酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

My Canadian friends and I decided to post a series of articles based on the "through-the-lens" metaphor, one which enables simultaneous explorations of the life-world we live in and of the literary worlds we travel around and ponder over. I hope this dual vision will help broaden our horizon of literary awareness in general and of poetic awareness in particular.

Mr. Barker's PROPOSAL FOR A FUNDATION FOR PEOPLE'S POETRY, posted at http://coviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=35960&sid=f4a10cc766491476d04f28afbb7a36ad , is the first strike at our "Literary Wok", and my revised piece about Lu Xun's conversion to writing is the second one.


The Poetic Lens

An Old Story Re-told: Lu Xun’s Conversion to Writing

In her award-winning work entitled Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Rey Chow reads Chinese films as ethno-cultural texts, and she seeks to examine and explore the socio-political significance of technologized visuality for China in relation to discourses of anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and women's studies. One of the major issues that she brings up is the relationship between "the discourse of technologized visuality" and modern Chinese literature. She begins her examination of this relationship with the well-publicized story of how Lu Xun (魯迅, 1881-1936), the founding father of modern Chinese literature, was motivated into a writing career through his encounter with a "visual spectacle" dwhile studying in medicine at the Sendai Medical School in Japan in 1905. At the time Japan was at war with Russia, but the war was being fought in Manchuria, on Chinese soil. One day, a supplemental classroom experience dramatically changed Lu Xun’s life – and that of modern China. What follows is this well-know episode of his conversion to writing recounted in his first collection of short stories entitled A Call to Arms:

If the lecture ended early, the instructor might show slides of natural scenery or news to fill up the time. This was during the Russo-Japanese War, so there were many war films, and I had to join in the clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students. It was a long time since I had seen any compatriots, but one day I saw a film showing some Chinese, one of whom was bound, while many others stood around him. They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic. According to the commentary, the one with his hands bound was a spy working for the Russians and who was to have his head cut off by the Japanese military as a public demonstration, while the Chinese behind him had come to appreciate this spectacular event.

Before the term was over, I had left for Tokyo because after this film I felt that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to make materials or be onlookers of such meaningless public exposures. Therefore, it doesn’t really matter how many of them die of illness because the most important thing is to change their spirit. Since at that realization, I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to promote a literary movement… I was fortunate enough to find some kindred spirits… Our first step, of course, was to publish a magazine, the title of which denoted that this was a new birth. As we were then classically inclined, we called it Xin Sheng, [New Life] (p. 4-5).

The Japanese photographic images outraged a Chinese medical student whose response was then the inauguration of a master narrative about modern Chinese literature -- changing the Chinese national character through literature. Thus Lu Xun’s conversion story has became the most enduring narrative of modernizing China and of how modern Chinese literature’ developed an “obsession with China”, C.T. Hsia’s seminal phrase describing modern Chinese fiction. In spite of the prominence of visuality and spectatorship in his story, Chinese scholars and critics have always interpreted it strictly from a literary perspective, making it part of the founding narrative of modern Chinese literary history and thus leaving unasked questions that are important to the interpretation of what in this case is first and foremost a visual encounter. They haven’t bothered themselves to ask one big question: how did Lu Xun know the Chinese onlookers were apathetic? Since we know about the practice of the public execution throughout human history, the onlookers could well have been part of a deliberate official setup to warn the public.

Rey Chow adopts a fresh approach to interpret this primary moment in the eminent writer’s life. Lu Xun's conversion to writing, according to Chow, results from his "intuitive apprehension of the fascistic power of the technologized spectacle." (p. 35) In her view, Lu’s experience “anticipated the ways European intellectuals such as Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin were to write about modernity” (p. 5). In their essays, Heidegger and Benjamin compare the effect of a work of art to a thrust or a blow. According to Gianni Vattimo, their conceptions expressed in their essays have at least one feature in common: “their insistence on disorientation.” (p. 5) For the young Lu Xun, what this disorientation resulting from the encounter with the technologized visual spectacle means is the beheading of a Chinese man, the apathy of the Chinese onlookers, and the meaning of these for China as a modern nation. This, indeed, is the explanation that Lu Xun offered and then most scholars and critics of modern Chinese literature have accepted (p. 6).

