The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren Sinica Leidensia

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Barend J. ter Haar Maghiel van Crevel

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P.K. Bol, D.R. Knechtges, E.S. Rawski, W.L. Idema, and H.T. Zurndorfer

VOLUME 120

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinl The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren

The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China

Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng

LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Portrait of Li Jieren in 1914. Courtesy of Li Jieren Memorial and Museum.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ng, Kenny Kwok-kwan. The lost geopoetic horizon of Li Jieren : the crisis of writing Chengdu in revolutionary China / by Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng. pages cm. — (Sinica Leidensia ; volume 120) Revision of the author’s dissertation (doctoral)—Harvard University, 2004. ISBN 978-90-04-29264-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29266-6 (e-book) 1. Li, Jieren, 1891–1962—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PL2877.C528Z785 2015 895.13’52—dc23 2015004115

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. For Kalina, and Pollia, and Hermia

∵ If you keep going over the past, you’re going to end up with a thousand pasts with no future. Ricardo Morales, from The Secret in Their Eyes

∵ Contents

List of Figures ix Acknowledgements x

1 Introduction: The Man, The Place, The Novel 1

2 From Tianhui to Chengdu: Geopoetics and Historical Imagination 42

3 No Place for Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 96

4 Tempest in a Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 150

5 Love in the Time of Revolution 177

6 The Road to Perdition 210

Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending 249

Appendix: Translations by Li Jieren 263 Works Cited 265 Chinese Glossary 291 Index 301

List of Figures

1.1 Photo portrait of Li Jieren in 1914 40 1.2 Photo portrait of Li Jieren in 1929 40 1.3 Covers of Fengtu zazhi 40 1.4 Former residence of Li Jieren 41 2.1 The Qingyang Temple in Chengdu 92 2.2 Public market in the Qingyang Temple 92 2.3 The Christian church on Sishengci Street 93 2.4 Great East Street in downtown Chengdu 93 2.5–2.7 Tianhui Town 94–95 3.1 Printed representation of railroads, Dianshizhai huabao 143 3.2 Railroads ruining Chinese landscapes, Dianshizhai huabao 144 3.3 A fatal railway accident, Dianshizhai huabao 145 3.4 Headline news of the Chengdu crisis, New York Times 146 3.5 Pictorial illustration of the ‘Chengdu massacre’ 147 3.6 Photograph of the Imperial Palace in Chengdu 147 3.7 Site of the Sichuan Provincial Government in Chengdu 148 3.8 Duyuan Street 148 3.9 The obelisk in the People’s Park in Chengdu 149 5.1 ‘Overturning the World,’ Tongsu huabao 202 5.2 Violent abolition of the queue, Tongsu huabao 203 5.3 Demolition of a Confucian temple, Tongsu huabao 204 5.4 Worship of the ‘Living Buddha,’ Tongsu huabao 205 5.5 Satire of new social and military leaders, Tongsu huabao 206 5.6 Satire of new military leaders, Tongsu huabao 207 5.7 A historic teahouse in the People’s Park 208 5.8 The Du Fu Caotang Memorial in Chengdu 208 5.9 A 1911 street map of Chengdu 209 6.1 “The Ship of State in China” 247 6.2 Photograph of the Yangzi gorges 247 6.3 Photograph of Qutong Gorge 248 6.4 Advertisement for steamboat travel on the Yangzi 248 Acknowledgements

As part of my research activities in Chengdu, I toured the historic city several times, taking photos of the sites and streets inscribed in Li Jieren’s novels. My experiences were at once intimate and disorienting, recalling Siegfried Kracauer’s spatial metaphor of a ‘journey’ to refer to the historian’s inquiry of the past. In his History: The Last Things before the Last, Kracauer remarked that historians are much in the position of ordinary tourists in a foreign place. As they encounter the past in sifting through materials, they resemble travelers shooting unseen objects with their cameras in a bid to retain the sights. A literary and cultural critic by training, though, I find that Kracauer’s figure of the (literary) historian as a ‘traveler’ and ‘stranger’ succinctly captures my experiences doing fieldwork in Chengdu and deciphering Li’s dense historical-fictional works about the city. This book is the outcome of a physical as well as mental journey that consisted of surprises, excitement, and anxieties in encountering and trying to overcome the foreignness of a past and a place. In my intellectual excursion I am indebted to a number of researchers and critics in Chengdu who have helped me to navigate the intricate contexts and texts of Li Jieren’s life and writing. I would like to thank particularly Ai Lu, Tan Xingguo, Wang Jialing, Zhang Zhiqiang, Wang Jinhou, and Yi Aidi for their assistance and interviews. They not only shared with me their local knowledge and prior studies of the author, but they also enlightened me with their affective bonding with the author and the place in which they live. Among the enthusiastic specialists in Chengdu, I was fortunate enough to have had close friendships with Zeng Zhizhong and Zhang Yiqi, who always introduced me to local intellectual circles, to various people and to their new studies on Chengdu and Li Jieren. It was through their warm hospitality that I came to appreciate the city’s daily lives and cultures, past and present, and so have learned to look into Li’s historical novels from an added but essentially ‘native,’ and down-to-earth, perspective. Several times Zhang Yiqi walked me through the old Chengdu city and its environs. We visited locales and landmarks depicted in Li’s fictions as well as places of the author’s activities—to be sure, they are mostly gone—and in this way my friend guided me through the maze of the urban and literary texts created by Li Jieren. My friends and their colleagues are mostly working outside academic institutions or universities without any salaries or research funds. In my observation their lifelong commitment to the study of Li Jieren and Chengdu is a labor of love. Their persistence is strong evidence of what Maurice Halbswachs has called ‘collective memory,’ in which diverse groups acknowledgements xi of researchers or followers have reconstructed alternative pasts by embracing the compelling literary symbols, words, and the life narratives of a charismatic local figure in their memories. This book is a sincere dedication to the unsung heroes who have striven to save forgotten cultural pasts from history against the current discourse of global China. Writing this book has been a journey full of detours and obstacles; along the way, I have met decent and goodhearted people and also have found astound- ing truths about humanity. John E. Knight kindly offered me all the digital prints of photographs taken by his great-great-uncle, Luther Knight (1879– 1913), an American Christian missionary who came to Chengdu as a foreign teacher in 1910–13. Thanks to John’s generosity, some of Luther Knight’s photo images appear in this book to support a visual-verbal correspondence in Li’s historical fictions. I was fortunate to come across John while internet surfing, and was amazed to find that he indeed had been living in Hong Kong much of the year doing missionary work. Regrettably, I missed the chance to interview Li Mei (1925–2007), the daughter of Li Jieren, as she passed away a few years ago. For all its possible biases, a personal interview can make up for what cannot be said in a written memoir, especially in China. I have interviewed another important family descendent, Li Shihua, the granddaughter of Li Jieren. She told me more intimate stories about her grandfather, particularly about his later years when he was rewriting The Great Wave. She was appalled to discover belatedly that Li’s family life was closely monitored by the state authority when he served as the vice-mayor of Chengdu during the 1950s and 60s. All their family letters were scrutinized and copied by the police before they were sent to the family members. The Li family had destroyed most of their correspondence during the Cultural Revolution. But a few years ago she was astonished to find that their family letters were all available for sale (possibly contributed by the police) in the flea market, as sought-after relics of a famed local figure. Her account validated my findings at the Sichuan Provincial Archives. In the minutes of government meetings which Li Jieren attended as vice-mayor, detailed records of Li’s words and complaints, as well as comments on his emotions and performance during the meetings, were preserved. Apparently, the state authority had maintained strict surveillance of Li’s activities and attitudes regardless of (or because of) his official position. These private stories of political censorship may have eluded the literary analysis in this book, but they have sharpened my sensitivity in understanding the repressive political ambience surrounding Li’s rewriting of The Great Wave. I am most grateful to my academic colleagues in the United States, China, Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong for their assistance at the early stages of xii acknowledgements my research. Kristin Stapleton and Wang Di, two of the foremost scholars on the history of Chengdu, have provided me with good insights through their work; they also kindly gave me human contacts and helpful advice on con- ducting research in Chengdu. I am thankful to Li Deying and Wang Dongjie of Sichuan University for their hospitality when I was doing research at the Sichuan University Library. They then invited me to a conference on the 1911 Revolution to deliver a working chapter of my book. Among the other scholars from whose opinions on fiction and history I have benefited at various conferences and occasions, I would like particularly to express my appreciation to Chen Mo, Jiang Hui, Li Tuo, Feng-ying Ming, Ping Yao, Sebastian Veg, Zhang Chuntian, Zhang Yongjiu, and Zhou Ding. I wish to thank Lei Bing of Chengdu University for generously letting me read his doctoral thesis on Li Jieren’s later life and political entanglements—somehow his thesis has become inaccessible on the mainland. I would also like to acknowledge the help of Han Yanli, who translated a Japanese critical article on Li Jieren into Chinese. A number of institutions supported my work and I am grateful for their help. The Research Grant Council of Hong Kong offered me a substantial grant in support of my research activities in Chengdu and elsewhere. The following institutions have been essential in my research work, including the libraries of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; the Sichuan University Library; the Sichuan Provincial Library; the Sichuan Provincial Archives; and the Shanghai Public Library. My special thanks go to Wang Jialing of the Sichuan Provincial Library and Zhang Zhiqiang of Li Jieren Memorial and Museum for allowing me access to rare print materials and images, and, last but not least, to Zeng Zhizhong and Zhang Yiqi of the Society for the Study of Li Jieren, without whom this book could never have been written in such a critical way. Preliminary drafts of some chapters were presented at various conferences, and I am thankful to their hosts for offering me the opportunities to present my work. These include the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sichuan University, Tsinghua University of Beijing, and the National University of Singapore. An excerpt of Chapter 3, published as “Temporality and Polyphony in Li Jieren’s The Great Wave” in Dongfeng Tao et al., eds., Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), is published in this book with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The book is a thoroughly revised and expanded version of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. I have to express my deep gratitude to my men- tors and to scholars who have read earlier (and rough and incoherent) versions or parts of it: Hazard Adams, Jianhua Chen, Eileen Chow, Theodore Huters, acknowledgements xiii

Wilt Idema, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Lydia Liu, Ronald Stanley Suleski, William Tay, Richard Terdiman, and David Der-wei Wang. My former supervisor Leo Lee has never lost confidence in me, and consistently encouraged me to continue this single-author project against the academic trend. I hope the book will prove to be a fruitful fusion of literary analysis, historical research, and cultural history. I wish to thank Brill’s editors and anonymous readers for reading the manuscript and giving positive comments to make this a better book, and also to acknowledge the professional editorial assistance of Ellen McGill. My students, Alvina Leung, Jessica Tan, and Chi-wai Yung, kindly offered their assistance in preparing the manuscript. Let me also share the joy of the book with my peers and friends: Jianhua Chen, Kit-yee Chan, Li-fen Chen, Robert Chi, Poshek Fu, Pui-tak Lee, Jianmei Liu, Liang Luo, Chang Woei Ong, Tian Yuan Tan, Lisa Wong, and Sai-shing Yung. They have supported me to finish this project and inspired me with their own unwavering pursuit of literature and humanity in an increasingly instrumental academic environment. This book simply would not have been written without the guidance of William Tay, who has inspired me in comparative literature, cultural studies, and cinema, and much earlier alerted me to the undervalued merits of Li Jieren. Finally, Li Jieren compellingly showed alternative ways of writing and reading Chinese fiction, and for that matter, of writing, reading, and understanding ‘China’ from the shared marginalities of Chengdu and Hong Kong. My deepest gratitude is to my family and goes beyond words. My eldest brother Kwok-chi has shouldered the burden of caring for our old parents. This book is a labor only made possible by the love and enduring support of Kalina, a capable manager and working mother who has taken up much of the duty of looking after our two daughters. Many years ago when I was a journalist, she made a wish that I could lead a ‘spiritual’ life in the future. Her wish may have partially come true, but only to the detriment of messing up many practical affairs in life. At a later stage, writing was unexpectedly but also happily interrupted by the birth of Hermia, and increasingly met with queries (and complaints) from Pollia about her father’s absence from family gatherings during many weekends. Though in truth I do not expect them to understand the cause that I have pursued, even after they grow up, I can continue to write because their love supports me, and because they will be happily traveling with me on our lifelong journey.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: The Man, The Place, The Novel

In the summer of 2000, when I was browsing the bookshelves in Harvard- Yenching Library, I chanced upon a 1938 reprint of Li Jieren’s (1891–1962) monumental novel The Great Wave (Dabo, 1937). The little-known novel describes the mass movement launched by the people in Chengdu to protest the government’s decision to take control of the railways in Sichuan Province during the latter half of 1911. Although I had some basic knowledge of the history of the Chinese revolution, I knew almost nothing about the turmoil of pre-1911 Chengdu. I finished reading the lengthy novel in a few days. I was overwhelmed by its stunning realism. Its photographic actuality seemed to make the reader present at the chaotic happenings. In vividly representing the everyday life of ordinary people in a bygone era, the novel demonstrates the power of literary fiction to capture the elusive and private past that future-oriented history has consistently left out. The Great Wave was the last part of a trilogy on turn-of-the-century Sichuan society; the other two novels were Ripples on Dead Water (Sishui weilan, 1936) and Before the Tempest (Baofeng yuqian, 1936). The opus received only scanty critical attention upon its publication except some enthusiastic comments by Guo Moruo (1892–1978). In 1937, Guo took only a few days to read the trilogy and wrote an essay blessing it as China’s first modern epic imbued with trenchant local colors and regional flavors. Guo remarked, “The scope of the work is surprisingly monumental, and the flavor of different periods and their relationship to one another, of local customs, the social life of people of different social strata, their psychology and language is presented in a thoughtful and natural way.” Having praised the realistic style and localism of the novels, however, Guo went on, “The only criticism I can make is that the style of his writing is ‘somewhat dated.’ But it is probably precisely this that enables him to avoid being pretentious or ostentatious.”1 Guo Moruo’s slightly dismis- sive comment on Li Jieren’s ‘outdated’ fashion of writing might refer to his prose style, which actually showed Li to be a better master of the Chinese language inherited from traditional Chinese vernacular fiction than many New Literature writers.

1 Guo Moruo, “Zhongguo Zuo-la zhi daiwang” and “Li Jieren and His Novels,” pp. 94–95.

Li Jieren’s historical-fictional narration appealed to me somewhat differently than it did to a fellow Sichuanese like Guo. Li’s novels can be seen as a creative appropriation of the social panoramas with which late Qing writers experimented, as well as a generic parallel of the ‘social novels’ (shehui xiaoshuo) popular in the Republican era. The dense fictional universe crowded with characters and having an open structure is a microscopic mirror of a society in turmoil. My personal interest in the novel’s description of people and events set in a remote time and place was rather driven by a sense of foreignness. Li Jieren depicts local minds and hearts, people’s attitudes and spontaneous responses to their changing outside worlds, in ways which resemble what French historians have called mentalité. His novel uncovers the forgotten stories, events, and conflicts that happened in the provincial capital, and portrays the lively mental worlds of its urban commoners who lived through the events. The lived experiences of Li’s characters diverge widely from what we normally read in history books. I could smell and enjoy the novel’s ‘thick description’ of Sichuan’s social mores, daily lives, and human behaviors—‘local knowledge’ for a remote reader observing from a temporal distance of nearly one hundred years. The novel conveys a deep sense of social and historical space in its geographical configuration. The writer’s creative commitment to Chengdu inevitably reminds us of the sense of territorial belonging and geographical authenticity which we find in Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) on Paris, Charles Dickens (1812–70) on London, or William Faulkner (1897–1962) on the American South. In other words, my initial reading was motivated by an interest in the place (and of course, the romance). It then took me a decade’s work to figure out the historical events and their relations to the people and the places. In 1936 Li Jieren was forty-five. Driven by his preoccupation with the 1911 events in Chengdu, he swiftly finished three full-length novels—Ripples on Dead Water, Before the Tempest, and The Great Wave—in two years. Spanning the period from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to the 1911 Revolution as background, the novelist strove to turn his experiences and memories of these historical events into fictional narratives. Ripples on Dead Water centered on a woman’s love affairs with a Christian convert and a secret society bandit. Before the Tempest focused on a gentry-scholar family’s interaction with students and revolutionaries in a society where reformism and radicalism clashed with the traditional Confucian worldview. The Great Wave, a much longer work in three volumes, chronicled the pivotal events of the Railway Protection Movement in Sichuan that triggered the 1911 Revolution. In the events of 1911, Sichuan and its capital Chengdu occupied a prominent place. At the time, the Qing government was attempting to nationalize the private railways, a move which brought unprecedented protest. Initially, the local Introduction 3 gentry struggled against the central government to retain control over the rights to railway construction. This soon spawned a mass protest in Chengdu and its surrounding towns and villages, which paralyzed the provincial administration. As revolutionary sentiments swelled across the country, these protests in Sichuan gained momentum and led to the temporary independence of the province. Eventually, the events in Sichuan contributed crucially to the collapse of the Qing government. Li Jieren’s novels recounted these stirring incidents, which transformed the local place in unprecedented ways. His fictional narratives centered on the tightly-defined regions of Chengdu and its neighboring small towns as specific localities in which “feudal forces, warlords, secret societies and imperialist elements, often Christian converts, vigorously contended for political power.”2 Before the 1911 Revolution, Chengdu was a distinctive provincial city with its own regional history and tradition known as the Shu culture. Situated on China’s disputed southwest border—literally the ‘periphery’ of the country— the region was simply too ‘old’ and geographically too isolated to have anything to do with ‘modern China.’ After the event, Chengdu and Sichuan province were vigorously transformed into the ‘center’ that triggered waves of political unrest empire wide. As Kristin Stapleton has claimed, “Chengdu itself occupied the eye of the storm over how China should be governed.”3 Cultural geography and history are crucial in understanding the changing sense of the place. The railroad dispute in Chengdu brings out the matrix of issues of locality, identity, and the sense of place in the series of historical events that followed in its wake. To overcome the spatial isolation of Sichuan province, a planned railroad connecting Sichuan and Hankou (modern Wuhan, in Hubei province) triggered vehement protests in Sichuan over native rights and local economic interests in railroad construction. By collapsing time and distance, a centralized rail system in China could strengthen the centralized authority of the government by facilitating trade, producing wealth, and promoting security. In the Western discourse of modernity, the railroad revo- lutionizes spatial relations and annihilates time and space by linking unfamiliar landscapes, distant towns, and rural regions to the metropolitan centers of a country.4 Modern transport and communication bring about humanity, enlightenment, and progress, contributing to the rise of urbanity, commer- cialism, and a bourgeois lifestyle. A positive image of Western technology

2 Li Mei, “Reminiscences of My Father,” p. 73. 3 Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, pp. 151–52. On Sichuan’s railroad protection movement and the political crisis of 1910–11, see pp. 164–76. 4 Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,” pp. 31–40. 4 CHAPTER 1

introduced to remote localities argues that “the railway allows local people to look outward, where city and country, north and south all come within reach, and mountains and rivers form no obstacle.”5 Yet in Sichuan, the adoption of the rails sparked political revolution before they were built and could materially function. In other words, Chengdu inhabitants might have less embraced the physical production of trains as modern life incarnate than harbored apprehensions about how the imminent threats of introduced technology and Western presence would affect local cultural life. The advent of modernity (in the sense of communication, exchange, and mobility that brings about enlightenment and progress) stirred up local sentiments and riots as well as reformulating a new sense of place and people of Sichuan. The modern disruption of marginal localities and the unprecedented nature of events demand new imaginaries of place and history. Inspired by the French roman-fleuve (‘river-novel’) in the manner of Balzac’s The Human Comedy (La comédie humaine, 1842–48) and Émile Zola’s (1840– 1902) Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), Li Jieren used a series of massive novels to depict the social tableau of Sichuan society in the last two decades of the Qing dynasty. He intended to use the form of the elastic ‘river-novels,’ with their indefinite openings and open closures, to continue the fictional series on Chengdu after The Great Wave in order to capture the bewildering changes and continuities, the struggles for order and the upheavals, as they punctuated Sichuan history from 1890 through 1950. Between 1919 and 1924 Li studied in France, where he became an avid reader and prolific translator of a corpus of French naturalist and realist fictions by Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), Guy de Maupassant (1850–93), Alphonse Daudet (1840–97), Edmond de Goncourt (1822–96), Jules de Goncourt (1830–70), and Marcel Prévost (1862–1941).6 Besides the grand novelistic schemes of Balzac and Zola, Li may have been influenced in his portrayal of female characters and the psychology of middle- and upper-class women through his translations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Salammbô (1862) and Maupassant’s Notre Cœur (1890) and Une Vie (1883). The erotic tradition of French fiction also opened up the private worlds of women in amorous liaisons with their secret lovers. The French impact is perceptible in the historical trilogy, in which a sense of female sympathy and the figure of the adulterous woman supply key scenarios, revealing the provincial place in moral and sociopolitical turmoil and pitting female desires against the crumbling male order of the Confucian polity. Li

5 Flath, “The Chinese Railroad View,” p. 183. The article studies early accounts of the popular response to introduced railway systems. 6 See Appendix for a list of Li’s translations of French fiction. Introduction 5

Jieren criticized Zola’s deterministic view of society and the neglect of human psychology inherent in his scientific scheme of heredity and environment.7 Li’s humanistic critique contrasts with the reception of Zola by Mao Dun (1896–1981), who rather turned Zola’s naturalist vision of determinism into the ideological confinement of the people when writing about the failure of the revolution in Chinese society in the 1920s.8 Unlike the Marxist ideologue Mao Dun, Li was drawn to the French naturalist’s approach to character-drawing, in particular of the female psyche, with its potential to undermine the moral system of a profoundly conservative society. In its multiple narrative strands of public affairs and individual stories, The Great Wave tells the story of a married gentry woman who, frustrated by marriage and male authority, commits adultery and incest. What would have captured Chinese readers at the time is the question of moral impropriety in the woman’s sexual bonds, as moral disorder foreshadows the breakdown of the family and political order. In an important sense, Li’s novel harks back to the conflict over morality and female sexuality in traditional (late Qing) society as a popular motif of the ‘sentimental novel’ (xieqing xiaoshuo) such as Wu Jianren’s (1866–1910) The Sea of Regret (Hen hai, 1906). At the same time, the modern woman’s passion and wanton sex in The Great Wave brought up the iconoclastic spirit of the May Fourth movement.9 Women, sentimentalism, forbidden sex, family, marriage, and the revolution—the 1930s edition of The Great Wave was probably written as a middlebrow historical romance targeting the reading public in cities such as Shanghai and Chengdu. A reader from a military unit expressed his great admiration for the heroine, and compared her with Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s (1900–49) Gone with the Wind (1936).10 In my 1938 edition of the novel, the pages on the heroine’s amorous rendezvous with a young relative had been ripped out of the book.11 Did this suggest that the erotic transgression and forbidden sex in the historical novel were something scandalous but also desirable for Chinese readers? The Great Wave had at least three printings by 1940—by any standard it was not unpopular.12 Despite Guo Moruo’s positive appraisal of Li Jieren in the

7 Li Jieren, “Fa-lan-xi ziran zhuyi yihou de xiaoshuo jiqi zuojia,” pp. 451–65. 8 David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism, pp. 33–35. 9 For a discussion of romantic love and familial piety expressed in late Qing popular novels, see Hanan, The Sea of Regret, pp. 1–17. 10 Gan Sheng, “Li Jieren de Dabo,” p. 22. 11 Li Jieren, Dabo (1938), 1: 105–28. 12 Zhang Yiqi, “Dabo de shiqing xushi yu lishi xushi,” p. 32. 6 CHAPTER 1

1930s, Li’s works have largely fallen into oblivion in mainstream Chinese literary criticism. The trilogy went out of print after 1940 and has mostly remained unread, especially in the mainland. Only a handful of non-PRC literary critics have taken serious note of Li’s historical novels. The earliest recognition came from critics based in colonial Hong Kong. Cao Juren (1900–72), in his Fifty Years of Literary Circles (Wentan wushi nian, 1955), considered Li’s novels “superior in achievement to the works of Mao Dun and Ba Jin (1904–2005).”13 Cao held Li’s works in the highest regard among all contemporary Chinese writers. He asserted that even Mao Dun’s Midnight (Ziye, 1933), a renowned leftist novel about 1930s Shanghai, could hardly compare with The Great Wave. Sima Changfeng (1920–80) claimed that Li’s historical novels could be compared with those of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) for their grand structure and design, while his descriptive style of narration was on a par with that of Flaubert. He believed that Li’s works came out too late to capture the notice of Lu Xun (1881–1936).14 Both Sima and Cao observed that Li’s densely populated fictional universe was without parallel in the author’s own time, and in many respects has remained unrivalled in its size and scope. During the 1960s and 1970s there was a favorable reception in Hong Kong of the Sichuan writer together with other nonpartisan writers excluded from Communist literary historiography, including Mu Shiying (1912–40), Shi Zhecun (1905–2003), Duanmu Hongliang (1912–96), Lin Huiyin (1904–55), Shen Congwen (1902–88), Shi Tuo (1910–88), Fei Ming (1901–67), and Luo Shu (1903–38).15 In Western sinology, C.T. Hsia contributed a footnote on Li Jieren’s trilogy in his ground-breaking study of modern Chinese literature, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. He said, “Since Ts’ao (Cao) has the highest respect for Mao Tun (Mao Dun), this would make Li Chieh-jen (Li Jieren) virtually the greatest modern Chinese novelist.”16 In spite of the insufficient scholarly study of Li’s works, a part of the trilogy has been translated into Japanese, French, and English.17

13 Cao, Wentan wushi nian, p. 44. 14 Sima Changfeng, Zhongguo xin wenxue shi, pp. 51–54. 15 Chinese Student Weekly (Zhongguo xuesheng zhoubao), no. 627 (24 July 1964), p. 11. Chinese Student Weekly was a literary and cultural magazine financed by the United States government and published by the Youlian Publishing Company. The reception of Li Jieren in Hong Kong can also be found in Chinese Student Weekly, no. 1038 (9 June 1972), p. 4; Huang Jundong, Xiandai Zhongguo zuojia jianying, pp. 235–37. 16 C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, p. 615 n. 23. 17 Minoru Takeuchi translated Ripples on Dead Water and Before the Tempest into Japanese, published in Gendai Chūgoku bungaku (Modern Chinese literature) in 1971 (Li Jieren, Sishui weilan and Baofeng yuqian). In France, Ripples on Dead Water was translated by Wan Chunyee as Rides sur les eaux dormantes in 1981 and has received considerable Introduction 7

It was not until 1980 that scholars in Li Jieren’s native city launched the study of his works. Researchers and critics in Chengdu have largely pushed for reviving the status of the author in literary history, but an insightful examination of the trilogy and a literary historical contextualization are still wanting. Most notably, Li’s 1930s version of The Great Wave was erased from public readership when the publishing house asked the author to rewrite the historical trilogy in the 1950s, and this revised version does not seem any more popular in Chengdu’s book market nowadays than at the time it first appeared.18 Only recently have Chengdu researchers rediscovered Li’s original trilogy and republished it as part of the new seventeen-volume collection of his works.19 Previous investigations of the regional writer in the mainland have been based on either a Marxist or ideological paradigm.20 At best, a revisionist literary- biographical approach has been adopted to cast light on the complexity of Li’s life and oeuvre.21 This book argues that these previous approaches are inadequate in dealing with the intricacies of historical representation and literary imagination in Li Jieren’s place-writing, even less the complicated problems of locality and history that Li’s works could have teased out. Through Li’s untold story and his ignored fictions on the 1911 Revolution in Chengdu, this study articulates the poetics of locality and politics of fiction writing as a native writer imaginatively presents a microhistory of Chengdu in a series of novels to tackle the connection between the native place and modernity on local, regional, and national levels. The profound geohistorical interest of Li’s novels and his life experience underscore the unique modernity of historical Chengdu and the violent, uncertain transition from the Qing empire to a modern nation state.

critical acclaim, probably because the romantic passion of the Chinese novel recalls the theme of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. There have been two English renditions of the novel. It was first translated as Ripples across Stagnant Water in China in 1955. The most recent translation just came out in 2014. Bret Sparling and Yin Chi translated the novel as Ripple on Stagnant Water: A Novel of Sichuan in the Age of Treaty Ports. 18 Neither version of The Great Wave was ever for sale in the flagship Xinhua Bookstore in Chengdu, for instance, during my several visits there. 19 Li Jieren, Li Jieren quanji, vol. 3. 20 Li Shiwen, Li Jieren de shengping he chuangzuo; Lu You, “Tan Li Jieren de Sishui weilan.” 21 Tan Xingguo et al., Li Jieren zuopin de sixiang yu yishu. In Chengdu, the Society for the Study of Li Jieren has published a series of collected essays including Li Jieren de renpin he wenpin, Li Jieren yanjiu, Li Jieren yanjiu 2007, and Li Jieren yanjiu 2011. For a recent update of Li Jieren’s biography and private correspondence, see Wang Jialing, ed., Li Jieren wannian shuxinji and Li Jieren wannian shuxinji: Zengbu ben 1950–1962; Wang Jialing and Guo Zhiqiang, eds., Li Jieren tuchuan; Yan Xiaoqin, ed., Li Jieren yu Lingke. 8 CHAPTER 1

Moreover, scrutiny of a significant regional writer offers a more sophisticated picture of Chinese literary modernity as a multifaceted enterprise transcend- ing the dichotomy of the elite and the popular.22 Its focus on the author’s enduring commitment to writing Chengdu provides a window on which to view the local variations of Chinese societies in their divergent visions of the past and present. This study thus joins pioneering efforts in modern China studies to take issue with a monolithic and teleological view of literary history. In terms of cultural locations, Beijing and Shanghai took turns to be the center of national politics and literary activities. Since the majority of active writers and intellectuals stayed in these two cities—the nation’s economic and political powerhouses—it was all but natural that most universities, much of the print media, and many socio-cultural activities were based there. It was precisely Chengdu’s remoteness that helped Li Jieren distance himself from May Fourth iconoclasm and the radical politics of anti-traditionalism that dominated China’s capital city in 1919. Moreover, his five-year sojourn in France (1919–24) coincided with the cultural aftershock of May Fourth, which may have allowed him to stay aloof from the political radicalism of the cultural movement. It is instructive to point out the shifting historical meanings of Chengdu, to which the writer was so attached and which he obsessively placed at the heart of his works. To begin with, the sense of marginality can only be invoked cautiously and relatively in describing the historical and cultural positions of Chengdu in modern Chinese history. Chengdu in the late nineteenth century was a city of well-established customs and commercial activities, dominated by high officials and attracting a large number of cultural elites. The banner garrison in the western section of the town was home to Manchu and Mongol soldiers and civilians.23 Chengdu occupied a privileged position in the eyes of foreigners and missionaries who visited the province and its capital city. They called Sichuan ‘the empire-province of China’ for the spacious land and abundant resources on the Chengdu plain.24 Geographically and historically, however, Chengdu was an isolated city surrounded by mountains in the upper Yangzi region. An inland city with a long cultural tradition, Chengdu had assumed economic and political importance in the Qing dynasty.

22 To bridge the gap between popular and elite writers, past and present, David Der-wei Wang argues that Chinese literary modernity has left a pluralistic legacy in dialogue with late twentieth-century writers and modernists. See his “Return to Go.” 23 Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, pp. 28–45. 24 Adshead, Province and Politics in Late Imperial China, p. 3. Introduction 9

During the 1920s and 1930s, many members of China’s cultural elite perceived Sichuan as a ‘foreign land within China’ (guozhong de yixiang) because of its closed cultural environment as well as the political chaos in the province. 25 In the mind of May Fourth modernists, moreover, ancient Chengdu was a country of no hope. In Ba Jin’s famous novel, Family ( Jia, 1933), his autobiographical hero Juehui finally leaves Chengdu for Shanghai to pursue a writing career. Chengdu was the place of family despotism and repressive morality, and Shanghai the city of enlightenment and fulfillment. Such a journey of escape, from Chengdu to Shanghai, from the western province to the eastern coast, constituted the May Fourth cultural geography of enlightenment. In Mao Dun’s Rainbow (Hong, 1929), the heroine Mei likewise leaves Sichuan for Shanghai, where she is awakened by the massive student movements. As the steamship sails down the Yangzi River and passes through the gorges, Mei muses, “So this is the Kui Pass. This is the great pass out of Sichuan. This is the demon pass that separates Sichuan from the rest of the world!”26 The moral dilemma and enlightenment experience of Juehui and Mei were typical of many modern Chinese writers and can be seen in their ambivalent attitudes toward ‘the city and the country.’ Many of them followed a similar trajectory in their creative careers. They were born in small towns or villages and then moved to major cities to achieve literary success. Those who got the chance to study abroad in Japan or Europe chose to return to Beijing or Shanghai.27 Such an intellectual upbringing and geographical movement constituted a particular mode of literary configuration of the city and the country. Mao Dun’s protagonist has to go to the metropolitan city to seek knowledge and freedom. She looks back at her hometown and paints a bleak picture of the ‘country.’ She then experiences disillusionment and vacillation in her adopted city, and seeks a way out by joining mass politics. In the unilateral assump- tions of telos, progress, and destiny underpinning the literary imagination of the nation, as shared by Mao Dun and his May Fourth contemporaries, time overwhelms spatiality in the rush to modernity and the revolution. In the modern Chinese consciousness, therefore, the ‘country’ and the ‘city’ should not be treated as bipolar opposites; rather, they coexist as competing and complementary images in the cultural landscapes. The writing of place to recreate changing meanings of the local vis-à-vis the nation constitutes the very poetics and politics of place-oriented literature in modern China. Susan Daruvala explicates the culturally dynamic notion of locality in Zhou Zuoren’s

25 Wang Dongjie, “Guozhong de ‘yixiang’.” 26 Mao Dun, Rainbow, p. 12. 27 Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, pp. 17–19. 10 CHAPTER 1

(1885–1967) idea of literary sensibility in relation to place. Zhou embraces an unorthodox cosmopolitanism and local flavor that he found in China’s diversi- fied cultural past in contradiction to the monolithic orthodoxy of May Fourth literary discourse and nationalism.28 In sociopolitical terms, as Prasenjit Duara suggests, the reality of weak political control on the part of the nation state in Republican China meant that the regime was inclined to tolerate alternative discourse and ideological defense of the local against the nation.29 A most significant literary manifestation of the centrality of the native place is the powerful discourse of the local by regional writers. Recent studies have seen a surge of interest in expanding Chinese literary topography to include more writers ambivalent about the nation (e.g. Xiao Hong (1911–42) from northeastern China, Shen Congwen from western Hunan, and Wu Zuxiang (1908–94) from southeastern Anhui) and their poetics of native soil writing. It challenges the persisting dichotomy of the country vs. the city, in which rural domains serve as backward temporalities in stark contrast to urban modernism and cosmopolitanism (such as Zhang Ailing (1920–95) in Shanghai and Hong Kong).30 The politics of marginality in place-based writing is discerned in many obscure regional writers of the 1930s. A prominent example is the rediscovery and reassessment of Shen Congwen in the 1980s. The deliberate neglect of Shen by mainland scholars, as both Jeffrey Kinkley and David Der-wei Wang point out, has to do with the writer’s lack of political awareness.31 But it is precisely Shen’s non-ideological regional sensibility and literary landscapes that have been recapitulated by the recent ‘root-seeking’ (xungen) writers. Shen’s successors have radicalized the discourse of native soil writing as opposed to any homogeneous literary establishment. Following on these literary trends, new studies have examined new perceptions of the native place and Chinese modernity in modern Chinese fiction and storytelling.32 In the same vein, this book contests our present literary canons built on the boundaries of the regional vs. national, the rural vs. urban, and the bipolar trajectory of the periphery and center. My study of Li Jieren calls for a more

28 Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity, pp. 142–43. 29 Duara, “Local Worlds.” 30 On Shen Congwen, see Kinkley, The Odyssey of Shen Congwen; on Wu Zuxiang, see Philip Williams, Village Echoes; on Zhang Ailing, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, pp. 267–303. 31 Kinkley, “Shen Congwen’s Legacy in Chinese Literature of the 1980s”; David Der-wei Wang, “Imaginary Nostalgia.” 32 See the essays under the rubric of ‘Country and City’ in Widmer and Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth, pp. 19–166. For monograph-length studies, see Chan, A Subversive Voice in China; Stuckey, Old Stories Retold; Yiyan Wang, Narrating China. Introduction 11 nuanced understanding of spatiality and literary geography as evidenced in his works. Li’s lifelong historical writing project has articulated an alternative vision of fictional-historical representation of locality and communal collectivity in opposition to the totalizing claims of national politics and ideology. My investigation of the author and his close alliance with Chengdu has benefited from a growing literature on Chengdu culture and history in terms of documentary records, literary sources, personal memoirs, missionary accounts, and visual evidence.33 Meanwhile, American sinologists and historians have cited The Great Wave (rewritten version) as valuable—and readable— historical material and verifiable data on everyday life and mindsets in late Qing and early Republican Chengdu. For example, Kristin Stapleton’s Civilizing Chengdu draws on Li Jieren’s fiction in providing a broader social history of Chengdu’s early twentieth-century modernization campaign. Di Wang’s cultural histories, Street Culture in Chengdu and The Teahouse, do likewise in painting a motley picture of the city’s public space and the myriad forms of social life of the ordinary people. The dense texture of locality and historicity in Li’s novels facilitate their treatment as historical documents in these works. Their imaginative strains and literary merits, however, have been little studied. Li’s immense corpus of regional writings, which gives the fullest expression of the ‘knowable communities’ in their historical specificities, has not yet been given its literary due.34 Is this because Li was a gradualist rather than a radical, or because he wrote of daily life in Sichuan rather than Shanghai or Beijing? In providing a literary historical configuration of Li Jieren’s monumental novels, I do not mean to treat the writer and his fictional output as an isolated oddity waiting to be put back in the pantheon of masterpieces in Chinese literary hierarchies.35 I argue that Li may be considered a microhistorian in the sense of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Robert Darnton, considering especially their emphases on public mentalities and everyday

33 Hartwell, “Reminiscences of Chengdu.” There has been a memory boom of ‘old Chengdu’ and publications in recent decades, including Chengdu zhanggu; Li Jieren, Li Jieren shuo Chengdu; Feng Zhicheng, ed., Shimin jiyi zhong de lao Chengdu; Liushahe, Lao Chengdu; Ran, Cong lishi de pianpang jinru Chengdu; Zeng and You, eds., Wenhuaren shiye zhong de lao Chengdu; Zhang Xiande, Chengdu: Jin wushinian de siren jiyi; Zheng, Chengdu jiushi. 34 I borrow this term from Raymond Williams. See Williams, The Country and the City, pp. 165–81. 35 For instance, Liu Zaifu has praised Li Jieren, Shen Congwen, and Zhang Ailing as the best modern Chinese writers for the artistic achievements of their works. See Liu, “Li Jieren— Nuobei’er wenxue jiazu zui heshi renxuan zhiyi,” pp. 9–10. 12 CHAPTER 1 social practices.36 Their microscopic studies of history have ventured into the vanished pasts of bygone social groups or societies and hitherto unheard stories.37 They have returned to the ancient historian’s craft of telling stories with growing interest in the “feelings, emotions, behavior patterns, values, and states of mind” of past societies and systems.38 My concern is less with can- onizing a forgotten figure than with using him as a disturbing local force to point out the lacunae of the literary fields from which his works, despite—or because of—their tremendous implications of localism, have been excluded. Li Jieren possessed the craft of storytelling like a cultural historian. He rewrote his native city of revolutionary Chengdu from the ground up with an ardent sensitivity in observing individual feelings, social symbols, local myths, and communal beliefs. I find this microhistorical contextualization with a dynamic literary exegesis of Li’s novels most productive. Li’s lifelong striving for artistic integrity and individual vision based on his place experience and memory drove him to search for an alternative writing mode that conveys the local pasts as haphazard, coincidental, and polyphonic configurations of history. Taken as a whole, this book is concerned with the way in which the novelist perceived the past as well as the sense his characters gave to the world in which they lived. It gives voice to an alien past that is nonetheless closely embedded in the larger literary and sociopolitical contexts of modern China. The failure to position Li Jieren’s place-writing and his strong regionalist- historical bent in modern Chinese literature indicates the paradigmatic problems in conceptualizing Chinese modernity and literary developments when it comes to geographical variances across disparate sites of literary production and appreciation.

Geopoetics, Memory, and Historical Fiction

In this book, I reinvent the term ‘geopoetics’ to designate not only the sense of place registered by someone who lived through the past, but also the com-

36 Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou; Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre; Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. 37 These microhistories “have focused in on particular moments and stories, hoping to catch, in the nightmare brilliance and clarity of a tightly focused study, past individuals going about tasks that ranged from harvesting crops to composing cosmologies to killing cats.” Grafton, “History’s Postmodern Fates,” p. 62. 38 Stone, “The Revival of Narrative,” p. 86. Introduction 13 munal identity created through exposure to lived experiences and memories grounded in a shared nature, culture, geography, and history. The poetics of space underscores the contested experience of loss and the struggle for remembrance in the reader’s mind. As the place is constantly losing its past linkages in global modernity and capitalism, a place-based realist novel can powerfully convey intimations and loaded meanings of the past. In this sense, Li Jieren fictionalizes his hometown by ‘spatializing’ history in microcosm. This microscopic view allows the writer to fully articulate the fragments of daily life at the local level. Li’s articulation of the locality as the site of everydayness and multiple past experiences proper to particular social groups thereby challenges the May Fourth idea of history as a singular, universal time of telos and destiny. The poetics of the place calls attention to the importance of spatial narratives in shaping literary forms and articulating modernity at marginal sites. One major reason for Li’s relative obscurity in literary circles must be the trenchant localism that informed his conception of writing, literary practice, and political engagement. If regional variation and geographical distance account for the wider indifference to Li’s historical place-writing, and for that matter, to all literary endeavors of localism, the problem should lie in the lack of understanding of the locality as it is crucially connected to personal experience, literary creativity, and social-historical evolution. The young Li Jieren should be considered as an advocate of the spirit of May Fourth modernity in every sense of the word. But in the realm of literary sensibility he inherited from the great tradition of classical Chinese novel, as well as being influenced by the vernacular novels of urban Republican China. The long neglect of his work supports the claim that the May Fourth paradigm was too rigid and too politicized in rejecting its debts to the past.39 Like his peers and the popular ‘Mandarin and Butterfly’ (yuanyang hudie) writers in urban Shanghai, Li embraced the modern by espousing freedom of expression; he mixed the old and new with local flavors in his vernacular historical novels.40 Li’s writings are suffused with superfluous and trivial social ‘details,’ which are

39 Lydia Liu argues that May Fourth radicals legitimized their own writings and denied others a place in the modern canon. See her Translingual Practice, pp. 214–38. 40 It was the ‘backward’ Republican popular writers and their late Qing predecessors who contributed to the momentum of the vernacular language movement and modern Chinese literature in the urban public sphere. See Chen Jianhua, “Canon Formation and Literary Turn”; Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Incomplete Modernity.” 14 CHAPTER 1 deemed ‘obsolete’ and incapable of conveying new thoughts and ideas in May Fourth’s instrumental vision of nation building.41 In crafting his place-oriented social panoramas, Li Jieren followed his late Qing forerunners in renovating traditional Chinese vernacular fiction into the historical genre proper to deal with temporality and the everyday in secular representations of localities. Li’s interest in historical knowledge and his search for a viable format of social panoramic novel can be situated within the debates and literary writings of turn-of-the-century China. Indeed, traditional Chinese fiction’s penchant for emulating historiography was most profoundly felt in late Qing literature because of the “excessive social and political role imposed on the novel by the Reformists and other champions of the genre.”42 Lin Shu (1852–1924) hoped to contribute to official history in his capacity as a professional translator of Western literature. In rendering Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) into Chinese, he compared the nineteenth-century Victorian novel to Sima Qian’s (ca. 145/135–86) Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji). He read David Copperfield as a social novel with the narrative power to manipulate a vast number of social details and “reassemble fragments into a whole.”43 Meanwhile, Zeng Pu’s (1872–1935) famous ‘flower pattern’ analogy for his ‘string-like’ novel, A Flower in the Sea of Sins (Niehai hua, 1905) exemplified the novelist’s eagerness to narrate a wide span of historical periods and multiple personages.44 Designed to encompass China’s social-political vicissitudes from 1870 to 1900, the novel was a piece of narrative experimentation for the author, who intended to interweave a linear, revolutionary historical vision with traditional Chinese historical discourse.45 Late Qing writers had thus

41 I quote Rey Chow’s critique of the May Fourth hegemonic discourse; see Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, pp. 85–87. 42 Henry Y.H. Zhao, “Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture,” p. 76. For a discussion of classical Chinese fiction and its mimetic representation of social reality, see Plaks, “The Novel in Premodern China.” 43 Lin Shu, “Preface to Part One of David Copperfield,” pp. 84–86. 44 Zeng Pu: “Let us take the analogy of flower blossoming. [. . .] In my case, I let the flowers blossom in the shape of an umbrella. Beginning in the center, they blossom in layers of different designs which bear a definite relationship to each other. The end product is a huge ball-shaped arrangement of flowers. [. . .] It cannot be said that my novel does not have complex structure.” Quoted from Peter Li, “The Dramatic Structure of Niehai hua,” p. 151. 45 See David Der-wei Wang, “Nonconformism as Narrative Strategy.” Wang claims that Zeng Pu’s novel betrays “a seemingly linear, dynamic process of history in which socio-political changes take place at a ‘flying pace’ replacing the old systems. Individuals are hurled into a tremendous flux of ever-changing trends and their fates are forged by them” (p. 67). Introduction 15 already begun to repudiate the cyclical, dynastic mode of temporality inherent in traditional Chinese novels in their search for a proper literary structure and linguistic style to represent historical reality.46 The late Qing social panoramas indicate a much earlier experiment of nation-building novels entwined in their historiographical appeal, formal innovation, and literary modernity. Social fictions such as Li Boyuan’s (1867– 1906) A Brief History of Enlightenment (Wenming xiaoshi, 1905), Wu Jianren’s Eyewitness Reports on Strange Things from the Past Twenty Years (Ershinian mudu zhi guaixianzhuang, 1905–10), and Liu E’s (1857–1909) Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji, 1903–7) cover a huge scope of geographical variation and vast number of local communities, in which the characters move between a series of border towns, provincial counties, and rising urban centers in a changing China. The novelists of this period “made every effort to transform the series of loosely connected episodes . . . and make it a homogenous whole.”47 The reformist-minded writers were preoccupied with narrative fiction’s ability to portray the fundamental character of an age and larger social phenomena. But they only performed partial innovations of the traditional novel to inscribe the real and the quotidian. However, Li Jieren’s preoccupation with historical and ethnographical changes in his native Sichuan can be traced to deep local traditions and the interest of the Sichuan literati in geography and history.48 Guo Moruo praised Li’s work as matching up to the ‘poetry of history’ (shishi) of the Tang poet

46 On the tradition of historical writings in late Qing, see Chen Pingyuan, “ ‘Shizhuan’ chuantong yu ‘shisao’ chuantong.” 47 Jaroslav Průšek remarks that the late Qing authors seem to have been fascinated by the idea of a ‘great work’ in the tradition of classical novels, all 100 to 120 chapters long. See his The Lyrical and the Epic, p. 115. 48 Li wrote “On Chengdu” (“Shuo Chengdu”) in 1949, an unfinished manuscript of about 150,000 words about the city’s topography and evolutionary history from ancient times through the imperial era. The whole work was lost during the Cultural Revolution. A small portion of the early draft can be found in Fengtu zazhi 3, no. 2 (1949/5–1949/8), reprinted in Li Jieren xuanji, 5: 369–442. In the 1950s, Li took the opportunity as the city’s vice-mayor to write reports on Chengdu’s history and geography, including The Evolutionary History of Chengdu (Chengdu lishi yan’ge) and On Chengdu’s City Wall (Huashuo Chengdu cheng qiang). On the extant copies of these essays, see Ai Di, “Li Jieren xiansheng yigao Chengdu lishi yan’ge,” and “Li Jieren xiansheng yigao Huashuo Chengdu chengqiang.” A surviving portion of Li’s second essay on the city wall, finished in 1959 and mentioned above, is republished in Li Jieren yanjiu 2007, pp. 17–33. One of Li’s essays on quotidian life includes his “Mantan Zhongguoren zhi yi shi zhu xing.” As the vice-mayor of Chengdu, Li also contributed to the establishment of the Du Fu Caotang Memorial. See Yi Aidi, “Li Jieren yu Du Fu Caotang Bowuguan de choujian.” 16 CHAPTER 1

Du Fu (712–70). Just as Du Fu was the ‘poet-historian,’ Li was the ‘novelist- historian’ proper. Li obviously saw himself as a local chronicler aspiring to be a novelist-historian.49 His sustained efforts to describe regional life and culture exemplify the Chinese intelligentsia’s inclination to reinterpret a past, in particular to explain a sequence of events inextricably tied to local circumstances. The late Qing literary field and its concomitant novelistic extensions in the early Republican period also revealed more complex narration of spatiality and modernity in popular fictions. The ‘social novels’ (shehui xiaoshuo) such as Li Hanqiu’s (1874–1923) The Tides of Yangzhou (Guangling chao, 1908–19) and Zhu Shouju’s (1892–1966) The Tides of Shanghai (Xiepu chao, 1921), for example, are long novels that offer rich social panoramas of a society in transition with a sharply local focus on “one city or town, its alleys and teahouses, and its concubines and courtesans.”50 Resorting to the format of classical Chinese novels, the novelists injected a new imagination of diverse social spaces into the modern vernacular narratives, whereby new ways of thinking about time and history moved stealthily into the practice of novel writing. This study links Li Jieren’s indigenous interconnected river-novels with late Qing social panoramas and asks: How was this ‘new’ China to be imagined—as an extension or restoration of the old empire, as constructs of a new nationhood, or as disparate locales and peoples in their diversely represented communities? Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’ bears an interesting parallel here. Anderson argues that the very form of fictional narrative creates the sense of a shared communal space and a shared historical time.51 But he does not fully flesh out the complicated process of the generic form and readership of a specific narrative tradition.52 In a similar predicament, the new

49 Li once edited a literary supplement for a local newspaper. He titled it Huayang guozhi to commemorate this famous local gazetteer. He also constantly contributed miscellaneous essays to Fengtu zazhi (Folkways), a journal published in the 1940s that dealt with local customs and daily life in the countryside. 50 Bärthlein, “ ‘Mirrors of Transition’,” p. 207. Produced in serialized form and written in a journalistic style, the Republican social novels are comparable to the popular works of Zhang Henshui, who produced several dozens of novels with an exclusive interest in the city of Beijing. 51 Benedict Anderson considers the realistic novel as a narrative experiment that opens new ways for the reader to imagine “large, cross-generation, sharply delimited communities,” in which people who are mostly unknown to one another can come to grasp the sense of society as a whole. Anderson, Imagined Communities; quoted from Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, p. 334. 52 Jonathan Culler raises a formal question about Anderson’s argument, and reminds us of the distinction between “the novel as a condition of possibility of imagining the nation” Introduction 17 imaginary of place-based history pioneered by late Qing fiction writers was not fully taken up by the high-sounding literary discourse of Confucian literati and writers themselves. Through creating the ‘political novel’ (zhengzhi xiaoshuo), Liang Qichao (1873–1929) intended to exploit fiction’s emotive power to convert romance and sensation to enhance the public appeal of novel writing.53 By utilizing the popular press to propagate his concepts and values, Liang sought to reimagine a new China and a new reading public comprised of ‘new citizens.’ As the champion of new fiction, Liang had no clear concept of what a new nation should be, nor had he succeeded in tapping into the rich repertoires of late Qing fictions, which were by nature ‘polygeneric,’ diverse, and entertaining.54 His elitist approach was probably at odds with the vast reading public that was accustomed to conventional modes of storytelling. Nevertheless, the multifarious styles of late Qing fictional writing later were deemed no longer adaptable to express social and cultural concerns in the May Fourth cultural discourse.55 The affinity between narrative and historiography granted the novel a certain legitimacy to narrate topical issues of present-day societies as well as recording memories of the past. It was precisely the ‘plasticity of the form’ itself and a wide range of generic conventions of the novel that enabled intellectuals to construct new knowledge and define a desired reading public in the service of the nation.56 Likewise, fiction composition was increasingly appreciated for its instructive function to illuminate historical veracity. Yan Fu (1853–1921) and Xia Zengyou (1863–1924) emphasized that historical fictions used to be more welcome than official history-writing, whereas the romantic ‘novels of talent

and “the novel as a force in shaping or legitimating the nation.” See Culler, “Anderson and the Novel,” p. 37. 53 Liang Qichao gave serious thought to adopting this foreign genre to “influence and change the views and arguments of the whole nation,” as he believed that political novels had made significant contributions to “the steady progress made in the political sphere in America, England, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and Japan.” Liang, “Yi yin zhengzhi xiaoshuo xu.” 54 See Ming, “In Search of a Position,” esp. p. 28. 55 Doleželová-Velingerová has claimed that the plots of late Qing chapter fictions are constructed according to specific structural principles. See her “Typology of Plot Structures in Late Qing Novels.” In his Fin-de-siècle Splendor, David Der-wei Wang argues that the four major fictional genres—the courtesan novel, chivalric and court-case fiction, grotesque exposés, and science fantasy—were blatantly demoted by May Fourth intellectuals. 56 Huters, “A New Way of Writing,” p. 261. 18 CHAPTER 1 and beauty’ (caizi jiaren xiaoshuo) continued to enthrall Chinese audiences.57 The heroes and lovers in classical novels were much better recognized than any historical figures in official records.58 Hence historical romance and classical love stories endowed the reader with more enduring memories of the heroic and romantic deeds in history. Wu Jianren asserted that a popular historical fiction written in the vernacular was much more accessible to the public than traditional historiography.59 Good historical fictions would effectively propagate historical knowledge. Intellectuals like Yan, Xia and Wu looked backward to existing popular fictional genres with their generic memories, and counted on the readers’ habitual consumption of such works.60 Late Qing champions called for a refunctionalization of the traditional genres to promote nation- building novels.61 But they failed to address the formal question of whether the traditional novels and their generic properties were able to accommodate the wide spectrum of ordinary people and stories of everyday life that were left out in specialized historiography. In the intertextual semiosis of history and fiction, memory and place in Chinese literary modernity, this book treats Li Jieren’s fictional oeuvre as an inter-generic and ever-growing work of geopoetic memory, scrutinized as a remarkable textual monument of a place and its society in crisis. Li carries on with his predecessors’ formal experiments not only by remodeling late Qing popular genres, but also by his radical strategy of spatial narratives with an exclusive focus on his hometown. Drawing on the capaciousness of the roman- fleuve, Li evolves his distinctive style by reworking the multigeneric codes of late Qing fiction into an open-ended form of place-writing, presented as a mirror of a turbulent place caught in the constant friction between the local and the national. The native writer takes the novel as an alternative forum for

57 Yan and Xia, “Benguan fuyin shuobu yuanqi.” This essay, coauthored by Yan Fu and Xia Zengyou, was serialized anonymously in Guowen bao, from 16 October to 18 November 1897. 58 For an analysis of Yan Fu’s and Xia Zengyou’s essay, see C.T. Hsia, “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i- ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction.” 59 Wu Jianren’s statements on historical fiction are recorded in three major essays; see Wofo Shanren [Wu Jianren], “Liang Jin yanyi xu,” “Lishi xiaoshuo zongxu,” and “Yueyue xiaoshuo xu,” all published in 1906. 60 C.T. Hsia points out that The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has been considered good fiction precisely because its slightly fictive elaboration of history has restored for readers the actuality of history. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, p. 35. 61 Doris Sommer argues that a similar move took place in Latin America, where romantic novels functioned as the primary trope for patriotic history as they were widely accepted by their local readers. See her Foundational Fictions, pp. 1–51 and “Irresistible Romance.” Introduction 19 documenting private memories of marginalized groups and people that are not registered in public history. Through his role as the public author and, in Ba Jin’s phrase, the ‘historian of Chengdu,’ Li’s lifelong writing project made his fictional trilogy into a vehicle for place memories, in which various pasts and local histories converge into a shared interface of social memory.

Biography and Geography

An author is a complicated historical actor who typically lives in a varied local context, perceiving life and imagining history differently in a specific time and place. Li Jieren is no exception. Born in 1891 in Huayang County near Chengdu, Li’s life spanned the old China and the new, with deep entanglements in literature, politics, and entrepreneurship. Guo Moruo was one of his classmates in the secondary school affiliated to Chengdu Normal College in the years 1908 to 1912. In his youth, he joined the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement as a student delegate during the 1911 revolution. His active participation in the mass movement, however, did not turn him into a revolutionary or a self-assured political radical. Very probably the young Li Jieren was quite disillusioned by the immediate outcomes of the revolution as Sichuan plunged into chaos and anarchy. As Li Mei, his daughter, recalled, “The victory of the 1911 Revolution could not so easily change feudal traditions and customs, nor could the filth and mire of the old society be quickly swept away.” Sichuan turned into a battleground where bandits, secret societies, warlords, and regional militarists fiercely contended for control. The condition of post-revolutionary Sichuan society only worsened. “It was a situation that caused my father to think deeply,” said Li Mei.62 After graduating from middle school, Li Jieren was too poor to continue studying. Through a relative’s connections, he served as a secretary in the yamen under the new government from 1914 to 1915. This experience proved to be devastating. The young Li was frustrated by what he observed in the new regime. “His two years there greatly shocked him, as he saw that after the 1911 Revolution the corruption of the Qing dynasty in its later stages was resurfac- ing in new forms.”63 The writer’s youthful experience in the new republican government system may have shaped his negative perceptions of the revolution and the ‘new society.’ Readers of his trilogy easily sense this cynicism as his fictional-historical world is inhabited by corrupt officials, conservative

62 Li Mei, “Reminiscences of My Father,” p. 73. 63 Ibid., p. 73. 20 CHAPTER 1

gentry characters, and selfish ordinary people. Often the images of intellectuals and revolutionaries are cast in a sarcastic light. In the words of his daughter, as a young man Li was outspoken and progressive-minded. He decided to withdraw from officialdom and continued to wield his pen.64 He wrote many essays and critiques to expose the evils of a society under the control of warlords. From 1912 to 1918, Li worked as editor-in-chief of the newspapers Community News (Qun bao) and Sichuan News (Chuan bao) in Chengdu. It was, however, the New Culture Movement that had the greatest impact on Chengdu’s young minds. Li Jieren and his liberal-minded colleagues were motivated by the intellectual ideas associated with the May Fourth movement. Both his literary and social engagements were very reflective of contemporary events. Although Chengdu was geographically remote, young people there were well informed of the sweeping cultural movements in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai through reading newspapers, new-style journals, and books. Reminiscent of the progressive young protagonists in Ba Jin’s Family, Li belonged to a minority of enlightened youths who were deeply concerned with the political and cultural trends in China. In his later years, Li assuredly claimed Chengdu as one of the three major centers (along with Beijing and Shanghai) in the New Culture Movement, in remembrance of May Fourth and its cultural impact on his generation.65 In 1918, under the sway of the New Culture Movement, Li Jieren helped set up the Chengdu branch of the Young China Study Society (Shaonian Zhongguo xuehui) with his friends Wang Guangqi (1892–1936) and Lu Zuofu (1893–1952). One of the society’s major commitments to cultural reform was implemented in a foreign study program as a means to create a more broadly based education system for Chinese youth. It was through the Young China Study Society’s work-study program, known as qingong jianxue (diligent work and austere study), that Li was sent to France to study literature from 1919 until 1924. There he led a spartan life, and frequently contributed his fiction and translations to its affiliated journal, Young China (Shaonian Zhongguo). In 1924, when Li Jieren returned to China from France, he declined an offer to teach at Southeastern University in Nanjing; he did not want to work with the Xueheng group of scholars who dominated its faculty. Li considered them to be conservative scholars in opposition to the May Fourth spirit.66 But

64 Ibid., p. 73. 65 Li Jieren, “ ‘Wusi’ zhuiyi Wang Guangqi,” p. 89. Li made the remark in 1950, when he wrote a memoir to pay tribute to Wang Guangqi, a musicologist, intellectual, and fellow Sichuanese who took an active role in spreading progressive ideas in provincial Chengdu. 66 See Li Jieren’s autobiography, written in 1956, in Li Jieren xuanji, 1: 6. Introduction 21 his own regionalist bent—as seen in his literary and political activities in Chengdu—separated him from his May Fourth peers and their literary groups and societies based in Beijing or Shanghai. Li seldom stepped into the Beijing or Shanghai literary circles to participate in their cultural politics. Li Jieren always wanted to be a truly unencumbered writer—in his own words, a ‘freelance writer’—to engage in a literary practice of both individual expression and social criticism free of any social, economic, and political constraints. The commitment to ‘freelance writing,’ he told his daughter, “means (that) I don’t want to become an official or accumulate money and become wealthy. When I want to write, I write. When I want to read, I read.”67 The young author seems to have been fascinated by the efficacy of language to engage social reality without being much aware of the crisis of representation in times of political stress. After returning to Chengdu, he refused to work for local warlords by taking a post in the political sphere. Instead, he worked as a translator, newspaper editor, journalist, and essayist. He used a pen name (Lao Lan) to write satirical pieces and social criticism for local newspapers. He tried to maintain his independence from the militarists and speak out for the interests of the local society. His oppositional stance irritated one powerful figure who ordered the local newspaper shut down and had Li and his colleagues placed in jail. Li Jieren’s maiden publication, a short story titled “Amusement Park” (“Youyuan hui”), appeared in the Morning Bell Daily (Chenzhong bao) in 1912. As an ardent follower of New Literature, he experimented in writing new vernacular short stories from 1912 to 1918. These early publications are no longer extant as many of Sichuan’s printed materials were lost during the tumultuous warlord period of the 1910s and 1920s. His extant short stories were written between 1924 and 1925. They tell of country fellows, local bullies, brigade commanders, and concubines in rural society. Their literary technique and narrative style bear the imprint of late Qing vernacular fiction, especially its loose structure and narrative tone.68 As a critic notes, “Such a style, like that of Zhang Henshui, was out of date in the eyes of an intellectual audience [oriented] towards Western culture in those years.”69 Apparently, Li’s belated discovery of his talents in the genre of the long novel and historical fiction was reinforced by his exposure to nineteenth-century French realism.

67 Li Mei, “Reminiscences of My Father,” p. 72. 68 These short stories are collected in The Good Family (Haorenjia), published in 1947 by Zhonghua shuju in Shanghai. Recently reprinted in Li Jieren quanji, vol. 6. 69 Ma Sen, rev. of The Good Family, pp. 99–101. 22 CHAPTER 1

Li Jieren’s multiple commitments to practical business and entrepreneurship also seem rather contradictory to the May Fourth perspective of elite intellectuals. Possibly the cultural industries and literary business could not sustain the writer’s livelihood, in addition to the constant political pressures threatening his life. His wife had culinary talent, and the couple once opened a restaurant in Chengdu to earn a living for the family. He may have had ideal- istic motives as well. Li considered economic and technological developments to constitute an important tool for place-building and modernization of the countryside. He had a passion to be an industrialist and hoped to contribute to his native place by running an industry. His initiation of local enterprises evinced the Qing reformers’ mission to ‘save the country through industry’ (shiye jiuguo). In the 1930s, Li worked with Lu Zuofu in running the Minsheng Shipping Company in Chongqing. The shipping company renovated local steamships to navigate the Yangzi River so as to improve steam traffic between Sichuan and the outside world.70 Li also helped establish a factory in Yaoshan to produce paper for local people. He took up an administrative position in both enterprises, apparently without much success. Such mixed commitments to literature and public affairs would make great sense for an engaged member of the local elite like Li Jieren. His work always embraced the moral duty of literary enlightenment and industrial modernization. But for conventional literary historians, Li’s literary achievement is too ‘amateurish’ and his intellectual profile too ‘regional.’ It is difficult to properly place Li in the accepted literary taxonomies, be they conservative or progressive, traditionalist or modernistic. His working life reveals very diverse engagements; he was a different type of a modern literatus with local characteristics, being a self-styled entrepreneur, a connoisseur of Sichuan culture, a scholar of classical painting and arts, a journalist and public intellectual, and above all, a celebrated Sichuan writer and historical novelist. Unable to make fiction writing a sustainable means of earning a living, Li Jieren was always torn between literature and politics. The writing of The Great Wave was aborted in 1937 when Li took a leading role in the national salvation movement following the outbreak the Sino-Japanese War. His antipathy toward Guomindang rule was evident in his full-length novel, Dance of the Heavenly Devils (Tianmo wu, 1948), a sardonic political fiction exposing the activities of secret agents and the corruption of the Nationalist government in Chongqing during the war years. Li was critical of the Nationalist regime just as he had hated the equally corrupt Qing and Republican governments. Although Li was sympathetic to leftist writers and Communist officials due to his cooperation

70 Zhang Qi, “Lun Li Jieren de shiye sixiang yu Minsheng Gongsi.” Introduction 23 with them in the anti-Japanese cause, he remained a non-Communist writer throughout his life. As a member of the cultural elite in Chengdu, however, Li Jieren had to actively respond to the political and social changes in post-1949 Sichuan. Because of his widespread social networks and influence in Sichuan and particularly in Chengdu, Li was persuaded by the Communist Party to take up the position of vice-mayor in 1950. Such integration of members of the local elite into administration was a common Party tactic to secure the hearts and minds of the local people during regime transition. Li had turned down the position the first time it was offered, but finally accepted, and held this office until his death. He believed that there were decent people in the Communist Party, as he told his daughter, and he had faith that the Party would support his writing.71 This was surely another great paradox in the life of Li, who wished to maintain his autonomy in creative writing without the intervention of politics. Fate instead made the author an active historical actor in the local political sphere. His rewriting of The Great Wave became a never-ending process in his bitter negotiations with party ideologues over the meaning of the past.

