MCLC: Yu Dafu diss review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Lucas Klein <LRKlein at cityu.edu.hk>
Subject: Yu Dafu diss review
****************************************************************

Source: Dissertation Reviews: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/2441

A review of Forbidden Enlightenment: Self-Articulation and Self-Accusation
in the Works of Yu Dafu (1896-1945), by Valerie M. Levan.

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.
— Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands” (1991)

Valerie Levan’s meticulously crafted dissertation deserves careful reading
and rereading for anyone interested in comparative literature, Chinese
literature, Sinophone studies, and sociolinguistics. It is not only the
first serious, full-length critical study of Yu Dafu’s 郁达夫 aesthetic
project in English; it is also the first of its kind in its comparative
breath and analytical depth in terms of formal analysis of literary texts.
The dissertation truly demonstrates the merits of a comparative approach
to the “world republic of letters” (p. 10); at the same time, it offers
thorough analyses of a major figure and a key genre in the history of
modern Chinese literature and in the broad cultural context of the
contemporary Sinophone world.

The dissertation consists of an introduction, four main chapters, and a
conclusion. In her introduction, Levan follows linguistic anthropologist
Paul Kroskrity to approach the study of Yu Dafu (1896–1945) with an
emphasis on competing “language ideologies.” She calls for moving beyond
“national literatures” and considers Yu Dafu, who began his writing career
in Japan and ended it in Singapore and Sumatra, “as a fitting figure to
which to apply a translational critical approach” (p. 10). Levan further
engages with the comparatist Pascale Casanova’s notion of a
“literature-world,” finding it most illuminating for how “it allows for a
broader consideration of kinships between texts that does not reduce them
in their relationship to each other to proxies for their respective
nations” (p. 11). Levan considers her study of Yu Dafu as a contribution
to Casanova’s “world republic of letters” that broadens the scope of
Casanova’s “world” to incorporate centers of literary power outside Europe
and its former colonies.

In Chapter 1, “Failure as Rhetorical Strategy: Yu Dafu, Language Reform,
and Alternative Texts,” Levan brings fresh insight into the study of early
twentieth-century Chinese literature through her consistent engagement
with language ideologies from a thoroughly comparative perspective. For
Levan, both the cynical and the exoticist approaches to foreign texts in
early twentieth-century Chinese literature fixate upon these texts’
semiotic function as signifiers of a single signified, i.e. “the West.”
She argues instead that these alternative texts are “an integral part of
the Chinese short stories” (p. 19) which, for Levan, become negotiating
grounds for contesting media of expression among three languages: “a
fictional vernacular, a nostalgically imagined language of classical
poetry as manifestation of reality, and an aspired to and admired modern
foreign language which is imperfect” (p. 67).

Levan opens Chapter 1 with a detailed analysis of early twentieth-century
language reform in the mainland Chinese context. She exposes the living
vernacular “as a myth of modern Chinese nation-building, and as the
fiction upon which the new Chinese literature was founded” (p. 26). The
desire for perfection of expression and communication led early
twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to imagine an endless expressive
potential for Western literature and traditional Chinese poetics. Levan
argues that these modern fantasies about the foreign and the classical
made them ideal alternatives to the yet-to-be-formed vernacular, although
the charge of “imitating Europeans” and the belief that traditional
poetics were hopelessly out of date in depicting modern subjects dropped
these intellectuals into a semiotic limbo.

With her impressive training in German, English, Chinese, and Japanese
literary traditions, Levan is able to weave together a thorough analysis
of how foreign texts work differently through visible or invisible
translation. Looking at Yu Dafu’s “Journey South” 南迁 against Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister, Levan argues that Goethe spares his reader “the jarring
experience of foreign text” (p. 55) by incorporating Mignon’s Italian
“original” into the fiction as an already posited original in the text,
while Yu Dafu’s readers “are supplied in the body of the story with only
the foreign text” and “are thus asked to engage with a work that has its
origin both outside of the story and outside of their own cultural
tradition” (p. 55). Similarly, in her analysis of Yu Dafu’s use of
Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” in the short story “Sinking” 沉沦, Levan
offers the fascinating insight that the poem’s unsatisfactory translation
is precisely the point, that “the translation is a plot element, and as
such its inferiority takes on narrative significance” (p. 62).

Chapter 2, “Self-Exposure and Judgment: Confession in Yu Dafu and Zhang
Ziping,” continues Chapter 1’s emphasis on language ideologies and
literary forms. Levan engages with previous critical readings of Yu Dafu’s
works that deal with the relationship of author and narrator to
protagonist, considering them to “fall on either side of an
autobiography/irony divide” if they do not resort to “the questionable
theory of national allegory” (p. 82). Instead, she advocates and practices
“a more thorough examination of the form,” and demonstrates that “such
narratives can be appreciated for both the emotional struggle they depict
and the highly analytic and detached framework through which they present
such sentimental content” (p. 82).

Levan’s deep engagement with previous scholarship at the intersection of
comparative literature and sinology continues in this chapter. She returns
to J. L. Austin’s speech act theory to elaborate on Peter Brooks’s
evaluation of “confession” as a double act. Levan, instead, considers
“confession” “a three-fold utterance, encompassing the sins it reports, a
performative declaratory admission of guilt, and a contractual request for
absolution” (p. 84). She observes that three incarnations of Yu Dafu the
author appear in his work “Blue Smoke” 青烟: one floating, the second
sitting and smoking, the third observing. She argues that “Yu Dafu
elegantly offers us a portrait of self knowledge that is at the same time
a tableau of the difficulty it presents, and of the illusions we conjure
up for ourselves as we struggle to attain it” (p. 107).

