Scope of the book

In this book I propose a reinterpretation of Mao Tun’s early fictional works—his first novel, the trilogy Eclipse (1927–28), the set of five short stories collected in The Wild Roses (1928–29), and three historical tales (1930)—a reinterpretation arrived at by taking into consideration their social, political, and biographical contexts. By concentrating on the social context, C. T. Hsia could take these works simply as realistic portraits of the lives of contemporary students, particularly of their amorous and political pursuits, while Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, a sort of comrade of Mao Tun’s, treats the trilogy as practically a disguised political history of the Communist Party during the Great Revolution. My concern is to find a place for both these components, the surface (social) narration and concealed (political) allegory in a framework which includes in addition Mao Tun’s own reflections on revolution.

As I see it, the basic conflict in the trilogy is between the beauty of the ideal (the Communist cause) and the ugliness of its failure to attain its goal. How is one to live with failure? One response is the self-delusion of Miss Huan (in The Wild Roses). How can one avoid failure, and, in particular, deal with one’s enemies (e.g., Pao-su)? It is necessary to deviate from the ideal and use stratagem and deception.

The trilogy was written at a time when Mao Tun was shocked by the sharp contrast between the purity of the ideal of revolution and the unsavory complexity of its attempted execution. He combined a realistic depiction of the effects of the revolution on particular regions and individuals with a layer of allegory presented in terms of the personal relations of the characters that parallel the political struggles within the Chinese Communist Party and its external relations to the Communist International and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The trilogy summarizes the revolutionary experience from 1926 to the beginning of 1928, and looks for an appropriate response to the discovery that faithful adherence to the revolutionary ideal is an inadequate guide to action.

The negative responses of suicide and self-delusion in The Wild Roses can be viewed as an admission of defeat or alternatively as the elimination of weaklings from the revolutionary ranks, leaving it to tougher souls to carry on with the revolution. Love has to be pushed into the background: the ideal must find a way to a more feasible means for attaining the ideal, for the cause can stay alive only if a realistic course can be found. Love gives way to power, for order is brought about only through power. In the historical tales Mao Tun continues the search for a way out by examining the need for deception and submission to leadership. Once these needs were accepted, the right course of revolution was settled for Mao Tun. From then on, the problem was to locate the leaders and to carry out the tasks ordained by the leadership in accordance with Communist premises.

Within this framework the writing of revolutionary literature became a simpler and more manageable endeavor. It was possible to adhere to a form of socialist realism by selecting and portraying actual happenings arranged to support the leaders’ interpretation of current events so as to further the current needs of revolution. The famous novel Midnight typifies this next stage of Mao Tun’s creative work. The earlier fictional works of Mao Tun are a record of his development as a revolutionary writer, dramatizing the choices with which he was faced. As such they constitute a coherent group of his writings, which in turn are an important part of modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Movement (1919) to the present day.

To produce this group of work Mao Tun had to satisfy several apparently incompatible conditions: (1) He was himself a devoted and active revolutionary; (2) He wanted to reflect in his writing the current history of the revolution; (3) He wanted to go back to fundamentals, and not merely produce examples of what Lu Hsün called (approvingly) “command-obeying literature.” At the time Mao Tun was a novice at fiction writing. In resorting to a subtle and complex use of allegory he set himself a formidable task that was carried out only with compromises (such as breaking up one work into three parts) and limited success (as exemplified by the mess toward the end of Pursuit). It is not surprising that the many levels of meaning in the resulting works are not easily accessible to the reader. I have tried to make them more accessible by showing the dialectical relation between Mao Tun’s texts and multiple contexts, devices and meanings. The difficulties of interpretation are best illustrated by a brief review of my own extended efforts to solve the puzzle.

Puzzles about Eclipse

Mao Tun and his fictional works have always held a special fascination for me. The elusive complexity one senses in him and in his works make him particularly challenging. I have never felt that any one of his novels is particularly well-written. Quite the contrary, I have always felt that his novels and stories, especially the early ones, do not hang together well: there are too many desultory episodes in them, too much unexplained violence, and too many eccentric characters encountering mystifying fates. Pursuit, the third part of Eclipse, is a good case in point. I could not explain the character Shih Hsün, since nothing in the first two parts prepares one for his appearance, nor could I understand the significance of Miss Chang’s fantastic therapeutic project. Freud was never an intellectual presence in China: where did Mao Tun get the idea that a release of inhibited sexual energy might restore a person to health?

