THE MODERN THAT IS NOT WESTERN: MEDIATED INDIVIDUALISM IN KHÁI HƯNG’S NỬA CHỪNG XUÂN AND YU DAFU’S “SINKING” - Full 10 điểm

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 ______________________________________________________________________________ Volume 3 Article 85 ______________________________________________________________________________ 2022 The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated Individualism in Khái Hưng’s N ử a Ch ừ ng Xuân and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking ” Camellia (Linh) Pham Dartmouth College Recommended Citation Pham, Camellia (Linh) (2022) “ The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated Individualism in Khái Hưng’s N ử a Ch ừ ng Xuân and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking ” ” The Macksey Journal : Volume 3, Article 85 This article is brought to you for free an open access by the Johns Hopkins University Macksey Journal It has been accepted for inclusion in the Macksey Journal by an authorized editor of the Johns Hopkins University Macksey Journal Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 1 The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated Individualism in Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” 1 Camellia (Linh) Pham Dartmouth College Abstract Literary modernisms in East and Southeast Asia, though constituted by cultural and linguistic exchanges between various nationalisms and colonialisms, are habitually seen as a unidirectional transfer from Western imperial ideologies West - to - East transference of modernity usually considers literary history as a point where t ranslation emerges as a linear movement between source and target language, and colonial subjects as an unquestioned replica of the Western consciousness However , w hen examining literature subject to competing nationalisms, imperialisms, and colonialisms, specifically in early twentieth - century Vietnam and China, we must consider translation as both a conventional technique and transcultural metaphor of interpellating the foreign “other ” This presentation applies David Der - wei Wang’s metaphorical sense of “carving modernity” and Lydia H Liu’s conceptual framework of “translated modernity” to emphasize a discursive understanding of literary modernity in its constructed nature through “performative/constative narratives ” Modernity transpires by way of “tra nslated performance” until the modes of representations “acquire legitimacy within the host language ” In Yu Dafu’s short story “Chenlun” 沉淪 (Sinking) and Khái Hưng’s novel N ử a Ch ừ ng Xuân (In the Midst of Spring), individualism as an imported ideology is m ade manifest not as a revealing orientation inherent to the literature of modernist writers in colonial Vietnam and semi - colonial China Rather, individualist zeal, evocative of embodied actions and self - and class - consciousness, is continuously performed in the discourse of East Asian modernism as mediated individualism, allowing for comparative analysis of how the “self” contests the conventionally - accepted and binary tropes of modernity –– the “new” being equivalent to the “singular,” the romantic - self, an d the powerful West Keywords : Chinese literature, Vietnamese literature, comparative modernism, modernity, translation studies , T ự L ự c Văn Đoàn, New Culture Movement 1 In this paper, I use the translated English name for Yu Dafu’s “Chenlun” 沉淪 [Sinking] while retaining the original Vietnamese title for Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring] This deliberate decision stems from the fact that there has not been any officially published English rendition of Nửa Chừng Xuân, whereas “Si nking” has been translated in full into English by Joseph Lau and C T Hsia in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature See Khái Hưng, Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring] (Sài Gòn: NXB Văn Nghệ, 1934); and Yu Dafu, “Sinking,” i n The Columb ia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature , ed Joseph S M Lau and Howard Goldblatt, trans Joseph S M Lau and C T Hsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 44 - 69 Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 2 September 1915 marked the founding of Xin Qing Nian 新靑年 [New Youth], the magazine that would eventually feature two seminal manifestos: “On Literary Revolution” 文學 革命論 by Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879 - 1942) and “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” 文學革命論 by Hu Shi 胡適 (1891 - 1962) These manifestos, harbing ers of literary revolution in China, were heralded by Li Zehou 李泽厚 (1930 - 2021) as the double tune of “national salvation and human enlightenment ” 2 The magazine hallmarked an important change as Xin Wenhua Yundong 新文化運動 [ The New Culture Movement] ( the 1 910s - 1920s) inaugurated the formal birth of modern Chinese literature The Movement’s thematic goals of “modernizing people through language, modernizing language through literature, and modernizing literature through Western thought” found camaraderie wit h a peripheral nation of the Sinosphere –– Vietnam –– where literary modernization reached its peak with Tự Lực Văn Đoàn [The Self - Reliant Literary Group; hereafter: TLVĐ] 3 It was not until the beginnings of TLVĐ and the Thơ Mới [New Poetry] Movement that th e process of literary modernization in Vietnam could be compared to that of mainland China, vis - à - vis the magnified and nation - wide scale of professionalism, formalism, and structuralism In this paper, I call into use the understanding of “modern” by David Der - wei Wang and Lydia Liu Regardless of how modernism as an aesthetic movement is quickly deemed futile, vitiated, and bereft of formal coherence, I invoke Der - wei Wang’s metaphorical sense of “carving modernity” and Liu’s conceptual framework of “translated modernity,” not to define what is constituted as “modern” in literature, so much as to emphasize the discursive way we understand literary modernity in its “constructed” and “transc ultural” nature through “performative/constative narratives ” 4 Modernity transpires in Vietnam and China by way of the modernists’ new and revolutionary paths, infiltrating through a conduit of “translated performance” until the modes of representations “ acquire legitimacy within the host language ” 5 Specifically, I apply the theoretical framework of modernity to “Chenlun” 沉淪 [Sinking] by Yu Dafu 郁達夫 (1896 - 1945) and Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring] by Khái Hưng (1896 - 1947) Born in the same year ag ainst the backdrop of a volatile period of revolutionizing 2 Quoted in Gu Ming Dong, Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature (London; New York: Routledge, 2019), 19 3 It may seem contentious for contemporary scholarship about modern Vietnam to include the country as part of the East Asian cultural sphere , or the Sinosphere, instead of regarding Vietnam in postcolonia l discourse as a Southeast Asian nation By including Vietnam in the realm of Sinitic influence, I highlight the puzzling characteristics of “claiming modernity,” as a result of the understanding that “modernity is an absent figure, an unattainable state ” Since the status of modernities in both countries is rather ambiguous, it would be arbitrary to decisively cut Vietnam off from its thousand - year Sinitic root This classification highlights the comparative analysis between China as the epicenter of the S inosphere and Vietnam as China’s peripheral entity and casts light on the previously ignored similarities between the two