Whereas the standard interpretation ends with Lu Xun’s literal explanation that it was the faces of these mindless spectators that inspired his social crusade, Chow goes one step further in suggesting that it was the film, itself, that inspired his moral reaction: a keen reaction to the potency of the film to compete with the written word, the traditional medium for conveying social commentary in Chinese society. Chow argues that his account of his shock at the apathetic onlookers exposes a raw nerve: whether consciously or subconsciously, he is shocked by the very power of this new breed of image to communicate reality and thereby dedicates himself to reinventing the quality of the Chinese written text. Consequently, as literary critic Arson Law claims in her essay entitled hk political cartoons, we see “in Lu Xun's and consequent Chinese writers’ works a move towards more compelling, more populist, and more visual literal narratives.” (p. 5)

Drawing upon Western philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin on the one hand, and postcolonial theoreticians like Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell on the other, Chow explicates the significance of the visual sign, which is different from, yet related to, the older literary sign for China's modernity. She argues that “the film's careful visual structure signals the successful dismantling of the older sign” and therefore functions as a revolutionary mode whereby not only “the repressions and brutalities of society are consciously ethnographized,” but also, at the same time, the “practices of 'primitive' cultures” are fetishized against the background of “the harsh social realities of modernized metropolises.” (p. 26)

Retelling Lu Xun’s story as a story about a modernist shock is, among other things, a good way of showing how “self-consciousness” is produced in the postcolonial “third world.” This self-consciousness is inextricably linked to the position of being a spectator. To put it simply, Lu Xun discovers what it means to “be Chinese” in the modern world by watching film. Because it is grounded in an apprehension of the aggressiveness of the technological medium of visuality, self-consciousness henceforth can not be separated from a certain violence that splits the self, in that very moment becoming “conscious” into seeing and being seen. “Being Chinese” would henceforth carry in it the imagistic memory -- the memorable image -- of this violence. National self-consciousness is thus not only a matter of watching “China” being represented on the screen; it is, more precisely, watching oneself as a film, as a spectacle, as something always watched.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

My Canadian friends and I decided to post a series of articles based on the "through-the-lens" metaphor, one which enables simultaneous explorations of the life-world we live in and of the literary worlds we travel around and ponder over. I hope this dual vision will help broaden our horizon of literary awareness in general and of poetic awareness in particular.

Mr. Barker's PROPOSAL FOR A FUNDATION FOR PEOPLE'S POETRY, posted at http://coviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=35960&sid=f4a10cc766491476d04f28afbb7a36ad , is the first strike at our "Literary Wok", and my revised piece about Lu Xun's conversion to writing is the second one.


The Poetic Lens

An Old Story Re-told: Lu Xun’s Conversion to Writing

In her award-winning work entitled Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Rey Chow reads Chinese films as ethno-cultural texts, and she seeks to examine and explore the socio-political significance of technologized visuality for China in relation to discourses of anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and women's studies. One of the major issues that she brings up is the relationship between "the discourse of technologized visuality" and modern Chinese literature. She begins her examination of this relationship with the well-publicized story of how Lu Xun (魯迅, 1881-1936), the founding father of modern Chinese literature, was motivated into a writing career through his encounter with a "visual spectacle" dwhile studying in medicine at the Sendai Medical School in Japan in 1905. At the time Japan was at war with Russia, but the war was being fought in Manchuria, on Chinese soil. One day, a supplemental classroom experience dramatically changed Lu Xun’s life – and that of modern China. What follows is this well-know episode of his conversion to writing recounted in his first collection of short stories entitled A Call to Arms:

If the lecture ended early, the instructor might show slides of natural scenery or news to fill up the time. This was during the Russo-Japanese War, so there were many war films, and I had to join in the clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students. It was a long time since I had seen any compatriots, but one day I saw a film showing some Chinese, one of whom was bound, while many others stood around him. They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic. According to the commentary, the one with his hands bound was a spy working for the Russians and who was to have his head cut off by the Japanese military as a public demonstration, while the Chinese behind him had come to appreciate this spectacular event.

