[Editor's Note] 100 years ago, 1922, was the beginning of modern Chinese literature. The literary revolution swept down the torrent of the new cultural movement, destroyed the decay, and was unstoppable, thoroughly criticizing the old literature, creating a new generation of literature, and contributing to the swarming of a number of new literary groups and the emergence of genres. In that year, Ye Shaojun, Liu Yanling, Zhu Ziqing, and others founded the first new poetry journal in the history of modern Chinese literature, "Poetry"; Feng Xuefeng, Pan Mohua, Ying Xiuren, Wang Jingzhi, and others established China's first new poetry society, the Lakeside Poetry Society; the first novel in the history of modern Chinese literature, "Fossils of the Alluvial Period," was also published in that year; Lu Xun published his first collection of novels, "Screams"; Hu Shi published "Literature in China in the Past Fifty Years," the first time with "History." The perspective is an attempt to study modern literature. In that year, Lao She had just embarked on the path of literature and created short works such as "Little Bells"; Shen Congwen came to Beijing from Hunan to start his new literary career...
At that time, modern Chinese literature, which was in its infancy, was inseparable from the nourishment and inspiration of world literature. And this year is also a miracle year of world literature. James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's Wasteland are two huge works that doomed the year to be colorful. However, 1922 brought us much more than that. The BBC recently published an article introducing the great works and writers published or appeared in the year of 1922, and calling this year the year of literary miracles.
Ulysses
The Wasteland
In the era of COVID-19 and climate change, it's easy to think that no one has a harder time than we do. But people 100 years ago thought the same thing. At that time, World War I and the Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people, and the social order in Europe was upended. Even in the years before these catastrophic events, the advent of cars, airplanes, and the first radio broadcasts brought about an increasingly technologically prosperous society — as revolutionary for people born in the 19th century as the Internet was for us today.
And for disaster, writers and artists react by looking for a way to reinvent their work, either in bizarre and uncontrollable ways, or simply portraying it more realistically. If the world is chaotic and disturbing, then so must music, art, and literature. Spanning decades, the period of modernism brought us the atonal music of Berger and Schoenberg, as well as the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque.
Literarily, 1922 was seen as a year of literary wonders, and in that year it ushered in the best time for a breakthrough. Memorable parts of the year are the first publication of James Joyce's novel Ulysses in February; and the T.S. Eliot Eliot's long poem,"The Waste Land," was published in October. These works are unprecedented in terms of style, scale and ambition.
The two books have much in common. Ulysses depicts a day of Dubliner life, down to the bedroom and bathroom, while The Wasteland depicts the bleakness of post-war Europe. Both books highlight their innovative style, with each page highlighting the author's personality and extraordinary wisdom. They adopted a collage method, combining their texts from different voices and perspectives, and all of them were elegant and popular.
The connotations of these two works are obscure, but they are full of beautiful traditional literary language that everyone can appreciate. Both Joyce and Elliot know how to please and challenge readers. This is not only the reason why they were so fresh at the time, but also why they were read repeatedly in later years.
Because works like Ulysses and The Wasteland changed the reader's view of literature in 1922— the poet W.H. Auden Auden later said that the "climate" had changed. It's been a landmark year, and after that, everything will be very different. However, when we celebrate the centenary of these two monuments of modern literature, it would be regrettable and dangerous to see only them.
In 1922, many other writers created innovative, bold, and satisfying works, but they were not as popular as Joyce and Eliot, perhaps because their work was less striking, or because they hid strangeness under a friendly surface. At the same time, most of these writers have their own views on Ulysses or The Wasteland.
Sinclair Lewis, a prolific and unstable fiction genius, went on to become the first Writer in the United States to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He took a lukewarm view of Ulysses, calling it "the great white pig." Lewis published his seminal novel Babbitt in 1922. Its innovation is not in style, but in theme: the protagonist, George Babbitt, a self-deluded, conformist businessman, struggles in an emptiness that he cannot recognize and therefore cannot fill. "He suddenly realized that all the life he knew and had worked so hard to pursue was in vain."
Its theme is that, apart from the roles and experiences given to us, it is difficult for individuals to identify the true self – a philosophy that is completely modern and highly controversial. But the book was a huge success, selling 250,000 copies in its first edition, making "Babbitt" synonymous with some kind of narrow-minded commercial figure.
Babbitt's exposure to suburban worries inspires a strong and unrepresentative emotion, giving rise to a genre of fiction about the hidden pain of successful middle-class men. Its successors include Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Richard Yates's The Revolutionary Road (1961), Joseph Heller's world-weary Something Happened (1974), and even Bret Easton Ellis) grotesque satirical American Psycho (1991).
On the other side of the world in Japan, Ryunosuke Wasagawa began redefining literature in his own way in 1922. In January, his novel "In the Bamboo Forest" was published in the New Year special issue of the literary magazine New Wave. Today, Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon is best known for its main material, but the novel itself remains a masterpiece. What was was the fusion of old and new in Japan after centuries of isolationism, while he retelled a 12th-century folktale in fragmented narratives, reporting the murder of a man from many different perspectives and witnesses, some of whose views contradicted those of witnesses. This has become a popular way of storytelling, forcing the reader to engage with the whole story.
