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感谢作者为本站提供稿件 Eileen Chang''s Fiction and C. T. Hsia''s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction[1] By Liu Zaifu Translated by Yunzhong Shu ________________________________________ Copyright MCLC Resource Center (July 2009) ________________________________________ Liu Zaifu Part I: The Characteristics of Eileen Chang''s Fiction and Her Tragedy (A Speech Delivered at a Conference on Eileen Chang Held at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, 2000) 1 From the 1950s to the 1970s, the histories and criticism of modern and contemporary Chinese literature published in mainland China ignored Eileen Chang. In other words, for thirty years in the second half of the twentieth century, Eileen Chang was thrown into the dustbin of history. In addition to Eileen Chang, writers such as Hu Shi, Zhou Zuoren, Shen Congwen, and Qian Zhongshu were also thrown into the dustbin of history. What C. T. Hsia''s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction managed to achieve was to rediscover some writers ignored by autocratic power and ideology. As it reintroduced these writers to the public and restored their reputation in the history of modern Chinese literature, it ushered in a new phase in the study of modern Chinese literature. In his book, C. T. Hsia praises Eileen Chang without any reservation. While describing the achievements Eileen Chang made in her fiction, he helps Chinese and foreign readers recognize her as a literary genius. This feat in the study of modern Chinese literature proves that critics and literary historians should not try to catch up with the latest fashion or repeat their predecessors'' conclusions all the time. Neither should they just write biographies and explications of well-known and well-studied writers or simply reshuffle the rankings of these writers. Instead, they should use their own knowledge and taste to discover truly valuable writers and works, especially those unusual writers and works ignored in contemporary times, and explain their achievements and significance. As for those well-studied writers, they should come up with their own objective evaluations rather than simply sing their praises. C. T. Hsia deserves our admiration not only because he has rediscovered writers such as Eileen Chang and Shen Congwen, but also because he has offered an entirely personal approach to the study of modern Chinese fiction. 2 Although many of C. T. Hsia''s comments on Eileen Chang are remarkable, some of his statements still leave room for further discussion. For example, he is certainly right to point out that artistically Eileen Chang''s short stories (in his opinion Eileen Chang''s representative works "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City" are short stories, not novellas) are characterized by "rich imagery" and "profound exploration of human nature," but his discussion of historical awareness and moral concern as the two features of the spiritual content of Eileen Chang''s short stories is not quite accurate. As a matter of fact, some of Eileen Chang''s novels and novellas, including "Xiao Ai," Rice-sprout Song and Love in Redland, are characterized by historical awareness and moral concern. In contrast, her best works "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City" transcend historical awareness and moral judgment, which is precisely what makes these works such remarkable masterpieces. Cover of the 1999 reprint of C. T. Hsia''s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction In A History of Modern Chinese Fiction,[2] C. T. Hsia makes the following statements: But in contrast to the world of stable moral standards and feminine fashions of the latter novel [Dream of the Red Chamber], Eileen Chang deals with a society in transition, where the only constants are the egoism in every bosom and the complementary flicker of love and compassion. Her imagery, therefore, not only embraces a wider range of elegance and sordidness but has to suggest the persistence of the past in the present, the continuity of Chinese modes of behavior in apparently changing material circumstances. In that respect her imagery has a strong historical awareness (396). She is little tempted to follow the dazzling fashions of present-day Western fiction--to pursue, for example, stream of consciousness to the neglect of weightier moral concerns (397). Miss Chang does not profess high-minded ideals, but this does not mean that her moral passion is in any way less intense than that of the professed didacticist. On the contrary, her registration of the inescapable pettiness and sadness of human endeavor is nearly always morally disturbing precisely because, given the human condition, she refrains from overt gestures of indignation or protest. A profound pessimist, she can afford at the same time to be a gay satirist, a good-natured critic of urban manners (414). The statements quoted above show that Hsia repeatedly emphasizes the historical content of Eileen Chang''s short stories, since he not only argues that her works are marked by "a strong historical awareness" but also considers Eileen Chang to be a truthful and profound historian. In addition, he also stresses Eileen Chang''s moral concerns, arguing that her works can inspire readers to contemplate moral issues. In his opinion, Eileen Chang emphasizes the contrast between elegance and sordidness in her imagery to offer moral judgments. The only difference between Eileen Chang and the leftist writers is that Eileen Chang is not overtly didactic. On the other hand, Eileen Chang is also different from Western practitioners of stream-of-consciousness fiction, for she rejects the approach of stream of consciousness to deal with "weightier moral concerns." These two views of C. T. Hsia on the content of the two best works by Eileen Chang are quite questionable. First of all, "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City" are characterized by their philosophical awareness rather than their historical awareness. In other words, in these early works Eileen Chang demonstrates her genius as a philosopher rather than as a historian. I am making this statement not because I purposely want to be argumentative against C. T. Hsia at today''s conference. Rather, it came from my reading of Eileen Chang a couple of years ago. In 1996, shortly after Eileen Chang died, I pointed out the philosophical characteristics in her early works in a short essay titled "Another Discussion of Eileen Chang," in which I made the following remarks: In this century, Eileen Chang is one of the few philosophical writers to ponder deeply over abstract issues. Consequently, her works are permeated with a profound pessimistic feeling about life and the world. As a writer she is in possession of a unique perception. She sees a wilderness where other people see civilization, the powerlessness of human emotion where other people see emotional strength and possibilities where other people see impossibilities. "Love in a Fallen City" tells us that, instead of making progress, the world is gradually entering a desolate wilderness. Human beings, who dominate the world, are selfish and their behavior is controlled by endless desires that corrupt human nature and cause the collapse of love. These desire will continue to exist until time has run its course and the world has come to its end. Only then can humankind rediscover love and revive the innocence in human nature. What "Love in a Fallen City" shows is precisely how war, which pushes the world to its end, salvages love. Eileen Chang is pessimistic about life, human civilization and the world. To her everything in reality--successes, failures, glories, and humiliations--will turn into nothingness and death in the end. So only nothingness and death are real. Thinking about the vast span between the remote past and the distant future without being able to find a true companion in an endless universe, she cannot help feeling sad and tearful. Her works are shot through with a feeling of desolation and this feeling of desolation is uniquely premised on her pessimistic view of human civilization and human nature. What gives rise to her pessimistic view is a discovery she makes in life about a tragic paradox humankind faces: humankind creates civilization to escape from the wilderness, yet the desires stimulated by civilization push humankind toward another wilderness. Human beings strive to get freedom, but they can never reach this goal. As hostages to the world and to their own desires, they resemble those birds and butterflies painted on screens, for which imprisonment and death are only too real and who fly only in viewers'' imagination. Eileen Chang''s doubts about the meaning of life and her questions about the significance of human existence give her works a remarkable philosophical depth. With its social concern, modern Chinese literature is, in general, focused on condemning the injustices in society, but it does not ask questions about the meaning of human existence. Yet Eileen Chang masterfully describes many human tragedies as she asks these questions.[3] Today I want to clarify my view by saying that what makes Eileen Chang a philosopher and not a historian is her ability to transcend the limits of space (urban areas) and time (history). In order to make my point, I borrow some views from Wang Guowei. According to Wang Guowei, there are two types of works in Chinese literature: one represented by Peach Blossom Fan and the other by Dream of the Red Chamber. He argues that "Peach Blossom Fan is concerned with politics, the nation and history whereas Dream of the Red Chamber is concerned with philosophy, the universe, and literature itself."