Before the term was over, I had left for Tokyo because after this film I felt that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to make materials or be onlookers of such meaningless public exposures. Therefore, it doesn’t really matter how many of them die of illness because the most important thing is to change their spirit. Since at that realization, I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to promote a literary movement… I was fortunate enough to find some kindred spirits… Our first step, of course, was to publish a magazine, the title of which denoted that this was a new birth. As we were then classically inclined, we called it Xin Sheng, [New Life] (p. 4-5).

The Japanese photographic images outraged a Chinese medical student whose response was then the inauguration of a master narrative about modern Chinese literature -- changing the Chinese national character through literature. Thus Lu Xun’s conversion story has became the most enduring narrative of modernizing China and of how modern Chinese literature’ developed an “obsession with China”, C.T. Hsia’s seminal phrase describing modern Chinese fiction. In spite of the prominence of visuality and spectatorship in his story, Chinese scholars and critics have always interpreted it strictly from a literary perspective, making it part of the founding narrative of modern Chinese literary history and thus leaving unasked questions that are important to the interpretation of what in this case is first and foremost a visual encounter. They haven’t bothered themselves to ask one big question: how did Lu Xun know the Chinese onlookers were apathetic? Since we know about the practice of the public execution throughout human history, the onlookers could well have been part of a deliberate official setup to warn the public.

Rey Chow adopts a fresh approach to interpret this primary moment in the eminent writer’s life. Lu Xun's conversion to writing, according to Chow, results from his "intuitive apprehension of the fascistic power of the technologized spectacle." (p. 35) In her view, Lu’s experience “anticipated the ways European intellectuals such as Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin were to write about modernity” (p. 5). In their essays, Heidegger and Benjamin compare the effect of a work of art to a thrust or a blow. According to Gianni Vattimo, their conceptions expressed in their essays have at least one feature in common: “their insistence on disorientation.” (p. 5) For the young Lu Xun, what this disorientation resulting from the encounter with the technologized visual spectacle means is the beheading of a Chinese man, the apathy of the Chinese onlookers, and the meaning of these for China as a modern nation. This, indeed, is the explanation that Lu Xun offered and then most scholars and critics of modern Chinese literature have accepted (p. 6).

Whereas the standard interpretation ends with Lu Xun’s literal explanation that it was the faces of these mindless spectators that inspired his social crusade, Chow goes one step further in suggesting that it was the film, itself, that inspired his moral reaction: a keen reaction to the potency of the film to compete with the written word, the traditional medium for conveying social commentary in Chinese society. Chow argues that his account of his shock at the apathetic onlookers exposes a raw nerve: whether consciously or subconsciously, he is shocked by the very power of this new breed of image to communicate reality and thereby dedicates himself to reinventing the quality of the Chinese written text. Consequently, as literary critic Arson Law claims in her essay entitled hk political cartoons, we see “in Lu Xun's and consequent Chinese writers’ works a move towards more compelling, more populist, and more visual literal narratives.” (p. 5)

Drawing upon Western philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin on the one hand, and postcolonial theoreticians like Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell on the other, Chow explicates the significance of the visual sign, which is different from, yet related to, the older literary sign for China's modernity. She argues that “the film's careful visual structure signals the successful dismantling of the older sign” and therefore functions as a revolutionary mode whereby not only “the repressions and brutalities of society are consciously ethnographized,” but also, at the same time, the “practices of 'primitive' cultures” are fetishized against the background of “the harsh social realities of modernized metropolises.” (p. 26)

