C. T. Hsia on Chinese Literature (Masters of Chinese Studies, V. 1)

C . T. H s i a O N C H I N E S E L I T E R AT U R E

MASTERS OF CHINESE STUDIES VOLUME 1

C . T. H S I A O N C H I N E S E L I T E R AT U R E

C . T. H s i a

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the preparation of the translation and in the publication of this series.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2004 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hsia, Chih-tsing, 1921– C.T. Hsia on Chinese literature / C.T. Hsia. p.

cm.— (Masters of Chinese studies ; v. 1)

Includes index. ISBN 0–231–12990–4 (cloth) 1. Chinese fiction—History and criticism. I. Title: Chinese literature. II. Title. III. Series. PL2416.H746

2004

895.1'3009—dc21

2003043477

A Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Della, my companion for life

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

I . C H I N E S E L I T E R AT U R E I N P E R S P E C T I V E

1

Classical Chinese Literature: Its Reception Today as a Product of Traditional Culture Chinese Novels and American Critics: Reflections on Structure, Tradition, and Satire

3

30

On the “Scientific” Study of Modern Chinese Literature: A Reply to Professor Pru˚ ˇsek 50

II. TRADITIONAL DRAMA

85

An Introduction to The Romance of the Western Chamber

87

Time and the Human Condition in the Plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu

I I I . T R A D I T I O N A L A N D E A R LY M O D E R N F I C T I O N The Military Romance: A Genre of Chinese Fiction

133 135

102

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CONTENTS

Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber: A Critique 171 The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture: A Reappraisal of Ching-hua yuan 188 Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction The Travels of Lao Ts’an: An Exploration of Its Art and Meaning

247

Hsü Chen-ya’s Yü-li hun: An Essay in Literary History and Criticism

I V. M O D E R N F I C T I O N

223

269

311

Introduction to Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919–1949 The Korchin Banner Plains: A Biographical and Critical Study Residual Femininity: Women in Chinese Communist Fiction Foreword to Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960–1970 Black Tears: An Introduction to Peng Ko’s Stories

Notes

427

Glossary Index

495

511

398 414

313 332 376

PREFACE

I have been in this country for almost fifty-six years, earning a Ph.D. in English at Yale in three and a half years, preparing a history of modern Chinese fiction with a three-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and teaching English at two colleges for five years after serving as a Visiting Lecturer in Chinese at the University of Michigan. For the next three decades, I taught and wrote about Chinese literature, first at the University of Pittsburgh in 1961–62, and then at Columbia University from 1962 to 1991. In July 1992 I was hospitalized for atrial fibrillation for ten days, and I have not been active as an American sinologist since, though my health has been improving in the last three or four years and I have become somewhat more active as a writer in Chinese. The present volume collects sixteen critical essays and studies in Chinese literature that I wish to preserve, all published during my Columbia years. Part I contains three pieces that place Chinese literature in critical perspective, examining its substance and significance and the approaches and methods adopted by Western scholars for its appreciation and evaluation. Part II has two essays on traditional drama—one on the sequence of Yuan plays called in English The Romance of the Western Chamber, and the other on the five plays of the Ming dramatist T’ang Hsien-tsu. Part III is quite substantial, containing a review of a book on the Dream of the Red Chamber and four refreshingly new studies of the military romance and three novels dating from the Ch’ing and early

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Republican years, plus an essay on two advocates of new fiction. Part IV has five pieces—only the one on Tuan-mu Hung-liang’s The Korchin Banner Plains is fully comparable to the best essays in part III. “Residual Femininity: Women in Chinese Communist Fiction” is very good, but is somewhat more confined in its accurate but psychologically more timid examination of women’s lives under Communism. The three other pieces are all introductions and forewords to anthologies of fiction. But I am apparently good at summarizing things in a neat and eloquent manner, defining a writer’s achievement as an artist in words capturing particular human predicaments in broad and general terms. With the exception of a foreword to the novel Sui-shih yi-wen, practially all my studies in traditional fiction and drama were written in English for my peers, whereas all the forewords and introductions to Columbia anthologies were designed for a student audience. You have to read my essays in Chinese for my more serious assessments of individual contemporary writers, such as Ch’en Johsi, Pai Hsien-yung, and Yü Li-hua. My introduction to Black Tears is comparatively slight because the anthology I am discussing is small in size. I have written in Chinese a far more serious critique of practically all of Peng Ko’s novels still in print in a long, original essay included in The Critical Essays of C. T. Hsia, published in 1987. Precisely because I am a Ph.D. in English who has read much European literature in English translation as well, when given the opportunity to teach and study Chinese literature as a tenured professor, I wanted to be as well read in Chinese literature as I was in Western literature. Thus I taught a reading course in Yuan drama from the very beginning, and finally in my retirement, an anthology of Yuan plays coedited by myself and George Kao, using the translations of my students and those accepted for publication in the translation magazine Renditions, will be published by Columbia University Press, with my new colleague Shang Wei providing an introduction and checking the translations once again. When I was invited to give a paper for the Conference on Ming Thought at the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1966, after participating in a Ming seminar for a year at Columbia, instead of doing another Ming novel, I proposed to do a paper on the foremost Ming playwright, T’ang Hsien-tsu himself. It took me a year to read the five plays and the voluminous literature on T’ang in order to write the article “Time and the Human Condition in the Plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu.” When the Bermuda Conference on Chinese Literary Genres was announced, I wanted to do

PREFACE

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another paper on Ming ch’uan-ch’i drama so that when I was still young enough to master what I had read (I was born in 1921), I would have assimilated another ten of the Ming plays (the standard text of Ming drama consists of sixty plays) to make that genre a true part of my heritage accessible for informed criticism. But this was not to be because a colleague and friend wanted to explore the genre himself and would prefer that I stay in fiction. So I wrote a pioneering paper on the military romance instead, and gave up Ming drama as a subject for mastery. But as a teacher of graduate courses in Chinese literature, by the middle seventies I had designed a three-year sequence of courses: T’ang poetry and Sung tz’u poetry for the first year, Yuan drama and Ming–Ch’ing drama for the second, and a reading course and a seminar in fiction for the third. This was for the broadening of my students’ knowledge as well as my perpetual encounter of the actual text from an earlier period, even if my own research confined me to modern pai-hua Chinese offering few surprises. A scholar who doesn’t claim to know much about Chinese literature beyond his specialty—Yuan drama or modern fiction—cannot pose questions regarding the excellence of Chinese literature as a whole. He may be in that sense happier because larger questions do not bother him. But as a Chinese who has spent his best years earning a Ph.D. in English and mastering the Western tradition of literature, I was perpetually bothered by that problem—how good traditional Chinese literature really is, and how it stands against the rich tradition of Western literature. But though not a polemicist, I had aroused the wrath of Professor Jaroslav Pru˚ˇsek of Czechoslovakia, who regarded himself as a friend of Communist China and was in fact a good friend to some prominent Chinese writers in Yenan and Peking, when he read my History of Modern Chinese Fiction with its anti-Communist and anti-Maoist stand. So he wrote a savage attack of my book in the leading European sinological journal T’oung Pao. I had to write a strong and convincing rejoinder in its pages; otherwise, my reputation as a critic and scholar might be damaged. After The Classic Chinese Novel was published to excellent reviews in 1968, more younger scholars were turning to these six major novels for serious study. As they did so, they often distrusted their own initial responses to such works and turned to the traditional commentators for guidance in their search for hidden meanings. They also looked among various new critical theories and scholarly disciplines for inspiration and support. I expressed my disagreement with these new ways of reading in my review of Andrew H. Plaks’s

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book Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in 1979. When Peter H. Lee asked me to contribute a paper on classical fiction at an international conference on East Asian literature to be held in 1983, I explored my disagreements with such American critics as David T. Roy and Andrew H. Plaks in my essay “Chinese Novels and American Critics: Reflections on Structure, Tradition, and Satire.” There have been no rejoinders from these two or from Pru˚ˇsek. These two essays register external battles that do not engage me personally, but “Classical Chinese Literature: Its Reception Today as a Product of Traditional Culture” (1990) does. As a senior scholar and leading critic in the field, to publicly announce my growing disillusionment with classical Chinese literature would seem an ill-advised move. It would be said that I am turning away potential students attracted to the field and I offending and antagonizing my colleagues everywhere by taking an unpopular position, and will further antagonize all champions and friends of Chinese culture whose job it is to make all forms of Chinese culture more popular and available to the vast worldwide audience. But, as I said at the very end of my rejoinder to Pru˚ˇsek, my position as critic of Chinese literature calls for “a refusal to rest content with untested assumptions and conventional judgments and a willingness to conduct an open-minded inquiry, without fear of consequence and without political prepossessions,” and I did precisely that in the essay. The editor in charge of the July 1988 issue of Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews called mine merely “a feisty essay” and further showed displeasure by not allowing me to read the proofs and deliberately tampering with the text by arbitrarily introducing many misprints. I was absolutely furious, of course, when I received the issue early in 1990. But about three months later, I received a handwritten postcard from Professor Victor H. Mair, whom I had met only once at a lecture he was giving at Columbia: 22/III/90 Dear Prof. Hsia: Your recent article in CLEAR on the fate of classical Chinese literature is absolutely breathtaking! Although I am sure that many narrow- and close-minded people will roundly detest you for it, I believe it is the most honest statement that has been made about Chinese literature since the May 4th Movement. You are a tremendously brave and honest person to have gone public with your

PREFACE

xiii

deepest, truest feelings and insights. In the end, you will be rewarded, both because it is a landmark that will stand the test of time and because it will contribute to fundamental change in China, without which the nation will perish. Hat off to you.

VH Mair I haven’t been made that happy by a letter since I received in Potsdam, New York, a totally unexpected letter from Professor Chi-chen Wang of Columbia University dated February 13, 1961. He wrote after reading just the first two chapters from the only “production copy” of A History of Modern Chinese Fiction at the Yale University Press, praising me almost excessively for my critical brilliance and command of English and wanting me to join him at the Department of Chinese and Japanese. Belatedly, I want to thank the John Simon Gugggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for awarding me fellowships during my sabbatical years in the seventies and eighties. However, I had promised both organizations a book-length study of the Chinese novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Family circumstances requiring both my wife and myself to provide day-and-night care of our autistic and severly retarded child had made sustained research on a single topic almost impossible to carry out. Now that our daughter Natalie has been for years the primary responsibility of the Anderson School at Staatsburg, New York, I could have easily completed the five or six chapters remaining to be written but for my heart condition, which erupted a year after my retirement. So under the circumstances, I hope the foundation and the endowment would accept the four published chapters, and other related papers in this book, as my contributions to criticism and scholarship undertaken initially with their generous support. Though I was like Chi-chen Wang in getting an energetic and promising younger scholar of exceptional brilliance to succeed me at Columbia, in the long term David D. Wang has been far more often my benefactor than my beneficiary. It was David’s idea to assemble my papers for a big book, and it is with additional funding that he has secured from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation that C. T. Hsia on Chinese Literature could be produced without financial difficulty. Ms. Jennifer Crewe, Editorial Director of the Columbia University Press, has kindly allowed the use of Chinese characters in the numerous notes to the essays on the military romance and Yü-li hun, and in the glossary. A careful writer myself, I am surprised

xiv

PREFACE

but all the more grateful that Leslie Kriesel could still find passages needing improvement. I want to thank Patrick Hanan and Robert E. Hegel for taking the time to reread all the essays in this volume and enthusiastically recommending publication. As early as 1983, both contributed an essay to the volume in my honor called Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature (Columbia University Press). In addition, my former student Robert E. Hegel served as the book’s chief editor, and wrote a preface and a long introduction exploring the literary self. My wife Della, who has suffered worse hardships in caring for Natalie, had expected my companionship when traveling in Europe or America. Instead, she is following my example in reading serious fiction, and has just finished George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. C. T. H. June 2003

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Twelve of the essays and articles collected herein have earlier appeared in academic journals and/or symposium volumes, and the remaining four as introductions to Chinese texts in translation. I want to thank Columbia University Press first of all for granting me permission to use four pieces from books under its imprint: “Time and the Human Condition in the Plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu” in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Self and Society in Ming Thought (1970); “A Critical Introduction” to S. I. Hsiung, tr., The Romance of the Western Chamber (1976); “Foreword” to Joseph S. M. Lau, ed., Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960–1970 (1976); and “Introduction” to Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919–1949, edited by Lau and myself plus Leo O. Lee (1981). My thanks go next to Princeton University Press for allowing me to use two essays from its symposium volumes: “The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture: A Reappraisal of Ching-hua yuan” from Andrew H. Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays (1977); and “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction” from Adele A. Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (1978). For nine of the remaining ten essays in this volume, I will likewise list their earliest appearances in chronological order, and thank the editors and publishers involved for granting me the right to reuse them: “Residual Femininity: Women in Chinese Communist Fiction” from The China Quarterly, no. 15 (London, 1962).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“On the ‘Scientific’ Study of Modern Chinese Literature: A Reply to Professor Pru˚sˇek” from T’oung Pao, L, nos. 4–5 (Leiden, 1963). “The Travels of Lao Ts’an: An Exploration of Its Art and Meaning” from Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, n.s. VII, no. 2 (Taipei, 1969). “The Military Romance: A Genre of Chinese Fiction” from Cyril Birch, ed., Studies in Chinese Literary Genres (University of California Press, 1974). “Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber: A Critique” from Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, XXXIX, no. 1 (Cambridge, 1979). “Hsü Chen-ya’s Yü-li hun: An Essay in Literary History and Criticism,” first published in Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology: Section on Literature (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1981). Also in Renditions, nos. 17–18 (spring & autumn 1982), pp. 199–240. Reprinted by permission of the Research Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “The Korchin Banner Plains: A Biographical and Critical Study” from La Littérature chinoise au temps de la guerre de résistance contre Japon (de 1937 à 1945) (Paris: Editions de la Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1982). “Chinese Novels and American Critics: Reflections on Structure, Tradition, and Satire” from Peter H. Lee, ed., Critical Issues in East Asian Literature (Seoul: International Cultural Society of Korea, 1983). Permission granted by the Korea Foundation, Seoul, Korea, which has absorbed the International Cultural Society of Korea. “Classical Chinese Literature: Its Reception Today as a Product of Traditional Culture” from CLEAR, X, nos. 1–2 (1988), but not published until the new year of 1990. Chinese Materials Center Publications, which published Peng Ko’s Black Tears: Stories of War-torn China in 1986, is now defunct, and I am only too happy to include my introduction to that volume in C. T. Hsia on Chinese Literature without having to ask permission from somebody else.

C . T. H s i a O N C H I N E S E L I T E R AT U R E

Part I CHINESE LITERATURE IN PERSPECTIVE

Classical Chinese Literature* Its Reception Today as a Product of Traditional Culture (1990)

I In this essay I am not concerned with modern Chinese literature, a literature both formally and ideologically indebted to western literature and in that sense less uniquely Chinese. That literature may be said to have begun in 1900, following the foreign occupation of Peking that fall, in the spirit of finally admitting China’s precarious position as a nation and her backwardness and stagnation as a civilization. This literature, and particularly that portion written since the Literary Revolution of 1917, is a vital, ongoing part of modern Chinese culture and history, and as such will always receive serious attention from students of Chinese affairs everywhere in the world. For the Chinese themselves, wherever they are, this is the literature they read if they are at all concerned with the fate of China. However disappointing the Maoist phase of that literature may have been on the mainland for some thirty years, the fact that soon after the death of Mao so many writers began to tell the truth as they knew it in poems, stories, and plays indicates that even under communism the modern habit of staying unflinchingly honest dies hard.1 It should also be noted that far more high school and college students in mainland China take a serious interest in the contemporary literature of their own nation than their counterparts in America today.

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The essay, therefore, is mainly concerned with the so-called traditional or classical literature recorded in Chinese since pre-Confucian times and expressive in the main of the dominant Chinese culture in the service of a despotic government supposedly Confucian in character. This is an indigenous literature cast in distinctly Chinese forms or genres and composed mainly by scholars primarily trained for government service. These writers, of course, were not cut off from popular music and oral entertainment, and in the later dynasties a great number wrote drama and fiction largely or mainly in the vernacular, almost in defiance of their training as poets and prose writers in classical Chinese. Except for folk songs and some forms of oral entertainment, the contribution of the people as such to the making of this literature is of little importance. What was once foreign in terminology and ideology (Buddhism, predominantly) has long been part of the Chinese tradition, so the issue of foreignness does not arise in the reading of this literature. As for the more modern western influence brought to court by such Jesuit missionaries as Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), it is so little reflected in the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that we are justified in identifying the modern period solely with the twentieth century. Before we can study the reception abroad of classical Chinese literature today, we must, of course, gauge the health and vitality of that literature as it appears to the Chinese themselves, on the mainland and in Taiwan. It would be unlikely that a body of literature to which the Chinese have become indifferent could become much read in translation by foreigners. Historically, the key importance of that literature to the intellectual training and spiritual sustenance of Chinese scholar-officials, and therefore to the maintenance of Chinese culture and political order, was never in question. It could never be in question either that serious students of Chinese culture and history should read at least the acknowledged masterpieces of that literature, in translation if not in the original, irrespective of its intrinsic worth as literature and of the size of its audience among the Chinese themselves. But, of course, even the intrinsic worth of Shakespeare depends upon the continuing training of the young to appreciate his works and their willing subjection to the necessary rigors of that training. His intrinsic worth has no practical meaning if the younger generation everywhere suddenly turns a deaf ear to his poetry. If this indifference were to continue for a few decades, it is conceivable that the educators concerned would revise the curriculum and displace

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Shakespeare with writers more congenial to the students. Thus it is entirely possible that someday even serious students of sinology would take only a token interest in classical literature. Classical Chinese literature held sway so long as the young had to master certain works of the Confucian canon as well as certain major poets and prose writers to qualify for bureaucratic and literary success. When the civil service examinations were abolished in 1905, a classical education was no longer the only road to academic success, and its importance was further discounted when in the 1920s pai-hua or the national vernacular replaced wen-yen or the literary language as the dominant medium for journalism and creative writing. Today, when most male students on the mainland and in Taiwan prefer science, technology, medicine, and other lucrative subjects to the humanities, it is not far-fetched to say that the continual survival there of classical Chinese literature as a cultural legacy depends mainly on the curricular requirement that high school students read some basic texts in the classical tradition and learn to write simple wen-yen prose. But when more new subjects and fundamental skills (computer science, for instance) call for curricular attention, it is inevitable that training in the classical language or literature will be further deemphasized. For the United States as for the two Republics of China, we can only predict a further decline in literacy if by literacy we mean the ability to write grammatically, if not elegantly, as well as close study from childhood of certain classics in one’s own language. Besides teachers, one is usually influenced by family or friends in choosing books to read. In my time, if the T’ang–Sung prose masters had to be taught in class and memorized, we read the classic novels by ourselves. Sooner or later, every one of my friends ran through the five major novels (the pornographic Chin P’ing Mei was forbidden), plus many more. I suppose this remained the situation for large numbers of mainland students before the downfall of the Gang of Four. Since current fiction was boring and translations of western fiction were limited in choice, it would be more natural for students to read novels like The Three Kingdoms (Sankuo-chih yen-i) and The Water Margin (Shui-hu chuan) for entertainment. Today, however, students have ready access to TV and a large supply of foreign fiction in translation (ranging from Don Quixote to current bestsellers in genre fiction), not to mention a bewildering variety of current journals and novels. As in Taiwan, traditional novels will eventually become passé on the mainland. In 1981, taking advantage of the new gen-

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eration’s inability to read wen-yen, a newspaper editor launched with great success a set of classics rewritten in simple pai-hua in forty-six volumes, ranging from The Book of Songs (Shih ching) to The Travels of Lao Ts’an (Laots’an yu-chi, an early modern novel). So juvenile readers (ch’ing-shao-nien tu-che) in Taiwan are reading even vernacular novels like The Journey to the West (Hsi-yu chi) and Dream of the Red Chamber (Hung-lou meng; also known as The Story of the Stone and A Dream of Red Mansions) in simplified and much shortened versions, with only samples of the original text appended.2 I may have given the impression that the diminished interest of young readers in classical literature has mainly been due to their linguistic incompetence. But generations of readers have proved that you don’t have to have many years of Chinese to read The Three Kingdoms or The Water Margin. If these perennial favorites are now losing readers, it is because other reading matter has proved more popular, whether newly written novels about swordsmen or historical figures or translations of works by Agatha Christie or Victoria Holt. The more serious readers would, of course, prefer nineteenth-century and modern classics of western fiction to traditional Chinese novels. This has been so since the Literary Revolution. Even while a few classic novels were enlisted in the battle for a new literature in the vernacular, traditional fiction was roundly attacked for its inhumanity or ideological backwardness. For cultural leaders of the time such as Hu Shih and Lu Hsün, the clear superiority of western fiction was unquestioned. If traditional Chinese fiction is steadily losing readers in recent decades, it is safe to assume that most Chinese do not touch classical poetry, prose, and drama once they have completed their formal schooling. As in this country, only teachers of the humanities, professional writers, and publishers continue to read classical literature outside fiction. But it may be said in fairness to the reputation of Chinese literature that, while readers are getting admittedly fewer, its major authors remain national heroes, and are held in greater esteem than ever on the mainland. Even during the May Fourth period when traditional literature was under attack, no one to my knowledge really made fun of Ch’ü Yuan, T’ao Ch’ien, Li Po, Tu Fu, Su Shih, Kuan Han-ch’ing, Shih Nai-an (the supposed author of The Water Margin), T’ang Hsien-tsu, and Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, to name those who are now cultural heroes above ideological reproach even though a number of them were vilified during the

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Cultural Revolution. Denunciation of old culture satisfies one impulse, but hero worship satisfies another. Especially in a nation with too few distinguished scientists and with all its premodern statesmen identified with Confucian ideology, the exaltation of great writers becomes a necessity. I would say that Ch’ü Yuan, Tu Fu, Kuan Han-ch’ing, and Ts’ao Hsüehch’in are receiving greater national reverence today than before 1949, in view of the postage stamps honoring their memory and the novels, plays, and films designed to commemorate their deeds and works. In a sense, they are arbitrarily seen as precursors to Lu Hsün and Mao Tse-tung and as enlightened giants capable of detaching themselves from the feudal culture and serving the people. Critical injustice is inherent in any large-scale attempt to glorify the great writers and make them appear even greater in the eyes of the people while dismissing the lesser writers as the typical product of feudalism. Nevertheless, in the process of making national heroes out of the great writers, new annotated editions of their works were prepared, along with new studies and translations (usually by the veteran team of Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang). Whatever we may say of the declining popular interest in classical literature, these new editions are undeniably beneficial to all serious students of that literature. To close this section on a more positive note, we may say that while readership of classical literature has suffered a dramatic decline in terms of the overall literate population (once upon a time every literate Chinese was a reader of that literature), there are now more regular readers in absolute numbers than during the Ming or Ch’ing. Teachers of Chinese language and literature alone, I should think, constitute today a far larger readership than the total number of degree holders in 1790 or 1890. Quite unlike the bureaucrats of old days, the majority of Chinese teachers presumably have to do some reading in classical literature to stay in the profession.

II While the teachers of Chinese on the mainland and in Taiwan and Hong Kong are strong enough to support a flourishing industry devoted to the reprinting of classical literature, we cannot honestly say that there has ever been a general public in the West for that literature, even though an eighteenth-century reader could already read specimens of Chinese

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fiction or drama in French or English. In a way, it is unrealistic to expect a large American public for classical Chinese literature (for convenience I refer only to America in view of its undisputed leadership in sinology and its larger audience) when you think of all the contemporary writers not merely from France, Italy, or West Germany but also from Eastern Europe, Latin America, India, Japan, and indeed mainland China and Taiwan that are represented in translation at the better bookstores. To a cultivated general reader contemporary literature is usually more enjoyable because it enables him to share areas of experience at home and abroad that he would otherwise have missed. In comparison, even eighteenth-century English literature would seem more remote to him, and require more preparation for its full enjoyment. Few general readers, short of some basic training in Chinese history and culture, could enter the Chinese world of the Ming and Ch’ing and feel right at home. The only non-Hebraic oriental book that has become a fully accredited western classic has been The Arabian Nights, a work ironically not assigned an eminent place by students of Arab literature. The chances of any characters from Chinese fiction becoming as well known as Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor appear very remote indeed. But though we don’t have yet a sizable public for translations from classical Chinese literature, I should emphasize the American reader’s fascination with China and the number of best-sellers written about the country by Chinese and American authors alike since World War II. Even before and during the war, Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People, The Importance of Living, and Moment in Peking, and Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy (Lo-t’o hsiang-tu, as translated by Evan King) all became best-sellers for weeks on end. Since the war, not counting American writers who have written hugely profitable books about China, writers of Chinese descent such as Han Suyin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bette Bao Lord, Liang Heng (in collaboration with Judith Shapiro) and Amy Tan have all written books that met popular and / or critical acclaim. Translations of works by eminent contemporary Chinese writers have not done as well, partly because their publishers—the university presses—don’t enjoy the resources to promote their books. But Chen Jo-hsi’s The Execution of Mayor Yin (Indiana University Press, 1978) enjoyed remarkable success, and there is no reason other translations of contemporary fiction couldn’t duplicate or surpass that success, given the American interest in China.

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In the absence of a general public, classical literature has not done as well in sales. We can certainly say that reader interest has not been dramatically stimulated by the fine series of translations that have appeared in the last three decades. Once upon a time Chinese poetry as translated by Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley was news to poets and serious readers of modern poetry in England and America. When there were so few translators but much curiosity about Chinese poetry, a few slim volumes of translation went a long way to raise expectations from readers and reviewers alike, even though practically every recent translator knows far more Chinese than Pound ever did. Sunflower Splendor (1975), a comprehensive anthology of classical Chinese poetry edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Lo, did receive a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and much praise elsewhere. But the very comprehensiveness of the volume and the resultant feeling that Chinese verse is much alike in regard to theme and sentiment must have dashed the expectations once aroused by Pound and Waley. Subsequent large-size anthologies such as The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry and The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry (translated and edited respectively by Burton Watson and Jonathan Chaves), and Waiting for the Unicorn: Poems and Lyrics of China’s Last Dynasty (edited by Irving Lo and William Schultz) have not made the bigcirculation reviews. Similarly, we could say that when Monkey, Waley’s breezy abridgment of The Journey to the West, first came out in 1944, it was greeted with enthusiastic reviews and whetted the appetite for more. It promised a book of comic adventure extraordinary by all standards. But in 1977, when Volume I of Anthony Yu’s complete translation of The Journey appeared, I had to volunteer service as reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, lest the book pass unnoticed by the general reader. Subsequently, when the University of Chicago Press published the fourth and last volume, the Times Book Review once again asked the reviewer of Sunflower Splendor, Professor David Lattimore of Brown University, to do an overall review of this magnificent undertaking by a single translator. But it is my impression that, though its cloth and paperbound editions must be doing quite well, this monumental translation remains for the time being a book read and consulted mainly by students of Chinese and Asian literature, and has made no impact on the teachers and critics of western literature at large, let alone the general public. Despite their abundant humor and satire, the many adventures of Tripitaka and his animal disciples follow the same nar-

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rative pattern and can become tedious. In fiction as in poetry, the age of tantalizing discovery has been succeeded by one of total translation, and the once hungry reader is now overfed and appears jaded. Judging by the prominent attention accorded books like Sunflower Splendor and The Journey to the West, we cannot say that the American press has been unfair or indifferent to classical Chinese literature. Especially expressive of American fairness has been the surprising but well deserved National Book Award received by Li-li Ch’en in 1977 for her superb translation of Master Tung’s Western Chamber Romance, a little read classic even among Chinese readers. But despite the welcome reviews and awards, classical Chinese literature has so far eluded the attention of prominent reviewers of international reputation who have done so much over the decades to promote significant foreign literature in this country. Li-li Ch’en won a coveted award, but I think that as a student of comparative literature she would have been even more gratified if her book had been reviewed not merely by sinologists but also by eminent critics of poetry or scholars of medieval European literature. At present, George Steiner, John Updike, and Gore Vidal are all prominent reviewers with a giant appetite for world fiction. But I don’t think that any of the trio has reviewed Chinese fiction, traditional or modern, though Vidal must have done a considerable amount of research in ancient Chinese thought and history to write his novel Creation (1981). Updike reviews practically everything in his recent omnibus of essays and criticism, Hugging the Shore (1983). But, typically, in the section on the Far East he reviews two batches of novels by Sôseki, Tanizaki, Endo, and Abe, but for China he would rather review Simon Leys’s Chinese Shadows and Ray Huang’s 1587. I am glad that both important books caught Updike’s eye, but it seems inexplicable that, as a prominent novelist and voracious reader of fiction from practically all nations, he would rather read a book on Ming history than take up the challenge of reading some Ming novels. During the decade or longer when he was writing most of the pieces gathered in Hugging the Shore, Updike could have reviewed The Journey to the West or the first four volumes of The Story of the Stone (David Hawkes and John Minford, translators).3 Or he could have reviewed The Execution of Mayor Yin or other fine titles of modern Chinese fiction published by Indiana University Press, such as Pai Hsien-yung’s Wandering in the Garden, Waking from the Dream and Hsiao Hung’s The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River in one volume. These books could have elicited high praise from

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Updike if he had reviewed them.4 Could it be that he was given some works of Chinese fiction to review but declined because he found them to be of insufficient interest? Or could it be—a more likely explanation— that he once had a disagreeable experience reading a Chinese novel, Chin P’ing Mei, say, or Dream of the Red Chamber, which permanently cured him of any desire for Chinese fiction? Whether the prominent reviewers are to blame for their silence or not, classical Chinese literature has certainly not enjoyed a large public in this country, but since World War II, many scholars, including advanced students of western literature from China, have specialized in the field, producing excellent studies and translations that have at least made it possible for a college student ignorant of the language to become something of an expert in that literature. To the list of translations already mentioned, I should add Burton Watson’s two-volume Records of the Grand Historian (1960), translated from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch’ien. Unlike more recent translators of classical literature, Watson kept the notes to a minimum and prepared this translation—a history of the Han dynasty up to the reign of Wu-ti—as much for the specialist as for the general reader. Would that Chinese names, with their monosyllabic sound-alikeness, were as easy to remember as Russian or Japanese ones, which are at least easier to pronounce despite their polysyllabic character! Nor apparently are most readers disposed to remember all the names in the initial two or three chapters to enable them to follow the narrative with enjoyment, so that the two-volume Records, though superbly translated from the greatest work of narrative art in classical Chinese, remains a work cherished mainly by the specialists. I don’t know if it has made any impression on historians of ancient Greece and Rome, though ideally they should be as familiar with Ssu-ma Ch’ien as with Herodotus and Tacitus. More recent translators of classical literature, knowing the utter unlikelihood that their work could attract the general public, have gone to the other extreme of providing immaculate translations with ample notes and other scholarly aids for the specialist. Both Richard Mather’s translation of Shih-shuo hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World (1976) and the first two volumes of David Knechtges’s ongoing translation of the Wen xuan, or Selections of Refined Literature (1982, 1987) are landmarks of sinology confirming America’s leadership in the field. When the Wen xuan is completed, Professor Knechtges will have accomplished a work of unprecedented importance in the study of pre-T’ang literature. It is

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virtually the only anthology of “refined literature” that all scholars of the T’ang and after should know by heart to be truly educated in literature. The rhapsodies of the first two volumes are notoriously difficult to read and understand in the original; now even leading scholars in China, Japan, and Korea, if they read English, will find much to profit them in reading Knechtges’s renditions of these compositions along with the copious notes. In the preceding pages I have cited titles of anthologies and basic works of Chinese literature that a college student can study if he wants to major in the subject. American sinology has made so much progress in the last thirty years that the same student can read the best-known works, if not the complete works, of all the major poets from ancient times through the Southern Sung. If he cannot yet read much shih poetry from the Yuan to the Ch’ing beyond the generous selections in Sunflower Splendor, The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry, and Waiting for the Unicorn, it is because most Chinese scholars have also neglected shih poets of these dynasties. Other genres of literature flourishing then claim so much of our attention that no shame is attached to our profession of ignorance in the later development of this poetry. In drama, whatever the quality of the translations (and the recent ones are invariably more readable and accurate), we can now read selected works of several Yuan playwrights, including Kuan Han-ch’ing and Wang Shih-fu, and such standard classics of Ming-Ch’ing drama as The Lute (P’ip’a chi), The Peony Pavilion (Mu-tan t’ing), and The Peach Blossom Fan (T’aohua shan). Among other novels to be translated, we might mention such ongoing projects as the complete translations of The Three Kingdoms and Chin P’ing Mei by, respectively, Moss Roberts and David T. Roy. Thus of the six major works discussed in my Classic Chinese Novel (1968), five have or are about to have brand-new complete and full translations. In the area of short fiction, we have now Y. W. Ma and Joseph S.M. Lau’s Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (1978), a large-format reader of all types of stories translated by various hands.

III In the preceding section I have shown the astonishing progress being made by western and especially American sinologists during the last thirty years in the study and translation of classical literature, even though the

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general public has not been sufficiently impressed to sample this large body of literature now available. The potential target of all this scholarship and translation, then, are our fellow specialists and the serious young students to be attracted to the field. In determining the world status of classical Chinese literature today, I shall relate the problem not so much to the specialist or to the Chinese reader (even though his increasing indifference to that literature, earlier noted, suggests one serious dimension of that problem) but to the hypothetical American college student who, on the strength of the list of translations given above, is going to concentrate on this literature as an undergraduate. As a Chinese long domiciled in America and at home in both western and Chinese literature, should I advise him to go ahead, or should I insist that, if he wants to specialize in Chinese literature, he must also become proficient in modern and classical Chinese? My answer that he should study the language reveals my attitude toward classical Chinese literature as well. Judging by its content alone, this literature is not sufficiently exciting or rewarding to a contemporary youth already exposed to newer kinds of literature addressing the problems of modern or postmodern man and his world. I would say that even for a Chinese (if he is to become literate at all on a cosmopolitan scale), the western literature of Romanticism and after, starting with the precursors of Rousseau, Goethe, and Blake, addresses his spiritual and intellectual needs in a far more searching way than the literature of his forebears can, despite his closer cultural and linguistic ties to that literature. The study of classical Chinese literature, insofar as it is a product of a traditional culture becoming increasingly remote from us, must be in part historical and philological to maintain its challenge and excitement as an academic discipline. To believe either that much of classical Chinese literature is fully alive and can be just as well read in translation or that, after due exercise of critical ingenuity, every famous Chinese poem, play, or novel will yield its secret as a tightly knit structure of meanings is to persist in delusion.5 Despite the availability of excellent new editions and translations, the lessening attraction of classical Chinese literature for both the Chinese and the western public tells the same ominous story of its failure to compete with modern Chinese literature, with serious western literature, with popular genre fiction in both Chinese and English, and with film, TV, and other forms of audiovisual entertainment. Western sinologists should concentrate on schol-

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arship and criticism and forgo the dream of cashing in on the potential popularity of classical literature. In reading a foreign literature systematically, an undergraduate attains two educational aims besides the pleasure of becoming personally acquainted with its major works: he knows more about the manners and ideals of that nation, and if we may use an old-fashioned word, its soul; and he knows himself better by stretching his imagination and sympathies to appreciate what foreign geniuses are capable of in the way of exploring human relationships, from the basic ones of parent and child and husband and wife to the most complex ones involving the fate of an entire nation. As the main source of western culture, ancient Greek literature (including, of course, the philosophers and historians) is so satisfying on both counts that I would not hesitate to advise any college youth to major in Greek even if he doesn’t intend to pursue a graduate education in the subject and may not want to learn the language well. Similarly, I would not hesitate to encourage a student who wants to major in classical Russian literature. Even though Russia in the nineteenth century was rather backward in comparison with Western Europe and even though the Russian soul is not something we can truly understand, still its great masters of prose fiction from Gogol to Chekhov offer so much in the way of understanding humanity that practically every reader, if at all sensitive and intelligent, is profoundly grateful for having read masterpieces of Russian fiction. A generation of readers in the English-speaking world was thus grateful to Constance Garnett for translating single-handedly all the masters of Russian fiction.6 Today, we have so many sinological translators doing their work with government or foundation support but getting a small audience in return. One obvious reason may be that most readers do not feel grateful for having read a Chinese masterpiece as they would after reading a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Indeed, during the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals themselves were profoundly moved by the great Russian novels and felt all the more tempted to belittle traditional Chinese fiction. We can say that during the flowering of ancient Chinese civilization the pre-Ch’in philosophers are strictly comparable to the Greek philosophers in their quest for truth and their search for a form of government mankind could live with. Imperial despotism began with the First Emperor of the Ch’in, and continued during the Han dynasty when Confucianism as such was officially distorted to bring about all the fea-

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tures of Chinese society that invited the label “feudal” from Marxist thinkers. It is not for nothing, therefore, that the great works of pre-Ch’in China such as The Book of Songs, the Analects, the Mencius, and the muchtranslated Tao-te Ching7 have long become an accepted part of world literature and thought, whereas most literature and thought since the Han remain little known in the West despite the valiant work done by the translators. During the two thousand years of imperial Confucianism, scholars thought alike and felt alike and cannot claim the freshness and originality of the writers of the pre-Ch’in period. It thus takes an intimate familiarity with the classical language to distinguish the poets one from the other and to relish them individually. In translation these stylistic nuances are inevitably lost, and all Chinese poets appear to bear a family resemblance to the point of blurring their individual features. But, fundamentally, even to a Chinese like myself, Chinese literature of the imperial period suffers in comparison with European literature since the Renaissance because it is not fortified with a humanistic idealism and cultivates a selfish lyrical mode that ultimately appears tiring or cloying. With due awareness of the historical connotations of the terms “classic” and “romantic” in western criticism, we may define the long imperial period of China as “classic” and see the modern period as characterized by the nation’s belated response to all the movements sweeping across the earth since the advent of romanticism in the late eighteenth century. In Jacques Barzun’s words, “the tendency of historic Romanticism was away from authority and toward liberty, away from the acceptance of caked wisdom and toward the exploratory development of the individual, away from the secure fixities and toward the drama of the unforeseeable, away from monarchy and toward the sovereignty of the people.”8 We could adopt this formula without change of wording to suggest the transformation of China during the May Fourth period: even the ominous word “unforeseeable” is accurate in suggesting the unexpected turn of events that led to the establishment of Communist tyranny on the mainland. But during the high tide of May Fourth romanticism, the tradition itself was the declared enemy, and to the many young writers and rebels of the time, the traditional scholar-official-poet could not but appear as an antithetical figure, with his caked wisdom and secure fixities, with his obligatory loyalty to the emperor and fundamental distance from the people. Though, as we have seen, individual great writers have always been spared, this negative attitude toward the scholar-official has persisted to this day, even

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among scholars and intellectuals opposed to the Communist caricature of traditional society. My own dissatisfaction with traditional poetry and prose has mainly to do with this narrow, self-centered, and unsympathetic character. By critical consensus, Ch’ü Yuan, T’ao Ch’ien, Li Po, and Tu Fu are among the greatest Chinese poets, if not the four greatest. They all wrote an individualistic type of poetry stamped with character and feeling. In real life they were unlucky by worldly standards in that their terms of office were either brief or unhappy. Probably, if they had served happily and had nothing to complain about, they could not have become the great poets that they were. But the point, nevertheless, is that even T’ao Ch’ien, who retired to his farm after a brief stint as an official, protested too much. One senses that his rural happiness is incomplete unless he reminds himself of his difference from all the courtiers and bureaucrats. The greatest poets of their age, Li Po and Tu Fu nevertheless spent futile years seeking potential patrons and trying to get government posts. Ch’ü Yuan was the first major poet in point of time, and remains a fountainhead of inspiration to poets today. Yet it is characteristic that in the Li Sao (On Encountering Sorrow) he is addressing the basic issue of all subsequent poet-officials—protestation of loyalty and virtue and disappointment over the prince’s failure to appreciate and trust him. Whether in the end he is supposed to commit suicide or become a recluse, his first duty to serve his prince, if he could have his way, is never questioned. Unlike these four, the poets who succeeded in officialdom tended to write poetry that is conventional, complacent, and far less personal to adorn every social occasion that arose. Of course, even a high minister has his ups and downs, and his personal frustration is as real as that of a man in any other calling. But today, when there are so many career openings for bright youth, the choices open to a poet-bureaucrat cannot but look limited and uninviting. In reading T’ang poetry, therefore, the sheer recurrence of the same joys and disappointments experienced by a court or provincial official, the same banquets and excursions, the same consolatory messages to failed examinees or demoted bureaucrats, the same unctuous praise of high ministers that could serve as one’s patrons, and the same flattery of Buddhist and Taoist priests for their spirituality is nothing short of nauseating. At the same time you detect in each poet the same reticence about his family life and his more private self because it is immensely to his advantage to maintain a correct image in accord with the

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conventional ideals of courtly and scholarly behavior. He rarely mentions his wife but upon her death he would have to write an elegy which, however short or unconvincing, is what his poet-friends would expect of him. So much of traditional Chinese verse was written to meet a social purpose that one cannot say if this poetry is sincere. It is certainly not authentic. Even Tu Fu had to praise friends he didn’t particularly care for and flatter officials he at heart detested. (But he mentions wife and children so often and is reckless of poetic decorum in so many other ways that he is the most endearing as well as the greatest Chinese poet.) When poetry serves the purposes of today’s greeting cards and thank-you notes, you don’t even expect it to give a picture of things as they are in society or in government. If lyrical feeling is stressed on all occasions to make it appear that the poet and his friends are all noble specimens of Confucian manhood, each in his proper social station or government post, then the mimetic impulse is given little expression in the generalized natural landscape or the human setting of this kind of poetry. In Chinese Lyricism, Burton Watson analyzes the kinds of nature imagery to be found in The Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang (T’ang shih san-pai shou), a standard anthology for home and school use. The samples chosen may not be large enough, but anyone who has read more extensively in T’ang poetry must also endorse Watson’s conclusion: All of this means that the Chinese nature poet is sketching out a more or less generalized landscape—mountains, rivers, trees, birds—rather than describing in detail; and when he does decide to add a touch of the specific, his choice of detail is dictated less by what we may suppose was actually before his eyes than by the conventions of literary allusion and symbolism.9

For most T’ang poets, writing poetry was so much of a social activity that they didn’t even have to use their own eyes. And the brief compass of most poetic forms spared them the need to spell things out in their minute particulars. The greatest weakness of classical Chinese poetry, which follows from its need to observe social and political decorum, is its satiric reticence—its fear to speak out against government and social abuses and its avoidance of raillery and lampoon in the name of good taste. Though Confucius does not rule out the satiric function of poetry and values The Book of Songs

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for enabling readers to express their grievances (k’o-i yuan), by the Han period the critical injunction that the poet should be gentle and kind (wenjou tun-hou) and refrain from satire has been sanctioned by the new Confucian orthodoxy supporting imperial despotism. Even without this critical doctrine, of course, Chinese poets would have to check their satiric impulse to preserve their personal safety. In the Han, so much of the court literature (the rhapsodies on metropolises and capitals, for instance) reeks of flattery and exaggeration that for descriptions of real life you have to turn to the ballad tradition of folk poetry. And it was in emulation of that tradition that the great T’ang poets Tu Fu and Po Chü-i wrote poems of conscious social protest. Poets of later dynasties followed in their wake and kept alive the spirit of humanitarian sympathy.10 But in view of the large-scale tyranny and corruption of the imperial government during these dynasties, it would seem that poets had not begun to exercise their satiric power when they merely noted local instances of suffering and injustice. I have so far characterized traditional Chinese poetry in terms of its social and occasional character, its inflated sentiment and mimetic inattentiveness, and its satiric restraint. This negative approach may seem the worst possible way to determine its world importance, but it is only when we have in view the gigantic heaps of verse written to lubricate the poet’s social relations and advance his bureaucratic career that we can see in contrast how great the great poets are, to make us enter their worlds and share their thoughts and feelings a thousand years, fifteen hundred years after their death. Part I of Milan Kundera’s new book on The Art of the Novel (1988) I find particularly useful in my attempt to separate the genuine poets that belong to the world from the hundreds of poets who should have no claim on our time. What follows is a key passage: The novel has accompanied man uninterruptedly and faithfully since the beginning of the Modern Era. It was then that the “passion to know,” which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect it against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light. That is the sense in which I understand and share Hermann Broch’s insistence in repeating: The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown

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segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality. I would also add: The novel is Europe’s creation; its discoveries, though made in various languages, belong to the whole of Europe. The sequence of discoveries (not the sum of what was written) is what constitutes the history of the European novel.11

We may not agree that the novel is solely “Europe’s creation” or that “knowledge is the novel’s only morality,” but Kundera’s conception of the history of the European novel as a series of discoveries in the realm of being is certainly true. We may say of classical Chinese poetry as well that its history is comprised of a sequence of discoveries in the realm of feeling as well as the world of human observation. In sheer bulk and number of poems preserved, no other culture can surpass the Chinese record in shih poetry. But the preponderant bulk of this poetry is reiterative of familiar feelings and sentiments dressed up in a language that, too, has been used before. The poets who truly feel and truly see are also inevitably the great technical masters of Chinese verse. For only those fussy about the expression of their feelings and sensations will take the necessary trouble to compel words to serve their needs. The great Chinese poets, including the four already mentioned and Li Ho, Li Shang-yin, and Su Shih of the T’ang–Sung period, in discovering feelings hitherto unexpressed or defining states of being hitherto only adumbrated, are at the same time the great innovators of Chinese verse. They constitute the history of Chinese shih poetry, and should be read by the western reader if he wants to know what shih poetry is all about, though preferably in the language in which it was recorded. But for anyone who has read much English poetry, even the great Chinese poets share a family resemblance greater than that between Pope and Wordsworth or between Spenser and Donne, even though both were Elizabethan poets. The brevity of the Chinese poem, the predominance of the lyrical at the expense of the narrative and satiric, the social occasions that poetry serves and therefore its masculine character (with the exception of special types of shih in which women are featured)—all these considerations would mean that Chinese poets made a smaller range of discoveries in the realms of feeling and action than the great English poets from Chaucer to Yeats in six hundred years, even if we exclude Shakespeare and the other great playwrights of his age. This is the case even though Ch’ü

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Yuan, Li Ho, and Li Shang-yin are exceptional among Chinese poets for their fascination with the mythic and erotic worlds. In English poetry we expect a shift in poetic style and sensibility every fifty years. Despite all the dynastic changes, Chinese sensibility really did not change much from the Han to the Ch’ing. The price of cultural stability is the narrower disparity between individual geniuses in the poetic tradition.

IV Traditional Chinese poets, denied the romantic vision of an unfettered humanity, could not conceive of a viable alternative to monarchical government even though many of their poems show sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, expose governmental cruelty, and yearn for tiny utopian retreats free of worldly cares. Because Chinese novelists are far more mimetic than lyrical in their depiction of the world, they appear all the more didactic in their endorsement of the Confucian political order and traditional morality. Poets complain a lot, and in so doing they are for the moment unreconciled to the emperor’s arbitrary system of rewards and punishments. The novelists take greater pleasure in justifying the ways of gods to men, but nevertheless describe the imperial court, the bureaucratic world, and the ordinary people in a far more detailed way than is possible in Chinese verse. We encounter thus a far greater range of male and female characters in fiction than in shih and tz’u poetry, and they constitute a bustling world, alive with intrigue and action. But all this diversity of character and incident notwithstanding, the world of Chinese fiction remains interpretable in accordance with the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist schemes of morality and justice so that the sequence of discoveries in the human realm that constitutes the history of the Chinese novel consists only of a number of outstanding works, usually including the six discussed in my Classic Chinese Novel. As that book has made abundantly clear, these six have each uncovered significant areas of Chinese experience, and their authors are like the major Chinese poets in being innovative in form and technique to the extent they are successful in discovering, to use Kundera’s phrase, hitherto unknown segments of Chinese existence for even today’s readers. But despite my brave words, these six with their many translations in English and other western languages, as I have said earlier, have so far failed to capture a much larger world audience while, on both sides of the

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Taiwan Strait, they are steadily losing ground with younger readers. I have earlier attributed this indifference to the general decline in literacy and the stronger pull of other types of reading matter and audiovisual entertainment, but surely the main cause lies in traditional China itself, since even the best of its novels and plays may not now attract the reading public with their old-fashioned didacticism and sentimentality rooted in Chinese culture, and may further alienate it with their depiction of a traditional society that appears today shockingly inhumane and unjust. After reading more widely in Chinese history and becoming better informed about traditional Chinese society in recent years, I find the religious messages in even the best Chinese novels and plays cowardly and depressing since the awakened heroes invariably have to give up their earlier dreams of romantic happiness or of a better world before they can supposedly find peace and enlightenment. Thus even in these works as in the best of Chinese poetry, I miss a larger vision of humanity grounded in kindness and idealism, and fortified with true courage to confront unflinchingly all forms of evil. Consequently, whereas I have earlier praised Dream of the Red Chamber to the skies for its Buddhist-Taoist interpretation of human suffering, I am now much less happy about its supposed religious wisdom, as can be seen in the following passage translated from a Chinese essay of mine: In recent years, after I have gained (so I thought) a more penetrating understanding of old Chinese society, I am not really at heart satisfied with Dream of the Red Chamber. In a recent essay I have asked: Is Dream really comparable to The Brothers Karamazov and Middlemarch? Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, of course, has shown positive sympathy for a great number of the maidens in the book, and seen something of the horror in his observance of the domestic life of a large aristocratic clan, but in the end he could only borrow Buddhist-Taoist ideas to underscore the emptiness of the mundane world. This means in effect that he has negated the thirst or longing for life and love as shown by so many youths and maidens in his novel, and further means that he has compromised with the bigfamily system and the old society that have so oppressed them. Anyone who bows, no matter how reluctantly, to the forces of evil is inglorious; any novelists who bow to the forces of evil on the pretext of seeing through human life are also inglorious—including our beloved Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in.12

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I have aired my dissatisfaction in full awareness, of course, of Dream’s key importance as a major work of the Chinese tradition, and of its author’s manifest sympathy for a life of romantic nonconformity. I am irritated, nevertheless, because, living as he did in the late imperial age, he saw no way out for his suffering hero other than to direct him to the path of Buddhist-Taoist enlightenment. Similarly, the ideal of Confucian reclusion as upheld by Wu Ching-tzu in The Scholars ( Ju-lin wai-shih) appears to me equally timid, if less saddening, in view of what should be done to make life more livable for the conventional and unconventional characters alike in the novel. I suppose the only ideal worthy of pursuit in late traditional China would be the kind of political and social revolution eventually launched by Sun Yat-sen; neither Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in nor Wu Ching-tzu, of course, could have dared to harbor such an ideal, even privately. Like the great poets Ch’ü Yuan, T’ao Ch’ien, Li Po, and Tu Fu, and like the great playwrights that I have no space to discuss except, later on, for one play by Kuan Han-ch’ing, these two great novelists were so much identified with Chinese civilization and so inured to its negative aspects that they could not envisage alternatives to the existing governmental, social, and familial systems that might enable themselves and their compatriots to live more freely and happily, and with greater individual dignity. When the world was too much with them, they could only seek various forms of individual retreat to preserve their honor or integrity. From his earliest stories and essays Lu Hsün saw as the major national disease the Chinese habit of self-deception and hiding the truth from others, especially the young. In “On Looking Facts in the Face” (1925), one of his most trenchant essays, he charges Chinese writers with sharing this national habit of concealment (man) and deceit ( p’ien), and summarizes as follows: Because we Chinese have never dared to look life in the face, we have to resort to concealment and deceit; hence we have produced a literature of concealment and deceit; and with this literature we have sunk more deeply than ever into the quagmire of concealment and deceit, to such an extent that we do not know it ourselves.13

But despite this categorical statement, I suppose Lu Hsün, with his high regard for both Wu Ching-tzu and Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, would be the first to deny that they were self-deceivers deliberately concealing the truth from their readers and misleading them with some false ideals.14 The

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poignancy of their narrative art should convince us that they were personally committed to these ideals of individual purity and religious awakening that they so painstakingly delineated against the mundane background of vulgar pursuits. In deconstructing traditional Chinese literature for us, Lu Hsün has, I am afraid, credited Chinese writers with too much cleverness, and failed to see the obvious irony and pathos of their cultural predicament. I would say that most Chinese writers believed in the traditional ideals because there were no others they could fall back on, and it is precisely because of their total immersion in their culture that it would have never occurred to them to “look life in the face” in the way Lu Hsün, with his additional education in Western medicine, literature, and thought, did. While Chinese writers were certainly cowardly, I believe it was much less their lack of daring than their cultural blindness that prevented them from looking life in the face. Thus, while it would be possible to see the molders of Confucianism at the Han court as diabolic schemers suppressing diversity of thought in the interests of a unified national ideology, I would be extremely reluctant to see the writers of Han and after as conspirators in a gigantic plot to deceive the people for over two thousand years. Judging by their earnest moralism on such matters as filial impiety and sexual dissipation, evident even in works of latter-day salacious fiction, and their gross insensitivity to glaring instances of inhumanity and injustice at the imperial palace, at the local yamen, and inside every household rich enough to contain concubines, servants, and bond slaves, we could say that Chinese writers from the high ministers down to the providers of popular entertainment were less hypocritical deceivers than genuine victims of their Confucian education. It was their education and upbringing that rendered them gradually insensible to such forms of human wretchedness and depravity as had been sanctioned by law or custom. Thus boys in good families, accustomed to the disadvantaged position of even their own sisters, learned to accept the subordination of women as a matter of fact, and to behave accordingly. It is due to Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in’s exceptional genius and family background that he could conceive a hero who is a friend to all girls, but the fact that Chia Pao-yü only belatedly appeared in a novel first published toward the end of the eighteenth century speaks volumes about traditional Chinese life and literature. The scholars turned bohemians who no longer cared for an official career or reputation tended to treat women as their equals and write about

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them with kindness and insight. The playwright Kuan Han-ch’ing is one of these, and his tragic and comic heroines, especially Tou O, Chao P’anerh, and T’an Chi-erh, are justly celebrated. But with Kuan Han-ch’ing as with Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in and Wu Ching-tzu, so much of the cruelty toward women has become an ingrained part of Chinese life that even these sympathetic writers could hardly be expected to notice every instance. Injustice to Tou O (Tou-o yuan), usually taken to be the outstanding social tragedy in Yuan drama, abounds in villainies. The principal villain, Prefect T’ao Wu, quite unconscionably convicts Tou O of murder when her accuser Donkey Chang, in trying to poison her mother-in-law Ts’ai P’o-p’o so that he may possess the young widow himself, has obviously brought about the death of his own father by mistake. Donkey Chang is certainly more of an active villain than the prefect, but one measure of the weakness of the play is that all such villains—including Donkey’s father and the pharmacist Sai Lu-yi—are too clownish or farcical to be taken seriously. Because of her role as a usurer, critics have even blamed Ts’ai P’o-p’o for Tou O’s tragedy, but so far as I know, no critic before me has assigned Tou O’s father, the self-righteous Surveillance Commissioner Tou T’ien-chang of act IV, the role of a villain. In “The Fate of Classical Chinese Literature,” part II, however, I have indicted him as the chief culprit who has made the short life of his daughter so very miserable. It is bad enough that Tou O should lose her mother when she is only three, but at the age of seven she is sold by her father as a child bride (t’ung-yang-hsi) for Ts’ai P’o-p’o’s son, ostensibly to repay a debt (plus interest) of ten or forty taels of silver but actually to equip the widower with enough money to go to the capital to take the examination.15 Tou T’ien-chang thus shows his callousness not only toward his only child—for a t’ung-yang-hsi is but a slave who drudges without pay—but to the memory of his wife as well. He must have thought that it would be very inconvenient to take his daughter along on the road and that once in the capital, she would be a burden and distraction when he should be concentrating on his studies. I translate from my own essay: From our modern point of view, does poverty matter that much if Tou T’ien-chang decides to share a hard life with his daughter? The wife has already died; the only child of her flesh and blood— must she be abandoned also? Ten taels of silver (even if forty taels)—how much money is that? A genuine man, a man of honor,

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forsaking his studies for a while, could easily earn that sum by selling his physical labor. But in old China, a scholar regards the examinations as the first priority; in comparison, the welfare of his children is not too important. But people will call him hard-hearted if he sells his son. Sooner or later, a daughter will be married off; so if she is sent away early as a child bride, it doesn’t matter that much. Living in that age, Kuan Han-ch’ing himself could not see how despicable Tou T’ien-chang was, and has thus deceived his readers for hundreds of years.16

Commissioner Tou, arriving in Ch’u-chou many years later to review the case of Tou O, is initially displeased because the executed murderess bears his surname. When her ghost appears before him and identifies herself, he becomes even more furious because her criminal record has disgraced his ancestors and injured his good name. He rebukes her with a long speech, and demands the truth from her: “If you utter one false word, I shall send you to the tutelary god; then your spirit will never re-enter human form, but remain a hungry ghost for ever in the shades.” Before her conviction the Tou family has been honorable because “for three generations no son of our clan has broken the law; for five generations no daughter has married again.”17 As a man of Confucian education, Commissioner Tou does not see that, whereas no son of his family has technically broken any law, his selling of a daughter constitutes a far more heinous crime than the remarriage of a widow. Likewise conditioned by his Confucian upbringing, the playwright himself, despite his compassion for Tou O and his indignation against all the people who have harmed her, sees her father nevertheless in a sympathetic light, and assigns him the role of her eventual avenger. He is allowed a tirade against his daughter’s ghost not only for dramatic effect but also to stress his clear conscience and utter incorruptibility to the point of disregarding all parental feelings should she be proven guilty of murder in a retrial. I have made a point of stressing Kuan Han-ch’ing’s total unawareness of Tou T’ien-chang’s real role in the tragedy of his daughter precisely because Injustice to Tou O is the best known of all traditional Chinese plays for its passionate defense of a helpless woman and indictment against official injustice. Yet even the author of this most acclaimed play is so inured to the established customs and priorities of traditional society that he actually feels less sorry for the daughter than for her father when he

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takes her to Ts’ai P’o-p’o’s place in the Prologue. Whereas in reading shih poetry, I am principally bothered by the self-centered scholar-official, in traditional fiction and drama it is the depiction of traditional society itself that mars my enjoyment, aside from literary considerations. For most such works, I not only can predict their ideological structures and anticipate their didactic messages but unavoidably will encounter scenes and incidents that are unpleasant to read because they reflect the callous and absurd cruelty of that society. No matter how kindhearted they are by nature, the novelists and playwrights are products of that society, and cannot maintain their humanitarian vigilance against the representation of ordinary customs and everyday occurrences that would today smack of cruelty. Episodes designed to illustrate some extraordinary virtue are usually the cruelest. In my essay on “Humane Literature,” I cite an episode from chapter 19 of The Three Kingdoms, where a hunter, unable to procure game to serve Liu Pei, kills his wife so that his distinguished guest may have a meat dish for dinner. At the same time the man has so much filial regard for his mother that he dares not leave her to seek his fortune with Liu Pei. For the next few days, however, she will be assuredly well fed as mother and son dine off his wife’s carcass with relish and equanimity. That wives and daughters, not to say concubines, prostitutes, and maidservants, are commonly seen as maltreated characters in Chinese fiction and drama should cause no surprise when in reality the life they lived in traditional society was much worse. I believe a feminist reevaluation of traditional Chinese literature is long overdue though, surprisingly, few women professors in the field have yet taken the initiative to do so. From the feminist perspective it would be legitimate not only to deconstruct fiction and drama but also to regard the poets’ conventional praise of feminine beauty and commiseration with the plight of women as a form of male-chauvinist mockery or insult. Thus the poetic convention of the post–Han period to depict and sympathize with the lonely and loveless ladies in the palace should be an obvious target for a searching critique. The feminist critic could wonder why the ministers, and especially the emperors and crown princes among these poets, did not do something to ameliorate the ladies’ situation. A truly concerned emperor could at least release all the women in the harem he was not personally interested in, thereby earning the praise of his Confucian ministers and historians. Instead, we find that Crown Prince Hsiao Kang, subsequently an emperor, commissioned Hsü Ling to compile a volume of palace poetry—

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the Yü-t’ai hsin-yung—expressly for distribution among the palace ladies so as to relieve their boredom, as the Preface so mellifluently states.18 It would seem the worst kind of insult that these ladies, who had not entered the palace of their own accord, should read and supposedly be entertained and edified by the unrelieved loneliness of other such ladies depicted in the volume. While the joyless confinement of palace ladies has remained a staple theme in shih poetry, the custom of foot binding, like the much more ancient custom of turning boys and men into eunuchs by slicing off their genital organs, did not become one probably because even for the poets it was too painful or ugly a subject to invite lyrical contemplation. Apparently, the historians were also not interested, since we have no accurate record of the rise and nationwide adoption of the custom. But certainly by the Southern Sung it had become usual for young daughters of respectable urban families to have their feet bound. Unbelievably, for some seven or eight hundred years no one protested in their behalf, and it was not until the early nineteenth century that two scholars—Li Ju-chen in his novel Ching-hua yuan and Yü Cheng-hsieh in his essay collection Kuei-ssu lei-kao—satirized or condemned this cruel practice. For that long span of time Confucian and Neo-Confucian fathers had heard the cries of their young daughters for weeks and months on end as their feet were being shrunk and deformed. The brothers of these girls had heard the same, and many of them eventually enjoyed high positions at court, as did many of the fathers. These influential men could have done something—petition the emperor to abolish the custom, set a personal example by refusing to torture their own daughters, or at least write denunciations of foot binding and circulate them among influential readers. But instead of such concerted actions to spare the young girls, these influential men, I am afraid, would insist on taking wives and concubines with bound feet, and if they went to brothels, would presumably favor the courtesans with the tiniest feet as well. And if they were poets, there would be occasions when they didn’t mind writing verses in praise of the “golden lilies” of real or imaginary beauties. If it is the writer’s duty to tell the truth, then it is possible to say that Chinese writers from at least the Southern Sung to the downfall of the Ch’ing were so blinded by custom that they couldn’t tell beauty from ugliness and would find the natural-sized “big feet” of women actually laughable, forgetting that, before the evil custom had prevailed, Li Po among other poets had praised girls for their white, natural feet.19

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It may be said that starting with the rage for chinoiserie Western Europeans took to Chinese art precisely because it represented an innocent world seemingly undamaged by inhumanity and injustice. Even today, I would suppose many western connoisseurs have turned to Chinese art and poetry because they wanted to be transported to a serener world not only blessedly uncontaminated by modern civilization but insulated as well from inhumanity and injustice, even though, living at a time when the brutalities of the Chinese government, past and present, have been widely reported by journalists and historians, they should have no excuse to be still ignorant of the fate of the Chinese people since time immemorial. But, while for dealers in traditional Chinese art, it is in their interest to perpetuate the myth of a serene and aesthetically refined China so as to attract more customers, we as teachers of Chinese literature in the western world should find it ignoble to perpetuate the myths of old China or invent new ones so as to lure more students to our subject. If twentieth-century Chinese literature, starting with the late Ch’ing novelists, has been telling the truth about China, then the crucial question regarding traditional Chinese literature should have been why so few of its authors bothered to address the problems of inhumanity and injustice that now preoccupy the modern writers. But as stated earlier, themselves victimized by their Confucian education, these writers became so myopically concerned with their governmental careers that they were oblivious of humanity other than their small circles of literary and official friends. Even the minority who knew the truth and would like to speak out would nevertheless restrain their indignation or satiric impulse in fear of governmental persecution. All this is very human and understandable, but if, generation after generation, dynasty after dynasty, enough literati had dared to speak out against imperial despotism, social injustice, and the maltreatment of women, China might have been changed for the better five hundred, a thousand, or fifteen hundred years ago, and the literature written since the hypothetical awakening or renaissance would have been incomparably richer. If this had been the case, the sinological translators cited for praise in section II would have earned gratitude not merely from the specialists but also from cultivated readers of English everywhere for introducing them to a body of literature that might prove as truthful and profound in its own way as the tragedies of ancient Greece or the great novels of nineteenth-century Russia.

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But in reality, the scholar-official class had dominated the political as well as the literary world in China from the Han to the Ch’ing, and while there were outspoken ministers in every dynasty who would court martyrdom to remonstrate against the emperor, the great majority of that class took care to safeguard themselves against risk or danger, and the poetry and prose they have bequeathed us are on the whole a safe, riskfree product showing little ardor or passion for governmental reform, for romantic love, or even for the mountains and rivers they all professed to love so much. But on the other hand, with all its apparent failure to retain the loyalty of Chinese readers everywhere and capture a larger worldwide audience, the literary legacy of China is nevertheless fortunate in having so many poets and prose writers whose disillusionment with or estrangement from the bureaucratic world was at least a sign of personal or creative integrity, and so many novelists and playwrights who had disavowed government service to turn to the art of writing as a serious profession.

Chinese Novels and American Critics Reflections on Structure, Tradition, and Satire (1983)

I Since I cannot give an adequate description of all the genres of traditional Chinese fiction in this paper, I shall concern myself principally with the novel, taking into account the development of the genre until the late Ch’ing and providing a broader view of the novelistic tradition than I presented in The Classic Chinese Novel. I shall also take into account the work of some of my distinguished American colleagues showing a serious concern with the form or structure of major Chinese novels.1 Since the aim of this conference is to promote a better understanding of East Asian literature, I have not hesitated in the following pages to state my disagreements with my colleagues so as to generate profitable discussion. This paper, comprised mainly of my observations and reflections on the critical understanding of the Chinese novel, is not therefore a systematic exposition of a well-defined topic. Since the heyday of the New Criticism, American academic critics have been conditioned to examine a poem or a novel in terms of its overall structure in the belief that the more unified and complex a work’s structure, the better the work is. Despite the subsequent emergence of various schools of criticism originating in continental Europe, this reigning doctrine has prevailed. Therefore, even in the study of Chinese fiction, American scholars have been anxious to demonstrate the complex struc-

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tural design of the major works, as if they otherwise could not be taken as seriously as the great novels of the western tradition. Since the publication of my Classic Chinese Novel in 1968, numerous articles and books have been written to show the complex structure of one or more of the Big Six that I discussed, and to prove their complete (or almost complete) success in integrating form with meaning by reference to such critical concepts as myth, allegory, archetype, symbolism, and irony. This new scholarship has been quite influential among specialists in all parts of the world, so that today the United States is clearly the leading center for the critical study of Chinese fiction. However, not all recent American scholarship has been motivated by a desire to demonstrate the grand design of the major novels. For example, Y. W. Ma, the foremost bibliographer of Chinese fiction today, shows himself to be a careful and responsible critic in his valuable article on the Chinese historical novel, wherein he makes no inflated claims about the artistry of the genre.2 In his study of short fiction over the years, culminating in the highly acclaimed book, The Chinese Vernacular Story (1981),3 Patrick Hanan has also proved himself to be a very reliable and judicious critic, whether he is defining the style, point of view, and narrative form of the genre in contrast to the classical tale know as ch’uan-ch’i or distinguishing the individual style, moral stance, and worldview of one story writer from another. He does all this work of description and discrimination with no critical flourishes. It would appear that it is only the Big Six that have prompted my colleagues to make exaggerated claims on their behalf. Any critical strategy that has been fruitfully applied to the study of western literature would seem worth a try, in view of these novels’ long-established and unchallengeable prestige as Chinese classics. Most American students of Chinese fiction know, of course, that even Dream of the Red Chamber (Hung-lou meng) and The Scholars ( Ju-lin wai-shih), the two most mature works of the Big Six, do not maintain an exciting narrative pace like that of The Brothers Karamazov or Middlemarch. To some of my colleagues who are well trained in comparative literature, it was a challenge to explain why the greatest novels of the Chinese and European traditions should show such sharp differences in narrative style and form. A few years ago, Andrew Plaks and Lin Shuen-fu turned to The Book of Changes (I ching) and Joseph Needham for guidance. They concluded that the Chinese mind is diametrically opposed to the European mind because it long ago evolved a cosmology

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that defines things and events in terms of cyclical changes and yin-yang wu-hsing correspondences.4 Therefore, what a western reader reading The Scholars or Dream in translation for the first time would view as obvious weaknesses in narrative structure may now be regarded as unique contributions of the Chinese mind to the making of long narratives. By thus invoking the peculiar Chinese mentality and worldview, we can turn almost any seeming or real deficiency of the Chinese novel into a strength. But this theory did not satisfy everyone in the field. Even Plaks himself, after introducing the terms “complementary bipolarity” and “multiple periodicity” to account for the structure of Dream and, indeed, of all Chinese literature, seems to have retired them, probably even before my review of his book, Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber, appeared.5 Along with David T. Roy and some others, Plaks has now turned to the traditional commentators for guidance. This has paved the way for the sudden currency of such early seventeenth-century critics as Chin Sheng-t’an, Mao Tsung-kang, and Chang Chu-p’o, the commentators on The Water Margin (Shui-hu chuan), The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San-kuo chih yen-i), and Chin P’ing Mei, respectively. Unlike modern Chinese critics, these early commentators are totally uncontaminated by the West and therefore cannot make prejudicial statements in favor of western literature. Though their criticism reflects their earlier training in the writing and appreciation of examination essays, they were of course well-read scholars naturally at home in the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist ways of thought. What is especially surprising to their American admirers is that these critics all insist on the importance of structure (chieh-kou) and speak endlessly of seamless unity and recurrent motives, both verbal and thematic.6 Once upon a time, then, China did produce critics as scholastically subtle as the present-day structuralists. What a pity that they should remain unexamined by modern Chinese scholars, or if examined (as is the case with Chin Sheng-t’an), with appreciation tempered by ridicule or stricture! In the wake of excitement over the rediscovery of these critics, some American scholars are already turning to the esoteric commentaries of some Ch’ing editions of Journey to the West (Hsi-yu chi). All this reliance on traditional commentaries and esoteric learning along with their expected dependence on contemporary western criticism and theory is not at all surprising in view of the graduate school environ-

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ment in which the specialists in Chinese fiction find themselves. They no longer seem to read Chinese novels for pleasure; they read the same text intensively and repeatedly in order to publish their critical and scholarly findings. It is not uncommon that when a professor is doing research on a novel, he will give a seminar on that novel so that students can join him on a collaborative journey in research. In an atmosphere of this sort, one puzzles over every scene, every chapter, as if the novel under scrutiny were the most subtle and challenging text in the world. Thus, we now face a paradoxical situation: whereas novels like The Water Margin and Journey to the West retain their popularity on mainland China and in Taiwan mainly as children’s classics, the sinological centers in this country are subjecting them to the most exacting kind of perusal in order to disclose their recondite meanings and their equally subtle forms. It seems that a determined critic would distrust his natural reactions to a novel during a first or second reading if they do not accord with his expectations of what this novel should be, given its high reputation in China and the rhapsodic praise given it in commentaries. Therefore, he will read on until he convinces himself that the said novel, upon which he has spent months or years of time, is truly a masterpiece. Such diligence and devotion, however, do not necessarily make a better critic; the critical faculty may become deadened in the process. I doubt that the young T. S. Eliot read the minor Elizabethan playwrights more than once or twice; yet his essays about them, nearly always dashed off in the form of book reviews, still stand as first-rate criticism bearing the imprint of an acute mind unusually sensitive to versification and dramatic form. After devoting many years to the study of Chin P’ing Mei, David Roy in 1977 published a short essay according the highest praise to Chang Chu-p’o.7 For those previously unacquainted with the commentator, this essay is mainly of interest for its series of brief extracts in translation from Chang’s Tu-fa (How to read the Chin P’ing Mei), purporting to prove that his commentary, “taken as a whole, is the most illuminating critical analysis in depth of any Chinese novel with which I am familiar in any language.”8 I am afraid Roy has even copied Chang’s style in making this extravagant statement. The extracts shouldn’t convince anyone that he is to be taken very seriously. Chang says, for example, “How can anyone say that there is a single instance of irrelevant writing in the Chin P’ing Mei?”9 Of the supreme classics in the western tradition, one can say this perhaps only of The Divine Comedy, since Homer occasionally nods, and

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Shakespeare frequently makes bad jokes. How can we say this of Chin P’ing Mei when it borrows and adapts material of all sorts from other sources and shows signs of careless composition as well? Moreover, Roy has apparently chosen what he believes to be the most attractive passages from Tu-fa to ensure our admiration; to read the untranslated long section on the symbolic and allegoric meanings of the names of characters in the novel is to be once again reminded that overingenious and irresponsible guessing of the author’s intent can be the deadliest game in the criticism of fiction. Even if Chang Chu-p’o were far more judicious than my brief quotation makes him out to be, we should nonetheless consult him with caution and not let deference to his supposed wisdom and insight put us under his spell. Roy’s latest article, “A Confucian Interpretation of the Chin P’ing Mei” (1981),10 attributes to the author the greatest artistic success and the highest moral idealism as a follower of Hsün Tzu, a contention that clearly shows Roy’s debt to Chang. Roy and I are no longer in cultural isolation like the traditional Chinese commentators; we have all read a great many classics of western fiction and thus have a different perspective when reading Chinese novels. Since Chin P’ing Mei can be considered China’s first true novel, as distinct from other types of long narrative, Chang Chu-p’o’s enthusiasm is understandable, but we must remember he had read very few works of long fiction, not even Dream of the Red Chamber. F. R. Leavis’s comment on the earlier English criticism of Tom Jones is surely apt here: “That the eighteenth century, which hadn’t much lively reading to choose from, but had much leisure, should have found Tom Jones exhilarating is not surprising; nor is it that Scott, and Coleridge, should have been able to give that work superlative praise. Standards are formed by comparison, and what opportunities had they for that?”11 Yet if we agree with Leavis that it would be “absurd” today to talk about the “perfect construction” of Tom Jones, then how much more so it is to insist on the formal perfection and moral excellence of Chin P’ing Mei! Our new fascination with traditional commentators only confirms our long neglect of modern Chinese critics writing in the wake of the New Culture movement. Lu Hsün’s Brief History of Chinese Fiction12 remains a handy reference because we have no better English-language survey to replace it, but most other critics have fared badly. They are consulted, if at all, for their research findings, and these, of course, have been largely superseded in the course of time. It is probable that many of my American colleagues find modern Chinese criticism too elementary and too full of

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plainly worded personal opinion to be trustworthy or useful, though personally I have learned a great deal from Hu Shih, Cheng Chen-to, and A Ying13—far more, I should say, than I could ever have learned from the traditional commentators. But the main reason for my colleagues’ antipathy to these critics, I strongly suspect, is that their attitudes to the Chinese tradition are so very different. The May Fourth critics, not to say the present-day Communist critics, all wrote from an antitraditionalist standpoint, so that they have few qualms about dismissing the bulk of traditional Chinese fiction and qualifying their praise of even the major novels. Western students of Chinese literature, on the contrary, have no personal quarrel with Chinese tradition, and find the May Fourth critics shallow because of their undisguised contempt for traditional Chinese society and ideology. Now that traditional Chinese culture has become a subject of dispassionate study for native and foreign scholars alike, it is easy to forget what a magnificent breakthrough it was for Chinese intellectuals to finally perceive the inhumanity of their society and the stagnation of their civilization, especially during the later imperial dynasties. For students of Chinese fiction as for students of Chinese history, to lose sight of this fundamental truth is to deny the amply attested facts of muddled emperors, powerful eunuchs, unjustly punished ministers and generals, corrupt prefects and magistrates in collusion with the local gentry, frustrated scholars bound for the examination mill, domestic tyrants and their miserable wives, and defenseless peasants forever victimized by bureaucracy and famine. I am heartened by the recent appearance of such books as Ray Huang’s 1587: A Year of No Significance and Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang, which tell the bitter truth about late traditional China with candid portrayals, respectively, of the ruling elite and ordinary poor folk.14 Yet students of Chinese fiction have apparently lagged behind the historians: in their objective examination of novels and stories in terms of style, point of view, and narrative method, or in their more ambitious interpretations in terms of myth, archetype, and allegory, they study fiction as literature and nothing more. Apparently, they think that only Marxist critics are concerned with social reality; and what simpleminded critics the mainland scholars are, with their perpetual talk of “feudal society” and “feudal thought”! Without ever having been a Marxist, I still believe it is time for American students of Chinese fiction to relate to life, society, politics, and

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thought without necessarily doing injustice to the integrity of a novel or story as a literary text. This can be done—the late Lionel Trilling is an example of brilliant success in this delicate critical endeavor. Fiction depicts not only life but also the possibilities of life. What possibilities are there for women in the confining worlds, say, of Chin P’ing Mei and Dream of the Red Chamber, except sexual pleasure, power over husband or household, and religious consolation? When women are denied romantic fulfillment, freedom of movement, or even rudimentary schooling, the fictional world in which they appear becomes oppressive as well. It speaks volumes about traditional Chinese society that since very early times, Chinese fiction writers should have wished to deliver young women from their oppressive environment into a world of fantasy where they are more or less in charge of their own destiny: the numberless celestial maidens and fox fairies in stories and jottings in classical Chinese, the young women of magical prowess in chivalric tales and military romances, and the precocious beauties of the stereotyped ts’ai-tzu chia-jen novels. These beauties finally became real human beings in Dream and at least enjoy discussing life’s possibilities while they are in the Takuanyuan; once forced to leave the garden, however, they are all inextricably caught in the net of social reality.

II In the first section I have isolated two tendencies observable in the work of some of my colleagues: an overly strong desire to reveal the grand design and complex meaning of at least the major novels, and a great respect for tradition so that these colleagues of mine would prefer to use traditional commentators as their guides and ignore the antitraditionalist critical legacy of the May Fourth period. I believe that a critic is doing less than he should if he sees a novel purely as a literary or aesthetic object without reference to whatever reality is embodied in it, and that he is irresponsible if he knowingly lets his method or interpretation triumph over the novel by making it more coherent in design or more consistent in thought than it actually is. I agree with the New Critics in their assertion that a novel with a coherent structure is better than a poorly organized one, and my disagreement with some of my colleagues arises over this matter of structure. Novels like Jane Austen’s Emma and Conrad’s The

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Secret Agent seem to me perfectly organized, but I do not find such complete integration of form and meaning in traditional Chinese novels. Of course, the major Chinese novels are many times longer and are much harder to organize into a unified whole. On the other hand, I can enjoy novels even if they are highly episodic and loosely organized. As Jacques Barzun has so aptly put it, “Judging by form alone, by coherence, unity, proportion, and mastery of varied tone, one would have to rank Zuleika Dobson higher than the novels of Stendhal and Dostoevsky.”15 No one does so because other factors count as well in determining our enjoyment of a novel and our estimate of its quality. To be interesting, I believe, a novelist must be very intelligent in his handling of language and dialogue, in his understanding and portrayal of character, and in his management of plot and action. Because so many traditional Chinese novels are conformist in their moral vision, the intelligent novelist should at least be able to view Chinese society or history with some degree of critical concern or ironic detachment and thereby rise above the usual moral and religious clichés that clutter the ordinary novel. A highly intelligent but structurally defective novel is far more interesting and commendable than a well-structured one bearing evidences of an ordinary mind. I am pleased that Plaks has recently more or less reached the same conclusion in his long article, “Shui-hu Chuan and the Sixteenth-century Novel Form: An Interpretative Reappraisal” (1980).16 It is, I believe, a much sounder piece of scholarship and criticism than his book on the Dream of the Red Chamber. Whereas that book practically isolates the novel from its own times, the new article pays great attention to the intellectual and literary currents of the late Ming. Instead of yin-yang wu-hsing thought, Plaks now sees the conscious use of irony as the distinguishing feature of the four great Ming novels—The Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, Chin P’ing Mei, and Journey to the West—so much so that he would not even call other long narratives of the same century “novels.” Irony is clearly a more useful interpretative term than “complementary bipolarity,” and Plaks’s new theory that the conscious use of irony offers a key to the subtle structure and meaning of the four Ming novels clearly deserves a trial. However, his patient demonstration of the principle of irony at work in the hundred-chapter Water Margin is not all that convincing, even though one must admire him for attempting a far more subtle reading of the book than traditional commentators, who saw the band leader Sung Chiang as a problematic character, portrayed ironically by the author so that

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such positive heroes as Li K’uei, Lu Ta, and Wu Sung could shine forth in greater glory. Plaks now lumps these heroes together with Sung Chiang, in contrast to such “good” heroes as Lin Ch’ung, as dark characters of whom the author disapproves because of their savagery, cunning, or misogyny. Plaks admits that no Chinese critics have ever read the novel this way. When irony is so subtle and imperceptible as to have escaped all previous readers, one may well wonder if the author did indeed construct his novel on the ironic principle. As is well known, Chin Sheng-t’an had to alter many passages in the novel to make Sung Chiang look worse and thus make his ironic reading of his character more plausible. We cannot give a fair review of Plaks’s new theory until the publication of his new book, which will include lengthy chapters on the three other novels. What troubles me after reading his article, however, is that the critical task of exploring an ironic dimension of meaning in this or that novel apparently could not satisfy him: as an ambitious theorist of the Chinese novel, he must give his all to hypothesize that suddenly, during the sixteenth century, four Ming novelists (all unidentified with the probable exception of Wu Ch’eng-en)17 were seized with the passion of a Flaubert for portraying Chinese life in an ironic manner, whether the subject be ancient history, a legend dating from the T’ang or the Sung, or a slice of domestic life. All nineteenth-century intellectual, literary, and artistic currents in Europe had paved the way for a Flaubert. The four Chinese authors could not have been so prepared for, especially if no prominent intellectuals of their time had read their novels in a consistently ironic light.18 Plaks’s go-for-broke approach betrays his preoccupation with the idea of form or structure: if the four works are indeed masterpieces of fiction, they must be proved to be works of conscious design and complex meaning, if not by their conscious use of irony, then by some other principle. Though Plaks would be the last person in the field to be suspected of any bias in favor of the European novel, subconsciously, I believe, he could not accept the four great Ming novels for what they are until they were transformed by his brilliant interpretative skill into complex and coherent structures as fully expressive of their authors’ individual visions as are the great European novels of the nineteenth century. Since those European novels are all vehicles of light in opposition to darkness, upholding high values in the face of crass materialism, philistinism, and institutional cruelty,19 so is Plaks’s new theory intended, con-

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sciously or not, to prove that the Ming novelists, too, were on the side of light and culture. Thus it is to be expected that a modern Chinese critic conditioned by western values would deplore Li K’uei, Wu Sung, and Lu Ta for their savage delight in killing, their vindictive sadism toward women, or their gargantuan appetites for meat and drink (a much less serious offense), and would go on to raise serious questions about Chinese culture for its endorsement of such heroes.20 Plaks, on the contrary, would maintain that the author of the hundred-chapter Water Margin showed that he agreed with us all along by subtly delineating these dark heroes in ironic terms and thereby affirming the cause of civilization, even though all his sources unambiguously side with these heroes. In order to certify The Water Margin as a world masterpiece that present-day western readers might read without qualms, Plaks would have us believe that the author was a transcendent genius of his time, repeatedly portraying the sadistic murders of wanton women not so much to provide thrilling entertainment for his unsqueamish (and male-chauvinist) readers but to show his ironic disapproval of such barbaric acts. Plaks has apparently forgotten that humanitarianism was not a secular religion even in western democracies until quite recent times, and that before the downfall of the Gang of Four, sexual crimes, including gang rape and murder, against innocent girls were often committed by the sons of high cadres (comparable to the ya-nei characters in The Water Margin). Similarly, in taking Hsün Tzu’s high-minded moralism as the organizing principle for Chin P’ing Mei, Roy is not only intent on proving its didactic seriousness but also driven, if I may so speculate, by his conscious or subconscious desire to “humanize” the book, so that, like Plaks’s Water Margin, this novel, repeatedly banned during the Ch’ing for its pornography and not commercially available on the mainland even today, may be accepted as a world classic. Roy takes me to task for saying that Chin P’ing Mei is expressive of “low culture and ordinary mentality.”21 If one is not initiated into subtle reading techniques, how can one take such things as pornography spiced with cruelty, coarse humor and buffoonery, broad literary burlesques, and pseudo-religious piety masking greed as anything but examples of “low culture and ordinary mentality”? By taking the author to be a stern moralist on a par with Juvenal and Swift, of course, Roy could say, as he does in his new article, that all this low taste, cheap humor, and religious sham are used to express the author’s total disgust with his degenerate times.

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Plaks’s and Roy’s reinterpretations of The Water Margin and Chin P’ing Mei will appear especially impressive if they are read by western students of comparative literature. The latter, usually knowing no Chinese and feeling rather guilty on that account, will now have to acknowledge the greater maturity of the late Ming novel, even in comparison with the supreme European novel of the same period, Don Quixote, which, despite its irony and moral idealism, is a merely loose-structured picaresque novel. But in raising high expectations among our colleagues mainly concerned with western literature, are we not also deceiving ourselves and our poor graduate students, who will find it difficult to reconcile their honest but unsophisticated impressions of the novels with our oversubtle but unconvincing interpretations? Are we not also doing a disservice to our profession in thus deceiving ourselves? I have probably read more Chinese novels than either Plaks or Roy, since I am professionally committed to the study of both traditional and modern fiction. Precisely because I have read more third-rate Chinese fiction than they, I am not easily daunted if a novel fails to please me. There is pleasure enough in being able to place that novel, and to broaden my knowledge of Chinese fiction through the unrewarding hours spent reading it. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to have read all traditional novels of note so that I could finally say that I have surveyed the whole field. However, I would never confuse the pleasure I might derive from pursuing this task as a literary historian and critic with the pleasure I would experience reading a true masterpiece that embodies formal complexity and a distinctive moral vision. The Water Margin and Chin P’ing Mei are undoubtedly two of the greatest novels of the Chinese tradition, but I would not for a moment class them with two western masterpieces earlier mentioned, The Brothers Karamazov and Middlemarch. In reading the latter, I become totally involved, literally heedless of hunger and sleep. In reading The Water Margin and Chin P’ing Mei, I remain more or less detached because their authors have failed to involve me completely. If we are seasoned readers of traditional Chinese fiction, it is totally unwarranted to mistrust our first impression of a novel either in deference to the supposed subtleties of its author or in fear of not seeing its moral intent and structural design. In my experience, A Supplement to the Journey to the West (Hsi-yu pu)22 is for obvious reasons the only novel that must be read several times to be fully appreciated. Dream of the Red Chamber

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improves upon repeated readings, but even during a first reading, its powerful impact is already unmistakable; it is the one work among the Big Six that we could confidently assign among world masterpieces. Professional students of fiction tend to forget that novels are to be read primarily for enjoyment. The fact that Dream proves more absorbing even during our first reading than, say, The Water Margin is highly in its favor as a work of fiction, even before we go on to reread it. However, the best parts of The Water Margin make quite a substantial novel; we should neither fret because its bad parts are very boring nor attempt to convince ourselves that all its parts are equally exciting. For most traditional novels, to insist on their possessing a coherent structural and moral design is to miss the target of enjoyment because we aim too high.

III Plaks, however, is on the right track when he maintains in his new article that the conscious use of irony by each of the four novelists “is directed towards a far-reaching reevaluation of certain traditional values and issues.”23 This represents almost a complete change of attitude from his first book, which presents Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in as an allegorist on the side of traditional wisdom, and even blames the unhappiness of Chia Pao-yü and his female cousins on “their willful self-assertion, social immaturity, and blindness to the cosmic reality.”24 Now Plaks realizes that even earlier Ming novelists saw the need to question “certain traditional values and issues” through their use of irony. Of course, modern Chinese critics have always emphasized the role of political and social satire in Journey to the West and Chin P’ing Mei, and the rebellious stance of the Liangshan heroes in The Water Margin. Plaks is far subtler than they in seeing the use of irony as a literary strategy whereby the novelist undermines our confidence in the heroes and in the moral codes and political institutions they represent. But though he does not endorse the simpler modern Chinese view of novelists as satirists choosing certain aspects of the traditional social and political order for ridicule or attack, he is clearly moving toward this view with his new recognition that all is not well in Ming China. Whether ironic, satiric, or rebellious, the serious Chinese novelists, as distinguished from purveyors of commercial entertainment, can be

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observed as having moved steadily during the late Ming and after toward social and political criticism, culminating in such major late Ch’ing novelists as Li Pao-chia (equally well known as Li Po-yuan) and Wu Wo-yao (Wu Chien-jen). The Manchu dynasty was about to collapse, and all the weaknesses of traditional China were now fully exposed to view. Living as they did in the foreign settlements of Shanghai, these two could now write about what they knew of Chinese society and government with a freedom undreamed of by their distinguished predecessors. The satiric trend of Chinese fiction from Wu Ching-tzu to Wu Wo-yao has always been recognized, but it is highly desirable that, for the earlier periods as well, we look beyond the familiar landmarks of fiction to discover writers that appeal to us because they share with us a critical or satiric temper. The early Ch’ing writer of great originality, Li Yü (1611–1680), was thus rediscovered by Chinese scholars in the 1930s, though he was then principally admired for his epicurean essays on the art of living and his drama criticism, because much of his fiction was not attributed to him or else unavailable.25 It is only quite recently, therefore, that we have been able to read proper assessments of his novel The Prayer Mat of Flesh ( Jou p’u-t’uan) and his short stories, respectively, in Robert E. Hegel’s The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China (1981) and Hanan’s The Chinese Vernacular Story. Both scholars praise him highly as a comic writer and parodist, but I would go along with Hegel in calling him a serious satirist as well. Li Yü does not merely parody popular literary forms for our entertainment; he uses parody as a means of self-protection so that he may mock traditional values to his heart’s content. He was probably the most radical satirist of his age. Since Yuan times, playwrights and fiction writers had always picked safe targets for satire, such as corrupt magistrates, playboy sons of officials, sensual monks, illiterate scholars, and quack doctors, without raising fundamental issues about the soundness of Chinese civilization. Even Chin P’ing Mei limits its satiric range to these stock characters. In all the twelve stories of Silent Operas (Wu-sheng hsi), which parody the typical stories of the San-yen collections, however, Li Yü ridicules and discredits all the conventional Confucian ideals, such as loyalty to the emperor (chung), filial piety (hsiao), female chastity (chieh), and altruism or selfless friendship (i), upheld in traditional fiction. In The Prayer Mat of Flesh, he not only extols sexual pleasure between husband and wife (or wives) as one of the supreme blessings of life but also makes fun of Neo-Confucian

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puritanism in the person of the heroine’s father, as well as Buddhist asceticism and the Ch’an ideal of sudden enlightenment in his portrayal of the monk Ku-feng and his two notorious disciples. Despite its grotesque pornography, The Prayer Mat of Flesh is a witty and mirth-provoking book truly supportive of the cause of humane living. To cite one example for more detailed discussion, in Opera 6, “A Male Mencius’s Mother,”26 a beautiful youth named Yu Jui-lang, after being married to his homosexual lover, castrates himself to please this lover and to ensure his permanent indifference to the opposite sex. Hsü Chi-fang, the husband, becomes the envy of all homosexuals in the area, and is consequently beaten at court and soon dies of physical injury and mortification. After Hsü’s death, Yu calls himself Jui-niang, dresses and lives like a widow, adopts Hsü’s son by a former wife, and moves three times in imitation of Mencius’s mother so as to better educate her son. He eventually becomes a chin-shih and official, and Jui-niang herself is given official honors for her virtuous widowhood. Hanan says of the author that “with great ingenuity, he is able to parody heterosexual courtship, heterosexual marriage, chaste widowhood, and strict motherhood, all in one story.”27 Yet Li Yü, who begins the story with a didactic preamble against sodomy, satirizes homosexuals as well, since we can be sure that never in history has such constancy and devotion on the part of a catamite been recorded. But at the same time, the couple are treated as truly devoted lovers. Thus Yu’s voluntary assumption of chaste widowhood and strict motherhood is at least genuine, and by implication puts to shame all widows in real life or in stories who have lived the same way not out of love for their husbands but for personal honor or fear of social criticism. Yu is also an extremely filial son whose selfish father rears him as a catamite and will deliver him to anyone who can pay the high price of 500 ounces of silver. To edge out the competition, Hsü must sell his house and land, thus reducing himself and his bride to poverty. Yet Yu feels no resentment toward his father and becomes even more devoted to Hsü out of a sense of gratitude that he has enabled his father to pay off his debts and live comfortably for the remainder of his life. Li Yü quotes a Chinese proverb to comment on the father’s happiness upon getting the money: “Having a son satisfies all wishes” (Yu-tzu wan-shih tsu).28 In my reading experience, never has a Chinese proverb been quoted so ironically and to such deadly effect.

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Apart from Li Yü, such devastating caricatures of Chinese ethical practices and ideals are rarely, if ever, encountered before the late Ch’ing. In The Scholars, Wu Ching-tzu deplores the examination system and makes fun of its victims and all other pretenders to learning and morality; yet he never once questions Confucian moral ideals, and even if bureaucratic service disgusts him, his preferred state of eremitism is nonetheless a traditionally sanctioned Confucian ideal. Even in the one episode in which he seems to question the ideal of chieh when a new widow starves herself to death, it seems to me he is merely showing a kind of humanitarian concern and pity for the woman’s and her father’s folly.29 If she, like most Chinese women in her situation, had lived on in virtuous widowhood, Wu Ching-tzu would have had no reason to include her story in his novel. We can say of all late Ch’ing novelists as well that, while they expose the rottenness of Chinese society far more systematically than their predecessors, they are still Confucians holding fast to the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, even though Neo-Confucianism and all its moral pretensions are now scorned. The teachings of the two sages appear to them, as to most Chinese today, the moral core of Chinese culture that should remain incorruptible even if the fleshy parts of that culture rot away. Though hospitable to western ways like his friend Li Pao-chia, Wu Wo-yao is the sterner moralist who appears all the more appalled by his times because he believes so desperately in Confucian ethics governing personal conduct. Li Pao-chia is the more brilliant satirist, too infinitely amused by the stupidity, corruption, and cowardice around him to be really angry. At his best, he is a comic genius without peer in all traditional Chinese literature. In some of the longer episodes in both Bureaucracy Exposed (Kuan-ch’ang hsien-hsing chi) and Modern Times (Wen-ming hsiaoshih), Li Pao-chia places his hapless comic characters in situations of some national significance to expose all the more ironically the hopeless blundering of the Ch’ing government.30 Wu Ching-tzu could not have written a miniature national comedy of this sort even if he had dared to, because the issues he was concerned with were altogether different. Unlike Li Pao-chia, Wu Wo-yao was not a true follower of Wu Ching-tzu, content to encase in the novelistic form a series of only thematically related episodes. In his best-known works, he showed a flair for experiment and a genuine concern for coherent narrative structure. His masterpiece, Strange Events Seen in the Last Twenty Years (Erh-shih-nien mu-

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tu chih kuai hsien-chuang), which took him many years to write, has the most pleasing and complex structure of all major late Ch’ing novels.31 Besides Liu E’s Travels of Lao Ts’an (Lao Ts’an yu-chi), this is the one novel of the period that every student of Chinese literature and history must read to gain a terrifying insight into Chinese life, supplementing what he has already learned from the earlier major novels. Strange Events is in the main a conversational novel that allows the first-person hero and his friends and acquaintances to exchange stories of bizarre happenings they have either witnessed themselves or heard about. But it is also a Bildungsroman about the young hero, a Chinese Nicholas Nickleby cruelly exploited by an evil uncle but soon helped by good friends to reach a degree of success in the business world. Until the last chapter, he turns to these friends as well as his own family for support, keenly aware of, but little threatened by, the surrounding world of deceit, greed, and sensuality. For twenty years the hero records whatever is of unusual interest in that world in a journal. The misfortunes he has suffered at the hands of his uncle and others make him keep a watchful eye on all the detestable people with whom he must deal. The novel, therefore, is not only a record of the hero’s self-education toward maturity and eventual disillusionment but also an account book of the careers of the wicked. The usual description of the novel as mainly an assemblage of shocking or funny stories is therefore not true. Such jokes and scandals, usually retold in the course of a conversation, add variety and scope to the “strange events” covered, but hardly contribute to the book’s emotional power. It is in describing what happens to the hero, to the people he has actually met on his trips to various cities, and to those he hates for personal and other reasons that the novelist invariably sustains interest through both his narrative skill and his moral earnestness. Even the hero’s impressions of cities are unusually well done. Wherever he goes on a first visit—Soochow, Hong Kong, or Peking—he unflatteringly records the street scenes there with all their sounds, colors, and smells. Such precision of description is very rare in traditional Chinese fiction. Despite its inclusion of many satiric vignettes, Strange Events is a somber rather than a comic novel. The author is principally concerned with traditional Chinese society at its basic family level. What happens in the bureaucratic or commercial world amuses or disgusts him, but it is what these officials and merchants do at home that appears truly shocking

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to him. Precisely because he is a Confucian, he prefers the nuclear family and other sensible western ways of avoiding domestic friction so that Confucian virtues may be practiced in reality. An enlightened physician, much admired by the hero for his happy contentment, tells him: Thus of my five sons, not a single one lives by my side. They earn their livelihood either as businessmen or as teachers. Even after they got married, I told them to take their wives along to wherever they were stationed. I live alone, and how carefree and happy I am! They come to see me maybe once or twice a year. When they see me, their eager demonstration of affection and their filial zeal to please me are indescribably heart-warming. Truth to say, this shows their true nature.32

This is a revolutionary message for its time, for even today many Chinese are still nostalgically drawn to the traditional ideal of four generations under one roof. Though stubbornly Confucian in his moral outlook, Wu Wo-yao was probably the first Chinese to believe that it is practically impossible for a multigenerational, polygamous family to live in happy concord. If the main families depicted in Chin P’ing Mei and Dream of the Red Chamber may be said to be rather atypical, we cannot say the same of Strange Events, which presents many parallel examples of rich and poor families all steeped in inhumanity. While the contentions between a wife and her husband’s concubine or mistress are sometimes depicted for their comic value, there can be no doubt whatever of the author’s passionate denunciation of the family system as he invites us to ponder the following incidents: A new widow forces her husband’s concubine to commit suicide. An elder brother forces his younger brother to die, and sells the brother’s widow to a brothel. A prodigal son robs his own father and tries to burn his house down. To ensure his poverty, the concubine of a deceased salt merchant brings her own son to court on charges of filial impiety whenever a new magistrate arrives in town to assume his duties. A widow persecutes her daughter-in-law and beats her son with a metal pipe until his head bleeds profusely. An old man, his hair and beard infested with lice, lives on scraps as a

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cruelly abused dependent of his grandson, an official. A Manchu official sadistically maltreats his son’s bride, causing the son to die of an illness brought on by his mental anguish, and then on his knees, begs the bride to become his superior’s concubine so that he himself may gain a more lucrative post. Subsequently, another son of his forms a liaison with one of his father’s concubines and slowly poisons him to death.

In reading these and other accounts of sordid family life through the length of 900 pages and 108 chapters (the Manchu official, Kou-ts’ai, first appears in chapter 4 and does not die until chapter 101), we can surely say that no previous Chinese novel has ever presented as comprehensive a picture of moral topsy-turvy and shown us as many evil men and women bent on destroying their nearest kin and trampling upon every sentiment of human decency. What David Roy says of Chin P’ing Mei can be more justly applied to Strange Events: “No more devastating or convincing indictment of a morally bankrupt society has ever been penned”33— certainly not by Wu’s contemporaries or predecessors. Yet as the last great novel by a scholar-novelist,34 Strange Events is also distinguished by a strong idyllic note in the chapters descriptive of the hero’s home life or his enjoyment of good talk among close friends. These chapters constitute the moral backbone of the book, without which it would be too bleak. This small group of good people, loving, sensible, and cultivated, are what the author wants to see more of in his society. On the one hand, they are models of decent humanity that the readers can imitate; on the other, they serve to display the author’s evident delight and erudition in traditional literary culture and articulate his ideas for reform and his concern with national affairs. As is to be expected, reform of the traditional family is much talked about in these chapters. My brief presentation of Strange Events serves to show that it is not merely a satiric or castigatory novel written under the influence of The Scholars; it is also a domestic and conversational novel written under the influence of Dream of the Red Chamber and Flowers in the Mirror (Chinghua yuan). Chin P’ing Mei is visibly present, too, in its insistent concern with domestic squalor. With the better Ch’ing novelists, we cannot speak of the “anxiety of influence”;35 on the contrary, it is their happy responsiveness to influence that accounts for the continuing variety and splendor of Ch’ing fiction following the publication of The Scholars and Dream in

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the second half of the eighteenth century. Wen-k’ang’s The Heroic Lovers (Erh-nü ying-hsiung chuan) and Han Pang-ch’ing’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai-shang-hua lieh-chuan)36 could not have been written without the massive example of Dream, and yet each is a distinct creation bearing the stamp of originality. Flowers of Shanghai, especially, marks a great advance beyond Dream as a much purer and technically more mature example of fiction; it was the first “purely dramatic novel” in Chinese.37 Likewise, Li Pao-chia and Wu Wo-yao were obviously under the influence of The Scholars, and yet their major novels are different and in some ways better. Strange Events is surely a greater and more powerful novel than The Scholars. Wu Wo-yao took greater pains in organizing his work, enjoyed far greater freedom to speak his mind, and is far closer to us in time and in spirit. My selective presentation of Li Yü and Wu Wo-yao is also designed to illustrate an obvious point. If we cannot fully appreciate certain aspects of traditional Chinese culture, we should nevertheless be reassured that we enjoy special advantages as well in discerning the pattern of development of the Chinese novel. After all, through the centuries, the great novelists have been steadily moving nearer our attitude regarding the tradition. Except for The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, an early novel concerned with war and politics in a remote period, the other five classic novels all register a profound uneasiness with certain fundamental aspects of traditional Chinese life. It would seem that we need not envy the privileged position enjoyed by such commentators as Chin Sheng-t’an or Chang Chu-p’o in being able to detect subtleties in novels that we do not readily see. After all, their contemporary Li Yü still speaks to us clearly and wittily, and he is also a greater critic (though he does not deal with fiction) because his mind is more logical and modern. Thus, being what we are, scholars of Chinese literature inescapably under the influence of western culture and incapable of responding with genuine enthusiasm toward certain “feudal” aspects of traditional Chinese society and thought, we can nevertheless see ourselves as enjoying a special rapport with the most serious of traditional novelists, even though they are not our contemporaries and could not tell us all they wanted to say about their society and government, given the despotic conditions of imperial rule under which they wrote. By the late Ch’ing, novelists could finally speak out, and they attacked traditional society without restraint. Given their satiric transformation of the traditional novel, we could per-

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haps say that, except for practical considerations of teaching, we need not divide vernacular Chinese fiction into two periods, traditional and modern, for the same kind of satiric energy has continued to inform Republican fiction, and would have informed Communist fiction as well if the writers had been permitted the luxury of satire.

On the “Scientific” Study of Modern Chinese Literature A Reply to Professor Pru˚sˇek (1963)

I. Basic Problems In his long review of my book,1 Jaroslav Pru˚ˇsek has in effect outlined a program for the “scientific” study of modern Chinese literature; he has defined the historical character and function of that literature and recommended objective methods for its analysis and evaluation. Since, in his view, my book practically ignores all the premises and methods that should have guided an objective historian of modern Chinese literature, I appear to him the prime example of a subjective critic, and one with illfounded political prejudices at that. I am naturally disappointed that a distinguished sinologist should have found my work so unacceptable, though I am quite unconvinced that, however inadequate as a literary historian, I could have so fatally misconceived my task. Indeed I remain completely skeptical whether, beyond the recording of simple incontrovertible facts, the study of literature could assume the rigor and precision of “science” and whether, in the study of any literary period, an inflexible methodology could be formulated once for all. In this rejoinder, therefore, I am principally moved to protest the advisability of a rigid and indeed dogmatic scientific approach to literary problems: Pru˚ˇsek may have erred in judging my book with the utmost severity precisely because he has been misled by his untested major assumptions about the modern period in China and its literature.

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Let me say first of all that there are certain tasks properly belonging to the literary historian that I could have undertaken were I not mainly concerned with what seems to me the basic task—a critical examination of the major and the representative writers of the period along with a succinct survey of that period designed to make their achievement and failure historically comprehensible. Thus I have not systematically studied the relations between modern experiments in fiction and the native literary tradition. Thus, though I have ventured many remarks concerning the impact of western literature upon modern Chinese fiction, I have made no systematic study of that impact. I have indeed cited many western works in a comparative fashion, but primarily as an aid to define more precisely a work under examination and not as an attempt to establish lineage and influence. Since, as Pru˚ˇsek admits, even “professional sinologists” are largely ignorant of modern Chinese literature and since my book is also designed for readers “who know little about modern China but are curious about its literature” (vii), such comparisons, however arbitrary, serve a legitimate function in my study. I also have not attempted a broad comparative study of the narrative techniques employed by Chinese writers of fiction, though such studies, as proven by Pru˚ˇsek ’s review-article and his other recent papers, can be of definite value in assisting the task of evaluation. To ascertain influence and indebtedness, to compare the techniques of authors in a neutral and objective fashion—these are surely important tasks, as Pru˚ˇsek rightly believes. But for a pioneer survey of modern Chinese fiction, the primary task is, I repeat, discrimination and evaluation: until we have elicited some order and pattern from the immense body of work available for examination, until we have distinguished the possibly great from the good writers and the good from the poor, we cannot begin the study of influence and technique, however temptingly scientific these kinds of study may be. In dealing with earlier periods, a literary historian may assume the key importance of certain writers whose greatness has been attested to by generations of readers. But even the verdict of the ages may not be always infallible, so that no literary historian or critic should slavishly rely upon the work of his predecessors. In dealing with the modern period in China, because so many of the native critics, aside from the question of their dubious training in their craft, were too much involved in the making of this modern literature to be unpartisan, the need to start from scratch appeared especially imperative. Yet

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Pru˚ˇsek berates me precisely for my “intrepidity” in having dared to make a new beginning, to exercise my independent judgment in apparent disregard of the authoritative critics of mainland China and of a few European sinologists who have largely echoed these authorities. As an instructive example of objectivity, Pru˚sˇek recommends Dr. Huang Sung-k’ang’s Lu Hsün and the New Culture Movement of Modern China (Amsterdam, 1957). Although Pru˚ˇsek has earlier criticized the book for its ineptitude as literary criticism,2 yet in comparison with mine, Huang’s book is “altogether objective” (TP 391), presumably because the author has shown no independent judgment, has not deviated to any appreciable extent from the Chinese sources she has consulted, both in regard to her estimate of Lu Hsün as a writer and thinker and to her interpretation of the New Culture movement. “Objectivity,” therefore, appears to mean uncritical compliance with the reigning opinion; to depart from it is to incur the risk of “subjectivity.” Not only that, it is to betray one’s sheer arrogance and “dogmatic intolerance” (TP 357). But I am afraid it is Pru˚ˇsek himself who may be guilty of “dogmatic intolerance” insofar as he appears incapable of even theoretically entertaining any other view of modern Chinese literature than the official Communist one. In section 1 of his review, Pru˚ˇsek drops many hints as to the kinds of ulterior motives that may have led me to uphold a position of “dogmatic intolerance.” In one place, he thinks I must be the kind of liberal Chinese intellectual loyal to the memory of Hu Shih and to Lin Yutang. But he immediately concedes that I am critical of Hu Shih for “his narrow view of literature as an instrument of social criticism” (9). But Lin Yutang he insists on regarding as a “favorite author” of mine and cites as evidence my description of his wartime role in America as “ a best-selling author purveying the charms of old China and reporting on the heroism of the new” (314). If Pru˚ˇsek has retained my earlier criticism of Lin Yutang’s cult of “personalism, which eschews high seriousness” (133) and other related faults, he could not have missed my ironic phrasing of his new role: certainly, the expressions “best-selling author” and “purveying the charms” are not meant to be complimentary. Then Pru˚ˇsek starts off on another track and aligns me with the traitors and collaborators under the Japanese occupation. Have I not warmly endorsed the early intellectual phase of Chou Tso-jen, who later became a collaborator, and have I not written appreciatively and at great length on the works of Eileen Chang and Ch’ien Chung-shu, who were living in occupied Shanghai during the

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greater part of the war period? Moreover, my summary dismissal of the bulk of wartime literature produced in the Nationalist interior and the Communist areas “points to an individual lack of those feelings and sentiments which seem natural in the citizen of any country” (TP 361). Pru˚ˇsek’s own enthusiasm for China’s heroic resistance against Japan and her subsequent “liberation” by the Communists, on the other hand, has led him to make the following assertion: “The transformation which took place in all the domains of life in the Liberated Areas is perhaps the most glorious page in the whole history of the Chinese people” (TP 371). I wonder how many sinologists of Pru˚ˇsek’s eminence and objectivity would endorse this judgment. Pru˚ˇsek simply cannot believe my statement, “In my survey of modern Chinese fiction, I have been principally guided by considerations of literary significance” (498). So he quotes a sentence immediately following to prove that I subordinate literary considerations to political ones: “The writers toward whom I have shown critical approval or enthusiasm share by and large the same set of techniques, attitudes, and fantasies with the other writers of their period, but by virtue of their talent and integrity, they have resisted and in some notable cases transformed the crude reformist and propagandist energies to arrive at a tradition that represents a different literary physiognomy from the tradition composed principally of leftist and Communist writers.” The test given here is whether writers have been able to resist or transform “the crude reformist and propagandist energies,” a literary rather than a political test. It is my conviction that with the majority of Chinese writers (and that would include Kuomintang propagandists), their preoccupation with social reform and political propaganda has incapacitated them from rendering the truth of things in all its complexity. Among leftist and Communist authors, I have singled out Mao Tun, Chang T’ien-i, and Wu Tsu-hsiang for praise precisely because their best works give evidence of that literary “integrity” which has enabled them to rise above mere reformist and propagandist passion. In other words, I deplore literature that, to use Keats’s phrase, has “a palpable design” upon us insofar as that design is incompatible with the fullbodied presentation of reality. Hence I prefer “disinterested moral exploration,” a phrase singled out by Pru˚ˇsek for contemptuous disapprobation, to the less strenuous kind of literary endeavor that is ulteriorly motivated and merely content to illustrate some ready-made truth rather than explore it. Pru˚ˇsek is quite mistaken, therefore, when he maintains that

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“C. T. Hsia repeatedly reproaches Chinese writers for devoting too much attention to social problems and being unable to create a literature unshackled by these problems and unburdened by the struggle for social justice” (TP 361). Surely, in accordance with my emphasis on “disinterested moral exploration,” the more problems a work of literature explores, not merely social but also political and metaphysical; the more it is concerned with justice, not merely social justice but the ultimate justice of man’s fate—the greater it is, provided that in tackling these problems, the author is not merely applying ready-made solutions in the spirit of didactic simplification. Surely, the modern Chinese novels to which I accord the highest praise, such as Mao Tun’s The Eclipse, Pa Chin’s Cold Nights, and Eileen Chang’s The Rice-sprout Song, are the very reverse of “escapist literature”;3 they are all ambitious works of passion and insight, exploring a wide range of social and philosophical problems touching on man’s fate. But the problems have to be concretely embodied. For this reason I quote in my concluding chapter a maxim of D. H. Lawrence, “Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind,” and apply it to modern Chinese fiction by saying that its generally mediocre level is “surely due to its preoccupation with ideals, its distracting and overinsistent concern with mankind” (499). Literature—imaginative literature— cannot deal with mankind in the abstract without forfeiting its specific character as literature; it can only deal with individuals. It should not merely adorn or affirm ideals, it should test them in the actuality of the concrete human situation. Hence I contrast the concrete, the realistic, the individually human in literary representation with the abstract, the idealistic, the stereotyped. Professor Harry Levin of Harvard is surely right when he designates socialist realism as “more precisely, an uncritical idealism—or, as they [the Soviet critics] would put it in candid moments, a revolutionary romanticism.”4 Compared with the uncritical idealism of most socialist-realist and romantic-revolutionary fiction, the kind of critical realism, however unambitious, exemplified by Lu Hsün and the good writers succeeding him appeared to me so praiseworthy that I have not hesitated to value it as the only tradition in modern Chinese fiction worthy of serious comment. If, after stating my critical principles, I still appear dogmatically intolerant, at least my intolerance of bad writing will be seen to have been a consequence of my commitment to literary standards and not of my political prejudices. My only “dogma” would appear to be that the same stan-

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dards of criticism should apply to all literature, irrespective of nation, period, and ideology. A literary historian, of course, should possess the necessary linguistic competence and the necessary biographical and historical knowledge for the proper appreciation of any writer, any period, but this historical scholarship cannot excuse him from the ultimate responsibility of literary judgment. Professor René Wellek has with his usual compelling judiciousness contradistinguished literary study from historical study: Literary study differs from historical study in having to deal not with documents but with monuments. A historian has to reconstruct a long-past event on the basis of eye-witness accounts; the literary student, on the other hand, has direct access to his object: the work of art. . . . He can examine his object, the work itself; he must understand, interpret, and evaluate it; he must, in short, be a critic in order to be a historian. . . . Many attempts have been made to escape the inevitable consequence of this insight, to avoid the necessity not only of selection but of judgment, but all have failed and must, I think, fail unless we want to reduce literary study to a mere listing of books, to annals or a chronicle. There is nothing which can obviate the necessity of critical judgment, the need of aesthetic standards, just as there is nothing which can obviate the need of ethical and logical standards.5

Pru˚ˇsek , on the contrary, believes that, as a literary historian, I should have acquired a sufficient degree of historical sympathy so as to absolve me from the “necessity of critical judgment.” Hence his second general charge about my “disregard for human dignity” (TP 357). Pru˚ˇsek is well aware, of course, that my book has repeatedly emphasized the need of compassion and respect for the individual. Thus I wrote, “Most contemporary Chinese writers reserve their sympathies for the poor and downtrodden; the idea that any person, irrespective of class and position, is a fit object for compassionate understanding is alien to them” (91). Even if one agrees with Pru˚ˇsek and the Marxist historians that “the chief enemies of progress” in modern China were “landowners, usurers, speculators and the comprador bourgeoisie” (TP 363), it does not follow that the literary task is therefore to depict these groups in the blackest color possible and divest them of their humanity. To indulge in melodramatic distortion is

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ultimately to cheapen human life and to debase the humane profession of letters. Yet in Pru˚ˇsek ’s view, I have disregarded human dignity nevertheless, because it is his impression that I have belittled so many writers for their mediocre performance. He actually shows little disposition to disagree entirely with me on these poor works, but he thinks it is the critic’s duty to exercise his forbearance and take into sympathetic account the authors’ intentions. “If we disregard the aim which the writer had in view,” he chides me, “we cannot do justice to his work” (TP 401). Thus in defense of Chao Shu-li’s early tales, he says querulously, “C. T. Hsia simply ignores the need to create a literature for the broad masses” (TP 401). Pru˚ˇsek agrees that Chao Shu-li’s novel, San-li Wan, is a failure, but then he explains, “Undeniably, in this last work Chao Shu-li came up against the difficult problem of how to give his work dramatic tension, when its main task was to describe quiet development and to underline the positive aspects of the characters portrayed” (TP 401). Similarly, Pru˚ˇsek concedes that Ting Ling’s Water is at least a partial failure, but the critic should nevertheless condone her lack of success because for her “it was a problem of considerable complexity to describe the life-history, not of individuals, but of a whole collective” (TP 402). Pru˚ˇsek applies this principle of forgiveness not only to works of fiction but to theoretical works as well. Thus he refuses to argue with me over the merits of Mao Tse-tung’s Talks at the Yenan Literary Conference, simply dismissing my “completely distorted” appraisal with an angry remark, “C. T. Hsia does not see the absolutely urgent need to create a new literature and art for the broad masses, now politically and culturally awaking, the greater part of whom were still illiterate” (TP 370). For Pru˚ˇsek ’s kind of critical approach, two distinguished literary theorists, W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, have a phrase, “the Intentional Fallacy,” that has met with almost universal acceptance in American and British academic circles. According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, “the Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem [i.e., the work of literature] and its origins, a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism.”6 The intention of an author is not to be erected as “a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art,”7 whatever valuable light it may throw on that work. As literary historians and critics,

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we cannot therefore evaluate a work by referring to its supposed intention at the neglect of its objective content, as has been Pru˚ˇsek’s practice throughout his review, and certainly we cannot condone a poor work simply because we feel the author’s intentions have been laudable. As I said in my concluding chapter, “A literature is to be judged not by its intentions but by its actual performance: its intelligence and wisdom, its sensibility and style” (506). The same goes for works of theory and criticism. One cannot presuppose “the absolutely urgent need to create a new literature and art” from reading Mao’s Talks; to analyze that document itself, on the other hand, is to provide us with clues why in 1942 Mao had called a halt to the petty-bourgeois trends of the earlier leftist literature and proclaimed a new era of propagandist literature. The literary historian should ideally pass over bad works in silence. But when the said works have been praised as masterpieces to a credulous public, it is surely his duty to analyze them in some detail and expose their faults. However sympathetic toward such persecuted writers as Hsiao Chün and Ting Ling, I have therefore tried to exercise scrupulous objectivity in my unflattering appraisal of their works. In retrospect, I believe I have been unfair to Ting Ling not because my estimates of her particular works, Water and Sun Over the Sangkan River, are mistaken, but because they are not her most characteristic works. If I had focused attention on her early stories and Yenan stories, a different picture of her achievement would have resulted.8 But as a modern woman who had intended to make her life an experiment in freedom, Ting Ling certainly would not have minded my few brief references to her love life: it was the systematic and malicious distortion of that life by her Communist persecutors during the 1957 trials that was truly frightening. It is Pru˚ˇsek’s intentionalist approach to the study of literature that has prompted his bitter complaint about my “disregard for human dignity”; it is also his intentionalist approach that characterizes his understanding of modern Chinese literature as a whole. To his mind, literature is but the handmaiden of history. Since he agrees with the “Marxist theoreticians” that modern Chinese history is nothing but a record of the Chinese people’s self-conscious struggle, under the leadership of the Communist Party, against “the survivals of feudalism” and “foreign imperialism” toward their full liberation, little wonder that he reserves his highest praise for works that seem to have given the fullest embodiment to that historical struggle and that he assigns no weight to works that seem to

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have nothing to do with that struggle, whatever their other claims to human truth and artistic excellence. Hence he speaks repeatedly of the “mission of literature,” an otherwise inexplicable phrase from a scholar passionately concerned with scientific objectivity. Thus preoccupied, Pru˚ˇsek is apparently unaware of the danger of using the literary record merely as a record of history, as a testament to the spirit of the age. I believe, on the contrary, that the literary historian should go about his task empirically: he should not allow preconceived notions of history to determine his quest for excellence, and he should form his own opinion about the vitality and culture of an age precisely on the strength of the literary record he has examined. To him, a lonely genius working in supposed defiance of the Zeitgeist may ultimately sum up that age much more meaningfully than a host of minor writers walking fully in step with the times. Thus, whatever historians and reporters may say of China since 1949, if one finds the literature produced since that date to be infinitely dreary, then this cultural fact should be taken into careful account in one’s objective evaluation of the period. This inductive method seems to me far more scientific than the contrary method, the deductive method adopted by Pru˚ˇsek of first broadly defining the historical image of a period and then finding literature to fit that image. It is not surprising that, preoccupied with the historical mission and social function of literature, Pru˚ˇsek appears a particularly didactic critic, a critic who supposes that all that really matters in literature is the correct message, the fighting spirit, the zeal and optimism. Thus even of Lu Hsün, whose best works all predate the Communist ascendancy in China and indicate an unregimented individualist contemplating the fate of China with a hope akin to despair, Pru˚ˇsek has the “intrepidity,” if I may use his word, to make the following critical estimate (TP 386): We would indeed be justified in drawing the conclusion that the more sharply Lu Hsün expressed his standpoint, the more definite the position he took up in the social struggle, the more successful were his stories in every way.

Nothing else, apparently, matters: artistic success is “in every way” assured once a writer manages to express his standpoint sharply and take up a definite position in the social struggle. Even if Pru˚ˇsek assumes here Lu Hsün’s customary stylistic excellence, he implicitly ignores all the

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attendant personal, emotional, and even physiological circumstances that normally play a part in determining whether the work now being contemplated or composed will result in an artistic success. Pru˚ˇsek apparently mistrusts the role of the unconscious—and with good reason. How can one maintain a sharply expressed viewpoint and a definite position in the social struggle if one opens the gates of the unconscious and lets one’s dark and invariably subversive dreams, desires, and fears impede the full articulation of one’s conscious, enlightened will? The inevitable corollary, therefore, is that the less emotionally charged a work is, the less exposed to the full exercise of the imagination, the more successful it will be in the business of maintaining a correct standpoint and positive position. Little wonder, then, that Pru˚ˇsek regards the wartime literature of the Liberated Areas as indicative of the most glorious age in the whole history of the Chinese people. Fully committed to the propagandist task of arousing the broad masses, the writers had no personal demons to wrestle with, no petty-bourgeois artistic conscience to hinder the full and glorious expression of their correct standpoint and position. Yet, by the same token, one wonders why Pru˚ˇsek still so highly values Lu Hsün, who, according to him, “up to 1928 had still various doubts and fits of pessimism” (TP 388), when the writers of the Liberated Areas were manifestly more dedicated to the task of the social struggle? Indeed, for clarity of standpoint, for definiteness of position, and for ease of comprehension (since Pru˚ˇsek is also vitally concerned with the broad masses), why should he not prefer slogans to the simple stories, poems, and plays of the Yenan period? Why, indeed, bother about literature? When one thinks of Hamlet, one shudders at its author’s pronounced “doubts” and “pessimism” that disfigure every page of the play.

II. Lu Hsün As a demonstration of his objective reading, Pru˚ˇsek devotes 20 pages of his 47-page review to Lu Hsün. Though the Lu Hsün chapter occupies only 27 pages in the 507 pages of my main text, apparently upon the test case of this author rests the burden of proof that my entire picture of modern Chinese fiction is willfully distorted. The reader should be reminded that I have not at all “debunked” Lu Hsün. Primarily concerned with his status as a short-story writer, I have

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examined nine of his stories—and three of them, “Medicine,” “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” “Soap” in greater detail—and come to the conclusion that these nine “constitute the finest body of fiction for the first period [1917–1927] and place their author in the forefront as a story-writer”(45). I maintain at the same time that his talent is “distinguished if narrow” and that many of his stories are quite disappointing. On the evidence of two small collections, Na-han and P’ang-huang, one cannot in fairness say more: to assign him a greater importance is to be unjust to the more resourceful and dedicated fiction writers who came after him. Not to mention the novelists Mao Tun and Lao She, would it be fair to story writers like Chang T’ien-i and Shen Ts’ung-wen, who in sheer creative fecundity far surpass Lu Hsün? In the face of the dozen or so distinguished volumes of short stories published by Chang T’ien-i in the thirties, how could one persist in believing Lu Hsün to be the greatest or most important story writer of modern China? It is true that, because Lu Hsün came upon the modern scene first, some of his characters, like Ah Q and K’ung I-chi, have made an indelible impression upon the Chinese mind, whereas none of Chang T’ien-i’s memorable characters seems to have possessed the same symbolic and representative importance. Partly, it is the accident of history that the initiators of a genre seem far more interesting and significant than its more mature practitioners; but principally, it is due to the unconscionable neglect by the Chinese critics that Chang T’ien-i, a writer well within the mainstream of leftist fiction, should have never been given a small fraction of that attention lavished upon his senior. By calling his section on Lu Hsün “Confrontation of Methods,” Pru˚ˇsek indicates his intention to demonstrate that, whereas my “subjective” approach consistently “misinterprets or, at best, obscures the true significance of Lu Hsün’s literary production” (TP 377), his own objective method has enabled him to “grasp the character of Lu Hsün’s oeuvre and to carry out a scientific analysis” (TP 387). My principal and inexcusable crime, according to Pru˚ˇsek, is that I have attributed to Lu Hsün a love for old China, which colors my interpretation of his life and work. Pru˚ˇsek bases his charge upon two passages in my text. The first compares Lu Hsün to James Joyce (32): One may indeed compare the best stories of Lu Hsün to Dubliners. Shaken by the sloth, superstition, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the rural and town people, whom new ideas could not change, Lu

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Hsün repudiates his home town and, symbolically, the old Chinese way of life; yet, as in the case of Joyce, this town and these people remain the stuff and substance of his creation.

The second comments on the hero of the story, “In the Restaurant” (41): Yet, as actually realized in the story, the kindness and piety of Lü Wei-fu, however pathetic, also demonstrate the positive strength of the traditional mode of life, toward which the author must have been nostalgically attracted in spite of his contrary intellectual conviction.

In both passages, I have been careful to maintain the distinction between Lu Hsün’s intellectual repudiation of the old Chinese way of life and his emotional or nostalgic attachment to this way of life “in spite of his contrary intellectual conviction.” An artist does not live by the intellect alone, and he cannot help the accidents of his birth and early environment. The symbol of his ideological hatred, the hometown remains for Lu Hsün nevertheless “the principal source of his inspiration” (31). Throughout my treatment of Lu Hsün, never have I once suggested that he was intellectually attracted or ideologically committed to the traditional mode of life. On the contrary, I maintain that, as a tsa-wen writer, he castigates “all manner of Chinese vices,” needles “popular assumptions of national superiority,” and attacks “all lovers of traditional Chinese art and culture.” Pru˚ˇsek is completely mistaken, therefore, when he maintains against all evidence to the contrary that “according to C. T. Hsia, Lu Hsün rejected on the one hand the traditional forms of Chinese life, while being, on the other, continually attracted by them. This is for C. T. Hsia proof of the vacillating ideological orientation of Lu Hsün, which, as he would have us believe, went so far as to destroy, in the long run, his creative powers” (TP 377–378). Never once did I suggest the slightest likelihood of the kind of “vacillating ideological orientation” formulated here. I believe, on the contrary, that his complex involvement with the hometown—the traditional life—far from being a sign of “vacillating ideological orientation,” provided the necessary artistic impetus toward the creation of his finest work—not only his best stories but also the prose poems in Wild Grass and the childhood sketches in Morning Flowers Picked in

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Evening. His eventual ideological vacillation, as I see it, is something quite different. It has to do with a crucial crisis in his personal and creative life in the years 1928–1929 when, under the pressure of criticism and the dictates of fashion, he largely forsook his deep-seated, somber, individualist faith in modern enlightenment, which had been nourished since his early youth upon his reading in nineteenth-century European literature and thought, in favor of a superficial adherence to a Communist program of collective action. It is my belief that this new allegiance never took root in the soil of his emotional being, so that the voluminous and repetitive tsawen of his later years, frequently petty and strident in tone, betray the loss of his creative powers and the impairment of his personal integrity. It is in terms of this emotional sterility and ideological reorientation that I analyzed the failure of his last creative effort, Old Legends Retold: “In his fear of searching his own mind and disclosing thereby his pessimistic and somber view of China at complete variance with his professed Communist faith, Lu Hsün could only repress his deep-seated personal emotions in the service of political satire” (46). His intellectual repudiation of Old China is not in question here. Committed to his scientific hypothesis of Lu Hsün’s unwavering intellectual development as a revolutionary fighter, Pru˚ˇsek, typically, refuses to see any political reorientation in his emergence as a nominal leader of Communist writers in the year 1930 following a period of painful ideological vacillation. He therefore misreads my account of this crisis as simply a matter of his being alternately repelled and attracted by “the traditional forms of Chinese life.” Characteristically, he refuses to debate with me about the later phase of Lu Hsün’s life and work, simply repudiating my account as “a mixture of half-truths and distortions of fact” (TP 391) and recommending to the reader Huang Sung-k’ang’s “objective” study. As regards Pru˚ˇsek’s critique of my appraisal of individual stories, may I acknowledge first of all the justice of his complaint about my inadequate appreciation of “The Diary of a Madman.” As a result of further reading and teaching, I have now come to the conclusion that it is one of Lu Hsün’s most assured successes. The irony and the technical virtuosity, which I have commented on, now seem to me to go hand in hand with a subtle exposition of the theme, largely in imagistic and symbolic terms, so that it was quite wrong of me to expect the author to “provide a realistic plot” and present the madman’s case in “dramatic terms.” I am

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grateful to Pru˚ˇsek for having called public attention to my inadequate reading of this story. But in general, when pinpointing my faults, Pru˚ˇsek writes as if he had expected from me a monograph on Lu Hsün rather than a comprehensive survey of modern Chinese fiction: he complains repeatedly of my confinement to “purely subjective observations” and inability to carry out a much more detailed scientific analysis. Moreover, these subjective observations are as a rule cunningly phrased so as to disguise and obscure the resolute, fighting character of Lu Hsün’s fiction. Thus, in discussing the story “My Native Place,” he takes strong exception to my description of Jun-t’u as “a weather-beaten man burdened with family care” and points to the phrase “family care” as a misleading euphemism intended to cover up “all the evils which had made a complete wreck” of this man. Pru˚ˇsek gives the list as follows: “oppressive taxes, soldiery, children, Government offices, usurers” (TP 390). The text, however, arranges it in a different order: “Many children, famines, taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials, and landed gentry.”9 With his scientific objectivity and his scrupulous regard for an author’s intentions, I wonder why Pru˚ˇsek has rearranged the list to unwarrantably emphasize man-made afflictions (“oppressive taxes, soldiery”) whereas Lu Hsün gives greater emphasis to natural misfortunes (too many mouths to feed and frequent famine) to account for Jun-t’u’s present misery. My formulation, “burdened with family care,” in contrast, does greater justice to this aspect of the peasant’s plight duly stressed in the tale. When Jun-t’u first visits the author to pay his respects, he brings along his fifth child, a boy about eleven or twelve sui old.10 In the ensuing conversation, a sixth child is mentioned—since he is able to help on the farm, he must be between ten and eight. During a subsequent visit, Jun-t’u brings along a five-sui-old girl, presumably his seventh or eighth child. And since he himself is only forty-one or forty-two, there could be one or two or three children who were born after her. The pathos of the situation is that, though Jun-t’u is able to correlate his misery with bad harvests and unjust financial exactions, he is incapable of the further reflection that his large brood is a bane rather than a blessing. A typical Chinese peasant, he complains with incomprehension, “Even my sixth can do a little work, but still we haven’t enough to eat,”11 because he looks upon his children primarily as producers and not as consumers. But to the author, since poor crops, taxes, soldiers, bandits, and gentry are endured alike by the peasants of the

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district, it is precisely the size of his family that defines Jun-t’un’s peculiar misfortune, which has transformed a boy of exuberant spirits into a weather-beaten man of dashed hopes, clutching at his gods. Pru˚ˇsek then accuses me of deliberate misrepresentation when I quoted a passage from the story to stress Lu Hsün’s honesty in equating his own ill-founded hope for the younger generation with Jun-t’u’s superstitious concern with his own welfare. According to Pru˚ˇsek, I should have cited instead a briefer passage at the end, which indicates that hope is like a road: there was no road to begin with, “but when many men pass one way, a road is made” (TP 388). I may first of all remind Pru˚ˇsek that a story, like a poem, is not paraphrasable: the only fair way to present “My Native Place” is to translate the text without comment, but even then, the translation, because it is cast in a different language, will also have distorted the meaning. In a one-page review, one could only point to the highlights. In the story, the author’s reflections on the delusiveness of hope enjoy the position of a climax to a dramatic incident—Jun-t’u’s asking for the censer and candlesticks to worship his idols with—and therefore should receive proper emphasis, whereas the oft-quoted passage at the end represents to me an afterthought, quite detached from the main body of the story. It is as typical of Lu Hsün as the wistful ending of “The Diary of a Madman”: “Perhaps there are still some children who have not yet become cannibalistic? Save these children. . . . ” In both instances, Lu Hsün tries to convince himself that some ground for hope must be indicated even though the stories themselves provide no hope.12 Since Pru˚ˇsek cites the concluding passage from “My Native Place” to remind me that in Na-han at least, Lu Hsün is much more hopeful and optimistic than I have made him out to be, we may turn to the preface to that collection to see how the author himself characterizes his mental condition in the writing of these stories. Indeed, with his high regard for the writer’s intentions, Pru˚ˇsek himself quotes twice briefly from that document to prove Lu Hsün’s resolute bravery, though both times he neglects to provide the necessary contexts to make the passages yield their full meaning. According to the preface, the title Na-han is part of an elaborate military metaphor by which the author views himself as a mere foot soldier in the battle against the tradition. The leaders of the New Culture movement—the editors of New Youth—are viewed as lonely commanders on horseback charging into the enemy ranks. As in old-style military romances, the commanders are here given all the credit for the actual

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fighting, while the foot soldiers merely yell (the term na-han comes from such stock phrases as “wave the banners and yell” and “beat the drums and yell”) to boost morale and provide the proper encouragement. As a reluctant conscript (earlier in the preface, he tells us how he has been pressed into service by Ch’ien Hsüan-t’ung, an editor of New Youth), however, Lu Hsün doesn’t care whether his decorative yell is “brave or sad, repellent or ridiculous.” “However, since it is a call to arms,” he continues, “I must naturally obey my commanders’ orders. This is why I feel no compunction in resorting to innuendoes, as when I made a wreath appear from nowhere at the son’s grave in ‘Medicine,’ while in ‘Tomorrow’ I did not say that Fourth Shan’s Wife had no dreams of her little boy. For our commanders then were against pessimism. And I, for my part, did not want to infect with the loneliness I had found so bitter those young people who were still dreaming pleasant dreams, just as I had done when young.”13 The last sentence reverts to an earlier parable in the preface which states that many people—the Chinese nation—are sound asleep in an indestructible iron house without windows. Lu Hsün thinks it would be cruel to wake these people up because, once awake, they would only face the agony of suffocation and death without the hope of relief. His interrogator, Ch’ien Hsüan-t’ung, argues, however, that if enough numbers are aroused, there might be a chance of destroying that house. Lu Hsün agrees; even though he sticks to his conviction that the house cannot be destroyed, he feels at the same time, “I could not blot out hope, for hope lies in the future.”14 In these two carefully worked-out metaphors, does the author see himself as a brave fighter rushing to the forefront to combat feudalism? (Mao Tse-tung’s subsequent assertion that Lu Hsün was “the greatest and bravest standard-bearer of the new cultural army” and “the commander of the cultural revolution” [29] appears to contradict completely the author’s self-portrayal as an insignificant foot soldier yelling to the tune of his commanders and not knowing whether his cry denotes bravery or sadness.) Yes, he provides a hopeful note here and there, because it is against the orders of the commanders to indulge in pessimism. More poignantly, he provides some hope because it would be too cruel to awaken these young people dreaming their pleasant dreams in an iron house. As a fully awakened person, he himself is faced with bitter loneliness and also saddled with the “conviction” that the house cannot be destroyed. Despite the reconstructed “scientific” facts in support of Lu Hsün’s brave opti-

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mism, it would seem that my interpretation of “My Native Place” and other stories in the same collection is far more in accord with the author’s appraisal of his intention as given in the preface, even though I set far less store by intentional statements and actually analyzed the stories without making specific references to these statements. Pru˚ˇsek, however, would assign greater weight to a later document, “How I Came to Write Stories,” as an expression of the author’s intention. This article was written to order in the year 1933, when Lu Hsün, as a prominent member of the Left-wing League, had to sustain his image as a resolute fighter of the reaction. But, characteristically, in this essay as in the slightly earlier preface to Tzu-hsüan chi, he maintains scrupulous honesty in reporting on his earlier career and does not at all repudiate the account of himself given in the preface to Na-han. Indeed, he calls “How I Came to Write Stories” a “complement” to that preface. He recalls the intellectual and literary climate of the May Fourth period and says that he wrote “in the hope of enlightening my people, for humanity, and of the need to better it. . . . So my themes were usually the unfortunates in this abnormal society. My aim was to expose the disease and draw attention to it so that it might be cured.”15 The last sentence is much less emphatic in the original; it reads, “My aim was to expose the disease so as to draw attention to its cure.”16 Though Lu Hsün assumes here a firmer tone as befits his new cultural role in the thirties, his statement of aim does not contradict my account: “It must be remembered that Lu Hsün’s primary ambition as a writer was to serve his country as a spiritual physician. In his best stories, however, he is content to probe the disease without prescribing a cure: he has too high a respect for the art of fiction to present other than the unadorned truth” (46). In his tsa-wen essays, he is emphatically didactic. In his best stories he exposes the disease and draws attention to its cure, but he does not prescribe a cure. From this digression on intentions, we return now to an examination of some of the other stories. According to Pru˚ˇsek, “Medicine” is another tale I have misread because I am not appreciative of its hopeful note. He believes my account of the story implies that “Lu Hsün did not believe in the Revolution [the anti-Manchu revolution, by the way, and not the Communist revolution]” (TP 387), whereas all I said in this connection is that “the death of Hsia indicates Lu Hsün’s gloomy view of the revolutionary cause in China” (35). Lu Hsün’s personal belief or disbelief is immaterial here, but the unjust and unavenged execution of the hero

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assuredly places the revolutionary cause in a pessimistic light. (In section 3 of the story, the small citizens gathered at the teahouse, the would-be beneficiaries of the revolution, gossip about the martyr in tones of malicious contempt.) But I immediately qualified my earlier statement by saying that, in spite of the author’s pessimism, “he lodges a memorable protest over Hsia’s unjust execution” (35) by placing upon his grave a western-style wreath. But perhaps even the word “protest” is too strong, since the officials responsible for his death would not visit the cemetery for the poor on a festival day like the Ch’ing Ming, and even if they did, they would be, like Hsia’s mother, completely baffled by the anachronistic significance of the wreath. If Lu Hsün had really wanted to be militantly hopeful, he could have conceived the story in an entirely different fashion. Hsia could have escaped from the prison, with or without the assistance of his comrades; he could also have saved the life of Hua by sending him to a western-style hospital in Shanghai (alas, there were then no socialist hospitals with free service for the poor). He could, furthermore, have given Hua’s parents a lecture about the inhumanity of their superstitious practices. If the new plot sounds too much like a present-day Communist story where the hero is invincible, the poor are getting the best of care, and everybody in the end is enlightened and happy, my intended parody shows how wrong it is for Pru˚ˇsek to read into the story a firmer message of hope than the text warrants. Pru˚ˇsek appears thoroughly irritated by my symbolic reading of the story. He objects particularly to my linking the names of the two youths to read Hua-hsia, China. It is his belief that, as a “deeply erudite student of Chinese literature,” Lu Hsün knew only too well what a senseless game it is to toy with words and meanings. The stories supply the contrary evidence, however, that precisely because of his literary erudition, Lu Hsün chose the names of his characters with particular care, investing them often with symbolic and/or comic connotations. A simple example is Kao Erh-ch’u, the ridiculous hero of “Professor Kao,” who styles himself after Gorky. A particularly happy example of the author’s ingenuity is the name Ah Q. As Chou Tso-jen has aptly observed,17 Q stands as a pictograph of a man’s head with the dangling end of his queue showing. And since “Q” is an exact homophon for the word “queue,” and since the queue is a shameful badge of feudalism, one is not surprised that the queue plays a highly symbolic and comic role in the satiric story of Ah Q. According to Chou Tso-jen, the real-life counterpart of K’ung I-chi was surnamed

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Meng and nicknamed Master Meng.18 Since Lu Hsün regards this character as a marginal member of the Confucian scholar-official class, he changed the name to the even more symbolic K’ung. In like fashion, as critics have long pointed out, Lu Hsün chose the name Hsia Yü for the martyr in “Medicine” to commemorate the woman revolutionary Ch’iu Chin. Ch’iu (Autumn) parallels Hsia (Summer), and the synonyms chin and yü share the same jade radical and go together as a phrase. (Thus among the famous personages of the Three Kingdoms period, Chou Yü is styled Kung-chin and Chu-ko Chin is styled Tzu-yü.) Once Lu Hsün hit upon the surname Hsia, it was only natural that he should assign the other victim of feudal ignorance the surname Hua, to enhance the symbolic or allegoric meaning of the story. As Hua is not a common family name, if Lu Hsün had not intended the additional dimension of meaning that the two names in conjunction would immediately suggest, he could have used any number of commoner names, like Wang or Li. As for Pru˚ˇsek’s alternative suggestion that the two names “underline the fact expressed in the tale, that brother eats brother” (TP 386), it simply doesn’t make sense. Both Hua and Hsia are victims of the old society, one ravaged by a wasting disease and the other murdered for his revolutionary crime. It is the executioner, the officialdom standing solidly behind him, the indifferent and malicious gossipers at the teahouse, who represent the “cannibalistic character of the old society.” Pru˚ˇsek strongly disapproves of the kind of cannibalistic society portrayed in “Medicine” in that it “enthusiastically sanctions the torture and killing of a fellow-creature whose crime was that he wished to liberate them” (TP 381). In his discussion of “K’ung I-chi,” “White Glow,” and “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” he also comments repeatedly on the “insensate cruelty of society” and “the dull indifference of the milieu.” Inexplicably, however, at the same time he takes strong exception to my inclusion of “the sloth, superstition, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the rural and town people” as an inherent part of Lu Hsün’s fictional world. According to Pru˚ˇsek, this description completely conceals the fact that “the aim and purpose of Lu Hsün’s oeuvre was . . . not only to lay bare the general insensibility and cruelty of Chinese society, but, above all, to point the finger at those who were responsible for this state of affairs” (TP 378). To prove his point, he asserts that the principal villain in “The New Year’s Sacrifice” is the heroine’s employer, “the conservative upholder of Confucian morality, the honourable Mr. Lu” (TP 389). A few pages ear-

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lier, however, he has spoken of Hsiang-lin Sao’s tragedy in terms of “a terrifying fatality and cruelty,” of “the absolute helplessness of a human being dragged to destruction by obscure forces” (TP 385). These obscure forces, it turns out, are now incarnated in the very visible person of the detestable Mr. Lu. In order to ascertain Mr. Lu’s crime, we have to review the story at some length. The main event that unhinges Hsiang-lin Sao’s mind, as every reader of the story will agree, is the death of her young son. Upon her second return to Lu-chen, she continually talks about this tragic incident, to the eventual disgust and contempt of the townspeople and her fellow servants. Though her second husband and her son have died within a short time of each other, she never refers to the former, and yet there is nothing in the text to indicate that their conjugal relationship had been unsatisfactory. Hsiang-lin Sao, nevertheless, is obsessed with the death of her son because it is through her negligence that a wolf has devoured him. Thus her set speech begins, “I was really stupid, really. I only knew that when it snows the wild beasts . . . may come to the villages; I didn’t know that in spring they could come too.”19 If it were indeed Lu Hsün’s aim to point his accusing finger at the gentry, why should he have made a hungry beast the agent of the son’s death? And for that matter, why should her second husband die of typhoid, when he could have easily died as a victim of gentry oppression? “The New Year’s Sacrifice” could have become a precursor of, say, The White-haired Girl, but apparently Lu Hsün had no intention of coveting this dubious honor. The wolf is not even part of the human world of feudalism. Hence I speak with justice of the “primitive peasant society” to which Hsiang-lin Sao belongs. It is only in that society that wolves are permitted to roam at large in daytime and snatch infants, that mothers-in-law can forcibly sell their daughters-in-law so that their younger sons may marry, that a convalescent typhoid patient can gobble down a bowl of cold rice to bring about a relapse and hasten his death. (This last detail, usually unmentioned in discussions of the story, indicates how, as a one-time medical student, Lu Hsün was very much concerned with the peasants’ carelessness about their welfare and health: Jun-t’u’s large family is another instance.) And it is not inappropriate that the wolf should play a crucial part in that world; for like Hsiang-lin Sao’s mercenary and cruel motherin-law, it, too, stands for that relentless struggle for existence in a forever hungry world of predators and helpless prey. And when one remembers

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the many references to the wolf in Lu Hsün’s other stories and also his prose poems, the symbolic dimension becomes unmistakable. After the townspeople, through their indifference and contempt, have caused Hsiang-lin Sao to repress her sorrow and guilt over her son’s death, the maidservant Liu Ma, described as “a devout woman who abstained from meat,”20 turns her attention to another of her supposed crimes that calls for expiation. Liu Ma reminds her that she should have remained chaste to the memory of her first husband and should have killed herself when being forced to marry the second time. Hsiang-lin Sao hasn’t thought of this before, but now, frightened, she decides to save enough money to donate a doorsill to a temple. In the process she works hard and doesn’t mind much the continual teasing by the townspeople about the scar on her forehead, the shameful badge of her crime. The final crushing blow, of course, is delivered by her mistress, Fourth Aunt Lu, who intercepts her in the act of fetching utensils to be used in the ancestral sacrifice. Hsiang-lin Sao thought her crime expiated with her purchase of a doorsill, but apparently she is still regarded as an unlucky woman. From then on, she steadily deteriorates. Because Fourth Aunt Lu and her husband can be seen in this respect as the final link in the chain of events leading to her death, Pru˚ˇsek wants us to believe that Mr. Lu is alone responsible for her tragedy. According to Pru˚ˇsek, it is Mr. Lu who “exploited her, who made her a social outcast, who implanted in her the crazy idea of her guilt and drove her to madness, who deprived her of work and drove her into the streets, who let her die of hunger and cynically commented on her death” (TP 388–389). Pru˚ˇsek makes here no mention of the many events in Hsianglin Sao’s life we have just reviewed; he ignores completely the more important agents of her tragedy but magnifies the villainy of Mr. Lu out of all proportion to his minor role in the story. First of all, one cannot speak of her “exploitation” by the Lus in the sense that, given the conditions of feudal China, the widow Hsiang-lin Sao could not aspire to better employment than being retained by a genteel family. In her initial term of service, she actually regains her spirits and finds a new purpose in life so that, if her mother-in-law had not forcibly abducted her, she would have remained a quite contented person. In the context of the Communist revolution, perhaps her lot will still be considered a miserable one, but since Lu Hsün does not write from the Communist viewpoint, one cannot make this anachronistic accusation. She works hard, of course; “nev-

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ertheless, she, on her side, was satisfied; gradually the trace of a smile appeared at the corner of her mouth, and her face became whiter and plumper.”21 The Lus’ willingness to employ her for the second time is even more a case of benevolence, since most families would not hire a woman who has been twice a widow and shows visible signs of emotional disturbance. On her part, Hsiang-lin Sao feels now she is unwanted not because the Lus treat her harshly (as a matter of fact, they tolerate her inefficiency and frequent spells of absent-mindedness), but because they forbid her to give any menial help in connection with ancestral sacrifices. In this respect, both she and her masters are seen as victims of feudalistic superstition. If either side can take the matter of religious worship less seriously, she will not feel rejected. In my chapter on Lu Hsün I have praised the story for its “flesh and body” representation of feudalism and superstition. With the exception of the first-person narrator (but even he respects the consolatory power of feudal religion so that he doesn’t know how to answer Hsiang-lin Sao’s despairing questions), everyone in the story is in the grip of the superstitious fear of the gods and Hell, be he a peasant or a member of the gentry. Lu Hsün makes it clear that Mrs. Lu is quite benevolent, judging by traditional standards, though her husband is more suspicious of and illdisposed toward people. But the fact of primary importance is that they are both superstitious, and initially, Mr. Lu more than his wife, because he respects more the taboo against hiring a widow. The author’s attitude toward him is satiric not because he is depicted as cruel but because, given his Confucian education, he at least should rise above folk superstition. Cunningly, in the introductory section of the story, the author calls Fourth Uncle Lu a Neo-Confucianist, mentions some of his favorite books by title (one is an annotated edition of the Chin-ssu lu), and recalls his having been exposed to such Neo-Confucian assertions as “Ghosts and spirits are properties of Nature,”22 to underscore his possible freedom from superstitious fears by virtue of his rationalist education. Yet, to the author’s disenchantment and disbelief, he is the one who seems most zealous about preparing the New Year’s Sacrifice, and he is the one who makes that unfeeling remark about Hsiang-lin Sao’s death. Pru˚ˇsek thinks his remark is “cynical,” but on the face of things, he is too superstitious to be cynical. He is actually highly incensed that the beggar should have died not earlier nor later, but exactly on the eve of the New Year festival when his family needs all the luck in the world and can ill afford the interference

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of an inauspicious accident. Fourth Uncle is certainly not charitable, but with ironic objectivity, Lu Hsün shows us at the same time that a temporary servant in the employ of the Lus, a man surely of plebeian origins, regards the event also with distasteful contempt. Despite the long catalogue of villainies attributed to him by Pru˚ˇsek, in the subsequent retelling of Hsiang-lin Sao’s past history, Fourth Uncle is only assigned a subsidiary role. He complains and grumbles several times, mostly over her unlucky widowhood, and following the climactic scene, after the horror-struck Fourth Aunt has asked Hsiang-lin Sao to desist from helping at the sacrificial table, he orders her to leave the room. Subsequently, of course, the Lus dismiss her after her worsened condition has incapacitated her from domestic service. But since no other family gives her employment, the whole town is in agreement about her undesirability. In dismissing her, Mrs. Lu has not suddenly become cruel; she has become finally convinced that Hsiang-lin Sao is indeed an unlucky person. Like Philoctetes stranded on an island with his incurable wound, like the blinded Oedipus sent to exile, what gods hate, man cannot help— hence my reference to the ethos of “the heroic society of Greek tragedy” (39). And in the term “man” is included every person in Lu-chen who has long jeered at her misfortune. Because of his enlightened education, the author-narrator alone feels keen commiseration and regret over her death. To him, the whole town in its festive gaiety, too preoccupied with the ritual of soliciting “boundless good fortune” for the next year to spare a thought for the unlucky dead, is implicated in her death. But, an unwelcome visitor himself, he certainly cannot change its ways of pitiful and largely unself-conscious cruelty; he plans to leave tomorrow. If my analysis of “The New Year’s Sacrifice” is faithful to every detail of the story, then it would seem that even in this most tragic of his tales, Lu Hsün has not singled out the gentry as the primary object of his hatred but has contemplated with sorrow and restrained anger, with compassion and ironic objectivity, the superstition and heartlessness of all “the rural and town people” living under the blighting influence of elementary hunger, disease, and feudalism. It would seem that Pru˚ˇsek has read the story in a very biased way precisely because he feels so certain about “the aim and purpose of Lu Hsün’s oeuvre.” He has read the story primarily to vindicate the thesis that Lu Hsün always points his accusing finger at the evil gentry. It is also by reference to Pru˚ˇsek’s presuppositions about the aim and purpose of Lu Hsün’s fiction that we can understand his otherwise puz-

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zling disagreement with me about the importance of the story “Soap.” He concedes that “the character-study of the man and the portrayal of his domestic milieu is [sic] extremely well done” and that the “irony is brilliantly effective” (TP 386); yet he begrudges it a high place among the author’s tales. Lu Hsün himself thought of it very highly: along with only three other stories of his, “The Diary of a Madman,” “Medicine,” and “Divorce,” he placed it in a volume of stories bearing the general title, A Comprehensive Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature.23 Pru˚ˇsek nevertheless thinks that “Soap” lacks “that specific something” uniquely Lu Hsün and does not sum up and “generalize” about “some fundamental feature of Chinese society” (TP 386). What he means, I suppose, is that the story does not chastise feudal society too harshly but holds it up for seemingly inconsequential ridicule. He seems to believe on principle that the impersonal comic style is incompatible with the serious aim of Lu Hsün’s fiction. It remains for me to say a few words about Old Legends Retold, now that I have answered in detail Pru˚ˇsek ’s specific charges against my misinterpretations of stories from Na-han and P’ang-huang. Pru˚ˇsek regards Old Legends Retold very highly and speaks of my inability to grasp the “individuality and originality of Lu Hsün’s artistic technique” to be discerned in that volume. In its defense, however, he resorts rather uncharacteristically to the poetic vocabulary of impressionistic criticism and speaks of the “many-facetted iridescence” of Lu Hsün’s art. I wish he had analyzed at least one episode from any one of the stories in this collection to demonstrate how it conveys “a multiplicity of meanings, every moment relating to a number of layers of reality, their changing hues reminiscent of a winding scarf of rainbow colours” (TP 382). In the absence of this demonstration, I could only say that Lu Hsün, whose opinion Pru˚ˇsek usually respects, is none too proud of these creations. In the preface to Old Legends Retold and elsewhere, he dwells upon his personal dissatisfaction with his first story in the style of satiric fantasy, “Mending Heaven,” and the faults of that story—a levity of tone and the intrusive note of personal peevishness and ephemeral satire—are largely present in most of the other tales. I would allow that “Pacifying the Flood” and “Picking Ferns” are better than the rest: in the first story, the satiric sketch of the intellectuals on the Culture Mountain, to borrow a phrase from Pru˚ˇsek, sums up a “fundamental feature of Chinese society,” and in the second, the hapless heroes, Po-i and Shu-ch’i, in spite of the

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author’s open mockery, are somewhat reminiscent of the many weakling characters in his nonhistorical fiction. But the remainder of the volume, in its levity and chaos, marks what I have called “the sad degeneration of a distinguished if narrow talent for fiction” (46).