Politics of Memory

During the anti-Rightist movement of the late 1950s, Li Jieren ran into deep trouble when he got involved in the controversy surrounding the poems of Liushahe (Yu Xuntan, 1931–), a young Sichuanese poet. In January 1957 Liushahe wrote a group of prose poems entitled “Pieces on Plants” (“Caomu pian”), which were published in the poetry magazine Star (Xing Xing). Smacking of the youthful quest for freedom and independence, the poems were immediately condemned for delivering the themes of individualism and love. Some critics found fault in the haughty tone of the verses, which they perceived as suggesting an implicit contempt for the power of the cultural bureaucracy. Soon Liushahe was labeled a ‘rightist’ and charged with the intention of cast- ing blame on the Communist Party and revolutionary comrades.72 This tumult in remote Sichuan province turned out to be but a ripple of a huge wave nationwide. Thousands of intellectuals and writers who spoke out during the ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement of 1956 to 1957 were also branded as ‘rightists’ and purged in ‘rectification’ movements. At the onset of the political

71 Li Mei, “Reminiscences of My Father,” pp. 81–82. 72 Liushahe suffered humiliation on account of his ‘rightist’ label for two decades, until he was rehabilitated in 1978. See Liushahe, Liushahe shiji. 24 CHAPTER 1 maelstrom, Li Jieren spoke out publicly in defense of Liushahe and the creative freedom of writers. Yet Li was soon to discover that his outspokenness had put him into a difficult situation, and his close friends persuaded him to compromise by writing a speech of self-criticism so as to avoid any more trouble brought by the oppressive literary politics.73 Public and political activities severely intervened into the writer’s literary creativity and private world in his later life. From July 1950 to December 1962 Li Jieren was Chengdu’s vice-mayor in charge of culture, education, and urban construction. During the early 1950s, Li committed himself to practical muni cipal affairs, participating in rebuilding his home city. A significant writer of ‘native soil’ literature, Li wanted to turn his energies to the causes of concrete social transformation and urban renovation under the new socialist regime. It was right after the anti-Rightist movement that the writer ostensibly withdrew from public life and threw himself into rewriting The Great Wave, which he had not finished by the time of his death in 1962. The double commitments of being a government official and an engaged writer constituted a complex life and resulted in his ceaseless toil of rewriting. The writer remarked on how he came to the decision to rewrite in 1954 when the publisher appealed to him:

In 1954, I received a letter from the People’s Literature Publishing House (Renmin wenxue chubanshe). With courtesy they asked me to reprint The Great Wave and rewrite the novel. I was greatly surprised. I had been reluctant to talk about The Great Wave in the past. The publisher’s appeal to revise my work encouraged an amateur writer like me to recommit to literary writing. But when I browsed through my old works, I sweated and blushed. There was nothing for it; they’d got to be rewritten. The task of rewriting the novels demanded a total rethinking of the sequence of events, cause, and effect.74

In composing the original trilogy, Li Jieren worked remarkably quickly. Ripples on Dead Water took him about twenty days, and Before the Tempest about one month. He took an actual writing time of three months to finish the three volumes of The Great Wave between 1936 and 1937. Driven by acute financial need,

73 Li Jieren had to make a public speech of self-denigration in August 1957. According to Li Shihua (Li’s granddaughter), Li’s son actually ghostwrote the speech for him, titled “I Have Come to the Brink of the Quagmire” (“Wo yi zoudaole nikeng de bianyuan shangle”). My interview with Li Shihua in 2009. 74 Li Jieren, “Tan chuangzuo jingyan,” p. 542. Introduction 25

Li had to finish in time to obtain advanced royalties. Leaving this aside, the writer’s resourceful memory, great creative impulse, and imaginative faculty were also credited for his speedy output. Yet, he could not have had plentiful historical materials at hand, nor did he conduct any interviews about the past events in the course of writing.75 The early version of the trilogy was based primarily on his personal remembrances, recollected historical experiences, and fictional imagination. It achieved less in the way of documenting the revolutionary events than in inscribing the images of Chengdu as the ‘place of memory’ where the local past and traditions intersect with macrohistory. The revision of Ripples on Dead Water and Before the Tempest posed little difficulty. The former had only minor changes, and the latter underwent some small degree of textual alteration. Neither novel dealt with the momentous revolutionary events in Chengdu in 1911, which the author faced as a daunting challenge in rewriting The Great Wave. As the revision of the novel began, Li Jieren had to throw away two substantially completed drafts separately in 1954 and 1955 before he felt he had gotten it right.76 The original version of The Great Wave had some 500,000 words. Li rewrote it as an entirely different novel from 1956 until he died in 1962. The later version, still unfinished, had another 900,000 words. The author had planned to write 300,000 words more to finish the whole rewriting project. For the trilogy alone, Li had written about two million words in his two attempts. The Great Wave underwent such dramatic textual alterations that it is likely no other single work in modern Chinese literature of comparably massive scale was rewritten to so radical an extent by a single author.77 Much of the intellectual history of Communist China has documented intellectuals’ anguish and oppression under Maoism.78 Largely concentrating on the suppression of intellectual thought in national politics, these studies

75 According to Zhang Yiqi, Li Jieren began writing The Great Wave in early 1936. He finished the first volume in just over nineteen days, the second in twenty days, and the last volume in two months. The writer was entirely devoted to composing the historical trilogy in this period, and accomplished each book all in one go. See Zhang Yiqi, “Dabo de shiqing xushi yu lishi xushi,” p. 33. 76 Li Jieren, “Tan chuangzuo jingyan,” p. 543. 77 Among modern Chinese writers, Zhang Ailing is noted for rewriting her own works and cross-writing them in Chinese and English. A well-known example is her novella The Golden Cangue (Jinsuo ji, 1943), which she translated and rewrote into English as The Rouge of the North (1967). See David Der-wei Wang, Foreword to The Rouge of the North, pp. vii–xxx. 78 The rectification movement was a subsequent development of Mao Zedong’s 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum to coerce writers to surrender their independence. See Fokkema, Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence, 1956–1960; Goldman et al., eds., China’s 26 CHAPTER 1 have offered little in the way of literary histories or more nuanced pictures of individual writers as active agents, who had to make personal choices and who responded variously to the extremities of regime change after 1949. Liberal littérateurs like Feng Zhi (1905–93), Shen Congwen, Xiao Qian (1910–99), and Zhang Ailing, who had been independent of both the Nationalist government and the Communist Party, were forced to face new cultural and political guide- lines imposed by the new regime. Some writers had to abandon their former literary creativity; some dramatically changed their professional practice; in one way or another all were alienated from their pre-1949 literary practices.79 Rewriting one’s own past works was an important cultural practice in the early PRC period. Under changing political circumstances, publishers began to select and reprint major works by New Literature authors such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu (1896–1945), Ba Jin, Lao She (1899–1966), Ding Ling (1904–86), and Zhang Tianyi (1906–85). Writers and playwrights including Mao Dun, Guo Moruo, Cao Yu (1910–96), Yang Hansheng (1902–93), and Shi Tuo modified their pre-1949 literary texts to fit into the new canon of socialist literature.80 This cultural scenario may be comparable with the Soviet experience of ‘epic revisionism,’ whereby Soviet authors rewrote the narratives of well-known stories and personalities under the doctrine of socialist realism.81 For the majority of New Literature writers, however, their artistic lives were brutally brought to a close in the 1950s, and their later writings never lived up to the standards of heightened creativity and criticality exhibited in their past work. These writers became ever more self-conscious of the ‘bourgeois’ mentality and ideological backwardness of their ‘old works,’ which, they thought, had failed to catch up to the zeitgeist of historical materialism and the revolutionary tenor of the new socialist stage. Lao She, for one, dared not “reread the work that was published before liberation.” Mao Dun devalued his revolutionary novel, Eclipse (Shi, 1927–28), as saying, “There were mistakes

Intellectuals and the State. For a study of the Hu Feng incident in the mid-1950s and Lu Ling’s tragic persecution, see Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature. 79 On the politics of writing in the early PRC period, see C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, chap. 13 (“Conformity, Defiance, and Achievement”), pp. 291–349. For recent studies of the experience of liberal writers in the early PRC, see Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face; Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation.” 80 For the canonization of May Fourth literature and leftist writings of the 1930s in the PRC during the 1950s, see Chen Gailing, Chongjian Xinwenxue shi zhixu. For case studies of literary revisionism of individual writers, see Jin Hongyu, Xinwenxue de banben piping. For a study of Ba Jin’s revision of Family, see Fisac, “Anything at Variance with It Must Be Revised Accordingly,” pp. 131–47. 81 Platt and Brandenberger, Epic Revisionism. Introduction 27 in observations and analyses of the contemporary revolutionary situation,” and the “ ‘pessimistic, hopeless’ mood at the time of writing caused [me] to neglect the existence and necessary development of ‘characterizations of the positive type’.”82 Despite remolding of their works and growing familiarity with the new socialist literary norms, these writers still found it impossible to fully “master the new objects of their literary expression, grasp the new artistic methods, and create works that would have a clear conscience when faced with the new age.”83 Rarely, it seems, has a literary rewrite been more radical than that of The Great Wave. Since the millennium local scholars in Chengdu have recovered historical materials and personal memoirs about Li Jieren to throw light on the author’s political and literary entanglements and his ordeal of historical retell- ings in Communist China.84 The conventional biographical approach primarily has emphasized how politics and institutional ideology affected the writer’s creativity. It fails to shed new light on the problematic of place-writing as an alternative form of Communist national historiography. Lei Bing argues that the prime motive for Li Jieren to rewrite his novels was political. He jumps to the easy conclusion that Li was pressured to reformulate his old works to embrace the Marxist-Leninist teleology and revolutionary rhetoric. He takes Li’s rewriting as evidence that the author painfully underwent an intellectual conversion in remodeling his work in alliance with prevalent Party doctrines. The writer therefore felt deeply worried and embarrassed, as he ‘sweated’ and ‘blushed’ over his old works, which looked ‘backward’ and did not fit in with the revolutionary tenor of the time. Li was eager to transform his ‘old’ mindset and integrate himself into the ‘new’ society.85 Lei’s plainly ideological view stresses the overpowering nature of the state apparatus that exerted ideological control over the creative mind. His

82 Hong, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, p. 35. 83 Ibid., p. 35. 84 I am indebted to Zhang Yiqi and Zeng Zhizhong for offering me the collected issues of Chengdu wenyi (2006–7), which contains the latest studies of Li Jieren’s later life. For the new discovery of Li’s personal correspondence in Communist China, see Wang Jialing, ed., Li Jieren wannian shuxinji, and Li Jieren wannian shuxinji: zengbu ben 1950–1962. 85 Lei Bing believes that Li Jieren showed an earnest attempt to learn and accept Marxism by regularly reading the People’s Daily (Renmin ribao) and leading Party journals like Red Flag (Hongqi). Lei claims that Li gave the first draft of his rewrite of The Great Wave to his son, a Communist cadre who had been trained in Yan’an, to read. His son turned it down and urged his father to enforce the idea of Marxist historical materialism in his renewed writings. Li decided to throw this early draft away and started anew. See his “Gaihang de zuojia” (2008). 28 CHAPTER 1 approach brutally strips the will and self-assertion from writers, rendering them as merely the ‘cog and screw’ of the Party-steered revolutionary machin- ery, and effaces the intrinsic nuances of literary narratives.86 Such a simplistic view suggests that the writer must have surrendered to official historiography and Party-sanctioned ideologies in recomposing his literary narratives. Many PRC writers may indeed have written with a political orthodoxy in mind in the heightened political climate. But it does not mean that we should narrowly regard authors as passive receivers who reproduced in a direct way the codes of nation building and history making sanctioned by Communist theoreticians. We should never take a writer’s public statements at face value, and naively use an extra-textual discourse or political lens to iron out textual intricacies in his works. Lei’s insistence on the political scenario explains away the issues confronting Li Jieren’s rewriting of the historical novel, namely, the entangled conflicts between truth-telling in historiography and imagination in narratology. As a form of narrative art, no history writing can be immune to its own literary qualities and cultural dependencies. Hayden White has controversially declared that all historiographical writing is nothing more than “modes of emplotment” of events.87 But the inherent literariness does not eliminate the specificity of historical texts or the ontological status of historical occurrences. All historical writings are perpetually subject to question and revision as new materials are discovered that could renew our knowledge and perceptions of past reality. The challenge for historians consists in reconstructing the elusive world of everyday life and the invisible lives of humble, everyday people in the past that political history has consistently disregarded. I see Li Jieren as wrestling with similar cognitive and aesthetic imperatives in his effort to drastically rewrite The Great Wave. Li had to come to terms with his personal experience of the events and that of others as he engaged in oral interviews and meticulous research. Drawing from his own memory and sup- plemented by new factual findings, the novelist tried to recompose a sophisticated vision of historical events as constituted of the myriad perceptions of various players. The principles of quotidian realism and historical credibility guided the author in his quest for a truthful depiction of the city and people

86 Rudolf Wagner, “The Cog and the Scout,” p. 336. 87 Hayden White argues that nineteenth-century European historiography was politically driven and typically grounded in one of the four principal literary tropes: metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, or irony. See his Metahistory, pp. 1–42. Introduction 29 in the course of revolutionary change.88 In so doing, Li also defended his writing mission against the political and aesthetic doctrines of socialist realism in resuscitating the place with its broadly based social-cultural history. This study takes the old and new versions of The Great Wave as engendering ‘intertextual’ exchanges and tensions—the author was torn between the wish to compose a fictional history of the common people from below and the grandiose ambition to present a form of epic narrative of military action and violent clashes. I place Li Jieren’s fictional revisionism as a persistent move to transcribe a ‘perfect’ version of history and as part of his obsessive ambition to craft a holistic picture of a bygone era. The problem lies in how the novelist should mediate between the contradictory demands of historical accuracy, subjective memories, personal biases, and imaginary constructs in his multiple capacities as Sichuan’s storyteller, ethnographer, and historian. Lengthy rewriting of one’s own work may not be an aberration in the practice of historical novelists. Tolstoy is known for revising War and Peace (1865–69) seven times in the space of six years. Tolstoy’s involvement with contemporary intellectual debates resulted in the gradual elevation of the novel from domestic chronicle to historical epic as new ideas affected the author and changed the literary form at various times.89 In traditional Chinese historiography, the historian’s achievement in working out a grand historical oeuvre itself constitutes a ‘historic fact’ of paramount importance by changing the way his successors might look at the past. A salient example is Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian in which the historian set out to inquire about past deeds and launch historical criticism.90 From an anthropological perspective, the cultural practice of producing a novel is as much reflective as ‘performative,’ for a work of historical fiction can be considered as an imaginative artifact as

88 Li’s revision of The Great Wave has less to do with political compromise than with the writer’s intention to approximate a truthful picture of the past. See Zhang Zhongliang, Ershi shiji sansishi niandai Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi, p. 75, n. 2. 89 Any, Boris Eikhenbaum, pp. 122–23. Zhang Ailing, in her “Ziji de wenzhang,” cites Tolstoy’s example and shows how the novelist succeeded in making War and Peace an immortal classic after seven revisions by improving the story plots. Viktor Shklovsky notes, “The draft of War and Peace has over 5,000 pages and the handwriting is very small. But apart from that, Tolstoy was constantly rewriting—he would go so far as to destroy parts that had already been set in type and start all over again, from the very beginning . . . it’s not just the refinement of style, not the reworking of characters, it’s an examination of the actual times, the purpose of which is to see the world as if anew.” See his Energy of Delusion, p. 209. 90 Ying-shih Yu, “Reflections on Chinese Historical Thinking,” p. 157; see also his “Shixue, shijia yu shidai,” 1: 92. 30 CHAPTER 1 well as a ‘historical fact’ for parties and readers with vested interests who are concerned to digest, evaluate, and critique.91 Beyond these problematics, the importance of historical writing as a form of public memory and the nature of the historical writer’s quest for authority in local public culture are worth notice. For instance, in 1938, immediately after the publication of The Great Wave, Zhou Shanpei (1875–1958), a high Qing official who had served in the Sichuan government between 1902 and 1912, published his own memoir of the revolutionary events to protest against some of the claims in The Great Wave, in which Zhou figured.92 Such debate over ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ always invokes controversy and counter responses from concerned readers. In a comparative context, European historical novels assumed important cognitive functions in the community; for example, Walter Scott’s (1771–1832) works often became the focus of discussion of that period in Scottish history. As Ann Rigney claims, the reading public does “not rest content with merely ‘imperfect history.’ They may come to the reading of the novel already armed with information that contradicts what is presented in the narrative, with a general view of events that is incompatible with the interpretation being offered.”93 The historical novel’s penchant for untruth stimulates reader participation in the communal project to shed light on the past. The idea of preserving local memories by means of the historical novel allows us to comprehend Li Jieren’s urge to have the trilogy written and reprinted in the new socialist literary environment. For the native writer, the emplotment of truth and fiction in historical novels is not merely an epistemological game of the intellect or a postmodern feat of questioning the legitimacy of history. The act of historical storytelling serves to construct knowledge of the past for communal recognition and remembrance. By the 1950s, Li might have realized that the 1911 events he was narrativizing in literary fiction were possibly slip- ping from the collective memory.94 His rewriting project in New China thus can be seen as the only way to save his historical novels with their trenchant local colors from being totally forgotten.

91 Maza, “Stories in History.” 92 Zhou Shanpei, “Xinhai Sichuan shibian zhi wo.” 93 Rigney, Imperfect Histories, p. 55. 94 Tan Xingguo, who was educated in post-1949 Chengdu, told me that Li Jieren’s literary fictions, including his miscellaneous short fictions, had never been adopted for the school curricula. A devotee and expert of Li Jieren studies, Tan only came to know Li’s works after he entered the university. Personal interview with Tan Xingguo in 2007. Introduction 31

Engaging in bold literary revision set Li Jieren apart from many senior writers who tended to remain inactive in this period. Besides, Li faced fierce competition from younger writers adept at an emergent fictional taxonomy, the ‘revolutionary historical novels’ (geming lishi xiaoshuo) that were in vogue from the 1940s and through the 1960s.95 Typical of the genre were Communist war narratives and land-reform novels that contributed to the remaking of national history in intricate spatial and temporal terms.96 Du Pengcheng’s (1921–91) Guarding Yan’an (Baowei Yan’an, 1954), Wu Qiang’s (1910–?) Red Sun (Hongri, 1957), and Qu Bo’s (1923–?) Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan, 1959) portrayed the crusade of larger-than-life heroic figures or noble soldiers to build a new nation, and emplotted the eventual victory of the Communist forces. The land-reform novels presented desperate peasants overthrowing local despots led by the Communist land and property redistribution movement. Outstanding examples include Zhao Shuli’s (1906–70) Changes in Li Village (Lijiazhuang de bianqian, 1946), Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang, 1949), and Zhou Libo’s (1908–79) Hurricane (Baofeng zhouyu, 1949). These stories valorized the ways farmers bring down the traditional rural system as much as they revealed the violence and chaos of the reform process. The genre of revolutionary historical novels addressed the fixed subject matter of the Communist-inspired revolutionary experience and the ideologies of class struggle and historical evolution.97 Historical fiction of this period was impelled by a political drive to authenticate Communist historiography and hagiography.98 The novelization of history dictated the writing of foundational stories about the rise of the Communist revolutionaries battling against the Nationalist power and Japanese aggression. The Marxist vision of contemporary history marked a return of the novel to “the Chinese narrative tradition in which historiography served as the central model of narration.”99 Communist

95 Huang Ziping, Geming, lishi, xiaoshuo, pp. 21–33. According to Huang, the ‘revolutionary historical novel’ refers to literature written after Mao Zedong’s 1942 Yan’an Talks, and which dealt with the historical period between 1921 (establishment of the Chinese Communist Party) and 1949 (establishment of the People’s Republic of China). 96 On Communist literature of this period, see the special issue of The China Quarterly, no. 13 (1963), especially Chi Li, “Communist War Stories,” and T.A. Hsia, “Heroes and Hero-Worship in Chinese Communist Fiction.” For a book-length study, see Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China. 97 Hong, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, pp. 122–23. For an account of revolutionary historical fiction in this period, see pp. 120–42. 98 David Der-wei Wang, “Reinventing National History,” pp. 39–64. 99 Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, p. 139. 32 CHAPTER 1 revolutionary fiction registered the desire to instruct the reader to throw away the past and look ahead to the bright future.100 Its mythical storytelling construction always prefigured the predetermined victory of the future over the past. Already an old writer in the 1950s, Li Jieren apparently faced an identity crisis resulting from anxiety and uncertainty about his reputation as a writer. Personal pride and the sense of prestige were inevitably involved as the author felt the pressure of composing his novels to compete with the popular revolutionary novels emerging in the socialist marketplace.101 Li sometimes aired his frustrations at the insufficient print runs of The Great Wave. Li even compared himself with Ba Jin, his younger Sichuanese peer and a famous writer who enjoyed much wider fame in the mainland’s literary circles. The realization that his past historical novels were little read might have irked him at times. But Li would still have believed that the true merits of literary works were mea- sured by their artistry and realism but not by their short-term popularity. Sha Ting’s (1904–92) diary recorded Li Jieren’s passing comments on contemporary PRC writers and their works. Li expressed disappointment at Qu Bo’s Tracks in the Snowy Forest, belittling the novel’s pursuit of astonishing plots at the expense of fidelity to reality.102 But he highly regarded Yang Mo’s (1914–95) Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge, 1958) and Luo Guangbin (1924–67) and Yang Yiyan’s (1925–?) Red Crag (Hongyan, 1961), possibly two of the most widely read novels in the early decades of the PRC.103 These two ‘Red Classics’ demonstrate the practice of novelistic rewriting as an institutional imaginary in the socialist literary system of Communist China. In either case, no finalized version of the past could ever be reached without passing through the state-maneuvered mechanism of constant comments, criticisms, and revitalizations.104 In a

100 Huang Ziping claims that Chinese revolutionary fiction employs the narrative power of traditional Chinese novels such as The Water Margin to emplot a temporal progression from chaos to order, from catastrophic beginnings to ultimate resolution. See Huang, Geming, lishi, xiaoshuo, pp. 25–26. 101 My understanding of Li Jieren’s identity crisis as writer and vice-mayor is indebted to Lei Bing’s doctoral thesis, “Gaihang de zuojia” (2004). Perry Link points out that Ba Jin got the highest remuneration as a writer in the prevailing pay scale. See Link, The Uses of Literature, pp. 131–32. 102 See Sha Ting’s diary entry on 17 March 1962, selected in Li Jieren yanjiu 2007, pp. 226–27. 103 Perry Link indicates that Song of Youth and Red Crag were the two most popular novels of the years between 1949 and 1965, followed by Zhou Libo’s Hurricane and Yao Xueyin’s Li Zicheng. See Link, The Uses of Literature, pp. 250, 315. 104 Song of Youth, an account of the political awakening of a heroine caught up in the anti- Japanese and anti-Nationalist student movement of the 1930s, held great attraction Introduction 33 different fashion, Li might just have considered the two novels as cherished realist fictions mixing historical memories with imaginary narratives. Li Jieren’s sagas about Sichuan social life around the time of the 1911 Revolution departed from the sanctioned subject of Communist revolutionary rhetoric, from its progressive temporality, and from its ideological sche- mas. This is shown by the author’s constant doubts about and even resistance against the essential narrative seductions invested in popular Communist novels as a result of the dogmatism of literature during the seventeen years between 1949 and 1966. As most Maoist literary writings were only allowed to partake of Communist historiography and hagiography, authors set out to rewrite the ‘sites of memory’ in modern China by commemorating Yan’an and the eruptive rural spaces as the sacred loci of national history.105 A biased literary history burdened with an array of state-initiated literary-historical narratives thus has precluded Li’s trilogy from our appraisal, and erased Chengdu from critical remembrance in modern Chinese historiographical and literary portrayals. In cultural geography, place and memory are inevitably intertwined. Place is where we absorb our emotional experience of the past. The affective bond between people and place is fundamental to the creation of a sense of place. In an idealized sense, the notion of ‘place-memory’ refers to “the ability of place to make the past come to life in the present and thus contribute to the production and reproduction of social memory.” For the most part, however, “places

for students and young urban readers. A year after the publication of the novel, Yang Mo received hostile criticism of the novel’s heroine (Lin Daojing) for betraying ‘petit- bourgeois’ feelings. The author published a revised edition in 1960, strengthening the heroine’s revolutionary character and deleting her bourgeois personality traits. The composition of Red Crag exemplifies the modes of collaborative authorship and organized literary production. Red Crag features underground espionage battles of Communist revolutionaries who were tortured in the Nationalist prison in Chongqing. The accredited authors of the novel took part in the events and intelligence activities described in the novel. They first collected oral accounts and interview reports from survivors and published Immortality amid the Roaring Flames (Liehuo zhong yongsheng) in 1956. Then they went on to rework the memoir as a novel, revising the drafts several times by collaborat- ing with editors and readers in organized seminars until their novel took on “an elevated tone, a bright shading” with “loftier, mightier” characters so as to “achieve a unitary ideological goal.” See Hong, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, p. 129. For a discussion of the criticisms and revisions of Red Crag and Song and Youth, see pp. 127–30, 135–39. 105 Denton, “Yan’an as a Site of Memory in Socialist and Postsocialist China”; Matten, “History, Identity, and Memory in Modern China.” 34 CHAPTER 1 of memory serve to commemorate the winners of history.”106 Mnemonic writing can be exercised as political power when it is used by the regime for state building or by individuals and social groups as a means of social critique.107 The conventional division in which memory is immanent to lived experiences of the past and history searches for certainties about substantive realities does not do full justice to ‘the politics of memory’ regarding the fluid interconnections of mnemonic and historical perspectives on the past. Memoro-politics in literary and cultural practice is always at risk as diverse forms of memory, knowledge, and interpretations of historical events coexist and vie to become dominant statist narratives. One of the main reasons why Li Jieren has been ignored by mainstream Chinese critics lies in his powerful representation of the regionalist movement stirred up by the Sichuan Railroad Company and local political elites against both the Qing court and the European powers. Given that the sense of place is a function of time and historical change, Li’s fictional representations delineate the shifting meanings of Sichuan-Chengdu from the late Qing to the Republican periods, meanings that have simply eluded the attention of literary scholars and cultural historians. Li’s later revisions of his novels in the new regime have further complicated the sense of place and place-memory when affective and ideological claims strive to represent the locality. In explicating the inseparability of collective memory and cultural identity of social groups, Maurice Halbwachs famously claims that an individual’s recollection of the past is intimately linked to the historical consciousness of one’s own community. Socially grounded by nature and transindividualistic in function, collective memories live beyond any individual’s lifespan and can pass on within the same social group from one generation to the next.108 It is because of the social transmission of memory and the concomitant fear of forgetting that we better comprehend the author’s persistent retelling of the local past and the complex encodings of events in the form of historical fiction. Such fiction may even inspire the search for lost local histories beyond the novel’s scope.109

106 Cresswell, Place, p. 87. For the concept of place in human geography, see Casey, Remembering; Tuan, Space and Place. 107 For a critique of national memory as history, see Wachtel, “Introduction”; Olick et al., “Introduction.” 108 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, pp. 50–51. For an explanation of Halbwachs’s idea of social memory, see Connerton, How Societies Remember, pp. 6–40. 109 At the centennial of the 1911 Revolution, there was a surge of books commemorating the railroad dispute and popular protests in Sichuan. See Zeng Shaomin, Manhua Sichuan Introduction 35

An isolated provincial, Li Jieren kept on reworking his stories on epic scales, and wrangled for an autonomous space of creative freedom in the face of political orthodoxy and ideological manipulation. His fictional writings are less about the ‘revolution’ than about the remembrance of the past with the ‘regional place’ as the central character. The dynamics of textuality, historicity, and memorialization makes his trilogy an important missing link to the continuing project of modern Chinese literary revisionism, in which contemporary authors of place-writing have sought to deconstruct historiographical master narratives of the Maoist period. Indicating a spatial turn as a new narrative strategy in post-1980s Chinese fictions, Howard Choy claims, “Writers are now seeking a new historical aura by evoking the feel of place and local community.”110 Writing alone and being out of tune with the notions of nationhood and revolutionary teleology in his time, Li would have been able to hear the distant echo of his regionalist successors and modern writers, who can assert more creative freedom in their fictional works to reappropriate the past under the premises of vernacular memory, quotidian life, personal stories, and family histories.111 In what sense can the novel serve as a mnemonic genre? This study ponders the legacy of Li Jieren’s creativity and his place-bound novels and asks whether his works continue to play a vital role as a public medium for framing disparate local pasts or even awakening eroded memories in later generations. Yet, the time-honored idea of historical fiction as a verbal monument for preserving memories of the past is violently disrupted by the unstable transformation and transmission of the fictional-historical texts in the course of time. Through his painful process of rewriting local memories and histories, the author brings to light the fictional function of historiography as well as its epistemological instability vis-à-vis the vicissitudes of political change. The evolving historical novels thus challenge us to reassess the dynamic textuality and factuality of novelistic discourse, and confront the inherently pluralist sense of historical meaning.

baolu yundong; Zhang Yongjiu, Geming daodi shi ganma?; Zheng, Sichuan baolu yundong lishi zhenxiang; Xian and Zhang, Baolu fengchao. 110 Choy, Remapping the Past, p. 10. 111 For a discussion of literary revisions of dominant historiography in narrative works after 1970, see Choy, Remapping the Past, pp. 1–15; Qingxin Lin, Brushing History Against the Grain, pp. 1–25. Andrew Stuckey argues that modern Chinese narratives have engaged in a historical consciousness that reappropriates fragments of the past into new configurations of the historical present. See his Old Stories Retold, pp. 147–51. 36 CHAPTER 1

The struggle of rewriting also questions the commensurability between history, memory, and fiction, that is, fiction’s ability to fully testify to historical events. The double versions of the revolutionary novel constitute the condition of the ‘fluid texts’ in all their textual inconsistencies and capricious historical representations in fictional rewriting.112 Written by the same author on the same historical event across different moments, The Great Wave offers an alternative case of ‘meta-historical’ narration. The fact that the writer goes about revisiting the traumatic events and revising his previous literary representations under changing political circumstances comments tellingly on the crisis of fictional-historical writing in recollecting images and knowledge of the past, when the author is unwilling and also unable to change his novel of local memory into a work of national allegory. The politics of personal memory is “a power struggle built around knowledge, or claims of knowledge. It takes for granted that a certain sort of knowledge is possible.”113 The stakes of communal memories and representations “are always the capacity of the groups or the individuals to ensure recognition of their identity.”114 The compulsion to rewrite historical events suggests a crisis of representation in which the fictional texts inherently testify against macrohistory, which itself presumes a progressive teleology.115 By rescuing Li Jieren’s singular ordeal of writing Chengdu, involving constant renegotiations between local experience, national ideology, and historical knowledge, the present study explores the eternal tensions between traumatic memory, fiction, and historiography as they simultaneously contend for representational authority in modern Chinese contexts.

The Novel as the Place of Memory

My study aims to reveal the repression of an alternative literary practice of extreme regional and local variation characterized by Li Jieren’s regional- historical writings in the margins of May Fourth’s progressive interpretive paradigms and the Communist socialist scheme of revolutionary politics. It calls for new strategies to decipher spatiality in literature and chart differently cartographical visions and more nuanced developments of literary history

112 I borrow the concept of textual criticism from Bryant, The Fluid Text. 113 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, p. 211. 114 Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, p. 5. 115 On the problem of the Chinese cultural imagination, see Braester, Witness Against History; Ban Wang, “Memory and History in Globalization.” Introduction 37 derived from a discontinuous geography and the situational complexity of a given place. How might place-based ties affect a writer’s mentality, perceived cultural inheritance, creative agency, and choice of literary form? Chapter 2 examines Li Jieren’s idea of the roman-fleuve and offers a closed reading of Ripples on Dead Water. By crisscrossing historical time and the locality, the geo-historical discourse in Ripples creates a new form of historical fiction in which a peripheral hometown is deployed to stand in for the site of nationness. Perceptive influences of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which Li Jieren translated in 1925, can be seen in his Ripples on Dead Water. But the author practices a critical nativ- ism to subvert the European master codes of novel writing and adapt them to Sichuanese soil. Li’s impeccable documentation and naturalistic writing locate verisimilitude in the sphere of the ordinary and the domestic, meticulously tracing the toponymical references, movements of characters, and local details to evoke the cultural milieu of the place. It is the sphere of everyday life in the very fabric of rural existence that sets the stage for the encounter between the old and new, which in turn becomes far more significant than the larger claims of political events. The following chapters deal with the unstable nature of memory and representations of locality as they are subject to the unusual vicissitudes of historical writing in Chinese contexts. My analysis pinpoints the vital cultural meanings of geopoetic memories inscribed in literature—subjective voices, affections, feelings, aspirations, and frustrations—as past historical registers and humanistic perceptions of a place inseparable from the lived experiences of the people. Chapter 3 delves into the interlocking tensions between time, place, and memory as they are dramatically brought up in The Great Wave (the 1937 version). This chapter looks into the event of the ‘Chengdu massacre’ (7 September 1911) sparked by the railroad conflict in Sichuan, and reads it against the extant records of personal reminiscences, newspaper coverage, and foreign accounts. I examine the multiple narratives of the same ‘event’ contributing to a pluralistic sense of histories with differentiated temporalities and remembrances. Zooming in on Chengdu’s mass protests against the Qing government’s railway policy, The Great Wave is a remarkably carnivalized form of historical fiction. The geopoetics of The Great Wave inspires us to ask: How does the place become charged and responsive to the movements of modernity, macrohistory, and local history? Li Jieren’s novel gives a particular account of the slow, tortuous, and mediated passages of historical events into everyday urban life. I explore how the novelist uses mixed voices and heteroglossia to problematize an easy connection between traumatic events and the structures of everyday 38 CHAPTER 1 life. My analysis demonstrates how Li struggles to sustain his polyphonic social panorama, a randomized vision of events, and multifaceted local memories against the Maoist version of the revolution as the inevitable outcome of class struggle and mass revolt. The challenge for Li Jieren lies in how to present the momentous event itself, that is, how to tell stories that are historically grand and complex as well as locally intimate and mundane. Chapter 4 focuses on Li’s narration of Chengdu’s disparate communities with its emphasis on the thoughts and deeds of ordinary people and the symbolic meanings of lifeworlds and everyday social practices. Though an event such as the execution of a Red Lantern rebel (1902) in Before the Tempest can be taken as a marker of antiforeignism in macropolitics, my textual analysis shows how Li questions any event-centered historiographical discourse by restoring social memories of the place in his vernacular narrative. The novelist inscribes the memories of local events not according to a scheme of historical causality but as a series of random happenings in a place as the characters would have perceived them. I ask why and how the novelist renders local historical events as uncanny spectacles and estranged experiences that cannot be seamlessly integrated into the national macrohistory. Li’s multi-layered text therefore depicts rich mental pictures of the local participants and their hybridized perceptions of the historical happenings as revealed in their individual responses, public actions, and communal rituals. The multiple encoding of a chain of particular local and social events in the novelist’s excessive rewriting of them bespeaks the difficult context of creativity. The politics of memory in fictional rewriting entails broader issues of the writer’s compromise and resistance and the formation of new identities and political subjectivities. Chapters 5 and 6 provide contrastive readings of the two vastly different versions of The Great Wave from humanistic and geopoetic perspectives. By tracing the visible processes of evolution between the original and revised texts, and discerning the ideas of historical-fictional narration that informed and perplexed the writer, I stake out the moral risks and aesthetic choices the author took, and recover the textual dynamics between fiction and history in their pluralistic diversions. I attempt to read spatiality in literature and put literature back in geography. My reading underscores the narratological and ideological tensions that arise when the writer has to modify the fictional space of localities and everydayness into foundational stories and allegories of the collectivity. In his last years, the author strategized to make the novel a repository of contradictory narratives of both dominant memories and latent recollections Introduction 39 of the past. The original novel as the ‘place of memory’ of local pasts coexists in tension with the rewrite and its ‘politics of memory,’ which is about ideology and difference, about erasure and resistance of the past in reconstructing the meaning of events. In short, Li’s regional novels do little to extend the franchise of May Fourth political fiction or Communist national literature in re-imagining a new nation in the throes of revolution. Chapter 6 returns to the enmeshed relationships of geographical space, historical development, and human destiny. I examine the author’s 1963 painstaking reconstruction of the last days of Duan Fang (1861–1911) who journeyed to Chengdu in a last-ditch effort to quell the riots. Crosscutting his account with my own documentary reconstruction of contemporary views and cultural geography of the area, I discuss Duan Fang’s misadventure as exemplifying the novel’s underlying views of geography and violence, savagism and modernity in the territorial confinements of the Sichuan Basin and the upper Yangtze region. By cross-reading travelogues written by Westerners and missionaries about their obstructed journeys to western China via the Yangtze, I raise the crucial factors of geographical inaccessibility and Sichuan’s rugged terrain as constraining the region’s belated modernity as well as engendering the revolutionary movement, pondering the clashes of the longue durée of geological/ natural time with the shocking break of social/eventful time in the ‘tides of history.’ I also ask why Li Jieren chose to spend so much time on a despised and unrevolutionary figure, and whether Li was in any way writing the historical figure in the revolutionary situation as an allegorical commentary on the writer’s own historical circumstances. Li Jieren’s multifaceted representations of localism and border-dwelling should offer us critical interventions informed by hindsight on the importance and consciousness of place. In the fashionable discourse of globalism and border-crossing, social boundaries are seen to be erased and human histories completely flattened out. Li’s concern with border-dwelling renders problematic the time-honored concept of the hometown or native place as the fixed locus of cultural authenticity and parochial identity, or the region as a metonym for the nation as a whole. Rather, the local is viewed as the conflicting domain of instability and anxiety, stasis and movement, continuity and rupture, decline and regeneration, particularly when the place is subject to a field of forces (localism, nationalism, foreign imperialism, trans-border connections, and the impacts of modernity) contending to appropriate its new meanings and identities. The rediscovery of Li’s works will shed new light on our present preoccupation with the ‘lure of the local’—in other words, with the politics of writing home in a globalized age. 40 CHAPTER 1

figure 1.1 (left) and figure 1.2 (right) Photographic portraits of Li Jieren in 1914 and 1929, respectively. The mixed dress mode portrays a traditional and modern literatus in early Republican China. Courtesy of Li Jieren Memorial and Museum.

figure 1.3 Covers of Fengtu zazhi (Folkways), a periodical established and edited by Li Jieren. Introduction 41

figure 1.4 Site of Lingke, former residence of Li Jieren, now a memorial to the author. Photographed in 2011. All photographs by author unless otherwise attributed. CHAPTER 2 From Tianhui to Chengdu: Geopoetics and Historical Imagination

Untamed Novel Boundaries

When Li Jieren started to compose his trilogy in the mid-1930s, more than two decades had passed since 1911. It was the ‘political’ birth of the region that inspired the novelist to memorialize Chengdu in the form of historical fiction. The trilogy, however, was more concerned with depicting the profound socio- cultural evolution brought to his native place by the revolution than the immediate effects of the political event itself. For a long time, Li had been conceiving a grand scheme of sequential novels about late Qing society. He invented an ingenuous narrative scheme in the form of a roman-fleuve, and drew on the capaciousness of its narrative patterns to capture the historical sweep of his novels. In this way, Li set out to resolve the formal question of how the social panorama could deal with the impasse of epic narrativity that had bothered his late Qing predecessors as well as his contemporaries. The notion of the river-novel, derived from the French term roman-fleuve, connotes a group of monumental social historical novels by Balzac, Zola, Alexandre Dumas (1802–70), and other French authors whom Li Jieren had read during his years in France. While in France, Li was much less interested in the avant-garde than in the realist and naturalist authors of the previous century.116 He translated some of the realist and regional fictions by Prévost, the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant, and Flaubert, and was also inspired by the panoramic social historical novels of Zola and Balzac. This experience allowed him to gaze critically back at the local and to translate and transfigure his home place in terms of more global literary sensibilities.117

116 Bret Sparling observes that Li’s literary mentality differed widely from that of the expatri- ate modernists—Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), John Dos Passos (1896–1970), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and E.E. Cummings (1894–1962)—who sojourned in Paris during the same period. See Sparling, “Translator’s Introduction,” x–xi. Sparling and Yin Chi recently translated Sishui weilan into English as Ripple on Stagnant Water. 117 Li stayed relatively briefly in Paris (1920–21), and spent more time in Montpellier (1921– 24) in southern France where he earned a living by doing translations and writing articles for periodicals in Shanghai and Chengdu.

As a generic concept, the roman-fleuve was first coined by French critics of the early 1930s to reflect the surge of an increasingly popular literary form in France during the first half of the twentieth century. Besides Balzac’s and Zola’s works of the nineteenth century, the most notable examples of the roman- fleuve include Romain Rolland’s (1866–1944) ten-volume Jean-Christophe (1905–12), and Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) seven-part À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27).118 Rolland first used the river metaphor in his preface to Jean-Christophe to describe his own work in the genre. The roman-fleuve denotes a series of novels—each complete in itself—following the life of one central character, a group of characters, or successive generations of a family to depict change within the larger social unit of the community, or within the individual, in a continuous narrative flow. As Lynette Felber remarks, the most unique feature of the roman-fleuve is the multiplicity of plots; no longer do plot lines conform to the linearity of a beginning, middle, and ending. The roman-fleuve inherently privileges narrative openness over closure, and “it differs from the long novel in its prevalent use of extraneous narrative substructures, extractable narratives within the comprehensive framework of the whole novel. Whereas in the long novel various plot lines and characters eventually converge, in the roman-fleuve many are, or seem to be, dispensable.”119 In short, the roman-fleuve shifts from a rather strictly defined narrative format to a more diffuse pattern of expansiveness, proliferation, and connection, which complicate closure and unity. The dynamics of plot suggest that “a thorough preconception of the details and structure of the entire work is unlikely.”120 The expansiveness of the roman-fleuve allows a monumentality in depicting change within the larger social unit, the community, or within the individual. It also poses both practical and aesthetic problems that may have relegated it to the margins of the canon. The genre lends itself well to such vast subjects such as “bildung, social change, history, and time,” but the length and complexity of the roman-fleuve make it fall into the lacunae in the critical space of our

118 According to Romain Rolland, his novel “m’est apparu comme un fleuve [. . .] il est, dans le cours des fleuves, des zones où ils s’étendent, semblent dormer [. . .] ils n’en continuent pas moins de couler et changer [. . .]” ([It] seemed to be like a river [. . .] there are, in the course of rivers, zones where they extend as if they are sleeping [. . .] they continue no less to flow and change). See Harvey and Heseltine, eds., The Oxford Companion to French Literature, p. 632. For a narrative history of the roman-fleuve and its French connections, see Coward, A History of French Literature, pp. 388–91. 119 Felber, Gender and Genre in Novels without End, p. 2. Felber looks at a number of British sequence novels as the British equivalents of the roman-fleuve. 120 Ibid., p. 14. 44 CHAPTER 2

current literary discourse.121 It has received neither adequate scrutiny as a serious form of the long novel nor a just share of critical attention, unlike the serial, the melodramatic novel, or other forms of popular fiction. Carol Collatrella argues for an intimate link between history and the interrelatedness of novels in the roman-fleuve. The subject of the roman-fleuve is by definition ‘history,’ which is understood as “the realistic portrayal of the multiplicity of society.”122 She maintains that the seeming open-endedness of the sequential novels and their capacity to push past boundaries are important. The genre’s emphasis on multiplicity of and connection between novels, which resembles the biological principle that all species are related, seems to her “a function of history,” particularly given the nineteenth-century European assumption that history is an evolutionary process. Its multiple plots encompass numerous characters (often numbering in the hundreds). With temporal gaps between the publications of individual parts, the interrelatedness of novels in a series captures well the complexity of history precisely because “such expansiveness demands a panoramic understanding, an emphasis on the way things take their meanings within a larger, always shifting, never quite deter- minable context.”123 Li Jieren’s ambition was to narrate the history of China from the last years of its imperial age down to the present by arranging his novels in an expansive format. Spanning precisely the writer’s lifetime, his fictional world would bear witness to his times.124 In his letter, dated 3 July 1930, the writer claimed that he was planning to write a multivolume novel about Chengdu’s “changes in social life and institutions, as well as the evolution of social mentalities.”125 He considered fiction writing as his lifelong vocation, and expected to devote ten years to this project.126 The historical trilogy was to be only a part of a dozen ‘linked novels’ (lianluo xiaoshuo) to “bring to light the life, feeling, and experience of the past few decades,” as Li wrote in a 21 December 1934 letter to Shu

121 Ibid., p. 12. 122 Colatrella, Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative, p. 7. 123 Quoted from Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life, p. 13. 124 Li conceived and named his series of novels with the connotation of fleuve. In a 27 February 1937 letter to a friend, he mentioned an unpublished novel called The Undercurrents (Hengliu), which was about Sichuan society in 1925. See Li Jieren yanjiu, pp. 212–13. His unrealized writing plan included a novel entitled Underneath the Torrents (Jituan zhixia), which was to reflect intellectual trends during the May Fourth Movement, and a full-length novel describing people’s lives after 1949. See Wei Junyi’s interview with Li Jieren, “Zuihou de fangwen—Daonian zuojia Li Jieren.” 125 Li Jieren yanjiu, pp. 197–98. 126 Li’s letter to Shu Xincheng, dated 26 June 1937, in Li Jieren yanjiu, pp. 213–16. From Tianhui To Chengdu 45

Xincheng, his close friend and Sichuan compatriot who was the editor of the Zhonghua Bookstore in Shanghai.127 His plan included already announced and unwritten or unfinished stories. The term roman-fleuve, or its Chinese equivalent—dahe xiaoshuo (literally the ‘great river novel’)—is used advisedly here. Li Jieren himself never used the term, nor did other Chinese writers of the period. It is very likely that the phrase dahe xiaoshuo did not gain currency among Chinese scholars and critics until a few decades later.128 Li’s idea of ‘linked novels’ demonstrated a belief in the capacity of fiction to create and deepen historical understanding. It was through fiction writing that the author intended to uncover the causes behind events and to portray the hidden human behaviors and mentalities that had so important an effect on the course of history. Li renovated the traditional format of chapter-fiction (zhanghui xiaoshuo) by transforming the conventional novel’s division between chapters into the unique gaps between parts and volumes in the series. Li thus developed a distinct plot of historical narration by renewing indigenous narratives in his own cultural tradition. Li Jieren’s experimentation with the genre was akin to that of his Western counterparts, who also sought a capacious form of narrative and a means to solve the question of historical narration. In a 14 June 1935 letter, Li remarked that he wished to establish a particular grand structure of sequence novels “similar to the works of Balzac, Zola, or Dumas.”129 In his 1842 Preface (Avant- Propos) to The Human Comedy, Balzac described a vast plan that included both a history and a criticism of French society in its entirety. Balzac sought to compose the untold history of social morals and manners ignored by so many historians, whereby the novelist was capable of revealing the social dynamic of all human activity, that is, “the hidden meaning in the immense assemblage of figures, of passions and events.” It was not enough for the writer to just describe

127 Li Jieren’s letter to Shu Xincheng, in Li Jieren yanjiu, p. 199. 128 To the best of my knowledge, Sima Changfeng was the first critic to use the concept of dahe xiaoshuo to refer to Li’s historical novels. See his Zhongguo xin wenxue shi (1976). The earliest usage of the term to translate roman-fleuve appeared in Li Liewen’s (1904–72) essay on Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958) and his Les Thibault (1922–40), an eight-part novel cycle that chronicles a family’s development and the social and moral issues confronting the French bourgeoisie from the turn of the nineteenth century to World War I. See Li Liewen, Yi wen tan pian, pp. 167–70. Li Liewen was a prolific translator of European literature and critic of French literature. In his essay, Li mentioned that Martin du Gard’s works could hardly have been introduced into China in the 1930s partly because the country was being swept into war, and partly because of the extreme length of the roman- fleuve itself. 129 Li Jieren yanjiu, p. 202. 46 CHAPTER 2 the outer social phenomena, for “the novelist must find the reasons of these social consequences.”130 Li similarly thought of his works as parts of a whole, serving to document the social and cultural history of his native place. His panoramic novels shared the Balzacian desire to create a fictional totalization of the native world and its evolving histories with sprawling narratives, reappear- ing characters, and complex plots through multiple volumes. Such fictional experiments also share a focus on place. Many of Balzac’s ambitious compositions took place exclusively in the same section of Paris; the idea of the great modern city decisively shaped his social panoramas. Balzac’s realist narration describes in an imaginative manner the complex tis- sue of people, places, and things that constitute society in order to construct “the temporal present as an ongoing process of change, as a becoming.”131 In the Yoknapatawpha sagas of Faulkner—like Li Jieren, a successor to Balzac132— the intimate link between the times and a place became the sign of the milieu. In spite of the explicit difference between Li’s realistic stance and Faulkner’s mythic narrative, the writers shared an imaginative effort to write a series of connected novels in terms of a single region in such a way as to elaborate a view of history from a provincial standpoint. The intricate stories of Faulkner’s invented Mississippi county can be extended to the entire American South. We find the same dialectics between the part and the whole in Li’s regional novels. His stories set in Sichuan are subordinate to the writer’s overriding vision of the local place as a miniature of the whole nation. Li focused on a home region as the site of historical movement, a complex arena vast enough to house place-based history and modernity in transformation. Li Jieren also took great interest in the works of the regionalist novelist René Bazin (1853–1932). He remarked that Bazin took not Paris but Nimes, Onnaing, Alsace, Nantes, Lyon, Perros Guirec, etc., to serve as the subjects of a series of accurate and picturesque scenes. He praised these as genuine ‘paintings of regional customs and natural landscapes’ (fengtu hua): “We can say that his works are mirrors that, through their myriad reflections, project a panoramic

130 Quoted from F.C. Green, French Novelists from the Revolution to Proust, p. 177. In “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde declared that “the nineteenth century” is “largely an invention of Balzac’s,” quoted from Brooks, Realist Vision, p. 21. To a large extent the Western “conceptualization of the nineteenth century (Europe) owes more to this reactionary (Balzac) who claimed to hate his time than to anyone else.” See Brooks, p. 21. 131 Reid, “Balzac,” p. 20. 132 Before Faulkner had earned fame as a modernist master of fiction, his earliest critics such as Malcolm Cowley perceived his series of novels as great regional and mythical works inspired by the intricate design of Balzac’s The Human Comedy. See Cowley’s introduction to The Portable Faulkner, pp. vii–xxxiii. Cowley’s earliest appraisal of Faulkner is in “William Faulkner’s Human Comedy.” From Tianhui To Chengdu 47 picture of a French regional spectacle in its entirety. . . . Therefore, people have called Bazin a regional and social novelist, as well as a painter.”133 Bazin, like Li, was preoccupied with “the draining of the village by the city” and wrote a successful series of fictions centering on the desertion of the land for the industrial cities. In The Dying Earth (La terre qui meurt, 1899), we find a grave concern with the dominion of the metropolis over the unsullied countryside:

He (Bazin) takes, in La terre qui meurt, the agricultural class, and shows how the towns, with their offices, cafés, railway stations and shops, are tempting it away from the farms, and how, under the pressure of imported produce, the land itself, the ancient, free prerogative of France, the unalienable and faithful soil, is dying of a slow disease.134

Li Jieren’s writings bear an interesting affinity with the French realist and naturalist writers, who insisted upon visiting the sites that would be described in their novels and taking detailed notes on everything. Balzac compared his task to that of a dispassionate secretary who drew up an inventory of contemporary French society comprised of multiple galleries of characters and their social lives. Li saw himself as, in part, an ethnographer who produced a rich collection of gazetteer-like records by jotting down the nitty-gritty details of everyday life in Sichuan. The roman-fleuve thus fulfilled the novelist’s need for an elastic narrative format to convey local history as polyphonic, coincidental, microhistorical configurations seen from a longue durée perspective. Reaching back as far as An Account of the Country South of Mount Hua (Huayang guozhi), the fourth century gazetteer of southwest China, Li Jieren’s river-novel is, however, a modern construct.135 The Sichuan writer sought to craft vast social spectacles of a painstakingly recreated regional world, imagining history as the flow of ‘rivers’ over this long timespan.136 The open-endedness of the roman-fleuve grants the

133 Li Jieren, “Fa-lan-xi ziran zhuyi yihou de xiaoshuo jiqi zuojia,” pp. 498–99. 134 Quoted from Gosse, French Profiles, p. 285. 135 Huayang guozhi is the earliest extant work on local history and geography in China. It deals with a vast territory known as Bashu, now part of the Sichuan region in western China; it was completed by Chang Qu during the fourth century AD. It documents not only historical information but also geography, administration, economy, customs and habits, legends, and folk traditions of ancient times, and contains local biographies not included in official histories. For a Western account of the book, see Fong, “Hua Yang Kuo Chih (Huayang guozhi).” 136 Fernand Braudel, the French historian and leader the Annales School, uses the term longue durée to refer to the slow, imperceptible, and cyclical time of nature and geography, and 48 CHAPTER 2 novel a capacity to evolve and respond to ongoing historical changes, to digress and sprawl; the storyteller is able to continually add and rewrite.

The Return of the Native Place

Leo Ou-fan Lee has argued that Chinese modernity can be seen as “a mode of consciousness of time and history as unilinear progress, moving in a continuous ‘stream’ or ‘tide’ from the past to the present.” In this trajectory of the modern, ‘the present era’ was always perceived as a valorized moment of the ‘epoch,’ which marked a rupture between the present and the traditional past. “The present epoch was, almost by definition, a ‘new’ era radically different from all past periods, bringing ‘new tides’ which could not be resisted.”137 Lee’s explication of the rising tide of modernity in Chinese consciousness relates closely to modern Chinese writers’ preoccupation with the generic capaciousness of literary fiction in embracing a society in flux and its historical experience. May Fourth writers and critics looked for a viable form of the ‘long novel’ (changpian xiaoshuo) to represent modern Chinese life in its entirety, and were curious about formal techniques or structural designs for modern social panoramas. In 1936 the scholar of Anglo-American literature Zhao Jiabi (1908–1997) extolled James Joyce’s (1882–1941) Ulysses (1922) as an exemplar of epic narration of modern life. “Ulysses has swiftly broadened the vision of novelists for a new way of writing as they are no longer restricted to the rule of describing ‘the slice of life’—they can put an entire life in the novel.”138 Zhao also wrote on John Dos Passos’ trilogy USA (1930–36), highlighting the spatialized form of ‘crosscutting’ (hengduan), a modernist technique used by Dos Passos in conveying complex images of modern American life. Likewise, in 1943 the critic Tang Shi lamented that long novels had been very few in number since the New Literature movement, and that many contemporary Chinese novels were still unsatisfactory performances flawed by their loose structures.139 As the Chinese critics desired a powerful narrative pattern in Ulysses, they disregarded the novel’s incisive depiction of everydayness and quotidian living that accounts for the epic proportions of the work. In the modernist novel, the sphere of the everyday is conceived in its specific moment and place whereby

expresses the history of France by evoking the natural metaphors of ‘tides,’ ‘floods,’ and the flow of ‘rivers.’ See Carrard, Poetics of the New History, pp. 201–2. 137 Lee, “In Search of Modernity,” pp. 120–22. 138 Zhao Jiabi, “Cong hengduan xiaoshuo tandao Du-si Pa-suo-si.” 139 Tang Shi, rev. of Marriage ( Jiehun). From Tianhui To Chengdu 49 social and cultural life is undergoing radical transformation. Joyce creates the ‘modern epic’ to bring the geographical and historical specificity of Dublin into his mythological mapping of the city.140 His modernist prose is suffused with “a vast number of references and cross-references” to the material aspects of quotidian living to “give the reader a picture of Dublin seen as a whole.”141 Indeed, experiments with the expression of everyday and material culture in changing societies had appeared in Chinese vernacular narrative prior to the May Fourth. One instance is Li Boyuan’s A Brief History of Enlightenment. Written as serialized fiction and yet adhering to a traditional chapter format, the novel’s hybrid form handles a wealth of narrative details and material emblems of modern life—railroads, steamboats, electric lights, telegrams, newspapers, and Western cuisine, wine, and lifestyle. The characters live within a new material matrix of modernity. But as readers follow the characters to traverse cities, small towns, and rural villages, they get a picture of uneven developments within the country, especially the contrast between metropolitan Shanghai and its backward peripheries. In this sense, Li Boyuan’s epic also takes on a ‘spatial’ form as it ventures to encompass the multifaceted world of a changing country. However, in the May Fourth fictional discourse, the modern as a secular concept of everydayness and change was submerged in a grand discourse of modernity as epoch-making process. The denunciation of traditional chapter fiction by the May Fourth literati is well known. But in what way was it evalu- ated as inadequate to narrate social-historical changes in their temporal and spatial specificities? Buttressed by an imported evolutionism, advocates of New Literature posited a linear and progressive mutation of literary genres in their yearning to overcome the past by radically negating their cultural heritage. The cultural elite put an excessive emphasis on the element of progressive time at the expense of a more nuanced and differentiated understanding of cultural modernity conceived in the category of ‘space.’ “Time, rather than space,” Shu-mei Shih points out, “was the crucial category in the radical rethinking of Chinese culture and literature.” The quintessential embodiment of the May Fourth zeitgeist was one of linear temporality expressed in “the desire to leap into the time of the modern.”142 This new linear consciousness of time and

140 Moretti, Modern Epic, chap. 6–8; Bulson, “Joyce’s Geodesy.” 141 Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, pp. 5–28, 53–66; quoted in McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel, p. 791. 142 Shih, The Lure of the Modern, p. 49; see especially chapter 1 on the May Fourth construction of modernity and temporality. 50 CHAPTER 2 history failed to capture geographical and spatial elements and topography as crucial sites for imagining history in novelistic narratives. For Mao Dun and his May Fourth contemporaries, this attitude was expressed in both their rhetoric and their fiction. The grand narrative pre- sided over plot, in which events unfolded according to a preconceived plan and resolution lay in a vague future. In writing Midnight, Mao Dun aspired to narrate a spatial progression from the country to the city. The author’s urban imagination of motion and speed in historical temporality reveals his ideological invention of the nation in rapid transformation. It is, however, his obsession with the grand structure and a Marxist scheme of historical teleology that impoverishes his potentially polyphonic text. For Mao Dun, the pressure of imperialist economic aggression would fatally speed up the industrial panic in the city together with the economic bankruptcy in the countryside, guiding the nation to an inevitable ‘revolution.’ In composing the novel, however, the novelist found it difficult to align the fictional form with the hard economic- historical model he used to diagnose China’s new reality. Marston Anderson regards the unfinished quality of Midnight as failing to achieve closure and unity in the narrative.143 For Anderson, Mao Dun’s inability to give an ending to many of his works of fiction throws light on the ideological and formal impasse in his writing. Nevertheless, the formal insufficiency that Anderson finds in Mao Dun’s works—disjointed plots, indefinite closures and beginnings, unfinished narratives—can rather be viewed as a formal attempt to create an open fictional format in order to capture the bewildering process of historical change.144 Mao Dun came close to composing a ‘symphony’ of the city and country with his sequence of open-ended fictions, each capturing a momentary experience of history on the move. Mao Dun includes a section about the countryside in Midnight, which narrates the rural chaos not too far away from the urban center of Shanghai. Yet he constructs the privileged space of the city as the essentialized place of modernity and change, and ultimately renders the rural domain largely as a geopolitical abstraction. The leftist writer

143 By erasing to a significant degree the sections that were to deal with the peasant world, Marston Anderson argues, Mao Dun could not effectively treat the rural peasantry. Hence the novel could only claim to represent Chinese society in miniature by portraying Shanghai’s urban society. Anderson, The Limits of Realism, pp. 128–29. 144 As Milena Doleželová-Velingerová suggests, “Mao Dun’s particular technical devices, such as indefinite openings and open closures, which Anderson considers a failure, befit the writer’s work, for they underline the lack of beginning and end in the process of transformation.” Rev. of The Limits of Realism, p. 311. From Tianhui To Chengdu 51 fails to depict history as lived and concrete reality. Time overwhelms spatiality in the rush to modernity in Midnight. In the Chinese scenario, it is not the exceptional metropolis of 1930s Shanghai—in which one can find the innate affinity between print capitalism and novels and newspapers so famously described by Benedict Anderson— that becomes the ‘legitimate space’ of a community and the signifier of nationhood. Chinese modernity and capitalism had yet to realize their full impact in the rural domains.145 While Shanghai emerges as a ‘city of darkness and light’ on the verge of revolutionary change in leftist fiction of the time, it is the slow and stagnant ‘countryside’ that haunts the historical imagination of most Chinese writers of the 1930s. The exclusive focus on temporality as the critical paradigm of literary modernity misses the crucial spatiality and place-based identity underlying modern Chinese novels. Where does Li Jieren’s work fit into this intellectual discourse of modernity? His trilogy aims at telling stories of the native place to be reformed by and reborn through historical forces: the novelist constructs a temporal progression of negative change. Instead of embracing a utopian future, the trilogy depicts a state of stagnancy and the decadence of a vanishing rural community in fin-de-siècle China. The titles of the novels—Ripples on Dead Water, Before the Tempest, and The Great Wave—give us a clue to the author’s historical vision. Rural town life is as stagnant as ‘dead water’; it will not survive the dynamic and irreversible historical ‘currents’—as embodied in the metaphors of the ‘tempest’ and ‘the great wave’—which threaten the countryside. Although Li Jieren’s novels appear to narrate a linear, chronological, and progressive history, they do so through a non-linear plot marked by circularity and reiteration. Li tempers the May Fourth teleology of progress with his sequence novels. As causal and chronological sequences are subordinated to a system of digressive narratives and wayward plots, the writer struggles to engage the new conception of linear time and history. The formal tendency of the roman-fleuve to relax teleology and complicate the beginning and closure of narratives was at odds with the utopian vision of history as progress. Li’s subjection of his native place to differentiated temporalities strikes a contradictory note. In this regard, Li Jieren’s noncanonical texts of the native hometown can be considered as fragments of lost solutions to the problem of fictional representation and literary modernity. His work posited a sophisticated connection between the rise of national consciousness, the novel’s epical intent, and

145 In “Shanghai (Midnight, Mao Dun, 1932),” Leo Ou-fan Lee indicates that the inherent ‘contradiction’ between fiction and social reality means that Mao Dun’s futuristic imagination has to go far ahead of actual Chinese reality. 52 CHAPTER 2 the geopoetics of localities. In his scheme, the depiction of local identity took place against the backdrop of a much bigger Chinese identity. The author once expressed this rhetoric explicitly: “In consideration of the present condition of China, fraught with internal conflicts and foreign invasions, we should advocate our sentiment of attachment to the ‘country’ (xiang) and push it forward to the ‘nation’ (guo).”146 In drafting his trilogy, Li perceived the countryside as a dynamic locus within a field of multiple forces and factors, including “the onslaught of foreign commodities, the aggression of the church, the people’s blind worship as well as ignorance of westerners, the muddleheaded and corrupt officials and gentry, the banality of ethical codes, the tyranny of the Gelaohui (a secret society known as the Elder Brother Society), the lack of mutual understanding between the country folks and the officials.”147 He was obsessed with the attempt to compose an image of Chinese identity through a regional discourse, which consistently invoked itself as the struggle, in the name of the nation’s future, of the countryside against the shackles of the past. Li Jieren’s deep commitment to the native soil in literature recalls, but ultimately differs from, the concern of some May Fourth literati for the locality as what mediates productively between the writer and nation. In the terms of Zhou Zuoren, Li’s penchant for French regional literature such as that of Bazin reflects at once his provincial mentality and ‘cosmopolitan’ tastes in literature. Zhou insisted that literary creativity and authenticity could only come from a writer’s intimate connection with his native soil. He was opposed to the tendency to ignore local flavor in the name of a cosmopolitanism that had developed in response to a homogenized conception of the nation. “Because the people of our generation have reacted against a notion of nationalism that is narrow-minded,” Zhou claimed, “they have cultivated the attitude of a kind of ‘citizens of the world’ (Kosmopolites), which easily reduces the flavor of our native soil (xiangtu) [. . .] in resisting nationalism, we have lost local color.”148 Any outstanding literature, Zhou believed, was mediated by a powerful sense of place, because “a strong attachment to the locality is actually an important component in ‘world’ literature.” In “Place and Literature” (“Difang yu wenyi,” 1923), Zhou outlined a meaningful connection between the locality and the writer and nation.149 Only by writing as “sons of the soil,” but not by yielding to the empty, homogenizing tendencies in literature, could writers develop a genuine literature which was true to their thought and imbued with the flavor

146 Wu and Wang, “Li Jieren nianpu,” p. 52. 147 Li’s letter to Shu Xincheng, dated 14 June 1935, in Li Jieren yanjiu, pp. 201–2. 148 Zhou Zuoren, “Jiumeng.” 149 Zhou Zuoren, “Difang yu wenyi.” From Tianhui To Chengdu 53 of their land and cultural origin. He hoped that a new national literature could be endowed with the capacity to give full play to the specific, historical character of the region. Yet Li Jieren’s vision of the locality and historical progress differentiates him from the traditional localism embraced by Zhou, whose understanding of place was based on a concept of genealogical succession that sought to preserve the received forms of local cultures and customs against the ravages of modernity. Daruvala rightly remarks that Zhou’s aesthetic of place was marked by ‘the absence of time.’150 His construction of regional culture, with its specific landscape, customs, and the material culture of everyday life, was ‘privileged over nation.’151 Zhou articulated a genealogy of locality that was less shaped by the force of external history than by the inheritance of culture and tradition. In his paradigm, the local was tied to a timeless rural domain in opposition to the historical time of the nation state. Li, by contrast, always perceived the countryside as the emblematic locus of change. His rhetoric of the native place created a dialectical strain between the countryside and the nation, whereby the native place dwells inside the lived experience of history, the messiness of the everyday. Li Jieren’s miscellaneous writings reveal his contemplation of the sphere of dailiness with an acute sense of time. “Old Accounts” (“Jiuzhang,” 1945) reproduced elaborate records of local funerals that had taken place a century earlier (1836, 1861) in his hometown. Li seriously considered that these funeral accounts, which were “all neatly written down with precision,” were not merely static descriptions of a local custom. They were fragments of precious social documents containing signs of a dynamic, historical process of transformation. As Li remarked, “What it recorded was not simply the commonplace and routine. This was a written account about a grand funeral a century before. Not only did it record all sorts of bills, but it also included the banquet menus and funeral orations.” “At least, as for its ostentation and extravagance (of the funeral), one can observe the life of the petit bourgeoisie a century before.”152 For Li, it was inadequate to treat the funeral accounts as domestic registers of the past or a reminder of a once celebrated family. In fact, the fragments of

150 Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity, p. 239. 151 Ibid., p. 64. 152 Li Jieren, Li Jieren shuo Chengdu, pp. 330–31. Li’s documentary writing is collected in Li Jieren shuo Chengdu, pp. 330–410. Li took great interest in the document, which he inad- vertently discovered in his relative’s home. He copied and edited the whole document, annotating between the lines to illustrate how its social details conveyed valuable messages about local history. 54 CHAPTER 2 the past provide the best materials for a writer to turn into a minor history of transformation in social institutions and social economy. His native place writing betrays a strong local flavor in its concrete descriptions of material life and social customs. The aspects of Chengdu’s social life that the writer found fascinating included architectural monuments, temples, topographies of the city, streets, vehicles, social customs, food, drink, tea culture, clothes and fashion, market festivities, weddings, funerals, and country rituals. The recently published book, Li Jieren on Chengdu (Li Jieren shuo Chengdu), reveals the writer’s vigorous efforts to give a complete portrayal of the city. Most of the passages in this collection are excerpts from original texts in Li’s historical trilogy, which show the omnipresence of descriptive narration and the open format of Li’s distinctive roman-fleuve. Here are some of the main categories: ‘History,’ ‘City Wall,’ ‘Imperial City,’ ‘Society,’ ‘Streets,’ ‘Shops,’ ‘Town,’ ‘Leisure,’ ‘Traffic,’ ‘Schools,’ ‘Temples,’ ‘Sichuan Cuisine,’ ‘Teahouses,’ ‘Festivals,’ ‘Marriages,’ ‘Funerals,’ and ‘Dialects.’ These categories of the everyday also reveal Li’s meticulous documentation of the specific details of Chengdu life as synecdoches of the historical era. Here Li’s writings are treated as a kind of guidebook to commemorate the ‘old Chengdu’ (lao Chengdu). For present-day readers, Li’s ‘ethnographic’ writings are supposed to convey a nostalgic sense of the ‘pastness’ and ‘oldness’ of the provincial region. Readers might find it more convenient to consume the antiquarian nostalgia in Li’s regional writings as commemorations of a place and time immemorial than to comprehend the sense of historicity that Li intended to convey.

The Cultural Trope of the Small Town

In twentieth-century Chinese cultural history, it is the trope of the small town, often a rural or semi-rural locale, which plays an important role in the rhetoric of the country. The modern Chinese preoccupation with the ‘hometown’ (guxiang) or ‘native place’ (xiangtu) in regional fiction—which came to prominence on the literary scene from the 1920s on—formed a significant cultural discourse on the concept of nationhood. Although the May Fourth intellectuals and writers envisioned a literature that would help forge a cosmopolitan identity to embody a new nationhood, it was predominantly the countryside, not the city, which dominated their fictional landscapes. The ‘countryside’ is but a vague idea. Yet it can be represented as a spectacular arrangement of built space, a cultural artifact such as a house or a garden that takes on the meanings of pastness and loss. In Xu Qinwen’s (1897–1984) ‘Father’s Garden’ (“Fuqin de huayuan”, 1923), the narrator’s imaginative return From Tianhui To Chengdu 55 to the countryside finds himself in a state of agonistic yearning for a vanishing past:

It is hard to reckon exactly the time when father’s garden was thriving. It has been quite a long time though. Once we did take a picture of it in a flourishing condition. But the image of the picture that is hanging over father’s room has been washed out. [. . .] I guess even if people begin to plant the garden with all sorts of flowers, they can never bring back the blossoming picture of the garden the way it used to be.153

In Xu Qinwen’s writing, rendered in a subjective memory narrative, the cultural trope of the countryside becomes a particular terrain for narrating the split between past and present. The remembrance of the domestic garden is emblematic of an idealization of the past in opposition to the historical time of the city and the nation state. Lu Xun was particularly critical of Xu’s sentimental attitude, however. In his introductory essay on native soil literature written in 1935, Lu Xun spelled out the problem of writing the homeland. He pointed out that writers could convey their feelings about their homeland, either ‘subjectively’ or ‘objectively.’ But many native place writings chose to do it in a ‘subjective’ way, which Lu Xun perceived as a crisis in representation.154 Lu Xun considered that Xu’s subjective memory of the past could only engender a feeling of nostalgia by mourning the things that no longer existed. “Before a writer (like Xu) sets out to write native soil literature, he finds himself already exiled from his home, driven by life to a strange place. What can he do but recall his father’s garden, a garden that no longer exists?” For Lu Xun, a forerunner of modern fiction and native soil literature himself, this subjective narration of homeland could not do full justice to the object being observed and described if the writer failed to connect himself or herself to the region in a productive way. In the same essay, Lu Xun also commented favorably on two native place authors, Qian Xian’ai (1906–94) and Tai Jingnong (1902–90), because they were able to give more dynamic regional self-images or local-color motifs. Dealing with the primitive customs in remote regions, Lu Xun believed, their fictions nonetheless served as a vehicle for transporting the readers to the locale and engaging them with the rural present. According to Prasenjit Duara, what Lu Xun would want to see in the native soil genre is a dynamic, historical notion of the locality, a writing that depicts

153 Xu Qinwen, “Fuqin de huayuan.” 154 Lu Xun, introduction to Zhongguo Xinwenxue daxi, vol. 4, pp. 8–9. 56 CHAPTER 2 the local “not as the lost past to be restored or preserved, but as the past to be reformed and transformed.”155 Lu Xun’s concept of the local “is not the place to encounter the past, particularly not as a nostalgic dwelling or mourning its loss.” It is embedded in a progressive, historical temporality, and its narratives should reflect the potentiality of change in the course of modernity. Although affection and nostalgia play a big role in many small town fictions, Duara claims, the most obvious reason for portraying these places is to show that they are unsatisfactory, and that they need to be changed as a part of the reform that should produce a new China. “The writing of the local has to cathect the imagined community of the nation through the locality.”156 In his criticism of Xu Xinwen, therefore, Lu Xun may well imply that Xu’s story is but a simpler form of fictional landscape, constructed through the single vision of the first-person observer without any complicated techniques such as distance and irony. Xu’s first-person narrator creates a homogenous voice incapable of giving a vivid picture of the complexities and richness of the local community. The writer’s gesture of seeing the local, limited to an individual’s point of view, can easily give rise to the sentiments of resentment and bitterness. The subjective strain denies the writer’s access to local reality, giving rise to an excessive imagination or criticism that overrides objectivism and detachment in narration. In this sense, Lu Xun sees the insufficiency of native soil fiction, identifying serious shortcomings in the technique of verisimilitude. Lu Xun’s native soil fiction is also obsessed with memories and the theme of homecoming. His lyrical treatment suppresses the plot so as to focus on the moment in which the characters’ inner minds are reflected in their reminiscence about the past. He combines sketches, lyrical description, and individual reminiscence. Lu Xun’s short stories constitute an “autobiographical ‘recherche du temps perdu’ enacted artistically in writing.”157 However, his hometown creations are at best polished miniatures of rural society, constrained by the genre’s shorter form and length. The issue of the generic change in Chinese fiction is closely related to the concern about native soil writing. The May Fourth writers invented a new genre of the short story to counter the traditional plot of chapter-fiction. The modern short story is characterized by its brevity and freedom in form. Lyrical in nature, it lends itself well to capturing the subject’s emotional or moral response to a slice-of-life situation; many native soil fictions used this form.

155 Duara, “Local Worlds,” p. 177. 156 Ibid., p. 178. 157 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House, p. 59. From Tianhui To Chengdu 57

Nevertheless, Lu Xun in this period would have liked to see a long novel that could recapture the local and its cultural dynamics against historical events. He aspired to produce a longer novel to reorganize a private past into a collective picture and to augment the capacity of fiction to summon up the the nation’s experience over time. In his 1935 comment on Xiao Jun’s (1908–1988) novel Village in August (Bayue de xiangcun), Lu Xun commented, “Historic events could not be any less since the late Qing dynasty—the Opium War, the Sino-French War, the Sino-Japanese War, the 1898 coup d’état, the Boxer Uprising, the International Expedition of Armies from Eight Foreign Nations, and the Xinhai (1911) Revolution. Yet there has not been a single work with a grand historical dimension.” Lu Xun’s historic intent demanded a longer form of fiction with a broad historical canvas.158 His criticism of native soil fiction points to the issue of the form itself, especially the formal problem of fictionalizing the small town as emblematic of the larger community in change. To tackle the formal constraint of native soil fiction as Lu Xun outlined it, writers experimented creatively with different schemes of spatialization to figure the locality against history. A reassessment of the literary innovations of Xiao Hong and Shi Tuo helps us to examine Li Jieren’s historical writing in a more critical light. Both had begun to write about the small town not simply as a ‘background’ against which characters move and events happen. Each portrayal of the small town stands as a powerful trope to represent the pastness of the nation. Xiao Hong’s novel, Tales of Hulan River (Hulan he zhuan, 1940), was written in the midst of China’s struggle for survival as an independent nation. It is set exclusively in a small town in northeast China during the waning years of the Qing dynasty, and curiously has nothing to do with war or with contemporary events. The figuration of the rural world is colored by more nuanced feelings and sentiments, blending the ethos of idealism with criticism, nostalgia with irony.

