Zhang Tianyi:
Fiction as Social Performance
The fiction of Zhang Tianyi, recognized by many critics as "the most brilliant short-story writer" China produced during the 1930s,[46] offers an interesting counterpoint to the fundamentally novelistic impulses that underlay Mao Dun's oeuvre. Although, as I shall show, the fictional output of the two authors must in the end be judged radically dissimilar in tone and structure, they shared a number of important presuppositions about literature. Not the least of these was a persistent theoretical commitment to realism: calls for truth and reality in fiction recur like a litany throughout Zhang's critical writings. In 1933, in a humorous account of his career entitled "A Tale of Writing," Zhang told how, upon learning that the realist school was out of fashion, he tried writing more modish works in the style of the "School of Incomprehensibility." But the results were unsatisfactory:
[46] C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction , p. 212.
Originally I had hoped to build an ivory tower, but ivory proved too expensive, so I had to make do with cow bones. But where was I to place this cow-bone tower? The city was filled with gunfire from the May Thirtieth and March Eighteenth atrocities, and the countryside was as always teeming with calamities, both man-made and heaven-sent. No matter where I looked, I still found myself in the real world.
Acknowledging failure, I had no choice but to step out of my cow-bone tower and try writing about real events in the real world.[47]
Like earlier realists, Zhang insisted that his literary product had an intimate connection with the external social environment. But as he frequently pointed out, his sense of realism conditioned not only the content of his stories but his style as well: "Since I was going to write about real events, I felt I had to use real language, language that would be understandable to everyone."[48]
As is clear from the passage about the cow-bone tower, Zhang Tianyi perceived the real world as an arena of conflict. And like Mao Dun, Zhang regularly employed dialectical thinking to make sense of its contradictions. His reliance on this method is already evident in a brief 1932 essay entitled "On the Lack of Vigor in Composition: Its Reasons and Its Cure," an article whose earnest tone contrasts sharply with the jocularity of "A Tale of Writing." Contemporary writers, he wrote, themselves embodied a poignant contradiction:
The majority are petty bourgeois intellectuals. The times have forced them to recognize that the class to which they belong has reached a dead end, so they strive to rid their writings of individualism and redefine themselves as part of the collective. On the one hand they have already abandoned (or partially abandoned) the individualistic lyricism of the old literature, as well as its focus on trivial personal affairs, but on the other hand they have not yet fully grasped the new consciousness. Their works as a result seem extremely impoverished.[49]
Zhang's solution for this problem recalls Mao Dun's argument about
[48] Zhang Tianyi, "Chuangzuo de gushi," in Zhang Tianyi, Zhang Tianyi wenxue pinglun ji , p. 306.
the dual need for analysis and observation. A work of literature, Zhang wrote, has a double source, the author's "thought" and the author's "life experience." Literature emerges from the fusion of these two, but each of these elements is itself to be understood dialectically. Ideologically, Zhang called for authors to submit to a kind of "theoretical cultivation" whose base was the "scientific dialectic." Only through "correctly and firmly grasping the dialectic" can authors overcome "the remnants of the old consciousness within themselves." Experientially, Zhang called for a new confrontation of the author's self with the collective: "All new writers should leave their windows and writing desks and enter the broad society of workers, peasants, and soldiers."[50]
Fiction writing, in this formula, entails an active purging of the self-involvement that, Zhang felt, marred earlier May Fourth literature. Like Mao Dun, Zhang Tianyi took as axiomatic a definition of the author as first and foremost an observer of others.[51] Both Mao Dun and Zhang spoke with contempt of authors who wrote only about the "trivial contingent affairs"
The one exception to this rule in Zhang Tianyi's oeuvre is his first work of fiction to receive serious attention, "San tian ban de meng"
[50] Zhang Tianyi, "Chuangzuo bu zhen zhi yuanyin ji qi chulu," in Zhang Tianyi, Zhang Tianyi wenxue pinglun ji , p. 6.
story to refer overtly to his personal affairs, "A Three and a Half Day's Dream" may be interpreted as a metaphorical purging of the author's autobiographical impulses. In the story, through a series of letters to a friend, the narrator describes his departure from X (by which letter he designates the city in which he presently lives and works) to make a reluctant filial visit to Hangzhou
The narrative situation in "A Three and a Half Day's Dream" parallels Zhang Tianyi's own life story.[53] Zhang was born in Nanjing, but during his childhood his family moved several times. His father, who was a teacher, finally settled the family in Hangzhou. In the mid-1920s Zhang studied for a brief time at an art school in Shanghai and then went north to attend Beijing University. He entered a science program there because at the time he "felt that there were so many irresolvable problems in the world (relating to life, the revolution, and love) that I could see no practical value in the literary arts." At heart, however,
"my interests still lay with literature."[54] After only a year of study, Zhang grew tired of his science classes and dropped out of the university. During his stay in Beijing, however, he had been exposed not only to new literary trends but also to a variety of radical political ideas, including Marxism. In 1927 Zhang returned south to undertake a series of temporary jobs (as teacher, office worker, and journalist) and to begin writing in earnest. While living in Shanghai, he received the encouragement of Lu Xun and met other important figures of the New Literature movement. Lu Xun and Yu Dafu themselves encouraged Zhang to publish "A Three and a Half Day's Dream" in the journal Benliu
In 1927 Zhang's father retired, leaving his family in poverty. Zhang's classmate Zhou Songdi
[54] Zhang Tianyi, "Zuojia zishu," p. 276.