III. Other Writers Pru˚ˇsek devotes twenty pages to Lu Hsün; the rest of the writers receiving individual attention in my book, however, are treated together in a third section called “Individual Portraits,” which has only twelve-odd pages. There his attention is mainly focused upon Mao Tun and Lao She (their prewar works), Yeh Shao-chün, Yü Ta-fu, Ting Ling, and Chao Shu-li. Even such well-known authors as Chang T’ien-i, Shen Ts’ung-wen, and Pa Chin are barely mentioned. I have taken pains to demonstrate the literary importance of Eileen Chang and Ch’ien Chung-shu, but Pru˚ˇsek dismisses them as merely authors “congenial” to my taste. For a scholar insisting upon scientific objectivity, is it fair that he should so dismiss them? Is it not rather his duty as a reviewer to examine their works and then decide whether they deserve the high praise I have given them? It also seems to me that Pru˚ˇsek has skirted around the long chapter on “Conformity, Defiance, and Achievement,” which treats in detail the continuing ideological struggle among leftist and Communist writers from 1936 to 1957. He touches upon some of the earlier debates, but the major events of the fifties, such as the anti–Hu Feng campaign and the persecution of rightist and revisionist authors, are passed over in silence. On the writers discussed in his third section, Pru˚ˇsek shows on the whole less sharp disagreement with my interpretations. (Even on the works of Ting Ling and Chao Shu-li, as has been earlier shown, he admits that I am partially or in the main right, though I have not grasped their intentions.) He seems, however, much more concerned with the problem of omission, noting, for instance, that I failed to discuss any of Lao She’s short stories. Writing a comprehensive history, I had to observe the requirements of proportion and economy. Since I believe that Lao She’s distinctive contribution to modern Chinese literature is as a novelist rather than as a short-story writer, I discussed all his novels, except the one disparaged by the author himself, City of Cats, in chapters 7 and 14. If my interpretation of Lao She is indeed faulty, why couldn’t Pru˚ˇsek pin-

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point the mistakes in my accounts of the novels, instead of deploring my neglect of the much less important stories?24 In the five-odd pages devoted to Mao Tun and Lao She, Pru˚ˇsek focuses his attention principally on the opening paragraph of chapter 7, where a general comparison of the two authors is attempted. I have already covered the prewar career of Mao Tun, and now I proceed to Lao She by way of a transitional passage. It is the penalty one has to pay for writing a book also intended for the general reader that such passages, which would have served no purpose for the specialist, are sometimes necessary. In the said passage, I had to be content with generalities, making no provision for the kind of qualifying statements that would have to be made if I were attempting an exact, detailed comparison: the reader knows that a much longer critique of Lao She will follow. Pru˚ˇsek, on the contrary, lingers over this designedly transitional passage, while paying no attention to the rest of the chapter. Particularly, he exhibits the sentence, “Using the time-honored test of Northern and Southern literary sensibilities, we may say that Lao She represents the North, individualist, forthright, humorous, and Mao Tun, the more feminine South, romantic, sensuous, melancholic” (165), as an example of my “purely subjective approach” to “literary questions” (TP 392). Any objective reader will see that I set little store by that expression, “the time-honored test of Northern and Southern literary sensibilities,” since I refer to this test only once and not again. And even in this single instance, I use the weak auxiliary verb “may” to indicate the conditional or concessional nature of my statement: “If we use this test, we may say that. . . .” Moreover, it surely does no harm to my readers, most of whom are nonspecialists, to be informed of this concept of geographical differentiation in traditional Chinese literary and art criticism, even if, according to Pru˚ˇsek, it is “completely invalid.” In the same captious vein, Pru˚ˇsek goes on to take exception to this and that formulation in my paragraph, without once reminding the reader that I have indeed taken care of these exceptions in my detailed critiques of the two authors.25 When Pru˚ˇsek finally passes on to a discussion of Mao Tun’s individual works, he again reminds me that, as is the case with Lu Hsün, I have not grasped the aim and purpose of his oeuvre and subjected it to a scientific analysis. According to him, Mao Tun “considers literature to be an important weapon in the political arsenal” (TP 395), and presumably all his own works should be evaluated primarily with reference to that polit-

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ical objective. This, indeed, has been the standard procedure of the Communist critics in China ever since they greeted his first masterpiece, The Eclipse, with a barrage of vituperative criticism. With his undoubted Communist sympathies, they could not understand why he should have cared far more for an honest representation of the revolutionary situation during the Northern Expedition than for the long-term interests of the Party. This political emphasis still obtains in Communist appraisals of Mao Tun today, so that his first two great works, The Eclipse and Rainbow, are always assigned lesser importance, while a later and coarser work, The Twilight, because of its political orthodoxy, is invariably given the highest praise. I am sorry to see that, with his far greater literary sensitivity and erudition, Pru˚ˇsek nevertheless endorses this critical approach. Thus he apologized for the fact that The Eclipse was “written under the impression of a despairing mood” (TP 395), whereas it was precisely this despairing mood, as I have demonstrated in my book, that contributed so immensely to its human truth and emotional power. Again Pru˚ˇsek apologizes that Rainbow is “not particularly typical of Mao Tun” (TP 395), even though part 1 of that work shows the novelist at the peak of his form. I may remark that, though he enjoys universal fame as Communist China’s greatest novelist, on the mainland only two of his novels and a handful of his stories have received unqualified praise. Even monographs devoted to a survey of his writing career hardly discuss such later works as the novel Maple Leaves as Red as Flowers of the Second Month and the fine stories collected under the title Grievances.26 His oeuvre has suffered drastic amputation on the Procrustian bed of Communist criticism. I rank The Twilight “among major contemporary Chinese novels,” though I deem it a big failure in terms of what the author could have done with his material if he had followed the lines of development indicated in The Eclipse and Rainbow. Lifting phrases from my book, Pru˚ˇsek accuses me on the contrary of having failed to notice “the accent of passion or conviction” and the signs of a “self-tormenting honesty,” though I have taken pains to explain why “the self-tormenting honesty of The Eclipse and Rainbow” (57) is missing from the later work. As a proof of the author’s “self-tormenting honesty,” he cites the “on the whole negative picture of Communist Party functionaries” (TP 396) and of women factory workers presented in the book. Now the novel takes place in 1930, when the Communist activists in Shanghai were all perforce following the Li Li-san line. Mao Tun composed it in 1931–1932, at a time when the then

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Communist leadership had harshly repudiated that line. Writing from hindsight, he had no choice but to present a “negative picture” of such misdirected Communists as K’e Tso-fu and Ts’ai Chen. To give a more flattering portrait, on the contrary, would have called for the exercise of personal courage and “self-tormenting honesty.” For a succinct presentation of the political content of The Twilight, the reader is recommended to T. A. Hsia, Enigma of the Five Martyrs (Berkeley, 1962), an engrossing study of the intricate connections between Communist literary workers and party leaders in 1930. Because in the chapter on Mao Tun I direct my attention primarily to the novels, Pru˚ˇsek accuses me of treating his short stories in “a very stepmotherly fashion.” Again, as with Lu Hsün, he expects me to have written a much longer chapter, if not a monograph on the author. In support of his charge, he cites my supposed misunderstanding of two stories, “Creation” and “Spring Silkworms.” In regard to the former, I have written only a one-sentence summary, which goes, “The heroine of ‘Creation’ feels compelled to leave her husband and mentor because she has advanced beyond his noncommittal intellectual dilettantism to a positive socialist position” (161). Pru˚ˇsek believes, on the other hand, that the heroine has reached only a “very indefinite” political position, and proceeds to give his own interpretation of the story, in more words. Of course, neither my brief summary nor his longer commentary could have done adequate justice to a story of more than thirty pages. I could say of Pru˚ˇsek’s account, for example, that he has completely ignored the conspicuous erotic element in the story: in his early fiction (as I have shown in my discussion of The Eclipse and Rainbow and my briefer comment on The Wild Roses), Mao Tun’s distinctive forte lies in his passionate dual concern with the ideological and the erotic. As for Pru˚ˇsek’s objection to my phrase, “positive socialist position,” I believe that its mention in my summary is justified by the text so long as I do not specify the political party, whether Communist or anarchist, to which the heroine is drawn. Her husband is a great reader of political philosophy, including “Kropotkin, Marx, Lenin,” though his political views remain strictly nonsubversive. He has encouraged his wife to read about politics, but the unexpected result is that she shows so much interest and concern that she has lately joined an “unsound and illegal ( = subversive) political movement.”27 She takes to another mentor, a Miss Li, who completely upsets her husband’s program of education for her. (In stories of

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this type, highly popular in the late twenties and early thirties, the mysterious stranger to whom the hero or heroine turns for guidance is usually a Communist, though to bypass the censor, his or her political identity is often not disclosed.) So the husband laments his ruined creation: “He had destroyed Hsien-hsien’s easygoing nonchalance, but materialism had replaced it; he had destroyed her affectation of an old-style scholar’s distaste for politics, but radical and extremist political thought had usurped its place, not to be dislodged.”28 Taking into consideration the censorship requirements of the times, one should think that such words and expressions as “unsound and illegal political movement,” “materialism,” “radical and extremist political thought,” along with the specific mention of the names of Kropotkin, Marx, and Lenin, are not at all ambiguous in indicating Hsien-hsien’s commitment to a socialist, if not Communist, position. And, Pru˚ˇsek to the contrary, her parting message to her husband, relayed by a servant, removes all possible doubt as to what the author is driving at: She’s gone. She has asked me to tell you: she’s now going ahead first, and may you catch up with her. . . . And she added, if you don’t intend to catch up with her, she’s not going to wait for you either.29

Pru˚ˇsek berates me for distorting the meaning of “Spring Silkworms,” a story I praised highly, perhaps too highly. Prior to offering my own interpretation, however, I gave the reader the standard reading: “As a Communist commentary on the Chinese scene, ‘Spring Silkworms’ shows the bankruptcy of the peasantry under the dual pressure of imperialist aggression and traditional usury, and as such the story is usually praised” (163). I suppose if I had continued in this vein, Pru˚ˇsek would for once have praised me for my objectivity. But I found this didactic reading quite inadequate, and so I traced the story’s “strength and appeal” to the author’s ritualistic attention to the minute details of silkworm raising and to his largely sympathetic portrayal of the old farmer T’ung-pao and his loyal family working beside him. I was well aware, of course, that Mao Tun does not approve of “their unsparing diligence and unfaltering trust in a beneficent Heaven” and that it is his “articulate intention to discredit this kind of feudal mentality” (163). But I insisted nevertheless that “almost in spite of himself, one feels that Mao Tun is celebrating in his tale the dig-

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nity of labor.” The youngest son, To-to-t’ou, of course, is his principal instrument for discrediting feudal mentality, but he plays only a minor role and he remains an artificial character. His undisguised superiority actually confirms our sympathy for his father and the other less enlightened members of his family. Their unremitting labor, of course, only brings them nearer ruin, but this failure, due to external causes beyond their control, does not deprive them of their impressive dignity. Pru˚ˇsek is therefore positively wrong when he maintains, “In fact, Mao Tun describes with extreme irony and deprecation the superstition of the old peasant, T’ung-pao, who believed in the Bodhisattva; only his Bodhisattva was the god of wealth, ts’ai-shen” (TP 397). Pru˚ˇsek has here confused “Spring Silkworms” with its sequel, “Autumn Harvest.” In that story, T’ung-pao is made into a pathetically ridiculous fool who acknowledges on his deathbed the rightness of his young son’s expedient ways. To prepare for this change in characterization, early in the story (the third paragraph) Mao Tun gives us this piece of belated information: it has been the old man’s lifelong habit to repair to a shrine outside the village to worship the god of wealth. During the entire season of silkworm raising, not once is he seen worshipping at that shrine: he is too busy caring for the silkworms and cocoons. Moreover, in the earlier story, he is depicted as the soul of honesty and rectitude. He is so much a stubborn and proud Chinese peasant that he hates anything foreign and refuses to yield to the counsels of expediency. He would raise Chinese silkworms and expect a smaller profit rather than raise the foreign kind. And one of the scenes in the story registers his hatred toward a passing foreign-style steamboat: A small oil-burning river boat came puffing up pompously from beyond the silk filature, tugging three larger craft in its wake. Immediately the peaceful water was agitated with waves rolling towards the banks on both sides of the canal. . . . The peaceful green countryside was filled with the chugging of the boat engine and the stink of its exhaust. Hatred burned in Old Tung Pao’s eyes.30

The author appears here in complete sympathy with T’ung-pao’s point of view. But in “Autumn Harvest,” this sympathy has been completely withheld. Though the two stories, along with a third, “Winter Ruin,” are today commonly referred to as The Rural Trilogy, Pru˚ˇsek should

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not have been misled into thinking that the characterization of T’ung-pao in the first two stories is consistently the same. Most of Pru˚ˇsek’s comments on Lao She, Yeh Shao-chün, and Yü Ta-fu are in the nature of supplementary or independent remarks having little to do with my text. Thus he discourses typically on the intentions and narrative techniques of these authors, with frequent digressions on the problem of subjectivism, of “the close interlinking of the work of art with the personal experiences, feelings and views of the author” (TP 398)—a problem with which Pru˚ˇsek has been much concerned in recent years. Some of these remarks betray his intolerance of non-Marxist ideas: thus Lao She is criticized because he “often does not understand these [social problems] very correctly” (TP 394). The implication is that there is only one correct, scientific way to understand social problems, and Lao She is so much the poorer as a writer for his failure to follow it. Not to contradict his present high reputation in China, however, Pru˚ˇsek charitably adds that his concern with social problems is “of quite secondary importance,” though the truth is that all his best prewar novels are vitally concerned with social problems. In his comments on Yü Ta-fu, however, Pru˚ˇsek does make the specific complaint that I fail to include for discussion two of the author’s best stories: “A Humble Sacrifice” and “A Lonely Man on a Journey.” The latter, by the way, is not even a story: it is a confessional essay written in memory of his deceased young son Lung-erh, and belongs with the series of diaries, confessions, and thinly disguised fictions about his relationship with his disapproving mother, miserably neglected wife, and sickly son. In my chapter on Yü Ta-fu, I devote some attention to this theme and refer to three specific titles: the diary “A Trip Home” and the two autobiographical stories, “Smoke Silhouettes” and “In the Cold Wind.” Since these three works are comparable to “A Lonely Man on a Journey” in emotional intensity and stem from the same domestic inspiration, I do not see any absolute reason why I must single out that confessional essay for special attention. But judging from the fact that Pru˚ˇsek links this essay not with the other domestic pieces but with two stories with a proletarian setting, “A Humble Sacrifice” and “One Intoxicating Spring Evening,” it is obvious that he is not so much concerned with Yü Ta-fu’s obsession with remorse and guilt—his dominant emotions since his first story, “Sinking,” and they are especially poignantly rendered in his domestic pieces—as with the fact

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that in this naked account of his son’s death, the author is finally seen sharing the same kind of “human suffering” with his proletarian brothers and sisters. Yü Ta-fu’s reputation would be surely improved if we could ignore his decadence and regard him primarily as a humanitarian author preoccupied with “the whole terrible fate of the Chinese proletariat” (TP 399)! But unfortunately, even in his proletarian stories, Yü Ta-fu always regards himself as a bohemian. His camaraderie with tramps, coolies, and factory workers is largely an extension of his self-pity; there is nothing revolutionary about it. In “A Humble Sacrifice,” as in most of his stories, the author sees himself as a poor person; yet in terms of leisure and means, he lives in a completely different world from the ricksha man whom he befriends. Once he witnesses a quarrel over money between the ricksha man and his wife and he stealthily leaves them a silver watch of his. After a siege of illness that lasts two weeks, he visits them once again, only to find a distraught family crying over the news of the ricksha man’s death. (He is accidentally drowned, but the widow entertains the doubt that he may have deliberately thrown himself into the water.) The author consoles her, buys for her a paper-made ricksha, and later joins her and the two orphans in the funeral procession. The author’s sympathy is unmistakable in the telling of the story, but still it is never quite separable from his commiseration over his own fate. At first, he even envies the ricksha man because, however poor, he at least enjoys his family and his night’s sleep, whereas he himself “hadn’t enjoyed a whole night’s sleep for two years”31 and has been away from his wife and son for so long. After the death of the ricksha man, the sight of the disconsolate widow and her younger son first of all “reminded me of my pitiful woman, of my Lung-erh, who would be now about the same height as the crying child crawling on the floor.”32 Even the final outburst of rage against the gaily dressed pedestrians in the street expresses as much indignation at their indifference to the plight of the ricksha man’s family as his habitual disgust with the respectable bourgeoisie. Despite the elaborate pathos at the end, the story is nevertheless in the author’s usual autobiographical-sentimental mode, so that it is misleading to say with Pru˚ˇsek that in this story “the author concentrates the whole terrible fate of the Chinese proletariat.” Since Pru˚ˇsek cites this story to refute my charge that Yü Ta-fu’s style is “sentimental and careless,” I may quote a passage for detailed examination. The author is speaking of his poverty and bohemian life:

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When bored to death, if I didn’t betake myself from the northwestern section of the city to the southern section, to mingle with my own kind of merry people at the theaters, teahouses, brothels, and restaurants, to forget my own existence and to learn from them how to forget both life and death in a drunken stupor, then I would go alone outside the P’ing-tse Gate to enjoy its local scenes. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel the compelling attraction of the serene quietness of the Jade Spring Mountain or the recessed calm of the Temple of the Great Awakening, but I, a man in need of money three hundred fifty-nine days out of a year, absolutely could not have the surplus cash to enjoy their sublime beauty.33

Well read in classical Chinese literature and foreign literature, Yü Ta-fu, of course, was never illiterate or ungrammatical like some writers of the May Fourth period. Though his periods (as the first sentence in our specimen) are sometimes too complex and Europeanized to read well, and though he often uses southern colloquial expressions and records them in characters of his own choice that may not prove readily intelligible to readers ignorant of the Wu dialect, his style appears on the whole candid, wordily eloquent, and remarkably adapted to the requirements of autobiographical and psychological fiction. But if one examines the style closely, one finds that even his best stories are blemished by touches of sentimentality and compositional carelessness. To emphasize his self-pity and occasionally to suggest the effect of overwhelming sexual stimulation, Yü Ta-fu resorts to exaggeration, and this exaggeration often brings about inconsistencies in the text resulting from one sentimental excess canceling out another. In the first sentence of our specimen, the author makes himself out to be a bohemian decadent bored with bourgeois life; so if he is not visiting the haunts of pleasure, he is strolling outside the city wall, enjoying his solitude. In the second sentence, he employs ironic exaggeration to indicate his actual distaste for the scenic resorts frequented by the middle class by saying that he cannot afford to visit these places of sublime beauty. Writing in a hurry, he does not realize that he would need a great deal more money to be a regular frequenter of brothels, theaters, and restaurants than to make occasional trips to the nearby resorts. To emphasize his poverty, moreover, he does not say that he is short of cash nine days out of ten; he has to invent the cumbersome locution that he is in need of cash 359 days out of a year. Depending thus upon whether he

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counts by the traditional Chinese or the modern calendar, he is not in want only one day or six days out of a year. Why he is suddenly not poor on that day or these six days we are not told. Of the early writers, Lu Hsün, Yeh Shao-chün, or Ping Hsin would never be capable of this type of careless exaggeration; only the members of the Creation Society, with their weakness for emotional display, could have committed such rhetorical excesses. The most brilliant and talented of the group, Yü Ta-fu is nevertheless also blameworthy in this respect. In this section as in the earlier section on Lu Hsün, I have tried to reexamine those texts that, according to Pru˚ˇsek, I have misinterpreted or willfully ignored, thereby confirming in most instances my original judgments on these works and their authors. I cannot claim that I am naturally a better reader of these texts than Pru˚ˇsek: I would think it is precisely his dependence on a “scientific” theory of modern Chinese history and literature and his unvarying habit of judging every work by its supposed ideological intent that have frequently misled him into simplifying a text or misinterpreting its import whereas, with all my “subjectivity,” I have at least tried to do justice to every author and every work without having first to accommodate my honest reactions to a predetermined theory of modern Chinese fiction. The concrete examples gathered from the works of Lu Hsün, Mao Tun, and Yü Ta-fu are therefore intended to support my general criticism of Pru˚ˇsek’s principles and methods governing his study of modern Chinese literature. I am sure Pru˚ˇsek believes as strongly as I do that unlimited opportunity exists for western scholars to make outstanding original contributions toward an understanding and assessment of this literature, though I wish he could also agree with me that this endeavor would seem to call for the exercise of the true critical or scientific spirit— a refusal to rest content with untested assumptions and conventional judgments and a willingness to conduct an open-minded inquiry, without fear of consequence and without political prepossessions.

Part II TRADITIONAL DRAMA

An Introduction to The Romance of the Western Chamber* (1968)

Through the centuries a number of love stories have delighted the Chinese both as literature and as popular entertainment. Among these the story of Scholar Chang and Ts’ui Ying-ying holds a unique place of honor not only because of its continuing popularity as a repertoire piece in the regionally diversified Chinese theater but also because, in the course of its evolution from roughly 800 to 1300, it has been thrice embodied in an imperishable masterpiece: Yuan Chen’s tale in the classical style, “The Story of Ying-ying” (Ying-ying chuan);1 Tung Chieh-yuan’s (Scholar Tung’s) long narrative poem, The Romance of the Western Chamber (Hsihsiang chi), and Wang Shih-fu’s play of the same title. No other Chinese love story has enjoyed comparable literary distinction. It is true that Emperor Hsüan-tsung’s infatuation for Yang Kuei-fei has been celebrated in at least an equal number of classics: Po Chü-i’s Ch’ang-hen ko (The song of everlasting regret), the Yuan playwright Po P’u’s Wu-t’ung yü (Rain on the wu-t’ung tree), and the Ch’ing playwright Hung Sheng’s Ch’ang-sheng tien (The palace of long life). But the two plays cannot claim the pivotal literary importance of Wang Shih-fu’s Hsi-hsiang chi, while Po Chü-i’s poem is a mere ballad in comparison with Tung Chieh-yuan’s love epic. Yang Kuei-fei, an imperial favorite killed upon the outbreak of a major revolt, was a legend even during her lifetime: her tragic story naturally attracted poets, storytellers, and playwrights. Ying-ying, however, would have remained an unsung beauty if Yuan Chen had not recorded

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her story. Though in the tale both her unusual refinement and her distinguished family name suggest an aristocratic upbringing (in Tung’s poem she is identified as a prime minister’s daughter), scholars now agree that the tale is disguised autobiography and that Ying-ying was in real life a girl of humbler social status with whom the author was once in love. After Yuan Chen went to Ch’ang-an (as does Scholar Chang in the tale), he found it to his advantage to discontinue the affair. Despite their romantic propensities, young poets and scholars residing in the capital in Yuan Chen’s time were determined to succeed, and they were equally ambitious to earn top honors at the examinations and to form matrimonial ties that would prove highly advantageous to their future career. Yuan Chen was extraordinarily successful: a poet enjoying equal fame with his close friend Po Chü-i, he soon earned the chin-shih degree, married a daughter of the prominent Wei family, and eventually reached the position of prime minister. In recording the story of Ying-ying, Yuan Chen must have been driven by remorse or a sense of regret. At the same time, however, the writing of such tales (ch’uan-ch’i) was a social act designed to win the admiration of one’s literary friends and earn the approval of the senior members of the national elite. Even if he had wanted to, Yuan could not have written a confession containing all the details of his courtship and desertion. He therefore invented a scholar Chang (Chang Sheng) as the hero and, according to the rules of the genre, included many poems and a few set pieces of rhetoric in the tale. Even Ying-ying’s touching letter was probably his own composition designed to show his mastery of the epistolary style. Modern readers have always been bothered by the hero’s lame and unfeeling apology for his desertion. But Yuan must have branded the sensitive and unassuming heroine a dangerous vixen worthy to be classed with the notorious kingdom wreckers of the past to impress his readers with his brilliance at argumentation. Despite its unconvincing attempt to defend the hero, however, the tale has retained a core of truth, and it moves us (as it must have moved its contemporary readers) for its portrayal of an enigmatic and fascinating girl of compelling credibility. Ying-ying is not the typical forsaken woman in Chinese poetry—a courtesan, a merchant’s wife, or a palace lady waiting helplessly in her boudoir for the absent lover. Nor is she the conventional heroine of romantic pluck and matrimonial good fortune. By Yuan Chen’s time several romantic scholar-lovers had become folklore figures,

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the most famous being the Han writer Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, whose lute playing persuaded the young widow Cho Wen-chün to elope with him, against the wishes of her rich father. In both the Tung and the Wang versions of Hsi-hsiang chi, Scholar Chang repeatedly identifies himself with Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and other romantic seducers and compares his beloved to Cho Wen-chün, but in the tale Ying-ying is not a young widow knowledgeable about love and resolute in her pursuit of happiness. Eager to respond to her suitor, she nevertheless gives him a stern lecture upon their first assignation, although soon afterward she yields to his ardor voluntarily, forgetting both her maidenly reserve and her traditional regard for propriety. In her apparent contradiction Yuan Chen has caught for all time the dilemma of every properly brought up Chinese girl faced with the supreme temptation. In both versions of Hsi-hsiang chi the characterization of Y ing-ying is much fuller. She shows a strain of slyness, rationalizes her rudeness toward Scholar Chang on their first tryst, and gives vent to her strong indignation against her double-dealing mother. She also conveys her varied moods of expectancy, languor, and dejection in some of the loveliest stanzas of verse. But with all this new wealth of lyrical and dramatic detail, neither Tung nor Wang succeeds in giving us a more complex portrait of the heroine mainly because, as the daughter of a late prime minister, she is further removed from the milieu of her prototype, and her apprehension and insecurity both during Scholar Chang’s courtship and after his departure to Ch’ang-an appear to be less firmly rooted in social reality. Despite her ambiguous family background, Yuan Chen’s Y ing-ying retains the essential vulnerability of a gentle girl turned mistress because of her overgenerosity to her lover. She makes no further move to influence him after he has failed to reply to her letter, and a year later she marries. But her refusal to see Chang after they both have married ends the story on a haunting note of unsentimental realism. Little wonder that, as a new type of heroine in Chinese literature, she was showered with sympathy and admiration in numerous poems and song cycles by T’ang and Sung poets. During the Northern Sung, which saw the rise of many types of popular entertainment, storytellers took over the tale of Y ing-ying and gave it a new lease on life. We must agree with some recent scholars, however, in assuming that, with their understandable sympathy for the heroine, their rather unsophisticated audiences could not have stomached the tale

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as Yuan Chen wrote it and would have wanted either a more tragic ending or a happier one, with the caddish hero duly transformed into a devoted lover. The storytellers apparently took the latter option, and during the years (1190–1208) when Emperor Chang-tsung of the Chin dynasty ruled over North China their version finally got written down in Tung Chieh-yuan’s magnificent poem of eight books and more than fifty thousand characters. The reformed hero, Chang Kung (courtesy name: Chün-jui), dominates the poem. He eventually marries Ying-ying after his rival Cheng Heng has been exposed as a malicious liar. Tung’s Hsi-hsiang chi is the only extant example of a complete work in the genre of chu-kung-tiao. The term, meaning “medley,” refers to the main feature of the work—lyrical stanzas set to tunes in various keys. In addition to describing scenery and action, these songs and song sequences delineate the psychological conditions of the characters and reproduce their soliloquies and conversations. In an actual performance, therefore, the narrator must be something of a dramatic interpreter as he in turn impersonates Scholar Chang, Ying-ying, or her maid Hung Niang and conveys their thoughts and words in song. After singing one, two, or three songs, he recites a passage that serves to summarize a situation, forward the plot or, occasionally, introduce a note of suspense. These passages are brief, except when they include dialogue or quotations from earlier versions of the story, such as Yuan Chen’s tale and his friend Li Shen’s “Song of Ying-ying” (Ying-ying ko). Tung’s Hsi-hsiang chi is without doubt the greatest narrative poem in the Chinese language. Though Wang Shih-fu’s play has always enjoyed far greater fame and popularity, partly because T’ung’s poem was for a long time not generally available, it is difficult to maintain that the play, which has adapted nearly all the episodes from the poem and numerous passages of its verse, is necessarily the greater work of the two. For one thing, the hero of Tung’s poem answers to a more serious conception of the lover, even though his lovesickness exposes him time and again to situations of genuine humor. The hero of the play, while basically as much of a naïve and ardent lover, is blemished by levity and assumes in some of his scenes the guise of an ineffectual and boastful seducer.2 If Yuan Chen has permanently fixed the image of Ying-ying, it is entirely to Tung’s credit that Scholar Chang has become in his own right a beloved figure and an archetype for the romantic scholar-hero to be seen in subsequent Chinese drama and fiction. He is not at all points believable, and to west-

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ern readers used to romantic heroes of greater self-assertiveness he may appear too easily despondent, too ready to commit suicide, and toward the end too cowardly in the face of Cheng Heng’s challenge. But in all his important scenes, subsequently adapted in Wang’s play, he engages our affection and sympathy. Certainly no previous Chinese author has ever caught the changeable states of a young man in love, by turns enraptured and dejected, tender and silly, with as much precision in such a copious volume of impassioned verse. In Hsi-hsiang chi Tung Chieh-yuan wrought a new kind of romance— the romance of the gifted scholar (ts’ai-tzu) and the gifted beauty (chiajen). But the label is somewhat misleading since Scholar Chang and Yingying are seen primarily as passionate lovers. They are of course paragons of beauty and talent, and they both come from distinguished families (in the poem as in the play, Scholar Chang has become the impoverished son of a late minister of rites). But in a sense their heredity and family background merely certify their capacity for the intensest kind of love experience. By the same token of logic, those who are ill-bred, gross in their features, or lacking in literary culture cannot love with poetic warmth, as is obviously the case with the rebel leader Sun Fei-hu and the hideous Cheng Heng, both of whom covet Ying-ying’s person without possessing an iota of the delicacy and tenderness befitting her lover. Once a gifted scholar meets a gifted beauty, they fall in love as a matter of course. Because of the homogeneity of their culture and because they are denied the right of free courtship, they do not need nor would they have the time for the kind of dates that provide modern lovers the opportunity to explore personality and background and to ascertain if their initial attraction for each other makes for lifelong compatibility. By modern standards Scholar Chang’s courtship of Ying-ying is extremely brief. During their second meeting (he has merely caught a glimpse of her at their first chance encounter) she already shows her strong interest by reciting a poem in response to his, and in Wang’s adaptation of the poem (part II, act 1) lines descriptive of Chang’s melancholy following the exchange of poems are subtly reassigned to Ying-ying to indicate that she, too, misses him. She has fallen in love and, given her predisposition to reciprocate, it suffices her to know that the handsome scholar is sincere and ardent and can convey his feelings through poetry and, later, the music of the lute. For both scholar and beauty, however, if their literary education prepares them for love, they have been since early childhood conditioned by

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their Confucian upbringing to respect propriety and to prepare diligently for their future roles in society. Neither Scholar Chang nor Ying-ying is a conscious rebel, but what is most endearing about them is that, driven by their hunger for love, they are able at least temporarily to disregard counsels of prudence and to risk parental and social disapproval. Once a scholar earns his chin-shih degree, he is assured of worldly success, and high officials will be only too happy to marry their daughters to him. He may marry happily, but he will have missed the agony and rapture of being held captive by love. While every Chinese scholar wants to compete in the examinations to prove his worth and earn his deserved place in society, the more romantically inclined would count it as his good fortune if he could seek love on his own and be loved for his own sake before his worth is certified by a degree. Scholar Chang may appear too sentimental by western standards, but he distinguishes himself precisely by his total submission to the dictates of love, by his shameless exhibition of all the symptoms of lovesickness (initial high spirits, loss of appetite, languor and sleeplessness, suicidal thoughts, revival of high spirits upon the least sign that his fortune has changed for the better). In a Chinese romance these symptoms alone are enough to move the young lady to pity and love. She is ready to pity and love because, among daughters of good families, few indeed are privileged to be courted clandestinely or to have a love intrigue. While the young scholar moves about a good deal to attend the examinations and can find genuine love or at least sexual solace in the arms of a courtesan, the young lady stays home, applies herself to needlework (since there is little else she is called upon to do), and watches the season go by until it is time for her to assume a more useful role as wife. It requires an act of imagination on our part, therefore, to realize the wild agitation she undergoes if someone should address a poem to her, serenade her at night, or send her a billet-doux. Ying-ying, moreover, is unusually lucky because she is lodging in a temple and is therefore more liable to attract attention. Had she lived at home, she would have had no choice but to marry the youth her parents had chosen for her. While she may live a reasonably happy life with him (since her fiancé Cheng Heng is obviously a gross caricature), she would nevertheless have been denied the tumultuous experience of being wooed and loved that she has in the temple. Upon the discovery of his clandestine affair, Scholar Chang is ordered by Ying-ying’s mother to go to the capital to take the examinations. But even without such prompting he would sooner or later bestir himself, and his

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beloved, while reluctant to be parted from him, would not think of stopping him. Theirs is not the motto, “All for love, or the world well lost”: they will want to return to the world after they have enjoyed love in its despite. Furthermore, even for the most passionate lovers, their ardor feeds upon secrecy and opposition. But in time the secret will be out, the opposition will relent in the face of a scandal, and the lovers themselves will want to rectify their relationship. The scholar has now to earn his academic honors to make up for his earlier course of romantic nonconformity and to vindicate the beauty’s honor. Since he usually has no difficulty in doing so, the erstwhile romantic lovers will settle into a happy marriage and rear talented children who, it may be hoped, will in time have romances of their own. All scholar-beauty romances end happily, though until the last possible moment their authors want to keep us worried over the possibility of the lovers’ not being able to achieve a lasting union. As a pioneer of the genre, however, Tung Chieh-yuan is not yet up to the game of suspense. He prevents Scholar Chang from marrying Ying-ying by postponing his return from Ch’ang-an and by creating a new villain, Cheng Heng, who has a legal claim to her hand. After Scholar Chang has achieved high honors as the third-highest-ranking chin-shih at the examinations, he falls unaccountably ill and Ying-ying anxiously awaits news of him. (In reading Chinese romances of this type, one has the feeling that much of the suffering would have been spared if the lovers could have made long-distance telephone calls, or at least entrusted their messages to a more efficient postal service.) She sends him the famous letter, duly copied from Yuan Chen’s tale, itemizing the sentimental meaning of all her accompanying presents. But since the loving hero, unlike his prototype in the tale, does not deserve her reproach and mistrust, the pathos occasioned by the sending and reading of the letter appears contrived. Then Cheng Heng arrives on the scene, convinces Ying-ying’s mother that Chang has married some girl in Ch’ang-an, and almost succeeds in marrying Ying-ying. Chang, who arrives too late to clear his good name, escapes with Ying-ying to the headquarters of General Tu, who intervenes on his friend’s behalf as he had done once earlier during the rioting soldiers’ siege of the temple. Out of shame, Cheng Heng hurls himself down a flight of stone steps and dies. (In the play he dies even more conveniently by knocking his head against a tree.) A brief review of the later episodes would indicate that Tung has unnecessarily complicated his tale to meet the requirements of a romance. The play suffers from the same fault to an even more serious extent.

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Wang Shih-fu’s Hsi-hsiang chi, composed some hundred years after Tung’s poem, is a series of five Northern-style plays (tsa-chü). In the early Ming period Yang Ching-hsien wrote Hsi-yu chi, a cycle of six plays about Tripitaka’s journey to the west. Aside from these two works, however, nearly all tsa-chü dating from the Yuan and Ming are self-contained units of four acts, with or without an additional brief scene known as hsieh-tzu (the wedge). In a performance the actor undertaking the principal male or female role sings throughout the four acts, though some plays require him to impersonate two parts. Other characters may sing in the wedge, usually according to prescribed tunes. All the arias in an act are in one key, and they all observe the same rhyme, a feat almost impossible to duplicate in an English translation. The playwright makes much use of dialogue and monologue; quite often even a minor character gives a lengthy account of himself when first appearing on the stage. In Hsi-hsiang chi most such monologues are quite short, and the 1656 edition of Chin Sheng-t’an, upon which the translation is mainly based, has further abridged General Tu’s long recitation in part II, act 1 (66). Wang Shih-fu would have certainly adapted Yuan Chen’s tale as a four-act play if Tung Chieh-yuan had not already greatly expanded it. Instead of condensing the poem, therefore, Wang took the bold step of developing most of its episodes even more fully. The resultant work, unprecedented in its length and unsurpassed for its wealth of lyrical poetry, towers above all other Yuan plays and is rightly considered the supreme masterpiece of Chinese drama. But it is a masterpiece manqué if the fifth play is to be regarded as an integral part of the whole. To justify Wang Shih-fu’s fair name as a playwright, tradition had early maintained that he was the author of only the first four plays and that the fifth was a continuation by Kuan Han-ch’ing. But Wang, who flourished during the reign of Emperor Ch’eng-tsung (1295–1307), belonged to a younger generation of playwrights than the pioneers Kuan Han-ch’ing and Po P’u. It is highly unlikely that an older man of greater fame would have wanted to complete the work of a younger contemporary. Besides, it amounts to slander to ascribe to Kuan, a great playwright of extreme versatility, something deemed unworthy of Wang. Scholars today are content to ascribe all five plays to Wang and to blame the inferiority of the fifth upon the intractable material he inherited from Tung. Still, there is no reason why a great playwright, as Wang has proved himself to be in the first four plays, could not have adapted or

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altered the material more successfully. If one examines the fifth play carefully, one finds at least its fourth act disturbingly different from all preceding acts on one important point of theatrical convention. Allowing for permissible departures, in the first four plays Wang has observed the rule that only one character sings throughout an act (unfortunately, this rule is no longer apparent in the present translation because the Chin Sheng-t’an edition has incorporated every wedge with its succeeding or preceding act). He seems to have deliberately violated the rule for greater dramatic effect only in part IV, act 4, where Scholar Chang and Ying-ying both sing, although the latter appears only as a presence in his dream and therefore an extension of his consciousness. In part V, act 4, however, Chang, Ying-ying, and Hung Niang all sing (in the present translation General Tu also sings and the concluding stanzas are marked for group singing). Writing in the prime of the tsa-chü tradition, it would seem that Wang Shih-fu would not have violated convention without apparent justification. If the traditional assumption that Wang did not write the fifth play is not entirely groundless, then it would seem reasonable to assume that some later hand, writing in the decadence of the tsa-chü tradition, wrote a sequel to meet popular demand for a complete cycle of plays based on Tung’s poem. The five parts of Hsi-hsiang chi comprise 20 or 21 acts (the long wedge preceding part II, act 2 [pp. 58–72 of the present translation] is in some Ming editions given the status of an independent act). In keeping with convention, Scholar Chang enjoys the singing role in part I as does Hung Niang in part III. In part II Hung Niang sings in act 2 while Ying-ying sings in the remaining acts. Scholar Chang is assigned the singing role in acts 1 and 4 of part IV, while Hung Niang and Ying-ying sing respectively in acts 2 and 3. In part V the singing roles for acts 1–3 belong respectively to Ying-ying, Chang, and Hung Niang, while in act 4, as has already been observed, all three sing. In enumerating the singing roles of the five plays, I may seem to have dwelt upon the obvious, but actually one cannot begin to appreciate Yuan drama unless one keeps in mind that a character is assigned the singing role usually to the exclusion of some other characters who could as well have had the honor and that, once chosen, he dominates the act or play and lends it its distinctive emotional tone and dramatic unity. In Po P’u’s Rain on the Wu-t’ung Tree, for instance, the love relationship between Yang Kuei-fei and Hsüan-tsung is seen through the perspective of his infatuation, dotage, impotence, and desolation because the

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emperor is assigned the singing role. The playwright, however, could with equal justification have given the role to Yang Kuei-fei, and his play would then be totally different because he would have written all the arias to accommodate the feminine point of view. In the case of Hsi-hsiang chi, while Scholar Chang would seem the obvious choice for the singing role in Part I because he is the dominant figure in the corresponding portion of Tung’s poem, for many subsequent acts the choice of a dominant part is by no means automatic. An act assigned to Hung Niang could be with equal propriety given to Chang or Ying-ying. It speaks for the dramatic genius of Wang Shih-fu that he should have assigned the entire third play and three additional acts to Hung Niang, who would logically appear to be a character of lesser importance than either of the lovers. If Yuan Chen has been the main creator of Ying-ying and if Tung Chieh-yuan has delineated Scholar Chang’s passion with a warmth and precision not surpassed in the play, then it is Wang Shih-fu’s primary distinction as the final shaper of the story that he should have chosen to give Hung Niang a role actually larger than Ying-ying’s and to compose for her some of the best scenes in the play. Hung Niang has already been quite important in Tung’s poem, but it is only in the play that she becomes fully alive. The long-lasting influence of Wang’s consummate portrayal can be seen in the fact that in nearly all versions of the play performed by regional operatic troupes all over China Hung Niang has been awarded the principal role. In Peking opera Hsi-hsiang chi has been long since retitled Hung Niang to emphasize her central importance. In traditional Chinese society (at least as it is reflected in fiction and drama) a young lady’s closest friend is usually her personal maid to whom she can confide her secrets and entrust her important messages. Her suitor, since he cannot communicate with her directly at least until he has gained her favor, must also rely on her maid for essential services. (In some romances the suitor’s page plays a similarly important role; in both versions of Hsi-hsiang chi, however, Scholar Chang’s page plays only a minor role in the later part of the story.) No romance of the Western Chamber could have prospered without Hung Niang. “An inveterate matchmaker, Hung Niang is the liveliest as well as the most unforgettable character in the play,” a recent scholar observes.3 “She is as adept in repartee and raillery as in the stratagems of love. She knows how to tell innocent lies, how to prevaricate, to tease, to persuade, to convince, to console, and to defy.” Hung Niang is certainly always on

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the go, and the lovers, when immobilized by lovesickness or despair, are goaded into action only because of her. But, speaking in terms of her essential dramatic function as distinct from her vital role in the plot, because she herself is not in love, Hung Niang appears perhaps even more important as an observer than as a doer. Ying-ying, too, observes, as in the powerful dinner scene (part II, act 3) where she pours forth in a long monologue her scorn for her perfidious mother and her pity for her dejected lover. But in most of her other scenes she primarily calls attention to her own melancholy and desolation as befits a heroine anchored in the sentimental tradition of tz’u and ch’ü poetry. Hung Niang, however, far more often diversifies the lyrical mood by providing an angle of observation from which to comment on the other characters in an amused, sympathetic, or indignant fashion. It is she who exposes the comic absurdity of Scholar Chang as an ineffectual and conceited lover, the unsuspected slyness of Ying-ying, the hypocrisy and stupidity of her mother, and the ridiculous pretensions of Cheng Heng. In doing so, she adds immensely to the drama of the play. When, for instance, we read in Tung’s poem that Scholar Chang takes great pains to prepare his toilet in readiness for the dinner in his honor, we are merely amused. Wang Shih-fu has borrowed this detail from Tung in part II, act 2, but, by assigning the singing role to Hung Niang in that act, he defines Chang’s eagerness with comic finality. When she comes to his room to invite him to dinner, Chang asks: I have not carried a mirror with me on my travels. Could you kindly look me over and see if I am presentable?

Hung Niang comments: I see that he is only too ready to obey the summons to the feast,4 But that, as he struts to and fro, he looks admiringly at his own shadow. The crazy Graduate, the poor mad scholar, Has taken such pains to polish his head, That flies might slither on it, And its brilliance might dazzle one’s eyes. He looks such a poor, miserable wretch that he sets one’s teeth on edge.

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(“A poor, miserable wretch” is Mr. Hsiung’s translation for the phrase suan liu-liu. Literally it means “something extremely sour to the taste”; hence it can be applied to a person who offends good taste by being too priggishly correct in word or behavior or by being too eager and officious in his attempt to please or impress others.) The reader of the present translation will not find Scholar Chang’s question that prompts Hung Niang’s amused observation. This is because Chin Sheng-t’an has deleted much comic dialogue from his version as beneath the dignity of the play. Though Mr. Hsiung has restored a few passages of verse deleted from that edition, his decision to adhere to its prose text is somewhat unfortunate since scholars today would have preferred the earlier Ming editions of Wang’s play. When Mr. Hsiung’s translation appeared in 1935, however, the prestige of the Chin version, which had prevailed over all other editions during the Ch’ing period, was still very high, and he could not have anticipated the recent change in taste. Though harshly attacked in Communist China for a multitude of sins, Chin Sheng-t’an was of course a critic of some originality, and most Chinese still prefer his truncated, 71-chapter edition of the novel Shui-hu chuan (All Men Are Brothers, or The Water Margin) to the complete 120chapter edition. In his copious commentary on Hsi-hsiang chi, which is in equal portions fatuous and brilliant, he vigorously defends the honor and chastity of Ying-ying, but to maintain his thesis he had to delete much dialogue and several lyrical passages that appeared to him in questionable taste. Thus in the most erotic scene (part IV, act 1) the stanza in which Scholar Chang praises the handkerchief stained with Ying-ying’s hymenal blood (fortunately restored by Mr. Hsiung on page 174) has been cut. Chin has also transposed and edited many verse passages and has added dialogue and stage directions of his own devising (all these changes inevitably accompanied by his own ecstatic comments). The slight tampering with several of Hung Niang’s stanzas appears to me especially regrettable. To illustrate Chin Sheng-t’an’s bowdlerization of the play, we may examine a small passage in part III, act 4. According to the Ming editions, after being rebuffed in the garden by Ying-ying, the lovesick hero soliloquizes as follows: My damned (t’ui) symptoms cannot be treated by any doctor. If only I could swallow a drop of the young lady’s sweet, nice-

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smelling, cool and dainty saliva, would my damned (tiao) sickness be cured.

T’ui and tiao, both low terms meaning “penis,” are common expletives in Yuan drama. Chin deletes t’ui and rewrites the second sentence. In Mr. Hsiung’s translation we read accordingly: But as my dangerous malady is not one that any skilled doctor can deal with, it is only some good prescription of the Young Lady that can cure it.

As is the case with Shakespearean comedy, the low and erotic language of Hsi-hsiang chi in no way diminishes its romantic idealism. On the contrary, in craving a drop of Ying-ying’s saliva, whose restorative properties are defined by a quartet of three-character phrases highly charged with sensuality (only lamely suggested in my translation), Scholar Chang bares his sexual hunger and appears the more sympathetic and passionate as a lover. By not specifying the medicine he wants, as by toning down his language, the speaker of the revised passage appears much less impatient with his desperate condition. Mr. Hsiung is certainly correct in saying that his version is “a faithful one” in that he gets the essential meaning of every verse or prose passage across to the reader in clear and readable English. But his uniform language actually does less than adequate justice to the poetic style of the original, which is at once elegant and colloquial. Not only is Hsi-hsiang chi an adaptation of Tung’s poem but Wang Shih-fu, like all Yuan playwrights, makes a habit of lifting lines and phrases from earlier poets, especially the tz’u poets. At the same time, however, his arias are unlike tz’u poems in their greater hospitality to colloquial expressions. While many of these, the so-called ch’en-tzu, are added to the prescribed number of syllables in a given aria and serve little poetic function beyond imparting a colloquial lilt, many are an integral part of the aria, and they blend with the more literary phrases to produce lyrical and dramatic effects not realizable in the tz’u. To a seasoned reader of Hsi-hsiang chi, therefore, it is a steady source of pleasure to spot, on one hand, the borrowed phrases and lines in juxtaposition to those of equal lyrical beauty composed by the playwright and, on the other, the more colloquial verses in a passage of traditional lyrical

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style. Since his translation is designed for the common reader, we do not expect Mr. Hsiung to identify for us those lines and passages adapted from Tung and other earlier poets; nevertheless, by judiciously modifying his style, it would have been possible for him to suggest where the original verse has produced a decidedly colloquial effect. This, however, Mr. Hsiung has failed to do. Thus, in part II, act 3, vexed with her mother because she is going to give Scholar Chang only a modest meal, Ying-ying remarks to Hung Niang, according to Mr. Hsiung: Being afraid that I shall cause loss to the family on account of my dowry, She is showing our gratitude and celebrating my marriage by one feast instead of two!

I am afraid that Mr. Hsiung has not quite achieved the bitter irony of the original not only because his rendition of the second line is debatable (a rare instance where I would disagree with him) but principally because his genteel style cannot capture the vulgar tone the heroine has deliberately adopted here in referring to her forthcoming marriage as a commercial transaction financially damaging to her mother. In the first line she actually says, “She is afraid that I’ll be a p’ei-ch’ien-huo (a thing or article of merchandise that will cost her plenty to sell or get rid of ).” The use of this colloquial expression implies Ying-ying’s utter contempt for her mother, who is after all a moneyed dowager. The arias in Hsi-hsiang chi contain a good many allusions. It is to the credit of Mr. Hsiung that he is able to provide a highly readable version without resorting to a single footnote. But in the absence of notes he is often compelled to burden his lines with explanatory matter that dilutes the poetry of the original. Thus in a pair of eight-character lines (part II, act 3) Ying-ying uses two allusions to indicate the distance from her lover newly imposed by her mother. In Mr. Hsiung’s hands these lines swell into 51 words: I am suddenly separated from my lover, who may be compared with him who was overwhelmed in the white waves while keeping his tryst at the Blue Bridge, Or with him who, missing his beloved, in fury set fire to the Temple of the Fire God, which was consumed in flames. . . .

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The use of footnotes in such cases would have considerably tautened the lines. At times, Mr. Hsiung shows an apparent distrust of the reader’s ability to grasp a metaphor by overexpanding. In part I, act 2, for instance, Scholar Chang summarizes Ying-ying’s desirability in a memorable fourcharacter phrase, Juan-yü wen-hsiang (Soft jade, warm fragrance), which becomes in the present version She is as beautiful as jade, but softer to the touch, and as fragrant as flowers, but not so cold.

At other times, Mr. Hsiung translates circumspectly, perhaps to avoid embarrassing the reader, as in part III, act 3, where Hung Niang sympathizes with Scholar Chang’s lovelorn condition: I take pity on you, because when you lie down to sleep under your coverlet you have no one except yourself to comfort you.

In the original the second line, “Your fingers get tired from overwork,” refers to masturbation far more explicitly. I have specified a few types of infelicitous rendering primarily to give the reader an idea of what he will be missing when reading Hsi-hsiang chi in the present translation. While I regret that Mr. Hsiung has chosen to use the Chin Sheng-t’an edition as the basic text for his translation, he has, however, done a conscientious job of reproducing in English the paraphrasable meaning of his adopted text in, as he says, a “line for line and sometimes word for word” fashion. Translators of Chinese verse have despaired of capturing the spirit and sense of even a four-line poem. How much more difficult, then, to translate a series of five plays containing stanza after stanza of dramatic verse that retains the elusive weightiness of Chinese lyric poetry! Mr. Hsiung’s The Romance of the Western Chamber has stood well for over thirty years. While we may hope someday to have a translation that renders the text of Wang Shih-fu in a more poetic fashion, its reprinting should serve to introduce the ever-increasing number of western readers of Chinese literature to this masterpiece of drama.

Time and the Human Condition in the Plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu (1970)

I Before the launching of the “Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” T’ang Hsien-tsu (1550–1616) had received attention as a thinker in his own right among Chinese Communist scholars actively concerned with late Ming thought.1 The greatest playwright of the Ming period, T’ang was of course a leading figure in the literary and intellectual world of his time. Among his older contemporaries Li Chih and Hsü Wei were his friends, and among his younger, the Yüan brothers. He was affiliated with the Tung-lin clique, and his submission of an outspoken memorial to the throne on one occasion speaks for his political bond with that group.2 Especially as a student of Lo Ju-fang, T’ang claims a place in the history of the T’ai-chou school, and his teacher Yen Chün, far more than its founder Wang Ken, stamped that school with its radical character.3 T’ang Hsien-tsu studied under Lo at the age of thirteen. While he must have been more a student of classics preparing for the examinations than a philosophic seeker, there is no doubt that T’ang was exposed to Lo’s thought through daily contact so that in retrospect he refers to his period of study under Lo as one in which his latent spiritual capacity (t’ien-chi) was kept in a state of blaze.4 In examining the sayings of Lo Ju-fang compiled by Huang Tsung-hsi, we find that his distinctive contribution to Ming thought lies in his application of the term sheng-sheng

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(perpetual renewal of life), taken from the Book of Changes, to a system of ethics and metaphysics largely built upon an interpretation of key terms found in The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean.5 Lo sees as the animating principle of the universe the phenomenon of life itself, or the endless process of birth and growth. This ceaseless vitality he regards as something intrisically good, and he would equate the term sheng (life, vitality) with the term jen (humanity, love). To him, the very endowment of life extends to man the supreme ethical attribute jen. He reasons thus: “The birth of a person is due to the latent vitality (sheng-chi) implicit in the process of creation. Therefore, when a person is born, he partakes in the joy of spontaneous creativity so that we may say the term jen (humanity) and jen (man) are identical.”6 He suggests that “those who are expert in discussing hsin (mind) would do better to replace the term with the term sheng.”7 As I shall later demonstrate, this vitalistic strain of his teacher’s thought is quite evident in T’ang Hsien-tsu’s first three plays, Tzu-hsiao chi (The purple-jade flute), Tzu-ch’ai chi (The purple-jade hairpins), and especially Mu-tan t’ing (The peony pavilion). Scattered through his extant letters, numbering about 450, and his voluminous writings in classical prose and verse8 are numerous instances where T’ang seems to have held the term sheng in especial regard. During his period of exile at Hsü-wen, Kwangtung, as a minor official (1591–1592), he established an academy called Kuei-sheng shu-yüan and wrote an essay explaining the term kueisheng (reverence for life). “Therefore the education of a great man starts with ‘knowing life,’ ” he writes. “Knowing what life is, he knows how to respect himself. Then he will also know how to hold in reverence all forms of life in this universe.”9 Since in both traditional and modern estimation T’ang is especially praised for his affirmation of ch’ing (love, feelings), we may further say that he attaches supreme importance to ch’ing precisely because ch’ing appears to him the distinguishing feature of human existence. In the teaching of Yen Chün, ch’ing already appears as a term of key importance. Huang Tsung-hsi reports Yen Chün as saying, “Of my many disciples I would discourse on hsing (nature) with Lo Ju-fang and on hsin (mind) with Ch’en I-ch’üan; as for the rest, I would discourse on ch’ing.”10 It is unlikely that Lo Ju-fang could have been uninformed of his teacher’s doctrine of ch’ing since he expounded it before so many of his disciples. After the age of fifty T’ang Hsien-tsu seems to have been more inclined to the traditional wisdom of Buddhism and Taoism. To most crit-

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ics, his last two plays, Nan-k’o chi (The Nan-k’o dream) and Han-tan chi (The Han-tan dream), represent an aberration from his earlier thought because of their otherworldly attitude toward life. The friend whom T’ang held in the greatest esteem during the middle period of his life was the Ch’an priest Ta-kuan, also styled Tzu-po. T’ang first met him at the age of fortyone (1590) and Ta-kuan died of government persecution in prison in 1603 when T’ang was fifty-four.11 Ta-kuan was a monk of intellectual stature who commanded almost as much attention among the literati of his time as Li Chih.12 But his influence on T’ang Hsien-tsu is difficult to estimate. While his active involvement in politics bespeaks his radical temper, in the speculative realm he appears an orthodox Ch’an thinker influenced by the major ideas of Neo-Confucianism. In a letter to T’ang, for example, he defends the greater human relevance of the concept hsing (nature) over against his friend’s advocacy of ch’ing.13 To many scholars, Ta-kuan would seem to have been an influence that accounts for T’ang’s ultimate retreat to Buddhism.14 Hou Wai-lu, however, gives greater stress to Ta-kuan’s positive influence on T’ang in his role as a political activist. He sees the political satire in Han-tan chi as evidence of T’ang Hsien-tsu’s active concern with Ming politics despite his ostensible espousal of Taoism. Further, he regards the author as a utopianist who projects his vision of a happier and more equitable society in the ostensibly Buddhist dream allegory of Nan-k’o chi.15 However, even in Communist China, scholars more competent in Ming drama have questioned Hou’s fanciful reappraisal of the playwright as a protosocialist of the utopian variety.16

II In the preceding section I have written as if I were complying with the request of a hypothetical scholar who wanted to include a brief section on T’ang Hsien-tsu in his systematic survey of Ming thought. I have therefore supplied the kind of information that would seem germane to his purpose. But T’ang Hsien-tsu, of course, is primarily a playwright: to extract his “thought” from his plays and other writings, to trace its probable derivation, and to relate it solely to the philosophical and political currents of his time is actually to do injustice to the meaning of each individual play and the total pattern of meaning that is revealed when his five plays are studied in organic relation to one another. Whereas the speculative schol-

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ars whose sayings are recorded in Ming-ju hsüeh-an are primarily concerned with concepts and study the problems of ethics and metaphysics at a high level of abstraction, the playwright as thinker, of necessity, dramatizes the philosophic issues either in the tension of actual human conflict or in the fantasy of a dream allegory. In reading the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu, therefore, we are far less concerned with the fixable meaning of individual ideas than with the dramatic interplay of such ideas. We all feel the profundity of Shakespeare’s thought, but we would be hard put to formulate that thought except in terms that would reduce it to a philosophical commonplace. Though T’ang Hsien-tsu is hardly to be ranked with Shakespeare (as many Chinese scholars would like us to believe),17 his plays, too, give us not so much a paraphrasable statement about life as an impassioned presentation of life with all the illogic of human existence itself. We must attend to every detail of dramatic structure, every nuance of poetic language, to do proper justice to the meaning of the plays. As stated in the title of my paper, I propose to examine the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu as a study of the human condition under the curse of time. I am not aware of any major Ming thinker specifically concerned with the problem of time and eternity, but, of course, T’ang is far more importantly a product of the Chinese literary tradition with its characteristic preoccupation with the transience of human life. Indeed, the literary tradition counts so enormously toward an understanding of the playwright that every salient feature of his “thought” mentioned in the preceding section could as well be explained with reference to that tradition alone. Even if T’ang were not philosophically concerned with such concepts as sheng and ch’ing, he would still have affirmed life and love in conformity with the ch’uan-ch’i tradition of Ming drama with its partiality for the welfare of young lovers. Likewise, even if T’ang were personally indifferent to Taoism and Buddhism, Taoist and Buddhist ideas would have crept into his plays as a matter of course, in view of their wide currency in the popular literature of the Yuan–Ming period. Again, even if T’ang were not actively concerned with government affairs, political satire of some inoffensive kind would have been present in his plays because such satire had always been an ingredient in Chinese drama. I have chosen to stress the theme of time in T’ang Hsien-tsu not only because of its importance in every one of his plays but also because it provides a unifying idea to our understanding of his work as a whole. Though scholars are not agreed as to when T’ang started writing each of his first

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three plays,18 they generally subscribe to the view that these plays are mainly concerned with love while his last two plays, composed during his early fifties, are “dream” plays that repudiate love and other worldly values in favor of a religious interpretation of life. Because of the modern partiality for worldly values, it has been the fashion to deplore the author’s religious stance in the last two plays, however much they may be admired on other grounds. Various explanations have been given for T’ang’s change of outlook: his retirement from official life and consequent adoption of a mode of thought more appropriate to a recluse, the influence of Ta-kuan, his grief over the loss of some of his children (especially his eldest son at the age of twenty-three in 1600),19 and general disillusionment with his times. Whatever the offered explanation, it is commonly believed that there is a definite ideological break between the first three and the last two plays. The oeuvre is therefore disappointing in view of its lack of philosophic continuity. A careful reading of the plays, however, will show that the case is overdrawn. Not only is the religious note already heard in the first play, Tzu-hsiao chi, but in the last two plays, especially in Nan-k’o chi, the married lovers are by and large described with as much tender affection as in the earlier plays, even though in the last scenes of each play love is repudiated. What seems to me certain is that T’ang Hsien-tsu had never suffered a drastic change of attitude that induced him in his later age to look upon love or any other human attachment traditionally sanctioned as something disgusting or repulsive. Such attachments remain endearing as long as the tyranny of time over humanity is not raised as an issue. In the last two plays sensuality unaccompanied by love is satirized, but this is nothing exceptional since sensuality has always been scorned in the traditional moral scheme. What seems to me to be the case is that in his last two plays T’ang prefers to see the human condition in the aspect of eternity, and it is only in this perspective that love and all other human values are found wanting. T’ang is not a mystic who can perceive eternity in the dimension of time. To him, eternity appears as an infinity of time that crushes his human consciousness. In his first two plays he is only slightly bothered by this problem so that he can submit himself to the stream of time and celebrate the kind of love that seems to obliterate time in the ecstasy of its enjoyment. Time itself is not yet the villain; the kind of villainy depicted in Tzu-ch’ai chi stems from human malice and spite, which is rectifiable in time by recourse to heroic action (hsia).20 Before the author

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submits to the defeat of humanity by time in his last two plays, however, he makes a gallant attempt to defy time in Mu-tan t’ing. Through the death and resurrection of the heroine, T’ang Hsien-tsu asserts the triumph of love over time, but in the comic framework of the play the heroine is eventually reduced to a creature of time seduced by its rewards.

III In Tzu-hsiao chi T’ang Hsien-tsu already appears as a master player of the many variations on the time theme to be seen in traditional Chinese poetry: youth versus age, mortal man seen against nature with its cyclical renewal, the intolerableness of time when one’s beloved is absent, the temporary obliteration of time when lovers or friends meet after a period of separation. Also present are the various goals sought by the Chinese poet to mitigate or cancel out the evil of time: Confucian fame, Taoist immortality, and Buddhist enlightenment. Most early Chinese poets, of course, simply drown time in a cup of wine; in place of this hedonism, T’ang Hsien-tsu characteristically offers the intenser joy of romantic love. Tzu-hsiao chi is loosely based on the famous T’ang tale by Chiang Fang, entitled “Huo Hsiao-yü” (Huo Hsiao-yü chuan), which tells of the betrayal of the title heroine by her lover, the poet Li I, and her death. In the play T’ang Hsien-tsu turns Li I into an admirable and ardent lover, partly in conformity with the romantic convention of the ch’uan-ch’i play, which dictates the portrayal of the hero in a favorable light, and partly out of his overwhelming sympathy for the heroine. For various reasons, however, T’ang did not complete the play,21 and he eventually chose to readapt the tale under the title of Tzu-ch’ai chi. Tzu-hsiao chi, which was written in the ornate p’ien-ch’i style then going out of fashion, was excluded from the canon of the “Four Dream Plays of Lin-ch’uan” (T’ang was a native of Lin-ch’uan, Kiangsi), and largely for this reason it has always been dismissed as an immature work.22 Actually, it is the most undeservedly neglected of T’ang’s plays. By the standards of Ming drama, which require an abundance of vicissitudes in the chronicling of the fortunes of young lovers, the play is of course incomplete and short on action. But by modern standards its paucity of action is amply compensated for by its rich imagery, its neat structure, and its passionate orchestration of the theme

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of love. Far more than the celebrated Mu-tan t’ing, it is a sustained paean of youthful passion. T’ang’s dramatic skill is especially in evidence in his exploration of the time theme implicit in the tale: the sharp contrast between the young beauty Hsiao-yü with all the promise of life ahead of her and the aging courtesans and entertainers living as dependents in the households of the great. The latter had enjoyed brief fame before they were bought as concubines by the aristocrats and officials of the capital. But with their beauty fading, any day they may be dismissed from service; they will become lonely and some of them will turn to religion for consolation. Already in T’ang’s first play, renunciation is entertained as a serious possibility, and even Hsiao-yü herself is once praised for her potential vocation as a Taoist nun.23 She is the illegitimate daughter of the Prince of Huo. In the tale her mother, named Cheng Liu-niang in the play, is turned out of the house after the prince’s death. She rears her daughter in a state of semirespectability, though actually training her for the profession of a singercourtesan. In the play the prince is still alive, but all of a sudden (scene 7), he follows his whim to seek Taoist immortality and dismisses his two concubines, Cheng Liu-niang and Tu Ch’iu-niang. They have served him for twenty years, and now they have to shift for themselves and to emulate his example if they feel the call for a Taoist career. Ch’iu-niang soon becomes a Taoist nun, living with a younger companion named Shan-ts’ai. The names of both characters are taken from Po Chü-i’s “The Lute Song” (P’i-p’a hsing), though in the poem shan-ts’ai actually signifies a teacher of p’i-p’a music.24 Just as “Huo Hsiao-yü” is the most tragic of T’ang tales depicting the fate of a young courtesan, “The Lute Song” is the most pathetic of T’ang poems about an entertainer who has outlived her days of glory in Ch’ang-an. T’ang Hsien-tsu re-creates the mood of “The Lute Song” to reinforce his sympathy for the aging beauties in his play. Even earlier in the play (scene 4), General Hua Ch’ing, who has been feeling the stirrings of ambition to achieve great deeds on the frontier, admires a steed owned by the scion of Kuo Tzu-i and has no compunction in exchanging for that horse his concubine Pao Ssu-niang (Pao Shih-niang in the tale), a professional singer who has served him for years. In the tale Pao is a “crafty, smooth-tongued” matchmaker, a type usually treated with contempt in Chinese fiction. But in the play, while she still plays the role of a go-between to bring together Li I and Hsiao-yü, she is a great friend of the discarded concubines of the Prince of Huo and shares their fate.

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The dramatic bearing of the fate of these aging beauties upon Hsiaoyü is unmistakable. Though she is addressed as a chün-chu (princess), she is being prepared for the vocation of a high-class courtesan. In the tale, upon being introduced to her, Li I cohabits with her the same evening; in the play the intervention of a wedding ceremony still leaves no doubt about her dubious status as a long-term mistress rather than as a proper wife. When Li I first seeks Pao Ssu-niang’s help as a go-between, she recommends Hsiao-yü and cautions him against dissipation: “Shih-lang, why injure your precious-as-gold body among the courtesans? It’s better to contract yourself to a famous beauty and let her entertain you as your companion (hsiang-p’ei tso-k’e).”25 In the tale Hsiao-yü begs Li I to stay with her for eight years—at the end of the term he will be only thirty and still eligible to marry a girl from a respectable and wealthy family. In the play she begs him for ten years of his companionship.26 Hsiao-yü is an intense romantic who believes that living happily for eight or ten years with the man of her choice is worth a lifetime, but at the same time she is a realist who knows the futility of expecting a famous poet with a promising official career to be hers for life. Hsiao-yü’s fate, therefore, depends entirely upon her lover. If he proves perfidious, she is ruined and will die. But since T’ang has changed his character, he proves in every way worthy of her trust and passion (except in scene 3, where he appears as the friend who advises Hua Ch’ing to exchange his concubine). Soon after their marriage, when Hsiao-yü confides to him her ten-year plan during a stroll in the garden, he protests eternal love for her in some of the loveliest stanzas in the play. For the young couple passionately in love, time creates no problem unless they are apart. Sure enough, soon after Li I has earned the chuang-yuan degree, he is appointed a secretary to the old general Tu Huang-shang at the frontier. Luckily, while he displays ability, he sees no action. But for both the poet and his wife the period of separation is unbearable. In scene 32 he pours forth his longing for her in a lyrical recapitulation of their delirious courtship, their mutual avowal of undying love in the garden, and their touching farewell scene. Peace is soon concluded on the frontier, however, and in the final scene (scene 34) the hero returns home on the seventh day of the seventh month—the one day in the year when the Herd Boy and the Weaver Girl can meet in Heaven. The young lovers in Tzu-hsiao chi overcome the tyranny of time over a three-year period through an act of reunion—and for the moment and

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possibly for years to come, time cannot bother them. But for the older people the situation is quite different. The women have time on their hands because love is denied them and they can only obtain some vicarious satisfaction in the good fortune of their beloved Hsiao-yü. The men, however, seek other ideals because for them a loving relationship can no longer ward off their sense of mortality: they would sooner choose Confucian fame or Taoist longevity. In this connection, the sudden decision of Tu Huang-shang to turn Buddhist upon returning from the frontier is of especial interest. An early follower of Kuo Tzu-i, he has had a long, illustrious career serving as minister and general under three emperors. Now, at sixty, he is being recalled to court. Ssu-k’ung, a saintly monk over a hundred years old, who has been the general’s friend in years past, awaits his arrival at his temple for a visit. Though the general has earlier shown few signs of otherworldliness, he is immediately awakened to the necessity of a spiritual life upon hearing Ssu-k’ung’s song about the ten decades of a man’s life: When a boy of ten, with cheeks as fresh as the hibiscus, You play all day and return home only near dusk. At twenty, you ride in a shining coach, drawn by spirited horses, And heartily talk of poetry and rhetoric. At thirty, strong enough to lift a tripod, you feel You can fly, sustained by the wind of ambition, determined To achieve fame and rank in government service. At forty, you straddle over provinces and commanderies, And with pendants jangling from your hat, you go in and out of the emperor’s courts. Full of pomp and circumstance at fifty, you are entertained By dancing and singing girls in exquisite silk and gold. At sixty you make arrangements to provide for your family. At seventy all joy is gone and you hate To look at your own visage in the mirror. At eighty, your intelligence is gone, and you can no longer Recall what you said or did in the past, in your state of retirement. Your days are declining at ninety. With body and mind out of whack, You are confused in speech and fearful at heart. Your tears course down as you remember the past

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And you don’t even know your sons and grandsons when they come to pay their respects. When you reach a hundred, life is totally sans taste; Your eyes are now blurred mirrors And your drooling mouth gapes for breath.27

The song bears a striking resemblance to Jaques’s famous speech in As You Like It except that it accords man a much longer span of life. To Jaques, man ends his “strange, eventful history” in his seventh decade as he creeps toward “second childishness and mere oblivion,” but nevertheless Jaques does not regret the various roles man has assumed before he reaches that state. For him, it is perhaps a good thing to shun the delusive glory of the court and the battlefield (for he is something of a philosopher), but each stage of a man’s life offers Jaques equal wry amusement as his cunning eye selects for emphasis the most comic and absurd detail. In the Chinese monk’s song, which is designed for a listener who has achieved unusual success, man’s early enjoyments and glories are pointedly contrasted with his dotage when life appears utterly tasteless and meaningless. General Tu reacts to the song in an expected manner, saying, “When a man’s life reaches this last stage, what’s the use of talking about Heaven and Tao? Even sages and worthies are not spared, and how could I hope to preserve my life? When I think of my past life, it is only the dream of an ephemeron.”28 He therefore seeks repentance and embraces Buddhism to await rebirth in the Western Paradise. This scene of General Tu’s conversion (scene 31) appears as a miniature play upon which Nan-k’o chi and Han-tan chi are eventually modeled. Though Ssu-k’ung has earlier spoken of the filthiness and decay of the body in conventional Buddhist terms, his song has not deliberately depicted man’s life in repulsive colors. It has only realistically called attention to the debilities of age, in contrast to which the earlier pleasures of man appear rather vain and delusive. General Tu, however, is immediately persuaded of the Buddhist logic of forsaking the world. At sixty there is enough vigor left in him to escape the humiliating circumstances of sheer senility; he has had a rich and rewarding life, and by electing Buddhism, he appears a sensible man who chooses wisdom before his intellect and senses have completely withered. But his awakening suggests no genuine spiritual enlightenment.

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In General Tu’s response to the song we hear a familiar strain in Chinese poetry. In fact, his comment, “Even sages and worthies are not spared” (Sheng-hsien pu-neng tu), is adapted from one of the “Nineteen Old Poems.” The relevant passage goes: Man’s life is like a sojourning, His longevity lacks the firmness of stone and metal. Forever it has been that mourners in their turn were mourned, Saint and Sage—all alike are trapped.29

(The last line is Arthur Waley’s rendition of Sheng-hsien mo-neng tu.) Like the early Chinese poets, General Tu appears primarily apprehensive of old age and afraid of death, and he chooses a conventional solution with its promise of a paradise. But among Chinese poets whose hedonism and melancholy betray their fear of death, there are major exceptions who have spoken eloquently of man’s existential dignity or who have truly apprehended the mystic light. T’ao Ch’ien’s poem, “Substance, Shadow, and Spirit” (Hsing ying shen), seems to have been deliberately written as an answer to the kind of questions raised in “Nineteen Old Poems.” Whereas Substance speaks for wine and sensual pleasure to make time pass by agreeably and Shadow speaks for fame and achievement as a Confucian answer to oblivion, the Spirit advises both to accept death calmly: You had better go where Fate leads— Drift on the Stream of Infinite Flux, Without joy, without fear; When you must go—then go, And make as little fuss as you can.30

If hedonism and Confucian endeavor are designed to lull one’s fear of death and oblivion, then the stoicism of T’ao implies a release from such fear in that every moment can be enjoyed for its sake without one’s worrying whether one is enjoying oneself or doing something worthwhile in the perspective of human history. One is ready to meet death at any moment because every moment represents a point in a continuum of calm enjoyment unperturbed by a sense of life’s transience. I would further suppose that, in electing to live by this existentialism, one does not have to

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exclude the heights of joy or achievement. If the indwelling spirit prompts a person to fall in love or to engage in an act of creativity, then he should be all the more grateful for its temporary invigoration of his bodily frame. General Tu’s sudden conversion also indicates that for T’ang Hsien-tsu it is the spectacle of mortality alone that impels one to seek a form of permanence that supposedly arrests time. The playwright, being no mystic, cannot see the simultaneous coexistence of timelessness and time. In his “First Fu on the Red Cliff ” (Ch’ien Ch’ih-pi fu), another great poet, Su Shih, transcends the Chinese concern with mutability to indicate his awareness of a higher form of reality coexisting with time: “For if you look at the aspect which changes, heaven and earth cannot last for one blink; but if you look at the aspect which is changeless, the worlds within and outside you are both inexhaustible, and what reasons have you to envy anything?”31 This is a piece of wisdom with which neither philosophical Taoism nor Ch’an Buddhism can disagree. And yet, despite his friendship with Ta-kuan, which would indicate an intellectual sympathy with Ch’an wisdom, and despite his passionate commitment to romantic love as an intense form of existence to be enjoyed in disregard of time, T’ang Hsientsu is nevertheless a time-obsessed poet who seeks religion as an alternative to life because he is neither sufficiently appreciative of man’s existential dignity nor sufficiently aware of the timeless aspect of things in all their apparent mortality.

IV After affirming love in two other plays (Tzu-ch’ai chi and Mu-tan t’ing, to which we shall return later), T’ang Hsien-tsu wrote Nan-k’o chi and Hantan chi as further elaborations on the theme of the dream of life from which General Tu has earlier awakened. Each play is based on a famous T’ang tale: Nan-k’o chi on Li Kung-tso’s “The Governor of Nan-k’o” (Nan-k’o t’ai-shou chuan) and Han-tan chi on Shen Chi-tsi’s “Life Inside a Pillow” (Chen-chung chi). T’ang must have been aware of the unpromising dramatic character of these sources, but he chose them nevertheless as vehicles for his new conviction about life. “The Governor of Nan-k’o” tells of Ch’un-yü Fen, a onetime military officer now addicted to drinking, and his changed fortune in a dream. Transplanted to an ant kingdom, he marries its princess Yao-fang and is

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put in charge of the province of Nan-k’o. He is a good governor and repels the invasion of a neighboring ant kingdom. After the death of his wife, however, he suffers calumny at court and is advised to return to the human world. Upon awaking, Ch’un-yü identifies the location of the ant kingdoms underneath the acacia tree in his courtyard and finds the predictions and happenings in the dream confirmed. Having realized that “man’s life is but a fleeting moment,”32 he turns into a Taoist recluse, forsaking the pleasures of wine and sex. Three years later he dies in his home at the age of forty-seven. T’ang Hsien-tsu changes the story by enlarging the role of the Ch’an priest, Ch’i-hsüan, who is only briefly mentioned in the tale, and by translating the awakened hero into a Buddha rather than a mere recluse. Ch’i-hsüan, possibly a glorified portrait of Ta-kuan, is the puppet master in the play who manipulates the lives of the ants as well as that of the hero. In his previous incarnation he was a follower of Bodhidharma who had accidentally spilled hot oil over an ant colony, and his rebirth, in a way, is for the purpose of redeeming these ants.33 The opening and concluding scenes involving the hero’s confrontation with the monk are of decided philosophic interest, though the bulk of the play, which faithfully recounts the hero’s dream career as given in the tale, is rather drab. It is the worst of T’ang’s five plays. In Tzu-hsiao chi General Tu’s awakening from life involves no emotional crisis because he is not called upon to tear himself away from anyone particularly dear to him. At sixty he is already indifferent to love and his election of a life of Buddhist devotion is comparatively easy. In Nank’o chi Ch’un-yü Fen is primarily depicted as a person committed to love (ch’ing): he inquires after the welfare of his deceased father, he loves his wife and children dearly, and as a lonely widower toward the end of his stay in the ant kingdom, he even has a brief fling with three sex-hungry ladies at court. Since in his three earlier plays T’ang Hsien-tsu has affirmed the supreme value of love in the temporal dimension, Nan-k’o chi represents his first serious attempt to place the value of love in the scheme of human transience. The three key scenes—scene 8: “Attachment to Love” (Ch’ing-chu); scene 43: “Transference of Love” (Chuan-ch’ing); scene 44: “Exhaustion of Love” (Ch’ing-chin)—are all significantly titled to indicate the schematic design of the play. Though in the very first scenes Ch’un-yü is depicted as a drunkard disillusioned with life (he knows every prostitute in Yang-chou and out of sheer boredom seeks

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amusement at the Avalambana Festival at a Buddhist temple), the author is so conditioned by the romantic conventions of Ming drama that once he meets two of the ant ladies offering on behalf of their princess a small box made of rhinoceros horn and a pair of gold hairpins before the statue of Kuan-yin at the temple,34 he appears considerably younger, handsome and well-behaved, a fit mate for a princess. During his stay at the ant kingdom, therefore, he appears no different from any other sentimental hero in a Ming play—a man of feeling firmly attached to Confucian and romantic values without a trace of his earlier disillusionment. Upon awaking, he examines the site of the ant kingdoms with two of his friends and is overcome with grief when he spots the burial ground of his wife: ch’un-yü (scans the site and cries): There you see the mound over a foot long and underneath it my wife lies. Alas, my princess!35

Overwhelmed by love and nostalgia, Ch’un-yü again goes to see Ch’i-hsüan and avows his wish to have his late father and wife and all the inhabitants of the ant kingdom ascend to Heaven. It is, of course, partly because of his compassion that he is eventually granted Buddhahood. But for Ch’i-hsüan, the ultimate test of his Buddhahood is the eradication of all feelings of love for sentient beings. He stages therefore a mass ascension to Heaven as a harrowing trial for the hero in preparation for his enlightenment. When Ch’un-yü sees his three ant mistresses ascend to Heaven, he is still amorous: ch’un-yü: You three celestials, please descend. I have something to tell you. lady a: Our bodies are now celestial. How could we descend? lady b: Even if we descend, to us your human body stinks, and it won’t do you any good. Most pitiful the human body, Most pitiful the human body, In Heaven we will have a new kind of fulfillment. How could you, crazy man, still cling to us?36

Then it is the princess’s turn to ascend. The hero, after apologizing for his infidelity, protests undying love:

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ch’un-yü: Day and night I am drunk with love, My longing for you never diminishes. Ah, Princess, is my fear justified That in Heaven you will seek a new mate? While in Heaven, could you once again take me as your consort? Once you are back in Heaven, when will we see each other again? Please vouchsafe a detailed answer to my three questions. (Cries.) If you cannot answer me, Then what’s so good about Heaven? Better descend to earth where we loved.37

Out of pity the princess descends. yao-fang: Ah, how come I have been lowered back to earth? ch’un-yü: Ah, my wife. yao-fang: The air of Heaven is different from the air of the earth. Please don’t stay too close, my brother. ch’un-yü: Why did you call me brother? yao-fang: Once you were at the temple and you called me sister. ch’un-yü: I did call you so. yao-fang: Once you said you wanted a token. On the seat of the Kuan-yin statue there lie a pair of gold hairpins with the phoenix design and a small box made of rhinoceros horn. Are these not the tokens that made you fall in love with me? ch’un-yü: It is so. yao-fang (bows before the Kuan-yin statue, picks up the hairpins and the rhinoceros box, and hands them to Ch’un-yü): Ch’un-lang, Ch’un-lang, cherish this box and these hairpins. I’m going now. ch’un-yü (receives the box and hairpins and pulls at the princess. He kneels and cries): I once searched for you underneath the earth; Now that you are ascending to Heaven, how can I let you go? I’ll never stop pulling at the sashes of your celestial skirt: When an ant is going to Heaven, what could I do but be its supplicant? yao-fang: It’s not yet time for you to ascend to Heaven. Oh, my husband! ch’un-yü: I must follow you to Heaven. (Ch’un-yü and Yao-fang pull at each other and cry. Suddenly Ch’i-hsüan enters with sword in hand. He parts them with his sword and ejaculates the sound “Ya!” to music. Exit Yao-fang hurriedly. Ch’un-yü stumbles and falls.)38

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Like lovers in nearly every culture, Ch’un-yü and Yao-fang want a Heaven that will perpetuate their love without change. In Rossetti’s “The Blessèd Damozel,” while the lover longs for his departed love, the girl herself, now in Heaven, fancies the day when he, too, will arrive there. She will then introduce him to the Virgin Mary and petition Christ to grant her wish: Only to live as once on earth With Love,—only to be, As then awhile, for ever now Together, I and he.

But if the Catholic imagination permits the reunion of lovers in Heaven, the Buddhist imagination allows no such dispensation. Yao-fang, as a mere celestial about to ascend to Heaven, may still speak of romantic love in human accent and wish for some kind of physical and spiritual union with her husband in the lower tiers of Heaven (in a passage omitted from the translation given above),39 but Ch’un-yü is to become a Buddha and he is not allowed the luxury of attachment. After he has parted the lovers, Ch’i-hsüan forcibly reminds the hero that his wife is but an ant, that his years of happiness with her are but a brief dream, and that her tokens of love are but trifles: ch’un-yü (awakens and examines the tokens): Ah, the gold hairpins are but twigs of the acacia and the small box is but a pod of the same tree. Pshaw, what’s the use of these things? (He throws away the hairpins and the box.) Now I, Ch’un-yü Fen, am finally awakened. The ties between king and minister, the ties binding a family, how do they differ from similar ties in the ant kingdom? All pleasure and suffering, all success and failure—they take place as well in Nan-k’o. Everything is in a state of dream, and what’s the use of ascending to Heaven? All my life I have been deluded.40

One may say that the awakening of the hero is too pat to be convincing. In describing the ant kingdom, the author has elevated the ants to the status of human beings so that naturally the hero gets as much involved with them as he would with his own kind. At the end, however, the author appeals to our prejudice against ants, saying that ants are but ants and

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their feelings are not worth bothering about. But the farewell scene between Ch’un-yü and Yao-fang is touching precisely because she is in everything but name a human being. When Ch’un-yü realizes that the person he loves is but an ant and throws away her tokens of love, he has not, as the author would have us believe, brought the world of human sentiments to its true scale in the perspective of Buddhist cosmology; rather, he has only cast contempt upon human feelings by a cheap appeal to our customary belittlement of the ant. And in the true scheme of Buddhist compassion (after all, it is to return the ant colony to Heaven that Ch’un-yü has resumed incarnation on earth), what is so contemptible about the feelings of ants? Twigs and pods may not compare in worth with gold and rhinoceros horn by the standards of monetary economy. But as sincere offerings of love or thankfulness, how do they differ from the so-called rare objects? In the play, therefore, while T’ang Hsien-tsu realizes that as long as we have emotional attachments we are the slaves of time and cannot obtain true liberation, he brings about the liberation of his hero by the device of an allegorical comparison that doesn’t tell us in the end why the feelings are bad. In the bulk of the play, in scenes descriptive of the hero’s varied activities as lover, governor, and military commander, he employs the affirmative poetic language appropriate to each of these scenes. He has actually depicted the human or ant world in a favorable light, and then in the end he equates it with a dream. One is not convinced that the state of awakening is preferable to the dream state if the kind of permanence sought in the former state cannot be arrived at without one’s first entertaining an intellectual contempt for all human and animal existence.

V Han-tan chi is a much more powerful play than Nan-k’o chi. Though “Life Inside a Pillow” is a shorter and less interesting tale than “The Governor of Nan-k’o,” its hero, Lu Sheng, is an ambitious malcontent exposed to greater extremes of success and humiliation in his dream state. In his dream Ch’un-yü Fen lives by and large a happy and useful life, the kind of life that tends rather to confirm our faith in humanity than otherwise; Lu Sheng, on the other hand, is a man on trial, though he is by no means an archetypal hero on a par with Job or Faust. In the tale, when asked by the Taoist Lü Weng why he is discontented, Lu Sheng answers, “Born into

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this world, a scholar ought to achieve great deeds and establish his fame. He should serve as a general when on the frontier and a prime minister when at court. He should preside over sumptuous banquets and order the orchestra to play what he likes. He should cause his clan to prosper and his own family to wax rich, and then he could say that he has fulfilled his heart’s desire. I was once ambitious at my studies and applied myself to all the arts, and I thought that rank and title were mine for the taking. But now at the prime of my life I still have to till my own field. What do you call this if not failure?”41 Lü Weng places a magic pillow under his head and asks him to take a nap. Upon awaking, he has experienced all the rewards and tribulations of a distinguished official and feels no desire to strive further. In the play, Lü Weng is identified with the Taoist immortal Lü Tung-pin. He receives the awakened hero as a disciple and wafts him to P’eng-lai Island. T’ang Hsien-tsu adapts the tale quite faithfully, but at the same time he has enriched many episodes of the hero’s dream life with political satire so that his play has about it an air of knowing cynicism that agrees well with its central message of Taoist detachment. Whereas both Ch’un-yü and Yao-fang are characters of conventional goodness to be expected in Ming drama, Lu Sheng and his wife, Miss Ts’ui, are not so innocent. Upon being sent to sleep in scene 4, Lu Sheng right away dreams that he is in the garden of Miss Ts’ui, an heiress of fabulous wealth, and she decides on the spot to marry him despite his shabby condition. The wedding itself is a rather coarse affair: both the groom and the servants talk in double-entendre and tease the bride about the anticipated sexual experience. After the wedding, again quite unlike most heroes in his situation, Lu Sheng shows not the least inclination to take the examinations even when his wife asks him to do so. His excuse is as follows: “I don’t want to deceive you, my wife. Though I have read the classics and history, for years I have neglected to prepare for the exams. Today, thanks to our heaven-destined marriage, I am in the lap of luxury, and please don’t even mention to me again words like ‘rank’ and ‘fame.’ ” Miss Ts’ui agrees that it is quite futile to prepare for the examinations, but she assures him that with her kind of connections at court and her kind of money to bribe everyone concerned, “to become a chuang-yüan is as easy as turning over the palm of one’s hand.”42 After Lu Sheng has bribed his way to the highest academic honors, the trials and challenges of his official career gradually mature him as a responsible statesman. But these early scenes of satire cannot be forgot-

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ten, and the ups and downs of Lu’s career are mainly the result of political intrigue. It seems that Lu Sheng, in bribing all around, has neglected the chief examiner Yü-wen Yung, a man of deep malice who enjoys great power at court. (He belongs to a special type of villain who has earlier appeared in Tzu-ch’ai chi and Nan-k’o chi, and T’ang Hsien-tsu may have drawn this type after Chang Chü-cheng, whom he detested for deeply personal reasons.)43 Upon obtaining the chuang-yüan degree, Lu Sheng further slights him deliberately. It is at Yü-wen’s recommendation, therefore, that, upon the completion of his three-year term at the Han-lin Academy, he is assigned to two difficult missions that, however, he accomplishes with amazing success. It is again at Yü-wen’s instigation that the hero is charged with treason and exiled to Hainan Island. He almost dies there, but with the intercession of his good friends, notably the eunuch Kao Li-shih, Lu Sheng is eventually recalled to court, and his wife, who has been sold into slavery to endure the indignities of being a seamstress at a government factory, is restored to honor along with their children. Yüwen himself is exposed for his treachery and sentenced to capital punishment. After twenty years’ distinguished service as a prime minister, Lu Sheng is enfeoffed as the Duke of Chao (Chao Kuo-kung) and is awarded by the emperor thirty thousand ch’ing of land and a special villa in which are housed twenty-four female entertainers for his amusement. At this moment in his career, Lu tells his wife, “My lady, I have now reached the utmost of my desires.”44 On the pretext of “robbing the yin to nourish the yang”—a Taoist form of sexual regimen much practiced among Ming emperors and aristocrats—Lu indulges himself in the company of the twenty-four girls and falls precipitately into a decline. On his deathbed, attended by Kao Li-shih and the emperor’s own physician, he worries over the verdict of history, which may not do adequate justice to his distinguished and meritorious career, and over his youngest son, who has not yet reached seniority and the official eminence of his four elder brothers. He entrusts both his record and his youngest son to the care of Kao Li-shih. But on the whole, he dies content. His last words are: “When a man reaches my age and position, he should be satisfied. Alas, why is my eyesight failing me? I’m going now.”45 The dreams of Lu Sheng and Ch’un-yü present obvious differences. First, whereas the latter is sent back to earth in mid-career, the former has

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lived his life to the full and expresses little regret over leaving it. Second, whereas the dream life of Ch’un-yü is seen in the aspect of a Ming play, with its usual round of romantic and military episodes, the dream life of Lu Sheng is at once charged with political meaning and conspicuous for a phantasmagoric quality in some of its most powerful scenes.46 Third, Lu Sheng’s career, far more than Ch’un-yü’s, symbolizes the life of political ambition in the full range of its glory and ignominy. Lu’s extreme suffering at Hainan Island dramatizes an experience common to many a Chinese official of literary or political eminence—unjust exile to an alien region as the consequence of a power struggle at court. Lu Sheng’s career also suggests that of Faust in a reverse fashion. The Chinese hero first achieves renown as an official in charge of canal digging over a mountainous region of some 280 li. Upon the successful completion of this task, he is appointed regional commander of Ho-hsi, to guard against the invading tribes. He scores a brilliant victory over the enemy and reaches T’ien-shan, almost 1,000 li from the Yü-men Pass, where the Chinese forces have been previously stationed. By act IV, part II of Goethe’s poetic drama, Faust has long enjoyed political eminence as a trusted counselor of his emperor, and in that act he routs the forces of a rival emperor. In act V he embarks on the project of reclaiming a tract of marshy land from the tyranny of the ocean for the use of a happier humanity. A deed of value to the public, then, crowns the career of a western seeker of self-fulfillment while it marks the beginning of a distinguished career for a Chinese official. While Faust’s work is enmeshed in the individual tragedy of an old couple who refuse to make room for his project, Lu Sheng’s task is carried out lightly, in a facetious, comic manner (his recipe for turning rocks into water: take a million bundles of dry wood and set them on fire over the rocky mountain area; pour vinegar over the cinders, and then drill the mountain until it crumbles into pieces of rock; pour salt over them and they will turn into water).47 But the two heroes differ in more fundamental ways. Faust begins as a scholar wearying of life; he presently goes in pursuit of pleasure at the instigation of Mephistopheles, and it is only when he has outgrown his phase of spiritual despair that Mephistopheles begins to lose his hold upon him; for Goethe, therefore, Faust’s last act of humanitarian goodness is regarded as a step beyond the kind of individualistic romanticism to which he was committed in his youth. As for T’ang Hsien-tsu’s hero, though he is goaded into good deeds by the malice of an evil minister, he is not

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afflicted with romantic nihilism and he performs them as a matter of course. It is only when he is surfeited with power that he begins to seek sensual pleasure outside of wedlock. But even then his debauchery is regarded primarily as a quest for longevity. Twice, as we have seen, Lu Sheng declares his contentment with his life. With Faust, it is his agreement with Mephistopheles that If ever I say to the passing moment “Linger a while! Thou art so fair!” Then you may cast me into fetters, I will gladly perish then and there!48

For Faust the moment never comes, since to him satiety means an end of life, and he regards his life as one of endless adventure in a process of unceasing self-realization. Even though at the very end of his life he does bid a hypothetical moment in the indefinite future to “linger a while,” he is expressing his contentment with the happy settlement of his reclaimed land by an ideal community that has not yet taken place and probably never will. As D. J. Enright has commented brilliantly, “Im Vorgefühl: in anticipation and only in anticipation, can he enjoy this unalloyed contentment.”49 In T’ang Hsien-tsu’s plays, the supreme moment comes soon enough: when the lovers consummate their passion and wish to prolong their joy forever, when an official reaches the pinnacle of his success and feels that there is nothing he wants further, or, conversely, when the same official is suddenly awakened from life in a new state of enlightenment. If on his deathbed Lu Sheng expresses on the whole satisfaction with his life, why does he then, upon awaking, immediately accept life as an illusion and go off with Lü Tung-pin? Why doesn’t he want to relive his lucky encounter with an heiress, his moment of triumph as a chuang-yüan, his historic deeds of digging a canal and routing an enemy, his last fling with a bevy of beauties, and perhaps even his tribulations during his exile? But after Lü Tung-pin has told him that his dream wife is but his donkey in disguise and that his children are but the chickens and dogs in the courtyard, Lu Sheng answers promptly enough, in a speech adapted from the tale: “Reverend sir, I, Lu Sheng, am now awakened. Our life and family ties are but like this. How could they pertain to the realm of reality? I have now completely realized the nature of life and death, and the principle lying behind our preordained glory and disgrace, gain and loss.”50

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Lu Sheng’s decision to forsake the world, therefore, primarily stems from the fact that nothing in the human condition is permanent. Whereas the true romantic as exemplified by Faust is characterized by perpetual self-dissatisfaction and ceaseless striving, the would-be Taoist man of enlightenment in T’ang Hsien-tsu is content enough to bask in mundane felicity so long as it proves permanent. It is because neither sexual love nor the progeny it produces, neither Confucian deeds nor the fame they bring guarantees perpetual happiness that he wants to sever his ties with the human world. In Faust, the act or deed is assigned primacy: so long as a man is true to himself and engaged in a meaningful quest, it matters little when his end comes. T’ang Hsien-tsu’s heroes have an aversion to action (a partial exception is Mu-tan t’ing, where everyone is on the move): it is nearly always at the instigation of an evil minister that the hero is sent on a dangerous mission, and while he is Confucian enough to appreciate the kind of honor the successful completion of his mission will bring him, at the same time he longs for his wife just as the wife, equally lonely at home, will think of him. A long tradition of poetry and drama has prepared T’ang to see the heroic deed as the agent that disrupts the family, that parts a couple happily in love, entailing for them painful emotional deprivation. In a sense, the touching reunion scenes that conclude Tzu-hsiao chi and Tzu-ch’ai chi are not unlike the scenes of the heroes’ final awakening in Nan-k’o chi and Han-tan chi. For the young lover, with years of happy domestic life ahead of him, the very fact that he has returned home to his wife provides security enough—he has as yet no time to bother his head with the ultimate necessity to release himself from the illusion of the permanence of a loving attachment. Having lived an abundant life in a dream, the heroes of the latter plays immediately seek the higher form of release. For Ch’un-yü Fen, forcibly torn from his dream life, it is understandable that he still clings to his ties with the ant world, but for Lu Sheng, who has lived to the hilt, his decision to aspire to Taoist immortality is promptly made. For both of the awakened heroes, their enlightenment suggests little radical alteration of their perception. We do not feel that their normal self-consciousness has yielded to a consciousness of God or a higher reality, which has filled its place. They have merely grown aware of the treachery of time and they adopt one of the traditional religious systems to enable them to escape from time. The dream device has foreshortened time, and each is brought face to face with the contemptible nature of

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human bonds because they appear ever so much more transient in the brief time-space of a dream. In Nan-k’o chi traditional Buddhist compassion is given lip service, and the hero is transformed into a Buddha partly because he wants to save all sentient beings. But in the process of his awakening, the antness of an ant and the humanity of a human being are slighted. I have mentioned three types of living in the present without recourse to external religious aid: the Goethean form of romantic striving, the kind of stoical existentialism advocated by T’ao Ch’ien, and the cultivation of a mystical awareness recommended by Su Shih and better exemplified in the West by Blake’s axiom, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” None of these or other possible forms of coming to terms with life without being intimidated by time is suggested by T’ang Hsien-tsu. To cite a contrasting example, Thornton Wilder, an American playwright much influenced by the Chinese and Japanese theater, sees the recurrence of ordinary human events as something worthy of unqualified affirmation. Human life is precious precisely because it is transient, but its transience does not preclude the presence of eternity. In Our Town the ghost of the heroine Emily relives her twelfth birthday in a vision and falls all the more in love with the human condition. Her only regret is that, as she sees herself and her parents occupied with routine tasks on the morning of that day, they are too busy to relish their every passing moment in the aspect of eternity: “I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. “Good-by, Good-by, world, Good-by, Grover’s Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” She looks toward the STAGE MANAGER and asks abruptly, through her tears: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?— every, every minute?”51

To Thornton Wilder, the human condition is not desperate because every passing moment is potentially a moment of eternity. For him, there-

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fore, there is no need to crave for bodily permanence. Precisely because T’ang Hsien-tsu lacks that mystical vision, in his plays we see rather the lust for permanence finding expression either in the seemingly timeeclipsing solace of a loving relationship or in the final retreat to some kind of religious anchorage, both solutions, however, decked out in a poetry that makes the author a great inheritor of the varied strands of the Chinese literary tradition.

VI Mu-tan t’ing, written at the height of his poetical powers, is T’ang Hsien-tsu’s sole attempt to defy time. In Tzu-ch’ai chi, the author has reworked the story of Huo Hsiao-yü to demonstrate the rectification of evil in the temporal order through the agency of hsia. But before the intervention of the Man in the Yellow Jacket (Huang-shan-k’e), the heroine, despite her generosity and chivalrous temper, is on the point of losing her life because she languishes over the absence of her lover. She would have died if there had been no intervention. But with her lover finally by her side, she undergoes an instant miraculous recovery. Intrigued by this idea, T’ang Hsien-tsu must have searched for a story to affirm love’s triumph over life and death, and he finally found it in a colloquial tale about Tu Li-niang. This tale receives its first mention in a catalogue compiled about 1560, though its earliest extant version, entitled “Enamored of Love, Tu Li-niang Returns to Life’’ (Tu Li-niang mu-sê hui-hun), appears only in an enlarged edition of a late Ming miscellany called Yen-chü pi-chi.52 But because this drab tale was probably little known even during the late Ming period, scholars have until very recently always assumed that, in a radical departure from the practice of most Ming playwrights, the author of Mu-tan t’ing had made up an original story about Tu Li-niang and Liu Meng-mei even though its basic motives are drawn from a few pre-T’ang tales.53 In his own preface to the play, however, T’ang Hsien-tsu has explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to the tale: The transmitters of the story of Prefect Tu have modeled it upon the tales of the daughter of Prefect Li Chung-wen of Wu-tu and of the son of Prefect Feng Hsiao-chiang of Kuang-chou, both prefects being of the Chin period. I have further changed the story and

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expanded it. As for the episode of Prefect Tu incarcerating and inflicting corporeal punishment upon Liu Meng-mei, this rather resembles the story of the King of Sui-yang meting out identical punishment to Scholar T’an.54

In checking the play against the tale “Enamored of Love, Tu Li-niang Returns to Life,” one cannot but agree with T’ang’s statement that, whereas the transmitters of the tale have made use of the stories of the two prefects, to be found in Fa-yüan chu-lin, for their basic plot, he has further embellished it with the story of a father punishing his daughter’s husband to be found in Lieh-i-chuan. Mu-tan t’ing is a very long play, but it is never dull.55 Chinese readers have always delighted in it, though no critics have traced its popularity to its comic exuberance. With a few slight changes, the main plot follows the colloquial tale. Tu Li-niang, the sole child of Tu Pao, prefect of Nan-an, Kiangsi, is tutored at home. One spring day, after taking a stroll in the garden of her house, she returns to her chamber and dreams of a youth taking her to the peony pavilion in the garden and making love to her. She becomes lovesick as a result, draws her own portrait for posterity, and before her death requests that she be buried under a plum tree in the garden. Soon afterward Tu Pao leaves Nan-an with his wife to accept a new post at Yang-chou. The youth of Li-niang’s dream, Liu Meng-mei, now arrives in Nan-an. He stays in the Tu residence, treasures the portrait he has accidentally found, and is visited at night by the ghost of Li-niang, who calls herself a neighbor. She finally reveals her identity and requests him to exhume her body. Miraculously resurrected, she marries him, and they go north to seek reunion with her parents. Upon this implausible tale T’ang Hsien-tsu has expended his comic gifts so that nearly all the minor characters become alive. In the tale, the father is a respectable, upright official and nothing more; in the play, in addition to being a good prefect earning the praises of his subjects and a lucky commander pacifying a critical region with minimal effort, he is a stern guardian of Confucian morality and a blind rationalist who refuses to believe in the reality of his daughter after she has been revived and insists on punishing his son-in-law as a grave robber. In the tale, Li-niang’s tutor is not even given a name; in the play he is called Ch’en Tsui-liang (also known as Ch’en Tsüeh-liang or Starveling Ch’en),56 and is at once a dull-witted tutor utterly insensible of the beauties of nature

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and the charm of love, a quack doctor and good Samaritan, a guardian of the heroine’s grave, a captive of the rebel forces, and a spy accomplishing single-handedly a most important mission. There are other comic characters of earthly coarseness suggestive of the clowns and rustics in Shakespeare. In T’ang’s other plays, the military scenes, which seem to be de rigeur in the ch’uan-ch’i tradition of Ming drama, are usually very dull. In Mu-tan t’ing, however, one such scene (scene 47) is uproarious.57 Readers accustomed to textbook description of the play as one of intense romanticism will be delightfully shocked by its coarse language and its abundance of bawdy jokes. Tu Li-niang is, therefore, the only serious character in the play. It is she who is obsessed with love and languishes in its deprivation. Though her body is crushed under this unrelieved suffering, her soul rises triumphant over the judges in Hell to claim her rightful happiness in the arms of her lover. Compared with her, even Liu Meng-mei is partly an object of satire. Though he has dreamed of her before he himself enters into her dream, until he finds her portrait he is a brash go-getter intent on official success by whatever means. In comparison, Li I and even Ch’un-yü Fen are more admirable lovers in that their thoughts seldom stray from the objects of their love. Liu Meng-mei is properly tender and passionate in his love scenes with the ghost of Li-niang. But once he marries her and embarks on his journey to Hang-chou to take the examinations, he is again his brash self and obtains the chuang-yüan degree with extraordinary luck. Delighting in his new importance, he takes pleasure in harassing his father-in-law for refusing to recognize his worth. By that time Li-niang herself is so overpleased with her husband’s changed status (and her father’s promotion) that she has almost forgotten the intensity of her passion that made her rise from the grave. Despite its comedy, Mu-tan t’ing has always been read as if the only scenes that matter are those tracing the heroine’s essential history—her dream and her quest of the lost dream in the garden, her grief and death, her judgment in Hell, her trysts with her lover, and her resurrection.58 T’ang’s own preface has certainly encouraged this partial reading: Of all the girls in this world, who is ever so committed to love ( yuch’ing) as Li-niang? Once she dreams of her lover, she falls ill and her illness worsens until with her own hand she transmits to the world a portrait of her features and then dies. After being dead for

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three years, she can still in her limbolike existence seek the object of her love and regain her life. Verily Li-niang can be called a person committed to love ( yu-ch’ing jen). She doesn’t know how she has fallen in love, but once in love, she is totally committed to it. While still alive, she wills her death, and while in death, she wills to have her life restored. To stay alive without the courage to die, and to die without the volition to regain life—such is not the condition of one supremely committed to love. Love engendered in a dream—who says it is not real? Aren’t there quite a few such dreamers in this world?59

In this eloquent statement of T’ang’s philosophy of love, we find the reiterative use of the key terms: sheng (life), ch’ing (love), and meng (dream). (Ssu [death] is also a key word, but its negative connotations only underscore by contrast the powers of sheng and ch’ing.) We have seen that Lo Ju-fang’s distinctive contribution to Ming thought lies in his replacement of the term hsin (mind) with the term sheng as the generating and animating force of the universe, and his further equation of sheng with the term jen (humanity, love). Since T’ang Hsien-tsu regarded Mu-tan t’ing as his favorite play, he may have deliberately adapted the story of Tu Li-niang to dramatize the kind of affirmation of life consonant with his teacher’s philosophy, and, further, to modify that philosophy by postulating “love” as the primary and essential condition of “life.” But at the same time his use of the third key term meng modifies his total commitment to love and life in the world of time. It is only when Li-niang falls into a dream, which is, in a sense, a timeless state because it is not subject to the measurement of waking time, that the intensest form of life and the richest fulfillment of love are intimated to her, and, further, it is only when she is enjoying her dreamlike existence as a ghost that she appears most daring and passionate in her quest of love. Once time reclaims her with her resurrection, she is no longer the girl supremely committed to love proclaimed in the preface. Mu-tan t’ing is T’ang Hsien-tsu’s only play in which the Taoist– Buddhist ideals are not once presented for serious consideration: the few Taoist nuns in the play are themselves sex-starved creatures now parading their physical or mental deformity for our comic attention.60 This is so because the play is solely concerned with this-worldly values, with love and life pitted against the kind of caricature of Confucian val-

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ues embodied in the father and tutor of the heroine, who are grossly insensible to her state of sexual awakening and regard sexual repression in a girl as natural until the time comes for her to get married. Li-niang triumphs over her father and tutor not by active revolt but, in a fairytale fashion, by a total submission to their tyranny. She is a sexually precocious Sleeping Beauty who lies dead for three years until a questing prince arrives at her castle and awakens her with a kiss. But if, in her total innocence, the Sleeping Beauty of the fairy tale lies in a state of deep sleep without a single dream to disturb her, it is only in her dream and in her state of death that Li-niang’s libidinous self is freed from all inhibitions and taboos to roam all over the world in quest of her love. Once revived, Li-niang appears quite a different person, a coy young lady very much aware of the importance of decorum and propriety. It has often been said that she is a far bolder and more impassioned girl than the heroine of Hsi-hsiang chi (Romance of the Western Chamber) in that she seeks her love through life and death.61 But her ghostly existence properly takes place in a timeless dimension where her censor-ego remains a nonentity. Without benefit of a dream existence, Ying-ying nevertheless gives herself to her importunate lover of her own will and experiences “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” something Li-niang could not have brought herself to do in her waking state. After her resurrection, she checks Liu Meng-mei’s immediate desire to have sexual union with her. li-niang: But, sir, you must surely remember what the ancient classic [Mencius] says about awaiting the parents’ command and the matchmaker’s counsel. meng-mei: Though I didn’t bore a hole through the wall to peep at you, I have already gone into your grave and got you out. Hsiao-chieh, why cite book and chapter to lecture me now? li-niang: Sir, this is not like the former times. On the earlier evenings I was only a ghost and today I am a person of flesh and blood. A ghost may respond to passion, but a person must observe the proper rites (kuei k’o hsü-ch’ing, jen hsü shih-li).62

Later on, in the same scene (scene 36), after she agrees to an immediate marriage, she surprises her lover with an admission.

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li-niang: Liu-lang, I am still a virgin. meng-mei: We have already had several trysts. How is it that your jade body still remains intact? li-niang: I was a ghost then; this time I’ll serve you with my real body: It was my wandering ghost that came to you, my lover; My virgin body is still whole.63

The self-conscious young lady who protests her virginity and insists on a basic distinction between ghostly passion and human propriety is not the same person who three years before died of lovesickness. Even though during her wedding night she tells Meng-mei, “Liu-lang, tonight I have finally realized the joy of living in this human world,”64 the situation has changed. Li-niang has got her man, and Meng-mei has found his dream girl, and from now on their immediate task is to justify their behavior before the eyes of her parents and the world. If he passes the examination with the highest honors (as he does), then the interlude of their ghostly love will be reinterpreted in the light of his success. After all, he is a ts’aitzu (young scholar of literary talent) and she is a chia-jen (beauty), and a certain romantic impropriety in their past is something to be admired. The last third of the play therefore becomes a more conventional romantic comedy that justifies the earlier imprudence and passion of the lovers because they are now the paragons of the official establishment, living very much in accordance with their newly acquired official dignity. In the last scene of the play (scene 55), Li-niang actually congratulates herself because the lover in her dream is now assured of far greater official success than any young man her parents could have chosen for her. She tells Ch’en Tsui-liang, “Tutor Ch’en, if you didn’t give me the idea of strolling in the back garden, how could I have set my heart on one who has plucked the cassia bough off the moon so successfully?”65 The romantic passion initially seen as a fierce assertion of life in the stifling environment of a deadened Confucian society is changed beyond recognition as the lovers afflicted with that passion pass beyond the phase of love to seek reconcilement with society. There is no doubt that T’ang Hsien-tsu has intended to embody in Li-niang a passion for love that is beyond time, beyond life and death. But, alas, love appears eternal only so long as it remains unfulfilled. The mood of eternity cannot continue once passion is normalized or abated in the actual sexual embrace. Li-niang and Meng-mei could have become

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tragic lovers if the fulfillment of their love had meant for them a continuing disregard of conventional success and defiance of conventional morality. But, for one thing, the tragic mode is not available to T’ang Hsien-tsu: with all its fondness for sentiment and pathos, the ch’uan-ch’i genre of the Ming theater is a drama in the comic mode. As a poor scholar, Liu Meng-mei has always wanted to succeed in the official world, and Li-niang herself, given her family background and upbringing, would not have been happy with a lover who remained a mere indigent scholar. Mu-tan t’ing, therefore, is a comedy of reconcilement: the impulse toward love, in the heroine’s case, has brought her greater worldly honor and success than if she had not taken the initiative in self-fulfillment and undergone death and rebirth. Her brief spell of rebellion against time notwithstanding, she is soon happily reconciled to time, and in time she will become a Confucian mother, anxious for the proper education of her children. In comparison with Nan-k’o chi and Han-tan chi, the distinction of Mu-tan t’ing lies in the fact that, whereas the dreams in the later plays contract time and dramatize the transience of life, the dream of Li-niang depicts a timeless condition where love is seen as the sole reality. But outside of her dream state and ghostly existence, the reign of time is absolute.

Part III TRADITIONAL AND EARLY MODERN FICTION

The Military Romance A Genre of Chinese Fiction (1974)

Students of traditional Chinese fiction have customarily divided historical novels into two categories: those that approximate the spirit and form of a popular chronicle and those that, despite their celebration of historical personages and events, make no pretensions to be serious history. Most, if not all, of the titles forming the latter category could be properly called military romances insofar as they tell of an individual, a family, a brotherhood, or a new dynastic team engaged in a large-scale campaign or a series of such campaigns. The popular chronicle, too, has frequent occasion to depict military engagements, but it rarely employs the language of fantasy that stylizes the battle scenes in a military romance. Nor does it concern itself with such engagements to the undue neglect of other matters of historical interest. Even in a military romance, of course, the principal hero is given a good deal of biographical attention. We are told of his premilitary career, his friends and enemies, and his trials as a loyal servant of the throne. But sooner or later, the hero embarks upon a campaign, which tends to supplant him as the object of primary interest and beget a cluster of subsidiary themes relative to its prosecution. Preoccupation with warfare, then, is at once the principal characteristic of the military romance and the main cause for its failure to reach the status of serious fiction. It shares the fate of detective fiction, science fiction, and other such genres in that its conventionalized overconcern with a special type of human activity has

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inevitably led to the neglect or stereotyped representation of ordinary human concerns and passions. In this paper I shall comment on several Yuan and Ming works of fiction essential to an understanding of the evolution of the genre and then proceed to describe its specific themes and concerns, mainly with reference to romances about the T’ang–Sung periods dating from the Ming and Ch’ing. Since for most story cycles it is usually their latest versions that are most characteristic of the military romance, I shall dwell upon such works rather than their predecessors, which are as a rule more reflective of the tradition of oral storytelling or popular chronicle. Thus for the T’ang period I shall focus on Shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan (hereafter abbreviated as Shuo T’ang), Shuo T’ang hou-chuan (commonly reprinted today under two consecutive titles as Lo T’ung sao-pei and Hsüeh Jen-kuei cheng-tung), Shuo T’ang cheng-hsi san-chuan (better known as Hsüeh Tingshan cheng-hsi, hereafter Cheng-hsi), and their sequels,1 though, for comparative purposes, I shall have occasion to refer to such earlier works as Ta-T’ang Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua, T’ang-shu chih-chuan, Sui-T’ang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan, Sui-shih yi-wen, and the culminating title in this series of popular works characterized by their intermixture of history and legend, Ch’u Jen-hu’s Sui T’ang yen-yi.2 Likewise, for the Yüeh Fei saga I shall discuss Ch’ien Ts’ai and Chin Feng’s Shuo Yüeh ch’üan-chuan (hereafter Shuo Yüeh) rather than such earlier and more historic versions as Ta-Sung chung-hsing t’ung-su yen-yi.3 The saga of Yang Yeh (Yang Chi-yeh)4 and his progeny, despite its continuing popularity to the present day, has undergone no further development as written fiction since the late Ming: accordingly, my attention will be confined to two crude but highly influential embodiments of that saga dating respectively from the Chia-ching (1522–1566) and Wan-li (1573–1619) periods: Pei-Sung chih-chuan t’ung-su yen-yi (hereafter Pei-Sung chih-chuan) and Yang-chia-fu shih-tai chung-yung t’ung-su yen-yi (hereafter Yang-chia-fu), with a preface by Chi Chen-lun.5 In contrast, the Ti Ch’ing novels to be discussed in this paper, viz. Wu-hu p’inghsi (hereafter P’ing-hsi), Wu-hu p’ing-nan (P’ing-nan), and Wan-hua lou, are publications of the Chia-ch’ing period (1796–1820). It was at this time that the saga of Ti Ch’ing first received full-scale fictional treatment, although it was mentioned as a subject for storytellers in Lo Yeh’s Tsui-weng t’an-lu and subsequently embodied in drama.6 With the exception of Yang-chiafu, all the above-mentioned military romances remain very popular, and they provide a double advantage for discussion in that, if we add Shui-hu

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chuan, the romances about the Sung generals form as much an unbroken period of history as the romances of the T’ang and that, since their dates of first publication are at least roughly ascertainable, they enable us to chart the evolution of the genre with some degree of assurance. With the exception of Shui-hu chuan and Feng-shen yen-yi (though they are usually categorized under different genres),7 the military romance has received little scholarly attention. But it is usually neglected for the wrong reasons. Ch’ing scholars have frequently called attention to the absurd distortions of history to be seen in military romances,8 and the prejudice still prevails insofar as the more reliable chronicles are invariably regarded with greater critical respect. But in departing from history, the military romancers are not so much willfully ignorant of history (though many of them, I would gather, were not well educated) as obedient to the dictates of the genre. To judge the military romance by the standards of history is to misapprehend its character. I would maintain that the genre has suffered as a whole not because it has failed the demands of history, but because it has failed to explore fully its possibilities as fiction. Even the popular chronicle, of course, has to be ultimately judged by the standards of fiction. Like the military romance, it draws to a significant extent upon a common heritage of hero legends irrespective of whether these legends already existed in a written form or remained in a fluid state as oral tradition, and it has to aim at fullness of fictional detail if it is to rise above being a mere recompilation of available historical facts in more popular language. Tung Chou lieh-kuo chih, a most reliable chronicle, has been deplored precisely for its dry recital of crowded facts, which leaves no room for the vivid re-creation of character and event. San-kuochih yen-yi, on the other hand, is highly praised because it frequently meets the challenge of fiction. In narrating such events as the Battle of Red Cliff and Liu Pei’s three visits to Chu-ko Liang’s retreat, Lo Kuan-chung has first of all employed the arts of fiction to create an illusion of reality (and in this respect the good novelist is no different from the good biographer or historian), and secondly has drawn upon legend and folklore. Though logically there is no reason why the legendary material should be so favored, in nearly all good historical novels it has received the most extensive elaboration.9 It seems that unless he had received a historical episode in a legendary form, the chronicler could not on his own initiative develop it at great length.

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The tendency to elaborate upon legendary material can also be observed in the military romance. Though their source materials differ to the extent that the chronicler relies far more upon official and anecdotal history than the military romancer, the latter is also at his best when, in his portrayal of a hero, he can draw upon a legend of human significance. The legendary hero is usually idealized: he is braver and more virtuous than his historic counterpart and he comes upon stranger adventures and suffers worse tribulations at the hands of blacker villains. But to a reader of fiction, it matters little whether a given legend agrees or disagrees with the hero’s official biography; what matters is that, thanks to the rich mytho-realistic episodes provided by the legend, the hero may emerge as a real person in a real setting even though his character may in the process become simplified. Since the hero’s official biography usually contains little information about his childhood and youth, the legend is of special service to the romancer (as to the chronicler) in investing his early years with an abundance of incident and detail. Little wonder that in most romances and chronicles the youthful adventures of the hero provide the most compelling narrative. (The military romancer was often a legend maker in his own right. If his hero had attracted little folkloric attention, he could borrow episodes from other hero legends and concoct a biography of his youth that, if it were not too synthetic, could in time become accepted as a legend.) In a military romance, however, once the hero has emerged from obscurity, his career tends to be stereotyped since it is now mainly identified with military action. (In a good chronicle, a hero’s historical career can be as interesting as his legendary youth.) Committed to a recital of his military exploits, the author now has to provide the details of a campaign for which neither the historical nor the legendary sources provide sufficient information. He must invent the circumstances of every battle, but usually his inventions betray a derivative character. I suppose it was the dynastic storytellers who first conventionalized the description of warfare to be seen in Chinese fiction, though the conventional battle, insofar as it focuses attention on two warriors in a stylized combat, also betrays the influence of the stage representation of military engagements.10 In their subsequent inventions and innovations, the military romancers have further exaggerated the conventional character of warfare in the direction of fantasy. In a military romance, therefore, two types of material wrap around the core of historical truth: legendary and fantastic. If the hero legend

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opposes good and evil in an unambiguous conflict and simplifies history in the direction of melodrama, the campaigns themselves embellish history in the spirit of fantasy. The two modes do not necessarily mix. If the plot hatched by a villain to trap a hero makes for good melodrama, the fantasy of warfare disrupts that melodrama to the extent that the hero will be for the duration engrossed in the military business at hand. To the author of a standard military romance, the legends and intrigues prepare for, and provide a diverting respite from, the campaigns, which are regarded as the main attraction of his work; but to a modern reader less impressed by fantastic warfare, it is precisely the lengthy campaigns that prevent the author from developing to the full the melodramatic potential of the hero legend. By the Chia-ch’ing period, when the author of P’ing-hsi subordinates military fantasy to melodrama in full realization that melodrama is intrinsically more exciting than the specialized kinds of interest warfare offers, he is effecting the transformation of the military romance.

I. The Early Romances; Magic Warfare If the six extant p’ing-hua of the Yuan dynasty are fairly representative of the oral narratives of history in their subject matter if not in their artistry, then it would seem that the split between popular chronicle and military romance had become apparent long before any novel was compiled or printed. These p’ing-hua fall into at least three types of narrative. Ch’in ping liu-kuo p’ing-hua is a popular chronicle with a military emphasis, but it conforms to the outline of the known facts of history with minimal stylization in the direction of a military romance. Wu-tai-shih p’ing-hua, while also a military chronicle, pays particular attention to the legendary youth of its several prominent heroes (this emphasis remains characteristic of subsequent narratives of the Five Dynasties period, as witness the long recital of Chao K’uang-yin’s career prior to his accession to the throne in both Nan-Sung chih-chuan and Fei-lung ch’üan-chuan).11 Yüeh Yi t’u-Ch’i ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu hou-chi, however, is already a pure if embryonic military romance with its emphasis on magic warfare and its total disregard of historical accuracy in its recital of the career of Sun Pin after his cruel mutilation by his rival in military wizardry, P’ang Chüan. The ch’ien-chi of Ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu, which must have been about their feud, is unfortu-

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nately not extant, but on the evidence of a later military romance, Sun P’ang yen-yi, it must have been fully as fantastic as its sequel. Wu Wang fa Chou p’ing-hua, too, is notable for its tendency toward military romance.12 Judging by the inadequate evidence of these p’ing-hua, then, it would seem that, whereas storytellers were relatively restrained in their embellishment of history for well-documented periods like those of the Three Kingdoms and Five Dynasties, they, like the romancers after them, tended to resort to wholesale invention of a fantastic character in their treatment of shadowy periods or celebrated figures about whom there is actually little historic information. And though we cannot be sure how much of that invention was actually folklore, the storytellers appeared especially fond of assigning fantastic deeds to characters long identified in the popular mind for their prescience and magic powers (Sun Pin, Chiang Tzu-ya, and, to a lesser extent, Chu-ko Liang). To account for their wizardry, Ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu hou-chi assigns to Sun Pin and P’ang Chüan a common teacher, the celestial Kuei-ku-tzu.The latter thus appears to be an archetypal figure since in subsequent romances about the T’ang and Sung, many heroes would undergo a period of celestial tutelage before rising to fame on the battlefield. To turn from p’ing-hua to novel-length fiction, we must first reckon with San-kuo-chih t’ung-su yen-yi. It was the earliest novel to appear in print, and scholars are agreed that, of all the romances traceable to the authorship of Lo Kuan-chung, it bears the closest resemblance to his original version. Though a popular chronicle in form and intent, the work contains elements of the military romance and must have proved highly useful to later military romancers as the first complete manual of conventional (i.e., nonsupernatural) warfare. In the novel a general exchanges blows with another and may adopt certain ruses to overpower him. Aside from pitched battles, one may stealthily conduct a night attack or stage an ambush at a narrow pass where enemy troops will have little chance to escape. The military counselor (chün-shih) plans somewhat more advanced forms of strategy. Chu-ko Liang, the paragon of all counselors, however, at times resorts to magic or invokes supernatural aid, as do the sorcerers (leaders of the Yellow Turbans) and barbarians (Meng Huo and his allies). It is noteworthy that the later romancers gave the freest rein to their imagination when describing warfare involving precisely such counselors, sorcerers, and barbarian chieftains of magic power.

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These romancers, however, have not enlarged the stock of conventional tricks and stratagems to be seen in San-kuo; nor have they advanced beyond the conventional realism of its battle scenes, though in some romances with descriptive passages in verse, especially the undeservedly neglected Ta-T’ang Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua, that conventional realism is decked out in pageantry and charged with considerable excitement.13 On the whole, descriptions of battle remain stereotyped in later romances, though their authors have considerably enhanced the powers of their warriors and diversified their weaponry. Compared with San-kuo, Shui-hu chuan, another work traceable to Lo Kuan-chung, shows a far wider gap between realism and fantasy. Its early chapters detail the pre-Liangshan careers of individual heroes with realistic distinction, and if it had continued in the picaresque vein, it would not have become a military romance. But as it is, it is far more a military romance than San-kuo since by chapter 33 it begins to depict in earnest the Liangshan band’s major military operations, at first against and then for the government. Even though two of its expeditions—against T’ien Hu and Wang Ch’ing—are later additions written under the influence of other military romances, the campaigns that take place before chapter 71 are already none too distinguished and cater to an audience that finds the depiction of war intrinsically satisfying even in the absence of other types of serious interest. The novel makes use of all the standard ruses and stratagems seen in San-kuo and places greater stress on the magical element. It further widens the split between muscle and brains (already noticeable in San-kuo) by having Wu Yung and Chu Wu, inheriting the mantle of Chu-ko Liang, map out each battle to be fought by the brave heroes. Among its other features copied by later military romancers are the close bond between the suffering hero of unshaken loyalty (Sung Chiang) and his rowdy companion of anarchic temper (Li K’uei), and the idea that, when the government is dominated by corrupt ministers, it is not dishonorable to occupy a mountain and turn bandit.14 Both San-kuo-chih t’ung-su yen-yi and the Kuo Hsün edition of the 100-chapter Shui-hu chuan were printed in the Chia-ching period. In view of the large quantity of novels produced subsequently during the Ming, it is understandable that modern scholars have begun to assess individually only such famous titles as Hsi-yu chi, Chin P’ing Mei, and Feng-shen yen-yi. Especially, the many works of historical fiction, with all their competing versions, are still awaiting critical attention, despite the pioneering efforts

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of such scholars as Sun K’ai-ti and Liu Ts’un-yan to straighten out their bibliographical data. And since this body of historical fiction has earlier appeared as topics for storytellers in Tsui-weng t’an-lu and provided themes for Yuan and Ming tsa-chü, the task of evaluation is rendered more difficult by the need to study it in comparative terms with reference to an oral tradition informing both written fiction and drama. Nevertheless, through all this period of growth for historical fiction, we may single out for honor the name of Hsiung Ta-mu (Hsiung Chung-ku), an industrious author and editor of the Chia-ching period. He stood squarely in the tradition of Lo Kuan-chung and, in the absence of reliable information concerning the interim period, he must be regarded as a worthy successor responsible for a large body of historical and pseudo-historical fiction, much of it traceable in earlier form to Lo. T’ang-shu chih-chuan, Nan-Sung chih chuan, Pei-Sung chih-chuan, and Ta-Sung chung-hsing yen-yi are all his compilations. An examination of these works on microfilm leads me to believe that Hsiung was a popular historian who genuinely wanted to edify the less educated public (including juvenile readers) of his time. By and large he adhered to history, though he freely admitted legendary material that would enhance narrative interest. In comparison with Shuo Yüeh, a military romance in the ripe manner, Ta-Sung chung-hsing yen-yi appears a remarkably sober narrative of history, and since no precedents to this work are known, Hsiung was most probably its original author. There is, however, one exception to my description of Hsiung’s work: Pei-Sung chih-chuan, which has all the features of a military romance. According to Hsiung’s preface, it incorporates a work given in short title as Yang-chia-fu, among other unspecified romances (chuan). Hsiung must have used this because there was no detailed historic record of the Yang family to fall back on, and the Wan-li edition of Yang-chia-fu must also have been an adaptation of the same old source, in all probability a more faithful one, though we cannot know whether the Taoist idea of abjuring government service to cultivate oneself, conspicuous in the new work but absent from Pei-Sung chih-chuan, also informs that version.15 A full comparison of the two extant novels of the Yang family must await another occasion, but it may be noted that, whereas Yang-chia-fu gives a full account of that family, Hsiung has assigned the early career of Yang Yeh to Nan-Sung chih-chuan and begins its sequel with the life story of Hu-yen Tsan, another Northern Sung general of legendary fame, and that the later campaigns of the Yang family, ineptly narrated in Yang-chia-fu, are

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omitted altogether by Hsiung in favor of a grand expedition against the Ta-ta Kingdom.16 In any event, the old version of Yang-chia-fu must have been a seminal military romance both for its description of the tribulations of the Yang family despite its indispensable service to the throne and for its emphasis on magic warfare. Historically, Yang Yeh’s matchless bravery has made him an object of envy, and his final defeat and suicide in a foredoomed battle against the Liao are brought about through the machinations of his commanding generals P’an Mei (P’an Jen-mei in fiction) and Wang Shen. Even his sixth son, Yang Yen-chao, who succeeds his father as a guardian of the frontier, is a repeated victim of calumny and imperial reprimand.17 Out of such historical facts it is inevitable that storytellers should have woven a saga of outstanding generals loyal to the throne but meeting with repeated slander and punishment. The influence of this saga on the Liangshan legend must have been considerable if we assume that Yang Yeh and his sons had exercised the popular imagination at an earlier date than had Sung Chiang. This hypothesis at least explains why Sung, a minor rebel, could have been transformed into a tragic hero of outstanding military achievement leading repeated expeditions against the enemies of the state. And we may further maintain that the Hsüeh family as we know it in fiction must have been patterned after the Yang family since, historically, Hsüeh Jen-kuei’s long career was sustained by imperial favor except for a few minor setbacks. The Yang saga must have also strengthened the role of villainy in the lives of Ti Ch’ing and Yüeh Fei as subsequently retold in fiction. Judging by its subsequent adaptations, the old version of Yang-chia-fu must have delighted in magic warfare, especially in the form of mazes (chen). Such chen already play a conspicuous role in Ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu hou-chi, so we can be sure that narrators of certain periods of history had long capitalized on magic warfare as a regular feature of their storytelling. But still, to trace its increasing prominence in several formative military romances is to illuminate an essential aspect of the evolving genre. In conventional warfare chen refers to the formation of troops in a set manner in preparation for battle. Whereas the duel between two generals on horseback is mainly a contest of physical strength and dexterity, the kind of engagement involving the array of troops in a prescribed manner usually invites the exercise of brains rather than brawn. The preparation of chen and the methods of throwing them into confusion are supposedly

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recorded in military manuals.18 We often read, therefore, that a general will on purpose set up a chen to test his opponent’s military erudition. While to recognize a chen is tantamount to asserting one’s ability to confound it, a general really skilled in warfare will be able instantly to transform his chen into another one so as to confuse and trap the attacking troops. Ten numerically ordered arrays, starting with the simplest snake formation (Yi-tzu ch’ang-she chen), are frequently mentioned in historical novels. But even though such formations employ only conventional soldiers, nevertheless the symbolic language used in their description suggests a utilization of esoteric lore drawn presumably from the Book of Changes and the yin-yang and Taoist schools of learning. In chapter 36 of San-kuo, Ts’ao Ts’ao’s general Ts’ao Jen sets up a chen to test the military knowledge of Liu Pei. Liu Pei’s counselor, Hsü Shu, however, is learned in warfare, and tells his lord (in the somewhat free translation of C. H. Brewitt-Taylor): The arrangement is called “The Eight [Locked] Gates,” and each “gate” has a name. If you enter by one of the three named “Birth,” “Bellevue” and “Expanse” you succeed; if by one of the gates “Wounds,” “Fear” or “Annihilation,” you sustain injuries. The other two “gates” are named “Obstacles” and “Death,” and to enter them means the end. Now, the eight “gates” are all there quite correct, the central “key-post” is lacking and the formation can be thrown into confusion by entry from the south-east and exit due west.19

The description is none too clear, though we are aware that the symbolic gates refer to points of varying degrees of vulnerability in the formation. In subsequent military romances what is figurative in the description here will become literal so that in its simplest form a magical maze is nothing but an enclosure with gates allowing for entrance and exit. Inside this enclosure usually stands a platform or elevated structure (t’ai or chiang t’ai) that serves as its key-post. A pennant or pennants of symbolic color and sinister significance rise high above the t’ai, visible to attackers outside the enclosure. The presiding general or sorcerer, stationed atop the t’ai, directs the military and magical defense of the chen, and he usually descends to engage in actual combat when the enemy seems to be gaining an upper hand in his struggle against the soldiery and / or magic forces in the chen.

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Chu-ko Liang has been long celebrated in literature for his setting up of a pa-chen-t’u, which, I suppose, is something of a Maginot Line against potential invaders of his country. In San-kuo this is described as a formation of rocks, but these rocks are so arranged as to actuate the mysterious forces of the universe. Following his smashing victory over Liu P’ei’s invading forces, the Wu general Lu Sun leads his army into Shu territory and comes upon these rocks. He sees sinister vapors hovering above them, but he enters the maze nevertheless and would perish if he were not guided out of it by Chu-ko’s kindhearted father-in-law.20 I suspect that the recital of this episode by Sung and Yuan specialists in the Three Kingdoms period must have stimulated their competitors to make up stories about similar mazes for their own dynastic cycles. Shui-hu chuan has far more occasions than San-ko to describe both types of chen. In chapter 76 Sung Chiang sets up a Nine-Constellation Eight-Trigram Formation (Chiu-kung pa-kua chen) against the imperial army of T’ung Kuan. The verse passages descriptive of the pageantry of the array praise its utilization of the mysterious forces of nature, but actually Sung Chiang resorts to no magic because T’ung Kuan’s army is easily routable even in the absence of supernatural aid. In chapters 87–88, Sung Chiang, then leading an expedition against the Liao, again prepares the Nine-Constellation Formation to display his might.21 In his turn, the king of the Liao throws in all his forces to form the T’ai-yi hun t’ien-hsiang chen, which proves impregnable. The goddess Chiu-t’ien Hsüan-nü, who had earlier given Sung Chiang a heavenly book (T’ien-shu) in chapter 42, now tells him how to destroy the chen. It is duly destroyed and the king of the Liao surrenders to the Sung. In subsequent romances the foreign king or chieftain usually sets up one or two major chen whose destruction spells the grand finale of a major campaign. Neither Pei-Sung chih-chuan nor Yang-chia-fu claims the literary distinction of Shui-hu chuan, but thanks to Peking opera, the average Chinese is far more familiar with the Seventy-two Heavenly Gate Formation (Ch’i-shih-erh-tso t’ien-men-chen)22 set up by the queen dowager Hsiao against the Sung forces than with any of the formations prepared by Sung Chiang or his opponents. The Heavenly Gate Formation, to be sure, is far more remarkable on three counts. First, the queen dowager not only throws into the complex network of mazes all her military resources but also enlists the assistance of five neighboring states, each sending fifty thousand troops headed by a prince, princess, or mar-

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shal. Second, some of the mazes forming the major chen are distinctly weird or grotesque in their set-up, though in this respect they merely confirm a trend already observable in Ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu hou-chi. (In one maze, for example, a princess stands in the nude, holding in her hand a skeleton or part of a skeleton, and she is supposed to burst into crying whenever the enemy troops enter; seven pregnant women are buried under the ground of another maze and they are supposed to be able to suck the souls out of the entering troops.)23 Third, the human battle around the Heavenly Gate Formation actually represents a feud between two of the Eight Taoist Immortals, Chung-li Ch’üan and Lü Tung-pin. Chung-li once berates Lü for his licentiousness; out of pique Lü descends to earth to help the queen dowager Hsiao just because Chung-li has already foretold the failure of her struggle against the Sung emperor Chen-tsung. This feud would certainly seem to echo that between the rival wizards Sun Pin and P’ang Chüan. But far more importantly, the T’ien-men chen episode anticipates the involvement of a far greater number of celestials and demons in Feng-shen yen-yi, the first full-blown military romance of single authorship. This episode (given identically in Pei-Sung chih-chuan and Yang-chiafu) is of further great interest in that a more terse account of the same story is found in Tung-yu chi, a book about the Eight Immortals that now form part of the omnibus volume Ssu yu chi but enjoyed an independent existence during the Ming. Its earliest extant edition, with authorship attributed to Wu Yüan-t’ai by the publisher Yü Hsiang-tou, dates from the Wan-li period. But since, judging by its style and format, the work must have been composed earlier,24 and since it has certainly drawn upon a folklore of some antiquity, it is difficult to say whether the T’ien-men chen episode originally belonged to the Yang saga or to the legend of Lü Tung-pin. While the altercation between the two Immortals appears very natural in Tungyu chi because it is immediately preceded by an account of Lü’s escapades, the same quarrel is quite arbitrarily introduced in the novels of the Yang family, and the reader remains in the dark about its antecedents. On the other hand, the battle against the T’ien-men chen would seem to enjoy far greater relevance in the Yang saga than in the lore of the Eight Immortals. Whatever the eventual scholarly solution to this problem, it is of crucial importance to note the context of Taoist mythology for the development toward fantasy of the Yang saga, which must have begun in the Northern Sung without the palpable element of the supernatural.

