Wenhui scholar | Wang Pu: Another "Combination of Sexes" in "Goddess"

In 1921, Guo Moruo's "Goddess: A Collection of Drama Poems" came out of nowhere, like a "public" radio wave, "looking for the same person as my vibration number", thus "opening a generation of poetry". Wen Yiduo famously exclaimed in his 1923 book review: "If you talk about new poetry, Guo Moruojun's poetry deserves to be called new!" In 1931, ten years after the poetry collection was printed, Qian Xing Estate exaggerated that "The Goddess" was "the only poetry collection in the new Chinese poetry scene". Now that this collection of poems is a hundred years old, can we still read "new" meanings from it? I want to try to talk about another "gender union" in "Goddess".

Why another? Why should "union of the sexes" be in quotation marks? The image of sexual desire is not a new topic, after all, behind "Goddess" is the transnational love between Guo Moruo and Tomiko Sato. The poem is titled "Goddess", and one of them, titled "Venus", the goddess of love and beauty, compares "love mouth" to "wine glass". But what I call "gender union" means something else. You may wish to re-read the famous work "Pen Standing Mountain Head Prospect", which has received special attention in Wen Yiduo's comments, and is closely related to themes such as "the spirit of the times" and "the century of moving", and has become a classic in the history of new poetry:

The pulse of the Metropolis!

Raw agitation!

Hitting in, blowing in, shouting in ,......

Spraying, flying, jumping in the ,......

The suburban smoke screen on all sides was hazy

My heart is about to jump out!

Oh well, the waves of the mountains, the waves of the tile houses,

Surging in, gushing in, gushing in, gushing in!

Symphony,

The wedding of nature and life!

The crooked coast is like Cupid's bow and crossbow!

Human life is an arrow, radiating from the sea!

Dark and sinking bays, moored ships, ships in progress, countless ships

Every branch of the cigarette tube has a black peony!

Oh well, the famous flowers of the twentieth century!

The strict mother of modern civilization!

The poem, written in 1920, fully demonstrates the "lyrical position" of Guo Moruo's "Goddess" writing explosion. At that time, Guo Moruo was a medical student at the Kyushu Branch of Imperial University of Japan. According to the Japanese scholar Ito Toramaru, Kuo Moruo could even be regarded as a "Taisho youth", but he was not in Tokyo, where consumerism was rising and "café girls" were all over, but he lived on Kyushu Island, where he had the opportunity to ascend to japan's industrial development and maritime trade. At the foot of The Hill is Moji City. Through the careful examination of Professor Iwasa Masaaki of Kyushu University, we learned that in the years before the writing of this poem, Moji jumped from a small fishing port to an industrial town, with factories on the shore and busy sea freight. Guo Moruo is therefore looking at not only natural scenery, but modern, busy coastal scenery. Landscape is an important rhetorical "installation" of modern literature; if classical romanticism often takes the "sublime" and "beautiful" of nature as lyrical scenery, then the scenery "painted" by Guo Moruo, standing on the top of the pen, is the industrialization of nature, the combination of nature and industry, and the "wedding of nature and life". The "wedding" here already has a bit of a sexual union.

The dynamics of modernity ("...) In" ), the excitement of the subject ("my heart"), the enthusiasm of love (Cupid)... Such a new lyrical landscape in which things and I blend is actually the key to "steamship". In the experience of China's "tianxia" collapse and modern transformation, the image of steamships is really intriguing. The "strong guns of ships" in the Western world are the first impressions in the history of humiliation in the past hundred years. In the May Fourth era, young Chinese poets in Japan regarded the dynamics of modern industry as a new progression in the vitality of nature, so that "spiritual vision" reached a climax with a wonderful metaphor: the poet compared the smoke from the steamship "pipe"—a kind of industrialized "sublime"—to a peony flower—a natural "beauty" rich in traditional poetry. The analogy between nature and industry expresses an ecstatic identification with the modern mode of production.

The image of the "smoke pipe" in the poem can be said to be one of the abuses of Chinese industrial aesthetics in the twentieth century, in a simplistic view of gender, it is associated with the so-called modern "majestic", while the graceful peony is connected with the traditional "feminine beauty" in Chinese classics. In this way, the "black peony", the "famous flower of the twentieth century", is wonderful in that "male and female are difficult to distinguish", and above the two sexes, it shows a kind of "combined sexiness". The "wedding" between nature and life, the analogy between "beautiful" and "sublime", is the combination of nature and industrial civilization; Cupid's desire for love is the libido of modernity.