Retelling Lu Xun’s story as a story about a modernist shock is, among other things, a good way of showing how “self-consciousness” is produced in the postcolonial “third world.” This self-consciousness is inextricably linked to the position of being a spectator. To put it simply, Lu Xun discovers what it means to “be Chinese” in the modern world by watching film. Because it is grounded in an apprehension of the aggressiveness of the technological medium of visuality, self-consciousness henceforth can not be separated from a certain violence that splits the self, in that very moment becoming “conscious” into seeing and being seen. “Being Chinese” would henceforth carry in it the imagistic memory -- the memorable image -- of this violence. National self-consciousness is thus not only a matter of watching “China” being represented on the screen; it is, more precisely, watching oneself as a film, as a spectacle, as something always watched.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Champagne]

[[Champagne]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[ericcoliu]

In his article entitled PROPOSAL FOR A FUNDATION FOR PEOPLE’S POETRY , posted at http://coviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=35960&sid=f4a10cc766491476d04f28afbb7a36ad , Mr. Terry Barker writes:

"A parallel psycho-social situation occurred at the beginning of the Modern Era that produced, first in Europe and America, and then in the countries influenced by Western societies, a cultural and political movement that attempted to welcome the new freer human relations, while retaining the communal links and artistic (in the broadest sense) distinctions of the past. Although often derailed and deformed during the age of Ideology now passing, this cultural tendency (present strongly in the liberal nationalist populism of Italy, France and Ireland, the Narodism of Russia, the Young China movement, the ligue nationalists of Quebec, American Populism and Progressivism, Canadian “Red Toryism,” British Tory socialism, etc.), survived usually most articulately in the realms of literature and visual art, these coming together, often, as poetry."

His insightful observation supports my arguments made here.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

In his article entitled PROPOSAL FOR A FUNDATION FOR PEOPLE’S POETRY , posted at http://coviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=35960&sid=f4a10cc766491476d04f28afbb7a36ad , Mr. Terry Barker writes:

"A parallel psycho-social situation occurred at the beginning of the Modern Era that produced, first in Europe and America, and then in the countries influenced by Western societies, a cultural and political movement that attempted to welcome the new freer human relations, while retaining the communal links and artistic (in the broadest sense) distinctions of the past. Although often derailed and deformed during the age of Ideology now passing, this cultural tendency (present strongly in the liberal nationalist populism of Italy, France and Ireland, the Narodism of Russia, the Young China movement, the ligue nationalists of Quebec, American Populism and Progressivism, Canadian “Red Toryism,” British Tory socialism, etc.), survived usually most articulately in the realms of literature and visual art, these coming together, often, as poetry."

His insightful observation supports my arguments made here.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[fanfan]

Deflecting from what is the decades-long held view about Lu Xun’s conversion to writing, Rey Chow’s fresh approach to interpret the primary moment in the eminent writer’s life is eye-opening. Lu Xun's conversion to writing, according to Chow, results from his "intuitive apprehension of the fascistic power of the technologized spectacle" (p. 35).

[[FAFAFA]]

Deflecting from what is the decades-long held view about Lu Xun’s conversion to writing, Rey Chow’s fresh approach to interpret the primary moment in the eminent writer’s life is eye-opening. Lu Xun's conversion to writing, according to Chow, results from his "intuitive apprehension of the fascistic power of the technologized spectacle" (p. 35).

[星子]

The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made materials or onlookers of such meaningless public exposures, and it doesn’t really matter how many of them die of illness. The most important thing, therefore, is to change their spirit...

True . . .
_________________

[[ANNA]]

The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made materials or onlookers of such meaningless public exposures, and it doesn’t really matter how many of them die of illness. The most important thing, therefore, is to change their spirit...

True . . .
_________________

[ericcoliu]

I've revised my piece.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

I've revised my piece.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul