The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Society's Reinvention of the Japanese Shishosetsu (Comparative Perspectives on Modern Asia)

The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature

Comparative Perspectives on Modern Asia Quansheng Zhao, Series Editor Also in the series Navigating Sovereignty: World Politics Lost in China Chih-Yu Shih

The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature The Creation Society’s Reinvention of the Japanese SHISHÔSETSU

Christopher T. Keaveney

THE SUBVERSIVE SELF IN MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE

© Christopher T. Keaveney, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6466–1 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keaveney, Christopher T. The subversive self in modern Chinese literature : the Creation Society’s reinvention of the Japanese shishˆosetsu / by Christopher T. Keaveney. p. cm.—(Comparative perspectives on modern Asia series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6466–1 1. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Chinese literature—Japanese influences. 3. Chuang zao she. 4. Autobiographical fiction, Japanese—History and criticism. I. Title: Creation Society’s reinvention of the Japanese shishˆosetsu. II. Title. III. Series. PL2302.K43 2004 895.1⬘509—dc22

2003070736

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July, 2004 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Shigeko, Bridget, and Erica, with all of my love

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Contents

A Note About Romanization

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1. Shishôsetsu Theory in Japan and the Creation Society’s Encounter with the Form

17

2. Creation Society Fiction and the Subjective Quality of May Fourth Literature

29

3. Bundan versus Wentan: The Dynamics of the Literary Coterie and Its Audience(s)

47

4. The Creation Society’s Remaking of the Shishôsetsu

67

5. The Limits of Subversion: Political and Social Critique in the Creation Society’s Early Fiction

89

6. The Legacy of the Shishôsetsu in Chinese Literature

113

Notes

135

Appendix A: Synopses of Selected Creation Society Stories

171

Appendix B: Glossary of Selected Terms from Chinese and Japanese

183

Bibliography

191

Index

203

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A Note About Romaniz ation

In rendering Chinese in this text I have used the pinyin system. All

Chinese names, titles, and terms in the document itself have been rendered in pinyin, but in the bibliographic references I have retained the original romanization system, with the pinyin equivalent in parentheses, where appropriate. In rendering Japanese I have used the standard Hepburn system, but I have indicated long vowel sounds by means of a circumflex symbol, rather than a macron.

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Acknowledgments

T

his book has been a long time in the making, and I have a number of people to whom I would like to express a debt of gratitude for helping me to bring this project to fruition. The present book is a revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation completed at Washington University under the supervision of Professor Marvin Marcus with important contributions provided by Professors Rebecca Copeland, Robert Hegel, and Robert Morrell. Robert Hegel originally suggested the impact of the shishôsetsu on May Fourth writers as a potential topic for comparative research and provided excellent guidance on the Chinese side of my research. Robert Morrell enabled me to see the relationships between the shishôsetsu and traditional forms of narrative in Japan more clearly. Rebecca Copeland helped me to refine my ideas about self-referentiality and the conventions of the shishôsetsu form. Marvin Marcus helped me to see Japanese self-referential literature of the Taishô period in the context of the bundan and its relation to literary journalism. I would like to express special appreciation to Marvin Marcus for his mentorship throughout the process as my dissertation advisor and for embodying the qualities of a true sensei. I am also very indebted to Dean Marvin Henberg and my colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages at Linfield College who helped me to complete this project. Without institutional and departmental help and support, this book would not have been possible. I also would again like to thank Dr. Rebecca Copeland, and my father, Dr. William P. Keaveney, for reading and providing comments for a draft version of one of the final chapters included in the book. I am also grateful to Dr. Quansheng Zhao of American University for recommending this manuscript for publication. Moreover, I would be remiss if I failed to express special thanks to Anthony Wahl and the editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan who gave me this opportunity and provided superb guidance throughout the revision and publication process. I must also express appreciation to the anonymous

xii

Acknowledgments

reviewers of the manuscript whose insightful comments and constructive suggestions helped me during the revision stage. Finally, I reserve my deepest, most heartfelt gratitude to my parents William and Margaret Keaveney who always supported and cultivated my intellectual interests, and to my wife Shigeko and my daughters Bridget and Erica whose unwavering love and support buoyed me up during the sometimes arduous but always thrilling process of writing this book.

Introduction

A ssessing the reception and transformation of a genre amounts to

one of the most daunting tasks confronting the literary comparatist. This is particularly true when the process involves not one writer but a community of writers appropriating a specific form of writing and, through an act of literary (re)creation, reconceiving it to fit the exigencies of a new literary milieu. Such a case can be made for one of China’s foremost modern literary coteries, the Creation Society, in regard to its adaptation of the Japanese shishôsetsu form.1 The Creation Society’s innovation was to see in the shishôsetsu form the potential for social critique and to transform this self-referential form into a tool of cultural and social reform. In response to their reading of contemporary Japanese shishôsetsu, the members of the Creation Society absorbed and imaginatively recast the form in the highly volatile Chinese literary world of the 1920s. In the process they developed a form that, while undoubtedly reflecting many of the characteristics of the shishôsetsu, nevertheless also exhibited qualities, which clearly diverge from the Japanese original. The Society’s mode of self-expression became a catalyst for further attempts at self-representation among May Fourth writers, and proved to be a touchstone for self-referential writing by Chinese writers in the post-Mao era as well.2 In Taishô (1912–1926) Japan, the authorities perceived literature that was confessional to be decadent and even subversive. For the Creation Society’s members, all of whom were studying in Japan in the Taishô period when the idea of forming a literary society was conceived, this self-referential narrative form, with its suggestion of subversion, was seen as an apposite vehicle for forging a new vernacular literature. Although the representative writers of the Creation Society were all eager to declare their affinities with specific Western literary ideologies and to allege their indebtedness to particular Western writers, a perusal of their early work suggests a different interpretation. In their

2

The Subversive Self

values and orientations, the Creationists and other May Fourth writers inherited the approach of the shishôsetsu along with certain features of late Qing fiction.3 Late Qing fiction has been called a “giant melting pot” in which traditional narrative devices and the continued use of the literary language converged with experiment and innovation.4 In its emphasis on the innovative character and iconoclasm of May Fourth literature, scholarship has been wont to gloss over the contributions of late Qing fiction that helped facilitate these innovations. Shanghai’s literary scene of the late Qing period consisted of an informal association of several distinct but amicable groups composed of educated youths disenfranchised from bureaucratic channels due to the abolishment of the Imperial Examination system. At least on the surface, these conditions, involving loosely affiliated coteries of young writers, apply as well to the contemporary Japanese literary scene and share features too with the May Fourth literary community.5 Nevertheless, it was largely as a product of their experiences in Japan that Chinese writers of the May Fourth period launched their own literary careers. In Japan as exchange students, a number of May Fourth writers became conversant with Western literature through English and Japanese translations. In their early writing and later reminiscences, the Creationists proudly proclaimed the names of Western writers and works that had inspired them. Such claims are certainly well founded, and scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee, Anna Dolezelová, and Kirk Denton have produced superb research concerning the impact of Western literature on the Society. Nevertheless, encounters with their counterparts in the Japanese literary world and familiarity with contemporary Japanese literature also affected the manner in which they perceived themselves as writers. Liang Qichao (1873–1929) was the first important Chinese intellectual to propose contemporary Japanese literature as a viable standard for Chinese writers. Liang, who fled to Japan after the failure of the Hundred Days Reform in 1898, advocated emulating the Japanese political novel that flourished in the 1880s.6 Liang and other late Qing intellectuals fled to Japan not only because of its proximity, but also because they saw in Japan a rapidly emerging power with a media infrastructure and communication system that would allow them to carry on their intellectual activities and reform movement from abroad. In the first of the magazines he produced while in exile, Xin xiaoshuo (New Fiction), which began publication in Japan in 1902, Liang sought to provide a forum for a new, politically oriented fiction based on the Japanese model.7 It is interesting, of course, to

Introduction

3

note the irony that Liang should advocate the adoption of the Japanese political novel just as it was falling out of fashion in Japan. Liang’s contribution to a modern vernacular literature included importing Japanese sentence structures and vocabulary items along with adopting the form of the political novel. Liang Qichao and other early advocates of literary reform from the late Qing period were confronting new ideas on the intellectual plane while remaining firmly entrenched in the old culture. Nevertheless, their achievements in the vanguard of reform paved the way for later contributions by such figures as Chen Duxiu and Zhou Zuoren. The earliest mature consideration of modern Japanese literature and its achievements came from Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) in a lecture delivered in April 1918 at Beijing University, that subsequently appeared in essay form in the July issue of Xin qingnian (New Youth). Zhou, the brother of Lu Xun and an exchange student in Japan during the final years of the Meiji period, was responsible for introducing major trends and figures in contemporary Japanese literature to Chinese writers and intellectuals throughout the May Fourth period. Zhou’s essay referred to earlier, “Riben jin sanshinian xiaoshuo zhi fazhan” (Developments in Japanese Fiction in the Last Thirty Years) praised Japanese fiction as a worthy paradigm for May Fourth writers, and in its valorization of the shishôsetsu form, prepared the way for the form’s acceptance in the Chinese literary world.8 The efforts of Liang Qichao, Zhou Zuoren, and other Chinese intellectuals who preceded the Creation Society members to Japan resulted in a familiarity with the achievements of the contemporary Japanese literary world and contributed to the acceptance in China of the Creation Society’s experimentation with self-referential fiction. A study of both the shishôsetsu and the self-referential fiction of the Creation Society necessitates an examination of what one scholar has referred to as the “epistemological gray area” where fiction intersects and overlaps with formal autobiography.9 That both the modern novel and autobiography were borrowed genres for these Japanese and Chinese writers, not subject to the restrictions of more traditional prose forms, undoubtedly facilitated transgression of these boundaries.10 The paradox that one immediately encounters in confronting such generic issues is the observation that all fiction can be said to constitute autobiography, with any given narrative being an artfully constructed metaphor for the self.11 The corollary of this is the idea on the part of scholarship concerning autobiography that the autobiographical act is itself an act of imaginative reconstruction of lived experience in narrative form and hence shares many qualities with

4

The Subversive Self

fiction. In the process of remembering and rendering past experience, the autobiographer must “imagine into existence” a fictional version of himself.12 The crux of this study is an attempt to define and compare the Creationist’s manipulation and blurring of the generic lines between fiction and formal autobiography with that of Japanese writers of the Taishô period (1912–1926). The emergence of literary coteries and literary journalism in the May Fourth China was prompted in part by important strides made in printing and publishing during the late Qing and early Republican periods.13 Both the larger publishing houses such as the Commercial Press, founded in 1897, and the many smaller publishing concerns published “Butterfly and Mandarin Duck fiction,” a popular style of Romantic literature characterized by a quasi-classical style and designed to have a broad appeal. There were in fact more than ninetyone Butterfly fiction magazines produced in Shanghai in the 1910s and 1920s.14 Thus, it was into a publishing world, which had already embarked on the process of modernization that the most important of the May Fourth literary coteries came to launch their various publishing activities. The Literary Research Association (Wenxue yanjiuhui) was founded in Beijing in January 1921 and included twenty-one members. The Association co-opted control of the magazine Xiaoshuo yuebao (Fiction Monthly), a publication of Shanghai’s Commercial Press and a leading organ of Butterfly fiction. Under the editorship of Mao Dun, the members of the Association produced their own literary efforts alongside translations of, and essays about, Western literature. The Creation Society published the first of its journals, a quarterly known simply as Chuangzao (Creation), in Shanghai in 1921 under the auspices of the Tai Dong Publishing House. It was in Chuangzao that the first examples of the Society’s self-referential fiction, inspired by the Japanese shishôsetsu, appeared.

The Subjective Quality of May Fourth Literature The self-referential fiction of the Creation Society in its first phase was merely one manifestation of the larger subjective orientation, which characterized May Fourth literature. The success of the May Fourth literary and cultural movement can be gauged in part by the profusion of literary works that in one manner or another belletrized the author’s lived experience. This new subjective literature took many forms, with the fiction of the Creation Society constituting merely one

Introduction

5

strain. Nevertheless, whether it was conscious Western-style autobiography, epistolary literature, diaries, or self-referential fiction, each form attempted to satisfy a growing demand on the part of readers for literature dramatizing the experiences of the writer as a unique individual. The May Fourth literary market was congested by a surfeit of ostensibly confessional literary works. Subjective fiction was a tendency that continued throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s and included such well-known examples as Ba Jin’s (1904–1997) novel Jia (Family, 1933), Ding Ling’s (1904–1986) fictional Shafei nushi de riji (Miss Sophia’s Diary, 1928), and Yu Dafu’s compilation Xiandai mingren qingshu (Love Letters of Famous Contemporaries, 1928). Such literature came about in an intellectual environment, which valued individuality and subjectivity. The intellectual groundwork had been laid by some of the important figures associated with the New Culture Movement. For the May Fourth intellectual, perceptions of the self were suffused with profound tensions concerning the self’s role in social transformation.15 The May Fourth writer’s view of the self portrayed the intellectual in a dilemma: on the one hand as an artist empowered with creative spirit, and on the other as the passive victim of larger historical and collective forces. In his essay “Ren de wenxue” (Humane Literature, 1918), Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) suggested that in order to write “humane” literature, literature that could be used as a tool to redefine and reshape China, the writer must begin by portraying himself as an individual. Zhou articulates the importance of individualism in the new literature in the following way: The humanitarianism I have in mind, therefore starts with man, the individual. To be able to discuss humanness, love of humanity, one must first have acquired the qualifications of man and stand in the position of man.16

Guo Moruo was stronger in his pronouncements advocating individual experience as the basis for literature in an essay from the August 4, 1922 issue of Shishi xinbao (Current Events News) called “Lun guonei de pingtan ji wo duiyu chuangzao shang de taidu” (Concerning Domestic Critical Circles and My Attitudes Toward Creativity). In the essay, not only does Guo suggest that “all art obviously comes from subjectivity,” but he further proposes that “from an individual’s suffering one can extrapolate society’s suffering, one can even infer universal suffering.”17 As early as 1917, in the pivotal essay “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (Preliminary Discussion on Literary Reform), Hu Shi had included among his eight suggestions for

6

The Subversive Self

literary reform the idea that human emotions are the “soul of literature.”18 The expressions that subjectivity took in May Fourth literature were shaped by the grim political and social realities of the period. As Xiaomei Chen urges in Occidentalism, we must discuss cultural phenomena, including literary genre, as products of the milieu and historical circumstances that gave rise to them.19 In interpreting the impact of the shishôsetsu on the Creation Society’s self-referential literature, it is important to keep in mind that no single theory can account for “local diversities” and “cultural specificities.”20 The self-referential literature of the Creation Society was just one manifestation of the larger phenomenon of literary subjectivity during the May Fourth period, which itself represented the convergence of a variety of factors. Fiction of the May Fourth period developed, as fiction always develops, in relation to a “particular conjunction of sociocultural and literary circumstances.”21 As Lydia Liu, in speaking about the literary subjectivity of the May Fourth period suggests, “The modern self is embedded from the beginning in a history of contested meanings within which the idea of nationhood looms large. It is impossible to treat the self as an isolated site of unique personal identity.”22 The particular circumstances that affected the May Fourth writers’ sense of self were the political chaos of the Warlord Era and the writer’s sense of mission to utilize literature, even literature reflecting individual experience, to effect social and political change. As a result of this convergence of these factors, the political, economic, and social conditions of Imperialism pervade May Fourth fiction’s modes of production, structures, and thematic concerns.23 Subjective fiction of the May Fourth period testified to the existence of tensions between several contending demands, which ultimately informed the temper of self-referentiality. At the core of the tensions driving this literature was a conflict between the discourses of iconoclasm and Nationalism.24 The result of the resistance between these contending discourses was a literature which, even though highly introspective, was always tempered by concerns for the fate of China. This was true not only for the Creation Society fiction under discussion but is indicative of most of the self-referential fiction that emerged in the May Fourth period, about which it can be said, “the assertion of self was inextricably tied to the higher goal of national regeneration.”25 Therefore, the May Fourth writers felt the weight of obligation to contribute to the project of national self-definition in a China experiencing tumultuous change.

Introduction

7

In the literature that emerged, individualism (geren zhuyi), and its fusion with political critique, which held out promise for resolving the “problematic of modern self and nation,” served to complicate the character of the narratives.26 As will be borne out in an examination of Creation Society stories in chapters 4 and 5, May Fourth writers generally struggled trying to accommodate and merge the exposition of self with the larger project of defining a new national culture. Chinese Revisionist cultural historians in the 1980s and 1990s portrayed the May Fourth conception of the individual as “inauthentic” because it tended to be incommensurate with the Western Romantic ideal of the individual as inevitably at odds with society and the state.27 However, as Lydia Liu cautions, scholars of May Fourth period literature must be careful not to use Western concepts of the individual as the sole measure of May Fourth literary expressions of the self.28 May Fourth writers did not necessarily adopt the Western Romantic vision of the self as perpetually at odds with society. Concepts of subjectivity were inevitably framed in the discourse of China and its fate. A great number of works produced during the May Fourth period, regardless of coterie or specific orientation, are ostensibly autobiographical to some degree. That these narratives are often in fact closely modeled on the authors’ own lives can be verified not only through biographical data, but also through their own later reminiscences.29 The social status of fiction was altered in the May Fourth period as authors represented distillations of their unique experiences as a daring gesture to challenge cultural norms. Fiction became, on one level, an opportunity for self-exposure and self-promotion as writers sought ways to inscribe individual values and perspectives in their work. The New Culture Movement produced the iconoclasm that fueled this drive toward self-referential writing. The May Fourth Movement, a part of the New Culture Movement, began with student protests following the Versailles Treaty in May 1919. Actually, a process of cultural reevaluation had started several years earlier with Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), and other young intellectuals who reacted against the gradualist reform movement of the previous generation led by such intellectuals as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. The new May Fourth literature that emerged was in part a response to Chen Duxiu’s advocacy of a break from “the old curiosity shop of Confucianism.”30 In the confessional literature that emerged, the May Fourth writers often “dropped the story-telling pose altogether” in order, as Leo Ou-Fan Lee has proposed, “to become one with the implied author or the author himself.”31

8

The Subversive Self

This interest in the literary subject and in the process of selfpresentation was accompanied by an obsession with China’s pressing social and political problems and the process of modernization. In this respect, the May Fourth writers were in step with tradition. One important function of literature in traditional China was that of promoting social melioration, and this new May Fourth literature of the self was seen as a means of revealing society’s ills in the hope that by portraying an individual’s sufferings, one could promote solutions for larger social problems.32 At the heart of May Fourth conceptions of the individual writer’s duties to China’s future were perspectives on China’s “national character” and the particular aspects of Chinese culture and society that had to be overcome in the construction of a new China. In Creation Society self-referential narratives, as in all May Fourth literature, there is an obsession with defining the Chinese national character and highlighting those areas in which China differs from the Imperialist nations.33 May Fourth literature inevitably attempts to isolate flaws in the Chinese national character, and writers offer a variety of “remedies” apropos what China might do to overcome those shortcomings in order to modernize.34 While this conception of the relationship between writer and state came about largely as a reaction to the ideas about self gleaned from May Fourth writers’ readings in Western literature and from the Meiji era Japanese political novel, it was also bound to traditional cultural values as well. Generally, Western culture was portrayed by May Fourth intellectuals as the antidote to traditional Confucian culture, and Western discourse of the self was regarded as politically liberating. On the other hand, ironically, concepts of the self in May Fourth literature must also be regarded as the culmination of concepts derived from traditional Chinese culture, particularly late Qing culture. Kirk Denton suggests, in fact, that concepts of the self in Creation Society fiction are the product of “neo-Confucian optimism” and Western liberal views of the self and of moral autonomy.35 It was the violence of China’s encounter with the Imperialism of the West that forced May Fourth era writers to superimpose the issue of nationhood onto that of selfhood.36 At the same time that the Creation Society writers were conflating the self in their early fiction, there was an equally deeply felt commitment to “national and revolutionary collectivism.”37 The best examples of May Fourth self-referentiality reflect a genuine balance between the opposing demands of individual exposition and national collectivism. It is hardly surprising that, given the

Introduction

9

difficulty of fusing such a dichotomy, an aesthetically satisfying balance was rarely achieved. An iconoclastic subjectivity and nationalism were necessarily locked in an uneasy tension, which was at times “mutually reinforcing” and at other times “hostile and antagonistic.”38 Nevertheless, while the Creationists recognized the impediments involved in holding these contending demands in balance, they nonetheless concluded that the new literature must serve these two requirements. Guo Moruo, in an essay from 1922 entitled “Women de wenxue xinyundong” (Our New Literary Movement) proposed that while the new literature must “sweep away” the corruption of contemporary society like a great wind, it must also portray the suffering of the individual as a model for the emerging society.39 The tension that developed among writers in regard to their role in the project of identifying China’s ills through their literature is a theme common to many works from this period. Wendy Larson has identified among May Fourth writers a strong “negative inscription” of literary work in narratives describing the act of writing. This she credits to a feeling of political powerlessness on the part of writers in regard to their own production.40 May Fourth writers, in seeking a more independent subjectivity, nevertheless came to portray a literary subject ultimately bound by responsibilities toward China. The individual personality was established against a confusing and constantly shifting background, thus the portrayal of self, set against the background of national malaise, often seemed like a parody or a caricature. In an essay from 1923 called “Xinwenxue zhi jingzhong” (The Warning Bell of New Literature), Creation Society member Zheng Boqi portrayed the existence of this new, subversive literature of the self as consistent with the revolutionary, iconoclastic nature of the New Culture Movement.41 After suggesting that all the best new literature was deeply rooted in the experiences of its authors, Zheng posed the question: how can writers who work from material outside of their own range of experiences expect to move readers? Zheng suggested that the great mass of new literature was superficial, prone simply to pursue any of a variety of -isms currently in vogue. He concluded that the overriding demand on producers of this new literature was to “construct a self ” (ziwo jianzhu).42 Wang Duqing, another Creation Society member, in an essay from the previous year called “Weilai zhi yishujia: pochu ziran de mixin” (The Artist of the Future: Destroying Natural Superstitions, 1922), likewise saw a literature situated in the experiences of the individual writer as inevitable. He criticized those writers who attempted to

10

The Subversive Self

write of a range of experiences outside of their own. Again, he contrasted contemporary literature with the essentially flawed literature of the past, which saw nature as inexplicable and therefore treated it as a vast, unknown quantity. On the contrary, he contended, the best new works of literature recognized that it is the individual character of the writer that creates. “I will admit,” Wang says, “that Nature can move us and can assist us in creating art. However, I will not allow that Nature provides us with the emotions that give rise to art or that Nature itself creates art.” His essay ended by expressing the hope that future artists would not put trust in anything outside of themselves.43

Chinese and Japanese Political Relations and Social Attitudes in the May Fourth Era The reception of the shishôsetsu by the Creation Society took place against the backdrop of intense political friction between China and Japan. In the Taishô period, Japan policies and social attitudes toward the Chinese continued to reflect the cultural about-face that had its origins in the latter half of the nineteenth century and had been affecting popular attitudes toward the Chinese ever since Japan’s victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. As a result of that change, Japan no longer looked primarily to China as its intellectual and cultural model. The early Creation Society fiction was written during the years of Warlord rule (1915–1926) and reflects the political and social instability that characterized that chapter in China’s modern history.44 Although there may have been some ambivalence toward Japan on the part of May Fourth intellectuals who, despite Japan’s obvious Imperialist ambitions, were willing to concede Japan high marks for its remarkable progress toward modernization, Chinese popular opinion toward Japan reflected no such ambivalence. Chinese popular attitudes toward the Japanese during the late teens and early twenties were characterized by an abiding suspicion of the Japanese people and an abhorrence of Japanese foreign policy in regard to China. AntiJapanese sentiment had been particularly strong since the infamous twenty-one demands of 1915 in which the Japanese had demanded, among other things, the transfer of control of the German interests in Shandong and additional privileges in Manchuria and Mongolia.45 Yuan Shikai’s capitulation to the Japanese demands led to nationwide demonstrations, an economic boycott of Japanese goods, and a return of a large number of Chinese students from universities in Japan.46

Introduction

11

Japan’s reputation in China continued to deteriorate in the wake of the events of May 4, 1919 that once again led to demonstrations and a return of students from abroad. The events of May Fourth and the political and social aftermath came about as the result of disagreements over Japanese claims to the Shandong Peninsula.47 The results of the events of 1915 and 1919 contributed to the mistrust of Japan by the Chinese and created a general climate of ill-will on the part of the Chinese toward Japan, which was further exacerbated by Japanese mercantile and military maneuverings on the continent. In Japan, the condescension toward the Chinese that had its origins in the late nineteenth century in the aftermath of the SinoJapanese War of 1895 continued to shape Japanese attitudes toward China. Starting in the latter part of the Meiji period (1868–1912), Japanese politicians, educators, and members of the press began to express their contempt for the “cowardly Chinamen” (chan-chan bôzu).48 Furthermore, ideologues in academic and political circles praised the high level of Japanese civilization while disparaging the Chinese as barabaric.49 The Creationist’s first-hand experience of this disdain by the Japanese while students in Japan will help explain the complexity of their attitudes toward Japan. While the tragic history of Sino-Japanese relations during the period will help explain the pairing of subjectivity with nationalism in the self-referential literature of May Fourth writers, it may also elucidate the Creationists’ reluctance to express indebtedness to the Japanese bundan in regard to their reception of the shishôsetsu. Thus the Creationists’s propensity to point to influences other than the Japanese shishôsetsu serves to explain the paucity of research linking the Creation Society’s early fiction to the Taishô period form.

The Creation Society and the S HISHÔSETSU : The State of the Field Research concerning the relationship between the Creation Society’s self-referential fiction and the Japanese shishôsetsu has increased in recent years. Examples of articles and single chapters in book-length collections can be cited from China, Japan, and the West. In America, several essays constitute the entire corpus of work related to this specific topic. Ching-mao Cheng’s essay, “The Impact of Japanese Literary Trends on Modern Chinese Writers,” which appeared as a chapter in a collection of essays edited by Merle Goldman in 1977,

12

The Subversive Self

considers the significant role of the shishôsetsu in the fiction of the Creation Society in urging the Chinese literary community’s receptiveness to the values and orientations of modern Japanese literature.50 While providing a lucid, concise description of Chinese writers’ contact with Japanese literature during the May Fourth period, Cheng fails to develop his contentions on any of the specific theoretical questions he raises. His basic argument is that the Chinese literary world of the May Fourth era, confronting questions of modernization some thirty years later than Japan, benefited from having a number of writers return from extended stays in Japan who had direct contact with Japanese literary trends. Kurt W. Radtke’s essay “Chaos or Coherence? Satô Haruo’s Novel Den’en no Yû’utsu and Yu Dafu’s trilogy Chenlun” also appeared as a chapter in a collection of essays.51 Focusing on the relationship between these specific literary works, Radtke’s approach is to compare the two narratives in terms of a theme central to both: the protagonist’s struggle with psychosis and with the growing sense of alienation from those around him. Furthermore, Radtke suggests that rather than being merely the record of an individual’s psychological disorder, the mental anguish of the individual is an allegory for the breakdown of a stable social order and a traditional value system. Nevertheless, while Radtke posits a “direct influence” of Satô’s earlier work on Yu Dafu’s trilogy, he does not situate Satô’s work within the traditionally conceived lineage of the shishôsetsu development.52 Neither does he attempt to assess how the collection of short-stories, Sinking, representative of a body of such works by the Creation Society, relates to the shishôsetsu tradition. Radtke does briefly touch upon some of the self-referential qualities of the two works, such as the respective protagonists’ constant soul-searching and inability to communicate effectively with others. Finally, Radtke mentions affinities between the two works regarding their functioning as self-referential narratives only in passing, focusing instead on stylistic and thematic similarities between the two works. Kirk Denton’s essay, “A Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking,’ ” argues for a much fuller reading of “Sinking” in which we consider the narrative from the perspective of contemporary readers who were attracted to the “emotional turmoil” of the story and were not inclined to read the story ironically and to separate the author from the narrator and fictional world.53 I am also in agreement with Denton’s assessment of the presentation of self in the story and the tension between modern concepts of self and traditional Chinese concepts of a socially engaged self.54

Introduction

13

In Japan there has been very little work to date concerning the Creation Society’s adaptation of the shishôsetsu. This paucity of relevant scholarship may be the result of a reluctance on the part of Japanese scholars to permit this most central of modern Japanese narrative approaches a role outside of Japanese literature. On the other hand, the scholar Itô Toramaru has made vital contributions to Creation Society studies in the last few decades in his efforts to collect and edit Creation Society research materials. For example, the twelvevolume facsimile edition of all of the Creation Society’s periodicals, Sôzôsha [Chuangzaoshe] shiryô (Creation Society materials, 1979), is the result of Itô’s editorial efforts, as is the two-volume collection of research materials concerning Yu Dafu called Yu Dafu shiryô hôben (Companion Materials for Yu Dafu, 1975). Itô’s essays have also appeared in translation in the Chinese journal Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu (Modern Chinese Literary Research) and elsewhere. In his essay “Chuangzaoshe yu Riben wenxue” (The Creation Society and Japanese Literature) he makes the significant assertion that the aestheticism often posited as the defining trait of the Creation Society during their first phase is a consequence of their familiarity with Taishô literature’s artistic consciousness.55 Itô also attempts to account for differences between Chinese Creation Society fiction and Taishô period Japanese fiction by suggesting that their sense of mission as writers was affected by differences in conditions between the two societies and by their experiences abroad. This led to a fundamentally different sense of “I” in the self-referential fiction produced by the Creation Society, leaving their works as closely aligned with the fiction of their contemporaries, including the Literary Research Society, as with the Japanese shishôsetsu. However, it is among Chinese scholars that the greatest strides have been made in comparative studies assessing the relationship of Creationist fiction to the Taishô period shishôsetsu. Foremost among these scholars is Xu Zidong, who in several essays and books from the 1980s, examines Yu Dafu’s development as a writer and his absorption of concepts related to the shishôsetsu. In the chapter “Yu Dafu yu Riben” (Yu Dafu and Japan) from his book-length study of Yu, Xu argues that Yu Dafu’s narrative style developed as a result of the writer’s experiences in Japan and his familiarity with Japanese literature. As with Radtke, Xu broaches Yu’s relationship with Satô Haruo and his admitted admiration for the Japanese writer as a substantial factor in the development of his own brand of self-referential fiction. In another essay from the 1980s, Xu suggests that the spiritual

14

The Subversive Self

dimension of Yu’s work is the result of his recognition of the introspection at the heart of the shishôsetsu.56 Among Chinese scholarship concerning the relationship between the Creation Society’s self-referential fiction and the shishôsetsu, several other works are worthy of mention. There is, for example, an article by the scholar Li Qiang written in Japanese entitled “Yu Dafu no shinpen shôsetsu to Nihon no shishôsetsu” (The Personal Narratives of Yu Dafu and the Japanese shishôsetsu). Li’s basic premise is that Yu and other members of the Creation Society were swayed by the shishôsetsu in their search for an effective medium for this protest. In turn, Yu’s work, particularly his first published collection, Sinking, was admired by a number of his young contemporaries who went on to produce a similar brand of personal narrative. After a description of Sinking, presumably for those among his Japanese readership who had not read the work, Li surveys the development of the shishôsetsu starting with Tayama Katai’s The Quilt and ending with Satô Haruo’s Rural Melancholy, with which he compares Sinking. Li suggests that Yu’s attraction to the form at the time of Sinking was in part the result of his self-perception as a typical bungaku seinen, or “literary youth.” Guo Laixun, in his article “Yu Dafu yu Riben de ziwo xiaoshuo” (Yu Dafu and the Japanese I-Novel), goes further than other commentators in alleging the influence of Satô Haruo’s novel Rural Melancholy on Yu by asserting that Yu “worshipped” Satô Haruo.57 Both works, Guo proposes, not only bear the trademarks of the shishôsetsu, they similarly express the fin-de-siècle angst that reveals them to be the spiritual heirs of European 1890s decadence. Guo identifies three prominent areas in which the title story from the collection Sinking betrays its indebtedness to the shishôsetsu: its bold and occasionally explicit passages, its lyrical descriptions of natural scenes, and finally the sense of incompleteness of its plot. “Yu Dafu yu sixiaoshuo” (Yu Dafu and the Shishôsetsu), an essay by Liang Huoren, is divided into several distinct parts. Liang’s essay starts from the premise that the self-referential narratives that Yu produced during the early 1920s were in fact a variation on the shishôsetsu, and that he is indeed only the most celebrated of a number of Chinese practitioners of the form.58 Liang provides a detailed introduction to the shishôsetsu and submits a chronological survey of the critical canon concerning the form in Japan. The second part of the essay gives a brief biographical portrait of Yu Dafu and describes Yu’s development as a writer and his shift from unabashed Romanticism in the early 1920s to Marxism thereafter. The final

Introduction

15

section of the second part, and the most pertinent to this study, describes Yu’s contact with the shishôsetsu and the development of his own variation on the form. The third and final part of the essay deals with Yu’s treatment of nature, which Liang sees as resulting from his adulation of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and his attempt to define a self in the manner of a Rousseauean hero, removed from society but still maintaining his bond with the natural world. Although scholars have begun to recognize May Fourth literature’s indebtedness to the trends and orientations of late Qing literature, there remains a need to underscore the iconoclastic, revolutionary quality of May Fourth literature.59 Hu Shi enunciated the principle that what one writes should reflect one’s personality. Yu Dafu stated unequivocally that the greatest success of the May Fourth Movement lay in its discovery of the individual personality. Certainly, a strain exhibiting a strong authorial presence that appeared in the late Qing and early Republican periods was further developed in the May Fourth period. Two qualities that defined the new May Fourth fiction were the youthfulness of the writers and a tendency toward subjectivity. It was not only the exaltation of the writer’s personality and life experience, Leo Ou-Fan Lee argues, but the “excessive preoccupation with the self ” that had a “crucial impact” on the quality of the literature produced during the May Fourth period.60 This included not only the Creation Society’s self-referential fiction but also a surfeit of diaries, literary epistles, and lyric poetry characterized by a subjective orientation. It is this conscious Romantic celebration of the self on the part of these young writers, and their recognition that self-referential fiction could be utilized as a tool for political and social change, that separates May Fourth literature from that which immediately preceded it. It was only because of this initial period of fervid, if uneven, subjective literary output that a modern language of literary expression could emerge in China.

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1 ˆ S E T S U Theory in Japan and S H I S HO the C reation Society’s E ncounter with the Form

T

The Creation Society

he members of the Creation Society, who were to play such vital roles in the construction of this new literature, were all young when the Society was formed in 1921, and the exuberance of their early writings was in keeping with the character of the age. Moreover, the most important of the founding members, including Guo Moruo (1892–1978), Yu Dafu (1896–1945), Zhang Ziping (1893–1959), and Cheng Fangwu (1897–1984), were all in Japan when the idea of forming a literary society was conceived. All four had been sent to Japan by the Chinese government in order to acquire practical skills, which they were expected to apply to the modernization of China upon their return. However, as with Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, and other writers who had preceded them to Japan as exchange students, the Creationists, in Japan during the former part of the Taishô period, came under the spell of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western literature and decided to pursue the path of the literati (wenren).1 If youthfulness is one of the hallmarks of the writers who rose to prominence during the May Fourth era, then the Creationists can be considered representative of the age.2 In all, the young writers who would later form the nucleus of the Creation Society spent from five to twelve years studying in Japan. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that their intellectual biases and literary tastes should have been informed by their experiences in Japan. The idea of forming a literary coterie was first conceived in 1918 when Guo Moruo, who had entered Kyushu Imperial University in order to pursue medical studies, met with Cheng Fangwu, an acquaintance of his, and decided to enlist the aid of a few like-minded students in founding a literary coterie and producing a magazine. At

18

T he Subversive Self

roughly the same time, Yu Dafu, who was studying economics and Zhang Ziping, who was majoring in geology, both at Tokyo Imperial University, were also discussing the idea of producing a literary magazine. Due to financial problems and a shortage of manuscripts, their plans for a magazine were eventually aborted. When Guo contacted Yu, with whom he had become acquainted soon after arriving in Japan, the stage was set for a merging of the two groups and the establishment of a new literary society.3 The original aims of the Society were spelled out in a number of places including an essay by Guo Moruo, which appeared in May 1923 in the Creation Weekly. In this essay entitled “Women de wenxue xin yundong” (Our New Literary Movement), after identifying nature and history as the Society’s true teachers, Guo expressed the Society’s dissatisfaction with the current state of Chinese literature. He further indicated their intention to create a completely new movement to eradicate the received literary tradition in order to cultivate new modes of expression.4 Similar aims had been articulated earlier in a manifesto entitled “Chunwenxue jikan Chuangzao chuban yugao” (Announcement of the Publication of the Pure Literature Journal Creation), which appeared in Shishi xinbao (Current Affairs News) on September 29 and 30 in 1921. In the manifesto, which included the names of the seven founding members, they announced the imminent publication of the Creation Quarterly and stated their intention to create a new national literature to serve the future. They also included a proposed table of contents for the first issue.5 This study concentrates on the fiction produced by the Creation Society during the first phase of its existence—years in which the self-referential fiction under discussion was a prominent part of their literary output. This is not to suggest that all of the early fiction of the Creation Society was of the self-referential variety, nor does it mean that in later phases of their careers the writers associated with the Creation Society produced no self-referential fiction. Nevertheless, by focusing on this earliest phase of the Creation Society one can most effectively explore the development of such fiction and most clearly demonstrate its connections to the Japanese shishôsetsu. The Creation Society was established in 1921 in Tokyo at the residence of Yu Dafu and was disbanded by government command in February 1929 in Shanghai. The period under consideration here includes the earliest efforts of the individual writers even before the Society was officially founded in 1921 and extends until 1924 when,

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due to conflicts with the Tai Dong Publishing House, publication of their three earliest journals, a quarterly, a weekly, and a daily, was suspended. The Creation Quarterly ran from the beginning of 1922 until the spring issue of 1924. The quarterly was supplemented by Chuangzao zhoubao (Creation Weekly), which ran from May 1923 until May 1924, and Chuangzao ribao (Creation Daily), which ran from July 21, 1923 until October 31 of the same year.6 These three publications, all bearing the name of the Society in the titles, were produced during the first phase before a brief suspension of activities in 1924 was followed by the Society’s conscious and highly publicized reorientation toward Marxist literature. The year 1923 marked the most productive year for the Society, with the simultaneous publication of the three aforementioned journals. Along with the conflict with the Tai Dong publishers, the increasing pressure on the members to produce three journals at the same time, while also maintaining teaching positions in order to subsidize their literary activities, proved too taxing on their collective energies. Soon after Guo Moruo left publication responsibilities in the hands of Cheng Fangwu and went off to Japan in 1924, publication came to a halt. The apocryphal story of Guo’s “conversion” to Marxism on the ship to Japan after reading Kawakami Hajime’s Shakai soshiki to shakai kakumei (Social Organization and Social Revolution) makes for dramatic reading and undeniably has a basis in truth, but the reality behind the Society’s ideological shift was more complex. On one level, it unquestionably involved the development of narrative tendencies, which existed in the Society’s work prior to Guo’s bold assertion. In retrospect, the bookish Kawakami Hajime was a curious choice for emulation. A self-professed “special Marxist,” he seems to have conceived of his role in the Japanese Socialist movement as that of a moral exemplar and has been described as a figure “more Confucian than Marxist,” who never really exhibited faith in the Marxist dialectic or in the concept of class struggle.7 The attraction to Kawakami’s intellectual brand of Marxism as opposed to more strident, propagandistic Marxist rhetoric suggests Guo’s continued interest in aesthetic concerns. At the same time, the Creationists consciously repudiated the egoism of their own earlier attempts at “pure literature.”8 In essays by the Creation Society’s members over the next few years, they expressed scorn for their own self-referential literature. How much the conversion was simple posturing and how much it involved a genuine rejection of their own earlier literary efforts and an ideological

20

T he Subversive Self

shift is open to debate. Some scholars suggest that Guo’s embracing the cause of “propaganda literature” and his condemnation of his own earlier self-referential narratives and poetry was less a question of his whole-hearted enthusiasm over the possibilities of Marxist literature than it was a “reluctant and half ashamed” repudiation of his earlier aestheticism.9 As Benjamin Schwartz has observed, the May Fourth period marked the return of intellectuals and writers to political engagement. He notes, for instance, a difference in attitudes toward political involvement between writers and intellectuals active before 1919, such as Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, and Lu Xun, and those who rose to prominence in the 1920s, such as the Creationists, in terms of the latter’s equation of literary activity with political activity.10 And yet, even for the Creation Society and other Romantically oriented coteries and individual writers from the May Fourth period who sought to create revolutionary new literature, there still remained a consciousness of political impotence along with the “old Confucian anguish” over their alienation from the political domain.11 This sense of estrangement from the political and social arenas on the part of the Creationists was compounded by their being products of the Taishô literary world.

The Model of Taishô Literature In many respects, the Creationists were heirs to the main currents of Taishô period literature. Although only fifteen years long, the Taishô was a period of remarkable diversity and this diversity affected the way in which the Creationists conceived of themselves as writers. The motivating ideal of the Taishô literary community (bundan) was a reaction against the feudal vestiges of the Meiji literary system of hierarchical relationships exemplified in the apprentice system (totei seido). Taishô period writers attempted to create for themselves an environment of communal understanding.12 The Taishô bundan was characterized by youthfulness and clung to an egalitarian ideal in which writing and reading were communal activities carried out in small, guild-like environments. These values had their origin in the 1890s among the breed of young Romantic writers represented by the influential Japanese literary coterie known as the Bungakkai. The Taishô bundan, here referring specifically to the realm of “pure literature” (junbungaku), exhibited several features, which set it apart from the Meiji bundan that preceded it. Edward Fowler identifies three qualities that defined the Taishô bundan: first, the

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camaraderie among writers found expression in the formation of a number of small literary coteries; second, creative output was characterized by a fashion for short works and serialized works; third, the coterie magazine emerged as the most important medium for writers of pure literature.13 By the time the Creation Society was formed in 1921, in the latter half of the Taishô period, the qualities that had come to define the Taishô bundan had already crystallized. One of the consequences of the small size and general homogeneity of the Taishô bundan14 was the sense, on the part of the writer, of the audience as a community of initiated insiders, familiar not only with particular works but with specific events in the writer’s life as well. This affected the reception of the work, insofar as it was intended to be read as the belletrization of the writer’s lived experience. According to an implicit faith in this principle, a “true” reading of a work presupposed some familiarity with events in the author’s life on the part of the reader. As in the Meiji period, literary criticism during the Taishô period generally took the form of “author and his work” studies that had the effect of merging life and work together as if they were inseparable. As in the Meiji period, writers of pure literature in the Taishô period saw themselves as a class on the fringes of society and continued to form communities, both professional and casual. Nevertheless, the Taishô period writers, in reaction to the hierarchical structure of the Meiji bundan, attempted to create an environment of mutual understanding in which works could be shared and exchanged freely. It was in such an environment that the shishôsetsu form flourished; the form was so dependent on this kind of milieu that it could, retrospectively, be perceived as an “organic” bundan form.15

The S HISHO ˆ SETSU and S HISHO ˆ SETSU Studies The shishôsetsu form is conventionally regarded as having originated with Tayama Katai’s (1871–1930) novella The Quilt (Futon, 1907). The form rose to prominence among the Japanese Naturalists in the first decade of the twentieth century. A theoretical statement concerning this new, ostensibly confessional literature was given in Katai’s essay of 1907 called “Straightforward Description” (Rokotsu naru byôsha), in which the author advocated an unadorned presentation of reality as it is.16 Various terms were soon applied to this new narrative form, which focused on the experience of a single protagonist modeled on the author and his immediate milieu (shinpen). Nakamura Murao

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T he Subversive Self

(1886–1949) and Kume Masao (1891–1952) were both to lay claim to having coined the expression shishôsetsu. However, regardless of who in fact first used this designation, the term eventually became the most widely accepted one for this new self-referential approach.17 The shishôsetsu narrative world is a world reduced to that of an individual and contains no value systems other than the author’s own. Yet, the reality described in the shishôsetsu is something more complex; it is intended to be received as the authentic record of events in the author’s life. Another factor integral to the reception of the shishôsetsu is the perception of the work as the result of spontaneity; the shishôsetsu is conceived of as an incontestable and unpremeditated record of the author’s emotional responses to specific events.18 These perceptions of the shishôsetsu have led some recent scholars, including Edward Fowler in Rhetoric of Confession and Richard Bowring, to reconceive of the shishôsetsu not so much as a genre but as an approach to narrative or as the dominant mode of reading in modern Japan.19 According to whichever of these interpretations one chooses to subscribe, the fact remains that this mode of discourse, which dominated the Japanese literary world during the Taishô period, was something decidedly different from contemporary narrative approaches in Western literature. The development of the shishôsetsu can be said in fact to have come about, partially, as a response to a sense of dissatisfaction with the artifice perceived in Western fiction. The shishôsetsu form was consciously opposed to the Western novel’s propensity toward fabrication so that even recognizably great Western novels appeared to some advocates of the shishôsetsu form as spurious, affected, and even vulgar. This reveals the basic paradox inherent in the central position accorded to this form so fundamentally at odds with the concept of fictional construction.20 The form had, even in this early period, both its fervent advocates and its equally zealous detractors, but its appeal as the most characteristically “Japanese” of modern narrative forms was soon an indubitable reality. As early as 1906 in fact, the year before Tayama Katai’s landmark novella The Quilt was published, the critic and Naturalist theoretician Hasegawa Tenkei (1876–1940) unambiguously stated that the art of the future must eschew all frivolous, illusory elements in favor of sincere, “honest” expression.21 Although the term “shishôsetsu” had not yet developed, the conceptualization of this new mode of selfreferential narrative had entered the critical arena. In the years that followed, the debate concerning the character of this new authorcentered literature became a focal topic in literary circles. However,

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the terminology used to refer to this new phenomenon still varied from school to school and from writer to writer.22 It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that the rhetoric surrounding the shishôsetsu became standardized and the discussion of the significance of the shishôsetsu in modern Japanese literature took on the dimensions of a literary debate. Among the early champions of the form within the bundan was Kume Masao who in the essay “Watakushi shôsetsu to shinkyô shôsetsu” (The I-Novel and the Mental Attitude Novel, 1925) provided the Confucian defense of the shishôsetsu form and a revaluation of fictional narrative. The controversy concerning the value of this variety of self-referential literature, as opposed to the Western novel, was triggered by Nakamura Murao (1886–1949). In his essay from the previous year, Nakamura contrasted the more objective narrative fiction of the West, as embodied in the nineteenth-century Russian novel, with the subjective and introspective modern Japanese novel. His conclusion was that the shishôsetsu, and its variant, shinkyô shôsetsu (mental attitude novel), constituted a uniquely Japanese form of expression. However, his approval of this new fiction was not unqualified. He expressed dissatisfaction with the expectation it held out that in order to be appreciated the reader needed to be familiar with the sometimes intimate details of the writer’s life.23 Uno Kôji (1891–1961) was another important practitioner and early champion of the shishôsetsu, who in his essay “Watakushi shôsetsu shiken” (A Personal View of the I-Novel, 1925) sought to construct a more decisive framework for the shishôsetsu. He underscored the quintessentially Japanese nature of the shishôsetsu as opposed to the “true novel” (honkaku shôsetsu), which provided a more natural means of expression for Western novelists.24 Also, he attempted to go further than previous commentators on the form in describing the function of the shishôsetsu as a narrative by asserting that the shishôsetsu is implicitly autobiographical and as such need not necessarily be tied to the first-person point of view. Moreover, he tried to emphasize the connection between the shishôsetsu and an indigenous Japanese tradition of personal narrative that would include, for example, Basho’s haibun and the classical tradition of the zuihitsu. This endeavor to find precedents in premodern Japanese narrative forms for the shishôsetsu, to describe its nativist pedigree, would later become an integral part of the shishôsetsu discourse. The shishôsetsu would again become the focus of critical attention in the mid-1930s. Three essays from 1935, all written by established figures in the bundan, criticized the shishôsetsu for its narrow perspective

24

T he Subversive Self

and simplistic notion of Realism.25 Among these essays it was Kobayashi Hideo’s (1902–1983) “Watakushi shôsetsu ron” (On the I-Novel), which appeared in the August issue of Keizai ôrai, that was to have the greatest impact on dictating the shape of the subsequent shishôsetsu debate. What distinguishes Kobayashi’s essay is his revisionist approach, whereby he conflates the borders of the definition of shishôsetsu to include Western self-referential fiction as well, making of the shishôsetsu a universal phenomenon of confessional narrative practice. He criticizes the Japanese version of this phenomenon for failing to portray the “socialized I” achieved by the best self-referential literature of the West.26

Later Redefinitions The golden age of shishôsetsu criticism and theory occurred in the late 1940s and the 1950s, accompanying a new wave of practitioners of the form including Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), and Yoshiyuki Junnosuke (1924–) among others. Itô Sei’s well-known essay from 1948, “Shôsetsu no hôhô” (Methods of the Novel), represented the first attempt to recognize the social function of the shishôsetsu form. In short, Itô suggested that the shishôsetsu existed as a vehicle for the bundan, and contributed to writers’ perceptions of themselves as elite outsiders. In opposition to Kobayashi Hideo’s critical perspective, Itô validated earlier attempts to situate the shishôsetsu in the context of an indigenous narrative tradition. He argued that it makes more sense to compare the shishôsetsu of the Taishô period with Kamo no Chômei’s Hôjôki (An Account of My Hut, 1212) and Yoshida Kenkô’s Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, 1340) than it does to compare them with the nineteenth-century Western novel.27 Two other essays, which appeared during the 1950s, also stand as important milestones in the development of shishôsetsu critical discourse. Nakamura Mitsuo, in the essay “Fûzoku shôsetsu ron” (Concerning a Novel of Manners, 1950), sought to describe the “special character” of modern Japanese narrative through a more rigorously historical approach than previous theorists. He suggested that the emergence of modern realism in Japanese literature culminated, ironically, in the emergence of the shishôsetsu. He then described the disappearance of Realism and later attempts among Japanese writers to produce a social novel, which simply led to the production of a new variant of shishôsetsu.28

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Hirano Ken in “Geijutsu to jisseikatsu” (Art and Life, 1958) adopted a different line of inquiry in trying to account for the often nebulous distinctions between the terms shishôsetsu and shinkyô shôsetsu, terms used since the 1920s. Hirano conceived of these two terms as embodying two important currents of development in which the shishôsetsu, as practiced by the Naturalists and their spiritual heirs such as Dazai Osamu, was the literature of destruction—an art precipitated by crisis. In opposition to this, the shinkyô shôsetsu, as practiced by Shiga Naoya and the Shirakaba group, was the literature of harmony and salvation. He concluded his essay by suggesting that the division of art and life accepted as an article of faith in the West is less clearly delineated in Japanese literature and culture.29 In the final analysis, most of the important shishôsetsu theorists in Japan, from the inception of discourse pertaining to the form through the 1950s, emphasized the uniqueness of the form and its indebtedness to an earlier, premodern narrative tradition of which it was a direct descendent. Because of the propensity on the part of Japanese critics of the form (with the notable exception of Kobayashi Hideo) to envision the shishôsetsu form as a quintessentially—and exclusively— Japanese mode of discourse, there has been an implicit reluctance to concede that the shishôsetsu might be adapted into foreign literatures. Nevertheless, through an active, (re)creative reading on the part of the members of the Creation Society, a form bearing many striking resemblances to the shishôsetsu appeared in May Fourth literature, and this in turn hastened the development of other varieties of selfreferential narratives among Chinese writers.

