3—
Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, and the Moral Impediments to Realism
Lu Xun:
The Violence of Observation
The preeminent position that both Chinese and foreign critics of modern Chinese literature accord to the few short stories in Lu Xun's two collections Nahan
[1] Theodore D. Huters makes a similar observation about "New Year's Sacrifice" in his "Blossoms in the Snow."
dissection are evident in the formal experimentation of his fiction. But Lu Xun was not much interested in bringing the details of his personal life into his writings, and the self-dissection he practiced was not that of a frankly confessional writer like Yu Dafu. Instead, what Lu Xun constantly probed with his restless experimentation was his identity and responsibility as a writer. The same moral purpose that dictated the didactic element in his fiction—making it, at least superficially, an outcry against social injustices—at the same time compelled a reflexive examination of his own role as observer of Chinese society and dispenser of its literary representations. Though later writers were to approach the ethical and formal problems he broached with more fertile narrative imaginations, none wrote with the same degree of scrupulous self-examination.
Lu Xun's preface to the short stories collected in The Outcry narrates the awakening, deferral, and eventual expression of the moral purpose that informs his fiction. Its narrative form pointedly directs readers' attention away from a simple thematic approach to the stories toward a consideration of the author's personal investment in their composition. The psychological origin of Lu Xun's moral indignation is evoked in the story of his father's death from superstitious medical practices,[3] as a result of which Lu Xun undertook the study of Western medicine. How that indignation was redirected from somatic to spiritual concerns, specifically to literature, is recounted in a scene whose impact is at once political, aesthetic, and personal. In the scene Lu Xun, at the time a young medical student in Sendai, Japan, views a war slide depicting a Chinese bound and about to be hanged as a spy by the Japanese. Lu Xun is interested not so much in the physical brutality of the act depicted in the slide as in its social significance: the execution is performed above all for its informational value, "as a warning" to other Chinese. Regardless of his possible guilt or innocence, the victim's death is intended to symbolically impose a certain order on the social relations of the observers. Lu Xun's attention thus naturally turns to the Chinese audience within the slide whose potential reception of the message conveyed by this act of violence may be said to license it, and he is appalled by their moral obtuseness. Oblivious both to the individual tragedy being played out before them and
[3] See the discussion of Lu Xun's psychological makeup in Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Genesis of a Writer: Notes on Lu Xun's Educational Experience, 1881–1909" in Merle Goldman, Modern Chinese Literature , pp. 161–88, especially p. 168.
to the significance of their own role as witnesses, they have come simply to "enjoy the spectacle."
Besides the content of the slide, the unique circumstances of its viewing—in a microbiology class after the day's lessons are concluded—disturb Lu Xun. The classroom setting, as well as the coldly reproductive nature of the photographic medium, would seem to encourage Lu Xun to view the projected scene with the distancing, objectifying perspective of scientific observation—as a self-delimited fact, unavailable to the interference of its viewers. But unlike the microbes that are the class's usual viewing matter and which are indeed oblivious of their observers, the execution assumes the observers' presence and is enacted for their sake. Lu Xun is aware of two groups of observers, in both of which he participates but with whose responses to the slide he feels profoundly at odds. While national identity connects him most intimately with the Chinese audience within the slide, his recognition of their spiritual apathy makes him painfully sensible of the distance, both moral and physical, that separates him from his compatriots. Yet his physical presence in the audience of Japanese students compels him to feign pleasure at the sight of the slide ("I had to join in the clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students"),[4] involving him in a kind of bad faith perhaps even more reprehensible than the curiosity of the Chinese audience he censures. The scene thus encapsulates a double sense of one observer's alienation and complicity: while, as a Chinese, he too is targeted as a receptor of the warning the act is meant to convey, for survival's sake he must share the delight of its authors.
The young Lu Xun has violated the smooth transmission of the slide's message by his affective identification with the victim, but he silences that sympathy, realizing that its immediate expression would be equivalent to offering himself in substitution for the victim, a risk he is unwilling to run. Only at the level of his personal interpretive heresy is Lu Xun's true response registered; his failure to find an outlet for that response condemns him to years of embittered "loneliness," a private agony that Lu Xun wanly hopes the composition of short stories will purge. If this aim is to be accomplished, however, a troublesome aesthetic dilemma must be addressed: lest Lu Xun's own work
be guilty of further disseminating the spectacle of violence, the narration must, while faithfully rendering scenes of paradigmatic social significance such as that depicted in the slide, disallow the unthinking transmission of their original message. Lu Xun's frequent expression of concern for the "young people" who will constitute his audience is in fact motivated by an awareness of the dangers of transmission; doubtful that his readers will fare better than he has at breaking the chain of violence through which the message of social discipline is perpetuated, he fears that his work will "infect" them with the same lonely, because inoperative, consciousness of social injustice that has embittered his own life. As we shall see, Lu Xun attempts to prevent the possibility of his fiction's spreading such infection by introducing a discursive counterargument (or what might be called an interpretive static) to the violence of the work's histoire .
"Shi zhong"
In its portrayal of crowd dynamics "A Public Example" employs, as Patrick Hanan has observed, a "cinematic" technique,[7] but this is less a point of similarity with the slide-viewing incident discussed above, as he suggests, than the mark of its difference. Where the slide had presented a static view, here the rapid movement of the narrator's observing eye as he moves among the crowd of onlookers is what one first notices on reading the story. At times, as if trying to follow a complicated sequence of rapidly edited closeups, readers become disoriented: to whom do the red nose, bald head, or straw hat belong? As a result readers, though their quality of observation retains the clinical exteriority of the camera, feel themselves pressed into the crowd, unable to attain the equanimity of a distanced view. The disorienting cinematic technique of "A Public Example" thus forces on readers an unwilling identification with the crowd. To the extent that they resist such identification on ethical grounds, they are compelled to scrutinize their own processes of observation. Readers' complicity in the observation of the criminal has already been suggested by the title, whose literal meaning ("show crowd") could refer either to the narrated exhibition of the criminal or to the act that the story itself represents of putting the crowd on display to its audience of readers.
The most developed treatment of ritual victimization in Lu Xun's works is the final scene of his best-known story, "Ah Q zhengzhuan"
[7] Patrick Hanan, "The Technique of Lu Hsün's Fiction," p. 89.
[8] See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred , especially the chapters entitled "The Origins of Myth and Ritual," pp. 89–119, and "Sacrificial Substitution," pp. 250–73.
position in a society where individuals are most powerfully conjoined through familial ties, but his claim, however unreliable, that his surname is in fact Zhao
[9] See Zhou Zuoren (Zhou Xiashou), Lu Xun xiaoshuo li de renwu , p. 41.
[10] In this connection see Lin Yü-sheng's discussion of Ah Q's "lack of an interior self" in The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness , p. 129.
someone else.[11] By playing both parts at once, Ah Q makes himself his own scapegoat. To the extent that he is a Chinese everyman, Ah Q's behavior typifies the arbitrary and self-divisive modes of social operation that Lu Xun believed characterized Chinese civilization.