These and other unresolved puzzles about Mao Tun’s early fiction gradually became an obsession. I read his critics and their reviews of his novels, and was puzzled by apparent discrepancies between what Mao Tun said of his own concerns with Eclipse and what his critics wrote about it. Where he was concerned with the problems of artistic structure and adequacy of characterization, his critics concerned themselves primarily with the referential world of his text and ideological purity.

Then I discovered from Chang Kuo-t’ao’s Memoirs that Mao Tun was a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and that he joined the party a month after its founding in Shanghai in July 1921. As I read on in Chang’s Memoirs, I was struck by certain repeated terms such as tung-yao (vacillation) and tzu-sha (suicide), which brought to mind similar uses in Eclipse and suggested possible connections between Mao Tun’s early fictional works and his personal activities as a member of the CCP in the 1920s.

I began to look for evidence that would support such connections, and published the results in an article, “Autumn in Kuling.” The evidence there is largely in the form of tropes: emblems, symbols, allegories, which seem to exhibit an internal system and cohere to bring forth a meaningful reading of the text. Further research into the history of the CCP was incorporated in my second article (on The Wild Roses) which found correspondences between Mao Tun’s own experience and his fictional text.

It was only after these preliminary skirmishes that I finally summoned the courage to tackle directly the formidable and intricate Eclipse. Of course I had been thinking about Eclipse all along. At one stage I suddenly became aware that my problems in understanding the interrelationship between the parts of that trilogy are exactly those which Mao Tun had been talking about in “From Kuling to Tokyo,” where he tells how he went about writing the trilogy. They were problems of artistic structure and of techniques of characterization. Mao Tun said there that he could not quite make an integrated whole of the three stages of the revolution he was portraying in Eclipse, and today we see that there is a noticeable hiatus between the first two parts and the third part. The realization that Mao Tun himself noticed incoherence in Eclipse encouraged me to proceed with more confidence.

To lay bare the devices with which Mao Tun constructed his fictional plots from the materials available in the outside world, I am here offering an explication du texte of his major novel, Eclipse, and the two clusters of short stories. There are a few familiar theoretical concepts which underlie my procedure.

Texts and multiple contexts

The issue of texts in Mao Tun’s early fiction cannot be intelligently discussed apart from the question of contexts. Contexts constitute the referential world from which literary texts are structured. In chapter 2 we have a limited problem with the text of the short story “Autumn in Kuling.” Whether the middle sections there were actually lost or censored out makes little difference to our reading of the story, given all the clues to the allegory supplied by the author in the story and its postscript. However, the cuts and changes made in the third part, Pursuit, constitute obvious contextual interference with the text. In the 1950s, more than twenty years after the publication of the work, Mao Tun was asked to make a “stylistic” editing which affects about one-third of the original work. Large chunks were deleted from chapters 6 and 7; the names of its principal characters were simplified in the interests of “consistency,” when inconsistency may have been a deliberate novelistic device. In our reading of Pursuit in chapter 5 we shall see that it is not a question of textual variance as such, nor of “stylistic editing” in any common understanding of the term, but a work of free artistic creation brought into conformity with official dogma. Disillusionment and Vacillation also underwent some “stylistic editing,” but not as extensively.

The broadly divergent interpretations of Mao Tun’s early fictional works offered by C. T. Hsia and Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un stem from their differing perception of the context (or contexts) of his works.

Until the appearance of Mao Tun’s “Memoirs” in the fall of 1979, his membership in the CCP and his activities as a high-level Party propagandist had never been revealed. Yet this information is central to an informed reading of his early fiction. In the absence of such information, critics have little chance to penetrate into the “reality” of the referential world represented in his early fiction.