Conclusions: Beyond Influence Studies Any attempt to describe generic and authorial interrelations involving two societies and two literatures provides a particularly challenging and potentially awkward task. This is especially true when the innately hierarchical—even imperialistic—concept of “influence” is introduced into the shifting terrain of political and cultural relations. Even Zhou Zuoren, in the pioneering essay touched upon earlier, “Riben jin sanshinian xiaoshuo zhi fazhan” (The Development of Japanese Fiction in the Last Thirty Years, 1918), took care to reassert the historical and cultural relationship between China and Japan as that of one between a parent and a child, before proposing that modern Japanese fiction might profitably be studied and emulated by Chinese writers.

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Zhou and his May Fourth contemporaries accepted concepts of influence and literary authority from the West. Nevertheless, it is significant to note that influence traditionally carried a different cultural weight in China and Japan than in the West, and I will suggest that this also may have been a factor in the Creation Society’s reception of the shishôsetsu. Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker has noted that the act of writing on the part of the May Fourth authors involved a reinterpretation of prior texts, and that the act of reinterpreting texts, particularly canonical works, led to the development of a new problematic literary subject in May Fourth literature.30 In a sense, May Fourth writers’ recapitulation of textual problems from traditional narratives had parallels in their reception and (re)creation of literature from the West and Japan. As Harold Bloom testifies in The Anxiety of Influence, discussing the question of literary influence across cultural or temporal borders, poems are written by people and not by “anonymous splendors.” Literary influence does not render the receiving poet any less original and may in fact make his work more original.31 What constitutes originality is in large measure dictated by a particular society’s attitude toward the phenomenon of artistic creation. However, when the literary relationship in question involves the transfer of a genre from one language and literary community to another, one must consider not only questions of intracultural but intercultural significance as well.32 One of the theoretical matters at the heart of this study is the question of differences in conceptions of originality and literary borrowing between traditional East Asian societies and the post-Enlightenment West. Literary creation in traditional (and, to some degree, in modern) China and Japan reflected a writer’s ability to make striking and “original” allusions to recognizably great works from the literary canon. A writer could expect his readers, with whom he shared a roughly equivalent educational background, to appreciate the subtleties of his literary gamesmanship. Thus a veiled (or sometimes quite open) acknowledgment of the debt owed some literary forebear in one’s work did not imply a lack of originality in the Chinese or Japanese context, rather it suggested one’s ability to echo an earlier text as a sign of literary cultivation. Although modern Western concepts of literary influence were undoubtedly embedded in the Creation Society’s recognition of their debt to prior literary works and writers, traditional acceptance of this variety of borrowing prepared the way for the acceptance of the appropriation of an “alien” literary form. Ultimately, the most cogent argument in defense of the assertion that the Creation Society’s reception of the shishôsetsu amounted to

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something more significant than mere imitation of the Japanese form comes through an examination of the works themselves. By examining a sampling of such self-referential works, it becomes apparent that through an ingenious act of literary (re)creation, the Creationists produced a form that departs in spirit and in practice from the Japanese paradigm. Undeniably, the intellectual and social milieu in which Chinese writers operated during the 1920s and 1930s was decidedly different than the Japanese one. The May Fourth writer lived and worked in a society that had been irrevocably destroyed and replaced by social and political chaos. His contemporary Japanese counterpart, on the other hand, pursued his craft in relative security and stability and could afford to turn his literary gaze inward. The essential difference between the Japanese shishôsetsu and the Creation Society’s self-referential fiction is that Yu Dafu and other Creation Society writers do not close off the protagonist from his social surroundings. Unlike the typical shishôsetsu, in which the protagonist is presented in a narrowly defined social milieu, effectively cut off from larger social concerns, the Creation Society’s “Sinicized” self-referential fiction emphasizes the connection of the protagonist to his peers, his family, and ultimately to his homeland. In the final analysis, the Creation Society’s self-referential fiction enjoyed only a few years of prominence, and the subjectivity that informed the character of May Fourth literature and the cult of the self had begun to fade, at least among established writers, by the end of the 1920s. There were certainly groups of writers, such as the New Sensationalists (xin’ganjue pai), who remained committed to an art-for-art’s sake stance. Nevertheless, they proved to be the exception, and as anti-Japanese sentiment began to coalesce in the late 1920s, inward-looking literature with an obviously foreign pedigree began to succumb to a Marxist literature serving a larger sociopolitical purpose. Even by the mid-1920s, Guo Moruo and the Creationists had begun to produce literature with a wider social perspective. Other important May Fourth writers such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun had never really embraced the period’s fascination with self-referential literature. In general, we can say that the 1930s in Chinese literature saw, as Cheng Fangwu declared at the time, a shift from “literary revolution to revolutionary literature.” That shift notwithstanding, during the early 1920s the Chinese literary community was most receptive to self-referential fiction. It was the period of the New Culture Movement, and the literature that flourished during the years following 1919 was bold, iconoclastic,

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and subjective. It was an age in which Chinese writers took for granted the dictum that all true literature is born of subjectivity, and there was a general consensus that traditional Confucian moralizing and overt didacticism were far from the spirit of art. Hence, it is perhaps natural that a Romantic conception of the individual should be perceived as subversive and should exert such a pervasive appeal on young writers. Its appeal bears testimony to a sincerity and hopefulness that underscores these writers’ youthful optimism along with that of their readers. Furthermore, the self-referential fiction produced by the Creation Society during this first period is weighted with all-consuming concerns about modernization and the fate of the homeland, endowing their fiction with a unique flavor. In terms of the bold, modern fiction the Creation Society sought to produce during these early years, the Japanese shishôsetsu form proved conducive to the exploration of the new sense of self that these young writers had in mind. Like the shishôsetsu, the representative self-referential fiction of the Creation Society is characterized by an idiosyncratic, subjective voice, which forces the reader into the author-protagonist’s confidence. That the shishôsetsu should have been received and innovatively adapted by the Creation Society, and that it should have played such a vital role in defining both the character of May Fourth literature and that of later post-Mao self-referential literature, demonstrates the tenacious appeal of the shishôsetsu as a vehicle for expressing a thoroughly modern consciousness of self.

2 Creation Society Fiction and the Subjective Quality of May Fourth Literature

In attempting to address matters pertaining to self-referentiality in fiction, this study begins from the premise that all fiction can be considered self-referential insofar as, by necessity, it reflects the interests and biases of the author. Patricia Meyer Spacks offers the following succinct statement about the fundamental self-referentiality at work in all fiction: It can be argued that all fiction ultimately constitutes autobiography, the artist inventing whatever the purported aim of his creation, only a series of metaphors for the self. Conversely, one can maintain that all autobiography is fiction, the imposition of form and discovery of meaning automatically converting life into its imitation.1

The second part of Spacks’s statement correctly acknowledges the essential kinship of fiction and autobiography and recognizes the fact that the attempt to separate them into discrete forms offers a number of serious obstacles. While agreeing with the proposition that all fiction contains elements of self-referentiality, this chapter focuses on those characteristics of the shishôsetsu that distinguish it from other modes of selfreferential expression. The protagonists in the Japanese shishôsetsu and in the Creation Society fiction seem at times to be the unintended reflection of the experiences and values of the author, and at other times appear to comprise a carefully contrived character portrait designed to stand in place of the author. In either case, the

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self-referential literature being considered is a variety of narrative that delights in the suggestion of a direct connection between the author and the authorial persona embodied in the protagonist.2 A brief overview of antecedents for self-referential narratives in the Chinese tradition will elucidate the true import of foreign literature in general, and of the shishôsetsu form specifically, as paradigms for the Creation Society’s innovations.

Antecedents for Self-Referentiality in Premodern and Early Modern Chinese Literature May Fourth literature, as Kirk Denton has argued, is most productively seen in terms of its continuities with tradition. Moreover, in order to appreciate the achievements of May Fourth literature, one must be willing to consider tradition’s role in shaping modern ideas of the self and society, and one must look to the “historically grounded, dynamic interaction of tradition and modernity.”3 The interplay between foreign influences and the abiding presence of traditional aesthetics and cultural mores contributes to what was considered novel and groundbreaking in the dynamic May Fourth literary world. As Pei-yi Wu demonstrates in his work on autobiography in traditional Chinese literature, the suppression of the personal voice for the sake of “narrative economy” was a nearly universal convention in the literatures of the ancient world.4 Wu further remarks that there was no specific genre in traditional Chinese literature that precisely corresponded to Western autobiography, although certain examples of autobiographical writing can be found in ancient China, which borrowed the approach and tone of the time-honored biography form.5 There was a tradition among Chinese historians of including a brief self-introduction (zixu) in either a foreword or afterword to a historical work, the example from Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Historian) being the most celebrated.6 Nevertheless, it was not until the Qing period that literati writers began to produce obviously autobiographical fiction. During the late Ming period vernacular fiction was infused with autobiographical information, and in the production of literati novels during the Qing period these writers found a new vehicle for experiments in self-expression. Traditionally, literary self-representation in China had been the province of poetry, and the self-expressiveness of Qu Yuan’s (340–278 B.C.) poem “Li Sao,” written in the first person and couched in a language that is at once both personal and allegorical,

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created a standard of personal, poetic diction that reached levels of refinement in the shi poetry of the Tang period.7 However, a qualitative change in the conception of the writer occurred during the late Ming period among literati authors of prose narratives. Gradually, a more developed sense of authorship emerged. The writer was no longer the “shadowy figure” that he had traditionally been conceived as but was now an integral element in textual production.8 Of the literati (wenren) authors of Ming period vernacular fiction, Patrick Hanan suggests that typically they were frustrated bureaucrats, disappointed in their ambitions to serve in an official, public capacity who turned as a consequence to fictional self-expression.9 The eighteenthcentury novel also saw significant changes in the concept of authorship. Novels such as Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber, ca. 1791) by Cao Xueqin (1715–1763), Rulin waishi (The Scholars, ca. 1750) by Wu Jingzi (1701–1754), and other novels of the period are recognizably the work of individual literati authors. Martin Huang sees this change in the idea of authorship as a symptom of an identity crisis during the Ming period on the part of the literati class. In their search for a sense of class identity, literati writers found in vernacular fiction a vehicle for self-expression not as strictly bound to conventions as either poetry or history.10 Vernacular fiction of the Ming and Qing periods can be considered “autobiographical” in the sense that its author reflects his personal dilemma of being a member of a literati class in the process of being (re)defined. Vernacular fiction provided a forum for the literati to explore and dramatize the acts of writing and self-discovery. Recent scholarship has reconceived the position of vernacular fiction in premodern China vis-à-vis its relationship to other modes of writing and now suggests that, contrary to received notions, vernacular fiction was not merely a form of entertainment for the marginally literate, but was in fact an integral dimension of literati culture.11 In the act of self-representation, literati authors were involved in a process of class definition. On one level, this constituted a literary game, and it seems reasonable to envisage Qing vernacular fiction as being tailored by literati producers for literati consumers. Nevertheless, there is also evidence to suggest that this vernacular fiction appealed to a wider range of readers representing a broader demographic spectrum than did classical poetry or prose. Literati writers strove to appeal to this new readership, and realized that this readership included readers of all ages and both sexes, including many without rigorous training in the Confucian classics.12 Vernacular fiction, as it developed during the Ming period, had different narratological conventions and interpretive expectations

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than fiction in the classical language. Whereas in classical forms, including both prose and poetry, there is the convention of regular references by the writer to himself as a historical being and to the act of recording, vernacular fiction tended to be compiled or produced “pseudo-anonymously” and these writers sought to downplay their role as author.13 One of the defining characteristics of vernacular fiction prior to the May Fourth period consisted in the narratological and stylistic features parodying the storyteller’s oral narrative performance. In the seventeenth century, Li Yu appropriated the conventions of the storytelling manner in developing a unique, idiosyncratic, self-referential style, which provided an antecedent of self-referentiality for May Fourth writers.14 The development of an explicit narrative in which the voice of the narrator merges with the voice of the implied author crystallized in the fiction of Li Yu (1611–1680).15 Li Yu can be credited with pursuing a new idea of authorship in which originality of plot and expression was deemed a virtue. None of Li’s three collections of stories was based on any specific previous source material, and each deliberately reflected the experience of Li the author in terms of the personal narrative style he cultivated.16 It was Li’s own colorful life that provided the material for his fiction. The complex interrelations of his large household, its tensions and squabbles, and Li’s experiences in the wars between 1644 and 1647 surrounding the fall of the Ming Dynasty during which he was exposed to widespread suffering and grief, insinuated themselves into his fiction. The fictional personae that he created reflect his varied experiences.17 Li Yu can be said, in one important sense, to have remade the traditional storyteller-narrator in his own image. And although his constant references to himself and the act of authorship may seem at times obsessive, the persona that emerges in his stories clearly comes to constitute an “essential element of his art.”18 According to Martin Huang, each major novel of the Qing period is considered autobiographical in the sense that its author is attempting to come to terms with his own personal dilemma as a member of a literati class experiencing a crisis of identity. The “mask of a fictional other” represented by the novel allowed literati authors of the Qing period to explore a multiplicity of selves and an increasingly ambiguous and complex identity.19 Although it is not the aim of this study to attribute any direct influence of the autobiographical quality of the Qing literati novel on May Fourth self-referentiality, the precedent was available to May Fourth writers and enabled them to recognize a native mode of fictionalized self-referentiality to stand alongside those from Japan and the West.20

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Among the community of urban readers during the late Qing period there was no distinction made between the writer’s life and his work.21 This receptivity toward self-referential literature on the part of Chinese readers can be attributed in part to what one commentator has called the “literary Japanization” in late Qing China.22 In the 1910s, writers such as Su Manshu presented versions of themselves and their fellow writers to an eager readership. Most writers knew each other and participated in formal and informal associations. Readers displayed an attraction to their favorite writers and an interest in their lives that was new to Chinese literature and anticipated the relationship between writers and their audience in the May Fourth period. There were clear precedents for self-referential expression in the late Qing and early Republican periods that immediately preceded the May Fourth period. Already in late Qing fiction a “process of subjectivization” was underway, as seen in the emergence of fictional narratives written in the first person reflecting the author’s experience such as Lao Can youji (The Travels of Lao Can, 1903–1907) by Liu E (1857–1909) and Wu Woyao’s (1866–1910) Ershinian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (Strange Events in the Last Twenty Years, 1906), which anticipate the popularity of such narratives in the May Fourth period.23 The 1910s in China, for example, saw an attempt at a unified conceptual order and a desire to posit Confucianism as the “national essence” (guocui) [Japanese, kokusui].24 This can be interpreted as an attempt to invest literature with the kind of authority necessary to promote social and political reform. Furthermore, this revaluation of the concept of influence and literary work was in part the result of a concentrated reading of Western Romantic literature.25 The decades prior to the May Fourth period witnessed a number of works and a variety of writers who in their lives displayed a penchant for Romanticism. Nevertheless, it was Su Manshu (1884–1918) who represented in both his work and his life the most immediate and finished example of Romantic values. If one accepts the premise that both the subjective and lyrical strains of May Fourth literature amounted to a continuation of late Qing fiction, then the contributions of Su Manshu must be viewed as central to this line of development.26 Su Manshu, born of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother in Yokohama and then raised in China, studied in Japan between 1898 and 1903. While studying in Tokyo, he was involved with several Chinese revolutionary student groups. Upon returning to China, he embarked on his literary career and became a Buddhist monk, traveling to Siam (Thailand) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in order to learn Sanskrit.

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Su’s remarkable life was juxtaposed by a sparse literary output that nonetheless included works that had a major impact on his contemporaries and later writers. This body of work includes a novel called Duanhong lingyan ji (The Lone Swan, 1912), several short stories, translations of selected poems of Lord Byron in 1909 (Bailun shixuan), and some translations of Chinese poetry into English in Chaoyin (Voices of the Tide, 1911). His novel, The Lone Swan, which enjoyed tremendous popularity upon its publication, is self-referential in nature and describes the sufferings of a young protagonist torn between secular desires and the celibacy and discipline imposed on him by his Buddhist faith.27 This novel, with its diffuse plot and emotionally charged Romantic language and tone, became a paradigm for the Romanticism of the May Fourth period as well.28 Su Manshu was among the first writers in the modern Chinese literary tradition to exemplify the Romantic ideal that the style of the writer was as significant as the works he produced.29 The Creationists, and Yu Dafu in particular, under the influence of Su were to establish the convention that the writer’s works both reflected the lifestyle and actions of the writer, but the writer’s behavior also provided direction for the works.30 Romanticism took a more direct route into May Fourth literature through the burgeoning field of literary translation in the late Qing and early Republican periods. Aside from the collection of Byron’s poetry translated by Su Manshu alluded to earlier, a torrent of translated works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western literature became available to May Fourth writers, constituting an immediate touchstone for literary self-expression. Translation from foreign literatures as a means of encouraging the modernization of Chinese language and literature and ultimately as a means of social amelioration was encouraged by Liang Qichao in his translations of Japanese political novels discussed in chapter 1.31 Lu Xun (1881–1936), along with his brother Zhou Zuoren, recognizing the value of literary translation, were responsible for a small body of translations from Japanese and Western languages prior to the May Fourth period. These translated works, from culturally or politically marginalized literatures of Eastern Europe, Ireland, and Japan, did not reach a wide audience and their impact was admittedly limited. The Zhou brothers’ collection of translations from Western literature called Yuwai xiaoshuoji (Anthology of Foreign Fiction, 1909) included translations of a variety of works, many of which were rendered using existing Japanese translations. However, starting in the 1890s the “translations” of Western literature that were to have the greatest impact on the literature to

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follow came from the pen of the late Qing official Lin Shu (1852–1924). Lin Shu’s works, more accurately called “renditions” or “adaptations” rather than translations, number nearly two hundred and were written in a form of classical Chinese. Lin, himself unable to read any foreign languages, worked with a number of younger protégées from whose summaries of Western literary works Lin fashioned his own works. Part of the protégées’ role in the process was to choose the texts to be translated, and their diverse tastes are represented in the range and quality of Lin’s adaptations, which include Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Ibsen, Balzac, and others.32 Lin’s “translations” familiarized the generation of Chinese writers who emerged during the May Fourth period not only with a broad range of works of Western literature, but also with the values that suffused them. They also set the stage for more serious translations in the decades to follow.33 The Legacy of Romanticism in May Fourth Literature One result of the Romantic orientation of Creation Society literature was the expectation that such self-referential narratives would be spontaneous, authentic, and the manifestation of individual genius. Even in its choice of the names of their early journals, the Creation Society was stressing the belief that artistic creativity was an organic process and, for the writer of genius, the necessary and inevitable articulation of individual feeling. In Yu Dafu’s “Caishiji” (Caishiji, 1922) the young writer-protagonist feels isolated and ostracized via the act of literary creation. Wherever he went, he would recite a poem or snippet of verse to himself. At other times, he would chuckle to himself and sigh with regret as he looked up to the heavens. Unable to compose himself, he would cast a harried glance around him. For those who saw him staring at such times with those wide eyes, his expression seemed like the blank face of a puppet. People who saw him at such times could not help but shrink away.34

According to the early aesthetics of the Creation Society in the first phase, talent is a gift bestowed on only a few individuals of great genius. The work of art is like a baby issuing from the mother’s womb: it is essentially a gift from nature fashioned and transformed in the hands of the artist.35 Likewise, in an essay that appeared in the first issue of the Creation Quarterly by Yu Dafu called “Yiwen sijian” (A Personal View of Art),

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Yu finds fault with contemporary critics who are incapable of recognizing true genius. Yu defines the “true critic” and explains his role in recognizing genius in the following way: According to this argument, literary criticism would appear to interfere with literary creation. This is not the case. There are two varieties of literary criticism: true and false. True literary criticism is produced for the sake of ordinary people and constitutes a variety of “words in praise of genius.” We must wait for great critics to come and pick out those moments of genius in a work that ordinary people like us cannot perceive.36

The article berates critics who insist on employing a plodding, “scientific” approach to their study of literature. Due to this they are incapable of recognizing true genius and label it “abnormal, eccentric, or unreasonable.”37 The subjective orientation of May Fourth literature and the existence of rhetoric concerning genius underscores the essentially Romantic quality of this movement. Although such a project is outside the scope of the present study, parallels can be drawn between the literary revolution in China embodied in the May Fourth Movement and the Romantic Movement in early nineteenth-century Europe. Like the Romantic Movement, the New Culture Movement was a reaction against conventions, artificiality, and lack of spontaneity in the classical tradition. As with European Romantics, these educated young Chinese writers felt themselves superior to society and capable of heightened emotional responses. This “romanticindividualist” stage eventually gave way to a Marxist orientation in the late 1920s and 1930s but continued to have an impact on writers’ perceptions of themselves.38 The early critical essays by writers in the vanguard of May Fourth literature including Cheng Fangwu, the leading theoretician of the Creation Society, are deeply imbued with the values of Romanticism. In his early critical writings, Cheng suggested that literature appeals directly to our emotions and does not stimulate construction of the intellect. He and other May Fourth writers associated with Romanticism including Xu Zhimo (1896–1931), the leader of the Crescent Moon Society, which sought to modernize Chinese poetry, stated that the purpose of literature was to narrate an event emotionally without artifice or construction.39 The pronounced political dimension of the Romantic literature of the May Fourth period has elicited comparisons with the Romanticism of Percy Bysshe Shelley

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(1792–1822), in which the poet’s political consciousness infuses even the most personal expression.40 The May Fourth period was a time of literary and political upheaval with various literary coteries and individual writers groping for new modes of expression that would be consonant with individual concepts of modernity. This new sense of the self was accompanied by a heightened political awareness that was often the result of political and literary activities entered into while abroad as exchange students. The result of the blending together of self-referentiality with a concern for China’s modernization on the part of the Creation Society will be commented on in greater detail later. Nevertheless, it is important to note that this ambivalence was not confined to the Creation Society. In one form or another this propensity permeated the entire Chinese literary establishment during the 1920s. The binary discourse of “romantic individualism” and “revolutionary collectivism” that characterized May Fourth subjectivity appealed to Chinese writers and readers on two levels.41 It offered a literary mode that was at once modern and iconoclastic, that would also serve the larger nationalist goal of creating a new Chinese aesthetic vocabulary. Guo Moruo, in his essay “Lun guonei pingdan ji wo duiyu chuangzuo shang de taidu” (Concerning Domestic Critical Circles and My Attitudes Toward Creativity, 1922) expressed the view that while literature must be grounded in scientific observations and should serve to guide society, nevertheless, all art must be legitimized by comparisons with the lived experiences of the individual writers.42 In the period under discussion, Shanghai and other urban centers attracted ambitious, financially privileged young people who saw in literature a fitting substitute for the bureaucratic opportunities and challenges lost following the demise of the Imperial examination system. The image of the literary figure of the 1920s and 1930s continued to take the basic pose of a “genius of the foreign mall” (yang cheng caizi).43 Although the idea of genius was by this time already centuries-old in China, it derived new impetus from Romantic ideals related to creative genius and in turn affected May Fourth concepts of the writer. The subjective literature that emerged in the May Fourth period manifested itself in a number of ways of which the self-referential fiction of the Creation Society was but one strain. Predictably, the early fiction of the Creation Society reflected the experiences of these young writers who had spent the better part of their adolescent lives in Japan. In terms of content, the Creation Society’s self-referential

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stories can be divided roughly into two categories: those concerned with the lives of exchange students in Japan and those concerned with the often dislocating experience of repatriation and reacclimatizing to a rapidly changing China. Paula Harrell’s work, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905, deals with an earlier generation of Chinese exchange students to Japan, but many of the general comments she makes about the exchange student experience in Japan are applicable to the period under discussion as well.44 Students generally came to study in Japan with some type of financial and logistical support, either a central government scholarship or a provincial or county government scholarship. In any case, the scholarships were rarely sufficient for students’ needs, leaving them in a constant state of anxiety about finances. Moreover, students were discouraged, by custom if not by policy, from interacting with their Japanese hosts. Although there were exceptions to this tendency among the Creation Society writers, this factor nevertheless contributed to the exchange students’ sense of alienation. Finally, an important characteristic of the exchange students’ experience in Japan was the high degree of political activism among them. The Chinese Student Union (Zhongguo liuxuesheng huiguan) was simply the largest and most conspicuous of a number of student groups that represented a wide spectrum of political orientations. These groups provided a gathering place and a safe haven in which to discuss current political issues and plan student-related activities.45 It was from the ranks of these student groups that many of the important May Fourth literary coteries emerged.

The Self-Referential Fiction of the Creation Society The early self-referential fiction of the Creation Society exhibits genuine diversity in terms of style. Nevertheless, the stories can be divided into several clearly defined categories based on content. The conventions of the early stories reflect the tensions and proclivities of Taishô self-referential fiction. It was the manner in which the experiences of the Creation Society writers were fictionalized that recalls the Japanese shishôsetsu. The stories possess an aura of sincere expression that reflects a like penchant in Japanese fiction. An examination of a selection of the early fiction of the Creation Society should reveal some of the characteristics, which demonstrate its indebtedness to the shishôsetsu.

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Starting with the first issue of the Creation Quarterly and continuing throughout the early phase, in each of the Society’s publications are stories concerned with the lives of Chinese exchange students in Japan. Among this category are stories revolving around romance, marriage, and the anxieties associated with maintaining a family on a limited government stipend, financial crises, interaction with the Japanese, and homesickness. Among the self-referential stories concerning the lives of exchange students in Japan, Yu Dafu’s “Chenlun” (Sinking, 1921) is the best known. “Sinking” is the story of a young Chinese exchange student in Japan who, smarting under the prejudice directed at him as a Chinese, frustrated by the rejections he is subjected to in his Romantic overtures, and keenly sensitive to China’s shortcomings in its attempts to modernize, commits suicide by throwing himself into the sea, all the while imploring his homeland to modernize.46 Among the earliest published works of the Creation Society, the story “Sinking” contains several important characteristics that became general features of the Society’s later fiction as well. It employs a third-person point of view in a narrative consciously crafted around the author’s own experience. Moreover, it frankly portrays sexual longing and describes an unbalanced emotional and psychological state brought about by the frustration resulting from unfulfilled longing. Thematically, its portrayal of sexual anxiety and the sense of longing for the homeland evinced by the protagonist were all to become major themes in the early stories of the Creation Society. Guo Moruo’s story “Can chun” (Lingering Spring), which appeared in the second issue of the quarterly, is a tale of friendship, desire, and the emotional price of creative genius; it is a fanciful mixture of incidents from Guo’s years in Japan and purely fictional elements. This first-person narrative describes the narrator’s experience as a medical student in the city of Fukuoka and a separate experience courting and marrying the nurse attending to a sick friend of his in Tokyo. Like “Sinking,” “Lingering Spring” freely juxtaposes autobiographical incidents with the blatantly fictional. Zhang Ziping (1893–1959) was one of the most prolific writers of fiction in the Society’s early phase; his stories include both narratives that are patently fictional and those which allude to his experiences as a student in Japan. “Yiban rongyuande shenghuo” (Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings), from the third issue of the Creation Monthly, describes the economic woes of Chinese students in Japan and the daily hardships they endure. Unlike other early Creation Society stories, which indirectly approach the problem of the economic

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hardships of students while focusing instead on questions of romance and politics, the theme of “The Lives of a Group of Goodfor-Nothings” itself is the foreign students’ lack of adequate funding and their ambivalent feelings toward the Japanese. The more he thought about it, the more upset Su Heizhou became. He thought again about a friend from long ago who had since passed away. That friend, Zhang by name, had encouraged him to go abroad. At the time, Heizhou despised the Japanese and had no desire to go to Japan. Even had the desire existed, his friend’s advice notwithstanding, Heizhou had not possessed the means to cross the Yellow Sea anyway. However, his opinion had improved from last year and he was able to overcome some of his animosities. In the end, though, he had arrived at the realization that the Japanese were not approachable and he dared not try to breach the distance which separated him from them. From that point onward, his life had been filled with anxiety.47

Other stories portraying the loneliness and frustration of the exchange student experience include Cheng Fangwu’s story “Yige langliu de xinnian” (A Vagabond’s New Year) that appeared in the first issue of the quarterly. The narrator recounts passing the New Year in Japan as an exchange student. Unlike many of the other stories in this category, this story does not revolve around a crisis, but is rather a personal perspective on the New Year’s season and its meaning for the narrator as a foreign student on the fringes of society. In tone and style “A Vagabond’s New Year” is very reminiscent of the intensely subjective, impressionistic contemporary Japanese prose form known as the shôhin (Chinese, xiaopin), itself based on a popular late Ming elegant literary form. Zheng Boqi’s story “Zuichu zhi ke” (The First Day of Class), which also appeared in the first issue of the quarterly, tells the story of a young Chinese exchange student’s first day at a secondary school in Kyoto. It conveys the pain and ambivalence felt by the exchange student as he faces insults and indignities in the classroom and fights to make sense of his circumstances. Like the other stories mentioned here about student life, it depicts the loneliness of the exchange student experience and the prejudice and humiliation he is subjected to as a Chinese living in an alien environment.48 The themes of frustration, indignation, and alienation continue in those stories recounting the dislocation of the students’ repatriation to China after an extended period of study in Japan. In this group of stories, the members of the Society conceptualize a homeland to which they retreat, having been victimized in Japan and awakened to

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feelings of racial and national inferiority.49 Predictably, whereas stories recounting student life dominate the early issues of the quarterly and weekly, later self-referential fiction of this first period describes the return to China and the attempt to reassimilate into Chinese society. As with the former category, Yu Dafu produced some of the bestknown and most representative stories from this category as well. Yu’s story, “Mangmang ye” (Endless Nights), from the first issue of the quarterly, provides insights into the challenges faced by these young writers and intellectuals repatriated from Japan to a reality contrasting with the idealistic expectations they nurtured while dreaming of their homeland from afar. “Endless Nights” relates the story of Zhifu, who has recently returned from studies in Japan to take up a position as an instructor at a school in a small town.50 The musings of the protagonist on the riverboat that will carry him to his new teaching post, on his hospitalization in Tokyo, his wrangling with a publisher in Shanghai, and the dislocation of returning to a China he can no longer fathom, are all based on autobiographical data with which Yu expected his audience to be familiar. In the following scene, for example, Zhifu considers how the experience as an exchange student in Japan contributed to what he has become. Zhifu stood listlessly on the deck and, taking a deep breath, he raised his eyes and gazed at the stars above. While rocking up and down and staring at the deep blue sky, he was suddenly struck by the tragedy of his situation. Zhifu himself was not able to explain this miserable feeling, having spent his youth as an exchange student in Japan and having already become accustomed to a life of drifting in and out of innumerable tragic situations. Consequently, his long separation from Wu Chisheng should not have been particularly painful, but still he found himself here, staring at the scenery along the Huangpu River.51

The frustrations of returning to a China fraught with political unrest and social chaos furnished Guo Moruo, as it had Yu, with ample material for self-referential narratives. In “Piaoliu sanbuqu” (A Sonata on Wandering, 1922) Guo liberally combines autobiographical and fictional elements in a narrative, which exhibits the bold narrative persona that Guo cultivated in his early fiction. “A Sonata on Wandering” revolves around the protagonist’s emotional decision to send his Japanese wife and children back to Japan from China due to political unrest and economic chaos, a plot reflecting the reality of Guo’s situation.52 In Guo’s case, the ambivalence of the Japanese experience and his return to China were compounded by his marriage

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to a Japanese woman and his responsibilities to the children produced by that union. This relationship and the strain it produced on him became an important theme in his early works, as evidenced by the following passage from Guo’s story “Weiyang” (Halfway, 1922) in which he contemplates the persecution his sons will face as children of mixed blood in the Japanese fishing village where they live: His son had already turned three, and before ten months had passed, a younger brother arrived compelling the older boy to sleep together amicably with his younger brother. Concerns about the boys had begun from the moment they had been conceived in their mother’s womb. They could only hope to cling to a sliver of happiness, and as they got older and strode out into the world they would surely be confronted by the neighborhood children calling them chankoro (the pejorative term the Japanese use to insult the Chinese), and would have to bear being hit by sticks and struck by rocks. How pitiful for this little boy who had just turned three and who, with his delicate constitution, had already been scarred deeply and irreparably.53

One common theme running throughout these stories of repatriation to China is a sense of responsibility, both patriotic and personal. Often, this sense of responsibility had to do with raising a family while simultaneously trying to ward off imminent poverty. One such example is Zhang Dinghuang’s “Zhishujie” (Arbor Day), which appeared somewhat later than these other stories, in the April 1926 edition of the Creation Monthly. The story tells of a writer and part-time teacher who, in trying to support his family while battling an illness and a growing dependency on painkillers, realizes that it is Arbor Day in Japan. The contrast he notes between the happy, carefree life he had led in his student days and the uncertainty of the situation his son now faces in a foreign land, gives him occasion to reflect on the value of his own professional and creative activities. This constant self-scrutiny was an important element in Creation Society fiction from this early phase. Not all contemporary readers (or writers) approved of this propensity toward literary self-exposure, but it did serve to elicit powerful responses among readers and was at the heart of what was perceived to be “modern” and innovative in the May Fourth literary world.54 The first question to be addressed in regard to the reception of the Creation Society’s work by contemporary readers is, who comprised the readership for May Fourth literature? Perry Link describes the heterogeneous readership of the 1910s in China as “petty urbanites,” comprised of clerks, students, merchants, and entrepreneurs. In this period, Link cautions, we still cannot

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properly speak of a mass audience for this new fiction. Reading vernacular fiction was still a middle- and upper-class phenomenon.55 One might expect that with the accessibility of a new literature based on the spoken language in the May Fourth period, the readership of fiction would have increased dramatically. In fact, the new literature’s association with decadent Western culture may have hampered its initial reception among the audiences for late Qing political, romantic, and adventure fiction. Nevertheless, the publication of Sinking drew immediate attention to both Yu and the Creation Society, it also familiarized the reading public with this new form of self-referential writing, and gave further impetus to narratives in which the writer fictionalizes his experience. On one level, the Creation Society’s fiction exerted a modish appeal for its young urban audience, eager for the kind of intellectual revolution it represented. In its intense subjectivity and introspection, this fiction was perceived as being relentlessly modern and avantgarde. The appeal of this new literature was not merely intellectual but also emotional, and it touched an emotional chord among a certain quarter of society.56 The style and diction of the Creation Society’s works were innovative and reflected their reading of Japanese literature. Edward Gunn, writing about the revolutionary changes in the language of Chinese prose exhibited in the May Fourth period, suggests that there is ample evidence indicating the influence of the Japanese language in Yu Dafu’s writing.57 In fact, Gunn proposes that Yu Dafu may be second only to Lu Xun as an innovative stylist in this period. “Sinking” contains a rich diction related to psychological states and concepts including: “anguish” (kumen), “depression” (yucuzheng), “sensitivity” (ganshouxing), and “subconscious” (yishidao), to name but a few. These new terms were often incorporated untranslated and without explanation into passages such as the following from “Sinking”: At times, while wandering in the mountains, he would come upon a farmer. At such times he would conveniently play the role of Zarathustra, and taking the words spoken by Zarathustra to heart, he would become the farmer. Thus his “megalomania” increased little by little in proportion to his “hypochondria.”58

These new terms were quickly adopted and widely used in the new literature from the 1920s and 1930s.59 These young readers were also attracted to the novelty of the foreign setting of many of these stories, and the unconventional lifestyles

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portrayed therein. Beside occasional attempts by writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Japan Sea to argue for mutual cultural affinities between Japan and China, it seems that for most Chinese of that period, Japan was still the epistemological “other” and Japan, if it held any attraction at all to young Chinese intellectuals, appealed as a society that had already successfully modernized. In this cultural context, the literary portrayal of the self had a particularly poignant appeal. Set in a foreign land, the unconventional lifestyle of the protagonists no doubt seemed at once both familiar and exotic.60 However, along with the attention self-referential fiction received, both critical and popular, it was in no way universally accepted or applauded. Although Yu Dafu received the support of Zhou Zuoren, Zuoren’s older brother Lu Xun remained one of the most vociferous opponents of a form of narrative, which he saw as decadent and selfindulgent. In an essay called “Shanghai wenyi zhi yipie” (A Glance at the Shanghai Literary Scene) and elsewhere, Lu Xun, the most important author of the May Fourth period who produced his own form of subjective narrative, was critical of the Society for foisting its pernicious variety of self-celebratory literature on an audience ill-equipped to judge the relative merits and demerits of this new literature.61 Responding to similar attacks from other critics that his work reflected foreign decadence, Yu Dafu freely admitted the existence of this tendency in his work and cited the instance of erotic elements in traditional Chinese literature as justification for his own experiments in self-referential writing.62 Paula Harrell’s suggestion that the Chinese exchange students in Japan represented an important “transitional generation” intellectually in China holds true for May Fourth period writers as it does for the generation she focuses on.63 For the May Fourth generation of writers who studied in Japan there is clearly a dichotomy between their familiarity with the Chinese literary and scholarly tradition and their reverence for Western literature acquired from the modern-style education they received in Japan. Their ties to the Confucian tradition were as significant to their intellectual development as the flood of intellectual borrowings acquired from the West, which were only partially digested.64 Unlike the students in Japan during the May Fourth era, of the Chinese students who went to study in Japan during the two decades preceding 1919, the majority were relatively mature (already in their late teens and early twenties); they came to the overseas’ experience equipped with a standard education in the Chinese classics and already embracing the values of the Chinese Confucian scholastic

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tradition. For those students, already adequately trained in China’s literary tradition before arriving in Japan, it was easier to make bold pronouncements of a complete break with the values of Chinese literary tradition than actually to execute those changes. For May Fourth writers, the difficulty of disencumbering themselves from the burden of tradition was exacerbated by the existence of Sinophile Japanese intellectuals eager to engage Chinese exchange students in dialogues concerning the great tradition of Chinese letters.65 Chapter 3 will explore ways in which concepts of literary community and the literary coterie imported from Japan helped to foster an environment in which the emergence of fiction of the shishôsetsu variety was made possible.

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3 B U N D A N versus W E N TA N : The Dynamics of the Literary Coterie and Its Audience( s)

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he 1920s represented a period of unparalleled interaction between the Japanese and Chinese literary communities. This interaction was the consequence of a variety of factors including a familiarity on the part of young Chinese writers with the values and concerns of the Taishô literary world obtained while they were exchange students in Japan. On the Japanese side, the desire on the part of certain Japanese writers to meet with their Chinese literary counterparts was reinforced by the reverence accorded traditional Chinese literati culture among Japanese intellectuals and was given further impetus by increased travel opportunities to China in the early modern period. One facet of the legacy of interaction between the two literary communities was the development by Chinese writers of a variety of self-referentiality that reflected the Japanese shishôsetsu. This tendency was accompanied by the absorption of contemporary Japanese values concerning literary community and the conventions of literary journalism. These factors in turn contributed to an environment in China in the 1920s in which new forms of literary self-referentiality could flourish.

The Character of the Taishô Period Bundan and the Appeal of Literary Journalism The Creation Society revealed the acquisition and adaptation of features of the Taishô period bundan (literary community) in the structure of the literary coterie and in the prominent position occupied

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by the coterie magazine in literary production. The bundan of the Taishô period referred to here consisted of the community of writers and critics of “pure literature”1 and the milieu in which literary works were produced, disseminated, and judged. It was in this environment that the Creation Society’s members first envisioned and represented themselves as writers. In this way, the concerns of the Taishô bundan informed their sense of identity as writers. The contemporary Chinese wentan (literary community)2 exhibited many of the same qualities as its Japanese equivalent, including features associated with literary journalism and the sense of itself as an elite institution set apart from society and its mundane concerns. The term bundan, in reference to the modern literary community in Japan, was first used by Tsubouchi Shôyô in his introduction to Ozaki Kôyô’s novel Ni’nin bikuni irozange (The Confession of Two Buddhist Nuns, 1889).3 The literary community of the Meiji period was a hierarchical, guild-like institution manifested in the teacher–apprentice system (totei seido).4 The bundan, as it evolved in the Taishô period, was characterized by a pattern of small, relatively independent groups. This model, which parallels the literary community as it developed in China of the May Fourth period, has been likened to a string of octopus traps by the critic Maruyama Masao.5 Part of this inheritance from the Taishô bundan by the Creation Society was a consciousness of the indissoluble ties between art and life. In making the decision to write, to set out on the path of the modern literati, the Creationists understood that this decision implied a lifelong commitment to literature: life and art would thereafter be inextricably intertwined. The Japanese author Kikuchi Kan (1889–1948), for example, remarked that since art reflects the author’s life, in order to improve one’s writing, the writer had to improve his character.6 In adopting from Japan this propensity toward self-referential fiction, the Creation Society also inherited features of literary journalism from Japan. Literary journalism took many forms during the Taishô period, from literary pages in the major daily newspapers to “members-only” coterie journals. The majority of works of pure literature was produced in small circulation journals for a very specific target audience primarily composed of other writers and persons associated with the bundan. Among those journals produced within the coteries themselves, many were printed in small numbers with excess copies to be circulated among established writers and critics upon whom the coterie members wished to make a favorable impression. These “member magazines” (dô’nin zasshi) proved to be an important testing ground for young writers hoping to establish themselves

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within the bundan.7 The goal of young writers associated with these journals was, after establishing oneself in these small in-house publications, to submit to established literary journals such as Bunshô sekai (Literary World), Subaru (Pleiades), and Shumi (Taste), edited by influential literary figures.8 Of all of the factors that separate the May Fourth literary coteries from traditional Chinese organizational schemes, the central importance attached to publishing and to the coterie journal is paramount. As posited earlier, it is precisely this factor in which the Creation Society and other May Fourth literary coteries resemble the Japanese dô’nin associations of the Taishô period. One of the most significant factors in regard to the Creation Society’s organization and literary activities was its association with the Taidong Shuju, a bookseller and publishing firm located in Shanghai, which employed members of the Society and published both their periodicals and book-length works.9 This intimate working relationship between the Society and the Taidong Shuju mirrored the relationship between the Literary Research Association and the Commercial Press, but also established a pattern that was to be followed by other May Fourth coteries. Like the Taishô models that they resemble, May Fourth period coteries produced a regular periodical, such as the Creation Quarterly, which became the official vehicle for the group’s literary productions. The journal’s function was to serve as the mouthpiece for the society, and it was a showcase for wenxue, in the form of creative works, criticism, and scholarship. Journals were both commodities and the essential medium for literary production during the May Fourth period. Moreover, the May Fourth literary world reflects the notion that such coterie journal production presupposes a “poetics of intimacy and immediacy” in which writers and readers were unified by the regular processes involved in producing and distributing the group’s journal.10 The close, symbiotic relationship between the coterie producing the journal and readers of the journal argues for a mode of reading that focuses on the journal itself in its entirety as the object of study rather than the individual works contained in the journal. Michel Hockx, for example, argues for a “horizontal reading” of journalistic literature in which we consider the entire journal not as a collection of discrete texts but rather as parts of a literary whole, which is most profitably examined as a single work. Only by such a reading, Hockx suggests, will one be able to appreciate contemporary notions of textuality and authorship.11

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The production and distribution of member magazines was merely the most important of a number of activities engaged in by the members of the literary coterie. For example, among the activities of the Shirakaba coterie, one of the largest and best organized of the Taishô literary coteries, there were some not specifically related to the maintenance of the magazine. These included roundtable discussions of famous works of literature and a series of art exhibitions organized by the Society in order to introduce recent trends in Western art and to showcase works produced by the Society’s members.12 The bundan of the Taishô period can be considered a “by-product” of the journalistic milieu, a kind of ongoing literary text to which a variety of writers contributed.13 This milieu, and the exigencies of contributing regularly to a journal, encouraged the production of short works or, alternately, long works in regular installments. The length of these serialized installments thereafter became the de facto length for prose production and influenced the character of the prose produced during the period.14 The production of the small coterie magazines demanded an ongoing, concerted effort on the part of each of the members of the coterie. It also meant that the two spheres of journalism and creative writing were intimately connected in Japan in the Meiji and Taishô periods. This mutual relationship meant that many novelists had their beginnings as journalists and all writers maintained connections with the newspapers and larger circulation magazines such as Taiyô and Chûo kôron in the hope of having their work published and their careers established.