modern nations For more discussion on the ambiguities of modernity, see Lingchei Letty Chen, “Reading Between Chinese Modernism and M odernity,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 24 (December 2002): 179 4 Lydia H Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity — China, 1900 - 1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 15; and David Der - wei Wang, “The Literary Mind and the Carving of Modernities,” Der - wei Wang, David “The Literary Mind and the Carving of Modernities ” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 3 , no 2 (2016): 203 DOI:10 1215/23290048 - 3713779 5 Liu, Tr anslingual Practice , 26 Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 3 literature, Khái Hưng and Yu Dafu were impassioned firebrands of their generations before they died at around the same age Khái Hưng, Vietnamese - born and French - educated, and Yu Dafu, Chinese - born and Japanese - educated, shared the juxtaposition of backgrounds representative of the transcultural tensions faced by their native countries at that time –– the competing powers of colonial imperialism and cosmopolitan nationalism, and foreign modernization and national backwardness 6 Drawing from the post - structuralist reading by Lydia Liu –– dealing with translation, not in its “ordinary sense of the word,” but considering the so - called “sinification” and “Vietnamization” 7 of concepts –– I claim that individu alism is not something inherent to the writing of TLVĐ and New Culturalists 8 to inculcate interpretive reading; rather, individualist zeal, evocative of embodied actions, is continuously performed in the discourse of East Asian modernism as mediated indiv idualism This treatment of the two texts allows for comparative analysis of how the “self” contests the binary and conventionally accepted tropes of modernity: the “new” is equivalent to the “singular,” the romantic - self, and the powerful West TLVĐ was a left - wing literary association in Tonkin and was arguably the most important intellectual collective during the interwar period (1932 - 1945) The group’s writers had a profound influence on the nascent yet powerful and tempestuous development of modern Vie tnamese society, covering a myriad of fields like literature, journalism, publishing, and art 9 They published extensively in their two journals –– Phong Hoá [Mores] and Ngày Nay [Today] –– which later became the highest - circulating journals in all of Indochi na that advocated for social reform and public proselytization of “gradual decolonization ” 10 Khái Hưng and Nhất Linh (1906 - 1963), TLVĐ’s co - founders and the group’s backbone, were prolific and significant 6 Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, On Our Own Strength: The Self - Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2021), 6 - 10; and Gu, Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature , 19 7 “Vietnamization” [Việt Nam hoá chiến tranh] is usually used to denote Richard Nixon’s doctrine on withdrawing American troops to end U S involvement in the Vietnam War (1955 - 1975) My understanding of “Vietnamization,” however, deflects from this notion a nd strictly relates to translation studies based on Keith Taylor and Nam Nguyễn’s usage of Vietnamization as transliteration –– to adapt foreign words by way of Vietnamese spelling and pronunciation See Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: Universi ty of California Press, 1983), 53; and Nam Nguyễn, Phiên Dịch Học Lịch Sử - Văn Hoá: Trường hợp Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục [Historical and Cultural Translation Studies: The Case of Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục] (Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnam National University Press, 2002) 8 I used the term “New Culturalist” instead of “May Fourth writers” based on Ziqi Yuan, “‘Isms’ and the Refractions of World Literature in May Fourth China” (Master’s thesis, The Ohio State University, 2005), 7 - 8 Yuan says: “According to the convention in Ch inese studies in the English - speaking sphere, ‘New Culturalist’ usually refers to the intellectuals who were supporters and promoters of the New Culture Movement Usually, native Chinese speakers do not distinguish between ‘the May Fourth Movement’ and ‘th e New Culture Movement ’ For my purposes, the term ‘New Culture Movement’ emphasizes the culture - related content of the historical period, which centers on ideas and practices regarding the construction of a modern national culture and literature (as oppos ed to the traditional, imperial Chinese culture and literature), linguistic reforms, education reforms, and so on ” 9 For discussion of TLVĐ’s literary contributions and their highly - commemorated standing in the process of literary modernization of Vietnam , see Phan Cư Đệ, Tự Lực Văn Đoàn: Con người và văn chương [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn: Writers and Literature] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn học, 1990); and Trần Đình Hượu, “Tự Lực Văn Đoàn nhìn từ góc độ tính liên tục của lịch sử qua bước ngoặt hiện đại hoá trong lịch sử văn họ c phương Đông,” [ Tự Lực Văn Đoàn from the Perspective of Historical Continuity Through the Turning Point of Modernization in the Literary History of the East ] Tạp chí Sông Hương (2021) http://tapchisonghuong com vn/tin - tuc/p0/c7/n30763/Tu - luc - van - doan - nhi n - tu - goc - do - tinh - lien - tuc - cua - lich - su - qua - buoc - ngoat - hien - dai - hoa - trong - lich - su - van - hoc - phuong - Dong html 10 M Nguyen, On Our Own Strength , 12 Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 4 writers; entirely Western - educated, they pioneered a number of artistic initiatives and showed a deep commitment to the modern ideals of humanistic progress and individual freedom 11 Across the nation’s border, to the north, TLVĐ was preceded by the New Culture Movement, a group of writers in China during the 1910s and 1920s However, compared to TLVĐ, the New Culture Movement is much more internationally known, acknowledged, and studied The New Culturalists promoted a new Chinese culture grounded on Chinese liberalism and language reform 12 Unlike TLVĐ’s formal self - organized structure, the Movement was constituted of rather diverse literary voices which founded smaller literary units, like Yu Dafu’s Chuangzao She 創造社 [Creation Society], Lu Xun’s Zhongguo Zuoyi Zuojia Lianmeng 中國左翼作家聯盟 [League of Left - Win g Writers] , and Xu Zhimo’s Xinyue She 新月社 [Crescent Moon Society], among others The literary modernizations that emerged in Vietnam and China, two adjacent countries that exerted a pronounced influence on each other throughout over a thousand years of history, featured compelling comparative literary attributes, the study of which has largely been neglected since the French colonization of Vietnam and the crumbling of the Qing dynasty as China’s last imperial rule 13 Both movements feature the fascinating insistence of the “new” to lambast the “old ” The cultural and literary reformations, of which Yu Dafu and Khái Hưng were trailblazing writers, foregrounded the keyword “new” [ mới or 新 ], which emboldened an era of rebels and non - conformity The iconoclasm of the epochal reformations proposed a “new nation” with “new youth,” “new language,” “new literature,” and “new poetry ” The multi - layered and multi - directional discourse of non - conformity applauded Western ideals and scientific methods, and s imultaneously rejected the domineering status of Confucianism in both societies 14 Wenyan 文言 [Classical Chinese] and ch ữ Nôm

