Original title: From "Performance" to "Revolution"——Cheng Fangwu in the Period of the Creation Society
Chinese the image of Cheng Fangwu in the University of Minzu
Cheng Fangwu of the Yan'an period Profile picture
The inaugural issue of Creation Monthly Information Photo
Cheng Fangwu (first from the right) is with yu dafu, Guo Moruo, and Wang Duqing, members of the Creation Society. Profile picture
【Everyone】
Biography of scholars
Cheng Fangwu (1897-1984), a native of Xinhua, Hunan, was an educator, writer and translator. He studied in Japan in his early years and returned to Japan in 1921. Together with Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu and others, he founded the famous literary group "Creation Society". In 1928, he joined the Communist Party of China in Paris, France, and edited the publication "Red Light", an organ of the Paris and Berlin branches of the Communist Party of China. In September 1931, he returned to China and participated in the organization of the "Left-Wing Social Scientists Alliance" in Shanghai. In 1934, he participated in the Long March. After arriving in northern Shaanxi, he served as the director of academic affairs of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and later served as the president of The Northern Shaanxi Public School, the president of North China Union University, and the vice president of North China University. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, he successively served as vice president of Chinese Min University, president of Northeast Normal University, president and secretary of the party committee of Shandong University, president and secretary of the party committee of Chinese Min University. He is the author of "Memoirs of the Long March", "Cheng Fangwu Anthology", etc., and translated "The Communist Manifesto" and "Criticism of the Gotha Program".
Cheng Fangwu is a proletarian revolutionary in our country, a loyal communist fighter, an important representative of the new cultural movement, a proletarian educator, and a social scientist. As a revolutionary and educator, Cheng Fangwu's historical merits have been widely recognized, and as an "important representative of the new cultural movement", Cheng Fangwu's contributions have not yet been fully summarized. This year marks the centenary of the founding of the Creation Society, and Cheng Fangwu is the most important theoretician who runs through the early and late periods of the Creation Society, and it is necessary for us to review his outstanding life and make a fair evaluation of the gains and losses of the literary theoretical exploration in the period of the Creation Society.
As a representative of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, Cheng Fangwu's most important contribution was to establish a positive literary concept for the Creation Society, and to inject elements of "imagination" and "emotion" into the new Chinese literature that has been carried out for five years and is mainly characterized by realism. He held high the banner of "literature is the conscience of the times" and made the initial theoretical way for Guo Moruo's "Goddess", which reflects the "spirit of the times". At the same time, with the spirit of a newborn calf who was not afraid of tigers, he launched a "whirlwind" of criticism of the new poetry poets and novelists who had gained a wide reputation at that time, and he had artistic insight into the criticism of Hu Shi's "Attempt Collection", Zhou Zuoren's translation of Japanese haiku, new poems by Yu Pingbo and others, small poems written by Bing Xin, and Lu Xun's novel collection "Scream". The courage to criticize, as well as the talent and insight displayed in his criticism, are commendable. Cheng's criticism greatly promoted the development of new Chinese literature. However, due to his "wrong criticism" of Lu Xun in history, Cheng Fangwu's contribution to the new Chinese literary theory and creative practice has never been well summarized. Today, a hundred years later, we can look at the criticism and controversy of that year with a more objective eye, transcend the inherent stereotypes, restore the logic of historical progress, and summarize it into the constructive part of imitation criticism, while not avoiding its historical limitations.
Abandoning Work and Literature: Study Abroad Career and Literary Enlightenment
The most important theoretical resource used by Cheng Fangwu in the beginning of his career in literary criticism was German Expressionism, which was inextricably linked to his study abroad experience. In 1910, at the age of 13, Narim followed his eldest brother Narimasa to Japan and entered the first grade of Nagoya No. 5 Junior High School. In 1911, Narimasago returned to China to participate in the Xinhai Revolution, while Narimakigo, who remained in Japan, came from Nagoya to Tokyo Cram School, and was later admitted to the second department (engineering) of Okayama No. 6 High School and entered the preparatory stage of university. Cheng Fangwu once compiled an English dictionary with his eldest brother, and coupled with his extremely high language talent, he was the only Chinese student who did not use dictionaries to take classes at Okayama Rokutaka. The first foreign language of the sixth high school is German, "the weight of foreign language classes is very heavy, and I always like to choose some literary masterpieces to make textbooks." This is a prominent feature of foreign language teaching in Japan, and teachers use literary works as teaching materials to teach the Chinese, which enables students to understand and appreciate the country's literature while learning foreign languages. Cheng Fangwu's interest in European literature, especially German-language literature, is closely related to the study of the Six High Schools period. There, he studied the works of Goethe and Schiller, and later dabbled in Kant's aesthetics. His understanding of Expressionism also began during this period. Studying foreign literature as a language reader stimulated his interest in literature.