The Role of the Reader in the Production of Taishô Period Self-Referential Fiction The success of the Creation Society’s self-referential fiction, like the contemporary shishôsetsu, was predicated on a certain presumed intimacy between writer and audience. The reader’s trust in the veracity of the narrative, even allowing for the existence of a certain healthy skepticism, was an important aspect of the ascendancy of the form during the Taishô period. Taishô period readers of the shishôsetsu tended to regard the author’s life as the definitive “text” existing behind the individual works. Within the bundan, tidbits of information about the personal lives of the writers were discussed and shared. Works of literature based on presumably biographical events were welcomed and led to inevitable comparisons of the lived experience

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and that experience refracted through the fictional lens.15 In such a literary environment, distinctions between the private person (the writer as individual) and the narrating persona lost significance. The degree to which the Taishô period reader of pure literature had faith in the verity of the shishôsetsu narrative can be illustrated by an incident involving the writer Kikuchi Kan who confessed to fellow writer Uno Kôji how moved his wife had been after reading about the tragic incidents related in Kasai Zenzô’s novel Nakama (The In-Group, 1921). Kan was nonplused when Uno explained that the bulk of that narrative was purely fictional.16 Nevertheless, the incident suggests the extent to which readers mistook the veracity of the shishôsetsu form for verity.17 Both writers and readers of the shishôsetsu were part of the same milieu and were united in contempt for the uninitiated who could understand neither the form nor its conventions.18 The writer of the shishôsetsu was dependent on an inculcated readership, an audience that understood not only the conventions of the form but also a particular author’s mode of representing lived experience and, in the case of an established writer, the corpus of works that preceded the work at hand. Writers and readers of pure literature during the Taishô period shared a consciousness of themselves as a class apart. The orientation in Taishô literature was to portray the writer from the vantage point of the bundan community “insider,” and the reader too was expected to share this sense of estrangement from society and its mercenary values. The self-referentiality that flourished in Taishô Japan had the effect of exposing the vulnerability of the author, and a fascination with discovering the “true author” behind the facade of the protagonist constituted part of the popularity of the form. Possibly to an even greater extent than other narrative styles, the self-referential narrative is predicated on the bond between the author, embodied in the narrator, and the reader. Without the acquiescence of the reader as a “communicative partner” it is impossible for the author to perform these narratological functions.19 For this reason, self-referential literature of the shishôsetsu variety requires an intimate, close-knit literary milieu such as the Taishô bundan.20 The conditions in the May Fourth period wentan, while admittedly different from those of the Japanese bundan, were nevertheless similar enough to permit the Creation Society writers to adopt a selfreferential approach dependent on the reception by a small but loyal and inculcated readership. In regard to readers’ reception of

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Yu Dafu’s epistolary literature, for example, Anna Dolezalová has the following to say: He [Yu] includes obscure details unclear to the uninitiated reader … In all probability Yu was conscious when he wrote these correspondences that they would be published. It is probable that he was aware of the fact that his works would be read by a restricted circle of readers to whom even details from the literary life would be of interest.21

In the functional relationship upon which self-referential fiction is based, the dialogue between the narrator and the implied reader is vital for the success of the narrative.22 In the supposed confession implied by the form, the reader becomes the confidant of the author-narrator in the act of remembering, and the entire readership becomes in essence a community of believers upon whose faith in the authenticity of the work the narrative is grounded. During the May Fourth period, the new literature anticipated a sense of intimacy on the part of the reader toward the writer. The writer Ding Ling, in later reminiscences, describes May Fourth readers in the following way: [They are] students of the petty bourgeois class above high school level. They feel that the writing suits their tastes … perhaps the events reflect their ideals, the characters seem so lovable, partly resemble themselves. They further believe them to be reincarnations of their author, so they fall in love with the author.23

The self-referential fiction of the Creation Society, and the shishôsetsu that it resembles, encourage readers to become active participants in the production as well as interpretation of texts. One commentator suggests that readers of Yu Dafu’s fiction were attracted primarily to the presumed sincerity of the narratives: The authorial self-image that emerges from beneath Yu’s writing brush in his many literary works in the form of his innumerable emotional, romantic protagonists thus causes readers to feel the kinship of a comrade. This “I” (regardless of whether or not he is called Yu Zhifu, Wenpu or some other name) is the most successful aspect of Yu Dafu’s works.24

What this comment suggests is that for Yu Dafu’s narratives, as for the shishôsetsu, the criterion is not simply literary merit but also the perceived sincerity of the narrator.25

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The success of Naturalist works of the late Meiji period set the tone for the popularity of confessional literature during the Taishô period.26 While participating in the production of the text by forging connections between the narrative account and the author’s life, the reader maintained a certain prudent distance. This positioning on the part of the reader, referred to by one commentator as “officially sanctioned voyeurism,” anticipates the reader’s familiarity with the life of the author and a shared perception of confession as the noblest mode of literary expression.27 In order to appreciate fully the diversity in the shishôsetsu form and the permutations it passed through when it was adapted to the circumstances of the Chinese literary world, it must be admitted that while works may have been produced based on certain expectations of audience response, readings surely varied. Any literary text must lend itself to being read in a variety of ways. From the perspective of the Taishô bundan as an interpretive community, one contemporary reader may have found it more difficult than another to extract meaning from a particular novel because his knowledge of various interpretive codes and conventions and particulars of the author’s life was more limited, thereby making the act of reading an “interweaving of anticipation and retrospection.”28 For both the Japanese and Chinese writers of self-referential fiction, the most immediate task at hand was to determine for which target audience a work was being written. The novel, as a genre, can be defined by the problematic relation it creates with its audience. Unlike a community of listeners or spectators, physically present at a musical or dramatic performance, the audience for the fictional narrative is at a remove, each reader separate and distinct, and the author unavailable for immediate feedback. Peter Rabinowitz, in describing the process of writing for an audience, distinguishes between a “narrative audience” for whom the author is writing, and the “authorial audience,” the hypothetical, idealized audience of the author’s imagination, a fiction necessary for production.29 In order to experience a work as the author desires, according to this view, the actual readers must come to share the characteristics of the authorial audience. Reading as the authorial audience is a necessary prerequisite for a consistent audience response. The small size of the literary community of the Taishô period, which encouraged familiarity and gossip, resulted in the association between a writer and his audience and supported a self-referential form grounded in shared values and beliefs. The sense of immediacy between writer and reader in the Taishô period may have benefited from what some scholars see as the essential

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orality of Japanese literature. In the context of Japanese literary criticism, discussions of the relationship between the writer and the reader revolve around the assumption that the Japanese language is by its nature listener- or reader-oriented. This “inscription of orality” in Japanese literature is manifested in the fundamental speaker–hearer paradigm that characterizes modern Japanese narratives.30 This argument further suggests that the speaker–hearer paradigm of modern Japanese fiction allows the reader to stand in an “unmediated relationship” with the world of the text.31 This accords well with the notion of the shishôsetsu as a form requiring a close relationship between narrator and narratee. This conception of the shishôsetsu as a narrative “directly” conveyed to an audience of attentive listeners emphasizes the essential communalism of the bundan. In both writing and reading a shishôsetsu, the expectations of the reader as individual were expected to “merge” with those of the author.32 In the case of the shishôsetsu of the Taishô period, the ability to envision bonds between writer and reader and to see the acts of writing and reading as somehow converging into a single process was facilitated by the small size and sense of shared convictions among the Taishô bundan’s members. The readers’ complicity was instrumental in the production of textual meaning and their anticipated response served to determine the ultimate quality of the narrative performance. In the process of emulating the dynamics of literary relations in Taishô Japan, the Creation Society were able to fashion a new May Fourth model of the wenren (literati). In traditional terms, since the Song Dynasty (960–1279), the term wenren referred to a class of frustrated scholar-officials who were active as painters and writers and who conceived of literary and artistic pursuits as their vocation.33 This traditional conceptualization of the wenren merged with the Taishô period Japanese concept of the bungaku seinen ideal of the young aspiring writer yet to make a name for himself in the literary world. It was the effective marrying of these two ideals that resulted in the May Fourth concept of the wenren. It can be argued that it was the Creation Society who made the status of the modern wenren fashionable.34 The model of the modern wenren embodied in the Creationists was one that drew from the Russian “superfluous man” model, the Japanese bungaku seinen ideal, and the traditional Chinese model of the mingshi, a man of style, whose life was bound up with literary pursuits, the consumption of wine, and romantic conquests.35 This image of the wenren was to affect all of the important literary coteries of the May Fourth era.

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The Taishô Model of the Bungaku Seinen and the Elitist Consciousness Among Writers of “Pure Literature” in Japan and China Bungaku seinen, or “literary youth,” as a cultural ideal during the Taishô period was actually based on a concept developed in Japan by the Bungakkai coterie during the 1890s. The Bungakkai, an affiliation of young, forward-looking writers intoxicated with Romantic idealism, established the model of the bungaku seinen for later generations of Japanese writers. The Creation Society’s founding members and other important May Fourth writers, who were in Japan during the first half of the Taishô period, were heirs to this bungaku seinen ideal. This ideal depicted the writer in league with other sympathetic young authors whose ambitions were tied to the success of the coterie magazine (dô’nin zasshi) around which the coterie’s activities were concentrated. The Creation Society’s founding members, having all spent from four to ten years in Japan, conceived of themselves as bungaku seinen and were heirs to the values of “Taishô Democracy.” Volume Sixteen of Itô Sei’s definitive treatment of the modern Japanese bundan focuses on the inner workings of the Taishô bundan and the life of the bungaku seinen. It was an age of heady optimism in which young people followed the path of the writer with a feverish abandon. The literary departments at Waseda University and Keiô University became the meeting ground for these young writers and older established writer-mentors with whom they could exchange ideas and critiques of one another’s work.36 Literary works of the Taishô period reflect writers’ perceptions of themselves as a privileged class set apart from society. This consciousness is apparent, for example, in Satô Haruo’s novel Den’en no yû’utsu (Rural Melancholy, 1919), in which the disaffected young protagonist’s flight from the capital brings him to rural environs in which his sense of isolation from society is merely exacerbated, as in the following example: In the city he had felt that he was being suffocated, as if he were being crushed by the weight of humanity itself. He had the feeling of being a mere sensory machine. It wasn’t pleasant to contemplate, and left him feeling yet more anxious. Even the bustle of spring around him only left him feeling more lonely. “Ah, on a night like this to fall into a deep slumber in a damp thatched hut in the countryside beneath a lamp with a red shade, a place to settle in and forget about everything …”37

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In the fiction of another representative work of the period, Mushanokoji Saneatsu’s Omedetaki hito (An Innocent, 1910), the protagonist wrestles with his Romantic aspirations, which he sees as more noble than those of his peers. In his unrequited love for a young woman named Tsuru, the protagonist hopes to provide a model of true love to others: No one irked me as much as those who were willing to tread the same path as everybody else and yet put on a show of wisdom while cowering behind their precious “experience.” I wanted to rub their noses in it by presenting them with the ideal marriage and home. I would prove to them that my love was of a completely different nature than theirs; I would demonstrate through the model of love I offered, that love can take various forms, but is in the end eternal and undying.38

The life of the self-professed bungaku seinen was predicated on the young writer’s unshakable faith in these Romantic ideals and involved the acceptance of a life on the fringes of social acceptability. Perceiving themselves as social outcasts, these bungaku seinen naturally assumed that their genius would go largely unrecognized and that they would be forced to produce only in the stifling hothouse atmosphere of the bundan. Poverty stimulated them to write about their most immediate needs and concerns.39 The tendency among writers of “pure literature” during the Taishô period was to convey the consciousness of the writer from the vantage point of the bundan community “insider.” Ironically, these politically disengaged bungaku seinen simultaneously portrayed themselves as an intellectual and moral elite; not merely outside of society, but somehow rising above it and its vulgar concerns. The shared consciousness among writers of themselves as part of an elite group is demonstrated in the following passage from Kasai Zenzô’s story “Akuma” (The Demon, 1915), a work that describes the activities of a literary coterie: Our life is wretched, tormented, miserable. But we are a blessed group because we have our souls and our art. O Lord, O God show us the beauty of total destruction!40

This is a quality shared by the Creation Society and other May Fourth writers. Writers of fiction in the May Fourth period were acutely sensitive to their position in the vanguard of a class of intellectual elite educated abroad. They returned to China with skills that could be applied to China’s modernization. This sense of empowerment

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led the Creation Society’s members to realize that they were no longer on the margins of society. These writers had been encouraged to believe that they belonged to an elite corps of intellectuals charged with a grave responsibility. One of the Creation Society’s founding members, Zheng Boqi, describes the psyche of the returned authors as the “literature of immigrants” (yimin wenxue).41 In the fiction that emerged in the Creation Society’s first period, the characters, and often the narrating “I,” are members of an elite class who have been raised to respect cultural mores, which prove to be increasingly incompatible with their own Western-inspired values and aesthetic vision. The fact that these authors felt separated from their cultural moorings due to years spent abroad further contributed to this consciousness. Moreover, the sense of ethical responsibility they evince as elite members of society added to an overwhelming sense of guilt at the recognition of their political impotence and became an important undercurrent in many of the Society’s early works. In Yu Dafu’s story “Caishiji,” Ya, a friend of the protagonist Huang Zhongze, a young poet struggling to make a name for himself, tries to console his friend by telling him that although the present generation does not appreciate his genius, future generation surely will. Be patient, Zhongze. At the moment, our lives are filled with uncertainty, Nowadays, the majority of people are blind and those who can truly see are few in number: Most people these days have ears but not eyes; they are unable to distinguish the bright from the dull. They are only capable of putting their faith in those who are already well known and great. We will have to wait one hundred years in order to be judged fairly.42

Consequently, they depict themselves in their narratives as rebels, a class estranged from society at large, and the image of the artist/ protagonist is one “left alone in the world, stripped of all normal or communal protection.”43 Like the Taishô period writers with whom they associated, the Chinese writers of the May Fourth period who went abroad were among the first generation to have experienced a largely Western education. The result of this exposure was a more informed, deliberate response to the West than the preceding generation. A new perception of writers in the May Fourth period developed in the 1910s, when readers experienced a new attraction toward their favorite writers as leaders in the development of a new cultural ethos.44

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The elevation of the status of writers in Japan and China could not have taken place had it not been for radically new, Romantic conceptions of the artist and artistic genius.45 In his May 1, 1922 essay entitled “Yiwen sijian” (Personal Views on Art), Yu Dafu reckoned that all literature, and indeed all art, is the product of genius and cannot be measured by any objective standards. The influence of Romanticism is evident in the Society’s creative works as well. A more immediate paradigm was the example of Japanese writers in the Taishô period bundan, including both young writers along with established figures such as Mori Ôgai and Nagai Kafû, who were dissatisfied with the Naturalist approach of the late Meiji period and were seeking new modes of expression. The wentan of the May Fourth Era and the Taishô Period bundan: Parallels and Divergences The most immediate model of group organization for the Creation Society was the Taishô period coterie, but traditional Chinese models of literary organization also exerted an influence on all May Fourth literary coteries. Like other May Fourth coteries, the Creation Society was indebted to traditional conceptualizations of writing as a group. This was particularly true of models from the Qing period, which provided examples of organizational schemes, a range of literary activities, and the division of labor among members. In May Fourth literature, continuity with tradition is found less in the thematic concerns and style of texts and more in the social context for literary production and in ideas of literary community.46 Although literary coteries in China can be traced to the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and earlier, during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) a number of “study clubs” were formed among literary gentlemen (dushu shizi) for the purpose of literary outings or poetic recitation.47 This tradition of literary organization continued into the Qing period, with the influence of Western and Japanese concepts of literary coteries affecting organizations of the late Qing and early Republican periods. It was the Southern Society (Nanshe), active in Shanghai in the 1900s that provided the most immediate native model of group organization for emerging May Fourth literary groups.48 Just as the Taishô bundan is best conceived of in terms of its evolution from the values and concerns of the Meiji bundan rather than as a wholly new institution, so too the May Fourth wentan exhibits features inherited from the wentan of the late Qing and early Republican periods. In the 1900s and 1910s, Chinese writers participated in a

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number of formal and informal associations. Although the concerns of each of these associations might be quite distinct, writers nevertheless shared common perceptions of themselves as writers. They dwelt in the same urban centers and would frequent the same teahouses, wine houses, and theaters. These literary associations during the early 1900s had no formal rules or membership criteria, nor did they cling to specific ideologies, helping them to avoid the antagonisms toward other groups common during the May Fourth period.49 The prototype for these literary groupings and for later May Fourth literary coteries was the Southern Society (Nanshe), which was formed soon after 1900 in Shanghai as a small group of revolutionary and reformist writers whose original orientation was political but which gradually shifted toward aesthetic concerns.50 Su Manshu, associated with members of the Southern Society, whose influence on May Fourth literature has already been noted, formed an important link between the Chinese literary community of the 1900s and the revolutionary new literature to follow. The 1900s also saw the development in China of journalistic practices, inextricably tied to the production of belles-lettres, which had parallels in the contemporary Japanese literary world. The largest publishers during the early 1900s, such as the Commercial Press, were located in Shanghai and produced periodicals as well as books. Among these publications were some, which included popular fiction and magazines that became the most important medium for the dissemination of popular fiction during the late Qing and early Republican periods. These magazines, which included sometimes lavishly illustrated covers and photographs, established a standard of high quality for May Fourth periodicals. One feature of Chinese literary journalism, with a parallel in contemporary Japanese literature, was the penchant for the serialization of longer works. This convention continued in the literature of the May Fourth period in the form of literary supplements in newspapers.51 The May Fourth wentan, centered in Shanghai and Beijing, relied not only on the examples of Western and Japanese literature and their conventions but also inevitably turned to the examples provided by these literary pioneers. May Fourth writers, returned from abroad, did not simply supplant the preexisting literary community but provided a healthy influx of thoughts and ideas. Shanghai of the period was a vibrant, cosmopolitan city, which in its infiltration of Western culture proved to be for these young May Fourth writers a cultural laboratory in which they were able to pursue ideas related to the creation of a new aesthetic vocabulary.

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The Creation Society and other May Fourth coteries diverged in several important ways from late Qing models. I submit that these differences suggest, at least in the Creation Society’s case, the direct influence of the Taishô period bundan. According to Michel Hockx, the May Fourth literary coteries differed from traditional Chinese literary organizations in their professional approach to publishing and editing, the focus on literary production as the central activity of the group, and the detailed by-laws and democratic voting procedure. Furthermore, May Fourth literary organizations exhibited greater levels of professionalism and specialization than traditional models.52 Nevertheless, many ideas concerning literary communalism and in some cases the literary coteries themselves entered the May Fourth scene already intact, having been formed abroad. In this regard, the student political groups formed in Japan in the early modern period were important precursors for May Fourth literary and intellectual associations.53 During his years in Tokyo, for example, before helping found the Creation Society, the dramatist Tian Han was involved in the activities of these Chinese student groups. He attributed the existence of these student groups to the influence of liberalism denoted by the term, “Taishô Democracy.”54 May Fourth period literary coteries often started as loose affiliations of kindred spirits called tongren or tongren jidan with relatively modest initial goals, which eventually expanded into more ambitious organizations referred to by Hockx as “organized societies.”55 Typically, having reached this stage of development, these coteries were supported by a publishing house and announced their existence in a local newspaper by means of an official proclamation and a manifesto of the group’s goals.56 In this model of group affiliation, the May Fourth coteries were greatly indebted to modern Japanese literature’s paradigm of the do’nin coterie to which many May Fourth writers were exposed in Japan. Not only do individual groups in May Fourth China reflect the Taishô dô’nin ideal but the structure and character of the entire wentan literary community reflects the Taishô period bundan. As in the case of the Japanese bundan, in China of the May Fourth period all of the parties involved, readers and writers alike, presumed the existence of the wentan and understood its basic functions and conventions, although its precise parameters remained largely undefined. Leo Ou-fan Lee suggests that it was the Creation Society who largely determined the character of the May Fourth period wentan and propelled the term into widespread use in 1921.57

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Building on organizational experience acquired in Japan, the leading May Fourth literary associations exhibited a maturity and sense of purpose that allowed them to help mold a new vision of literary community. Scholars have been prone to overemphasize the ideological differences between the Literary Research Association and the Creation Society at the expense of recognizing the similarities between the two groups in terms of actual practice. That notwithstanding, scholarship invariably points to the fact that these two groups, whose members had, according to Guo Moruo’s memorable phrase, been “baptized” in Japan, constituted the vanguard of May Fourth literature. The Literary Research Association was officially founded in January, 1921 in Beijing. Its twenty-one members included Zhou Zuoren, Mao Dun, Zheng Zhenduo with the participation and support of Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and others. Their main vehicle was the Xiaoshuo yuebao (Fiction Monthly), a journal produced by the Commercial Press formerly associated with Butterfly Fiction but rechristened with a manifesto setting forth the Association’s goals. These included the desire to write in a fellowship of mutual understanding, to advance the knowledge of Western literature, and to establish a forum for writers dedicated to a lifelong commitment to literature.58 However, these two literary groups were simply the most successful and celebrated of the major urban coteries which by 1917, according to certain estimates, were said to number over one hundred.59 Other notable literary societies that produced journals included the Thread of Words Society (Yusishe) and the Crescent Moon Group (Xinyueshe). The former, founded by Zhou Zuoren early in 1924, composed of Yu Pingbo (1900–1980), Creation Society member Mu Mutian (1900–1981), and others. Less theory-oriented than the Fiction Monthly and other May Fourth literary journals, the periodical they produced contained no articles on the lives of Western writers or news columns, but rather was devoted to translations from Western writers and showcased the works of the Society’s members.60 Like the Thread of Words Society, the Crescent Group produced their magazine in reaction to prevailing trends toward popular literature on the one hand and toward critical writing about Western literature on the other. Their journal, Xinyuekan (The Crescent Monthly) was established in 1928 and also focused on works and translations rather than on scholarly essays. Members included the Society’s founder Xu Zhimo (1896–1931), along with Wen Yiduo (1889–1946), Shen Congwen (1902–1988), and Hu Shi (1891–1962). Xu Zhimo’s poetry was

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based on the models of British Romanticism with which he became familiar while studying in England. His four collections of poetry, published before his tragic death in 1931, helped to establish the taste for introspective and confessional poetic expression among young writers. Nevertheless, it was the Creation Society, formed in 1921, which can be credited with infusing the Chinese literary world with the values of Romanticism. Although the animosity between the Literary Research Association and the Creation Society may be exaggerated, there no doubt existed some organizational and ideological differences between the two, which led to a literary debate concerning the direction that the new literature should take. Although both groups used their coterie journals to introduce creative works of their own, in their advocacy of Western literature the Literary Research Association produced serious, scholarly essays in contrast to the translations and introductory articles of the Creation Society.61 Although each of the literary coterie of the May Fourth period possessed a set of characteristics that was uniquely its own, the Creation Society can be seen as one of the most important prototypes of group affiliation during the period. According to Michel Hockx, the Creation Society developed a set of strategies that was to be emulated by other Chinese coteries in the immediate years to follow, which he refers to as the “underdog strategy.”62 According to this strategy, a new coterie such as the Creation Society, would portray itself as smaller than the existing dominant groups, unmoved by money or fame, and devoted solely to literary concerns.63 This selfportrayal was to guide the Creation Society through the first phase of its existence. Moreover, the Creation Society’s style of organization was particularly suited to a group whose members were not yet established in the wentan and which benefited from an approach that was consciously antitraditional, even aggressively so, and which was able to position itself as somehow different and more avant-garde than existing established coteries. The Creation Society’s success with this approach served to “canonize” this style of literary affiliation and to position it as the preeminent model for literary affiliation during the teens and twenties.64 The Creation Society, in fact, was something of an aberration in the May Fourth wentan in terms of the longevity and the fact that in its ideological orientation it reflected a number of radically different perspectives. Starting as a small aesthetic collective, it gradually developed into a diversified commercial venture with a number of shareholders,

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and in its final stage, in the late 1920s, it was transformed into a partly political and professional organization, which maintained close ties to the Communist Party.65 Significantly, the ideological vision of the Creation Society reflects the predilections of the Japanese literary world to a greater degree than contemporary coteries whose members had also spent time in Japan. In their early dedication to an art-for-art’s sake aesthetic in opposition to the realism of the Literary Research Association, and in their revolt against the moral and aesthetic standards of the existing literary milieu, the Creation Society exhibited the influence of Taishô idealism. Itô Toramaru, reflecting on this complex state of affairs, comments that one legacy of the Society’s popularity in China in the early 1920s was the existence of a “Creation Society–Style Literature” permeated with the values of the Taishô period bundan.66 Despite its advocacy of an art-for-art’s-sake credo, the Society’s stance, both in practice and in its polemics, in no way promoted the absolute separation of art from social and political issues. Cheng Fangwu, one of the ideological spokesmen for the Society, maintained that even an art-for-art’s sake position contained social significance in that writers adopting this stance were charged with providing society at large with a sensitivity to a variety of subtle emotions. According to Cheng’s notion of creativity, the ego (ziwo) of the writer was of fundamental importance; the artist was a moral exemplar and must by nature possess the emotional capacity to be a great artist. The writer’s responsibility, according to this view, extended beyond the mere ability to produce aesthetically pleasing depictions based on one’s lived experience. One also had to exhibit a willingness to criticize the society that had produced that individual. Central to the art-for-art’s sake aesthetic of the early Creation Society was the Romantic belief that all creative work is the product of genius. For instance, Yu Dafu’s essay, “Yiwen sijian” (A Personal View of Literature) states that all literature is the work of genius and cannot be measured by conventional means. This proposition was summarily attacked by Mao Dun in his article, “Chuangzao gei wo de yinxiang” (My Impressions of Creation) in the journal Literary Weekly (Wenxue zhoubao) on May 21, 1922. Guo Moruo’s September 12, 1923 treatise entitled “The Birth of Art,” proposed that talent was a gift from heaven and went on to compare the work of art to a baby issuing from the mother’s womb. As this metaphor makes explicit, the work of art was regarded as a natural creation.67 Like the Shirakaba group, an important Taishô period coterie, the Creation Society was critical of Japanese Naturalism and, in their

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polemics, stressed the validity of individual experience. Like the Shirakaba group, the Creation Society was heir to the culte du moi initiated in Europe by Rousseau. Also, as with the Shirakaba group, the Creation Society members were votaries of Tolstoy and adopted his humanistic values. The Creation Society’s members’ respect for Shirakaba writers such as Mushanokôji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya, and Arishima Takeo was qualified by the fact that they did not share the Shirakaba group’s celebrated indifference toward political issues.68 The initial success of the Creation Society can be attributed in part to the fact that, like the Shirakaba group, the members worked successfully within prescribed roles. Each member was willing to fill a certain niche in the organization and to meet the requirements of that role in order to ensure that the Society could withstand the inevitable fatigue brought upon them by maintaining an intense editorial pace under the most adverse financial and material conditions. Reminiscent of the production of contemporary Japanese literary coterie magazines was the distribution of tasks according to one’s acknowledged forte, with each of the key members ultimately perceived to be a specialist in a certain area of literary production. For example, Yu Dafu and Zhang Ziping became the Society’s most prolific fiction writers; Tian Han was the chief dramatist (until his early departure from the Society); Cheng Fangwu was the resident literary theorist; and Guo Moruo was the group’s chief spokesman, apologist, and poet. Ye Lingfeng, a graduate of the Shanghai College of Fine Arts, designed the covers for the journals produced by the Society.69

Toward a Self-Referential Literature of Social Engagement For both Japanese and Chinese writers and intellectuals during the teens and twenties, literary self-referentiality not only represented a thoroughly modern approach toward addressing questions of modernity but also constituted a vehicle for political and social critique. The writer of pure literature during this period was engaging in an activity that was generally deemed unworthy of his talents and of the educational opportunities that had been afforded him by the state. Under these circumstances, the decision to devote one’s life to writing amounted to nothing less than an act of social and political sabotage— a reckless waste of intellect and opportunities, which ought to have been devoted to the nation-building process. While it must be admitted that both China and Japan traditionally could boast bodies of literature that were introspective and

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autobiographical, neither constituted the narrative mode represented by the shishôsetsu form, a variety of literature that celebrated its own bold exposition of the self. Integral to this narrative approach was the sense of the individual’s needs running counter to the demands of society. Certain values and conventions of the Japanese bundan affected the development of May Fourth literature. The acceptance of the conventions of literary journalism and concepts related to the bundan created a climate in the May Fourth period in which self-referential literature could flourish. Despite some very real differences between the Japanese and Chinese literary communities, genuine similarities in the conditions of the two literary communities contributed to the popularity of self-referential fiction in both Japan and China. In China of the May Fourth period readers were confronted with a variety of new, imported literary forms and aesthetic ideals, but direct knowledge of Western literature was still rather limited. A chief source for understanding the characteristics and conventions of Western literature was Japan, both indirectly through contemporary Japanese literature and directly via Japanese translations of Western writings. The Japanese bundan as the Creation Society members experienced it as marginal insiders, having participated in the production of several small coterie magazines during their university days in Japan, provided a pattern of productive interaction between writers and their audience. In turn, the self-referential fiction that emerged in the Society’s writing was dictated in part by the discourse community that gave rise to it, the rhetorical network in which such a readerdependent form could effectively take root. In China as in Japan, it was the anticipated reception of such self-referential fiction that determined the form’s popularity. The ultimate legacy of the Creation Society’s role in May Fourth literature has yet to be fully assessed. What can be stated with some assurance is that Japanese models for the literary coterie and the coterie magazine provided a structured paradigm for group affiliation, which, even when transplanted into China’s more unsettled and heterogeneous literary world, permitted a firm platform for experimentation and diversification. Although creating a new vernacular literature based on Western models was the ostensible goal of May Fourth writers, the Taishô-style coterie group was the crucible in which this transformation was able to take place.

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4 The Creation Society’s Remaking ˆ SETSU of the S H I S H O

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he transfer of a distinct genre from one national literature to another is a difficult one to measure with any degree of accuracy. Frequently, this difficulty is compounded by the nebulous and often contradictory nature of genre distinctions themselves. Genres, by their very nature, are in a constant state of flux, developing in response to the exigencies of the literary community in which they are produced.1 This is certainly true of the shishôsetsu, a form that was evolving at the very time that the Creation Society was exposed to it. Both the shishôsetsu and Creation Society fiction are dependent on the perception of the narrative as the autobiographical record of the author. One of the intriguing ironies of autobiographical writing is that it is never merely a passive record of an already completed self but rather represents for the writer an integral stage in the lifelong process of self-definition.2 It is also noteworthy that both the shishôsetsu form and the selfreferential fiction of the Creation Society originated as manifestations of the traditional East Asian bias against fiction.3 Concepts of originality in both Japan and China in the early modern era were tempered by the belief that Confucius had limited the idea of authorship to the function of editing for posterity, in opposition to creating unique literary works. This bias can help explain some of the urgency on the part of writers during the period in question to portray themselves not as literary artists alone but also as teachers. In the resulting literary works, writers sought to erase the fiction of their work and to portray them instead as genuine records of lived experience. Contemporary writers’ protestations to the contrary, fictionalization and inventiveness were necessarily employed to sustain

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a narrator’s presentation of self. Writers such as Yu Dafu, who produced narratives recounting crises, were compelled to invent instances of suffering from time to time in order to cast themselves in a light designed to excite the sympathy of his audience.4

The Illusion of Spontaneity and Sincerity in an Ostensibly Confessional Narrative Implicit in the shishôsetsu form is the expectation that the narrative is the bona fide, unadulterated record of the author’s lived experience and therefore is not subject to the artifice that characterizes Western fiction. Moreover, despite the form’s association with modernity and its position in the avant-garde of narrative representation, the air of heartfelt expression demanded by readers of the form in the Taishô period situates it in a lineage that includes the zuihitsu (personal essay), nikki (literary diary), and monogatari (tale literature). Not only is the shishôsetsu to be received as an authentic record in which a one-to-one correspondence between narrative and biographical events is assumed, but the shishôsetsu is also perceived to reflect a “lyrical capacity” that characterizes traditional Japanese prose forms.5 In adopting the shishôsetsu, the Creation Society’s writers also accepted the conventions that applied to the form. These young Chinese writers, recently embarked on their literary careers, also accepted the proposition that a lack of real literary merit in a work could be forgiven if the work appeared to represent the sincere effort of the author to convey lived experience.6 The paradox of an approach that purports to be a sincere record of lived experience and yet so blatantly manipulates and fictionalizes biographical material was not lost on the Creation Society writers. In the stories of Zhang Ziping, for example, such as “Muma” (Hobby Horse, 1922), the narrator calls upon the reader to support authorial intrusions: The owner of the boarding house was named Hayashi. Thereafter, we took to calling him “Old Man Hayashi.” First names in Japan had traditionally been quite superfluous. Names such as “Third son of Inoko” or “Fourth son of Kame” were not only difficult to remember but also lacked panache. “C” had often heard Old Man Hayashi call his daughter “Lucky.” Chances are, her name really was “Lucky.”7

This type of narratorial intrusion, which bolsters the authority of the self-referential narrative, reflects Zhang’s reading of such masters of

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the shishôsetsu form as Shiga Naoya and Kasai Zenzô and underscores the obsession with the narratological reliability of the shishôsetsu.8 The authorial intrusion is a ploy frequently encountered in the shishôsetsu. For example, in Shiga Naoya’s novella Wakai (Reconciliation, 1916) the narrator makes reference to a piece of writing that he is currently working on concerning his relationship with his father, a theme that appears in a number of Shiga’s works including the story “Otsu Junkichi” and in Reconciliation itself: I brought along a piece that had to be finished by August 19. I started writing at about 10:00 in the evening but for some reason I found the material difficult to manage. Finally, after giving it the title “A Visionary” I changed it to “A Dreamer.” I was trying to write about relations with my father from a time six years earlier when I had been living alone in Onomachi. I harbored some pretty unpleasant feelings about my father.9

The self-referential fiction of the Creation Society also employs techniques such as authorial intrusion in order to make a narrative appear unpremeditated and unaffected. In one of his early theoretical pieces, Guo Moruo had stated that while writing he felt as free and impulsive as a “wild horse” and further commented that utilitarian concerns were far from the spirit of true art.10 Like the shishôsetsu, the early fiction of the Creation Society stood in stark contrast to heavily emplotted and cleverly inventive Western fiction. The distinction is one which Stephen Kohl characterizes, in regard to the fiction of Shiga Naoya, as the “literature of experience” manifested in the shishôsetsu as opposed to the “literature of ideas” represented by Western literature. In other words, the writer of the shishôsetsu was attempting to convey the “texture of experience” rather than an ideology or philosophy.11 The Creationists too eschewed architectonic literature in opting for narratives, which, however awkwardly, would convey the “essence” of the experiencing self. Zhang Dinghuang’s “Zhishijie” (Arbor Day, 1926) for example, is less concerned with describing the events resulting in the current financial crisis, which dominates the protagonist’s life and has made him ill, than in providing an unadorned record of a day in his life.12 As one critic says, the shishôsetsu remains, along with the self-referential fiction of the Creation Society, a variety of “art that refuses to acknowledge art.”13 The “veteran reader” of the shishôsetsu avoided passing moral judgment on a work and accepted as an article of faith that a specific narrative reflected the individual writer’s experience. The presumed sincerity of the narrative was another feature of shishôsetsu reading

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inherited by the Creation Society writers and their audience; readers were expected to suspend their disbelief in order to receive these narratives as the incontestable accounts of the activities of the authorprotagonist. Although Guo and Yu and the others in the early fiction of the Creation Society purported to write solely from their own experiences, their readers quickly came to understand that the reality they portrayed merely amounted to one of the many conventions of this new fiction.14 In both shishôsetsu narratives and the self-referential fiction of the Creation Society, the protagonist created by the author constitutes a “second self,” a carefully constructed self-portrait. The verisimilitude of the narrative voice is itself a fiction created by the author and the art of constructing such a narrator is “largely that of mastering all of oneself” in order to project the persona that appears in the fiction.15 Perhaps it is not surprising that the self-referential fiction of the Creation Society flourished in a May Fourth literary environment, which esteemed such forms as epistolary literature and diary literature precisely because they were seen as forms expressive of authentic sentiments.16 Ye Shengtao (1894–1988), writing of the demands of literature of the May Fourth period, echoed the sentiments of Creation Society writers when he said that sincerity is the essential condition for any occupation, especially that of artist.17 Furthermore, the new selfreferential literature and the qualities of spontaneity and sincere expression that it espoused were a conscious reaction against an attenuated classical tradition, promoting the notion that only bold expression and narratives that clearly flaunted tradition could usher in a new age of Chinese belles lettres.18

Manipulating Concepts of Authenticity in “Pure Literature” An understanding of the term “pure literature” in the context of the Taishô period, and its many connotations, is essential for understanding the impact of the shishôsetsu form on the fiction of the Creation Society. Lu Xun was one of the first Chinese writers to appropriate the term pure literature (chun wenxue) from the Japanese literary world and include it in his critical writing. In his essay “Moluo shi li shuo” (On the Power of Mara Poetry), which first appeared in the May and June issues of the periodical Henan in 1908, Lu Xun sought less to define what pure literature was than to describe its effects on its readers, which was, in his estimation, to enlighten while also rousing and

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delighting the audience. He also maintained that a poem was not the poet’s alone but was held in common by all of those who came in contact with it.19 In Lu Xun’s essay, his usage of the term pure literature shows little affinity with the meaning it accrued when applied to the shishôsetsu, nor does it anticipate how the term would be used in the critical writing of the Creation Society. The Society’s conception of pure literature came via the members’ exposure to contemporary Japanese literature while in Japan through literary journals. In these journals, such as Bunshô sekai (Literary World) and Waseda bungaku (Waseda Literature), they had become acquainted with literary theories then in vogue in Japan, and the fiction they sought to create was informed by their perusal of this body of critical writing. For example, Honma Hisao’s “Oshû kindai bungei shichô ron” (Concerning Recent Trends in European Literature) became an important source of knowledge about Western literature for these writers. So important were Honma’s critical writings, in fact, that one of his general works about literary theory, “Bungaku kenkyûhô” (An Approach to Literary Research) was used as a textbook during the 1920s in Chinese secondary schools.20 Another critic whose writing had a profound effect on young May Fourth writers was Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923), the most translated critic in China in the 1920s.21 Although his contributions to literary scholarship are largely forgotten today, Kuriyagawa was an important critic during the Taishô period whose writings about Romanticism had a significant impact on both his Japanese and Chinese contemporaries.22 With his work, “Bungaku shichô ron” (Concerning Literary Trends), Chinese writers were provided with a thorough introduction to a variety of Western literary movements and writers. Kuriyagawa’s theoretical writings revolved around the values of Romanticism and stressed the role of suffering in artistic creation and the importance of the individual artist.23 Kuriyagawa’s endorsement of Romantic values is immediately evident in the following passage from his essay “Kindai no ren’ai kan” (Views on Modern Love): On the other hand, no matter how ideal a romantic match may be, even one at its most feverish pitch is bound not to last. So when a love begins to lose its luster it is best that those involved should part and seek a new love; maintaining a loveless relationship will only cause both parties to suffer.24

It was Kuriyagawa’s celebration of values associated with Romanticism, including intensely personal expressions of individualism

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that found an audience among young Chinese intellectuals in the May Fourth era. One commentator proposes that “Sinking” by Yu Dafu, which is often compared with Satô Haruo’s Rural Melancholy, owes an equal debt to Yu’s familiarity with the critical writing of Kuriyagawa.25 In his essay “Kumon no shôchô” (Symbols of Sorrow, 1921), Kuriyagawa stated that the inner demands of the artist are an expression of one’s life. In this same essay he also proposed that the expression of individuality constitutes the creative life.26 The Creation Society’s adaptation of the shishôsetsu form suggests that they saw in self-referential literature an opportunity to express truths, which would serve society. Just as Lu Xun had abandoned his early medical studies in Japan in order to produce literary works that could heal China’s greater spiritual ills, Guo too put aside his medical studies in order to pursue literature as one avenue for serving society.27 However, Guo’s celebrated “conversion” to Marxism in the mid1920s was accompanied by a repudiation of both “pure literature” and of the self-referential literature that was its vehicle.28 Precisely what impact Guo’s repudiation of his earlier self-referential literature had on the Creation Society’s subsequent production and on Chinese literature in general is an issue that is addressed in chapter 5. Given the irony of a form of fiction proclaiming itself to be the “sincere” and “authoritative” record of the author-protagonist’s lived experience, perhaps it is not surprising that the presentation of the protagonist is the most distinctive element of the shishôsetsu narrative. In Yu Dafu’s fiction the tortured, alienated, often-paranoid protagonists and the desperate, self-deprecating narrative voice established in the collection Sinking (1921) became trademarks of his fiction and continued to characterize his works until the end. There is little physical description in his work and very little dramatic conflict—his works depict the emotional and psychological changes of urbane, well-educated protagonists who are trying to reinhabit a world to which they are returning after an extended, dislocating absence. In Yu’s story “Caishiji” (Caishiji, 1922), for example, the protagonist Huang is a sensitive young poet who composes lyrics while thinking of a woman he loved when living in the city seven years earlier. Much of the wistfulness and sense of frustration and anxiety that characterize Yu’s works are the result of the reacclimatizing process that his protagonists undergo upon returning home from afar. In “Caishiji,” Huang thinks back to the man he was seven years earlier: He considered his present mental state. Comparing himself today with the man he had been seven years ago, he seemed at that time to have

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been merely like a clump of fragrant grasses bowing beneath the warm spring sun. At that juncture he was about to complete his schooling and infinite hopes had danced before his eyes. “And now to have become so mediocre,” he mumbled to himself, thinking about his current status. Inevitably, he began to feel sorry for himself.29

As this brief passage demonstrates, the narrative voice in Yu’s fiction is confident and urbane but also occasionally exhibits vulnerability. It was apparently this perceived air of vulnerability that his readers were drawn to as proof of the sincerity of his narratives. Guo compared Yu’s writing to a spring breeze, which “intoxicated” the literary world.30 The figure of the author in Yu’s works, as with representative writers of the shishôsetsu, is a presence that seems always to be lurking behind the “second self” embodied in the authorial persona. The narrator in a work of fiction is, according to Wayne Booth, a “unified, coherent and transcendental subjectivity” that stands just outside of the text.31 The perceived necessity of associating the protagonist with the author in self-referential fiction adds to the image of the author as accessible and the narrative itself as a variety of performance evolving from text to text. May Fourth literature was seen as a platform for self-expression, and no Chinese writer of that period was able to package a more polished, consistent self-portrait than Yu Dafu.32 In compact narratives, he was able to concentrate on self-presentation and to eschew lengthy description and dialogues in order to leave room for the musings of his self-absorbed protagonists—making his works appear to constitute compact interior monologues as in the following example from Yu’s story “Fengling” (Wind Chime): My life to this point has been a history of failure, and when I look back I am left with nothing but tears and sighs. Until a few years ago, I still took some small solace in this suffering because I was as yet clinging to my dreams, but now I have no heart to enjoy this “sweet bitterness.”33

Yu’s method of self-presentation, in which a modicum of plot, and loosely developed characterization and dramatic conflict provide merely a backdrop for the monologue of the narrator, creates an impression of the narrating subject as fissured and unfinished. Moreover, Yu’s tendency to undercut his protagonists’ sentimental views of themselves serves, as I shall demonstrate, to amplify the basic absurdity of his self-image.34

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Reading Yu Dafu’s “Caishiji” as S HISHÔSETSU The self-referential fiction of the Creation Society under consideration possesses qualities that suggest affinities with the contemporary Japanese shishôsetsu. Yu Dafu’s 1923 story “Caishiji,” for example, in its approach to characterization, narration, and plot development demonstrates features reflecting the shishôsetsu. “Caishiji,” which is summarized in appendix A, is a fictional treatment of events in the life of the Qing period poet Huang Zhongze (1749–1783).35 It revolves around his pilgrimage to the grave of the Tang poet Li Bai in the village of Caishiji in Anhui Province. The protagonist, who grapples not only with unsympathetic, myopic critics but also with an unnamed malady, is the quintessential articulation of the Yu Dafu hero: misunderstood, lonely, bitter, drunken, ill, lyrical, persecuted, and prone to narcissistic self-absorption. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist is described in the following manner: From the time that he was little, Huang Zhongze had been acutely sensitive, and having reached the age of twenty-three he was now incapable of changing his character or of ridding himself of feelings of loneliness and self-doubt.36

Not only is the protagonist described as a loner, separated from all but a handful of sympathetic friends, he is also depicted as suffering from paranoia and a persecution complex. The colleagues with whom he lived together at the school called him crazy behind his back, but when they came face-to-face with him, they were genuinely unnerved.37

The approach to characterization in this story parallels that of contemporary Japanese shishôsetsu authors. Numerous critics have cited Yu’s indebtedness to European Romanticism and to the “superfluous man” protagonist of nineteenth-century Russian literature in the realization of his drunken, alienated heroes, but affinities with Japanese novelists such as Kasai Zenzô are less-often cited.38 Kasai’s protagonists, too, wallow in self-absorption and fits of drunken insecurity while fighting for the recognition that they feel they deserve. For instance, the protagonist in Kasai’s story “Kanashiki chichi” (An Unhappy Father, 1912) is described in this way: No matter what direction the life of this solitary man took he remained lonely and apprehensive. Moreover, he again found himself unhappy. “Unhappy father”—that is how he came to refer to himself.39

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The self in the shishôsetsu is identified by its separation and withdrawal from society, and “society” largely remains an opaque background to the action of the narrative, which is limited to the protagonist’s interaction with a small cohort of supporting characters.40 In “Caishiji,” Huang stands at a critical remove from society, able to communicate with only a few trusted friends. This detachment from society is both painful and humiliating but in a sense is the inevitable result of the protagonist’s increasingly antisocial behavior. Other than Hong Zhicun and Zhu Gong, there was no one with whom [Huang] could speak for more than half an hour. Whenever he met someone for the first time, those who could understand him would say of him that he was arrogant and difficult to get along with; those who could not understand him would simply say that he was totally bereft of learning and was dependent on Zhu Gong’s prestige and power. Due to his irascibility, his reputation and that of his friends worsened year-by-year, and the melancholy which had assailed him since childhood began to deepen.41

The protagonist is not merely the focal point of the narrative, but the portrayal of the protagonist in situations involving a dearth of social interaction defines the shishôsetsu narrative and can be observed in “Caishiji” and other Creation Society stories. In such a narrative scheme, characters other than the protagonist are not fully realized and often amount to mere complements or foils to the protagonist. Interactions between the protagonist and supporting characters also do not constitute dialogues but rather simply create opportunities for the protagonist to pontificate on various topics. Dialogues are transformed, in Yu’s early fiction as well, into “compact, interior monologues.”42 Although dialogues appear frequently in “Caishiji,” they are not characterized by the give-and-take, the communicative function of conversation. Rather, the few supporting characters with whom Huang deigns to speak provide commentary for the protagonist’s ruminations and initiate his observations and critiques. In the following scene Zhongze, who is battling illness, is visited by his friend Yacun: Zhongze listened to his friend’s words and then he raised his tear-filled eyes and looked at Yacun. After a brief pause, he said, “Yacun, my head is pounding.” After he said that, he silently bowed his head and while pacing back-and-forth he again addressed Yacun. “Yacun, I’m afraid of getting sicker. I’ve been running around all day, and I’m extremely worn out. I’m afraid that when I come to

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In the story, Zhongze often plays the role of the mentor in this manner, dispensing wisdom or issuing directives to his younger protégés, while in fact remaining dependent on these same friends. While Yacun and his friends defend Zhongze from the barbs and insults of his critics, they also act as intermediaries between the protagonist and the audience; their comments and questions serve to interpret Zhongze’s actions (and nonactions) to the audience. Another significant quality of “Caishiji” that reflects one of the characteristics of the shishôsetsu is the portrayal of the protagonist himself. If the supporting characters are not clearly delineated, the protagonist too remains at a remove from the reader. One of the telling ironies of the shishôsetsu is that despite the centrality of the individual protagonist and the “narcissistic absorption” with the figure of the protagonist, he often remains to the reader an elusive figure.44 Not only does Yu’s mode of characterization in “Caishiji” parallel the characterization in the Japanese shishôsetsu, but the narrative structure and presentational style also reveal affinities with the shishôsetsu form. The use of a third-person point of view, for example, while unique neither to the shishôsetsu nor to Yu’s fiction, is handled in “Caishiji” in such a way as to underscore similarities between the protagonist and the author and suggests a familiarity with the conventions of the shishôsetsu. In “Caishiji,” Yu adopts a third-person approach in his selfportrayal, appropriating the figure of the poet Huang Zhongze as a literary surrogate for the author. After the protagonist is introduced at the beginning of the story, he is generally referred to thereafter using the third-person pronoun ta. One of the linguistic features of the shishôsetsu singled out by Edward Fowler and other critics as noteworthy is the use of the third-person pronoun kare in many of these narratives of the self. Fowler notes that the third-person kare, and the feminine equivalent kanojo, have a “far more circumscribed denotation” in Meiji and Taishô literature than do the English “he” and “she.” In this type of narrative, kare is restricted to a single character, the protagonist, and is best thought of as a proper noun.45 One of the major linguistic changes in May Fourth literature was the expanded use of the third-person pronoun in which, for the first time, particular, gender-specific hanzi characters for “he” and “she” came into regular use.46 The Creation Society writers widely use the

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third person in regard to the protagonist in their self-referential fiction, and their usage generally follows Japanese conventions in the strict association of the third-person referent with the narrator.47 In “Caishiji,” references to the protagonist Huang Zhongze by the third-person pronoun ta serve to distance the association between the protagonist and the historical figure of the poet while enabling the reader to strengthen associations between “he” and the author Yu Dafu. The following passage appears near the climax of the story as the protagonist makes his way to the grave of the poet Li Bai: His extreme state of excitement caused him to shed tears. As he pressed onward, the path narrowed and the various trees and shrubs by the side of the path began to increase little by little. Having apparently already walked for about a half an hour, he went down a little green mountain path. On a steep grassy path he encountered two children cutting firewood and singing a song of the mountains while shouldering their loads of firewood on their way down the path.48

