Modernism in Europe and in China, taking Lukcs, Brecht and Lu Xun as examples

河南大学 高继海

Hegel and his followers in German philosophy have persuaded us that the world is governed by thought, that the process of history is the gradual dialectical unfolding of the laws of reason, and that material existence is the expression of an immaterial spiritual essence. People have been led to believe that their ideas, legal systems, and religions were the creations of human and divine reason.

Marx reverses this formulation and argues that all mental systems are the products of real social and economic existence. “The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”. (Marx 1965: 86) He believes that the material interest of the dominant social class determines how people see human existence, and legal systems ultimately reflect the interests of the dominant class in particular historical periods.

In 1844ParisManuscripts, Marx argues that the separation of mental and manual work dissolved the organic unity of spiritual and material activities, with the result that the masses were forced to produce commodities without the joy of creative engagement in their work while the appreciation of art was professionalized, dominated by the market economy and limited to a privileged section of the ruling class.

In a series of brilliant works, especiallyTheHistoricalNovel(1937) andStudiesinEuropeanRealism(1950), Lukcs refines and extends his theory, and inTheMeaningofContemporaryRealism(1957), he advances the Communist attack on modernism. He grants Joyce the status of a true artist, but asks us to reject his view of history, and especially the way in which Joyce’s static view of events is reflected in an epic structure which is essentially static.

InTheMeaningofContemporaryRealism, Lukcs offers a comprehensive evaluation of Brecht. He believes that Brecht’s drama can be divided into two periods, with his exile as dividing line. Before his exile, the plays were simply mouthpieces for his political ideas, lacking in artistic merits. After the exile, his art matured, produced works that have great artistic values.

Brecht, on his part, criticizes Lukcs for not paying attention to class struggle, emphasizing that the function of literature is to arouse the political consciousness of working class people, and to engage them in class struggle for political power, as class struggle is the keynote and essence of Marxism and should be expressed fully in literature. Brecht’s best-known theatrical device, the alienation effect, recalls the Russian Formalists’ concept of defamiliarization. He called his theory anti-Aristotelian. Aristotle emphasized the universality and unity of the tragic action, and the identification of audience and hero in empathy which produces a catharsis of emotions.

Brecht rejected the entire tradition of Aristotelian theatre. The dramatist should avoid a smoothly interconnected plot and any sense of inevitability or universality. The facts of social injustice needed to be represented as if they were shockingly unnatural and totally surprising. To avoid lulling the audience into a state of passive acceptance, the illusion of reality must be shattered by the use of the alienation effect. Improvisation rather than calculation is encouraged in order to create a sense of spontaneity and individuality. Brecht rejected the kind of formal unity admired by Lukcs. His epic theatre is composed of loosely linked episodes.

We can summarize their differences as follows: 1. Both Lukcs and Brecht consider Realism as the fundamental way of literary creation, but their understandings of Realism are different. Lukcs connects Realism with humanism while Brecht links Realism with the cause of working class struggle. 2. Lukcs pays attention to the epistemological function of literature while Brecht sees literature as a weapon in the struggle for political power. 3. Lukcs insists on the objectivity of literature, on its function of reflecting truth and value, while Brecht insists on the subjectivity of literature, emphasizing its political function and intention. 4. Lukcs holds that literature has an innate law, a universally acceptable model while Brecht sees literature as various, multi-faceted.

We can trace their differences back to their different backgrounds. Lukcs sees Marxism chiefly as a theory for man’s emancipation, while Brecht sees Marxism chiefly as a weapon for the working class to seek emancipation. Lukcs first of all is a scholar, versed in classical German philosophy and literature, and his view of history is that of dialectical development. Brecht grew up around the First World War, an angry young man of energy and ambition. When he accepted Marxism, Marx’s idea of class and class struggle appealed to him most. He is more of a fighter than a theoretician, just as Lukcs is more of a theoretician than a fighter.

In a series of letters written in the 1890s, Engels insists that, while he and Marx always regarded the economic aspect of society as the ultimate determinant of other aspects, they also recognized that art, philosophy and other forms of consciousness are relatively autonomous and possess an independent ability to alter men’s existence. In his letter to Margaret Harkness on her novelCityGirl, Engels says that Balzac, a reactionary supporter of the Bourbon dynasty, provides a more penetrating account of French society in all its economic details than all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together. Balzac’s insights into the downfall of the nobility and the rise of the bourgeoisie compelled him to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices.

The problem of the class nature of art is a complex one. Brecht believes that art is class oriented and serves class struggle. Stalin, Mao and other political leaders also hold this view.Lukcs insists on the universal character of literature. Most writers of the humanistic inclination support this idea.

The Chinese Communist revolution has been under the direction and influence of the Russian revolution from the beginning in 1921, when the CCP was founded, until 1956, when Khrushchev at the 20thCongress of the Soviet Communist Party made the “secret speech”, attacking Stalin, which signalized the final and complete break of the Sino-Soviet Union relationship. The 1920s witnessed the formation and collapse of the first United Front between the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The break came during the Northern Expedition, in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek killed many CCP members and workers in Shanghai, and the CCP took armed uprisings in the countryside to defend its interests.

