount, Glossographia . . . (1656), etc. Ibid., 274. Chen Duxiu, “On Literary Revolution,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 141. For a detailed discussion of the May Fourth Movement, see Chow Tse-Tusing, The May Fourth Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Benjamin Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). Kirk Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 114. Ibid., 114. In the recent decades, the “May Fourth” paradigm that privileges only writings produced by May Fourth progressive writers has come under critical scrutiny. My engagement with this debate will be seen later in chapter 4. Qian Xuantong, “Zhongguo jinhou zhi wenzi wenti,” in Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi (Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature), ed. Zhao Jiabi (Shanghai: liangyou tushu gongsi, 1935) vol. 1, 141. For more on the spread of Esperanto in early twentieth- century China, see Muller & Benton, “Esperanto and Chinese Anarchism 1907–1920: The Translation from Diaspora to Homeland,” Language Problem and Language Planning, 30: 1 (2006): 45–73. Chen Duxiu, “Fuzhu,” in Zhao Jiabi, vol.1, 146. Hu Shi, “Fuzhu” Ibid, 146. Lu Xun, “Guanyu xinwenzi” in Lu Xun Quanji (Complete Works of Lu Xun), (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), vol. 6. Fu Sinian, “Hanyu gaiyong pinyin wenzi de chubu tan” (“A Preliminary Discussion of Replacing Chinese Characters with a Phonetic System of Roman Letters”) in Zhao Jiabi, vol.1, 149. Also see Ping Chen, “China,” in Language and National Identity in Asia, ed. Andrew Simpson (Oxford University Press, 2007). Zhu Jingnong, “Letter from Zhu Jingnong” in Hu Shi xueshu wenji (Collected Scholarly Work of Hu Shi), ed. Jiang Yihua (Zhonghua shuju, 1993). Liu Bannong, “Wode wenxue gailiang guan,” in Zhao Jiabi, vol.1, 67. Hu Shi, “Jianshe de wenxue genming lun” Ibid., 128–130. Hu Shi, “Bishang liangshan,” ibid., 9. Hu Shi, “Some modest suggestions for literary reform,” in Denton, 125.


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147

55. Wang Feng, “Wenxue gemin yu guoyu yundong zhi guanxi,” (On the Relationship between the Literary Revolution and the National Language Movement), in Xia Xiaohong, 46–70. 56. Fu Sinian, “How to write in the vernacular,” in Zhao Jiabi, vol.1, 223. 57. Qu Qiubai, “Problems Pertaining to Mass Literature.” For a detailed discussion on the Leftist criticism on the May Fourth vernacular movement, see Merle Goldman, “Left-Wing Criticism of the Pai Hua Movement,” in Reflections on the May Fourth Movement, ed. Benjamin Schwartz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 85–94. 58. Zhou Zuoren, “Humane literature,” in Denton, 219. 59. C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 21.

Two


1. My examination of Hu’s encounter with Sichel’s book benefits from Robert Darnton’s illuminating study of bestsellers in pre-revolutionary France, which showed that meanings do not come prepackaged in discourses but, rather, are shaped by various circumstances. Darnton’s work has made it easier for scholars to pay attention to popular genres and to explore the role of publishers and booksellers when discussing the reception of ideas. See Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995). 2. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge Press, 1992), Mary Louise Pratt uses “contact zones” to designate the social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other. While I adopt the term, I do not emphasize the highly asymmetrical power relations of domination and subordination inherent in her study. 3. Burke, “Jacob Burckhardt and the Italian Renaissance,” in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Penguin Books, 1990), 12. 4. Instead of uncovering an essence of the Renaissance, Burckhardt may have looked at the Renaissance with a particular horizon of expectation and found that some neglected aspects resonated with him. 5. Edith Sichel, The Renaissance (New York: Henry Holt, 1914), 8. 6. Ibid., 13. 7. Hu Shi, Hu Shi liuxue riji, (Hu Shi’s Diary While Studying Abroad) (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1959), vol. 4, 1155. 8. Irene Eber, “Thoughts on Renaissance in Modern China,” in Studia Asiatica: Essays in Asian Studies in Felicitation of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of Professor Ch’en Shou-yi, ed. Laurence G. Thompson (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1975), 216. 9. For more discussions on the problem of translation and translingual practices in modern China, see Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practices.


