Miao Folk Music and the Marginal Modernism of Shen Congwen

Qianwei He

Soochow University, China

Abstract Shen Congwen (1902-1988) was a high-profile modern Chinese writer, and one of the most discussed Chinese writers within and outside China. For his whole life, he considered himself a “countryman”, different from his contemporary writers, and he employed his regional background to his advantage. His attention on the Miao ethnic culture in his home region, West Hunan Province, was constant. In the first half of the twentieth century, while the cities of China started to move towards modernity, the Miao people in West Hunan Province remained relatively primitive and marginalized. With his re-imagination and possible over-romanticism of the marginalized Miao culture, Shen became one of the most unique modern Chinese writers. This kind of marginalization in both folk music and literature clashed with modern China’s interest and need to revitalize its society. This paper will argue that, with the application of psychoanalytical and cultural anthropological theories, the folk music of a minority group that was incomprehensible to mainstream modern China exactly brought out the “marginally” modernist quality of Shen Congwen’s literary works.

Keywords: Shen Congwen, marginalization, modernism, Miao ethnicity, folk music

1. Introduction

Shen Congwen (沈从文, 1902-1988) was a high-profile modern Chinese writer, and one of the most discussed Chinese writers within and outside China. He was born in Fenghuang in West Hunan Province, a place embodied by the rich cultures of different ethnic groups, primarily the Miao people. After the May Fourth (1919) and New Culture movements—seen as the start of modern China—happened in Beijing, Shen Congwen, who was with the troops on the borders of Hunan, Sichuan, and Guizhou Provinces at the time, read about the May Fourth Movement and decided to go to Beijing to become a writer and one of the literati in 19221.

However, the first few years in Beijing were difficult for Shen Congwen. He was poor, and could not publish much at first. He had little modern education, did not know any English and could not be admitted into university. It was not until 1924, when Yu Dafu, a famous writer at the time, noticed his letter published in a newspaper describing his desperate situation and offered help, that Shen started to regularly publish in literary periodicals with the help of other established writers, including Xu Zhimo and Zhou Zuoren. After becoming a writer, he attended their salons and poetry reading groups organized by other writers in Beijing. However, most of the modern writers at the time came from gentry families, had higher education or even education in Europe, America, and Japan. Shen could not truly blend in and thus had a sense of inferiority, which was reflected in his early semi-autographical short stories. Before he was appointed lecturer of Wusong China Institute (吴淞公学) in 1929 by Hu Shi, Shen was also one of the few writers who was not a teacher at the same time. In this way, Shen was marginalized among the writers and intellectuals in early 1920s China.

Nevertheless, there was another identity of Shen Congwen that could be marked as marginal, which was not only partially internal, but also an intentional choice of his to emphasize in his writings. It was, at the same time, exactly this marginality that made his name widely-known in modern Chinese literature. That is, Shen’s Miao ancestry. For Shen’s whole life, he identified himself as a “countryman”, but that was not just a contrast to the urban persona, but also a contrast to the Han people. In Shen’s early life, he was imperceptibly influenced by the Miao culture, and later he wove the Miao elements into his writings. To Shen, the identity of being a countryman is interconnected with the Miao ethnicity. Shen does not always clarify the ethnic identities of his characters, and he sometimes seems to blur the distinction between the regional features of West Hunan and ethnic features by using some ambiguous cultural elements (Li, 2017). However, he does closely associate the folk singing and magic worshiping tradition with the Miao people, which also forms an important feature of the country life so attractive to readers.

Literary criticism usually relates this countryman identity to his literary regionalism and investigates how Shen presents the pastoral life-style and the good side of humanity in these regional works. Some scholars focus on discussing whether Shen takes after his Han or Miao cultural identity, such as in J. C. Kinkley’s The Odyssey of Shen Congwen (1987), which is a founding work in Shen Congwen studies and presents a rather complete research of the Han-Miao historical and political map of West Hunan around Shen’s time, as well as Li Guotai’s paper which argues that Shen’s works about the Miao always take the perspective of an “outsider” and he sways between the Han and Miao identities (2017). This paper, on the other hand, wishes to explore how his apparently marginalized identity as a writer in the 1920s is connected to a parallel marginality of the Miao ethnicity in West Hunan from the perspective of Shen’s use of Miao folk music.

