Guo Moruo’s “Rebirth of the Goddesses” is among the landmark works of modern Chinese poetry. Its myth-rewriting amounts to an act of “disenchantment” carried out amid the ruins of “enchantment”. Yet this heroic undertaking is caught in a triple dialectical vortex: in order to disenchant, it must appeal to the primordial “energies” of myth (nature, life, imagination); in order for disenchantment to be effective, it strategically “uses enchantment” (by requisitioning textual canons and ritual authority); and in the end—because of the intensity of rewriting and the depth of political and spiritual investment—it becomes itself a new layer of enchantment (a cycle of re-enchantment). This exposes the core dilemma of China’s modernity project: to build a new order on the ruins of tradition is necessarily a tragic enterprise of rupture and continuity, of disenchantment and re-enchantment at once.
Yao et al. (Sat,) studied this question.