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Notes

10. Liang Qichao, Zhongguo xueshu sixiang bianqian zhi dashi (On the Development of Chinese Scholarship and Intellectual Trends) (Taipei: Huazheng shuju, 1981), 103. 11. Quoted from Chen Pingyuan, Zhongguo xiandai xueshu de jianli (Establishing Modern Chinese Scholarship) (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1998), 336. 12. Hu Shi, Hu Shi liuxue riji, vol. 4, 1155. 13. Cited from Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 338. 14. See the invention of the word transculturation in Ortiz: “The word transculturation better expresses the different phrases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. In addition, it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation.” Fernando Oritz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 102–3. 15. Although the notion of renaissance was mainly associated with rebirth and other future-looking features of modernity and progress in May Fourth China, there was also an alternative way of understanding that was championed by Zhou Zuoren, another major contributor to the May Fourth literary revolution. As Zhou wrote in one of his 1926 essays, “I often think that among other genres in the New Literature, modern prose is least inf luenced by the foreign literary tradition; to say it is the product of a literary revolution therefore does not do justice, for it is rather the fruit of a literary Renaissance.” Interestingly enough, in Zhou’s discourse, “Renaissance,” a foreign word, is used to describe something mostly free from foreign inf luence, which is in a way an accurate use of term, since conventionally the term is about going back to the past, to the roots of the culture. 16. Zhao, “Preface” in Zhao Jiabi., Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi. 17. For example, in response to May Fourth intellectuals’ self-identification with the Renaissance, Chow Tse-tsung in his seminal book The May Fourth Movement gives a lengthy discussion of how the May Fourth period bears very little resemblance to the European Renaissance. 18. Yu Ying- shih, “Neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment: A Historian’s Ref lections on the May Fourth Movement,” in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, ed. Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral (Harvard University Press, 2001), 320. 19. It is tempting to approach Hu’s appropriations of the Renaissance as instances of Occidentalism defined by Xiaomei Chen as “a discursive practice that, by constructing its Western Other, has allowed the Orient to participate actively and with indigenous creativity in the process of self-appropriation, even after being appropriated and constructed by Western Others” (Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China [Oxford University Press, 1994], 2). The reason I am hesitant to do so is that Chen’s Occidentalism is in a way a derivative of Orientalism, as Chen herself acknowledges: “Chinese Occidentalism is the product of Western Orientalism, even if its aims are largely and specifically


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20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

149

Chinese” (Ibid., 5). On the one hand, I am not denying that Hu’s worldview is highly inf luenced by the Western thought, but I do not think that should be considered a case study of Western world domination. On the other hand, the emphasis of my discussion is certainly not on the workings of power relationship. My choice not to focus on them is a response to the overarching power of the theory of power. Sometimes one wonders whether obsessively talking about power merely reinforces that power, verbally and in other ways. For this reason, I prefer a more neutral term such as transculturation. Hu Shi, “Some Modest Suggestions for Literary Reform,” Denton, 123. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 138. Hu Shi, “Jianshe de wenxue geming lun” (“Toward a Constructive Theory of Literary Revolution”), in Zhao Jiabi, vol.1, 127–128. See Bruno Migliorni, The Italian Language (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984). The vernacular gained considerable ground in the fourteenth century, although the main contributions to the development of the vulgar tongue were made by the likes of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who drew strength from their knowledge of the classics and in their efforts to give artistic nobility to Italian. In the early fifteenth century, the vernacular went through a crisis. The humanists’ exaltation of Latin lowered the vernacular in public esteem. However, in the last decades of the century, the humanists’ search for a pure Latin only increased the uses of the vernacular in practical spheres. Between 1470 and 1550, printing made a decisive contribution to the stability and uniformity of language in Italy. The final codification of a standard written language occurred in the sixteenth century. The national language of Italy that Hu refers to did not even exist until a unified Italy was established in the nineteenth century. Volosinov. V. N. “Verbal Interaction,” in Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 52–53. For a recent book that examines the phenomenon of other Renaissances, see Brenda Schildgen, Gang Zhou and Sander Gilman, eds., Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006). David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773–1885 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 123. Hu Shi, The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1933), 46. Aurobindo, 1–2 Ibid., 3. The Bengali Renaissance traces its origin to the ancient Aryan civilization. The Aryans brought to India the Vedas and Brahmanism, with their sacred language, Sanskrit. The Bengali Renaissance, usually also labeled the Indian Renaissance, came to marginalize the Southern Indian Tamil Renaissance that began during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Tamil Renaissance espouses a separate “Dravidian” identity. See Francis Britto, Diglossia: A Study of the Theory with Application to Tamil (Georgetown University Press, 1986); also see Schildgen,


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32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