The role folk music plays in Shen’s regional works is significant, but the significance does not only lie in its musical qualities such as melody or lyrics, but more importantly, in its signified cultural meaning. Saussure differentiates the signified and the signifier of signs (1983). Likewise, music is an important sign of culture that can be deconstructed. The signified concept of music changes with racial, cultural, historical, and class differences. Thus, in Ethnomusicology, it is recognized that a particular action produces a particular sound subject to certain concept or idea, and in this way, the meaning of music is never just the meaning of the sound or the musical work, but extends to the meaning of the action and the idea. This means that when we study a particular musical sound, we are studying the concept entrusted by the whole process (Song, 2011, pp. 340-342). This explains why it is meaningful to study the music mentioned in Shen’s works, as it leads to a much larger context of social and cultural issues. His writing of folk music offers us a perfect mode to look at the marginalized status of the Miao at that particular period of time and the meaning of utilizing that marginality. The term “modernism” is a complex one. It is first and foremost a Western concept, and not always suited to explain the modern Chinese literary context. In this aspect, Shen, as a writer who had little direct influence from the West, stood on the margin of a modernist paradigm. The purpose of this exploration thus also lies in a further examination of Shen’s position as a modernist writer, with the application of psychoanalytical and cultural anthropological theories.

2. The Marginality of the Miao in Ancient History and Early Twentieth Century

To a large extent, modernism is a response to the crisis of the alienated modern society, and one of the best weapons to defy modern civilization is its polar opposite—primitivism. Albright defines modernism as “a testing of the limits of aesthetic constructions” (2004, p. 11) and explains that “in the modernist movement, the most barbaric art tends to be the most up-to-date and sophisticated” (2004, p. 12). Therefore, it is important to first establish that at Shen’s time, the primitivism reinforced by Miao’s marginality was exactly that weapon to defy modernity.

According to Shen’s family story, his biological paternal grandmother was a Miao woman who was sent away after giving birth to a son and heir to his grandfather (Shen & Wang, 2003, pp. 121-123). Shen did not know the full story until shortly before his mother’s death, but he expressed sympathy for the fate of the Miao woman, and took great pride in his Miao ancestry (Kinkley, 1987, p. 20). According to Shen in “After Joining the Troop” (《入伍后》), in Zhen’gan (referring to his hometown Fenghuang), at his time, one-third of the residents were Miao (with more living outside the town of Fenghuang), and two-thirds were Han people who moved there from other places; despite the ethnic differences in customs, the Han and Miao’s influence on each other’s culture was mutual (Shen, 2009, Vol. 1, p. 263). In Shen’s childhood, because of the co-living environment with the Miao, as well as the Miao nanny he and his siblings had, he naturally learned about the Miao’s culture, including the Nuo Play (傩戏, the ritual play of some ethnic groups in Southwest China which involves singing and dancing) and the history of the Miao being cruelly suppressed by the imperial governments of the many dynasties (especially Ming and Qing Dynasties when fortresses were built in West Hunan to separate the assimilated and nonassimilated Miao people) until after the 1911 Revolution. All of these are reflected in his autobiographical works and other regional works.

The Miao people, known as the Hmong people outside China, are an ancient ethnicity who originated in China, and whose legendary ancestor Chi You (蚩尤) was the archenemy of Yan Di (炎帝, also known as Shen Nong) and the Yellow Emperor (黄帝), the ancestors of the Han people. However, after Chi You was defeated, the Miao people gradually moved from central China to the mountainous areas in today’s southwest China. They were spread in the mountains in various provinces of China (some of them moved to Southeast Asia, and some, in the twentieth century, to North America and other countries), and the majority of them kept a clan/tribe type of autonomy for thousands of years. They thus had been marginalized politically, culturally, and geographically, at least by the time Shen went to Beijing in the early 1920s. While the Han people developed a “civilized” political system replacing religion and mythology with morality, law, and history, the Miao kept their worship of gods and shaman magic. According to Luo Yiqun’s judgment, this major cultural differentiation between the Han and Miao happened in Zhou Period (1046-256 BCE), and from then on, while the magic worshiping culture that prevailed since the Yin and Shang Period (1300-1046 BCE) faded in Han culture, it was preserved among generations of the Miao people (Luo, 2005, pp. 18-19).

The Miao people live on the borders of Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan, and Guizhou Provinces, and the Miao living in West Hunan are especially closely connected to the ancient Chu culture. In the opinion of Zhou Renzheng, through Qu Yuan’s Songs of Chu (《楚辞》), the magic culture of the ancient Chu country has been passed down, the relics of which can still be found among the Miao in West Hunan (2016, p. 95).

After the Westerners invaded China in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the 1911 Revolution broke the feudal system, and the Chinese intellectuals started the earth-shaking May Fourth movement which culturally pushed China (though gradually) into a Westernized sense of modernity. Metropolitans like Beijing and Shanghai were the first to transform, and although, West Hunan was not yet too much affected by what happened outside by the time Shen left his hometown in 1922, there were already newspapers, troops, and missionaries. Even if the Han and assimilated Miao people in Shen’s hometown were starting to sense the change, the non-assimilated Miao people were still behind this historical course, living in a primitive and pastoral way.