If at his execution Ah Q is technically scapegoated for a crime he has not committed, the text is careful to prevent readers from sentimentally identifying with him as a hapless victim. They know he is guilty of similar crimes, and as he disingenuously admits to his accusers, he had wanted to take part in the crime of which he is accused (523); readers also recall how he had once relished the spectacle of another's execution (509). As he is being paraded about as a public example before his execution, Ah Q is wise enough not to protest his innocence ("It seemed to him that in this world it was probably the fate of everybody at some time to have his head cut off" [525]) but to simply try to satisfy the crowd's expectations of his behavior. Again in conformity with the anthropological model of the sacrificial victim, Ah Q, in spite of his very real fear of death, perceives his execution to be an honor. As the primary participant in the ultimate spectacle of social reinforcement, in which the community's reciprocal violence is concentrated on a single victim, he basks in what the narrator has earlier termed "reflected glory": "It may have been like the case of the sacrificial beef in the Confucian temple; although the beef was in the same category as pork and mutton, being of animal origin just as they were, later Confucians did not dare touch it since the sage had enjoyed it" (494–95).
Ah Q faces his execution with aplomb until near the end, when Lu Xun introduces one of his favorite and most extreme images to revive a sense of the execution's cruelty and violence. In the last moments of his life, Ah Q grows dizzy and sees before him only a sea of eyes, which are "eager to devour more than his flesh and blood." The eyes then merge into one, "biting into his soul" (526). The same image was used in "Yao"
1918), where the protagonist senses the cannibalistic desires of relatives and fellow villagers primarily through their gazes. Much of the story "A Public Example" also follows the eyes of the crowd, whose scrutiny of the criminal takes on a particularly vicious quality. But in that story and in "The Diary of a Madman" the victim's own glance meets the gaze of the crowd at moments, with interesting results. At one point in "A Public Example" the character called "Fat Boy" looks up at the prisoner's eyes, which "seemed to be fixed on his head," and then hastily averts his glance.[13] Later Fat Boy notices the criminal staring at his chest and nervously inspects himself to see what is wrong.
The madman in "The Diary of a Madman" also mentions several times how his gaze disturbs those he believes are persecuting him. In the exchange of glances between oppressor and victim the direction of violence is momentarily inverted: however briefly, the observed (the arbitrarily chosen public example) becomes the observer, and the observer (the Chinese crowd, and by extension the readers themselves) becomes the observed. For a moment readers sense that the crowd's violence is rooted in just the feeling of terror their actions arouse in their victim.
Ah Q is not awarded a return glance, but at the crucial moment of his death, a sudden break in the narrative accomplishes a similar bringing-to-consciousness of the nature of his sacrifice and the observer's role in it. Just when Ah Q feels himself consumed by the eyes of the crowd, now conflated into a single monstrous eye, the psychological narration is suddenly broken by the cry "Jiu ming
[13] Lu Xun, "Shi zhong," p. 69.
allowing him to present his personal plea for Ah Q's salvation. Ah Q is incapable of achieving the degree of self-consciousness implicit in the cry, so the narrator must help him to the thought. If this latter interpretation is correct, the narrative, which to this point has depicted the social order as a seamless web in which all are guiltily enmeshed, is here rent to allow the direct expression of an indignation that originates outside the narrated social world in the critical consciousness of the narrator.
Whether we perceive the thought as originating in the narrator's or Ah Q's mind may in the end matter little, however, considering the particular nature of the relationship between narrator and protagonist in the story. As is clear from the opening chapter, the narrator shares with Ah Q an identification that runs far deeper than the affective bonding of pity. The narrator complains that he has long felt "possessed" by his subject and observes that his own fate as an author is intimately entwined with Ah Q's: the subject of a biography "becomes known to posterity through the writing and the writing known to posterity through the subject—until finally it is not clear who is making whom known." Or more literally translated: "It is finally unclear whether people are made known through writing, or writing is made known through people
is, the story as understood through the critical consciousness of the narrator) from a culturally subservient narrative of ritual violence, or what we might call, using an equally likely translation of the term zhengzhuan , the "story proper."[14]
Chinese society, as depicted in the stories we have discussed, is a field of arbitrary significations that nevertheless exerts a binding, tyrannical influence over the lives of its individual members. Its oppressive effect is less the result of the willful manipulation of one class—whether defined in sociological or ethical terms—by another than of the impersonal, enmeshing authority of culture and tradition.[15] This authority is consolidated through acts of ritual violence, but perpetuated on a daily basis through textual governance, that is, through the intimidating power of the written word.[16] More frequently than they are made into examples through execution or public display, the characters in Lu Xun's stories are brought to submission through obedience to the written manifestations of Chinese culture: in the story "Kong Yiji"
[14] As the narrator points out at the beginning of the story, the term zhengzhuan derives from a stock phrase of the traditional novelist: "Enough of this digression, and back to the story proper " (488; my italics).
Double fifth festival, 1922), Teacher Fang Xuanchuo's
Clearly Lu Xun hoped that he was not himself guilty of this kind of bad faith and that his own compositions, by serving as a formal vehicle for the dissemination of a critical social consciousness, could avoid contributing to the social oppression whose textual agency they so frequently evoke. But as Lu Xun was acutely aware, representational art risks making the victim into a mere object of the reader's curiosity or pity; in the process of reading, these emotions, which significantly are those of the observer, are satisfied, thereby camouflaging the true nature of the reader's involvement with the victim. We have seen how Lu Xun employed a cinematic technique and the image of the devouring eye to establish an uncomfortable identification between reader and crowd in several of his stories. More commonly in his early stories, however, Lu Xun attempted to counter the purgative effect of representational art by using what in the preface to The Outcry he calls qubi
referred to deliberate misrepresentations of the truth by historians to avoid the wrath of the powerful. As Lu Xun describes them, these distortions are introduced at the closure of some of his stories to cancel their pessimistic effect. He cites the wreath that appears on the son's grave in "Medicine" and the possibility that Shan Si Saozi
Lu Xun's distortions are never integrated into the work's histoire but operate only at the discursive or symbolic level of the text. They can indicate hope only if we assent to the intervention of the author's extrinsic symbolic imagination. The willed nature of such significations is apparent, for example, in the symbolic structure of "Medicine," not only with the wreath that Lu Xun mentions but also with the two other images that dominate the story: the blood-soaked bun that is used as a medicine and the crow that also "appears from nowhere" at the grave side. As Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova[*] has observed of the crow, these images must be given a dual interpretation: the original superstitious interpretation is replaced at closure with a "hopeful" radical one.[19] To accomplish this hermeneutical inversion, however, the story resorts to a dual strategy involving both the discursive and narrative levels of the text. The superstitious belief that an execution victim's blood will cure a child's body is disabused through emplotment (the child dies), while the hope that the revolutionary through his execution may be proffering a medicine for the country's soul is advanced symbolically. The discursive level of the
[19] See Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova, "Lu Xun's 'Medicine,'" in Merle Goldman, Modern Chinese Literature , pp. 221–32.
story, with its revolutionary symbolism, may be said to resist the pessimism of the plot, in which traditional cultural significations are impugned.