Hulan River is one of these small towns, not a very prosperous place at all. It has only two major streets, one running north and south and one running east and west, but the best-known place in town is the Crossroads, for it is the heart of the whole town [. . .]. The town of Hulan River is where my granddad lived. When I was born Granddad was already past sixty, and by the time I was four or five he was approaching seventy.

158 See Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, 6: 226–28. 58 CHAPTER 2

The house where we lived had a large garden that was populated by insects of all types—bees, butterflies, dragon-flies, and grasshoppers. There were white butterflies and yellow ones, but these varieties were quite small and not very pretty [. . .]. The garden was bright and cheerful, deriving its freshness and beauty from all the reds and the greens. It had once been a fruit orchard that was planted because of Grandmother’s fondness for fruit. [. . .] From the time of my earliest recollection the garden had only a single cherry tree and a single plum tree, and since neither bore much fruit, I was not very aware of their existence.159

The narrator takes you to the most intimate space in her memory, the ‘garden,’ which appears as the most important place. Not only is it a site where the narrator indulges in the memory of her most satisfactory contact with nature, but it also provides a refuge for her to escape from the pressure of war and history. Is Xiao Hong’s writing not just another autobiographical account of the homeland, a story told in the manner of introspective narration? To be sure, the poetics of the hometown in Tales of Hulan River is achieved through subjective memory, with the first-person narrator presenting snapshots of daily life and country rituals in the isolated rural locality. Yet, most significantly, Xiao Hong invents a new form of the novel by writing it as a prose poem. The author breaks with the convention of unilinear plot and the unity of character and action. Such an innovation grants her a flexible narrative framework to present a fuller rural picture, which contains a gallery of peasant characters and ‘sketches’ of their daily life. It allows the writer to evoke the geographical matrix and local color of the place as a series of tableaux. Further, the descriptive manner and ironic distance maintained by the narrator help to minimize authorial intervention or excessive emotional engagement. The visualizations of rural town life in Xiao Hong’s novel are all connected by a common locale, a common time, under the observations of the child-narrator, as if the multifaceted ways of seeing the local allow the narrator to reimagine her community by piecing together the ‘fragments’ of memories. Xiao Hong’s originality is remarkable and may well remind us of what Joseph Frank has called the ‘spatial form’: a tendency among European modernist writers to intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence.160 On the one hand, in Xiao Hong’s fictionalization, only spatiality, but not temporality, is represented. No wonder

159 Xiao Hong, Tales of Hulan River, pp. 4, 73. 160 Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, pp. 5–28, 53–66. From Tianhui To Chengdu 59 her unique form of episodic structure and disconnected stories baffled critics, including Mao Dun, who found that Xiao Hong’s experimental writing is not an orthodox autobiography nor a novel at all in the normal sense but “a narrative poem, a colorful genre painting, a haunting song.”161 On the other hand, Xiao Hong’s narrative betrays an ironic awareness of temporality, a fascination with the paradoxical timelessness and deterioration of the small town. In her novel, the fictionalized local world remains inaccessible to the outside world. The past not only takes on the meaning of backwardness but also appears as eternal cycles. Birth, old age, sickness, death—time moves in accordance with nature’s dictates rather than as the effects of history. While from one point of view the narrator attempts to convey complex representations of small town life, from another point of view everything in the novel speaks to the community’s historical amnesia. For all her formalistic breakthrough, Xiao Hong chooses a non-omniscient I-narrator, a device that largely conforms to the conventional practice of first-person narration in native soil fiction. In a different manner, Shi Tuo’s deployment of the non-omniscient narrator does its utmost to challenge such conventional practice. In Records of Orchard Town (Guoyuancheng ji, 1938–46), Shi Tuo’s most obvious ambition is to give the reader a picture of a representative small town as a whole, to recreate it as a living protagonist, endowed with “its own life, character, thought, opinion, feeling, and fate, exactly like a living person.”162 As if to parody Lu Xun’s narrator in “Hometown” (“Guxiang,” 1921), who returns to his old home in the countryside only to experience a personal sense of loss and alienation, the narrator Ma in Shi Tuo’s fiction is uncertain about the lapse of time and ignorant of the precise details regarding the characters and events in his stories. Ma appears as an ‘unreliable’ narrator who fails to reconnect with the local community to which he once belonged. This, however, can be seen as caricaturing “the obsessive confessionalism of the first-person stories” prevalent in native soil fiction.163 Shi Tuo’s non-realistic narration seems to repeat Lu Xun’s self-criticism of native place literature as nothing more than an act of writing that blends one’s lived experience with the tricks of memory and mixes imagination with recollection. Insofar as the

161 Quoted from Goldblatt, Hsiao Hung, p. 105. Mao Dun wrote a long preface to Xiao Hong’s novel in 1946. 162 Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, p. 39. 163 “This narrator breaks with the self-confident authority of the story-teller manner in traditional fiction even as he separates himself from the routine omniscience of 1920s’ realism or the obsessive confessionalism of the first-person stories of such modern writers as Yu Dafu.” See Huters, “The Telling of Shi Tuo’s ‘A Kiss’,” p. 81. 60 CHAPTER 2 fictional world remains unknowable or unverifiable, the writer’s modernistic stance, which claims to create a mythic image typical of all the small towns in the country, can be taken as a narrative irony to question native place writing as a medium of representation. Shi Tuo’s ironic observance of history deserves our particular attention. In “A Kiss” (“Yi wen”, 1944), one of the stories in Records of Orchard Town, the author subtly treats the passage of time as it exerts its impact on the small town locale. The story takes place just after the 1911 Revolution, but the effects of political change are barely perceptible. The narrator ruminates on the uncertainty of time and history.

It was 1913 or 14 or 15, I do not know in complete detail. Try to imagine those good times in Orchard Town, when life was simple and easy, before the revolution of 1911 had stirred up the populace. But in the space of one night, people said they were free, that they had become the masters of big, old China, and that the emperor who had ruled over them for several thousand years was toppled from this time on.164

Still, slow changes in the sphere of everyday life have been taking place. At the outset a busy hub of country life, the center of the town has been occupied by the train station, surrounded by a few ‘odd buildings.’ Theodore Huters notices that the ultimate disposition of the tale’s ‘protagonist’—the town itself— remains steadfastly insensitive to the nature of time. The character Sister Liu has to come back and visit the town to encounter the change between past and present. In fact, the woman becomes the main figure for change as much as the town. In the beginning a poor working-class girl, Sister Liu is the last property of her impoverished family. She is married, to satisfy her mother’s wishes, to a local magistrate as his concubine, and leaves the town. Upon her return to the station, she has changed into a lady who has long lost the freshness of youth. The tension between a stagnant locality and its transformation is brought up precisely by a narrative that subordinates a woman’s change- fulness to the minimalism of the plot. Readers have to read very carefully in order to get the messages of marriage and social mobility as implicated in the woman’s fate. Seen against the elliptic style of Xiao Hong or Shi Tuo, Li Jieren’s monumental style of writing the region provides a sharp contrast. All three, however, were simultaneously working out their own spatialized narratives to represent the small town as the figure of history and locality. A generic process is at work

164 Shi Tuo, “A Kiss,” p. 153. From Tianhui To Chengdu 61 here—it is the textual flexibility of the modern novel that allows various innovations to explore the small town space and historical temporality. Xiao Hong and Shi Tuo hit upon their own ingenious methods to break through the limits of the short story and achieve an amorphous form of fiction. They make the most of the freedom of the novel form, and proceed to develop a larger scale of narrative to encompass the totality of the small town. In fact, they craft medium-length novels centering on a rural locale. Li Jieren comes up with his own solution in the form of the long novel that figures the locality against the flow of history. The beginning of Ripples on Dead Water throws light on the way in which Li Jieren transforms the form of native soil fiction into historical narrative.

I remembered sitting with Mum in the covered sedan chair. [. . .] As soon as we left the high massive city gate, though we passed streets much the same as those in town, we could soon see that the shops were lower, smaller, poorer, and then they began to disappear, revealing fields, a high- way thick with dust, and clumps of woods by the farms. By then the air smelt so different that I, a child who was able to leave town only a few times a year, felt myself quite carried away by the countryside.165

Following the narrative pattern of native soil fiction, the prologue is presented as an individual’s reminiscence of events that happened some forty years before the time when the narrator recounts the story (which is simultaneous with the time of Li Jieren’s actual writing, that is, the mid-1930s). We hear the voice of an anonymous narrator recollecting the fond memories of his child- hood. Whereas his school life in ‘town’ is routine and boring, his first journey to the countryside is eye-opening; he is mesmerized by the natural scenery. The lyrical tone of the narrative is discernable in the narrator’s remembrance of things past, particularly in the descriptions of the graveyard and the ancestral house that hold great fascination for him. “Looking back, I truly longed for it the whole time like a lover, but most of all at the beginning of spring.”166 In the mode of introspective narration, the prologue sets up a time frame. Most importantly, it provides a snapshot of the heroine through the naïve vision of the child narrator. Readers will soon discover that the heroine has remarried into the Gu family, which will rise in prominence as it survives

165 Li Jieren, Ripples across Stagnant Water, pp. 29–30. In my opinion, ‘dead water’ captures better the sense of the Chinese original than ‘stagnant water.’ I use the former translation throughout to refer to the novel’s title, Ripples on Dead Water. 166 Ibid., p. 28. 62 CHAPTER 2 through the nation’s crises. At the end of the prologue, the narrator’s father breaks in to comment on the woman’s moral conduct: “It’s only a pity her conduct is so deplorable.”167 The ending is strikingly similar to that of Shi Tuo’s “A Kiss,” which concludes with the narrator’s regretful remark: “But if she had a son and a daughter—if you will allow the person who wrote this piece a word—she would want them only to grow up, have good fortune, and not copy their mother’s example.”168 In both stories, it is the comment from the narrator or the character on personal conduct that gives us the hint of social change. A few pages down, Li Jieren ends the prologue and decisively abandons the conventional device of the first person, replacing it with an omniscient narrator that he uses throughout the trilogy. This is a purposeful transformation of the genre. The endeavor to compose a monumental novel of the native place obliged the writer to work against the canon of the May Fourth short stories (with their emphasis on narrative subjectivity and emotional engagement). Creating a panoramic representation of a community in change asks for a multi-voiced poetics that is no longer subordinated to a single authorial voice. In Li’s scheme, the fictional world evoked has to extend beyond the experience of particular individuals, and should be conceived as geographically situated or bounded. In the next section, I examine how Li’s historical novel spatial- izes the linear historical narrative and imagination, locating concrete and fictive people, events, and places into a flowing, panoramic historical set of coordinates.

Ripples on Dead Water

Place motivates the narrative in Li Jieren’s historical novels. His works have remained remarkable experiments in literary topography. Through concrete locales—the marketplaces, the teahouses, the wine shops, the opium dens, the temples, the public parks—the novelist explores a new form of fiction, a writing that not only foregrounds the geographical setting, but also reflects larger movements of history as they are silently filtered through the fabric of everyday life in a small town setting. His texts entail the creation of a ‘chronotopic’ imagination, in which time must be understood in its interconnection with specific space, and space as saturated with historical time. Bakhtin defines the ‘chronotope’ (literally, ‘time-space’) as a narrative’s way of conceptualizing the interrelations of time and space. “Spatial and temporal

167 Ibid., p. 41. 168 Quoted from Huters, ed., Reading the Modern Chinese Short Story, p. 161. From Tianhui To Chengdu 63 indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole”; it is “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.”169 As such, a literary chronotope is a specific time/space figure that is typical of a certain type of historically instanced plot. Li’s perception of history through the complex spatial network of Chengdu and its surrounding small towns constitutes powerful chronotopic figures in his novelistic discourse. By presenting a series of portrayals of rural town life, Li Jieren explores the social transition of the rural locale and reflects chaos and disorder in society as a whole. The novelist invents a spatial-narrative strategy to establish the locality as a metonym for the nation as a whole. Li’s idea of history is expressed through writing the locality as an ongoing process of change from the realm of rural stagnation to the full realization of the political form of modernity, the nation state. It is precisely because of the “representational importance of the chronotope,” as Bakhtin suggests, that “time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible.”170 The chronotope makes narrative events concrete, and history ‘visible’ within well-delineated spatial areas. Social space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history, as in the beginning of Ripples on Dead Water:171

Going out from the north gate of Chengdu, Sichuan’s provincial capital, most people said it was forty li, though in fact it was just over thirty, to Xindu County under Chengdu’s jurisdiction. The road, a dirt track less than five feet wide, twisted and turned through the flat fields, with just two rows of flagstones on the right side. After heavy rain it was so muddy you could hardly walk a step without fastening clamps to the back of your straw sandals. In fine weather the mud turned to dust which often swirled up several feet behind your heels. But this was one of the highways of north Sichuan. The former post road to the capital Beijing, it headed north to the border county Guangyuan, then to the prefectures of Ningqiang and Hanzhong in

169 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” pp. 84–85. For a discussion of Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, see Holquist, Dialogism, pp. 109–15. 170 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” p. 250. 171 Li Jieren, Sishui weilan (1936); Ripples Across Stagnant Water (1990). All future references and page numbers are cited from the English translation with some modifications. Specific chapter and section numbers are the same in the Chinese and English versions. The reprinted version of Sishui weilan (2000) has only minor or insignificant differences from the original. The translation by Sparling and Yin Chi, Ripple on Stagnant Water (2014), came out too late to be used here. 64 CHAPTER 2

Shaanxi. West of Guangyuan was the big market town of Bikou between Sichuan and Gansu; next came Jiezhou and Wenxian in Gansu. All goods shipped in or out of the northwest had to go by this route [. . .]. This was the famed Tianhui Town outside the north gate of Chengdu. According to the local records it had won its name at the height of the Tang Dynasty. This was because when the Tang emperor Li Longji fled from An Lushan’s revolt, he went from Changan to Chengdu, then known as the southern capital as it lay south of Changan. As soon as he reached here, “The earth revolved and the dragon carriage returned.” Since the emperor considered himself the Son of Heaven, the fact that the Son of Heaven had returned to the town gave rise to such an offensively feudal name, meaning ‘Imperial Return.’ (42–45: ch. 2, sec. 1)

By virtue of the chronotopic construction, the native land is not only converted into a crucial setting for the novel, but it also plays as a chief rhetorical figure in the narrative. Let us look closely at the above passage to see how the rhetoric of place is embodied in terms of spatio-temporal connections to convey a sense of history. The descriptive narration gives us a vivid image of and reliable knowledge about the geographical locations of Chengdu and Tianhui Town (Tianhui Zhen). The passage traces the literally historical meaning of the small town. ‘Tianhui’ means the ‘return of the Son of Heaven’—a historic locale made famous as the place to which the Tang Emperor fled in the mid-eighth century to escape An Lushan’s revolt and from which he eventually made his ‘imperial return.’ But the rural world depicted does not merely represent its objective existence on the map. The precise evocation of the geographical space and the frequent references to real places produce a spatial effect in the text, allowing the author to comment on his era. The above passage perceptibly pays much attention to the networks of traffic within which the provincial town (Tianhui) is linked up with the capital (Chengdu) and its surrounding locales. Through such a descriptive discourse, the narrator begins to define the ‘provincial space’ of the small town as the locus of action. The novel’s realistic technique of detailed, objective description is nevertheless filtered through the subjective consciousness of the narrator who acts like a local guide; he comments on the social space as he presents it. The intimate tone of the narrator (who addresses the reader as ‘you’) and the pretentious gesture of giving ‘you’ detailed information about the locality evoke in some sense the ‘knowable communities’ of Raymond Williams: “the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communica- ble ways.”172 What is knowable is also “a function of subjects, of observers—of

172 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, p. 165. From Tianhui To Chengdu 65 what is desired and what needs to be known.” As the narrator takes “a position which is part of the community being known,” readers will find that they are less drawn to the ‘reality’ of the rural community than to a set of spatial connections that Li’s narrator tries to set up for them. In this manner, the narrator digresses to introduce the genealogy of the town and describe its geographical layout with exactitude. But, more importantly, he reveals that this provincial place will not escape change precisely because of its connections with the outside world. Most prominent is the ‘road,’ which functions not only to collapse the physical distance between sites but also to connect the isolated rural town to larger political and social spheres in other parts of the country. “Most officials or scholars traveling between Beijing and Sichuan took this road,” and it needs to be maintained.173 The road demarcates the domain of ‘in-between-ness.’ The mapping lays out the place’s interconnections with its neighboring provinces in ways that are at once topographical, social, and historical. It suggests that the possibilities of mobility are being opened up by the advent of the ‘highways.’ The remote city of Chengdu by the nineteenth century enjoyed an advantageous position due to its extensive networks of official communication.174 In the mid-1880s, telegraph lines connected Chengdu to Beijing, drastically reduc- ing the time required for news from the Qing court to reach the interior. In this regard, the novel’s foregrounding of the visible networks of traffic, which are about to transform a previously isolated rural community, is all the more suggestive. In Ripples, news about the Boxer Uprising and the siege of the imperial city of Beijing spreads in only a matter of days to Sichuan, dramatically changing the fates of the protagonists. In The Great Wave, another modern system of transportation—the railway—triggers a political movement and transforms Sichuan into the greatest locus of political turmoil within the whole nation. Under the combined pressures of modernity and revolution, the small town plays a very important role in the trilogy. Tianhui Town has its origin in the distant past (the ancient legend of the ‘Imperial Return’), and soon it will again be turned into a significant space. The provincial town is a narrow rural world, but also a more tumultuous domain, more interdependent and thus more vul- nerable to change. The documentation of the real, in the sense of the quotidian, is the central subject of Li Jieren’s fiction. The flexibility of the novel form allows the author to absorb novelties by means of naturalistic techniques and accommodate within a fictional format an extraordinary wealth of social information in the ordinary and the commonplace. It is also on account of the digressive

173 Li Jieren, Ripples across Stagnant Water, p. 42. 174 Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, p. 33. 66 CHAPTER 2

potential and openness of the roman-fleuve that the novelist can turn the form into a massive spatialized structure, whereby its wayward plots become interwoven with the geographical matrices and social contours of the native land. The roman-fleuve’s “inherent propensity for rendering process,” which allows “the possibility of variation, expansion, and repetition” in narratives,175 perfectly serves the author’s intention to create vibrant pictures of the locality in change. In the author’s efforts to record local cultures, however, the bland rhythm of the everyday must be elevated to take on profound historical meanings. The descriptions of a rural locale are preoccupied with turning tediously accurate minutiae into a lively tableau. We see this in the following evocation of a provincial marketplace.

These stalls also catered specially for women with coarse locally made flannels and finer ones, besides scented soaps and white soap from Chengdu, cakes of powder, red hair-ribbons, rouge and all kinds of thread and silk, colored or gilded, as well as gold-paper. There were scissors from well-known shops, knives for paring toe-nails, rulers, needles and thim- bles. Most tempting of all were the Mexican dollars and foreign needles, the latter being especially popular although more expensive than Chinese ones, as they were easy to thread; but there were none big enough to sew shoe-soles or make up quilts. Foreign thread, though smooth and shiny, was rather stiff, and not many women used it. In addition, there were copper and silver hairpins, and hairpins inset with gold and jade, as well as earrings and bracelets of imitation jade. There were ribbons and embroi- dery of every kind, goods from Suzhou and Guangzhou, glass flowers from Beijing and artificial pearls from the West. (88–89: ch. 3, sec. 1)

The naturalistic description fictively constructs the marketplace as a historically grounded social space that continually gives rise to difference and transformation in the sphere of the commonplace. In a Balzacian manner, the narrator renders a marvelous bird’s-eye view of the countryside. Fredric Jameson observes how Balzac provides a ‘realist’ texture to reflect the increasing commodification of nineteenth-century capitalism.176 Upon the realistic

175 Felber, Gender and Genre in Novels without End, p. 16. 176 Jameson, “Realism and Desire,” p. 156. Jameson suggests that Balzac’s particular choice and arrangement of the details in his fiction create not a sense of verisimilitude, but a literary effect as a sign of a bourgeois fantasy wherein affluent living is presented as ‘natural.’ From Tianhui To Chengdu 67 setting of Tianhui Town in Ripples, likewise, the narrator imaginatively builds up a dynamic space filled with the flow of old and new commodities in a section entitled, “Interflow.” The particular location of the marketplace—as a metonym for the provincial town—is thus depicted as the site that has been invaded and shaken by both internal and external forces, thereby showing an ever tighter network of relationships between the rural locale and the outside world. Through descriptive discourse, the novel creates a spatial effect that addresses the small town spaces as synecdoches of a specific historical temporality. Like a native tour guide taking his readers down the market street, the narrator in Ripples invites them to observe together with him the sights and sounds of the environment. Yet the overall impression of objectivity created is merely an illusion. Despite employing a tone of neutrality, the omniscient narrator actively selects his literary facts and leads the readers to see them as evidence of the historical process. In fact, the naturalistic narration foregrounds the explosion of commodity culture on a national or even international scale, allowing connections to be made across various regions at the level of daily life. The picture evoked points to a slowly changing social order as it is subject to a network of external forces, both local (homespun commodities from Chengdu) and foreign (goods from other cities such as Suzhou, Guangzhou, and Beijing, and those from the West). Li Jieren’s meticulous attention to rural material life is reminiscent of the longue durée perspective associated with the Annales School. Beneath the flux of political events lies the more ‘timeless’ strata of social and geographical history, modulated by the slow pace of everyday life and the imperceptible forces of nature, whose cumulative effects nonetheless shape the human condition.177 This sense of gradual transformation as reflected in the sphere of everydayness leads to my premise that Li’s politics of writing is less concerned with the eventfulness of history than it is with the fabric of rural life rooted in specific sites. For Harry Harootunian, the lived experience of history is understood not as the sacred or the monumental (History) but as a potentially radical transformation of everyday social life. The category of the everyday allows for a nuanced and complex account of the way ‘modernity’ articulates itself in different geographical settings.178 Constant activity and social change are embedded in the

177 See Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences.” 178 Harootunian, History’s Disquiet. Harootunian uses the topos of the ‘everyday,’ which he defines as a “minimal unity of temporal experience” (4), to understand modernity and change of the different lived experiences in different places (namely, Euro-American 68 CHAPTER 2 sphere of the quotidian. And history too grows out of the very fabric of daily life, in which the larger claims of political events stand in a tense, often antagonistic, relationship to the monotony of the provincial town. Li Jieren’s fictional world is even more complicated because his descriptions of rural town life are poised between the timeless stasis of repetition and the irreversible currents of history. The novelist articulates a vision of place not as a site of bygone traditions, but as a dynamic social space standing on the brink of modernity. Paradoxically, it is only through the vision of the locality that the novelist can convey an all-embracing view of the nation. Precisely by bringing together a revolutionary history, with the specificity of regional and cultural continuities and discontinuities of the place, the everyday becomes a powerful force for Li’s historical fiction. Ripples can be understood as the author’s great achievement in constructing a spatial narrative of history, which is constituted by tightly-delineated chronotopic spaces with a microscopic view of everydayness. The novel depicts the socio-historical evolution in Sichuan Province from the first Sino- Japanese War (1894) to the advent of the twentieth century. With a small town near Chengdu as the social setting, the story revolves around the fall and rise of a beautiful country girl, Deng Yaogu. She first marries Cai Xingshun, an indus- trious and simple-minded shop owner, and then is involved in an affair with Skewmouth Luo (Luo Waizui), an influential member of the Elder Brother Society (Gelaohui), a secret society that flourished in Sichuan and elsewhere during the Qing dynasty. The heroine soon finds herself enmeshed in dangerous liaisons with powerful or rich men in the community. Her love affairs and domestic life are intertwined in the quotidian existence of rural society against a background of national upheavals. Although the characters indulge in a life of pleasure and excess, they can never manage to escape from history as the forces of local landlords, secret societies, and Christian converts compete for survival in the rural backwater. In the wake of the invasion of the Allied Armies from Eight Foreign Nations caused by the Boxer Uprising, many members of secret societies are either arrested or driven out by the Manchu provincial government under pressure from the foreign missionaries. Skewmouth Luo’s life is in jeopardy but he manages to escape. His dangerous situation turns out to be the outcome of the malicious scheme of his mortal enemy, Gu Tiancheng, a local landlord-

and Japanese societies). He suggests that everyday life provides an arena that allows both the particularity and commonality of a global (but also always local) capitalist modernity to be registered. For a brief introduction to Harootunian’s theory, see the editor’s note in Highmore, ed., The Everyday Life Reader, p. 118. From Tianhui To Chengdu 69 turned-Christian convert who seeks revenge on the mafia hero because he has been cheated in gambling and seriously beaten by Skewmouth and his men. Soon after Skewmouth flees the village, the woman begins to suffer because of her intimate relationship with him. Her husband is imprisoned, the grocery is looted, and she is physically persecuted. In the highly dramatic finale, Gu surrenders to the woman’s charm and begs her to marry him. By then, he has become a rich and powerful figure after joining the Christian church and elimi- nating his once influential rival. The woman accepts Gu’s marriage proposal and dissolves her marriage with her imprisoned husband on condition that she will take charge of all the family’s possessions and wealth, and can exercise her freedom after her remarriage. Ripples takes place in a small town on the periphery of the provincial capital of one of China’s largest provinces. Li Jieren first puts his socially insignificant heroine in the dull monotony of rural town life. He then depicts her movement toward the ‘center,’ that is, Chengdu. Such movement of the characters to the provincial capital—from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘center’—in activities such as marriage, traveling, visiting, or even escaping is notable in Ripples. The rural space is thus constituted by the dynamic relations between people, between places, and between people and places. The main narrative thread centers on the ways the heroine achieves mobility, both socially and physically, through making the right marriage choice. Her initial movement is frustrated after a marriage proposal that will place her into a rich Chengdu household runs awry. She ends up marrying into the much smaller Tianhui Town, which is “twenty li between Chengdu and Xindu” (43: ch. 2, sec. 1). Here both the border town and the woman’s marginality have a great deal to do with the circumscriptions of the provincial milieu. But the boredom of the rural town merely marks the beginning of her romances and excursions. By moving into the neighborhood of the capital, a ‘backstage’ of historical space, the heroine is gradually approaching the ‘center’ of political turmoil. In Civilizing Chengdu, Kristin Stapleton states clearly the spatial arrangement and power structure of Chengdu’s various commercial, municipal, and military quarters. “Within its walls of earth and brick stood the clusters of official buildings—the yamen—that housed Sichuan province’s highest officials.”179 Chengdu had much of its area occupied by government offices and military parade grounds. Situated in the eastern and northern parts of town were the various government authorities: Chengdu County yamen, Chengdu Prefecture

179 Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, p. 11. For a succinct account of Chengdu’s topography and design, see Civilizing Chengdu, chap. 1. 70 CHAPTER 2 yamen, and Huayang County yamen. The commercial quarters were clustered in the southeastern part of the city near the East Gate. The commercial arcade adjoined the city’s administrative, financial, judicial, and military offices, whereas the district was flanked by the Provincial Treasurer’s yamen and the Commander’s yamen. The Governor-General’s yamen and Provincial Judge’s yamen were situated further south near Great East Street (Dongda jie), probably the most crowded street and open space for outsiders especially during the festivals.180 Yet there are discrepancies between the political configurations of Chengdu and the heroine’s ‘mental mapping’ of the city. Born a peasant’s daughter, Sister Cai (as she is known after her first marriage) develops an increasing interest in Chengdu. She loves to hear her mentor, Second Mistress Han, talk about the city: its streets, houses, temples, parks, delicious snacks, fresh vegetables, commodities, and the appearances of its people. The heroine gradually forms a picture of the city (which she has never visited herself). From Second Mistress’s piecemeal descriptions, the heroine begins to dream about the city more and more.

She knew it had four gates, north, south, east and west, and the height and thickness of these city walls. She could imagine how crowds thronged in and out of the city gates. She knew that it was over nine li from the North to the South gate, and that there was a Manchu city inside the West Gate, where lived only Manchus who didn’t get on with the Hans. (52: ch. 2, sec. 4)

The narrative is not a simple presentation of verifiable facts about the place. Rather than giving only an empirical or ‘realistic’ setting of the town or city in terms of its topography and physical design, the narrator sets up the spatial relations between people and places as the ‘symbolic’ means to convey the notions of border and marginality. The narrative first dramatizes the fantasy, as well as the real possibility, of the woman’s movement within the provincial space. On the face of it, the heroine’s knowledge of Chengdu is a near realistic account of the city’s topography; the narrator offers ethnological information by speaking through the heroine’s mind. She remembers many details of Chengdu’s main streets, big houses, festivities, and lively cultures of food and clothes. Yet her impressions also reflect her unconscious desire for the power and riches possessed by Chengdu’s elite and well-to-do families. She is fascinated by the accounts of the wealthy households and the leisurely way their

180 See the map of Chengdu in the late Qing in ibid., p. 14. From Tianhui To Chengdu 71 wives and mistresses live in big mansions. She fantasizes about the authority of the Governor-General and military and police officers, and visualizes their splendid public appearances that command respect and awe from the people. Chengdu, for someone who has never been there physically, appears in the heroine’s mind as an imagined locale invested with emotional intensity and spurs her desire to move to the city. Unfortunately, no marriage proposal that might send her to a rich family in the capital city materializes. Convinced that she is hardly in a position to contract such a marriage, she decides she would do better to become a shopkeeper’s wife in a small market town. Pragmatically speaking, this is a better deal than becoming an old man’s concubine in Chengdu. The gentry and government officials dominate Chengdu society, but their families only appear fully in The Great Wave. Ripples centers on the socially marginal characters in the border town. Deprived of social, political, or economic power in the existing social hierarchy, they come from, or end up in, such small towns. The honest proprietor, Cai Xingshun, rarely travels away from his shop and hometown. The nascent bourgeois shop owner has a low social position. His cousin, Skewmouth, is at the bottom of society. With the country in complete economic and political turmoil, Skewmouth becomes destitute, roving the countryside and joining an underground society to make a living as a bandit. The social outlaw takes charge of gambling and smuggling, having illegal connections with both the local municipalities and the criminal organizations. “He could call on officials, had access to various yamens (government offices), helped people to win their lawsuits and guaranteed their debts,” comments the narrator. All these official and unofficial social networks “made him sound like the heroes described by the storytellers” (64: ch. 2, sec. 6). To the townsfolk, Skewmouth appears as quite a legendary figure. He travels more widely and lives in a larger world comprised by other cities in Sichuan Province, such as Chengdu and Chongqing. The spatial network is not so much city vs. country as a center-periphery distinction, with more nuanced contacts and tensions between the capital city and its regional locality. In the local network, Tianhui Town serves as a ‘transitional’ space, a stopover, where people who are separated by spatial and social distance tend to congregate. It is where the fates of Sister Cai and Gu Tiancheng finally become intertwined through the many twists and turns in the plot. The particular chronotope of the small town also assumes negative moral connotations with the specific narrative events of human conspiracy and infidelity. Tianhui Town stands for the territory of moral temptation combining sex, violence, and crime. It constitutes the provincial space of malaise peopled 72 CHAPTER 2 by the lower class such as hooligans, swindlers, thieves, and prostitutes. The drama of stratagem and cheating happens to Gu Tiancheng when he embarks on his journey to Chengdu. Gu comes from a landlord family in a neighboring village. His relative is a Chengdu official. Gu wants to use his relative’s connections to buy an official post and so he brings with him the money needed. But his plan is hampered. The relative who is to help him has suddenly left on official business. Instead of going straight to Chengdu, Gu stops at Tianhui Town, where someone entices him to a gambling den. There Skewmouth and his gang order Third Liu (Liu Sanjin), a prostitute and Skewmouth’s woman, to trap the man through sex. The gang knows that Gu is a country bumpkin and a lecher, who is ready to spend money at the gambling table. Gu loses all the money he had raised for the post by selling his land. Worse, he is ditched by Third Liu, beaten up by Skewmouth’s gang, and thrown out of Tianhui Town. He literally loses his ticket of access to the municipal government. The small town in Ripples thus becomes a stage for encounters and confrontations of strangers. Bakhtin reminds us that the meeting point of space and time in a novel is always at the site of the origin of narrative impetus: a point of new departure and a place for events to unfold.181 In Li Jieren’s historical novel, the imaginary space of the small town shares the transitoriness and ‘in- between-ness’ of Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope of the road.’ Tianhui Town is where, to paraphrase Bakhtin again, “the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people—representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages—intersect at one spatial and temporal point.”182 The technique of topographical realism is a symbolic means to dramatize the social positioning in which the author inscribes his characters. More significantly, the characters’ dynamic movements back and forth between the small town and the provincial capital reveal Li Jieren’s meticulous treatment of the novel’s spatial-temporal coordinates. Whereas Tianhui Town represents the space of provincial malaise, sexual fantasy, and moral corruption, Chengdu stands for the destination of human aspirations. The provincial capital is where the characters of minor social position aspire to go, represented as a complex conglomeration of social diversity and the territory of conflict and confrontation. Sister Cai’s excursions to Chengdu are all the more significant. In Chapter 2, the heroine’s movement to the provincial capital is obstructed when a pro-

181 It is “on the road” that “the spatial and temporal series defining human fates and lives combine with one another in distinctive ways, even as they become more complex and more concrete by the collapse of social distance” (italics original). Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” p. 243. 182 Ibid., p. 243. From Tianhui To Chengdu 73 posed marriage that will bring her to one of Chengdu’s rich families is thwarted. In her fantasy of the city, Chengdu’s walls stand as a barrier between the worlds outside and inside the four massive gates. In Chapter 5, Skewmouth and Sister Cai leave Tianhui Town to go to the New Year Festival in Chengdu. For the first time, the heroine can set foot inside the provincial capital, which she has long desired to do. She is going there with her lover, and her public presence instantly arouses unexpected encounters and skirmishes between potential opponents and social forces. More specifically, it is on Great East Street that a minor scuffle occurs, pushing Skewmouth and Gu Tiancheng to front stage. Gu comes to the city to attend the birthday banquet of his uncle, a member of the landed gentry in Chengdu. He wanders onto Great East Street where there are big lantern fairs and fireworks shows, and looks for the opportunities of gambling and whoring. He is distressed that all the young and pretty female-character actors in the opera troupes are being kept by high officials and gentry. Incidentally he runs into the company of a ‘knifeman’ called Wang and his fellow swordsmen, who are on the run. Not surprisingly, the antagonism and hatred between Gu and Skewmouth are intensified by our heroine, the most captivating woman in the story. In a crowded street, Gu is caught by the charm of Sister Cai, who stands in the company of Skewmouth. In Gu’s eyes, Sister Cai is not as wild as the prostitute Third Liu, but not a respectable woman either. Gu can tell that she is not from the city (Chengdu) since she looks somewhat unruly. The woman’s attraction adds to his jealousy of and grudge against Skewmouth. His defeat by Skewmouth in Tianhui Town immediately flashes into his mind. Intending to embarrass and humiliate his enemy, Gu incites his companions to molest Sister Cai. In Li Jieren’s carnivalesque rewriting of the traditional genre of popular knight-errant fiction, the conflict between Skewmouth and Gu Tiancheng is staged as a farcical martial drama. The sexual assault on Sister Cai in the public street immediately gives rise to a potential fight between Gu’s party and Skewmouth’s gang. Readers who expect a fierce duel as seen in chivalric fiction are disappointed by Li’s anti-climatic treatment of the conflict, in which the opposition between the gangs remains largely in the form of verbal abuse! No battle is ever fought; the warlike drama ends without any trace of bloodshed or violence. The crowd quickly disperses when they hear that the soldiers and officials are coming. As the narrator tells us:

People who brandish knives and are ready to fight to the death can also be afraid of army officers. They are afraid because an army captain may order his soldiers to arrest them, lay them on the ground and beat them. 74 CHAPTER 2

It was said that ‘blood brothers’ and ‘knife-wielders’ did not mind having their bodies pitted with knife wounds, but that they hated being beaten by the law. That would dishonor their forefathers and when they died, they would not have the courage to face the ‘god of the ghosts.’ So the cry signaling the captain’s approach was more effective than magic in driving away the evil spirits. All at once, the ‘damsels and heroes’ and the glint of knives and hairpins vanished. The human wall was again changed to a rushing torrent of waves. (175: ch. 5, sec. 2)

In the novel’s symbolic mapping of the city, it is in the public streets on a special festival occasion that social boundaries are crossed as the socially marginal protagonists involved in potential social conflicts. The interactions of the diverse groups are collapsed into in a single space in the public sphere. The melee that occurs at Great East Street draws various social forces into play. These include: 1. The authority of the military officer of the governor general’s yamen and his armed guards patrolling the streets. 2. The knifeman who embodies the image of men-at-arms active in the unofficial underworld of the jianghu (‘waters and lakes’) in traditional chivalric fiction. 3. Skewmouth and Gu Tiancheng, who represent the two rising forces of the secret society and the Christians. 4. A curious crowd. Vaguely recalling Lu Xun’s satire of Ah Q wrestling with Young D, there is no great victory or defeat but only a crowd of onlookers (and readers) expecting to see violence and bloodshed. The fight ends as Skewmouth gives Gu a powerful and resounding slap on the face. Gu’s repeated humiliation by his enemy amplifies his determination to take revenge. The sequence underscores Li Jieren’s subtle exploitation of the popular knight-errand fiction. Late Qing chivalric fiction straddles the contradiction between affirming the political order and the chaos unleashed when the right eous knight must act unlawfully to punish a wrongdoer. The genre highlights self-sufficient men- or women-at-arms who vow to enact a personal sense of honor and justice in opposition to public authority.183 The presence of the mocked heroes in the scene is especially interesting as neither the bandit leader (Skewmouth) nor the swordsman appears as the executor of social justice. The chronotopic space of the jianghu in chivalric fiction, with the concomitant values of justice, loyalty, and heroism, has no place in the social space within the city areas of the official yamens. Li presents a world in which violence becomes farce, justice is ridiculed, and traditional ethics are turned upside down.

183 On late Qing chivalric and court-case fiction, see David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor, pp. 117–82. From Tianhui To Chengdu 75

In portraying confrontation in everyday life, Li Jieren is not interested in descriptions of explicit action and violence. He aims to delineate a social mapping to encompass the entirety of the city through a microcosmic vision. This recalls Balzac’s realist narrator, who artificially reconstructs Parisian social space in the increasingly capitalist world of early-nineteenth-century France by interpreting the “habitual actions of a novel’s characters and the physical environment” as a means by which “society reproduces its fixed hierarchical relations between rich and poor, strong and weak, at a particular historical moment.”184 Li’s descriptions likewise reconstruct a temporally specific society by giving it the form of a perceivable social space. But their spatialized schemes also differ. For one, Chengdu, as the political and official center, is not home to the social outlaws in Li’s novel. Thus the activities of these outsiders and visitors are not exactly their habitual actions but rather incidental visits and chance meetings of the characters with unpredictable results. In the hierarchical social spaces of Chengdu, their interactions are confined to public places where official and unofficial figures might meet. In Chapter 5, the narrative departs from Tianhui Town and directs the reader to observe the multitude of Chengdu’s social spaces and cultural landscapes. The whole scheme is much larger and more ambitious as it begins to lay out a picture of social totality for the whole novel. Although the city’s social space remains fixed on the existing hierarchical relations between the rich and poor, the public places become crucial locales for remapping and foreseeing new social relations in a symbolic manner. In this way, the festivals and carnivals strategically serve as important narrative settings for individual actions and potential social interactions between the high and low. Sister Cai’s chance encounter with an elite family from the city in her excursion is a case in point. The episode anticipates her potential social mobility. After their visit to the street fair, Sister Cai and Skewmouth go to visit the temple market at the Qingyang Temple (Qingyang Gong), a historic Taoist temple and a famous landmark located at the southwestern corner of the city. The country woman comes across some of the wealthiest gentry in the city, the Hao family (who will play a prominent role later in the trilogy). On one occasion, some riffraff take liberties with a daughter of the family. Seeing the public harassment of the woman, Sister Cai prods Skewmouth to intervene. He over- powers the local gangsters, and his heroic deed saves the face of the Hao family. After the incident, Sister Cai feels better about herself because she has seen that even the daughter of an official family is unable to defend herself and may

184 Reid, “Reading Social and Historical Space in Le Père Goriot’s Descriptions,” p. 62. 76 CHAPTER 2 suffer ill-treatment in a public place. It is only in such a public venue that we find the uneasy interaction between high society and the criminal underworld. The author uses the movement of a minor character to guide the reader to navigate the city’s social landscapes. It is through illegal trafficking of a child that the social boundaries between the high and low are transgressed. In the street scuffle, Gu Tiancheng loses his beloved daughter, Zhaodi, on Great East Street. The girl is seized by a child trafficker, who first takes her to Lower Lotus Pond, a lower-class habitat crammed with “the inhabitants of straw huts on public wasteland in a provincial capital” (198: ch. 5, sec. 6). Eventually, the abductor sells her to the Hao Mansion on Shuwa Street as a servant. By way of the transfer of the child, the two contradictory spaces of high and low—the gentry and the lower class—are linked together to form the ‘imagined communities’ of the provincial capital. Li Jieren’s panoramic delineation of the provincial city has to be a bigger and more ambitious mapping than the ‘knowable community’ of a rural locale. Williams notes how the upper-class society as drawn in Jane Austen’s (1775– 1817) novels are neighbors defined not by physical proximity but by social rec- ognizability. “What she sees across the land is a network of propertied houses and families, and through the holes of this tightly drawn mesh most actual people are simply not seen.”185 Other kinds of country and people are simply excluded.186 In Ripples, although the novelist represents his protagonists and their actions as mostly staying within the confines of their respective rural counties, he introduces a narrative of mobility to bring them to the capital city to join the local elite and gentry. The movements of the characters from one end of the social spectrum to the other let a traditional omniscient narrator map out a larger social picture of his region. The characters’ movements therefore function to collapse the distance between rural locales and social classes. Zhaodi’s entry into the gentry residence allows the narrator to describe as well as to imagine the interior space of the houses. From the perspective of the little girl, the Hao Mansion seems

185 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, p. 166. 186 Similar to Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities,’ Moretti argues that the small, homogenous England of Austen’s novels suggests an equally strong affinity between the novel and the geopolitical reality of the nation state. Moretti calls Austen’s novelistic geography an ‘intermediate space’ because it is a middle-sized world larger than the region defined by a rural estate or village but much smaller than the nation or the empire. He contends that Austen’s fiction of country society is particularly suited to the representation of a rural core-England as the nation. See Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900, pp. 12–24. From Tianhui To Chengdu 77 unworthy of comparison with her country house and farmlands. She prefers the infinite space of her native region with its boundless sky and natural land to these big and elegant houses and gardens. The lavish furnishings and orna- ments do not impress her. Again the narrative is not a direct transcription of reality but a fictive imaginary of the social spaces of the country and the city. The motif of a country-city dichotomy is meticulously expressed in a multivoiced poetics, in which the girl’s subjective vision of the gentry’s house (ch. 5, sec. 7) is contrasted with the descriptive discourse of the mansion’s interior space (ch. 5, sec. 11). The head of the family, Hao Dasan, has broad yamen connections as well as commercial interests in the city. He also owns numerous shops on Zongfu Street around the commercial arcade. The narrator excels at creating conservative-minded upper-class characters who are resistant to change from the outside world and yet are still affected by its material presence. The Hao family members use many new and foreign things in their domestic life. They buy a large Western-style kerosene lamp to light the house, hire photographers from Guangdong to take family photos, and keep a gramo- phone and wax discs of recent Beijing opera recordings. Urban innovations elsewhere in China and around the world quickly become known to Chengdu’s elite. In this fashion, Ripples sets the stage for the trilogy; the rural inhabitants from the provincial town start to intrude upon the territory of the elite in Chengdu. So do foreign powers in the form of missionaries. By carefully plotting Gu’s experiences of religious conversion and personal revenge, the author conjures up a picture of late Qing society in which Western power and impact have increasingly made their presence felt. After Gu loses his daughter, he falls terribly ill. Mistress Zeng, who knows the foreign language well enough to have broad connections with Chengdu’s missionary community, takes Gu’s relatives to the Four Sages Temple (Sishengci) where they seek out a foreigner to give them a foreign medicine which cures Gu. Sishengci is also the name of the Protestant mission area, which was situated in a well-to-do section in northeastern part of Chengdu. Most foreigners lived in the neighborhood of the Protestant mission along with wealthy upper-class families. Different from other areas in Chengdu, of which the author gives vivid descriptions, the missionary district is barely explored in terms of its geographical setting and cultural milieu, and the few foreign characters receive only a flat depiction. A Christian priest lives in the area and is known to have good connections with the local government. Beyond introducing Gu to the Christian faith and the coming of God’s kingdom, the priest prophesies that foreign encroachments are already on the way, and one day the foreign powers will terminate the rule of the Qing government and take over all of China (276–78: ch. 5, sec. 13). 78 CHAPTER 2

Despite its sketchy description, this foreign presence is indispensable in Li Jieren’s mapping of Chengdu. The city’s area of foreign power later will provide a refuge for Gu Tiancheng, where the destitute protagonist has a sudden epiphany and concocts his plan of revenge. In June 1900, when Gu hears about the Boxer Uprising in Beijing, he escapes to Chengdu because, like all foreigners and Christian converts, he fears he will become a target. In Chengdu, Gu hides in the home of one of his convert friends, which is located near the Manchu community. At times he goes to the church to seek consolation for his recent mishaps. A pastor tells him in all seriousness that his misfortunes will soon pass if he puts complete faith in God, and Mistress Zeng raises his spirits as she preaches to him on the foreigners’ ultimate victory over the Boxer disturbance. Chapter 5 also narrates Gu’s activities in this Manchu area over the long, hot summer of 1900. Gu seeks refuge on the western side of the city where the Manchu General’s yamen, Christian church, and Shaocheng Park (a central pleasure district and a new public space) are found. This entire western section, one-fifth of the walled area, was divided off from the rest for the banner garrison and was home to some 20,000 Manchu and Mongol soldiers and civilians in the late Qing.187 The population density of the garrison area, called the Shaocheng (the younger city) by Chengdu residents, was much lower than that of the other areas of the city. Stapleton observes that by the beginning of the twentieth century, the banner garrison of Chengdu had come to symbolize “the decline of the Manchus,” at least to the foreigners who walked in its “quiet streets lined with dilapidated walls and crumbling houses.”188 Every day Gu takes a walk around the Manchu city. His stroll is relaxing as he finds the place filled with stillness and refinement. He can often “walk down through whole streets without encountering other pedestrians” (279: ch. 5, sec. 13) as the Manchu area is deserted. In Ripples, Gu dares not wan- der into the lanes in the residential areas because he hears that some of the Manchu residents still have power. But looking back from the end of the trilogy, we know that Gu will experience a meteoric rise in social position and political power in the future as a key figure of the oppositional force in The Great Wave. The co-presence between the locale of a declining regime and our deserted hero seems all the more suggestive. Gu’s symbolic trespassing upon the Manchu area anticipates his future bid for political authority.

187 Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, p. 14. 188 Ibid., p. 30. From Tianhui To Chengdu 79

The prominence of the foreign presence in Ripples is reminiscent of Li Boyuan’s treatment of the foreign power in A Brief History of Enlightenment, a novel that offers very rich portraits of Christian missionaries, and is set in roughly the same period. Aiming to encompass the whole of China at the juncture of the nation’s modernization, Li Boyuan’s novel begins with a local riot in Yongshun in Hunan, an inland province known for its conservatism. An Italian mining engineer (the embodiment of Western technology) threatens action against the local innkeeper who breaks one of his teacups. Fear of angering the foreigners and spoiling their mining project leads the local prefect to mis- handle the dispute by inflicting punishment on the local people. As a result, the preferential treatment given to the foreigner infuriates the townsfolk and stirs up social unrest. The first few chapters of the novel depict local resistance to foreign intrusion in Hunan’s secluded border region, which is similar to the situation in the rural backwater in Ripples. However, A Brief History offers a different scheme of spatialization and social panorama. The conservative and primitive provincial town in Hunan, which has thus far been unaffected by the times and tides of change, is sharply contrasted with the more liberal province of Hubei and the few treaty ports such as Hankou and Shanghai, where reform-minded officials are in power. Chapters 8 to 13 narrate the endeavor of a missionary who comes to the aid of a group of young scholars who are being arbitrarily persecuted by local officials in Hunan. The missionary intends to send the Chinese scholars to Shanghai, the metropolitan city where the impact of the West is deeply felt. Instead, when they arrive at Wuchang in Hubei, they are warmly received by liberal officials who are enthusiastic supporters of foreign affairs and modern civilization. Eventually, the young escapees stay in Hubei and serve its liberal governor. They are assigned jobs in the Translations Bureau and the Government Publishing office, two modern institutions that help spread Western civilization. In A Brief History, the presence of the missionaries activates the movement of characters across provincial boundaries. The travels of the protagonists are meant to construct an imaginary mapping of the national space to reflect the uneven development in the process of the nation’s renewal and enlightenment. Conversely, in Ripples, the narrative enacts character movements within the internal borders of the province. Whereas the topographical imaginary allows a local plot to be perceived in a broader sense of the nation, the chronotopic time of the locality is expressed in conjunction with public history in an unusual way. 80 CHAPTER 2

The Romantic and the Erotic

Because of Li Jieren’s French connections, critics tend to compare Ripples with Madame Bovary.189 Both are novels of adultery set in provincial towns where life is characterized by boredom and repetition. Flaubert explores the provincial petit bourgeois mentality, and the tragic life and death of a middle-class wife are connected with the limitations of existence. Emma Bovary revolts against the ordinariness of provincial life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. Her sensuous and sentimental desires finally drive her to suffering, corruption, and social downfall. Sister Cai too is unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy, provincial husband, but her fate could not be more different from that of her French counterpart. Although inspired by Flaubert’s sarcastic condemnation of the suffocat- ing conventionalism of French provincial life, Li Jieren’s novel takes on much broader historical dimensions, spanning the period between 1894 and 1901. Li explores the human effects of momentous events (from the Sino-Japanese War to the Boxer Uprising) as they filter through small-town life and the structure of feelings of common folks. The novel lays bare local antipathy to the Westerners’ penetration in the inland region as people are caught up in the enmity between the secret societies and Christian missionary affiliates. Ripples relates a turbulent time in a confined rural domain, in which possibilities of mobility are opening up for the heroine. Sister Cai’s sexual transgression and remarriage raises her social status and increases her wealth, making her a daring and independent heroine rather than a miserable woman subject to the oppression of patriarchy and social prejudice. The narrative interest of Ripples focuses not so much on detailing the sexual acts and pleasures of the characters as on figuring the politics of sex and marriage. It is in this sense that the ‘opposition’ between husband and lover in the small town can be read as an allegory of the contrast between diverse social powers. The intriguing events linked to Sister Cai’s courtships and marriages are perhaps illuminated better by comparing our heroine with Balzac’s creation in The Old Maid (La vieille fille, 1844). Balzac’s woman is caught in a triangle between a sexually potent aristocrat (a member of a dying species of the Old Régime) and a virtually impotent but rich husband (who stands for the rising, liberal force of the Republic). These men themselves are representatives of competing social forces of the Restoration period. In Jameson’s analysis, Balzac’s story of the wooing of a rich middle-aged spinster can be read as an allegory of desire. The woman’s troubled sexual relationships with

189 For a comparison, see Wang Jinhou, “Cai Dasao yu Bao-fa-li furen.” From Tianhui To Chengdu 81 husband and lover become a powerful figure for the longing for legitimacy and power and its inherent conflict.190 Viewed from this perspective, in Li Jieren’s novel, the sexual relationships between the woman and her rival lovers are more revealing and complicated. Silly Cai is a nascent bourgeois but a sexually boring husband. The townsfolk call him Silly Cai because of his all too honest and dull character. Although tall and well built, he is dumb and knows almost nothing about sex. Frustrated by a feeling of captivity and the boredom of country life, Sister Cai is gradually driven to commit adultery with Skewmouth, who appears in the woman’s eyes as a larger-than-life hero. The married woman can only find release in her affair with Skewmouth, whose worldliness is exactly opposed to her husband’s downright provinciality. What is more intriguing is the arrangement in which both husband and lover encounter each other in the same confined rural domain, caught up at the particular historical moment of the Boxer Uprising. The chain of clashes provoked by the heroine involves not only the antagonism between the rich husband and the proletarian bandit lover, but also the two main opponents—the secret society leader (Skewmouth) vs. the Christian convert (Gu Tiancheng). The ingenuity of Li’s convoluted plot thus rests on the deployment of the woman as a creator of desire among her rival suitors, whose opposition is simultaneously understood as the symbolic struggle for power over China between the secret society and Christianity. The author portrays the predominant contradiction between the contesting social forces as they are subtly diffused through the human conflicts of his representative characters. The conflict between the members of secret societies and the Chinese Christians is the core of the novel.191 Historically, Sichuan in the late nineteenth century became a hotbed of anti-Christian and anti-Western/imperialist outbreaks led by secret societies. The penetration of Western forces into the Chinese hinterland not only produced hostility among the Chinese toward the Western nations, but also created turmoil in the stagnant Chinese society. Being the predominant secret society, the Elder Brother Society collaborated to some extent with officials, military leaders, and even the scholar elite of the local society. At the same time, Christianity presented a serious ideological challenge to the popular religious culture. Although the source of conflict often involved Chinese Christian converts and the popular sects of secret societies,

190 Jameson, “Realism and Desire,” pp. 158–66. 191 On secret societies and revolution, see especially Chesneaux, ed., Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China, 1840–1950; Duara, “Secret Brotherhood and Revolutionary Discourse in China’s Republican Revolution.” 82 CHAPTER 2 these tensions were rapidly translated into a wider conflict between Chinese culture and a foreign ideology. In his study of Christianity in nineteenth-century China, Paul Cohen notes that the growth of violent anti-foreignism had to do with the increasing foreign infringement of Chinese norms on the local level.192 From the Chinese viewpoint, the missionaries’ tendency to interfere in local affairs constituted a very serious and widespread abuse of power. A growing number of foreign missionaries were allowed to preach and live outside the treaty ports, to own property, and to have judiciary and administrative power in local affairs. As Christian churches offered new converts economic protection and possibilities for social ascendancy, popular hostility grew, in particular among the marginal and destitute groups of the towns and villages. The antagonism between the mafia hero and the Christian convert in Ripples can be understood as the popular animus against the Christian missionaries during this period. Skewmouth’s affair with Sister Cai begins precisely at a decisive turning point in anti-foreign sentiment. Because of his connections with the local administration, Skewmouth is embroiled in frequent scuffles between Christians and his secret society fellows in the rural village. His leading position in the secret society involves him in various anti-Christian activities. There is a court case in which Skewmouth’s influence in the magistrate’s office is undermined by a landlord who claims to be a Christian and brags about his relationships with foreigners. The Christian succeeds in bullying the local magistrate to change his ruling to go against Skewmouth’s gang. The bandit chief is very worried about such collaborations between the missionaries and Chinese converts, as foreigners have ostensibly intervened in local affairs and challenged the authority of his secret society. In Flaubert’s novel of adultery, Emma Bovary devours the novels of Walter Scott, whose stories of romantic adventures in exotic historical settings provide an outlet for the heroine’s unfulfilled yearnings. History is nothing but a literary text as read by the bourgeois subject in Flaubert’s ironic treatment. In Ripples, romance and history are intertwined in a satirical way. Sister Cai loves to hear Skewmouth brag about his conflicts with the Christians. Skewmouth often hangs around the shop whenever he is in the town to meet his fellow gangsters. Cai’s shop hence becomes the favorite spot of the secret society members. Although Sister Cai does not understand their business and cannot speak their jargon, she comes to believe that she could “appreciate the subtlety of their coarse language and found it livelier and more forceful than cultured speech” (67: ch. 2, sec. 7). The stories of villains and rogues in the underworld

192 For an account of these antiforeign rumors, see Cohen, China and Christianity. From Tianhui To Chengdu 83 fill her imagination with images of the heroic and the grandiose, allowing the woman to escape from the narrowness of her rural existence. As if to bring to light the heroine’s ignorance of history, in one of their daily conversations, the narrator has Skewmouth read her a long pamphlet that strongly accuses the Christian church of killing children and pregnant women.

Next, their medicine, according to Christians and patients whom they have cured, is mostly made from little children’s bodies. People have seen their dispensaries filled with ears, eyes, hearts, livers and other vital organs kept in glass tanks steeped in liquid. When they take it out to use it, they decoct it into paste on their strange stoves. They have whole fetuses too, some several months along, some fully formed, all cut out from their mothers’ wombs just as is done by the White Lotus sect. So since these devils’ arrival pregnant women have been killed and children kept disappearing. In the case of the children, as people have seen for themselves, all those abandoned in the streets or bastards born in priv- ies, whether alive or dead, are taken by them as soon as they know of it. (72–73: ch. 2, sec. 8)

Li Jieren’s fiction reproduces almost verbatim inflammatory anti-Christian texts that were widely circulated in some rural provinces during the period. Skewmouth’s malicious stories are filled with loathsome obscenities and gross distortions of the behavior of priests and converts in order to provoke xeno- phobic sentiments among the country folk.193 What is more intriguing, however, is the dialectic between the fictional and historical discourse as it is ironically played out. The charges of atrocious practices and sexual perversions among the Christians have largely proved to be misrepresentations and falsehoods, but it is exactly after their prolonged conversation on the recent ‘historical’ events that Sister Cai and Skewmouth begin their flirtatious exchange. In other words, the historical ‘moment’ becomes the tippng point for the couple’s illicit romance, triggering their libidinous desire and licentious behavior. The man is suddenly aware of the daring and noncon- formist spirit of the woman who is “not contented with her lot in life” (76: ch. 2, sec. 9). The woman seems to be ‘enlightened’ after her ‘history lessons’ from Skewmouth. But this is not the case. Instead of representing the growth of a politically awakened woman, the narrative turns into a drama about infidelity.

193 Paul Cohen shows that these gruesome tales were widely circulated in rural China during the time, reflecting the fears of the populace at a time when xenophobia was surging. See ibid., pp. 45–58. 84 CHAPTER 2

The dynamics between romance and history can only be understood in an ironic sense when politics and the erotic come together. Li Jieren plays with and subverts the legend of brotherhood seen in the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan), in which the hero Wu Song kills Pan Jinlian, the archetypal licentious woman, to revenge his brother’s death after Wu Song discovers Pan’s adultery with the murderer. In Ripples, the author reworks the traditional genre and turns the ethical world upside down. The traditional ethical principles of ‘righteousness’ and masculine bonding, which the secret society still emphasizes in Ripples, are replaced by individual deceit and desire; the bandit leader has an affair with the wife of his own cousin, whose protégé he is. At one stage, the adulterous couple considers their affair fairly ordinary as they are not members of upper-class society, who after all have to be careful about their reputation. They consider eloping or murdering the husband, but eventually they decide that it would be better to tell the husband so that they can be free to do as they wish. To their surprise, Silly Cai is conciliatory. The cuckold asks if they want him to divorce his wife so that Sister Cai can go to her lover. Skewmouth is so moved by his cousin’s spirit of self-sacrifice that he does not want to take the woman away from him. Instead, he teaches his cousin about all the secrets and sexual skills between husband and wife. For a short time, the three country people live happily together in a ménage-a-trois. What distinguishes Li Jieren’s novel of betrayal and adultery from conventional fiction is its carnivalesque impulses, which are expressed without any moral constraints. The vision of a disintegrating society is screened through the lens of a family structure that plays a negative role: a dysfunctional family where Confucian moral teachings exert little influence, and a kinship relationship in which human morals are tossed aside as people follow their instinctual desires. The novelist declines to take any ethical stance on the woman’s polyandrous relationships or the ‘degrading’ morality of rural life. Li represents a rural underworld as an alternative social order in which justice no longer holds, and individuals’ carnal pleasures and private interests replace the ideal of romantic love. The farcical drama of depravity and moral transgression, in which Skewmouth teaches Silly Cai secret sexual skills, refers back to the romantic and erotic repertoires of traditional Chinese narratives, in particular, the courtesan novel of the late Qing period. No wonder critics tend to compare Sister Cai to Pan Jinlian, the femme fatale in The Golden Lotus (Jin ping mei), the archetypal erotic work of fiction.194 In examining the late Qing code of

194 Wan Chunyee, the French translator of Ripples, considers that although the Chinese heroine might remind the reader of Madame Bovary, Sister Cai’s temperament and reactions From Tianhui To Chengdu 85

sexuality and its fictional manifestations, David Der-wei Wang argues that the genre of depravity fiction redefines the conventions of romantic and erotic fiction within a social and narrative space—the courtesan house. This typically metropolitan erotic space becomes the site where intellectual, ethical, commercial, and political currents of the day mix together in an atmosphere of sexual promiscuity.195 The family and grocery compound in Ripples may be considered a symbolic locale on a much smaller, regional scale. More than a place of sexual desire, the grocery shop is simultaneously the domestic household, business center (the biggest of its kind in the countryside), social hangout (for gangs), and political arena. Its chronotopic space constructs the crossroads of the small town’s space and history. The crisscrossing of private, everyday occurrences and social and historical incidents is all the more intriguing as the two narrative threads interweave. Ordinary occurrences—flirting with women, chance encounters, gang fights—suddenly become complex events with unpredictable, serious consequences. Gu takes a passing fancy to the heroine in the street fair just a few months before the outbreak of the Boxer Uprising. Often the narrator alludes to the events in the story based on a rural time frame and according to the lunar calendar. But readers soon realize the importance of his intricate time frame, as the historical events of 1900 bear tremendous influence on Gu’s successful revenge on Skewmouth. In Chengdu, politics creeps into the sphere of everyday life. Political gossip and intrigues spill through the streets, the teahouses, the wine shops, and the opium dens where people while away much of their time. It is in a public teahouse in Chengdu that Gu Tiancheng meets Lu Maolin. The casual meeting becomes a pivotal moment that will change Gu’s fate. Both men had flirted with Third Liu and Sister Cai, but lost the women they most desired to Skewmouth. As the Boxers turn violent in northern China in 1900, culminating in their siege of the foreign diplomatic legation quarter in Beijing, Skewmouth and his gang are concocting a plan to sack churches and kill missionaries and their Chinese converts in Sichuan. Knowing this, Lu incites Gu to report the scheme to the church and yamen. Both Gu and Lu correctly believe that the foreign troops will attack very quickly. As history catches the characters unawares, an omniscient narrator pronounces on the drama from a godlike position.

The news that the foreign embassies were under attack caused only faint ripples through Chengdu, as if this old city, usually as still as stagnant

remain Chinese, which makes her a modern counterpart to the promiscuous Pan Jinlian. See Wan, “Introduction,” Rides sur les eaux dormantes, p. 10. 195 David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor, pp. 54–55. 86 CHAPTER 2

water, had been swept by a light breeze. At first, it didn’t really alarm the officials and the traders, householders, pleasure-seekers and opium- smokers, all of whom carried on as usual. Moreover, the news spread rather slowly, so that the feelings of the local inhabitants weren’t really stirred and remained as still as stagnant water with only the slightest surface ripples. Saying that there was no evidence of movement really meant only that the news hadn’t caused a great stir at the bottom of the water. Some faint ripples were visible on the surface and this barely perceptible movement finally pushed a certain person to the front of the stage. (271: ch. 5, sec. 13)

Its essential regionalism and a trenchant sense of geographical particularity make Li Jieren’s native place writing an intriguing opportunity for us to ponder the question of allegory and history. When a writer composes what is ostensibly a ‘local’ plot, to what extent can it be imagined to stand in for the larger community of a society or nation? How can one relate a specifiable geographical locale to an entire history of the nation in the interplay between geography, memory, and inscription of history? Li shows that ‘politics’ and its effects filter down to more intimate spheres of daily routines and country rituals. Even as the provincial town is being transformed by history, the revolutionary thrust supposed to bring radical changes to the locality is submerged or concealed under the surface of routine situations and country rituals. The author avoids any close or direct causal correlation between human action and the course of history. Through this aesthetic distance the narrative achieves its compelling power of representation with a trenchant sense of historical irony. The protagonists’ rise or downfall is primarily caused by purely personal loves or hatreds. Meanwhile, external events subtly influence individual destinies, as if the individuals’ blindness to history lends us insight into the forces of history. As history turned out, the Boxers’ triumph only lasted a brief moment until foreign troops entered Beijing in mid-August of 1900. In Ripples, the military victory of foreigners in Beijing benefits Gu Tiancheng and his collaborator. A few days after the meeting between Gu and Lu, the Governor of Sichuan receives an imperial decree to protect churches and favor Christians. Immediately after Gu’s report about Skewmouth’s involvement in church looting and attacks on foreigners, the government sends a detachment of troops to arrest the bandit leader, who has no choice but to run away from his village. After a series of surprise events over a few months, Gu successfully eliminates his enemy and drives him out of town for good. The historical moment of the Boxer Uprising becomes the principal turn in the protagonists’ fates and their relationships to the milieu. From Tianhui To Chengdu 87

Gu Tiancheng’s spectacular ascension has much to do with personal passions and motivations. He takes risks in the political turmoil and seeks to transgress the normal social order to take revenge. Insofar as unbridled desires and personal interests dictate individuals’ actions, how does one understand the historicity of the age that the writer is probing? Li Jieren’s oblique way of portraying the relationship between his characters and historical events raises the question of the aesthetics of historical fiction. For Georg Lukács, the historical novel must reveal the fundamental dynamics of the interaction between individual and history. What is of the greatest interest to the European Marxist critic is not the retelling of great historical events but the story of the hero.196 The hero is normally a minor character caught willy-nilly in the overall historical movement and embodies the forces for future social change. Judging from Lukács’s perspective, the Christian convert Gu appears as the ‘hero’ at the final stage of the drama, though the portrayal is marked by mockery and irony. In the fashion of late Qing satirical fiction, the author represents his down- trodden hero in caricature as one who desires personal gain, profit, and carnal pleasures, a self-anointed knight-avenger who dares to violate the existing social order and join the foreign power in order to achieve his personal mission of retribution. Whether his personal passion and self-interest counteract or coincide with the great historical movement, the ongoing tension between the individual and history is the rupture point at which the novelist seeks to diagnose his age. After his illness is cured by Western medicine, Gu Tiancheng decides to yield to the power of the church that can offer him economic protection and the possibility of revival. But Gu’s intention raises objections from his family, who consider conversion an unfilial act and a disgrace to the ancestors. Gu is driven out of his native community, and all his property confiscated by his uncle. This severe punishment turns Gu from a rural landlord into a pauper. The protagonist survives by his opportunism; he capitalizes on the foreigners’ growing influence to achieve social advancement. His endurance of life’s vicissitudes foreshadows a winner in history; he changes from a minor character to a major player, expelling Skewmouth and marrying Sister Cai. The fate of Skewmouth suggests the dwindling power of the social outlaw, whose influence in the upcoming revolution will be insignificant. Li Jieren undoes the world of justice and brotherhood found in the traditional genre of chivalric fiction. The novelist creates an anti-heroic image for the bandit figure, who performs not a single heroic deed or act. Skewmouth is a romantic lover who is fearful and emotional, a desperate vagrant without rebellious

196 Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 42. 88 CHAPTER 2

potential, a social outlaw who fails to uphold the traditional moral codes. Li’s narrator presents the crumbling of Skewmouth as historically inevitable, ironically undercutting the romantic tenor of his love affair with Sister Cai.

They were so besotted with one another that they seemed to be in a trance. Sister Cai idealized Skewmouth Luo. It seemed that of all men there was no one more valiant and gallant in his dealings with other people, more considerate and gallant toward herself than Skewmouth. To her it seemed that of all the people in this whole world he was the only perfect man and the only lover whose feeling for her was genuine and trustworthy. And what was she to Skewmouth? It goes without saying that she occupied a unique position in his heart. He thought she was incompara- bly beautiful, with a loveliness the like of which he had never seen or even hitherto imagined. At the very sight of her he forgot his own existence, subordinating his moods and feelings to her—dominated and controlled entirely by her likes and dislikes. (293–94: ch. 5, sec. 15)

Sister Cai and Skewmouth become madly engrossed with each other to such an extent that they publicly defy all social rules and moral standards. The bandit hero is obsessed with the woman. After twenty years of whoring he enjoys genuine affection. Sister Cai thinks that he would sacrifice his own life to defend her and her honor under any circumstances. But all the lovers’ convictions turn out to be illusions. Their romantic defiance is at odds with historical development. When Skewmouth is pursued by the local government, he flees, leaving the woman to suffer beating and persecution at the hands of his enemies. When the heroine ultimately settles for marriage with another man, Li Jieren demystifies the romantic defiance embraced by the once zealous lovers. Li’s lovers are ignorant of external historical forces as much as they are conditioned by the weaknesses of their personalities, that is, their instinct for survival and their greed for riches and power. As it turns out, the individuals’ fates are motivated more by power and self-interest than by pure love. Skewmouth’s inevitable decline stands out against Sister Cai’s great adaptability to change, a capacity which helps her to survive her ordeals. Ignorant as she may seem of broader social circumstances, the woman is highly sophisticated when it comes to the battle of the sexes, which ironically brings her through China’s turbulent history. A great opportunist, Sister Cai first succeeds in escaping from her hometown in the remote countryside by marrying a busi- nessman in a modernizing small town. She cleverly makes use of her physical beauty to maneuver from lover to lover and navigate her way through the maze From Tianhui To Chengdu 89 of social interconnections. In every critical instance, the heroine makes the right marriage choice to settle the deal against all odds. Her assertive behavior and scandalous remarriage inevitably provoke criticism from the conservative townsfolk. But it is the woman’s feminine power that allows her to capitalize on historical currents and keeps her from being subordinated to the patriarchal plot of an arranged marriage. With her charm and skillful balance of practical reasoning and sentimentality, the woman in the end marries Gu Tiancheng. Her decision has more to do with economic necessity than romantic love. The woman considers her second marriage with another aspiring protagonist as a way to reestablish her finances and upgrade her social position. She still exercises total control over the family’s affairs and finances, implementing her freedom and authority just as she used to do in her old household. The marriage of Gu and Sister Cai represents the most dramatic rise to affluence and power among the huge gallery of characters in Li’s roman-fleuve. In The Great Wave, Gu becomes an active participant in the revolution, and successfully jockeys his family into the upper echelon of Chengdu’s gentry and official elite. Ripples redirects the reader’s focus to its insignificant country people as a mirror of the undercurrents of history.