To be clear, it is not politically right to call any ethnic group “primitive” or “backward”, which is a discriminative term popular among the nineteenth century anthropologists to distinguish the so-called “savages” from the “civilized” modern Westerners. “Indigenous people” is also not the exactly right term to describe the Miao though they share many characteristics, not only because the Miao are not native to the area as explained above and they have been assimilating and assimilated by the Han and other ethnic groups in the area for thousands of years, but also because the term carries a special emphasis of the natives being colonized by foreigners and foreign culture. The Miao—if we recognize the legend that they are the descendants of Chi You—are the natives of China like the Han. We can only acknowledge the complexity of the ethnic situation of West Hunan, and according to Ling Yu, in the early twentieth century, primitivism, feudalism, and capitalism were interwoven in West Hunan, and the fusion of different cultural forms affected all aspects of the social life in West Hunan (2009, p. 23). The Miao culture should be considered an inseparable part of Chinese culture. In analysing Shen and his works, by calling that culture primitive is to salute to their preservation of the nature worship and animism. On the one hand, it is a fact that they were marginalized by the dominant Confucianism adopted by the majority of Chinese in ancient China; on the other hand, they also provided Shen and the other Chinese with a chance to glimpse the spiritual life of our common past.

Therefore, when he further experienced modernity in Beijing and Shanghai, and after experimenting with different styles of writing, in late 1920s and during the early 1930s, Shen widely explored the possibility of using Miao elements, including folk songs and stories—this shows his choice of “the otherness” is conscious or even deliberate. The world of West Hunan shaped by Shen cannot simply be taken as the real embodiment of minority cultures. Rather, it is the product of the collective imagination in the Chinese culture towards ethnic minorities under the influence of Western culture (Zhou, 2017, p. 159). While the Western culture marginalized Chinese culture, in parallel, Shen, as a modern Chinese writer, marginalized the Miao culture, and in turn used it as a weapon to defy modernity.

3. Shen Congwen’s Use of Miao Folk Music

Shen’s use of Miao folk songs can be roughly divided into three categories: poetry that imitates folksongs, insertion of either folksongs or imitated folksongs in short stories, and descriptions of Miao people’s singing and dancing from a bystander’s point of view.

The first category can be considered as a response to the “New Folk Song Movement” initiated in 1918 by Liu Bannong, Zhou Zuoren, Gu Jiegang, etc. At the beginning of the 1920s, “The Folksong Research Society of Peking University” (北京大学歌谣研究会) was founded, using the related journals, such as Ballad Weekly (《歌谣周刊》) and Supplement to Morning Post (《晨报》副刊) as their platform to publish the collections and research results.

According to Zhang Tao, the New Folk Song Movement occupies a very special position against the backdrop of the New Culture Movement, exactly because of its seeming incompatibility with the overall anti-tradition environment. While the old scholars despised folk music for its vulgarity and did not appreciate it as traditional culture, the new progressive scholars picked it up because of its vulgarity in spite of its connection with traditional culture (2016, p. 2). The Folksong Research Society and its followers took the folksongs as the vestige of savagery (Kang, 2020, p. 95), and regarded that the folksong retained on the semantic level the national essence (in terms of historical experience and mentality) (p. 92).

In 1926 and 1927, two selections of folk songs (“Folk-songs of Zhen’gan”《筸人谣曲》and “A Collection of Zhen’gan Folk-songs”《筸人谣曲选》) collected by Shen from his hometown Fenghuang (or known as Zhen’gan) were published in Supplement to Morning Post. While the New Folk Song Movement progressed, the movement gradually changed from simply calling for attention to the folk culture and collection of folksongs to the more academic interest in the folk songs (Zhang, 2016). In Zhang’s categorisation, between 1918 and 1925, the study of folk song was mostly carried within the mature disciplines such as literature and history, attracting a wide range of interests, but after 1928, folk song study gradually moved towards the more systematic folklore studies (ibid., p. 43). When Shen started to collect folk songs, his contribution had literary meaning and provided folklorists with the anthropological and ethnological meaning as well.

