The Beibei Cultural Sphere And The Chinese Literature In 1940s

With the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war, the outlook of the modern Chinese literature was characterized by an overall spatial shift for the simple fact that the former literary centers like Peking and Shanghai were successively occupied by Japan. Accordingly the seeds of the new literature were scattered in the different areas, which, in accordance with the warfare conditions, were designated as non-occupied, occupied and liberated. Sequentially this political and geographical division were also applied to literature definition, which is, however, can never defines the uniqueness of literature. For me, categories like "war"and "dispersion "can better generalize and interpret the true spirit of the writings in that period in that the war with its irrational quality was subtly felt by people, who would rethink over civilization, and dispersion would remind people of their alternative experiences about time, life and alienated space, which would reveal the spiritual state of the writers or the literati in general in a more direct way. Thus it is the spatial shift characterizing the modern Chinese literature since the anti-Japanese war that defines the existential conditions and textual production of the writers and literati. As a matter of fact, this spatial shift in literature occurred at the very beginning of the modern Chinese literature, namely at the turn of 20th century when a trend to study overseas was initiated. It was such literary figures as Lu Xun and Guo Moruo, who studied in Japan, and as Xu Zhimo and Hu Shi, who studied in Euro-American universities who became the backbones in the May Fourth New Culture Movement and whose cultural introspection against a world view and cultural practice activating the Chinese literature's internal impetus to change determined the outlook of the Chinese modern literature in the following decades. As a result, the binary pair "foreign vs. local"became the key words in this cultural turn. Another school of these literary figures such as Yan Yangchu, Tao Xingzhi and Huang Yanpei, nonetheless, turned to the country, realizing the international significance of the rural enlightenment in the 20th century. They initiated in 1920s the famous countryside construction movement, a most influential one ever since the May Fourth Movement, differentiating themselves consciously from their scholastic peers. 1920s saw the first tide of the spatially literary shift expressed in the "country literature"composed by a group of young writers who were then living temporarily in the capital but re-examining their country experiences retrospectively and representing aesthetically the country living style and reality. If the appearance of the country literature and the literature of the Left-wing writers was a response to the call of the "May Fourth Movement", highlighting enlightenment and individual liberation, and was a symbol of literati movement from the cultural margin, namely the countryside, to the cultural centers, viz., the cities, the new literature ever since 1937 was definitely and unprecedentedly a reverse movement resulting from the wholesome literati dispersion caused by war. In 1920s and 1930s, the former cultural constellation consisted of a combination of adjacent cities like Peking, Nanking and Shanghai went apart and split into various separate spots in such districts like Chongqing, Kunming, Guilin and Yan'an. But the spatial shift in modern literature in 1940s was strikingly differentfrom those in the former two decades. The literarily spatial shift around May Fourth Movement was related to the backwardness of the 19th China, so the binary oppositions in the new literature and culture reflected the opposite categories like modern vs. traditional, west vs. east. These oppositions are of a temporal quality, which is also seen in the relation between Peking School literati and Peking, characterized by an infatuation with tradition, and that between Shanghai School literati and shanghai, characterized by a worship for western culture. In their imagination of and design for modernity, the founders of the Chinese modern literature focused on criticizing the Chinese national character and absorbing western civilization, which was mainly an operation conducted on a temporal dimension. It was not until 1937 that the temporal dimension in literary experience gave way to the spatial dimension in that the reality of war plus dispersion stopped the consciousness of temporal anxiety. Thus 1940s witnessed the occurrence of certain "experience realism"in literature. To be concrete, there appeared a passive, temporary and wholesome literary shift from the center to the marginal areas, which was vividly revealed in the founding of the China National Anti-Japanese Association for Literature and Arts at Wuhan, the assembly of the writers under the call of saving China with literature and arts, the congregation of the literati at Southwest United University, the endless emergence of magazines at Guilin and the prosperous mass -cultural activities in the communist-dominant areas. As a result, this shift opened an avenue to the formerly closed civilian world which was little influenced by the new culture. The always traveling literati, the frequent appearance and disappearance of literary magazines, the endless migration of the literary institutions, the changes of the battle fields and the constantupheavals in political climate, all these factors influenced and even determined the commencement, development or disappearance of certain literary groups or trends. Therefore it is more reasonable to map the war-time literature by cultural sphere and literary groups than to map it by dividing literatures between non-occupied, occupied and liberated areas. Seen in this light, the war-time literature can be investigated in such chunks as Chongqing cultural sphere, Chengdu cultural sphere, Hongkong cultural sphere, Kunming cultural sphere or Guilin cultural sphere. Compared with the prewar literature, the wartime literature acquired such new qualities as contingency, temporality and alienation. The literati's constant migration and their internal nature of sliding between group and selfdom further disturbed the literary as well as cultural ecology, leading to the relativity of the literary characteristics. Some writers, Zhang Henshui for instance, contributed to different magazines of different styles but belonged to no