The feelings between [Zhang] and his father were quite deep. The old man thoroughly loved his son. In the letters he sent Tianyi, he would always write some humorous phrase at the end, like "As many as the bamboo shoots after a spring rain" or "As many as the threads of rain during a fall shower," and would never repeat himself. . . . [Tianyi] explained, "He means his kisses are as abundant as bamboo shoots after a spring rain." "Zhang Tianyi he Xianshi wenxue ji qita"
(Zhang Tianyi and Realist Literature , etc.), in Shen, Huang, and Wu, Zhang Tianyi yanjiu ziliao , pp. 91–94, here p. 93.
personal life at the time he wrote it. Nevertheless, in the context of Zhang's literary development, it is the story's unique—and finally dismissive—treatment of such autobiographical details that is remarkable. The contingent affairs of one's personal life, the conclusion suggests, may in the context of one's family life possess a compelling sense of reality, but this is an illusion: it is finally one's independent work in the larger society that aligns the self with the Real. "A Three and a Half Day's Dream" thus constitutes a definitive evacuation of the personal preoccupations from which such authors as Ye Shaojun labored for years to disengage themselves. The impatience the narrator of the story feels with his family's inconsequential gossip mirrors Zhang's irritation with the triviality of much contemporary writing, and the narrator's final pledge hints at Zhang's own resolve to produce a fiction unfettered by overt self-reference.
Zhang Tianyi's reception as an important newcomer on the literary scene in the early 1930s was occasioned not simply by his avoidance of autobiography, however, but also by his disparaging attitude toward the vacillations of young bourgeois intellectuals. In 1931 Feng Naichao
Feng Naichao's observation notwithstanding, many of Zhang's early stories do feature disappointed lovers and disaffected intellec-
tuals; it is less Zhang's choice of subject matter than his treatment of these figures that distinguishes him from earlier writers. Where previously the spiritual infirmities of such characters were explored with a measure of authorial sympathy, in Zhang's works they are generally the target of an uninhibited mockery. Zhang's intellectual characters do not vacillate out of pure intellectual frustration; more often than not they recognize that political engagement offers a way out of their private contradictions, but they lack the courage or resolution to alter their behavior. The protagonist of "Zhuchangzi de beiai"
The times are simply too powerful—so powerful that I no longer dare write. If I am asked to write about fine wine and women or to compose a tribute to decadence or to relate a few trivialities from my present life, I can do so without any trouble in a way that will entice readers. But the times do not permit such compositions; they force me to write something new. Unfortunately my life, my consciousness, my education, in short, everything about me, is still of the old style. (226)
As Pig Guts later acknowledges, he is unable to "resolve the contradictions" of his life, having grown too accustomed to the pleasures of his old "life-style," which revolves largely around drinking and socializing at dance halls and cafes.
Pig Guts several times invokes the times (shidai ) and contradictions (maodun ), notions that I suggested above were of serious concern to Mao Dun. But in Zhang's stories they are less substantive ideas than fashionable slogans, whose repetition serves ironically to screen the characters from changing social realities. The protagonist of "Jing Ye xiansheng"
The pain he suffered was undoubtedly of a very modern kind . . . but he was hard put to say precisely what caused it. You might say it was the pain of vacillation. But that didn't express it exactly. For although he felt a measure of real discomfort, what he called his decadence did not really arise from his thinking anything in particular. It was more a matter of his fearing that life was becoming too drab and ordinary, of his craving a bit of stimulation. . . . But—if we may employ the conjunction here one more time—in the end he didn't have a clue to what motivated his own behavior. (39–40)
The narration here satirically underlines the self-canceling nature of Jing Ye's vacillations by calling attention to the repeated use of the adversative but in his interior monologue. Unlike the vacillations of intellectuals in Lu Xun's stories or in Mao Dun's Eclipse , Jing Ye's anxiety is less a frustrated response to historical exigencies than it is a complement to the character's romantic self-image. Jing Ye's friend Lao Hui
To expose the shallowness of Jing Ye's vacillation, Zhang has him confront a radical alter ego in the person of an acquaintance named Ge Ping
heard of Jing Ye's new life: some say that he has reverted to a life of decadence, some that he continues to struggle to rehabilitate himself, and others that he has taken a wife and become a successful businessman. Although these reports are "contradictory to the point of absurdity," Lao Hui contends that "they are all possible" (46). The friends depart, feeling puzzled.