The extended use of the third-person pronoun in this passage, and throughout the story, serves to weaken the association of the protagonist with the historical figure of the poet and allows the reader to see the protagonist’s emotional response to the visit to Li Bai’s grave as that of Yu himself. It also encourages the reader to read the poems that follow as Yu’s poems. The use of the third-person point of view in autobiographical fiction creates a narrative detachment that allows for a number of intriguing perspectives on the protagonist’s actions.49 In “Caishiji,” as in Yu’s other early stories, the narrator stands at an epistemological distance from the protagonist, but through narratological intrusions, he enters and reenters the “spiritual and mental field” of the protagonist.50 Most interesting of these narratological intrusions in “Caishiji” is the profusion of poetry scattered throughout the narrative. Yu was recognized during his day as an accomplished poet in the classical style and although the poems interspersed throughout the story are those of the poet Huang, the focus is on the process of artistic creation rather than the poems themselves. Yu is offering glimpses of his own struggle to compose a poem making the narrative, on one level, a vehicle for Yu the poet.51 For instance, after reciting four lüshi style poems that were contained in a notebook, the protagonist Zhongze, considers his life to that point: Three years after that in the city of Yangzhou, while visiting at a local temple, he saw a young girl strolling together with a man of about

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This passage precedes four more of the protagonist’s poems. These poems, along with the others in the narrative, reestablish the association between the protagonist and Yu. In “Caishiji,” as in a number of Yu’s stories, the act of writing itself is a critical feature of the plot. This too is a quality held in common with fiction of the Taishô period. There is the well-known example of Shiga Naoya’s narratorial intrusion in his story “Kinosaki nite” (At Kinosaki, 1917) to his earlier work, “Han no hanzai” (Han’s Crime, 1913), in which he refers to the other story and goes as far as to summarize the earlier story and offer an alternate ending.53 Another example is the ending of Kasai Zenzô’s “Kanashiki chichi” (Unhappy Father, 1919) in which the protagonist turns at the end of the story to literature as a means of escape from the emptiness and tedium of his current circumstances. The ice pack which he had been using was empty and now hung on the wall. On the small desk by the window was a glass bowl in which several goldfish glided around silently. In the silence he turned back to the poem he was writing . . . 54

In both Japanese and Chinese literature of the period, protagonists are often engaged in the acts of reading and writing. What characters do with texts and what texts do with them becomes a critical convention of the plot.55 Moreover, the fact that protagonists are involved in literary activities allows readers to forge more easily a connection between the protagonist and the author looming behind his work. The central feature of the shishôsetsu is the unique narrative voice. The distinctive narrative voice that Yu Dafu established in “Caishiji” and elsewhere is the most remarkable quality of his fiction and it is this, which most suggests parallels with the Japanese shishôsetsu. Yu developed a narrative style that proved to be an effective vehicle in fostering a new, revolutionary mode of narrative discourse of the self in Chinese letters. In this respect, not only does he exhibit parallels with the Japanese shishôsetsu writers but also with contemporary Chinese writers such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun who also found in the concentration of “rhetorical power” in one voice an effective means of gaining leverage against the preponderance of traditional modes of narration.56

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Another quality of Yu’s fiction that suggests associations with the shishôsetsu is the approach to plot development. The shishôsetsu as a form is characterized by a diffuse, open-ended plot. In Yu’s stories, as evidenced by the descriptions in appendix A, plot is not nearly as important an element as are style and the development of a distinctive, identifiable narrative voice. The focus on the presentational style in this type of narrative, the attention spent on creating a recognizable narrative voice, comes at the expense of plot development. It is this quality of style over content that makes the form difficult to grasp for those unaccustomed to this type of narrative and somewhat opaque for the uninitiated reader. Some commentators suggest that with the shishôsetsu we are not dealing with narrative literature at all. Edward Fowler, for example, suggests that with the shishôsetsu, as with premodern Japanese prose forms, we are in the presence of a “performative” mode. The flow of the narrative in such forms is constantly disrupted in order to redirect the reader’s attention toward the narrating subject.57 As outlined, the plot of “Caishiji” merely amounts to Huang Zhongze’s visit to the grave of the poet Li Bai and his attempts to prove his literary prowess to both his friends and critics. The protagonist wrestles with a number of conflicts both internal and external: he fights for acknowledgment of his literary talents while combating physical illness and his own professional and personal insecurities.58 Just as the plot of the shishôsetsu generally has no clear structure or denouement, neither does it exhibit the careful organizational scheme or dramatic tension of Western fiction. The stories tend to be fragmented, and the lack of a lucidly articulated architectonic structure suggests a certain insouciance toward plot development and organization. The lack of attention to narrative detail is the product of a writing style that favors a distinctive narrative voice: telling a good story was less critical a concern than the presumed authenticity of the voice telling the story.59 The existence of a persuasive authorial voice is simply the most prominent of several areas in which Yu Dafu’s “Caishiji” fulfills the generic code of the shishôsetsu. As in the shishôsetsu, in “Caishiji” Yu utilizes autobiographical and historical material to create and maintain a fictional reality. The following is said of Kasai Zenzô but applies to Yu Dafu as well: Kasai was by no means committed to recording the events of his life as they had actually happened. He took an interest only in the event and the part of himself that conformed to his artistic predilection.60

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The dislocated, persecuted protagonist who emerges in “Caishiji” and other stories by Yu is a figure of the imagination loosely modeled on the author himself. Huang Zhongze is best thought of as a scrupulously altered version of Yu Dafu or, in another sense, as a consciously distorted self-portrait. The story may incorporate autobiographical information, but such incidents are portrayed in such a way as to provide, in many cases, a fictionalized, amplified version of the author himself—not Yu, but the “Yu hero.”61 The personal life and the artistic re-creation of the life formed a unity in which a “reciprocal influence” was at work, with the lines of demarcation between the two constantly blurred.62 This projection of a likeness of the authorial self (often a disparaging portrayal) can be seen, for example, in the scene in which Huang the poet is described in the following grandiose manner: Among those who listened to him speak, if anybody opposed what he had to say, whether they expressed lack of agreement through a smirk or via their gaze, he would defend his position vehemently and would pontificate until his eyes bulged out and he looked like something that had just flown in from Mars.63

The implication of constructing a fictional self is that it becomes, through repetition, recognizable to the reader. Yu’s stories had to pass the same acid test as the shishôsetsu; the protagonist is a recognizable, though distorted portrait of the author. The only way that recognizability could be achieved was through a presentation style made familiar from previous texts. The existence of “sibling texts,” as one commentator refers to those texts that are closely related to the text in question, allows for the development of an immediately recognizable protagonist-cum-author.64 Individual works by shishôsetsu authors, and certainly “Caishiji,” can be read without recourse to other works of fiction by the author, but one’s reception of a work is conditioned by familiarity with other works by that author. The authorial self, refracted in the protagonists of other works by the author, demonstrates subtle variations that only an initiated reader would understand and appreciate. Yu, like the finest shishôsetsu authors, understood the appeal of the form for his readers and would alter the situations and perspectives of his characters in relatively discrete ways in order to pique the interest of an audience of contemporary readers concerned with identifying those areas in which various works in his oeuvre both parallel and differ from one another.65

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Directed to an audience of “initiated,” informed readers, “Caishiji” demonstrates those features that are critical to the form’s generic code: it presents a protagonist intended to be associated with the author who remains distant but whose voice is distinctive and recognizable; the narrative includes didactic dialogues and metanarratological features, which help to strengthen connections between author and protagonist, and its plot is loose and disjointed. “Caishiji” is one example of a number of such stories among the early works of the Creation Society, including others summarized in appendix A, which exhibit critical features associated with the shishôsetsu.

The Case of Guo Moruo’s “Halfway” Like “Caishiji,” Guo Moruo’s 1922 story “Weiyang” (Halfway) possesses qualities that reflect the generic conventions of the contemporary Japanese shishôsetsu.66 As with many of the early Creationist stories, “Halfway” is set in Japan, and the protagonist, Aimou, a Chinese student, is clearly modeled on the author himself. “Halfway,” which is also summarized in appendix A, is the story of a father’s concern for his sons who were born and raised in a small Japanese fishing village and who, Aimou fears, will face increasing prejudice as they grow up. The narrative juxtaposes Aimou’s present concerns for his sons with memories of his own youth in China and contrasts the complexity of the present state of affairs with the comparative simplicity and certainty of his childhood. After describing the father’s attempts to pacify his crying son, we learn that Aimou suffers from a nervous disposition and a chronic hearing problem that has plagued him since his youth. The latter half of the story portrays Aimou’s youth in Sichuan province as ideal, and the protagonist longs for those halcyon days. While admiring a Millet print that adorns his study, Aimou compares himself with the Han period hero Su Wu who, taken prisoner by the Huns when acting as an ambassador, was forced to tend sheep in the North for nineteen years. When he finally returned to his home village it had changed so dramatically that he neither recognized nor was recognized by anyone. Aimou wonders if this also will be his fate. After further glimpses into Aimou’s youth, which are contrasted with an unsatisfying present, Aimou has a dream in which he imagines how different his life would have been had he stayed and married the local girl his parents had urged him to marry rather than starting a family with a Japanese woman in this small village far from his

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home. In the end, his wife wakens him from his reveries, and he is forced once again to face the harshness of his present circumstances. The most intriguing feature of “Halfway” is the manner in which it counterpoises the present and a largely idealized past in order to dramatize the severity of the protagonist’s current circumstances as a Chinese in Japan. Like many Taishô period shishôsetsu, “Halfway” revolves around a crisis. However, in “Halfway” the crisis is not only personal, it is also racial and revolves around the protagonist’s distress about his son’s well-being and his growing apprehension about staying in Japan. The protagonist’s crisis is expressed in metaphorical terms of an illness, the nervous disorder and hearing impairment, which Aimou has borne since the age of seventeen. Finally and most importantly, the entire orientation of the narrative is inward: the author’s interactions with others and the dialogues merely serve to delineate more clearly the author’s own subjectivity, and the mode of presentation is a more significant feature of the work than is plot development. It is interesting to note how deftly Guo weaves together biographical fact and fictional elements in the narrative performance. A year or two prior to the founding of the Creation Society, Guo Moruo, who was studying at the University of Kyushu, entered into a commonlaw marriage with a nurse by the name of Satô Tomoko. She eventually bore him five children (including the two boys in the story) whom she raised in Kyushu while Guo continued his medical studies and embarked on his literary career. This relationship and the strains produced by this marriage to a Japanese women during a time of increasing tensions between the two countries was revisited in several other works. For example, Guo’s story “Can chun” (Lingering Spring), which appeared in the summer 1922 issue of Creation, is the depiction of two Chinese friends, Liang and Jia, who are studying in Japan. While visiting Jia in the hospital, Liang, who is a medical student, meets and falls in love with the nurse attending to his friend. The two later marry and have two sons, which complicates Liang’s desire to return to China.67 A more interesting depiction of Guo’s family life in Japan, for historical reasons, is a 1938 story by Satô Haruo called “Ajia no ko” (Children of Asia), which tells of a character named Zhu married to a woman named Aiko and living with their two sons in Japan. The story is a powerful indictment of the turncoat politics of Zhu and his friend Chen (Yu Dafu), and its appearance in the 1938 edition of Nippon Hyôron infuriated both Guo and Yu Dafu and effectively ended the relationship between Satô and the two Chinese writers.68 In the case of “Halfway,” both style and content suggest the influence of the shishôsetsu. The crisis portrayed in “Halfway” is both

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personal and ideological. While stewing over concerns for his sons’ happiness, Aimou also attempts to rationalize to himself his reasons for being in Japan and the desire to return to the home he had left behind. “In a gentle voice he turned to his son and said, ‘Son, Daddy’s home is far across the sea. Wait until you grow a little and I’ll take you there.’ ”69 This promise seems less a means of pacifying his crying son than it is a way to mollify his own increasing sense of alienation. It is interesting to note that in this narrative, the reader does not encounter the signs of real material poverty and dependency on drinking that are so common in the shishôsetsu’s descriptions of crisis and self-persecution or in Yu Dafu’s self-referential fiction. In the case of many shishôsetsu, the crisis around which the story is centered is merely exacerbated by the negligence and irresponsibility of the protagonist. The ambivalence that Aimou feels about raising sons in Japan, and his sense of responsibility to alleviate that crisis, is complicated by his physical ailments. The portrayal of the protagonist as a victim not only of social but also physical circumstances beyond his control is a quality reminiscent of a number of contemporary shishôsetsu.70 In the following passage the reader is apprised of Aimou’s physical condition, which adds to the burden of anxiety about his sons: At times, he had to endure his sons’ whimpers of hunger. Aimou’s nervous condition, which had been bad to begin with, had turned for the worse, and his mind was muddled due to a lack of sleep and his vision was clouded. His ears too, those same ears which had been damaged during a serious illness at the age of seventeen, had become a chronic problem for him. He often experienced a ringing in his ears which made it painful to listen, and he feared that this condition might result in a permanent loss of hearing.71

The protagonist’s illness complicates his ability to fulfill his duties as father and husband, but also adds special poignancy to his struggle toward self-understanding. The Taishô period shishôsetsu offers a number of examples of stories in which the emotional or physical illness of the protagonist is integrated into the narrative of self-revelation. In Shiga Naoya’s “At Kinosaki” the injury sustained on a subway platform in Tokyo becomes the impetus for the first-person narrator’s musings on death at the hot springs where he has come to convalesce. In Satô Haruo’s Rural Melancholy, the disease that afflicts the roses in the garden of the protagonist’s rented home reflects his increasing emotional instability and neurosis. In Kasai Zenzô’s later stories such as “Jakusha” (The Weakling, 1925) and “Suikyôsha no dokuhaku” (Monologue of

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a Drunken Lunatic, 1927), we are confronted with a protagonist who is destroying himself with drink in order to relieve the pain of a nervous condition and rapidly worsening tuberculosis.72 Although illness or injury affects each of these protagonists in different ways, in all cases it makes the protagonist seem more vulnerable and sympathetic—a victim of inexorable fate. The crisis in “Halfway” underscores the author’s sense of vulnerability at being Chinese in Japan in a time of increasing tensions, but it is also a familial crisis. Aimou is concerned for his sons’ sake. Although his ruminations focus on his sons’ happiness and do not extend to concerns for his wife, there remains the implication of regret for having become involved in this relationship in Japan in disregard of his parents’ wishes that he marry a girl from his hometown. At one point, he recites a couplet that states that when one marries one walks out the door never to return again, only to spend one’s remaining days wishing to return home. After comparing the circumstances that he and his wife now confront with those faced by legendary lovers from the past who also defied separation, Aimou considers the following: He felt that the distance that now separated him from his wife was very great, and he feared that life for them had become just like the one stated in the couplet he had been thinking about a few moments earlier. How pitiful! Oh, how pitiful!73

The entire discourse of family and marriage, so central to this narrative, also plays an important role in the shishôsetsu. Although the portrayal of the family will change from writer to writer and indeed from work to work, there are certain common elements in the conception of the family for these writers.74 Family circumstances and issues concerning family are affected by the fact that the entire orientation is toward the protagonist; everything that we know of the family’s structure and the particulars of their circumstances come via the protagonist’s point of view, serving to reinforce the univocal nature of the narrative.75 In shishôsetsu treating familial issues, wife and children are both the cause of the travails faced by the protagonist as well as the immediate reason for the struggle to seek resolution of the crisis. They are to be pitied as the victims of the protagonist’s neglect and financial and professional ineptitude. Thus they are often depicted as an additional burden in the protagonist’s attempt to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty, illness, self-abuse, and professional failure.

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Kasai Zenzô’s story “Ko o tsurete” (With Children on My Hands, 1918) describes the events in the author’s life from the previous year. Due to increasing debts, the protagonist sends his wife to the countryside to try to raise some funds, while he stays with their two children in Tokyo. After several days, with no money forthcoming from his wife, he and his children are evicted from their lodgings. After wandering around in search of another place to stay, they finally arrive at the home of one of his remaining friends. Although the landlord is reluctant to allow them to stay, he finally submits out of sympathy for the children, and the story ends with the protagonist regretting having dragged his children into his misery.76 In the case of “Halfway,” concerns of the author for his family are also pecuniary: he worries about his ability to feed and care for them properly on a student’s stipend, and although he promises to return with them to his homeland, he realizes that he is not in a position to do that now and would be ashamed anyway to return in his current financial straits. Pecuniary worries are the source of the crisis in a number of Creation Society stories including several summarized in appendix A. As with the shishôsetsu, “Halfway” narrates all experience through the consciousness of the protagonist and the action is thus limited. This reduction of the action of the narrative to that which is experienced in the consciousness of the protagonist leads to the sense of the shishôsetsu as a means of self-cultivation and the writing of this type of narrative as an act of “purification” that affects not only the writer but also the reader.77 Nevertheless, race is clearly an important subtext in this narrative and questions about belonging and integration are at the heart of the protagonist’s concerns for his sons. It is difficult to think of any Japanese shishôsetsu in which issues of race play a prominent place at all. In the course of the shishôsetsu narrative, the consciousness of the protagonist becomes the locus of individual perception and the veracity of the self-portrait serves to authenticate the narrative.78 The absence of a palpable external reality in the portrayal of a character presumably engrossed in important familial and social issues creates a sense of “narrative claustrophobia.”79 In the case of “Halfway,” the protagonist is ostensibly wrestling with concerns for his children while reevaluating his ambivalence about living in Japan, and yet no details about his current circumstances are revealed; we are asked to sympathize with the “plight” of the protagonist without ever being apprised of the particulars of that “plight.” As with “Caishiji” and representative Taishô period Japanese shishôsetsu, “Halfway” is a narrative in which the authentic voice of the

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authorial protagonist is a more important component of the narrative than is the development of an interesting, clearly delineated plot. There is little linear narrative development in “Halfway.” We are informed of the protagonist’s concerns for his sons and are provided with a brief description of their current circumstances. Thereafter, via a series of flashbacks, we are introduced to the protagonist’s childhood circumstances and are encouraged to contrast the largely idyllic youth of the protagonist with the tenuous position faced by his sons in this society that he fears will never readily accept them. The use of flashback in “Halfway” seems to constitute a way to compensate for the lack of narrative development in the story. Even in the more vivid descriptions provided in these flashback sequences, there is scarcely a dramatic incident and characters are barely sketched. For example, in a scene in which the protagonist remembers a teacher from his youth, an idealistic young teacher who had a profound impact on the protagonist as a boy, we learn almost nothing about any specific qualities of the young teacher. Instead, during a description of an outing the two took together we witness the emotional development of the protagonist as he learns to trust and begins to look upon the teacher as his mentor. In the shishôsestu variety of self-referentiality more important than developing an ingenious, emplotted narrative is providing a suitable vehicle for the musings of the author. In “Halfway,” the absence of clearly delineated plot development is offset by impressionistic descriptions of the protagonist’s youth and his current circumstances and by the narrator’s meditations on a variety of issues, which serve to acquaint us with the authentic voice of the author-protagonist. The following passage provides a glimpse of the protagonist in his study in which we are able to perceive his intellectual and artistic predilections along with certain character traits: There were a number of large, thick tomes among other books with exquisitely conceived red and green covers. Simply by examining these books one would recognize that here was a person with a Romantic character, but also a person who had lost his focus and was as bifurcated as an amphibian. After adjusting his gaze, Aimou paused and looked at length at his books, but could still find no stimulation there.80

Such glimpses into the character of the protagonist serve to authenticate the descriptions and musings that follow. If the perceived sincerity of the narrative voice is one of the most significant hallmarks of this type of self-referential narrative, such descriptions also provide a portrait of the authorial self, necessary for us to establish authenticity.

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The plot of “Halfway” meanders from one flashback to another and finally to a dream of the past before finally returning to the narrative present where the author must again confront the hopelessness of his circumstances. Just as there is little linear plot development in “Halfway” so too there is no lucid denouement. In a frame-like fashion, the narrative simply returns to its starting point. There is no resolution. The crisis articulated in the story’s opening paragraph remains a source of consternation for the protagonist, and he remains no closer to finding a means to provide for his sons the stability and sense of belonging that he knew as a child growing up in China but which, in his mind, they lack.

Conclusions: The Inevitability of Fiction As conveyed in the quotation from Patricia Meyer Spacks that opened chapter 2, just as one can say that all fiction is essentially autobiographical, all autobiography too can be said to represent an act of narrative selection and embellishment that calls into question traditional generic distinctions. Despite the shishôsetsu form’s claim to authenticity and authorial reliability, fictionalization is integral and inevitable. The generic convention of reading the work as “authentic” was adopted by the Creation Society writers, but like the shishôsetsu, which they resemble, the Society’s narratives reveal their fictionality upon closer examination. The goal of the shishôsetsu writer was verisimilitude. The shishôsetsu narrative creates a reality of its own, a “fictional reality” tailored to readers’ expectations.81 In the case of the Creation Society, the extent to which autobiographical events are transformed in fictional texts can be seen in the work of Yu Dafu, who occasionally referred to the same autobiographical event in several works. The treatment of these events, if compared across the narratives, exhibits varying degrees of fictionalization. The indebtedness of the early fiction of the Creation Society to the shishôsetsu lay precisely in its assimilation of several of the more compelling and unique features of the Japanese form. In particular, these revolve around the acceptance of the connotations of “pure literature”: the presentation of fictional narratives as sincere, unadulterated distillations of the author’s lived experiences, and the accompanying creation and maintenance of an authorial persona—a “second self”—which stood in ironic juxtaposition to the author. As in the case of the shishôsetsu, the irony of such autobiographical representation was not lost on its young, educated readership, who were willing accomplices to this narrative deception, cognizant of the

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innovation and gamesmanship necessary to invent an alternate version of the self. In May Fourth China, as in Taishô Japan, the tendency toward self-presentation in literature was seen not only as the highest form of pure literature but was also perceived to be a most modern mode of narrative discourse. In China, the form was applauded not only for its presumed ability to challenge and expand the limits of contemporary culture, as it was in Japan, but as a form that could be employed to reform society itself.

5 The Limits of Subversion: Political and Social Critique in the Creation Society’s Early Fiction

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he two Creation Society stories examined in chapter 4, “Caishiji” and “Halfway,” provide examples of the relatively subtle ways in which Creation Society writers embedded criticism of contemporary Chinese society in their self-referential narratives. A consideration of several, more orthodox examples of self-referential stories by the Creation Society reveals an even greater degree of social criticism and even more conclusive evidence of the manner in which the shishôsetsu was transformed beneath the pens of the Creationists into a flexible tool for probing deficiencies of contemporary China and condemning anti-Chinese attitudes and official policies in Japan. This chapter presents three early Creation Society stories for examination. Each of these stories, which include Zhang Ziping’s “Yiban rongyuan de shenghuo” (Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings), and Yu Dafu’s two stories “Qingyan” (Blue Smoke) and “Zhongtu” (In the Middle), combine self-referentiality with some manner of political or social criticism. While exemplifying the defining qualities of the Society’s early fiction, these stories demonstrate the selfreferential narrative’s capacity for social criticism, a potential not explored by the Japanese writers of the shishôsetsu. At the same time, these stories also reveal the limitations of self-referential fiction for the larger project of political critique and social reform. In the hands of the Creationists, the confessional narrative became the vehicle for expressing the political conscience of the May Fourth

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generation of writers educated abroad. The self in these narratives becomes the site for contesting issues of nationhood, culture and, most significantly, race. The attention given to these issues ranged from the subtly veiled protest of authority in the historical narrative “Caishiji” to the powerful metaphorical treatment of social entropy and China’s political infirmity in Yu Dafu’s “Sinking.” However, the majority of Creation Society stories reflect a compromise in terms of representation of social and political protest. The three stories under examination in this chapter offer further examples of the manner in which political critique was integrated into the Creation Society’s early fiction. The goal of chapter 4 was to demonstrate how Creation Society fiction reflects the indebtedness to the generic conventions of the shishôsetsu. However, even while focusing on these parallels, stark differences also become apparent. One senses, when reading examples of the early fiction of the Creation Society, that these young writers found the shishôsetsu form both liberating and constricting. It was liberating to the degree that it allowed them to explore and expose their individual concerns in a vernacular style that was self-consciously avant-garde. On the other hand, their increasing sense of mission to use fiction as a tool for social reform, left them increasingly dissatisfied with a form that, by its very nature, was forever turning inward to focus, in voyeuristic fashion, on the subjectivity of the thinly veiled author-cum-protagonist. This subjective imperative eventually was to prove too great a burden for the Creationists, but at least in the early fiction, the admixture of self-referentiality and the desire for political and social critique produced some fascinating results. Because these stories represent the marriage of these contending demands, they display, in dramatic fashion, the strengths and weaknesses of self-referential fiction. The differences between the manifestations of self-referential literature of the Creation Society and the Japanese shishôsetsu can be explained in part by differences in the social background of the writers. Taishô writers were bungaku seinen who were discouraged by the authoritarianism of prewar Japan from active social engagement and concentrated instead primarily on literary pursuits. The young Creation Society writers in Japan looked to their homeland and felt drawn to the revolutionary fervor of the era, sensing the need to follow the national impulse.1 This difference in the conceptions of the writer and of selfreferentiality in the two literary worlds can be described in a variety of ways. Essentially, it amounted to a difference in the conception of the authorial “I” and the duty of the writer to represent oneself as

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a voice of social conscience. Japanese writers of pure literature felt no compunction to represent anything other than the individual “I,” with no responsibilities beyond representing the author’s subjective concerns. On the other hand, May Fourth writers felt an obligation to represent a greater public “I” in order to address a variety of public concerns via the introspection of the self-referential narrative.2 The Creationists were merely realizing a potential to challenge the social order that is inherent in all self-referential writing. James Stull, in commenting on the capacity of autobiographical writing to reach out beyond the circumscribed world of the individual, suggests that autobiographical writing can either provide an affirmation of community or a “symbolic challenge to the social order.”3 In a sense, the self-referential fiction of the Creation Society does both, although it is the latter capacity that is explored in this chapter. The Taishô period practitioners of the shishôsetsu, on the other hand, while producing narratives that reflect the values of the class of writers of pure literature, eschewed overt social commentary. One of the factors that contributed to the dramatic alteration of the shishôsetsu form in the hands of the Creationists was as simple a matter as setting. The stories under consideration, all produced between 1920 and 1924, are either set in Japan or in a China that welcomed the returning writer after years of study in Japan. Defining the protagonist vis-à-vis either the foreign society in which he is dwelling or the drastically changed society to which he returns, constitutes a critical feature of nearly all these stories and consequently affects the act of self-exposition. The Creationists pushed self-referentiality to its limits by endeavoring to be as intensely introspective and brazenly open as the Japanese shishôsetsu writers while simultaneously attempting to give expression to the larger national issue of trying to contribute to a society buffeted by unsettling changes.4 The balancing act required by these two often-contentious requirements was no small feat and often involved negotiating an uneasy truce between exhibitionism and social protest. How each of these writers manipulated these conflicting concerns depended largely on the propensities of the particular writer, but also involved the quality of the experience being described and the institution or set of values being challenged. The objects of critique in the early Creation Society stories are as varied as the settings of these narratives. Nevertheless, an examination of a representative sampling of early Creation Society stories suggests that the targets of criticism fall into several identifiable categories. Prominent among these categories are stories that criticize Chinese

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society and the vestiges of traditional culture, those that indict Japanese political policies and social attitudes toward the Chinese, and a small number of stories that directly protest Western Imperialism and the excesses of Capitalism. It should come as no surprise, in fact, that a number of these stories aim their criticisms in more than one direction. For example, while Guo Moruo addresses the protest in “Halfway” toward Japanese society in regard to Japanese attitudes toward the Chinese living among them, he also directs the critical gaze of the protagonist homeward toward China as well. While he contrasts an idealized youth spent in China with the hardships his sons are presently experiencing in Japan, he also admits that his privileged youth was a “fairy-tale world” (tonghua li de shijie) far removed from the sordid reality of contemporary China.5 As representative examples of the fiction under discussion, the objects of criticism in the stories being considered in this chapter include such issues as Japanese political and educational policies, social attitudes toward the Chinese among the Japanese, social conditions in China and the laggard pace of political and social change in China, and Western Imperialism and Capitalism. Just as the correlation between Creation Society fiction and the Japanese shishôsetsu was established in chapter 4, my readings of the three stories in this chapter are intended to reveal how the Creationists cultivated a fiction that transcended the generic code of the shishôsetsu. The resultant form possesses a decidedly different flavor than the Japanese original.

Innocents Abroad: Zhang Ziping’s “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” Zhang Ziping’s “Yiban rongyuan de shenghuo” (Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings, 1922) is summarized in appendix A along with the other two stories considered in this chapter.6 The story revolves around the daily lives of a group of Chinese students in Tokyo and provides the most vivid portrait of the daily struggles of Chinese students in Japan among the Creation Society’s fiction. Moreover, it offers a scathing indictment of both the Chinese government’s policies concerning its students studying abroad and the inflexibility of Japanese university officials to provide academic supervision and social support for these students. “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” describes the circumstances of a student simply known as “C” (the first initial of the author Zhang’s name according to the contemporary romanization

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system) and his fellow students. The story details the activities and concerns of the students and conveys the economic situation of Chinese students in Japan and their dependence on measly government stipends. The action revolves around the question of what happens when the stipends are delayed and the various attempts on the part of the students to redress their situation. In the process of narrating the economic straits of the Chinese students, the ineptitude of the Chinese authorities to support their students abroad and the arrogance and lack of human warmth on the part of the Japanese officials and school authorities entrusted with caring for the Chinese students are targeted for criticism. Having studied as many as ten years in Japan, it was inevitable that the routines and concerns of the Chinese student abroad should have become literary fodder in the Creationist’s early self-referential narratives. Besides Yu Dafu’s well-known story “Sinking” (1921), other examples of Creation Society stories set in the student days in Japan include Zhang Ziping’s “Muma” (Hobby Horse, 1922) about a student’s search for suitable housing and his relationship with a poor family in Tokyo’s slums. Tao Jingsun’s “Muxi” (Osmanthus, 1922) tells of a Chinese student studying in Tokyo who falls in love with a female teacher who has helped him overcome some of the prejudice he faces at school. Just as the two seem on the verge of publicly affirming their love for one another, the young teacher mysteriously dies while visiting her family in the country. Aside from “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings,” the most interesting and vivid portrayal of the life of the Chinese students in Japan is Zheng Boqi’s story “Zuichu zhi ke” (The First Day of Class), which appeared in the first issue of the Creation Quarterly in 1921.7 What makes “The First Day of Class” so significant is that it is the only story among the early fiction of the Creation Society to focus on the prejudice faced by Chinese students in the classroom itself, and provides vivid descriptions of the arrogance and supercilious attitudes directed at Chinese students by Japanese classmates and teachers. Nevertheless, “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” is a more richly developed narrative than any of the aforementioned stories and provides a fascinating portrayal of the various aspects of the Chinese student experience in Japan in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it depicts the economic duress under which Chinese students existed and the plethora of reactions toward penury and prejudice on the part of the Chinese students, ranging from mild acquiescence to active protest. The contention, made by Theodore Huters, that all modern Chinese writing is essentially a “literature of resistance” is no more

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evident than in this body of stories describing the Chinese student experience in Japan.8 The material and financial deprivations that the students in the story are forced to undergo are apparent in the following passage which appears early in the story describing the protagonist’s attempts to economize on the cost of food by curtailing his morning meal. A few weeks passed. C discovered yet another way to save three copper pieces. He found that whether he ate one piece of the government ration bread or two, the effect on his sense of fullness was about the same, so recently he had taken to eating only one piece.9

Although his friends ridicule him for his thriftiness and despite constantly arguing with his landlady about late rent, he is determined to economize in any possible way in order to muddle through until the promised government stipend arrives. The inability of the Chinese government to support its students in Japan, the officiousness and lack of flexibility on the part of Japanese bureaucrats and school officials, and the generally negative images of the Chinese on the part of Japanese society itself are all presented in dramatic fashion in this story. One senses that, on the whole, this narrative offers an accurate account of the tribulations of Chinese students as marginalized, occasionally vilified, members of Japanese society. Chinese students were dispatched to Japan in fairly large numbers in the first decade of the twentieth century, reaching a high of twelve thousand in 1906. In 1912, at a time when the first Creation Society members arrived in Japan, the figures had dwindled to fourteen hundred but they began to increase again in the late teens when this story was set.10 In a sense, the phenomenon of Chinese students in Japan can be characterized, as it has been by Paula Harrell, as the “first systematic large-scale study abroad program.”11 Although a certain number of these students were privately funded, the majority came to Japan supported by central government or provincial government scholarships administered by directors dispatched from China and local officials. Furthermore, officials at the Japanese schools themselves were involved in the actual supervision of the students, and thus there were ample opportunities along this long chain of command for incompetence, inefficiency, and corruption. The students’ day-to-day existence was thus as perilous and frustrating, presumably, as this story suggests. One of the strengths of “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” is its vivid characterization. Each of the varied cast of students reflects

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a particular position in regard to economic privations and each responds differently to the challenges of the overseas study experience. While the protagonist C remains politically engaged and represents those students who have taken it upon themselves to obtain the money due to them, others among his acquaintances react differently. For instance, C meets with his friend and they discuss a mutual friend who spends his meager stipend on a drinking habit while neglecting his wife and child. This leads C to consider the special plight of married students and the particular challenges that they face. Another classmate, Yan, is described as a bright student studying at prestigious Meiji University who can write Japanese elegantly but has no confidence in his spoken ability and carries a notebook wherever he goes in order to communicate with his Japanese hosts. Another student named L, who has a speech impediment that hampers his social interaction with the Japanese, comes to C for advice about a girl. Finally, there is a student named Zhang who along with C goes to demand an advance on their stipend from the director. Differences among students’ levels of political engagement and propensity for protest can be discerned from the following exchange between C and Yan. C has become dejected as a result of his communications with Chinese authorities, and Yan tries to buoy his friend’s hopes. Yan said, “As long as our country has even a flicker of life left we all have an obligation to try and rescue it. At the moment, among the Association’s membership in Tokyo there is only Y, S and you. I believe that there is still a need to go out and make appeals, even though we don’t have the cachet of a political party. As for China’s needs right now, all we have to fear is a lack of people, not a lack of money.”12

The foremost object of criticism in this story is not any individual policy or person but rather Japan itself and the attitudes of the Japanese. The contemptuous and condescending attitudes toward the Chinese on the part of the Japanese that we encounter in this and other Creation Society stories reflect a significant about-face from the traditional position of reverence toward China in premodern Japan. In particular, attitudes toward the Chinese as backward and traditionbound were the product of Japan’s victory over China in the SinoJapanese War of 1895, and these negative images extended to the Chinese students residing in Japan as well.13 One significant factor in relations between Chinese students and their hosts was that the students’ “social adaptability” was never taken

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into account. How a student adjusted to the new environment was apparently of little concern to anyone involved in the supervision of the Chinese overseas students.14 Such direction as existed took the form of a modicum of guidance provided by the Chinese legation and student-produced handbooks that began to appear in the decade before the Creationists’ arrival in Japan and included bits of advice and information, especially pertaining to the do’s and don’ts of living in Japan.15 The picture that emerges in “Lives of a Group of Good-forNothings,” and other Creation Society stories about student life in Japan, is that the Chinese students were not only not encouraged, they were actively discouraged from interacting with the Japanese among whom they lived and studied. This made them tentative about revealing themselves as Chinese, as can be inferred from the description of the aforementioned student who was so self-conscious about his spoken Japanese that he preferred to communicate via pencil and paper. Another example of insecurity fed by Japanese contempt in this story is the passage in which C and his friend Zhang are on a train on their way to ask the authorities for a loan until their stipends arrive, and they are too self-conscious to speak Chinese in front of the other passengers: “On the train, the two [Zhang and C] sat down and closed their eyes and said nothing. C remembered that Zhang had this phobia: he didn’t like to speak Chinese in front of the Japanese.”16 Descriptions of such unfortunate circumstances are balanced in the narrative by instances of Japanese who do make an effort to reach out to Chinese students. There is a warm description, for example, of an elderly Japanese widow who has opened up a small restaurant that serves inexpensive, simple Chinese dishes to a clientele composed mostly of Chinese students. The most severe criticisms in this story, however, are reserved for those authorities, both Japanese and Chinese, who conspire to contribute to the misery of the Chinese students. The students depicted in the story anxiously await their monthly stipend, which is overdue and ultimately insufficient. Everywhere they turn in order to receive a loan or have their stipend increased they are rebuffed, and the tension and sense of futility accumulates in dramatic fashion as they search for any available means of temporary relief. C and the other students try first to contact the Chinese Division of Education directly. Because they didn’t know how much of an increase in their stipend to expect, they sent off a number of telegrams to the Division of

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Education, but all were ignored. The students receiving government stipends could not but curse the Division of Education for their indifference. However, rumor had it that the Division was also straining each month just to maintain the status quo, and the number of scholarship students was admittedly enormous.17

When C and his friend W turn to the Japanese professor who is responsible for providing support and guidance, they are again disappointed. Professor Y, who is notorious for his condescending attitude toward the Chinese students in his charge, confronts the two with an article written by a group of Chinese students demanding an increase in their monthly stipend. Before he dismisses them, he urges them to avoid political involvement and to concentrate instead on their studies. Unable to protest to their professor, C and W can only contemplate the arguments they are powerless to make. “The government treats us like a bunch of good-for-nothings, and wants to be rid of us as soon as possible,” W had been tempted to say but checked himself. C also felt that the Chinese government was cowardly for not daring to bring the stipend students home. If only they could get the students to return, they could muster several battalions to contribute to China’s influence.18

C then considers his own situation as a government scholarship student dispatched by his province in the south, and he laments the rift that has developed between the Chinese students from the south and those from the north, which contributes to their inability to wield any real power in negotiations with authorities. Nevertheless, as a student activist, C pins his hopes on the influence of the Youth Association (Qingnianhui), the most prominent of a number of student organizations that were formed and operated in Japan in the first two decades of the twentieth century. These groups were hotbeds of political activity and fought for the rights of Chinese students in Japan. There were a variety of Chinese student groups active in Japan during these decades including the Youth Society, which was formed in 1902, the Promote Determination Society, the Chinese Student Union (Zhongguo liuxuesheng huiguan), which represented an amalgam of several student organizations, and such provincial organizations as the Jiangsu Society and the Hunan Translation Society.19 These organizations served as centers of social interaction and political discussion, along with translation and scholarly exchange.20 Certainly, their most important function seems to have been as social

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clubs in which Chinese students attending a variety of academic institutions in Japan could meet and exchange information and simply escape, at least momentarily, from the generally hostile and uninviting environment they experienced in Japan. Tian Han, for example, was active as a student leader in these organizations while in Japan and quickly became involved in political circles upon his return to China.21 It was really the function of these organizations as centers of political agitation that is emphasized in “Lives of a Group of Goodfor-Nothings.” When discussing what steps the stipend students might take to seek redress for their concerns, Yan says to C, “ ‘Well then, we should organize an advance meeting before next week’s Youth Society meeting.’ As Yan was about to leave he exhorted C several more times to make sure he attended that meeting.”22 While preparing for the upcoming student group meeting, C and another student named Zhang decide to call on the director of government-sponsored students in order to request a loan of money until their stipends arrive. The director, who is speaking with a law professor when the students arrive, does not attempt to hide his displeasure when they come in. The two students, whose pride makes them reluctant to have to kowtow before the director for money, nevertheless swallow their pride and explain their situation. C tries to impart the dire nature of their financial circumstances: “Sir, we are being driven to death here! Frankly speaking, we are here about a loan. We have sent any number of telegraphs to the provincial government but have yet to receive a reply, and we don’t know if next month’s stipend will be sent out or not.” The Director could lend to one or two students, but with three, four, five, ten, twenty students requesting loans, one could imagine that the Director was in difficult straits also.23

After three hours of supplications, the director finally concedes to advance the two students fifteen yen, with five going to C and ten going to the married Zhang. On the way back, the two take the less expensive private train line rather than the municipal line because they calculate that were they to take the municipal line they would end up using most of the advance on the train ride itself. In the end, after visiting his friend F, whose tastes tend toward the extravagant, C has already used up the five yen lent to him and his economic prospects are again bleak. The Chinese student in the late Meiji and Taishô periods not only had to contend with layers of entrenched bureaucracy, both Chinese

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and Japanese, he had to endure the condescending attitudes of the Japanese as well. Furthermore, he had to adapt to customs and policies that often made attention to studies themselves a trying proposition. The school narrative was intended to appeal to its readers on several levels. As foreign students, they were in a most tenuous, vulnerable position while in Japan, and bore the full brunt of Japanese social injustices. Government scholarship students in particular were at the mercy of sudden policy changes and the caprices of the chain of command that provided them with their stipend money each month. The years in Japan coincided with a period in their lives when they were becoming increasingly cognizant, via involvement in student groups, of their duties toward the homeland as an educated elite, and of the power that they could potentially wield upon their return. It was also, in many cases, their first taste of personal freedom. This confluence of social awareness and individual freedom quite naturally resulted in narratives that focus on individual experience while offering implicit criticism of social and political institutions. “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” describes the situation of overseas students in all its complexity. The self-referential narrative merely provides the starting point for engaging issues of social reform, racial identity, and national consciousness, questions that are explored in stories which revolve around the return to Japan and attempts to reacclimatize to a dramatically altered China.

The Price of Genius: Yu Dafu’s “Blue Smoke” While studying abroad, the Creationists imagined an alternative “China” that was not necessarily reflective of the realities of contemporary China.24 It was in some measure the China that they remembered from their youth, a China steeped in tradition and characterized by ethical and social stability. Moreover, when viewed from a distance and through the lens of time, the China they envisioned also bore the promise of change and a smooth transition into modernity. The China that these young writers discovered upon their return from years in Japan in many ways stood in stark contrast to the one they had anticipated. “Qingyan” (Blue Smoke, 1922) dramatizes the process of repatriation and demonstrates Yu’s genius for establishing a mood of selfscrutiny and self-loathing against the backdrop of criticism of Chinese society.25 We again encounter a protagonist who has “tasted bitterness” and feels trapped in a web of circumstances that does not allow

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him room to express the genius that he is convinced he possesses but which remains undiscovered by the world. In due course, Yu criticizes not only China’s policy shortcomings but also the vestiges of Western Imperialism, which he encounters in the China to which he returns. “Blue Smoke” is in many ways typical of Yu Dafu’s stories about the experience of repatriation after years of study in Japan. The firstperson narrator conceives of himself as a spokesman for his generation of dispossessed intellectuals. The narrative essentially describes his peripatetic musings on several summer evenings, first in a major city and later in the hometown to which he has returned after many years away. The story’s melancholic mood provides the backdrop for the protagonist’s wistful meditations on the pathetic remnants of a society incapable of the changes needed to modernize. Like all of Yu’s most successful stories, “Blue Smoke” depends on a formula that places a higher premium on mood than on a welldeveloped plot. Moreover, the first-person protagonist stands in as the embodiment of the values of Yu himself.26 His aimlessness in nights of dejected wandering at once mimics and satirizes the lack of direction of Chinese society. And yet what holds the narrative together is not a carefully circumscribed plot, but rather the lyricism that is at the heart of the shishôsetsu, which Yu exploited and manipulated so adroitly.27 Yu was able to subvert the shishôsetsu form and present his social protest with such aplomb because he managed the conventions of the form so well. This necessitated establishing authority in the narrative by creating a “sincere” narrator who would appeal to his readership. Yu clung to the principle, throughout the vicissitudes of his career, that the first-person narrative was best suited for dissecting the self.28 As a result, the authorial “I” becomes in his narratives the vehicle for critiquing social and political institutions. Stories such as “Blue Smoke” were intended to appeal to the young May Fourth readership both as avant-garde narratives of the self and as subversive narratives of political protest. Yu tailored his stories to meet these two manifestly dissimilar, sometimes contending, demands. Yu was at pains to fulfill both of these sets of criteria and in his essay “Wenxue shang de jiezhi dozhang” (The Class Struggle in Literature, 1923) he stated emphatically that he believed that art and life were inextricably connected, and that literature had an obligatory social function.29 The relationship between May Fourth writers and readers underscores the indissoluble relationship between author and readers in which both are “culturally-produced producers of texts” who share a common set of values and beliefs.30 In the May Fourth period, both contributed to a taste for literature that exposed the individual and reflected concepts of social melioration.