Notes

“Sri Aurobindo: Renaissance in India and the Italian Renaissance.” in Schildgen, Other Renaissances. Quoted from G. Smith, Life of Alexander Duff (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1879), I, 118. David Kopf ’s seminal work British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization (1783–1835) is one of the great examples, although the concept of “hybridity” itself is best explored in Homi Bhabha’s theorization. Report of the Second Indian National Congress, 2. Quoted from Sankar Ghose, The Renaissance to Militant Nationalism in India (Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi, Madras, Bangalore: Allied Publishers, 1969), 8. Schildgen, “Sri Aurobindo: Renaissance in India and the Italian Renaissance,” 140. See Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Book, 1979). See R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan, “India,” in Simpson, 55–83 Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education, 1979 [1935]. Ghose, The Renaissance in India, 30–31. Ibid., 27. The kind of harmonious relationship with the English language that Aurobindo experienced became impossible as India went further down the road to national independence. A year after India had attained independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking in English at the Constituent Assembly in Delhi on May 16, 1949, said: “Here I am the patent example of these English contacts, speaking in this Honorable House in the English language. No doubt we are going to change that language for our use, but the fact remains that I am doing so and the fact remains that most other members who will speak will also do so.” H. J. S. Cotton, New India or India in Transition (London, 1886) But as of today, English, a “foreign” language, remains an “associate official language” in India. In one of her articles on translation, G.C. Spivak tells the other side of the “vernacularization” story in India. “[F]rom the end of the eighteenth century, the fashioners of the new Bengali prose purged the language of the Arabic-Persian content until, in Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s (1824–73) great blank verse poetry, and the Bangadarshan (1872–76) magazine edited by the immensely inf luential novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya (1838–94), a grand and fully Sanskritized Bengali emerged . . . A corresponding movement of purging the national language Hindi of its Arabic and Persian elements has been under way since independence in 1947” (in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Berman and Michael Wood [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], 98). The kind of “synthesis” emphasized in Aurobindo’s paradigm was probably also oriented towards certain parties and certain relationships. See Sasson Somekh, Genre and Language in Modern Arabic Literature (Otto Harrassowitz Wiesbaden, 1991). Quoted from M. Pei, The Story of Language (New York, 1960), 159. See Anwar Chejne, The Arabic Language: Its Role in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969).


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46. Ibid., 20. 47. Taha Husayn, the great Egyptian writer (1889–1973), states: “I am now and will always remain unalterably opposed to those who regard the colloquial as a suitable instrument for mutual understanding and a method for realizing the various goals of our intellectual life . . . The colloquial lacks the qualities to make it worthy of the name of a language. I look on it as a dialect that has been corrupted in many respects. It might disappear, as it were, into the classical if we devoted the necessary effort on the one hand to elevate the cultural level of the people and on the other to simplify and reform the classical so that the two meet at a common point.” Husayn, The Future of Culture in Egypt, trans. Sidney Glazer (Washington: American Council of Learned Society, 1954), 86. 48. Seybolt & Chiang, Language Reform in China (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1979), 18–19. 49. The Constitution of India considers twenty-two languages the “major” languages of India, including Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, Tamil, and Telugu. 50. Sheldon Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity 1000–1500,” Daedalus 127 (3): 41.

Three The Shaky House 1. Huang Zunxian, Renjinglu shicao jianzhu, ed. Qian Ersun (Shanghai, 1981). 2. Although Huang Zunxian himself never used the term “Poetic Revolution” in his own writing, he was frequently praised by Liang Qichao, who states “Huang Zunxian’s poetry has opened up a new realm. He stands alone in the world of twentieth- century poetry, and all consider him a great author.” See J.D. Schmidt, Within the Human Realm: The Poetry of Huang Zunxian: 1848–1905 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47. 3. Ibid., 65. 4. Cohen, 6. 5. The name of the studio was taken from the famous couplet by Tao Yuanming (365–427), “I built my studio near where humans dwell, and yet there is no clamor of carriages and horses.” 6. Noriko Kamachi, Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 237. 7. See Leo Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 8. Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China: 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 71. 9. See Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 10. Heidegger, 57.