2022

The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated

Individualism in Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân

and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking”

Camellia (Linh) Pham

Dartmouth College

Recommended Citation

Pham, Camellia (Linh) (2022) “The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated Individualism in Khái

Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking.”” The Macksey Journal: Volume 3, Article 85

This article is brought to you for free an open access by the Johns Hopkins University Macksey Journal It has been accepted for inclusion in the Macksey Journal by an authorized editor of the Johns Hopkins University Macksey Journal

The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated Individualism in Khái Hưng’s Nửa

Camellia (Linh) Pham

Dartmouth College

Abstract

Literary modernisms in East and Southeast Asia, though constituted by cultural and linguistic exchanges between various nationalisms and colonialisms, are habitually seen as a unidirectional transfer from Western imperial ideologies West-to-East transference of

modernity usually considers literary history as a point where translation emerges as a linear movement between source and target language, and colonial subjects as an unquestioned replica of the Western consciousness However, when examining literature subject to

competing nationalisms, imperialisms, and colonialisms, specifically in early twentieth-century Vietnam and China, we must consider translation as both a conventional technique and

transcultural metaphor of interpellating the foreign “other.” This presentation applies David Der-wei Wang’s metaphorical sense of “carving modernity” and Lydia H Liu’s conceptual

framework of “translated modernity” to emphasize a discursive understanding of literary

modernity in its constructed nature through “performative/constative narratives.” Modernity transpires by way of “translated performance” until the modes of representations “acquire legitimacy within the host language.” In Yu Dafu’s short story “Chenlun” 沉淪 (Sinking) and Khái

Hưng’s novel Nửa Chừng Xuân (In the Midst of Spring), individualism as an imported ideology is

made manifest not as a revealing orientation inherent to the literature of modernist writers in colonial Vietnam and semi-colonial China Rather, individualist zeal, evocative of embodied actions and self- and class-consciousness, is continuously performed in the discourse of East Asian modernism as mediated individualism, allowing for comparative analysis of how the

“self” contests the conventionally-accepted and binary tropes of modernity––the “new” being equivalent to the “singular,” the romantic-self, and the powerful West

Keywords: Chinese literature, Vietnamese literature, comparative modernism, modernity,

translation studies, Tự Lực Văn Đoàn, New Culture Movement

1 In this paper, I use the translated English name for Yu Dafu’s “Chenlun” 沉淪 [Sinking] while retaining the original

Vietnamese title for Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring] This deliberate decision stems from the fact that there has not been any officially published English rendition of Nửa Chừng Xuân, whereas “Sinking” has been translated in full into English by Joseph Lau and C T Hsia in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese

Literature See Khái Hưng, Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring] (Sài Gòn: NXB Văn Nghệ, 1934); and Yu Dafu,

“Sinking,” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, ed Joseph S M Lau and Howard Goldblatt,

trans Joseph S M Lau and C T Hsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 44-69

September 1915 marked the founding of Xin Qing Nian 新靑年 [New Youth], the

magazine that would eventually feature two seminal manifestos: “On Literary Revolution” 文學 革命論 by Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879-1942) and “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” 文學革命論 by Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) These manifestos, harbingers of literary revolution in China, were heralded by Li Zehou 李泽厚 (1930-2021) as the double tune of

“national salvation and human enlightenment.”2 The magazine hallmarked an important

change as Xin Wenhua Yundong 新文化運動 [The New Culture Movement] (the 1910s-1920s) inaugurated the formal birth of modern Chinese literature The Movement’s thematic goals of

“modernizing people through language, modernizing language through literature, and

modernizing literature through Western thought” found camaraderie with a peripheral nation

of the Sinosphere––Vietnam––where literary modernization reached its peak with Tự Lực Văn

