Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu

by Xu Xu

  [t]his Romantic restitutionism may indeed be deemed the most important of all, from both the qualitative and quantitative viewpoint […]. It is the closest to the essence of the overall phenomenon [of Romanticism], given that nostalgia for a pre-capitalist state lies at the heart of this worldview. (Löwy 2001, 59)

  According to Löwy, it finds articulation in the writing of romantics such as Novalis and Coleridge and also in the neo-romantic work of Gottfried Ben and Julius Evola, both of whom expressed in their work “their hatred of the modern world in its bourgeois, capitalist, urban, scientific … aspects” and their “dreams of a primitive past of instinctual life” (Löwy 2001, 68).

  Xu Xu himself observed this tendency of certain twentieth-century modernists to articulate in their works a skepticism toward the limits of scientific progress, radical finalism, and mechanism. In his 1954 essay entitled “A Hard-born Era” 難產時代, Xu Xu writes that

  [f]ollowing World War One, artistic and intellectual culture underwent tremendous changes. The promises of the nineteenth century of a mechanized civilization and the foundations that had been believed to be unshakable all started to shake. The assumption that humankind had touched the cornerstone of progress suddenly began to lose its credibility after World War One. (Xu 2008, 10:161)

  As a result, Xu Xu argues, literature lost its confidence in mankind. “The literature of the Twentieth Century,” Xu Xu writes, “is a literature of ‘doubt’ 懷疑. All great writers began to explore in their souls worlds of gloom and terror, of mysticism and desperation” (Xu 2008, 10:162). This new literature, he continues, “no longer has any trust in the kind of reality produced by mankind” (Xu 2008, 10:162). In addition, Xu Xu notes that “under the illuminating effects of new developments in psychology, notions of what constitutes ‘reality’ 現實 and what constitutes subjective illusions 主觀的幻覺 have become increasingly difficult to separate” (Xu 2008, 10:162). Xu Xu then provides a list of some of the writers whom he considers masters of this new type of literature: “There are the Germans Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, the Frenchmen Marcel Proust and André Gide, the Englishmen James Joyce [sic] and T. S. Eliot, and the American Faulkner” (Xu 2008, 10:163).

  Xu Xu’s reference to Hermann Hesse (1877−1962) is particularly noteworthy here because of the many strikingly similar aesthetic concerns explored in their respective literary oeuvres. Hesse, one of the most prominent heirs of the romantic movement, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946 while Xu Xu was in Washington as a correspondent for Eradicator Daily, the wartime paper that had serialized his novel The Rustling Wind. Xu Xu must have felt an artistic kinship with Hesse: Both had an apparent preference for first-person (and at times quasi-autobiographical) narrators, and both frequently made use of changing narrative perspectives that switched between first- and second-person narration. Both engaged in their work with mysticism, spirituality, and the surreal, and both celebrated in their fiction and poetry the sublimity of love. Furthermore, the image of the restless wanderer, epitomized in Hesse’s iconic Steppenwolf, found its counterpart in many of Xu Xu’s Hong Kong stories, such as in the disillusioned narrator in “Bird Talk,” the lovesick wanderer in his novella The Other Shore, and the heartbroken narrator in the novel Time and Brightness 時與光 (1966) who likewise finds himself stranded in Hong Kong.

  Especially The Other Shore, a tale about love found and lost, resembles some of Hesse’s most famous works, such as Siddhartha (1922), Hesse’s iconic tale about a spiritual journey of self-discovery.5 The memory of harmony and beauty the narrator in The Other Shore once experienced while in love with Lulian, a nurse who saves him from suicide and whose own suicide is triggered by the narrator’s betrayal of her, becomes the object of the narrator’s nostalgia during a long stay at a lighthouse. There, a combination of quasi-religious epiphanies and the wisdom of an old lighthouse keeper give him a glimpse of hope of once more attaining the sublime state of bliss he had felt around Lulian. His experience somewhat mirrors that of Hesse’s protagonist in Siddhartha, who comes to the realization that it is only through a totality of experiences that one can gain glimpses of understanding and who has a first taste of enlightenment while living with the wise ferryman Vasudeva by the river in which he had originally attempted to drown himself.

