“Realism And Alliegory In The Ealy Fiction Of Mao Tun” in “Realism and Alliegory in the Ealy Fiction of Mao Tun” | Open Indiana

Shortly after Mao Tun returned to Shanghai in April 1930, he wrote three short pieces of historical fiction: “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” (about 2,500 words), “Stone Tablet” (about 2,000 words), and “The Great Marsh District” (about 2,500 words).¹ He tried to rejoin the Communist Party but did not succeed. He was disappointed, but he had learned something about how to sidestep disappointment and cynicism and their self destructive consequences. He patiently observed the new political struggles in the Party from the periphery and remained sharp and penetrating in his analyses. Some of his old comrades were still Party activists, and his wife continued to be active in the women’s movement. His brother Shen Tse-min and his wife returned from Moscow in July 1930 as one of the Twenty-eight Bolsheviks; Tse-min would soon become active in the new Pavel Mif-Wang Ming coalition in the Party.²

Mao Tun’s health was not good; he was suffering from attacks of acute trachoma and was nearly blinded in one eye.³ He was also hard-pressed financially. Having been denied official reentry into the Party, he was probably not on the Party payroll and had to rely entirely on his writing to support his family. In May, the dual pressures of security and money forced him to move twice, and his mother went back to Wu Village so that the family could take a smaller apartment. Fortunately, his old friends Yeh Shao-chün and Cheng Cheng-tuo from the Literary Association group were both in Shanghai. Cheng, who as a Party sympathizer had found it prudent to spend a year in England had returned to edit the Short Story Monthly again; Yeh, who had replaced him as editor, was still on the staff. Between them, they saw to it that Mao Tun’s work was published regularly.

After the second move, settled in a three-room apartment on Yü-yüan Road, and with his living expenses more or less covered, Mao Tun rejoined the literary world and began a new chapter in his life as a revolutionary thinker and creative writer. Mao Tun also found a new friend in Feng Hsüeh-feng, a revolutionary writer and disciple of Lu Hsün, who would later write a very touching biographical work about Lu Hsün’s years with the League of Leftist Writers. He resumed his continuing political dialogue with Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, who after more than a year in Moscow was also back in Shanghai and, though now out of power in the Party, had not lost a shred of his power with words and dialectics. Although generally in disagreement with Ch’ü’s position on literature, Mao Tun nonetheless found in Ch’ü an honest antithesis to his own ideas. The presence of Lu Hsün and Ch’ü Ch’iu-po no doubt greatly speeded up Mao Tun’s renewed zest in reentering the revolutionary struggle on the literary front. The League of Leftist Writers itself, founded in March 1930 to form a united front between Communist writers and their fellow travellers, was of limited interest to Mao Tun. He joined it in May, but remained only loosely attached because of the propagandistic ploys its members used—street demonstrations, open forums, wall posters, agitation in the factories; the whole gamut Mao Tun had long since gone through in his pre-Wuhan days—and also because of the “phonograph disk” opinions of the league’s dominant group—the people from the Sun Society and the Creation Society who had launched the attack on Eclipse. As the irony of history would have it, on one occasion Mao Tun was even assigned to a working group headed by Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un.⁴

The Chinese Communist movement had continued its confusing and uncertain journey along the “soviet” path. From 1928 to 1930, the top leadership shifted rapidly: Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, who succeeded Ch’en Tu-hsiu as the General Secretary of the CCP in August 1927, was severely criticized for putschist tendencies—ordering uprisings at a time when objective circumstances were not favorable for success—at the Sixth Congress of the CCP in July 1928. Ch’ü was then replaced by Li Li-san at the Ninth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in February 1929⁵ and remained in Moscow till August 1930. Li Li-san, closing rank with the Comintern, went to even greater extremes than Ch’ü with his “Li Li-san line,” which promoted armed uprising in industrial centers and cities regardless of strength and price just to create the impression of a continuously rising revolutionary tide.

While Li’s line was being carried out with the endorsement of the CCP and the Comintern, Mao Tse-tung, completely on his own initiative and unbeholden to either Shanghai or Moscow, was creating a new guerrilla strategy of revolution, a new peasant movement with the goal of surrounding the cities by an awakened and armed countryside. Mao’s and Chu Te’s experiments in the Chingkang Mountains on the Hunan-Kiangsi border were, in Benjamin Schwartz’s words, “born under a cloud of orthodox disapproval and, at the time [1928], seemed to hold little hope of further development.”⁶ But by late 1929 and early 1930, Mao not only showed no sign of weakening but was growing stronger and stronger: Two new dynamic factors within the Chinese Communist movement—the Soviet areas and the Red Army—were beginning to merge. Li Li-san, however, refused to endorse or support this new development. As late as April 1930, when Mao Tun returned to Shanghai, Li was still emphatically opposing the possibility of either “encircling the city with country,” as Mao Tse-tung put it, or relying on the Red Army to take the cities.⁷

Thus in 1930 the political situation of the Chinese Communist Party was complex. Its headquarters in Shanghai was directly under the Li Lisan leadership, and its soviet movement in the country was developing along a very different track. Actions were not coordinated under a centralized party line: P’eng Te-huai captured Changsha in July with the Fifth Red Army he commanded but Mao Tse-tung refused to attack Nanch’ang as a follow-up; instead he began to consolidate his own power base.

Opinions about peasant policy were divided too at the Shanghai Party headquarters. In April 1930, Chou En-lai had gone to Moscow as peace maker, and when he returned that summer, Pavel Mif and twenty-eight Chinese students who had been at Sun Yat-sen University came with him. Their assignment was to oppose Li Li-san under the flag of the Comintern, and support emerging leaders of their own. Obviously, Li had no liking for Mif or his Chinese protégés, Li’s chief lieutenants, Ho Men-hsiung and Lo Chang-lung, threatened to quit over the issue of cooperation with Mif. Then Ch’ü Ch’iu-po and Teng Chung-hsia returned from Moscow in August 1930 to urge accommodation with the rich peasants, a position reflective of the current Moscow stand on the issue. This differed in fundamental ways with Mao Tse-tung’s policy of open peasant revolt. With Wang Ming and the Twenty Eight Bolsheviks ready to take power, the accommodation line was in the ascendant.