This ending reflects in part Zhang's uncertainty about the prospects of reform for such intellectuals as Jing Ye, but more importantly it subverts readers' expectations of fictional closure. It makes Jing Ye's character an assemblage of possibilities rather than an integrated personality, thus destroying the consistency of characterization that readers expect from realist fiction. But Zhang Tianyi is less interested in producing a static portrait of intellectuals like Jing Ye than in exploring moral choices. The story's open-ended conclusion functions as a defamiliarization technique, disallowing a simple cathartic response to the story and forcing readers to take a moral stand, both for Jing Ye and for themselves. In approaching his characters in this way, Zhang rejects the reflectionism of conventional realism—which entails passively delineating the representative characteristics of individuals and social groupings—for a more activist fiction that explores the potential for change. The conclusion is, in short, Zhang Tianyi's formal means of choosing Ge Ping's path over Jing Ye's.
Defamiliarization techniques abound in Zhang Tianyi's early ficton, especially in his first two novels, Guitu riji
fiction writing that seem designed to point out the shortcomings of the realism Mao Dun practiced: he advised that fictional scenes be developed rapidly, that characters be revealed through action rather than psychological description, and that descriptions of objects and scenery be kept as brief as possible.[62]
The text of Cogwheel makes these same points through a series of satirical asides. At various points the narrator baldly announces the text's resistance to metaphor ("Some people said his mouth was a bit like . . . well, we won't try to find a comparison but just say straight out that his lips seemed a bit thin" [22]), to physical description ("To describe a person, there's no need to get wordy and go into all these details; I'm just trying to tell you her shoulders were a bit crooked" [23]), to disquisitions on psychology ("If you must have some psychological description here, the author can tell you" [37]), and to the treatment of romantic themes ("I really can't tell love stories—I start stuttering. If the reader likes love stories, I've heard Turgenev has written all kinds of them—you might try borrowing one of his to read" [269]). Other devices common to realist fiction are employed, but self-consciously: a flashback, for example, is announced first with a quotation from Turgenev ("Pardon me, beloved reader, but let me guide you back several years") and then with a blunt heading in bold letters ("ADDITIONAL NARRATION") that makes an absurdity of Turgenev's delicacy (49–50). Most radically, the ending of the novel, like that of "Mr. Jing Ye," intentionally frustrates readers' curiosity about the outcome of the plot. In the final chapter Zhang stages an interview in which the narrator tries to wrest from two of the novel's characters the information he needs to wrap up their story; they refuse to cooperate and walk off remarking, "If you don't mind, we have things to do; in times like these, how can you keep chattering on about such trivia?" (271). This ending amounts, of course, to an assault on the readers, who, it is implied, should themselves be attending to better things. Such a parody of the formal conventions of realist fiction allows Zhang to achieve a double purpose: while continuing to employ the suspect conventions to structure and pattern his story he at the same time calls them into question.
The plot of Cogwheel , which concerns the radical education of a naive country girl at the hands of a group of self-styled revolutionaries, also makes specific parodic reference to Mao Dun's "Disillusionment." The girl resembles Jing, and her name, Huixian
She used to envy those girls; she felt she couldn't measure up to them. They felt free to love the country (indeed, they had loved a number of countries more than once, mostly in May), and they could sing foreign songs and wear high heels. But today, at long last she felt she was a match for them: here she was at a rally loving her country, and she was perfectly capable of wearing high heels too if she chose to. (38)
In the end political rallies become confused with theatrical performances, and the characters' behavior itself comes to seem purely performative, detached from any ideological moorings. The young people use the rallies as occasions for sexual cruising, fussing more over their personal appearance than over the content of their slogans ("While shouting, he combed his hair with his fingers" [81]). When bored with political rallies, they rush off to the theater, but the major rally that occurs near the end of the book is itself little more than a vaudeville show, whose bill of fare includes speeches, songs, dances, and even a skit prepared by Huixian's friends, entitled "Action News" and touted with the slogan "Art can save the country" (214–15). In the penultimate chapter the characters' fatuous conversations—about such fashionable topics as contradictions and the meaning of life—are set against stark headlines announcing the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. Eventually, as though to restore some sobriety to the novel's treatment of this important historical event, the narration abandons its characters and resorts to a straightforward journalistic account, interrupted by the cries, not of fashionable revolutionaries, but of the anonymous masses reacting with heroic indignation (251–60).