Many leftist intellectuals, siding with the CCP, launched a cultural offensive against the GMD by attacking the Nanjing national government in their literary works. In 1929 the CCP consolidated its control over the radical forces in Shanghai’s literary circles. It decided to unify its followers and allies by forming the League of Chinese Left-Wing Writers. The league’s founding congress was held in Shanghai on March 2nd, 1930. From 1930 to 1934, the league supported discussions on the politicization of literature, promoted resistance to Japanese aggression, and denounced the GMD government’s revival of Confucian classics. In December 1935, the league leadership received a directive from Moscow to disband the league in order to organize a broader cultural united front. The league was thus dissolved in the spring of 1936.

Lu Xun was one of the major Chinese writers of the 20thcentury. Considered by many to be the founder of modern Chinese literature, he wrote in the vernacular as well as classical Chinese. In the 1930s he became the titular head of the Chinese League of the Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai. Lu Xun’s works exerted a very substantial influence after the May Fourth Movement to such a point that he was highly acclaimed by the CCP. Mao Zedong himself was a lifelong admirer of Lu Xun.

Though sympathetic to the ideals of the Left,Lu Xun never actually joined the CCP. He was primarily a liberal. Lu Xun was a versatile writer. His style has been described in broad terms, conveying both “sympathetic engagement” (as inMyOldHome,ALittleIncident) and “ironic detachment” (as can been seen inTheTrueStoryofAh-Q). His essays are often very incisive in his societal commentary, and in his stories he frequently treads a fine line between criticizing the follies of his characters and sympathizing with those very follies. He is considered the “soul of the nation” for his piercing analysis of the Chinese mentality. He abandoned medicine for literature as he believed saving the soul was more important.

Lu Xun, like Brecht, insisted on the class nature of literature, emphasizing the fighting function of literature in a time when the nation was faced with Japanese invasion. Citing the classical novelADreamofRedMansions, Lu Xun says that a male servant in the novel would never fall in love with Sister Lin, the beauty of an aristocratic house. Lu Xun’s translations were important in a time when Western literature was seldom read. And his ideas on translation also caused some debates. In response to one accusation that his translation was too literal, and therefore too hard for the reader to grasp, he wroteOnLiteralTranslationandtheClassNatureofLiterature.

The article was aimed at Liang Shiqiu, a writer, professor, and translator of Shakespeare. Lu Xun had many enemies in his lifetime, political, literary, as well as otherwise, and Liang was one of them. Liang says that in Webster’s dictionary, the word “proletarian” is defined as “a citizen of the lowest class who served the state not with property but only by having children”. From Liang’s remarks, Lu Xun senses the class prejudice of Liang.

Liang was born in Beijing. He was educated at Tsinghua College in Beijing from 1915 to 1923. He went on to study at Colorado College and later pursued his graduate studies at Harvard and Columbia Universities. At Harvard, he studied literary criticism under Irving Babbitt, whose New Humanism helped shape his conservative literary tenets. After his return to China in 1926, Liang began a long career as a professor of English at several universities. He also served as the editor of a succession of literary supplements and periodicals, including the famousCrescentMoonMonthly(1928—1933). Liang is now remembered chiefly as the first Chinese scholar who has single-handedly translated the complete works of Shakespeare into Chinese. This project, which was first conceived in 1930, was completed in 1967.

Lu Xun called Liang the “running dog of bourgeois class”, who, being old, has been discarded by his master. Lu Xun also insisted that the so-called “fair play” could not be implemented under the bad role of Guomindang. He was on constant move to avoid being arrested by the agents of ruling authorities.

The relationship between Lu Xun and the CCP after the author’s death was a complex one. On one hand, Party leaders depicted him as “drawing the blueprint of the communist future”, defined him as the “chief commander of China’s cultural revolution”. On the other hand, they downplayed the cosmopolitan aspects of Lu Xun, in order to try to match Lu Xun with the Party’s ostensible support of folk literature and the common people. During the 1920s and 1930s, Lu Xun and his contemporaries often met informally for freewheeling intellectual discussions. Mao wrote that “the style of the essay should not simply be like Lu Xun’s. In a Communist society we can shout at the top of our voices and have no need for veiled and round-about expressions, which are hard for the people to understand” (毛泽东 1991： 872).

Modernism is a very big and sometimes vague term to cover generally the literature and arts in the first half of the 20thcentury, but as our centre here understands, it can be applied to arts and literature in the late 19thcentury and late 20thcentury as well. Chinese modernism is heavily influenced by Western modernism yet retains its Chinese characteristics.

Lu, X. 2009.TheRealStoryofAh-QandOtherTalesofChina:TheCompleteFictionofLuXun[M]. London: Penguin Books.

Marx, K. 1965.TheGermanIdeology[M]. S. Ryazanskaya (ed.). London: Lawrence & Wishart.

毛泽东. 1991. 在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话[A]. 毛泽东选集(第三卷)[M]. 北京: 人民出版社. 847-879.