The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics
367
The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics
367Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472120345 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 367 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China
Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics
By Liang Luo
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07217-0
CHAPTER 1
The Lights of Tokyo
See the light that surrounds them! Hear how the air is ringing with music!
AUGUST STRINDBERG, A DREAM PLAY, 1901
It was 4:30 in the afternoon. I went to Kanda for French lessons. Lingering rain had stopped, and the firelike setting sun with its golden light was shining on the glass windows of each household. Taking the streetcar, I passed Iidabashi. Looking outside the streetcar window, I saw a rainbow showing off its colors from an opening in the red clouds. On the way back from my lesson, a bright sun was still hanging in a perfect blue sky. When I reached the sports field at Waseda, the moonlight seemed to be already within reach and the night air surrounded me. I could hear the sound of music and singing leaking from the brightly lit hotel windows. Climbing a hill and turning back, I saw the Waseda terminal and the colorful electric lights at the Imperial Cinema. The lights shone like a string of luminescent pearls draped around the face of a beautiful woman."
So ends the October 11, 1921, entry of Tian Han's Tokyo diary, in which various sources of illumination reveal a magical urban landscape whose enchantments include Western-style architecture, music drifting from unseen singers, and an invocation of archetypal feminine beauty. The sun drives away the lingering rain and reflects off the glass windows, which bear witness not only to natural light but also to the recent advent of modern architecture engineered by such renowned figures as Frank Lloyd Wright. A rainbow radiates colorful light from behind the red clouds, which, to the diarist, who was immersed in Japanese folklore, may have recalled the "creators" in Japanese mythology crossing the rainbow bridge. With the help of the night air, the moonlight, less passionate than the sun but more ethereal, fosters an air of the mystical and mysterious, where music and light together produce a moment out of time.
Under Tian Han's gaze, the natural elements of the scene before him quickly yield, literally and figuratively, to the man-made: the brightly lit hotel, cinema, and streetcar terminal where colorful electric light shines like "luminescent pearls" and, importantly, performance takes place onstage, onscreen, and in the streets under the limelight and streetlamp. Whatever his attachment to the poetic symbology of nature, Tian Han ultimately finds the most enchanting illumination in the modernity of everyday urban life, in the architecture, popular media, and technologies that manifested the "light, heat, and power" of the cosmopolitan experience of the time.
Using "light" — both spiritual and material — as the central trope and Tokyo as the converging locale, and focusing on the textual, contextual, and subtextual implications of Tian Han's debut play Lingguang (Spiritual Light), this chapter examines the interpenetration of Christianity, romanticism, feminism, and socialism as embodied in the play and its performance in Tokyo in 1920. Though a minor work in Tian's oeuvre, "Spiritual Light" is one of the first expressions of many of the key threads that run through the intellectual evolution of both Tian Han and his generation. As an emblematic work of its time, it deserves more attention than it has heretofore received from scholars in the field. Its neglect is attributable in part to the fact that its explicitly Christian theme rendered it an object of political suspicion both during the May Fourth movement and after the founding of the People's Republic. However, its power as a condensed expression of a particular moment, the zeitgeist of that place and time, is disproportionate to its length and performance history and merits close attention.
The Christian imagery of "spiritual light" emerges out of the specific cultural milieu of Tokyo at the post–World War I moment, a milieu that was uniquely conducive to the development of a wide range of highly politicized and spiritualized discourses. As we shall see, the iconography of Christianity supplied the key link for Tian Han between romanticism and socialism. The spiritual and literal lights of Tokyo produced an illuminated landscape where aesthetic, social, and political movements creatively cross-fertilized.
Tian Han in Tokyo
Having arrived in Tokyo at age eighteen from the central southern Chinese province of Hunan by way of Shanghai in 1916, Tian Han had spent more than five years in this rising Asian metropolis by the time he wrote the opening diary entry. He encountered cinema for the first time and quickly became a "cinema fan" during his first year in Tokyo. He came to appreciate the popular love stories serialized in Japanese newspapers the year after, and started to frequent Western-style theater performances in 1918.