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“Blue Smoke” takes as the objects of its protest both Western Imperialism and the failings of an atrophied and feeble Chinese society, hobbled by tradition and lethargy. The narrating subject is portrayed in the manner of the protagonists in a number of Yu’s narratives, with “Caishiji” as the most celebrated example, as a misunderstood genius. The fact that society is incapable of recognizing his considerable talents and acumen then adds a certain ironic poignancy to his observations among readers who themselves felt misunderstood by May Fourth society. The precedent for Yu’s self-conceptualization of the protagonist in “Blue Smoke” as a misunderstood impresario can be traced back to the depictions of writers of Butterfly Fiction in the late Qing period. The writers associated with the Butterfly movement in the 1910s portrayed themselves as sickly, grief-stricken individuals whose talents and even genius remain unnoticed and unappreciated by their contemporaries.31 Not only did Yu and other members of the Creation Society adopt the essentially Romantic ideal of the individual genius as misunderstood, but they also conceptualized the individual of talent as a rebel. Guo Moruo, in fact, conveyed the image of the true creative artist as both a genius and, by nature, a revolutionary.32 Such an individual, as embodied in the protagonist of “Blue Smoke” can be understood and appreciated by only a few discerning individuals. There were friends who were pretty familiar with my character who said, “What you are feeling is Toska [Russian for “anxiety”], which is what everybody in China is feeling these days.” If only, I thought, I possessed a myriad mind, I would already have become a Shakespeare.33

The protagonist’s alienation leaves him somehow out of step with his contemporaries. He experiences toska, a modern anxiety, but needs a Shakespearean “myriad mind” to overcome it. Moreover, he is depicted as one having the misfortune of being born in a time and place in which his talents are destined to go unrecognized. My brothers remarked, “Ah, you are to be pitied! To be born just at this juncture in history, this time of upheaval. No wonder you are depressed all the time. If you go up north, there is nothing for you; if you go down south there is no respite. Your anxiety is only to be expected. It would have been better had you been born twenty years earlier or twenty years later.”34

What is being criticized is not tradition per se, but rather the current state of affairs in China. Moreover, the story protests the languid

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pace of social change and the haphazard manner in which those changes have been implemented. The protagonist lays much of the blame on the capitalist class, but also reserves special contempt for those in the press who have chosen not to recognize his true worth and have slandered him in the newspapers. The musings of the narrator allow Yu to critique tradition without rejecting it; they allow him to endorse modernism while indicting the excesses of Capitalism. The critique of Chinese society is accompanied by a more pointed assault on Western Imperialism and Capitalism, which complicate China’s ability to modernize. The protagonist perceives the excesses of Capitalism all around him. He becomes overwhelmed by the consciousness of China’s inability to protect itself and by the apparent inevitability of his homeland’s capitulation to the West. When confronted by a friend with the possibility of China perishing as a sovereign nation and being ruled in perpetuity by the Imperialist nations, Yu momentarily gives in to his sense of despair. If the nation were to perish, so what? Wasn’t Sienkiewicz, who lost his country, a dynamic figure of his generation? Aren’t there fellow countrymen of mine walking this world without a care? If the nation were to perish, so what? Might it not be better if foreigners came in to rule us?35

Soon after that, he recants this pessimistic view, but the frustration that characterizes this passage is reflective of the mood that suffuses this entire piece. The narrator’s critiques of the inadequacies of Chinese social reform and the evils of Western Imperialism in “Blue Smoke” are articulated in the form of a series of conundrums. The juxtaposition of such dichotomies as China versus the West, aesthetic production versus social activism, tradition versus modernity, and urban life versus rural life provide the ground for the protagonist’s critiques, but they also reflect Yu’s complex relationship with each of these issues. The protagonist’s experience with the West via his education and its manifestations in the foreign concessions in the cities with which he has had contact have cast him into a bitter love–hate relationship with the West. His admiration for the West is demonstrated through his references to Western culture such as the ones to Shakespeare and the novelist Sienkiewicz quoted earlier. For the protagonist, and indeed for Yu, Western culture provides an aesthetic point of reference against which to measure his own creative efforts. For Yu Dafu and the other writers of his generation, urban centers with a foreign presence, particularly Shanghai, were places where one

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could experience the forbidden flavors of Western culture, but they were also physical manifestations of China’s colonial humiliation. The foreign concessions in Shanghai, for example, served as “aesthetic laboratories” for May Fourth writers.36 Yu Dafu, Zheng Boqi, and other recently returned Creation Society writers found in Shanghai expressions of the West that they had only hitherto encountered in texts. Zheng later recounted how he and Yu would go to the foreign concessions and wander along both the wide avenues such as the Avenue Joffre in the French Concession, but also the smaller side streets searching for aesthetic stimulation and a taste of the forbidden.37 In the night of wandering described in the first section of “Blue Smoke,” the allure of the foreign concessions can be felt even from the distance of his small room, but he realizes that he remains firmly separated from their exotic pleasures. In the distance he could hear the honking of automobile horns. More than likely, these were the salutations of the young Western capitalists, men and women, returning from an evening in the lewd dance halls. Alas, for those pleasures one needed to possess experience, a handsome face, and, of course, money.38

As he lights a cigarette and looks at his own face reflected in the darkened mirror, he realizes that he does not meet the requirements to be welcomed into that world. The ambivalence that the protagonist feels toward the West as represented in the foreign concessions in the city gives way quite naturally to a sense of uncertainty toward the hometown to which he returns in the second half of the story entitled “A Phantom.” The return to the small provincial city, which is his hometown, allows the protagonist to turn his critical gaze away from the West and homeward toward the residue of tradition that he finds in his hometown, which now appears to him to be merely a faded example of the place he remembered from his childhood. In keeping with the mood of the piece, it is already dark when the protagonist arrives in his hometown, with a full moon casting an ominous light over locales remembered from his youth. Actually, we learn that the author has arrived here in the evening only after a long afternoon’s walk. He goes first to a quiet corner of the small provincial city to seek refreshment and a place for quiet reflection after his long walk. He enters a small inn and encounters a woman working there. This encounter with another character, the only such encounter to appear in this story, is interesting for what it reveals about traditional society

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but also for what it reveals about the protagonist’s capacity for genuine human sympathy. The two discuss her situation and her status in a traditional family. We learn through their conversation that she is all that remains of the family that owns and runs this shop. Various members of her immediate family have either died or moved off to such major cities as Tianjing and Beijing. Her husband too abandoned her nearly twenty years earlier, leaving her alone to run the inn. With no further support and with no prospects for remarriage, the protagonist sees her as a victim of the strong traditional values, which still hold sway outside of the major metropolitan areas. Not only has the woman been abandoned by her family, she is now stigmatized by society for being abandoned.39 The protagonist sympathizes with her as a fellow victim. For her part too, the woman senses in the protagonist something of a kindred spirit, as one who has also tasted suffering. He spoke these last words gloomily and hadn’t finished speaking, so the woman followed him out. For a short time she looked at his retreating figure in the moonlight. As she watched his shadow becoming smaller with each step and heard the sounds of his sobs becoming more distant, tears fell from her eyes to her cheeks as well.40

Ultimately, this encounter, and the ambivalence that the first-person narrator feels about traditional China in opposition to the West, and between tradition and modernity, lead him back to his original dilemma—what should be the role, if any, of the writer in regard to social and political reform? This is, of course, the question explored in a great number of works under discussion in this study and reflects the perennial concern of the May Fourth intellectual. Among Yu Dafu’s early stories, “Blue Smoke” in particular struggles with the issue of the writer’s duty to serve as a prophet of change and to provide solutions to the inequities that beleaguered China during the era under consideration. For example, in an ironic commentary on the power of literature to effect social change, the protagonist muses over what might have been had he chosen a different career path. He looks back on the prior twenty years and concludes that had he been a builder, he would at least have a legacy of structures to his credit. Had he studied clothes making, he could have contributed to the basic needs of society as a tailor. Having instead chosen the path of the writer, he senses that he can contribute nothing of any real value to the construction of a new society. He feels that his writing has been nothing more than an act

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of self-deception. With this realization comes the awareness that he must nevertheless carry on, unappreciated by traditionalists or those committed to creating a new China. In the final section of “Blue Smoke,” appropriately entitled “Epilogue,” the murkiness that has characterized the story thus far begins to give way to the dawning light of day, as the character responds to the transformation taking place before his eyes: Could it be? Look! Aren’t the roof tiles outside the window becoming, little-by-little, more distinct? Ah, look at the clear blue of the sky! The dawn has arrived!41

Nevertheless, even in his exuberance over the fact that a dark night of consternation and wrestling with questions related to China’s future and his role in that future has passed, the protagonist refuses to see in this particular dawn the symbol of hope. On the contrary, he feels again deceived and sees in the dawn the presentiment of an inauspicious future. Nevertheless, at length I again became aware outside of the flushing of innumerable toilets. Now this was a symbol—some kind of symbol. The so-called “dawning” of our new China was in fact merely the curtain rising on some filthy shadow play.42

Nothing is finally resolved during the author’s perambulatory soulsearching. He is left to ponder the same sordid questions, and like the abandoned women he had encountered the night before, he remains unconvinced that there is any role for him in the construction of a new China, and unsure, in fact, if that can even be accomplished. In this story of return and reacclimatizing, the gaze of the protagonist is firmly homeward and forward; what concerns him is China’s future and his place in that future. No attention is given to where he has come from or what experiences have informed his views. In the final story examined in this chapter, the protagonist looks backward at the Japan that he is leaving behind in order to assess his formative experiences there and to document in painstaking detail his confused feelings in regard to that experience.

Neither Here nor There: Sexual Politics and Race in Yu Dafu’s “In the Middle” Like “Blue Smoke,” “Zhongtu” (In the Middle, 1922) also by Yu Dafu, offers a narrative detailing the process of repatriation to China

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after years spent in Japan.43 The first-person protagonist, about to return to China, reflects upon the ten-plus years he spent in Japan as a student. His reminiscences run the emotional gamut, from sincere admiration of Japan’s cultural achievements to indignation at the treatment he received there. The title of the story is both indicative of the protagonist’s physical location between the two nations and evocative of the complex feelings that the protagonist has toward Japan. Whereas stories of return such as “Blue Smoke” and “Mangmang ye” (Endless Nights) focus on the repatriation process and reacclimatizing to Chinese society, “In the Middle” treats the experience of separation from Japan, and the protagonist’s gaze is fixed, for the most part, backward toward Japan. Like many of the other early Creation Society stories, “In the Middle” grapples with the issues of racial identity and power hierarchies as they affect the protagonist’s self-perception about his relationship with Japan and his homeland. Moreover, many of the protagonist’s perceptions of Japan are revealed through his attitudes toward and interactions with women, and sexual politics becomes the means for exploring issues of race and power. The protagonist’s attitude toward Japan is established early in the story as he prepares to depart from Japan and to return to a homeland from which he has long been separated. The protagonist has very complex feelings in regard to Japan, and even wavers in his resolve to leave. I have lived for more than ten years in this island nation and have wasted my rose-tinted youth on this foreign soil. I have borne innumerable insults, and although I would hardly have her kiss my feet, and despite deep feelings of revulsion toward her, now that I am about to leave, I have a sneaking suspicion that I cannot break decisively with her.44

“In the Middle” gives full expression to Yu’s ambivalence toward Japan, and it also conveys the idea that the protagonist feels himself victimized by his experience in Japan.45 Not only has he borne insult from a personified, feminine Japan, as the aforementioned passage suggests, he also feels that he has been deceived and his youth has been stolen from him during his years in Japan. The style of “In the Middle” is uniquely tailored to the plot in order to most effectively convey the ambivalence about Japan with which the protagonist is struggling. Dialogue in the story is confined to just one line spoken by the protagonist’s traveling companion, Lu, aboard the ship. Other than that, we are privy only to the thoughts of the protagonist. In place of dialogue, one unique feature of the

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narrative is that the protagonist “addresses” a number of people, and even occasionally places, via interior monologues, which are articulated only in the mind of the protagonist. One such example occurs at a festival in Kobe, the initial port of departure. The protagonist recalls a woman whom he met at the same festival the previous year. He considers what he might say to her, were he to meet her again this year: “Woman, Oh woman! Although I wish you health and good fortune, I cannot call on you today. Alas, if only we could meet again and not be separated forever. . . . ”46 One can only conjecture about the therapeutic value to the emotionally scarred protagonist of such monologues, but as a narrative device they are apparently intended to give us access to the most personal of the protagonist’s meditations. Interestingly, these monologues are not all directed at people. In the passage following the aforementioned one, the protagonist addresses a place, Akashi, with historical associations made famous in the Tale of Genji, in which, ironically, one of Prince Genji’s most important romantic encounters occurs. These dialogues also allow the author Yu to more effectively detail the protagonist’s feelings toward Japan and to address issues of race, which are at the heart of the story. As the protagonist and Lu board the ship and prepare to leave Kobe, the protagonist turns to “address” Japan, to articulate in his own mind his feelings for Japan. Tears well up as he thinks about what Japan has meant to him. “Oh, Japan! Japan, one of the strongest nations in the world! Japan, whose people are smaller than us, but are filled with so much more ambition!”47 He thinks of the beauty of the country he is leaving behind, but like an unfaithful lover, he feels jilted by Japan and deceived by false promises: “Ah, my wasted youth! Probably I will never again be able to recover what has been lost.”48 Through these interior monologues the dominating voice that characterizes Yu’s personal narratives is subverted to the function of addressing political issues. Whereas Taishô and early Shôwa period writers of the shishôsetsu may have used the form as a platform to express views relating to tradition and education, no Japanese practitioner of the form exploited it to so directly tackle such difficult issues as race and nationhood.49 Throughout the story, the protagonist repeats, in mantra-like fashion, his intention to never return to Japan, which he feels has deprived him of his youth. And yet, in an example of the uncertainty toward Japan that characterizes the work, he senses the need to define contemporary Japan more clearly in his own mind in order to better understand what the experience in Japan has meant.

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While in Moji (a section of the city now known as Kitakyushu), the final port from which the ship is to depart for China, the protagonist visits a bookstore in search of a book that will authenticate his own feelings toward Japan. Tellingly, he eschews books by Japanese authors, and after considering a work by Lafcadio Hearn, he settles on a work called Kimono by an author named John Paris, which he feels best assesses the realities of contemporary Japan.50 With a few hours to kill, the protagonist wanders the back streets into the pleasure quarters. He stands before a brothel and vacillates as to whether to enter and spend some of his remaining money or not. In this story, as with many of Yu’s stories, the discourse on race and nation is inextricably linked with issues of sexual politics. For one as politically impotent and victimized by his experience in Japan as the narrator of “In the Middle,” his ability to exploit Japanese prostitutes and his capacity to exercise power over a feminized Japan provided him with a certain leverage. It is telling that, having contemplated the sexual act as his final act in Japan, the protagonist opts to go instead to a drinking establishment for a beer and afterward to a public bath to cleanse himself.51 The protagonist’s final encounter in the story is one in which race and sex collide to further complicate the protagonist’s sense of identity and his perspectives on the land that he is leaving behind. After finally boarding the ship and departing for China, the protagonist goes out to the main deck for some air and spies a beautiful young Eurasian woman with her white male companion. The protagonist estimates the young woman’s age at eighteen or nineteen and proceeds to describe her appearance in great detail. In describing the woman and her companion, the protagonist concentrates on those physical features, which distinguish them as foreign. He describes the young woman’s complexion as a little swarthy and remarks on her large nose. The Western man who is her companion is described as “ruddy-faced” and “corpulent.” Later, in the passage describing the two, the protagonist says of the girl, “her fleshy throat and neck, a deep yellow, were charming.”52 Skin color in this story constitutes that feature which ultimately defines the characters and acts as the catalyst for the protagonist’s ruminations on the questions of race and national identity. When the protagonist finally “addresses” the Eurasian woman via an interior monologue, he professes empathy with her due to shared skin color. And yet, it is the association of this woman, who is racially “in the middle,” with a man of a different race that raises his ire. Oh, young woman, my half-countryman! Your mother has already sullied herself with a man of another race. You would do well to never

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again become involved with them . . . . When I imagine your soft yellow flesh flattened by that obese, hog-like Westerner I feel sparks fly from my eyes.53

This is the longest of the story’s monologues and, as the protagonist is overcome by his emotions, his “address” to the young woman quickly degenerates into a diatribe about race as evidenced by the final lines of the monologue: We Chinese also have fine looking men. We Chinese also have brawny men as virile as any black man. We also have innumerable men of great wealth. So what need then is there to become involved with a foreigner? Alas, our nation could perish, but our young women should never be violated by foreigners. Oh, young woman, listen to my heartfelt plea!54

The protagonist repeats to himself again and again that he does not want the young Eurasian woman for himself. Nevertheless, increasingly he feels the need to “save” her from the Westerner whom he describes as beast-like. He expresses the desire to protect her but feels powerless to intercede. The reader is encouraged to regard the entire encounter between the Chinese protagonist and the Eurasian girl and her Western lover allegorically. Certainly, one valid way to read this encounter is as a deliberate and rather heavy-handed allegory in which the young woman represents those Westernized elements of Chinese society that are under the control of the West and which seem enthralled by its domination. The protagonist at once wants to “save” and “protect” the vulnerable female from further advances by the Westerner but is painfully aware of his own limitations. He can only wait and watch from a distance while admiring those exotic features of hers, which seem to represent an intoxicating amalgam of East and West. In the final analysis, the protagonist clearly desires the young Eurasian woman and imagines what it would be like were he to replace the Westerner as the object of her affections. However, having been spurned in Japan, he has become as apprehensive about his abilities to succeed in romance as he is insecure about his capacity to serve the society to which he is returning. In that unfeeling island nation, I suffered for more than ten years. After returning to the country of my birth if I am again subjected to society’s torments, tell me what I am to do. When the young women of Japan were ridiculing and deceiving me, I could always rationalize, “Afterall, I am only a visitor here.” If the women at home insult and betray me in a similar manner, what shall I do then?55

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He fears, in fact, that at that very moment, the Eurasian woman is ridiculing him if indeed she is even aware of his existence at all. The protagonist looks from the ship’s deck toward the East, to Japan, which is now just a strip on the horizon. If, he ponders, he is only going back to China to face ill-treatment like that which he received in Japan, what is the use of returning at all? In the final interior monologue, which acts as a coda to the story, the protagonist addresses Japan and communicates the confusion that he feels toward Japan as he confronts his impending return. Japan, Oh, Japan. I leave never to return again. Nevertheless, I’m afraid that when I am subject to social pressures at home, even to the point of being forced to take my own life, what will come floating into my mind’s eye in the end is this island nation! Ave Japon [sic]! All before me is utterly dark!56

More than any of the other stories considered in this study, “In the Middle,” which takes aim at a number of targets, demonstrates the inadequacies of employing the self-referential narrative for the purpose of political criticism. This story is, by any standards, less effective than most of the early Creation Society stories at integrating political commentary and value judgments into the self-referential narrative. That the element of political criticism stands out as garish and ineffective can be attributed to several factors having to do with the peculiar style of this narrative. In many ways, “In the Middle” is a fairly orthodox example of Yu Dafu’s early fiction, but differs from his normal approach in his use of two key narrative strategies. First of all, the narrative employs a series of interior monologues, which allow the narrator to “address” the other as a vehicle for expressing his political and moral perspectives. This convention encourages the thinly veiled first-person narrator to expound on subjects without a clear context. Therefore, these monologues rise above the commonplace narrative, but the disconnect is often quite abrupt. Moreover, the final section of the story, in which the protagonist encounters the Eurasian woman and her companion, constitutes a particularly unwieldy allegory, which enervates the power of the protagonist’s description of his ambivalence toward Japan even further. In this story, what is lost due to these awkward narrative conventions is the very narrative of self, and what remains is merely a voice, disengaged from the events in the narrative. Nonetheless, Yu seems in this story to be attempting to push the limits of the shishôsetsu form

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by using the device of the interior monologue to represent interiority in ways that dialogue or description could not. In the process, he imagines a narrative form that transcends the limits circumscribed by the shishôsetsu form as it was practiced in Taishô Japan.

Conclusions The three Creation Society stories examined in this chapter suggest the range of targets for criticism in their early self-referential fiction. One common target was Japan as the Creationists experienced it as exchange students, both as a model for China’s modernization and an impediment toward that goal. The West also was treated in these stories as both a cultural touchstone and a pernicious influence from which China needed to escape. Finally, however, it was the reality of a divided homeland in need of social and political reforms to which these returnees directed their critical gaze. Zhang Ziping’s “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” is representative of a strain of Creation Society fiction, which treats the overseas study experience and critiques the deficiencies of the educational program and the challenges they faced in Japan. In “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” the blame for the suffering of the protagonist “C” and other students is distributed between the Japanese and Chinese authorities responsible for the student experience. The story is a thoroughgoing indictment of authority, and the critique is woven relatively seamlessly into the self-referential narrative of the author’s experiences as a student leader. “Blue Smoke,” on the other hand, is representative of that body of Creation Society fiction that chronicles the return to China and attempts at reintegration into Chinese society. The gloomy mood of the piece is a projection of the severity of the protagonist’s shock at the condition of the homeland he finds upon his return and his pessimism at the prospects for China to accomplish the transformation into modernity. Although the metaphor of the “dawning” of a new China at the end of the story seems a little cumbersome and contrived, the story represents an effective melding together of selfreferentiality and social consciousness conveyed via a compelling narrative voice and a sustained elegiac mood. The final story considered in this chapter, Yu Dafu’s “In the Middle,” reveals the drawbacks that accompany the attempt to marry the almost contradictory demands of self-referentiality and political critique. The narrative convention of the interior monologue results in relentlessly dogmatic homilies that stand out in stark relief from the

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confessional narrative. The allegory at the end is also ill-conceived and enervates some of the emotional power that the narrative might otherwise have had. The fissures that appear between self-referentiality and political critique intimate the problems inherent in the merging of such contradictory form and content. These fissures also suggest the reasons for the Creation Society’s increasing dissatisfaction with the self-referential form as a tool for the unrelenting social criticism that accompanied the development of the Creation Society writers’ maturing style in the mid-1920s. The Creation Society had recognized and explored a potential in self-referential fiction not exploited by Japanese writers of the shishôsetsu. In the most successful of these stories, the fusing of selfreferentiality and political censure resulted in a unique, revolutionary hybrid form. Nevertheless, what the Creationists discovered, and what becomes apparent in an examination of this corpus of writing, are the very limitations of self-referentiality as a medium for political and social reform. It was the conception of self-referential fiction as a tool of social reform that set it apart from the shishôsetsu. Ironically, it was this propensity that ensured the decline of self-referential fiction in China at the end of the May Fourth period and led to the neglect of this variety of fiction until its reevaluation and renewed currency among Chinese writers in the 1980s. In the self-referentiality of the May Fourth period, post-Mao writers found an exciting antecedent from which to draw inspiration.

6 ˆ S E T S U in The Legacy of the S H I S H O Chinese Literature

Intriguing parallels exist between the early fiction of the Creation

Society and the Japanese shishôsetsu. However, despite the brief ascendancy of this and other forms of subjectivity in China of the May Fourth period, such narratives became increasingly less common in China in the 1930s and thereafter. Nevertheless, the motivation toward self-referentiality among Chinese writers was not completely eradicated with the diminishing popularity of this mode of expression in the 1930s. May Fourth literature, including Creation Society fiction, became a touchstone for writers of self-referential fiction in China in the 1980s, searching for native models from which to draw inspiration. The members of the Creation Society had originally turned to Western literature, and eventually to the shishôsetsu, out of dissatisfaction with existing modes of narrative expression and out of a desire to develop a narrative mode that would be consistent with their ideals of modern literary expression. Early theoretical essays by the group contain numerous expressions of the Society’s dissatisfaction with the popular Butterfly and Mandarin Duck fiction of the day and the desire to find more up-to-date models from which to draw inspiration.1 These early essays invariably include a litany of Western writers and thinkers whose work the Society’s members admired and sought to emulate. The unfortunate consequence of this type of name-dropping is that even a careful, informed reading of the Society’s works does not necessarily demonstrate indebtedness to particular writers and sometimes merely obfuscates the impact of literature from sources other than those mentioned by the authors themselves. Recent Chinese critics, however, seem to be increasingly cognizant of the fact

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that May Fourth writers in general, and the Creationists in particular, had limited direct exposure to the West and naturally gravitated toward contemporary Japanese literature, which was the product of a cultural milieu with which many of them had direct contact.2 The writers of the Creation Society ultimately had more in common with their contemporaries in Japan than they did with the American and European writers whom they admired. Japanese literature was not seen as distant and largely inaccessible, as was the literature of the West. While the writers associated with the Creation Society continued to look at contemporary Japanese literature as merely the conduit through which Western literature was filtered, they had to admit begrudgingly the significance of the debt owed to Japanese literature, as in the oft-quoted statement by Guo Moruo that “China’s new literature was baptized in Japan.”3

Literature as a Tool of Social and Political Change in Traditional China In examining reasons why self-referential fiction did not continue to flourish in China as it did in Japan, and why the two modes of selfreferentiality differed in kind from the outset, one must consider key differences in the narrative traditions of the two countries. At the risk of oversimplification, one can observe that whereas literature in Japan traditionally eschews direct engagement with larger social and political issues, traditional Chinese literature demonstrates a comparatively greater attention to society and to political issues of the day. In traditional Chinese literature, even those works that appear initially to be subjective and apolitical often can be (and were intended to be) read allegorically as indictments of the existing political and social order. Just as the writers of the Creation Society may have possessed a greater affinity with contemporary Japanese writers than with the Western writers whose names they so often bandied about, so too their familiarity with the Chinese narrative tradition informed their own writing.4 One commentator hails this as a significant quality of May Fourth literature in general: Since most May Fourth writers are well read in traditional Chinese fiction (in which they are certainly better informed than in Western fiction, though they may have admired the latter more), the habits formed by reading are bound to turn up unawares in their writing.5

Literature in China had traditionally been regarded as a part of an ongoing process of social melioration and the writer tended to see

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literature as one avenue for confronting social issues. The modern Western novel, when it arrived in China, was seen by young writers as a form eminently suited to be a tool of reform.6 Liang Qichao’s advocacy of the Japanese political novel as a form worthy of emulation, followed by the success of Lu Xun’s “Kuangren riji” (Diary of a Madman, 1918), served to validate the utilization of fiction as a tool of reform. May Fourth literature, including the fiction of the Creation Society, is most profitably and appropriately seen as the culmination of tendencies already on the scene rather than as a qualitatively new departure.7 For the young May Fourth writers there remained the old Confucian anguish over alienation from the political domain and a consciousness of political impotence.8 Both China and Japan possessed a tradition of recluse writers—writers who left society behind (either as the result of a personal decision or as the victims of political exile) and followed the path of literature in some unobtrusive, rustic setting away from the political and social bustle of the dynastic capital. On one level, the fiction of the Creation Society can be read as the beneficiary of this tradition. Certainly these narratives often give the impression of works produced by writers in exile, longing to return to the land they left behind.9 As in the Tang period poetry of Du Fu (712–770) and Li Bai (701–762), the personal cultivation reflected in the self-referential narratives of the Creation Society was a means of social commentary. May Fourth writers’ aesthetic perspectives, however consciously avant-garde and iconoclastic, remained grounded in a Confucian point of view through which artistic pursuits were tied to a concern for society.10 Autobiographical literature in the West has traditionally implied the search for self-understanding. In Japan, modern self-referentiality, despite its early association with the conversion autobiographies of such noted Christians as Nitobe Inazo (1862–1933) and Uchimura Kanzô (1861–1930), did not necessarily carry these same connotations. In China, the modern autobiographical narrative’s obsession with the homeland had its roots in tradition and found an immediate antecedent in the late Qing and early Republican literature preceding the May Fourth period in which a consciousness of social responsibility gives shape to the narrative of self. Thus, the shishôsetsu form was one of several important touchstones for Creation Society fiction. In actual practice, the Creation Society narratives’ sense of self differs from those of the Taishô period shishôsetsu. We cannot account for the self-referential fiction of the

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Creation Society simply on the basis of the debt owed to Taishô literature, but must also consider such factors as intellectual development, the influence of traditional literature, and individual differences among writers. Undoubtedly, the Creation Society’s familiarity with the native literary tradition contributed to a sense of obligation to see literature as a mode of criticizing the existing social order and further as a means of reforming society and its stagnant traditions.11

The Manner in Which Creation Society Fiction Differs from the Taishô Period S HISHÔSETSU In Japanese critical circles the shishôsetsu has been regarded as a form peculiar to Japanese literature. The implication of this belief is that the form is “unique” and cannot be transplanted outside of the Japanese literary milieu. In fact, the penchant toward self-referential fiction that was adopted from the Taishô period model by the Creation Society did undergo a radical transformation in the process. These young writers fashioned it according to their own ideals in order to meet the exigencies of the Chinese literary scene. The reception of the shishôsetsu form and the development of a new variety of self-referential narrative in China was not without its critics. Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing, 1896–1981), himself one of the leading lights among May Fourth critics and an important writer of fiction starting in the late 1920s, criticized contemporary Japanese literature for adopting an authorial consciousness that failed to look beyond its own subjective interests. In fact, the early self-referential fiction of the Creation Society immediately reveals significant differences from the Japanese shishôsetsu. The Creation Society’s writers perceived in self-referential fiction a vehicle for social critique. Ironically, insofar as their stories address social issues, the Creation Society seems to come closer to developing the variety of self-referential Naturalism that Japanese writers had sought but failed to create. All self-referential literature of the May Fourth period, in fact, betrays profound tensions revolving around the individual’s role in social transformation.12 The fiction of the Creation Society consistently raises questions about the writer’s relationship with and responsibility to society. These young writers, abroad in Japan, were wont to portray the current state of Chinese society in metaphorical terms of a patient in need of healing. Given the mercurial political situation in China at that time, the Creation Society writers were prone to place their selfreferential narratives in the context of social critique.13 The

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development of self-referential fiction with a strong political dimension in China was due in part to differences in the political climate of the two countries. Despite increasing authoritarian control, Taishô period Japan was already a mature capitalist society that offered relative security for writers and intellectuals; contemporary China was a society in the throes of momentous social and political change with vast differences between lifestyles in the rural and urban areas. The admixture of concerns for self and country in the Creation Society’s fiction was a quality absent from the Japanese prototype.14 The critical vision of the Creation Society, though personal, also reflects a sense of sociopolitical anguish. Reality is perceived from the individual’s point of view, coupled with an obsession with China and its “illness.”15 On the other hand, questions of social relevance play little or no part in the shishôsetsu. The Taishô period shishôsetsu writer conceived of himself as an apolitical being occupying a position outside of mainstream society.16 In fact, of course, it can be argued that while portraying himself as apolitical, the Taishô period writer of pure literature was in reality adopting a position; the decision to avoid larger social and political issues in their narratives was itself a political statement. One quality of the shishôsetsu form assimilated by the Creation Society and incorporated into their narratives was a crisis consciousness, a struggle in the self-referential narrative to overcome some defining crisis in the author’s life. This is a quality which, according to the Japanese critic Hirano Ken, is the defining feature of the Naturalist shishôsetsu, and the attempt to escape from such a crisis, or to come to terms with it, constitutes the dramatic conflict of the typical shishôsetsu.17 The crisis in the otherwise monotonous life of the protagonist provides the impetus for the narrative. The shishôsetsu writer Ozaki Kazuô (1899–1983) identifies four kinds of crises reflected in the shishôsetsu: health crises, financial crises, domestic crises, and ideological crises.18 In actual practice, of course, individual shishôsetsu might represent an amalgam of several of these. The majority of Creation Society self-referential narratives revolve around an ideological crisis in conjunction with at least one other category of crisis. These narratives occasionally concentrate on the financial straits of the protagonist as in Guo Moruo’s “Weiyang” (Halfway) or on the health crisis of the protagonist as in Zhang Dinghuang’s “Zhishujie” (Arbor Day). Ultimately, they almost all return to larger sociopolitical questions: What are the protagonist’s feelings toward the homeland? Toward Japan? What is the writer’s obligations to family?

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For example, although Yu Dafu’s story “Niaoluo xing” (Trail of Ivy, 1923) revolves around a domestic crisis—a husband’s feelings of guilt over the manner in which he has mistreated his wife and caused her to suffer—it finally amounts to a critique of society. The explanation the protagonist offers his long-suffering wife as an apology for his shabby treatment of her is that, as an artist, he has been mistreated by society, and his tyrannical attitude is the result of the pressure brought to bear on him by society: Wasn’t our marriage ultimately the source of this tragedy? Or is society to blame? If a mistaken marriage is to blame, the problem can be easily solved; but if the cause lay in the fact that the order of society would not allow me to obtain a suitable profession, then I will feel awful for all the pain I have caused you. If that is the case, then the society which produced this tragedy is in need of fundamental reforms.19

Further evidence of differences between the shishôsetsu and the selfreferential fiction of the Creation Society can be obtained from a comparison of the works of two writers who provide the clearest link between the two literary communities: Yu Dafu and Satô Haruo. The two were acquainted in the 1920s and Yu, in his early writings, had singled out Satô as a contemporary Japanese writer whose work he admired. The main difference between the two, according to the Chinese scholar Xu Zidong, is that whereas Satô’s works focus almost exclusively on the protagonist, placing other characters and the social milieu in a subordinate position, in Yu’s narratives the protagonist is engaged in a struggle with society and its values.20 Certainly the similarities noted between Satô’s Den’en no Yû’utsu (Rural Melancholy, 1918) and Yu’s “Chenlun” (Sinking, 1921) make this comparison an attractive one. Moreover, the rapport de fait that exists between the two entices one to perceive these two works as representative of their respective bodies of writing. Although an alluring proposition, it is nevertheless a facile one, which fails to account for the variety of modes of self-referentiality demonstrated by writers in both Japan and China in the 1920s. Thematically, Satô’s Rural Melancholy and Yu’s short story “Sinking” have much in common. Kurt Radtke suggests that it is the thematic similarity, which is most noteworthy: “Den’en no Yû’utsu [Rural Melancholy] likewise focuses on ‘alienation’ and despite obvious differences it is in this respect that both novels become truly comparable. Both works take psychological disorders, the result of alienation and disturbed human relations, as the central theme.”21

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The style of the pieces further suggest attempts on the part of both writers to create works that would be perceived as new and even revolutionary. Both employ a rich diction comprising terms derived from the recently developed field of psychology. The inclusion of English and German words such as “megalomania,” “hypochondria,” and “paranoia,” often with no explanation for an audience for whom these were presumably new terms, seems to reflect attempts on the part of these two authors to stay one step ahead of their readers.22 The parallels between the two works in terms of theme, style, and characterization serve only to amplify those differences that do exist. The most noteworthy difference is that in “Sinking” Yu has not closed off his protagonist from his social surroundings as did Satô in Rural Melancholy. The ending of “Sinking” in which the protagonist, while wading into the ocean toward imminent death, implores China to change not only underlines the essentially fictional nature of the narrative but also, however clumsily, serves to accentuate Yu’s basic project in the narrative, which is not the exposition of self but rather the project of developing a new “national consciousness” ( guojia yizhi).23 Perhaps it is not surprising that the self-referential mode often seems unwieldy for achieving the Creation Society’s goal of offering a critique of Chinese society. In Yu Dafu’s “Sinking,” the difficulty in marrying form and content is already evident. Even if the mental disorder and untimely demise of the protagonist are read as an allegory of China’s subjugated position, the combination seems ungainly and poorly integrated. Anti-Imperialism and nationalism seem to have no bearing on the psychological deterioration of the protagonist. Creation Society writers embraced the belief that as writers they had a mission toward social melioration. In an essay from 1927, called “Shiming” (The Mission), Cheng Fangwu fully articulated, in terms that the Society had been using since the early 1920s, the duty of the writer as one of serving his society while also offering readers universal lessons.24 In this essay and in Cheng’s earlier critical writing, the concept of the ego (ziwo) is of central importance—the expression of the ego serves not only to reveal something about the author, but it is also the repository of universal truths.25 For the May Fourth writer, regardless of the literary company he kept and of the ideological ground he occupied, the ultimate goal of composition, as Lydia Liu and others argue, was the construction of a “national literature” ( guomin wenxue). The reader today may make the same mistake that some contemporary critics such as Mao Dun did of interpreting the Creation Society’s self-referential fiction as opposed to the development of a consciously national literature, but

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that is to miss the point of narratives portraying the role of the new writer in a changing society.26 As a response, in part, to critics of the “art-for-art’s-sake” approach, Zheng Boqi’s essay “Guomin wenxue lun” (On a National Literature) appeared from December 1923 to January 1924 in the Creation Weekly. The essay suggests that even overtly subjective literature, if it elicits a consciousness of shared goals and communal identity, is expressing a love of the homeland.27

The Political Climate in May Fourth China and the Responsibilities of the Writer The May Fourth period was an age in which writers were confronted with the dilemma of trying to create and sustain a literature consistent with their concepts of modernity, which included the lofty ambition of creating a new national cultural identity. It is perhaps fitting that the cultural movement with which these writers were associated was the product of a political event, the demonstrations initiated by students beginning with the May 4, 1919 protest against the conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles on China. The politically charged environment in which these writers had their beginnings undoubtedly contributed to their self-perception as participants in a cultural mission. An irony not lost on the Creation Society writers, and later used as a way of justifying their early work, is that they began their literary careers as expatriates. The experience of writing while abroad served to sharpen their sense of duty to create a national literature. Yu’s admission that it was in Japan that he first began to consider China’s place in the world, is worth quoting: It was only in Japan that I began to recognize the position of China in the competitive world. It was there that I began to understand the greatness and profundity of modern science (whether physical or metaphysical). And it was in Japan that I immediately perceived China’s current and future fate, and the purgatory that my 450 million countrymen would have to undergo.28

Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) saw in the novel a felicitous form for advocating social and intellectual reforms. In fact, although writers of the May Fourth period portrayed themselves as disenfranchised from the political base and cut off from traditional sources of power, they saw in fiction an opportunity to indict traditional culture and to offer paradigms for modernity.29

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The Creation Society clung in the early years to the ideals of “pure literature” and self-referentiality but found themselves defending their individualist ideology with increasing frequency as it became more difficult to reconcile self-representation with their goal of raising national consciousness. Some critics conclude that the narcissistic quality of the Creation Society’s fiction was a gesture of self-deception employed by the members in order to ease anxieties over their political impotence.30 Perhaps it was inevitable that the basic contradiction of their position would be resolved in favor of a narrative mode that would better reflect the increasingly politicized climate among Chinese intellectuals. When the ideological change came for the Creation Society, it was announced in dramatic fashion. In a letter to Cheng Fangwu dating from 1924, Guo Moruo proclaimed his “conversion” to Marxism immediately after reading Kawakami Hajime’s (1879–1946) “Shakai soshiki to shakai kakumei” (Social Organization and Social Revolution) in April 1924. As if to show the strength of his newfound convictions, Guo later published his translation of Kawakami’s essay in one of the Society’s magazines.31 Guo’s conversion to Marxism and the shift in the Society’s orientation toward Marxist literature had implications not only for the Society itself but for May Fourth literature in general. Guo’s own work exhibited a very dramatic shift thereafter, and he proposed that the revolutionary writer was charged with mimicking the message of revolution rather than initiating some new narrative style.32 Guo’s position concerning the need to create a new Proletarian literature was made even more explicit in an article from 1926 called “Geming yu wenxue” (Revolution and Literature), in which he refuted what he regarded as the Confucian idea of the writer as the “other” removed from social and political events. He advocated a conscious attempt on the part of writers to engage their audience in dialogues of social and political import, and he challenged his colleagues to alter their approach to meet these new exigencies. Actually, Guo enunciated the proposed change in the ideological direction of the Society on a number of occasions. In one such essay, “Wenyijia de juewu” (The Awakening of the Artist, 1926) from several years later, Guo states with typical exuberance: Friends, if you consider yourselves imbued with the spirit of rebellion, you naturally walk along this path with me. We have to sacrifice our own individuality and freedom only temporarily in order to plead the case for the freedom of the masses. Why should we grieve at the

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prospect of the grand alternative? Why recoil from it? Friends, friends who feel as I do, the time of our awakening is now! In our literary activities, we must grasp firmly the spirit of the times as well as our own calling.33

Cheng Fangwu, already an important young voice in literary critical circles, also produced an essay that was to play an important role in the emergence of Marxist literature in China. The very title of Cheng’s essay, “Cong wenxue geming dao geming wenxue” (From Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature), became a clarion call to these young writers who saw in Proletarian literature an unprecedented opportunity to serve society via literature. Their ideological position having been forcefully articulated, the Creation Society writers were now ready to produce the Proletarian fiction they advocated. After the suspension of publication of their early journals in 1924, the Creation Society began publishing a new semimonthly journal in September of 1925 called Hongshui (The Deluge). In the first issue of the magazine, the Society included an introductory essay called “Fahua xuanchuan” (Proclamation of a Revival) in which they clarified their new ideology.34 Although short-lived, The Deluge was followed by the publication of the Creation Monthly from 1926 until authorities forced cessation of publication in 1929. Gong Binglu’s story “Yijiuerwunian de xue: guanyu wu sanshi de chuanwen” (The Blood of 1925: Regarding Rumors About May Thirtieth, 1928) illustrates the character of the literature produced by the Society in its post-1924 incarnation.35 The new Marxist literature was produced by the original members along with a number of younger members who entered the Society after its ideological shift in 1924. Although narrated in the first person, “The Blood of 1925” diverges in a number of fundamental ways from the early Creation Society fiction, which is the focus of this study. “The Blood of 1925” opens with the narrator explaining that in summer 1925 he had been working in a coal mine that was little more than a “hell.” Separated from the world of the living, he and his comrades labored like prisoners, never breathing the air of the “real world” and never receiving any news from the outside. The narrative describes his journey by train one day to a nearby town. Walking to the station he senses a storm brewing, and by the time he arrives he is caught in a downpour. While waiting on the platform he sees no one save a signalman who is also waiting for the train to arrive. Finally, the train pulls into the station and, sopping wet, he enters the dimly lit train and sits down. When his eyes adjust to his

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surroundings he realizes that there is only one other passenger in the car, a man of indeterminate age sitting across from him. At first the two men say nothing to one another, but eventually the other man comes over and greets the narrator and sits beside him, offering to tell him about some shocking news he has heard from Shanghai. The story he relates concerns a factory worker named Gu Zhenghong who had become fed up with the treatment meted out to him at a factory where he and his coworkers were forced to labor for parasitic capitalists. Gu concluded that the labor system was in need of fundamental reforms and gathered his coworkers together to proclaim that since they alone were the ones who labored, the world belonged to them and it was their duty to wrest it back from the capitalists before expelling them. Gu’s message was well received by his comrades. The plant foreman heard of Gu’s remarks, and he and the other factory managers and bureaucrats gathered from among the factories in Shanghai’s various foreign concessions to discuss how best to deal with this agitator. In the end, Gu was murdered by a Japanese assassin. Nevertheless, according to the passenger telling this story, this incident, which occurred on May Thirtieth, ignited a fire beneath the proletariat. They had come to realize that the working class and the capitalist class are sworn enemies. All of the world’s conflicts, the fellow passenger continues, start out like this, and Shanghai will soon be saturated with blood. After he finishes the story, the fellow passenger explains that due to the news of this incident he has arrived at the understanding that this world is divided into two types of people: the enemy, who will use any foul tactic in their attacks against the proletariat, and workers, who must be prepared for persecution. At the story’s conclusion, the narrative returns briefly to the ruminations of the protagonist, who asserts that the rightful anger of people like his companion will rise as inevitably as the lanterns emerging from the coal mine. The story is followed by a brief, interesting note by the author in which he explains the origin of the story. He admits that although the topic of the piece was suggested by one of his editors, the entire structure was based on an unidentified story by the contemporary Russian writer Lídya Nikoláyevna Seyfullina (also Seifullina) (1889–1954).36 He had been so moved by her work that he decided to share his impressions of it in a story of his own. Differences between this story, representing the Creation Society’s later fiction, and the self-referential fiction under consideration are immediately evident.37 For example, although this story employs the

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first-person approach, which is a common feature of the early Creationist fiction, the role of the narrator in this story deviates from the narrator of those early stories. The narrator in “The Blood of 1925” never becomes more than the device for the story’s telling, and we are never provided with the information about the narrating “I” that would allow us to draw into sympathy with the narrator. Nor does the narrator attempt to interpret the significance of the incidents related in the narrative for the reader. In fact, it is the other passenger who both relates the events that transpired in Shanghai and then interprets the social significance of these events. Both the passenger relating the story and the martyred worker Gu Zhenghong constitute more well-rounded and fully articulated characters than does the narrating “I.” “The Blood of 1925” also diverges from the body of self-referential work under consideration in this study in terms of plot development. The narrative structure of Gong’s story is compact and has a clear linear progression, constituting an unambiguous story-within-a-story. When the passenger finishes relating the story of Gu and offers his own interpretation of the significance of Gu’s death, the narrator then provides more complete closure to the narrative by offering his own perspective on the ultimate meaning of the act. Moreover, the didactic quality of the narrative—the Marxist commitment to class struggle and revolution—is maintained throughout, even further diminishing the importance of the narrator’s subjectivity. The new Marxist literature, which emerged in this latter phase of the Society, was inspired in part by the emerging body of Proletarian literature in Japan. Just as the self-referential literature produced by Guo, Yu, and the others reflects their absorption of what was au courant in the early Taishô period, the fiction produced by the Creation Society’s young writers in the late 1920s demonstrates their familiarity with important trends in the late Taishô period. A 1928 essay by one of the young writers, Chen Qiyu, called “Riben de puluolietariya yishu zenme jingguo ta de yundong” (How Japan’s Proletarian Literature has Affected Their Movement, 1928) provides an overview of Proletarian literature.38 In a sense, this shift not only reflects the rejection of selfreferentiality by May Fourth writers but also portrays the Creation Society as very much on the cutting edge of literary developments in China. Despite friction between the founding members over the direction the Society should take, resulting in the untimely departure of Zhang and Yu, there was no Creation Society member unaffected by the increasing politicization of literature.

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Yu Dafu, despite his penchant for Romantic self-portrayal, considered himself a revolutionary and took an active role in the advocacy of Marxist literature. In 1930 Yu, along with Lu Xun, was instrumental in the establishment of the League of Leftist Writers (Zhongguo zuoyi zuojia lianmeng). As a graduate of Tokyo University’s Economics Department, Yu was an important contributor to the League.39 Yu accepted his role as a standard bearer in the shift from “literary revolution” to “revolutionary literature” in the Chinese literary world, and yet it is interesting to note the irony that his own writing remained predominantly self-referential until his death in 1945.40

The Literary Subject and Its Role in the Nation-Building Process in May Fourth China Self-referential writing, regardless of the form it takes, is inconceivable without a consciousness of the self as a discrete subjectivity and of the experience of the individual as worthy of literary expression. Autobiographical writing in the West was the product of the development of a strong individual consciousness that emerged out of exposure to Western religious and philosophical traditions. Autobiography emerged in a cultural landscape marked by a consciousness of subjectivity.41 Georges Gusdorf contends that autobiography is historically limited and culturally specific.42 In their reception of the forms and concerns of Western literature, Japanese and Chinese writers were also unwitting heirs to the cultural background that sustained this mode of expression. This tendency for the Creation Society writers, as with writers of Taishô Japan, involved the reception of a Romantic ideal of self as socially derived, as the product of cultural circumstances. The literature that resulted in the two countries was nevertheless markedly different. For the Creation Society writers, the exposition of the self and the author’s search for selfhood merged with the mission of nation- and culture-building. I am in agreement with Paul John Eakin’s comment that autobiographical writing in the West is an act of “self-invention.”43 In May Fourth literature, the act of self-invention implied by self-referential literature was accompanied by the process of class definition on the part of writers. Among the early critical writing of the May Fourth period there was a tendency to portray the self in a fundamentally ambivalent position, at once serving society as a writer while remaining true to one’s personal aspirations.44

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Chen Duxiu, the charismatic editor of New Youth, had earlier seized upon the idea of individualism as a powerful weapon to attack Chinese tradition. By the time the early fiction of the Creation Society appeared, the bifurcation of public versus private self, and the dilemma of commitment to serve society while celebrating the individual self, had already been established.45 What the self-referential fiction of the Creation Society achieved, I believe, was a mode of expression in which the individual’s commitment to society was coterminous with the act of self-exposition. Even in narratives that narcissistically celebrated the self, larger national and social concerns were not abandoned. In fact, as Lydia Liu argues, in May Fourth literature “collectivism now inhabited the same homogeneous space of modernity as individualism.”46 It is in this attempt to critique society within the matrix of the self-referential narrative that the Creation Society’s fiction veers most sharply from the Japanese model. The “search for selfhood” (jiko tankyû)47 that characterizes the Japanese shishôsetsu is broadened by the Creation Society to include a quest for national and cultural redefinition. Some commentators note that the evolution of modern Chinese literature had benefited from a process of subjectivization in late Qing fiction; in traditional Chinese vernacular fiction the “storyteller” narrator was not an individualized personality but embodied a “general social consciousness.”48 The writers of self-referential literature in the May Fourth period first had to gain a readership—to make themselves familiar—before social commentary would be acceptable. Not content to see the shishôsetsu form merely as a means of expressing subjectivity alone, the Creation Society’s writers seized upon the shishôsetsu as a means of critiquing society by raising questions about social institutions and conventions within the framework of the self-referential narrative. Among writers of the shishôsetsu in the early Taishô, when the Creation Society was first exposed to the form, individual concerns were often divorced from social concerns. For the writers of the Creation Society however, the two were inextricably linked.49 The self-referentiality of the Creation Society’s narratives was authenticated by their attention to the question of self within the larger conceptual framework of the nation. The narrated self became a privileged site for the contest over the meaning of modernity.50 In fact, commentators such as Xu Zidong have proposed that all of the self-referential narratives of the Creation Society are best seen as allegories of a suffering China. While in Japan, the writers associated with the Creation Society examined China from the outside and were able to observe the homeland with a more dispassionate, discerning

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gaze than they would have had they remained in China. The complexity of their emotions toward China reflects a devotion to the homeland, but their narratives also convey some of the Japanese prejudices toward China: China as backward and indeed “ill,” and the Chinese as stubborn guardians of a moribund tradition, incapable of change.51 Kurt Radtke interprets Sinking, here again referring to the collection containing the story of the same name, as a work of political protest. The protagonist’s unsuccessful search for love and companionship, Radtke contends, may be taken as an allegory for China’s equally unsuccessful search for nationhood.52 However, Michael Egan, in an earlier essay about the story “Sinking,” maintains that confusing the condition of the protagonist with that of contemporary Chinese society oversimplifies the issue. According to internal evidence in the story, Egan suggests that nationalism and anti-Imperialism have no bearing on the psychological deterioration of the protagonist. He regards the plot as apolitical and individualistic, leaving the political element to stand out as incongruous.53 Kirk Denton opts for something of a “middle road,” which seeks to situate “Sinking” in the context of May Forth readers’ expectations, and he sees it as both a personal narrative and a commentary on the fragility of contemporary China.54 Certainly the tendency in premodern China to read narratives allegorically prepared Yu’s readers to receive his work in allegorical terms. Moreover, among the early Creation Society stories there exists an irrefutable tendency to delineate characters, who are suffering from some physical malaise while wrestling with their personal predicaments. While an allegorical reading is one valid approach to this body of writing, it lends itself to a reductionist reading of these narratives in which each of these self-referential stories is irrevocably subject to a preordained interpretation. The self-referential literature associated with the May Fourth period had decreased dramatically by the 1930s due to the burgeoning influence of Proletarian literature and the association of selfreferentiality with Western decadence.55 Literature’s subjugation to revolutionary concerns and the requirement that art serve utilitarian needs was given official expression in the Forum on Literature and Art organized by Mao Zedong at Yenan in 1942.56 The politicization of literature in China and the susceptibility of art to increasingly vigilant Party control resulted in the noticeable decrease of selfreferential literature in China by the 1940s. Therefore, whereas selfreferential literature remained a dominant narrative mode in Japan, its

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period of ascendancy in China lasted less than a decade. With the loosening of authoritarian control on literature in the 1980s, writers turned with even greater vigor to the production of consciously selfreferential narratives, rediscovering in May Fourth fiction a native model for their own excursions into modern literary self-referentiality.