This was what Mao Tun saw between the time he came home in April and the time he wrote “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” in September: the internal struggle between Li Li-san and Mif and the contradiction between Mao’s and Moscow’s peasant policies. Apart from Mif and the Twenty Eight Bolsheviks, the other leaders on the scene were all his old comrades. The situation at the CCP Central was not altogether different from that during the period of the Great Revolution period (1925-27), with the Party split over strategy and peasant policy, and with the Comintern making the decisions. But outside the feuding leadership center in Shanghai, the vast countryside was beginning to stir.

Old Tune and New Materials.

In the autobiographical piece, “In Retrospect,” Mao Tun wrote,

The great events of the several years before 1928 which shook China and the world were all familiar to me. . . . I made only partial representation of them in Disillusionment, Vacillation, and the unfinished Rainbow. . . . Yet it seems that due to the fact that I myself was dissatisfied with those old works, I subsequently steered away from the old subject matter. Besides, I had another unwarranted way of thinking: I felt that to do full justice to those “historical events” in question required novels of more than a hundred thousand words, and yet my mental state at the time did not permit me to write such long works. A last reason is that at that time I had made no confident reevaluation of the “old subject matter,” so I felt that even if I did write, it would probably still be of the same “old tune,” which would be worse than not writing at all. However, my determination to change the subject and the method [of fictional representation] was very strong. Meanwhile, I had returned to where the flesh-and-blood struggle was—metropolitan Shanghai. That was the spring of 1930. . . . “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head,” “Great Marsh District,” and others were written during that period, when I was recuperating from illness. They can be considered as my first attempt to write “short.” My former short pieces ran at least ten thousand words. I had changed my subject; I evaded reality. Naturally there was no lack of new subject matter, but I am not accustomed to using fresh materials while they are still hot. . . . ”⁸

Reviewing the historical events in the Chinese Communist movement from 1928 to 1930, we have no difficulty understanding why Mao Tun should have the weary feeling of witnessing scenes déjà vu.⁹ It must have appeared to him that political struggle was going to be a permanent feature in the upper level of leadership, forever confusing and treacherous. On the other hand, the development of the peasant movement in the countryside might offer new premise for organizing the dynamic forces for the revolution.¹⁰ Mao Tun began to see the collective as more important than the individuals making up the leadership. In particular, for the first time he saw the peasants as the premise of the future.

In 1930, Mao Tun was in no position to portray the peasants “realistically.” He was not from a peasant family and the only person he had known who could associate with peasants in a positive and creative way—positive and creative by the concrete proof that he was still alive and well in the mountains with both theory and material resources well preserved from enemies without or within—was Mao Tse-tung. And he had not seen Mao in person or in action for three years. Mao Tun’s intention to write “short” did not lend itself to a full, realistic portrayal. Lacking close knowledge of corollaries in current history and deficient in first-hand experiences, he was almost compelled to present his perception as “forms of consciousness (yi-shih-hsing-t’ai).”

The term “yi-shih-hsing-t’ai” plays a prominent role in Mao Tun’s writing and thinking after his sojourn in Japan. He had already connected the term to the concept of “class” when he was writing his “Foreword” to The Wild Roses.¹¹ Class consciousness (chieh-chi-i-shih) now became one of the central themes in all three of the historical tales. In “The Great Marsh District” for instance, “chieh-chi (class)” appears in a number of places as the basis of group interest versus brotherhood—i—of the earlier tradition. “Ch’u-shen (social background, social status)” serves as a synonymous variant of “class” in “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” and “Stone Tablet.”

Mao Tun’s experiential constraints and his strong urge to write about the new dynamic forces in the Chinese Communist movement combined to produce some very unusual heroes, unusual in May Fourth fiction, normally concerned with present time, and especially unusual for Mao Tun, who had refused the notion of heroes in his trilogy and had no compunction about separating the means of perception and the central character in his stories. In the old tradition, Chinese bandit heroes are mostly men of action. Once in the mountains, few of them think about anything personal or what action they should take. But Mao Tun took these ancient models and remade them into highly reflective personages, men of conscious action. Lin Ch’ung, for example, is made to think out the question of how best to serve the rebel cause. It is not enough to kill a bad leader. Unless there is a more capable replacement, assassination merely leads to disintegration and chaos. Hsiao Jang in “Stone Tablet” recognizes that, realistically, intrigue and deception are acceptable means within the rebel camp and may even be necessary sometimes if the purpose is to achieve unity and forestall destructive rivalry among leaders. Ch’en She and the peasants in “The Great Marsh District” are awakened by the force of dire circumstance to a consciousness of their collective interest. The lesson is brought home to them that if they do not rebel together, there is no life or future, but if they do rise up, there is hope of controlling their own destiny.¹² As fictional characters, Lin Ch’ung, Hsiao Jang, and Ch’en She have each achieved a lucid understanding of their environment and themselves—an understanding never before so confidently presented in Mao Tun’s fiction. This direct confrontation of revolutionary consciousness with revolutionary reality is an important link in the writer’s maturing process. Mao Tun had not really changed his subject, as he had declared in “In Retrospect,” nor had he evaded reality. What he had done was make a technical change in his level of narrative from the mimetic to the nonmimetic, and a corresponding adjustment in his subject from the surface actions and events in the rebel movement to the underlying forms of rebel consciousness. These new heroes have no illusions about the reality they face.