For Levan, Zhang Ziping 张资平 (1893–1959) has a place in this chapter about
the confessional form because in comparison with Yu Dafu, he employs “a
slightly different narrative structure to engage with concepts of sin and
expiation” (p. 107). Levan offers detailed analyses of Zhang’s narrative
strategy in three works, which she calls “novels of judgment,” written
between 1920 and 1924. Consistent with her theoretical engagement in
Chapter 1, Levan takes issue with past scholarship’s uncritical use of
Fredric Jameson’s concept of “national allegory” in the China field (p.
119). Through meticulous textual analyses, Levan argues that Zhang’s and
Yu’s texts’ connection with the nation may be casual and realistic, rather
than symbolic or metaphorical. The “Bridge” at the end of Chapter 2 serves
to connect the linguistic and semiotic analyses of Chapter 1 with the
examinations of narrative structures in the current chapter.

The development of the notion of the necessarily guilty subject, discussed
at the end of Chapter 2, gracefully introduces Chapter 3, “Iconoclasm in
Self-Expression: Narratives of Love and Guilt.” Levan continues her
emphasis on language and form with Rousseau’s words from his Confessions,
“For what I have to say, I shall have to invent a language as novel as my
project,” (p. 146) explained as a fitting description of Yu Dafu’s output.
Departing from past criticisms’ consideration of the problem of
subjectivity in relation to the status of the subject’s nation, Levan
borrows from Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self to read it as a
relationship, instead, between ethics and modernity. She carefully
distinguishes her approach from Haiyan Lee’s use of Taylor; rather than
focusing on the “affirmation of ordinary life,” as Lee does, Levan focuses
on how the guilt and anxiety about intimacy we find in Yu Dafu are
produced (pp. 157-158).

The widely perceived conflict between ling 灵 (spirit) and rou 肉 (flesh) in
Yu Dafu’s Sinking collection guides Levan to an in-depth discussion of the
sexologist and philosophy professor Zhang Jingsheng’s 张竞生research into
the 
“rules of love.” Here Levan emphasizes the discrepancy between aspirations
and reality, which, according to her, introduced even greater uncertainty
into intimate life at Zhang’s and Yu’s time. Levan concludes Chapter 3
with a beautiful analysis of two classical poems Yu Dafu published in
Japan in 1920. The final couplet of the second poem reads, in her
translation, “Plainly I know these are pleasures had by one and all / and
yet I feel that our affairs are quite extraordinary” 明知此乐人人有，总觉儿家
事最奇 (p. 
196). Levan considers this a pivotal moment in Yu’s textual performance:
in a single sentence Yu summarized a truth Rousseau did not learn in a
lifetime, that “only hubris or inexperience makes us insist on the
singularity of our intimate experience, and yet the illusion of such
singularity remains vital to our visions of ourselves” (p. 196).

Chapter 4, “The Afterlives of Yu Dafu: Huang Jinshu’s Parodic
Intervention,” concludes the main body of the dissertation by venturing
into the contemporary Sinophone world to examine the Malay-Chinese writer
and critic Huang Jinshu’s 黄锦树 parodic treatment of Yu in his stories.
Levan opens the chapter with Goethe’s hilarious poem (in her translation
from the German) parodying Friedrich Nikolai’s rewriting of The Sorrows of
Young Werther (p. 198). Her comparative acumen leads to a fascinating
reading of the thematic similarities and “shared scatological metaphor” in
Goethe’s parody of Nikolai and Huang’s parody of Yu (p. 200). An equally
intriguing comparison between Chinua Achebe’s famous post-colonial
critique of Joseph Conrad and Huang’s reaction against Yu’s legacy forms
the main body of the second part of the chapter, where Levan situates the
problem of the Sinophone writer within the larger literary context of a
global dilemma of representation (p. 215). The irony of Huang’s
intervention, Levan contends, lies in its demonstration of Yu’s continuing
significance for problems of self-articulation Huang himself confronts in
his work.

Levan’s conclusion offers a concise assessment of the dissertation’s
contribution to the field of modern Chinese literature. She is modest in
her assessment, as far as this reviewer is concerned, for Levan’s
contribution is as least three-fold: she resurrects Yu Dafu through a
definitive account of his engagement with the classical and the foreign as
integral to the development of the modern Chinese vernacular; she offers a
thorough theoretical treatment of the confessional form in the modern
Chinese cultural context; and she broadens the conceptual scope and
analytic depth of the “world republic of letters” through exemplary
comparative analyses.

Liang Luo
Department of Modern and Classical Languages
University of Kentucky
liang.luo at uky.edu

Primary Sources

郁达夫:《郁达夫文集》Yu Dafu: Yu Dafu wenji
张资平:《张资平小说选》Zhang Ziping: Zhang Ziping xiaoshuo xuan
张竞生:《性史》Zhang Jingsheng: Xingshi
黄锦树:《死在南方》Huang Jinshu: Si zai nanfang
《晨报副刊》Chenbao fukan and《新青年》La Jeunesse

Dissertation Information

University of Chicago. 2010. 260 pp. Primary Advisor: Anthony Yu.


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