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

was a considerably more prolific writer of fiction. Between 1922 and 1936 he published six volumes of short stories and one of the first Chinese novels in the contemporary colloquial language, Ni Huanzhi (1929). In fact, Ye began publishing fiction as early as 1914, when he was twenty years old; in that year alone nineteen of his stories (all composed in the classical language) appeared in the popular Shanghai magazine Libailiu (Saturday).^[31] Although these early stories were written in part because Ye needed the income they provided, Ye insisted that he had approached their composition seriously, that (borrowing a phrase that had from ancient times been used to disparage fictional composition) they were intended as something more than "idle talk of the streets" ^[32] The historian Gu Jiegang a childhood classmate and lifelong friend, was later to concur with this appraisal, insisting that Ye had from the start "aimed at realism, not at illusion," and thus "had nothing in common with the popular romantic and humorous schools of fiction."^[33] Given this earnest attitude toward fiction writing, Ye Shaojun perhaps inevitably became disenchanted with the political and cultural stance of commercial magazines like Saturday ; in 1917, when the publishers distributed an advertisement whose copy ran "I'd rather subscribe to Saturday than take a concubine," Ye was overwhelmed with disgust and discontinued his association with the magazine. He turned his energies instead to his teaching job in the countryside not far from Suzhou and apparently did not write another story until 1919. In that year Gu Jiegang, now a member of the reformist Xinchao she (New tide society) at Beijing University, wrote to Ye, inviting him to

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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"

(A life) for publication in the March edition of Xinchao (New tide). In the following months he proceeded to publish a series of stories in the vernacular language, as well as several essays on such topics as educational reform and women's issues. These attracted the attention of Mao Dun and Zheng Zhenduo, who late in the winter of 1920 were organizing what was to become the Association for Literary Studies; they invited Ye Shaojun to become one of its twelve founding members and shortly thereafter visited Shanghai to make his acquaintance. By 1921 Ye was thus emerging as one of the most promising figures of the New Literature movement.

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

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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

or "stylistic allure") of Washington Irving's sketches and Oliver Goldsmith's fiction that most attracted him in his youth.^[35] As Jaroslev Prusek^[*] has observed, Ye's early fiction is also indebted to traditional Chinese literary jottings and ballads, as well as the writings of such Western realists as Turgenev and Chekhov.^[36] These diverse models all share a preoccupation with locale and mood and generally exhibit a highly restrained use of narrative resources. Emplotment, to the extent that it is allowed, appears always to derive from something close at hand. Ye himself described the source matter of his stories as follows:

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.

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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"

(Night, 1927), for example, which concerns Jiang Jieshi's 1927 massacre of Communist sympathizers, views that calamity through the eyes of an old woman and a child as they come to terms with the death of their family members. Similarly, in Ni Huanzhi , Ye Shaojun avoids a direct portrayal of the revolutionary events of 1927, presenting them only through fragmented allusions in the protagonist's memory; as Mao Dun was to complain, this indirectness has the effect of robbing Ye's novel of a sense of historical immediacy.^[38]

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

(Barriers, 1922), is a lyric epiphany, for which the narrative workings appear no more than a staging. Characters too are not so much developed as sketched in as necessary adjuncts to the emotional elevation of the epiphany; often they are nameless and designated only by pronouns. A work such as "Bukuai zhi gan" (An unhappy feeling, 1920), in which the narrator struggles to overcome a vague, inexplicable sense of discomfort, is little more than an exercise in emotional hermeneutics. If in such works Ye risks descending into solipsism, that danger is offset somewhat by the nature of the emotional epiphany that is attained or sought. The stories invariably dramatize the presence or absence of tongqing , "fellow feeling" or "pity." Tongqing figures most forcefully—and sentimentally—in the relationship of mother and child in such stories as "Mu" (Mother, 1920) and "Yi he ta" (She and he, 1920).