“New Era” Fiction of the 1980s and the Reception of May Fourth Self-Referentiality Writers in China in the 1980s occupied a position analogous to that of May Fourth period writers; both were confronted with new opportunities for literary expression. Moreover “New Era” writers of the 1980s faced many of the same ideological and aesthetic questions as May Fourth intellectuals.57 Writers in the post-Mao period wrestled with the question of how to balance tradition with the influx of Western values, and for the first time in decades were moved to use their newfound literary freedom to create an innovative narrative idiom.58 Post-Mao writers turned again to the representation of self and subjectivity with a “sense of urgency and vengeance,” and subjectivity became a major current in post-Mao literature.59 Moreover, Chinese writers in the 1980s sought a more independent subjectivity to replace the old model of class consciousness imposed by Maoist ideology.60 In this search for models of self-referentiality, they had access to numerous Western literary examples, but they also sought and found suitable models from within their own tradition. In an important sense, the Cultural Revolution can be said to have completed the eclipse of the May Fourth Romantic tradition, diminishing the personal vision of reality along with confessional literature. However, in the 1980s, May Fourth Romanticism, with its penchant for self-referentiality, was revived and popularized by a generation of authors whose works again tended toward the confessional.61 Concerning the significance of May Fourth literature as a model for narrative experimentation in the 1980s, one critic says, “To think of literary modernism as a postMao phenomenon is either ignorance or a pretension or a strategic illusion (often all of them) on the part of Chinese Modernists in the 1980s. Western Modernism not only was introduced into China some eighty years ago, but it has left its traces and signature in virtually all the literary movements and major figures of Modern Chinese literature.”62 In the 1980s, the theorists Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu inaugurated a discussion of subjectivity within a Marxist framework in which they

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advocated “recovering once-denounced humanist values” and “returning” to the May Fourth project of cultural enlightenment.63 These two scholars, by advocating a humanist, introspective literature, were challenging a literary orthodoxy which, since the decline of the May Fourth period, had valorized a revolutionary collective at the expense of individuality. It is not surprising then that they hearkened back to a period in which individuality and a search for modern concepts of selfhood were dominant concerns. Li Zehou’s and Liu Zaifu’s advocacy of “recovery” and “return” to the “incomplete enlightenment” of the New Culture Movement can be seen in part as a strong critique of Mao’s Yenan legacy. In his essay, “The Subjectivity of Literature Revisited,” Liu Zaifu challenged accepted models of socialist–realist literary criticism adopted from the Soviet Union. He advocated instead the reassertion of humanism and expressions of subjectivity, which he associated with the New Culture Movement. His essay further attempted to define subjectivity (zhutixing) as the “essential human force that is intrinsic to the subject’s existence.”64 It was May Fourth literature’s attempt to convey that subjectivity which Liu Zaifu applauded and urged writers to reclaim. One of the ironies of the Chinese literary milieu in the 1980s is that in many ways writers were further removed from Western culture and less conversant with Western literature than were May Fourth writers sixty years earlier. The youthful writers of the May Fourth period, many of whom had studied abroad, had direct access to foreign literature and were cognizant of contemporary literary trends. Writers in the post-Mao era too were in revolt against tradition but did not have the same direct recourse to models from foreign literature. Ultimately, they benefited from a native model for selfreferentiality. Among the examples of self-referential literature from China in the 1980s one could cite Yu Luojin’s “Yige dongtian de tonghua” (A Winter’s Tale, 1980). The story is a fictionalized account of the author’s divorce and a lyrical recounting of his brother’s murder. Li Ping’s “Wanxia xiaoshuo de shihou” (When Sunset Clouds Disappear, 1981) is the autobiographical account of the romance of the Red Guard son of a victorious PLA general and the granddaughter of a Guomindang officer, which culminates in the ascent of Mount Tai in an allegorical search for truth.65 Shen Rong, in works of fiction such as “Guangming yu heian” (Light and Darkness) and “Ren dao zhongnian” (At Middle Age) from the 1980s, explores the dilemmas faced by young intellectuals and professionals who had suffered through the Cultural Revolution and now look back wistfully on their

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lost youth. By the author’s own admission, these narratives reflect experiences from her own life and of people close to her who suffered during those years.66 Other examples of self-referential writing from the 1980s include the work of Wang Ruowang and Zhang Jie. Wang’s “Ji’e sanbanqu” (Hunger Trilogy, 1980) depicts his experiences in prison on three different occasions as a political prisoner. For example, the first and shortest of the three stories in the collection describes the author’s experience as a political prisoner of the Guomindang (KMT) Party during the Republican period preceding the war with the Japanese. At the age of sixteen the protagonist, who shares the same name as the author, is sentenced to ten years in prison due to his involvement in Communist Party activities. The narrative, which revolves around a hunger strike the prisoners undertake to demand better food and improved treatment, describes the young man’s relationship with the other prisoners. In graphic detail we witness the suffering that the prisoners endure through the eyes of the young protagonist. Soon after they win their demands, all of the prisoners are released due to the unification of Republican and Communist forces against the Japanese Army.67 Although this story and the two that follow relate autobiographical episodes, they differ from conventional autobiography in terms of the importance accorded the words and actions of characters other than the protagonist and in the degree to which events are dramatized through the eyes of the young protagonist. In the introduction to the English translation of The Hunger Trilogy, the translator makes the following statement concerning the inconsistencies between the narrative and the autobiographical record: “Some concessions to literary convention and drama were made in the work but the events themselves and most of the people in them are true to life.”68 In stories like “Ai, shi bu neng wangji de” (Love Must not be Forgotten, 1981) and Fangzhou (The Ark, 1981), Zhang Jie writes of her experiences as a divorced woman in post-Mao Chinese society, and of her struggle for recognition and professional advancement. In the title story of the collection “Love Must not be Forgotten,” for instance, the protagonist, an unmarried professional who has recently turned thirty, describes her relationship with her mother. The protagonist’s father had abandoned his wife and daughter when she was still an infant. The starting point for the protagonist’s reveries is a diary, which she finds after her mother’s death. She discovers that her mother, who never remarried, had for many years been infatuated with a man to whom she was unable to communicate her feelings.

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In the end, the daughter resolves to follow the advice of her mother to forego marriage until she finds a man with whom she can both give and receive love.69 In response to allegations from critics that her work is blatantly autobiographical, Zhang Jie says: Some people say “that story was about Zhang Jie herself,” and take it upon themselves to make investigations—in a certain month of a certain year there was such-and-such a person, such-and-such an event, all so authoritative that it seems true . . . The truthfulness of literature and the truthfulness of life are two entirely different matters. But there are people who insist on confusing them. Is this stupidity, feudalism or backwardness?70

For May Fourth intellectuals, concerns about the role of the individual in social transformation were coupled with tensions generated by conflicting aspirations toward aesthetic and political goals. For “New Era” writers of the post-Mao period, the trauma of the Cultural Revolution left them jaded with politics and eager to redefine the role of the author in society. As Helen Siu puts it, “When young writers dwell on artistic issues, for example, and claim that creativity can blossom only when both authors and the subject of their art are not tied together by political and moral obligations, they are redefining the self-image of the educated elite in modern China.”71 The self-referentiality of the May Fourth period differs qualitatively from that of the post-Mao era in that the latter does not exhibit the same anxiety due to the conflicting demands of self-revelation and sociopolitical critique. In appropriating May Fourth self-referentiality, post-Mao writers employed only those aspects of self-referential expression that would serve them in the development of their own self-referential idiom, while eschewing those qualities associated with cultural analysis and nation-building.

Conclusions The self-referential fiction of the Creation Society flourished in the Chinese literary world for less than a decade in the 1920s before being abandoned as ardently as it had been embraced. The rise of Communism in the 1920s and 1930s certainly contributed to its demise. In order to begin to understand the import of this body of writing, it is essential briefly to reassess both its short-term and its long-term effects.

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The short-term significance of the early Creation Society fiction is that it exemplifies a characteristically May Fourth penchant toward self-referentiality. The Creation Society was one of the best organized and most ideologically focused of the May Fourth literary coteries. It is significant that their experiments in self-referential fiction were accompanied by a body of critical writing in support of it that provided impetus for the production of literature of this type throughout the 1920s. Even after the Society had eschewed self-referentiality, the fashion for self-exposition that they had set in motion remained strong in the Chinese literary world throughout the 1920s. Another of the immediate effects of the early fiction of the Creation Society was that it betokened a familiarity with the aesthetic values of the Taishô literary world, contributing to the ease with which writers from the two nations were able to interact in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite a paucity of translations of contemporary Chinese literary works into Japanese, writers such as Tanizaki Junichiro and Satô Haruo knew of the works of Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, and Yu Dafu and were aware of these Chinese writers’ conversance with modern Japanese literature. Moreover, the predilection toward selfreferentiality of the shishôsetsu variety gave writers from both literary communities a common aesthetic point of reference. The long-term impact of the shishôsetsu in China must be qualified with the understanding that from the late 1920s until the end of the Cultural Revolution, self-referential literature was castigated. Early Creation Society fiction, due to its association with Western decadence and egoism, was held in low regard and was subject to censorship. Nevertheless, it was revived to a certain extent in the 1980s among “New Era” and “Roots” writers who saw in this body of writing a native-born variety of self-referentiality.72 This set of circumstances suggests that the propensity toward self-referentiality did not die with the disappearance of this mode in the 1920s but merely decreased in relative importance, waiting to emerge when opportunities for self-referential expression again arose. The Creation Society’s self-referential fiction occupies, I would like to suggest, an important, if somewhat ambiguous position in modern Chinese literature. It is an ambiguous position because of the manner in which this body of writing was criticized and summarily cast aside for decades after it flourished in the 1920s; it is an important position because it constitutes a distinctly Chinese, selfconsciously modern narrative mode. The form reflects the intellectual and political environment of the era in which it was written, an era that demanded social and political engagement on the part of writers.

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The 1920s and 1930s were a period of unparalleled interaction between the Chinese and Japanese intellectual and literary communities, and the appropriation and transformation of the shishôsetsu by the Creation Society can be seen as one example of salubrious cultural interaction between the two countries. What this work has endeavored to prove is that, in the hands of the Creation Society, the shishôsetsu was transformed into something unique—a form that allowed the Creation Society writers to look homeward in order to assess and offer a cure for China’s social ills while simultaneously looking inward in order to forge a new variety of self-referential expression. In its ambiguities, in its complexity, the form that emerged faithfully reflects the dilemma of modernity confronting the May Fourth intellectual.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Throughout this book I refer to the Chuangzaoshe using the generally accepted English equivalent, “Creation Society.” In referring to the members of the Society, I have opted for Leo Ou-Fan Lee’s usage of “Creationists.” On the other hand, the shishôsetsu form, central to my discussion, has sometimes been translated as the “I-Novel.” However, in accord with the two book-length studies of the form by Edward Fowler and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, I have chosen to employ the Japanese term. 2. Although it can be posited with some justification that all creative writing is ultimately “self-referential,” what I am referring to specifically in this study is a variety of narrative that consciously calls attention to itself as the authentic record of the author’s lived experience or purports in some way to be “confessional.” Moreover, for the purposes of this study, selfreferential literature should not be confused with “self-reflexive” literature, which refers to fiction that refers ironically back to itself. 3. I am using the term “May Fourth” literature in the commonly accepted way to refer to the new vernacular fiction produced between 1919 and 1930. I will also make reference to the New Culture Movement, initiated by Chen Duxiu in the journal New Youth (Xin qingnian) in 1916, which merged with the May Fourth movement. 4. Milena Dolezelová-Velingerova, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 10. 5. The late Qing literary scene (wentan) [Japanese, bundan] has much in common with the subsequent May Fourth literary scene. For more about the affinities between the late Qing scene and the May Fourth literary scene, see Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981), 156. 6. The Hundred Days Reform was instigated by Liang Qichao’s mentor, the reformer Kang Yuwei (1858–1927), with the support of the Guang Xu emperor. Kang sought to reform all sectors of Chinese government and

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9. 10.

11.

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14. 15.

16.

Notes society. For one hundred and three days, from June 11 to September 20, nearly fifty of the reforms promulgated by Kang were carried out, before being crushed by the Empress Dowager Zixi and other conservatives. Fearing for their lives, Liang and Kang fled to Japan. See Immanuel C.Y. Hsü, The Rise of Modern China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 373–380. Not to be confused with the contemporary Japanese journal bearing the same name—Shinshôsetsu. Among Liang’s own contributions was his translation of the well-known political novel Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women (Kajin no kigu, 1887) by Shiba Shiro (also Tokai Sanshû). In this essay, Zhou Zuoren, after describing the relationship between Japanese and Chinese civilizations as that of one between a parent and a child, provides a rough sketch of the Japanese narrative tradition. He goes on to describe important literary trends and figures in the previous thirty years including the contributions of the White Birch group (Shirakabaha) and the Aesthetic group (Tanbiha) in the early Taishô period. The essay ends with an entreaty to someone in the Chinese literary world to produce a theoretical work comparable in function to Tsubouchi Shôyô’s The Essence of Fiction (Shôsetsu no shinzui), which would precipitate the establishment of truly modern literary expression in China. Susanna Egan, Patterns of Experience in Autobiography (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 1. The reception of Western literary forms in Japan and China during the period under discussion was shaped by the experience of incursion by the West, and Imperialism pervades the fiction of both countries in terms of themes, narrative structure, and the modes of production. See Mary N. Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 8. James Olney, “Some Versions of Memory,” in Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 241. George Gusdorf referred to autobiography as a “Western cultural act,” the product of a culture, which assumes a sensitivity to the sanctity of the individual. See Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 34. I am here referring to the two decades preceding the May Fourth period, approximately 1900–1919. For more on the strides made during this period, see Perry Link’s work, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies. Ibid., 92. Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 44. For a translation of the essay, see Ernst Wolff, Chou Tso-jen (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971), 97–105. In her recent study of Zhou Zuoren,

Notes

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

137

Susan Daruvala correctly emphasizes his significance as a leading voice of Modernist values in the May Fourth era. See Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2000). Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao, vol. 1 (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1985), 14–16. For further discussion of the role of this essay in the emergence of new critical perspectives in China of the New Culture Movement period see Marián Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917–1930) (London: Curzan Press, 1980). Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in PostMao China, Second Edition (Lantham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 10. Ibid., 10. Layoun, Travels of a Genre, 7. I am in agreement with Kirk Denton’s assessment of the presentation of self in Yu Dafu’s “Sinking.” Moreover, I would suggest, in all early Creation Society fiction, the narrative expresses the May Fourth writer’s anxiety about the clash between an essentially iconoclastic Western view of self and the pervasive appeal of the traditional Confucian, socially engaged “collectivist” model. See Kirk A. Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking,’ ” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 14 (December 1992): 117. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 82. Layoun, Travels of a Genre, 8. Kirk A. Denton, The Problematic Self in Modern Chinese Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 46. Ibid., 47. Liu, Translingual Practice, 83. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 84. Such reminiscences exist in abundance. For examples from the modern era, see Helmut Martin, ed., Modern Chinese Writers: Self-Portrayals (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992). Possibly more than any other Chinese intellectual of the period, Chen Duxiu urged a clean break from China’s intellectual tradition. Interestingly, Chen was a founder and important theorist in China’s fledgling Communist Party. For more on Chen Duxiu’s stance, see W.H. deBary, ed., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 152. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Literary Trends I: The Quest for Modernity,” 48. According to David Wang, the proclivity toward self-referential fiction in China was a native trend that originated from the 1840s. See David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 8.

138

Notes

32. Theodore Huters, “Blossoms in the Snow: Lu Xun and the Dilemma of Modern Chinese Literature,” Modern China 1: 1 (January 1984): 49–77. 33. Liu, Translingual Practice, 49. 34. Ibid., 50. 35. Denton, “Distant Shore,” 122. 36. Liu, Translingual Practice, 82. 37. Denton, The Problematic Self, 47. 38. Denton, “The Distant Shore,” 119. 39. This essay originally appeared in the May, 1923 issue of Creation Weekly. Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao, 1: 46–47. 40. Wendy Larson, Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 2. 41. Originally appeared in December 9, 1923 issue of Chuangzao Zhoubao, No. 31. Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., 1: 68–71. 42. Ibid., 1: 71. 43. Originally appeared in the October 1, 1922 issue of Xueyi, 4.4. Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao, 1: 18–20. 44. Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971), 21–22. 45. Sydney Gifford, Japan Among the Powers, 1890–1990 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 50–51. 46. Hsü, The Rise of Modern China, 494. 47. Gifford, Japan Among the Powers, 57. 48. Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myth: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 135. 49. Ibid., 136. 50. In Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 63–88. 51. In Rethinking Japan, vol. 1., ed. Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti, and Massimo Raveri (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 86–101. 52. Ibid., 88. 53. Kirk A. Denton, “The Distant Shore,” 107–123. 54. Ibid., 117. 55. Itô Toramaru, “Chuangzaoshe yu Riben wenxue” (The Creation Society and Japanese Literature), Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu. trans. Pan Shijing (March 1986): 210–216. 56. Xu Zidong, “Langmanpai? Ganshangzhuyi? Sixiaojia Zuojia? Yu Dafu yu waiguo wenxue” (Romantic? Sentimentalist? I-novelist? Yu Dafu and Foreign Literature), Zhongguo bijiao wenxue 1 (1985): 22–232. Kurt Radtke’s essay, mentioned earlier, criticizes Xu Zidong for attributing too much of Yu’s style to foreign influence, while neglecting important native influences. See Radtke, “Chaos and Coherence,” in Rethinking Japan, ed. Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti, and Massimo Raveri, vol. 1 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 95.

Notes

139

57. The term he uses, chongbai, translates as “worship.” See Guo Laixun, “Yu Dafu yu Riben de ziwo xiaoshuo,” Wenxue pinglun, 4 (1983): 252. 58. Liang Huoren. “Yu Dafu yu sixiaoshuo,” Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu, 3 (1990): 200–217. 59. In her 1991 study, Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), Wendy Larson remarks as follows: Although it can be argued that the search for literary modernity began in the last half of the Qing Dynasty, it is clear that for most scholars the May Fourth Movement marks a radical break with the past (1). 60. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Literary Trends I: The Quest for Modernity,” 481. 1 SHISHO ˆ SETSU Theory in Japan and the Creation Society’s Encounter with the Form 1. Yu Dafu, e.g., came to Japan as an upper school student in 1913 and continued his studies in Economics at Tokyo Imperial University until 1922 when he returned to Shanghai to devote himself full-time to writing and publishing. See Xu Dongzi, Yu Dafu zhi Xinlun (Suzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chuban, 1984), 214. In this study, I intentionally use the problematic term wenren in referring to the young writers of the May Fourth era, despite its association with traditional culture, in order to emphasize the ironic ties these young writers maintained with tradition despite their leading role in the avant-garde movement. 2. Guo arrived in Japan in 1913 at the age of nineteen; Yu, following an older brother, came to study in Tokyo in 1913 at the age of seventeen; Zhang arrived to study in Yokohama on a government scholarship in 1912 at the age of nineteen; Cheng, as with Yu following an older brother already in Japan, arrived in Nagoya in 1910 at the tender age of thirteen; the dramatist Tian Han, who began his career as a member of the Society, arrived in Japan in 1916 at the age of eighteen. 3. Inaba Shoji, Iku Tappu [Yu Dafu]: Sono seishun to shi (Tokyo: Tôhô senshu, 1982), 199. 4. This essay, which appeared in the May 1923, No. 3 edition of the weekly, is reprinted in its entirety in Chen Huangmei, ed. Chuangzao ziliao, vol. 1 (Fuzhou: Fujian chubanshe, 1985), 47. 5. Aside from the five founding members already mentioned, other original members include Mu Mutian (1900–1981) and Zheng Boqi (1895–1979). 6. According to Itô Toramaru, the Society’s existence can be divided into either two or three phases. Itô chooses the latter format. Based on this system of periodization, the first phase lasted from the group’s establishment until suspension of their journals in 1924; the second phase began with the publication of the semi-monthly Hongshui (The Deluge) in September 1925; the third and final phase was marked by the formation of the Creation Publishing Division in 1926 and by commencement of the publication of the Chuangzao yuekan (Creation Monthly) including

140

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

Notes an influx of younger writers recently repatriated from Japan, and ending with the dissolution of the Society in 1929. See Itô, Toramaru, Sôzôsha [Chuangzaoshe] shiryô (Tokyo: Ajia shuppan, 1979), 1–2. Gail Bernstein, “Kawakami Hajime,” in H.D. Harootunian and Bernard S. Silberman, eds. Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 83. The complex issue of what constituted “pure literature” in Taishô period Japan and how the term was interpreted by Chinese writers will be addressed in chapter 4. Bonnie McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971), 145. Benjamin Schwartz, from the Introduction to Reflections on the May Fourth Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 6. Ibid., 6. Irena Powell, Writers and Society in Modern Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1983), 31. Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishôsetsu in Early Twentieth Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988), 20. Here referring specifically to the community of writers of elite or “pure” literature as opposed to popular literature in the gesaku tradition. Powell, Writers and Society, 35. Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature (New York: MacMillan Press, 1980), 35. Some of the other terms used to refer to this new personal literature that appeared at the end of the Meiji period include jiko shôsetsu, mi no uebanashi, shinpen zakki shôsetsu, jibun shôsetsu, and moderu shôsetsu. A 1918 essay focusing on the popularity of this kind of narrative by Honma Hisao was called “Saikin waga bundan ni chûmoku subeki kokuhaku bungaku” (The Confessional Literature that has Recently Captured the Attention of the Bundan). See Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishôsetsu as Literary Genre and SocioCultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 197. Incidentally, the three-graph word for shishôsetsu can also be read as watashi shôsetsu or watakushi shôsetsu. Ibid., 400. Ibid., 122. The backlash against the nineteenth-century Western novel that had hitherto been worshipped among Japanese writers and critics can be seen, e.g., in Kume Masao’s pioneering essay “Watakushi shôsetsu to shinkyô shôsetsu” (The I-Novel and the Mental Attitude Novel, 1925) in which he contends that the individual self is the basis of all art and in which he criticizes the novels of Tolstoy, Flaubert, and others for their divergence from the “true path” of self-expository narratives. See Kume Masao, Kindai bungaku hyôron taikei, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1975), 50–57.

Notes

141

21. Hasegawa described the goal of this new narrative mode as the pursuit of shinjitsu, or truth. See Francis Mathy, Shiga Naoya (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974), 36. It is important to point that the concept of Naturalism and its relation to self-referentiality differed considerably between Taishô period Japan and China of the May Fourth period. Whereas Naturalism in the Chinese context was associated with writers like Mao Dun who eschewed the self-referentiality of the Creationists and adopted an “objective” social orientation, Taishô writers of pure literature saw the intense introspection of the shishôsetsu as the ultimate expression of Naturalism. 22. One such critic confronting this phenomenon was Kaneko Chikusui, a regular contributor of essays about contemporary literature and thought to the large circulation periodical, Taiyô (The sun). In an essay from the March 1912 issue of Taiyô called “The Transformation of Life into Art” (Seikatsu no geijutsuka), Kaneko noted the pervasiveness of this new selfreferential fiction, and described the diversity among such narratives. He also distinguished between the Naturalists, whom he referred to as “Objectivists,” who wrote about generally negative experiences and the anti-Naturalists or “Aesthetes,” who tended toward a more optimistic portrayal of experience. See Kaneko Chikusui, “Seikatsu on geijutsuka” (Turning Life into Art), Taiyô (March 1912), 20. 23. Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 49. 24. Ibid., 56. 25. Beside Kobayashi Hideo’s “Watakushi shôsetsu ron,” these essays included the Modernist Yokomitsu Riichi’s “Junsui shôsetsu ron” (Concerning the Pure Novel (April 1935)) and Nakamura Mitsuo’s “ ‘Watakushi shôsetsu ron’ ni tsuite” (A Response to [Kobayashi’s] “Watakushi shôsetsu ron,” September 1935). In Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 56. 26. The Japanese term that Kobayashi uses to describe the portrayal of individual experience in the context of society is shakai shita watakushi or “Socialized I” (Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation, 35). 27. Ishizaka Mikimasa, Shishôsetsu no riron: sono hôhô to kadai o megutte (Theories of the shishôsetsu: Considering Its Approaches and Themes) (Tokyo: Yachiyo shuppan, 1985), 18. 28. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation, 41. 29. Those interested in Hirano Ken’s perspectives on the shishôsetsu and its place in modern Japanese literature are urged to read his Shôwa bungaku shiron (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1963). 30. In her article “Text, Intertext, and the Representation of the Writing Self,” Feuerwerker makes these comments specifically in regard to the writings of Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Wang Meng, although it seems this view could justifiably be applied to May Fourth literature in general. According to her theory, intertextuality in the works of these writers took several different forms: imitation, adaptation, revision, and quotation from prior texts. See Yi-tsi Feuerwerker, in From May Fourth to

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Notes

June Fourth, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 168. 31. One of the shortcomings of Bloom’s otherwise trenchant assessment of literary influence is his reluctance to apply his theoretical vision to any other than those he deems “strong poets” (a problematic term itself), and his insistence on conceiving of influence being transmitted between one poet and a single predecessor, with no latitude for cases involving the movement of genres and ideas from one entire literary community to another. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 39. 32. Ihab Hassan uses the term “intracultural significance” in his 1955 essay “The Problem of Influence in Literary History” to describe the historical, social, psychological, and aesthetic circumstances that must be considered when using the term influence. What I am suggesting with the term “intercultural significance” is that in cases involving two languages and literatures, these same factors must be considered from the perspective of the two cultures. Ihab H. Hassan, “The Problem of Influence in Literary History: Notes Toward a Definition,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 1: 14 (September 1955), 66. 2 Creation Society Fiction and the Subjective Quality of May Fourth Literature 1. Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 26. 2. In regard to the presentation of self in literary works, Robert Hegel distinguishes two variants: “created selves” that refer to the fabricated individuals who people narratives, and “revealed selves” that refer to “those features of individual writers’ psyches unwittingly or deliberately manifested as self-expression in their work.” See Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney, Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3. 3. Kirk A. Denton, The Problematic Self in Modern Chinese Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9. 4. Exceptions, according to Wu, would include those classes in ancient societies who were relatively free from social or conventional restraints. The example he provides is that of female diarists in Heian period Japan. See Pei-yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 8. 5. Very often the authors would play upon or parody conventional biographical writing in writing about themselves. The most celebrated example of this kind of self-parody can be seen in the work, which Wu describes as the first Chinese autobiography, Tao Qian’s (365–427) “Wu Liu xiansheng chuan” (Biography of the Master of the Five Willows). Ibid., 30. 6. Ibid., 46.

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143

7. Ibid., 51. The question of subjectivity in Chinese poetry is itself a complicated and contentious issue, which cannot be effectively addressed here. Much has already been written on this matter including several studies by Stephen Owen. See, e.g., his work, The End of Chinese “Middle Ages”: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). 8. Robert E. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 39. 9. Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 10. 10. Martin Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth Century Chinese Novel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 7. 11. Robert Hegel, “Traditional Chinese Fiction: The State of the Field,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53: 2 (May 1994): 408. 12. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 300. 13. Martin Huang, “Authority and the Reader in Traditional Xiaoshuo Commentary,” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles and Reviews (CLEAR) 16: 2 (December 1994): 51. 14. The “storyteller’s manner” refers to the style that characterizes a certain variety of short fiction from the Ming period, which attempts to recreate, via a variety of narratological conventions, the aura of oral performance. See Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 19. 15. In this study the term “implied author,” which I have appropriated from Wayne Booth, does not refer to the biographical author but rather a persona projected in his works. Through the conscious manipulation of his protagonists, the author creates a carefully tailored version of himself. 16. These collections include Silent Operas (Wusheng xi, 1655–1656), Silent Operas, Second Collection (1656), and Twelve Towers (Shi’er lou, 1658). It should be noted however that, although Li himself was not dependent on earlier narrative materials for his stories, he did adapt some of these stories into highly successful plays. See Shuhui Yang, “Storytelling and Ventriloquism,” diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 1994, 19. See also Shuhui Yang’s recently published work, Appropriation and Representation: Feng Menglong and the Chinese Vernacular Story (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998). Li Yu also adopted some of his own stories into plays, with his play The Jade Clasp, derived from one of his short stories, being the most celebrated example. See Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu (London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 55. 17. Nathan K. Mao, “A Preliminary Appraisal of Li Yu’s Narrative Art,” in Critical Essays on Chinese Fiction, ed. Winston L.Y. Yang and Curtis P. Adkins (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1980), 151–164. 18. Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, 31. Another commentator is even more direct in his assertion that “His [Li’s] fictional personae reflect his own experiences.” Mao, “A Preliminary Appraisal,” 153.

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19. Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation, 9. 20. As a result of the burgeoning publishing industry in China in the 1910s, a number of works of vernacular fiction from the Ming and Qing periods, including Li Yu’s works, were reprinted and were available in new editions to the young May Fourth writers. 21. Perry E. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981), 156, 163. 22. Hiroko Willcock, “Japanese Influence on the Chinese Political Novel,” The Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 4: 4 (1989): 163. 23. Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, “Text, Intertext and the Representation of the Writing Self,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 172. 24. As noted earlier, the idea of “national essence” was promoted by Liang Qichao’s mentor Kang Youwei prior to the Hundred Days Reform. See also Theodore Huters, “A New Way of Writing,” Modern China 14: 3 (July 1988): 243–277. 25. The impact of Western Romanticism in general and of particular Western writers is a complicated issue that is outside of the scope of this work. Those interested in pursuing this legacy are directed to Leo Ou-fan Lee’s seminal essay, “The Romantic Temper of May Fourth Writers,” in Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium, ed. Benjamin I. Schwartz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 69–84. 26. Bonnie S. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China: 1919–1923 (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971), 145. 27. Jaroslav Prusek, ed., Dictionary of Oriental Literatures, vol. 1 [East Asia], (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), 165–166. Translations of The Lone Swan in English include a 1929 translation by George Kin Leung published by the Commercial Press. 28. It is interesting to note that the Japanese author Satô Haruo, who will be mentioned later in regard to the influence his work exerted on Yu Dafu’s fiction, was himself aware of Su Manshu’s work and produced an essay called “The Person Known As Su Manshu” (Su Manshu to wa ikanaru hito zo, 1934) introducing Su to the Japanese reading public. See Satô Haruo Zenshû, vol. 11 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1969), 501–511. 29. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 65. 30. Ibid., 81. 31. Liang had appropriated the term zhengzhi xiaoshuo (Japanese, seiji shôsetsu) to describe the variety of political novel he was advocating. Lu Xun, in the 1920s, looking back on the literature produced between 1897 and 1910, referred to it as the “fiction of exposure” (qianze xiaoshuo). The aesthetic and ethical values represented by this “fiction of exposure” no doubt insinuated themselves into May Fourth literature.

Notes

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

145

See Milena Dolezelová Velingerova, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 2. Prusek, ed., Dictionary of Oriental Literatures, 1: 98–99. For more about Lin Shu’s contributions to a familiarity with Western writers among May Fourth intellectuals see Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation, 41–57. The pace of translation increased in the May Fourth period and included contributions by a number of important young writers including Guo Moruo’s translation of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (1922), Xu Zhimo’s rendering of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, and Yu Dafu’s translations of Turgenev. The style of May Fourth literature would not have been possible without the contributions made during this translation period. See Edward Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 107. Yu Dafu, “Caishiji” (Caishiji, 1922) in Huang Houxing, ed., Chuangzaoshe Congshu (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 101. The title is a place name in Anhui Province where the Tang poet Li Bai’s grave is located. Marián Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917–1930) (London: Curzan Press, 1980), 35. Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzao ziliao, vol. 1 (Fuzhou: Fujian chubanshe, 1985), 11. Originally appeared in the first edition of the Chuangzao jikan in March 1922. In Chen Huangmei, ed., 1: 3–5. May Fourth Romanticism portrayed an individualism that sought to remove the intellectual from engagement with social issues. Marxist literature provided May Fourth writers with a narrative model through which they were able to address social issues. See Denton, ed., The Problematic Self, 47. Leo Ou-Fan Lee. “The Romantic Temper,” 80. See Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 17. Denton, The Problematic Self, 10. This essay originally appeared in the August 4, 1922 issue of Current Event News (shishi xinbao). Reprinted in Chen Huangmou, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao, 1: 14–15. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, 161. Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). The degree to which these student organizations were politically active can be seen in the students’ response to the issuance of “Ordinance Nineteen” by the Japanese government in 1905. The fifteen-clause document was designed to standardize enrollment procedures for expanding the number of Chinese exchange students. Students, for their part, saw it as an infringement on their rights and objected to the controls it sought

146

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

Notes to impose on their ability to live and work where they pleased. In the wake of the demonstrations that resulted, nearly two thousand students returned to China in protest. Again in 1915, Japan’s presentation of the infamous “Fifteen Demands” to the Chinese government sparked an angry reaction among students climaxing in the flight of Chinese students reminiscent of the 1905 demonstrations. Ibid., 164–171. “Sinking” is widely available in translation. See, e.g., Joseph S.M. Lau, C.T. Hsia and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919–1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 123–141. Synopses of a selection of other stories alluded to in this study that are not available in an English translation are included in appendix A. Apropos the final scene, Kirk Denton suggests that the “suicide” in “Sinking” is really quite ambiguous, and this scene, in which the author looks out at the sea and the sky above could be interpreted as his looking off toward China’s new beginning. See Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking,’ ” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 14 (December 1992), 113. Zhang’s story, “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” first appeared in the third issue (Autumn 1922) of Chuangzao. Reprinted in Itô Toramaru, ed., Sôzôsha no shiryô, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Ajia Shuppan, 1971), 23. Other stories about student life in Japan deal with romance and relations with the opposite sex on the part of these exchange students, Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” being the most celebrated example. Wendy Larson, Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 146. For further information about the lives of Chinese students during the early modern period see Chi Yün, Shadows in a Chinese Landscape (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1999). It is worth remarking that Yu Dafu often named his characters “Yu” or “Y” or “Da” or, the variation used here, Yu Zhifu. This convention was employed not only among Creation Society writers but by a number of May Fourth writers to indicate that the narrative was to be seen as autobiographical. See Henry Y.H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 195. Yu Dafu, “Endless Nights” (Mangmang ye, 1921) in Itô Toramaru, ed., Sôzôsha no shiryô, 1: 86. According to the scholar Zhu Defa, “A Sonata on Wandering” can be read as a record of Guo’s activities. See Zhongguo wusi wenxueshi (Jinan: Shandong wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 559. Guo Moruo, “Halfway” (Weiyang) from Chuangzao Jikan 1:3 (1922). Reprinted in Itô Toramaru, ed., Sôzôsha, 13. Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing) was among the most vociferous of early opponents of the Creation Society’s dramatic self-referentiality. In his essay “My Impressions On Reading Creation” (Chuangzao gei wo de yinxiang) that appeared in the May 21, 1922 issue of Wenxue Xunkan, he attacked

Notes

55. 56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

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the Creation Society writers for what he perceived as a lack of attention to social issues. See Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 28. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, 189–191. For example, Tian Han’s play “Hushang de Beiju” (Tragedy on the Lake) is said to have elicited a profound emotional response among young audience members in the 1930s. “Tragedy on the Lake” is available in English translation in Ku Tsong-nee, ed., Modern Chinese Plays (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1941), 91–118. Gunn suggests that this is particularly true in “Sinking.” Stylistic innovations are apparent in the grammar of these works: e.g., in the preponderance of verb–object constructions and clauses used in the attributive position as modifiers. See Edward Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 231. In the original Chinese, the words “megalomania” and “hypochondria” in the passage appear in English without translation. Reprinted in Huang Houxing, ed., 3: 56. It should be noted that Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra had already been translated into Japanese and enjoyed a certain popularity among Japanese intellectuals at precisely the time of Yu’s residence in Japan. Guo Moruo himself translated Also Sprach Zarathustra into Chinese in 1923. Those interested in Nietzsche’s impact on Japanese intellectuals are advised to see Randolph Petralia’s dissertation, “Nietzsche in Meiji Japan: Culture Criticism, Individualism and Reaction in the ‘Aesthetic Life’ Debate of 1901–1903” (Washington University in St. Louis, 1981). For the complete, annotated English translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, see Walter Kaufmann’s translation: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (New York: The Modern Library, 1992). Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 108. It has been suggested that the advent of May Fourth Literature, and the Shanghai literary scene in particular, would not have been possible without the input of Chinese writers returned from abroad. Many of these writers, upon their return to China, settled in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. Shanghai, like the foreign lands that provided the settings for early May Fourth stories, was exotic and slightly unreal to most Chinese of the period. See Heinrich Fruehauf, “Urban Exoticism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 133. See the reference to Lu Xun’s essay in Larson, Literary Authority, 144. The article in question, “Wo chengren shi ‘shibai’ le” (I Admit to Being Decadent), appeared in December 1924 in the periodical, Nong shenbao fujin. Reprinted in Wang Zili, ed., Yu Dafu yanjiu ziliao, vol. 1 (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1981), 233–235.

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63. Harrell is speaking specifically about the generation who had received their education in Japan from around the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. This generation would include, e.g., the brothers Zhou Zuoren and Lu Xun who had studied in Japan in the first decade of the twentieth century. See Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change, 184. 64. For more about the intellectual background of May Fourth writers see Theodore Huters, “Blossoms in the Snow: Lu Xun and the Dilemma of Modern Chinese Literature,” Modern China 10: 1 (January 1984), 50. 65. Despite the superficial Westernization of Japanese society during the late Meiji and early Taishô periods, there remained a number of Japanese intellectuals who had received an education in the Chinese classics and were eager to hear the views of young Chinese intellectuals. One manifestation of this education was the vogue for Chinese poetry (kanshi) among Japanese intellectuals such as Natsume Soseki. This passion for Chinese culture is ironic in light of the general reluctance on the part of either the Japanese or the Chinese students to establish friendly relations. See Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change, 15, 86. 3 BUNDAN versus WENTAN: The Dynamics of the Literary Coterie and Its Audience(s) 1. “Pure literature” (junbungaku), as the term was defined by the Japanese literary community in the Taishô period, referred to a variety of new, elitist literature that coexisted with popular literature and Proletarian literature. According to the proponents of pure literature in the Taishô period, selfreferential literature in the form of the shishôsetsu was the purest form of prose expression. The irony of this perspective is that in embracing a form of narrative that was presumably so antagonistic to construction, Taishô writers came to conceive of nineteenth-century Western novels as “impure” and “vulgar.” See Karatani Kôjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature trans. Brett DeBary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 154. 2. Wentan is the Chinese reading for the same two-graph word as bundan. 3. Ozaki Kôyô’s novel was inspired by a genre of such “revelatory tales” (zangemono) from the Medieval period. Tales such as “The Three Monks” and “The Seven Nuns” present confessional narratives about individuals and describe their religious awakenings (hosshindan) as a model for believers. It is plausible that Kôyô’s novel, with its pseudoconfessional approach, had an impact on the newly emerged shishôsetsu. See Margaret Helen Childs, Rethinking Sorrow: Revelatory Tales of Late Medieval Japan (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1991), 14. 4. The bundan of the Taishô period had a number of features in common with the Meiji period bundan that preceded it, including a sense of economic and social insecurity that impelled writers to unite in professional communities. The Taishô period bundan however, in contrast to that of

Notes

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

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the Meiji period, exhibited an environment of mutual understanding among peers as opposed to the hierarchical relations of the Meiji bundan. See Irena Powell, Writers and Society in Modern Japan (New York: Kodansha International, 1983), 31. Like the traditional Japanese octopus pots (tako tsubo) referred to in this analogy, each of the literary coteries in early modern Japan was independent and distinct, but they remained essentially in contact with the others and were sensitive to changes and movements on the part of the other coteries. Ibid., 9. Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishôsetsu in Early Twentieth Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley, Calif.: The University of California Press, 1988), 48. These small in-group journals were also referred to as “circulating journals” (kairan zasshi) and were generally produced in small numbers. One can cite the example of the first issue of the journal Kiseki in 1912, which sold only twenty-eight copies. Ibid., 131. Itô Sei, Nihon bundan shi, vol. 16 (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1972), 127. Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China 1911–1937 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2003), 84. The Taidong Shuju also published the works of the Low Grass Society (qiancaoshe). Ibid., 127. Ibid., 95. While I have been examining individual Creation Society works outside of the context of the periodical in which they first appeared, I believe that Hockx’s argument is significant. Moreover, I am in total agreement that for such coteries, in both May Fourth China and Taishô Japan, their very existence revolved around the production and dissemination of the coterie journal. This example underscores the fact that the bundan was not simply a closed world inhabited by writers and critics and publishers, but rather was one facet of a much larger network, which included artists, scholars, composers, and others concerned with forging a new cultural life in Japan. Marvin Marcus, Paragons of the Ordinary: The Biographical Literature of Mori Ôgai (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 33. The need to produce ample and varied material for regular inclusion in journals encouraged the development of a number of intriguing forms including the zadankai (round table discussion) and danwa hikki (transcribed conversation), both of which purported to be the transcription of actual discussions about literature and writing. Another manifestation of this tendency was the phenomenon of the anketto (questionnaire) sent around to writers. See Marvin Marcus, “The Writer Speaks: Late Meiji Reflections on Literature and Life,” in The Distant Isle: Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Robert H. Brower, ed. Robert Borgen, Thomas Hare, and Sharalyn Orbaugh (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center of Japanese Studies, 1996), 228–271.

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15. Certainly there were precedents for this interest in the fictionalization of lived experience in the Japanese literary tradition. There is the case, e.g., of the interest generated by discrepancies between Matsuo Basho’s classic literary diary Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi) and the more pedestrian, but biographically accurate account of the same journey by Basho’s disciple, Sora. 16. Ômori Sumio, Watakushi shôsetsu kenkyû (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1982), 79. 17. The shishôsetsu form anticipates active involvement, on the part of the reader, in the composition of the novel’s meaning. This echoes Wolfgang Iser who describes the reading of a novel as the “convergence” of the text and the reader, which “brings the literary work into existence.” Furthermore, Iser suggests that a literary text “will engage the reader’s imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative.” See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 275. 18. Irena Powell, Writers and Society in Modern Japan (New York: Kôdansha International, 1983), 428. 19. Henry Y.H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 50. 20. Strictly speaking, the “halting, fragmented portrayals of the self ” that characterized self-referential fiction during much of the Meiji period gave way to a more self-assured portrayal of self during the Taishô period. Nevertheless, the character of both the Taishô period bundan and the shishôsetsu form had their origins in the late Meiji period among writers associated with Japanese Naturalism. See Marcus, Paragons of the Ordinary, 25. 21. Anna, Dolezalová, Yü Ta-fu Specific Traits of His Literary Creation (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1971), 32. 22. Horst Ruthrof, The Reader’s Construction of the Narrative (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 123. 23. This originally appeared in Ding Ling’s “Yijiusanlingnian chun Shanghai” (Shanghai, Spring 1930, 1936), 190–191. This passage is translated and quoted in Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 21. 24. Zhao Yuan, “Yu Dafu ‘ziwo’ xiezhen de lanmanzhuyi xiaoshuo” (Yu Dafu’s “Self ” and the Romantic Novel) in Yu Dafu yanjiu ziliao, ed. Chen Zishan and Wang Zili (Hong Kong: Huacheng chubanshe, 1989), 309. 25. In regard to the significance of the reader’s role in textual production, Wolfgang Iser maintains that the implied reader is part of the structure of the narrative and one of several positions that provide perspectives on a work’s meaning. See Wallace Martin, ed., Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 161.

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26. We must again distinguish between the European Naturalism of Zola and the Japanese Naturalism referred to here, which was centered in the shishôsetsu form and sought to adopt the “scientific approach” of Zola in minutely detailed descriptions of the suffering of the individual protagonist. 27. Dennis Keene uses this expression to indicate a fascination with the personality of the writer on the part of the reader of the shishôsetsu. See Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishôsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.) 286. 28. Iser, The Implied Reeder, 282. 29. Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 25. 30. In his argument promoting the idea of the essentially oral nature of the modern Japanese novel, James Fujii admits a debt of gratitude to the Japanese scholar Komori Yôichi whose scholarship seeks to demonstrate the differences between the speaker (katari) in modern Japanese fiction and its equivalents in modern Western literature. See James A. Fujii, Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993), 31. 31. Ibid., 171. 32. Miyoshi Masao, “Against the Native Grain: The Japanese Novel and the ‘Postmodern West,’ ” South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 1988): 537. 33. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 36. 34. Ibid., 36. 35. Ibid., 38. 36. Itô describes, via a variety of anecdotes and reminiscences, the manner in which these writers interacted with one another both in the production of small-circulation (and usually short-lived) coterie magazines. He describes, e.g., how the young poet Satô Haruo, while in Tokyo, ostensibly preparing for the entrance examination to Tokyo University, would spend his days translating the poetry of Heinrich Heine and Christina Rossetti rather than preparing for his exams. See Itô Sei, Nihon bundanshi, vol. 16 (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1972), 130. 37. Satô Haruo, Den’en no Yû’utsu (Rural Melancholy) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980), 8. 38. Mushanokoji Saneatsu, “Omedetaki Hito” (An Innocent) in Gendai Bungaku Taikei, vol. 20, Mushanokoji Saneatsu, ed. Furuta, Toru (Tokyo: Chikuma shobôhan, 1964), 153. 39. Ishizaka Mikimasa, Shishôsetsu no riron: Sono hôkô to Kadai O megutle (Tokyo: Yachiyo Publishers, 1985), 86. 40. As quoted by Fowler in Rhetoric of Confession, 258. 41. Zhao Yuan, “Yu Dafu ‘ziwo’ xie zhen de lanmangzhuji xiaoshuo,” 227. 42. Yu Dafu, “Caishiji” in Huang Houxing, ed., Chuangzaoshe congshu, vol. 3 (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 111. 43. Zhao Yuan, “Yu Dafu ‘ziwo’ xie zhende lanmangzhuji xiashuo,” 227.

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44. Perry Link notes that this change in the status of writers was in part the consequence of a new, varied readership which included students enrolled in new Western-style schools who would comprise an important portion of May Fourth writers. See Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981), 191. 45. Ibid., 167. 46. Hockx, Questions of Style, 255. 47. Chen Baoliang, Zhongguo de she yu hui (China’s Societies and Associations) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1996), 279–280. 48. Hockx, Questions of Style, 26. 49. Ibid., 84. 50. Ibid., 34. 51. Ibid., 90. 52. Ibid., 34. 53. The largest and most important of these student associations in Japan and a veritable hotbed of revolutionary thought was the Chinese Student Union (Zhongguo liuxuesheng huiguan), established in Tokyo in 1902 as a nonpartisan, cross-regional group which, at its height, embraced thousands of members. The Student Union provided a gathering place and an environment in which students could exchange ideas. This group along with several others formed in Japan eventually became political parties back in China. See Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 100. 54. The thought and activities of these Chinese student groups were also swayed by their awareness of recent events unfolding in Russia and with the onset of the Great War in Europe. See Otani Ichirô, “Chuangzaoshe yu Riben: qingnian Tian Han yu nage shidai,” Zhongguo xiandai wenxue (March 1989): 244. 55. Hockx, Questions of Style, 90. 56. Ibid., 93. 57. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation, 30. 58. Unfortunately, superficial studies of the contributions of these two literary coteries have tended to focus only on what appears to be the concentration of each society—the scholasticism of the Literary Research Society in its advocacy of the study of Western literature versus the essentially production-oriented approach of the Creation Society. This interpretation obfuscates the fact that both societies were in fact dedicated to the study of foreign literature in conjunction with the production of their own literary works. 59. Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Literary Trends I: The Quest for Modernity,” in The Cambridge History of China: Republican China (1912–1949), vol. 12, ed. John Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 473.

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60. Bonnie S. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China: 1919–1925 (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971), 48. 61. In opposition to the traditionally endorsed view that the differences between these two groups polarized the Chinese literary world into two sides, Bonnie McDougall surmises that in their iconoclasm and their eagerness to discover the “literary riches” of the West, the two groups had much in common. Ibid., 40. 62. Hockx, Questions of Style, 69. 63. According to this theory, of course, the group against which the Creation Society was positioning itself was the Literary Research Society. See Hockx, Questions of Style, 69. 64. Ibid., 253. Hockx further suggests that in terms of literary organization and range of activities in which they were engaged, the Creation Society provided a paradigm for Chinese literary coteries of the 1920s. 65. Ibid., 94–95. 66. Itô Toramaru, “Chuangzaoshe yu Riben wenxue” (The Creation Society and Japanese Literature), Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu (March 1986): 210. 67. Guo’s views on art took a radical turn in the second half of the decade, when he proposed that the revolutionary artist was simply a mouthpiece for the party’s views and that writers should become “gramophones.” See Mariàn Gàlik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917–1930) (London: Curzan Press, 1980), 28. 68. The Shirakaba group’s supposed antipathy toward social and political issues was merely one facet of a complex and original group of artists. Some of the main figures associated with the group such as Shiga Naoya and Satomi Ton did indeed steer away from political and social issues, but this was not the case for all Shirakaba members. One merely has to look at the fiction of Arishima Takeo or to the New Village (atarashiki mura) communal living experiment to find proof of the group’s capacity for social engagement. The Creation Society’s members accepted the proposition articulated by Shirakaba member Nagayo Yoshiô (1888–1961) that a “genius should steer society by making it conform to himself.” The responsibility of the artist to society was a prerequisite to the art of individual expression. See Gàlik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 200. 69. A fuller comparison of the Creation Society and the Shirakaba group might include an examination of the roles played by key figures in both groups in which Guo’s role in the Creation Society corresponds to Mushanokoji’s role in the Shirakaba group, Shiga Naoya’s role to Yu Dafu’s, and Ye Lingfeng’s to Arishima Ikuma’s. While admitting that such comparisons are superficial, they do at least demonstrate the organizational flexibility of both coteries.

