Beyond the Limits of Realism: Uncanny Moments in the Modern Chinese Canon

• In Event: Modern Chinese Culture and the Uncanny: The Unknown as Critique of Enlightenment

Abstract

This paper examines episodes or aspects of fictional works by well-known modern Chinese writers that defy rational explanation. The purpose is to push back against the idea that from the time of the New Culture Movement, fiction and literature in general were meant to fight “superstition” under the banner of realism, where realism was conceived as a scientific and rational method for the literary analysis of social life.

There are enough examples of this in the fiction of Lu Xun to fill a whole study, but the graveyard scene at the end of “Medicine,” in which the soul of the executed revolutionary Xia seems to speak to her mother through the black bird suffices to illustrate the point. My paper will also draw examples from other stories by Lu Xun, Ba Jin’s Family, Mao Dun’s Vacillation, Shi Zhecun’s “Devil’s Road,” and Eileen Chang’s “The Golden Cangue,” each of which reflects the experience of the Uncanny (unheimlich) as explicated by Freud.

While marginal to the dominant aesthetics of realism, these bizarre moments are nevertheless paradigmatic in the construction of the moral consciousness of modern Chinese literature; they open the door to seeing Chinese society not through the lens of rational objectivity, but as a hellish nightmare afflicting minds whose clarity and balance are themselves always already compromised. They belie the confidence of the Enlightenment discourse of scientific rationality and in doing so, I argue, they are fulfilling, rather than failing, the promise of modern artistic intervention.

Author

• Charles Andrew Laughlin, University of Virginia