At the same time, Shen’s collection of folk songs offered him materials for his poems and short stories. For example, one of the songs in the Zhen’gan collections appeared in A Story of Ah Hei (《阿黑小史》) (1933) to indicate the young lovers’ sexual compatibility:

Dainty younger sister has grown whiter than white,

Her darling has [i.e. I have] grown blacker than black,

When black ink is written on white paper,

Just look, don’t they go together well? (Shen and Kinkley, 1995, p. 496)

姣妹生得白又白，

情郎生得黑又黑，

黑墨写在白纸上，

你看合色不合色？(Shen, 2009, Vol. 7, p. 264)

According to Shen Congwen, unlike people in the city, “[the Miao] either use their mouths to kiss or to sing songs that praise nature and sexual desire, but not to tell lies, as the other Chinese do” (“他们的口除了亲嘴就是唱赞美情欲与自然的歌，不像其余中国人还要拿来说谎的”) (ibid., Vol. 7, p. 189). This statement clearly presents two qualities that Shen often praises in the Miao—the natural simplicity and the freedom to express sexual desires. Considering his experience in the cities, one can assume that “lying” only symbolizes the many illnesses of modern society. It is a rather Freudian way of applying the primitive image to suggest that civilization creates a garrison on an individual’s dangerous desires (Rossetti, 2006, p. 121), and thus generates the illness of modern society. In Theodore D. Huter’s opinion, one of the most important features of Modernism is the discontent and criticism of modernity (Huters & Luo, 2020, p. 143). In this sense, Shen could be seen as a Modernist.

In another sense, although Shen was not among the first generation of the Folksong Research Society, he continued their mission to encode a type of specific historical text and to build a future-oriented political construction of the modern nation, by returning to and discovering history (Kang, 2020, p. 93). The first two categories of Shen’s use of folk songs show his participation in the cultural anthropological activity of modern China, and proves the academic inspiration of his regional writings. The paper will especially focus on the third category in which Shen or his narrator/protagonist acts as the observer of the Miao folk culture, which would show Shen’s intention of using the Miao’s primitiveness to build a modern nation. The best textual example of this is his novella Fengzi (《凤子》), first published in 1932 with its tenth and last chapter published in 1937. In the story, there was a young man from the city who witnessed some Miao folk rites with singing and dancing, and discussed beauty, science, and divinity with the local officer. The city dweller exclaimed that,

What I just saw was no rite but a piece of superb drama, indescribable. It was the source of poetry, drama, and music, and was the nature of them. The correspondence of sounds, colours, lights, and shadows was weaved into a piece of brocade in which God existed. I, indeed, saw your God in that scene. I thought, what a miracle! Now I know why you talk about God all the time. You have your reasons. I didn’t understand until now why China two thousand years ago could have someone like Qu Yuan, who wrote all those gorgeous and miraculous poems. It turns out that he was no more than someone who came here and acted as a recorder of the scenery and people here. Though Qu Yuan has been dead for two thousand years, the source of The Nine Songs remains. I believe that, if there is someone interested, he can still draw fresh spring water from this ancient well!

我刚才看到的并不是什么敬神谢神，完全是一出好戏；一出不可形容不可描绘的好戏。是诗和戏剧音乐的源泉，也是它的本身。声音颜色光影的交错，织就一片云锦，神就存在于全体。在那光景中我俨然见到了你们那个神。我心想，这是一种如何奇迹！我现在才明白你口中不离神的理由。你有理由。我现在才明白为什么二千年前中国会产生一个屈原，写出那么一些美丽神奇的诗歌，原来他不过是一个来到这地方的风景记录人罢了。屈原虽死了两千年，九歌的本事还依然如故。若有人好事，我相信还可从这口古井中，汲取新鲜透明的泉水！(Shen, 2009, Vol. 7, pp. 163-164)

That Shen considers the Miao ritual music as the source of Qu Yuan’s The Nine Songs has a theoretical basis. As Xiong Xiaohui quotes the ancient scholar, Wang Yi, of the Eastern Han Dynasty:

The Nine Songs were written by Qu Yuan. Qu Yuan was banished to this area, and, bearing in mind the anxiety as poison and the forlornness which boils into melancholy, he saw the local folk doing ritual singing and dancing in the ceremony, but their lyrics were of poor quality, so he composed the classics, The Nine Songs.

《九歌》者, 屈原之所作也。屈原放逐窜伏其域, 怀忧若毒, 愁思沸郁, 出见俗人祭祀之礼, 歌舞之乐, 其辞鄙陋, 因为作《九歌》之典。(Xiong, 2008, p. 164)

Xiong then further proves, with textual comparison, that The Songs of Chu shares great similarities with ancient Miao folk songs, and that, in the time of Qu Yuan, the traditional culture of the State of Chu was the culture of sorcery, the magical activities were popular among common people, and the ritual songs would be sung when they honoured gods and ghosts. The Nine Songs were the songs sung when the shaman honoured God (ibid., p. 167). Therefore, the Miao folksongs are indeed the source of Songs of Chu, and they will keep being the source of poetry and other arts, if the artists can “draw fresh spring water from this ancient well”. In “Boats in Changde” (《常德的船》) (1938), Shen introduces the boat songs in this way: “The sailing ceremony and songs reminded people of why The Songs of Chu originated here two thousand years ago, and the music has been preserved well until now, unchanged, present and past” (“在开船仪式与行船歌声中，使人想起两千年前《楚辞》发生的原因，现在还好好的保留下来，今古如一”) (Shen, 2009, Vol. 11, p. 341). Under the influence of modern anthropology and mythology, myths and folksongs have inspired the literature of Western poets such as Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats. Like them, Shen firmly believes that he and all the other writers can find inspiration in folksongs and myths.

