1. From Shen Yen-ping to Mao Tun:
Literature-Politics-Literature

1. Mingpao Monthly 119 (Hongkong, November 1975), pp. 10–11. Paul Bady, “Should Chinese People be Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature?” Translated by Ho Ch’i. The list of names reads:

2. Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clark (eds.), Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism 1921–1965, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 759–764.

According to Mao Tun’s “Memoirs VI,” Source Materials on the History of the New Literature (January 1980), Mao Tun met Mao Tse-tung for the first time on August 5, 1923, when the latter attended the sixth meeting of the Executive Committee of the Greater Shanghai Region as a delegate from the CCP Central Committee. In 1924, when the Shanghai Executive Department of the reorganized and expanded KMT was formed, Mao Tse-tung became secretary of its Organization Department. This means that the two of them had already worked together in Shanghai in 1923–24 in propaganda and organizing work.

3. A fuller autobiography, entitled Roads I Have Traveled, which does start with Mao Tun’s ancestry and childhood and includes a whole chapter on his marriage, was published in Hong Kong by the Joint Publishing Company in August 1981. Why the book was published in Hongkong and not by the People’s Literature Press in Peking, which has been publishing all of Mao Tun’s official editions, is a fascinating new puzzle for students of the politics of publication in China. To me it indicates that the authorities in China felt some urgency in getting the official version of Mao Tun’s life and works during the 1920s on the public record in China, before Western research outruns what is being done at home.

Mao Tun, Wo tzou-kuo ti tao-lu (Roads I Have Traveled) (Hongkong, Joint Publishing Co., 1981).

4. K’ung Ch’ang (pseudonym), “Biography of Hauptmann,” “Hauptmann’s Naturalistic Writing,” and “Hauptmann’s Symbolist Writing.” All three articles were published in Short Story Monthly 13.6 (June 1922), a month before Mao Tun’s famous article, “Naturalism and Modern Chinese Fiction.”

5. Matsui Hiromitsu (ed.), Collection of Mao Tun’s Critical Essays (Mao Tun p’ing-lun chi), 5 vols., and A Bibliographical Supplement to Mao Tun’s Critical Essays (Tokyo, 1957–1966).

Professor Hiromitsu’s bibliographical effort continues with A Bibliography of Mao Tun’s Creative Writing, Critical Essays and Prose Works (Tokyo, 1974–76) of which only the first two volumes have appeared.

6. Mao Tun, “Memoirs I” (Hongkong, May 1979), pp. 8–9.

7. Mao Tun, “Memoirs II,” Source Materials (Hongkong, August 1979), p. 52.

8. Ibid., pp. 52–53.

9. Mao Tun, “Chi-chü chiu-hua” (“Remarks on the Past”), Yin-hsiang, kan-hsiang, hui-i (Reflections and Reminiscences) (Shanghai, 1936), pp. 1–5.

10. Mao Tun, “Memoirs II.” For the Saturday School of popular literature, also known as the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School, see Perry Link’s excellent Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

11. Ibid.

12. Mao Tun, Midnight (abridged), translated by Hsu Meng-hsiung (Peking, Foreign Language Press, 1957).

In the West, C. T. Hsia’s chapter on Mao Tun illustrates the standard view held of Midnight outside of China. See C. T. Hsia, “Mao Tun,” A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) pp. 155–160.

In China, the high evaluation of Midnight began with the short essay by Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, “Tzu-yeh ho kuo-huo-nien” (“Midnight and the Year for Chinese Native Goods”), Collected Works of Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, vol. 2, pp. 435–438. Ch’ü’s praise for Midnight was faithfully echoed by most leftist critics in the 1930s and reiterated in both Yeh Tzu-ming’s Mao Tun ssu-shih-nien te wen-hsüeh-tao-lu (On Mao Tun’s Forty Years Literary Road) (Shanghai, Shanghai Wen-i-ch’u-panshe, 1959) and Shao Po-chou’s Mao Tun te wen-hsueh tao-lu (Mao Tun’s Literary Road) (Ch’ang-chiang-wen-i ch’u-pan-shu, 1959), pp. 73–103.

Recently Yüeh Tai-yün of Peking University again expressed the opinion that Midnight is a greater work than Eclipse in her “Shih ho Tzu-yeh te pi-chiao fen-hsi” (“A Comparative Analysis of Erosion and Midnight”) (Wen-hsüeh p’ing-lun [Journal of Literary Criticism]) 1981.1, pp. 110–120.

The only critic who differed in his critical appraisal of Midnight, as far as I know, is Chu Tzu-ch’ing. In his short essay “On Tzu-yeh,” Literature Quarterly (Wen-hsüeh chi-k’an) II (April 1934), pp. 405–498, he wrote:

Chu Tzu-ch’ing obviously did not place a well-researched documentary novel above the achievement of one that is deeply felt by the author.

Mao Tun’s Memoirs also by its discussion of Eclipse attests though not in so many words to the fact that his experience as a revolutionary and a CCP member is more central and overwhelming than his two-month observation of the Shanghai stock market. By contrast Midnight is dealt with in the installment of Memoirs 1981.4 (November 1981) which was published posthumously (#13, in HWHSL). This chapter goes on at great length about the “circumstances” surrounding the writing of Midnight. The attention devoted to this work is unprecedented, totally overshadowing Mao Tun’s own earlier discussion of Eclipse. Since the chapter was published posthumously and its rather unwieldy format differs so strikingly from the chapters published in Mao Tun’s lifetime, it is not clear to me how much of the writing was by Mao Tun himself or how much he could have revised the rambling emphasis on Midnight before publication. The broad coverage of his revolutionary experiences in the “Memoirs” is not evidence to support the argument that Eclipse is a greater novel, but it points out that to Mao Tun it is a more important novel than Midnight in his early fiction.

13. Other stories include “Spring Silkworms” (1932), “Autumn Harvest” (1933), and “Lin’s Store,” which are all widely anthologized. “Lin’s Store” was made into a movie in the 1950s. See Mao Tun, Spring Silkworms and Other Stories, translated by Sidney Shapiro (Peking, Foreign Language Press, 1956).

14. Chou Erh-fu, “When Critically Ill: In Memory of Comrade Mao Tun,” Shou-huo (Harvest Bimonthly) 1981.3 (May 1981), pp. 86–92. See especially p.90. Chou Erh-fu is himself a novelist. His own four-volume Shanghai ti tsao-ch’en (Morning in Shanghai), a 1,700,000 word novel about the three-anti and five-anti campaigns, was published in its entirety only in 1983.

15. In his recent article, Yeh Tzu-ming listed five possible birth dates and two possible birthplaces for Mao Tun. Since the year of his birth is undisputed, I am not trying to be more specific than that.

Yeh Tzu-ming, “A Few Questions Concerning the Biography of Mao Tun,” Wen-hsüeh p’ing-lun ts’ung-k’an (Collected Essays on Literary Criticism) 8, Special Issue on Modern Chinese Literature (Peking, 1981).

This part of chapter 1 generally follows the middle part of my article, “Mao Tun and the Use of Political Allegory in Fiction: A Case Study of His ‘Autumn in Kuling’,” in Merle Goldman (ed.), Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1977). There are some minor changes, and information that has become available with the publication of Mao Tun’s “Memoirs” is incorporated.

16. Mao Tun, “Memoirs I,” Source Materials 1979.1 (Hongkong, May 1979), pp. 1–2. A fuller account of his years at Peking University can be found in Roads I Have Traveled, pp. 79–88; the section on the first years at the Shanghai Commercial Press is the same.

17. According to the “Memoirs,” his contact with Marxism had already begun before the arrival of Ch’en. However, it was only after his acquaintance with Ch’en Tu-hsiu that he began to translate what had been an intellectual and patriotic interest in Marxism into concrete action. See “Memoirs IV,” Source Materials 1980.1 (Hongkong, February 1980), pp. 1–2.

18. According to Mao Tun’s “Memoirs IV,” ibid., the Shanghai Communist Party nucleus (Kung-ch’an-chu-i hsiao-tsu) and the Marxist Study Group (Mak’e-ssu-chu-i yen-chiu-hui) were founded in May 1920 by Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Li Han-chün, Li Ta, Ch’en Wang-tao (translator of the Communist Manifesto), Chang Tung-sun, and Tai Chi-t’ao. Mao Tun joined the party nucleus sometime between February and March of 1921, after being recommended by Li Han-chün.

In “Memoirs VI,” Source Materials 1980.1 (Peking, February 1980) Mao Tun suggested a different date for his joining the Party nucleus. There he said that in the winter of 1920, an underground publication of the Shanghai Communist Party nucleus called Kung-ch’an-tang (yüeh-k’an) (Communist Party Monthly) was published under the editorship of Li Ta. It introduced Communist theory and practice, relayed news of the Comintern and informed readers of the workers’ movement in the Soviet Union and other countries. The contributors, Mao Tun said, were all exclusively “members” of the Shanghai Party nucleus. Mao Tun was one of the contributors in December 1920, hence we can infer that he was a member of the nucleus by December 1920.

19. Mao Tun, Roads I Have Traveled, p. 123.

20. Ibid., pp. 150–151.

21. Mao Tun, “Wo-ti-hsiao-chuan” (“A Brief Autobiography”), Mao Tun hsüan-chi (Selected Works of Mao Tun) (Shanghai, 1940), p. 265.

22. Mao Tun, “Memoirs VI,” pp. 165–168. Also, Klein and Clark, op. cit., pp. 760–761.

23. Mao Tun, “Memoirs IV,” 1980.1 (Hongkong, February 1980), pp. 1–2.

24. Chang Kuo-t’ao, Wo-ti-hui-i (Memoirs), 3 vols. (Hongkong, 1971). See vol. 1, p. 97.

In “Memoirs IV,” Mao Tun did not mention precisely when he joined the CCP. See “Memoirs IV,” p.4. Nor did he supply as much detail about the circumstances surrounding the founding of the CCP itself as Chang Kuo-t’ao did in his Memoirs. The founding of the CCP was implied, however, when Mao Tun wrote, “The First Congress (I-ta) elected Ch’en Tu-hsiu as the Secretary General but Ch’en Tu-hsiu was at the time in Canton hence was not present at the First Congress” (p. 5).

When we compare Mao Tun’s “Memoirs” (1979–1982) to Chang Kuo-t’ao’s Memoirs (1968–1971) for information about this period of 1921–1930, we find that they differ in two essential aspects: (1) Mao Tun provides more information about his own political activities than about the CCP’s activities as a whole, whereas Chang Kuo-t’ao treats the latter at such length that they sometimes overshadow his own; (2) there is a conspicuous absence of any mention of the Comintern’s role in any aspect of the CCP movement in Mao Tun’s “Memoirs” (beyond the mention of Marin’s name), whereas Chang Kuo-t’ao continually berated the Comintern for interfering in and imposing its will on the CCP’s policies. Chang’s Memoirs is more useful to the present study for the light it sheds on the subject and substance of Mao Tun’s early fiction, which deals with the Chinese Communist movement and not his part in it. What Mao Tun tells us in his “Memoirs” that he himself was doing is less directly relevant.

25. Roads I Have Traveled, pp. 150–154 and 195ff. “Memoirs, IV, VI, IX, XII–XV,” Klein and Clark, Dictionary II, pp. 757–759.

26. The impression of Mao Tun’s being prudent derives from the comments by Ch’en Pi-lan in an interview published in 1967. See A. Fairen, “The Literary Policy of Mao Tse-tung and the Cultural Revolution” (Mao Tse-tung ti wen-i-chen-ch’e chi wen-hua-ko-ming,” tr. Kuo Hsiung, Mingpao Monthly 21 (Hongkong, September 1967), pp. 22–27. Ch’en Pi-lan joined the Chinese Communist Party in October 1922 and was a leader of the women’s movement in the 1920s. She seems to have known Mao Tun well, though he does not mention her in his “Memoirs.”

Chang Kuo-t’ao shows a different facet of Mao Tun’s character when he remarks that in 1922 Mao Tun supported Ch’en Wang-tao in the latter’s protest against a Party resolution to increase discipline and ideological indoctrination. See Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs, I, p. 217.

27. Ch’en Pi-lan, for instance, mentioned in the interview with A. Farien (see n. 26) that she had known Mao Tun well since the early 1920s. She and Ting Ling were roomates at Shanghai University in 1923–1924 when Mao Tun was teaching Marxism, fiction, and possibly also English there. Teng Yin-ch’ao at that time was the Chairman of the Committee for the Women’s Movement. Ch’en Pi-lan, Ting Ling, and K’ung Te-chih (Mao Tun’s wife) were all members of the Committee. Mao Tun knew them all since he and they worked for the May Thirtieth Movement. For Mao Tun’s own account of his activities and his involvement with the women’s movement, see his “Memoirs VI,” pp. 165–183.

28. Roads I Have Travelled, p. 201. Also “Memoirs VI,” pp. 165–166.

29. Roads I Have Travelled, pp. 207–213. Also “Memoirs VI,” pp. 168ff.

30. A quick check of the issues of Short Story Monthly shows a near blank of contributions from Mao Tun in the second half of 1925. The same is true for 1926 and for the first eight issues of 1927.

31. Mao Tun, “Tu Ni Huan-Chih” (“On Reading Ni Huan-chih”), Wen-hsüeh chou-pao (Literature Weekly) (WHCP) 8.20 (May 1929). Collected in Collection of Mao Tun’s Critical Works, vol. 1, pp. 64–80.

Chang Kuo-t’ao did not mention Mao Tun in his account of the May Thirtieth Movement in his Memoirs, but Mao Tun provides a most detailed eyewitness account in his “Memoirs VII,” Source Materials 1980.2 (May 1980), pp. 7–9. He also goes into great detail about the strike at the Commercial Press which he organized after the May Thirtieth Incident.

32. “On Reading Ni Huan-chih” p.10.

From Mao Tun’s “Memoirs VII,” we learn that after the May Thirtieth Incident, he was involved in mobilizing the teachers to join protesting students in the “Save-the-nation” movement. He gave lectures in the streets. Since most of the Shanghai newspapers shied away from publishing news about the Incident, the CCP in June 1925 sponsored two new publications—the “Je-hsüeh jih-pao” (“Hot-Blooded Daily”), with Ch’u Ch’iu-po as its editor, and Kung-li jih-pao (Justice Daily), privately funded by the Commercial Press. Mao Tun probably wrote for these papers to protest and to publicize the Incident. Funding problems caused the Justice Daily to close on June 24. After that, he became involved in the labor strike at the Commercial Press. See “Memoirs VII,” pp. 9–12, also Roads I Have Travelled, pp. 231–241.