Mao Tun was always intent on creating two levels of reality in his fiction. From the beginning he experimented with combining contemporary characters and political allegory to effect a double reality: beneath the surface level, the covert political reference. But the practical difficulties were great. When he used students as protagonists in a contemporary setting, he was obliged first of all to place them in a social milieu. Then he had to provide the particular background of each of the students: they had to have parents, relatives, friends, and schoolmates, and all these on a realistic level. The more successful he was on this level of objective reality, the more fixed were his characters in their social identity, and the less free to act as allegorical representatives of political events which he was not allowed to treat openly.

To alert his readers to the allegory, Mao Tun frequently used allusions, symbols, and other devices. Sometimes they were effective but they did not always contribute to the artistic merit of his works. Realism suffered as in the case of the name symbolism and the allusive Futuristic speech of the battalion leader Ch’iang Wei-li in Disillusionment. There, Ch’iang Wei-li loses as a realistic character. When they do not work, as with the overnight love affair between Pao-su and Miss Ching in the same novel, allegory becomes ineffectual: the love affair is so convincing that the reader doesn’t look for what it represents.

Mao Tun was aware of the technical difficulties involved in creating this double reality, especially when one of the two levels had to be disguised. He discussed these difficulties in terms of the structure of the novel Eclipse in “From Kuling to Tokyo”—how to make the same characters appear in different places in different parts of the novel when events have to be simultaneous—and in “On Reading Ni Huan-chih” he defended his failure to resolve these problems in characterization and his reason for resorting to “profile painting.” From the very beginning of his career as a writer, he was conscious of the challenge facing someone who is committed to the practice of realism in art, and yet prohibited by his political purpose from being totally open with his reader about the true nature of his subject.

By 1930, Mao Tun’s reflections on the future of the revolution led him to shift his emphasis from preoccupation with an authentic chronicling of the revolutionary movement to recommending a course of action that would avoid the familiar pitfalls on the road of revolution. The three historical tales can well be read as experiments with ideas about possible courses the revolution might take. In them we can find his comments and recommendations to currently active members of the Chinese Communist Party. From the artistic perspective, these tales are an experiment: a new attempt to meet the challenge of remaking the rebel tradition and consciousness in a different fictional form and with a different set of characters from students and the New Woman.

Remaking the Traditional Base

In his historical tales Mao Tun for the first time turns from contemporary reality to history and popular fiction of the oral tradition for his material and characters. “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” and “Stone Tablet” are adapted from episodes in the fourteen-century popular novel about banditry, The Water Margin,¹³ which is set in the Liang mountains surrounded by lakes and swamps. “Great Marsh District” is taken from chapter 48, “The Hereditary House of Ch’en She,” in the Records of the Grand Historian by Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145-90 B.C.).¹⁴ All three stories are about popular uprisings, and deal directly with political rivalry and intrigue among outlawed people.

The immediate consideration behind the shift is obviously a technical one. Using tradition and archetype in fiction gives an author the practical advantage of not having to explain everything on the very first level of communication, for tradition operates on an established level of communication. Lin Ch’ung, Wu Yung, Hsiao Jang, and probably Ch’en She and Wu Kuang, too, are familiar names to the Chinese popular reader. For centuries their exploits have been recounted by storytellers and enacted in local operas. They are archetypal political rebels, and their deeds are part of a tradition of political subversion and popular uprising. With these protagonists, Mao Tun was immediately relieved of the awkward task of having to disguise and expose at the same time the political identity of his characters. He is thus left free to exploit traditional plots and characterization for his own purposes.

In each of the stories he has changed several elements of the original. The character Lin Ch’ung, for instance, aside from the familiar Liang-shan setting and a few touches reminding one of his initial confrontation with Wang Lun, is hardly the hero familiar to us. He has acquired not only an interesting peasant ancestry but also a collective consciousness and a new pattern of behavior. Similarly, the stone tablet in the story “Stone Tablet” is no longer a heaven-sent ranking of the leaders of the Liang-shan rebels as in the original, but an artifact of human design, conceived expressly to serve a communal purpose. Looking at these changes, we must first ask why Mao Tun made them.

In modern Chinese literature, as we know, the traditional past is generally used to reflect the present. Some of Lu Hsün’s “Old Tales Retold” ridicule modern-day pedantry in historical research, and Kuo Mo-jo glorified contemporary romantic rebels, male and female, in his historical plays “Ch’ü Yüan,” and “Cho Wen-chün.” Were Mao Tun’s tales written to satirize current CCP politics or to celebrate his Party’s glorious inheritance of the age-old rebel tradition?

Our answer might be: all this and more. Mao Tun is trying to clarify and combine, for himself as well as his public, two different modes of popular rebellion: (1) the individually oriented mode that characterizes the traditional rebellions as found in his sources, and which dramatizes the seizure of power by individual heroes; and (2) the new collectively oriented mode that characterized the Chinese Communist movement in the present. The new mode is based on recognition of the needs and aspirations of the masses as the moral base and unifying goal of a relentless, sometimes even sinister, struggle for power. The contrast between the two modes is revealed first by the deviations from tradition in Mao Tun’s reworking of the old tales, then more pointedly in the way he perceives these deviations.

“Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head”

“Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” recasts an episode from the Lin Ch’ung cycle in The Water Margin in terms of top-level CCP politics: how a high-ranking army commander¹⁵ manages to keep his anger and frustration in check and thereby avert a bloody feud between himself and a civil leader whom he does not respect. The story was published in September 1930, a very troublesome time for the Chinese Communist movement, and it showed an acute awareness of the perils attendant on the actions of a political outlaw.