Patrick Hanan has observed that Lu Xun's "pleas" for the future, which we have here analyzed as distortions, are to be found only in Lu Xun's first volume of stories, The Outcry .[20] The stories in his second volume, Hesitation , however, accomplish the same goal in a more sophisticated way, through the use of ironical mediating narrators. As we shall see, these narrators allow Lu Xun to posit the opening of a full critical illumination of the social order and to explore its consequences. The narrators and protagonists who are granted moments of illumination assume a particular role in the social order as it is described in Lu Xun's stories: they are all intellectual onlookers, situated morally between the crowd and its victims. "The Diary of a Madman," one of Lu Xun's earliest stories, had, of course, also taken the bearer of a full critical consciousness as a protagonist, but there the madman had been treated as a full-fledged victim of the social order. The intellectuals who people Lu Xun's later stories represent a third party, who because of their intimation of the true nature of traditional society feel a degree of alienation from it but who also continue to enjoy, however indirectly, the benefits it accords to members of the elite classes. The nature of their alienation is tested in the course of the story, often through direct confrontation with one of society's victims.[21]
The encounter between the narrator of "New Year's Sacrifice" and the character Xianglin Sao
[20] Patrick Hanan, "The Technique of Lu Hsün's Fiction," p. 93.
[21] For another treatment of the alienated loner in Lu Xun's stories and his or her relationship with the crowd see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House , pp. 69–88. My emphasis here differs somewhat from Lee's in that I see the fundamental social configuration behind the stories not as a dyadic one (of loner and crowd) but as a triadic one (of intellectual, crowd, and victim). The intellectual feels caught between the crowd and its prey: his sense of alienation (born in part of self-pity) accords him a measure of sympathy for the victim, but as a relatively privileged member of society, he cannot avoid a sense of complicity with the crowd. The alienation that interested Lu Xun was not that of the misunderstood or frustrated individualist but that of the moral coward. All of his loners are intellectuals who achieve a degree of insight into the cannibalism of Chinese society, only to discover that they do not have the courage or the wherewithal to act on their ethical instincts.
course of the story Xianglin Sao has been kidnapped and physically abused by peers from her village, but her final ruin is brought on by the symbolic and spiritual abuse more insidiously practiced by the narrator's own family. After she is forced into a second marriage, her employers treat her as contaminated, prohibiting her participation in the family sacrifices, and through idle comments awakening her doubts about an afterlife. In a crucial scene Xianglin Sao shocks the narrator, who has been educated abroad and prides himself on his enlightened thinking, by cornering him and asking, "Do dead people have souls or not?"[22] This question, though apparently superstitious, directly addresses the question of the cannibalized victim's fate: can those sacrificed for the maintenance of an orderly society be simply buried and forgotten, or does the violence of their deaths leave ineradicable scars on the social body? Can such as Ah Q in fact be saved? The intellectual, in evading the victim's question ("I am not sure" [8]), exposes both his intellectual poverty and, more profoundly, his moral cowardice. Xianglin Sao's question, by undermining the authority of the intellectual's social position, which is predicated on both moral and intellectual leadership, momentarily awakens in him an intimation of his complicity in the collective act of violence against her. But the intellectual, as always in Lu Xun's stories, proves unfaithful both to the victim and to his own insight. By pitying Xianglin Sao, he reduces his understanding of her situation to a purely affective involvement, which may then be purged through catharsis. At the end of the story, the narrator is suddenly freed of all the doubts that had plagued him as he considered Xianglin Sao's tragic story: "I felt only that the saints of heaven and earth had accepted the sacrifice and incense and were reeling with intoxication in the sky, preparing to give Luzhen's
Such moments of purgation, in which the intellectual narrator feels a sudden uplift that is often incongruous with the events related in the story, are common at the conclusions of Lu Xun's later stories. After the narrator of "Zai jiulou shang"
tor of "The Misanthrope" unexpectedly cries out in "anger and sorrow mingled with agony" upon seeing his friend Wei Lianshu's
These questions are explored in a resonant way in one of Lu Xun's most troubling stories, "In the Wineshop." The narrative heart of the story is the simple tale of a boatman's daughter, Ashun
on Ashun to bring her the sprigs of artificial flowers she once desired: "You have no idea how I dread calling on people, much more so than in the old days. Because I know what a nuisance I am, I am even sick of myself; so knowing this, why inflict myself on others?"[26] But Lü Weifu's delicacy in fact masks a fear that direct involvement with Ashun will force him to face the moral dilemma that their class separation entails, a confrontation to which he does not feel equal.
The many layers of narration that Lu Xun employs in "In the Wineshop" succeed, finally, not in shielding the narrator from Ashun's tragedy but in extending the range of responsibility for it. The boatman's neighbor ignorantly blames her story on "fate"; Lü Weifu dismisses it as "a futile affair" and returns to giving instruction in the Confucian classics. Both, although touched by Ashun's story, ultimately reinstate it in a system of meaning (superstition in the case of the neighbor, Confucianism in the case of Lü Weifu) that can only continue to reproduce such stories. Both of them are thus touched by the moral contamination that irradiates from the story of her death. But since the primary narrator, the "I" of the narration, walks away from his encounter with Lü Weifu feeling "refreshed," having succeeded in his intention to "escape the boredom" of his stay precisely be being entertained with the story of Ashun, perceptive readers cannot but see that his narrative, the story "In the Wineshop" itself, has not escaped that contamination. It is as much a violation of Ashun as the two narratives that it mediates.
By self-consciously exposing the cathartic operation of realist fiction through his ironical epiphanies, Lu Xun offers in these stories a radical critique of his own method and of the realist project in general. Realism, he implies, risks making authors accomplices to the social cruelty they intend to decry. The realist narrative, by imitating at a formal level the relation of oppressor to oppressed, is captive to the logic of that oppression and ends by merely reproducing it. As the title of his second collection suggests, many of Lu Xun's experiments in the short story form turn in on themselves and hesitate between speech and silence, between the assertive act of fictional creation and a metafictional retraction of that act. This hesitation mirrors formally the emotional vacillation of which Lu Xun frequently complained.
[26] Lu Xun, "Zai jiulou shang," p. 8.
Though he several times admitted that he found "only darkness and nothingness" to be real[27] and that it was "only by coming down in the world that one learned what society was really like,"[28] he was unwilling in his writings to submit entirely to the "darkness" of reality. In the story "Tomorrow" the narrator observes: "Fourth Shan's Wife was a simple woman who did not know what a fearful word but is. Thanks to this but , many bad things turn out well and many good things turn out badly."[29] Lu Xun's stories are in fact predicated on this but : in "Tomorrow," Fourth Shan's Wife uses the word to express a superstitious hope that fate will spare her child from suffering ("But maybe Bao'er
The gate to critical consciousness that Lu Xun's stories wish to open is a revolving door hinged on the adversative but from which, once entered, the reader can never escape. Wavering between disillusionment and hope, Lu Xun exposes and obstructs the fictional effects he introduces. His ruthless introspection ends by disturbing the model of realist fiction he adopted from the West by undermining both the assured objectivity of the observer and the complacency of the reader's cathartic response. In his postscript to The Grave , Lu Xun asks whether he is building a monument in his essays or digging his own grave.[30] So too his stories appear at once constructive and destructive (or deconstructive) of both the larger cultural heritage and of their own effect on the reader. As other writers inherited the new fictional model Lu Xun's stories presented, they took on as well the profound moral doubts and formal uncertainties that inform them.