When Gu Jiegang complains in his preface to Barriers that the title of the collection inadequately represents its contents, he points to the

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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"

(A friend, 1920), which take as their subject the social barriers that separate individuals. The distinction Gu marks here is a real one, but not, as he seems to suggest, of thematic consequence. Both kinds of stories share a common ethical preoccupation, of which they are the positive and negative formulation: the barriers of the title are precisely the psychological and social obstructions that inhibit consciousness of tongqing . The stories differ, however, in their strategic representation of this moral concern and in their management of the plot. In what might be called the sentimental stories the protagonist is permitted to achieve a lyric awareness of tongqing , which readers are invited to experience sympathetically. The redemptive value of the experience is then affirmed by the text discursively, rather than dramatized. For example, the story "Chun you" (A spring outing, 1920), in which a married woman experiences an intense feeling of communion with both her husband and the natural surroundings while strolling by a lake one day, concludes: "Her life was as before, unaltered. But she stubbornly held on to her memory of that feeling, and in light of that feeling, you couldn't say that her life was unchanged."^[39] The woman's epiphany is credited with powers of spiritual transformation that significantly remain closed off from narrative; at the level of the plot, "nothing has changed."

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"

(This too is a human being),^[40] is now communicated through a thin veil of irony in the animal references that are repeated throughout the story. "She" is

[40] Shang Jinlin gives this as the original title for the story in his "Ye Shengtao nianpu," p. 261.

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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"

(Bitter greens, 1921), which concerns an attempt to counter the forces of disillusionment by cultivating a personal sense of growth and productivity. The story begins with the narrator's description of a plot of vacant land behind his house, which is used by "cheeky youngsters" as a playground. The narrator views their play as a "waste" of the land, so he has the plot fenced off to make a garden. His purpose in taking up gardening is not pragmatic, however, but spiritual: he harbors "a fervent, profound hope that this piece of empty land will be the spring of my new life."^[42] Indeed, at first he feels empowered by the simple physical labor of sowing the stubbly soil. His perception of spiritual decay is replaced with a vital sense of the self's ripening: "I didn't feel time passing; no thought or emotion troubled me. I was transformed!

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Power

is I, I am power; the development of I-Power is true time" (84). But as he waits for the garden to grow, this vitality gives way to a growing feeling of impatience. In the end, his exaggerated idealism simply induces anxiety.

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

whom the narrator enlists to help him. For Futang farming is a detested routine, whose "flavor" is bitter like the vegetables the narrator's gardening project predictably produces. Farming provides Futang with a living but no personal satisfaction; it can at best be endured. To the narrator's dismay, Futang shows no "pity" for the damaged or undeveloped plants and dreams only of freeing himself from dependence on the land (he dreams, perhaps, of the untrammeled merrymaking that the children once enjoyed but that the narrator has now banished from the garden). In a way typical of Ye Shaojun's early stories, Futang's misery provides the occasion for a wave of authorial tongqing followed by the formulation of a transferable moral: the narrator recognizes that he is no better than the gardener, that he has allowed his other endeavors—pedagogy and the "life of art"—to become routinized. The encounter here between classes, the intellectual bent on his spiritual development, the farmer on survival, is finally not allowed the critical illumination such confrontations elicited in Lu Xun's stories. In the airing of platitudes with which the story concludes, Futang's misery is assuaged by moral self-congratulation. But if the narrator's project of self-cultivation fails in part because he has violated his class role (by engaging in an inappropriate activity), at a deeper level it miscarries because the narrator has not understood the nature of time, which, as the parent of disillusionment, may be endured or transcended but never mastered.

By the time his second collection of stories, Huozai

(Conflagration, 1923), was published, Ye had matured considerably in his art. Stylistically, the stories in Conflagration are written in a purer colloquial language, exhibiting fewer evidences of archaic vocabulary and grammatical compressions. There is a discernible movement away from the exploration of emotional states for their own sake toward more self-contained narratives. The plotting of the stories has become more complex and assured, and a new self-consciousness about narrators and their role in the transmission of the story makes itself felt. Often the narrator takes on the persona of eavesdropper or father

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confessor: in such stories as "Xiaoxing"

(Morning walk, 1921), "Beiai de zhongzai" (Tragic load, 1921), and "Lülu de banlü" (Traveling companion, 1921), the details of the story are overheard by the narrator or eagerly related to him by the protagonist during a chance encounter. The narratives thus disclosed are further material on which the authorial emotion of tongqing may be exercised, and the narrator's sympathetic response is duly recorded. But the narrator's role as outsider secures a personal distance from the events recounted, as a result of which his sympathetic response, however sincere, seems ineffectual. By providing an opportunity for the protagonist to air his complaints, the text for its duration draws him out of the stream of events into a timeless moral and affectional sphere of the narrator's making. But in the absence of any sustained relationship with the character, the narrator can offer neither to relieve his suffering in practical terms nor to provide long-term spiritual consolation. Closure, where the narrator and the protagonist are forced to part ways, brings only a resigned recognition of the inevitable return of the quotidian.

