MCLC: Developmental Fairy Tales review

Wed Jan 11 08:40:33 EST 2012

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Developmental Fairy Tales review
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Source: China Beat (1/10/12): http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=4005

Book Review: Developmental Fairy Tales
by Nicole Kwoh

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Jones, Andrews F. Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and
Modern Chinese Culture
<http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=31128>. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2011. 259 pp. $49.95 (cloth).
====================================

At the 1996 APEC Economic Leaders Meeting, Jiang Zemin concluded his
speech on economic development with a quote from Lu Xun: ³For actually the
earth had no road to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is
made² (1921). This quote highlights the important role played by the first
generation of modern Chinese literature in shaping the current rhetoric of
building a road to progress. In Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary
Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture, Andrew F. Jones explains the
construction of this ubiquitous concept of cultural and historical
progress. With a focus on Lu Xun (1881-1936), Jones broadens the influence
of evolutionary theory beyond short stories and essays to include
narratives of ³everyday discourse² (p. 8), and skillfully pieces together
widely circulated academic journals, film, print advertisements, and
children¹s literature of the Republican Era. Jones¹s fresh
interdisciplinary approach sheds light on the extent to which artistic and
political reverberations of developmental social theory shaped modern
Chinese culture, with the crucial help of the contemporary growth of print
culture, Western science, and commercial media. The five chapters of the
book are organized to show the broadening of developmental theory¹s impact
on literature, politics, and economy.

Jones links vernacular developmental narrative forms with Late Victorian
³science fiction² (p. 48), in particular that of Edward Bellamy and Jules
Verne. Their works, Jones explains, explore evolutionary social theory by
questioning the relationship between a ³backward² reality and a utopian
destination, a narrative that came to be appropriated by Lu Xun and fellow
participants in experimental fiction such as Wu Jianren, author of The New
Story of the Stone (1908). Jones shows that this narrative structure often
also worked as a framing device in which plots and characters come full
circle, inevitably ending where they had started despite their efforts. In
their journey, the final part of a chain of events is presented both as an
avoidable crisis and an inevitable natural process. The opening line from
Lu Xun¹s ³The Misanthrope² (1925) illustrates this circularity in its
stark declaration: ³My acquaintance with Wei Lianshu began with a funeral,
and ended with a funeral.²

Jones keenly argues that the politicization of these developmental
narratives was grounded in the tenet that literary creation has the
ability to influence the historical path of the nation. Chinese
nationalist intellectuals perceived a decline in China¹s sovereignty in
the face of increasing reliance on goods and technology imported from the
West, foreign political control, and a fractured central government.
China¹s powerlessness in attaining modern nation-state status in the
imperialist world order came to be viewed by Lu Xun and his contemporaries
as a consequence of an inherited cultural tradition that appeared
inexorable, but from which a rupture was needed if ever China was to
overcome a stalled modernity. Jones subscribes to the prevailing view that
developmental theories informed nationalist intellectuals, who believed it
was their responsibility to take the lead in awakening the nation to
action (or, at least, to its predetermined condition) and, consequently,
turned to vernacular fiction as an instrument of social change.
Significantly, Jones comes to the provocative conclusion that this
developmental narrative was understood not merely as a parable to convey
tensions emerging from a desire for agency against Western imperialism and
from a need to confront an inevitable modernization. It also, in itself,
served as an ³act² that re-captured historical agency from the steady pace
of the evolutionary view of human history.

The author¹s insightful examination of literature, film, and artwork
reveals that these narrative acts converged on the recurrent use of the
image of a captive animal or child receiving education in his or her
formative years, a scene in which the shape of the child¹s future is
reliant on adult intervention. Indeed, posits Jones, the child or beast,
as determiner of the nation¹s future and embodiment of the consequences of
both ³nature and nurture,² becomes the ³primary object of literary
representation² (p. 10). This is especially convincing in a detailed
analysis of Lu Xun¹s essay ³How to Train Wild Animals² (1933) inspired by
³A Narrow Cage² (1921) by Vasilii Eroshenko (1890-1952), an advocate of
developmental theory with whom Lu Xun forged a close friendship. Looking
at the expanding commercial publishing industry, Jones points to the
launch of children¹s magazines in 1921 by publishing giants Commercial
Press and Chunghwa Books as further evidence that the image of the child
became central to the discourse on development in popular culture and mass
media. Jones expands the scope of analysis of these magazines beyond their
article content to analyze advertisements, cover illustrations, and
photomontages. By examining this intersection of child education, national
development, and print capitalism, Jones reveals a fascinating Republican
Era discourse on child development. It is in children¹s literature itself
that we detect a form of ³the vernacularization of evolutionary narrative²
(p. 82). Jones goes one step further to argue that this expanding market
for products aimed at educating children catalyzed the rise of the entire
print industry.

In one of the most intriguing sections of the book, Jones provides a
comprehensive and reliable study on the rise of Western taxonomy and
natural science as institutional disciplines in China, highlighting the
role of Lu Xun¹s younger brother Zhou Jianren (1888-1898), a zoologist and
advocate for the importance of external conditions to child development.
Western scientific texts, especially those pertaining to biology or
zoology, were translated and disseminated in China, primarily through the
efforts of a network of New Culture writers. According to Jones, this
enabled the indigenization of foreign texts, which took on meanings
specific to the Chinese condition.

This provocative study pushes open the boundaries of developmental theory
in the formation of modern Chinese literature and media culture. It is a
valuable resource for scholars interested in twentieth-century China¹s
comparative literary history, intellectual history, children¹s literature,
translation, and cultural studies.

Nicole Kwoh is a graduate student in modern Chinese history at Columbia
University.