The original Lin Ch’ung story, occupying nearly seven chapters in The Water Margin (chs. 7-12 and 19) is one of the all-time favorites of Chinese audiences. Lin Ch’ung, a military instructor of the Imperial Guards in the Eastern Capital of the Northern Sung Dynasty, has married a beautiful wife and enjoys comfort and security. One day the dissolute adopted son of Grand Marshal Kao happens to see the wife in public and takes an immediate fancy to her. This is the beginning of Lin Ch’ung’s troubles. Young Kao conspires with his lackeys to entrap Lin Ch’ung in a criminal offence, and Lin Ch’ung is tricked into carrying a weapon into the White Tiger Hall where arms are strictly forbidden. As a consequence he is arrested, branded, and sentenced to exile. The lackeys bribe his guards to murder him en route to his place of exile. When the attempt fails, another scheme is concocted to burn him to death in his sleep. When Lin Ch’ung finally becomes aware of the designs on his life, he kills the conspiring lackeys. Now, guilty of murder, he has no recourse but to join the bandits in the Liang-shan marshes.

The traditional Lin Ch’ung story up to the killing of the conspirators occupies five and a half chapters in The Water Margin and is a classic example of how a perfectly innocent man can be driven to open revolt by extreme social injustice and political persecution; hence the proverbial folk defense of lawless behavior, “driven to Liang-shan” (pi-shang-Liangshan).

“Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head,” however, does not take its plot from any of these traditional incidents that drive Lin Ch’ung to Liang-shan. Mao Tun’s story begins after Lin Ch’ung’s arrival at Liang-shan; by that time he is no longer a citizen with a place in society but an outlaw. Clearly Mao Tun’s tale is not about the workings of political corruption and injustice.

In The Water Margin version, Lin Ch’ung’s trouble was not over after his arrival at Liang-shan. Driven out of a corrupt society, he is still well within the world of universal human iniquity. The bandit leader Wang Lun, nicknamed Scholar-in-White,¹⁶ is jealous of Lin’s martial skills and sees in him a potential rival. As a deterrent Wang makes his admission into the bandit gang conditional on offering the head of a passer-by. Yang Chih happens to pass by on the third day.¹⁷ Wang Lun, watching the fight, is impressed by Yang Chih’s prowess and decides to enlist Yang Chih into his service to counter-balance the threat from Lin Ch’ung. He stops the fight, and invites Yang Chih back to the fortress, but Yang Chih declines and continues his journey. Several chapters later, Ch’ao Kai, a wealthy landowner known for his sympathy and generosity to outlaw heroes, takes refuge at Liang-shan and is given the same cold reception Lin Ch’ung previously received. Angry at Ch’ao Kai’s treatment, Lin Ch’ung no longer hesitates to draw his sword and kills Wang Lun, the mean, imposturing bandit leader. A new leader has appeared, and to Lin Ch’ung’s mind the time is ripe for a change of leadership.

Mao Tun’s “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” begins on the night of the third day after Lin Ch’ung arrives in Liang-shan. Lin Ch’ung’s fight with Yang Chih is halted, and Yang Chih, who has just declined Wang Lun’s invitation to join the outlaws, is resting in the guest quarters for the night. The parallel between Mao Tun’s story and its original breaks off at this point. What follows is entirely Mao Tun’s invention.

As the story opens, the crisis of Lin Ch’ung’s cold reception by Wang Lun is past. Lin Ch’ung is alone at night, ruminating over his situation. A year ago he himself had been thinking the very same thoughts Yang Chih expressed earlier in the day—aspiring to a secure position under the patronage of the powers in court. But now he finds Yang Chih’s ambitions contemptible. A peasant in origin, Lin Ch’ung recalls the ruin of his parents under the burden of heavy taxation and landlord exploitation. His own career as a military officer has been wrecked by corrupt court officials. Fully convinced that Yang Chih, in spite of the fact that he comes from a family of generals, will eventually suffer the same fate at the hands of those powerful at court, Lin Ch’ung can feel nothing but scorn for Yang Chih’s naive resolve to curry favor with them. He feels a surge of “latent peasant rebelliousness in his blood;” someday he will certainly avenge the wrongs done to himself and to his family. His thoughts then turn to Wang Lun.

He was not at all afraid of bloodshed, but he would not kill without a good reason. Therefore, when that Scholar-in-White, Wang Lun, refused to accept him and demanded from him some “formal application for admission,” he felt from the bottom of his heart that this unscrupulous scoundrel of a scholar was no different from Kao Ch’iu, the Grand Marshal. The only difference was that he, Wang Lun, lived in the marshes.¹⁸

Lin Ch’ung’s thoughts then swing back to Yang Chih. His anger suddenly wells up. He must kill him. Sword in hand, Lin Ch’ung begins to walk toward the guest sleeping quarters. “But which one am I going to kill?” Lin Ch’ung stops in his tracks at this unexpected self-questioning. Is he going to kill Yang Chih? The idea of killing a man while he is asleep repels him. Then is he to kill Wang Lun? Wang Lun is truly an impostor, a pretender to leadership, every inch a knave and a coward. His own family suffered a series of losses because of scholars. It seems to Lin Ch’ung that scholars are bastards, whether or not they are bandits at the same time.

With renewed indignation, Lin Ch’ung quickens his steps in the direction of the place where Wang Lun is sleeping. Then he stops a second time. Two watchmen who see him hurrying with sword in hand demand to know if he is practicing his martial arts at that late hour. He suddenly realizes that he is no longer in the world of White Tiger Hall, and that if he kills either Wang Lun or Yang Chih and creates disorder among the bandits, he will not have another Liang-shan to go to. Flushed to the ears, he realizes, to his embarrassment that in spite of his consummate martial skill, he has not been gifted with comparable intelligence:

In this eight hundred square li of the Liang-shan marshes, in this sanctuary for the oppressed, there is a need for a pair of iron arms, but there is an even greater need for a great mind.¹⁹

Lin Ch’ung’s anger subsides when he realizes his personal limitations. Wang Lun admittedly is by no means a worthy leader of the Liang-shan bandits. But who else is? He, Lin Ch’ung, has no such ambitions, much less the ability. It is better to wait, then; someday the “true emperor” is sure to appear. On this note the story ends.