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"

(Nebulae, 1921), that specifically address these questions and in a larger sense probe the role of writing itself in the self's struggle to win a correspondence between personal moral ideals and the exigencies of the time-bound external world.

At the opening of "Conflagration," the protagonist Yan Xin

who was in fact modeled on an acquaintance of Ye Shaojun,^[43] is pointedly associated with the primary virtues of sincerity and pity that

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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

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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

pious reflections on husband and wife as "one body," in which he scornfully dismisses notions of individual freedom and privacy as the source of barriers between people. But Meng Qing, a writer of fiction, then ironically proceeds to compose a story that casts doubt on the sincerity of a conjugal relationship. In the story-within-the-story a character named Mr. Fu writing a letter to his wife, begins to relate a dream in which he conversed about art with an ill-defined female presence in a highly romantic garden setting. In the dream he felt that "for the first time in his life he had entrusted his innermost feelings to a human companion" (71). But as he writes he grows fearful that the content of the dream will cause his wife to doubt his full affection for her, and in the end he lies, telling her she is the one he encountered in the dream. The bad faith involved in Mr. Fu's suppression of the true nature of his dream is then repeated by Meng Qing himself, who, having completed

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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

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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"

(Rice, 1921) from Conflagration , and in many of the stories from the three collections that followed in the 1920s, Xianxia (Under the line, 1925), Chengzhong (In the city, 1926), and Weiyan ji (Without satiety, 1928), Ye was able to objectify his ethical concerns in narratives that appeal minimally to an authorially affirmed lyricism or didacticism. Realism comes to be understood not simply as a convenient medium for the thematic treatment of the experience of disillusionment but as the consummate formal expression of a disabused consciousness. Despite its purported representational fidelity, realism seems to offer, not a closer correspondence of text to external world, but a reinforced sense of the line that divides them. This formal division is reflected thematically in the stories by an increasing polarization of society and the individual. The interest in psychological ex-

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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"

(Alone, 1923), "Chunguang bushi ta de le" (Not hers the spring light, 1924), and "Weipo" (Ripples, 1926), individual characters do not simply undergo disillusionment at the hands of a cruel society but are depicted as permanently haunted by private emotions of loneliness and bitterness that are its reified product. Alienation, however, is not the only result of the disjunction between the social sphere and the individual psyche. To operate in a treacherous and competitive social environment, the individual is forced to construct a variety of self-serving social personae. In several stories reminiscent of Lu Xun's satirical fiction, Ye Shaojun exposes the resulting hypocrisy, manifested in the behavior of pedagogues and other petty bourgeois intellectuals.

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

located not far from his home city of Suzhou a school mate of Ye's named Wu Binruo established an experimental school there in 1917 and invited Ye Shaojun to join the staff. Ye accepted the offer and worked there until 1921; he later took the Luzhi school as a model for the fictional school in Ni Huanzhi . Wu Binruo shared many of Ye Shaojun's pedagogical ideals and proved a sympathetic headmaster. Ye's theory of education, outlined in several articles in the late 1910s and 1920s, emphasized the need to combine "knowledge and action, training and life." Social progress, he argued, in fact depended on the nourishment of "healthy individuals" in the schools.^[45] As we shall see, similar ideals governed his fictional alter ego Ni Huanzhi's attitude toward education.

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.

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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

[The scholars]), but the teachers in Ye's fiction face problems unknown to their predecessors: in the new society they are no longer budding scholar-officials but professionals in the Western sense. The designation as professionals forces a new social marginality on them; everyone treats them with contempt, from the bureaucrats who are their employers to their students, who show an uncanny ability to see through their efforts to preserve self-esteem. Those few teachers who still harbor a measure of reformist zeal encounter daunting obstacles and eventually give up their reform efforts;^[48] the great majority succumb to a crippling apathy and treat their profession either as a simple source of income or as a retreat from the hazards of more active professions, such as politics.

In "Rice" and "Pan xiansheng zai nan zhong"

(Mr. Pan in distress, 1924) the protagonists are given impossible educational assignments in areas plagued by famine and warlord squabbles. Both Teacher Wu of "Rice" and Mr. Pan struggle valiantly to fulfill their duties, but in the context of these emergencies it is all they can do to feed and protect their own families. Both men's comic dilemma results from their inability to be in two places at once: circumstances finally force them to choose one responsibility over the other. Teacher

[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.