The apostrophe at the end of the poem not only compares the smoke of steamships to "the famous flowers of the twentieth century", but also names the industrial beauty that is sweeping East Asia and the world - "the strict mother of modern civilization". Why can't modern civilization follow the traditional Chinese type, just the so-called "strict father" or "loving mother", but must be "strict mother"? This time, the "Zhang Xianzhi" is not only a "surge" of water, but also a bit unexpected in the image. Friends familiar with Japanese culture have told that Japanese people do have the idea of "strict mother" and cultural preferences, and Guo Moruo may have been affected. But I want to make a little more association.

The "strictness" here, of course, refers to the "harshness" of modern civilization, and as the "iron law" of social development, it does not depend on the will of man, and represents the inevitable process of "majestic" history. But on the other hand, this "harsh" is the "mother", the "motif" and the "mother", which nurtures the productive forces and the energy of human self-renewal. As we all know, the praise of "force" and the worship of "eternal women" are the two major themes of "Goddess", and the two quietly merge here. In the poet's imagination, "modern civilization" is the ideal type of hermaphrodite, a new model of gender union. It is also well known that from "The Rebirth of the Goddess" to "Phoenix Nirvana", there is another clue that "female" is the opportunity for human renewal, and I would like to emphasize that Guo Moruo's "eternal woman" is already a combination of the sexes, the "oneness of all" of hermaphroditism. The two sexes merge into one, from the theme of love to the vision of civilization, and even represent a certain cultural and political desire, revealing the modern human ideal of "Goddess".

Is this my over-interpretation and far-fetchedness? not necessarily. In fact, as early as the nineteenth century utopian socialism in France, the hermaphrodite human paradigm was part of the utopian imagination. Various socialists associated with the Saint-Westers' school conceived not only of a new society but also of a new human being of the sexes, combining the names Adam and Eve to propose "Adam and Eve doctrine" and naming this ideal type "le Mapah" (mother-father). From the material collected by Walter Benjamin in the manuscript of the Arcade Street Project, we can read "Saint-Simon's Formula: Men Remember the Past; Women Divinely Reveal the Future; Combine the Two to See the Present", and also see a new utopian belief, "the female and male factors are found in God, and seek to resurrect these elements through priestly marriage", in which the "Father" is "iron" and "mother" is the grace of salvation, and the two must be "embraced".

Cover of the 1930 edition of Goddess

The combination of the sexes to achieve an ideal human society, such an intention, finally completed the metaphor in Guo Moruo's translation of Goethe's Faust. In 1947, during the stalemate of the Liberation War, Guo Moruo finally translated the second part of Faust. In A Brief Treatise on Faust, he interprets the outcome of Faust's soul being saved in the Chinese Revolution. In his view, Faust represents bourgeois progressive individualism, while the tearful/eternal woman represents people's democracy, and her appearance with angels to redeem Faust's soul means that heaven also has a "gender revolution". The combination of progressive individuals and people's democracy is also the "combination of the sexes", which is the grand finale of China's "Faust" and the new picture of the Chinese revolution envisioned by the middle-aged Guo Moruo.

Of course, looking back today, whether it is the French utopian socialist or the Chinese poet Guo Moruo, their ideal of "gender integration" is still subject to the dichotomy of "male characteristics" and "female characteristics", and has not been separated from gender stereotypes. But we should not ignore the utopian factor hidden in it, that is, yearning and "prospecting", towards a new humanity and new civilization full of sexy love and beyond gender.

The theory of "the union of the sexes" is generally like this, which should have ended, but we can also think of the "wedding feast" in "Goddess" in addition to "The Goddess", such as "The Wedding Feast of the Sunset":

The setting sun, caged in the rose-colored sarong, is like a full moon, silently thinking. The sea that loved her also deliberately pretended to be calm, but his tender green silk coat could not hide the excitement in his heart. A few twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, laughing and talking, prepared a wedding feast for them in the dry grassland. The bride finally blushed her plump pony, and was embraced by her most beloved lover.

We can also continue to think that later, as a Marxist historian, Guo Moruo was the first to introduce the theory of marriage system of Morgan, Engels and others into the study of ancient Chinese history, providing a new perspective of social change from the marriage system. In his autobiographical work "Black Cat", he satirized the wedding of his arranged marriage as the historical "widow" of various primitive social marriage systems. Of course, this is all off-topic, so stop here.

Author: Wang Pu Associate Professor, Brandeis University, USA

Editor: Chen Shaoxu

Editor-in-Charge: Junyi Li

*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.