Mao Tun’s Lin Ch’ung bears little resemblance to the simple and forthright hero of The Water Margin. As a work of imaginative fiction, “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” compares poorly with the original both in vividness of characterization and in force of narrative flow. To comprehend its thematic thrust and the meaning of the new Lin Ch’ung, we need to know why Mao Tun chose to write such a piece.

Mao Tun’s choice of the feud between Wang Lun and Lin Ch’ung as the center of his story offers an important clue to his theme: it is about the tension and political rivalry among rebel leaders. When the story begins, Lin Ch’ung is already on the wrong side of the law, confronting his first test of survival in a rebel community. Wang Lun’s rebuff and the encounter with Yang Chih brings on a state of crisis. Lin is deeply distressed by his discovery that leadership at Liang-shan falls short of his expectations: Wang Lun does not respect genuine merit, and he stands for no principle of justice or brotherhood. What is Lin Ch’ung to do under the circumstances? Mao Tun’s exploration of Lin Ch’ung’s situation at Liang-shan is cast in the form of interior dialogue, a probing record of Lin Ch’ung’s mind. This is a device that permits the author to bring new issues to bear on the question of internal rivalry in a closed community, without significantly altering the traditional plot.

One of the new issues raised in Lin Ch’ung’s stream of consciousness which deserves special attention is the matter of “class background (ch’u-shen).”²⁰ Mao Tun invented a class background for each of the main characters in the story. Lin Ch’ung is of peasant ancestry; Yang Chih comes from a family of generals; and Wang Lun is a member of the literati class. The concept of class does not exist in The Water Margin, with its established vantage point of classless “brotherhood.” Nevertheless, Lin Ch’ung involves his class background and class history to define the cause of the antagonism between himself and Yang Chih and Wang Lun (such antagonisms will be dramatized in more explicit and explosive form in “The Great Marsh District” and “Stone Tablet”). This is the key to the difference between the new Lin Ch’ung and the traditional military commander of The Water Margin.

All three characters in “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” have suffered reverses in their lives before they are brought together at Liang-shan. Yet the effects on these men, which are brought out in their confrontations, are quite different. Yang Chih, because of his family tradition, clings to the illusory hope of resuming his post at court. Wang Lun has been forced to abandon the career of a low-ranking literatus-administrator but retains his narrow, selfish vision in a new context by concentrating his small abilities on remaining leader of his little empire. Neither has learned from experience to reflect on the general cause of his individual suffering and displacement. Lin Ch’ung is the only one who is able to think in collective terms and to relate his personal experience to collective suffering as exemplified by the experience of his peasant ancestors.

Mao Tun has not fully developed the concept of “class” in his depiction of Lin Ch’ung’s thought. It is historically and novelistically impossible for him at this point to transform Lin Ch’ung completely into a hero of the peasant class. Nonetheless, it is by means of his collective thinking that Lin Ch’ung is able to transcend the particular circumstance of his suffering (as a military commander and not as an exploited peasant) and to begin to think of himself as a member of a class. Once class consciousness awakens, and once he feels the “latent peasant rebelliousness in his blood,” Lin Ch’ung is no longer the same person as the military commander of White Tiger Hall days and the Water Margin tradition. It is with his new consciousness as a peasant that he determines to someday avenge the wrongs done to himself and his family and it is also with his new peasant consciousness that he feels a historical (not merely a personal) hatred toward Wang Lun, who, aside from being an impostor and a usurper of the Liang-shan leadership, now also symbolizes the natural enemies of the peasants—literati as gentry and as lower government officials who collect rents and impose heavy taxes.

When Lin Ch’ung stops at the sudden thought of the White Tiger Hall, it is not entirely clear what Mao Tun intends to show. A provisional explanation is the very practical and immediate consideration of personal survival. But from Lin Ch’ung’s subsequent thoughts, we can see that group survival is also prominent in his mind (“In this eight hundred square li of the Liang-shan marshes . . . there is even greater need for a great mind”). His final resolution not to act is not a sign of personal passivity and weakness, then, but a form of positive action. Lin Ch’ung has recognized the potential of timely collective action in the future and the danger of untimely individual action. If he cannot lead the heterogeneous group of Liang-shan bandits ably and successfully himself, he can at least avoid a crisis of leadership by eschewing a rash show of individual heroism and individualistic moral indignation.

Lin Ch’ung’s change from a warrior hero in The Water Margin to a thoughtful peasant turned military leader in “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head” is fundamentally a change of political consciousness, an expansion from individual values to a collective goal as the basis of politically responsible action. Lin Ch’ung’s final forbearance in Mao Tun’s story, in contrast to his killing of Wang Lun in the traditional version, shows that he is not only capable of deeds of anger and valor, but is also able to think in terms of the larger cause and control his anger for the sake of a goal that is important not only to himself but also to his potential fellow rebels. Lin Ch’ung has become a mature revolutionary leader.

“The Great Marsh District”

“The Great Marsh District” is inspired by Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s historical account of Ch’en She’s rebellion in 209 B.C. against the tyrannical Ch’in Dynasty. Here again Mao Tun changes and rearranges the elements of the story to bring out his new theme of conflicting class interests. The original events took place not in an administrative center but in the countryside. Mao Tun surely had that in mind when he chose the Ch’en She story as a vehicle for his own thoughts on the development of the peasant movement in the countryside in 1930.²¹

Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s chapter on Ch’en She is another story of men forced outside the law by harsh social circumstances. Ch’en She was a farm laborer with dreams of glory. He and Wu Kuang were among a group of nine hundred men conscripted for garrison duty at Yü-yang, where they had to arrive by the appointed time on pain of death. On the road, escorted by Ch’in army officers, they encountered heavy rains, which made further progress impossible; obviously they could not meet the deadline. Ch’en She and Wu Kuang decided, “Since we stand to die anyway, why not die fighting for our country?” that is, as supporters of the State of Ch’u against the State of Ch’in.