[28] Lu Xun, "Zi xu," p. 415.
[30] Lu Xun, "Xie zai Fen houmian," p. 282.
Ye Shaojun:
Pity, Sincerity, and the Divisive Power of Narrative
Lu Xun's short stories constitute a small portion of his literary output and are the product of a brief creative period in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when Lu Xun had already reached middle age. Ye Shaojun, also known by the pen name Ye Shengtao
join the organization and suggesting that he write some pieces for publication in the society's journal. Ye, who had been eagerly absorbing the ideas of the New Literature movement, responded quickly, submitting the story "Yisheng"
Ye's years of apprenticeship as a writer and his fecundity allow us to examine his developmental pattern, which was in fact characteristic of many Chinese realists. Whereas Lu Xun's stories, as the mature product of a rigorously examined life, allow the expression of self and class concerns only in a highly indirect manner, Ye Shaojun's early works are characterized by a high degree of self-reference and sentimentality. As he developed in his craft, Ye Shaojun clearly worked to eliminate these elements from his fiction in the interests of a more objective representation of his social environment. Though he continued to use autobiographical materials, he struggled to achieve greater distance between his life and its mediated expression in his fiction. This process of growth has been applauded as "maturation" toward realism by several critics,[34] but perhaps because of the nature of Ye's early aesthetic philosophy, in his case this maturity may have been achieved at a high cost. In the essays collected under the title On the Literary Arts , which were written in 1921, just as he was coming into his own as a writer of short stories, Ye Shaojun argued that composition should be understood as a kind of self-cultivation through which authors foster in themselves the virtues of pity and sincerity. But as
we have seen, realism as an aesthetic form assumes an ambivalent view of both these virtues: because of realism's dual claim to be at once fact and fiction, the voice of the realist narrator inevitably contains a measure of artifice and is therefore not fully "genuine"; moreover, realist works induce the emotion of pity only with the ultimate intention of purging it through catharsis. As we shall see, Ye Shaojun's early commitment to these values as important not only to daily life but to the activity of writing itself, led him to resist certain of realism's formal characteristics and thus influenced in a significant way the development of his art.
Despite his more considerable fictional output, Ye Shaojun was even less of a natural storyteller than Lu Xun was. Discussing the predominant influences on his fiction, he wrote that epic and adventure fiction interested him little. It was the style (literally, the biqu
I've lived in cities and in towns; I witnessed some small part of life in those places, so I wrote about what I saw. I've been a teacher and exposed to educational circles, so I wrote about that. I've had some superficial acquaintance with the events of the Chinese revolution as it developed, so that became my subject as well. Almost all the characters in my fiction are either intellectuals or the urban bourgeoisie because those are the groups with which I am familiar; I don't understand workers or peasants any more than I understand wealthy merchants and bureaucrats.[37]
[36] Jaroslev Prusek, "Yeh Shao-chün and Anton Chekhov," in his The Lyrical and the Epic , pp. 178–94.
As a consequence of Ye's reluctance to go beyond the part of life that he had personally observed, the narrative situations in his stories tend to be grounded in domestic or local life, and his use of plot tends to be highly restrained (as we have observed, Ye associated contrived plot machinations with popular fiction, which he felt catered shamelessly to the audience's predilection for sensation and scandal). Even when Ye does treat significant historical or political events in his fiction, he does so indirectly: the story "Ye"
The downplaying of plot in Ye Shaojun's fiction results in an increased focus on psychological and emotional realities. At the center of many of the stories in Ye's first collection, Gemo
When Gu Jiegang complains in his preface to Barriers that the title of the collection inadequately represents its contents, he points to the
stories that evoke a deep communion between characters. The title is appropriate, he writes, only to those few stories, such as the title story, "A Life," and "Yige pengyou"
Much, however, changes, if to little effect, in stories of the other variety, which we might call melodramatic. The frequently anthologized "A Life," for example, takes the form of a brief biography, but its protagonist's life, a busy tale of mistreatment, flight, and widowhood, is denied the spiritual elevation that would lift it above melodrama. The animation of the plotting appears meaningless as long as the spiritual elevation of tongqing is denied. It is finally left to the narrator to proffer a sense of the protagonist's humanity, since she is herself denied consciousness of it. What was declared in the original title of the story, "Zhe ye shi yige ren"
[40] Shang Jinlin gives this as the original title for the story in his "Ye Shengtao nianpu," p. 261.
nothing more than a kind of chattel: to her family "she was an ox, not entitled to any opinions of her own; so now that they had no further use for her, they had better sell her off."[41] Dimly conscious only of her sorrow and able to express herself only through tears, she is less a positively defined character than an affective sponge, steeped in the authorial emotion of tongqing . Closure brings the narrator's regretful awareness of the "barriers" that deny individuals the spiritual elevation that would give meaning to their lives and invites readers to make up that lack—and indulge their own sense of moral superiority—by extending pity to the captive or blinded characters of the fiction. Taken together, the two kinds of stories in Barriers clearly assert the greater authenticity of the lyrical interludes that the protagonists of the sentimental stories enjoy over the exuberant plotting of the melodramas; it is as if Ye believed the events of a life are nothing but meaningless distractions from its psychological and spiritual realities.
On a deeper level, Ye Shaojun's resistance to narrative arises from apprehensions about the operation of time in the world, for time drives the purposeless activity depicted in the stories, activity that in turn generates social barriers. Invariably in Ye Shaojun's stories, the individual experiences time as a process of disillusionment, as a falling away from the consummate awareness of tongqing figured in the mutual attentions of mother and child. Perhaps the most suggestive of all the stories in Ye's first collection is "Ku cai"
Power
The mingling of hope and restlessness in the narrator's psychology is set in marked contrast to the attitude of the long-suffering gardener, Futang
By the time his second collection of stories, Huozai
confessor: in such stories as "Xiaoxing"
In these stories Ye Shaojun seems to have lost his earlier confidence in the power of tongqing to bring about real spiritual transformation and to have concurrently ceded a new authority to time and its effects. The process of erosion through which the characters' cherished ideals and ambitions are disabused takes on an ever-greater sense of inevitability. Tongqing increasingly seems to be operable only within the boundaries of the text itself; and once the reach of the narrator's pity is limited in this way, it inevitably becomes subject to a cathartic purging at closure. As a result, new questions arise concerning the efficacy of such values as pity and sincerity. In what follows, I will look briefly at two stories, the title story of Conflagration and "Yunyi"
At the opening of "Conflagration," the protagonist Yan Xin
Ye Shaojun everywhere preaches: his name means "speaks truth," and his first act in the story is to calm the narrator's restless infant with his sympathetic attention. He explains his success with the child in the following way: "We must attend to her wholeheartedly so that her little heart will be comforted completely, so that she will be cocooned in happiness. If we let our attention stray just a little, she feels it immediately and cries out for reassurance" (157). But Yan Xin's capacity for tongqing , however useful in pacifying the child, is ineffective in the adult world, which appears to have abandoned itself to the cynical pursuit of "excitement." Life in Yan Xin's hometown, which he describes to the narrator, is a clear example of this: besieged by warlords, who themselves seem motivated by a pure passion for adventure, the peasants have perversely grown to enjoy the bandit attacks as a diversion from the routines of village life. In context we understand that this psychological distemper is simply a variation of the child's restlessness, a debased expression of the natural human need for sympathy and attention. This need is the tinder for the conflagration that eventually consumes the town: "Yan Xin's prophecy was now realized; the fire in men's hearts had incited an actual conflagration" (162). Yan Xin himself has fallen victim to the general passion for stimulation; as he confesses to the narrator in a resigned and self-contemptuous tone, he has been so scarred by events that he too has adopted the "mad" spirit of the other villagers.
The narrator, on hearing Yan Xin's confession, performs his only act in the story that has any effect on the plot: he proposes that Yan Xin compose an account of the conflagration in his village for the enlightenment of those on the outside. Yan Xin responds to the suggestion with enthusiasm: "Conflagration! That will be my sole project when I get back there! Never mind about the others, I will mail it directly to you chapter by chapter" (161). The narrator apparently thinks the writing project he has suggested will serve as a therapy for his friend, but Yan Xin, who is "powerfully stimulated" by the suggestion, clearly views it as simply another means of appealing for the attention of a sympathetic other. The narrator's writing contract thus plays directly on both Yan Xin's desire for tongqing and his craving
for stimulation. Significantly, for his part the narrator offers no more than the promise of a deferred sympathy in payment for Yan Xin's report. When, after a long period of waiting, he receives only an occasional letter from Yan Xin recounting his growing spiritual "numbness" and final surrender to malaria, the narrator's disappointment at the failure of the writing contract appears to override what concern he feels for his friend's ill health. His emotional investment in Yan Xin's account of the conflagration betrays a curiosity finally not distinguishable from the thrill seeking in which the villagers are engaged, but he is careful to risk exposing himself to the conflagration only indirectly. The narrative transaction thus allows the narrator to indulge in a show of tongqing without getting burnt. For Yan Xin, the urge to return home to the locus of a primal experience of tongqing and examine the subsequent decay proves self-destructive; he is able to speak the truth but unable to write it. A number of questions are suspended at the conclusion of the story. If writing as a moral project is, as Ye defines it in his critical writings, "speaking truth" by penetrating beyond the world of narratable events to a "home" of primal emotions, what is pure writing if not the silencing of narrative? Is the act of narration—such as that the narrator himself accomplishes in relating Yan Xin's story—simply part of the mad search for stimulation that consumes the adult world?
In "Nebulae," as in "Conflagration," Ye Shaojun did not so much tell a story as document a disturbance in narrative production. The story opens with the protagonist Meng Qing's
his story, has second thoughts about publishing it: will his own wife doubt him, mistaking what was produced from "observation of others" for a reflection of his own true feelings? Mr. Fu's dream is at the heart of a complex series of revelations and concealments. If the dream itself is a thought buried in the subconscious mind, this thought is first revealed in its subversive significance to Mr. Fu as he writes, then suppressed in the letter he writes to his wife; it is then exhumed in the story that Meng Qing composes about Mr. Fu, suppressed again when Meng Qing burns the story ("burying the story in ashes and in his heart" [74]), and finally brought to light a final time in the story as we read it. As a manifestation of the unconscious mind, the dream is understood to represent the spontaneous, unfalsifiable "heart" of the dreamer. Its message is less the temptation of sexual infidelity than the suggestion that full honesty is possible only with a shadow figure of one's subconscious. The implicit solipsism of this message undermines the eager protestations of total conjugal communion made both by Meng Qing at the opening of the story and by Mr. Fu, who has gone so far as to claim an equivalency between his writing and his subjective self: "These are not my words, not my writing, but the beat of my heart" (69). Both Mr. Fu and Meng Qing take writing to be the expression and affirmation of their powers of tongqing , but in the process of articulating their personal feelings, what they write is twisted into something directly contrary to their intentions. They are forced finally to falsify or destroy what they have written in order to secure conjugal harmony and preserve their ideological authority. Much is made in the story of the "boundless" sensation of listlessness against which Mr. Fu struggles as he begins to compose his letter; in context this listlessness may be understood as a natural psychological resistance to the revelatory, divisive power of writing. If writing inevitably works against an author's best intentions and, as it were, destroys the trusting relationship with its audience that it simultaneously purports to build, this struggle should result either in the abandonment of writing or in the repudiation of doctrines that demand impossible standards of personal honesty and fellow feeling. The story "Nebulae" does not make such a choice, however, but, as if operating in opposition to the best intentions of its author, manages concurrently to express a profound suspicion of writing and to demystify the communalizing value of tongqing .
The complicated narrative embeddings in "Nebulae" allow Ye
Shaojun to explore the changes a story kernel (here, the dream) undergoes as it becomes the property of successive narrators, each of whom relates it from his own point of view. Mr. Fu tells his dream in the first person of the romanticists; Meng Qing chooses the third person of much realist fiction. Neither mode of telling the story, however, has quite the effect we might expect: writing in the first person does not ensure Mr. Fu's honesty, despite his insistence that he speaks directly from the heart; nor does writing in the third person provide Meng Qing with immunity from the events and emotions he recounts, for, as he realizes, the reader may suspect that he has simply transferred his own feelings onto his characters. Mr. Fu's account is not unadulterated self-expression, for he cannot drive from his mind the likely reaction of his reader (in this case, his wife); nor is Meng Qing's account a fully disinterested, objective report, for his very selection of materials is conditioned by a private interest in the theme they illustrate. In either mode of telling the story, both subjective and social (or mimetic) motives are at work. The compositional problem explored in the story thus converges with the ethical dilemma that everywhere haunted Ye Shaojun: both in form and content Ye was wrestling with the problem of how to reconcile subjectively derived ethical imperatives with an intransigent social environment, that is, how to externalize the self without falsifying it.
It is perhaps not coincidental that concurrent with the composition of such works, which suggest that writing is itself a disillusioning force, Ye for the first time began to write stories that display a true mastery of conventional realist techniques. In such stories as "Fan"
ploration many critics have observed in Ye's works[44] is matched by a new abstraction of the social world as a controlling force in individuals' lives. In such stories as "Gudu"
Many of these satirical stories are set in schools and thus foreshadow Ye's most expansive fictional effort, Ni Huanzhi . Ye Shaojun had a lifelong interest in education: unable to attend university because of his family's straitened financial circumstances, he began teaching at the age of eighteen. Of the many teaching assignments he undertook in the years that followed, the one that had the greatest influence on him was at a middle school in the town of Luzhi
Ye Shaojun wrote about his move to Luzhi that "because of my
[44] See, for example, Yang Yi, "Lun Ye Shengtao duanpian xiaoshuo de yishu tese," pp. 207–13.
youth and ignorance, I had come to feel after three years of teaching that it was a dull, unfulfilling profession; only after arriving in Luzhi did I realize that there was much to like in it after all."[46] Ye insisted that his early frustration with teaching had been the fault not of his students but of his narrow-minded colleagues,[47] who lacked the idealism of the progressive educators at Luzhi and as a result became alienated both from their students and from society at large. The picture of the pedagogue that emerges from Ye's stories reflects these frustrations, but it is also informed by sympathy. Teachers had been the butt of satire in some traditional Chinese fiction (such as the eighteenth-century novel Rulin waishi
In "Rice" and "Pan xiansheng zai nan zhong"
[47] See Chen Liao, Ye Shengtao pingzhuan , p. 19, for several passages from Ye's letters where he expresses his frustration with his fellow teachers.
Wu leaves his students alone for a while during the school day, for that is only time that rice is available at the market. To neglect his class in this way is to elect self-preservation over his public obligation, and the students clearly recognize the significance of his action: "Teacher," they mutter, "is a lot richer than we are; when we've rotted, he'll still have a full, fat belly."[49] Wu's self-interest is further underscored at closure, when, after a series of humiliations, he takes consolation in the materiality of his pay: "After all, on the table was a shiny silver dollar. In spite of himself he took it in hand. It left a cold, hard sensation in his palm" (51). Teacher Wu's profession has been drained of its social rationale; it becomes for him simply a means to procure the rice that ensures his family's survival.
The teacher-protagonist of "Mr. Pan in Distress" is similarly torn between his responsibility to his family, whom he takes as refugees to Shanghai during a warlord attack, and his duty to his school. Faithfully following orders from the Bureau of Education, he returns alone to his endangered village and there drafts a circular encouraging continued attendance at the school:
War and fighting might be worrisome, he wrote, but the education of young people was a necessity like food and clothing. Now that the summer holidays were over, school would start as usual. In the time of the great war in Europe, the notice went on, a net was spread in the air over the schools to catch bombs and allow classes to continue uninterrupted. This kind of heroism should not go unrivaled.[50]
Mr. Pan's comically exaggerated fealty is, of course, belied by his behavior, both in ensuring his own family's survival and in conniving to accumulate Red Cross banners and badges, which he uses as amulets in the belief that they will afford himself and his school some magical protection from the impending attack. Like "Rice," Mr. Pan's story ends with an image that underlines its protagonist's self-betrayal: after the invading warlord has been defeated, Mr. Pan is asked to prepare jingoistic posters applauding the virtue and benevolence of the general who defended the town. The crowd marvels at the sincerity of his
calligraphy, but as he writes, Mr. Pan's consciousness is consumed with images of the destruction he narrowly escaped. In a world where expediency requires the suppression of the self's true concerns, sincerity becomes little more than a marketable faculty, in whose very demonstration the word's true content is lost. As a calligrapher to the powerful, Mr. Pan is reduced, as was Teacher Wu in "Rice," to the pure instrumentality of the professional.
As a refuge for beleaguered intellectuals, education is used by Ye's teacher-protagonists not simply to ensure survival but to excuse their withdrawal from the political activity engulfing the larger society. But political engagement is itself fraught with spiritual risks, as is illustrated in "Qiaoshang"
The imaginative and operative worlds are brought into eerie proximity in "On the Bridge"; the danger of transgressing the border between the two worlds is more typically given comic treatment in Ye Shaojun's stories. In "Yibao dongxi"
violence that he fears will be his own fate: "The square package appeared to be a thick pile of bound papers, on which he felt sure was printed the picture of a grotesque corpse lying in a thick pool of blood, one of those recently fallen to the enemy. Doubtless under the picture was printed the stark warning 'A martyr to the people! Another enemy atrocity!'[52] In the panic of his flight from the checkpoint, he reexamines his unwillingness to become involved in a political movement he believes to be just, rationalizing his personal fear as loyalty to his profession ("It's not much of an ambition, but I'd like to make something of that school and see what becomes of those students" [61]). The story closes with an ironical reversal: the pamphlets prove to be nothing more threatening than announcements of an old woman's funeral. This discovery forces the schoolteacher to confront his cowardice: facing a mirror, he experiences as shame the profound disjunction between his private moral imagination and his social function and averts his own gaze. The only possible remedy for the schizophrenia that results from this disjunction is to engage in the repugnant and hazardous realm of arbitrary violence that is radical politics. To remain disengaged is to redirect that violence onto the self or, worse, to transfer its effect to the next generation through the unthinking practice of traditional pedagogy.
All of the concerns that we have observed in Ye's stories about educators surface in one way or another in his longest work, Ni Huanzhi , a novel that was commissioned by Ye's editor friend Zhou Yutong
the 1911 revolution (and it was as such that Mao Dun praised it)[54] and as an autobiographical study of his own troubled process of maturation during that period. The novel recounts the efforts of Ye Shaojun's alter ego, Ni Huanzhi, to bring a new vitality to each of three arenas of his life, the pedagogical, the romantic, and the political, each time with unsatisfactory results. First, in his role as teacher Ni tries to institute a program of reform that consists, in effect, of applying Ye's favored ethical ideals of pity and sincerity to education: Ni contends that one must "serve the child" by "projecting oneself into the child's world" (5) and that a troubled child is to be brought around not by discipline but by rational appeals to its better nature, a technique the other teachers contemptuously call "conversion by sincerity" (73). What Ni most vociferously opposes is a view of education as textual indoctrination, as the mere transmission of cultural doxa to a new generation. When first encouraged to go into education by his headmaster (who wishes to protect him from "the treacherous waters of the army or of politics" [16]), he is disturbed by a perceived similarity between teaching and his first job working in a telegraph office. Education as he has experienced it is pure "sign memorizing" (57), and the instructor, nothing more than a mechanical transmitter of information. But by bringing his ethical ideals into play, Ni transforms his profession into a mission, whose goal is not to pass on some stable, text-bound knowledge to children but to instill in them an intangible sense of vitality, or "energy" (47). In the words of the motto he chooses for himself, he wants simply to "get the children to live!" (19). In practical terms, this means introducing such nonverbal activities into the school curriculum as music making, exercise, and gardening (53–54). But at a deeper level Ni's reform project denies the value of all content that traditionally the adult educator was expected to communicate to children. The teacher is given only the passive role of "creating an environment" in which the children may develop instinctively. But the result of Ni's application of this theory is a discomfiting inversion of roles. The children naturally possess an abundance of precisely those qualities that in theory their teachers wish to inculcate but feel that they themselves lack. Thus, while attempting to instill a sense of vitality in his students Ni is himself increasingly bothered by a
[54] See Mao Dun, " Du Ni Huanzhi ," in Mao Dun, Mao Dun wenyi zalun ji , p. 284.