Cogwheel is a hothouse in which one finds growing all the elements of Zhang Tianyi's fiction: parodic exaggeration, which finds its freest expression in the farcical novels A Diary of Hell and Yangjingbin qixia
Mao Dun was not the only author to be offended by the humor of Zhang Tianyi's fiction. Even some of those who had been the first to recognize his talent objected to the wilder manifestations of Zhang's parodic spirit. Lu Xun wrote in a letter to Zhang that his fiction was often "too jocular,"[65] and Qu Qiubai, in a review of A Diary of Hell , complained that his writing was too schematic and self-indulgent.[66] Wang Shuming
[65] Lu Xun, letter to Zhang Tianyi, 1 February 1933, in Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji 12:143–44, here p. 144.
cisms assume the conventional realistic standards that the parodic passages in Zhang's works were designed to undercut. Zhang disdained the earnest artisanship that underlay those standards, as his rapid and somewhat carefree writing habits make clear: Zhou Songdi wrote that Zhang "would write every day for more than ten hours without stopping. He was frequently able to finish an eight-thousand-to-nine-thousand-character short story, and averaged more than two thousand characters a day."[68] Zhang viewed his stories not as polished and enduring works of art but as rapid-fire, topical communications; to him they were less objects for meditation than incentives to act. The stylistic and formal innovations he employed—the aborted closures, the comic-book expletives, the caricatures—were all designed to challenge the complacency of his audience and thus to prevent his stories from simply being "consumed" as examples of a bourgeois art form.
Perhaps the most insightful critical evaluation of Zhang Tianyi by one of his contemporaries is an essay written by Hu Feng in 1935, entitled simply "On Zhang Tianyi." Hu Feng praises Zhang Tianyi's fiction in many of the same terms used by Feng Naichao. Zhang, he writes, has overcome the individualism and sentimentality of earlier May Fourth fiction and succeeded in painting a fresh and convincing picture of the self-delusions and cruelties of China's petty bourgeoisie. Hu Feng goes on, however, in an analysis of Zhang Tianyi as a plain materialist
The necessity Hu Feng speaks of here is that of a reified social pattern. Eschewing both physical and psychological description, Zhang is forced to define character solely in terms of the individual's socially
[68] Zhou Songdi, "Wo he Tianyi xiangchu de rizi," p. 69.
[70] Hu Feng, "Zhang Tianyi lun," in Shen, Huang, and Hu, Zhang Tianyi yanjiu ziliao , p. 279.
meaningful acts and intentions. Since characters are denied any internal reality divorced from such patterning, they are compelled, as it were, to simply play the role in which society has cast them. As a consequence, all behavior in Zhang's fictional world takes on a theatrical quality. Actions are dictated by a purely situational social logic. Characters struggle, not to remain true to internal psychological or ideological compulsions, but simply to maximize their control over whatever social circumstances present themselves.
In an essay he wrote on the subject of humor, Zhang Tianyi once wrote, "Isn't it true that we Chinese most love face?"[71] To succeed in their social manipulations, the characters in Zhang's world must present a consistent and understandable face to the world, and the construction of such social personas is the primary subject of Zhang Tianyi's fiction. Maintaining face is, of course, an essentially theatrical project, which relies for its success on the actor's awareness of his or her audience. Social behavior, as Zhang Tianyi presents it, is thus in its essence specular: individuals discover and define themselves by carefully monitoring the response others give to their actions. To convey this understanding of human behavior, Zhang frequently resorts to situational irony: typically, a character is confronted successively with two very different audiences; to maintain face with each group he or she must give two highly contradictory performances. Readers are left to evaluate the discrepancy between these two performances and answer for themselves the moral question posed by that discrepancy. "Dizhu"
becomes clear that not so much his daughter's innocence as the bulwark of his own morality is being assailed. While self-righteously intoning to his daughter that "a person shouldn't listen to things that aren't proper," he feels himself increasingly fascinated by the "irresistible" conversation next door. He finally goes to inquire, only to discover that one of the conversationalists is an acquaintance, President Xiao
Crucial to the situational irony of "The Bulwark" is the story's setting: the passenger ship is the site of a convergence of social groupings that make it impossible for Huang to maintain a clear partitioning of social roles. In Zhang Tianyi's longer fiction the city plays a similar role. The constant collision of social spheres in the urban environment provides repeated opportunities for hypocritical behavior, as well as for its exposure. Fascinated by the challenge such encounters constitute for individuals as they struggle to maintain face, Zhang situated all of his later novels in the city, including the two that conform most closely to the realist model, Yi nian (A year, 1933) and Zai chengshi li (In the city, 1937).[73] The premise for both these novels is the same: an
unsophisticated villager arrives in the city, where he is gradually introduced to a wide array of imposters and evildoers. In A Year , we follow the progress of an honest village tailor named Bai Muyi
At the time of A Year 's publication in 1933, a critic complained, with some justification, that the story "could be cut off at any point or could go on for another hundred pages" without significantly altering its effect.[74]In the City is considerably more successful, largely because it is organized around a central plot conflict, a family feud over a plot of inherited land. Like A Year, In the City opens with the arrival of a character from the country, in this case a shifty opportunist named Ding Shousong
Ding Shousong and Tang Qikun represent two modes of self-interest, the one wily and sycophantic, the other pompous and despotic. Much of the comic effect of the novel results from their apparently contrasting but finally complementary styles of self-deception and manipulation. One of their early meetings is described as follows:
Tang Qikun looked the other over. Ding Shousong's eyes, one small, one large, seemed to be begging for mercy, and his back was hunched as though he were cowering under the weight of Tang's authority. With his usual insight into character, Tang felt that this Ding, despite his surname, was a reliable sort after all. He would probably do whatever he was told, and that might make him useful for a variety of errands—once, that is, Tang had him completely under his thumb.