However, unlike most of Shen’s stories about Miao people or the people of West Hunan, in which the protagonists were part of this folk culture and were the creators of the folk arts, in Fengzi, the protagonist stood at a distance from the Miao people. He was an outsider and a spectator, like an anthropologist, and like Shen himself, who was already transformed by the modern society at the time. Therefore, there exists a gap between the protagonist in Fengzi and the Miao. This gap also exists between Shen’s memory of his hometown and his re-imagination of it. According to Zhou Ziyu, when describing the non-Sinicized Miao people, Shen often uses an exaggerated tone to marvel at their difference from the other Chinese people in appearance and behaviour, and that this kind of tone can only belong to an “outsider”. This evidently states the gap between the author and the Miao, and his position as “the cultural other” (Zhou, 2017, p. 164). Thus, between Shen’s words and the world, he created the “exoticism”, “anachronism”, “displacement”, and “chronotopical” in Shen’s nostalgia, as defined by David Der-wei Wang (2016, pp. 224-225). Shen Congwen then, was the modern man who marginalized the Miao as the other writers once marginalized Shen to be a non-Westernized writer.

4. Shen’s Marginality and Modernism

First of all, when we are talking about the folk music of the Miao, we are not just talking about songs and instrumental music. In Ethnomusicology, “music”, different from that concept in generalized musicology, is not just the audio art, but the integrated culture of a people (Song, 2011, p. 340). Music in different cultures also has different connotations. To the Han people, it can be a type of high art or, in terms of popular music, entertainment, but for the Miao, music is involved in every part of their lives, from a way of communication to the essential element of their rituals, and their songs are their oral literature. Therefore, in the case of the Miao people (in Shen’s description of the Miao as well), songs, dance, instrumental music, folk drama, and even poetry, mean the same—the Miao culture in integration.

Meanwhile, because of the linguistic difference, the songs of the Miao are incomprehensible to the Han, which also signifies that the Miao culture is incomprehensible and marginalized to the modern world. When the cities of China were pushed into a Westernized sense of modernity, the Miao in West Hunan stood for the exact opposite of modernity, in other words, the primitive. Because of the popularity of Western cultural anthropology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shen, a writer who was indirectly influenced by these Western theories, was, in the same way as other modern writers, interested in creating the primitive image of the Miao to vitalize the modern society. According to Zhang:

Shen gets his inspiration from the Greek gods and borrows their images to describe his “ideal” people—the Miaos—living in primitivism. It was a common nineteenth-century belief that primitive culture was freer, a source of vitality that civilization wanted to tap. It is also a Freudian concept that civilization is seen as requiring instinctual repression. (Zhang, 1992, p. 146)

Undeniably, Shen’s description of the Miao culture is also not entirely factual but imaginative. While his sympathy is always with the Miao, he does enlarge the simplicity and purity of the Miao culture to create an antithesis of the Han. However, this re-imagination of the Miao culture coincides with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Modernism by using this signal of otherness to signify modernity (Rossetti, 2006, p. 119).

According to Oakes, Shen Congwen’s regional works before 1934 are about trying to eulogize what can be foreseen as being lost in the modern world, and after 1934, “Shen tells us directly what is being lost in West Hunan” (1995, p. 95) in a more tragic way. This is probably a reason why references to folk music appear more frequently before the mid-1930s, as folk music symbolizes the lost treasures. In this sense, “the primitive landscape was a modern construction, a way of knowing what modern progress meant” (ibid., p. 96). Shen expresses his wish to find an antidote to modernity, to implant vitality in Chinese people by advocating sexual freedom and primitive power, and he hopes to restore people’s worship of the divine beauty through primitive rites which he considers to be the origin of all arts. To convey these ideas, Shen Congwen utilizes the art and culture of his hometown, which can be the perfect source of primitivism.

Although it looked like Shen had little Western education, he was not unfamiliar with the theories of cultural anthropology and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shen had close contact with some scholars who were interested in Western anthropology and psychology. He had read Abnormal Psychology (1930) by Zhu Guangqian and had once offered to provide Jiang Shaoyuan with description of some fighting customs in West Hunan for Jiang’s anthropological research. Zhou Zuoren also had a lecture transcript published in Ten Day Literature (《文学旬刊》), a special issue of Supplement to Morning Post in 1924, in which he approved Andrew Lang’s anthropological method (in Ritual, Myth, and Religion) and Freud’s psycho-analytical method (in Psycho-analysis) to analyse mythology (Zhou, 1924). This shows that at least by the early 1920s, the related theories had been discussed in China, and Shen very likely knew about them.