Coda

Through a close reading of Ripples, this chapter explicates Li Jieren’s idea of the roman-fleuve and his novelistic resolution to articulating rural modernity— its tardiness and stagnancy—and Chinese literary modernity at large. Li conceives the river-novel as an alternative model of the long novel. He deploys topographical imagination, local everydayness, and an open-ended time scheme to challenge the May Fourth canonicity of the novel and its preoccupation with historical teleology. I also delineate the more fragmented visions of localities produced by such native-place writers as Sha Ting, Shen Congwen, Shi Tuo, Xiao Hong, Wu Zuxiang, and Zhou Zuoren in order to demonstrate the uniqueness of Li’s representations of Chengdu as comprising local character, historical dynamism, and cosmopolitan appeal. Li’s long sojourn in France and his foreign literary experiences allowed him to take a critical gaze back at the local and to translate and transfigure his home place in terms of more global literary sensitivities. His novelistic arrangement to represent geography and its regional and historical specificity takes on broader inflections. In the Western paradigm of literary regionalism, Franco Moretti propounds the view that geography significantly shapes the narrative structure of the European novel and programs the plot’s possibilities. Social geography counts 90 CHAPTER 2 in certain novelistic actions and narratives as they are connected with particular places. Further, Moretti contends that the central action in some European historical novels, such as those of Walter Scott and his successors, concentrates at borders and untamed terrains. Scott’s fiction, Moretti argues, “seems to flourish only away from the center,”197 and the historical novel fulfils “the need to represent the territorial divisions of Europe” in negotiating between European borders and nations. In this sense, the locales of the Scottish highlands and their wilderness, geographically demarcated from London, become the most contentious ‘spaces’ in Scott’s imagination of the ‘border’ of the nation. In Ripples, Li Jieren creates a spatially marked narrative scheme of rural quotidian existence that shares the fictionalization of geography in European novels as teased out by Moretti. The themes of border-dwelling and border- crossing are especially stimulating in the novel’s topographical representation of human movements and desires as the characters journey between the provincial capital (Chengdu) and the neighboring small town (Tianhui). Li’s exclusively regional historical fictions also participate in the global literary trends in which the geopolitics of the novel tends to flourish most vigorously on the metropolitan peripheries, where cultural life is disparate and uneven, thus lending itself to ‘polyphonic’ or internally discontinuous literary forms.198 In a word, Li’s historical place-writing with deep local roots has global branches as the regional-historical novel becomes a site of narrative complication and interaction. Li Jieren’s historical trilogy underscores the problematic of writing about the locality as synecdoche of the nation, that is, the troubled relationship between the part and the whole in connecting place description to national ideology. Morever, Li cannot neglect historical time, the crucial teleology in modern Chinese literary thought that provides the moral and developmental justifications for modern Chinese societies. Li’s experimental roman-fleuve seems to be a response to Mao Dun’s monumental political novel (Midnight)

197 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900, p. 33. Italics in the original. 198 In his Modern Epic, Moretti raises the examples of Johann Goethe’s (1749–1832) Faust (1828–29) in Germany, Joyce’s Ulysses in Ireland, and Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927– 2014) One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) in Columbia as a series of baggy masterworks of world literature that have struggled to make sense of the place of their novels in the world. See Moretti, Modern Epic. For a critique of Moretti’s idea of the modern epic, see Eagleton, “Mixed Baggy Monsters,” p. 26. From Tianhui To Chengdu 91 and its unresolved narrative dilemmas. Mao Dun was unable to integrate a narrative of rural development into his panoramic novel, and his problem lay in an increasing identification of the novel with the nation but not the place (the urban space of Shanghai). How can the novel accommodate both the national and the local, and the present and the teleological? Benedict Anderson’s sweeping claim that novels act as the symbolic means for representing imagined national communities199 should not blind us to the complicated ways in which Chinese fiction writers of the 1930s and later strove to mediate between geographical localities and an imagined national identity. In Li Jieren’s regional historical novels, this means a more complicated ‘spatial logic’ since Sichuan (Chengdu) as a ‘peripheral region’ within the modern ‘nation,’ with its long civilization and cultural heritage, was historically the hotbed of the 1911 Revolution. In other words, Sichuan as a provincial region assumes larger historical and cultural identities, while the native homeland is represented as a contested ‘space’ and evocative ‘border’ in between the local and the national. Is it possible to reconcile the uneventful experience of the everyday and the commonplace with eventful history as unrepeatable and traumatic occurrences? In his trilogy, Li Jieren seeks to tell private and public stories on both local and national levels, which are inextricably linked to historical events, and explain the forces that have caused the advent of the nation. As Li’s fictional worlds and characters cross the border from Tianhui to Chengdu, from the periphery to the center of historical action, the writer’s imagination is increasingly pressured to subside into the literalness and eventfulness of history. He is torn between his desires to transcend the limits of the provincial world and write allegorical stories of the nation on the one hand, and on the other to defer the telos of history in the elastic and digressive form of the roman-fleuve.

199 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 26. 92 CHAPTER 2

figure 2.1 The well-preserved Qingyang Temple, a Taoist building dating to the Tang dynasty, at the southwest corner of Chengdu. Photographed in 2006.

figure 2.2 Public market in the Qingyang Temple. In Ripples, official families and country folks come across each other in this public place on festival occasions. Photograph taken by Luther Knight in 1911. Courtesy of John E. Knight. From Tianhui To Chengdu 93

figure 2.3 The Christian church on Sishengci Street. The missionary community lived in the area in turn-of-the-century Chengdu. In Ripples, this neighborhood symbolizes the Western power in Chengdu. The old Methodist church was seriously damaged during the 1895 riot, and again during the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The current Bavarian-style architecture was rebuilt in the 1920s. Photographed in 2006.

figure 2.4 Great East Street (Dongda Jie) in downtown Chengdu. This is where Gu Tiancheng confronts Skewmouth Luo in Ripples. It remains the commercial hub of the city. Photographed in 2006. 94 CHAPTER 2

figure 2.5 Tianhui Town. Photographed in 2008.

figure 2.6 An old street and groceries in Tianhui Town, reminiscent of the Xingshun grocery in Ripples. Photographed in 2008. From Tianhui To Chengdu 95

figure 2.7 A traditional-style tea garden in Tianhui Town, like the one in Ripples where Gu Tiancheng chances upon Lu Maolin. Photographed in 2006. CHAPTER 3 No Place for Good Memories: Chengdu 1911

What Happened on 7 September 1911

The ‘Chengdu massacre’ is said to have triggered a wholesale rebellion of the Sichuanese people against the Qing court and catalyzed a nationwide revolution that ended dynastic rule in the same year. After months of nonviolent protests initially mounted by the gentry against the imperial government’s decision to nationalize the provincial railroad, what happened on 7 September turned this peaceful cause into a fierce revolt, boosted mass uprisings in the surrounding regions, and led to a turning point in history. It all began with a ruse cautiously executed by Qing officials to quell the railway disputes by arresting its ringleaders. On the morning of 7 September, Governor-General Zhao Erfeng lured nine of the leaders of the railroad protection movement to the viceregal yamen and imprisoned them there. News of the arrest leaked out quickly, and crowds of sympathizers and petitioners rushed to the yamen to plead for the release of the leaders. Tragedy followed when the situation got out of hand: as the crowd surged angrily into the court- yard through the gateway, Zhao’s soldiers fired, killing dozens of civilians (the numbers of deaths and casualties differ in various accounts). The bloody suppression of the riot immediately instigated military confrontations on the outskirts of Chengdu, and the provincial capital was soon besieged by revolutionary forces and political upheavals, which contributed ultimately to the downfall of the Qing dynasty. The fundamental issue that precipitated armed conflict and violence was the Qing court’s attempt to centralize railroad construction as part of a series of vital reforms to modernize the empire. In May 1911, the Manchu government had announced its decision to nationalize all existing private trunk railroads in order to take full control over construction of rail systems countrywide. This drastic measure instantly met with resistance in Hunan, Hubei, Guangdong, and Sichuan, from local people who had vested interests in regional railway enterprises. In Sichuan, this centered on the line from Hankou to Sichuan. In June, the gentry, merchants, and provincial council members established the Sichuan Railroad Protection Comrades League (Sichuan baolu tongzhihui) to defend the affairs of the Sichuan-Hankou Railroad Company under the leadership of members of the Sichuan gentry, including Pu Dianjun and Luo Lun, and some provincial assembly members. Anxiety and outrage flared during a

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292666_004 No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 97 series of shareholders’ meetings, where people demanded to maintain private ownership and management of the company, and objected to seeking more financial loans from foreigners, as called for in the nationalization policy. Strong anger was expressed at Qing officials; in particular, the Minister of Posts and Communications, Sheng Xuanhuai, was accused of stealing the line. In May, Sheng had signed a contract with the representatives of a four-power group representing England, France, Germany, and the United States to raise huge railway loans. Stockholders in Sichuan denounced the nationalization policy for compromising local and national interests. The floating of loans from foreign powers would result in the potential loss of Chinese sovereignty. Political tensions mounted when the original cause of defending regional rail rights engendered a provincial autonomy movement. Opposition spread to all walks of life to include students, workers, merchants, and townspeople. Meanwhile, popular zeal was stirred up throughout the province as numerous regional railroad protection associations were set up on the county level to support the movement in Chengdu. In August, Chengdu citizens staged mass strikes to paralyze the city. Students boycotted classes, small merchants closed down their shops, and people talked about withholding taxes province-wide to show their determination and defiance. Still, nonviolent protest remained the rule until the watershed of 7 September.200 The Great Wave, the last part of Li Jieren’s trilogy, presents a panorama of Chengdu’s everyday life during the latter half of 1911, as the railroad protests unfolded into a mass movement and the Xinhai Revolution approached. The political events only constitute an exterior framework in the novel, however. Li Jieren seeks to seize on the foundational series of events that led to the revolution, as well as their impact on a place and its inhabitants, who are inad- vertently caught up in the radical consequences of overthrowing a state and remaking social norms. The Great Wave (1937) is the longest of the works in the trilogy; it is composed of three volumes201 in about five hundred thousand words. Its narrated time by contrast occupies a mere five months. Instead of depicting a unilinear direction of revolutionary change from chaos to order, the panoramic novel focuses on the complexity and multiplicity of change,

200 For historical accounts of the railroad dispute and mass protests in Sichuan, see Hedtke, “The Szechwanese Railroad Protection Movement”; Hedtke, “Reluctant Revolutionaries,” pp. 226–27; Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, pp. 170–80; Di Wang, Street Culture in Chengdu, pp. 211–21; Y.C. Wang, Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872–1949, pp. 216–79. 201 A fourth volume was aborted because of the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. 98 CHAPTER 3 from the railroad protection movement to successive phases of mass protests and strikes. The fictional world in The Great Wave hence bears a very different relation to history than that of its two predecessors. In Ripples on Dead Water and Before the Tempest, historical events are still remote from Sichuan. The Boxer Uprising and the International Expedition of Armies from Eight Foreign Nations take place in far-off Beijing. Yet the impact of history is felt like ‘ripples’ across stagnant water, eventually developing into a ‘tempest.’ In The Great Wave, Sichuan Province itself becomes the boiling hub of revolution. Writing the novel more than twenty-five years after the canonical event, how could Li Jieren recreate the past from the shared memories of his fellow Chengdu residents and extant historical records? Li’s literary engagement with the past calls into question the sense of place and memory as they are registered in the act of writing and remembrance of things past in the form of historical fiction. The historical novelist has to bear a historian’s burden of making truth claims regarding the extra-textual reality that existed prior to his narration. Yet, historical fiction also allows the novelist the freedom to create fictional characters, rhetorical figures, and narrative strategies in recollecting past experiences. This chapter focuses on the early version of The Great Wave that Li Jieren completed from 1936 to 1937 and scrutinizes how memory, history, and place intersect in the polyphonic novel. Li attempts to integrate the traumatic events with the quotidian existence of people who live through them. In other words, he chooses to portray the events and their meanings as seen from the ground up through the eyes of common folks. Taking a place-based view, Li experiments with the novelistic form and encounters ideological issues in relating local memories of the place to a greater collective and revolutionary discourse. The mnemonic practice of the novel registers a ‘memory crisis,’202 I shall argue, when the writer experiences the uncertainty of his locality’s involvement with revolutionary history. Li’s literary devotion to Chengdu as the place of memory reflects the writer’s anxiety of ‘not remembering,’ or forgetting, the living tradition and historical significance of Chengdu as it has been elided by the revolutionary rhetoric of modern China.

202 Richard Terdiman has coined the term ‘memory crisis’ to refer to the European cultural sentiment and anxiety of disconnecting from the past after the French Revolution (1789– 1815). See Terdiman, Present Past, pp. 3–32. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 99

Conflicting Narrative Memories of the Event

It is instructive to see that narrative historians cannot ignore the concept of event. A historical event is understood as a short-term dramatic happening that ultimately turns into an explosive atom of social change. Historical discourse deals with real events, which occur in a concrete time and place and are mobilized by individual actors, as meaningful entities of causality in a linear historical progression. These constraints define limits for historians and may well impose an epistemological imperative for the historical novelist Li Jieren. Yet, as Rigney argues in her study of the narrative histories of the French Revolution, historians employ diverse rhetorical strategies to create very different ideological messages from the same apparently limited facts.203 While the storming of the Bastille, the riot that erupted in Paris on 14 July 1789, is generally accepted as the ‘beginning’ of the French Revolution and as a symbolic move to demolish French monarchy and feudalism, historians have also reminded us that “the Bastille was almost empty on 14 July 1789.”204 In other words, there is a wide space for creativity and mythic interpretation even in the most fact-bound narrative. The episode of the Chengdu massacre, rendered in complex narrative patterns, is a case in point here. There have been varied and often contradictory descriptions of the historical incident and contrasting explanations of how the incident ignited the subsequent revolutionary movements in Sichuan. Communist discourse of the Sichuan railroad protection movement is suffused with Marxist-Leninist class analysis that stresses the exemplary role of the masses at the vanguard of the movement. Wu Yuzhang, a Sichuanese revolutionary and Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance) activist at the time and later a Chinese Communist Party official, subscribed to the view of an abstract but powerful agent of the ‘Chinese people,’ who were promptly awakened to learn of the corrupt regime of the Manchus as well as the treacherous leadership of the local gentry and constitutionalists. In his grandiloquent descriptions, Wu praises the valor of the masses after Zhao Erfeng ordered his soldiers to open fire on them: “Dozens of people were killed and a countless number were wounded. However, the people did not yield to Zhao’s (Chao’s) frantic suppression; on the contrary, they intensified and extended their struggle. The entire province of Sichuan (Szechuan) was soon boiling over and a great uprising, involving the people of the whole province, broke out.”205 Although the

203 Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation. 204 Darnton, What Was Revolutionary about the French Revolution? p. 5. 205 Wu Yuzhang, Recollections of the Revolution of 1911, p. 111. 100 CHAPTER 3 emergence of the ‘broad masses of people’ is largely spontaneous at this point, Wu indicates, the subsequent development of the riots into a full-fledged mass movement could not have been possible without the interventions of the Tongmenghui revolutionaries to push the uprisings to new heights. Wu’s class analysis reflects official Communist interpretations of the 1911 Revolution as a bourgeois democratic revolution. Whereas the mass railroad protection movement witnessed the growth of a Chinese working class, the movement was led by the upper and middle bourgeoisie and the landed gentry, who had no genuine desire for social revolution; hence they allied even more closely than before with their class interests in establishing the new republican regime. “The serious weakness of the Revolution of 1911,” Wu submits, “was that it lacked an ideological revolution to pave the way.”206 Guo Moruo’s autobiographical writing about this period is likewise suffused with a Marxist-Leninist ideological twist. A Sichuan native and contemporary of Li Jieren, Guo also had personal experience of the event as a young student; he completed his autobiographical account, “Around the 1911 Revolution” (“Fanzheng qianhou”), in 1929.207 His description of the railway protests nevertheless smacks of the political rhetoric indicative of his espousal of Marxism- Leninism in the 1920s.208 Crafted with emotive rhetoric and meticulous attention to detail, Guo gives vivid recollections of the hopes and anxieties of his fellow student activists, the egotism and later the corruption of the revolutionaries, and above all, the charismatic influence and, again, the ultimate corruption of the constitutional leaders. In his own reminiscence, as a radical student, Guo devoured tales of heroism and martyrdom, and desired more violent revolutionary actions to overthrow the Manchu regime. He was disappointed to see that the people of Sichuan were inclined to follow the constitutionalist leaders, and he fantasized about seeing a real revolutionary in his native province.209 Thus, Guo’s ideological retrospection squarely discredits the conservative constitutional monarchists and decries the weakness of the

206 Ibid., p. 19. 207 Guo, “Fanzheng qianhou.” 208 In the 1920s, Guo embraced Marxism-Leninism and its collectivist revolutionary ideology as a means to liberate the individual and the nation. For Guo’s conversion to Marxism- Leninism, see Xiaoming Chen, From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution, pp. 98–107. 209 Guo, “Fanzheng qianhou,” pp. 218–20. David Tod Roy explains that in Sichuan public opinion on the whole favored the constitutional monarchists, whereas young students like Guo Moruo and his classmates were attracted to the agenda of the revolutionaries to overthrow the Manchu government. See Roy, Kuo Mo-jo, pp. 35–38. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 101 gentry for failing to take the mass movement in the right direction in the wake of the mass slaughter of innocent people in Chengdu. More importantly, in his account, Guo Moruo mocks the railroad protection leader, Pu Dianjun, as an opportunist, and charges him with betraying his Sichuanese mass supporters and hence the revolutionary cause at the critical moment:

Pu Dianjun never made an appearance during the course of the movement. They [the league leaders] were ready for a plan for withdrawal. Once they encountered the suppression of the government, Pu Dianjun would come out and act as a conciliator to make a compromise. 在這次的運動中，蒲殿俊自始至終沒有出過水面，這在他們的計劃中便是預先準備著一個退路，預備到高壓臨頭的時候，蒲殿俊好出來轉圜，做一個和事老.210

It is precisely because of Zhao Erfeng’s misapprehension of the constitutionalists as genuine rebels, Guo implies, that he holds them in custody and his measure subsequently stirs up the mass revolts. Guo’s sarcastic remark infers a bitter historical irony in which the government officials’ fear of the conservative gentry members resulted in turning the peaceful protests into violent social riots. It also drives home the ideological message of the inevitable failure of the gentry in the revolution. In fact, some historians have pointed out that the constitutionalist movement was led by leaders who held official ranks and local self-government posts. Thus the gentry reformers were conservatives motivated by self-interest and lacked a clear goal of overthrowing the existing government.211 However, other interpretations have viewed the constitutionalist leaders more positively.212 Furthermore, Guo’s denigration of the constitutional reformers reflects his Marxist-Leninist leanings. Guo characterizes turn-of-the century China as a transitional stage from feudal society to a capitalist system, and presents the social unrest in Sichuan as the inevitable confrontation between the

210 Guo, “Fanzheng qianhou,” pp. 266–67. 211 Ichiko, “The Railway Protection Movement in Szechuan in 1911” and “The Role of the Gentry: An Hypothesis.” 212 Taiwan-based scholar Zhang Pengyuan argues that the gentry reformers made a positive contribution to the founding of a new republic. See his “The Constitutionalists,” and Lixian pai yu Xinhai geming, pp. 132–42. Hong Kong-based literary historian Cao Juren believes that the gentry-led constitutionalist movement in Sichuan critically contributed to the success of the 1911 Revolution. See Cao, Xiandai Zhongguo tongjian, p. 21. 102 CHAPTER 3 feudalistic and capitalistic forces in a grand historical trajectory. His critique befits the paradigm of Communist historiography, which argues that the newly emergent Chinese bourgeoisie was still too weak and too divided to take revolutionary leadership and organize the masses into a powerful political force. Owing to their alliance with feudal forces and foreign imperialism, they actually constituted an obstacle to the revolution. In this sense, Communist historians considered the constitutionalist movement a failure and the 1911 Revolution ‘unfinished’ because China remained under the heel of imperialist and feudal forces.213 These ideological positions not only bypass vehement disputes over factual records of the incident but also crudely neglect the fundamental concern of historical memory. How should the event be remembered by the people? Who was involved in it? Most post-event records and memoirs have consisted of accounts of who did what and when; how such documentation should be related to historical context is a serious matter of historical inquiry. Above all, in what sense was the Chengdu massacre causally linked to the whole revolutionary movement in Sichuan? In narrativizing what actually happened on 7 September, foreign diplomats and missionaries at the time seem to have aligned with the imperial regime. The West China Missionary News reported that on 6 September a student who pretended to be possessed asked to see the Viceroy (Governor-General): “He reported to the guards that he had a dream in which it was revealed to him that Chengdu (Chengtu) was to be destroyed on the 16th inst. He declared that the Viceroy was the only person who could save the city, and begged to be allowed to see him.”214 After various crazy antics, this student revealed to the authorities the subtle plans of the railroad protection movement for an imminent uprising. This is evidently a mythic narrative to justify the official suppressions, for it turns out that the Viceroy’s coup had been skillfully planned to disperse the railroad protection movement. On 6 September all foreigners were invited to settle at the Canadian Methodist Mission compound in the northeastern corner of the city (to clear the stage of impediment when violence broke out). Early on 7 September soldiers were ordered to patrol the streets within the capital. That morning, the Viceroy summoned the railroad league leaders to the yamen to see the latest wire from Beijing, pretending that the Qing court

213 Chongji Jin, “The 1911 Revolution and the Awakening of the Chinese Nation”; Lu and Wang, The Revolution of 1911, pp. 291–99. For the Communist views on the 1911 Revolution, see Hsieh, Chinese Historiography on the Revolution of 1911, pp. 41–63; Fung, “Post-1949 Chinese Historiography on the 1911 Revolution.” 214 “The Closed City,” p. 9. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 103 might be proposing a resolution to the month-long stalemate. When Zhao Erfeng met the gentry after their long wait, he accused the leaders of inciting the people to agitation against the government by staging strikes and suspend- ing businesses and schools in Chengdu. At the Viceroy’s command soldiers rushed out and seized the guests from behind and handcuffed the entire band. At a critical moment Zhao and his officers even “desired the execution of the nine captive leaders.”215 One of the gentry in custody, Peng Fen (Peng Lancun), provided a slightly different version. He remembered that they had been treated roughly as they entered the guest room. Each of them, with their hands tied, was escorted by two soldiers with pistols. There were guards holding long swords and soldiers with rifles stationed everywhere around the yamen courts. The soldiers seemed to be present for the protection of the Viceroy. Peng Fen did not mention the trial that Zhao held, but he felt that he and his colleagues were in imminent danger of being killed or executed at any moment.216 S.C. Yang, a young officer responsible for communicating with foreigners in Chengdu at the time, painted a melodramatic incident and ‘heroic’ picture of the gentry hostages. According to Yang, when the captives heard rifle reports outside and knew that people had come to plead for their release, they were saddened and feared that “the people were suffering on their behalf.” The gentry demanded of Zhao Erfeng that they be taken out at once and executed, as they would “take full responsibility” and were “ready to die.”217 As soon as the gentry leaders were detained in the yamen, military action took a swift turn within the city. When a gong was sounded in response to a fire on Gold Street—it was believed that the fire was set on official order—the streets were flooded with soldiers, cavalry, and police, the four gates of the city closed, the railroad offices raided, the students bottled up in the city, and the offending newspapers sealed up and their proprietors put under arrest.218 The crowds seem to have gathered for the purpose of saving the gentry leaders. Upon hearing of the incarceration, thousands raced to the Viceroy’s yamen, demanding the surrender of the captives. The North-China Herald reported that when the Viceroy could not disperse the angry crowds, he ordered his guards to open fire.

215 S.C. Yang, “The Revolution in Szechwan, 1911–1912,” p. 76. 216 Peng Fen, “Xinhai xun Qing zhengbian fayuan ji,” 2: 423. 217 S.C. Yang, “The Revolution in Szechwan, 1911–1912,” p. 77. 218 “The Viceroy’s Foresight.” 104 CHAPTER 3

[T]hen up went the officer’s sword and a volley was discharged into the air. Those in front turned, but were held and pushed forward from the rear. Then a second volley, this time right into the mass of humanity and with screams men fell or fled in all directions. There was no longer doubt of the loyalty of the soldiers, or of the dire nature of the work of their guns. Over a dozen had fallen, others were wounded and many more were trampled down in the wild rush that followed.219

The North-China Herald considered the mass demonstrations and strikes in Chengdu as “a patriotic movement to conserve a right granted by a previous Emperor” (that is, the restoral to the people of Sichuan of the railroad franchise granted them by the former Emperor Guangxu). As the journalist put it, “By the righteousness of their protest and the sanity of their campaigns they won to themselves the sympathy and support of masses of the people, the students and gentry and not a few of the officials and foreigners.”220 According to the report of British diplomats, about 2,000 to 3,000 people congregated in front of the Viceroy’s yamen where troops were posted. There were some “respectable people” among the crowds, and most of the others were of “the lower class.” They all begged the Governor-General to release the gentry in custody, and promised that they would reopen their shops and halt all agitations should their plea be fulfilled. The crowds made no attempt to enter the yamen further, but an expectant officer, one Wang by name, ordered the troops to fire on the crowds.221 The turning point where the railroad dispute abruptly changed into violent disturbance has remained contentious. Immediately after the bloody confrontations on 7 September, the Viceroy proclaimed that there had been a well- laid plot for insurgents from the countryside to enter from all four gates on 8 September to sack the city. Zhao Erfeng charged the agitators with plotting an insurrection and sedition as he had found evidence of connections between the leaders and the local militias and of the drilling of troops and collecting guns and ammunition. It was, Zhao proudly claimed, the government’s prompt arrest of the leaders that prevented catastrophe.222 Official proclamations warned the people that all resisting parties would be “treated as rebels,” urging good citizens to avoid the rioters. The leaders of the Society were misleading

219 “The Revolt in Chengtu,” pp. 159–60. 220 Ibid., p. 160. 221 Letter of Acting Consul Brown to Sir J. Jordon, Chongqing, 22 September 1911. 222 “Another Proclamation.” Zhao Erfeng’s 11 September edict is documented in Dai, ed., Sichuan baolu yundong shiliao, pp. 317–19. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 105 them and only designed to make of them a “sacrifice of cattle.”223 An imperial edict issued on 12 September accused some “evilly disposed persons” for inciting the people to further trouble. The recent circulation of a provocative pamphlet—namely, The Tract Discussing the Sichuanese People’s Self-Defense (Sichuan ren zibao shangque shu), which called for the political independence of Sichuan—was proof of insurrection. The government also noted the recent distribution of circulars calling on the people to halt tax payments and demanding the establishment of self-government in Sichuan. The official statement described the demonstrators as insurgents coming to attack the yamen: “On the 7th instant a mob many thousands strong made a fierce attack on the Viceroy’s yamen with fire and sword, killing a number of soldiers. Such lawlessness is obviously the work of revolutionaries and can have no connection with the railway question.”224 In line with the official indictment of the mass revolt, the West China Missionary News called the surging crowd a ‘mob,’ and sympathetically claimed that the soldiers were forced to fire on the people when the situation really got out of hand:

Thousands of men, women and children with sticks of lighted incense in one hand, and yellow paper spirit tablets of the Emperor in the other, pressed toward the Viceroy’s yamen, weeping and wailing, all crying: “Give us back our Loh-lun [Luo Lun]; give us back our Loh-lun.” The mob pressed so hard about His Excellency’s yamen and some of the streets leading to it, that at last he was compelled to give the order, “Fire” (k’ai pow [kai pao]) and the soldiers immediately responded. It is reported that most of them shot in the air, but twenty-six persons were killed, and more than that number wounded. The soldiers all behaved themselves admirably and, so far as we can learn, used no unnecessary force, but their prompt action was sufficient to show that they were going to stand by their master and the mob began to yield, and towards evening the soldiers began to get the crowds pretty well in hand.225

In his 1950s memoir, Zhou Shanpei, a consummate Qing official who served six Sichuan governors-general in Chengdu, claimed to have been sympathetic to the railroad league members and attacked the government’s policy. His attitude sounds politically correct after the demise of the regime. On the one hand, his

223 “The Viceroy’s Foresight.” 224 Translation of Gazette of 12 September 1911. 225 “The Closed City,” p. 10. 106 CHAPTER 3 presence on the spot and first-hand experience of the tragedy suggests credibility, but his previous official status undermines the account on the other. A key government administrator in charge of the railroad affair in the disputed province in 1911, Zhou was sympathetic to the officials handling the crisis. Zhou recalled that Zhao Erfeng indeed had made a few compromises when he was confronted by the petitioners at the yamen gate.226 The Governor-General first dispatched one of his officials to discuss the arrests with the protesters. The people rejected the proposal and asked to speak to Zhao face-to-face. Zhao did come out to meet the petitioners, but he wanted to speak to their representatives and ordered the petitioners to proceed no further into yamen grounds. The people continued to press forward. Zhao sounded a few warnings to the crowd before he commanded the troops to fire. In Zhou’s reminiscence, only seven people (including two yamen sedan-chair bearers) were killed on the spot. He believed that the participants were not violent agitators as he saw only placards and incense in the hands of the crowd. Zhou’s version diverged from the official proclamations that the petitioners were riotous arsonists armed with clubs and swords.227 In Zhou’s estimation, the carnage would have been worse had the crowd entered the yamen’s east gate, which was defended by seasoned army troops under Tian Zhengkui, head of the military department. Obviously, Zhou Shanpei may have played down the number of those killed. Taiwan-based historian Quan Hansheng has argued that Zhou’s memory may have been unreliable after so many years, and that he might have unwittingly left unstated the tragic consequences as a former high official and member of the ruling class.228 In addition, Zhou’s version widely differed from that of S.C. Yang. In Yang’s recollection, written some twenty years after the event, it was Tian Zhengkui who ordered the troops to open fire and killed a few protesters. As a result, “several tens were killed and many wounded.” As the people would not budge, Tian further ordered the troops to “use the big guns.”229 Yang’s account also included a dramatic episode when the Chengdu prefect named Yu Zongtong “walked up to the mouth of the cannon and prevented it from firing,” weeping and wailing for the authorities to have mercy on the people.

226 Zhou Shanpei, Xinhai Sichuan zhenglu qinli ji, pp. 33–34. 227 According to those who sympathized with the league, British diplomats wrote, “the rioters” were “peaceable folk who had approached the yamen gates as suppliants, and were humbly kneeling, holding to their foreheads and breasts the yellow slips.” Letter of Consul-General Wilkinson to Sir J. Jordon, Chengdu, 16 September 1911. 228 Quan, “Tielu guoyou wenti yu Xinhai geming,” p. 243. 229 S.C. Yang, “The Revolution in Szechwan, 1911–1912,” p. 74. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 107

These ‘official’ stories became insignificant and illegitimate after the collapse of the Manchu regime. They were quickly abandoned and overshadowed by personal reminiscences that brought out the brutality and injustice of the massacre and highlighted the Manichean struggle of the people against their despotic rulers. These early scattered memories offered impressionistic or sentimental recollections without furnishing more precise information on the composition of the crowds. Even Guo Moruo’s account lacks such details:

As soon as the citizens, unarmed and defenseless, rushed to the east gate, the guards at the entrance fired at them in a string of shots, and killed a few people who were unfortunately standing in the front of the crowds. When the soldiers stationed at the pass heard the gunshots at the Viceroy’s yamen, they also opened fire on the surging crowds. So the crowds were stuck and surrounded by bullets on all sides. The people could only flee into the streets and seek shelter in the shops on both sides. The gunfire stopped after a few gunshots were heard.230

手無寸鐵的市民剛好走到督署的東轅門，門口的衛兵便一排槍打過來. 可憐為頭的便打死了好幾個. 附近要隘處把守著的衛兵聽見督處的衛兵在開槍，他們也就開起槍來，打那如潮水一樣崩潰下來的群眾. 這樣，群眾便陷在槍彈的重圍中了，大家只好向兩街兩側的鋪面裡逃避，槍聲只開了幾次便停止了.

Guo emphasized that it was a mass slaughter. He confessed that he could not remember exactly how many had died or been wounded; what he could remember was that the victims included a “12- to 13-year-old child and an old mother of 50 or 60.” The bloodstained streets were littered with debris of broken memorial tablets, incense sticks, and shoes. Although Guo’s personal memoir may have been distorted or exaggerated, it highlighted the defenselessness and innocence of the people killed by Zhao Erfeng’s troops. Indeed, the Sichuanese people had nicknamed the Governor-General “Zhao the Butcher” (Zhao Tuhu) for his earlier high-handed suppression of Tibet. Dehumanization of the ruler was characteristic of Guo’s rhetorical strategy, which indeed reflected Sichuan public opinion at the time. Later historiography and historical writings about the railway dispute have gravitated toward the constructed narratives of the ‘people’—both as the injured party and as the revolting subject—and may well have blossomed into historical vignettes heralding the struggle of the common people in the wider

230 Guo, “Fanzheng qianhou,” p. 267. 108 CHAPTER 3 context of anti-imperialist struggle. Historians have in particular been concerned about the role of the masses as the motive force of the 1911 Revolution. Dai Zhili, who compiled the three-volume Historical Materials on the Railroad Protection Movement in Sichuan (Sichuan baolu yundong shiliao) in 1959, claimed that Sichuan’s mass railroad protest was a patriotic cause supported by the peasantry and the working class, and the precursor of the Wuchang Uprising.231 Wei Yingtao, a Sichuan historian who published an important study of the railroad protection movement in 1981, championed the working class and the masses as a vital mobilizing force of the movement. Culling earlier memorial accounts of the incident, however, Wei indicated that most of the petitioners were workers, artisans, and people of lower social status. Among the dead, twenty-six were identified: eighteen were weavers, carvers, apprentices, tailors, peddlers, hawkers, and water pipe tobacco workers.232 The ideological props of Communist discourse notwithstanding, the ordinary people and everyday life have apparently become a renewed focus of study for revolutionary history in Chengdu. In his study of Chengdu’s everyday culture as practiced by what he calls the ‘commoners,’ cultural historian Di Wang shows how Chengdu’s urban inhabitants used popular culture and public rituals to motivate mass politics, and claims that “the year 1911 symbolized commoners’ political participation and the transformation from street culture to street politics, which radically affected their daily lives.”233 Wang perceives the short span of time in 1911 as the utopian moment when elite reformers and urban commoners joined in the same political cause, but the massacre led to violent confrontations between the people and the government, and escalated political rallies among Chengdu’s urbanites.

Eyewitness Testimonies

How do Chengdu’s people remember the singular events in 1911? To rephrase this question in more critical terms, we should ask instead: How do elites and state power rewrite the events by making use of government records and participant accounts derived from a vast compendium of materials including

231 Dai, ed., Sichuan baolu yundong shiliao huizuan, 1: 1–10. 232 Wei Yingtao, Sichuan baolu yundongshi, p. 292. Qin Nan, a lower-rank yamen officer who was present on the scene on 7 September, later gave his personal reminiscence of the event, in which he recorded that more than twenty people died in the incident, most of whom were lower-class workers. See Qin, Shu xin, 1: 373. 233 Di Wang, Street Culture in Chengdu, p. 221. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 109 official correspondence, unofficial memorials, diaries, and the like? By the time people involved in the events at various levels start recapturing the past as they experienced it, their memory narratives are unstable, fluid, and pluralistic. The fragmented multiplicity of remembrances and the appropriations of them by social groups for various uses constitute the ‘politics of memory’ in historical writing and cultural discourse. In the study of how popular memories of Mao’s revolutionary past function in contemporary China, Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang contend that there are not only a simple division of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ memories that compete to interpret historical experiences, but also distinctly different versions of popular memories held by various social communities that help to shape the past and their group identities. But the ‘collective memories’ as partial reconstructions of the past are highly malleable, inevitably affected by a standpoint in the present and also a vision of the future. Furthermore, it is the process of remembering and forgetting itself that produces political subjects and “contributes to the microfoundation of the state and its challenge from society.”234 In short, memory-work is not simply a cognitive faculty of individuals or groups; it is always a social and political act—be it individualistic, collective or social in nature—and can be “susceptible to forgetting, distorting, forging, manipulating, and silencing.”235 What Lee and Yang have claimed about the politics of memory in modern China can be critically borrowed to think through the dilemma of Li Jieren in composing The Great Wave. This early version of the novel basically follows the chronology of the mass political movements in Chengdu. However, the fictional narrative interrupts the linearity and actuality of historical events by posing a few fictive characters on the front stage as they witness the course of history and even play determinant roles at each historical turning point. Employing the structure of social panorama, the novel delves into the many layers of Chengdu society in the throes of social collapse. Among the vast array of fictive and actual personages, the main protagonists stand out from their respective facets of society; they observe history from their own platforms and plan their actions and reactions. Huang Lansheng is a low-ranking government official, and the Huang family has intimate connections with the gentry. The Huang family’s interactions with people both above and below them offer readers privileged access to the worldview and conservative attitudes of the landed gentry. Chu Zicai, Huang Lansheng’s nephew, is a twenty-year-old student acquainted with the young social activists of his generation. Through Chu’s interrelations with his peers,

234 Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, “Introduction: Memory, Power, and Culture,” p. 3. 235 Meusburger, “Knowledge, Cultural Memory, and Politics,” p. 51. 110 CHAPTER 3 the narrative constructs images of a motley crew of younger intellectuals who are keenly occupied with the mass movement or are cynically detached from it. The novel also creates an unconventional female figure, Mrs. Huang (Huang Taitai), who aggressively manipulates her many lovers; these range from her middle-aged gentry relatives to the young Chu. In his portrayal of an enter- prising and sexual alluring woman, Li Jieren creatively borrowed from French naturalism, underscoring powerful human desires and depicting an uncom- promising heroine who turns the opportunity of historical change to her own private interest. In the lower echelons of society stands another representative figure, Fu Longsheng, an umbrella maker and petty shopkeeper who witnesses the Chengdu massacre and devotes himself to the public protest by following the gentry leaders.236 Indeed, it is through Fu Longsheng’s participation in the railroad protection protests that the novelist tries to reveal the mentalities of the region and the historical sentiments of the local people who experience the events on a microscopic scale. Take, for example, the narration of the Chengdu massacre in the novel. Rather than describing the dramatic arrest of the gentry leaders or seeking the truth about who did what and who was to blame, as most later memorials have done, the fictional narrative allows the reader to hear the voices of the characters. The narrator reminds the reader of how the event could have been remembered—or forgotten—by the local people themselves. Halfway through The Great Wave, the narrator interrupts the story to talk about the mass riot on 7 September, and comments on the difficulty of recalling the past as time goes by:

By seventy to eighty years after the founding of Republican China, when the offspring of the second generation have become older, the stories of what happened in Chengdu on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month (in 1911) will probably have disappeared in the minds of most of Chengdu’s residents. When these stories are retold in this book at this moment—which is only a short span of twenty-five years from the time when they happened back then—don’t you think that these events appear to be unfolding “before your very eyes” 如在目前?237

236 For a summary of the novel, see Ma Sen, rev. of The Great Wave. 237 Li Jieren, Dabo (1938), 2: 115. Subsequent references are to this earliest version of the novel unless noted otherwise. All references to the novel (volume no.: page no.) are cited parenthetically in the text. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 111

The narrator couches his remarks in a precise manner of reporting to convey a tone of historical authenticity, but his voice in fact reflects a mood of uncertainty. Striving to reconstruct the scene in all its vividness and presentness, the authorial voice expresses the fear that the local inhabitants might suffer from amnesia. Of note here is the way in which the narrator places himself within the narrated world on a level with his characters, and addresses his reader in an intimate tone. He sounds like one of the participants in the event, reporting the happenings on the spot. He convinces the reader that he “remembers (the event) all too clearly” 記得清清楚楚 (2: 115); he will take you back to that historical scene to witness how these events took place and were perceived by people, as if they could be re-presented “clearly before your very eyes” 真真如在目前 (2: 115). The way that the narrator is posed as a figure of the past, promising like a stage director to articulate images of collective pasts for the present generation, suggests the dialectics of memory and history in the operation of the historical novel. Readers may easily associate the subtle narrative tone with the voice of Li Jieren, who was committed to composing panoramic novels as complex testimonies to the past. Speaking of the dynamics of individual remembrance and collective representations of the past, in a comparable tone, Maurice Halbwachs has noted:

During my life, my national society has been theater for a number of events that I say I “remember,” events that I know about only from newspapers or the testimony of those directly involved. These events occupy a place in the memory of the nation, but I myself did not witness them. In recalling them, I must rely entirely upon the memory of others, a memory that comes, not as collaborator or completer of my own, but as the very source of what I wish to repeat. I often know such events no better nor in any other manner than I know historical events that occurred before I was born. I carry a baggage load of historical remembrances that I can increase through conversation and reading. But it remains a borrowed memory, not my own.238

For Halbwachs, memory is as much framed in the present as in the past, and personal memory can never be severed from the necessary social frameworks in which individual remembrances are always embedded in collective deliber- ations of the past. In other words, it is impossible for individuals to remember in any coherent and persistent way outside of their group contexts. Thus, when

238 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, p. 51. 112 CHAPTER 3 one says “I remember,” one may be mentally assembling a network of rhetorical symbols and visual images in which the past has been socially articulated or negotiated. To grasp the historical reality underlying these representations, Halbwachs remarks, one would have to go outside oneself and be placed within a group viewpoint. In light of Halbwachs’ insight, I argue that the polyphonic novel of The Great Wave provides a vital platform to convey the mnemonic dynamics of a place, in which readers are instructed to see how the events mark a canonical moment because it is imbued with the hopes, passions, and anxieties of its characters. As in the “prologue” to the event, the novelist is preoccupied by an inelucta- ble sense of historical time and eventfulness. He has to temporalize the native place and local history against the modern time frame of the Revolution:

The fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month was a memorial date in the city of Chengdu. If we admit that the railway movement in Sichuan was closely connected with the Wuchang Uprising in the year of Xinhai (1911), then the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month—only one month before the beginning of the Republican era—was a prologue to the event of the Double Tenth in that year (10 October), which marked the establishment of Republican China.239 (2: 115)

The fictional time frame of the event is equivalent to the historical date when the incident took place. In the above passage, the storyteller announces the advent of a new sense of time and place, as if the entire history of the new China is to be linked up with this locality. Also noteworthy is how the narrator intervenes to remind the reader of the time frame in such an explicit manner. There are two different temporal configurations of the native place that compete in the historical-fictional narrative: a rural time defined in terms of the lunar month and day (which structures daily activities and yearly festivities in the rural community), and a modern time marked by the Western calendar month (with specific reference to the events of the 1911 Revolution and arrival of the new Republican era). Yet, the narrator stresses the incommensurability of a different place and milieu of Chengdu vis-à-vis the homogeneous ‘historical time’ of the nation. There is little concern about how historical teleology is going to overwhelm the regional place of stasis and inertia. The issue is how the stagnant and motionless native place, which is still marked by its cyclical time, is going to clash with the passage of the revolutionary history that is looming larger with every passing day.

239 Before 1949, 10 October was the National Day in China. After 1949, it continued to be the National Day in Taiwan. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 113

Since the narrator cannot pretend to know everything about the event, he has to resort to the experiences of several fictive characters to reconstruct the spectacle of chaos and revolt. The narrative shifts from the crowd to the personal perspective of one of the protagonists. In a tone of constructed objectivity, the memorial accounts of Fu Longsheng are quoted as one of the ‘he said, she said’ stories (“as Fu Longsheng remembered later” 後來據傅隆盛記憶起來 (2: 122)), but they are told in third-person narration to vali- date their credibility. Readers are informed that Fu Longsheng impatiently joins the crowd in the street, following the people to the yamen and shouting for the release of the leaders. The bullets just miss his head, and he sees the people around him get hit and fall down. In this way, readers are led to see through the eyes and feel through the response of the individual participant in order to experience the traumatic event more spectacularly. Thanks to his artistic rendering of narrative voices, the novelist’s attempt to transcribe history ‘as it really was’ produces more tensions between the fictive and the real, as well as a skeptical retrospective look at the past. The novel’s polyphonic discourse entails a seemingly objective narration, which is juxtaposed with the characters’ eyewitness accounts and the occasional intrusion of the storyteller’s voice as he comments on the narrated events. Technically, the rendering of Fu Longsheng’s eyewitness account in a mode of indi- rect reportage functions to deliver a sense of impartiality and transparency in representation. By avoiding the use of the first person or internal focaliza- tion of the character’s experience, the novelist strives to—or pretends to— present the event from a more detached position so as to intermingle fiction with history. The authorial voice does not give too much weight to Fu Longsheng’s traumatic experience, nor expect the reader to be any more traumatized by the massacre experience as it reports it. Rather, the text is interested in delving into the mentalities of the crowd. In explaining the eventful phenomenon, Li Jieren is faced with the same tough question as a historian. What does the event mean to the participants, and how do they invest their actions with possible meanings? Denying privileged access to the consciousness of the people in narrative representation, the narrator at times exploits the greater freedom of fiction to explore possibilities of representation, passing his own judgment on the crowd in spite of his seemingly impersonal stance. Consider the following commentary by the narrator:

People were so enthusiastic. They were coming to rescue Mr. Pu (Dianjun) and Mr. Lo (Lun) without hesitation. Could Pu and Lo be released? They didn’t care. What benefit might the release bring? They didn’t care either. They had only one single idea: “Mr. Pu and Mr. Lo have been arrested by 114 CHAPTER 3

Zhao the Butcher, and are to be decapitated. We gotta go to the South Court to save them!” 人民是那樣的熱忱，他們全是不假思索的來救蒲先生，來救羅先生.救得出來，救不出來，他們不管.救出來了，於他們有什麼好處，他們也不管；他們只有一個念頭：蒲先生羅先生被趙屠戶捉去了，要殺頭，我們得到南院上去救他！ (2: 118)

The narrator describes a crowd that acts spontaneously in the face of unexpected danger. Most of the people are not motivated by a political ideology to save their place (Sichuan) or the nation (China), but rather by the simple urge to release their leaders. For the narrator, however, these people seem to lack a strong will or a sense of direction. They act in spite of themselves as a mystified mass: “Perhaps the crowds don’t have the slightest idea (about what they were doing). They were just doing their duty to press forward and shout. What the consequences would be was basically not on their minds.” 或許群眾心裏就連這一點念頭也沒有，他們只是盡其職責的擠，盡其職責的喊，結果如何，他們根本就沒有想到. (2: 122) When they hear the gunshots, the people are so frightened that they scramble madly to get out of the way. As the narrator informs the reader, there is no leader to try to bring the people together, and so the crowd’s protest expresses no identifiable goals other than the common resentment against the arrest: “After all, without a leader who could unify the consciousness of the masses, everybody seemed to be gripped by fear somehow, and could not act in unison and rush forward.” 畢竟沒有指揮的人. 不能把群眾意識統一起來，大家也畢竟各懷了三分懼怯，做不出一湧而上的步調齊一的舉動. (2: 122) Sounding like a condescending external spectator, the opinionated narrator’s commentary confers a mixed sense of authenticity and irony to the narrated event: “Death is so horrible: it utterly strangles the throats of the masses, making thousands of people stumble and run out of the gate. They all clenched their teeth, crying sound- lessly.” 死是那樣的可怕，它把群眾的喉嚨全扼住了，使得千數的人馬撲撲跌跌的朝頭門外跑，而都緊咬著牙巴，喊不出一點聲音. (2: 124) The fictional tone in The Great Wave differs from that of most of the memoirs and historiographical accounts in that it does not valorize the resilient spirit of the masses. The narrator derides the ‘lofty’ human cause in somewhat comic or ironic terms. In the mayhem, Fu Longsheng is thrown into the scene. He knows what happens at that moment but he apparently does not comprehend the cause or outcome of his actions. Eventually the key witness walks away from the scene and later reports to his fellow villagers about the terrible slaughter. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 115

The complex narrative pattern through which Li Jieren depicts the crowd scene demystifies the historical ‘aura’ of the mass movement. Rather, by giving full expression to the characters’ uneasy responses, the novelist attempts to render the explosive impact of the events on the interrelationships of the characters in the cross-section of a brief moment. This is the momentary experience that usually eludes a historian’s schematization. But the retrospective recognition of the moment as “a memorial date in the city of Chengdu” carries a strange note: the narrator here infers that the historical significance of the date is gradually falling into oblivion, as much as he reveals that even the participants in the scene do not comprehend the impact of their actions in a historical sense. In this riot episode, Li Jieren employs narrative techniques to drive home convictions about the spontaneity of human action and the unpre- dictability of history. The fictional narratives resist the teleology of a knowable future as an outcome of the characters’ actions and their fixed relations with an ‘epoch.’ Most significantly, the novelist ventures to underplay the high drama of the social upheaval so as to create an impression of uncertainty, in which the instance opens on an unknown future, as the event unfolds to the actual perceptions of the characters in the presentness of the past, before the events had acquired their ‘historical’ meanings in official records. Li Jieren’s historical narration characteristically instills a sense of being-in-the-present in the historical scene. The novelist must recapture all the potentialities of presentness when writing about the past so as to leave space for all the potential outcomes and accidental or haphazard occurrences. The novelist’s persistent effort to articulate the historically specific world- views and modes of thinking of Chengdu people, who were thrown into unprecedented historical changes beyond their mental horizons, may strike a similar note to the Annales School’s emphasis on reconstructing the mentalités of people and groups of the past. Mentalité encompasses a socially shared system of beliefs, habits of mind, moral values, collective emotions and affinities, social ideology and practices within a given people. The Great Wave is likewise less interested in explaining the progress of the revolution than reimagining a lost connection between memory and mentalités. It has much to do with narrative: “the stories we tell to say ‘who we are,’ the stories we tell about who ‘our’ people are.”240 It is by virtue of the mnemonic narrative of the historical novel that the mentalités of the past are attached to memory writing, in which

240 Daniel Little, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History, p. 199. For a succinct account of the French historical understanding of mentalité, see pp. 195–208. 116 CHAPTER 3 the novelist explores how people perceive the world around them and how a society remembers its past.241 The narrator at times relies upon vivid dialogues to render the speech habits of the characters with comic precision in order to show their cognitive response to the changing world around them. Instead of portraying engaged participants in the railroad protection movement, the novel presents individuated characters with idiosyncratic attitudes. Wu Fengwu, a soldier who represents the military adventurer and an opportunist who rises to power with the change of situation, does not have the slightest sense of the object—the disputed railroads—despite the fact he has been involved in the Comrades’ Society. A military figure who even joins the revolutionary army, Wu tells his friends:

But I still do not quite understand—what is that thing called the “iron- road” (railroad)? In recent years, I have been hearing people who keep saying: build the “iron-road”; let the train run; “iron-roads” have got to be built in Sichuan. I still don’t quite understand—what does an “iron- road” look like? Do they really construct the roads in iron? 不過我還不甚懂得，啥子東西叫鐵路？幾年來常聽見人人再說：修鐵路，走火車，四川也要修鐵路了.我可是至今不明白，鐵路是啥樣子？難道把路修成鐵的？(1: 50–51)

The depiction not only articulates the character’s ignorance of larger events and high-sounding ideologies, but also lays bare the native mental horizons in interpreting and reacting to happenings and actions by others. Through the experiences of Fu Longsheng, the novel shows how an illiterate man at first loyally follows the movement and its leaders with absolute faith, and how his emotions change from elation to frustration over time: “At the onset of the railroad protection movement, he (Fu) maintained a disciple’s spirit, highly regarding the railroad protection cause as a supreme and pure religion, and Mr. Luo Lun and Mr. Pu Dianjun who were in charge of the movement as the revered figure of Confucius.” 自從爭路事起，他一直秉著信徒精神，把保路救國當作了一種至高無上的純潔宗教，把主持這事的羅綸羅先生，蒲殿俊蒲先生等，當作了孔夫子元始天尊. (2: 40) The narrative commentary callously describes how the native folks construe the social movement in terms of a traditional mindset and infuse their actions with the humble disposition of the followers of a sage. Yet the folk mentality

241 Concerning the French historical tradition, Alon Confino reveals the intellectual and methodological affiliations between memory studies and the history of mentalities. See Confino, “Memory and the History of Mentalities.” No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 117 betrays variability and plasticity when loyalty and solidarity quickly degenerate into the expression of grievances and discontent. Only seventy days after the Chengdu massacre, the gentry leaders are released and they soon join the collaborative government. The people who risked their lives to save their leaders now cannot help feeling a sense of betrayal, as the narrator shrewdly observes: “Only seven days ago, everyone’s mind was like a sheet of white paper, on which a line was printed: Rescue our Mr. Luo! But today everyone has all kinds of desires, all kinds of demands; besides these desires and demands, everyone has all kinds of reproaches.” 但是七十天前，大家的心地全似一張白紙. 上面只印了一行“援救我們的羅先生！ ”而今天則有種種的欲望，種種的要求. 欲望要求之後，還有種種的責備. (3: 87–88) Importantly, Fu Longsheng manifests at once the individual and group mentalities of local Chengdu citizens. In The Great Wave, none of the major fictional characters and participants of the movement are martyred or meta- morphose into towering heroes or heroines. To be sure, the novelist reveals free subjectivity and temperament in the characters: they are largely devoid of the ideological imperative of being a conscious political participant or awakened figure in a typical national struggle story or revolutionary tale. They are rather linked to the Chengdu massacre because the singular characters with their distinctive habits of mind and genuine speech voice their inexplicable fears and hopes that instinctively drive history forward.

Figure of the Crowd

In The Great Wave, the depictions of the gentry’s uneasy encounter with the crowd, and the escalation of the mass movement as seen through the eyes of Chengdu elites, reveal Li Jieren’s distinctive treatment of the individual and the collective. Li’s style is fundamentally at odds with the practice of mass fiction that became prominent in the increasingly politicized literary scene of the 1930s and 1940s. Marston Anderson argues that one finds the ‘eruption of the crowd’ and the dominant position of this imagery in contemporaneous works by Zhang Tianyi, Ding Ling, Ye Zi (1912–39), Sha Ting, Ai Wu (1904–92), and Wu Zuxiang. In the political ‘massification’ of fiction, writes Anderson, “Chinese writers acknowledged a new imperative: they began erasing the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘they’—between the self and society—that had been an indispensable basis for the practice of critical realism, subsuming both in a collective ‘we’.”242

242 Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism, p. 202. 118 CHAPTER 3

Let us look quickly at a few prominent examples. Wu Zuxiang’s “Eighteen Hundred Piculs” (“Yiqianbabai dan,” 1934) stands out for its controversial portrait of a looming rebellious crowd vis-à-vis wealthy clan members who are depicted with psychological depth and subtlety. The novella presents episodes of a clan meeting, in which the rural elites discuss how to put eighteen hundred bushels of rice to good use to steer through economic difficulties caused by drought and famine. The clan meeting ends up in a typical family quarrel because of a conflict of private interests. But the domestic turmoil is finally cut short by desperate farmers who storm the compound to take the grain by force. Scholarly opinions have been divided on the riot scene in the finale: C.T. Hsia finds it an unsatisfactory and awkward representation of the proletariat in compliance with ideological fashion;243 Philip Williams, however, argues that the peasant uprising has been carefully foreshadowed, and the crowd’s obscure presence rather underscores the psychological threat to the ruling class.244 In either case, the challenge of depicting the crowd and the epic dramatization of the subject’s change of consciousness is central to left-wing progressive fiction in this period, particularly for literary writers of urban and petty bourgeois intellectual backgrounds. Ding Ling’s “Flood” (“Shui,” 1931) faces a similar dilemma. The author tries to demonstrate how wild nature in the form of great floods is a threatening force, but ultimately awakens traditional Chinese peasants and galvanizes them into defiant masses of people. Yet, as Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker notes, Ding Ling’s technique falls short of delivering clearly perceived images of the peasant victims or convincingly outlining the psyches of lower-class figures to explain their rise to revolt.245 As a result, “the relationship between the subjective experience of the crowd instinct and pragmatic revolutionary action remained unarticu- lated” in the text.246 Many a progressive work of fiction of this period struggled with giving a concrete picture of the crowds as they encounter traumatic events. To borrow Daniel Fried’s notion in his criticism of Mao Dun’s Rainbow, left-wing writers tended to generate a “rhetoric of absence” when it came to representing real social confrontations or chaotic happenings. In emplotting the May Thirtieth incident in Shanghai in relation to the political enlightenment of the heroine (Mei) in Rainbow, Mao Dun does not arrange for Mei to witness the massacre and bloodshed in person. As Fried observes, “Her moment of full awakening

243 C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, pp. 283–84. 244 Philip Williams, Village Echoes, pp. 92–102. 245 For her critique of Ding Ling’s “Flood,” see Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, pp. 67–69. 246 Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism, p. 197. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 119 is not at the moment of the massacre itself, but at her realization of the indifference of the privileged classes to the massacre.”247 Mao Dun does not bother to reconstruct details of the scene or violence because Mei’s traumatic experience precisely arises from people’s self-interest and apathy about social oppression. With regard to the underscoring of the ‘We’-oriented narrative voice identified by Anderson, it is important to point out that Li Jieren’s stylistic explo- ration of the narrative voices in The Great Wave solidly ventures beyond the homogeneous collectivizing demand and stylistic conformity found in much leftist fiction. Hence, the historical novelist confronts the challenge to imagine the collective body of the people without giving up the novel’s generic impulse to express the subjectivity of individual characters. The anonymous people as historical actors, or the ‘masses,’ are seen not as a coherent body of agents in a teleological sequence of development, but as individuated observers who perceive events as inchoate, quotidian spectacles. In Bakhtin’s conception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (1821–81) poetics of poly phony, the novelist ceases to exercise monologic control over the fictional world. Characters must not be objects of authorial discourse. Instead the author should grant his characters their own consciousness, so they can meet as equals and engage in a dialogue that is in principle open and free for interpretation. In the Bakhtinian sense of polyphony, the author creates a world in which many disparate points of view enter into conversation. His task is to set the stage for the different voices to narrate their versions of history.248 Different parties, including even figures of the ruling power that has consistently received populist bashing and ridicule throughout The Great Wave, are given a chance to voice their opinions and express diverse and unflattering images of the masses. At the outset of the mass movement, Governor-General Zhao Erfeng remarks sarcastically:

You Sichuanese are born low and mean. Coming from a border province, after all, you folks are contaminated with a good deal of barbarian culture; hence you are prone to fear of authority and have an inferior moral temperament. It is laughable to talk about the so-called ‘people’s morale.’ I have no idea whatsoever about that which is called minqi. This is only a new term which dissidents like Kang (Youwei) and Liang (Qichao) translated from Japan, with which they use to trick ordinary people. 你們四

247 Fried, “A Bloody Absence,” p. 26. 248 See Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 251; Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 7. 120 CHAPTER 3

川人生成下賤，到底是邊省，沾染了不少的夷風，所以也養成了一種畏威而不懷德的劣性. 至於說到民氣，可更令人發笑了! 我根本就不懂什麼東西叫做民氣，這不過是康、梁等叛逆從日本翻譯出來，以騙下民的一個新名詞. (1: 139)

This is one of the sporadic instances in the novel where the narrator internal- izes the thoughts of his character—indeed the monologue of a real historical personage—in order to reveal the official’s arrogance and his misjudgment of the mass movement underway in Chengdu. Zhao Erfeng sniffs contemptuously at the new and provocative concept of minqi—people’s morale or spirits— which intellectuals and dissident thinkers introduced in order to suggest new forms of union of the Chinese people and bring reform to Chinese society. In The Great Wave, Zhao is treated as the epitome of official corruption, evil, and cruelty, repeatedly lampooned and caricatured. To a great extent the historical novel must have embodied the collective memory and local gossip about ‘Zhao the Butcher.’ In the above constructed narrative passage, the official’s inability to read the mass action as something more serious than mindless protest, and his disdainful remarks about the provincial subjects as low and cowardly, suggest not just his own blindness but that of elites in general to the social mentalities in Sichuan. The official voice dramatizes the great simplification and abstraction of the masses. Reform-minded intellectuals like Yan Fu, Kang Youwei (1858–1927), and Liang Qichao attached sociopolitical importance to the new idea of cohesive groups or groupings (qun) and considered them fundamental to the construction of a new society and creation of new citizens independent of the state. Late Qing intellectuals believed that the creation of a strong nation depended on the renovation of the entire body of the people by mobilizing the energies and abilities of all ‘citizens’ (gongmin).249 Liang famously postulated the strong impact of Chinese fiction on governing the masses. Fiction served to institute a new social and political order by framing a different discourse of the common people unlike their elite authors. Liang called on scholars and social reformers to use popular fiction to “write for the crowd” as well as writing about ordinary

249 For a discussion of late Qing intellectuals’ introduction of new concepts about the people, citizenship, community, and society, see Fan-shen Wang, “Evolving Prescriptions for Social Life in the Late Qing and Early Republic” and Judge, “Publicists and Populists.” On Liang Qichao’s concept of xinmin (‘new citizen’) and qun, see Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition on in China, 1890–1907, pp. 149–219. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 121 folks. By virtue of fiction’s mesmerizing power, the mass of readers would be enticed to emulate good models or characters in fiction.250 Nevertheless, these radical conceptions sound rather high-flown. In political theory, this view presents fundamental questions on how intellectual elite rule could guide the people, namely, “how ‘the people’ could become effective political actors; and how the erstwhile literati-turned-intellectuals could perform effectively within this new structure of authority.”251 For late Qing reformists and elite writers, the greatest challenge was how to express ‘the people’—the illiterate, anonymous, unknowable, and often dreaded min (people) of the lower levels of society. How to evoke the agency of min, which had been historically excluded from participation and power in the Confucian humanist tradition, remained a conundrum. Progressive elites maintained their commitment to uplifting and reforming the common people, and it may have become an ideological mission for popular novelists to appropriate these elite aspirations of collective action and group cohesion in fictional narratives. As if to reject the high-flown image of the common people projected by late Qing literati, The Great Wave registers a growing discord between the common people who are involved in mass action and the elites and gentry who are supposed to lead them. The novel at first narrates the masses as a shadowy presence; but as the plot unfolds, there is a sense of the crowd evolving from an unorganized mob to a congregation of active participants in historical incidents. Readers can see the emergence of increasingly self-conscious groups of people in action, and yet their cohesive unity and collectivity seem to have little to do with the leadership of the gentry. Cao Juren has argued otherwise that it is the spontaneous masses and the surge of the people’s morale that advance the movement, hence leaving the passive gentry leaders far behind the current of the times.252 In the 24 August railroad league meeting, the representatives decide to escalate the resistance and call for massive citywide strikes to close businesses and for a tax revolt across the province. An elusive narrator in The Great Wave comments: “It looks like the people have finally wielded their weapons.” 民眾的最後利器，已是亮了出來. (2: 29) Sounding like a spokes- man for the masses, the narrator may express views shared by the author to evoke the power of ‘the people’ (minzhong), whose action has finally betrayed a collective instinct and pursued its own course. The authorial voice here becomes somewhat belligerent, generating a verbal polemic against the ruling power from the position of the people. According to

250 Saussy, “Crowds, Number, and Mass in China,” pp. 252–53. 251 Jenco, Making the Political, p. 148. 252 Cao, Xiaoshuo xinyu, pp. 99–100. 122 CHAPTER 3 written records and personal memoirs, when friction between the Sichuanese people and their officials intensified during the summer, Chengdu citizens staged strikes in a ritualistic fashion so that they could at once air their grievances and show their respectful and loyal sentiments to the deceased emperor and past traditions. As S.C. Yang vividly recalled:

On the first of July the merchants closed their shops and the students quit school. The Railroad League sent speakers everywhere and stirred up the people, and great disturbances were created. In Chengdu the people were afraid of the military oppression, and shop-keepers put up tablets of the Emperor Kwang Hsu (Guangxu) over their shops, to show their loyalty. On each side of the tablets were six character expressions—on one side, “Public Administration Must Be Understood by the People,” on the other, “The Railway Franchise Was Pledged to Provincial Officials.” Elevated platforms were erected at street inter- sections where the emperor’s tablet was publicly displayed. These platforms were arranged at such a height as to compel officials to alight from their high sedan chairs in order to pass by. The people derived great satisfaction from thus hindering the progress of officials to their office, and compelling them to dismount and walk. There were many opportunities to press and advance the new revolutionary movement.253

The above reminiscence also sheds light on the particular social practice and mentalities of protesters in the locality. Because Chengdu people were cus- tomarily afraid of committing violence and being accused as rebels, they built commemorative altars and erected spirit tablets of the late emperor to indicate that they were still loyal to the Qing regime and had no intention to overthrow the government. Many shop owners adopted the tactic of hanging icons of memorial tablets of the emperor outside their stores. The elaborate symbols were understood to ward off possible interventions by the soldiers who would be sent to force them to reopen the shops. People burned incense and paid respect to the Guangxu emperor at altars stationed extensively on streets. The ingenuity of the protest action, indeed, showed itself in many forms and could generate multiple meanings. Chengdu activists made the late Guangxu emperor the symbolic champion of their cause. Elite reformers sought to ‘sacralize’ the dead figure of the sovereign as a gesture of resistance, as “the act of invoking him eventually seems to have indicated commitment to representational constitutionalism as much as to the throne per se.”254 The

253 S.C. Yang, “The Revolution in Szechwan, 1911–1912,” p. 71. 254 Rankin, “Nationalistic Contestation and Mobilization Politics,” p. 345. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 123 emperor icon functioned to summon the participation of Chengdu commoners by appealing to their loyalty to the throne as they called for lawful constraint of imperial authoritarianism. In his memoir, Guo Moruo reflected that the emperor figure was particularly effective in eliciting dedicated support from ordinary Chengdu citizens who felt more comfortable as loyal subjects than as rebels.255 By conjuring up the past imperial authority, moreover, elite social activists deliberately expressed their discontent with the present governance, and accused Zhao Erfeng and Sheng Xuanhuai of showing disrespect to the Guangxu emperor’s edict. The ceremonial nature and festival mood of the strike—as if Chengdu people sought to celebrate a moment of riot—invite a comparison with Mona Ozouf’s treatment of the festival as essential to understanding the French Revolution.256 In a different traditional context and political practice, railroad protection campaigners appropriated the sacred symbol of the late emperor as a code of obedience as well as an implicit act of transgression. Incidentally, the ubiquitous presence of high platforms could also hinder official attempts to take repressive measures and use physical force against the shopkeepers; soldiers had already been patrolling the streets since the strike. “From the point of view of potential revolutionaries,” as a foreigner observed, the platforms had the further advantage of “preventing the maneuvers of cavalry.”257 In fact, in The Great Wave not all the merchants and small business traders support the boycott and behave like a unified body of the ‘mass.’ First, a vendor is reluctant to close his shop and sacrifice his business for the cause. Then, people tell Fu Longsheng that the family of a local magistrate pays no notice to their demonstration and refuses to display the yellow slogan placards in front of their house. As a consequence, the protagonist seeks to right the wrong and work out the situation: he gathers up his gang to force the hesitators to yield to the call of the strike. An exemplary figure of the crowd, Fu Longsheng conveys a sense of historical verisimilitude. After the resolution of the strike was passed on 24 August, The North China Herald reported: “Crowds thronged the streets and broke into the shops of any merchant they found open.”258 The strike could have been even more militant and violent, as the Viceroy had issued a strong proclamation ordering all the shops to open, and sent out guards carrying bayonets to patrol the streets.

255 Guo, “Fanzheng qianhou,” pp. 262–63. 256 “Every festival involves reminiscences,” Ozouf claims, and festivals seek to re-enact the past and project images of harmony and social unity. See “The Festival in the French Revolution,” p. 181. 257 Combe, “Events in Chengtu: 1911,” pp. 7–8. 258 “The Szechuan (Sichuan) Rising.” 124 CHAPTER 3

In his plebeian understanding of the revolt, Fu Longsheng constructs his own story and appeals to the people, convincing them that the strike is an expression of loyalty to the regime and tradition. He blames those who fail to show the utmost support and sympathy for the demonstration as ‘traitors’ to their country! Still, when the participating shopkeepers complain that the suspension of business has greatly affected their livelihoods, Fu Longsheng allows them to partially continue their business behind closed doors. The contingent solution is lastly applied to all teahouses, as Chengdu inhabitants surely could not live with their favorite places closed down even temporarily. Having become the leader of the neighborhood residents, Fu thus enacts his own sense of justice. Try as they might, the Chengdu residents in The Great Wave cannot defy their self-interest, their impulse to survival, and their instinctual wishes for comfort in their daily lives. The meanings of the protest are influenced by the existence of these improvised tactics. The shop owners stage a peaceful strike as well as maintaining their business and daily routines behind the scenes. For his part, Fu Longsheng hardly understands the resistance as a gesture of social griev- ance or the expression of a class revolt. He rather evokes the implicit codes of allegiance and obedience to the imperial ruler that are embedded in the folkways. People’s loyalty to tradition and authority may well be expressed through the voice of the well-educated young intellectual, Chu Zicai, as he explains the motivations behind the strike: “We want to show that in our minds, it has nothing to do with rebellion or revolution; we only want to comply with the late emperor’s edict.” 表明我們爭路的心跡，並非造反，並非革命，只是遵守先皇的上諭. (2: 28) Fu Longsheng’s attempt to stitch the community together and reinforce the resistance paradoxically proves that the townspeople are not rebellious subjects, and their behaviors can hardly be fit into a homogeneous paradigm of ‘collective behavior’ and psychology of the crowd. The ‘unreliable’ narration of Fu Longsheng’s overwhelming capacity to seize and mobilize his folk borders on artifice, and it ironically alerts us to the dialectics of fiction-making and historical truth. The revolutionary episodes in which urban dwellers occupy Chengdu’s streets and stage massive strikes cannot be seen in ideal terms as a ‘ceremonial utopia.’259 The reader becomes conscious of the novel’s realist thrust, which lies less in grappling with the discourse of uniformity and order in historical records than in the fictional expression of the liveliness and rhythm of the everyday in the native world.

259 The concept of ceremonial utopia comes from Mona Ozouf. See Harvey Chisick’s discussion, “Mona Ozouf (1931–).” No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 125

In The Great Wave, the people do not realize themselves as a conscious political subject; or to put it another way, the people are polemically unable to represent the elevated intellectual ideals of solidarity and collective morale. There is a strong sense that the anonymous people have become increasingly alienated from the control of their gentry leaders. The people express a growing strength once the movement gains momentum and snowballs to encompass different social strata. When historians revisit the stirring moment in 1911 Chengdu, they tend to see a utopian scene, albeit a short-lived one, where ordinary folks and gentry seem to have joined hands and shared common concerns in rallying against Qing authorities. As Di Wang puts it, “For the first time, reformers and commoners joined in the same political organization . . . their common interests brought various groups and classes together, at least at this moment, the gap between social classes become narrower.”260 Reading The Great Wave, on the contrary, gives us a diametrically opposite sense of the past. The novel suggests that the relationships between reformist elites and commoners are tense and, to be sure, the reader fails to see any sense of commonality and unity between the various classes. Who are the masses? In what ways are they perceived as a powerful group? In the novel, the narrator switches the reader’s attention from crowd behaviors to look at the perceptions of the upper-class protagonists—the gentry, intellectuals, student activists—and appreciate their viewpoints and anxieties about the worsening situation. Notably, the main characters from the higher rungs of society do not witness the mass political gatherings on the spot. They can only rely on their peers’ memories and testimonies; events are prone to apprehension and distortion. After the citywide strikes and boycotts begin, the gentry soon find that the railroad league leaders have lost control; the ‘people’ have deviated from the League’s direction, showing a developmental logic of its own. Wang Wenbing, a student leader who has just attended the railway company meetings, reports to the elites about his nervous observations of the rage of the people, who have insisted that the strikes should continue until the government promises to settle the dispute. For Chengdu’s gentry, the episode was a wake-up call, as it seems that “the authority on deciding to shut down or resume business happens not to be in the hands of a few people (leaders) but in the hands of a crowd of uninformed people.” 而開市罷市的權柄，偏偏不在他們幾個人的手上，而在一夥不明事理的人民手上去了. (2: 57–58) Wang Wenbing anxiously describes the uncontrolled and explosive nature of the crowd’s behavior: “In the past we feared that we could not ignite the wildfire; now this wildfire is flaming and spreading to burn us!”

260 Di Wang, Street Culture, p. 213. 126 CHAPTER 3

以前生怕放不起來的野火，現在紅焰瀰天的燒到自己身邊來了! (2: 51) Huang Lansheng warns the student activist against the crowds that are seen to be engulfing the mass movement. He personally would like to see the mass meetings halted because “it is easy to set a fire but it is hard to put it out.” 放火容易救火難. (1: 175) In the dialogic exchange, the author uses the characters’ diverse viewpoints to record their perplexed but apprehensive perceptions of the mass movement, as the devastating powers of the people become alarmingly evident to the upper-class protagonists. As the social movement is taking shape, the elites are unable to cope with the events. The complete passivity of the gentry leaders ironically illuminates the uninterrupted shaping of the historical events. The novel’s implicitly negative tone regarding the role of Chengdu’s social leaders and elites in guiding the mass protests, intriguingly, generates different accounts of the evolving events than appear in some of the existing historiography. Historians have generally recognized the successful propaganda efforts launched by the elites and social luminaries in mobilizing Chengdu’s merchants, students, and common people through organizing public meetings, distributing political newsletters, and initiating public speeches to rally collective support for their goals. Several public meetings held by the Railroad Protection League from June to August 1911 have been considered landmark moments as they drew thousands of enthusiastic local participants from all walks of life, and the leaders achieved consensus from the people in defying official orders and taking further radical moves. At the peak of the movement, the League published its Report of the Sichuan Railroad Protection Comrades Association (Sichuan baolu tongzhihui baogao) with sensational reportage and pompous rhetoric. Its inaugural issue on 26 June reported that two thousand citizens went to the mass meeting at the railroad company headquarters, where the hall was drowned in “bitter wailing,” “loud cries,” and “confused shouting”; “the sound of weeping, the sound of wailing, rent heaven and shook earth.” As emotions ran high, people manifested religious devotion and vowed to die for the rail line. “Everyone now howled bitterly, stamping on the ground and crying to heaven. Their deepest feelings were lacerated.”261 Linguistic tactics were deployed in revolutionary pamphlets to convince Chengdu residents that the railroad issue was a life-and-death struggle, and the political rhetoric linked the “perishing of the railroad” with the “perishing of the province.” A leaflet circulated at the 14 May railroad league meeting went: “The railway is the very life blood of the province; if the control of the

261 Translation from the “Journal of the League of Sympathizers in the Conservation of the Sichuan Railway,” no. 1, 26 June 1911. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 127 line is lost our life is cut short. If the control of the line is filched from us, it is as though the people of the province were consigned to death.”262 The railroad meetings were then turned into venues for airing public grievances as well as carnivalesque occasions in which Chengdu citizens were given the space to confront and even ridicule officials publicly. It was reported that at the 24 August meeting, “teacups were thrown at the four Taotais (officials) who were present,” and “things got very exciting.”263 Even Zhao Erfeng himself was cari- caturized and Chengdu was adorned with “frescoes with verses and other lam- poons of literature, doggerel, most derogatory to (Zhao) and his authority.”264 Obviously, political leaders were very adept at deploying verbal rhetoric to shape public opinions and sentiments. Guo Moruo gave a melodramatic account of the railway shareholders’ meeting, in which Luo Lun addressed the crowd and indicted Sheng Xuanhuai for stealing the property of the people of Sichuan. His words were so charged with pathos and emotion that they drove all the participants, including the speaker himself, to cry copiously for almost thirty minutes. Guo Moruo wrote: “He (Luo Lun) began to wail and weep aloud. People throughout the hall then began to wail and weep aloud— they were really wailing. All old people, middle-aged and young folks in the hall were sobbing, full of tears and noises.” 他接着便號啕大哭起來，滿場便都號啕大哭起來了—真真是在號啕，滿場的老年人中年人少年人都放出了聲音在汪汪汪汪的大哭.265 The inflated tone elicited doubt or cynicism from foreign observers. A British diplomat once commented on the League’s preliminary meeting:

To a European spectator the sight of Chinese gentlemen rolling about a platform, vociferating emulously “Let me die! Let me be the first to die!” amid the sobs and plaudits of the audience would seem pure comedy. Nor would he be moved except to laughter, by the miseries of the two thousand dandies, whose ‘patriotism’ impelled them to walk a full half- mile through Chengtu (Chengdu) streets in the sunshine without unfurl- ing their parasols or taking to their chairs.266

262 Enclosure 2 in No. 1, Consul Giles to Sir. J. Jordan, Changsha, 2 June 1911. 263 “The Szechuan (Sichuan) Rising.” 264 The North-China Herald, 21 Oct. 1911, pp. 159–64; quoted from Hedtke, “The Szechwanese Railroad Protection Movement,” p. 376, n. 88. 265 Guo, “Fanzheng qianhou,” p. 256. 266 Letter of Consul-General Wilkinson to Sir J. Jordan, Chengdu, 7 July 1911. 128 CHAPTER 3

Lynn Hunt has asserted that language itself became charismatic and took on a “unique magical quality” during the French Revolution. “Political language became increasingly invested with emotional, even life-and-death significance,” she argues.267 Keith Baker has emphasized that political language does not simply reflect a deeper social reality. Rather it helps to frame a new social and political order by controlling a radically new discourse of human affairs and social life.268 In other words, political language itself can be influential in effecting social and political change. In the summer of 1911, Chengdu’s revolutionary actors were particularly conscious of the power of rhetoric, and they employed public speeches and language games to stir up popular zeal and invest revolutionary action with emotion. In The Great Wave, Wang Wenbing, who has some experience of lecturing, coaches Chu Zicai on how to make a public speech more effective by manipulating its linguistic effects and so charging it with emotion. He boasts of the art of persuasion he uses in order to get the truth transformed and enlarged with each telling:

When you go out and talk to the people, you don’t always have to be honest, and state the facts as they are. If you talk in this way, the audience would not feel excited about what you say. . . . You must exaggerate what you want to say to seven to eight times or even ten times of what it is worth. Let’s say a guy is good or wicked. We have to say that the guy is thoroughly good or wicked. Let’s say the guy has done just a good deed or a bad thing. We have to say the thing tenfold. First, the audience would feel happy. Second, even if the people don’t believe what you have said and dismiss it to some degree, the credibility of your words has already increased by four to five times. You would not speak in vain.

你出去向人說話，總不要老老實實，有一是一，有二是二的講. 你這樣講了，聽的人一定不起勁. . . . 你一定要把你講的事，擴大到七八倍，或十來倍. 比方說一個人壞，或是好，我們就得把他的好壞說到極點. 他本來只做了一件好事或者一件壞事，我們得說上十件. 一則聽的人也才高興，二則就有人不信，把你說的話打個對折，已經比實在的增加了四五倍，你的話便不算枉說了. (2: 173)

Wang Wenbing is the epitome of revolutionary actors who embrace the charisma of words and can appreciate the allure of rhetorical practice and

267 Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, pp. 20–21. 268 Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, pp. 1–11. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 129 language games on the stage to help shape public opinion and even the development of ideologies. When speaking and naming take on enormous significance, the sophisticated deployment of verbal lies, exaggerations, and fabrications itself becomes instrumental to mobilizing political and social change. A self-appointed ‘revolutionary’ and student activist, Wang Wenbing often invokes the rhetorical power of geming on private and public occasions, declaring to his friends: “Bastards, revolution is imperative!” 雜種，非革命不可! (1: 26–27) The ironical tone in the narrative passage, however, does not elude the reader because his favorite slogan is so pretentiously expressed that the term geming is robbed of its own sociopolitical meaning and resonance. Wang Wenbing serves as a fictional parallel embodying the mentality of the gentry leaders of the movement, who seek to guide the people with the rhetorical power of language. The Great Wave rewrites some of the dramatic episodes of the mass meetings to showcase how elite leaders such as Wang Wenbing manipulate language to affect the people. The spectacular ‘bloodshed’ incident of a young activist named Zhu Shan at the founding meeting is a case in point. When Luo Lun called for volunteers to carry the League’s message to people outside of Chengdu and organize branch associations in their home counties, Zhu Shan was reportedly the first of the crowd to go up to the stage to respond to the call. He took vows and pounded his fist on the table, incidentally hitting and breaking a tea cup. His hand, scraped by the broken cup, bled. In private conversation, Wang Wenbing confides in Chu Zicai that what one read from the association’s report about Zhu Shan’s determinism and valiant gesture was nothing but an embellished fiction. The particulars had been transformed and amplified by association leaders to provoke the people’s sentiment. Chu’s response that “history is simply not credible” 歷史根本就不可信 underpins the metafictional voice in The Great Wave; it contests the credibility and textuality of historical discourse. (1: 63) The disclosure of the ‘true story’ through the character’s eyewitness account unveils how powerful language is used to emplot the event as a heroic narrative. The reader cannot miss the mockery as the protagonists keep on debating the significance of the events. History is presented and remembered as grandiose public performance in a theater, and is even more so in the grand public meetings at which later generations seek to retrace their written records or living memories. Having striven to mobilize the masses in public meetings, the novel suggests, the League’s directors and elites are swept away by the power of the political rhetoric they have initiated, which in turn stirs up the people and transforms them into a rising force beyond the control of the movement leaders. Li Jieren describes the gentry’s idea of guiding the movement as theatrical and grotesque. The narrative employs the tropes of ‘a theatrical show’ 130 CHAPTER 3

(yitai xi) and ‘script’ (xiwen) to parody the political intrigue and secret bonds between officials and protest leaders who seek to quit the campaign to collaborate with the state. In the course of the strike, the narrator implies, the protest leaders wish to withdraw from the campaign to maintain peace and order in Chengdu through close official-elite cooperation. The narrator whispers to the reader what the elite leaders think: “We start this theatrical show as we start to sing on stage. As long as we don’t sing any longer, all the drums and gongs, flutes and pipes will cease to play. What is so difficult about doing this?” 這一臺戲，本是我們唱起來的，只要我們不唱了，鑼鼓簫管，自然只好收聲罷打，那有甚麼難事? (2: 35) Realistic as the novel claims to be, The Great Wave abounds in gossip, rumors, and conspiracy talk, all happening behind the curtain. The friends and guests in Huang Lansheng’s upper-class house are discussing the dramatic development of the railroad dispute. The elite reformers, Huang has heard, are more concerned with getting the central government to accept their demands. After they have successfully rallied the masses against the state, the movement leaders are ready to strike terms with the local officials behind the scenes. They will promise to stabilize Chengdu in return for further political power. Hence officials and gentry leaders “intend to make a public speech to change people’s hearts so as to put out the blazing wildfire.” 打算一場演說，好好的把人心轉移過來，以便將這熊熊的野燒撲滅下去. (2: 57) It is only when the performance of the elites deviates from the original ‘script’ that, the novel reveals, the people begin to take control into their own hands as they find themselves betrayed by their leaders.269 In the eyes of the gentry, from this moment on, the crowds have become unknowable, eerie, spontaneous, and alarmingly destructive. In the cultural memory of the French Revolution, ‘the people’ (le peuple) and their ideas were seen as “expressions of immaturity and base instincts,” and their actions often evoked disgust and fear for nineteenth- century writers and political thinkers.270 Likewise, for the gentry in The Great

269 In Wu Yuzhang’s memoir, the constitutional monarchists including Pu Dianjun tried to check the people’s movement at the peak of its development. “A revolutionary struggle waged by the broad masses of people, however, could not be controlled by a handful of constitutional monarchists, especially when there were revolutionaries pushing it forward.” Wu stressed the role of the revolutionaries in giving impetus to the movement at the critical moment. See Wu, Recollections of the Revolution of 1911, p. 110. In The Great Wave, however, Li Jieren tried to depict the revolting people as an autonomous mass without the intervention of the revolutionaries. 270 Johnson, “The Invention of the Masses,” p. 57. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 131

Wave, the ‘people’ as a living idea has become an increasingly appalling entity; their existence, with the possibility of rioting and violence, is deeply disturbing. As chaos reigns in Chengdu, and as revolutions break out in province after province, the people in Huang Lansheng’s social circles begin to turn nervous. They all wonder: When will the revolutionaries come to Chengdu? Will violent insurrections put their lives in danger? The novelist’s ironic narration elu- cidates the perceptions and appropriations of geming—the ‘revolution’—as the term circulates among Chengdu’s social elites. The meanings of geming become multiple, volatile and fragile as they are appropriated by different parties in confused fashion. The puzzlement over geming reflects the gentry’s partial knowledge or even total ignorance of recent social and intellectual developments, and their understandings surely depart from the ideological agendas of the revolution as proposed by late Qing literati. Historically, the term registered a range of historical meanings from moderate social reform to the violent overthrow of the ruling regime.271 Hence, the gentry characters view geming as an unstable mixture of personal perils and such horrible social violence as killing, rape, looting, death, and family separation. Another example shows how the novelist uses the conventional device of dialogue to contest historical truth. Dialogue is deployed widely in The Great Wave to generate exchange and tension in narratives so as to illuminate the vac- illating boundary between historical narration and living memory. Communal dialogues and gossip contain larger historical truths as they allow the whole community to define itself against the event through the perceptions and experiences of its inhabitants. In the communal life of the characters, the comprehension of the events has little to do with modern communications tech- nologies such as newspapers and telegrams; rather it is mainly constructed “out of words, spoken and remembered: out of opinions, stories, eye-witness reports, legends, comments and hearsay.”272 The revolution at Wuchang breaks out on 10 October, and the news of the declaration of independence of Hubei

271 As critics point out, the meaning of geming as ‘revolution’ for late Qing intellectuals evolved through a process of appropriation and domestication in the history of ideas so that its connotations differed from its Japanese and European counterparts. The complicated shift of the meaning of revolution from one culture to another produced a multitude of historical understandings of the concept as they were used by revolutionaries. For the diverse adoptions of the concept of revolution by Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), see Chen Jianhua, ‘Geming’ de xiandai xing, pp. 1–182; also his “Chinese ‘Revolution’ in the Syntax of World Revolution.” 272 Berger, Pig Earth, p. 9. Berger wrote on living in a peasant village and gave impressive accounts of daily rural life. 132 CHAPTER 3 province finally reaches Chengdu’s upper circles in early November (as the general public has been denied access to all telegraphic information and news). These developments throw the gentry into disarray since they then realize that a radical change or overthrow of the government and existing power structure is an imminent reality. The situation in Sichuan and in Chengdu society further deteriorates. The pressing call for the independence of Sichuan finally comes to fruition on 27 November. In a cynical and sardonic manner, The Great Wave depicts how gentry characters feel the looming threat of the revolutionaries, and reasonably predict their coming to town. Yet, they also want to take advantage of the opportunity to advance their position in a new regime:

Mrs. Huang: If the army really has to rebel, let it happen sooner rather than later. If there has to be a revolution, let it happen sooner. It’s a hard time right now to see our fortune slip and slide away in such a messy situation. To be quite fair, if there can be no killing, life returned to normal, roads and communication reinstated, and goods bought in town— right now the goods are either too expensive or unobtainable—it doesn’t matter who is going to come and rule this place. Given that no one talks about the revolution at all, it’s really no big deal that this place is going to be occupied by foreigners! 陸軍要變就早點變，要革命就早點革命. 惟有這樣交運脫運，亂糟糟的，真不好過! 我倒說句良心話，只要不殺人，可以照常過日子，路上通了，東西來得到，不像目前又貴又買不出，任憑咋個都好，不說革命，就是著外國人占了，也只那們一回事! Sun Yatang: Our job has basically to do with pen and ink, and has nothing to do with the revolution. Still, there has got to be an officialdom after the revolution, and as a government official you get to ask your friends to work things out for you. As long as I can ask favors from people, I won’t do without a job anyway. 本來，像我們吃筆墨飯的，革命不革命倒和我沒甚相干. 革了命，還不是有官，做官的還不是要請朋友辦公事，只要有人情，事倒不會沒有. Mrs. Huang: If you can locate the revolutionary party, you can make it. Why don’t you find a way to first join the revolutionary party? Won’t you get a good official post then in the future? 只要你拿得定革命黨硬可成事，你何不找個門路，先投到革命黨裏? 將來不是也好做官嗎? Huang Lansheng: Would it be that easy? Our ways are different. How shall I know where the revolutionary party is? 談何容易! 我們的行道不同，曉得革命黨在那裏呢? (3: 66–67) No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 133

In The Great Wave, Li Jieren makes extensive use of interpersonal dialogue not so much to reveal the inner thoughts of his characters as to communicate to readers how the characters interpret the event—that is, the various ways in which they are ready to perform actions in response to the anticipated change in the name of the ‘revolution.’ Read in their respective contexts, dialogue constructions carry multiple meanings in the novel when they are highly invested in each character’s own version of the event. Mrs. Huang wishes to get the ‘revolution’ over with quickly and peacefully, as if it was just another adversity to overcome in her personal life. She hopes her husband can affiliate with this new institution of the ‘revolutionary party’ so that their family can continue to live a good life. As for Sun Yatang, an official of middle rank, he is waiting for the revolt to be pacified so that he can get a post in the bureaucracy. As the situation has become so unsettled that the revolution may happen at any time, it seems that all his work for career advancement will come to nothing. Such character portrayal echoes Li Boyuan’s The Bureaucrats: A Revelation (Guanchang xianxing ji, 1905), Li Jieren’s favorite late Qing exposé fiction, which features individual existences obsessed with money and aspirations to office in a crumbling bureaucratic order and political structure. Besides the key protagonists, The Great Wave presents a gallery of sketches of people from all walks of life, whose characterizations are revealed through their dialogic exchange in their respective social circles. Sticking to an impersonal style, the omniscient narrator creates snapshots of private or social occasions and delivers reported speeches of the characters. Fiction mimics reality as if the readers are overhearing the characters talking on the spot, but have no way to know what they think from the outside. Without gaining entry to the minds of the characters to fathom their personal motives and actions, readers are largely given portraits of opaque figures, or character types that are deriva- tive of social status and hierarchy. It is precisely the partiality and subtlety of the character representation that pique the reader’s curiosity to ponder human intrigue and social malice in the bureaucratic world and upper-class Chengdu society. The spectral presence of the ‘revolution,’ filtered as it is through the gossip in a parochial setting, is obviously reminiscent of the art of rhetoric in many of Lu Xun’s famous short stories. In such stories as “Remembrances of the Past” (“Huaijiu,” 1911), “Storm in a Teacup” (“Chabeili de fengbo,” 1920), and “The True Story of Ah Q” (“Ah Q zhengzhuan,” 1921), Lu Xun describes the threats or rumors of a rebellion that either haunt the memories and dreams of his rural inhabitants, or turn his unheroic figures into victims of the chaotic forces unleashed by history. The insignificant lives of rural villagers are ruthlessly 134 CHAPTER 3 juxtaposed against events of far-reaching consequence in a mock-epic structure. The small rural characters, as exemplified in the eponymous anti-hero in “The True Story of Ah Q,” have mixed feelings about and reactions to the revolution yet to come, and choose to interpret what has happened around them for their own self-interest. Ah Q eagerly hopes for the actual coming of the revolutionary troops when he finds that the power-elite of the village is terrified of them. Ah Q thus imagines that he could join the revolutionaries some day to seek personal revenge on the ruling class and the people who have bullied him. Phony as he is in embracing the revolutionary cause, Ah Q—the paragon of common Chinese folks—relates himself to the revolution as a spectral absence. As William Lyell puts it, “Ah Q, of course, is totally barred from the revolution and, much to the relief of the village’s power structure, it soon becomes apparent that nothing has changed except perhaps a few titles.”273 Opportunistic appropriations of the revolution eventually bring the characters to an end of tragic irony. “By becoming a revolutionary without any knowledge of what the revolution is all about,” as Leo Ou-fan Lee comments, “Ah Q thus becomes an inevitable victim of the chaotic forces which the 1911 Revolution has unleashed.”274 Lu Xun’s well-known skepticism of Republican politics and revolution is powerfully extended in The Great Wave, which presents sardonic images of the gentry jockeying for place and power in the new government. The novel presents a satirical drama of the final days of the Qing and levels a scathing attack at the self-serving and opportunistic gentry figures, as if it was reworking and reversing Lu Xun’s tragic farce about the Republican Revolution. In Li Jieren’s historical narrative, likewise, readers may detect similar techniques of irony and satire used to portray ignorant characters living in small worlds of their own.275 Not only does Li narrate the local people’s comic incomprehen- sion of the chaotic historical world outside, but the novelist is also ambitious enough to evoke the imagined community of Chengdu’s elites. The narrative builds around the gentry’s fear of the surging social uprisings encroaching on their private lives. Huang Lansheng, who nervously strives to catch up with revolutionary developments after 10 October, becomes a victim of the melodramatic farce. As the gentry stay fearfully in their enclosed community, they passively receive information about current political affairs through their daily conversations

273 Lyell, Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality, p. 172. 274 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House, p. 77. 275 Li Jieren had an interesting reading of Lu Xun’s earliest short story, “Remembering the Past.” Li perceived Lu Xun’s story as having the potential to be worked into a full-length historical fiction had Lu Xun continued to work in the genre. See Li, “Yihan.” No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 135 based on rumors from miscellaneous and unreliable sources. The conversation between Mrs. Huang, her husband, and Sun Yatang exposes the elite’s own rationalization and misperception of the chaotic situation. The husband is thrown into a panic after paying bribes to an alleged representative and middleman of the revolutionary force, and yet he has failed to see any real revolutionary show up and contact him. The comic portraiture of the gentry has an ironic twist when the story lays out the domestic quarrels between the heroine and her husband concerning the man’s ‘betrayal’ of his wife by currying favor with the revolutionaries. For his part, Huang Lansheng is still bewildered by the rapid turn of events after several contiguous provinces have rebelled against the Qing and successively claimed independence, declaring the collapse of the old regime. With not the faintest clue about the actual scale of mayhem that the revolution might wreak, Huang is anxious to seek out the revolutionaries and poke his nose into revolutionary politics for a new post in the new regime. The drive of the narrative irony is derived from the different levels of knowledge unevenly accessible to the protagonists and readers. In showing the protagonists’ competing interpretations of what geming could mean to them, the dramatic scene reveals the way that the breakdown of the meaning of words mimics the breakdown of social order. There is a discrepancy between the characters’ realization of the ‘current’ historical development at the very ‘present’ instance and the reader’s comprehension of later historical outcomes ‘after the fact.’ Li Jieren portrays the protagonists’ ignorance of the future significance of these events as their most authentic perceptions of the events.276 They can only respond to the particularities of their present moment. Further, they misperceive the significance of their time and milieu and thus take the wrong action. At every stage, the gentry are caught unawares in the center of a complex play of human intrigues and deceptions. Having lost sight of the future, they vainly take sides and place their hopes on the insurrectionary forces. For Huang Lansheng and other members of his class, the nature of the ‘revolution’ remains incomprehensible. “Previously, he thought that the revolutionary party is intimidating because they throw bombs and fire guns; they are brutal and violent as they don’t listen to reason. He did not expect that the revolutionary party can do even more ruthless damage by championing the principles of equality and freedom.” 在前，以為革命黨之可怕，只在丟炸彈，打手槍，暴烈強橫，毫不依理；還沒有想到革命黨的平等自由之害，乃如此其烈. (3: 114–15) It seems that neither radical actions to

276 In Li Jieren’s 14 June 1935 letter to Shu Xincheng, the author noted that a writer had to write the past “the way things were.” He warned himself that a writer “should not impose modern thoughts on the people of the past.” 絕不將現代思想強古人有之. See Li Jieren yanjiu, p. 202. 136 CHAPTER 3 remove the throne from power nor the peaceful reforms of social democracy and freedom could suit his private interest. In his final rationalization, Huang recognizes that an imminent ‘revolution’ may offer people like himself an opportunity to gain political capital to promote their careers. The conservative characters just want to get the most out of the chaos for personal gain. The moral confusion among the upper-class families bespeaks their deep-seated ambivalence toward the ‘revolutionary force.’ What used to be thought of as the reckless aggression of the ‘revolutionary party’ is then regarded as a new power, and the belief that one could become a revolutionary overnight turns history into a farce. Historically, Sichuan followed its neighbors to form an independent government on 27 November, as Chengdu elites had succeeded in persuading Zhao Erfeng to resign his power to the leaders of the provincial assembly. Earlier Zhao had released all the leaders of the railroad protection movement from captivity, after they all agreed to collaborate with the new government to restore social order in Sichuan. Pu Dianjun became the first governor (but could only stay in office for a short term due to the chaos).277 In The Great Wave, therefore, the depiction of the gentry’s hypocrisies and aspirations to office invites a complex allegorical interpretation of the real relationships of politics. The former revolutionaries turn into the power elite of the new establishment, and there is only a blurred line between dissidence and conformity. The fictional parallel ridicules social reality, provoking us to contemplate Li Jieren’s implicit critique of the gentry’s role in the revolution and their betrayal of the people.

Politics of Memory

Tracing the vast and miscellaneous body of personal memoirs (some of them brief records written by participants and eyewitnesses of various incidents), I have attempted to juxtapose these memory narratives and public historical accounts centered on the ‘Chengdu massacre’ with Li Jieren’s novelistic discourse, and give intertextual reflections on the significance of their com- monalities and differences. The various agents give their memory accounts from their respective social positions and retrospective views; they include S.C. Yang, Peng Fen, and Qin Nan (junior officers), Zhou Shanpei (top official), Guo Moruo (student activist and later Communist partisan), Wu Yuzhang (revolutionary), and Wei Yingtao (Sichuan historian), among others.

277 Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, pp. 176–77. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 137

In his succinct analysis of Maurice Halbwachs’s conception of the memory/ history problem, Patrick Hutton remarks:

Memory confirms similarities between past and present. There is a magic about memory that is appealing because it conveys a sense of the past coming alive once more. It touches the emotions. History, by contrast, establishes the differences between past and present. It reconstructs the past from a critical distance and strives to convey the sense that its connections with the present are devoid of emotional commitment. Memory deals in customary events that recur all the time. History identifies singular events that happen once and for all time.278

For Halbwachs, the images of the past retrieved by memory are protean and elusive. Unstable and unreliable by nature, they constitute our living pasts as much as they are intimately connected with the subjective aspect of human affect or emotion. History, by contrast, seems to authenticate the past by providing documented facts and verifiable data, and piling them up to give a chronological sense of continuity; but Halbwachs bemoans the fact that all historical reconstructions have inevitably cut off living memory by forsaking human mentality and imagination, the subjective state of mind and thought that actively shapes every single instance of the past. As the French thinker has remarked in his compelling simile, “History indeed resembles a crowded cemetery, where room must constantly be made for new tombstones.”279 Halbwachs’s romantic view of memory provides a powerful rhetoric on the memory/history schism. Memory on the personal or collective level is spontaneous, dynamic, and still ‘living’ in that it fuses past and present. Historical records speak to a ‘dead’ past and may serve at best as simple outlines of those bygone events. In other words, history begins where living memory ends. Nonetheless, Halbwachs has not fully reflected on the interactions of history and memory, and how the imaginative endeavor of writing historical fiction deals with the interplay of memory work and historical restructur- ing of past events. It is precisely the permeable boundary and mutual influence between historical recollection and memory writing that amount to the ‘memoropolitics’ of the literary scene. The central issue lies not in the ultimate opposition between memory and history as Halbwachs conceives it. Rather the state authorities can manipulate private or group memories and turn them into official histories. As Hutton puts it, history can be considered as “a kind of

278 Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, p. 76. 279 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, p. 52. 138 CHAPTER 3 official memory, a representation of the past that happens to enjoy the sanc- tion of scholarly authority.”280 To put Halbwachs’s idea another way round, concerning the events in Chengdu/Sichuan that precipitated the historical change in 1911, it is not possible to draw a clear line where history begins and living memory ends, nor is it easy to demarcate the difference between official and unofficial narratives in the matrix of history and memory. For one thing, the functions of remembering and forgetting by individuals or groups act more like metaphoric strategies in literary and cultural expressions. It is therefore more productive to ponder how contesting narratives compete for truth claims and a shared communal knowledge of the past. The ‘Chengdu massacre’ has become the pivotal point, functioning as a traumatic ‘memory trigger’ that brings out both strong emotional recollections and schematic historical reconstructions of local past experiences. For Ann Rigney, fictional narrativization has the potential to become more memorable and attain greater cultural longevity than non-fictional and fact- bound accounts precisely because fictional discourse is endowed with imaginative flexibility and aesthetic power.281 She uses Pierre Nora’s notion of ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de mémoire)282 to stand for the lived experience of a past in opposition to ‘history,’ which is alienated from popular feelings.283 Memory is the locus of everything that is missing in history proper, and the novel offers a dynamic medium where readers can witness the formation of a living memory and cultural tradition. Yet the claim that the historical novel should be seen to purely “offer an alternative forum for recording memories of the past”284 can be problematic in the modern Chinese context. It still begs the question as to how memory-work, historical reconstruction, and fictional rewriting implicate and complement one another as they are subject to the flux of changing mentalities and ideologies of the times. There is always a break in continuity between the society and the interpretive community reading a particular history later and the participants or groups in the past that acted in or witnessed the events at the very moment. My analysis of The Great Wave so far has demonstrated that the novelist wants to mimic how individual actors, great and small, real and fictional,

280 Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, p. 77. 281 Rigney, “The Dynamics of Remembrance,” p. 348. 282 See Nora, “General Introduction,” 1: 1–20. For a usage of Nora’s notion to critique globalization in Chinese culture, see Ban Wang, “Memory and History in Globalization.” 283 Rigney, “Portable Monuments,” p. 365. 284 Ibid., p. 375. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 139 might have thought and seen the world around them. The novel focuses on the thoughts and actions, spontaneous in nature and scarcely rational, of the characters that are contingent upon a shifting sequence of dramatic circumstances and outcomes entirely beyond their expectations and ability to foresee. Most intriguingly, Li Jieren seems to be particularly interested in depicting the crisis of the bourgeois intellectuals and gentry seen cynically and critically from the inside. All the protagonists experience history-as-action in the here and now, bewildered by a rapidly shifting reality, and try to improvise meaningful action and steer themselves through the chaos. In The Great Wave, remembrance of historical events is never simply a cognitive faculty of individuals or groups of individuals; it is instead a subjective state of mind—hopes and dreams, ideals and values, often fragmentary and highly prejudiced—that contributes to the actions of individual subjects and propels the movement of history. By embracing multileveled plots and cacophonic voices, the panoramic novel recreates an elaborate network of social discourses driven by gossip, rumors, and distorted news as forms of oral communication as well as printed words like official edicts, correspondence, public speeches, flyers, and folk poetry to present clashing social views and opinions. The flow of words from person to person constructs a continuous and sensible communal history. Through rhetorical circulation of the meaning of events, the characters are able to couch their sense of reality in terms of their beliefs and imaginations, and hence formulate their conceptions of the present and expectations of the future. The first version of The Great Wave with its particular focus on local mentalities accordingly presents a less structured social reality by dwelling intensely on local passions and interests. The novel’s seemingly non-ideological tendency and dialogic structure retrieve the ‘presentness’ of human mentalities. Thus, the work diverts itself from any teleological historical discourse that views the revolution as a grand historical design predetermined by inexorable social changes. This little-known early version clashed with Communist historiography. Li Shiwen, for example, characterized the depiction of the Chengdu massacre in The Great Wave as the weakest link in the whole narrative because it fails to highlight the episode as a crucial turning point that galvanizes previously unorganized mass riots into a purposeful series of revolutionary movements leading to the collapse of empire. In the novel, as armed conflict and chaos reign after 7 September, the narrator describes the various subversive forces that have emerged and occupied Sichuan as composed by “the generally reckless, unorganized masses” 一般盲動的，無組織的群眾, who are bounded by their “thinking capacity inherited from the old times” 憑著舊時代的思維 140 CHAPTER 3

能力 (2: 213). The novelist insists on unveiling the ‘old’ mentalities of Chengdu people who are occupied with the thought of saving their righteous and good leaders and bashing the wicked and corrupt government officials, without the slightest hint of their ‘revolutionary’ mindset.285 By contrast, Li Shiwen remarks, Guo Moruo’s account asserted that Zhao Erfeng’s frantic suppression had fundamentally changed the railroad protection movement into a full- fledged armed uprising and class struggle.286 Ai Lu, a veteran Chengdu literary critic, appreciated the scene of the Chengdu massacre in The Great Wave for its realistic style, but he lamented its limited view in presenting the pivotal moment (through Fu Longsheng’s fictive first-hand experience); he further criticized the novel’s lack of a panoramic depiction of the complex events in the aftermath, such as a balanced description of the military confrontations in the surrounding counties after the Chengdu massacre. At best the novel only gives very fragmented images of the armed rebellions as unorganized riots by rabble troops.287 All in all, these ideological criticisms interpret the Chengdu massacre as an inevitable event integral to the grand historical scheme of the revolution. Communist historical discourse views the bloodshed in Chengdu on 7 September as a political trigger that set off a chain of violent oppositions from the people of Sichuan, and eventually contributed to the success of the Wuchang Uprising on 10 October. As Wu Yuzhang’s political rhetoric emphasizes, “The entire province of Szechuan (Sichuan) was soon boiling over and a great uprising, involving the people of the whole province, broke out.”288 Communist political rhetoric turns the memory trigger into the revolutionary cause. It shows how ideologues seek to bestow order and meaning on the event in monologically political terms. It has to be noted, however, that many local ‘revolutions’ at the time with varying actors, agendas, timing, and dynamics could be loosely linked to national-level goals and has been more than the story of Communist Party fortunes.289

285 For an appreciation of the novel’s competence in illustrating the mentality, emotion and morality of the people as a key historical factor, see Li Siqu, “Dabo.” 286 Li Shiwen, Li Jieren de shengping he chuangzuo, pp. 209–25. The critic mentions Guo Moruo’s 1929 memoir, “Fanzheng qianhou.” 287 Ai Lu, “Li Jieren jiuban Dabo zhaji,” unpublished notebook. I am indebted to Ai Lu for giving me a copy of his notes and sharing his lifelong passion and shrewd observations on Li Jieren’s work. 288 Wu Yuzhang, Recollections of the Revolution of 1911, p. 111. 289 Schoppa, “Contours of Revolutionary Change in a Chinese County, 1900–1930.” No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 141

No doubt Li Jieren’s early fictional version of The Great Wave disappointed these critics because the polyphonic novel rejects the totalizing impulses of historical teleology. In the rewrite, however, the author attempted to incorporate a chronological ordering of historical events to showcase the teleology. As Li remarked:

At the end of the previous volume (of The Great Wave), I had yet to depict the incident of bloodshed at the yamen in a more comprehensive way. Indeed, the event marked only the start of chaos and turmoil in Sichuan. It inevitably witnessed the uprising of the people in west Sichuan. Then the Comrades’ Army took advantage of the situation to rally and continuously clash with the troops of Zhao Erfeng. Flurried and confounded, the Qing government could not but command Duan Fang to dispatch Hubei’s New Army to Sichuan, and order Rui Cheng to dispatch a strong troop to patrol the border of Sichuan and Hubei. As Wuchang was emptied of its defensive power, the revolutionaries caught the government off guard by firing the first shot on 10 October and instigated a call to arms. These events created a crisis like “a big and crushing wave.” This is precisely the theme of The Great Wave.

而且上卷末的制台衙門流血，既寫得不夠全面，那件事，這只算四川亂事的開始，必先到川西垻民眾起來了，同志軍因利乘勢，與趙爾豐的軍隊不斷衝突，使得清朝統治階級手忙足亂，不能不派遣端方統率湖北新軍入川，又不能不叫瑞澂多調勁旅到川鄂邊境佈防，以致武昌空虛，革命黨人振臂一呼，而於十月十日打出革命第一槍，這才算得“軒然大波”，這才是“大波”的主題.290

Li Jieren’s description echoes almost exactly the official line.291 The novelist’s statement reveals that the revision of The Great Wave has to reconsider the notion of revolutionary time as integral to the representation of local culture and historicity. It may also highlight a ‘memory crisis’ in re-transcribing a shared local past and memory into a greater collectivity as the nation. “Historical chronologies solder a multiplicity of personal, local, and regional historicities and transform them into a unitary, national time. They link the experiences of day to day life to events which are categorized as ‘national’

290 Li Jieren, “Afterword” (1959) to the second volume of The Great Wave, in Dabo, 2: 756. 291 See Wu Yuzhang, Recollections of the Revolution of 1911, pp. 109–12. 142 CHAPTER 3 and in so doing, they reinforce the solidarities of nationality.”292 Modern states usually solidify their power by actively reconfiguring everydayness in the social world into historical time and space. This chapter delineates the competing memories and narratives of the same event. As memory knowledge itself is contested, the state and cultural elites may engage in ‘memoropolitics,’ the politics of memory as an ongoing tug-of-war over competing claims to truth and historical representation, and power struggles over how an event should be recorded, commemorated, or discarded.293 Therefore, local memories and stories of the incidents in Chengdu in the summer of 1911 are inevitably submerged under the macro-political narration of militant uprisings, dramatic coup d’états, and revolutionary actions contributing to China’s ultimate change of regime.294 How did Chengdu people, who might not have been ready for a ‘revolution’ to happen, remember their experienced moments and private sentiments as they went through the seismic upheavals in 1911? For Li Jieren, the ways in which memory, fiction, historiography, and revolutionary discourse can be interwoven and contextu- alized presented insurmountable challenges to his fictional rewriting. Li committed himself to collecting oral materials and printed archives as a means to restore the past in a legitimate account for the entire community.295 What is at stake is the ways in which he has to reconsider all the competing versions of events in rewriting The Great Wave. Li Jieren was surely preoccupied with intellectual and ideological conun- drums in fictionalizing local pasts against public memory and historiography. First, the novelist is constantly confronted with the issue of causality and temporal coherence when he seeks to dramatize the historical process in a successful form of prose fiction. As long as Li is affectively concerned with articulating

292 Alonso, “The Effects of Truth,” p. 40. 293 Meusburger, “Knowledge, Cultural Memory, and Politics.” 294 Communist historians labeled the railroad protection protest in Sichuan as an “immediate cause” of the revolution; it was portrayed as paving the way for the revolutionary cause and heralding the Wuchang Uprising of October 10. See Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 1840–1928, pp. 240–44. They honored “the growth of the political consciousness and the strength of the Chinese people” in their effort to bring down “auto- cratic Manchu rule” and its imperialist patrons. See Hu Sheng, Imperialism and Chinese Politics, p. 177. 295 In The Crippled Tree, Suyin Han documented numerous first-hand personal accounts of Sichuan people during the 1911 Revolution. Han got most of the records from Li Jieren’s notes. Han’s narrative prose was somewhat sloppy, however, as she mixed the eyewitness accounts with Li’s own remarks. See Han, The Crippled Tree, pp. 213–52. Notably, Wei Yingtao’s historiography of Sichuan’s railroad protection movement, Sichuan baolu yundongshi, refers to the 1950s revised version of The Great Wave at more than a dozen points. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 143

the structure of daily life and human mentalities in his native-place writing style, he faces the challenge of emplotting the disruptive and traumatic local incidents into a single grand process of the revolution. Emphasizing as he does the particularity of local-place realities in the historical novel, he has to provide narrative transitions and causal linkages between disparate and traumatic local events in linear temporality. In so far as prose fiction excels in illuminating inwardly complex characters, plotted action, and social milieu, the historical novelist is constantly looking for formal virtuosity to create fictional plots and characterization so as to fit into the dramatic narrativization of historical process. In other words, the difficulty for Li lies in the fact that the microfoundation of everyday life, with the myriad of micro-events in the fictional cosmos, may not lend itself well to the causal exposition of the macrohistory of military action and political change. Chapter 4 will deal with Li’s aesthetic means of micro-narratives, and how his artistic intuition tries to cope with the multiple levels of historical experiences with distinctive formal constructions.

figure 3.1 An early Chinese printed representation of railroads. Even before the new form of transportation was actually extended into remote localities like Sichuan, the construction of rails had become an intensely political subject in the popular mind, as depicted in The Great Wave. Dianshizhai huabao, 1884. 144 CHAPTER 3

figure 3.2 A popular pictorial newspaper showing how the construction of railroads would ruin Chinese landscapes and bring misfortune to the people. Giant snakes are seen driven out from the ‘dragon hole’ because the locale’s fengshui has been damaged. The native’s animosity to foreign modernity depicted in the picture is similar to the mindset of the Sichuan people as described in The Great Wave. Dianshizhai huabao, 1897. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 145

figure 3.3 A fatal railway accident in which the train runs over a passenger on the track. The popular fear of railroad hazards heightened when the train drove straight through quiet rural areas. Dianshizhai huabao, 1892. 146 CHAPTER 3

figure 3.4 Headline news coverage of the political crisis in Chengdu in the New York Times, 15 September 1911. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 147

figure 3.5 A pictorial illustration of the ‘Chengdu massacre’ at the viceregal yamen on 7 September 1911. Courtesy of Li Jieren Memorial and Museum.

figure 3.6 The people of Chengdu thronged to the Imperial Palace (called “Huang Cheng” by Chengdu citizens) to celebrate Sichuan’s independence on 27 November 1911. Governor-General Zhao Erfeng was executed there after a public trial on 22 December 1911. Li Jieren depicted both the public celebrations and the bloody incident in The Great Wave. Photograph taken by Luther Knight. Courtesy of John E. Knight. 148 CHAPTER 3

figure 3.7 Current site of the Sichuan Provincial Government, the exact location of the viceregal yamen in Qing-dynasty Chengdu, where the ‘Chengdu massacre’ occurred on 7 September 1911. Photographed in 2011.

figure 3.8 Duyuan Street (Duyuan Jie) where the viceregal yamen was situated in Qing-dynasty Chengdu. It was where Zhao Erfeng was captured by the crowds in his residence on 27 November 1911. Photographed in 2006. No Place For Good Memories: Chengdu 1911 149

figure 3.9 The obelisk in the People’s Park (Renmin Gongyuan, formerly Shaocheng Park) in Chengdu. The public monument built in 1913 was dedicated to the victims of the railroad protection movement in 1911. Photographed in 2011. CHAPTER 4 Tempest in a Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics

As a historical novelist, Li Jieren played the dual roles of historian and fiction writer. He juggled the conflicting demands of the cognitive inquiry of history and the imaginative understanding of human psyches in fictive reconstruction, and played against comparative edges and limitations in both capacities. While the novelist side controls an imagined world, the historian side is constrained to represent, on the basis of the surviving evidence, a world that is lost. The novelist’s insights and psychological acumen allow readers to glimpse hitherto unseen vistas through creative imagination. In “the study of individual minds and collective mentalities,” as the cultural historian Peter Gay admits, “the novelist and the historian meet.”296 In the 1950s, after reading Ripples on Dead Water and Before the Tempest, the Japanese critic Umitani Hiroshi commented perceptively on Li Jieren’s literary artistry and realistic method as well as the novelist’s idea of history:

No writer would ever think that it would suffice to fabricate a few episodes to fully depict the mundane world of everyday people. Modern writers indeed confront various difficulties in trying to give a total picture of all the lively phenomena and pulsating movements of everyday reality in human society. . . . This is not the case for Li Jieren, however. His literary creation does not entail any processing, for he describes any detail with scrupulous attention just as he feels. It shows that the writer creates his vivacious social characters by deriving them from historical trends; that is to say, he depicts the historical trends as they really were. . . . He wants his work to be a testimony to history. I guess he thinks that way. . . . A writer has to restrain his or her subjective consciousness in order to depict objects with exactitude and vividness. The disappearance of subjectivity itself, or having one’s subjectivity submerged in the historical world in writing, will thus nurture the reader’s sense of trust in history. The narrator of history has exactly this prudent attitude. Seizing on history with care and precision, [the writer can turn] history into a mirror of the future. The revolution will evolve from history in its own way. No doubt this is the value of his (Li’s) work.297

296 Gay, Savage Reprisals, p. 152. 297 Umitani, “Ri Ketsujin no bungaku ni tsuite,” pp. 464, 466.

Li Jieren’s conscious exploitation of objective observation and the realistic method provide the novel’s power to describe behavior and social mores. The novelist can still exercise the freedom of imagination to unravel “the historical trends,” understood as changes in social customs and everyday life, as they actually happened. Li appears contented to “transform historical facts into literary contents,” the Japanese critic maintains, as “history has become the ultimate source for his creative inspiration.”298 In other words, history serves as the primary index of the reality that the novel strives to represent. The novelist’s approach to historical narration by emphasizing verifiable evidence and notation of empirical phenomena owes a critical debt to the narrative paradigms of the French naturalist and realist writers. The realist doctrine permits the author to depict contemporary and everyday events in chronological development, and to present ordinary people and their interactions within various social groups in their lived environments. At many places in his work, Li Jieren also resorts to the naturalist scheme of meticulous description to lay bare the entire milieu and its multifarious changes. The belief in the guiding influence of the social environment on human thought and action in the naturalist dogma, coupled with Li’s geopoetical interest, justifies his literally descriptive style with its abundant social details functioning to increase the veracity of the past. At times the author’s realist desire to lay bare the whole historical past may take precedence over the pursuit of literary sophistication. Li Jieren may well have partaken of the vision of European realist novelists to faithfully reproduce real events and social changes with detachment and impartiality. Peter Novick contends that literary realists like Flaubert and Zola resembled the professional historians of the late nineteenth century in their unremitting efforts at objectivity in narration along with the pretension of scientific vigor. Novick has termed the creed of objectivity as the ‘noble dream’ shared by realist writers and historians alike, and explicates the philosophical predicaments of recapitulating the past fully and entirely in literary novels and historical literature.299 The author’s penchant for restraining his own subjectivity from inter- vening into the external world in novelistic depiction is akin in spirit to the impersonal style of Flaubert, who championed the self-effacing narrator in

298 Ibid., pp. 463–67. 299 On scientism in nineteenth-century European literature and historiography, see Novick, That Noble Dream, pp. 21–46. Novick criticizes the unattainable ideal of objectivism held by historians who try to become disinterested observers of the past. One’s understanding and representation of the world, Novick argues, are essentially circumscribed by one’s particular interests, inclinations, and social conditions. 152 CHAPTER 4

Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education (1869). Salammbô, one of the two major novels by Flaubert that Li Jieren translated (the other being Madame Bovary), manifests the passion for scrutiny of the past shared by both writers. A romance set against the background of ancient Carthage, Salammbô possesses a sheen of historical authenticity through Flaubert’s painstaking archeological research. However, his heroine Salammbô is seen as resembling too closely contemporary characters and romantic heroines because she acts in terms of a nineteenth-century bourgeois mentality. Critics have dismissed Flaubert’s work as a nostalgic quest for an exotic bygone Orient.300 The discrepancy between the fashioning of historical truth on the one hand and playing out individual and romantic plots on the other bespeaks the difficulty of fully recapitulating things as they happened in the past. It also points to the essential dilemma in Li’s fictional-historical writing of reconciling subjective invention and the empirical reconstruction of historical details. Li Jieren’s elaborate literary descriptions resemble Zola’s extreme naturalist techniques, Ma Sen comments, which ask the novelist to become a pure recorder of details and admit no ideological and imaginative judgments. “The author’s effort to stick to historical events and to remain as objective as possible is so obvious that this novel (The Great Wave) can be considered as a historical novel from the point of view of its chronological recording, or as a naturalistic one from the point of view of its objectivity and tendency towards determinism.”301 There is an unresolved disjuncture between the realistic bent and subjective tendency in Li’s trilogy. Less concerned with ideological problems and more intent on the observation of the surroundings, “Li clings to objective descriptions but gives the impression that he somewhat lacks imagination” in his historical novels.302 The mere piling up of facts and details, however reliable, only introduces the problem of presentation: how to organize the accumulation of facts into a meaningful coherence in an imaginative form. In drawing upon the French realist and naturalist models in undertaking historical investigation and literary description, Li Jieren is more interested

300 The Marxist critic Lukács denounced the novel’s historical descriptions as a frozen landscape of archeological precision, in which history simply provided a decorative, monumental setting for the tragic-romantic drama of a bourgeois-minded woman, while the protagonist became merely a decorative symbol. See Lukács, The Historical Novel. For a reassessment of Flaubert’s historical novel, see Donato, “Salammbô”; Anne Green, Flaubert and the Historical Novel. 301 Ma Sen, rev. of The Great Wave, 1: 120. 302 Ma Sen, rev. of Ripples on Dear Water, 1: 117–18. Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 153 in pursuing historicism than political tendentiousness. Reflecting on the rewriting of The Great Wave in 1962, the old writer spelled out the dilemma of the Rankean commitment to reproducing the past “as it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen) in narrative fiction. A good historical novelist was expected to become an unbiased observer and recorder of the past, Li claimed; he should avoid adorning human behaviors and the social environment with contemporary dialogues, costumes, and objects. “What is most difficult,” the author explained, “lies in how one can enter the lived environment of the past.”303 He advocated the impossible ideal of recovering authentic representations of the ‘archaic society’ (guren shehui) of fifty years ago. Modeling oneself on the disciplinary practice of the historian, Li believed, a writer should withdraw his ego from presentation and resort to impersonal narration in order to bring to light the past for its own sake. The dual role of Li Jieren as historian and novelist calls into question the function of authenticity and objectivity in the historical novel as a form of fiction as well as of history. Li’s painstaking research and documentation serve his purpose of bringing to light the immense store of historical lore of Chengdu city and the Shu culture more broadly. As a novelist, however, Li must grapple with the problem of what is real and imaginary, what to preserve and remember in history and what to abandon, making the right stylistic choices between narration and description, and putting them in a proper narrative structure. The confidence with which a fiction writer appeals to consensual truth and historical actuality in establishing the legitimacy of the historical novel exposes the intricate tensions between fictionality, historiographical consciousness, and value judgment. The aesthetic imperative to mix fact with fiction again raises the fundamental problematic in historical novels, namely, how to combine ‘facts’ taken from records with freely fictional elements into a seamless narrative structure. How does the historical novel signal where history ends and where fiction begins? Li Jieren’s ongoing struggles with fictional style and candid historical narration in fact recuperates the formal impasse that long bothered Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), the popular Italian novelist and critic who took issue with the hybrid genre that combines both falsity and truthfulness. After finish- ing one of the most influential historical novels in Italian literature, Manzoni turned to writing On the Historical Novel (1850), a treatise that purported to critique the historical novels written roughly between 1828 and 1850.304 While

303 Wei Junyi, “Zuihou de fangwen.” 304 Alessandro Manzoni is known today as a foremost novelist of European historical fiction for his panoramic novel of seventeenth-century Italy, The Betrothed (I promessi sposi), 154 CHAPTER 4 history presents ‘positive truth’ and fiction delivers ‘poetic truth,’ Manzoni declared, the historical novel inevitably leads to deception and hence is not a viable genre because of its intrinsic contradiction. Manzoni’s position, put bluntly, was that “the historical novel fails as history because it includes fictional elements, and it fails as fiction because it includes historical elements.”305 It is by nature a misfit genre: “combining historical oil and fictitious water, it gave off no light.”306 Beyond his concern with the aesthetic flaws of the genre, Manzoni noted the ethical hazard to which the historical novelist is exposed. “The situation of the historical novelist is quite different, for he very nearly pretends to be the histor, to give the reader a faithful representation of the past.”307 Worse yet, the fiction writer chooses the novel form precisely for its strong mimetic power, its ability to resemble outward reality (the situated temporal-spatial contexts of the past, the social morals and manners proper to chosen societies). In so doing, the historical novelist cannot but violate the truth-telling contract between the materials (history) and the form (fiction) in which they are represented, and does nothing less than counterfeit history by means of fiction’s immense capacity to deceive. In disputing the validity of the hybrid historical genre, Manzoni thereby heightened the unresolved formal and ethical burdens involved in writing historical fiction, when the novelist is morally obliged to communicate fully and truthfully to the community of readers as much as he is enticed to use fictional storytelling to enlighten and entertain the audience. Yet it is precisely the genre’s hybridity and resulting formal looseness—its ‘inability’ to take on a convincing and stable form—that grants it the potential to maintain productive tensions between fiction and reputed reality, the latter perceived subjectively by the created characters and implied readers. For all its claims to historicity, the historical novel rests ultimately on mimetic invention; the novelist’s expressive and empathetic capacity to reclaim the voices of the people is crucial. How can the novelist creatively integrate the world of everyday life, with its multitude of human dramas and occurrences, into the

first published in 1827. Admiring critics claimed the author as their own Sir Walter Scott. Some rank the novel with War and Peace as marking the summit of the historical novel. See Manzoni, On the Historical Novel. 305 Quoted from de Piérola, “At the Edge of History,” p. 153. 306 Rigney, Imperfect Histories, p. 58. 307 Sandra Bermann, “Introduction,” in Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, p. 39. On the dilemma between historical discourse and the verisimilar in the historical novel, see Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, pp. 63–81. Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 155 narrative exposition and progression of grand political and historical plots expected of the genre? I first turn to Before the Tempest to illustrate how fictional discourse is woven into historical events in certain episodes. What catches our attention is how the novel presents the exclusive perspective of the local world inhabited by characters from a wide spectrum of social strata, including domestic servants, workers, soldiers, prostitutes, new-style students, radical intellectuals, elite officials and conservative gentry. Set in the early twentieth century in pre-revolutionary Chengdu, Before the Tempest touches upon a series of social uprisings that have unsettled these crisis-ridden communities. Creating ethnographic vistas of the local societies in constant commotion, the novel tries to direct readers to see things from the native point of view, to seek out the diverse meanings of uncanny events in all their opacity to a divided populace afflicted by the clashes of new thoughts and old mentalities on the eve of the revolution.

Scandalous Oversights

On 26 April 1895, a strange affair involving a young Presbyterian physician and a local Chinese family occurred in Chengdu, which sparked a series of outbreaks of anti-foreignism and mob violence. The doctor, a Canadian missionary named Hare, was called in early evening to visit a woman who was in critical condition. The call had come too late to save her life. Upon arriving at the house, the doctor found that his patient had been dead for some time. The woman’s husband, Chwang [sic] by name, became distraught and double-barred the door as Hare tried to leave. Hare, who could not understand the man’s local dialect, became cross and shook him to force him to open the door. Mumbling, Chwang ran outside after Hare, where the missionary found some fifty neighbors waiting for him. Chwang and a number of men caught Hare by the collar and sleeve, and at this point the doctor lost his temper. He struck Chwang under the chin to make him let go. Just then another fellow hit Hare behind the head and knocked his cap off. All this time the crowd was increasing, numbering over a hundred in Hare’s estimate, and running after Hare “like devils.” The doctor could hear their howls of protest, as they yelled “Strike the foreigner!” and “Kill the foreigner!” Seeing that the crowd was ready for immediate violence, and aware that he himself was alone and weaponless, Hare ran back to the Canadian mission hospital. But before he went inside, he seized Chwang and dragged him in, too. Hare and Chwang wrestled for a while until Chwang broke free and escaped. 156 CHAPTER 4

Not surprisingly, this story was recounted in the memoirs of the missionaries. The mob’s emergence was a strong signal of local people’s hatred and distrust of the foreigners.308 The missionaries also found that vicious rumors among the locals demonized their goodhearted cause. “All through the city there circulated the story that the foreign doctor had been the cause of the woman’s death. For some time her dead and naked body was exposed in front of the man’s house, for all the curious to gaze upon, as evidence that the foreign doctor had poisoned her, for some horrible purpose of his own.”309 The near-riot occurred just a month before the notorious Chengdu riot at the end of May. The latter disturbance began on 28 May, which happened to be the Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwujie), and took on grotesque overtones as the story was retold. By 4 p.m. a large crowd of women, children, and young men had gathered on the parade ground, which was located next to the Canadian Methodist mission at Sishengci Street. The people were watching the proceed- ings and enjoying the local custom of ‘plum-throwing’ that was one of the festival’s highlights. Diverse versions exist as to what happened next. The Chinese story went that some children struck a missionary in the head several times with plums, until at length he grabbed a ten-year-old Chinese. Immediately the crowd gathered around and began throwing bricks and stones instead of plums at the foreigner. Without trying to reason with his assailants, this missionary picked up the child and hurried back to his mansion. The furious crowd followed and surrounded the compound to demand the child’s release. The Canadians denied the allegation of the child’s capture by one of their missionaries.310 According to foreign accounts, the uproar started at 5 p.m. when a group of some twenty men gathered in front of the hospital and quarters occupied by the missionaries, to which they were denied access. Some began to throw rocks over the compound wall, and before long the crowd had forced the gate and was milling around inside the compound. Two Canadian doctors rushed out with rifles and ordered the mob to leave. They began firing

308 For an account of the bizarre incident, see Hart, Virgil C. Hart, pp. 265–69. 309 Ibid., p. 269. Hart (278–82) mentioned that ferocious tales were widespread in many Chinese communities and charged the missionaries with the drugging and murdering of native children for pharmaceutical purposes. Stories of missionary atrocities provided a historical source for Ripples on Dead Water, in which the secret society members dissemi- nate similar tales to incite hatred of foreigners. 310 Hyatt, “The Chengtu Riots (1895),” pp. 31–32. For the missionary reports on the Sichuan riots, see Cunningham, A History of the Szechuen Riots (May–June, 1895); Hartwell, Granary of Heaven, pp. 47–52. Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 157 into the air and against the compound walls to scare away the strangers. Their action triggered the revenge of the Chinese, as the crowd was soon attacking the mission in earnest. In stark contrast, the Chinese version of this point is bloody and sensational: the missionary captured three men who attempted to save the child held in his house, and he then chloroformed them and hung them up on trees.311 In the meantime, the crowd outside became greatly augmented and was determined not to disperse until the men and child were released. Later, when the Chengdu district magistrate with his two prefects rushed to intervene, the foreigner demanded that money be immediately paid for his loss of property. He went on to threaten and strike several officials who came to remonstrate. Seeing that the officials were suffering for the sake of the people, the outraged populace looted and razed missionary properties in response until they had destroyed all the Christian missions in the precinct. The riots lasted for a day and a half, spreading rapidly to a dozen places in and out of the city. I bring up these accounts of the social unrest in Chengdu in 1895 because in Before the Tempest, Li Jieren recasts the story in a very different light. The 1895 riot is invoked as a shadowy presence in the novel. The narrative diverts attention from sensational versions of the story to localized visions of the event framed as rumors, gossip, spontaneous actions, and perceptions full of sights and sounds. Even as the novelist claims to be an objective chronicler, he exercises the imaginative power of selection and exclusion; he cunningly alters the time scheme and perspectives of the historical event so as to give voice to those marginalized and silenced in official historical representation. How does the novel represent the invisible and elusive private past often overlooked by political history? How can readers reimagine local characters in their myriad responses to real historical happenings, from the people’s uncaring ignorance and false expectations to their apprehensive reception of the event? By dramatizing the eyewitness accounts of, and local testimony about, historical incidents, the fiction writer intends not so much to deliver biased visions of the event as to invite the reader to become a spectator, who can reflect on the pervasive force of history that has caught the characters unawares. In Part 1, Chapter 4 of Before the Tempest, we see how Wu Ping, a socially marginal character, enters the historic scene and becomes an observer and

311 For the Chinese versions of the riots, see Hyatt, “The Chengtu Riots (1895),” pp. 30–31; Cunningham, A History of the Szechuen Riots, pp. 36–38. 158 CHAPTER 4 involuntary participant of the riot.312 Wu Ping is a jobless scoundrel who lives with his mother and his bride in Lower Lotus Pond (Xia Lianchi), a slum where vagrant families live in thatched huts.313 Wu Ping’s involvement is characteristic of the rioters, who are believed to have included a good mixture of rogues and rascals engaged in heartless looting and fortune-seeking. Walking with his family to join the festive celebrations on the afternoon of the Dragon Boat Festival, Wu Ping is distracted by a roaring. He swiftly changes course and joins a mob rushing to the premises of the foreigners as soon as he hears people yelling: “The church on Sishengci Street has been raided. Hurry! Rush! If you want to make a foreign fortune (fa yangcai).” Wu Ping cannot figure out what is going on inside or outside of the church premises as he can only see the crowd gathering around the spot and hear its indistinct murmur. According to missionary reports, many local people ransacked foreign properties in the unrest, joined by some soldiers and yamen runners who were supposedly sent to suppress the riots.314 It is illuminating to see how the narrator in Before the Tempest engages the reader with the character as a spectator of the historical scene, to reimagine a multitude of personal experiences of the event in the native communities. As Wu Ping scurries around and tries to wriggle his way through the crowd to see what is happening, he accidentally picks up a parcel for which people had been madly scrambling and passing around. Without a second thought, he takes the parcel and heads home, only to hear people around applauding him for “making a foreign fortune.” Arriving home with excitement, he opens the parcel before the curious gazes of his family and neighbors:

When the parcel was opened, a few empty glass bottles rolled out. They checked further. There was a green leather case, and there were five to six pieces of thick porcelain dishes of a grayish white color and bluish floral patterns. The leather case looked exquisite, wrapped in a layer of silvery white copper. It looked like there would be some ‘good treasures’ (hao baobei) inside. But the case was tightly closed. They had no way of opening it. Holding it up and shaking it, they could hear no sound. But they could tell the case was really heavy. (1: 4, 128)

312 Li Jieren, Baofeng yuqian (1940), pp. 116–23. Chapter, page, and section numbers are put in parentheses in the main text hereafter, and they refer to this earlier version of the novel. 313 Li Jieren has described the geographical distinction and the lower class background of Lower Lotus Pond in Ripples on Dead Water, part 5, chap. 6. 314 “Committee’s Report,” in Cunningham, A History of the Szechuen Riots, pp. iii–iv. Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 159

Why does the narrator go into the details of the parcel loaded with minute objects, besides potentially showing the folly of the natives? I would argue that the narrator strategically inserts the physical objects as real-life references so as to create a sense of verisimilitude. In “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes (1915–80) contends that the ‘irrelevant’ detail is an essential code to denote reality in realistic fiction.315 Barthes cites Flaubert’s description of Mme Aubain’s room in A Simple Heart (1877), and argues that the author includes the barom- eter, an insignificant object, to create the “reality effect.” It makes readers feel the atmosphere of ‘real life’ (which is also essentially made up of minor and insignificant details and incidents). Building on Barthes’ notion, Naomi Schor further suggests that the prosaic objects in Balzac’s novels can serve as “diegetic details” to reveal the psychological state of the characters and interpersonal relationships or conflicts.316 In similarly close-up shots, Li Jieren exercises the imaginative faculty of a realistic novelist by reconstructing prosaic life episodes and details to illuminate the unseen and the hidden aspects of the historical past. When finally the villagers manage to open the leather case, they discover nothing more than “some knives, forks, and long spoons” firmly secured inside the red velvet grid in the case (1: 4, 120–21). The villagers are greatly disappointed as the discovery has shattered their dream of making a fortune. The realistic description here points to the deeper cultural incongruity and misunderstanding of daily customs between native Chinese and foreigners, which are dramatically embodied in the immaculate knife-and-fork setup subject to the amused gazes and inquisitions of native eyes. Nevertheless, Chinese readers would detect that the foreign thingamajigs are by no means irrelevant details in the text. The novel’s evocation of the Western material presence not only testifies to the constructed nature of literary details in historical fiction, but its satiric warning of civilizational clashes also bears out a thematic similarity to Li Boyuan’s A Brief History of Enlightenment, a novel that gives prominence to the foreign presence via the infiltrations of material culture in daily life. Chapters 1 to 11 of the novel revolve around the local officials’ mishandling of the popular uprisings in Yongshun in Hunan Province, a secluded border region inhabited by the Miao tribesmen and Han Chinese, a mixed population known for primeval customs and conservative practices.317 Mob violence originates from a small daily scuffle involving a foreign porcelain teacup. An Italian mining engineer flies into a rage when the proprietor of the

315 Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” pp. 141–48. 316 Schor, Reading in Detail, pp. 141–47. 317 Li Boyuan, Modern Times, pp. 13–106. For a synopsis of the novel, see Lancashire, “Introduction.” 160 CHAPTER 4 inn where he is lodging breaks his teacup. The foreigner bullies the Chinese and threatens to take him to the magistrate. The prefect maltreats his fellow Chinese citizens and toadies to the foreign visitors. Owing to the arrival of the foreigners, this local official then decides to postpone a military examination already scheduled, and this decision causes a bunch of restless young men to be stranded in town. They congregate at teahouses and wineshops, where they begin to trade gossip about the prefect planning to sell all the mountains to foreigners for mining and wiping out the populace. As the rumors snowball and spread to a growing and aggrieved crowd, the disturbance gains momentum and the crowd begins to wreak havoc. Li Boyuan traces the emergence of rioting as a series of interlinking and spontaneous incidents, where the seed of chaos is the breaking of a foreigner’s teacup. The physical object triggers the populace’s resentment of the local government as well as their mistrust and hatred of the foreigners.318 In Before the Tempest, the discovery of the foreign material objects by native inhabitants serves primarily as a signaling code or catalyst for the ominous ‘presence’ of foreigners and the West. Li Jieren creatively reconfigures the ‘historical experience’ of his Sichuan locals as an ‘absence’—the threatening foreign ‘otherness’ as exemplified by the incursion of Western cultural materialism looms in the background of the remote locale without actually appear- ing. Further, the historical novelist has improved upon Li Boyuan’s social panorama, in which the narrative is largely governed by an all-knowing narrator who gives a plain reportage of the incidents in chronological sequence. Readers do not really see the faces or hear the voices of the people as individualized human subjects. In comparison, the narrator in Before the Tempest introduces multivocal and multiperspectival dialogic scenes to render more colorful portraitures of the native crowd as individuals, and paints a tableau of personal responses (or testimonies?) to the significantly insignificant details of history. A few days after the riots, when the news finally reaches the community about the local government’s plan to arrest the rebels involved in looting the church, panic sets in among Wu Ping’s family. They realize with fear that they are implicated simply because they have foreign objects in their possession.

Wu Ping: “XXX (foul language in Sichuan dialect)! All the cheers were in vain. I thought I made a foreign fortune. Such worthless stuff!”

318 For a brief analysis of the crowd scene in A Brief History of Enlightenment, see Saussy, “Crowds, Number, and Mass in China,” pp. 254–56. Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 161

Wu Dasao (Wu’s wife) says to her husband with loathing: “When you brought the stuff home the other day, you should have come straight into the house and not let the neighbors see it. That way things would just be fine. But you opened the parcel before the public as if you wanted everybody to know about it.” Wu Taipo (Wu’s mother): “These are not any gold or jewels or treasures. It is pitiful if we get involved and suffer for these knives and forks! You shouldn’t have brought them home the other day. And you shouldn’t have let anybody know about it at all!” (The old woman may have forgotten that she had told her son to keep the utensils anyway, for they could sell them for a few bucks.) (1: 4, 121–23)

Through these speeches, the narrator manages to draw the reader’s attention to the narrow vision and limited knowledge of the native subjects, each seeking to ‘translate’ the complex historical world (about which they know little) in their biased and self-interested responses. Li Jieren seems to advocate the use of constructed dialogue as a sensible method to communicate with readers and help them to know the characters. He allows the dialogue to go on at great length not because the speech will tell readers what the characters are thinking and feeling and why they are doing something this way or that way. Rather, the dialogic exchange of the characters effectively conveys the essential opacity and difficulty of comprehending the local world and the mentalities of local people when they are caught unprepared in historical transitions. The narrator refuses to explain the motives of the characters or make moral or philosophical commentaries on their behavior. He wants the reader to live ‘beside’ (but not ‘inside’) the characters, sharing their ways of talking and acting and observing how they become highly invested in their own versions of events. In the novel as in real life, we can only hear people converse and see them act. It is through this impersonal style of representation that the narrator tries to engage the reader as an ironic spectator of the historical scene or tableau, and then as a suspicious inquirer into history. Have all these uprisings to do with the hatred of foreigners, a rise of local consciousness, or simply the contingency of human actions? What are the complex forces that would give rise to the ensuing revolutionary changes in the locality? There is an implicit recognition that the narrator is less interested in achieving historical truth than in creating an historical awareness on the part of the reader by deploying a multiplicity of voices presenting their miscellaneous ways of perceiving and narrating events. Wu Ping’s excursion and his final departure from his family and hometown have been steered by a cacophony of voices and noises. Seduced by the sounds 162 CHAPTER 4 of the crowds, he walks into the looting. He snatches the foreign ‘treasures’ amidst the uproarious screams of his neighbors. While he is still squabbling with his family about the use of his catch, news of the pending arrests drives him out of town. The character’s perceptions of historical reality are built upon a mass of eavesdrop and hearsay. History is conjured up as a communal web of dialogic voices, and as a network of information (and misinformation) imbued with localized interpretations, which dictate the moves of the character. In the overall design of the roman-fleuve, Wu Ping leaves home to become a guard in a provincial district, and will join the revolutionary army in The Great Wave. Even the omniscient narrator hardly poses as an all-knowing agent. Retaining a position of partiality, the third-person storyteller has no way of reporting historical truth. The narrator rather draws the reader’s attention to the community’s views and verbal impressions of the event by recounting prevalent rumors:

When people talked about the reason for raiding the church, nobody seemed to know. They could recall that on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, when people were throwing plums on the Eastern Parade Ground, ‘rumors’ (dipifeng: Sichuan dialect) were suddenly blowing that children were being killed in the church; their shrieks were said to be horrible. People who used to be indifferent to the presence of the church and foreigners, and those who had felt hatred for Chinese converts who presumed upon the power of foreigners—they all went furious on hearing the news, and were filled with an air of righteousness against injustice. When one person called for action, thousands of people followed. At first they may just have wanted to find out the truth of what had happened, and then try to reason with the foreigners. Surprisingly, once they entered the gate (of the church premises), their feeling of righteousness was immediately overpowered by the idea of making a foreign fortune. (1: 4, 121–22)

Assuming a third-person voice of detachment, the narrator makes authorial commentary to account for the rise of mob violence and drive home the comic paradox as he recounts the process of rioting. The sarcastic tone bespeaks the rhetorical strategy in the historical novel. The omniscient narrator does not care about relating history proper (histoire) as a series of historical facts expressed in the past tense. By investing historical narrative with fictional overtones, on the contrary, the narrator lays bare his own opinions and judgment of history, and establishes the ironic distance between the reader and the narrator over and against the narrated event. In other words, the framing Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 163 of historical narrative is invariably subject to the function of ‘discourse’ (discours), that is, to the discursive inflection of the narrator. It is on the level of ‘discourse’ that the narrator “is free to accompany his narrative of events,” and “the historian and the novelist alike can comment on the action being related and orient the reader’s attitude toward it.”319 In the rewritten version of Before the Tempest, Li Jieren added a dramatic paragraph to this episode, in which the foreigners confront the crowd and beat the people, therefore inciting more violence.320 While the minor addition in no way undermines the irony of the original novel, the changeability of historical writing epitomizes the nature of unsettled historical truth and unstable textuality. By admitting the undecidability of historical knowledge across the slippery boundary between the real and the imagined, the historical novel produces the incoherence of historical writing between what is claimed by public records and what is subjectively known and recalled in private reminiscences. As one realizes that the truth recovered from the past is not final and absolute, the novel produces a sense of hesitation on the truth-claim.

Public Orgies and Spectacles

The beginning of Before the Tempest (Part I, Chapters 1 and 2) dramatically stages a sequence of hesitating moments filled with verbal and visual impressions of the pending assault of the Red Lantern (Hongdengzhao) outlaws. The author mingles imaginative narrative with a real historical event—the devastating attack on Chengdu by a motley group of female Boxers and radicals in 1902, culminating in the arrest and beheading of its leader, who was known as Liao Guanyin (Goddess-of-Mercy Liao). The opening scene, presented like a stage drama and spiced with lively dialogue and dialect used by lower-class servants, reveals the interior of a mansion and the tensions existing in a gentry family at the advent of the unrest. The tone and dialogue recall Lu Xun’s “Remembrances of the Past” (“Huaijiu,” 1911), in which the old gentry characters reminisce about the time when the

319 Gossman, “History and Literature,” p. 22. Gossman borrows Émile Benveniste’s notion of histoire and discours to refer to two spatial-temporal modes of historical narration. Histoire is the form proper to a third-person narrative that focuses exclusively on the events being narrated in the past tense. Discours denotes the temporal frame of reference in which the narrator maintains the present relation with the reader or listener, and performs the act of storytelling as contemporaneous with what is being told. 320 Li Jieren, Baofeng yuqian (1957), pp. 94–95. This is based on Li’s rewritten version in 1956. 164 CHAPTER 4 long-haired Taiping rebels had invaded their hometown several decades before. Jaroslav Průšek has noted that dialogue in “Remembrances of the Past” functions to reveal intricate human relationships rather than move the plot forward.321 In Before the Tempest, similarly, the narrator directs our attention to the responses of the lower-class servants to the rebellion in order to unveil hidden class conflict in the house. They speak of the extraordinary feats of the Red Lanterns, and wish to take opportunity of the invasion to produce chaos and devastation to upset the present social hierarchy. Unfeeling and self-serving as they may sound, the servants and hired workers express class grievances against their masters and vague carnivalesque longings for social change.322 Li Jieren’s comic-realistic rewriting of the Red Lantern rebellion demystifies the superstitious and religious colors of the Boxer movement in general. The author shows how the elite household of the Hao family has been thrown into chaos first by rumors of a possible attack and then by the real threat of destruction by the Red Lanterns. Li holds up the historical event as a mirror to refract light onto the antagonistic class relationships and social structure contained within a microcosm of Chengdu society. He extends and diversifies the images of perceived historical reality with a multiplicity of viewpoints and voices of minor characters from different sectors of society. In this sense, historical reality is portrayed as an incoherent variegation of the past as presented by different eye-witnesses and through conversations overheard, with all the speakers and hearers standing in their respective social positions with vested interests. The Boxer event is a red herring. The narrative primarily aims to reveal the interrelationship between human motivation and historical situation, adding to the reader’s critical awareness of the network of human interactions that constitute social reality. In February 1902, the Boxers known as the “Red Lanterns” got a foothold in Sichuan, and during the year they burned mission stations and murdered native Christians in different parts of the province. Soldiers were hurriedly dispatched to contain them, and in May a battle was fought not far from Chengdu. Trouble still continued all through the summer as the Boxers kept the province in a state of panic. The Red Lanterns launched a series of attacks on missionary communities, wealthy landlords, and local officials. The missionaries loathed the government’s indifference and dilatoriness in suppressing the revolt, even as more and more native pastors and church members were massacred. They estimated that over two thousand Chengdu Catholics and many Protestants

321 Průšek, “Lu Hsun’s Huai-chiu,” pp. 174–75. 322 For an analysis of the episode, see the article by the Chengdu scholar, Jiang Weiming, “Baofeng yuqian dui Hongdengjiao de miaoxie.” Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 165 were killed. At length a day was set for the destruction of the Christians in Chengdu. On the 15th of September, about thirty Boxers rushed into the city when the gates were opened. They were met by a body of soldiers, and, after a brief fight, were dispersed. Many were captured and beheaded, and their heads placed in conspicuous places as a warning.323 Historians have described the formation of the Red Lanterns as a regional offshoot of female Boxers. Comprised mostly of teenage girls and young unmarried women between the ages of twelve and eighteen, the Red Lantern members shunned the traditional dress code and the custom of foot binding. The women radicals were clad entirely in red and trained in wielding swords and waving fans as weapons. They were believed to possess supernatural powers: they could walk on water, fly through the air, and even leap up to heaven by a wave of their fans and so reach the heartland of the imperialists to take back their country’s stolen land.324 It was said they could render themselves invisible, cross rivers without boats, and live without food: they were quite invin- cible. Many Chinese troops were overawed by these alleged magical powers. Female Boxers were regarded as a potent opponent against corrupt governments and foreign, imperial powers. One charismatic leader was the sixteen-year-old ‘Liao Guanyin,’ known for her legendary beauty, magical power, and martial skills. She commanded thousands of supporters in fighting against provincial troops. Born in 1886 to a poor peasant family in rural Sichuan, Liao was their ninth child and nicknamed Liao Jiumei (Ninth Sister Liao). As a teenager, Liao followed the local Red Lantern practitioner, Zeng Ayi, to practice boxing, swordsman- ship, and Red Lantern doctrines. By sixteen, Liao had become a more accomplished and versatile leader than her teacher. Local chroniclers and historians alike have claimed that Liao rose on a wave of collective aspiration rooted in deep despair to strike a blow at some of the local manifestations of social oppression. The Red Lantern uprising in 1902 was said to have crystallized deep-seated local resentment against the government and foreign intrud- ers. Her charm also drew thousands of local protesters and Boxers to strike at foreigners and elite officials.325 Liao and her local rebels shouted the slogan,

323 For the earliest missionary memoir of the Boxer unrest in Sichuan, see Wallace, The Heart of Sz-Chuan, pp. 89–91. For a brief account of the incident, see Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, pp. 77–78. 324 See Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, pp. 297–98; Ono, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850–1950, pp. 49–50. 325 Prazniak, Of Camel Kings and Other Things, pp. 131–33. For a legendary account of the rise and death of Liao, see He Yili, “Liao Guanyin, Zeng Ayi.” 166 CHAPTER 4

“Destroy the Qing, Expel the Foreigner.” Official troops finally crushed the Red Lanterns in late 1902. Liao was caught and beheaded in a public execution held in Chengdu on 5 January 1903. Sichuan officials expressed the belief that Liao had been a pawn under the control of rebel instigators; but given her notoriety among the populace, it was obligatory to send her to the execution ground as a warning to the people in order to quell further local resistance.326 In Before the Tempest, the narrator tells us, the execution became a spectacle, drawing huge crowds. For Chengdu natives, watching the execution of Goddess-of-Mercy Liao also became a monumental event in their lived memories and in the history of Chengdu social life (看殺廖觀音，也是成都人生活史上一樁大事) (1: 6, 29). Liao’s beheading indeed had a dark side of vicious cruelty to it: the woman was first stripped and paraded naked from the waist up around the town before being executed. No latter-day ethnographical accounts or local legends have dwelled on this event in so much lively detail and with such a critical lens as Before the Tempest. The novel not only depicts the barbaric act of showing off the woman’s naked body before killing her, but also pokes fun at the enthralled local crowds who attend the decapitation with untold nasty wishes and violent drives. Liao’s gory execution scene becomes another thread woven into Li Jieren’s satirical reminiscences on a heightened moment of primitive violence in local histories. His novelistic account possibly provides evidence on the wicked treatment of the woman’s body, and about the equally vile and unfeeling crowds who victimize the accused and await her punishment with salacious excitement. Li’s fictional treatment remains the only written record of cultural history on this cruel incident in Chengdu, mixing history, legend, and imagination. Instead of depicting Liao’s defiant expression or attitude as the legends would have it,327 the narrator in Before the Tempest directs the reader to look at the apathetic and even morally depraved spectators. For them, the woman’s body is as much an attraction as the head-chopping ritual:

No sooner had the woman appeared than the spectators outside the gate roared, mixed with their profuse laughter. For the young woman’s fair,

326 See Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan and Beijing shifan daxue lishixi, eds., Xinhai gemingqian shinianjian minbian dang’an shiliao, p. 78. Official documents on curbing the 1902 Boxer uprisings in Sichuan are collected in Sichuansheng dang’anguan, ed., Sichuan jiao’an yu Yihequan dang’an, pp. 765–88. 327 Some notorious cases of Chinese females who were stripped in public executions can be found in an article on the internet. See Junshi Lanmu Hailukong, “Miandui luoxing congrong jiuyi de liuwei Zhongguo weida nüxing.” Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 167

curvaceous figure revealed her sex appeal as expected, and lived up to the good name of Goddess of Mercy. The way that she died a miserable death under the admiring and envious gazes of the crowd should appease the public’s psyches in their extreme curiosity and brutality!

那女人剛一露面，轅門外的觀眾更其大喊起來，並且雜有很多的笑聲，大約因那女人果然露了色相，又果然年輕白胖，不負觀音的名稱，而又在眾人又愛好又嫉妒的眼光下活活慘死，實足以滿足大眾的好奇而殘酷的心情罷? (1: 6, 38)328

The sheer fun enjoyed by the crowds and their complicity in witnessing the brutal killing are stunning. The narrator also infuses the scene with uncomfortable sexual connotations. The crowds seem to be sizzling in their malicious yearnings to see the woman tortured, a scathing revelation of the male’s fear of the opposite sex. The young female Red Lanterns, being in many cases prepu- bescent and also presexual, were viewed (by men) as possessing extraordinary powers. Female Boxers could be even more frightening than their male counterparts because of the presumed sexual and moral ‘purity’ of these young females (as versus the ‘polluted’ adult women).329 Once revered as a female immortal by local natives, Goddess-of-Mercy Liao is now ruthlessly victimized by the cheering crowd, whose voyeuristic gazes subjugate the woman by making her into an alienated body of impurity, criminality, and sexual allure. Without a doubt, Li Jieren’s treatment of the Chinese crowd and primitive vision convincingly recalls Lu Xun’s fictional configurations of the ‘voyeuristic crowd.’ In his acclaimed short stories such as “The True Story of Ah Q” and “A Warning to the People” (“Shizhong,” 1925), Lu Xun describes his country- men’s fascination with watching executions. Public executions have been turned into a ceremonial occasion for gatherings as much as thrilling entertainments. The audiences are largely benumbed spectators ignorant of the local circumstances: what has happened, who is going to be punished, and what the criminal has done to deserve capital punishment. Lu Xun’s imaginative critique lays bare the idea of apathetic Chinese spectatorship by centering on “the people’s mindless craving for excitement and their heartless indifference to the suffering of others,”330 but it entirely leaves out

328 The author has deleted this passage in the revised version of Before the Tempest. 329 On the purity myth of the Red Lanterns as virginal women, see Cohen, History in Three Keys, pp. 138–45. 330 Lyell, Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality, p. 267. 168 CHAPTER 4 more concrete portrayals of these spectators in terms of their faces, voices, or individual mentalities. In his oft-quoted news-slide account of the beheading of a Chinese peasant accused of spying for the Russians by Japanese soldiers, Lu Xun provides scanty descriptions of the few Chinese onlookers who “come to enjoy the spectacle.” Speechless and expressionless as the Chinese viewers appear in his storytelling, Lu Xun is apparently self-conscious about being himself the only uneasy Chinese witness sitting among his Japanese classmates and feeling increasingly enraged by the ridiculous spectacle. Lu Xun’s memoir-like story attempts to sound a wake-up call for national awareness among his fellow May Fourth intelligentsia and compatriots. He achieves this effect by foregrounding the lone enlightened observer of the slide while eliding descriptions of the mindless Chinese faces among other groups of eyewitnesses involved.331 It is through his selective invention and preclusion of spectatorial visions that the traumatic decapitation show has attained its supreme allegorical meaning to become the imagined ‘primal scene’ of atrocities and a form of ‘primitive passions’ of modern Chinese literary creation.332 Lu Xun’s highly elite construction of Chinese spectatorship and the complex testimonies of violence, of course, leave much narrative fissure. How could one recover the voices of the anonymous audience? Would they be silent and unconcerned witnesses? How would they sound? What would be their states of mind? It is against these interpretive voids that Li Jieren offers his compelling and ironic narratives anchored in concrete times and locations. The omniscient narrator gives local natives back their voices, and renders transparent people’s minds by speaking through their mouths. Most strikingly, the narrator’s dispassionate tone reveals to us the ugly faces of the community, as they anxiously wait to watch a naked woman be skinned alive and tormented before the execution:

More than half of the people only wanted to see a decent-looking young girl be paraded stark naked in broad daylight. Less than half of the people

331 In his rereading of Lu Xun’s news-slide account, Leo Ou-fan Lee has found that the narrator may have intentionally skipped elaborations of the facial expressions and visions of the other spectators involved in the incident—the Japanese executioner, the Japanese soldiers as spectators, and the anonymous beheaded Chinese victim. Also, Lu Xun uses only vague words to describe the few dumb Chinese onlookers. See Lee, “Invitation to a Beheading.” For an analysis of Lu Xun’s figuration of the crowd in his short stories, see Lee, Voices from the Iron House, pp. 69–88. 332 See Chow, Primitive Passions. Chow underscores Lu Xun’s shock and the Western technological power of visuality in discussing the news-slide incident. Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 169

likewise wanted to see a decent-looking young girl wailing pitifully and yet gracefully, and they would feel comfortable at seeing the girl dripping in blood from being flayed alive by ninety-nine cuts; only then would they feel at ease. (1: 6, 30)

一多半的人只想看一個體面的少女，精赤條條，一絲不掛的，在光天化日之下遊行.一小半的人卻想看一個體面少女，婉轉哀號的，着那九十九刀割得血淋淋的，似乎心裡才覺安逸.

The narration impersonates a collective voice of the crowds, suggesting their looming gazes and wicked expectations of seeing the most heinous act of capital punishment in pre-modern China, lingchi, or ‘lingering death.’ This extremely brutal form of execution, in which convicts were slowly sliced to death, is believed to have been a state practice for more than a thousand years and was not abolished until the last years of the Qing dynasty.333 It would seem that this inhuman punishment should have been condemned as a remnant of an uncivilized society and as a ruthless display of state discipline when it was practiced in Chengdu in 1902. The narrator instead conjures up bloodthirsty masses, who seem to be anticipating all the gore and savoring the mutilation of the female body with erotic pleasure rather than fear or anger. The narrator is mocking a delirious native crowd and a collective state of violent agitation bordering on what George Bataille conceived of as religious ecstasy. Contemplating a gruesome photo of lingchi as a typical representation of ‘Chinese torture,’ Bataille expressed the idea that the graphic image of muti- lating the sacrificial victim can engender at once ecstatic and intolerable pain and joy in the viewer.334 For him the voluptuous effect of the violent image can be immensely alluring, especially when seen in solitude. In Before the Tempest, the anguishing sight of torture is a public spectacle and a form of collective pleasure. As the narrator tells us, the merciless crowds would not even be satisfied with seeing the victim’s head being severed at one fell swoop. They fancy sentencing the woman to a ‘lingering death’ by tying her to a post and slicing the human body (her forehead, breasts, and legs) bit by bit (1: 6, 29). Lu Xun would have been outraged by the sadistic fervor evoked by Li Jieren. Lu Xun later delineates similarly outrageous behavior in “A Spectacle of Chopping Communists” (“Changong daguan”). Some Hunan crowds rush to view the beheading of several young female communists with a feeling of

333 For a brief discussion of lingchi, see Berry, A History of Pain, pp. 32–35. 334 Bataille, The Tears of Eros, pp. 204–6. 170 CHAPTER 4 blissful thrill: “Their facial expressions showed that they were longing for a scene of decapitation or that they had already been satisfied by the ones they had seen.”335 If Lu Xun loathes the people’s shameful tendency to treat horrible incidents as carnivalesque occasions, Li’s critique of the popular mind is close to one of overt and blunt exposé. The memory of a once legendary religious figure is turned into a voyeuristic tableau for callous crowds, a depiction which should rouse the reader to ponder the intricate problem of visual- izing and conceiving history. Needless to say, Lu Xun’s call for national identity and awakening would hardly have occurred to these Chengdu inhabitants; Li’s satirical narration implies not even a vague regional awareness or resistance. The novelist wants to suggest a link between history and eroticism in the painful course of societal transitions from primitiveness to civilization. Li portrays a sinking old world of decadence and moral depravity at its breaking point, awaiting only the imminent storms of social change that are going to sweep over the backwater provincial capital. Nevertheless, the panoramic narrative in Before the Tempest does not end with this haunting perception of the public psyche as fundamentally evil. In what ways does historical reality unfold in the minds of elites, intellectuals, and commoners? Perceived as an erotic visual display of violence, this local execution engenders uneasy feelings and multiple interpretations for witnesses of several different social levels. The appalling rituals of death represent a tipping point of the disquiet and intellectual ferment that have generated heated debate among reformist students and potential revolutionaries in their budding reform organization called the Cooperative Society of Civilization (Wenming hezuoshe). Speaking in a voice akin to Lu Xun’s awakened spectator and narrator of the beheading news-slide, the progressive students of the Society are incensed by the barbarity of the execution. The liberal intellectuals not only call for the abolition of this primitive form of capital punishment, but some of them also push for more radical implementations of social and political systems in opposition to Qing and Manchu governance. In short, the beheading incident foreshadows impending social upheavals and radicalism, serving as a prelude to new tides of social thought and unceasing movement in the changeability of historical processes. In order to reveal the disparate groups and communities on the eve of the revolution, the narrator needs to continually change viewpoints and positions of enunciation to construct a vivid mosaic of vocalized opinions on the event.

335 Lu Xun, “Changong daguan,” p. 124; quoted from David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History, p. 22. Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 171

For Li Jieren, a champion of realism and social panorama, the bloody event still has to be ‘seen’ through the eyes of a single beholder derived from the novel’s network of multiperspectival narration. It is through the eyes of the individualized character that the narrative manifests crowd psychology as threatening disturbance. It is as though the reader has to think and feel through the individual eyewitness consciousness in order to perceive chaotic reality with as much expressive immediacy as ironic distance. A young son of a gentry family in Chengdu, Hao Yousan is one of Li’s favorite social types: a wavering upper class young man who is caught between tradition and modernity and hesitantly embraces societal change. When the woman is paraded through the streets under guard, Hao is thrust into the midst of the throng to watch the execution. He jostles with the onlookers for an advantageous position. Hao is shocked to find the scene turned into a frenzied spectacle for a perverted audience, as the woman is forced to expose her naked body to the crowds. At the climax of the execution, Hao Yousan is so baffled by the noises of the joyous crowd that he nervously shuts his eyes and dares not watch the gruesome killing of the victim:

Hao Yousan simply closed his eyes tightly. He hated that he could still hear the audience cheering. That nice-looking head of the girl viewed from afar probably had been chopped off by the executioner’s blade and fallen to the ground. (1: 6, 38)

郝又三簡直把眼睛閉得緊緊的.只恨耳朵還明明白白聽見觀眾在歡呼，大概那顆遠看來彷彿不錯的少女的頭，已着帶領爺的刀鋒切落在地了.

The narrator establishes differential levels of spectatorship between the acts of seeing and not-seeing. It is all the more suggestive to ponder the matrix of testimonies through sight and sound: what the gentry protagonist desires to see (the woman’s body), what he dares not see (the beheading), and what he neglects and fails to see (the significance of the historical event for his class) constitute a multilevel dramatization of the visibility and invisibility of history. On the initial level of seeing, the narrator puts the eyewitness character at the same level as that of the voyeuristic crowd. The narrator implies that Hao has nudged his way to the front of the crowd and takes a peep at the unclothed victim. Both Hao and the crowds could have become unwitting persecutors as they watch the disrobed woman and long for the mutilation of the female body. Just when his curiosity and excitement reaches its highest pitch like that 172 CHAPTER 4 of his fellow townsmen, Hao realizes that he cannot bear to witness the violent act of decapitation. At the critical second, he turns away. This brings the reader to the second level of visuality, in which the protagonist refuses the sight of bloodshed while he seems to relish the image of the naked female figure. The act of closing one’s eyes is here a surplus realistic code, with which the fictional narrator strives to bring the reader back to the historical site to imagine what could have happened on the spot. We are driven to re-experience what the character sees and hears, as well as what he cannot see but would want to see. In discussing the power of historical fiction to achieve the ‘reality effect’ by evoking superfluous detail, James Wood cites Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace as the supreme exemplar. Wood quotes an execution scene in Book 4, Chapter 11 of the novel to illustrate how the historical novelist could use irrelevant detail to illuminate what historians might have failed to see in real life:

In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight.336

Wood considers Tolstoy’s description of the prisoner’s minor gesture—“the fiddling with the blindfold”—as what might be called “irrelevant or superfluous details” in the terms of Roland Barthes. “They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the ‘effects’ of realism, of ‘realistic’ style.”337 Li Jieren likewise reminds us of the importance of unnoticed human gesture and minor detail to suggest the inexplicability of the past.338 Hao’s insignificant gesture not only draws the reader’s attention to the character’s consciousness so as to reimagine the historical scene but also stimulates the reader to reflect upon the complex testimony of the protagonist. On the third level of spectatorship, then, an emotionally detached narrator presents the protagonist’s difficulty with seeing as another poignant instance charged with ironic overtones. Hao’s avoidance of watching the beheading,

336 Wood, How Fiction Works, pp. 85–86. 337 Ibid., p. 86. 338 An English translation of the passage in War and Peace reads: “When they began to blindfold him he himself adjusted the knot, which hurt the back of his head; then, when they placed him with his back against the bloodstained stake, he leaned back, and finding the position awkward, straightened himself, placed his feet evenly, and leaned back more comfortably. Pierre did not take his eyes from him and did not miss the least movement he made.” Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 1154. Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 173 which is symptomatic of irrational mass persecution, immediately alienates him from the cheering crowd, though he is still far from being a lone and sober spectator of Lu Xun’s intellectual type. Hao fails to stand aloof to observe the crowd, let alone judging or criticizing their behaviors, or poring over the chaotic situation. In War and Peace, Tolstoy presents Pierre as a solemn thinker at the execution platform. He looks around at his fellow prisoners, scrutiniz- ing their faces and eyes as well as meditating on what he is seeing with introspective intent. Pierre is an active inquiring agent of the meanings of life and humanity. In Before the Tempest, on the contrary, Li invents a young member of the gentry who loses his power to observe and reflect on the public orgy even as he can vaguely hear the noises of the surrounding crowds. With respect to the art of historical fiction, readers may demand a more imaginative depiction of the individual faces in the crowd, or even the facial expressions of the victim and the executioner, as one would find in Tolstoy’s account. But Li Jieren could well be suggesting the direct experience of the character—things as seen and felt, one after another—without delving into psychological analysis. The author may imply that it is a more realistic style of rendering the mind of the everyman, for whom the world is plainly a disor- derly mess. Li’s characters usually lack a critical intellect to carefully evaluate the inchoate and senseless details of daily phenomena. In the representation of Hao, Li could also intend to present the gentry class as unthinking agents still in a secure slumber; at this historical juncture, most of them are still ‘blind’ to the severity of the historical situation and mob violence. In other words, Hao’s fragmentary impressions and ignorance of the event are ‘realistically’ true to the author’s judgment of the ruling class. In The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton recounts a story from eighteenth-century pre-revolutionary France in which a group of Parisian printing apprentices held a series of mock trials and then hanged the ‘guilty’ cats—the favorite pets of their masters.339 Darnton reminds us that scapegoating and victimization seem to play an important role in the carnival, and suggests that the aggressive act of killing cats is symbolic of a rebellious sentiment of the working class against their bourgeois masters. The cultural historian takes an apprentice’s account of a vicious carnivalesque massacre of cats as a ‘syn- ecdochic’ moment that casts a flickering light on the ‘whole’ enigma of the nascent French revolution.340

339 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, pp. 75–104. 340 Cook, “Synecdoche in Modern History Writing,” p. 218. 174 CHAPTER 4

In Before the Tempest, the historical anecdotes of social uprisings can be taken as mounting pressure points that manifest the ‘prerevolutionary men- talité’ of the Chengdu masses. But the novelistic account of Li Jieren entails an ironic reflection on the discrepancy between observable social phenomenon and the participant protagonist. Hao, the only gentry eyewitness, simply cannot discern the relevance of the beheading ritual and the hilarity the crowd. How could the people take such despicable pleasure in the torture of the female rebel? Does he take the reaction of the crowd as a call for more violence or for revolution, or as a sign of their scapegoating impulse and libidinal disturbance? History appears to him as confusing and incomprehensible happenings without any foreseeable direction. His physical proximity to the scene does not bring clarity but rather increased cloudiness of historical meaning. The festive mood of the crowd perhaps has stunned him as something threatening to the elite ruling class. Not only does this crowd scene reveal the class contradiction between the gentry and the commoners, but it also prefigures the dangerous collective mania of the masses that is soon to erupt and will take over the (historical) stage. Indeed, in The Great Wave, the last part of the trilogy, the author deals at length with the gentry’s misperception and apprehension of historical reality, and the upper class’s increasing estrangement from other social groups in the course of the revolution.

Testimony against History

Through a detailed textual-historical analysis of certain historical episodes in Before the Tempest, I wish to demonstrate that for all his claims to objective treatment of the past and reliance on veracity of words, Li Jieren does exploit the autonomy of a creative novelist to freely mix historical truth with fictional imaginary and even to distort the temporal order. As history looms in the background, the incidents of popular revolts and local uprisings are treated as sidelights whose anecdotal significance bears on the characters in the novel. In creating cynical pictures of local reality and the bizarreness of historical occurrences, the novelist is preoccupied with exploring the matrix of native memorial dynamics, namely, how the locals remember and digest events and understand the significance and impact of historical incidents on their quotidian lives. The novel as the practice of rewriting the past becomes a site of contestation; it functions as much to embody historical memory as to articulate historical meaning and truth. For a historical novelist who is split between his deeply biased interest in the locality and an intellectual yearning for impartial historical knowledge, the fundamental problem rests with an epistemological Tempest In A Teacup: Local Memorial Dynamics 175 disjuncture and insurmountable difficulty: how to cohere the experienced past (in the sense of history as something his fellow natives directly or indirectly experience, perceive, or believe) with the historically reconstructed past (in the sense of history as a valid account reconstructed by historians and based on, and after, the facts). With theoretical hindsight, Li Jieren’s commitment to historical rigor in novel writing stretched to the epistemological threshold between historical actuality and fictive reality. Postmodernist historical thinkers and literary theorists alike have radically dismantled the fraught relationship between history and fiction. For Hayden White, the foremost representative of this critical school, both historical writing and narrative fiction are forms of ‘verbal fictions’ and ‘literary artifacts’ sharing comparable rhetorical strategies and literary structures, with similar objectives of emplotting the past under certain discursive and ideological constraints.341 For White, historical events and their factual descriptions in historical accounts are ‘stories’ and essentially linguistic entities that belong to the level of discourse. Therefore, writing a ‘history’ may not be too different in nature from writing a ‘historical novel.’ But White’s extreme relativism, which strives to debunk any faithful conviction of historical actuality and truth value and show them to be illusory, has irked his fellow critics. His postmodernist position squarely “denies the claims of both historians and novelists to veracity on the simple ground that there is no such thing as truth to begin with. Everything, a work of history as much as a novel, is only a text with its subtexts. . . . Hence all texts, including historical texts, however solid they may appear, are susceptible to the most variant readings.”342 White’s blurring of the boundary between history and fiction may well offer insight into Li Jieren’s case with an ironic twist. In the Chinese writer’s belief, writing fiction is not only one of the many ways to write history, but could be the only viable means to do so. For Li, ‘history’ is always an integral part of the writer’s fictional endeavor. Li’s rewriting of his historical novels seems to vin- dicate White’s theoretical injunction that there is no single correct view of any event or historical process, but rather changing views in various times, each requiring its own style of representation. As White reiterates, “a specifically historical inquiry is born less of the necessity to establish that certain events occurred than of the desire to determine what certain events might mean for a given group, society, or culture’s conception of its present tasks and future

341 Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”; “The Fictions of Factual Representation”; and “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation.” 342 Gay, Savage Reprisals, p. 153. 176 CHAPTER 4 prospects.”343 In that respect, Li’s rewriting ventures to present a local Chinese paradox and concrete corrective to White’s universal theory of relativism. The historical novelist is more constrained than a fiction writer but the discursive power of the historical novel can be more influential in the local community concerned. Hence the novelist is burdened with the historian’s ideological baggage and the community’s horizon of expectations in the process of creating his historical novels, themselves artifacts of social acts inherently shaped by dominant social myths and political discourse. I shall move on to discuss the case of writing and rewriting The Great Wave, in which both local and national constraints of politics and ideological paradigms could have impinged on Li’s writing of the past, even as the historical novelist must yet have struggled to exercise his imaginative freedom and moral integrity within the narrative fissure.

343 Hayden White, “Historical Pluralism and Pantextualism,” p. 230. Italics original. CHAPTER 5 Love in the Time of Revolution

In his insistence on the art of the novel, Li Jieren turned the problem of history into one of style and concentrated on new possibilities of writing social panorama. His narratives of particularity reflect his attempt to defeat a more rigid conception of time and history. Li faces the conundrum of the historical novelist: how to strike a fair balance between the artistic figuration of individual characters and concrete dramatization of the collectivity and social process. In standard fiction, protagonists are characteristically at center stage, while social milieu, minor characters, and plotted action are there to form a historical backdrop to illuminate the individuals. But this formal arrangement of the conventional novel is at odds with the prior purpose of historical fiction, which attempts to employ characters to manifest prominent aspects of a milieu. Harry Shaw contends that in historical fiction, character is likely to illuminate historical events and destinies, but the opposite is less likely. There is a negative tradeoff when historical novelists delve excessively into the consciousness of individuals as inward complex agents; they risk blurring the representation of the distinctively historical force. How to create a fictional texture that is primarily descriptive and analytic of historical change, and then particularize it through imaginative excursions into groups and individuals? The question, Shaw argues, poses an insurmountable challenge for novelists. He is not convinced that historical fiction can enact all levels of individual experience with a significant depth of human interiority, insofar as the narrative sequences still maintain the intention to elucidate exterior historical process with equal success.344 Still, Li Jieren had to respond to the novel’s formal challenge by striking a balance between the private plot of individual action and desire in quotidian life and the public plot of political change represented in panoramic fiction. I shall turn to the old version of The Great Wave to discuss the figuration of the hero and the heroine. The private love affair of the illicit couple, unconventional within the traditional moral code, demonstrates the writer’s oblique method of representing events, characters, and situations emerging against the trajectory of history. The difficulty of narrative representation hinges upon the characters’ traumatic encounter with events and the extent of their involvement in (or distancing from) historical developments. Li wrestles with the problem of

344 Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction, pp. 48–49.

The Erotic vs. the Political

For all his concern with objective narration in The Great Wave, Li Jieren strove to carve out a space for the psychological drama of the major characters. To begin with, the opposing dimensions of romantic plot and political history in the novel are woven together to flesh out the incestuous relationships between the aunt and nephew—Mrs. Huang and Chu Zicai. Long and detailed accounts of their forbidden love reveal their subjective minds. The novelist depicts the times by adhering to the perplexed psyche of the individuals. While historical movements are unfolded to us through external description, the narrative delivers detailed descriptions of the troubled psyches of the romantic couple. The lovers reflect on morality and private desire, an ability which is denied to all the other characters in the novel. Presented in a realistic- naturalistic narrative format, the narrator at times delves into the lovers’ interiority and musings against a backdrop of chaos in the exterior world. Hence the formal fissures of ‘psychological narration’ give us crucial clues to the novel’s quotidian approach that probes the everyday lives and psychological turmoil of the fictive protagonists. In the original version of The Great Wave, Chu Zicai is a timid, young student who lacks a focus in life. He comes from his provincial town to Chengdu to attend a new-style school run by local reformists. Huang Lansheng, his uncle, lets him stay in his house, and the nephew develops a close relationship with the Huang family. In the summer of 1911 the revolutionary incidents begin to intrude into the young male’s personal life. Chu is involved in a grotesque series of events arising from the railroad protection movement, sometimes as a student participant but most of the time as a passive witness. Supporting the railroad protection campaign, the young man is charged with the task of setting up a student alliance in his home county of Xinjin, where the secret societies and the forces of the Gowned Brothers (paoge) have taken firm root. At the zenith of the political movement, however, the young hero begins to have an affair with his aunt, for whom he has a deep affection. Readers who might be put off by the almost day-to-day historical details about the revolutionary movements may instead read the novel as the story of a thwarted romance, of the sexual initiation of a young man by a married woman from a gentry family during the revolutionary moment. Li Jieren demonstrates an exceptional ability to handle the sentimental and sexual relationships Love In The Time Of Revolution 179 between Mrs. Huang and her many lovers, who include her brothers-in-law and nephew. The author also strives to examine the emotional blockage that paralyzes the woman and her gentry-official husband. Mrs. Huang seduces her nephew after having a row with her husband. The woman is deeply dissatisfied with his conservative mindset and cynical attitude in shying away from supporting the opposition. She indulges in a life of pleasure-seeking and love affairs as a reprisal for her husband’s incapacity for political action. In sexual terms, Mrs. Huang is much more experienced, sophisticated, and aggressive than the men around her. After their first sexual encounter, she ‘instructs’ Chu Zicai to abide by their secret bonds:

Now you are my man. . . . But you have to listen to my words. . . . First, listen to me, and do as you are told. . . . Second, hush up. Don’t let slip. You have to behave yourself and not give yourself away! [ . . . ] If you don’t listen to me, I can make you die in misery! [ . . . ] Now, out you go!

唉! 你是我的人了 . . . 你是要依我兩句話 . . . 第一，要聽我說，叫你哪個就得哪個 . . . 第二，嘴要緊，不准漏半點風聲，行為要穩，不准露半點行跡! . . . 若不聽從我的話，我有本事叫你不得好死! . . . 好了，你出去了罷!345

The woman is absolutely in command of the secret liaison. Most significantly, the irrepressible desires of the hero and heroine are perceptibly at variance with the impersonal and rapidly evolving historical world outside. Both protagonists appear to have a refined sensibility for moral introspection as they live in a world where old and new moralities coexist and contradict each other. But the ‘outcomes’ of their reflections are starkly contrasting. Mrs. Huang’s subjective thought produces the image of an audacious woman who has made up her mind to transgress the traditional moral codes of high society. The heroine has absolutely no scruples, and even within her domestic situation will do anything to achieve what she wants. As the narrator comments:

She has an appreciation of pleasure-seeking as life’s purpose. It was no accident that she was born into this world. She would act completely without scruple. She can’t bear to let herself down and can’t fail to live up to the expectations of the Will of Heaven. But back then, society had not

345 Li, Dabo (1938), 1: 106. Subsequent references are to this version of the novel unless noted otherwise. All references to the novel (volume no.: page no.) are cited parenthetically in the text. 180 CHAPTER 5

yet allowed freedom to women. Hers is also an official family, in which it is difficult for her to go too far. Still, she lacks the kind of vision and boldness to shatter the restraints of the mundane world. And this is also because she is too isolated! Of course she can only obtain fulfillment in a confined (domestic) space.

她更認定了享樂便是人生的究竟.天之生她如此，絕非偶然，她不能多所顧忌，辜負了自己，辜負了天意.只是當時的社會還未曾允許女子自由哩，她家也算是仕宦人家，要想跑得太快，而世俗的網撕個粉碎，她尚無此認識，無此氣魄.這也由於她太孤立了! 她自然只能在狹小的範圍內要求滿足.(2: 5–6)

Here the omniscient narrator delivers a commentary-narrative from a detached position. The impersonal voice in the third person lends authority and objectivity to the depiction of the character’s performance and thought. The novelist creates a female protagonist who considers herself equal to men, and who is reluctant to subscribe to conventional morality in practice. The men close to her easily fall under her spell, but to her mind they have never been sensitive to her unique difference from other women. Although the heroine may at times wrestle with the conflicts between female decorum and promiscuity, her unruly nature will triumph over the conventional rules of the gentry community and upper-class society. Mrs. Huang’s moral autonomy leads to her imagined and practical (sexual) ‘liberation’ from the social demands pressed upon her. In the guise of a disinterested storyteller, the novelist uses the technique of ‘telling’ extensively to inform the reader of the individual’s thoughts. The narrator engages in elaborate representations of the character’s interiority. Thanks to the technique of impartiality, the narrator can mediate his protagonists’ thoughts without distancing them from the reader and running the risk of representing them as objects of authorial desire and projection. For Chu Zicai, sexual experience liberates his youthful energy in all its physical- ity and rawness. Driven by romantic sentiments, he is ready to give his love solely to his aunt. But he is invariably condemned by an internal voice of moral conscience:

You shouldn’t have done this! Don’t you fear the harm to your integrity and retribution for your conduct? Are you not bothered by people’s ridicule, when they will say your behavior lacks a sense of honor and shame? Is it fair to your uncle (to have an affair with his wife)? Are you repay- ing your uncle’s kindness with enmity? Don’t talk about woman’s folly. You are a young man from an educated family. Your family is upright. You Love In The Time Of Revolution 181

have spoiled all your good deeds and virtue by doing this. Can you really feel at ease?

你真不應該這樣做! 你不怕損陰德，受報應嘛? 你不怕遭世人的恥笑，說你太無廉恥了嗎? 你對得住你的表叔嗎? 你豈不是一個恩將仇報的小人嗎? 女人之糊塗，不說了，你是耕讀成家的子弟，你家是有清白門風的，你這樣把你世德敗壞,你舒服嗎? (1: 114)

The young hero’s tormented consciousness reveals that he is helplessly immersed in the world of traditional caution as he struggles with the dilemmas of love, duty, and marriage. He is afflicted by a fine sense of morality and yet at the same time beset by a paralysis of action—he loathes the impossibility of marrying his aunt, for whom he has fallen passionately. When he sees his classmates chasing girls of their own age, Chu Zicai feels alienated from his peers; he has already passed through the ‘ritual’ of sexual initiation, which grants him maturity. Later, he is startled to realize that his aunt is a lustful woman who is having affairs with other relatives. Traditional ideas about female chastity and loyalty come to his mind and burden his moral introspection. Is he sharing this love with all his uncles? Is there hope for marriage? Is he committing the sin of adultery? The characterization of the protagonists exhibits an intertextual adherence to famous Chinese vernacular novels. The narrator presents vivid images of an emotionally immature young male who is imprisoned by his own fantasized images of ideal love and womanhood derived from classical scholar-beauty fiction and drama. In his mind (and perhaps to most readers of traditional Chinese fiction), there are only two stereotypical relationships between men and women. The first type is between a talented scholar and a fragile female beauty, such as the one described in The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) and The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting). The other type is shown in the popular fiction of depravity like The Golden Lotus, in which one sees a vain and lusty adulteress Pan Jinlian cavorting with a sexually and economically powerful man like Ximen Qing. Chu Zicai considers that neither of the two situations fits his real-world relationship with his aunt. He is no match for a man as talented as Jia Baoyu, nor is he endowed with the bold and uninhibited charisma of Ximen Qing. Although Mrs. Huang’s promiscuity reminds him of Pan Jinlian, he finds his aunt to be more assertive because the fictional adulteress does not dare pro- claim her authority over her men, as Mrs. Huang does. However, the young man’s conservatism compels him to take refuge in a conventional male fantasy, which strives to conflate the heroine’s image not in her specifically human 182 CHAPTER 5 personification—a lustful woman denying traditional morality—but by cloak- ing her with the stereotypical representations of womanhood and beauty as portrayed in classical Chinese fiction. As Chu muses, “If she (his aunt) really loves me, she should be like Lin Daiyu, who loved only one man. Even Pan Jinlian wouldn’t say to Ximen Qing that she also loved Chen Jingji.” He comes to the painful conclusion that he lacks both the talents of a scholar and the “lofty quality of a real man” (zhangfu qigai) to be an eligible protagonist like those shown in classical Chinese fiction. (2: 72–74) The exposition of the protagonist’s inner self reveals a male psyche driven by both sexual and political impulses. The young man’s moral compass is torn between the polarized strains of the Confucian values of loyalty and modesty on the one hand, and the radical thinking of social rebels on the other. A successor to the older generation of gentry-officials as well as a young member of the potentially new social forces, Chu Zicai stands out as an ambiguous figure that embodies the inevitability of change in the realms of social morality and contemporary political life. His persistent introspective voice allows the novel’s subtle metafictional commentaries to convey a sense of irony on the problem of figuration in traditional fictional genres. Readers may recall how Liang Qichao charged the classical chivalric fiction and scholar-beauty fiction, as represented by The Water Margin and The Dream of the Red Chamber, with ‘inciting robbery and lust’ (huidao huiyin). The self-reflexive tone here reminds the reader that it is best to read The Great Wave as a transitional genre that uses rather traditional types of ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’ to circumscribe the characters’ psychic realm and imagination. The ironic narrative satirizes the classical plots of scholar-beauty romance and depravity fiction as proper narratives of history; in The Great Wave the private and romantic plot is under increasing pressure from political developments in the public realm. In this sense, The Great Wave is also a metacommentary invested with a ‘generic’ consciousness. The above passage parodies the ‘heroic’ model of Chu since even at the high point of the revolutionary movement his mind is still imprisoned in the fictional imagination of a ‘fragile scholar’ type character.346 Li Jieren’s elaborate depiction of the individual’s difficulty in intermingling public and political life with the private and romantic self recalls the idiosyncratic writing of Lu Ling (1923–94), whose work probed the rhetorical/ideological problem of the self and other, the individual and community, and similarly

346 For a study of the caizi figure in classical Chinese literature, see Song, The Fragile Scholar. Song argues that the concept of ‘masculinity’ in pre-modern Chinese literary culture was conceived in the network of hierarchical social and political power in a homosocial context rather than in opposition to ‘woman.’ Love In The Time Of Revolution 183 created interpretative troubles in a highly politicized literary scene. Lu Ling’s novel Children of the Rich (Caizhu de ernümen, 1948) captured the experience of passionate hearts and minds wrestling with the impersonal forces of historical destiny. The narrative unravels the psychological journey of a solitary individual and focuses on his libidinal desires and the psychic impact of war and atrocities. Dissatisfied with the limits of objectivity and representation in realistic writing, Lu Ling invents an ‘inner form’ of psychological narration to give a fuller expression to human emotion and mind as reflections of increasingly complex historical experiences.347 In tracing the causes and consequences of social change through the inner conflicts of individuals, Lu Ling privileges the romantic and erotic self over the concerns of collectivity. Kang Liu suggests that in Lu Ling’s work

[t]he libidinal desires of the individuals [do] not go beyond the immediate realm of sensuous experience. In other words, he [Lu Ling] does not elevate the libidinal desire to a higher, allegorical level of social and political significance. Neither does he recoil from an obsessive fixation on erotic details and conflicts of desire for fear of obliterating the real mission of realist socialist criticism, as in the case of Mao Dun.348

The uneasy balance between public-political and private-romantic was also a common concern among politically engaged writers, Mao Dun in particular. Mao Dun’s trilogy Eclipse and his novel Rainbow seek to chart the pilgrimage of modern Chinese women toward selfhood and political awakening. The author does not shy away from describing the erotic experiences of his heroines, as they are inextricably tied up with their revolutionary passions.349 In crucial ways, Li Jieren’s writing has distanced itself from the ideology of May Fourth iconoclasm or the revolutionary frenzy of the contemporary literary scene. His strenuous efforts to stick to the past and to portray the complexity of life meant that he had to faithfully depict the sterile old society that existed before the new could be born.

347 Kang Liu, “Mixed Style in Lu Ling’s Novel Children of the Rich”; for a discussion on Lu Ling, also see Denton, “Lu Ling’s Children of the Rich”; Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature, chaps. 6–7. 348 Liu, “Mixed Style in Lu Ling’s Novel Children of the Rich,” p. 65. 349 For an analysis of how Mao Dun remodeled sentimental fiction into a revolutionary genre by fashioning a new heroine figure, the shidai nüxing (“epoch-making women”), see Chen Jianhua, ‘Geming’ de xiandai xing, pp. 286–366; Geming yu xingshi, pp. 91–127, 168–219. 184 CHAPTER 5

The Wanderer in the Besieged City

In The Great Wave, both sexual and political temptations come together to shape Chu Zicai’s inchoate sensibility of love and politics. The young hero—a mix of both the conservative gentry and the progressive mind—is forced to engage in a dual process of seeking love and self-realization in private life, as well as coming to terms with the demise of the gentry class on the political terrain. Chu enters into his maturation process by way of an ‘incestuous’ relationship with his young aunt and his ‘illicit’ liaison with the revolutionary cause. In the end his vacillations make him as incapable of any serious political commitment as he is incompetent to attack the established moral precepts and family order. Li Jieren chooses not to represent a heroic transformation of the character but rather portrays an ambiguous, unstable young male who constantly vacil- lates between love and revolution. The narrative probes the protagonist’s inner life in great depth, but then counterbalances his delicate psyche with explosive political events that exist largely as the pretext for the romance. The novel strives to dramatize the hero’s sentimental desires in love and politics as set in opposition to the collective progress of the revolution. There is a fundamental split between individual private life and public events. Book 2 of The Great Wave gives detailed descriptions of Chengdu’s social atmosphere during the two weeks of a great strike starting in late August. (2: 39–112) During the strike, the deserted city streets are turned into a backstage where Chu Zicai drifts around. Ironically, the moment of political high tension provides a peaceful time for Chu to reflect on his private romance, which so sorely bothers him that he finally decides to withdraw from his political involvement. Arresting descriptive prose interweaves individual psychology with the vicissitudes of political activity, placing the ‘subjective’ vision of the protagonist against an ‘objective’ picture of Chengdu’s quotidian life. The steps of the character take the reader to the nooks and crannies of the city. (2: 63–84) A depressed Chu Zicai sits in a teahouse in the city park, musing for hours on his affair with Mrs. Huang. He strolls back and forth between the park and the railway company, where the sound and fury scare him off. He runs into his classmates and joins them to discuss the prospects of the student movement. But all these political goings-on now sound mundane and no longer interest him. Soon enough, our young protagonist makes up his mind and goes back to seek a reconciliation with Mrs. Huang. For the moment, Chu seems to realize that ‘pure love’ is an illusion. He decides to understand and accept Mrs. Huang’s multifaceted love relationships, and is ready to share her with other male lovers in order to maintain the intricate web of love affairs. Love In The Time Of Revolution 185

The conflict and contrast between public life and individual erotic desires and fantasies are effectively dramatized by the juxtaposition of the character’s ‘internal’ thoughts and the ‘external’ sociopolitical atmosphere.

While Chu Zicai changes his mind, his heart burning like a fierce fire, the shareholder meeting in the Railway Company is quickly ablaze with action. They (shareholders) have just passed their four ardent principles of resistance against the government. . . . They have actually forged the consciousness of the masses like a steel whip. It is mercilessly lashing their backs, spurring them on to rush forward and onward! They have previously tried many times to hold this steel whip in their hands so that they can use it to beat others, or to prevent it from waving around by itself. But things do not happen as expected. It continues to lash their backs and forces them to rush ever forward and onward!

當楚子材轉了念頭，心裏像烈火在燃燒之際，鐵路公司的股東會，也像烈火燃燒着似的，正在通過他們熾熱的抵禦政府的四條議案. . . . 群眾的意識，被他們鍛煉得恰像了一條鋼鞭，更毫不通融的鞭撻着他們的脊樑，叫前進, 前進! 他們先前還努了許多次的力，想把這鋼鞭把握在手上，或仍前的用來打人，或把它收拾起來，不要它不聽命的亂揮. 然而不成功，它一下一下的偏打在自己的脊樑上，勒逼着前進，前進! (2: 96)

The narrator juxtaposes the two ‘moments’ of the railroad dispute and the individual’s aimless roving. The subtle interplay of distance and proximity, of irony and empathy, serves to highlight the disunity of character and event. The ‘lashing’ of the ‘steel whip’ dramatizes the increasing consciousness of the people. Meanwhile, Chu Zicai’s burning passion leads him to cloister himself from political life. Nothing can be more ironic than the protagonist’s decision to retreat at the moment when the railroad movement is embarking on a radical course. The young man’s abandonment of his political involvement for the sake of domestic happiness is symbolic of the weaknesses of the gentry- officials; a compliant and fragile young man trapped in domestic pleasures for- sakes any hope for political action. How could the male protagonist possibly become a defiant hero of his class and the people when the narrator’s ironic tone suggests nothing but the hero’s incapacity for action? In terms of literary topography, The Great Wave constitutes an immense geopoetic memory of Chengdu that is at odds with the disruptive, ongoing process of the revolution. Let us rethink the overarching scheme of the trilogy from the perspective of cultural geography. Li Jieren maps out the spatial 186 CHAPTER 5 division between the provincial capital and the peripheral rural town to depict an ambivalent continuum between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ on a local scale. Li’s story of adultery in the small town in Ripples on Dead Water becomes an allegory of provincial boredom and the heroine’s desire for social mobility— from the small town to the provincial capital where the main characters will potentially take part in the revolution. Chengdu, on the other hand, is inhabited by well-to-do gentry and young members of the elite who are accustomed to a life of pleasure and non-productive leisure activities. Li’s narrative builds up tensions between the swiftness of revolutionary change and the slowness of everyday life. Similar to Balzac in reproducing the social space of Paris, the narrator in The Great Wave goes to great lengths to describe the characters’ habitual actions and social gatherings and to reconfigure the social spaces of the city with real place names and geographical locations. Readers may skip over these to get to the dramatic happenings of the political movement. But shying away from the descriptive nitty-gritty means that readers will miss the novel’s intricate juxtaposition of multiple spaces and temporalities hidden in the realistic narrative. Chu Zicai takes us in the company of his young educated friends or elite relatives to visit Chengdu’s favorite teahouses, theaters, gardens, city parks, and historical sites, including such famous places as the Smaller City (Shaocheng, the Manchu enclave), the Caotang Temple (Caotang si, the memorial of the Tang poet Du Fu), and the Wuhou Temple (Wuhou ci, the shrine of Zhuge Liang). The purpose is not to provide a guide to the city for outsiders nor to reconstruct a static place in the longue durée. Rather the novel serves to reorganize mental images of the city for native memory and give shape to the structure of social spaces in the gradual transformation of social change. At the peak of social turmoil, when the city is drowned in the noises of political propaganda and rumors and engulfed in the spectacles of mass performance and mobilization, the novel’s descriptive geography provides a counterweight. The fictional narrative makes the city not only legible and comprehensible to readers but also memorable to native Chengdu residents and posterity. The novelistic description functions mnemonically by inscribing topographical features and embedding the characters’ habitual interactions in specific places. Juxtaposing the inhabited city in fictional representation with the grotesque series of events at the pivotal moment lays bare the complex social spaces and uneven topography. As a provincial young man coming to Chengdu to seek a new-style education, Chu Zicai is baffled by the kaleidoscopic images of Chengdu as an urban place for an idle lifestyle, a rising stage for political struggle, and most intimately, an erotic and comfort zone for his private affair. The sense of irony Love In The Time Of Revolution 187 directs us to look at the decisive turns in which the protagonist reacts to the events. He begins his affair with Mrs. Huang in the early summer of 1911, precisely when the city’s elites and gentry leaders, the social class to which Chu belongs, decide to oppose imperial rule on the railroad disputes. To put it another way, he is seduced by the woman and her sexual allure at the same time he is enticed by politics. As his infatuation with the woman intensifies, he distances himself from the political movement when the Chengdu people resolve to step up their resistance with citywide strikes. At this stage, the novel informs us that the political situation has simply got out of hand and the mass action is no longer under the command of its original gentry leaders. No sooner has Chu surrendered to the spell of Mrs. Huang than the ‘Chengdu massacre’ erupts in early September. As Chu has turned his back on politics and has no secure ties to the mass movement, he is reduced to being a passive observer of the event. On 7 September he incidentally leaves the center of the city and the riot scene, but he walks to the south gate of the old city and witnesses the violent fighting in the outskirts when the insurrectionary local militias confront the Qing armies. (2: 152–56) In the novel’s narrative structure, it is through the protagonist’s shifting position and ‘wandering viewpoints,’ among those of the rest of the characters, that a total panorama of the city as a spatial matrix of leisure and violence, of idleness and motion, of libidinal desire and revolutionary energy, is conveyed to readers. The revolutionary events provide the backdrop for Chu Zicai’s loafing within the city. His fractured visions and feelings resemble those of Flaubert’s hero Frédéric Moreau in The Sentimental Education, whose uncomfortable encounter with the revolutionary crowds during the 1848 revolution in Paris suggests a world of human folly stripped of heroism and political idealism. Both portrayals reveal the ineffective ties of the bourgeois intellectual to the collectivity and the changing milieus. Being a figure of political failure, Flaubert’s character is a forerunner of what would later be identified as the flâneur in the narratives of the modern city.350 Much as the Parisian flâneurs are urban nomads roaming the streets with no great urgency, in The Great Wave a love-stricken Chu becomes a drifter in Chengdu’s streets. On a hot summer day, as the city is paralyzed by the mass strike, Chu aim- lessly walks the empty streets of the Smaller City, also called the Manchu City (Mancheng), seeking solace from the political crowds. (2: 64–77) As a recur- ring topographical subtext in Li Jieren’s trilogy, the novelistic chronotope of the Manchu city illuminates the humanistic angle from which to understand

350 On Flaubert’s construction of revolutionary Paris in The Sentimental Education, see Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, pp. 80–114. 188 CHAPTER 5 the meaning of the ‘poetic space’ to the protagonist. The narrator describes the Manchu city in Ripples on Dead Water as follows.

The low wall created two entirely different worlds. In the Greater City, there were houses and shops everywhere and numerous pedestrians moving to and for on the cobblestone streets. Not a drop of green could be seen in the whole district. By contrast, as soon as one entered the Manchu City, there were trees in abundance. . . . Everywhere was one vast expanse of green. . . . [It was] most unlike, for example, the Greater City where pedestrians were everywhere and on some of the downtown streets you had to squeeze through shoulder to shoulder. In the Manchu City, you could walk down whole streets without encountering other pedestrians. In any case, those whom you did meet were utterly different from people in the Greater City where, except for some cultured older types, everyone was invariably in a hurry. . . . The Manchu City was indeed a different world.351

The above passage visually captures the spatial and atmospheric differences between the Manchu and Han quarters. The Greater City (Dacheng) is relatively crowded but bustling with city rhythms. The Smaller City occupied by Manchu bannermen is filled with picaresque charm, but dilapidated and isolated. Putting the topographical features of the Manchu City in the historical context of The Great Wave suggests the sharp spatial and racial segregation between the Manchus and the Han. The impending decline of the Manchu power is implied, as the district garrisoned by Manchu banner troops appears quite deserted. More importantly, the feeling of desolation in space is intensely associated with the young protagonist’s particular sentiments of melancholy, loss, and meaninglessness in life. In The Sentimental Education, as Priscilla Ferguson remarks, “Frédéric’s inability to direct his steps—his existential flânerie—signals his inability to conduct either his career or his emotions.”352 In The Great Wave, Chu Zicai wanders the empty streets in the Manchu City and finds himself not only alienated from the physical environment but also increasingly distanced from social milieus and emotional commitments. His previous participation in the mass movement turns out to have been ineffectual. And his romantic yearning for love looks incompatible with the turbulent times.

351 Quoted from Rhoads, Manchus and Han, pp. 39–40. 352 Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, p. 97. Love In The Time Of Revolution 189

The Manchu City becomes an estranged space for the character’s own reflection and self-loathing. Places thus are not just the real ‘backgrounds’ created by fictional narratives in which events unfold themselves. Places signify human sentiments and private memories to constitute the subtext of cultural topography in the novel. Chu Zicai’s activities and sometimes involuntary meanderings through the city render him a moving eyewitness to direct the reader to see things in both the private and public domains. The various domestic and social spaces that he inhabits or frequents mirror the hero’s confused and split mind. Literary geography helps us to look at the spatialized divisions of the city. Chu sojourns in the intimate space of the Huang family in the mansion on Xiyu Street (Xiyu jie), an upper-class neighborhood in the heart of the city. Following his seclusion from politics, he walks away from the mass demonstrations in the streets; the public protests mostly take place on the east side of the city. His physical movement is rather constrained. At times he prefers to walk westward to the Smaller City, hanging out in the teahouses and theaters in the vicinity of the quiet and spacious neighborhoods. Occasionally he enjoys visiting the scenic spots on the outskirts of the city. Sometimes he ventures out to the commercial arcade on the east side in his ephemeral meetings with Mrs. Huang. The movements of the flâneur are confined to the city’s public spaces of com- merce and urban entertainments. His social experience shows a lack of political mobility; he is barred from political territories—that is, the central and northern part of the Greater City areas where government officials, prefectural administrators, and military commanders are seated. Specifically, in The Great Wave, the public theaters become not only a chronotope of social gatherings for the leisurely class but also a venue for romantic rendezvous. Reading a theater scene in the novel and observing the courtship of the lovers, Di Wang comments:

Although this episode is from the novel, it provides a vivid account of how people behaved in the theater on the eve of the Revolution. The scene takes place before Chu and Mrs. Huang begin their affair. They were relatives, so they had the opportunity to go to the theater together, where, despite being seated in different areas, men and women could still see each other and communicate through servants. This passage also indicates that the theater became a place where elite men and women could socialize while watching shows, drinking tea, and eating snacks.353

353 Di Wang, The Teahouse, p. 190. 190 CHAPTER 5

Di Wang certainly takes Li Jieren’s novel as a valuable document of the societal changes and public life in Chengdu during the late Qing. Human behaviors in the theaters and teahouses as depicted in The Great Wave, Wang asserts, demonstrated the local community’s transition from tradition to modernity. Public venues were gradually opened up from being male-only sanctuaries to admit both men and women. Teahouses and theaters became favored places for socializing between the sexes, and some even played a matchmaking role for young lovers. However, the imaginary literary narratives tell us something more subtle about social interactions and sexual hierarchy. In The Great Wave, the meeting scenes between the young man and the woman in the theaters and teahouses reveal the uneasy interaction between high society and the general public, and between men and women, under the traditional moral codes that conventionally govern society. The city’s public space has both favored and frustrated their liaisons. Chengdu may have provided the place for Mrs. Huang’s meetings and affairs, but the family system does not give her any authority or the freedom of love. Compared with her male partner, Mrs. Huang enjoys little mobility. She crosses physical and social boundaries only occasionally in her romantic rendezvous. The heroine seldom idly walks in the city, but she does much more thinking and reflecting and even takes the decision at the final, critical moment in the novel to exercise her limited power against the family system. The original version of The Great Wave presents the victory of the woman and her ‘revolutionary’ story in the private family space.

Transfiguration: Unbecoming Heroine

The Great Wave has been surprisingly neglected in modern Chinese literary history. Even when contemporary critics have a chance to read the 1930s version, they continue to view the historical novel through the ideological lens of Communist historiography and revolutionary rhetoric. They denigrate the heroine as a negative personification of moral corruption in a feudalistic family, disparaging the author’s idiosyncratic method of juxtaposing female promiscuity and history. As one critic comments, “This kind of sexual passion (as expressed by the heroine), which is deprived of social content, gets more and more detached from the subject matter (history) as the novel progresses. For that reason, the image of Mrs. Huang is surely devoid of any significant meaning regardless of the strong individuality of her image.”354 But such an interpretation misses the intricate links between sexuality and politics.

354 Li Shiwen, Li Jieren de shengping he chuangzuo, pp. 225–26. Love In The Time Of Revolution 191

Conversely, Yang Lianfen praises Li Jieren’s unconventional heroines and traces his amoral female characters such as Mrs. Huang and Sister Cai to the prototype of the courtesan figure in A Flower in the Sea of Sins written by the late Qing novelist Zeng Pu.355 Zeng painted a promiscuous woman, Fu Caiyun (modeled on the legendary courtesan Sai Jinhua), who embodies the roles of courtesan, concubine, and official lady, using her sexual allure to liaise with men at the upper echelons of Qing official circles. Mrs. Huang and Fu Caiyun betray similar character traits of moral decadence and female resil- ience, which could be threatening to the order of male-dominated society in the last days of the crumbling Qing empire. In both novels female promiscuity also provides a fitting metaphor for “a world in which corruption and decadence prevail as normalcy,” and where at critical moments feminine sex and power can intervene in the sociopolitical events of the country and even reverse men’s fates and their social canons.356 Besides the impact of Zeng Pu and other late Qing writers, Guy de Maupassant’s Notre Cœur (1890), which Li Jieren translated three times under the Chinese title Renxin, may have inspired Li’s romantic characters and their unrequited love in The Great Wave. Notre Cœur is a simple story of lovers bounded by passion as much as by vanity and frailty. André Mariolle, a gifted young talent who comes to Paris with no profession, falls in love with a daz- zling young widow, Madame de Burne, whose salon is a gathering place for artists, writers, composers, and men of distinction. Madame de Burne is a new type of woman who flirts with the men around her but is incapable of devoting true love to Mariolle. The general plot of provincial young men coming to metropolitan Paris to be seduced or captivated by high society ladies is common in nineteenth-century French novels by such writers as Balzac and Flaubert. In his introduction to the translation of Notre Cœur, Li Jieren noted that Maupassant’s novella itself smacks of ‘bourgeois’ (buerqiaoya) sentiments by depicting a pair of lovers in utter despair and abjection, and so the French story should have nothing to do with the lofty cause of national revival or cultural enlightenment in contemporary China. Written in 1934, Li’s ironic introductory note apparently referred to the larger politicization and radicalization of literature in the mid-1930s.357 It nevertheless pointed to Li’s eclectic literary tastes; both the Chinese and French canons overlapped and were recon- figured in his historical fiction. Thematically, the immoral French heroine

355 See Yang Lianfen, Wan Qing zhi Wusi, pp. 279–94. 356 David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor, p. 107. For Wang’s analysis of A Flower in the Sea of Sins, see pp. 104–9. 357 Li’s three translations of Maupassant’s Notre Cœur were published respectively in 1921, 1934, and 1943. Li’s introductory note is collected in Li Jieren quanji, 15: 85–86. 192 CHAPTER 5 provocatively informed the unscrupulous Mrs. Huang in The Great Wave; Madame de Burne’s amorous adventure in the salon society of Paris is turned into Mrs. Huang’s socializing circles and flirtatious relationships with her gentry lovers in Chengdu. One of Li’s ingenious contributions in The Great Wave is his sympathetic creation of an eccentric female model without ideological convictions. As Ma Sen notes on the 1930s novel, “In Li Jieren’s work, we find, probably for the first time in Chinese literature, a profligate woman being depicted in a sympathetic, rather than self-righteously moral, way.”358 Stylistically, Li might have been drawn by the psychological technique in the French novel, which motivated him to develop his artistry of characterization and psychological analysis through the device of voice. Consider the following passage in Notre Cœur.

He realized that he was jealous, no longer merely as an idealizing lover but as a possessive male. . . . What was he to her, after all? A first lover, or the tenth? . . . That she was a lovely woman, more elegant than any other, intelligent, subtle, witty, but capricious, easily bored, wearied, disgusted, supremely self-absorbed, and insatiably flirtatious. Had she had a lover— or lovers—before him? If not, would she have given herself so brazenly? Where had she learned to open his bedroom door, at night, in an inn?359

The subjective voice of the character serves to open up his mind to the reader, as if the narrator wants to use the internal monologue to draw the reader into the character’s mind and confusion. The narrative effect of such penetrating psychological storytelling would have seemed unprecedented to Li Jieren in the 1930s. The author most likely absorbed technical innovations in narrative voice through his French translations, and used it to improve on vernacular Chinese narratives.360 Consider the abundant narrative prose in The Great Wave with which the narrator renders the minds of Chu Zicai and Mrs. Huang transparent to the reader. Chu’s thought is suffused with an inquisitional tone blaming himself for adultery and moral deceit; he suffers because he is psychologically

358 Ma Sen, rev. of The Great Wave, p. 120. 359 de Maupassant, Alien Hearts, p. 93. 360 Scholars have argued for rhetorical innovation partially initiated by the late Qing novelist Wu Jianren, who exercised partial narrative experiments with interiority of character in The Sea of Regret. See Hanan, “Wu Jianren and the Narrator”; Huters, “Wu Jianren: Engaging the World.” For a lucid account of the technique of novelistic internalization in Western fiction, see Cohn, “Narrated Monologue.” Love In The Time Of Revolution 193 encumbered by the Confucian moral codes. But the heroine appears as a designing woman and a creature licentious to the core. This is reflected in her feminine voice in the novel, accusing the traditional family and society and expressing a vengeful attitude to male dominance. The search for individual and inner human realities of Maupassant and other French naturalist writers had opened up new ways for Li Jieren to explore the female psyche. However, the vigorous commitment of the naturalist writers to laying bare the entire truth of the inner self cannot be fulfilled without a price. What is the place of human agency and voluntarism in a deterministic environment? Li disapproved of Zola’s extreme realistic doctrine, which depicted people as if they were entirely dominated by their nerves and blood, without free will, and dragged into actions by the fateful inevitability of their flesh. Li’s reaction against Zola’s pessimistic views on the subject of heredity and the concomitant dehumanized cosmos echoed the unfavorable perceptions among Chinese of French naturalism as more a form of scientific literary experiment than an adequate artistic means to express human consciousness and agency.361 In a critical essay on French naturalism and literature, Li argued that Maupassant set out to attack malicious women of the upper class. The French works should be read as social exposés of the darker sides of bourgeois society by unveiling female vanity and male hypocrisy. Therefore the naturalistic descriptions can be turned into powerful realistic critiques with sympathy and moral direction.362 Yet, for all his seeming moral rectitude in condemning and containing French images of the destructive female, the critic Li Jieren is outrun and outwitted by the artistic persona of the novelist himself. In spite of authorial imagination and in the absence of moral judgment in the novel, the unconventional Mrs. Huang clearly unleashes her sexual power and immense adaptability in the harsh male-dominated political environment. Moreover, in Zola’s

361 Li might have demonstrated a moral tone resembling Mao Dun’s ethical precept of realism by invoking the Tolstoyan concern with humanism. David Der-wei Wang argues that Mao Dun turns to both Zola’s deterministic naturalism to inquire into the characters’ confinement by social ills and to Tolstoy’s concern with religious epiphany and metamorpho- sis in foreseeing a communist apocalypse descending around his characters. See David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism, pp. 69–77. 362 Commenting on Marcel Prévost’s depiction of women, Li Jieren remarked that it should arouse moral questions in the reader’s mind. “Does the misdeed committed by the woman originate from her inner self, or is it caused by the environment? Are women who have fallen into darkness hateful or pitiable? Will they continue their descent and corruption, or is there any chance for them to go back to the moral way? If women are endowed with a virtuous nature, then where is it?” See Li, Li Jieren xuanji, 5: 562. 194 CHAPTER 5

Rougon-Macquart series, incest and adultery threaten the order of family life, and at worst can terminate the extensions of the family tree.363 Li’s treatment, however, does not develop an alarming potential of biological degeneration, nor subjugate the woman to puritanical condemnation. Let us place Li’s approach more broadly in the Chinese context. In the works of such May Fourth writers as Ba Jin and Cao Yu, the decaying ‘feudal’ family system or an urban bourgeois family becomes the central theme.364 The dialectical relations of progress and decadence are the major concerns in the Chinese family narratives. In this light, uncontrolled feminine instincts and naturalistic impulses appear as much a threat to the traditional family system as to nationhood. Against the tide of the rising political movement in Chengdu, the illicit lovers are caught in a maelstrom of emotions in their private, domestic space. The novelist portrays the couple’s erotic feelings as they sink into the realm of bodily sensuousness and sexual pleasure. Sexuality bears no clear, coherent relation to revolutionary passion, but is associated with carnal and oral pleasures in the family’s secret chambers. Mrs. Huang describes her reckless sexual relations:

A clandestine love affair between a man and a woman is like this (eating). If you eat too much in one mouthful, you will be fed up with it very soon. What if you have it once in a while? When you are starving, you take a dish of delicate dim sum. Or you eat hot dim sum on a full stomach. You see, which one retains the flavor longer? [ . . . ] That’s why I told you to go away last night. I want you to retain this flavor (of sex) in your heart so that you chew it over back home. You are likely to salivate when you are chew- ing it, right? So you will be more anxious to come back to me next time.

男女偷情也是這樣,若果一開口就吃個飽,不久就會生厭的.如其偶爾一次，比如肚子十分餓了，吃一盤精緻點心，你想，這比撐開肚皮吃熱點心的，哪個味道長些? . . . 所以我昨夜才叫你走.我的意思，就是要把這味道留在你的心中，讓你回家去慢慢咀嚼.你自然越咀嚼越流口水，你也才會荒着要來.(1: 123–24)

363 After Guo Moruo’s review of Li Jieren’s trilogy, Chinese critics have largely followed suit to compare his works with Zola’s Rougon-Macquart in terms of their grand design and structure. For discussions on French naturalism and family narratives, see Nicholas White, The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-century French Fiction, chap 4. 364 I am referring to Ba Jin’s saga Family and Cao Yu’s play Thunderstorm (Leiyu, 1934). On the decadent narrative in May Fourth literature, see Sun Lung-kee, “The Presence of the Fin- de-Siècle in the May Fourth Era.” Love In The Time Of Revolution 195

Elsewhere, Mrs. Huang compares her appetites for food and drink with her hunger for men. Seducing many lovers with different personalities is like tast- ing wine by mixing the old and the new. Here Li Jieren uses a culinary analogy to describe the heroine’s sexual appetite and her enticing engagements with her lovers.365 When Mrs. Huang thinks of her husband’s affection for her sister, she explains to herself that it is entirely because of her husband’s “bad taste.” She muses, “Can it be true that he is fed up with rich bird’s nest and shark’s fin and fleshy meat, and would rather eat some simple greens and root vegetables?” 難道果真把燕窩魚翅,肥濃大肉吃慣了，想要吃點青菜蘿葡來換換口味嗎. (1: 123–24) The appetite for food and the craving for sex are interchangeable. Chu Zicai behaves like a spoiled child and acts as if he was totally reduced to a biological creature anxious for food and sex.

My good auntie! My good mama! My little mama! Be good to your miserable son. I am begging for any leftovers from your bowl. Please give me some more. Save me! 好表嬸! 我的乖媽媽! 小媽媽! 可憐你的兒子，簡直跟討口子一樣.殘湯剩飯，你多賞一碗，救救你的兒子罷! (3: 164)

The images of female orality, sex, and politics are inextricably bound up with the domestic drama of adultery and sexual passion. By creating a promiscuous female character, Li Jieren took issue with the prevailing May Fourth ideology of his time that persistently portrayed traditional women as victims of social hierarchy and patriarchal power. There is a parallel with Lu Ling’s Hungry Guo Su’e (Ji’e de Guo Su’e, 1943), which touches upon the issues of eating, sexuality, and revolutionary passion by describing a lower-class woman who develops an insatiable appetite for both food and men. While the narratives of Lu Ling and Li Jieren could not be more different thematically, as the former centered on the plight of a woman in the lower depths of society and the latter revolved around upper-class characters, their common valorization of the human subject’s erotic feelings and bodily desires ran counter to the ideological orientation of the times.366 Li Jieren’s sexually and morally provocative heroine is presented through a detached mode of narration. Her impulsive energy and impetuous mind are portrayed through a language of desire and culinary pleasure. Restricted

365 A meticulous observer and writer of his native culture, Li Jieren was also an expert on Sichuan’s food culture. See Li Jieren, Li Jieren shuo Chengdu, pp. 255–81. 366 On Lu Ling’s sexual politics and the revolutionary discourse, see David Der-wei Wang, “Three Hungry Women.” 196 CHAPTER 5 by the traditional values of decorum in the gentry family, the heroine has to pursue her liberation within the domestic bounds. Although she cannot change the traditional system by herself, she performs sexual promiscuity as a vital and indeed the only means to liberate her spontaneous passions. The woman’s fetishistic interest in materiality (food) and body (men) is metaphori- cally translated into the feminine power to reverse the logic of matriarchy and patriarchy, private and public affairs, erotic and political ambitions. The power of gentry families is on the wane in both spiritual and physical terms in the novel. The Huang family has a weak male lineage. Huang Lansheng’s two sons are ironically named Zhenguo and Zhenbang, meaning literally ‘strengthening the nation’ and ‘strengthening the state.’ Huang’s first son died prematurely when he was just one month old. His second son suffers from poor health. The submerged phenomenon of yinsheng yangshuai (flourishing femininity, weakening masculinity) implied in The Great Wave can be read as a sign of the collapse of the gentry’s traditionally prestigious position. In her study of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ in contemporary Chinese literature, Xueping Zhong argues that in literary representations the male subjects suffer from a femininity complex that constitutes the ‘unconscious’ in the Chinese national psyche. The anxiety about the weakening of male identity has to be understood in social and political terms at large, as it should be “considered a problem not only for men but also for the culture and the nation.”367 In this light, the thwarted sexual bonds between the heroine and her gentry devotees in The Great Wave stand for the pathology of social sterility. Their illicit sexual relations are products of a decadent milieu and a sign of social degeneration. Beyond the decadent drives and sexual aberrations that threaten to disin- tegrate the family system and male political order, Li Jieren sought a new and positive force of regeneration. Mrs. Huang, who believes herself to be equal to men and does not subscribe to traditional moral precepts, comes to the fore in a critical moment to intervene in her husband’s business. Toward the end of the original The Great Wave, Mrs. Huang ‘saves’ her husband and the family from the threat of political change during the revolution. It is precisely the heroine’s entrepreneurial communicative skills and her ability to stay poised

367 Xueping Zhong, Masculinity Besieged, p. 51. The concern over the inferior quality of Chinese men has been linked with the essentialist critique of the Chinese ‘national character.’ In his study of Chinese collective psychology and personality, Sun Lung-kee claims that the Chinese fear of emasculation manifests the idea of male weakness and femininity in the ‘deep structure’ of Chinese culture. See Sun, Zhongguo wenhua de shenceng jiegou. Love In The Time Of Revolution 197 between agency and passivity, action and passion, within the domestic bounds that rescue her family from potential crisis in the decline of the dynasty. The farce begins when her husband Huang Lansheng secretly plans to join the revolutionary party. He does not confide this to either his wife or her lovers. Mrs. Huang soon learns her husband’s secret from Chu Zicai, who is close to his uncle. (Huang Lansheng never learns of the affair between his wife and nephew.) The young man becomes the middleman carrying knowledge of the political secrets and covert affairs in the gentry circles. After Chu joins the secret circle of Mrs. Huang’s devotees, he becomes the most possessive and ruthless of her lovers, hating his senior relatives for sharing the woman. To Mrs. Huang, her husband’s secret deal with the revolutionaries is tantamount to his deliberate betrayal of her love. The woman feels that she is ‘disenfranchised’ by politics as she has lost her appeal to the man. In other words, politics will deprive the heroine of her private wishes and desires. If she wants to win over her lovers, she has to intervene in politics to win over their hearts, and bring them from the perils of politics back to the private chamber of domestic life. When all the members of the gentry waver at the decisive moment, the heroine comes forth to establish the position of Wu Fengwu, an aspiring chief in the militia, enabling him to seize power by granting him financial support. Since Wu Fengwu represents the new military government rising to power with the revolution, Mrs. Huang’s decisiveness helps to secure a place for her husband as well as her gentry lovers in the new regime. In the maelstrom of the revolution, Mrs. Huang’s resolve overshadows that of her male companions, who lack the capacity for action. She is willing to utilize her family’s social connections to secure the men’s political aspirations and social ambitions; in so doing she takes control of them and recaptivates her lovers. As the literary historian Cao Juren puts it, “It is only an assertive Mrs. Huang who can really come to grips with the ‘revolution’.” Placing her wager on romance and revolution, Mrs. Huang is importantly involved in the ‘great wave’ of the times.368 Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Balzac’s realistic writing could be relevant to Li Jieren’s historical imagination. Jameson advocates an allegorical reading of Balzac’s family narrative, in which the sexual potency of the male aristocratic characters is essentially linked to their class affiliations and aspirations. Balzac’s novel offers a symbolic representation of the male struggle for political power and legitimacy through the domestic drama of love and hatred.369 Frederick Green has observed that Balzac depicts the dismantling of the old

368 Cao, Xiaoshuo xinyu, p. 99. 369 Jameson, “Realism and Desire.” 198 CHAPTER 5 family order in French society as symptomatic of the evil results of the revolutionary period. Green discusses Balzac’s La Cousine Bette (1846), a tragic tale about the downfall of old Baron Hulot, who loses his family fortune during the revolutionary transition. Human passion, individualism, and egotism destroy parental authority and undermine the social fabric.370 Many of Balzac’s big novels picture the disastrous consequences of social changes when society has abandoned the solidarity of the family and the ruling elites have lost their fundamental values of honor and pride, giving way to individual pursuit of greed and opportunism. In The Great Wave, Li Jieren displays analogous literary sensibilities in capturing a symbiotic relationship between the declining dynasty and the degen- erating family. Mrs. Huang symbolizes both the invigorating and destructive forces within the traditional order. Her incestuous acts threaten to disrupt the family order and the Confucian moral code. The heroine’s promiscuous inertia—her determination to pursue erotic satisfaction and carry on her treacherous affairs—ironically entices her to intervene in the gentry’s political life. Mrs. Huang’s sophistication helps her manipulate her lovers, triggering a chain of human intrigues and betrayals in the men’s rivalry for political information. In their competition for sex and power, the male lovers hold secrets against one another, vying for the woman’s exclusive affection as well as for political capital. The plots of individual lust and public history interweave at crisis points in the narrative. Mrs. Huang’s subtle but powerful ‘rebellions’ against the family and societal code in the form of self-gratification and hedonism have involuntarily got in the way of political affairs. For all her reactionary attitudes to the revolution, Mrs. Huang comes out as a powerful player in politics as well as in her love affairs. Her superb adaptability and female flexibility rescue her family, ironically validating the Darwinist doctrine of the survival of the fittest in the ruthless matrix of family and politics. In contrast, Chu Zicai may hint at the degeneration of the gentry on the eve of the revolution since he engages incestuously with his young aunt and flirts intellectually with political idealism. Toward the end of the novel, the narrative unveils the dual orientation of the private and the public. The big house of the Huang family serves as a temporary ‘military headquarters’ for Wu Fengwu’s administration. The narrator abandons the gentry’s dialogues on political subjects and abruptly switches to the retrospective musing of Mrs. Huang. In her cozy private corner in the house, Mrs. Huang is sipping tea while the men are conversing on politics outside. She ‘recalls’ (huixiang) her rendezvous with Chu Zicai.

370 F.C. Green, French Novelists from the Revolution to Proust, pp. 173–74. Love In The Time Of Revolution 199

Of course Chu Zicai was quite a good-for-nothing character. It seemed even more irksome that he was prone to hiding himself away from any troubles, lacking the audacity that a man should possess. But he was also meek and mild. He would not look upon himself as any great or exceptional person. All of these would be gratifying for a middle-aged woman of strong character. What is more, the burning passion and love [that he let her see] in private were powerful enough to soften her up from top to toe, and let her experience an unquenchable zest in the love affair. . . . She puts down her teacup, and stamps her foot on the ground, saying firmly, “I want him! I want him badly! I cannot leave someone who has a fiery heart!”

楚子材這個人，誠然是百無一取，尤其使人生恨的，就是毫無一點兒男兒漢的膽量，動輒便朝家中跑. 但是他那馴柔的性情，不把自己看成一個了不起的男子的性情，業已足令一個中年而又剛強的女人，愜心稱意的了，更加他那在無人時，比火還要熱的情愛，真夠以使人通身為之鎔化，嘗味著一種永不能夠饜足的滋味. . . . 她放下茶杯，決然把腳尖向地板上一頓道: “我要他! 我正要他! 他那比火還熱的心，我是不能離的!” (3: 324–25)

The omniscient narrator enters into the woman’s thought from the descriptions of the ‘exterior’ environment. Although the account of what the woman ‘recalls’ is rendered in the third person, its tone of intimacy and privacy truly sounds like her own thoughts. The act of huixiang signals the woman’s thought-language, blurring the boundary between the character’s voice and the narrator’s. Despite his emphasis on narrative neutrality, Li Jieren has rendered a narrative format to probe the interior world of consciousness as well as to depict the external, visible world. The depiction of subjectivity allows the reader to have access to the subject’s inner convictions or rationalizations, maintaining the polyphonic interplay between fiction and history. The female tone bears the stamp of individual neglect of present and future circumstances. The irony of the narrative ending hinges on the incongruity between the character’s distortion of the present and the reader’s knowledge of historical reality in hindsight. In actual fact, Sichuan’s restoration of peace was only temporary and precarious, and so was the gentry’s seizure of power. “The revolution had come to Chengdu, but what it meant for the city was not at all clear,” comments Kristin Stapleton.371 The uncertainty of the ‘future’ in history is contrasted with the woman’s indulgence in the ‘past’ in her private moments. Her

371 Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, p. 180. 200 CHAPTER 5 musings on past romantic relationships with her lovers are permeated with nostalgic sentimentality and a sense of irreversibility in time. In her incestuous liaison with her nephew, she experiences youthful passions and sexual impulses that she can no longer enjoy in her old lovers. These fond memories reinforce the heroine’s resolution to decide her own fate and pursue a good life on her own. The woman’s private/domestic space is positioned at odds with the revolutionary current. Feminine desire is embraced at the expense of patriarchy and male control of the political order. The subtly ‘disruptive’ episode reveals the ending’s ‘openness’ in Li Jieren’s characteristic use of the roman-fleuve. The presentness of the moment in which the ending resides is indicative of the author’s refusal to use the novel’s closure to give a dramatic resolution to the question of history.

Figuration and Reconfiguration

In the 1930s version of The Great Wave, characters do not stand at the forefront of history or take any explicit political action. Their behaviors are dictated more by personal desires and wishes than by abstract, collective ideals. This schism between subjective desire and the exterior historical world reflects a significant difference between Li Jieren’s treatment of the hero and heroine and the character formulation by Georg Lukács. Li prefers Walter Scott’s method of creating mediocre figures out of burgeoning events and then bringing them into lived relations with their epoch. But for Lukács, the historical novelist has to concentrate on an individual’s fate and awakening as a point of historical rupture: “What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events.”372 The Lukácsian character can be considered as a crucial literary device to conjure up mass historical experience. How can the novelist inscribe the memory of real events not according to a scheme of historical causality or a ‘deterministic’ plot but as a series of potential and random happenings in a place as the characters would have potentially perceived them? In The Great Wave, Li Jieren allows the narrative to generate a sense of everlasting uncertainty about the ‘presentness’ of the moment to recapture the characters’ involuntary responses to unexpected events, thereby emphasizing the ‘authenticity’ and geopoetic sentiments of history. The novelist gives a vivid presentation of the thoughts, feelings, and habitual lives of the gentry of Chengdu society, who are caught up in the sudden advent of the

372 Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 42. Love In The Time Of Revolution 201 revolution. The historical inertia and slowness of gentry life are shaken by the onslaught of radical political change. Instead of ‘foreshadowing’ a future that guides events in the flow of backward causation, the novelist employs a strategy of ‘sideshadowing’ with which to restore the presentness of events and “offer an alternative to prevailing deterministic and otherwise closed views of time.”373 Li Jieren’s distinctive historical discourse inevitably made his work incon- gruent with his time, a time that saw a radical turn to revolutionary fiction and patriotic rhetoric in the literary world. His fiction was an alternative response to the popular theme of ‘revolution plus love’ (geming jia lian’ai) in the cultural politics and literary practices of the 1930s,374 underscoring the contradiction between modern subjectivity and the collective commitment to the nation. The creation of a promiscuous woman in late Qing Chengdu society in the early edition of The Great Wave ostensibly violated the typical female roles in fiction that were subjected to the male-dominated discourse of national salvation in revolutionary literature, in which “the female body is no longer a corporeal existence but an embodiment of historical value”; hence, “the natural being of women has been integrated into the nationalist symbolic and endowed with sociohistorical essence.”375 Li’s construction of femininity harked back to the late Qing fictional world, which did not monologically represent female identity as a symbol of nationalism but emphasized the sexual and bodily particularities of women.376 In Li’s novel, hence, the flirtatious relationship between the adolescent hero and his young aunt can be read as symptomatic of the characters’ psychological resistance to history and their pathetic incapacity for political participation. The lovers ignore the ‘reality’ of morality and history. The elite’s resistance to change is imagined in the form of love and allegory, where human passion and unrestrained emotion become an impediment to revolution. From this comparative perspective, we are reminded of Ma Sen’s

373 I use Gary Saul Morson’s concept of ‘sideshadowing,’ which refers to the narrative strategy deployed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. ‘Foreshadowing’ involves ‘backward causation’ and offers us a world in which ‘time is closed.’ ‘Sideshadowing’ refers to ‘an open sense of temporality’ and a set of novelistic devices used to convey that sense to counter foreshadowing. See Morson, Narrative and Freedom, pp. 6–7. 374 For a genealogy of the genre in modern Chinese fiction, see Jianmei Liu, Revolution Plus Love. 375 Xiaobin Yang, “Conjuring up the Specter of Revolution,” p. x. 376 For an analysis of the representation of women in late Qing literature, see Jianmei Liu, “Nation, Women, and Gender in the Late Qing.” For a critical overview of the revolutionary tradition in modern Chinese literature, see Tao et al., eds., Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. 202 CHAPTER 5

observation that Li’s characters “lack initiative and merely react to external events.”377 In light of the bodily rhetoric behind the revolutionary impulse, the extreme depictions of female sensuality and erotic expressions had to be restrained and disciplined as they held great potential to challenge the grand revolutionary discourse in the new PRC regime. To a significant degree, the novelist’s rewrite represented his serious effort to refigure and regenerate his characters from passive observers to active participants of historical events. Whether such attempts at refiguration are successful—or if they are artistically and ideologically justified—will be pursued in the coming chapter.

figure 5.1 A comical representation of ‘overturning the world’ that takes place at the mahjong and poker tables common in the everyday life of the Sichuan people to satirize the idea of fundamental change being brought by the recent ‘revolution.’ Tongsu Huabao, no. 8, 6 July 1912.

377 Ma Sen, rev. of The Great Wave, p. 120. Love In The Time Of Revolution 203

figure 5.2 The abolition of the queue is violently enforced on the common people as one of the radical social effects of the 1911 revolution. Tongsu Huabao, no. 41, 14 August 1912. 204 CHAPTER 5

figure 5.3 In a Sichuan county, a Confucian temple is knocked down by the revolutionaries in the wake of the establishment of the Republic of China. The captioned message warns that society might readily fall back into tyranny if people lose faith in their ancient sage. Tongsu Huabao, no. 15, 15 July 1912. Love In The Time Of Revolution 205

figure 5.4 Old mindsets still prevail in post-revolutionary Chinese societies as women worshippers look for a new ‘Living Buddha’ as their spiritual icon. Tongsu huabao, no. 26, 27 July 1912. 206 CHAPTER 5

figure 5.5 A pictorial satire of new social and military leaders in postrevolutionary China in the guise of Buddhist saints. Tongsu Huabao, no. 23, 24 July 1912. Love In The Time Of Revolution 207

figure 5.6 Military leaders of the new society are lampooned and called ‘insane’ as they have perfunctorily adopted military suits and caps along with the traditional Chinese attire. Tongsu Huabao, no. 10, 9 July 1912. 208 CHAPTER 5

figure 5.7 A historic teahouse inside the People’s Park (Renmin Gongyuan, formerly Shaocheng Park). In The Great Wave, Chu Zicai likes to frequent teahouses like this one in the public park even when the revolutionary events are erupting. Photographed in 2011.

figure 5.8 The Du Fu Caotang Memorial in Chengdu. As the vice-mayor in the 1950s, Li Jieren made great efforts to rebuild this memorial. Photographed in 2008. Love In The Time Of Revolution 209 G F E C D B A 1911 Chengdu map illustrating some of the important locations in Li Jieren’s novels: novels: some of map illustrating Chengdu in Li Jieren’s A 1911 locations the important Palace; (at the southern end of Imperial (C) Shaocheng Park the Manchu City); (B) Temple; (A) Daoist Qingyang church Christian (G) (F) East Street; yamen; Great viceregal jie); (E) (Xiyu Street Xiyu (D) A figure 5.9 CHAPTER 6 The Road to Perdition

Writing against the Grain

In 1956, the eminent writer Ding Ling was traveling in Sichuan. She happened to obtain a copy of Ripples on Dead Water and read it for the first time.378 In her diary entry dated 16 September, she jotted down her fresh impressions and intuitive appreciation of the novel.379 She found Li Jieren’s style very refresh- ing. Artistically speaking, the novelist in Ripples designed a good structure of narration and remarkable characters with vivid images and profound personalities. Li’s novel, Ding Ling noted, certainly stood out among much recent PRC literature, which appeared to her as merely empty narratives intended to impart didactic lessons to readers. In revisiting Li Jieren’s novel less than one month later, however, Ding Ling abandoned her initial enthusiasm, and entirely changed her admiring remarks to negative comments. In her diary entry on 11 October, Ding Ling discussed the portrayal of Skewmouth Luo, the secret society leader, and the world of entangled love affairs in some detail.380 She denigrated Li’s compassionate description of the ringleader character as a fatal fault. Adopting a class standpoint, Ding Ling regarded Skewmouth as the great exemplar of the reactionary class, and the depictions of the figure’s uninhibited passions and carnal desires as symptomatic of the declining class in the historical process. Li’s compelling descriptions of the outlaw and his tempestuous affairs with women, Ding Ling remonstrated, could do a great disservice to literary enlightenment by captivating the readers and luring them to sympathetically identify with such an amoral bandit character or anti-hero. As Ding Ling asserted in her reading notes, Li Jieren could have chosen to construct a ‘positive hero’ image of the ‘gowned brother’ (paoge) figure, the social underdog and rebel in the story.

I believe that there can be good-natured and lovable characters among the paoge even though they were a reactionary class being used by the

378 Ding Ling might have read a revised version of Ripples; a minor revision was published by Zuojia chubanshe in 1955. 379 Ding Ling, “Shenghuo pianduan,” p. 5. 380 Ibid., pp. 8–9.

ruling class. But Li could write an amiable character and hero out of them. That is to say, this hero will be endowed with the fine qualities of the Chinese national tradition, especially all the good qualities of this class at the early stage of the secret society.381

The hero thus embodies the superior power to rebel against the ruling class and to fight for the underdog; he also possesses a sense of selflessness and self- sacrifice. The ideological proposition of a socialist hero unquestionably contrasts with Li Jieren’s artistic tenet of realism in depicting people’s behavior and social mores grounded in the historical moment. Li’s characters are more real than most of those created by his contemporaries.382 Ding Ling’s double readings and contrastive interpretations of Ripples on Dead Water—a primary aesthetic appraisal of the fiction over which a finalized political judgment concerning its ideological shortcomings was violently imposed—are indicative of the politics of revisionist criticism in the post-1949 literary scene. Back in the early 1930s, Ding Ling herself composed “Sophia’s Diary II” (1931) as a sequel to “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (1928),383 in which Sophia denounces her emotional old self in order to represent the growth and transformation of the heroine in compliance with new revolutionary discourses. As if to echo the fictional diarist’s conflicting tones, Ding Ling in her own diary seemed to be drawn to the gripping tales of Ripples, particularly the obsessive love and private fantasies shared by the lovers in a rural society, but she still repudiated their behavior and anxiously pointed out a right way for a heroic narrative. She readily “surrendered herself and her writing to the cause of the socialist revolution” so as to reinvent herself as a progressive writer.384 The celebrated writer known for exposing feminine emotionalism and bourgeois mentality in her epistolary fiction was eager to present new narrative methods to steer her life in a new direction under the influence of radical revolutionary discourses emerging in the 1930s.

381 Ibid., p. 9. 382 For a critique of Ding Ling’s judgment of Li’s novel, see Yu Qiao, “Ping Ding Ling guanyu Sishui weilan de pingjia,” p. 3. 383 “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi de riji) was first serialized in Short Story Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) in 1928. Ding Ling wrote “Sophia’s Diary II [Unfinished]” (Shafei riji dier bu (weiwan gao)) in 1931. It was an unfinished piece published posthumously. 384 Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, p. 81. By renewing her early epistolary narratives, Ding Ling became increasingly concerned over the gap between her ‘old style’ and the ‘new (revolutionary) content’ of her fiction. See Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth- century Chinese Fiction, pp. 180–86. 212 CHAPTER 6

Ding Ling’s self-imposed literary rewriting and her critical voice bespeak the institutionalized politics in which one interpretation overrides another contingent upon changing ideological agendas, so much so that a writer is induced to overwrite an old narrative with a new one. In the same year, Lu You also discussed the ideological defects in Li Jieren’s novel.385 This critical article set out to frame Li’s historical fiction in terms of the dogmatic doctrines of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary rhetoric. The historical significance of the 1911 Revolution should nonetheless be noted.386 Official PRC historiography has linked the revolution to the awakening of the Chinese nation from impe- rialistic aggression and foreign invaders.387 According to this logic, whereas the Communist insurgence should overwhelmingly receive literary expression in creative fiction, the historical role that Mao assigned to the 1911 Revolution had clearly become the point of departure for understanding and reinterpret- ing Li’s trilogy through ideological prisms. Lu You’s essay praised Ripples for expressing the conflicts between foreign imperialism and local inhabitants, the corruption of gentry and officials of the Qing court, the economic invasion of material culture and the decadent lifestyle in the native place. Nevertheless, the critic found fault with Li’s inability or reluctance to articulate squarely the “struggle between the Sichuanese people and imperialist forces.”388 He indicated that the major shortcoming in Ripples was its lack of a full-fledged narrative to develop the clash between the foreign missionaries and the local villains of the secret societies. As Li Jieren had begun to revise his trilogy in 1954, Lu You’s assessment of Ripples, which appeared two years later and turned out to be the only piece of public critical comment, represented an authoritative judgment on Li’s historical novels under the new PRC cultural directives. How did a writer without particular ideological leanings cope with the contradiction between aesthetics and politics in his further novelistic ventures? Li reportedly responded to the

385 Lu You, “Tan Li Jieren de Sishui weilan.” 386 According to Mao Zedong’s theory of China’s revolutionary development, the 1911 Revolution marked the outbreak of the ‘old-democratic’ revolution led by the bourgeoisie. But the political weakness of the bourgeois revolutionaries caused the ultimate failure of the first revolution. The ongoing revolutionary process, Mao maintained, was not yet completed owing to the limitations of historical circumstances, and its unaccomplished mission was to be carried out by the ‘new-democratic’ revolution under the leadership of the Communists. On orthodox PRC historiography of the 1911 Revolution since 1949, see Hsieh, Chinese Historiography on the Revolution of 1911, pp. 41–63. 387 For a political interpretation of the 1911 Revolution, see Chongji Jin, “The 1911 Revolution and the Awakening of the Chinese Nation.” 388 Lu You, “Tan Li Jieren de Sishui weilan,” p. 63. The Road to Perdition 213 criticism with an open and modest attitude, hoping that readers could submit more opinions, and saying he would still want to revise his original work. It is evident that Ripples only suffered from some minor ‘defects,’ as explicated in the article, and The Great Wave was the major target of rewrite. In Chapters 3 and 5, I have examined the 1930s edition of The Great Wave and demonstrated that Li Jieren’s historical writings are less about the revolution than about memories of the regional place, quotidian life, and native characters enacted in compelling narrative strands. The author’s experimentation with historical fiction merits our attention not because of its explicit treatment or political analysis of history, but because of the unresolved tension between fictional form and historical representation it poses. The poetics of the place cast in grand historical schemes illuminates the representational problems between the novel and nationhood. When the nation itself became the subject of history, and fictional writing was subsumed under a historical teleology, Li’s polyphonic and quotidian approaches to narrating historical changes stood ambiguously in an increasingly politicized literary field as the writer launched his scheme of rewriting in the 1950s. On 1 June 1957, in an interview by the Chengdu Daily (Chengdu ribao) held at his residence, Li Jieren paid tribute to the prose poems by Liushahe, a young poet who had just been castigated as a ‘rightist’ for his supposed contempt of Communist authority. Li praised Liushahe’s “Pieces on Plants” as exemplifying the Chinese tradition of “singing of objects” (yongwu) in lyrical poetry, and cautioned against any unreasonable indictments of the young talent for his lack of social experience. He was bold enough to say that the political campaigns against a minor literary piece by a young writer verged on “making too much fuss over a trifle” (xiaoti dazuo). Li implied that one should grant autonomy to creative expression and do away with crude allegorization to dictate literary activity. He may have wanted to critique obliquely the cultural bureaucrats who had kicked up a political storm by imbuing the poetic utterance with ideological connotations. But it was the barbed comments which Li Jieren delivered at an official meeting that really got him into hot water. Sha Ting remembered that earlier he had made a visit to Li’s residence with a group of cultural officials.389 They had invited Li to participate in the public literary forum (the Seventh “Rectification Talk”) organized by the Literary Association of Sichuan Province (Sichuan Sheng Wenlian). Li refused to go. Before they left, Li pulled Sha Ting aside and warned him to keep his mouth shut on such a sensitive occasion: “Old Sha (Ting), the water is terribly murky now. Don’t speak out for your own

389 Sha Ting, Zaji yu huiyi, pp. 62–64. 214 CHAPTER 6 sake!” To the surprise of Sha Ting, Li showed up in the official forum on 3 June 1957 (Li had seldom attended the meetings of the association before, evidently a sign of his dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic institution). In his speech at a Party meeting, as reported in Sichuan Daily (Sichuan ribao) on 4 June 1957, Li called on Party members to end the current “brutal” (cubao) attacks on Liushahe. Li cautioned them about the growing problem of bureaucratization of the literary institution. The next few months saw anti-intellectual campaigns everywhere in the country. Li Jieren’s former forthright criticism of Party policies met with belligerent reactions from radical campaigners. He was under great pressure in successive meetings. On 29 August, Li had to make a speech of self-criticism before Party officials in the People’s Congress meeting in Chengdu. Li obliquely referred to the unpleasant situation in which he was just one step away from falling into the camp of the ‘rightists.’390 Li described his situation in his speech entitled “I have come to the brink of the quagmire” (“Wo yi zoudaole nikeng de bianyuan shangle”). An eyewitness in the assembly saw Li wearing a silk gown and light jacket on a hot summer day, with a folding fan in hand, looking upright and proud.391 Tan Xingguo and Ai Lu, two Chengdu experts on Li’s life and work, believed that the writer spoke publicly against his will, and buried his restiveness beneath a calm composure. In a speech reported in Chengdu Daily on 30 August 1957, Li criticized himself as an intellectual from the ‘old society,’ bearing the mentalities of capitalist and bourgeois ideology, Confucian thought, and eighteenth-century European liberalism. He admitted his detachment from the rapidly changing ‘new society,’ which stemmed from nothing but the ‘inferiority complex’ of an old-style intellectual and the unconventionality and indifference of a pompous ‘scholar’ (mingshi), who stood aloof from the ‘progressive’ society. Li attributed his acri- monious relationships with the cultural cadres and dissatisfaction with the party’s authoritarian literary policy to the ‘backwardness’ of his feelings and thought. He wished to throw away this knapsack of old mentalities but confessed that it still weighed him down. Li would continue to vilify his former liberal views and bourgeois background in the press until the spring of 1958.

390 According to Li Shihua, Li Jieren’s speech of self-criticism was actually written by his son, Li Yuancen (1927–77). Li Shihua believes that his grandfather (Li Jieren) was so stubborn and honest that he could never have written anything in defiance of his own moral principles and beliefs. My interview with Li Shihua in 2009. 391 Ai Lu, “Li Jieren de fengcai,” p. 151. The Road to Perdition 215

Tan Xingguo, who was a young editor of the literary magazine Grassland (Caodi) in Chengdu, cherished his visits to Li Jieren in the 1950s.392 As the magazine’s messenger, Tan had the opportunity of seeing the renowned native writer. Remembering Li fondly and with deep admiration, Tan recalled his dialogue with Li about the subject of literary writing and creativity on his visit to the ‘Caltrop Nest’ (Lingke), Li’s private residence on the eastern outskirts of Chengdu, where Li lived in seclusion after about 1958 and where he revised The Great Wave.393 Tan claims that the two occasions on which Li Jieren made personal comments in the press and the public forum were pivotal moments in his life.394 He believes that the anti-Rightist storm in Chengdu had profoundly upset the old writer. Although Li was not condemned as a ‘rightist’ and was not a ‘victim’ per se of the movement, the experience had been an ordeal for him.395 Afterwards, Li apparently retired from most of his official duties, albeit still keeping his official title as the vice-mayor, and tried to stay away from municipal affairs as well as Party politics. Tan felt that the writer exhibited a sense of solitude and isolation at the later stage of his life. Politically perturbed and silenced, Li poured his energies back into fiction writing, shifting his identity back from a public official to a private writer engrossed in his own historical world. Li Jieren devoted himself to rewriting The Great Wave as an ‘amateur’ writer outside of the PRC literary system. It turned out that the writing progress was much slower than he had anticipated. Between 1956 and 1962 he had only completed the first three volumes of the planned novel with the fourth unfinished. His death left the second version of The Great Wave another orphaned work. In the last few years of his life, he still tirelessly wrote letters to his family, friends, editors, and anonymous readers of The Great Wave to discuss the problems of writing historical fiction as well as the difficult creative condition of the author himself. In one of his letters dated 23 March 1963, Li Jieren wrote: “Certainly there have been immense difficulties in creative writing and learn- ing. First, I feel that I have run out of time; second, I feel that I have run out of

392 I interviewed Tan twice in 2007 and 2008. 393 Li began to build his own house in 1938, and renovated it in the 1950s. The house has been turned into the present Li Jieren Memorial and Museum. 394 Tan Xingguo, unpublished memoir, accessed in 2007. 395 According to Tan, Sha Ting helped Li to avoid the purge. Tan also told me that at that time a group of students of the Chinese Department at Sichuan University had organized a series of articles to criticize Li’s works. They sent their malicious attacks to Grassland. But Tan barred them from publication. Fortunately, Li was protected from a possible condemnation of his work in print. 216 CHAPTER 6 energy; third, I feel that my memory may be failing me.”396 Li was now writing in the sociopolitical milieu of New China in the aftermath of the anti-Rightist movement. As public politics could be a taboo subject even in private correspondence, a significant number of his letters reflected his personal preoccupation with novel writing. Attending political meetings and taking lessons in the political thought of historical materialism had surely taken away a part of the writer’s time as much as they might have interrupted his creative thinking. The intellectual persona of Li might want to sound politically progressive and culturally a new thinker, but it could indeed be hard for an old writer to unlearn and unpack all his traditional baggage. His late letters delicately reveal the writer’s contradictory self-identity and his struggle between art and politics. Against all odds, it was artistic integrity and an overriding concern with fiction’s claims to history that obsessed the writer in these letters. In rewriting The Great Wave, Li Jieren was bothered by the readers’ reception of the artistic balance between veracity and fictionality in historical fiction. The novelist’s responses were often unapologetically firm about rhetorical fiction’s credibility and authoritativeness when compared with unmediated factuality in reclaiming the past. In his 27 August 1962 letter, Li did not heed the criticism of Wu Yuzhang (a Sichuan participant of the 1911 events) that The Great Wave had many unforgivable oversights of fact. The writer rather asserted: “The Great Wave is not a pure record of history. Literary art should be prioritized over the bare recording of facts.”397 In spite of the novelist’s emphasis on the power of fiction-making in his letters, sometimes by invoking the seminal model of vernacular Chinese fiction like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi yanyi), paradoxically he was captured by an ideology that historical fiction can serve as a ‘perfect’ testimony to the past by continuously seeking truth claims in the process of discovering more facts and documents. The novelist’s artistic self was thrown off balance by his historical obsession during the course of rewriting. On 5 November 1962, his daughter Li Mei wrote a letter to the author, saying that the rewrite of The Great Wave contained so many historical details and intricate plots that his latest novels actually deterred general readers as they found the fictions ‘incomprehensible.’ These ‘general readers’ were the colleagues and Party cadres in her institution, most of whom held a university degree or had equivalent intellectual knowledge. She also implied that the rewrite in no way attracted young readers, perhaps because the events were too remote from them. As she remarked: “Of course, (they are) young. It is true

396 See Wang Jialing, ed., Li Jieren wannian shuxinji, pp. 5–6. 397 Ibid., pp. 38–39. The Road to Perdition 217 that they are ignorant of history. But it shows that the two books (Book 1 and 2 of The Great Wave) are somewhat too ‘specialized.’ ”398 However, Li Mei added that Ripples on Dead Water and Before the Tempest (both had been much less modified) still held enormous appeal to her colleagues. She observed that these two novels had been frequently loaned out in many libraries, and they were quite worn out as they got much flipped over by readers. The daughter implicitly advised her father that in pursuing veracity, he should stick to fictionality as the crucial artifice in novelization. (He had indeed demonstrated his flair for fictionalization in the old trilogy.) “Fiction is fiction after all,” Li Mei wrote to her father. “Fiction is different from history and biography. It is essential to shape the characters and vividly describe their images with plot structures. It is because of these factors that Ripples on Dead Water and Before the Tempest have been so successful and sold well.”399 The intimate exchange between Li Jieren and his daughter as a caring and thoughtful reader bespeaks the issues of cultural memorability and the aesthetic appeal of historical fiction in which the entangled components of authentication and make-believe coexist and contest. Fictional creativity grants the artist poetic license to evoke vivid characters and design dramatic plots. In narrativizing the past, it is the novel’s aesthetic dimension and trans- figurative power that exert wide appeal to readers without a prior knowledge of the historical subject. By contrast, “those who ‘stick to the facts’ may paradoxically end up with a more historical and authentic story, but also a less memorable one, than the producers of fiction.”400 Li Jieren’s unfinished venture of historical storytelling registers the complicated mission of historical fiction in its negotiations with truth and imagination, causality and uncertainty, temporality and local spatiality when the writer has to cater to particular ideological or collective purposes under new political paradigms. The two versions of The Great Wave bear a significantly different ‘desire for the plot’ in their singular perspectives on the past. The 1930s version tends to slide into the interactions of fictive characters and the private world of family life and character interactions, as the plots of macro-politics recede into the background more or less as time signals in the

398 For Li Mei’s letter, see ibid., pp. 226–27. 399 The older generation of readers seemed to prefer to read the old version of The Great Wave too, as revealed in their memoirs. Tu Guangqun, for example, favors the earlier version of The Great Wave for its rich flavors of local color and historic feel. See Tu, Wushinian wentan qinli ji, 1949–1999, pp. 334–36. 400 Rigney, “The Dynamics of Remembrance,” p. 347. On fiction’s power in recalling history, also see Rigney, Imperfect Histories, pp. 15–38. 218 CHAPTER 6 novel. The 1950s rewrite aspires to a higher historical terrain in order to depict the development of events in a panoramic view. The author intends to repo- sition the revolution in Sichuan historically by rearranging successive events in the mythical telos of progressive temporality. Book 1 chronicles the establishment of the Sichuan Railroad Protection Comrades League and the rapidly growing mass movements that culminate in the Chengdu massacre. Book 2 continues to trace the development of armed uprisings of various rebellious forces in the localities, followed in the last two volumes by the exposé of the political intrigues and inner conflicts in the Qing court and the eventual dis- solution of the old regime.401 Nonetheless, such a schematic outline may easily hide the novel’s rich descriptions of social life and customs, historical facts and rumors, human conflicts and dramas couched in the complex web of narrative voices. The rewrite continued to encounter criticisms from leftist critics and writers for its naturalistic tendency to document social mores and living habits. In 1959, in an internal meeting with the author, the eminent leftist writer Zhang Tianyi pointed out the ‘deficiencies’ of The Great Wave, commenting that the author was too committed to the “descriptions of the details of everyday life such as native customs, local sentiments, and marriage rituals” without giving concrete social analyses of the figures from different walks of life in the revolutionary period.402 Zhang’s ‘friendly’ critique, which indeed represented the Party’s position and judgment on literary creativity, indicates not so much the ideological shortcomings of Li’s style as his intellectual and artistic persistence in reconstructing the past in monumental fictional form. The task of interweaving the ever more complex strands of plots and almost five hundred characters in The Great Wave was an impossible mission that increasingly defeated the author himself. Critical evaluations of the rewritten version of The Great Wave raised the fundamental question of human figuration in regard to the structural unity of the panoramic novel. The author’s multitude of figures and plotlines overwhelms the work, defying any effort to discern a coherent whole. The innumerable incidents, characters, and details stunned readers. In the “Afterword” to Book 3 of The Great Wave, dated 31 December 1961, Li Jieren responded, in a mild and yet unyielding tone, to one of the criticisms from an anonymous reader:

401 Li Jieren, Dabo (The Great Wave), rewritten version, 3 vols. (1958–63; 2012). All subsequent references from the rewritten novel are quoted from this edition and given parenthetically in the text. 402 Zhang Tianyi’s criticism of Li Jieren’s work is noted in Chen Tushou, “Guo-ge-li dao Zhongguo yeyao kumen,” pp. 22–23; see also Ai Lu, “Li Jieren de fengcai,” p. 150. The Road to Perdition 219

A reader has said that there are too many characters in The Great Wave. Some of them have no distinguishable features for the reader to recog- nize. Some of them fade out without a trace just after their brief appearance in the story. This reader asks me: “Can you not write about all these characters of lesser importance? [ . . . ] You don’t have to bother to give them a name.” This reader implies that a novelist should focus only on a few central characters in the novel and that he does not need to pay attention to the minor ones.403

This reader complained that Li Jieren’s writings violated the practice of literary appreciation at the time. In the PRC context, between the 1950s and 1970s, the ‘reader-response’ phenomenon was deeply intertwined with politics and ideology. In the process of rewriting, Li had to deal with commentary from his colleagues and anonymous readers, which represented the voice of the normative literary system that aimed to monitor the writing of authors and the artistic outlooks of literary works. As Hong Zicheng reminds us, this kind of reader response was most probably an extension of authoritative criticism, an ideological construct meant to eliminate the multiplicity of trends in thought, artistic styles, and artistic tastes in literary writing.404 This critical reminder reveals the political subtext and aesthetic norms of contemporary Communist fiction which lay behind the author’s response. Li Jieren’s endeavor to achieve a new panoramic fiction with multiple characters and interlaced plots inevitably digressed from an ideologically-driven and state-sanctioned form of narrative. Communist novels of the 1950s and 60s, as Mau-sang Ng notes, saw the rise of Soviet-inspired fictions featuring a galaxy of ‘positive heroes’ who are “strong, healthy, devoted, selfless and Party- conscious,” and whose life journey “recapitulates symbolically the stages of historical process as described in Marxist-Leninist theory.”405 In Li’s revised novel, in other words, the main characters still failed to conform to leftist stereotypes of intellectuals, the ruling class, and working people. Yet, the rewrite’s overem- phasis on the unfolding of macrohistorical episodes and plotted action can easily sacrifice the characters as they are essentially creatures of the milieu, bereft of individual traits. This is the reason why a contemporary critic faults The Great Wave:

403 Li Jieren, “Afterword” (1961), in Dabo (2012), p. 373. 404 Hong, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, p. 32. 405 Ng, The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction, pp. 280–81; for the Chinese reception of Soviet fiction and the heroic models, see pp. 265–92. 220 CHAPTER 6

Too much concentration on the historical sequences leaves little freedom for the author to concern himself with the growth and development of the personalities of his heroes and a deeper analysis of their psycholo- gies. No matter how real the protagonists may be in relation to their social conditions, they seem to be incomplete and fragmented. We also have the impression that they lack initiative and merely react to external events. If, in a novel, people are to be more crucial than events, and if the growth and development of the characters is to retain as much interest as the unfolding of episodes, Li Jieren does not seem to strike a fair balance between these two major factors in The Great Wave and sacrifices the people to the episodes.406

Evaluating Li Jieren’s trilogy in a positive light, however, Sabina Knight submits a contrastive view that the narrative inclusions of an overabundance of detail and an excessive number of secondary characters critically situate the main protagonists within a deterministic paradigm so as to unveil the power of external social forces.407 Like a cultural historian, Li was more interested in the longue durée of slow-changing facets of native lives hidden beneath restless historical currents. The social panorama may work well to evoke myriads of interlocking events and movements as manifesting the underlying forces at work in the wholeness of history. In a nutshell, the rewrite is as much a contradictory text as the original novel in its struggle to balance the heterogeneous levels of the private human plots and the political experiences in history.

Alternative Pasts with No Future

How do memory and history shift in their respective mnemonic and amne- siac functions against each other in the textual variations of the novel? In the rewrite, most significantly, the promiscuous heroine Mrs. Huang is much ‘purified’ and reduced in her reckless sexual liaisons with men of the gentry class. There is no question that the original portrayal of Mrs. Huang as a pleasure- loving character with complex emotions and psychological strivings shocked conservative critics.408 By subscribing moral decency to the heroine and making her into a symbol of the revolution, however, the revision fatally flattens

406 Ma Sen, rev. of The Great Wave, 1: 120. 407 Knight, The Heart of Time, p. 115. 408 Li Zuoren, “Chaoyue shisu, chaoyue shidai.” The Road to Perdition 221 her characterization, stripping her of much psychological realism in her pursuit of sexuality and equality with men.409 Another major revision of the novel relates to the image of the young intellectual, Chu Yong (Chu Zicai), who undergoes a radical transformation from a wavering anti-hero to a student revolutionary. In Book 2, Chapter 2 of The Great Wave, Chu as a member of the student force joins the Comrades’ Army to battle the Qing forces (2: 40–123). In the military confrontation between the student army and Qing soldiers in Xipu on the western outskirts of Chengdu, the young protagonist fights with bravery and great passion, suffering serious physical injuries. Nevertheless, the battle sequence does not so much valorize individual chivalry or group heroism as demonstrate the protagonist’s dual entanglements with revolutionary idealism and disillusionment. As the battle scene subsides, Chu begins to question the efficacy of revolutionary actions undertaken by a motley crew of student activists and secret society members. Li Jieren did not succeed in creating a larger-than-life heroic figure that could be merged into the currents of revolution without qualms. In the spirit of quotidian realism, however, the novelist suggests that neither young students nor local ruffians comprise the vanguards of real revolutionary forces. Rash and unprepared, the local rebels could hardly possess any lofty ideals or undergo a heroic boost typical of the revolutionary historical novel in Communist China. Through transforming the young protagonist in the rewrite, Li Jieren sought to redeem himself as a ‘progressive’ writer in New China.410 After being condemned as a petty-bourgeois intellectual of the ‘old society’ in the anti-Rightist political storm, Li seemed more earnest about showing his new thought and identity. Tan Xingguo even suggests that “Chu Yong was Li Jieren; Li Jieren was Chu Yong” because the novelist seemingly projected his complex feelings and youthful endeavors onto the protagonist.411 Li erased the cowardice of Chu Zicai and asserted the valor and unconditional sacrifice of Chu Yong. He alle- gorically rewrote his present political predicament into the past revolutionary

409 Li Shiwen also notices that the image of Mrs. Huang in the rewrite pales in comparison with the portrayal of the unconventional woman in the first edition of The Great Wave. See his Li Jieren de shengping he chuangzuo, p. 247. For a comparison of the diverse versions of The Great Wave, see pp. 207–50. 410 Zhong Siyuan suggests that Li Jieren at his old age was eager to rejuvenate his youthful impulses and idealism through the re-creation of the hero. See his “Dabo de chongxie yu Li Jieren de ‘erci geming,’” esp. pp. 101–3. 411 This is what Tan Xingguo told me in our email exchange in 2009. Tan pointed out the meaning of ‘Yong’ (function, efficacy) in the name of ‘Chu Yong.’ He believed that Li Jieren was frustrated and felt diminished by the lack of recognition for his service in public office during his later life. 222 CHAPTER 6 situation, namely, the divide between what the revolution was ideally about and how things really were. Having been himself a student activist and young rebel back in 1911, Li might have nostalgically reenacted the revolutionary fervor of the past in his rewritten novel. But his romantic idealism had to stop where he began, for the principle of historicism required him to stick to the actuality of historical developments in Sichuan, where the revolution had eventually led to further chaos instead of order and harmony. In this regard, readers can sense why Chu Yong’s quixotic pursuit of idealism is again trun- cated by his emotional complex of compassion and frustration about the revolutionary cause. Hence, as a narrative of memory, the renewed writing of The Great Wave differed intrinsically from its peers of Communist nation-building novels that prescribed the rise of Communist revolutionaries or saintly heroes and narrated “what should have happened” ideologically rather than what had happened historically.412 For all the novelist’s efforts to rewrite the male protagonist by thrusting him into historical battle as not just an eyewitness but also a valiant participant, Chu Yong still engages in a love affair with Mrs. Huang. This fact hangs over the ensuing bloodshed and violence of military confrontations in the course of revolution. By recreating a desexualized Mrs. Huang, the rewrite maintains her saintly love with Chu Yong in the private sphere. Li Jieren might have created an incomplete ‘revolution plus love’ fiction in the leftist tradition along the lines of The Song of Youth. In Communist literature and revolutionary hagiography, The Song of Youth serves as a model text of intellectual conversion and political consciousness. Born into a petty bourgeois intellectual family, Lin Daojing overcomes her shortcomings and emerges as the model of revolutionary youth. By revealing the dynamic between eros and politics, the heroine displaces her desire for males by her love of the Party. The revolutionary tale stages her heroic becoming as an exemplar of “the sublimation of libidinal energy into revolutionary ideals.”413 In many ways, Li Jieren never learned to create lofty figures or achieve grandiose stories of revolution; or perhaps in his old age he was simply not attracted to the sublime and make-believe. In the revised novel as in the original, the poignantly dramatized adultery between Chu Yong and Mrs. Huang

412 For an analysis of Communist war novels, see David Der-wei Wang, “Reinventing National History,” pp. 41–43. For the creation of the ‘positive hero’ in Stalinist-inspired Chinese works, see Ng, The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction, pp. 280–88. 413 Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, p. 132. For an analysis of The Song of Youth in the context of the socialist transformation of the intellectuals, see Hong Zhang, “Eros and Politics in Revolutionary Literature.” The Road to Perdition 223 is never resolved or sublimated into revolutionary activism, intensifying the protagonist’s split commitment to social action and the impossible romantic situation. Nor can the textual conversion and re-figuration in The Great Wave bring about an intellectual conversion of the regional author himself, whose insistent explorations of local color, archaic tradition, and social panorama marginalized his idiosyncratic work in the PRC literary canon. Through his quotidian realism Li Jieren continued to resist the lure of grand narratives of revolutionary utopianism, thereby presenting a paradoxical text with skeptical commentaries on the revolutionary spirit of the unruly masses. Adhering to the late Qing narrative mode of social panorama, The Great Wave maps out Sichuan’s regional uprisings on the eve of the revolution as local strife and sporadic riots. In Xinfan County, social unrest is triggered by a trivial incident. (2: 172–77) On his patrol in town the magistrate is irritated by the deafen- ing noise of firecrackers ignited by a mischievous child, who is then arrested by order of the county chief. A ruffian who belongs to the Gowned Brother society stands up to the official order and this in turn sparks mob violence. The infuriated crowds succeed in plundering the yamen office, declaring themselves ‘revolutionaries’ and enlisting local gangs into their military units. In narrating such a haphazard incident (a phenomenon that abounds in the novel), the narrator suggests that when collective rebellions reached a critical point, they culminated in a mass upsurge without the leadership of a revolutionary force or peasant class consciousness. Some Chinese critics have noticed that The Great Wave paints a multifarious pattern of revolutionary developments in Sichuan, recovering the past as it actually happened and thereby conveying a complex texture of history as ‘primitive phenomena’ (yuansheng xiang).414 In Peng County, the commotion arises from a festival day in a communal ritual and opera performance. (1: 327– 30) The wife of the county secretary—a flirtatious woman connected to a high official’s family in Chengdu—attracts attention with her seductive demeanor on stage during the show. Some hooligans mistake her for a prostitute and force her to socialize with the gangsters present. In the midst of the chaos, an infuriated county head orders his guards to open fire on the gangs. The shooting angers thousands of people, who rush into the county office and sabotage the premises. The panoramic novel dramatizes how an accumulation of ‘carnivalesque mass protests’ in specific locales eventually ignites the revolution. It also emphasizes the particularity of local passions and individual strivings in

414 Zhang Zhongliang, “Li Jieren de Xinhai geming xushi,” p. 15. For a brief reassessment of the rewrite of The Great Wave, see Li Yi, “Lishi ruhe ‘xiaoshuo’ ”; Huang Huachang, “Li Jieren sanbuqu yanjiu,” pp. 79–89. 224 CHAPTER 6 counties and villages. The novel’s geopoetics indeed tells us that historical evolution encompasses a number of parallel social processes and actions in distinct places, experienced differently by individual participants in those places. Li Jieren’s rewriting thus continued to challenge a totalizing historiographical discourse by emphasizing the role of unpredictable events in motivating historical change. Furthermore, he did not shy away from recapturing the naked realities of revolution and destruction. His persistent research led him to emplot more traumatic events, plunging the reader into the darkness of history by excavating violence and death on the battlefield. In Book 2, Chapter 7 of The Great Wave, the author narrates in the detached manner of reportage fiction the tragic massacre in Sandushui. (2: 259–94) A band of Qing soldiers led by Chen Jinjiang are transporting ammunition from Chongqing to Chengdu. They are intercepted by a troop of the Comrades’ Army (Tongzhijun) comprising local militias and Gowned Brothers under the command of Sun Zepei. Chen is believed to have switched his loyalty to the revolutionary comrades, and so he orders his imperial soldiers to surrender. But Sun willfully betrays them; his troops effortlessly entrap the Qing soldiers, seize their armaments, and brutally slaughter them. The omnipresent narrator does not focus on the dramatic military action nor try to explain away the devastating human impact of the battle. Rather, a student activist’s eyewitness account gives the reader a focalized and voyeuristic picture of dead bodies with multiple stab wounds and visible signs of torture before death. The discrete episode fulfils no clear causality or ideology of revolutionary warfare, and the battle shows no pattern or predictability of consequence. Are the rebels a righteous force? Are they the legitimate revolutionary subjects driving history to a bright future?415 The author does not seem to think so. In recovering this forgotten episode of mass murder in a close-up shot, the old writer must have been perplexed by the extent to which individual strivings and spontaneous reactions motivate the course of history. The clinically objective reportage of human revenge and butchery smacks of a Zolaesque universe. The lyrical natural environment is changed into the horrific killing field, where humans are seized by their own naturalistic instincts as their action launches an orgy of killing. Naturalism can be perceived in the elaborately descriptive detail of the slaughter; it also manifests the lack of freedom of the revolutionary

415 Historically, Kristin Stapleton points out, as the provincial bureaucracy had been removed from Chengdu in the fall of the Qing, the militarists and secret societies could never gain complete control of the city in post-revolutionary Chengdu. See her “Urban Politics in an Age of ‘Secret Societies’: The Cases of Shanghai and Chengdu,” especially pp. 36–40. The Road to Perdition 225 subjects, whose behaviors are solely dictated by their bestial impulses. If sexuality has been barred from the historical world in the ‘purified’ version of The Great Wave, the looming existence of Thanatos goes in through the back door to figure the degeneration of life in revolutionary Chengdu. Li Jieren’s multi-layered texts weave local agencies (individual, collective, and institutional), public actions, social mores, and communal rituals into his historical place-writing as a form of place-based historical memory. For Maurice Halbswach, history conforms to the external framework of the nation and essentially submerges multiple collective memories and different temporalizations proper to various groups and their local pasts.416 Li’s rewriting of the 1911 events can be seen as an act of counter-memory against the regime’s totalizing national narratives, reinstating the historical uncanny over which the socialization of national history had been written. It is precisely this stubborn place-based identity and problematic notion of national history that I shall explore through the novelist’s renewed concentration on an unlikely main character, Duan Fang (1861–1911), a prominent Manchu official whose fatal encounter with the revolution led to his murder in Sichuan on 27 November 1911. In the early edition of The Great Wave, the death of Duan Fang receives only a passing comment by some of the Chengdu gentry. The rewrite gives a new and extensive dimension to Duan’s provincial excursions before his death.417 Why did the author choose to remember a distinguished official of a vanished dynasty and expose his appalling death? Why should the novelist give so much attention to one of the ‘losers’ of history, someone who was unlikely to arouse sympathy from PRC readers? Li Jieren evidently did not reformulate the narrative to conform to Marxist-Leninist teleology or the tenets of class struggle in Communist revolutionary rhetoric. He instead demonstrates a diverse strategy to expand the novel’s capacity in reimagining the experience of a real historical personage, who acts as a key witness to the uncanny in history inextricably bound up with geography and violence. The textual evolution of The Great

416 As Harry Harootunian remarks, “According to Halbwachs, the discovery of historical memory reflects a process of acculturation aimed at reaffirming the regime of external time and relocating a people within the familiarizing narrative of the nation, more about amnesia than remembering, having the intended effect of smothering the uncanniness associated with collective memory.” Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” p. 492. 417 For the brief treatment of Duan Fang’s death in the old version, see Li, Dabo (1938), 3: 262–63. Duan Fang’s story is fully stretched out in the rewrite of The Great Wave, Book 3, Chapters 2, 5, 7, and 10. See Li, Dabo (2012), vol. 3. 226 CHAPTER 6

Wave not only reveals the instability of the fictional text and its historical representation, but it also encodes the shift of the writer’s attention from Eros to Thanatos.

Untaming the Wild West

In September 1911, the consummate Manchu official Duan Fang was sent by the Qing government to Sichuan to settle the unrest over the railroads. He left Wuchang on 11 September, right after the Chengdu massacre, to head an investigation into the recent events in Sichuan. He brought with him two regiments of the Hubei army as a loyal outside force. Famous for his tact and the ability with which he handled public affairs, Duan Fang would have seen his mission to Sichuan as yet another chance to promote his status in the imperial bureaucracy. Duan Fang was known as a remarkably enlightened and progressive official—for a Manchu—during his term in office. He was particularly well remembered by foreign officials and personnel for his pro-Westernization and anti-violence attitudes. As a political figure, Duan Fang endeavored to adapt himself to the changing conditions of the time.418 He had taken office as super- intendent of the proposed Canton-Hankou-Chengdu Railroad Scheme in the spring of 1911. He had reportedly bribed his way to this appointment after being forced into a brief retirement by his rivals in the imperial court.419 No sooner had he taken up the post in Wuchang in September 1911 than the people in Sichuan rose against the proposal to centralize the railroad in their province. In a brutal game of palace politics, Duan Fang reprimanded Zhao Erfeng for his weakness and incompetence in handling the crisis in Sichuan. In his rivalry with Zhao, Duan Fang now seems to have gained the upper hand; he was given

418 During the Boxer movement in 1900, as acting-governor of Shaanxi Duan Fang earnestly warned the local people to abstain from violence, and saved the lives of many missionaries and other foreigners isolated in the interior. Although as a liberal he was once sympathetic to Kang Youwei and his fellow reformers, he promptly withdrew from their radical anti-dynastic movement to preserve his loyalty to the throne. For a brief historical account of Duan Fang’s involvement in Sichuan’s railroad dispute, see Dingle, China’s Revolution, 1911–1912, pp. 279–304; McCormick, The Flowery Republic, pp. 72–81; and Y.C. Wang, Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872–1949, pp. 270–79; for a recent detailed Chinese biography of Duan Fang, see Zhang Hailin, Duan Fang yu Qingmo Xinzheng. 419 In 1909, Duan Fang was dismissed from office as Governor-General of Zhili as his rivals charged him with showing disrespect to the funeral procession of the Empress Dowager by permitting photographers to take pictures of the procession. The Road to Perdition 227 the rank of Acting Governor-General of Sichuan and entrusted by the Emperor with the task of suppressing the opposition there. Duan Fang must have con- fidently embarked on his excursion to Sichuan with great hope and ambition. Duan Fang could have never anticipated what was going to happen in the next two months, although he surely calculated all the risks involved in the journey. Thus, he disciplined his troops and warned them against molesting the people so as not to incite potential insurrections; he also cautioned his troops against any hostile confrontations with local militias and brigands on the road.420 Duan Fang must even have considered the worst scenario of engaging in internal warfare with the armed forces of Zhao Erfeng, who saw Duan Fang’s arrival as a threat to his position as governor. In any event, the idea that the Qing empire would fall within a few weeks must never have occurred to Duan Fang. He strove to maneuver his way through the crisis and make the most of his adventure. But it was the natural barrier of geography instead of palace politics that fatally deflected his plans and ambitions. As he was sailing up the Yangzi River into Sichuan, his travel was increasingly obstructed by “the sublimity and the risks of the navigation of the Upper Yangzi”421 that deterred his military procession, to quote the words of Isabella Bird, a British woman who traveled widely in western China through the Yangzi basin in the late nineteenth century. In stark contrast to this positive evaluation of Duan Fang in official records, Li Jieren portrays a different image of the historical figure in rewriting The Great Wave. The author laboriously reconstructs the events surrounding the official and delves into detailed descriptions of the figure’s psychological state through his untimely death. With temporal and geographical precision, Li documents the official’s fatal excursion. Duan Fang and the Hubei regiments boarded a Chinese gunboat at Wuchang on 11 September, and arrived at Yichang on 15 September. (3: 56)422 To travel further along the river, Duan Fang’s regiments had to overcome rapids, rocks, and other impediments while navigating sharp bends and curves. Chinese gunboats were not advanced enough to ply these dangerous waters. This difficult stretch of the river was traditionally navigated by specially built native boats towed by haulers. At Yichang Duan Fang and his soldiers were expected to take a newly launched modern steamship, the Shutong lun, which could provide faster means of access to the interior through the famously formidable Yangzi gorges. The powerfully constructed vessel had

420 “Report on Duan Fang.” 421 Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, p. 8. 422 The dating of Duan Fang’s excursions varies slightly in different sources. Here I use Li’s dating (in lunar calendar dates) in the novel as reference. 228 CHAPTER 6 just come into commercial service in 1910. It could cruise from Yichang to Chongqing in sixty-five hours, towing alongside a flat for about three hundred passengers and sixty tons of cargo.423 However, in August the Shutong had run on the rocks near Fengjie in Chongqing, and service had been suspended for six weeks.424 Accessibility of the interior had become a burning political issue for the Beijing government as steamship traffic had been brought to a standstill. The disturbance in Sichuan had placed the imperial power at a great disadvantage. The Qing government and Duan Fang even made urgent appeals to foreign powers (British, French, German) who might have more powerful gunboats patrolling the Yangzi to assist in sending Duan’s armies to Sichuan.425 Eventually, Duan Fang and his detachments were commanded to proceed by forced marches to Sichuan. Some made the overland journey, and some took the river. From the time they left Yichang on 22 September, Duan Fang’s troops took two weeks to reach Wanxian in Sichuan on 5 October. They boarded the Shutong and finally landed in Chongqing on 13 October. Instead of taking less than three days to go from Yichang to Chongqing by steamship, the troops took exactly three weeks without ever making it to Chengdu. In The Great Wave, the narrator hints at the perilous waters and difficult geography that make the troop’s upward passage along the Yangzi extremely risky: “It was the season of big autumnal floods. Swift and turbulent currents rushed along the Three Gorges. It would be tremendously dangerous for any wooden junks to ply the waters, and would produce much delay as well.” 這時，秋汛尚大，三峽中水流湍激，木船行水，不但危險異常，而且也稽延時日. (3: 57) Duan Fang decides that he and a small group of followers are to journey overland, while “the rest of the people and troops, and their baggage and ammunition entirely resort to native junk boats, which are hauled by thousands of men to pull them against the stream.” 其餘人員，行李，軍隊，軍需，全用木船, 憑幾千名縴夫拉上去. No doubt the river voyage is

423 The Shutong was owned by the Sichuan Navigation Co. Ltd. but commanded by Captain Plant, who had persuaded Chinese merchants and officials in Chengdu to build the vessel to provide regular and safe navigation between Yichang and Chongqing. See Plant, Glimpses of the Yangtze Gorges. 424 The China Year Book, 1919–20, p. 33. 425 Letter of Sir J. Jordon to Sir Edward Grey, Beijing, 18 September 1911. The British diplomat’s letter revealed that the Qing government even proposed to Britain to sell a gunboat to the Chinese: “The Chinese, however, feel keenly the great delay which the journey in native boats will entail, and have pressed us to move our Governments to consent to sell them a war-vessel equipped for river navigation, which they could man and place under their own flag.” The Road to Perdition 229 most tortuous, the narrator reminds us, for it is impossible that the soldiers with their heavy armaments could beat the water traffic to make it to Sichuan. Foreign travelers had long mentioned that the most difficult stretch of the Yangzi lies westward of Yichang. As Ernest Henry Wilson observed:

This is the region of the world-famous Yangzi Gorges. Five in number, these gorges extend from the immediate west of Yichang to Kuizhou Fu, a distance of about 150 miles. Throughout this stretch the river flows between perpendicular walls of rock, is narrowed to a third or less of its usual width, and becomes in consequence very deep. . . . The cliffs, composed largely of hard limestone, are 500 to 1000 feet or more high, and commonly 500 to 1000 feet or more sheer. The scenery hereabouts is sav- agely grand and awe-inspiring.426

Other foreigners’ travelogues testified to the fact that the ascent on the river from Yichang westward by native boats was fraught with considerable dangers and accidents. Isabella Bird observed that hundreds of junks and houseboats were wrecked every year.427 Cornell Plant, the British captain of the Shutong, sadly observed that fatal accidents on the upward voyage on the Yangzi were so customary that the junk men themselves evinced an “apparent disregard of human life.”428 Leaving aside human casualties, the sheer toil involved in pull- ing the junks along the river was an anxious sight in itself. A big junk dragged by hundreds of men could make hardly any perceptible progress in hours, as it was hauled inch by inch against tremendous currents. These testimonies help us imagine Duan Fang’s difficult procession and the inhumanly hard and bru- talizing conditions under which the boatmen and haulers labored, especially as the soldiers might have frantically pushed them to speed up. The revised The Great Wave opens with a new scene of conversations among the passengers on board the powerful steamer Shutong—an emblem

426 Wilson, A Naturalist in Western China, 1: 6. 427 Bird remarked: “Of the vast fleet of junks which navigate its perilous waters, five hundred on an average are annually wrecked.” She also noted that there were one thousand rapids and rocks between Yichang and Chongqing in a distance of about five hundred miles. See Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, p. 8. For an earlier account of the dangerous river traffic on the Yangzi, see Archibald John Little, Through the Yangtze Gorges. 428 Plant, Glimpses of the Yangtze Gorges, p. 54. Plant quoted the Chinese estimate: “the total loss of life among the boatmen on the Upper Yangtze (Yangzi) between Yichang and Chongqing averages 1,000 per year.” Based on his own observations, Plant believed that this figure underestimated the case. 230 CHAPTER 6 of modernity.429 In doing so, the novelist underscores the difficult transition of Sichuan society from tradition to modern civilization. A reform- minded intellectual, Zhou Hongdao, who has just returned from studying in Japan, sighs with regret at the sight of the primitive Chinese river traffic: “In the reformist era of the twentieth century, there are still so many wooden junks cruising the Yangzi. How could we stop both the Eastern and Western civilized countries from laughing at us as a diehard, conservative empire?” 二十世紀維新年代，我們川江還有這麼多的木船在行駛，怎不叫東西洋文明國家笑我們是頑固守舊的老大帝國哩! (1: 5) However, most of the common folk of Sichuan are still constrained by their local mindset and do not realize the importance of modern transportation. They seem cynical about modernity. “Though the small steamer Shutong has been running for two years,” the narrator tells us, “it is not quite visible in the minds of most people. As far as the Yangzi River traffic is concerned, what immediately comes to the minds of most people is always the wooden boats that are towed upstream with wire ropes.” 雖然蜀通小火輪已在川江行駛了兩個年頭，但一般人尚未把它擺在腦子裏，只要說到川江交通，大家首先想到的，依然是靠纖繩牽挽著逆流而上的木船. (2: 289) In the novel, the Sichuanese student’s perception of Chinese backwardness vis-à-vis the incursions of Western civilization brings us back to the crisis mentality of turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectuals and writers who championed the complete reformation of the country from its institutions to its technological infrastructure. Readers may be reminded of the sinking ship parable of Liu E in his 1903 novel, The Travels of Lao Can. At the outset of the novel, the narrator associates the Chinese empire with the metaphoric image of “a foundering ship that has recently become unable to navigate outside ‘taiping rizi,’ or the ‘pacific days,’ as the author characterized the period before the West arrived at China’s doorstep.”430 Li Jieren’s literary sensibilities seem still attached to the late Qing ethos of reform and modernity. His views stand in stark contrast to the ideological writing of the Sichuanese revolutionary Wu Yuzhang. A returned student from Japan, Wu wrote about his trip on the Shutong from Yichang to Sichuan in 1911 as an eyewitness account of foreign imperialism. In his memoir, Wu lamented: “But even such a simple vessel was under the control of foreigners. Its technical personnel were foreigners

429 The early version of The Great Wave begins with a geopoetic scene of shadow plays and Sichuan opera shows which Huang Lansheng attends. See Li, Dabo (1938), 1: 1–3. For the new opening in the rewrite, see Li, Dabo (2012), 1: 3–25. 430 Quoted from Huters, Bringing the World Home, p. 2. The Road to Perdition 231 and even the captain was a foreigner. The ferocious captain, with the air of an imperialist, treated the Chinese people brutally.”431

The Road to Perdition

We shall go back to Duan Fang’s story and ponder the historical meaning of his journey. If Lao Can’s boundary-crossings convey a sense of mobility and hope for social transformation initiated by self-righteous reformers, then the resistant geographical boundaries of Sichuan pose a limit to Duan’s movement in time. Against the spatial localities and timelines that trace Duan’s excursions into Sichuan, Li Jieren reveals the dialectics of speed in The Great Wave. On the one hand, the story dwells on the great delay of Duan Fang’s mission. The immensity and inaccessibility of the natural landscape seem to overwhelm and suspend time. On the other hand, it pits primitive river travel against the presence of the modern steamer. The novel further reveals that Duan Fang’s team proceeds on a route through main ports and towns along the telegraph line, where they might expect to keep in more effective communication with Beijing and Chengdu. The poorness of land communication contrasts sharply with the speed of the telegraph. The most advanced long-distance communication technology at the time is not only deployed for confidential diplomatic exchanges; Duan and other high-ranking officials often take advantage of it to acquire the latest information to promote their personal interests and political schemes. The novel exposes intrigues and ‘secret news’ in the upper echelons of Qing court politics, perceptibly written in the manner of the ‘black screen’ novels (heimu xiaoshuo) and social exposés that purported to unveil truths and facts long denied to the public. In Chapter 2, Book 3 of The Great Wave, a flashback recounts Duan Fang’s stay at Yichang and his political calculations as he plans for further action contingent upon confidential information and the latest news about the recent events accessed from telegraphic communication. (3: 56–58) Upon his arrival at Yichang, Duan Fang learns of Zhou Erfeng’s bloody suppression of 7 September, which has abruptly turned the railroad protection movement into mass insurrection. He reckons that it would be dangerous for him to deal with armed uprisings in Sichuan, so he wants to procrastinate until he sees the situation change to his own advantage. He appeals to Beijing to be excused from entering Sichuan on the grounds of his incapability and

431 Wu Yuzhang, Recollections of the Revolution of 1911, p. 113. 232 CHAPTER 6 inexperience in military affairs.432 The Beijing government still pushes him to head for Sichuan, and promises to send more troops from Hubei. What makes Duan Fang change his mind, the narrator confides in us, is a confidential telegram he receives from his son. It urges Duan Fang to go to Sichuan because this appears to be a golden opportunity for him to take the post of governor after the crisis is resolved. As the narrator reports the telegram in a satiric tone, “Now let’s see if his father can rush to enter Sichuan ahead of Cen Sanye (Cen Chunxuan)? If he can do it and then has some success in subjugating the rebellion, who in all likeli- hood will dare to fight him for the lucrative vacancy of Sichuan’s governor?” 現在就看他這位爸爸能不能趕在岑三爺前頭進入四川? 如其能夠，而對敉平川亂又稍有把握，那麼，四川總督這個肥缺，十有八九不怕人來爭奪了. (3: 57) The son’s advice is based on his appraisal of a recent political struggle. He claims that Zhao has fallen out of favor with the imperial court because of his mishandling of the Sichuan problem; at the same time, Cen Chunxuan, a former respected governor of Sichuan who is considered a potential candidate to replace Zhao, does not seem likely to be in good favor with the Qing rulers. The novel’s carefully woven historical facts are seamlessly blended with its imaginative thrust to portray Duan Fang and Zhao Erfeng as crafty political creatures. As soon as Duan Fang arrives in Sichuan in early October, he engages in a vicious attempt to smear his political rival. In Wanxian Duan Fang has warmly entertained petitions from Sichuan’s merchants and gentry, and he diplomatically assures them of an impartial investigation whose results will be reported to Beijing. Duan Fang cannot wait to impeach Zhao, emphasizing that there was no sign of a revolution in Chengdu; he believes that Zhao in his report to Beijing had exaggerated the seriousness of the disturbance with a view to shielding his own faults and boasting of his own merits. In return, Zhao accuses Duan Fang of shying away from a potential revolution in Chengdu, and of cowardice in treating the problem as purely an affair of the railroad. This public altercation in official pronouncements, however, is stripped of its authoritative voice in the novel. Instead, it is rendered as verbal tactics and underhanded tricks used by the historical personages to assault their rivals and advance their own political interests.