Tang's face suddenly took on a severe expression, as though, having accepted the role of master, he needed to exhibit his authority. (570)
A later encounter is described in similar terms:
Looking at the wretched shape before him, Tang felt a rushing through his veins as though he had just injected a vial of glucose straight into his heart. He couldn't resist twisting his face into a furious expression and issuing a loud harrumph through his nose. Without saying a word, he fixed a powerful glare on Ding. He loved to watch people like this squirm.
Ding gave a little cough and looked down with a mortified expression. Closing his left eye into a narrow slit, he peeped timidly at Second Master with his right eye.
"What can I do for you, Second Master?"
He knew he ought to say something more than that. He ought to ask how Second Master had slept last night or whether he had had too much to drink. But in this atmosphere even the best oiled of tongues would congeal, and Ding's mouth was stuck fast. (608)
Ding Shousong's groveling, however, proves just as affected as Tang's self-assurance: his servile manner is calculated to win Tang Qikun's patronage. His actual feelings when Tang first employs him are characterized as follows:
Secretly he felt that Second Master should recognize his, Ding Shousong's, position. Everyone knew he had better opportunities than this and that his own family would help him out in a pinch. Lately these Tangs had been acting in a particularly high-handed fashion, and the
present proposal was something of an insult. Did they really expect him to help promote a wastrel like Tang Qikun?
But still, where there was a profit to be made, Ding could never just walk away. (570)
The faces Tang and Ding present to each other, the one imperious, the other deferential, are equally false. Tang Qikun's confident manner conceals his growing desperation as the web of lies and pretense on which his authority is based comes unraveled. Ding Shousong's servility, on the other hand, serves as a cover for his personal appetites. His rather tenuous kinship ties with both branches of the family (the exact nature of which are never spelled out) force both sides to grudgingly admit him into their circle. These ties secure his loyalty to neither, and he soon becomes a double agent, carrying information from one branch of the family to the other; in the end he divulges to the Dings Tang Qikun's plan to sell the family property, thus hastening Tang's fall.
When first enlisting Ding's services, Tang warns him several times that "the city is not like the country" and instructs him not to run loose
Tang Qikun dismisses him, Ding goes to the study where the clocks are kept to pilfer a few:
The watches hanging on the wall were ticking noisily; they seemed to be competing to see which could go the fastest. One was ticking so enthusiastically that it swung violently back and forth on its chain. Several alarm clocks stood by stiffly and haughtily as though awareness of their own loud chime made them contemptuous of the others. The desk clocks, however, seemed uninterested in this competition, absorbed as they were in their slow, rhythmic tick, tock, tick, tock . (795)
Ding Shousong is caught in the act and evicted from the Tang household, but the cacophonous sound of the Tangs' clocks echoes throughout the book.[75] At the novel's conclusion, Tang Qikun, wandering the streets contemplating his ruin, ominously hears "the great clock by the river strike twelve." Although the time struck here is noon, it carries much the same sense of termination (and imminent rebirth) as the stroke of midnight does in Mao Dun's novel. In both In the City and Midnight such references connote an objective progression of time and history to which the characters themselves remain blinded; we, as readers, however, recognize that the march of events will inevitably overtake the characters and in the process expose their petty ambitions and squabbles as the mere flotsam of history.
These similarities to Midnight notwithstanding, Tang Qikun does not attain the tragic stature of Wu Sunfu. He is, at least at the beginning of the novel, depicted as pure appetite, without the larger ideals that motivate Wu Sunfu. Ironically, he only begins to elicit a measure of sympathy when, late in the novel, we see him in the secret second household he has established with a young woman named Yajie
He heard her sniffling and rasping as though she had a cold. She was always whimpering about things and getting thinner and more haggard by the day. He couldn't bear looking at her anymore, for fear her piti-
able, swollen face would confirm his feelings of guilt. He mumbled exasperatedly, "It's too much, I can't stand it!"