Đoàn [The Self-Reliant Literary Group; hereafter: TLVĐ].3 It was not until the beginnings of TLVĐ

and the Thơ Mới [New Poetry] Movement that the process of literary modernization in Vietnam could be compared to that of mainland China, vis-à-vis the magnified and nation-wide scale of

professionalism, formalism, and structuralism

In this paper, I call into use the understanding of “modern” by David Der-wei Wang and Lydia Liu Regardless of how modernism as an aesthetic movement is quickly deemed futile, vitiated, and bereft of formal coherence, I invoke Der-wei Wang’s metaphorical sense of

“carving modernity” and Liu’s conceptual framework of “translated modernity,” not to define what is constituted as “modern” in literature, so much as to emphasize the discursive way we understand literary modernity in its “constructed” and “transcultural” nature through

“performative/constative narratives.”4 Modernity transpires in Vietnam and China by way of the modernists’ new and revolutionary paths, infiltrating through a conduit of “translated performance” until the modes of representations “acquire legitimacy within the host

language.”5

Specifically, I apply the theoretical framework of modernity to “Chenlun” 沉淪 [Sinking]

by Yu Dafu 郁達夫 (1896-1945) and Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring] by Khái Hưng

(1896-1947) Born in the same year against the backdrop of a volatile period of revolutionizing

2 Quoted in Gu Ming Dong, Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature (London; New York: Routledge,

2019), 19

3 It may seem contentious for contemporary scholarship about modern Vietnam to include the country as part of the East Asian cultural sphere, or the Sinosphere, instead of regarding Vietnam in postcolonial discourse as a Southeast Asian nation By including Vietnam in the realm of Sinitic influence, I highlight the puzzling

characteristics of “claiming modernity,” as a result of the understanding that “modernity is an absent figure, an unattainable state.” Since the status of modernities in both countries is rather ambiguous, it would be arbitrary to decisively cut Vietnam off from its thousand-year Sinitic root This classification highlights the comparative analysis between China as the epicenter of the Sinosphere and Vietnam as China’s peripheral entity and casts light on the previously ignored similarities between the two modern nations For more discussion on the ambiguities of

modernity, see Lingchei Letty Chen, “Reading Between Chinese Modernism and Modernity,” Chinese Literature:

Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 24 (December 2002): 179

4 Lydia H Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 15; and David Der-wei Wang, “The Literary Mind and the Carving of

Modernities,” Der-wei Wang, David “The Literary Mind and the Carving of Modernities.” Journal of Chinese

Literature and Culture 3, no 2 (2016): 203 DOI:10.1215/23290048-3713779

5 Liu, Translingual Practice, 26

literature, Khái Hưng and Yu Dafu were impassioned firebrands of their generations before they died at around the same age Khái Hưng, Vietnamese-born and French-educated, and Yu Dafu, Chinese-born and Japanese-educated, shared the juxtaposition of backgrounds representative

of the transcultural tensions faced by their native countries at that time––the competing

powers of colonial imperialism and cosmopolitan nationalism, and foreign modernization and national backwardness.6 Drawing from the post-structuralist reading by Lydia Liu––dealing with translation, not in its “ordinary sense of the word,” but considering the so-called “sinification” and “Vietnamization”7 of concepts––I claim that individualism is not something inherent to the writing of TLVĐ and New Culturalists8 to inculcate interpretive reading; rather, individualist

zeal, evocative of embodied actions, is continuously performed in the discourse of East Asian

modernism as mediated individualism This treatment of the two texts allows for comparative

analysis of how the “self” contests the binary and conventionally accepted tropes of modernity:

the “new” is equivalent to the “singular,” the romantic-self, and the powerful West

TLVĐ was a left-wing literary association in Tonkin and was arguably the most important intellectual collective during the interwar period (1932-1945) The group’s writers had a

profound influence on the nascent yet powerful and tempestuous development of modern Vietnamese society, covering a myriad of fields like literature, journalism, publishing, and art.9

They published extensively in their two journals––Phong Hoá [Mores] and Ngày Nay [Today]––

which later became the highest-circulating journals in all of Indochina that advocated for social reform and public proselytization of “gradual decolonization.”10 Khái Hưng and Nhất Linh

(1906-1963), TLVĐ’s co-founders and the group’s backbone, were prolific and significant

6Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2021), 6-10; and Gu, Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, 19.

7 “Vietnamization” [Việt Nam hoá chiến tranh] is usually used to denote Richard Nixon’s doctrine on withdrawing American troops to end U.S involvement in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) My understanding of “Vietnamization,” however, deflects from this notion and strictly relates to translation studies based on Keith Taylor and Nam Nguyễn’s usage of Vietnamization as transliteration––to adapt foreign words by way of Vietnamese spelling and

pronunciation See Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 53; and Nam Nguyễn, Phiên Dịch Học Lịch Sử - Văn Hoá: Trường hợp Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục [Historical and Cultural Translation

Studies: The Case of Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục] (Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnam National University Press, 2002)

8 I used the term “New Culturalist” instead of “May Fourth writers” based on Ziqi Yuan, “‘Isms’ and the Refractions

of World Literature in May Fourth China” (Master’s thesis, The Ohio State University, 2005), 7-8 Yuan says:

“According to the convention in Chinese studies in the English-speaking sphere, ‘New Culturalist’ usually refers to the intellectuals who were supporters and promoters of the New Culture Movement Usually, native Chinese speakers do not distinguish between ‘the May Fourth Movement’ and ‘the New Culture Movement.’ For my purposes, the term ‘New Culture Movement’ emphasizes the culture-related content of the historical period, which centers on ideas and practices regarding the construction of a modern national culture and literature (as opposed to the traditional, imperial Chinese culture and literature), linguistic reforms, education reforms, and so on.”