To further their plan, Chen She and Wu Kuang began to fabricate supernatural portents. Conscripts eating a fish for dinner discovered in its belly a piece of silk with the inscription “Ch’en She shall be king.” Near their camp at night, the conscripts heard a fox (actually Wu Kuang imitating a fox) crying, “Ch’en She shall be king.” Having thus built up Ch’en She’s prestige and implanted awe among the ranks, Ch’en She and Wu Kuang killed the army officers and rallied the conscripts to their cause. Ch’en She had great military success but became arrogant and arbitrary. Within six months his original followers were disaffected; he was defeated in battle and killed by his own men. Nevertheless, the Grand Historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien commented, “Although Ch’en She himself died very early, the various rulers and commanders whom he set up and dispatched on expeditions eventually succeeded in overthrowing the Ch’in.”²² Clearly, Ssu-ma Ch’ien saw Ch’en She’s life and deeds as those of an individual hero; he was the planner and the leader; the rebellion was his accomplishment. Ssu-ma Ch’ien saw history as being shaped by great men. Mao Tun moves the human dynamics from the leadership level to the masses. He has kept the bare bones of the original story. “The Great Marsh District” begins with the heavy rainfall and the resulting predicament. The counterfeit omens of fish and fox are also present, designating Ch’en She as future king. But Ch’en She and Wu Kuang are no longer at center stage. The rebellion, when it occurs, is spontaneous, arising from the conscripts’ realization that they too have a right to live. Moreover, Mao Tun introduces two new elements that drastically reorient the political message of the story. One new element is the class background of the characters.²³ Mao Tun has made the two army officers escorting the conscripts descendants of generals and members of the wealthy landowning class. He has also, rather unsuccessfully, ascribed peasant origins to all of the nine hundred conscripts. This addition of class background serves to change the original struggle between Ch’en She and the Ch’in dynasty into a confrontation of forces represented by the conscripts and the officers respectively.

The second new element is class consciousness, which is projected as an identification of self-interest with the common interest of a group to which the individuals feel they belong. The conflict of interest between officers and conscripts that is brought on by the heavy rain constitutes the dramatic core of Mao Tun’s version of the uprising. It is presented in the first two sections of the story by a juxtaposition of the thoughts and aspirations of the two groups when they contemplate the consequences of failing to meet the deadline at Yü-yang. It is clear that common predicament and common destiny are not the same thing. In “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head,” we have already seen one instance of how people sharing a common fate—Wang Lun, Yang Chih, and Lin Ch’ung as outlaws—do not necessarily work toward a common destiny. “The Great Marsh District” recapitulates the same motif in even more explicit terms. The rain, the fox cries, and the missing of the deadline at Yü-yang provoke very different reactions from the officers and the conscripts.

The two officers are annoyed by the heavy rain. Unable to fulfill their assigned delivery of the conscripts to Yü-yang, they begin to consider the consequences. Members of a prestigious social class, they make no identification of interest whatever with the conscripts; their military commissions are their birthright and their class privilege. Usually the men they lead are men of their own class, landowners like themselves, “youths from their own villages, bound together by class loyalties.” But today they are commanding mere conscripts, “contemptible slaves who never before had the right to serve as soldiers, rabble with no feeling at all for their officers’ status.”²⁴

As the rain falls day after day, the officers worry about two things. First, there is the deadline, and missing it is punishable by death under military law. But being officers with powerful connections in court, they know pretty well how to avoid most punishments. Then there are the nine hundred conscripts. “Another seven days of rain, and all nine hundred of them would die of hunger. But before that happened, was there anything the conscripts would not dare to do when they found themselves threatened with starvation?”²⁵ The rumors about Ch’en She, the portentous piece of silk, and the fox cries are much less threatening. The officers recognize in Ch’en She a handsome figure for a peasant, and possibly a good fighter too, but “the greater danger,” to their minds, “lay not in Ch’en She but in the rain,” and in what action the rain was likely to provoke from the doomed conscripts.

Mao Tun now turns to the class background and the thoughts and fears of the nine hundred. The conscripts are not at all happy about the heavy rain. On the one hand, they are not enthusiastic about going to Yü-yang:

The conscripts originally had been peasants in the six kingdoms conquered by the state of Ch’in. . . . They were slaves now, conscripts who had to plunder for the rich landowners the ‘free citizens’ of the powerful state of Ch’in. Weren’t they going to Yü-yang to protect these free citizens who held them in such contempt, to win booty for rich landowners like their officers? And weren’t they going to put their poor men’s bones in mortal combat against the Hsiung-nu—nomads moving south in search of pastures—in order to turn them into slaves like themselves?²⁶

On the other hand, they know that if they do not get to Yü-yang in time, death will be their lot. Caught in this dilemma, the conscripts for the first time begin to think about their own position and choices.

They have heard the weird cries of the fox in the night, and they knew about the inscribed strip of silk found in the belly of the fish. Like their officers, the conscripts are not overimpressed by these supernatural omens:

. . . these things the nine hundred conscripts considered uncanny. But that was as far as their ideas went. They had had more than their share of strife because this one or that one had wanted to be king. Their only desire was to be free again.²⁷

But there is another prophecy which the conscripts are more interested in:

Hadn’t a stone fallen from the sky two years before inscribed with these words: “When the First Emperor dies, the land will be divided”? And hadn’t the wizard who lives east of Hua Mountain and drives a chariot with a white horse predicted, “The Dragon Emperor will die next year”? Well, the First Emperor of Ch’in had died and been succeeded by the Second. Now was the time to realize the part of the prophecy about dividing the land.²⁸

Land, unquestionably, has a fundamentally different kind of appeal to peasants than does fighting for another king. In the following description of the conscripts’ thought, Mao Tun defines what he understands to be the social and moral basis of mass uprising.