Guo Moruo, a classmate of the same school whom Okayama Rokugao met, is the catalyst for Cheng's literary activities. In the summer of 1915, the two men saw each other as they were, because they both had the ambition of a rich country and a strong army, and both had a fanatical love for literature. They often climb mountains together, row boats together, and swim together to swim into the deep sea. More often, literary ideals are exchanged together. Even after they were admitted to Tokyo Imperial University, one studied weapon making and the other studied medicine, their love for literature did not diminish slightly. At that time, the newly launched "New Youth" magazine advocated vernacular literature, and the latest trend of the times spread across the ocean to Japan. The sensitive Guo Moruo was the first to be eager to try, he began to write new poems, between 1919 and 1920 wrote "Snow Dynasty", of which "My whole body seems to be turned into light and flow away" is the most imitative verse that I admire. Cheng Fangwu also followed Guo Moruo and began to write poetry from 1920, and his poems were "unusually delicate and contained an elusive sadness". Cheng Fangwu and Guo Moruo gradually became acquainted with Yu Dafu and Zhang Ziping, who were also at Tokyo Imperial University, and discussed running "a magazine of pure literature and art." At that time, their literary ideals were still relatively "romantic" and had a tendency to "art for art's sake".
Cheng Fangwu and Guo Moruo, who were deeply affected by literary ideals and uneasy about their professional studies, gave up their studies and returned to Shanghai in April 1921. The two entered the Taidong Bookstore together, encountered some twists and turns in the middle, and finally Cheng Fangwu compromised to go to Changsha to work, in exchange for Guo Moruo to stay in the Taidong Bookstore, which provided the necessary preparations for the later publishing business of the Creation Society. In July 1921, the Creation Society was established in Japan. At this time, Cheng Fangwu, who was working as a technician (chief engineer) at the Changsha Arsenal, resigned and went to Shanghai in order to concentrate on the editing and writing work of the Creation Society. He painstakingly worked hard in the whole process of the publication, review, editing and even publishing and distribution, and at the same time did both theoretical work and creation, which was really the "pillar of heaven" of the Creation Society.
Blow up a new world: the theoretical construction of the early stage of the Creation Society
From 1922 to 1926, Cheng wrote more than 40 literary theories and critical texts. The most important of these, the two articles "The Defensive Battle of Poetry" and "The Mission of New Literature", published in 1923, blew up a new world for the "Creation Society". Cheng Fangwu, who debuted in the literary world, was not yet a Marxist, and his literary theory background ranged from Plato and Aristotle to Kant's Western classical aesthetics, as well as the cutting-edge Expressionism at that time.
In the later widely controversial article "The Mission of New Literature", he clearly put forward the proposition that "literature is the conscience of the times", and his so-called "mission of new literature" consisted of three items, including "the mission of the times, the mission of the Chinese, and the mission of literature". Although the Later Creation Society was known in the history of modern literature as "art for art's sake", the Creation Society was not a "only art school", and the "three missions" proposed by Cheng Fangwu in its early days included both sides of "social-aesthetic". Literature is the "conscience of the times," and this era is "an era in which the weak prey on the strong, where there is power and no justice, an era in which conscience withers and shame is lost, an era in which materialism is contested and is ruthless and cruel," and "our times have been filled with hypocrisy, sin, and ugliness." In the text, Cheng Fangwu loudly shouted about the problems of the times, and believed that literature could express the hope of change in these sufferings in the world, believing that if literature enriched the "ability to express itself", it could "eliminate all obstacles to the heart and mind".