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Notes 4

The Creation Society’s Remaking of the SHISHO ˆ SETSU

1. Anthony Pare and Graham Smart, “Observing Genres in Action: Toward a Research Methodology,” in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 153. 2. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 226. 3. It must be admitted that the pervasiveness of this traditional bias against fiction is difficult to assess in modern Chinese and Japanese literature. Western attitudes toward fiction had already been absorbed and accepted to a certain extent by a younger generation of East Asian writers as a result of their exposure to the values of Western literature in essays by scholars such as Tsubouchi Shôyô, Liang Qichao, and others, and by their direct reading of works of Western fiction. 4. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 145. 5. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self Revelation: Shishôsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 162. 6. The importance accorded to sincere expression in May Fourth literature can be seen, e.g., in Hu Shi’s groundbreaking essay “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature), which appeared in New Youth 2: 5 (January 1917). In the essay, Hu argued for the creation of a new literature possessing substance and insisted that the new literature be the expression of genuine experience. He suggested, “The greatest reason for the deterioration of literature is that the literati have become mired in politics and are without any kind of far-reaching thought or sincere feeling. The harm of an overly formalist literature lies in this so-called language without substance.” For a translation see Kirk A. Denton, ed. and trans., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 125. 7. “Hobby Horse” first appeared in Creation, 1:2 (Summer 1922). Reprinted in Huang Houxing, ed., Chuangzaoshe congshu (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 140. 8. The understanding on the part of the Creation Society members of the irony implicit in the shishôsetsu form suggests that they were cognizant of the fact that “one of the most delicate of all distinctions is the difference between autobiography and its parody.” See Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 14. 9. Shiga Naoya, Wakai (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1974), 8. 10. Guo Moruo, “Lun guonei de pingdan ji wo duiyu chuangzuo shang de taidu” (Concerning Domestic Critical Circles and My Attitude Toward Creativity) in Chuangzaoshe ziliao, vol. 1, Chen Huangmei, ed. (Fujian: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1985), 15. Originally appeared in the August 4, 1922 edition of Shanghai’s Shishi Xinbao newspaper.

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11. Stephen W. Kohl, “Shiga Naoya and the Literature of Experience,” Monumenta Nipponica 32: 2 (Summer 1977): 211. 12. In regard to this type of narrative, one scholar, commenting on the “mystifying abruptness” of Kawabata Yasunari’s fiction, draws a parallel between this largely plotless fiction and the asymmetry of the traditional Japanese garden. See Thom Palmer, “The Asymmetrical Garden: Discovering Kawabata Yasunari,” Southwest Review 74: 3 (Summer 1989): 392. 13. Masao Miyoshi, “Against the Native Grain: The Japanese Novel and the ‘Postmodern West,’ ” South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 1988): 537. 14. Guo Moruo suggests that such sympathy existed between the Society and its readers in his essay, “Lun guonei de pingdan.” See Chen Huangmei, ed., 1:15. 15. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edition (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 83. 16. Henry Y.H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction From the Traditional to the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 60. 17. Ye Shengtao, “Wenyi tan,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. and trans. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 164. Originally published serially from March 5 to June 25, 1921 in Chenbao. 18. Guo Moruo, “Women de wenxue xinyundong” (Our New Literary Movement) in Chen Huangmei, ed., 1:46. Originally appeared in the May 1923 issue of Chuangzao zhoubao, 3 (May 1923). 19. Translated and reprinted in Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought, 99–106. 20. Of the 120 translations into Chinese from Japanese literature in the period from 1924 to 1949, the great majority were theoretical works as opposed to creative works of fiction or poetry. See Wang Jinghou, Wusi: xinwenxue yu waiguo wenxue (Sichuan: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 1989), 61–96. 21. Kuriyagawa’s works were translated by Lu Xun, among others. See Marián Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917–1930) (London: Curzan Press, 1980), 78. 22. Interestingly, Kuriyagawa was at least partially aware of the impact of his writings on the contemporary Chinese literary community as can be surmised from the following account of an exchange between Kuriyagawa and one of his students: [Kuriyagawa] praised me saying, “I read with interest that piece of yours in ‘X’ Newspaper.” “Recently, in a Chinese magazine there was a translation of a passage from your ‘Ten Lectures in Modern Literature,’ ” I affably replied, and when I showed Professor Kuriyagawa the issue of New Youth, he responded,

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Notes “Hm, a while back a student named Tian Han came by and told me the same thing. Apparently, they’ve even published a special issue devoted to Ibsen—the Chinese are really on the ball, aren’t they? If we Japanese keep loafing around, we’re going to be left behind!” From a reminiscence about Kuriyagawa, who died tragically in the Great Kantô Earthquake of 1923, by a former student. See Maami Makoto, “Hora Hakuson to Genroku onna” (The Braggart Hakuson and Women of the Genroku Era), in Kindai sakka tsuitô bunshûsei, vol. 9, ed. Inamura Tetsumoto (Tokyo: Yumani shobô, 1987), 48.

23. Kuriyagawa possessed a broad knowledge of Western literature. Although his ideas were not original, for his readers he represented an important Romantic alternative to the ascendant Naturalist approach. See Bonnie S. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories to Modern China (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971), 93. 24. As quoted in Hinatsu Yûjiro, “Kuriyagawa Sensei no omokage o shinonde” (Treasuring Vestiges of Professor Kuriyagawa) in Kindai sakka tsuitô bunshûsei, vol. 9 (Tokyo: Yumani shobô, 1987), 80. 25. Itô Toramaru, “Satô Haruo yu Yu Dafu,” Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu 2 (February 1993), 209. 26. Kuriyagawa’s essay was translated into Chinese as “Kumen de xiangzheng.” See Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 78. The most recent Chinese translation of “Kumon no shôchô,” by Tang Yumei was in 1987 via the Wenguo shuju publishers as part of the Shijie wenxue mingzhu series, no. 56. 27. Guo Moruo, “Lun guonei” in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao, 1: 14. 28. One critic suggests, in fact, that Guo didn’t so much embrace propaganda literature in the latter half of the 1920s out of enthusiasm for its possibilities as he did out of a “reluctant and half-ashamed repudiation of pure literature.” See McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories, 145. 29. “Caishiji” first appeared in Creation, 1: 4 (1922). Reprinted in Huang, ed., 103. 30. Quoted in Yu Yun, Yu Dafu Chuan (Fuzhou: Fujian sheng renmin dasha, 1984), 54. 31. As quoted in James A. Fujii, Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993), 20. Originally appeared in Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 151. 32. One of the most trenchant critics of Yu Dafu’s work, Anna Dolezelová, describes Yu as the consummate “performance author” who skillfully packages an altered version of himself. See Li Huoren, “Yu Dafu yu sixiaoshuo,” Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu (March 1990), 209.

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33. Yu Dafu’s “Wind Chime” (Fengling) originally appeared in Chuangzao Jikan 1:2 (1922). Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., 1: 83–99. 34. Lydia H. Liu, “Narratives of Modern Selfhood: First-Person Fiction in May Fourth Literature,” in Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 114. 35. Although the story can be read as an example of historical fiction, I believe that in its portrayal of the misunderstood, underappreciated genius, Yu is merely using a well-known historical figure to depict his own experiences, making the story another manifestation of selfreferentiality. 36. Yu Dafu, “Caishiji,” in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao, 1: 99. 37. Ibid., 101. 38. Leo Ou-Fan Lee suggests that in his talk of suicide and drunkenness, Yu Dafu hit upon the celebrated nineteenth-century Russian intellectual hero who, deprived of traditional channels to success, has become politically impotent. See “The Romantic Temper of May Fourth Writers,” Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium, ed. Benjamin Schwartz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 73. 39. Kasai Zenzô, “Kanashiki Chichi,” in Gendai bungaku taikei, vol. 29, ed. Takenauchi Shizuo (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 1967), 265. 40. Edward Fowler has proposed, “To authorize a self was no easy task in a society unwilling to acknowledge the individual as a viable social unit.” This statement applies to the Creation Society fiction under consideration as well. See The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishôsetsu in Early TwentiethCentury Japanese Fiction (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988), 24. I am in agreement with Fowler who maintains that the social milieu is so little described in the shishôsetsu as to be conspicuous by its absence. 41. Yu Dafu, “Caishiji,” 101. 42. Anna Dolezelová, Yü Ta-fu: Specific Traits of His Literary Creation (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1971), 36. 43. Yu Dafu, “Caishiji,” 112. 44. Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 151. 45. It is kare, the protagonist, “through whose eyes the narrator sees and through whose mind the narrator thinks.” For this reason, a shishôsetsu protagonist may be introduced from the very first as kare, and only later will a given name be introduced. See Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 36. 46. In regard to the use of personal pronouns in the May Fourth era, Edward Gunn states, “The promotion of pronouns distinguishing gender after 1918 resulted in a demonstrable expansion in the cohesive use of pronouns for anaphoric reference.” Although use of personal pronouns preceded the May Fourth era, the length of passages in which cohesion was sustained by the use of personal referents “clearly increased substantially”

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47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54. 55.

Notes during this period. See Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 271. The degree to which usage of the third-person pronoun as an alias for the author affected the Creation Society’s early fiction can be surmised from its extended use in the early stories of the society such as Tao Jingsun’s “Liang Guniang” (Two girls, 1922), Teng Gu’s “Xiangchou” (Homesick, 1923), and Huang Zhengzhi’s story “Ta” (Him, 1923), among others. Yu Dafu, “Caishiji,” 115. I have chosen to italicize the third-person pronoun in order to accentuate the frequency of its usage in this brief passage. Because the third-person point of view does not carry the same sense of the “incontrovertible truth” as does the first-person narrative, it allows for a more ambiguous, and therefore interesting, interpretation of the relationship between the narrator and author. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 131. Wang Xiaochu, “Xinjiang xiaoshuo: Yu Dafu zaoqi xiaoshuo de xushuxingshi he yiyi,” Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan, vol. 2 (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1993), 119. Anna Dolezelová states emphatically that Yu’s “Sinking,” e.g., “necessarily required processing in the third person” in order to transform the autobiographical narrative into a universal experience of tragedy. See Dolezelová, Yü Ta-fu, 15. During his lifetime, Yu produced over four hundred highly accomplished poems in the classical style. See Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, “Text, Intertext, and the Representation of the Writing Self in Lu Xun, Yu Dafu and Wang Meng,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 181. Yu Dafu, “Caishiji,” 103. The lüshi (regulated verse) is a poetic form of eight lines consisting of either five or seven syllables. The same rhyme is maintained throughout the poem and the four lines in the middle of the poem must form two antithetical couplets. The form originated in the Tang period but remained a popular form thereafter. The zashi (miscellaneous verse), on the other hand, was a form with less rigidly defined conventions. See James J.Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago, Iu.: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 26. Shiga Naoya, “At Kinosaki,” in Donald Keene, ed., Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day, trans. Edward Seidensticker (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 274. Kasai Zenzô, “Kanashiki chichi,” 270. Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, “Text, Intertext, and the Representation of the Writing Self,” 170. Feuerwerker’s work examines literary production as a significant theme in May Fourth literature.

Notes

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56. Theodore Huters, “Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature,” From May Fourth to June Fourth, 272. Although Huters acknowledges significant stylistic differences between Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Yu Dafu, he cites the strong narrative voice as the featured shared by all three writers. 57. Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 28. 58. It was fellow Creationist He Weijing who compared Yu’s place in Chinese literature to that of Satô Haruo in Japanese literature. See Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 112. 59. As a narrative form, the shishôsetsu is less plot-driven than it is lyrical. Lyricism is, in fact, the defining quality of the form. See HijiyaKirschnereit, Rituals of Self Revelation, 300. 60. Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 254. 61. The unique persona that Yu created, in its instant recognizability, is reminiscent of the “Shiga hero.” See William Sibley, The Shiga Hero (Chicago, Iu.: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 62. Dolezelová, Yü Ta-fu, 50. 63. Yu Dafu, “Caishiji,” 100. 64. These “sibling texts” then become a guide for reading an author’s subsequent works. See Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 66. 65. For example, an instance in which Yu struck his son in a fit of rage after his son had asked him numerous times to buy Western clothes is fictionalized not only in the stories “A Lonely Man on a Journey” and “Street Lamps” but is given a more straightforward, autobiographical treatment in his essay, “An Old Letter to Moruo.” Another example of this type of narratological transformation of autobiographical material in several different works involves an incident in which, as a struggling young writer, Yu was forced to sell his wife’s ring in order to pay off his debts. This incident was incorporated into both the stories “Silvergrey Death” and “Marital Episodes.” For a further description of this phenomenon, see Dolezelová, Yü Ta-fu, 78. 66. Guo Moruo, “Halfway,” Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao, 1: 13–32. Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1: 3 (Fall 1922), 1–20. 67. The most interesting passage in “Lingering Spring” is one that appears toward the end of this patently fictional story in which Liang dreams that his wife has committed suicide after murdering their two sons. After he awakens and finds his wife sleeping soundly beside him, he attributes this awful dream to his recent reading of the Medea tale. This passage suggests the same sense of estrangement from his wife that we see in “Halfway.” 68. Although “Children of Asia” is too long to summarize here, it is essentially the story of Zhu’s constantly shifting political agenda, from support of Chiang Kaishek’s (Jiang Jieshe, 1887–1975) Republican forces to his sympathies with Communism, to his final decision to go with his family to support the Japanese Army there, where he and his family will open a

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69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Notes medical clinic and Japanese culture school. Despite its surprisingly warm description of the love shared between Zhu and his wife and their dutiful sons—the true “Children of Asia”—the petty propagandistic nature of the piece infuriated both Guo and Yu who quickly published essays of their own attacking Satô and seeking to make their political stances adamantly clear. Guo, “Halfway,” 17. According to Edward Fowler, sickness in the shishôsetsu can be seen as a metaphor for victimization and is symbolic of the protagonist’s sense of vulnerability. See Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 283. In the case of the early Creation Society fiction, as we have seen elsewhere in such stories as Yu Dafu’s “Sinking,” illness is also inevitably a metaphor for an “ill” China in need of healing. Guo, “Halfway,” 16. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1984), 521. Guo, “Halfway,” 18. Generally speaking, to the degree that family is portrayed at all in the shishôsetsu it is portrayed as a “collective nuisance” and a source of many of the tribulations encountered by the protagonist. See Marvin Marcus, “The Writer Speaks: Late Meiji Reflections on Literature and Life,” in The Distant Isle: Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature, ed. Robert Borgen, Thomas Hare, and Sharalyn Orbaugh (Ann Arbor; Mich.: University of Michigan, 1996), 229. This quality gives credence to the contention that the shishôsetsu represents a “single-consciousness” perspective in which all action in the narrative is perceived and reported through the consciousness of the authorial protagonist. See Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 28. Kasai Zenzô, “Ko o tsurete,” 271–285. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self Revelation, 459. Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 295. Ibid., 151. Guo, “Halfway,” 17. Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 295. 5 The Limits of Subversion: Political and Social Critique in the Creation Society’s Early Fiction

1. Itô Toramaru, “Chuangzaoshe yu Riben wenxue,” Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu (March 1986), 213. 2. Zhu Defa, Zhongguo wusi wenxue shi (Shandong: Shandong wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 554. 3. James N. Stull, Literary Selves: Autobiography and Contemporary American Nonfiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 5. 4. Anna Dolezalová, Yü Ta-fu: Specific Traits of His Literary Creation (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1971), 22.

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5. Guo Moruo, “Weiyang” (Halfway), in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao (Fujian: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1985), 1: 13–32. Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1: 3 (Fall 1922), 19. 6. Zhang Ziping, “Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” (Yiban rongyi de shenghuo) in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chungzaoshe ziliao, 1: 35–53. 7. Zheng Boqi’s “First Day of Class” and Zhang Ziping’s Hobby Horse” are both summarized in appendix A. 8. Theodore Huters, “Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 269. 9. Zhang, “The Lives,” 36. 10. Wang Jinhou, Wusi: xinwenxue yu waiguo wenxue (May Fourth: The New Literature and Foreign Literature) (Sichuan: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 1989), 62. 11. Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 69 12. Zhang, “The Lives,” 42. 13. Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change, 82. 14. Ibid., 81. 15. Ibid., 83. 16. Zhang, “The Lives,” 39. 17. Ibid., 40. 18. Ibid., 41. 19. Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change, 99, 100–101. 20. Ibid., 98. 21. Otani Ichiro, “Chuangzaoshe yu Riben: qingnian Tian Han yu nage shidai” (The Creation Society and Japan: Young Tian Han and His Age) Zhongguo xiandai wenxue (March 1989), 247. Inevitably, many of the returned students from Japan were leaders in political and social reform movements in the May Fourth period and became leading elements among the “modern-spirited” class of intellectuals. See Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change, 215. 22. Zhang, “The Lives,” 43. 23. Ibid., 51. 24. While abroad, these young writers tended to invent a “China” as an alternative to Japan. See Wendy Larson, Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 113. 25. Yu Dafu, “Blue Smoke” (Qingyan). Originally appeared in Chuangzao Zhoubao, 8, 1923. Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., 1: 116–122. 26. Xu Zidong, Yu Dafu xinlun (New Essays About Yu Dafu) (Hangzhou: Jiejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1984), 225. 27. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self Revelation: Shishôsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 300.

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Notes

28. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 95. 29. Bonnie S McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China: 1919–1925 (Tokyo: Center for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971), 201. 30. Eric Rothstein, “Diversity and Change in Literary Histories,” in Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, eds., Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 31. Perry E. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981), 161. 32. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories, 139. 33. Yu, “Blue Smoke,” 117. 34. Ibid., 117. This use of Russian is notable. The protagonist’s condition is so modern and foreign that there is no way in Chinese to describe his condition. 35. Ibid., 117. Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, is remembered primarily for his historical fiction, which includes Krzyzacy (The Teutonic Knights, 1900) and Quo Vadis (1896). Katherine Baker Siepmann, ed., Benèt’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, 3rd edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 898. 36. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang, ed., From May Fourth to June Fourth, 141. 37. Zheng recalled how he and Yu would attempt to impress the counter girls working at the Western bookstores with his English skills and familiarity with Western literature. As recounted in Yu Yun, Yu Dafu chuan (Fujian: Fujianshan renmin dasha, 1984), 51. 38. Yu Dafu, “Blue Smoke,” 118. 39. Ibid., 118. 40. It is notable that the character who represents the ruin of tradition is a woman. One could of course interpret this character as the repository for the author’s own sense of ruin. In the other story by Yu examined in this chapter, the female character becomes the site for contesting issues of race, culture, and power. 41. Ibid., 121 42. Ibid., 122. 43. Yu Dafu, “In the Middle” (Zhongtu), Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzaoshe ziliao, 2: 478–486. 44. Ibid., 478. What is noteworthy about this passage that appears early in the story is that Japan is described vis-à-vis the protagonist as the feminine other with whom the protagonist has had a long relationship and from whom he feels obliged to part. 45. Dolezalovà, Yü Ta-fu, 22. 46. Yu Dafu, “In the Middle,” 480. 47. Ibid., 480. 48. Ibid., 480.

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49. Itô Sei provides the example of Ozaki Kazuo who used the shishôsetsu form to express his views on traditional values and institutions. Itô, Itô Sei Zenshû, vol. 16 (Tokyo: Shinchô shuppan, 1973), 406. 50. John Paris, Kimono (New York: Macaulay Company, 1922). This novel tells of a young English aristocrat who marries a woman named Asako Fujinami, who had been brought from Japan as an infant and raised in France with no memory of her homeland. The novel’s action revolves around the complications that arise when the newlyweds go to visit Japan and discover that Asako’s family, a prominent family in the Yoshiwara licensed quarters of Tokyo (formerly Edo), are opposed to her marriage to a Westerner. The novel had just been published when the character in Yu’s story encountered it in a bookstore in Japan. 51. Other stories of Yu Dafu in which an otherwise politically impotent character uses sex with a prostitute as a way of overcoming a lack of status include his well-known stories “Sinking” and “Endless Nights.” 52. Yu Dafu, “In the Middle,” 484. 53. Ibid., 484. It is interesting to note that, as with the encounter with the female shopkeeper in “Blue Smoke,” in this encounter he again projects onto a victimized female his own ambivalence and self-loathing. 54. Ibid., 485. 55. Ibid., 486. 56. Ibid., 486. 6 The Legacy of the SHISHO ˆ SETSU in Chinese Literature 1. One such example expressing dissatisfaction with contemporary literature comes from Wang Duqing, “Weilai zhi yizhujia: pochu ‘ziran’ de mixin” (The Art of the Future: Destroying “Natural” Superstitions), which originally appeared in 4:4 issue of Xueyi. Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzao ziliao, vol. 1 (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1985), 3. 2. Wei Jian, “Riben jindai wenhua zhiyu qianqi Chuangzaoshe” (Modern Japanese Literature and the Early Creation Society) Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu (January 1989): 55. It must be admitted that, along with their familiarity with Japanese literature, writers such as Mao Dun, Zhou Zuoren, and even the Creationists Yu Dafu and Guo Moruo, had a strong interest in the West and were widely read in Western literature. 3. Having spent their formative years in Japan, perhaps it was natural that the Creation Society writers would eventually conceive of Japan as a “reference book” toward understanding the West. Guo Moruo as quoted in Wei Jian, “Riben Jindai,” 59. 4. Familiarity with the Chinese narrative tradition is a quality that the Creationists shared with a number of early modern Japanese writers including Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), Natsume Soseki (1867–1916), and Mori Ôgai (1862–1922). 5. Zhang Ziping’s use of metanarratological intrusions in the manner of traditional vernacular fiction is one indication of the familiarity of the May

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Notes Fourth writers with the tropes of traditional fiction. See Henry Y.H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 74. Theodore Huters, “Blossoms in the Snow: Lu Xun and the Dilemma of Modern Chinese Literature,” Modern China 1: 1 (January 1984): 53. Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 6. Ibid., 6. The May Fourth literature that emerges, even the subjective strain represented by the Creation Society’s fiction, was fundamentally a “literature of resistance” and reflects what C.T. Hsia refers to as an “obsession with China.” See Theodore Huters, “Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 269. The early fiction of Guo, Zhang, and the other Creationists conceptualizes a “China”—an invented China—from which they escape, arriving in Japan to become victims of a “beleaguered consciousness of racial and national inferiority.” See Wendy Larson, Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 146. One commentator contrasts Yu Dafu’s self-referential literature, which reflects this Confucian concern for society, with Satô Haruo’s selfreferential narratives, which seem to express a Zen-inspired aesthetic, encouraging self-cultivation and an attempt to adapt to a new environment. See Zhe Mingquan, Zhongguo xiandai zuojia yu Riben (Chinese Modern Authors and Japan) (Shandong: Shandong wenyi chubanshe, 1993), 41. Even in the West, self-referential writing is perceived as serving the double duty of articulating a self while also providing a commentary on the individual’s relation to society and the state. Self-referential writing, according to this perspective, provides a “ritual affirmation of community” while simultaneously constituting a “symbolic challenge to the social order.” See James N. Stull, Literary Selves: Autobiography and Contemporary American Nonfiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 5. Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 44. Some commentators see this social dimension present in the Creation Society fiction as an improvement on the Japanese shishôsetsu model. Whereas the Japanese model avoids the complexities inherent in direct social commentary, the Creation Society’s fiction does not flinch from social critique. See Guo Laixun, “Yu Dafu yu Riben de ziwo xiaoshuo” (Yu Dafu and the Japanese “I-Novel”) in Zhongguo bijiao wenxue nianjian, ed. Yang Zhouhan (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1986), 253. This essay originally appeared in the April 1983 issue of Wenxue pinglun.

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14. In a statement that seems to anticipate Mao Zedong’s proclamation at the Yenan conference on the writer’s responsibility to society, Creation Society writer He Weijing remarked, in an essay that originally appeared in the May 1926 issue of the Creation Monthly, that it was a writer’s duty to create mass, public art. See He Weijing, “Gerenzhuyi yishu de miewang” (The Destruction of Individualistic Art) in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzao ziliao, 1: 137. 15. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Literary Trends I: The Quest for Modernity (1895–1927),” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 12, ed. John Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 452. The obsessive need to address political and social concerns by May Fourth writers can be gauged by the sheer volume of works addressing Chinese society. Moreover, the metaphor of Chinese society as “ill” can be seen in works as diverse as Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking.” 16. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self Revelation: Shishôsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 277. Admittedly, this “apolitical stance” can be interpreted as a convention associated with the shishôsetsu that was employed regardless of a writer’s actual involvement in social and political issues. 17. Hirano Ken’s critical writing about the shishôsetsu is exemplified in the essay “Geijutsu to jisseikatsu” (Art and True Life, 1958). 18. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self Revelation, 409. 19. “A Trail of Ivy” (Niaoluo xing) first appeared in April 1923 in Chuangzao ziliao. Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzao ziliao, 1: 158–177. 20. Xu Zidong, Yu Dafu xinlun (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1984), 227. For more on literary and personal relations between Yu and Satô, see my article, “Satô Haruo’s ‘Ajia no ko’ and Yu Dafu’s Response: Literature, Friendship and Nationalism” in Sino-Japanese Studies 13: 2 (March 2001): 21–31. 21. Kurt W. Radtke, “Chaos or Coherence,” in Rethinking Japan, vol. 1, ed. Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti, and Massimo Raveri (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 87. Here, I disagree with Radtke. It is not in terms of the theme but rather in the explicitly self-referential narrative approach that Yu’s works most closely resemble the Taishô shishôsetsu. 22. Radtke suggests that whereas Satô’s inclusion of allusions and quotations from Western languages seems controlled and well integrated, Yu seems at times to have included terms, which are not well integrated into the narrative simply in an effort to impress his audience. Radtke interprets Yu’s style as a reflection of the “transitional and hybrid” Chinese culture of the time. See Radtke, “Chaos and Coherence,” 95. For a comprehensive glossary of Chinese and Japanese neologisms from the early modern era and how they transferred from one language to another, see the appendices in Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).

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Notes

23. Michael Egan, “Yu Dafu and the Transition to Modern Chinese Literature,” Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 320. 24. Cheng Fangwu also maintained that a reader must have “warm sympathy” toward any literary work in order to appreciate it. See Marián Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917–1930) (London: Curzan Press, 1980), 66. 25. Guo Moruo too, in his early critical writings, stressed the “culturebuilding” function of literature as a by-product of the nation-building project. See Liu, Translingual Practice, 188–191. 26. The “I” in the Creation Society’s fiction must be conceived not only as an individual “I” but also as a greater public “I,” the embodiment of larger social concerns. See Zhu Defa, Zhongguo wusi wenxue shi (A History of Chinese May Fourth Literature) (Jinan: Shandong wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 554. 27. Referred to in Xu Yu Dafu Xinlun, 217. 28. Yu Dafu, “Early Autobiographical Fragments: A Young Sojourner in a Foreign Land” (Xueye, Riben guoqing de jishu: zizhuan zhi yi zhang) trans. Theodore Huters in Modern Chinese Writers: Self Portrayals, ed. Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley (Armonk, N.Y.: An East Gate Book, 1992), 307–312. 29. Yu Dafu can be said to have fashioned his persona in accord with the image of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia cut off from the political power base. See Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “The Romantic Temper of the May Fourth Writers,” in Reflections on the May Fourth Movement, ed. Benjamin I. Schwartz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 72. 30. Ibid., 81. 31. Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 17. 32. The shift in Guo’s ideological posture can be summed up by saying that whereas in the former half of the 1920s Guo saw genius as the basis of art, in the latter half of the decade he equated art with revolution. See Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, 60. 33. This essay originally appeared in 1926. This passage is translated in Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986), 175. 34. This dramatic ideological shift led to a debate among group members over the direction the Society should take. With the publication of the Creation Monthly, Yu Dafu and Zhang Ziping began to gradually disassociate themselves from the group out of dissatisfaction with the increasing politicization of the group’s work and were replaced by an influx of younger writers including Zhou Quanping, Jiang Huangzi, and Ye Lingfeng. See Itô Toramaru, ed., Sôzôsha shiryô, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Ajia shuppan, 1979), 2.

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35. Gong Binglu, “Yijiuerwunian de xue,” in Huang Houxing, ed., Chuangzaoshe congshu, vol. 4 (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 1992), 211–216. 36. Although the story that inspired Gong remains unidentified, most of Seyfullina’s stories are set in small northern villages during and immediately after the Revolution of 1917 and portray individuals involved in social conflicts. Her best-known story, “Mulch” (Peregnoy, 1923), describes a good-for-nothing peasant who is completely transformed by the revolution. The story also describes the impact of the Revolution on village life. See Gleb Struve, Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 152. 37. In the interest of a fair portrayal of the Creation Society’s later fiction, it must be conceded that although stories such as “The Blood of 1925” represent the dominant mode of fiction produced by the Society after 1924, examples of the explicitly self-referential approach that characterized the Creation Society’s early fiction can be found among the later stories as well. Examples of later self-referential stories include Zhang Dinghuang’s “Zhishujie” (Arbor Day, 1926) and a number of Yu Dafu’s later stories such as the 1930 collection Guoqu (The Past). Nevertheless, the difference between the Creation Society’s fiction produced prior to 1924 and its later fiction is striking, and “The Blood of 1925” indicates the degree to which a qualitative change had been achieved by the Society in its later fiction. 38. “Riben de puluolietariya yishu zenme jingguo ta de yundong guocheng” originally appeared in the November 25, 1928 issue of Richu. Reprinted in Chen Huangmei, ed., Chuangzao ziliao, 1: 35. Chen explores the new literature’s roots in the Socialist literature of Kinoshita Naoe (1869–1937) and other writers associated with the Peoples’ Rights’ Movement, but also suggests the extent to which these young Chinese writers conceived of Japanese Proletarian literature as a model for their own works. 39. Xu Yu Dafu Xinlun, 221. 40. At the Taiwan Symposium concerning Sino-Japanese relations held in November 1936 and sponsored by the Yomiuri newspaper, Yu Dafu, after stressing that he still held fast to his belief that literature should never stray far from political and social concerns, was asked whether he still believed that all literature was nothing more than the belletrization of the writer’s experience. He replied that his position had not changed. A transcript of the Taiwan Symposium, conducted in Japanese, is included in Itô Toramaru, ed., Yu Dafu shiryô hoben, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku bunken sentaa, 1975), 226. 41. Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 29. 42. The scholar Saeki Shôichi indicates that autobiography (jiden) was a recognizable feature of pre-Meiji Japanese literature. For a comprehensive

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43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

Notes analysis of the phenomenon of premodern autobiography in Japan see Saeki Shôichi, Jiden bungaku no sekai (Tokyo: Asahi shuppansha, 1983). Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: The Moment of Language (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 182. This dichotomy was expressed, e.g., in an essay dating from 1916 by Jia Yi called “Geweizhuyi” (Individualism) in the magazine Eastern Miscellany that established a new oppositional rhetoric between the concerns of the “private self ” (xiaozi) and the “public self ” (dazi). See Liu, Translingual Practice, 90. The works of the Creation Society reflect the ambivalence of the May Fourth intellectual’s mission. As one commentator states, in the May Fourth period, “the partnership between cultural iconoclasm and an emotional commitment to building a nation-state was tense.” See Helen F. Siu, ed., Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals, and the State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 10. Liu, Translingual Practice, 95. Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishôsetsu in Early Twentieth Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 10. David Der-wei Wang, “The Storytelling Context in Chinese Fiction: A Preliminary Examination of It as a Mode of Narrative Discourse,” Tamkang Review 15: 1–4 (1984–85): 144. The Creation Society’s writers predictably demonstrated a preference for those Japanese writers who appeared to evince a concern for society and to incorporate that concern for society into their narratives, such as Arishima Takeo, Mushanokoji Saneatsu, Hayashi Fumiko, and Kobayashi Takiji. Lydia H. Liu, “Narratives of Modern Selfhood: First-Person Fiction in the May Fourth Literature,” in Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tung (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 104. The change of attitude on the part of the Japanese toward China from reverence and passionate admiration to contempt and disgust was a process that had begun as early as the late Tokugawa period. One manifestation of this turnabout can be seen, e.g., in the mission to Shanghai in 1862 of the vessel Senzaimaru involving government officials and merchants, in which these officials were shocked by the filth and poverty they witnessed in Shanghai along with the servile attitude the Chinese displayed toward Westerners in their cities. For more information see the chapter entitled, “The Voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai: Early Sino-Japanese Contacts in the Modern Era,” in Joshua Fogel’s The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 79–94. Radtke situates Sinking in the Chinese tradition of literary works comprising political allegories. See Radtke, “Chaos and Coherence,” 87. While I am in general agreement with Radtke’s assessments, like Michael Egan, I

Notes

53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

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believe that Radtke overstates the importance of the political dimension of “Sinking.” The story “Sinking,” and the other stories in this collection, are most profitably read not as simple allegories for an “ill” China but rather as portraits of complex individuals grappling with personal demons while attempting to overcome feelings of alienation and self-doubt. Egan, “Yu Dafu and the Transition,” 320. Denton’s interpretation comes closest to my own interpretation of “Sinking.” See Kirk A Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking,’ ” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), vol. 14 (December 1992): 107–123. Those May Fourth writers associated with self-referential writing during the 1920s were more likely during the 1930s to extol a mythic proletariat. See Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “The Romantic Temper,” 83. It should be noted that in 1930s Japan, literary works that were perceived as not serving greater political (military) needs were subject to censorship, with the example of Tanizaki Junichiro’s Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters) being but the most celebrated example of a work that remained unpublished during the war era due to the threat of censorship. “New Era” (xin shiqi) literature refers to the avant-garde aesthetic movement that emerged in post-Mao China (approximately during 1979–1989). For more about that period see Zhang Xudong, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1. There were some significant differences between the conditions for writers in the two periods as well. Whereas May Fourth writers grew up in a society that was still essentially feudal but also possessed capitalist enclaves in the coastal cities, Chinese writers during the 1980s had experienced many of the horrors associated with the Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, writers in the post-Mao also enjoyed financial security due to the danwei system. See Gàlik, 60–74. One can also conjecture that in such radically different environments the very meaning of modernity diverged as well. Cai Rong, “The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature,” Ph.D. diss. (Washington University in St. Louis, 1995), 1. Ibid., 2. Michael S. Duke, Blooming and Contending: Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 168. Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 104. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang, eds., Politics, Ideology and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 12. Ibid., 24. “A Winter’s Tale” appeared in the journal Dangdai 3 (1980). “When Sunset Clouds Disappear” was included in Shiyue 1 (1981). See Duke, Blooming and Contending 187, and Yu Luojin, A Chinese Winter’s Tale, trans. Rachel May and Zhu Zhiyu (Hong Kong: Renditions, 1986).

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66. A translation of Shen Rong’s story “Ten Years Deducted” is included in The Time is Not Ripe: Contemporary China’s Best Writers and Their Stories, ed. Ying Bian (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991). 67. Among the post-Mao era writers, Wang in particular, in the explicitly confessional mode that he employs, and in his deliberate intermingling of autobiographical fact with fictional elements recalls the presentation style of the early Creation Society fiction. Ji’e sanbuqu was produced at the height of the “literature of the wounded” (shanghen wenxue) movement that portrayed in harshly realistic terms the human suffering brought on by the Cultural Revolution. See Wang Ruowang, Hunger Trilogy, trans. Kyna Rubin and Ira Kasoff (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), 1–23. 68. Ibid., 9. 69. Zhang Jie, “Biographical Note—My Boat,” in Love Must Not Be Forgotten trans. Yu Fanqin (San Francisco: China Books, 1986), 16–32. 70. Ibid., 2. 71. Siu, ed., Furrows, 22. 72. “Roots” literature is an abbreviation for the “search for roots fiction” (xungen xiaoshuo) of the 1980s which, like the “New Era” literature defined earlier, made use of models in the May Fourth tradition. “Roots” literature is represented by such writers as Han Shaogong, A Cheng, and Jia Pingwa. See Zhang, “Biographical Note,” 6.

Appendix A: Synopses of Selected Creation Society Stories

The stories summarized in this appendix were selected on the basis of their

similarity, in style or content, to the Japanese shishôsetsu. Most of the stories included here were produced during the first phase of the Creation Society’s existence (1921–1923), although one later story was included to demonstrate the enduring appeal of self-referentiality in the Creation Society’s oeuvre. I have intentionally selected stories by a number of the Society’s members in order to emphasize generic similarities while demonstrating differences between individual writers in terms of their approaches to self-referentiality. The stories are organized in chronological order according to the date in which they first appeared in print. 1. “Ten Days at Shiobara” (Shiobara tôkaki) by Yu Dafu (1921) Written in Japanese in the form of a diary, this story is set in the Shiobara hot springs resort in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. It describes a ten-day period in August. The first-person narrator decides to escape the swelter of summer in Tokyo and visit the resort town of Shiobara in the countryside. After arriving by train from Tokyo, he asks his way around from the local people and books a room at a small inn. He gazes at the garden behind his lodgings and then changes into a yukata and enters the bath. While in the bath he muses over the well-known poem “The Everlasting Sorrow” by the Tang Dynasty poet Bo Juyi and is moved anew by the poet’s capacity for compassion. Returning to his room, he writes poems of his own and goes to bed. In the days that follow, the protagonist becomes acquainted with the proprietor of the inn, who shares his passion for classical Chinese poetry. He also visits a mountain temple called Myô’unji, where he strolls the grounds, listening to the conversations of others. Back in his lodgings, he begins to read a novel but soon grows bored. He goes to the communal baths where he encounters a group of elderly women who have come to the hot springs in order to treat a variety of maladies. After his bath he goes to write another poem before returning to his room.

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Unable to relax fully, the protagonist is left to wonder about the upcoming O-Bon festival that he has heard so much about. At around 9:00 in the evening an acquaintance of his named Oshima drops by and invites him to go out to the festival. By this time the rain, which had been falling earlier, has stopped and the two can hear the rhythm of the drums as they make their way to the wooded area where the performance is taking place. Beneath two ancient cedars, young men and women undulate in the bon-odori dance to the accompaniment of the musicians. The plaintive tones bring tears to the protagonist’s eyes, and he finds himself strangely moved by the mysterious, almost primitive, quality of the music and the dance. He is inspired to write three poems (which are included in the text). Two days later he returns to Tokyo by train. (Originally appeared in Japanese in the Chinese student magazine, The Elegant Voice [ya sheng] in the October, November, and December 1921 issues) 2. “Endless Nights” (Mangmang ye) by Yu Dafu (1922) Zhifu is a young man who has recently returned from studies in Japan and has accepted a position as a teacher. His friends come to see him off as he boards a boat that will carry him down river to the small town where he is to teach. En-route, he thinks of the French Symbolist poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine and fancies himself to be like them. Like those poets, Zhifu is also young and he too writes poems about his homeland. Aboard the Yangtze transport, he thinks of the time he spent three months ago in a Tokyo hospital. He had to sell his house and move back to Shanghai where he worked at a publishing house. In Japan he had studied English and German, and on the homeward voyage he had occasion to speak German with the captain. He notes that the air in this cabin, in all of China in fact, has the stink of a hospital ward. Zhifu is accompanied on the boat by a young man named Wu, who is suffering from a lung disease. Zhifu encourages his friend to go to Japan for treatment. He thinks about what it would be like were he to live with Wu in one of the suburbs of Tokyo. After all, he reasons, there are other kinds of relationships beside romantic ones. And yet, while rationalizing in this way he realizes that what he really craves is the companionship of a woman. They finally reach “A” city, their destination. Zhifu takes a rickshaw past the city wall’s moat toward the school. In this pretty village the future seems to hold so much promise. And yet, before long the realities of his new situation set in. Several of his fellow teachers, planning to petition the government for help, resign and leave the school in disgust after a conflict with administrators. In the end, Zhifu goes with a friend to visit a brothel. (Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1:1 [Spring 1922]) 3. “The First Class” (Zuichu zhi ke) by Zheng Boqi (1922) Su Heizhou wakes up early on the first day of his classes in Kyoto and goes for a walk. He feels fortunate to have this opportunity to study in Japan and

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thinks of those among his friends who were not so fortunate. Already a year has passed since he came to Japan, and he resolves to live a disciplined life dedicated to study. On the way to school, surrounded by hundreds of other uniformed students, he feels like he is foundering in a sea of humanity. He suddenly feels pangs of loneliness and wants to cry, but is cheered by the appearance of another Chinese student. Arriving at school, he nervously searches for his classroom. He cannot find a seat and naturally gravitates to the back of the classroom where the other foreign students are clustered. The teacher comes in. He is in his mid-thirties and is small in stature. He calls out the students’ names and asks them various questions. When he comes to Heizhou he asks if he is Korean or Chinese, using the term “Qingguo ren.” Heizhou becomes indignant at the teacher’s use of that antiquated term and calmly replies that he is a citizen of the Chinese Republic. He assures himself that he is not arrogant by nature, but simply has been pushed too far. During the geography lesson, Heizhou again feels slighted when the teacher summarily declares that Japan can now count itself among the great nations of the world. His indignation grows when Japanese students raise their hands and ask incredulously whether the Chinese really did invent all of those things with which they are credited, apparently finding it hard to believe that the Chinese could really be that creative. Heizhou secretly curses them for questioning the Chinese capacity to create and realizes that he really has learned a valuable lesson today. (Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1:1 [Spring 1922]) 4. “In the Middle” (Zhongtu) by Yu Dafu (1922) This first-person narrator sits in his room on a cold night and considers his imminent return to China after ten years as a student in Japan. He thinks of his years in Japan and considers how he was at first charmed and later repelled by this island nation. He is filled with a sense of frustration and loss when he thinks of the valuable years of his youth wasted in a foreign land. He buys his return ticket and goes down to Kobe to prepare for his journey home. While in Kobe, he visits Suma and Akashi and considers their importance in terms of culture, particularly as the setting for one of the most significant episodes in the Tale of Genji. He thinks about a woman he met and stayed with during his visit to the Sumadera Festival the year before and addresses her briefly in his mind. As he boards the ship with his friend Lu and pulls out of the harbor on the final stage before their departure, tears well up in his eyes and he curses Japan for having deceived him and stolen his youth. They arrive at Moji, which is the final stopping point before their return to China. While in Moji, killing time before their departure, he walks around the small port city. He goes to a bookshop and makes a point of avoiding the Japanese literary periodicals, instead looking for Westerners’ works about Japan. He buys a book called Kimono by John Paris because it seems to correctly assess

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the reality of Japan, which differs dramatically from his previous idealized image of Japan. After purchasing the book he considers going to a brothel but goes instead to a café for a beer. In the end, he goes to the bathhouse before returning to the ship. In the afternoon he boards the ship and watches the sun setting over Japan for what he presumes to be his last visit to Japan. Later, on the deck he sees a young Westerner with a pretty multiracial girl. He describes her appearance and is drawn to her exotic appeal. He senses that the Westerner is only using the young woman in the same way that the Western Imperialists use China and are willing to abandon it after they have taken all that they need. He wants to intercede on behalf of the young woman but he feels powerless to help. As he looks at Japan becoming a strip on the eastern horizon he thinks of all the Japanese women who used him and wonders how he will be treated by Chinese women upon his return. In his heart he addresses Japan, remarking how he never wants to return to Japan but fearing that circumstances in China may force him to go to Japan again. (Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1:2 [Summer 1922]) 5. “Wind Chime” (Fengling) by Yu Dafu (1922) The protagonist, Zhifu, is jotting down ideas about what it is that constitutes the true artist, whom he describes as an ambitious person who relentlessly pursues his dreams. He tends to look to the past and is sensitive toward beauty. Zhifu has come to the realization that his own life has been a history of repeated failures and that he has little hope for the future. Zhifu puts down his pen. Outside his window is a small garden containing varieties of Western flowers. The air in Tokyo had been unpleasant to breathe, so he has come to live out here in the countryside in a room rented from an old woman with a cat. He leaves his room and goes out drinking. Looking at the hands of the waitress who is pouring his drinks, he is reminded of an incident that happened five years earlier, when he was a student at Tokyo University. Always sickly, he had gone to a hot springs spa where a number of young people were convalescing from a variety of maladies. At the inn he had met a pretty young woman who was reluctant to go back to her room because a severe storm was raging outside. He invited her to stay in his room, and although nothing happened between the two, he could not help but be excited by his proximity to the sleeping form of the girl. Later, after meeting by chance at the public bath, they went out for a walk together. However, that same evening his hopes of happiness were dashed when he heard her laughter coming from her room mingled with that of a man. His tears were mixed with self-pitying laughter. After graduating from Tokyo University, he returned to Shanghai but ended up working under oppressive conditions at a publishing house and eventually became depressed. He began to feel that having graduated from prestigious Tokyo University held no currency in China. He borrowed money from his family in order to return to Japan.