literary circle or organization; some others, even if committed to certain institution, kept loose contact with it; the literary groups based on friendship also split because of the difference in beliefs among the members or of the war itself, and most of the members lived and worked in seclusion and isolation, such as Xiao Hong, Sha Ting and Ai Hu. Surveyed in the above manner, the literature since the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war did attain something very complicated, which is very hard to be grasped without careful investigation. Changes in cultural circumstances and differences in individual fortunes resulted in significant changes in the writers'and the literati's modes of existence and writing, compared to those in the prewar years. In 1920s and 1930s, while the literary youths, lodging in the guildhalls or in the garrets,were describing the gaudy and grotesque facets of modern life, the scholastic literati, the representatives of the mainstream culture, undertook in their comfortable studies the tasks of introducing China to the world culture and constructing the new literary poetics. But the war changed this course. The living modes of the wartime literati vested their writings with a taste of unruliness in that changes in their physical conditions and cultural circumstances had caused subtle nuances in their perceptions and literary expressions, to which the non-literary factors often attributed much effort. Although much attention has been paid to the literary texts of these wartime literati, yet personally I don't think this is enough, for the writer's literary living modes and their corresponding life texts seem to serve a more cubic reference frame, compared to their literary texts. In simple words, all of the literati's life experiences and actual activities in their drifting life should be taken into consideration in the studies of modern Chinese literature while the texts they made are under scrutiny. This inclusion points to a new perspective in literary studies in that the text-centered (as revealed in the announcement of the author's death) approach to literary study now gives way to a comprehensive one. The comprehensive approach extends the reading of texts to the reading of the drifting life of the writers. The usually called extra-text factors like the writer's political and social roles, their idea preference, their daily social intercourse and their likes and dislikes now all become "the significant forms"of their lives. In this way, the extension from their literary texts to their "life texts"turns the writer's physical existence into certain literary existence. Viewed from the modes of life intercourse, everything including literature has been invested with meaning for they are connectedwith human beings; in terms of the cultural formation, everything a writer encounters at some place is an ingredient of his life texts that constitute other forms of texts as trivial as the individual life history or as important as the national ethnography, has contributed to. The combination of the writers'life ingredients provide an approach to their interior spiritual structures, so the writers'life texts blended by the fragments collected from their living environment can shed much light on writers themselves who had enlightened so many minds. In anthropology such an approach is called field investigation, which is derived from the belief that all evolutions in human civilization will leave some traces, all of which will constitute the general outlook of civilization. Consequently the discovery, blending and reconstruction of these traces will be the prerequisite for interpreting and composing human civilization history; in the similar vein, in literary studies efforts also should be made to look into the traces that translate the writer's true feelings and experiences about the specific time and surroundings, his works included, so as to reach an entire understanding of his "literary existence", which is also in accordance with the artistic tenet that "knowledge of literature is but the knowledge of man". With the Chinese literature in 1940s is concerned, the various and distinct experiences about happiness or mishaps, love or hatred the writers experienced in their drifting life betray the true scenes of their literary existence, blended with their feelings about individuals, nation and state, passion, imagination and war. Focusing on the temporarily formed cultural sphere in Beibei, a suburb district reputed "the provisional capital of the provisional capital"in westChongqing during the Nationalist Party's rule, this dissertation tries to look into the cultural formation, the literati make-up, the literati intercourses and activities and the artistic production, attempting to expose the relations between the cultural sphere and the literary evolution, the literary integration and splitting, and the writers'creation in relation to their life state and further attempting to reveal the characteristics of the literary spatial shift in 1940s, its impact on the writing and life of the literati and its internal relation to the production of the literary texts since the start of the anti-Japanese war. Based on large amount of work on materials collecting and interviewing, this paper, guided by an "extended text"approach, has abstracted from the Beibei wartime cultural sphere some common characters such as the "extended literature"and the "narrowed culture"in the sense that literature was vested with some social obligations to solve problem in reality on the one hand, and the utilitarian function of culture was weakened on the other. By close reading of the literati and their works produced during their residence in Beibei, I found a prevailing personal discourse which is embodied in the literary existence of such writers as Lu Lin, to whose literary career Beibei was the starting as well as ending point, Lao She, who accomplished his cultural and artistic self-restoration and Liang Shiqiu, whose Essays of Refined Residence bestowed a stroke of poetic magnificence on Beibei and all other places he lived in his drifting life. The case studies show that the foci on "the drifting writers"and "the places the drifting literati resided", together with a interdisciplinary perspective from history of social thoughts, history of culture and institutions, accounts of literati activities, history of literati ideas and so on, may present a research path extending from the literary texts to life texts.