Hsia’s criticism derives from the Western humanistic value system, which claims the right of an individual to pursue freedom, happiness, and self-fulfillment, and he focuses on the development and interaction of the characters in fiction. Here, where men and women share many universals irrespective of race, ideological belief, or religion, he proves himself to be a perceptive and understanding critic. But Hsia does not always distinguish between what is in the literary texts and what is in the referential world; the principle of verisimilitude is literally subsumed.

Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un approached Mao Tun’s early fiction from quite another point of view. After a career as a leftist radical, he became a member of the CCP in 1928. He reads Mao Tun’s works of the 1920s with an inside knowledge of the latter’s early Party membership and revolutionary activities which Hsia could not have. However, this knowledge did not enhance the quality of his criticism. His too is a cultural and historical criticism, in this case one steeped in a Marxist ideology, which regards literature as a vehicle of political indoctrination, and he judges a literary work in terms of its adherence to the current party line.

His ideology has a more restrictive influence on his understanding of literature and on his conception of how an author can design his work. For him what is important is not the meaning but the correctness of a writer’s texts, contexts, and devices. Ch’ien distorts the principle of verisimilitude, for he leaves the author no freedom to structure his texts from the materials available in the referential world. Hence, what at first appears to be a difference in the respective ideological positions of the two critics on the issue of a political movement turns out to affect profoundly their implicit assumptions about the role and function of literature in the world in which they reside.

How does one go about determining which information from these multiple contexts (Mao Tun’s life, his Party history, his role in that history, his interest in literature, the society of his days) is relevant to his structuring of the texts that concern us? The question of contexts quickly turns into one of artistic design and representation. It is only by examining the fictional works that we can answer the question: If the contexts are multiple, where do the shifts occur?

The artistic design of Eclipse and the short stories, as we shall see in chapter 3 and following, is intimately related to how Mao Tun viewed the course of the revolutionary movement which is the subject of his works. Chapter 2 illustrates how Mao Tun first began to structure his literary texts (short poems and a short story) from a welter of contextual materials (literary, historical, and biographical). We also see how the elucidation of such texts has to take into consideration the multiple contexts.

Since some of the contexts are not generally known, I have added a chapter on Mao Tun’s life from approximately 1918, the time when he began to be totally politicized, to 1930, when he emerged from a period of despair over the catastrophic defeat of the revolutionary movement at the Canton Commune. In the chapters on Eclipse, The Wild Roses and the historical tales, I have provided the more immediate context of Party history, especially the role played by the Comintern.

Outlining the multiple contexts serves to document my allegorical reading of Mao Tun’s early fiction, a reading that requires documentary proof. It also supplies the story stuff which Mao Tun transmuted into the plot of Eclipse. Events provide only the raw material even for a historian. The context of a literary text is at a further remove from events in their chronological order. It is a distinct sphere of human reality, illuminated by the writer’s understanding of the meaning of the events, and organized into an artistic design by means of a set of literary devices so that a new meaning emerges.

The thinning of the text

Devices are an instrument for accommodating a multiplicity of contexts in a single text which may sometimes be distributed, as in the case of Mao Tun’s trilogy, into several subtexts. The abundance of contexts increases the “density” of a text. If fewer contexts are present, we get what I would like to call a “thinning of the text” which accompanies a reduction of the contexts and a simplification of the devices. In order to arrive at a fuller understanding of the meaning of a text, it is, however, not sufficient to determine what contexts and devices are present; we have to examine also how the contexts are used in the text and which thematic or character material is the dominant.

Even though (Russian) Formalism is primarily concerned with the study of poetry, I find some of the concepts can also be adapted to look at some principal features of my study in this book.^✻ In terms of devices, the concepts of defamiliarization, temporal rhythm, and parallelism all seem to apply to Mao Tun’s artistic designs, particularly in his trilogy. In terms of meaning, the concepts of density, presence, and use as well as the dominant are all quite appropriate. For example, if we look at Mao Tun’s creative work from 1927 to 1948, we find that after Eclipse, a thinning of the text had set in, largely as a result of his decision to move from a radical (personal and independent) reflection to a “command-obeying literature” stance. Another consequence of this change of purpose (and reduction of contexts) is the shift of attention from the ideals to the feasible measures (largely as determined by the leadership); thematically love gives way to power (which often resorts to deception).

