“Realism And Alliegory In The Ealy Fiction Of Mao Tun” in “Realism and Alliegory in the Ealy Fiction of Mao Tun”
The third novel in the Eclipse trilogy was written in April-June 1928. The period it encompasses, August 1927 to June 1928, saw a series of unremitting catastrophes for the Chinese Communist movement. The retreat to Swatow of the Southern March forces in October 1927 was followed in December by the bloody three-day Canton Commune. The Autumn Harvest Uprisings led by Mao Tse-tung in eastern Hunan in the fall of that year were succeeded by the defeat of the Hai-lu-feng Soviet in rural Kwangtung and the assassination of P’eng Pai, its brilliant young leader.1 In the cities, the KMT White Terror that followed the Wuhan split has taken the lives of many Communist leaders: Li Ta-chao was arrested and executed in Peking in October 1927; Chang T’ai-lei died in action during the Canton Uprising; the two sons of Ch’en Tu-hsiu were martyred in Shanghai; and Hsü Pai-hao was also sacrificed there, in one of the blindly ordered city strikes of the last months of 1927.2
By the time Pursuit was completed, all Mao Tun’s hope for a strong Red Army and a “soviet” base in the South was extinguished. The future of the Chinese Communist revolution hung precariously, like “a spider on a thread,” as Mao Tun had prophetically portrayed it in the last scene of Vacillation.
Inside the CCP there was constant reassessment and change of policy in response to the terror. At the August 7, 1927, Emergency Conference of the CCP in Wuhan, at the Enlarged Session of its Central Committee on November 9 in Shanghai, as well as at the Ninth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in February 1928 in Moscow,3 the defeats had been evaluated in terms of the theory of “rising and falling waves.”4 There were, it was held, rising and falling waves in the revolutionary situation in China, marking the beginning and ending of different phases of the Chinese Communist revolution. On these grounds the “subjective” failures of the CCP leaders were identified and castigated. Ch’en Tu-hsiu was severely criticized at the August 7 Emergency Conference. His “rightist opportunism” was said to have aborted the CCP-led mass movements, and he had failed to take proper advantage of the “rising waves” in the Chinese revolutionary situation. Thus he had not completed the historic mission of the “second, bourgeois-democratic phase” of the revolution, seizing power from within the KMT armies and government. Ch’ü Ch’iu-po replaced Ch’en as Secretary General and the Comintern delegate Besso Lominadze was made co-leader.
The Comintern now predicted an imminent surge of rising waves, and Ch’ü, urged on by Lominadze, soon issued bold calls for “armed uprisings on every hand.”5 Thus the Chinese Communist revolution began its tottering journey from the “bourgeois-democratic revolution phase,” under the rubric of the united front, to a “proletarian revolution phase,” whose new historic mission was to establish soviets under the slogan of proletarian hegemony.6 In December, with the CCP-organized and worker-led uprising in the city of Canton, which was intended to mark the beginning of the third, or soviet phase in the Chinese Communist revolution, that journey came to an abrupt end. Though the Red Army and the Canton citizenry fought heroically, the uprising was speedily and ruthlessly suppressed by the counterrevolutionary forces led by the Kwangtung warlords. The Party base in South China was nearly destroyed, and the staggering casualties dealt a nearly fatal blow to the young Red Army, Party morale was very low, and the Comintern in Moscow was forced to reexamine its China policy.7
At the time of the August Emergency Conference, Mao Tun was still in Kuling, recuperating and awaiting secret passage back to Shanghai. By the time the Autumn Harvest Uprisings and city strikes began under the new Ch’ü-Lominadze leadership, he was in hiding in Shanghai, in low spirits but not despairing, being “still in the grip of the stubborn will to live.”8 News of the Southern March and the uprisings trickled in, probably through old friends at Shanghai newspapers and publishing house and certainly through comrades at the underground Party headquarters in Shanghai.9 The news was not good, but the momentous tragedy of the Canton Commune was still in the future. Mao Tun began writing Disillusionment in August; at the same time he “roughed out” the outline of Vacillation and Pursuit. In the projected outline, as Mao Tun put it in “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Pursuit was to depict the unwillingness of modern youth “to withstand loneliness and their attempt to make yet a final effort at pursuing their original goal.”
This early outline, briefly described but never used, cherishes a picture that is considerably more optimistic than the novel itself became. In September the outlook for the Southern March was still promising; it had just scored a resounding victory in Kianssi under the able command of the future general Liu Po Ching. Ho Lung, too, whose bandit origin and operating style had made both marching cadres and the rank and file uneasy, had acquitted himself exceedingly well in battle and was formally recruited as a Party member. The march was pushing forward to Ch’angting in Fukien, on its way to meet P’eng Pai at Hai-lu-feng in Kwangtung to form the first Chinese soviet. Mao Tse-tung, too, with whom Mao Tun had worked in Shanghai and Canton, had escaped capture after the Autumn Harvest Uprisings, and was hiding in the Chingkang mountains on the Hunan-Kiangsi border, rebuilding his forces. These exploits were indeed the stuff of “medieval romances.”10
But between October 1927 and April 1928, news about the Southern March and the ill-planned uprisings became everywhere steadily worse. By the time Mao Tun actually began writing Pursuit, the Canton Commune had been destroyed and the Ch’ü-Lominadze leadership had been dismissed at the Ninth Plenum of the Comintern Executive Committee in Moscow. The revolution had deteriorated so much that an honest novel could no longer present the period as a “final effort at pursuing their original goal.” Mao Tun, fully aware of his change of tone, wrote in “From Kuling to Tokyo”:
I myself love this piece very much, not because it is well-written, but because it expresses a period of depression in my life. . . . Pursuit is not any longer than Vacillation, but it took twice as much time to write, two solid months not counting the days spent on interruptions. I could not proceed very quickly, because I was undergoing a period of spiritual depression at that time; in an instant my mind would dash back and forth between conflicting ideas, my emotions would suddenly ascend to an incandescent pitch, and just as suddenly drop to icy coldness. This was because at that time I met several old friends and learned about a number of heart-rending events from them; those who can stand unyielding in the face of strong forces can still be made to despair and go mad over the perverse acts of those dear to them. These events may come to light in the future. This imbued my work with a pessimistic color and brought about the interweaving of both sorrowful and rousing strains in it. Pursuit is just such a wild and disorderly mixture. My moods, which went up and down like waves, are revealed between the lines, from the first page to the last page.11
In a deep personal sense, Pursuit is Mao Tun’s elegy to his dead comrades, who laid down their lives at the bidding of a blind and callous leadership. As he began writing, his last rays of hope for the future of the “Great Revolution” had been extinguished. His condemnation of events, his rage, and the weight of his grief brought up a voice of despair that was without hope for grace or for redemption:
The basic tone of Pursuit is extremely pessimistic; the large and small goals pursued by the characters in the book are, without exception, thwarted. I even went so far as to describe the failure of a skeptic’s attempted suicide—the most minimal kind of pursuit. I admit that this basic tone of extreme pessimism is my own, although the dissatisfaction with the existing situation, the frustration and the searching for a way out on the part of the young people is an objective reality. If one says that this shows how my thoughts are behind the times, then I do not understand why blindly crashing like flies against the window pane should not also be considered behind the times. Likewise, I will admit to the charge that I am only negative and do not give my characters a way out; but I myself cannot believe that making oneself into a phonograph shouting “This is the way out, come this way” has any value or can leave one with an easy conscience. It is precisely because I do not wish to stifle my conscience and say things I do not believe—and I am not a great genius who can discover a trustworthy way and point it out to everybody—that I cannot make the characters in my novel find a way out. . . . From the beginning I have never approved of what many people for the past year or so have confidently called “the way out.” Hasn’t it now already been proved clearly that this “way out” has become almost a dead end?12
The fact that Mao Tun could no longer follow his original plan for Pursuit is the reason why the novel departs from the straightforward plot line of Disillusionment and Vacillation. The intention of using and developing the student-Party worker cast from Disillusionment is radically distorted. Characters disappear—Miss Ching, Wang Shih-t’ao’s lover Tung-fang Ming, the Futurist Ch’iang Wei-li, the students-turned commissars Shih Chün and Li K’e. Yet two of these major characters are symbolically present, with altered names that signify the terrible alterations in their lives. Miss Chang Ch’iu-liu of Pursuit, though no longer the Miss Chang Ching of Disillusionment, is still connected by the surname; the suicidal Mr. Shih Hsün of Pursuit cannot be the noisy, positive Shih Chün of Disillusionment and Vacillation but again the surname has been kept.
The changing fortunes of the Party are also reflected at other levels. Money, or the lack of it, assumes a new dominance as a symbol of the desperate need for material resources. Love and love affairs have become overwhelmingly destructive. Chang Ch’iu-liu perverts love with her sexual adventure; the “ugly-voiced” Chu Chin-ju destroys love with her lies; and love is over for the beautiful Lu Chün-ch’ing when her face is disfigured by an accident.
Some of the characters from the two earlier novels meet an unhappy fate: Wang Shih-t’ao, her lover killed, has to resort to prostitution for a living. Ch’ao Ch’ih-chu, too, adopts that profession to keep herself and her lover alive on the subsistence level. New characters appear without explanation, representing the now fragmented revolution, and the people of the novel are no longer bound together by a concerted goal. A deep chasm has developed, separating the world of Chang Man-ch’ing, for instance, from that of Miss Chang Ch’iu-liu and her old “west-side” student group. All these dramatic, indeed drastic, changes in plot and character are made silently, with only the most oblique references in the novel. Mao Tun never explained these amazing changes anywhere, although he made an equally oblique comment about them in his defense of the trilogy:
[The characters] were all unwilling to spend their days unthinkingly and without purpose; they all wanted to pursue something but in the end they all failed; even Shih Hsün’s goal of committing suicide failed. I feel very apologetic about having written such a depressing novel. What I had to say went from bad to worse. But please forgive me, I really could not exorcise all this away. I could only let it be written down as it is, a sort of memorial.13
So Mao Tun was still continuing to depict the Great Revolution and its aftermath, seeking to make do with the good intentions of his characters for what was lacking in their actions. Not surprisingly, he provides more speeches, private thoughts, and dream visions in Pursuit than in either Disillusionment or Vacillation; emphasizing this subjective factor in his characterization. Finally, though, events subvert all intentions, and reality destroys the original purposes of all the characters’ pursuits.
Tsui-ch’iu (Pursuit), which means literally questing after,14 contains eight chapters. It is considerably longer than Disillusionment and somewhat longer than Vacillation. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce two young men, Chang Man-ch’ing and Wang Chung-chao, and their outlook on the present and future of the revolution. From chapter 3 on, the futility of their goals is gradually exposed. Chang Man-ch’ing has chosen the education of modern youth as his new career, aiming to point a “way out” for the coming generation through the teaching of world history. Wang Chung-chao wants to enlighten the public; he has ideas about how to reorganize the “social reporting”—news of local events and sketches of urban life—of a local newspaper, so that its content will authentically register the “pulse of the cities” and serve as an index of the health of the nation. Moreover, both of them have found an ideal woman to whom to entrust their love: Chang Man-ch’ing has met a faculty colleague, Chu Chin-ju, and Wang Chung-chao has a girlfriend, Lu Chün-ch’ing, from a genteel family in Chia-hsing (the Shanghai suburb where the the CCP was actually founded).
But as the novel goes on, the goals of the two men become “illusory bubbles,” and their loves too eventually yield only shock, disappointment, and bitterness. Chang’s courtship of his “ideal woman,” Chu Chin-ju (literally meaning “bearing a resemblance to Red”), and their subsequent married life is one of the most grotesque and degrading of all the love stories in the trilogy. By comparison, the affair between Pao-su and Ching is a romance. Even the free-love attitude of Miss Hui and Sun Wu-yang, and the unabashed sexual encounter that Shih Hsün and Chang Ch’iu-liu will have later in Pursuit, are more sympathetic, for here at least the characters are honest with themselves.
Parallel to the degradation of Chang’s and Wang’s goals is another set of pursuits chosen by a group of people who are veterans of the Wuhan days of the Great Revolution. These include Wang Shih-t’ao’s attempt to continue her past love affair with Tung-fang Ming into the future by nourishing the baby inside her, and Chang Ch’iu-liu’s pursuit of revitalization for a demoralized comrade. Shih Hsün no longer has a pursuit of his own, but Ts’ao Chih-fang, Chang Ch’iu-liu, and Wang Shih-t’ao do.
Given such a decentralized and multilinear surface plot, it seems helpful to first have a diagram of the fragmentized story of Pursuit and then follow the individual pursuits of the main characters in the summary and discussion proper, cutting across chapter lines and forsaking the preceding format of chapter-by-chapter synopsis. Simultaneity in the novel is employed to underscore intertwining events, suggesting cause and effect. For examples, in chapter 3, Wang Chung-chao’s going to Chia-hsing is linked to Shih Hsün’s suicide attempt by simultaneity in time, and Shih’s suicide in turn intertwines with his recollection of a certain Miss Chou and France, thus relating Shih and Pursuit obliquely to Chou Ting-hui and Disillusionment In chapter 7, the three invitations Wang receives on the same day are similarly intertwined by their simultaneity (and thereby suggesting causal relationships) with the deaths of Tung-Fang Ming and Shih Hsün and Wang Shih-t’ao’s choice of prostitution.
There is no central point of view in Pursuit except that of the omniscient author. Or in Mao Tun’s terms, there are no “positive characters.” Those who at first seem positive are disqualified as the discrepancy grows between their words and deeds. First, however, all the characters in Pursuit are introduced in chapter 1 in a group scene that sets the stage for them.
Reunion in Shanghai (Chapter 1)
As the story opens, we find Chang Man-ch’ing talking to his former classmate Wang Chung-chao in a scene reminiscent of Miss Ching’s conversation with Miss Hui in the opening chapter of Disillusionment. The subject is still “What am I to do?” but the time has changed from pre-Wuhan to post-Wuhan days, and the setting from S University to the parlor of an alumni club for its former students. Chang Man-ch’ing, who has just come back to Shanghai—presumably from southern China—is telling Wang about his year of revolutionary work:
“Chung-chao, you used to say when I was at the university that I pursued my vision without sparing any effort. Yes, each of us has a vision we strive for. However, when your goal turns into an illusory bubble, would you rather endure the pain of disillusionment and go ahead and puncture the bubbles, or would you rather deceive yourself and go on dreaming sweet dreams? For me, I would rather accept the sadness of disillusionment. Therefore, although I hate what happened last year, yet at the same time I am still thankful for the year’s mixed tears and laughter, songs and sobs. My pessimism—yes, I confess I am a bit pessimistic—does not stem from my vanished vision; rather it is for the insight I gained into the “sickness of the time!”
Chang Man-ch’ing goes on to tell Wang what he means by the phrase:
“Chung-chao, do you know what is meant by the ‘sickness of the time’ today? It is exactly the fin de siècle ennui that we used to speak of. Of course it is a Chinese style fin de siècle ennui. Last year I went to so many places . . . and I saw this sickness everywhere; as someone once said, wandering youths all feel ennui. But our ennui consists mainly of the sadness of disillusionment, the anxiety to do good and the impulses and urges toward decadence. Their ennui is different. Their ennui is that they do not know what will happen from one day to the next, and hence become as restless as if they were sitting on a blanket of needles. Not a single one of them dares to say how long his life is going to last; everybody is concerned only with the here and now. When interests converge, they unite; when interests conflict, they part, quite irrationally, without aim, and without principle: but their words sound just as beautiful to the ear.
“Chung-chao, tell me if you think there is anything one can do about all this? I do not even dare to believe in a purpose for this race of ours; for even if a purpose exists, as claimed by a lot of overoptimistic and over idealistic people today, it exists only as a form of self-rationalization, or self-deception. Even if it were not self-deception, I still do not dare believe it can be translated into reality.”15
While Chang Man-ch’ing is revealing himself to the patiently listening Wang Chung-chao, there is a commotion at the west end of the room. With much excitement and group spirit, several young people are discussing what to do next. Their Canton and Hunan accents signify that they are survivors of the Southern March, the Autumn Harvest Uprisings, and the Canton Commune.16 A proposal to organize themselves into an “association” has been made, overriding Ts’ao Chih-fang’s boisterous suggestion that all of them should go to the mountains and become bandits. Miss Chang Ch’iu-liu disagrees vehemently with Ts’ao. Agitated but undaunted, not at all resigned to disillusionment but with little confidence in banditry, she proclaims:
“We as a group are all fond of action and detest inaction. But in this time of great change, we are placed in the position of doing nothing. It’s not that we can’t find work to do: if we have no shame, we can get along fine. We’ve thought about the idea of shutting ourselves in and studying; but we are not superhuman. We have burning emotions; when all around us is enveloped in fire and blood and when demons and goblins are on the loose, we cannot quiet our hearts and attend to our studies. Everywhere and all the time we hear about deeds of heroism carried out. Our hot blood boils every minute, every second, but there is nothing for us to do. We are not qualified to be great lords and masters; we do not know how to be bandits and robbers. In this time of great change, we are the equivalent of zero. We are almost unable to believe that we are still alive. We sit idle from morning to night, brooding, brooding. We while away half our day at this alumni club, and while away our evenings at a dance hall. When we are driven beyond tolerance by our frustration, we laugh and shout at the top of our voice. With tears in our eyes, we abandon ourselves to romances. But who is to say that we choose willingly to squander our lives this way? We still want to march forward. This is the background to our plan for the organization of an association.”17
When Miss Chang finishes her speech, members of the group excitedly propose ideas for the draft charter of the prospective association. Participants in the discussion including Miss Wang Shih-t’ao, whom we have met in Disillusionment; Lung Fei, the less important part of Miss Wang’s triangular trouble, and Hsü Tze-ts’ai, also from Disillusionment; and the new figure, Ts’ao Chih-fang, who was two classes junior to Chang Manch’ing in school and who has just proposed that they all become bandits as a “way out.” Their contradictory proposals include (1) a magazine to comment on “current affairs;” (2) members’ engagement in “social movements;” (3) a new sort of “united front” with other political groups; and (4) prohibition of triangular love relationships.18
Their idea of an association, however, stirs no sympathetic response in Chang Man-ch’ing, veteran of a year’s work in the “social movements.” He has seen enough of associations already, he explains, and no association of this kind has ever worked. Sooner or later and without exception, all such organizations either become the tool of some ambitious politician or come to a quick end. He feels condescending toward this lost, hotheaded group.
Chang Man-ch’ing thinks that he himself, by contrast, has something constructive mapped out, nothing like the group work the association plans, and nothing like the dangerous lawlessness of Ts’ao Chih-fang’s banditry. His goal is “education,” the instruction and guidance of the younger generation through classroom study. It is a noble calling, he believes, for it is in the youth—youth in high schools or, even better, youth in elementary schools—that hope for the future of China lies.19
Thus step by step Chang Man-ch’ing is distancing himself from the “west-side circle” of his youth and installing himself safely in a position of authority on a separate plane. It is from that elevation that he sees the surviving enthusiasts from the bygone Wuhan days as a “decadent, selfdestructive, and self-abandoned lot.”
At this point a former classmate of his, Shih Hsün (whose name literally means History in Cycles), comes in unexpectedly and cynically punctures Chang’s thoughts:
And their course reads: when seventeen and eighteen, rebuild society; when twenty-seven and twenty-eight, try to get along with society; when thirty-seven and thirty-eight, tread on the heels of society; and when forty-seven and forty-eight, drag society backward from behind.20
Chang Man-ch’ing is shocked at the changed thinking as well as the changed appearance of his former classmate. The zealot Shih Hsün has become a near-skeleton, a hopeless man. The other young people are overjoyed to see Shih Hsün; they gather around him, embracing the newcomer and fondly pulling him this way and that. But Man-ch’ing quickly regains his composure and begins to look upon the convivial group as “fear-inspired” children huddling together for mutual consolation.
Toward the end of the first chapter, the group, boisterously pushing and shoving, crowds out the door to go again to their favorite movie, Souls of Late Party Members.21 Chang, staying behind with Wang Chung-chao and Shih Hsün, continues to ruminate upon the difference between himself and the group, and how far, for example, he has gone beyond people like Miss Chang. Only a year ago he and Miss Chang could easily have fallen in love with each other. He can still remember how, the evening before he left for “the affairs of state,” he and Miss Chang kissed in the moonlight tenderly and passionately.22 But now, he muses,
Even if Miss Chang is still the same Miss Chang, even if her pretty smile appears a second time, still radiant with deep affection, I, Man-ch’ing, am no longer the same Man-ch’ing. How capricious life is!23
Chang Man-ch’ing has shed his old infatuations with politics and political women. He has resolved to devote himself to something that progresses slowly, something that does not yield quick results, and has also resolved that his ideal mate will not be one of those “loud, self-styled martyr types,” but someone “gentle, quiet, not prone to empty talk and not ashamed of humble endeavors.”24
Chang Man-ch’ing’s Pursuit (Chapters 1, 5, 8)
Once the new directions of his work and personal life are outlined, we find Chang Man-ch’ing keeping only a minimal contact with his former classmates. For example, in chapter 3, after Shih Hsün’s first suicide attempt, he agrees to pay part of the hospital bill but shows none of Chang Ch’iu-liu’s deep concern for his old friend. And his brief meeting with Ch’iu-liu does nothing to bring back his romantic feelings of the year before.
In chapter 5, Chang’s two pursuits converge in apparent success—portrayed so grotesquely, however, that one senses the author’s deep irony.
Chang Man-ch’ing arranges a debate for his history class. The topic, chosen by his faculty colleague Miss Chu Chin-ju, carries a patently “international” tone: “Where will World War II break out.” A certain Dr. Gold (Chin) is invited to be the debate referee. Dr. Gold is a social scientist who, as Miss Chang presently remarks sarcastically, specializes in “painting a gold-colored idealism over what are in reality commonplace facts.”25 The debate, which the author sets up perfunctorily and in fact never actually portrays, is obviously not the main subject of the chapter. The central attraction is Chang Man-ch’ing’s courtship of Miss Chu Chin-ju.
Chu Chin-ju is first introduced through the impressions of Chang’s friend Wang Chung-chao the journalist, then through the sensibility of his former girl friend, the self-invited and hostile Miss Chang, and finally through Chang Man-ch’ing himself, in the form of his martyr-like acceptance of Miss Chu as his ideal woman.26
The scene is a reception room where the guests assemble before the debate. Wang Chung-chao, at first sight of Miss Chu, is caught by surprise at the close physical resemblance between her and his own girl friend. However, on closer acquaintance subtle differences began to show themselves. The greatest observable difference between the two is in the texture of their voices. Chung-chao
could not understand why there was such a dissonance between the voice of Miss Chu and her appearance. The tone of her voice, flat and broad to begin with, was further coarsened by a grinding hoarseness, evoking a most unpleasant lead-heavy and gagged feeling even when it attempted a gentle whisper.27
Miss Chang who invites herself to the debate does not linger over looks or voice. She sees a deep and deplorable duplicity in Miss Chu. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that remotely resembles the new “ideal woman” Chang Man-ch’ing recently described to her. “In this slender and externally attractive figure, there is only shallowness, meanness, vileness, and small-mindedness.”28 Feeling sorry for Man-ch’ing, Miss Chang decides to warn him about her presentiment.29
But Chang Man-ch’ing has no choice even at this early stage of his love. He sees how angry Miss Chu is at Miss Chang’s presence and friendship with him, how her “gray complexion” turns to a “sinister glow of seething anger” when Miss Chang acts the mischievous tease with him.30 And when he tries to explain his relationship with Miss Chang, her voice, originally coarse, becomes unbearably harsh, “a gritty grinding that makes his hair stand on end.”31 The reasons which they finally give each other to finalize their pledge are grotesquely devoid of passion and ideal.
“I cannot but love you,” Miss Chu said in a low voice, glancing sideways at Man-ch’ing as if she had been wronged. Two circles of pink began to show at her temples. She turned halfway toward him, holding out her hands as if waiting for Man-ch’ing to embrace her.
“Out of ethical considerations, I, too, cannot but love you,” Man-ch’ing said with determination. Suddenly what Miss Chang had just said to him flashed across his mind, knocking out of him the courage to embrace Miss Chu. He merely picked up her hand and kissed it once. The sound of a bell came from afar, reminding them that the debate was starting and that Man-ch’ing was expected there as the chairman.
Picking up Miss Chu’s hand and kissing it once again, Man-ch’ing walked out of the room, his arm locked in hers. But when they came to the short hallway, Miss Chu quietly freed herself and let Man-ch’ing go a few steps ahead of her; thus they entered the auditorium one after the other.32
The seduction of Miss Ching by Pao-su and her courtship by Ch’iang Wei-li, the remembered honeymoon of Fang Lo-lan and his wife, and the orgiastic sexual encounter of Chang Ch’iu-liu and Shih Hsün which will occur later all help us to evaluate the meaning of love in the trilogy. If these other pursuits of love are to be ruled failures or excesses, then how are we to describe the outcome of Man-ch’ing’s courtship of Miss Chu, which will result in a miserable marriage for him? In the final chapter of the novel, we will find the couple finally married. After the wedding, Miss Chu turns out to be even less the “gentle, quiet” type. Man-ch’ing finds her to be greedy and banal and interested only in worldly gain.
Man-ch’ing felt that the shadow of his ideal woman was fading farther away from Miss Chu by the day. But Miss Chu had already become his “sacred partner for life.” Social conventions as well as moral teachings prohibited him from thinking any irregular thoughts. He had no choice but to bear this heavy load and keep going. Meantime, self-consolation, that miraculous cureall, began to stir in his heart. He hoped he would never find out any more of Miss Chu’s defects; that was all he could ask for.33
His courageous statement in the opening chapter that he “would prefer to stand the pain of disillusionment and go ahead to puncture the bubble . . . rather than deceive” himself has by the end of the novel become a statement of unrelieved irony. In the final chapter we learn also that his career has been subverted by the school authorities: educating the minds of the young has become a process of brutalizing their minds by an unswerving indoctrination that stifles all intellectual curiosity. The only excuse Man-Ch’ing can find is probably in the statement that, near the end of the novel, he wishes he could make to Wang Chung-chao, “Chung-chao, you may not be the exception either.”
Sadly enough, the pursuit of Wang Chung-chao has not been exempt from failures.
Wang Chung-chao’s Pursuit (Chapters 2, 3, 4, 8)
Wang Chung-chao is a journalist, an editor at a Shanghai newspaper.34 Not coincidentally, one of Mao Tun’s duties as a Party newspaper editor during the Wuhan period was exactly what Wang Chung-chao in Pursuit is hoping to do: to select and organize incoming news in such a way that its publication would create the impression that the revolutionary “tides” are pushing forward succesfully toward a historical destiny. In the years of the Great Revolution and afterwards, newspapers and other forms of mass communication—wall posters, for example, in Vacillation, and soapbox speeches by characters like Ts’ao Chih-fang in Pursuit—were all politicized. As in Disillusionment, schools and student meetings are Mao Tun’s fictional representation of Party leadership meetings where toplevel decisions were made and transmitted to the cadres. In turn, the mass media in Pursuit function as his fictional representation of the Party communication system that disseminated the decisions and instructions to the public, often in altered form. When we compare the careers of Wang Chung-chao and Chang Man-ch’ing with Mao Tun’s work in the Great Revolution years, we see a connection emerging from their otherwise totally unrelated undertakings: Wang Chung-chao is Chang Man-ch’ing’s propaganda agent in the Party structure.
For his classroom history lessons Chang Man-ch’ing needs raw data from Wang Chung-chao’s news items to substantiate his theses. The conversation between Wang Chung-chao and Chang Man-ch’ing in the opening chapter, about the vacuousness that underlies almost every exalted pursuit, contrasts sharply with the casual joke made by the “west-side” people, who six chapters later, pleased that the slogan of “the united front” has lost its “old popularity,” propose banditry as a way of life (and material for history). Banditry usually means taking to the mountains, like the heroes of the traditional novel Water Margin, who operated out of reach of official authority for group self-preservation. Mao Tun’s contemporary reference here is no doubt to the peasant movement, as exemplified in the Autumn Harvest Uprisings, which have a similar goal of self-preservation and the same romantic, heroic idealism of the old banditry. By the same token, a conversation between Wang and Chang in chapter 5 about the vacuousness of teaching material for contemporary history also acquires a new significance.
According to Chang, all information about contemporary life that comes from newspapers has either been heavily edited or is told from a subjective viewpoint, and therefore has little connection with day-to-day historical reality of the time.35 This is more than a disillusioned statement made by a pedantic theoretician of “modern history” to a detached, and similarly disillusioned, but nonetheless still committed and over-cautious professional journalist. Chang’s opinion bears directly on our understanding of the internal working of the revolutionary leadership at the top and the revolutionary strategies of propaganda and organization during the Wuhan and post-Wuhan period. Mao Tun’s portrayal of the interrelationship in the career quests of Chang and Wang, and of the selfdeception and empty slogan mongering involved in both, unmistakably reflects the author’s view that false information and inflated propaganda not only destroys the cadres’ confidence in the Party’s integrity and affect the morale of the rank and file, but also reduce the revolutionary movement to an empty facade.
Wang Chung-chao therefore plays a strategically, if not dramatically, important role (just the reverse of Hu Kuo-kuang in Vacillation). As a fictional character he is rather pale. His defeat and disillusionment have none of the drama and the glamor of Chang Man-ch’ing’s or Chang Ch’iu-liu’s, and his quest is as fatally flawed as that of any other character in the novel. Unassuming and unimposing, Wang has received little attention from critics, but we cannot overlook the fact that he is the one character in Pursuit who keeps his presence of mind and his analytical and critical ability from beginning to end.
Wang Chung-chao is also the one character who at all times is consciously aware of the nature, limitations, and inherent perils of the quests of those around him. Artistically he supplies one of Mao Tun’s vantage point in the conceptual scheme of Pursuit. From this vantage point the disorganized world acquires a perspective and the other character types derive their relative positions. As he begins to realize the failure of his own pursuit, he is also the reader’s vantage point, from which we may assess the lack of significance of the surrounding characters’ pursuits.
Wang Chung-chao is an observer rather than an actor. From his first appearance, he lacks the charismatic air that characterizes most of the other characters. He listens to the self-satisfied sophistry of Chang Man-ch’ing with critical detachment and to the agonized outcries of Chang Ch’iu-liu and her group with sympathetic understanding. Wang is not carried away by rhetoric, and in response to Ts’ao Chih-fang’s sarcasm about his modest proposal of journalistic reform, he merely says,
Why should we bring in such large problems as saving the country? Man-ch’ing, you are probably right in pointing out that public opinion today has very little dignity and freedom left to it. Yet insofar as a personal profession and making a living is concerned, the world of journalism still has its lure. Here, of course, I am speaking only of a person’s limited choice of a profession, nothing so ponderous as the large question of saving the nation. Recently I’ve gotten so sick of those big-hat names. The bigger the hat, the more empty the head. To me the most substantial thing one can do today is to save oneself: to save oneself from frustration and aimless wandering, and to save oneself from futile endeavors and rashness. To be a healthy person one should at least be equipped with superior common sense, a cool head, a sharp eye for details, and a forbearing spirit.36 The reason why I prefer journalism is exactly because the life of a journalist can turn me into such a person.37
How much self-irony is woven into this portrait of Wang Chung-chao we do not know. What we do know is that Mao Tun, at the time of writing Pursuit, undoubtedly shared Wang Chung-chao’s abhorrence for those who specialize in big-hat names and content-empty slogans and who thereby contributed decisively to the Wuhan and Canton disasters.
Chapter 2 is almost exclusively devoted to a depiction of Wang Chung-chao’s working environment38 and his pursuit of love and career. Wang is courting a beautiful girl whom he met at a party at her school. Her name is Lu Chün-ch’ing and she comes from Chia-hsing where her authoritarian old father still lives. Wang Chung-chao understands that if he is to court Miss Lu, he must first make something of his career, so that her old father will view him favorably. Wang’s pursuit of journalistic reform becomes interwoven with his pursuit of the beautiful Miss Lu.
Wang Chung-chao, in charge of the page-four “social news” section of his paper, plans to reorganize methods of news-gathering and train a new staff. He wants investigative reporters who will go out into society to collect news, then analyze it, and present an overall picture that captures the “pulse of urban life.” He tells his boss, the editor-in-chief:
The essential materials for the page four . . . are (1) disorders in society—kidnaping, robbery, rape, strikes, divorce, and so on. (2) social entertainments—movies, plays, dance halls, and the like. These two contrasting areas reflect the bewilderment and frenzy of modern life, provide us with the pulse of urban life, and allow us to make our diagnosis of the state of health of our society.
But the data we have in front of us today did not come from our own special search. They were passively supplied to us, not actively gathered on our own initiative. Therefore I find them only a mass of contemptible garbage. There is not much news value in them, and even less social significance. Of course, one can hardly blame everything on the data. Most of our field reporters are not equipped with much knowledge of the social science [Marxism]. Moreover, they are not perceptive; they cannot see behind an event to find the issue at the core. If we want to make this garbage pile shine, we can no longer rely upon the old reporters we have; we have to have trained reporters out in the field. . . .39
The editor-in-chief, however, wants none of the troubles that he knows would come with such new, responsible reporting. Neither the authorities nor the rich and powerful, he says, want any news about strikes or sex or violence that would stir up unrest in their areas of control. Wang Chung-chao, of course, is distressed to see that the real readership his superior has in mind for their newspaper is not the general public but rather the staff of other newspapers in the city. The purpose of their work is not to communicate with society at a basic level but to outdo the next paper in retailing insipid prepackaged items.40
After the meeting, Wang Chung-chao goes back to his desk and falls into one of those reveries during which Mao Tun allows us into the inner truth of a character’s personality:
Chung-chao sank into deep thought with his head in his hands. But he could not think clearly, blood kept humming in his ear, creating all sorts of sound waves. Among them there was the sound of the marrow-chilling sarcasm of Shih Hsün, the pent-up, impatient outcries of Ts’ao Chih-fang’s group, and the weary groans of Chang Man-ch’ing. All these sounds raced violently around inside his skull, each trying to take full control of him, ravenous and greedy. It seemed that there was a phonograph disc spinning at top speed right under the middle of his skull,41 making a grinding, gritty sound that combined all the different sounds in question. Yes, there was such a thing spinning there, spinning, and spinning faster, till all phrases and words blurred into one single deadening noise. He felt a dizzying headache.
Suddenly all noises die down, leaving only the cold voice of Shih Hsün ringing out:
“Life is a tragedy; all ideals are empty; hopes are phony; and what lies ahead of you is only darkness, darkness. Your groping is futile. Will you still not admit to the frailty of mankind? Will you still not admit your own frailty? Before disappointment overtakes you, you act as if you were someone brave. But look what’s happening to you now. You used to take such pride in being practical, not pursuing extravagant hopes. But now, isn’t your practicality pretty hollow? Even your most limited hope cannot escape the fate of being turned into a dream.” Chung-chao lifted his head, puckered his lips, and blew through them. At the same time he shook his body as if he wanted to shake away that skeptical, pessimistic shadow [of Shih Hsün] and he admonished himself thus: “In our lives, there were originally threads of light and threads of darkness. The path of man’s life was originally overlaid with thorns. But those who succeeded know how to use the light of hope to illuminate their journey and how to use the flame of patience to burn away those thorns.” As if to rebuke the Shih Hsün of his imagination, he thought to himself, “The world has never seen a man who is born brave; all brave people develop through discipline. The setbacks one suffers in the present are to be welcomed. Life that is too easy is mediocre. Whatever can be gotten easily cannot be valuable. If we have to take our journey step by step anyway, why not take just half a step to begin with? To take half a step, after all, is better than taking no step at all.” He again consoled himself. “Everything has happened as you expected. Why get so nervous? Isn’t it true that you are already able to coolly confront all the turns of events in the world and not get pessimistic? Then why can’t you be patient with this little obstruction?”42
Wang cheers up after this long period of introspection and begins to see that the prospect for his dual pursuit is not entirely hopeless. Even without the editor-in-chief’s explicit support and even without the help of additional trained staff, he can still write his own articles, his “impressions” of urban realities.
In the fortnight following, he writes and publishes a series of eight “impressions” of dance halls and other scenes. His editor-in-chief then calls him in for further instructions. This time Wang is politely but firmly told that he has to stop these “impressions” of his, to cut out all such troublesome reporting and print in its place boilerplate, preprinted advertisements, for imported goods and the like.43
Dejected at this further curb, Wang gives in without much struggle: he has already written enough innovative “impressions” to win Miss Lu’s father’s favorable opinion, and he and Miss Lu will soon be formally engaged. He will not lose much by giving up that type of reporting, and besides, he has not found in the dance halls the kind of information he was looking for. He had expected to find:
the tears hidden behind loud laughter, the frustration behind decadence, the defiance that seeks to sample the meaning of existence in sensual stimuli, the cries of despair that pierce through the grey veneer of life. He had looked upon the meteoric rise of the dance halls in Shanghai as the equivalent of the Sturm und Drang Expressionism of post-World War I Berlin and expected to find in it a natural explosion of the disillusioned and vacillating human heart in gloomy and callous surroundings. . . .
Instead, Wang had found vile sexual license, ugly trading of gold for sensual gratification. These of course were not the data he had wanted for his feature “impressions.” He had met only one person who could conceivably symbolize for him the target of his quest—Chang Ch’iu-liu. But to write her up in his “impressions” and make her the personification of all he wanted to bring out simply seemed inappropriate.44
Finally, Wang Chung-chao decides to forget about his plan to reform journalism which appears increasingly dishonest to him. From then on, one phase of his pursuit is quietly abandoned as he dangles between an inability to go forward and an unwillingness to resign his job. For the rest of the novel Wang Chung-chao becomes only the objective observer, quietly noting the disasters that overtake the lives and crush the ideals of his friends and former classmates.
Shih Hsün’s first attempted suicide, for example, falls on the same day Wang Chung-chao goes to Chia-hsing to visit his ideal love (chapter 3); and Wang’s return from Chia-hsing coincides with three events inside and outside of the revolutionary camp: the internal quarrel and disbandment of the “west-side” group as reported to him by Chang Ch’iu-liu, Chang Man-ch’ing’s invitation to the debate in his “school” on where the next war will start, and the Tsinan Incident of May 3, 1928, in which Japanese soldiers murdered Chinese civilians in Shangtung Province. The interrelationship of the first two is underscored by the simultaneity in time, and their respective responses to the third reflects the divided stand of the Party on a national issue.
Further disasters occur all at once as Mao Tun telescopes the last two chapters of the novel to rush everyone to his or her fate. Wang attends the Cannon Bay picnic party of Chang Ch’iu-liu and Shih Hsün (chapter 7), and the wedding of Chang Man-ch’ing and Chu Chin-ju (chapter 8), on the same day.45 On that day also, Shih Hsün finally succeeds in killing himself and Chang Man-ch’ing discovers that his bride is a travesty of his ideals. As the pursuits of all those around him culminate in tragedy or disappointment, Wang receives news of the reward of his own pursuit of love: his Miss Lu’s beautiful face has been disfigured in an accident and she is in critical condition.
All these dire events involving the young people and their pursuits have their counterparts in CCP history. The ones that are of particular relevance to our discussion of Wang’s pursuit here are of course the events tied by simultaneity of time in the fictional context to his visit of Miss Lu in Chia-hsing and to Miss Lu’s accident and disfigurement.
The name of Wang’s fiancée Lu Chün-ch’ing immediately reminds us of the Lu family in Vacillation and the mass movements in the countryside. And the name Shih Hsün effectively brings back the image of Shih Chün, also in Vacillation, who misdirects the mass movements. The simultaneous appearances of Shih Hsün and Miss Lu in chapter 3 allegorically registers the continuous presence within the CCP of mass movements on both the slogan and the action levels. But in Pursuit they are no longer centrally staged. The value of their actions is drastically undercut by the ineffectualness of their means: Wang’s pursuit of Miss Lu depends on a series of very subjective “impressions” of urban life, and Shih Hsün’s suicide uses an obsolete token of love linked up with the fading memory of a woman reminiscent of Miss Chou Ting-hui of Disillusionment.
In this way Mao Tun recast in Pursuit in May-June of 1928 CCP’s continuing attempt at mass uprisings in the wake of the various suicidal attempts since May and June of 1927, making a montage of its past heroism and present unreality. In the changed context of 1928, the once vivacious hero of the Wuhan period has become a mere shadow of his former self. But even at that the developing events do not allow the shadow to live long. A new love affair was brewing, at the headquarters, between the new CCP leadership and the new Comintern representative. A new slogan of the “soviet phase” was being concocted.
As we know, Moscow’s order in the fall and winter of 1927 for the CCP to begin acting on the new slogan (viz., the “soviet phase”) meant literally the death in action of many valiant and dedicated CCP cadres from the Pre-Wuhan days. So Shih Hsün, who narrowly survives his own suicidal attempt in chapter 3, has to die a blood-spitting violent death in the midst of a revitalization project, on precisely the same day when the Party ideologue Chang Man-ch’ing weds his international history instructor colleague in the “School.” In other words, what calamity that has not been accomplished for the Party by the mass movements depicted in Vacillation (recast as Shih Hsün’s suicide alongside with Wang Chung-chao’s pursuit of Miss Lu in chapter 3) is finally accomplished by the mass uprisings at the Canton Commune ordered by the Comintern (the orgy at Cannon Bay taking place simultaneously with a wedding involving the gritty-voiced Miss Chu in chapter 7).
Mao Tun was despondent at the historical happenings. But before he let the final catastrophe in the novel sweep away all known romances and pursuits of his characters, he stopped the clock of time, took a pause, and made an undeletable record for history of the terrible passion and beauty that had gone into the making of this momentous tragedy of the Canton Commune. His fictional representation of the degrading and wrongheaded pursuits of Wang Shih-t’ao (chapter 6) and Chang Ch’iu-liu (chapter 7) which we will examine next reiterates a same conviction, as he has earlier voiced through Miss Ching in her overnight affair with Pao-su, of the historical responsibility involved in the implementation of a revolutionary tactic: that Miss Wang and Miss Chang are responsible for their action, they are not passive prey of their circumstances, they have actively participated in the making of history, be its outcome disorder or fulfillment.
Wang Shih-t’ao’s Pursuit (Chapter 6)
Chapters 6 and 7, devoted to the pursuits of the two main women characters, Wang Shih-t’ao and Chang Ch’iu-iliu, are the two most heavily censored chapters in the current official edition of Eclipse. In chapter 6, Wang Shih-t’ao’s half-hearted flirtation with Lung Fei is deleted as is the section on her hard choice of a future life of prostitution.46 In chapter 7, Chang Ch’iu-liu’s vision of Tung-fang Ming’s martyrdom has been drastically pruned, as has the lengthy description of her love-making with Shih Hsün, the disbandment of the “west-side” group association, and the attempted suicide of Shih Hsün. All these come together to provide the context to Wang’s change and her lover’s death.
The first persons who appear in chapter 6 are Chang Ch’iu-liu and Ts’ao Chih-fang. Miss Chang, having just listened to Man-ch’ing’s debate, is on her way to visit Wang Shih-t’ao. She has heard that Wang has been ill for two weeks and has no money. On the way she is attracted by a commotion. She saw Ts’ao Chih-fang standing on a platform in the street exhorting a gathering crowd about the recent Tsinan Incident (neither Chang Man-ch’ing nor Wang Chung-chao who are so keen about educating the young and reporting news to the public show comparable concern for the incident). Ch’iu-liu exchanges a few words with Ts’ao and both resume their separate but related missions.
When Miss Chang arrives, the Wang Shih-t’ao who meets her eyes has aged considerably and her silvery laughter has grown leaden. Wang tells Miss Chang that her lover Tung-fang Ming is dead and she is carrying his child. She also confides to Miss Chang that before Tung-fang Ming left, he had told her that he had chosen to go to the countryside a second time because her flirtation with another man had freed him from the last worry he had, which till then had always been his worry for her. Once freed, he was ready to die.
Wang says that after she learned of Tung-fang Ming’s death, she contemplated death herself, but finally rejected the idea, being convinced that their children will take over their torch.48
Ch’iu-liu asks no questions about the lost lover but concentrates on the future. What will Shih-t’ao do now that she is alone and without resources?
Miss Wang lowered her head and did not answer. When it came to the question of the future, she was not really all that confident. She was already less confident about how she was going to solve the problem of her livelihood in the present. Had there not been this pregnancy, she might still be able to manage for herself. But it was obvious that this unborn baby was going to drag her down in the days to come. For example, she could accept the love of anybody who happened along and rely on his financial support. This, of course, could be easily accomplished. But this was the same as being “married off to someone,” just as her parents had once wanted to marry her off.49 At that time, because of her determination to be independent and free, to pursue her own goals, she had rebelled against her parents and left her family to keep from being thus married off. Now, was she to turn around of her own accord and be married in the name of the very same sacred ideals she then entertained? This time it would be a marriage by her own will, but was that going to be any better than being married in accordance with someone else’s wish? The man who would be able to provide for her financially would by definition not be one of her poor friends. There would necessarily be conflicts in the way they thought and her way of thinking would necessarily be scorned. . . . Once again she thought of abortion. That would enable her to roam the world freely and to carry on her struggle. . . .50
On the surface, Wang seems to be pondering over the choices available to her for sustenance. But what Wang is really deciding here at the level of political allegory, is whether she should defect—exchange her révolutionary ideal for material support as some of her comrades had done by choosing outside support in exchange for the impoverished independence of the Party—or leave the Party to form another political alliance. The choice she finally decides upon is neither marriage nor abortion but prostitution—a way of purchasing her long-term freedom and independence with a short-term selling of her body. She tells Ch’iu-liu that she has heard that her former classmate Chao Ch’ih-chu, the girl friend of Shih Chün, has been doing that for some time. Chang Ch’iu-liu is appalled by such a choice, but Wang Shih-t’ao has already made up her mind. With the life and future of her child inside her and with Chao Ch’ih-chu’s example supporting her choice, she will not be alone in making this temporarily degrading concession for survival. She defends herself accordingly to Chang Ch’iu-liu.
Chao Ch’ih-chu and her lover are literally penniless. Neither of them has been able to find a job. Since they are not allowed to work for revolution anymore, they have lost their means of livelihood. Ch’ih-chu hit upon this very natural recourse. Is it not true that the ultimate means of making a living for a woman is to sell her sex? She said that she would under no circumstances compromise her ideas and beliefs, but in order to maintain this independence of her ideas and beliefs, and to conserve their physical selves for the sake of resuming their struggle someday in the future, prostituting her body once or twice in the present is a totally immaterial consideration.51
Chang Ch’iu-liu is at once moved and persuaded by the moral strength of her friend’s conviction. She thinks,
Why should [Chao Ch’ih-chu] feel pain? She has the backing of a public cause and she has the self-confidence of her firm moral beliefs. She definitely will not feel the pain. Only those who loiter and vacillate, leading a life of contradiction and remorse, will feel the pain.52
We have mentioned previously that in his 1921 article on Maurice Maeterlinck, Mao Tun had raised the questions of the value of women’s chastity and the value of sacrificing chastity for a greater cause.53 Now, in his fictional exploration of Miss Wang’s choice, the questions resurge. And Miss Wang’s answer is just as positive. Once again the issue of woman’s virtue is enlisted here allegorically to support a political decision in a revolutionary situation.
In depicting Wang’s choice of a way of life, Mao Tun’s emotions, over and above his political conviction, were deeply involved. The question of sacrificing for a larger cause in the summer of 1928 is not as hypothetical as is the case with his 1921 literary study of “Mona Vanna.” What agony it must have been to him to entrust to words the covert reality behind Wang Shih-t’ao’s situation—that the glorious goal of universal emancipation of the oppressed was now forced to the level of bare survival, and that its future was as precarious as the life of an unborn baby in a prostituting mother.
But not even Wang Shih-t’ao’s predicament is the complete equivalent of how deeply into the mire of desperation the revolution had sunk by the summer of 1928. Immediately following Wang’s story we come to the even more heart-rending love adventure of Chang Ch’iu-liu and Shih Hsün, the accompanying violence and passion of which almost made Mao Tun lose control of Pursuit in his fictional representation of the wrong-headed courage, devotion, and bravado of his dearest comrades.
Chang Ch’iu-liu’s Pursuit (Chapters 6, 7, 8)
Chang Ch’iu-liu is a very different “type” from the other characters in Pursuit. She is the Futuristic present, harking back to the passionate romantic union between the warrior Ch’iang Wei-li and the trusting Miss Ching of Disillusionment. She is dynamic, enigmatic, and reckless, at once passionate and compassionate. Defending her against Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un’s charge of unrevolutionary behavior and licentiousness, Mao Tun wrote that if women like Chang Ch’iu-liu are “not revolutionary women, neither are they merely superficial and licentious women.”54
The first thing we note about Chang Ch’iu-liu is that she is the only character in the novel who shows deep concern for others. She is the author’s means of deepening all the characters by infusing their intellectualized pursuits with her own emotional intensity. Ch’iu-liu is the one who visits Shih Hsün at the hospital and arranges for her schoolmates to pay his hospital bills. It is to her that Shih Hsün confides that he has tried to kill himself because his vitality has been drained by an attack of appendicitis. Again, when Wang Shih-t’ao is making her sad decision to become a prostitute, it is Ch’iu-liu who visits her to offer comradeship and support.
From the novelistic viewpoint, Chang Ch’iu-liu provides a second perspective, after Wang Chung-chao, for a reading of the fictional events. She affirms emotional truths that, for technical and historical reasons, are not available to the male characters in the novel. Her disenchantment with Chang Man-ch’ing, for example, runs even deeper than Chang’s disenchantment with her. She does not merely complacently dismiss Chang’s new pursuits, she refutes them. She feels that Chang’s “bighatted” theory of education has no contact with reality and is as hollow as the base of Wang Chung-chao’s news data. She has no respect whatever for Man-ch’ing’s “ideal woman.” Persistently, relentlessly she exposes the ugliness of Miss Chu’s voice and the total absence of genuine love between Man-ch’ing and Chu Chin-ju. Miss Chang’s condemnation of Miss Chu is as eloquent as it is absolute, and her charges find staunch support in the more objective observations of Wang Chung-chao.
Miss Chang’s evaluation of the different pursuits of the others persuades us with its simplicity and intuitive perception. We are led to see the serious self-deception in Chang Man-ch’ing’s courtship and the equal if not greater destructiveness in his education theory, as compared to the limited, personal damage of Shih Hsün’s self-destruction—and even the Futuristic affirmation of her own revolutionary project to rescue Shih Hsün through sexuality.
In addition to her accurate perceptions of others, Miss Chang’s unconditional compassion for Wang Shih-t’ao and Tung-fang Ming, and her totally unselfish scheme of remaking Shih Hsün, finally entitle her to her creator’s defense that she is not a superficial or simplistically “romantic” woman. In Mao Tun’s fictional representation, her affair with Shih Hsün is imbued with a tender lyricism that expresses not conventional eroticism but an infinite comradely love, a sense of the irretrievable loss that characterizes the foolhardy martyrdom of a committed revolutionary.
In chapter 6, after Chang Ch’iu-liu leaves Wang Shih-t’ao, Ts’ao Chih-fang bursts into her room to demand that she prove herself by running off with him to a life of “banditry.” Miss Chang, though caught nearly naked, refuses both his advances and his partnership offer but afterward feels uneasy. Self-doubt makes her ask herself whether it was cowardice that caused her hesitation:
She had never been a cowardly or base woman. She was a person of complete self-control and self-confidence. But what happened a moment ago seemed to prove that she was just a tiresome word-mongering person. She had suddenly fallen into the pitfall of cowardice and could not extricate herself. This brought on a sorrow that was embarrassing, unjust, and more than she could bear. It was only an impulse of curiosity that made her behave as she did. In the past few days, she had been completely under the dictates of that impulse and has been deeply enthralled by it. She wanted to bring a miracle to pass, namely, to remake the skeptic, Shih Hsün. Three or four days ago, when she first started on this project, there were quite a number of difficulties. The thoroughly disillusioned Shih Hsün did not lend himself easily to a revivification effort, but this had just made Miss Chang more determined . . .55
In the next chapter, we find a complete picture of the inner and external life of Chang Ch-iu-liu.
At the beginning of chapter 7, Wang Chung-chao has received a letter from Miss Lu saying that her father has finally agreed to their union. Wang then has a premonition that something will prevent this marriage—which is symbolized by a dream that the warmhearted Chang Ch’iu-liu has forged the letter,56 but then the disturbing resemblance between Miss Chu and Miss Lu flashes across Wang’s mind.57 He suddenly remembers that Chang Man-ch’ing too is getting married and that the wedding is only two days away. Wang is pleased that, compared to Chang Man-ch’ing, he is definitely getting the more ideal woman. There is no question that Miss Lu is prettier and has a sweeter voice and a better personality. With his own wedding in mind, he goes to visit Miss Chang Ch’iu-liu, and for the first time becomes conscious that Ch’iu-liu also has a dreamlike resemblance to his fiancée. In this section we have a hint of the two kinds of resemblance of the women types in Pursuit: that between Miss Chang and Miss Lu (their similar revolutionary ideals) and the superficial resemblance between Miss Lu and Miss Chu (which connects the inherent hollowness of their lover’s pursuits).
When Wang Chung-chao arrives at Miss Chang’s he is greeted with no comparable good news. The first thing he learns is that Wang Shih-t’ao has in fact confirmed her decision to make a living by prostitution. Miss Chang has seen it. But Wang Chung-chao, though a professional journalist specializing in just such events, seems to be not at all interested in such real-life news. Miss Chang then says,
“Since it doesn’t affect you, you’d better not ask any questions. What has happened to Wang Shih-t’ao may make people indignant and sorry for her. But I myself feel choked. A better way of putting it would be that I feel suffocated, suffocated with that infernal suffocation one feels when one smells the stench of a rotting corpse.”58
Then she drops the subject and goes on to Miss Chu:
“Chung-chao, have you ever heard Man-ch’ing talk about his ‘ideal woman’? . . . It’s an open question whether Man-ch’ing’s ideal is right for him or not, but whatever his ideal is, this Miss Chu certainly comes nowhere near it. I have spoken my mind to Man-ch’ing but he never pays any attention to me. He has finally taken this impostor Miss Chu to be his real ideal. Chung-chao, do you know, Man-ch’ing is an overcautious person. He must have given a lot of thought to this matter of Miss Chu. Yet he still cannot escape being deceived by her imposture. This is how fate plays with human beings.”59
When Miss Chang mischievously suggests that his Miss Lu might also turn out to be as much a disappointment as Chang Man-ch’ing’s “ideal woman,” Chung-chao quickly denies the possibility:
“When a person hoists the standard of his ideal in the air and pursues it, he may get something that looks like his target but actually is not. This is because his eyes are already dazzled by his own ideal and he can never see reality with a cool mind. I do not set up any standard to begin with. I am not one of those ambitious people who think they are living in the best and most beautiful of ideal worlds. I am not that kind of dreamer. I pursue only what my reason tells me is beautiful and good. I first look with my cool, observant eyes to locate beauty, and then I apply my entire self to the quest. Therefore, in my case there may be failures but not disappointment. But now I am completely triumphant.”60
Chang Ch’iu-liu is skeptical but she is not going to argue. She extracts Wang’s promise to come to a picnic two days later and meet a “new friend” of hers. They do not mention that Chang Man-ch’ing’s wedding day is also two days later, but the coincidence is certainly designed.61
After Wang leaves, Miss Chang sits on her window sill and, thinking of her friend Shih-t’ao, has a waking dream of Tung-fang Ming’s death,
A piece of floating cloud moved aside, and the golden sunlight poured on Miss Chang. Her flimsy dressing gown was transparent and the slight undulation of her breasts could be vaguely seen. Terrible mental pictures once again enveloped her. Night before last, she had seen a man and a woman walking by with their arms around each other’s waists. That woman had looked very much like Wang Shih-t’ao. . . . The next day she purposely went to see Miss Wang about it, mentioning what she had seen the night before. Miss Wang confessed. . . .
Miss Chang let out a breath uneasily. She opened her eyes wide and firmly focused on the sun that just showed its face from behind floating clouds. As if this radiant star in the sky were her enemy, even though it donned such an aggressive mien she was unwilling to flinch or show any timidity, and she stared directly into it. But in a few seconds she began to feel dizzy. She could not help closing her eyes.
A number of airy red circles emerged at the edge of her field of vision. Following them was the sorrowful stricken face of Wang Shih-t’ao, squarely on top of each of the red circles. Then, the scene changed again. Flickering, flickering, miraculously magnifying, it congealed into a horrifying face. Ah! It was the horrifying face of Tung-fang Ming, his teeth clenched tight. The red circle, supporting Tung-fang Ming’s head, looked exactly like a bloody line encircling his neck. Miss Chang opened her eyes in fright. . . .
. . . The blood-dripping red circles continued to dangle in front of her eyes. She began to feel goose pimples on her smooth skin. . . .
“That’s strange. I have never let anything haunt me like this.” She questioned herself coolly. “Is this a revelation of my latent timidity? But this is totally without rhyme or reason. Of course, the profound sorrow of Wang Shih-t’ao’s situation is also an unforgettable fact. Did this tragic fact stir up such compassion that it brought on this abnormal reaction? Is it because of that burning compassion that I cannot chase away the image of the blood-dripping red circles, that I become so frightened and lapse into timidity? It never occurred to me before that indignation and fright are two sides of the same thing. Is it because when I think about Wang Shih-t’ao I become indignant, and when I am indignant I become frightened?”62
The vision of Tung-fang Ming leads Miss Chang to the thought of Chao Ch’ih-chu, who preceded Shih-t’ao into prostitution. Thinking of both women, Ch’iu-liu decides that to sacrifice the present for the unknown future, as they have done for somewhat different reasons, is a passive morality not congenial to her taste. She herself will have nothing to do with a passive morality. To her
the first rule of morality was to respect yourself. This she called “initiative.” It had been her standing opinion that to toy with men bespoke the amorality of women, but to be toyed with by men, even for a defined goal, was not worthy of her consideration, let alone acceptance for the sake of an indefinite and unknowable future.63
Upon that thought Miss Chang gets up and goes out to look for Shih Hsün.
Shih Hsün, though still far from well, is ready to join in her plan of revitalizing him. The two decide to go at once to a hotel on Cannon Bay on Shanghai’s Wu-sung Harbor. They will have two days before the picnic to which Miss Chang has invited her group and Wang Chung-chao. Provided with ample money and wine, they take the train to the ominously named center of Shanghai’s seashore defenses.
When they arrived at Cannon Bay, Shih Hsün had sobered up completely. He still did not say much. They sat by the riverbank for a long time, watching the foreign gunboats and merchant ships entering and leaving the harbor busily. It was night. The silvery beams of the half-moon bathed the bay. They sat on the hotel porch. The Wu-sung-Shanghai train roared by. The long, sad whistles of the steamboats came from the river. The army sentinels on the nearby boulevards shouted a question every now and then. Aside from these noises, everything else was quiet, in deep slumber. The two of them exchanged only a few insignificant remarks, nothing like a lively conversation. A silent tension spread between them. Their hearts were dwelling on the thing that was about to take place. They had expected it to take place for a long time. But its final arrival threw them, as instruments, into a palpitating anxiety. . . .64
Shih Hsün and Miss Chang retreat to their room and the daring, violent, unrestrained lovemaking begins, with “the voluptuous and healthy body of Miss Chang” contrasting sharply with “the skeleton-like emaciated Shih Hsün.” The aphrodisiac wine supplies the passion that Shih Hsün could not otherwise summon. On the second night,
Under the cover of wine, they forgot the past, and no longer worried about the future. Their hearts and their souls were wholly immersed in the unrestrained pleasure of the flesh of a brief fleeting instant. . . . The moonlight was even better than last night, but they did not go to the porch; They just shut themselves in their room and drank. Nothing untoward occurred, except that Shih Hsün was even more excited. [Outside] this night too passed quietly, lightfootedly, while the lovers were under the violent stimulus of wine and in the eddies of passion. As they had the night before, they lost consciousness in extreme exhaustion.
Not long afterward sunlight came to the earth again. It pierced through the window screen, peeping onto these two intoxicated beings and invoking blessings on them. . . . The life in retreat of the past three or four months, together with all the vital energy accumulated during that period, had been poured out in the two or three hours of last night, beyond all precedent.65
When morning comes they are hurried back into reality. The picnic is held on schedule and everybody from chapter 1 except Chang Man-ch’ing and Wang Shih-t’ao is there to celebrate the birth of a new Shih Hsün. As merriment is in full swing, Shih Hsün suddenly falls to the ground. Blood gushes from his mouth; he is taken to the hospital and in a few hours dies just as Chang Man-ch’ing’s travesty of a wedding is taking place.
A few days later Chang Ch’iu-liu tells Wang Chung-chao that she has contracted syphilis from Shih Hsün, and just as Wang Chung-chao is comparing his own good luck with Miss Chang’s misfortune, a telegram arrives informing him that Miss Lu has been critically injured and disfigured.
As the novel ends, the goals and the pursuits of all the major characters have turned to dust. The dreams were delusions, and the survivors are aware that they were. Wang Shih-t’ao’s baby may have a slim chance for life; Miss Lu may survive the accident; and Chang Ch’iu-liu may be cured—but these rays of hope are dim indeed in the dark present.
The Real and the Symbolic
Pursuit is clearly not a natural development from Disillusionment and Vacillation. Some events in this novel do not show the characteristics of a rational world; their meaning is repressed in the realistic setting of the novel and they acquire lucidity only when we follow the inner thoughts of the characters into the underlying psychological world where a different order of time exists and a different interpretation of events is possible. While references to current historical events seem to be anchoring the surface action in the historical present, they in fact are more truly read as indices to decisive turns of events in the recent past, events that elucidate the present.
The Tsinan Incident of May 3, 1928, for example, is one of such realistic points of reference. It appears twice in the novel: once in chapter 4 when Wang Chung-chao is shuttling between Shanghai and Chia-hsing, and once in chapter 6, when Ts’ao Chih-fang is giving his soapbox speech. Superficially it provides a setting in time for the events in Pursuit, pointing to the development of the Great Revolution up to May 1928. This time reference serves a practical purpose when it comes to the identification of the Party theoretician behind Chang Man-ch’ing: we will find Ch’ü Ch’iu-po and not Ch’en Tu-hsiu or Li Li-san.66 But thematically, it is also used by Mao Tun as a novelistic device to imprint another chapter of Party history during the Great Revolution years that is not likely to appear in the official version. Its twice occurrence actively registers for Mao Tun how by May 1928 the CCP leadership (represented by Chang Man-ch’ing) and its Propaganda Department (Wang Chung-chao) had done an aboutface and turned away from crying national issues in their dogged and empty pursuits of newly concocted slogans from Moscow (debate in Chang’s school and instruction for Wang to advertise imported goods), and how only a small group of old-time revolutionaries (the “west-side” group) still persists in their old tactic of mass agitation and in their effort at seeking national emancipation.
Ts’ao Chih-fang’s soapbox speech scene, otherwise a dangling digression from the plot line of Pursuit, becomes thus centrally related to the overall theme and structure of the trilogy. The Great Revolution, after all, is not merely an account of the intricate Party politics at the headquarters. The Tsinan Incident and Ts’ao Chih-fang’s street scene, therefore, by breaking away from the domination of Party politics as represented by the pursuits of Chang and Wang in chapters 1 to 5, manage to take the story line of Pursuit back to the concrete and join it to where Disillusionment ends—Tung-fang Ming marching off to the south.
Mao Tun apparently had great difficulties, in chapters 6 and 7, in handling the story of Tung-fang Ming and what his death signifies to the future of the revolution and to the surviving coworkers. Time and reality in these two chapters become more and more confused as Mao Tun tries to step back from the present (i.e., May 1928), retracing from the news of Tung-fang Ming’s death to the monumental tragedy of the Canton Comune behind it, and then to the selfless devotion and comradely love that finally transform that apparent act of blind heroism to a drama of passion and of love. The narrative rewinds in chapters 6 and 7, and scenes are exposed in their reversed order.
The news of Tung-fang Ming’s death comes from Wang Shih-t’ao, but the circumstances surrounding it becomes known only later in Chang Ch’iu-liu’s hallucinatory vision. We know he died in action in the Canton Commune because he appears in Chang’s vision with a bloody ring around his neck. The red ring came from the strips of red cloth which the insurgent Chinese Communists tied around their necks for identification during the uprising in Canton—an ironic contrast to the blood-red tie Pao-su wears in Disillusionment and a reminder of the red neckerchiefs the youth groups wore in Vacillation. But when suppression started, the red ring left by sweaty neckerchiefs unmistakably identified the cadres as well as the rank and file to the counterrevolutionary forces. Leaders and followers alike were rounded up by the thousands and executed in the streets.
What is of interest to us today, beyond uncovering the historical events behind Tung-fang Ming’s death, is, of course, how Mao Tun, as an active coworker at the time, reacted to this bloody event and to its impact on the Great Revolution. We do not normally find out from revolutionary slogans or Party propaganda what the Party leadership really felt about a political blunder of this order. Mao Tun, fifty years later, eschewed the whole issue in his “Memoirs.” But in Pursuit, his method of “profile painting” and his use of political allegory and private symbolism offer some sharp side views.
In Chang Man-ch’ing’s renunciation of his past relationship with Miss Chang and in his subsequent pursuit of Miss Chu, we have a political allegory, portrayed by Mao Tun with notable abhorrence, of the CCP unfeelingly closing its chapter on the second phase (the democratic bourgeois revolution) and entering into the third “soviet phase.” And in Wang Chung-chao’s busy reorganization of his news section to phase out the “united front” slogan in order to promote another revolutionary tide, we have another allegory of the Party’s propaganda organ being forced into synchronizing its action with the new Party line.
But what about the second phase just closed and the comrades sacrificed for its closing? Are they to be so easily deleted from the memory of history just because another “big-hatted” slogan has been advanced to take their place? In 1928 Mao Tun could not bear to see it so. Chapters 6 and 7 are his testimony. The mixture of lyricism and abandonment in his depiction of Chang Ch’iu-liu and Shih Hsün’s love affair leaves an indelible record of genuine human passion. The Cannon Bay episode, an interlude out of the temporal order of the events surrounding it, reveals Mao Tun’s inconsolable grief at the martyrdom of his beloved comrades. Through its irrevocable sense of loss, Mao Tun salutes the “Souls of Late Party Members” who sacrificed themselves unflinchingly in the mad December days in Canton. Their noble but misguided attempt to revitalize the Party is mirrored in Ch’iu-liu’s doomed plan to revitalize Shih Hsün.
As he wrote later, “Those who can stand unyielding in the face of strong forces can still be made to despair and go mad over the perverse acts of those dear to them.” These dead comrades were more real to Mao Tun in the fictional present of May 1928 than what was going on around him in actual life. The silvery moonshine that bathes the couple the night before they plunge into their wild pursuit, and the golden sunlight that blesses their deathlike slumbering bodies on the morning of the picnic day intertwined to form Mao Tun’s personal wreath of thorns and roses on the unmarked graves of his martyred coworkers. But for the lovers as for the insurgents, the noonday reality has quickly overtaken the poetry of passion.