vague "dispiritedness" that he believes is due to exaggerated "expectations." The spiritual elevation he seeks is available only in the expectant contemplation of his ideals, whereas the application of his theories in the operable world brings only disappointment. It is, significantly, through the literary rehearsal of his ideas (in his letters or in his reading of the theoretical paper on education that the sympathetic headmaster, Jiang Bingru
Shared pedagogical interests are, in fact, the ground on which Ni Huanzhi and his fiancée, Jin Peizhang
coy "How can you say such things!" (173). Yet their letters, whether colloquial or classical, serve a purpose not met by personal encounters: they open an arena in which the imagination can contemplate an emotional union that later events prove is unattainable in the real world. For as soon as Ni Huanzhi's romantic ideal is subjected to the mundane requirements of marriage, it is disabused: after their wedding he quickly grows weary of domestic chores and disgusted with Peizhang's narrowing preoccupation with home life. His avid imagination must look elsewhere for an incarnation of its ideals, and he begins fantasizing about a new woman, a "martial goddess" with "bobbed hair, a close-fitting cotton gown, and a face glowing with vitality," who, unlike Peizhang, prefers to write her letters in "simple, straightforward colloquial language" (223). In spite of Huanzhi's protest toward the end of his correspondence with Peizhang that he has become "fed up with all this verbiage" (157), the letters appear retrospectively to represent the full measure of his love. As always, Ni finds his true fulfillment in the onanistic arousal of intellectual or romantic voluntarism—in the dream rather than in practice, in literary reveries rather than in life.
Ni Huanzhi's engagement in the third major arena of his life, radical politics, if viewed solely from the perspective of his subjective engagement in it, shows the same blend of vitalism and idealism that characterized his pedagogical and romantic involvements. Early in life he distinguishes revolutionary activity from ordinary politics. The latter, he complains, is nothing more than a "boring" succession of warlord squabbles (33). Revolution, however, transcends the arena of politics as usual: it is above all a kind of pure energy, a "force" hidden in people's minds (215). If this truth is forgotten, revolution itself becomes subject to a terrible debasement, as is demonstrated in the novel by the opportunist Jiang Shibiao
tongqing on a larger scale. But as we learned in our examination of the two kinds of stories in Barriers , the call for tongqing may simply hide a sense of its absence, and it is this sense that is forcefully expressed by a bare-chested worker who appears at one of Ni's rallies and skeptically inverts Ni's slogan: "The Chinese will never pull together! If they did, why, there'd be no stopping us!" Ni's slogan, which, as formulated, expresses only an illusory hope, becomes in its inverted form a realistic assessment of both China's buried potential and the continued existence of barriers preventing its realization. It is, as Ni later concedes to himself, a concise expression of the "essential point" (218). When Ni attempts to strike up a conversation with the bare-chested man, he is ignored: "The man stalked haughtily past, not in the least interested to find that someone else sympathized with him. Huanzhi felt reluctant to let him go and turned to rest an admiring glance on his retreating back in its sweat-stained blue jacket" (205). As his largely proletarian audience immediately realizes, the young intellectual's rhetorical assertion of unity does not conceal his difference from them. Rebuffed, Ni begins to doubt the "preaching manner" of his speeches, and just as he discovered in his teaching practice that children fare better without adult interference, he comes to recognize that the workers and peasants require no teaching, that they already possess the essential empowering source, the "motive force that is in life itself" (217).
If the pattern of Ni's disillusionment with radical politics is immediately recognizable from his experiences with pedagogy and romance, it is, however, only one aspect of the novel's representation of revolution. Even before Ni Huanzhi becomes actively involved in it, the revolution has had a significant, if not fully acknowledged, impact on his life. Each subjective metamorphosis Ni undergoes throughout the novel is pointedly correlated with a development in the period's political history: the rumor of the empire's restoration generates an early presentiment of the disillusionment to follow (135); the May Fourth movement encourages a new interest in affairs beyond the village (177); the May Thirtieth Incident convinces Ni to abandon teaching for urban political activity (203); and the abortive 1927 revolution brings on his final descent into hopelessness and death (264). One may in fact trace the influence of the revolution back to Ni's early schoolboy memories. In a flashback we are told that news of the 1911 revolution first inspired in the young Ni a restless contempt for tradi-
tional education as the mere transmission of dead texts and provoked an overwhelming desire to act: "A flag, a bomb, a gun—anything would do so long as he could grasp it firmly in his hand and charge forward with it" (13). Characteristically, Ni grasps none of the above; he grasps a pen and redirects his energy into the composition of poetry. But Ni's vitalism, however expressed, was clearly sparked by his early exposure to the revolution. Not finally reducible to Ni's subjective conjuring, the revolution is thus accorded a higher reality in the text than pedagogy and romance as a persistent, generative force in Ni's life. This force is, however, experienced as intrusive. The revolution operates against Ni's will, obligating his public commitment and, through the agency of disillusionment, drawing him away from classroom and family, as well as from the literary reveries that, as we have seen, were at the root of his pedagogical and romantic commitments.
With Ni's increasing disillusionment, this view of revolution as an external historical force begins to take precedence in the novel over Ni's subjective view, just as fire supplants water in the natural imagery consistently employed throughout the text. Water imagery has embellished the characterization not only of Ni's voluntary political commitment but also of his other enthusiasms as well: his educational program is described as "releasing the fountain" (125), and the confessional sessions he conducts with his students are frequently the occasion for what his colleagues call "goody-goody tears" (75), as is his correspondence with Peizhang (142). At the rallies he attends, which are invariably enveloped in a sudden downpour, tears well to his eyes (207) and his words are endued with a "vital power, like a hot spring boiling and gushing up in the middle of a quiet little stream" (227). But the revolution as a historical force, though hopefully compared to a great tidal wave in Ni Huanzhi's dream (240), is more frequently evoked through the destructive, purifying image of fire: Tiger Jiang's forces are "like a fire that has just burst into flame" (257), and Wang Leshan
Huanzhi concedes his friend's spiritual superiority, Leshan acknowledges his own likely pulverization by the "wheels of history" but stubbornly affirms his intention to continue "driving them forward with his own hands" (317). In a modern formulation of the quintessential Chinese ethical problem, Leshan distinguishes those who withdraw from history (who "stand aside and stare") from those who commit themselves to it; he proudly aligns himself with the latter but continues to nourish the ethical purity traditionally associated with withdrawal by refusing all benefits that might accrue from involvement, even the most elementary—his personal survival. He has elsewhere denied that "the final chapter [of the revolution] will soon be written" and acknowledged that "to write this work, one must give a security, and that security is one's head" (233–34). Leshan's willingness to accede to martyrdom elicits from Ni Huanzhi the following words of admiration with their surprising religious imagery:
Having spent a moment in thought, he grasped Leshan's hand and said, gripping it tightly, "The Buddha said, 'If I don't go to hell, who will?' There's something in that, you know."