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11. Leo Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 81. 12. Sun Yurong, ed., Yu Pingbo yanjiu ziliao (Research Material on Yu Pingbo) (Tianjing: Renmin chubanshe, 1981), 119. 13. Peter Burke, “Heu domine, adsunt Turcae: A Sketch for a Social History of PostMedieval Latin,” in Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Polity Press, 1991), 23–50. 14. Michelle Yeh, Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice Since 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 15. Yu- sheng Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-Traditionalism in the May Fourth Ear (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979). 16. In the early 1900s, when studying in Japan, Lu Xun used old baihua to translate science and adventure fictions. His translations of Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Moon and Voyage to the Center of the Earth were published in 1906. Interestingly enough, the last two chapters of Lu Xun’s translation of Voyage to the Moon were predominated by classical Chinese. It seems like Lu Xun changed plans in terms of his language choice. My guess is that Lu Xun felt more at home with classical Chinese, so when he tried to finish the translation in a hurry, he switched to classical Chinese. The language of Lu Xun’s translation of Voyage to the Center of the Earth was also an interesting mixture, predominantly classical Chinese, but interspersed with many vernacular phrases (Lennart Lundberg, Lu Xun as a Translator, [Stockholm: Orientaliska Studier, 1989], 37). During the same period, Lu Xun and his brother, Zhou Zuoren, employed classical Chinese as the literary medium to translate their favorite Russian and Eastern European literary works, which resulted in the publication of Yuwai xiaoshuo ji (Anthology of Foreign Fiction) in 1909. When Lu Xun wrote his first real short story, “Huai jiu” (“Looking Back to the Past”), in 1911, again he chose to use classical Chinese. Here, we see clearly how such conventional language attitude had to be completely reverted for Lu Xun to be able to write his revolutionary piece “Diary of a Madman” in 1918. Lu Xun’s almost obsessive need to condemn classical Chinese may well have attested to the kind of traumatic experience he had to undergo to embrace new vernacular writing. 17. Jon Kowallis, The Lyrical Lu Xun: A Study of His Classical-Style Verse (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 1. 18. Michel Hockx, “Liu Banong and the Forms of New Poetry,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, vol.3, no.2 ( Jan. 2000): 83–118. 19. Xiao Binru ed., Liu Dabai yanjiu ziliao (Research Material on Liu Dabai) (Tianjing: Renmin chubanshe, 1981), 109. 20. Cited from Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 90. 21. See Patrick Hanan’s work. Also, see Jian Xu’s essay, “The Will to the Transaesthetic: The Truth Content of Lu Xun’s Fiction,” (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol.11, no.2 [Spring 1999]: 61–92), where he gives a comprehensive account of different readings of “Diary of a Madman,” both in China and in the West.


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22. Zhong- qi Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 68. 23. In one of his essays on modern Chinese short stories, “Guanyu zhongguo xiandai duanpian xiaoshuo” (“On Modern Chinese Short Stories”), Chen Sihe also uses “internal splitting” to describe the unique feature of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman.” He writes, “The story’s merit lies not in perfection or artistic harmony but in its unique feature of ‘internal splitting.’ In terms of its language, the story combines classical Chinese and the Europeanized modern vernacular. The diary proper composed of a large number of odd sentences written according to western grammar contrasts sharply with the preface written in f luent classical Chinese, which immediately outperform the soft and plain traditional vernacular.” While I agree with Chen’s observation on the unsettling and conf licting nature of the linguistic medium of “Diary of a Madman,” I want to push his argument one step further. I argue that the “internal splitting” of Lu Xun’s text should not only be approached from the perspective of formal linguistics but also from that of social linguistics, because this “internal splitting” allows us to see how Lu Xun’s text was linked to the revolutionary cause of inaugurating the vernacular and, in addition to that, to see how Lu Xun as a transitional writer had to struggle to come to terms with a new form of writing. 24. When Petrarch decided to write an epic (Africa), he chose Latin as its linguistic medium. 25. See Dante, Inferno, 27–29. 26. Yu Dafu, Guoquji (The Past), 56. 27. Yu Dafu, “Sinking” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Joseph Lau and Howard Goldblatt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 44. 28. Ibid., 46. 29. See Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. 30. Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, 277. 31. Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett De Bary (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 69. 32. Yu, “Sinking,” 52. 33. Ibid, 52. 34. Ibid, 52–53. 35. Ibid, 53. 36. Ibid, 66. 37. Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 91. 38. Yu, “Sinking,” 51. 39. Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 71. 40. Natsume Soseki, “Bungakuron,” NSZ (The Complete Works of Natsume Soseki), vol. 16, 8–9, Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1960; also Ibid., 17–18 41. Ibid., 44. 42. Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore.