Suddenly feelings of regret and shame overwhelmed him. He longed to run to her side, utter some soothing words, and then move her and his son across the river, where she could live proudly in the city as his second wife. (698)
As Tang admits to himself, he has experienced a true familial happiness only with Yajie and her son. His desire to legitimize the relationship is perhaps the single good impulse he evinces in the novel. Unsurprisingly, however, he fails to act on it—not just because of the social embarrassment that would follow but also because making this second family public would destroy the pleasure he has found in it. In his legitimate family he is constantly forced to play a part, to assert his mastery by impersonating the gestures and mannerisms of the powerful; only in the private world of his adulterous family can he indulge his true feelings of powerlessness, regret, and shame. In the relationship's secrecy lies its ability to gratify his deeper emotions. This second family, however, is a luxury supportable only as long as Tang maintains his wealth and reputation in the outside society. When these are stripped from him at the end of the novel, he loses Yajie and his son as well. Just at the time he hears the news of his bankruptcy, he learns of the boy's death, an event that leaves him feeling "childless" despite his large legitimate family. Then in the final chapter, Tang Qikun learns that Yajie has herself run off with the man he hired to look after her. They have left only the ironical message "Thank you for serving as our matchmaker."
Zhang Tianyi's relentless focus on his characters' petty ambitions and on the superficial manifestations of social life can in longer works become repetitive and stifling; the touches of irony and psychological complexity that we have observed in his portrayal of Tang Qikun come as a welcome relief, although most readers would agree that they arrive too late in the novel. One senses that in works like A Year and In the City , Zhang has taken the criticisms of his earlier novels too much to heart and consciously suppressed his instincts for formal innovation in the interests of a conventionally realistic representation of Chinese society. Where Zhang allows his satirical and parodic instincts a freer reign, as in the inventive farce Strange Knight of Shanghai and in many of his short stories, he avoids the "plodding" quality that C. T. Hsia rightly complains mars A Year and In the City .[76] The short story,
in particular, was well suited to Zhang's temperament and to the themes that preoccupied him as a writer; it allowed him to spotlight an isolated scene of social theater without belaboring its dramatization with the descriptive and interpretive passages that he found so tiresome in Turgenev's and Mao Dun's fiction. Zhang's spotlight commonly picks out a scene of considerable violence in which an empowered individual forces a victim to enact a ritual humiliation. Often these encounters are related through the eyes of the victim, generally a child or defenseless woman. From such a perspective the villain takes on a savage, comic-book quality; he or she comes to embody power in a threatening, almost abstract sense. In such stories Zhang confronts the reader with stark dramatizations—divorced from mitigating psychological or ideological rationales—of the exercise of power in Chinese society.
The leverage powerful individuals emloy to compel their victims' compliance in these stories is rarely a matter of simple brute force: often it is provided by the threat of a secret's exposure. The early story "Baofu"
[76] Strange Knight of Shanghai is a parodic treatment of martial arts romances and is not directly relevant to our discussion here. For a description of the novel see C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction , pp. 231–35.
and then gives her a useless foreign coin for her services. He is driven less by sexual need than by a desire to cuckold her husband, who has insulted him. Jiuye further mortifies Fa Xin Sao by insisting that she smile: "I'm not happy to see such a sour face. . . . Just give me a little smile!" (123). When she discovers the nature of the coin he has given her, she goes to a teahouse she knows he patronizes to insist he exchange it, but he taunts her: "How is it that I, Jiuye, should have given you a dollar? What kind of debt have I contracted? Tell me in front of everyone here, and I'll immediately give you another dollar in exchange" (122). That he has violated her is an open secret, but he knows that any public appeal for justice on her part would, in the eyes of the world, be tantamount to admitting she had prostituted herself. Fa Xin Sao clearly finds the enforced dramatization of her humiliation more agonizing than the rape itself.
In "Revenge" and "Smile" power is asserted nakedly, that is, without accompanying moral rationale. In both cases sex is not in itself the motivation for the male's violence but rather the means by which he avenges his bruised ego and asserts his authority. This authority arises, however, not just from his financial clout or physical strength but also from the sexual double standard; it is thus supported by the whole weight of a social order that sanctions, indeed mandates, certain kinds of hypocritical behavior. The bullying male may act the puppeteer in these ritual acts of aggression, but the social order with its conventions has provided the script.