  Both Hesse and Xu Xu displayed religious eclecticism in their works, and while Siddhartha as well as The Other Shore and “Bird Talk” clearly carry Buddhist overtones, it is important to note that neither Hesse nor Xu Xu had much interest in the ritualistic aspect of religion or believed that any one religion could ultimately lead to salvation. Rather, each insisted that only through the overcoming of self could there be a return to or fusion with the origin of the universe.

  If for the young Xu Xu, Europe and Western civilization had been a source of inspiration and longing, it was the East and its mysticism that had a particular appeal to Hesse. His Journey to the East (1932), for example, is told by a first-person narrator named H. H. who, together with a group of famous historical figures, embarks on a pilgrimage to the East in search of the ultimate Truth. Their journey, the narrator proclaims, “was not only mine and now; this procession of believers and disciples towards the Home of Light […] was only a wave in the eternal striving of human beings, of the eternal strivings of the human spirit towards the East, towards Home” (Hesse 1956, 12−13). Their destination, then, is as nostalgic-utopian as the quest of the narrator in Xu Xu’s The Other Shore or “Bird Talk.”

  In Journey to the East, Hesse appears to explore a phenomenon that Georg Steiner so aptly termed “nostalgia for the absolute” in his 1974 Massey lecture series of the same title. Steiner argues that it was the erosion of religious life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and the resulting moral and emotional vacuum that made humans seek out alternative mythologies such as Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, astrology, or new pseudo-religions. Nostalgia for the absolute, Steiner suggests, is “representative of the great current of thought and feeling in Europe we call romanticism” (Steiner 1997, 6). This metaphysical kind of nostalgia, Steiner writes, “was directly provoked by the decline of Western man and society, of the ancient and magnificent architecture of religious certitude. Like never before, today at this point in the twentieth century, we hunger for myths, for total explanation: we are starving for guaranteed prophecy” (Steiner 1997, 5−6). The nostalgia for a prelapsarian home that Hesse believes awaits the seeker in the East Steiner calls “Orientalism,” arguing that it “is habitual to Western feeling from the time of the Greek mystery cults to Freemasonry and beyond” and that it “inspires the work of Hermann Hesse, of C. G. Jung, and, to some extent, of T. S. Eliot” (Steiner 1997, 44).

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  It is the same kind of nostalgia for the absolute, one is tempted to conclude, that Xu Xu displayed in his postwar fiction and that drove him to turn to the fantastic and surreal as an ultimate recourse for his protagonists’ nostalgia. Xu Xu had already displayed an intense interest in the fantastic in his prewar fiction. In works like “The Goddess of the Arabian Sea” or “Ghost Love,” Xu Xu used the fantastic as a literary device in order to appropriate modernist European literary techniques and aesthetics, Bergsonian phenomenology in particular, and to challenge the politicization of literature by mostly leftist writers (Green 2011, 68−69).

  However, for the most part, the fantastic in Xu Xu’s prewar fiction eventually was unmasked as merely uncanny encounters or else as dreams from which the narrator awoke in the end. Xu Xu’s use of the fantastic in his postwar fiction from Hong Kong was of a different nature, as is evident in the two stories “The All-Souls Tree” and “Departed Soul” 離魂 (1964). In both, the embrace of the fantastic and the surreal as the driving plot element is a clear manifestation of an impulse Löwy identifies as the utopian projection of every romantic artistic creation: a world of beauty created by the imagination in the present (Löwy 2001, 23). If romantic writers in the West had discovered the fantastic as an artistic
weapon against the constraints of reason dictated by enlightenment thinkers, as Löwy argues, twentieth-century surrealist writers in the West like André Breton discovered its appeal “as a secular alternative to the religious stranglehold on access to the universe of the non-rational” (Löwy 2001, 217).

  In “The All-Souls Tree,” a first-person narrator recounts his experience during a sojourn in Taiwan in the early 1950s. On a trip to Mount Ali, the narrator meets Xiancheng, a reticent young woman who had only recently relocated to Taiwan from China. One stormy night, the narrator notices how Xiancheng sneaks out of their hostel. He follows her and finds her standing greatly disturbed under an all-souls tree 百靈樹, insisting that the wailing sound of the wind in the tree crown is the wailing of her fiancé from whom she had been separated during the civil war on the mainland and who, she is certain, must have died. When a few days later, the narrator wants to pay Xiancheng a visit, he finds her home full of mourners. It turns out that Xiancheng committed suicide after receiving a telegram that informed her of her fiancé’s death. He had died, we learn, on the night of the storm.