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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

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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"

(On the bridge, 1923), one of the few stories Ye wrote depicting a motivated political act. In the story a young terrorist named Zu Qing plans and carries out the murder of a wealthy landlord. He undertakes this murder not for pragmatic purposes but as an act of communication: he wants both to demonstrate that he is not an idle bystander to social injustice and to "awaken" the "pitiable" masses with a violent symbolic act. The killing serves, in fact, as a substitute for writing: Zu Qing decides not to leave an explanation of it because the murder was "just like reading a book or writing a letter; if you felt like doing it, you went and did it."^[51] As narrated, however, the murder is a profoundly absurd performance, possessed of a surreal ordinariness: "In a crazy, rapid movement his right arm shot out of the window as though he were picking off the most convenient target on an ordinary bird hunt. There was a sturdy ping sound" (79). Zu Qing's madness is rooted in an inability to differentiate the protected realm of the imagination (which is also the domain of literature and schematic ideology) from the real world, where acts have violent, irrevocable consequences.

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"

(The package, 1926) a schoolteacher is followed as he passes through a checkpoint while carrying what he believes is a package of incriminating propaganda handouts. The handouts as he sees them in his mind's eye illustrate the

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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

in late 1927 for serial publication in Jiaoyu zazhi (Journal of education). Ye began writing the novel in January 1928, produced a chapter "about every seven or eight days," and was finished with the work by November of the same year.^[53] Despite its publication in an educational journal, Ye intended his novel both as a general portrait of the changes Chinese society had undergone since

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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.

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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

has written) and through theoretical discussions with "fellow idealists" like his fiancée that Ni Huanzhi achieves his greatest professional satisfaction.

Shared pedagogical interests are, in fact, the ground on which Ni Huanzhi and his fiancée, Jin Peizhang

first meet, and Ni brings to their relationship the same idealism that characterizes his program of educational reform. If progressive education is designed to break down barriers (33), so too love is a "cohesive force" (157) that surmounts the "invisible barrier" between the sexes (49). Though the couple's early conversations are limited to a discussion of pedagogical matters, they are colored by an awkward adolescent eroticism: we are told that while sharing Jiang Bingru's paper on education with his fiancée, Huanzhi "frees himself from the inhibiting influence of the sex barrier" sufficiently to announce, "It is an extremely penetrating piece of writing!" (52). Yet however strongly he is overwhelmed by the power of love, which, "like innumerable tiny snakes," must force its way out of his heart (139), he cannot bring himself to speak directly of his feelings to Peizhang but chooses a substitute means of expression, the love letter. The correspondence that follows illuminates not only the tentative, explorative sexuality of young people during the May Fourth period but also the sexual encoding of the colloquial language that made it the expressive ground for the potency of both a new politics and a new sexuality. Huanzhi makes clear that he has chosen to write his letters in the vernacular in order to narrow the gap between writing and speech ("I feel I can express myself more naturally in it, just as if I were speaking to you face to face" [141]) and to communicate better the sense of virility he has found in contemplating their romance. Peizhang, though pleased that in reading his letters "she could almost hear his musical voice and envision the charming way he looked at her," nevertheless finds them "blunt, naked, and in some ways rather rude" (142). For her response she chooses the classical language, the formal means of leaving herself uncommitted, of keeping the correspondence open while expressing nothing more than a

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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

("Tiger Jiang"), who exploits radical ideology for his private benefit. In his own activities Ni is not entirely innocent of the seductions of power, but the authority he enjoys for a time is not a pragmatic domination of others but a spiritual influence he imagines his speechmaking exerts over the crowd. Unwilling to doff his pedagogical ambitions, he bills himself as an "educator for revolution" (211) whose goal is "to have the whole public come to us for instruction" (185). His rhetoric remains saturated with the same phantasmic idealism that rendered his educational program inoperable: in choosing the slogan "We are together!" he is simply preaching

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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-

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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

Ni's radical friend, who eventually persuades him to give up teaching for political work, compares revolutionary violence to a child's learning the danger of fire in the only practicable way, by playing with it (264). Where for Ni Huanzhi the two views of revolution prove as irreconcilable as the elements, it is Leshan who, by radically internalizing the revolution, manages to eradicate all superficial emotionalism from his subjectivity and make his heart "a glowing coal of fire" (317). In the crucial scene where Ni

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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