ABSTRACT
Close examination of modern and contemporary Chinese literature reveals an internal paradox that the almost uniformly didactic face it presents to the world seeks to mask. On its surface, this literature seems to have little of the painful scrutiny of the problematic nature of its own working that is the very hallmark of modernist literary movements elsewhere in the world. One finds instead that twentieth-century Chinese writers focused intensely on the matter of how ostensibly agreed-upon ideas were to be disseminated. If writing’s didactic exterior reflects a conscious wish to communicate positive information about society, however, the question about what that information should be, while rarely allowed overt thematic expression, can be seen as a subtext that haunts almost all writing throughout the years since 1917. Questions of how to communicate rather than the problematics of the message itself form the center of modern literature’s explorations of itself; thus the issue of how to get that message across has of necessity expanded to crowd out other issues. The question of how, or even if, ideas can propagate, having by and large taken the place of even such basic issues as whether literature should be so manifestly didactic, has, however, assumed a highly wrought complexity. And it is within this complexity that one can discern the anxieties about literature’s role and literature’s limits that rarely emerge to the level of conscious discussion.
