《神州交流》Chinese Cross Currents

Foreword: Literature and Society
—A World not so Apart

Vol. 1, No. 2, April-June 2004

Times of great economic and social transformation tend to favour creativity. This is true in the arts in general, and in literature in particular. Economic changes produce social tensions and inequalities: some people will gain from these changes, others will lose; some winners will keep all for themselves, others will share and redistribute their gain; some losers will eventually recover, others will be utterly marginalised.

With the advent of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution in the West, many writers shouldered the responsibility for revealing the workings of these great social changes. Some works that one immediately thinks of are Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and Hard Times , Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , and of course Balzac's Human Comedy that epitomises the Realist movement and Zola's Rougont-Macquart cycle that gave rise to the Naturalist movement. In the case of Zola, inequality and unfair treatment were to be denounced in all their guises, and his writings and activities brought about the term “intellectual” as we understand it today.

But literature with a social concern does not only deal with the marginalised poor: huge changes affect society as a whole—the slave-owners in William Faulkner's Sartoris , the provincial bourgeois in Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary as well as the idealist journalists in Balzac's Lost Illusions . A significant portion of modern literature therefore deals with issues proper to modernisation, and the genre itself was given its ultimate recognition in the turbulent interbellum period of the twentieth century in the writings of authors like John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, Mikhail Bulgakov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lao She, Lu Xun or Ba Jin.

“Realist literature” tends to be scorned by today's avant-garde literary critics as a bit passé , but as was argued by Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature?, engaged writing does not preclude the power of evocation in “revealing the world” proper to each individual writer. And Erich Auerbach, the important German-Jewish literary critic and author of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, precisely discusses how “reality” is constructed in literary works in different times and places by imaginative minds as diverse as Homer, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Flaubert or Woolf.

It has been twenty-five years now since China has opened up to the world again. Twenty-five years of development that have given rise to genuine economic success as well as great social upheavals. The opening-up policy was furthermore meant to be a clear-cut break with the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, a time when the mass movements forbade any expression of the self and The East is Red was the sole horizon. The arts have thus re-flourished in the 1980s and 1990s and Chinese contemporary literature has made a vivid comeback to bookstands all over China and is being translated and disseminated worldwide.

The deprivations of the Cultural Revolution and the economic transformations of the past quarter of a century have given rise to a literature that could be characterised as neo-realist, a literature that is also the mirror of the tensions at work in present-day China. Hence the idea of our special dossier on “Literature and Society”. Our interest moreover lies in the fact that this neo-realist literature has a larger impact and is often more telling about society than most of the academic social studies published in China. One exception to this is the Zhongguo nongmin diaocha (Report on Chinese Peasants) published in January 2004 by Chen Guidi and Chun Tao that sold more than 200,000 copies in just two months, and caused a national conscience electroshock by revealing without compromise the harshness of life in the Chinese countryside. Nevertheless, literature's reach goes far beyond any other artistic production, even cinema, and there is no doubt that the “script” on paper or posted on the Internet, is still ruling in China.

We have thus assembled a mixture of creative and critical works in this special dossier, intertwining a tribute to the great Chinese novelist Shen Congwen, with a translator's reflection on her job, and a study of women writings. We have also included a detailed analysis of a novel first published on the Internet, an interview with detective stories writer He Jiahong, a presentation of the literary research done on modern Chinese literature in China itself, and, finally, an English-French bilingual translation of a short story by Chen Wu. One cannot pretend that these seven contributions offer an exhaustive view of current Chinese literature, but it is our sincere hope that this panorama will help our readers to broaden their perspectives and inspire or provoke them to know more.

Eric Sautedé, Chief Editor