Jean Christophe And The Chinese Modern Intellectuals

Chinese readers came to know Romain Rolland during the May Fourth Movement, a turbulent age of great social changes. His works have since the past century been acclaimed while the same time criticized negatively. Nonetheless Jean Christophe, widely regarded as Rolland’s masterpiece, enjoys much popularity among most of Chinese intellectuals, which is further spurred by Fu Lei’s excellent translation. Since the founding of People’s Republic of China in 1949, critique of this novel mushroomed and reached its first peak in 1958. In that year, Readers’ Monthly set columns for discussing Jean Christophe, and the Writers’Press even launched a book named How to Understand John Christophe (1958) on account of the bad influence of the individualism and bourgeois humanistic thought that are alleged to have exerted on the youth.Bearing this in mind, this dissertation endeavors to reveal how Jean Christophe has helped to shape the modern Chinese intellectual thoughts, giving efforts to discuss the reception of this novel in China in light of five case studies. This paper falls into four parts. Considering the personality of the eponymous hero and the evolution of the modern Chinese intellectual tradition, the first chapter illustrates why this novel fits snugly with the Chinese intellectual thought. The second Chapter delves into the character the protagonist of this novel, and I then coined "Christophianism," on the basis of which later Chapters develop their arguments.The Third Chapter, the bulk of this dissertation, mainly discuss the influence of Jean Christophe on the Chines critic Hu Feng, the novelist Lu Ling, and the scholar Wang Yuanhua as well as the interaction between Romain Rolland and Lu Xun. It is exactly at that time that the literary tradition of Lu Xun and Christophianism came into close contact. The fourth Chapter, using Luo Dagang’s monograph On Romain Rolland (1979) as the main case, demonstrates the misunderstanding and distortion of Jean Christophe since 1949. Thus this chapter, existing as the counterpart of the third Chapter, not only deepens our understanding of this novel, but also expresses its sympathy for the deplorable fate of Chinese intellectuals living under the socio-political context of that particular period of time. Making efforts to illustrate how this novel has been misread, this dissertation then traces the evolution of the reception aesthetics of this novel as well as how the social ideology and thoughts have influenced its reception in different ages, thus making some considerable contribution to the study of the Chinese literary history and the intellectual thought of the twentieth century.As has been shown above, instead of offering a textual decoding of Jean Christophe, this paper makes efforts to demonstrate the very process of how this novel has been interpreted, transformed, and distorted in the particular social context of China, thus providing an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the reception of this novel. In a word, this dissertation explores less what is Jean Christophe than what it becomes and how it becomes during the meantime.