9 For discussion of TLVĐ’s literary contributions and their highly-commemorated standing in the process of literary

modernization of Vietnam, see Phan Cư Đệ, Tự Lực Văn Đoàn: Con người và văn chương [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn:

Writers and Literature] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn học, 1990); and Trần Đình Hượu, “Tự Lực Văn Đoàn nhìn từ góc độ tính liên tục của lịch sử qua bước ngoặt hiện đại hoá trong lịch sử văn học phương Đông,” [ Tự Lực Văn Đoàn from the Perspective of Historical Continuity Through the Turning Point of Modernization in the Literary History of the East ]

Tạp chí Sông Hương (2021)

http://tapchisonghuong.com.vn/tin-tuc/p0/c7/n30763/Tu-luc-van-doan-nhin-tu-goc-do-tinh-lien-tuc-cua-lich-su-qua-buoc-ngoat-hien-dai-hoa-trong-lich-su-van-hoc-phuong-Dong.html

10 M Nguyen, On Our Own Strength, 12

writers; entirely Western-educated, they pioneered a number of artistic initiatives and showed

a deep commitment to the modern ideals of humanistic progress and individual freedom.11

Across the nation’s border, to the north, TLVĐ was preceded by the New Culture Movement, a group of writers in China during the 1910s and 1920s However, compared to TLVĐ, the New Culture Movement is much more internationally known, acknowledged, and studied The New Culturalists promoted a new Chinese culture grounded on Chinese liberalism and language reform.12 Unlike TLVĐ’s formal self-organized structure, the Movement was constituted of rather diverse literary voices which founded smaller literary units, like Yu Dafu’s Chuangzao She 創造社 [Creation Society], Lu Xun’s Zhongguo Zuoyi Zuojia Lianmeng 中國左翼作家聯盟

[League of Left-Wing Writers] , and Xu Zhimo’s Xinyue She 新月社 [Crescent Moon Society], among others

The literary modernizations that emerged in Vietnam and China, two adjacent countries that exerted a pronounced influence on each other throughout over a thousand years of

history, featured compelling comparative literary attributes, the study of which has largely been neglected since the French colonization of Vietnam and the crumbling of the Qing dynasty as China’s last imperial rule.13 Both movements feature the fascinating insistence of the “new” to lambast the “old.” The cultural and literary reformations, of which Yu Dafu and Khái Hưng were

trailblazing writers, foregrounded the keyword “new” [mới or 新], which emboldened an era of

rebels and non-conformity The iconoclasm of the epochal reformations proposed a “new nation” with “new youth,” “new language,” “new literature,” and “new poetry.” The multi-layered and multi-directional discourse of non-conformity applauded Western ideals and

scientific methods, and simultaneously rejected the domineering status of Confucianism in both societies.14 Wenyan 文言 [Classical Chinese] and chữ Nôm 𡨸喃 [Classical Vietnamese] were brought into confrontation with the written Baihua 白話 [Vernacular Chinese] and chữ Quốc Ngữ [modern Vietnamese alphabet, or national script] and colloquial Annamese Likewise, traditional Chinese and Vietnamese-regulated verse clashed against free verse composition, Confucian patriarchal society against democratic individualism, and high-brow literature against

11 For discussion of the prominent status of Khái Hưng and Nhất Linh within TLVĐ, see Lê Thị Đức Hạnh, “Thêm

mấy ý kiến đánh giá về Tự Lực Văn Đoàn” [More Evaluations of Tự Lực Văn Đoàn], Tạp chí Văn học, no 3 (1991), 78; and Phạm Thế Ngũ, Việt Nam văn học sử giản ước tân biên [Literary History of Vietnam–A New and Simple

Edition], vol III, Quốc Học Tùng Thư, 497

12 Arthur H Hummel, “The New-Culture Movement in China,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and

Social Science 152 (1930), 55

13 For discussion on the interaction between twentieth-century Vietnamese and Chinese modernism in the context

of translation, see Nguyễn Thu Hiền, “Dịch thuật văn học Trung Quốc từ thế kỉ 20 ở Việt Nam dưới góc nhìn văn học sử” [Translation of Chinese Literature from the Twentieth-Century in Vietnam with a Literary History

Approach], Hanoi: Faculty of Philology, Hanoi National University of Education (2020)

http://nguvan.hnue.edu.vn/Nghiên-cứu/Văn-học-nước-ngoài/p/dich-thuat-van-hoc-trung-quoc-the-ky-20-o-viet-nam-tu-goc-nhin-van-hoc-su-1323

14 For “new poetry,” specifically in the case of Vietnam, I want to highlight Phong Trào Thơ Mới [New Poetry Movement] (1932-1945), a movement that is contemporary, interlocking, and mutually interdependent with TLVĐ

We must recognize how the movement is called “Thơ Mới,” a compound of two vernacular Vietnamese words, instead of its synonymous “Tân Thi,” a Sino-Vietnamese word formation

literature for the popular masses.15 TLVĐ and New Culturalists both viewed heightened “self-reliant,” “self-sustaining,” and “self-sufficient” awareness as a continuity of nationalism, or rational patriotism.16 In addition, they single-handedly directed the promotion of modern literature for the working class––the keyword “popular literature” appears within both Vietnam and China’s discourses of modernity.17 And lastly, these groups of writers envisioned their modernization as an act of propagandization––enlisting the general public in the process of reading journals and newspapers.18 In this way, writers participated in the activism of

modernization by mobilizing the knowledge of the masses and making the groups’ members not only consumers of literature but also producers in their own right