Kuo Mo-jo and Ch’eng Fang-wu were not involved in these activities.

33. The announced reason for the decision was that Mao Tun wanted to devote more time to social movements. But pressure from the board of directors of the Commercial Press must have contributed to it; they had been criticized for Mao Tun’s political outspokenness. See Yeh Tzu-ming, Lun Mao Tun Ssu-Shi-Nien ti Wen-Hsüeh Tao-Lu (On Mao Tun’s Forty-Year Literary Road) (Shanghai, 1959), p. 13.

According to Mao Tun’s “Memoirs IV, VI,” his resignation from the editorship of Short Story Monthly was caused primarily by his fight with the Saturday School. See especially “Memoirs IV,” pp. 11–15, and “Memoirs VI,” p. 171.

34. Yeh Tzu-ming, op. cit., p. 39.

“On Proletarian Literature,” WHCP 172, 173, 175, 196 (May 10, 17, 31, October 25, 1929). I was able to obtain a copy of this long article in the spring of 1982, through the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences at Peking. My summary of the article differs from the one that appears in Yeh Tzu-ming’s book on pp. 39–41.

In Part 1, Mao Tun surveys the rise of proletarian literature, he distinguishes proletarian literature from the “people’s literature” of Romain Rolland on the basis of its “class” concept. He names Gorky as the only writer who was able to write about the proletariat with authenticity. He lists about half a page of other self-proclaimed proletarian writers whose works did not yet approach the standard of art.

In Part 2, Mao Tun presents a formula for conditions necessary for proletarian literature: new, lively images + the author’s creative selectivity + selections imposed by the society in which the literature belongs = literature and art. (The formula greatly resembles what Filippo Tommaso Marinetti has in his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (May 11, 1912). See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. By R. W. Flint (New York, 1971) p. 85: “To accentuate certain movements and indicate their directions, mathematical symbols will be used: + - × : = the musical symbols.”

In Part 3, Mao Tun discusses the domain (fan-ts’ou) of proletarian literature. It is first of all not “peasant literature.” “Peasant literature” describes only the hardships of peasant life, uninformed by the proletarian spirit. Peasants are selfish, clan-oriented, and superstitious. Because of their economic life and mode of production, they do not have class consciousness (chieh-chi i-shih). They are nostalgic about plundering of the romantic Robin Hood type, unorganized, primitive revolutionary action which is insufficient to uproot the capitalist class. As we shall see in chapter 7, this point bears cogently on Mao Tun’s reinterpretation of the Water Margin tradition of banditry in his three historical tales. It is a pity that anthologies which include “Spring Silkworms” and “Autumn Harvest” tends to omit “Winter Ruins,” an integral part of Mao Tun’s “trilogy.” The former two describe exactly what Mao Tun saw in “peasant literature”—the hardships of peasant life, uninformed by the proletarian spirit, and peasants who are selfish, clan-oriented, and superstitious. “Winter Ruins” depicts the first awakening of peasants’ “class consciousness” in a peasant riot. Unfortunately, the true significance of the rioting scene is poorly understood, and the scene is generally regarded as an uncomplimentary picture of the peasant spirit.

Nor is proletarian literature the same as revolutionary literature. Revolutionary literature rebels against the past and is in essence destructive. The proletariat as a class seeks freedom, growth, and the realization of its historical mission. Physical force is its means to peace, not its goal. Much post-October Revolution poetry celebrates the heroic killing of its enemies by the Red Army. This cannot be considered mainstream proletarian literature. (Here we anticipate the Futuristic ode to blind destruction in Ch’iang Wei-li’s speech toward the end of Disillusionment, an imaginative rendition of this position. See chapter 3 in this volume.

Furthermore, proletarian literature is not identical with socialist literature. Verhaeren’s play Daylight, for example, in celebrating the success of a workers’ strike overemphasizes the importance of the leader and hence is lacking in the collective spirit that characterizes true proletarian literature.

This part ends with three necessary conditions for proletarian literature: (1) it lacks the peasant’s clan-oriented thinking and religiosity; (2) it lacks the soldier’s hostility toward individual capitalists; (3) it lacks the intellectual’s individualistic liberalism.

Part 4 discusses the content of proletarian literature. Mao Tun succinctly points out that proletarian literature should neither limit itself to take material from toilers’ lives nor content itself with the role of agent provocateur. Class struggle does not mean vilification of capitalists and the bourgeoisie. Class struggle aims to uproot the exploitive system and those interest groups that guard this system, not any one individual. Agitation devoid of reality does not make literature.

In Part 5, Mao Tun discusses the artistic form of proletarian literature. Mao Tun considers artistic form more than the subject matter to be tradition-bound. There can be no new art form overnight. If there is, it is not a genuine art form but a pathological phenomenon. (Italian and Soviet Futurism are named here as an example.)

“On Proletarian Literature” contains much of the ideological material that in 1927–1928 gave rise to the polemics between Mao Tun and Lu Hsün on the one side and members of the Creation Society and the Sun Society on the other. Aside from the controversial issues of what constitutes orthodox revolutionary literature and what is authentic proletarian literature, we can see here how Mao Tun’s analytical mind works on the subject of literary theory and criticism to digest and assimilate it. “On Proletarian Literature” shows that Mao Tun was influenced by other than the purely Marxist literary theory that critics in China today are preoccupied with.

35. Compare the events narrated in “Remarks on the Past” with Mao Tun’s “Memoirs VIII,” Source Materials 1980.3 (Peking, August 1980) pp. 1ff.

36. “Hsing-shih” (“Awakened Lion”) was also the title of a periodical being published in 1926, which was very much to the right politically and whose main thesis was national revolution by the KMT (as against Communist-Socialist revolution).

In Mao Tun’s “Memoirs VIII,” we learn that Mao Tun was one of the five delegates elected by the Shanghai Communist Party Congress at the end of December 1925 to attend the Second National Congress of the KMT in Canton. The ship they boarded was the “Awakened Lion” (p. 1). At the Second National Party Congress, the CCP and its supporters scored a victory. The extreme right-wing Hsishan group was expelled from the KMT. The Congress also reiterated its support for the three policies of the late Sun Yat-sen: (1) alliance with Soviet Russia, (2) admittance of CCP members into the KMT, and (3) promotion of the labor and peasant movements.

37. Italics added.

38. For a detailed account of the duties and activities of a Party propagandist, see Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ting How, Documents on Communism, Nationalism, and Soviet Advisers in China 1918–1927 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 97–98. And also, Jane L. Price, Cadres Commanders and Commissars: The Training of the Chinese Communist 1920–45 (Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1976).

For Mao Tun’s account of his duties and activities as a Party propagandist, see his “Memoirs VIII,” pp. 3–4.

39. For training programs in the Party schools and activities of Party cells, see Wilbur and How, op. cit., pp. 97–98. See also Mao Tun, “Memoirs IV-VIII,” passim.

40. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, “Mao Tun yü Hsien-shih” (“Mao Tun and Reality,” renamed from “Returning from Tokyo to Kuling”), Hsien-tai Chung-kuo Wen-hsüeh Tso-chia (Contemporary Chinese Literary Writers), vol. 2 (Shanghai, 1930), p. 121.

In Chapter 5 of Disillusionment, a group of students in S University calls a meeting to discuss and pass a resolution on a triangle love relationship among three classmates. See the discussion of the political allegory in that scene in Chapter 3 of this book.

41. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, op. cit., pp. 153–154:

42. Mao Tun, Mao Tun hsüan-chi (Selected Works of Mao Tun) (Peking, 1951), p. 7.

Note that this is not the same Selected Works of Mao Tun as in note 21 above. This volume was published by K’ai-ming-shu-tien in Peking and is a title in the Library of Selections from New Literature (Hsin-wen-hsüeh hsüeh-chi), while the 1940 Selected Works of Mao Tun was published by Wan-hsiang-shu-wo in Shanghai and is a title in the Library of Contemporary Creative Writings (Hsien-tai Ch’uang-tso wen-k’u). The latter shows less political bias in its selections than the former.

43. The correlation between history and fiction finds further support in his later reminiscences about September-October 1928.

44. Mao Tun, “From Kuling to Tokyo.” Mao Tun’s own account of the events of 1927–1928 in his “Memoirs IX,” Source Materials 1980.4 (Peking, November 1980), pp. 1–15, and his own discussion of Eclipse in “Memoirs X” Source Materials 1981.1 (Peking, February 1981), pp. 1–10, however, are curiously devoid of passion. In old age he seemed to prefer keeping his distance from events that had once reduced him to despondency.

45. Wu T’ien-wei, “Chiang Kai-shek’s March Twentieth Coup d’Etat of 1926,” Journal of Asian Studies 27.3 (May 1968) pp. 585–602.

In his “Postscript to the New Edition of Eclipse,” Mao Tun Wen-chi, vol. 1 (Peking, 1958), Mao Tun also pointed to Chiang Kai-shek as the principal cause of the failure of the Great Revolution: “The Great Revolution of 1927 was frustrated by Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist treason.”

Mao Tun was in Canton at the time of the Chungshan Gunboat Incident. He gave a rather detailed account of the events of those days in his “Memoirs VIII,” Source Materials 1980.3 (Peking, August 1980), pp. 1–14. Mao Tse-tung was very prominent in Mao Tun’s account even though he did not seem to have much to do with the movements of the Gunboat.

46. For discussion of the Comintern-CCP relationship in the 1920s, see Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs; Benjamin Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1951); Robert C. North, Chinese Communism (New York, World University Library Paperback, 1966); Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of Chinese Revolution, Second Revised Edition (New York, Atheneum Paperback, 1968).

Books in Chinese include Li Yün-han, Ts’ung jung-kung tao ch’ing-tang (From Admission of the CCP to the Purge of the CCP) (Taipei, 1966); Chiang Yung-chin, Pao Lo-t’ing yü Wuhan chen-ch’üan (Borodin and the Wuhan Regime) (Taipei, 1963).

47. Mao Tun, “Kuling chih-ch’iu” (“Autumn in Kuling”) Wen-hsüeh (Literature) 3, 5, 6 (September, November, December 1933), pp. 371–374; 752–761; 922–925.

2. “Autumn in Kuling”: From Life to Fiction

1. The story was later added to a collection of Mao Tun’s short stories bearing the title Kuling chih-ch’iu (Autumn in Kuling) (Shanghai, 1975), pp. 1–65. I have translated this text for use in this chapter.

In his “Postscript to Volume Eight,” Mao Tun wen-chi (Collected Works of Mao Tun) (Peking, 1959), Mao Tun wrote:

Thus the official edition, the Collected Works, still omits the story. It seems that Mao Tun’s difficulties with censorship did not end in 1949.

2. Mao Tun, Autumn in Kuling, p. 65.

3. It has been suggested that these sections were never written, since Mao Tun seemed to have a predilection for incomplete works—his novel Rainbow (1929) is one example. But there was another, closely related withdrawal. Ch’ien Hsingch’un omitted a section of his vehement attack on Mao Tun’s Eclipse and “From Kuling to Tokyo” when it was published in January 1929. Ch’ien mentioned the omission in a postscript to his “Mao Tun and Reality” and added that as a result he had changed the article’s title from “Returning from Tokyo to Wuhan”:

The “latter part” turns out to be a vociferous sixty-page attack on Mao Tun’s “betrayal” of his revolutionary commitment since his days of illness in Kuling. It was later collected in Fu Chih-ying (ed.), Mao Tun p’ing-chuan (Critical and Biographical Essays on Mao Tun) (Shanghai, December 1931), pp. 255–314. It was never reincorporated into “Mao Tun and Reality.”

When we juxtapose Ch’ien’s “Postscript” with Mao Tun’s “footnote,” the comparison strongly suggests that the missing parts of Mao Tun’s story were also deliberately withdrawn. There seems to have been a secret feud going on between Mao Tun and Ch’ien’s Sun Society group, and the most controversial parts of both men’s works were probably kept out of print by the Party authority to avoid public scandal. In any event, there is a discrepancy between what Mao Tun said in 1933 and in 1959, and the “reasons unknown” version of 1933 seems more reliable. Probably, as Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un put it, this was “not a suitable place or time.”

4. Mao Tun, “Chi-chü ch’iu-hua” (Remarks on the Past) Mao Tun hsüan-chi (Selected Works of Mao Tun) (Shanghai, 1935), pp. 1–5.

Compare Mao Tun’s “Memoirs VIII,” Hsin-wen-hsüeh shih-liao (Source Materials on the History of the New Literature) 1980.3 (August 1980), pp. 1ff.

5. Ting Ling, “The Diary of Miss Sophia,” Tsai hei-an-chung (In the Darkness, a collection of short stories) (1982). Translated by A. L. Chin in Harold Isaacs (ed.) Straw Sandals: Chinese Short Stories, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1974), pp. 129–169.

6. Mao Tun, “Memoirs IX,” Source Materials 1980.4 (November 1980), p. 13.

7. Ibid., p.13.

Also “Remarks on the Past,” op. cit., p. 4.

8. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, “Returning from Tokyo to Wuhan,” collected in Fu Chih-ying, op. cit., p. 258.

9. When I was searching in China in 1982 for the text of “Master Cloud and the Straw Hat,” I did not mention the flea-catching newsletter, assuming that if I could find the one I could find the other too, and that it would complicate matters too much if I asked for more than one item at a time. In any case, I was more interested in the Cloud-Straw Hat allusion.

10. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, op. cit., pp. 256–258. This is the source of the poem.

11. In “Memoirs X,” 1981.1 (February 1981), p. 9, Mao Tun wrote, “When I arrived in Japan I lost contact with the Party organization. Moreover, the Party organization did not try to contact me.” But it seems that the tie was broken earlier, when Mao Tun got back to Shanghai in mid-August 1927. That is the point in the “Memoirs” where he ceases to mention the “Party organization.”

12. Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, “T’an-t’an San-jen-hsing” (Notes on In Company of Three), Hsien-tai (Contemporary) 1.1 (March 10, 1932). Collected in Ch’ü Ch’iu-po wen-chi (Collected Works of Ch’ü Ch’iu-po), vol. 2, pp. 334–341. See especially p. 334.

13. Mao Tun, San-jen-hsing (In Company of Three) (Shanghai, K’ai-ming shu-tien, March 1929, “First edition”). This edition has, on the back of its title page, the note: Nei-chen-pu chu-cho-ch’üan chu-ts’e-che-chao chin-tzu ti 1118 hao (Ministry of Interior Affairs Authorship Registration Number Chin-1118). The “first edition” is Mao Tun, San-jen-hsing (Shanghai, K’ai-ming shu-tien, October 1931).

