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

Nor is its position fixed once and forever.”¹⁴ Based on such an interrogation, each essay presents a view that stresses the multiple implications of the cultural politics that we observe in Jin Yong’s novels and suggests alternative means of engaging in the study of modern Chinese literature and culture.

For Liu Zaifu, culture is a major site of ideological struggle, from which he responds to two different histories and traditions—new literature and native literature—and a whole set of formations. By exploring different conjunctures and moments in these two trajectories, he questions the power of naming in literary history, in which the significance of the native literary tradition as well as Jin Yong’s writing, which modernizes this native tradition, has been ignored. As Liu reminds us, “without sufficiently reevaluating Jin Yong’s novels, the history of modern Chinese literature would be incomplete.” In his argument, Jin Yong’s succession and development of the native literary tradition, his free spirit of writing, and non-Europeanized vernacular, have challenged the mainstream literature that has been shadowed by political ideology. By affirming Jin Yong’s position in the history of modern Chinese literature, he critiques the discourse of enlightenment, the “new” literary tradition, and Chinese intellectuals’ long-standing obsession with China.

Using the special term “Jin’s baihua,” Li Tuo thinks the importance of Jin’s language is two-sided: first, it inherits but distinguishes itself from the language of the native literary tradition; second, it takes advantage of the grammar and rhetoric of a Europeanized new modern Chinese language. He then raises a very controversial question: “With the emergence of the new literature, realism dominated, and the tradition of nonrealism, which originated from traditional zhiguai (fantasy) and chuanqi (legend), fell into decay. Does this phenomenon have anything to do with the Europeanized new modern Chinese language? Has this kind of Europeanized language, from its inner structure, determined that modern writing must rely on the regulations of Western realism? Or going one step further, is it possible that the Europeanization of the modern Chinese language has led to the inexorable connection between the narrative of modern Chinese language and the Western model of representation, which controls all narrative formation and expression in the West?” Those questions force us to reconsider the relationship between modernity and Chinese writing.