The sexual encounter of Chang Ch’iu-liu and Shih Hsün strongly reminds us of the week of similarly abandoned lovemaking of the Futurist Ch’iang Wei-li and Miss Ching in Kuling at the end of Disillusionment, and Mao Tun used a similar vocabulary to describe their intense pursuits of the pleasures of the flesh. In both cases, they are allegorical representations of the two self-willed albeit reckless military adventures by the CCP in the second half of 1927: the Nanch’ang Uprising and the Canton Comune. Yet the consequences of the two pairs of selfless and hence self asserting lovers are drastically different. The “future” toward which Ch’iang Wei-li and Tung-fang Ming marched off together has become utter devastation in the Cannon Bay episode: the cyclical history of blind uprisings that Shih Hsün represents has finally consumed itself in action; the revolutionary vision of an emancipated political Party and military force, in the second instance, loses its ability to reproduce itself, as Chang Ch’iu-liu believes she has,67 and the seed of a future life for the revolution is imprisoned in the prostituted present of Wang Shih-t’ao.
It is not a bright picture, but Mao Tun had to make it: “I feel very apologetic about having written such a depressing novel. What I had to say went from bad to worse. But please forgive me, I really could not exonerate all this away. I could only let it be written down as it is, a sort of memorial.” The question of crime and punishment in Disillusionment, whether a human being can be absolved of crime committed for a public “superhuman” cause, is given one answer in the symbolism of the reverent movie title of “Souls of Late Party Members.” But still, if one can be morally absolved of his crime by his own selfless sacrifice, how about the effect of the crime on others? To Mao Tun, the ultimate intentions of the comrades who led the Canton Commune were beyond question, but his reading of the goals of the Great Revolution did not permit him to forgive deplorable tactics. For in adopting a tactic one is, knowingly or not, committing one’s self to a particular view of history. And if one’s view is partial, or if what one counted on betrays one, one is still responsible for the outcome. And it is this drama of historical responsibility that Mao Tun is laying bare for us in his portrayal of the pursuits of Chang Ch’iu-liu and Wang Shih-t’ao. Although the emotional crisis at the time disabled Mao Tun from exploring further into the drama, he has by no means given it up. In The Wild Roses stories which will be discussed in the next chapter, we shall see that most of the personal drama of love and love politics there are his studies in fictional form of the ways he and other members like him have found of living with that responsibility, or of avoiding it.
Chapter 6 and 7, therefore, reenact, in their break from the story line of chapters 1 to 5, Mao Tun’s refusal to reconcile the death of his comrades with the lie of a new revolutionary era beginning. The narrative there is violently thrown back to the past, retracing through the memory and nightmarish vision of Miss Wang and Miss Chang to the point when the explosive and self-destructive plunge of Chang Ch’iu-liu and Shih Hsün takes place. In this way, Mao Tun manages to join, somewhat belatedly as the news of the Canton Commune has come to him so belatedly, one course of development of the Great Revolution back to when Disillusionment ends, a course for which he would never have forgiven himself had he let it be distorted into a dress rehearsal for the fiasco of a third revolutionary phase.
Allegory and Symbolism
Allegory and symbolism, as we know, work on many levels throughout Eclipse. In Pursuit their interaction is especially subtle and intricate. On the verbal level, they include the witty labeling of “big-hat” and “phonograph disk,” equally self-defeating slogans of two of the revolutionary camps—the theorists and the disoriented activists. Political allegory infuses the dramas of the characters and their pursuits: Chang Man-ch’ing the Party ideologue; Wang Chung-chao the reformist Party propagandist; and Wang Shih-t’ao the devastated hope for the future of the revolution.
The novel is replete with such political meaning. There is the allegorical representation of the bloody three-day Canton Commune in the orgy at Cannon Bay, and the rift over the united-front policy in the internal disease of appendicitis that brought Shih Hsün to physical exhaustion and abortive suicide.
Name symbolism is plentiful in Pursuit. The family name Shih (History) is shared by two characters in the trilogy: Shih Chün (History Handsome), a symbolic presence of mass movement leadership within the CCP in Disillusionment and Vacillation, and the transformed suicidal history Shih Hsün (History in Vicious Circles). Such name symbolism also extends to suggest Mao Tun’s conception of the total structure of the trilogy: how the events in the three novels related to one another in history and in ideals, and how the events in Pursuit in particular relate to the history and ideals portrayed in Disillusionment and Vacillation. The two most important name symbols in this connection are Tung-fang Ming and Chang Ch’iu-liu, each of which signifies a broad network of interrelations and transmogrifications.
The name Tung-fang Ming (East is Bright, meaning dawn and symbolizing hope for a new future) alludes to the title of a play Vor Sonnenaufgang (originally entitled Der Saemann—the Seed Sower), by the German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946), which was translated in Chinese as Tung-fang wei-ming (East is Not Yet Bright).68 Tung-fang Ming, who made the Southern March after the Nanch’ang Uprising in Disillusionment, is the allegorical seed-sower for the Communist-led revolution, sowing the seed of a politically independent future with his military action. In Pursuit, the sower is destroyed. The responsibility for his death, strangely enough, is directly attributed to his lover Wang Shih-t’ao. The name Wang Shih-t’ao also carries symbolism of a sort, alluding via the two characters in the first name “shih” (poetry) and “t’ao” (T’ao Ch’ien, a poet and a self-supporting farmer-intellectual who lived at a time of great political unrest, 365-427) to the mass movements in the countryside. Wang was to await for Tung-fang Ming’s return in Shanghai. But in late 1927 and early 1928 there is no reunion between the military and the masses. Because of Shih-t’ao’s weakness for Lung Fei (whose name symbolism I have not been able to read), Tung-fang Ming again went away to the countryside and Shih-t’ao was reduced to nourish his “seed” with the most degrading of means.
Tung-fang Ming, the Seed Sower, has meantime died a phoenix death. His Party role is resurrected in Pursuit in the person of the “big-hat” theorist Chang Man-ch’ing. That Chang Man-ch’ing is a successor, though an impostoring one, of Tung-fang Ming can be seen in a play on their names. Man-ch’ing was the courtesy name of Tung-fang Shuo, a jester and attendant to the Han Emperor Wu-ti. This pun, joining the two characters via the name of Tung-fang [Ming] and [Chang] Man-ch’ing, joins as well the empty shell of a once genuine hope to the pretentious claim of a new Party line. It is quite in tune with Mao Tun’s view of what has been transacted at the time.
Chang Ch’iu-liu’s resurrection from the ashes of Chang Ching of Disillusionment is analogous to the transformation of Tung-fang Ming into Chang Man-ch’ing. “Ch’iu-liu” means “autumn willow.” It carries an allusion to a pair of poems in the eighth century between two lovers separated in war. In the poem “Chang-t’ai Liu” (“The Willow of Chang-t’ai”), the T’ang poet Han Yi (circa 755) addresses his love thus:
Willow of Chang-t’ai, Willow of Chang-t’ai
Are you as green as you used to be?
Your long branches may be dangling still
Picked no doubt by another’s hand.
And the lady responds with her poem:
The willow (liu) branch has kept its fragrance.
Too bad it is only used to say goodbye.
A leaf falls in the wind, autumn (ch’iu) is here.
Even if you came now, it would not be worth your picking.69
To those who are familiar with the story behind the poems, the allegory is transparent. The autumn willow (Ch’iu-liu) stands symbolically for the lady’s image of herself after she was kidnapped by a barbarian general. And the contemporary parallel lies obviously in the constant interference of the Comintern in the internal affairs of the CCP, which, in a sense, contaminated the purity of the Party like the barbarian general sullying the purity of Lady Liu with his attention and favor forced on her. In the fictional context of the trilogy, the foreign interference is the principal factor that underlies the allegorical transformation of Chang Ching, the revolutionary ideal of 1927, to Chang Ch’iu-liu, the revolutionary ideal of 1928. Perhaps Chang Ching did not reappear in Shanghai, as the reader was promised at the End of Disillusionment, because the change between her course of action after August 1927 and her course after December 1927 was so great that the disparity could not be contained within the same character. Mao Tun tried to keep Wang Shih-t’ao the same person and the result is artistically unsatisfactory.
One last point in Mao Tun’s characterization of political women in the novel that is worth our attention is his revised understanding of the relationship between the Comintern and the CCP, a revision poignantly represented in his characterization of Chang Ch’iu-liu. In “From Kuling to Tokyo,” he refers to Miss Chang as belonging to the same type as Hui and Sun Wu-yang. But if we look more closely, we will see that Chang Ch’iu-liu differs from the other two in a very important way. First of all, she is not promiscuous. She turns her back on Chang Man-ch’ing and rejects the advances of Ts’ao Chih-fang. Love for her is no longer represented as a matter of expediency. Ch’iu-liu directs her love to a definite goal—to revitalize Shih Hsün. Secondly, she is genuinely concerned for Wang Shih-t’ao’s and Shih Hsün’s well-being, and her concern is qualitatively different from Sun Wu-yang’s flirtatious good will toward Fang Lo-lan or from Hui’s philosophy of love. Something has been cleansed from the character of Hui and Sun Wu-yang to make the characterization of Chang Ch’iu-liu different—and when we look closer, we find that it is the foreign element that has gone out of her physical and psychological make-up. Chang Ch’iu-liu has no “foreign” connection (like Lady Liu in the poem being finally delivered from the barbarian’s custody and reunited with her poet-lover.) That part of her psyche has been recast into a separate character, Miss Chu Chin-ju, a type we have never met before in the other two novels.
The appearance of Miss Chu in Pursuit marks a decisive turning point in Mao Tun’s political consciousness. He begins to appreciate the difference between international communism as a tool for power politics for a foreign country and as a genuine revolutionary goal for China. Later on, when Mao Tun emerges from exile to reopen the question of the “seed” of the revolutionary future for China in his fiction, he will not forget his determination to cast out the image of the “foreign” Comintern from the characterization of his revolutionary heroes and heroines.70
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