Within the bounds of modernity, the common premise that looms over the

characteristically Vietnamese and Chinese developments of poetic and novelistic genres is the individual’s embrace of the modern––the construction of a new subjectivity and the sense of individualism The most widely-accepted understanding of the “new”––the “singular”––can be

explained by Chen Jia’ai’s statement on the inaugural issue of the journal Xinchao 新潮 [The

Renaissance]: “The [new] is singular for being absolutely unique, whereas the [old] is plural for being open to infinite multiplication.”19 The new self-reflexive and self-articulated perception speaks to China’s modern selfhood, and in turn, it becomes an indication of China’s possession

of modernity.20 Likewise, Neil Jamieson also attests to the tensions of modern literature in

15 For detailed manifestos of the two movements, see the translation of TLVĐ’s ten major objectives in Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, “The Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tự Lực Văn Đoàn): Colonial Modernism in Vietnam, 1932-1941,” (PhD diss., Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 2012), ix The original text was published in Tự Lực Văn

Đoàn, Phong Hoá [Mores], no 87 (1934), 2 For one of a few examples of the New Culture Movement writers’

mission statement, see Hu Shi, “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” 文學改良芻議 [Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of

Literature], trans Kirk Denton, in Modern Chinese Literary Thought (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 125; Chen Duxiu, “Wenxue geming lun” 文學革命論 [On Literary Revolution], trans by Timothy Wong, In

Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford, California: Stanford University

Press, 1996), 141; and Timothy B Weston, “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community

1913-1917,” Modern China 24, no 3 (1998): 274

16 Hu Shi’s second rule in “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” states: “Do not imitate the ancients.” Since “there is no literature to speak after the Six Dynasties,” we should “free ourselves from this kind of slavery and no longer write poems of the ancients and only write our own poems” to cure “our sick nation in such

a perilous state.” TLVĐ in their canonized manifesto also pronounces that modern Vietnamese writers should “use one’s own ability to produce literary works of value” to “truly embody Annamese character.” See Hu, “Some Modest Proposals,” 125

17 Chen Duxiu’s third rule in “On Literary Revolution” states: “Down with obscure, abstruse eremitic literature; up with comprehensible, popularized literature!” TLVĐ, on the same note, dedicates two of their ten goals to

champion popular literature: “Praise the beauty of our homeland as it reflects the common people, which in turn encourages others to love their country in a populist way” and “Follow populism, produce only works about the common people, and encourage others to love populism.” See D Chen, “On Literary Revolution,” 141

18 Notable initiatives include Chen Duxiu’s Xin Qing Nian 新靑年 [New Youth], The League of Left-Wing Writers’

bibao 壁报 [wall newspaper], and TLVĐ’s Phong Hoá [Mores] and Ngày Nay [Today] For more discussion on literary writings in the newspapers of the New Culturalists, see Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics

of Historical Experience (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 87

19 Translated and quoted in Liu, Translingual Practice, 81

20 L Chen, “Reading Between Chinese Modernism and Modernity,” 176

Vietnam in a single quandary: the antagonism between the individual and the community.21

The most well-canonized claim about the synthetical setup of modernity and singularity by Hoài Thanh (1909-1982) and Hoài Chân also reveals that “since ancient times, there was no

individualism in Vietnamese society,” as if “‘I’ was lost in a strange land” because the unique characteristics of the individual “were submerged in the family and the country, like a drop of water in the sea.”22 It was not until Thơ Mới (1932-1945) and TLVĐ appeared as two

constellations in Vietnamese literary history that “I” became validated Vietnamese and Chinese literary modernists, scholars believed, attacked the long-ritualized, rigidly obedient, and

unchanged Confucian society that emphasized family- and society-oriented happiness, with the constrictive localization of harmony in the sense of unity

The second trope of modernity concerns the idea that the new self is conditional on the romantic one, which further deems individualism to be the stance oppositional to realism, based on the Western models between the two Modern Vietnamese individualism, Ben Tran argues, privileges the authentic self and heartfelt articulations “Chủ nghĩa cá nhân”

[Individualism] comes hand-in-hand with the long-established tradition of romantic literature, which becomes an antithesis to socialist realism according to the nation’s adopted Marxist-Leninist apparatus.23 Take 1939 Dưới Mắt Tôi [Beneath My Eyes] by a notable literary critic, Trương Chính (1916-2004), as an example Trương Chính reckons Nửa Chừng Xuân is “a

combative challenge” of the “individualistic endeavors” and the “new humanistic values” versus

“a traditional system filled with the obsoletes.”24 Similarly, Chinese literary critics have built an edifice of factionalism dividing the realists from the romantics, as expressed in the antagonism between Wenxue Yanjiu Hui 文學研究會 [Literary Research Society] and Chuangzao She 創造

21 Neil L Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995),

111-13

22 Translated by David Marr, “Concepts of ‘Individual’ and ‘Self’ in Twentieth Century Vietnam,” Modern Asian

Studies (Cambridge University Press) 34, no 4 (2000): 787 For the original text in Vietnamese, see Hoài Thanh and

Hoài Chân, Thi Nhân Việt Nam [Poets of Vietnam] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn học, 2015), 58-9

23 Scholarships about romanticism, displayed in TLVĐ’s writings, were extremely divergent not only between the

interwar period (1932-1945), the First and Second Indochina Wars (1946-1991), and after the Đổi Mới period

(1986-present), but also concerning the divide between northern and southern literary criticism During the interwar years, literary critics like Hoài Thanh and Hoài Chân, Vũ Ngọc Phan, and Trương Chính described

