Rehabilitating Chinese modern aesthetic thought from the perspective of global modernity

Through the relation established between this genealogy and the global postcolonial context of 20th century China, Button manages to rethink the historical and theoretical issues related to the introduction of modern (Western) texts, theories and concepts in China. In his introduction, Button contests as “false and a-historical” the Eurocentric dichotomy involving, on one hand, Western theory, and, on the other hand, modern Chinese literary texts. His approach puts into question the very notions of “origin” and “influence” that have made most histories of modern Chinese literature read as “derivative discourse.” Button aims at showing that the essential link between philosophy, literature and theory, described by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy as the trademark of the modern concept of literature, is as present in modern Chinese literature and literary criticism as it is in so-called classical theoretical current in the West like New Criticism or Poststructuralism.  Button discusses selected texts and authors to demonstrate his thesis, from classical May Fourth writers like Lu Xun (1881-1936) and Mao Dun (1896-1981) to literary and theoretical works following the establishment of the Popular Republic of China, including the Marxist aesthetic philosophy of Cai Yi (1906-1992), socialist literary production like Yang Mo’s Song of Youth (1958) and contemporary Chinese thinkers working on continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel) like Li Zehou (1930- ). Button’s perspective brings him to question the traditional position of subalternity and secondarity attributed to Chinese texts in relation to Western theory. In his introduction, Button worries about the incapacity for North American Sinology to perceive that “the role of theory was a given at the outset of the emergence of modern Chinese literature” and to recognize the importance of modern philosophical thought in China. Following this discussion, his incisive evaluation of the now classical History of Modern Chinese Fiction by C.T. (Chih-tsing) Hsia (1960; 1971) brings back complex theoretical and historical questions about difference and similitude between Hsia’s New Criticism-orientation and modern Chinese literature. In spite of Hsia’s delegitimization of modern Chinese literary realism under the sacred criterion of “disinterestedness”, Button convincingly demonstrates the existence of strong philosophical links between Hsia’s New Criticism and modern Chinese Marxist aesthetics that make impossible simple opposition between the two: the separation between science and literature/art, the emphasis upon universality, the faith in an onto-theological conception of literary art.

By interrogating the theoretical foundation of authoritative studies on Chinese modern literature (Tang Xiaobing (1992), Marston Anderson (1990) and David Wang (1992)), Button proceeds to a re-evaluation of Chinese realist literature and Lu Xun’s earliest work. He argues that their far-too-simplistic reading of realist theory, and especially their untenable requirement over realist literature and its supposed pretence to represent the Real, lead them not only to miss the eidaesthetic dimension - or literature-as-theory - of Chinese realism already ingrained in Lu Xun’s earliest work, but also to obscure the complex filiation between Lu Xun’s literary works and later Chinese realist philosophical aesthetics. Through an analysis of Lu Xun’s “True Story of Ah Q” (1921) and its relation with Nietzsche’s philosophy, Button focuses on the emergence with “Ah Q” of the crucial philosophical and literary concept of the “type” (a literary figure embodying a philosophical idea about human being). But Button goes further in his analysis by linking the creation of “Ah Q” as a “type” of what Nietzsche named “gruesome hybrid” - full of both rebellion and resentment - and the construction of the discourse of Chinese national character. Button is convincing when he contests the traditional position which insist on the subordinated relation of Lu Xun to American Missionary Arthur Smith’s racist and essentialist book on the so-called Chinese characteristics (1894). Button wants to show the gap between Smith (and also Chiang Kai-shek)’s conception of the “Chinese character” grounded in Christian faith and the idea of an active project of construction of the “Chinese”, or “Chinese-in-becoming”, in the discourse of national character attributed to Lu Xun. In a sophisticated theoretical demonstration, Button pushes further this line of discussion by arguing that the affirmation of the “type” in Lu Xun and other modern Chinese writers can thus be construed as a critical response to the onto-theological discourse, Hegelian or Smithian, deployed by European imperialism—a critique whose critical force is accomplished by virtue of a displacement towards onto-typology.

In the next chapter, Button proposes an extensive discussion of the oft-ignored Chinese Marxist aesthetic theoretician Cai Yi dialed-in on questions surrounding the concept of the “type” and Cai Yi’s sophisticated aesthetic critique of capitalist instrumental modernity. He points out Cai Yi’s sharp critique of positivist science and the abstract mode of thinking of “enlightenment rationality”. He shows how the Marxist theoretician adopted the position that literature (and art), differing here from the abstract knowledge of science, is able to produce knowledge of reality through the realization of the “concrete universal”—which is, precisely, the artistic type. Button also examines Cai Yi’s aesthetic critique of modernity through a comparative perspective, which brings together, synchronically, Chinese aesthetic Marxism and Western cultural critique of the instrumental dimension of capitalist modernity. In the last two chapters, Button proposes a close reading of two realist socialist popular novels of the 50s, Yang Mo’s Song of Youth (1958) and Lin Guangbin/Yang Yiyan’s Red Crag (1961). Confronting these texts with Cai Yi’s Marxist aesthetic theory, Button proposes also to read these novels by taking into account their philosophical dimensions. What is particularly striking is Button’s ability to avoid the lure of the normative, allowing him to reveal the ways in which Song of Youth challenges many elements in both the Party-State appropriation and the Western sinological repudiation of the eidaesthetic elements in the Chinese revolution. Through a new reading of these famous but underestimated novels, Button proposes a reflexion on modern Chinese revolutionary subjectivity, dealing with the question of Freedom – being free to believe or not in communism - and the possibility for the heroes, Lin Daojing or Li Siyang, to overcome their class origin. Button’s primary goal is evidently not to rehabilitate Chinese socialist realist literature, since the evaluation of the “quality” of artistic production is always coined by political and historical limitations. However, his reading of these novels demonstrates that those texts are far more open-minded and complex than the criteria of evaluation used in the past by the dominant critique of this so-called “literary propaganda”. This stimulating book, the philosophical sophistication of which is somewhat puzzling, offers a wide range of global and transhistorical theoretical and literary references, making it an invaluable working tool for students and scholars of Comparative Literature, Philosophy or Chinese Studies aiming to familiarize themselves with aesthetic theory in China’s twentieth century, and particularly Chinese modern Marxist literature and criticism.

Florent Villard, Vice-Director of the Institute of Transtextual and Transcultural Studies, and Associate Professor at the department of Chinese Studies, University of Lyon (Jean Moulin) (feinanfei@gmail.com)