  Even more pronounced is the evocation of the fantastic in “Departed Soul.” A first-person narrator loses his wife not long after their marriage. Overcome by grief, he frequently dreams of her and often visits her grave, until he leaves Shanghai when it is occupied by the Japanese. After the war, he returns to Shanghai, where he starts a relationship with the singer Yuanxiang. When during an outing, they pass a wedding ceremony, the narrator suddenly has a flashback of his own wedding and causes a serious car accident in which Yuanxiang dies. The narrator himself falls into a coma during which he frequently encounters his former wife. Finally released from the hospital, the narrator decides to visit his wife’s grave, and he encounters a young woman dressed in a gray gown who has an uncanny resemblance to his wife. Doubtful at first, he becomes convinced that she is in fact his former wife, especially after overhearing a conversation between her and an old woman in whose house they hide from a sudden rainstorm. But when he returns there after a few days, he finds the house abandoned, and is told by a farmer that the owner died many years ago. Yet when he looks back one last time, he sees “[…] just for a moment, […] the figure of the woman in the gray gown” (Xu 1971, 18).6

  Unlike the fantastic in Xu Xu’s prewar stories, the fantastic in his postwar fiction is no longer questioned by a supposedly enlightened narrator who needs to be convinced of its marvelous nature. Nor is the fantastic unmasked as the merely uncanny when the narrator awakes from a dream, as often happened at the end of his early stories. In both “The All-Souls Tree” and “Departed Soul,” the fantastic event is witnessed and faithfully recounted by a narrator who passes no judgment on its probability.

  While the use of the fantastic in these short stories clearly echoes Xu Xu’s own aesthetic preferences discussed above, it also mirrors European twentieth-century artistic currents that embraced the fantastic, the mythical, and the surreal. As a literary movement, especially as articulated by André Breton, Surrealism claimed to take in the whole spectrum of human activity, “embracing hitherto neglected areas of life like dreams and the unconscious” (Ades 1994, 124). Its celebration of myths, Löwy further reminds us, facilitated the articulation of “the innermost emotion of human being […] in its haste to express itself” (Löwy 2001, 218).

  Xu Xu likewise shared this preference for the mythical in literature and art, something he believed was largely lacking in modern Chinese literature. In an obituary for Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895−1976), Xu Xu remembers how he had discussed this question with Lin, stating that writers and thinkers like Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, or Hu Shi all lacked a sense of mysticism 神祕感. In the West, Xu Xu continues, thinkers like Rousseau had also lacked it, while “Blaise Pascal and Henri Bergson both were imbued with plenty of mysticism” (Xu 2003, 81).

  In twentieth-century painting, the impulse to incorporate the fantastic, the illogical, and poetic mythology is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Marc Chagall (1887−1985). Especially his dreamlike evocations of his childhood home in Belarus, characterized by scenes of pastoral beauty, joyful musicians, and blissful lovers hovering in a blue sky, invite the viewer to assume what Anne Goldman describes as an “angelic gaze” (Goldman 2008, 17). “Chagall paints dreams,” she writes, “the language of space speaking for time, the high-flown perspectives of the canvases carrying us far away from the present” (Goldman 2008, 17). Like Xu Xu’s fiction, Chagall’s canvases are imbued with nostalgia, a nostalgia that, in the context of the Soviet Union’s refusal to embrace Chagall, Goldman finds almost perplexing and touching.

  Like Xu Xu, Chagall was an exile. Finding a home in France after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, he ends up as a refugee from the Holocaust in New York. Here, his beloved wife Bella passed away from an infection in 1944. Yet on his canvas, the past becomes the same light-filled prelapsarian Eden as Xu Xu’s prewar childhood home in his Hong Kong stories. Chagall’s natal Vitebsk was forever the place where he found sublime love, just as prewar Shanghai was for Xu Xu from his Hong Kong exile. Yet nostalgia in Chagall’s paintings—just like the nostalgia found in Xu Xu’s postwar fiction—is not the expression of a yearning for a concrete place or time. Instead, the past and the people and places that come alive in the dreamscapes captured on Chagall’s warm and colorful canvases are artistic sanctuaries for his inner self.