Despite the fact that the influence is undeniable, it is still difficult to track down the exact sources. The only feasible way is to look at the translations that were available at the time, which comprise a vast collection. Liu Xicheng summarizes the translations of and introductions to Western Literary Anthropology in China (Liu, 2004). The leading scholars studying anthropology at the time include Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Zhou Zuoren, Zhao Jingshen, Zhong Jingwen, Zheng Dekun, and Zheng Zhenduo. The main periodical publications can be found in Ballad Weekly (《歌谣周刊》), Morning Post (《晨报副刊》), and Yu Si (《语丝》), and others, of which Morning Post had Shen as one of the main contributors, and there are also some works of Shen in Yu Si. Thus, Shen could have been exposed to these materials. Translated works on Western anthropology and mythology include E. S. Hartland’s Mythology and Folk Tales (1923), translated by Zhao Jingshen; J. A. MacCulloch’s The Childhood of Fiction (1933)2, “A Discussion of Folktales” (《民间故事的探讨》) (1927)3, “Story about Beast Marriage and Totem” (《兽婚故事与图腾》), translated by Zhou Zuoren; H. R. Haggard and Andrew Lang’s The World’s Desire (1907); Jane Harrison’s “Preface to Greek Mythology” (1926), translated by Zheng Zhenduo; M. R. Cox’s Introduction to Folklore (1934), translated by Su Bingqi; J. Frazer’s “The Great Flood”,4and so on. However, it is worth pointing out that most of these were merely excerpts or single chapters. Last but not least, in 1931, Li Zhai’an translated a chapter from The Golden Bough—Chapter Three, from the 1922 edition—entitled “Sympathetic Magic”.5Then, in 1936, Li continued to translate Bronisław Malinowski’s Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, and edited and translated Magic and Language (《巫术与语言》). Li’s translation of “Sympathetic Magic” is important because, while The Golden Bough was a major influence on modern Western literature and was mentioned many times by Chinese scholars, Li’s was the first whole chapter translation. The lack of widely available complete academic translations meant that writers like Shen Congwen were more likely to have only received vague, guideline-style influence, just like Zheng Zhenduo derives his methodology from The Golden Bough when writing Responsibilities of Ancient Kings and Emperors (《汤祷篇》), a study in Chinese mythology, custom, and folklores. The book was only written in 1946 and published in 1957, but it is an example of how Western influence was absorbed: The Golden Bough functions more as a guide of how to research (Zheng, 1998, Vol. 3, pp. 574-575).6

In “Sympathetic Magic”, Frazer lists various forms of sympathetic magic from different cultures across the globe. Frazer argues that, “in short, to him [the primitive magician], magic is always an art, never a science” (Frazer, 1993, pp. 11-12), because the idea of science does not exist in the primitive mind. Li’s translation to this sentence is “总而言之，巫术对于他来说永远是艺术，不会是科学” (Frazer, 1931, p. 3), where he translates “art” into “艺术” (yi shu), which links magic with a way of artistic creation. According to Frazer, magic can also be divided into “Practical Magic” and “Theoretical Magic”, and the former is “false art”, while the latter is “false science”; also, most Sympathetic Magic is Practical Magic, which means it is false art (Frazer, 1993, p. 11).

It is most important that, in The Golden Bough, Frazer discusses the relationship between magic, religion, and science. As he considers magic to be “art” to the primitive magician, art is also involved in this relationship. Frazer argues that magic, religion, and science are three phases of the evolution of human civilization (Frazer, 1993, p. 56). Shen Congwen, in Fengzi, also touches on the question. The local officer says that the God of the place (West Hunan) does not conflict with science, unlike in Christianity. When the city dweller asks if his belief in God conflicts with his faith in science, the local officer says, “science only conflicts with superstition, or is obstructed by superstition, or destroys superstition” (“科学只能同迷信相冲突，或被迷信所阻碍，或消灭迷信”) (Shen, 2009, Vol. 7, p. 123), which implies that the God of the local officer is not superstition or the object of a religion like Christianity, but something above that. Apparently, Christianity is a religion that fits in Frazer’s magic-religion-science triangle, but this God does not. The local officer continues to say that “here our God is not superstitious, and he does not refuse knowledge; he has nothing to do with science” (“在我这里的神并无迷信他不拒绝知识，他同科学无关”) (ibid.). Therefore, this is not a dogmatic religion but rather an abstract idea of divinity.