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The close kinship between Taoist lore and military romance is even more apparent in Feng-shen yen-yi. If its author is indeed Lu Hsi-hsing, as Liu Ts’un-yan maintains,25 then we can see why he commands incomparable freedom and the requisite erudition for the creation of this massive military romance. While Lu has adapted portions of Lieh-kuo chihchuan, a popular chronicle, and inherited an oral tradition as represented by Wu Wang fa Chou p’ing-hua, at the same time he has consciously followed the tradition of Ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu hou-chi, Shui-hu chuan, and the novels of the Yang family and developed the legend of the conquest of the Shang in the direction of military fantasy. With his erudition in Taoist and Buddhist lore, he would have no difficulty in making up the names and deeds of a great many of his characters, who come in all sizes and shapes, each with his distinctive magic weapons and powers. Nevertheless, with all his inventiveness, the major element of his plot— the feuding of two sects of Taoist immortals in support of the mundane struggle between the Shang and Chou—is squarely in the tradition, as is his increasing reliance on magical formations in his depiction of that struggle. The celestial and demonic friends of the Shang set up all together three major chen (the Ten-Exterminating Maze, the CelestialSlaying Maze, and the Myriad-Celestial Maze) and two lesser ones (the Yellow River Maze and the Plague Maze). In contrast to mazes in earlier works, the majority of these chen are conspicuous for the absence or merely residual presence of soldiery: what counts is their magic equipment. The Celestial-Slaying Maze, presided over by T’ung-t’ien Chiaochu, the principal deity siding with the Shang, is an enclosure bare of equipment except for four magic swords, each guarding one side of the wall. But, on the other hand, the Myriad-Celestial Maze appears empty of magic paraphernalia following the routine destruction of three of its constituent chen: it is simply a battlefield on which the myriad gods and demons engage in mortal combat without reference to any specific formation that has to be destroyed. All subsequent military romancers have adopted the defense and destruction of a chen as a standard feature of their work, but in their failure to surpass the author of Feng-shen yen-ji in inventiveness, their descriptions appear derivative and eventually perfunctory, and they have to exploit other sources of interest to keep the genre alive. Ironically, the only novelist who has turned this standard feature of a military romance to good literary account is Li Ju-chen. In Ching-hua yüan he describes

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with learned humor and vivid, realistic detail four allegorical mazes illustrative of the dangers of drinking, sex, greed, and anger.

II. Heroes and Villains Having traced the growth of the military romance till Feng-shen yen-yi by reference to one of its standard attractions, I shall now examine its other features in a less chronological fashion by focusing mainly on the romances of the T’ang and Sung periods. San-kuo, Shui-hu chuan, and Feng-shen yen-yi all present a great many warriors. But if we were to single out for each work a principal hero, then the respective logical choices should be Chu-ko Liang, Sung Chiang, and Chiang Tzu-ya—all military commanders who are involved little, if at all, in actual fighting. Starting with Pei-Sung chih-chuan, however, every cycle of T’ang–Sung romance owed its rise to its fascination with a general distinguished for bravery and prowess, even though that fascination would inevitably extend to his sons and grandsons, who are in many cases entirely fictitious. The principal heroes of historical interest in these romances are, therefore, Ch’in Shu-pao, Hsüeh Jen-kuei, Yang Yeh, Yang Yen-chao,26 Ti Ch’ing, and Yüeh Fei. Each was accorded the honor of principal hero clearly because he had already become the subject of legend, but it certainly bespeaks the Chinese predilection for a definite type of hero that the man of prowess in each case should also be a loyal servant of the throne and, in some instances, a filial son as well. The choice of a principal hero does not always abide by the verdict of history. While Yüeh Fei is without a doubt the preeminent hero of his time, Ch’in Shu-pao is but one of many flourishing during the late Sui and early T’ang. Ch’in and Yü-ch’ih Kung are equally distinguished as warriors, and judging by the evidence of Yuan drama, Yü-ch’ih certainly appeared to be a greater favorite with the people.27 And in actual history, both Li Ching and Li Chi (Hsü Chi or Hsü Shih-chi, better known in fiction as Hsü Mao-kung) are statesmanlike generals of greater stature and military achievement. Their official biographies are fuller and they figure more frequently in the anecdotal and fictional literature of the T’ang period.28 But precisely because the achievements of these men of greater intellectual powers are more difficult for the popular mind to comprehend, Li Chi is assigned the position of a prescient military counselor

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(chün-shih) in Shuo T’ang, while Li Ching suffers an even worse fate—he becomes a Taoist immortal only intermittently concerned with T’ang affairs. In both cases, a comparison with Sui T’ang yen-yi and its predecessors shows that the author of Shuo T’ang has actually pruned the available legendary material to make these two heroes fit certain stereotypes of the military romance. The principal heroes share certain basic experiences in their youth.29 We are usually told of their astral origin, the unusual circumstances attending their birth and infancy, their tutelage under a human or celestial master, their acquisition of a steed and weapons that will stand them in good stead in their years of military glory, their sworn brotherhood with several lifelong friends and their persecution by villains enjoying powerful positions at court, and their initial participation in a public contest that attracts more than transient attention. Thus Yüeh Fei is the Garuda (a celestial attribution suggested by his names).30 His village is flooded soon after his birth, causing the death of his father. He floats with his mother to another village, where he makes friends with four boys who serve him loyally as sworn brothers and comrades-in-arms. He is taught and adopted as a son by Chou T’ung (since most such teachers are celestials, the author of Shuo Yüeh has made the historic Chou T’ung also the teacher of Lin Ch’ung and Lu Chün-yi, among the mightiest heroes of an earlier generation.)31 He conquers a wondrous serpent that turns into a lance (it is eventually reclaimed by a monster in a river). He marries and goes to the capital with some rowdy friends (a recurrent experience in the hero legends, because these friends will involve the more prudent hero in some disaster), and receives as a gift a magic sword once owned by Hsüeh Jen-kuei. As a candidate for the highest honors in the military examination, he earns the patronage of an aging but loyal general (a chung-ch’en) but at the same time contracts the hatred of three co-examiners, who are all treacherous ministers (chien-ch’en). At the examination he is goaded into killing a prince, causing a riot in the capital. As with Yüeh Fei, all principal heroes are attended by companion heroes. Some of these have legends of their own, but many do not. In Shuo T’ang, Ch’in Shu-pao pledges brotherhood with thirty-eight heroes; many of these, like Hsü Mao-kung, Ch’eng Yao-chin, and Lo Ch’eng,32 play important roles in their own right. In his humble position as a cook-soldier (huo-t’ou chün), Hsüeh Jen-kuei has eight sworn brothers of lesser ability who stay in his service. Ti Ch’ing has four sworn brothers and two attendant generals who go

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with him on every campaign. Among these companion heroes, the most lovable is the comic hero of bandit origin—coarse, honest, and extremely resilient. Though he is often seen in the guise of a clown, he voices the sentiment of disaffection or rebellion against an ungrateful emperor. It is an article of faith with military romancers that though their heroes may die a tragic death, their sons and grandsons and their descendants many generations hence will carry forward the heroic spark, ready to reemerge from the greenwood to serve the dynasty in crisis. In the novels of the Hsüeh family, the sons, the grandsons, and the great-grandsons of the founding heroes of the T’ang—Ch’in Shu-pao, Yü-ch’ih Kung, Ch’eng Yao-chin, Hsü Mao-kung, et al.—continue to serve the dynasty until the Wu Tse-t’ien faction is completely exterminated. It so happens that Hsü Ching-yeh, the grandson of Li Chi, did start an abortive rising against Empress Wu, resulting in the almost total extinction of the Hsü clan. But according to Fan-T’ang yen-yi, two of Hsü Ching-yeh’s sons have escaped unharmed to continue their rebellion. Fen-chuang lou, a Ch’ing novel that can bear no relation to the work of the same title attributed to Lo Kuan-chung, chooses to celebrate Lo Ch’eng’s descendants, Lo Ts’an and Lo K’un, but their honors and exploits are shared by nearly all the scions of the founding heroes, including those of Li Ching, Ma San-pao, and Yin K’ai-shan. Because Shuo Yüeh was in a sense written as a continuation of Shui-hu chuan, the roster of heroes rallying to the cause of patriotism, mostly under Yüeh Fei, is especially impressive. Fighting against the Chin invaders are the scions of Chu-ko Liang and Kuan Yü (the Three Kingdoms period), of Lo Ch’eng (the Sui–T’ang period), and of Cheng En, Kao Huai-te, Yang Yeh,33 and Ti Ch’ing (Northern Sung). In addition, Hu-yen Cho, Juan Hsiao-erh, Yen Ch’ing, and An Tao-ch’üan, formerly of the Liangshan band, are still alive, and the sons of Kung-sun Sheng, Tung P’ing, Han T’ao, and the Vegetable Gardener Chang Ch’ing also contribute to the war effort. Little wonder that with these replicas of famed heroes assisting Yüeh Fei and his historic companions, the Chin invaders are easily routed. After the death of Yüeh Fei, the children of his followers claim our attention so that, in effect, the authors celebrate two generations of such fictitious heroes. In reading the romances about the T’ang and Sung periods, one gets the impression that a self-perpetuating community of heroes could be called upon to meet any national emergency. In auspicious times, they

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indeed serve with alacrity, but very often they are hampered by villainous commanders or treacherous ministers or both, so that, even if their campaigns are successful, their loyalty and devotion to the throne are nevertheless put to trial. Unlike Chiang Tzu-ya and Chu-ko Liang, who enjoy the complete trust of their superiors, they suffer imprisonment, torture, poisoning, exile, and at times the wholesale slaughter of their families. In the long run, of course, they or their survivors are duly restored to honor, but in the short run, they are the pawns of scheming villains determined to discredit them before the emperor. In these romances there are few enlightened emperors. It is true that as the Prince of Ch’in, Li Shih-min merits the love and devotion of his followers; but his father is then emperor, as easily imposed upon by his sons and concubines as any emperor in Chinese history. And after Li Shih-min has ascended the throne, he shows none of his historic brilliance and is readily deceived by his uncle Li Tao-tsung, the determined enemy of Hsüeh Jen-kuei.34 But for Yü-ch’ih Kung, who forfeits his life to remonstrate against the emperor, Hsüeh Jen-kuei would have been executed. He is eventually released from prison when a new crisis at the frontier requires his service. But the unmasked villain, Li Tao-tsung, is only nominally punished, whereas the innocent heroes are too often maligned and suffer unmerited punishment. Both Yang Yen-chao and Ti Ch’ing rise from their supposed state of death (a ruse adopted to avoid further persecution by their enemies) only when a new invasion at the frontier makes their services indispensable. In military romances, therefore, it is not the utterly evil and dissolute rulers that infuriate us. Few true heroes would serve a Chou-hsin, a Yangti, or an Empress Wu, and even if some are tragically caught in their web of tyranny, their plight is nevertheless understandable. It is the weakwilled, gullible emperor (hun-chün) who exasperates us with his fitful appreciation of the heroes, his forgetfulness of their past merits, and his proneness to punish them at the instance of his favorites in the harem and at court. This emperor is of course a stereotype designed to enhance our appreciation of the heroes’ dogged loyalty, but the fact that this stereotype should have arisen and become accepted by readers amounts to a serious reflection on the absolute monarch. It implies that, living a life of ease surrounded by people intent on flattering and deluding him, even an emperor of good will cannot tell truth from falsehood, patriots from traitors. While the completely wicked emperors have lost their mandate of

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Heaven and invite their own overthrow, these blind emperors usually reign with a clear conscience. They are not openly attacked, and their acts of caprice and cruelty are to be endured by the heroes as best they can. Sung Kao-tsung is in one sense a true emperor (chen-ming t’ien-tzu), since it is with Heaven’s miraculous protection that he escapes alive from the Chin camps to serve as a rallying point for all loyalists. But once he sets up his quarters in Nanking, he lives a life of indolent hedonism and shows no interest whatever in regaining the lost territory. During the trials of Yüeh Fei, Yüeh Yün, and Chang Hsien, the authors of Shuo Yüeh carefully avoid mentioning Kao-tsung’s name, and we do not know whether he abets or deplores Ch’in Kuei’s treachery. But at the same time the authors make it clear that every citizen in Hangchow is burning with indignation over the shameful trials. Could it be possible that the emperor has not heard, or that if he has heard, he could let the heroes die? Later, Ch’in Kuei and his wife are hounded to death by their own consciences; they have not received a word of reprimand from the emperor. Yet precisely because the authors have shielded Kao-tsung, his crime in countenancing the heinous deeds of Ch’in Kuei appears all the more inexcusable. On the surface, therefore, an emperor rarely turns against a hero on his own initiative unless his pride is affronted or his kinsmen are killed; the actual crime of persecution is assigned to several kinds of villains whose hatred for the hero is usually explainable in personal or supernatural terms. Hate, then, sets in motion nearly all the events in a military romance that make for melodrama. Though the principal hero (as contrasted with the comic hero) never thinks of retaliating against the emperor, he or his descendants are equally eager to clear his name and bring his enemies to justice. Hence the wheel of karma ceaselessly turns, and generations of heroes and villains are engaged in a feud. Ostensibly, the novelist laments this perpetual display of enmity. In doggerel the author of Lo T’ung sao-pei records a sentiment shared by all military romancers: Why should we keep on contracting enmity and hatred? Vengeance begets new vengeance—when will this process ever end? If we keep on tying these knots and make no attempt to loose them, Generation after generation, the hatred will never cease.35

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But in reality, he delights in exploiting the theme of hatred precisely for its melodramatic interest. From Lucifer to Iago, the classic cause for hatred in western literature is envy. To an objective observer, the envious person has little cause to harbor an undying hatred against one who surpasses him in goodness, knowledge, or beauty, but it precisely speaks for the meanness of his soul that he should do so. In military romances most villains have reasons closer to home for hating the hero, but subconsciously they are all envious. The classic case of envy in Chinese folklore is P’ang Chüan, who, as we have seen, hates the superior attainments of his fellow disciple Sun Pin. The author of Feng-shen yen-yi must be under the conscious influence of the legend in developing the feud between Chiang Tzu-ya and Shen Kung-pao, both disciples of Yüan-shih T’ien-tsun. Out of spite, Shen supports the Shang house just because Chiang Tzu-ya is leading an expedition against it. He persuades one after another of his numerous friends in the human, demonic, and celestial worlds to block Chiang’s path. By the time he meets his doom (in chapter 84), he has incited three major confrontations between opposing camps of celestials. A comic variety of the envious person is the small-minded general acutely aware of his own limitations and determined to obstruct the advancement of any man under him possessing greater merit. Such a person is Chang Shih-kuei, commander of the vanguard in T’ai-tsung’s expedition against Korea. Serving under him is Hsüeh Jen-kuei, the young warrior in white who has earlier appeared to T’ai-tsung in a dream as his savior. In two Yuan tsa-chü Chang Shih-kuei has already appeared as a comic figure who suppresses Hsüeh’s identity and claims all feats of valor as his own.36 In Cheng-tung Chang Shih-kuei assigns all of Hsüeh’s merits to his son-in-law, Ho Tsung-hsien, maintaining that the latter is indeed the young warrior in the emperor’s dream. His transparent deception, however, neither impedes the progress of the expedition nor deters Hsüeh from achieving mighty deeds, and until he turns traitor, Chang Shih-kuei’s villainy and the attempts made by Yü-ch’ih Kung and others to expose him provide some of the breeziest comedy to be seen in a military romance. Chang Shih-kuei, his son-in-law, and three of his four sons are all punished with death. But even if they deserve their sentences, their survivors are now committed to a course of vengeance. The surviving daughter, a concubine of Li Tao-tsung, soon implicates Hsüeh in a capital crime,

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and Chang Chün-tso, a descendant of Chang Shih-kuei’s surviving son, serving as a high minister under Kao-tsung and Empress Wu, succeeds in bringing about the execution by imperial order of the entire Hsüeh clan. The immediate cause, however, is that Hsüeh Kang, the unruly son of Hsüeh Ting-shan, has killed Chang’s son, the bully Chang Pao. Many an enemy of the hero, in fact, embarks on his course of villainy primarily to avenge the death of a son or a father. In Pei-Sung chih-chuan P’an Jen-mei, best known for his implacable hatred of the Yang family, also plots repeatedly against Hu-yen Tsan, who has killed his son in battle. Because his father was justly executed by Ti Ch’ing’s grandfather, Sun Hsiu wreaks vengeance upon the Ti family, and with the cooperation of his father-inlaw, the powerful minister P’ang Hung, succeeds in involving Ti Ch’ing in no end of trouble. In their determination to kill Ti Ch’ing, P’ang Hung and Sun Hsiu eventually collaborate with the foreign government at war with China. They are willing to hurt their own country in order to satisfy their private vengeance. In military romances, traitors are usually the lowest of villains. In Pei-Sung chih-chuan, Wang Ch’in, a Chinese in the service of the Liao government, volunteers to serve as a secret agent at the Sung court.37 He rises to the position of a prominent minister and does everything possible to injure the Yang family and other upright servants of the throne. According to Shuo Yüeh, Ch’in Kuei, serving under the Chin conquerors, is sent back to the Sung capital for the express purpose of gaining total victory for his masters. It is of further interest to note that both Wang Ch’in and Ch’in Kuei are described as clever and accomplished scholars; Ch’in Kuei is a chuang-yüan. As Ch’in Kuei is a traitor, his hatred for Yüeh Fei is perfectly explainable. But in a military romance, all such cases of deep hatred that cannot be assigned a personal motive are usually traceable to a feud existing between hero and villain in an earlier celestial or mundane existence. Thus Ch’in Kuei’s crime is blamed on his wife, who is a heavenly bat (Nüt’u-fu)38 prior to her exile on earth. She gives forth a fart while the Buddha is expounding the Lotus Sutra, and the enraged Garuda (Yüeh Fei), also in the service of the Buddha, forthwith kills her. For his crime, the Garuda is exiled, while the Bat seeks human form to avenge herself. In the same novel (chapter 73) we are shown a vision of Hell in which both Ch’in Kuei and his wife are suffering the worst possible torments along with other traitors in Chinese history. We are further informed that after three years

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of such torment Ch’in’s wife will face the butcher’s knife in endless reincarnations as a sow. Now if Ch’in’s wife were really a minor celestial being with just cause against the Garuda, then her punishment would appear too severe. But since Hsiung Ta-mu had already described her suffering in Hell in Ta-Sung Chung-hsing yen-yi,39 Ch’ien T’sai and Chin Feng have most probably superimposed a tale of their own invention about the celestial feud upon the older tale without seeing their inherent contradictions. If a grievously wronged individual has left no heir to avenge his death, it is possible for him to be reborn into his enemy’s family and plot its destruction. Fan Li-hua, a warrior of great magical prowess, detests her fiancé, the hideous Yang Fan, and deserts her own country (the Ha-mi Kingdom) to marry Hsüeh Ting-shan.40 Later, she and her adopted son, Hsüeh Ying-lung, kill Yang Fan in battle. In retaliation, Yang Fan is reborn as Hsüeh Kang, Li-hua’s own son, who brings death and disaster upon the Hsüeh family, even though he himself lives on to exemplify the Hsüeh tradition of loyal service to the T’ang house. Against the gullible emperor and evil ministers, the principal hero usually has no recourse except to submit to the test of time to vindicate his integrity and honor. In the military romance, therefore, the forthright hero uneducated in Confucian decorum is heard as the principal voice of protest against such authorities. A favorite with storytellers’ audiences, this savage and eventually comic hero has been early endowed with a recognizable personality. In San-kuo chih p’ing-hua, Chang Fei appears as the dominant hero, and it is Lo Kuan-chung’s better sense of historic proportion that assigns him a position of lesser importance in San-kuo yen-yi. Li K’uei appears as the favorite character in the extant Yuan plays about the Liangshan heroes, and in Shui-hu chuan he is probably the most completely individualized character. Subsequently, this archetype appears as Cheng En in Nan-Sung chih-chuan and Fei-lung ch’üan-chuan, as Chiao Tsan and Meng Liang in the novels of the Yang family, as Niu Kao in Shuo Yüeh, as Ch’eng Yao-chin (and Yü-ch’ih Kung) in Shuo T’ang and its sequels, and as Chiao T’ing-kuei (Chiao Tsan’s son) in the novels about Ti Ch’ing. In Shui-hu chuan, Li K’uei repeatedly urges Sung Chiang to kill the evil ministers and assume the throne himself. In moments of anger and humiliation, his comic successors have similarly echoed the sentiment. Thus Niu Kao says to his friends, after the riot at the capital: “Don’t get panicky. Let’s turn back and slaughter our way into the city. Let’s first kill

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all the treacherous ministers and capture Pien-liang. Elder Brother Yüeh will then take over as emperor and the four of us will become marshals. Won’t that be much better? Then we won’t ever have to suffer under those rascals, and who would still have to compete for top honors in the military examination?”41 After Yüeh Fei’s death, Niu Kao exhorts his comrades, “Our elder brother has been treacherously put to death by evil ministers. Let’s march to Lin-an, seize the traitors, cut them into ten thousand pieces each, and avenge our elder brother.”42 But it is the spirit of Yüeh Fei, forever loyal, who forcibly stops them from crossing the Yangtze River and carrying out their threat. In consequence, two of his sworn brothers immediately commit suicide rather than live on in shame: They saw that Yüeh Fei was in great anger. He waved his sleeves; instantly a mighty storm overturned three or four ships, and the rest could not proceed. Yü Hua-lung shouted, “Since our elder brother does not allow us to carry out our task of revenge, how could I have the face to live on!” With one loud yell, he drew his sword and killed himself. Ho Yüan-ch’ing also cried, “Since Brother Yü has gone, I will join him.” He raised his silver ch’ui and smashed his own head, and he, too, was dead. Seeing that two of his comrades had committed suicide, Niu Kao burst forth into a loud fit of crying and jumped into the Yangtze River.43

But Niu Kao does not die. He lives on to guide the younger generation of heroes against the Chin and to intercede for the full restoration of honors due the Yüeh family. Despite his bandit origin and his anarchic temper, he is further stereotyped as a fu-chiang (lucky general), who can survive in the battlefield against the greatest odds. In Shuo T’ang the misadventures of Ch’eng Yao-chin as a fu-chiang are even more fully delineated for their comic value. (While suffering from a severe case of diarrhea, he faces an enemy general and beats him off with his axe. Then Ch’eng goes into the woods to relieve himself. The enemy comes upon him while the squatting hero is completely off guard. Nevertheless, trousers in hand, he manages to slay his opponent.)44 Moreover, he is a prankster and buffoon, and dies laughing at the ripe old age of 120. To what extent the subjection of the anarchic and rebellious hero to a deliberate comic treatment is due to the storytellers’ and novelists’ fear of government censorship and persecution is difficult to say. But it would seem

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that so long as the principal hero pledges complete loyalty to the throne, the comic hero is rendered relatively harmless despite his outspoken criticism of the emperor and the government.

III. The Romantic Element The sons (and daughters) of the principal heroes are a privileged lot. While their fathers suffer many hardships to reach their deserved eminence, they are early wafted to a celestial mountain to be taught military and magic arts by an immortal. Or else they have inherited a strength equal to or surpassing their fathers’. They have few adventures during their childhood, but they are all eager to prove their usefulness at the frontier, despite their mothers’ apprehensions. To facilitate their rise, the heroes of an earlier generation will be conveniently besieged (usually, along with the emperor) by the enemy while a messenger, usually the fuchiang, dashes to the capital with an urgent request to raise the siege. A new expeditionary force will be assembled, headed by the younger heroes. After the siege is broken, while the principal hero still exercises nominal commandership, his son usually supplants him as the military hero because of his greater command of magic. With psychological justification, therefore, the novelist often plays up the antagonism between father and son. The father (Hsüeh Jen-kuei, Yang Yen-chao, Ti Ch’ing, and even Yüeh Fei) is prepared to behead his son, sometimes over the slightest infraction of military discipline, though he will relent when other generals intercede on his son’s behalf.45 Sometimes, however, the novelist adapts or makes up a story that has true oedipal implications. Upon returning home after twelve years at war, Hsüeh Jen-kuei, aiming his arrow at a strange beast, accidentally shoots his son Ting-shan, who is immediately succored by an immortal and wafted to his celestial quarters. Many years later, Hsüeh Jen-kuei is trapped in a mountain; Ting-shan comes to the rescue and fatally shoots a white tiger, which turns out to be his father’s astral self. The son arouses his father’s anger, especially over his romantic involvement with a female warrior of the opposite camp. The latter, usually a foreign king’s or chieftain’s daughter, plays an important role in some of the later romances, and to trace her lineage is further to enhance our awareness that the military romances composed a self-conscious tra-

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dition. In San-kuo Lady Chu-yung, Meng Huo’s wife, is the only woman to participate in a battle, though Liu Pei’s third wife is distinguished for her martial temper. The female warriors do not play a big role in Fengshen yen-yi either, but there is one minor heroine who anticipates the more romantic ladies to come. Princess Lung-chi, a celestial exiled on earth, captures the enemy general Hung Chin. We know nothing of his age and appearance and there are no indications that they are enamored of each other. When he is about to be executed, however, the Old Man in the Moon (Yüeh-ho Lao-jen) descends and announces his predestined marriage to the princess. Lung-chi reluctantly agrees. The episode appears very crude and bears no comparison to similar episodes in later romances. The T’ien Hu episode was a late addition to the Shui-hu chuan and may have been composed after the publication of Feng-shen yen-yi. Ch’iung-ying, the foster daughter of T’ien Hu’s uncle, throws pellets with deadly precision, and so does the Featherless Arrow Chang Ch’ing. Their marriage is foretold in dreams, and the two duly fall in love at first sight. With her help, Chang Ch’ing infiltrates the enemy camp as a doctor’s brother, and Ch’iung-ying is only too happy to kill her evil foster father and the rebel chief. Many love episodes in later military romances show the influence of this tale. In Feng-shen yen-yi we find an amatory episode of the comic variety that serves as a definite link between Shui-hu chuan and later romances. In Shui-hu, Wang Ying the Short-Legged Tiger (Ai-chiao hu) is short and lecherous. He is captured in battle by Hu San-niang and eventually married to her. In Feng-shen yen-yi, T’u-hsing Sun is a dwarf barely over four feet tall and eager to get married to his commander’s daughter, Teng Shan-yü. Though her father has earlier granted him permission to marry her, he nevertheless has to apply force to consummate his marriage because Shan-yü finds the prospect of being married to a dwarf highly repugnant. In Hsüeh Ting-shan cheng-hsi, Tou I-hu (One-Tiger Tou), a three-foot dwarf, sees Hsüeh Chin-lien on the battlefield and instantly falls in love. Like Wang Ying, he is originally a bandit, and like T’u-hsing Sun, he can vanish and travel below ground. He, too, proves to be an unwelcome suitor. To complicate matters, a fellow dwarf, Ch’in Han (the grandson of Ch’in Shu-pao) falls in love with a foreign princess while in battle. His specialty is to fight while hovering in the air. The two dwarfs eventually manage to have a double wedding. If it affords some comic diversion to have a dwarf marry a beautiful girl (the Aphrodite–

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Hephaestus myth), it is even more fun to have two amorous dwarfs wooing their ladies. Many military romancers innovate in this mechanical fashion. But the female warrior is far more often the wooer than the wooed. Judging by her best-known exemplars, she has studied under a female celestial since early childhood and is in command of greater magical power than the man she is destined to marry. As a barbarian, she is unashamed in her pursuit of love and unhindered by the kind of moral scruples that would beset a Chinese girl. While impressed by her beauty and power, the object of her love is usually too shocked to want to acknowledge his interest. The romancers consciously exploit this love situation as a clash between two ways of life. That the female warrior should have gradually gained ascendancy appears inevitable when one realizes that each romancer, while inheriting the formulas from his predecessors, was also obliged to depart from the familiar and offer something new. Already in Feng-shen yen-yi, Chiang Tzu-ya warns his generals, “In battle you should exercise special caution against three types of opponents: Taoist priests, monks, and women. These three types of warriors, if they do not belong to heretical sects, usually command magic arts. Since they rely on such arts, you will certainly be injured if you are not careful.”46 In a romance where most warriors have to rely on magical arts to excel, this warning is perhaps unnecessary, but even there these three types depart from the norm of an armored male warrior who may or may not use magic. To these three categories Chiang Tzu-ya should perhaps have added the child or juvenile warrior whose small size belies his superhuman strength or magical prowess. In point of time, the female warrior first gains prominence in the saga of the Yang family. Yang Yeh’s widow, She T’ai-chün or Yü T’ai-chün, is herself a mighty warrior and accompanies her family on many expeditions during her long life.47 By the time Yang Yen-chao commands his first expedition against the Liao, all of his six brothers have either died or withdrawn (although his fifth brother occasionally leaves his monastery on Mt. Wu-t’ai to help him) and he has to count on the female members of his family to destroy the T’ien-men chen. Luckily, during this as during his second expedition against the Liao, several ladies proficient in the martial arts join the family (including two as his wives),48 and the Yang women become even more formidable as a fighting team. After the death of Yenchao, as we have seen, twelve widows launch a victorious campaign against

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the Ta-ta Kingdom. In P’ing-nan, when Ti Ch’ing is beleaguered by Nung Chih-kao, the Yang family, composed mainly of women, twice come to his rescue. The second expedition is led by a young girl named Yang Chinhua. She is assisted by Lung-nü, a hideous kitchen maid only three feet in height. Since female warriors are usually handsome, this dwarf adds another twist to the formula. Upon the conclusion of the campaign, she is ordered by the emperor to marry Wei Hua, a nine-foot-tall retainer of the Yang family who has also distinguished himself in battle.49 Thanks mainly to her colorful presence on the Chinese operatic stage, by far the most famed of the Yang women is Mu Kuei-ying.50 But in neither Yang-chia-fu nor Pei-Sung chih-chuan is she too colorful or important, though in her determined pursuit of Yang Tsung-pao, the handsome son of Yang Yen-chao, she rightly appears as an archetypal figure of consequence to subsequent military romances. Early taught by a goddess (shen-nü) in archery and in the use of flying swords, she is the daughter of a chieftain in possession of two pieces of Dragon-Subduing Wood (hsianglung mu). She instantly falls in love with Tsung-pao when he comes on a mission to obtain the wood, which is indispensable for the purpose of slaying the mighty Liao warrior Hsiao T’ien-tso, a dragon in disguise. Tsungpao agrees to marriage with alacrity, but when he goes back to report the news, the infuriated Yang Yen-chao orders his execution. He relents somewhat only when his own mother intercedes for the grandson’s life; still Tsung-pao is put in prison. Soon after, Yen-chao faces Mu Kuei-ying in battle and is captured. Realizing the importance of obtaining the wood, he gives his consent to the marriage, and the new daughter-in-law soon distinguishes herself in the battle against the T’ien-men chen. In the sequels to Shuo T’ang we have several instances of the infatuated foreign princess. On his expedition against a northern state, Lo T’ung encounters Princess T’u Lu, daughter of its prime minister, who falls madly in love. But since she has earlier killed his younger brother, Lo T’ung hates the girl, although he swears a false oath of love (all such oaths are eventually fulfilled, as in the Indian epics, the Maha¯bha¯rata and the Ra¯ma¯yana)51 in order to secure her help to overturn her country. T’u Lu gladly turns traitor to her own country, and upon its pacification, Emperor T’ai-tsung and the foreign king are equally happy to see the handsome warrior marry the princess. But on their wedding night, Lo T’ung denounces her not only for her murder of his brother but also for her unfilial and unpatriotic behavior:

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Harlot, as a subject of your king beholden to his bounty, instead of returning his kindness, you shamelessly ran away from the battlefield to a deserted mountain in order to plight troth with me. In doing so, you have shamed your family—this is filial impiety. You opened wide the gates of the pass to let our troops trample upon your camps. You are a traitor to your country—this is the reverse of loyalty.52

Put to shame, the princess kills herself. As punishment for spurning the love of a selfless princess, Lo T’ung is forced to marry a demented girl of utter repulsiveness. But the author hates to carry a practical joke too far; on her wedding night, she is transformed into a beauty. Fan Li-hua, perhaps the most famous of all female warriors in Chinese fiction, is also the most determined wooer. Hsüeh Ting-shan has earlier aroused the passion of two female warriors of magic skill and married them, to the subsequent consternation of his father.53 Now at Hanchiang Pass, Ting-shan encounters the magic might of Fan Li-hua, who has been told by her celestial teacher that this man is her predestined husband. Already betrothed to Yang Fan, Li-hua feels all the more reason to secure her happiness and is infinitely patient with her stubborn lover. She liberates him three successive times on his false word of promise. Because they oppose her union with Ting-shan, Li-hua unintentionally kills her father in a fight and slays her two brothers in self-defense. On their wedding night, therefore, Ting-shan is even more self-righteous than Lo T’ung. He draws his sword to avenge her father and brothers. Not easily abashed, however, Li-hua fights back. Eventually Ting-shan repudiates her, and she has to pretend death to earn his love and retaliate against his repeated acts of humiliation. Li-hua’s courtship of her husband is the most interesting long episode in Cheng-hsi, a sequel to Shuo T’ang hou-chuan and almost certainly by the same author. Having played several variations on the theme of a female warrior in love, he has deliberately drawn a most complicated case of courtship for the reader’s enjoyment. Even in the story of Princess T’u Lu, the crude melodrama opposing instinctive passion to Confucian honor is redeemed by irony. If her determination to stake everything for love is highly repugnant to Lo T’ung’s Confucian sensibility, she is at least trusting and honest, whereas the Chinese hero has stooped to expediency and proved to be false. In the story of Fan Li-hua, the conflict between

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passion and honor is taken less seriously. There is a suggestion that Ting-shan rejects her not because of her disloyal and unfilial behavior but because she is his superior as a warrior and he finds it difficult to adjust his sense of male superiority to this reality. Whereas Hsüeh Jen-kuei has objected to his son’s two earlier marriages, he is eager to have a daughterin-law of Li-hua’s unsurpassed might to facilitate his conquest of the Hami. This paternal pressure Ting-shan also resents. His stubbornness is therefore quite understandable. A proud and fascinated male at first shocked by the amorality of a determined pursuer and later won over by her repeated proofs of devotion, Ting-shan is almost the hero of a comedy of manners. The foreign princess in love receives an even more memorable embodiment in the novels about Ti Ch’ing. His twin sons, Ti Lung and Ti Hu, both marry magical warriors of the opposite camp, but coming as late as he does in the tradition of the military romance, the hero Ti Ch’ing has himself become an object of romantic attention. His light of love is Princess Sai-hua (or Pa-pao Kung-chu). On his expedition against the Hsi Liao, Ti Ch’ing has followed his blundering vanguard into the Shan-shan Kingdom,54 which is at peace with China. He must take pass after pass until he encounters the princess. They fall in love at first sight, and after due complications, they are married. But Ti Ch’ing cannot long stay at a foreign court when it is his mission to pacify the Hsi Liao. One morning, pretending to go on a hunting trip, he escapes, but the princess, then already pregnant, soon overtakes him. He gives her the real reasons for leaving her in precipitate haste; she understands and lets him go. Unlike Lo T’ung and Hsüeh Ting-shan, who denounce their wives for their betrayal of Confucian principles, Ti Ch’ing is truly torn between love for his wife and duty to his country. Though she possesses great magical powers and resembles Fan Li-hua in other superficial respects, Princess Sai-hua is far more distinguished for her humanity. In observing an old formula, the author of P’ing-hsi has discovered genuine tenderness between a Chinese general and his princess-wife.

I V. T h e Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n o f a G e n r e In the preceding sections, I have dealt with the salient features of the military romance and shown that, while these features persist from earlier to

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later romances, they tend to be modified, in accordance with the felt need to vary old formulas and introduce new sources of interest. These innovations either refine, exaggerate, or render more comic a received plot situation. The generic structure of the military romance remains intact, however, so long as the other elements of the plot are properly subordinate to the campaigns and do not supplant them as the main source of entertainment. In Shui-hu chuan, Pei-Sung chih-chuan, Yang-chia-fu, Fengshen yen-yi, and Shuo Yüeh (Chin Feng’s preface dated 1744), we feel that the authors are properly serious about the conventions of the military romance. Even in Shuo Yüeh, the comic hero is within bounds, and scenes of magic warfare are described with due seriousness. In Shuo Tang (preface by Ju-lien chü-shih dated 1736) and its sequels (composed during the Ch’ien-lung period), however, we begin to detect the note of burlesque. There are scenes that unmistakably treat war as a joke, which is a different thing from comic embellishment of a battle scene. By the Chia-ch’ing period, at least in Wan-hua lou and P’ing-hsi, the legend of Ti Ch’ing is so well plotted that the campaigns themselves definitely occupy a subordinate place. I have earlier referred to the comic treatment of certain conventions and episodes to be seen in Shuo T’ang and Shuo T’ang hou-chuan. While a certain buoyant heroism sustains the comedy of Hsüeh Jen-kuei’s eastern expedition, other episodes betray intentional levity. The impression is reinforced when we compare Shuo T’ang and Sui-shih yi-wen in their treatment of Ch’in Shu-pao and his companion heroes. (For our purposes, the question of whether the author of Shuo T’ang also used Sui T’ang yen-yi as a major source is immaterial, since Ch’u Jen-hu has apparently incorporated the whole Sui-shih yi-wen into his novel without any attempt at serious revision.)55 Along with the early parts of Shui-hu chuan, Sui-shih yi-wen must be ranked as one of those masterpieces of Chinese fiction that best reflect the strength of the heroic storytellers. It is the novel of Ch’in Shu-pao, and it has given him the most subtle portrayal of any military hero in Chinese fiction. (At the same time, of course, I am aware that this kind of high praise should more justly be lavished upon the old novel of which Sui-shih yi-wen is itself a redaction if it were ever to be recovered.) Confronted with this moving legend of Ch’in Shu-pao as embodied in either Sui-shih yi-wen or Sui T’ang yen-yi, the author of Shuo T’ang shows no desire to improve it further in the direction of psychological realism; on the contrary, he appears bored by it. By chapter 14 he drops Ch’in

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Shu-pao to introduce the six mightiest champions of the Sui–T’ang period who far surpass Ch’in in prowess. The first hero so introduced— Wu Yün-chao—is modeled after Wu Tzu-hsü, and the author is still following the practice of the military romancers in importing an old legend of proven audience appeal and giving it a new setting.56 But about the other five there is less of a story to tell: they are simply there with their unbelievable strength. The first three are especially incredible because they perform feats of wonder in the absence of magic equipment: Li Yüan-pa, Li Shih-min’s younger brother and Li Yüan’s third son by his principal wife, wields two iron hammers together weighing 800 chin even though he is only a puny twelve-year(sui)-old of sickly appearance; Yü-wen Ch’eng-tu, a youth of unspecified age but large size, wields a tang of 320 chin and is the mightiest champion of the Sui empire;57 P’ei Yüan-ch’ing, the twelve-year-old son of the historical P’ei Jen-chi,58 wields two hammers of 300 chin. (Kuan Yü, China’s most revered military hero, wielded a sword with a long shaft weighing only 82 chin.) But Li Yüan-pa is even more deadly than the ponderosity of his weapons would suggest. Twice he routs single-handedly the combined strength of 18 rebel kings. The second time he slaughters 1,180,000 of the 1,800,000 troops assembled against him.59 No other hero could beat his record; he is the hydrogen bomb of the military romance. When an author traces the might of a hero to his possession of magical weapons, he is still appealing to a kind of logic. The devastating strength of Li Yüan-pa is beyond explanation: he is invented solely to confound the logic of the military romance. The fact that today Li Yüan-pa remains a legendary name may lend support to the hypothesis that he had been a folklore figure even before the author of Shuo T’ang celebrated his deeds in his romance. But this theory is hardly tenable. None of the six mightiest champions appears in earlier works of fiction,60 and the best proof of their being inventions of the author of Shuo T’ang is that by chapter 42, these heroes are all dead, with the result that he can resume his narrative more or less in accordance with his sources. Historically, Li Yüan’s third son is named Hsüan-pa; practically no information is given of him except his early death. No folklore could have gathered around him. The author of Shuo T’ang resurrects him partly because he needs a champion for the T’ang house, since initially Ch’in Shu-pao and his sworn brothers all serve under Li Mi at Wa-kang-chai. 61 Among these new champions Ch’in Shu-pao is completely at a loss, although judging by the space devoted to his career, he is still the princi-

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pal hero. To compensate for his mere human prowess, however, he has by chapter 36 acquired a magic steed, and to win battles he often resorts to tricks that would have been completely unworthy of the legendary hero as he appears in Sui-shih yi-wen or Sui T’ang yen-yi. In Hsüeh Jen-kuei chengtung, Ch’in Shu-pao, now seventy, competes with Yü-ch’ih Kung for the command of the expedition against Korea. T’ai-tsung suggests that whoever can lift the gold-plated, wrought-iron lion standing by the Noon Gate and bring it before the throne will be awarded the post. Since the lion weighs a thousand chin, Yu-ch’ih Kung, tottering under its weight, barely manages to complete one round of the court: Shu-pao, addressing the emperor, sneered: “See, General Yü-ch’ih is no good anymore. Though old, I will walk three rounds by your throne and make nine turns. Your Majesty please watch.” Then he swept back his sleeves and tried to lift the lion as Yü-ch’ih had done, but it wouldn’t move. He himself couldn’t believe it, saying, “The strength of my youth, where has it gone?” Afraid of losing face, he exerted his utmost strength and managed to lift it, but try as he might, how could he walk three rounds and nine turns with it! He walked one step and he saw sparks before his eyes. By the second step, blood had surged up and squirted out of his mouth. He fell flat on his face and fainted away. Poor Shu-pao, to maintain his great reputation as a hero, he had endured loss of blood and bodily injury. In his prime, he could stand this punishment; now in his age, he had been long plagued by disease and there was no more blood for him to squirt out. He had fallen unconscious.62

Shu-pao remains bedridden after this attempt. As early as San-kuo, childish warriors have competed for an assignment before Chu-ko Liang, but none has suffered such disastrous consequences. The author, who has earlier subjected his hero to an unfair comparison with Herculean champions of his own invention, now designs for him an inglorious end. Read out of context, the scene may appear to contain a note of sympathy, but read in context it expresses amused contempt. It would seem that the author has deliberately exploited the absurd conventions of the military romance to mock his own hero. It should be a worthwhile task to explore whether any subsequent military romances were written in the spirit of parody.

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The Ti Ch’ing novels of the Chia-ch’ing period constitute the last significant group of military romances. In time the wu-hsia hsiao-shuo, whose early titles are wedded to the conventions of detective fiction, were to replace the military romance as the main staple of adventure fiction of indigenous origin among the Chinese. The yen-yi novels compiled during the late Ch’ing and early Republican periods seem to have conformed more to the requirements of the popular chronicle63 as the wu-hsia hsiaoshuo gradually took over the supernatural aspects of the military romance in accordance with its own evolving conventions. While in a historical study of the genre the place and influence of Erh-nü ying-hsiung chuan, a work of the Hsien-feng period, must be accounted for, the actual trend toward wu-hsia hsiao-shuo began with the highly popular Chung-lieh hsiayi chuan, better known as San-hsia wu-yi, first printed in 1879. That work begins with the crime story of the substitution of a dead cat stripped of its fur for a newborn prince, the future Sung emperor Jen-tsung.64 In diversifying the military episodes of Wan-hua lou, Li Yü-t’ang has earlier drawn upon another version of the same legend and narrated Pao Cheng’s eventual detection of the crime with even greater dramatic power. This coincidence seems to me symbolic of the transition from one popular genre of fiction to another. The Ti Ch’ing novels have received no attention from modern scholars beyond a few bibliographic notices and Cheng Chen-to’s short essay on Wan-hua lou.65 Because this novel narrates the early career of the hero, Cheng is of the opinion that P’ing-hsi and P’ing-nan were composed later as its sequels, though he is not sure whether they were by Li Yü-t’ang or not. But bibliographical evidence shows quite clearly that, of the three novels, P’ing-hsi, dubbed the ch’ien-chuan of Ti Ch’ing yen-yi on its title page, was published first and that P’ing-nan was published soon afterward as the hou-chuan.66 And there can be no doubt that it was because of the popularity of these two books that a third volume tracing the earlier career of Ti Ch’ing was soon commissioned. The Ching-lun-t’ang edition of P’ing-nan actually concludes with an announcement of the reprinting of an “old text” (ku-pen) dealing with the birth and early career of Ti Ch’ing (plus colorful deeds by Pao Cheng and Yang Tsung-pao), which readers of the ch’ien-chuan and hou-chuan are urged to read in order to get the whole story of the great hero.67 The commentary appended to the last chapter of Wan-hua lou corroborates the statement, explaining why the book had not been available earlier and why P’ing-hsi had to begin with Ti Ch’ing

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already a famous general in command of the Three Passes.68 For this reason the full title of Wan-hua lou contains the phrase ch’u-chuan, since normally the phrase ch’ien-chuan would indicate the earliest title in a sequence of novels. The preface to P’ing-hsi is dated the sixth year of Chia-ch’ing (1801) and the preface to Wan-hua lou the thirteenth year of the same reign-period (1808);69 P’ing-nan, then, must have been completed and published between these two dates. I have no doubt that these dates are reliable. The early editions of Wan-hua lou all carry the author’s preface by Li Yü-t’ang of Lingnan. Normally, we would have expected its publishers to entrust its composition to the same man who wrote P’ing-hsi and P’ing-nan. But while the plots of Wan-hua lou and Ping-hsi tally remarkably well, there still exist significant discrepancies of the kind that would call into question the theory of single authorship.70 Stylistically the most obvious difference is that, whereas the reported speeches in P’ing-hsi and P’ing-nan are most often introduced by the character shuo, in Wanhua lou such speeches are commonly introduced by the more literary yüeh, even though expressions like shuo, tao, and shuo-tao are also used. Moreover, in P’ing-hsi and P’ing-nan, one character often addresses another by his name or title plus the particle ah (e.g., “Ti Ch’ing ah”); this stylistic feature is rarely observed in Wan-hua lou. Li Yü-t’ang was by his own admission a man of Kwangtung; the author of P’ing-hsi and Ping-nan at times uses colloquial expressions that would seem to occur only in the Wu dialect. Even on stylistic grounds alone, therefore, there would seem to be no reason to attribute P’ing-hsi and P’ing-nan to Li Yü-t’ang. Cheng Chen-to, in giving praise to Wan-hua lou, fully acknowledges its indebtedness to earlier military romances: Fen-chuang lou, Yang-chia-fu, Shuo T’ang, Shuo Yüeh, and Shui-hu chuan. But he continues: Even though Wan-hua lou has used stereotyped plots and characters, we cannot say that it does not have its special distinction. Among Chinese hero-romances ( ying-hsiung ch’uan-ch’i), it surely deserves a mention. In several parts of the book the descriptions are excellent. Even though the author uses the old formulas, he is able to vary them. Though Ti Ch’ing’s deeds and companions are not unlike those of Yüeh Fei, Yang Yen-chao, and Hsüeh Jen-kuei, his character absolutely differs from theirs.71

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But Cheng Chen-to perhaps should not even have apologized for the book’s derivative character since, as I have shown, it is the peculiar feature of the genre that each author builds upon the work of his predecessors and varies the formulas according to his own lights. Cheng Chen-to, however, dismisses P’ing-hsi and P’ing-nan as routine romances of no distinction. I believe he is right about P’ing-nan, a short work of forty-two chapters that adds nothing to the formulas of the military romance. Though, historically, Ti Ch’ing earned his widest renown by quelling the rebellion of Nung Chih-kao in the south, the author nevertheless makes him only a nominal hero (as is Hsüeh Jen-kuei in Chenghsi) in order to glorify his sons Ti Lung and Ti Hu as warriors and lovers. Historically, Yang Wen-kuang, Yang Yen-chao’s son, served under Ti Ch’ing in the expedition against Nung. But in the retelling of this episode in the Yang saga, the Yang family had long supplanted Ti Ch’ing as the chief architect of victory (as a matter of fact, Ti appears as a villain in Yang-chia-fu determined to wreak his vengeance upon Yang Tsung-pao and Yang Wen-kuang for his own failure to quell Nung).72 The author of P’ing-nan has unwisely followed this tradition by emphasizing the helplessness of Ti Ch’ing, who twice must call for rescue by expeditionary forces under the command of the Yang family. The melodrama of vengeance in P’ing-nan also excites little interest. Since the story of Ti Ch’ing’s persecution by P’ang Hung and Sun Hsiu has properly ended with their execution in P’ing-hsi, there is no need for the author to prolong the story by inventing the new villain Sun Chen, who, as Sun Hsiu’s nephew, ineptly schemes for Ti Ch’ing’s downfall. In all these respects, P’ing-nan is a derivative work that adds nothing to our appreciation of Ti Ch’ing as a hero of military romance or as a historic general of outstanding achievement. But P’ing-hsi is a military romance of compelling interest, and it constitutes, with Wan-hua lou, a coherent legend of Ti Ch’ing from his birth to his full vindication as the supreme commander of his time. I have shown that the early careers of heroes are much more amenable to fictional treatment than their later careers as military commanders. However conventionalized, a hero’s youthful adventures and tribulations tell a story of human meaning, and it is only after his emergence upon the public scene as a military commander that his career is told in terms that would suggest the basic unreality of the military romance. All the formulas and conventions described in the earlier sections are in a sense

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designed to disguise that unreality and diversify the routine battle. Thus P’ing-hsi, insofar as it has turned a conventional military romance into something of sustained narrative interest, represents a far more difficult achievement than Wan-hua lou, which, after all, models its hero after the Ti Ch’ing of P’ing-hsi and relies to a great extent upon the legends of Pao Cheng and Emperor Jen-tsung for the enrichment of his story. Principally, the author of Wu-hu p’ing-hsi has refashioned the military romance by assigning predominant importance to one of its story elements—the persecution of the hero by his determined enemies—and by enhancing the hero’s romantic status. The other features of the military romance are still there: the female warrior, the comic warrior, the companion heroes, magical weaponry, and the magical formations. But the author has not tried to outdo his predecessors in his handling of these elements. Though celestially tutored in magical weaponry, Princess Sai-hua is far more a domestic creature than Fan Li-hua and is seldom seen in battle. Chiao T’ing-kuei, while immensely funny in guiding the expeditionary army into the wrong country, is otherwise a rather subdued creature lacking the comic exuberance of Ch’eng Yao-chin. The magical weapons and formations are nothing to be compared with what we have seen in earlier romances. Also, the author has deliberately reduced the number of companions serving under Ti Ch’ing, and none of them is really distinguished in battle. On the whole, therefore, the author concentrates on the continuing feud between the hero and the villains. P’ang Hung and Sun Hsiu are very cunning, but Ti Ch’ing, while a hero of uncomplaining loyalty, is no passive victim either. If P’ang Hung’s daughter is Jen-tsung’s favorite concubine, Ti Ch’ing’s father’s sister is the emperor’s aunt who once nursed him. And Jen-tsung, though partial to P’ang Hung, is too soft-hearted to inflict harsh punishment upon either faction. Especially, Pao Cheng, Ti Ch’ing’s civil counterpart at Jen-tsung’s court, is ever ready to defend the innocent. At once a master detective and a stern judge, he corrects the power imbalance between villain and hero to be seen in most military romances and renders the course of villainy more difficult but at the same time more fascinating to watch. With a true novelist’s instinct, therefore, the author has transformed a military romance into a piece of detective fiction. Even the campaigns are instigated by the villains to get Ti Ch’ing and his companions into trouble. Ti Ch’ing does not grudge the opportunity to earn fame and

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glory, but each time he leads an expedition, he knows that his real enemies will watch his every move and will even collaborate with the Hsi Liao government to plot his downfall. Upon the conclusion of his second expedition, he himself brings to court a key witness to substantiate his charge of treason against P’ang Hung and Sun Hsiu. Presiding over the case, Pao Cheng not only convicts the villains of their crimes but also compels the emperor himself to bring about their due punishment. At this juncture we are truly happy for Ti Ch’ing. It is the kind of happiness we feel after reading through The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, or any other well-constructed romance that has fully engaged our sympathy for the hero and our detestation for his enemies. Measured against the tedium of Feng-shen yen-yi and of the Four Expeditions in Shui-hu chuan, P’ing-hsi has gone a long way toward making something enjoyable out of the military romance. Though the author has only written an entertaining story without pretension to literary greatness, his discovery of the well-made plot amounts to a recognition that preoccupation with the stylized presentation of warfare, however well supplied with wonders and diversified by related themes of subsidiary interest, has been a costly mistake in the development of the Chinese novel. And in composing Wan-hua lou, Li Yü-t’ang has gone a step further in deemphasizing stylized warfare for the full exploitation of the kind of human interest implicit in the tribulations of the young Ti Ch’ing and in Pao Cheng’s determined attempt to bring about the reunion of Jen-tsung and his long-suffering mother. Though a full survey of the genre cannot stop with P’ing-hsi and Wan-hua lou, insofar as their authors have channeled its potential for further growth into the new genre of wu-hsia hsiaoshuo, they may be said to have killed the military romance.

Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber A Critique (1979)

Of the younger American scholars who have written on traditional Chinese fiction in recent years, Professor Andrew H. Plaks of Princeton University is clearly the best trained in comparative literature and the most ambitious as a theoretician. On the evidence of the book under review (Princeton University Press, 1976) and the two long essays in the symposium volume under his editorship (Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, Princeton University Press, 1977), “Allegory in Hsi-yu Chi and Hung-lou Meng” and “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative,” one cannot but be impressed by his earnest scholarship and his wide-ranging knowledge of literature and criticism. To provide a comparative framework for his understanding of Dream of the Red Chamber, Professor Plaks has read the major poetry of medieval and Renaissance Europe in the original and mastered a considerable body of modern criticism on the subject. But for a young sinologist specializing in fiction, what is perhaps even more remarkable is his firsthand knowledge of a large variety of Chinese writing outside his own field, including the pre-Ch’in classics, T’ang–Sung prose masters, and an assortment of Ming–Ch’ing works in the literary language. As a writer of English, it is true, he has an overly impersonal style and fondness for big Latinate terms that have not pleased all reviewers, and I for one find his studied avoidance of the first-person pronoun particularly irksome. (He habitually employs such formulas as “it is maintained” when the more forthright “I

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maintain” is definitely to be preferred.) Yet despite his abstract vocabulary and occasionally dense style, I must say that Plaks is rarely ambiguous and shows on the contrary a remarkable mind thoroughly at home in the world of ideas. Yet with all the evidence in its favor of a discriminating mind at work and of enviable erudition covering both Chinese and western literature, Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber is not a book I can recommend without serious reservations. It is assuredly a most impressive piece of work, but neither as an essay in comparative aesthetics nor as a study of the novel in question is it entirely satisfactory, even though every reader should be grateful to the author for the sheer number of subjects he discusses in connection with the novel: Chinese mythology and cosmology, Chinese garden aesthetics, anthropology, the western tradition of allegorical poetry. Regarding Dream of the Red Chamber as the crowning achievement of the Chinese narrative tradition, Plaks proceeds to show in his book how very Chinese the work is in its narrative logic and in its employment of archetypal and allegorical motives and how in all these respects it is radically different from the representative works of western literature. In pursuing this dual task, however, Plaks appears altogether detached from the human events in the novel that normally engage the reader. His lack of interest in the human dimension of Dream, and of the other novels discussed in his two aforementioned essays, may be seen as a consequence of his theoretical ambition to define the Chinese narrative tradition, if not the whole tradition of Chinese literature. A formulator of the principles of Chinese aesthetics cannot be much concerned with the concrete human problems facing the characters in a novel. But more seriously, Plaks’s Olympian detachment reflects his oversimplified view of Chinese civilization as one that sees all human phenomena in the aspect of endless change and cyclic recurrence. Why take joy or sorrow seriously if one follows the other as surely as night follows day? I am afraid Plaks himself is conditioned by this mode of thought so that in the course of his study he repeatedly makes disparaging remarks about the philosophic inadequacy of the novel in its mimetic mode even though Dream is by and large a realistic narrative. It is not the reviewer’s job to speculate whether the author is predisposed to examine Dream as allegory because he holds a particular view of Chinese civilization or whether he arrives at this view through his intensive study of the novel. The former hypothesis would seem more likely in

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view of the undeniable influence of Professor F. W. Mote, who receives thanks in the preface “for his thoughtful reading of the manuscript and invaluable comments and corrections” (viii) and from whom the author borrows the term “organismic” to describe the Chinese view of the cosmos. In his book Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Knopf, 1971), Mote regards the Book of Changes as “one of the earliest crystallizations of the Chinese mind” and the “one touchstone of what is peculiarly Chinese.” “The genuine Chinese cosmogony” as seen in that classic is “that of organismic process, meaning that all the parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants in one spontaneously self-generating life process” (19).1 Plaks, too, regards the Book of Changes as the most infallible guide to the Chinese mind, and cites it more often than any other pre-Ch’in classic. The quotations from Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Tung Chung-shu, Chou Tun-i, and even from books on garden architecture are all fully in support of its worldview. We may indeed regard Plaks’s study as a book of applied aesthetics whose ostensible topic is Dream but whose real object is to ascribe to much of Chinese literature, and presumably its entire narrative tradition, the worldview of the Book of Changes. Thus Plaks devotes much space to the concepts of yin-yang and wu-hsing (the five elements) and explains their working in terms of “complementary bipolarity” and “multiple periodicity.” Among other possible uses toward an understanding of Chinese civilization, these terms serve for Plaks as a master key with which to unlock the “abiding aesthetic forms that lend consistency and continuity to the system of Chinese literature” (53). Before we examine Plaks’s use of these two terms to disclose the narrative structure of Dream, it is surely pertinent to consider whether the complementarity of such contrastive states of experience as joy and sorrow, movement and stillness (“complementary bipolarity”), and the ceaseless recurrence of the even more intricate patterns of experience to be understood with reference to wu-hsing cosmology (“multiple periodicity”) are indeed “abiding aesthetic forms” characteristic of Chinese literature. Of the two scholars whose reviews I have seen (Frederick P. Brandauer’s in Journal of Asian Studies 36 [1977]: 554–557; Timothy C. Wong’s in Literature East & West 18 [1974]: 402–410), Professor Brandauer is the more impressed by Plaks’s theoretical enterprise, but even he questions whether “the patterns he identifies not only account for the aesthetics of Ts’ao’s novel but are definitive for all traditional Chinese literature” (556).

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Professor Wong is more skeptical and argues with reference to Plaks’s allegoric treatment of life in the Ta-kuan Yuan that “balanced duality and ceaseless alternation in a spatialized totality are simply not reconciled with a concurrent unilinear temporal flux with a clearly discernible beginning, middle, and end” (409). Indeed we may say that, despite the allegedly radical differences between Chinese and western aesthetics, every narrator, if he is to engage the reader’s interest, tells a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in and Kao Ê, though they may have exemplified Chinese aesthetics in other distinctive ways, are above all narrators with a long story to tell and could not have moved readers for two centuries without paying strict attention to the “unilinear temporal flux” of events affecting the Chia family. Plaks, however, distrusts this obvious view of Dream as a narrative with a beginning and an ending because one of his principal aims is to use the novel to prove that the Chinese mind functions differently from the western mind in the aesthetic realm. If we ignore for the present the logical concept of “multiple periodicity,” which merely complicates what Plaks has to say about the more easily grasped term “complementary bipolarity,” we may reduce his theory regarding the essential differences between western and Chinese literature to rather simple terms. Whereas the western writer is dualistic and dialectical because all bipolar opposites in his world (good and evil, truth and falsehood, etc.) contend with each other in a temporal framework, the Chinese writer is neither dualistic nor dialectical because he transcends time to posit “a spatial vision of totality” in which all dualities are seen as complementary. As a form of temporal art, western literature is end-oriented; as a projection of spatial vision, Chinese literature is not. Plaks’s formulations are certainly neat, but are they true? Ever since Lessing’s Laokoon, of course, western critics of literature and the arts have been much concerned with the concepts of time and space, and Plaks has not been the first to stress the spatial qualities of a literary work or a body of literature. Thus in his famous essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945; revised version in The Widening Gyre [ New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963], Professor Joseph Frank has demonstrated that modern western writers like Eliot, Pound, Proust, and Joyce “ideally intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence” (Gyre 9). His thesis has won general acceptance, and making due allowance for their failure to incorporate

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Chinese cosmology, we may nevertheless regard works like The Waste Land and Ulysses as valiant attempts by experimental writers to capture some vision of totality in spatial terms. Although Plaks may not have designed his theory of comparative aesthetics for modern literature, Chinese or western, he specifically links Dream with Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past in his first chapter, seeing each work “as an encyclopedic compendium of an entire tradition in a form that itself serves as a model against which to judge works of less imposing stature” (11). Whether he agrees with Joseph Frank or not, I am afraid his theory of western literature as dualistic and dialectical representation of temporal reality will have to be revised in order to accommodate such complex examples of modern narrative art as Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past. But Plaks’s theory is in far worse trouble with regard to traditional Chinese literature. He maintains, on the one hand, the universal applicability of “complementary bipolarity” and “multiple periodicity” to the Chinese system; on the other hand, however, he admits that there are very few Chinese works of conscious allegoric design comparable in magnitude to Dream and Hsi-yu chi. If this is indeed the case, then how can he see the bulk of Chinese literature as a species of nondialectical and non-end oriented art embracing the “spatial vision of totality”? Nearly all Chinese lyrical poets are obsessed with time, content to view the human situation in the perspective of mortality, without much need of an overtly religious or allegorical overview. We may agree with Plaks that Chinese myths as preserved in ancient writings are “essentially detemporalized forms of vision” (25) since they are narrated without gusto or circumstantial detail. But one must remember that, precisely because of the fragmentary state of their ancient myths, the Chinese had long assigned history a role comparable to that enjoyed by epic poetry in the West. Thus their true heroes of national stature comparable in mythological status to such western heroes as Achilles and Odysseus have always been Hsiang Yü, Liu Pang, Kuan Yü, Chu-ko Liang, and other beloved figures from the Shih chi or San-kuo yen-i rather than such shadowy figures as Nü-kua and Fu-hsi, to whom Plaks devotes a chapter. Had he compared the heroes of Hebrew and Greek mythology not with these demiurges of primordial antiquity but with personages whose deeds are abundantly recorded in history and fiction, he would not have been so easily tempted to conclude that the Chinese are different from the other peoples for their essential indifference to “narrative action.”

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As for Chinese drama and fiction, Plaks does not really believe that the “abiding aesthetic forms” of complementary bipolarity and multiple periodicity are applicable to most works of these genres. Thus he concedes that traditional Chinese drama is “often structured more in terms of the sort of unilinear, end-oriented patterns that we have associated with the dialectics of the Western tradition than in terms of the aesthetics of endlessness” (220) governing Chinese literature. He also agrees with Chih-yen Chai in condemning scholar-beauty romances for their “stereotyped treatment of alternating union and separation or joy and sorrow” (56), which makes them, in Plaks’s eyes, end-oriented and dialectical. But since plenty of other Chinese novels and stories share with these romances a dialectical concern with dualities and a proneness to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked, they, too, must fail the test of Chinese aesthetics as formulated by Plaks. So his theory is probably intended to cover only the six so-called classic novels (he has dealt with two of them at length, and remarked on the other four in “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative”) plus some other novels of allegoric intent whose thought or structure may be amenable to his kind of interpretation. We may regard Hsi-yu pu as an important work of the latter category, but according to Brandauer (JAS 556), who has published two articles on the novel, it, too, is end-oriented since its hero, Monkey, does make a real progression toward Buddhist enlightenment. To test if Dream indeed conforms to Plaks’s description as a supreme example of nonunilinear and nondialectical Chinese narrative, we must first question the appropriateness of relating the novel to some ancient myths and yin-yang wu-hsing cosmology without paying any attention to its more immediate literary, intellectual, social, and political background except for a chapter on garden aesthetics and some passing references to Hsi-hsiang chi and Mu-tan t’ing. Plaks is of course aware of the vast amount of contemporary criticism (and not merely Communist criticism) that regards Dream as a work of vital social and ideological significance in relation to the Chinese tradition as a whole and to its own times in particular. But, as befits an archetypal critic, Plaks is not interested in social and political reality and sees ideas primarily as Jungian archetypes that can be traced back to antiquity. So in a way he has no choice but to rely on the Book of Changes and other traditional works expressive of a yin-yang wuhsing mentality to work out the archetypal structure of Dream to his satisfaction. If he has to delve into more contemporary sources, he would

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rather choose the subject of garden architecture so as not to get involved in the social and ideological issues of Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in’s time and earlier. The Book of Changes, of course, has been a pervasive intellectual force throughout China’s imperial history, but this does not mean that every great Chinese writer was visibly under its influence or found its cosmological thought necessarily congenial. Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in may have been one of those relatively indifferent to the Book of Changes. Certainly Plaks has failed to cite any passage from the novel in which this classic serves as a focus of discussion, whereas conversations of a Taoist or Ch’an Buddhist character can be easily cited.2 Without claiming any competence in the social and intellectual history of the Ming–Ch’ing period, I am nevertheless inclined to believe that the kind of yin-yang wu-hsing thought that serves Plaks as a tool for the study of the novel’s structure had lost its intellectual potency long before the eighteenth century; it had perhaps even forfeited a large measure of its social respectability because of its commercial exploitation by geomancers, quacks, and fortune-tellers, who always appear as disreputable characters in Ming–Ch’ing fiction despite or rather because of their habitual resort to wu-hsing terminology. Li Ju-chen, quite unlike Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, does often cite the Book of Changes in his novel Ching-hua yuan as a work of the highest moral authority, but this does not prevent him from attacking the geomancers in the harshest terms through the mouths of the Wu brothers in the Country of Gentlemen episode. If one does for Ching-hua yuan what Plaks has done for Dream, I suppose one could find the ideas of yin-yang and wu-hsing playing a part in the aesthetic structuring of the novel. But I would think such ideas could have become aesthetic counters for the scholar-novelists to play with because they had never claimed the kind of moral authority enjoyed by the Confucian concepts of chung hsiao chieh i in society at large. In Ming–Ch’ing fiction, paragons of filial piety and wifely chastity are always praised because they exemplify two of the cardinal virtues upon which society is built. Even during the May Fourth period champions of the New Culture would denounce hsiao and chieh for their still potent social authority, but no one would feel a comparable indignation against the notions of yin-yang and wu-hsing in view of their dwindling influence and utility. Plaks has me in mind when he refutes the notion that “Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in is only playing a literati game . . . when he injects hints of yin-yang and five-elements correspondences into his text” (213–214). But

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even if “the sum total of all such hints and correspondences does add up to a certain dimension of meaning,” I would argue it remains a playful dimension if one does not go all the way with Plaks in seeing all the paired concepts implicit in the plot of the novel, such as movement and stillness, joy and sorrow, elegance and baseness, as evidence of the author’s conscious application of the bipolar mode of yin-yang thought.3 Plaks’s own patient unfolding of that dimension of meaning with reference to the wuhsing implications of the names and careers of four of the major characters—Chia Pao-yü (earth), Lin Tai-yü (wood), Hsüeh Pao-ch’ai (metal), Wang Hsi-feng (fire)—actually leaves one more than a little skeptical regarding the utility of the wu-hsing system as a serious instrument of literary analysis. On Plaks’s own showing, the meanings of the constituent terms of that system are so imprecise and changeable (“ceaseless alternation from term to term, mutual implication of opposites, and infinite overlapping of axes or cycles” [6]) that any critic using the wu-hsing terminology must be quite arbitrary in his elaborate working out of a particular narrative structure. One wonders if Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, great literary artist that he was, could have used the wu-hsing system of correspondences in a systematic and coherent manner as Plaks would have us believe. What is readily apparent is his extensive use of traditionally sanctioned bipolar terms (such as chin-yü and ts’ao-mu) for the symbolic and allegoric enrichment of his narrative. At the mimetic level, the whole novel is surely built upon the vast contrast between the virtuous maidens of the Ta-kuan Yuan and the sensual men of the Chia clan living outside it. The famous saying of the boy Pao-yü quoted in chapter 2, to the effect that girls are made of water and men of mud, a saying known to every Chinese reader, is curiously not mentioned by Plaks, probably because its simple adoption of only two of the wu-hsing terms to underscore the purity of one group and the grossness of the other runs counter to his far more complex scheme of complementary correspondences. Plaks’s study of the narrative structure of Dream in terms of yin-yang wu-hsing correspondences, while dictated by his archetypal approach, betrays his indifference to thought as ideology, as a guide to meaningful action in the world of practical affairs. Characters in a novel are no different from people in real life in having to face personal crises and make important decisions. Such decisions imply thought of a dialectic character since something or some course of action is rejected in favor of another. In retrospect, what happens in a lifetime may seem to be nothing more

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than complementary recurrence of joy and sorrow, union and separation, and all such bipolar states of experience, and one may indeed exclaim that “life is but a dream” or “ripeness is all.” But at the moment of decision making, few will take comfort in the thought that nothing really matters because all alternatives are complementary. Dream is admittedly a philosophical novel with an allegoric overview, but what makes it especially fascinating is that the author has invested his characters with life and makes us share their feelings and thoughts as if they really matter. To insist as Plaks does that all bipolarities are complementary rather than dialectical is to take the life out of the novel as novel. As I have tried to show in The Classic Chinese Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), the thought structure of Dream is indeed dialectical insofar as the story of Pao-yü is tested against three ideals of Chinese culture: the Confucian path of dutiful service urged upon him by his father and the Goddess of Disillusionment, the Taoist–Buddhist path of self-liberation, and the romantic path of individualist nonconformity sanctioned by the literary tradition. Pao-yü is naturally inclined to take the third path, but his spiritual nature (symbolized by his stone) complicates matters because it actively involves him in the world of suffering even while it prepares him for enlightenment. After a period of idiocy during which he is literally numbed by suffering, Pao-yü decides to follow the religious path, but, ironically, this decision also marks the tragic extinction of the most endearing component of his spiritual nature, his active sympathy and compassion. My reading of Pao-yü’s mundane career, however inadequate in other ways, at least tries to be fair to the novel in both its mimetic and allegorical dimensions. In Plaks’s curiously moralistic reading of the novel as allegory, our hero appears merely as a selfish boy socially immature and given to excessive demonstrations of emotion. Plaks actually blames his tormented existence on “his consistent reluctance to accept the fact of emergence from self-contained innocence to social maturity” (208). If his mundane career is at all tragic, it is due to “a block in perception” resulting from his “apparent failure to grasp the complementary nature of joy and sorrow” (206) and all the other bipolarities governing the cosmic process of recurrence. Plaks blames nearly all Pao-yü’s female cousins as well, and Tai-yü in particular, for their willful self-assertion, social immaturity, or blindness to the cosmic reality, forgetting that they are all but teenagers rightfully opposed to the kind of social maturity represented by the

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squalid life of most of their elder relatives, and rightfully looking forward to a life of self-fulfillment. In urging upon them the wisdom of age and blaming their unhappiness not upon their familial circumstances but upon their supposed spiritual deficiency, Plaks appears to me either curiously wanting in sympathy or curiously inattentive to the sympathetic texture of their portrayal in the novel. Far from being affirmed as a unique Chinese hero of tragic stature, it would seem that Pao-yü is actually deplored by Plaks for not being sufficiently like Lu Sheng of the T’ang tale Chen-chung chi, who, rising from a dream of brief duration, becomes instantly percipient of the complementary nature of such bipolar terms as honor and disgrace, gain and loss, life and death. If Plaks’s theory of comparative aesthetics and his reading of Dream in the light of that theory leave much to be desired, it is far easier to acknowledge his contributions as a sinologist determined to place the novel within its own tradition. It may even be said that Plaks has actually enlarged the scope of Hung-hsüeh by citing many texts of antiquity and miscellaneous works of the later dynasties as documents relevant to our enjoyment of the novel. Thus, though his allegorical interpretation of the Ta-kuan Yuan as a Garden of Total Vision may be mistaken, his chapter on “The Chinese Literary Garden” offers a useful summary of Chinese garden aesthetics that should be of interest to all sinologists ignorant of the subject. Chapter 2, “The Marriage of Nü-kua and Fu-hsi,” though largely dependent on Wen I-to, is even more fascinating as a study of certain loci classici that may have been at the back of Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in’s mind as he concocted the creation myth for the very opening of his novel. The passage from the Huai-nantzu cited on pages 27–28 concerning Nü-kua’s use of five-colored stones with which to repair Heaven and her subsequent checking of the wild waters (yin-shui) is especially enlightening since Pao-yü is originally a fivecolored stone and is subsequently reproved by the Goddess of Disillusionment for embodying the quality of yin. But unfortunately Plaks is not content to be a mere sinologist; he also reads modern anthropology in order that he may reinterpret his sinological findings in archetypal terms. This ambition, coupled with his moralistic view of the novel as an allegory, produces curiously mixed results. For it is one thing to pinpoint the mythic and linguistic connections between certain classical texts and our novel; it is quite another to equate the fivecolored stone with the rainbow on anthropological grounds and then

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confidently assign it all the beneficent and sinister significances the rainbow has assumed in Chinese and other cultures. Thus Plaks’s archetypal interpretation of the novel, at once anthropological and moralistic, appears to me highly unsatisfactory, as may be seen in the following excerpt from the concluding paragraph of chapter 4 (83): In its simplest terms, the novel may be described as the story of the sexual initiation of the rainbow-stone, from the puberty rites of Chapters 5 and 6 to the conjunction of marriage and death in Chapter 97. Despite the rich plenitude of life in the garden evoked through overlapping patterns of ceaseless alternation, a sense of uneasiness also hovers over the vague impropriety of Pao-yü’s residence among the girls, the faint echoes of taboo in the practice of cousin-marriage, and particularly the emotional excess of Pao-yü’s relation with Tai-yü.

I find it rather odd that Plaks should regard Pao-yü’s story as primarily one of “sexual initiation.” But even if we agree that the chapters descriptive of his “puberty rites” are of crucial archetypal significance, can we really speak of “the conjunction of marriage and death in Chapter 97” in terms of myth and ritual when what forcibly strikes us at the mimetic level is the terrifying inhumanity of both events? I believe it is cruel of Plaks to observe that “Pao-yü’s marriage to Pao-ch’ai entails the ritual murder of Tai-yü’s springtime spontaneity” (80) when all three are equally helpless pawns in the hands of their elder relatives. The springtime spontaneity of Tai-yü has been “murdered” long before her death takes place, and neither Pao-yü nor Pao-ch’ai is in a springtime mood when going through the motions of a wedding. Their marriage, incidentally, is not consummated until several months later, and we read in chapter 109 that Pao-yü is rather apologetic toward Pao-ch’ai that evening over his long neglect while she, not to miss the opportunity to return her husband to normality, is conciliatingly tender. But it would surely be a mistake to regard this, as Plaks does on page 80, as “a scene of warm consummation inconceivable with the earlier heroine.” The author has to plant this scene in order to account for Pao-ch’ai’s eventual pregnancy, but any reader of Chinese fiction should know that the clichés descriptive of the couple’s sexual union are strictly perfunctory. And how could Plaks know that Tai-yü would have been incapable of this kind of “warm consummation”

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had she been married to Pao-yü? Is it because she is assigned to the sphere of wood and must therefore forever represent “the unripe prefecundity of the passing spring” (79)? But if we pay strict attention to the text of the novel without heeding the wu-hsing symbolism that Plaks reads into it, it would seem that precisely because she is tubercular and flies at Pao-yü for any indication of impropriety or familiarity, she is much more passionate than Pao-ch’ai with her strict Confucian upbringing. Both Pao-ch’ai and Tai-yü are Pao-yü’s cousins, and either could marry him with perfect propriety. Wang Hsi-feng, the wife par excellence in the novel, is also married to a cousin. But Plaks professes to hear some “faint echoes of taboo in the practice of cousin-marriage,” presumably to justify Tai-yü’s fate as a rejected bride for Pao-yü. The way they behave, aren’t they really brother and sister? So they should remain siblings and not aspire to marriage. For the same reason Plaks is a little uneasy over “the emotional excess of Pao-yü’s relation with Taiyü.” But generations of Chinese readers would have been wrong if their thwarted marriage could have suggested, in words Plaks borrows from Lévi-Strauss, an “abnormal, maleficent” conjunction, a “reprehensible” union implying the violation of some taboos. What Lévi-Strauss says about the significance of the rainbow in the mythology of the Amazon tribes, one should think, has nothing whatever to do with two Chinese cousins in love. In chapter 8, “A Garden of Total Vision: The Allegory of the Ta-kuan Yuan,” Plaks continues with the theme of excess ( yin) and speaks of the Ta-kuan Yuan as “a paradise of earthly delights” (197) and even of “the danger of excessive garden delights” (198). Actually, the confined maidens of the Ta-kuan Yuan and even Pao-yü himself are not the shepherds and shepherdesses of western pastoral poetry with their perpetual courtship, lovemaking, and singing in praise of nature and love. The Ta-kuan Yuan would certainly appear the very opposite of the prelapsarian Eden where Adam and Eve go about naked, totally unaware of shame and sin. Plaks, however, cites the affair between Ssu-ch’i and her cousin-lover and an ambiguous passage from chapter 79 concerning Pao-yü’s wild behavior as proof positive that the Ta-kuan Yuan does furnish “earthly delights.” But Ssu-ch’i’s pathetic trysts with her lover, held in secrecy for fear of being found out and in full awareness of their impropriety, suggest nothing of an idyllic situation, while Pao-yü’s “unrestricted play” with his maids takes place when he is already “literally sick with grief ” (as Plaks notes on 196)

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over the several tragedies that have overtaken the Ta-kuan Yuan. Most probably the author does not imply any sexual orgies by his strong words (cf. my comments on this passage in The Classic Chinese Novel 286). On the contrary, even before tragedy overtakes the garden, what has always been excessive is the oppressive boredom of its principal inhabitants in being deprived of any regular, meaningful occupation and in being denied an outlet for the sexual energy of their adolescence. Pao-yü may sport with his maids, but his virgin cousins, the widow Li Wan, and the nun Miao-yü are lonely and bored in their state of unnatural confinement. Professor J. Mason Gentzler, in an unpublished paper, has remarked on the key word descriptive of their condition, “men.” Plaks himself sees their life in the garden in the bipolar terms of “excitement ( je-nao) and ennui (wu-liao)” (59). But surely ennui is their basic condition: it is because they are bored that they seek some forms of innocuous “excitement.” So these female cousins visit one another and chat and form a club to discuss poetry; surely, none of these activities can be construed as “excessive garden delights.” They are happy only in the sense that they are even more fearful of what the future will bring them in the cruel outside world. If the Ta-kuan Yuan is indeed a paradise, then it can only be one “for frightened adolescents, designed to lull their awareness of the misery of their approaching womanhood” (The Classic Chinese Novel 279). In the title essay of my recent collection, Jen-te wen-hsüeh (Taipei: Ch’unwen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1977), I have cited with approval the novelist Wang Wen-hsing’s description of the Ta-kuan Yuan as a concentration camp for girls. In “Allegory in Hsi-yu Chi and Hung-lou Meng,” Plaks concedes that “the most common response of the reader of the fictional text is to identify more with the temporal perspective of Pao-yü and Tai-yü (or that of Paolo and Francesca, Troilus and Criseyde, etc.), the perspective of human mortality that craves individual fulfillment and refuses to be fully comforted by the overview” (Chinese Narrative 198–199). But in view of the alarming proliferation of academic criticism in this country and elsewhere that holds the common reader in contempt, it may be instructive to quote Dr. Johnson on Gray’s “Elegy”: “For by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” Though acknowledging here and there the power of Dream at the mimetic level, Plaks appears to be a victim of his own

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subtlety and learning insofar as he has not consulted the realistic text as fairly and closely as he can in arriving at his archetypal and allegorical reading of the novel. In distrusting the common reader, Plaks would rather go all the way with the commentator Chih-yen Chai in some of his allegorical interpretations. Among some western students of Chinese fiction today, we may indeed note an increasing reliance on traditional Chinese criticism in the hope of arriving at an understanding of that fiction independent of their own cultural bias. That trend reflects partly their belief that, Chinese and western literature being comparable in longevity and accomplishment, traditionally esteemed Chinese novels must be as good as, if not better than, the classics of western fiction, and partly their concomitant disappointment with some western-slanted critical approaches insofar as they have failed to appraise these novels in strictly positive terms. So these scholars believe it would be far better to think Chinese and adopt Chinese criteria for interpretation and judgment. A graduate student under their influence, although he may not think much of the Chinese novel he is working on as his dissertation topic, will be too diffident now to voice his independent opinion, believing that he must affirm the work’s literary importance if his research project is not to be jeopardized. So he turns to the traditional commentators for guidance, appropriates their vocabulary of appreciation, and waxes enthusiastic over the supposed subtleties of that work. But the plain truth is that, as works of narrative art, few traditional Chinese novels besides Dream could be honestly ranked with the major novels of Stendhal, Tolstoy, or George Eliot, to name just three of the western giants. When the late John L. Bishop pronounced on “The Limitations of Chinese Fiction” (Far Eastern Quarterly 15 [1956]: 239–247), he was at least voicing the honest opinion of a cultivated American reader who had devoted years to the study of Chinese language and literature— an opinion, moreover, that was by and large shared by Chinese scholars and intellectuals of the May Fourth era and after. Bishop’s disappointment at least was genuine, though today his essay has been frequently cited as a notorious instance of western condescension or parochialism. The new critical fashion in the West, which prizes hermeneutics over evaluative discrimination and examines individual works less for their intrinsic literary worth than for their illustrative importance in the study of a genre, type, or national system of literature, has further abetted this trend.

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Despite his excellent training in western criticism and comparative literature, Plaks is also a follower of this trend and studies Dream in fundamentally traditional terms. When Plaks uses The Romance of the Rose, the poems of Chaucer, The Divine Comedy, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost to exemplify the western mode of allegory, he makes it clear that he is dealing only with some of the greatest poems of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, knowing full well that even while Milton was composing his epic poems, the Restoration had set in and brought forth a literature alien in spirit to the great poetry of the English Renaissance. But if the philosophical ideas and literary forms available to the western poet had changed during the few centuries that separate The Romance of the Rose from Paradise Lost even though Europe showed then visible unity in Christian faith, how could Chinese civilization have remained stationary from the Book of Changes to Dream, forever bound to yin-yang dualism and wu-hsing cosmology? Anyone even superficially acquainted with Chinese thought knows this is not so. To place Dream in its proper literary and ideological contexts, we may note, for instance, the two key terms employed by Professor Wm. Theodore de Bary to characterize a dominant trend of late Ming thought—individualism and humanitarianism. These terms would certainly indicate the diminishing relevance of cosmological speculation to the radical wing of the Wang Yang-ming school seriously concerned with self and society. The radical tide of thought, of course, was stemmed by the early Ch’ing, and Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in was no radical. But as an inheritor of the romantic tradition of late Ming drama, he was certainly enough of a humanitarian individualist to care deeply about his adolescent characters and sympathize with their plight in a stifled social and familial environment. That kind of humanitarian sympathy, particularly for young lovers—already evident in such Yuan and Ming plays as Hsi-hsiang chi and Mu-tan t’ing and in many of the San-yen stories—may be said to represent a new current of Chinese thought much more vital and dynamic than the kind of cosmological thought that, in Plaks’s view, informs the novel’s “spatial vision of totality.” Plaks affirms the perennial wisdom of complementary bipolarity and slights “the perspective of human mortality that craves individual fulfillment” for its refusal to take comfort in that total vision. But if we are properly aware of the novel’s place in Chinese literary and cultural history and of its influence on subsequent Chinese literature, then it would be entirely plausible to argue that what is distinctively

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new is its mimetic dimension of human sympathy, while what Plaks takes to be its allegorical wisdom, precisely because it represents a mode of thought traceable to antiquity, is old to the point of being stale. While it is useful to speak of Chinese literature as a system contradistinguishable from other systems of literature, one must remember that this system has never been closed, forever admitting new ways of speech and new forms, new thought and new sensibility, and, most important, the new writers of genius who have made these periodic renewals possible. The words of T. S. Eliot are certainly apt in this connection: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives: for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.” Judging by its immediate and lasting impact on readers and writers alike, Dream was unquestionably one of the really new works of Chinese literature whose appearance altered the whole order or system of that literature. Plaks’s study is directed to prove how unsuspectingly traditional or archetypal the work is in its conformity to perennially unchanging ways of Chinese thought, whereas one should think what makes it a key work of the Chinese system is that it has permanently enriched its reservoir of mimetic possibilities and permanently altered our understanding of traditional Chinese life through its disclosure, among other things, of the kind of unbelievable meanness and cruelty allowed to prevail even in an aristocratic family and of all the needless suffering inflicted upon the young and sensitive and talented. While the Communist reading of Dream as mainly a work of social criticism and political prophecy is surely inadequate in its inattentiveness to aspects of the work that spell the author’s evident delight in the tradition, it is perhaps less falsifying than Plaks’s contrary attempt to see the novel as a work fully conforming to traditional wisdom and to traditional aesthetics and narrative patterns. Plaks has failed to see its newness because he refuses almost on principle to be swayed by the emotional logic of its mimetic narrative. Actually, it is by force of its massive achievement in the mimetic mode of sympathetic narrative that Dream heralds the new directions Chinese literature is going to take in the nineteenth and especially in the twentieth century. Though yin-yang dualism and wuhsing cosmology are supposed to be characteristic of Chinese thinking, I know of no contemporary Chinese writers still bound to that mode of

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thought for the aesthetic structuring of their work. On the other hand, partly as a testimony to the legacy of Dream, every twentieth-century Chinese writer writing in freedom is for the individual fulfillment of serious-minded youth and against the tyranny of familial, social, and governmental oppression. Though we are grateful to Professor Plaks for giving us a most ambitious and impressive study of Dream of the Red Chamber, we are nevertheless justified in expressing our disappointment over his dual failure to achieve a workable system of comparative aesthetics and to provide a reading of the novel that takes into account the dialectic tension between its allegorical and mimetic modes.4

The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture A Reappraisal of Ching-hua yuan (1977)

I In this essay I propose to discuss Ching-hua yuan (Flowers in the Mirror) as a ripe example of the scholarly novel and what that term implies in our understanding of its thought and structure. Ching-hua yuan is best known for its wit and humor, its erudition and wide coverage of miscellaneous information; but, far more intrinsically, it is an allegoric romance in total support of Confucian morality and Taoist wisdom. If it is, as has been enthusiastically proclaimed by modern scholars of the May Fourth era, a satire of women’s position in traditional Chinese society,1 it is far less ambiguously a celebration of feminine virtue and talent in strict accordance with traditional morality. The scholarly mind that perceives the need for reform nevertheless endorses all the traditional precepts for women without critical protest. Li Ju-chen tries his hardest to entertain, but he sees the reiteration of conventional moral and religious sentiments as the essential part of his entertainment. Structurally, the novel in Li Ju-chen’s hands has become the most hospitable of literary forms, allowing him to express himself on all subjects of interest; yet in compensation for this liberty, he feels all the more need to make use of an allegoric framework for rigid support. If Ching-hua yuan can no longer entirely please us, it is as much an indication of its failure to break loose from its allegoric bondage as a reflection on the mind of Li Ju-chen himself,

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which, for all its intelligence and humor, is ultimately complacent and dull in its unquestioned support of traditional culture. In the West we habitually associate the intellectual or erudite novel with a critical, satiric intelligence; for all its reputation as a satire, Ching-hua yuan is not satiric enough. Before the novel is half over, Li Ju-chen has long abandoned his role as satirist to engage in a full-scale celebration of the ideals and delights of Chinese culture. Li Ju-chen, of course, is as much a scholar as a literary man. The latter label, however, is much more inclusive since, thanks to Patrick Hanan and W. L. Idema, we now recognize the all-important role played by the literary men of Ming–Ch’ing times in the making of colloquial fiction.2 Idema actually goes to the length of dividing that body of fiction into the broad categories of “literary novels”—i.e., novels and short stories by literary men— and the less refined “chapbooks.” In the first category he puts the six so-called classic novels, “the writings of Feng Meng-lung and Ling Meng-ch’u,” and indeed “the great majority of the works usually discussed in histories of Chinese colloquial fiction,” while consigning to the second all swordsman fiction (wu-hsia hsiao-shuo), most historical novels, and “some works on religious and legendary themes.”3 Although Idema claims to have made several kinds of linguistic and socioeconomic tests to arrive at his classification, the net effect of his rather superficial investigation, I am afraid, seems to be to sanction the literary importance of those works that have always commanded a degree of critical respect and confirm our indifference to so many others not fortunate enough to have received critical scrutiny.4 The existing histories of Chinese fiction, then, would seem to be both adequate in their coverage and reliable in their critical judgment. In actuality, of course, the literary novels vary as widely in quality as do the chapbooks. And even if we agree that all reputable Chinese novels are by literary men (since I do not see how we can deny their hand in the best chapbooks),5 then these same men would have to be ranked according to merit and classified with reference to the kinds of novels they actually prepared. A wealthy retired official may publish at his own expense a sumptuous edition of his novel, with glowing prefatory endorsements and commentaries by his friends. This may assure the novel’s respectability in the eyes of the buying public, but certainly does not guarantee its intrinsic literary worth.6 It is in recognition of this need for further classification that I would propose the term “scholar-novelist” to designate a special class of literary

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men who utilized the form of a long narrative not merely to tell a story but to satisfy their needs for all other kinds of intellectual and literary selfexpression. In his Brief History of Chinese Fiction Lu Hsün has earlier cited four Ch’ing works—Ching-hua yuan along with Hsia Ching-ch’ü’s Yeh-sou p’u-yen, T’u Shen’s Yin-shih, and Ch’en Ch’iu’s Yen-shan wai-shih—as examples of a type of novel distinguished for its erudition and / or literary elegance.7 Of the four, Ch’en Ch’iu and T’u Shen are undoubtedly scholars deeply versed in classical literature, but as novelists their claim to fame lies solely in their stylistic innovation—Ch’en’s happy choice of parallel prose to go with his sentimental love story and T’u’s far less defensible adoption of a terse ku-wen style to narrate the fantastic proceedings of his military chronicle. Like the great majority of Chinese novelists, they are entertainers who saw little need to diversify their narratives with other forms of discourse that would more readily convey the pleasures and concerns of a traditional scholar. Hsia Ching-ch’ü and Li Ju-chen, on the other hand, are true scholar-novelists despite their sharp contrast in temperament and philosophic outlook. They both chose the novelistic form for the convenience it afforded them in displaying their learning and wit and articulating their wide-ranging concern with the state of the society and culture they lived in. It would appear that most literary novelists, professionals and amateurs alike, wrote primarily to amuse themselves and their friends. Whatever their commercial motive, professionals like Feng Meng-lung and T’ien-hua-tsang chu-jen would not have written prolifically had they not gotten immense satisfaction from their creative and redactorial labors.8 This, of course, is even truer of the scholar-novelists, since most would spend years over a novel without actually overseeing its publication in their lifetime, while what they may have produced in the line of belleslettres and scholarship did not seem to receive as much loving care. Despite their classical education and ostensible moral intent, it would seem best to regard the ordinary literary novelists as providers of narrative entertainment, though this description does not mean that they could not reach heights of artistic excellence if they were gifted narrators. The scholar-novelists appear far less content with plain storytelling in their fuller exercise of their role as scholars and literary men. In addition to Hsia Ching-ch’ü and Li Ju-chen, this group would certainly include Wu Ch’eng-en, Tung Yüeh, Wu Ching-tzu, and Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, to name only those whose novels are familiar to all.9

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These novelists avoided competition with historians as a matter of principle because the mere recital of history or pseudo-history would offer them least scope for the expression of their sensibility and scholarship. Yü Wan-ch’un, who wrote several unpublished treatises on military and medical subjects, is disqualified as a scholar-novelist because, although his pseudo-historical novel Tang-k’ou chih is designed as a tract against banditry, the social criticism as such is fully assimilated in the narrative texture, leaving no room for authorial digressions on contemporary issues.10 Rejecting plain narration of history, most scholar-novelists would diversify their novels with allegories and myths of their own fabrication. While Wu Ch’eng-en, the first scholar-novelist in point of time, had still to adapt a received legend, the later ones as a rule made up their own stories for the better exemplification of their ideals and beliefs. In choosing the contemporary scholars themselves as the main objects of his observation, Wu Ching-tzu could almost dispense with allegory in attending to his dual task of cultural affirmation and social criticism, but even he employs a good deal of dialogue that, while inconsequential in terms of the plot, provides a showcase for his learning and wit and a forum for his ideas. In comparison with the plain narrators, the scholarnovelists appear more playful toward their medium but at the same time more innovative and experimental because they were not writing to please a large public and could indulge their every creative whim as they composed. All these tendencies toward allegory, talkiness, and playful innovation are consciously exploited by Li Ju-chen as the most spectacular scholar-novelist of the line. More than any other group of novelists, the scholar-novelists have claimed attention as thinkers in their own right. In Communist China the fashion has been to hail a number of them for what seems progressive or revolutionary in their thought while deploring what seems backward or reactionary because of their inescapable ties with the feudal tradition. Even to non-Communist readers accustomed to the terrifying honesty of modern literature, it may seem regrettable that not even the best of these novelists are “modern” enough to provide a radical critique of their society, not to say of the human condition itself.11 This is because they are so firmly rooted in their tradition that they would have felt repelled by that characteristic theme of modern literature so ably defined by Lionel Trilling as “the disenchantment of our culture with culture itself.”12 However disapproving they may be of their age and society, the scholar-

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novelists are nevertheless enchanted with their cultural heritage. Living in a world of insular tranquility where Chinese values held undisputed sway, they could not have felt the need, as did the writers of the May Fourth era, to challenge the major premises of their own civilization. Making all due allowance for their cultural conservatism and unsystematic thinking, we may say that Wu Ching-tzu, Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, and Li Ju-chen definitely shared with certain leading thinkers and scholars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a wide-ranging humanitarian sympathy and a distaste for the kind of pseudo-learning and narrow morality usually identified with the examination system and orthodox Neo-Confucian thinking.13 But even Tai Chen, the boldest philosopher of that age, did not defiantly oppose his individual thought to the tradition: he saw himself as a true disciple of Confucius and Mencius and wanted above all to restore that tradition to a condition of purity of which the two sages would have approved.14 Despite the “progressive” strands of their thought, Wu Ching-tzu, Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, and Li Ju-chen are therefore quite incapable of being disloyal to their cultural tradition. They prescribe a simple Confucian code of morals for the betterment of society and may additionally stress the importance of Taoist enlightenment for select individuals, but these twin goals have always been the major ideals of Chinese civilization.15 Theoretically, Taoism distrusts or negates all society and civilization; yet as an alternative lifestyle cultivated by Confucian scholars through the ages, it has been in the course of time purged of its subversive character and made quite compatible with a life of culture. Thus, even if we grant full intellectual seriousness to the Taoist vision of life prominent in Hunglou meng and Ching-hua yuan, we should be struck by their authors’ positive delight in the arts and pleasures of the cultivated life and their implicit or explicit endorsement of Confucian morality for everyday conduct. Whereas the modern writer of Trilling’s description is self-consciously alienated from society and scornful of traditional wisdom and morality, the Chinese scholar-novelist is ultimately little differentiated from the common man (and the commercial novelist) in moral outlook if not in religious faith. His classical education notwithstanding, he often appears in modern eyes quite unintellectual, in his childish gaiety as well as in his didactic solemnity. Aside from considerations of literary talent, if we feel closer to Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in and Wu Ching-tzu than to Li Ju-chen, it is because we sense their greater personal disenchantment with their society.

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They are certainly more bitter or sardonic in their depiction of certain senseless aspects of traditional Chinese life. Despite his remarkable satiric ability, Li Ju-chen appears, on the other hand, a person of genuine good humor truly enchanted with his culture, and his novel cannot but turn from a social satire into a celebration of that culture.

II Li Ju-chen (c. 1763–1830) wrote his novel in retirement, after serving some eight years in government and producing an important study of phonetics, Yin-chien (1810).16 The nation was then at peace, and the intellectual climate was all in favor of philology and evidential research. To judge by his novel, Li Ju-chen would appear a quite remarkable scholar of his age, actively interested in all forms of learning and amusement. He could have gathered his opinions and findings into a book of miscellaneous notes; it must have been his connoisseurship of the novel that led him to incorporate his erudition in that form. It is generally believed that it took him more than ten years (1810–1820) to complete the novel, but I tend to agree with H. C. Chang that he “probably went on reshaping and polishing the work” until its actual publication in 1828.17 For Ching-hua yuan is one of the most carefully wrought novels in the Chinese tradition. I find in it no contradictions in the story line, no oversights of the kind that mar most traditional novels, and almost no unintentional anachronisms, which is indeed remarkable for a novel set in the period of Wu Tse-t’ien.18 Li Ju-chen did not live to see the Opium War of 1839–1842. After that war, the Chinese scholar could no longer have the necessary composure and self-assurance to celebrate the multifarious aspects of his culture. It is symptomatic of this change in outlook that no scholarly novels comparable in design and ambition to Ching-hua yuan were produced during the remainder of the nineteenth century.19 When the satiric novel came into fashion in the last decade of the Ch’ing dynasty, the traditional scholar had assumed the role of a journalist, probing all signs of national decay in the major cities as well as in the provinces. The new satirist still affirmed the basic Confucian values, but he was in no mood to entertain the Taoist idea of immortality as Li Ju-chen did, or comment lovingly on all the arts and graces that customarily delight the scholar.

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As the kind of life celebrated in Ching-hua yuan has become more remote with time, the modern approach to the novel has always been to praise the portions that still appeal to our critical sensibility (mainly the comic and satiric episodes in the first forty chapters) and more or less disregard the rest. The truncated Ching-hua yuan, in the eyes of its modern champions Hu Shih and Lin Yutang, becomes a Chinese version of Gulliver’s Travels whose wit and humor are particularly directed against the traditional subjugation of women in China. The Communist critics have clung to this view, though they admit that much of the work is neither artistically satisfactory nor ideologically sound.20 So far as I know, the only critic to break away completely from this modern attitude of partial endorsement is Yüeh Heng-chün, an associate professor of Chinese at National Taiwan University. In a recent article she dismisses Ching-hua yuan for its total lack of contemporary relevance: “I believe that at a time when even readers of Hung-lou meng are dwindling in number, the general public will absolutely not want to read Ching-hua yuan . . . . This fate seems to hint that it can no longer be of service to an understanding of the problems with which mankind is concerned. It belongs to an age which has irrevocably gone by.”21 While I share Miss Yüeh’s sense of gloom that traditional Chinese fiction now has little appeal for Chinese youth in Taiwan and overseas nurtured on modern literature, it seems to me that, with all the justice of her observations about the tediousness of Ching-hua yuan, she is quite unfair in dismissing the work mainly by reason of what seems to her the discredited and outworn Taoist philosophy and Taoist vision of life. Miss Yüeh appears a modern Chinese alienated from traditional culture judging a work almost in full support of that culture. But she is sounder than the earlier critics in that she at least makes an honest critical response to the total design and worldview of the novel. In attempting a fairer description of the world of Ching-hua yuan, we may say first of all that its main plot is firmly built upon a celebration of three major ideals: loyalty to the sovereign (chung), filial piety (hsiao), and the quest for Taoist fairyhood or immortality (hsien). Without going into the ambivalent character of Wu Tse-t’ien for the present, we observe that the good scholars of an earlier generation are all T’ang loyalists firmly opposed to Empress Wu. Their numerous male scions, with the aid of their wives and friends, finally succeed in restoring the T’ang house and thus vindicate the principle of chung. A disaffected scholar remotely connected with an earlier abortive uprising against the usurper, T’ang Ao

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goes to the seas with two companions, his brother-in-law Lin Chih-yang and an old helmsman called To Chiu-kung, after a deity has sent him a dream foretelling his Taoist destiny. On the voyage he eats some magic plants and meets twelve girls, many of whom he rescues from danger. His good luck and good deeds demonstrate without a doubt that he is one of the elect, and by the time he reaches the island of Little P’eng-lai,22 he leaves family and friends behind to become a candidate for fairyhood. His dejected daughter, T’ang Hsiao-shan, then undertakes another voyage to get him back. As the Spirit of the Hundred Flowers and the principal heroine in a novel about a hundred flower spirits in mundane exile, she plays at least three roles: dutiful daughter, literary genius, and candidate for fairyhood. In undergoing the emotional trial of the loss of her father and in seeking him with determination, she exemplifies great filial piety. While she is already aware of her celestial destiny upon reaching Little P’eng-lai for the first time, she cannot forsake the world until she has gone to Ch’ang-an to participate in some examinations for girls so as to bring honor to her family and prove her literary talent. Both are worthy Confucian goals, and in a community of bright girls she is the outstanding representative of literary culture (wen), a Confucian ideal complementary to the seeking of moral perfection. She takes the examinations under the name of T’ang Kuei-ch’en (“A maiden minister of T’ang”—her original name, “Little Mountain,” clearly alludes to Little P’eng-lai), thus signifying her loyalty to the T’ang even though Empress Wu is on the throne. Then, her Confucian destiny fulfilled, she goes back to Little P’eng-lai to become an immortal. Except that she has no romantic involvement of any kind (Li Ju-chen is curiously uninterested in romantic love), T’ang Hsiao-shan appears the perfect heroine enjoying the best of the two worlds. To judge by the fate of T’ang Ao and T’ang Hsiao-shan, the Taoist ideal of hsien is obviously preferred to the Confucian goals of moral endeavor in that it guides a person to his ultimate transcendence of this world. But the novel as a whole clearly gives the impression that the Taoist and Confucian paths are equally admirable. The antagonism of the two systems, so very noticeable in Hung-lou meng, is resolved in the sense that they call for the same kind of moral preparation. Though in some allegoric chapters the author tries hard to imitate Hung-lou meng and depict the world as a vale of tears, his genial good humor belies any notion that to become a Taoist adept is to be awakened to the sufferings of the world. The

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world is a pretty good place in which to live, and to become a Taoist immortal is ultimately a matter of grace or extraordinary good luck. No amount of religious training can help you if you are not already among the elect; and if you are not, you may as well enjoy the good life your literary and moral education entitles you to. Quite unlike the three main pilgrims of Hsi-yu chi, each allegorizing one part of the human personality, the three voyagers in the first part of Ching-hua yuan, with their differing personal backgrounds, share so much of the kindness, generosity, and good humor of the author that spiritually they are on a par with one another. Lin Chih-yang could have every right to become a fairy, as I shall demonstrate later; yet he remains a merchant, happy with his domestic life and business career. To Chiu-kung, the old helmsman, has voyaged around the world so many times that he has acquired a kind of patriarchal wisdom. He is in one sense almost a coeval with the Yellow Emperor and certainly enjoys the free and easy wandering of Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu.23 And yet when he partakes of some magic plant that, in T’ang Ao’s case, prepares him for fairyhood, he contracts a severe case of diarrhea instead. This means that he is disqualified for fairyhood. As the father of the principal heroine, T’ang Ao is privileged to become an adept in order to lead the way for his daughter, but one cannot say that he is morally superior to his companions. As the elect leave the world, they inflict upon their relatives and friends the pain of separation that time will assuage. This pain should also lead them to an awareness that no joy is lasting and that sooner or later good things will come to an end. Li Ju-chen really has no quarrel with the world except that it is ultimately insubstantial and unreal. When Yen Tzu-hsiao, a girl of knightly temper and magic prowess, decides to accompany T’ang Kuei-ch’en on her last voyage, the latter warns her that she may not return to the world in the event her father has chosen the path of renunciation. Tzu-hsiao’s answer puts the author’s Taoist wisdom in a nutshell: From a strictly human point of view, it is best that you bring back your father. Reunion of husband and wife, father and daughter— such fulfillment of natural human affections is a legitimate goal to strive for in this human life. But, according to my way of thinking, after such a reunion, then what? After such a happy gathering, what next? Several decades pass, and everything ultimately comes to naught. When the time comes, who can escape the desolate grave? In wanting to accompany you this time, I am seized by another

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thought. I only wish that your father refuses to come back so that not only you can leave the world of red dust, but I also can escape the bitter sea of life.24

Death is the final parting; for the sake of forestalling the inevitable end, one may want to leave the world early to become a hsien. But of the hundred girls, only two choose the Taoist path: the world is a happy place if one does one’s duty, as in T’ang Kuei-ch’en’s final injunction to her younger brother Hsiao-feng: You are not a child anymore, so I don’t have to admonish you. In a word, when at home, you must be filial; when serving as an official, you must be loyal to your emperor. Whatever happens, all that matters is that you have no reason to feel ashamed of yourself when you look up and look down. Always keep in mind heaven and earth, and your sovereign and parents: this is all you have to worry about all your life.25

Though she elects to become an immortal, she is as fully appreciative of the importance of ethical Confucian endeavor. Both kinds of life are admirable and, for those living in this world, if they have no reason to be ashamed before heaven and earth, there is so much joy besides, as the novel abundantly illustrates with the three male voyagers on their first voyage and the hundred girls in festival union after their examination. Throughout the novel the author stresses the importance of chung and hsiao. In comparison, the two other Confucian virtues commonly celebrated in Chinese fiction, i (selfless friendship) and chieh (chastity), receive much less attention. Possibly, as a masculine virtue, i is not strictly applicable to the world of girls. Yen Tzu-hsiao, as we have seen, accompanies T’ang Kuei-ch’en to Little P’eng-lai. Three of the brightest girls from abroad—Chih Lan-yin, Lu Tzu-hsüan (T’ing-t’ing), and Li Hung-wei (Hung-hung)—volunteer to serve as her ministers when Yin Jo-hua, the heir apparent to the Kingdom of Women (Nü-erh Kuo), flies home to assume her throne.26 But while offering friendship, these four girls are also seeking personal liberation or achievement, so the element of self-sacrifice implicit in a deed of friendship is missing. Chastity is not an issue, since all the heroines are virtuous and most of them remain unmarried until the last few chapters. Still, it is somewhat

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disturbing that in these chapters the author should feel the need to endorse, however perfunctorily, the extreme course of wifely constancy— a widow’s suicide. During the final campaign against Wu Tse-t’ien, many young heroes perish in the magic formations presided over by the Wu brothers, who are trusted kinsmen of the empress. Six young widows immediately commit suicide to join their husbands, though the author assures us none of these is either pregnant or a mother. Before the campaign starts, the young heroes agree to take their wives along so that “in case of a disaster, rather than suffer the torture and punishment of the Wu brothers, it would be better to have whole families commit suicide so as to ensure a spotless name and preserve integrity (chieh).”27 The reasoning is sound: the families cannot be left behind when the young heroes have turned rebels. But in the actual campaign, even if their husbands have fallen, these six young widows are in no danger of being seized by the Wu brothers: the rebels are winning all along and each formation is destroyed with remarkably little fuss. There would seem to be no reason for their suicide unless it was the author’s deliberate intention to seize the opportunity to celebrate the virtue of chieh. It is true that Li Ju-chen has repeatedly hinted at an early death as a fate reserved for the hundred and that Shih Lan-yen, a girl noted for her sagacity, has predicted a short life for four of the suicides, on the strength of their physiognomy. By seeing to the death of ten girls—four others perish in battle—the author has at least partially fulfilled his pledge. But since he cannot begin to indicate the fate of most of the surviving girls, we wonder why he wants to spoil the happy atmosphere of his romance by introducing these six suicides. We are not affected by their death since none of them has an individual story to tell; we are only irritated by this ritualistic celebration of chieh.

III Though far more moralistic than most critics take it to be, Ching-hua yuan would not enjoy a reputation for erudition if it did not include a wide range of information on all matters of interest to the traditional scholar. This aspect of the novel, however, is difficult to discuss without taking up substantial issues with the author on points of scholarship and interpretation. Suffice it to say that, far more bookishly than the preceding scholarnovelists, Li Ju-chen digresses on such subjects as the classics and their

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commentaries, philology, phonetics, poetry, music, astrology, medicine, arithmetic, calligraphy, painting, gardening, chess, go, and many other kinds of parlor and wine games. Thus in the course of the novel we find a large number of prescriptions, usually given in response to an emergency. All the ingredients are easily obtainable at an herb pharmacy or the marketplace. In view of the incompetence of Chinese-style doctors, so often ridiculed in fiction, and of the good doctors’ habit of passing on their experience only to their students, Li Ju-chen must have intended his prescriptions as a public service.28 But if the author fully exploited the looseness of the novelistic form for the inclusion of all kinds of digression, at the same time he delighted in the fabrication of an allegorical and fanciful piece of fiction to accommodate his needs as a scholar and moralist. Of many big, sprawling Chinese novels, one can say that precisely because their structure is highly episodic, their authors felt the need to use an allegoric or religious framework to bind the episodes together. It is the peculiar triumph of Li Ju-chen as a scholar-novelist that he is able to loosen up the episodic structure to the point that nearly all episodes unrelated to the allegoric design appear uneventful: the characters themselves neither suffer nor act as they make amusing comments on foreign customs or convey their zest for life and learning in animated conversation. Ching-hua yuan could have moved in the direction of the Swiftian satire or the Peacockian novel if it were not designed to be an allegoric romance about the hundred flower spirits. But as a connoisseur of the novel, Li Ju-chen could not help constructing a large-scale allegory in direct competition with the authors of Shui-hu chuan, Hsi-yu chi, and Hung-lou meng, even if he had to incur the risk of introducing an unmanageable cast of characters and of injecting a note of sentimental religiosity that is at odds with his true bent for comedy and humor. In many Chinese novels we find that a piece of allegoric machinery sets in motion a large-scale human action but does not necessarily advance the aims of true allegory. In Shui-hu chuan a certain official releases 108 spirits and the novelist is bound to rehearse the careers of an equal number of heroes leading to their union. Shui-hu would not have been Shui-hu if only 36 heroes were destined to meet; yet it would have been a tidier and more entertaining novel. Having chosen the pleasant legend of Empress Wu’s forcing flowering plants to bloom in the dead of winter to start off his novel, Li Ju-chen appears even more foolhardy in literally

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introducing 100 flower spirits in human form. Whereas the Liangshan heroes differ in personality, background, and prowess, the hundred girls, being all beautiful, talented, and well brought up, are much harder to tell apart. One cannot even remember all their names after reading through the novel. To aid our memory, the author assigns all the girls from the Meng family personal names containing the character chih and all the girls married to the Chang family personal names containing the character ch’un. Some names suggest whether a girl excels in painting, music, calligraphy, or whatnot. There are otherwise few easy ways of identifying the less important girls. Moreover, as T’ang Kuei-ch’en discovers in chapter 48, the names of the hundred girls as inscribed on the white jade tablet on Little P’eng-lai are ranked according to merit. Each girl is assigned a nickname and the guardianship of a particular flowering plant. The higher-ranking girls are identified with the nobler flowers and the lower-ranking ones with the commoner varieties. In addition, the girls at the top and bottom of the list all bear allegoric names to suggest the collective virtue and talent of the hundred and the sadness of mortal existence in the Taoist perspective, as does the nickname of T’ang Kuei-ch’en, Meng-chung Meng (Dream within a dream).29 It would be idle to study the list in a systematic fashion since most of the names mean nothing to us, though it must have given the author particular pleasure to make them all up and rank them according to a system known only to him. A comic observer of genial humor, Li Ju-chen appears particularly unwise in contemplating the collective fate of the hundred girls in the melancholy tone of Hung-lou meng. The regular abode of the Spirit of the Hundred Flowers on Mt. P’eng-lai is the Rosy Cheeks Cave (Hung-yen tung) of the Fragile Fate Cliff (Po-ming yen). Hung-yen po-ming (“Beauties have unfortunate lives”) certainly seems a very inappropriate description for an immortal fairy. On Little P’eng-lai the white jade tablet is placed inside the Cry-Over-Red Pavilion (Ch’i-hung t’ing), which is itself situated by Water Moon Village (Shui-yüeh ts’un) under the Mirror Flower Range (Ching-hua ling). “Flowers in the mirror, moon in the water”—traditional images of illusion and insubstantiality found among other places in a crucial song cycle in Hung-lou meng30—underscores the Taoist title and theme of the novel. But why lament the fate of beauties and cry over their rosy cheeks if everything is illusory? The banished flower spirits are having a holiday on earth, if we judge by the merry tone of the main section of the

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novel descriptive of their festive union in Ch’ang-an. But at the same time, rather unconvincingly, the author wants to view their existence on earth as something infinitely sad, though neither the Taoist vision nor the fairy-tale quality of the romance warrants this note of despondency. Inscribed on the jade tablet, accordingly, is a general commentary by the Master of the CryOver-Red Pavilion (Ch’i-hung-t’ing chu-jen). The collective fate of the hundred fills him with “a bellyful of bitter sadness” (Man-fu hsin-suan). A fourline riddle concluding the commentary reads in part, “Limitless the great expanse; everything is absurd and improbable” (Mang-mang ta-huang, shih she huang-t’ang). We remember from chapter 1 of Hung-lou meng, of course, that, sequestered in his Mourn-Over-Red Studio (Tao-hung hsüan), Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in repeatedly reads and revises his own novel and then epitomizes its meaning with a quatrain that begins, “Sheets of paper filled with absurd and improbable words; one handful of bitter sad tears” (Man-chih huang-t’ang yen, i-pa hsin-suan lei). To judge by his indebtedness in wording, Li Ju-chen must have at one time envisioned the story of the hundred girls as another Hung-lou meng. But as he began writing, he discovered his distinctive bent for comic observation, and, while still heavily under the influence of Hung-lou meng, what he actually did was to develop the parlorcomedy aspect of the novel without venturing into the tragic realm. Yet the story of T’ang Kuei-ch’en is told with so much solemnity and false sentiment that his novel never regains its lightness of touch after its allegoric intention is fully disclosed in the middle chapters. Related to the central allegory of the hundred flower spirits is the subsidiary allegory of one’s necessity to rise above the four traditional temptations—wine, sex, money, anger (chiu se ts’ai ch’i)—that constitutes the climax of the novel. Before attacking Ch’ang-an, the young loyalist heroes have to storm four passes, each of which is guarded by a magic formation allegorizing the fatal lure of a particular temptation. Li Ju-chen reaches positive brilliance in his vivid portrayal of the weak heroes as they fall imperceptibly into the self-destructive states of intoxication, anger, and greed, though the victims of sexual infatuation are rather perfunctorily described. For a brilliant and detailed analysis of this subsidiary allegory I must refer the reader to H. C. Chang’s Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser, which discusses The Faerie Queene by way of our novel. The allegorization of this episode may seem an afterthought on the part of the author. Since a military expedition has to be launched against Wu Tse-t’ien to conclude the novel, why not enrich the narrative with

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allegory since otherwise the adventures of the young heroes, whom we barely know by name, can hardly be of any interest? But the transcendence of the four temptations has earlier been achieved by Lin Chih-yang in the Kingdom of Women episode (chapters 32–38), the longest and the climactic episode of the first voyage. So it could hardly be an accident that the author should have chosen two episodes of such importance to depict this allegory. It would seem that, while the total transcendence of these temptations would mark the enlightened Taoist, the Confucian gentleman, too, should refrain from indulging in them. As a man of both Confucian and Taoist sympathies, Li Ju-chen may have found it necessary to affirm the common moral ground of both teachings. Even in the prelude to the novel proper the fairies’ quarrel shows the bad effect of anger while Empress Wu’s arrogance in ordering the flowers to bloom is initially traceable to her state of intoxication. Lin Chih-yang’s tribulation in the Kingdom of Women has been so unanimously praised as an instance of the author’s concern with the double standard that readers may not be easily reconciled to the author’s view of the episode as one of temptation. But aside from its obvious feminist satire, the episode shows a man emerging unscathed (except for his temporarily maimed feet) from the deepest humiliation possible. After his escape from the palace, Lin Chih-yang discusses his trial with his friends, specifically asking T’ang Ao to provide historic examples to match his kind of behavior. Thus his refusal to consummate his marriage with the “king” despite her beauty reminds T’ang of Liu-hsia Hui. Though fond of wine, Lin Chih-yang, to keep his wits about him, declines to drink (on the wedding night he pretends to be drunk after only two cups): this reminds T’ang of the Great Yü declining the services of the wine maker Yi Ti. Lin’s determination not to be swayed by money and jewelry suggests Wang Yen, who never talks about money and even hates the smell of copper coins. Lin bears up under great torture without yielding to anger, and T’ang Ao compares his forbearance to that of Lou Shih-te, who, if spat at, would let the spit dry on his face without losing his temper.31 To Chiu-kung then puts in: “Brother Lin can see through all these: I would not be surprised if he became an immortal.” T’ang Ao said, smiling, “Chiu-kung is certainly right. But among the gods and immortals there has never been one with his feet bound. Formerly there was the Barefoot Immortal; in the

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future I guess Brother Lin will be known as the Immortal with Bound Feet.”32

The banter here shows the author at his best, but he clearly suggests that Lin could become an immortal if he were among the elect. In the concluding episode of the novel, Lin’s four historic models—Yü, Liu-hsia Hui, Wang Yen, and Lou Shih-te—each serve as a patron saint of the attacking troops to ensure the swift destruction of a particular formation. The author’s minute care in planning his work so that historic personages casually introduced in a conversation should be called upon to serve a vital allegoric function some forty chapters later is impressive. Yet despite the author’s loving attention to small allegoric details, one cannot say the episode of the Four Passes has added anything new to conventional wisdom, caution against chiu se ts’ai ch’i being such a ubiquitous theme in traditional fiction, including the San-yen and Erh-p’ai stories. The long episode of the Kingdom of Women, however, shows Li Ju-chen to be a finer novelist than his obvious didacticism would lead us to believe. For this episode, which encompasses not only the trial of Lin Chih-yang but the stories of Yin Jo-hua and flood control as well, is so very brilliant that it deserves a separate study to demonstrate the author’s narrative skill and his obvious indebtedness to Hsi-yu chi. Though, at the conclusion of the episode, the author almost gloats before the reader with his disclosure of its allegoric meaning, he is offering a reconstruction that does not square with our actual impression of Lin’s ordeal. We know that Lin is no prig and loves to make money, as befits his character as a merchant. In a state of danger, he cannot possibly enjoy wine or take pleasure in the “king’s” gifts. As a happily married man whose wife is with him on the voyage, he cannot possibly enjoy dalliance with the “king” when she is his tormentor and takes the aggressor’s role. Li Ju-chen himself must have written Lin’s story as one of comic tribulation with clear implications of social satire, though he felt at the same time it was in the spirit of his romance to offer an allegoric interpretation.

IV While suggesting the sadness and transience of life, the central allegory of the novel is mainly designed to support a celebration of Chinese

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womanhood, with all its beauty, virtue, and talent. The modern view of the novel as a feminist satire cannot be taken seriously. It is true that Ching-hua yuan contains episodes satiric of the cruel custom of foot binding and betrays a sympathy for women that is humanitarian and reformist in character. Especially through her proclamation of the twelve statutes to improve the lot of women, Empress Wu, who is in origin a celestial fox exiled to earth to wreck the T’ang house, appears the radical feminist, the chief advocate of female welfare and education. Yet throughout the novel she is an ambivalent figure who retains the historical taint of a usurper if not of a dissolute woman: her overthrow is the avowed objective of all the young heroes and heroines, as it was of the heroes of an earlier generation. Mention is made of her capricious cruelty, though it is not demonstrated except through the initial incident of her forcing the flowers to bloom. Certainly, if we take the novel as a romance, then she would appear in the role of a villain, the innovator of a new order, and it is the business of the younger generation of heroes to restore the old order. Perhaps Li Ju-chen could not help the historic accident of her being a usurper; but if he were really partial to Empress Wu, he would not have ended the novel with her defeat and abdication. In any event, the reforms are designed to alleviate the lot of poor and unfortunate women; they have nothing to do with the hundred girls, who are all paragons of virtue and talent, though a few slow ones, who barely made the honors list at the examination, are occasionally ridiculed for their small intellectual capacity. Even T’ing-t’ing and Hung-hung of the Black Teeth Country (Hei-ch’ih Kuo), who appear most intellectually aggressive in tormenting To Chiu-kung with questions about phonology and the classics, are girls in the traditional mold of virtue rather than Shavian heroines in search of moral and intellectual honesty. Thoroughly abashed by their display of erudition, To Chiu-kung beats a hasty retreat from their studio, taking absently a fan inscribed with the complete texts of Pan Chao’s Nü-chieh (Precepts for Women) and the poetess Su Hui’s Huiwen hsüan-chi t’u (the “Tapestry Poem,” in Lin Tai-yi’s convenient rendering), in the calligraphy of, respectively, Hung-hung and T’ing-t’ing. Eventually it is returned to them after they have arrived in China. With all their intellectual superiority, the fan is nevertheless emblematic of their character and talent, and there can be no doubt that Li Ju-chen chooses these two pieces of writing to suggest his ideal of a woman.

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Pan Chao, also known as Ts’ao Ta-ku (Grand Instructress Ts’ao), was the foremost lady scholar of ancient China. Her Nü-chieh, in seven sections, was the first of many such bibles designed for the edification of women.33 Its most celebrated section outlines a wife’s four duties (ssuhsing): fu-te (virtues: sobriety, chastity, orderliness, a sense of shame); fuyen (speech: choice of words, avoidance of malicious or tiresome gossip); fu-jung (appearance: scrubbed face, clean clothes, periodic bathing); fukung (tasks: spinning and sewing, avoidance of joking and foolery, entertaining guests). While mentioning the desirability of education for young girls, Pan Chao sees no need for any kind of intellectual and artistic education for women and, further, warns against brilliance or showiness. She agrees with tradition that a woman is totally subordinate to her husband and has no right to remarry when he dies. With all its reputation as a feminist novel, Ching-hua yuan actually begins with a total endorsement of Nü-chieh: In ancient times Grand Instructress Ts’ao’s Nü-chieh specified a woman’s four duties in regard to virtue, speech, appearance, and daily tasks. These four constitute the great principle of a woman’s existence and cannot be dispensed with. Now why should I begin the book by citing Pan Chao’s Nü-chieh? It is because, though this book narrates the trivial events of female quarters and the idle pursuits of girls, a great number of them excelled in the performance of the four duties as laid down by Grand Instructress Ts’ao. Not only is their substance gold and jade, but their heart is pure like ice and snow. If they did not obey these precepts for women and reverently observe good counsel, how could they have reached this state of excellence? Thus how could they be allowed to pass into oblivion just because their deeds belong to the realm of the shadowy and because not all of them are distinguished by beauty? Therefore, by the lamplight and the moonlight, in summer and winter alike, I playfully dipped my brush in ink and wrote this book.34

To judge by his novel, Li Ju-chen is much fonder of feminine brilliance and wit than Pan Chao would allow; but as a careful writer, he has not begun with a pious declaration of moral intent unconnected with the events that follow. All his heroines are by definition virtuous in a traditional way, and many of them in the course of the novel reaffirm by word

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or deed the precepts of Pan Chao. The example of Shih Lan-yen, particularly interesting in this context, will be discussed later. It is because of his great admiration for women’s intelligence that Li Ju-chen cites Su Hui’s Hsüan-chi t’u as a document in women’s honor worthy to stand beside Nü-chieh. This supreme proof of female intelligence is a square pattern of 841 characters, each line consisting of 29 characters. If you read this maze of characters “backwards and forwards, up and down, in squares, whorls, diagonally and in a dozen other combinations,” as Lin Tai-yi aptly puts it, you can get more than two hundred poems out of it.35 According to Empress Wu’s biographical preface to the work, which the novel quotes, Su Hui turns jealous after her husband Tou T’ao, an official of the fourth century, takes a singer as a concubine. This further alienates his affection, but when Tou takes his concubine to his official post elsewhere, Su repents of her jealousy and expresses her sorrow and remorse by embroidering her composite poem on a piece of tapestry. Upon receiving this gift, Tou is so moved by her brilliance that they are soon reconciled. In effect, then, the Tapestry Poem is quite like Nü-chieh in being a testament of a woman’s willing submission to male domination. In the novel, after proclaiming twelve statutes to improve women’s lot, Empress Wu by chance comes across this work and falls in love with it. To please her, two talented girls at court unravel even hundreds more poems than the poetess had intended. Highly impressed by the genius of Su Hui and the cleverness of the two girls, Empress Wu institutes a sequence of nationwide examinations for girls of sixteen and under in order to discover female talent in her realm, thus bringing about the union of the hundred girls in Ch’ang-an. But as much as Wu Tse-t’ien, Li Ju-chen, in extolling Su Hui as a feminine ideal, is taken by a form of intelligence that is mere cleverness, however extraordinary. The hundreds of poems embedded in the maze cannot but be turgid and dreary so that chapter 41, which is devoted to the unraveling of a great number of these poems in an abridged form, is honestly unreadable. But Li Ju-chen himself must have been charmed, for otherwise he would not have copied down these poems for the reader’s admiration. Characteristic of his admiration for both Nü-chieh and Hsüanchi t’u, then, is the novel’s bipolar tendencies toward extreme gravity and extreme levity: the same girls who in one moment quote the classics and endorse traditional morality on every count in the next utter jokes and witticisms in evident glee. What we do not find in these girls is the cen-

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tral moral intelligence addressed to the serious business of ordering one’s life: the fusion of a scrupulous moral sensibility and an earnest intelligence that is characteristic of so many major heroines of western literature. In reading Hung-lou meng, too, we are supposed to admire the heroines for their morality or literary talent or both; but they are believable human beings to the extent that they seek happiness and have life’s problems to contend with. While we do not expect complex characters from an allegoric romance, still the girls of Ching-hua yuan, by turns moralistic and frivolous, forcibly strike us with their inner vacuity. They do not seem to have any problems of their own. Even T’ang Kuei-ch’en goes through the ritualistic motions of seeking her father, passing her examinations with distinction, and renouncing the world without acquiring a character: she merely enacts the parts called for by the allegory. Li Ju-chen lends his girls all his wit, erudition, and moral wisdom to make them shine forth in talent and virtue, but they do not live. Moreover, this admiration for exceptionally gifted girls, in the ultimately male-chauvinist context of Chinese tradition, partakes more of the nature of a game or joke. Thus the author wants us to laugh at one of the slower girls for protesting the enormous amount of erudition a wine game requires: “I have studied only over a dozen classics plus Shih chi and Han shu and the more outstanding philosophers. In addition, I have read several wen-chi. The total sum is less than thirty books.”36 But we want to protest that this represents a most impressive amount of reading for a girl of sixteen, especially since, in the Chinese scheme of education, she would have to commit the dozen classics to memory, if not the other works as well. In any other novel this girl would have stood out for intellectual precocity. Along the same line of reasoning, we cannot even take seriously the special examinations instituted by Empress Wu as a means of promoting female talent. It certainly does not seem to strike a blow for women’s liberation when no adult women and no girls over sixteen are allowed to take the metropolitan and palace examinations. More of a sport for the amusement of the empress and of the novel’s intended readers, these examinations are certainly suggestive of an American-style beauty contest even though a girl’s literary talent is tested rather than her physical beauty. The successful candidates are supposed to be given honors and emoluments, but at the novelist’s behest all the hundred take a leave from the court and decline to serve. Only the four leaving China for the Kingdom of Women will find fulfillment in active government service.

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The festive section of the novel takes place in chapters 67–94, where, following the announcement of the honors list, the hundred girls celebrate together by joking and conversing among themselves, attending dinners, and playing all kinds of games. Except for the interruption of some celestials to complete the allegoric design, these chapters are almost totally devoted to merrymaking, though there are overtones of sadness here and there, occasioned in part by Yin Jo-hua’s decision to leave China. Technically, this long section is quite remarkable since no previous Chinese novelist has assigned so much space to so much talk that is totally inconsequential in terms of the plot. Chapters 81–93, amounting to more than sixty pages of small print, especially, are quite unparalleled for the author’s minute description of a banquet game that calls for the hundred girls to quote from a hundred different classics. The girls, however, constantly interrupt the game with jokes, stories, parodies, poems, and all kinds of raillery and banter to show that they are at their merriest. Nevertheless, this elaborate banquet scene has apparently never pleased the critics, and even a nineteenth-century connoisseur of fiction was moved to protest: The book Ching-hua yuan first appeared in the Chia-ch’ing period; it was highly praised in Yün-ho-hsüan pi-t’an. I, for one, however, must object to this excessive praise. The author considers himself an encyclopedic scholar and never tires of filling out his book with his learning. Why didn’t he straightway compile a lei-shu rather than write a novel? For example, on the day the hundred girls pay a visit to the examiners after the list has been announced, they gather together for a drinking party, playing games over wine, so much so that even three or four chüan cannot exhaust the events of a day. The drowsy reader wants to sleep, and yet the author is apparently engrossed in his narration. How could he be so unafraid of boredom?37

During these celebrations, the hundred girls are the prime exhibits of Chinese culture as well as its guardians. The author conscientiously attends to the hundred, but it is quite obvious that he has chosen three to be the outstanding representatives of that culture: T’ang Kuei-ch’en for literary talent, Shih Lan-yen for morality and wisdom, and Meng Tzu-chih for wit and humor. Since we have discussed T’ang Kuei-ch’en

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elsewhere, it is sufficient to note that at the climactic moment of the banquet scene her celestial enemies, Ch’ang-o and Feng-i, come down from heaven to humiliate her in her hour of glory and she repays them in kind with a fu composition filled with mocking references to the moon and wind. Shih Lan-yen (“Teacher’s orchid words”), representing the Nü-chieh tradition of caution, sobriety, and piety, is given frequent occasion to utter words of conventional wisdom in full support of Confucian morality. Among other things, she counsels her companions to do good and not worry about the future, fully convinced of the justice of moral retribution. One of the girls, Pien Chin-yün, teasingly contradicts her on this point, citing Wang Ch’ung as her authority. Shih Lan-yen gives an earnest reply: What I uphold is the orthodox truth, what Wang Ch’ung perversely maintains is heresy, and heresy cannot violate the truth. Even if Wang Ch’ung confronts me in person, I could beat him in argument. Moreover, that Lun-heng of his goes so far as to question Confucius and mock Mencius; it shows the spirit of total irreverence. What is there to say about a book like that? One more thing. If the principle maintained in the Yin-chih wen that good deeds and bad have all their due recompense is stale nonsense, then how about the words from the Tso-chuan, “Good fortune and bad depend upon the person himself,” and “If the people desert the norm, then evil portents arise”? Aren’t they the clear proof that the consequences of good and evil will always become manifest? The Book of Changes says, “The family which accumulates good must have surplus good fortune; the family which accumulates evil must have disaster in store.” The Book of Documents says, “If you do good, then a hundred blessings will descend upon you; if you do evil, then a hundred misfortunes will descend.” Aren’t these the words of the sages? Of the classics that have been transmitted to our times—the books Fen and Tien had long perished—the Book of Changes and the Book of Documents are the oldest. If what they contain is also stale nonsense, then what more is there to say?38

In this speech, which is applauded by all the girls present, Shih Lanyen has made no attempt to debate with Wang Ch’ung at all. What she does is to charge him with heresy and bolster the dubious authority of a popular morality book, Yin-chih wen, with quotations from ancient clas-

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sics. The principle of moral retribution is held in common by nearly all the professional story writers and novelists, and Li Ju-chen endorses it with an equal lack of reservation. All the exhortations of his moral spokesman, Shih Lan-yen, are equally conventional. The third girl, Meng Tzu-chih, is the life of the party, the quintessence of Chinese culture in a playful mood. She flits here and there, cracking jokes and teasing everyone. Occasionally, she sings comic songs and recites stories in the manner of professional storytellers. There can be no doubt that the author has made up this character to enliven the festive proceedings in this section of the novel and to substitute for the three male voyagers, who had provided so much fun earlier. But whereas the bantering of the three friends often makes pointed references to human nature or to conditions in China, the wit of Meng Tzu-chih is totally innocuous and ultimately tiresome in its avoidance of serious issues. She is at her best in the following parody of Chuang Tzu on the subject of a flying sandal: “It is called a sandal. The sandal is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li it measures. When it rises up and flies off, its wings are like clouds all over the sky. When the sea begins to move, this sandal sets off for the southern darkness, which is the Lake of Heaven. The Ch’i hsieh says: ‘When the sandal journeys to the southern darkness, the waters are roiled for three thousand li. It beats the whirlwind and rises ninety thousand li, finally plummeting after a six-month period.’”39

She is less happy in the following scatological joke, which pointedly makes fun of her companions on the swings: “An old maggot in a toilet bowl is quite famished. But suddenly he feels sleepy, and so he commands the little maggot: ‘If there is delivery of food, promptly call me.’ Not too long after, a young lady sits on the stool. Because she is constipated, she sits there for a long while. Although the bowel movement has started, the exposed portion has not yet dropped. Sighting it from afar, the little maggot awakens the old maggot. He raises his head and truly sees a piece of yellow food dangling in the air and refusing to drop. Impatient, the old maggot orders the little maggot to crawl up the

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bowl and discover the cause. After being up there for a while, he returns to tell the old maggot, ‘It looks to me that the yellow food is playing a game.’ The old maggot asks, ‘What kind of game?’ The little maggot replies, ‘It sways in mid-air; I guess it is playing on a swing.’ ”40

Such jokes, if funny to the traditional Chinese taste, pall because they fail to make any kind of comment on life. Like the long-winded banquet game itself, Meng Tzu-chih thus typifies pointless cleverness that in the main abuses the cultural heritage for the enhancement of social merriment. With all the care he lavishes upon this part of the novel, Li Ju-chen is not only tedious but almost decadent because, in demonstrating the literary talent, erudition, cleverness, and wisdom of the three principal heroines among a host of less distinguishable ones, he shows his uncritical love for and complacent enjoyment of Chinese culture. The Chinese reader today finds this part of the novel hard going not necessarily because he is too unfamiliar with the classics to enjoy quotations therefrom or too ignorant of the arts and pastimes of his forebears to relish the author’s comments on them. It is because he cannot share his infatuation.

V Everything considered, one cannot controvert the critical consensus that the most lively part of Ching-hua yuan and the part that makes its reputation as a classic of the second rank remains the account of the first voyage (chapters 8–40). The famous episode from the second voyage involving a hen-pecked brigand and his virago of a wife (chapters 51–52) matches the best comic episodes of the first voyage, but the voyage itself is dominated by the piety and seriousness of T’ang Kuei-ch’en, which dampen the comic spirit. Comparing the earnest discussion of ritual, history, and the style of Ch’un-ch’iu by T’ang herself, T’ing-t’ing, and Yin Jo-hua in chapters 52–53 with T’ing-t’ing’s earlier torture of To Chiu-kung in the Black Teeth Country shows the difference between two modes of presentation. In the earlier episode, the author delights in subjecting To to ridicule in order to suggest the unapproachable erudition of T’ing-t’ing; in the later episode, the three learned girls are openly admiring one another, and the sense of malicious challenge is altogether missing. The author must on all

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occasions regard his major heroines as paragons, while he feels free to make fun of his three male characters, which adds immensely to the comedy of the first voyage. Whereas most other sections of the novel invite comparison with Hung-lou meng to their disadvantage, the first voyage is obviously patterned after Hsi-yu chi insofar as it deals with three voyagers visiting a variety of bizarre countries. But its mode of narration is much more relaxed: except for the long episode of the Kingdom of Women, the author exploits not so much the comedy of adventure as the humor of tourism: the exhibition of the strange peoples and animals for the amusement of the sight-seeing Chinese. T’ang Ao, it is true, has to fulfill the allegoric obligation of meeting the twelve girls, but he meets them one or two at a time, and their personal circumstances are divergent enough to maintain interest. Usually, the three voyagers stay in a country long enough to enable Lin Chih-yang to exchange goods with the natives, though by that time the three are nearly always bested or embarrassed in their brief exploration of that country. In the voyage section Li Ju-chen is as much a scholar as in the rest of the novel, but he makes much more subtle use of his scholarship to serve the aim of comic satire. Though discussions of the classics and phonetics occur in some important episodes, he is most concerned with resurrecting a large number of the bizarre countries, peoples, and animals mentioned in Shan-hai ching and such other ancient works of geographic interest as Huai-nan tzu, Shih-i chi, and Po-wu chih. One does not have to have a prior knowledge of these texts to enjoy the narrative; but with that knowledge, one relishes all the more the care and cleverness with which the author invests many peoples with absurd features and manners by simply improving upon the terse descriptions of them in the old books. Since the original descriptions are merely weird, without any human or mythic significance that we can discover, it is not too much to say that it is Li Ju-chen who has belatedly stamped many of the countries with a kind of allegoric or satiric meaning and made their names current among Chinese readers.41 Not all the countries listed in these old books are promising for fictional treatment, of course. In the novel, therefore, the voyagers pause longer in those whose manners and customs offer a pointed contrast with those of China or else confirm them by way of satiric exaggeration. The countries that offer no relevant points of comparison are passed over

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quickly, and yet their description is of no less interest as a philosophic commentary on some foibles or weaknesses of mankind. Information on these latter countries is inevitably supplied by To Chiu-kung, who has been to them before, for the amusement of his friends. What Li Ju-chen has done through the mouth of To is to revive in colloquial idiom the Six Dynasties mode of chih-kuai fiction and maintain a touch of humor reminiscent of Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu. The account of Po-li Kuo (Hundred Anxieties Country), though seldom cited by critics, is among the best: Formerly the men of Ch’i were afraid that heaven would fall and crush them and so they worried about heaven day and night. This everyone knows. The people of the Po-li Country, though they don’t worry about heaven, are all their lives most afraid of falling asleep. They are afraid that, once asleep, they will never wake up and thus pass away; so day and night they worry about falling asleep. In this place there are no quilts and pillows. Though there are beds, they are for resting, not for sleeping. Thus, year in and year out, they are in a drowsy state, barely managing to keep awake. It often happens that someone, after being awake for several years, can no longer stand his extreme fatigue and falls sound asleep. He cannot be awakened even if you yell at him and urge him to get up in a hundred ways. His whole family gather around to cry, thinking that his life is beyond saving. When he wakes up, it will be several months hence, and his kin and friends will all gather around to congratulate him. Seeing that he has escaped death, the whole family rejoices. Everyone here dreads sleep, but oddly, numberless people, once asleep, would never wake up and die. Therefore the very idea of sleep they are afraid of.42

Po-li Kuo, just a name in Shan-hai ching, receives no description whatever in the standard commentary by Kuo P’u. By taking po to mean “hundred” and thereby defining the country by its obsession, Li Ju-chen has created a brief parable of strange power tapping, in the manner of Kafka and Borges, the indefinable source of our existential anxiety. For a contrast, his account of the No-Sex Country (Wu-ch’i Kuo) offers a Taoist vision of the serene acceptance of both life and death. Kuo P’u’s commentary on Shan-hai ching describes the country as follows: “Its people live in caves and eat earth. They are not differentiated into men and

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women. Once they die, they are immediately buried. But their hearts remain alive, and after a hundred and twenty years they revive.”43 Li Ju-chen has aptly expanded this to read: Though they don’t reproduce, their corpses don’t rot after death, and after a hundred and twenty years, they revive. The ancient saying, “After a hundred years transformed back to human form,” refers to them. So the people of this country live and die and then revive, and their numbers never diminish. Though they know they will live again after death, they have absolutely no desire to struggle for fame and fortune. Seeing that life ends in death, they realize that, even if one, in contending for fame and fortune, reaches the utmost in wealth and rank, it’s all but a dream when death comes, all reduced to nothing. Although one is reborn after death, yet after more than a hundred years the world has changed and things and people are all altered beyond recognition. The past and the present are utterly different. After being revived, he enters another world and cannot help struggling a bit for fame and fortune, and when he reaches some moderate degree of success, he has turned old without being aware of it, and the messenger from Hell will again invite him back. Taking everything into careful consideration, he realizes that life is but a spring dream. So the people of this country call death “sleep” and life on earth “dreaming.” They have seen through life and death, and their desire for fame and fortune has cooled. As for harboring extreme ambitions and using extreme means for their realization, this has never happened.44

This account is of peculiar interest for its contrast with the central allegory of the novel, which laments the transience of life with excessive sentimentality. While it is difficult to say whether Li Ju-chen was capable of true Taoist wisdom in his own life, what is certain is that the accounts of weird countries in Shan-hai ching and kindred works, and sometimes even the names of these countries, were able to conjure up for him various kinds of possible existence. To be able to entertain these possibilities bespeaks a true philosophic temper and a kind of amused intelligence that, unfortunately, are not continually in evidence in the novel. In some other instances of adaptation Li Ju-chen rises to heights of grotesque satire. The people of the No-Gut Country (Wu-ch’ang Kuo),

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according to Shan-hai ching, digest food without benefit of intestines. Li Ju-chen seizes upon this conceit to make fun of misers: “The people of this place have huge appetites and they are easily hungry [To Chiu-kung tells his friends]. Every day they spend a disproportionate amount of money on food and drink. Do you know how the rich people manage? The story is really absurd. Because the food they eat passes quickly through their systems, the so-called excrement didn’t really stay too long in the stomach and is not putrid or smelly. So they carefully collect and store the stuff to serve as food for their servants. It’s like this every day, and they are miserly in other ways as well. How can they help not getting rich?” Lin Chih-yang asked, “Do they eat the stuff themselves?” To Chiu-kung said, “Such good food, and it doesn’t cost a penny—how could they pass it up?” T’ang Ao said, “If they have the fortitude to partake of such odious matter, it doesn’t matter. But they go too far to order their servants to eat such dirty stuff.” To Chiu-kung said, “Such putrid and stinking matter, if they let their servants eat their fill of that, that won’t matter much either. But the servants have always to contend with hunger and have no full meals to eat. Moreover, the stuff that has passed through the body three or four times, still they would order their servants to dine on that. Not until the servants vomit, so that what is food and what is excrement become really indistinguishable, would they light the oven and start a new meal.”45

A constant butt of satire in the voyage section is the “sour” (suan) scholar who has not properly digested his learning and remains unpalatable even to the hungriest beast. While Li Ju-chen delights in making fun of other types, it is inevitable that, as a scholar-novelist consciously celebrating Chinese culture, he should return oftener to the pseudo-scholar, though not without sympathy for his ignorance and hard lot as a pathetic victim of the examination system. Thus Lin Chih-yang, a merchant spared the necessity of taking examinations, frequently underscores the comic plight of the unsuccessful scholar doomed to take examination after examination in the course of his miserable life. Two of the funniest

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episodes involve the voyagers’ encounters with the arrogant, actually illiterate, scholars of the Country of the White People (Pai-min Kuo) and the sour-smelling, parsimonious inhabitants of the Country of the Elegant Scholars (Shu-shih Kuo). Among the pedants of the latter country are two immensely successful comic creations: a waiter at a tavern and his aged customer, both bespectacled and decked out in scholarly garb, who talk in a continual flow of debased classical Chinese. The voyagers themselves, as we have seen, are ridiculed for their ignorance of phonetics. The author takes so much pride in his phonetic system that, for a long stretch of their journey, they are in quest of a phonetic system in much the same fashion as the pilgrims of Hsi-yu chi seek the Buddhist sutras. All such types as the miser and the sour scholar are implicitly Chinese, but the author does not do much about them beyond exposing their absurdity. One cannot hope to change human nature or improve human intelligence, though one may do something about evil or foolish social customs. Thus in the Country of Gentlemen (Chün-tzu Kuo) episode the author concentrates all his explicit criticism of China in the hope of effecting some change in the national life. While disclaiming any intention to criticize the government, his spokesmen, the Wu brothers, nevertheless disconcert the voyagers with their description of some dozen social phenomena prevalent in China, including geomancy, expensive burials and weddings, lavish entertaining, butchering of oxen that have seen service on the farm, lawsuits, foot binding, women in some disreputable lines of business (san-ku liu-p’o) tending to corrupt morals, cruel stepmothers, and hapless children surrendered by their parents to the care of religious orders. The brothers speak with sarcasm in deference to China as the most civilized nation in the world, but they are not otherwise satirical in offering advice to the Chinese for their ignorance and folly in not ordering their lives in a rational, humane fashion. This advice is as sincerely offered as the medical prescriptions that punctuate the novel. It must be emphasized, however, that, though the condemnation of foot binding seems novel for its time and has raised the author’s satiric stature in the eyes of modern critics,46 all the other points of criticism are not original with Li Ju-chen and can be found in earlier fiction and popular morality books. Whenever the occasion offered itself, the story writers of the San-yen tradition would deplore cruel stepmothers and quarrelsome litigators, dishonest geomancers and all disreputable women having free access to the inner apartments of ladies. It is of some interest to

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observe that, with his unambiguous affirmation of the Taoist ideal of hsien, Li Ju-chen should join Hsia Ching-ch’ü in wishing for the ultimate withering away of the religious orders of Buddhism and Taoism, but even Chin P’ing Mei, a popular novel ostensibly upholding the Buddhist doctrine of salvation, deplores the practice of abandoning boys to the care of Buddhist monks and has nothing but contempt for the mercenary Buddhist and Taoist priests.47 In examining the Wu brothers’ criticism of China, one is again forcibly struck by the fact that, in his role as a public moralist, a scholar-novelist like Li Ju-chen differs really little from the popular story writer and novelist. They are all equally confident of the basic soundness of Chinese civilization, and they attack or deplore bad customs as aberrations from an ideal state of Chinese culture. Thus, with the possible exception of cruel stepmothers, all the social phenomena deplored by the Wu brothers can be rectified if people are more sensible: they are the consequences of human folly rather than the manifestations of an inherently evil human nature. Compare, in this regard, the Wu brothers’ criticism of China with Gulliver’s outwardly dispassionate description of the conditions of England and Europe before the astounded Houyhnhnms. In blaming the princes, ministers of state, lawyers, physicians, and soldiers for their inherent rapacity and cruelty, Gulliver implicates a whole civilization tainted from its leaders down with the evil nature of the Yahoos. For all their sarcasm, the Wu brothers actually speak in the guise of sensible, frugal, and humanitarian Confucians who would like to see China restored to moral soundness by the rectification of many of its customs. Of these customs, the author seizes upon foot binding for extensive satiric treatment in the Kingdom of Women episode, though in several places he makes fun as well of lavish entertainment involving the use of a tasteless but expensive ingredient for high cuisine known as bird’s nest. The torture of Lin Chih-yang certainly makes a neat satiric point, and the episode is deservedly the most celebrated in the whole novel. But, given the comic character of the first voyage, we know that Lin will never come to serious harm, and we can safely laugh at him as at the aggressive, amorous “king” and the husky, bearded “women” who appear plainly ridiculous. In contemplating his pain, moreover, Lin Chih-yang repeatedly compares his freshly bound feet to a footloose scholar constrained to take another examination. The artificial nature of Lin’s torture is thus brought to bear upon the torture regularly inflicted upon scholars of the

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hsiu-ts’ai level. With all its satiric dimensions, however, the comedy of the episode lies mainly in its depiction of a topsy-turvy world. We are so accustomed to the ordinary world of male domination and female subordination that a depiction of its contrary is immense fun. The satire as such is embedded in a comedy that is broad and good-natured in character. There can be no doubt that Li Ju-chen wants to startle the male reader out of his complacency by his description of Lin’s torture. But once he concludes the first voyage and embarks on the romance of the hundred girls proper, he has to bury foot binding as an issue. As a scholar, Li Ju-chen knew only too well that T’ang women did not bind their feet, but, as a mid-Ch’ing novelist, he knew he could not well describe beautiful young ladies without mentioning their tiny feet. So every one of his hundred girls hobbles. Initially, Yin Jo-hua had natural feet since she enjoyed the prerogatives of a man. Soon after her arrival in China, she accompanies T’ang Kuei-ch’en on her voyage to seek her father. Facing the prospect of mountain-climbing in Little P’eng-lai, T’ang remarks of her companion, “As for Sister Jo-hua, though recently she has her feet bound, she has been in male costume since childhood and is used to walking: so it should not be too difficult for her.”48 So a foreign “prince,” in embracing Chinese culture, should accept as her first requirement the binding of her feet. She must have suffered the kind of agony that Lin Chih-yang underwent, but it is passed over in silence. If it is comically appropriate for a male to suffer the torture of foot binding, it would mar the spirit of romance to remind the reader that each of the hundred girls, each flower spirit, had to undergo torture to qualify for being a proper young lady. Meng Tzu-chih, the embodiment of wit and vivacity, is described as “nimble of feet.” In chapter 73, she tells a companion who complains of her aching feet, “I advise you, Sister, it would be acceptable to have feet four inches long—why must you insist on making them three inches long and refuse to be content until the bound feet could hardly walk?”49 As if the poor girl were ever in a position to dictate to her parents about the size of her feet! The bang of brave protest sounded by the Wu brothers has ended on a whimpering note of lame advice.

VI As a rule, the scholar-novelists are at once more serious and more playful in their attitude toward their medium than other writers. They can be as

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didactic as they like, but they also indulge in the idlest of mystifications, the most improbable of allegoric fictions. Taking his cue from Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, Li Ju-chen appears to take a particular pleasure in selfadvertisement, about the unique story he is privileged to tell and the unique honor that has fallen upon him to be the chosen instrument of its telling. It would appear that, precisely because he was very fond of the novel he was writing, he had to insert authorial jokes of this kind for the amusement of his reader. In this respect, Li Ju-chen certainly, if not all of his predecessors in the tradition of the scholarly novel, shares a certain affinity with the line of self-consciously manipulative novelists in the West, stretching in time from Cervantes to Nabokov. In many Chinese novels the triumphant moment arrives when all the heroes who are destined to meet are finally assembled for a common enterprise. This is as true of Shui-hu chuan as of Ju-ün wai-shih, where all the good scholars finally meet in Nanking for the dedication ceremonies of the T’ai-po temple. Li Ju-chen, too, takes great pains to assemble his hundred girls in Ch’ang-an and feels justified in regarding their union as a pseudo-historical event of unparalleled novelty. Thus Yin Jo-hua comments proudly in chapter 71: “Sisters of different surnames congregated to the tune of a hundred—that is a unique event in all history.” When Meng Tzu-chih, always mischievous, appears incredulous, Chang Hung-chu puts in, “The words of Sister Jo-hua are not unfounded. If you are curious, Sister, you may consult all the official histories, unofficial histories, and novels. If you can find an instance of the union of a hundred sisters together, then I will pay the cost of having three operas staged in the theater right in front of us.”50 While another girl continues to argue by saying that larger numbers of girls must have frequently met in the Country of Women one reads about in Hsi-yu chi since its entire population is female, the point is nevertheless established that the author has scored a first in the history of Chinese fiction by his collective celebration of a hundred girls. In chapter 93, when the banquet game is about over, one of the girls similarly stresses the uniqueness of the event by saying, “The wine game we have been playing—it is not that I am bragging—is unprecedented, and it will not be duplicated. It can be said to be unique in all time.”51 Li Ju-chen is even more conscious of his role as the recorder of certain unique events than of the events themselves. He seems to be telling the reader that the story has been begging to be recorded for centuries—

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and what a privilege for the reader of the mid-Ch’ing to be finally able to read it! Thus, as is the case with Hung-lou meng, we may piece together from his novel an account of its genesis, transmission, and authorship. In chapter 1 we are told that the white jade tablet in Little P’eng-lai is transmitting light visible to celestials in heaven even before the hundred flower spirits have incurred the sentence of exile. In chapter 49 T’ang Kuei-ch’en is busily transcribing the words on the tablet onto banana leaves. Later, aboard her ship, she retranscribes them onto paper and playfully tells a pet monkey to find a literary man to make the record into a novel. Upon reaching home, she reminds the monkey of her earlier request, and he snatches her writing away and disappears for good. At the end of the novel we are told that the monkey was from the cave of the guardian spirit of the Hundred Flowers who had stealthily accompanied his mistress to the mundane world. Over the centuries he has had great difficulty in finding the right man to develop the record into a novel. The compilers of both the Chiu T’ang-shu and the Hsin T’ang-shu decline the task until centuries later he assigns it to “a descendant of Lao Tzu enjoying somewhat of a literary reputation” who completes the first half of the story.52 But, as is the case with part II of Don Quixote, where Cervantes maintains the fiction that he is translating from an Arab source describing the adventures of Don Quixote, Ching-hua yuan is referred to as a completed work under another title even while the novel is still in progress. In chapter 23 Lin Chih-yang drops the name of Shao Tzu along with Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu to impress his pedantic interlocutors in the Country of the Elegant Scholars. On being pressed for more information about the work, he makes up the following description: “This book Shao Tzu came out during the peaceful reign of a sage Emperor. It was written by a scholar of our Celestial Dynasty. He was a descendant of Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu wrote the Tao-te ching, discoursing on the mysterious and ineffable. That Shao Tzu, though playful in spirit, unobtrusively advises people to be good, never departing from the intention of moral persuasion. His book contains all schools of thought and discusses people, flowers, birds, calligraphy, painting, lute-playing, go and chess, medicine, divination, astrology, physiognomy, phonology, and arithmetic. Not one of these escapes his attention. Furthermore, it contains all kinds of riddles and wine games as well as games of dice and cards, ball

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games and other kinds of pastimes. Each item discussed can chase away your desire for sleep and make you laugh heartily. Of this book I have brought along many copies; if you don’t mind sullying your eyes, I’ll go and get them.”53

The listeners are all so eager to buy the book that they part with their cash and urge Lin Chih-yang to go back to the ship and get the copies immediately. At this stage of the game, of course, the reader is not yet aware that the work Shao Tzu is identical with Ching-hua yuan. While any person bearing the surname Li is a descendant of Lao Tzu, up till then the novel is mainly a book of travels and its encyclopedic character has not emerged with clarity. The reader therefore enjoys a peculiar sense of satisfaction when, on encountering the expression “a descendant of Lao Tzu” once again on the last page, he connects it with Lin Chih-yang’s description of Shao Tzu. The author recapitulates the novel in yet another fashion. In chapter 88, following T’ang Kuei-ch’en’s confrontation with Ch’ang-o and Feng-i, the Literary Star in female guise (Nü K’uei-hsing) descends to rebuke the latter. The Long-Fingered Fairy, better known as Ma-ku, arrives next to serve as a peacemaker, and the other celestials depart. The hundred girls now press Ma-ku for information, and in the next two chapters, she enlightens them with a long poem summarizing the episodes concerning the hundred girls and foretelling the death of a few during the storming of the Four Passes. It ends with a brief mention of the visit by Ch’ang-o and Feng-i. The novelist is apparently so enchanted with his own fable that he rehearses it here in verse so as to invite comments by the affected girls themselves as well as praise from the reader. It is a thousand-word poem in the ancient, five-word style. It adopts a single rhyme throughout and does not duplicate a single character, with the exception of many repetitive phrases to be expected in ancient-style poetry. It is altogether a most difficult poetic feat, and one feels that the author is almost competing with Su Hui, though his cleverness is not on the same stupendous scale. Indeed, so much of the novel is designed to elicit the reader’s admiration for the author’s erudition, cleverness, or morality that we feel he must be quite as happy about his achievement as a scholar-novelist as about the culture he is celebrating in his work. Writing in the last great period of peace and prosperity before the country was opened to the West and

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before its culture became problematic, perhaps Li Ju-chen had every right to be satisfied with his novel: he wrote most carefully, and packed it with as much amusing and edifying matter as a novel could be expected to carry. It is probably not his fault that our understanding of both China and the novel should have changed so much since his time that Ching-hua yuan can never again be as fully enjoyed as it once was.

Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction (1978)

I Many scholars and journalists of the late Ch’ing period championed the novel as an instrument for national reform. In 1897 Yen Fu (1853–1921), then editor of the Tientsin Kuo-wen pao, wrote with his close friend Hsia Tseng-yu (1865–1924) a long essay entitled “Pen-kuan fu-yin shuo-pu yüan-ch’i” (Announcing our policy to print a supplementary fiction section), which has been generally regarded as the first piece of criticism to affirm the social function of fiction in modern times.1 This was followed by Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s (1873–1929) much shorter “Yi-yin cheng-chih hsiaoshuo hsü” (Foreword to our series of political novels in translation) in the first number (Yokohama, December 1898) of his own journal Ch’ing-yi pao (The China discussion).2 Then, in October 1902, Liang launched another journal in Yokohama called Hsin hsiao-shuo (New fiction) and wrote an inaugural editorial entitled “Lun hsiao-shuo yü ch’ün-chih chih kuan-hsi” (Fiction seen in relation to the guidance of society).3 It opens with the famous passage affirming the educational value of fiction in no uncertain terms: To renovate the people of a nation, the fictional literature of that nation must first be renovated. Thus to renovate morality, we must first renovate fiction; to renovate religion, we must first renovate

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fiction; to renovate manners, we must first renovate fiction; to renovate learning and the arts, we must first renovate fiction; and even to renew the people’s hearts and remold their character, we must first renovate fiction. Why? It is because fiction exercises a power of incalculable magnitude over mankind.4

The next few years saw the publication in Shanghai of several fiction journals that, along with Hsin hsiao-shuo, featured a sizable body of criticism testifying to the influence of these three essays and serialized practually all the most important late Ch’ing novels informed with a political awareness.5 In view of the intellectual prestige of Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, it is understandable that their pioneering essays should come to be regarded as bold manifestoes heralding the new achievement in fiction for the period. Following A Ying’s lead in Wan-Ch’ing hsiao-shuo shih, Chinese literary historians concerned with the period have all cited the influence of these three essays. But they have not discussed them with any degree of critical sophistication, nor have they illuminated them against the traditional Chinese and foreign literary backgrounds. Even Chu Mei-shu, who has made a rather detailed study of Liang’s two essays, is apparently unaware that his advocacy of the new novel was greatly influenced by literary developments in Meiji Japan.6 Regardless of their intrinsic worth as contributions to criticism, these three essays would certainly seem to deserve a more rounded and systematic study in view of their undisputed influence at one time. In assuming the task myself, however, I must confess my lack of training as an intellectual historian and hence my incompetence to relate Yen and Liang’s views on fiction to their more substantial achievement as major intellectuals of their time. The three texts themselves, then, will be the main focus of my essay. In addition, I shall comment on some of the contemporary reactions to the main ideas contained therein and gauge the extent of Liang’s success as an advocate of the idealistic kind of political novel in an age of predominantly satiric fiction.

II In undertaking this study, I find it at times unavoidable to reiterate points made by earlier scholars, and I may as well begin by making the com-

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monplace observation that, as understood by most late Ch’ing and early Republican critics, the term hsiao-shuo is wider in coverage than its present-day English equivalent, “fiction.” Although there is little doubt that both Yen and Liang were promoting the novel (the short stories featured in late Ch’ing fiction journals are of little or no interest and the westernstyle short story was not cultivated until the Literary Revolution of 1917), they understood the term hsiao-shuo to comprise drama as well as all forms of popular narrative literature, including the classical tale, the novel, and t’an-tz’u. While they made no attempt to define the term, one reason for their strong affirmation of hsiao-shuo is that it is almost equivalent to all imaginative literature, with the exclusion of lyrical poetry. Thus Yen lists among the most familiar characters of hsiao-shuo those drawn from Sankuo yen-yi, Shui-hu chuan, Hsi-hsiang chi, and Mu-tan t’ing. In his essays on fiction and society, Liang cites among the most influential works of hsiaoshuo not only Shui-hu and Hung-lou meng but also Hsi-hsiang chi and T’aohua shan. However, since the three essays under study clearly focus upon the novel as the most popular form of hsiao-shuo or one in most urgent need of renovation, I see no point in replacing “fiction” with a more comprehensive word or phrase to designate the Chinese term. To determine precisely what is new in Yen and Liang’s attitude toward fiction, we must first summarize the traditional attitude that the two scholars inescapably shared. In their time, the pejorative connotations of hsiao-shuo, sanctioned by accounts of its origin in classical sources, remained strong. Fiction is opposed to official historiography for its lack of concern with truth and to serious, improving literature for its frivolous, salacious, and often politically subversive character. Even though a few exceptional works like Shui-hu and Hung-lou have attracted in the course of time a large body of affirmative criticism and commentary, prefaces to most novels are apologetic or defensive in tone. These prefaces readily concede the low breeding of fiction but emphasize its educational impact on the intended audience, who cannot be expected to read or understand the more serious kinds of literature. If a novel departs little from the official account of a particular period of history, then it is praised for imparting information that would otherwise be denied a large public. Even inadvertent or deliberate departures from history are defended in terms of the novelist’s desire to tell the essential truth in a more palatable form. The more fantastic accounts of history and legend are usually defended on allegorical grounds for their supposed conveyance of hidden

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meanings. Many novels are, of course, open to the charge that they “incite robbery and incite lust” (hui-tao hui-yin), but since the outlaws and lechers in such works usually meet a bad end, it can be easily maintained that depiction of their crimes actually serves to vindicate mundane or religious retribution and thus contribute to the improvement of “manners and morals” (shih-tao jen-hsin). Thus defenders and governmental proscribers of fiction alike regard the reader as totally impressionable—he is as ready to imitate bad characters as to take warning from their punishment. The notion that a reader may contemplate in an aesthetic fashion scenes of crime and lewdness without necessarily being incited to imitation is rarely entertained. Totally unsuspected, of course, is the therapeutic value of popular fiction in providing a vicarious outlet for a reader’s repressed drives. Most prefaces to short-story collections, however, dwell on the intrinsic appeal of fiction in recording the unexpected or astonishing truth about life. Thus the preface to Ku-chin hsiao-shuo claims the storytellers’ ability to recite “what gladdens and astonishes us, what saddens us and makes us cry, and what causes us to sing and dance” (k’o-hsi k’o-o k’o-pei k’o-t’i k’o-ko k’o-wu).7 The preface to a Kuang-hsü edition of Chin-ku ch’ikuan assures us that the stories in the collection will “make us sad or joyful, will cause us to sing or astonish us” (k’o-pei k’o-hsi k’o-ko k’o-o).8 Such standard formulations, while always subordinate to a didactic defense of fiction, stress its power to affect our emotions and its ability to tell the kind of truth that is its own vindication. But apparently, according to these prefatory statements, what contributes toward the emotive power of fiction is the sensational incident, the melodramatic turn of the plot, rather than a rich evocation of life in all its apparent uneventfulness. With rare exceptions (as, for example, the Chih-yen-chai commentary to Hunglou meng) it would seem that traditional Chinese critics of fiction are all moralists who frequently testify to its emotive power but little stress the kind of aesthetic pleasure that comes from relishing the art of fiction itself. While endorsing the power of fiction in the traditional manner, Yen Fu, in his essay “Announcing Our Policy to Print a Supplementary Fiction Section,” also draws upon biological and social Darwinism to account for its intrinsic appeal. For him fiction consists mainly of stories of heroism and love. Primitive and civilized man alike worship the hero because he spells success in the struggle for survival. In man’s rise above the animal level, cultural heroes subsequently incorporated into mythology played an

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all-important part. In later periods, as nations contend with one another for survival or supremacy, we have a great variety of military heroes, celebrated alike in China and the West, including “Peter the Great, Washington, and Napoleon” (6). But it is typical of Yen Fu’s scientific faith and optimism that he clearly prefers intellectuals of modern enlightenment who are in his eyes unqualified benefactors of mankind: Martin Luther, Francis Bacon, Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin. These heroes have left behind the sanguinary world for the cerebral world, but, alas, the military heroes are still with us; those two worlds will coexist for another several hundred years. As for love stories, mankind has to propagate itself, and any sexual union that strikes us as romantic or unusual or that has affected the course of history (Yen retells at great length the stories of Helen and Cleopatra) will continue to fascinate us. In a remarkable sentence he asserts that “love is not merely the subject of tz’u and fu; it is almost the foundation of all ritual, music, literature, and refinement” (9). Yen goes on to say that it is the written record alone that preserves those heroic and romantic deeds “that frighten us and astonish us and cause us to weep and sing” (10). There are two kinds of such records—history and fiction (inclusive of all unofficial and miscellaneous history—paishih hsiao-shuo). The fact that Ts’ao Ts’ao, Liu Pei, Chang Sheng, and Ying-ying are the best known of all recorded Chinese heroes and lovers argues for the greatest effectiveness of fiction at preserving deeds. This is so because fiction is recorded in a language closer to the living tongue and is more verbose and circumstantial in its description of morals and manners. At least in the Chinese tradition, where historiography always employs a terse, classical style and captures little of the concrete reality, the arguments advanced so far are plausible. But then, Yen’s clinching argument in favor of fiction is clearly sentimental or condescending: he maintains that, whereas actual historical events do not always conform to our heart’s desire, fiction invariably does so by punishing the evil and rewarding the virtuous (one may ask what virtue has to do with the struggle for individual or group survival). Such a result can be contrived even if a work of fiction “alters somewhat the events of history” (12). And he goes on to say that “nothing in the world is more satisfying than this meting out of just reward and punishment; since human minds are alike, that is why such books of fiction circulate fast and last long.” In other words, whereas traditional Chinese moralists look down upon fiction for its lying or distortion of truth, Yen regards as the peculiar virtue of fiction its

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strong tendency to rectify history so as to ensure the perpetual commemoration of certain heroes and lovers (even though such celebrated lovers as Chang Sheng and Ying-ying are totally fictitious). One may ask Yen: Is it better to falsify history in conformity with man’s desire for elementary justice or to preserve the truth, however bitter and unpalatable, about historic struggles in the sanguinary and cerebral worlds? Although most traditional novelists, both Chinese and western, subscribe to a scheme of justice that flatters conventional morality, it has always been the distinction of great fiction (not to say of tragic drama) that it refuses to yield to sentimentality in its inspection of the human condition. Of the two protagonists from San-kuo, in what sense is Liu Pei rewarded or Ts’ao Ts’ao punished, even though most readers sympathize with the former and detest the latter? Yen curiously omits Hung-lou meng from his examples of beloved fiction: the novel remains fascinating without meeting most readers’ expectations regarding its main characters. I believe Yen is being dishonest with himself when arguing for the greater appeal of fiction over history in strictly Chinese terms. If applied to the western tradition, all his arguments would collapse, and yet Yen must have been exposed to a good deal of western history, fiction, and drama. He should know that a work of history does not have to be more terse and archaic in style or less committed to the full truth than a novel. And a moment’s reflection will tell him that it is patently not true that the great figures of Chinese history retain their identity and fascination mainly through the medium of fiction (and drama). The first emperors of the Ch’in and Ming, though indifferently treated in fiction, remain no less awesome figures to the average Chinese. And what has fiction to do with the lasting appeal of Peter the Great, Washington, and Napoleon? Although Napoleon figures in some great novels, no one gains a sense of his importance solely from reading them, which, more often than not, attempt to reduce his heroic size. And readers today are drawn to semihistorical accounts of Napoleon’s amours precisely because they have been preconditioned to accept him as a great man whose every little escapade is of interest. Despite his employment of some Darwinian arguments to account for the appeal of fiction, Yen is therefore very much of a traditionalist in his condescension toward it. He takes pains to demonstrate the power of fiction among the masses so as to underscore its vast potential as an educational instrument. But this new type of educational fiction has yet to be

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created and translated, since traditional fiction, including its most celebrated works, is full of “poison” (tu). San-kuo has attracted the militarists, Shui-hu has become a manual for the underworld, and the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu have caused young men and women to be unhealthily preoccupied with love. But since his whole essay builds upon the power and prestige of these works of poison, Yen cannot deny their literary or moral value and so, as a last resort, he shifts to another traditional line of defense: “But when the ancients made fiction, each had in mind a subtle and refined purpose that, however, is conveyed beyond words and is too deeply hidden to be fathomable. And because people of shallow learning are addicted to fiction, the world has suffered incalculably from the poison of fiction and it is difficult to speak of its benefit” (12). So the biological and evolutionary urge to delight in lovers and heroes counts for nothing at all. The vast majority of Chinese turn out to be incapable of profiting from either fiction or the Confucian classics and history. They have to be reeducated with the kind of new fiction presumably without any subtle intent (and without the kind of literary pretension that distinguishes San-kuo and Shui-hu) that has done wonders in the West and in Japan. “We also understand,” Yen tells his readers, “that the European countries, the United States, and Japan, at the time when they got enlightened or civilized (k’ai-hua), have time and again benefited from the assistance of fiction” (12). This statement definitely refers to Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, but the term k’ai-hua remains unclear when applied to Europe or America. When did England and France get enlightened? During the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or the Industrial Revolution? For both countries, while each of these periods produced its characteristic fictional literature (including drama), it is difficult to say that its authors deliberately set out to instruct or enlighten the public in compliance with the Zeitgeist or a massive governmental program of civil education. It is true that writers like Voltaire and Rousseau consciously sought to educate the public, but they were primarily philosophers or intellectuals appropriating fiction as a vehicle of ideas rather than as a medium of entertainment. In Russia, it is true, great novelists from Gogol down have all tried to enlighten the public, but by and large the czarist government has opposed their endeavors at enlightenment so that late Ch’ing intellectuals are quite right in believing that, with all its military expansionism, Russia remains a backward country and not a model for China to imitate.9 So at least in Russia, a fictional literature of

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unsurpassed greatness has not at all assisted progress except in the modern sense (unintended by Yen) that it has remained powerfully subversive and fostered generations of a dissident elite opposed to the establishment. It is only in Meiji Japan, then, that fiction can be said to have played a conscious role in arousing the people and in assisting the government’s plan for modernization and progress. Although educated in England, Yen Fu could not help being impressed by the phenomenal success of Japan’s modernization in his chosen role as a reformer and publicist, and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, who acquired his knowledge of western history, culture, and institutions mainly through his reading of secondary Japanese sources, must have been even more decidedly under the spell of Japan’s success when, following his exile there in October 1898, he advocated fiction as a medium for national reform. In his “Foreword to Our Series of Political Novels,” Liang concurs with Yen in seeing the vast educational potential of fiction, but he shows even greater contempt for the traditional product. Even its most highly esteemed titles, Shui-hu and Hung-lou, do not escape his implicit scorn. Liang maintains that most Chinese novels are imitations of either one or the other and have thus earned the disapprobation of scholars for their “incitement to robbery and lust.” But popular novels cannot be proscribed since they are far more intelligible and interesting to the populace than the Confucian classics and history. A far better policy would be to transfer the public’s interest in old fiction to translations of political fiction (cheng-chih hsiao-shuo). One would think that novels like San-kuo and Shuihu all belong to this category, since they deal with politics and implicitly or explicitly endorse an ideal political order. But Liang clearly has in mind novels descriptive of the actual political transformation of modern nations that could have direct bearing on the contemporary Chinese situation. He gives a rather fanciful account of the genesis and prestige of political novels in foreign countries: Formerly, at the start of reform or revolution in European countries, their leading scholars and men of great learning, their men of compassion and patriots, would frequently record their personal experiences and their cherished views and ideas concerning politics in the form of fiction. Thus, among the population, teachers would read these works in their spare time, and even soldiers, businessmen, farmers, artisans, cabmen and grooms, and schoolchildren

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would all read them. It often happened that upon the appearance of a book a whole nation would change its views on current affairs. The political novel has been most instrumental in making the governments of America, England, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and Japan daily more progressive or enlightened. (14)

Even if we discount the illogic of lumping America and Japan among European countries, the whole passage is full of untruth and wild exaggeration. How many of the world’s “leading scholars and men of great learning” have written political novels while active in politics or during their retirement? Has there ever been a novel that overnight changed the opinion of a nation? Mrs. Stowe, no leading scholar but certainly a compassionate woman, did stir up America on a vital issue with Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), but the vast sympathy for the slave elicited by her novel was not instantly translated into legislation, and the South certainly was not persuaded, for otherwise there would have been no Civil War. The whole passage makes some kind of sense only with reference to Liang’s understandable admiration for the political novel then in vogue in Japan. By 1898 Japan had already embarked on serious experimentation with western forms of fiction. Its first modern novel, Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (Drifting clouds)—the kind of novel that did not appear in China until the 1920s—was serialized from 1887 to 1889, and Tsubouchi Shõyõ’s Shõsetsu shinzui (The essence of the novel, 1885) had appeared some time earlier to promote the art of realism and disabuse the Japanese of their didactic notions about fiction.10 But the political novel, which had dominated the literary scene during the 1880s, was certainly still quite popular with the general public in the next decade. Arriving in Japan in late 1898, Liang could not be expected to follow its latest trends in fiction and criticism and would have found the political novel far more relevant to his needs as a propagandist of political reform. In early Meiji Japan, as in late Ch’ing China, no systematic plan was discernible in the translation (in the loosest sense of the term) of western fiction. Perennial juvenile classics vied in popularity with Victorian bestsellers. In 1879, Oda Junichirõ, who claimed to have studied law at Edinburgh University, translated Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers (1837), which became highly popular and set the trend for the political novel. That of all the Victorian novelists a British-returned student should have chosen to introduce Lytton to his nation would always strike us as rather

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odd. But Ernest Maltravers, about a talented youth’s rise to high position against a political background, must have appealed to Oda not only because it describes the kind of life that ambitious youths of Japan “saw themselves destined to lead” (in the explanation of Sir George Sansom)11 but also because he must have been fooled by its literary quality. In her pioneering study of the popular novel in England, Fiction and the Reading Public, Q. D. Leavis calls Lytton the earliest best-selling novelist of the modern variety: For all his yawns and indolence and stiffness Scott has a splendid self-assurance which Lytton in the next generation woefully lacks, but then Lytton had discovered how to exploit the market, as a mere list of his novels proves. And this lowering of the level of appeal makes Lytton the first of modern best-sellers, with Marie Corelli and Gilbert Frankau as his direct descendants . . . . Lytton’s inflated language means an inflation of sentiment, and his pseudophilosophic nonsense and preposterous rhetoric carry with them inevitably a debasing of the novelist’s currency. But they were taken seriously by the general public. . . . To make a useful generalization, best-sellers before Lytton are at worst dull, but ever since they have almost always been vulgar.12

If Lytton was taken seriously by the British public, how much more so must his “pseudo-philosophic nonsense and preposterous rhetoric” have impressed a Japanese with his greater readiness to be dazzled by an inflated language! Another factor that must have made Oda decide to translate Lytton’s novels and that must have contributed to their popularity with Japanese readers was that Lytton was a nobleman in government service. He was created a baronet in 1838 when serving as a member of Parliament; he later served as colonial secretary and was raised to the peerage in 1866. The fact that an important public servant, and a lord no less, should also be a novelist must have caused the Japanese (and later Liang Ch’i-ch’ao) to revise their attitude toward fiction, since in their own countries novelists had always been men of no consequence or official standing. With Lytton in high favor, it is understandable that Disraeli should have become the second Victorian novelist to be translated and widely read in Japan. The Earl of Beaconsfield, after all, was a statesman of the highest distinction.

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When in his “Foreword” Liang Ch’i-ch’ao refers to European novelists as “leading scholars and men of great learning,” therefore, he must have in mind primarily Lytton and Disraeli, and possibly also Voltaire and Rousseau. At the same time he could not but be highly impressed by the prestige and influence of Japan’s leading political novelists—Suehiro Tetcho (1849–1896), Yano Ryûkei (1850–1931), and Shiba Shiro (1852–1922).13 As eminent public figures, they all took trips abroad and played an active part in journalism and politics. Yano Ryûkei, after writing the first political novel to adorn the Meiji period, Keikoku bidan (A noble tale of statecraft, 1883–1884), took control of the newspaper Hochi shimbun and served as minister to Peking from 1891 to 1899. Shiba Shiro was private secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce when he started serializing in 1885 his work in eight parts, Kajin no kigu¯ (Unexpected meetings with beautiful women), which, while unreadable by modern standards, became one of the most popular novels of the Meiji period. He was elected to the Diet at its opening in 1890, and later served as the director of the Osaka Mainichi shimbun and Vice-Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. The last three parts of his novel came out in 1897, and if the brief extant accounts of the story are to be believed, Liang was introduced to the book about a year later during his passage to Japan as a political refugee, and he started translating it forthwith. But since he did not seriously study the language until after his arrival in Japan, one may well wonder if he knew enough Japanese at the time to translate the work even though its style was highly sinicized. In any event, Liang was so impressed by Kajin no kigu¯ that it became the first political novel to be serialized in Ch’ing-yi pao, and even though he had never signed his name to the work, the Chinese version was posthumously collected in Yin-ping shih ho-chi.14 Liang’s second essay, “Fiction Seen in Relation to the Guidance of Society,” is generally believed to have been most instrumental in effecting a new attitude toward fiction among Chinese novelists and readers. As in the earlier essay, Liang sees the reader’s response to fiction as primarily visceral: “The most popular novels are invariably those that shock us, astonish us, sadden us, and move us so that the reading of them causes us to have numberless nightmares and wipe away countless tears” (15). But by 1902 he has somewhat refined his understanding of fiction so that he is able to illustrate its power with four metaphors: fiction spreads a cloud of smoke or incense (hsün) around the reader so that his senses and power of judgment are conditioned by his reading; it immerses (chin) him in the sit-

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uations and problems depicted in its pages so that even for days or weeks after the reading he is still seized by sorrow or anger or other appropriate emotion; it pricks (tz’u) him into an unusual state of excitement over scenes depicted with great power; lastly, it lifts (t’i) him to the level of the hero and motivates him to imitate him.15 Liang attaches the greatest importance to the last virtue of fiction (t’i), but he deplores the fact that, instead of lifting the reader, Chinese fiction regularly sinks him to the level of the undesirable types of hero. Thus the reader of Hung-lou meng inevitably identifies himself with Chia Pao-yü, while the reader of Shui-hu patterns himself after Li K’uei or Lu Chih-shen (one may well wonder why he should not imitate Sung Chiang or Lin Ch’ung instead). Since such heroes are all unfit for imitation, the reader’s plight is in direct proportion to their creator’s ability to fumigate, immerse, prick, and lift him. By emphasizing the spellbinding power of some famous Chinese novels, Liang, in a sense, concedes their artistic excellence only to underscore the greater harm they will do the reader. Liang apparently shares Yen Fu’s position that these novels all contain poison despite their irresistible appeal, but he is the harsher critic in that he no longer sees the need to exonerate them on the ground that they all convey a subtle message beyond the comprehension of the populace. Having demonstrated to his satisfaction the pernicious influence of Chinese fiction, Liang then performs the amazing rhetorical feat of tracing to that influence all the undesirable life ideals and superstitions of traditional Chinese society: “Whence comes the Chinese habit of overprizing the successful scholar and prime minister? It comes from fiction. Whence the Chinese vice of fancying oneself as a talented beauty or gifted young scholar? It comes from fiction. Whence the Chinese admiration for brigands and thieves of the rivers and lakes? It comes from fiction. Whence the Chinese fascination with demons, shamans, fox spirits, and ghosts? It again comes from fiction.”16 Subsequent critics, even those writing for Hsin hsiao-shuo, would question Liang’s logic here. It would certainly seem more plausible to believe that it is precisely because traditional Chinese society has always encouraged young men to earn the highest honors at the examinations and in bureaucratic service and has always delighted in romantic lovers, chivalrous outlaws, and tales of the marvelous that there will be a fiction to cater to this deep-seated hunger for vicarious thrill or wish-fulfillment.

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But although the Chinese have suffered incalculably from their imitation of fictional heroes, at the same time Liang envisages a society modeled upon the most admirable characters. He would certainly have delighted in Shelley’s praise of Homer’s influence on society in the following passage from “A Defence of Poetry”: Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses; the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration.17

But the heroes fit for Chinese imitation are to be drawn from modern western history rather than from the Homeric past. “If the hero of our book is Washington,” Liang confidently asserts, “then the reader will transform himself into Washington; if the hero is Napoleon, then he will transform himself into Napoleon; and if the heroes are Confucius and Buddha, then readers will want to transform themselves into Confucius and Buddha” (17). Given Liang’s passion for national reform, it can safely be assumed that, despite his great interest in and high regard for Mahayana Buddhism, he throws in the names of Confucius and Buddha as a sop for the tradition-bound reader: the real paragons for modern Chinese are Washington, Napoleon, and many other modern patriots, revolutionaries, and statesmen who have transformed their nations. Liang himself has already written several biographies of the latter,18 and now it is the novelists’ turn to follow suit. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao apparently believes with Tolstoy that all art is infectious: hence his stern dismissal of traditional fiction for its pernicious effect upon the nation and his utterly naïve faith that to read about Washington is to become like Washington. One may quibble by saying that, whereas it is relatively harmless for people to fancy themselves as romantic lovers or to aspire to high examination honors and bureaucratic success, society would be really thrown into confusion if everyone were determined to become a Washington or Napoleon. But Liang must have

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envisioned a new nation of noble patriots, all working in unison for the common good, and he could well apply Shelley’s definition of poetry to his own utilitarian brand of political fiction: it is “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution.”19 Although most famous for its admonition to novelists to lift the political level of the nation, “Fiction Seen in Relation to the Guidance of Society” appears to me far more interesting as a contribution toward critical theory in its attempt to discriminate between two kinds of fiction. Between 1898 and 1902 Liang must have acquainted himself to some extent with contemporary Japanese criticism, for his new essay shows an awareness of romantic literary views that is otherwise difficult to account for. In the early part of the essay, Liang gives two basic reasons for the appeal of fiction beyond the usual explanations (its easy intelligibility and human interest). First, each person lives in a narrow world confined by what he can see, feel, and touch, and fiction offers him worlds (shih-chieh) beyond his own world. “Fiction, then, frequently guides him into another world and alters the climate of his customary sensory experience.”20 Second, each person is so inured to his own world that his sensory and emotional responses to it become mechanic. “Frequently he knows that this is so but does not know why this is so. Even if he wants to re-create a scene, neither his mind nor his mouth nor his pen is able to convey or depict it. But if someone lays bare the whole scene and thoroughly explores it, then he will slap the table and cry in astonishment. ‘How true, how true! This is so, this is indeed so!’ ” (15) Although the phrase “slap the table and cry in astonishment” is a cliché in the traditional criticism of the novel, Liang is not here referring to sensational or melodramatic incidents that would normally call for this kind of praise, but to the truth obscured by habit or custom, or, in the far more famous words of Coleridge, descriptive of Wordsworth’s aim when composing his share of the Lyrical Ballads, to “the loveliness and the wonders before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”21 The kind of fiction that extends beyond our own limited world would seem also to correspond to the kind of poetry Coleridge wrote for that joint volume. While Liang may not care for “persons and characters supernatural” (Coleridge’s phrase), he would certainly include in fictional worlds other

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than our own exotic lands, foreign political heroes fired by patriotism, and utopian and scientific projections into the future. Liang calls this kind of fiction “the idealistic school of fiction” (li-hsiang-p’ai hsiao-shuo) and the other kind “the realistic school of fiction” (hsieh-shih-p’ai hsiao-shuo).22

III In the preceding section I have analyzed the main points of the three essays and further examined them with reference to the traditional Chinese attitude toward fiction, the western ideological and literary influence, and the vogue for political novels in Meiji Japan. We have seen that both Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao are so obsessed with the educational function of fiction that they deliberately forfeit any sense of objectivity in painting a picture of lurid contrast between Chinese and foreign fiction solely by reference to their utility. They both exaggerate the power of fiction and presuppose a naïve reader utterly docile to persuasion. Although Yen Fu’s application of Darwinism to account for the appeal of fiction is of some interest23 and although Liang’s discrimination between two kinds of fiction shows genuine discernment, clearly their three essays are by design superficial and propagandistic and make no pretense of being serious works of critical thought. In the Chinese context, the sole distinction of Yen and Liang lies in the fact that, whereas earlier critics and commentators defend or deprecate fiction for its moral effect on the individual reader, they are mainly concerned about the impact of fiction on the possible reformation or degeneration of the nation as a whole. But obsession with China is characteristic of late Ch’ing thought, and one is not surprised that such prominent intellectuals as Yen and Liang should regard fiction as an instrument for national regeneration. Clearly, the importance of these essays lies in their influence. But it is good to remember that, with most critical documents of this type, it is only in retrospect that we can assign them the full measure of their significance. I rather doubt that an unsigned article in Kuo-wen pao, as Yen and Hsia’s piece was, could have caused an immediate stir.24 It was important at the time of its publication only in the sense that it expressed a point of view with which a significant portion of the elite was already in sympathy. While Liang’s two essays were visibly more influential, they represent, nevertheless, a small part of his endeavor as an advocate of new

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fiction. The full measure of his influence must be assessed with reference to his triple role as a promoter and translator of foreign fiction, as the founder of the first magazine to promote new fiction, and as the author of the fragment, Hsin Chung-kuo wei-lai chi (The future of new China) (1902), which marks the first appearance in China of a new kind of political fiction. The impact of Yen’s and Liang’s essays on subsequent late Ch’ing criticism, however, can be easily ascertained. Practically all late Ch’ing comments on fiction have been gathered in Hsiao-shuo hsi-ch’ü yen-chiu chüan, which forms a part of A Ying’s Wan-Ch’ing wen-hsüeh ts’ung-ts’ao, to which all students of that literature are beholden for its inclusion of a large number of works otherwise not easily obtainable. An inspection of the critical volume not only confirms Yen and Liang’s influence, however; it also reveals considerable reaction against their sweeping condemnation of traditional Chinese fiction and Liang’s indiscriminate endorsement of foreign fiction as the work of erudite scholars and high-minded patriots. Liang’s first essay is, I believe, directly responsible for the late Ch’ing fashion of labeling different kinds of novel. If the term hsiao-shuo has retained its pejorative connotations, the label cheng-chih hsiao-shuo (political novel) is a newly minted term of positive approbation. Under Liang’s influence, therefore, it soon became the fashion among editors and novelists to label one work as a political novel and another as a social novel. Philosophic novels, idealistic novels, scientific novels, nihilist novels, and especially detective novels flooded the market. Even the traditional types of yen-yi and love fiction regained dignity under their new designations respectively as li-shih hsiao-shuo and hsieh-ch’ing hsiao-shuo or yen-ch’ing hsiao-shuo.25 Translations and abridgments of foreign fiction were similarly labeled. This is not the place to account for the enormous popularity of foreign fiction at that time, but the public’s initial receptivity must have been partly due to the influence of Liang’s first essay. But, ironically, by the late nineteenth century, the gap between best-selling authors and serious novelists had already become apparent in the West. The bestsellers would easily attract Chinese attention because they were more widely publicized in western periodicals and more easily available in cities like Shanghai and Tientsin. We have seen the undeserved popularity of Bulwer-Lytton in early Meiji Japan; the comedy is repeated with even greater absurdity in late Ch’ing China, when Rider Haggard is

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declared to be a genius on a par with Shakespeare and becomes the most assiduously translated of all living novelists.26 While many publishers and translators in Shanghai were clearly after profit at the reader’s expense, we find a serious translator like Lin Shu trying his best to say something good about Haggard’s novels, usually about their embodiment of a martial or adventurous spirit or their moving depiction of romantic love.27 But in traditional eyes these works are no better than Chinese novels in their encouragement of robbery and lust. Thus in a matter of years we begin to hear adverse criticism of the imported product. Writing in Hsin hsiao-shuo in 1905, Chin Sung-ts’en (the original author of the first few chapters of Nieh-hai hua), while parroting Liang Ch’i-ch’ao about the great influence of fiction on society, raises an alarm over the tremendous popularity of the translations of such love novels as La Dame aux camélias and Haggard’s Joan Haste (1895; first truncated Chinese version, 1901; Lin Shu’s complete version, which incorporates that version, came out in 1905) and their impact on morality: “If a man wants to dally with prostitutes, he can say, ‘I am Armand Duval,’ and then his father’s command will be easily defied . . . . If a girl falls in love, she can say, ‘I am Joan Haste,’ and then her chastity will be instantly lost.”28 At the same time, exposure to translated fiction has only confirmed many readers in their admiration of the best Chinese novels. In their sweeping condemnation of Chinese fiction, Yen and Liang have not taken into account the kind of nationalism that would prompt writers to defend these popular classics. In view of their supposedly poisonous character, their defenders have to assert their modernity or ideological relevance, and the easiest way to do so is to relabel them according to fashion. Shui-hu and Hung-lou meng, quite expectedly, were singled out for unqualified critical reendorsement. In the series of Hsiao-shuo ts’ung-hua featured in Hsin hsiao-shuo, one of Liang’s associates, Hsia-jen, declares that “of our country’s novels none is more wonderful than Hung-lou meng. It may be called a political novel, a novel of human relationships, a social novel, a philosophical novel, a moral novel.”29 Hsia-jen implicitly exonerates the work from Liang’s charge of immorality and further anticipates more recent criticism by saying of Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in that “with the insight of a great philosopher he tore down and demolished the structure of old morality.”30 Several other critics call Hung-lou meng a consciously anti-Manchu novel, thus placing it on another plane of contemporary relevance.

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By 1908 a new edition of Shui-hu chuan with commentary was being prepared by one Yen-nan Shang-sheng, who subtitled his version “Our Fatherland’s Foremost Political Novel.” He declares in the preface that it is also a social novel, military novel, detective novel, and novel of human relationships. Apparently, the more labels a novel can have, the greater it is, and Shih Nai-an is for that reason “the patriarch among the world’s novelists.”31 But even in 1908 the kind of political novel represented by The Future of New China and its most distinguished successor, Ch’en T’ien-hua’s Shih-tzu hou (The lion roars),32 commanded great respect so that Yen-nan Shang-sheng felt justified in regretting that Shih Nai-an had forgotten to spell out the constitution of the just government established by the Liangshan heroes: if the novel “could imitate The Future of New China and The Lion Roars of the present day and draw up all kinds of statutes for the guidance of the citizens, then it would be the best of the best.”33 In the same year T’ien-lu Sheng, a more influential critic, ranked Shih Nai-an with Plato, Bakunin, Tolstoy, and Dickens, and labeled Shuihu as a socialist novel, a nihilist novel, and, of course, a political novel.34 Many other famous novels were similarly defended. Thus, apropos of the remark that China has no scientific novels, a contributor to the Hsiaoshuo ts’ung-hua series maintains that Ching-hua yuan comes closest to being one.35 Out of this random, unconcerted defense of the old and notso-old novels, and the best works of Li Po-yüan (1867–1906) and Wu Chien-jen (1867–1910), emerged the tradition of the Chinese novel substantially as we know it today. When during the Literary Revolution Hu Shih corresponded with Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Ch’ien Hsüan-t’ung about the novel, they were echoing the view of these late Ch’ing critics. The only contribution of that correspondence is Hu Shih’s unqualified endorsement of Ju-lin wai-shih as one of China’s greatest novels.36 Tsubouchi Shôyô declares in Shôsetsu shinzui: “The novel is art; it is not something to be made for practical purposes. An attempt to make the novel the means of bestowing practical benefit would be a distortion of its purpose.”37 Even though in his second essay Liang Ch’i-ch’ao extols fiction as “the highest kind of literature” (Tsubouchi calls the novel “nothing other than a variety of poetry”),38 he is all for didacticism, not only because he lacked comparable training in literary criticism but because in the interests of national renovation the task of political enlightenment appeared paramount. But when the fraudulent claims for the foreign novel were being exposed and the merits of old Chinese novels being

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defended in new terms, the advocates of new fiction could no longer avoid the question of aesthetics. Granted all the educational values of fiction, it would seem that it must first have artistic value to be worth bothering about. In 1907 Huang Mo-hsi became co-founder of the magazine Hsiaoshuo lin (The grove of fiction) and spoke out unambiguously for the art of the novel. In his “Fa-k’an tz’u” (Announcement of publication), he acknowledges the great influence fiction now wields in changing the manners and attitudes of the people, but deplores the fact that “whereas fiction used to be too much looked down upon, it is now regarded too highly.”39 “Today, the situation is the reverse of the old days. Whenever one publishes a novel, he vaunts its claim to advance the people; whenever one reviews a novel, he asserts its intention to reform manners and morals . . . as if the statutes of a state, the scriptures of a religion, the textbooks to be used in schools, and the moral norms of nation and society were all to be provided through the medium of fiction. Is this indeed the case or not?” He believes that a serious critic should ask himself whether fiction can really transform a benighted person into an intelligent one, whether it can dispel the rotten air around us and refresh it, whether, despite his pious declarations, a particular novelist is seriously interested in promoting the welfare of the masses or merely seeking pecuniary profit, and whether fiction is the panacea it is supposed to be. He then invites the reader to examine “the nature of the novel.” Fiction, after all, is a species of literature and it has to be aesthetically satisfying. The novelist who scorns all artistic consideration to vaunt a higher or nobler purpose is not performing his proper function: all he can accomplish is “a valueless lecture or a series of roughly formulated maxims.” Huang’s “Announcement” marks a new maturity of understanding in its assessment of the nature and function of fiction; in the history of Chinese criticism, it should be assigned a place of higher honor than Yen’s and Liang’s essays, despite their far greater impact on the public. For his magazine Huang Mo-hsi wrote a series of Hsiao-shuo hsiao-hua that are far more distinguished than similar “fiction talks” of his time. When he discusses Shui-hu as a novel of socialism or ranks two of Haggard’s novels with San-kuo and Sui-T’ang yen-yi as exemplars of historical fiction, he is, of course, strictly a critic of his age, but, on the whole, his cool-headed approach to the Chinese novel, neither downgrading it for its supposed depravity nor advancing new claims for its relevance but assessing each and every work on its own artistic or philosophic merit, sets

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a high standard for later critics. Especially remarkable is his critical survey of some ninety works of historical and pseudo-historical fiction. Scholars today have only begun to pay them more than bibliographic attention.40 I must not close this section without mentioning the unique example of philosophic criticism of its time with which all students of Chinese fiction are familiar—Wang Kuo-wei’s “Hung-lou meng p’ing-lun” (1904).41 With all its simplifications, it is a remarkably brilliant study of the novel according to the aesthetic principles of Schopenhauer, and was clearly written in disregard of all current cant about the importance and function of fiction. No less a patriot in his own fashion than Liang, Wang had the scholarly tact not to subject literature to a narrow political or educational test, with the result that, whereas Liang’s essays on fiction can be studied only as historical documents, Wang’s essay on Hung-lou meng, along with his Jen-chien tz’u-hua and studies in Chinese drama, is still consulted by scholars today for their critical insights.

IV Liang Ch’i-ch’ao was most certainly the first Chinese to refer to the “realistic school of fiction,” which was destined to dominate the Chinese literary scene down to the present day. But, judging by his contributions as a translator and practitioner of fiction, he must have been far more taken by the idealistic school. His Future of New China, serialized in the first issues of Hsin hsiao-shuo, is by his own definition a political novel of the idealistic variety. Since this fragment exemplifies what he preaches in his two essays on fiction, we must give it some attention to ascertain the extent of his success and influence as an advocate of the political novel. The Future of New China was not a project that Liang could carry out with ease. According to his preface to its first installment, he had wanted to write the novel for five years, but, since he was always so busy, he had launched Hsin hsiao-shuo in order to force himself to meet each monthly deadline so that he could complete it. He says he had written two or three chapters, but since the second and third chapters are equally inventive in technique, while the fourth chapter departs in mood and method completely from the preceding narrative, I believe Liang must have completed three chapters by the time he wrote the preface, and it was his realization that chapter 4 was a false start that led him to discontinue the novel.

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Liang has enough self-knowledge to say in the preface that after reading several times the first two or three chapters I have completed, it strikes me that this work looks like a novel but is not quite one, looks like unofficial history but is not quite that either, looks like a treatise but is not quite that also. Not knowing what kind of literary form it will have, I cannot help laughing at myself with wry amusement. But since it is my aim to publicize my political views and deliberate on national policy, the novel will naturally have a somewhat different form from that of an ordinary novel. It frequently records statutes, bylaws, orations, and disquisitions, and these take up so much space and are so boring that I know I cannot satisfy the reader’s expectations.42

Actually, The Future of New China, with its shapelessness and miscellaneous content, is a remarkable example of the type of fiction designated by Northrop Frye as “anatomy.”43 Its opening scene is set sixty years hence, during the New Year season of 1962, when China is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its governmental renovation.44 At that time the plenipotentiaries of all the nations are attending the International Peace Conference in Nanking, China’s new capital, and many heads of state are there, too, to congratulate the government on the anniversary of its renovation. Meanwhile, a great exposition is being held in Shanghai, attracting a multitude of foreign visitors, including several thousand distinguished specialists and authorities and tens of thousands of college students. As one of its programs, the exposition features Dr. K’ung Hung-tao, a venerated educator-statesman and direct descendant of Confucius, giving a series of lectures on sixty years of recent Chinese history. According to Liang’s original plan, then, these lectures were to constitute the substance of the novel. The pageantry of the brief introductory chapter reminds one of the opening scene of The Lotus Sutra, which sets the stage for Buddha’s grand discourse. In chapter 2, Dr. K’ung cites various kinds of evidence in support of China’s progress during the last sixty years, but by chapter 3, he has no choice but to begin his recital in the year 1902 and present the issue then uppermost in the author’s mind: whether China should adopt the form of a parliamentary monarchy or oust the Manchus with a revolution. Accordingly, Dr. K’ung introduces two youths freshly returned

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from years of study in Europe: Huang K’e-ch’iang, the future father of the Republic,45 and his best friend Li Ch’ü-ping. They hold a nightlong debate over the immediate prospects for China—Huang speaking as a constitutional reformer and Li as more of a revolutionary. For more than twenty rounds, each argues cogently against the other without yielding an inch of ground, and the whole debate is indeed sustained with intellectual brilliance. The commentator (most probably Liang himself ) is perhaps justified in calling it an unprecedented piece of writing, surpassing in power its only model in Chinese literature, Yen-t’ieh lun (Debate on salt and iron).46 But by chapter 4 Liang’s inspiration has flagged. Abandoning completely the framework of a lecture, he resorts to narrative and tells us a few inconsequential adventures of the two young heroes. Since in late 1902 neither the reformers nor the revolutionaries have scored any decisive victory or accomplished anything beyond influencing public opinion, Liang cannot predict the immediate future and recite the as-yet-unknown careers of the two representative leaders of the new China. He could, of course, fabricate, but fabrication would forfeit the note of urgency so ably maintained in the earlier debate. The gulf between the known present and the utopian future is impassable for Liang or any other novelist. Following Liang’s precept and example, many tried to write political novels presupposing a rejuvenated China after a period of reform or revolution, but they were all saddled with the problem of how to depict the immediate future. Ch’en T’ien-hua abandoned The Lion Roars after completing the eighth chapter. But even if he had not committed suicide, I believe he still could not have proceeded to finish the novel. In the allegorical introduction he presents the double vision of China’s total extinction and the alternative possibility of her total rejuvenation. Then he proceeds to describe the education of a group of patriotic youths on a small island off the coast of Chekiang. Many soon leave for Europe, America, and Japan for advanced study, but one prefers to begin his patriotic task on the mainland. There he gets in touch with revolutionaries and members of secret societies, but the author simply cannot go on without knowing the coming shape of the revolution. To judge by the number of its abortive imitations, the special type of fiction that The Future of New China exemplifies must have caught the imagination of many patriotic writers, but its possibilities nevertheless remained unfulfilled. If we regard Liang’s fragment in this fashion, then we

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can appreciate all the more keenly the prophetic interlude in Liu E’s Laots’an yu-chi and the romantic interlude of Russian nihilists in Tseng P’u’s Nieh-hai hua.47 But clearly, despite their authors’ excursions into the realm of idealistic fiction, these two representative works, along with the best novels of Li Po-yüan and Wu Chien-jen, are firmly grounded in contemporary political and social reality and share little affinity with The Future of New China and its successors. The latter constituted a separate small stream, not to be confused with the main current of late Ch’ing fiction. It would seem that Liang was far more realistic in his awareness of what kinds of useful fiction could be produced for his time before he was seized by his enthusiasm for the political novel. In 1896 he serialized in Shih-wu pao a long treatise called Pien-fa t’ung-yi (A comprehensive proposal for governmental reforms), which includes a remarkable section on juvenile education (“Lun yu-hsüeh”). Because Liang recommends novels (shuo-pushu) as suitable reading matter for schoolchildren, he includes in that section a general discussion of Chinese fiction that is far more sympathetic in tone than his later essays on the subject. He appreciates the educational value of the great novels (Shui-hu, San-kuo, Hung-lou) and refutes the idea that fiction was looked down upon in earlier times. Even though the novel is now in disrepute because too many men of little talent have produced works “inciting robbery and inciting lust,” its proper educational function can be easily restored: Now we should exclusively use the colloquial language to produce numerous books for the benefit of the populace. Their higher function is to propagate the teachings of the sages, and their lower is to narrate historical events in a miscellaneous fashion. Their immediate concern is to awaken a sense of national shame and their less urgent business is to depict the conditions of the people. The shameful ways of the bureaucracy, the ludicrous stupidities at the examination halls, the inveterate habit of opium smoking, the cruel torture of foot binding—these could all be described with utter realism so as to lift us above the manners and customs of a degenerate age. Aren’t the benefits to be reaped from this kind of fiction indeed measureless?48

Not yet the ardent advocate of new fiction, Liang adopts here a far more flexible program for the novelists to follow. He appears definitely partial

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to the kind of satiric and castigatory novel that was to become the staple of late Ch’ing fiction. In 1915 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao wrote one more article on fiction, entitled “Kao hsiao-shuo-chia” (An appeal to novelists). By that time the patriotic and political fervor of late Ch’ing fiction had been extinguished and two kinds of novelists, the so-called “black curtain” school and “mandarin duck and butterfly” school, were dominating the literary stage.49 Liang could not be pleased. In that article, therefore, while acknowledging the enormous popularity of the current fiction, he denounces its bad quality and worse influence. Nine tenths of that fiction, he declares, “incite robbery and incite lust,” while the rest is mere “playful writing” (yu-hsi wen). As moralistic as ever, he now appears somewhat old-fashioned as he pleads with the writers not to accumulate bad karma for themselves and pave the way to Hell for their young readers. But, what is surprising, he does not condemn merely the strictly contemporary product but includes in his sweeping indictment the fiction of the last ten years. The degeneration of new fiction, then, dates from 1905, the year when his own journal Hsin hsiao-shuo folded. “In the last ten years morals and manners have declined by a thousand chang, and what aspect of that degeneration has not been traceable to the influence of the so-called new fiction? If we slide down in this fashion, in a few years it would be a wonder if the land of China did not sink until it disappeared from the face of the earth.”50 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao remains as convinced as ever of the enormous power of fiction over society, but now that his youthful vision of a new China has fled, he feels too disenchanted to champion political fiction. It would be enough if novelists could heed their moral obligation to society.

The Travels of Lao Ts’an An Exploration of Its Art and Meaning (1969)

The Travels of Lao Ts’an (Lao-ts’an yu-chi) is the most beloved of all Chinese novels produced during the last decade of the Ch’ing dynasty. Among other signs of its popularity, it has attracted a larger amount of scholarly attention than any other novel of the same period,1 and yet with all this commendable industry, it would seem that its incontestable human appeal and artistic excellence have not yet been adequately accounted for in critical terms. Its champions have been content to isolate for inspection its major ideas and its more obvious kinds of literary beauty readily supportable by quotations,2 not realizing that in appraising any work of presumed greatness considerations of thought and style are properly inseparable. As evidence of Liu Ê’s modern enlightenment and literary skill, we are told especially to admire his acute criticism of the officials and several elaborate passages descriptive of scenery and music. But to stress the author’s concern with official injustice and tyranny has the practical effect of ignoring his larger concerns with China’s fate as a whole, and to prize merely his descriptive powers implies an unawareness of his far more remarkable innovations within the tradition of the Chinese novel, in regard to both form and technique. The present essay shall examine conjointly the larger artistic and political aspects of The Travels of Lao Ts’an as a preliminary step toward a fuller appraisal of its greatness. In a sense, the mechanical approach to the novel has been forced upon the critics because of its rambling structure and its apparent uncon-

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cern with plot. Even Professor Harold Shadick, who valiantly speaks of “the book’s unity of feeling produced by the author’s tireless interest in people and things, his moral integrity, and his pervading sense of humor,” concedes its lack of unity in both plot and subject matter when “judged by the Western conception of a novel.”3 But since in his management of narration, dialogue, and description Liu Ê shows himself to be an accomplished craftsman rather than a beginning novelist unsure of his powers, the absence of the latter kinds of unity may have been deliberate rather than due to clumsiness or carelessness. The last two chapters certainly prove that Liu Ê could tell a well-rounded story if he wanted to. His decision not to do so in the earlier chapters would indicate, rather, his dissatisfaction with the plot-centered novel of his predecessors and his ambition to encompass the higher and more complex kinds of unity consonant with a faithful rendering of his personal vision of China. Writing at a time when novelists were already exposed to western fiction through the large number of translations then available and were further urged to concern themselves with national problems, Liu Ê would seem to have enjoyed greater success than his distinguished and prolific contemporaries, Li Pao-chia and Wu Wo-yao, in shedding the traditional role of the novelist as a storyteller and in subordinating all conventional elements of storytelling to the implementation of individual vision. But for its adherence to the form of a third-person narrative, The Travels of Lao Ts’an could have been the first Chinese lyrical novel in the first person, and yet at the same time, its author is so unlike the satiric novelists of his period with their self-righteous penchant for ridicule and castigation that his searching study of the country’s present and future could be regarded as China’s first political novel.4 All the points maintained in the preceding paragraph shall be substantiated in the course of the essay. For the present, it suffices to mention the most striking feature about the structure of the novel—the middle section comprising chapters 8–11, which constitutes a philosophic and prophetic interlude almost totally detachable from the main narrative about the travels of Lao Ts’an. This section records Shen Tzu-p’ing’s journey to the Peach Blossom Mountain, ostensibly to look for the recluse Liu Jen-fu but actually to receive words of wisdom from the girl philosopher Yü-ku and the prophet Huang-lung-tzu (Yellow Dragon). Since there is no urgent business awaiting Lao Ts’an at the time when Shen sets out for his journey, if the author had wanted to maintain the integrity of

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his novel as the hero’s journal, he could have easily assigned him the trip. But for reasons to be spelled out later, it would seem that Liu Ê has deliberately risked a split in his narrative so as to state fully his complex and contradictory responses to his times as voiced by Lao Ts’an and the Yellow Dragon. Accordingly, for the convenience of critical discussion, the novel could be read in two ways: one could attend primarily to the self-sufficient narrative about the hero, with which modern readers are in ready sympathy, and then read it in conjunction with the middle section, which, with all its display of esoteric learning and abstruse reasoning, contributes immensely to the emotional resonance and political meaning of the novel as a whole. I shall adopt the first approach in section I. Since the novel’s middle section hardly differs in style and narrative method from the main narrative, I feel justified in making no reference to the former in my discussion of Liu Ê’s technical contributions as a novelist in that section. But since the main narrative is itself of absorbing interest as a commentary on China charged with deep personal emotion, I shall also discuss that aspect of the narrative in order to prepare the reader for section II, which will be mainly concerned with the philosophic and prophetic interlude. Taken together, these two sections will, I hope, contribute to a better understanding of the art and meaning of the novel.

I Following the occupation of Peking by the Allied Powers in August 1900 in retaliation against the Boxer assault on its foreign community, even the most reactionary of the educated Chinese began to sense the approaching end of an era and to fear for the future of their country. Liu Ê wrote his novel in 1903–1904; even though it recalls a period when the Chinese empire was in less danger of imminent collapse, it is inescapably permeated by that awareness of doom, as is made explicit in the concluding passage of the author’s preface: We of this age have our feelings stirred about ourselves and the world, about family and nation, about society, about the various races and religions. The deeper the emotions, the more bitter the weeping. This is why the Scholar of a Hundred Temperings from Hungtu has made this book, The Travels of Lao Ts’an.

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The game of chess is finished. We are getting old. How can we not weep? I know that “a thousand lovely ones” and “ten thousand beauties” among mankind will weep with me and be sad with me.5

In the preface, then, Liu Ê suppresses the more self-confident voice heard in the prophetic section to call attention primarily to his deep sense of sorrow over China’s senility and impotence. Chin Sheng-t’an’s preface to Shui-hu chuan set the fashion for novelists to compose autobiographical statements tinged with melancholy, and Liu Ê’s essay on weeping is a particularly famous product of that tradition. Two kinds of weeping are described: Spiritual nature gives birth to feeling; feeling gives birth to weeping. There are two kinds of weeping. One kind is strong; one kind is weak. When an addlepated boy loses a piece of fruit, he cries; when a silly girl loses a hairpin, she weeps. This is the weak kind of weeping. The sobbing of Ch’i’s wife that caused the city wall to collapse, the tears of the Imperial Concubines Hsiang that stained the bamboo—these were the strong kinds of weeping. Moreover the strong kind of weeping divides into two varieties. If weeping takes the form of tears, its strength is small. If weeping does not take the form of tears, its strength is great: it reaches farther.6

In the preface, then, Liu Ê places himself in the second class of strong weepers: Ch’ü Yüan, Chuang Tzu, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Tu Fu, Li Hou-chu, Wang Shih-fu, Pa-ta Shan-jen, and Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in. He believes that all these weepers have a great capacity for feeling, which in turn indicates the depth of their spiritual nature. Since the majority of them have transcended personal sorrows to weep for mankind, one may say Liu Ê believes with Keats that none are true poets But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.

Strong weeping, then, distinguishes the poet of impersonal sorrow from the “dreamer tribe” who, while capable of weak weeping, feel nothing of the “giant agony of the world.”7

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Of the strong weepers instanced, Liu Ê bears the closest kinship to Tu Fu, and it is a measure of the novelist’s greatness that he stands comparison with the poet-sage without at all being dwarfed. He is as much unexcelled among traditional Chinese novelists for his powers of description as is Tu Fu among poets. Profoundly concerned about their times, both assert an abiding faith in the Chinese tradition despite their pronounced melancholy and despondency. The poems of Tu Fu’s middle period are as much a record of wandering amid scenes of sorrow as is The Travels of Lao Ts’an. With all their indignation against cruelty and injustice, both authors show a passionate love for landscape and a genial sense of humor. My pointed reference to Tu Fu also serves to define Liu Ê’s narrative method. Critics approaching the novel with conventional expectations for a well-rounded plot or a series of well-rounded plots have inevitably found its structure wanting. But the novel, as its title says, is a record of travels, and the author appears far more indebted to nature poets and familiar essayists than to traditional novelists in his concern for the unique moment, the unique experience. The Travels of Lao Ts’an has captured a sense of felt life because it has fully lived up to its title as a third-person journal of the hero’s observations, meditations, conversations, and doings. (Even the prophetic section can be taken as the journal of Shen Tzu-p’ing.) In its relative unconcern with plot and in its delight in seemingly trivial or inconsequential events, this journal has far more in common with the modern lyrical novel than any traditional type of Chinese novel, and it is a pity that, just because a new generation of writers would soon seek guidance from western fiction, Liu Ê’s almost revolutionary achievement in transforming the old novel into a lyrical vehicle capable of dwelling lovingly over a character’s innermost feelings and thoughts had never been given any recognition. The Travels of Lao Ts’an is therefore not a satiric novel in the style of The Scholars. Except for minor scenes like the one in chapter 4 where two would-be officials offer Lao Ts’an money to buy a post, there is very little satire in the sense of exposing someone to shame or ridicule. Nor is it by any means a castigatory novel (ch’ien-tse hsiao-shuo) in the company of Kuan-ch’ang hsien-hsing chi (Bureaucracy exposed) and Erh-shih-nien mu-tu chih kuai-hsien-chuang (Strange events seen in the last twenty years), as Lu Hsün would have us believe.8 Liu Ê is not a know-it-all journalist who delights in exposé for its own sake. Each time someone tells Lao Ts’an of

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the misdeeds of an official, he is profoundly shocked, and this sense of shock and helpless compassion provides the proper emotional response for the reader. Though the two principal evil officials in the book—Yü Hsien and Kang Pi—are almost unbelievable in their cruelty, one does not get the impression that the author has caricatured them, as Li Pao-chia and Wu Wo-yao would certainly have. Rather, he maintains with all seriousness that Kang Pi is utterly “incorruptible” and that the equally unbribable Yü Hsien is further distinguished by his “ability.”9 Nearly every critic has praised Liu Ê’s originality in exposing the so-called pure officials (ch’ing-kuan),10 but he seems to extend his sympathy even to these sadists, tracing their cruelty as much to their well-meaning stupidity as to their evident pleasure in persecuting the defenseless and, at least in the case of Yü Hsien, their ruthless ambition to advance their own career. As a new kind of novel in the form of a journal, then, The Travels of Lao Ts’an is weakest in the well-plotted last two chapters where the hero assumes the active role of a detective and then unpardonably disappears from view for several pages as his assistant Hsü Liang goes about in disguise to trap the villain Wu Erh-lang-tzu. Given the tremendous popularity of detective fiction in the late Ch’ing period, Liu Ê’s flirtation with this type of story is understandable, but in adopting a conventional plot to wind up his novel, he has destroyed the unity of a journal so ably maintained in the earlier chapters. The detective story also weakens the novel for the reason that the crime it uncovers is of a domestic and private character and has nothing to do with the theme of official injustice. The story of the Chia and Wei families has been of primary interest to us in providing an instance of Kang Pi’s shocking cruelty and stupidity. When Kang Pi is beaten, the story has served its main function. The climax of the novel occurs, therefore, at the moment in chapters 16–17 when, trembling with rage over Kang Pi’s order to place Mrs. Chia under torture, Lao Ts’an pushes aside the crowd and walks to the center of the court, confronts the judge, and challenges his right to shackle the enfeebled woman and her old father. Liu Ê himself is aware that the domestic crime is of no relevance to his theme, and he resurrects all victims of poisoning so as to nullify the crime and conclude the novel on a happy note. Ts’ui-huan and Ts’ui-hua, two prostitutes newly released from their bondage, also face a brighter future at the end.

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In the journal proper we are shown the full range of the hero’s tastes, interests, and concerns. His concern with China is fully established in the first chapter, where he successfully treats the patient Huang Jui-ho (an allegorical disguise for the Yellow River) and dreams of the leaking and foundering ship of China torn by dissension and mutiny, but at the same time he is a traveling doctor who delights in nature and music, keeps a few old books by his side, reads poetry and composes verses, and enjoys the company of the humble people on the road and at the inn. When he arrives in Tsinan, the capital of Shantung, in chapter 2, therefore, he is at first primarily interested in its scenes and attractions (the singing of the Fair Maid, for example), as a traveler should be, and it is the shocking stories he hears that draw him ineluctably to the crimes of the officials and the sufferings of the innocent. But to the end Lao Ts’an remains a person of infinite curiosity and zest whose concern with China never completely eclipses, except in moments of anger or sorrowful meditation, his manysided interests. It is largely in attending to his hero’s interests that the author is able to leaven his narrative with humor and laughter and maintain a rich sense of life with all its odd surprises and delightful contingencies. Earlier Chinese novelists are far more businesslike in attending to the plot and far less likely to develop a scene until it is fully brought to life. Even the author of Dream of the Red Chamber, with all his knack for staging a lively and seemingly inconsequential conversation, has not developed the possibilities of a scene as far as Liu Ê. From the moment Lao Ts’an meets Huang Jen-jui, one evening in chapter 12, until they go to sleep early next morning in chapter 16, we have the vivid transcript in nearly forty pages11 of the conversations and doings of these two friends in the company of Ts’ui-hua and Ts’ui-huan, and this continuous scene records undoubtedly the longest night in traditional Chinese literature and, in terms of fictional art, the most triumphant. All four characters are alive; Huang Jen-jui, especially, emerges as possibly the most lovable opium smoker in all Chinese fiction. It is true that the retold stories of the flood and of the murder of the Chia family have contributed considerably to the length of the night scene. But these are by no means inset tales of complete narrative autonomy, and the first story, especially, is told in such a way as to involve the active participation of all four present. While it is the ostensible purpose

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of the evening party to inform us of the flood and the murder case, the author has surely seized the occasion to render that party in all its actuality, to disclose further facets of Lao Ts’an’s character, and to establish the identity of his three companions for their intrinsic human interest. Huang Jen-jui’s repeated procrastination until he is finally ready to tell his story of the murder is typical of the author’s narrative art: had he told the story immediately after the dinner as he promised to do, the party would have been soon over and we would have had no opportunity to know its principals so intimately. Right after the dinner, Lao Ts’an complies with Huang Jen-jui’s request for a new poem. He can do so because he has been composing in his head ever since he saw the frozen Yellow River the day before. The poem goes: The earth cracks; the north wind howls; An ice sheet covers the river below. Ice behind pursues the ice before, Piling up and pressing down. The river bend jams solid; It forms a jagged silver bridge. The homeward-bound [sighs] long sighs, The traveler vainly groans and plains. Only a narrow strip of water, But a canopied carriage cannot cross; An elegant feast with girls and music Makes a riot of the bitter night.12

This is an unexceptional poem in the old style of the pre-T’ang poets, though the original reads much better than the translation. But just as on an earlier occasion Lao Ts’an writes a poem to vent his anger against Yü Hsien after hearing so many stories of his tyranny,13 on the present occasion he composes one to still his agitation. It is customary for Chinese writers to preface a poem with a prose account of its genesis: a justifiable procedure since the poem is usually too brief to provide the necessary biographical information for its full enjoyment. In that respect, nearly the

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entire twelfth chapter up to the point when the hero takes up his brush to write on the wall can be viewed as a preface to the poem. But so richly poetic is the prose account that in comparison the poem itself appears a conventional distillation of feeling little suggestive of the unique experiences that have gone into its composition. Lao Ts’an is detained in Tung-ch’ang-fu because he cannot cross the impassable Yellow River to reach Tsinan. The day before he meets with Huang Jen-jui, a very cold day, he walks about the embankment of the river to see if there are any available means of transportation. He is, however, so fascinated by the surging masses of ice in the river and by the men in boats breaking ice with wooden clubs that, soon after supper at the inn, he puts on a sheepskin gown and again goes to the embankment to enjoy the view. Enraptured by the moonlit scene, he recalls a couplet by Hsieh Ling-yün and becomes very pensive over the swift passage of time and the troubled state of Chinese affairs. The next morning he again goes to the riverbank to inquire about transportation. The river is frozen solid now, and on his way back to the inn he takes his time walking through the desolate streets of the city. Upon reaching his room, no doubt unconsciously prompted by his earlier recall of Hsieh Ling-yün’s lines, he reads a newly edited anthology of pre-T’ang poetry and compares it with earlier such anthologies. He then idles for a while at the door of the inn and a servant sent by Huang Jen-jui greets him. Huang, also stalled in town, soon invites him to have dinner with him, an extremely lively affair inadequately summarized in the last two lines of the poem. The afternoon scene by the icebound Yellow River, which corresponds to the first six lines of the poem, is justly celebrated for its magnificent passages of description. The beautiful night scene with Lao Ts’an watching the bright moon shining through the white clouds and upon the snow-capped mountains is also too well known to deserve quotation.14 More germane to my purpose is the meditative scene immediately following: Faced with this landscape where the brightness of snow and moon met, Lao Ts’an recalled the two lines of Hsieh Ling-yün’s poem: Clear moon lights up snow drifts; North wind strong and doleful.

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If you haven’t experienced the bitter cold of the north, you cannot know how well chosen the word “doleful” is, in the line: “North wind strong and doleful.” By this time the moonlight was making the whole earth bright. Lao Ts’an looked up. Not one star appeared in the sky except for the seven stars of the Dipper which could be seen clearly, gleaming and twinkling like several pale points. The Dipper was resting slantwise on the west side of the “Imperial Enclosure,” the handle on top, the bowl below. He thought to himself, “Months and years pass like a stream; the eye sees the handle of the Dipper pointing to the east again; another year is added to man’s life. So year after year rolls along blindly. Where is an end to be found?” Then, remembering the words of the Book of Odes, In the North there is a Dipper But it cannot scoop wine or sauce, he mused, “Now indeed is a time when many things are happening to our country; the nobles and officials are only afraid of bringing punishment on themselves; they think it is better to do nothing than to risk doing something, and therefore everything is allowed to go to ruin. What will the final result be? If this is the state of the country how can an honest man devote himself to his family?” When he reached this point in his thinking, unconsciously the tears began to trickle down his face, and he had no heart left for the enjoyment of the scenery. He went slowly back to his inn. As he walked along, he felt that there was something sticking to his face. He touched it with his hand and felt on each cheek a strip of smooth ice. At first he couldn’t understand it. Then he understood and smiled to himself. The tears he had just shed had immediately frozen solid in the cold air. There must have been many other “frozen pearls” on the ground. He returned to his inn feeling very melancholy and immediately went to bed.15

This is one of those passages that, while attracting far less attention than the elaborate descriptive passages, indicate Liu Ê’s sure artistry as a lyrical novelist. If the mental condition of the hero as described here is eventually reduced to a couplet emotionally colorless (“The homeward-

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bound [sighs] long sighs, / The traveler vainly groans and plains”), the prose passage follows with fidelity the workings of the hero’s consciousness as it juxtaposes freshly received impressions with lines of poetry suddenly retrieved from memory and reverts to melancholy thoughts in contemplation of the signs in the sky. The experience depicted here is of course nothing unusual: any serious-minded Chinese scholar well read in poetry and concerned about his times could have such thoughts while pacing under a bright moon. But whereas such poignant moments of rumination are frequently caught in Chinese verse (Tu Fu comes prominently to mind), so alien was the concept of the subjective hero to the tradition of Chinese fiction that it was nothing short of extraordinary for Liu Ê to grope toward the stream-of-consciousness technique not only here but in many equally remarkable passages as well. The quoted passage is of further interest in the light of the author’s stated intention to equate his book with the kind of strong weeping that “does not take the form of tears.” In a novel concerned with human suffering tears are of course unavoidable: one especially remembers Mrs. Yü Hsüeh-li crying her eyes out in front of her husband’s corpse before slitting her own throat to join him in death; Ts’ui-huan restraining her tears as she begins to tell her life story before Lao Ts’an and Huang Jen-jui and at the end breaking into a wail over their promise of help; and Mrs. Chia sobbing plaintively over the impossible task of supplying her torturer with the name of her nonexistent paramour.16 These women are all strong weepers who could have caused “the city wall to collapse” if Heaven had listened to their cries. Even the street urchin knocked over by an official’s chair bearer in chapter 2 is a strong weeper since in a just society the latter would be more careful and considerate. If the accident had been unavoidable, the chair bearer or, better still, the official inside the sedan chair would have consoled the boy and made proper apologies to his mother. As it is, she has no other recourse than to mutter imprecations and drag the crying boy home. Lao Ts’an does not cry, as befits a hero trying his best to help the sick and persecuted in the guise of a doctor and a knight-errant without arms. But on a few occasions tears well up in his eyes as he contemplates the atrocity of official injustice or the future of his country, just as once when he is seized with the desire to kill Yü Hsien his hair bristles in anger.17 But Lao Ts’an’s usual restraint in giving way to his sorrow or indignation speaks for a deeper disquiet over the futility of individual action when “the

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game of chess is finished.” In the present instance tears again trickle down his cheeks, but it is only moments later when they have turned into ice that he becomes aware of their presence. And he good-humoredly uses a cliché (“frozen pearls”) to describe those uselessly spilled on the ground. His ironic self-awareness has not only visualized the cold but also averted the threat of sentimentality that could have obscured the impersonal character of his profound sorrow. His kind of weeping can indeed find no satisfactory outlet in tears. For, despite the happy events that temporarily conclude his journey, the questions that have prompted Lao Ts’an to shed tears during his evening walk remain unanswered in the main portion of the novel. With all his kindness and chivalry, he is by no means a mighty swordsman who provides the reader with the vicarious thrill that justice is indeed done once the wrongdoers are punished. Even if Lao Ts’an rectifies all cases of injustice that come his way, he is aware of the numberless wrongs perpetrated every day without his knowledge,18 and, beyond that, the national situation in general, about which he can do nothing. Though his knowledge of flood control promises his greater usefulness in the future, within the novel itself, one may even ask, what has Lao Ts’an done in the way of counteracting tyranny and relieving suffering? He takes Ts’ui-huan as a concubine and arranges for Ts’ui-hua’s future as Huang Jen-jui’s secondary wife. He writes a letter to Governor Chang Yao (Chuang Yao, in some editions) that causes him to relieve Kang Pi of his special assignment to preside over the murder case and thus obtain justice for Mrs. Chia and her father. But an earlier letter he has written to Governor Chang concerning the misdeeds of Yü Hsien gets no results at all. In chapter 19 he has an interview with the governor: The Governor said, “Until I read your letter, I had no idea that Prefect Yü was so ruthless. I am indeed to blame. I shall certainly have to do something about it. But at the moment I dare not ‘recommend a man and then cashier him’; it would appear disrespectful to the Emperor.” Lao Ts’an said, “ ‘To save the people is to serve the King.’ It seems to me that this principle is also sound.” The Governor made no reply to this. They continued chatting for about half an hour, and then the Governor raised his teacup and Lao Ts’an took his leave.19

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For with all his independence of mind and action, Lao Ts’an can exert his influence in Shantung mainly because officials know that Governor Chang esteems him highly and wishes to employ him. Without the governor’s backing, a traveling doctor without an academic degree could not have challenged Kang Pi at court. But ironically, the governor, though a conscientious administrator of evident good will, has misplaced his confidence in Yü Hsien and Kang Pi as two of his ablest subordinates, and even when convinced of the former’s harshness, he is too much of a career bureaucrat to want to cashier him and thereby earn the emperor’s displeasure over his contradictory recommendations. And with even less excuse, he has earlier adopted a scholar’s plan to let the Yellow River flood over its dikes, thus causing the death of several hundred thousand people. Ts’ui-hua, a direct victim, tells of his reluctant consent to this most inhumane plan: “Governor [Chang] could do nothing. He nodded his head, heaved a sigh, and I have heard he shed a few tears.”20 These, too, are perhaps strong tears of commiseration, but his uneasy conscience on this momentous occasion, as on the later occasion when he declines to answer Lao Ts’an’s reproach, seems to say that it is unavoidable for a man of his importance to make or agree to wrong decisions. For all its chivalrous fervor, The Travels of Lao Ts’an is a novel grounded in political reality: the success the hero enjoys in delivering a few individuals from the clutches of injustice and misery only renders the more poignant the plight of multitudes oppressed by bad officials and victimized by misguided policies.

II The Travels of Lao Ts’an is a political novel especially in its explicit and implicit concern with the Boxer Incident. As is well known, Liu Ê’s personal fate is tragically involved in the events of 1900. In the fall of that year, he went from Shanghai to Peking and successfully negotiated through his Russian friends for the purchase of large quantities of rice stored in the imperial granary, then under the control of the Russian troops. He distributed this rice at a nominal price to the hungry in the city, and yet for this philanthropic deed he was accused by his enemies, prominently Yüan Shih-k’ai, of the treasonous crime of misappropriating imperial property. In 1908 Liu Ê was banished to Sinkiang, partly for this

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crime, and he died in Tihwa the next year at the age of fifty-three.21 At the time he warmed to the idea of writing a novel for Illustrated Fiction (Hsiuhsiang Hsiao-shuo), the thought must have occurred to him to draw upon his personal experiences during the siege of Peking since novels about Boxers were then very popular. (Liu Ê turned novelist to provide a source of income for his friend Lien Meng-ch’ing, a victim of government persecution then living in hiding in Shanghai. A few issues before The Travels of Lao Ts’an appeared, Illustrated Fiction had already begun serializing Lien’s own novel, Lin-nü yü (The words of neighboring women), which featured a hero remarkably suggestive of Liu Ê in undertaking a northward journey to the occupied capital.)22 But even though Liu Ê turned to an earlier period of his life for inspiration, probably because the other topic was too difficult to manage, still he contrived by various devices to include in his novel his concern with the Boxer catastrophe. Judging by biographical evidence, the novelist must have drawn heavily upon his memories of 1890, the year when he began serving in Shantung as one of Chang Yao’s advisers on flood control. Governor Chang died in August 1891, and since the novel places Lao Ts’an’s meetings with him in the fall and winter season, they could have happened only in 1890.23 Liu Ê, then thirty-four years (sui) old, agrees in age with Lao Ts’an (“some years above thirty”—pu-kuo san-shih-to-sui). The Manchu Yü-hsien was then prefect of Ts’ao-chou-fu (as is his counterpart Yü Hsien), though he was not officially confirmed in his post until 1891.24 Kang Pi, however, cannot be similarly placed among the author’s fellow officials in Shantung if he is to be taken as a disguise for the Manchu Kang-i. No scholars, however, have challenged this hypothesis since Liu Ta-shen, the novelist’s son, proposed it in 1940, and there can be little doubt that Liu Ê intended to equate the two not only because their rhyming names contain the same character kang but because, among his bad attributes noted by novelists and popular historians of his time, Kang-i was indeed known for his perverse obstinacy (kang-pi).25 But from 1898 to 1892 he was governor of Kiangsu and could not have served under Chang Yao in Shantung.26 Though Kang-i could have perpetrated injustice in the manner suggested in the novel during his earlier years as a provincial official, in the light of our present knowledge it is safer to maintain that Liu Ê quite arbitrarily assigned him his unflattering role as a judge, since the murder story involving the Chia and Wei families is by design fictitious. Kang-i, after all, once accused Liu Ê of treason; there would seem

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to be far greater personal cause for the novelist to portray him in a bad light than is the case with Yü-hsien.27 But principally, Liu Ê must have singled out these two as prime symbols of cruel and blundering government not so much to settle old scores or denounce their earlier tyranny, as has been generally emphasized, as to stress their eventual crime of inciting and supporting a fanatic movement of grave national consequence. As governor of Shantung (1899), Yü-hsien was the first official of his importance to abet the antiforeign activities of the Boxers and legitimize their status, and as governor of Shansi (1900), he killed many Chinese Christians, lured all foreign missionaries in his province to the capital Taiyuan with their families, and personally supervised their massacre.28 As Grand Councilor and Associate Grand Secretary, Kang-i was perhaps the most fervent supporter of the Boxer cause among the high ministers enjoying the confidence of Empress Dowager Hsiao-ch’in, and at the time it was generally believed that it was mainly upon his recommendation that she opened the gates of Peking to the Boxers to usher in a reign of unbelievable terror.29 Both Kang-i and Yü-hsien were listed by the Allied Powers among the chief war criminals, and certainly next to Prince Tuan, they were most instrumental in inciting the Boxer uprising. Kang-i died of an illness (brought about by his rage and mortification over the Boxer fiasco, if popular historians are to be believed) while accompanying the imperial court to Sian, but he was posthumously deprived of his titles and honors to appease the Allied Powers.30 Yü-hsien, on his way to Sinkiang to serve his sentence of exile, was decapitated in Lanchow after the Empress Dowager had submitted to the Allies’ demand for his death. He faced his end, however, with impressive dignity.31 Soon after the imperial court returned to Peking in 1901, popular writers began to turn out largely factual accounts (in the form of novels and ballads) of the national catastrophe as well as stories told against the background of the Boxer Incident.32 Whatever their attitude toward the foreign powers, all these writers held the Boxers in the utmost contempt, and since they could not attack the Empress Dowager, who was still alive and powerful, they denounced her principal advisers, now dead or disgraced, with all the greater vehemence. Prince Tuan, Kang-i, and Yü-hsien appear especially infamous in such works as Li Pao-chia’s ballad, Keng-tzu kuo-pien t’an-tz’u. Liu Ê, however, did not join the chorus of direct denunciation, choosing rather to give us revealing glimpses of

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Yü-hsien and Kang-i in their pre-Boxer days. But no contemporary readers could have failed to grasp the nature of his indictment, especially in view of his strong condemnation of the Boxers in the prophetic section. By the 1920s, however, most of this anti-Boxer literature was forgotten, and even leading scholars like Hu Shih would read the novel out of its historical context, stressing its critique of the pure officials but dismissing its diatribe against the Boxers and revolutionaries as at best an interesting appendage unrelated to the main theme.33 However, even in the main narrative, Liu Ê has hinted at the vital connections between official tyranny and national calamity, as in Lao Ts’an’s prophetic comment on Yü Hsien: “But just because he is overanxious to be an official, or rather hankers after being a great official, he acts as he does, wounding heaven and damaging all principles of justice. And with so great a reputation as an administrator I fear that within a few years he will become provincial governor. The greater the official position such a man holds, the greater the harm he will do. If he controls a prefecture, then a prefecture suffers; if he governs a province, then a province is maimed; if he [administers (tsai) the affairs of ] the Empire, then the Empire dies!”34

Yü-hsien never rose above the rank of governor, but both Kang-i and Prince Tuan were in a position to guide the destiny of the empire and hasten its death. Though the post of prime minister (tsai-hsiang) had long been abolished, it was the practice of some popular writers occasionally to refer to Kang-i as Kang hsiang-kuo, in deference to his high position at court.35 The thesis that China is doomed, endorsed in the preface and dramatized in the allegorical dream of chapter 1, is therefore also confirmed by the behavior of the bad officials in the novel. But at the same time it is the author’s refusal to accept this thesis that dictates his insertion of the philosophic and prophetic interlude. Though his many ventures as a businessman and industrial entrepreneur exemplified his great admiration for the West (his hero tries to offer western nautical instruments to save the ship of China), Liu Ê was of the generation of late Ch’ing intellectuals that, quite unlike the succeeding generation of Lu Hsün and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, was incapable of repudiating the Chinese tradition.36 In a way, Liu Ê weeps for China not only because of his strong attachment to its humble

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people and to its mountains and waters, which are so lovingly depicted in the novel, but also because of his unswerving commitment to its intellectual and cultural heritage. In his early twenties he had studied under Li P’ing-shan (hao Lung-ch’uan), an exponent of the so-called T’ai-ku school, which stressed the essential identity of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in their moral aspect. Liu Ê valued this teaching highly and maintained a lifelong friendship with his fellow disciples, among them Huang Kuei-ch’ün.37 Liu Ta-shen maintains that the Yellow Dragon was modeled after this friend, presumably because their names contain the same character huang. But since we know nothing of the Yellow Dragon’s past history except for a series of six cryptic poems that, again on the authority of Liu Ta-shen, tell among other things of Liu Ê’s spiritual enlightenment under the guidance of Li P’ing-shan, we are certainly justified in regarding this character as a portrait of the author’s ideal self, whose prophetic faith in the future of Chinese culture opposes and transcends the despondency of his other self, Lao Ts’an the passionate weeper. The sketchy biographies of the two characters, while drawing upon the author’s personal experiences, are accordingly different. While the disillusioned Lao Ts’an once harbored the ambition to serve his country and made friends with a select group interested in military and practical studies,38 the Yellow Dragon appears in his autobiographical poems primarily as a seeker of truth who has found abiding peace in the wisdom of the T’ai-ku school. Lao Ts’an refuses to be a high-minded recluse, though he prefers to render useful service under the anonymous mask of a traveling doctor rather than under an official appointment; the Yellow Dragon, who clearly foresees the portents of the times, remains a recluse because he is able to place them in an optimistic scheme of Chinese history and cosmic struggle. To maintain the continuity of Lao Ts’an’s travels, as I have earlier suggested, the author could have easily dispensed with the character Shen Tzu-p’ing and assigned his hero the journey to the Peach Blossom Mountain. But he could not do so because he did not want a confrontation of the two aspects of his self that are in unreconciled conflict. A more naïve person without the mature experience of Lao Ts’an will be far more receptive to the discourses of the Yellow Dragon and Yü-ku. Yü-ku appears to be the author’s central intellectual spokesman whose analysis of the Chinese situation lends support at once to Lao Ts’an’s gloom and the Yellow Dragon’s optimism. What she expounds before Shen Tzu-p’ing is the main tenet of the T’ai-ku school: that the three

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teachings are alike in “encouraging man to be good, leading man to be disinterested [ta-kung].”39 She speaks with a clearly Confucian emphasis, however, and accounts for the weakness of China during the last thousand years primarily in terms of moral intolerance as exemplified by Han Yü’s unreasoned attack on Buddhism and Taoism and of the Neo-Confucian repression of natural impulses. The sadism of the bad officials, we may draw the legitimate inference, stems directly from this tradition of moral inflexibility and obsessive concern with evil. To be disinterested is to be unselfish, and to be good is to be natural and human in the pristine Confucian fashion. Yü-ku herself exemplifies this type of goodness that moves in natural accord with Confucian li. In the sequel to the novel Liu Ê depicts in the nun I-yün the even more rarefied condition of Buddhist grace that equates human freedom with natural transcendence (as versus Neo-Confucian repression) of desire.40 Few Chinese readers outside the mainland would quarrel with Yüku’s moral philosophy, which anticipates to a remarkable extent the antipuritan thought of such influential modern thinkers as Hu Shih, Chou Tso-jen, and Lin Yutang. It is with the Yellow Dragon’s esoteric learning and mystical speculations, his discredited predictions and unjustified alarm over the “southern revolutionaries” that many Chinese feel uncomfortable or out of sympathy. (For readers in Communist China, of course, his diatribe against the Boxers is the author’s major offense.) The southern revolutionaries, after all, overthrew the Manchu dynasty and founded the Republic, and no one in this scientific age should build a cosmic philosophy upon Indic mythology and the Book of Changes and cite a hexagram to prove the dangers of revolution. But even those who feel superior to the Yellow Dragon should at least appreciate the moral imagination that has compelled the author to adopt the pose of a prophet not merely to justify his fears for the immediate future of China but also to affirm its continuing cultural vitality. Thus, according to the Yellow Dragon, the troubles brewed by the revolutionaries will culminate in the political reforms of the year chia-yin (1914): After Chia-Yin will be a time of cultural florescence, but although brilliant to look upon, still it will not equal the development of other countries. Chia-Tzu [1924] will be a time of a real independent cultural harvest. After that the introduction of new culture from Europe will revivify our ancient culture of the Three Rulers

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and Five Emperors, and very rapidly we shall achieve a universal culture. But these things are still far off, not less than thirty or fifty years.41

It has been the fate of all western apocalyptic thinkers to have their predictions proved wrong by history.42 But prophecy, nevertheless, is a mode of utterance necessary to certain writers concerned with political or eschatological problems. In English literature Blake and Yeats are prominent examples of a poet compelled to construct a private system of myth or philosophy in order to clarify his vision and ensure his gift of prophecy. Cleanth Brooks has finely stated the poetic function of A Vision: “The system, to put it concisely, allows Yeats to see the world as a great drama, predictable in its larger aspects (so that the poet is not lost in a welter of confusion), but in a pattern which allows for the complexity of experience and the apparent contradictions of experience (so that the poet is not tempted to oversimplify).”43 Precisely the same can be said of the Yellow Dragon’s system, which is actually far more in accord with traditional Chinese thinking than is Yeats’s system with traditional western thinking. The Yellow Dragon’s contemplation of the hexagram ke (revolution) as an unstable mixture of water (marsh) and fire, as the explosive situation of two women married to the same person living together, would have delighted Yeats. And in castigating the Boxers and revolutionaries, Liu Ê should not be looked upon as a Manchu loyalist sentimentally attached to a doomed cause; he is defending civilization, and not merely Chinese civilization, against the forces of unreason and anarchy. Few would disagree with his diagnosis of the Boxer madness as barbaric antiforeignism rooted in a superstitious regard for gods and spirits, and to some extent he is certainly justified in seeing the southern revolutionaries as atheists determined to desecrate ancestor worship and destroy the family system. The resurgence of militant antiforeignism and antitraditionalism in Communist China especially since the Proletarian Cultural Revolution would seem to indicate that, though Liu Ê had overestimated the destructiveness of the actually moderate revolutionaries around Dr. Sun Yat-sen, whose respect for Confucian culture equaled his own, his fear of the eventuality of a violent revolution undermining the very existence of civilization was not unfounded. Whatever our reactions to the pronouncements of the Yellow Dragon, Liu has provided for the inhabitants of the Peach Blossom

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Mountain an idyllic environment of freedom and peace that contrasts powerfully with the prevalence of injustice and suffering in the rest of the novel. (In the sequel, even the nunnery on Mount T’ai is not free from the molestations of bullies enjoying the backing of officials.) Yü-ku, the Yellow Dragon, and their relatives and friends have by no means escaped the vexations of the human condition and the inconveniences of their mountain retreat: the son of Yü-ku’s elder sister suffers from ailments incidental to childhood, and the crude oil used for lamps cannot compare with kerosene. But having at least transcended the Neo-Confucian obsession with evil, they converse with intelligence and candor and express their joy in life by playing music. The recital by the Yellow Dragon and Yü-ku, each playing a different instrument to a different score and yet producing a richer harmony than that provided by the Chinese custom of having all performers following the same score, is impressively described, and so is their subsequent contrapuntal session with the Sang sisters participating, though the dazzling account of the Fair Maid’s singing in chapter 2 has deservedly earned higher praise. But, philosophically, the later sessions are more indicative of spontaneous joy and creativity since the Fair Maid, no matter how exceptional, is a professional entertaining a commercial audience. The Peach Blossom Mountain also echoes with the roaring of tigers and the howling of wolves. To Yü-ku and the Yellow Dragon these wild animals are as entitled to their “freedom of speech”44 as they, and a tiger’s roar, though it would paralyze with fear a stranger to the region like Shen Tzu-p’ing, is as natural and pleasing as the “Melody of Sea Water and Heavenly Wind” they will later improvise for their guest. But if in the idyllic world of Taoist freedom the tiger is a proud symbol of Blakean energy, in the human world below it remains the traditional Chinese synonym for “harsh government.” Agitated by the tyranny of Yü Hsien, Lao Ts’an asks the people in the street about his administration: All with one voice said it was good, but all wore a look of gray misery; unconsciously he nodded his head as he realized that the ancient writer’s saying, “Harsh government is fiercer than a tiger,” is absolutely true.45

Even at the mountain retreat, with all their natural sympathy for the tiger in its state of freedom, the inhabitants still regard it as a pejorative

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symbol once they touch the topic of politics. Thus, while sorry for the tiger that has left the mountain to forfeit its freedom in the human world, the Yellow Dragon can at the same time jokingly compare it to a court official under a cloud who can only go home “to vent his feelings on his wife and children.”46 Not unexpectedly, therefore, the tiger appears as a powerful symbol in the four quatrains of prophetic verse concerning the Boxer Incident that Shen Tzu-p’ing reads at Yü-ku’s home. These quatrains are titled “The Riddle of the Silver Rat”: First Clue: Eastern mountain, nursing tiger, Lies in wait at men and hu; A year from now devours the roebuck, Sorrow comes to Ch’i and Lu. Second Clue: Dry bones in wolfish disorder, Nursing tiger unappeased; Flies aloft to visit heaven, [ Where a standing swine rules.] Third Clue: Nursing tiger brindled over, Tyrannizes Western Hill; Father Adam’s sons and grandsons, Persecutes and wastes at will. Fourth Clue: Neighbors four are stirred to anger, Heavenly house takes flight to west; Violent death for swine and tiger, Black-haired people live at rest.47

Precisely because of its obscure symbolism, this riddle tracing the four stages of the Boxer Incident mainly through the career of the nursing tiger, i.e., a mother tiger that is the more ferocious in guarding its brood,48 conveys powerfully the Yeatsian mode of prophetic indignation. But when one realizes that the nursing tiger represents Yü-hsien and the

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standing swine Kang-i,49 then the poem’s crucial relevance to the novel as a whole becomes crystal clear. While Lao Ts’an himself is involved in the earlier misdeeds of these beasts, the poem summarizes their later career and foretells their death. The prophetic section of the book therefore places the hero’s concern with injustice and suffering in a larger historical and political perspective: the persecution of the innocent by Yü-hsien and Kang-i confirms their later crime of precipitating a national calamity. The author’s complex responses to that event, ranging from flat despair for the country’s future to defiant hope for its cultural renascence, in large part account for the rich emotional appeal and structural peculiarity of The Travels of Lao Ts’an, a lyrical novel steeped in politics.

Author’s Note As originally published in Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, New Series VII(2)(Taipei, August 1969), this article has a bibliographical note of some length that has not been reproduced here because it contains a long paragraph of Chinese text. The interested reader may consult pp. 57–61 of that journal.

Hsü Chen-ya’s Yü-li hun An Essay in Literary History and Criticism (1981)

Now that an increasing number of scholars are turning to late Ch’ing and May Fourth fiction as rewarding subjects for study, the fiction of the intervening years, 1912–1918, appears all the more negligible for lack of critical attention. Conditioned by what we read in the available literary histories, we are content to dismiss that period as of little interest since it is mainly identifiable with the rise of “mandarin duck and butterfly” fiction ( yüanyang hu-tieh p’ai hsiao-shuo) and “black curtain” fiction (hei-mu hsiaoshuo)—two pejorative labels seemingly designed to ward off all but the most determined students of Chinese fiction. The wide acceptance of the former label as a generic term for all types of Republican fiction produced by old-style writers before 1949 is further symptomatic of our critical indifference.1 The general inferiority of old-style Republican fiction is taken for granted even by the few scholars claiming an interest in it. Thus it seems to me quite characteristic that Professor Perry Link, who has written a pioneering study on the subject in English,2 should examine it primarily as popular literature deficient in the kind of artistic seriousness that has distinguished the new-style modem fiction produced in the May Fourth period and after. Though his book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the social history and popular culture of the early Republican decades, as a literary historian I wish he had made a more systematic study of any of the authors cited in his book for their representa-

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tive importance—Hsü Chen-ya, Li Han-ch’iu, Hsiang K’ai-jan, Chang Hen-shui, et al. Link does devote considerable space to Hsü Chen-ya’s Yü-li hun and Chang Hen-shui’s T’i-hsiao yin-yüan, but his failure to discuss any other novels at all adequately betrays his limited reading knowledge of this branch of fiction and also his superficial command of classical Chinese literature.3 He tries to rise above the prejudices of the May Fourth critics who have pronounced on butterfly fiction (in the broader sense of the term) with undisguised ridicule and scorn, but unfortunately his own sociological understanding of that fiction as a “fiction for comfort” is hardly designed to remove these long-entrenched prejudices. As champions of a new, western-oriented literature with a new ideological content, the May Fourth critics (Lu Hsün, Mao Tun, and Cheng Chen-to) were certainly justified in attacking butterfly fiction on ideological and artistic grounds.4 But if butterfly novels are ideologically backward and artistically shoddy, then what about Ming–Ch’ing novels, whose ideology cannot be any less backward from the May Fourth point of view? In this day and age, it seems to me hypocritical to maintain a double standard of judgment: to adopt all kinds of critical strategies, traditional as well as modern, to make the Ming–Ch’ing novels look respectable but to abide by the prejudices of the May Fourth critics and of the doctrinaire Communist Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai in our estimation of butterfly novels. Considering the scarcity of good fiction in any given age and culture, we can safely assume that the majority of the latter are as unworthy of serious attention as the majority of Ming–Ch’ing novels, but it is not unrealistic to expect that the most outstanding butterfly novels, the ones that had captured the hearts of tens of thousands of readers, may not compare unfavorably with the best of Ming–Ch’ing novels in artistic worth, and may command comparable interest as intellectual and historical documents of their time. Instead of treating them merely as a species of popular literature (after all, what are the classic Chinese novels if not works that have achieved enduring popularity through the centuries?), we should be prepared to examine the best butterfly novels as artistic and ideological structures worthy of critical attention, and further study them in as many contexts (biographical, literary, social, philosophical) as may be needed to bring out their full significance. In a word, we should be as fair-minded about these works as we have been about the best of the Ming–Ch’ing novels. The present paper attempts to give a rounded critical examination of one such novel, Yü-li hun ( Jade pear spirit, 1912), the phenomenal best-

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seller of the early Republican period that sold several hundred thousand copies during its years of fame, and reached even larger audiences when it was made into a silent movie.5 The novel is generally taken to be the outstanding representative of mandarin duck and butterfly fiction in its narrower definition, and its author, Hsü Chen-ya (1886–1937), was certainly the most renowned novelist of the school and the first to receive nationwide acclaim. Despite its popularity, however, Yü-li hun was not written in an easy style for the enjoyment of the semiliterate; on the contrary, it is recorded in parallel prose and contains so many literary allusions and so many poems in the classical style that its proper enjoyment requires a sound education in Chinese literature and familiarity with its major poets, plays, and novels. Nor is Yü-li hun a cozy novel of lovers nestling side by side like mandarin ducks or fluttering together like butterflies—the unfortunate generic image inviting the scorn of May Fourth critics;6 for its author and its contemporary readers, it was a tragic novel of love (ai-ch’ing hsiao-shuo) that commented powerfully on the society and family system of its time. More importantly, it was a tragedy making full use of the sentimental-erotic tradition in Chinese literature, a long and proud tradition inclusive of such poets as Li Shang-yin, Tu Mu, and Li Hou-chu, and such works of drama and fiction as Hsi-hsiang chi, Mu-tan t’ing, T’ao-hua shan, Ch’ang-sheng tien, and Hung-lou meng. One major thesis of this paper is indeed to prove that Yü-li hun is a culminating work without which the tradition itself would have been felt wanting. Far from being a commercial product exploitative of the sentimental clichés of the past for the amusement of the public, Yü-li hun owed its tremendous popularity to its astonishing emotional impact upon the educated readers of its time and its equally astonishing literary virtuosity. It was a new kind of Chinese novel fully utilizing the traditional storehouse of lyrical imagery descriptive of love and its deprivation but partly inspired, too, by Lin Shu’s translations of western fiction. But if we regard Yü-li hun as an essential work of the Chinese sentimental-erotic tradition, then the career of Hsü Chen-ya is all the more disappointing for his rapid deterioration as a novelist. Challenged by the great success of Yü-li hun, Hsü took pains to write another version of the same story in the form of a journal. Initially serialized under the title Ho Meng-hsia jih-chi (The diary of Ho Meng-hsia), Hsüeh-hung lei-shih (The snow and the swan: a lachrymose story, 1915) was most probably the first nonsatiric Chinese novel recorded in the first person.7 It is a longer nar-

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rative with a slower pace, inclusive of more poems and letters exchanged between the hero and heroine; but since so many of its incidents and their supporting documents appear in the earlier novel, it cannot but be a work of lesser impact though autobiographically more revealing. More important, whereas the reader of Yü-li hun could identify the author as a patriot in sympathy with the revolutionary ideals of the day, Hsüeh-hung lei-shih disclosed more clearly a reactionary writer openly hostile to modern ways and in fervent support of what we may call feudal morality. In Yü-li hun that reactionary tendency is somewhat camouflaged by talk of patriotism and social reform; its attainment of vast popularity, however, had emboldened the author to declare himself on the side of Confucian morality, thus exposing his unbridgeable distance from the champions of the New Culture. Hsü, after all, had never studied abroad and was too well entrenched in the Chinese tradition to school himself in western thought. After his second serious experiment in novel writing, Hü Chen-ya clearly became a commercial storyteller, turning out short novels in rapid succession that exploit the tragic formula of his first success by denying sexual fulfillment to his lovers while affirming their moral purity. Reading Yü-li hun by itself, one could say that but for the high wall of Confucian feudalism the lovers could have escaped into freedom; reading the subsequent works, one sees more readily that the lovers were as much committed to the love ideal as to the ideal of martyrdom. It is only in the context of despair and death that they could achieve the kind of sublimation that forever ennobles and enshrines their love. Written on the eve of the New Culture movement, Yü-li hun extols spiritual love only to underscore the more poignantly the kind of feudalist inhumanity soon to be totally repudiated, but Hsü Chen-ya’s subsequent career could only confirm his unenviable role as high priest of a feudal society and its life-denying code. Once Lu Hsün directed the nation’s young readers to the cannibalistic aspect of that society in “The Diary of a Madman” (1918) and other stories, their repudiation of Hsü Chen-ya became inevitable. But whatever we may say of Hsü’s old-fashioned moralism and eventual worthlessness as a novelist, his youthful masterpiece, Yü-li hun, should be rescued from oblivion and restored to a position of honor in the sentimental-erotic tradition of Chinese literature. To repudiate Yü-li hun is to deny merit to that sentimental strain in Hung-lou meng that moved generations of Chinese readers to tears. It has always been characteristic of that tradition to capitalize on the nonfulfillment of sexual love against

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supposedly higher social imperatives or religious commands: it is certainly to the credit of our novelist that, in contrast to the author of Hung-lou meng, he at least spurns the easy solution provided by Buddhism or Taoism to concentrate on the agonies of lovers equally obedient to the dictates of love and morality.

I In time critics may agree that the two decades preceding the full-scale launching of the new literary movement in 1919 were linguistically a most interesting and dynamic period in Chinese literature. One would have to be as learned and tradition-bound as Ch’ien Chi-po to fully appreciate and discriminate among the various styles of ku-wen and p’ien-wen, of shih, tz’u, and ch’ü as exemplified by the leading writers of that age.8 But as early as 1921, in his “Survey of the Literature of the Last Fifty Years,” even Hu Shih found praiseworthy the poetic style of Huang Tsun-hsien; the prose styles of authors and scholars as different from each other as Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, Chang Ping-lin, and Chang Shih-chao; and the innovative achievements in prose by the translators Lin Shu and Yen Fu. In that essay and elsewhere, of course, Hu Shih was even more enthusiastic about the descriptive prose of Liu Ê, the colloquial Northern idiom of the novel San-hsia wu-i, and the Soochow dialect of the novel Hai-shang hua liehchuan.9 But because Hu Shih was eager to legitimize the success of pai-hua or kuo-yü, he did not see that the universal adoption of the vernacular by the new writers of the May Fourth period had made possible a marked impoverishment of the language as seen in the literature of the period immediately preceding. The classical language, especially, was then in a state of vigorous health as it met the various challenges posed by the rise of journalism, the gravity of the national situation, and the task of translation. During his brief debate with the champions of pai-hua literature, Lin Shu still upholds terseness or brevity as an ideal of wen-yen writing, forgetting that, in the prefaces to his translations, he has repeatedly compared classical Chinese literature to western fiction, citing in the latter’s favor its abundance of narrative and descriptive detail and its wealth of humor and pathos.10 However wanting in accuracy, his own translations attest to the fact that for the first time in Chinese history the ku-wen style was forcibly enlisted in the cause of copious narration interspersed with

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dialogue and description. Similarly, in the realm of political journalism and popular biography, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao had to forge a style able to meet the demands of clear exposition, rhetorical persuasion, and ample narration. Compared with the ku-wen masters of the past, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao was verbose and therefore vulgar, but for his intended audience his was a living style possessing the kind of verve and power it would have lacked if he had striven for classical terseness. By the standards we invoke to praise Lin Shu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, the author of Yü-li hun must also be judged a classical writer of great power and versatility for his time. His p’ien-wen style would be considered vulgar if compared with that of Yü Hsin (513–581). Even Ch’en Ch’iu’s Yen-shan wai-shih (c. 1810), the only pre-Republican work of full-length fiction set in parallel prose, would be regarded as purer in style. But whereas Ch’en Ch’iu was content to use various combinations of sentence units of four and six characters, Hsü Chen-ya is much more flexible in style, alternating the more formally structured passages of descriptive or lyrical emphasis with the more relaxed passages of dialogue or narration where a ku-wen type of prose is admitted. Yü-li hun, in addition, is studded with shih and tz’u poems in a variety of styles and meters, though the great majority are seven-word lü-shih and chüeh-chü in the style of Li Shang-yin. Letters, the majority set in an impassioned parallel prose style, are another regular feature of the novel. Except for his failure to use the lyrical meters of tsa-chü and ch’uan-ch’i (closet dramas of this type were regularly featured in late Ch’ing magazines), Hsü Chen-ya had experimented with every type of classical verse and prose with great success. The immense popularity of Yü-li hun was surely due in great part to the public’s ready appreciation of his poetic talent and stylistic virtuosity. Given the reputation of butterfly fiction and the irrefutable evidence of his rapid deterioration as a novelist, we are, of course, less disposed to accept Hsü Chen-ya as a master poet and prose stylist of his time. We want to know who were the teachers from whom he learned to write so well. But, then, what illustrious teachers had guided Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, Lin Shu, and Lu Hsün in their youth so that they could write in various styles of prose and verse with ease? It would seem that during the late Ch’ing boys smart enough to profit from a rigorous classical education didn’t need particularly famous teachers to guide them to a literary career. Two veteran writers knowledgeable about old Shanghai and old-style fiction, Ch’en Ching-chih and Huang T’ien-shih, have written memoirs about

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our author.11 According to Ch’en, Fan Tseng-hsiang (1846–1931), a Hupeh poet of national renown, was Hsü’s teacher, but I am more inclined to agree with Huang, who had known Hsü in the twenties, that the senior poet was happy to befriend the novelist out of admiration for his literary talent.12 According to Hsü himself, by age twenty he had written some eight hundred poems, mostly in the lü-shih and chüeh-chü style.13 In the cultural climate of Chiangnan, a youth of literary bent needed only a coterie of like-minded friends to spur his poetic productivity. It has always struck me as a matter of curious significance that the earliest promoters and practitioners of the new pai-hua literature should come from Anhwei and northern Chekiang rather than from Soochow, Wusih, Changshu, and other cities of southern Kiangsu, which had been the bastions of literary and artistic culture during the Ming and Ch’ing and had produced the largest number of scholars with the chin-shih degree. It would certainly seem that precisely because southern Kiangsu had been identified with literary culture, so many of its youths, if denied the opportunity to study abroad during the late Ch’ing and early Republican years, were content to serve as editors and authors for literary supplements and magazines. Thus the great majority of old-style novelists hailed from this region. Hsü Chen-ya came from a family without scholarly pretensions that had long settled in Changshu. His father, however, had trained himself as a scholar but apparently enjoyed little success in the official world. In early retirement, he personally taught Chen-ya and his elder brother T’ien-hsiao and prepared them for the civil service examinations. But while T’ien-hsiao did earn the hsiu-ts’ai degree, Chen-ya, enjoying no such luck, received his further education in a normal school in Changshu and became a schoolteacher upon graduation.14 Judging by Yü-li hun and other early novels, he was quite envious of his friends who had gone to Japan for advanced study. Had he been as lucky as Lu Hsün and Chou Tso-jen in that regard, he would not have written Yü-li hun and might have joined the ranks of new writers. It was the spectacular success of Yüli hun that confirmed him in the old ways and made it psychologically easy for him to scorn the New Culture movement. The Hsü brothers had been close friends with Wu Shuang-je, a fellow townsman somewhat older than they. After teaching school for a while, Hsü Chen-ya joined the other two in Shanghai and served with them on the editorial board of Min-ch’üan pao, one of the most progres-

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sive newspapers of the day especially noted for its uncompromising opposition to Yüan Shih-k’ai during his presidency and subsequent reign as emperor. A founder of that newspaper was Tai Chi-t’ao (Tai T’ien-ch’ou, also Tai Ch’uan-hsien, 1891–1949), a staunch follower of Sun Yat-sen and subsequently one of the revered statesmen of the Republic. Just as Li Pao-chia and Wu Wo-yao had written for the most progressive journals of their day, so did the Hsü brothers in working for Min-ch’üan pao. We cannot say, therefore, that early Republican novelists had set out to write for money to please an audience unconcerned with national issues. It was following the rise of a literary avant-garde serving the more radical ideals of the West that these novelists began to look old-fashioned and consciously promoted a literature designed for readers intellectually unequipped to enjoy the new May Fourth journals. Li Ting-yi, a youth from Wuchin, another city of southern Kiangsu, had joined the Min-ch’üan pao a few months earlier than Wu Shuang-je and the Hsü brothers, and he, too, specialized in tragic love stories in parallel prose. When we speak of the early Republican vogue for butterfly fiction in the narrow sense, we are strictly referring to this trio: Hsü Chen-ya, Wu Shuang-je, and Li Ting-yi.15 Hsü T’ien-hsiao, who also dabbled in fiction, was better known as a calligrapher and seal carver. He was also more modern: according to Huang T’ien-shih, he went to Canton in 1918 and was among the first there to promote a pai-hua literature. Eventually he served in the Examination Yüan when Tai Chi-t’ao became its president in 1930.16 Wu Shuang-je’s Lan-niang ai-shih (The tragic tale of Lan-niang), the very first story to be featured in the illustrated supplement of Min-ch’üan pao, may have appeared earlier than Yü-li hun, which was serialized in the literary section of that paper. But even if this was the case, Hsü Chen-ya was still the first modern author to write a novel in parallel prose, since Lan-niang ai-shih was only a tale of some ten thousand words.17 Yen-shan wai-shih, though well known in modern times because Lu Hsün had favored it with a discussion in his Brief History of Chinese Fiction, had remained an isolated experiment without any imitations, and we are not even sure if it had served as a direct stimulus for Wu and Hsü to write their stories.18 Of greater influence would certainly be the massive example set by the translations of Lin Shu. If novels could be written in ku-wen, why couldn’t they be in parallel prose? It would seem characteristic of the period when so many styles of verse and prose were assiduously cultivated

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that some youths from Changshu would want to choose parallel prose as a medium for fiction. According to Ch’ien Chi-po, the outstanding p’ienwen writers of that period, such as Liu Shih-p’ei, Li Hsiang, and Sun Tech’ien, were all natives of Kiangsu, though none came from Changshu.19 In its first two years of publication by the Min-ch’üan-pao Press, Yüli hun sold more than twenty thousand copies, an unprecedented record for a new work of fiction in China. As an employee of the newspaper, however, Hsü Chen-ya did not receive any royalty, which prompted him to make a legal fight for ownership of its copyright. He won the case and soon reissued the book under the auspices of his own monthly, Hsiao-shuo ts’ung-pao. It ran from May 1914 to August 1919 and serialized such new novels by Hsü as Shuang-huan chi (Two maidservants), Yü chih ch’i (My wife), and Hsüeh-hung lei-shih. In August 1918 Hsü Chen-ya launched a new fiction quarterly called Hsiao-shuo chi-pao and released it through his own book firm, Ch’ing-hua shu-chü. Its large format and high price per copy ($1.20) doomed the quarterly from the start, and only four issues were published, the last one dated May 1920. From then on Hsü Chen-ya ran only the Ch’ing-hua shu-chü, which published many other works of old-style fiction besides his own. According to Cheng I-mei, an old-style author most knowledgeable about journals of butterfly fiction, “later on, Hsü Chen-ya was too lazy to write any new books so that his book company declined in business until it could no longer be maintained. Moreover, the war of resistance had started; so he sold all the books in stock and their copyright to Ta-chung shu-chü for a flat sum. With Ch’ing-hua ceasing to exist, Hsü himself returned to Changshu and lived in poverty. Soon afterward he died. The mandarin duck and butterfly school of fiction, with its leader gone, slumped without any hope for recovery.”20 We don’t even know the date of Hsü’s death in 1937.

II In a study of Yü-li hun we cannot be too curious about Hsü Chen-ya’s other works. As a matter of fact, after such a long period of neglect, we cannot even establish the canon of his authentic works without a considerable amount of research. At the height of his fame, Hsü was such an obliging friend that he didn’t mind lending his name to works written by

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friends so as to boost their sales, and later, as an opium addict without much creative energy, he would ask friends to write novels in his own name, so that two of his works serialized in Hsiao-shuo chi-pao were really by Hsü Chin-fu, another veteran of old-style fiction.21 Even two of his authentic early novels, the aforementioned Shuang-huan chi and Yü chih ch’i, listed among the so-called “four masterpieces of Hsü Chen-ya,” are so patently inferior to Yü-li hun and Hsüeh-hung lei-shih that one is discouraged from reading any further in his voluminous fiction. Content to be a mere storyteller in these two works, Hsü did not exert himself stylistically to rise to the heights of Yü-li hun. Though he continued to point to the absurdity of the family-arranged marriage and other evils of the old society, he capitalized on these as a tragic device to involve his heroes and heroines in needless suffering. Also sentimental in this regard, Yü-li hun and, to a lesser extent, Hsüeh-hung lei-shih are nevertheless redeemed by a pervasive note of lyrical authenticity bearing witness to the pain and turmoil of remembered experience. Hsü Chen-ya was primarily a poet and writer of autobiographical inspiration; his inability to create characters became patent once he left the autobiographical realm to fabricate stories, and the stories in turn became the more implausible the harder he tried to sustain his reputation as a tragic novelist. However, among the host of unexamined novels there might be one or two written out of deeply felt personal experience; it is much to my regret that I have not yet begun the task or had access to the author’s autobiographical and miscellaneous writings other than volume I of Chen-ya lang-mo (1915).22 It was the fate of quite a number of early Republican writers to be left without a father before they reached manhood: Hu Shih, the Chou brothers, Yü Ta-fu, Mao Tun, and Lao She, among others. Hsü Chen-ya was only twenty years old when he lost his father, and for both him and his brother, the claims of filial piety toward the widowed mother exacted a high price in terms of personal happiness. Though Hsü Chen-ya in his poetry bragged of his youthful addiction to wine as a form of heroic release from the pressures of everyday life, he was apparently a man of weak will very much under the domination of an unreasonable mother. Huang T’ien-shih reports as a matter of common knowledge among his friends that she made life intolerable for the first wives of her two sons, if she did not actually drive them to suicide.23 After the Hsü brothers had moved to Shanghai, they took turns returning home once every month to see their mother and family. In January 1915, a few days after his trip

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home, T’ien-hsiao again took the train to Changshu on account of his infant daughter’s illness. Four days later, Chen-ya was shocked to receive a letter from his brother saying that not only his daughter had died, but also his wife. In the autobiographical narrative from which I am citing,24 he does not see fit to give the cause and circumstances of her death, but there can be no doubt that his mother was to blame. Upon the death of his own wife in 1924, Chen-ya wrote two books, Ku-p’en i-hen (The sorrows of a bereaved husband) and Yen-yen li-hun chi (The swallow and the wild goose: the record of a tragic death), to vent his grief. Another source states that he wrote all together a hundred poems to lament his wife. If my sources are correct, we can safely assume either or both of the books contain a great deal of elegiac verse.25 For months Hsü Chen-ya would dissipate his sorrow in opium smoke rather than incur further tragedy by seeking a new wife. Liu Yüan-ying, the daughter of the last chuang-yüan in Chinese history, Liu Ch’un-lin, was greatly moved by Yü-li hun and Hsü’s books on his late wife, and vowed she would marry no one but the novelist, despite their disparity in age. From Peking she started a correspondence with him, with the sole object of making him her husband. Finally, her father could not object to the marriage when Fan Tseng-hsiang himself served as matchmaker. In traditional scholarly circles no one was entitled to higher respect than a chuang-yüan, and a chuang-yüan‘s daughter was usually a certified ts’ai-nü enjoying the benefit of a superior literary education. Liu Yüan-ying’s infatuation with Hsü solely on the strength of his literary talent and the kind of depth of feeling revealed in Yü-li hun is comparable to recorded cases of young ladies pining after T’ang Hsien-tsu as a result of reading Mu-tan t’ing. It proves that, far from being despised by the traditional élite, Hsü’s best-known works were as much loved as had been Mu-tan t’ing and Hung-lou meng in their time. But of course, Hsü Chen-ya, who could write heartrending poetry to please his female readers, was not at all a dashing, romantic figure, and could not even break his addiction to opium to please his second wife. Their marriage, which attracted so much attention at the time, turned out to be a miserable failure, and the couple soon lived apart in Shanghai and Peking. It will be of interest to find out if our author ever wrote about his new unhappiness in the form of a novel.26 Hsü Chen-ya was much younger and took himself much more seriously as a novelist when he wrote Yü-li hun, which fictionalizes a period of

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his life predating his first marriage. Upon graduation from normal school, he became a teacher in some village of Wusih and lived with the Ts’ai family, where he also tutored the grandson. The boy’s mother, a widow, and our novelist fell hopelessly in love, and the affair must have terminated when he quit his post as schoolteacher. When Huang T’ien-shih visited him in 1925, an enlarged picture of the widow still decorated the wall of his bedroom. Huang regarded her as a rather attractive woman, though he also knew from reliable sources that she was slightly lame in one foot. Hsü said that she was still living in her native place, and expressed some disappointment over her not being sufficiently sheng-chieh (holy and pure), which Huang took to mean that she must have remarried.27 In Yü-li hun, of course, Hsü Chen-ya has depicted the tutor and the widow as the purest of lovers who would never trespass beyond the bonds of propriety.

III Since the real-life romance of the tutor and the widow did not end in death, Hsü Chen-ya’s decision to turn it into an agonizing tale of doomed lovers must have been due to his predilection for the tragic and his habitual immersion in the sentimental-erotic tradition of Chinese literature. That tradition began with the Ch’u-tz’u and had more recently assimilated several western works of fiction through Lin Shu’s translation, particularly Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux camélias. Along with some T’ang–Sung poets, I have already cited some great Ming–Ch’ing plays and Hung-lou meng as works constituting that tradition. Among the latter-day poets, Hsü Chen-ya and his circle seemed particularly to favor Wang Tz’u-hui of the late Ming for his erotic and elegiac verse,28 and among the post-Hung-lou novels Hsü prized above all Wei Tzu-an’s Huayüeh hen (Traces of flower and moon), which was first published in 1859 but did not achieve great popularity until the Kuang-hsü period.29 That tradition stresses the close linkage and ultimate identity of the three faculties without which no one can be called a lover: ch’ing (capacity for love or feeling), ts’ai (literary talent), and ch’ou (capacity for sorrow). Thus Hsü Chen-ya writes of the hero of Yü-li hun that he “was, to be sure, a man of talent and a man of feeling, but he was a man of sorrow as well.”30 Hsü employs another triad of key terms to describe his lovers in their self-destructive, tragic aspect: ch’ing, ch’ih (love gone crazy), and tu (love

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as poison, fatal love).31 Implicit in the love poetry of Li Shang-yin, this morbid view of passion was not fully embodied until Hung-lou meng. Thus, while Chinese literature boasts several pairs of happy lovers, such as Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and Cho Wen-chün, Han Shou and Chia Ch’ung’s daughter, who have won praise for their romantic misconduct,32 the main bias of the sentimental-erotic tradition, as Hsü Chen-ya sees it, has been to lyricize the kind of negative feelings the lovers may have when they are not together or when they entertain no hope of ever being united in wedlock, such as loneliness, despair, or grief, and to celebrate the true lovers in their courtship of martyrdom when confronted with a crisis. The sentimental-erotic literature of China is thus death-oriented: the unfulfilled lovers, including the countless palace ladies, singing girls, and merchants’ wives, are trapped in a state of emotional death while the constant lovers, such as Han P’ing and his wife, Chiao Chung-ch’ing and Liu Lan-chih, assert their ultimate integrity through a suicide pact. True, most scholar-lovers do not die for their wives or mistresses: hence all the sentimental praise lavished upon the concubines and courtesans who die of grief or kill themselves in over-repayment of their lovers’ kindness. Though the convention of Chinese drama departs from that tradition insofar as it calls for a happy ending for the lovers, in actual practice readers of Hsi-hsiang chi or Mu-tan t’ing have always preferred the more lyrically intense scenes descriptive of the hero or heroine in a state of love’s deprivation to the more perfunctory or flippant scenes descriptive of the couple’s self-satisfaction after they are assured of marital happiness. Today, of course, we are entirely justified if we feel the need to reinterpret the love tradition in Chinese literature by praising all the brave elopers, adulterers, and widows who seek love at the risk of their life and reputation, over against all the languishing maidens, loyal concubines, and courtesans celebrated in that tradition. But to do so is to misconceive the tradition sanctioned by poets and moralists alike. Implicit in this tradition of eulogizing love’s martyrs is the recognition that, while it is noble to be committed to love, it takes even greater courage to be obedient to the dictates of morality while in a state of love. Such lovers as Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and Cho Wen-chün who circumvent propriety to achieve personal happiness are admired, but they remain paragons in a type of love poetry traditionally deemed to be of lesser seriousness. The despairing lover in Li Shang-yin’s untitled poems is regarded as nobler not because his morals are any less questionable but because his passion appears so hopeless. For

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the highest type of lovers, however, the conflict between love and morality does not arise: because of their absolute double loyalty, when they die for love, they at the same time assert their integrity as moral beings. Given our understanding of the sentimental-erotic tradition in Chinese literature, it is easy to see why, of all the heroines of Hung-lou meng, Lin Tai-yü has been given the highest praise and the most profuse sympathy by its readers. She is not only the most abundantly endowed in terms of her capacity for ch’ing, ts’ai, and ch’ou. She is also the most correct in her observance of a puritan morality and therefore the most helpless in her state of romantic languishment. If she had done anything to encourage Pao-yü’s physical endearments or curry favor with her elder relatives, she might have been spared her tragic destiny but would not have been as universally loved and praised. Among comparable heroines in earlier literature, Ying-ying also languishes but soon compromises herself in the arms of her lover, while Tu Li-niang dies of languishing but, through the conventions of romantic comedy, gains a new lease on life to properly enjoy her marital happiness. Tai-yü suffers and dies a virgin, and becomes in traditional Chinese eyes the most tragic of all heroines.33 While the mundane world of Hung-lou meng should properly be seen in a Buddhist–Taoist perspective, it must not be forgotten that at least the womenfolk in that world, including our beloved Tai-yü, are all victimized by feudal morality. A number of girls die of shame after being caught in an embarrassing situation, and some maidservants martyr themselves to show their love for their mistresses. Compared with Yüan–Ming fiction and drama, Hung-lou meng can be said to have introduced a purer code of morality for young women, which is observed in all subsequent domestic novels of the Ch’ing period like Ching-hua yüan and Erh-nü ying-hsiung chuan. Though Wu Wo-yao is noted for his enlightened satire of various kinds of corruption in late Ch’ing society, his sole novel about young lovers, Hen-hai (Sea of remorse), is surprisingly uncritical in its affirmation of feudal morality.34 The story depicts the rapid degeneration of a weakwilled youth and the belated attempts by his devoted fiancée to restore him to physical and moral health. He dies nevertheless, and she bids her parents farewell to enter a nunnery. One didn’t expect Wu Wo-yao to be so very sentimental, and yet the social pressure for young women to remain chaste even during the collapse of the Manchu government must have been such that the novelist could not but avail himself of the pointless pathos of female martyrdom. Because of its sentimentality, Hen-hai

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has been cited by literary historians as a precursor of butterfly fiction even though, as a realistic and often ironic piece of pai-hua narrative, it had very little to offer Hsü Chen-ya in terms of style and technique. Next to Hung-lou meng, Hua-yüeh hen was clearly the most important literary model for Yü-li hun. It emboldened our author to go all the way for tragedy and include in his narrative a large number of poems and letters. Hua-yüeh hen is little read today, and one can cite obvious reasons for its well-deserved neglect: a wooden narrative, no sense of humor, too many characters, too much space given to parties and wine games, etc. But for late Ch’ing readers, the novel showed first of all the tragic disparity between the idealized scholar-courtesan world of love and poetry and the actual unsettled conditions of China during the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion. Secondly, it exposed the sharp contrast between the forced gaiety of courtesans at wine parties and their gross maltreatment at the hands of pimps and bawds. The novel is certainly remarkable for extending our sympathy from the hapless young ladies of the Takuanyüan to the even worse situated prostitutes in nineteenth-century Taiyuan, Shansi. Hua-yüeh hen chronicles in fifty-two chapters the contrasting fortunes of two scholar-courtesan couples, one pair waxing in prosperity and fame35 and the other hounded to death by ill health and adversity. Wei Tzu-an, who was for years stranded in Taiyuan, is drawing upon autobiographical experience in depicting the latter pair, whose sad story accounted for the novel’s immense popularity. A replica of the frail orphan Tai-yü, the unhappy prostitute Liu Ch’iu-hen is forced to ply her trade by her mercenary foster parents. Wei Ch’ih-chu, the unhappy scholar, is a tubercular poet twice her age. As the novel progresses, he spits out ever larger quantities of blood until he dies almost unattended in chapter 43 at the age of 40. Having recently suffered the death of a favorite concubine at the hands of the T’ai-p’ing rebels, Ch’ih-chu feels too keenly the transience of human attachments to want to redeem the prostitute he loves so dearly; he is also too much concerned about his absent mother and too poor to properly attend to the task of negotiating for her freedom. In any event, as rumors circulate that he wants to buy Ch’iu-hen, her foster parents abduct her to another city. She nearly dies of dysentery on the road, but thanks to an accidental fire that kills her foster parents in a hotel, she manages to return to Taiyuan, only to learn of her lover’s recent death. Ch’iuhen dies the same night by hanging herself from a tree. To Chinese readers immersed in sentimental-erotic literature, nothing is more beautiful or

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pathetic than a high-minded prostitute or concubine killing herself in this fashion to prove her fidelity to her lover. Hers is an act of hsün-ch’ing or hsün-chieh. The unhappy lovers dream a lot, and in that dream world we are given to understand that Ch’ih-chu and his three loves are all incarnations of celestial beings banished to earth, but I don’t think the author expects us to take this hoary fiction seriously. What he has done in the novel is to remedy the unequal fate apportioned to Pao-yü and Tai-yü by assigning his lovers an equal share of misfortune, ending in something like a death pact. Even today we find many Chinese critics too sentimentally partial to Tai-yü to appreciate properly the equally tragic, if not more tragic, fate of her rival Pao-ch’ai or her lover Pao-yü. After all, the latter marries on the eve of Tai-yü’s death, gets his wife pregnant, and then leaves the mundane world for good. Such readers—and they were legion in the late Ch’ing period—would find Hua-yüeh hen far more satisfying in that Ch’ih-chu suffers as much as Ch’iu-hen and has so completely earned her love that she chooses to die as if she were the most faithful of wives. The popularity of Hua-yüeh hen showed the Chinese reader’s increasing appetite for tragic literature (by now the reader should be aware that I use the terms “tragic” and “tragedy” quite loosely in this paper and not in conformity with Aristotelian definitions, for not to use such terms in a discussion of ai-ch’ing hsiao-shuo would prove an even greater inconvenience). After the Opium War and the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion, the country was heading for worse times, and for that part of the élite unable to rouse itself to meet the national crisis, the ideal of love was worth clinging to when larger goals of personal fulfillment appeared out of reach. But for a novel like Yüli hun, which concentrates on the tormenting and agonizing relationship between lovers, to be written, there had to be the intervening example of the western novel to serve as model and inspiration. The narrative style of Hua-yüeh hen is altogether too flat to go into the psychological condition of the lovers, who reveal themselves mainly through the poems they send each other. Luckily, by the time Hsü Chen-ya wrote Yü-li hun, many western novels had already been rendered into classical Chinese through the collaboration of Lin Shu with his oral translators. His first work as a translator, Ch’a-hua nü i-shih (La Dame aux camélias), especially, was a sensation when it appeared in 1899, and there is internal evidence in Yü-li hun itself that Hsü was consciously using the work as a model when composing his last two chapters.36 Professor Leo O. Lee has called Lin Shu an “unusual”

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Confucian scholar for his excessive attachment to his family and excessive grieving over its departed members, and his high regard for sentiment (ch’ing) in general.37 But if Lee examines the lives of scholars and writers of the period besides Lin Shu and Su Man-shu, he will find that quite a number of them were attached to ch’ing and prone to grief. Hua-yüeh hen and Yü-li hun could not have been written and could not have won so many readers except for the sentimental bias of their age. Lin Shu, who had contracted tuberculosis in his youth and had a sentimental regard for prostitutes not unmingled with respect, would naturally find La Dame aux camélias to his liking, and his translation would naturally appeal to all Chinese readers who had wept over the fate of Tai-yü and Ch’iu-hen, not to mention the scores of noble-minded courtesans celebrated in Chinese poetry and drama. It was especially easy for them to weep over the dying Marguerite Gautier because she is so very devoted to her lover and at the same time so very unselfishly moral. Armand Duval, while not a scholar in the traditional Chinese sense, comes from a substantial banking family and has studied law: he is not unlike the handsome hero of many a traditional Chinese short story who forms a liaison with a reigning courtesan in the capital before pulling himself together for the more serious business of getting the chin-shih degree. To further please the Chinese taste, while the author is all sympathy toward Marguerite, he is not at all antagonistic toward Armand’s father, who, after trying in vain to alter his son’s course of dissipation, has little difficulty persuading Marguerite to give him up so as to assure his worldly success and domestic happiness. Her self-sacrifice is all the more tragic because she leaves Armand utterly in the dark as to the cause of her sudden desertion. If Marguerite had not sacrificed herself and if Armand had continued to be her lover despite his father’s anger and the eventual disapprobation of society, the story would have lost its flavor of something infinitely sad and beautiful cherished by sentimental readers all over the world. Though the novel and especially the play La Dame aux camélias were a great European and American success, we may regard Ch’a-hua nü as an even more auspicious happening in Chinese literary history for the novel’s right combination of virtue and sentiment that could be properly enjoyed and wept over by the Confucian literati, whereas a sentimental novel of more assertive romantic individualism, such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, might have left them cold.38 It is not coincidental that the first spoken drama to be written and staged by the Chinese was also Ch’a-hua nü.39

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Hsü Chen-ya was mindful of the examples set by Pao-yü and Tai-yü, Ch’ih-chu and Ch’iu-hen, Armand and Marguerite when writing about his lovers in Yü-li hun, but what was revolutionary in the Chinese context was that his heroine is a chaste widow with an eight-year-old son. It was the accident of autobiographical experience that made possible this unlikely choice of a heroine for a tale steeped in the diction and imagery of the sentimental-erotic tradition. Had the author written an equally moving story about a young scholar’s foredoomed love for a respectable girl or a prostitute, it would have lacked that dimension of tragic meaning or social relevance that the public, then about to be awakened to the absurd cruelty of feudal morality, found in Yü-li hun. For, the historic daring of Cho Wen-chün notwithstanding, Chinese literature records few widows with a triumphant romantic story to tell. In reality as in fiction, the good widows have abandoned all hope for romance and are supposed to lead a life as placid as the unruffled water in a well. Anyone who disturbs a widow’s emotional life until it ripples is doing her an unkindness, and in traditional stories about such widows, “The Case of the Dead Infant” for instance,40 that person is usually depicted as a villainous seducer. In Hung-lou meng the widow Li Wan participates to some extent in the social life of her younger cousins, but she has no story of her own other than that of rearing her son. The heroine of Yü-li hun has the poetic sensitivity and emotional vulnerability of a Tai-yü, but must lead the placid life of a Li Wan as befits a widow with a son to care for. When she is confronted with her Pao-yü, a true ts’ai-tzu as ardent as he is virtuous, her trials uncover a truly new territory for the Chinese psyche, never before explored in literature.

IV Briefly told, Yü-li hun is a tragic tale of love and self-sacrifice involving three principals: the hero Ho Meng-hsia (Ho Dreaming of Rosy Clouds), the heroine Pai Li-ying (White Pear Image), and her younger sister-inlaw Ts’ui Yün-ch’ien. Meng-hsia, a twenty-one-year-old graduate from a normal school, goes from his native city of Soochow to teach in a village school near Wusih. While paying a visit to Old Mr. Ts’ui, a distant relative, in that village, he is persuaded to stay at his home to teach the eightyear-old grandson, P’eng-lang, in exchange for room and board. Li-ying,

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more familiarly known as Li-niang, is the boy’s mother who, at twentyseven, has been a widow for three years. Though they rarely see each other, the tutor and the widow fall violently in love by reason of their spiritual and poetic affinity and regularly exchange poems and letters with P’eng-lang as messenger. Li-niang, while profoundly touched by and grateful for Meng-hsia’s love and returning it in her own fashion, has no doubt whatever where her duty lies. It is only when he becomes ill and vows perpetual bachelorhood to match her determination to remain a widow that she becomes greatly worried and gets sick in turn. She cannot see him wasting his life for her sake when it is his primary duty to get married and produce a son to please his widowed mother. Moreover, with his talent, he should aim higher than being a lover—he should serve the country and, like the headmaster of his school, Ch’in Shih-ch’ih, go to Japan to study. She would exhaust her own savings to bring this about. When the seventeen-year-old Yün-ch’ien returns from her boarding school for the summer vacation, Li-niang shows dramatic improvement in health. The two sisters-in-law have always been very close, and to all appearances, Li-niang’s recovery is due to Yün-ch’ien’s able ministrations and cheerful company. But what restores her health so very quickly is the thought that it would be best for all concerned if Meng-hsia could agree to marry Yün-ch’ien and live with the family as a resident son-in-law. Meng-hsia, too, is duty-bound to go home for the summer to be with his mother and his elder brother, due to return from Fukien, but he cannot leave so long as Li-niang remains ill. Fearful that outright rejection of her proposal will further endanger her health, he reluctantly agrees in principle to the match but stalls for time. He returns home and spends a miserable summer plagued by malaria. When the fall term begins, Meng-hsia returns to the Ts’ui residence, unchanged in his love for the widow. His co-teacher, Mr. Li, suspects the worst and inflicts even greater torment on the lovers by his malicious meddling. This crisis soon brings about the betrothal of Yün-ch’ien to Meng-hsia, with Headmaster Ch’in, on holiday from Japan, serving as matchmaker. Yün-ch’ien, who has set store by her modern education and talked much about women’s liberation from feudal bondage, now quits school and resigns herself to her fate as a girl under paternal command to marry a stranger. Upon learning of her misery, Meng-hsia accuses Li-niang of duplicity and avows his love in even more violent terms.

