I apologize for this response being so delayed, but I have had flu oddly off and on...I had it with mostly just muscle aches and headache last week, it went away, and now it's back with cough and stuff, probably made worse by standing out in the cold rather a lot. SO forgive my response not being as long and detailed as usual. I felt it was kind of important to write something about this topic though since lat week was a particularly Revolutionary one. This topic of Revolution + Love came up more than once in class and with the demos and all, the whole week was steeped in the theatre of revolution.
"I have Revolutionary Feelings for You"
So this is a bit of phraseology from the Cultural Revolution, but it is interesting to see the use of Revolution in Maoist discourse as a euphemism for love, romance or attraction. Maybe by this point it is less a case of revolution PLUS love than a case of revolution AS love, and love, (very) occasionally as revolution. Obviously this is much later than the writings we have been looking at but it in some ways represents an extreme end of the discourse inside the Geming jia Aiqing genre. “Free Love” was one of the underpinning concepts at work in the doctrines of New Culture, often tied up together with the "Woman Question" as posed by an overwhelming male group of intellectuals. Love, marriage and sex, loosened from their moorings of "traditional" morality became free and radical and consequently immediately subject to a new set of moralities often times conjunct to political philosophy imported from the West (usually through Japan). In my opinion sex, romance and especially their relationship to the family and to matrimony are always politically inflected if not overtly political, and so the heightened relationship and tension between these at times of political upheaval should come as no surprise. Examples in abound in the West also, (consider the persecution of homosexuals as a consequence of relations drawn between homosexuality and communism in the McCarthy era, for example). Sexual morality and the mores surrounding love are usually pivotal to cultural streams and consequently often come under fire even in the course of political change that seems unrelated to them. Furthermore in this week’s readings we are investigating ROMANTICISM… the idealistic, aesthetic, lyrical and overestimated. That poltical change that requires investment of passions (sic) should speak in the language of romance especially as constructed to be diametrically opposed to a system equally constructed as disdaining the will of the individual makes sense…we are to fall in love with the movement and with the idea of ourselves as agents in it. It might even be worth considering the romanticism of the protests of 1989 along this continuum.
Libidinal energy is a powerful thing, one to be channeled and used for the aims of the revolution, and sexual frustration or excess in this context take on meaning far greater that the desires of a particular body, just as romance extends its influence to the creation of the self, as hero or as villain, a caizi or a blackguard, in any event thus in Freudian terms overestimated, as in the case of the object of many libidinal engagements. Yu Dafu's struggle with himself on and off the page of fiction illustrates precisely the crux of the contradiction inherent in the mixing of romance, or sexuality and revolution, or nation saving. Essentially we are speaking of two related types of romance here, as presented by Leo Lee...the sexuality of the individual as directed onto others, that is the politics of correct and incorrect sexual practice, and secondly the romancing of one's image in the public eye, or as related to the masses. Obviously one arises from the other and they are very closely related, being essentially tied up with defining the self against some other, and the importance of one’s sexual practices…whether one masturbates every morning or not, are only significant if one perceives of oneself as somehow essential to the future of a nation that would be adversely affected by such things, even as it desires (sic) freedom. Leo Lee’s understanding of Yu Dafu pulls him in the end from his status as tragically flawed “superfluous man” or accidental romantic hero after years of struggle between his various selves into a comprehension of him playing a role, perhaps romanced by the public eye, perhaps knowingly playing to it. It is difficult to read works like Sinking and not detect moments where protagonist and narrator pull apart in ironic distance, and it is perhaps this complex distance which may be present in Yu Dafu’s view of himself that is often ignored in interpretation of his works and life (I am not altogether comfortable with the tendency of the analysis of Yu Dafu and Lu Xun’s works that rely heavily on diary…).
In essence, Yu Dafu in life and often in the portrayal of his protagonists pits sex against progress, and sexual politics as crucial to the moral health and character making of the nation, as it would be of the adolescent boy. Revolution is romantic, and the choice of sexual partner could mean the population of the landscape of the new Chinese Eden with revolutionary souls or the spreading of pestilence. In this he perpetuates traditional ideals, as did the discourse that would prevail in citing the moral health of the nation in relations with women.
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