In the tenth chapter of Fengzi, Shen describes a god-worship rite (the rite itself is an example of Sympathetic Magic: each of a collection of ribbons is marked with a name and, after each ribbon is given to the shaman acting as God, it can bless the person of that name), which is praised by the city dweller as the best form of drama: “What I just saw was no rite but a piece of superb drama, indescribable. It was the source of poetry, drama and music, and it was the nature of them […]” (ibid., p. 163). Interestingly in Fengzi, country people take the rite as magic, but someone like the city dweller takes it as art, and in the end they both refer to a religion that is primitive but at the same time beyond superstition and even science. Frazer writes:

The very idea of science is lacking in [the primitive magician’s] undeveloped mind. It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the magician’s practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern the spurious science behind the bastard art. (1993, p. 12)

However, in Fengzi, facing the primitive magic, the protagonist takes the whole thing (both abstract principles and concrete applications) as art, and God derives directly from the beauty of it. While Frazer argues the rite/magic is “bastard art”, Shen, like many other modern writers, considers it art. The difference is that Frazer is an anthropologist, but Shen, after all, is a writer.

Kinkley observes that Western ethnography (Kinkley also seems to associate it with Western mythology and anthropology) influenced “Shen’s acceptance of idea that all art had its origins in the needs of ancient primitive man (the original outlet being primitive religion)” (1987, p. 112), but he has not provided a link between such acceptance and Shen’s Fengzi, with the novel being a perfect example of such acceptance. For Shen, he has found the living “original rites” from the Miao people in his home region and recreates them in Fengzi. He finds the element of art (in the narrow sense), as the magical rites largely involve music and dance. Luo Yiqun remarks on the rites of the Miao people that if other ethnic groups go through the evolutionary process of Magic→Religion→Science, the magic of the Miao people develops as Magic→Religion→Art (1993, p. 28). Luo argues so because the magical rites of the Miao people involve poetry, myths, music, dance, and so forth, and are imaginative, symbolic, emotional, and visual (ibid., pp. 36-37). He thinks that the rites of the Miao are already on the edge of being an art, and are more spiritual than material (ibid., p. 38). While science conflicts with superstitious religion, science does not conflict with art—and this is why the local officer in Shen’s Fengzi says that the God there “has nothing to do with science”; it is the God of art.

It thus becomes the source of modern art. In a way, Shen takes a writer’s, not an anthropological, approach to Frazer’s theory by further romanticizing the primitive “art” (music and dance) of magic, and this approach is Etic rather than Emic. The Etic approach in Ethnomusicology is considered objective and scientific, and is to compare and analyze certain music and culture based on the Outsider’s past experience in another culture (Wu, 2011, p. 119). Shen, through the observation of the city dweller and his discussion with the local officer in Fengzi, compares Miao ritual music with the outside and modernized world. Obviously, Shen does not take this primitivism of the Miao as “backward”, but shares a similar purpose with other modern writers of taking advantage of the marginality of the Miao to suggest the real meaning of art.

By using Saussure’s Semiotics and Levi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology, Luo Yiqun explains that all societies construct their own realities according to those spiritual and psychological principles that determine form and function, and project these realities onto any real world that might actually exist, which also suggests that the “enlightened” works of art are to a large extent related to “primitive” mythology, since they want to emphasize and insist on the same process: how the world is constructed, which seems to be the only thing they have to describe (Luo, 2005, p. 191). Therefore, to Shen, Miao people’s ritual music and dance carry the same power as modern art and philosophy in creating the spirit of a society, and he intends to use that power.

From the perspective of modern psychology, this purpose of Shen’s can also be confirmed. One already thoroughly studied aspect of Shen’s Freudian way of using Miao folk love songs is that, unlike Shen’s fellow writers who describe the sexual repression in the city, Shen turns to celebrate passionate country people in order to defy the repression of modern society. Kinkley discusses in some detail the love songs and regional mating customs Shen describes, and writes that it was through these folksongs that Shen “first explored and praised frontier sexuality, deprecating urban repression” (1987, p. 142). Yet what this paper is more interested in is how Shen’s use of Miao folk music reflects the Jungian collective unconscious.

In Zhu Guangqian’s Abnormal Psychology, he introduces the Jungian theory that civilized people “regress” into primitive people in dream (1982, p. 350). Zhu compares Jung’s theory of collective unconscious with Freud’s, and considers that the collective unconscious has great impact on individuals. Not only is instinct a component of collective unconscious, dream is also a replica of “primordial imago”; while Freud holds that adults “regress” into infants in dream, Jung thinks that civilized people “regress” into primitive people in dream (Zhu, 1982, p. 350).

Therefore, we can assume that in Shen’s world, while the Han are the reality, the Miao can be the dream. In this way, Chinese people may be able to “regress” to the instinct they have through fictions set among peoples like the Miao, especially when Shen personally says that fictions consist of facts and dreams (Shen, 2009, Vol. 12, p. 65).

