The Reconstitution of the World in 1922: ‘Mending Heaven’ and ‘The Waste Land

Abstract

Two revolutionary literary works, both confounding generic conventions and structured ironically around classical myths, appeared in the year 1922: T.S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) “The Waste Land” and Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) “Mending Heaven” (“Bu tian” 補天, originally titled “Buzhou shan” 不周山). While Eliot’s poem was widely recognized as an epochal tour de force, Lu Xun himself was unsatisfied with his story, at first including it in but later excising it from the collection “Call to Arms.” Yet both works employ anachronism and generic hybridity to comic and startling effect, with Eliot interweaving high literature and music-hall songs, and Lu Xun juxtaposing modern narrative prose with classical Chinese dialogue. While Eliot revives Tiresias to unify the disparate impressions of modern life, Lu Xun parodies the Chinese myth of Nü Wa, who fashioned mankind and repaired Heaven using five-colored stones. Most importantly, both works center on the motif of fragments, using linguistic and generic fragmentation to represent cultural and social disorder, and finding in ancient myth a potential means to heal the rupture of modernity. While “The Waste Land” was widely influential, the world still awaits a writer able to complete the task of “Mending Heaven,” reconstituting the world of mythical imagination in a China denuded of tradition.