50
PARTISAN REVIEW
students began seriously to introduce the major modernist writers;
Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, as well as T. S. Eliot.
In away, it is not surprising to see modernism now taking
some hold in post-Mao China. As Mr. Yin so eloquently told me ,
life during the Cultural Revolution was as "absurd" as anything in
Kafka's works. I was struck by his mention of Kafka in the same
breath with Sartre, Camus, Erich Fromm, and 'jonathan Liv–
ingston Seagull." (The latter seems a curious choice, but perhaps it is
because young people think it champions personal freedom.) These
names were among the first of Western modernists to interest young
readers like him. Soon afterwards, a translation of Kafka's
The Castle
was published, and stories with a Kafkaesque tone began to appear
in official literary journals.
The first major writer in post-Mao China who claims to use a
modernist technique in his works is Wang Meng. A former rightist
now firmly reestablished, Wang Meng openly experimented in such
stories as "The Eye of the Night," "Butterfly," "The Voice of Spring,"
and "Bolshevik Salute" with what he considered to be "stream-of–
consciousness" fiction.
In addition to his modernism, Wang's humanism achieves that
odd affirmation of life, a "positive" trait which is in tune with the
Party's guideline to "look forward" toward a future of the "four
modernizations." As a result, Wang has become well established
politically - one of the favorite model writers of the new Party
leadership.
The younger writers, particularly poets, have explored new
techniques in order to probe their own selves . Some of them had
begun writing in the pages of a most unusual "unofficial" journal
called
Today,
which was first established in October 1978 by a group
of students and workers headed by two poets, Bei Dao and Mang
Ke . The journal began as "big-character posters" on Beijing's
"democracy wall" and as the major artistic voice in a chorus clamor–
ing for political democracy. After the wall was banned in 1980, the
journal was circulated in mimeographed copies and distributed
rather openly in Beijing, although it failed to obtain official permis–
sion for publication. Like all journals of its kind, it stopped appear–
ing by the end of 1981. Yet the cause it championed has not died
with it, but has received tacit support from a number of established
writers.
Some of the
Today
poets - especially its two founders Bei Dao
and Mang Ke - seem more inclined to write shorter poems; even their
