An Alternative Lyric Modernity? Modern Classicism and Zhou Zuoren's Wartime Doggerels.

• Author: Yang, Zhiyi

In July 1937, Imperial Japan's decade-long military provocations of and territorial encroachments on China escalated into a full-scale invasion. At the end of this month, the besieged ancient capital Beiping (name for Beijing, 1928-49) fell. University professors and students joined the mass exodus to the hinterland, where the Nationalist Government was planning protracted resistance. Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), a prominent essayist, translator, literary critic, and professor at Peking University, decided, however, to stay in the fallen city. In the months that followed, the war spread throughout southeast China, hopes for a peaceful solution faded, and an undeclared total war broke out.

In the occupied Beiping, Zhou, a pioneer of the New Culture Movement, which proposed the thorough vernacularization of all genres of Chinese literature, began to write quatrains in the classical style, which he called "doggerels" (dayoushi), "to show their distinction from real classical poetry." (1) The naming and the language of these poems, forty-four published in total, suggest deliberate iconoclasm and anticanonicity, even though their form, technique, and prosody, let alone the cultural memory evoked through allusions, all hark back to China's classical literary traditions. Despite their apparent lucidity, these poems are in effect rather esoteric in meaning. Their imageries and allusions are woven together in such a subtle and innovative fashion that even a contemporary admirer of Zhou's confessed his lack of understanding.2 The wartime became a pivotal turn in both Zhou's literary and personal life. He eventually agreed to serve as the Educational Commissioner of North China (1941-1943) under the collaborationist regime, was tried and convicted as a collaborator after the war, and imprisoned until 1949. Under the People's Republic he was stripped of citizenship and prohibited from teaching. He died of torture at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. Classical-style poetry, the primary means of creative self-expression in the last stage of Zhou's life, has become the unexpected poetic legacy that this pioneer of modern Chinese literature left behind.

Since the slang word dayou often has a sexual innuendo, Zhou, to avoid misunderstanding, named the poems written after 1945 zashi, or "miscellaneous poems," for their language and thoughts are all mixed in register and in kind. Esotericity, however, remains a pronounced feature. As Zhou declared: "Sometimes a certain thought occurs to me and I would like to write it down. But an essay is not appropriate, because the matter is too simple, or the mood would be too explicit. In an essay it would be fully exposed, too direct, and tasteless. On the other hand, I cannot write a good vernacular verse. For these reasons, I choose to write zashi for my own convenience." (3) He also called them xin gudianshi (lit., "neoclassical poetry") since their language, thoughts, and sentiments deliberately diverge from high-register classical Chinese poetry. (4) In this article, I will call such poetry "classicist" to underline its departure from the "classical-style." (5) In doing so, I place Zhou's works under the broader cultural context of modern aesthetic classicism, which is not the opposite of modernism, but a kind of "antimodern modernism" that rejects relentless pro-gressivism as another status quo. (6)

In this article, I attempt to bridge the gap between the two periods of Zhou's life, drawing attention in particular to the consistency between his later return to Chinese lyric classicism and his earlier career as a pioneer of vernacular poetry, translator of Japanese haiku, and literary critic championing a "Short Verse Movement" (xiaoshi yundong). I argue that Zhou's wartime doggerels, under closer examination, are a modernist project in classicist guise, a continuation of Zhou's endeavor to lend expression to the immediacy and transience of the moment through a native linguistic medium. Zhou's classicist poetry, in this regard, was part of a global moment of lyric modernity, when poets across cultures were experimenting with novel ways of expression, often inspired by newly discovered foreign lyric traditions. Zhou's case thus helps shed new light on China's literary modernity, in which classicist poetry is yet to be recognized as an indispensable component. Lastly, speaking in the intimate voice of a cultural collaborator, these poems provide a fresh perspective for research on China's wartime collaboration. Seeing all explicit self-defense as vulgar and futile, Zhou instead chose poetry as a channel of coded self-revelation. As all poetry writing potentially entails public performances, however, the private voice that is essential to Zhou's lyric subjectivity cannot avoid being ambivalent, its claim of authenticity dubious. The historical agent's inner life, thus displayed, forms a vast, murmuring, and shifting terrain of exegetical openness below the seemingly solid architecture of historical facts.