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He returns from his reveries to the story’s original scene. Still living a tenuous existence in that Tokyo suburb, he is visited by a Chinese friend who calls on Zhifu to inform him that he has decided to return to China in order to serve in the military. Zhifu is forced to think about his own situation and his particular role in China’s future, but he doubts that there is a place for him in the new China. The following day he is among those who have come to see his friend off. Also in the group is a young woman with whom he had once been infatuated. He looks at the scene of his friend’s parting with critical detachment. His friend shouts out to him to hurry back to China, but he can only stand in silence as the others toss their caps into the air. Later at his desk, after reading a letter in which his friend again implores him to return to China, he begins to write a story with the words, “I admire your bravery and loyalty . . . .” (Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1:2 [Summer 1922]) 6. “Hobby Horse” (Muma) by Zhang Ziping (1922) “C” (the first letter in the author’s last name, according to contemporary romanization) is a graduate of a Japanese high school who will be attending Tokyo University in the upcoming school year, and is in the process of looking for an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs. The narrator notes that before World War I Chinese exchange students tended to have more money than the Japanese students, but now many of the Chinese students are living in poverty. Moreover, due to the prejudice they often face from the owners of affordable housing, it is hard for them to procure decent lodgings. “C” finally finds a room in a north Tokyo suburb. The owner of the house is a sixty-year-old man living with his two daughters, one of whom has a young daughter of her own. The older of the two daughters is a dressmaker and the younger daughter works at a bank. They are obviously poor and the house is cluttered, but they express an interest in China and occasionally invite “C” to share a meal with them. After living with them for a short time he begins to feel very comfortable with the family. Over the course of time he learns that the older daughter’s husband has run off, leaving her to raise her daughter. The little girl is teased by the other children in the neighborhood who know that she has been abandoned by her father. When she goes into town she asks for things that her mother cannot afford, and this creates tensions in the family. “C” becomes especially close to the little girl, to whom he feels drawn out of a sense of pity and a feeling of shared loneliness. In the course of time the police come to investigate the Chinese student who has moved into the neighborhood. Soon thereafter, the family celebrates the little girl’s birthday. At the party, the girl is shown a photo of her as an infant being held by a man said to be the father who abandoned them. She had previously been told that her father was dead and is shocked by this revelation. Out walking with “C” a short time later, the girl becomes smitten with a hobby horse in the window of a shop they pass. “C” wishes that he could buy

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the toy for her, but realizes that his financial situation will not permit this. Two days later the little girl is missing. Days pass and the family searches frantically for her, but to no avail. In the end, hearing the girl’s mother cry, “C” regrets that he had been unable to buy the wooden horse for the girl. (Originally appeared in Creation Quarterly 1:2 [Summer 1922]) 7. “The Gray Bird” (Huise de niao) by Cheng Fangwu (1922) Part 1: The first-person protagonist is exhilarated at the thought of his imminent marriage to a young woman named Bi Xiang, though he cannot help worrying about his childhood friend, a poet named Ding Bailan who now lives in the countryside far away. As children they had only each other with whom to share their secrets and aspirations. The narrator had supported Ding while his family was trying to push him into an early marriage. Eventually, Ding had grown weary of familial pressures and had moved out into that remote area in the countryside. With Bi Xiang, the protagonist finally goes out and pays a visit to Ding. The poet gives the two his blessing. Part 2: After describing his new wife’s beauty at length, the protagonist concludes that, with such an ideally suited mate, he has need of neither power nor wealth; theirs will be a perfect life together, dedicated to following their respective vocations. Together, they read from a poetry collection of Ding’s. Afterward, the narrator concludes that Ding may be depressed and begins to consider ways in which he might help his old friend. Part 3: On a pleasant day in June, the protagonist and his wife get together for an outing with some friends including Ding, a young lady named Miss Liu and another old friend and classmate of the protagonist named Hu. Miss Liu piques Ding’s interest during a long and intellectually stimulating conversation about fate and free will. Although they do not necessarily agree, Miss Liu proves herself to be a strong, independent thinker. The protagonist secretly hopes that his own wife is not swayed by her strong will. Although married for only a short time, he revels in his newfound happiness and wishes that his friend Ding, who still struggles alone with his poetic ideals, might find the same happiness with Miss Liu. In the end, the protagonist has returned with his family to his hometown. Although he too sometimes feels lonely and rejected by society, he has unbending faith in both his children and in the future of his homeland. His wife reads to him from a letter from his old classmate Hu announcing that he, and not Ding, has become engaged to Miss Liu. (Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1:3 [Autumn 1922]) 8. “Halfway” (Weiyang) by Guo Moruo (1922) Part 1: Aimou listens to the crying of his eldest son as he goes off to sleep. The father fears that when the boy gets older and goes off to school he will be bullied by the other children in this small Japanese fishing village. Recently, watching the ships enter and leave the harbor, he had assured his son that they would someday return to China. When the boy cries again, Aimou goes and sings a lullaby to him about a fish and a crow calling out to one another to

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come and play, yet unable to bridge the distance that separates their two different worlds of sea and air. After the boy eventually quiets down, Aimou thinks about his own childhood. His mother would recite Tang poems to him in order to calm him. From the second floor room, which he shares with his wife and children, Aimou listens to a passing train. If one were to look at my books, he muses, one would know that I am a Romantic. He looks at the print of Millet’s “The Shepherdesses” hanging on the wall and thinks of the Han Dynasty poet Su Wu who died in exile far from the Han court. He wonders if he too is fated to die far from home. Part 2: Aimou reminisces about his childhood. He came from a big family in the Mount Emei in Sichuan. There had been a school there surrounded by willows that beautifully reflected the change of seasons. The protagonist had spent his first thirteen years there and had read and been educated in the classics. After passing the entrance examinations, he had entered a school in a city, a day’s journey from his home. His new life in the city had exhilarated and transformed him. While there he had been influenced by a dynamic young teacher who became his mentor and had introduced him both to literature and history and took him to visit many of the beautiful natural sites in the vicinity. However, pressure from his parents to marry and settle down has driven him to this faraway place. He compares the many obstacles he and his wife must face to the struggles faced by Ivanhoe and Rowena, and by Romeo and Juliet. In the end, he fantasizes about what it would have been like had he obeyed his parents’ wishes by remaining in Chengdu and marrying a local girl. What would have awaited him, he admits, is a life of prosperity and stability. His wife awakens him from his reveries and he looks again over at the Millet print on the wall. He desires to return to the realm of dream from which he has been awakened. (Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1:3 [Autumn 1922]) 9. “The Lives of a Group of Good-for-Nothings” (Yiban rongyuan de shenghuo) by Zhang Ziping (1922) The protagonist, “C” (also the name of the protagonist in Zhang’s story “Hobby Horse”), lives in a boardinghouse and has been searching for methods of cutting expenses even further so as to ward off the landlady’s demands for payment. His breakfast each day consists of bread and water and he is forced to eat his lunch at a rundown eatery where students congregate. He rarely has sufficient money for the luxury of a bath. C speaks about his circumstances with his friend “K,” who is studying at Waseda University. They speak about a friend named Pang who spends his meager stipend on drink while neglecting his wife and child. They talk about returning to Beijing and negotiating directly with the Chinese Ministry of Education to increase the stipend that accompanies their scholarship. Later, C complains about his measly government stipend with another student, and they decide to go and see Professor “Y,” the professor supervising

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Chinese exchange students. In an article that appeared in a student newspaper, several of the Chinese students had demanded an increase in their stipend. Professor Y now angrily confronts the two students with this article and asks them why they cannot simply concentrate on their studies. He insists that when he was a student he made do with less than they now have. A short time after that encounter, C discusses the issue of the stipends with his friend “L” and another friend from Meiji University, whom he characterizes as having no confidence in his spoken Japanese. Afterward, they attend a meeting of the Chinese exchange student group called the Youth Society (qingnianhui). It is decided that C and another student also named Zhang will go and speak to the representative of the Chinese Educational Bureau in Tokyo concerning stipends. On the train, C and Zhang want to talk about their negotiations but are reluctant to use Chinese in front of the other passengers for fear of revealing themselves to be non-Japanese. In the end, no response arrives from the government concerning the scholarships, and although C and Zhang receive a small loan, the scholarship students are unsure if next month’s stipend will be forthcoming. (Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1:3 [Autumn 1922]) 10. “Osmanthus” (Muxi) by Tao Jingsun (1922) Suwei is a high school student in Japan, where he has come to study piano. He lives the demanding life of a student with no free time and barely enough to eat. On this particular morning he is late for school and rushes off to his first class unkempt and improperly attired. He is afraid he will be reprimanded by the physical education instructor, with whom he has his first class. Yoshiko, a teacher of English in the elementary school, notices his consternation when he arrives at the school and offers to help. She explains Suwei’s predicament to the physical education teacher and invites Suwei back to her residence so that he can tidy up and prepare for his next class. He looks around her meticulously kept room and notices a portrait of the Virgin Mary on the wall. He is so grateful that he cannot find the words to thank her. She explains that she sympathizes with him and invites him to come and visit her any time he has a problem and needs a sympathetic ear. Everyday after that he goes to visit Yoshiko on the way home from school. The joy of meeting her exhilarates Suwei in a way that he has never experienced before. He finds himself thinking about her incessantly. One day he goes to visit her considerably later than usual. She hugs him and tells him how worried she had been, awaiting his arrival. Her room is suffused with the sweet scent of Osmanthus—a fragrance familiar to him from his youth. He resolves to find a place to live closer to the school so as to be closer to Yoshiko. Everyone at the school soon learns of the secret friendship shared by the two, and one of the older teachers, Mr. Tani, urges them to be more discrete. Suwei is now scared to call on Yoshiko at her residence and decides to stop visiting her, but comes upon her one night while out walking in a meadow. She invites

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him back to her residence where she caresses his shoulder and kisses him. It is fate, she suggests, that has brought them together. She asks him if he thinks about the time they have spent together and urges him not to abandon her. Yoshiko returns to her home during the winter holiday. He receives a note from her explaining that she will return soon and asking him not to forget her. She implores him to “believe in us; believe in fate.” He goes to her empty room and feels that he will go mad from loneliness. He writes her name in his diary and beneath it the line, “Croire en Destinae.” Afterward he receives a telegram revealing that she has died. (Originally appeared in Japan in the Chinese student magazine Green, and reprinted in the Creation Quarterly 1:3 [Fall 1922]) 11. “Caishiji” (Caishiji) by Yu Dafu (1922) The title refers to the locale in Anhui Province where the Tang poet Li Bai’s grave is located. It is known historically as a popular destination for aspiring poets who go there on pilgrimage and leave their own poetic efforts in front of the grave of Li Bai. Part 1: We are introduced to the protagonist, the well-known Qing period poet Huang Zhongze (1749–1783), who in the story is young, hungry for praise but suffering from anxiety and self-doubt. He is a teacher at a small academy and has few friends due to his moodiness and inability to accept criticism. He often drinks and argues passionately about poetry. He has been ill, but few friends have come to visit him. Part 2: The school where Huang teaches is located in a city south of the Yangtze. It is a summer evening and a cool breeze carries over the songs of insects. Huang reminisces about a girl from long ago. She was sixteen at the time and had loved him, ignoring the attentions of wealthier suitors. Eventually, he broke relations with her and they had fallen out of touch. One day three years later he saw her by chance in the city with another man. Now seven years have elapsed, and he writes four poems about that encounter. In an attempt to finish one of the poems, he recites the final line aloud. From the garden outside of his window a voice comments, “nice poem.” It is a friend of his from the academy who has come to visit. They talk about the upcoming examinations at the school, and they talk of more personal matters. The friend, depressed, begins to weep and Huang finds himself in the role of the comforter. The two drink together until dawn, and Huang awakens several hours later with a hangover. He begins to compose another poem. Part 3: Huang puts the finishing touches on his poem and feels satisfied. After getting something to eat, he sets forth on a personal pilgrimage to the grave of the great poet, Li Bai. He sets out with a general idea of the grave’s location, asking directions along the way. He asks an old woman and a couple of young boys he meets on the road for directions. He is directed to a small fairytale-like forest. However, when he reaches the grave of Li Bai itself he finds it dilapidated and choked with weeds and is disappointed. He contrasts his own pathetic life with that of the great poet and composes an elegy.

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Part 4: When he returns home he continues the poem he began composing the previous night. His friend Ya is waiting for him and asks him about his excursion to the grave of the poet. He praises Huang for a speech he had delivered sometime earlier for which he had been roundly criticized by several influential critics. Huang freely admits that he has no patience with that kind of criticism and again expresses his disappointment at the myopia of today’s critics. He says that he would like to return to his family’s home but realizes he does not possess sufficient funds to undertake the journey. Part 5: That night Huang meets Ya in the faculty room. In a few hundred years people will appreciate my genius, Huang insists. He asks Ya to defend him before those who have unfairly criticized him. Ya departs and returns later to tell Huang that all who read his most recent poem praised it. Nobody else has come to visit him in his illness, although Ya, by way of consolation, tells him that others came to visit while he was asleep. Part 6: The New Year arrives and the weather improves, but Huang is still suffering with his illness. Huang thinks of the past and composes four new poems (which are included in the text). Later, on a boat excursion with his friend Ya in which they encounter a number of well-known historical sites, Huang writes a poem. In a few days, it was later rumored, this poem was on the lips of all of the young women on both sides of the river. (Originally appeared in the Creation Quarterly 1:4 [Winter 1922]) 12. “Blue Smoke” (Qingyan) by Yu Dafu (1923) The protagonist listens to a passing train and thinks about the past. He has experienced suffering and pain and has, as yet, attained nothing. If he were an architect or a tailor, he reasons, at least he could find solace in his handiworks, but as an unknown poet, he has nothing in which to find consolation. What the world calls success has been as elusive as the floating clouds. He remembers reading a friend’s poems years earlier and realizes that a poet’s only consolation comes in the act of reading. He is filled with rage when he considers the criticism he has faced, and he wants to tell his critics that the melancholy he feels is genuine—this indeed is what all Chinese are now feeling. He cannot sleep and goes to the window. There, mixed with the sound of the train is the sound of young Westerners departing from the dance halls. This fills him with envy for their comfortable lifestyle. “A Phantom” (Part 2): The narrator goes for a stroll on a path beside the riverbank. The moonlight glistens on the trees like water. He is a true wanderer and has, on several occasions, walked from early morning all the way to his hometown. He continues along into a quiet quarter of the town. There he enters a solemn but brightly lit establishment and finds a young woman working there. When he inquires about the owners he learns that they have moved away and left her on her own. The woman explains that her husband has run away and then she begins to cry, whereupon the narrator too begins to shed tears. The moon has set as he begins to walk home. The dogs bark at him as he passes the otherwise silent homes. The stars reflected on the river’s surface bob up and down, phantom-like.

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“Epilogue” (Part 3): The next morning the narrator looks out of his window at the blue sky, like the dawning of the new China itself. The sound of flushing toilets seems to symbolize the inauspicious beginnings of modern China. (Originally appeared in the Creation Society Weekly 8 [1923]). 13. “Arbor Day” (Zhishujie) by Zhang Dinghuang (1926) Part 1: The Protagonist, “V,” has been ill and suffering from insomnia. His doctor has given him medication to help him sleep. After finally achieving a good night’s sleep, “V” wakes to find his wife and two young children still asleep. In his weakened condition he considers the seriousness of his economic situation. With children too young to understand the gravity of their hand-to-mouth existence, he must abide the insults of his wife while trying to devise ways to procure enough money for that day’s meal. Part 2: While brushing his teeth, “V” is filled with resentment at the fact that his friends, who really amount to nothing more than petit bourgeois, seem to have money to spare. He secretly blames his wife for her inability to economize like the wives of his friends. It is Arbor Day in Japan, and just as with the Qing Ming festival in China, people tend to use this day to go and clean the family graves. In the future, he thinks, his children can expect to be treated coldly in Japan. “V” recalls that he was here in Japan when his own father was suffering most. His wife and children finally awaken, and he goes out with his older son in an attempt to get some fresh air while fleeing from the writer’s block that is now assailing him. Part 3: Looking at the flowers surrounding the lake, “V” recalls a similar scene five years earlier. He realizes that in the intervening years he has become careworn and pitiable, and yet he receives no sympathy from others. The students at the school where he teaches consider him lazy. He has to admit that his classes must be terribly boring for his students. Presuming that his death is imminent, he considers how desperate a situation will arise for his children. Musing on the possibility that his children might not remember him at all when they mature, he feels like crying here in the middle of the street, but refrains. Part 4: With his son in tow, “V” takes a rickshaw to go visit his friend “S.” When he arrives at the home of “S” and observes the obvious happiness and tranquility that reign at his friend’s home, he cannot help but contrast it with his own household. His wife, he realizes, is to be pitied for never having tasted happiness in the four years of their married life. When they married, he recalls, he was not yet financially stable and she too, at eighteen, was still a student. He had been captivated by her beauty, and they had ignored the protestations of their families. No need to consider divorce now though, he concludes, since he will soon be dead anyway. Part 5: “V’s” son wants to return home in a rickshaw, but “V” does not have sufficient money for the fare home. Instead, he pays the driver what he has and asks him to take them for a short jaunt. Recently, he has borrowed money from the other teachers, but he realizes that he will not be able to do

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A ppendix A

that for much longer. In fact, the school is running low on funds and has begun to cut teachers’ salaries. He thinks again about his student days and feels emotionally drained. While walking, he considers the unpleasant irony of several coffins lined up beside a rice shop. He continues the long walk home with his son. When he realizes that he cannot even afford the steamed bun that his son is asking for, he can only laugh. (Originally appeared in the Creation Monthly 1:3 [April 18, 1926])

Appendix B: Glossary of Selected Terms from Chinese and Japanese

Chinese Terms “Ai shi buneng wangji de” Ba Jin (1904–1997) “Baihehua” “Banye qiaomen” “Caishiji” “Can chun” Cao Xueqin (1715–1763) Chao Lian (a late pen name for Yu Dafu) Chaoyin Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) Chenlun Cheng Fangwu (1897–1984) chuangzao “Chuangzao gei wo de yinxiang” Chuangzao jikan Chuangzao ribao Chuangzao yuekan Chuangzao zhoubao Chuangzaoshe “Chunwenxue jikan Chuangzao chuban yugao” dazi Ding Ling (1904–1986) Du Fu (712–770) Duanhong lingyan qi dushu shizi “Fahua xuanchuan”

184

Appendix B

“Fangzhou” “Fengling” ganshouxing “Geming yu wenxue” geren gerenzhuyi “Gerenzhuyi yishu de miewang” gewei zhuyi Gong Binglu “Guangming yu heian” Guo Moruo (1892–1978) guocui guojia yizhi guomin wenxue “Guomin wenxue lun” Guoqu “Haishang tongxin” Hao Ran (1932–) He Weijing Henan Hongloumeng Hongshui Hu Shi (1891–1962) huaju “Huang hun” Huang Zhongze (1749–1783) huashen “Huise de niao” “Hushang de beiju” Jia Ji´e sanbuqu Kang Youwei (1858–1927) “Kuangren riji” kumen langmanzhuyi Lao Can youji Li Bai (701–762) Li Sao Li Yu (1611–1680) “Liang guniang” Liang Qichao (1873–1929) Lu Xun (1881–1936) “Lun guonei de pingtan ji wo duiyu chuangzuo lüshi

shang de taidu”

Appendix B “Mangmang ye” Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing ) (1896–1981) Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Miyang “Moluo shili shuo” Mu Mutian (1900–1981) “Muma” “Muxi” Nahan “Nan huan” Nanshe “Niaoluo xing” Nüshen “Piaoliu sanbuqu” Qiancaoshe qianze xiaoshuo qiao “Qingyan” Qu Yuan (340–278 BC) “Ren dao zhongnian” “Ren de wenxue” “Riben de puluolietaliya yishu zenyang jingguo ta de yundong” “Riben de wenshi yu changfu” “Riben jin sanshinian xiaoshuo zhi fazhan” Richu “Riji wenxue” Ru Zhijuan (1925–) Rulin waishi Shafei nüshi de riqi “Shanghai wenyi zhi yipie” Shen Congwen (1902–1988) Shen Qiyu shi Shi´er lou Shiji “Shiming” Shina ju yanjiuhui Shishi xinbao “Shu xinqi de Chuanzaoshe” Su Manshu (1884–1918) Su Wu ta (he); (she) “Ta” Taidong Shuju

185

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Appendix B

Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang Tao Qian (Tao Yuanming ) (365–427) Tian Han (1898–1979) Tongren Tongren jidan Wang Duqing (1898–1940) “Wanxia xiaoxiao de shihou” “Weilai zhi yishujia: pochu ziran de mixin” “Weiyang” Wen Yiduo (1889–1946) Wenmingxi wenren wentan (see also Japanese bundan) wenxue “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” Wenxue pinglun “Wenxue shang de jiezhi dozhang” Wenxue xunkan Wenxue Yanjiuhui Wenxue zhoubao “Wenyijia de juewu” “Wo chengren shi ‘shibai’ le” “Wo de chuan” “Wo zai Xiacun de shihou” “Women de wenxue xin yundong” Wu Jingzi (1701–1754) Wu Liu xiansheng chuan Wusheng xi “Xiandai mingren qingshu” “Xiangchou” xiaopin (see Japanese shôhin) xiaoshuo (see Japanese shôsetsu) Xiaoshuo yuebao xiaozi xin xin shiqi Xin qingnian “Xin wenxue zhi jingzhong” Xin xiaoshuo Xin Zhongguo Xinchao Xingzhou ribao xinwenhua yundong Xinyue kan Xinyueshe

Appendix B xiyang de shu Xu Zhimo (1896–1931) Xueyi xungen xiaoshuo “Xueye Riben guoqing de jishu: zizhuan zhi yi zhang” Yasheng yangcheng caizi Ye Lingfeng (1904–1975) Ye Shengtao (1894–1988) “Yiban rongyuan de shenghuo” “Yige dongtian de tonghua” “Yige langliu de xinnian” “Yijiuerwunian de xue: guanyu ‘wu sanshi’ de chuanwen” yimin wenxue “Yinhuise de si” yishidao “Yiwen sijian” Yu Dafu (1896–1945) Yu Pingbo (1900–1980) yucuzheng Yusishe “Yuwai xiaoshuo ji” zashi Zhang Ziping (1893–1959) Zheng Boqi (1895–1979) zhengzhi xiaoshuo (see Japanese seiji shishôetsu) Zhifu “Zhishujie” Zhongguo liuxuesheng huiguan Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu Zhongguo zuoyi zuojia lianmeng Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) zhuti zhutixing ziwo zixu “Zuichu zhi ke” Japanese Terms “Ajia no ko” “Akuma” anketto An´ya Kôro

187

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Appendix B

Arishima Ikuma (1882–1974) Arishima Takeo (1878–1923) Atarashiki mura bundan (see also Chinese wentan) Bungakkai bungaku seinen chûkan shôsetsu Chûo koron danwa hikki Dazai Osamu (1909–1948) Dô’nin zasshi (also dôjin zasshi) Futon “Fuzoku shôsetsu ron” “Geijutsu to jisseikatsu” haibun haikai “Han no hanzai” Haru Hasegawa Tenkei (1876–1940) Hirano Ken (1907–1978) honkaku shôsetsu Honma Hisao (1886–1932) iemoto “Jakusha” jibun shôsetsu jiga jiko jiko shôsetsu junbungaku “Junsui shôsetsu ron” kairan zasshi Kamo no Chômei (1153–1216) “Kanashiki chichi” kare katari Kawakami Hajime (1879–1946) Kikuchi Kan (1889–1948) “Kinosaki nite” Kinoshita Naoe (1869–1937) Kiseki Kitamura Tôkoku (1868–1894) “Ko o tsurete” Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) kojin Kume Masao (1891–1952)

Appendix B Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923) makoto minoue-banashi Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) moderu shôsetsu monogatari Mori Ôgai (1862–1922) Mushanokôji Saneatsu (1885–1976) “Nakama” Nakamura Mitsuo (1911–) Nakamura Murao (1886–1949) nikki Ninin bikuni iro zange Nippon hyôron Omedetaki hito Ôtsu Junkichi Ozaki Kazuo (1899–1983) “Saikin waga bundan ni chûmoku subeki kokuhaku bungaku” seiji shôsetsu “Seikatsu no geijutsuka” “Shakai soshiki to shakai kakumei ” Shiga Naoya (1883–1971) “Shii no wakaba” shinjitsu shinpen shinpen zakki shôsetsu Shinsei “Shiobara tôkaki” Shirakabaha shishôsetsu (see also watakushi shôsetsu) shizenshugi shôsetsu no kamisama Shumi “Su Manshu to wa ikanaru hito zo” Subaru “Suikyôsha no dokuhaku” “Takibi” tako tsubo Tayama Katai (1871–1930) totei seido “Ugomeku mono” Uno Kôji (1891–1961) Wakai Waseda Bungaku watakushi shôsetsu (see also shishôsetsu)

189

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Appendix B

“Watakushi shôsetsu ron” “Watakushi shôsetsu shiken” Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) Yoshiyuki Junnosuke (1924–) zadankai zuihitsu

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Index In this index a continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g. “57–59.” Passim is used for a cluster of references in close but not continuous sequence. An “f” after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page, and an “ff” indicates separate references on the next two pages.

“Ai, shi bu neng wangji de” (Love Must Not Be Forgotten; Zhang Jie), 130 “Ajia no ko” (Children of Asia; Satô Haruo), 82, 159n68 “Akuma” (Demon; Kasai Zenzô), 56 Also Sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche, Fredrich), 147n58 anketto (questionnaire), 149n14 apolitical, stance of Taishô period writers, 117 Arishima Ikuma, 153n69 Arishima Takeo, 64, 153n68, 168n49 art-for-art’s sake, 63, 120 Atarashiki mura (New Village), 153n68 audience, for self-referential literature, 43, 54 authenticity, as a quality of pure literature, 68, 85–7 passim authorial persona, 87 authorial voice, in self-referential fiction, 54, 73, 78, 159n56 autobiography, 3, 29, 91, 125, 154n8; relationship with fiction, 3–4; in traditional China, 30–1, 141n4 and n5; differences in conception of in East and West, 115, 167n42

Ba Jin, 5 Bailun shixuan (Selected poems of Lord Byron; Su Manshu), 34 Balzac, Honoré de, 35 Bashô (see Matsuo Bashô) Beijing, 59, 104 Beijing University, 3 Bloom, Harold, 26, 142n31 bundan (literary community)(see also wentan), of the Taishô period, 20–1, 47–51 passim, 149n12; of the Meiji period, 20f, 48, 148n4; comparisons with the Chinese wentan, 58–64, 135n5; influence on the May Fourth period wentan, 20 Bungakkai, 55 Bungaku seinen (literary youth), 54ff, 90 “Bungaku shichô ron” (Concerning Literary Trends; Kuriyagawa Hakuson), 71 Bunshô Sekai (Literary World), 49, 71 Butterfly and Mandarin Duck Fiction, 4, 61, 101, 113 “Caishiji” (Yu Dafu), 35, 57, 72, 90, 179–80; as an example of self-referential fiction, 74–81

204

I ndex

“Can chun” (Lingering Spring, Guo Moruo), 39, 82, 159n67 Cao Xueqin, 31 Cervantes, Miguel de, 35 Chan Buddhism, 30 Chaoyin (Voices of the Tide, Su Manshu), 34 Chen Duxiu, 7, 20, 120, 126, 137n30 Chen Qiyu, 124, 167n38 Chenlun (Sinking, Yu Dafu), 39, 90; comparisons with Satô Haruo’s Den’en no Yû’utsu, 12–13, 72, 118–19; Popularity among contemporary readers, 43; stylistic innovations, 43, 147n57 and n58; as a work of social protest, 137n21; as political allegory, 12, 146n46, 168n52 Cheng Fangwu, 17–19, 40, 64, 119, 121–22, 139n2, 166n24 Chiang Kai-shek (see Jiang Jieshi) Chinese Poetry, 77–8 (see also lüshi and zashi) Ching-mao Cheng, 6 “Chuangzao gei wo de yinxiang” (My Impressions of Creation; Mao Dun), 63, 146n54 Chuangzao jikan (Creation Quarterly), 18–19, 49, 82, 93 Chuangzao ribao (Creation Daily), 19 Chuangzao yuekan (Creation Monthly), 122, 139n6, 165n14, 166n34 Chuangzao zhoubao (Creation Weekly), 18–19, 120 Chuangzaoshe (see Creation Society) chun wenxue (see Pure literature) Chuo kôron (Central Debate), 50 Commercial Press, 59 confessional literature, 135n2 Confucianism, 65, traditional bias against fiction, 154n1 “Cong wenxue geming dao geming wenxue” (From Literary

Revolution to Revolutionary Literature; Cheng Fangwu), 122 Creation Society, introduction to, 17–20; formation of, 139n6; ideological shift, 120–1; comparisons with Literary Research Society, 62–3, 152n58 Creationists, 18–19, 135n1 Crescent Moon Society, 36, 61 crisis consciousness, among writers of shishôsetsu and Creationists, 39, 74, 115 Current Affairs News, 5, 18 danwa hikki (transcribed conversation), 149n14 Dazai Osamu, 24f decadence, association with modern Western literature, 14 Den’en no Yû’utsu (Rural Melancholy; Satô Haruo), 55; comparisons with Yu Dafu’s Chenlun, 12–13, 72, 118–19 Denton, Kirk, 127, 137n21, 146n46 Diary literature, 70 “Diary of a Madman” (see Kuangren riji) Dickens, Charles, 35 diction, introduced from Western languages into Japanese and Chinese in the 1920s, 43, 119 Ding Ling, 5, 52, 61 dô’nin (coterie), 60 dô’nin zasshi (coterie magazines), 48–9, 55 Du Fu, 115 Duanhang lingyanji (Lone Swan; Su Manshu), 34, 144n27 dushu shizi (literary gentleman), 58 Eakin, Paul John, 125 Egan, Michael, 127, 168n52 epistolary literature, 70

Index “Ershinian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang” (Strange Events in the Last Twenty Years; Wu Woyao), 33 exchange students, from China to Japan, 38, 44, 94–9 passim, 145n45, 146n49, 152n53 and n54, 161n21 expatriate, experience among Creation Society writers, 120, 126–7 “Fahua xuanchuan” (Proclamation of a Revival), 122 “Fengling” (Wind chime; Yu Dafu), 174–5 Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi, 141n30 “Fifteen Demands,” 146n45 Fogel, Joshua, 168n51 Fowler, Edward, 157n40 Fujii, James, 151n30 Futabatei Shimei, 163n4 Futon (The Quilt; Tayama Katai), 21f “Fûzoku shôsetsu ron” (Concerning a Novel of Manners; Nakamura Mitsuo), 24 ganshouxing (sensitivity), 43 “Geijutsu to jisseikatsu” (Art and Life; Hirano Ken), 25 “Geming yu wenxue” (Revolution and Literature; Guo Moruo), 121 genius, 153n68; May Fourth concepts of, 157n35 Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji; Lady Murasaki), 107, 173 genre, distinctions, 67, 79 “Geweizhuyi” (Individualism; Jia Yi), 168n44 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 145n33 Gong Binglu, 122–4, 167n35 and n36 Guang Xu Emperor, 135n6

205

“Guangming yu heian” (Light and Darkness; Shen Rong), 129 Gunn, Edward, 43, 157n46 Guo Laixin, 14 Guo Moruo, 17–19, 39, 41–2, 64, 72, 81–7 passim, 92, 117, 139n2; views on art, 5, 9, 37, 63, 154n10, 166n25 and n32; embracing of Marxism, 27, 121–2, 153n67, 156n28; as a translator, 145n33, 147n58 guocui (National essence), 33, 144n24 guojia yizhi (National consciousness), 119 “Guomin wenxue lun” (On a National Literature; Zheng Boqi), 120 Guomindang, 129–30 Gusdorf, Georges, 125, 136n12 haibun, 23 “Han no hanzai” (Han’s Crime; Shiga Naoya), 78 Harrell, Paula, 38, 44, 148n63 Hasegawa Tenkei, 22, 141n21 Hassan, Ihad, 142n32 Hayashi Fumiko, 168n49 Hearn, Lafcadio, 108 Hegel, Robert, 142n2 Henan, 70 Hirano Ken, 25, 117, 141n29 Hockx, Michel, 60, 62, 149n11 Hôjôki (An Account of My Hut; Kamo no Chômei), 24 Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber; Cao Xueqin), 31 Hongshui (Deluge), 122, 139n6 honkaku shôsetsu (true novel), 23 Honma Hisao, 71, 140n17 hosshindan (Religious awakenings), 148n3 Hu Shi, 5–7, 20, 61, 154n6 Huang Martin, 31–2 Huang Zhengzhi, 158n47

206

I ndex

“Huise de niao” (Gray Bird; Cheng Fangwu), 176 Hundred Days Reform, 135n6, 144n24 Hushang de beiju (Tragedy on the Lake; Tian Han), 147n56 hypochondria, 119 Ibsen, Henrik, 35 illness, as a metaphor for Chinese society among May Fourth writers, 126–7, 160n70, 165n15, 169n52 Imperialism, as a subject for criticism In May Fourth Period fiction, 101–3 implied author, 143n15 individualism, ambivalence about among May Fourth intellectuals, 7, 145n38 Intercultural significance, versus intracultural significance, 26, 142n32 Iser, Wolfgang, 150n17 and n25 Itô Sei, 24, 55, 151n36, 163n49 Itô Toramaru, 13, 63, 139n6 “Jakusha” (The Weakling; Kasai Zenzô), 83 Jia (Family; Ba Jin), 5 Jia Yi, 168n44 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), 159n68 Ji’e Sanbuqu, (Hunger Trilogy; Wang Ruowang), 130, 170n67 jiko tankyû (search for selfhood), 126 junbungaku (see Pure literature) “Junsui shôsetsu ron” (Concerning the Pure Novel; Yokomitsu Riichi), 141n25 “Kaijin no kigu” (Strange Encounters With Beautiful Women; Shiba Shiro), 136n7 kairan zasshi (circulating journals), 149n7

Kamo no Chômei, 24 “Kanashiki chichi” (Unhappy Father; Kasai Zenzô), 74, 78 Kaneko Chikusui, 141n22 Kang Youwei, 7, 135n6, 144n24 Kanojo (she), use of third-person in Shishôsetsu narrative, 76–7 Kare (he), use of third-person in Shishôsetsu narrative, 76–7, 157n45 Kasai Zenzô, 51, 56, 69, 74, 78f, 83–4f Katari, 54 Kawabata Yasunari, 155n12 Kawakami Hajime, 19, 121 Kikuchi Kan, 48–51 “Kindai no ren’ai kan” (Views on Modern Love; Kuriyagawa Hakuson), 71 “Kinosaki nite” (To Kinosaki; Shiga Naoya), 78, 83 Kinoshita Naoe, 167n38 “Ko o tsurete” (With Children on My Hands; Kasai Zenzô), 85 Kobayashi Hideo, 24f, 141n25 and n26 Kobayashi Takiji, 168n49 kokusui (National essence), 33 “Kuangren riji” (Diary of a Madman; Lu Xun), 115 Kume Masao, 22f, 140n20 Kumen (anguish), 43 “Kumon no shôchô” (Symbols of Sorrow; Kuriyagawa Hakuson), 72 Kuriyagawa Hakuson, 71, 155n22, 156n23 and n25 Kyushu Imperial University, 17 Lao Can yanji (The Travels of Lao Can, Liu E), 33 Larson, Wendy, 164n9 Lee, Leo Ou-Fan, 15, 157n38 Li Bai, 115, 145n34 Li Ping, 129 “Li Sao” (Qu Yuan), 30–1

Index Li Yu, 32, 143n16, 144n2 Li Zehou, 128–9 “Liang guniang” (Two girls; Tao Jingsun), 158n47 Liang Huoren, 14–15 Liang Qichao, 2–3, 7, 34, 115, 135n6, 144n24, 154n3 Lin Shu, 35, 145n32 literary journalism, in Taishô period Japan, 65, 149n14; in Qing and Republican period China, 61 Literary Research Society (see Wenxue Yanjiuhui) literary revolution, shift to revolutionary literature by the Creation Society, 121–2, 166n32 literary youth (see bungaku seinen) Literati (see wenren) Liu E, 33 Liu, Lydia, 126 Liu Zaifu, 128–9 Lord Byron, 34 Lu Xun, 20, 61, 70, 72, 78, 115, 125, 132, 144n31; as a student in Japan, 148n53; attitude toward self-referential literature, 27, 44; as a translator, 34 “Lun guonei de pingtan ji wo duiyu chuangzaoshang de taidu” (Domestic Circles and My Attitude Toward Creativity; Guo Moruo), 5, 37, 154n10 lüshi, 77 lyric poetry, 61–2 “Mangmangye” (Endless Nights; Yu Dafu), 41, 106, 172 Mansfield, Katherine, 145n33 Mao Dun (also Shen Yanbing), 61, 63, 78, 119; attitude toward self-referential literature, 27, 146n54 Mao Zedong, 127, 129, 165n14 Marcus, Marvin, 149n14, 160n74 Marxism, “conversion” to by Creationists, 19, 121–2, 124

207

Matsuo Basho, 135n3, 150n15 May Fourth literature, indebtedness to Qing literature, 31–3 passim; in context of intellectual movement, 11, 120–5 passim megalomania, 119 Mental attitude novel (see Shinkyô shôsetsu) Ming period, 58, vernacular fiction of, 30–1 Mishima Yukio, 24 mission, sense of on the part of Creation Society writers, 91, 99, 119, 168n45 “Moluo shi li shuo” (On the Power of Mara Poetry; Lu Xun), 70 Mori Ôgai, 163n4 Mu Mutian, 61, 139n5 “Mulch” (Peregnoy; Seyfullina, Lídya Nikoláyevna), 123, 167n13 “Muma” (Hobby Horse; Zhang Ziping), 68, 93, 175–6 Mushanokoji Saneatsu, 56, 64, 168n49 “Muxi” (Osmanthus, Tao Jingsun), 93, 178–9 Nagayo Yoshiô, 153n68 “Nakama” (The In-group; Kasai Zenzô), 51 Nakamura Mitsuo, 24 Nakamura Murao, 21f Nanshe (Southern Society), 58f narrative voice, in Yu Dafu’s fiction, 78–9, 99, 146n50 narratological conventions, of self-referential literature, 52–4 nation building, as a function of May Fourth fiction, 42, 91, 168n45 Nationalism, as a quality of May Fourth literature, 9, 119

208

I ndex

Naturalism, Japanese interpretation of, 53, 117, 141n21, 151n26 New Culture Movement (see Xin wenhua yundong) New Era literature (Xin shiqi wenxue), 128–31 passim “Niaoluo xing” (Trail of ivy; Yu Dafu), 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 147n58 nikki (see also Diary literature), 68 Ni’nin bikuni irozange (Confession Of Two Buddhist Nuns; Ozaki Kôyô), 48 Nitobe Inazo, 115 Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North; Matsuo Bashô), 150n15 Omedetaki hito (An Innocent; Mushanokoji Saneatsu), 56 oral literature, 54 “Ordinance Nineteen,” 145n45 “Oshû kindai bungei shichôron” (Concerning Recent Trends in European Literature; Honma Hisao), 71 Ozaki Kôyô, 48, 117, 148n3 Paris, John, 108, 163n50 performance, as a quality of the shishôsetsu, 67; as a quality of Yu Dafu’s fiction, 68, 156n32 “Piaoliu sanbuqiu” (Sonata on Wandering; Guo Moruo), 41 plot, in Yu Dafu’s fiction, 76, 79; In shishôsetsu, 79, 86; Proletarian literature, 127; advocacy By Guo Moruo, 153n67; Influence of Japanese variant on Creation Society, 24; development of in May Fourth period China, 167n38 Post-Mao literature, 169n57, influence of May Fourth literature, 128, 169n58

protagonist, in Yu Dafu’s fiction, 75, 100; portrayed as writers, 101 pure literature (junbungaku), 19, 140n8 and n14; in Taishô Japan, 20, 48, 121, 148n1; repudiation of by Guo Moruo, 20; features adopted by Creation Society, 70–3 passim Qianze xiaoshuo (Fiction of exposure), 144n31 Qing Period, 139n59; fiction of, 2, 30–2, 135n5; literary community of, 58–9; as a model for May Fourth literature, 58 “Qingyan” (Blue Smoke; Yu Dafu), 180–1; as an example of self-referential fiction, 99–105 passim Quilt (see Futon) race, as a theme in Yu Dafu’s fiction, 85, 108–9 Radtke, Kurt, 127, 165n21 and n22 readership, 53–4; for late Qing fiction, 33, 42–3, 152n44; for May Fourth literature, 37, 42–3, 52; for the shishôsetsu, 50–1, 150n17; in Yu Dafu’s fiction, 52–3, 81 Realism, 24 reclusion, as a tradition in East Asian Literature, 115 reform, literature as a tool of, 115–16 Ren dao zhongnian (At Middle Age; Shen Rong), 129 “Ren de wenxue” (Humane Literature; Zhou Zuoren), 5 Revolutionary literature, 37 “Riben de puluolietariya yishu zenme jingguo ta de yundong” (How Japan’s Proletarian Art

Index Has Affected Their Movement; Chen Qiyu), 124, 167n38 “Riben jin sanshinian xiaoshuo zhi fazhan” (Developments in Japanese Fiction in the Last Thirty Years; Zhou Zuoren), 3, 25 “Rokotsu naru byôsha” (Straightforward Description; Tayama Katai), 21 Romanticism, 33–4, 74, 144n25; comparisons with the New Culture movement, 35–8, 125, 128 Roots literature, (xungen wenxue), 170n72 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 15, 64 Rulin waishi (The Scholars; Wu Jingzi), 31 Saeki Shôichi, 167n42 “Saikin waga bundan ni chûmoku subeki kokuhaku bungaku” (The Confessional Literature that has Recently Captured the Attention Of the bundan; Honma Hisao), 140n17 Sanskrit, 33 Sasameyuki (Makioka Sisters; Tanizaki Jun’ichiro), 169n56 Satô Haruo, 12–13, 55, 72, 82, 132, 144n28, 151n36; relationship with Yu Dafu, 118–19, 165n20 Satomi Ton, 153n68 second self, 73, 87 “Seikatsu no geijutsuka” (Transformation of Life into Art; Kaneko Chikusui), 141n22 self-referentiality, 87–8, 161n11; as a quality of fiction, 135n2, 137n31; as a tool of social critique for Creation Society writers, 91, 114, 126–7, 164n36

209

Senzaimaru, 168n51 sexual politics, as a theme in Yu Dafu’s fiction, 106, 162n44, 163n53 Seyfullina, Lídya Nikoláyevna, 123, 167n36 Shafei nüshi de riji (Miss Sophia’s Diary; Ding Ling), 5 “Shakai soshiki to shakai kakumei (Social Organization and Social Reform; Kawakami Hajime), 19, 121 Shakespeare, William, 35, 101 Shanghai, 59, 102–3; literary scene in May Fourth period, 147n60 Shanghai College of Fine Arts, 64 “Shanghai wenyi zhi yipie” (Glance at the Shanghai Literary Scene; Lu Xun), 44 Shanghen wenxue (Literature of the wounded), 170n67 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 36–7 Shen Congwen, 61 Shen Rong, 129, 170n66 Shi’er lou (Twelve Towers; Li Yu), 143n16 Shiga hero, 159n61 Shiga Naoya, 25, 64, 69, 78, 83 Shiji (Records of the Historian; Sima Qian), 30 “Shiming” (The Mission; Cheng Fangwu), 119 shinkyô shôsetsu (Mental attitude fiction), 25 shinpen, 21 “Shiobara Tôkaki” (Ten Days at Shiobara; Yu Dafu), 171–2 Shirakaba (White Birch Society), 25, 136n8; comparisons with the Creation Society, 63–4, 153n68 and n69 Shishi xinbao (see Current Affair News)

210

I ndex

Shishôsetsu (I-novel), 1, 54, 116, 148n1; scholarship about, 22; Creation Society’s adaptation of, 38–45 passim, 74–81 passim, 107, 116–20 passim; concerning the Creation Society and, 90–2 passim, 126–7; long term impact in China, 127–8; relationship to traditional narrative forms, 67–8 shôhin (vignette), 40 “Shôsetsu no hôhô” (Methods of the Novel; Itô Sei), 24 Shôsetsu no Shinzui (Essence of the Novel; Tsubouchi Shôyô), 136n8 Shumi (Taste), 49 sibling texts, 159n64 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 162n35 Sima Qian, 30 sincerity, as a quality of selfreferential fiction, 100 Sino-Japanese War, 10f, 95 Siu, Helen, 131 Society, detachment from in Shishôsetsu, 117 Song Dynasty, 54, 58 Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer, 29, 87 storyteller’s manner, 143n14 style, innovations by May Fourth writers, 43 Su Manshu, 33–4, 59, 144n27 and n28 Subaru (Pleiades), 49 subjectivity, as a quality of Chinese poetry, 143n7 “Subjectivity of Literature Revisited” (Liu Zaifu), 129 subversive, quality of self-referential Literature, 1 Ta (he), use of third-person in Creation Society narratives, 76–7. “Ta” (Him; Huang Zhengzhi), 158n47 Taidong Publishers, 4, 19, 49

Taishô Democracy, 60 Taishô period, 20–1, 117; literature as a model for Creation Society, 50–1; Proletarian literature of, 124 Taiwan Symposium, 167n40 Taiyô (The Sun), 50, 141n22 Tanbiha (Aesthetic group), 136n8 Tanizaki Junichiro, 132, 169n56 Tao Jingsun, 158n47 Tao Qian, 142n5 Tayama Katai, 21f Teng Gu, 158n47 third person point of view, in self-referential fiction, 76–7, 157n47, 158n48 Tian Han, 60, 64, 98, 139n2, 147n56, 161n21 Tokyo Imperial University, 18, 125, 139n1, 174 Tolstoy, Leo, 35 tonghuali de shijie (fairy-tale world), 92 tongren (coterie), 60 Tongren jidan (coterie group), 60 Totei seido (Master-disciple system), 20, 48 Translated literature, in China of the May Fourth period, 155n20 True novel (see honkaku shôsetsu) Tsubouchi Shôyô, 48, 136n8, 154n3 Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness; Yoshida Kenkô), 24 Uchimura Kanzô, 115 Uno Kôji, 23 vernacular fiction, of the Ming and Qing periods, 31–2 Versailles Treaty, demonstrations against by May Fourth intellectuals, 7, 120 Wakai (Reconciliation; Shiga Naoya), 69

Index Wang Duqing, 9–10, 163n1 Wang Ruowang, 130, 170n67 “Wanxia xiaoshuo de shihou” (When Sunset Clouds Disappear; Li Ping), 129 Warlord Era, 10 Waseda Bungaku (Waseda Literature), 71 Watakushi shôsetsu (see shishôsetsu) “Watakushi shôsetsu ron” (On the Shishôsetsu; Kobayashi Hideo), 24, 141n25 “ ‘Watakushi shôsetsu ron’ ni tuite” (A Response to [Kobayashi Hideo’s] “Watakushi shôsetsu ron”; Nakamura Mitsuo), 141n25 “Watakushi shôsetsu shiken” (Personal View of the shishôsetsu; Uno Kôji), 23 “Watakushi shôsetsu to shinkyô shôsetsu” (The Shishôsetsu and the Mental Attitude Novel; Kume Masao), 23, 140n20 “Weilai zhi yishuji: pochu ziran de mixin” (Artist of the Future: Destroying Natural Superstitions; Wang Duqing), 9–10, 163n1 “Weiyang” (Halfway; Guo Moruo), 42, 92, 117, 176–7; as an example of self-referential fiction, 81–7 Wen Yiduo, 61 wenren (literati), 54 wentan (literary community), comparison with Japanese bundan, 58–64f; of the Qing period, 42–3 “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature; Hu Shi), 5–6, 154n6 Wenxue Yanjiuhui (Literary Research Society), 61, 152n58 Wenxue Zhoubao (Literary Weekly), 63

211

“Wenyijia de juewu” (Awakening of the Artist; Guo Moruo), 121 Western literature, influence on the Creation Society, 2, 8, 163n2 “Wo chengren shi ‘shibai’ le” (I Admit to Having Failed; Yu Dafu), 147n62 “Women de wenxue xin yundong” (Our New Literary Movement; Guo Moruo), 9, 18 Wu Jingzi, 31 “Wu Liu xiansheng chuan” (Biography of the Master of the Five Willows; Tao Qian), 142n4 and n5 Wu Woyao, 33 Wusheng xi (Silent Operas; Li Yu), 143n16 Xiandai mingren qingshu (Love Letters of Famous Contemporaries; Yu Dafu), 5 Xiaomei Chen, 6 xiaopin (see shôhin) Xiaoshuo yuebao (Fiction Monthly), 4, 61 xiaozi (private self), 168n44 Xinganjuepai (New Sensationalists), 27 Xin qingnian (New Youth), 3, 126, 135n6 Xin shiqi wenxue (New era literature), 128–31 passim, 169n57; similarities with May Fourth literature, 128, 169n58 Xin wenhua yundong (New Culture Movement), 36 “Xin wenxue zhi jingzhong” (Warning Bell of New Literature; Zheng Boqi), 9 Xin Xiaoshuo (New Fiction), 2 Xinyuekan (Crescent Monthly), 61 Xinyueshe (see Crescent Moon Society) Xu Zhimo, 36, 61, 145n33

212

I ndex

Xu Zidong, 13, 118, 126, 138n56 Xungen wenxue (Search for roots Literature) (see Roots literature) Ya sheng (Elegant Voice), 175 yangcheng caizi (genius of the foreign mall), 37 Ye Lingfeng, 64, 166n34 Ye Shengtao, 70 Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, 127, 129, 165n14 “Yiban rongyuan de shenghuo” (Lives of a Group of Good-fornothings; Zhang Ziping), 39–40, 177–8; as an example of selfreferential fiction, 92–9 passim, 111 “Yige dongtian de tonghua” (A Winter’s Tale; Yu Luojin), 129 “Yige langliu de xinnian” (A Vagabond’s New Year; Cheng Fangwei), 40 “Yijiuerwu de xue: guanyu wu san shi de chuanwen (The Blood of 1925; Gong Binglu), 122–4, yimin wenxue (literature of immigrants), 57 yishidao (subconscious), 43 “Yiwen sijian” (Personal View of Art; Yu Dafu), 35–6, 58, 63 Yokomitsu Riichi, 141n25 Yoshida Kenkô, 24 Yoshiyuki Jun’nosuke, 24 Yu Dafu, 17–18, 39, 41, 52, 58, 64, 99–105 passim, 105–11 passim, 120, 139n1 and n2; and Satô Haruo, 12–13, 118–19, 165n20, reception by contemporary readers, 72–3; views on art, 125, 147n62 Yu hero, 80 Yu Luojin, 129 Yu Pingbo, 61 yucuzheng (depression), 43

Yushishe (Thread of Words Society), 61 Yuwai xiaoshuoji (Anthology of Foreign Fiction; Zhou Zhoren and Zhou Shuren [Lu Xun]), 34 zadankai (Round table discussion), 149n14 zangemono (Revelatory tales), 148n3 Zarathustra, 147n58 zashi, 78 Zhang Dinghuang, 42, 69, 117, 167n37 Zhang Jie, 130–1 Zhang Ziping, 17–18, 39–40, 64, 68, 92–9 passim, 111, 139n2, 163n5 Zheng Boqi, 9, 40, 57, 93, 103, 139n5, 162n37 Zheng Zhenduo, 61 zhengzhi xiaoshuo (political novel), 144n31 “Zhishujie” (Arbor Day; Zhang Dinghuang), 42, 69, 117, 167n37, 181–2 Zhongguo liuxuesheng huiguan (Chinese student union), 38, 97, 152n53 “Zhongtu” (In the Middle; Yu Dafu), 173–4; as an example of self-referential literature, 105–11 passim Zhou Zuoren, 3, 5, 25–6, 44, 61, 136n8, 137n16; as translator, 34 zhutixing (subjectivity), 129 ziwo (ego), 9, 42, 63, 119 Zixi, Empress Dowager, 136n6 “Zuichu zhi ke” (First Day of Class; Zheng Boqi), 40, 93, 172–3 zuihitsu (Personal essay), 68 Zuoyi zuojia lianmeng (League of Leftist Writers), 125