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43. Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Cultural and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (State University of New York Press, 1984), 4. 44. Ibid., 25–26. 45. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 74. 46. Chang Sung- sheng Yvonne, “Taiwanese New Literature and the Colonial Context: A Historical Survey,” in Taiwan: A New History, ed. Murray A. Rubinstein (M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 269. 47. Huang Chengcong, “Lun puji baihuawen de xinshiming” (“The New Mission of Promoting the Vernacular”) and Huang Chaoqin , “Hanwen gaige lun” (“On the Reform of Hanwen”), in Rijuxia taiwan xinwenxue wenxian ziliao xuanji (Selected Research Materials On Taiwan New Literature under Japanese Colonial Rule), ed. Li Nanheng (Mingtan chubanshe, 1979), 6–19 and 20–35. 48. Huang Shihui, “Zeme bu tichang xiangtu wenxue” (“Why Not Promote Local Literature?”) Wurenbao, 1930, 10, 6. 49. Frank Stone, The Rub of Cultures in Modern Turkey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 28. 50. Ibid., 28. 51. In The Turkish Muse (Syracuse University Press, 2006), Talat Halman describes the language crisis the Turkish Republic faces in the present day: “a vast transformation, broader than the language reform undertaken by any other nation— vocabulary that consisted of seventy-five percent Arabic, Persian, and French words in 1920 increased its ratio of native words to eighty percent and reduced borrowings to only twenty percent by the 1970s,” 20. 52. Ibid., 20. 53. See Jing Tsu’s Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 195. 54. Cited from Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 90. 55. Yu, “Sinking,” 51. 56. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2. 57. Paolo Valesio, “The Language of Madness in the Renaissance,” Yearbook of Italian Studies, 1, 1971, 219.

Four The “Vernacular Only” Writing Mode 1. Liu Yazi, Nanshe Jilue (A Brief Account of Southern Society) (Shanghai: Shanghai kaihua shuju, 1940), 123. 2. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 271–72. 3. See Liu Yazi, Liu Yazi Shuxin Ji (Collected Letters of Liu Yazi) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1984). 4. In fact, Lu Xun did the same thing before he decided to participate in the May Fourth literary revolution.


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5. See Yang Tianshi and Wang Xuezhuang, eds., Nansheshi changbian (An Extensive History of Southern Society) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1995), 550. 6. Ibid., 584. 7. See Liu Wu- chi, “Biographical Account of Liu Yazi,” in Liu Yazi zizhuan nianpu riji (Liu Yazi: Autobiography, Chronology, Diary) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1986), 418. 8. See Wang Yao, Zhongguo xin wenxue shigao (A Draft History of Modern Chinese Literature) (Shanghai: kaiming shudian, 1951); Also see C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, Amitendranath Tagore, Literary Debates in Modern China, 1918–1937 (Tokyo: The Center for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1967); Chen Jingzhi, Xinwenxue yundong de zuli (Resistance to the New Literature Movement) (Taipei: Chengwen, 1980). 9. As Lydia Liu astutely observes, the first issue of Critical Review was adorned with stately portraits of Confucius and Socrates printed back to back. See Liu, 247. 10. Zhang Shizhao, “Ping xinwenhua yundong” (“Criticism of the New Cultural Movement”) in Zhao Jiabi, ed., vol. 2. 11. See C.T. Hsia, 12. 12. See Hu Shi, “Lao Zhang you fanpan le” (“Lao Zhang Has Rebelled Again”) in Guoyu weekly, Vol. 12, August 1925. 13. See Zhang Shizhao, “Ping xinwenhua yundong.” 14. See Leo Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 46–47. 15. Ma Xuexin et al., eds. Shanghai wenhua yuanliu cidian (A Dictionary of Cultural Sources in Shanghai) (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 199. 16. Liang Qichao, Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period, trans. Hsu, 102; original in Qingdai xueshu gailun, 85–86. 17. Citing Wang Yuanhua, Theodore Huters points out that Du Yaquan’s dismissal as editor at Dong fang zazhi was due to his resistance to the wholesale adoption of the vernacular and the management’s fear of possible consequences for the textbook market. See Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 227. 18. Du Yaquan, “Lun tongsuwen” (“On the Common Language”), Dong fang zazhi, vol.16, no.12 (1919). 19. Joan Judge, Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1. 20. Du Yaquan, “Lun tongsuwen.” 21. Wang Dungen, “Remarks on the Publication of Saturday,” in Denton, 243. 22. Michel Hockx, “Playing the Field, Aspects of Chinese Literary Life in the 1920s,” in The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, ed. Michel Hockx (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 61–2.