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Under the unbearable pain of this accusation, the tubercular widow is now determined to die, hoping against hope that, with her out of the picture, the betrothed couple may yet find happiness. She hides her worsened condition from Meng-hsia and dies on New Year’s Eve when the unsuspecting lover has already gone home to spend the holidays. He returns disconsolate. Yün-ch’ien is equally grief-stricken when she discovers a long letter from Li-niang telling about her unfortunate affair with Meng-hsia, her well-intentioned plan to match him with her beloved sister-in-law, and her determination to leave the world to ensure their happiness. Deeply affected by her friendship and self-sacrifice, Yün-ch’ien wants to offer her life in love and gratitude, and dies half a year later, in the sixth month of 1910. After studying in Japan for a few months, the doubly bereaved Meng-hsia dies a patriotic martyr in the Wuchang revolution of October 10, 1911, to topple the Manchu government. My summary of the novel, I am afraid, does little to suggest its power and fascination while exposing all the weaknesses in the story line. We feel, first of all, that the tragic fate assigned to each of the principals is not inevitable enough. Drawing mainly upon his knowledge of classic western tragedies, Northrop Frye has finely observed that “the tragic poet knows that his hero will be in a tragic situation, but he exerts all his power to avoid the sense of having manipulated that situation for his own purposes.”41 By the Aristotelian and Shakespearean standards implicit in that statement, Yü-li hun must be seen as a sentimental novel lacking the full dignity of a tragedy that unfolds a situation in all its inevitability without authorial manipulation. In reading the plot summary, we feel that the hero’s reluctant acceptance of the idea of marrying Yün-ch’ien, however nobly meant to assuage Li-niang’s pain and improve her health, is somewhat out of character: the author has clearly manipulated his decision to quicken the pace of tragedy. Yün-ch’ien’s sudden change of character is even less plausible: if she has flatly refused to consider the marriage proposal as befits a modern girl sustained by a vision of personal freedom, the wheels of tragedy will have stopped moving regardless of Meng-hsia’s decision. Moreover, once he discovers Yün-ch’ien’s revulsion against the idea, the least he can do is to cancel the engagement. Even if the betrothed pair do not want to disobey the dying wishes of their beloved Li-niang, there is every reason to suppose that her self-sacrifice should serve to cement their bond though they may have been indifferent, if not hostile, to each other at the beginning. Yün-ch’ien would have been a braver girl

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if she had obeyed her sister-in-law’s dying injunction to love Meng-hsia and tried to find true love in a marriage not entered into willingly. If we follow this line of reasoning, then Li-niang’s original plan may not seem as crazy as subsequent events in the novel prove it to be: many a man can maintain a Platonic relationship with the woman he truly loves while fulfilling his conjugal duties to his wife. As resident son-in-law in the Ts’ui house, Meng-hsia should take satisfaction in being able to see his true love in the aspect of a sister-in-law and help bring up her son. If we honor her desire not to seek remarriage, the plight of Li-niang is of course more real. But even her tragic situation has been manipulated to some extent: not every unhappy widow is afflicted with bad health, and even an unhappy widow of frail health may want to live on if she truly minds the welfare of her son. I have argued that every step of the way the tragic direction of the novel could be reversed. Indeed, if both Li-niang and Meng-hsia were truly governed by their passion, they could have formed a liaison from the very start in disregard of Confucian propriety. But, of course, no proper reader of the novel would have raised this question of ultimate disbelief: in education and refinement Meng-hsia is the very opposite of the Lawrencian gamekeeper, and Li-niang is no Lady Chatterley seeking sexual liberation and fulfillment. If Lawrence’s lovers can be said to stand for life, then the point of our novel is precisely that, conditioned by their literary and moral culture, its three main characters all opt for death, Li-niang most obviously in her preference for a chaste widowhood and Yün-ch’ien no less so in decisively repudiating her modern education when a chance for martyrdom presents itself. Meng-hsia dies a patriot’s death in the end, but the author plainly tells us that he sacrifices himself in this fashion so as to be worthier of the two women who have died for him. An eloquent protestant of love, Meng-hsia is certainly weaker than Li-niang for his actual paralysis in the realm of action, his utter powerlessness to defy conventional morality. All three prefer death to life, choose the negative heroism of self-denial rather than adventure on the highway of life with all the risks and rewards such a journey brings. Thus Yü-li hun is not a tragedy of fate as we ordinarily understand the term. If its three main actors strive for individual happiness, they can easily overcome the obstacles in their way. Their failure or refusal to do so symbolizes the paralysis of a society bound to its self-imposed laws, and defines the self-imposed tragedy of lovers committed to ch’ing but capable

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of only hurting one another because their passion is immobilized by their moral purity. Indeed, the tragedy of Yü-li hun can only take place in the moribund society of late imperial or early Republican China. In earlier love dramas, the lovers are set against the guardians of society, who are either satirized or ridiculed or else seen as menacing figures of authority, such as the mother of Ying-ying and the father and tutor of Tu Li-niang. Few authority figures in Hung-lou meng live up to their roles; quite a number are sensualists who exploit their advantages in a male-chauvinist society. In post–May Fourth novels written in conscious protest against the feudal society, such as Pa Chin’s trilogy, The Turbulent Stream, the young in all their suffering and indignation are diametrically opposed to their elder relatives set in their ways of inhumanity. In contrast to both traditional fiction and drama and the new literature of social protest, Yü-li hun is conspicuous for its absence of villains. The only character harboring some villainous thought is the teacher Li, who manages to have Menghsia recalled home by his mother while blackmailing Li-niang with a compromising poem in the handwriting of her lover not intended for her eye. Li-niang, highly incensed over Meng-hsia’s supposed breach of confidence and over the bad taste of the poem, sends him a letter urging his immediate return. Because the lovers live in a self-enclosed world of secret communication into which only the confidants (P’eng-lang and the maid Ch’iu-erh) can gain entrance, Mr. Li has to be in the novel to dramatize their fear of exposure. The actual effect of his threat, however, is to enable the lovers to meet and confer for the first time in the dead of night, for otherwise they are too moral to seek each other’s company at close range. Meng-hsia is properly indignant over Li’s evil design, but characteristically, Li-niang counsels forgiveness. And because Meng-hsia forgives Li and pledges his continual friendship, Li repents and is transformed into a good person.42 There are no authority figures who are antagonistic to the lovers, either. Old Mr. Ts’ui, who is kindness itself, never watches over the doings of his daughter-in-law. Quite unlike Chia Cheng and Dowager Ts’ui, who are capable of inflicting corporal punishment upon their misbehaving children, this old man stays by himself and lets Li-niang run the household. He loves Meng-hsia like his own son and delightedly agrees when Headmaster Ch’in proposes his betrothal to his daughter. Though it would never occur to him to seek a new husband for Li-niang, there is little reason to doubt that, if Meng-hsia is proposed for that role, he will also

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give his assent once he sees the advantages to be derived from this arrangement: he will gain a son, Li-niang a husband, and P’eng-lang a father. The times are changing, even his own daughter is in school, and the old man has everything to gain even if initially neighbors and relatives may disapprove of the marriage. The only other authority figure in the novel is Meng-hsia’s mother, who bears no resemblance to the author’s mother and is an understanding and kind woman. Thus in a novel that wrings the reader’s heart over a young widow’s refusal to consider remarriage, there are no villains or authority figures blocking her path to a new happiness. In her determination to stay constant to her deceased husband, Li-niang herself is her worst enemy. Li-niang’s individual tragedy of self-denial, however, mirrors a society in paralysis. Precisely because the author has endowed his hero and heroine with all the poetic expressiveness of the ts’ai-tzu chia-jen of the past and the moral scrupulosity of the unquestioning supporters of the Confucian social order, they are noble embodiments of that spiritual disease afflicting the last generation of the traditional élite not yet awakened to the gospel of western enlightenment—the disease that will be soon exposed in its true colors by Lu Hsün’s short stories. Almost as morbid as the heroes and heroines of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, Meng-hsia and Li-niang move about noiselessly in and around a house, hardly ever seeing each other but forever aware of each other’s existence, and turning an allconsuming love into a fury for self-destruction. Compared with Ligeia and Lady Madeline of Usher, who assert their will even in death and are thus true vampires,43 Li-niang would seem, of course, to be utterly incapable of malice as a pure example of self-denying womanhood. Yet we may press our analogy further and regard Yü-li hun as a Chinese version of Gothic fiction when we see that, while praising Li-niang for her impeccable moral purity, Hsü Chen-ya has actually demonstrated the destructiveness of the kind of life-denying goodness she represents. Superficially, she is totally unlike Ligeia, who avenges herself on her husband’s new wife Rowena by returning to life in the moribund body of her rival. But in her solicitude for her lover’s welfare, Li-niang has not dealt openly with Yünch’ien and envelops her, too, in the stifling environment of a doomed house when the latter could have continued to breathe fresh air on the campus of a modern school. It is next to impossible today to know all the facts about Hsü Chen-ya’s life when he was serving as a tutor in the Ts’ui house, though it would not

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be too difficult to find out how a tutor stationed in a scholarly family would have lived during the first decade of the century. It would not be surprising if Hsü Chen-ya had indeed reduced the size of the Ts’ui family or exaggerated its observance of Confucian decorum to suit his artistic needs. As we have seen, the Ts’ui family is extremely small, consisting of the old man, the widow and her son, and a daughter in school during the regular academic terms. Even if the whole family and Meng-hsia dined together, they would not make a full table by Chinese standards. And yet the rules governing the sexes are so strict that our hero, who would normally expect to be introduced to P’eng-lang’s mother on the day of his visit if he agrees to serve as his tutor, hasn’t caught a glimpse of her during the first two weeks of his residence at her place. We don’t even know if Li-niang ever dines with Mr. Ts’ui on a regular basis, though it would seem to be no part of the Confucian etiquette to segregate a young widow from her father-in-law if his wife is no longer alive. A very lonely man, Ts’ui would certainly welcome Meng-hsia as his dinner companion, but they, too, eat separately. The tutor lives in a small lodge in the garden, and meals are brought in by a servant. Sometimes Li-niang cooks his meals herself out of her concern for his health, but she would never go to his place when he is there. Since early Republican readers did not find all this separate dining and segregation of the sexes implausible enough to impede their enjoyment of the novel, it would be idle for us to question the novel’s realistic integrity on these minor details. On the other hand, it would certainly seem to be the case that, in stressing the morbid isolation of the members of the Ts’ui house, the author was guided by his artistic instinct to turn his story into a Chinese Gothic novel to underscore the sickness of society precisely because of its preoccupation with etiquette and morality.

V Yü-li hun has thirty chapters, of which the first one and a half may be taken as a prologue and the last two as an epilogue.44 The unhealthy note of exaggerated sentimentality is already powerfully struck in the prologue, which establishes the spiritual affinity of the hero and heroine even before they have met. Since we have nothing comparable to the Gothic conventions in the traditional Chinese novel, Hsü Chen-ya achieves his Gothic

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effects mainly by developing key episodes in Hung-lou meng involving Lin Tai-yü. Thus the prologue reworks the famous incident of the burial of fallen flowers. Meng-hsia, having lived in his cottage for two weeks, rises one Sunday morning to see the blossoms of the pear tree all shattered to the ground after a night of blistering wind while the magnolia, the only other tree in the courtyard, is beginning to bloom in its gorgeous beauty. Greatly saddened by the fallen petals, he sweeps them together and makes a mound over them. He hasn’t slept very well the previous night, and becomes very tired after busying himself the whole morning and crying over the flowers and his own fate into the bargain. But after lunch, he has regained enough energy to compose a poem each about the pear and the magnolia tree, and carve some characters on a stone tablet for the duration of two hours. This done, he asks a servant to erect it above the mound and goes to sleep without supper. At about ten o’clock in the evening, he is wakened by someone crying in the courtyard. In the bright moonlit night, he sees the apparition of a young woman in white crying over the pear tree and, upon discovering the tablet on the mound, caressing it and crying even harder. To get a closer view of the woman, Meng-hsia knocks his head against the glass window, which frightens her and makes her flee. In Hung-lou meng, chapter 23, before her quarrel with Pao-yü over some imagined insult, Tai-yü is having a good time all decked out as a gardener to bury the fallen petals; it is in chapters 27–28, after Tai-yü has received some further slights, that Pao-yü happens to overhear her crying and chanting her song about the fallen flowers. But even if Pao-yü joins in the crying, the two teenagers, after sharing a heart-to-heart talk, are soon in a better mood. Hsü Chen-ya’s relentless rewriting of these scenes toward far greater pathos is designed to establish the mood for the novel and identify the hero and heroine as people abundantly endowed with ch’ing and ch’ou and therefore liable to feel profound empathy even with flowers. One may ask incredulously: Since Meng-hsia is a man, how can he respond to fallen blossoms with even greater grief than Tai-yü? But in ts’ai-tzu chia-jen fiction and drama the heroes and heroines have always been equally delicate in features and demonstrative of emotions, and the immense success of Hung-lou meng has further established the virtual identity of hero and heroines in appearance and sensibility, so much so that in contemporary films of the novel Pao-yü is always played by a young woman: a male actor will betray too much masculinity to fit the popular image of the hero. Nevertheless, Yü-li hun does represent the

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over-ripe decadence of a literary tradition insofar as few heroes before Meng-hsia have so self-consciously emulated Tai-yü and agitated themselves over such a common occurrence in nature. In the symbolic scheme of the novel, of course, the pear tree stands for Li-niang, and the magnolia for the younger beauty Yün-ch’ien. Because pear blossoms are white and easily shattered by wind and rain, Chinese poetic tradition has long established their affiliation with sorrowing, vulnerable women. By virtue of her name and misfortune, Li-niang has certainly long identified herself with the pear tree in the courtyard, and sight unseen, Meng-hsia now earns her love and gratitude because of his great sympathy for that tree. But no matter how grateful, she can only take flight once she discovers he is spying on her. As cousins, Pao-yü and Tai-yü communicate rather freely in the early days of the Takuanyüan; as a widow, Li-niang does not desire and is indeed afraid of further physical contact with Meng-hsia. The prologue thus ends with a masterly little scene that rehearses the tragedy to come: the widow’s principled refusal to accept her lover even though he, equally immobilized by his regard for Confucian decorum, hardly does any nonverbal wooing beyond knocking his head against a window.

VI Li-niang flees upon being discovered, but in comparison with Meng-hsia, who hardly ever contrives to meet her, she is decidedly the person of greater initiative in trying to know about the man who cares for her so deeply. When assured of his absence in school, she time and again glides into his study to take and leave some mementos of love. After her first such visit, Meng-hsia returns to his study to find the manuscript copy of his poems on Hung-lou meng missing.45 From the floor he picks up a camellia apparently dropped from his fair visitor’s hair, and he wonders if this is deliberate on her part. Sufficiently encouraged, he writes the first of his many letters to her, in which he gives his best regards, regrets their not having formally met even though he did catch a glimpse of her the other night, and wishes to see some of her own compositions in exchange for the poems she has taken. After supper, P’eng-lang comes as usual to do his lessons, and Meng-hsia asks him to take the letter to his mother. Thus the eight-year-old boy plays Cupid and enables the lovers to com-

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municate incessantly with their written and oral messages even though they rarely see each other. The reader is thus privileged to read their innermost thoughts through their poems and letters. If the poems exchanged by the lovers testify to Hsü Chen-ya’s thorough immersion in the sentimental-erotic tradition, it is the letters that impart his novel’s peculiar power and tone of authenticity. For impassioned eloquence, they far surpass those in Ch’iu-shui-hsien ch’ih-tu, which had by late Ch’ing times become a standard reference work for home use and may have inspired Hsü to include correspondence as a staple of his novel.46 Stylistically, these letters in parallel prose are, of course, utterly unlike the colloquial, chatty letters we read in eighteenth-century English novels. Yet in his own way and for his own time, Hsü Chen-ya was surely the Chinese Samuel Richardson in directing the Chinese novel toward greater coverage of subjective experience through his regular use of the epistolary form. In The Rise of the Novel Professor Ian Watt has rightly defined Richardson’s role as an innovator of modern literature: What forces influenced Richardson in giving fiction this subjective and inward direction? One of them is suggested by the formal basis of his narrative—the letter. The familiar letter, of course, can be an opportunity for much fuller and more unreserved expressions of the writer’s own private feelings than oral converse usually affords, and the cult of such correspondence was one which had largely arisen during Richardson’s own lifetime, and which he himself both followed and fostered. In itself it involved a very significant departure from the classical literary perspective; as Madame de Staël wrote, “the ancients would never have thought of giving their fiction such a form” because the epistolary method “always presupposes more sentiment than action.” Richardson’s narrative mode, therefore, may also be regarded as a reflection of a much larger change in outlook—the transition from the objective, social, and public orientation of the classical world to the subjective, individualist, and private orientation of the life and literature of the last two hundred years.47

Hsü Chen-ya has not adopted the personal letter as the sole formal basis of his novel, though it may be of interest to remark that, like

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Richardson, he, too, wrote at least one manual of letter-writing. Whereas the English novelist was seized by the idea of writing an epistolary novel while engaged in the preparation of such a manual, the author of Yü-li hun was induced by its great popularity with the young readers, who were then beginning to entrust their amatory messages to the post office, to provide a volume of imaginary letters to cover a variety of situations such lovers might encounter.48 If Hsü Chen-ya was as conservative as Richardson in his moral outlook, he was certainly equally forward-looking in sensing “the subjective, individualist, and private orientation of the life and literature” of his own time. And it is certainly characteristic of his subjective orientation that Hsü should subsequently recast his novel in the form of a journal, with even more liberal inclusion of letters and poems exchanged between the lovers. Though the debt has not, as far as I know, been acknowledged, Hsü’s two novels certainly paved the way for the many love novels written in pai-hua during the May Fourth period, including those cast entirely in the form of letters.49 Letters between friends have enjoyed generic dignity as a form of literary discourse since Han times. In some of the best-known early models, the writer uses the vehicle for candid self-disclosure, so as to vindicate his name and defend his honor, and the convention is followed by subsequent writers of ch’uan-ch’i fiction like Yüan Chen, who includes in his famous tale a most appealing letter by Ying-ying. In the course of their correspondence, Meng-hsia and Li-niang carry forward this convention inasmuch as they are engaged in a perpetual recrimination precisely because they love each other so much. Theirs is the kind of soul communion that dispenses with physical contact and even oral converse but capitalizes on the solitary hour when the lover can vent all his frustrations and griefs in a torrential flow of epistolary verse and prose. More than Hung-lou meng and even more than the romantic plays, Yü-li hun explores the subjective world of the hero and heroine. Short of translating the novel in its entirety, it is impossible to suggest the kind of pain the lovers ceaselessly inflict upon each other. The more passionate Meng-hsia becomes in his avowal of love, the more touched Li-niang is by his declaration but at the same time the more alarmed about the misery they are sowing for each other. In chapter 8, for instance, after he spits blood over his hopeless love, Li-niang asks her son to send him a comforting letter and two pots of orchids, which instantly lift his spirits. Then, in a state of recuperation, he accompanies Mr. Li on a

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Sunday excursion with students to visit the neighboring schools. He lies in bed upon his return that evening and finds to his surprise a suitably framed photograph of Li-niang underneath the coverlet. Beside himself with happiness, he regrets that he should have wasted a day when his beloved was going to visit him. Moreover, she must have written some poems while in his studio and then burned them, on the evidence of one surviving line, which would seem to indicate her disappointment over his absence. In raptures over the photograph and the significance of that line, Meng-hsia writes two poems on the back of the photograph and sends her two additional ones. In her reply Li-niang says, however, that it is just an accident that a fragment of her verse has survived the fire and that of course she would not have paid a visit if she had not known he would be gone for the day. The portrait is a gift of love, but it is also a souvenir to console him because their future union is out of the question. Furious with this cold answer, Meng-hsia writes a passionate letter avowing his eternal love. He would rather be a bachelor than ever think of transferring his love to some other woman; he would hasten his end so that, in view of their present frustration, they might both look forward to a happy life together in their next round of existence. This letter makes Li-niang grievously ill, and decides her upon a course of action that will precipitate the three principals to their doom. To turn to another cluster of letters, we are now in the eleventh month of the lunar calendar, and the engagement between Meng-hsia and Yün-ch’ien has been formalized. One afternoon, Meng-hsia overhears her singing a series of songs, to the accompaniment of the organ, that are modeled after a famous sequence of Tu Fu’s poems.50 She sings of her former freedom and her preference of study to sewing, of her old father, of her deceased brother, of her sister-in-law in her widowhood, and then of her own total forfeiture of happiness due to the arbitrary arrangement of her future. Meng-hsia, who has been all along unhappy about his betrothal, is shocked by his discovery that Yün-ch’ien is in an even worse state of misery. So he sends Li-niang a letter bitterly accusing her of duplicity, of the folly of plunging both herself and her sister-in-law in a sea of torment, and once again pledging his eternal love regardless of whether she wants to sever relations with him or not. Li-niang, who has become all too keenly aware of Yün-ch’ien’s growing estrangement and therefore of the obvious failure of her scheme, is profoundly shocked to read this accusatory letter. She composes a reply even while in a state of uncon-

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trollable weeping, literally drenching the sheets of paper with her tears, and bids her son to give Meng-hsia a package containing, besides the letter, a lock of her newly cut hair and the manuscript copy of his poems on Hung-lou meng, which has been in her keeping all these months. It is already the second watch of the night when Meng-hsia receives the package and examines its unbelievable contents. He faints away upon reading the letter, which charges him of gross insensitivity in having misconstrued her good intentions and announces her decision to terminate their love. Upon awaking, he rereads the letter, caresses the lock of hair, and then burns the manuscript. Though anxious to reassure Li-niang, who must be in a worse state of mental turmoil than he is, Meng-hsia is too confused and upset to write an immediate reply. After lying in bed for two hours, however, he rouses himself and bites a finger of his left hand until it bleeds. Then choosing a new brush, he dips it in the blood to write a two-page letter filled with self-reproach and passionate declarations of undying love: The next day Li-niang received the letter, and was so shocked that she almost passed away. One blur of blood, eye-appalling and mind-boggling, all dots and lines, indecipherable and indescribable, what was this fiery red thing? Hsia-lang, Hsia-lang, why did you punish yourself so? At the moment Li-niang was in such a state of fright and agony that her hands kept trembling, her face had changed color, and her eyes couldn’t focus. And she felt as if her heart were being stabbed by ten thousand relentless awls. Nevertheless, with tears in her eyes, she proceeded to read the text: Alas, you want to sever our ties, do you really want to sever our ties? What is there for me to say? And yet how can I fail to speak? If I don’t speak, then my heart will remain besmirched and your anger will remain unpacified. You have misunderstood me and want to have nothing to do with me. How can I not lay bare my heart so as to be ready to accept your repudiation? But once my heart is laid bare, I know that you will not have the heart to forsake me. My last letter was written in a state of extreme agitation. I know it now, but at that time I was under the seizure of extreme pain, and to whom if not to you should I pour out my anger and resentment? I did not know that you, too, would be stabbed by pain and that my letter would serve further to wound your heart. I was

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wrong, I was wrong. I wanted to sever ties with you first; how could I now blame you for wanting to sever ties with me? Nevertheless, though I may be said to be insensitive, I have never harbored the thought of forswearing our love. I am not wood or stone; how could I not know that you have exerted your mind and body on my behalf to the point of exhaustion? My gratitude to you has reached the utmost degree; there can be no one who can rob me of my love for you. And you have always loved me and pitied me. If you don’t love me, who else will love me? If you don’t pity me, who else will pity me? If you want to repudiate my love, then it amounts to passing a death sentence on me. Do you have the heart to see me die? If you want me to die, what choice is there for me but to die? But I want to die as a martyr of our love, and not as a victim of your repudiation. Even if I die, I still hope that you will have pity on me. My words stop here, but my remorse is limitless. I bit my finger and wrote these two sheets with my own blood and now submit them to you. When one is about to die, one cries plaintively. May you see my condition and forgive me. Written by Meng-hsia with his own blood, the fourth watch of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in the year chi-yu (1909).51

This letter is quite short and relatively unadorned with the kind of metaphors and allusions that make some of the other letters impossible to translate. Still, it is difficult to convey the full intensity of its emotional rhetoric because certain recurrent terms like chüeh, variously translated above as “sever,” “repudiate,” “forsake,” and “forswear,” cannot be consistently rendered with a single English word. Nevertheless, because the original letter is so very powerful, I hope even an inadequate rendition may convey something of Meng-hsia’s despairing agony. If the liberal inclusion of the lovers’ letters and poems constitutes a primary distinction of Yü-li hun as a Chinese novel, we may note at the same time that the behavior of these lovers has been anticipated in earlier fiction and that Hsü Chen-ya fully expects us to see this indebtedness for the proper enjoyment of his work. In Hung-lou meng, before Tai-yü dies, she burns two old handkerchiefs given her by Pao-yü along with her manuscript poems, just as Meng-hsia burns his when they are returned by Li-niang. In Hua-yüeh hen, when Ch’iu-hen is stranded in a hotel and believes she is dying, she tears off a piece of her chemise and writes

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thereon eight four-word lines with her bleeding finger because there are no ink and brush to be had.52 But the novelist has merely a servant report the incident as he hands over this piece of cloth and other farewell gifts to Ch’iu-hen’s anxious lover. Hsü Chen-ya has enlarged upon this episode in having his hero write a two-page letter, and thus enhanced the Gothic quality of his novel. Meng-hsia and Li-niang may not be tested to the limit of their courage as to what they can do to achieve happiness, but given their unquestioning obedience to feudal morality and their disdain for happiness if it conflicts with their sense of duty or honor, they can only engage in a worsening quarrel with each other. The translated letter serves to show that Hsü Chen-ya would agree with the sentimental novelists of eighteenth-century Europe in believing that “the subject of the novel is the ‘human heart,’ which is to say, the psyche in all its complexities and dark self-conceits, but especially in the moment of love.”53

VII If the May Fourth period signals the advent of romanticism in modern Chinese literature, then Yü-li hun is surely the kind of sentimental novel popular in England and continental Europe prior to the full-scale launching of the romantic movement, inclusive of Richardson’s Clarissa and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Yü-li hun shares with the latter the epistolary method of narration, the preponderant interest in the human heart, the dual concern with virtue and sentiment, and the minimal representation of the objective social world to allow the fuller exploration of characters afflicted with love. But, inheriting the ts’ai-tzu chia-jen tradition of Chinese drama and fiction, Hsü Chen-ya sees his lovers as identical in background, education, and taste, the sole barrier standing in the way of their marital happiness being the Confucian code governing a widow’s conduct. The main difficulty with their English and German counterparts, on the other hand, is that they cannot communicate as readily on account of their differing tastes and social origins. As an aristocrat, Lovelace is fascinated by the world of bourgeois virtue as represented by Clarissa, and is repulsed. Precisely because he is a poet and artist delighting in his solitary communion with nature, Werther is irresistibly drawn to Charlotte, who inhabits the altogether different world of domestic duty and contentment. Meng-hsia doesn’t have to woo his lady in the manner

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of Lovelace and Werther, yet because of the moral barrier separating him from Li-niang, he is in a worse state of torment for a longer period of time than Werther ever is, and inflicts as much pain upon his beloved as has been endured by Clarissa at the hands of her cunning seducer. One way of accounting for the Chinese novel’s fascination in comparative terms is indeed to look upon its hero and heroine as Chinese versions of Werther and Clarissa. Meng-hsia is much luckier than Werther in that his object of adoration reciprocates his love totally, sight unseen. Charlotte is a woman of lesser spiritual capacity than either Li-niang or Clarissa, and she is not Werther’s intellectual equal. But eighteenth-century Europe allowed much freer social intercourse between young men and women, and is thus kinder to a despairing lover than Chinese society ever was. Werther sees Charlotte almost daily, during his two periods of sojourn in her locality. She delights in his adoration but in the end is forced to agree with her husband that Werther is insane with his inconsiderate craving for her company. Thus Werther suffers without ever getting the kind of spiritual recompense he is entitled to: his grim suicide concludes the tragedy of an individual and not of a pair of lovers sharing the same ideals. Hsü Chen-ya grants his lovers two nocturnal interviews when they can talk to their hearts’ content, though only the one precipitated by Mr. Li’s villainy is fully described. Werther and Charlotte see each other far more frequently, but only their final interview, which takes place after Werther has already decided to kill himself, can be counted as a lovers’ meeting. Regardless of how much each author drew upon autobiographical experience in his lengthy description of the lovers’ confrontation, to compare the two interviews is to be struck with greater force by the glaring sickness of Hsü Chen-ya and his world. Both Werther and Meng-hsia have been pure and idealistic lovers who care far more for spiritual communion than for bodily contact; both have not been alone before with their beloved for a tête-à-tête at night, and Meng-hsia has never seen Li-niang at close range. Their interview occupies the whole length of chapter 18, entitled “Crying Face to Face” (Tuich’i), and that’s precisely what they do when they are not talking about Mr. Li’s villainy or communicating through poetry. After all their misunderstandings are cleared, Meng-hsia chants four quatrains of impromptu composition amid his sobs; in addition, he asks for brush and paper to write out four seven-word poems in the regulated style for Li-niang to

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read. With all their sobbing and gazing at each other until almost dawn, it seems quite unnatural that Meng-hsia should still communicate his love through poetry. Before seeing him off, Li-niang sings some verse from Romeo and Juliet. Ironically, the brief lines would seem to be taken from act III, scene 5, where Juliet is initially urging Romeo to stay even though morning light is already flooding her room.54 The Shakespearean lovers have spent their night making love; the Chinese lovers haven’t even held hands. Whereas Meng-hsia has to be summoned by Li-niang to both of their meetings, Werther surprises Charlotte with his final visit. Though she has asked him not to come before Christmas Eve, he wants a last interview with her when she is alone rather than surrounded by her family. Quite uneasy because her husband is not home, Charlotte asks her visitor to entertain her by reading something. Werther, who does not enjoy the gift for impromptu composition, asks for his manuscript in her keeping and reads therefrom his own translation of Ossian the Gaelic poet, who is then the rage of Europe.55 This long recitation of poetry causes “a torrent of tears” to stream from Charlotte’s eyes; Werther also weeps bitterly. Then he reads a few more lines intimating his suicide: The whole force of these words fell upon the unfortunate Werther. In deepest despair, he threw himself at Charlotte’s feet, seized her hands, and presented them to his eyes and to his forehead. An apprehension of his terrible plan seemed to strike her. Her thoughts were confused, she held his hands, pressed them to her bosom; and, turning toward him with the tenderest expression, her burning cheeks touched his. They lost sight of everything. The world vanished before them. He clasped her in his arms tightly, and covered her trembling, stammering lips with furious kisses.56

Charlotte, of course, immediately regains her composure and asks Werther to desist. But though on this occasion he is as much of a spiritual lover and lachrymose poet as Meng-hsia, Werther cannot restrain himself from demonstrating his thirst for love in physical terms—the only scene of this kind in the whole novel—and Charlotte cannot but reciprocate. The Sorrows of Young Werther would have been an incomplete novel without this scene giving concrete proof of the hero’s desperate need on the eve of his suicide, and we may say of Yü-li hun that it would

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have been a work of greater truth and power if its lovers, who are much more in love, had on rare occasions yielded to caresses under the power of their emotion. That these lovers should not lose self-control even under the most inviting circumstances tells as much of the society of their times as of the author’s determined championship of feudal morality. And, as I have said earlier, it is mainly due to Hsü Chen-ya’s increasing self-satisfaction with that role that his subsequent novels should appear so very irrelevant and out of touch with reality. The lovers’ first nocturnal interview in Hsüehhung lei-shih, for instance, takes place in the presence of Ch’iu-erh, who serves as her mistress’s chaperone. Meng-hsia no longer chants his four quatrains in that interview; he writes them out and has them delivered to Li-niang by her maid. The distraught lady, too, has much less to confide in her visitor and dismisses him early without singing those verses from Romeo and Juliet. After returning to his studio, Meng-hsia tosses and turns in bed, thinking mainly of Li’s villainy, and then writes the same four seven-word lü-shih poems in the morning for his own consolation.57 The author has certainly gone to absurd lengths to assure the reader of his lovers’ utter transcendence of paltry passion ( yü).

VIII Hsü Chen-ya had no knowledge of Goethe’s novel when composing Yü-li hun, but he had read Ch’a-hua nü, among other translations by Lin Shu, and was obviously in its debt not merely for a western example of a sentimental tragedy featuring a noble-minded heroine but, more importantly, for a direct model for the writing of a conclusion to his own novel. Though we can say in a general way that exposure to western fiction had led some late Ch’ing novelists to try new techniques, Yü-li hun was the first Chinese novel whose compositional indebtedness to a European model could be conclusively proven. As such, it should be of further interest to students of comparative literature. As an epilogue, the last two chapters of Yü-li hun are different from the first twenty-eight chapters in narrative form and method. Li-niang has died in chapter 26, and in the next chapter Yün-ch’ien discovers on her person that long letter disclosing in full her affair with Meng-hsia and her well-intentioned effort to bring about a happy marriage between him and

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her beloved sister-in-law. Chapter 28 goes on to describe Yün-ch’ien’s remorse and Meng-hsia’s belated return to the Ts’ui house two days after Li-niang’s death. Since she is already in the coffin, he finds it more comforting to lament her alone by the now moss-covered grave for the pear blossoms. Except for the prelude, which lifts the incident of the burial of flowers from its proper temporal context, the author has organized the first twenty-eight chapters as a straightforward chronicle of the year 1909, from the first to the last month, plus two additional days. (In Hsüeh-hung lei-shih he recasts the narrative as a month-by-month journal of the hero, not forgetting even to enter the intercalary month following the second.)58 These twenty-eight chapters, then, constitute a third-person narrative by an omniscient narrator having access to all the papers belonging to the late hero and heroine. Once in a long while the narrator speaks out in the first person, but since such authorial commentaries are nothing unusual in traditional Chinese fiction, we are not too curious about his identity. It is the main business of the epilogue to relate the deaths of the other two main characters so as to conclude the tragedy, but since even Yün-ch’ien outlives Li-niang by half a year, a detailed chronicle is no longer feasible or desirable in the absence of a continual variety of engaging incidents. With Li-niang gone, both Yün-ch’ien and Meng-hsia are waiting for the end, and there is little to tell about the other members of the Ts’ui family. Moreover, the author has already given us a full account of Li-niang’s ghastly death, and he cannot hope to top it with a similar omniscient narrative about Yün-ch’ien’s last days. Nor should he do so in view of the fact that, as she is the title heroine, Li-niang’s death should properly be the climax of the novel. So Hsü Chen-ya hits upon the brilliant idea of giving us a fragmentary diary of the dying Yün-ch’ien. Her daily entries, some long and some quite brief, while differing in dramatic effect from the sustained narrative of Li-niang’s death, are grimly impressive in their own way and add further interest as a new type of document copied into the novel. There can be no doubt whatever that Hsü Chen-ya got his inspiration for introducing the diary from his reading of Lin Shu’s translation of La Dame aux camélias. Following the introductory section, the latter novel is in the main Armand’s retelling of his affair with Marguerite to the firstperson narrator, a sympathetic novelist. By chapter 25, Armand has dozed off, “tired by this long narrative, often interrupted by his tears,”59 and the

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novelist starts to read on his own Marguerite’s last letter to her lover, who received it from her friend Julie Duprat. The letter begins with an account of the elder Duval’s secret visit to Marguerite, which has compelled her to leave his son for seemingly mercenary reasons, but soon turns into a journal wherein the dying courtesan records her sensations and thoughts for her absent lover’s perusal. The entry for February 5, the last entry in her own handwriting, goes as follows: Oh, come, come, Armand! I suffer horribly; I am going to die, O God! I was so miserable yesterday that I wanted to spend the evening, which seemed as if it were going to be as long as the last, anywhere but at home. The duke came in the morning. It seems to me as if the sight of this old man, whom death has forgotten, makes me die faster. Despite the burning fever which devoured me, I made them dress me and take me to the Vaudeville. Julie put on some rouge for me, without which I should have looked like a corpse. I had the box where I gave you our first rendezvous. All the time I had my eyes fixed on the stall where you sat that day, though a sort of country fellow sat there, laughing loudly at all the foolish things that the actors said. I was half dead when they brought me home. I coughed and spat blood all the night! Today I cannot speak, I can scarcely move my arm. My God! My God! I am going to die! I have been expecting it, but I can not get used to the thought of suffering more than I suffer now, and if . . .60

After that entry, Julie Duprat continues the letter from February 18 on, keeping a record of her friend’s last few days. The very last chapter (chapter 27) is in the form of a postscript in which the first-person narrator tells of his accompanying Armand on several visits and gives his reason for recording this true story of Marguerite. In chapter 29 of Yü-li hun, entitled “The Diary,” the first-person narrator finally reveals his identity as an old classmate of Ch’in Shih-ch’ih. Mindful of his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas fils of the Orient (tungfang Chung-ma), Shih-ch’ih had sent him in the winter of 1910 a rough draft of Meng-hsia’s love story and asked him to turn it into a novel. The oriental Dumas, however, is reluctant to do so because of his contempt for Meng-hsia, who has callously survived Li-niang; furthermore, he doesn’t

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know what has become of Yün-ch’ien. By sheer accident, a friend of the author’s, who also took part in the Wuchang uprising, has returned to his native city of Soochow with a journal that a dying comrade has entrusted to his care. He shows the journal to our author, who has no difficulty in identifying its original owner because of the many poems to and from Li-niang contained therein and develops a great admiration for Meng-hsia, who has followed her instructions to study in Japan and died a patriot.61 Our Dumas is further encouraged to write the story down because he now knows about the fate of Yün-ch’ien. Duly transcribed into the journal is a record of her last days (5th to 14th day of the sixth month in the year of keng-hsü [1910]), as taken from her own diary. The diary is clearly modeled after Marguerite’s, as may be seen in her last entry: The 14th. I am very ill. Can’t even swallow one drop of water. My hands and feet are numb and have gradually lost the sense of touch. My throat is so parched I can’t utter a single sound. All that congestion of phlegm has blocked my breathing; I can only gasp as if someone were choking me. There is no pain quite like it. My old father has written a letter to Meng-hsia for me. I have been yearning for Meng-hsia, but Meng-hsia hasn’t come even at this late hour. I am afraid I can’t wait for him any longer. I can’t even have a glimpse of my husband at the time of my death. How can I die with my eyes contentedly closed? But after my death he will surely come, and my diary will surely be read by my husband. I hope he will take care of himself and not become grief-stricken. As I am writing this, I can’t even form characters properly. From now on I can’t even hold a brush anymore.62

At this point we find Meng-hsia’s postscript to the diary, in which he describes his remorse over his shabby treatment of his long-suffering fiancée and records her age (18) and the date of her death (the 17th of the sixth month). He also notes her last agonies, as does Julie Duprat her friend’s in her continuation of Marguerite’s letter. Having read through Yün-ch’ien’s journal, the Chinese Dumas is filled with the compulsion to see her old home and to know what has become of the rest of her family, and the final chapter, entitled “The Site Revisited,” is mainly taken up with that visit. In the last chapter of La Dame aux camélias, too, the first-person narrator, accompanied by

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Armand, calls on two of Marguerite’s dearest friends, visits her grave, and spends some time with Armand’s father and sister at their country estate. But the chapter is only two pages long, and the visit to the grave is summarized in one sentence (“Lastly, we went to Marguerite’s grave, on which the first rays of the April sun were bringing the first leaves into bud”).63 In his last chapter, however, Hsü Chen-ya has immeasurably improved upon his model with an elegiac recapitulation of all the themes of the novel. The narrator takes a special journey to Wusih to see Ch’in Shihch’ih and goes with him to the Ts’ui house in the village. Only a crone guards the place now; old Mr. Ts’ui has died and P’eng-lang has been entrusted to the care of relatives. The grave for pear blossoms, no longer marked by the stone tablet, is barely visible under the moss. Both the pear tree and the magnolia, prematurely dead like the young ladies of the house, have been chopped down. Meng-hsia’s old study, dusty and foulsmelling after long neglect, is bare of furniture except for a full wastebasket from which the visitors retrieve two tz’u compositions by its former occupant. These poems of autumnal lament, quoted in full, appropriately conclude the novel. I have discussed the epilogue of Yü-li hun at some length partly to establish our author’s obvious indebtedness to Dumas in matters of narrative technique and partly to show what a fine artist he was to conclude his novel the way he did, by first validating the credentials of his first-person narrator and then assigning him an active role in the story as eyewitness to the ruin of a house where the tragedy took place. Whereas the main body of the novel is experimental only within the context of the sentimental-erotic tradition, the epilogue anticipates Lu Hsün in its use of a diary, its employment of a concerned but helpless narrator, and the desolate landscape he observes for us. When Hsü Chen-ya styles himself the oriental Alexandre Dumas fils in the epilogue, most probably he is calling attention not to his specific indebtedness to the French novelist’s craftsmanship but rather to his proud creation of a noble but unfortunate heroine who will wring tears from his readers. Both Li-niang and Marguerite are victims of pulmonary tuberculosis, and if Marguerite, like her Chinese sister, has not attracted critical attention in recent decades as a character in fiction, her tubercular condition certainly receives much implicit commentary in Susan Sontag’s probing study of Illness as Metaphor, though the brevity of that book allows only one mention each of Marguerite and her operatic counterpart,

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Violetta Valery. And what Sontag has to say about the TB victim in mainly nineteenth-century western literature applies equally to our heroine, as may be seen in the two following quotations: In contrast to the modern bogey of the cancer-prone character— someone unemotional, inhibited, repressed—the TB-prone character that haunted imaginations in the nineteenth century was an amalgam of two different fantasies: someone both passionate and repressed.64 TB is disintegration, febrilization, dematerialization; it is a disease of liquids—the body turning to phlegm and mucus and sputum and, finally, blood—and of air, of the need for better air. . . . TB is a disease of time; it speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it.65

As a Chinese widow steeped in Confucian culture, Li-niang is actually much more “repressed” than Marguerite, who attempts a life of false gaiety after relinquishing Armand to his respectable father. And if Marguerite lives a life of febrile dematerialization, the three principals of the Chinese novel all do so in their intense cultivation of passion as something ethereal, disembodied. Prodigiously decked out in the vocabulary of melancholy, sickness, grief, despair, decay, and death, Yü-li hun surpasses all previous works of the Chinese sentimental-erotic tradition with its morbid lyricism, and if we follow Sontag, it may be said to be the prime example of a work conceived by a tubercular imagination even though Hsü Chen-ya himself was not known to be afflicted by the disease. Li-niang literally turns her body into “phlegm and mucus and sputum and, finally, blood”; in her last moments, she gasps for air as well. The author has not specified Yün-ch’ien’s terminal illness, but as we have seen from the quotation from her diary, she, too, cannot breathe and craves for air. Meng-hsia also spits blood, though he suffers for a longer period from the febrile condition of a malarial patient. And it is not an accident that his study, from which he has written so many passionate poems and letters, should eventually strike the two visitors with its “evil and foul” air that forces them to leave in precipitate haste.66 All this sickness and decay may define Yü-li hun as a Chinese variant of the Gothic novel, but surely it would seem more appropriate to regard its hero and heroines, with their emotional hypersensitivity and sexual

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repression, as inhabitants of that windowless house of iron Lu Hsün describes in his preface to Na-han. Lu Hsün, himself a TB victim, is especially aware of “the need for better air” and for “bright, wide-open spaces.”67 Though not an awakener of Chinese youth in that sense, the author of Yü-li hun has certainly defined the stifling condition of that iron house with poetic fervor and deep personal feeling, fully exposing the agonies of its inhabitants. With his unswerving allegiance to the Chinese literary and moral traditions, he has nevertheless evoked the horror of Chinese decadence with a kind of power rarely felt in works by later authors explicitly denouncing the feudal system.

Postscript I have recently read “Real Facts Disclosed about Yü-li hun” (Yü-li hun chen-hsiang ta-pai), an article in Soochow Magazine (Suzhou tsa-chih), no. 1, 1997. Its author, Shih Meng, has got hold of altogether 93 sheets of authentic letters and poems exchanged between Hsü Chen-ya and the widow named Ch’en P’ei-fen while he was living as a lodger in her fatherin-law’s house. Before the tragic endings the events recorded in the novel are quite similar to those to be discerned in the letters and poems. But P’ei-fen is not as pure as Li-niang, and eventually yields to her lover’s ardor during their nocturnal meetings in her room. Despite vehement protests, Chen-ya himself also yields to her persuasion to marry Ts’ai Juichu, who is the widow’s niece rather than her sister-in-law. Thus despite my plausible argument in note 27, I was quite mistaken in rejecting Juichu as the author’s first wife. As stated on p. 279, she died in 1924. Fan Po-ch’ün, the principal editor of A History of the Popular Literature of Early Modern and Modern China (Chung-kuo chin-hsien-tai t’ung-su wenh¨sueh shih [Nanking: Jiangsu chiao-yü ch’u-pan-she, 2000]), makes much use of Shih Meng’s article in the section on Yü-li hun in Volume I, pp. 269–278. All students of “mandarin duck and butterfly” fiction, in both its narrow and broad senses, should find this massive, two-volume work of pioneering scholarship indispensable. The names of Ch’en P’ei-fen, Ts’ai Jui-chu, Fan Po-ch’ün, and Shih Meng are given in Chinese in the glossary.

Part IV MODERN FICTION

Introduction to Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919–1949* (1981)

In this companion volume to Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (ed. Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau), my co-editors and I have chosen forty-four works by twenty authors to represent the achievement in fiction during the three decades, 1919–1949. Forty-one of these are short stories of various lengths while three can be safely called novellas: Hsü Ti-shan’s “Yü-kuan,” Lao She’s “An Old Tragedy in a New Age,” and Eileen Chang’s “The Golden Cangue.” Even in an anthology of this size, of course, we cannot include a full-length novel without sacrificing diversity of representation; fortunately, many novels of our authors dating from the same period, such as Mao Tun’s Midnight, Lao She’s Cat Country and Rickshaw, Pa Chin’s Family and Cold Nights, Hsiao Hung’s The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, and Ch’ien Chung-shu’s Fortress Besieged, are readily available in translation to meet the needs of the serious reader. Our volume covers practically all fiction writers of the first rank who rose to fame in the twenties and thirties, but of the new writers of the forties we have included only four—Chao Shu-li, Ch’ien Chung-shu, Lu Ling, and Eileen Chang—though Ting Ling, a famous writer since the late twenties, is represented solely by her stories of the forties. Scholars agree that for that decade Yenan fiction is best represented by Chao Shuli and Ting Ling and Shanghai fiction by Eileen Chang and Ch’ien Chung-shu. But since there is yet no critical consensus regarding the relative merits of several important novelists to emerge from the Nationalist

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interior during the war years, we can only exercise our best judgment in preferring Lu Ling above the others, both for his unmistakable talent and for his copious productivity. The reader of the last volume, if previously unacquainted with modern Chinese fiction, will find a different type of fare awaiting him in this one. While he might miss the wide range of themes, along with the knights-errant, ghost-wives, alchemists, and other such characters that contribute so much to the exotic flavor of the previous anthology, at the same time he will find our selections little encumbered with notes on historical or literary allusions, and on the whole both easier and more engrossing to read because of their conformity to a western mode of realistic narrative. The “Questing Man” retains his thematic importance in modern Chinese fiction, but he is altogether of a different breed from the archetype defined in Traditional Chinese Stories as “a selfless seeker of supernatural power through an exceedingly difficult journey for the salvation of someone else.” The questing hero in the modern fiction seeks nothing less than the salvation of his suffering compatriots, or of the nation as a whole. Of course, he expects no supernatural aid in this task— unless he is the type of stupid and gullible patriot satirized in Chang T’ien-i’s The Strange Knight of Shanghai. For all modern writers seeking the salvation of Mother China, her shame appears especially visible through the gross superstitions of her religious populace. Thus these writers have nothing but contempt for Buddhist and Taoist priests, shamans, and witch doctors who, in addition to their cupidity and quackery, reconcile the believers to a miserable existence on earth. Quite unlike the other volume, supernaturalism plays no part in Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas unless it is the playful kind of satiric machinery that we find in Ch’ien Chung-shu’s “The Inspiration.” Confucianism, insofar as it is identifiable with the gentry and the official establishment, does not fare much better: the hypocritical gentleman forever mouthing proverbs and getting angry with the wicked modern ways is an object of derision in some of our selections from Lu Hsün, Lao She, and Chang T’ien-i. All of our twenty authors were of course brought up on the Confucian classics and may be called Confucian if we regard kindness, sympathy, and charity as Confucian virtues. But the inoperancy of these virtues in the society around them makes our writers angry and harsh: their humanitarianism, while reconcilable with Confucian teaching, is nevertheless something more deeply rooted in the western

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tradition. Even with the only two of our writers whose religious sense remains intact—Hsü Ti-shan as a Christian convert and Shen Ts’üng-wen as a philosophical Taoist nostalgic for a premoral condition of humanity— their humanitarian anger against the oppressors of the people remains quite apparent. In view of the abundance of love stories in the other anthology, one would expect an even larger supply of such stories in this one, since it was during the twentieth century that Chinese youth finally gained the right to court and marry whomever they will without parental approval. A large quantity of love stories and novels were indeed produced in the twenties and thirties by identifiably modern writers, but they all appear quite dated by reason of their excessive sentimentality. The most poignant love story in our volume remains the thwarted courtship by a timid student home from abroad of an old-fashioned girl in “The Golden Cangue”; their silent communion contrasts sharply with the verbosity of the gushy lovers in the fiction of the twenties. Ch’ien Chung-shu, responsible for the sole satiric fantasy in our volume, also provides in “Souvenir” the only adult example of a tale of seduction and adultery that compares well with some famous European models in its classical restraint and psychological precision. From the many untranslated stories of Eileen Chang we could have chosen another of comparable maturity, but few modern writers of an earlier period have written a love story of equal irony and detachment. Typically, the would-be lover in Yü Ta-fu’s “Sinking,” a Chinese student in Japan, is thwarted in his search for an Eve by his perpetual awareness of his alienation, and the young lovers in both Tuan-mu Hung-liang’s “The Rapid Current of the Muddy River” and Wu Tsu-hsiang’s “Fan Village” must stand united against their enemies. Though their potential for idyllic happiness is stressed, in neither story is their love relationship the central concern. The modern Chinese writer discards the baggage of traditional beliefs and even finds romantic love an expendable luxury because, as I have said elsewhere, of his “obsessive concern with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity” (A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 533–34). Because of this obsession, modern Chinese literature far surpasses the bulk of traditional Chinese literature in moral seriousness and human understanding. It is a rare traditional poet who is seriously concerned with the sufferings of the common man, and it is a rarer play-

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wright or novelist who writes of women as vibrant human beings in their own right. During the three decades of our coverage, all writers shared a larger vision of humanity in which the common man and woman, and the common child as well, are as much entitled to respect as the officials and scholars of the past. This is a revolutionary change of the most fundamental nature. The modern writer not only writes with greater candor than the scholar-official of the old days but also sees himself or herself as an observer and recorder of the truth about Chinese society. Every story in our volume, though some may provide pat answers in accordance with socialist or Communist teaching, is fundamentally true; most were disconcerting to their contemporary readers, and should remain disconcerting for their disclosure of some ugly aspects of Chinese society, though in time we may be more concerned about the generic and aesthetic features of this type of realistic fiction than its truth-telling power. Not since the age of philosophers in pre-Ch’in times has there been a period in China when its writers were primarily engaged in truth speaking. Though truth speaking has met with official disapproval and punishment on the China mainland since 1949, the intellectual revolution of the previous decades cannot be easily overturned. Whenever circumstances permit, mainland writers will still speak out for freedom and for the common man. After the Opium War the Chinese began to perceive themselves as an endangered nation, but the further perception that China was inhumane did not dawn on them until they began to read western thought and literature. By the late Ch’ing period novelists were habitually contrasting the barbarity ( yeh-man) of their country to the civilization (wen-ming) of western nations. Among the intellectual leaders of the May Fourth era, the American-educated Hu Shih no less than the Japanese-educated Lu Hsün and Chou Tso-jen openly acknowledged the vast inferiority of Chinese civilization after their exposure to western thought and literature, particularly of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Chou Tsojen spoke out in 1918–1919 for a “humane literature” and a “literature of the common man,” he was expressing for a whole generation of westerninfluenced writers and readers their radically altered understanding of the function and profession of literature. In late 1920 several young writers, including Mao Tun, Yeh Shao-chün, and Hsü Ti-shan of our volume, responded to Chou’s call by forming the Literary Association (Wen-hsüeh yen-chiu hui), whose principal organ, The Short Story Magazine (Hsiao-shuo

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yüeh-pao), became the first major journal of humane literature realistically concerned with the problems and sufferings of the common man. The subsequent ideological split of the May Fourth writers and intellectuals into a left wing and a liberal wing was unfortunate but inevitable, but the succeeding good writers, whatever their political persuasion, never lost sight of the humane importance and enhanced dignity of their profession. Their fundamental repudiation of the old literary culture remained intact, along with their fundamental disgust with the old society. If we continue to honor Lu Hsün on the centennial of his birth in 1981, it is not because he is the greatest of modern Chinese writers, as the Communist critics would have us believe, but because his stories and early essays have effected a permanent revolution in attitude toward their national past for the succeeding generations of writers and readers. Since Lu Hsün, it has not been possible to reinculcate in the minds of the young an unqualified respect for the Chinese tradition without inviting disbelief and ridicule. Again with the exception of Ch’ien Chung-shu, a satirist engrossed in the follies and foibles of modern intellectuals, all our writers in this volume share an attitude of disgust toward the old society, even though a trio of less angry writers—Hsü Ti-shan, Shen Ts’ung-wen, and Eileen Chang—accept its pervasive influence as a necessary condition under which their characters have to live. It is their defeat or triumph under the most absurd circumstances that engages these writers’ creative interest, and not the circumstances themselves. However disagreeable their circumstances, the heroes and heroines of traditional Chinese stories inhabit a moral universe and act in full expectation that virtue will be rewarded and vice punished. Hence the numerous instances in our companion anthology of divine intervention on behalf of the good to demonstrate the visibility and efficacy of the moral principle in human affairs. Modern Chinese writers find this moral principle much less in evidence, and even Hsü Ti-shan is too good a Christian to stress the material rewards accruing to good conduct: on the contrary, his good characters find their spiritual improvement sufficient reward for being mistreated by the world. Alienated from traditional beliefs by intellectual choice, the authors of our volume are thus no different from modern western writers in seeing man as a much smaller creature, and his fate as more pathetic or ironic. Only the objects of satire—the Confucian gentlemen, the landlords, and the big merchants—are as self-assured and as much mired in greed and lust as the villains in traditional fiction. Barring

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the resolute heroes of romantic-revolutionary novels, the good characters are much less sure of themselves and very often reconcile themselves to their smallness and transience by developing an ironic attitude of selfmockery. Thus even the earliest writers in this volume, Lu Hsün and Yeh Shao-chün, quite often strike a Chekhovian note, which makes them so very different from the authors of traditional fiction. This Chekhovian quality is also quite conspicuous in our selections from Pa Chin, Hsiao Chün, Ting Ling, and Hsiao Hung. Pa Chin, whose early novels in the romantic-revolutionary mode are quite bad, is at his Chekhovian best in “The General” and “Piglet and Chickens.” The former story is about a Russian exile in a Chinese city, presumably Shanghai, who pretends to be an ex-general so as to forget the humiliation of being supported by his prostitute wife, also a White Russian. The Chinese widow in the latter story, who tries to augment her income by raising a piglet and some chickens, is no less pathetic because her only weapon is her abusive language, which does nothing to prevent defeat in her contention with her landlady and some of her fellow tenants. Our two selections from the Manchurian writer Tuan-mu Hung-liang, written under the stimulus of the Japanese invasion, are sustained on a heroic note, though some of his best tales are equally noted for their irony and pathos. His “Nocturne in March” (San-yüeh yeh-ch’ü), also about Russian exiles in Shanghai, is, I believe, an even finer story than “The General.” A Chekhovian quality also distinguishes some of Eileen Chang’s best stories, though “The Golden Cangue” is in the tragic mode because its heroine, however unhappy, remains a fanatic unreconciled to her fate. Beginning with Lu Hsün, Chinese story writers frequently wrote of modern intellectuals like themselves, who, while wishing to accomplish something big for their country, soon become aware of their individual smallness and the magnitude of the reactionary forces with which they have to contend. In The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, Leo Lee has rightly noted the persistence of a Promethean strain in modern Chinese literature that is conspicuously romantic. During the three decades of our anthology, veneration for Romain Rolland and his masterpiece Jean-Christophe (rarely mentioned by American intellectuals today, but once popular enough to become a Modern Library Giant) was attested to by a great many writers, and the creation of a modern Chinese hero in the image of Jean-Christophe was consciously striven for, but

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without success. The dedicated hero of invincible will looms large in the type of romantic-revolutionary fiction once highly popular; he eventually hardens into the Party “cadre” who works day and night on behalf of the people in Communist novels. This figure is barely visible in our anthology, however, because we prefer stories of greater realism in which modern intellectuals are viewed more ironically. Lü Wei-fu of Lu Hsün’s “In the Wine Shop” is a self-confessed failure whose earlier zest for modern enlightenment has been crushed by economic necessity and by his continual regard for maternal wishes. But the first-person narrator, sipping wine alone as a total stranger in his hometown (as the author was during his return to Shaohsing in the winter of 1919–1920) is even more an object of ironic contemplation: he is much more famous and successful than his former classmate, but is he any nearer his goal of awakening the Chinese people? Lu Hsün’s helpless sympathy for a childhood companion in “My Old Home” and for a dismissed servant in “The New Year’s Sacrifice” is also in subtle counterpoint with an awareness of his own impotence and estrangement despite—or rather because of—his own success as a modern intellectual. The intellectual heroes of Yü Ta-fu’s “Sinking” and Hsiao Chün’s “Goats” fare even worse, one a suicidal student in Japan and the other a political prisoner in his own country. But if the sea tempts the former to drown himself partly in protest against his country’s weakness, it provides for the latter the only gleam of hope in his otherwise viewless confinement. Like so many writers of the thirties, Hsiao Chün has espoused socialism, if not Communism, as the only hope for China’s future, and in “Goats,” his finest story, he presents his case for hope without ever raising his voice to denounce his captors or the whole rotten system that has made possible the inhumane treatment of petty thieves. In contrast to his own prolonged confinement, however, two Russian boys named Kolya and Alyosha are about to be released after a brief stay in the prison, and they intend forthwith to go to Russia rather than stay with their exiled parents in Shanghai. If there is a land of hope for Chinese intellectuals in the thirties, it is the Soviet Union. Thus Hsiao Chün’s hero is quite envious of the boys willing to return even though they have only seen Soviet Russia in picture magazines and movies. What they know by heart is what their parents have taught them: the poems of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy.

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They recited the poems and songs they could recall, especially the younger one, and when he began to chant Pushkin’s “My Nurse,” I was moved to the point that I could no longer hold back my tears. “Children, listen to me. . . .” Softly I too recited for them all the poems that I knew and could remember. But the children couldn’t understand their meaning. I explained them and at the same time said: “In your homeland all these are very popular poems.” The children—the younger one, that is—draped himself around my neck. “We are friends!”

Since Alyosha and Kolya are common familiar names for Russian boys, I cannot be certain if Hsiao Chün had read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and has alluded to it in his choice of these names. In the subplot of that novel Alyosha Karamazov moves among a group of boys whose leader is Kolya Krassotkin. Although Alyosha can do nothing to prevent the tragic contentions in his own home, his gentle persuasion of these nihilist boys asserts a note of hope at the end of the novel. In “Goats,” however, the roles of mentor and students have been reversed: our Chinese Alyosha, who is a young man of experience and suffering, now plays the part of a wonder-struck boy who listens to the children’s poetry recitation and shares their dream of eventual freedom and happiness in a Soviet paradise. He is so wrapped up in their impending liberation that he doesn’t even think of his wife and friends in other prisons. The boys, on their part, are ready to forsake their parents even though they are much more ignorant of the conditions in Soviet Russia than even the Chinese hero, who could at least recite some of the revolutionary poems popular in their homeland. The short story ends with the hero receiving a letter from his Russian friends: Once I received a letter from the two Russian kids. They said they had already reached Harbin, had received entry from their country, and were about to strike out across Siberia and return to their homeland. In the letter they wrote: “Mr.——, haven’t you had your fill of the ocean yet? Wishing you good health.”

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Yes, my dear little friends, I’m still watching the ocean, watching the same slice of ocean . . . I’m healthy . . . I shook my head, and some strands of hair fluttered down onto the letter; this time I was truly smiling.

One is almost tempted to spoil his happiness by saying, “Wait until you get their next letter from Moscow!” But perhaps once there, they are not even allowed to write to their Chinese friend anymore. “Goats” is a truly moving story, especially in its graphic account of the torture and death suffered alike by the goat thief and his three stolen goats. The reader almost allows the hero the sentimental dream of a better homeland, in his captive role as a numb spectator of all the senseless brutality around him. Disgusted with political repression in China, writers like Hsiao Chün were not really much better informed about conditions in Stalinist Russia than the two eager immigrants; judging by “Goats” and other stories in the hopeful vein, it is quite evident that the leftist authors of the thirties confused the noble humanism and humanitarianism of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy with the new cynicism and brutality of a Soviet state. Pa Chin, an anarchist, does not share the delusions of the more orthodox writers on the left. He believes in the teachings of Kropotkin and is much more drawn to the pre-Bolshevik revolutionaries of Czarist Russia, such as Vera Figner and Sophia Perovskaya. As we have seen, he even extends his sympathy to the Russian “general” and his wife. But Pa Chin is one with the orthodox leftists in his scornful attitude toward the liberal intellectuals of the thirties. There can be no doubt whatever that the protagonist of “Sinking Low” is a caricature of several prominent intellectuals of that period—Hu Shih for his insistence on historical research, his management of the Boxer Indemnity Fund for advanced students, and his pacific stand on Japanese aggression; and Chou Tso-jen and Lin Yutang for their espousal of the familiar essayists of the late Ming period and their cultivation of their own garden in deliberate retreat from national affairs. The protagonist’s unhappy relationship with his giddy and flirtatious wife suggests the poet Hsü Chih-mo, whose notorious courtship of Lu Hsiao-man ended in marital disillusionment. Throughout the forties, Communist writers would continue to attack Hu Shih, Chou Tso-jen, and Lin Yutang in a grossly unfair fashion for their supposed crimes. But in his

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story Pa Chin takes these three to task not so much for their obstruction of leftist enlightenment as for their betrayal of the causes they had earlier espoused. The suffering of the Chinese people as individuals and as a nation should have remained their primary concern (as has been Pa Chin’s throughout his writing career, with a brief interlude as a compliant Communist propagandist in the fifties). In the context of the primacy of this unfinished task—to strengthen China against foreign aggression and to alleviate the sufferings of its people—we can see why he should regard historical research for its own sake, the young scholars’ quest for fame, and the remapping of literary tradition for the greater glory of individualist authors as idle pursuits. If Pa Chin is properly indignant against the “lost leaders” of the New Culture movement in 1934, he himself might be included in the blanket attack on all fashionable authors of the thirties in Ch’ien Chung-shu’s grotesque caricature of The Writer in “The Inspiration” (1946). Edward Gunn has grouped the most brilliant Shanghai writers of the forties under the broad label of Antiromanticism.1 But Ch’ien Chung-shu is not so much antiromantic as temperamentally Augustan and classic. With the exception of a few critics and scholars under the influence of Irving Babbitt, one can say that the portion of western literature that seized the Chinese imagination begins with Rousseau, Goethe, and Blake. In China as in other Asian nations, the Romantic Movement with its enhanced respect for the individual and its discrediting of all institutional authorities made possible the exposure of the glaring ills of a traditional oriental society. Ch’ien Chung-shu is almost unique in modern Chinese literature for his affiliations with Pope and the Augustans as well as for his satiric preoccupation with his fellow writers and scholars. If he pokes fun at the romantic, revolutionary, and leftist writers in “The Inspiration,” in another story, “The Cat” (Mao), he ridicules with equal composure what the leftist camp would have called the reactionary writers: Chou Tso-jen, Lin Yutang, and Shen Ts’ung-wen. They too are patently under the romantic influence. Ch’ien Chung-shu is salutary in providing a refreshing way of looking at the modern tradition without seriously challenging our estimate of the writers affected. As a short-story writer and novelist, he is at his best (as in “Souvenir”) for his Augustan discernment of the human heart and all its wiles and pretenses. His is a different kind of satire from the dominant type exposing inhumanity and injustice.

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For the three decades of literature represented in our anthology, the abiding question is not why people are so ridiculous or stupid (as in “The Inspiration”), but why they are so unkind and cruel. The pat answer that the feudal system or society is entirely to blame, subscribed to by Pa Chin in the thirties, is certainly not adequate, since we find in the stories of Chang T’ien-i, Wu Tsu-hsiang, and Lu Ling so many sadistic characters whose delight in torturing others cannot be explained solely in terms of their class background. In “The Golden Cangue,” Eileen Chang surpasses even these writers in exposing the worsening madness of its heroine, who destroys the chances of happiness for her own children to compensate for her own unhappiness. While implicitly condemning the moral turpitude of a social system that makes it possible for an elder brother to sell his sister to the paralytic son of a wealthy family, the author stresses nevertheless the volitional aspect of the unhappy victim’s moral decline. In at least this one story, then, the human will is even more of a corrupting agent than the environment. In our stories, if male members of the gentry are mostly seen in unflattering roles, as hypocrites and oppressors, representatives of the underprivileged classes are usually depicted as people of moral integrity even by the strictest Confucian standards. This is so because the poor cannot gain our sympathy unless they are seen as honorable and upright, thrifty and diligent. Old T’ung Pao, the peasant hero of Mao Tun’s “Spring Silkworms,” for instance, still lives by the traditional maxim that personal honesty and hard work ensure economic self-sufficiency even though he is now living in a harsher world of rural bankruptcy. While Mao Tun has to depict T’ung Pao and his family in their habitual piety and diligence to earn our sympathy, as a Marxist writer, he shows at the same time how wrongheaded they are to place their trust in their betters and in Heaven when they should have followed the lead of the old man’s youngest son, Ah To, whose lack of traditional piety actually marks the beginning of his modern enlightenment. There is a sequel to the story, “Autumn Harvest,” in which the deliberate contrast between father and son is exploited even further to prove that, for all his immoral behavior, Ah To is right after all, as T’ung Pao himself, now increasingly ridiculed, acknowledges on his deathbed. The hero of Chao Shu-li’s “Lucky,” another peasant in the traditional mold, suffers worse tribulations than Old T’ung Pao but is eventually

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saved from pauperdom and ignominy with the aid of the Communist cadres. Of the twenty authors in this volume, Chao Shu-li was the only one unschooled in western literature; he had become Communist without ever being modern, and his story can be read as a simple Communist fable. Yet because of the naïveté of his vision, he has drawn in Lucky an archetypal orphan whose exemplary virtue would have moved the gods to assist him if he had inhabited the world of traditional fiction. He is the modern Tung Yung—one of the twenty-four exemplary sons and daughters in traditional folklore, who sells himself as a slave so as to have enough money to give his father a decent funeral. After Tung has observed his mourning period, he goes to serve his master and meets on the road a young woman who offers to be his wife and whose miraculous skills as a weaver soon restore him to freedom. She says in parting, “I am the Weaving Maid from Heaven. Because you are a filial son, the Heavenly Emperor ordered me to repay your debt.”2 The modern Tung Yung has no such luck; at fifteen or so, he is betrothed to an orphan of eight, who lives in his home as a child bride. At twenty-two, he has to marry her to please his dying mother, and has to buy a coffin and provide a funeral upon the latter’s death. To pay these expenses, he borrows thirty dollars from his uncle Myriad Wang, who is also the clan leader of his village. Lucky becomes virtually his uncle’s slave, trying to pay off the debt and its accumulated interest in the next few years. In the process, he is dispossessed of land and house, earns a bad reputation as a gambler, turns fugitive, and doesn’t dare to confront Myriad Wang until many years later, following the liberation of his village by the Communists. Though loving and faithful even when her husband is away for years as a fugitive, Silver Flower is of course no heavenly maiden who can ransom him with only ten days’ work. “Lucky” retains the framework of a fairy tale, but its main interest lies in recounting the tribulations of the hero and indicting Myriad Wang as a representative of the landlord class for his impossible usury and callous exploitation of poor peasants. Discounting the possible exaggeration of Myriad Wang’s villainy, I am inclined to believe that he represents a perennial figure in Chinese villages who has oppressed the peasants for centuries. It is true that from the late Ch’ing to the war with Japan, China had fallen on hard times, and people tended to be even more cruel when there was not enough food for everybody. The satiric fiction of the late Ch’ing and the fiction of our three decades are in that sense especially reflective of

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their times. But we must also remember that it is the Chinese scholars’ traditional preoccupation with Confucian learning and polite letters that has made possible a literary image of traditional China little plagued by large-scale suffering and injustice, except for reminders to the contrary from some of its popular poetry, fiction, and drama. It is also good to remember that western reports on conditions in China by earlier missionaries as well as more recent historians and journalists have largely confirmed what modern Chinese writers have to say about their country. Thus Theodore White’s capsule description of Chinese villages in the forties in no way deviates from what we have learned from Lu Hsün or Hsiao Hung: If Chungking was noisy, as all Chinese towns were noisy, the village, as most villages, was silent—the somber, brooding silence of countryside which I later came to recognize as the sound of emotionless vacuum. Nothing happened in villages; people grew up, lived and died in their villages, lashed to the seasons, to the fields, to the crops, their lives empty of any information but gossip, any excitement except fear.3

Among academic historians as well, an increasing interest in Chinese social and local history has meant that they are beginning to see a traditional China that is in every way as cruel and callous as the China depicted by modern novelists. Further research along the lines of Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang (New York, 1978), which is about some humble residents of a poor county in seventeenth-century China, will continue to corroborate the massive evidence of inhumanity supplied by modern Chinese fiction. Tung Yung of the Han dynasty is a legendary figure, but in Han times, because of the government’s promotion of filial piety, many an orphan of Tung Yung’s poverty did sell himself as a slave in order to provide his deceased parent with a proper burial. And in modern times, a landlord like Myriad Wang could not charge such exorbitant rates of interest on his loans were it not for the fact that a desperate orphan has to turn to him in order to maintain his self-respect in the eyes of his clan. Chao Shu-li blames Lucky’s tribulations on an evil landlord and usurer, but surely his need to observe a financially ruinous ritual dictates his contraction of an impossible debt in the first place. For Tung Yung and Lucky alike, it is

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their obligatory fulfillment of a familial duty rather than their filial piety per se that changes their status from free men to enslaved. Our anthology supplies other incidents illustrating a truism about the traditional Chinese family, namely, that junior and female members must subordinate themselves to the elders lest they violate a set of arbitrary regulations ensuring the family’s honor and continuation. While most rich men buy concubines as a matter of course, even the most shrewish of wives cannot stop her husband from buying one if she herself is without a son. The middle-aged scholar in Jou Shih’s “A Slave-Mother” is quite henpecked, but even his wife encourages him to rent a poor man’s wife so that the family line may be continued. The title heroine of Shen Ts’ung-wen’s “Hsiao-hsiao,” a child bride like Silver Flower, is made pregnant by a farmhand. Though a peasant girl in the primitive region of West Hunan, she has nevertheless violated the honor of her husband’s family and must be either drowned or sold as a concubine. In the pastoral scheme of Shen’s story, she is spared either fate and lives on to see her bastard marrying in time a child bride. Shen Ts’ung-wen is entitled to his idyllic vision of a child of nature surviving unscathed, but of course he is the last person to be oblivious of the fate of many a Hunanese maiden who embraced death after a brief affair with a sailor or soldier. It is because the family comes first that Myriad Wang can flog Lucky with the clan’s support and even rally it to the idea of punishing him with death. He exhorts the clan thus: “This—this Lucky has lived long enough! The latest is that he’s working in the town as a hired musician at funerals. If people outside the clan hear of this, how will we ever be able to face them again? A common ancestral line, a common burial ground—if we of the Wang clan get this muck smeared on us, none of us will ever be clean again!” The same thought runs through the mind of a T’ang nobleman over a thousand years ago when he hears of his son’s degradation as a professional singer at funerals. The reader of “The Courtesan Li Wa” (in Traditional Chinese Stories) will surely remember the scene where the nobleman, after scolding the wastrel for disgracing the family, forthwith “stripped his son and used a horse whip to flog him several hundred times. The young man, overcome by pain, fell unconscious. The father left him for dead.”4 It is true that the pride of the nobleman is genuinely hurt, whereas Myriad Wang is merely simulating anger to get rid of Lucky for good. But the same moral prejudice prevails in both scenes: a wastrel should be dead rather than disgrace the family by entering a mean pro-

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fession. Little wonder that the point of so many modern Chinese novels is the ultimate decision of the young hero or heroine to leave the family and exercise independence in the outside world of revolutionary action. Despite its artistic flatness, the overwhelming response of the young readers of the thirties and forties to Pa Chin’s Family, which features such a hero, was mainly due to their recognition of its truthfulness as a chronicle of a large-size family of Confucian gentility in any province, any city. As is amply demonstrated in Family, women have been the main victims of traditional Chinese society. By Han times the existence of such bibles for women as the lady scholar Pan Chao’s Nü-chieh (Precepts for women) indicated already the rigid codification of female subservience and chastity in a society run by men for their convenience and pleasure. From the Han to the late Ch’ing, except for a tiny minority who made some mark in literature and the arts, ordinary women who aspired to posthumous fame in local or national history have been invariably those whose heroic acts of wifely constancy or filial piety, resulting nearly always in death, compelled male admiration. Since at least Sung times the crippling of nearly all urban women by deforming their feet at a tender age had added further injury to insult, and the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the same period, with its even harsher insistence on female chastity, could not be coincidental. By the Ming–Ch’ing period the misery of women and the depravity of some of them in contriving for pleasure and power despite their subjection to male domination had been spectacularly displayed in such novels as Chin P’ing Mei and Dream of the Red Chamber (or The Story of the Stone; Hung-lou meng) as well as the much less read verse narratives, written by women themselves, known as t’an-tz’u. This literary record notwithstanding, a systematic examination of the biographies of notable women in all the local gazetteers dating from that period and earlier will add immeasurably to the heart-rending record of appalling inhumanity that amply justifies Lu Hsün’s indictment of China as a cannibalistic society. Women’s lot has considerably improved during the three decades covered by our anthology. But precisely because of their changed attitude toward Chinese society and toward women in general, our authors have left us an astounding gallery of memorable female characters, young, middle-aged, and old, from the twice-widowed Hsiang-lin’s wife of Lu Hsün’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” to the madwoman Ch’i-ch’iao and her captive daughter Ch’ang-an in Eileen Chang’s “The Golden Cangue.” There can

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be no doubt that these women leave on the whole a far stronger impression on the reader than the male characters in this volume. While both Lu Hsün and Yeh Shao-chün are as noted for their sympathetic portrayal of lonely and pitiful men—K’ung I-chi, the teacher in “Rice,” and the old man in “Solitude”—as for their portrayal of women, quite a number of their male characters are objects of satire, such as Ssu-ming and his Confucian friends in Lu Hsün’s “Soap.” Given the nature of Chinese society in the pre-Communist decades, it was quite inevitable that story writers of satiric disposition should treat many of their central male characters as embodiments of its hypocritical and wicked ways, as is the case with Lao She’s “An Old Tragedy in a New Age,” Chang T’ien-i’s “The Bulwark” and “Midautumn Festival,” and Lu Ling’s “The Coffins.” The protagonists of these stories are certainly sharply visualized, but as satiric vignettes, they do not assume an independent existence outside their tales and do not haunt us the way some of the wronged women characters do. It is altogether fitting that, given the brutalization and enslavement of Chinese women over the millennia, far more female characters than male should stand for outraged humanity in modern Chinese fiction, while nearly all the women writers of our period, including Ling Shu-hua, Ting Ling, Hsiao Hung, and Eileen Chang of this volume, should be particularly drawn to the fate of Chinese women and include in their portrayals some heroines who represent their own frustrated idealism in a still malechauvinist society. Of our three stories with a Communist setting, if Chao Shu-li’s “Lucky” gives an unqualified endorsement of Communist benevolence in a liberated village, it is appropriate that Ting Ling, whose early stories are famous for their nihilist idealism, should display so much sympathy for the young heroines of “When I Was in Hsia Village” and “In the Hospital”: Chen-chen, afflicted with venereal disease for her Partyapproved work among the Japanese and now an outcast in her village; and Lu P’ing, an obstetrician shocked by the callousness of a Yenan hospital and censured for reformist ardor. Ting Ling too was censured by the Communist authorities in Yenan for the latter story and for an editorial pleading the women’s cause in the following year (1942). Mao Tse-tung gave his Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art that May in direct response to the grievances expressed by Ting Ling, Hsiao Chün, and other like-minded authors. The heroines of Lu Hsün’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” and Jou Shih’s “A Slave-Mother” are unfortunate women of an earlier age long before

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Communism had penetrated into Chinese villages. Hsiang-lin’s wife of the former story, upon being widowed, is forcibly sold by her motherin-law for a sum of money, and the slave-mother is given on loan to the scholar by her destitute husband for a hundred dollars. Though Chen-chen and Ch’i-ch’iao come close, no other women in our volume suffer greater ignominy than these two. Yet if they cannot have much affection for their husbands, what stands out is their instinctive, unfeigned maternal love, which defines their humanity without mitigating their suffering. Hsiang-lin’s wife becomes in the eyes of others a crazed person because she constantly tells of the death of her son, and the slave-mother suffers as much mental anguish when torn from her first-born son to serve a stranger as when torn from her second son to return to her longestranged husband. Though he is initially a brute who has no compunction in boiling her newborn daughter alive, and though she cannot expect to see her second son ever again, toward the end the slave-mother’s fate is somewhat kinder than that of Hsiang-lin’s wife, since there is every indication that her first son will return her love. The heroines of Ling Shu-hua’s two stories, though urban women of higher social status, lead lives as unfree and predetermined as those of Hsiang-lin’s wife and the slave-mother. Like so many daughters of genteel families, the Eldest Young Mistress of “Embroidered Pillows” regards her skill in needlework as her best recommendation on the marriage market. Lately she has devoted half a year to embroidering a pair of back cushions. Though in the admiring eyes of a woman servant she still looks “as fresh and delicate as a scallion,” she is actually a drudge doing close work in the summer heat and impairing her eyesight into the bargain. The servant predicts that upon the delivery of the finished cushions to a cabinet secretary’s house, “the matchmakers will be coming to see you; the gate will be trampled down by the crowd.” Actually, these same cushions will be trampled and actually vomited upon the day they arrive at the secretary’s house, thus foreshadowing Eldest Young Mistress’s future if she ever becomes a daughter-in-law in an official family. The wife of the shopkeeper Ching-jen in “The Night of Midautumn Festival” is not particularly sympathetic for her cold indifference toward her husband’s dying foster sister. However, the story of the foster sister, which tells us much about Ching-jen, is not essential to our understanding of his wife’s fate; quarrel over any other issue could easily have caused a rift between the recently married couple after the euphoria of the first months wore off.

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And once Ching-jen decides to find fault with his wife, he immediately notices that she has ugly features. It is also very easy—and traditional— for his mother to blame her for not keeping him at home when he has turned into a libertine and spendthrift. The heroine herself is also in character when she blames the ruin of her life on that unfortunate quarrel over the foster sister, and so is her mother in counseling her to accept her fate and “wait for your next life.” Though Ching-jen’s wife is almost as much abused by her husband as is the slave-mother by hers, all the readily proffered explanations for her failure in life comment powerfully on feudal mentality and lend her story its special pathos. In Hsiao Hung’s “Hands” the schoolgirl Wang Ya-ming is as much a symbol of unwanted humanity as is Hsiang-lin’s wife in Lu Hsün’s story. But whereas the latter lives and dies a victim of feudal cruelty and superstition, Wang Ya-ming’s maltreatment in a modern girls’ school is all the more accusatory of the supposed modern enlightenment that has failed to instill kindness and remove class barriers. She is a poor dyer’s daughter whose blackened hands serve effectively to isolate her from everyone in the school, with the exception of the sympathetic first-person narrator. Wang Ya-ming is ostensibly expelled for her poor academic performance, and yet this unkind deed will dash all her father’s hopes for betterment and probably hasten her to the grave. Not all the authors in this volume are content to view this feminine suffering with mere sympathy and indignation. Despite their tribulations, the heroines of Hsü Ti-shan’s “The Merchant’s Wife” and “Yü-kuan” reach out for a deeper understanding of life’s meaning in which sufferings have their appropriate place. Yü-kuan’s quest for self-knowledge, especially, makes her tale a triumphant testament of human spirituality. Whereas Shen Ts’ung-wen’s Hsiao-hsiao remains inviolable by feudal morality by virtue of her animal grace and whereas Eileen Chang’s Ch’i-ch’iao, married against her will into a decadent upper-class family, steadily deteriorates until she becomes the most corrupt and cruel representative of her adopted class, the humble missionary woman Yü-kuan makes a conscious choice to lead a good life and eventually succeeds after she has seen through her self-deception during the long years of her widowhood. Though Hsü Ti-shan, Shen Ts’ung-wen, and Eileen Chang transcend humanitarian realism to reach for a larger or more complex view of life, their stories do not gainsay the evilness of feudal society or its victimiza-

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tion of women. The young heroine of Shen’s “Three Men and One Woman” dies by swallowing gold, surely in protest against her parents’ arbitrary arrangement of her marital future. The author’s casual comment that such deaths occur too often to bother the survivors does not lessen the cruelty of such tragedies. It is only because Shen Ts’ung-wen is mainly concerned with the strange fulfillment such a death brings to a smitten youth that it is passed over lightly. The girl’s fate is worth exploring in itself, though Shen has not done so in the story. Since it is not possible to discuss all of our forty-four selections in a short introduction, I have passed over many in silence because they have already been discussed in my History of Modem Chinese Fiction. For the same reason I have paid particular attention to the stories not mentioned in that book, such as Pa Chin’s “The General” and “Sinking Low,” Jou Shih’s “A Slave-Mother,” Hsiao Chün’s “Goats,” Hsiao Hung’s “Hands,” and Chao Shu-li’s “Lucky.” With the four exceptions already noted, all our twenty writers are humanitarian and satiric realists primarily concerned with the old society, with all its victims and its perpetrators of cruelty and injustice. Many of these writers, of course, also wrote political or revolutionary fiction concerned with the making of a new China in accordance with some socialist or utopian dream. And insofar as the new China that came into being in 1949 has not lived up to the aspirations of the May Fourth era, the literary record of our three decades shows by and large a strain of political naïveté for its failure to forewarn against any possible resurgence of the forces of reaction and tyranny. The best fiction of our period, however, is little tainted with political naïveté or political didacticism in its obsession with the ugly realities of contemporary China. In culling some of the best short fiction from these decades, therefore, our collection stands as a proud and moving record of an old nation’s attempt to regain its humanity and redefine its identity through fearless self-criticism.

The Korchin Banner Plains A Biographical and Critical Study (1982)

Tuan-mu Hung-liang (Ts’ao Ching-p’ing, known at birth as Ts’ao Han-wen, also known as Ts’ao Chih-lin, b. 1912), a writer from Manchuria, rose to national fame when his first short stories appeared in leading Shanghai magazines in 1936. By 1940, at the age of twenty-eight, he had completed four novels—The Korchin Banner Plains (K’o-erh-ch’inch’i ts’ao-yuan, composed in 1933), The Sea of Earth (Ta-ti-te hai, 1936), The Great River (Ta-chiang, 1939), and A Fluffy Tale of the New Capital (Hsin-tu hua-hsü, 1940)—at least three of which were already in print, along with three story collections: Hatred (Tseng-hen, 1937), Feng-ling Ferry (Feng-ling tu, 1939), and Scene in Chiang-nan (Chiang-nan feng-ching, 1940). His more diversified output from 1941 to 1949 includes, in addition to essays and short stories, two novelistic fragments: The Great Age (Ta-shih-tai, 1941) and The Korchin Banner Plains, Part II (K’o-erh-ch’in-ch’i ts’ao-yuan ti-erhpu, 1943); The Korchin Banner Plains: A Family History (K’o-erh-ch’in ch’ienshih, 1940–1941), among other memoirs; a quintet of plays based on the novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Hung-lou meng) and a dramatic adaptation of Anna Karenina; adaptations of Greek idylls and a translation of the biblical Song of Songs; and a study of the mythological content of the Shanhai ching entitled The Earliest Treasury (Tsui-ku-ti pao-tien). But, owing to its inaccessibility, this large body of work received no scholarly notice until the middle seventies. Of course, Tuan-mu Hung-liang did attain a

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measure of international recognition in the postwar period when several of his early stories became available in English and Russian, but for a quarter of a century after 1949 he received no critical attention whatever except for brief discussions of his career in the standard literary histories. The present revival of interest began when I presented a long paper on Tuan-mu Hung-liang at a conference on modern Chinese literature held in Massachusetts in August 1974; in the following summer an even longer article by Shih Pen-hua was serialized in Ming Pao Monthly, the leading intellectual journal of Hong Kong. The fact that, like myself, Miss Shih discussed only the first three novels and the stories from Hatred because of the unavailability of the author’s other writings prompted me to make a search for his uncollected works, which has continued to this day. A collaborator in this search has been the Hong Kong novelist and journalist Liu I-ch’ang, who published in 1977 a short study of our author. In response to the new interest in Tuan-mu, several of his books have been reprinted in Hong Kong. Concurrently, our author, though partially paralyzed since 1963, has emerged from obscurity since the downfall of Chiang Ch’ing and told reporters that he has been engaged in writing a biographical novel about the author of Dream of the Red Chamber entitled Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, volume 1 of which is scheduled for publication in 1980. In view of his great productivity during the thirties and forties and his present determination to finish a project of deep personal significance, it is a genuine loss to Chinese literature that Tuan-mu Hung-liang, given literary assignments that could not have interested him much, should have produced nothing of consequence even by Communist standards during the three decades of 1949–1979. Since Tuan-mu has been primarily identified with the novels and stories he turned out in the thirties, any reassessment of his career must begin by focusing attention on that remarkable body of work and especially on his first novel, The Korchin Banner Plains, which has remained his most substantial creation and his chief claim to major distinction as a novelist. For this reason, while I am also preparing a critical biography of Tuan-mu providing an examination of his oeuvre, the present paper is devoted to this novel alone. It draws upon the author’s other works only insofar as they throw biographical light on the novel and provide the needed critical perspectives for its fuller understanding.

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I Tuan-mu Hung-liang is usually ranked with Hsiao Chün and Hsiao Hung as one of the three most important writers hailing from the northeastern provinces of China. This critical consensus most probably needs no revision though, it must be remembered, no scholar has yet attempted a survey of the careers of all the young writers who escaped from the puppet Manchukuo in the early thirties. The trio are taken to represent the antiJapanese patriotism and Manchurian regionalism of the group, but again we must remember that, like others of the group, they eventually diversified their subject matter in the course of assimilating new experiences during their protracted exile. Writers, of course, differ in talent, personality, and family background to begin with, and for the Manchurian group as a whole, it is difficult to say that they shared the same geographical background in view of the immense size of Manchuria (bigger than Japan and Korea combined). Tuan-mu Hung-liang was born in a village called Tz’u-lu-shu (Cormorant Tree) but spent most of his childhood and early youth in the nearby city of Ch’ang-t’u, which is the administrative and commercial center of the fertile plains of West Liaoning, historically a region assigned to the Manchus of the Korchin Banner. Tuan-mu had never been to Harbin, the cosmopolitan capital of Heilungkiang where the majority of these writers—Hsiao Chün, Hsiao Hung, Lo Feng, Pai Lang, et al.—had gathered prior to their dispersal to cities like Tsingtao or Shanghai, but on the other hand, he had attended middle schools in Tientsin, a privilege denied his fellow Manchurian writers. To be more specific in our comparison, the hometowns of Tuan-mu and Hsiao Hung, though equally bound to feudal customs, are in other respects quite different. Hulan, Heilungkiang, so very minutely described in Hsiao Hung’s memoir, Tales of Hulan River (Hulan-ho chuan, 1942), is as stagnant as the Shaohsing of Lu Hsün’s stories, and its populace is even more steeped in cowardice, cruelty, and mindless stupor. In Ancient Elms (Ku-yü)—Tuan-mu’s designation for Ch’ang-t’u—and its surrounding plains, on the contrary, large landowners have in their regular employ dozens of gunners ( p’ao-shou) standing on guard on fortified towers against roaming bandits. As Tuan-mu has repeatedly emphasized, his home region is not unlike the American West in its pioneering days; the landowners in their heyday, as described in The Korchin Banner Plains, certainly remind us of the cattle barons in Hollywood Westerns, with their

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insatiable appetite for land, their systematic elimination of small homesteaders, and their perpetual vigilance against whiskered bandits (hu-tzu or hung hu-tzu). Yet in the spacious homes of these landlords, their womenfolk are as much bound to a joyless feudal existence as the ladies of Dream of the Red Chamber, and equally beset by ill health. The reader of The Korchin Banner Plains is immediately struck by the author’s deliberate study of the vast contrast between the primitive, health-giving plains and the miserable, stagnant lives of the women confined to the home. It is as if the Yungkuofu had been transplanted to a wilderness to suffer, among other ills, perpetual harassment by desperadoes. Yet these bandits draw the sympathetic attention of our novelist because they are seen as dispossessed farmers and hunters who could be enlisted in the cause of anti-Japanese resistance. Hsiao Chün, too, was proud of his bandit connections because his father and three of his uncles had briefly turned to banditry before joining up with the anti-Japanese guerrillas. As a volunteer in General Sun Tien-ying’s army in the Jehol–Chahar region in 1932, it was Tuan-mu’s job to persuade bandit bands to join the regular army and fight the Japanese. Though he had more realistic knowledge of their dastardly deeds, Tuan-mu was no less romantic than Hsiao Chün in his admiration for the bandits, as we may see in The Korchin Banner Plains, The Great River, and some short stories. In fact, what distinguishes the anti-Japanese Manchurian fiction from the earlier modern fiction is its celebration of the bandit, the peasant, and the hunter as the new heroes of China. His romantic attachment to bandits notwithstanding, Tuan-mu is by origin a scion of landed aristocracy, the fourth and youngest son of the largest landowning family in the Ch’ang-t’u area, which, in its heyday, collected rent from tenant farmers assigned to plots of various sizes from some two thousand acres (t’ien) in its possession. Tuan-mu’s greatgrandfather was the founder of this mighty family, and partly through their marital connections with the official gentry, the Ts’aos had held on to power and wealth through the next two generations though some of the heirs turned to various forms of dissipation—to the inevitable neglect of the estate. Tuan-mu’s father was a fancier of martial arts in his youth, a sensualist in his prime, and a collector of curios and rare books in his later years. After the birth of his third son, he left his wife behind for a pleasure trip to Shanghai, Soochow, and Yangchow that lasted some years.

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But bad heirs and bandits constituted much less of a threat to the economic well-being of a large clan like the Ts’aos than the two imperialist powers contending for total control in Manchuria. Following the foredoomed Boxer Uprising in 1900, the Czarist government had sent troops to Manchuria ostensibly to protect its railways and other investments, ushering in a reign of terror among its native inhabitants. The Korchin Banner Plains, while devoting no space to this initial period of pillage, does describe the same marauding troops in 1905, following their unexpected defeat by the Japanese in a war conducted largely on Manchurian soil. These straggling soldiers must have wrought havoc on the Ts’ao estate, if we judge by the devastation of the corresponding Ting family in the novel. While most big landlords soon rallied, there can be no doubt that what old-style banking or industry they could foster with their surplus capital met in the following years increasingly adverse competition from the Japanese, who had supplanted the Russians as the legitimate exploiters of Manchuria. Keenly interested in the economic history of his region, the author of The Korchin Banner Plains is particularly drawn to this aspect of the family chronicle and shares honors with Mao Tun among the novelists of the thirties for comparable power in depicting China’s deteriorating economy under the domination of foreign imperialism. But despite the worsening plight of Manchuria, Tuan-mu had lived from his birth to the Mukden Incident (September 18, 1931) the life of a young lord very much pampered by his parents and surrounded by adoring women. Though also drawn to virile sports in his early teens, the young Tuan-mu showed the same type of literary and romantic propensity as did his more illustrious namesake, Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in. A child prodigy, he had read by the age of six (sui) many forbidden books, presumably of fiction, in his father’s library. And when he came across Dream of the Red Chamber some years later, he was truly elated that its author bore his surname. He read the novel repeatedly in his boyhood because, unlike the vast majority of less privileged readers, he could truly identify with Chia Pao-yü, not the least for his poetic precocity and fondness for female company. After being tutored in the art of versification at the age of nine or ten, Tuan-mu became an incessant composer of amatory verse, heavily under the influence of Li Shang-yin. Tuan-mu, of course, did not have four maidservants waiting on him, but he did have one named Hsiang-ling, originally his mother’s maid. She reappears with her name unchanged (though commonly referred to as Ling-tzu) in The Korchin Banner Plains;

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there can be little doubt that Tuan-mu did enjoy sexual intimacy with her, as does his counterpart Ting Ning in the novel. Much of the biographical information in the preceding paragraph is drawn from a pair of memoirs Tuan-mu wrote in 1942 about his early sexual awakening, “First Kisses” (Ch’u-wen) and “Early Spring” (Tsaoch’un).1 Both are fascinating not only for their autobiographical disclosures but also for their brilliant observance of the short story form. Tuan-mu paints therein a self-portrait of great candor showing his willfulness and excitability, his proneness to chase after beautiful objects, and his quick forgetfulness of them once his interest is aroused by some other object. At the age of eleven he has his first kisses with a teenager whom he calls Lani (Aunt Orchid); some years later he learns to his consternation that the same girl is about to be discarded by his father after being his mistress for some time. At about the same age he also avows love to a neighboring girl of much humbler background, Chin-chu (Golden Branch), whom he has no sooner met than completely forgotten during a month’s vacation at an aunt’s house. Upon returning home, he learns to his bitter remorse that the girl and her family have moved to the northern wilderness ( pai-huang) beyond the Willow Wall. We also learn from the same sources that for fear of kidnapping, the young Tuan-mu is not allowed to leave the heavily guarded home unattended. But when spring finally returns after the long cold winter and especially during the summer months, he frequently strays from home to enjoy the company of somewhat older girls who show interest in him for the obvious reason that, being much younger than his brothers, he has no competition in the neighborhood among boys of his age. When a wife is sought for his second brother, Tuan-mu enjoys himself by inspecting and commenting on all the demure young ladies visiting his home in the company of their anxious mothers. Years later, when Tuan-mu himself approaches marriageable age, the leading families of Ch’ang-t’u likewise look upon him as the best possible match for their daughters. His subsequent conversion to modern thought notwithstanding, we must stress Tuan-mu’s period of childhood happiness lasting into the early teens when he took his aristocratic privileges for granted, and we cannot overemphasize the advantages he enjoyed as a novelist in having lived this kind of pampered life. Like practically all Chinese writers of the thirties, Tuan-mu eventually identifies with the student-intellectual and the exploited peasant, but he is prevented from depicting the landlord class in

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standard satiric or caricaturistic terms by reason of his assured personal knowledge. No other Manchurian writers enjoyed comparable family background. We may even say that, while several modern Chinese writers came from a family of greater wealth or official distinction, few were as privileged as Tuan-mu was to know in their childhood the opulent decadence of the traditional mode of life on an immense estate. Tuan-mu is also unlike his fellow Manchurian writers in having been early exposed to western culture and well trained in English. He studied first at the Tientsin Academy, a middle school run by American Methodists, for one year (1923–1924), and then after a period of self-study and local schooling, he enrolled at Nankai, another school of high repute in Tientsin, from 1928 to 1932. During five years of middle school, therefore, while he stayed home in the summers, he received a western-style education in a port city only less cosmopolitan than Shanghai. Given his precocity, he became passionately fond of western movies and western music while in Tientsin—references to both forms of art are numerous in his fiction—and gained in time probably enough proficiency in English to be able to read western novels in that medium rather than in the much less reliable Chinese versions. It is difficult to say how politically left Tuan-mu was in his middle school days since he was more obviously attracted to capitalist forms of western culture. Like all literary youths of his time, he worshiped Lu Hsün, and by the time Lu Hsün joined the leftist cause in 1929, it is safe to assume that he had followed suit. In the postface to the 1955 edition of Hatred, however, Tuan-mu acknowledges an earlier debt of Communist guidance: Because I was born in the Northeast and had a more intimate knowledge of the life of the Northeastern people in opposing Japanese imperialism, I wanted to express it. But this absolutely does not mean that I could have recognized the reality of that time and that place on the strength of my spontaneous passion alone. If I had not been taught by the revolutionary lessons of the post-1927 period and if I had not joined the League of Left-wing Writers in Peking in 1932, I would not have been able to analyze and express that reality.2

Despite this belated acknowledgment, other evidence would seem to suggest that the “revolutionary lessons of the post–1927 period” had not

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drastically changed his intellectual diet. While he had read by the middle thirties such Soviet classics as Aleksandr Serafimovich’s Iron Flood and Dmitry Furmanov’s Chapayev, it is safer to maintain that, insofar as he had earlier sought Communist guidance in his readings, he was principally enthralled by those masters of western literature sanctioned by Soviet criticism in the name of critical realism. In the middle thirties he was to declare his passion for Balzac as his literary hero par excellence, but it is unlikely that he had read Balzac by the time he was composing The Korchin Banner Plains. Tolstoy, however, had been an earlier discovery: Tuan-mu must have been impressed by his own similarity in background to the Russian nobleman enjoying the prerogatives of his class and yet much taken by the sufferings of the serfs on his estate. In fact, Resurrection served as the direct inspiration for the most personal episode in The Korchin Banner Plains, as we shall later see. Nietzsche was another strong influence. Even while a student at Nankai, Tuan-mu had organized a New Humanity Club (Hsin-jen she), launched two journals called Mankind ( Jenchien) and New Humanity (Hsin-jen), and written a manifesto on the literature of energy (li-ti wen-hsüeh). All these activities would seem to betray the influence of Nietzsche rather than Marx. In The Korchin Banner Plains the hero Ting Ning recalls the discussions at the New Humanity Club and his Nietzschean ambition to be a superman. But even though Tuan-mu was open to many kinds of new influence in Tientsin, what turned him against his own status as a landlord’s son even during the thoughtless days of his early youth was the fate of his mother, to whom he was greatly attached. For his first wife, Tuan-mu’s father had married a daughter of the Wang family, which had powerful official connections, but after her early death without a son, the young landlord fell for the beauty of a daughter of the Huang family, which had been for generations tenant farmers on the Ts’ao estate. Despite the opposition of her father and elder brother, he was determined to marry her. Ordinarily, a tenant farmer would have been only too happy to marry his daughter to a landlord, but the Huangs were not subservient and cared too much for her future happiness to want the disrepute of selling their daughter to enlarge their holdings. Literally abducted to the Ts’ao mansion, she was denied the right to visit her own family during the early years of her marriage and did not even attend her mother’s deathbed until she had passed away. From reading Tuan-mu’s The Korchin Banner Plains: A Family History, one gets the impression that, while his mother shared the

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fate of every young wife in a house of feudal manners if her parents-in-law proved difficult to please, she was further punished for her low birth insofar as she had to get up at dawn to dust and polish all the clocks and objets d’art on display (a task that could be easily assigned to the servants) before attending her parents-in-law at breakfast and could not go to bed until she had served them opium late at night. On winter days she went about often numb with cold because she was not allowed to wear furs even though they were quite commonplace in the Ts’ao house. By the time Tuan-mu was eleven or so, however, she had long outlived her parents-in-law and gained a large measure of independence. A woman of spirit, she had repeatedly prevented her husband from taking a concubine. Thus, as a middle-aged woman in “First Kisses” and “Early Spring,” she would seem no more unhappy than any lady of means leading an idle existence in a feudal mansion and possibly worrying over her husband’s neglect and infidelity. But deep at heart, remembrance of her earlier maltreatment rankled. Even when Tuan-mu was only eight or nine years old, she would confide in him: Because I was quite young and was by her side a good deal of the time, she told me about herself in especially minute detail. And she pinned on me the hope that someday I would write down her story “so that,” as she would say, “people may know that not even those heroines of old days celebrated by storytellers had apparently suffered as much as I have.” And Mother also said, “Don’t let the Ts’ao family go on being so conceited all the time!” It seemed Mother really believed that writing her story down would hurt the Ts’ao family.3

And again, in an earlier section of A Family History: When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, Mother would tell me about her story, saying, “You must remember my words; when you grow up, study hard and write down the sufferings of Mama.”4

These repeated injunctions by his mother certainly inspired Tuan-mu to include the story of Huang Ning in his first novel. Daughter of a tenant farmer in the service of the Tings, she is likewise abducted by the young master, to the bitter opposition of her own family. Though Tuan-mu con-

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siderably shortens her life as a further victim of Russian atrocity and exercises his authorial freedom in other ways in his depiction of her family, his novel is by design an exposé of the crimes of his paternal clan and a celebration of the virtues of his maternal family. In real life, Tuan-mu’s maternal grandfather was well off enough to become the victim of the bandits’ extortion and physical torture, which broke his health. Having forfeited the favor of the Ts’ao family, however, none of his sons did well enough in life; the third, in particular, ended up as a thief and morphine addict. But as family relations improved with the passage of time, Ta-hsiang, son of Tuan-mu’s eldest maternal uncle, came to stay with the Ts’aos to be groomed as a cook. At sixteen or seventeen, he was older than Tuan-mu’s eldest brother by one or two years and earned his cousins’ admiration for his skill in flying kites, trapping birds, and other such sports. After a period of venturing on his own in the northern wilderness, he returned to the Ts’ao family and stayed on as a servant even after the Mukden Incident. Because Tuan-mu was very fond of him as a representative of the Huang family and as a childhood companion who taught him how to use a gun, he redubbed him Ta-shan (Big Mountain) in the novel and made him into a friend / foe of Ting Ning and the principal organizer of the tenant farmers against the Ting clan. Japan’s occupation of Mukden on September 18, 1931, is the major public event that brings the novel to a close. While it is difficult to say how much of a role this day of national shame played in the fortunes of the Ts’ao family, it certainly signaled its decline and dispersal even though the death of Tuan-mu’s father had preceded it. Long aware of the unrest of the tenant farmers and the unreliability of land as a source of income, he had started many business ventures, including a brokerage firm that failed. Subsequently he turned to usury and suffered even heavier losses. Even in the otherwise frank Family History Tuan-mu does not see fit to enlighten us as to the cause of his father’s death (the totally unexpected death of Ting Ning’s father, his counterpart in the novel, is equally wrapped in mystery). What is certain is that by the time of his death the Ts’ao family had suffered a decline in fortune. They had plenty of cash on hand, but only two hundred acres (t’ien) left—one tenth of what they formerly owned. And the cash was further depleted when Tuan-mu’s eldest brother went into traditional-style banking and lost out on high-interest loans. Whether the Ts’ao family suffered direct humiliations from the Japanese after the Mukden Incident or took part in some form of resist-

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ance remains conjectural. If we read the postface to The Sea of Earth in conjunction with some of the patriotic stories in Hatred, we may tend to believe that Tuan-mu lost a brother and sister as a result of the Japanese aggression and that members of his maternal clan rose to fight the enemy after the Mukden Incident. But judging by his subsequent autobiographical writings, particularly The Korchin Banner Plains: A Family History, I believe that during the thirties Tuan-mu tended to exaggerate his family’s sufferings and his maternal cousins’ heroism partly to give vent to his patriotic sentiments and partly to capitalize on his role as a refugee writer. His younger sister had certainly died before the Mukden Incident, probably in the early spring of 1931, as had the younger sister of Ting Ning in the novel. But she was the victim of a disease rather than of Japanese atrocity. On the evidence of two very moving stories of autobiographical significance in Hatred, “Sad Nostalgia” (Hsiang-ch’ou) and “Why Did Grandpa Refuse to Eat Kaoliang Gruel?” ( Yeh-yeh wei-shih-me pu-ch’ih kao-liang-mi chu), it is possible to infer that one of Tuan-mu’s brothers in Mukden had either perished on the day of invasion or gone on to fight the Japanese, but again we find no corroboration of either possibility in his autobiographical writings. As for Tuan-mu himself, he was a senior at Nankai Middle School in the fall of 1931. Since he must have left for Tientsin before the Mukden Incident, he did not personally feel the impact of the event on his hometown. Soon thereafter his mother was moved to Mukden to get treatment at the Southern Manchurian Hospital. Though a devout Buddhist, she became a Christian in token of her gratitude to a British doctor at another hospital under whose care her health improved. By the spring of 1932 she had moved to Peking to undergo surgery at the Union Hospital. Since its services were very expensive and since she was not covered by an insurance policy, she could not have been very poor, as we would infer from reading “Sad Nostalgia.” She settled there for good, and Tuan-mu lived alternately with her or with his brother and sister-in-law in Tientsin until early in 1936 he left alone for Shanghai to try his literary fortune.

II Whatever its effect on other members of his family, the Mukden Incident gave Tuan-mu no choice but to embark on a career as a patriotic writer

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and political activist. He was very active as a student leader in the fall of 1931, and joined the Northern or Peking branch of the League of LeftWing Writers in 1932, most probably soon after the league was formed in Shanghai in February. That spring he wrote for Tsing Hua Weekly a short story called “Mother” (Mu-ch’in), which eventually became chapter 3 of The Korchin Banner Plains. Some other fragments of nostalgic description dating from the same period were later incorporated in The Sea of Earth. But, not content with mere writing to give vent to his patriotic indignation, he volunteered for service in the army of General Sun Tien-ying most probably even before the conclusion of the spring term, since the only story he wrote about his military stint, “The Faraway Wind and Sand” ( Yao-yuan ti feng-sha), takes place toward the end of the third month, lunar calendar. In a middle-school student such strong expression of patriotism was quite rare, but at the same time we cannot rule out the strong probability that, mindful of the example of the young Tolstoy, Tuan-mu had set out to acquire military experience in preparation for his literary career. If the future of his nation was to be decided upon the outcome of its ever-widening struggle against Japan, he must have reasoned, how could one live up to the role of a major novelist without participating in that struggle? While he did not stay in the army long, it must have required an enormous amount of fortitude for a youth of his landlord background to share the primitive living conditions of illiterate soldiers. Tuan-mu returned to Peking sometime in the summer after the situation in North China had stabilized in Japan’s favor. Sun Tien-ying was about to be transferred to a new post in the West, and there would seem to be no point for Tuan-mu to remain with the army in the absence of actual fighting against the Japanese. In the fall he was a freshman majoring in history at Tsing Hua University and a political activist in charge of several magazines financed by the League of Left-Wing Writers, and he continued to be a student leader during the December 1935 demonstrations for national resistance even though by then he was no longer affiliated with any university in Peking. There is little information about the school year 1932–1933 other than his preoccupation with political journalism. Then followed a period of depression, as Tuan-mu tells us in “My Writing Experience” (Wo-ti ch’uang-tso ching-yen): By the second half of 1933 Four Hundred Million (Ssu-wan-wan pao), Scientific News (K’o-hsüeh hsin-wen), and the other journals I had

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managed in Peiping had all been banned, and some of my friends had died, some had moved, some had disappeared, and some had ceased to correspond with me. I went to Tientsin to live with my elder brother, staying in the house from morning to evening and never going anywhere, enveloped in dejection and pain. My brother wanted me to go to the T’ung Tower to enjoy the sport of rowing or take a stroll in the Sea-River Park, but all such exertions were then to me a torment. At that time I had reached the condition of “apathy.” I felt most comfortable only when I was lying in bed like someone dead. I had become perverse, morose, and abnormal. I didn’t know how to live on, every part of my being filled with vexation and disgust. Then suddenly one day I received a letter from Mr. Lu Hsün addressed to Miss Ts’ao Chih-lin. The letter began with a salute to “Miss Chih-lin”—I was amused, not to say exhilarated—and went on to say, “It is autumn in Shanghai, but the weather is still hot. The sleeveless woolen sweater has been sunned; please don’t worry.” Next it said that the news of Mao Tun’s arrest was false and that I should rectify this rumor in some Peiping journal. This letter made me feel as if I had suddenly seen my lover with whom I had lost touch for years. It seemed that something I had forgotten was recalled. That day I got hold of some writing paper (kao-chih) and pen and began to write page one of The Korchin Banner Plains—though that page was not the first page of the printed edition. . . . At that time I wrote on uncontrollably, didn’t feel like eating, and didn’t sleep well. At night I went to bed with my clothes on, returned to my desk as soon as I was awake.The milky-white forty-watt bulb of Braided Silk Brand was lit almost the whole night through. I didn’t smoke, didn’t drink coffee or liquor, and didn’t have the habit of having snacks at night. I was all by myself when writing. I didn’t want to read when so engaged and didn’t even care to smell the fragrance of flowers. Not having much of an appetite, I would rather drink some plain water. Whatever I did—whether taking a meal or taking a stroll—no longer observed the rhythm of my usual daily routine.5

This long passage, which has never been previously cited in connection with our novel, tells a story that appears to me entirely believable

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even though, as I have said, Tuan-mu is not always reliable when writing in an autobiographical vein. And it remains one of the most fascinating accounts of this kind by a modern Chinese writer. That Tuan-mu should become dejected following the failure of all his magazines is to be expected; what may seem unusual is that Lu Hsün’s reply to Tuan-mu could have served as such a powerful catalyst, transforming his state of severe depression into one of sustained creativity. But in the thirties, of course, Lu Hsün was looked upon as an idol by countless young writers and readers on the political left. Like Tuan-mu, many of these wrote him letters on one pretext or another, and usually received prompt, if brief, replies. Luckier than most were Hsiao Chün and Hsiao Hung who, after starting a regular correspondence with Lu Hsün, eventually became the most trusted of his younger friends. Tuan-mu was far less lucky in that respect, and did not even think it would be proper to make a social call on the ailing master once he arrived in Shanghai in 1936. But when he received that first letter of no particular encouragement from Lu Hsün, he was elated enough to count himself among those blessed children forever indebted to the intellectual giant for upholding the “gate of darkness” for them: Like a ray of sunlight, Lu Hsün’s voice beckoned me, and I crawled through the gate of darkness. Like a tide, I could not check myself and wrote without stop until I had finished The Korchin Banner Plains. That set my literary career on its course.6

Over the years Tuan-mu was to speak fondly of The Korchin Banner Plains on different occasions, and not without a touch of pride, because never again could he compose a work of that complexity and scope (though the forthcoming Ts’ao Hsüeh-chin may turn out to be a work of that order). Even before he joined the army, he had thought of writing about his father’s clan and mother’s clan in two separate novels. The Korchin Banner Plains was to be about the father’s clan, but it contains much information about the mother’s clan as well. In “My Writing Experience,” Tuan-mu recalls the emotional state he was in when writing about his own family for his first novel: The Korchin Banner Plains is a chronicle of my paternal clan, and so when I was writing it, it seemed events were unfolding before my

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eyes. Even if I were dead and then revived, I could still recite the story. But the emotional state I was in when writing the novel was peculiar to that period of my life, as irretrievable as the period itself. My mental state then, so very desolate and radiant, appears to me now like a dream. Emotions once had cannot return, and mankind is the poorer for this kind of deprivation. At times I am afraid to look back on my emotions of that period, and at other times I indulge in the secret pleasure of trying to recall them.7

In 1933 Tuan-mu was only twenty-one years old. There have been no other modern Chinese novelists who completed at twenty-one a novel as complex and as long as The Korchin Banner Plains (510 pages of small print). The only senior novelist with comparable epic ambition, Mao Tun, started his trilogy The Eclipse (Shih) at twenty-nine, with years of apprenticeship behind him as editor and critic. But because Tuan-mu had no luck in getting it published before 1939, The Korchin Banner Plains has always been discussed as a wartime product rather than as a major work of the prewar decade of leftist dominance, 1928–1937. If publishers had been more perceptive of its worth, The Korchin Banner Plains could have appeared in 1934, in direct competition for critical and popular acceptance with the major novels of the previous year—Mao Tun’s Midnight (Tzuyeh), Lao She’s Cat Country (Mao-ch’eng chi), and Pa Chin’s Family (Chia). Discerning critics could have hailed it as a work superior to all three by reason of its compelling interest as a narrative, its formal and technical innovations, and its dual vision of national decadence and rejuvenation. Indeed, except for its stylistic roughness resulting from the author’s youth and feverish mode of composition, one could easily contend that The Korchin Banner Plains is a more massive work of imagination than any of the more highly acclaimed and artistically finished novels of the prewar decade. Judging by the prose of The Sea of Earth and The Great River, Tuan-mu had become a distinguished stylist capable of magnificent passages of description in a matter of a few years. Had he taken the trouble to revise his manuscript for greater clarity of style and storytelling before submitting it for publication in 1939, The Korchin Banner Plains could have won eventual recognition as the greatest Chinese novel produced in the thirties. I have shown in section I that Tuan-mu has rich material to draw upon in his contemplation of his family and home region, and the result-

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ant novel is indeed a chronicle of deep autobiographical significance. Like Mao Tun, Lao She, and Pa Chin, he is appalled by the decadence around him, in his home and in his region; but whereas the three senior novelists could only lecture us through their spokesmen in Midnight, Cat Country, and Family about the various courses to be adopted for China’s rejuvenation, Tuan-mu feels in his bones that the land he has inherited, so primitive and fertile, so very health-giving despite the decadent landlords and feudal-minded ladies in its midst, is itself a living proof of China’s perennial vigor. We are told in the postface to The Sea of Earth that as a child, Tuan-mu’s imagination was stirred by “the myriad square miles of the vast wilderness, the incomparable desolation, the coarse and ferocious look on the large faces of the Red Whiskers (hung hu-tzu), the Cossackian wiliness and toughness of the tenant farmers, the mournful howling of Mongolian dogs at night, the wild and improbable legends about the fox spirit Husan-hsien-ku,”8 and for a novelist, such childhood impressions cannot be eradicated even if he has become educated in the decadence of his own family and the revolutionary ideology of class struggle. Just as Shen Ts’ung-wen remains unshakable in his belief about China’s goodness because that belief is nurtured upon his memories of West Hunan, also a primitive region by the side of the coastal cities, so Tuan-mu Hung-liang, in The Korchin Banner Plains and in the first phase of his career, asserts the instinctive heroism of the Chinese people, irrespective of his political faith in the nobility of the proletariat. Given his love for the Chinese land and the people that draw sustenance from it, it is not surprising that the novelist is able to offer in The Korchin Banner Plains a countervision of China’s awakening on the eve of Japanese invasion. Just when the Japanese are occupying Mukden, we get the impression from the geological and geographical metaphors in the last chapter of the novel that the region to the west of Mukden is undergoing a cataclysmic transformation in order to engulf and annihilate the invaders. The hallucinatory intensity of that vision appears all the more remarkable when we ponder that the conquest of Manchuria by Japan has temporarily led Lao She, a pragmatic realist, to a totally negative vision of the extinction of the Chinese nation in the guise of the Cat People. In point of time, therefore, The Korchin Banner Plains was the first modern Chinese novel to assert a heroic vision for the future of China (hitherto the honor has been reserved for Hsiao Chün’s Village in August [Pa-yüeh-ti hsiang-ts’un, 1935]); it set the pace not only for the heroic novels to come in praise of national

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resistance but also for the many chronicles of modern China written in the perspective of ultimate Communist victory that were launched but never quite completed during the late fifties and early sixties. Tuan-mu was also the first modern novelist to consciously align himself with the tradition of Chinese fiction and stress the archetypal affinities of some of his characters with well-known heroes from classical novels. In their eagerness to dissociate themselves from the traditional techniques of fiction and to import western-type heroes for emulation, earlier modern novelists had disavowed the traditional novel and acknowledged few instances of conscious indebtedness. In the postface to The Plains, on the contrary, Tuan-mu specifically cites Dream of the Red Chamber and names characters from The Water Margin (Shui-hu chuan), Chin P’ing Mei, and The Scholars ( Ju-lin wai-shih) as prototypes for the landlords in his region. We shall return to this aspect of the novel in section III. Yet, as I have said earlier, The Korchin Banner Plains remains the most experimental Chinese novel of its time. Just as James Joyce was driven to stylistic and technical innovation to pinpoint parallel events in The Odyssey and his novel, the comparable ambitions of Tuan-mu in linking his creation to the great Chinese novels of the past may have similarly driven him to adopt a new form for his novel. He rightly believes that for a modern Chinese novelist to belong to the tradition, he must recapture the perennial Chineseness of the experiences recorded; however, he cannot rest content with the narrative techniques of the past but must render experiences in a way that does not negate his assimilation of modern culture in point of both ideology and technique. Perhaps in view of his youth, it would have been wiser for Tuan-mu, tackling as he does a novel of great complexity fraught with personal and national significance, to merely adopt the more conventional style of his senior contemporaries and strive no further for technical experimentation. The novel would have been immediately published and acclaimed, and it would have made a great difference in the contemporary estimation of our author. But in the realm of art, it is far better to try and fail than not to try any experiment at all: except for the unfinished The Great Age, which promised a new rhythm for the Chinese novel designed to accommodate the apparent levity and underlying seriousness of the author’s maturer vision, the relative conventionality of Tuan-mu’s later novels, despite their magnificent passages of description and meditation, indicates his failure to find a fable that calls for comparable utilization of his memory and intellect.

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In the absence of clues from the author, it is difficult to pinpoint any western works that may have served as models for his technical experimentation. We find specific references to Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Hermann Sudermann’s Frau Sorge in The Korchin Banner Plains, but these novelists have certainly not influenced Tuan-mu in matters of style and narrative organization. To account for the experimental form of the novel, then, we must believe what the author’s postface tells us about what he did once he had chosen the Ting clan as his main subject: So I chose it. And because I saw with my own eyes the changing scenes in the history of that large family and had lived my whole life in it, I wrote about it with particular intimacy. I wrote about its many different aspects. It was very difficult to handle this because all these aspects involve one another in their complexity; as a result, what representational method to adopt became a problem. I wrote quite a lot, and then adopting the method of film cutting, I revised and deleted a lot until the novel assumed its present shape. Its first half shows a vertical section of the plains, and the second half a cross section. The first half may thus show the history of the region as recorded in its annual rings, and the second half the many kinds of activity going on in the region. I felt that only this method could enable us to see the region more closely and truthfully. I described everything in a careful and minute fashion, but then I cut my scenes and spliced them together in a rough-andready manner. I felt this was what I ought to do: the tedious accounting for every incident in Dream of the Red Chamber is, after all, reflective of its period.9

We shall discuss the bipartite structure of the novel when we introduce its plot. For the present, we may note that Tuan-mu was apparently taken with the artistic implications of the cinema for prose fiction and was certainly the first Chinese novelist to openly acknowledge his indebtedness to that medium. Using a character in A Fluffy Tale of the New Capital as his mouthpiece, Tuan-mu has expressed his fondness for the early films by G. W. Pabst, and he may have seen some silent films by Eisenstein and Pudovkin as well while a student in Tientsin. For a Chinese youth little

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exposed to the best contemporary literature from abroad and unable to enjoy it in its untranslated form, classical European and American movies from the silent era represented the best in modern storytelling that he could fully enjoy. Tuan-mu was apparently struck by the ease with which a movie changes or juxtaposes scenes without additional verbal explanation. Inspired by the art of the film, Tuan-mu’s “rough” cutting of his original manuscript meant nothing less than the deliberate suppression of exposition and commentary, of any summarizing narrative that could link chapter to chapter, scene to scene. Throughout the novel, therefore, we find either dramatic long scenes or a series of short scenes constitutive of one incident or one day’s events. Except for chapters 13–14, which constitute a continuous dramatic scene, each of the novel’s nineteen chapters consists of scenes of a chosen day or else of a discrete series of days, as in the early “vertical” chapters where the essential history of the region is rendered through a succession of vignettes. In some chapters, it is true, the focal character does enjoy the privilege of recalling past events through the use of a flashback, and here and there, particularly in the last section of chapter 3, we do find narrative passages covering days and months. But these departures only prove the author’s stubbornness in adhering to the dramatic scene as the main staple of his narrative. But, regrettably, this scenic method is more suggestive of the stage than of the more fluid screen. In the first years of the sound era, it is true, many movie adaptations of plays were literally “talkies,” but as a veteran moviegoer, Tuan-mu should have been more impressed by the art of the silent film in forwarding action with the most sparing use of dialogue. Yet he has not at all transferred the full range of gestures and expressions available to the camera onto the written page, but rather relies on the use of dialogue to advance the story. While some of the conversations between Ting Ning and his elder relatives are very absorbing, the overuse of unedited dialogue consisting of short questions and answers can be truly irritating. The reader is watching a conversation being unfolded on stage, little guided as to what is trivial and what is important in that conversation and often unable to grasp the full import of what is being discussed. He may indeed miss some vital information at a first reading, since crucial events are often cryptically alluded to or briefly reported in the course of a tête-à-tête. They take place, as it were, off screen, without the benefit of an observing camera. The reader, quite unlike the affected characters talking to each other, is merely baffled or annoyed.

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Now that experimental modern fiction has been placed by scholars in the larger context of narrative literature, we are in a far better position to enjoy the advantages of an author firmly guiding us into the world of his fiction by the traditional means of exposition, summarizing narrative, and even authorial commentary. Whatever the tedium of this procedure, the reader is never at a loss as to how to interpret an incident or a character. But in discarding these devices for storytelling, Tuan-mu is showing his impatience not only with age-old literary conventions but also with the cultural tradition blighting the lives of the people on the Korchin plains. He seems to believe that Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in took pleasure in describing every small incident in his novel because he was totally at home in the world he depicts. By 1933, like his hero Ting Ning, Tuan-mu had come to feel totally ill at ease in his home region and particularly with his paternal clan, and a jerkier narrative rhythm would seem more appropriate to indicate his disgust with his own people, so very unlike Ts’ao’s fascination with the residents of the Takuanyuan at the height of its glory. Tuan-mu must have reasoned that it would be enough for his reader to watch the unfolding scenes without necessarily getting emotionally involved. It would serve little purpose to give a full accounting of the events covered so long as the reader is strongly impressed by their stupidity or pathos. To put the matter in a different light, one could say that the allegoric vision of China’s decay and rejuvenation so exercises the novelist’s epic ambition that he feels to be overcurious about the Ting clan would defeat that larger aim. Yet its epic and allegoric dimensions notwithstanding, The Korchin Banner Plains is substantially the novel of the Ting clan and the young hero Ting Ning. Many of the chapters, tantalizing in their dramatic incompleteness, are nevertheless so richly evocative of life on the plains that one cannot but believe the novel would be much stronger if it had been properly edited and revised to remove unnecessary ambiguities and to bring some of the off-camera events into sharper focus. Tuan-mu did bring out a shorter, revised edition in 1956, and enhanced the readability of the first three chapters by pruning verbiage and providing firmer guidance for the reader. But he could not do anything with Ting Ning except shorten his scenes and delete his soliloquies, since the kind of consciousness he represents would be anathema to the Communist regime. In its revised form, therefore, the novel has become a Hamlet without sympathy for the Prince of Denmark.

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III According to Tuan-mu himself, The Korchin Banner Plains consists of two parts, one providing a vertical section of the family tree of the Tings and the other a horizontal section of the same clan in the year 1931 when, after an absence of some years, both Ting Ning and Ta-shan have returned to their home region. Part I, comprising the first three chapters and 93 pages, is thus a prelude to the main story’s 16 chapters and 407 pages. But the author’s view of its structure notwithstanding, insofar as the novel from chapters 2–18 inclusive is strictly concerned with the Ting clan and its servants and tenant farmers, chapters 1 and 19 stand out for their mass scenes, marking respectively the Tings’ emergence from and reabsorption by a sea of humanity in a matter of 200 years. The novel, therefore, begins with a legend of migration and ends with a prophetic vision of China’s transformation. The heading for chapter 19, “The Conclusion of a Conclusion; the Beginning of Another Beginning,” places the novel squarely in the epic tradition of The Aeneid and Paradise Lost. Because The Korchin Banner Plains remains practically unread by western students of Chinese literature, it is necessary at least to go over the first few chapters before we can discuss the work in detail. According to history, the Korchins were a Mongol tribe who had pledged their allegiance to the Manchus prior to their conquest of China proper. The last great Manchu general, Seng-ko-lin-ch’in (d. 1865), was a Mongol prince of the Korchin Banner and had virtual control over all the Korchin plains. It was following his death, so Tuan-mu informs us in A Family History, that the Manchu princes of the region, being absentee landlords in Peking, began to lose their grip on the land, enabling the Chinese from Shantung and Hopei to settle there. Tuan-mu traces his own family to his greatgrandfather, and in the novel the actual history of the Tings also begins with the great-grandfather of Ting Ning. In chapter 1, however, the author invents a patriarch who emerges as the leader among a horde of hungry refugees trekking from Shantung to the Manchurian plains in around 1730. This patriarch, known as Old Mr. Ting or Half-Celestial Ting, takes a fox fairy to wife and chooses an auspicious site for his burial, both deeds ensuring the continuing prosperity of his descendants. According to A Family History, Tuan-mu’s father still places faith in the good will of the fairy and the excellent location of the family cemetery, and even the young Tuan-mu himself, as we have seen, is awed by family

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accounts of the fox spirit Hu-san-hsien-ku. But the grown novelist is disbelieving, and imputes to Ting Ning’s ancestors a cunning exploitation of the twin myths so as to reconcile the local populace to their Heavenordained prosperity. In chapter 2, after describing the continuing expansion of the Ting empire through Fourth Great-grandfather’s ruthless annexation of a rival landlord’s estate, Tuan-mu goes on to disclose some incipient signs of its eventual decline through a subtle study of the contrasting lifestyles of Ting Ning’s grandfather and Third Granduncle on a harvesting day. No other section of the novel vindicates Tuan-mu’s narrative method more triumphantly than his account of that day (especially in its revised form). As Third Granduncle cavorts with farm girls and tramples upon their humanity, the more conscientious Grandfather, in going from cottage to cottage to exact promises of payment in kind from his tenants, begins to feel the stirrings of dread over their discontent and the futility of the endeavor when, among other signs of foreboding, his younger brother is clearly irresponsible. In this chapter, while exposing their ruthlessness and sensuality, the author retains a sense of awe toward these ancestors of his hero and keeps us spellbound. The bulk of chapter 3 describes a fateful day in the life of Ting Ning’s father in 1905, following the routing of Russian troops by the Japanese army. Though in the vigor of his martial youth, Father becomes a crushed person after witnessing the day’s tragic events: his parents shot dead by rampaging Russian soldiers on his estate, his pregnant wife almost raped by three such (whom he dispatches with a knife) but still dying of fright after giving premature birth to a son. Earlier that day, the wife Huang Ning, sulking in bed, recalls the days of forcible courtship leading to her abduction, substantially following the story of Tuan-mu’s mother given earlier. In his grief, Father enlists the help of Huang Ning’s sister-in-law to nurse the baby, though it is not clear how she can do so without being a lactating mother. She herself has been a victim of rape on that fateful day, and it is Father (with whom she had trysts) who resuscitates her after she tries to hang herself out of a sense of shame. Some nine months later, she finally dies in giving birth to Huang Ta-shan. At first it was feared she might produce a semi-Russian bastard, but since he shows no Caucasian features, he is declared to be of pure Huang stock. Father, who might have been his begetter (the doubt is not clearly removed), eventually returns to

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his own estate a fin-de-siècle sentimentalist steeped in his sorrows and dreams. Chapter 4 shifts to the year 1931 and presents Ta-shan, now a grown man, as the hero. While enjoying his sleep one night in the northern wilderness where he has gone for two years in search of adventure and profit, Ta-shan is rudely awakened by a mysterious uncle (who later reappears as the mighty bandit chieftain Lao Pei-feng, Old North Wind), who tells him to go home on account of his father’s death. On his way back, Ta-shan shows his heroic temper by battling a carload of police and then jumping a train to avoid arrest. He eventually reaches home to find his stepmother in a sickly condition and his siblings famished, so he goes to a hostile pawnshop and intimidates the attendants into giving him $40 for a broken gold hairpin. Ta-shan has the looks to match his prowess, most conspicuously a large hooked nose resembling an eagle’s beak and a crop of hair like a lion’s mane. More important, he is a truly awakened hero of the proletariat. While in the northern wilderness, he had met with a Big Nose (Ta-pi-tzu—a standard appellation for a Russian), who presumably enlightened him about the importance of class struggle. Tuan-mu gives this incident only a brief mention so as to escape the notice of government censors, but in so doing, he does not play fair with his readers as well. Chapter 5 belongs to Ting Ning, who made his first appearance in the earlier chapter inviting Ta-shan to go hunting with him at a primitive spot known as Hsiao Chin-t’ang where they used to enjoy themselves as children. One would expect Ting Ning to be the posthumous son of Huang Ning, since it is only logical that the two boys deprived of their mothers at the time of their birth and locked in kinship despite their contrasting backgrounds should become the complementary heroes of the novel when they are older. But, no, the posthumous son, named Ta-ning, is now a military commander somewhere in Manchuria who has left his unhappy wife moping at home and himself does not appear once in the novel. The eighteen-year-old Ting Ning, who has just returned after some three years in the South, including time for regular schooling in Shanghai, is his younger brother by Father’s second wife. We may surmise that, while Tuan-mu has indeed carried out his mother’s injunction to tell her story of woe, he prefers to kill her off in childbirth so that she may not be contaminated by the Ting spirit. What he does, therefore, is to reverse the order of his father’s two marriages. His second wife, also née Wang, is the daughter of an official family. Her only daughter has died of an illness just

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before Ting Ning’s return, and the author has certainly drawn upon his own mother’s bereavement of her only daughter in creating that incident. But aside from her grief over the tragedy, Ting Ning’s mother shows the kind of credulous religiosity, cold aloofness, and capricious cruelty that would seem more in keeping with the character of the first wife of Tuan-mu’s father had she lived on. Certainly she bears no resemblance to the idealized portrait of the author’s mother in A Family History. But even if Ting Ning is the only son of a woman of gentry background and is not at all related to the Huangs by blood, he behaves in the novel as if he were Huang Ning’s posthumous son. He bears her name, for one thing, and is particularly drawn to Ta-shan even though the latter has inherited from his father an implacable hatred of the Ting family. In chapter 5, Ting Ning is especially worried about Ch’un-hsiung, the daughter of Huang Ning’s sister, who has lived for some time in the Ting mansion as companion and maid to his mother. Because her mother has just died, Ch’un-hsiung has been ordered to go home by her brutal father, and Ting Ning fears for her safety there. Having summarized the story of the Ting family up to the reemergence of Ting Ning and Ta-shan on the Korchin plains, we can now discuss the novel without paying strict attention to the sequence of subsequent events. Our summary makes it clear that The Korchin Banner Plains is an autobiographical novel only in the sense that the author is free to retell and reinterpret the events of his family in the light of his own intellectual and political awakening, which had occurred by the Mukden Incident. In assuming editorial responsibility for so many journals during his freshman year at Tsing Hua, Tuan-mu must have been a fully committed member of the League of Left-Wing Writers sustained by extraordinary zeal, but following his spiritual fatigue of the subsequent fall, while he remained politically left like all the refugee writers from Manchuria, he was liberated from the bondage of politics insofar as he had not written his novel in strict accordance with the directives of the League. The Korchin Banner Plains is clearly a work of its age in its ideological and political orientation, but the author’s thought is too intensely personal, and his vision of China too grandiose, to be primarily identified as a work of leftist or Marxist inspiration. By the early forties Tuan-mu had become even less political and could have written a memoir more sympathetic to his paternal family, even though The Korchin Banner Plains: A Family History is altogether too short to rise above being a memoir of strictly autobio-

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graphical interest. Hsiao Hung, too, had shed her leftism by the time she wrote Tales of Hulan River, a memoir of lyric authenticity unerring in its description of her childhood milieu because the author does not violate her memories. Hsiao Hung’s book, I am confident, will be read generations hence as a timeless classic; even if it is a work of far greater complexity and scope and deserves to be ranked among the greatest novels of the thirties, The Korchin Banner Plains is nevertheless a work stamped by its period and in part vitiated by it. A Korchin Banner Plains conceived in the spirit of Tales of Hulan River would have been a smaller novel but a more authentic chronicle of the region. What prevents The Korchin Banner Plains from being an authentic chronicle is the alien presence of Ting Ning and Ta-shan in a region whose inhabitants are not yet capable of revolutionary modes of thought. These two remain strangers in their midst. Ta-shan, insofar as he is a successful leader of the discontented tenant farmers, is merely a symbolic figure. It is characteristic of the novel that whatever conspiratorial or organizational activities he may have been involved in to rouse the peasantry are not presented—the author knows only too well that such activities never took place in his home region in the months preceding the Mukden Incident. As a student-intellectual exposed to western ideas and literature, Ting Ning is of course entitled to his “strangeness.” He is of the region and yet not of the region: sympathetic toward the poor and downtrodden as well as the weak and helpless among his own kind, he is at the same time angry at or contemptuous of them for their benighted condition. For a reader who does not share his revolutionary consciousness, Ting Ning cannot but appear callow, conceited, and unfeeling, though I would suppose that Tuan-mu regards him as an ideal hero of his age whose only limitation is that he was not born a proletarian and cannot really identify with the poor. This apartness of Ting Ning, insofar as his consciousness dominates the bulk of the novel, imparts to the work a peculiar emotional tone and accounts for its basic unsatisfactoriness. The novel would have gained in depth of feeling or range of sympathetic understanding if its hero were less of an intellectual snob and more capable of acting upon his compassion. Or if he remains one, he should be like Bazarov of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, ultimately placed and redeemed. But Ting Ning is neither placed nor redeemed: it would have taken an older author, as Turgenev was when composing his masterpiece, to see the kind of callow arrogance that Ting Ning actually represents.

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As the spoiled scion of a very wealthy family on its way to ruin, Ting Ning is situated very much like Chia Pao-yü, a handsome youth loved by all women of his clan and adored by his personal maid Ling-tzu and all his female cousins. But, aware of his superior destiny, he does not mingle with these girls easily and shows an utter incapacity for the kind of selfless love bordering on idiocy that distinguishes Pao-yü. If Pao-yü dreads the prospect of marriage for every talented girl he knows, Ting Ning is more obsessed with the benighted helplessness of the girls living in genteel idleness or servility, totally unnourished by the health-giving land of the Korchin plains. For that reason, he writes regularly to Little Lin, an intellectual girl friend presumably living in Shanghai and a member of the New Humanity Club, which he founded. Of all the girls in his own region, he cares for his cousin Ch’un-hsiung most because she represents the Huang family as its most vulnerable, a poor relation in his own home living in perpetual fear of her father, who eventually becomes the instrument of her murder as he throws her among the bandits for a sum of money. Ting Ning once tells her that it would constitute his lifework to restore her to her original worth and develop her potential, and he does think about equipping her for school in the South. Profoundly shocked by the news of her murder, he remembers her fondly on a day of mourning three weeks later. Another girl Ting Ning cares for is Shui-shui, a fey creature on the order of Undine and living in utter seclusion with her old father, a descendant of a mighty landlord ruined by Fourth Great-grandfather generations ago. To Ting Ning, Shui-shui is the type of paradisal Eve innocent of morality because still uninfected by the disease of civilization. Ultimately spotted by the bandits, Shui-shui shares the brutal fate of Ch’un-hsiung; Ting Ning tries too late to rescue her. A self-assertive male, Ting Ning shares nothing of the effeminacy of Pao-yü and makes love to Shui-shui and Lin-tzu, each once on the spur of the moment. He stands in no fear of his father who, in chapter 6, prompted by the news of the death of a Korean actress he deeply loved, confides in him his romantic past and reveals his innermost thoughts and dreams. To mitigate his sorrow and relive his past, Father decides on that day to leave for Dairen as a speculator in commodities, and soon dies there in mysterious circumstances. In his father’s absence and especially after the news of his death, Ting Ning is mainly seen in his role as manager of the estate, and invites com-

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parison with Tu Shao-ch’ing, the proud hero of The Scholars, who squanders his inheritance through his reckless generosity. Whatever his ideological revulsion toward the task, Ting Ning cannot but take care of his family in a moment of crisis, and in a narrative sequence of mounting tension (chapters 10–14), he reveals himself as a forceful if somewhat enigmatic character coping, among other troubles, with the threatened strike by the tenant farmers. He is at first too arrogant to come to terms with them and would rather let his land lie fallow. But in another moment, perhaps showing more contempt for his own role as landlord than sympathy for the tenants’ plight, he announces to their astonishment his readiness to remit a year’s rent. Financial ruin is averted by a loyal old steward who interprets the order to mean a liberal decrease of the rent, and Ting Ning ironically earns the reputation of a shrewd, hard-dealing landlord in the manner of his ancestors. But at heart he doesn’t really care about what happens to the land or, for that matter, to all members of his clan because he is sick of their doomed mode of existence. Although both Chia Pao-yü and Tu Shao-ch’ing can be regarded as his prototypes, Ting Ning is, of course, by design a modern Chinese intellectual attracted to all the romantic and revolutionary ideals of the West. He wants to achieve great deeds undreamed of by his forefathers; hence his contempt for the burden of his estate and his reluctance to commit himself to the region and lend an active hand to all the unfortunates around him. Even his Edenic vision of humanity—a subject we shall return to later—reflects his utter disgust with China’s feudalistic civilization. As a modern youth pulled in every contrary direction, however, Ting Ning remains largely in a state of self-debate because never given the chance to prove himself in action. Though his confrontation with the tenant farmers does try his soul, it only confirms the proud and selfdespairing attitude of a youth who doesn’t feel he can do anything to help his fellow men. In a sense, his father and mother, his elder kinswomen, Ch’un-hsiung, Shui-shui, and Ling-tzu all beseech him for help, and he fails them all because he is too wrapped up in himself to give his love or sympathy promptly. It is only toward his alter ego and antithesis, Ta-shan the revolutionary doer without any intellectual pretensions, that Ting Ning shows great love and admiration, and yet, as we shall see, even that friendship is not subjected to a dramatic test of true moral consequence that could stamp either as a truly representative hero of modern China.

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Tuan-mu himself, however, is convinced of the representative character of his hero and devotes a portion of chapter 15 to a discussion of his personality. Ruefully contemplating his new reputation as a forceful, strike-breaking landlord, Ting Ning recalls a meeting of the New Humanity Club where various friends analyzed his character, and feels tempted to write Little Lin that, in view of his failure to accomplish anything since returning home, he is nothing but a combination of Hamlet and Don Quixote. This assessment is certainly of interest as an indication of the author’s familiarity with Russian criticism and his extreme ambition to embody these two archetypes in his own hero. But the reader cannot feel Ting Ning suggests either, despite his periodic monologues of selfappraisal and his fitful display of chivalric generosity. At that club meeting, Ting Ning further recalls, someone by the name of Mussolini proposed a formula to explain his character: Nihilism + Egoism + Sentimentalism + Bolsivikism [sic] = Ting Ning-ism. Mussolini proposes this formula rather facetiously (though it has been cited by nearly all critics of The Korchin Banner Plains), since he goes on to malign our hero as a pure egotist who would want to gratify all his desires in the manner of Genghis Khan and Nero. But since all heroes of romantic-revolutionary fiction produced in the leftist decade exhibit in varying combinations these four elements of Ting Ning-ism, Tuan-mu must be given credit for critical shrewdness in being able to isolate these traits for a representative hero of his time when he was just a beginning novelist of twenty-one. As for his own hero, however, his bolshevism is not at all conspicuous except for its inclusion in the formula: he is a humanitarian filled with the revolutionary impulse to liberate all the oppressed but following no specific course of political action. His sentimentalism, I would gather, indicates both his humanitarianism and his capacity for love and sympathy, though that capacity is often rendered inoperative by his egoism. His nihilism, too, may be seen as a logical extension of his egoism inasmuch as he strives to be a Nietzschean superman able to destroy the old order and establish a new one. But because the youth hasn’t begun to achieve any great deeds, he repeatedly undergoes agitations of the kind that would suggest his acute awareness of a great disparity between his vaulting ambition and actual impotence. Thus, following the brutal murder of Ch’un-hsiung, Ting Ning ponders the death of many unfortunates around him and his failure to do anything about the situation:

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I am to achieve great, stupendous deeds, Ting Ning thought. I do not deny that I am of the same mold as Alexander. I am to support the sky-reaching tent of this age with my backbone. I not only intend to do so, but I must. But now reality with its iron-hard spell has ground to powder the whole system I have planned for myself. I want to seize hold of the age, but the age has forced me out of my role with its intolerance and incomprehension. I want to offer my strength, but my strength has been driven out of circulation by the bad banknotes in use on the market. How unreasonable and absurd, and what kind of terrible arrangement this is! Is this my fault, is this my crime? What I repudiate, I want to destroy! Whatever runs counter to my way of reckoning, I must throw into Hell! I am the knife of Procrustes: I dare harbor this kind of ambition because I have been commissioned and entrusted by the new age with the task of throwing into the pit of nothingness all the customs, moral codes, and institutions that I scorn and repudiate. This has to be so; this is the way I clean up this age! I have no tolerance, no forgiveness: in my dictionary I have only violence and striving, and no peace and no submission. . . . A devouring wrath seized hold of Ting Ning’s entire body. He wanted instantly to destroy the universe, destroy mankind, destroy himself and let all the broken pieces fall where they may so long as they co-exist with Destruction! Ting Ning almost jumped up, to first seize upon his own house and garden as objects to be totally destroyed. But, a moment later, a rare kind of fatigue pervaded his whole body. He had never experienced this kind of fatigue before, a spiritual fatigue that he could not feel with his nerves, could not measure with a yardstick, and could not wash away with the water of disgust. The fatigue occupied every one of his cells; every one of his cells became swollen with the seed of fatigue, flooded with the fountain of fatigue. He tried to shake it off as if he would petals strewn over his body, but with no effect whatever. Without any strength left, he despondently sighed and sat under the lilac tree, motionless.10

In utter contrast to this vacillation between exultation and despondency is the steely character of Ta-shan, the friend of Ting Ning who

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remains firmly opposed to him as a representative of his family and class. If Ting Ning suggests Chia Pao-yü and Tu Shao-ch’ing, then Ta-shan is by design a modern replica of a Liangshan hero. Once Ting Ning discusses The Water Margin with Ta-shan, and both declare their great love for Lu Chih-shen: “Ah, the books you gave me to read I cannot follow all the way. But The Water Margin is all right. Ah, I love The Water Margin best; ah, the story of Lu Chih-shen’s drunken fury at the monastery is really marvelous.” Ta-shan rubbed his clumsy, large hands together as if there were a ponderous iron staff by his side. “I love dog meat best; yesterday I couldn’t get dog meat and ate alone five pounds of beef.” . . . “Good, I, too, love the Jolly Monk best,” [Ting Ning concurred.] “He is the purest embodiment of the sense of righteousness and the finest example of the earthy type of Chinese hero.”11

In the preceding dialogue, the author at least suggests that Ta-shan shares with Lu Chih-shen a spiritual affinity and an earthy appetite for dog meat, and elsewhere he is given the nickname “Li K’uei of the Cormorant Lake.” But except for his impressive presence in chapter 4, he is too seldom visible to suggest either hero. In theory, he complements Ting Ning as the other half of a double hero, but in reality, he largely looms in the background as a dark symbol of vengeance. Only in chapter 9 is there a scene of confrontation where the complementary character of the two heroes is dramatized. Incensed over the fact that the Ting family has indirectly caused the death of a tenant farmer (though actually he is killed by the Japanese as he tries to cross the railroad tracks at night), Ta-shan ties Ting Ning to a tree, enumerating the crimes of his clan over the generations and threatening to kill him. Though unresisting, Ting Ning puts up a defense: “Crazy fool, think it over yourself. I don’t mind at all giving up my life. If, on account of my death, all of you can be delivered, I don’t mind dying at all: I would kill myself with my own hands. But what can you get out of my death? Big landlords will still be big landlords, and farmers still farmers. If you are a man and have a man’s intelligence, think it over carefully.”12

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Ta-shan shoots twice without taking straight aim, and then unties him. Now it is Ting Ning’s turn to ask: “Why didn’t you kill me?” The question exploded like a crash of thunder. Like a child, Ta-shan hid his face in his hands, sobbing.13

Logically, the novel should end with the downfall of the Ting family. Though Ting Ning, as an intellectual, wishes for its destruction, his pride should prevent him from acquiescing in Ta-shan’s relentless plotting to bring about the event. To meet the expectations of the reader, therefore, there would have to be a more dramatic or tragic confrontation between the two precisely because of their contrasting backgrounds and spiritual kinship. But such a confrontation does not materialize because by the novel’s end the Ting family appears no longer of significance in the author’s visionary enactment of the national drama of resistance against the Japanese. Ting Ning has earlier left the scene without anticipating the tidal wave of humanity that will sweep forward to Mukden following its occupation by the Japanese the night before. Ta-shan emerges on the last page as part of the movement, however, his lion’s mane trembling on a head the color of ancient bronze. In his assumption of a larger role as patriot, he cannot be concerned with his personal retaliation against the doomed Ting family. The prophetic drama of national awakening adds as much fascination to the novel as the epic drama of the first chapters focusing on the emigration of Shantung peasants, the rise of the Ting clan, and the Russian rape of the Korchin plains. In contemplating that drama, the author appears seized by the kind of excitement that made William Blake rhapsodize over the American and French revolutions in some of his prophetic works. For a Chinese reader in possession of the bitter knowledge that the Japanese would not have left Manchuria even in 1945 but for their defeat at the hands of the Americans, this epic postlude may appear ironical for its hasty predictions. But for Tuan-mu Hung-liang, his story would not be complete unless the people who once migrated to the Korchin plains in search of food and land now reassert themselves in a far more severe struggle for survival. The town of Ancient Elms, which has been pillaged that night by a horde of bandits, is beside itself with excitement over the arrival of bandit volunteers on their march to Mukden:

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But the people in the streets were not reduced in number; on the contrary, there were now more of them in the streets. Around the yamen buildings the sea of humanity overflooded, the sea of humanity broke over the banks, the sea of humanity tossed and turned in wondrous waves. . . . Now was the time for the oncoming of the flood tide; when the first gleam of the dawn was announced by the rooster, the sea of humanity was in flood tide, the sea of humanity was in flood tide.14

The mover of this sea of humanity is none other than Old North Wind, who has appeared briefly in chapter 3 as Ta-shan’s uncle. But other than providing this bit of information, the author wisely refrains from describing the origin and background of this mysterious bandit because such a titanic character cannot be accounted for. The other bandit leader who precedes him to town is the Hound of Heaven (T’ien-kou), an angel of destruction. Earlier in chapter 17 he has made a memorable appearance as a visitor to a foul-mouthed village prostitute. As killer, kidnaper, and rapist, he is seen there in all his coarseness and cruelty. On the night of September 19, however, he seems bent on destroying all enemies of the poor, including the Japanese and the business interests as represented by the Tings, so as to pave the way for the arrival of Old North Wind. Following the Japanese occupation of Mukden, then, the dormant plains of the Korchin Banner are thrown into a cataclysm by the eruption of the forces for destruction and rejuvenation, and both are represented by banditchieftains. Sometime before the eruption occurs, Ting Ning has left for an unspecified destination. Though under normal circumstances he should be going back to school after the summer vacation, can he in all conscience even think of wanting to leave his family now that he is literally the only man around to manage its affairs? In any event, the last we see of him (in chapter 18, titled “Great Earth”), he is galloping away in the radiance of the dawn, along with two unidentified companion riders: At this moment his whole body radiated light. He raised his arm high, the hair on his brow danced in the wind, and his whole body was moist. The blood-red morning sun, looking like the giant mouth of a demon licking his tongue, rose swiftly above the horizon, its rays pouncing on the human world.