  Chagall himself rejected the use of the term “fantasy” to describe his work. “All our interior world is reality,” he asserted in an interview from 1944, “and that perhaps more so than our apparent world. To call everything that appears illogical ‘fantasy’ […] would be practically to admit not understanding nature” (Chipp 1968: 440). Xu Xu must have sensed an artistic affinity to Chagall—how else can one explain that he chose to adorn the cover of his anthology Step by Step, Mr. Everyman 小人物的上進 (1964) that contained the story “Departed Soul” with Chagall’s Ciel d’Hiver (L’Accordéoniste) (1942–50; see page 125), an oil painting that shows a young woman and young accordion player drifting through a wintry sky, high above a rural landscape?

  In “The All-Souls Tree” and “Departed Soul,” Xu Xu expressed his idealistic tendencies and his artistic belief that interior worlds shape external reality. Both stories also underscore Xu Xu’s aesthetic preference for the use of nostalgia. However, as with “Bird Talk,” nostalgia ultimately is place and time unspecific and is foremost the expression of the melancholic conviction that in the present reality something precious has been lost.

  Xu Xu’s physical exile in Hong Kong only partly explains the frequency with which nostalgia is invoked in his fiction. His celebration of the pastoral paradise of his childhood home and the use of the fantastic as a way to project interior worlds were as much political gestures in defiance of authoritarian policies regarding literature and art in China and Taiwan as they were the aesthetic gestures that connected him to a global romantic revival in the twentieth century. If romanticism is indeed a weltanschauung or worldview, as Michael Löwy asserts, that may be expressed in quite diverse cultural realms (Löwy 2001, 14), then Xu Xu’s fiction clearly possesses the virtue of enabling the critic to “recognize the cultural multiplicity of romanticism” (Löwy 2001, 7).

  To describe Xu Xu’s aesthetics as a form of “transnational Chinese romanticism” is above all a heuristic gesture. Romanticism as a conceptual tool can help us discern the shared features and preoccupations of a set of twentieth-century texts that all respond to similar historical circumstances in similar fashion. It is through the lens of this redefined romanticism, then, that Xu Xu’s oeuvre partakes in what Löwy describes as a highly diverse global literary modernity and that Xu Xu’s readers were (and still are) able to find metaphysical sanctuaries from their mundane existence and the challenges of modern life.

  Endnotes

  1. Like the works of many other Republican-period writers, Xu Xu’s works were unavailable to readers in mainland China an
d only reappeared in the 1980s. The reasons are discussed below. Most mainland Chinese studies of Xu Xu’s work tend to focus on his prewar oeuvre.

  2. For a brief discussion of these prewar and wartime works, see the Introduction. For a more in-depth analysis, see my two articles on the subject (Green 2011 and Green 2014). See also Christopher Rosenmeier’s study that discusses some of Xu Xu’s early works (Rosenmeier 2017).

  3. Shi Huaichi was the pen name of Fudan University graduate Shu Yiren 束衣人. The essay quoted here is from an anthology of critical essays that was published posthumously and prefaced by Jin Yi 靳以 (1909−59), another prominent Marxist critic and writer.

  4. Liu Yichang has remarked that most immigrant writers who wrote for the United States Information Service did so primarily for economic considerations since it was very difficult to make a living as a writer or intellectual in postwar Hong Kong (Liu 2002b, 203).

  5. While some of Hesse’s works were translated into Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s, Hesse was not a particularly influential author during the Republican period. Zhao Jingshen 趙景深 wrote articles about Hesse and translated some of his early short works into Chinese, which appeared in The Short Story Magazine 小說月報. Siddhartha did not appear in Chinese translation until 1974, when it was published in Taiwan as Song of a Vagabond 流浪者之歌, while Steppenwolf, which appeared the same year, was translated as Wolf of the Steppes 荒野之狼. Most Chinese scholarship on Hesse has since explored the influence Chinese thought has exerted on Hesse, and not vice-versa.