LEO LEE
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as a guard of a male prisoner who apparently was a poet and a
humanist. Their romance - she reportedly fell in love with
him - became the subject of her first novel,
The Death of a Poet.
The
sequel to it, entitled
Ren ah ren
(which could be rendered as "man, ah
man" without its male-chauvinist tinge), became a political
cause
scandale
when it was published in Canton in late 1980. The novel's
central protagonist is a young man who has written a treatise on the
compatibility of Marxism and humanism. Thus life and art, fact and
fiction, have obviously been intertwined;
Ren ah ren
can itself be read
as the author's humanist manifesto:
I am no longer willing to suppress the call of my heart ... I am
now no longer afraid of (wearing) the hat of ,self-expression' . . .
In creative writing an author must never forget about herself;
she (or he) should do her best to discover herself, to express her
own unique sensibility and perception.
Even more striking than this personal admission, is Dai's fur–
ther argument that the standard technique of realism (which has
been upheld by most political figures and writers as a revolutionary
orthodoxy) is insufficient to describe the complex emotions of the
self, and that she would favor the Western techniques associated
with modernism: symbols, dreams, abstractions, absurdities, and
stream-of-consciousness. As a novice modernist, Dai Houying is not
very successful. But she has certainly opened up a new avenue: to
put a Western legacy - the result of an artistic effort at "dehumaniza–
tion" (in Ortega y Gasset's famous description of modernism) - in
the service of the Chinese cause of humanism.
The issue of modernism: in modern Chinese literature is com–
plex. Historically speaking, modernism was introduced to China in
the early 1930s with the European trends of the avant-garde; from
reading translations of Baudelaire a small number of Chinese poets
moved to assimilate the works of Eliot and Auden. But the limited
experimentations by some of them in the symbolist mode (such as Li
Jinfa, Dai Wangshu, and Bian Zhilin) did not find a ready reception
on a literary scene dominated by leftist ideology and in a China em–
broiled in war and chaos. The major emphasis of creative writing,
especially after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, was
social-realistic. Even before Mao's Yan'an Talks, the notion of "art
for art's sake" was denounced by the majority of the Chinese writers.
It
was not until the early 1960s in Taiwan that a group of university
