Thammasat University students are cordially invited to participate in a free Zoom event on André Malraux’s “Revolutionary China”: Shared Predicaments between French and Chinese Unorthodox Leftists, 1927-1945
The seminar is organized by the Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).
The TU Library collection includes books by and about the French author André Malraux.
The speaker will be Ying Xing, PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature, HKU.
The discussant for the event will be Professor Nicole Huang, chairperson of the Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU.
The supervisor will be Assistant Professor J. Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU.
The respondent will be Associate Professor Catherine E. Clark, who teaches history and French studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The event will be held on Friday, April 8, 2022 at 9am Bangkok time.
Students may register to receive a Zoom link at this link:
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=80804
For further information or with any questions, please write to
gchallen@hku.hk
As the webpage announcing the event explains,
In this talk, I engage with Dai Wangshu’s reading of André Malraux’s “Revolutionary China” to explore unorthodox leftists’ social and political situations during the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that the escalating political extremism in Europe and China inspires them to learn from their remote counterparts and shapes their literary and political ideas. Despite being criticized for lacking revolutionary spirit by communists, French and Chinese unorthodox leftists insisted on the independence of literature from politics during the interwar period. Yet, by the late-1930s, both Malraux and Dai assumed a clear political standpoint when Stalin gained absolute power and Japan invaded China. Focusing on both writers’ literary and political activities, I present how the shift of unorthodox leftists’ attitudes to the literature-politics relationship occurs. Moreover, reading Dai’s translation of Malraux, I reveal how the nature of Chinese nationalism changes over time, from anti-imperialist salvation to anti-Japanese patriotism intertwined with vague anti-fascist internationalism.
Dai Wangshu (1905 –1950), was a Chinese poet, essayist and translator. A native of Hangzhou, Zhejiang, he graduated from the Aurora University, Shanghai in 1926, majoring in French.
He was closely associated with the Shanghai Modernist school, also known as New Sensibility or New Sensation School, a name inspired by the Japanese modernist writer Riichi Yokomitsu.
Here is a translation of a poem by Dai Wangshu, posted online:
====================================
By Xiao Hong’s Tomb, An Impromptu
A lonely walk of six hours
To lay red camellias by your head —
I wait through the night,
While you lie listening to the chitchat of the ocean tides.
===========================
Here is another poem by Dai Wangshu, from another website:
===========================
Circling the halo of candlelight,
night moths dance in wretched repetition.
These reincarnated spirits from Buddha’s kingdom can’t recall
the insects already dead, the leaves yet to die.
Moths are said to be napping kinfolk,
soaring across steep mountains, soaring across cloudy trees,
to soothe us in our misfortunes.
Or else the dead ones who miss us,
pulled by memories, returning from the hushed netherworld.
But I see myself in the moths,
for their colorful vast velvety wings
have overtaken my shadow,
abandoned it in grave darkness.
All for one conviction, not a fantasy,
but that day I became a phoenix.
=============
The literary historian G.B. Lee wrote in this thesis:
Dai Wangshu as a poet and a personality made a controversial and lasting impact on the Chinese literary world of the 1930s and 1940s. Since the 1950s, however, many literary figures of the time have suffered neglect because they are not easily categorized as belonging to the orthodoxies of Left or Right. This has been so in Dai Wangshu’s case. Moreover, there is also genuine confusion about Dai’s political and literary beliefs. This thesis aims to revaluate Dai’s position in the canon of modern Chinese literature and, by chronicling his literary, political and personal life, to present a comprehensive picture and correct current misconceptions. There is a biographical emphasis as a result of much new information uncovered in the course of the author’s research. The approach is chronological and covers Dai’s early involvement in poetry and politics in late 1920s Shanghai, the process of intellectual sophistication and expansion in Europe, his anti-Japanese stance during the war period in Hong Kong and the final years of poetic silence leading up to his premature death in Peking, in 1950. Dai’s poetry is treated in terms of theme, language and form to reveal the poet’s growth and progression of style. The extent of the poet’s retention of classical Chinese poetic elements and the assimilation of Western post-Symbolist and other poetic influences are assessed in order to arrive at the essence of the poet’s style, to examine its effectiveness as a modern medium for the expression of poetic thought and to decide the appropriateness of the label ‘Modernist’. The definition of Modernism is thus broached and discussed. Previously unconsulted material such as letters, diary fragments and manuscripts have been exploited and in the discussion of Dai’s poetry and the literary and political questions of his day, extensive use has been made of correspondence and interviews conducted in China.
Dr. Lee explains that he began to be especially interested in Dai Wangshu because his poetry was qualitatively different from that of most of modern Chinese poets, what attracted me more was the poet’s apparent interest in the modern poetry of France and to a lesser extent, of Spain.
In many ways, Dai may arguably be a more interesting writer for our times than Malraux, author of some dated novels whose own record is very uneven, as one article describes him:
After studying oriental languages, Malraux travelled to Asia. He was arrested in 1923 for stealing statues and bas-reliefs from an ancient temple near Angkor in present-day Cambodia, but was freed when French writers mounted a campaign on his behalf. Malraux’s love for the orient included a fascination with opium. In his 1933 Prix Goncourt winning novel Man’s Fate, he described the feelings of an opium user as “a desolation which approached the divine”.
Another overview notes about Malraux:
Thief or Anti-Colonial Agitator: Who Is André Malraux?
A new book explains how André Malraux became a human rights activist in French Indochina after failing as a thief.
It was 1923 when Malraux, then 22, arrived in Cambodia with his wife Clara. Newly broke Parisian intellectuals, they had a scheme to steal statues from the Angkor temples to sell in the West. It failed, and they were both arrested in December of that year. The legal wrangle that ensued, ending in a one-year suspended sentence for Malraux and nothing for his wife, meant he spent more than a year stuck in Phnom Penh and, later, Saigon.
The incident is often mentioned as an aside in Cambodian history books but less often noted is the extraordinary change that it wrought in Malraux. During that time he became an anti-colonial agitator and champion of causes that are still important in the region today. But to most people, he’s best-known for his time in Indochina as the era’s most curious thief.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)