[4] Similar to Dream of the Red Chamber, Eileen Chang''s works transcend the limits of politics, the nation, and history while remaining concerned with philosophy, the universe, and literature itself. Eileen Chang inherits her style from Dream of the Red Chamber. More important, she inherits from Dream of the Red Chamber an understanding about the dilemmas in human existence and human nature that lurk behind family activities, love relationships, and marriages. In so doing, she consciously or unconsciously demonstrates a concern for the fate of humankind, an everlasting concern that transcends the boundaries of space (Shanghai and Hong Kong) and time (her own era). At first glance, Eileen Chang''s best works, including "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City," describe the details of family activities, love relationships, and marriages that occupy mundane life in places like Shanghai, but they in fact reveal the eternal mysteries in human nature that lie beneath the surface of life, mysteries of human desires for power and money. Human desires have something to do with politics, ethics, and history, but they are not the same as politics, ethics, or history. Specifically, Eileen Chang''s works deal with Shanghai and Hong Kong, but they are not just about Shanghai or Hong Kong, just as they are not just about the 1930s and the 1940s they describe. As powerful motivating forces, human desires exist in reality, yet it is difficult to explain them in logical terms. However, they can be fully portrayed in literature. The success of Eileen Chang''s early works comes precisely from her resistance to the restraints of history and ethics. She demonstrates her skills as a writer in expertly describing the workings of human desires. The conventional view holds Cao Qiqiao, the main character in "The Golden Cangue," to be a terribly bad woman, but this moralistic judgment does not do justice to the story In fact, Qiqiao is a woman full of life and "The Golden Cangue" describes her changes in life. As the saying goes, "when a daughter-in-law becomes a mother-in-law herself after years of suffering at the hands of her mother-in-law, it is hard for her not to be cruel." Qiqiao lives in anguish as a powerless daughter-in-law. Although she is married to a son of a wealthy family, she herself is a daughter of a lowly sesame oil vender, for which she is ridiculed by everyone. To make things worse, her husband is a ne''er-do-well. As she suffers class discrimination and sexual frustration, she represses her desires for years. However, her desires begin to run out of control once she becomes a mother-in-law and gains power. Subsequently, she gives rein to her desires and indulges herself in doing whatever she wants. She toys with her former secret crush (Jize), making him grovel in front of her before pushing him away. She knows what attracts this man is power and money, not her as a person. Subconsciously she is aware that the world is a machine running on power and money. So the golden cangue is a symbol of power and money. An autocrat who refuses to yield to anyone or make any compromise, she sees through everything, especially the golden cangue. The golden cangue harbors the ugliest and dirtiest aspects of the world, but it holds people under its spell and makes them debase themselves willingly. As a social product, Qiqiao derives her desires from a powerful male-centered society. As a result, she represents the desires for power and money in a male-dominated society, just as Grandmother Jia represents all the female rulers in Chinese political history and Ah Q represents all the deficiencies in the national character of the Chinese. What she represents not only exists in China but also in the rest of the world, because it is part of human nature and not limited to modern China. It is therefore more accurate to regard "The Golden Cangue" as a philosophical allegory about a society obsessed with power than to call it a historical record of modern Chinese society. In this allegory, Eileen Chang demonstrates her rare genius with her unsentimental revelation of the human world as an ugly network of power and money, a network in which human beings struggle as two-legged animals wrapped in the trappings of civilization and driven by desires. If we regard Lu Xun''s "Diary of a Madman" as an allegory about the cannibalistic features of traditional Chinese culture, we can regard "The Golden Cangue" as an allegory about people''s self-destructive as well as cannibalistic behavior in the network of power. In "The Golden Cangue," the main character is transformed into an animal driven by desires for power and money, just as the main character in Kafka''s Metamorphosis is transformed into a beetle. Like all other masterpieces in world literature, "The Golden Cangue" conveys a multiplicity of hidden messages about the nature of the world and the nature of humankind, about the absurdity of the world and humankind, and about the unpredictability of fate and the unreliability of love. In its world, notions of truth and falsity, good and evil, cause and effect and right and wrong are irrelevant, just as they are in the remarkable world of Dream of the Red Chamber. As it overcomes the restraints of these notions, it portrays the dilemmas humankind will always face. Unfortunately, Eileen Chang herself did not realize her own genius. So she thought her success had come from her portrayals of ordinary people and harmony, which stands in contradistinction to aggression. (Where can we find harmony among the diabolic conflicts in "The Golden Cangue"?) She also believed that ordinary people represent society in its entirety better than heroes ("My Own Writings"). In fact whether this statement is true or not depends on whether the writer lives in an era of poetry or in an era of prose. According to Hegel, ancient times, in which heroes, ideals, wars, and revolutions served as fundamental symbols, can be called an era of poetry. In such times (ancient Greece for example), heroes of course represented society better than ordinary people. On the other hand, modern society is very prosaic in that it does not have heroes, ideals, or revolutions. In this prosaic environment, ordinary people can indeed represent society better. Eileen Chang did not understand that her success did not come from her skills in portraying ordinary people but from her ability to enter a philosophical, universal, and eternal world as she transcended the boundaries of politics, the nation, and history. In other words, she is able to move from the world of Peach Blossom Fan to the world of Dream of the Red Chamber. It is precisely the philosophical, universal, and literary elements in "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City" that make them continue to attract people''s attention today. What these works describe is the way humankind lives and human nature exists throughout history, subject matter unrestrained by politics, the nation and history, or by moral standards. At first glance "The Golden Cangue" supports the notion of retribution, since selfishness, cold-heartedness, and domestic tyranny all get their just deserts and even Qiqiao''s children suffer because of her behavior. So in that sense it touches some moral issues. However, at a deeper level it deals with irresistible human desires and the way human desires subtly control people''s fate. Here Walter Benjamin''s comment on Goethe''s novella "Elective Affinities" can shed some light for us. "Elective Affinities" describes an extramarital affair. In this novella, the male protagonist Eduard falls in love with his wife''s niece Ottilie and, in the meantime, his wife Charlotte falls for a friend of his, a captain. As they pursue sexual gratification, their son is drowned in an accident. The death shocks everyone. Burdened by a guilty conscience, Ottilie commits suicide. Eduard also dies in sorrow. Although Charlotte and the captain manage to live on, they always feel shadowed by death and, no matter how hard they try, they remain unable to overcome their guilty feelings. Many critics argue that in this work Goethe emphasizes the sanctity of marriage and the immorality of extramarital affairs. Instead of passing another moral judgment, Benjamin focuses his attention on the irresistibility of fate reflected in this story about an extramarital affair. He argues that the subject matter of "Elective Affinities" is not marriage, because from the very beginning the ethical force of marriage begins to recede like a wave receding from a beach and, in the end, such a force is nowhere to be seen. In this work, marriage is neither an ethical issue nor a social issue. Moreover, it has even less to do with the behavioral pattern of the bourgeoisie. As the marriage system disintegrates, all the elements in human nature begin to show. As a result, myth remains the core of the work. In Benjamin''s view, the tragedies experienced by the characters in "Elective Affinities" are neither moral tragedies nor historical tragedies. Instead, they are mysterious philosophical and universal tragedies, tragedies human beings cannot control or resist. That is what he means by the word "myth." If we read "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City" from Benjamin''s point of view, we can see their rich philosophical connotations. 3 I do not like to rank writers when dealing with the history of literature. Granted, critics can evaluate the different qualities of different writers, but it is difficult to compare some outstanding writers qualitatively, because each has his or her own unique characteristics. For instance, whom should we vote for if we are supposed to choose the most outstanding writer from among Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Shen Congwen, Li Jieren, and Xiao Hong? In dealing with this problem, I am inclined to agree with Hugo that critics should refrain from comparing master writers because they are equally outstanding. If forced to make such a choice, however, I could certainly choose between Lu Xun and Eileen Chang and, in the end, vote for Lu Xun. The reason for my choice is that Lu Xun put his genius to full use while Eileen Chang did not. A genius can only display his/her brilliance when all his/her talents are fully utilized. Unfortunately, Eileen Chang abandoned her unique aesthetic approach right after reaching the peak of her career. This tragic turn put an end to the most outstanding phase of her career and made her a genius who failed to tap all her potential. In twentieth-century China, only two writers had a genuine sense of despair: Lu Xun and Eileen Chang. When despairing, Lu Xun tried to overcome his despair and, as a result, his writings are characterized by anger and frustration; whereas Eileen Chang just felt despair and, as a result, her works are characterized by a feeling of desolation. Lu Xun saw through life, but he also confronted life and struggled hard with it, so his works display a masculine sublimity; whereas Eileen Chang could see through life but did not have the courage to face it. As a result of her constant attempts to escape into the details of mundane life, her works display a unique feminine sensibility. Although these two writers portray the existential and mental state of the Chinese people in masterful yet different ways, Lu Xun obviously goes much further than Eileen Chang in his spiritual exploration. Eileen Chang''s tragedy began with "Xiao Ai" (1950) and Tender Age (Shiba chun, 1951), two works written at a time when China was going through a political transition. Compared with "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City," "Xiao Ai" and Tender Age can only be considered second- or third-rate works. Yet the beginning parts of these works still demonstrate Eileen Chang''s brilliance. In "Xiao Ai," Eileen Chang manages to describe the suffering of those women living at the bottom of Chinese society in a particularly moving manner. Nonetheless, the plotlines, especially the endings, of