Once lies and deception are accepted (as necessary) in the process of revolutionary politics and in its representation in literature, love as a synthetic ordering of human emotions directly in tune with the zestful unmediated pursuit of the ideal is no longer possible. Love by definition is exclusive of lie either as a means or as an end. After The Wild Roses Mao Tun never wrote another love story. Throughout the decade of the 1930s, Mao Tun went into an earnest search for an heir to fill the vacancy of love in the emerging mercurial concept of class consciousness. When love resurges in Putrefaction (1942), it is represented not as love but as betrayal. Nostalgia, penitence, and atonement do not add up to love as a dominant, for they are deformations of love.

With a predetermined will to survive dominating his vision of the revolution at one end and an equally predetermined conclusion of victorious proletarian class consciousness at the other end, the freedom of formal creation in the text becomes increasingly localized, favoring the representation of the deathbed scene of the oppressing class. This is evident in most of the novels Mao Tun wrote after the three historical tales: Midnight (1933), Polygonal Relations 1936), and even his rather powerful Frosty Leaves Red as February Flowers (1942). What had once been a realm of free formal creation was reduced to a somewhat automatic formula largely based on an externally (by the Party) determined ideology.

_______________________

✻ I have borrowed heavily from Victor Erlich’s Russian Formalism in my attempt to put my interpretation of the early fiction of Mao Tun in a theoretical framework. The terms text, context, device, and meaning are all from Erlich’s study of Russian Formalism. I wish to acknowledge full debt to Erlich in the conceptual and critical approach to Mao Tun in this chapter.

Device and meaning

Having identified the contexts of Mao Tun’s early fiction, the next step in our critical examination is to try to understand and, if possible, to define the use to which these heterogeneous material and ideas were put in his fictional works. For example, we know that in the early Chinese Communist Movement, there are at least two antithetical views of the goals and process of the revolution, a most obvious illustration being the bifurcated position toward the “United Front” policy with the KMT. Of course, there are also the more striking instances of the Nanch’ang Uprising and the Canton Commune. How are these internal antitheses represented in the literary text? In what images and constructs? How about the relationship of these political positions to the goals of the Chinese Communist revolutionary movement? After all, the avowed goals of “expelling imperialists” and “eradicating traitors” were the same not only for the rival factions of the CCP but also for the KMT. There was, however, a much greater specificity in Mao Tun’s own conception of the goals of the revolution. How much of a dominant role for this specificity Mao Tun allows in his representation is an issue that one cannot ignore in a critical examination of the text.

In chapters 3, 4 and 5 I deal in great documentary detail with how Mao Tun constructed his Eclipse, as a novel about the Great Revolution, from the contextual material of his Party history as well as literary sources and literary theories (Chinese and Western), employing a whole array of devices. The devices range from the more familiar ones like puns, symbols, literary allusions, emblems, and allegories to the less familiar ones such as what the Formalist school calls “parallelism” (which Mao Tun used for characterization) and “rhythm” and “density” (which he used in his plot construction). All these devices can be viewed as ways of “defamiliarization” (“creative deformation”) which, according to the Formalist theory, functions by using a novel method in representation to make a familiar subject “perceptible” to the readers again.

Defamiliarization

The most noticeable example of Mao Tun’s use of this device is his treatment of sex in Eclipse. Whether as a device of characterizing the new women types in his fiction or as an allegorical device to represent Party politics, its function of shaking his readers into a new perception certainly is effective. As I see it, what we want to find out, for example in Disillusionment, is not so much whether Miss Hui, Miss Sun Wu-yang, and Miss Chang Ch’iu-liu are realistic portrayals of exceptional or even revolutionary women at the time but rather what it is that Mao Tun wanted to render perceptible by throwing their attitude towards sex into bold relief.

Some critics of Eclipse who are in the know about the political target to which the device is directed were outraged. Ch’ien Hsing-t’un, for instance, denounced vociferously Mao Tun’s use of sex in the characterization of his modern women and the editor of the official edition of Eclipse in the early 1950s simply expurgated, ostensibly on puritanical grounds, the more explicit description of it in Pursuit.