"Perhaps the Buddha was a lifelong inhabitant of hell because he wanted to suffer the same retribution and the same fate as all living creatures!" was Leshan's unhesitating reply. (264)
At the very moment that Leshan affirms his total commitment to the revolution (as well as, it should be observed, to the most rigorous standard of tongqing ), the text evokes the cultural image most closely associated with retreat from the temporal world. A curious collapsing of ethical alternatives results: the revolution in its insistent, intrusive function as history becomes identified with fate, and the most engaged course of action possible for such as Leshan and Ni Huanzhi entails the passive acceptance of its arbitrary violence. They must, as Leshan soon does, heed its call to self-immolation.
The terminus of a voluntary commitment to tongqing would appear to be submission to the determinism of the revolution. Through his martyrdom Leshan keeps intact the moral integrity that allows his identification with tongqing , but Ni's proud proffering of sympathy to the disadvantaged is finally supplanted by his own bathetic appeals for pity as he succumbs to typhoid fever and finally descends into the confused fantasies that conclude the novel. Georg Lukács has written about the nineteenth-century Western novel that it
is primarily concerned with self-fashioning, with wresting a "glimpse of meaning" from the heterogeneous events that make up a life.[55] As a quasi-autobiographical novel written in imitation of Western fiction, Ni Huanzhi promises to provide just such a glimpse of meaning for its protagonist. But Ni Huanzhi is instead disfigured, invaded, and scattered at closure, and it is the revolution—perceived in its objective role as the inexorable march of history and time—that must be recognized as the primary force behind Ni's decline. At once hero and villain, the revolution grinds all sentimental idealism underfoot as it marches toward a utopian fulfillment, to be enjoyed only by those who have no need of the novelist's self-fashioning and who would scorn his pallid sympathies.
As an experiment with the Western novel form, Ni Huanzhi may thus be said to disabuse itself. Like Ni's love letters, the modern colloquial novel purports to be more vital than traditional fiction, a truer participant in the real world, by which is meant not simply the external physical world but the operative political arena with its power struggles. Yet the novel remains disconnected, trapped in a vicious circle in which subjective fantasies are repeatedly disappointed only to be reconstructed in altered terms. Like Lu Xun with his stories, Ye Shaojun finally resorts to distortions at the close of Ni Huanzhi (specifically, Peizhang's determination to go out and work for the good of society) to point to possible solutions in the extraliterary world, alternatives that by definition remain external to the narration.
We began our discussion of Ye Shaojun by noticing the process of maturation toward realism that many critics have discovered in his work. Ye's explication of his own work, given in his occasional prefaces and essays on composition, would seem to confirm this process of change. In 1936 he wrote:
Whenever I encountered something I felt was wrong, I took up my pen and satirized it. . . . I always tried to limit the expression of my own views as much as possible. It wasn't that I coveted the title of realist, but I felt if I devoted too much space to my own viewpoint, I would overstep the boundaries of the satire.[56]
[55] See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel , especially pp. 77–83.
From this passage, it is evident that Ye had radically revised his opinions about fiction since the time in the early 1920s when he wrote On the Literary Arts . He is no longer preoccupied with the expressive power of fiction and its role in the individual's moral cultivation; he now gives priority instead to the social function of satire, by which he seems to be referring to the critique of social peccadilloes found in some of his works. Significantly, however, this new emphasis on critique is accompanied by a loss of confidence in fiction's social efficacy: "The satire to which I refer is no more than self-consolation; I don't really believe it has any influence on society. . . . If you want to make a real contribution, fiction is much less useful than oral storytelling, skits, and so forth."[57]
Few readers, I think, would agree with Ye's retrospective characterization of his fiction: satire seems only a minor strain in his work taken as a whole. Ni Huanzhi , as an autobiographical novel, makes clear that at least until the late 1920s Ye continued to be fascinated with the problems of the self and its expression. For at the heart of Ye's fictional project was not the intention simply to reflect or capture the external world but a desire to mediate his personal subjectivity with the exigencies of that world. As we have seen, the very notion of self that Ye Shaojun inherited from neo-Confucianism required that the individual labor to achieve a correspondence between his subjective being and the world through the process of ethical cultivation; in other words, the aim of such cultivation was the perfect alignment of the self as subjective "I" with the self understood as an externally delimited "he/she." For Ye a truly unproblematic sense of self could be achieved only if the absence of tongqing that troubled both his inner world and the objective social environment was somehow remedied. We noticed in Ye's earliest works a fondness for lyrical episodes—moments when the self freely exercises its powers of sincerity and pity—as well as a distaste for the mechanics of narrative, including such basic components of fiction as plot and point of view. As he matured in his art, Ye began experimenting with these components, using point of view to examine the limits of sincerity in fictional expression and using plot to explore the disillusioning effects of time on individual hopes and ideals. But with Ni Huanzhi a new equation is made between time/
[57] "Suibian tantan wo de xie xiaoshuo," in Ye Shaojun, Ye Shengtao lun chuangzuo , Ibid., p. 120.
narrative and the revolution. This equation is both hopeful, promising a final overturning of the barriers that divide the social world, and fearful, since in its absolute objectivity it marshals a call for the demise of the questing bourgeois self that Ye had sought to forge. And it is this bourgeois self—with its confident command over an objectively observed social environment—that the Western realist novel, in imitation of which Ni Huanzhi was written, explores and affirms. In Ni Huanzhi , Ye Shaojun posits such a notion of the self as he experiments with the novel form, but in the end he subjects both to a reflexive moral examination that proves profoundly subversive. Realist fiction, formerly entrusted with the self's creation and expression, is in the end left only the task of enacting its deconstruction, a narrative suicide.
C. T. Hsia has written of Ni Huanzhi that "despite its apparent honesty, the sympathetic bond between author and hero is too personally close to generate the kind of ironic objectivity which distinguishes Ye Shaojun's better short stories."[58] That is to say, Ye has failed in his intention to suppress his subjectivity in the interest of the "satire," making his work simply too raw to offer a completely satisfactory aesthetic experience. We may agree that Ye failed in Ni Huanzhi to demonstrate the formal ingenuity of Lu Xun at his best, and as a result his struggle with the novel form is everywhere apparent. But a sympathetic reading of Ni Huanzhi must recognize the novel's ambition, which distinguishes it from the narrow scope of the short stories Hsia praises, for Ye hoped with his novel to solve the problems of individual and national self-invention that preoccupied his generation. In the process he did much more than merely adapt his Western model to Chinese circumstances; he actively probed the resources of his borrowed form, discovering and exposing its inherent limitations. The realist novel proved, however, to be too cramped a vessel for his aspirations. Ye Shaojun's fictional enterprise, like Lu Xun's, led its author from an idealistic confidence in the moral power of fiction to effect change to a formal impasse that would seem to throw into doubt the very possibility of literary transitivity.
[58] C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction , p. 65.