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The blood of Ting Ning surged upward. He waved his uplifted arm, crying loudly: VITA NOVA! VITA NOVA! VITA NOVA!15

The Latin phrase is repeated four more times after a brief descriptive passage. The author himself clearly has no idea where his hero is going though he has apparently staged this tableau to let Ting Ning share with the rising sun its boundless light, its demonic fury in quelling the forces of darkness, and its promise of a new day. He is transfigured beyond recognition from his usual self into an allegorical figure of fiery radiance. For a fuller appreciation of this tableau, it may be appropriate to quote from Blake a passage on the American Revolution: As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbèd heaven, Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood, And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea, Intense, naked, a Human fire, fierce glowing as the wedge Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire, With myriads of cloudy terrors, banners dark & towers Surrounded; heat but not light went thro’ the murky atmosphere.16

The description of Orc here as “a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea” is entirely appropriate to the mythic-allegoric mode of “America: A Prophecy,” though it would take a Blake scholar to fully appreciate this type of emphatic poetry. But Ting Ning is no Orc, no “Human fire,” except by reason of the author’s rhetoric. This kind of feverish rhetoric, of course, is even more powerfully operative in the final pages of the novel descriptive of the cataclysm of Ancient Elms, as we have seen in an earlier quotation. Realistically, after a night of terror, those inhabitants of the town fortunate enough to have escaped pillage and death would have been too scared and too tired to dare go out into the streets to greet the new bandits. Just as Ting Ning did not turn into a body of human fire to greet a new dawn, so in reality the Korchin Plains did not undergo a spiritual revolution of geological proportions following the Japanese occupation of Mukden. The more divorced from reality the novelist’s vision is, the more need he feels to resort to turgid rhetoric and violent metaphors to drum

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up excitement. While this kind of naked and feverish intensity does not sort well with the portions of the novel rooted in autobiographical experience, it bespeaks the epic intention of The Korchin Banner Plains that it should begin with a vision of the children of famine seeking the land of honey and milk and ending with a vision of a new Jerusalem in Manchuria even as it is about to receive its new conquerors.

IV Yet for all its patriotic and prophetic grandiosity, The Korchin Banner Plains is a truly remarkable novel if the reader, properly forewarned, gives it more than one patient and sympathetic reading. It is a Faulknerian type of novel inasmuch as the author, ruling over the mythic kingdom of the Korchin plains (a much bigger realm than Yoknapatawpha County, but equally characterized by heroism, tradition, decadence, and squalor), has peopled it with a far larger number of characters than a single novel can properly accommodate. One gets the impression that even characters of the least consequence—a steward, a gunner, or a tenant farmer—have stories of their own that cry to be told. The story of Shui-shui and her father, merely tantalizing in its present form, must be part of a bigger story that the author had mapped out in his head. Ting Ning’s father, whose career of fin-de-siècle sentimentality is compressed into one chapter and whose mysterious death in Dairen remains a source of bafflement, could be the fascinating subject of a novel. His elder son Ta-ning, whose military career is merely alluded to, and his estranged wife, who remains totally uncommunicative with her mother-in-law, likewise call for separate novelistic treatment. The story of Ch’un-hsiung, her long-suffering mother, and her brute of a father, Black Su (Su Hei-tzu), could also be expanded into a grim family chronicle. Whereas in Family and its sequels Pa Chin seems to tell us everything he wants us to know about the Kao family and leaves nothing to the imagination, the fascination of The Korchin Banner Plains stems partly from the fact that the author holds so much back we could visualize a series of supportive novels about the Ting clan, about the farmers, bandits, and hunters, to make the myth of the region more complete. Not surprisingly, in view of its autobiographical substance, it is in the domestic scenes of the Ting family that The Korchin Banner Plains captures

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best a quality of felt life and stays clearest of the author’s rhetoric. The chapters about Ting Ning’s conflict with the tenant farmers are extremely well done, but it cannot be helped that, for a beginning novelist, it is the memories of his parents and immediate relatives that come to him unbidden and charged with personal emotion. Outside Chiang Kuei’s The Whirlwind (Hsüan-feng), Eileen Chang’s The Embittered Woman (Yuan-nü) and several of her stories, and Mao Tun’s Maple Leaves as Red as Flowers of the Second Month (Shuang-yeh hung-ssu erh-yüeh-hua), I have not come across a work of modern Chinese fiction that compares as favorably with Dream of the Red Chamber for its evocation of gentry life in the feudal mode. Tuan-mu, of course, is the victim of his method in his almost exclusive reliance on dialogue and description for the rendition of scenes. But even though he denies himself the full range of the narrator’s art, he manages exceedingly well in some chapters to render atmosphere and establish mood and to engross the reader’s interest in whatever business is being unfolded. To take less complicated examples, we are certainly highly impressed by the ritual scenes in chapters 10 and 16 involving, respectively, a procession of supplicants for rain and a Buddhist mass for the soul of Ting Ning’s father, and we feel that in each instance the author must be drawing upon his memory of comparable rituals witnessed in his youth. Like his hero Ting Ning, Tuan-mu may have nothing but contempt for the priest in charge of both occasions, Efficacious Celestial Wang (Wang Ling-hsien), but because of the novelist’s fascination with and unerring rendition of ritual, this religious humbug is not entirely robbed of the awe in which the populace holds him. For a detailed demonstration of the author’s ability to render life in the feudal mode, we may cite chapter 7, which depicts Ting Ning’s visit to Grandaunt Third’s mansion to borrow $20,000 from the Third Lady of the Thirteenth Uncle so that his father may undertake his doomed journey to Dairen. While procurement of the loan is in this regard important to the development of the plot, the visit actually serves the far more important purpose of unfolding before us the pathos and squalor of idle, neurotic ladies. Like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, Ting Ning often plays the role of a visitor who drops in on others and in the course of a conversation elicits their secrets and heartfelt thoughts. He succeeds especially well in this chapter. The Thirteenth Uncle, son of Grandaunt and the deceased Granduncle Third, hasn’t been home for years, busy trying his luck in the

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official world. After squandering $30,000 on a worthless mayoral post, he has just borrowed $50,000 from his mother to buy the post of a revenue collector. Though his first wife has been dead for some years, he doesn’t seem to care for his Second Lady, a consumptive about to die, or the more vivacious Third, who in her state of sexual frustration has conceived a passion for Ting Ning. There are also in the mansion female cousins of Ting Ning’s age, and servant girls. Ting Ning, being away in the South, hasn’t visited the mansion for three years. He has always been reluctant to go there because of its atmosphere of decay and the kind of special attention he receives from his Third Aunt. Today, however, he is on his best behavior, and chats gaily with his aunt and cousins over a mahjong-like game. Scenes pass until, after the dinner and the music session, Ting Ning pays a visit to the lonely and childless Second Aunt, who for years had wanted to adopt him as her son. During their interview, which lasts nine pages, we see her through Ting Ning’s eyes—“the wreck of a tubercular frame” lying on an opium couch and with cheeks unnaturally peachcolored in the dim glow of the lit pipe—and we wish he were indeed Alyosha who would be all compassion in the face of this immense suffering rather than one whose conscious desire is to curb his compassion for the doomed. Yet after Second Aunt has reiterated her long-frustrated desire to adopt him and wishes that she could live with him in Peking, away from everybody, there follows a long moment of awkward silence during which Ting Ning feels keenly her pitiful need for love and companionship: Grief and pain over thoughts that had long been repressed were too much of a strain for Second Aunt to bear. Her face turned flaming red, and her throat rattled as if something wanted to come out. But she controlled herself with effort, her body shivering and her brow oozing with clammy sweat. Ting Ning knew this to be an evil omen—the rising to the surface of the dregs of her life. Emitting a long sigh, Ting Ning decided to give this dying woman some token satisfaction, because he could not bear to see this bounden slave to the social system die in such loneliness. She was altogether too lonely, a stranger to everyone on earth and yet fancying that her mother-love could tie to herself a youth inhabiting an altogether different world—how pitiful was she! And Ting Ning felt somewhat guilty when he realized that just a moment ago he

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was trying hypocritically to give her some solace. Overcome by this thought, he affectionately placed his hand on her brow and inclined his lips to her ear, whispering with emotion, “Mama . . .” A painful joy ran through her whole body, as if it were battered by a mighty storm of pouring rain. With great effort, she inclined her head to the side. “Water!” No sooner had she said this than a mouthful of blood squirted out. Hurriedly she wiped it away with a handkerchief and hid it under her pillow, afraid that Ting Ning might see it. Complying with her wish, Ting Ning pretended not to have seen anything. Without a word, he brought her a glass of water with which to rinse her mouth, and gently tapped her back with his hands.17

Immediately after the interview, Ting Ning lies restlessly in bed in a room adjacent to Second Aunt’s. Thirsty, he calls for water, and Third Aunt comes ready with some sweetened potion that makes him her captive for the night. Second Aunt cannot but hear her wild lovemaking: No noise was blocked. What followed was a wave of lewd laughter, an unashamed, obscene “Ouch,” more frenzied groaning, and noise indicative of the rapid movements of the body—all these, transmitted through the paper partition, thundered in Second Aunt’s ears, fraught with temptation. Hysterically she pulled all her blankets to cover her head; she wrapped them around it tightly as if she were determined to strangle herself. Her neck could hardly breathe; still she would not let up. But, then, something tasting sweet and sickly again swam up her throat; she exerted herself to fetch a handkerchief from under her pillow and casually wiped her mouth with it. After that, she reclined her head and let it fall where it would, away from the pillow, and let all the gold stars and silver stars whirl in front of her eyes.18

This passage, with all its author’s fondness for rhetoric, nevertheless concludes Ting Ning’s social visit with an epiphany of unmistakable power. In the day, the ladies entertaining him are able to disguise their misery with an air of merriment; in the evening, in the privacy of a tête-àtête, Second Aunt bares the tragedy of her life to her would-be adoptive

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son. But, surely, as much as the aggressive Third Aunt, this dying woman is famished for sex, and her frenzied response to the noises of lovemaking surpasses in terror her luckier rival’s equally frenzied delight in conquest. In his visit to Grandaunt Third, Ting Ning is primarily a witness to tragedy, though in the end he himself becomes an unwitting victim of Third Aunt’s lust. But as a young landlord enjoying aristocratic privileges, he, too, can be the unwitting cause of individual tragedies around him, as Tuan-mu should know from personal experience. While he is violently opposed to feudal Chinese morality and Christian morality, there can be no doubt that Tolstoy’s Resurrection was very much on his mind when he was composing the novel, so much so that, among his other roles, Ting Ning can be seen as a Chinese Nekhlyudov who seduces a servant girl and then abandons her to her fate. In chapter 8, immediately following his distasteful experience with Third Aunt, he meditates for several pages on the meaning of Resurrection, believing that Nekhlyudov and Maslova are right in doing what they did and that it is the unjust social system that brands her as a sinner and a criminal. Apparently assuming that the young prince was deeply in love with Maslova during the initial phase of their relationship, he believes that they were very much like Adam and Eve before the Fall, though Nekhluydov was soon seduced by the false values of society: At that time they shared the pristine glory of Adam and Eve; they were beyond criticism. The whole universe would sing for them because their love was what the golden law of human nature delighted in. At that time their kisses were mankind’s purest kisses. They kissed twice, and then pausing to think if there was need, or rather deciding there was need, they kissed once again, and they both smiled. At that time they were happy and glorious because they were only doing what the natural law said they should do, because their actions had not yet been judged and commented on by someone wielding society’s mighty golden pen in the service of traditional values. At that time that black-eyed, petite girl was happy and glorious. She heaved her soft virgin’s bosom and let out a long sigh as if she had just completed some enjoyable piece of manual labor.

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Nekhlyudov was like that also. But after a dull night heavy with white fog, mankind had completely changed.19

The author is apparently with his hero here in imagining a Rousseauist state of unfallen man and woman enjoying sexual happiness in unashamed freedom and glory. Typically, Ting Ning associates this paradisal vision with his childhood memories of idyllic happiness at Hsiao Chin-t’ang, which is identifiable with a secluded spot totally unspoiled by man near the author’s home where, as a boy, he had caught a small fish from a creek of icy water and swallowed it raw, relishing “the primitive man’s joy,” and where he had read through Lu Hsün’s Outcry (Na-han) in one afternoon, leaning against an old tree whose trunk almost lay flat against the creek.20 Many modern writers, Chinese and western, have celebrated comparable spots of wilderness as Edenic preserves of their childhood innocence, but for our author, who had enjoyed sexual license as a landlord’s son, paradise also means the prolongation of innocence in the realm of experience. Unlike Tolstoy and Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, therefore, Tuan-mu refuses to see with Blake the essential selfishness of the human will in the sexual realm. As representative major novelists of the western and Chinese traditions, both Tolstoy and Ts’ao would seem to agree that to be fully human is to accept the price of suffering and that, whatever the social and political accommodations for man’s pleasure and convenience, the inherent selfishness of man as a creature driven by libido cannot be eradicated. The further human endeavor after one’s contamination by evil in the realm of experience, as seen by Tolstoy and Ts’ao, is to reach for greater charity or enlightenment rather than to assume that one can automatically revert to a state of Edenic innocence by somehow exorcising the nightmare of civilization with all its laws and conventions. For many modern novelists, therefore, their failure or refusal to scale the moral heights of their great predecessors is ultimately due to their impatience with the human condition, their contempt for traditional morality, and their hope for a psychological or political revolution that would return man to paradise. Thus D. H. Lawrence, while praising Tolstoy’s novels for their “phallic splendor,” deplores his compromises with society in Anna Karenina and “the silly duplicity of Resurrection,” whose hero Nekhlyudov is nothing but “a muff, with his piety that

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nobody wants or believes in.”21 Tuan-mu’s hero and spokesman, even though he is truly moved by the experience of reading Resurrection, also makes fun of Tolstoy, because he, too, cannot accept his “new Christianity,” with its starting thesis in a dualism affirming man’s capacity for both good and evil. Like Pa Chin and so many other young novelists of the thirties, Tuan-mu asserts the instinctive goodness of man and ascribes the rise and rampancy of evil to the social system. The problems of metaphysics and individual ethics can be of no importance once one contemplates the ubiquitous illness and suffering on the Korchin plains, and in China at large. But even though Tuan-mu Hun-liang cannot transcend the major philosophic and political premises of his age, his own adaptation of the Nekhlyudov theme is grimly powerful for its indictment of the moral code that governs China’s feudal society. In chapter 17, in a state of utter depression, principally over the tragic death of Ch’un-hsiung, Ting Ning feels the criminal urge to make love to his personal maid Ling-tzu, a virgin: But today his thoughts were very wicked; even unconsciously, in his muddled way, he wanted to make her the object of his wanton violation; so her soft, bright, and intelligent eyes again floated in front of his own. . . . Then he summoned all his strength and uttered a cry from the deepest recesses of his soul: Let reason help me, let my self-respect and purity give me courage, let me banish these harmful, idle fancies, let the footprints of Maslova stay well within the confines of the moral fable imagined by that fuddy-duddy Tolstoy, let him, self-intoxicated, cling to the tail of his Christian doctrine. . . . Give me courage, or else I’ll be broken to pieces.22

Despite this appeal to reason and self-respect, he seduces Ling-tzu, though the scene is not described. Soon thereafter, he leaves home for an undisclosed destination. In the meantime, Ling-tzu, who has become pregnant, suffers a fate far worse than Maslova’s. Even though she receives letters from Ting Ning, she doesn’t write back, afraid that telling him of her condition would put him in an angry or jeering mood. By September, when people can see she is pregnant, she hides in her room, pretending to be ill and not reporting to work (though, since she has been seduced only recently, her

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condition shouldn’t be detectable). Then, on September 19, Ting Ning’s mother summons her to her bedroom. A recent widow left lonelier by the death of her companion Ch’un-hsiung and the departure of her son (not to mention the earlier death of her daughter), Mrs. Ting nevertheless commands Ling-tzu to drink a cup of poison to punish her for her impudent crime of having seduced her son. She has no regard for Ting Ning’s seed in her womb and doesn’t mind being practically a ghost in her mansion since her daughter-in-law stays by herself. Ling-tzu pleads: “T’ai-t’ai . . . Ch’un-hsiung is also dead. . . . T’ai-t’ai . . . leave me here to wait on you. . . .” Her every sound was broken even before it had left her mouth. “Slut, what do I want you to wait on me for? I’ll be satisfied when all of you are dead. Heng, you . . .” Ling-tzu’s whole body trembled in fright; her eyes, popping wide, stared straight ahead at the k’ang; gradually two teardrops, very, very large, oozed out of her eyes. Mother didn’t utter a sound; she lay there betraying no trace of feeling but rather an air of self-satisfaction. “You’d better drink it. . . . I’ll give you face; you die and nobody will know anything about it: I’ll bury you handsomely.”23

This scene (only a brief excerpt is given above) and the subsequent description of Ling-tzu’s state of mind as she gradually sinks into unconsciousness constitute one of the finest sections of the novel. Before she dies, gunshots are already heard, ushering in a long night of rioting and revolution. Through this powerful use of montage, it looks as if the gunshots are an instant response to the cruel crime of forcing an innocent girl to die. If we can say that the Ting family stands for the old China about to pass away, then it is precisely because that family has sunk into the darkest night of shame through this act of wanton murder that a bright dawn for a new China can be predicted. No comparable instances of deliberate cruelty are perpetrated by Pao-yü’s mother in Dream of the Red Chamber. Of the maligned maids, Chin-ch’uan feels too ashamed to live on while Ch’ing-wen is driven out of Pao-yü’s quarters when she is ill. But she is not forced to drink poison. What could Pao-yü have done if Madame Wang had forced her to drink poison? Under the circumstances, to turn Buddhist monk or, in the manner of Nekhlyudov, to seek a new life in

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Siberia would have been equally futile and cowardly. While, in our fondness for novels like Dream of the Red Chamber and Resurrection, we would have wanted the author to thicken the moral texture of the cruel episode, to keep Ting Ning informed of the tragedy taking place in his home and make him bear the burden of its memory, as a modern intellectual disgusted with the old China, Tuan-mu Hung-liang is certainly amply justified in feeling that it is not worth the dignity of his hero to be involved in this ugliest of tragedies. A Ting Ning scarred by the memory of Ling-tzu’s murder could not again cry “Vita Nova!” with confident gusto. While this cry remains something of an empty boast, as we do not know where Ting Ning is going, it certainly speaks for his desire to do away with the morality of Tolstoy and Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in in favor of the rough justice of The Water Margin; to eradicate the bad influence of Christianity, Buddhism, and Taoism; and to put an end to all domestic misery, social injustice, and national humiliation. The cry of “Vita Nova!”, ringing loudly in the morning splendor of the Korchin plains, is the cry of every Chinese novelist in the thirties seized with social indignation and patriotic fervor. Upon the completion of The Korchin Banner Plains, Tuan-mu Hung-liang wrote for seven years mainly novels and short stories about anti-Japanese resistance. Then his patriotic fervor waned, and when he started to write a sequel to our novel in 1943, he could only finish five chapters because the grander vision of The Korchin Banner Plains could not return.24 Since lately he had enjoyed remarkable success in being strictly autobiographical in such stories as “First Kisses” and “Early Spring,” it could have been his intention to give a more truthful account of his family in the sequel. So his first order of business was to resurrect the poisoned maid (we may safely assume the real-life Ling-tzu did not die on September 19, 1931, even if she had been made pregnant by Tuan-mu). It so happens that an old steward, forever kind and loyal to the Ting family, gives her some medication that causes her to vomit. Then a ginger preparation is forced down her throat to detoxify her system so that by dawn she is clearly out of danger. That same morning, Ting Ning’s elder brother Ting Lan (he is no longer called Ta-ning) returns to Ancient Elms with his troops to restore order and guard against further raids by bandits (it would appear the bandit volunteers did not march on to Mukden after all). By chapter 5, Ling-tzu, much like Ch’ing-wen after being banished from Takuanyuan, is temporarily sharing humbler quarters with a woman

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servant called Yün, and there is a hint that a lesbian relationship may be developing between the two. The author still includes no news of Ting Ning, apparently not knowing what to say about his mysterious activities away from home before bringing him back to the Korchin plains. In view of the obvious fiasco of the attempted sequel, it would seem pointless to regret that The Korchin Banner Plains, the author’s most ambitious work, should have been undertaken at a time when he was most experimental and least sure of himself as a stylist. Admittedly, the work would have been far more readable if he had waited a few years and gained greater proficiency as a novelist. But at twenty-one, his patriotic fervor, his revolutionary romanticism, his recent participation in army life and political journalism, and his fresh memories of a lost home and a lost land had all gone into the making of a vision of epic scope. With the years the vision became fragmentary and eventually vanished. We should be grateful, therefore, that Tung-mu Hung-liang should have felt at the very start of his career the creative compulsion to compose a novel that, for all its faults in style and execution, remains the most ambitious embodiment of an affirmative / negative vision of China by a writer in the thirties.

Postscript In a letter postmarked February 7, 1981, Tuan-mu Hung-liang wrote me from Peking that his mother was married into the Ts’ao family as a concubine while his father’s first wife, née Wang, who had a daughter of her own, was still alive. The latter, however, “soon” died (the phrase pu-chiu could mean “several months” to “a few years”), thus paving the way for the concubine’s promotion to the rank of a legitimate wife. This could explain why, according to The Korchin Banner Plains: A Family History, Tuan-mu’s mother was treated so shabbily by her parents-in-law and why her own family was so very opposed to the marriage. Out of his filial regard for his mother, Tuan-mu has never referred in his published writings to her initial status in the Ts’ao family, and I am privileged indeed to have been the first scholar in China or abroad to receive from him this vital piece of information, which provides a new perspective to our understanding of The Korchin Banner Plains.

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According to the same letter, Tuan-mu’s father died of diphtheria and erysipelas in the autumn of 1927. He was only forty-nine years old. That fall diphtheria also made Tuan-mu ill and claimed the life of his younger sister.

Bibliography (This is a very select bibliography. The notes contain additional titles.) Tuan-mu Hung-liang. K’o-erh-ch’in-ch’i ts’ao-yuan. Shanghai: K’ai-ming, 1939. ——. K’o-erh-ch’in-ch’i ts’ao-yuan. Rev. ed. Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-pan-she, 1956. Hsia, C. T. and Kong Haili, eds. Ta shih-tai (full title in glossary). Hsintien: Li-hsü wen-hua, 1996.

Residual Femininity Women in Chinese Communist Fiction (1963)

In Chinese Communist literature, men and women are primarily seen in their similarity as workers rather than in their sexual and emotional difference as human beings. Women, as much as men, are praised for their socialist zeal and heroic capacity for work and condemned for being socialist sluggards indifferent to production. But despite its repudiation of “human interest” as a symptom of capitalist or revisionist decadence,1 even this supremely practical literature cannot begin to exist without some superficial attention to personal problems, and these problems inevitably attest to the persistence of biological instincts and immemorial habits of human civilization. Until the techniques, Communist or otherwise, for dehumanization are perfected, men and women will remain subject to irrational passions, and if circumstances permit, they will fall in love, get married, bring up children, and in other devious ways contrive for pleasure and happiness. In tracing the lot of Chinese women under Communism, I will therefore take for granted that the primary purpose of their earthly existence is to contribute to and assist in production and examine rather their residual personal problems in the context of the overriding importance of socialist construction. The results of my investigation, if my women characters, drawn invariably from short stories, are at all typical, will show, not surprisingly, the pathetic adjustment of their feminine instincts and interests to the jealous demands of party and state. The exceptions that I will note—sympathetic victims and challengers of

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the impersonal Communist bureaucracy—are all heroines of revisionist fiction that has been subject to vehement attack by the press. Space permitting, I would have liked to conduct my inquiry in a strictly historical fashion: a year-by-year survey of the changing condition of women under changing political and economic circumstances during the twelve years of Communist power since 1949. Though in its main emphases Chinese Communist literature has remained unchanged since the proclamation of the Mao Tse-tung line in 1942, writers, of necessity, have responded to particular drives and campaigns through the years, and in so doing, have reflected the changing complexion of the new society. Roughly, the change has been toward greater dehumanization under the increasing necessity for collectivization so that the literature of the Yenan period, with its permitted bucolic simplicity, is quite different from the literature of the post–1949 period, and the literature of the early and middle fifties is quite different from the literature of the Great Leap Forward and after, when the foundering of the commune system in a sea of apathy has meant for the people a regimen of impossible toil and actual starvation. Since the late Yenan period, production has always remained “the theme of all themes,”2 but in reading the more recent literature, one recalls a time when labor was not seen as a night-and-day process, when the material rewards for labor were confidently and rightly expected. These changes have been duly reflected in the behavior of women characters in fiction. In 1943, in his celebrated story “The Marriage of Hsiao Erh-hei,” Chao Shu-li could suggest the popularity of a village beauty in patently idyllic terms: “With or without excuse, the village lads would always want to exchange a few words with Hsiao Ch’in. When Hsiao Ch’in went laundering, the lads would immediately go laundering; when Hsiao Ch’in climbed trees to pick edible leaves, the lads would immediately do the same.”3 In spite of its great absurdity as a description of Chinese village life, the passage carries in retrospect a poignant pastoral charm because after 1949 any comparable description in a story of contemporary life would have been out of place. In a story about life in a commune, it would have been unthinkable. Granted that washing clothes and picking leaves are useful work, the youths in Chao Shu-li’s story are nevertheless motivated by their desire to get closer to a village beauty rather than by their desire to build socialism. Their behavior is reprehensible, and the girl, by causing these regular commotions, is also censurable as a distracting and disruptive influence. Following this line of

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reasoning, one can understand why Fang Chi’s story “Let Life Become More Beautiful” ( Jang sheng-huo pien-te keng mei-hao pa) ( Jen-min wen-hsüeh [People’s Literature, or PL, March 1950]), also about a village beauty, became one of the earliest stories to merit severe censure from the People’s Daily.4 Like Hsiao Ch’in, Hsiao Huan, though very faithful to her chosen lover, welcomes attention from all her admirers. The village militiamen gather at her house every evening, giving her a bad reputation. But when the local cadres have failed to recruit able-bodied youth for the Liberation Army, it is she who incites eleven of her friends, including her lover, to volunteer for service. Throughout the story, the author is quite self-conscious about his heroine’s objectionable popularity, and he apparently thought that her meritorious action as an inspirer of patriotic zeal would vindicate her honor. But he didn’t realize that if it is wrong to attract so many militiamen to her house, it is positively wicked of her to rally these men to a worthy cause when the cadres have failed. The Party brooks no rivals. A beautiful girl in Communist China has to suppress all vanity lest in her small circle she unwittingly supplant the Party as the primary object of adoration. “The Heirloom” (Ch’uan-chia pao) (1949), another story by Chao Shu-li, confidently asserts the kind of prosperity that has eluded the grasp of the Chinese in the years of their increasing collectivization. The story depicts, quite ably, the comic contentions between a feudal-minded woman and her enlightened daughter-in-law, Chin-kuei, who, as a labor hero and chairman of the local women’s association, is enjoying with her husband the blessings of the new Communist order. But the mother, bound to extreme frugality by her habitual poverty, disapproves of her spendthrift ways. Who has ever heard of a daughter-in-law who uses half a bucket of water to wash a head of cabbage, squanders one catty of oil each month for cooking, and has her uniforms fashionably made by a tailor? Good-humoredly, Chin-kuei eventually convinces the woman that under the new regime extreme measures of economy are impractical and uncalled for. Yet following the establishment of the commune system, the roles of the two women are reversed: it is now the tradition-bound woman who would insist on token comfort and luxury, and her progressive husband or daughter-in-law who would force her to conserve all capital for socialism. In “Corduroy” (Teng-hsin jung), a recent story by Hsi Jung (PL, July–August 1961), the backward wife of a commune director badly wants to buy a few yards of corduroy to make a suit of clothes for her

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prospective daughter-in-law, a labor hero. If in 1949 the chairman of a women’s association is entitled to the luxury of custom-made uniforms, one would think that the wife of a commune director in 1961—after a dozen years of frenzied national reconstruction—would be within her rights to buy some cloth. But no, the poor woman doesn’t have a penny to spend, since the dividend due to her family for their last year’s labor, along with all the earnings of the member families in the commune, has been deposited in the commune trust as development capital. And her husband, a selfless worker, is firmly against her borrowing money to meet this unnecessary expense. Using her influence, however, she eventually gets the money from a sympathetic accountant (also censured for his wastefulness because, while keeping accounts deep into the night, he keeps on using a glass-covered new lamp that consumes more kerosene than the smoky old lamp). But when the story becomes scandalous news, she has to return the money and the corduroy. Moreover, her husband instigates his future daughter-in-law to convene a mass meeting to criticize her: “Your big aunt is too backward in her ideas. If we don’t criticize her now, I am afraid her backwardness will get worse.”5 In 1949 the self-denying mother-in-law is backward; in 1961 the selfdenying daughter-in-law is progressive. Conditions on the mainland may have deteriorated during the interim, but “progressive” and “backward” have remained a reliable pair of propaganda terms, supplying all the needed drama in stories about women (or about men and children). So far as women are concerned, the decisive event during this period has been the enactment of the Marriage Law in 1950, proclaiming the emancipation of all women from feudal bondage. During that and the following year, a great many stories appeared to welcome the new marital freedom of women. Nearly all center upon the conflict between the progressive and the backward—a theme hashed and rehashed since the May Fourth period—with the progressive children easily winning out against their backward parents, who are uniformly stupid in attempting to arrange undesirable matches for their offspring.6 Between the marriage stories of the May Fourth period and those of the Communist period, however, there is a fundamental difference. The stories of the early period—and this is true even of Pa Chin’s later massive assaults on the feudal marital custom, Family and Spring—are crude in the direction of sentimentality: a lachrymose exaltation of the emotion of love in the stifling environment of feudal oppression. The Communist stories,

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on the other hand, are crude in the direction of practicality: true love among the young is always cemented by their love for labor. The progressive daughters instinctively choose the labor heroes of their locality, while their mothers, guided by their feudal regard for property, would marry them into families that are comparatively well off. The contest between the progressive and the backward is, in the last analysis, a contest between two forms of prudence: the prudence of Communist youths who invest in labor and the discredited prudence of their elders who still bank on individual wealth. And in this contest the love factor necessarily receives only minimal and perfunctory attention. By 1950, writers on the mainland did not have to be told that romantic love was disruptive of Party discipline and destructive of Party loyalty.7 They knew that while the cheerful and hard-working lovers might brighten the socialist scene, any personal attachment that manifested a deeper emotion than a jaunty cheerfulness was potentially subversive. Once they have removed the feudal obstacles to their union, therefore, the Communist lovers remain positively cheerful. They do not pine for each other’s company, and they are happily resigned to an infinite postponement of their marriage as long as more imperative duties claim their attention. On their wedding day they are more likely than not to perform some feats of unusual valor; during the wedding ceremony they invariably pledge themselves to work much harder in the years ahead. These brave deeds and promises are necessary to atone for what appears almost as the inherently criminal character of marriage as a private union between two individuals. With his brief story “Marriage” (Chieh-hun) (1950), Ma Feng set the trend for cheerfulness. In that story the heroine Hsiao-ch’ing, on one pretext or another, postpones her wedding. When her lover Ch’un-sheng wants to set the date again following her stint in the nearby city as a trainee in hygiene work for women and infants, she good-humoredly lectures him: “See how impatient you are! I’ve just returned from study and the village hygiene work for women and babies hasn’t started yet and we are discussing our personal problem. That would certainly set a bad example among the people! I think maybe after the Chinese New Year . . .” Not waiting for her to finish, Ch’un-sheng said with a smile, “I am too individualistic. I agree with you.”8

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The date is finally set, after further postponements. As luck would have it, before they can register on that day, Ch’un-sheng has to help unload and load a truckful of cargo and then run five or six li after a secret agent and grapple with him in a river. One of his ears is bitten and torn, and his left foot suffers a bad cut. Begrimed, drenched, and bloody, he has now shown sufficient socialist zeal to be granted the privilege of marriage, and his bride, who that same morning has delivered a baby and therefore made good use of her training in hygiene, can now eye him affectionately without fear of reproach. “Hsiao-ch’ing now could no longer suppress her passion and she dashed over to clasp Ch’un-sheng’s hand. For a long while she was speechless, but it looked as if her pair of big eyes were saying, ‘You are so lovable!’ ”9 In the second half of 1956, when writers were beginning to enjoy some illusion of freedom, one critic attacked the trend started by Ma Feng’s story and wondered if only ascetics are fit for socialism.10 Another critic, Huang Ch’iu-yun, catalogued the formulas employed by writers to make love look trivial, silly, or mechanical, and rightly attributed this tendency to their fear of the puritan critics who would denounce any elaborate love scene as a sign of “petty-bourgeois mentality” and “vulgar capitalist taste.”11 Granting the primacy of collective welfare, he then hurled the question that would be repeatedly asked by the rightist and revisionist critics during the “hundred flowers” period: “Then what is collective welfare? Isn’t this a hope that every individual will live a little better? And to live better, won’t that include love and family happiness?”12 Among the uncensored fiction, it is the rare story that conveys some feeling of love despite the prescribed formula of cheerful prudishness. Liu Chen’s “Big Sister Ch’un” (Ch’un ta-chieh) (PL, August 1954) is such a story. Big Sister Ch’un, a member of the Youth League, is constrained by her mother to marry a medium-income peasant, while her own choice is Ming-hua, a turned-over peasant now serving as Party secretary to a neighboring village. The outcome of this conflict is of course foreseeable, but in the author’s account of the lovers’ courtship, there are some fine moments. After having fallen in love with Ming-hua, Ch’un gives him two pairs of shoes made by her own hand. “He was now twenty-two years old and had always worn shoes made by his mother. This was the first time he was ever wearing shoes made by someone else. His heart felt an indescribable sensation.”13 Later, she goes to his village to attend the theatricals at a fair. “She stood near the top of a hilly slope, scanning the thou-

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sands of faces in the open theater. Truly, she was searching for him as if he were a pearl in the ocean, but she finally located him. Her pleased face turned crimson. She thought that in this multitude of people everyone had his own features but there was no one better-looking than he, or more pleasing to her eyes!”14 But, characteristically, despite the two brief scenes just cited, the author dares not explore love at a more intimate level. The lovers soon leave the theatrical performance for a secluded peach grove. After a brief avowal of their love for each other, the scene ends quite disappointingly: Ming-hua tightly clasped her two hands. They talked till dark and then each went his own way home.15

( Judging from my limited experience of Communist fiction, it seems that unmarried lovers express their deepest feelings only by holding hands. Only babies are kissed. Married couples may embrace when under the exhilarating influence of good news, such as the admission of the husband to the Communist Party or his promotion.)16 As a marriage story of 1954, “Big Sister Ch’un” would be quite dated if it did not concern itself with the then vital issue of the launching of agricultural cooperatives. The progressive Ming-hua is a member of his village cooperative, while the man Ch’un’s mother has chosen for her is an independent. After months of lonely estrangement from her married daughter, the mother is surprised on her first visit to her new home that the young couple live in a state of abundance even though Ming-hua has long been known for his poverty. The awakened mother will naturally work now for the collectivization of her own village. In the stories about agricultural cooperatives, mostly written during 1954 and 1955, the younger generation plays a decisive part in the struggle between the progressive and the backward.17 Theoretically, no one can force a well-to-do farmer, who has bettered himself after the land reform through sheer industry, to join the cooperative in his village, but he is always compelled to do so under the influence of his son or daughter who has fallen in love with someone already participating in the collective enterprise. As in the marriage stories, love here again serves a practical purpose: to make the recalcitrant parents fall in line and thereby increase farm production. In “Song of the Forward March” (Ch’ien-chin ch’ü) (PL, March 1954), a story in which the author has retained much of his

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preliberation skill for scenic and character description, Shih T’o18 probes well the mind of the young under powerful pressure to join the majority. Ta-pao, twenty-three years old, is smitten with a progressive girl whose family has already become a part of the cooperative, but his father has remained a stubborn independent. Under the circumstances, he feels ashamed and humiliated, developing an acute case of inferiority complex toward his girl. To educate (or to spite) his father, he leaves home to join some technical expedition in the Northeast, which causes his father infinite pain. His two crops already ruined by bad weather, he now applies for membership in the cooperative and undertakes a fruitless journey to seek his son. The following year, on his second visit to the village, the author’s sympathy is impressively with the defeated old man: “His body was not sturdy to begin with; now he was bent with age to an extraordinary degree. His wrinkled and dry skin was almost in direct contact with his bones; the lines on his face had deepened; formerly he had only a few white whiskers, now they were over half white.”19 In “Song of the Forward March,” Shih T’o has written an exceptional story that abandons the prescribed cheerful note to probe a more complex and bitter reality. His observations on Ta-pao show especial psychological acumen: “I didn’t then realize that the country youths, though their outward expression is stolid and imperturbable, approach the city schoolchildren in their inner simplicity.”20 Precisely: it is not so much that the young are progressive and enlightened as that, under Communist education, they are conditioned to join the crowd, to compete with their peers and emulate their betters. And love, inevitably, plays an important role in sharpening one’s appetite for competition and emulation. Ai Wu has written a number of stories on the theme of love-inspired emulation, of which “Return at Night” (Yeh-kuei) (PL, March 1954) is the best. An established preliberation author with many impressive titles to his credit, Ai Wu is perhaps the most accomplished short-story writer in China today. Though his themes are predictably trite, his techniques have remained thoroughly western so that he avoids alike the heavy touch of propaganda and the traditional Chinese naïveté of telling the “whole story,” cultivated by many Communist writers. “Return at Night,” therefore, is delightfully superior to most Chinese Communist stories. The hero of this story, K’ang Shao-ming, is a cheerful and talkative factory youth with few worries; the one thing that possibly bothers him is that his membership in the Youth League is still pending. One night, after

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a long meeting, he has missed his last train and has to walk a long distance in bitter cold to reach home. Luckily, a buggy passes by and he gets a ride with a girl driver, who is quite severe and is lashing her horse on to maintain a fast pace. K’ang Shao-ming enjoys nothing as much as talking and joking with girls, but after repeated promptings, the girl only tells him curtly that she is trying to make her night class at her village: Noticing that the girl driver had finally cast him a glance, K’ang Shao-ming explained to her airily, “Comrade, you don’t know how hard we work.” Then with a cheerful sigh: “Tonight, for instance, I even missed the train, really too damned busy.” “We then are different. However busy, we have to make night school.” The girl driver proudly gave this brief answer, then applied her whip to make the horse gallop ahead.21

Finally she has to water the horse. She halts the buggy and borrows a trough of water and a lantern from a village house. “K’ang Shao-ming . . . then hurriedly stepped down from the buggy and held up the lantern for her. The hair around the horse’s mouth was encrusted with white frost, but as it dipped into the trough for water, the frost gradually melted. The girl driver’s fresh and delicate cheeks, frozen to a thorough red like an apple, were radiant with beauty. A girl so pretty he had never before seen; he was in a daze.”22 Meanwhile, the boy’s begrimed face, exposed by the same lantern, has amused the girl, and she becomes more talkative. She particularly inquires about an old, special-class model worker in his factory. She also tells him that she works in a model cooperative. Before alighting, he asks for her name, which she gives. But he is hurt because she doesn’t return the courtesy but drives on without looking back. Without his usual cheerfulness, he proceeds to walk home preoccupied by the thought. “This young thing, her eyes are set so high. She only sees special-class model workers.”23 Later, while serving him supper, his mother finds him particularly pensive. Ai Wu sketches the two characters sharply against a night journey, and in keeping with the scenic method of the modern short story, he doesn’t tell us whether the boy will see the girl again, not to say whether their “romance” will ever prosper. It is a masterful study of a boy’s awakening to love, but in a Communist story, this awakening is concomitant

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with an equal awakening to his sense of responsibility as a factory worker. His talkative jocularity will get him nowhere; to be at all deserving of the girl’s attention, he has at least to work as hard as she, if not to strive for the distinction of a special-class model worker. In a much less successful companion piece, “Rain” (Yü) (PL, April 1957), Ai Wu reverses the situation to depict a girl’s silent adoration of a studious factory youth. For over two years since the hospitalization of her father, Hsü Kuei-ch’ing has been forced to discontinue school to serve as train conductor on a commuting line. Quite envious of high school girls in her deprived state, she especially reserves her admiration for a factory youth who for over a year now has sat next to a window on his evening ride home and concentrated on reading or solving mathematical problems. Occasionally, when preoccupied with a tough problem, he will miss his regular stop and alight at the next station. He is so studious that never once does he glance at her or greet her while handing her the ticket. But the girl has of course fallen in love. Under his good influence, she studies every night, in spite of extreme fatigue. One evening she walks home through a heavy thunderstorm particularly depressed; her mother thinks she is sick, but actually she is worried about her hero, who has again missed his regular stop this evening and will have to walk home thoroughly drenched and exposed to the danger of lightning. Among factory workers and their wives, the same condition of emulation obtains. One spouse, usually the husband, devotes his waking life to work, and the other has to catch up with him to reinvigorate a marriage gone stale with new socialist zeal. In “The New Home” (Hsin-te chia), another skillful story by Ai Wu (PL, October 1953), the heroine, a country wife just arriving in the city to join her husband, is quite miserable because, too busy in the factory, he has broken his promise to meet her at the railroad station. But in the company of his friends, who greet her in her new home and tell her of his spirited dedication to work, her resentment gradually melts until, following their departure, she grows positively ecstatic in contemplation of her apartment: “The walls were snow white, the window panes were shining. The new iron-frame bed was covered with a white sheet with a red floral design. The oil-painted table and chairs were all gleaming. On the wall there was a new portrait of Chairman Mao, which made her especially happy.”24 When her husband comes home later in the evening, she is already imbued with a new spirit for “study.”

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In the above story, the emphasis is of course on study. The new furniture may dazzle for a while, but with the husband rarely at home, even the benign portrait of Chairman Mao will soon pall. Only through study and through full participation in the life around her can a factory wife live a tolerably happy life. But some wives, though efficient housekeepers entirely devoted to their family, adjust to their new life rather slowly. In Ai Ming-chih’s story, “The Wife” (Ch’i-tzu) (Wen-yi yüeh-pao, February 1957), Yüeh-chen is worried about her husband’s growing indifference following his promotion to a position of greater responsibility and consequent total preoccupation with his work; she is even alarmed that he may abandon her for a younger woman. Trying the bourgeois trick of making herself more attractive, she goes to a beauty parlor to give her hair a permanent. But her somewhat shocked husband only comments teasingly, “Ha, how you’ve fixed your hair. It looks now like a duck’s rear.”25 Heartbroken, Yüeh-chen steels herself to the challenge of attending study sessions in the afternoons. Not too long after, she surprises her husband one night with her new literacy and even helps him copying figures. From then on, she has regained his affections and becomes known in the neighborhood as a model wife. In “The Warmth of Spring” (Ch’un-nuan shih-chieh) (PL, October 1959; translated in Chinese Literature [CL], July 1961), by the highly praised new short-story writer, Miss Ju Chih-chüan,26 the heroine has to embrace a far more rigorous work schedule to earn her husband’s renewed appreciation. Ching-lan goes regularly to the meetings of the neighborhood women’s committee, though without enthusiasm; for the past month, furthermore, in addition to taking care of her husband and two children, she has been putting in eight hours of voluntary work every day for the committee’s Production and Welfare Cooperative. But her husband remains unimpressed, even with a special shrimp dinner she has prepared one Sunday to arouse memories of their shared poverty in the early days. Following this fiasco, she turns to her committee work with new zeal, determined to help fulfill the cooperative’s challenging new assignment of turning out ten thousand transmitters within seven days. Now her husband begins to show new interest: he even calls for her at her workshop late one night and treats her to a bowl of noodles at a snack bar. In her complete dedication to socialist labor, Ching-lan feels that “that invisible intangible ‘barrier’ had vanished completely.”27

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Along with her husband’s appreciation, a woman so dedicated of course gets public praise: Ching-lan’s name is cited in the workshop bulletin for her contribution to “technical innovation.” For factory wives in fear of losing their husbands as for children of backward peasants eager to join the cooperative, it is the terror of isolation that drives everyone to behave like a schoolboy in quest of group conformity, praise, and appreciation. A bowl of noodles, a smile from one’s husband or sweetheart, or even an official citation may not mean much, but these gestures of encouragement surely soothe the spirit when one is under the constant dread of being backward and not wanted. If the stories about factory wives reflect at all the actual conditions, then their socialist zeal is not so much an expression of disinterested love for country and Party as an inverted expression of bourgeois “togetherness”; in a Communist society a woman is closer to her husband when sharing his kind of drudgery than when merely content to perform her traditional wifely functions. This Communist variety of domestic fiction can be seen to have much in common with the type of American middlebrow fiction intended for women readers. They pose the same problems though the solutions they offer are entirely different. When faced with the loss of her husband’s affections, a typical heroine from a story in the Ladies’ Home Journal will try to improve her physical appearance, social poise, or culinary skill; quite unlike her Chinese sister in a similar quandary, she will curtail her busy schedule of outside interests to cultivate an image of pliant femininity. In America as in China, a husband’s preoccupation with his work or ambition is a source of domestic discord. But whereas, in a typical American middlebrow novel like Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the husband gallantly relinquishes his ambition to become an executive and settles for a nine-to-five job so as to preserve domestic peace, the Chinese husband is denied this recourse to bourgeois chivalry, and it is entirely up to his wife to catch up with him in endurance and zeal to maintain a semblance of spiritual unity. At the Third Congress of the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation (September 1957), “to diligently and thriftily manage the home” was proclaimed to be as much a woman’s duty as “to diligently and thriftily build the nation.”28 But if the short stories are any evidence, housework is only tolerated, if not actively despised: a woman’s mere contentment with housework, as shown in “The Wife” and “The Warmth of

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Spring,” indicates a want of socialist zeal. Not only progressive girls shudder at the idea of being tied down to domestic chores, but even old women get restless at home and want to serve in a public capacity. In “A Promise Is Kept” ( Ju-yüan) (Wen-yi yüeh-pao, May 1959; reprinted in PL, August 1959), another story by Ju Chih-chüan, a grandmother is seen enjoying new contentment and pride as a worker in a toy factory. Since both her son and daughter-in-law earn good wages in factories, she would be actually more useful at home doing the chores and taking care of the granddaughter. But how empty she used to feel when on May Days she was left all alone while her son and his wife were marching in the parade! And how she hated cooking rice! “She took down the pot and sat musing in the kitchen. This was the responsibility she had—a task which could never amount to much but was a nuisance if she forgot about it.”29 But with the nationwide conversion of the cooperatives into largescale people’s communes in 1958 and 1959, millions of regimented women were of course relieved of the odious task of preparing meals for their families. They were not only liberated from the kitchen, but thanks to the military mode of their new existence and the provident service of the nurseries and kindergartens, they were to a great extent emancipated from their traditional servitude to husband and children as well. Story writers reporting on the commune experiment now wrote with expected enthusiasm of women’s new freedom and much enhanced socialist utility. Quite unlike the stories about factory wives, these tales would assert the superior zeal and dedication of the new women, often at the expense of their prejudiced or incredulous menfolk (for the cliché of progressive vs. backward must be maintained to provide dramatic interest), praising their infinite resourcefulness in a great variety of jobs now opening to them: as captain of a production brigade, mess hall superintendent, pig-raising expert, obstetrician, or meteorologist. A young writer, Li Chun, explored this vein with conspicuous success and emerged as the foremost eulogist of the new women under the commune system. In his most celebrated work, “The Story of Li Shuang-shuang” (Li Shuang-shuang hsiao-chuan) (PL, March 1960),30 he traces the happy evolution of a peasant woman from the drudgery of cooking at home to the challenging excitement of cooking for the masses in the mess hall; the title heroine has appropriately become a national symbol for emancipated women. In comparison with other propaganda tales of this type, this story is not without distinction: appropriating the style of Chao Shu-li for the occasion, the author has actually sur-

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passed his master in his ability to sustain the mood of pastoral comedy in his more effective scenes. But these scenes are dominated not so much by the heroine as by her comic foil, the husband Hsi-wang, whose backward but endearing ways are done remarkably to life. But precisely because of their new enlightenment, the exemplary heroines of the commune stories are so taken up with their public duties that they rarely have time to attend to personal business. In Li Chun’s “Mother and Daughter” (Liang-tai jen), for example, the younger heroine, Chu-chu, finds time to lecture her prospective father-in-law over his objections to her volunteering for service as a midwife, but not once is she seen in her fiancé’s company, and even his name remains unrecorded in the story. One gets the impression that she is so happily busy with her manifold tasks that she scarcely needs the luxury of a romantic attachment. But if women in the communes have ceased to be distracted by feminine frivolities, they are, on the other hand, seen with rather odd frequency in the habit of bearing children. The disproportionate number of stories about childbirth serves no doubt to call attention to the improved obstetric and maternity service now provided by the communes. A typical story like Ju Chih-chüan’s “Quietly in the Maternity Hospital” (Chingching-te ch’an-yüan li) (PL, June 1960) harps on the gratitude a lying-in patient ought to feel when contrasting her good fortune with the primitive care her peasant mother received while giving birth to her a generation ago. But in celebrating the new era of socialist welfare, the story writers also give occasional glimpses of the psychological condition of women while in confinement and convalescence. In the two examples that follow we will see that, while one woman, understandably though atypically, still demands her husband’s tender care, the other, far more noble-minded, actually refuses to attend to her condition because of her total preoccupation with her work. In Ho Fei’s “A Big Family” (Ta chia-t’ing) (PL, December 1961), a young wife has just given birth and is now resting at home. It is two days before the Chinese New Year, and a snowstorm is raging. When her husband, the captain of a production team, comes home that afternoon from work, she again reminds him of two pieces of long-neglected business: to repair the leaking roof and to pay a visit to her mother, who hasn’t seen them for months. The first item of business is particularly urgent as the health of the convalescent mother and new baby might be endangered living in an unheated house with a leaking roof. Her husband agrees but

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immediately leaves home for more important business: to get provisions for the public dining hall at the commune headquarters some twenty li away. He pushes a cart over tortuous mountain paths in a worsening storm and returns the same night to his village, loaded with cargo. But on reaching the dining hall, he proceeds to decorate the hall and prepare for a big New Year’s Eve dinner so that for over forty-two hours he works incessantly, with time out only for two meals. In the meantime, of course, he has completely forgotten his wife’s request to fix the roof. When he finally returns home on the morning of New Year’s Day—with the snowstorm still raging—he is therefore agreeably surprised to find that in his absence the roof has been repaired by friendly neighbors and his family well attended to. Under the commune system a wife may not always count on her husband in times of need, but she is part of “a big family” and should be happily resigned to its efficient service. She should make even fewer demands than a factory wife on her husband’s precious time. Unlike the young wife in the preceding story, the heroine of Lin Chin-lan’s “New Life” (Hsin-sheng) (PL, December 1960) scorns the traditional feminine weakness for attention; in fact, she feels so guilty about wasting time for childbirth that she would rather risk her life than stop working. She, a captain in charge of vegetable production, cultivates with her comrades a tract of land situated in a mountainous region completely detached from the other units of the commune and unreachable by normal means of transportation. Because of this geographical difficulty and because, with her pelvis so narrow, she is certainly going to have a hard time giving birth, the old doctor from the commune headquarters has urged her to come down a month earlier from her isolated spot to make ready for hospitalization before the baby is due. But how could she neglect those eggplants growing so plump under her care? So she refuses to go; now in the third night of her confinement she is dying. But later that night a young woman doctor arrives in the nick of time, after an extremely arduous journey, to save the lives of mother and son. The young doctor, who dominates the second half of the story, serves as an appropriate occasion to introduce a subject so far undiscussed in this article—the professional woman. Ever since Mao Tse-tung decreed the worker, peasant, soldier line for literature in 1942, intellectuals have played a relatively small role in fiction. But stories about women teachers and especially about women physicians and nurses are not uncommon, since their socialist utility is quite self-evident.31 Insofar as these stories

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evince a feminine interest, it always takes the form of the heroine’s unreserved preference for the selfless nobility of her profession over any selfish hankering after personal happiness she may have retained. The young doctor in “New Life” is typical. On her return journey, elated by her amazing success as an obstetrician and the gratitude of the overjoyed villagers, she pauses in the hills to pour out her thoughts to a fellow doctor, her regular correspondent and possibly her lover. She writes of her newfound happiness, “I’ve been thinking and thinking that this is far more sublime and far greater than any kind of personal ‘happiness.’ Perhaps they are two entirely different things.”32 The heroine of the significantly titled story “Love” (Ai-ch’ing) (PL, September 1956), a young physician named Yeh Pi-chen, comes to the same conclusion, but under far more trying personal circumstances. Writing at a time when adverse criticism of mechanical descriptions of love was widely heard, the author, Li Wei-lun, apparently attempted a full-blown romantic exercise, though the end product is unbelievably sentimental. But the story has nonetheless escaped censure because it positively and unambiguously affirms the incomparable nobility of socialist “love” over individualist romantic “love.” Pi-chen is finally to part from her colleague, Chou Ting-shan, whom she has loved so hopelessly for so long. Dr. Chou also loves her passionately, but a few years previously he had pledged his honor to marry and cherish a nurse, when under a temporary misapprehension that his love for Pi-chen was hopeless. On the eve of his departure, Pi-chen is quite miserable, but she is saved from spending the night in unendurable agony because she is soon called to attend a dying patient. She saves her life and thus forgets her own unhappiness in contemplation of the happiness she has brought to the patient’s family. Early next morning she bids farewell to Dr. Chou with great calm: “Now go, Ting-shan! Don’t worry about me; I’ll be all right,” she interrupted him. “The emotion that I ought to have conquered I have now conquered. For your happiness, for the happiness of you two, I am very glad. . . .” Yes, she had conquered that almost unconquerable emotion. Why had she done this? It was because of love—a Youth League member’s and a true doctor’s deep and sincere love for the people, for her own profession. Could any other kind of love be more sublime, more beautiful?33

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My examination of Chinese women under Communism begins with cheery peasant brides united with their labor-loving heroes for greater productivity and ends with women doctors potentially or actually renouncing personal love for the greater love of mankind. Superficially, these stories seem to have little in common. Yet they, and all the other examples in between, stress the importance of self-adjustment to facilitate socialist construction. The greatest hero is he who exercises the greatest self-denial for the sake of Communism. Though complete self-denial is biologically impossible, one should progressively demand more of oneself and expect less of others so that one may ultimately approach the ideal Communist person—a cheerful automaton whose one passion is love of labor. The cumulative effect of this propagandist emphasis may well have been to persuade readers on the mainland that socialist dedication is all that matters in life and to reconcile them to further calls for self-sacrifice: even to an experienced non-Communist reader, a few of the more felicitous tales in praise of Communist endeavor may not prove unappealing insofar as a self-denying hero or heroine attempting a difficult task normally excites admiration. But the seeming dignity of this heroism is ultimately pathetic because it draws no sustenance whatever from the deeper springs of the human being. To a model Communist all feelings are expendable except his passion for labor: he must above all simplify his emotional existence to promote greater zeal and efficiency. In the last story discussed, “Love,” it is not so much that spinsterhood is generally recommended for women doctors as that a happy, simple solution must be given for complicated emotional problems that threaten to reduce one’s efficiency. As a literary product of the autumn of 1956, the story is, of course, quite uncharacteristic of Communist fiction in that it gives unduly prominent attention to personal problems and borders on tragedy, even if of the soap-opera variety. And the tragic attitude, inasmuch as it sanctions freedom of the will and sympathizes with man in a state of psychological and moral bewilderment, is the very antithesis of the positive attitude of Communist zeal. The women characters in the stories we have examined—whether dedicated workers, anxious emulators, or prudent conformists—are all efficiently untragic. Indeed, when compared with their benighted sisters in traditional Chinese fiction—such well-known heroines as P’an Chin-lien, Wang Hsi-feng, and Lin Tai-yü—these women appear to have disowned all too successfully their Chinese inheritance, with all its feudal squalor and

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animal savagery. Always public-minded, they are above the temptations of lust, greed, and self-destruction and superior to sadistic and masochistic schemes for unashamed and selfish happiness. Yet with all their abject enslavement to a cruel social code and blind refusal to rise above the evil passions, the earlier heroines are nevertheless as memorably human as the new Communist heroines are not: they have not abdicated their ultimate freedom—the tragic perversity of the will that makes for good and evil. The new heroines do not inhabit that metaphysical realm; their human worth is nearly always pitifully equated with their socialist utility. Yet even in Communist China, the cause of human dignity has not been without its defenders—the pre-Communist modern tradition of humanitarian idealism has persisted in spite of repeated massive Communist attempts to stamp it out. The purged writers—prominently the Hu Feng group and the “rightists” and “revisionists” of 1956–1957— were nearly all condemned for their stubborn belief in an unchanging human nature with undeniable rights to love, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, though their more immediate crime was their impudent attempt to liberalize the literary bureaucracy and demand freedom of expression.34 The creative output of these writers was not large since their most convenient weapon was critical and polemic journalism. But, especially during 1956–1957, a number of stories were produced that protest movingly against the universal imposition of dreary conformity and unendurable toil under the regime. And in these stories, it was not an accident that women characters played key roles as martyrs of and fighters against Communist oppression. In the mainstream of modem Chinese fiction, women have always been seen as warmhearted idealists intolerant of sham and hypocrisy, though easily crushed in their struggle for a meaningful and abundant life. But even their defeat is a triumphant form of selfassertion: the defiant and self-indulgent nihilism so characteristic of the heroines of the early Mao Tun and Ting Ling is poles apart from the anxious conformity of labor-loving women as seen in today’s fiction. Until she was censured in 1942, Ting Ling, while a prominent writer in Yenan, characteristically opposed her warmhearted heroines to the coldness of Communist bureaucracy, in such notable stories as “When I Was in Hsia Village” (1940) and “In the Hospital” (1941).35 The revisionist stories of 1956–1957 nobly carry forward Ting Ling’s interrupted protest. Within the framework of an unquestioned faith in Communism’s ultimate benevolence and a cautious hope for immediate

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reforms, they express nevertheless the fatigue and despair of a crushed humanity as well as the defiant idealism of a few chosen spirits battling against an impersonal bureaucracy. Feng Ts’un’s story “Beautiful” (Mei-li) (PL, July 1957) laments Chinese youth for all its unappreciated nobility and self-sacrifice. As the woman narrator confides to the first-person author: “Today’s youths, they all have a beautiful heart, a heart like a precious stone, like a crystal in its prismatic transparency. . . . The young are so lovable. But they also have their own sorrows and troubles; at times, one is really worried about them.”36 The person who worries her most is her niece Yü-chieh, who has served for many years in a government cultural organization. For the first few years she was the personal secretary to an important official in that organization, assisting him day and night and imperceptibly falling in love with him. But, thoroughly conditioned to self-abnegation, she cannot admit the necessity of personal happiness and muster enough courage to fight for it. Furthermore, she shrinks from the malicious criticism going around the organization that her exceptional devotion to work is due to her ambition to get ahead, and from the frightful jealousy of the functionary’s tubercular wife. So when, following the wife’s death, he does propose to her, she refuses. But, of course, the functionary doesn’t press his suit very hard; he is soon transferred to Peking, where he meets an actress and marries her. In the meantime, Yü-chieh works so hard for that organization that she has absolutely no time to attend to her personal problems. Her sympathetic assistant comments bitterly: “You know our kind of work; there are no Sundays and no holidays. Even if you have a friend, you see him maybe once in every two or three months. This really is a problem.”37 Yü-chieh does have an admirer, a young doctor; but they both are so busy and she especially has so many meetings to attend that she doesn’t even have time to answer his telephone calls, let alone go out on dates with him. To make things easier for both, she breaks with him completely. And yet she is now thirty-one; however “beautiful” her heart, she has let her grinding routine take over her life completely. The final affirmative note in the story rests on the rhetorical question that a selfless and dedicated worker cannot be unhappy: “You just wait and see, Yü-chieh will be happy. How could she be miserable?”38 Upon its publication, “Beautiful,” though a rather poor story in my opinion, immediately aroused the wrath of important critics, who all

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attested to its subversive character as a disconcertingly moving tale: the plight of Yü-chieh must have appealed tremendously for its acute truth. My next example of revisionist fiction, Liu Pin-yen’s “Our Paper’s Inside News” (Pen-pao nei-pu hsiao-hsi) (PL, June 1956; October 1956), however, is an excellent story; judging from my limited reading, it must be ranked with Lu Ling’s “The ‘Battle’ in the Ditch” (PL, March 1954)39 as one of the two outstanding successes among the more ambitious longer stories to have appeared in Communist China. Both stories and their authors were vehemently attacked, Lu Ling’s in 1954–1955, and Liu Pinyen’s in 1957–1958. Prior to its denigration, however, “Our Paper’s Inside News” had been a sensation; the editors of People’s Literature greeted the first installment with pride: “While we are becoming accustomed to writings that oppose rightist, conservative [i.e., orthodox Communist] thought, this ‘special report’ again raises a new problem: the existence in our midst of other situations that shackle people’s constructiveness and creativeness and zeal for labor and obstruct the development of society [literally, ‘life’].”40 The person intent on removing these shackles and obstructions is the woman reporter, Huang Chia-ying. In part I, her attempt to reform the paper, the New Light Daily, which has served as a mere echo of the Central Committee of the Party, into a real organ of the people ends in deep personal frustration. In part II, however, she has won substantial support from the newspaper staff. The climactic scene depicts a staff meeting convened to debate whether Huang Chia-ying, with all her reformist zeal and intransigent individualism, should be admitted as a Party member. Sensing the general disaffection with the bureaucratic line, the editor-inchief, Ch’en Li-tung, speaks surprisingly in favor of her admission. Under her influence, the other conscientious members of the staff have already shed their former despondency, fatigue, or caution to stand by her. Huang Chia-ying, while on a field trip to a mining area, has been peremptorily asked to return to her office. When the story begins, she is seen as a passenger on a night train, pondering her experiences with the miners, her difficulties at the newspaper office, and her chances of ever becoming a Communist Party member. She has just written a long report on the conditions at the mine, but from long and bitter experience, she knows that such outspoken articles will never be published and so she has torn it to pieces. She tries to relax with a popular novel, but each time she opens the book she has to put it down almost immediately, thinking to

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herself: “Why have so many novels treated life and people in such a commonplace, flat and simplified manner as if, once liberated, people have all lost their capacity for intense feelings of pleasure and anger, sorrow and joy; have all suddenly become on the surface good-mannered and goodtempered, punctually attending meetings and punctually arriving for and departing from work?”41 A biting comment on the pseudo-cheerfulness of Communist fiction, this observation also reflects the actual life of the people. Huang Chia-ying is convinced that a mechanical observance of duty and form has resulted in a paralytic submissiveness, killing all initiative and strangling all honest attempts at reform. For several years now, the miners she has observed on her trip sleep only four hours every night. They get up every morning at 2 A.M. to walk to work; by the time they return home, it is usually after 9 P.M. The work hours are long, but even more fatiguing to body and spirit are those endless meetings. The workers’ efficiency naturally falls off, and yet if they fail to fulfill the production goals, the inevitable remedy is to hold more and longer meetings to incite them to greater zeal for study and work. As she later tells her immediate superior at the office in great anger, “When the greatest desire of the workers is to lie down and sleep for days on end, how can they study?”42 Yet nobody at the mines had the initiative and courage to recommend fewer and shorter meetings. Huang Chia-ying wonders aloud if it is to the credit of the Party to perpetuate this cruel farce of fatigue. The same lethargy prevails in the newspaper office. Governed by fear and cowardice, the paper will never dare publish editorials and feature stories on any subject unless it has received instructions from the Central Committee on how to attack that subject. And the heroine’s personal drama—her prolonged failure to receive Party membership—is enacted against the same background of fear-induced conformity. While never doubting her zeal and courage, even her close friend and admirer, Chang Yeh, advises her to resort to the expediency of confessing her faults so that her application may be approved. The first part of the story ends with Huang Chia-ying profoundly shocked by this counsel: So, even he was of this opinion! To want to join the Party and yet not to uphold the interests of the Party! To want to join the Party and yet to hide one’s opinions! Huang Chia-ying suddenly stood still. She wanted to say something, to rebuke Chang Yeh harshly. But finally she didn’t say

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anything; she turned around and walked away. Hearing Chang Yeh calling after her, she walked on in even bigger strides. Never, never, so it would seem, had she been so insulted.43

Throughout, Liu Pin-yen has presented his heroine as a loyal Communist fighting ultimately for the best interests of the Party. Workers should get proper rest and care; newspapers should of their own initiative correct social and bureaucratic abuses and reflect the actual sentiments of the people; applicants for Party membership shouldn’t bow before group pressure to belie their honorable record. Yet, in its harsh repudiation of Huang Chia-ying as an unbridled and rebellious individualist, the Party has declared its unaltered policy to uphold total obedience by the people as the best means to ensure socialist advance: perhaps one major reason why socialist construction in recent years has been increasingly foiled by general apathy. Unquestioned supporters of the Communist cause, the women characters in the approved short stories have all endeavored to earn praise, to avoid reproach, to wrest a bare minimum of personal satisfaction from an impossible regimen of hard toil and emotional starvation. They are resigned, but not completely, to the spiritual barrenness of a subhuman existence. As the most spirited of revisionist characters, Huang Chia-ying exemplifies in contrast the tradition of warm sympathy and defiant idealism, the struggle for personal honesty and integrity against general indifference and corruption, that has always distinguished the representative heroines of modern Chinese fiction.

Foreword to Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960–1970* (1976)

Because only three writers from Taiwan (Nieh Hua-ling, Shui Ching, and Pai Hsien-yung) are included in my Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories (1971), I expressed my hope in the preface that “it will be possible for me or some other scholar to prepare in the near future an anthology exclusively devoted to Taiwan fiction.” I am very pleased to report that in less than five years my hope has come true with the publication of Joseph S. M. Lau’s Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960–1970, which includes, in addition to Pai Hsien-yung, ten important authors brought up and educated in Taiwan. A few months earlier, the National Institute of Compilation and Translation of the Republic of China brought forth an even more comprehensive Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature: 1949–1974, representing years of work by a team of translators headed by Professor Chi Pang-yuan. More than a thousand pages in length, it includes representative pieces by twenty-two poets and seventeen essayists (Vol. I), and twenty-three stories by seventeen writers (Vol. II). Since the University of Washington Press will soon serve as its distributor in North America, the reader of the present volume can easily turn to that anthology for an even larger variety of Taiwan literature. In 1971 I did not anticipate that the western reader’s curiosity about this literature could be so amply met in a matter of a few years. So rich is Taiwan fiction that only five authors (Huang Ch’un-ming, Lin Huai-min, Pai Hsien-yung, Wang Wen-hsing, and Yü Li-hua) appear

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in both the Anthology and Chinese Stories from Taiwan, and of these five, only Pai Hsien-yung is represented in both places by the same selection— “Winter Nights” (or “One Winter Evening”). The three anthologies, if I include mine, yield a total of thirty-seven stories by twenty-five writers; the number of stories is significantly enlarged if we include several earlier anthologies published in Taipei and individual translations appearing in such journals as Renditions and The Chinese PEN.1 Of the older story writers included only in Professor Chi’s Anthology, mention must be made of the novelist and journalist P’eng Ko; the women writers Lin Hai-yin, Meng Yao, and P’an Jen-mu; and the three retired officers who began their literary career even while serving in the army— Chu Hsi-ning, Ssu-ma Chung-yuan, and Tuan Ts’ai-hua. But since the sixties represent a far more exciting literary decade for Taiwan than the fifties, the very fact that Joseph Lau has concentrated on the so-called second-generation writers of that decade has made his volume a richer anthology of fiction than Professor Chi’s, though the writers appearing only in the latter are no less worthy of serious attention from the western public. While Professor Lau could have added stories by Shui Ching, Shih Shu-ch’ing, and possibly Ou-yang Tzu (all represented in the other two anthologies), the eleven chosen are undoubtedly among the most important writers of the decade, and most of them have continued to make vital contributions in the seventies. Five or six of the stories chosen were critical sensations at the time of their first appearance in magazines, while the rest certainly represent their authors at their best. In Taiwan as in the United States, increasing numbers of serious writers are being identified with the university where they have received advanced training and where they are often subsequently employed as teachers. But despite this irreversible trend, our eleven writers still maintain a healthy balance between those who stay in academe and those who do not. Six have been identified as members of the academic school (hsüeh-yuan p’ai) because they have all received some graduate training in America: Chang Hsi-kuo has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and the other five (Ch’en Jo-hsi, Lin Huai-min, Pai Hsien-yung, Wang Wen-hsing, Yü Li-hua) have master’s degrees in literature, journalism, or creative writing. Yet of the six, only Pao Hsien-yung and Wang Wenhsing have been fully identified with an academic career. Conversant with the “two cultures” because of his technological training, Chang Hsi-kuo has so far alternated between university teaching and industrial research;

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in his spare time he writes not only novels but also a newspaper column. A college teacher of English, Lin Huai-min has in recent years won new fame as a dancer and choreographer, though he still writes occasionally. Of the two women writers, Yü Li-hua teaches part-time while Ch’en Jo-hsi has recently found employment in a bank. Both make their homes in North America and have growing children to care for. Wang Chen-ho, a student of western literature who visited America for a year, could be listed among the academic group. But judging by his lifestyle and the style of his fiction, he clearly belongs with the remaining four of our authors: Ch’en Ying-chen, Ch’i-teng Sheng, Huang Ch’un-ming, and Yang Ch’ing-ch’u. These five are all natives of Taiwan (as are Ch’en Jo-hsi and Lin Huai-min of the first group) whose parents and grandparents lived under Japanese rule, and they themselves can draw upon memories of a more backward Taiwan before the National Government took steps to improve its living conditions. Other than their passion for writing, these writers seem not to have tied themselves down to a specific profession or line of business that would facilitate their social advancement. While biographical information on some of them remains extremely scanty, the stories these five have written certainly indicate their familiarity with villages, small towns, and the humbler walks of life in a big city like Taipei or Kao-hsiung. In comparison with the second-generation mainlanders, therefore, these writers (and Ch’en Jo-hsi in the early phase of her career) would certainly seem to be more provincial (in the geographical sense of the term) in their imaginative sympathy and choice of subject matter. To turn from the authors to the stories themselves, we may begin by comparing the fiction of the sixties with the fiction produced on the mainland during the thirties, with which the reader is more familiar. Since the thirties stand out as a golden decade for writers of the leftist persuasion, one difference we detect right away is that no comparable dominant ideology governs the stories of our collection, though we catch in several a pervasive tone that may be loosely defined as existentialist. Another obvious difference is that, while the fiction of the thirties is highly patriotic in its expression of anti-Japanese sentiments, the fiction of the sixties has actually shied away from the strident patriotism of the fifties to assert a provincial or regional character. Many anti-Communist novels were produced in that decade, but by the late fifties we saw the rise of a new generation of writers and readers who, while retaining their full identity as

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Chinese and nostalgic about the mainland in their own fashion, are much more interested in what is going on in Taiwan and America (since they may go there someday) than in what happened on the war-torn mainland of the thirties and forties. The emergence of a Taiwan-oriented regional fiction, then, would seem to be symptomatic of a general disenchantment with patriotic cant among the young, whereas in the thirties a patriotic fiction of regional emphasis was produced in direct response to the steady expansion of Japanese aggression. In particular, Manchurian regionalists like Hsiao Chün, Hsiao Hung, and Tuan-mu Hung-liang received wide acclaim in the middle thirties because student readers then were keenly concerned about the fate of Manchuria, which had already fallen into Japanese hands. Today, Taiwanese regionalists have found comparable favor among the young because Taiwan is the only Chinese province left that they can proudly claim as their own. Yet, though differing in ideology, mood, and geographical awareness, the writers of this volume certainly share with their predecessors in the thirties an emotional identification with the young and the poor. Then as now, writers empathize with their young intellectual heroes for their discontentment with society, their yearning for a better world, or their despair over their sense of futility, even though the more flippant youths who ape foreign ways are as a rule satirized. While the more academic writers of today do not go out of their way to search for proletarian experience of social significance, they are no less drawn than the regional writers to peasants, factory workers, soldiers, and prostitutes on account of their social maltreatment and economic deprivation. Though of all the writers in the present collection only Ch’en Ying-chen has been suspected of leftist leanings, it is a sure sign of the continuity of modern Chinese fiction that they should have inherited this dual allegiance to the young and the poor. But, compared with the mainlanders in the thirties, the Taiwan population today is surely enjoying better times. Mainly thanks to the successful implementation of a governmental program of agricultural reform that has enabled the farmer to till his own land, the evil landlord—a ubiquitous villain in the fiction of the thirties—has disappeared from the scene and is not to be found in any of our stories. Leaders of business and industry in Taiwan have certainly become more benevolent or at least disguised their greed by handling their public relations more competently, so that the sensual pot-bellied merchant (ta-fu ku) and the harsh manufacturer

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bent on oppressing his factory hands—both stock figures in the earlier mainland fiction—are scarcely visible in the present collection. A prosperous businessman of the American type, Hu Hsin-pao, the suicidal hero of Ch’en Ying-chen’s “My First Case,” is actually depicted as a tormented intellectual. The sons and daughters of the well-to-do in Lin Huai-min’s “Cicada, “ pleasure-seeking but easily bored, certainly remind us of the equally frivolous youths in the Shanghai world of Mao Tun’s The Twilight (Tzu-yeh), but the former have acquired a knack for existentialist talk, which makes them somewhat more serious and sympathetic. The feudalist tradition, with its rigid code of morality, which was the main target of attack among such novelists of the thirties as Pa Chin, has also dwindled in influence despite the government’s active promotion of Confucian teaching. Ch’en Ying-chen, who appears bothered by this type of promotion, enhances our pity for Hu Hsin-pao by portraying the inspector of the suicidal case as one who, in his new state of wedded bliss, fully identifies himself with Confucian morality so that he may the more smugly condemn Hu for his moral turpitude. This attempt at topical satire, however, remains half-hearted to the extent that we retain a rather nice impression of the inspector for the objective, if not altogether sympathetic, way he examines the case. The other writers, insofar as they appear bothered by feudalist morality, are mainly concerned with the sway it has enjoyed in the past. Yü Li-hua, a novelist best known for her depiction of Chinese intellectuals in America, has chosen for “In Liu Village” her childhood milieu in rural Chekiang. This gives her a chance to explore the psychology of a country woman bound to the traditional ways, rather than the frustrations and infidelities of her typical heroine—a more or less emancipated Chinese wife in America. Ts’ui-o, a victim of sexual assault by the puppet village head, faces the implacable enmity of her mother-in-law and subsequently the mistrust and estrangement of her husband, but it is characteristic of the author that the arch-villain of the story is not the village head but the feudalist mother-in-law who breaks Ts’ui-o’s spirit and almost ruins her life. “Enemies,” Yang Ch’ing-ch’u’s grimmer story with a comparable village setting, tells of a Taiwanese girl who, having abandoned her newborn son in a public toilet, faces persecution by the Japanese police. More sadistic than any landlord in the work of Chang T’ien-i (the most powerful short-story writer of the thirties), they line up all the unmarried girls of

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the village and squeeze their exposed breasts in order to identify the guilty one. Yet the Japanese police are conducting this search in the name of Confucian morality, and insofar as the heroine would not have disposed of her son in this callous manner but for her uncle’s adamant opposition to her lover, he is surely the principal cause of her tragedy. The uncle is not without nobility in defending his family name and enduring torture by the Japanese; yet if he had not been such a rigid adherent to a feudal code of honor, the lovers could have been happily married and the child born in wedlock. It is surely a sign of improved social conditions in Taiwan that both stories explicitly concerned with the inhumanity of the feudalist tradition—“In Liu Village” and “Enemies”—should take place in villages under Japanese occupation: contemporary reality in the province offers the writers few opportunities to observe the blind moralist who would trample upon the young in the name of Confucian morality. Indeed, middle-class parents in Taiwan have long ceased to coerce their children to marry against their wishes. They send their daughters to America in the expectation that they may marry a Chinese Ph.D. and live happily ever after, but often to their disappointment (in stories not represented in this volume) they may marry a Caucasian instead or else remain spinsters, too proud in their unhappiness to admit defeat and return home. Left to their own devices to cope with life’s problems, the liberated young have really nothing to hold against the tradition except the feeling that it has somehow inhibited them from enjoying their freedom with as much abandon as their American friends. Thus even T’ao Chih-ch’ing, the emancipated but still unhappy heroine of “Cicada,” feels justified in complaining, “We Chinese have never learned to really let ourselves go. Five thousand years of culture weighs down on our backs like a great big stone. We’re so inhibited we can’t even breathe.” It may be of further interest to observe that this caustic critic of Chinese culture and potential rebel doesn’t have much of a choice except to attend Sarah Lawrence College once her sister in America has got her admitted there. T’ao Chih-ch’ing marries in time, has two children, and joins a Peking opera club for relaxation. One cannot say her taste has changed for the worse by shedding her earlier passion for rock music, but in her eyes her new lifestyle in America must be a shame, since Peking opera represents cultural bondage and rock music represents youth and liberation. Despite her brief fling among her friends in Taipei, then, she

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has turned out to be as considerate of her parents’ feelings as an obedient daughter of an earlier era. Whatever her own state of happiness, they should be very proud of her for having taken all the right steps toward bourgeois respectability. Even during the May Fourth period, of course, tradition was never something entirely to be repudiated. With such leading iconoclasts as Lu Hsün and Chou Tso-jen, the traditional way of life is inevitably identified in their minds with the innocent delights and sorrows of their childhood and recalled with affection whenever they are not consciously attacking the social evils of their day. Now that the traditional way of life is fast disappearing under the impact of Taiwan’s accelerated pace of industrialization, many essayists are writing in the nostalgic vein to capitalize on the public’s insatiable appetite for information about the old China. One of the unobtrusive but important themes of this volume is surely its nostalgia for a simpler and more tranquil mode of existence within the context of the island’s rapid economic growth. Ch’en Jo-hsi’s “The Last Performance” underscores the rapid decline of the traditional Taiwan opera, showing that even small-town audiences are bored by this form of old-fashioned entertainment. The heroine is admittedly a singer of waning popularity, and yet her addiction to heroin suggests the prevalence of an underground culture destructive of rural values. Similarly, though Wang Wen-hsing’s “Flaw” is the timeless story of a boy’s awakening to his sexual needs and the perfidies of the adult world, the mysterious and unprincipled woman whose beauty enthralls him is also the owner of the new building that portends ruinous change for Tung-an Street, one of many such streets in Taipei during the author’s childhood, where “cats could be seen strolling lazily along the tops of the low walls, from one house to the next. The whole landscape was filled with glistening green foliage and delicately fragrant odors from the profusion of flowers and plants in the front yards.” Since this female swindler rudely awakens the boy from his sweet dream of first love by absconding with the savings of many residents of that street, she certainly appears to be the ominous symbol of a meretricious commercial culture that will in time overtake the whole city of Taipei. In Chang Hsi-kuo’s “Earth,” however, the nostalgia of some recent college graduates for their lost youth does not imply an awareness that society has in the meantime changed for the worse. It stems rather from their sense of entrapment in a society that offers them few opportunities

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for self-advancement or meaningful service. So during a brief reunion they play chess and have some boisterous fun in a futile attempt to regain the sense of happiness they had as high school classmates. It is certainly poignant that these youths in their early twenties should behave so childishly and at the same time sound so very cynical and resigned about their future prospects. Yet there does seem to be no road open except to pursue graduate studies in America, as one of them, Hsiao-yü, eventually does. The young intellectual in modern Chinese fiction has always appeared at his noblest as a fighter against traditionalist and imperialist forces. That none of our stories features such a hero invites, of course, the obvious explanation that the second-generation writers of Taiwan have been cut off from the leftist tradition of heroic defiance that flourished in the thirties. Yet the National Government on Taiwan has always actively encouraged a literature of national heroism, and even today such writers of military background as Chu Hsi-ning and Tuan Ts’ai-hua are happily cooperating, but not necessarily writing at the level of propaganda. The younger writers’ reluctance to depict Japanese aggression or Communist tyranny indicates, finally, their refusal to compromise their talent by writing about things of which they have no first-hand knowledge. While they may be far less sanguine than the older patriotic novelists in their expectations of a triumphant return to the mainland, they are certainly aware of the traumatic effects of violent dislocation experienced by mainlanders lucky enough to have escaped Communist tyranny. For both the suicidal hero of “My First Case” and the veterans of the civil war in “Earth,” the forced retreat from their homeland provides key psychological clues to their present state of unhappiness or resignation. But neither Ch’en Ying-chen, a Taiwanese, nor Chang Hsi-kuo, who was only five when he left with his family for Taiwan in 1949, could have referred to the civil war in other than oblique terms. Of all the second-generation writers, Wang Wen-hsing alone has written about the war in the absence of personal knowledge. But his long story “Dragon Sky Restaurant” (Lung-t’ien lou), which recounts the Communist siege of Taiyuan, the capital of Shansi (one of the goriest episodes of that war), turns out to be a philosophic fable about life, death, and fate with probably little correspondence with reality. Only the opening and closing sections of the story describing the survivors’ reunion at the restaurant are done in impressive realistic colors. Nor could the second-generation writer, as has been indicated earlier, depict the intellectual as a fighter against tradition. Tradition is no

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longer of sufficient social and moral authority to affect his lifestyle; he can adopt whatever style pleases him so long as he does not voice antigovernment sentiments or engage in subversive activities. And once he goes to America, he can turn Communist if he wants to. But wherever he goes, the uncertainty of his personal future and the national future weighs heavily on his own mind. Thus, in recent Taiwan fiction, the intellectual, finding no concrete ideal to serve and no identifiable enemy to fight against, has turned inward, and we find in our stories several little Hamlets pondering the meaning of life, including the two suicides in “My First Case” and “Cicada” (though Lin Huai-min does not say for sure whether Fan Ch’o-hsiung, a delicate youth susceptible to every kind of allergy, drowns himself deliberately). In my conclusion to A History of Modern Chinese Fiction I pondered “whether the study of Western literature has in any significant manner enriched the spiritual life of the Chinese,” since it seemed to me that modern Chinese novelists have by and large failed to emulate their western masters in writing stories that leave the reader deep in thought over their philosophic meaning and psychological revelations. Recent Taiwan fiction, however, would certainly seem to mark a new departure, at least in its fondness for philosophic rumination. By the late fifties a significant number of writers, both of fiction and of poetry, have discovered existentialism as a mode of thought attuned to their own dilemma in not knowing what to do next. Though failing to display in their own lives the existentialist courage to stand by any absurd cause, these writers are certainly bothered by the horror of unreflective existence on the one hand and the no less horrible conviction, on the other, that it is thinking that makes life miserable. Thus the suicidal hero of “My First Case” repeatedly muses, “That man should go on living is really strange” and “Why is man able to drag on day by day, knowing all the time that he doesn’t know what he’s living for?” Li Lung-ti, the hero of Ch’i-teng Sheng’s “I Love Black Eyes,” finds the desire to hold on to life in the absence of thought even more appalling. When people in the street, alarmed by the rising flood, scramble to get to the roofs by means of ladders, he thinks indignantly, “How shameless people who fight for survival like this are. I’d rather stand here and cling to this pillar, and just die with it.” T’ao Chih-ch’ing in “Cicada,” on the other hand, equates thought with pain: “In fact, we shouldn’t think of anything; we can go on living. And after we’ve lived, we won’t have to think of anything, we won’t have to think.”

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Such thoughts, baldly presented without the poetry of Hamlet or the erudition of Herzog, may strike the western reader as rather tame. But I believe that the new philosophic fiction, while claiming no originality in the realm of thought, should nonetheless command respect for the way the second-generation writers construct their fables to illuminate certain kinds of human predicament. Joseph Lau has observed with justice that nearly all such writers “have attempted at one time or the other the parabolic form during their formative years,”2 and of the stories in this collection, “I Love Black Eyes” certainly stands out as an arresting parable despite, or rather because of, its intentional moral ambiguity. An uncommunicative sort of person, Li Lung-ti is seen by his neighbors only because he takes strolls. Apparently in love with his wife and depending on her for support, he nevertheless shows a Dostoevskian streak of cruelty when refusing to acknowledge her identity in front of all the victims of the flood staying on the roofs. He does so because he is caught in the compromising situation of befriending a young and frail prostitute and believes that it will be impossible to talk reason with his wife under the circumstances. He does drive her insane with jealousy by his refusal to communicate, but would she be in this state if his entirely commendable action were duly explained? Why talk about “this huge and treacherous gulf ” separating him from his wife when it is entirely of his own making? The only plausible explanation for Li Lung-ti’s odd behavior is that, in rescuing the prostitute, he has finally done something that makes him proud of himself. In thus equating his manhood with this duty, he apparently feels that, so long as they are stranded together, he should make her completely happy as her friend and protector and proffer her the illusion of total devotion. In the end, after seeing her off by train to start a new life at her native place, he decides to take a few days’ rest and then look for his missing wife and make up with her. But can she be reconciled after the gross insult and humiliation she has received? The intellectual hero has no place in Wang Chen-ho’s “An Oxcart for Dowry” and Huang Ch’un-ming’s “ A Flower in the Rainy Night,” which are deservedly two of the most celebrated stories in the style of Taiwanese regionalism. Yet precisely because they do not deal with the quandaries of intellectuals, Wang and Huang have succeeded eminently (as has not been the case with the overtly philosophic Ch’en Ying-chen and the intentionally baffling Ch’i-teng Sheng) in singing the praises of man for his arduous struggle toward decency and dignity no matter whether his attempt

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ends in failure or success. Despite their tribulations, the oxcart-carrier of Wang’s story and the prostitute-heroine of Huang’s embrace life with a wry stoicism or exuberant optimism that would put to shame the many easily despondent youths we meet elsewhere in this volume. It would seem that, compared to these two, they haven’t suffered at all.3 “An Oxcart for Dowry” begins with a restaurant scene where five young villagers show Wan-fa, a deaf man in his middle forties, open contempt for his acquiescence in cuckoldry for the sake of his economic betterment. The author shares their mockery of his hero (since his is a comic tale), in much the same fashion that Lu Hsün exposes Ah Q, a shiftless village youth of comparable destitution, to repeated ridicule. But far from being made a symbol of national shame, Wan-fa is an honorable man despite his manifest inability to maintain his family at a subsistence level. He wants to own an oxcart badly, but somehow can never raise enough cash to buy one. In this respect, he invites comparison also with Camel Hsiang-tzu, the title hero of Lao She’s famous novel, who is forever frustrated in his desire to own a ricksha. It is only with the generous assistance of the clothes peddler Chien that Wan-fa finally owns an oxcart, but he has to pay the humiliating price of condoning that man’s open adultery with his wife Ah-hao. On one level, the story is surely a tall tale since there is no reason in the world for the peddler to be friends with Wan-fa and his wife by moving into an abandoned hovel by the graveyard when he could have better and more convenient lodgings elsewhere in the village, and there is no reason whatever for him to persist in a liaison with Ah-hao, who is “at least ten years older” and hideous to boot, when he could, with his money and attractive wares, buy the favors of younger women. Realistically, too, there is little reason for Wan-fa to wax indignant over his wife’s adultery to the point of refusing the peddler’s help since, as an impotent husband, he cannot be jealous for reasons of sexual rivalry. But since Wang Chen-ho is a serious student of western literature, all these improbabilities would indicate that he has designed his immensely funny tale as an allegory. Chien, who comes out of nowhere to meddle in the affairs of Wan-fa’s family, can surely be seen as the Devil himself, who has made a wager with God to test this man of infinite patience, a Chinese Job almost, who has already sold three daughters out of economic necessity. Chien comes to the destitute family, therefore, as a tempter, and though deaf, Wan-fa dislikes him right away because of his offensive body

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odor (a palpable sign of his evil). Ah-hao becomes increasingly friendly with the peddler after he hires her son, and Wan-fa, though financially relieved by having one less mouth to feed, becomes increasingly suspicious. He guards Ah-hao day and night, and the lovers can only outwit him by putting him in a state of drunken sleep. Twice Wan-fa sends the Devil packing, and twice Chien promptly leaves the neighborhood without a protest. But each time during his absence Wan-fa meets some unforeseen misfortune, and it is only following his own imprisonment that he submits to the reality of his wife’s open adultery. Thus the Devil wins, and Wan-fa is bribed into a state of contentment with the gift of an oxcart. The five villagers at the restaurant, in mocking Wan-fa, would seem to be traditional moralists on the side of God venting their anger over His apparent defeat, but they don’t realize, of course, to what lengths Wan-fa has gone to maintain his honor. He is far less corruptible than Camel Hsiang-tzu, who is too easily discouraged after each calamity and in the end courts his own ruin. We retain to the end our great liking for Wan-fa and cannot feel superior to him for his eventual reconcilement with the Devil, who has won his cunning battle through bribery. Starvation is no joking matter, even if cuckoldry for a man of dire poverty and sexual impotence remains laughable. If Wan-fa is a Chinese Job eventually rewarded with good fortune through his defeat, then Pai-mei, the heroine of “A Flower in the Rainy Night,”4 can be seen as a saintly woman possessed by a beatific vision of her own destiny, who rises triumphant above her tribulations as a lowly prostitute. Thoroughly believable on the realistic plane, her story nevertheless calls for a religious or allegorical interpretation, if only to bring into clearer definition our wonderment over her inexhaustible humanity. No other heroine of modern Chinese fiction radiates her kind of glory as a visible embodiment of faith and hope in a largely godforsaken world. The title heroine of Hsü Ti-shan’s Yü-kuan is a woman of comparable saintliness, but she is a Christian missionary conditioned to the habit of moral introspection and unexposed to the dehumanizing forces at work in a third-class brothel. Her struggle to eradicate selfishness from her bosom, therefore, partakes less of divine rapture than does Pai-mei’s determination to emerge from the lower depths of degradation to find self-fulfillment. Traditional Chinese poetry loves to depict the imaginary sorrows of languid courtesans without touching upon their actual degradation as human beings. Even the courtesans in the colloquial San-yen tales, whose

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sufferings are more real, are nevertheless seen as genteel young ladies endowed with wit and beauty. It is a measure of modern Chinese literature’s enhanced respect for human dignity that, at the beginning of this century, we at last come across a pair of lower-class prostitutes utterly believable and sympathetic in their helplessness in Liu Ê’s The Travels of Lao Ts’an (Lao-ts’an yu-chi, 1903–1904). Pai-mei and her younger companion Ying-ying can be seen as the direct descendants of Ts’ui-hua and Ts’ui-huan, and the story of their friendship at the brothels and their accidental, happy reunion on a train is told with a realism by turns heartrending and heartwarming that Liu Ê would have loved. In accordance with a vicious Taiwanese custom, both girls are sold by their poverty-stricken parents when very young to their foster mothers (or foster parents), who in turn rear them for the brothels. Sold to a brothel at fourteen, Pai-mei has been a peripatetic prostitute for fourteen years when the story opens. The single most moving passage occurs, I believe, when on a visit to her foster mother she gives a bitter retort upon being called “rotten baggage”: “Yes, I’m rotten baggage—rotten baggage that you sold off fourteen years ago. Think about it—what kind of life were the eight of you living then? And how are you living now? Now you have a house to live in. Yü-ch’eng’s graduated from college and has gotten married. Yü-fu’s going to senior high school. Ah-hui’s married. Do you eat any worse, or wear any worse clothes than anybody else? Where would you be today without this ‘rotten baggage’?”

Yet despite Pai-mei’s stinging denunciation of her ingratitude, her foster mother at least cares enough to urge that she quit her trade and marry. Huang Ch’un-ming, though verbose and careless at times, cannot be accused of the kind of sentimentality that is partial to prostitutes by painting all their exploiters in a bad light. He neither condemns Pai-mei’s mother for selling her daughter nor censures the fishermen in quest of pleasure after their rough days on the sea. He actually describes with relish young fishermen gobbling down supposedly aphrodisiac parts of raw male fish in preparation for their brief holiday among the prostitutes: it is surely not their fault that they have no girlfriends to turn to for sexual relief. Both Ts’ui-hua and Ts’ui-huan become concubines, thanks to the kindness of Lao Ts’an and his friend Huang Jen-hui. Ying-ying, too, is

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lucky enough to meet an army officer who offers marriage. At twentyeight, however, Pai-mei is too much of a veteran at her trade to expect salvation in this fashion, but the sight of Ying-ying glowingly happy on the train with her three-month-old son so arouses her maternal instinct that she is determined to achieve motherhood without benefit of a husband. She eventually chooses a nice young fisherman to be the instrument of her impregnation and returns to her real mother’s home to wait out her term. In time she does have a son, though she almost risks her own life in delivering him. The scene of childbirth may appear overlong for some tastes; yet the author is surely intimating that it is a life-and-death struggle for a veteran prostitute to regain the full measure of her humanity by bringing forth a male child with all its promise of a bright future.5 In a sense, the good luck she brings to her village after an absence of twentythree years is as much a miracle as her successful impregnation by the man she chooses to be her unborn child’s father. At a time when abortion has become legalized in so many parts of the world, it is surely heartwarming, if I may use that word once again, to read a story where copulation strictly for the purpose of procreation and the agony of childbirth are described in all their sanctity as indispensable means for a woman’s redemption. Of all the stories in this collection, “A Flower in the Rainy Night” speaks most eloquently of man’s endurance and triumph, and of his vision for a bright future. Huang Ch’un-ming is surely one with Faulkner in believing that it is the writer’s duty “to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.”6 Among earlier modern Chinese writers, Shen Ts’ung-wen alone has proudly fulfilled the Faulkerian injunction to lift man’s heart with a large corpus of distinguished fiction. Huang Ch’un-ming can already be seen as a worthy successor to Shen Ts’ung-wen; if he continues to be productive and does not dissipate his imagination by writing carelessly, he may even turn out to be China’s Faulkner. In reviewing the contents of this anthology, I have stressed the secondgeneration writers’ tendency toward despair when they contemplate the fate of intellectuals like themselves facing an uncertain future, and these same writers’ humanitarian bond with the poor, whose very ignorance of local and world politics renders them immune to despair and whose very struggle for survival and decency reminds us that hope and love are still with us after all. The western reader at all knowledgeable about modern

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Chinese literature perhaps should not be surprised by the presence of both worlds—one of intellectual despair and the other of humanitarian hope and optimism—in recent Taiwan fiction. But because he is used to more violent forms of nihilism and despair in the recent literature of his own culture, I believe he is likely to be more deeply impressed by the stories about the sorrows and joys of the simple folk and their amazing capability to survive and stay human despite the odds against them. Though western in form and technique, this fiction of Taiwanese regionalism claims a linear descent from the folk tradition of Chinese literature that began with the songs of ordinary lovers, farmers, and soldiers in the ancient Book of Poetry (Shih ching). I have so far failed to discuss Pai Hsien-yung’s “Winter Nights” because, while it is poignantly expressive of Taiwanese experience, it stands apart from the other stories for its conscious attempt to encompass the whole range of modern Chinese experience through the conversation of two old friends who had been active student leaders at the May Fourth (1919) demonstrations in Peking. One is an eminent professor of Chinese history at Berkeley on a brief visit to Taipei and the other an obscure professor of English poetry at a local university whose youthful ambition for patriotic and revolutionary endeavor is symbolized by his great love for Byron but whose only present resemblance to that poet is his lameness. But the disparity in the worldly fortunes of these two friends pales to insignificance when, through their reminiscences, we see a more glaring contrast between their youthful patriotic ardor and the placid determination of the English professor’s son to study physics in America, preferably at Berkeley, upon his graduation from college. While T’ao Chih-ch’ing shows obvious discontent with her life in America and while, in the epilogue of “Earth,” Hsiao-yü, lately transferred from a midwestern college to the California Institute of Technology, is at least aware of something missing from his life despite his growing smugness, we can be sure that the young physicist will be single-minded in his pursuit of academic success in America. He represents the “happy” Chinese of his generation eagerly looking forward to permanent exile in this country and repudiating the patriotic tradition of his father’s generation without a trace of regret. There is little need to dwell on “Winter Nights,” since I have already discussed it at some length in a recent article and Joseph Lau has devoted a whole article to the collection Residents of Taipei (Taipei jen), of which the story forms a part.7 Suffice it to say that Pai Hsien-yung is the most nos-

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talgic of the writers represented in this volume, since in the present story, as in nearly all his mature stories, he contrasts the diminished lives led by the Chinese in Taiwan and America with their more glorious or heroic past on the mainland and unequivocally declares his emotional allegiance to the past. And it is because even young readers little disposed to applaud patriotic rhetoric are capable of responding to this kind of nostalgia that the stories of Pai Hsien-yung, with their unmatched artistic finish, have in recent years exerted such a strong appeal. But one cannot indefinitely refer to the mainland in the past tense and ignore its Communist present. The massive transformation of the land and people under the most totalitarian of governments in China’s history, of course, has received intensive journalistic attention in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as in America. But ever since Eileen Chang’s escape in 1952, for some twenty years no creative writer approaching her stature has been able to leave the mainland and write about the Communist experiment there from first-hand experience. In November 1973, however, Ch’en Jo-hsi managed to arrive in Hong Kong with her husband and two young sons, and they have subsequently settled in Vancouver, Canada. An idealist imbued with the desire to serve her unseen fatherland, Ch’en Jo-hsi had gone there with her husband in the autumn of 1966, during the unleashing of the Cultural Revolution, and suffered through seven years of hell. The price she paid in personal suffering, however, has meant a maturing of her art and a deepening of her understanding of the Chinese people. The series of stories she has been writing since her return to freedom, not represented in this volume because they appeared too late for inclusion, uncovers a new, tragic range of Chinese experience hitherto inaccessible to the second-generation writers of Taiwan.8 Ho Huai-shuo (1941– ), whose ink painting, “The Pale Moonlight,” perfectly complements the anthology as an example of contemporary Chinese art at its best, is himself a noted writer from Taiwan with two volumes of critical essays to his credit. But his primary vocation is painting, and I believe he is exceptional among painters of his generation for his stubborn refusal to imitate current western fashions and his subtle transformation of the traditional Chinese style for the projection of a somber individual vision. All his best paintings haunt us with their desolate or spectral grandeur, as does his present rendering of a nocturnal Taipei suffused with the pale light of a large moon.

Black Tears* An Introduction to Peng Ko’s Stories (1986)

Peng Ko (P’eng Ko, pen name of Yao P’eng, 1926– ) is one of the most prolific writers of the Republic of China. His publications from 1953 to 1982 included eight novels, eight collections of short stories (though previously collected stories reappear in later volumes), twenty-five volumes of essays that first saw print as newspaper columns, translations of eleven books by mostly American authors, eight books on writing, reading, and reporting, and three travel books. In the last three years he has published at least two new books—the story collection Specks of Dust (Wei-ch’en, 1984), of which only the title story is new, and Love and Hate (Ai yü hen, 1985), a collection of short essays and longer articles he wrote for the Central Daily News (Chung-yang jih-pao). While this book of nine stories presents Peng Ko only as a writer of fiction, we must remember that he is by training and vocation a journalist, and has enjoyed phenomenal success as a newspaperman. In 1964, at the age of thirty-nine, he became the deputy director and editor-in-chief of the Hsin Sheng Pao, for which he had worked since his arrival in Taipei in 1949. In 1972 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the Central Daily News, a more prestigious paper whose airmail edition reaches Chinese readers all over the world. Eight years later he became the publisher and president of the same paper. It can be said that, of all the young journalists starting their careers in the late forties and early fifties, none enjoys today a more commanding position in the Republic of China than Peng Ko.

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Understandably, even though Peng Ko remains at heart a serious novelist, his demanding schedule as a newspaperman has over the years increasingly robbed him of the necessary leisure to compose fiction. Since he hasn’t published a new novel in fifteen years, we cannot even call him a currently active novelist, and lately he hasn’t been active as a translator either. No American publisher and editor of comparable stature, of course, would even think it his business to write fiction (William F. Buckley excepted, but he writes spy novels strictly as entertainment) or to translate books from another language, especially those claiming no permanent interest as literature, history, or social science. But while a prominent journalist, Peng Ko differs from his American brethren by being solidly in the tradition of modern Chinese writers who didn’t mind writing ephemeral pieces for newspapers and willingly took on the burden of translating and introducing foreign books for the edification of their readers. Thus Lu Hsün, the modern Chinese writer best known to western readers, published in his lifetime only three volumes of stories but five times as many of miscellaneous prose. He also translated many European and Japanese authors who are today far less well-known than Lu Hsün himself. Similarly, Peng Ko didn’t think it was beneath his dignity to translate books by Richard Bach ( Jonathan Livingston Seagull), Leon Uris, and Norman Vincent Peale if in his opinion these books could help his readers in Taiwan to lead a richer life or sustain them with faith in a great national future despite recent diplomatic setbacks. And when he took time to translate Robert Downs’s Books That Changed the World and Books That Changed America, he was strictly thinking of their educational value for young readers in need of guidance about western books of key importance. I have thus far introduced the fiction writer Peng Ko by calling attention to his vocation as a newspaperman and his exemplification of the modern Chinese literary tradition as a journalist and translator. But, of course, he began his career as a novelist soon after he and his bride— both new graduates from the Department of Journalism at Chengchi University—had escaped from the mainland in August 1949. Not content just serving as an editor and reporter at the Hsin Sheng Pao, he had to recall his childhood and youth and express his sorrow and anger over China’s double devastation by the Japanese and Communists in a steady succession of short stories and novels. This prolific pace was broken once Peng Ko took a leave from the Hsin Sheng Pao in September 1960 to study in America. So for over three

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years he worked hard for an M.A. in journalism at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and another in library science on the UrbanaChampaign campus of the University of Illinois. But despite his preoccupation with studies, his stay in America has proved quite beneficial to his further growth as a serious novelist, even though he has subsequently written only two novels and some stories. With Peng Ko as with most writers, a change in cultural and geographical scene entails a change in perspective. If his emigration from the mainland had confirmed his antiCommunist patriotism, his exposure to the then dominant liberalism (including the leftist variety) on the campuses of Illinois and daily reiterated in the editorials and columns of certain major American newspapers tested that patriotism and made him a more searching prober of China’s weaknesses. It is true that his study of library science had further encouraged him to assume the role of a translator and curtail the time at his disposal for serious writing. But, on the other hand, there can be no question that the few works of his embodying his American experience are markedly more resourceful in technique and more painstakingly honest in addressing the problem of China’s future. Particularly impressive are the two prize-winning novels drawing directly upon his own experiences as a graduate student at the University of Illinois and as a waiter for one summer at a resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains: Yonder Shore (Tsai-t’ienchih-ya, 1963) and Coming from Champaign (Ts’ung Hsiang-pin lai-te, 1970). Judging by these two works, Peng Ko must be taken as an outstanding practitioner of a type of writing very popular among Taiwan readers in the late fifties and sixties: the so-called literature about Chinese students abroad (liu-hsüeh-sheng wen-hsüeh). Coming from Champaign, especially, is a rich record of the author’s complex feelings as a double exile from home and country and of his keen observations of campus life, especially among the Chinese students. In the last two chapters (17–18), however, Peng Ko writes of his hero Chung Hua’s deep sense of letdown once he returns to Taipei to resume work as a newspaperman. For those critics and writers in Taiwan who habitually identify Peng Ko as a government spokesman on literature and art—both the Hsin Sheng Pao and Central Daily News are government-affiliated newspapers—and dismiss him on that account, it would be instructive to see the ironic contrast between Chung Hua’s feverish existence while dreaming of a better China as a student in Champaign and his sense of helplessness once he returns to the worsening cultural climate in Taipei. Who would strive for real excel-

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lence, he keeps asking, if the people around him are frivolous, materialistic, and indifferent to quality? It is unfortunate, therefore, that his demanding roles as editor and publisher should have prevented Peng Ko from writing fiction just when he was showing outstanding promise as a novelist of strenuous honesty. All he has written in the line of fiction since Coming from Champaign consists of “Specks of Dust” and an earlier story of equal length, “Mr. K Goes Fishing” (K hsien-sheng ch’ü tiao-yü), first collected in a book of the same title in 1972. Understandably, therefore, many critics would still regard Peng Ko as primarily a writer of the fifties for the obvious reason that he had slowed down just at a time when many exciting young writers, such as Pai Hsien-yung and Wang Wen-hsing among the mainlanders and Huang Ch’un-ming and Wang Chen-ho among the Taiwanese, were emerging to meet critical and popular acclaim. It is to Nancy Ing’s credit that she has given us a larger and fairer view of Peng Ko as a short-story writer by including “Specks of Dust” in this volume, but the other eight stories all date from the fifties. Six of these feature a first-person narrator who draws to a larger or smaller extent upon the author’s personal experiences as a boy and youth in making up his own stories. The remaining two—the love story in the third person “Under the Tao-nan Bridge” (Tao-nan ch’iaohsia) and the military story in the first person “Night Reconnaissance” (Yeh-t’an)—are clearly nonautobiographical. But even so, the heroes of these stories, while stationed in Taiwan or Quemoy, are mainlanders early bereaved of one or both parents. Like other orphans in Peng Ko’s stories, they find life meaningful only if they are sustained by reciprocal love from a girl and / or love of country. In view of the autobiographical character of the six stories from “Black Tears” (Hei-se te lei) to “Candlestick” (La-t’ai-erh), we must now review Peng Ko’s life prior to his arrival in Taiwan. He was born in Tientsin of Hopei parents, who were only eighteen or nineteen in the year of his birth (1926). Both received modern education, the father, Yao Ch’ung-shih, as an engineer and the mother as a graduate from a normal college for women. In view of their age, however, they could not have completed their formal education when their son arrived. In Peng Ko’s dim recollection of his childhood, Father seemed never home, busy as he was attending college or serving as an engineer in another city. He certainly did not seem to miss his wife, who once took her son to live with relatives in Mukden for a few months. Though she had taught school

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briefly, Peng Ko’s mother was in chronic ill health and died in 1933 at the age of twenty-five or twenty-six. Mr. Yao had certainly come home for her burial, and then returned to his post after entrusting his seven-year-old son to the care of his own parents in Tientsin. When Peng Ko moved with his grandparents to Peking, he was eleven, and thus identical in age with Little Tiger in “Black Tears” at the time he arrived in Peking to live with his maternal uncle. But Peng Ko was even more unfortunate than Little Tiger in that in less than two years he was bereaved of both grandparents to become a dependent of the old man’s concubine, who was nevertheless kind enough to see to it that he continued with his schooling. Mr. Yao, who must have come home to attend his parents’ funerals, would now have had less reason to visit his son since he did not have to pay filial respects to his father’s concubine. Most probably Peng Ko had not seen his father after he had moved to the Northwest in 1937 to serve as an engineer on the Lunghai Railway, nor had he ever met his father’s new family. Mr. Yao was dean of Nankai University’s Engineering School in Tientsin at the time of his death in 1953. We can well understand that, as a lonely boy and youth, Peng Ko would become especially attached to schoolmates and neighbors who had earned his love and trust, and would look for father figures among his teachers. Thus the crippled coal maker in “Black Tears” and the slowwitted but loyal friend in “Candlestick” would seem to be characters that meant very much to Peng Ko in real life as well, and he must have retold their stories without much disguise of the real facts. In the postface to a story collection (Peng Ko tzu-hsüan chi, 1972), he says specifically of the two men commemorated in “Father Lin” (Lin shenfu) and “Major Chia” (Chia ying-chang) that the first was an American priest and teacher in charge of his dormitory at a Catholic high school in Peking while the second was an older classmate of his who interrupted his army career to study at Chengchi University and eventually died a martyr fighting against the Communists. At the time when Peng Ko saw them regularly, Father Lin may have appeared too demanding a taskmaster and Major Chia too comically clumsy in his way of preparing lessons and courting girls to merit unqualified respect, but in the long run, each in his own way has a personal goodness and strength of character that have stayed with Peng Ko long after he settled in Taipei. Brave and selfless people like these served as role models and filled the lonely life of our orphan with purpose and meaning and awakened and strengthened his love for China.

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For as a northern Chinese orphan living first under autocratic warlords and then under the Japanese-controlled puppets, the young Peng Ko was abandoned not only by his father but by the legitimate government of his country as well. A loving son without parents to turn to, Peng Ko was also a helpless patriot who saw his patria overrun by enemies from within and without. Little wonder that when he started to write fiction in the early fifties, so many of his main characters should turn out to be orphans and patriots sharing something of the author’s own background and traditional sensibility. Those who can read Chinese should consult “Peng Ko as Orphan and Patriot: A Study of His Fiction,” a much longer article of mine in the Critical Essays of C. T. Hsia.1 In addition to the two novels earlier mentioned, it discusses the four that established Peng Ko’s reputation as a major writer of the fifties: The Setting Moon (Lo-yüeh, 1956), Meteor (Liu-hsing, 1956), In Search of Father (Hsün-fu chi, 1958), and Good-bye to the Mountains (Tz’u-shan chi, 1960). In view of his lonely childhood, it is understandable that Peng Ko should so often turn to the theme of mother love. In Meteor he pours out his sympathy for a hapless concubine unable to protect her son from the clutches of the principal wife, and then subjects that son, following his mother’s untimely death, to a series of harrowing trials. Ugly human passions explode only at the very end of Good-bye to the Mountains, which is in the main a pastoral eulogy of maternal and filial love as enjoyed by Manchurian tigers since time immemorial. Born in the year of the tiger, Peng Ko has repeatedly sung its praises in his essays, but what he has done in Good-bye to the Mountains is to imagine an idyllic childhood for himself that could be enjoyed only by a tiger cub growing up without fear of men in the utter wildness of nature. With a loving mother to nurture him and a twin sister as his playmate, he could wax big and strong toward full enjoyment of his powers. But whatever its therapeutic value for the author, Good-bye to the Mountains enjoys its independent existence as an enchanting and morally discerning tale of tigers and hunters that should continue to delight young and old alike. I would regard it as the best novel Peng Ko wrote before his departure for America in 1960. From a novelist who has suffered greatly from his father’s desertion, In Search of Father is surely a surprising tale in that it sings the praises of filial devotion even though the object of the heroine’s quest, a dying old man just smuggled out of mainland China, is more deserving of her pity as a grossly abused capitalist in a Communist society than of her love as a

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daughter. The father is named Liu Ch’ung-hou—an unmistakable reference to Yao Ch’ung-shih, especially since the terms hou and shih are complementary in meaning and go together as an idiomatic phrase. And certainly suggestive of Peng Ko’s own father is this man’s callousness toward his first wife and infant daughter, who were practically abandoned in Tientsin after he went to the interior during the war with Japan as an industrial magnate. These two haven’t seen him since they left for Taipei in 1948, and now years later, they are asked to pay a large sum of money to secure his freedom. The daughter does raise the ransom, and meets her father in Japan under the most melodramatic circumstances, but the reader cannot share their supposed joy of reunion. An American novelist in Peng Ko’s position might have written a different kind of novel to show his hatred for his unfeeling father, and would have a better chance of earning the reader’s sympathy. But far from showing hatred, Peng Ko, who didn’t learn of his father’s death in 1953 until the late seventies, must have been greatly worried about his safety on the mainland to write a novel like In Search of Father, with its emphatic teaching of filial piety. Yet despite its Confucian theme, the novel is also a suspenseful story of international intrigue in the manner of a Graham Greene entertainment. An American novelist in Peng Ko’s situation would perhaps have as little reason to love his country if its central government had abandoned the coastal cities and moved the capital to the interior. Yet like thousands of high school and college students trapped in Japanese-occupied areas, Peng Ko was determined to show his love for country and detestation for the enemy by undertaking arduous and often dangerous journeys to be with his government in inland China and attend school there. In early 1943, then only seventeen, Peng Ko left Peking with two schoolmates and got stranded in a mountainous region in Shansi contested by both the Japanese and Communist troops. They had to return, but the journey opened Peng Ko’s eyes to the barren grandeur of the Chinese north and the destitution of its hard-working peasants. A year later, he took the train southward to Hsuchow, and from there journeyed successfully to reach government territory in Shensi. The colleges in Shensi or Szechwan did not have the facilities and resources of those in Peking or Shanghai, but for Peng Ko as for all the others who made the journey, it was the idea of being on free soil, in the embrace of their mother country, that mattered most. In view of the author’s passionate love for China, it is little wonder that his mentors and friends in the autobiographical stories in this volume

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all teach patriotism by word or personal example. Thus when Little Tiger, having lost a sizable sum from various donors, appeals to Black Cripple Li for help in “Black Tears,” the coal maker in all seriousness gives up his hard-earned silver dollars for the worthy cause of helping the volunteers in Manchuria. He further confides in the boy that it is the Japanese who have made a cripple and pauper of him and forced him to leave Manchuria for Peking. In 1949, the aging cripple again helps Little Tiger, now a college teacher of the lowest rank, by getting him safely outside the city gate after Peking has fallen into Communist hands. Likewise, the title hero of “Father Lin,” an American, impresses Peng Ko and his classmates not only for his personal integrity and fairness but also for his patriotic injunction to study hard so as to become masters in their own country: I am a stranger. At the very end, when there is no other way, I can return to my own country. But, where will you go? Do you wish to remain another people’s slaves forever and ever? Or do you yourselves wish to stand up and become masters? This responsibility will fall on your shoulders. If you don’t want to be slaves, it is not enough to curse at others, but you yourselves have to actually have the power and the way. This is why I want you to put all your energies and efforts into your studies. Understand?

Though Father Lin counsels students against needless provocation of the Japanese, he himself is placed in a concentration camp right after Pearl Harbor: We never saw Father Lin again after that day. From then on, as if it had been previously agreed upon, none of us ever mentioned Father Lin, but none of us could forget him. The day before he left the school he had given us a text to memorize and after he was gone even the worst students among us learned it thoroughly and could rattle it off without one single mistake. Each time when the original English class period was changed into a study period, the classroom would be absolutely silent and everyone of us would be studying hard as if Father Lin’s eyes were still watching us. We could never let him down again.

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Peng Ko did not have to elaborate on this incident to produce the right response in his readers because schoolchildren of his generation and younger had all read Alphonse Daudet’s “La Dernière Classe” in a Chinese version by Hu Shih that has remained popular to this day. When Hu Shih translated the story in his spare time as a college student at Cornell University, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 could not have meant much to him as a historical issue. It is the story itself of the old Alsatian teacher who urged his class to love and study French because German would now be the official language in the conquered province that must have moved him deeply, as it would all Chinese readers mindful of the repeated losses of territory to foreign powers since the Opium War. While English is also a foreign tongue to his students, Father Lin is certainly justified to fear the ominous consequences of cultural domination if Japanese is to replace English as the primary foreign language in all schools in Japanese-occupied cities. “The Ivory Balls” (Hsiang-ya ch’iu) is the touching story of a forsaken wife tainted nevertheless with the dishonor of her husband as a Japanese collaborator. In his patriotic self-righteousness, the boy Little Yuan is cruel toward her as only children can be. “The Swallow of Sha River” (Sha-ho yen) is the brave young woman who, though not yet twenty, has succeeded her late brother as leader of a guerrilla band fighting against both puppet and Communist troops. She may be a fictitious character, but on the other hand, Peng Ko could have met someone like her during his second journey to the interior in early 1944. Since he was by Chinese counting already nineteen (a year younger than his counterpart in the story), he could have become an object of romantic interest in Swallow’s eyes. We don’t know what happened to her after saying goodbye to her would-be lover, but in “Candlestick” and “Major Chia” we are given detailed accounts of how both title heroes fought unavailingly against the Communists and died. The first-person narrator in “Night Reconnaissance,” on the other hand, survives a dangerous mission at sea with a fellow frogman. Early bereaved of his father, this youth from the birthplace of the Sung patriot Yüeh Fei joined the army at age twenty and always remembers his mother’s parting admonition to defend his country. Of all the stories from the fifties, only “Under the Tao-nan Bridge,” a poignant love story involving a lonely bachelor from the mainland and a Taiwanese girl of humble origins, is unconcerned with the issue of patriotism.

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“Specks of Dust” was first serialized in the Central Daily News for ten days in April 1983. Twenty-five years had elapsed since the publication of “The Ivory Balls” in 1958, and the other five stories of autobiographical significance were published even earlier, mostly during 1954. The contrast in style between these and “Specks of Dust” indicates the greater maturity and self-assurance of the later Peng Ko as a narrative artist. Except for “Night Reconnaissance,” all the earlier stories in this volume have a loose narrative structure spanning days or years. The title story of Specks of Dust, however, takes forty pages to describe a brief encounter between two Chinese—the man originally came from Taiwan and the woman arrived from Peking only fifteen months ago—mostly in a stalled elevator. According to Peng Ko, the story is almost a parable and could happen in any metropolis—London, New York, Tokyo, Paris. But of the four proposed, New York would seem the most appropriate locale, not merely because of the author’s greater familiarity with the city, as evidenced in Yonder Shore and Coming from Champaign. In the last three decades, far more college graduates in Taiwan have gone to America for graduate study than to any other country, and a great many have stayed on permanently. The unnamed hero would seem no exception. Today, on the campuses of leading American universities, students from the mainland and Taiwan study for degrees in an amicable atmosphere without noticeable political tensions. Certainly the mainland students don’t have to report frequently to a consular official in charge of student affairs. In “Specks of Dust,” however, Peng Ko is writing of 1982 or 1981, when mainland students in America were fewer in number but under greater supervision by their own government. So it could happen that someone would be told to return after being abroad for over a year, as is the case with the heroine of the story, a math student in her twenties. To make ready for her departure, she goes to an office building one late afternoon to return a violin to its original owner—a black instructor of English who has befriended her. She doesn’t accomplish her mission, however, and on her way down she gets suspended between floors, in a darkened elevator. The only other person trapped with her is the man from Taiwan in his middle thirties, who has just completed a decade’s service with a company located in this building. He uses a Ronson lighter first to find the telephone, and then to have a closer look at his companion after they have conversed for a while. They have got along quite well by the time light returns to the elevator.

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In its basic situation of two strangers conversing in a stopped vehicle, “Specks of Dust” inescapably reminds one of Eileen Chang’s “Blockade” (Feng-so, 1943), where a married accountant in a stalled trolley car complains about his family life, and elicits the sympathy and romantic interest of a college instructor in her middle twenties. After the blockade is lifted, however, the accountant promptly leaves her and merges himself in the standing crowd, and the unmarried teacher “knew what he meant by this act: all that took place during the period of blockade should be consigned to oblivion. The whole city of Shanghai had dozed away, had had a preposterous dream.”2 Similarly in Peng Ko’s story, once power is restored, “the darkness became a mere accident as if it had never happened.” But while this would be true for any number of impatient passengers in the other elevators of that building, it is certainly not the case with the two “specks of dust” that so far have been blown here and there without any volition of their own. For both the man and the woman who have hitherto lived a passive and uneventful life, the accident of being thrown together in an utterly dark elevator has meant a renewal of interest and purpose in life, certainly an indication of their willingness to take command of their destinies. As their conversation gets more interesting, he makes her laugh by asking her permission (such quaint western manners!) to use the lighter once again. By its flame she finds his face very likeable and reassuring, and he finds her dainty features and the easily startled look of an antelope very appealing indeed. Later, as they leave the building and step into the street, he proposes that they go to a nearby Chinese restaurant to have some special dumplings for dinner. She readily agrees. Will the evening stay even longer for them than just a meal? Will she summon enough courage to defy the order to return and stay where she is? It all depends. The story ends with the man proposing a toast that he may see more of her if she decides to stay. At heart she certainly agrees that it is time to exercise her own volition in matters affecting her future. In his initial passiveness, the man in the story resembles the fortynine-year-old hero of “Keng Erh in Peking,” a famous story from Chen Jo-hsi’s The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1978). Both bachelors remain strangers in the city where they have lived for at least ten years, and console their loneliness by occasional enjoyment of food and liquor. Keng Erh, defeated in his attempt to find a wife because his status as a returned scholar from

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America is held against him during the Cultural Revolution, looks forward to a mutton fire pot at his favorite restaurant every Saturday. The man in “Specks of Dust” has received that day a bottle of wine from someone in the company, and has intended to drink it alone in his apartment to make his TV dinner more palatable and then write an overdue letter to his mother in Taipei, who has been long disappointed over his procrastination to marry. Keng Erh at thirty-nine would have been someone like him, a lonely bachelor in America, though he was enough of an idealist to want to go back to mainland China to start a new life there. Better informed about conditions there, the man in Peng Ko’s story will not make the same mistake, but he seems not in a hurry to get married or to go back to Taiwan either. For him, the darkness of the suspended elevator symbolizes the psychological condition of someone lacking the courage to break out of the shell of self-contentment. But at the same time, the possibility of new life begins in that darkness because only in darkness can he confide in and feel close to someone “very, very Chinese.” Later, sharing his wine and dumplings with that person, we may presume he will be filled with the kind of joy that Keng Erh felt when eating out with the factory girl Hsiao Ch’ing soon after his return from America. On her part, the math student from the mainland, whose brief enjoyment of a freer life may be terminated in a day or two, is of course even more keenly aware of the need to fill life’s emptiness with love. In its essential terms, “Specks of Dust” is a delicate human drama of awakening into love, regardless of the political stance of each protagonist. But in stressing its allegorical character, Peng Ko has also conceived his story as an ideological drama in which the man, representing the cause of a free China, puts the woman at a disadvantage with her unconvincing defense of her own government. Her ideological defeat, however, resolves her own self-doubt, wherever her next move may lead her. Since the author is suggesting that such dramas of persuasion are taking place in all international metropolises where mainland Chinese may freely meet and converse with Chinese from Taiwan and elsewhere, his story is also one of hope and in that respect different by intention from “Blockade” and “Keng Erh in Peking.” To present-day readers, the literature of hope would often seem less realistic and more sentimental than the literature of cynicism or despair. In shattering her ground for hope, Eileen Chang places her heroine in an ironic perspective that seems far more in accord with everyday life, since

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casual conversations in a stalled trolley or elevator do not ordinarily lead to an affair or romance. But, on the other hand, Eileen Chang has not denied the possibility of two people genuinely and rhapsodically in love: the heroine of “Blockade” is merely out of luck because the accountant is utterly unworthy of her. Even in “Keng Erh in Peking,” a tragedy in a despairing mood, Chen Jo-hsi has not denied the possibility of reciprocal love in a Communist society: it is the frustration of that instinct for love and the hero’s eventual acceptance of a loveless life that constitutes her indictment of Communist inhumanity during the Cultural Revolution. Keng Erh and Hsiao Ch’ing were once far more crazily and miraculously in love than we have the right to presume regarding the unfolding friendship between the man and woman in Peng Ko’s story. But if Chen Jo-hsi wrote her story to suggest the incalculable human cost of the Cultural Revolution, Peng Ko is capturing with his story the more hopeful mood of the eighties when tens of thousands of mainland students are living and studying in capitalist countries and becoming increasingly disillusioned with their own system of government. Peng Ko is justified to feel cautiously hopeful that thousands upon thousands of such students will change themselves and their country for the better. It is thanks to Nancy Ing, editor of The Chinese PEN and distinguished translator of Taiwan literature, that so many Chinese writers have been introduced to western readers. Chen Jo-hsi, for one, could not have become a writer of international reputation without the English edition of The Execution of Mayor Yin, of which Nancy Ing is the co-translator. Now we have again to thank her for bringing out a volume of Peng Ko’s stories. It is true that his overall importance to Chinese letters and journalism cannot be measured by his works of fiction alone, but on the other hand, even Peng Ko himself must have felt some regret that he should have written so little fiction since the publication of his masterpiece Coming from Champaign in 1970. In honoring our sixty-year-old author in this year of the tiger with a new book of translations, we have reason to hope that he may be rekindled with enthusiasm for some major project to begin his third and finest phase as a writer.

NOTES

P A R T I . C H I N E S E L I T E R AT U R E I N P E R S P E C T I V E

Classical Chinese Literature: Its Reception Today as a Product of Traditional Culture *A partial version of this paper was first presented at a symposium on Chinese civilization held on the campus of Memphis State University, Tennessee, in October 1984. It was subsequently expanded into a Chinese article entitled “The Fate of Classical Chinese Literature,” which appeared in a New York quarterly, The Chinese Intellectual I, 3 (spring 1985); II, 2 (winter 1986). It is at the urging of the editors of CLEAR that I have completed the English version under the present title. The interested reader may want to read my Chinese article, as well as other essays of mine germane to the topic, in particular, the title essay in Jen-te wen-hsüeh (Humane Literature, Taipei, 1977), and “Chinese Novels and American Critics: Reflections on Structure, Tradition, and Satire,” this volume. 1. This literature of the so-called New Period (Hsin shih-ch’i) has understandably come to a halt following the Peking massacres of June 1989. 2. For example, the text of Hung-lou meng as rewritten by K’ang Lai-hsin has only 286 pages. This Chung-kuo li-tai ching-tien pao-k’u edition also contains sixteen pages of illustrations but only twenty-two pages of the original text of the novel. In 1984 Editor-in-chief Kao Shang-ch’in added fifteen new titles to his popular Treasury of Classics. Po Yang, a very popular writer and social commentator in Taiwan, has been translating the Tzu-chih t’ung-chien into pai-hua for some years. Despite negative comments by some historians, the volumes so far published have sold very well.

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3. Custom, however, would have prevented him from reviewing such nonAmerican publications as Outlaws of the Marsh (Sidney Shapiro’s translation of the 100-chapter Shui-hu chuan), Journey to the West (another translation of the Hsi-yu chi by W. J. F. Jenner), A Dream of Red Mansions (translated by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang), and André Lévy, tr., Fleur en Fiole d’Or (Jin Ping Mei cihua). 4. The New Yorker (July 23, 1979) did carry an unsigned but highly favorable short review of the Hsiao Hung volume, presumably not by Updike. 5. See “Chinese Novels and American Critics,” this volume. 6. See Charles A. Moser, “The Achievement of Constance Garnett,” The American Scholar (summer 1988). 7. I take the opportunity to recommend The Tao Te Ching: A New Translation with Commentary, by Ellen M. Chen (New York: Paragon House, 1989). 8. Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern (New York: Anchor, 1961), xxi. 9. Chinese Lyricism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 133. 10. Especially noteworthy in this regard is Chang Ying-ch’ang’s compilation of a large anthology of poems on social, political, and economic topics originally called Kuo-ch’ao shih-to (1870), now retitled Ch’ing-shih to (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1960). Professor Paul S. Ropp has cited several poems from this anthology in his long paper on “The Status of Women in Mid-Qing China: Evidence from Letters, Laws and Literature,” first presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C. in December 1987. 11. Cited from part I: “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes,” of Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (translated from the French by Linda Asher; New York: Grove, 1986), 5–6. I first read this part under the title “The Novel and Europe”(David Bellos, tr.) in The New York Review of Books (July 18, 1984). 12. “The Fate of Classical Chinese Literature,” The Chinese Intellectual II, 2:81. 13. As translated by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang in Selected Works of Lu Hsün, volume II (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1957), 190–191. 14. In the essay Lu Hsün pokes fun at Dream of the Red Chamber for its endings, particularly the final tableau of Pao-yü as “a monk in crimson woollen cape” bidding good-bye to his father and leaving the world. But, on the other hand, he believes that “the author dared to write comparatively truthfully,” in contrast to all those who wrote sequels to his novel with a happy ending: “these men felt such an urge to deceive themselves and others that a little deception was not enough: they had to close their eyes and talk gibberish” (Selected Works of Lu Hsün II:188). Since Lu Hsün believes Kao E to be largely responsible for the last forty chapters of the novel, in the essay he may be gently ribbing Kao rather than Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in. See chapters 23–24 of A Brief History of Chinese Fiction for Lu Hsün’s considered views on Dream and The Scholars. 15. In the prologue to the play as preserved in Ku ming-chia tsa-chü of 1588, both Ts’ai P’o-p’o and Tou T’ien-chang declare that he owes her ten taels in capital and

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interest. In the fuller text adopted by Tsang Chin-shu for his Yuan-ch’ü hsüan of 1616, the debt is increased to forty taels, presumably to make Tou more sympathetic. 16. The Chinese Intellectual II, 2:79. 17. The two excerpts from Tou’s speech are taken from Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, trs., Selected Plays of Kuan Han-ching (Shanghai: New Art and Literature Publishing House, 1958), 44. 18. Dr. Anne Birrell’s elegant rendition of Hsü Ling’s preface is appended to her full translation of the Yü-t’ai hsin-yung. See New Songs from a Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1986), 337–345. 19. See especially his poems about girls of the Chiangnan region (four quatrains under the title of Yüeh-nü tz’u, and another quatrain known as Huan-sha-shih shang nü) for lines in praise of their feet.

Chinese Novels and American Critics: Reflections on Structure, Tradition, and Satire 1. Among important essays not mentioned in the main text of this paper, two by Andrew H. Plaks are particularly noteworthy: “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative,” in Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); and “Full-length Hsiao-shuo and the Western Novel: A Generic Reappraisal,” in New Asia Academic Bulletin 1 (Hong Kong, 1978). This is a special issue on Comparative Literature East and West. 2. Y. W. Ma, “The Chinese Historical Novel: An Outline of Themes and Contexts,” Journal of Asian Studies 34 (1975): 277–293. 3. Published by Harvard University Press. Unlike Hanan’s highly technical study, The Chinese Short Story (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), this book can be read by the nonspecialist with enjoyment. 4. Cf. Plaks, “Allegory in Hsi-yu chi and Hung-lou meng,” and Shuen-fu Lin, “Ritual and Narrative Structure in Ju-lin Wai-shih,” in Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative, 163–202, 244–265. 5. Plaks’s book was published by Princeton University Press in 1976. My long review (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies XXXIX [1] [1979]: 190–210) is in this volume. 6. See the essays by Plaks listed in note 1. Consult also David T. Roy, “Chang Chu-p’o’s Commentary on the Chin p’ing mei,” and Shuen-fu Lin’s essay in Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative, 115–123, 244–265. 7. See note 6. 8. Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative, 122. 9. Ibid., 120. 10. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology: Section on Literature (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1981).

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11. The Great Tradition (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 12. Leavis continues: “But the conventional talk about the ‘perfect construction’ of Tom Jones . . . is absurd. There can’t be subtlety of organization without richer matter to organize, and subtler interests, than Fielding has to offer.” 12. Translation of Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih lüeh by Hsien-yi Yang and Gladys Yang (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959). 13. Especially, the essays on Chinese novels in Hu Shih wen-ts’un, 4 vols. (Taipei, 1953); Cheng Chen-to, Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh yen-chiu, vol. 1 (Peking, 1957); and A Ying, Wan-Ch’ing hsiao-shuo shih (Peking, 1955). 14. 1587 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) bears the subtitle The Ming Dynasty in Decline. Spence’s book was published by Viking Press in 1978. 15. Barzun, “Biography and Criticism—A Misalliance Disputed,” Critical Inquiry 1 (3) (1975). 16. In Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 2 (1) (1980): 3–53. A shortened version, entitled “A New Interpretation of the Shui-hu Chuan,” appears in Proceedings (full title given in note 10). 17. Since Plaks doesn’t refer to Wu Ch’eng-en as the author of Hsi-yu chi in this article, we do not know if he still believes that Wu wrote the novel, as he did in “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative” in Chinese Narrative, 309–352. 18. See “Shui-hu Chuan and the Sixteenth-century Novel Form,” 49–50, concerning the contemporary reception of The Water Margin. Plaks admits on p. 49: “Particularly troubling is the nearly universal praise by sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury commentators for Li K’uei as a totally honest individual free of all cant and dissimulation, an unbridled free spirit, a veritable ‘living Buddha.’” 19. The Russian novel, of course, is different from the Western European novel. Dostoevsky would regard European liberalism itself as a form of darkness. 20. See The Classic Chinese Novel, chap. 3: “The Water Margin.” 21. Proceedings, 39. 22. Shuen-fu Lin and Larry Schultz have translated this short novel into English as The Tower of Myriad Mirrors: A Supplement to Journey to the West by Tung Yüeh (1620– 1686) (Berkeley: Lancaster-Miller, 1978). The book is difficult to understand because Tung Yüeh’s method is “the creation of dreams, dreams with features familiar to dreamers all over the world: distortions, discrepancies, inconsequence, irrelevance, and preposterous happenings imbued with emotional tensions.” Quoted from T. A. Hsia’s essay on Hsi-yu pu in Chow Tse-tsung, ed., Wen-lin: Studies in the Chinese Humanities (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 241. 23. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews II (1): 5. 24. Quoted from my review of Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber, this volume, p. 179. 25. Li Yü wrote one novel, Jou p’u-t’uan, and three collections of stories: Wusheng hsi (Silent Operas), First Series; Wu-sheng hsi, Second Series; Shih-erh lou (Twelve Structures). Of these, only the last was in general circulation in the thirties, along with his plays. Wu-sheng hsi was not available to Chinese scholars until Helmut Martin made a photocopy of a rare combined set of both series and published it in a limited

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edition (Taipei: Ku-t’ing shu-wu, 1969). Recent scholars have all confirmed Li Yü’s authorship of Jou p’u-t’uan. See, especially, Robert E. Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 181–183. 26. The full title is Nan Meng-mu chiao-ho san-ch’ien. 27. The Chinese Vernacular Story, 175. 28. Wu-sheng hsi (Taipei, 1969), 384. 29. The widow dies in chapter 48. What Wu Ching-tzu finds inexcusable is that her father, a Neo-Confucian, should encourage her to die. 30. For a sampling of Li Pao-chia’s satiric art, read Douglas Lancashire’s translation of Modern Times, chapters 1–5, in Renditions 2 (Hong Kong, 1974). He has since translated the complete novel under the same main title (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996). Lancashire has also written a monograph on the novelist, Li Po-yuan (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). Donald Holoch’s long chapter on Bureaucracy Exposed in Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980) is to be avoided as a piece of pretentious and misleading critical analysis. 31. The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century contains two chapters by the editor herself dealing with plot structures and narrative modes. Her analysis of Strange Events in both chapters should be read with caution. 32. Translated from Wu Chien-jen, Erh-shih nien mu-tu chih kuai hsien-chuang, 2: 831–832. This two-volume edition (Peking: Jen-ming wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1981) has annotations by Chang Yu-ho. The doctor’s speech occurs in chapter 101. 33. “A Confucian Interpretation of the Chin P’ing Mei,” Proceedings, 46. 34. For an explanation of this term, see “The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture: A Reappraisal of Ching-hua yuan,” this volume. 35. Cf. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 36. For a brief discussion of Wen-k’ang’s novel see James J. Y. Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 124–129. Stephen H. L. Cheng has written a doctoral dissertation on Flowers of Shanghai and the Late-Ch’ing Courtesan Novel (Harvard University, 1979). 37. I quote from Stephen Cheng’s dissertation, 171–172: “According to Lubbock, there is only one ‘purely dramatic novel,’ and that novel is Henry James’s The Awkward Age, published in 1899, five years after the publication of Flowers of Shanghai, a fact which is astonishing, because the narrators of traditional Chinese novels are very meddlesome.”

On the “Scientific” Study of Modern Chinese Literature: A Reply to Professor Pru˚ š ek 1. J. Pru˚šek, “Basic Problems of the History of Modern Chinese Literature and C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction,” T’oung Pao, XLIX (4–5) (Leiden, 1961): 357–404. In this paper, all page references to Pru˚šek’s article will be preceded

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by the abbreviation TP. It may not seem improper to introduce a personal note here. During Professor Pru˚šek’s visit to the United States in the spring of 1963, it was my good fortune to meet him and converse with him on many topics of traditional and modern Chinese literature. Needless to say, I was most impressed by his personal cordiality and his profound erudition. But since Professor Pru˚šek had already submitted his article before making my acquaintance, necessity has forced upon me the unpleasant task of arguing with him in public. I trust he will find that throughout my article I have discussed only points of substance and refrained from unseemly polemics. 2. See J. Pru˚šek, “Lu Hsün the Revolutionary and the Artist,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung (5–6) (1960): 229–236. 3. Pru˚šek quite arbitrarily equates the literature of “disinterested moral exploration” with the kind of escapist literature fashionable in Taiwan, deplored by my brother in the appendix on Taiwan to my book, 511. Pru˚šek also arbitrarily assumes that my brother has a much higher opinion of Lu Hsün than I by reference to his remark, “The early stories and essays (of Lu Hsün) seem to me to have spoken best for the conscience of China during a period of agonizing transition” (TP 404). But nothing in my chapter on Lu Hsün contradicts this statement. This review article is now more easily available in J. Pru˚šek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). 4. Harry Levin, “Apogee and Aftermath of the Novel,” Daedalus (spring 1963): 216. 5. René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 15. 6. W. K. Wimsatt Jr., The Verbal Icon (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), 21. 7. Ibid., 3. 8. I have indicated my changed view of her importance in my recent article, “Residual Femininity: Women in Chinese Communist Fiction” (The China Quarterly (Jan.–Mar. 1963): 175–176), this volume. 9. Selected Works of Lu Hsün (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), 1:72. 10. According to the story, Lu Hsün first met Jun-t’u when the latter was “a boy of eleven or twelve” and “that was thirty years ago” (ibid., 65). Until the author’s visit home after an absence of “over twenty years” (ibid., 63), they “never saw each other again” (ibid., 68). It is therefore extremely odd to read later on that Jun-t’u’s fifth child strikes Lu Hsün as “just the Jun-t’u of twenty years before, only a little paler and thinner” (ibid., 71). The phrase “twenty years before” (nien-nien ch’ien) should be corrected to read “thirty years before.” However, with their hagiographical attitude toward Lu Hsün, no scholars on the mainland have to my knowledge ventured to point out or correct this obvious mistake, even though many editions of Lu Hsün’s works have appeared in recent years. 11. Ibid., 72. 12. I have discussed Lu Hsün’s hopeful attitude toward the younger generation

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in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 52–54. There I cited quotations from the story “The Solitary” and an open letter dated April 10, 1928, included in San-hsien chi. 13. Selected Works of Lu Hsün, 1:6. I have slightly revised the translation. 14. Ibid. 15. Selected Works of Lu Hsün, 3:230. 16. Translated from “Tzu-hsüan chi tzu-hsü” in Nan-ch’iang pei-tiao chi. See Lu Hsün ch’üan-chi, IV (Hong Kong: Wen-hsüeh yen-chiu she, 1973), 347–348. 17. Chou Hsia-shou, Lu Hsün hsiao-shuo-li ti jen-wu (Shanghai: Shanghai ch’upan kung-ssu, 1954), 64–65. 18. Ibid., 14–15. 19. Selected Works of Lu Hsün, 1:165. 20. Ibid., 169. 21. Ibid., 158–159. 22. Ibid., 156. This is a loose translation of a statement by Chang Tsai starting with Kuei-shen che (Chinese text in Glossary II). 23. Lu Hsün, ed., Hsiao-shuo erh-chi, vol. 4 of Chao Chia-pi, ed., Chung-kuo hsin-wen-hsüeh ta-hsi (Shanghai: Liang-yu t’u-shu kung-ssu, 1935–36). 24. Most of Lao She’s short stories strike me as disappointing. In chapter 8 of Lao-niu p’o-ch’e (Shanghai, 1937), Lao She tells of the difficulties and frustrations he encountered in writing short stories. The only group of stories he speaks of with some pride are the longer tales that are actually condensations of novels he had intended to write but didn’t have the time for. Among these, “Yüeh-ya erh,” because of its proletarian subject matter, has received the highest praise in Communist criticism. But a complementary story in the same style about a rich girl, “Yang-kuang,” first collected in Ying-hai chi (Shanghai, 1935), is decidedly much superior. Since both tales should be regarded as novelettes rather than short stories, the inescapable conclusion is that Lao She has little aptitude for the short story. 25. Thus because I referred to Mao Tun’s “ornate literary vocabulary,” Pru˚šek infers that I am incapable of discriminating among the several kinds of style in Mao Tun’s work. Actually I was referring to his vocabulary rather than to his style: the large number of words and phrases taken from classical literature that does give his novels and many of his short stories an “ornate” quality. Similarly, because I contrasted the “individualist” Lao She with the “romantic” Mao Tun in that transitional passage, Pru˚šek believes that I have failed to see the considerable amount of romanticism in Lao She’s fiction. Actually, in chapter 7 I refer to his romantic heroes—the “romantic Ma Wei” (174) and Lao Li with “his romantic dream of a world with poetry and meaning” (178)—and properly stress the strong note of individual heroism and chivalry in his work. Unfortunately, “romantic” being one of the most imprecise words in the English language, I applied it to Mao Tun primarily to suggest the erotic character of his fiction: hence the word is used in conjunction with two other adjectives, “sensuous” and “melancholic.” Lao She, of course, has as much right to that epithet if we intend it to denote the world of individualism, heroism, and chivalry.