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23. Jianhua Chen, “Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn: Literary Debates in Republican China, 1919–1949,” in Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity, ed. Chow Kai-wing, (Lexington Books, 2008), 53. 24. Link, 20. 25. Ibid, 59–60. 26. Jianhua Chen, “Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn,” 62. 27. Ibid, 63. 28. See Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds. The Appropriation of Cultural Capital; also see Michel Hockx, “Is There a May Fourth Literature? A Reply to Wang Xiaoming.” 29. The example of scholarships in the West that challenged the conventional view of “Mandarin Ducks and Butterf lies” literature include Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities; Denise Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001); and Jianhua Chen, A Myth of Violet: Zhou Shoujuan and the Literary Culture of Shanghai, 1911–1927 (Ph.D dissertation, Harvard University, 2002). In China, there appeared in recent years numerous reprints of Butterf ly works; most notably, in 1997 Shanghai Dongfang chuban zhongxin published the eight-volume Compendium of Essays of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School (Yuanyang hudie pai sanwen daxi), (reminiscent of the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature, a ten-volume collection of canonical works of May Fourth progressive writers). 30. See Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), which challenges the conventional paradigm by introducing the gender perspective. Other scholars, like Wendy Larson, Tani Barlow, and Dai Jinghua, have also done substantial works on women writers in the context of modern Chinese literature. 31. See David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siecle (French) Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). For works by historians that focus on alternative voices in early Republican China, see Charlotte Furth, ed., The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) and Prasenjit Durara’s Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Other recent publications that focus on the same period, see Jon Kowallis, The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” During Late Qing and Early Republican China (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2005); and Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home. 32. Yang and Wang, eds, Nansheshi changbian, 654. 33. Not by coincidence, we see scholars in the United States making efforts to recover a multilingual America against the English Only myth that had long shaped people’s understanding of America and American literature. 34. Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, 27–41.


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35. Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and Politics in Renaissance Writing (New York: Routledge, 1996). 36. Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65. 37. Ibid., 67. 38. Ibid., 55–56. 39. Anderson, 68. 40. Tony Crowley, “Bakhin and the History of the Language,” in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 185. 41. Indra Levy, “The Modern Japanese Vernacular as a Femme Fatale,” AAS 2008 paper. 42. Works that have touched upon this matter include Indra Levy’s Sirens of the Western Shore and Vicente L. Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 43. Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 45. 44. See, Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford University Press, 1999). 45. Katznelson, “Language Insomnia.” According to the translator, the original title, nedudey lashon, is untranslatable. Literally, it means “language wandering,” meaning “shifting from language to language.” 46. Ibid., 184. 47. Ibid., 185. 48. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (University of California Press, 1993), 138. 49. Ibid., 138–139 50. Ibid., 87.

Epilogue 1. Jale Parla, “The Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel,” PMLA, vol.123 ( January 2008) no.1: 27. 2. Chen Jianhua, “Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn,” 52. 3. Zheng Min, “Shiji mo de huigu: Hanyu yuyan biange yu Zhongguo xinshi chuangzuo” (“A Fin- de- Siecle (French) Retrospect: The Transformation of the Chinese Language and the Creation of Chinese New Poetry), Wenxue Pinglun, no. 3, 1993: 5–20. 4. Chen Jianhua, “Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn,” 64. 5. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Oxford University Press, 1986), vii. 6. Wai Chee Dimock, “American Literature and Islamic Time,” in Damrosch, Teaching World Literature, 306.


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7. Chen Sihe, “Ershi shiji zhongwai wenxue guanxi yanjiuzhong de ‘shijiexing yinsu’ de jidian sikao” (“Thoughts on ‘World Elements’ in the Study of the 20th Century Foreign Literary Relations”), in Kuawenhua yanjiu: shenme shi bijiao wenxue (A Cross-Cultural Study: What Is Comparative Literature), ed. Yan Shaodang and Chen Sihe (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2007), 145. 8. Most noticeable are Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (Columbia University Press, 2002), Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), and Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004). 9. Damrosch, What Is World Literature? 282 10. Ibid., 283.


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Index

Damrosch, David, 12–13, 139–140 Dante Alighieri, 10, 11–12, 56, 57, 59, 80, 86, 97, 98, 127–129, 131–132, 140, 149n24 De vulgari eloquentia, 1–3, 11, 56, 59, 127–128 Dewey, John, 42, 45 Di Baoxian, 118 Dialect, 26–27, 31, 64, 67–70, 97, 99, 127, 143n10, 143–144n11, 151n47 Diary of a Madman, 8, 11–12, 83–87, 93–94, 96, 140, 152n16, 153n23 Dimock, Wai Chee, 9, 97, 137–138 Diglossia, 17–18, 20, 23, 31, 40, 74, 86, 118, 143n10, 144n21, 149n31 Multi-glossia, 83, 94, 104, 137 Ding Ling, 83 Divine Comedy, 11, 80, 86, 97, 140 Don Quixote, 102 Dream of the Red Chamber, 20, 84 Du Fu, 56 Du Yaquan, 117–120, 155n17 Eco, Umberto, 2 English language, 10, 23–24, 29, 32, 35, 37, 63–65, 67, 70, 73, 78, 87, 90, 92, 93, 95, 110, 128, 140, 144n21n22, 145n37, 146n38, 150n41, 156n33 Erasmus, Desiderius, 128 Esperanto, 110, 146 European Renaissance, 8, 10, 36, 45–53, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 70, 73, 102, 131, 137, 148n17 Europeanization, 43 Ferguson, Charles, 17–18, 20, 23, 143n10,n11 French language, 25, 35, 37, 69, 73, 97, 110, 127–128, 134, 142n11, 144n22, 154n51 French Renaissance, 97 Fu Sinian, 35, 36, 42, 60 Futabatei Shimei, 8, 12, 96, 140

