Keynote speech

Shelley’s Scattered Words in China

        This paper reflects on our current crisis by looking at Percy Bysshe Shelley’s peculiar afterlife in twentieth-century China. From the almost undisrupted trajectory of advocacy and admiration that sharply contrasts with Shelley’s controversial English critical heritage, it makes the case for the radical Chinese revision and appropriation of Shelley.
        In tracing Shelley’s reception history, the paper first discusses the late Qing introduction and the Republican popularization and celebration of Shelley, paying particular attention to the divided interpretations and promotions of Shelley by rivalling literary groups with conflicting literary programmes. More emphasis will be put on the post-1949 era, when Shelley enjoyed a uniquely untarnished reputation among the British Romantics, most of whom were denigrated or neglected in Communist China.
        The paper then attempts to tease out the complex forces at play in shaping this almost thoroughly ‘red’ Chinese Shelley. It discusses the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and politics in Shelley’s poetry that played into this process of appropriation. It also unveils the irony in the appropriation of Shelley’s radicalism by the authoritarian state ideology and institution, the very powers that Shelley was fiercely against. The chief means of the appropriation, the paper suggests, were reduction and mediation. The reduction was achieved by playing down the inconveniently contradictory aspects of Shelley, especially his scandalous biography and his sceptical philosophy, both of which challenged the propagandised Shelley. Meanwhile, Shelley was almost exclusively mediated in Communist China via such authoritative Shelleyans as Marx and Engels and their Soviet followers, whereas other critical voices, Shelleyan or anti-Shelleyan, were silenced. The paper considers mediation in the linguistic sense as well, when the Chinese translation seemed to have toned down, if not erased, the challenge of Shelley’s stylistic features, especially his metaphorical language.
        The paper concludes that while Shelley’s words, as the poet bids in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, did ‘scatter’ ‘among mankind’ – his Chinese readers included, his words were also scattered; in the same way that different facets of Shelley survive, but only as dispersed, shattered fragments. It takes a terrible crisis like the one we are experiencing today to revive his words which, two hundred years back, had already prophesied the self-destructive demise of those powers which, unaware of the irony, chose him as their mouthpiece.