He declared that literature "is directly appealing to our feelings" and that "the purpose is to convey the feelings of a mental or material phenomenon", firmly believing that "literature always takes emotion as its life, and emotion is its end". Such a view can easily be understood as emphasizing the "subjectivity" of literature. According to Yu Zhaoping's research, Cheng Fangwu is the "universality" and "objectivity" of literature that establishes "subjective" and "expressive" in the sense of Kant's epistemology. Yu Zhaoping pointed out that "the concepts of 'subjective' and 'objective' used by Chengfangwu are different from the philosophical concepts we generally understand", but can correspond to the three stages of "subjective deduction" discussed by Kant's epistemology, that is, Chengfangwu summed up that "in consciousness, all intuitions and other monologies are unified by experience are subjective unity, and if they are unified by the understanding Verstand, they can be called objective." Thus, the "subjective" that I have discussed is a synthesis of experience, "containing a transpersonal nature", that is, universality, and therefore "objectivity". This shows that he advocates writing "inner" literature, not only advocating writing private special emotions, but hoping to show the whole of the times with distinctive individuals, that is, to show universality with special characteristics.
In this sense of "universal" and "special", he distinguishes between "expressive" literature and "reproduced" literature, with emphasis on the former. Literary and artistic works that can "hint at the big with the small and all with the part" are the literature that he affirms as "expressing"; and the literary and artistic works that "show the whole with the whole" are the "descriptions" of "labor and fruitlessness" and the literature of "reproduction". He called on writers to "grasp the times and consciously express them", so as to "give ordinary people a chance to recall and judge their lives". He believes that good literary works "are 'performance' rather than 'description'", "description is ultimately just the last skill of the writer", "description" is "naturalistic", "shallow", "ordinary" and even "vulgar". Using this as a framework, he launched a serious and valuable critique of the literature of the May Fourth period. He ruthlessly classified most of the works in Lu Xun's "Scream" collection as "vulgar" works of "reproduced accounts". Guo Moruo said that He had "exploded a new world" for the Creation Society, and several of the heaviest bombs were dropped on Mr. Lu Xun. Cheng Fangwu's criticism of "Scream" is mainly that Lu Xun is good at "describing" and not good at "performance". He believes that "The Scream" concentrates "the Diary of a Madman is a record advocated by the naturalists" and "Kong Yiji" and "A Q Zheng Biography" are shallow documentary biographies"; he points out that works such as Kong Yiji, Medicine, and Tomorrow are collected in thousands of articles, and they also imply that none of them are out", and such "dead writing" "is worthless".
For a long time, most of the explanations given by people for Cheng Fangwu's criticism of Lu Xun in that year were "misunderstandings". This is actually a well-intentioned defense divorced from specific historical contexts. Cheng Fangwu's "performance" overrides "reproduction", indicating that he has a different view of art and literature than Lu Xun. Like expressionism, Cheng Fangwu regards "expressing the heart" as the highest pursuit of literature, so the "Scream" concentration he highly affirms is the "Dragon Boat Festival", because the novel is full of the author's "efforts to express himself", and this "performance" is likely to imply the whole of society. Therefore, Cheng Fangwu's criticism of Lu Xun's works is not a misunderstanding, but a literary criticism standard based on his own expressionism.
Turning to "Revolutionary Literature": Theoretical Contributions to the Later Period of the Creation Society
1926 was Cheng's second "outbreak period", and he began to turn to "revolutionary literature".
In early March 1926, Guo Moruo applied for the position of dean of liberal arts at Guangdong University, and after Guo Moruo arrived in Guangzhou, he wrote an article entitled "Revolution and Literature", which was the first article to advocate proletarian revolutionary literature and had pioneering merits. Cheng Fangwu followed suit and published Revolutionary Literature and Its Perpetuality. But the understanding of the "revolution" of "revolutionary literature" is still a little vague. He believes that "revolution is a conscious leap forward. Regardless of whether it is a group or an individual, any conscious leap forward is a revolution." It is certain that the "revolution" here is still in the category of the "national revolution". At this time, Cheng Fangwu emphasized the connection between "revolution" and human feelings and human nature, and he regarded "revolutionary feelings" as "revolutionary literature" and "qualitative prescriptiveness": "Revolutionary literature does not need the phenomenon of revolution because of the word "revolution"; what is important is that the feelings transmitted are revolutionary. Even if a work is based on the fact of revolution, it can still be non-revolutionary, let alone literary. On the contrary, even if its material has not been taken by the revolution, and it is not afraid that it is a trivial matter, as long as the feelings it conveys are revolutionary, and can blow up faith and enthusiasm for revolution in the dead hearts of mankind, such works cannot but be said to be revolutionary. On the one hand, this emphasizes the perceptual characteristics of literature, and on the other hand, it also highlights the utility of literature.