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26. Cf. Yeh Tzu-ming, Lun Mao Tun ssu-shih-nien ti wen-hsüeh tao-lu,1959, and Shao Po-chou, Mao Tun ti wen-hsüeh tao-lu,1959. 27. Mao Tun wen-chi (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1959), 7:27. 28. Ibid., 29. 29. Ibid., 34. 30. Mao Tun, Spring Silkworms and Other Stories (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), 13. 31. Yü Ta-fu, Han-hui chi (Shanghai: Pei-hsin shu-chü, 1931): “Po-tien,” 6. Each item in that volume has its own separate pagination. 32. Ibid., “Po-tien,” 17. 33. Ibid., “Po-tien,” 8.

PART II. TRADITIONAL DRAMA

An Introduction to The Romance of the Western Chamber *Originally appearing as “A Critical Introduction” to S. I. Hsiang, tr., The Romance of the Western Chamber (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). Mr. Hsiung’s translation was first published by Methuen (London, 1935). 1. Readers unfamiliar with the tale are advised to read Mr. Hsung’s translation on 271–281 before proceeding with this introduction. 2. Cf. Chang Hsin-chang, “The West Chamber: The Theme of Love in Chinese Drama,” Annual of the China Society of Singapore (1957):9–19. 3. Liu Wu-chi, An Introduction to Chinese Literature (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1966), 173. 4. This line actually precedes the question.

Time and the Human Condition in the Plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu 1. Notably, Hou Wai-lu, Lun T’ang Hsien-tsu chü-tso ssu-chung (On four of T’ang Hsien-tsu’s plays) (Peking: Chung-kuo hsi-chü ch’u-pan-she, 1962). Like most other eminent scholars on the mainland writing about Ming history or thought, Hou has been harshly attacked since the launching of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” In his article “Hou Wai-lu chieh-ku feng-chin pei-ch’ing-suan” (Hou Wai-lu was purged for drawing upon the past to satirize the present), Ming-pao yüeh-k’an I (12) (Hong Kong, 1966), Wu Wen-pin reports on two articles appearing respectively in Kuang-ming jih-pao (August 10, 1966), and Hung-ch’i 10 (August 10, 1966), which attack Hou especially for his writings on T’ang. According to the first article, it was Chou Yang who took a personal interest in the preparation of the 4-volume T’ang Hsien-tsu chi (The works of T’ang Hsien-tsu) and asked Hou to write an introduction to it. The two were therefore conspirators affirming the nobility of T’ang’s thought

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as an indirect critique of the inhumanity of the Communist regime. T’ang Hsien-tsu chi, hereafter abbreviated as THTC, was published by Chung-hua shu-chü in 1962. Vols. 1–2, “Shih-wen chi” (Poetry and prose), were edited by Hsü Shuo-fang; vols. 3–4, “Hsi-ch’ü chi” (Plays), by Ch’ien Nan-yang. 2. In 1591 T’ang Hsien-tsu submitted a memorial defending the Censorate and criticizing Prime Minister Shen Shih-hsing. Highly displeased, Emperor Shen-tsung exiled T’ang to a minor post in Hsü-wen hsien, Kwangtung (cf. THTC II:1215). The memorial, known as “Lun fu-ch’en k’o-ch’en shu,” is reprinted in THTC II: 1211–14. T’ang’s submission of this memorial constitutes an important episode (scenes 6–7) in Chiang Shih-ch’üan’s (1725–85) biographical play entitled Lin-ch’uan meng. 3. The sayings of Lo Ju-fang are preserved in Huang Tsung-hsi, Ming-ju hsüeh-an (hereafter abbreviated as MJHA), chüan 34 (Wan-yu wen-k’u hui-yao, ed.; Taipei: Commercial Press, 1965), VII:1–30. The serious student should also consult Lo Chin-ch’i hsien-sheng ch’üan-chi (The complete works of Lo Ju-fang), which is much less accessible. For a concise presentation of Yen Chün’s thought, see Huang’s introductory essay on the T’ai-chou school in MJHA, chüan 32 (VI:62–63). Fung Yu-lan maintains in Derk Bodde, tr., A History of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1953), II:627: “Huang Tsung-hsi is not unjustified in accusing Wang Chi of Ch’anist bias. His similar criticism of Wang Chi’s fellow student, Wang Ken, however, seems less well founded, and would appear to apply more appropriately to Yen Chün.” 4. T’ang Hsien-tsu refers to his spiritual condition under Lo Ju-fang in his preface to T’ai-p’ing shan-fang chi-hsüan (THTC II:1037). The latter work was by Tsou Yüan-piao, an early leader of the Tung-lin group. 5. Cf. T’ang Chün-i, “Lo Chin-ch’i chih li-hsüeh” (The Neo-Confucianism of Lo Ju-fang), Min-chu p’ing-lun V (5) (Hong Kong, 1954), and Mo Chung-kuei, “Lo Chin-ch’i chih ssu-hsiang” (The thought of Lo Ju-fang), a mimeographed report (n.d.) given at the twentieth monthly meeting of the research assistants of the New Asia Institute, Chinese University of Hong Kong. 6. MJHA VII:34/20. 7. Ibid., 26. 8. In addition to the plays and letters, THTC contains 2,274 poems (shih) and 145 compositions in prose and in verse forms other than the shih, including 30 fu. These compositions and letters have received scant attention as literature in their own right, though they have been utilized by scholars in their studies of the author’s life and thought. Hsü Shuo-fang, especially, has quoted copiously from these writings and other relevant documents in his excellent chronological biography of the playwright, T’ang Hsien-tsu nien-p’u (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1958). Huang Chih-kang, “T’ang Hsien-tsu nien-p’u,” Hsi-ch’ü yen-chiu 2–4 (Shanghai, 1957), is particularly good in relating T’ang’s life to the politics of his time. In its serialized form, however, the biography stops at the year 1591 when T’ang was only fortytwo years old; the work was completed long ago, but, so far as I know, it has not

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yet been published as a book. Yagisawa Hajime, Mindai gekisakuke kenkyu (Studies in Ming playwrights) (Tokyo, 1959), also includes a chronological biography in its long chapter on T’ang Hsien-tsu. The work has been translated into Chinese by Lo Chin-t’ang as Ming-tai chü-tso-chia yen-chiu (Hong Kong: Lung-men shu-tien, 1966). 9. “Kuei-sheng shu-yüan shuo,” THTC II:1163. 10. MJHA VI:32–63. 11. Cf. the Chronological Biography in THTC II:1577–1578. According to Hsü Shuo-fang (“Ch’ien-yen,” THTC I:4), Ta-kuan had wanted to convert T’ang twenty years before they actually met. Upon Ta-kuan’s death, T’ang wrote three four-line poems to express his grief (THTC I:595). 12. Cf. Hou Wai-lu, “T’ang Hsien-tsu chu-tso chung ti jen-min-hsing ho ssuhsiang-hsing,” THTC I:6. 13. Ibid., 7. On the same page Hou quotes a passage from Ta-kuan opposing li (principle) to ch’ing. In Appendix A to T’ang Hsien-tsu nien-p’u, Hsü Shuo-fang includes three letters from Ta-kuan to T’ang that are of decided help in furthering our understanding of this intellectual friendship. 14. See, for instance, “Ch’ien-yen,” THTC I:8, and Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh shih (A history of Chinese literature) (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1959), III: 375. The latter work was prepared by the class of 1955 of the Chinese department of Peking University. 15. Cf. Hou Wai-lu, Lun T’ang Hsien-tsu chü-tso ssu-chung, 28–40. 16. See, for instance, Wang Chi-ssu, “Tseng-yang t’an-so T’ang Hsien-tsu ti ch’ü-i,” Wen-hsüeh p’ing-lun 3 (1963). 17. The fact that Shakespeare and T’ang died in the same year has naturally tempted many Chinese scholars to regard the Ming playwright as if he were the equal of his English contemporary in poetic and dramatic excellence. Aoki Masaru, whose Shina kinsei gikyoku shi (A history of the Chinese drama of the more recent dynasties) has been very influential among the Chinese since it was translated by Wang Ku-lu in 1936 (Chung-kuo chin-shih hsi-ch’ü shih; Shanghai: Commercial Press), may have been the first to make the comparison. In Ming Drama (Taipei: Heritage Press, 1966), 163, Josephine Huang Hung has with greater propriety compared Mu-tan t’ing to two of Shakespeare’s earlier works, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. T’ang Hsien-tsu has also been compared to the young Goethe: see the stimulating essay on T’ang and the Sturm und Drang movement in China (“T’ang Hsien-tsu yü Chung-kuo chih k’uang-piao yun-tung”) in Li Ch’ang-chih, Meng-yü chi (Chungking: Commercial Press, 1945). 18. Of T’ang’s recent biographies, Hsü Shuo-fang has dated the plays with the greatest precision. According to him, T’ang wrote Tzu-hsiao chi between the autumns of 1577 and 1579 when he was twenty-eight to thirty years (sui) old, and he began Tzu-ch’ai chi in 1586 and most probably completed it by 1587. The play was being readied for the printer in 1595, the year T’ang wrote a preface to it. He wrote the preface to Mu-tan t’ing in the fall of 1598 when he was forty-nine years

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old; Hsü believes that this date marks the completion of the play and argues against the hypothesis held by many scholars that it was completed a few years earlier. Cf. Appendix C in Hsü, T’ang Hsien-tsu nien-p’u, 217–226. According to Yagisawa Hajime (Ming-tai chü-tso-chia yen-chiu 426), the first drafts of Tzu-ch’ai chi and Mu-tan t’ing were completed respectively in 1589–1590 and 1588, while their final versions were completed in 1595 and 1598. But Mu-tan t’ing could not have been an earlier work than Tzu-ch’ai chi: the latter is closely linked to Tzu-hsiao chi in style and imagery while the former marks in many ways the author’s greater maturity as a playwright. As Hsü Shuo-fang has rightly noted, the many references to Kwangtung in Mu-tan t’ing would suggest that T’ang had incorporated in the play his experiences in Hsü-wen during his exile there in 1591–1592. The first draft could not have been completed in 1588 unless one assumes that it bears very little resemblance to the final version. To conclude our chronological account, Nan-k’o chi and Han-tan chi were completed respectively in 1600 and 1601. Yagisawa’s supposition (423–426) that the final versions of these plays were not completed until 1606 and 1613 respectively cannot be taken seriously. 19. Cf. Hsü, T’ang Hsien-tsu nien-p’u 147–148; Ming-tai chü-tso-chia yen-chiu 412. 20. As in Chiang Fang’s story, the main agent of hsia in Tzu-ch’ai chi is Huangshan-k’e or the Man in the Yellow Jacket. 21. In his preface to Tzu-ch’ai chi (THTC II:1097), T’ang Hsien-tsu states that, while engaged in the writing of Tzu-hsiao chi, he had become the target of malicious rumor and had to publish the play in its incomplete form to show that it had nothing to do with contemporary politics. The preface further quotes a comment by a friend to the effect that Tzu-hsiao chi is “a book for perusal and not a play for the stage.” It seems to me that Tzu-ch’ai chi was certainly written to make the story of Huo Hsiao-yü more conformable to the structure of a ch’uan-ch’i play and hence more actable by contemporary standards. According to some early commentators, the play that caused the spread of malicious rumor against T’ang could not have been Tzu-hsiao chi, which in its present form is politically innocuous, and must have been an overtly satiric work about the four temptations of man—chiu sê ts’ai ch’i (drinking, sex, covetousness, anger)—which the author had withheld from publication. Huang Chih-kang, who believes this, accordingly slights Tzu-hsiao chi as a work dashed off in a hurry to quiet dangerous gossip (see “T’ang Hsien-tsu nien-p’u,” Hsi-ch’ü Yenchiu 4 [1957]: 106–107). Hsü Shuo-fang argues against this theory along with other myths surrounding the composition of the play in Appendix D to T’ang Hsien-tsu nien-p’u. According to early Ch’ing biographers, T’ang eventually completed Tzuhsiao chi, but the manuscripts were burned after his death by his third son K’ai-yüan. Hsü (231) believes on the contrary that, if such manuscripts did exist, they must have been consumed in the fire that destroyed T’ang’s collection of calligraphy and painting in 1613. 22. But it must be remembered that Tzu-ch’ai chi, with its ornate poetic imagery

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and its antithetical and often stilted prose passages, was also composed in the p’ien-ch’i style. In “T’ang Hsien-tsu ho t’a-ti ch’uan-ch’i” (Yüan Ming Ch’ing hsi-ch’ü yen-chiu lun-wen chi) (Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-pan-she, 1957), 349, Hsü Shuo-fang singles out for attack a highly hyperbolic passage on tears (Tzu-hsiao chi, scene 24 [THTC IV: 2543]), not realizing that the same passage occurs intact in Tzu-ch’ai chi, scene 25 (THTC III:1674), except for the revision of the last two lines to even greater stiltedness. If Tzu-hsiao chi deserves criticism for this passage, then so should Tzu-ch’ai chi. Actually, this passage is not unpleasing as poetry, and it is not typical of either play in its deliberate cultivation of a conceit. 23. She is so praised by Tu Ch’iu-niang in scene 29 (THTC IV:2561). In scene 10, after Li I has declared his marital interest through a matchmaker, Hsiao-yü tells her mother that she does not want to marry but would rather keep her company and live a life of Taoist cultivation. This avowal, of course, cannot be taken seriously. With all her religious sympathy, she is primarily a romantic heroine. If T’ang Hsien-tsu had completed the play in adherence to the plot outline given in scene I, Hsiao-yü would soon after the reunion scene that completes the extant version have suffered many trials before she and her husband were finally reunited and restored to honor. But the résumé gives no indication that she would have turned religious. 24. In “The Lute Song,” the merchant’s wife recalls her glory in Ch’ang-an in the following lines: When my recital was over, even shan-ts’ai would frequently acknowledge my excellence; When my toilet was done, even Ch’iu-niang would very often show her envy. In the preface to the poem Po Chü-i states that she “had learned to play the p’i-p’a from two shan-ts’ai named Mu and Ts’ao”; the shan-ts’ai of the first line would seem naturally to refer to either or both of her instructors. In Yüan Po shih chiencheng kao (Canton: Lingnan University, Chung-kuo wen-hua yen-chiu-shih, 1950), Ch’en Yin-k’o gives further references to Ch’iu-niang in the poems of Yüan Chen and Po Chü-i and believes that she must have been a celebrated courtesan of her time. In Tzu-hsiao chi T’ang Hsien-tsu has given Ch’iu-niang the surname Tu; in “Tu Ch’iu-niang shih,” Tu Mu celebrates a beauty of the same name much loved by the T’ang emperor Hsien-tsung. In Tzu-hsiao chi, scene 29, Ch’iu-niang admits that she was of an envious temper in her youth, and both she and Shan-ts’ai, depicted as a woman ten years her junior, recall their earlier days in terms suggested by Po Chü-i’s poem. 25. Scene 9 (THTC IV:2473). 26. Scene 20 (ibid., 2531). 27. Scene 31(ibid., 2570). The whole song has been adapted from the poet Lu Chi’s (261–303) Pai-nien ko. Ch’ien Nan-yang, the editor of plays for THTC, has mispunctuated some lines descriptive of a man of ninety.

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28. Ibid., 2571. Tu Huang-shang is a historical figure whose biography appears in Chiu T’ang-shu, chüan 147, and Hsin T’ang shu, chüan 169. He died at the age of seventy-one sui (according to Chiu T’ang shu) or seventy (Hsin T’ang-shu) without undergoing a religious conversion. 29. Arthur Waley, tr., Chinese Poems (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946), 62. 30. Ibid., 103. 31. A. C. Graham, tr., “The Red Cliff, I,” in Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature (New York: Grove, 1965), 382. 32. “Nan-k’o t’ai-shou chuan,” in Wang P’i-chiang, ed., T’ang-jen hsiao-shuo (Hong Kong: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1958), 40. 33. Cf. scene 4. 34. In scene 8. 35. Scene 42 (THTC IV:2260). 36. Scene 44 (THTC IV:2271). 37. Ibid., 2273. 38. Ibid., 2273–2274. 39. In scene 44 (ibid., 2273) Yao-fang tells Ch’un-yü of a tier of Heaven known as Tao-li-t’ien where husband and wife could still have sexual intercourse, though without the accompanying “clouds and rain.” She says further that, higher up, husband and wife are no longer sexual partners though, when prompted by love, they still embrace, smell, or smile at each other. Beyond these tiers of Heaven, however, is Li-hen-t’ien, where no human love is possible. 40. Ibid., 2274. 41. “Chen-chung chi,” in T’ang-jen hsiao-shuo 37. 42. Han-tan chi, scene 6 (THTC IV:2307–2308). 43. Biographies of Yü-wen Yung appear in Chiu T’ang-shu, chüan 105, and Hsin T’ang-shu, chüan 134. T’ang Hsien-tsu’s refusal to accept Chang Chü-cheng’s patronage and his consequent failure to achieve the chin-shih degree as long as Chang was in power were dwelt upon by Tsou Ti-kuang in his biography of his good friend (THTC II:1511–1514) and have been made much of by all subsequent biographers, including the Ch’ing playwright Chiang Shih-ch’üan. (Chang died in 1582, and the following year T’ang became a chin-shih at the age of thirty-four.) Other villains implacably opposed to the young heroes in T’ang’s plays and possibly modeled after Chang Chü-cheng include the Minister of the Right in Nan-k’o chi and Grand Commander of the Armies (t’ai-wei) Lu in Tzu-ch’ai chi. The latter eventually keeps Li I as a captive guest in his house in his attempt to force him to marry his daughter; in this respect, he is not unlike Prime Minister Niu in Kao Ming’s P’i-p’a chi, who incarcerates the hero Ts’ai Po-chieh in his house and forces him to marry his daughter. The villains in T’ang’s plays may have autobiographical significance, but at the same time they must be seen against the villains in P’i-p’a chi and other earlier plays in the ch’uan-ch’i tradition. 44. Scene 27 (THTC IV:2412). 45. Scene 29 (ibid., 2420).

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46. The phantasmagoric note is especially pronounced in scene 22, which depicts Lu Sheng’s banishment to Kwangtung and his subsequent voyage to Hainan Island. 47. Scene 11 (THTC IV:2329). 48. Translation by Louis MacNeice (Faust, Oxford University Press, 1951), quoted in Maynard Mack, general editor, World Masterpieces (New York: Norton, 1956), II:1448. 49. D. J. Enright, A Commentary on Goethe’s Faust (New York: New Directions, 1949), 150. 50. Scene 29 (THTC IV:2423). 51. Thornton Wilder, Three Plays (New York: Harper, 1957; Bantam, 1958), 62. Page reference is to Bantam edition. 52. “Tu Li-niang chi” (The story of Tu Li-niang) is listed among more than a hundred titles of fiction in the catalogue of Ch’ao Li’s private library entitled Paowen-t’ang fen-lei shu-mu. During his trip to Tokyo in 1931, Sun K’ai-ti discovered this catalogue and duly lists its titles of fiction in Chung-kuo t’ung-su hsiao-shuo shu-mu (Peiping, 1933). On the same trip Sun found in the Naikaku Bunko a late Ming edition of Yen-chü pi-chi bearing the full title of Ch’ung-k’e tseng-pu yen-chü pi-chi and in the Archives and Mausolea Division of the Imperial Household (Kunaicho¯ Toshoryo¯) an early Ch’ing edition known as Tseng-pu p’i-tien t’u-hsiang yen-chü pi-chi. In Jih-pen Tung-ching so-chien Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shu-mu t’i-yao (Peiping, 1932), Sun notes that chüan 9 of the earlier set contains the story “Tu Li-niang mu-sê hui-hun” while chüan 8 of the latter contains one entitled “Tu Li-niang mu-tan-t’ing hui-hun chi.” Both books of Sun’s are fully described in the abbreviations section preceding the notes to “The Military Romance,” this volume. I have examined photostatic copies of both tales and found the second to be of little direct concern to the student of T’ang’s play about the same heroine, Mu-tan t’ing, since it bears all the earmarks of being a condensation of the first. The shorter tale, however, is simply titled “Tu Li-niang chi” (Sun K’ai-ti must have transcribed the longer title from the table of contents), and for the present I would not rule out the possibility of its being an earlier tale of which “Tu Li-niang mu-sê hui-hun” was an expansion. Though Sun K’ai-ti had early noted these titles about Tu Li-niang, their possible connections with T’ang’s play were not explored until T’an Cheng-pi wrote for Wen-hsüeh i-ch’an 206 (Kuang-ming jih-pao, April 27, 1958), a short article entitled “Ch’uan-ch’i Mu-tan t’ing ho hua-pen ‘Tu Li-niang chi.’” T’an believes “Tu Li-niang chi” to be the primary source of Mu-tan t’ing, though he has seen neither version of the story noted by Sun K’ai-ti. In his aforementioned article, “Tseng-yang t’an-so T’ang Hsien-tsu ti ch’ü-i” (1963), Wang Chi-ssu reports his discovery of a set of Ch’ung-k’e tseng-pu yen-chü pi-chi in the Peking University Library and states his conviction that Mu-tan t’ing was indeed based on the tale of Tu Li-niang to be found in that miscellany. My own examination of a photostatic copy of presumably the identical tale in the Naikaku Bunko set has led me to the same conclusion. T’ang,

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however, must have read the tale in a miscellany or story collection printed earlier than Ch’ung-k’e tseng-pu yen-chü pi-chi, and at present we have no way of knowing whether the two versions are identical. 53. Whenever they had occasion to discuss the sources for Mu-tan t’ing, all literary historians writing at length on Ming drama tended to overstress the importance of the three pre-T’ang tales alluded to in T’ang’s preface to the play. Aoki Masaru seems to have set the precedent in his survey of Chinese drama (cf. Chung-kuo chinshih hsi-ch’ü shih, 240–241). Ch’en Wan-nai is among the latest scholars to have repeated this error; see his Yüan Ming Ch’ing hsi-ch’ü shih (History of the drama of the Yüan, Ming, and Ch’ing periods) (Taipei: Chung-kuo hsüeh-shu-chu-tso chiang-chu wei-yüan-hui,1966), 475–476. 54. “Mu-tan t’ing chi t’i-tz’u,” THTC II:1093. 55. It has 55 scenes and runs to 247 pages in THTC. Tzu-ch’ai chi, T’ang’s second longest play, is shorter by two scenes and twelve pages. 56. The character tsüeh (Mathews’, No. 1703) is usually romanized chüeh. I have adopted the tsüeh form to indicate that the tutor’s nickname is a pun on his given name. In the Analects, XV, 1, we are told that Confucius once starved in Ch’en (tsai Ch’en tsüeh-liang). The name Ch’en Tsüeh-liang has therefore a further dimension of humor as a quotation from the Confucian classic. 57. In that scene an envoy from the Chin headquarters lusts after the rebel Li Ch’üan’s wife and makes progressively more impudent demands upon her through the help of an interpreter. Both the envoy’s gibberish and the interpreter’s translations are exceedingly funny. 58. As given in scenes 10, 12, 14, 20, 23–28, 30, 32, 35. 59. THTC II:1093. 60. For instance, in a long, self-deprecating monologue in scene 17, the Taoist nun Shih mocks her own misery as a shih-nü, that is, a woman with a hymen as impenetrable as a stone (shih). 61. See, for instance, “Ch’ien-yen,” THTC I:8–10, and Liu Ta-chieh, Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh fa-chan-shih (The development of Chinese literature) (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1963), III:1002–1003. 62. THTC III:1973. In this conversation both Li-niang and Meng-mei are alluding to a passage in Mencius, III B: “If the young people, without waiting for the orders of their parents, and the arrangements of the go-betweens, shall bore holes to steal a sight of each other, or get over the wall to be with each other, then their parents and all other people will despise them.” James Legge, tr., The Chinese Classics (London: Trübner & Co., 1861), II:144. 63. THTC III:1976. 64. Ibid., 1977. 65. Ibid., 2075.

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P A R T I I I . T R A D I T I O N A L A N D E A R LY M O D E R N F I C T I O N

The Military Romance: A Genre of Chinese Fiction Abbreviations ES KYT III Liu I Liu II

Sun I Sun II

Erh-shih-wu shih 二十五史. 9 vols. Reprint, Taipei: K’ai-ming shutien, preface dated 1934. Ku-pen Yüan-Ming tsa-chü 孤本元明雜劇, vol. 3. Peking: Chungkuo hsi-chü ch’u-pan-she, 1957. Liu Ts’un-yan. Chinese Popular Fiction in Two London Libraries. Hong Kong: Lung Men Bookstore, 1967. Liu Ts’un-yan. Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese Novels. Vol. I: The Authorship of the Feng Shen Yen I. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1962. Sun K’ai-ti 孫楷第. Chung-kuo t’ung-su hsiao-shuo shu-mu 中國通 俗小說書目. Reprint, Hong Kong: Shih-yung shu-chü, 1967. Sun K’ai-ti. Jih-pen Tung-ching so-chien Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shu-mu 日本東京所見中國小說書目. Reprint, Hong Kong: Shih-yung shu-chü, 1967.

1. The direct sequel to Cheng-hsi is Fan T’ang yen-yi chuan 反唐演義傳(cf. Sun I, 46–47), which features Hsüeh Kang 薛剛, Hsüeh Ting-shan’s son, as hero. Fen-chuang-lou ch’üan-chuan 粉粧樓全傳 (Sun I, 47; Liu Ts’un-yan, Chinese Popular Fiction in Two London Libraries [Liu I, 264–265]) may also be considered as a sequel as it depicts the adventures of the descendants of Lo Ch’eng 羅成 and other heroes of the early T’ang. In preparing this paper, I have consulted the popular Taiwan reprints of all the T’ang novels as well as the better Ch’ing editions available at the East Asian Library of Columbia University: Hsiu-hsiang shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan 繡 像說唐前傳 (如蓮居士編次, 京都文和堂藏, 光緒戊寅新鐫); Hsiu-hsiang shuo T’ang hou-chuan (compiler, publisher, and date identical with those of the Ch’ien chuan), comprising Shuo T’ang hsiao-ying-hsiung chuan 小英雄傳 and Shuo T’ang Hsüeh-chia-fu chuan 薛家府傳; Shuo T’ang san-chuan (full title: 新刻異說後唐傳三 集薛丁山征西樊梨花全傳, 中都逸叟編次, 慶餘堂藏板); and Hsiu-hsiang cheng-hsi ch’üan-chuan 繡像征西全傳 (中都逸叟原本, 經元堂梓行, 道光庚寅年重鐫). The last item, another edition of which is described in Sun I, 45–46, is a hybrid work of forty chapters offering a condensed version of Hsüeh Ting-shan’s expedition against the Hsi Liao (but differing in detail from Cheng-hsi) and over thirty chapters copied from Sui T’ang yen-yi. For bibliographic information on all these romances see Sun I, 44–47 and Liu I, 260–265. Shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan was originally titled Shuo T’ang ch’üan-chuan 全傳; but since this title is now used to cover both the Ch’ien-chuan and Hou-chuan, I have avoided it in this paper. 2. Ta-T’ang Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua is available in a photolithographic edition published by Wen-hsüeh ku-chi k’an-hsing she (Peking, 1956). I have consulted on

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microfilm the rare copies of T’ang-shu chih-chuan t’ung-su yen-yi and T’ang-chuan yen-yi 唐傳演義 (for data see Sun II, 34–38) as well as Sui-shih yi-wen. Unfortunately, the microfilm copy of the last title, preserved in Waseda University, contains only sixteen of its sixty chapters (ch. 1–10, 31–33, 51–52, 55). These microfilm copies were originally made by Professor James I. Crump for the University of Michigan Library. The East Asian Library of Columbia University now owns a duplicate set; it also owns a Xerox copy of Sui T’ang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan (Sun II, 38–41), made from a Xerox copy in the possession of Professor Liu Ts’un-yan. This work should perhaps be more appropriately known as Sui T’ang liang-ch’ao shih-chuan 史傳, the title that decorates the table of contents as well as the first page of most chüan. The preface by Yang Shen 楊慎 identifies the novel as Sui T’ang shih-chuan, while that by Lin Han 林瀚 designates it as Sui T’ang chih-chuan. 3. For data on Ta-Sung chung-hsing yen-yi, see Sun II, 31–32. Again I have availed myself of the microfilm copy originally prepared by Professor Crump. In addition to a Hong Kong reprint of Shuo Yüeh, I have consulted a Chia-ch’ing edition of Shuo Yüeh ch’üan-chuan 新鐫精忠演義說本岳王全傳 in the East Asian Library of Columbia University. This large-size edition of 1798 is definitely more valuable than the small-size edition of 1801 described in Liu I, 273. It carries the presumably identical preface by Chin Feng, but its eighty chapters are divided into 20 chüan, each chüan consisting of four chapters. 4. Yang Yeh is better known as Yang Chi-yeh since he is so identified in Peking operas. The notes appended to the biography of Yang in Sung shih 宋史, chüan 272 (ES, 5229), cites one standard source that gives Yang’s original name as Liu 劉 Chiyeh and another that declares it to be Yang Chung-kuei 楊重貴. Since even the standard histories are in disagreement about Yang’s name and origin, the biographical account given in Yang-chia-fu yen-yi (see note 5) may be of genuine value as history. According to this source, a younger sister of Liu Chün 劉鈞, King of the Northern Han, was married to Hsüeh Chao 薛釗 and had a son by the name of Chi-en 繼 恩. Because Liu Chün had no son of his own, he adopted Chi-en. Later, Liu’s sister married Ho Yüan-yeh 何元業 and had two sons, Chi-yüan 繼元 and Chi-yeh 繼業, who were also adopted by Liu Chün. When Liu Chi-en became king, Chi-yeh soon distinguished himself as a general, especially for his repeated successes in repulsing the Sung forces sent to subdue the Northern Han. When Chi-yeh finally surrendered, he was given the new name Yang Yeh by Emperor T’ai-tsung. According to this account, then, the famed general was first called Ho Chi-yeh, then Liu Chi-yeh, and finally Yang Yeh. 5. Because only the front matter of Pei-Sung chih-chuan (Sun II, 43–46; Liu I, 268–269), including the table of contents, is available on microfilm at Columbia, I have consulted in its stead mainly the Tao-kuang edition of Pei-Sung chin-ch’iang ch’üan-chuan 北宋金鎗全傳, which, according to Sun I, 49, is identical in text. This work survives in Taiwan in a highly corrupt, abridged version known as Pei-Sung Yang-chia-chiang 北宋楊家將 (Taiwan: Ta-tung shu-chü, 1966). The Library of Congress has a microfilm copy of the Wan-li edition of Yang-chia-fu (Sun I, 52; Liu I, 269–270). The title page identifies the work as Yang-chia-chiang yen-yi while Chi

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Chen-lun’s preface designates it as Yang-chia t’ung-su yen-yi. It is uncertain whether Chi was also the editor or compiler of the work. The Wan-li edition credits him with the role of chiao-yüeh 校閱, while another version of Yang-chia-chiang yen-yi (Liu I, 271) identifies him as editor (pien-chi 編輯). But judging by Liu Ts’un-yan’s description of the work, I am positive that it is far more identifiable with Pei-Sung chih-chuan than with the Wan-li edition of Yang-chia-fu, which I have seen on microfilm. The latter is not available in reprint form in Taiwan or Hong Kong, and presumably it has been long out of print even in mainland China. 6. In addition to popular Taiwan reprints, I have consulted the Ching-lun-t’ang edition of Ti Ch’ing yen-yi 狄青演義 at Columbia’s East Asian Library, comprising Hsiu-hsiang wu-hu p’ing-hsi ch’ien-chuan (狄青演義•征取珍珠旗•繡像五虎平西 全傳•經綸堂藏板) and Hsiu-hsiang wu-hu p’ing-nan hou-chuan (狄青演義•楊文 廣掛帥•繡像五虎平南後傳•經綸堂藏板). Sun K’ai-ti has seen the Ching-lunt’ang edition of P’ing-hsi but not that of P’ing-nan. In the Columbia set, both novels still maintain their separate prefaces and tables of contents. To my great regret, I have not been able to consult a Ch’ing edition of Wan-hua lou (fuller titles: 萬花樓 楊包狄演義 and 後續大宋楊家將文武曲星包公狄青傳萬花樓初傳), but the two contemporary reprints I have used (Hong Kong: Kuang-chih shu-chü, n.d.; Taiwan: Ta-tung shu-chü, 1965) are identical in text and appear not to have deviated from Ch’ing editions. For data on Ti Ch’ing novels see Sun I, 53–54; Liu I, 272; and the article “Wan-hua lou” in Cheng Chen-to, Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh yen-chiu 中國文學 研究, vol. I (Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-pan-she, 1957). Tsui-weng t’an-lu, chap. 2, refers to Chu-ko Liang and Ti Ch’ing in the same couplet, which would seem to indicate the popularity and magnitude of the story cycle about the Sung general: “三國志諸葛亮雄材, 收西夏說狄青大略.” We know that Shuo Ti Ch’ing 說狄青 once existed as a yuan-pen 院本 play of the Chin-Yuan period. The Yuan tsa-chü Ti Ch’ing fu-to yi-ao-ch’e 狄青復奪衣襖車 is extant, though Wu Ch’ang-ling’s 吳昌齡 play Ti Ch’ing P’u-ma 狄青撲馬 has been lost. P’ing-nan chuan, about Ti Ch’ing’s pacification of the South, was a theatrical spectacle often performed in the inner palace of Ch’ing emperors. See Ch’en Ju-heng 陳汝衡, Shuo-shu shih-hua 說書史話 (Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-pan-she, 1958), 69–70. 7. Thus in Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih-lüeh Lu Hsün lists Shui-hu among the works of chiang-shih 講史 and Feng-shen yen-yi among shen-mo hsiao-shuo 神魔小說. Sun K’ai-ti agrees with Lu Hsün in identifying Feng-shen as a Ling-kuai hsiao-shuo 靈怪小 說, but places Shui-hu under the hsia-yung 俠勇 category of Shuo kung-an 說公案. 8. See comments culled from various sources on nearly all military romances in K’ung Ling-ching 孔另境, ed., Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih-liao 中國小說史料 (Taipei: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1957). 9. For many historical novels, of course, it is difficult to tell whether their authors are elaborating on a legend in their own words or merely copying an old text that had been lost or to which few scholars have access. Thus, read on its own, Sui T’ang yen-yi is an excellent novel, and I have accordingly lavished praise on its treatment of the legend of Ch’in Shu-pao 秦叔寶 in The Classic Chinese Novel (New

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York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 342. In the summer of 1970, however, Mr. Robert E. Hegel, who is completing a dissertation on Sui T’ang yen-yi and its sources under my supervision, alerted me to the fact that the first fifty chapters of the novel are nearly all copied from either Sui-shih yi-wen or Sui Yang-ti yen-shih 隋煬帝艷史 (see Sun I, 43; Liu I, 259–260). My subsequent reading of Sui-shih yi-wen (Taipei: Yu-shih wen-hua, 1975) has confirmed his discovery that the whole legend of Ch’in Shu-pao contained therein has been copied, for the most part verbatim, into Ch’u Jen-hu’s novel. On the evidence of such wholesale copying, Sui-T’ang yen-yi would seem to forfeit much of its intrinsic merit, though it will continue to be enjoyed as one of China’s best novels. There can be no doubt, of course, that Ch’u Jen-hu is a most skillful adapter who was able to improve his sources beyond recognition: cf. the essay “Yi-tse ku-shih, liang-chung hsieh-fa” 一則故事, 兩種寫法 in Hsia Tsi-an hsüan-chi 夏濟安選集 (Taipei: Chih-wen ch’u-pan-she, 1971). 10. For a description of the early Chinese military opera see James I. Crump, “The Elements of Yuan Opera,” Journal of Asian Studies XVII (3) (May 1958): 431–433. Ming cognoscenti of fiction were themselves aware of the indebtedness of historical novels to the theater. Thus in his preface to P’ing-yao chuan 平妖傳, Chang Wu-chiu 張無咎 dismisses novels about the Seven Warring States, Han, T’ang, and Sung periods as bad plays of the Yi-yang school (Sun II, 93). Unlike the more refined K’un-ch’ü, Yi-yang 弋陽 Opera is known for, among other things, its emphatic use of drums and gongs and its acrobatics and mock representation of battle. 11. It is curious that, with the long tradition of storytellers specializing in the Five Dynasties period, there should have been no full-scale military romances about this colorful era. It would certainly seem that by the late Ming popular interest in the period had waned. The extant Ts’an-T’ang wu-tai ch’üan-chuan 殘唐五代全 傳 (Liu I, 266–267), attributed to Lo Kuan-chung, is a crude chronicle containing elements of an incipient military romance. Actually, by limiting my examples to the T’ang–Sung romances and a few other works, I have not slighted any major military romances, with the possible exception of the novels about the rise of the Ming. For data on the latter see Sun I, 56–58 and Liu I, 273–276. 12. Liu II, chap. 2, gives a complete translation of the work with notes on its connections with Feng-shen yen-yi. 13. Cf., particularly, Ch’in Shu-pao’s duels with Yü-ch’ih Kung 尉遲恭 in chapters 29–30. The battle by the Mei-liang River 美良川 (美梁川 in Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua), which sees Ch’in desperately trying to save Li Shih-min 李世民 from Yü-ch’ih’s hands, is a high point in all subsequent chronicles about the Sui–T’ang period. Even Hsiung Ta-mu’s T’ang-shu chih-chuan, usually a pedestrian narrative, gives an animated account of the battle in chüan 4, sections 31–33, which must have been written under the influence of the storytellers. The author of Shuo T’ang, a military romance, has deliberately mocked the battle. It would be instructive to make a comparative study of the battle from the pageantry of Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua to the intentional parody of Shuo T’ang. 14. For a study of Sung Chiang and Li K’uei as a double character cf. The

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Classic Chinese Novel 106–114. Later in the paper I maintain that the saga of the Yang family must have influenced the formation of the Shui-hu story. Perhaps even the idea of honorable banditry had first appeared in the Yang saga. After the treacherous minister Wang Ch’in 王欽 (see note 37) has assigned old and decrepit troops to Yang Yen-chao to guard Mt. Chia 佳山, Yang rebuilds his strength by recruiting bandits, prominently Meng Liang 孟良 and Chiao Tsan 焦贊. Soon after, when Yang Yen-chao gets into trouble and has to live in hiding, nearly all his lieutenants turn to banditry in the mountains. Cf. Yang-chia-fu, chüan 2–4. 15. It is common knowledge that Yang Yeh’s fifth son Yen-te 延德 early in his life becomes a monk on Mt. Wu-t’ai. But since Yang-chia-fu is a rare book, it is not generally known that, following the successful conclusion of his campaign against Nung Chih-kao, Yang Wen-kuang 楊文廣—historically (and in Pei-Sung chih-chuan) the son of Yen-chao, but in most fiction (including Yang-chia-fu) and drama the son of Tsung-pao and therefore the grandson of Yen-chao—has a mystical experience and becomes a Taoist adept. Following the death of his father largely as a consequence of Ti Ch’ing’s villainy (see note 72), Wen-kuang publicly performs the miracle of turning himself into a crane and disappears, even though he actually goes home to cultivate the Tao, living in total obscurity. At the age of sixty he is ordered by the emperor to lead another expedition. Upon the conclusion of this campaign his son Huai-yü 懷玉 leads the whole Yang family to live on Mt. T’ai-hang in Taoist retirement. When a prince arrives at the mountain with an imperial request that he stay on in government service, Huai-yü excuses himself by reason of his father’s frailty and goes on to recount the woes and indignities suffered by the family ever since Yang Yeh surrendered to the Sung. 16. In Pei-Sung chih-chuan, following its total defeat signaled by the destruction of the T’ien-men chen (discussed later in the paper), the Liao Kingdom again starts trouble at the instigation of its spy at the Sung court, Wang Ch’in. Yang Yen-chao has little trouble quelling this uprising, but he dies soon afterward, grief-stricken over the deaths of his comrades Meng Liang and Chiao Tsan. Then the Ta-ta Kingdom invades China, and the novel concludes with Yang Tsung-pao’s victorious expedition against the kingdom with the assistance of the twelve widows of his family. (This episode is generally known as the Expedition Against the Hsi Hsia. But the term Hsi Hsia as it appears in the expression “Hsi Hsia Ta-ta kuo” would seem to indicate the region in which the kingdom is situated rather than the historic Hsi Hsia Kingdom that plagued Sung China.) At that time Yang Wen-kuang is only fifteen years old. In Yang-chia-fu it is only when Wen-kuang has reached the age of sixty (see note 15) that the twelve widows (not identical with those in Pei-Sung chih-chuan) lead a rescue operation to liberate him from his besiegement by Li Kao-ts’ai 李高材, the king of the Hsin-lo Kingdom 新羅國. Earlier in the novel, the Yang family undertook a lengthy campaign against Nung Chih-kao. 17. The villainy of P’an Mei and Wang Shen is fully apparent from a reading of Yang Yeh’s biography in Sung shih, chüan 272. Wang Shen is punished for not providing proper assistance to Yang, and even P’an is demoted, though he is soon

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restored to high position. According to the biography of Yang Yen-chao in the same section of Sung shih, it is only because Emperor Chen-tsung appreciates his bravery and the distinguished service of his family that he is repeatedly spared more severe punishment. 18. While the Ching-chi chih 經籍志 of Chiu T’ang-shu lists only 45 works on warfare and strategy (ping-shu 兵書) comprising 289 chüan, the Yi-wen-chih 藝文志 of Sung shih, chüan 207, lists 347 such works comprising 1,956 chüan. Many of these works deal with chen-t’u 陣圖 and chen-fa 陣法, such as 玄女厭陣法, 九九陣圖, 五 行陣圖 (two separate titles, one by 符彥卿). ES 3266, 5001. We may assume that the Sung storytellers’ interest in things military, and not merely the chen, must have reflected the government’s concern with national defense, as is seen in the marked increase in the production of military manuals. 19. C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, tr., Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1959), I:375–376. I have amended “Docked,” an obvious misprint, to read “Locked.” For a fuller and more accurate rendition of this passage, see Moss Roberts’s excellent translation of Three Kingdoms (Berkeley and Beijing: University of California Press/Foreign Languages Press, 1991), 275. 20. San-kuo yen-yi, chap. 84. It is of interest to note that in describing the maze to Lu Sun, Chu-ko’s father-in-law also refers to eight gates. These gates recur in descriptions of various chen in subsequent romances. 21. In the tsa-chü Sung Kung-ming p’ai chiu-kung pa-kua chen 宋公明排九宮 八卦陣, Sung Chiang sweeps forward to a great victory against the Liao forces by means of this chen. Along with many other military plays, this play is reprinted in KYT III, which provides a mine of information for comparative studies in the military romance. According to Ma Tai-loi, “現存元代水滸雜劇考,” Ming Pao Monthly (明 報月刊) II (I) (January 1967), Chiu-kung pa-kua chen is a Ming play written after the publication of Shui-hu chuan. He doesn’t specify which edition, however. 22. For a description of this complex of mazes see Pei Sung chin-ch’iang ch’üanchuan, chap. 33. The account given in Yang-chia-fu is identical in detail, if not in wording. Lü Tung-pin builds the chen according to a blueprint (chen-t’u). Seventy-two general’s platforms (chiang-t’ai 將臺) are erected along with five altars (t’an 壇) of greater strategic importance, though the number of individual chen inviting attack amounts to only seven or eight. The corresponding T’ien-chen 天陣 in the play Yang Liu-lang tiao-ping p’o t’ien-chen 楊六郎調兵破天陣, included in KYT III, comprises 142 constituent chen. 23. The naked princess guarding the T’ai-yin chen 太陰陣 is Huang-ch’iung-nü 黃瓊女, daughter of the king of Hsi Hsia 西夏. She soon deserts the Liao to marry Yang Yen-chao. The chen with seven buried pregnant women is known as Mi-hun chen 迷魂陣. A chen by this name is frequently seen in military romances. Its earliest appearance is in Ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu hou-chi, chüan B. Prepared by Yüeh Yi’s 樂毅 teacher Huang Po-yang 黃伯楊, 伯陽, this chen calls for the burial in seven places of seven fetuses ripped from the wombs of pregnant women. Sun Pin stays captured in the chen for a hundred days.

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24. Liu Ts’un-yan has examined with great care the early independent editions of what are now the four constituent parts of Ssu yu chi. He thinks that “they were all early storyteller’s prompt-books which have probably been in circulation ever since the early Ming” (Liu I, 138). See also his discussion of a fragmentary Ming copy of Tung-yu chi on 199–202. 25. Cf. Liu II. 26. The legend of Yang Yeh as retold in the novels of the Yang family is faithful to history at least in its broad outline. It is around his son Yen-chao that storytellers wove the kind of fantasy romance that later distinguished the fictional careers of Hsüeh Jen-kuei, Hsüeh Ting-shan, Yüeh Fei, and Ti Ch’ing. There can be little doubt that the original Yang-chia-fu as well as several Yuan–Ming plays about the Yang family depicts the fictitious career of Yen-chao in accordance with the storytellers’ tradition. 27. Of the extant Yuan tsa-chü about Sui-T’ang heroes, Yü-ch’ih Kung figures as a hero in four: Hsiao Yü-ch’ih 小尉遲, Ching-te pu-fu-lao 敬德不伏老, Tan-pien to-shuo 單鞭奪槊, and Yü-ch’ih Kung san-to-shuo 尉遲恭三奪槊. Ch’in Shu-pao also appears in the last two plays. Hsü Mao-kung chih-hsiang Ch’in Shu-pao 徐懋功智降 秦叔寶 (KYT III) is most probably a Ming play since it is not included in Yüan-ch’ü hsüan wai-pien 元曲選外編. 28. Chiu T’ang-shu, chüan 67, is devoted to the lives of Li Ching and Li Chi, whereas Yü-ch’ih Kung and Ch’in Shu-pao share biographic attention in chüan 68 with three other generals. Li Chi, especially, emerges from his biography as an outstanding human being passionately devoted to his friends. His grief over the death of Li Mi 李密 and Shan Hsiung-hsin 單雄信 is especially moving. The Ch’in Shu-pao of legend, too, is distinguished for his great friendship with Shan; there can be no doubt that storytellers had transferred this endearing trait from Li Chi to Ch’in, who is known in official history primarily as a peerless warrior. Even in T’ang times Li Ching had become a legendary hero in ch’uan-ch’i fiction; for other anecdotes of Li Ching and Li Chi see such works as Sui T’ang chia-hua 隋唐嘉 話, collected in T’ang-tai ts’ung-shu 唐代叢書. In a comic play of the Yuan-Ming period, Shih-yang-chin Chu-ko lun-kung 十樣錦諸葛論功 (KYT III), Li Ching and Li Chi are listed among the thirteen greatest military geniuses of all time, on a par with Chiang Tzu-ya and Chu-ko Liang. But whereas both Chiang and Chu-ko have romances of their own, it is a quirk of fate that the two Lis should have played only subordinate roles in the novels about Ch’in Shu-pao and Hsüeh Jen-kuei. 29. The exception is Yang Yeh, whose birth and early youth are only baldly summarized in both Nan-Sung chih-chuan and Yang-chia-fu. Had the Yang saga received further expansion after the late Ming, Yang Yeh’s early career would certainly have been romanticized. 30. Yüeh Fei’s courtesy name is P’eng-chü 鵬舉. The Chinese name for the Garuda is 大鵬金翅明王. 31. In Ta-Sung chung-hsing yen-i, Hsiung Ta-mu faithfully follows the official biography (Sung shih, chüan 265) in his treatment of Yüeh Fei’s birth and boyhood.

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Thus we find that his father did not die in the flood and that, although Yüeh Fei showed almost filial regard for the memory of his teacher Chou T’ung 同 (not 侗), the latter had not been his adopted father. That Yüeh Fei’s boyhood should have been romanticized (as we have seen in Shuo Yüeh) would seem to be inevitable in the formation of any hero legend. It may be of further interest to note that since the publication of this novel Chou T’ung himself has grown in stature as a teacher of heroes. We read in Wang Shao-t’ang 王少堂, narrator, Wu Sung 武松 (Nanking: Kiangsu wen-yi ch’u-pan-she, 1959), vol. I, chap. 2, sec. 7, that before Wu Sung returns home to find his elder brother murdered, he spends a month with Chou T’ung mastering his use of the sword. Thus, according to the foremost present-day storyteller of the Yangchow school, Wu Sung has joined Yüeh Fei, Lin Ch’ung, and Lu Chün-yi as a disciple of Chou. Wang Shao-t’ang further depicts Chou as a man over fifty and a sworn brother of Lu Chih-shen 魯智深. 32. The legend of Lo Ch’eng is most interesting. According to Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua, Ch’eng is the given name of Lo Shih-hsin 羅士信, even though his biographies in Chiu T’ang-shu, chüan 187A and Hsin T’ang-shu, chüan 191 make no note of this fact. This brave young warrior was born in Li-ch’eng, Ch’i-chou, and was early distinguished together with his fellow townsman Ch’in Shu-pao when serving under the Sui commander Chang Hsü-t’o 張須陀. Lo died at the age of twenty as a T’ang general captured by Liu Hei-t’a 劉黑闥. Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua maintains, however, that though he dies fighting against the forces of Liu, his death is actually contrived by Li Shih-min’s evil brothers Chien-ch’eng 建成 and Yüan-chi 元吉, the commanders in charge of an expedition against Liu. The author of Shuo T’ang, who has elevated Lo Ch’eng to be the seventh mightiest hero of the Sui–T’ang era, follows this account of his tragic death. Two earlier works, T’ang-shu chih-chuan and Sui–T’ang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan, record Lo Shih-hsin’s deeds and death without, however, further identifying him as Lo Ch’eng. In Sui-shih yi-wen the fictitious Lo Ch’eng and the historical Lo Shih-hsin have become two separate persons. Lo Ch’eng is made the son of Lo Yi 羅藝, a famous general of the Sui who eventually joined the T’ang cause and then rebelled. And since Lo Yi’s wife is supposed to be an aunt of Ch’in Shu-pao, Ch’in pays her a visit and comes to know Lo Ch’eng when the latter is only a boy. In adapting Sui-shih yi-wen, Ch’u Jen-hu has further made Lo Ch’eng into a romantic hero while retaining Lo Shih-hsin as a historic character of minor importance. To the average Chinese it is the Lo Ch’eng of Shuo Tang and Peking opera who appears most familiar—a handsome young warrior who died tragically. 33. Yang Tsai-hsing 楊再興 is one of the bravest generals under Yüeh Fei. According to Shuo Yüeh, he is a descendant of Yang Yeh, but his ancestry is not mentioned in his biography in Sung-shih, chüan 368. 34. Li Tao-tsung once provoked the wrath of Yü-ch’ih Kung at a dinner and may on this account have earned his notoriety as a villain in popular literature. This incident is related in Yü-ch’ih’s biography in Chiu T’ang-shu (ES, 3313) and is further elaborated on in the Yuan tsa-chü Ching-te pu-fu-lao. Despite his distinguished record in battle, Li Tao-tsung was once imprisoned for accepting bribery, which may

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have further tarnished his reputation. His own biography appears in Chiu T’ang-shü, chüan 60. 35. Lo T’ung sao-pei, chap. 12, 53, in Cheng-tung, Cheng-hsi, Sao-pei 征東, 征 西, 掃北 (Taipei: Wen-hua t’u-shu kung-ssu, n.d.). This quatrain does not appear in the corresponding chapter 13 of Shuo Tang hsiao-ying-hsiung chuan (see note 1). The Taipei edition appears to be a reprint of a fuller version; in any event, verse passages of identical sentiment are not uncommon in military romances. 36. The two plays are Hsüeh Jen-kuei jung-kuei ku-li 薛仁貴榮歸故里 and Moli-chih fei-tao tui chien 摩利支飛刀對箭. A comic monologue of Chang Shih-kuei from the latter play has been translated in Crump, “The Elements of Yuan Opera,” 433 (see note 10). In Shih-yang-chin Chu-ko lun-kung (note 28), too, Chang appears as a boastful clown along with the brave Wei general Hsia-hou Tun 夏侯惇. Chang’s brief biography in Chiu Tang-shu, chüan 83, presents a praiseworthy record of his generalship, but the fact that it was he who recruited Hsüeh Jen-kuei for the Korean expedition may have led the storytellers to paint him as a buffoon or villain in contrast to the young warrior’s shining innocence and bravery. In T’ang-shu chih-chuan Chang is given his due as a general. Upon the completion of the Korean expedition, however, he advises T’ai-tsung against giving Hsüeh too many honors and too high a promotion, and the emperor agrees. ( Jen-kuei is duly appointed Wu-wei chiangchün 武衛將軍.) In Sui-Tang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan, chap. 86, Chang is exposed by Yü-ch’ih Kung for claiming Jen-kuei’s distinguished record as his own. There he appears as a villain, but not a comic one. 37. While P’ang Hung suggests P’ang Chi 龐籍 (Sung-shih, chüan 311) on the strength of his surname and his official prominence at Jen-tsung’s court, there can be no doubt that the Wang Ch’in of the Yang family saga stands for Wang Ch’in-jo 王欽若 (Sung-shih, chüan 283), the cunning and evil prime minister under Chentsung. He and four members of his clique were known to their contemporaries as the “Five Devils” (wu-kuei 五鬼). Though not a traitor, Wang was opposed to such upright ministers as K’ou Chun 寇準, who is depicted in the novels as a champion of the Yang family. In the play Yang Liu-lang tiao-ping p’o t’ien-chen, act I (see note 22), Yang Yen-chao gives an autobiographical monologue in which he names Wang Ch’in-jo as the chien-ch’en who fabricates an imperial order for his execution. In the prologue (hsieh-tzu 楔子) of the tsa-chü Hsieh Chin-wu 謝金吾 (included in Yuan-ch’ü hsüan 元曲選), Wang Ch’in-jo reveals himself as a Liao spy sent to the Sung court by Queen Dowager Hsiao. His real name is Ho Lu-erh 賀驢兒, and he is presumably a Liao Khitanese. Foiled in his attempt to execute Yang Yen-chao and Chiao Tsan, he is later exposed in the play as a spy and punished with lingering death. For the plot of Hsieh Chin-wu and a discussion of its sources see Lo Chin-t’ang 羅錦堂, Hsien-ts’un Yuan-jen tsa-chü pen-shih k’ao 現存元人雜劇本事考 (Taipei: Chung-kuo wen-hua shih-yeh kung-ssu, 1960), 363–366. Wang Ch’in-jo’s name has been shortened to Wang Ch’in in both Pei-Sung chih-chuan and Yang-chia-fu. While the latter agrees with Hsieh Chin-wu in identifying Wang as a Khitanese by the name of Ho Lu-erh, the former describes him as a

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man of Chinese origin initially serving at the Liao court. We may assume, therefore, that, while the legend of Wang Ch’in as given in Hsieh Chin-wu and Yang-chia-fu represents an older tradition, Hsiung Ta-mu must have revised it in Pei-Sung chihchuan in order to restore Wang’s Chinese identity and make his treachery look more heinous. 38. Nü-t’u-fu (Female earth bat) stands for Aquarius; see Mathews’ ChineseEnglish Dictionary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 1177. Many characters in Chinese fiction, not necessarily female, are supposed to be incarnations of Aquarius. Thus Li Yüan’s principal wife, Empress Ch’ang-sun 長孫皇后, is described as a Nü-t’u-fu in Ta-T’ang Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua I:36. 39. The scholar Hu Ti 胡迪 witnesses the torture of the Ch’in Kuei family during his guided tour through Hell in the concluding section of the novel. Hsiung Ta-mu must have adapted this episode from a storytellers’ hua-pen that subsequently appeared in print as Tale 32 of Ku-chin hsiao-shuo 古今小說: 遊酆都胡母迪吟詩. In both versions the hero is a native of Chin-ch’eng 錦城 (Ch’eng-tu) who waxes indignant over heavenly injustice after reading a work known as Ch’in Kuei tungch’uang chuan 秦檜東窗傳, but the independent tale further specifies that Hu-mu (or Hu-wu) Ti flourished during the reign of Shun-ti, the last Yuan emperor. In Shuo Yüeh, chap. 73, Hu Ti appears as a citizen of Lin-an (Hangchow) at the time of Yüeh Fei’s execution and is given the additional name Meng-tieh 夢蝶. 40. The author of Cheng-hsi must have named her Fan Li-hua because Hsüeh Ting-shan’s father has a secondary wife called Fan Hsiu-hua 樊繡花. Prior to his expedition to Korea in Shuo T’ang hou-chuan, Hsüeh Jen-kuei rescues Hsiu-hua from the hands of three bandits and promises to marry her himself. By the time he returns from the expedition he has forgotten about the girl; nevertheless, he marries her after her father has escorted her to his official residence at Chiang-chou 絳州. Having created a thoroughly colorless character in Fan Hsiu-hua, the author of Shuo T’ang hou-chuan nevertheless proceeded to invent in its sequel a most fascinating wife for Hsüeh Ting-shan. 41. Shuo Yüeh ch’üan-chuan (see note 3), chüan 4, chap. 13, 2b–3a. 42. Ibid., chüan 26, chap. 63, 35b. 43. Ibid., chap. 63, 36a–b. This and the two preceding quotations can more easily be found in Shuo Y’üeh ch’üan-chuan (Hong Kong: Kuang-chih shu-chü, n.d.), chüan shang 卷上, 54; chüan hsia 卷下, 107–108. 44. Shuo T’ang ch’üan-chuan, chap. 48, 122–123. This title constitutes part I of Ta T’ang yen-yi 大唐演義 (Tainan: Ya-tung shu-chü, 1963). The episode appears in identical form in the Kuang-hsü edition of Shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan (see note I), chüan 8, chap. 49, 2a–3b. The slain general is named Wang Lung 王龍. 45. In this connection it is of interest to read the tsa-chü Shou-t’ing-hou nu-chan K’uan P’ing 壽亭侯怒斬關平 (KYT III), in which Kuan Yü, too, wants to execute his own son Kuan P’ing and finally relents only when other generals intercede for him. In San-kuo yen-yi Kuan P’ing is described as Kuan Yü’s foster son. 46. Feng-shen yen-yi (Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-pan-she, 1955), vol. I, chap. 53, 505.

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47. Most Chinese call her by the title She T’ai-chün, since she is usually so identified in Peking opera. She plays an important part in the play Hsieh Chin-wu and identifies herself there as She T’ai-chün. In the Ti Ch’ing novels, too, she is known by this title. But in both Pei-Sung chih-chuan and Yang-chia-fu her surname is Yü rather than She, though she is commonly referred to as Yang Ling-p’o 楊令 婆 (her husband is Yang Ling-kung 楊令公). In Pei-Sung Yang-chia chiang (see note 5), chap. 10, 19, she is unaccountably called Lü shih 呂氏 and not Yü shih, as in the corresponding chapter in Pei-Sung chin-ch’iang ch’üan chuan. 48. Yang Yen-chao’s principal wife is known as Ch’ai Chün-chu 柴郡主, a descendant of the imperial family of the Later Chou dynasty. During his first expedition against the Liao, Yen-chao acquires his second wife Huang Ch’iung-nü (see note 23). His third wife is Ch’ung-yang-nü 重陽女, who joins forces with him during his second Liao expedition. Both of these ladies are supposed to have been promised to Yen-chao during their childhood. 49. In Yang-chia-fu, chüan 6, Wei Hua commands the vanguard of Ti Ch’ing’s expeditionary forces against Nung Chih-kao. When Ti Ch’ing is besieged, Wei Hua dashes through the enemy lines to get help from the capital, and a new army led by Yang Tsung-pao and Yang Wen-kuang is duly sent. Subsequently, in chüan 7, with Wen-kuang trapped by Nung’s forces and Tsung-pao immobilized by a foot injury, Wei Hua again goes to the capital to fetch the Yang ladies, who finally quell the rebellion. Wei Hua also accompanies Wen-kuang on his mystic journey (see note 15). It is through these connections, I suppose, that Wei Hua is eventually reduced to the status of a retainer (chia-chiang 家將) of the Yang house in P’ing-nan. In his concluding commentary to Pei-Sung chin-ch’iang ch’üan-chuan, Yüan-hu fei-hsien chu-jen 鴛湖廢閑主人 of the Tao-kuang period says that Yang Ling-p’o will not be granted first-rank imperial honors until after the return of Yang Wen-kuang from his southern expedition, presumably against Nung Chih-kao. So presumably the commentator knows of a novel about Wen-kuang’s southern expedition. While I have not seen the Kuang-hsü edition of P’ing-Min ch’üan-chuan 平閩全傳 (Sun I, 53), which is about Yang Wen-kuang’s pacification of Min, it is good to know that P’ing-nan itself bears an additional title, Yang Wen-kuang kua-shuai (note 6). As I suggest below, P’ing-nan must have drawn upon a novel about Wen-kuang’s expedition against Nung. And in that work Wei Hua must also have played a part. 50. Mu 穆 Kuei-ying is known to most Chinese as a martial lady of romantic pluck through the following series of Peking operas: Mu-k’o-chai 穆柯寨, Ch’iang t’iao Mu T’ien-wang 槍挑穆天王, Yüan-men chan-tzu 轅門斬子, and Ta-p’o T’ienmen-chen 大破天門陣. Two new operas, Mu Kuei-ying kua-shuai 穆桂英掛師 and Yang-men nü-chiang 楊門女將, frequently seen in mainland China before the Cultural Revolution, have further enhanced her popularity. Unlike Fan Li-hua, however, she did not have an auspicious start as a fascinating character in fiction. In Yang-chia-fu, chüan 5, the home base of Mu Kuei-ying is Mu-ko-chai 木閣寨, rather than the exotic-sounding Mu-k’o-chai of Peking opera. Her father is known by the name

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Mu Yü 沐羽 and the title Ting-t’ien-wang 定天王. Though the novel calls her by the name Mu 木 Kuei-ying throughout, we are initially told she is Mu Chin-hua, also named Mu Kuei-ying 名木金花, 又名木桂英. In Pei Sung chin-ch’iang ch’üanchuan, chüan 35, 283b, and presumably in Pei-Sung chih-chuan as well, we are given identical information except that Chin-hua is identified as the heroine’s hsiao-ming 小名and Kuei-ying as her pieh-ming 別名. As a Tao-kuang publication, however, Chin-ch’iang ch’üan-chuan has printed her name as Mu 穆 Kuei-ying in the couplet heading chap. 35. The Taiwan edition of Pei Sung Yang-chia-chiang has consistently changed her surname to Mu 穆. 51. In Sao-Pei, ch. 11, Lo T’ung swears to the princess that if he is false, he will eventually die at the sharp point of a spear (ch’iang 鎗) held by a man in his seventies or eighties. In Cheng-hsi, chap. 20, he meets in battle a ninety-eight-year-old general named Wang Pu-ch’ao 王不超. With his spear (mao 矛) Wang slashes open his opponent’s abdomen, causing his intestines to tumble out. Furious, Lo wraps them tightly with a piece of cloth, resumes battle with Wang, and decapitates him. It is not until he has reached his own tent that he drops dead. This famous episode, known as “P’an-ch’ang ta-chan 盤腸大戰,” has a fuller text in Shuo T’ang san-chuan (see note 1), chap. 20. The fact that, allowing for minor discrepancies of detail, Lo T’ung’s death fulfills his oath provides almost certain proof that the hou-chuan and san-chuan of Shuo T’ang were by the same author. Lo T’ung is the son of Lo Ch’eng. 52. Sao-pei, chap. 14, 66, in Cheng-tung, Cheng-hsi, Sao-pei. The corresponding passage in Shuo T’ang hsiao-ying-hsiung chuan, chap. 15, 26b, is identical except for three characters. 53. Hsüeh Ting-shan’s first two wives are Tou Hsien-t’ung 竇仙童 and Ch’en Chin-ting 陳金定. The first is beautiful and the second ugly, but both are disciples of goddesses. 54. The Shan-shan Kingdom is, of course, fictitious. I have romanized 單單 as Shan-shan because at least once upon a time there was a Shan-shan Kingdom 鄯善 國 (see Han shu, chüan 96A). 55. Cf. note 9. While Sun K’ai-ti asserts that Shuo T’ang is a crude adaptation of Sui T’ang yen-yi (Sun I, 44–45), Liu Ts’un-yan agrees with Cheng Chen-to that Shuo T’ang appeared “after Sui T’ang chih-chuan had been in circulation for some time but prior to Ch’u Jen-hu’s adaptation of the latter” (Liu I, 261). One of the two textual proofs adduced by Cheng and Liu in support of their thesis is a passage in chapter 8 of Shuo T’ang: “那叔寶的箭, 是王伯當所傳, 原有百步穿楊之功, 若據小說上 說, 羅成暗助一箭, 非也.” Both scholars believe the novel (小說) in question to be Sui T’ang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan. But this is not the case since, as I have shown in note 32, Lo Ch’eng does not appear in the novel. In both Sui-shih yi-wen (chüan 3, chap. 15) and Sui Tang yen-yi (chap. 14) we read that Lo Ch’eng secretly shoots down an eagle or falcon ( ying 鷹) to help Ch’in Shu-pao, who is less skilled in archery. The introductory couplet for chapter 15 of Sui-shih yi-wen goes as follows: 勇秦瓊 舞簡服三軍, 小羅成射鷹助一弩. The introductory couplet for Sui T’ang yen-yi,

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chap. 14, goes: 勇秦瓊舞A服三軍, 賢柳氏收金獲一報. The second line differs from that of the couplet from Sui-shih yi-wen because it is intended to recapitulate chapter 16 of the earlier work: 羅元師作書貽蔡守, 秦叔寶贈金報柳氏. There can be no doubt about the crucial importance of Sui-shih yi-wen as a primary source for both Sui T’ang yen-yi and Shuo Tang in their treatment of Ch’in Shu-pao and his companion heroes. Sui Tang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan, on the other hand, is a work of much less importance in this regard. 56. See “Wu Tzu-hsü yü Wu Yün-chao,” in Cheng Chen-to, Chung-kuo wenhsüeh yen-chiu, vol. I. 57. In Shuo Tang ch’ien-chuan, chüan 3, chap. 14, 2a, the weight of the tang is initially given as 200 chin; subsequently, it is given as 320 chin. This discrepancy remains uncorrected in Ta-T’ang yen-yi (see note 44) as well as in Ch’en Ju-heng 陳 汝衡, ed., Shuo T’ang (Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-pan-she, 1959). 58. In Shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan, chüan 5, chap. 31, 15b, P’ei Yüan-ch’ing is said to be ten years old. In the two popular reprints (note 57), his age is given as twelve. But since Ch’en Ju-heng is a careful scholar and has consulted a Ch’ien-lung edition of the novel, I have followed his text with regard to P’ei’s age. Pei Jen-chi does have a son of extraordinary bravery, but his name is Hsing-yen 行儼. See Jen-chi’s biography in Sui-shu, chüan 70. 59. Shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan, chüan 7, chap. 42. The event takes place in chapter 41 of the Tainan and Peking reprints of the novel. See postscript on 390. 60. The name Li Hsüan-pa 李玄霸, the third son of Li Yüan, duly appears in the list of historic characters preceding the main narrative in T’ang-shu chih-chuan, T’ang-chuan yen-yi, and Sui T’ang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan. In compiling such lists, these works have followed the convention established by the Chia-ching edition of San-kuo-chih t’ung-su yen-yi; see The Classic Chinese Novel, 38. In these name lists we are told that Li Hsüan-pa died at the age of sixteen sui. Sui T’ang chih-chuan further gives his tzu as Ta-te 大德. All this information is based on Li’s biographical note in Hsin T’ang-shu, chüan 79, which further praises him for his precocity (幼辯慧). This shadowy figure, of course, bears no resemblance whatever to the Li Yüan-pa of Shuo T’ang. 61. The author of Shuo T’ang may have modeled Li Yüan-pa after Li Ts’un-hsiao 李存孝, the principal hero of Ts’an-T’ang wu-tai ch’üan-chuan. The latter, too, is a youth of slight build and sickly appearance who achieves stupendous feats on the battlefield without resorting to magic. 62. Cheng-tung, chap. 3, 5, in Cheng-tung, Cheng-hsi, Sao-pei. The corresponding passage in Shuo T’ang hou-chuan, ts’e 3: Shuo T’ang Hsüeh-chia-fu chuan, chüan 1, chap. 3, 7b–8b, is slightly different. The author must have got his immediate inspiration for the weightlifting scene from Shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan (probably his own composition), chap. 34 (chap. 33, in the Tainan and Peking editions), where Li Yüan-pa and Yüwen Ch’eng-tu have a contest of strength before Sui Yang-ti. Yü-wen lifts a golden lion of 3,000 chin by the Noon Gate, brings it to court, and then returns it to its

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original position. Li Yüan-pa, however, carries two lions of equal weight to court, and before returning them he swings them up and down over a dozen times. As for the episode as a whole, however, the author of Shuo T’ang hou-chuan must have adapted it from Sui T’ang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan, chap. 82: “Ch’in Ch’iung holds a mouthful of blood and squirts it at Ching-te 秦瓊含血喋敬德.” In that chapter Yü-ch’ih competes for the command of the Korean expedition by lifting a thousand-chin gold lion and walking three rounds with it. But T’ai-tsung misses Ch’in Shu-pao, then sick in bed, and goes with Yü-ch’ih to see him. Ch’in regrets his inability to serve in his present condition and worries that the Korean conflict will be protracted in his absence. Yü-ch’ih taunts him in kind, and Shu-pao, remembering that his disease is the direct result of having endured three lashes of Yü-ch’ih’s whip years ago, holds a mouthful of blood and squirts it at him. The biography of Ch’in Shu-pao in Chiu T’ang-shu, chüan 68, quotes him as saying that he cannot help being sick later in his life, seeing that he has participated in more than 200 battles, repeatedly suffered severe wounds, and lost blood (ch’u-hsüeh 出血) altogether to the extent of several hu 斛. Subsequent storytellers must have taken this statement to mean that Ch’in is a victim of hemorrhage and thus made much of his spitting or swallowing blood without, however, lessening his heroic stature. The usual explanation is that Heaven had afflicted Ch’in with this disease, for otherwise he would have been too powerful. Even during his battle with Yü-ch’ih at the Mei-liang River (note 13), he swallows three mouthfuls of blood (Ta-T’ang Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua, chüan 4, ch. 30, 646). But the author of Cheng-tung deliberately makes fun of Ch’in by having him appraise his own strength in an unrealistic fashion and collapse in his attempt to compete with Yü-ch’ih. 63. See, for example, such historical novels by Wu Wo-yao as T’ung-shih 痛史 and Liang-Chin yen-i 兩晉演義. The most ambitious attempt by an early Republican author to present reliable history in the popular language of fiction is Ts’ai Tungfan’s 蔡東帆 Li-ch’ao t’ung-su yen-i 歷朝通俗演義 (44 vols. [reprint, Hong Kong: Wen-kuang shu-chü, 1956]), which covers the whole span of Chinese history from the rise to supremacy of the Ch’in State to the early years of the Republic. The author’s preface to this work is dated 1925. 64. Hu Shih has traced the evolution of the story known as “Exchanging a Tabby Cat for a Prince” in fiction and drama in “San-hsia wu-i hsü 三俠五義序,” Hu Shih wen-ts’un, vol. 3 (Taipei: Yüan-tung t’u-shu kung-ssu, 1953). He has, however, failed to discuss Li Yü-t’ang’s treatment of the story in Wan-hua lou. 65. Cf. note 6. 66. Cf. note 6. The full titles preceding the table of contents for the two novels are: 新鐫異說五虎平西珍珠旗演義狄青前傳, and 新鐫繡像五虎平南狄青后 傳. 67. Wu-hu p’ing-nan hou-chuan, chüan 6, 45b. It was customary, of course, for a publisher to refer to a brand-new work of fiction as a rediscovered ku-pen. 68. Wan-hua lou (Hong Kong: Kuang-chin shu-chü), 278; (Tainan: Ta-tung

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shu-chü), 227. The commentary is identical in both editions, though the Hong Kong edition has divided it into three paragraphs and adopted modern punctuation. Though I have not seen any earlier editions, the very fact that both contemporary editions carry the commentary vouches for its appearance in earlier editions. Logically, it should have appeared in the first edition. 69. The fuller titles of Wan-hua lou are given in note 6. For the date of the preface to P’ing-hsi see Sun I, 53, and for that of the preface to Wan-hua lou, see Cheng Chen-to, Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh yen-chiu, 308. The preface to the Ching-lun-t’ang edition of P’ing-hsi is not dated, but the preface to the same edition of P’ing-nan is signed by one Hsiao-hsiang-huai chu-jen 小鄉環主人. From the tone of the preface, however, I would rule out the possibility of his being the author of P’ing-nan. The editions of Ping-nan seen by Sun K’ai-ti all carry a preface identical with that of P’ing-hsi. When the owner of Ching-lun-t’ang decided to publish P’ing-hsi and P’ing-nan as one set, he must have commissioned somebody to write a new preface for P’ing-nan. 70. I shall mention here only a few discrepancies that can be easily grasped. In Wan-hua lou Ti Ch’ing is married to the daughter of Fan Chung-yen 范仲淹; this wife is not mentioned in P’ing-hsi. In fact, when Princess Sai-hua tries to learn from the captive Ti Ch’ing if he is already married, he emphatically says no (this glaring difference between the two novels is commented on in the concluding section of Wan-hua lou). Shih Yü 石玉, a handsome youth and one of the “Five Tigers,” is married to Kao Ch’iung’s 高瓊 daughter in Wan-hua lou; in P’ing-hsi his wife’s maiden name is Chao 趙. Hu-yen Tsan, a general of Yang Yeh’s time who should have died long before, is still present in P’ing-hsi, chap. 39; Wan-hua lou, chap. 9, describes his son Hu-yeh Hsien 呼延顯 as a man over seventy. In Wan-hua lou Pao Cheng is said to be a man of seventy; in P’ing-hsi he appears as a man in his prime. 71. Cheng Chen-to, Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh yen-chiu (Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-panshe, 1957), I:308. 72. Cf. note 15 and note 49. After surrendering his seals to Yang Tsung-pao as the new commander of the expeditionary forces against Nung Chih-kao, he swears that he will exterminate the Yang family. When Tsung-pao and Wen-kuang return victorious to the capital, Ti Ch’ing sends one of his men, Shih Chin 師金, to infiltrate the Yang mansion. He is supposed to assassinate Tsung-pao; even though he doesn’t go through with the plan, Tsung-pao has reached the predestined end of his life and summons his son to his deathbed to warn him of Ti Ch’ing’s enmity. And mainly because of this warning Wen-kuang decides to retire from the world. Thus in Yangchia-fu Ti Ch’ing is one of a series of villains bent on injuring the Yang family.

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Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber: A Critique 1. Of course, in chapter 2 of his book, from which the quoted passages are taken, Professor Mote repeatedly acknowledges his debt to Joseph Needham and Wang Ling, particularly for volume II of their Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). Plaks, however, cites Mote’s book as the source from which he borrows Needham’s word “organismic.” See note 2 to chapter 3 on 227. 2. By Plaks’s admission (55) the only passage discussing yin-yang bipolarity at some length is found in chapter 31, where Shih Hsiang-yün explains that dualism to her maid Ts’ui-lü. As I read it, this is a humorous passage of no particular significance. After Shih Hsiang-yün has answered a series of questions about yin and yang to Ts’ui-lü’s satisfaction, the latter reaches the conclusion that she must be yin in relation to her mistress’s yang since this is how the servant/master relationship is to be understood in the yin-yang perspective. Shih Hsiang-yün cannot refrain from laughing at this answer, presumably because it is preposterous to regard herself as yang even if her maid’s reasoning is correct. So, if anything, this lighthearted exchange would seem to expose the absurdity of yin-yang dualism if it is made to cover all relationships. 3. Plaks himself admits on 58, “The simple alternation of such contrasts of experience, of course, is not in any sense unique to the Dream of the Red Chamber, but is basic to extended narrative in all traditions.” 4. For the concluding section of this critique, see Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies XXXIX (1) (June 1979): 208–210.

The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture: A Reappraisal of Ching-hua Yuan 1. The most influential essay in this regard has been Hu Shih’s “Ching-hua yuan ti yin-lun” (1923), originally serving as an introduction to the Ya-tung edition of the novel and subsequently collected in Hu Shih wen-ts’un II (Taipei: Yüan-tung t’u-shu kung-ssu, 1953). Tien-yi Li, Chinese Fiction: A Bibliography of Books and Articles in Chinese and English (New Haven: Yale University, Far Eastern Publications, 1968), while fairly adequate in its bibliographic coverage of the novel, fails to mention Lin Yutang, “Feminist Thought in Ancient China,” T’ien Hsia I (2) (Shanghai, 1935), which, together with Hu Shih’s two English articles on Ching-hua yuan (listed in Li’s book), was instrumental in calling western attention to its importance as a feminist satire. Under the influence of the women’s liberation movement, present-day scholars have continued to prize Ching-hua yuan as a feminist novel. See Pao Chia-lin, “Li Ju-chen ti nan-nü p’ing-teng ssu-hsiang,” Shih-huo 1 (12) (Taipei, 1972). 2. Cf. Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship, and

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Composition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), and W. L. Idema, Chinese Vernacular Fiction: The Formative Period (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974). 3. Idema xi. 4. I would have to write a separate essay to show how dangerously misleading it is to maintain even a “broad” distinction between “literary novels” and “chapbooknovels,” as Idema does in his “General Introduction.” By his own linguistic criterion many works that he would confidently dismiss as chapbooks are actually “literary novels.” He maintains on page xi that “countless novels” in the chapbook tradition are “written in a most stereotyped language, better characterized as simplified wen-yen than as real pai-hua, a dreary, repetitive and monotonous ‘novelese,’” citing San-hsia wu-i as “probably the best known example” of the type. But since San-hsia wu-i is assuredly written in a vivid colloquial style that deserves the appellation “real pai-hua,” one wonders if Idema has ever read the novel cited in support of his thesis concerning the stylistic dreariness of the chapbooks. Though he excepts Sui-T’ang yen-i as a literary novel by a known scholar, Idema lumps all other novels “on the founding of the T’ang dynasty” as chapbooks of little or no literary distinction. I have recently argued, however, that Sui-shih i-wen, an indisputable work of the storytellers’ tradition as edited by the scholar Yüan Yü-ling, is one of the finest Chinese novels, a far more moving and coherent work of art than Shui-hu chuan or Chin P’ing Mei. See my preface to the new edition of Sui-shih i-wen (Taipei: Yu-shih wen-hua kung-ssu, 1975). Read also “The Military Romance: A Genre of Chinese Fiction,” this volume., for my attempt to discriminate among many novels that Idema would indifferently identify as “chapbooks” in regard to their literary excellence. Faced by Idema’s confident dismissal of so many novels of the chapbook tradition, I can only reiterate here the alarm sounded by Edward H. Schafer in his review-article on Perspectives on the T’ang (Journal of the American Oriental Society 3 (1975): 473), that “few students of Chinese literature seem greatly concerned with the problem of detecting good writing—which is presumably what it is all about” because they are “preoccupied” with applying “popular academic doctrines” to the study of that literature. Idema seems so contemptuous of chapbooks as literature that he does not express horror over Chinese Communist scholars’ unconscionable alteration of the texts of such novels as Ying-lieh chuan, Shuo T’ang, and San-hsia wu-i so as to purge them of “feudal morals and superstitious ideas.” Apparently, he agrees with them that such works are mere “t’ung-su tu-wu (popular reading materials).” It is true that mainland scholars have edited and annotated a few classic novels, i.e., the most prestigious of Idema’s “literary novels,” with scrupulous care. But along with the scholarly editions, they have also seen fit to provide readers with bowdlerized versions of Hung-lou meng and Shui-hu chuan. And what about Chin P’ing Mei, a certified “classic novel,” since the government has not reprinted it in any form that I know of? It is surely banned not so much for its “feudal morals and superstitious ideas” as for its graphic pornography. 5. Idema believes that literary novelists are to be sharply distinguished from the

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authors of chapbooks by reason of their superior literary education. “Where known, the authors of the literary novel turn out to belong to the highly literate group, even if they did not always have brilliant official careers. . . . And when the author of a literary novel was unknown, it was attributed to some famous scholar [whereas] the authors of the chapbook-novels are practically without exception anonymous, and nobody bothered to find out who they were” (Idema liv). I would maintain, however, that, whatever their connections with the storytellers’ tradition, the chapbook-novels, with the exception of those hastily prepared by publishers to capitalize on the popularity of a certain title or type of novel, could only be prepared by men of literary education. Pseudonymous authorship is not identical with anonymous authorship, and the so-called literary novelists are as shy about disclosing their full identity as the literary men responsible for the less well-known novels. The fact that modern scholars have been primarily concerned with the authorship of Shui-hu chuan, Chin P’ing Mei, Hsi-yu chi, Feng-shen yen-i, Hung-lou meng, and the San-yen tales indicates more than anything else the prestige these works have enjoyed in recent decades. In time, I am sure, scholars will be paying increasing attention to the authorship of the less prestigious works. In Chinese Popular Fiction in Two London Libraries (already abbreviated as Liu I in notes to “The Military Romance,” this volume), Liu Ts’un-yan has already made some headway in identifying the authors of lesser novels. Thus, Idema to the contrary (xviii), Liu has already affirmed the role of two literary men of probably the official class as the final shapers of the San-hsia wu-i text that got published in 1879. 6. Another criterion adopted by Idema to distinguish the literary novel from the chapbook is the cost involved in publishing them. So far as the literary novels and story collections are concerned, “quite often the edition is large in size, and the type is bold, clear, and nicely cut. . . . There can be no doubt that such editions were costly deluxe publications, intended for a well educated, high-class public.” The chapbooks, on the other hand, were cheaply printed. “Badly cut characters crowd the pages, and there are few extra materials, mostly no more than a two-page preface” (Idema lxi). While it is certainly true that a handsome first edition reflects the worth of a novel in the eyes of its author, sponsor, or publisher, there is no strict correlation between the cost of a book and its literary value. If a book became really popular, it would have to come down in price to meet the demand of the public, as Idema readily notes in the case of such literary novels as San-kuo, Shui-hu, and Hung-lou meng. Lü Hsiung’s Nü-hsien wai-shih (1711) certainly enjoyed one of the most luxurious first editions ever put out during the Ch’ing; for a listing of commentators included in that edition, see Liu I, 278. But that edition did not catch on, and the novel has remained practically unread to this day. Availing herself of a rare set of the first edition at Columbia University’s East Asian Library, Catherine Swatek has made a pioneering study of the novel in her M.A. essay. 7. In giving important mention to such novels as Yin-shih, Yeh-sou p’u-yen, and Hsi-yu pu in his Brief History, Lu Hsün must have been influenced by Huang Mo-

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hsi’s Hsiao-shuo hsiao-hua, first serialized in Hsiao-shuo lin (1907) and now collected in A Ying, ed., Wan-Ch’ing wen-hsüeh ts’ung-ch’ao: Hsiao-shuo hsi-ch’ü yen-chiu chüan (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1960), abbreviated hereafter as HHYC in the notes to this and some other chapters. An editor of Hsiao-shuo lin, Huang was also a professor at Soochow University; see Pao T’ien-hsiao, Ch’uan-ying-lou hui-i-lu (Hong Kong: Ta-hua ch’u-pan-she, 1971), 114. Because of Lu Hsün’s influence, subsequent historians of Chinese fiction have all felt it their duty to mention Yin-shih. It is, in my opinion, an unreadable book. Despite his Confucian orthodoxy, Hsia Ching-ch’ü (c. 1681–1740?) has a licentious imagination and places his hero Wen Pai tzu Su-ch’en, a supreme genius in all civil and military arts, in every kind of improbable adventure. For a psychoanalytic study of the author and his novel, see Hou Chien, “Yeh-sou p’u-yen ti pien-t’ai hsinli,” Chung-wai Literary Monthly II (10) (Taipei, 1974). During the early forties in Shanghai, the famous actor Chou Hsin-fang played the hero in a succession of feature-length Peking operas entitled Wen Su-ch’en. 8. For information on T’ien-hua-tsang chu-jen, see Liu I, 314–318. 9. Scholars are not agreed as to whether Wu Ch’eng-en was the author of Hsi-yu chi, but Liu Ts’un-yan’s biography (T’oung Pao, LIII, 1967) gives us an excellent portrait of a scholar who could have written this long novel. Hsi-yu pu may be regarded as a sport among the scholarly novels in that it is a short work of only sixteen chapters and Tung Yüeh (1620–1686) wrote it when he was only twenty-one sui old. 10. The author’s son lists his father’s unpublished works in a biographical note appended to the novel. See Liu I, 290. 11. Hung-lou meng may constitute the only exception. In The Classic Chinese Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 1 have examined it as a philosophical novel that provides a radical critique of the human condition, while the Communist critics have always praised it for its radical critique of Chinese feudal society. But one must remember that for readers of the Ch’ing period and even for aficionados of the present day the primary appeal of Hung-lou meng has always been its full expression of a traditional literary and artistic sensibility. See Phillip Sun, “Hung-lou meng ti ch’uan-t’ung i-shu kan-hsing,” in Ch’ien Mu hsien-sheng pa-shih-sui chi-nien lun-wen chi (Kowloon: Hsin-ya yen-chiu-so, 1974). 12. Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Beyond Culture (New York: Viking, 1968), 3. Trilling goes on to say, “It seems to me that the characteristic element of modern literature, or at least of the most highly developed modern literature, is the bitter line of hostility to civilization which runs through it.” 13. I have in mind such eminent personages as Yüan Mei (1716–1799), Tai Chen (1723–1777), Chi Yün (1724–1805), and Yü Cheng-hsieh (1775–1840). In “Feminist Thought in Ancient China,” Lin Yutang regards Yüan, Yü, and Li as the only champions of female rights China has produced in premodern times. In their pi-chi fiction, both Yüan Mei and Chi Yün, despite their belief in moral retribution and supernatural happenings, share with Wu Ching-tzu and Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in

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a delight in making fun of the narrow scholars and moralists of the Ch’eng-Chu school. It may be of interest to note that, of the three non-Marxist major thinkers of the May Fourth era, Hu Shih champions the thought of Tai Chen, Chou Tso-jen claims Yü Cheng-hsieh as one of his three intellectual heroes from China’s past (the other two being Wang Ch’ung and Li Chih), and Lin Yutang admires the honest hedonism of Yüan Mei, among other late Ming and early Ch’ing figures. Yet, despite their modern appeal, I would maintain that these Ch’ing intellectuals, like the scholar-novelists, were still the product of their age. For one thing, they could not survey the Chinese scene from a radically new angle because they lacked exposure to western thought. See notes 14 and 46. 14. It is possible to view the Ch’ing scholar-novelists as the precursors of Liu Ê, who, with his new apprehension of the national doom, unequivocally blames the cruel and enervating morality of Neo-Confucianism for China’s decline. But Tai Chen has long anticipated Liu Ê in equating the li (principle) of Neo-Confucians with the fa (law) of harsh officials as an instrument of murder (sha-jen). See his powerful indictment of the “later Confucians” (hou-ju) in a letter reprinted in Hu Shih, Tai Tung-yüan ti che-hsüeh (reprint, Taipei: Commercial Press, 1967), 1–3, following 157. But in his major philosophical work, Meng-tzu tzu-i shu-cheng, he does not express himself so bluntly but keeps up the pretense of merely explicating certain Mencian terms. His immediate influence upon fellow intellectuals was that of a scholar and philologist. 15. Except for the Ch’an variety, Buddhism has fallen out of favor with the scholar-novelists of the Ch’ing. Hsia Ching-ch’ü attacks Buddhist and Taoist orders with undue vehemence. For Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in and Li Ju-chen alike, Ch’an Buddhism is practically identical with Taoism. While they may adopt Buddhist modes of allegory, they no longer believe in the Western Paradise or salvation through the intervention of bodhisattvas. 16. For a life of Li Ju-chen embodying research into little-known sources see the introduction to “The Women’s Kingdom” in H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973). The introduction also lists the strange lands visited by the Chinese voyagers and gives background information for the proper enjoyment of the Women’s Kingdom episode. Chang has earlier translated the concluding episode of the Storming of the Four Passes in Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1955). 17. Ibid. 6. 18. As a rare example of anachronism, T’ang Ao, in discussing the pronunciation of a certain character from The Analects in chapter 18, alludes to Chu Hsi as “a great scholar of that time whose ancestral home was Hsin-an.” Since it is the intention of the novelist to rectify Chu Hsi’s pronunciation, he cannot but refer to the Sung commentator, but he cunningly minimizes the shock of anachronism by refraining from calling him by name or title. Ching-hua yuan (hereafter CHY) (Taipei: Shihchieh shu-chü, 1955), 69. See also note 31.

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19. Wen-k’ang’s Erh-nü ying-hsiung chuan, most probably completed in 1854 (cf. Liu I, 331), is the conspicuous example of a novel written after the Opium War fully endorsing conventional Confucian morality and the official establishment. Though its dialogue contains some learned discussion, it is debatable if this work of p’ing-hua fiction could be called a scholarly novel as I have defined it. Highly praised for its colloquial style and some chivalric episodes involving one of its heroines, it has been customarily deplored for its fulsome celebration of the official ideology, especially by Hu Shih in his preface to the novel in Hu Shih wen-ts’un III. Recently, Hou Chien has put up a spirited defense of the work on both artistic and ideological grounds. But by dissociating himself completely from the modern tradition that Hu Shih represents, Hou Chien, though much more sophisticated in his use of the comparative method, appears an academic living in total detachment from his age and rather nostalgic about the values the novel celebrates. Hu Shih’s critique of the novel is of one piece with his intellectual position. Does Hou Chien seriously want us to believe that he has disavowed all the values implicit in western romanticism and individualism, or is he playing an academic game? His article, “Erh-nü ying-hsiung chuan shih-p’ing,” nevertheless, is extremely stimulating; it can be found in Hou Chien, Erh-shih shih-chi wen-hsüeh (Taipei: Chung-ch’eng ch’u-pan-she, 1976). 20. See, for example, the article by Li Ch’ang-chih listed in Tien-yi Li, Chinese Fiction, 169, and all the multivolume histories of Chinese literature issuing from mainland China. 21. Yüeh Heng-chün, “P’eng-lai kuei-hsi: lun Ching-hua yuan ti shih-chiehkuan,” Hsien-tai Wen-hsüeh 49 (Taipei, February 1973). Yüeh, who did her M.A. essay on Sung-tai hua-pen yen-chiu (National Taiwan University, 1969), has published an impressive series of articles on Chinese fiction and mythology. For an introduction to Yüeh Heng-chün, Hou Chien, and other Taiwan critics, see Yen Yüan-shu, “New Trends in the Study of Classical Chinese Literature in the Republic of China,” Review of National Literatures VI (I) (spring 1975). 22. At the very beginning of chapter 1, the author tells us that, in addition to Mt. K’un-lun, long identified as the dwelling place of Hsi Wang Mu, there are in the seas three mountainous isles where the gods and celestials reside: P’eng-lai, Fangchang, and Ying-chou. These three all have their “little” counterparts in the human world of the novel. Hsiao P’eng-lai, also situated in the seas and partaking more of the celestial atmosphere of its namesake, is the place where T’ang Ao and, later, his daughter turn into hsien. Hsiao Fang-chang, in China proper, is a celestial-haunted mountain where filial piety is rewarded. To Chiu-kung tells his friends in chapter 27 how his great-grandfather received a magic prescription for dysentery. After even his filial act of slicing flesh from his thighs had failed to return his sixty-yearold mother to health, To’s ancestor repaired to Hsiao Fang-chang in desperation and fasted for three days and nights. On the fourth day, a celestial in the guise of a fisherman transmitted to him the prescription that lengthened his mother’s life for another forty years. Hsiao Ying-chou (chaps. 58, 95) serves as a stronghold for the young loyalists before they lead an expedition against Empress Wu. Thus the three

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replicas of the celestial mountains provide allegoric settings for the proper fulfillment of the ideals of hsien, hsiao, and chung. 23. Though only an octogenarian, To Chiu-kung seems to have been everywhere and knows the customs of all the countries he visits or sights from his ship. Among other tall tales, he tells in chapter 9 how once he consumed a single grain of rice that sustained him for a whole year. It is quite significant that the first mythological tale he tells for the benefit of his friends takes place in the time of Yen-ti and that the last stop for the voyagers before they are wafted to Little P’eng-lai is the Hsien-yüan Kingdom, where the Snake King, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, is celebrating his thousandth birthday. To can identify all the weird-shaped kings attending that ceremony. 24. CHY, chap. 94, 401. 25. Ibid. 26. This takes place in chapter 94. These four girls, together with the emissary from the Women’s Kingdom and a servant, take off in three flying cars, each seating two. 27. CHY, chap. 96, 406. 28. Hsia-jen, who contributed a series of notes on fiction to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s journal Hsin Hsiao-shuo, calls Ching-hua yuan a scientific novel on the basis of these prescriptions. He testifies to their efficacy and mentions a book by a Mr. Shen entitled Ching-yen fang (“True and tried prescriptions”) that has borrowed many from our novel. See A Ying, ed., HHYC, 341. 29. See the General Commentary on the jade tablet. CHY, chap. 48, 194. 30. The phrases occur in the third of the fourteen songs bearing the collective title Hung-lou meng, which Pao-yü hears in his dream in chapter 5. David Hawkes translates the relevant passages as follows: All, insubstantial, doomed to pass, As moonlight mirrored in the water Or flowers reflected in a glass. The Story of the Stone, Vol. 1: The Golden Days (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 140. The nickname for T’ang Kuei-ch’en, Meng-chung Meng, also suggests the definite influence of Hung-lou meng. 31. Because Lou Shih-te served under both Kao-tsung and Empress Wu, the author shows extreme care in having T’ang Ao refer to him as “a man of our Dynasty, recently deceased.” CHY, chap. 38, 150. According to H. C. Chang, Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser, 44n1, “Lou Shih-Tê died in a.d. 699. His spirit therefore could be invoked by the heroes of this story, whose campaign should be in a.d. 705.” But if this is indeed the case, then Lou should be still alive during the first voyage since more than six years must have elapsed between that voyage and the final campaign. 32. CHY, chap. 38, 150. 33. For a translation of the Nü-chieh, see Nancy Lee Swann, Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China (New York and London: The Century Co., 1932).

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34. CHY, chap. 1, 1. 35. Lin Tai-yi, tr., Flowers in the Mirror (London: Peter Owen, 1965), 308. As Miss Lin herself states in her introduction (8), “this translation is the extract of the entire original work.” 36. CHY, chap. 82, 338. The speaker is Hua Tsai-fang, who ranks as No. 99 on the jade tablet. Min Lan-sun, No. 98, supports her by saying that she has digested fewer than twenty books. Pi Ch’üan-chen, No. 100, further contends that it would take one twenty years to master a hundred classics and that, at sixteen, she could not have possibly read that many even if she had started reading when three days old. In reality, of course, to write of this wine game taxed even Li Ju-chen’s own erudition, as he confessed in a letter to Hsü Ch’iao-lin, now preserved in K’ung Ling-ching, ed., Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih-liao (Peking: Ku-tien wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1957), 216–217. Hsü was Li’s brother-in-law. 37. Ibid. 215. A longer quotation from Yang Mou-chien’s Meng-hua so-pu, including the translated passage, appears in I-su (Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un), ed., Hung-lou meng chüan II (Peking:, Chung-hua shu-chü, 1963), 364–365. Addicted to Hunglou meng since his early youth, Yang states that in the course of over a dozen years he has jotted down 2,000 notes on the novel. He accords high praise to P’in-hua pao-chien as a work consciously indebted to Hung-lou meng but depicting altogether a different area of life, in much the same manner that Hung-lou meng itself, though different from Chin P’ing Mei, is heavily in its debt. On the evidence of these dicta, Yang Mou-chien would appear to be an exciting critic though his Meng-hua so-pu was probably never printed. Yang was probably writing during the Tao-kuang period. 38. CHY, chap. 71, 288. Extracts from Yin-chih wen are translated in Wm. Theodore de Bary, et al., compilers, Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 635–638. 39. CHY, chap. 87, 359. In translating this passage, I have consulted Burton Watson, tr., Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 23. Chapter 87 features a series of quite delightful parodies in a variety of styles, all on the subject of a giant sandal. 40. CHY, chap. 75, 304. The striking expression “yellow food” (huang-shih) elicits praise from one of the girls made fun of. 41. I agree with J. R. Hightower that Shan-hai ching makes rather depressing reading. T’ao Ch’ien’s fondness for Mu T’ien-tzu chuan and Shan-hai ching has prompted Hightower to make the following comment: “The first pretends to be history, the second geography, and only a mind starved for fiction could rejoice in either.” The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 230. The novelist Tuan-mu Hung-liang, however, has made high claims for at least one section of Shan-hai ching as a repository of China’s earliest myths. See his stimulating articles in the Shanghai magazine Wen-i Ch’un-ch’iu V (6) (Dec. 1947) and VII (6) (Dec. 1948). 42. CHY, chap. 27, 106. I have taken the expression Ch’i-jen to be plural so that the people of Ch’i may be contrasted with the people of Po-li Kuo. The Ch’i-jen

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of the famous parable in Lieh Tzu, chüan 1, clearly refers to “a man of Ch’i.” Cf. A. C. Graham, tr., The Book of Lieh-tzu (London: John Murray, 1960), 27. The Po-li Kingdom is mentioned in the Hai-nei nan-ching section of Shan-hai ching. 43. “Hai-wai pei-ching,” Shan-hai ching, chüan 8, in Ku-chin i-shih (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937), ts’e 17, 1a. Kuo P’u takes ch’i to mean “the large intestines.” In the novel T’ang Ao identifies Wu-ch’i Kuo with Wu-chi Kuo; hence H. C. Chang’s translation of the term as “the Heirless Nation”—Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama 408. 1 have adopted a freer rendition to pinpoint the most conspicuous trait of that nation. 44. CHY, chap. 16, 57–58. 45. CHY, chap. 14, 51–52. 46. Though, on the evidence of their writings, Yü Cheng-hsieh and Li Ju-chen share many interests and concerns, it is difficult to say if they had ever met. While Yü could have read Ching-hua yuan, Li could not have read Yü’s Kuei-ssu lei-kao (1833) unless we assume them to be friends of many years’ standing with free access to each other’s unpublished writings. Kuei-ssu lei-kao contains four essays defending the rights of women and attacking such cruel customs as foot binding and the cult of chastity, which practically denied young widows the right to remarry. Since these essays were written long before their actual publication, Yü must share honors with Li as among the first Chinese to decry the evil of foot binding. But like Li, Yü is too much a scholar of his own time to be consistently reformist and open-minded in his thought. For one who strongly condemns enforced widowhood, I am amused to find that in Kuei-ssu lei-kao he joins the chorus of Ch’ing scholars in protesting with undue vehemence the very idea of Li Ch’ing-chao’s remarriage. As if one could no longer cherish her poetry if she did not stay a widow after her first husband’s death! But it turns out to be a fact that she did remarry. Yü’s essay and the contemporary scholar Huang Sheng-chang’s refutation both appear in Li Ch’ing-chao chi (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1962), 241–242; 196–212. 47. C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, 180–184. 48. CHY, chap. 46, 185. 49. CHY 297. 50. This and the earlier comment by Yin Jo-hua appear in CHY 289. 51. CHY 396. The speaker is Chiang Ch’un-hui. 52. CHY, chap. 100, 427. 53. CHY 90. For a fuller translation of the same passage, see H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama, 405–407.

Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction 1. Hsia Tseng-yu was in his prime also a close friend of Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. Greatly admired in his own time for his knowledge and practice of Buddhism, he is known today mainly for his participation in the new poetry movement of the 1890s,

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of which Liang was also a member. Pen-kuan fu-yin shuo-pu yüan-ch’i was serialized anonymously in Kuo-wen pao beginning with its sixteenth number dated November 10, 1897; see photographic reprint of the first installment in HHYC (see note 7 to my essay on Ching-hua yuan). The essay is reprinted in HHYC 1–13. It was several years later that Liang disclosed its joint authorship in one of his early entries for Hsiao-shuo ts’ung-hua, a regular feature of his journal Hsin hsiao-shuo. However, since Hsia was ignorant of western tongues and his essay is remarkable for its wealth of references to western learning and history, Yen must have been the principal author so far as its main ideas are concerned. According to Hsia’s biography in Yang Chia-lo, Minkuo ming-jen t’u-chien (Nanking: Tz’u-tien kuan, 1937), I:4–31, 4–32, Yen regularly consulted Hsia for the stylistic improvement of his translations; the article must have been another instance of their collaboration in this fashion. In 1903 Hsia wrote for Hsiu-hsiang hsiao-shuo, No. 3, an article called “Hsiao-shuo yüan-li” (HHYC 21–27), which presents views quite different from those in the earlier essay. He maintains, for example, that our passion for fiction is as instinctual as our appetite for food and sex and that at the present juncture fiction should be prepared primarily for the edification of women and the lower classes (ts’u-jen). For these considerations, and not merely for the sake of convenience, I shall refer only to Yen Fu in my discussion of the Yen–Hsia essay. 2. Reprinted in HHYC 13–14. 3. HHYC 14–19. The term ch’ün-chih in the title, probably Liang’s own coinage, has long dropped out of contemporary usage and is therefore difficult to translate. Literally, it would mean the guidance or government of the people or masses, but wherever the term actually occurs in this essay and in an earlier essay of the same year, “Lun fo-chiao yü ch’ün-chih chih kuan-hsi,” it is practically equivalent to “society” in meaning. However, I have adopted the translation “guidance of society” because in both essays the term she-hui, which had been adopted by the Japanese to translate the western concept of society, is also used. For a listing of Japanese terms (many of classical Chinese origin) adopted by Chinese writers of Liang’s generation, see Li Yu-ning, The Introduction of Socialism Into China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). It is well known that Yen Fu coined the term ch’ün-hsüeh to stand for “sociology”; his translation of Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology, entitled Ch’ün-hsüeh yi-yen, was prepared during 1898–1902 and published in 1903. 4. HHYC 14. In the quoted passage Liang calls for a renovation of fiction in order to renovate the morality and religion of the Chinese people. Since so much of traditional Chinese fiction reflects Buddhist morality and religion, one should logically expect Liang to be scornful of Buddhism, at least in its popular manifestations of credulity and superstition. But in his essay on Buddhism and society he makes no reference to the debilitating effects of popular Buddhism on Chinese society. Instead, he extols Mahayana Buddhism far above Confucianism and Christianity as a universal faith for mankind to embrace. Such contradictions, of course, are typical of the thought of Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. 5. Practically the whole body of this criticism is reprinted in HHYC. For a

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description of the leading fiction journals see A Ying, Wan-Ch’ing hsiao-shuo shih (1937; rev. ed., Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-pan she, 1955). 6. Chu Mei-shu, “Liang Ch’i-ch’ao yü hsiao-shuo ko-ming,” Ming Ch’ing hsiao-shuo yen-chiu lun-wen chi hsü-pien (Hong Kong: Chung-kuo yü-wen hsüehshe, 1970). Originally collected in Wen-hsüeh yi-ch’an tseng-k’an, 9th Series (Peking, 1962), Chu’s article also fails to discuss an important passage on fiction in Liang’s long essay “Pien-fa t’ung-yi” (1896). This passage is discussed below. 7. Ku-chin hsiao-shuo, I, hsü, 3b (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chü, pref. by Yang Chialo dated 1958). This edition is a photographic reprint of the earliest Ming edition. 8. Tsu-pen Chin-ku ch’i-kuan, I, “Yüan-hsü” (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chü, 1956). I have quoted from this preface by Yüeh-hu tiao-t’u, dated 1906, rather than an earlier preface to the book to show the persistence of this type of critical cliché. Similar phrases from Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao are cited below. 9. This attitude is reflected in the large number of late Ch’ing novels, many adapted or translated from foreign works, about nihilists or anarchists bent on destroying the czarist government. The best-known example is Tseng P’u’s Nieh-hai hua (see note 47 below). The popularity of this type of fiction deserves a full-scale investigation. 10. For a study of both works, see Marleigh Grayer Ryan, Japan’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967). 11. Sir George Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New York: Knopf, 1950), 398. 12. Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 163–164. 13. The best-known works of these three authors are reprinted in Yano Ryu¯kei, et al., Seiji sho¯setsu shu¯, which also provides for each a chronological biography. This is vol. 3 of Ito¯ Sei et al., eds., Nihon gendai bungaku zenshu¯ (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1965). For accounts in English of these novelists and their works see Sansom, The Western World and Japan; Horace Z. Feldman, “The Meiji Political Novel: A Brief Survey,” Far Eastern Quarterly IX (May 1950): 245–255, and “The Growth of the Meiji Novel” (unpublished dissertation, Columbia University, 1952). 14. Yin-ping shih ho-chi, comprising a wen-chi and a chuan-chi, was edited by Lin Chih-chün and first published in 1936. Chia-jen ch’i-yü appears in Chuan-chi, XIX, c. 88 (Shanghai: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1936). The editor appends to the work a brief note (220), asserting Liang’s role as translator. A fuller account of how Liang started translating the novel while a passenger to Japan is given in Ting Wen-chiang’s Liang Jen-kung hsien-sheng nien-p’u ch’ang-pien ch’u-kao (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chü, 1958), I:80–81. Ting cites as his authority a work known as Liang Jen-kung hsiensheng ta-shih chi, without giving the name of its author. The only instance of Liang’s acknowledgment of his role as translator is a poem that begins with the line Nang-i Chia-jen ch’i-yü ch’eng (Chinese text in glossary). The poem is quoted in the editor’s note to the translation. It may be of interest to note that “Foreword to Our Series of Political Novels in Translation” eventually served as the preface to Chia-jen ch’i-yü after Liang had made an appropriate change in the wording of its last sentence.

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15. The article is remarkable for its references to Buddhism and Buddhist sutras. Thus, of the four terms cited here, hsün is borrowed from Lankavatara Sutra. It appears, for instance, in c. 4 of Gunabhadra’s Chinese version dated a.d. 443. See Leng-chia ching (Shanghai: Ta-chung shu-chü, n.d.), 126. Chin has specifically to do with the length of a work and the time it takes to read it. Along with Hung-lou meng and Shui-hu chuan Liang regards the Avatamsaka Sutra as a prime example of a work that has the power to “immerse” the reader. Liang likens the power of tz’u to the Zen experience of sudden enlightenment and regards t’i as the most advanced of all Buddhist means for self-transformation. 16. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, Yi-ch’ou ch’ung-pien Yin-ping-shih wen-chi (hereafter YW; Chinese title in glossary), ts’e 17, 18a–b. The corresponding passage in HHYC 18 contains a misprint. I have conveniently translated yao as “demons.” Actually the term applies to plants as well as to animals that have attained human intelligence or form. They are usually described as evil. 17. Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie, eds., Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), 458–459. 18. By the time Hsin hsiao-shuo was launched (October 15, 1902), Liang had already published in his biweekly Hsin-min ts’ung-pao his biographies of Louis Kossuth (Nos. 4–7) and Madame Roland de la Platière (Nos. 17–18) and was about to conclude the serialization (Nos. 9–22) of Yi-ta-li chien-kuo san-chieh chuan, his celebrated collective biography of Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi. 19. Schorer et al., Criticism, 470. 20. HHYC 15. I have followed Professor James J. Y. Liu in translating chingchieh, which itself is the standard Chinese term for the Sanskrit word visaya, as “the world.” See Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 84. In view of the numerous Buddhist references in the essay, Liang must have used the term in the Buddhist sense of “sphere” or “spiritual domain.” 21. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 14, reprinted from Schorer et al., Criticism, 250. The same idea is memorably phrased in Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry”: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Ibid. 459. 22. In The Introduction of Socialism Into China Dr. Li Yu-ning lists chu-yi (shugi), li-hsiang (riso¯ ), and hsien-shih chu-yi (genjitsu shugi) as Japanese-coined terms later adopted by the Chinese. Hsien-shih chu-yi (shajitsu shugi), although not on her list, must also have been one of these terms. Thus in Sho¯setsu shinzui Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯ champions realism (shajitsu shugi) and divides fictional heroes into two categories: genjitsuha (hsien-shih-p’ai) and riso¯ha (li-hsiang-p’ai). It is difficult to say whether or not Liang had read Tsubouchi’s treatise since, despite their terminological resemblance, Liang’s didactic approach is utterly different from the Japanese critic’s aesthetic approach. 23. At the time Yen Fu wrote, it was the fashion among American, French, and British critics to apply the Darwinian theory of evolution to the study of literature.

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See “The Concept of Evolution in Literary History” in René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). In The Introduction of Western Literary Theories Into Modern China 1919–1925 (Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971), Bonnie S. McDougall has studied the prevalence of the concept of literary evolutionism among Chinese scholars and critics of the May Fourth period. 24. In the entry for Hsiao-shuo ts’ung-hua referred to in note 1, however, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao avows his great love for this piece even at the time of its serialization. 25. In examining the fiction journals of the period, I find that all novels advertised in their pages are clearly labeled as to their nature of interest and that some of these journals label all their entries in fiction in the table of contents. This policy was adopted, for instance, by Yüeh-yüeh hsiao-shuo (The All-Story Monthly was its given English title), which began publication in 1906. For readers without access to these journals, see the listing of the principal works of fiction featured in Hsin hsiao-shuo in Chang P’eng-yüan, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao yü Ch’ing-chi ko-ming (Nankang: Academia Sinica, 1964), 308–309. See the entry on li-shih hsiao-shuo in glossary II for several such labels in Chinese. 26. Lin Shu, the foremost translator of his time, rendered twenty-five of Haggard’s works into classical Chinese. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Lin Shu and His Translations: Western Fiction in Chinese Perspective,” Papers on China (Harvard University, East Asian Research Center, 1965) XIX:176. This essay studies Lin’s reactions to Haggard, Scott, Dickens, and La Dame aux camélias. In the preface to his translation of Tales from Shakespeare (Yin-pien yen-yü, 1904), Lin Shu introduces the poet by way of Haggard, whom he had already translated: “The English prose writer Haggard and the poet Shakespeare, are they not the exceptional geniuses of a great civilized nation?” (HHYC 208). 27. Nearly all the prefaces and postfaces to Lin’s translations are collected in HHYC, section 3. It must be noted that, after he was introduced to Dickens in 1907, Lin took great delight in his genius as a novelist and could appraise Haggard realistically even though he continued to translate him. In his brief and perfunctory postface to San-ch’ien-nien yen-shih-chi (a translation of She, 1910), he concedes Haggard’s vast inferiority to Dickens as a writer (HHYC 268). 28. HHYC 33. Joan Haste, one of Haggard’s lesser novels that have been long forgotten in the West, had a reception in China that should have astounded its author. Of all the sentimental foreign novels available to the late Ch’ing public, Chia-yin hsiao-chuan was by all indications second in popularity only to La Dame aux camélias, the novel that launched Lin Shu’s career as a translator in 1899. Both novels feature a noble-minded heroine who sacrifices herself so that her lover may improve his worldly fortune; but, whereas Marguerite is a courtesan by profession, Joan is an honest girl who fell in a moment of weakness (as she laments in the last chapter, “Oh, one hour of love—and life and soul to pay!”). The first version, which translates only the first half of the novel and is silent about Joan’s pregnancy, was well received, but it was Lin’s completion of that version that made Chia-yin (Joan)

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a household name in China by its disclosure of her sinful condition. Appended to this version are a tz’u by the translator himself and a lü-shih by Hsia Tseng-yu, both poems attesting to the work’s tragic power (HHYC 597–598). In his Shih-hua (YW, ts’e 79, 81b), Liang Ch’i-ch’ao includes a poem by a friend on this novel and echoes the general opinion that it is the equal of La Dame aux camélias in literary art. The young Kuo Mo-jo wept over the complete version of Joan Haste (Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Lin Shu and His Translations,” 187). Other testimonials by famous men of letters could be cited. According to Lin’s preface to his version, the truncated version was by P’an-ch’i tzu and had a preface by T’ien-hsiao-sheng (Pao T’ien-hsiao) (HHYC 210). According to A Ying, Wan-Ch’ing hsi-ch’ü hsiao-shuo mu (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan she, 1957), 129, P’an-ch’i tzu was the pen name of Yang Tzu-lin and the first partial translation was the joint effort of Yang and Pao. 29. HHYC 324. 30. Ibid. 327. 31. Ibid. 125–126. The editor A Ying has seen only ts’e 1 of this projected edition of Hsin-p’ing Shui-hu chuan. Most probably it was never completed. 32. Ch’en T’ien-hua was a revolutionary propagandist who drowned himself on December 8, 1905 in Tokyo to further the cause of patriotism. He had studied in Japan and, upon his return to China, joined the Hua-hsing hui, a revolutionary group led by Huang Hsing (1874–1916), a fellow Hunanese. Later he joined the T’ungmeng hui. See Chün-tu Hsüeh, Huang Hsing and the Chinese Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), for scattered references to Ch’en. Shih-tzu hou, a fragment of five chapters, was serialized in Min Pao, Nos. 2–9 (Tokyo, 1905–1906), and has been reprinted by A Ying in Wan-Ch’ing wen-hsüeh ts’ung-ch’ao; Hsiao-shuo san-chüan (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1960). In “hsü li,” however, the editor has wrongly assigned 1903–1904 as its dates of serialization. 33. HHYC 132. 34. “Chung-kuo san-ta-chia hsiao-shuo lun-tsan,” HHYC 100–101. The other two novels praised are Hung-lou meng and Chin P’ing Mei. T’ien-lu Sheng is the pen name of Wang Wu-sheng, a regular critic for Yüeh-yüeh hsiao-shuo. 35. HHYC 329. The contributor is Hsia-jen. With even less plausibility he claims the same distinction for Tang-k’ou chih and Hsi-yu chi. For another comment on Ching-hua yüan as a scientific novel, culled from a late Ch’ing or Republican source, Fu-hsüan hsü-yü, see K’ung Ling-ching, Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih-liao (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan she, 1957), 215. 36. See Hu Shih wen-ts’un (Taipei: Yüan-tung t’u-shu kung-ssu, 1953), I:5–54. In “Wen-hsüeh kai-liang ch’u-yi,” Hu Shih names three novelists—Li Po-yüan, Wu Chien-jen, and Liu E—as the only contemporary Chinese authors worthy of being classed among the world’s “first-rate” writers and further maintains that they are all influenced by or indebted to Ju-lin wai-shih, Shui-hu, and Hung-lou meng. In a letter to Ch’en Tu-hsiu dated February 25, 1917, Ch’ien Hsüan-t’ung places these three along with Kuan-ch’ang hsien-hsing chi and Erh-shih-nien mu-tu chih kuai-hsien-chuang among the only six Chinese novels of value, replacing Liu E’s Lao-ts’an yu-chi with

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Tseng P’u’s Nieh-hai hua. In reply to Ch’ien (in a letter to Ch’en dated May 10), Hu Shih dismisses Nieh-hai hua as a work of lesser importance but maintains that all the late Ch’ing novels mentioned in Ch’ien’s letter are “the offspring of Ju-lin wai-shih.” In his survey of Wu-shih-nien-lai Chung-kuo chih wen-hsüeh (1923), Hu Shih reiterates his view that all the best-known late Ch’ing novels stemmed from Ju-lin, a view that has since become a critical commonplace. But Hu Shih himself was the first to acknowledge that, of all the classics of the Chinese novel, Ju-lin had until recent times the most limited circulation (Hu Shih wen-ts’un II:233), which would certainly seem to account for the paucity of references to the work in HHYC. (In combing through some 650 pages of HHYC, I may have overlooked some references to Ju-lin, but it is nonetheless striking to note the sheer scarcity of references to that novel, in contrast to numerous references to what we would regard as the lesser novels of the Ch’ing.) Even if we assume that Li Po-yüan, the earliest late Ch’ing novelist to write the episodic type of satiric fiction, was directly influenced by Ju-lin, it is still a moot question whether his followers were directly responding to this popularity or consciously modeling their work after Wu Ching-tzu’s novel. 37. Ryan, Japan’s First Modern Novel, 60. 38. HHYC 15: Ryan, Japan’s First Modern Novel, 52. Tsubouchi’s phrase comes from the introduction to his translation of Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi. 39. For this and the immediately following quotations from “Fa-k’an tz’u” see HHYC 159–160. 40. See especially C. T. Hsia, this volume, “The Military Romance: A Genre of Chinese Fiction.” Hsiao-shuo hsiao-hua is reprinted in HHYC 351–377. Among the unconventional novels receiving Huang Mo-hsi’s attention are Hsi-yu pu, Yeh-sou p’u-yen, and Yin shih. Lu Hsün was most probably under his influence when he chose to discuss the three works at length in Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih-lüeh. 41. HHYC 103–125. It was originally published in Chiao-yü ts’ung-shu in that year. 42. YW, ts’e 80, 1b. 43. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 308–312. 44. Suehiro Tetcho¯’s Setchu¯bai (Plum blossoms in the snow) (1886), one of the most popular political novels of Meiji Japan, “opens with a prologue describing a scene in Tokyo on October 3 in the year 2040, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first opening of Parliament in Japan.” Liang must have been influenced by this and other Meiji novels forecasting the future. Sansom, The Western World and Japan, gives a rather full account of this prologue; my quotation comes from 416. Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888), which appeared too late to influence Suehiro Tetcho¯, could also have inspired Liang to write The Future of New China. By 1900 the book had become internationally well known. Timothy Richard’s translation, entitled Pai-nien yi-chüeh, was published by Kuang-hsüeh-hui in 1894. See A Ying, Wan-Ch’ing hsi-ch’ü hsiao-shuo mu, 120. Since Liang was for a time Richard’s secretary in 1895–1896 (Chang P’eng-yüan, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao yü Ch’ing-chi

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ko-ming, 35–36) and was deeply indebted to him for his intellectual development, he must have read the Chinese version of Looking Backward soon after its publication. 45. Every student of modern Chinese history knows that the revolutionary leader Huang Hsing was styled K’e-ch’iang. But his original name was Chen, and he did not change it to Hsing and adopt the tzu K’e-ch’iang until 1904. He was a student of education in Tokyo from May 1902 to June 1903. Since Liang’s writings were avidly read by Chinese students in Japan, Huang must have read The Future of New China in Hsin hsiao-shuo and must have later adopted the name K’e-ch’iang because Liang had so named the national savior in his novel. In a speech given in 1911, however, Liang expressed surprise over this coincidence. See Chang P’engyüan, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao yü Ch’ing-chi ko-ming, 306. 46. See the tsung-p’i appended to chap. 3 in YW, ts’e 80, 33a–b. The commentary states that the debaters in Yen-t’ieh lun digress too often from the main theme and resort too readily to rhetoric without basing their arguments on solid learning. 47. For a discussion of the prophetic interlude in Lao-ts’an yu-chi see section 2 of my article “The Travels of Lao Ts’an: An Exploration of Its Art and Meaning,” this volume. The nihilist interlude in Nieh-hai Hua about Hsia-ya-li and her comrades is given in chaps. 15–17. Hsia-ya-li, who forfeits her life in an attempt to assassinate the czar, is the direct antithesis of the Chinese heroine Fu Ts’ai-yün for her bravery and revolutionary fervor. 48. YW, ts’e 2, 27b–28a. 49. Recent literary historians have generally assumed that these two schools of writers dominated the literary scene from the last years of the late Ch’ing period to the Literary Revolution of 1917. See discussions of this period from six Communist-prepared histories of literature in Wei Shao-ch’ang, ed., Yüan-yang-hu-tieh-p’ai yen-chiu tzu-liao (Shanghai: Shanghai wen-yi ch’u-pan she, 1962), 86–119. No serious historian, however, has begun to examine the period in a systematic fashion. “The mandarin duck and butterfly school” has gained ascendancy as a generic term; Wei Shao-ch’ang subsumes the black curtain school under this label. 50. HHYC 21.

The Travels of Lao Ts’an: An Exploration of Its Art and Meaning 1. In Chinese Fiction: A Bibliography of Books and Articles in Chinese and English (Yale University, Far Eastern Publications, 1968), Tien-yi Li lists seventeen critical and scholarly entries for Lao-ts’an as against sixteen for Nieh-hai hua, the late Ch’ing novel next in popularity. However, there are three complete or abridged English translations of Lao-ts’an and one translation of the first six chapters of its sequel, whereas Nieh-hai hua has none. Lao-ts’an has also been translated into Russian, Czech, and Japanese. Cf. Wei Shao-ch’ang, ed., Lao-ts’an yu-chi tzu-liao (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1962) (hereafter, Tzu-liao), 1.

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2. Hu Shih has set the fashion for this type of critical approach in “Lao-ts’an yu-chi hsü,” reprinted in Lao-ts’an yu-chi ch’u-erh-chi chi-ch’i yen-chiu (Taipei: Shihchieh shu-chü, 1958) (hereafter, Ch’u-erh-chi) and in Hu Shih wen-ts’un, III (Taipei: Yüan-tung t’u-shu kung-ssu, 1953). Harold Shadick follows this approach in his “Translator’s Introduction” to The Travels of Lao Ts’an (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952; paperback ed., 1966) (hereafter, LT). 3. LT xxi. 4. In a sense, of course, nearly all Chinese historical novels have political significance insofar as they implicitly endorse a stable Confucian political order as the ideal. In calling Lao-ts’an a political novel, I have in mind mainly the kind of modern novel discussed in Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon Press, 1957). See especially chap. 1: “The Idea of the Political Novel.” 5. LT 2. 6. Ibid. 7. The two lines of verse as well as the quoted phrases are from Keats’s poem “The Fall of Hyperion.” 8. In Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih-lüeh Lu Hsün discusses these three works along with Nieh-hai hua as four major works exemplifying the spirit of the castigatory novel in the last decade of the Ch’ing dynasty. Because of his immense prestige and of the many surveys of Chinese fiction patterned after his pioneering study, the term ch’ien-tse hsiao-shuo has acquired a currency that seems to me unfortunate, especially since it is Lu Hsün’s contention that the castigatory novel is generically inferior to the satiric novel as exemplified by The Scholars. While the castigatory intent of Bureaucracy Exposed and Strange Events Seen in the Last Twenty Years is obvious, the prominent attention accorded them by Lu Hsün and other literary historians actually does little justice to the careers of their authors as a whole. If Lu Hsün had discussed both of Li Pao-chia’s masterpieces, Wen-ming hsiao-shih as well as Bureaucracy Exposed, and paid attention to other important works by Wu Wo-yao besides Strange Events, especially the grimly memorable Chiu-ming ch’i-yüan, he would have given us a fuller idea of the creative vitality of the decade. But then he would have had to redefine or abandon the term ch’ien-tse hsiao-shuo. See also my comments on Li and Wu in “Chinese Novels and American Critics,” this volume. 9. Lao Ts’an acknowledges Yü Hsien’s ability at the end of chap. 6, and Huang Jen-jui refers to Kang Pi’s incorruptibility in chaps. 15–16. See also the conversation between Kang Pi and Pai Tzu-shou in chap. 18 (LT 205). 10. Liu Ê appended to chap. 16 a comment on ch’ing-kuan that has been quoted by both Hu Shih and Lu Hsün in their respective studies of Lao-ts’an. Lu Hsün’s partial quotation from this comment has been translated in Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, trs., A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), 382–383: All men know that corrupt officials are bad, but few know that strict officials are even worse. For whereas a corrupt official knows his own faults

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and dares not play the tyrant openly, a strict official imagines that since he never takes bribes he is free to do as he likes. Then self-confidence and personal prejudice may lead him to kill the innocent or even endanger the state. I have seen many such officials with my own eyes: Hsü T’ung and Li Ping-heng are notable examples. What has so far escaped notice is that, like Yü-hsien and Kang-i, Hsü T’ung and Li Ping-heng were fanatic supporters of the Boxer Movement. Liu Ê has certainly not chosen these names at random. See my subsequent discussion of the novel in relation to the Boxer uprising in section II. 11. In the Yu-lien edition the night scene comprises 37 pages (pp. 95–132). It takes up 41 pages of the annotated edition prepared by Ch’en Hsiang-ho and Tai Hung-sen. 12. LT 140. In the seventh line I have substituted “sighs” for “sigh” since the “homeward-bound” and “traveler” both refer to the poet. 13. Cf. LT 66. Among essays written in defense of Lao-ts’an by mainland critics, the best is perhaps Hsü Cheng-yang, included in Chung-kuo ku-tien hsiao-shuo p’inglun chi (Peking: Peking ch’u-pan-she, 1957). The author sees the compass with which Lao Ts’an tries to save the ship of China and the official’s red hat-button dyed in blood (mentioned in the poem on Yü Hsien) as two major political symbols in the novel. 14. Hu Shih quotes from both scenes in his preface to Lao-ts’an. 15. LT 132–133. 16. Cf. chaps. 5, 13–14, 16. 17. “And now he became so angry that ‘his angry hair pushed up his hat,’ angry that he could not immediately kill Yü Hsien and so give vent to his anger” (LT 67). 18. Lao Ts’an tells Huang Jen-jui in chap. 16, “There are many injustices in this world. When they come to my knowledge, I do what I can to help, and that’s all” (LT 179). 19. LT 216. 20. LT 150. 21. Cf. Shadick’s biography of the author in LT ix–xv. In addition to Liu Ta-shen, “Kuan-yü Lao-ts’an yu-chi,” a major biographical source, Tzu-liao contains Chiang I-hsüeh’s long chronological biography, Liu T’ieh-yün nien-p’u, and a valuable article by A Ying. The diary of Lu Shu-fan referred to in that article has been reprinted in A Ying, ed., Keng-tzu shih-pien wen-hsüeh chi (2 vols.; Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1959) (hereafter, KSW), II:1048–65. 22. Hsiu-hsiang Hsiao-shuo began serializing Lin-nü yü in No. 6 (the fifteenth of the sixth month, 1903), while Lao-ts’an first appeared in No. 9. The magazine serialized Lin-nü yü irregularly until its twentieth number, which featured the twelfth chapter. A Ying has included this incomplete novel in KSW I, and commented on it favorably in Wan-Ch’ing hsiao-shuo shih, 44–48.

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Liu Ta-shen maintains that his father wrote for Hsiu-hsiang Hsiao-shuo to provide financial assistance to Lien Meng-ch’ing. However, Liu also tells us that the magazine paid only five Chinese dollars per thousand characters, and it would seem that, if Lien were really desperate, he could have asked for a sizable sum of money from his friend without imposing upon him the additional chore of writing a novel. While Liu Ê probably did turn over the proceeds from Lao-ts’an to his friend at least during its serialization in Hsiu-hsiang Hsiao-shuo, I am more inclined to the belief that he agreed to write a novel more for the fun of engaging in a friendly competition with Lien, who had already begun one. The hero of Lin-nü yü—Chin Chien, tzu Pu-mo—undertakes a northward journey in chaps. 1–6, and his surname obviously alludes to the character t’ieh in Liu Ê’s courtesy name, T’ieh-yün. In his turn, Liu adopted the name T’ieh Ying for his hero as much to call attention to his own name as to allude to the name Chin Chien, which parallels T’ieh Ying in meaning. Both names, Chin Chien and T’ieh Ying, are in the glossary. 23. In both his earlier chronology of Liu Ê’s life included in “Lao-ts’an yu-chi k’ao-cheng” (Ch’u-erh-chi 251–261) and his much enlarged “Nien-p’u” (cf. note 21), Chiang I-hsüeh maintains that Liu Ê was invited by Chang Yao to serve in 1891 while listing under the year 1890 no biographical information other than that Liu was then 34 sui old. I believe Harold Shadick must be right in maintaining that “Chang Yao, Governor of Shantung, invited him to his yamen as an adviser on flood control, with the rank of subprefect, later raised to prefect. He remained in Shantung in this capacity from 1890 to 1893” (LT xi). Fang Chao-ying also agrees that Liu started working for Chang in 1890 (cf. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period I:517), It is extremely unlikely that Chang should have employed a conservancy expert but not given him an official post until the next year. We know for sure that Chang died on the 23rd of the seventh month in 1891 (August 27). Cf. Kuo T’ing-i, Chin-tai Chung-kuo shih-shih jih-chih (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1963), II:845. For the novel Liu Ê has utilized a great many of his personal experiences in Shantung, especially during the period 1889–1891, but he has wisely left the year unspecified in which the travels of Lao Ts’an took place. One event retold in the novel is precisely dated. While Ts’ui-huan is telling the story about the flood, Huang Jen-jui interjects, “I arrived [in Shantung] in the year Keng-Yin [1890]. This all happened in I-Ch’ou [1889]”—LT 154. In his commentary on chap. 14, Liu Ê endorses the truth of Ts’ui-huan’s story by saying that, as a surveyor of the Yellow River in Shantung, he himself witnessed that year the flooding of many villages (Tzu-liao 11). But since Huang Jen-jui does not specify how much time has elapsed since his arrival in Shantung, we cannot date the events in the novel by reference to his statement. The time scheme for the novel proper does not seem to apply to the prophetic interlude, which refers to the Sino-Japanese conflict of 1894 as an event of the past (LT 119). 24. For Lao Ts’an’s age see Ch’u-erh-chi 1. Both Ch’ing-shih kao, lieh-chuan 252, and Ch’ing-shih lieh-chuan (Shanghai: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1928), ts’e 62, 5a–6a, contain biographies of Yü-hsien.

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25. Liu Ta-shen’s article, “Kuan-yü Lao-ts’an yu-chi,” was originally published in Yü-chou-feng I-k’an; for further data see Tien-yi Li, Chinese Fiction, 221. Professor Li, however, has mistranscribed Liu’s name as Liu Ta-k’un. In nearly all popular fiction and history concerned with the events of 1900 Kang-i is depicted as a fanatic conservative currying favor with Prince Tuan and placing blind faith in the magic might of the Boxers. In Keng-tzu kuo-pien chi (Chung-kuo shih-hsüeh-hui, ed., I-hot’uan [Shanghai: Shanghai jen-min ch’u-pan-she, 1957], I:30), Li Hsi-sheng says that “Kang-i was more kang-pi than Jung-lu but less crafty and cunning.” Li Pao-chia describes Kang-i as both kang-pi and chien-hsien (Li Pao-chia, Keng-tzu kuo-pien t’an-tz’u [hereafter, T’an-tz’u], KSW II:751). 26. Though the career of Kang-i during and after the Boxer uprising is embroidered with rich detail in popular history and fiction, its early phase has been little explored. In The Boxer Catastrophe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 29–30, Chester Tan gives an account of his activities in 1899 as Imperial High Commissioner in the southern provinces, but his earlier role in Ch’ing government is not studied. For a listing of Kang-i’s official posts, see Ch’ing-shih lieh-chuan, ts’e 62, 10b–14a. Before returning to court as a Grand Councilor in 1894, he had served from 1880 on in Kwangtung, Kiangsi, Chihli, Yünnan, Shansi (as governor, 1885–1888), Kiangsu, and Kwangtung (as governor, 1892–1894), but never once in Shantung. Liu Ta-shen’s assertion that his father and Kang-i were in Shantung during the same period cannot be true. Several popular accounts of the Boxer Incident make note of the fact that Yü-hsien was Kang-i’s men-sheng (see, for example, T’an-tz’u, KSW, II: 711). Both instigators of the Boxer Movement should make fascinating subjects for study. 27. Liu Ê really detested Yü-hsien as a harsh official; cf. his commentary on chap. 4 given in note 10. They must have met each other while in Shantung, but it is difficult to say whether Liu could have hated Yü-hsien for personal reasons. In 1897, when Liu Ê got involved with an English company trying to build a railway into Shansi and open coal mines there, Kang-i accused him of being a traitor. As an antiforeign conservative and former governor of Shansi, Kang-i had ample cause to be alarmed, and I see no reason to believe with Shadick (LT xiii) that his action against Liu was dictated by personal animosity. But Liu must have borne a grudge against his accuser, and during the Boxer Incident he had further cause to detest him. The two might have known each other personally, but we have no direct evidence for this. While I see no reason to doubt that the name Kang Pi was intended as an allusion to Kang-i, Liu Ê may have modeled the character after some unidentified colleague of his in Shantung. In chap. 15, Huang Jen-jui says of Kang Pi: “He is a disciple of Lü Chien-t’ang who imitates his master in everything and is utterly incorruptible!” (LT 171). The Ch’en Hsiang-ho edition provides a note on Lü: “We suspect that Lü Hsien-chi is meant here. Lü flourished during the reign of Hsien-feng. Because he once served in the capacity of a censor (chi-chien, chi-shih-chung) people called him Chien-t’ang. He died a victim of the Taiping Rebellion and was regarded by the

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Ch’ing court as a good official of ‘integrity and forthrightness’”—Lao-ts’an yu-chi (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1954), 149. But Lü Hsien-chi was killed in action in 1853 (cf. Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, II:949) and any men-sheng of his surviving in 1890 would have been quite old. Kang Pi, however, gives the impression of a man in his prime. 28. According to Yü-hsien’s biography in Ch’ing-shih kao, lieh-chüan 252, the foreign missionaries and their families massacred in Taiyuan numbered more than seventy. Popular sources give larger numbers. 29. When hostilities broke out between the Boxers and the troops under the command of General Nieh Shih-ch’eng in the Chochou area in June 1900, Kang-i was finally dispatched there to settle the dispute and report on the case. According to Chester Tan, The Boxer Catastrophe, 69–70, “The assertion that the Imperial Court decided to utilize the Boxers and called them into the capital after the return and personal report of Kang I is not accurate. Kang I left Chochou for Peking about the midnight of June 14. He probably did not arrive at Peking before June 16. . . . [On June 13] the Boxers entered the capital in force, and a reign of lawlessness set in. It was apparent that before the return of Kang I the Court had decided to utilize the Boxers, although it was quite possible that the Imperial Commissioner contributed to the decision by reports sent from Chochou.” 30. Li Pao-chia gives a lurid account of Kang-i’s death in T’an-tz’u, chap. 28. In Hsiao-hsien yen-i, Ch’eng Tao-i gives a brief but more factual account. Cf. KSW I:497–498. 31. According to Hsiao-hsien yen-i, KSW I:513, 5,000 people in Lanchow protested against the imperial order for Yü-hsien’s decapitation. Even in Li Pao-chia’s unsympathetic account (T’an-tz’u, chap. 32), Yü-hsien is not robbed of his dignity. It would seem that, unlike Kang-i, he was genuinely incorruptible and that, though denounced by novelists and popular chroniclers, his antiforeign measures were not without popular support. 32. Cf. KSW, chüan 2 and 3. In my opinion the novel that gives the most touching account of ordinary people suffering from the Boxer uprising is Wu Wo-yao’s Hen-hai. Patrick Hanan has translated it under the title The Sea of Regret (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). 33. Hu Shih speaks for many intellectuals of his time when maintaining in his preface (Ch’u-erh-chi 223) that “the most ridiculous thing in Lao-ts’an yu-chi is its prophecy concerning the ‘northern Boxers and southern revolutionaries.’” 34. LT 70. Shadick renders tsai as “rules.” I have changed the word because a minister, no matter how powerful, only assists the emperor in ruling the country. 35. Cf. T’an-tz’u, passim. 36. See my comments on Liu Ê and Lu Hsün in “Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature,” which serves as Appendix 1 to A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 37. Cf. Liu Ta-shen, “Kuan-yü Lao-ts’an yu-chi,” sec. 3. See also Ma Yau-woon, Ta-lu Tsa-chih, XXVIII 10 (May 1964).

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38. Lao Ts’an tells of his past in chap. 7. Cf. LT 76. 39. LT 98. 40. I-yün’s long confession to Mrs. Te Hui-sheng in chaps. 3–4 of the sequel, telling of her love for Jen San-yeh and her final awakening, is the most astonishing proof of Liu Ê’s genius. Few Chinese novelists, traditional and modern, could match his ability to lay bare the heart of a girl with such psychological acumen and endow her tongue with such natural eloquence. 41. LT 120. 42. Cf. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), chap. 1. 43. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 200. 44. In a famous meditative passage in chap. 6, Lao Ts’an refers to the “freedom of speech” enjoyed by the cold and hungry crows (LT 66–67). “Freedom of speech” must have been a rather new term in 1903. 45. LT 63. 46. LT 104. 47. LT 111–112. Shadick has translated the eighth line as “Leaves a swine to rule at ease.” This is misleading since it would mean that the tiger, flying “aloft to visit Heaven [the imperial court],” has left a swine to rule Shantung in his place. I have also corrected the phrase “suckling tiger” [ ju-hu] in ll.1, 6, 9 to read “nursing tiger.” According to Chiang I-hsüeh (Ch’u-erh-chi 240–241), the original term refers to a mother tiger and further connotes a harsh official. 48. Yü-ku immediately enlightens the puzzled reader Shen Tzu-p’ing that the nursing tiger refers to Yü Hsien. All commentators are agreed that the standing swine designates Kang-i since the main component of the i (character 3010 in Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary) consists of two graphs meaning “stand” and “swine.”

Hsü Chen-ya’s Yü-li hun: An Essay in Literary History and Criticism Abbreviations Butterflies

Chiu-p’ai wen-i

HHYC

Perry Link. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1981. Min-kuo chiu-p’ai wen-i yen-chiu tzu-liao ti-i-chi 民國舊派文 藝研究資料第一輯. Hong Kong: Shih-yung shu-chü, 1978. A Ying 阿英, ed. Wan-Ch’ing wen-hsüeh ts’ung-ch’ao: Hsiaoshuo hsi-ch’ü yen-chiu chüan 晚清文學叢鈔: 小說戲曲研 究卷. Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1960.

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Lang-mo Lei-shih

YLH

Yuan-yang

479

Chen-ya lang-mo ch’u-chi 枕亞浪墨初集. Shanghai, 1915. 13th printing: Shanghai: Ch’ing-hua shu-chü, 1928. Hsüeh-hung lei-shih 雪鴻淚史. Taipei reprint: Wen-kuang t’u-shu kung-ssu, 1978. Modern punctuation by Li Fengch’un 李鳳椿. Yü-li hun. An early edition with old-style punctuation and illustrated cover. Main text, 169 pp. Prefatory matter: 序 by 雙熱; 題詞 by various hands; 藝苑 by 陳惜誓 and 枕亞. Corrigenda. Date and place of publication not given. Wei Shao-ch’ang 魏紹昌, ed. Yuan-yang hu-tieh p’ai yenchiu tzu-liao 鴛鴦蝴蝶派研究資料. Shanghai: Shanghai wen-i ch’u-pan-she, 1962.

1. Thus the most important guide to old-style Republican fiction is the Wei Shao-ch’ang compilation abbreviated in the notes as Yuan-yang. It includes valuable contributions by such veteran old-style writers as Fan Yen-ch’iao 范煙橋 and Cheng I-mei 鄭逸梅, who all prefer the designation Min-kuo chiu-p’ai hsiao-shuo 民國舊派 小說. 2. I had completed the main text of my paper before Link’s Butterflies was published. However, I did consult a Xerox copy of a typescript of identical title and presumably identical content (preface dated February 1979) given me by Professor Link, along with his article, “Traditional-Style Popular Urban Fiction in the Teens and Twenties,” in Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). 3. His discussion of such novels as Li Han-ch’iu’s Kuang-ling ch’ao 廣陵潮 and Hsiang K’ai-jan’s Chiang-hu ch’i-hsia chuan 江湖奇俠傳 is much more perfunctory. He translates several passages from Yü-li hun and analyzes the novel from different angles. 4. See their essays in Yüan-yang, section I. 5. Both Fan Yen-ch’iao and Yen Fu-sun 嚴芙孫 are content to say that Yü-li hun sold “several hundred thousand copies,” not counting unauthorized editions published in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other cities outside China (Yüan-yang 174, 462). Citing another source, Link reports that both Yü-li hun and Hsüeh-hung lei-shih enjoyed “a total circulation of over a million, counting continued reprintings in the 1920s and later” (Butterflies 53). The movie Yü-li hun (1924) was directed by Chang Shih-ch’uan 張石川 and Hsü Hu 徐琥 from a screenplay by Cheng Chengch’iu 鄭正秋. Though the principal heroine (played by Wang Han-lun 王漢倫) dies tragically in the movie, the hero (Wang Hsien-chai 王獻齋) and other heroine (Yang Nai-mei 楊耐梅) are allowed to marry in the end. See Ch’eng Chi-hua et al., Chung-kuo tien-ying fa-chan shih 中國電影發展史 (Peking: Chung-kuo tien-ying ch’u-pan-she, 1963), I:64–65. There were two subsequent movie versions; see Butterflies 54.

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6. Liu Pan-nung 劉半農, who had been friends with some old-style writers before supporting the Literary Revolution in 1917, is believed to have been the first one to jokingly label novels like Yü-li hun as Yüan-yang hu-tieh hsiao-shuo. This incident took place in 1920 at a Shanghai restaurant. See the account by P’ing Chinya 平襟亞 in Yüan-yang 127–129. 7. The first satiric novel in the first person was, of course, Wu Wo-yao’s Erhshih nien mu-tu chih kuai hsien-chuang, partially translated by Shih Shun Liu 劉師舜 as Vignettes from the Late Ch’ing: Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed Over Two Decades (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1975). 8. Cf. Ch’ien Chi-po, Hsien-tai Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh shih 現代中國文學史 (expanded edition, 1936; reprint, Hong Kong: Lung-men shu-tien, 1965). 9. Cf. Hu Shih wen-ts’un, vols. 3–4 (Taipei: Yüan-tung t’u-shu kung-ssu, 1953). Stephen H. L. Cheng has completed a dissertation on Hai-shang-hua 海上花 entitled “Flowers of Shanghai and the Late-Ch’ing Courtesan Novel” (Harvard University, 1979). 10. Nearly all the prefaces and postfaces to Lin Shu’s translations are collected in A Ying’s compilation, already abbreviated as HHYC in this volume. See particularly Lin’s comments on Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain 斐洲煙水愁城錄; Scott’s Ivanhoe 撒克遜劫後英雄略; Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book 拊掌錄 and Tales of a Traveler 旅行述異, and the Dickens novels. 11. Ch’en Ching-chih, “Yüan-yang hu-tieh p’ai ta-shih Hsü Chen-ya,” and Chieh K’o 傑克 (pen name of Huang T’ien-shih), “Chuang-yuan nü-hsü Hsü Chen-ya 狀元女婿徐枕亞,” are collected in the volume abbreviated here as Chiup’ai wen-i). Ch’en’s article originally appeared in Chang-ku yüeh-k’an 掌故月刊 2 (Hong Kong, October 1971), and Huang’s in Wan-hsiang 萬象 1 (Hong Kong, July 1975). 12. Better known by his hao Fan-shan 樊山, Fan Tseng-hsiang excelled in parallel prose and wrote some of the most celebrated poems of his time in the late T’ang style. Thus there is much stylistic and temperamental affinity between him and Hsü. But while Hsü may have deferentially called himself a student in his correspondence with the senior poet, there would seem to be no period in Fan’s life when he could have served as Hsü’s teacher or patron. For a critical biography of Fan see Ch’ien Chi-po, Hsien-tai Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh shih, 179–191. 13. Cf. “Yin-sheng tzu-hsü 吟賸自序,” in the volume abbreviated here as Langmo, chüan 2, 5. 14. Hsüeh-hung lei-shih begins with an account of the hero’s family that is much more autobiographical than its counterpart in chapter 2 of Yü-li hun. Hsü Chen-ya himself wrote a commentary on the later novel (“Hsüeh-hung lei-shih p’ing,” included in Lei-shih), designed to show that the earlier novel is more fictional, and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this contention with regard to his family background up to the year 1909. In Lei-shih 2, we read of the hero’s father that “晚年督子綦 嚴, . . . 顧屬望方殷, 而名場已畢, 余兄猶博得一第以慰親心, 余乃一無成就.” This would seem to indicate that whereas T’ien-hsiao did earn a degree, the author

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himself was denied the chance, following the abolition of the civil service examinations in 1905. In YLH, 9, however, we read of the hero that “夢霞雖薄視功名. 亦曾兩應童 試. 皆不售.” Hsü may have taken part in these preliminary examinations. According to the essay “Tu-shu-t’ai chi 讀書臺記” (Lang-mo, chüan 2, 4), Hsü became a student at Yü-nan Normal School 虞南師範學校 in the spring of 1904. The corresponding school in Yü-li hun is called Liang-chiang 兩江 Normal School (YLH 9). 15. In his survey of old-style fiction (Yüan-yang177), Fan Yen-ch’iao has rightly grouped Su Man-shu 蘇曼殊 (1884–1918) with the trio as authors of ai-ch’ing hsiaoshuo though Su wrote sad love tales only in the ku-wen style. Because Su knew some foreign languages, cultivated an eccentric lifestyle, and had influential friends in literary and political circles, he was a legend even in his lifetime and has always been treated much more kindly by literary historians than the writers of the butterfly school. But whatever his importance as a cultural phenomenon of his period, I would maintain that, as a writer of fiction, he is certainly overrated. His longest and most famous piece of fiction, Tuan-hung ling-yen chi 斷鴻零雁記 (available in English as The Lone Swan), is a sketchy and rambling narrative with little to offer besides the vaunted monasticism of the autobiographical hero. Tuan-tsan chi 斷 簪記 (“The Broken Hairpin”), the only other story by Su available in English, is unbelievably bad. W. Y. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau have unfortunately included that story in their otherwise excellent anthology, Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 16. Huang T’ien-shih, 44, in Chiu-p’ai wen-i. 17. Hsü Chen-ya informs us of its length in his preface to Lan-niang ai-shih (Lang-mo, chüan 2, 9–11). Regarding the publication of that tale in Min-ch’üan huapao 民權畫報, see Cheng I-mei’s biography of Wu Shuang-je in Yüan-yang 492. Of course, we cannot determine the dates of serialization for either work without access to a complete set of Min-ch’üan pao and its illustrated supplement. Under the circumstances, it is more reasonable to assume that Wu, an older man earlier entrusted with editorial responsibilities at the newspaper, wrote his tale first. It might not have occurred to Hsü to compose a novel in parallel prose without having a shorter model serving as his direct inspiration and challenge. 18. In Yü-li hun we find many references and allusions to love stories celebrated in Chinese poetry, fiction, and drama. This can be taken as the author’s way of honoring and acknowledging his indebtedness to previous works of the sentimental-erotic tradition. Thus of all the stories in Liao-chai chih-i 聊齋志異, he singles out for praise that of a fanatic lover, Sun Tzu-ch’u 孫子楚 (“A-Pao 阿寶,” chüan 2), to express his admiration for the kind of total commitment to ch’ing that also distinguishes the hero of his own novel. Thus Hsü’s failure to mention Yen-shan wai-shih may mean that he was not impressed by the story or had not read it. 19. Ch’ien Chi-po, Hsien-tai Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh shih, 94–126. 20. Yüan-yang 321. 21. These two are Jang-hsü chi 讓婿記 and Tieh-hua meng 蝶花夢 (Yüan-yang 320–321). See also Huang T’ien-shih 45, in Chiu-p’ai wen-i.