Galilei, Galileo, 129 Gao Xu, 111 Genbun itchi, 8, 27, 36, 89, 95 German language, 68, 69, 78, 91, 97, 110, 128–129 Germanization (Verdeutschung), 97 Ghose, Sri Aurobindo, 10, 62–67, 150n41 Giles, Peter, 23 Greek, 1, 2, 69, 86, 112, 128 Gu Jiegang, 35 Guanhua (Mandarin), 26, 27, 31, 42, 67, 68, 99, 144n11 Guoyu (national language), 41–42 Guoyin (national pronunciation), 27, 42 Hebrew language, 8, 10, 61, 132–134 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 77, 142n11 Heine, Heinrich, 91 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 129 Hindi Language, 70, 150n42, 151n49 Hong Xiuquan, 109 Hsia, C.T. 44, 112 Hu Shi, 5, 6, 10, 11, 31, 33–44, 45–47, 54–60, 61, 62, 67, 71, 73, 76, 78, 79, 98, 111, 113, 116, 135–136 Hu Xiansu, 111 Huang Chaoqin, 99 Huang Chengcong, 99 Huang Shihui, 99 Huang Zunxian, 27, 35, 73–75, 83, 151n2 Hundred Days’ Reform, 28–29, 74 Ibsen, Henrik, 112 Ideal language (perfect language), 2, 3, 5, 7, 10–11, 15–17, 24–25, 27–29, 39, 132, 134 Italian language, 2, 25, 53, 59–60, 68–69, 97, 127–129, 149n24 Italian Renaissance, 59, 97


174

Japanese I-novel, 89, 101 Japanese language, 6, 8, 12, 27–28, 30–31, 36, 75, 95, 98


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175

Japanese loanwords, 28, 31 Japanese Meiji period, 8, 12, 27, 30, 89, 95–96, 98 Jones, Richard Foster, 32, 145n37, 146n38 Journey to the West, 20, 21

Luther, Martin, 56, 97–98, 128 Lu Xun, 8, 11, 12, 32, 34, 36, 80–82, 83–87, 93–94, 96–97, 101, 125, 126, 140, 152n16, 153n23 Luo Jialun, 35, 60

Kang Baiqing, 35 Kang Youwei, 5, 16–17, 24–29, 35, 39, 73, 74, 107, 110 Karatani Kojin, 89–90, 95 Katznelson, Rachel, 132–133 Kopf, David, 60–61, 150n33

Macaulay, 65 Mao Dun, 121–122 Mao Zedong, 126 Maupassant, Guy de, 112 May Fourth generation, 32, 74–76, 78, 96, 98, 99, 131 May Fourth movement, 44, 50, 52, 117, 146n40, 148n17 May Fourth vernacular movement, 6, 7, 10, 11, 33–44, 60, 61, 70, 73, 98, 105, 125, 131, 135–137 Mei Guangdi, 111–112 Michelangelo, 46 Modernity, 3, 10, 23, 30, 46, 51, 60–62, 71, 101, 112, 114, 126, 129, 130, 132 Monolingualism, 7, 16, 70, 107, 125–127, 136, 142n More, Thomas, 15, 17, 23, 24, 140, 144n21 Moretti, Franco, 12–13, 141–142n8 Mori Ogai, 95

Lai He, 98 Language attitude, 5, 6, 17, 32, 64, 74, 77, 86, 94, 125, 152n16 Language choice, 8, 20, 23, 64, 65, 94, 97, 129, 133, 152n16 Language discourse, 5, 6, 22–24, 33–44, 53–60, 61, 67, 71, 98–99, 129 Dead vs. living language, 39, 40, 136 Spoken vs. written language, 16, 27, 36, 56, 131, 143n11 Language revolution, 4, 17, 42, 76, 100, 114 Language war, 9, 61, 67, 85, 94, 123, 131, 135 Late Qing language reform, 23, 28, 35, 37, 39, 90 Latin, 1–2, 11–12, 18, 23–24, 47, 56–57, 59, 69, 73, 80, 97, 128–129, 131, 144n22, 149n24, 153n24 Lenin, Vladimir, 109 Li Zhi, 21–22, 24 Liang Qichao, 17, 26, 27, 28, 30–31, 35, 39, 48, 73, 74, 83, 107, 116, 118, 119 Lin Shu, 30–31, 83, 111, 123 Lingua franca, 27, 97, 130 Literacy, 23, 26, 29, 73 Liu Bannong, 37, 82 Liu Dabai, 82, 83, 94, 125, 134 Liu Hsieh, 19 Liu Yazi, 105–111, 113, 114, 126 Lomonosov, 68

