Baudelaire in China, 1919-1937

• Main Authors: Ma, Yiu-Man, 馬耀民
• Other Authors: Chang Han-Liang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1997
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/02290996641470790942

博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學系 === 85 === This thesis aims to study the forces that shaped the images of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in China from 1919 to 1937. It will mobilize the available materials--translated poems, criticisms, essays, commentaries, passing references, etc.-- produced within this period to narrate the peculiar fortune of Baudelaire. It involves the two-fold task of presenting "what" images of Baudelaire were produced and "what" forces were at work to shape his various images. In the following chapters, I am going to show at from 1919, when Chou Tso-jen 周作人 acknowledged his indebtedness to Baudelaire''''s poems in prose in his writing of the first masterpiece of new poetry, to 1937, when Ho Ch''''i-fang 何其芳, heading for Yenan 延安, the communist base in North-Western China, declared that he would no longer be the "stranger" who contemplates the clouds, Baudelaire enjoyed a literary fortune in China which has not much to do with the intrinsic value of his poetry, culminated in Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris. RatherBaudelaire himself and his writings were appropriated and manipulated in different contexts to address different issues, be it ideological or poetological, resulting in the shaping and re-shaping of the image of the poet and his poetry. The study of the appropriation and manipulation of Baudelaire, a perspective that structures the present research, necessitates the unraveling of the workings of the complex phenomenon known as culture, or more specifically, the culture that produces the Chinese literature the period in question. Chapter 1, entitled "The Search for Relevance," will focus on the period from 1919 to 1925. The literary revolutionists introduced Baudelaire to China in support of their iconoclastic fervor--to justify the literary revolution, to argue for the spirit of freedom and individualism, to exemplify the new poetics, unrhymed pai-hua, with Baudelairean poems in prose. The traditionalists, on the other hand, either used the "Decadent" Baudelaire to warn against different forms of literary libertinism or Baudelairs rhymed verses to justify the return to Classicism. But in every case, Baudelaire was used to search for the relevance of different agendas. Chapter 2, entitled "Politics or Poetics," will identify different positions Baudelaire was made to assume in a literary system gradually politicized from mid- to late twenties. The relative "anarchic" period from 1926 to 1927 witnessed the "poetological" rewriting of Baudelaire to perfect a language for Chinese poetry and to signal a return to formal craftsmanship which was denounced in the previous period. The left and non- left dichotomy in literary ideology since 1928 began a new form of rewriting of Bdelaire. To counter the attacks from the left which saw Baudelaire as a decadent petite-bourgeois, the non- left either reworked Baudelaire, ideologically and poetologically, as a poet who is socially committed, or represented the poet as a Decadent and Aesthete, offering an alternative poetics to proletarian literature. Chapter 3, entitled "Politics vs. Poetics," deals with a period spanning the establishment of the Chinese League of the Left Wing Writers to the beginning of World War II. It describes separately the literary systems of Shanghai and Peking. The institutionalization of the leftist literary ideology in Shanghai, the headquarter of the League, resulted in the further marginalization of Baudelaire. Beyond the sphere of influence of the Shanghai system, Baudelaire sought refuge in the educational institutionsn Peking, where he was carefully read, sympathetically understood, and enthusiastically transmitted from teachers to students, until the outbreak of World War II changed the political consciousness, and thus the aesthetic norm, of the young poets.