In the Bamboo Challenges the Idea that the Truth Can Be Clearly Known and weakens the notion of the narrator's authority, as Joyce and Eliot did in their messy, chaotic structure. Wasagawa's life was also fraught with chaos: his mother, who suffered from a serious mental illness in the year of his birth, was hidden upstairs until his death; his father later had another child with her sister. In 1927, Wasagawa's sister's house caught fire, suspected to be set on fire by her husband, and then committed suicide. A few months later, Wasagawa committed suicide. His death—according to his translator Jay Rubin—was seen as a symbol of the failure of bourgeois modernism."
Virginia Woolf had mixed opinions of Joyce's Ulysses. She found herself at once "amused, stimulated, fascinated, interested" and at the same time "confused, bored, irritable, disillusioned.". She also showed a condescending attitude towards this — she wrote in her diary that it was "the work of a self-taught worker, and we know how miserable they were."
In 1922, Woolf broke with her own literary tradition to create the novel Jacob's Room, her first experimental work and her transition from the early traditional novel to her most famous works, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Sure, the stunts here are more restrained than Ulysses' ones, but the experiment is unquestionable. James is not so much present as absent in the book. Unlike the fictional protagonists we are accustomed to, we see more than 200 characters in this novel, as well as their ephemeral associations and impressions of Jacob's life. Woolf's approach paved the way for multiple perspectives, like Eliot's Wasteland and Wasagawa's Bamboo Forest.
As Woolf's friend, Elliot called Jacob's Room "a huge success." Woolf and her husband, Leonard, who ran The Hogarth Press at the time, mentioned in her diary in early 1922 that Eliot "wrote a 40-page poem that we will publish in the fall." Woolf offered The Wasteland the opportunity to publish it independently for the first time (though she was "unsure" how the various parts of the poem were linked), and this is just one example of her key role in modernist circles. May Sinclair, who was less famous than Woolf but equally important to her, was Elliot's idol—a mutual cult that she had long admired for his 1915 poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock—and she sponsored Ezra Pound, helping him to be active at the center of modernist poetry.
In 1922, Sinclair, a critic, poet, philosopher, and novelist, published the short story Life and Death of Harriett Frean, which depicts the protagonist's vain life in a beautiful and brutal way. It's a creative but understandable book (one critic called Sinclair a "readable modernist") that captures fragments of Harriet's life in categories. As she described in her letter to Sinclair Lewis, it was "an experiment in compression." A few years after Women in the UK eventually gained the right to vote, Harriet's life shows that women's lives are still limited by societal expectations of them to "look good". Sinclair shows mercilessly how Harriet continued to crush the course of his own happiness prospects. "Months have passed, years have passed, and time is getting faster and faster. Harriet is 39 years old. ”
Sinclair's work is emblematic of the "New Woman" movement after the turn of the century, questioning the traditional role of women in the family and economy.
The determination to be a part of the "New Woman" also created katherine Mansfield, the last overlooked genius of 1922. In 1903, she moved from her birthplace of New Zealand to London, where she became a central figure in the literary world with her extraordinary personality and talent. She had tea with James Joyce in Paris, had an unstable long-standing friendship with Virginia Woolf, and—in the view of Mansfield's biographer Claire Tomalin—she learned from D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence) contracted tuberculosis there, which eventually led to her death in 1923 at the age of 34. After Mansfield's death, Woolf wrote in his diary: "Writing seems to me to start to become meaningless. Catherine could never read it again. I lost this opponent. ”
Mansfield's views on other writers were uncompromising, whether it was the modernist writer Eliot who was "too dull to describe" or the traditional writer E. .M. Foster. M. Forster's novel's delicate surface lacks substance.
Mansfield's own work was best illustrated in his last book, The Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922. These short stories—she never wrote a novel—are fluid, vivid, and funny, with open-ended plots and brisk brushstrokes; the characters have little background information that readers can fill in with their own imagination. The narrative changes perspective because Mansfield says she wants to "reinforce the so-called little things — to make everything meaningful." In addition to the modern style, the opening story, At the Bay, is very timely in describing a character reflecting on the fear of returning to the office: "I was like an insect that flew into the room automatically—I hit walls, hit windows, hit ceilings, and in fact, I did everything I could but fly out again." ”
The stories and books of these 1922 writers—Mansfield, Sinclair, Woolf, Lewis, and Wasagawa—are not as fresh and wise as the works of Eliot or Joyce. (Eliot lightly praised Mansfield's work as "perfectly handling the smallest material—I believe that's what's called femininity.") But they are also an important response to turbulent times. Both stylistically and thematically, we can clearly see their impact on writing today. Writers aren't always so confident. Mansfield worries that "I'm not going to be 'hipster' for too long." They will find me, then disgusted, and then trembling with frustration. ”
In late 1922, on Christmas Day, Virginia Woolf wrote to her friend Gerald Brenan, saying she feared that their generation of writers would be stepping stones for the next generation of writers: "I agree with you that we can't do anything." We'll leave sporadic fragments and paragraphs, maybe a page, but no more. "And 100 years later, we're happy to see that she was completely wrong.