National language, 3, 5, 7, 16, 23–27, 41–44, 47, 57–59, 64, 67–68, 90, 98, 111, 113, 114, 124, 126, 149n24, 150n42 National language movement (guoyu yundong), 26, 39, 42, 90 National Language Study Society (Guoyu yanjiuhui), 42 Natsume Soseki, 95–96, 98 New Atlantis, 24 “New style,” 28, 30–31, 79, 116, 119 New Tide, 35, 42, 49 New Youth, 33–34, 37–39, 41–42, 51, 54, 58, 81, 82, 85, 87, 94, 117, 125


Index

Orlando Furioso, 102–103, 140


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Index

Petrarch, Francesco, 86, 127, 149n24, 153n24 Pleiade, 127 Qian Xuantong, 35, 37, 38, 82, 85, 111 Qiu Tingliang, 29 Qu Qiubai, 43 Questione della lingua, 97, 102, 127 Quoc ngu, 130 Romanization, 9, 25–27, 36–37, 39, 90, 130, 145n29 Ronsard, Pierre de, 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 112 Roy, Rammohan, 63, 65 Ricci, Matteo, 26 Russian language, 68–69, 110, 134, 152n16 Said, Edward, 65 Sanskrit, 10, 63–67, 70, 149n31, 150n42, 151n49 Saturday, 122, 124 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 136 Seyfettin, Omer, 100 “Shaky House” family, 8–9, 75, 83, 96–98 Shaw, Bernard, 112 Shen Congwen, 83 Shen Xue, 26 Shi Nai’an, 56 Sichel, Edith, 45–47, 49, 147n1 Sinking, 78, 87–92, 93–94, 101 Southern Society, 111, 126 New Southern Society, 110–111 Spanish language, 69 Su Manshu, 89 Sun Yat-sen, 74, 107 Tai-oan-oe, 99 Taiwan, 71, 98–99, 137 Tamil Renaissance, 67, 149n31 Tao Yuanming, 56, 151n5

Tolstoy, Leo, 112 Tongcheng-style, 31 Tongguang school, 126 Translingual practice, 5–6, 76 Transnational vernacular movement, 4–5, 10, 12, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140 Trigault, Nicolas, 26 Turkish language reform, 9, 99–100, 131, 135, 137 Ukigumo, 8, 12, 96, 140 Utopia, 15–17, 23–24, 140 Vasari, Giorgio, 48, 53 Vernacular Only, 7, 67, 81, 105–106, 107, 119, 126, 136 Vernacularization, 6–10, 12–13, 18–20, 40, 45, 71, 90, 119, 129, 130, 150n42 Vietnamese language, 130 Virgil, 11, 59, 86, 97, 102 Volosinvov, V.N., 60 Wang Dungen, 122 Wang T’ao, 74 Wang Tongzhao, 83 Wang Yangming, 22, 144n18 Wang Zhao, 26, 42 Wenxin diaolong, 19 Wenyan (classical Chinese), 4, 7, 18–22, 30–33, 35–41, 44, 54, 59, 61, 66–68, 70, 78–83, 93–94, 105–108, 110–114, 123–126, 130–131, 135–136, 143n11, 152n16, 153n23 Wordsworth, William, 87, 92 World literature, 4–5, 8–9, 12, 62, 71, 97–98, 110, 137–140, 141–142n8 Wu Cheng-en, 20–21 Wu Jianren, 89 Wu Mi, 111–112 Wu Rulun, 26, 42


176


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Index Wu Woyao, 56 Wu Yu, 34

177

Yuanyang hudie pai (Mandarin Duck and Butterf ly school), 123, 125, 156n29

Yan Fu, 83 Yiddish language, 8, 132–134 Young Pens, 100 Yu, Ying-shih, 52 Yu Dafu, 78, 82, 87, 90, 92, 93–94, 101–102, 104, 126 Yu Pingbo, 79, 94, 134

Zhang Shizhao, 112–114, 123 Zhang Taiyan, 48 Zhang Wojun, 98 Zheng Min, 135 Zhou Zuoren, 34, 42, 43–44, 82, 111, 148n15, 152n16 Zhu Jingnong, 36–38 Zhuangzi, 56


Xin Qiji, 56


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