The Position and Pursuits of Intellectuals: A Study by the Literature Research Association

Author: Shi Shuping / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Although there is a slogan of "For Life" serving as a guiding principle, the overall style within the Literary Research Society is diverse and rich. The major writers within the society exhibit distinct personal characteristics in both their literary views and creative works, many of which are detached from the banner of "For Life" as a form of realism. The overall creative style of the major writers is gentle and refined, reflecting the general tendency of the Literary Research Society in their rich personalities. This style was inherited and continued by a group of younger members of the society, represented by Jiangzhe writers such as Ye Shengtao, Zhu Ziqing, Liu Yanling, Feng Zikai, Xia Guanzun, and Yu Pingbo. They added a fresh and ethereal touch to the gentle style, which later came to be known as the "White Horse Lake School" literary style. This group of Literary Research Society members occupied a very important position in the literary scene of the 1930s and even became the main impression for later generations to understand the style of the Literary Research Society. However, the creative style of the Literary Research Society was not solely gentle; it also included some outliers. For example, writers like Lu Yin, Wang Yiren, Xu Yuno, and Zhu Xiang belonged to the passionate category. Unlike most "stationary" intellectuals of the Literary Research Society, these writers had no fixed jobs and lived in poverty and hardship, facing ups and downs in life. They ultimately died young. They belonged to the category of "wandering" intellectuals, closer to the lower strata of life, and were more sensitive to the harsh side of life than other intellectuals with fixed jobs. They were more likely to voice sorrow in the face of pain, and thus their works were filled with romantic passion, with the flames of life bursting forth from every line. They were considered the "outsiders" within the Literary Research Society, their style far removed from gentleness and closer to that of the Creation Society. Lu Yin was a rebellious and unrestrained female writer. Moreover, although Lu Yin also gained recognition in literature with her "problem novels," she was completely different from Bing Xin's gentle and refined demeanor. Her works reflected the life struggles of women from the petty bourgeoisie. Bing Xin had "love" and salvation for the world, but Lu Yin, lacking a loving childhood, was filled with doubt and hostility toward the world. Her two marriages, which she scorned as worldly, made her more aware of the inescapable of women in that era. Lu Yin was "a woman swept up by the 'May Fourth' wave and awakened from feudalism." Her rebellious nature and skeptical spirit made her closer to the spirit of the time among the "May Fourth daughters" who ran away from home. As a result, she endured more spiritual suffering and tragically died in childbirth in May 1934. Her suffering in life and the tragic outcome of her death seemed to symbolize the price that modern women had to pay for their awakening. If in the May Fourth New Literature, Yu Dafu was a bold and straightforward male writer who openly expressed the suffering of love and sex, then Lu Yin was one of the earliest female writers to explore the suffering of love and sex. Although her novels were also labeled as "problem novels," discussing philosophical questions such as "What is life?"; and her struggles with the "problem of life" were "dressed in the clothes of love," the best example is her Seaside Friends. However, it is clear that Mao Dun's summary still centered on the theme of "For Life." If we set aside this artificial assumption of creative purpose, we might see Lu Yin more clearly. The characteristic of her novels is that she mixed the suffering of love with her "philosophical illness," and there was no issue of one wearing the other's clothes between life and love. The suffering of survival was intertwined with the suffering of love from the beginning. In other words, the suffering of love is an important aspect of the suffering of survival. Lu Yin wrote about the ambiguous attitude of the awakening women of the May Fourth generation toward love in a romantic and emotional way, an indescribable suffering of love caught between reason and emotion. Representative works include Seaside Friends, The Diary of Li Shi, and The Sorrow of Or. Whether in terms of the themes of her novels or her expression, or her own experiences and fate, Lu Yin was an outsider in the Literary Research Society. Her novels were a romantic, decadent, and rebellious style, completely different from gentleness, and highly controversial at the time. Zhu Xiang was a strange figure in the Literary Research Society, where his rebellious nature and elegance were miraculously combined. His rebellious nature referred to his personality, while elegance referred to his creative style. The two were contradictory yet harmoniously merged into a talented poet. Zhu Xiang's rebellious personality was evident in his life experiences. During his time at Tsinghua University, someone was hired to teach at Tsinghua, but Zhu Xiang declared, "I might as well teach him, he can't teach me?" and ultimately ruined the other man's opportunity to become a professor. At the time of his studies, Zhu Xiang was so poor that he didn't even have money to eat, yet he still funded an irregular literary journal, New Literature, which published his translations and original works. However, due to financial reasons, it only lasted two issues before being discontinued. When he was about to graduate from Tsinghua, he strongly resented the rigid and pretentious rules of the canteen, which required students to report for breakfast or be marked absent. Zhu Xiang deliberately rebelled against these regulations and was ultimately expelled. In August 1927, Zhu Xiang went to the United States to study at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. His strong sense of national pride and his rebellious nature made him feel like a "lost goose," and he left Lawrence University in anger when the French textbook called Chinese people "monkeys." In January 1928, he transferred to the University of Chicago, but the following year, he left again due to a professor's suspicion that he had not returned borrowed books, and he transferred to Ohio University in disgrace. In September 1929, Zhu Xiang returned to China early to support his family and taught at institutions such as Wuhan University and Anhui University. Due to frequent salary arrears from the schools, his living conditions grew increasingly difficult. A child born to him was less than a year old and died of starvation because he had no milk to feed him. The poet's innocent fantasies about life were completely shattered by the harsh reality. In 1932, Zhu Xiang resigned from his teaching position at Anhui University in anger over a single-character difference in the name change from "English Literature Department" to "English Department." In the year and a half that followed, he wandered from place to place, earning a living by writing, and ultimately took his own life by jumping into a river due to poverty, illness, and mental exhaustion at the age of 29. Zhu Xiang's personality was marked by the pride of traditional Chinese scholars and romanticism, but it was completely out of sync with reality. This made his life a tragedy. Strangely enough, his poetry was full of elegance and refinement, neither a furious critique of reality nor an ode to the times, but rather "free from restlessness, desire, and the slightly exaggerated brilliance" of passion, exuding a calm and refined beauty. For example, in The Little River, unlike Zhou Zuoren's companion poem, which contained a struggle against life, it interwove the beauty of rhythm with a composed and elegant tone. Works like The Lotus-Picking Song and The Lullaby show that Zhu Xiang's poetry drew on the soul of traditional Chinese ci poetry in its form, with a strong sense of music and soft, warm content, holding an important place in the history of the development of Chinese new poetry. "In writing poetry, what is meant is that new poetry should not be separated from old poetry. It only differs in rhyme and line breaks, and draws reference from forms like the sonnet or other poetic styles, but uses the pure emotions of the Chinese people to handle the words within the realm of traditional Chinese poetry, writing his own poetry. This is the characteristic of Zhu Xiang's poetry," "The author's calmness and subtlety place his poetry in a position of classical and luxurious achievement, far removed from the entire literary interest." Such a form and aesthetic made Zhu Xiang's poetry somewhat lonely in his time, but looking back, one would discover the distant charm in his elegant and refined poetry. And his exploration of poetic meter and rhyme made another significant contribution to the history of the development of new poetry. P201-203