This thesis aims to study the forces that shaped the images of
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in China from 1919 to 1937. It
will mobilize the available materials--translated poems,
criticisms, essays, commentaries, passing references, etc.--
produced within this period to narrate the peculiar fortune of
Baudelaire. It involves the two-fold task of presenting "what"
images of Baudelaire were produced and "what" forces were at
work to shape his various images. In the following chapters, I
am going to show at from 1919, when Chou Tso-jen 周作人
acknowledged his indebtedness to Baudelaire''''s poems in prose in
his writing of the first masterpiece of new poetry, to 1937,
when Ho Ch''''i-fang 何其芳, heading for Yenan 延安, the communist
base in North-Western China, declared that he would no longer be
the "stranger" who contemplates the clouds, Baudelaire enjoyed a
literary fortune in China which has not much to do with the
intrinsic value of his poetry, culminated in Les Fleurs du mal
and Le Spleen de Paris. RatherBaudelaire himself and his
writings were appropriated and manipulated in different contexts
to address different issues, be it ideological or poetological,
resulting in the shaping and re-shaping of the image of the poet
and his poetry. The study of the appropriation and manipulation
of Baudelaire, a perspective that structures the present
research, necessitates the unraveling of the workings of the
complex phenomenon known as culture, or more specifically, the
culture that produces the Chinese literature the period in
question.
Chapter 1, entitled "The Search for Relevance," will focus on
the period from 1919 to 1925. The literary revolutionists
introduced Baudelaire to China in support of their iconoclastic
fervor--to justify the literary revolution, to argue for the
spirit of freedom and individualism, to exemplify the new
poetics, unrhymed pai-hua, with Baudelairean poems in prose.
The traditionalists, on the other hand, either used the
"Decadent" Baudelaire to warn against different forms of
literary libertinism or Baudelairs rhymed verses to justify the
return to Classicism. But in every case, Baudelaire was used to
search for the relevance of different agendas.
Chapter 2, entitled "Politics or Poetics," will identify
different positions Baudelaire was made to assume in a literary
system gradually politicized from mid- to late twenties. The
relative "anarchic" period from 1926 to 1927 witnessed the
"poetological" rewriting of Baudelaire to perfect a language for
Chinese poetry and to signal a return to formal craftsmanship
which was denounced in the previous period. The left and non-
left dichotomy in literary ideology since 1928 began a new form
of rewriting of Bdelaire. To counter the attacks from the left
which saw Baudelaire as a decadent petite-bourgeois, the non-
left either reworked Baudelaire, ideologically and
poetologically, as a poet who is socially committed, or
represented the poet as a Decadent and Aesthete, offering an
alternative poetics to proletarian literature.
Chapter 3, entitled "Politics vs. Poetics," deals with a period
spanning the establishment of the Chinese League of the Left
Wing Writers to the beginning of World War II. It describes
separately the literary systems of Shanghai and Peking. The
institutionalization of the leftist literary ideology in
Shanghai, the headquarter of the League, resulted in the further
marginalization of Baudelaire. Beyond the sphere of influence
of the Shanghai system, Baudelaire sought refuge in the
educational institutionsn Peking, where he was carefully read,
sympathetically understood, and enthusiastically transmitted
from teachers to students, until the outbreak of World War II
changed the political consciousness, and thus the aesthetic
norm, of the young poets.