Turning ghosts into people: 'The White-Haired Girl', revolutionary folklorism and the politics of aesthetics in modern China.

摘要

This dissertation takes the famous Chinese revolutionary music-drama The White-Haired Girl as a case study of the importance of notions of folk cultural authenticity on the literature and art produced under the auspices of the Communist Party in China during the wartime era of the 1940s. The idea that The White-Haired Girl was originally inspired by folklore has often been emphasized by the Chinese literary establishment to make it appear as a collective creation of the nation and interpreted by scholars as evidence of the Communist Party's successful appropriation of popular social values for revolutionary propaganda during the war. This study goes beyond such claims by examining the roles of the individual writers, literary theorists and dramatists who produced The White-Haired Girl to reveal how themes and forms from Chinese folk culture were converted into artistic signs of the social authenticity of the revolution, in a process I label revolutionary folklorism. Examining the ways that romantic nationalist ideas of folkloric authenticity mediated modern literary and theatrical aesthetics and revolutionary politics in China during the war, I aim to resituate Chinese Communist cultural production within a larger global history of modernism's attempts to overcome tradition through reconfigurations of elite and popular cultures. Although widely understood as originally inspired by an authentic oral folktale, the first chapter of this study argues instead that the narrative of The White Haired Girl was crafted by the little-known writer Shao Zinan, who utilized motifs of the fantastic from folklore and traditional fiction and drew upon modern literary, social-scientific and political imaginaries to depict the plight of women under rural patriarchy and offer Communist revolution as a vision of gender liberation. The second chapter of this dissertation examines how the Marxist literary critic Zhou Yang, head of the premiere Communist literary and artistic training institute during the war - the Lu Xun Art Academy, sponsored the production of The White- Haired Girl amidst criticisms that its narrative was too fantastic by re-interpreting Shao's story in light of theories of Russian literary aesthetics, Soviet Socialist Realism and the Maoist ideology of national liberation. The third chapter of this study examines the intersecting legacies of the Western and Soviet modernist theaters and the early twentieth-century movement to reform traditional Chinese theater that the drama theorist Zhang Geng drew upon as he supervised the stage production of The White-Haired Girl at the Lu Xun Academy. Through Zhang's influence, the music-drama was conceived as type of national revolutionary Gesamtkunstwerk , or "total art-work," that could maximize the emotional affect and political impact of the work on the basis of a formal integration of elements of Chinese and Western and folk and elite performing arts, revealing unexpected traces of the influence of Wagnerian aesthetics on the revolutionary literature and art of twentieth-century China. This study concludes by considering how The White-Haired Girl represented a unique historical repurposing of traditional Chinese modes of literary production on the basis of local folkloric sources to apply a Marxist critique of ideology to popular religious consciousness in China, an operation which outlined the Communist revolution within the paradoxical discursive figure of a legend about the falsity of legends or an anti-mythological myth.