“romanticism” as depressing, somber, or even antiquated and ordinary TLVĐ’s literature, henceforth, was

corrective of these characteristics in popular Vietnamese romance novels like Tố tâm and Giọt lệ thu On the

contrary, later Marxist scholars and the Communist party, such as Trương Tửu and Trường Chinh, considered romantic elements in TLVĐ as a pejorative tactic that signifies degeneracy, deterring away from social-realist literature that propelled Communist revolutionaries This strand of thinking, according to Ben Tran, was rooted in the taxonomical binary between romanticism and realism, individualist autonomy and social collective, and Western foreign paradigm and traditional Confucius society For more discussion, see M Nguyen, “The Self-Reliant Literary Group,” xii-xxii; and Ben Tran, “The Politics of Vietnamese Romanticism and Literary History,” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, Ann Arbor: ProQuest LLC, 2008), 19.

24 Trương Chính claims: “Nửa Chừng Xuân là cuốn truyện ghi sự phấn đấu giữa cá nhân với chế độ ấy Tác giả biện

hộ cho giá trị nhân sinh mới và công bố sự bất hợp thời của những tập quán do nền luân lý cổ truyền tạo ra.”

Trương Chính, “Dưới mắt tôi” [Beneath My Eyes], in Tự Lực Văn Đoàn: Trào lưu - Tác giả [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn: Movement and Authors], ed Minh Đức Hà (Hà Nội: NXB Giáo dục, 2007), 313

社 [Creation Society].25 Ultimately, scholars consider romantic love as an elusive display of

“individual sentimentality and passions” that, in effect, “directly challenges” Confucian

ideological structure, representative of medieval Vietnamese and Chinese society

Most poignantly, many scholars understand that individualism in China and Vietnam has

an explicit connection with the equivalent interplay between modernization and

Westernization Japan’s imperial expansion in China and France’s empire-building colonization

in Vietnam resulted in the arrival of a Western modernity that was traumatically sudden and inherently foreign It is tremendously striking that Huỳnh Sanh Thông (1926-2008) translated the first policy of TLVĐ’s manifesto as “Modernize completely without hesitation, and

modernization means Westernization,” even though the original manifesto published in Phong

Hoá number 87 does not mention a definitive goal to Westernize [Tây phương hoá].26 TLVĐ even amplifies the strong sense of nationalism and self-producing literary recognition “Use one’s own ability to produce literary works of value,” the manifesto urges, “[don’t] just

translate works from foreign countries simply because they have literary worth.” It explains,

“[t]his is to enrich the literary corpus of the nation.”27 Interestingly, the interpretation of

modernization as Westernization provokes a similar discussion in China Because the

legitimization of the “new” in the New Culture Movement interlocks with the West’s territorial expansion, China has been led to believe that “the violence of imperialism” shaped the

purported equation between Chinese modernity and “a complete and total Westernization”–– China had to modernize (read: Westernize) “in order to survive.”28

Considering the dialectic nature of these three tropes of modernity and individualism, I

argue that Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” challenge the normative dyad

of singularity and multitude and the dichotomy of Eastern-established society and Western-imported values The three tropes, although they appear arbitrary and unconnected to one another, are in fact woven together in a united, cohesive ideological whole The individualistic

wo 我 or “tôi,” I contend, indicates a self-reflexivity that is not intrinsic but rather acquired

Firstly, this means that the utterance of “tôi” in Nửa Chừng Xuân and 我 in “Sinking” only

becomes meaningful through the mediated, repetitive performativity of language Secondly, via sustained performativity, individualism emerges not merely on the textual level, but also on socio-historical and linguistic levels that are characteristic of and unique to Vietnamese and Chinese modernism Individualism in TLVĐ and New Culturalists’ writings, therefore, is neither

25 Chang Hao described four primary literary tensions in the May Fourth era, including rationalism and

romanticism, individualism and collectivism See Kirk Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s

‘Sinking,’” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 14 (December 1992): 109 DOI:10.2307/495405

26 Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “Main Trends of Vietnamese Literature Between the Two World Wars.” Vietnam Forum 3,

no 3 (Winter-Spring 1984), 113-14

27Tự Lực Văn Đoàn “Tôn chỉ của Tự Lực Văn Đoàn” [Principles of Tự Lực Văn Đoàn] Phong Hoá (March 2, 1934): 2 For further discussion on how the group encouraged writers to find the literary voice of tính cách An Nam

[Annamese characters] instead of a total and universal Westernization, see M Nguyen, “The Self-Reliant Literary Group,” ix.

28 Liu, Translingual Practice, 81; and Teh-yao Wu, “Chinese Traditional Values and Modernization,” Southeast Asian

Journal of Social Science 4, no 1 (1975): 116

something one can possess, nor is it an “equivalent” to an imported Western concept

Individualism is significative,29 birthed in the process of “carving” modernities

First, if we explain that these two literary modernists indulge in the absolute autonomy

of individualism as an antithesis to the collective whole (based on the Western humanist model

of the “self”), then how do we come to terms with Yu’s patriotic and nationalist overtone in

“Sinking”? Or does this dichotomy best represent the promotion of individualism in Khái Hưng’s

Nửa Chừng Xuân, where at the end of the story, the heroine Dương Thị Mai fails to defend her

love against the traditional, Confucianist bà Án? This dualistic thinking has been reexamined,

because the heroine Mai’s “failed attempts” to articulate herself at the beginning of Nửa Chừng

Xuân do not speak to the “universality of Western individualism,” but instead to “a disjuncture

between the modern individualistic “tôi” and the social reality of Vietnam’s colonial world” with social and historical determinants outside the Western European’s imaginations of the Orient.30