To date, Zhou's classicist poetry has not been properly investigated due to various factors: the genre is marginalized by the May Fourth definition of modern literature, the meaning of the poems is often esoteric, and they were written when the author was in the most infamous period of his life. In China and beyond, scholars have begun to reflect upon the May Fourth discourse, and the relation between the nation and the individual has come under increasingly critical scrutiny. Although the moral and political taboo concerning wartime collaboration remains strong, European research on collaboration during World War II has inspired more neutral and objective studies in recent years, particularly in North America, Taiwan, and Japan. It is beyond due that these poems be investigated for what they are: a major poetic legacy of a truly cosmopolitan literary pioneer. In Susan Daruvala's terms, they may represent an "alternative lyric modernity" for China. (7)

HAIKU, "SHORT VERSE," AND GLOBAL LYRIC MODERNITY

In 1917, the New Culture Movement was launched, which proposed to reform the Chinese mind and soul through a modern literary vernacular. Zhou Zuoren and his brother Zhou Shuren, better known as Lu Xun (1881-1936), quickly joined its vanguard. Lu Xun's short novel "Diary of a Madman" (Kuangren riji, 1918) would come to be seen as the first classic of China's new literature. (8) Zhou Zuoren, more academic in disposition, published a series of articles to guide this new literature toward humanistic, democratic, and cosmopolitan orientations.

Poetry, however, remained the last stronghold of classical literature to the New Literature reformers. In 1917, the beauty of new poetry was posited but remained unproven. Two years later, Zhou Zuoren's "Rivulet" (Xiaohe) was published and gained considerable acclaim as the first masterpiece of new poetry. (9) This poem, fifty-seven lines in total, is written as a parable: a peasant builds a weir that blocks the flow of a rivulet; crops and trees downstream not only suffer from thirst, but are worried that, once the rivulet breaks the dam, they will be drowned by the flood. The poem is unrhymed, conversational, and syntactically prosaic. It may be better described as a prose poem. Back in its own time, it was a radical innovation, so radical that Zhou declared that he had no idea to what genre it belonged and that it probably should not be considered a poem at all. (10) Zhou's statement was perhaps not made entirely out of modesty. Curiously, this poem's style appears rather different from Zhou's purported ideal of poetry, which he discovered in Japanese short poems.

From 1916 to 1923, Zhou Zuoren wrote multiple articles on the history and characteristics of Japanese short poetry, including tanka, haiku, and senryu, and translated dozens of examples into free-style verse in Chinese. He often cites the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904; also known by his Japanese name, Koizumi Yakumo). As Hearn argues in "Bits of Poetry" (1899), the best short poem should be like a Japanese pictorial illustration: "with a few strokes of the brush," it evokes "an image or a mood" and revives "a sensation or emotion." Its accomplishment "depends altogether upon the capacity to suggest, and only to suggest." A poet "would be condemned for attempting any completeness of utterance in a very short poem: his object should be only to stir the imagination without satisfying it." Only bad verses tell everything; good ones "leave in the mind the thrilling of a something unsaid. Like the single stroke of a temple-bell, the perfect short poem should set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long duration." (11)

Zhou regarded Hearn's argument as valid not only for Japanese poetry, but for poetry in general. He stated that "the value of poetry lies in transmitting the spirit; its power lies in implication and not in explicit articulations," and then paraphrased the French symbolic poet Stephane Mallarme's poetics of the mystery, who suggested that the poet should not present objects directly. (12) In Mallarme's words, "to name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is made up of the joy of guessing little by little." Through the "perfect use of this mystery," the reader participates in deciphering the meaning and in the process of creation. (13)

Zhou's statement implies a certain open exegetical process in which the reader's imagination is crucial in cocreating the poetic effect. His poetics further placed him in the midst of a global modernist movement, which began in the mid-nineteenth century when European and American painters explored capturing the transient effects of movement and light on canvas. As a matter of fact, the Symbolist poet Mallarme was also an insightful critic of Impressionism. The art of Edouard Manet, as Mallarme observes, is to surprise the viewer with...