14. Several incidents are highly suggestive of Mao Tun’s muted but nonetheless stubborn defiance of censorship. In chapter One, I mentioned the way he treated the manuscript of his play on the three-anti and five-anti campaigns of the 1950s. In 1980, when the official People’s Literature Press wanted to reissue his Eclipse and offered to reinstate all the deletions it had made in the 1954 edition, he firmly rejected the proposal and mentioned both the offer and his rejection in a postscript to the new edition, putting the responsibility for what had been called “stylistic revisions” where it belonged. Then in his “Memoirs VI,” Source Materials 1980.1 (February 1980), when he was talking about the very important Third Party Congress of 1923 and listing the names of delegates, he left out the list of the delegates from Shanghai who went to Canton to attend the Congress and inserted in its place a parenthetical remark “wang-ch’i-ming” (names forgotten). From Chang Kuo-t’ao’s Memoirs, we know that Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, Chang Kuo-t’ao Ta’ai Ho-shen, and Mao Tse-tung were all present at the Congress. The figure who most infuriated Chang Kuo-t’ao, and hence has the most space in Chang’s account, was Marin, the Comintern representative. It is simply impossible that Mao Tun could have forgotten the names of these close comrades and of his Comintern antagonist.

Cf. Chang Kuo-t’ao, Wo-ti-hui-i (Memoirs), vol. 1 (Hongkong, Mingpao ch’upan-she, 1971), pp. 283–302.

It is quite conceivable that the stubborn Mao Tun took the opportunity to publish in 1933 when he had the chance what had been prohibited in 1927–1928.

15. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “The Cloud in Trousers,” The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, edited by Patricia Blake, translated by Max Hayward (Bloomington, Indiana University Press), pp. 61–169. The quotation is from pp. 61–63.

16. Fang Pi (pseudonym), Hsi-yang wen-hsüeh t’ung-lun (Outline of Western Literature) (Shanghai, 1929?), p. 254.

17. Ibid., pp. 59–61.

18. When I interviewed Mao Tun on September 29, 1977, I asked him if Hsiang-yang-wan was really the name of the ship that took him to Kiukiang and whether it had any symbolic significance. Mao Tun said that it was really the name. Hsiang-yang is a city in Hunan, but the suffix “wan” meant that it was a Japanese ship. Only Japanese ships were sailing at the time, so Mao Tun had no choice but to take it.

19. Autumn in Kuling, pp. 58–59.

20. The date August 8 is inferred from Master Cloud’s remarks about Fuchow. The retreating troops arrived in Fuchow about August 8, 1927. See, for instance, “Chou Yi-ch’ün’s Report,” in Martin Wilbur, Ashes of Defeat (Institute of East Asian Studies, Columbia University, New York, 1964). Reprinted from The China Quarterly 18 (April-June 1964), pp. 3–54.

21. Ibid., p. 9. Also Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 706.

22. Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 710. See also note 20 above.

23. Ibid., p. 658. Cf. Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Second Revised Edition (Atheneum, New York, 1968), pp.252ff.

24. Mao Tun, “Tu Ni Huan-chih” (On Reading Ni Huan-chih), Wen-hsüeh chou-pao (Literature Weekly) 370 (Vol. 8, No. 20) (May 1929).

25. Mao Tun, “T’an Wo-ti yen-chiu” (My Understanding [of Fiction Writing] (1934), in Yin-hsiang, kan-hsiang, hui-i (Impressions, Reflections, and Reminiscences) (Shanghai, Wen-hua shen-huo ch’u-pan-she, 1936), pp. 49–52.

Mao Tun had much earlier published a rather long article, “Study in Characterization [in Fiction],” Short Story Monthly 16.3 (March 1925). Ideas similar to those in the 1936 publication already appear there, but the article is much more formal and more verbose.

26. Autumn in Kuling, p. 9. Apparently the censor did not object to the expression “not an X-tang.” Had it been in the positive, “is an X-tang,” things would probably have been different.

27. Dr. Marián Gálik in a personal communication of May 21, 1974, identifies Master Yün as Sun Yun̈-pin, a CCP member who went to Kiukiang on board the same ship with Mao Tun and then went up to Kuling with him. Mao Tun in his “Memoirs IX” also says that the “Master Yün” of his “newsletter” was Sun Yün-pin. This contradicts Mao Tun’s earlier, very strong insistence in “From Kuling to Tokyo” that characters in his stories and novels are types, composite pictures of men and women he knew at the time, rather than specific individuals. We are here confronted with a dilemma: whether to interpret Mao Tun’s early fiction in the light of how he himself conceived and wrote in the 1920s, or to accept the perspective of his “Memoirs” and take it as reflections of his personal life.

The latter choice can be dangerously misleading, especially in discussing Mao Tun’s fiction between 1927 and 1933. Mao Tun’s “Memoirs” frequently give the names of real persons as models or partial models for his fictional characters. Besides Sun Yün-pin, he mentions, for example, Fan Chih-ch’ao, a woman co-worker in the “International Office,” whom he met in Kuling and who told him about the Nanchang Uprising and other news; and a young man named Ku Chung-ch’i, first a worker in Shanghai and then a low-ranking military officer in the KMT Northern Expedition army, whom Mao Tun seemed to know fairly well and who he said provided a partial model for the Futurist battalion leader Ch’iang Wei-li in Disillusionment (see “Memoirs X”).

The danger of these fragments of biographical information is that readers and critics may be satisfied with such neat alignments with the fictional characters and not explore their deeper dimensions. For example, Master Yün and his straw hat carries a much more subtle and important message than an identification with the historian and literary man Sun Yün-pin. And the Futuristic speech of Ch’iang Wei-li in Disillusionment surpasses any significance we can get from the designated life model Ku Chung-ch’i, especially in view of the fact that Ch’iang’s distinguishing characteristic is his Futuristic passion for the battlefield, not an attribute of the worker-turned-soldier Ku Chung-ch’i.

In his essays of the 1920s and the 1930s, Mao Tun emphasizes that relationships among characters are thematically even more important than single characters. His later attempt to supply life models—acceptable to the national government in all cases—for his characters should not be mistakenly used as a basis for interpreting his early fiction. Doing this would be reducing the fiction to autobiography.

28. In July 1927, Lushan was a meeting ground for political negotiations, intrigues, and party reorganization. The Nanchang Uprising was partly planned there. Borodin and Ch’ü Ch-iu-po met there to discuss pending top-level leadership turnover; Wang Ching-wei, Sun Yat-sen’s son Sun K’o, and Chang Fa-k’uei also went there later in July to discuss new political alliances and ways of dealing with the ominous movements of CCP troops preparing for the Nanchang Uprising.

In “Autumn in Kuling,” Yün buys a travel guide to Lushan and studies it with great care. But once he gets there, all he can do is play chess in the hotel. His situation serves as an ironic comment on the general futility of the CCP activities.

Chang Kuo-t’ao, who as a CCP Central Committee representative from Shanghai was deeply involved in the attempt at remote control by the CCP Central Committee and the Comintern of the field action of the Front Committee for the Nanchang Uprising, gives a detailed account of the planning and execution of the historic event in his Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 695–734.

Mao Tun, on the other hand, eschews in his “Memoirs X” the larger events as a whole and concentrates only on his own itinerary and his errands, such as delivering two thousand dollars for the Party to a connection in Kiukiang. He particularly avoids any reference to interference by the Russians and any mention of the principal engineers of the uprising—Li Li-san, Chou En-lai, and Yün Tai-ying.

29. Autumn in Kuling, p. 15.

30. Ibid., p. 17. Following the first remarks, Hsü goes on to say, “I am not finished yet. The Honan people stirred up only a little bit of trouble, and our Director Teng immediately compromised. . . .” That Teng is Teng Yen-ta, see Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs II, p. 547ff.

31. See the reconstruction and description of the Nanch’ang Uprising by Colonel J. Guillermaz, The China Quarterly 11 (July–September 1962), pp. 161–169.

32. A parallel account can be found in Chang Kuo-tao’s Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 698–705. Or see Mingpao Monthly 25 (January 1968), pp. 90–96, where it was first published.

3. Disillusionment

1. Mao Tun, “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Short Story Monthly 19.10 (October 1928), pp. 1138–1146. Section 5, p. 1141.

2. Mao Tun, Huan-mieh (Disillusionment) (Shanghai, K’ai-ming shu-tien, 1930), p. 5.

“Miss” is used here to translate “nü-shih,” which implies a woman of education. “Mr.” is added to male characters’ names for gender identification.

3. Ibid., p. 6.

4. Ibid., p. 7.

5. Ibid., p. 15.

6. Ibid., p. 18.

7. Ibid., pp. 23-24.

8. Ibid., p. 27.

9. The fly dashing itself against the glass pane was used in “From Kuling to Tokyo (Section 4)” as a symbol for those in the Great Revolution who, in their desperation to find a way out of the impasse of the CCP-KMT alliance, rushed into armed resistance and death. The “west side of the room” is also significant, because in Pursuit it will be the corner where, after the Wuhan purge of the CCP in July 1927, the former S University students who had worked with the Wuhan government recongregated and planned their next step.

Mao Tun, however, in “Memoirs X,” Source Materials for the History of New Literature 1981.1 (February 1981), remarked that Fu K’e-hsing—a member of the Sun Society and a returned student from Japan who viciously attacked Eclipse—“was apparently one of such flies heavily drugged by putschism.” The remark, in my opinion, is a pointer to the symbolism rather than a genuine identification because Fu K’e-hsing was not involved in the Great Revolution.

10. Disillusionment, pp. 33–35. The color red, as we would expect, is symbolic of the revolutionary forces.

11. This is the first mention of “fate” in the trilogy. Later, in chapter 8 of Disillusionment a crushing sense of fate overwhelms the sick Miss Ching. The crescendo of “fate” continues to build in Mao Tun’s early fiction till it reaches suicidal proportions in Pursuit and in the short stories in The Wild Roses. Then the spell breaks. See chapter 6 of this book.

12. Disillusionment, p. 42.

13. Disillusionment, p. 42.

14. Ibid, pp. 43–444. The signature “Kuo-liang,” meaning “pillar of the nation,” may carry an ironic jibe at Chiang Kai-shek or the factions he represents. At the time he was referred to as a “pillar of the national revolution.” See Benjamin Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1951), p.56. It is not a name a revolutionary would adopt.

15. Ibid, pp. 45–46. Miss Ching’s reaction to “fate,” as we see, is very different from Hui’s. On one level, this is an aspect of her character that distinguishes her from Hui. She struggles against the power of “fate” whereas Hui either resigns herself to it or sports with it. On the level of political allegory, it distinguishes one line of development of the CCP from another line.

16. The reference to “the people” is to the mass movements organized by the CCP in support of the Northern Expedition. See Robert C. North, Chinese Communism (New York, World University Library, 1971), pp. 63–94.

17. Disillusionment, pp. 52–53.

18. I have summarized in some detail the plots of all three novels in the trilogy and quote as much as possible from them before analyzing their bearing on historical events, so the reader will understand the total context of what has gone into the analysis, hoping to avoid the objection that I have selected from Mao Tun only what serves my purposes, and not what Mao Tun wrote for his purposes, an objection that could be made of Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, for instance. The summaries are rather detailed, but given the complexity of the issues involved, I believe they will be helpful for readers who do not have access to the Chinese originals.

It may also be well to note here that the problem that divided the Chinese Communist Party in 1926–27 was altogether different from the so-called putschist tendencies that characterized the thinking of the CCP Central Committee after August 1927 (when Disillusionment ends), under the leadership first of Ch’ü Ch’iu-po and then of Li Li-san. And the problems that confronted the stilldivided Chinese Communist Party in 1930–31 (when Mao Tun wrote the three historical tales) were different again. When the group of returned students from Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow who called themselves the “28 Bolsheviks” arrived in the early summer of 1930 in Shanghai under the personal direction of Pavel Mif, the new Comintern delegate, to “correct” the putschism of Li Li-san, they created quite separate problems from those that grew out of Li Li-san’s own leadership (see Benjamin Schwartz, op.cit., pp. 127–172). In Mao Tun’s fictional representation of such shifting of lines, subtle but necessary distinctions are always preserved. The Li Li-san line, for example, appears in the image of banditry, Water Margin style in two of the three historical tales (see chapter 8). And, Mao Tse-tung’s peasant movement, earlier represented by the “banditry” of Ts’ao Chih-fang in Pursuit has moved to the countryside and is represented by the peasant uprising of “Great Marsh District.” Water Margin, though a historical “romance” and hence portraying life in a mode that Mao Tun considered too remote from reality, still falls into a literary genre that he did not completely disapprove. But it certainly carries a distinctly different flavor from the historical records of Ssu-ma Ch’ien that supplies the source to the story in “Great Marsh District.” Mif and the 28 Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were not so kindly treated in their fictional images in The Road, where they were reduced to the level of high school students, with Mif (projected fictionally as Dean Thorn) recognizable as their principal. (A firsthand account of Mif’s high-handed administration at Sun Yat-sen University and in 1930 Shanghai can be found in Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs II, Hongkong, Mingpao yüeh-k’an-she, 1973, pp. 777–860.)

During my 1977 interview with Mao Tun, I specifically asked him whether he had met Mif in Shanghai when he came back from Japan in the summer of 1930. To my great surprise, he answered that Mif was never in China. His denial gave me the impression that he absolutely detested Mif. His brother Shen Tse-min was at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow when Mif was its head, and when Tse-min came back as one of the 28 Bolsheviks, he must have told Mao Tun about life in those years under Mif. According to Chang Kuo-t’ao’s account, Mif was hated by all the Chinese students at the University, even by the 28 Bolsheviks. I have always suspected that Dean Thorn, the corrupt administrator in The Road, is modeled on Mif.

19. See especially Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs I and II; Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (Second Revised Edition, New York, Atheneum, 1968); Hua Kang, Chung-kuo ta-k’o-ming-shih (A History of the Great Revolution in China) (Shanghai, Ch’un-keng shu-tien, 1936); and Robert C. North, Chinese Communism.

20. Compare Chang Kuo-t’ao’s account in his Memoirs II with Mao Tun’s account in “Memoirs VI,” pp. 175–176.

21. See Note 20.

22. When we compare references to the presence and activities of Comintern delegates through the Great Revolution years and afterward—as here with Voitsinski and Maring and the 1923 Third Party Congress—we see a striking contrast between the exhaustive details in Chang Kuo-t’ao’s Memoirs and the conspicuous omissions from Mao Tun’s “Memoirs.” Chang Kuo-t’ao, writing in Hongkong as a non-Party member, apparently enjoyed and fully exercised a degree of freedom of speech that was not available to Mao Tun on the perennially sensitive topic of Soviet ambition in China. In the West, nearly every important book on this period goes into great detail about the Comintern role in China. See, for example, any of the books listed in note 19, and Conrad Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China 1924–1927 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1958).

See also Tai Chi-t’ao, Kuo-min ko-ming yü Chung-kuo Kuo-min-tang, preface July 23, 1925.

23. The term “tzu-sha” (suicide) occurs with great frequency in Chang Kuo-t’ao’s account of the KMT-CCP collaboration period. Apparently it captures the peculiar color of many CCP members’ feelings about the collaboration policy. Mao Tun used the expression in a variety of ways later in the trilogy—in words, in dramatic episodes such as Shih Hsün’s attempted suicide in Pursuit—and also as the title of the short story “Suicide” in the volume The Wild Roses. Chang’s Memoirs is helpful in supplying a political frame of reference for Mao Tun’s trilogy via such verbal echoes as well as factual details. “Tung-yao” (“vacillation”) is another example, and “t’u-fei” (“banditry”) still another.

24. Such public intervention often occurs in internal Party cell meeting, where possible political ramifications are assumed. The student assembly in chapter 5 is thus plausible when read as an allegory.

25. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1961), p. 143.

26. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, “Mao Tun yü hsien-shih” (“Mao Tun and Reality,” renamed from “Ts’ung Tokyo hui-tao Wuhan”) Hsien-tai Chung-kuo Wen-hsüeh Tso-chia (Contemporary Chinese Literaty Writers), II (Shanghai, T’ai-tung t’shu-chü, 1930), pp.113–178. See pp. 120–121.

27. Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs I, pp. 283–302; Benjamin Schwartz, op.cit., p. 50; Mao Tun, “Memoirs VI,” p.175ff. Mao Tun’s direct responsibility for implementing the united-front policy sheds additional light on why he shows such an intimate knowledge of its failures in Disillusionment. Later, in chapter 8, we have a follow-up: the CCP’s position of noncollaboration with the KMT overruled by the Comintern was registered in the novel under the allegorical disguise of a report by Li K’e to Ching in the hospital, in which Li says that Shih Chün’s proposal to punish Miss Wang for getting herself into such a situation was finally defeated.

28. Betrayal is the central note of Mao Tun’s revelation scene here. When Paosu’s identity is discovered, and when we recall the sympathy he expressed for criminals like Raskolnikov, we see that what is being condemned here is not merely an impostor in the revolutionary camp but the kind of thinking and behavior (Hui’s cynical philosophy) and the kind of illusion (Ching’s trusting naïveté) within the camp itself that made Pao-su’s betrayal possible.

Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un’s criticism, however, was not primarily concerned with the issue of responsibility in the betrayal. Ch’ien had probably never expected anything different from the KMT to begin with, but he was rueful because Mao Tun did not bring the “correct” ideology to bear on the historical facts. The collaboration policy was decreed at the First Nationalist Congress of January 1924 and Chiang Kai-shek did not show his first signs of betrayal till March 1926 and April 1927. Hence in Ch’ien’s opinion, Mao Tun’s compression of the lovemaking and the discovery into an overnight affair did not adequately represent the time involved. Besides, the betrayal did not take place in CCP headquarters. It was not an insider’s act. Hence Ch’ien objected to Ching’s room as “the place of discovery”—that is too close to home.

Mao Tun and Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un are interested in very different aspects of the disastrous CCP-KMT collaboration policy. The discussion of Crime and Punishment that serves as a prelude to the triangular love affair highlights Mao Tun’s moral and intellectual concern with questions of means and responsibility in a revolutionary situation. At the time he was writing the trilogy he evidently believed that the individual is responsible for the means he lets himself be persuaded to adopt. The motive of the individual at the time he is persuaded to act is the only test for the authenticity of his belief. The profound moral ambiguity of Raskolnikov’s murder obviously intrigued Mao Tun: Is it an act of freedom or is it an act of crime? He had studied and written about Dostoevsky extensively and has been fascinated by Dostoevsky’s exploration into the human irrational. As his two articles in the Special Issue on Dostoevsky in Short Story Monthly 13.1 (January 1922) show, he was particularly attracted to Dostoevsky’s political thinking and his insight into the pathological state of mind of his characters.

Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un apparently did not share Mao Tun’s literary taste. He was not interested in questions of moral ambiguity and psychological complexity in a fictional character. To him good and evil in revolutionary literature was simply a matter of whether you were with the revolution and the Party line (which is incapable of doing wrong) or not. He seems to have been the very type of revolutionary socialist writer that Mao Tun had cautioned aspiring writers of proletarian literature not to be in “On Proletarian Literature,” Literature Weekly 172, 173, 175, 196 (May 10, 17, 31, October 25, 1925). See summary of the article in chapter 1, note 34, especially that of parts 3 and 4.

29. Huang-po and Huang-kang in Hupeh Province are not mentioned in most Chinese Communist histories of the peasant movement. Peasant organization is associated almost exclusively with the Hunan movement led by Mao Tse-tung. I have found only one instance where Huang-po and Huang-kang are mentioned, and it is in a Hongkong publication, probably not generally available on mainland China, Ho Kan-chih’s Chung-kuo hsien-tai ko-ming-shih (A History of the Contemporary Chinese Revolution) (Hongkong, Joint Publishing Co., 1958), p. 111. The place name “Huang-po” was deleted from the 1954 Peking official edition of Eclipse ostensibly for stylistic streamlining. Considering the kinds of deletions made throughout the trilogy in that edition, it seems more likely that the aim is to eliminate all traces of the novel’s linkage with Party history, especially those aspects of it that have been changed or omitted in the intervening years.

30. “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Section 3: “Miss Hui, Sun Wu-yang, and Chang Ch’iu-liu are not revolutionary women either. However, neither are they superficial women. If the reader does not find them lovable or worthy of sympathy, then the author has failed in his characters.” Most critics ignored Hui in their discussion of Disillusionment, concentrating only on Ching.

31. The same two questions persist through the trilogy. They are again raised and discussed in chapter 5 of this book when Pursuit is examined.

32. Interestingly, Chang Kuo-t’ao also used the term “purity” when he wrote about the CCP and the sullying effect of the collaboration. Apparently he and Mao Tun shared the same memories of how the issue was discussed and the language the arguments were cast in. See Chang, Memoirs I. Chang Kuo-t’ao incidentally identifies the red necktie Pao-su wore as that worn by cadres of the Whampoa Military Academy (see Memoirs II, p. 414).

33. For this part of the history, see Benjamin Schwartz, op. cit., pp. 73ff.

34. For a firsthand account of the Fifth Party Congress, see Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs II, p. 363. Robert North in Chinese Communism also has a short section on the Fifth Party Congress, pp. 86–90.

There is a very brief allegorical representation of the Fifth Party Congress and its political significance in chapter 6 of Disillusionment (p. 32). Since in essence the Fifth Party Congress merely reendorsed the collaboration policy formulated at the Third Party Congress, the scene outside of Classroom Number Five is not on the same scale as the debate scene in Classroom Number Three. Nevertheless, Mao Tun’s distaste for the policy is expressed again through Ching’s fear of the sinister side of man-woman relationships when she sees a couple embracing in a dark corner outside of Classroom Number Five and considers it “ugly.”

35. Robert North, Chinese Communism, pp. 86–90. Benjamin Schwartz, Chinese Communism and The Rise of Mao, p. 64.

36. “Tung-yao” (“vacillation”) is also Chang Kuo-t’ao’s expression for the CCP policies on mass movements during the Wuhan period. Memoirs II.

37. Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs II. Benjamin Schwartz, op.cit., pp. 65–68.

38. Disillusionment, p. 63. Here we see how the pen name for the author of the trilogy “Mao Tun” (“Contradiction”) was conceived.

39. Ibid.

40. Changsha appears quite a few times in the second half of Disillusionment. In chapter 11, for example, Ching’s mother wrote Ching asking her to come home to Changsha. Earlier, when Ching was in the hospital, her mother specifically asked her not to come home. Certainly Mao Tun attached special significance to Ching’s relationship with her mother in Hunan, where the CCP movement had successes and failures in quick succession during 1926 and 1927.

41. Chang Kuo-t’ao records the CCP’s active participation in the Honan batties of the Second Northern Expedition; see Memoirs II, p. 656.

42. Disillusionment, p. 42.

43. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, “Mao Tun and Reality,” p. 122.

44. Disillusionment, chapter 13, p. 77.

45. Ibid., chapter 14, p. 83. This line was deleted from the 1954 edition and was not restored in the 1980 reprint. In latter-date official taste, tenderness is not something that inspires military action, and sensual pleasure between the sexes makes a totally unacceptable metaphor for battle.

46. Mao Tun’s attitude toward Futurism has attracted little attention, though all through Eclipse we can find the emotional weight of “energy,” “strength,” “machine civilization,” and “blind destruction” as the means of revitalization. Marián Gálik, in his thorough study of Mao Tun’s literary theory, referred to Mayakovsky and Mao Tun’s interest in Futurism (e.g., p. 90 and p. 107) but did not devote as much attention to it as he did to Naturalism and Realism.

Yeh Tzu-ming and Shao Po-chou also emphasized Mao Tun’s investigation of Naturalism and Realism, and “proletarian literature,” without discussing the influence of Futurism on Mao Tun’s literary theory and practice. This tendency is continued in Sun Chung-t’ien’s recent Lun Mao Tun ti Sheng-huo yü Ch’uang-tso (On Mao Tun’s Life and Creative Writings) (T’ien-chin, Pai-hua-wen-i-ch’u-pan-she, 1980), and in Yüeh Tai-yün’s “Mao Tun tsao-ch’i ssu-hsiang yen-chiu” (“A Study of Mao Tun’s Early Thought”), Chung-kuo hsien-tai wen-hsüeh yen-chiu ts’ung-k’an (Anthology of Essays on Modern Chinese Literature) 1979.1 (Peking, Peking-ch’u-pan-she, 1979), pp. 134–158.

Mao Tun in fact paid a great deal of attention to the development of Futurism in the West and to its possible use for China. On more than one occasion, he traced Futurism from Marinetti in Italy to the Futurist poets in Soviet Russia. Since the October Revolution in Russia offered the closest model for Chinese revolution, and since Russian fictional characters like Bazarov and Sanin came closest to the pre-revolutionary youth Mao Tun knew in the 1920s, it is only to be expected that he should have early become involved with Russian literature and with the Futurist announcement of revolutionary changes. He wrote a great deal on Futurism and Mayakovsky. “Wei-lai-p’ai wen-hsüeh te hsien-shih” (“The Current Development of Futurist Literature”), first published in Short Story Monthly 13.10 (October 1922), was collected together with his articles on Tolstoi, Hauptmann, and Maeterlinck into a small volume Hsin-wen-i p’ing-lun (Critical Essays on New Literature), complied by Liang Kung (Shanghai, Min-chih-shu-chü, 1923). There is also his “Su-wei-ai O-lu-ssu ko-ming-shih-jen Mayakovsky” (“Mayakovsky, A Revolutionary Poet of Soviet Russia”), Literature Weekly, no. 130 (July 1924).

In his book Hsi-yang Wen-hsüeh T’ung-lun (An Outline of Western Literature) (Shanghai, Shih-chieh-shu-chü, 1929? 1930?), published under one of his work-for-hire pseudonyms, Fang Pi, there is a long section on Futurism (pp. 237–259) in chapter 9, “Tzu-jan-chu-i i-hou” (“After Naturalism”). There Mao Tun wrote that Mayakovsky was the poet “who brought Futurism into the street to make contact with the broad masses,” that Mayakovsky’s poetry expresses the shouts of strong and heroic giants, not susceptible to ordinary evaluation of “good or bad.” He uses the strong, living language of the people, Mao Tun said, recreating it for his own poetic purposes, completely free from tradition. “His poetry is written in a new colloquial language which he himself created. The assonance and alliteration in his verse, together with his specially selected consonantal sounds, orchestrate into a din like that of the drum in a military march, with a sweep like that of a storm.” Hence Mayakovsky “is a poet of the crossroad, roaring out his speeches . . . In the first years of the Russian revolution, Mayakovsky’s school was the most powerful one on the literary scene, totally in support of the Soviet government and calling themselves the most revolutionary poets. . . . Russian Futurism therefore joined in with the proletarian revolution, whereas Italian Futurism, with its fascist tendency, has now provided court poets for Mussolini . . .” (pp.254–255).

Mao Tun’s attitude toward Futurism and Mayakovsky changed before and after the Great Revolution, as Mayakovsky himself changed before and after the October Revolution. In Disillusionment, Mao Tun could still cast the Futurist in an ironic light and in general hold the Futurist faith in the power of revolution and violence in willing suspension of disbelief. Futurist mentality like Futurist slogans was part and parcel of the CCP reality in 1927. Hence Mao Tun’s portrayal of the Futurist battalion leader is not without its basis in reality. After 1925, however, his enthusiasm for Russian Futurism and Russian literature dwindled as he became disillusioned with the leadership of the Comintern and the Moscow government.

47. In 1922, with his brother Shen Tse-min and his friend Wang Ch’iung-ch’üan, Mao Tun wrote a series of articles introducing Futurist literature and painting of the West. They were published in the September and October issues of Short Story Monthly.

48. Wang Ch’iung-ch’üan, tr. “Hsien-tai Pu-kuei-tse shih-p’ai” (Contemporary Avant-Garde Poetry), Short Story Monthly 13.9 (September, 1922).

The article says that the principal tenet of Futurist poetics is based on a sensation dynamique. A sense of time dominates Futurist pictorial art. For example, when a painter looks at an apple, what he sees is not merely a red object on a plate, but all associations, past or present, with the object. At the time the painter may be thinking of a girl he knew in his younger days. The girl then belongs in the painting. Futurist literature likewise emphasizes movement. The characteristic fanaticism of Futurist literature of the day celebrates machine power, insults women, and praises physical force. It rejects everything gentle and fragile, identifying only with violence and brute force that is considered masculine, proclaiming a philosophy of science and will.

The notion of time and associations across time in Futurist art is of particular interest here when we think ahead about the topsy-turvy time-scheme in Pursuit when past becomes part of the present in Wang Shih-t’ao’s pregnancy, and especially in Chang Ch-iu-liu’s hallucinatory vision of Tung-fang Ming’s death.

Mao Tun’s article, “The Current Development of Futurist Literature” treats a different phase of Futurist literature as it developed in the post-World War I world of Bolshevik Russia. Russian Futurism was unlike Italian Futurism in that its reaction against post-Naturalistic European subjectivism in literature and art had developed into a demand for a total destruction of the past. In particular, Mao Tun said,

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. See note 34 in chapter 1 for the correlation between musical symbol and Futurist literature mentioned in Marinetti in his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” and also Marinetti’s 1909 “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in which the sound of the machine as pleasing to the ear is emphasized. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Marinetti, Selected Writings, edited with an introduction by R. W. Flint, translated by R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, 1972).

52. Shen Yen-ping, “The Current Development of Futurist Literature.” Cf. Marián Gálik’s brief discussion of Futurism and Mao Tun’s literary theory (1924–1925) in chapter 8, “On Revolutionary and Proletarian Literature,” of his book Mao Tun and Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (Wiesbaden, 1969), pp. 90–94, and of Mayakovsky in chapter 9, “Contemporary Proletarian Chinese and World Avant-garde Literature,” pp. 106–110.

53. Marián Gálik, ibid., chapter 8, p. 93.

54. Disillusionment, chapter 12, pp. 74–75.

55. Ibid., p.75. Cf. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” op.cit., pp. 39–44, and “Let’s Murder the Moon Shine,” pp. 45–54.

4. Vacillation

1. Mao Tun, “On Reading Ni Huan-chih,” Wen-hsüeh-chou-pao (Literature Weekly) 8.20 (May 1929), Section 7.

2. Mao Tun, “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Short Story Monthly 19.10 (October, 1928), pp. 1138–1146. Section 5.

3. Ibid.

4. Vladimir I. Lenin, “Kung-ch’an yün-tung chung ti tso-ch’ing yu-tzu-ping” (“Infantile Leftism in Communist Movement”) Collected Works of Lenin, Vol. 31 (Peking, Editorial Committee of the CCP Central Committee for The Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, 1960), pp. 1098.

5. For Mao Tun’s personal experiences in the Wuhan period of the Great Revolution, see his “Memoirs IX,” Source Materials on the History of the New Literature 1980.4 (November, 1980), pp. 1–15.

After the Northern Expedition forces took Wuhan in October 1926, the Nationalist Government was moved from Canton to Wuhan. The Central Committee of the CCP also decided to send a work force there, and Mao Tun left Shanghai to join it at the end of 1926.

Mao Tun first taught at the Central Military-Political Academy in Wuhan and supervised a weekly “Literary Supplement” to the Central Daily, a KMT organization paper at Wuch’ang. Soon he was reassigned by the CCP Central Committee to serve as editor-in-chief of the Hankow Republic Daily (Min-kuo jih-pao), working with Tung Pi-wu as the Director and Mao Tse-min as the manager. Ch’ü Ch’iu-po was then the head of the Propaganda Department of the CCP. It was understood between Ch’ü Ch’iu-po and Mao Tun that one of the tasks of the Republic Daily was to promote the mass movements and to be a propaganda organ for the revolution. Much of the raw material that went into the depiction of the mass movements in Vacillation was therefore originally news that came to Mao Tun for possible publication in the Republic Daily. See especially “Memoirs IX,” pp. 2–11.

Marián Gálik first noted Mao Tun’s teaching at the military academy in his Mao Tun and Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (Wiesbaden, 1968). I have relied heavily on his book and on Yeh Tzu-ming’s Lun Mao Tun Ssu-shih-nien ti Wen-hsüeh Tao-lu (On Mao Tun’s Forty-Years On The Literary Road) (Shanghai: Shanghai Wen-i-ch’u-pan-she, 1959), both published before the “Memoirs,” for information on Mao Tun’s life and works during this period.

6. During the Manchu Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1911), men were required to grow a queue. When the revolutionary movement began in the early twentieth century, activists and their followers cut off their queues to signify their determination to join the revolutionary ranks. Until the fall of the Manchus the absence of a queue was punishable by death.

7. Mao Tun, Tung-yao (Vacillation) (Shanghai, K’ai-ming shu-tien, 1930), pp. 4–5.

8. Ibid., p. 9.

9. Ibid., chapter 5, p. 42.

10. The red cloth that Communist cadres and followers tied around their necks for identification during the mass movements in May and June 1927, and later during the Canton Commune of December 1927, became a fatal badge during the brutal suppressions of the commune by the KMT forces. The red line of dye left by the neckerchiefs after they were discarded exposed the wearer’s identity to the KMT soldiers coming to round them up for execution. See Robert C. North, Chinese Communism (New York, World University Library, 1966, 1970, 1971), p. 103.

In chapter 5 of Pursuit, we shall see that the red ring around Tung-fang Ming’s neck which Chang Ch’iu-liu sees in a hallucinatory vision is produced precisely by one of these strips of red cloth.

11. Vacillation, p. 65.

12. Ibid., p. 66.

13. This is one of the slogans in Sun Yat-sen’s Land Reform Program, which represents the original KMT position on peasant problems.

14. Vacillation, pp. 108–109.

15. Ibid., p. 110.

16. May 1 is Labor Day in China after the Soviet tradition; May 4 commemorates the May Fourth Movement of 1919; May 7 and May 9 are both memorial days for “kuo-ch’ih” (national humiliation), having to do with President Yüan Shih-k’ai’s agreement to sign Japan’s infamous Twenty-one Demands.

17. Vacillation, Chapter 9, p. 122.

18. Ibid., Chapter 11, p. 134.

19. Ibid., p. 145. This speech reads like a parody of what Lenin is castigating in his long essay on “infantile leftism;” all its points are taken from Stalin’s letter of June 1 to the CCP Central Committee.

20. Ibid., chapter 11, pp. 151–152.

21. See “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Section 5; also Mao Tun, “Memoirs IX.”

22. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 144–146.

23. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, “Mao Tun and Reality,” Contemporary Chinese Literary Writers II (Shanghai, T’ai-tung t’u-shu-chü, 1930), p. 129.

24. “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Section 5.

25. Mao Tun, Disillusionment (Shanghai, K’ai-ming shu-tien, 1930), Chapter 10, pp. 62–63.

26. C. T. Hsia, op.cit., p. 145. Hsia also has a section on the triangular relationship of Fang Lo-lan, Mrs. Fang, and Sun Wu-yang, which he praises as perceptive in terms of love psychology, pp. 143–146.

27. Vacillation, chapters 2 and 6.

28. Ssu-ma Ch’ien “Tz’u-k’e lieh-chuan” (Biographies of Assassins) Shih-chi (Records of the Grand Historian), chüan 86.

29. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, “Mao Tun and Reality,” p. 137.

5. Pursuit

1. For the history of the Great Revolution at this period, see Benjamin Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 79–108; Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs II (Hongkong, Mingpao yüeh-k’an ch’u-pan-she, 1973), pp. 611–774; Robert C. North, Chinese Communism (New York, World University Library, 1966), pp. 72–118. The Hai-lu-feng Soviet incorporated the surviving troops from the Swatwo retreat; see Robert C. North, pp. 97–98.

2. Chang Kuo-t’ao has the most detailed account of the final fate of these onetime comrades of his. See his Memoirs II, pp. 748–774. His Memoirs, like Hua Kang’s A History of the Chinese Great Revolution 1925–1927 (Shanghai, Ch’un-keng shu-tien, 1936), show deep feelings of pride as well as sorrow at the deaths of the Chinese Communists. Both give a moving roll call of the martyrs; Chang blames the Comintern as strongly as Mao Tun does.

3. Benjamin Schwartz, op.cit., pp. 86–116; Chang Kuo-t’ao, op.cit., pp. 735–772.

4. See in particular Schwartz, op.cit., pp. 86–116.

5. Ibid., p.96.

6. Ibid., p.94. Here we cannot but recall the “second phase” of Miss Cloud’s tuberculosis in Mao Tun’s “From Kuling to Tokyo,” and the story of her life as she tells it.

7. Benjamin Schwartz, op.cit., p. 106.

8. Mao Tun, “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Short Story Monthly 19.10 (October 1928), pp. 1138–1146. See section 1. See also his “Memoirs X” Source Materials on the History of the New Literature 1980.1 (February 1980), p. 2.

9. Mao Tun, “Memoirs X,” p. 8.

10. Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs II, pp. 727 ff.

11. “From Kuling to Tokyo,” section 6.

12. Ibid., section 4.

13. Ibid., section 6.

14. Mao Tun, Tsui-ch’iu (Pursuit) (Shanghai, K’ai-ming shu-tien, 1930), p. 5. Tsui-ch’iu has been variously translated as Quest or Searching. “Quest” carries a religious connotation which Tsui-ch’iu does not have, and “searching” does not have the sense of momentum that “pursuit” or “pursue” has.

15. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

16. Ibid., p. 3.

17. Ibid., pp. 9–10.

18. Ibid., p. 11.

19. Ibid., pp. 14–15.

20. Ibid., p. 15.

21. The group’s going to the movie here reminds us of the movie scene in chapter 3 of Disillusionment, where Pao-su and Miss Ching and Miss Hui went to see Crime and Punishment. The title of the movie Miss Chang Ch’iu-liu and the “west-side” group go to see here, Tang-ren-hun (Souls of Late Party Members) reads like an apt subtitle to the first movie: crime in the name of revolution, punishable by death, is not absolved by invocation of the goal.

22. Pursuit, p. 19.

23. Ibid., p. 20.

24. Ibid., pp. 20–21.

25. The name of Dr. Gold is reminder of how Sun Wu-yang appeared in the eyes of Hu Kuo-kuang in Vacillation—glittering like a pile of silver. The reflection of “gold” (idealism) and silver in the eyes of the gazers—Chang Man-ch’ing in Pursuit and Hu Kuo-kuang in Vacillation—is certainly not meant to be complimentary. The “international” theme in both cases subtly underscores the continuing presence of the Comintern in CCP politics and the Russian aid.

26. Pursuit, p. 104. The expression used in the novel is: “with the courage befitting a martyr walking up to the guillotine.”

27. Ibid., p. 96.

28. Ibid., p. 105.

29. Ibid., p. 107.

30. Ibid., p. 104.

31. Ibid., p. 109.

32. Ibid., p.110.

33. Ibid., p. 160.

34. Mao Tun began to work at the Commercial Press in 1916 and resigned in 1925. He was then involved in Party newspaper work, first in Canton and later in Shanghai, Wuch’ang, and Hankow, till July 1927.

Mao Tun’s “Memoirs VIII” mentions his editorship of Cheng-chih chou-pao (Politics Weekly) in Canton in January 1926 at the request of Mao Tse-tung, at that time head of the Central Propaganda Department of the Nationalist Party. After the Chungshan Gunboat Incident, which he reported in great detail in the same installment of the “Memoirs,” he went back to Shanghai to take charge of the Nationalist Party Communications Bureau there. One of the functions of the Communications Bureau was to reprint and distribute material from Politics Weekly and other propagandas from the Central Propaganda Department. While in charge of the bureau, Mao Tun asked to have a special field investigator sent to the North and to the provinces along the Yangtze Valley to do some on-site investigation. The request and its refusal are reflected in Wang Chung-chao’s request and in his subsequent dance-hall visits to gather material for his special column. See “Memoirs IX.”

What Mao Tun was instructed to do for the Wuhan Republic Daily in 1927 also bears interesting comparisons with Wang Chung-chao’s assignment in Pursuit. The Republic Daily had ten pages, six pages of news and four pages of advertisements. One of the news sections was called “local city news,” one was “mass movements,” and one was “news of Party business.” See “Memoirs IX,” pp. 3–4. The last item may have been the fictional “advertisement for imported goods.”

35. Pursuit, p. 94.

36. These are the very prerequisites Mao Tun laid down in his article “On Reading Ni Huan-chih,” Wen-hsüeh chou-pao (Literature Weekly) 8.20 (May, 1929), for would-be writers of new literature. In Section 7, he wrote:

Wang Chung-chao’s views about committed writers contrast with the “big hat” speech of Chang Man-ch’ing and the phonograph disk that he and Chang Ch’iu-liu hear in their heads, as well as the ugly grinding gritty voice of Miss Chu Chin-ju. See note 41.

The most immediate provocation for Mao Tun’s attack on the “phonograph disk” in Pursuit and then in “On Reading Ni Huan-chih” was a famous article, “Liu-sheng-chi ti hui-yin” [Echoes of the Phonograph Disk], an essay on the proper attitude for young writers by the recent convert to revolutionary literature, Kuo Mo-jo, published in Wen-hua-p’i-p’ing (Cultural Review) no.3 (March 1928), pp. 1–12, under the pseudonym Mai-k’o-ang. The opening line of the article says, “Be a phonograph—this is the best credo for young literary writers.” “Phonograph,” the article goes on to explain, is a metaphor for “dialectic materialism,” its characteristics being “objective.” All young writers need to be a phonograph to overcome their innate property-classed consciousness. So the articie exhorts: “Don’t blow at will on your time-worn trumpet [a metaphor for the consciousness of the propertied-class]. Be a phonograph for the time being.”

Such opinions are reason enough for Mao Tun’s absolute scorn of the vocal qualities of the thoughts expressed by various characters in Pursuit.

37. Pursuit, chapter 1, pp. 21–22.

38. The working environment was probably modeled either on Mao Tun’s working environment at the Commercial Press or his newspaper offices, or a combination of both.

39. Pursuit, chapter 2, pp. 29–30.

40. Ibid., p. 32.

Mao Tun wrote in his “Memoirs IX” about the warnings from his Party superior about his Republic Daily reportage on the workers’, peasants’, and women’s movements. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, still the Secretary General of the CCP, advised Mao Tun to cut down on such “radical” news. According to the “Memoirs,” Mao Tun sought the opinion of Tung Pi-wu, the Communist director of the Republic Daily, who told him to disregard Ch’en. See “Memoirs IX,” pp. 6–8. People from the Nationalist Party had protested against such news because they helped to spread communism, and in May 1927 there were already protests against the overradicalization of the workers’ and peasants’ movements. (Mao Tun used the heading “The Struggle between Light and Darkness” for news about these movements against landlords and capitalists; the metaphor of light-and-darkness was to recur in his Wild Roses short stories.)

41. For the significance of the phonograph disk, see note 36 above. The adjectives “grinding, gritty,” we may note, are the same ones applied to the voice of Miss Chu Chin-ju.

42. Pursuit, pp. 32–33.

43. Ibid., p. 37.

In “Memoirs IX,” Mao Tun wrote that he was greatly vexed by the kinds of items he had to put into the section on “Urgent News”; “Announcements by the Central Executive Committee of the Nationalist Party, the Nationalist Government and their sundry orders, instructions, and speeches by Nationalist V.I.P.’s . . .” (p. 8). But I suspect that what Mao Tun was talking about in the novel in terms of “newly arrived goods” was new instructions from the Comintern and the Moscow government telling the CCP how to carry on its revolution and propaganda.

44. Pursuit, p. 43.

45. C. T. Hsia was the first critic to notice that Wang Chung-chao attended Chang Ch’iu-liu’s wild beach party and Chang Man-ch’ing’s wedding on the same day. See C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1961), p. 147.

Moscow’s order for the CCP to begin the “soviet phase” meant literally the death in action of many CCP members from pre-Wuhan days. Hence the wedding of the Party man Chang Man-ch’ing to his gritty-voiced partner with an interest in international history is simultaneous with Chang Ch’iu-liu’s effort to create a new Shih Hsün.

46. Pursuit, pp. 115–117.

47. This ambiguity was eliminated in the 1954 and 1957 editions of the trilogy by giving Miss Chang [Ching of Disillusionment] the name Chang Ch’iu-liu, so that two Miss Changs were reduced to one at the very beginning. The 1928 Short Story Monthly serialized version calls Chang Ch’iu-liu Chang nü-shih (Miss Chang), as Chang Ching is called in chapter 1 of Disillusionment; so in the beginning pages, there are moments of ambiguity in the reader’s mind whether this Chang nü-shih is not related in some way to the Chang nü-shih of Disillusionment. Or in the case of more careless readers, for those initial moments, they might indeed be taken as the same one. The 1930 K’ai-ming edition follows the Short Story Monthly. It introduces at the beginning of Pursuit Chang Ch’iu-liu as Chang nü-shih except when she is addressed directly as Ch’iu-liu by another character. The effect of a double montage there with the Chang nü-shih in the first chapter of Disillusionment cannot be accidental. Mao Tun said in “From Kuling to Tokyo” that he had hoped to use the same characters throughout the three novels but was forced to give up the idea. Of course it is difficult to say with certainty that the two Miss Changs represent the same “type” of person under two different historical circumstances—that is, two different stages of development of the same Great Revolution—but if we take seriously the author’s own references to the problem, this is the most logical reason for the discrepancy. I believe the name symbolism of Chang Ch’iu-liu (discussed later in this chapter) helps to track the development of Mao Tun’s thoughts about his double character.

Mao Tun specifically mentioned in his postscript to the new 1980 edition of Eclipse that the editors had proposed to restore the earlier deletions and he had refused. Thus he implicitly puts responsibility for the deletions on the editors. The total effect of the deletions as they still stand today is to obscure the links between the novel and the CCP history.

48. Compare Wang Shih-t’ao’s reflections about her pregnancy here with Miss Huan’s thinking about her pregnancy in the story “Suicide” in The Wild Roses (see my discussion in chapter 6). Mao Tun apparently reasoned through many alternatives for action for the CCP and for himself following the apocalyptic Canton Commune. If Miss Huan’s reasoning represents a retreat from Wang’s faint but determined hope for the future, a stronger hope appears in the short novel of 1931, In Company of Three, where K’o’s optimism reflects the author’s own mental journey. K’o, a young revolutionary who is perhaps one of the heirs of such characters as Tung-fang Ming and Wang Shih-t’ao, has vanished. After his disappearance his Friend Hui finds K’o’s diary and reads this passage:

49. This alternative as a possible form of action in the wake of revolutionary defeat is given a full treatment in the story “Haze” in The Wild Roses (see the discussion in chapter 6).

50. Pursuit, p. 117. This section was deleted in the 1957 edition and remained deleted in the 1980 edition.

51. Ibid., p. 119.

52. Ibid., p. 120.

53. Here we may well be reminded of the two questions Mao Tun raised with regard to Maeterlinck’s play Mona Vanna (see Tung-fang tsa-chih 18.4 (1920), pp. 59–60). Can a woman remain spiritually chaste when her body is sullied? Should a woman sacrifice her body as courageously as she would sacrifice her life in order to save others and her country? The metaphor is quite clear when transposed to the context of the Chinese Great Revolution: How much bodily and spiritual violation can a committed Party member endure without self deception in the name of the revolutionary cause? (See also the discussion of this issue in chapter 3).

54. “From Kuling to Tokyo,” section 3.

55. Ibid., chapter 6, p. 128.

56. Here a rather forced link is established between the Wang-Lu relationship and the Chang-Shih adventure. Later on, a similar link was established between the Chang-Shih adventure and the Chang-Chu wedding. Evidently Mao Tun was trying very hard to compress the three parallel sets of love relationship into one exposure by manipulating the time of the climactic incidents. The pursuit of Chang Ch’iu-liu is in one sense the pursuit of Chang Man-ch’ing on a different level, which in turn is the pursuit of Wang Chung-chao, all being part and parcel of the complex, multilinear development of the Great Revolution and its aftermath. Similarity here assumes the form of either simultaneity or mistaken identity.

57. That Miss Lu resembles not only Miss Chang but also Miss Chu further reinforces the above point.

Mao Tun as propagandist was supervised by people very much like Wang’s editor, and he had to listen to the “social science” expertise of people like Dr. Gold and supply data to substantiate the Party line as advocated by Chang Man-ch’ing. In his private world of personal identity, his love is for the Party (the girl at Chia-hsing where the CCP was first founded); his sympathy is with his diehard, wrong-headed comrades who rushed to their death in the 1927–28 soviet movement (the women Ch’ang Ch’iu-liu and Wang Shih-t’ao); his contempt is for the gilded authority of the ideologue (Dr. Gold) and the slogan-mongering CCP disciple (Chang Man-ch’ing); and his unremitting hatred is reserved for Miss Chu, the harsh voice of the Comintern that will wreck the Party as she will destroy her partner.

58. Pursuit, p. 133.

59. Ibid., p. 134.

60. Ibid., p. 135.

61. The possible significance of these simultaneous events is discussed in note 45 above. Here I want to call attention to the meaningful simultaneity of Chang Man-ch’ing’s wedding, which Wang Chung-chao attended, and the beach party of Chang Ch’iu-liu and Shih Hsün, which Wang also attended. They are both “profile” painting of the disaster that was meant to inaugurate the “soviet” movement.

The Canton Commune was the result of a host of historical factors, of course, but the most prominents ones were, first, the blind orders of the Comintern (Miss Chu’s willful manipulation of Chang Man-ch’ing and her own shallowness of mind and character); second, the indigenous CCP’s aspirations for independence and emancipation of the masses (Miss Lu in Chia-hsing as the offstage goal of the realist Wang Chung-chao); and third, the Futuristic self-destructiveness of those who set off the Canton Commune, the same people who had founded and led the Red Army in the Nanch’ang Uprising only a few months before (young Party veterans like Chang Ch’iu-liu, Shih Hsün, and the west-side group).

62. Pursuit, pp. 137–138. This section was deleted in the 1957 and 1980 editions.

63. Pursuit, p. 139.

64. Pursuit, p. 145.

65. Ibid., pp. 150–151.

66. The date is important because the Sixth Congress of the CCP and the Sixth Congress of the Comintern both took place in Moscow in June 1928. CCP leadership was formally transferred from Ch’ü Ch’iu-po to Li Li-san at this congress. By anchoring the events to around the Tsinan Incident, Mao Tun makes it clear that he was talking about the Party history prior to the congress. For Ch’ü’s curious indifference to the Incident, see Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs II, p. 770.

67. In China, syphilis is called mei-tu after a fruit yang-mei because of the red pimples or pustules that are often symptoms of the primary stage. The final stage of this disease fatally affects the female reproductive organ and causes death. An article called “Syphilis and Pulmonary Consumption” (“Mei-tu yü fei-chieh-he,”) Tung-fang tsa-chih 18.16 [August 1921] was published in one of the Commercial Press magazines in 1921. In it, Hsü Sung-ming discussed the symptoms and phases of development of the two diseases in Western medical terms. As a matter of fact, Tung-fang tsa-chih carried quite a number of articles on Western science, medicine, and technology, in the late teens and early 1920s, reflecting the general public’s interest in learning from the West.

Western medicine was especially fascinating to the Chinese. The new definition of diseases (typhus, venereal diseases, and tuberculosis) and the discovery of viruses was mind-boggling in China, since Chinese medicine had a totally different way of diagnosing illness and a totally different theory of “cure.” One interesting feature of the May Fourth generation of writers is that their characters have begun to get sick with Western diseases. Appendicitis, typhus, and tuberculosis are particularly popular (Ting Ling’s “Miss Sophia” is best known of many examples), but there is also the typhus of Yeh Shao-chün’s Ni Huan-chih, the “depression” of Yü Ta-fu’s hero in the famous novella Sinking, and the appendicitis that quite unscientifically stripped Shih Hsün of vitality in Pursuit. Lu Hsün’s characters, however, who generally live in the countryside, still become ill with the old Chinese names for their sicknesses—for example, the son in the story “Medicine.”

68. [Shen] Yen-ping, k’ung Ch’ang, and Ch’en Ku, Chin-tai hsi-chü-chia lun (On Modern Playwrights) (Shanghai, Tung-fang Wen-k’u, Commercial Press, 1923), p.23.

Hauptmann’s play Der Saemann, originally entitled Vor Sonnenaufgang, is translated as Tung-fang wei-ming (The East is Not Yet Bright). Mao Tun in the 1930s also took “Tung-fang wei-ming” as one of his pseudonyms. The implication of the name, of course, is that the East is soon going to be bright. The chapter on Hermann Sudermann and Gerhart Hauptmann originally appeared as an article in Tung-fang tsa-chih 17.15–16 (August 1921).

69. Men Ch’i (circa 755), “Chapter 1: On Matters of Personal Feelings (Ch’ing-kan-ti-i),” Pen-shih-shih (Stories about Poets and Their Poems) (Shanghai, Ku-tien-wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1957), pp. 8–11.

The association between the names Chang Ch’iu-liu in Pursuit and the title of the poem “Chang-t’ai Liu” (“The Willow of Chang-t’ai”) in the story about the T’ang poet Han Yi is indirect, as is the association of Sun Wu-yang in Vacillation with Ch’in Wu-yang in Shih-chi, and the connection cannot be proved.

70. In the short novel The Road (Shanghai, Kuang-hua shu-chü, 1932), the overbearing dean or supervisor of the school who ravishes a girl student is named Chin (Thorns). He is the thorn in the rose crown of revolution and also the thorns that cover the path of revolution. But evil as he is, the Dean’s influence is soon limited, because he is aliented from and distrusted by both the “Devil’s Clique” and the “Scholars’ Clique” of the students. The Dean still persecutes them, but he is no longer able to become part of their consciousness and thus lay claim over the pattern of their behavior.

6. The Wild Roses: The Psychology of Revolutionary Commitment

1. Mao Tun, “Memoirs XI,” Source Materials for the History of the New Literature (HWHSL) 1981.2 (May 1981), pp. 1–2.

2. Ibid., p. 2.

3. Ibid., pp. 3-17.

4. Mao Tun arrived in Japan nearly a year after the Wuhan retreat and the Canton Commune of 1927. The situation of the CCP worsened in early 1928, when a member of the upper echelons of the Party informed on her comrades, leading in one instance to the arrest of the CCP Shanghai Branch Secretary, Lo Chüeh. One might suggest that the motif of internal betrayal among “schoolmates” in Ho Jo-hua’s unexplained change of heart in the story “Haze” is based on a political reality which Mao Tun in his mental and spiritual agony preferred not to remember clearly and could not in any case refer to directly. The informer against Lo Chüeh was Ho Chih-hua (very close to Ho Jo-hua). See Chang Kuo-t’ao, Wo ti hui-i (Memoirs) (Hongkong, 1973) vol. II, pp. 759–64.

Mao Tun in his “Memoirs X-XI” writes about the period after the Wuhan retreat and about his departure for safety in Japan but does not mention the Lo Chüeh incident, HWHSL 1981.1 and 1981.2.

Recently Professor Satoru Nagumo published an article on The Wild Roses, incorporating much biographical information from Mao Tun’s “Memoirs.” Satoru Nagumo, “Mao Tun and his First Collection of Short Stories, Ye Qiang Wei,” The Nippon-chūgoku Gakkai-hō (Bulletin of the Sinological Society of Japan) no. 33 (1981), pp. 263–277.

5. Mao Tun, “Mai tou-fu ti shao-tzu” (Whistle of the Bean-curd Seller) Short Story Monthly 18.2 (February 1929). Also see “Memoirs XI,” p. 8.

6. Many of the essays attacking Eclipse and “From Kuling to Tokyo” were collected by Fu Chih-ying in a volume called Mao Tun P’ing Chuan (Critical and Biographical Essays on Mao Tun) (Preface dated Shanghai, October 20, 1931; reissued Hongkong, Nan-tao ch’u-pan-she, 1968). The most detailed literary criticism of Eclipse, The Wild Roses and Rainbow in that volume was in an essay by Ho Yü-po, “Mao Tun ch’uang-tso ti k’ao-ch’a” (“A Critical Investigation of Mao Tun’s Creative Works”), pp. 7–51, and the most controversial was Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un’s “Mao Tun yü hsien-shih” (“Mao Tun and Reality”), pp. 195–216. K’o Hsing’s “P’ing Mao Tun ti ‘Ts’ung Ku-ling tao Tokyo’ ” (“On Mao Tun’s ‘From Kuling to Tokyo’ ”), pp. 217–243, and Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un’s “Ts’ung Tokyo hui-tao Wu-han” (“Returning from Tokyo to Wuhan”), pp. 255–314, typified the kind of literary polemics propounded by writers and critics on the radical left.

The direct and immediate bearing of communist politics on leftist literature and criticism of the period is attested to in a statement written by Mao Tun and given to Yu-shih Chen during an interview in September 1977 when the latter asked him, also in writing and delivered ahead of the interview, about the relationship of his fiction in the later 1920s and early 1930s to the situation of the Chinese Communist movement” “Literary polemics during the period were intimately related to the different outlooks on the situation of the revolution. . . . The reason is that when literature is at the service of revolution, different lines in party policy-making cannot but be concretely reflected in the subject matter and methods of creative writing.”

Mao Tun, “Hsieh tsai Yeh ch’iang-wei ti ch’ien-mien” (“Foreword to The Wild Roses”), Yeh ch’iang-wei (The Wild Roses) (Shanghai, 1929), pp. i-vii. See especially section 3, Mao Tun’s self-admonishment appears in Yu-shih Chen, (trans.), “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Revolutionary Literature in China: An Anthology, John Berninghausen and Ted Huters (ed.) (White Plains, N.Y., N.E. Sharpe, 1976), pp. 37–43. The relevant passages are on pp. 4, and 43.