It seemed to the nine hundred conscripts that the only thing worth risking their lives for was the joy of planting their own land. They were not interested in ‘Emperor Ch’en She.’ If they had to go on having emperors, they wanted one who would be different from the Old Emperor, one who would give them land of their own to till.²⁹

It is the simple and spontaneous desire of the peasants to own their own land and partake freely of the joy of farming that is the decisive motive in bringing them to participate in an uprising. People may sometimes be rallied to action by their fear and hatred of dark exploitative forces, and they may sometimes be rallied by their natural admiration of heroic leaders. But for the common masses, it is the positive hope for a better ordinary life of labor with the assurance of their daily needs being met that has the broadest appeal and the greatest sustaining power after the first and easily dissipated wave of hatred and admiration. Mao Tun has shown in “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head,” and is going to show again in “Stone Tablet,” that without the masses at the base, without their weight behind the momentum, and without their interest in the collective goal, all historical rebellions are no more than a game of intrigue, played for the sake of individual interests by would-be kings posing as popular heroes. This, not Ch’en She’s heroism and defeat as in Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s Records, is the new political message of “Great Marsh District.”

The outcome of “The Great Marsh District” is predictable. The officers, realizing that “they could not stand with folded hands . . . and wait for the hatred of the slaves to rise and throw them into the flood,” decide to do away with the nine hundred before it is too late. The conscripts, in their simple way, also conclude that “If we stay here, we’ll starve. If we get to Yü-yang late, we’ll die too. But if we act together we will all live.”³⁰ In the climactic scene of physical confrontation, the officers are killed by the representative hero of the peasants, Wu Kuang. The better known traditional hero, Ch’en She, is not in the picture as the story ends on a resounding note of hope for the millions like the nine hundred: “The Emperor is dead! The land will be divided!” The story of Ch’en She the leader has turned into a story of his peasant followers.

“Stone Tablet”

The last of the historical tales again takes as its point of departure a section of The Water Margin. Mao Tun adapts from chapter 39 and chapter 71 of the novel. Chapter 39 tells about a legal clerk, Sung Chiang, nicknamed Timely Rain because of his ready assistance to any outlaw in bad straits, and the subversive verse he once in drunkenness scribbles on the wall of a wine shop and as a consequence is arrested and jailed. Wu Yung, chief adviser and second in command of the Liang-shan bandits, devises a plan to rescue him. By rather devious means, Wu recruits two skilled craftsmen, the master seal carver Chin Ta-chien and the calligrapher Hsiao Jang, who, before Wu Yung lures them to Liang-shan, are both solid citizens in town. As part of the plan to get Sung Chiang out of jail, they forge a letter with an official seal. But the forgeries are detected, the plan falls through, and Sung Chiang, at the end of the chapter, is in even worse trouble because of Wu Yung’s effort.

Later, however, Sung Chiang is rescued from execution and becomes the bandits’ leader. In chapter 71, an epilogue to the seventy-chapter version of The Water Margin, the ground is opened up by a thunderbolt from Heaven and a stone tablet is found. On it are inscribed the names of the hundred and eight leading Liang-shan bandits in the hierarchical order of the stars with which they are associated in Heaven. Sung Chiang’s name is at the head of the list as a sign of the Mandate of Heaven.

Mao Tun borrows the two characters Hsiao Jang and Chin Ta-chien and fragments of their deeds from chapter 39 and throws them together with the stone tablet story from chapter 71 The way he does it totally undermines “Heaven’s will,” which in the original is the justification for power among rebel leaders. The narrative content—a dialogue between Chin and Hsiao on the subject of political intrigue and morality—is entirely Mao Tun’s creation. What links his tale to the original is that he uses a situation of bandit leaders in conspiracy as the point of departure for his own story.

At the beginning of “Stone Tablet,” Chin Ta-chien is carving a stone tablet as Hsiao Jang looks on. As the scene develops, we learn from their conversation that the tablet is the instrument of a secret scheme concocted by chief adviser Wu Yung.³¹ Evidently there has been serious disagreement among different factions of the bandits over who should be their paramount leader. The controversy threatens to destroy the unity of the whole group and thus jeopardize its survival. The tablet will be “discovered” in the ground—a fabricated message from Heaven like the fox cries in the Ch’en She story—and is intended to settle peacefully the hierarchy of rank among the bandit leaders of Liang-shan.

As Chin carves, he chuckles to himself, and Hsiao Jang begins to worry about Chin’s attitude toward his task. Wishing to be sure of Chin’s total commitment to the project, Hsiao Jang repeatedly insists upon its importance and the need for secrecy. Chin says nothing. In fact, Hsiao is worried about whether this stratagem violates the principle of justice and equality among brothers and smacks of dishonest intrigue. To his mind, the ranking of brothers, even in the interest of group discipline, should be put to an open vote. But now that the vote is out of the question, Hsiao supports Wu Yung’s scheme and wishes to be sure of Chin’s feelings on the subject, and so he asks Chin’s opinion on the relative merits and faults of their superiors. Chin expresses a thought that has long been in his mind: “People tend to go in groups. Those close to Squire Lu would naturally favor Lu.” Hsiao quickly corrects him, saying, “No, no! Only those from the same class background as Squire Lu hold him in higher esteem.”³² Chin looked bewildered, and so Hsiao patiently analyzes for him the two main groups of bandits at Liang-shan in terms of their backgrounds and functions: those who come from the nonpropertied class and had lived by mean and disreputable professions, and those who come from a background of wealth and power and had occupied high and influential positions. Among the former group, Hsiao mentions various shiftless characters, lakeside thieves, a cutthroat innkeeper, and an itinerant Taoist; among the latter group he mentions two former government generals and Squire Lu himself, who had at first opposed the gathering of the bandits at Liang-shan and then himself “driven” to join them.