He also said: "If a literary work is revolutionary, its author must be a man of revolutionary zeal; if it is eternal revolutionary literature, its author must penetrate thoroughly and trace to eternal sincere humanity." And "eternal humanity" refers to "love of truth, love of justice, love of neighbors, etc.", and can also be collectively referred to as "the love of life". His definition of literature is that "the content of literature is necessarily human." These are obviously "bourgeois" and "humanitarian" sets, and there is not much "proletarian class consciousness". It is only when we speak of "group consciousness" that there is a hint of an emerging class: "And when we maintain self-consciousness, we must maintain group consciousness; when we maintain personal feelings, we must also maintain group feelings." Only in this way can revolutionary literature be produced and have permanence. From the above quotations, we can see very clearly that Cheng Fangwu, who advocated "revolutionary literature" in 1926, had not yet reached the height of "ideology" and "class consciousness".
In the summer of 1927, Cheng Fangwu went to Japan again, and gained new theoretical inspiration from Li Chuli, an activist of the late Creation Society, and gradually formed his relatively mature view of "revolutionary literature". Li Chuli, Feng Naichao and other members of the late Creation Society studied at Tokyo Imperial University in Japan in the second half of the 1920s, and unlike Guo Moruo and Cheng Fangwu, who had returned to China in 1921, they coincided with the resurgence of Japanese proletarian literature. The Marxist research and reading activities of the students of TOK Were very active, and Li Chuli and others were activists who often discussed issues related to proletarian literature together. They followed the slogan of "direction change" put forward by the Japanese proletarian political and cultural camp, led by Kazuo Fukumoto's theory, hoping to achieve "transformation" in the Chinese literary circles as well. It was precisely because of the radical transformation ideas of Li Chuli and others that Heyamobu came to Tokyo to write the famous "transformation" essay "From Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature" in Japan. The so-called "transformation", in a word, is to shift from "bourgeois revolution" to "proletarian revolution", from "petty-bourgeois literature" to "revolutionary literature" (proletarian literature).
In Japan, Cheng Fangwu wrote "From Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature", which was obviously influenced by Li Chuli's revolutionary literary ideas, further strengthening the original criticism of "reproduced literature". Compared with the previous view of literature, Cheng Fangwu has several points that are more clear. The first is about the nature of the "literary revolution". Second, the Creation Society was proposed by him as a generation with a separate historical status, in order to distinguish it from the generation of the "literary revolution" and as an intermediary towards "revolutionary literature". Third, he clearly proposed that writers need to overcome their own consciousness and achieve "Ovoch change" in order to make it possible to move towards "revolutionary literature". Judging from the time of publication, Cheng Fangwu's "From Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature" and Li Chuli's "How to Build Revolutionary Literature" were published in the same month, which can be regarded as the two most important pioneering works advocating "revolutionary literature". Li Chuli's articles are more theoretical, while Cheng's articles are based on the facts of literary history for more than a decade since the literary revolution, so they are more flesh and blood.
First of all, Cheng Fangwu explicitly characterized the "literary revolution" as "petty-bourgeois literature". Cheng Fangwu affirmed the early stage of the May Fourth Literary Revolution, but was not satisfied with its overall state; Cheng Fangwu's overall literary view of the decline of the literary revolution was that it was a literature created by petty-bourgeois authors as the main body, and they "created a 'middle' language that was not donkeys and not horses, and brought into play the bad roots of the petty bourgeoisie."