these two works obviously try to meet a political demand. Since they do not falsify life, it is hard to say whether the author made such attempts against her conscience, yet it is undeniable that these attempts indicate the dilemmas Eileen Chang faced as a writer who wanted to have nothing to do with revolution. "Xiao Ai" is an important work in Eileen Chang''s career in that it indicates the uncertainties in her political and ideological stand as well as her failure to adhere to the direction she had adopted early in her career. In her article "My Own Writings" (written in December 1944), Eileen Chang declares that "the method I use is the method of subtle comparison because I do not like the classical method of sharp contrast between good and evil or flesh and soul." However, while writing "Xiao Ai" she had to give up this method and adopt the method she disliked--namely, the method that emphasized the sharp conflict between good and evil. In 1950, the recent founding of the People''s Republic of China must have had a huge impact on Eileen Chang''s mind. To show her support for the new government and the new era, she created Xiao Ai as a character whose life spans both the old society and the new society, a character who becomes a maidservant at the age of nine and is raped and made pregnant by her master (petty bureaucrat Xi Jingfan) at the age of fourteen before she is injured by the master''s concubine when the latter kicks her and causes a miscarriage. Eileen Chang harshly refers to the old society as a "cannibalistic society" and also curses those in power in the old society as "the Jiang bandits." Reading about Xiao Ai''s oppression, humiliation, and suffering in the old society, one cannot help feel angry. In addition to gaining an understanding of the old society from her own personal experiences, Xiao Ai also gets to know the nature of the old society from other maidservants'' even worse tragedies. Having suffered enough in the Xi household, she wants to run away but cannot find a better place because oppression exists everywhere in the old society. Eileen Chang specifically mentions the story about another maidservant in the Xi household and Xiao Ai''s reaction to that story: In the past, Third Mistress had a maidservant, a smart girl named Lianxi who was bought together with Xiao Ai and who was a few years older than her. Lianxi''s later escape left a deep impression on Xiao Ai, still young at the time. Then Xiao Ai heard that someone ran into Lianxi in the street and found out she had become a streetwalker. It was said that she met a bad guy who lied to her and sold her under the pretext of sending her to work in a factory. When Xiao Ai heard the story, she felt sad, but at the same time she also gained a better understanding of the cannibalistic society. Just as Xiao Ai is driven to despair, she meets by chance Jinkui, a typesetter working in a printing house, and falls in love. She complains to Jinkui that after her parents sold her everyone has treated her as a worthless animal. Jinkui, though, tries to inspire her class consciousness by telling her that the same thing has happened throughout society. We then read the following passage: As he listened, Jinkui fell silent for a while before he said, "I don''t think you can blame your parents. They must have been forced to do what they had to do. Since you have grown up in the Xi household, of course you don''t understand the situation in the countryside." He then told her how peasants were exploited and how they starved even when they had a good harvest and how they had no choice but to sell their children to pay back the high-interest loans they had to take out when they had a poor harvest and failed to pay their rent on time. After Xiao Ai and Jinkui get married they continue to live a hard life in the old society before they finally welcome the arrival of the new society. Eileen Chang describes the transition with the following words: It was the last spring in which the Jiang bandits still controlled Shanghai. In May the city was liberated. . . . After liberation, Jinkui threw himself into study with all his enthusiasm. Just as he did right after he met Xiao Ai, he always carried a book with him wherever he went. He would read on the trolley on his way to the printing house and on his way home. At home he would often explain "new democracy" and the history of social development to Xiao Ai and others. Xiao Ai liked to listen to his discussions. To her, theoretical talk was a kind of decoration for men, so she always smiled contentedly as he talked, without trying too hard to figure out what he meant. At first, what she felt most keenly was that prices had been stabilized and life had become peaceful. However, since human beings were forgetful animals, not long after starting this good life, she gradually forgot the nightmarish past. In "Xiao Ai," Eileen Chang resorts to clear-cut political and moral judgments: the old society was cannibalistic, while the new society saves people; the old society was a nightmare, while the new society is brimming with light; in the past, people were exploited, but now they are liberated; and the old society was evil, while the new society is good, with the Jiang bandits as the source of all evils. As a witness, Xiao Ai, with all her wounds, reminds people that they should not become "forgetful animals" that fail to keep in mind the nightmarish cannibalistic old society and how much the working classes had suffered in the past. "Xiao Ai" is written in an unsentimental style, but its condemnation of the old society is very harsh and, as a result, it can be seen as a classic text for class education and for contrasting past misery with present happiness. In "Xiao Ai," Eileen Chang does not distort reality, and we, for our part, should not pass any judgment on her moral and political judgments. But one thing is clear in the political orientation of this work: Eileen Chang is no longer a writer in search of eternal literary and aesthetic values. Given the politicization of this 1950 work, Love in Redland (written in 1954 in Hong Kong) is just a further development with an entirely different political direction. What I want to show with my detailed discussion of "Xiao Ai" is that Eileen Chang''s genius was ruined by historical changes, not by the United States Information Agency. The new era no longer provided a refuge for any writer who wanted to transcend the times. Whether she lived in Shanghai or Hong Kong, Eileen Chang was forced to deny her old self and, as a result, a tragedy took place in her career. In the middle of the twentieth century, Eileen Chang and Ding Ling, two outstanding female writers, experienced the same tragedy in entirely different political situations. This shared tragedy was a typical tragedy of aesthetics rather than a tragedy of politics. Ding Ling was a talented writer who emerged on the literary scene after the May Fourth movement with outstanding works such as "The Diary of Miss Sophia" and "When I Was in Hsia Village." Eventually, however, she wrote The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River to carry out an order and to flesh out the policies of the Land Reform movement. Eileen Chang had an entirely different political stand, yet in her career, from the writing of "The Golden Cangue" and to the writing of Love in Redland, she followed the same tragic path. In spite of their opposite political standpoints, Eileen Chang and Ding Ling shared the same motivation and the same way of writing when they wrote about the "Redland" and the "Red Area," respectively. Driven by political considerations, they both used fiction as a political tool and tried to sound a clarion call for their times. This interesting phenomenon in the history of modern Chinese literature can be regarded as the same tragedy played out by two different writers from opposite political directions. In "The Diary of Miss Sophia," Ding Ling courageously describes the physical needs and desires of women and, in so doing, reveals that, although the May Fourth movement had brought liberation for Chinese women, it had failed to solve their real problems. In this work, which established the author''s reputation, Ding Ling clearly adopts a feminist approach. She not only calls attention to social issues related to women but also explores the psychological world of women and portrays women''s complicated interactions with tradition and modernity and their bodily desires. As it broke new ground in both social purpose and writing style, it became, deservedly, an outstanding work of the May Fourth era. Ding Ling''s political stand later changed the direction of her writings, yet for a while she did not give up her exploration of the fate of women. The conflict between her political stand and her feminist view is most intensely displayed in "When I Was in Hsia Village," a story she wrote in Yan''an before the Rectification Campaign. In this story, the "I" narrator bears a strong resemblance to the author. Sent to a village by the political department, the "I" narrator meets a girl named Zhenzhen. After being raped by Japanese soldiers, Zhenzhen worked as a comfort woman and, driven by her yearnings for a better future, spied for the Communists at the same time. In David Wang''s view, Zhenzhen''s body is exploited by both the Japanese and the Communists.[5] When she returns to her village with venereal disease, Zhenzhen is looked down upon by the ignorant villagers. On the other hand, the "I" narrator is full of sympathy for Zhenzhen''s suffering and, with her sympathy for a suffering woman, she stands in subtle contrast to the "masses." At the end of the story, the headstrong Zhenzhen rejects her boyfriend''s marriage proposal and decides to go to Yan''an for medical treatment. For all its political intentions, this story, with its attention to the fate of women, casts some doubt upon Communist propaganda, since it points out that even in the "land of light" women''s happiness is still not guaranteed. As a work that is at once feminist and political, this story, together with Ding Ling''s article "Thoughts on March Eighth," was later criticized and caused a big controversy. Unfortunately, after the Rectification Campaign, her voice as an individualist and feminist became weaker and weaker and it was completely lost when she wrote The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River in 1948. In The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River, a novel that won second place in the 1951 Stalin Prize for Literature and was praised as "artistically representing unprecedented changes in the Chinese countryside," all the characters, positive and negative, are mere political signs. Heini, a female character, retains some traces of life, but in the end these traces are erased because of their incompatibility with the dominant voice in the novel. The journey from Sophia to Zhenzhen and finally to Heini shows that eventually Ding Ling''s individuality was completely replaced by an ideology. To discuss the culmination of this journey in The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River, Lin Gang and I wrote "The Political Approach in Modern Chinese Fiction" and "The End of the General Trend of Revolutionary Literature in Twentieth-Century China."[6] The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River later became a model novel in mainland China, but it also marked Ding Ling''s downfall as a writer. In comparison, Eileen Chang''s experience was more tragic. Ding Ling, after all, had tried hard to follow the dominant trend of her time. "The Diary of Miss Sophia," for example, reflected a historical trend in spite of its questions about women''s liberation. As the trend of revolution surged forth in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, she threw away all her doubts and made up her mind to sacrifice art for revolution. For her that was a logical move. Eileen Chang, by contrast, did not try to catch up with the times. Her emergence on the literary scene and the success of her early works came from her attempt to resist the trend of the time. In the 1930s and the 1940s, she intentionally kept herself away from leftist literature, the dominant trend on the literary scene in China. Built on the basis of individuality and a unique aesthetic approach, her success was a result of rejecting the historical trend, as she notes in the following remarks from "My Own Writing": In this way, I try to describe how humankind has lived throughout history so that I can provide a lesson for the present. I do not know if I have succeeded in carrying out my plan. Generally speaking, I do not have the ability to write anything that can be called a "monument to its time." Neither will I try to write such a work, since it seems that the source materials for such a work are still too scarce. Focused only on the small matters among men and women, my works have nothing to do with war or revolution. I believe human beings are more innocent and freer in love than in war or revolution. Because of their nature, war and revolution often need intelligence more urgently than they need emotion. Consequently, those works about war or revolution often fail because their artistic elements are overwhelmed by practical considerations. In contrast to the freedom in love, coercion characterizes war and in revolution people often force themselves to participate. The above statement, made in December 1944, shows how clearheaded Eileen was at the time. She tells her readers that: (1) she wrote about things that exist throughout history, namely, eternal subjects that refuse to be monuments to their times because they transcend their specific historical periods (a clear indication that Eileen Chang''s early works are marked not by their "historical awareness" but by their resistance to historical awareness; in other words, they are marked not by an awareness of a specific historical period but by an awareness of eternity); and (2) this standpoint enabled her to free herself from the restraints of weighty, fashionable subjects such as war and revolution and to choose to write about things that exist eternally, things such as the love between a man and a woman. At that time, it took a strong belief in art and strength in character to keep a distance from war and revolution and to reject the historical trend and fashionable subjects. As we reread the early works Eileen Chang wrote in Shanghai, we realize that she indeed keeps a distance from politics. Without making any moral judgment on society, life, or the characters, these works have neither heroes nor villains. Their characters are all ordinary people who struggle to exist. As they make calculations in their own interest, they become rather worldly. As for the female characters in these works, they are often selfish women living in a mundane world, with tricks up their sleeves to deal with the entanglements of love. Feeling lost in a fast-changing society, these women are poles apart from the female revolutionaries. They never want to change society. All they manage to do is to carefully struggle with the details of life. As Eileen Chang says in her essay "Changing Clothes": "Unable to improve their social environment, people can only create their bodily environments--namely, clothes, since we all live in our clothes." As a result, for these women, clothing becomes a refuge where they are sheltered from the hardships in life and can take a break. With this statement about her stand as a writer (written in 1944 in "My Own Writings") in mind, we are surprised to find that ten years later, as she wrote Love in Redland in Hong Kong, Eileen Chang had become an entirely different writer. Instead of writing about subjects that exist throughout history, she wrote about the tremendous social changes of the time. Instead of avoiding war and revolution, she focused her attention exclusively on war and revolution. Instead of resisting the dominant historical trend, she embraced it, followed it, and tried to reflect it in her novel. Both Rice-sprout Song and Love in Redland were works made to order under financial pressure. Eileen Chang went to Hong Kong in 1952 and stayed there for three years. During her stay, she worked as a writer for the United States Information Agency, so the two novels she wrote in that capacity were bound to follow the anti-Communist standpoint adopted by the U. S. government. Dealing with the most earthshaking events in post-1949 China, events such as the Land Reform movement in the countryside, the Three-Antis Campaign in the urban areas, and the Korean War, they displayed a clearly anti-Communist standpoint. In his interesting interpretation of these two novels, David Wang has argued that behind Eileen Chang''s political stand one can still detect her own style. For example, in Rice-sprout Song, a novel dealing with hunger, the female character Yuexiang does not lose as much femininity as do Lu Xun''s Xianglin''s Wife or Lu Ling''s Guo Su''e. Instead of becoming a mere sign of suffering, as Xianglin''s Wife and Guo Su''e do, Yuexiang remains a woman full of life. Indeed, Rice-sprout Song, with its remarkable depiction of hunger, is more readable than Love in Redland. In contrast, in Love in Redland political elements completely overwhelm artistic elements. Consequently, even the descriptions of love in this novel are full of political connotations. The promiscuous and calculating female character Ge Shan, for instance, is meant to be a parody of the innocent female revolutionary. As a result, Ge Shan turns into an anti-Communist political sign in the novel, a carrier of a male-centered ideology. To make things worse, Love in Redland ends with excessively overt anti-Communist propaganda, as it describes how the main character, Liu Quan, after he goes to Korea as a Communist soldier to run away from a failed relationship with a girlfriend and then gets captured on the battleground, decides not to "seek freedom" in Taiwan but to go back to China to fight Communism. As Liu Quan switches from one political camp to another, he loses the value he has as an individual human being and, with his story at the center, the whole novel becomes a political allegory. Isn''t it a tragedy that a writer who had remained intent on writing about eternal human nature and achieved her success by resisting the dominant political trend of her time ended up using her fiction as political propaganda? It can be said that as she wrote Love in Redland Eileen Chang had lost her aesthetic, artistic direction, because what she wrote by order was precisely what she had been opposed to ten years earlier. So Love in Redland marks an unfortunate deviation in her career as a literary genius. In an article I wrote in 1996, I use the following words to describe Eileen Chang''s tragedy: Eileen Chang''s early works are more interesting than those she wrote later in her career. It is a remarkable phenomenon that she reached the peak of her career soon after she began writing as a young writer. Unfortunately, she did not fully recognize the significance of her unique artistic approach and, as she wrote Love in Redland and Rice-sprout Song, she soon stopped pursuing her goal and stopped thinking about life and the universe in an unsentimental, philosophical manner. Her early works excel in ruminations on eternal questions and stay away from contemporary issues. In contrast, political considerations replace the aesthetic concerns and philosophical reflections on eternal, universal questions of her later works. Instead of using her own unique imagery to portray the familiar urban areas, she began to use popular symbols to describe the unfamiliar countryside. In the meantime, instead of conducting subtle aesthetic exploration of her characters'' minds and souls, she chose to illustrate their personalities and fates according to foregone conclusions. In short, she gave up her transcendental aesthetic standpoint to embrace a vulgar standpoint, which stunted her development as a precocious writer and prevented her from becoming a first-rate master.[7] I like Eileen Chang''s works, but I do not want to create a myth about her. It took me more than ten years to free myself from the myth of Lu Xun as a vengeful fighter that I had once believed in. I do not want to be seduced by another myth. Any genius has his/her own flaws. I can understand Eileen Chang''s narcissism, masochism, worldliness, and her final self-seclusion, but I do not admire these traits. Just as I cannot accept Lu Xun''s recalcitrance, I cannot accept Eileen Chang''s vulgarity and cynicism. Part II: The Biases in C. T. Hsia''s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction--A Response to C. T. Hsia''s Response 4 Right after I made a speech at the international conference "Eileen Chang and Modern Literature in Chinese" at Lingnan University in Hong Kong (Part One of the present article), C. T. Hsia made some comments on my speech. His comments centered on two points: (1) A comparison between Eileen Chang and Lu Xun. C. T. Hsia believed that Lu Xun''s failure was bigger than Eileen Chang''s. Eileen Chang failed to utilize her talent because she had to change her direction to make a living. However, it was improper for Lu Xun to let the League of Left-Wing Writers take advantage of him and to serve as the leader of leftist writers. He went as far as calling Lu Xun a "running dog for the Communists" in an interview with a reporter from Asia Weekly after the conference. He said: Lu Xun was also a writer who failed to put his talent to full use. We are justified to say that in terms of personal character and the quality of their works Lu Xun was not as good as Eileen Chang. When he was in Peking, Lu Xun, like Hu Shi, was a decent man of letters. But later he surrendered to the Communists and became the leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers. You might regard him as a great writer. But if you change your point of view you can also see him as a running dog.[8] C. T. Hsia believed that "Eileen Chang was the most dignified Chinese person of the last few decades" and that "her anti-Communist stand came from her support for humanism, justice, and her sympathy for the people. A person often makes compromises when he/she is in a difficult situation. . . . Probably because of the financial difficulties she had when she was in Hong Kong, Eileen Chang received some support from the United States Information Agency when she wrote Love in Redland according to a ''predetermined outline.'' For that she would always feel unhappy. Yet the novel is still an outstanding work. In comparison, Lu Xun''s compromise was worse. Among the liberal men of letters of the time, including Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Xu Zhimo, Ye Gongchao, and Chen Yuan, Lu Xun was the only one who made this compromise." C. T. Hsia also criticized me by saying that "Mr. Liu seems to imply that male writers are always superior to female writers since he said that as a man Lu Xun was a better writer than Eileen Chang." [9] (2) A comparison between Eileen Chang and Ding Ling. In his comments, C. T. Hsia faulted me for equating Eileen Chang''s tragedy with Ding Ling''s tragedy. He said that "Ding Ling is a different kind of writer. None of her works is good. Her style, for example, the style of "The Diary of Miss Sophia," is terrible. With such a clumsy style, Ding Ling really does not amount to anything." [10] I did not expect that C. T. Hsia would be so harsh in his criticism of Lu Xun and Ding Ling. C. T. Hsia has proved that he is even more biased against leftist writers such as Lu Xun and Ding Ling than he was more than forty years ago, when he wrote A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. Back then, instead of simply dismissing Ding Ling out of hand, as he does now, he admitted that Ding Ling adhered to her own beliefs early in her career and that her representative work "The Diary of Miss Sophia" had its own value. In Chapter 11 of his book, titled "Communist Fiction, I," we see the following comments on Ding Ling: Unlike Chiang Kuang-tz''u, Ting Ling began her career as a highly personal author rather than a dedicated propagandist. In her first phase (1926-29) she was primarily interested in probing the meaning of life in unabashedly feminine and autobiographical terms: the stories in her first collection, In the Darkness (1928), notably "Meng K''o" and "The Diary of Miss Sophia," all flaunt the sexual restiveness and impotent fury of a warm-hearted girl in the sinister powers of the city. Apparently lonely and confused, Ting Ling pours all her resentments and exasperations in the diary mold of her fiction. (262-63) This statement is exactly the same as the one I made about Ding Ling''s tragedy of giving up her early personal approach. It contradicts the statements that "none of Ding Ling''s works is good" and that "Ding Ling really does not amount to anything." While confirming the value of Ding Ling''s early works, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction treats Ding Ling''s joining the Communist Party in 1931 as a watershed and sees Ding Ling''s post-1931 works as "trite propaganda," completely disregarding good works such as "When I Was in Hsia Village." As can be seen in the statements I have made so far, I am also critical of the class hatred and the vindictiveness in Ding Ling''s The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River. However, I do not want to simply dismiss Ding Ling as a "Communist writer" without any analysis. A writer should have his/her freedom to choose his/her political stand. To dismiss a writer because of his/her political stand is not literary criticism but political criticism. I am critical of The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River and Love in Redland not because of their "pro-Communist" or "anti-Communist" political viewpoints but because of their failure to keep an aesthetic distance in the exploration of their subject matter and the resultant loss of aesthetic sensibility as they use a political approach rather than an aesthetic one to deal with their subject matter. Whether or not a writer joins the Communist Party does not determine his/her success or failure as a writer. Sh髄okhov, a Communist writer, wrote And Quiet Flows the Don and Virgin Soil Upturned, but they are universally acknowledged masterpieces. That is because Sh髄okhov portrays war and revolution from a transcendental viewpoint, a viewpoint drastically different from the vulgar viewpoints in The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River and Love in Redland (two novels that discover their arch villains in the landlord class and the Communist Party, respectively). C. T. Hsia''s judgments on Ding Ling and Lu Xun (and his judgment on Zhao Shuli, which I discuss below) indicate a determinist bias: a writer is certainly a failed writer if he/she leans toward Communism. It is from this na飗e deterministic viewpoint that C. T. Hsia evaluates Lu Xun. As a result, he completely overlooks the criticism of the collective unconscious of the Chinese (the national character of the Chinese, in other words) that Lu Xun engaged in throughout his life. He also fails to realize that this criticism remained the same after Lu Xun joined the League of Left-Wing Writers. Lu Xun even saw the weaknesses of the national character of the Chinese in some Communists (for instance, the so-called "four gentlemen"). From the day he wrote "Diary of a Madman" to his death, Lu Xun spent about twenty years exploring the soul of the Chinese and trying to find a cure for the spiritual flaws of the nation. At no time in his writing career did he ever stop his exploration or give up his tenacious struggle against the feeling of despair. In other words, he never failed to fully utilize his talent. Summarizing the agonies the Chinese nation went through during its transition from tradition to modernity, the corpus of his works can be seen as an all-inclusive symbol of such agonies. In terms of spiritual richness and depth, no other writer can match Lu Xun, and Eileen Chang is no exception. To be more exact, Eileen Chang''s works fall far short of Lu Xun''s works in spiritual depth, and the distance between the two resembles the distance between Bunin and Tolstoy rather than the distance between Bunin and Chekhov. Elegant and philosophical, Bunin''s works have an air of nobility and are characterized by pathos, but they fall far short of Tolstoy''s works in spiritual richness and depth. Here we are dealing with the issue of criteria in literary criticism. In evaluating a literary work, a critic should examine the spiritual content and depth of the work in addition to its style. In a speech titled "May Fourth and Fin de Si鑓le Literature" delivered at Lingnan University in the spring of 1999, Bai Xianyong made an argument that in the twentieth century China had produced no great writers--even Lu Xun could not be included in that rank.[11] He also argued that Eileen Chang was the most accomplished writer, because her style was the most elegant. What was the criterion for Bai Xianyong''s judgments? He offered the following explanation: "With regard to a writer''s accomplishments, we should realize that literature is, after all, an art of language. In terms of content, the influence of contemporary politics and society might give rise to social awareness and revolutionary awareness in literature. These things might seem to be very important, but in the final analysis literature is an art for which the use of language is very important."[12] For all my admiration for Bai Xianyong and appreciation of his accomplishments as a writer, I criticized his criterion in the following statement in a short article "A Discussion with Professor Bai Xianyong," which I published right after his speech: Bai Xianyong believes that Eileen Chang''s elegant style makes her the most accomplished writer. In making this assertion, Bai Xianyong regards the use of language as the ultimate reality in literature and linguistic skill as the ultimate criterion for the evaluation of literature. In so doing, he refuses to acknowledge that spiritual content is also part of the ultimate reality in literature and one of the ultimate criteria for judging the quality of literature. It was certainly wrong for mainland Chinese critics in the past to regard social awareness and revolutionary awareness as the most important elements in literature. However, it is essential for outstanding literary works to have rich spiritual content (including psychological content, concern for its era and for humanity, and aesthetic content). Tao Yuanming''s linguistic style is not necessarily the most beautiful, but his poems stand out for their unique yearnings for a life uncontaminated by a vulgar world. As stylists, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky probably do not match Turgenev, but their works, rich in spiritual content, surpass Turgenev''s works and became unparalleled masterpieces. Could these two masters'' works still remain great works if they only had meager spiritual content?