7. Mao Tun worked on mythology during the 1920s. He referred to it in his “Chi-chü chiu-hua” (“Remarks on the Past”) Wen-hsüeh (1933), saying that he had begun his serious research in Chinese mythology sometime after April 1926 (see Yu-shih Chen in Goldman, ed. Modern Chinese Literature, p. 266). In a later autobiographical piece he referred to his mythology studies thus: “The second half of 1928 was an exception. I was not sick at the time, but I was not writing novels either. At that time I wrote a few monographs on subjects of academic interest (I feel ashamed to mention this), for example, A Study of Chinese Mythology” (Mao Tun, “In Retrospect,” Self-Selected Works of Mao Tun [Reissued Hongkong: Hsin-yüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1962], p. 1).

Between 1925 and 1930, Mao Tun published several articles and at least two books on mythology: The A.B.C. of Chinese Mythology (Shanghai: Shih-chieh shu-chü, 1929), and The A.B.C. of Nordic Mythology (Shanghai, Shih-chieh shu-chü, 1929). He also published Greek Mythology (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1926). In 1928, he published an article, “Greek Mythology and Nordic Mythology,” Short Story Monthly 19.8 (August 1928), pp. 942–969. The article shows that Mao Tun had been thinking about the various aspects of the two mythologies in a comparative framework—their creation myths and their mythical representation of natural phenomena such as the sun, the moon, the clouds, and the earth. Their goddesses of Fate appear on pp. 950–951. The comparative perspective behind the article is more interesting than details of its content. It is clear that in the mid-to late 1920s Mao Tun was preoccupied with the meaning of mythology, and we may assume that his borrowing of mythical names for his fictional character (see note 11 below) was conscious and deliberate.

8. Shen Yen-ping (ed.), Chuang-tzu (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1926) and Ch’u Tz’u (Shanghai, The Commercial Press, 1926).

There is a terse exposition of Chuang-tzu’s “escapist” philosophy by Chün-shih in “Creation” which certainly reflects Mao Tun’s own rejection of its view of the ultimate spiritual detachment of man in his world. But Mao Tun’s most telling statement on the subject is in his “Preface” to Chuang-tzu, where he remarks on Chuang-tzu’s lack of involvement in times of disorder and concludes that he was “not revolutionary” (a most amusing way to characterize Chuang-tzu). For a discussion on Mao Tun’s involvement with Chuang-tzu studies in high school and later, see Marián Gálik, “From Chuang-tzu to Lenin: Mao Tun’s Intellectual Development,” Asian and African Studies (Brastislava) Vol.3 (1967), pp. 98–109.

9. How Ch’ü Yüan died is still debated by some scholars. Mao Tun raised no questions about the circumstances of Ch’ü Yüan’s death when he included the biography of Ch’ü Yüan from the Shih-chi in his Ch’u Tz’u. My hypothesis about the significance for Mao Tun of Chuang-tzu’s philosophy and Ch’ü Yüan’s tragic death helps to explain a great deal about Mao Tun’s early works and what he said about them during this period.

10. Mao Tun, “Suicide,” Short Story Monthly 19.9 (September 1928).

11. These allusions later reappeared and became even more pronounced in two novelettes he wrote after his return to Shanghai, The Road (1930) and In Company of Three (1930–31). The names of the principal characters in The Road are Hsing, Tu-jo, and (Chiang) Yung, all flowers in Ch’u Tz’u. There is also an explicit reference, though it is made in joking allusion to a line in a Ch’u Tz’u poem about wading the river to pick the yung flower. See Mao Tun, The Road (Shanghai, Wen-hua sheng-huo ch’u-pan-she, 1935), p.32. Hsing (a graph that is identical to the Hsing in The Road), Hsü’s girl friend in In Company of Three, and Ch’iu-chü (autumn chrysanthemum), the maid who commits suicide, in particular, carry definite Ch’u Tz’u overtones. There are many other mythical and historical references in the names of Mao Tun’s character such as Chün-shih in “Creation” which we have already discussed.

Mao Tun himself in his “Memoirs XI-ХII” identified the symbolism in many of the proper names used in his stories and essays of this period. See HWHSL 1981. 2–3 (May, August, 1981).

12. “Foreword,” The Wild Roses, Section 2, p. iv.

13. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, “Mao Tun and Reality,” Contemporary Chinese Literary Writers (Shanghai, T’ai-tung-t’u-shu-chü, 1930), vol.II, p. 172; also Fu Chih-ying, op.cit., p. 215.

14. “Foreword,” pp. i-ii.

15. In Greek myth, Lachesis measures the thread of life spun by Clotho and determines its length. Mao Tun, however, describes her as “twisting together the thread of life. Her wrist-power is at times strong and at times weak; that explains why man’s life force varies in degree of strength.” As a revolutionary, Mao Tun was more concerned with the strength than the length of life when the issue at stake was power in the political as well as the military field; but it is impossible to say whether he changed the myth deliberately or inadvertently. My guess is that he did it deliberately (“Foreword,” p. i).

For a short account of the Greek Fates, see Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. I (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1955), p. 48.

16. “Foreword,” p.ii. Mao Tun’s version of the Nordic fates probably also contains elements of free variation of his own. I have not been able to find a description of Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld that conforms closely to his concept of mythological time. In Brian Branston’s Gods of the North, the sisters’ being symbols of the Present, Past, and Future is there, but not the open relationship between man and his fate in mythological time. Instead, the following is said about the Fates: “The names of the three Nornir are Urdr, Verdandi and Skuld, words which may be translated Past, Present and Future: so that when ‘the three giant maids came from Giantland’ they brought with them time; then the timeless existence of the youthful gods in the Ancient Asgard ceased, and they put off their immortality. From the ‘coming of the women’ the predestined events must take place one after the other until the Doom of the Gods” (Brian Branston, Gods of the North [New York: The Vanguard Press, 1955], p.209). The Larousse World Mythology (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965) gives a slightly different version of “the mistresses of human destiny” (pp. 390–391), but it also differs from Mao Tun’s version.

Mao Tun may have seen an early illustrated edition of the Nordic myths which I have not seen. Since I have not been able to locate his A.B.C. of Nordic Mythology, which according to his “Memoirs XI,” shows eight sources, I do not know his exact sources. Here again, Dr. Marián Gálik came to my last-minute rescue. In a letter dated September 26, 1984, he said that there was indeed an illustrated book of Nordic mythology which Mao Tun had seen: “It was a book by H. A. Guerber, entitled Myths of the Norsemen (London 1919), where are also pictures you have rightly anticipated in China Quarterly.” I am very grateful to Dr. Gálik for his continuing supply of rare information concerning now obscured references in Mao Tun’s early works.

17. Yu-shih Chen (reanal.) “From Kuling to Tokyo,” p.39.

18. “Foreword,” p.iii.

19. Ibid., p.iii. I have used John Berninghausen’s translation of this sentence from his conference paper, “Mao Tun’s Early Fiction: A Dialectic Between Politics and Love,” which was revised and published as “The Central Contradiction in Mao Tun’s Earliest Fiction,” in Goldman, Modern Chinese Literature, pp. 233–229. In the published version the long quotation is considerably cut (see pp.242–243). Translations of other passages from the “Foreword” are my own.

20. “Foreword,” p. vii.

21. The interpretation of the dramatic personalities in the stories as metaphors for flowers is my own; the phrase and the idea of a “rose-flower crown” are in the text (“Foreword,” p. vii). I made a simple inference.

22. Ibid., pp. iii-iv.

23. “Suicide,” The Wild Roses, p. 75.

24. Ibid., p. 76.

25. Ibid., p. 77.

26. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 140–164 (p.161).

27. John Berninghausen, “Central Contradiction,” pp. 233–259.

28. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’ung, vol.II, p. 161; also Fu Chih-ying, p. 204.

29. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, ibid, pp. 161–162; also Fu Chih-ying, pp. 204–205.

30. This view is represented by C. T. Hsia’s statement, cited in note 26. Hsia regards Mao Tun’s characterization of Miss Huan in essentially the same way that Wayne Booth looks upon Henry James’s characterization of the governess in “The Turn of the Screw” (see Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], p. 312). I find Booth’s chapters on “The Price of Impersonal Narration, Ch. I: Confusion of Distance,” (pp. 311–319) and “Ch.II: Henry James and the Unreliable Narrator” (pp. 339–346) helpful in understanding similar technical problems confronting Mao Tun in his characterization of Miss Huan and other women in The Wild Roses.

31. Cf. note 27. Berninghausen’s position can be challenged by invoking Booth’s discussion of the use of the “unreliable narrator” as a device in fiction to effect a double focus—the unreliable narrator (in this case, Miss Huan) as the protagonist, and the author (Mao Tun) uncontrollably “breaking out” of his narrative to speak on a different level (cf. Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 346). Applying Booth’s analysis of the James story to Mao Tun’s “Suicide,” we can see that ambivalence about revolution, freedom, love, or women’s emancipation does not necessarily have to be a part of Miss Huan’s dramatic character nor a part of Mao Tun’s personal feeling as the author. It can very well reside in the fictional device of the unreliable narrator. What Mao Tun wants his dénouement in “Suicide” to address is the nature and structure of commitment and its betrayal. The ambivalence reflected in Miss Huan’s situation can be resolved once we see it in that perspective.

32. The theoretical issues involved in the uses of “telling” and “showing” in realistic fiction are many and complicated. Mao Tun obviously employed some such device as the double focus discussed in n.31 to communicate on more than one level of reality. Also, he left no record of his technical planning of his fiction beyond the Chinese terms “profile painting,” “allusion” (an-shih), and the like. Cf. Wayne Booth, “Telling and Showing,” Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 3–20.

33. “Foreword,” p. v.

34. Ibid., p. v.

35. Ibid., p. iv.

36. Mao Tun puts them in two separate groups of character types in section 4 of his “Foreword.” Miss Huan is called a “weak” character, and Ch’iung-hua a victim of circumstance and egocentrism who once was innocent and loving. Their different outlooks on love and their different kinds of tragic death may point toward allegories for two different Party lines in different periods of revolutionary struggle. In light of the parallels that inform the other early fiction, Miss Huan’s suicidal psychology could be interpreted as the lesson Mao Tun wanted his readers to learn from the putschist tendencies in late 1927 and early 1928 that cost the lives of many of his long-time comrades and caused large casualties among the rank and file of the party. Both Miss Huan and the putschist advocates mistook the road to death for the road out of a critical situation. By the same token, Ch’iung-hua’s “egocentrism” could be regarded as another lesson on the deadly consequences of the politically egocentric “Li Li-san Line” which was obsessed with the idea of making comebacks by capturing urban centers, despite the fact that CCP military forces were not equipped for such large-scale undertakings after the setbacks of 1927. It is tempting to speculate in this direction, especially when we ask the reason for Mao Tun’s preoccupation with suicide and sickness-unto-death motifs in these stories. Moreover, it is difficult to understand otherwise what Mao Tun meant by “egocentrism” in Ch’iung-hua: the story itself hardly supports such a description.

37. In the story, she is frequently shown to be lonely for love. See “A Woman,” The Wild Roses, pp. 90–92, 100 and 112–14.

38. Ibid., p. 91.

39. Ibid., p. 99.

40. Ibid., p. 162.

41. Tsu Hsiu-hsia, “Mao Tun ti ‘I-ko nü-hsing,” (“Mao Tun’s ‘A Woman’ ”), in Fu Chih-ying, p.130.

42. In Mao Tun’s early fiction the image of the mother is invariably projected as warm and comforting, and she plays a positive role in the lives of the protagonists. “Mother” seems to stand for a relationship between the revolution and its goal that is spontaneous, natural, loving, healing, and rejuvenating. Miss Ching in Disillusionment is reminded of her mother whenever she is in distress, as Ch’iung-hua is in “A Woman.” The latter’s partial will to survive after the fire springs largely from her concern for her aging mother. The father figure in Mao Tun’s early fiction generally fares less well. Fathers are nonexistent in Eclipse, and Miss Chang’s father in “Haze” is an ugly tyrant.

43. “Haze” The Wild Roses, p.184.

44. In contrast to the legendary cradle of Chinese revolutionary movement, Canton, Peking, and Nanking are the bases of the warlords and the KMT respectively. As Pao-su in Disillusionment is an agent from Nanking, Ping’s girl cousin in “Poetry and Prose”—his tie to the conservative past—finally goes with her father to Peking. Thus it is auspicious for the revolution that Miss Chang decides to go to Canton and her mother. Mao Tun does not have her think of marrying someone in Nanking nor of leaving for Peking; she does not betray herself.

45. Hsien-hsien’s leftist and Communist affiliation and activities have been commented upon by C. T. Hsia in his “On the ‘Scientific’ Study of Modern Chinese Literature, a Reply to Professor Průšek,” T’oung Pao L.4–5 (1963), pp. 466–467.

46. “Poetry and Prose,” The Wild Roses, p. 145.

47. Ibid., pp. 136–137.

48. Ibid. pp. 139–140.

49. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, “Mao Tun and Reality,” p. 162; also Fu Chih-ying, pp. 205–206.

50. Chün-shih’s obsession with his “creation” conforms closely to the concept of humors in Western comedy. Northrop Frye’s definition of humors and his penetrating study of the sources of absurdity in the role of humors in a changing society as reflected in the works of Dickens shed a great deal of light on Mao Tun’s conception of his comic characters in The Wild Roses, such as Chün-shih and young man Ping: “The humor is a character identified with a characteristic, like the miser, the hypochondriac, the braggart, the parasite, or the pedant. He is obsessed with whatever it is that makes him a humor, and the sense of our superiority to an obsessed person, someone bound to an invariable ritual habit, is, according to Bergson, one of the chief sources of laughter. But it is not because he is incidentally funny that the humor is important in New Comedy: he is important because his obsession is the feature that creates the conditions of the action, and the opposition of the two [congenial and obstructing] societies” (Northrop Frye, “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970], p. 223).

Frye’s observation about the possibility for “comic action” to overcome or evade the sinister forces in a highly structured society bears cogently on the social and political function of the combined role of Chün-shih and Hsien-hsien in “Creation,” and of Ping and Madame Kuei in “Poetry and Prose.” “In most of the best Victorian novels, apart from Dickens, the society described is organized by its institutions: the church, the government, the professions, the rural squirearchy, business, and the trade unions. It is a highly structured society, and the characters function from within those structures. But in Dickens we get a much more free-wheeling and anarchistic social outlook. For him the structures of society, as structures, belong almost entirely to the absurd, obsessed, sinister aspect of it, the aspect that is overcome or evaded by the comic action. The comic action itself moves toward the regrouping of society around the only social unit that Dickens really regards as genuine, the family.” (pp. 227–28).