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22. Lang-mo, 13th printing, carries an advertisement of Hsü’s works up to 1928, including three additional series of Chen-ya lang-mo: Hsü-chi 續集, San-chi 三集, Ssu-chi 四集. Since the first collection provides much valuable biographical information and shows many facets of Hsü’s literary versatility and connoisseurship, it is much to my regret that I have had no access to the subsequent volumes of Lang-mo. While his inspiration as a novelist soon flagged, Hsü appeared much more comfortable as a traditional man of letters writing in various styles of verse and prose and doing research and compiling for his own amusement. Ping-hu han-yün 冰壺寒韻, in Lang-mo, chüan 3, is a brief anthology of more than seventy poetesses of the Ch’ing dynasty. Hsü must have read voraciously in Ch’ing literature to get some biographical information on these women and samplings of their verse. 23. Huang, 45, in Chiu-p’ai wen-i. 24. “Yü kuei yeh wan 余歸也晚,” Lang-mo, chüan 1, 1–5. Though labeled as a ts’an-ch’ing hsiao-shuo 慘情小說, this narrative is patently autobiographical. We are informed, for instance, that the author’s daughter Ming 明 was born in May 1912, and T’ien-hsiao’s daughter Ying 英 in October of the same year. 25. Cf. Ch’en Ching-chih, 66–67, in Chiu-p’ai wen-i, and Yen Fu-sun’s biography of Hsü in Yüan-yang 462. Judging by their titles, Ku-p’en i-hen could be a volume consisting entirely of memorial verse while Yen-yen li-hun chi could be either a confessional record or an autobiographical novel. Ch’en specifically mentions thirteen seven-word chüeh-chü poems in memory of the deceased wife to be found in Ku-p’en i-hen. 26. In retelling the story of Hsü and Liu Yüan-ying here, I follow strictly the account of Huang T’ien-shih (composed in 1960), which is based on recollections of his actual meetings with Hsü in the years 1925–1927. Huang first saw our novelist in late 1925. During his second trip to Shanghai, which took place most probably early in 1926, Huang saw Hsü more frequently, and on one occasion Hsü disclosed the news of Miss Liu’s courtship and showed Huang a photograph and some letters of hers. She looked in the picture a pretty woman of twenty-three or twenty-four. Huang returned to Kunming after a short stay in Shanghai, and reemerged there a few months later, prior to his voyage to Japan. He again saw Hsü, who informed him that he had already been to Peking and become formally engaged to Yüan-ying and that he was going there again to get married and take his bride home. Huang stayed in Tokyo for over a year. Because of a coup d’état in Yunnan province (February 1927), he decided not to return to Kunming from Tokyo but go to Hong Kong instead. En route, he disembarked at Shanghai and again saw Hsü. Huang does not specify the month of his visit; but whether it took place in the spring or summer of 1927, by then Hsü was living alone because his wife had already gone back to Peking to resume her career as a teacher. Yüan-ying, who had been brought up in Peking, disliked Shanghai, and on his part, Hsü could not go to Peking for any length of time without neglecting his book company and feeling useless and stranded. But the main cause of her disillusionment, Hsü confided in Huang, was his inability

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to cure himself of his addiction to opium. Thus we can infer from Huang’s article that, though the couple stayed married, the period of their actual cohabitation was extremely brief. Perry Link, who prefers to follow some less reliable sources in his account of the marriage, would have us believe that Yüan-ying had a quarrel with her husband right on their wedding night because of her jealous inquisitiveness concerning his affair with the real-life counterpart of the heroine of Yü-li hun, which is totally unlikely. Link is also misled into believing that Hsü was a man of fifty in 1924 and Yüan-ying was about thirty at the time of her wedding. It is also unlikely that “Hsu had one son by Liu Yüan-ying; she, who became as depressed as Hsu himself, died a few years later,” as Link would have us believe (Butterflies 47). Ch’en Ching-chih (Ch’en, 67, in Chiu-p’ai wen-i) relates that Hsü wrote about a henpecked husband in Chü-nei hsiao-shih 懼內小史 (hard to tell by title alone if it is a novel or short story), but if he did turn out such a work, it is extremely unlikely that he would be drawing upon his painful experiences with his second wife. The title would indicate a comic rather than a tragic tale. 27. Since, according to Yen Fu-sun (Yüan-yang 462), the first wife was named Ts’ai Jui-chu 蔡蕊珠, Link believes that Hsü did heed the widow’s advice by marrying her sister-in-law, a daughter of the Ts’ai family, thus providing an almost exact model for the hero of Yü-li hun. While further research is necessary to establish the facts of Hsü’s first marriage, I find this hypothesis untenable. If Hsü had been married to the widow’s sister-in-law, he would have regarded her as a rather close relative and could have continued to see her at family gatherings until her new marriage. Certainly he would not have talked about her the way he did in front of a new acquaintance. Huang does not say if the widow’s picture had decorated Hsü’s bedroom even while his wife was alive or if it was newly displayed after her death. In either case it would have been highly improper for a man of Hsü’s Confucian upbringing to adorn his bedroom with a portrait of his wife’s sister-in-law. If the two women were totally unrelated, Hsü’s wife could have tolerated the picture, knowing as she did his premarital infatuation with that widow. See postscript on p. 309. 28. Wang Tz’u-hui is best known for his collection I-yü chi 疑雨集, which the Japanese writer Nagai Kafu¯ 永井荷風 compares to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. For an excellent introduction to the poet see Cheng Ch’ing-mao 鄭清茂, “A Preliminary Study of Wang Tz’u-hui 王次回研究,” Wen-shih-che Hsüeh-pao 文史 哲學報 No. 14 (Taipei: National Taiwan University, 1965). 29. For information concerning the novel and its author see K’ung Ling-ching 孔另境, Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shih-liao (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1957), 227–233. The popularity of Hua-yüeh hen is attested by copious references to the work, usually laudatory, in HHYC. In Stephen Cheng’s dissertation cited in note 9 the novel is given a negative and rather perfunctory appraisal. 30. YLH 9. In chapter II, section 3: “The Romantic Route” of Butterflies, Perry Link discusses the attributes of the ideal lover quite fully. 31. YLH 57–58.

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32. However, according to tradition, even Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju once wanted to take a concubine, to the chagrin of Wen-chün. The story of Han Shou was first told in Shih-shuo hsin-yü 世說新語, 35, where Chia Ch’ung’s daughter doesn’t even have a given name. The brevity of the tale notwithstanding, its subsequent popularity with Chinese writers in search of a romantic allusion indicates more than anything else the extremely small number of unconventional lovers worthy of celebration. The real name of Ch’ung’s daughter—Chia Hu 賈午—remains unknown to the Chinese public, even though she and her powerful son Chia Mi 賈謐 played a part in Chin history. See Chin shu 晉書, chüan 40. 33. Popular opinion to the contrary, I have denied Tai-yü the status of “a fully tragic character” in The Classic Chinese Novel. See, however, Anthony C. Yu’s learned defense of her tragic status in “Self and Family in the Hung-lou Meng: A New Look at Lin Tai-yü as a Tragic Heroine,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews II (2) (July 1980). 34. A recent study of this novel is Michael Egan, “Characterization in Sea of Woe,” in Milena Dolezelová-Velingerová, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 35. Han Ho-sheng 韓荷生, a scholar-general, and his wife Tu Ts’ai-ch’iu 杜采 秋, formerly a courtesan. 36. See section 8 of this essay. 37. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), chapter 3. 38. In contrast, The Sorrows of Young Werther, a European work of far greater cultural impact, was not translated until 1921 by a self-proclaimed romantic, Kuo Mo-jo. German fiction, of course, was almost totally ignored by late Ch’ing translators; of some 600 works of foreign fiction translated into Chinese between the years 1875–1911, only three were by German or Austrian authors, one of them identifiably Hermann Sudermann. See A Ying, ed., Wan-Ch’ing hsi-ch’ü hsiao-shuo mu 晚清戲曲小說目 (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1957), section on Translated Fiction. However, even if Goethe’s novel had been available, the great majority of late Ch’ing and early Republican readers would have found the work baffling and its hero antipathetic. It is perfectly understandable for a young man or even an older man with wife and children to form a liaison with a courtesan; for a young man of culture to dote on a girl as good as engaged to another and to persist in seeing her even after her marriage would make him look ridiculous, if not downright unprincipled. And his suicide would appear repellent, while the suicide of a loving and tubercular prostitute, be she Ch’iu-hen or Marguerite, would be readily appreciated as something highly poignant. 39. A group of male students in Tokyo staged the play in 1907. 40. Translated by C. T. Hsia and Susan Arnold Zonana and included in Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau, eds., Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations. 41. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 211.

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42. This takes place in chapter 19. Mr. Li is given the name Ch’i-sheng 李杞 生 in Hsüeh-hung lei-shih. 43. Cf. the essays on Poe in Allen Tate, The Man of Letters in the Modern World (New York: Meridian, 1955). 44. The first two chapters are titled “Tsang-hua 葬花” and “Yeh-k’u 夜哭” and the last two “Jih-chi 日記” and “P’ing-tiao 憑弔.” 45. Lang-mo, chüan 3, contains a cycle of sixty tz’u poems, each about a specific episode from the novel, bearing the general title Hung-lou meng-yü tz’u 紅樓夢餘 詞. This cycle was composed in 1908 when the author was twenty-two years old. 46. At his friends’ urging Hsü Ssu-mei 許思湄, an obscure Ch’ing scholar who made his living mainly as a teacher and yamen secretary away from his ancestral home in Shaohsing, collected his letters to friends and relatives under the title Ch’iu-shuihsüan ch’ih-tu. See Hsü, Hsiang chiao pu-chu Ch’iu-shui-hsüan ch’ih-tu 詳校補註秋 水軒尺牘, with notes by Lou Shih-jui 婁世瑞 (Shanghai: Hui-wen t’ang shu-chü, 1912). 47. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 176. 48. Hua-yüeh ch’ih-tu 花月尺牘 (corrected edition: Shanghai, Hsiao-shuo-pao she, 1920). Its first edition must have appeared by 1916 since it was advertised in the first edition of Hsü’s novel Lan-kuei hen 蘭閨恨 (Shanghai: Hsiao-shuo ts’ung-pao she, February 1917). Even today this manual can be safely recommended to students as a textbook on the p’ien-li 駢儷 style of writing. At the end of each imaginary letter Hsü Chen-ya provides notes on literary and historical allusions. The 1920 edition of Hua-yüeh ch’ih-tu carries an advertisement for Li Ting-yi, ed., Hsin yen-ch’ing shu-tu 新艷情書牘, featuring imaginary letters by Li himself and some fifty other writers. The East Asian Library of Columbia University owns a copy of Feng-yüeh yen-ch’ing ch’ih-tu 風月艷情尺牘 (third printing: Canton, Chung-hsing shu-chü, 1937). Hsü Shen-ya is listed as author, but that name does not appear on the cover (on covers of reliable editions of his works the name of Hsü Chen-ya 徐枕 亞 is always conspicuously displayed). The book is actually an assemblage of imaginary letters by various hands, including Li Ting-yi and several others responsible for Hsin yen-ch’ing shu-tu. Many of the letters are addressed to or written on behalf of imaginary prostitutes. Some letters, designed to be humorous, are in low taste though stylistically competent. So the volume was definitely a project carried out by veteran butterfly writers in Shanghai. Li Ting-yi or even Hsü Chen-ya himself could conceivably be its editor if we assume that by the late twenties such writers had declined in popularity and had to write and compile books of questionable taste for an audience much inferior in literary culture to that which had made Yü-li hun an instant success. Feng-yüeh yen-ch’ing ch’ih-tu must have appeared in Shanghai many years before it had its unauthorized third printing in Canton. By 1937 the p’ien-li style of writing was definitely passé. 49. Thus Chang I-p’ing 章衣萍 (1902–1946), best known for Ch’ing-shu i-shu 情書一束 (1926), wrote much fiction incorporating love letters and diaries. See

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his biographies in Jos. Schyns, ed., 1500 Modern Chinese Novels and Plays (Peiping: Scheut Editions, 1948), and Li Li-ming, Chung-kuo hsien-tai liu-pai tso-chia hsiaochuan (Hong Kong: Po Wen, 1977). 50. Tu Fu’s sequence of poems bears the title of “Ch’ien-yüan chung yü-chü T’ung-ku hsien tso-ko ch’i-shou 乾元中寓居同谷縣作歌七首,” in P’u Ch’i-lung 浦起龍, Tu Tu hsin-chieh 讀杜心解 (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1961), I:262–265. The first four of Yün-ch’ien’s songs appear in translation in Butterflies 209. 51. YLH, chapter 24: “Hui-hsüeh 揮血,” 133–134. 52. Ch’iu-hen’s farewell message goes: 釵斷今生, 琴焚此夕, 身雖北去, 魂實南 歸。裂襟作紙, 嚙指成書, 萬里長途, 伏維自愛! Hua-yüeh hen (reprint, Foochow: Fukien jen-min ch’u-pan-she, 1981), 351. 53. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), 84. Fiedler has in mind especially Richardson, Goethe, and Rousseau. 54. The relevant passage from chapter 18 (YLH 101) is as follows: 乃低唱泰 西羅米亞名劇中天呀。天呀。放亮光進來。放情人出去數語。促夢霞行。 Juliet’s line, “O, now be gone, more light and light it grows,” best corresponds to Li-niang’s Shakespearean injunction to her lover. At the present state of our knowledge, we do not know if Hsü lifted or adapted it from some source or made it up after acquainting himself with the story of the tragedy. That brief passage does not appear in Lin Shu and Wei I’s 魏易 complete translation of Tales from Shakespeare entitled Yin-pien yen-yü 吟邊燕語 (1904), while an earlier partial translation of the text, Hsieh-wai ch’i-t’an 澥外奇譚 (1903), does not even include the play. For fuller information on these two books, see Ko Pao-ch’üan 戈寶權, “Sha-shih-pi-ya ti tso-p’in tsai Chung-kuo,” in Shih-chieh wen-hsüeh 世界文學 (Peking, May 1964). 55. The Ossianic poems of James Macpherson (1736–1796). 56. Translated by Victor Lange in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; The New Melusina; Novelle (New York: Rinehart, 1949), 129. 57. The two sets of poems in Hsüeh-hung lei-shih contain three substitute words, however. The phrase wo-shih 我是 in the second lü-shih poem (Lei-shih 139) is a misprint for shih-wo 是我, as in YLH 100. 58. Thus Hsüeh-hung lei-shih consists of fourteen chapters, the first thirteen covering the year 1909 and the last chapter the succeeding half year. Li-niang now dies on the 25th of the 4th month of the year keng-hsü (1910). 59. Alexandre Dumas fils, Camille: La Dame aux camélias, tr. Edmund Gosse (New York: Heritage, 1955), 211. 60. Ibid., 225. 61. In the eyes of his comrade, Meng-hsia had a jadelike complexion but barely enough strength to tie up a live chicken. He reports nevertheless, that, though a bleeding victim of several bullet wounds, our hero didn’t die until he had fatally shot three enemies in rapid succession with his Mauser rifle. The forced heroic note is somewhat comic. Cast in the form of a journal, Hsüeh-hung lei-shih ends with the hero about to depart for Japan in the company of Shih-ch’ih. His resolve to die for his country is hinted at, however.

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62. YLH 164. 63. Dumas, Camille, 231. Dumas does not dwell on this visit because earlier in chapter 6, before Armand begins his narrative, he and the narrator had visited Marguerite’s original grave and had her corpse moved to a new burial site. They saw her face after the shroud was removed: It was terrible to see; it is horrible to relate. The eyes were nothing but two holes, the lips had disappeared, vanished, and the white teeth were tightly set. The black hair, long and dry, was pressed tightly about the forehead, and half veiled the green hollows of the cheeks; and yet I recognized in this face the joyous white and rose face that I had seen so often. (47) This is the most impressive piece of description in the whole novel, and not something that a translator would render casually. To see if Lin Shu has done it justice, I quote from Hsiao-chai Chu-jen 曉齋主人 (Wang Shou-ch’ang 王壽昌) and Leng-hung Sheng 冷紅生 (Lin Shu), trs., Ch’a-hua-nü i-shih (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1964), 13: 面赫然。見目眶巳陷。唇腐齒豁。直至耳際。齒粲白猶如編貝。 黑髮覆額上。左偏直掩其耳。此即當年坐油壁車臉如朝霞之馬克 也。

Lin translates altogether too freely, but his terse language is certainly impressive. While some obvious departures from the original may be regretted, his addition of the phrase 坐油壁車 cunningly links Marguerite to several Chinese courtesans of the past, including the ill-fated beauty celebrated in Li Ho’s 李賀 “Su Hsiao-hsiao mu 蘇小小墓 .” 64. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage, 1979), 38. 65. Ibid., 13. 66. The relevant passage goes: 室中空氣惡俗。余不能耐。呼石痴曰。是 間不可以少駐矣。YLH, 169. 67. This phrase comes from a famous passage written in 1919 where Lu Hsün urges the awakened man to “shoulder up the gate of darkness” so that the children “may rush to the bright, wide-open spaces and lead happy lives henceforth as rational human beings.” Translated by Tsi-an Hsia in The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 146–147.

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P A R T I V. M O D E R N F I C T I O N

Introduction to Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919–1949 *Edited by Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee; New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. 1. See Edward M. Gunn, Jr., Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 2. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, trs., The Man Who Sold a Ghost: Chinese Tales of the 3rd–6th Centuries (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1958), 11. 3. Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 86. 4. Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau, eds., Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 168.

The Korchin Banner Plains: A Biographical and Critical Study Professor Kong Haili has written an excellent biography of our author, Yu-yü-te (full title in glossary) (Taipei: Yeh-ch’iang ch’u-pan-she, 1998). The following notes supply mainly page references to passages translated from the works of the author. 1. “Ch’u-wen,” Wen-hsüeh ch’uang-tso 1 (1) (Kweilin, Sept. 1942); “Tsao-ch’un,” Wen-hsüeh ch’uang-tso 1 (2–3) (Oct.-Nov. 1942). Both are included in C. T. Hsia and Kong Haili, eds., Ta shih-tai (full title in glossary) (Taipei: Li Hsü, 1996). 2. Tseng-heng (Shanghai: Hsin-wen-i ch’u-pan-she, 1955), 185. 3. “K’o-erh-ch’in ch’ien-shih,” Shih-tai p’ing-lun III (64) (Hong Kong, Feb. 1941): 35. Also in Hsia and Kong. 4. Ibid. 34. 5. “Wo-ti ch’uang-tso ching-yen,” Wan-hsiang IV (5) (Shanghai, Nov. 1944): 35. Also in Hsia and Kong. 6. Ibid. 36. 7. Ibid. 8. “Hou-chi,” Ta-ti ti hai (Shanghai: Hsin-wen-i ch’u-pan-she, 1957), 260. 9. “Hou-chi,” K’o-erh-ch’in-ch’i ts’ao-yuan (Shanghai, K’ai-ming shu-tien,1939; 3rd printing, 1948), 513–514. 10. Ibid. 444–445. 11. Ibid. 212. 12. Ibid. 255. 13. Ibid. 256. 14. Ibid. 509–510. 15. Ibid. 469.

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16. D. J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis, eds., The Prophetic Writings of William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), I:51. 17. K’o-erh-ch’in-ch’i ts’ao-yuan, 193–194. 18. Ibid. 198–199. 19. Ibid. 206–207. 20. Cf. Tuan-mu Hung-liang, “Yu-jen wen-ch’i wo-ti chia,” Chung-liu 11 (5) (Shanghai, 1937). 21. Quoted phrases from D. H. Lawrence, “The Novel,” in Roger Sale, ed., Discussions of the Novel (Boston: Heath, 1960), 94–95. 22. K’o-erh-ch’in-ch’i ts’ao-yuan, 447. 23. Ibid. 483. 24. These chapters were serialized in Wen-i tsa-chih II (3)–III (1) (Kweilin, March–Dec. 1943).

Residual Femininity: Women in Chinese Communist Fiction 1. Orthodox Communist critics in China have of course no quarrel with “human interest” in its broader neutral meaning; in that sense, whatever a character does or fails to do is of human interest. Their quarrel with the revisionist critics is over the more dramatic kind of “human interest”: the problem whether under strong emotion or other unusual circumstance a person habitually seen in his “class” character may reveal his essential “human” character. The test case is whether a Communist hero may turn coward when facing death. The revisionists think he may; the orthodox Communists maintain, on the other hand, that to impute cowardice to a Communist hero is to distort and malign his Communist character. In his long address to the Third Congress of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles on July 24, 1960, Mao Tun cites the following situations of “human interest” for special condemnation: “That a hero facing death must show a weak longing for life, that there must be mental conflict or hesitation when a man has to sacrifice his family for a just cause, or that a man may set free an enemy for the sake of ‘humanity.’” Mao Tun continues: “The revisionists like this kind of ‘human interest,’ but we are against it. To us, this smacks of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, not the human interest of the proletariat. In particular, the signs of weakness in a hero going to his death are intolerable distortions of a hero’s character and not a matter of human interest at all.” The quotations are taken from the English text of Mao Tun’s address as given in Chinese Literature (Dec. 1960): 34. The issue of “human interest” is inseparable from the persistent debate between orthodox and revisionist Communists on “human nature,” of which see this chapter, note 34. 2. Cyril Birch quotes this phrase in his valuable article “Fiction of the Yenan Period,” The China Quarterly 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1960): 3. 3. Chao Shu-li hsüan-chi (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan-she, 1952), 59.

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4. In its May 1950 issue, PL published two letters from readers attacking the story, one reprinted from the People’s Daily ( Jen-min Jih-pao). Fang Chi’s self-criticism was featured in the following issue. 5. PL (July–Aug. 1961): 61. 6. These stories, of course, make no reference to the far grimmer reality. According to Chang-tu Hu et al., China: Its People, Its Society, Its Culture (New Haven: HRAF Press, 1960), 176, following the promulgation of the Marriage Law, “a rising number of suicides and murders, mostly of women, reached such an extent that in September 1951 the Government Administration Council . . . issued a directive to all local authorities calling for a general investigation in their respective areas.” In February 1953 the National Committee for the Thorough Implementation of the Marriage Law disclosed that “between seventy and eighty thousand people were killed or committed suicide in a single year in China over marriage difficulties” (ibid. 177). 7. Cyril Birch, “Fiction of the Yenan Period,” 5, quotes an early critical pronouncement by Chou Yang, “Love has retired to a position in life of no importance; the new works have themes a thousand times more important, more significant than love.” Chou Yang, of course, is merely echoing Mao Tse-tung’s belittling view of love maintained in his Talks at the Yenan Literary Conference, 1942. 8. Ma Feng et al., Chieh-hun (Marriage) (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh ch’u-panshe, 1953), 2. This slim anthology includes six stories on the marriage theme of the 1950–1951 period. 9. Ibid. 7. 10. See Li Feng, “To Start with ‘Marriage,’” PL (Aug. 1956): 111–112. 11. Quoted phrases taken from Huang Ch’iu-yun, “On ‘love,’” PL (July 1956): 61. 12. Ibid. 60. 13. PL (Aug. 1954): 40. A girl making shoes for her lover, however, is a quite common situation in marriage stories. In Wang An-yu, “Li Erh-sao Getting Remarried,” included in Ma Feng et al., Chieh-hun, the widow Li also makes shoes for her lover. 14. PL (Aug. 1954): 41. 15. Ibid. 42. 16. In Ai Ming-chih’s “The Wife,” a story subsequently discussed in this paper, for example, Yüeh-chen, while in bed with him, “tightly embraced her own husband” on receiving the news that he would soon become a Party member. See Tuan-p’ien Hsiao-shuo Hsüan, 1949–59 (Selected Short Stories, 1949–59) (Shanghai: Shanghai wen-i ch’u-pan-she, 1960), II:466. This two-volume anthology is part of a uniform series entitled Shanghai Shih-nien Wen-hsüeh Hsüan-chi (Selected Shanghai Literature of the Last Decade). 17. The most famous work depicting the co-operative movement under the guidance of progressive youth is perhaps Chao Shu-li’s novel San-li Wan, discussed in my History of Modern Chinese Fiction, hereafter History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 491–495.

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18. For a critical study of his pre–1949 career, see the chapter on Shih T’o in History. 19. PL (Mar. 1954): 51. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 40. 22. Ibid. 41 23. Ibid. 43. 24. PL (Oct. 1953): 6. 25. Tuan-p’ien Hsiao-shuo Hsüan, 1949–59, 11:462. 26. Mao Tun was the first critic to praise her highly, in his article “On the Latest Short Stories,” PL (June 1958). Wei Chin-chih parrots this praise in his foreword to Tuan-p’ien Hsiao-shuo Hsüan, 1949–59, I. 27. CL ( July 1961): 80. 28. See the woman leader Chang Yun’s address to the Congress, included in Chung-kuo Fu-nü Ti-san-tz’u Ch’üan-kuo Tai-piao Ta-hui Chung-yao Wen-hsien (The Third Congress of All-China Women’s Delegates: Important Documents) (Peking: Chungkuo fu-nü tsa-chih-she, 1958), 12–46. 29. CL (Dec. 1960): 54. 30. In addition, Li Chun has written two important stories on the new women: “Mother and Daughter” (PL, Oct. 1959); “Sowing the Clouds” (PL, Sept. 1960). The high values assigned to these stories by the Communist literary leadership can be gauged by the fact that English translations were made available to readers of Chinese Literature soon after their original publication: “Mother and Daughter” (Dec. 1959), “The Story of Li Shuang-shuang” (June 1960), “Sowing the Clouds” (Jan. 1961). These stories also immediately prompted highly favorable critiques: see, for example, Wei Ch’ün, “In Praise of New China’s Women—Three Stories by Comrade Li Chun” (PL, June 1960) and Jen Wen, “The Achievement of ‘Sowing the Clouds’” (PL, Nov. 1960). 31. In the commune stories, to be sure, many heroines are seen actively engaged in a professional capacity. But these hardly literate nurses, obstetricians, and meteorologists, usually teenagers and invariably drawn from the ranks of the peasants, have merely undergone a crash training program so that they are hardly professional in the accepted sense of the word. The young doctor in “New Life” is, of course, a professional. 32. PL (Dec. 1960): 41. 33. PL (Sept. 1956): 53. 34. For a detailed account of the Communist persecution of the Hu Feng group and the rightist and revisionist authors, see the chapter on “Conformity, Defiance, and Achievement” in History. In his Talks at the Yenan Literary Conference, Mao Tsetung scoffs at the idea of an abstract and unchanging “human nature.” All the purged critics and theorists—principally Hu Feng, Feng Hsüeh-feng, Ch’in Chao-yang, Liu Shao-t’ang, and Pa Jen—were accused of advocating the bourgeois or revisionist theory of human nature. In his address to the Third Congress of the All-China

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Federation of Literary and Art Circles on July 22, 1960, Chou Yang refers to the persistent attraction of this theory even after the great purge of 1957–1958: “At present the revisionists are desperately advocating the bourgeois theory of human nature, the false humanism of the bourgeoisie, ‘the love of mankind,’ bourgeois pacifism and other fallacious notions of the sort, to reconcile class antagonisms, negate the class struggle and revolution, and spread illusions about imperialism, to attain their ulterior aim of preserving the old capitalist society and disrupting the new socialist society” (CL [Oct. 1960]: 47). 35. I have briefly treated Ting Ling’s Yenan career in History, 275–279. During 1957–1958, the two Yenan stories were cited by the orthodox critics as evidence of Ting Ling’s anti-Party, rightist character. Their striking resemblance in mood and tone to the author’s early bourgeois stories was also emphasized to show her unchanged commitment to individualist nihilism through the years. 36. PL (July 1957): 26. 37. Ibid. 35. 38. Ibid. 36. Li Wei-lun’s “Love” also ends with a rhetorical question. Dr. Chou’s parting words to Pi-chen are: “Good-bye, Pi-chen. I wish you the greatest of happiness. Who could believe that a girl like you can be unhappy?”—PL (Sept. 1956): 53. 39. I reluctantly exclude this story as a subject for discussion from this paper because its heroine, a Korean girl in love with a Chinese volunteer, is not Chinese. 40. PL (June 1956): 125. The magazine’s associate editor, Ch’in Chao-yang, was later persecuted not only for his own revisionist articles and stories but also for his warm commendation of “Our Paper’s Inside News” and his supposed collusion with its author. 41. Ibid. 7. 42. Ibid. 14. 43. Ibid. 21.

Foreword to Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960–1970 *Joseph S. M. Lau, editor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. 1. For a listing of four such anthologies, see Preface, note 4. Among other stories by authors represented in this volume, we may note Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Huang Ch’un-ming’s “Sayonara, Tsai Chien” (The Chinese PEN, Taipei, autumn 1975), and Pai Hsien-yung’s “The Eternal Yin Hsüeh-yen” (tr. by Katherine Carlitz and Anthony C. Yu) and “New Year’s Eve” (tr. by Diana Granat) in Renditions 5 (Hong Kong, autumn 1975). 2. Joseph S. M. Lau, “The Concepts of Time and Reality in Modern Chinese Fiction,” Tamkang Review IV (1) (Taipei, April 1973): 32. 3. Chang Hsi-kuo, among others, is aware of the vast contrast between intellectuals and men of the soil. While sympathetic to the college graduates and main-

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landers in exile for their frustrations, he titles his story “Earth” in honor of an old man known by the nickname Shih-t’ou-tzu (“Rock Man,” or “Kid Stone,” as in John Kwan-Terry’s translation) who untiringly works over a tract of rocky land without giving up hope. “All these thirty years,” someone comments in admiration, “he has lived in that thatched hut there, every day digging up the rocks and carrying them away.” He is a modern version of the legendary Foolish Man Who Removed Mountains. 4. The actual title of the story is “Days for Watching the Sea” (K’an-hai-ti jihtzu). With the author’s permission, Joseph Lau has substituted it with the title of a song (Yü-yeh hua) sung by the heroine in the story. 5. Chin Hsi-tzu, the heroine of Ch’en Jo-hsi’s story, is equally maternal. But as a heroin addict, she has to entrust her infant son to the care of some other woman in order to assure for him a better future. 6. Quoted from Faulkner’s “Speech of Acceptance upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature,” The Faulkner Reader (New York: Random House, 1959), 4. 7. See C. T. Hsia, “The Continuing Obsession with China: Three Contemporary Writers,” Review of National Literatures VI (Special Number: “China’s Literary Image”) (1) (spring 1975), and Joseph S. M. Lau, “‘Crowded Hours’ Revisited: The Evocation of the Past in Taipei jen,” Journal of Asian Studies XXXV (1) (Nov. 1975). My essay, now retitled “Obsession with China (II): Three Taiwan Writers,” serves as appendix 3 in the third edition of A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 8. Mayor Yin (Yin hsien-chang), her new collection of stories, has just been published by Taipei’s Yuan-ching ch’u-pan-she in March 1976. My promised introduction appeared in subsequent printings of the book.

Black Tears: An Introduction to Peng Ko’s Stories *Black Tears: Stories of War-torn China, trans. Nancy Ing (Taipei: Chinese Materials Center Publications, 1986). 1. Hsia Chih-tsing wen-hsüeh p’ing-lun chi (Taipei: Lien-ho wen-hsüeh tsa-chihshe) has 302 pages and 12 articles, including other long ones on T. S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell; Orwell’s 1984; and the playwright Ts’ao Yü. 2. My translation in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 414.

GLOSSARY

In part I of this glossary all Chinese and Japanese names, titles, terms, and other expressions consisting of six characters or fewer are alphabetized. Only book titles, chapter headings, and titles of individual poems, stories, essays, and all such compositions and translations are italicized. In part II all Chinese names, titles, and quotations consisting of more than six characters are alphabetized. No titles are italicized.

I A Ying 阿英 ah 阿 Ah-hao 阿好 Ai Ming-chih 艾明之 Ai Wu 艾蕪 Ai yü hen 愛與恨 Ai-ch’ing 愛情 ai-ch’ing hsiao-shuo 哀情小說 An Tao-ch’üan 安道全 Analects 論語 Anthony Yü 余國藩 Aoki Masaru 青木正兒 Bodhidharma 達摩祖師 Ch’a-hua nü i-shih 茶花女遺事

ch’an 襌 chang 丈 Chang 章 Chang, Scholar 張生 Chang Ch’ing, the Featherless Arrow 没 羽箭張清 Chang Ch’ing, the Vegetable Gardener 菜園子張青 Chang Chu-p’o 張竹坡 Chang Chü-cheng 張居正 Chang Chün-tso 張君左 Chang Hen-shui 張恨水 Chang Hsien 張憲 Chang Hsi-kuo 張系國 Chang Kung (Chün-jui) 張珙 (君瑞) Chang Pao 張保

496

GLOSSARY

Chang Ping-lin 章炳麟 Chang Shih-chao 章士釗 Chang Shih-kuei 張士貴 Chang T’ien-i 張天翼 Chang Tsai 張載 Chang Yao 張曜 Chang Yeh 張野 Chang Ying-ch’ang 張應昌 Ch’ang-an 長安 Ch’ang-hen ko 長恨歌 Ch’ang-sheng tien 長生殿 Ch’ang-t’u 昌圖 Chao Chia-pi 趙家璧 Chao K’uang-yin 趙匡胤 Chao Kuo-kung 趙國公 Chao P’an-erh 趙盼兒 Chao Shu-li 趙樹理 chen 陣 Chen-chen 貞貞 Chen-chung chi 枕中記 chen-ming t’ien-tzu 真命天子 Chen-ya lang-mo 枕亞浪墨 Ch’en Ch’iu 陳球 Ch’en Ching-chih 陳敬之 Ch’en I-ch’üan 陳一泉 Ch’en Jo-hsi 陳若曦 Ch’en Li-tung 陳立棟 Ch’en P’ei-fen 陳佩芬 Ch’en Tsui-liang (Ch’en Tsüeh-liang) 陳最良 (陳絕糧) Ch’en Tu-hsiu 陳獨秀 ch’en-tzu 襯字 Ch’en Wan-nai 陳萬鼐 Ch’en Ying-chen 陳映真 cheng-chih hsiao-shuo 政治小說 Cheng En 鄭恩 Cheng Heng 鄭恆 Cheng I-mei 鄭逸梅 Cheng Liu-niang 鄭六娘 Ch’eng Tao-i 程道一 Ch’eng-tsung 成宗 Ch’eng Yao-chin 程咬金 Chi Chen-lun 紀振倫

chi-chien (chi-shih chung) 給諫 (給事中) Chi Yün 紀昀 ch’i B Ch’i-ch’iao 七巧 Ch’i-hsüan 契玄 Ch’i-hung-t’ing chu-jen 泣紅亭主人 Ch’i Pang-yuan 齊邦媛 Ch’i-teng Sheng 七等生 Ch’i-tzu 妻子 Chia 賈 Chia 家 chia-chiang 家將 Chia Ch’ung 賈充 chia-jen 佳人 Chia-jen ch’i-yü 佳人奇遇 Chia Pao-yü 賈寶玉 chia-tzu 甲子 chia-yin 甲寅 Chia-yin hsiao-chuan 迦茵小傳 Chia ying-chang 賈營長 Chiang Ch’ing 江青 Chiang Fang 蔣防 Chiang Kuei 姜貴 Chiang-nan feng-ching 江南風景 Chiang Shih-ch’üan 蔣世銓 chiang t’ai 將臺 Chiang Tzu-ya 姜子牙 Chiao Chung-ch’ing 焦仲卿 Chiao T’ing-kuei 焦廷貴 Chiao Tsan 焦贊 chieh 節 Chieh-hun 結婚 chieh-kou 結構 Chien 簡 chien-ch’en 奸臣 ch’ien-chi 前集 Ch’ien Chi-po 錢基博 Ch’ien ch’ih-pi fu 前赤壁賦 Ch’ien-chin ch’ü 前進曲 Ch’ien Chung-shu 錢鍾書 Ch’ien Hsüan-t’ung 錢玄同 Ch’ien Nan-yang 錢南揚

Glossary

Ch’ien Ts’ai 錢彩 Ch’ien-tse hsiao-shuo 譴責小說 chih 芝 Chih Lan-yin 枝蘭音 chih-kuai 志怪 Chih-yen Chai 脂硯齋 chin 浸 chin 斤 Chin Chien 金堅 Chin-chih 金枝 Chin-ch’uan 金釧 Chin Feng 金豐 Chin-hsi-tzu 金喜仔 Chin-ku ch’i-kuan 今古奇觀 Chin P’ing Mei 金瓶梅 Chin Sheng-t’an 金聖歎 chin-shih 進士 Chin-ssu lu 近思錄 Chin Sung-ts’en 金松岑 chin-yü 金玉 Ch’in Han 秦漢 Ch’in Kuei 秦檜 Ch’in ping liu-kuo p’ing-hua 秦併六國平話 Ch’in Shih-ch’ih 秦石痴 ching-chieh 境界 Ching-ching-te ch’an-yuan li 靜靜的產院裏 Ching-hua ling 鏡花嶺 Ching-hua yuan 鏡花緣 Ching-jen 敬仁 Ching-lan 靜 蘭 Ching-lun-t’ang 經綸堂 ch’ing 頃 ch’ing 情 ch’ing-chin 情盡 ch’ing-chu 情著 Ch’ing-hua shu-chü 清華書局 ch’ing-kuan 清官 Ch’ing-shih to 清詩鐸 Ch’ing-wen 晴雯 Ch’ing-yi pao 清議報 chiu-kung pa-kua chen 九宮八卦陣

497

Chiu-ming ch’i-yuan 九命奇冤 chiu se ts’ai ch’i 酒色財氣 Chiu T’ang-shu 舊唐書 Chiu-t’ien Hsüan-nü 九天玄女 Ch’iu Chin 秋瑾 Ch’iu-erh 秋兒 Ch’iu-shui-hsien ch’ih-tu 秋水軒尺牘 Ch’iung-ying 瓊英 Cho Wen-chün 卓文君 Chochou 涿州 Chou-hsin 紂辛 Chou Hsin-fang 周信芳 Chou Ting-shan 周丁山 Chou Tso-jen (Chou Hsia-shou) 周作人 (周遐壽) Chou Tun-i 周敦頤 Chou T’ung 周侗 Chou Yang 周揚 Chou Yü (Kung-chin) 周瑜 (公瑾) Chu-chu 珠珠 Chu Hsi-ning 朱西甯 Chu-ko Chin (Tzu-yü) 諸葛瑾 (子瑜) Chu-ko Liang 諸葛亮 chu-kung-tiao 諸宮調 Chu Mei-shu 朱眉叔 Chu Wu 朱武 Ch’u Jen-hu 褚人穫 Ch’u-wen 初吻 chuan-ch’ing 轉情 ch’uan-ch’i 傳奇 Ch’uan-chia pao 傳家寶 Ch’uan-yin-lou hui-i-lu 釧影樓回憶錄 Chuang Yao 莊曜 chuang-yuan 狀元 ch’ui 錘 ch’un 春 Ch’un-hsiung 春兄 Ch’un-nuan shih-chieh 春暖時節 Ch’un-sheng 春生 Ch’un ta-chieh 春大姐

498

GLOSSARY

Ch’un-yü Fen 淳于棼 chung-ch’en 忠臣 Chung Hua 鍾華 Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh yen-chiu 中國文學研究 Chung-li Ch’üan 鍾離權 Chung-lieh hsia-yi chuan 忠烈俠義傳 Chung-wai Literary Monthly 中外文學 Chung-yang jih-pao 中央日報 Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai 瞿秋白 Ch’ü Yuan 屈原 chüeh-chü 絕句 chün-chu 郡主 chün-shih 軍師 Chün-tzu Kuo 君子國 ch’ün-hsüeh 群學 Cicada 蟬 Donkey Chang 張驢兒 Eileen Chang 張愛玲 Emperor Chang-tsung 章宗 (金) Emperor Shen-tsung 神宗 (明) Erh-nü ying-hsiung chuan 兒女英雄傳 Erh-p’ai 二拍 Erh-shih shih-chi wen-hsüeh 20 世紀文學 Fair Maid 白妞 Fa-k’an tz’u 發刊辭 Fan Ch’o-hsiung 范綽雄 Fan Li-hua 樊梨花 Fan Po-ch’ün 范伯群 Fan-T’ang yen-yi 反唐演義 Fan Tseng-hsiang (Fan-shan) 樊增祥 (樊山) Fa-yuan chu-lin 法苑珠林 Fei-lung ch’üan-chuan 飛龍全傳 Fen 墳 Feng Hsiao-chiang 馮孝將 Feng-ling tu 風陵渡

Feng-shen yen-yi 封神演義 Feng-so 封鎖 Feng Ts’un 豐村 fu 賦 fu-chiang 福將 Fu-hsi 伏羲 Fu-hsüan hsü-yü 負暄絮語 fu-jung 婦容 fu-kung 婦功 Fung Yu-lan 馮友蘭 Futabatei Shimei 二葉亭四迷 fu-te 婦德 fu-yen 婦言 H.C. Chang 張心滄 Hai-shang hua lieh-chuan 海上花列傳 Half Celestial Ting 丁半仙 Ha-mi Kingdom 哈迷國 Han Pang-ch’ing 韓邦慶 Han P’ing 韓憑 Han Shou 韓 壽 Han shu 漢書 Han-tan chi 邯鄲記 Han T’ao 韓滔 Han Yü 韓愈 Hei-ch’ih Kuo 黑齒國 Hei-se te lei 黑色的淚 Ho Fei 何飛 Ho Meng-hsia 何夢霞 Ho Meng-hsia jih-chi 何夢霞日記 Ho Tsung-hsien 何宗憲 Ho Yuan-ch’ing 何元慶 Hou-chi 後記 Hou Chien 侯健 hou-ju 後儒 Hou Wai-lu 侯外廬 Hsi Jung 西戎 Hsi Liao 西遼 Hsi-hsiang chi 西廂記 Hsi-wang 喜旺 Hsi-yu chi 西遊記 hsia 俠 Hsia Ching-ch’ü 夏敬渠

Glossary

Hsia-jen 俠人 Hsia Tseng-yu 夏曾佑 Hsiang-ch’ou 鄉愁 Hsiang K’ai-jan 向愷然 hsiang-kuo 相國 Hsiang-lin’s wife 祥林嫂 Hsiang-ling (Ling-tzu) 湘靈 (靈子) hsiang-lung-mu 降龍木 hsiang-p’ei tso-k’e 相陪作客 Hsiang-ya ch’iu 象牙球 Hsiang Yü 項羽 hsiao 孝 Hsiao Chin-t’ang 小金湯 Hsiao Ch’in 小芹 Hsiao-ch’in (Empress Dowager) 孝欽 (太后) Hsiao Ch’ing (in Keng Erh in Peking) 小晴 Hsiao Ch’ing (in Marriage) 小青 Hsiao Chün 蕭軍 Hsiao Erh-hei chieh-hun 小二黑結婚 Hsiao Fang-chang 小方丈 Hsiao-hsiao 蕭蕭 Hsiao hsiao-shuo 小小說 Hsiao-hsien yen-i 消閒演義 Hsiao Hung 蕭紅 Hsiao-shuo chi-pao 小說季報 Hsiao-shuo erh-chi 小說二集 Hsiao-shuo hsiao-hua 小說小話 Hsiao-shuo lin 小說林 Hsiao-shuo ts’ung-hua 小說叢話 Hsiao-shuo ts’ung-pao 小說叢報 Hsiao-shuo yuan-li 小說原理 Hsiao-shuo yüeh-pao 小說月報 Hsiao T’ien-tso 蕭天佐 (左) Hsiao Ying-chou 小瀛洲 Hsiao-yü 小禹 Hsieh Ling-yün 謝靈運 hsieh-shih-p’ai hsiao-shuo 寫實派小說 hsieh-tzu 楔子 hsien 仙 hsien-shih chu-yi 現實主義 hsin 心

499

Hsin-jen 新人 Hsin-jen she 新人社 Hsin-sheng 新生 Hsin-sheng pao 新生報 hsin shih-ch’i 新時期 Hsin T’ang-shu 新唐書 Hsin-te-chia 新的家 Hsin-tu hua-hsü 新都花絮 Hsin yen-ch’ing shu-tu 新艷情書牘 Hsing ying shen 形影神 Hsiu-hsiang hsiao-shuo 繡像小說 hsiu-ts’ai 秀才 Hsiung Ta-mu (Hsiung Chung-ku) 熊大木 (熊鍾谷) Hsü Chen-ya 徐枕亞 Hsü Chen-yang 許振揚 Hsü Chi-fang 許季芳 Hsü Chih-mo 徐志摩 Hsü Chin-fu 許廑父 Hsü Ching-yeh 徐敬業 Hsü Kuei-ch’ing 徐桂青 Hsü Liang 許亮 Hsü Mao-kung 徐懋功, 茂功, 茂公 Hsü Shu 徐庶 Hsü Shuo-fang 徐朔方 Hsü Ssu-mei 許思湄 Hsü Ti-shan 許地山 Hsü T’ien-hsiao 徐天嘯 Hsü T’ung 徐桐 Hsü Wei 徐渭 Hsüan-feng 旋風 Hsüan-tsung 玄宗 Hsüeh Chin-lien 薛金蓮 Hsüeh-hung lei-shih 雪鴻淚史 Hsüeh Jen-kuei 薛仁貴 Hsüeh Jen-kuei cheng-tung 薛仁貴征東 Hsüeh Kang 薛剛 Hsüeh Ting-shan 薛丁山 Hsüeh Ting-shan cheng-hsi 薛丁山征西 Hsüeh Ying-lung 薛應龍 hsüeh-yuan p’ai 學院派 hsün 熏

500

GLOSSARY

hsün-chieh 殉節 hsün-ch’ing 殉情 Hsün-fu chi 尋父記 Hu Hsin-pao 胡心保 Hu-san-hsien-ku 胡三仙姑 Hu San-niang 扈三娘 Hu Shih 胡適 Hu-yen Cho 呼延灼 Hu-yen Tsan 呼延贊 Hua Tsai-fang 花再芳 Hua-yüeh ch’ih-tu 花月尺牘 Hua-yüeh hen 花月痕 Huai-nan-tzu 淮南子 Huan-sha shih-shang nü 浣紗石上女 Huang Chia-ying 黃佳英 Huang Ch’iu-yün 黃秋耘 Huang Ch’un-ming 黃春明 Huang Hsing (K’e-ch’iang) 黃興 (克強) Huang Jen-jui 黃人瑞 Huang Jui-ho 黃瑞和 Huang K’e-ch’iang 黃克強 Huang Kuei-ch’ün 黃歸群 Huang-lung-tzu (Yellow Dragon) 黃龍子 Huang Mo-hsi 黃摩西 Huang Ning 黃寧 Huang-shan k’e 黃衫客 Huang Sheng-chang 黃盛璋 Huang T’ien-shih 黃天石 Huang Tsun-hsien 黃遵憲 Huang Tsung-hsi 黃宗羲 hui-tao hui-yin 誨盜誨淫 hui-wen hsüan-chi t’u 迴文璇璣圖 Hulan 呼蘭 Hulan-ho chuan 呼蘭河傳 Humane Literature 人的文學 hun-chün 昏君 Hung-ch’i 紅旗 Hung Chin 洪錦 Hung-hsüeh 紅學 hung hu-tzu 紅鬍子 Hung-lou meng 紅樓夢

Hung-lou meng p’ing-lun 紅樓夢評論 Hung-lou meng-yü tz’u 紅樓夢餘詞 Hung Niang 紅娘 Hung Sheng 洪昇 Hung Tu 洪都 Hung-yen tung 紅顏洞 Huo Hsiao-yü chuan 霍小玉傳 huo-t’ou-chün 火頭軍 i 義 I Ching 易經 I-yün 逸雲 Irving Lo 羅郁正 je-nao 熱鬧 jen 仁, 人 Jen-chien 人間 Jen-chien tz’u-hua 人間詞話 Jen San-yeh 任三爺 Jen-te wen-hsüeh 人的文學 Jou p’u-t’uan 肉蒲團 Jou Shih 柔石 Ju Chih-chüan 茹志鵑 ju-hu 乳虎 Ju-lien chü-shih 如蓮居士 Ju-lin wai-shih 儒林外史 Ju-yuan 如願 Juan Hsiao-erh 阮小二 juan-yü wen-hsiang 軟玉溫香 Jun-t’u 閏土 K hsien-sheng ch’ü tiao-yü K 先生去釣魚 K’an-hai-te jih-tzu 看海的日子 Kang-i 剛毅 Kang Pi 剛弼 kang-pi 剛愎 k’ang 坑 K’ang Lai-hsin 康來新 K’ang Shao-ming 康少明 kao-chih 稿紙 Kao Ê 高鶚 Kao hsiao-shuo-chia 告小說家

Glossary

Kao Huai-te 高懷德 Kao Li-shih 高力士 Kao Ming 高明 Kao Shang-ch’in 高上秦 ke 革 K’e Tso-fu 克佐甫 Keikoku bidan 經國美談 Keng Erh 耿爾 Keng-tzu kuo-pien t’an-tz’u 庚子國變彈詞 King of Sui-yang 睢陽王 K’o-erh-ch’in ch’ien-shih 科爾沁前史 K’o-hsüeh hsin-wen 科學新聞 Kou-ts’ai 苟才 Ku-chin hsiao-shuo 古今小說 Ku-chin i-shih 古今逸史 Ku-feng 孤 峯 Ku ming-chia tsa-chü 古名家雜劇 Ku-p’en i-hen 鼓盆遺恨 ku-wen 古文 Ku-yü 古 楡 Kuan-ch’ang hsien-hsing chi 官場現形記 Kuan Han-ch’ing 關漢卿 Kuan-yin 觀音 Kuang-ming jih-pao 光明日報 Kuei-ku-tzu 鬼谷子 Kuei-sheng shu-yuan 貴生書院 kuei-ssu lei-kao 癸巳類稿 Kung-sun Sheng 公孫勝 K’ung Hung-tao 孔弘道 Kuo-ch’ao shih-to 國朝詩鐸 Kuo Hsün 郭勳 Kuo Mo-jo 郭沫若 Kuo P’u 郭璞 Kuo Tzu-i 郭子儀 Kuo-wen pao 國聞報 La-t’ai-erh 蠟台兒 Lady Chu-yung 祝融夫人 Lan-i 蘭姨 Lan-kuei hen 蘭閨恨

Lan-niang ai-shih 蘭娘哀史 Lao-niu p’o-ch’e 老牛破車 Lao Pei-feng 老北風 Lao She 老舍 Lao Ts’an 老殘 lei-shu 類書 Leng-chia ching 楞枷經 Li Ch’ang-chih 李長之 Li Chi (Hsü Chi, Hsü Shih-chi) 李勣 (徐勣, 徐世勣) Li Chih 李贄 Li Ching 李靖 Li Ch’ing-chao 李清照 Li Chun 李準 Li Chung-wen 李仲文 Li Ch’üan 李全 Li Ch’ü-ping 李去病 Li Han-ch’iu 李涵秋 Li-hen-t’ien 離恨天 Li Ho 李賀 Li Hou-chu 李後主 Li Hsiang 李詳 li-hsiang-p’ai hsiao-shuo 理想派小說 Li Hsüan-pa 李玄霸 Li Hung-wei (Hung-hung) 黎紅薇 (紅紅) Li I 李益 Li Ju-chen 李汝珍 Li K’uei 李逵 Li Kung-tso 李公佐 Li-li Ch’en 陳荔荔 Li Li-san 李立三 Li Lung-ti 李龍第 Li Mi 李密 Li P’ing-shan (Lung-ch’uan) 李平山 (龍川) Li Pao-chia (Li Po-yuan) 李寶嘉 (李伯元) Li Ping-heng 李秉衡 Li Po 李白 Li Sao 離騷 Li Shang-yin 李商隱

501

502

GLOSSARY

Li Shen 李紳 Li Shuang-shuang 李雙雙 Li Shuang-shuang hsiao-chuan 李雙雙小傳 Li Tao-tsung 李道宗 li-te wen-hsüeh 力的文學 Li Ting-yi 李定夷 Li Wan 李紈 Li Wei-lun 李威侖 Li Yuan-pa 李元霸 Li Yü 李漁 Li Yü-t’ang 李雨堂 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao 梁啟超 Liang-tai jen 兩代人 Liangshan 梁山 Lieh Tzu 列子 Lieh-i chuan 列異傳 Lien Meng-ch’ing 連夢青 Lin Chih-yang 林之洋 Lin Chin-lan 林斤瀾 Lin-ch’uan meng 臨川夢 Lin Ch’ung 林沖 Lin Hai-yin 林海音 Lin Huai-min 林懷民 Lin-nü yü 隣 女語 Lin shen-fu 林神父 Lin Shu 林紓 Lin Tai-yü 林黛玉 Lin Yutang 林語堂 Ling Shu-hua 凌叔華 Little Lin 小林 Little P’eng-lai 小蓬萊 Liu Chen 劉真 Liu Ch’iu-hen 劉秋痕 Liu Ch’un-lin 劉春霖 Liu Ch’ung-hou 柳崇厚 Liu Ê (T’ieh-yün) 劉鶚 (鐵雲) Liu-hsia Hui 柳下惠 Liu-hsing 流星 liu-hsüeh-sheng wen-hsüeh 留學生文學 Liu I-ch’ang 劉以鬯 Liu Jen-fu 劉仁甫

Liu Lan-chih 劉蘭芝 Liu Meng-mei 柳夢梅 Liu Pang 劉邦 Liu Pei 劉備 Liu Pin-yen 劉賓雁 Liu Shih-p’ei 劉師培 Liu Ta-shen 劉大紳 Liu Ts’un-yan 柳存仁 Liu Yuan-ying 劉沅穎 Lo Ch’eng 羅成 Lo Chin-t’ang 羅錦堂 Lo Feng 羅烽 Lo Ju-fang 羅汝芳 Lo Kuan-chung 羅貫中 Lo-t’o hsiang-tzu 駱駝祥子 Lo T’ung sao-pei 羅通掃北 Lo Yeh 羅燁 Lo-yüeh 落月 Lou Shih-jui 婁世瑞 Lou Shih-te 婁師德 Lu Chi 陸機 Lu Hsi-hsing 陸西星 Lu Hsiao-man 陸小曼 Lu Hsün 魯迅 Lu Hsün ch’üan-chi 魯迅全集 Lu Ling 路翎 Lu P’ing 陸萍 Lu Sheng 盧生 Lu Sun 陸遜 Lu Ta (Lu Chih-shen) 魯達 (魯智深) Lu Tzu-hsüan (T’ing-t’ing) 盧紫萱 (亭亭) Lü Chien-t’ang 呂諫堂 Lü Hsien-chi 呂賢基 Lü Hsiung 呂熊 lü-shih 律詩 Lü Tung-pin 呂洞賓 Lü Wei-fu 呂緯甫 Lü Weng 呂翁 Lun fu-ch’en k’o-ch’en shu 論輔臣科臣疏 Lun heng 論衡 Lung-erh 龍兒

Glossary

Lung-nü 龍女 Lung-t’ien lou 龍天樓 Ma Feng 馬烽 Ma San-pao 馬三保 Ma-ku 麻姑 man-fu hsin-suan 滿腹辛酸 Mao-ch’eng chi 貓城記 Mao Tsung-kang 毛宗崗 Mei-li 美麗 men 悶 men-sheng 門生 Mencius 孟子 Meng 孟 Meng-chung Meng 夢中夢 Meng Huo 孟獲 Meng Liang 孟良 Meng-tzu tzu-i shu-cheng 孟子字義疏證 Meng Yao 孟瑤 Miao-yü 妙玉 Min-ch’üan pao 民權報 Ming-hua 明華 Ming-ju hsüeh-an 明儒學案 Ming-pao yüeh-k’an 明報月刊 Miss Ts’ui 崔小姐 Mrs. Wei 賈魏氏 Mt. Wu-t’ai 五臺山 Mu-ch’in 母親 Mu Kuei-ying 木桂英, 穆桂英 Mu-tan t’ing 牡丹亭 Mu-t’ien-tzu chuan 穆天子傳 Myriad Wang 王老萬 Na-han 吶喊 Nan-ch’iang pei-tiao chi 南腔北調集 Nan-k’ai 南開 Nan-k’o 南柯 Nan-k’o chi 南柯記 Nan-k’o t’ai-shou chuan 南柯太守傳 Nan-Sung chih-chuan 南宋志傳 Nieh-hai hua 孽海花 Nieh Hua-ling 聶華苓

503

Nieh Shih-ch’eng 聶士成 nien-nien ch’ien 廿年前 Niu Kao 牛皋 No-Gut Country 無腸國 Nung Chih-kao 儂智高 Nü-chieh 女誡 Nü-erh Kuo 女兒國 Nü-hsien wai-shih 女仙外史 Nü-kua 女媧 Nü-t’u-fu 女土蝠 Oda Junichiro¯ 織田純一郎 Ou-yang Tzu 歐陽子 pa-chen-t’u 八陣圖 Pa-ta shan-jen 八大山人 Pa-yüeh-te hsiang-ts’un 八月的鄉村 Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇 Pai Lang 白朗 Pai Li-ying (Li-niang) 白梨影 (梨娘) Pai-mei 白梅 Pai-min Kuo 白民國 Pai-nien ko 百年歌 Pai-nien yi-chüeh 百年一覺 pai-shih hsiao-shuo 稗史小說 Pai Tzu-shou 白子壽 Pan Chao 班昭 P’an Jen-mu 潘人木 P’an Mei (P’an Jen-mei) 潘美 (潘仁美) P’an-ch’i tzu (Yang Tzu-lin) 蟠溪子 (楊紫驎) P’ang Chüan 龐涓 P’ang-huang 彷徨 P’ang Hung 龐洪 Pao Ssu-niang (Shih-i-niang) 鮑四娘 (十一娘) Pao T’ien-hsiao 包天笑 p’ao-shou 炮手 pei-huang 北荒 P’ei Jen-chi 裴仁基 P’ei Yuan-ch’ing 裴元慶 p’ei-ch’ien-huo 賠錢貨

504

GLOSSARY

Pen-pao nei-pu hsiao-hsi 本報內部消息 P’eng Ko 彭歌 P’eng K’o tzu-hsüan chi 彭歌自選集 P’eng-lang 鵬郎 Phillip Sun 孫述宇 P’i-p’a chi 琵琶記 P’i-p’a hsing 琵琶行 Pien Chin-yün 卞錦雲 Pien-fa t’ung-yi 變法通議 p’ien-ch’i 駢綺 p’ien-li 駢儷 p’ien-wen 駢文 P’in-hua pao-chien 品花寶鑑 Ping Hsin 冰心 p’ing-hua 平話, 評話 Po Chü-i 白居易 Po-i 伯夷 Po-li Kuo 伯慮國 Po-ming yen 薄命巖 Po P’u 白樸 Po-tien 薄奠 Po-wu chih 博物志 Po Yang 柏楊 Prince of Huo 霍王 Prince Tuan 端王 Princess Lung-chi 龍吉公主 Princess Sai-hua (Pa-pao kung-chu) 賽花公主 (八寶公主) Princess T’u Lu 屠爐公主 pu-chiu 不久 pu-kuo san-shih-to-sui 不過三十多歲 Queen-dowager Hsiao 蕭太后 Red Cliff 赤壁 San-ch’ien-nien yen-shih chi 三千年 艶 屍記 Sang sisters 桑家姊妹 San-hsia wu-yi 三俠五義 San-hsien chi 三閒集

san-ku liu-p’o 三姑六婆 San-kuo-chih yen-yi 三國志演義 San-li wan 三里灣 San-yen 三言 San-yüeh yeh-ch’ü 三月夜曲 Seng-ko-lin-ch’in 僧格林沁 Setchu¯bai 雪中梅 Sha-ho yen 沙河燕 Shan-hai ching 山海經 Shan-shan Kingdom 單單國, 鄯善國 shan-ts’ai 善才 Shao Po-chou 邵伯周 Shao Tzu 少子 She T’ai-chün (Yü T’ai-chün) 佘太 君 (余太君) Shen Chi-tsi 沈既濟 Shen Kung-pao 申公豹 Shen Shih-hsing 申時行 Shen Tzu-p’ing 申子平 sheng-chi 生機 sheng-hsien mo-neng tu 聖賢莫能度 sheng-hsien pu-neng tu 聖賢不能度 sheng-sheng 生生 Shih-wu pao 時務報 Shiba Shiro¯ 柴四郎 Shih 蝕 shih 詩 Shih chi 史記 shih-chieh 世界 Shih ching 詩經 Shih-erh lou 十二樓 Shih Hsiang-yün 史湘雲 shih-hua 詩話 Shih-huo 食貨 Shih-i chi 拾遺記 Shih Lan-yen 師蘭言 Shih Meng 時萌 Shih Nai-an 施耐庵 shih-nü 石女 Shih Pen-hua 施本華 Shih Shu-ch’ing 施叔青 Shih-shuo hsin-yü 世說新語 shih-tao jen-hsin 世道人心

Glossary

Shih T’o 師陀 Shih-t’ou-tzu 石頭子 Shih-tzu hou 獅子吼 Sho¯setsu shinzui 小說神髓 Shu-ch’i 叔齊 Shu-shih Kuo 淑士國 Shuang-huan chi 雙鬟記 Shui Ching 水晶 Shui-hu chuan 水滸傳 Shui-shui 水水 Shui-yüeh ts’un 水月村 shuo 說 shuo-pu-shu 說部書 Shuo T’ang 說唐 Shuo T’ang cheng-hsi san-chuan 說唐征西三傳 Shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan 說唐前傳 Shuo T’ang hou-chuan 說唐後傳 shuo-tao 說道 Ssu-ch’i 司棋 ssu-hsing 四行 ssu-k’ung 四空 Ssu-ma Ch’ien 司馬遷 Ssu-ma Chung-yuan 司馬中原 Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju 司馬相如 Ssu-ming 四銘 Ssu-wan-wan pao 四萬萬報 Ssu-yu chi 四遊記 Su-hei-tzu 蘇黑子 Su Hui 蘇蕙 Su Man-shu 蘇曼殊 Su Shih 蘇軾 suan liu-liu 酸溜溜 Suehiro Tetcho¯ 末廣鐵腸 Sui-shih yi-wen 隋史遺文 Sui-T’ang liang-ch’ao chih-chuan 隋唐兩朝志傳 Sui-T’ang yen-yi 隋唐演義 Sun Chen 孫振 Sun Fei-hu 孫飛虎 Sun Hsiu 孫秀 Sun K’ai-ti 孫楷第 Sun P’ang yen-yi 孫龐演義

Sun Pin 孫臏 Sun Te-ch’ien 孫德謙 Sun Tien-ying 孫殿英 Sung Chiang 宋江 Ta-chia-t’ing 大家庭 Ta-chiang 大江 ta-fu-ku 大腹賈 Ta-hsiang 大祥 Ta-kuan 達觀 ta-kung 大公 Ta-ning 大寧 Ta-pao 大寶 Ta-pi-tzu 大鼻子 Ta-shan 大山 Ta-shih-tai 大時代 Ta-Sung chung-hsing yen-yi 大宋中興演義 Ta-ta Kingdom 達達國 Ta-T’ang Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua 大唐秦王詞話 Ta-ti-te hai 大地的海 Tai Chen 戴震 Tai Chi-t’ao (T’ien-ch’ou, Ch’uanhsien) 戴季陶 (天仇, 傳賢) t’ai 臺 T’ai-chou school 泰州學派 T’ai-i hun t’ien-hsiang chen 太乙混天象陣 T’ai-ku hsüeh-p’ai 太谷學派 T’ai-po 泰伯 Takuanyuan 大觀園 T’an, Scholar 談生 T’an Chi-erh 譚記兒 t’an-tz’u 彈詞 tang 鐺 Tang-k’ou chih 蕩寇志 T’ang Ao 唐敖 T’ang Chün-i 唐君毅 T’ang Hsiao-feng 唐小 峯 T’ang Hsiao-shan (Kuei-ch’en) 唐小山 (閨臣) T’ang Hsien-tsu chi 湯顯祖集

505

506

GLOSSARY

T’ang K’ai-yuan 湯開遠 T’ang-shih san-pai shou 唐詩三百首 T’ang-shu chih-chuan 唐書志傳 tao 道 Tao-hung hsüan 悼紅軒 Tao-li-t’ien 忉利天 Tao-nan ch’iao-hsia 道南橋下 Tao-te ching 道德經 T’ao Ch’ien 陶潛 T’ao Chih-ch’ing 陶之青 T’ao-hua shan 桃花扇 T’ao Wu 桃杌 Te Hui-sheng 德慧生 Teng Shan-yü 鄧嬋玉 Teng-hsin jung 燈心絨 the Celestial-Slaying Maze 誅仙陣 The Chinese Intellectual 知識份子 the Myriad-celestial Maze 萬仙陣 the Plague Maze 瘟C陣 the Ten-Exterminating Maze 十絕陣 the Yellow River Maze 黃河陣 Ti Ch’ing 狄青 Ti Hu 狄虎 Ti Lung 狄龍 t’i 提 T’i-hsiao yin-yuan 啼笑因緣 tiao 屌 T’ieh Ying 鐵英 Tien 典 t’ien 天 t’ien-chi 天機 T’ien-hsia 天下 T’ien Hu 田虎 T’ien-hua-tsang chu-jen 天花藏主人 T’ien-kou 天狗 T’ien-lu Sheng 天僇生 T’ien-shan 天山 t’ien-shu 天書 Ting Lan 丁蘭 Ting Ning 丁寧 To Chiu-kung 多九公 To-to-t’ou 多多頭 Tou I-hu 竇一虎

Tou O 竇娥 Tou T’ao 竇滔 Tou T’ien-chang 竇天章 tsa-chü 雜劇 tsa-wen 雜文 tsai 宰 tsai Ch’en tsüeh-liang 在陳絕糧 Tsai-t’ien-chih-ya 在天之涯 Ts’ai Chen 蔡真 Ts’ai Jui-chu 蔡蕊珠 Ts’ai P’o-p’o 蔡婆婆 ts’ai-nü 才女 ts’ai-shen 財神 ts’ai-tzu 才子 ts’ai-tzu chia-jen 才子佳人 Tsang Chin-shu 臧晉叔 Ts’ao Ching-p’ing (Ts’ao Han-wen, Chih-lin) 曹京平 (曹漢文, 之林) Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in 曹雪芹 Ts’ao Jen 曹仁 ts’ao-mu 草木 Ts’ao Ta-ku 曹大家 Ts’ao Ts’ao 曹操 Ts’ao Yü 曹禺 Tseng-hen 憎恨 Tsou Ti-kuang 鄒迪光 Tsou Yuan-piao 鄒元標 Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯ 坪內逍遙 Tsui-ku te pao-tien 最古的寶典 Tsui-weng t’an-lu 醉翁談錄 Ts’ui-hua 翠花 Ts’ui-huan 翠環 Ts’ui-lü 翠縷 Ts’ui-o 翠娥 Ts’ui Ying-ying 崔鶯鶯 Ts’ui Yün-ch’ien 崔筠倩 Ts’ung Hsiang-pin lai-te 從香濱來的 tu 毒 Tu, General 杜確 Tu Ch’iu-niang 杜秋娘 Tu Fu 杜甫 Tu Huang-shang 杜黃裳 Tu Mu 杜牧

Glossary

Tu Pao 杜寶 Tu Shao-ch’ing 杜少卿 T’u-hsing Sun 土行孫 T’u Shen 屠紳 Tuan-mu Hung-liang 端木蕻良 Tuan Ts’ai-hua 段彩華 Tui-ch’i 對泣 t’ui 頹 Tung-ch’ang-fu 東昌府 Tung Chieh-yuan 董解元 Tung Chou lieh-kuo chih 東周列國志 Tung-lin clique 東林黨 Tung P’ing 董平 Tung-yu chi 東遊記 Tung Yung 董永 Tung Yüeh 董說 T’ung Kuan 童貫 T’ung-pao 通寶 t’ung-su tu-wu 通俗讀物 T’ung-t’ien chiao-chu 通天教主 t’ung-yang-hsi 童養媳 Tzu-ch’ai chi 紫釵記 Tzu-chih t’ung-chien 資治通鑑 Tzu-hsiao chi 紫簫記 Tzu-hsüan chi 自選集 Tzu-po 紫柏 tz’u 詞 tz’u 刺 Tz’u-lu-shu 鴜 鷺樹 Tz’u-shan chi 辭山記 Ukigumo 浮雲 Wa-kang-chai 瓦崗寨 Wa-ti-shang-te ‘chan-i’ 窪地上的 ‘戰役’ Wan-Ch’ing hsiao-shuo shih 晚清小說史 Wan-Ch’ing wen-hsüeh ts’ung-ch’ao 晚清文學叢鈔 Wan-fa 萬發 Wan-hua lou 萬花樓 Wang Chen-ho 王禎和

Wang Chi 王畿 Wang Chi-ssu 王季思 Wang Ch’in 王欽 Wang Ch’ing 王慶 Wang Ch’ung 王充 Wang Hsi-feng 王熙鳳 Wang Ken 王艮 Wang Ku-lu 王古魯 Wang Kuo-wei 王國維 Wang Ling-hsien 王靈仙 Wang Shen 王侁 Wang Shih-fu 王實甫 Wang Tz’u-hui 王次回 Wang Wen-hsing 王文興 Wang Wu-sheng 王 无 生 Wang Ya-ming 王亞明 Wang Yen 王衍 Wang Ying, the Short-legged Tiger 矮 脚 虎王英 Wei 魏 Wei (a surname) 韋 Wei-ch’en 微塵 Wei Ch’ih-chu 韋痴珠 Wei Hua 魏化 Wei Tzu-an 魏子安 wen-chi 文集 Wen hsüan (Wen xuan) 文選 Wen-hsüeh yen-chiu hui 文學研究會 Wen-i ch’un-ch’iu 文藝春秋 Wen I-to 聞一多 wen-jou tun-hou 溫柔敦厚 Wen-k’ang 文康 wen-ming 文明 Wen-ming hsiao-shih 文明小史 Wen Pai (Wen Su-ch’en) 文白 (文素臣) Wo-te ch’uang-tso ching-yen 我的創作經驗 Wu brothers 吳氏兄弟 Wu-chi Liu 柳無忌 Wu-ch’i Kuo 無D國 Wu Ching-tzu 吳敬梓

507

508

GLOSSARY

Wu Erh-lang-tzu 吳二浪子 wu-hsia hsiao-shuo 武俠小說 wu-hsing 五行 Wu-hu p’ing-hsi 五虎平西 Wu-hu p’ing-nan 五虎平南 wu-liao 無聊 Wu-sheng hsi 無聲戲 Wu Shuang-je 吳雙熱 Wu Sung 武松 Wu-tai-shih p’ing-hua 五代史平話 Wu Tse-t’ien 武則天 Wu-t’ung yü 梧桐雨 Wu wang fa Chou p’ing-hua 武王伐紂平話 Wu Wo-yao (Wu Chien-jen) 吳沃堯 (吳趼人) Wu Yuan-t’ai 吳元泰 Wu Yung 吳用 Wu Yün-chao 伍雲召 ya-nei 衙內 Yagisawa Hajime 八木澤元 Yang Chin-hua 楊金花 Yang Ching-hsien 楊景賢 Yang Ch’ing-ch’u 楊青矗 Yang Fan 楊藩 Yang Hsien-yi 楊憲益 Yang-kuang 陽光 Yang Kuei-fei 楊貴妃 Yang Mao-chien 楊懋建 Yang-ti 煬帝 Yang Wen-kuang 楊文廣 Yang Yeh (Yang Chi-yeh) 楊業 (楊繼業) Yang Yen-chao 楊延昭 Yano Ryu¯kei 矢野龍溪 Yao Ch’ung-shih 姚崇實 Yao-fang 瑤芳 Yao P’eng 姚朋 Yao-yuan te feng-sha 遙遠的風沙 Yeh-kuei 夜歸 yeh-man 野蠻 Yeh Pi-chen 葉碧珍

Yeh Shao-chün 葉紹鈞 Yeh-sou p’u-yen 野叟曝言 Yeh-t’an 夜探 Yeh Tzu-ming 葉子銘 Yen Ch’ing 燕青 yen-ch’ing hsiao-shuo 言情小說 Yen-chü pi-chi 燕居筆記 Yen Chün 顏鈞 Yen Fu 嚴復 Yen-nan Shang-sheng 燕南尚生 Yen-shan wai-shih 燕山外史 Yen-t’ieh lun 鹽鐵論 Yen Tzu-hsiao 顏紫綃 Yen-yen li-hun chi 燕雁離魂記 Yen Yuan-shu 顏元叔 Yi Ti 儀狄 yi-tzu ch’ang-she chen 一字長蛇陣 Yin-chien 音鑑 Yin-chih wen 陰 隲 文 Yin hsien-chang 尹縣長 Yin Jo-hua 陰若花 Yin K’ai-shan 殷開山 Yin-ping-shih ho-chi 飲冰室合集 Yin-shih 蟫史 yin-shui 淫水 yin-yang 陰陽 Ying-hai chi 櫻海集 ying-hsiung ch’uan-ch’i 英雄傳奇 Ying-lieh chuan 英烈傳 Ying-ying 鶯鶯 Ying-ying chuan 鶯鶯傳 yu-ch’ing 有情 yu-hsi wen 遊戲文 Yu Jui-lang (Jui-niang) 尤瑞郎 (瑞娘) yu-tzu wan-shih tsu 有子萬事足 Yuan brothers 袁氏兄弟 Yuan Chen 元稹 Yuan ch’ü hsüan 元曲選 Yuan Mei 袁枚 Yuan-nü 怨女 Yuan Shih-k’ai 袁世凱 Yuan Yü-ling 袁于伶

Glossary

Yuan-shih t’ien-tsun 元始天尊 Yungkuofu 榮國府 Yü 雨 Yü-chieh 玉潔 Yü chih chi 余之妻 Yü-ch’ih Kung 尉遲恭 Yü Hsiang-tou 余象斗 Yü Hsien 玉賢 Yü-hsien 毓賢 Yü Hsin 庾信 Yü Hsüeh-li 于學禮 Yü Hua-lung 余化龍 Yü-ku 嶼姑 Yü-kuan 玉官 Yü Li-hua 於梨華

509

Yü-li hun (Jade Pear Spirit) 玉梨魂 Yü-t’ai hsin-yung 玉臺新詠 Yü Wan-ch’un 俞萬春 Yü-wen Ch’eng-tu 宇文成都 Yü-wen Yung 宇文融 Yü-yeh hua 雨夜花 yüeh 曰 Yüeh Fei 岳飛 Yüeh Heng-chün 樂蘅軍 Yüeh-ho lao-jen 月合老人 Yüeh-nü tz’u 越女詞 Yüeh-ya erh 月牙兒 Yüeh-yüeh hsiao-shuo 月月小說 Yün 芸 Yün-ho-hsüan pi-t’an 韻鶴軒筆談

II Ch’i-shih-erh-tso t’ien-men-chen 七十二座天門陣 Chung-kuo hsin-wen-hsüeh ta-hsi 中國新文學大系 Chung-kuo li-tai ching-tien pao-k’u 中國歷代經典寶庫 Hou Wai-lu chieh-ku feng-chin pei ch’ing-suan 侯外廬借古諷今被清算 Hsia Chih-tsing wen-hsüeh p’ing-lun chi 夏志清文學評論集 Hsiao-shuo hsi-ch’ü yen-chiu chüan 小說戲曲研究卷 Jang sheng-huo pien-te keng-mei-hao pa 讓生活變的更美好罷 Keng-tzu shih-pien wen-hsüeh chi: KSW 庚子事變文學集 K’o-erh-ch’in-ch’i ts’ao-yüan: ti-erh-pu 科爾沁旗草原: 第二部 k’o-hsi k’o-o k’o-pei k’o-t’i k’o-ko k’o-wu 可喜可愕可悲可涕可歌可舞 k’o-pei k’o-hsi k’o-ko K’o-o 可悲可喜可歌可愕 kuei k’o hsü-ch’ing, jen hsü shih-li 鬼可虛情, 人須實禮 kuei-shen che erh-ch’i chih liang-neng yeh 鬼神者二氣之良能也 Li-shih hsiao-shuo and other labels 歷史小說, 政治小說, 哲學小說, 冒險小 說, 寫情小說, 傳奇小說, 科學小說 Lu Hsün hsiao-shuo-li te jen-wu 魯迅小說裏的人物 Lun hsiao-shuo yü ch’ün-chih chih kuan-hsi 論小說與群治之關係 man-chih huang-t’ang yen, i-pa hsin-suan lei 滿紙荒唐言,一把辛酸淚 mang-mang ta-huang, shih-she huang-t’ang 茫茫大荒, 事涉荒唐 Nan Meng-mu chiao-ho san-ch’ien 男孟母教合三遷 Nang-i Chia-jen ch’i-yü ch’eng 曩譯佳人奇遇成 Pei-Sung chih-chuan t’ung-su yen-yi 北宋志傳通俗演義 Pen-kuan fu-yin shuo-pu yuan-ch’i 本館附印說部緣起 San-kuo-chih t’ung-su yen-yi 三國志通俗演義

510

GLOSSARY

Shuang-yeh hung-ssu erh-yüeh hua 霜葉紅似二月花 Ta-shih-tai: Tuan-mu Hung-liang ssu-shih-nien-tai tso-p’in hsüan 大時代: 端 木蕻良四十年代作品選 The Eight Locked Gates: Birth, Bellevue, Expanse, Wounds, Fear, Annihilation, Obstacle, Death 八門金鎖陣: 生, 景, 開, 傷, 驚, 休, 杜, 死 The fate of classical Chinese literature 中國古典文學之命運 Tu Li-niang mu-se huan-hun 杜麗娘慕色還魂 Yang-chia-fu shih-tai chung-yung t’ung-su yen-yi 楊家府世代忠勇通俗演義 Yeh-yeh wei shen-mo pu-ch’ih kao-liang-mi chu 爺爺為甚麼不吃高梁米粥 Yi-ch’ou ch’ung-pien Yin-ping-shih wen-chi 乙丑重編飲冰室文集 Yi-ta-li chien-kuo san-chieh chuan 意大利建國三傑傳 Yi-yin cheng-chih hsiao-shuo hsü 譯印政治小說序 Yu-yü-te tung-pei-ren: Tuan-mu Hung-liang chuan 憂鬱的東北人: 端木蕻良傳 Yüeh Yi t’u-Ch’i ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu ch’ien-chi 樂毅圖齊七國春秋前集

Index

A Ying, 35, 224, 238 Ai Ming-chih, 386–387 Ai Wu, 383–386 allegory: Li Ju-chen’s Ching-hua yüan and, 188, 198–203; Plaks’s theory of archetype and allegory in Dream of the Red Chamber, 171–187 Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser (Chang), 201 An Tao-ch’üan, 150 Analects, 14 “Announcing Our Policy to Print a Supplementary Fiction Section” (Yen Fu), 223, 226–230 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 370 Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature: 1949–1974, 398–399 antiromanticism, 322 archetypes: The Korchin Banner Plains and, 348, 359; Plaks’s theory of archetype and allegory in Dream of the Red Chamber, 171–187; “Questing Man” archetype, 314 The Art of the Novel (Kundera), 18–19 art, traditional, 28

As You Like It (Shakespeare), 111 Austen, Jane, 36 Babbitt, Irving, 322 Balzac, Honoré de, 339 Barzun, Jacques, 14, 37 “The ‘Battle’ in the Ditch” (Lu Ling), 395 Beardsley, Monroe, 56 “Beautiful” (Feng Ts’un), 394–395 “A Big Family” (Ho Fei), 389–390 “Big Sister Ch’un” (Liu Chen), 381–382 Bishop, John L., 184 “black curtain” fiction, 269 Black Tears, introduction to (Peng Ko), 414–426 “Black Tears” (Peng Ko), 417, 418, 421 Blake, William, 124, 265, 322, 362, 364 “Blockade” (Eileen Chang), 424–426 The Book of Changes (I Ching), 31, 103, 173, 176–177 The Book of Songs (Shih ching), 6, 14, 17–18

512

INDEX

Boxer Rebellion, 249, 259, 261–262, 264, 265, 267–268 Brandauer, Frederick P., 173, 176 Brewitt-Taylor, C. H., 144 A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Lu Hsün), 34, 190 Brooks, Cleanth, 265 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 40 Buddhism, 103–104, 111–118 “The Bulwark” (Chang T’ien-i), 328 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 231–232 Bureaucracy Exposed (Kuan-ch’ang hsienhsing chi; Li Pao-chia), 44 “Candlestick” (Peng Ko), 417, 418, 422 “The Cat” (Ch’ien Chung-shu), 322 Cat Country (Lao She), 346, 347 Cervantes, Miguel de, 220, 359 Ch’a-hua nü i-shih (Lin Shu, trans. of La Dame aux camélias), 284–286, 303–309 Chang Ch’ing, the Featherless Arrow, 158 Chang Ch’ing, the vegetable gardener, 150 Chang Chu-p’o, 32–34, 48 Chang, Eileen, 52, 54, 315, 413; “Blockade,” 424–426; compared to Chekhov, 318; depiction of women, 328, 330; “The Golden Cangue,” 313, 315, 318, 323, 327; humanitarianism of, 317; Pru˚sˇek and, 74 Chang, H. C., 201 Chang Hen-shui, 270 Chang Hsi-kuo, 399–400; “Earth,” 404–405, 412 Chang Hsien, 152 Chang, Scholar. See The Romance of the Western Chamber Chang Shih-kuei, 153 Chang T’ien-i, 53, 60, 323; “The Bulwark,” 328; compared to Yang

Ch’ing-ch’u, 402; “Midautumn Festival,” 328; The Strange Knight of Shanghai, 314 Ch’ang-sheng tien, 271 Chao Shu-li: “The Heirloom,” 378; “Lucky,” 323–327; “The Marriage of Hsiao Erh-hei,” 377; Pru˚sˇek and, 56, 74 Chapayev (Furmanov), 339 Chaves, Jonathan, 9 Chekhov, Anton, 318 chen, 143–145, 147 Ch’en Ching-chih, 274–275 Ch’en Ch’iu, 190, 274 Ch’en I-ch’üan, 103 Ch’en Jo-hsi, 399–400, 413; The Execution of Mayor Yin, 8, 424–426; “Keng Erh in Peking,” 424–426; “The Last Performance,” 404 Ch’en T’ien-hua, 240, 244 Ch’en Ying-chen, 400, 401, 402, 407; “My First Case,” 402, 405, 406 Cheng Chen-to, 35, 166, 167–168, 270 cheng-chih hsiao-shuo, 238 Cheng En, 150, 155 Cheng I-mei, 277 Ch’eng Yao-chin, 149, 150, 155 Chi Chen-lun, 136 Ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu ch’ien-chi, 139 Ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu hou-chi, 140, 143, 147 Chi Pang-yuan, 398–399 Ch’i-teng Sheng, 400, 407; “I Love Black Eyes,” 406–407 Chia. See Family Chia-ching period: military romances, 136, 141–143, 166–170 Chia Pao-yü, 282, 284, 357, 358, 372–373; see also Dream of the Red Chamber Chiang Fang, 107

INDEX

Chiang-nan feng-ching. See Scene in Chiang-nan chiang t’ai, 144 Chiang Tzu-ya, 140, 148, 153 Chiao T’ing-kuei, 155 Chiao Tsan, 155 chieh, 197 Ch’ien Chung-shu, 52, 315, 317; “The Cat,” 322; “The Inspiration,” 314, 322; Pru˚sˇek and, 74; “Souvenir,” 315, 322 Ch’ien Ts’ai, 155 Chih-yen Chai, 176, 184 ch’ih, 280–281 Chin Feng, 155, 163 Chin-ku ch’i-kuan, 226 Chin Sung-ts’en, 239 Chin P’ing Mei, 327; as disagreeable reading experience, 11; Plaks’s theory on irony in, 37–40; Roy and, 33–34, 38–40; satire in, 42; social commentary in, 217; traditional commentaries on, 32–34; translations of, 12; Tuan-mu Hung-liang and, 348; women in, 36; and Wu’s Strange Events Seen in the Last Twenty Years, 47–48 Chin Sheng-t’an, 32, 48; commentary on Hsi-Hsiang chi, 98; preface to Shui-hu chuan, 250 Ch’in Han, 158 Ch’in Kuei, 152, 154 Ch’in ping liu-kuo p’ing-hua, 139 Ch’in Shu-pao, 148–149, 150, 163–165 Chinese Lyricism (Watson), 17 Chinese reading public: diminished interest in classical literature, 5–7 Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960–1970, foreword to, 398–414 The Chinese Vernacular Story (Hanan), 31, 42 Ching-hua yüan (Li Ju-chen), 27, 47, 147–148, 177, 188–222, 240; alle-

513

gory in, 188, 198–203; Confucian morality/Taoism in, 188, 192, 202, 217; cultural conservatism of, 217; digressions in, 198–199; humor in, 188, 200, 207–211, 212–218; Li Juchen’s self-satisfaction with, 219–222; voyage sections, 211–218; women and, 188, 195–198, 202–211, 216–218; worldview in, 192–198 ch’ing, 103, 104, 128, 280, 282 Ch’ing period, 42–49; scholar-novelists, 190; Yen Fu and Liang Ch’ich’ao as advocates of new fiction, 223–246; see also The Travels of Lao Ts’an Ch’iu Chin, 68 Ch’iung-ying, 158 Chou-hsin, 151 Chou Tso-jen, 52; Ch’ien Chung-shu and, 322; Communist writers and, 321; on Lu Hsün, 67; nostalgia and, 404; on “humane literature,” 316 Chou T’ung, 149 ch’ou, 280, 282 Chu Hsi-ning, 399, 405 Chu Mei-shu, 224 Chu-ko Liang, 140, 148, 150, 175 chu-kung-tiao, Tung’s Hsi-hsiang chi as example of, 90–101 Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai, 270 Ch’ü Yuan, 19–20; individualistic style of, 16; May Fourth period and, 6–7; weeping and, 250 ch’uan-ch’i, 105 Chuang tzu, 213 Chuang Tzu, 250 chüeh-chü poetry, 274, 275 chung, 194, 197 Chung-lieh hsia-yi chuan. See San-hsia wu-yi, 166 “Cicada” (Lin Huai-min), 402, 403, 406

514

INDEX

civil service examinations. See examination system Clarissa (Richardson), 300–303 classical literature, 28; academic approach to, 31–34; American critics and, 9–11, 30–49; categories of historical fiction, 135; compared to classical western literature, 14, 19–20, 40; compared to modern western literature, 36–37, 40; current reception of, 3–29; diminished popular interest in, in China, 5–7; exaltation of traditional authors, 6–7; lack of individuality in, 14; lack of interest in, among western reading public, 7–12; lack of social commentary in, 14–18, 22–28; Liang Ch’ich’ao’s perceptions of, 233–237; poetry and the Confucian political order, 16–20; reasons for lack of popular appeal, 12–20; religious messages in, 21–22; satire in, 9–10, 17–18; simplified versions of, 6; social characteristics of novels and plays, 20–29; teachers of Chinese and, 7; terseness of style, 273–274; traditional attitude of Chinese critics toward, 225–226; traditional commentaries on, 32–34; translations listed, 10–12; women in, 21–27, 36, 39, 43; worldwide recognition of pre-Ch’in works, 14; see also military romances; novels, classical; plays, classical; poetry, classical “The Coffins” (Lu Ling), 328 Cold Nights (Pa Chin), 54 The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry (Watson, ed.), 9 The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry (Chaves, ed.), 9 comedy. See humor; satire

Coming from Champaign (Ts’ung Hsiang-pin lai-te; Peng Ko), 416, 423 commentaries, traditional, 32–34 Communist authors, 53, 376–397 Communist China: agricultural cooperative stories, 382–383; Chao Shu-li and, 324; characteristics of heroines, 392–393; Ching-hua yüan and, 194; commune stories, 388–390; and Dream of the Red Chamber, 186; factory workers, 385–386; Lu Hsün and, 62, 65; Mao Tun’s novels and, 76–79; marriage stories, 379–382; and Pru˚sˇek’s intentionalist approach to study of literature, 57–59; purged writers, 393; revisionist stories, 393–397; scholar-novelists and, 191; self-denial and, 392; Taiwan and, 413; Tuan-mu Hungliang and, 338; women doctors and nurses, 390–392 complementary bipolarity, Plaks’s theory on, 175–176, 179, 185, 186 Confucianism: classical education and, 5; classical poetry and, 16–20; and lack of individuality in classical literature, 14, 19–20; and lack of social commentary in classical literature, 14–18; Li Ju-chen’s Ching-hua yüan and, 188, 194–198, 202; Li Yü’s ridicule of conventional Confucian ideals, 42–43; love’s martyrs and, 281–284, 289–292; satire and, 44; scholarnovelists and, 192; and social characteristics of classical novels and plays, 20–29, 42–43; Taiwanese fiction and, 402–403; time and, 107; women and, 23–27; see also examination system; Hsüeh-hung lei-shih

INDEX

Conrad, Joseph, 36–37 “Corduroy” (Hsi Jung), 378–379 “The Courtesan Li Wa,” 326 “Creation” (Mao Tun), 77 Creation (Vidal), 10 critics, American: classical literature and, 9–11, 30–49; contemporary fiction passed over by, 10–11; and modern Chinese critics, 34–35 critics, Chinese, 34–35; impact of Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 237–242; traditional attitude toward fiction, 225–226; Yen Fu and Liang Ch’ich’ao as advocates of new fiction, 223–246; see also commentaries, traditional; May Fourth period La Dame aux camélias (Dumas), 284–286, 303–309 Daudet, Alphonse, 422 The Death of Woman Wang (Spence), 35, 325 de Bary, William Theodore, 185 “La Dernière Classe” (Daudet), 422 detective fiction, 252 “The Diary of a Madman” (Lu Hsün), 62–64, 272 The Diary of Ho Meng-hsia (Hsü Chenya), 271–272 Disraeli, Benjamin, 232–233 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 220, 359 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 37, 40 “Dragon Sky Restaurant” (Wang Wen-hsing), 405 drama: characteristics of tsa-chü, 94–95; religious messages in, 21–22; satire in, 104, 105; social characteristics of, 20–29; women and, 24–26; see also The Romance of the Western Chamber; T’ang Hsien-tsu Dream of the Red Chamber (Hung-lou meng), 192, 195, 212, 327, 372–373;

515

compared to Travels of Lao Ts’an, 253; as disagreeable reading experience, 11; endorsement by Chinese critics, 239; as example of sentimental-erotic tradition, 271, 272–273; feudal morality and, 282; first impressions of, 40–41; influence on later novels, 47–48, 348; letters in, 299; Liang Ch’ich’ao and, 234; love’s martyrs and, 282; Plaks’s theory of archetype and allegory in, 171–187; religious messages in, 21–22; simplified versions of, 6; structure of, 31–32; Tuan-mu Hungliang and, 336; women in, 36, 286; Yen Fu and, 228 Dubliners (Joyce), 60–61 Dumas fils, Alexandre, 284–286, 303–309 “Early Spring” (Tuan-mu Hungliang), 337, 340 “Earth” (Chang Hsi-kuo), 404–405, 412 The Eclipse (Mao Tun), 54, 76 “Embroidered Pillows” (Ling Shuhua), 329 Emma (Austen), 36 “Enemies” (Yang Ch’ing-ch’u), 402–403 Enigma of the Five Martyrs (T. A. Hsia), 77 envy, in military romances, 153 Erh-nü ying-hsiung chuan (Wen-k’ang), 48 Erh-shih-nien mu-tu chih kuai hsienchuang (Wu Wo-yao), 44–48 Ernest Maltravers (Bulwer-Lytton), 231–232 examination system, 44; classical education necessary for, 5; in military romances, 149; in the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu, 119–120

516

INDEX

The Execution of Mayor Yin (Ch’en Johsi), 8, 424–426 Fa-yüan chu-lin, 126 family life: in classical novels, 45–47; in early modern fiction, 326–327 Family (Pa Chin), 327, 346, 347, 379 Fan Li-hua, 155, 161 Fan-T’ang yen-yi, 150 Fan Tseng-hsiang, 275, 279 “Fan Village” (Wu Tsu-hsiang), 315 Fang Chi, 378 “Father Lin” (Peng Ko), 418, 421 Faulkner, William, 411 Faust, 121–123 Fei-lung ch’üan-chuan, 139, 155 Feng-ling Ferry (Feng-ling tu; Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332 Feng Meng-lung, 190 Feng-shen yen-yi, 146–147, 153, 158–159, 163, 170 Feng Ts’un, 394–395 “fiction,” Chinese term for, 225, 238 fiction, Communist, 376–397; agricultural cooperative stories, 382–383; characteristics of heroines, 392–393; commune stories, 388–390; factory workers, 385–386; female doctors and nurses, 390–392; love-inspired emulation, 383–387; marriage stories, 379–382; purged writers, 393; revisionist stories, 393–397; selfdenial and, 392 fiction, modern, 270, 315–317; author’s reply to Pru˚sˇek (see Pru˚sˇek, Jaroslav); characteristics of, 315–316; Chinese society criticized in, 314–331; ignored by American critics, 10–11; “Intentional Fallacy” and, 56–57; introduction to Modern Chinese Stories and

Novellas, 1919–1949, 313–331; “mandarin duck and butterfly” fiction, 269–270; morality in, 314–315, 315–317; romance in, 315; satire in, 317; unjust neglect of old-style Republican fiction, 269–270; women in, 327–331; see also The Travels of Lao Ts’an; The Korchin Banner Plains; Yü-li hun fiction, Taiwanese. See Taiwan writers The Field of Life and Death (Hsiao Hung), 10 1587: A Year of No Significance (Ray Huang), 35 films, silent European, 349–350 “First Fu on the Red Cliff ” (Su Shih), 113 “First Kisses” (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 337, 340 “Flaw” (Wang Wen-hsing), 404 “A Flower in the Rainy Night” (Huang Ch’un-ming), 407–408, 410–411 Flowers in the Mirror. See Ching-hua yüan Flowers of Shanghai (Hai-shang-hua lieh-chuan; Han Pang-ch’ing), 48 A Fluffy Tale of the New Capital (Tuanmu Hung-liang), 332 foot binding, 27, 204, 216–218, 327 Frank, Joseph, 174–175 Frye, Northrop, 243, 288 fu-jung, 205 fu-kung, 205 fu-te, 205 fu-yen, 205 Furmanov, Dmitry, 339 Futabatei Shimei, 231 The Future of New China (Liang Ch’ich’ao), 240, 242–244 “The General” (Pa Chin), 318, 321 Gentzler, J. Mason, 183

INDEX

“Goats” (Hsiao Chün), 319–321 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 300–303, 322 “The Golden Cangue” (Eileen Chang), 313, 315, 318, 323, 327 Good-bye to the Mountains (Peng Ko), 419 “The Governor of Nan-k’o” (Li Kung-tso), 113–114 The Great Age (Ta-shih-tai; Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332, 348 The Great River (Ta-chiang;Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332, 346 Greek literature, 14 Grievances (Mao Tun), 76 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 217 Gunn, Edward, 322 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider, 238–239, 241 Hai-shang-hua lieh-chuan. See Flowers of Shanghai Hamlet (Shakespeare), 359 Han Pang-ch’ing, 48 Han period, 11, 18; see also Confucianism Han Suyin, 8 Han-tan chi (T’ang Hsien-tsu), 104, 113, 118–125 Han T’ao, 150 Hanan, Patrick, 31, 42, 43, 189 “Hands” (Hsiao Hung), 330 Hatred (Tseng-hen; Tuan-mu Hungliang), 332, 338, 342 Hawkes, David, 10 Hegel, Robert E., 42 hei-mu hsiao-shuo. See “black curtain” fiction “The Heirloom” (Chao Shu-li), 378 Hen-hai (Wu Wo-yao), 282–283 The Heroic Lovers (Erh-nü ying-hsiung chuan; Wen-k’ang), 48 Ho Fei, 389–390

517

Ho Huai-shuo, 413 Ho Meng-hsia. See Yü-li hun Ho Meng-hsia jih-chi (Hsü Chen-ya), 271–272 homosexuality, 43 Hou Wai-lu, 104 “How I Came to Write Stories” (Lu Hsün), 66 Hsi-hsiang chi. See The Romance of the Western Chamber Hsi Jung, 378–379 Hsi-yu chi play cycle (Wang Shih-fu), 94, 212; see also Journey to the West hsia, 106 Hsia Ching-ch’ü, 190 Hsia-jen, 239 Hsia, T. A., 77 Hsiang K’ai-jan, 270 Hsiang Yü, 175 hsiao, 194, 197 Hsiao-ch’in (Empress dowager), 261 Hsiao Chün, 57, 401; background of, 334, 335; “Goats,” 319–321; Lu Hsün and, 345 “Hsiao-hsiao” (Shen Ts’ung-wen), 326 Hsiao Hung, 325, 328, 401; background of, 335; “Hands,” 330; Lu Hsün and, 345; Tales of Hulan River, 10, 335, 356 Hsiao Kang, 26 hsiao-shuo, 225, 238 Hsiao-shuo hsi-ch’ü yen-chiu chüan, 238 hsien, 194–195, 197, 217 hsin, 103, 128 Hsin-tu hua-hsü (Tuan-mu Hungliang), 332 hsing, 103, 104 Hsiung, S. I., 98–101 Hsiung Ta-mu (Hsiung Chung-ku), 142 Hsü Chen-ya, 278; background and early career, 275–277; deterioration as a novelist, 271–272, 274;

518

INDEX

Hsü Chen-ya (continued) early love affairs, 280; later life, 277; other works, 271–272, 277–279; personal tragedies, 278–279; poetry by, 274–275; writing style of, 274; see also Yü-li hun Hsü Chi. See Li Chi Hsü Chih-mo, 321 Hsü Chin-fu, 278 Hsü Ching-yeh, 150 Hsü Ling, 26–27 Hsü Mao-kung, 148; see also Li Chi Hsü Shih-chi. See Li Chi Hsü Ti-shan, 313, 315, 316–317, 330 Hsü T’ien-hsiao, 276 Hsü Wei, 102 Hsüan-chi t’u (Su Hui), 206 Hsüeh Chin-lien, 158 Hsüeh Jen-kuei cheng-tung, 165 Hsüeh Jen-kuei, 143, 148, 149, 151 Hsüeh Pao-ch’ai, 284 Hsüeh Ting-shan cheng-hsi, 136, 158, 161–162 Hsüeh-hung lei-shih (Hsü Chen-ya), 271–272, 278 Hsün Tzu, 34 Hu San-niang, 158 Hu Shih, 35, 52; Chinese civilization criticized, 316; Ching-hua yüan and, 194; Communist writers and, 321; prose styles and, 273; translation of “La Dernière Classe,” 422; western fiction and, 6 Hu-yen Cho, 150 Hua-yüeh hen, 283–284 Huai-nan tzu, 212 Huang Ch’iu-yun, 381 Huang Ch’un-ming, 398, 400; “A Flower in the Rainy Night,” 407–408, 410–411 Huang Kuei-ch’ün, 263 Huang Mo-hsi, 241

Huang, Ray, 35 Huang Sung-k’ang, 52 Huang T’ien-shih, 274–275 Hugging the Shore (Updike), 10 human condition: time and the human condition in the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu, 102–131; and weakness of classical literature, 14–18, 21–22; see also morality “A Humble Sacrifice” (Yü Ta-fu), 80–81 humor: classical novels and, 44; Li Juchen’s Ching-hua yüan and, 188, 200, 207–218; Liu Ê’s Travels of Lao Ts’an and, 253; military romances and, 158–159, 163; in the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu, 126–127; see also satire Hung Chin, 158 Hung-lou meng. See Dream of the Red Chamber “Hung-lou meng p’ing-lun” (Wang Kuo-wei), 242 Hung Sheng, 87 “Huo Hsiao-yü” (Chiang Fang), 107 i, 197 I Ching, 31, 103, 173, 176–177 “I Love Black Eyes” (Ch’i-teng Sheng), 406–407 Idema, W. L., 189 The Importance of Living (Lin Yutang), 8 “In Liu Village” (Yü Li-hua), 402–403 In Search of Father (Peng Ko), 419–420 “In the Cold Wind” (Yü Ta-fu), 80 “In the Hospital” (Ting Ling), 328, 393 “In the Wine Shop” (Lu Hsün), 319 Ing, Nancy, 417, 426 Injustice to Tou O (Tou-o yuan), 24–26 “The Inspiration” (Ch’ien Chungshu), 314, 322 Intellectual Foundations of China (Mote), 173 “Intentional Fallacy,” 56–57

INDEX

Iron Flood (Serafimovich), 339 irony: Plaks’s theory on irony in classical novels, 37–40, 41 “The Ivory Balls” (Peng Ko), 422, 423 Jade Pear Spirit. See Yü-li hun Japan: anti-Japanese fiction, 400 (see also The Korchin Banner Plains); Mukden incident, 341–342, 347, 362–364 Japanese literature, 229–333 Jean-Christophe (Rolland), 318 jen, 103, 128 Joan Haste (Haggard), 239 Jou Shih, 326, 328–329 The Journey to the West (Hsi-yu chi), 94, 212; academic approach to, 33; early commentaries, 32; Plaks’s theory on irony in, 37; simplified versions of, 6, 9; Yu’s translation of, 9–10 Joyce, James, 60–61, 348 Ju Chih-chüan, 386–388, 389 Ju-lien chü-shih, 163 Ju-lin wai shih. See The Scholars Juan Hsiao-erh, 150 k’ai-hua, 229 Kajin no kigu¯ (Shiro¯), 233 Kang-i, 260–262 “Kao hsiao-shuo-chia” (Liang Ch’ich’ao), 246 Kao Huai-te, 150 Keikoku bidan (Ryu¯ kei), 233 “Keng Erh in Peking” (Ch’en Jo-hsi), 424–426 Keng-tzu kuo-pien t’an-tz’u (Li Paochia), 261 King, Evan, 8 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 8 Knechtges, David, 11 The Korchin Banner Plains (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332–375; archetypes,

519

348, 359; bandits and, 335; experimental nature of, 348–351; gentry life and, 366–370; and heroic vision for future of China, 347–348; morality in, 370–373; movies and, 349–350; Mukden incident and, 362–364; plot summary and analysis, 352–365; prototypes for characters, 348, 361; structure of, 350–352; Tuan-mu’s background and, 334–342; western literature and, 338–339, 369–371 The Korchin Banner Plains, A Family History (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332, 339–342, 352, 355–356 The Korchin Banner Plains, Part II (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332, 373–374 Ku-chin hsiao-shuo, 226 Ku-p’en i-hen (Hsü Chen-ya), 279 ku-wen, 273–274 Kuan-ch’ang hsien-hsing chi (Li Paochia), 44 Kuan Han-ch’ing, 22; May Fourth period and, 6–7; translations of, 12; Wang Shih-fu and, 94; women and, 24–26 Kuan Yü, 150, 175 Kuei-ku-tzu, 140 kuei-sheng, 103 Kuei-ssu lei-kao (Yü Cheng-hsieh), 27 Kundera, Milan, 18–19 “K’ung I-chi” (Lu Hsün), 68 Kung-sun Sheng, 150 kuo-yü, 273 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 289 Lady Chu-yung, 158 Lan-niang ai-shih (Wu Shuang-je), 276 Lao She, 8, 60; compared to Tuan-mu Hung-liang, 346–347; “An Old Tragedy in a New Age,” 313, 328;

520

INDEX

Lao She (continued) Rickshaw Boy, 8; Pru˚sˇek and, 74–75, 80 Lao-ts’an yu-chi. See The Travels of Lao Ts’an “The Last Performance” (Ch’en Johsi), 404 Lattimore, David, 9 Lau, Joseph S. M., 12, 398–399, 407 Lawrence, D. H., 54, 289, 370 Leavis, F. R., 34 Leavis, Q. D., 232 Lee, Leo O., 284, 318 “Let Life Become More Beautiful” (Fang Chi), 378 letters, in novels, 294–300 Levin, Harry, 54 Li Chi (Hsü Chi, Hsü Shih-chi), 148–149 Li Chih, 102, 104 Li Ching, 148–149, 150 Li Chun, 388–389 Li Han-ch’iu, 270 Li Ho, 19, 20 Li Hou-chu, 250, 271 Li Hsiang, 277 Li Ju-chen, 27, 147–148; Ching-hua yüan analysis (see Ching-hua yüan); cultural conservatism of, 192–193; Plaks and, 177; as scholar-novelist, 191; self-satisfaction of, 219–222 Li K’uei, 155–156; see also The Water Margin Li Kung-tso, 113–114 Li-li Ch’en, 10 Li-niang. See Yü-li hun Li Pao-chia (Li Po-yuan), 42, 44, 240; Boxer Rebellion and, 261; compared to Liu Ê, 248, 252; influence of The Scholars on, 48 Li P’ing-shan, 263 Li Po, 6, 16, 27 Li Po-yüan. See Li-Pao-chia

Li Shang-yin, 19, 20, 271 Li Shih-min, 151 Li Tao-tsung, 151 Li Ting-yi, 276 Li Wei-lun, 391–392 Li Yü, 42–43, 48 Li Yü-t’ang, 166–170 Li Yüan-pa, 164 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao: and educational value of literature, 245; “Fiction Seen in Relation to the Guidance of Society,” 223–224, 233–237; “Foreword to Our Series of Political Novels in Translations,” 223, 230–233; The Future of New China, 240, 242–244; impact on later criticism, 237–242; “Kao hsiao-shuochia,” 246; perceptions of traditional fiction, 233–237; perceptions of western and Japanese fiction, 230–233; Pien-fa t’ung-yi, 245; writing style of, 274 Liang Heng, 8 Lieh-i-chuan, 126 Lieh-kuo chih-chuan, 147 Lieh Tzu, 213 Lien Meng-ch’ing, 260; his novel Linnü yü, 260 “Life Inside a Pillow” (Shen Chi-tsi), 113, 118–119 Lin Chih-yang, 202 Lin Chin-lan, 390–391 Lin Ch’ung, 38, 149 Lin Hai-yin, 399 Lin Huai-min, 398, 399–400; “Cicada,” 402, 403, 406 Lin Shu, 239, 273, 276; influence of translations by, 284–286, 303–309 Lin Tai-yi, 206 Lin Tai-yü, 282, 284, 392–394; see also Dream of the Red Chamber

INDEX

Lin Yutang, 8, 52; Ch’ien Chung-shu and, 322; Ching-hua yüan and, 194; Communist writers and, 321 Ling Shu-hua, 328, 329–330 Link, Perry, 269–270 The Lion Roars (Shih-tzu hou; Ch’en T’ien-hua), 240, 244 literature, modern. See fiction, modern Liu Chen, 381–382 Liu Ch’iu-hen, 283 Liu Ê: compared to other writers, 248, 252, 253; fate of, 259–261; two kinds of weeping, 250–251, 257–259, 262–263; see also The Travels of Lao Ts’an Liu I-ch’ang, 333 Liu Meng-mei. See Mu-tan t’ing Liu Pang, 175 Liu Pin-yen, 395, 397 Liu Shih-p’ei, 277 Liu Ts’un-yan, 142 Liu Yüan-ying, 279, 482–483 Lo Ch’eng, 149, 150 Lo, Irving, 9 Lo Ju-fang, 102–103 Lo Kuan-chung, 137, 140, 141 Lo T’ung, 160 Lo T’ung sao-pei, 152; see also Shuo T’ang hou-chuan “A Lonely Man on a Journey” (Yü Tafu), 80–81 Lord, Bette Bao, 8 “Love” (Li Wei-lun), 391–392 Lu Chih-shen, 361; see also The Water Margin Lu Chün-yi, 149 Lu Hsi-hsing, 147 Lu Hsün, 190, 325; author’s reply to Pru˚sˇek on, 58–74; A Brief History of Chinese Fiction , 34, 190; “butterfly” fiction and, 270; compared to Chekhov, 318; depiction of male vs. female characters, 328;

521

“The Diary of a Madman,” 62–64, 272; “How I Came to Write Stories,” 66; Hsiao Chün and, 345; Hsiao Hung and, 345; “In the Wine Shop,” 319; “K’ung I-chi,” 68; Liu Ê and, 251; “Medicine,” 66–68; “Mending Heaven,” 73; Morning Flowers Picked in Evening, 61; “My Native Place,” 63–64, 66; “My Old Home,” 319; Na-han, 60, 64–65; and national habits of concealment and deceit, 22–23; “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” 68–72, 319, 327, 328–329; nostalgia and, 404; Old Legends Retold, 62, 73–74; “On Looking Facts in the Face,” 22; “Pacifying the Flood,” 73; P’anghuang, 60; “Picking Ferns,” 73; “Professor Kao,” 67; “Soap,” 328; social criticism and, 272, 316–317; Tuan-mu Hung-liang and, 338, 344–345; western fiction and, 6; “White Glow,” 68; Wild Grass, 61 Lu Hsün and the New Culture Movement of Modern China (Huang Sung-k’ang), 52 Lu Ling, 323, 328, 395 lü-shih poetry, 274, 275 “Lucky” (Chao Shu-li), 323–327 The Lute (P’i-p’a chi), 12 “The Lute Song” (Po Chü-i), 108 Ma Feng, 380–381 Ma San-pao, 150 Ma, Y. W., 12, 31 maids: importance in drama, 96–98 “Major Chia” (Peng Ko), 418, 422 “mandarin duck and butterfly” fiction, 269–270; 276 Mao-ch’en chi. See Cat Country Mao Tse-tung, 56–57, 65, 328 Mao Tsung-kang, 32

522

INDEX

Mao Tun, 53, 54, 60, 393; “Autumn Harvest,” 79, 323; “butterfly” fiction and, 270; compared to Tuan-mu Hung-liang, 346–347; “Creation,” 77; The Eclipse, 54, 76; Grievances, 76; humanitarianism of, 316–317; Maple Leaves as Red as Flowers of the Second Month, 76, 366; Pru˚sˇek and, 74–79; Rainbow, 76; “Spring Silkworms,” 77–79, 323; The Twilight, also known as Midnight, 76–77, 346, 347, 402; “Winter Ruin,” 79 “Marriage” (Ma Feng), 380–381 “The Marriage of Hsiao Erh-hei” (Chao Shu-li), 377 martyrs. See romance: love’s martyrs Master Tung’s Western Chamber Romance (Tung Chieh-yuan Hsihsiang chi), 10, 90–93 Mather, Richard, 11 May Fourth period: compared to Communist period, 379–382; critics listed, 270; Lu Hsün and, 66; major classical authors and, 6–7; nostalgia and, 404; rejection of “butterfly” fiction, 270; rejection of tradition during, 14, 35; social commentary and, 316 mazes (military formations, chen), 143–145, 147 “Medicine” (Lu Hsün), 66–67, 68 Mencius, 14 “Mending Heaven” (Lu Hsün), 73 meng (dream), 128 Meng Huo, 158 Meng Liang, 155 Meng Yao, 399 “The Merchant’s Wife” (Hsü Tishan), 330 Meteor (Peng Ko), 419 “Midautumn Festival” (Chang T’ien-i), 328

Middlemarch (George Eliot), 40 Midnight (Mao Tun). See The Twilight military romances, 135–170; causes of strife, 153; characteristics of, 135, 137–139; fantasy vs. melodrama in, 138–139; heroes and villains, 148–157; magic warfare, 139–148; romantic element, 157–162; Taoism and, 146–147; transformation of genre, 162–170; types of narratives, 139–140; works listed, 136 Minford, John, 10 Modern Times (Wen-ming hsiao-shih; Li Pao-chia), 44 Moment in Peking (Lin Yutang), 8 Monkey (abridgement of Journey to the West), 9–10 morality: conformist moral vision in classical novels, 37, 44; Li Juchen’s Ching-hua yüan and, 194–198; Li Yü’s ridicule of conventional Confucian ideals, 42–43; Liu Ê’s Travels of Lao Ts’an and, 263–268, 272; love’s martyrs, 281–284, 289–292; in modern fiction, 314–317; scholar-novelists and, 188–193, 194–198; Taiwanese fiction and, 402–403; Tuan-mu Hung-liang’s Korchin Banner Plains and, 370–373; see also Confucianism; Taoism Morning Flowers Picked in Evening (Lu Hsün), 61 Mote, F. W., 173 “Mother and Daughter” (Li Chun), 389 motherhood, 43 “Mr. K Goes Fishing” (Peng Ko), 417 Mu Kuei-ying, 160 Mu-tan t’ing (T’ang Hsien-tsu), 271; compared toYü-li hun, 279; time and, 107, 125–131; translations of, 12; vitality and, 103

INDEX

Mukden incident, 341–342, 347, 362–364 multiple periodicity, Plaks’s theory on, 175–176 music, 90, 94–95 My Country and My People (Lin Yutang), 8 “My First Case” (Ch’en Ying-chen), 402, 405, 406 “My Native Place,” also known as “My Old Home” (Lu Hsün), 63–64, 66, 319 “My Writing Experience” (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 343–347 Na-han (Lu Hsün), 60, 64–65 Nan-k’o chi (T’ang Hsien-tsu), 104, 106, 113–118 Nan-Sung chih-chuan (Hsiung Ta-mu), 139, 142, 155 Napoleon Bonaparte, 228, 235 Needham, Joseph, 31 New Culture movement, 64–65, 322 “The New Home” (Ai Wu), 385 “New Life” (Lin Chin-lan), 390–391 “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (Lu Hsün), 68–72, 319, 327, 328–329 New Youth, 64–65 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 339 “The Night of Midautumn Festival” (Ling Shu-hua), 329–330 “Night Reconnaissance” (Peng Ko), 417, 422, 423 Niu Kao, 155–156 “Nocturne in March” (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 318 nostalgia, 404–405, 412–413 The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China (Hegel), 42 novels, classical, 43; academic approach to, 31–34; compared to western novels, 40; exaggerated claims about, 31–32; first impres-

523

sions of, 40–41; May Fourth critics and, 35; moral vision in, 37; Plaks’s theory on irony in, 37–40, 41; religious messages in, 21–22; satire in, 42–45; social characteristics of, 20–29, 42–49; social criticism in, 42–49; structure of, 30–32, 36–37; traditional commentaries on, 32–34; women in, 39 Nü-chieh (Pan Chao), 205–206, 327 Oda Junichiro¯, 231–232 Old Legends Retold (Lu Hsün), 62, 73–74 “An Old Tragedy in a New Age” (Lao She), 313, 328 On Encountering Sorrow (Li Sao), 16 “On Looking Facts in the Face” (Lu Hsün), 22 “One Intoxicating Spring Evening” (Yü Ta-fu), 80 Opium War, 284, 316 “Our Paper’s Inside News” (Lin Pinyen), 395–397 Our Town (Wilder), 124 “An Oxcart for Dowry” (Wang Chenho), 407–409 Pa Chin, 321–323; Cold Nights, 54; compared to Chekhov, 318; compared to Tuan-mu Hung-liang, 346–347; Family, 327, 379; “The General,” 318, 321; “Piglet and Chickens,” 318; “Sinking Low,” 321; Spring, 379; The Turbulent Stream, 290 Pa-ta Shan-jen, 250 “Pacifying the Flood” (Lu Hsün), 73 Pai Hsien-yung, 398–399; “Winter Nights,” 412–413 pai-hua, 273 Pai Li-ying. See Yü-li hun

524

INDEX

Pan Chao (also known as Ts’ao Ta-ku), 205, 327 P’an Chin-lien, 392 P’an Jen-mu, 399 P’ang Chüan, 153 P’ang-huang (Lu Hsün), 60 Pao-ch’ai. See Hsüeh Pao-ch’ai Pao-yü. See Chia Pao-yü parallel prose, 276–277, 295 The Peach Blossom Fan (T’ao-hua shan), 12 Pei-Sung chih-chuan (Hsiung Ta-mu), 136, 142, 145–146, 148, 154, 160, 163 “Pen-kuan fu-yin shuo-pu yüan-ch’i” (Yen Fu), 223, 226–230 Peng Ko (pen name of Yao P’eng), 399; background of, 417–420; career, 414–417; introduction to Black Tears, 414–426; novels, 416–417, 419–420; see also specific works The Peony Pavilion. See Mu-tan t’ing philosophy: Taiwanese writers and, 406–408; time and the human condition in the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu, 102–131; see also Buddhism; Confucianism; morality; Taoism P’i-p’a chi, 12 “Picking Ferns” (Lu Hsün), 73 Pien-fa t’ung-yi (Liang Ch’i-ch’ao), 245 p’ien-wen, 273–274 “Piglet and Chickens” (Pa Chin), 318 p’ing hua, 139–140 Plaks, Andrew, 31–32, 41; author’s critique of Plaks’s study of Dream of the Red Chamber, 171–187; “Shuihu Chuan and the Sixteenthcentury Novel Form,” 37–40 Po Chü-i, 18, 87, 88, 108 Po P’u, 87, 95–96 Po-wu chih, 212

Poe, Edgar Allan, 291 poetry, traditional Chinese, 16–20, 274; Confucian political order and, 16–20; courtesans and, 409–410; cultural stability and, 19–20; in Hsü Chen-ya’s Yü-li hun, 274, 294–300; individualistic style of the greatest poets, 16–17; satiric reticence of, 17–18; social characteristics of, 16–19; translations of, 9; western reception of, 9–10; women and, 26–27 political novels: Chinese term for, 238; in Japan, 233; Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as advocates of new fiction, 223–246; see also The Travels of Lao Ts’an; satire; social commentary polygamy, 46 Pound, Ezra, 9 The Prayer Mat of Flesh (Jou p’u-t’uan; Li Yü), 42–43 Precepts for Women (Nü-chieh; Pan Chao), 205–206, 327 pre-Ch’in period, 14–15 Princess Lung-chi, 158 Princess Sai-hua (Pa-pao Kung-chu), 162 Princess T’u Lu, 160 “Professor Kao” (Lu Hsün), 67 “A Promise Is Kept” (Ju Chih-chüan), 388 Pru˚sˇek , Jaroslav, 50–83; author’s reply to basic criticisms of, 50–59; “Individual Portraits,” 74–83; intentionalist approach of, 56–59; misreading Lu Hsün, 58–74 The Purple-Jade Flute (Tzu-hsiao chi; T’ang Hsien-tsu), 103, 106, 107–113 The Purple-Jade Hairpin (Tzu-ch’ai chi; T’ang Hsien-tsu), 103, 106, 107, 125

INDEX

“Quietly in the Maternity Hospital” (Ju Chih-chüan), 389 “Rain” (Ai Wu), 385–386 Rain on the Wu-t’ung Tree (Po P’u), 95–96 Rainbow (Mao Tun), 76 “The Rapid Current of the Muddy River” (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 315 reading public. See Chinese reading public; western reading public Records of the Grand Historian (Watson, trans.), 11 religious messages, 113; in Li Ju-chen’s Ching-hua yüan, 188; in the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu, 103–104, 106, 107, 111–118; in T’ang poetry, 16; time and, 107; see also Buddhism; Confucianism; Taoism Resurrection (Tolstoy), 369, 370, 373 “Return at Night” (Ai Wu), 383–385 “Rice” (Yeh Shao-chün), 328 The Rice-Sprout Song (Eileen Chang), 54 Richardson, Samuel, 295–296, 300–303 Rickshaw Boy (Lo-t’o hsiang-tu; Lao She), 8 The Rise of the Novel (Ian Watt), 295 Roberts, Moss, 12 Rolland, Romain, 318 romance, 111–118; in Communist China, 379–382, 391–392; happy couples, 281; love-inspired emulation (Communist period), 383–387; love’s martyrs, 281–284, 289–292; in modern fiction, 315; role of maids, 96–98; scholar–beauty romances (see Mutan t’ing; The Romance of the Western Chamber); in T’ang Hsien-tsu’s plays, 106–118, 127–128; types of love, 280–281; widows and, 286; see also military

525

romances; Mu-tan t’ing; T’ang Hsien-tsu; Yü-li hun Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 32 The Romance of the Western Chamber (Hsi-hsiang chi), 87–101, 129; Chin Sheng-t’an’s commentary on, 98; as example of sentimentalerotic tradition, 271; Hsiung’s translation, 98–101; importance of maid Hung Niang in, 96–98; structure of, 94–96; Tung Chieh-yuan’s poem Hsi-hsiang chi, 87–101; Wang Shih-fu’s play Hsi-hsiang chi, 87–88, 90–101; Yuan Chen’s “The Story of Ying-ying,” 87–88 The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Leo O. Lee), 318 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 302–303 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 229, 233, 322 Roy, David T., 12, 32–34, 38–40 The Rural Trilogy (Mao Tun), 79 Russian literature, 14, 229–230, 318; influence on Tuan-mu Hungliang, 339, 369–371 San-hsia wu-yi, 166 San-kuo chih p’ing-hua, 155 San-kuo-chih t’ung-su yen-yi, 140–141 San-kuo; San-kuo-chih; San-kuo-chih yen-i. See The Three Kingdoms San-li Wan (Chao Shu-li), 56 satire: Ch’ien Chung-shu and, 322; in classical novels, 42–45; in Journey to the West, 9–10; Ching-hua yüan and, 189, 204, 215–218; in Ming drama, 104, 105; in modern fiction, 317; satiric reticence of classical poetry, 17–18 Scene in Chiang-nan (Tuan-mu Hungliang), 332 Scholar Chang. See The Romance of the Western Chamber

526

INDEX

scholar-novelists: characteristics of, 218–219; cultural conservatism of, 191–193; defined/described, 189–191; examples of, 190; values and, 188–193; see also Ching-hua yüan scholar–beauty romances. See The Romance of the Western Chamber; Mu-tan t’ing The Scholars (Ju-lin wai shih), 22, 47; influence on later novels, 48; satire in, 44; structure of, 31–32; Tuan-mu Hung-liang and, 348 Schultz, William, 9 The Sea of Earth (Ta-ti-te hai; Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332, 342, 343, 346, 347 The Secret Agent (Conrad), 36–37 sentimental-erotic tradition, 272–273; examples of, 271; love’s martyrs and, 281–284; see also Yü-li hun Serafimovich, Aleksandr, 339 Shadick, Harold, 248 Shakespeare, William, 4–5, 105, 111, 231, 302–303, 359 Shan-hai ching, 212, 213–215 Shapiro, Judith, 8 She T’ai-chün, 159 Shen Chi-tsi, 113, 118–119 Shen Kung-pao, 153 Shen Ts’ung-wen, 60, 411; Ch’ien Chung-shu and, 322; depiction of women, 330–331; “Hsiao-hsiao,” 326; humanitarianism of, 315, 317 sheng, 103, 128 sheng-chi, 103 sheng-sheng, 102–103 Shi chi, 11 Shiba Shiro, 233 Shih ching, 6, 14, 17–18 Shih-i chi, 212 Shih Nai-an, 6, 240 Shih Nan-an, 6

shih poetry, 19, 27, 274; see also poetry Shih-shuo hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World (Mather, trans.), 11 Shih T’o, 382–383 Shih-tzu hou (Ch’en T’ien-hua), 240, 244 Sho¯ setsu shinzui (Shoyo), 231, 240 Shuang-huan chi (Hsü Chen-ya), 278 Shui-hu chuan. See The Water Margin Shuo T’ang cheng-hsi san-chuan. See Hsüeh Ting-shan cheng-hsi Shuo T’ang ch’ien-chuan, 136, 149, 155–156, 163–165 Shuo T’ang hou-chuan, 136, 163 Shuo Yüeh ch’üan-chuan, 136, 150, 152, 154, 155, 163 Silent Operas (Wu-sheng hsi), 42 “Sinking” (Yü Ta-fu), 315, 319 “Sinking Low” (Pa Chin), 321 “A Slave Mother” (Jou Shih), 326, 328–329 “Smoke Silhouettes” (Yü Ta-fu), 80 The Snow and the Swan (Hsüeh-hung leishih; Hsü Chen-ya), 271–272, 278 “Soap” (Lu Hsün), 328 social criticism: in classical novels, 42–49; Hsü Chen-ya’s Yü-li hun and, 271; lack of, in classical literature, 14–18, 22–28; Li Ju-chen’s Ching-hua yüan and, 216–218; Lu Hsün’s “Diary of a Madman” and, 272; in modern fiction, 314–331; novels as reflective of life vs. novels as literary texts, 35–36; in Taiwanese fiction, 402–404; Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as advocates of new fiction, 223–246; see also The Travels of Lao Ts’an; satire “Solitude” (Yeh Shao-chün), 328 “Song of the Forward March” (Shih T’o), 382–383 songs, 90 Sontag, Susan, 307–308

INDEX

Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), 300–303 “Souvenir” (Ch’ien Chung-shu), 315, 322 “Specks of Dust” (Peng Ko), 417, 423–425 Spence, Jonathan, 35, 325 Spring (Pa Chin), 379 “Spring Silkworms” (Mao Tun), 77–79, 323 ssu-hsing, 205 Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 11, 250 Ssu-ma Chung-yuan, 399 Steiner, George, 10 Stendhal, 37 “The Story of Li Shuang-shuang” (Li Chun), 388–389 The Story of the Stone. See Dream of the Red Chamber Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 231 Strange Events Seen in the Last Twenty Years (Wu Wo-yao), 44–48 The Strange Knight of Shanghai (Chang T’ien-i), 314 Su Hui, 206 Su Shih, 6, 19, 113, 124 “Substance, Shadow, and Spirit” (T’ao Ch’ien), 112 Suehiro Tetcho¯ , 233 Sui-shih yi-wen, 163, 165 Sui T’ang yen-yi, 149, 165 suicide, 198, 281, 283–284, 331, 405 Sun K’ai-ti, 142 Sun Over the Sangkan River (Ting Ling), 57 Sun P’ang yen-yi, 140 Sun Pin, 140 Sun Te-ch’ien, 277 Sunflower Splendor (Wu-chi Liu and Irving Lo, eds.), 9–10 Sung Chiang, 143, 145, 148 Sung Kao-tsung, 152 A Supplement to the Journey to the West (Hsi-yu pu), 40

527

“The Swallow of Sha River” (Peng Ko), 422 Swift, Jonathan, 217 Ta-chiang (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332, 346 Ta-kuan (Tzu-po), 104 Ta-shan. See The Korchin Banner Plains Ta-shih-tai (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332, 348 Ta-Sung chung-hsing yen-yi (Hsiung Ta-mu), 142 Ta-T’ang Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua, 141 Ta-ti-te hai. See The Sea of Earth t’ai, 144 Tai Chen, 192 Tai Chi-t’ao, 276 T’ai-chou school, 102 T’ai-ku school, 263 T’ai-p’ing Rebellion, 283, 284 Tai-yü. See Lin Tai-yü Taiwan writers, 398–414; allegiance to the young and the poor, 401–403; characteristics of, 405–406, 411–412; Communism and, 413; Confucian morality and, 402–403; literature about Chinese students abroad, 416–417; nostalgia and, 404–405, 412–413; philosophic prose, 406–408; social criticism and, 402–404; see also Peng Ko Tales of Hulan River (Hsiao Hung), 10, 335, 356 Talks at the Yenan Literary Conference (Mao Tse-tung), 56–57, 328 Tan, Amy, 8 t’an-tz’u, 225, 327 T’ang Hsien-tsu, 102–131, 279; background of, 104; Han-tan chi analyzed, 118–125; May Fourth period and, 6; Mu-tan t’ing analyzed, 125–131; Nan-k’o chi analyzed, 113–118; religious messages and,

528

INDEX

T’ang Hsien-tsu (continued) 103–104, 106, 107, 111–118; romance and, 106–107; satire and, 104, 105; time and, 107; Tzu-hsiao chi analyzed, 107–113; Yen Fu and, 229 Tang-k’ou chih (Yü Wan-ch’un), 191 T’ang poetry, 16–20, 108 T’ang shih san-pai shou, 17 T’ang-shu chih-chuan (Hsiung Ta-mu), 142 T’ang-Sung poetry, 19 T’ang-Sung prose masters, 5 T’ao Ch’ien: individualistic style of, 16; May Fourth period and, 6; “Substance, Shadow, and Spirit,” 112; time and, 124 T’ao-hua shan, 271 Tao-te Ching, 15 Taoism: fairyhood/immortality, 194–195; Li Ju-chen’s Ching-hua yüan and, 188, 194–198, 202, 217; military romances and, 146–147; passage of time and, 112; scholarnovelists and, 192; T’ang Hsientsu’s plays and, 103–104, 107, 112 Teng Shan-yü, 158 The Twilight (Mao Tun). See Midnight The Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang (T’ang shih san-pai shou), 17 The Three Kingoms (San-kuo-chih yen-i), 5, 6, 137, 144–145, 158, 165, 229; Plaks’s theory on irony in, 37; translations of, 12; women and, 26 “Three Men and One Woman” (Shen Ts’ung-wen), 331 Ti Ch’ing novels, 136; heroes and villains, 148–151, 154, 155; romantic element, 160, 162; transformation of genre, 163, 166–170; see also Wan-hua lou; Wu-hu p’ing-hsi; Wu-hu p’ing-nan T’ien-hua-tsang chu-jen, 190 T’ien-lu Sheng, 240

time: Plaks’s theory on multiple periodicity, 175–176; time and the human condition in the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu, 102–131; types of living in the present, 124; types of themes related to, 107 Ting Ling, 56, 57, 74, 328, 393 Ting Ning. See The Korchin Banner Plains Tolstoy, Leo, 339, 369, 370–371, 373 Tom Jones (Fielding), 34 Tou I-hu, 158 Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (Ma and Lau, eds.), 12 traditional literature. See classical literature; drama; novels, classical; poetry tragedy: Liu Ê’s two kinds of weeping, 250–251, 257–259, 262–263; tragic novels of love, 281–284 (see also Yü-li hun) The Travels of Lao Ts’an (Lao-ts’an yu-chi; Liu Ê), 247–268; as China’s first political novel, 248; humor in, 253; main narrative, 249–259; morality and, 263–268; narrative method, 251; preface, 250–251; prophetic middle section, 251, 259–268; prostitutes in, 410; simplified version of, 6; structure of, 247–249, 251–252; two kinds of weeping, 250–251, 257–259, 262–263; villains, 252; weaknesses of, 252 Trilling, Lionel, 36, 191 “A Trip Home” (Yü Ta-fu), 80 tsa-chü, 94, 153 Tsai-t’ien-chih-ya. See Yonder Shore ts’ai, 280, 282 ts’ai-tzu chia-jen novels, 36 Ts’ao Ching-p’ing (Ts’ao Chih-lin). See Tuan-mu Hung-liang Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in: cultural conservatism of, 192–193; May Fourth

INDEX

period and, 6–7; Plaks and, 176–177; religious messages in, 21; as scholar-novelist, 190; Tuan-mu Hung-liang and, 370, 373; weeping and, 250; women and, 23 Ts’ao Ta-ku. See Pan Chao Tseng-hen (Tuan-mu Hung-liang), 332, 338, 342 Tsubouchi Shoyo, 231, 240 Ts’ui Yün-ch’ien. See Yü-li hun Ts’ung Hsiang-pin lai-te (Peng Ko), 416, 423 tu, 229, 280–281 Tu-fa (Chang Chu-p’o), 33–34 Tu Fu: individualistic style of, 16–17; May Fourth period and, 6; social protest and, 18; weeping and, 250, 251 Tu Li-niang, 282; see also Mu-tan t’ing Tu Mu, 271 Tu Shao-ch’ing, 358; see also The Scholars T’u Shen, 190 Tuan-mu Hung-liang, 332–375, 401; background of, 334–342; bandits and, 335; compared to other writers, 346–347; early career, 342–351; “Early Spring,” 337, 340; “First Kisses,” 337, 340; Lu Hsün and, 338, 344–345; mother’s fate, 339–341, 374; movies and, 349–350; Mukden incident, 341–342, 347, 362–364; “My Writing Experience,” 343–347; “Nocturne in March,” 318; “The Rapid Current of the Muddy River,” 315; western influences, 338–339, 369–371; works listed, 332 (see also specific works); see also The Korchin Banner Plains Tuan, Prince, 261–262 Tuan Ts’ai-hua, 399, 405

529

Tung Chieh-yuan. See The Romance of the Western Chamber Tung Chou lieh-kuo chih, 137 Tung P’ing, 150 Tung-yu chi, 146 Tung Yüeh, 190 Tung Yung, 324–326 The Turbulent Stream (Pa Chin), 290 The Twilight (Mao Tun’s novel Tzuyeh, also known as Midnight), 76–77, 402 Tzu-ch’ai chi (T’ang Hsien-tsu), 103, 106, 107, 125 Tzu-hsiao chi (T’ang Hsien-tsu), 103, 106, 107–113 Tzu-po. See Ta-kuan Ukigumo (Futabatei), 231 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 231 “Under the Tao-nan Bridge” (Peng Ko), 417, 422 Updike, John, 10–11 Vidal, Gore, 10 Voltaire, 229, 233 Waiting for the Unicorn (Lo and Schultz, eds.), 9 Waley, Arthur, 9, 112 Wan-Ch’ing hsiao-shuo shih (A Ying), 224, 238 Wan-hua lou, 136, 166–170; see also Ti Ch’ing novels Wan-li period: military romances listed, 136 Wandering in the Garden, Waking from the Dream (Pai Hsien-yung), 10 Wang Chen-ho, 407–409 Wang Ch’in, 154 Wang Hsi-feng, 392 Wang Kuo-wei, 242 Wang Shih-fu, 12, 250; see also The Romance of the Western Chamber

530

INDEX

Wang Wen-hsing, 398, 399; “Dragon Sky Restaurant,” 405; “Flaw,” 404 “The Warmth of Spring” (Ju Chihchüan), 386–388 Washington, George, 235 The Water Margin (Shui-hi chuan), 5, 6, 141, 145, 147, 150, 155–156, 158, 163, 170, 348, 361; academic approach to, 33; allegory in, 199; Chin Sheng-t’an’s preface to, 250; endorsement by Chinese critics, 239; first impressions of, 41; Huang Mo-hsi and, 241; Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and, 234; morality in, 373; Plaks’s theory on irony in, 37–40; traditional commentaries on, 32; Tuan-mu Hung-liang and, 348; Yen Fu and, 229 Water (Ting Ling), 56, 57 Watson, Burton, 9, 11, 17 Watt, Ian, 295 weeping, Liu Ê’s two kinds of, 250–251, 257–259, 262–263 Wei Ch’ih-chu, 283–284 Wellek, René, 54 wen, 195 Wen-k’ang, 48 Wen-ming hsiao-shih (Li Pao-chia), 44 Wen xuan, or Selections of Refined Literature (Knechtges, trans.), 11–12 wen-yen, 273 western literature: compared to classical Chinese literature, 14, 19–20, 36–37, 40; envy as cause of hatred in, 153; influence on Tuan-mu Hung-liang, 338–339; influence on Yü-li hun, 284–286, 300–309; Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s perceptions of, 230–233; Plaks’s theory of Chinese–western differences, 174, 185; popularity of translations, 6;

structure of novels, 36–37; Yen Fu’s perceptions of, 229–330 western reading public, 7–12; see also critics, American “When I Was in Hsia Village” (Ting Ling), 328, 393 “White Glow” (Lu Hsün), 68 White, Theodore, 325 widowhood, 43, 44, 198, 286, 300; see also Yü-li hun “The Wife” (Ai Ming-chih), 386–387 Wild Grass (Lu Hsün), 61 Wilder, Thornton, 124–125 Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., 56 “Winter Nights” (Pai Hsien-yung), 412–413 “Winter Ruin” (Mao Tun), 79 women: classical literature and, 21–27, 36, 43; Communism and, 376–397; duties of wives, 205; in early modern fiction, 327–331; female doctors and nurses, 390–392; female warriors, 157–162; foot binding, 27, 204, 216–218, 327; importance of maids in drama, 96–98; Ching-hua yüan and, 188, 195–198, 202–211, 216–218; Li Yü and, 43; love’s martyrs, 281–284; marriage stories (Communist period), 379–382; marriage to dwarfs, 158–159; in Ming novels, 39; misery of, 327; motherhood, 43; in Taiwanese fiction, 409–410; see also The Romance of the Western Chamber; romance; widowhood Wong, Timothy C., 173–174 Wu Ch’eng-en, 190, 191 Wu-chi Liu, 9 Wu Chien-jen. See Wu-Wo-yao Wu Ching-tzu, 22; cultural conservatism of, 192–193; satire and, 42–45; as scholar-novelist, 190, 191

INDEX

Wu, Empress, 150, 151; Li Ju-chen’s Ching-hua yüan and, 194, 199, 202, 206 wu-hsia hsiao-shuo, 166 wu-hsing, 177–178, 182, 185, 186 Wu-hu p’ing-hsi, 136, 162, 166–168; see also Ti Ch’ing novels Wu-hu p’ing-nan, 136, 160, 166–168; see also Ti Ch’ing novels Wu-sheng hsi, 42 Wu Shuang-je, 276 Wu Sung. See The Water Margin Wu-tai-shih p’ing-hua, 139 Wu Tsu-hsiang, 53, 315, 323 Wu Wang fa-Chou p’ing-hua, 140, 147 Wu Wo-yao (Wu Chien-jen), 42, 44; compared to Liu Ê, 248, 252; Hen-hai, feudal morality and, 282–283; his masterpiece Strange Events Seen in the Last Twenty Years, 44–48 Wu Yüan-t’ai, 146 Yang-chia-fu shih-tai chung-yung t’ungsu yen-yi, 136, 142–143, 145–146, 160, 163 Yang Chin-hua, 160 Yang Ch’ing-ch’u, 400, 402–403 Yang Ching-hsien, 94 Yang, Gladys, 7 Yang Hsien-yi, 7 Yang Keui-fei. See The Romance of the Western Chamber Yang-ti, Sui emperor, 151 Yang Yeh, 136, 143, 148, 150, 159 Yang Yen-chao, 148, 151 Yano Ryu¯ kei, 233 Yao P’eng. See Peng Ko Yeats, William Butler, 265 Yeh Shao-chün: compared to Chekhov, 318; “Rice,” “Solitude,” depiction of male vs. female characters, 328; humani-

531

tarianism of, 316–317; Pru˚sˇek and, 74, 80 Yeh-suo p’u-yen (Hsia Ching-ch’ü), 190 Yen Ch’ing, 150 Yen Chün, 102, 103 Yen Fu: impact on later criticism, 237–242; “Announcing Our Policy to Print a Supplementary Fiction Section,” 223, 226–230; perceptions of traditional fiction, 226–229; perceptions of western and Japanese fiction, 229–330 Yen-shan wai-shih (Ch’en Ch’iu), 190, 276 Yen-yen li-hun chi (Hsü Chen-ya), 279 “Yi-yin cheng-chih hsiao-shuo hsü” (Liang Ch’i-ch’ao), 223, 230–233 Yin K’ai-shan, 150 Yin-shih (T’u Shen), 190 yin-yang wu-hsing, Plaks and, 177–179, 185, 186 Ying-ying, 282, 410. Ying-ying chuan. See The Romance of the Western Chamber Yonder Shore (Tsai-t’ien-chih-ya; Peng Ko), 416, 423 Yu, Anthony, 9 Yü Cheng-hsieh, 27 Yü chih ch’i (Hsü Chen-ya), 278 Yü-ch’ih Kung, 148, 150, 151, 155 Yü-hsien, 260–262 “Yü-kuan” (Hsü Ti-shan), 313, 330 Yü Li-hua, 398, 399–400; “In Liu Village,” 402–403 Yü-li hun (Hsü Chen-ya), 269–309, 284–286; compared to Mu-tan t’ing, 279; early success of, 277; epilogue, 305–308; letters and poems in, 274, 294–300; literary models for, 283–286, 300–309; love’s martyrs, 281–284; origins of story, 280–281; plot summary and

532

INDEX

Yü-li hun (continued) analysis, 286–292; symbolism in, 294; writing style in, 274; see also Alexandre Dumas fils; Edgar Allan Poe; Samuel Richardson; Romeo and Juliet; Susan Sontag, Sorrows of Young Werther Yü Ta-fu, 74, 80–82, 315, 319 Yü T’ai-chün, 159 Yü Wan-ch’un, 191 Yuan Chen. See The Romance of the Western Chamber

yüan-yang hu-tieh p’ai hsiao-shuo. See “mandarin duck and butterfly” fiction Yüeh Fei, 136, 148–149, 150, 152, 154, 156 Yüeh Heng-chün, 194 Yüeh Yi t’u-Chi’i ch’i-kuo ch’un-ch’iu huo-chi, 139 Yüeh Yün, 152 Zuleika Dobson, 37