[13] Even if we limit our attention to the issue of style, we have to say that Lu Xun''s style is more elegant, colorful, and adept than Eileen Chang''s. A pioneer in twentieth-century Chinese literature, Lu Xun was the first writer to use vernacular Chinese to write fiction and won instant success with "Diary of a Madman." Indeed, he was the first experimenter in modern Chinese fiction, just like the legendary hero who courageously ate a crab before anyone else. Being the first to conduct an experiment is hard, but, surprisingly, Lu Xun''s style was already very mature when he began his experiment, a style that would become uniquely personal. Concise and humorous, Lu Xun''s highly personalized style adopts the form of modern vernacular Chinese, yet it still retains the flavor of classical Chinese. What is more remarkable is that Lu Xun experimented with different styles and the style of his essays is especially peerless. Liang Qichao achieved an enduring success when he called for a revolution in fiction and changed people''s habit of regarding poetry as the mainstream of Chinese literature and fiction and drama as secondary branches. But as time went on critics in China went to another extreme, an extreme of "Eurocentrism," and forgot the value of prose, including Lu Xun''s essays. As he devoted his life to the writing of essays and was fully aware of the artistic value of essays, Lu Xun produced masterpieces with high artistic value, such as those in Wild Grass and Morning Flowers Plucked at Dusk. In contrast, Eileen Chang only took essay writing as a sideline, as Wang Anyi has pointed out in her comments on Eileen Chang''s essays. Consequently, her essays do not match Lu Xun''s essays in artistic value. In "A Miracle and a Tragedy in Chinese Literature," an article I wrote two or three months ago for the one hundred and twentieth anniversary of Lu Xun''s birth, I argued that Lu Xun was a miracle. To me the miracle of Lu Xun lay first of all in the maturity and brilliance he demonstrated in his style as he began to write in a new way. C. T. Hsia''s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction obviously shows many biases in its evaluation of Lu Xun. Its treatment of The True Story of Ah Q is an example. The True Story of Ah Q is the best work in modern Chinese fiction in the eyes of all literary historians, and scholars have never stopped discussing the spiritual content of this work. That a novella could so incisively describe the collective unconscious of the Chinese is just a miracle. With China''s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, Chinese intellectuals and some foreign Sinologists began exploring the problems in Chinese people''s national character, but they could not pinpoint them in spite of their realization of their existence. Lu Xun, however, managed to capture the unhealthy collective unconscious of the Chinese with his creation of Ah Q as a reflection of the nation. In particular, his portrayal of Ah Q''s "spiritual victories" encapsulated the numb soul of the Chinese. An expression both of a significant intellectual discovery and of a significant artistic approach, Lu Xun''s work became an enduring contribution to Chinese literature. It was very difficult to discover and capture the core of the flaws in the national character; it was also very difficult to describe it artistically. Yet Lu Xun overcame both difficulties and succeeded in coming up with an insightful and vivid portrayal. C. T. Hsia, however, dismisses this marvelous work with the following sarcastic remarks: The major work in The Outcry is, of course, "The True Story of Ah Q," the only modern Chinese story to have attained an international reputation. But as a work of art it has surely been overpraised: it is mechanical in structure and facetious in tone. The circumstances of its composition may help explain these defects. Lu Hs黱 had agreed to write a humor serial for the literary supplement of the Peking Morning Gazette (Ch''en Pao), providing in each issue a comic episode illustrative of the character of Ah Q. When eventually the assignment proved irksome, Lu Hs黱 changed his original plan and thrust upon his hero a tragic destiny. But he apparently never bothered to correct the resultant incongruity of tone in his story. (37) C. T. Hsia is excessively harsh when he describes the organic structure of the story as "mechanical," the commonly acknowledged humor in the story as "facetious," and calls the tragic ending that defies the convention of happy ending "incongruity in tone." He even dislikes the name Ah Q, saying that "the name was shortened to Ah Q after the author facetiously confessed to his inability to determine which Chinese character should be adopted to designate the sound ''quei.''" Obviously C. T. Hsia''s attitude is an emotional one, an attitude stemming from the belief that Lu Xun was a Communist writer. At the very beginning of the chapter on Lu Xun (Chapter 2) in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, we see the following political verdict: The earliest practitioner of Western-style fiction, Lu Hs黱 has also been generally regarded as the greatest modern Chinese writer. During the last six years of his life he was the prominent cultural hero to a large public nurtured on leftist opinions; since his death in 1936, his fame has turned positively legendary. The immediate posthumous publication of his twenty-volume Complete Works was an unprecedented literary event in modern China, but even more impressive has been the unabated growth of a Lu Hs黱 literature: memoirs and biographies, studies of his works and ideas, and countless magazine articles commemorating the anniversary of his death for over the past two decades. No other modern Chinese writer has received comparable adulation. This adulation, of course, was a Communist enterprise. During the period of the Communist struggle for power, Lu Hs黱 was immensely useful as the beloved spokesman for the cause of antigovernment patriotism. Even Mao Tse-tung, rarely generous in his appraisal of his Chinese contemporaries, felt justified in paying this author the highest tribute in The New Democracy (1940). (28) During his lifetime, Lu Xun indeed showed sympathy for the Communist revolution in China and pinned his hopes on it. After he died, he was indeed used as a pawn (especially during the Cultural Revolution) by different political forces in their struggles for power. This is Lu Xun''s tragedy. However, a writer should only take responsibility for the artistic creation of his/her own works and should not, and cannot, take responsibility for the unexpected aftermaths of his/her works. The value of a literary work is different from its social effects, just as the Bible is different from the Inquisition in the Middle Ages and, consequently, Jesus should not take responsibility for the persecution of heresy. A serious literary history should abide by literary and aesthetic standards and provide fair-minded evaluations of literary works. It should acknowledge the existence of literature as an art and should not be swayed by a writer''s political standpoint in its evaluation of the writer''s works. Unfortunately, C. T. Hsia apparently abides by a set of political standards in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. As he criticizes mainland Chinese critics for using ideological principles to dismiss a group of writers, he himself is trapped by a different set of ideological principles. Politically he separates writers into "Communist writers" and "non-Communist writers," which impairs his artistic evaluations. He tries his best to elevate non-Communist writers, and he also goes to extremes in his mockery of Communist writers. Lu Xun and Ding Ling have the misfortune of being defined as Communist writers and dismissed. Similarly, other writers defined as Communist writers are mocked mercilessly. Of all the mocked writers, Zhao Shuli suffers the most. C. T. Hsia even uses words such as "clumsy" and "clownish," inappropriate for a literary critic, in his comments on Zhao Shuli: It is almost impossible to discover any merit in Chao Shuli''s early stories, unless one takes as positive virtues their facetious tone (which passes for humor) and their colloquial style (which makes the stories somewhat more enjoyable when read aloud). As a matter of fact, "The Marriage of Hsiao Erh-hei" and "The Verses of Li Yu-ts''ai," which first prompted Chou Yang''s glowing praise of their author, are about two of the feeblest stories ever to have been thrust upon public attention. . . . Chao Shu-li''s clumsy and clownish style is utterly incompetent to serve the purposes of narration, and his so-called new subject matter is merely a rehash of the familiar themes of antifeudalism and Communist benevolence. (482) Zhao Shuli is certainly not beyond reproach and critics will certainly continue to debate the value of his works. I, for example, have written some articles about Zhao Shuli in which I acknowledge his success and, at the same time, criticize him for unnatural characterization in The Changes in Li Village. However, it is hard for one to accept C. T. Hsia''s condescending, sarcastic attitude toward Zhao Shuli and his insulting description of Zhao Shuli as a writer with a "clumsy and clownish style." A serious literary critic should neither overpraise any writer willfully nor belittle any writer willfully. In other words, a serious critic should not exaggerate a writer''s strengths or weaknesses. As a result of his condescending attitude, C. T. Hsia''s comments on Zhao Shuli are obviously lacking in fairness and seriousness. An unbiased reading of Zhao Shuli''s works will show that C. T. Hsia''s comments are wide of the truth. Is it true that Zhao Shuli''s works are among the "feeblest stories" and that his style is "clumsy and clownish"? Probably not. In a speech delivered at Yale and Harvard in 1987, the late well-known Chinese writer Wang Zengqi used the following words to describe Zhao Shuli''s style: Aside from the literati culture there is a popular, oral culture. Some writers did not have the opportunity to receive a good education. During times of war, some writers'' educations were interrupted. Some, such as Zhao Shuli and Li Ji, came from peasant backgrounds and were very familiar with oral literature. Zhao Shuli was a talented peasant writer who could stage a performance at a temple fair all by himself, singing, performing, and mimicking the tune of the trumpet and the sound of the gong without making any mistake. His fiction was deeply influenced by popular drama and traditional storytelling. (Zhao Shuli was also a very decent person who died in the Cultural Revolution. I still miss him very much.)[14] Wang Zengqi was Shen Congwen''s most outstanding student and a highly accomplished writer. Twenty years after Zhao Shuli''s death he still admired him, missed him greatly, and called him a "very decent person." I believe that, like Wang Zengqi, many Chinese writers and critics still miss Zhao Shuli and consider him an upright, intelligent, and dignified writer. The title of Wang Zengqi''s speech at Yale and Harvard was "The Issue of Language in Chinese Literature." As he dewith this issue, he praised Lu Xun''s style as the best example of literary language and Zhao Shuli''s style as the best example of popular language. Wang Zengqi''s view represents a consensus among those writers and scholars who truly understand fiction. It is precisely because of Zhao Shuli''s unique, lively style that his works are still admired by many Chinese writers. After May Fourth literature emerged on the literary scene, many works were written about peasants and the countryside. Lu Xun and Jian Xian''ai represent this trend. However, these writers looked at the peasants and wrote about them from the intellectual''s point of view. In addition, they also used the intellectual''s language in their works. Zhao Shuli caused a significant change--namely, he began to look at the peasants from the peasant''s point of view and to describe the peasants with their language. As a result, his style became devoid of the triteness in the language of the intellectual and, as a lively, down-to-earth style, it breathed new life into literature. In world literature, it is hard to find another writer who has created such authentic peasant literature with such a refreshing peasant style. Given that some young readers might not be very familiar with Zhao Shuli''s works, let us take a look at his style in "Young Blacky Gets Married" (The Marriage of Hsaio Erh-hei), a style praised by Zhou Yang and denigrated by C. T. Hsia, to see whether it is truly "clumsy and clownish." Zhao Shuli uses the following words to describe how handsome Young Blacky is: Young Blacky is the second son of Second Kongming. In an anti-mopping-up battle he killed two enemy soldiers and was awarded for being an excellent marksman. He is known as a handsome young man not just in Liu Village. In the first month of every year, when he acts in plays, every woman''s eyes follow him closely in every village he tours in. He describes Little Qin in a similar way: Little Qin is eighteen now. Those frivolous people in the village say she is far more beautiful than her mother at that age. Whether they have an excuse or not, young men of the village always want to exchange a few words with her. When Little Qin goes to the river to wash clothes, they all follow suit; when she goes to the mountain to gather wild herbs, they all do the same. The most remarkable description appears in the passage about a trip to the district government made by Third Fairy, Little Qin''s mother: The girl who had been ordered to play outside soon spread the news that there was an elderly woman in the district administrative office who still had powdered face and wore embroidered shoes, although she was over forty-five years old. All the women nearby came to see her, filling up half of the courtyard of the office. They whispered to each other: "What a forty-five-year-old woman!" "Look at that pair of trousers!" "Look at her embroidered shoes!" Third Fairy, who had never blushed before, was now very embarrassed indeed for the first time in her life and her face became hot and wet with sweat. Then the contact officer came in with Little Qin and said deliberately loudly for everyone to hear: "What are you staring at? She is just a human being like any of you. Don''t tell me you haven''t seen anybody like her before. Get away!" This caused everybody to burst out laughing. The mayor then asked Third Fairy: "You can now ask your daughter whether she wishes to marry the man you have chosen for her." At this moment Third Fairy could only hear voices in the courtyard saying "forty-five . . . wearing embroidered shoes . . ." Feeling so ashamed, she had to wipe away sweat from her face continually and totally lost the ability to utter a single word. Suddenly the people in the courtyard changed the subject of their conversation and commented: "That''s her daughter. . . . But the daughter is not as good at beautifying herself as the mother.... It is said that she also knows how to invoke goddesses." Now Third Fairy wished she had killed herself by butting her head against the wall. These are the passages Zhou Yang cited for praise from "Young Black Gets Married." In addition, Zhou Yang also cited two passages for praise from "The Verses of Li Youcai." The first one is about the relationship between Xiao Yuan, an activist in the Land Reform Movement, and other young peasants in his village. Friendly with his buddies at first, Xiao Yuan changes his attitude once he has become a director with the help of his young friends. When he orders two friends to hoe his field, the two friends make the following comments: "The first time we hoed his field voluntarily. Now he orders us to do it!" "The first time was different. Then we all saw him off, and were glad to help him. Now he''s an ''official''! He doesn''t want to hoe his land, and orders us around. If we had known he was going to turn out this way, we would not have helped him. It would have been better to spend the time sleeping!" The second passage is about Old Qin, a peasant who "had been poor all his life, and squeezed by the landlord so much that he''s afraid to open his mouth, yet he looks down on anyone else who''s poor." But Old Qin has one good point. "He never argued when a young man crossed him." The passages cited above are examples of a style dismissed by C. T. Hsia as "clumsy and clownish." Surprisingly, this unembellished style can offer a succinct depiction of a character''s personality. Take the description of Old Qin as an example. The sentence "He has been poor all his life, but he looks down on poor people" summarizes Old Qin''s worldliness and snobbery in just one sentence, while the next sentence, which describes how he falls silent as soon as a youngster gets angry with him, shows his kindness and reluctance to hurt others. Having read this passage, one will never forget this image of a peasant created by Zhao Shuli. It is a rare talent to be able to portray the soul of a peasant living in poverty with such a plain peasant style, a style uncontaminated by pedantry. For all its plain appearance, it is in fact very difficult to master this style. The well-known critic Kang Zhuo once remarked that, "in addition to its simplicity, sincerity, wit, and humorous optimism, Zhao Shuli''s fiction is also characterized by its vivid depiction of Chinese peasants'' lives, attitudes, ideals and spirit." "Clear and simple, its language is the purified language of the masses and this clear and sonorous language is used naturally in narration, description, and dialogue." "Moreover, none of these characteristics is in any way detached from the life of the masses or the life in the countryside, because they all stemmed from the author''s intimate relationship with the peasants." In short, "Zhao Shuli himself came from a peasant background and his outstanding talent was naturally rooted in the culture of the countryside."[15] In general, Kang Zhuo''s remarks are accurate. In contrast to Zhao Shuli, a writer who based his works on his rich experience in the countryside, Eileen Chang resorted to using news dispatches and rumors to write Rice-sprout Song. In her afterword to Rice-sprout Song, she admitted that her novel was based on a writer''s self-criticism published in People''s Literature during the Three-Antis Campaign and on a story, told by a girl she knew who had worked in the countryside near Nanchang, about how the girl and the peasants lived on thin rice soup mixed with inch-long blades of grass. The central event in the novel came from A Faraway Village, a Communist movie. "Seeing the granary being set on fire in the movie, I began to think. If it was not a complete fabrication, it must be an act of revenge by the peasants distorted by the Communists." In other words, the idea for setting the granary on fire in Rice-sprout Song came from a movie and the author did nothing more than flip the movie''s political stand. As a result of Eileen Chang''s unfamiliarity with the peasants and the countryside, for all its humor, its elegant style, and its touching descriptions of the poverty and hunger in the Chinese countryside, descriptions that won Hu Shi''s praise, the novel still makes us feel that all its characters--from the protagonist Tan Jingen, a model peasant, and his wife Yuxiang to Comrade Wang (Wang Lin), a district cadre, and Gu Gang, a playwright going to the countryside to gather material for a script--remain mere illustrations for Eileen Chang''s abstract ideas and, as such, they become devoid of their own individual life, personalities, or language. With its close-knit plotline, the novel is highly readable, but the basic plot and the protagonist''s personality and behavior can hardly bear scrutiny. It is totally unbelievable that a land reform activist and model peasant (Tan Jingen) would become a "reactionary" who leads the peasants to sack a granary before setting it on fire simply because he cannot stand poverty and, in particular, the government policy of aiding military families (half a pig and forty pounds of rice cake). Why would he revolt at the risk of his life? Why does he still hate the Communists so much after he has received some land and a vase from them? What is the cause of his poverty and the hunger the whole village suffers, the old regime or the new regime? In short, the author fails to show what drives him into rebellion. It is also not quite clear whether he is an innocent peasant or a manipulator, a revolutionary or an counterrevolutionary, because he is just a pawn Eileen Chang uses for her political purposes. The peasants in Rice-sprout Song are entirely different from those in Zhao Shuli''s fiction: they are fake peasants, whereas those in Zhao Shuli''s fiction are genuine peasants full of life. Eileen Chang was familiar with the city, not the countryside. So she knew very little about the rural society or the minds of the peasants. Of course it would be impossible for her to succeed when she chose to write about things she was unfamiliar with; with all her linguistic skills, she could still only produce a weak novel. It is not that difficult to compare Zhao Shuli''s peasant characters with Eileen Chang''s. What we should use is not political standards but artistic standards. If we use artistic standards in our evaluation, we cannot argue that Eileen Chang achieved a glorious success where Zhao Shuli failed miserably. In A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, C. T. Hsia spends twelve pages praising Rice-sprout Song to the skies. His point of view, however, is a political one. He calls Rice-sprout Song "a tragic record of the trials of human body and spirit under a brutal system." He also makes the following statement: It is because, in the perspective of the humane tradition, Communism is so monstrously unreal, so much of an evil to be exorcised, that fables and myths enjoy such an ironic relevance in the scheme of the novel. Gods and ghosts in the Chinese tradition are most beneficent, and unlike Comrade Wong torturing innocent peasants, even the infernal judges mete out punishments in a most scrupulous fashion. But Communism exceeds in cruelty the most sanguinary melodrama, confirms the worst fears about Hell. In investing the Communist world with an eerie kind of unreality so as to render with full justice the kind of reality insupportable to the human imagination, Eileen Chang has fashioned not merely a tale of suffering but a tragedy instinct with all the human aspirations and dreams against which Communism has always marshaled all its diabolic resources. (426-27) Here C. T. Hsia uses extreme political standards in his evaluation, believing that a writer can only reveal the reality of Communism when he/she portrays Communists as monsters, just as Eileen Chang does in Rice-sprout Song. However, he does not realize that a writer will lose his/her perspective and objectivity and turn the characters into caricatures when he/she regards the characters as monsters. Gu Gang and Wang Lin, two characters in Rice-sprout Song, are such caricatures, and C. T. Hsia''s impression of Wang Lin as a character worse than