Then he affirmed the Creation Society as the only and greatest achievement of the literary revolution, and even regarded it as the Creation Society's "creative efforts", "the movement that saved our whole literary revolution", "inspired by the Creation Society", and "the new cultural movement fortunately preserved a division". Of course, under the scrutiny of the theoretical vision of "proletarian literature" that Cheng Fangwu has already accepted, the problems of the Creation Society are also extremely obvious, that is, the characteristics of "romanticism and sentimentalism" in the works determined by the "petty-bourgeois roots" of the authors. But Cheng Fangwu made further defenses and analysis. In his view, compared with the bourgeoisie, this petty-bourgeois root "is still revolutionary." Therefore, as long as the writers are willing to consciously go through the "Ovokh change",that is, the transformation of consciousness, to "acquire class consciousness" through self-denial, then they can still "provoke the responsibility of the revolutionary 'Indalis and More Pursuit of Asia'". Continuing the pursuit of literary language and form in the early stages of the Creation Society, it demanded that "the language of our media be close to that of the peasant-worker masses, and we should take the peasant-worker masses as our object", and even uttered such an agitated statement: "Overcome your petty-bourgeois roots, turn your back on the class that will be 'transformed by Ovohe', and start to walk towards the 'dirty' peasant-worker masses." ”
epilogue
Looking back at Cheng Fangwu's literary theory and literary criticism practice from 1922 to 1928, we can see his value and significance, as well as his limitations. From a constructive point of view, in the early stage of the Creation Society, Cheng Fangwu theoretically established for them the goal of "literature is the conscience of the expression of the times", which has the dual pursuit of "society and aesthetics"; in terms of criticism and practice, Cheng Fangwu has created a way for the Creation Society to survive through his own articles. In the later period of the Creation Society, he began to advocate "revolutionary literature" and gradually formed a complete theoretical thinking, which initially established the theoretical connotation of "revolutionary literature - proletarian literature" in China.
Throughout his life, the practice of literary theory and criticism focused on 1922-1928. Since then, his life path has gradually turned to revolution. His relationship with Lu Xun began to ease in 1927. In early 1927, Cheng Fangwu drafted the "Declaration of Chinese Writers on the British Intellectual Class and the General Public", contacted Lu Xun and obtained his support, and jointly signed the declaration. When he came into direct contact with Lu Xun in Shanghai in 1933, Cheng Fangwu's understanding of Lu Xun had undergone great changes and improvements. After Lu Xun's death, he immediately wrote a commemorative article praising Lu Xun's works for reflecting the darkness of the times and fully affirming that Lu Xun's political understanding had reached the "highest level" of his time.
On October 19, 1937, Mao Zedong gave a speech at the Northern Shaanxi Public School, commending the "spirit of Lu Xun", calling Lu Xun "the sage of new China", "a great literary scholar" and "the vanguard of national liberation"; praising him for his "spirit of struggle" and "spirit of sacrifice"; and specifically pointing out that "especially in his later years" and "his thoughts, actions, and works are all Marxist". Needless to say, Mao Zedong's high appraisal of Lu Xun was completely different from Cheng Fangwu's positioning of Lu Xun's backward petty-bourgeois intellectuals in his early years. What is valuable is that Cheng Fangwu, who has been "straight-talking and straight-talking" all his life, has never made a reversal article for his previous criticism of Lu Xun's words. In the years that followed, he used his own practical actions to accomplish the cause he envisioned when he was arguing with Lu Xun—that is, to be a revolutionary, to cultivate revolutionary feelings in the revolutionary cause, and to complete the preliminary preparations that revolutionary literature must have. As he said to the students of the Shaanxi North Public School Mobile Theater Troupe, "We must flow to the masses of workers and peasants" to understand their lives and changes in their thinking, and then realize the changes in their thoughts and feelings. It is a little regrettable to the literary worker that he did not return to the revolutionary literary cause after that, but devoted his life to the cause of education.
This year marks the centenary of the founding of the Creation Society, and while fully demonstrating the achievements of Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu and others in the creation of humanities, we should also realize that the theory and critical practice of the Chengfangwu Creation Society period are constructive and far-reaching.
(Author: Yao Dan, Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Chinese Min University) (Yao Dan)