Having heard Hsiao’s analysis, Chin is still noncommittal about adviser Wu’s scheme. Hsiao now tries to justify it in terms of “carrying out the way of Heaven” and “demonstrating the will of Heaven.” His skepticism aroused, Chin throws a question back at Hsiao: “Leaving aside all the other questions, just let me ask you this: To what group do we belong?”³³ Hsiao winces at Chin’s abruptness. He has no ready answer. He cannot quite bring himself to endorse brother Sung Chiang’s group, even though he is caught up in the plan for a forged mandate. Seeing Hsiao’s embarrassment, Chin bursts out laughing and answers his own question, saying that he himself belongs to no group. He follows orders and does what is asked of him, not concerning himself with whose will he is carrying out, be it that of Heaven, Earth, or Man. If there is anything to be said about the “Liang-shan way,” then it is Chin Ta-chien’s studied opinion that self-interest is supreme: “You may call it ‘class background’ if you like. But to me, that [self-interest] is the ‘Way of Heaven’ we are trying to practice here.”³⁴

“Stone Tablet” is probably the wittiest of Mao Tun’s three historical tales. In it, Mao Tun plays with the method of class analysis with great irony. The stone tablet in the novel, as we know, functions as the ultimate sanction by Heaven of the earthly order of the hundred and eight principal Liang-shan brothers. But “Stone Tablet” deliberately subverts the traditional tale and discloses the human reality behind the myths of bandit leadership. The lucid, dispassionate, and almost sarcastic tone of the dialogue strongly suggest that Mao Tun has finally reconciled himself to the fact that intrigue is an inevitable part of high rebel politics. The moral worth of a rebel group is not to be judged by its political intrigue and intrigue should not be grounds for disparaging a rebel group with a just cause. It is not for an intellectual (like Chin Ta-chien or Hsiao Jang, or himself), whose primary value lies in his professional skill, to question which leader’s will he is serving or in what intrigue he is participating. If intrigue in the leadership helps to unify contending groups, and thereby advances the rebel cause, no one should withhold his support because of personal misgivings. When called upon, one may serve the cause unquestioningly, like Chin Ta-chien; or one may go even further, like Hsiao Jang, and try to persuade others to serve, despite one’s own reservations.

From Heroics to the Quotidian

The three historical tales are not among Mao Tun’s major fictional works. But it was in these three short pieces that Mao Tun first dramatized the distinction between individual heroism and class interests, and between individual morality and collective goals.

He has settled his quarrel with the revolutionary movement in the final affirmation of “The Great Marsh District.” He has decided that the welfare of the oppressed masses, of which the poor peasants are the majority in China, is ultimately the collective goal of all dedicated rebels, be they leaders or followers. Feuds and intrigues among leaders are common features of any political body. It is not always possible to judge the justice of the cause of a body by the morality of its leadership and the righteousness of its means. But when such a decision must be made, Mao Tun has shown in the interplay between his tales and their historical sources what the choices are and on what grounds they should be based.

After the three historical pieces Mao Tun wrote the short novels The Road and In Company of Three as his final examinations of the problem of factional struggle. Subsequently he turned his attention to the daily life of plain people, beginning with sketches and short stories of people who reside outside the isntellectual realm—hoodlums, pirates, vagabonds, and gangsterlike local bullies.³⁵

In December 1932, Mao Tun wrote in “In Retrospect”:

I am confident that . . . I will never dare to forget the social significance of literature. . . . This is no longer a time when fiction is to be treated as something for amusement. Therefore, a fiction writer needs not only broad life experience; he must also have a disciplined mind that is capable of analyzing complex social phenomena. Especially in our rapidly changing society, those who have not seriously studied social science [Marxism] generally cannot correctly analyze them. What society urgently demands from our writers is precisely a correct and purposeful reflection of those social phenomena.³⁶

Mao Tun in the early 1930s clearly recognized the economic nature of politics. To him revolutionary literature is no longer a realm where things are measured by moral standards determined by personal emotions or inherited from the past. Politics is not ethics. Success in political matters generally comes from a proper balancing of economic interests, not merely from people who can be martyrs for absolute moral good and evil. Martyrs who do not understand the relationship of politics to economic interests have no place in political struggles. In contemporary China, they can at most become fictional legendary figures,³⁷ or, worse, a radical in words who is really a romantic stereotype. In humanistic terms, they are representatives of a historical epoch, the crystallized images of certain social phenomena in a dated time. They are dramatic characters on the way to revolution, but not revolutionaries.

There were no supermen among those deeply involved in the Chinese revolution up to the beginning of the 1930s. At least Mao Tun saw no superman. They were the Devil’s Clique, the Scholar’s Clique, and the overbearing and corrupt school administrator Dean Thorn (The Road), all of them Mao Tun’s allegorical representations of the forever feuding factions within the CCP.³⁸

The creative work of Mao Tun in the 1930s no longer depicts the political action and moral consciousness of heroes. As he turns from “students” and would-be revolutionaries to tradition-bound and “new” women, and from heroes old and remade to the life experiences of workers, peasants, and petty bourgeois, along with the economic factors that underlie their behavior and ethics, Mao Tun has moved from politics to society to economic, from ideals to reality to mass-as-center. There is a clear record of this change in his creative work, essays, and literary criticism of 1932 to 1942.

This second period of his creative life is soundly based on that first creative flow of hope-despair-new hope, the years 1927-1930 in the life of a young, growing writer. Indeed, the second period is so closely connected to the first that it may not be presumptuous to say that the first period, with which we have been concerned in this book, ends with a resolution of many of the contradictions that the pen name implies, and an even more important recognition that some contradictions are part of life, perhaps especially radical life. Some may even be desirable as well as permanent. The pen name assumed in confusion, elation, and despair will not be discarded during a long life that saw both oppression and triumph. The name Mao Tun still identifies the author of the last document, the Memoirs, written at the end of his life, when he was fully recognized as one of the enduring figures of modern Chinese literature.

Realism And Alliegory In The Ealy Fiction Of Mao Tun