51. “Foreword,” pp. iv-v.

52. Ibid., p. iv.

53. Ibid., p. v. The Chinese concept of the Golden Mean (chung-yung)—the middle road, moderation instead of taking to extremes—is close to the Aristotelian principle of the Mean.

54. Ibid., p. vi.

55. “Creation,” February 3, 1928 (following Disillusionment, September–October 1927, and Vacillation, November-December, 1927).

“Suicide,” July 8, 1928 (following Pursuit, April-May 1928, and departure for Japan in June 1928).

“A Woman,” August 20–25, 1928 (following “From Kuling to Tokyo,” July 16, 1928).

“Poetry and Prose,” December 15, 1928 (following “Whistle of The Bean-curd Seller,” “Maple Leaves,” “Knocking,” and “Fog”).

“Haze,” March 9, 1929 (following “Colorblindness,” March 3, 1929).

“Foreword to The Wild Roses,” May 9, 1929 (following “Muddiness,” April 3, 1929, and “On Reading Ni Huan-chih,” May 4, 1929).

We see that “Creation” was written immediately after Disillusionment and Vacillation, or possibly at the same time as Vacillation, before Mao Tun had learned about or thought through the events that threw him into the despair of Pursuit. In these three works he was quite optimistic about the future, convinced of the value and reality of love and courage. But in the period of Pursuit, “Suicide,” and “From Kuling to Tokyo,” spontaneous love and courageous struggle had become the road to sickness and death. In Japan, physical distance from the center of revolutionary struggle created the initial elegiac mood of an “exile from home” that was reflected in his lyrical essays of the first half of his stay, and also the later, more creative psychological distancing from history that is reflected in the neither-love-nor-hate philosophy of “A Woman.” The direction Mao Tun was striving for is captured briefly in “Poetry and Prose,” in Madame Kuei’s bold, uninhibited mode of sexuality and life. Biographically, the creation of Madame Kuei in the image of Hsien-hsien implies that Mao Tun had not given up, or had reenvisioned, the future that the endings of Disillusionment and “Creation” point toward. Finally, as exemplified in “Haze,” Mao Tun’s decision to recommit himself to his originally revolutionary course was conclusive, despite all reservations about a possible reversion to “suicidal” tendencies among friends, “schoolmates,” and loved ones. If nothing else, “Haze” is a declaration of the renewed courage to take risks.

After “Haze,” Mao Tun’s writings became more spirited. “Muddiness” looks ahead to his three historical tales, and “On Reading Ni Huan-chih” and the foreword to The Wild Roses, written only five days apart, are full of strong, nonillusionary belief in the revolution, and renewed belief in the author’s ability to influence events for the better.

56. “In Retrospect,” Self-selected Works, pp. 4–5; “Afterward [i.e., after the Eclipse and ‘Creation’], I wrote four or five short pieces, such as ‘Suicide.’ In subject matter and technique they all belong to the same kind of writing. It is a waste indeed of brush and ink. . . . In subject matter, ‘The Top’ [November 5, 1929] is not any different from ‘Creation’ and the other. . . .”

57. “Wu” (“Fog” December 14, 1928), Su-mang (Shanghai: K’ai-ming shu-tien, 1931), pp. 125–27.

58. “Hung-yeh” (“Maple Leaves”) Short Story Monthly 20.3 (March 1929). Also collected in Su-mang, pp. 130–133. “The Sound of the Bean-curd Seller’s Whistle,” Short Story Monthly 20.2 (February 1929): “In an outcast like me, without home, without motherland, refined sentiments like homesickness are not natural to the heart any more.”

59. “K’ou men” (“Knocking,” January 1929), Su-mang, pp. 121–123.

60. “Ch’iu-ti-kung-yüan” (“Autumn in the Public Park”), Mao Tun San-wen-chi (Collected Essays of Mao Tun) (Shanghai: T’ien-ma shu-tien, 1933); reissued as Mao Tun Tzu-hsüan San-wen-chi (Self-selected Essays of Mao Tun) (Hongkong: 1954), pp. 77–82.

“Chi-chieh-sung” (“Odes to Machines”), ibid., pp. 25–29.

“Tsai kung-yüan-li” (“In the Public Park”), ibid., p. 88.

“Wu-yüeh san-shih-jih ti hsia-wu” (“The Afternoon of May Thirtieth”), Mao Tun hsüan-chi (Selected Works of Mao Tun) (Shanghai: Hsien-tai ch’uang-tso wen-k’u edition, 1933), pp. 259–262.

7. Consciousness of the Collective: Remaking the Rebel Tradition

1. “Pao-tzu-t’ou Lin Ch’ung” (“Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head”) Short Story Monthly 21.8 (August 10, 1930); “Shih-chieh” (“Stone Tablet”) Short Story Monthly 21.9 (September 10, 1930); “Ta-tse-hsiang” (“The Great Marsh District”) Short Story Monthly 21.10 (October 10, 1930).

2. Mao Tun, Lu (The Road) (Shanghai: Wen-hua sheng-huo ch’u-pan-she, 1935). In the postscript of this edition, Mao Tun outlined the vicissitude that visited the printing of the novel and also severe eye trouble he suffered: “I began writing this novel in the winter of 1930. When it first went to print, I had the following passage in my ‘Notes written after reading the galley proofs’—‘The novel was only half written when my old ailment, trachoma, again broke out. I was almost blinded in one eye. It took three months of medical care before I recovered from the attack. As a result, the second half of the novel was completed in the spring of 1931.’ ”

Mao Tun apparently had eye trouble throughout his life. When I interviewed him in September 1977, he told me that he could not see with one eye, and the other eye had only 0.2 vision.

3. Mao Tun, “Memoirs XII,” Source Materials for the History of the New Literature (HWHSL) 1981.3 (August 1981), pp. 81–104.

4. Ibid., p.83.

5. Benjamin Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1951). See especially chapter 8, “A New Shift in Line,” pp. 109–126.

6. Ibid., p. 108.

7. Ibid., p. 139. I am puzzled to find that Mao Tun in “Memoirs XII” denies knowledge of the activities of Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te in Chingkang mountains but highlights the Fifth Red Army commander P’eng Te-huai and his attack on Changsha (see “Memoirs XII,” pp. 89–90).

8. Mao Tun, “Wo-ti-hui-i” (“In Retrospect”), Self-Selected Works of Mao Tun (Reissued Hongkong: Hsin-yüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1962), pp. 5–7. Italics added.

9. For background to the history behind “In Retrospect,” see Benjamin Schwartz, op.cit., pp. 109–163. Also, Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs II (Hongkong, Mingpao yüeh-k’an ch’u-pan-she, 1973), pp. 777–860.

10. Benjamin Schwartz, op.cit., pp. 172–188. From his writing of “The Great Marsh District” and later his trilogy of the countryside in short story form—“Spring Silkworms,” “Autumn Harvest,” and “Winter Ruins”—we can infer that Mao Tun’s outlook on the future of the peasant movement in 1930–32 had greatly improved from his apocalyptic view of 1927–28.

11. “Foreword,” The Wild Roses (Shanghai, 1929), p.vii: “All five stories in this collection appear in the guise of love stories. The author attempts to reveal the chieh-chi ti i-shih-hsing-t’ai (class consciousness of each of the characters through their actions in a love relationship.”

12. “Ta-tse-hsiang” (“The Great Marsh District”), Collected Short Stories of Mao Tun II (Shanghai, 1939), p.107: “If we wait here, it will be death for sure. Why don’t we take action together? Only then can we escape death.” There is a very similar speech between Ch’en She and Wu Kuang in Shih-chi.

13. Shui-hu-chuan (The Water Margin) (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh ch’u-panshe, 1957).

14. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Grand Historian, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), I, pp. 9–30.

For the Chinese version see “Ch’en She shih-chia,” Shih-chi hui-chu K’ao-cheng, 48.1–25.

15. The person who comes first to mind as the model for Mao Tun’s Lin Ch’ung is Mao Tse-tung. Some Japanese scholars have actually said so. However we find significant discrepancies between their positions and background.

Lin Ch’ung, both in the source and in Mao Tun’s story, is always where the central court is. In Water Margin, he begins as the captain of the Imperial Guards right in the capital of the Northern Sung dynasty. In Mao Tun’s story, he is in Liang-shan, at the headquarters of the rebel group, contending actively for leadership. Neither case adequately reflects Mao Tse-tung’s situation in 1930, who at that time was out in the countryside, away from the CCP headquarters in Shanghai.

For an account of Mao Tse-tung’s activities in 1930 up to the Fut-ien Incident, see Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 172–188, especially pp. 172–178.

Li Li-san is my candidate as model for Mao Tun’s Lin Ch’ung if a candidate need be found. It was he and not Mao Tse-tung who repeatedly ran afoul of “scholars” at the leadership level: first Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, then in 1930, Wang Ming. He was also the one who had held military command after the Nanchang Uprising of August 1927. The details of his role in the CCP better fit Mao Tun’s portrayal of Lin Ch’ung in the fictional version of the intra-party feud.

16. There was only one set of people on the scene on the leadership level in the CCP that approximated the image of Wang Lun, namely, Wang Ming and the group of returned students from Moscow. The feud between this group and the Li Li-san group was fictionalized in The Road, with Mif presiding as Dean Ching.

17. Yang Chih is a good fictional projection of those like Ch’ü Ch’iu-po and Teng Chung-hsia who in 1930 still clung to the practice of deferring to the wishes of Moscow and the Comintern as the orthodox way of advancing the cause of the communist movement in China.

18. Mao Tun, Collected Short Stories, II, p.442.

19. Ibid., p. 445.

20. See note 11.

21. See note 15.

22. Burton Watson (tr.) Records of the Grand Historian I, pp. 29–30.

23. See note 11 for the variant forms of expression for “class” in Chinese.

24. Mao Tun, Spring Silkworms and Other Stories (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), pp. 267–268.

25. Ibid., p. 269.

26. Ibid., p. 270.

27. Ibid., p. 271.

28. Ibid., p. 271.

29. Ibid., p. 275.

30. Ibid., p. 275.

31. It is difficult to resist the temptation to speculate on the person behind Mao Tun’s “chief advisor Wu Yung.” There is one person throughout the Chinese Communist movement who fits consistently into this role of a master negotiator excelling in the art of ho-hsi-ni (making thin mud mixture), and that is Chou En-lai. Reviewing his activities in 1930, his role of a master peace-maker certainly stands out. See Chang Kuo-t’ao, Wo ti hui-i (Memoirs) (Hongkong, 1973) vol. 2, pp. 777–857, especially pp. 821–857.

32. Collected Short Stories of Mao Tun I (Shanghai: K’ai-ming shu-tien, 1934), p. 339.

33. Ibid., p. 340.

34. Ibid., p. 341.

35. The three historical tales were first published in Short Story Monthly.

“Pao-tzu-t’ou Lin Ch’ung” (Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head), first appeared in Hsiao-shuo yüeh-pao (Short Story Monthly) XXI. 8 (August 10, 1930), and was later collected in Mao Tun tuan-p’ien hsiao-shuo-chi II (Collected Short Stories of Mao Tun, II), pp. 439–445.

“Shih-chieh” (Stone Tablet) first appeared in Short Story Monthly XXI.9 (September 10, 1930) and later on collected in Mao Tun tuan-p’ien hsiao-shuo-chi I (Collected Short Stories of Mao Tun, I) (Shanghai: K’ai-ming shu’tien, 1934), pp. 336–341. “Stone Tablet,” probably because of its cynical attitude towards political ideology and revolutionary leadership, is the least anthologized of the three historical tales. It is overlooked by leftist publishers to the extent of deliberate oblivion.

“Ta-tse hsiang” (Great Marsh District), Collected Short Stories of Mao Тun, II, pp. 429–438. It was first published in Short Story Monthly XXI. 10 (October 10, 1930). It was much anthologized, and was the only of the three pieces translated in Spring Silkworms and Other Stories (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), pp. 267–276. Its popularity is easily explained by the glorification of the peasant movement and the cult of Mao Tse-tung’s leadership developed since the mid-1930s.

The shift in Mao Tun’s fictional characters from the upper strata of society to the lower and middle strata in mid-1930s is reflected in the following examples: “Hsiao-su” (The Little Witches) (1932.2.29); “Lin-chia p’u-tzu” (1932.6.18) and “Ta-pi-tzu ti ku-shih” (Story of the Big-nosed Boy) (1936.5.27).

“The Little Witches” is a story about the lawless behaviors of the village powers along the lower Yangtze who controlled the local militia. The title “Hsiao-wu” is somewhat puzzling because the allusion is not apparent. There is a saying in Chinese “hsiao-wu chien ta wu” meaning something like one is surpassed by another in his realm of expertise. Chang Kuo-t’ao has an interesting phrase in his Memoirs (Volume 2) which may elucidate the reference of Mao Tun’s use of the term Hsiao-wu. Chang says, “I have been to the rural villages to visit collective farms, to study the actual happenings in the struggles against rich peasants and against religious practices. They reminded me of some of the excessive measures taken in the peasant movement of the Wuhan period. By comparison, the latter appears like little witches in the presence of master witches.” Chang Kuo-t’ao, Memoirs, II, p.839.

“Lin’s Store” is a story about the bankruptcy of small town storekeepers. Collected Short Stories of Mao Tun, I, pp. 204–250. Translated in Spring Silkworms and Other Stories, pp. 113–163.

“The Story of the Big-nosed Boy” is about a child tramp in Shanghai in the 1930s. Collected Short Stories of Mao Tun, II, pp. 271–294. Translated in Spring Silkworms and Other Stories, pp. 189–210.

36. Mao Tun, “In Retrospect,” pp. 2–3.

37. Mao Tun, San-jen-hsing (In Company of Three) (Shanghai: K’ai-ming shu-tien, 1930).

Hsü attempted to combat the evils around him singlehandedly. After repeated failures, he was duly martyred for his cause. The moral of Hsü’s story is obvious: deeds of individualistic heroism are futile in a society dominated by organized interest groups and repressive forces.

38. Mao Tun, Lu (The Road) (Shanghai: Wen-hua sheng-huo ch’u-pan-she, 1935).

These are student groups and characters in The Road. In The Road Mao Tun goes back to the allegorical method of Eclipse, using student activities to represent Party politics. It is not a very well written novel. Its “tune” is certainly old. From the novelistic viewpoint, it breaks no new ground. Hence it is not included in this study.