Throughout Mao Tun’s early fiction more local uses of the device of defamiliarization can be found in his seemingly accidental allusions to Western literary sources: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Maeterlinck’s “Mona Vanna” in Disillusionment, Russian Futurism in the character of Ch’iang Meng in the same novel, and the goddesses of Fate (Greek and Nordic) in The Wild Roses. And the creative deformation he exercises over the Water Margin sources in the three historical tales further testifies to his innovative ability as an artist in handling the literary material.

Temporal rhythm and plot construction

“Rhythm,” the artistic tempo created out of an even flow of chronological time in Eclipse and elsewhere, certainly is a central feature of Mao Tun’s “plotting device.” Critics who insist on an adherence to chronology as a necessary condition of realistic fiction will certainly consider Mao Tun’s deviation from the temporal order of events in contemporary history a distortion and a misrepresentation of “facts.” Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un again, as the spokesman for those who were in the know about the actual chronology of some of the story stuff used in Eclipse, took great pleasure in pointing out such discrepancies as indisputable proof of the novel’s weaknesses and flaws. The overnight love affair between Pao-su and Miss Ching in Disillusionment, for instance, was criticized by Ch’ien knowingly as happening “too soon.” Ch’ien even considered it regrettable that the military action toward the end of the novel did not last long enough. More of it, he said, should be worked into the text. The basis on which Ch’ien offered these “corrections” goes beyond literary criticism and is worth a closer examination, which I shall make in chapter 3.

The relationship between the three parts of Eclipse has never attracted much discussion by Mao Tun’s critics, in spite of the fact that Mao Tun has made it one of the two foci of his own defense of the work in “From Kuling to Tokyo” (the other being characterization and character types). Vacillation, as we shall see in chapter 4, is temporally in parallel to the time period spanned by chapters 7 to 11 of Disillusionment. Yet the discrepancies between mass movements as a Party policy and the effects of its implementation was so great that Mao Tun, as a beginning novelist, could not devise a plot structure plastic enough to formally contain within one novel the widely divergent developments of the same theme on two different levels.

To simplify this formidable task, Mao Tun adopted an independent treatment of the actual events of the mass movement in Vacillation, which was in large measure dislodged from the context of Disillusionment. The appearance of Li Ke and Shih Chun in both books supports my reading that Disillusionment deals with the headquarters (allegorically) while Vacillation deals with the district level (manifestly). Following this reading, a more significant link is the Futurist Ch’iang Wei-li recovering from a near fatal wound on the battlefield he craved for and loved. I take him as a symbol both for the revolutionary zeal which Mao Tun affirmed and for the casualties suffered on the local level (whether the mass movements depicted in Vacillation or the battle in Honan). Mao Tun’s affirmation of Ch’iang is revealed by his uncorrupted love affair with Miss Ching, the only admirable love relation in the whole trilogy.

This shift in levels of presentation within Disillusionment and between Disillusionment and Vacillation serves as a magnified illustration of Mao Tun’s efforts to control the rhythm and density of his text, thereby making it easier to bring the dominant factors in his representation of the revolution into relief. If Vacillation were woven into Disillusionment, the mixture would distort the rhythm of the text and displace the dominant in it. The parallel composition in the rhythmic structure of the three parts in Eclipse yields a text much richer than critics have so far credited the novel with. A literary text as a system according to the Formalist theory does not mean coexistence of components on the basis of equality. It presupposes the preeminence of one group of elements over the scaling down of others. The notion of the dominant underlies practically all the episodes having to do with villainous characters in Eclipse. Their characterization may occupy considerable space in a text such as the character Hu Kuo-kuang in Vacillation and Pao-su in the first half of Disillusionment; but their importance on the scale of the dominant for a novel on revolution is impressionably foreshortened in Hu’s case in his ultimate non-appearance, and in Pao-su in the time allotted to his “overnight seduction plan.”

The rhythm in Pursuit, that is, its temporal order, is thrown into great confusion because of the violent emotional reaction Mao Tun experienced when he learned about the catastrophic happenings at the December 1927 “Canton Commune” several months after it took place. Chapters 6 and 7 of Pursuit are totally out of step, in terms of the temporal order, with the rest of the novel no matter whether we look at them from within the text or outside of it.

