The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern ...

Jin Yong’s writing has emerged as an interrogation of Chinese intellectuals’ project of modernity. Jin’s anti-Europeanized writing not only disturbs definitions of canonized mainstream modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth movement forward, but also points out a new direction for the institution of Chinese writing that waned under the control of Mao discourse. One is compelled to question whether an anti-Europeanized language might achieve its own literary modernization without privileging the hegemonic discourse of Western modernity.

The significance of Jin Yong’s writing, which benefited from the native literary tradition, lies in its effort to slow down the linear progression of modernity, to negotiate with modernity within its effective operation. If, however, we seal the sign of Western modernity within the simple ideas of progress and truth, we are then blinded to the historical conditions under which the power relations of defining the “modern” were engendered. Modernity, as Homi K. Bhabha suggests, “is about the historical construction of a special position of historical enunciation and address. It privileges those who ‘bear witness,’ those who are ‘subjected,’ or in the Fanonian sense … [those who are] historically displaced. It gives them a representative position through the spatial distance, or the time lag between the Great Event and its circulation as a historical sign of the ‘people’ or an ‘epoch,’ that constitutes the memory and the moral of the event as a narrative, a disposition to cultural communality, a form of social and psychic identification.”⁵ What Homi K. Bhabha stresses here is fully historical and discursive difference inside the articulation of modernity rather than a teleological or transcendent politics of address. Therefore, as we interrogate how twentieth-century Chinese defined the modern and what kind of language they used to talk about it, we should keep in mind the danger of homogenizing modernity.

The richness of Jin Yong’s language illustrates how the writing of cultural difference in the midst of modernity can be inimical to binary boundaries. As a combination of the traditional and the modern, his writing not only preserves the native literary tradition, but also modernizes this “obsolete” tradition by adding modern narratives and consciousness to it.