TLVĐ’s novels usually lack the hierarchical, neutral first-person “tôi,” characteristic of the

group’s nuanced individualism Rather, a system of class-conscious, relationship-based, and societally charged first-person pronouns [đại từ nhân xưng] mediates “tôi” within a larger

Vietnamese sociolinguistic configuration, such as cháu, con, em, and mình, among others

During the financial negotiation between Mai and the landowner Nguyễn Thiết Thanh,

the heroine continuously defines and redefines herself in several first-person terms to avoid Nguyễn Thiết Thanh’s urges that she marry him and become his fourth wife “Thưa ông, tôi nhớ

đến thầy tôi mà khóc” [Dear ông (you), I (tôi) think of my father, and so I (tôi) am crying] is later altered into “Thưa cụ, cụ hãy cho cháu nghĩ lại đã” [Dear cụ (you), cụ should let cháu (me) go

home to think about this].31 Mai first establishes herself through a non-kinship pronoun, “tôi,” then changes to the kinship term “cháu,” which means grandchild, niece, or nephew She concurrently addresses Nguyễn Thiết Thanh as “ông,” which means grandfather Through this material, habitual reiteration of many first-person reference forms, Khái Hưng’s character has distanced herself from her addressee Such variety in pronouns does not exist in any European languages; hence, it cannot be simply deemed as an “equivalent” to the Eurocentric paradigm

of individualism Mai makes use of the collective social stratum of the Confucian hierarchy to negotiate herself in the modern society of Vietnam.32

In this vein, Yu Dafu also calls into question the observed Western model of the self, which sees “individual consciousness” as the primary and ultimate negation of the Chinese

“national collective.”33 The more the anonymous character assumes and recognizes the “self,” the more indignant towards the Japanese he becomes, exemplifying the

irrefutably-documentarian and realistic value that Yu’s work has rendered When the character’s Japanese

29 The word “significative” in this sentence refers to the Jacques Derrida concept of “significance.” I borrowed Derrida’s commentary about “deferred” significance, which he argues “slides between signs.” Based on this Derridean concept, I understand individualism in East Asian literature not as an instantaneity––the idea that as

soon as we have tôi or wo 我 as signifiers, we instantly achieve “individualism” as a signified Rather, individualism

herein “slides between signs” and acquires its meaning presumably through a process of reiteration by which the signifier becomes the signified.

30 Trans Tran, “The Politics of Vietnamese Romanticism,” 131

31 Ibid., 155-56

32 Ibid., 15

33 Denton, “The Distant Shore,” 109

classmates shun his company, he immediately comforts himself: “They are all Japanese, all my enemies I’ll have my revenge one day I’ll get even with them” [他們都是日本人，他們都是

his diary: “Why did I come to Japan? … China, O my China! Why don’t you grow rich and

appearance of “I” always happens in concert with his malevolence towards Japanese subjects and his self-imposed exile, seen through the isolated self and the absent motherland To

disregard the suicide of the “self” at the end is to accept unquestionably the astonishing

complexity and significative ambiguity of Yu’s story, threatening the configuration of a

“Chinaman” and “Chineseness” on the one hand, while asserting defiance towards the Western prototype of individualism on the other

“Sinking” starts with the appearance of the lonesome “he” [ta/他] and ends with the

suicide of the wretched “I” [wo/我] This roundabout cycle in which “he” finally obtains the “I”

signifies repetitive compulsions, aggravated by and interpellated through psychological

soliloquies and interior monologues that gravitate towards self-annihilation At first, when taking in the beauty of the natural landscape around him, he addresses himself as an

ambiguous “you” [ni/你]: “This, then, is your refuge… You might as well spend the rest of your

life in this simple countryside, in the bosom of Nature” [這裡就是你的避難所。 。 。你就在 這大自然的懷裡，這純樸的鄉間終老了罷].36 One can readily assume that this “you” is in fact the incognito “I,” because “he” was not incentivized to find a voice for “himself”––consigning his frustration to nature serves as his only escape while studying abroad in the colonizing nation

of Japan This also enables what C T Hsia calls an “obsession with China.”37 Through Yu Dafu’s extensive literary name-dropping and poetry recitation, we see the main character gradually embark on the path of self-exploration to ultimately realize his “I.”38 Yu Dafu’s use of interior monologues gives voice to the mechanism of preservation; he decisively philosophizes about the character’s circumstances while relishing his state of remoteness and seclusion In one instance, for example, he finds himself prone to self-pity and solemnly vows, “I mustn’t do that sort of thing again” [我以後決不再犯罪了].39 The multiple “I”s scattered throughout the work emphasize the material and habitual course of action that necessitates the final appearance of the “I” in the ending scene

The call for a critical reevaluation of the carving of East Asian modernities and its strict accordance with the romantic-self elucidates the second trope Special attention should be paid

to the fact that the textual backdrop of “Sinking” happens in Japan, which is also where the story was written.40 The status of Japan to Chinese students serves more than just a symbolic meaning: it represents a “national humiliation” to Chinese pride, traced back to even the First

34 Yu, “Sinking,” 34

35 Ibid., 35

36 Ibid., 32

37 C T Hsia, “Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature,” in A History of Modern

Chinese Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967): 536-7

38 Yu, “Sinking,” 33

39 Ibid., 42

40 Feng Lan, “From the De-Based Literati to the Debased Intellectual: A Chinese Hypochondriac in Japan,” Modern

Chinese Literature and Culture 23, no 1 (2011): 106