Simpson: “Phoenix nirvana” (1920), was nothing but a glorification of the beauty of the destructive impulse.
Chris Titan: oh fuck
Simpson: Guo Morou's first major poem, "Phoenix nirvana” (1920), was nothing but a glorification of the beauty of the destructive impulse.
Chris Titan: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1324-9347(200301)49%3C225%3ATLOTMW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S
Simpson: The poet embraced the idea that the highest state of things-that of beauty, perfection and truth: nirvana in his terminology-will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the old. As he wrote in 1918 to fellow student Zhong Baihua: "Now I wish very much to be like a phoenix, collect some sandalwood, and burn away my present carcass admist the mournful tunes of the elegies, and from the cold and cleanses ashes a new 'self ' will be born again."
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(Creation society), the primary rival of the Association for Literary Studies throughout the 1920s, traditional expressive views were blended with the influence of Western romanticism to promote a self-revelation that was, at least in intention, new in Chinese literature. Even the aggressive self-display of modern Chinese romanticists needs to be distinguished, however, from a Western-style individualism, since it invariably disguises a latent hope that the author's self-expression will somehow contribute to a larger cultural rejuvenation. Lu Xun's early call for a Byronic Mara poetry, for example, was above all motivated by the desire to discover a "warrior of the world of spirit" to "lead us to goodness, beauty, strength, and health."[28] Guo Moruo's early poetry appears at first to be a highly individualistic celebration of his own creative powers, frequently verging on a kind of pure auto-affection, but Guo's pantheism allows a lyric equation of the self with all who might share in the joy of creation; the rebirth he continually celebrates in Nüshen
(The goddesses ) is not just the renaissance of his individual creativity but the renaissance of the Chinese people at large. Even in the confessional fiction of Yu Dafu
the narrator's personal humiliations are pointedly connected with the abased position of the Chinese people in international politics, as if the author's private anxieties could only be healed through a change in the nation's historical fortunes.[29] Once this aspect of their romanticism is understood, the Creation Society members' sudden ideological rebirth in the mid-1920s, after which they denounced individualism and proclaimed their desire to write a littérature engagé , does not seem so remarkable: in a typically voluntaristic manner, they simply generalized their individual emotions and, overriding the obvious class distinctions, pro-
[28] Lu Xun, "Moluo shi li shuo," p. 100.
― 39 ― nounced themselves spokespeople for the masses. Their works continued to display the same heroics of the self, but a self now viewed above all as the progenitor of the coming social revolution.[30]
That we find approving references to traditional expressive theories in the works of writers now classified as realists may seem doubly surprising, but realists too sought a new origin for their literature in the extraliterary world; they too hoped their fiction would speak with the voice of living individuals, that it would be "intimately connected with life."[31] Moreover, May Fourth realists hoped to appropriate for fiction some of the respectability traditionally accorded the expressive art of poetry. If the new fiction was to play an important role in cultural transformation, as they earnestly hoped it would, it must do more than merely amuse or preach; it must engage the affective life of its audience at the deepest level. Only in this way could it be distinguished from traditional didactic fiction and from popular romantic and satirical genres, which the intellectuals belittled as trivial and scandalmongering. The critic Zheng Zhenduo, in the context of a vehement attack on a popular form of satirical fiction that the literary reformers had dubbed castigatory fiction