Zhu also explains that according to Jung, inventions of scientists and creations of artists all rely on “primordial imago” and “archetypes of thoughts”, taking advantage of their ancestors (Zhu, 1982, p. 398). Thus when Shen describes the god-worshipping rite as “no rite, but a piece of superb drama, indescribable” and “the source of poetry, drama, and music”, he makes the Miao’s ritual music a metaphor of what Jung defines as “archetypes of thoughts” or “primordial imagos”. Shen not only takes Qu Yuan, the ancient poet, as an example of someone who relied on something like primordial imagos of Jung and became an artist, as Jung defines it, but also believes that “if there is someone interested, he can still draw fresh spring water from this ancient well” (Shen, 2009, Vol. 7, p. 164). In Fengzi, Shen goes on to describe Qu Yuan as a recorder of the rites (ibid.). The rites existed before Qu Yuan or any other artists. In this sense, Qu Yuan is the artist who borrowed the primordial imago to create his poetry, and modern writers can keep doing so, as the primordial imago or archetype of thought would continue to live in the Chinese people’s collective unconscious, as defined by Jung.

According to Zhou Ziyu, the sudden upsurge of interest in folk culture studies in the 1920s and 1930s China happened because a group of literati were seeking a powerful living culture that belonged to neither the Western culture nor the already corrupted Han culture (2017, p. 165). Shen Congwen succeeded with the Miao culture, a long-marginalized culture that was alive since the beginning of Chinese civilization. He brought the literati’s attention to it by purposefully creating an otherness and emphasizing the Miao’s marginality, and by using its music as the bridge between modernity and primitivism.

5. Conclusion

If Shen’s use of Miao love songs is a way to free Chinese people from repression that kills vitality and creative force, his constant writing on primitive myth and rituals is a way to reawaken the primordial motives and imagos hidden or forgotten by the Chinese, the somewhat romantic and poetic life-force and humanity, something that is still in the conscious of the Miao people but long hidden in the unconscious of the Han. For the early twentieth-century China, the term modernity is a completely Westernized concept. This Western-centralism pushed Chinese culture to the margins, but the Miao people in Shen’s works were yet on the margin of margins. It, like Terry Smith’s inference about Australian Tribal Aborigines, “[exemplified] everything that Western modernity might list as other to itself” (2015, p. 158). To Shen, this marginality and otherness condensed in their music is exactly what China needed to defy the illness of modernity. Such emphasis on marginality and otherness is deeply embodied in a kind of primitivism and is in parallel with the Western modernist primitivism, especially with the primitivism in music, in which, unlike primitivism in literature and painting, the darker side is minimized.

Like other Western folksong researchers, Shen also believed that “primitiveness is purity and civilization filthy corruption” (Albright, 2004, p. 236). Thus, in his 1938 documentary work West Hunan (《湘西》), he expresses a sense of loss and regret when hearing Hunanese people adopting urban music—“not euphonic at all, with strange tunes that were hard to remember” (“实在不大好听，调子又古怪难记”) (2009, Vol. 11, p. 391). According to Albright, one of the great paradoxes of modernism is the “convergence of the artificial and the natural” (2004, p. 242). This convergence recurrently appears in Shen’s works, in his description of Miao folk music and his reflective voice as the modern man.

Shen came out of this marginal culture and finally became a spectator of it. His regret for the loss of culture also reflects the helplessness of man in face of modernity. His paradoxical perception of what it means to be marginal deconstructs the binary opposition of the modern and the primitive, and expresses modernism in a way that no other modern Chinese writers can. Despite that his works seem to distinguish the Miao culture from the Han culture, Shen’s intention is to push forward the marginality into the centre, and to resonate with a kind of “inaudible rhythm” (Kang, 2020, p. 67) hidden in the Chinese nation’s collective unconscious. This intention is a modernist one. Disguised in his marginal status, Shen shares the same intention as the Western modernist writers such as Pound and Yeats to use a kind of ethnological observation of the “pre-modern”, “organic” and “natural” way of living as the antidote to modernity (ibid., p. 72). Even though primitivism has been under attack since the late twentieth century, Shen’s effort had its significance in early twentieth-century China.

Notes

1 The date of Shen’s arrival in Beijing is controversial; it may be 1923 in fact.

2 Or Maculloch in the original journal in Literature Weekly (《文学周报》).

3 Excerpt from The Childhood of Fiction.

4 A chapter of Folklore in the Old Testament.

5 The Chinese title is《交感巫术的心理学》(The Psychology of Sympathetic Magic).

6 Zhou Yutong mentions in the preface to Zheng’s Responsibilities of Ancient Kings and Emperors that Zheng planned to translate the whole of The Golden Bough, but the project failed because of the lack of time and rejections from publishers.