Stories such as "Revenge" and "Smile" pit villains against victims in brutal power plays; ideology—the intellectual manipulation of the grounds for social conventions—has no place in the lives of these characters or in their stories. As we have already seen in our discussion of "Mr. Jing Ye" and "The Bulwark," however, Zhang Tianyi was frequently concerned with the nature and efficacy of ideological commitment. But his ideologically engaged characters, whether conservative defenders of conventional morality or self-styled reformers, typically discover, to their comic surprise, that their own behavior is working to undermine the belief system that they profess. Ideological explanations somehow never provide the fixed perspective on the social hierarchy that they are intended to provide. Ideology may serve a tactical purpose in a character's project of social ascent, but to the extent that beliefs are sincerely held, they serve only to hinder the climb. In "Yihang"
Sanghua
Those who remain cynically immune to the self-deceptions of ideology and operate by a pure politics of performance fare better in Zhang Tianyi's world, although their actions are the object of chilling authorial disapproval. Such an individual is the title character of "Mr. Hua Wei,"[81] a story that was greeted upon its appearance at the height of the war with Japan as having precisely captured the nature of a certain kind of Chinese bureaucrat.[82] Mr. Hua Wei, whose surname means
"China" and whose given name means "dignity" or "awe" but is a homophone for the character meaning "crisis," maintains his powerful position in the resistance movement simply by promoting the appearance of leadership. He does nothing but attend meetings, always arriving late and leaving early, proffering nothing more substantial than a call to step up resistance work and a reminder of the importance of preserving a "center of leadership"—by which phrase he clearly refers to himself. Mr. Hua Wei believes his dignity depends on two things: he must be informed of every local meeting related to the War of Resistance, and he must make at least a cursory appearance at each of them. Associates who fail either to report meetings or to invite his personal attendance risk accusations of treason or worse. As Mr. Hua Wei well understands, his power comes first from a panoptical awareness of all activity connected with the resistance and second from the constant reminder of his omniscience that his personal appearances constitute. He intuitively understands that his political position is determined not by substantive actions or ideas but solely by his appearance at these meetings. Such performative politics may be effective within the closed system of Chinese society in aligning relations of power so that they favor Mr. Hua Wei, but, as the text with its larger vision makes clear, they are not only ineffective in the face of such threats to the system's existence as the Japanese invasion but seriously undermine its powers of resistance as well. The national crisis announced by his name is at once the excuse for Mr. Hua Wei's activities and the result of the kind of self-aggrandizing leadership he represents.
In Zhang Tianyi's world all behavior, whether political or sexual, is thus reduced to an expression of the will to power. In a few exceptional stories even the arts are examined in this light. In "Xia ye meng"
to perform pervades her dreams: in one nightmare she finds herself on stage unable to utter a sound, to the amusement of the audience and the fury of her "Mama" at the orphanage, who beats her. Even in her waking hours she experiences no natural pleasure in singing; training makes her feel as if "things, tightly bound, were being dragged forcibly from her mouth." Her instructor, "Elder," a once-rich man who has squandered his inheritance on his passion for opera, has an explanation for her displeasure that reflects his personal dissatisfactions: "Singing's fun when you're an amateur, but when you turn professional, it disgusts you" (388). Yunfang is indeed being trained as a professional, who must for survival enact the nostalgic dreams of Elder's amateur past. As such, she is not expected to have personal feelings for the songs she sings or for the stories she enacts: upon observing her tearful response to a popular song, the matron of the orphanage admonishes her, "What are you bawling about, stupid! People will laugh at you. Movies aren't real!" (378). Nevertheless, the stories she performs, particularly those that concern the reuniting of loved ones, have become entangled with her personal dreams of her father's return; she is not sure whether the stories move her because she has heard them so often or because they "have some special connection with her fate" (370). One of the other girls at the school enviously interprets Yunfang's orphanhood as a kind of freedom: "Whatever you do, it's up to you; she's not your real mother anyhow" (379). But Yunfang herself feels differently: she keeps waiting for the vague memories of her infancy to be "reenacted" (380), for her relationships to take on a sense of reality. She enviously tells her friend, "You're much better off than we. . . . Your mother is your real mother, your kid brother is your real kid brother" (379). Her emotional life has become so inextricably bound up with the performance of others' fantasies that she can only wonder helplessly, "Why can't one pick one's dreams?" (376). Once her imagination has been contaminated with the drama she is compelled to perform, her spiritual imprisonment is as secure as her physical imprisonment by the school walls.