The new Miss Wang whom Miss Chang found sick and pregnant in chapter 6 is a phenomenon totally unprepared for. The gory vision of Tung-fang Ming’s head bobbing on a ring of blood in the same chapter and the sexual orgy in the following chapter merely serve to shock. Where do they come from? Mao Tun’s inability to give a clear account of what is going on in those two chapters and how they fit into the total context of the novel as a whole comes through vividly in his desperate but unsuccessful attempt at getting hold of the time scheme in Pursuit.

He tried, I think, to juxtapose the events of chapters 6 and 7 with those in chapters 1 through 5 by evoking the same date, May 3, 1928, to highlight the ironic contrast between the unperturbed pursuits of those allegorical students (in chapters 1 through 5) at the very time when catastrophes are visiting their close classmates (in chapters 6 and 7). Recurrence of the same date here works on the compositional level like alliteration and rhythmical parallelism to convey a note of ironical contrast. The major problem in placing the temporal order is the handling of the Canton Commune which, from what I take to be conclusive evidence, exerted great influence on the construction of Pursuit, which was written from April to June of 1928. There was a fairly long interval between the occurrence of the actual episode of the Commune and its being known in Shanghai where totally different types of Party activity were taking place. Mao Tun tried to depict the impact of the Commune in chapters 6 and 7 in a disguised form and shifted the time scale.

What drove Mao Tun to frenzy there was his perceptions of the equally fatal impact on the revolution of the lazy and almost vacuous activities in Shanghai (portrayed in chapters 1 through 5) and the violent but misguided sacrifices at the Commune (with its effects portrayed in chapters 6 and 7). Despairing of both kinds of revolutionary effort, he concluded Pursuit with a despairing final chapter. But before his despair developed into hopelessness in The Wild Roses, Mao Tun was still able to discern a difference between the two approaches, which were depicted in Pursuit as both mistaken. This distinction may very well be related to the moral distinction he then and later made between those who are damned because they had not loved wisely (Miss Chang and Miss Wang and Ch’iung-hua) and those who were not able to love at all (Miss Chu and Chang Man-ch’ing).

Parallelism and Mao Tun’s art of characterization

The effects of Mao Tun’s women character types in Eclipse are frequently construed by his critics as “daring” and “new,” seemingly testifying to his successful delivery of defamiliarization as a device for character portrayal. But whatever this newness means and represents, it is certainly not a uniform object, especially when we consider Mao Tun’s statement that his women characters are representative of revolutionary types. Revolution as the dominant central object for fictional representation in Eclipse is bifurcated through the device of parallel character types which register multiple reflections and juxtapositions on the level of composition. Synchronic examples are the pairs Hui-Ching and Mrs. Fang-Sun Wu-yang, as well as the quadruplet of Chang Chiu-liu, Wang Shih-tao, Chu Chin-ju, and Mrs. Lu. In addition, there is also the diachronic pair of Chang Ching and Chang Ch’iu-liu. Here again I should like to reiterate that the central critical problem in Mao Tun’s fictional characters is not in their presence and their referent in the outside world, but the use to which they are put in the content of the literary text as a distinct sphere of perceived reality.

In the body of this book, I have devoted a great deal of attention to the role of parallelism and the use of the characters in Mao Tun’s text. This is another area in which critical discussion has been sparse. Miss Ching, for instance, needs Miss Hui to bring out her relative position in the bifurcated development of love and revolution in time. I have explained in chapter 3 the meaning of parallel love affairs with Pao-su, and in chapter 5 the much denser love affairs of three couples in Pursuit. On the whole, women types in Mao Tun’s early fiction are, I believe, not just realistic portrayals of new women, but generally used to structure the development of the Communist movement on the policy as well as the execution levels. Their adventures with love and sex not only reflect the existing attitudes among young bourgeois intellectuals on the subject, but also denote allegorically Mao Tun’s own revolutionary ideals as well as the attitudes of different factions, the successes and the failures in the immediate history of the Chinese Communist Party.