MCLC: David Wang on C. T. Hsia

Denton, Kirk denton.2 at osu.edu
Sat Jan 4 10:21:42 EST 2014


MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: David Wang on C. T. Hsia
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere Blog, NYT
(1/3/14):http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/q-a-david-der-wei-w
ang-on-c-t-hsia-chinese-literary-critic/

Q. & A.: David Der-wei Wang on C.T. Hsia, Chinese Literary Critic
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

C.T. Hsia, the Chinese literary critic who died in New York on Dec. 29,
aged 92, had a “legendary career” as “a true cosmopolitan, shrewd,
critical and brilliant,” says David Der-wei Wang, the Edward C. Henderson
Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, in an interview on
the significance of the life and work of his mentor and friend.

Born in Shanghai in 1921, C.T. Hsia, also known as Hsia Chih-tsing, moved
to the United States in 1947, later becoming a professor at Columbia
University. Though he adored Western literature, he is best known for
introducing Chinese literature to the West amid the information vacuum
about China that characterized the Cold War, and establishing a literary
canon that lasts to this day, Mr. Wang said.

Importantly, Mr. Hsia drew attention to several Chinese writers neglected
amid the ideological battles of the day, such as Qian Zhongshu, Shen
Congwen and Eileen Chang, whose works included “Lust, Caution” (made into
a film by the director Ang Lee) and “Love in a Fallen City.”

Mr. Hsia corresponded with Ms. Chang and, in her obituary in The New York
Times in 1995, called her “the most gifted Chinese writer to emerge in the
 ’40s 
<http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/13/obituaries/eileen-chang-74-chinese-write
r-revered-outside-the-mainland.html>.” He compared her favorably to
writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor and Franz Kafka.

Mr. Hsia wrote three major works: “A History of Modern Chinese Fiction”
(1961), “The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction” (1968) and
“C.T. Hsia on Chinese Literature” (2004). His final book, an edited
anthology of Yuan dynasty drama, will be published by Columbia University
Press this spring.

In an obituary Mr. Wang wrote, he examines a central idea of Mr. Hsia’s —
that Chinese writers have suffered from a kind of “obsession with China.”
He elaborates on this in the interview. Edited excerpts follow:

Q. What was C.T. Hsia’s significance to Chinese literature?

A. He went to the U.S. at a very tumultuous time in Chinese history. He
went in 1947 [two years before the Communist victory in the civil war]. He
wanted to pursue a degree in English literature and was caught in the
so-called Cold War cultural politics of the 1950s. This was a young man
with great expectations. He loved English literature and European culture.
He grew up in cosmopolitan Shanghai, then the civil war happened in China
and he got stranded and couldn’t go back. And couldn’t find a good
position in the U.S. at a college.

Q. What did he do?

A. In 1951, David Rowe [a professor of political science at Yale
University] hired him to compile a manual for the Korean War: “China: An
Area Manual.” He got bored and left, but along the way he gathered a real
knowledge of Chinese literature, something he didn’t have before that.
Eventually he became more and more involved in Chinese literature studies.
In the 1950s, there was no field called modern Chinese literature, so the
publication of his book in 1961 ["History of Modern Chinese Fiction"],
that was a big thing. That was a book that made him famous in the West. As
a result, a discipline was established.

Q. In your obituary you write: “One cannot start any new study of Chinese
literary modernity without first consulting, challenging, or at least
reflecting his opinions” and, “For years Hsia has been faulted for his
Euro-centric, anticommunist stance as well as his New Critical criteria.”
He was controversial as well as respected, wasn’t he?

A. Today we can look back and laugh at his mistakes, or his prejudices or
whatever. But he was someone who set up the paradigm. That’s where the
controversy and debate comes from. In China [where his books became
available in the 1990s] lots of people love him, because they think he’s a
spokesman for democracy and freedom of aesthetic values. But our leftist,
our neo-leftist friends, they call him a rightist. And C.T. Hsia really
enjoyed that kind of tension. He was quite a character. I’ve never seen
anyone like him in the field. Never a cynic. But opinionated.

Q. What of his personal life, his identity?

A. C. T. Hsia’s story is really the story of the diaspora, of the
intellectual who traveled from East to West. His passing represents a
whole generation. He went to the U.S. on a grant between the First and
Second World Wars, he was of a generation of intellectuals who were
literally stranded in the U.S. unless they really loved China and wanted
to go back. But his first love was English and European literature. That’s
why there is controversy, because things got more and more tense when the
younger generation of Chinese scholars went to the U.S. from China [after
Mao's death in 1976]. Some Chinese felt, how could he be so
non-nationalist? He truly embraced New York culture, U.S. culture. And he
was a jester. He was funny.

Q. In the obituary you also write, “Of all his critical undertakings,
Hsia’s comment on the ‘obsession with China’ has exerted the most powerful
influence. As he notes, ‘There has been no modern Chinese writer consumed
with the passion of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, of Conrad or Mann, to probe the
illness of modern civilization. But at the same time every important
Chinese writer is obsessed with China and spares no pains to depict its
squalor and corruption.’” What was the significance of this theory of
self-obsession?

A. The phrase was coined by Hsia in an article called “Obsession With
China,” in an appendix to the second edition of “A History of Modern
Chinese Fiction,” in 1971. In that article he reviewed the development of
Chinese fiction to the end of the 1960s and how people were obsessed with
the malaise in their own nation. They didn’t have the energy or the mind
to turn their attention to anywhere outside China. And they saw China as a
center of malaise and injustice. He felt it was a self-defeating attitude
that cut two ways. In one way it could produce a true sense of urgency in
an old empire, an old civilization. But he found all that an almost
sadistic culture, and he used the term to critique Chinese modernity.

He argued, we need to look beyond China to really engage with the world,
with Western civilization, even if was sick too. Kafka, Joyce and Proust
would never have ghettoized the problems of their own civilization. He
argued, if only Chinese writers could have the magnanimity to look beyond
their own culture. Parochialism is the word he liked to use. He felt that
Chinese writers were morbidly obsessive. He didn’t like Lu Xun and you can
see why. And Chinese people argue he is the conscience of China. But he
denigrated Lu Xun as narrow-minded, as a talent who abused his own talent.
If China had a problem, that problem had to be understood in the universal
context of humanity, of the degeneration of humanity, he felt.

Q. How does Chinese culture fit into this universal perspective? Didn’t
Joyce, Kafka and Proust also write about their own cultures?

A. Some people say Hsia argued this at the cost of the specificity of
Chinese culture. That everything was universal to him. I would argue that
he may be suffering from an “obsession with China” too. When he attacked
modern Chinese literature as suffering from an obsession with China, was
he too suffering from one even by seeing this?
He would say, “Be that as it may, we still need to open up.” China still
needs to open up to the world, to humanity. Cosmopolitanism was the bottom
line of his argument. For good and for ill. Never say, “China is the
worst” or “China is the best.”

Q. Does this theory still apply to China today, with so much changing and
the country growing in wealth and influence?

A. Quite a few Chinese say “China is rising.” And Hsia’s point about
self-obsession, made in 1971, has some relevancy today. Then it was
self-defeating, but today it’s self-aggrandizing. I am a more cautious
person. I don’t think I have the magisterial confidence about others’
obsession with China. But I feel this theory is a really critical
interface for us to engage with the past and the future of China. One may
disagree with Hsia, but one cannot overlook the arguments he made all
those years ago.



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