the "infernal judges" is precisely a result of such caricaturization. If we put aside political standards, we will find that both Eileen Chang''s caricaturization of the Communist cadres and Ding Ling''s caricaturization of the landlords in The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River are artistic failures. Compared with the characters of cadres, peasants, and landlords created by Eileen Chang and Ding Ling, those created by Zhao Shuli are much more vivid and lifelike. If a critic is not influenced by his political prejudices, he will never conclude that Zhao Shuli''s style is "clumsy and clownish." It is not an exaggeration to call Zhao Shuli a "decent" writer. Anybody who knows anything about Zhao Shuli would know that he was not the kind of incompetent writer who blindly praised Communist benevolence as C. T. Hsia makes him out to be. Instead, he was very talented and independent. When he wrote "Young Blacky Gets Married" he was not aware of Mao Zedong''s "Talks at the Yan''an Forum on Literature and Art." The story was well received in the Communist-controlled area in the Taihang mountains, and more than thirty thousand copies were sold before it caught Zhou Yang''s attention. In 1946 Zhou Yang, then in charge of the cultural affairs in Yan''an, published an article "A Discussion of Zhao Shuli''s Works" in the Communist Party newspaper Liberation Daily and praised Zhao Shuli''s achievement as a "victory" for Mao''s "Talks." Afterward, Zhao Shuli naturally became a role model for those engaged in producing revolutionary literature for workers, peasants, and soldiers. However, his independent personality and literary taste prevented him from fulfilling the duties of such a role model. In the 1950s, he was criticized for writing works such as Sanliwan Village and "Selling Tobacco Leaves." Zhao Shuli''s literary taste typically represented the folk taste that came into being after May Fourth. He was not well educated, but he was not an uneducated peasant either. As a rural intellectual, he was nurtured by two kinds of cultures: the new culture and new ideas of May Fourth, on the one hand, and the folk culture rooted in the countryside, on the other hand. Unlike those elite writers who approached folk culture from the outside, he was born into a folk culture environment and became deeply influenced by the folk taste and keenly aware of the riches of folk culture. Instead of making efforts to acquire a folk taste and a folk style, he simply inherited them from his environment. As a result, his style was naturally humorous and showed no traces of artificiality. Unfortunately, for political purposes he was later set up as a model writer who carried out the decrees in Mao''s "Talks," and his career was described as the correct direction for writers to follow. His example was used to reform other writers, and a new interpretation was imposed on his career (that writers must go among the workers, peasants and soldiers and must reform themselves). During the Cultural Revolution Zhao Shuli was accused of clinging to his folk taste and failing to serve as a model. For that he was subjected to inhuman tortures. His experience was indeed very tragic. In the meantime, C. T. Hsia, an overseas scholar, made Zhao Shuli''s fate even more unfortunate by simplistically labeling him a Communist writer and a clumsy propagandist who gave praise to Communist benevolence. Zhao Shuli was attacked by extreme political forces from opposing directions. 5 With my discussions of Eileen Chang, Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and Zhao Shuli, I intend to show that C. T. Hsia''s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction is premised on the sharp division of modern Chinese writers into "Communist writers" and "non-Communist writers" and the conflict between the two groups. Hsia overpraises non-Communist writers and mocks and denigrates Communist writers with remarks inappropriate for a critic. The use of political standards in place of literary standards leads him to disregard the reality of literary texts. This kind of simplistic and biased approach reflects the influence of the Cold War on literary criticism as well as the influence of the political conflict between the Nationalists and the Communists. It is, therefore, a product of a specific era. As literary historians in mainland China adopted a radical political viewpoint and overlooked non-leftist writers such as Eileen Chang, Shen Congwen, and Qian Zhongshu for political, ideological reasons, C. T. Hsia adopted an opposite viewpoint and discounted the Communist writers and pro-Communist writers for a different set of political, ideological reasons. Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and Zhao Shuli were victims of this approach. C. T. Hsia certainly did the right thing in rediscovering writers like Eileen Chang and Shen Congwen. His intentional denigration of writers like Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and Zhao Shuli, however, was wrong. In its evaluations of modern Chinese writers A History of Modern Chinese Fiction differs greatly from the highly politicized literary histories published in mainland China in the 1960s and the 1970s, but it shares the latter''s way of thinking and standards (and attitude). Similar to mainland Chinese critics, C. T. Hsia remains unable to shake off the restraints imposed on literary criticism by politics. Political standards lurk behind his aesthetic evaluations. In other words, for him literary criticism is ultimately based on political standards. This can be seen as a problem shared by critics on both sides of the Taiwan Straits at the time. In the late 1980s, some mainland Chinese literary historians brought up the issue of rewriting the literary history of modern China. What motivated these scholars was a desire to reexamine the literary histories written between the 1950s and the 1970s so that scholars could reject the dualistic mentality that had dominated the writing of literary histories with its emphasis on the conflict between good and evil. In fact in the 1980s scholars had already begun to reexamine the politicized approach to literary history before the issue was brought up. As scholars made serious efforts in this area, non-Communist writers such as Hu Shi, Zhou Zuoren, Liang Shiqiu, Lin Yutang, and Shen Congwen, writers who had been ignored, were reevaluated fairly. However, as mainland Chinese critics examined their own prejudices, it never occurred to C. T. Hsia that he should examine the prejudices in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, make adjustments to his statements and reject the political sentiments and the political terms in his artistic evaluations. Unfortunately, instead of conducting this needed self-examination and self-criticism, C. T. Hsia went further astray in his response to my speech and article and labeled Lu Xun "a running dog for the Communists" and Ding Ling "a writer who really does not amount to anything." For those of us who study modern Chinese literature, it is perhaps our duty now to give up this simplistic approach and Cold War mentality, free ourselves from political, ideological restraints, broaden our horizons, and make literary criticism more scientific, more objective, and more mindful of aesthetic standards. Qian Mu''s approach and attitude to the study of history come to my mind. Qian Mu believes that a historian should show respect and sympathy for what happened in the history of his nation (which includes, of course, the history of literature and culture). This means that a historian should not try to lay the blame on somebody, should not get too emotional, and should not go to extremes in his praise or censure. Respect for history will result in calmness and humility on our part, which will enable us to evaluate our predecessors'' intellectual creations objectively. In the 1980s, many scholars in mainland China had learned from the lessons of the Cultural Revolution the importance of overcoming the animosity and other mental obstacles left by endless political struggles. In other words, they learned that a critic should treat the author(s) he studies with respect and love, not animosity. A critic could study any author, no matter what kind of political stand the author chose to adopt in the past. But the critic must be sympathetic, understanding, and must adhere to aesthetic standards. It seems that in the 1990s this way of thinking went out of fashion. Some writers and scholars in mainland China went out of their way to denigrate Lu Xun and the leftist literature in China. In the meantime, they also tried their best to create myths about non-leftist writers. Consequently, they revived the simplistic approach in literary criticism that emphasized the conflict between two literary camps. Now it is time for us to take a critical look at the literary criticism and the writing of literary history in China in the 1990s. Notes: [1]. The first part of this article was written in October, 2000. The second part was written in November, 2001 on the campus of the City University of Hong Kong. The entire article was first published in Shijie (Scope) no. 7 (2002). [2]. All citations come from A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). [3]. See "Another Discussion of Eileen Chang" in my book Xi xun guxiang (Looking for a homeland in the West) (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1997), pp. 291-292. [4]. See the third chapter "The Aesthetic Value of Dream of the Red Chamber" in Wang Guowei''s "Critical Essay on Dream of the Red Chamber." [5]. See David Der-wei Wang, Xiaoshuo Zhongguo (Fiction China) (Taipei: Maitian, 1993), pp. 327-335. [6].See my book Fangzhu zhu shen (Exiling the gods) (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1994). [7]. See my article "Another Discussion of Eileen Chang," in Liu Zaifu, Xi xun guxiang (Looking for a homeland in the West) (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1997), pp. 291-292. [8]. See "The Reappearance of the Remarkable Story of Eileen Chang in a New Century," Yazhou zhoukan (Oct 30-Nov. 5, 2000). [9]. See C. T. Hsia''s article "Eileen Chang and I" in Mingbao yuekan (Nov. 12, 2000) and Xu Zidong''s report "Sidelights on the international conference ''Eileen Chang and Modern Literature in Chinese''" in "The Reappearance of the Remarkable Story of Eileen Chang in a New Century,"Yazhou zhoukan (Oct. 30-Nov. 5, 2000). [10]. See C. T. Hsia''s article "Eileen Chang and I" cited above. [11]. See Mingbao yuekan (May, 2000). [12]. Ibid. [13].See Mingbao supplement (May 20, 1999). [14]. See Wang Zengqi quanji (Complete works of Wang Zengqi) (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue, 1998), vol. 8, p. 219. [15]. Kang Zhuo, "Afterword," in Zhao Shuli wenji (Collected works of Zhao Shuli) (Beijing: Gongren, 1980), vol. 4, pp. 1964-1965. (责任编辑：admin) |