Another story composed the same year, "Yige ticai"
fession, fiction writing, may contaminate those it touches in a similar way. The narrator in the story, a novelist called Master Han
Auntie Qing Er has been doubly violated, first by the landlord's son and then by Master Han, whose prying has humiliated her into retracting her story in the final line, thus enabling him to appropriate it and present it to us as his own. Auntie Qing Er was wrong about story writing; fiction does require a kind of capital—in the form of precisely such tales of personal violation as her own. But Auntie's illiteracy means that she can never directly deploy her capital on the literary market and that she must entrust her story to a representative of the literate class such as Master Han. His detective work—if not his prurient manner—may seem justified for its role in disclosing the underlying moral corruption of the landlord's son. But Master Han's project of ethical probing, to the extent that it is operative, succeeds only against the victim's will and in the wake of her personal mortification; it is an exclusively male dialogue conducted by directing blows at a female third party. As resourceful as Auntie is in dealing
with social inferiors, her only means of establishing intercourse with her literate betters is by using either her physical body, subject to sexual exploitation, or the spoken word, itself subject, as the story dramatizes, to the exploitation of writing. In the same manner, all characters and objects given representation in fiction are, in the process of their translation into writing, subject to a kind of violation: their stories—their being—are taken in hand by an elevated third party (the author), who exploits their exclusion from writing to ensure that the literary product possesses the substantiality of the Real. They are inevitably and always found objects whose fictional presentation redounds to the authority of the finder. Just as the opera in "A Summer Night's Dream" both coerced Yunfang's performance and interfered in her own emotional life, so fiction not only elicits Auntie Qing Er's confessional performance but forces her to shape her life story into the sort of sensational material required for a short story.
As we have seen, both Mao Dun and Zhang Tianyi grounded their fictional projects in a refusal to engage in May Fourth introspection; both stubbornly turned their gaze away from the self toward society. This intention is evident in the content of their fiction (with its rejection of autobiography) and in their concern with the social efficacy of the new literature. Despite this common premise, however, and despite their shared understanding of society as an arena of conflict where historical contradictions play themselves out, the two authors produced fiction of markedly different styles and forms. Mao Dun, with his novelistic impulses, constantly labored to expand his narrative vision so that it would comprehend all of historical reality. Modeling his work on the great nineteenth-century Western realists, he sought to make his fictional world commensurate with society at large, to offer a descriptive portrait so complete that one could trace in it all the complex relations of cause and effect that determine historical progress. He attempted, that is, to repair the fragmentation of contemporary society through aesthetic means and thereby allow readers to glimpse—if only momentarily—the totality of the historical moment. Zhang Tianyi, on the other hand, actively fractured the surface of his fiction so that it would itself reflect the shattered social environment. He focused his attention less on the motivations of his characters than on the consequences of their actions; in particular, he was fascinated with the way in which all human behavior constitutes the enactment
—and finally the reinforcement—of fundamental social divisions. Zhang's emphasis on the externalities of social behavior is paralleled by the linguistic play that characterizes his work; whereas Mao Dun's highly literary style works to naturalize his narrative voice, lulling readers into a passive acceptance of his vision of the world, Zhang Tianyi's aggressive and often-facetious narrative personae repeatedly call attention to the linguistic surface of the text, shocking readers into recognizing an ingenerate relationship between the signifying practices the text parodies and the social practices it describes.
The highlighting of the text's performative quality in Zhang Tianyi's works—evident in his unusual stylistic and formal experiments and in his affinity for parody—reveals a high level of artistic self-consciousness and makes him, of all Chinese realists, seem closest in spirit to Western modernists. The Japanese critic Ito[*] Keiichi
Zhang Tianyi's point of departure was his disillusionment with reality and his desire to find a new means of expressing his despair. Humankind was, in his view, already stripped of hope and moral direction and no longer able to maintain a sense of spiritual wholeness. The old techniques of realism and romanticism were inadequate to communicate this kind of spiritual disintegration and self-alienation, so he turned to a more penetrating, impressionistic means of expression.[85]
Neo-impressionism did in fact exert an important influence over Chinese writers in the early 1930s (including such committed realists as Sha Ting
of representation the material whose exploration is the substantive heart of modernism, the subconscious and the surreal. In a 1939 article entitled "Art and Struggle" he wrote, "You are clearly standing there. You have your friends and your enemies. . . . Where is your ivory tower?"[87] Both author and work, he argues, are inextricably situated in an embattled social environment; in the end all literature must announce its allegiance in the larger social contest.
Here again Mao Dun and Zhang Tianyi meet on common ground: both writers, while giving full expression to their generation's feelings of disillusionment and despair, refused any means of consolation that did not recognize the fundamentally historical nature of their plight. Both denounced all recourse to aesthetic or psychological universals and insisted that their work was bound to a particular moment and to a particular milieu. Consolation was to be found only in the potential for change within Chinese society itself and in the capacity of fiction not simply to reflect the times in which they lived, but actively to propel the wheels of history. As realists, however, Mao Dun and Zhang Tianyi continued to insist that these progressive forces be discoverable within the world as they observed and described it, not forcibly imposed from an external ideological framework. They found themselves, in short, caught in an intermediate position, resisting both the determinism of a purely reflectionist aesthetic and the naive voluntarism of the ideologues. In the following chapter we will examine the various tactics employed by Chinese realists of the 1930s in their effort to stake out and defend this middle ground.