However, the very first publication Tian produced in Tokyo was a 1917 political essay on the economic cause of the February Revolution in Russia. It was a decisive shift from his creative writings in the style of Peking Opera published only a few years earlier, when he was a middle school student in Hunan. Through his maternal uncle's network of professional revolutionaries, in 1919 Tian joined the Young China Association, a cosmopolitan assembly of members who variously advocated anarchism, socialism, nationalism, feminism, and Marxism. He soon befriended the Japanese student radicals at the Christianity-inspired New Man Society and joined the anarchist Cosmo Club together with Japanese socialists, Korean activists, and other Chinese student radicals.
By the early 1920s, Tokyo had emerged as a world metropolis, blissfully ignorant of its pending destruction in the Great Kanto Earthquake and ensuing fire a few years later. Streetcars had been largely absorbed into the fabric of daily life in the city. Carrying well over one million passengers daily in a city of two million (the population of the Greater Tokyo area amounted to four million), they remained a powerful symbol of modernity and a constant presence in Tian Han's descriptions of the city during his six-year sojourn there from 1916 to 1922.
The streetcar captivated Tian Han not only as an image of modernity but also as an image of transit and exchange, of mobility. People traveled in streetcars in Tokyo with the same fluidity with which ideas traveled in the textual and visual creations of Tian Han and his contemporaries. Tian Han's Tokyo diary not only maps the physical landscape of the city, but it also outlines the mental atlas of the young Chinese as a romantic (i.e., utopian) avant-gardist. In this particular entry and his 1921 diary in general, Tian Han recounts in detail sensational newspaper stories of love affairs, whether of celebrities or ordinary people, a sign of his obsession with the notion of "free love" and the cultural mélange of Tokyo at this time, when romanticism was coexisting with modernism. Tian also describes in detail his intimate home visits and meetings with Japanese literary luminaries, including Kuriyagawa Hakuson in Kyoto and Sato Haruo in Tokyo. He was taking in the urban milieu of Japan with all its sights, sounds, smells, and sensations, but notably concentrating on the bright and luminous, the rosy and romantic: indeed, he titled his diary collection Qiangwei zhilu (Road of Roses), and one searches in vain in its pages for any mention of the mud, crowds, and traffic hazards that fill the writings of Nagai Kafu and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, two of his Japanese contemporaries who were observant critics of the discontents of an emerging but soon to disappear Tokyo modernity.
How to interpret this rosy picture in the context of Tian Han's political activism in Tokyo? Can Tian Han the romantic avant-gardist be reconciled with Tian Han of the political vanguard? Most previous scholarship has treated Tian Han's Tokyo sojourn within the limited context of the representative "art for art's sake" group of the time, the Creation Society (Chuangzao she). But such an approach fails to do justice to the impact of Tian's activities in Japan as a leading avant-gardist and activist of his time, in particular, his political activism in relation to the Young China Association, the New Man Society, and the Cosmo Club. Although Tian Han was one of the founding members of the Creation Society and was probably responsible for its refusal to join the "art for life's sake" Literary Research Association (Wenxue yanjiuhui), he occupied, intellectually and personally, a more ambiguous and fraught relationship with the society's principles than is often supposed. When Tian discovered numerous errors in the transcription of his play Kafeidian zhi yiye (A Night in a Café), published in the inaugural issue of Chuangzao jikan (Creation Quarterly), he suspected Yu Dafu, one of the Creation Society's key members, who had overseen the final editing in Shanghai, of having framed him. After the publication of his 1921 Tokyo diary, the harsh criticism he received from Cheng Fangwu, another key member, further alienated him from the Creation Society. These clashes not only point to the increasingly fragile personal ties between Tian Han and other members of the Creation Society, but they also reveal Tian's anarchism, avant-gardism, and independence in reaction to an avant-garde group that was becoming increasingly established. Indeed, when all is said and done, the most important outcome of Tian Han's association with the Creation Society may have been his literary friendship with Guo Moruo, a fellow key member and compatriot residing in Fukuoka who was establishing himself as a leading avant-garde poet at the time, and who was one of the first Chinese translators of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Faust — works that, as we shall see, would come to play a key role in Tian Han's own intellectual evolution.
Performing "Spiritual Light"
Now they had enough love filled with new power, they knelt down to thank the bounty of God and they determined to go back to their fatherland to distribute it among those miserable lives. When Christ hearing their prayer, his head gave forth brilliant rays indicating his joy, thus we finish: "Where love is, God is."
