Write of Love: How Texts Interweave the Self and Revolution in 1920s China

Yingyu Zang, University of Virginia

How do people connect their private, personal projects to the social, revolutionary projects of their time? This paper examines love letters written by two Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth era, the poet Wang Jingzhi and the writer Lu Xun, as a lab of the new Chinese language, and a site where intimate sentiment and public transformation were mutually constituted. Widely circulated as literary works and preserved as historical archives, these letters enact a new doing things with words: refurbishing the interior self, negotiating life trajectories, and rehearsing dispositions for social action. I argue that the revolution in how life is organized precedes and prepares the revolution of society itself. This analysis links narrative genres to the inner environment of social action, bridging the self and the social through texts. Through close reading of the archives, I identify three genres of love in this period: the retrospective and resigned logic of arranged marriage; the reflexive aspiration of Western romantic love; and a distinctly revolutionary love, characterized by inward passion, a sense of calling, and the tight bonding of private fate with collective transformation. The narrative structure of revolutionary love bears a striking homology with the discourse of social revolution, mobilizing interiority, devotion, and self-transcendence for action. Love letters provide a lens for examining the revolution not as a culmination of structural conditions, but as a gradual change in the self articulated through texts. The new models of love change relatively little in the substance of the self, but transform it vastly in form. And it is precisely this formal transformation that matters: the new form affords new interpretations of old experiences, new vocabularies for old passions, and ultimately new possibilities for action. In other words, the use of certain narratives turns the revolution from in-itself to for-itself.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 196. Revolutionary Writing, Identity, and Social Discourse