TIAN HAN, "PREFACE TO LINGGUANG" (1921)
In October 1920, a year before the publication of his Tokyo diary, a twenty-two-year-old Tian Han staged a short play in Chinese in a prestigious theater in Tokyo to an audience reportedly made up of people from twenty-four countries, with the aid of the rather poorly written English playbill from which the above quote was taken. The play, entitled Lingguang (Spiritual Light), tells the story of two young Chinese lovers on a spiritual journey from the United States back to China. It appeared to be semiautobiographical, with some obvious factual tweaks: Chinese students in the United States stand in for the Chinese student in Japan, and a Christian female protagonist stands in for the non-Christian male author. However, the play did capture the spiritual and patriotic longings of a not insignificant number of diasporic Chinese students, of which Tian Han was one, in the years following World War I. More important, it became one of the very first Chinese "spoken dramas" (huaju, as distinct from xiqu, "traditional Chinese theatre") to also depict Chinese characters at a time when most Western-style performances confined themselves to Western characters and subjects. The emergence of this "modern" form went hand in hand with the experimental nature of its content: bringing a Christian-based social gospel to China at the post–World War I moment.
The "brief encounter" among spirituality, performance, and politics through the romantic love story between two patriotic youths in Tian Han's one-act play represents a pivotal opening up of linguistic, cultural, and political possibilities for cultural production in modern China as mediated through Taisho Tokyo. Others have observed that twentieth-century Chinese literature diluted the religiosity of Christianity in favor of its literary and symbolic value, such that it retained the secular utility and emotional appeal of Christianity while channeling its energies to political ends. I would add that the emphasis on social and political salvation reinstituted a deep spiritual — if not strictly or conventionally Christian — dimension into political and social practices in modern China through the mediation of modern Japan. In Taisho Tokyo, a special blend of Christian romanticism and Christian socialism joined forces with an international socialist trend to form a special configuration of a social democratic modernity charged with political activism. Tian Han's cultural practices emphasized this convergence, expressed a cosmopolitan imagination of universal love and mutual aid, and advocated both a nationalist sentiment and an internationalist spirit.
Written by a young Chinese man soon to be classified in Japanese secret police records as a "radical" (kagekiha), an "anarchist communist" (museifu kyosanshugisha), and a "socialist" (shakaishugisha), "Spiritual Light" foregrounds the conflict between free love and arranged marriage, one of the central preoccupations of the May Fourth generation of modern Chinese intellectuals. More important, it forges and preserves many of the now forgotten linkages among avant-garde performance, national politics, and spiritual salvation in the context of early-twentieth-century East Asia.
The play opens with the sound of a church bell tolling in the background while the female protagonist plays piano and sings her prayers in her American-style dormitory room. She wears a white dress in a style that "combines the best of the Chinese and the West" (zhongxi hebi). A suitor visits her and reports that her lover is returning to China to marry the fiancée arranged for him by his family. The female student converses with her suitor in a combination of Chinese and colloquial English phrases. After dismissing him, she turns to Goethe's Faust for consolation, whereupon a play opens within the play, a dream sequence, in which Mephistopheles materializes onstage to guide the protagonist to a cliff where she witnesses the suffering of her countrymen in a devastating drought, as well as her lover's reunification with his fiancée. The last scene of the play takes the viewer back to the same dormitory room, where the girl awakens from her dream to find her real lover, who has come to inform her that his fiancée has found her own lover, freeing all of them from the constraints of arranged marriage. With the guidance of her dream and the support of her lover, the female protagonist develops from a sentimentalist to an engaging social activist. The story ends with the two protagonists bidding farewell to the United States and returning to China. The male lover dedicates himself to curing the physical weakness of his countrymen through medical science, while the female protagonist is determined to use her playwriting to cure them spiritually, to save the souls and regenerate the spirit of the Chinese people.
A Female Faust
Tian Han had originally named what became "Spiritual Light" Nü fushide (The Female Faust), for the female protagonist who reads Goethe's Faust and dreams of Mephistopheles in the play. The removal of any direct reference in the title does not dilute the Faustian theme deeply embedded in the play. "The Heavenly Light" (das Himmelslicht) is a concept and image that frequently appeared in multiple registers in Goethe's celebrated play, in which the title character, Faust, like Tian Han's protagonist, is on a quest in search of the true essence of a "bright-hued life."
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