432 “Duan Fang has submitted an earnest appeal to the Cabinet in a telegram dispatched on his arrival at Shensi [Shaanxi], in which he frankly admits his incapability, and requests the appointment of a high official who is experienced in military affairs, to face the Sichuan problem.” See “Chinese News.” The Road to Perdition 233

In The Great Wave, the mode of telecommunication with modern (calendar) time registers promises to overcome the isolation of remote local spaces and temporalities. In the deadly tug of war between Duan Fang and Zhou Erfeng, future success is determined by how fast each could access reliable news and information on court politics, and so make timely tactical moves. In his star- tling attention to detail, Li Jieren delivers a little-known episode that overrides the reader’s commonsense understanding. Although Duan Fang is delayed, he is able to stay abreast of the recent political developments in the country telegraphic connections. In contrast, Chengdu has been cut off from all postal and telegraphic communications since 7 September; Zhao is thus terribly disad- vantaged. Even news of the Wuchang revolt on 10 October reaches Zhao somewhat belatedly (2: 338) and indirectly from Duan Fang. When Zhao’s envoy goes to the official ceremony at Chongqing to welcome the arrival of Duan Fang by the Shutong on 13 October, he overhears it and promptly sends a secret telegram to Zhao, who has privileged official access to telecommunication. Zhao learns of the explosive event three days after it happened. To be sure, the effect of this news would be electric if it spread throughout the province. It deals a death blow to Zhao’s original ambition to reinstate his power and governance of Sichuan, since the surging anti-dynastic revolution looks set to tear the country apart. Likewise for Duan Fang, it is hard to tell whether the modern technology that allows him to be informed of the changing events gives him any edge over his opponent. The fall of Wuchang three days before he reached Chongqing has certainly placed him in a bind. He can no longer retreat to Hubei, nor can he advance to Chengdu, which is still under the control of Zhao’s forces. Finally, he decides to proceed on the road from Chongqing to Chengdu. Agitated by the news of Republican victories including the fall of Wuchang, his Hubei soldiers mutiny and join the revolution en route to Chengdu. Duan Fang never makes it to his destination or completes his political venture. He is brutally slain by his own men in Zizhou on 27 November, the day Sichuan declares independence. By virtue of its meticulous realism, The Great Wave illuminates the significance of cultural geography by pushing us to ponder the agency of historical actors as they are conditioned by shifting events, contingent outcomes, geographical circumstances and their cultural meanings. A few contemporary Sichuan scholars have diverged from the revolutionary paradigm to look at the novel from the new perspective of geographical configuration and modern technology. One critic praises The Great Wave for its perceptive description of Sichuan’s transportation and communication networks at the turn of the century, so that the work convincingly offers a ‘veritable historical record’ 234 CHAPTER 6

(xinshi) of a traditional society in the process of change and modernization.433 I argue that the historical novel goes beyond realism to give us a viewing platform on the cultural memory of Sichuan’s topography and difficult communicative routes, shedding light on the locality’s struggle between civilization and savagery, modernity and tradition, mobility and stasis. It fuses fact-based narratives with intricate, variegated imaginative plots to portray the participants’ mentalities and reactions as they are constituted by the contingencies of historical time and space. Duan Fang embarks on a mission to conquer the untamed territories of Sichuan. A conceited Manchu official (as we see him in the novel), his westward movement seems to take him ever backward in time. In the eyes of the condescending official, the remoteness and rugged terrain of Sichuan are recognized as a fundamental impediment to progress. As he reaches the border of southwestern China, he arrives at a symbolic border dividing the world of the imperial ‘center’ of power and the ‘barbarian’ and ‘peripheral’ territories in Sichuan. Elsewhere in modern Chinese fiction, Mao Dun provides a glimpse of the chronotope of the Yangzi River in the opening chapter of Rainbow as a symbolic spatial transition between tradition and modernity. Mei, the heroine, embarks on a steamship to leave Sichuan for Shanghai. She has long hated her isolation and bondage in the interior (Chengdu), and dreams of going to Shanghai, which seems progressive and future-looking to her. As the steamship passes the Kui Pass, the last ‘gate of darkness,’ and heads eastward for Shanghai, Mei is relieved that she has at last got away from the “meandering, narrow, dangerous, mazelike route” of the Yangzi basin and is set to “enter the broad vast world of freedom” in Shanghai!434 Mei leaves, in other words, exactly where Duan Fang’s western journey begins. His story ends where Mei takes her departure. For the leftist Mao Dun and perhaps for many Chinese writers in general, Chinese modernity takes on an ideological homology between the teleology of history and spatial configuration. Shanghai is the place of frantic speed and flashy modernity, whereas Sichuan is the peripheral interior of stasis and conservatism. As Li Jieren harks back to the past and persists in writing about Sichuan ‘back then,’ his work becomes increasingly strange to the cultural geography and literary imagination of modern Chinese literature. How shall we understand his handling of space and time? Lyman van Slyke takes the longue durée of the Annales school to task in reading the particularity of Chinese geographical and

433 See Xie, “Cong Dabo kan Qingji Sichuan jiaotong jindaihua.” 434 Mao Dun, Rainbow, p. 12. The Road to Perdition 235 historical spaces. Van Slyke reasserts the importance of events and individuals that could have a decisive impact on the tides of history. To explicate the richly loaded symbolic meanings of the Yangzi in Chinese cultural history, he adds the notion of ‘remembered time’ to Braudel’s implicit ideas of ‘natural time,’ ‘social time,’ and ‘eventful time.’ Like all great geographical phenomena in the world, van Slyke emphasizes, the Yangzi has constituted complicated historical spaces and temporal planes in its geographical configuration. In Chinese history, “layers of time and memory lie like geological strata deep upon the land,” and the ‘Long River,’ as the Yangzi is called in Chinese, powerfully sum- mons “memories, attitudes, emotions, symbols” in the ever-flowing stream of cultural pasts and remembrances.435 In light of van Slyke’s insights, the Yangzi and the world of Sichuan, both as natural geographical realities and sites of collective memory, also provide temporal lenses with which to contemplate Duan Fang’s tragic end and Li Jieren’s rendering of it. The formidable landscapes of the interior may instinctively remind Chinese readers of the Tang poet Li Bai’s (701–762?) famous “Shu dao nan” (The way to Shu is hard), in which the poet laments the difficult nature of land travel to Sichuan: it is much harder than scaling the sky or ascending to heaven. The legends of the Three Kingdoms following the breakup of the Han dynasty in the late second century AD, especially as refracted through popular histories and the Ming vernacular novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, also provide particular historical understandings and symbolic meanings of the Yangzi River and Sichuan for Chinese readers. It was in the middle Yangzi that the most pivotal events of the Three Kingdoms era took place. Thanks to its unique geographical isolation from the heartland of China and its defensive topography, the ancient Shu territory (present-day Sichuan) was characterized by a strong separatist tendency and remained a hotbed of political chaos throughout Chinese history. As the saying goes, “Shu always precedes other regions in causing tumult and is the last in the world to accept imperial governance” (天下未亂蜀先亂，天下既治蜀後治).436 Seen against this history, Duan’s march to Sichuan is actually a very challenging wager. The historical memory of the Three Kingdoms period still vividly lingers in the mind of Duan.

Furthermore, you Sichuanese are prone to fear of authority without virtuous character. During the era of the Three Kingdoms, the military

435 Van Slyke, Yangtze, p. 3. For a critique of Fernand Braudel’s concept of the longue durée, see Daileader and Chichester, eds., French Historians, 1900–2000, pp. 62–76. 436 Quoted from Hongjie Wang, Power and Politics in Tenth-century China, p. 25. 236 CHAPTER 6

commander Zhuge governed Shu with severe measures. Today people still remember this. Is it not a good precedent? Besides this, can anyone come up with a better strategy to bring peace to Shu? 何況四川人畏威而不懷德，三國時候，諸葛武侯治蜀以嚴，民到於今思之，豈不是個好例? 除此之外，還找得出什麼更好的定蜀方策來呢? (3: 58)

The novel portrays Duan Fang as overconfident. In taking over Sichuan, he would either resort to military force to subjugate the rebels or employ a conciliatory policy to win over the hearts of the people. The Great Wave is very likely modeled on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms in narrating the feuds between Duan Fang and Zhao Erfeng. Both of the Qing officials are real historical figures who appear in the novel as utterly depraved and aggressive political creatures.437 Duan Fang may well be influenced by the traditional concept of cyclical, dynastic time as he ponders the chance of grabbing provincial power. By giving substantial character description and psychology to the historical figure, the novel hence generates an ironic sense of anachronism. Engrossed in the ‘remembered time’ in the historical space of Sichuan, Duan Fang is unable to look beyond the past and is totally blind to the advent of modern eventful time with the emergence of the new republican nation in late 1911. His ambitions look merely ephemeral as they are enacted against the indifferent and everlasting forces of nature and geography. In addition to reimagining the western voyage and political venture of Duan Fang, Li Jieren takes us on a journey into the soul of the man during his last days by rendering his psychological change transparent to us. That this was important to Li is clear from his other writings at the time. In December 1961, shortly after he finished Book 3 of The Great Wave, Li wrote an afterword in which he held an exchange with his readers on the portrayal of Duan:

As for the legendary figure Duan Fang, I have spared no effort to write about him. In depicting his image and psyche, I have barely tried to put the narrative indirectly through someone else’s eyes or mouth. Yet I am always aware that in writing about this figure, I should not make the narrative too wordy or cumbersome, nor should I divert from the typical- ity of the figure’s action only to focus solely on his psychological development.

437 Liu Zaifu argues that The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is an encyclopedia of political tricks intrinsic to Chinese political culture. See Liu, A Study of Two Classics, pp. 115–42. The Road to Perdition 237

對於那個風雲人物端方，我便沒有放鬆過一筆. 從他的形象，到他的內心，差不多沒有借重另一個人的口，和另一個人的眼，敍述他，描繪他. 雖然我隨時注了意，在寫這個人的時候，不要寫得冗長、臃腫、甚至離開典型活動，而孤獨地寫他心理變化. (3: 372)

The novelist seems to be responding to the criticisms of the earlier parts of The Great Wave for failing to give a deeper analysis of character psychology and development. The critical world in Sichuan had favorably appraised the successful depiction of Duan Fang in Book 3, but they gave a wrong ideological explanation. For instance, in the earliest response, written in 1962, Yan Gang considered that the narrative description of Duan Fang’s designing mindset and political intrigues convincingly turns the protagonist into the common enemy of the people and the revolutionary parties, hence upholding the historical necessity of his demise.438 This kind of politically correct criticism persistently misreads Li Jieren’s realistic style and its merits of historical recall. For one thing, Li shows no propagandist purpose of demonizing the figure or affirming the historical inevitability of his failure. Instead the novelist is as much concerned with the existential fate of the individual as with caricaturing how his ambition, fear, and wickedness begin to alienate him from outside reality. Let me explicate how Li’s particular realistic ‘style’ achieves the effect of denoting historical verisimilitude in a hyperbolic manner by imagining a historical figure he had never encountered personally. In terms of narrative structure, the story of Duan Fang is presented in four separate chapters. Each gives a snapshot of his journey in the May Fourth fashion of modern fictional construct, emplotting the protagonist’s slice-of- life experience in a brief span of time and placing him at different geographical points along the route. It begins in Chapter 2 with Duan Fang’s arrival at Chongqing with a grandiose official reception ceremony, followed in Chapters 5 and 7 by his departure on 5 November for Chengdu. It is during his journey from Chongqing to Zizhou that he begins to realize the political situation is worsening as the city of Chongqing and other provinces revolt (Chongqing declared independence on 22 November). Chapter 10, the last in Book 3, presents Duan Fang’s last days in Zizhou, where he is executed in a mutiny. The movement and changing state of mind of the character, temporally dated and spatially located in the four chapters, corresponds to four chronological seg- ments of his progression. The journey is narrated with an irony that directs the reader to look at each principle turn in the figure’s fast-changing relationship

438 See Yan Gang, Xiaoshuo chuangzuo tan, pp. 177–84. 238 CHAPTER 6 to the milieu on a microscopic scale. As Duan Fang proceeds westward, he begins to find himself entrapped in a geographical impasse as well as a historical deadlock. The meaning of Sichuan for him has also changed from being a desirable destination of desire with a fantastic potential of power to a dystopian land of wilderness and danger. Why does the novel begin with Duan Fang’s arrival at Chongqing? Chapter 2 reenacts a scene where local officials throw a flamboyant reception ceremony for the commissioner as Duan takes the Shutong steamer and lands at the Chaotianmen pier, the traditional landing place of imperial governors and a site for local officials to receive imperial decrees. In flashback narration, we realize that Duan Fang already knows about the Wuchang Uprising, but he is not yet worried. More importantly, in his trip from Hubei to Sichuan, he is much heartened by his advisors’ suggestion he should capitalize on the present rebellion in Sichuan to take the territory in hand. He has been contaminated by the idea of grabbing more political power. With a tinge of sarcasm, the Chongqing episode is intended to unveil the folly of human conceit. The narrative reveals the protagonist’s mentality through describing the exterior environment and background. Li Jieren recreates the historical figure as ordinary people would have perceived or recollected him—a self-serving public official dazzled by vanity and illusory power. In a crucial sense, the novelist does not so much reveal the interiority of character as an idiosyncratic individual; instead, he constructs a collective image of Duan Fang in terms in which the reader—or more likely Li and his posterity—would want to see him and remember him. Ironically, this theatricalizing treatment in the narrative in no way aggrandizes the personage but rather leads to the diminishing of the figure as a satirical embodiment of corrupt officialdom and human folly. Noteworthy is the fact that Duan Fang in his own time was much favored by the reformist writer Li Boyuan. In Chapter 60 of A Brief History of Enlightenment, Governor Ping Zheng is a thinly disguised model of Duan, who is depicted as a modest, open-minded, and far-seeing official, and above all, the public pillar of a rejuvenated and modernized China in the future. Half a century later, Li Jieren extravagantly changes his representation from a virtuous governor to an imbecile official engaged in villainy and foul play. Li Jieren shares with his late Qing predecessor the acknowledgment of Duan Fang as an enthusiastic connoisseur of Chinese antiques, calligraphy, painting, and arts. But even this intertextual commonality takes a satiric turn in The Great Wave. The narrator confides that Duan Fang has actually come to Sichuan to look for more cultural relics and treasures for his personal collection. “For this The Road to Perdition 239 elegant and cultured high-ranking official, taking the post of governor is just a part of his purpose of coming to Sichuan; he also has an intention to collect some antiques there.” 這個風雅大員，他來四川的目的，除做總督以外，還有一個，便是要在四川搜集一些古董. (3: 242) The informed narrator, who sounds humorous and sardonic, seems to be whispering to his reader and poking fun at the character. In Chapter 7, Book 3 of The Great Wave, the novelist focuses on an intense buildup of psychological tension in Duan Fang. At Zizhou, he begins to realize the worsening situation of the empire. The neighboring provinces have declared their independence one after another; worse still, in Zizhou he has been cut off from telegraphic connection with the central government, and the lack of information only heightens his panic. He is trapped literally in the middle of the road as much as he is thrown into a sticky dilemma politically. His plan for taking Chengdu is preempted by Zhao Erfeng, who releases Pu Dianjun and other captured gentry leaders who are going to establish a new republican government in Sichuan. Then Duan Fang realizes that the Hubei troops feel no loyalty to him and they are not willing to march with him further into unfamiliar territory. It is not feasible to force his way to Chengdu to engage in military confrontation with Zhao’s army. Return to Hubei is impossible because it has already been lost to the revolutionaries. For Duan Fang, the decision to go forward or stay becomes a life-or-death choice. As he wavers, the figure shows no capacity for reasoning on his own. Duan Fang is portrayed as a confused and shallow person who can think only in the words of his advisors. He finally adopts the advice to continue on to Chengdu, but first to send envoys to Zhao and make compromises. In a judg- mental tone, the third-person narrator comments on the character in a somewhat hysterical state: “Duan Fang actually has turned into just another hesitant and mediocre official” 端方竟自變成另一个患得患失的俗吏了. (3: 243) The omniscient narrator continues to weave his judgments into the story, and wants the reader to remember an incompetent official who is swayed by his advisors in the last days of his life. As the historical figure is stripped of his capacity for inner thoughts, readers can only see and understand him from the outside. But it is precisely the opacity of the character that drives readers to think deeply about the vagaries of life. His soldiers, who are anxious to return to their home province of Hubei, decide that his head might prove their loyalty to the revolutionaries. Duan Fang is doomed. The historical novel hence expresses human agency through psychology and irony by projecting the individual as imprisoned within a destiny and an alienating environment over which he himself has little control. 240 CHAPTER 6

Geography and Violence

“The murder of Duan Fang was one of the saddest features of the whole unrest,” a historian has remarked.439 No different from any other traumatic event, Duan Fang’s death has generated many versions of the story, which are in themselves deeply confused and contradictory. Accounts of foreigners who had entertained Duan Fang tended to believe that the official had attempted to escape from Sichuan after he learned that over half of China had rebelled against Manchu rule; another version put it that the official wished to return to Manchuria to pay his respects to the emperor. In both cases Duan Fang is said to have sought to make terms with his soldiers and offered them money for his safe release. It was unfortunate that the soldiers quarreled over Duan Fang’s inadequate offer and resorted to murder.440 Other popular accounts generally circulated among the Chinese provided a political explanation of the event and they, of course, tried to place Duan Fang’s elimination in the logic of revolutionary discourse. One version went that Duan Fang planned to spearhead an independence movement with his troops in Sichuan, but another asserted that the revolutionaries had actively plotted the mutiny in Zizhou so as to speed up the anti-Qing revolt.441 Commenting on the interrelationship between geography and narrative in European historical fiction, Franco Moretti notes, “Treason is there in all great historical novels.”442 Moretti suggests that whereas the hero’s adventure takes place along external frontiers, the narrative of treason is more often associated with internal borders. This is because national and local loyalties are confused on internal borders, and so subversion or betrayal can easily become the central theme to show the bitter conflict in the subject between nation and region. In the tragic expedition of Duan Fang, the imperial subjugation of the locality is frustrated, and insurgence and violence arise symbolically in the transition from empire to nation. Foreign observers were shocked at the news of Duan Fang’s decapitation by his soldiers and they condemned the act as barbaric. Some of them remembered Duan Fang for his courage and defiance in meeting his death. When Duan Fang refused the soldiers’ appeal to declare against the Manchus, they bowed his head for decapitation. Again Duan Fang refused to kneel, and his

439 Dingle, China’s Revolution, 1911–1912, p. 304. 440 “The Death of Tuan (Duan) Fang”; McCormick, The Flowery Republic, pp. 78–80. 441 For the various popular Chinese versions, see Zhang Hailin, Duan Fang yu Qingmo Xinzheng, pp. 542–48. 442 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, p. 37. The Road to Perdition 241 head was struck off as he stood erect.443 For most Sichuanese people at the time, Duan Fang must have appeared as a proud and loyal Qing official who stood for the dying Manchu regime. Nevertheless, the Sichuanese revolutionary Wu Yuzhang in his memoir asserted Duan Fang’s cowardly behavior before his death. He stated that Duan Fang abjectly implored his soldiers to spare his life. He shamelessly lied to them and said that his family had been Han Chinese only four generations ago, hoping that might avert his soldiers’ anti-Manchu revulsion.444 The brutality of beheading their Manchu leader notwithstanding, the revolutionaries’ later behaviour was even more gruesome. Duan Fang’s brother, who attempted to save him, was cruelly slain. According to a foreign source, the Hubei soldiers carried the head of Duan Fang on their way home, passing from city to city. During the next month the soldiers continued to steal Duan Fang’s personal belongings, including his foreign decorations, and sold them in Chongqing. “Photographs of his head with his two executioners standing beside it could be purchased in the street,” and probably this was how the news of Duan Fang’s death reached the streets of Chengdu.445 Against the multiple rumors and stories surrounding Duan Fang’s death, it is instructive to contemplate the novel’s retelling of the event as a vital means of history-making. Li Jieren strives to fold up the narrative ending of the historical figure to cope with the various claims to truth in the polyphonic novel. The narrative evades melodrama by not mentioning any plot to escape or cowardly appeal in face of execution. Rather it hints at an existential crisis of the protagonist when he is confronted with the unknown. Confronted by impending death, Duan Fang behaves as if he had not foreseen it. When he is dragged out of his bed to the hall by his soldiers, one of them suddenly stabs a sword in his chest. The assault happens so quickly, almost out of the blue, that a bleeding and perplexed Duan Fang could only ask in puzzlement: “Do you really need to kill me?” 你們真要殺我嗎? (3: 368) The unemotional but sudden killing of Duan Fang underplays the death scene by giving us neither a terrified figure begging for his life nor a noble character defying death. Duan Fang’s question shows that he is dumbfounded. His unexpected demise deprives readers of the possibility of reflecting on the cause and rationale of a series of occurrences that leads to the particular outcome. Though the narrator shies away from directly describing the macabre dismemberment of the executed, the detached recounting of the soldiers’

443 Service, ed., Golden Inches, pp. 127–28. 444 Wu Yuzhang, Recollections of the Revolution of 1911, p. 123. 445 McCormick, The Flowery Republic, pp. 78–80. 242 CHAPTER 6 wrapping up of the victim’s decapitated corpse in a matter-of-fact manner chills and disturbs the reader more deeply and suggests the inscrutable terror of revolutionary violence. Likewise, Duan Fang is stripped of his ability to make his last theatricalizing appearance on the historical stage or offer a vale- diction to his implied audience like a Shakespearean character such as Othello. Revolution and violence, as ungraspable phenomena that temporally suspend human rationality and social order, have rendered the eminent figure a mere victim at the mercy of brutal renegades. Hence by allowing readers to overhear Duan Fang’s last words—or an existential query as to why things should end up this way—the novelist draws his reader to ponder the (lack of) meaning of all the chaos and killings. Significantly, in Book 3 of The Great Wave the story of Duan Fang’s death does not really come to an ideological denouement or ‘end’ with the success of the uprising. There is certainly a rhetorical heightening of the revolution when the hall is filled with the noise of the soldiers cheering and chanting ‘Long Live the Revolution’ after the execution of the official. The novelist does not give closure to Duan Fang’s story on a high revolutionary note. When news of his decapitation reaches Chengdu, we overhear the conversations of Zhao Erfeng and Zhou Shanpei, who, despite being Duan Fang’s rivals, are still struck by his horrible death. We also overhear the gossip of anonymous voices in the community: “The revolution is really horrible! The revolution is really horrible!” 革命真可怕! 革命真可怕! (3: 370) In Li Jieren’s polyphonic fiction, the voices of the characters and people are always juxtaposed contrapuntally in their quarrels, debates, and gossip. Li Jieren tried to cope with the political imperatives he faced at the time of his rewriting by rendering all closures as open-ended; the structure of the novel remains multivoiced and multileveled. Readers sense the pressure of the historical voices of the Communist epoch impinging upon Li’s work. They might compare the novelist’s fear of the past with that of the present politicized environment, or even expose the similarities of past and present in terms of their collective violence, populism, or anarchy. Acclaiming the Russian novelist Dostoevsky’s polyphonic poetics, Bakhtin notes, “Dostoevsky seeks words and plot situations that provoke, tease, extort, dialogize.”446 The merit of the polyphonic novel, Bakhtin argues, lies in its fundamental plurality of unmerged consciousness and automatic human viewpoints to provide a counterpoint to the systematic monologic framework of a single worldview. Even when the author writes under conditions of ideological conflict, the polyphonic novel allows him to elude the strict ideological

446 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 39. The Road to Perdition 243 conformity imposed by the time. Bakhtin’s insight may well illuminate the problems and resistances of Li’s realistic style. In The Great Wave, by virtue of the communal gossipy voices, the manipulating narrator intends his reader to revisit the past from the perspective of the common people, albeit a past shrouded in a chain of occurrences rendered as obscure and impenetrable. The imaginative voice of the folk exclaiming at ‘the horror’ of the revolution reminds readers of the evil in the hearts of humans, counterposing the inevitable revolutionary emplotment of the novel. Why is the author so obsessed with remembering a renowned imperial official and exposing his appalling death? The renowned scholar Wang Guowei (1877–1927) wrote a lengthy poem in 1912, titled “Shu dao nan” (The way to Shu is hard), modeled after Li Bai’s famous poem. Wang’s text broods over the traumatic killing of Duan Fang in an attempt to purge the pity and fear aroused by the inexplicable cruelty of the event.447 It should be noted that Sichuan was the only province in which the revolutionaries killed the imperial viceroy. Zhao Erfeng, who had already agreed to a peaceful handover of power to the new republic in the hope of restoring a semblance of order in Chengdu as well as saving his own position in the new regime, could not even save his own life. On 22 December Zhao was arrested in Chengdu on the charge of inciting disorder and plotting a coup d’état. He was dragged through the streets to the front of the old imperial palace situated in the middle of the city. The story goes that on the execution ground the young revolutionaries demanded that Zhao confess. Zhao did not yield and was decapitated, leaving as his last words: “Baby! If you want an old man’s head, you can have it!” (“娃娃! 你可以把老子殺了吧!”)448 Sichuan took a decisive turn for the worst as order broke down. In the immediate post-revolutionary period, the province descended into anarchy, and outlawry and slaughter became rife.

No Country for an Old Man

Li Jieren’s realistic style and counter-ideological retelling of Duan Fang’s demise lay bare the question of historical causality and individual freedom. Does history have a purpose? Is there a plot with which the figure is fated to be caught up? Tolstoy’s radical irony of history may shed light here. In Book 9 of War and Peace, the narrator meditates that great men are not the causes of history but actually puppets of unknown forces they cannot escape, no matter how

447 See Bonner, Wang Kuo-wei, pp. 147–48. 448 Combe, “Events in Chengtu: 1911,” pp. 17–18. 244 CHAPTER 6 eagerly they try. Napoleon, the very exemplar of a pompous world leader who believes that his actions can change history, becomes its most ludicrous victim. ‘History’ ceases to be an account of the past and emerges as a force in itself, Hayden White explains, at the point it is revealed as the hidden manipulator of the destinies of both individuals and nations.449 Tolstoy states that it is not the conscious actions of heroes but rather the private lives and unaware strivings of ordinary people which further the true course of historical development. The historical experience of Duan Fang as the novelist retells it captures something of the Tolystoyan idea of the unaccountability of history. Despite being a consciously acting hero positioned at the forefront of history, Duan Fang has no way to gauge the future as he embarks on his deadly historical journey. History confronts him as a series of incomprehensible and unexpected occurrences working against his wishes and commands. Mixing archival facts with fictional speculations, the author’s imaginative involvement in the psyche of the figure at once arouses in the reader contradictory sentiments of hatred, farce, and even bitter sympathy. Not unlike his historical protagonist, Li Jieren was perplexed by the haziness of the future. China had yet to become a modern nation. Li’s historical novel had yet to solve the teleological conundrum of infusing national aspirations into the local realities of war and military tyranny. In Perry Anderson’s words, the spirit of verisimilitude drove the novelist to depict “not the emergence of the nation, but the ravages of empire; not progress as emancipation, but impending or consummated catastrophe.”450 The first time Li Jieren wrote The Great Wave in a predominantly satirical tone; there was no explicit mention of deaths or human casualties. But the second version was quite obsessed with scenes of mortality and manmade tragedies. His two emplotments of history seem to reverse Karl Marx’s remark in the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte “that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”451 The retelling of the events in The Great Wave presents military mutiny, vicious fighting, and gruesome murder as omnipresent and mundane occurrences in the course of the revolution; and as such the traumatic memory of violence begins to test the limits of literary representation. David Der-wei Wang claims that the

449 Hayden White, “Against Historical Realism.” The classic explanation of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history is Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox. Conversely, Lukács criticized Tolstoy’s idea of history for his emphasis on the effects of unconscious human motives and unin- tended action on history. See Lukács, The Historical Novel, pp. 86–87. 450 Perry Anderson, “From Progress to Catastrophe,” p. 28. 451 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 15. The Road to Perdition 245 savage practice of beheading one’s enemies on the battlefield obsessed writers of the late Qing and May Fourth generations alike, and that decapitation has turned into the ‘primal scene’ in narrative memory and the monstrous imaginary haunting both individual and national psyches.452 For Julia Kristeva, through reading stories of decapitation, “a humanity possessed by the urge for death and terrorized by murder acknowledges that it has, in fact, arrived at a fragile and overwhelming discovery: the only resurrection possible may be . . . representation.”453 The glaring brutality of decapitating Duan Fang and the sanctioned violence of mass slaughter in warfare recall the reign of terror in the French revolution when the crowds called for royalist and aristocratic blood to be spilt and their heads guillotined. In Duan Fang, Li Jieren depicted a tragic figure with individual psychological flaws (as against a monolithic state ideology that viewed the historical figure as a class enemy). Like his protagonist, Li faced the unknown in the midst of grand historical transitions. Shuffling back and forth between literature and politics, the author was not insensible to the perilous political circumstances and contingent events that surrounded him. Incapable of understanding the development and rationale of revolution, Li seems to have perceived himself as an ineffective idealist and reformist, shedding his pessimistic evaluation of the past as well as the future. Lacking the foresight to predict what lay ahead, the author most likely wanted to revisit the past to look for the wisdom of hindsight, or simply the irony of the past. The fictional revisionism in The Great Wave should be considered as the author’s repeated act of writing against the totalizing Communist rhetoric of hero-making and simplistic portrayals of popular revolt over official injustice. Li Jieren could have followed other Communist writers of the period in replicating the popular narrative format of The Water Margin; in valoriz- ing the classical novel as the ur-text for peasant rebellion, PRC writers turned the traditional virtue of sworn brotherhood into new codes of fraternity and comradeship in portraying their Communist heroes.454 The gory episodes in The Great Wave nevertheless occasion a deconstruction of the revolutionary tale, in which human solidarity and altruism transform into their opposites: it is human corruption and treachery, merciless revenge, and hysterical murder that reign supreme in extraordinary situations. The author cast doubt on the picture of grand, impersonal historical force; rather, he inscribed the geohistorical texture of the place into his panoramic narrative, not omitting everyday villainy, human intrigue, and pompous lies.

452 David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History, pp. 15–40. 453 Kristeva, The Severed Head, n. pag. 454 David Der-wei Wang, “Reinventing National History,” p. 42. 246 CHAPTER 6

His revisionist tales of violence can be seen in the context of literary allegory. Critics have speculated that a growing awareness of the ‘people’ as ferocious and destructive mobs in the rewrite are contingent upon the novelist’s own experiences of the political turmoil in his later years, when Li Jieren and his friends bore witness to the mass violence and bloodshed following the anti- intellectual movements in Chengdu in the 1950s.455 This may account for why in the last parts of The Great Wave, the novelist described scenes of violence, death and wounds, conveying a sense of helplessness and an environment in which a peaceful life is impossible. History is associated with grotesquery and disintegration; individuals are swallowed up by rioting mobs and bandit behavior, whereas any actual uprisings degenerate into revolutions running amok. Benedetto Croce’s dictum that every historical inquiry should have a contemporary interest provides a good reference for Li’s case.456 Novel writing and rewriting have become a form of emotional catharsis for the historical novelist, who designs new narrative strategies to adapt to conditions of extreme insecu- rity and contingency and to accommodate the horror in history. Li Jieren’s longing for completed fact in conjunction with fictional narrativity is significant given a social-political context in which official history was actively shaped by an ideological imaginary. In practice, the socialist realist writers of the PRC took ‘reality’ to mean success stories of the revolution or of the economic and social engineering of the 1950s. Partaking in the Chinese tradition of literary rewriting, however, Li’s unremitting efforts cast a haunting shadow over old and new projects of novel writing, which purport to replace historical totality with fragments, and eventful certainty with contingency. Reclaiming his personal vision of historical truths, Li paradoxically spells out a modern skepticism of historical ideology or ontology. As Daniel Little puts it, “there is no such thing as coherent, logical, orderly, causally structured human history. Instead, all there is, is a congregation of separate threads, processes, contingencies, actions, choices, ideologies, and freakish accidents that ultimately do not add up to a coherent whole.”457 In lieu of giving an explanation of events or their ideological causalities, Li’s historical fiction composes a holistic picture that amounts to the ‘deconstruction’ of the revolution in favor of a de-totalized vision of realities.

455 Zhong Siyuan, “Dabo de chongxie yu Li Jieren de ‘erci geming,’” p. 114. 456 Croce claims that “only an interest in the life of the present can move one to investigate past fact.” A past deed or event must vibrate in the “soul of the historian.” See his “History and Chronicle,” quoted from Curthoys and Docker, eds., Is History Fiction?, p. 92. 457 Daniel Little, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History, p. 51. The Road to Perdition 247

figure 6.1 “The Ship of State in China.” From McCormick, The Flowery Republic, p. 48.

figure 6.2 A native boat sailing against the rapids through the Yangzi gorges. Photograph taken by Luther Knight in 1911. Courtesy of John E. Knight. 248 CHAPTER 6

figure 6.3 Plank trails built along a cliff in Qutang Gorge. The picture shows part of the craggy landscape and the tough routes taken by boat trackers, walkers, and sedan carriers along the Yangzi River. Photograph taken by Luther Knight in 1912. Courtesy of John E. Knight.

figure 6.4 A 1930s Shanghai advertisement promoting steamboat travel on the Yangzi. From Woodhead, The Yangtsze and Its Problems, n. pag. Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending

The cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) has famously questioned the ability of generalized historical narratives to interconnect with microhistorical realities. Criticizing Arnold Toynbee’s (1889–1975) vision of macrohistory, Kracauer comments, “Toynbee’s suggestion of a merger of the bird’s-eye view [of macrohistory] and the fly’s-eye view [of microhistory] is in principle unfulfilled. The two kinds of enquiry may co-exist, but they do not completely fuse: as a rule, the bird swallows the fly.”458 For Kracauer, history is nonhomoge- neous in structure: “the fact that such macro realities are not fully traceable to the micro realities going into them—that interrelated events at low and higher levels exist, so to speak, side by side—is by no means an uncommon phenomenon.”459 Kracauer explains this paradoxical situation in terms of what he calls the law of perspective and levels of human generalizations. “As we ascend pro- gressively higher over the historical terrain, events and situations begin to blur and their full particularity is lost; different patterns emerge at different altitudes.”460 Kracauer cautions historians that there is no smooth and seamless traffic between microhistory and macrohistory, or between particulars and universals in a philosophical sense: “It is doubtful indeed whether the truths of the highest generality are capable at all of rousing the particulars they logically encompass. These extreme abstractions crystallize into statements so wide- meshed that the particulars—a series of historical events, or so—cannot but drop through the net.”461 Kracauer’s warning also illuminates a predicament inherent in writing historical fiction. His viewpoint has been used to defend a historical novelist like Walter Scott, “whose fiction is fundamentally informed by a desire to preserve the remnants of Scotland’s past,” and who should be regarded as a “collector” of history for redeeming aspects of the past from oblivion.462 This is also a valid judgment on Li Jieren’s antiquarian interests and novelistic projects. For Li, the critical problem lies in how to shape the infinitely varied facets of the everyday life of the past into a seamless structure of novelistic narration. Do the discrete particulars of quotidian existence lend themselves well to the narrative exposition

458 Kracauer, History, pp. 127–28. 459 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 460 Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction, p. 47. 461 Kracauer, History, p. 102. 462 Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction, p. 47.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292666_008 250 Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending of political events and the national macrohistory conventionally dealt with in historical novels? Yet, the pursuit of a view that encompasses both the bird and the fly, that is to say, a fictional narrative that can shuttle between the close-up of individuals and local groups and an analytical description of history as a whole, presents an epistemological conundrum for Li Jieren. In Ripples on Dead Water and Before the Tempest, Li shows himself to be a realist and chronicler of everyday life. He seeks to weave history into the fabric of daily life—its routines, unimportant details, and chance encounters. History sneaks into the mundane private worlds of the characters in such a way as to create dramatic tensions in which the destiny of the individual is entangled in pervasive historical forces. The novelist puts historical facts and the real personages ‘off stage’ to fore- ground fictive human dramas and social lives in their interplay with historical currents. The progression of grand political events and the private lives of individuals are simply rendered ‘side by side.’ In composing The Great Wave, Li Jieren displays technical virtuosity in bridging the gap between the specifics of microhistory and the generalities of macrohistory. In both its old and new forms, The Great Wave is a multilayered narrative interweaving historical documents and naturalistic descriptions of social minutiae with a great multitude of characters (real and fictive) and plots. The intricate narrative threads render the characters’ actions and thoughts against the historical backdrop of the Republican Revolution in Sichuan. The writing of The Great Wave seeks to zero in on real historical happenings and the momentous events that brought the revolution to fruition. Why does the novelist adopt this new and difficult approach? To choose a known moment surely puts the author’s imagination on a tighter rein. The challenge for Li Jieren lies in how to employ characters and plotted action to dramatize historical events and illuminate salient aspects of a historical milieu. Li never gives up his attempt at creating a form of panoramic fiction to encompass the macrohistorical process as well as to redeem micro-realities of local pasts. A close reading of the two versions of The Great Wave further reveals a multifarious composition of literary devices, narratological voices, and figurations of numerous fictive and real historical personages. To establish the veracity of individual episodes, the author inserts historical documents known to the public (government announcements and telegrams, newspaper editorials, and propagandist pamphlets of the time) in the text to faithfully document ‘macrohistory,’ alongside naturalistic representations of social minutiae and the actualities of quotidian life to reconstruct ‘microhistory’ in a near-reportage tone. Running down the scale of social and human particulars, an all-knowing Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending 251 narrator acts like a passionate ethnographer, bringing the reader into Chengdu’s popular teahouses, local theaters, famous temples, public parks, and private chambers to observe how these places incarnate the experiences and aspirations of local people. The putatively objective voice of the narrator in describing social milieu and historical factuality quite smoothly interweaves with the fictive voices of the main protagonists who are core social members planted in different walks of life. Through these various narratological positions, the novel construes the het- eroglossic local communities and agencies with native accents, representing their microhistorical experiences in constant contestation with the macrohistorical developments as spelt out by the ‘official’ voice (represented by government documents and the reported speeches of high officials). The historical universe and human drama are subject to the active maneuvers of the narrator, who plays mixed roles as a reporter, a commentator, or an eyewitness, at times expressing his individual standpoints and opinions. How is the memory of Chengdu people conveyed and sustained in historical fiction? Li Jieren is burdened with a double mission in writing The Great Wave. Treated as complex social texts and native-place writings, Li’s novels are affectively concerned with local color, social texture, urban everydayness, and particularly the unique mentalities of Chengdu people with their shared memories of the most disruptive moment in their life experience. Focusing on his lifelong striving after an independent outlook based on his own experience, erudition, and memory, this study highlights the novelist’s search for a writing mode that portrays local realities as multidimensional and microhistorical configuration of the past. Yet, Li Jieren passionately writes the historical novel also as a testimony to history in order to delineate the development of events and cultural impact against diverse records and personal remembrances of the events. To what extent does Li intend to turn memorial narratives into History? I argue that the rewriting of The Great Wave is best viewed not through—or not only through— political and ideological prisms. It was the politics of memory and poetics of place-writing that drove the historical novelist to keep writing and rewriting The Great Wave from the 1930s to 1960s. Ultimately the writer’s epistemological and aesthetic conceptions of historical storytelling informed his revision. This study has attempted to put Li Jieren’s immense compositional task in the context of his broader intellectual concerns about the conflicting claims to historical truths and values embodied in subjective memory, fictive imagination, and empirical objectivity. The writer on the one hand sought to chase the shadows of objectivity and truth by collecting historical documents and gathering eyewitness accounts about the local events like a historian; on the other 252 Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending hand, as a novelist his actual practice had to play against the impetus of subjective imagination and creative freedom. For him, fictional rewriting transformed itself into a labor of love that strove to reveal the past in its entirety, and in which the artistic imperative of a novelist converged with the vocation of a historian.463 This compulsive return to the local historical events of national importance is indicative of the politics of rewriting initiated by the author in radically revising his old work. It raises issues of historical representation centered on reliability, verisimilitude, and totality as the writer strives to integrate individual memory, collective experience, and factual records into fictional texts. The writer engages in a most compelling way with the politics of writing home in his resilient effort to liberate the local from the macrohistorical homogenizing currents, renegotiating between local experience, actual knowledge, and national dogma in his singular ordeal of novel writing. Li’s insistence on illuminating local destinies alongside macro-events contributes to his idiosyncratic style of historical fiction that problematizes and decenters the nation from the point of view of the distant province. In her autobiography The Crippled Tree (1965), Suyin Han (1917?–2012) called Li Jieren “the most reliable witness” in her interviews with him on the revolutionary history of Sichuan.464 She quoted Li as saying, “The Revolution of 1911 captured me, and I found myself unable to go forward or back from that event.” For Li, “the 1911 Revolution had been so all-compelling that the creative work had become centered around it.”465 He was also sensitive to the dilemma of inscribing the past experience in words.

You call me eye-witness to revolution; yet what man sees a great turbu- lence such as a revolution in its wholeness? That is why always man seeks to midget greatness to his own size, enclosing a landscape on a sheet of paper, trees and rocks, a mountain and a lake, in a miniature rock garden,

463 As Li Mei described her father’s painstaking research in rewriting The Great Wave, Li Jieren “concentrated his efforts on reading various works, (both) Chinese and foreign, reexamining the relevant historical materials, checking facts, interviewing people, and soliciting comments from the readers.” See Li Mei, “My Father Li Jieren,” p. 24. 464 The Crippled Tree is a family history and autobiography by Suyin Han, born Elisabeth Chow to a Chinese father and Belgian mother in China’s Henan province around 1917. The autobiographical novel covers the years 1885 to 1928 and hence touches upon the revolutionary changes in 1911, which her father and the older generation of her family went through in Sichuan. Han visited Chengdu in the 1950s to collect the accounts of people who had experienced the 1911 Revolution. 465 Ibid., p. 306. Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending 253

thus giving his heart noble amplitude without feeling overwhelmed. As a writer I am aware of this, and how inexact all words are to represent reality. Especially the reality of a revolution, which seems to give normal time a shove, so that one lives with the feeling of never catching up with events, of having to run hard, hard, merely to remain in place. So much happens, and I have not yet come taut with time myself, I am still bemused, trying in my mind to order the past decades, for only last week it seems it was 1911.466

Li Jieren articulated fundamental questions concerning the capacity of historical narratives to retrieve the past faithfully, accurately, and holistically. At the same time, he had faith in the novel’s potential to transcend one’s individual vision and experience to attain a picture of the revolution “in its wholeness.” Li was still “bemused” by the event—its unprecedented impact, its sheer complexity and incomprehensibility. “An event is ‘historical’ precisely in the extent to which it is new, original, unique, singular, which is to say, initially unclassifi- able,” writes Hayden White, and therefore demands an explanation “not only of its singularity but also of its continuity with the other events that made up its context.”467 In taking on the historian’s mantle, Li hoped the rewritten novel would explain to his readers what had happened in the past. The novelist’s increasing drive to find out the ‘underlying’ causes of history is rooted in the cognitive desire of a historian to present intelligible stories of a historical event. In his interview by Suyin Han, Li Jieren expressed his frustrated longing to reconstruct the inchoate human experience and real historical occurrences into a historically coherent set of accounts. Historical events do not necessarily have the neatness of a ready-made story or pattern as human action and plot are represented in the formal and thematic model of narrative fiction: epic, tragic, comic, or farcical.468 All historical writing thus entails the tidying up of messy and opaque experience into a neat order and clarity. Li’s remark adum- brates the incongruity between the writer’s call for correspondence, which aims at capturing the past in its full reality, and an equally strong suspicion about the reliability of verbal forms in recreating the historical world. In rewriting The Great Wave, the novelist encountered an insurmountable problem in conceiving the canonical events and explaining their transition from one stage to another. He sought to reconstruct the origins and evolution

466 Ibid., p. 214. 467 Domanska, “A Conversation with Hayden White.” 468 See Hayden White, “Historical Pluralism and Pantextualism”; “Storytelling.” 254 Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending of events and invest them with causations and interrelationships in the process of the “retrospective assignment of historical meaning.”469 He perceived the early 1930s version as incomplete because the outbreak of the Sino- Japanese War had impeded his original scheme of writing. Literary revisionism indeed allowed the author to renarrativize the past. Still, the difficulty for him lay not only in the paucity or inaccessibility of recorded evidence. The novelist had to resort to historical imagination in his narrative excursions into the elusive social lives of individuals and groups, the unrepresentative fringe that has largely remained anonymous in history. In his epilogue to the second volume of The Great Wave (rewritten version), Li Jieren stressed the inextricability of political events and social life and trends.

Can you depict the political transformations without writing about the changes in people’s lives and thoughts? Can you depict the pulsating movements of people’s lives and thoughts without writing about the political and economic evolution of society? One has to depict the entire era, so that others can grasp an authentic picture of history through the efforts of one’s pen.470

Crafted to restore the ‘aura’ of a bygone era, The Great Wave exhibited the author’s sensitivity as a cultural historian to excavate daily habits and individual thoughts against the backdrop of disruptive political change. In such exemplary works as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and Natalie Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), cultural historians have turned to the novel’s literary devices for inspiration in order to represent in a pleasurable manner newly uncovered aspects of everyday reality. Li Jieren’s apologia strikes a similar chord. He carefully examined the enduring structure of daily life and social customs in order to give meaning to the revolutionary events of short duration. The novelist’s concern with quotidian human existence and social mentalities also coincides with the interests of European writers like Scott, Balzac, Hugo, and Flaubert, who saw themselves as historians of manners and everyday life. Conventional political history stops where the undocumented and private worlds of everyday people elude the historian’s understanding. The realm of fictional practice opens up such subterranean history by means of the writer’s inventive and speculative interventions to create characters and actions in literary form. For modern-day readers, Li’s mammoth

469 Cohen, History in Three Keys, pp. 8–9. 470 Li Jieren, “Afterword” (1959) to the second volume of The Great Wave, in Dabo, 2: 756. Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending 255 historical work perhaps can be more pleasurably read as a book of social manners, which conceives history as the aggregates of the individual experiences of ordinary people rather than as impersonal forces imposed by an abstract view of the historical process. The novelist’s impossible mission—writing out a ‘complete’ version of history to one’s fullest satisfaction—resembles what Ann Rigney has termed ‘imperfect histories’ in her study of nineteenth-century European historical writing.471 For historians, Rigney reminds us, “this paradoxical state of being overextended and yet unfinished would seem to be endemic to representation of the past.”472 The tension between the historian’s search for totality of representation and the paradoxical state of imperfection is apparent in Li Jieren’s problem in writing historically. By attempting to give a complete account of all the causal relations and interactions between microphenomena and major events, the historical novelist is writing “an impossible book, so long as to be unreadable, a Borgesian Library of Babel.”473 The two versions of The Great Wave are complex works each in their own right. The core of this study probes the dialectics of repetition and recollection that constitutes the novelist’s continuous act of rewriting on both personal and collective levels, and rethinks the interplay of remembrance and forgetting, transgression and repression in fictional revisionism as the new aesthetic authority had yet to claim discursive power over local histories. We can treat the textual variants of the novel as two separate big books, written as they were in different moments and under different ruling regimes with diverse contents. In this sense, the novelist indeed twice retold the same events under varying political situations. A never-ending oeuvre, The Great Wave generated enormous problems in reading and interpretation. The controversy over interpreting the texts derived not only from the monumental scale of the work, but also from the fact that the novels contained many contesting voices, which in their own ways negotiated the fictive, the historical, and the realistic imperatives imposed by a new aesthetic regime on fictional narratives toward the end of the writer’s life. When the rewrite of The Great Wave came out in the late 1950s, critics contended that the novel satisfied neither their literary tastes nor conformed to the usual reading practice of Mao-era literature and culture. Orthodox PRC readers questioned the ability of the panoramic novel to bear witness to (macro) history. Maintaining his peripheral position, Li Jieren refused to succumb to

471 Rigney, Imperfect Histories, p. 60. 472 Ibid., p. 60. 473 Ibid., p. 64. 256 Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending these normative judgments or to any master narrative. In response to the claim that the huge number of characters caused the novel to fail to illuminate historical events and meaning, Li pointed out the distinctively formal strength of prose fiction in capturing the past.

There are plenty of examples in European literature of long novels that treat only a few major characters and their activities, such as [Miguel de] Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Alexandre Dumas’s [Le comte de] Monte-Cristo, and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. The writing method of these works could only be suitable for their respective subjects. But such works as David Copperfield by the English novelist Charles Dickens, or Travail (Labor), one of the four classics by the great French realist master Émile Zola, were written in very different ways. To take one more example, can we ask Tolstoy to write War and Peace in the same way as he wrote Resurrection? No, this is impossible because (the vastness of) the subject in Tolstoy’s novel should demand a different aesthetic scheme. In this case, our Chinese classical long novels, such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Golden Lotus, are also good examples that do not need mention here. Let me point out Wu Jianren’s Eyewitness Reports on Strange Things from the Past Twenty Years. If Wu only wrote about a few major characters and their activities, could he still achieve his purpose of reflecting the myriad, strange spectacles of the human world?474

Drawing on Western and Chinese long novels for his defense, the writer insisted that massive literary narratives in both literary traditions offered a viable model for The Great Wave to narrate the vast quantity of historical materials and personages in representing the past.475 The extensive fictional narratives were formally capable of articulating the magnitude and complexity of the historical process. Like a cultural historian, Li Jieren perceived history as the playing out of individual lives, each assuming their peculiar private existence. Burdened with an overabundance of discrete particulars of

474 Li Jieren, “Afterword” (1961), in Dabo (2012), p. 373. 475 Zhang Yiqi reckons that there are altogether about 500 characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace; the rewrite of The Great Wave has approximately the same number. For a study of Li’s rewrite and figuration, see Zhang Yiqi, “Dabo de shiqing xushi yu lishi xushi.” Chinese critics have identified over 600 characters in The Scholars, 800 in The Water Margin and The Golden Lotus, and 975 in The Dream of the Red Chamber. See Moretti, “The Novel,” p. 117. Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending 257 microhistory, however, Li strove to represent complex historical materials by means of stylistic devices and structural designs of prose fiction. The novelist’s compulsion to revisit and rewrite the historical events testifies to his desire to write alternative microhistories: therefore, his novel was criticized for its indulgence in exhaustive depictions of social mores and native customs and the lack of a concrete social analysis of its many characters. Politics always exists within literature as a valid or even threatening force in the course of historical retelling. Looking back at Li’s subtle debate with his readers during his painful rewriting process, we come to understand the strained relationship between the author and his audience in the public realm. Furthermore, Li Jieren’s admiration of Tolstoy’s artistic virtuosity tells profoundly about his conception of the great novel in relation to history and temporality. The formal peculiarities of War and Peace—its massive plots, episodic quality, slow pace, absent ending, and a lack of main ideas and exceptional heroes—was tantamount to Li’s fundamental norms of narrative art. Gary Saul Morson argues that Tolstoy’s War and Peace offered a conceptual challenge to prevailing deterministic and otherwise closed views of time and history. In Tolstoy’s work, ordinary and undramatic events are not just important; they also “constitute the only important events in the chain of historical causality.”476 For Tolstoy, history is made up of countless, small daily actions, whose motives and cumulative effect one cannot understand. No single system of thought or ideology can fit a specific fictional narrative in all its multiplicity and hetero- geneity. Li’s artistic assertion on style bears much resemblance to a Tolstoyan emphasis on historical fiction’s creative potential, and his neglect of ideology is similar to Tolstoy’s suspicion of any macrohistorical claim to explain away the accidental or randomized aspects of historical reality. Morson’s analysis of War and Peace as rejecting Marxist views of the historical process in favor of humanist descriptions of ordinary people throws light on Li Jieren’s dilemma in his continuous revision of The Great Wave. This study examines the formalistic and ideological issues of Li’s rewrite by delineating the conflict between two visions of historical time: the teleological (Marxism and Maoism) and the more randomized, the former informed by historical inevitability and the latter by contingency and chance. In Li’s art of fiction, history is not perceived as the outcome of conscious individual engagement but rather is presented as an external occurrence in ‘the way things are.’ Li’s novels are not just historical documents of prosaic detail and historical breath but are also imaginative texts that allow the writer to “explore the epistemological

476 Morson, Hidden in Plain View, p. 126. 258 Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending implications of setting human experience within the context of larger social and historical dynamics.”477 Li Jieren resorted to the roman-fleuve as a dynamic narrative scheme to capture the diachronic interactions between macro-events and micro-realities. We can perhaps regard the novelist as weaving the multiple fictional-historical strands into a long-running and ever-growing structural whole of a river- novel written over several decades, and interrogate the old and new versions together as an intrinsically ‘imperfect’ historical novel. The sprawling river- novel permits the writer to place a limitless aggregation of lesser and contingent processes, events, moments, and personages in an encompassing scheme, bringing to light the mental worlds of local subjects within the tangled skein of actions. The expansiveness of the roman-fleuve grants the author a powerful tool to recount the slow and contingent passages of local events into the quotidian existence of the provincial city. Ever growing and extending, Li’s rewritten oeuvre could continue without arriving at any definitive version of historical representation.478 It is never closed and can admit of many plausible versions and reinterpretations whenever new perspectives and interests are brought to bear upon the text. In this sense, the serial feature of the river-novel not only complicates closure but also thwarts teleology and the illusion of progress in historical storytelling. For Li, the boundless world of everyday life demands a compatible form of series fiction, which allows him to emphasize the centrality of place. Place, understood in this study as a geopoetically specific locale as well as its temporal and humanistic extensions, is inextricably intertwined with local histories and communal memories. I consider Li Jieren as a storyteller who offers an alternative form of the historical novel as microhistorical configurations of a place of memory in opposition to a hegemonic politics of memory, which increasingly claimed its discursive authority over local stories according to the shifting political, moral, and aesthetic paradigms in the PRC. The evolving textual production of The Great Wave offers us a critical lens with which to observe an engaged writer’s resilient efforts to maintain his dedication to

477 Knight, The Heart of Time, p. 115. 478 In his later life, Li Jieren role model expanded from the French masters to include the Soviet author, Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84). Sholokhov’s epic And Quiet Flows the Don (published in four parts between 1928 and 1940) was about the civil war in the Don Cossack region. Written under the influence of Tolstoy, Sholokhov’s historical novel can be considered as a Soviet form of the roman-fleuve. Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending 259 historical reconstruction and rhetorical freedom in the face of heightening political and ideological demands on literary writings. The novel inevitably has been contested as a site of memories and histories. Whereas the fictional thrust in the historical novel is apt to generate memory narratives of lived experience and everydayness in the social world, the historical imperative of the genre seeks to impose an interpretive model on the unfolding of history in schematic divisions of epochal change. The dynamic textuality of the historical novel contributes profoundly to our understanding of an historical event in the making with the expression of multiple temporalities and unstable memories. The study reconceives the writer’s dilemma not only as an individual case but also as an example of the universal interaction between writer and ideology, memory and self-identity. It is only by reconsid- ering politics within the realm of fictional-historical representation that we can understand the unusual commitment of the marginal writer to writing the local past under oppressive literary conditions. Li Jieren’s historical rewriting is double-edged; it authenticates as well as de-humanizes history itself. Disillusioned by political realities, the writer desired to compose foundational stories, emplotting alternative detours to utopia in his backward-looking novel. Transcribing the past for a collective group could be read as an endeavor to reconstruct fragments of the past in creating the image of the new nation. Yet his intention to craft forward-looking historical fiction was soon defeated as he plunged into the horror of the past, in which the arbitrariness of human affairs and violence overpowered him. Individual ethical reasoning and choice-making are not abstract entities but are situated in changing conceptions of time and sociopolitical circumstances. Sabina Knight tells us that “accounts of moral experience are linked to portrayals of time” (particularly in the highly controlled context of the PRC).479 Li Jieren undertook the mission of rewriting against tumultuous political situations stretching across the early phase of cultural liberalization to that of vehement ideological restrictions on literature. The fear of ‘anachronism’ loomed over the writer’s last years when he was always anxious about lagging behind his time and so sought ways of catching up with the prevailing ideological ambience. His daunting rewriting project demonstrates how human agency and literary creativity were connected with individuality, locality, and state power, as the novelist struggled to be an autonomous agent writing out the paradoxes of textuality and historicity.

479 Knight, The Heart of Time, p. 6. 260 Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending

What does it mean for a historical novelist himself to be caught up in a momentous historical crisis? The native writer determined to document the histories of his place has been turned into a ‘historical figure’ himself, manifested in the complex historical ‘texts’ of PRC politics and the buried layers of local memories in Sichuan-Chengdu. This study serves as a testimony to the singular but revealing path of an independent regional author, whose literary and political experiences illuminate broader issues of modern Chinese writers’ commitments and resistance and creative tactics in historical remembrance and rewriting. Li Jieren was a misfit—it is not easy to pigeonhole him into our normal intellectual taxonomies: a Marxist humanist or radical, one of the May Fourth literati, a traditionalist or conservative, a dissident or conformist. In a Lukácean vision, Li could be regarded as a ‘typical’ figure—he was not an eccentric type, but certainly not an average person—swaying on the currents of history that so engrossed his creative energy and affected his own life. At the last stage of his life, Li Jieren chose to go back to his desk, sitting in solitude and inscribing his words with a traditional Chinese writing brush. He dreamed of drawing a holistic canvas of his world, in which he had inhabited many conflicting but committed identities as a journalist, a restaurateur, an ethnographer, a city administrator, a member of the native elite, and above all, a political actor and a writer. The writer did not allow failing health to keep him from exerting his historical imagination, or to prevent him from writing. Writing had become a heroic enterprise for him, an act of defiance against the odds of history. Unable to locate his own place in the new era, Li Jieren found his sense of ‘homeliness’ in novel writing, a redemptive act that staked out his vision within the cracks and limitations between the private and the political. What allowed him intellectual space and individual freedom was the shifting writing strategy developed through the novel as the viable ‘site of memory’ with its power of mnemotopia. Pierre Nora’s claim of a place-based and individu- ally initiated historical memory captures Li’s lifelong endeavors. As a society’s memory is exteriorized and deliberately preserved by the state in the official sites of archives, museums, memorials, anniversaries, and histories, the individual feels an increasing need to interiorize it and forge his or her identity by historicizing personal memory. The individual is responsible for this will to remember, interpret, and narrativize the past, responding to the call for the dignity of historical writing.480 For Li, was history a nightmare or simply a dream from which he could not wake up? With metahistorical irony and the

480 For a discussion of the individual as a moral and epistemological agent of collective memory, see Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory.” Conclusion: No Sense of an Ending 261 benefit of hindsight, Li’s rewriting demonstrates that reshaping the past and changing a foregone conclusion do not so much negatively violate the truth value of sacred texts as exercise the novel’s ability to grow and evolve in—and respond to—time, to celebrate contingency and uncertainty for the possibilities thereby granted, and to defeat the sense of historical inevitability and fore- closure of the future.

Appendix

Translations by Li Jieren

Novels and Novellas

Da-ha-shi-kong de feifei 達哈士孔的狒狒. Translation of Tartarin de Tarascon, by Alphonse Daudet. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1924. Madan Bo-wa-li 馬丹波娃利. Translation of Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1925. Xiao wujian 小物件. Translation of Le petit chose, by Alphonse Daudet. 5th ed. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1928. Furen shujian 婦人書簡. Translation of Lettres de femmes, by Marcel Prévost. 5th ed. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1931. Wenming ren 文明人. Translation of Les civilizes, by Claude Farrer. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1934. Nülang Ailisha 女郎愛里沙. Translation of La fille Elisa, by Edmond de Goncourt. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1934. Ren xin 人心. Translation of Notre Cœur, by Guy de Maupassant. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1935. Sa-lang-bo 薩郎波. Translation of Salammbô, by Gustave Flaubert. [Shanghai]: n.p., [1936]. Danshen guniang 單身姑娘. Translation of La Garçonne, by Paul et Victor Margueritte. Chengdu: Zhongxi, 1944. Bide yu Luxi 彼得與露西. Translation of Pierre et Luce, by Romain Rolland. Chengdu: Renyan, 1945.

Short Pieces

“Gan si” 甘死. Translation of “Un mort volontaire,” by François Coppée. Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 (Short Story Monthly) 13, no. 8 (August 1922): 8–13. “Xieyang renyu” 斜陽人語. Translation of “Dialogue au soleil couchant,” by Pierre Louys. Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 (Short Story Monthly) 13, no. 12 (December 1922): 15–20. “Hejie” 和解 (“Conciliation”). Translation of section from Lettres de femmes, by Marcel Prévost. Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 20, no. 8 (April 1923): 119–30. 264 appendix

“Zhonggai” 忠蓋 (“Dévouement”). Translation of section from Lettres de femmes, by Marcel Prévost. Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國 (Young China) 4, no. 3 (May 1923): n. pag. “Enhui” 恩惠 (“Grace”). Translation of section from Lettres de femmes, by Marcel Prévost. Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國 (Young China) 4, no. 3 (May 1923): n. pag. “Fannao” 煩惱. Translation of “Tourments,” by Henri Lavedan. Shaonian Zhongguo (Young China) 4, no. 4 (June 1923): n. pag. “Huo” 火 (“Au feu”). Translation of section from Lettres de femmes, by Marcel Prévost. Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國 (Young China) 4, no. 6 (August 1923): n. pag. “Jiuguan zhong” 酒館中 (“In the tavern”). Translation of section from Lettres de femmes, by Marcel Prévost. Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國 (Young China) 4, no. 7 (September 1923): n. pag. “Xixue” 戲謔 (“La Blague”). Translation of section from Lettres de femmes, by Marcel Prévost. Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國 (Young China) 4, no. 9 (January 1924): n. pag. “Xinchun” 新春 (“Nouveau printemps”). Translation of section from Lettres de femmes, by Marcel Prévost. Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國 (Young China) 4, no. 9 (January 1924): n. pag. “Chong” 蟲. Translation of “L’insecte,” by Paul Margueritte. Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 (Short Story Monthly) 16, no. 1 (January 1925): n. pag. “Lihun zhihou” 離婚之後. Translation of “Après le divorce,” by Paul Margueritte. Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 (Short Story Monthly) 16, no. 5 (May 1925): n. pag. “Nülang Ailisha” 女郎愛里沙. Translation of La fille Elisa, by Edmond de Goncourt. Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 23, no. 8 (25 April 1926): 105–16; 23, no. 9 (10 May 1926): 109–24; 23, no. 10 (25 May 1926): 113–34; 23, no. 11 (10 June 1926): 113–26; 23, no. 12 (25 June 1926): 115–39. “Bide yu Luxi” 彼得與露西. Translation of Pierre et Luce, by Romain Rolland. Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 (Short Story Monthly) 17, no. 6 (June 1926): 10–42; 17, no. 7 (July 1926): n. pag. “Gongguoer de ‘Nülang Ailisha’ yuanxu” 龔果爾的《女郎愛里沙》原序. Translation of Preface to La fille Elisa, by Edmond de Goncourt. Wenxue zhoubao 文學周報 (Literature Weekly) 4 (November 1928): 189–91. Works Cited

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Ah Q 阿 Q “Ah Q zhengzhuan” 阿Ｑ正傳 Ai Lu 艾廬 Ai Wu 艾蕪 An Lushan 安祿山 Ba Jin 巴金 Bashu 巴蜀 Baofeng yuqian 暴風雨前 Baofeng zhouyu 暴風驟雨 Baowei Yan’an 保衛延安 Bayue de xiangcun 八月的鄉村 Beijing 北京 Bikou 碧口 buerqiaoya 布爾喬亞 Cai Xingshun 蔡興順 Caizhu de ernümen 財主底兒女們 caizi 才子 caizi jiaren xiaoshuo 才子佳人小說 Cao Juren 曹聚仁 Cao Yu 曹禺 Caodi 草地 “Caomu pian” 草木篇 Caotang si 草堂寺 Cen Chunxuan 岑春煊 Cen Sanye 岑三爺 “Chabeili de fengbo” 茶杯裡的風波 Chang Qu 常璩 Changan 長安 “Changong daguan” 鏟共大觀 changpian xiaoshuo 長篇小說 Chaotianmen 朝天門 Chen Jingji 陳敬濟 Chen Jinjiang 陳錦江 Chengdu 成都 Chengdu ribao 成都日報 Chenzhong bao 晨鐘報 Chongqing 重慶 292 chinese glossary

Chu Yong 楚用 Chu Zicai 楚子材 Chuan Bao 川報 cubao 粗暴 Dabo 大波 Dacheng 大城 dahe xiaoshuo 大河小說 Dai Zhili 戴執禮 Deng Yaogu 鄧么姑 Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畫報 “Difang yu wenyi” 地方與文藝 Ding Ling 丁玲 dipifeng 地皮風 Dongda jie 東大街 Du Fu 杜甫 Du Fu Caotang 杜甫草堂 Du Pengcheng 杜鵬程 Duan Fang 端方 Duanmu Hongliang 端木蕻良 Duanwujie 端午節 Duyuan jie 督院街 Ershinian mudu zhi guaixianzhuang 二十年目覩之怪現狀 fa yangcai 發洋財 “Fanzheng qianhou” 反正前後 Fei Ming 廢名 Feng Zhi 馮至 Fengjie 奉節 fengshui 風水 fengtu hua 風土畫 Fengtu zazhi 風土什誌 Fu Caiyun 傅彩雲 Fu Longsheng 傅隆盛 Fuqin de huayuan 父親的花園 Gansu 甘肅 Gelaohui 哥老會 geming 革命 geming jia lian’ai 革命加戀愛 geming lishi xiaoshuo 革命歷史小說 gongmin 公民 Gu Tiancheng 顧天成 chinese glossary 293

Guanchang xianxing ji 官場現形記 Guangdong 廣東 Guangling chao 廣陵潮 Guangxu 光緒 Guangyuan 廣元 Guangzhou 廣州 guo 國 Guo Moruo 郭沫若 Guoyuancheng ji 果園城記 guozhong de yixiang 國中的異鄉 guren shehui 古人社會 guxiang 故鄉 “Guxiang” 故鄉 Han 漢 Hankou 漢口 Hanzhong 漢中 Hao 郝 hao baobei 好寶貝 Hao Dasan 郝達三 Hao Yousan 郝又三 heimu xiaoshuo 黑幕小說 Hen hai 恨海 Henan 河南 hengduan 橫斷 Hengliu 橫流 Hong 虹 Hongdengzhao 紅燈照 Honglou meng 紅樓夢 Hongqi 紅旗 Hongri 紅日 Hongyan 紅岩 “Huaijiu” 懷舊 “Huang Cheng” 皇城 Huang Lansheng 黃瀾生 Huang Taitai 黃太太 Huayang 華陽 Huayang guozhi 華陽國志 Hubei 湖北 huidao huiyin 誨盜誨淫 huixiang 回想 294 chinese glossary

Hulan he zhuan 呼蘭河傳 Hunan 湖南 Ji’e de Guo Su’e 飢餓的郭素娥 Jia Baoyu 賈寶玉 Jia 家 jianghu 江湖 Jiezhou 階州 Jin ping mei 金瓶梅 Jituan zhixia 急湍之下 “Jiuzhang” 舊帳 Juehui 覺慧 kai pao 開炮 Kang Youwei 康有為 Kui 夔 Kuizhou Fu 夔州府 Lao Can 老殘 Lao Can youji 老殘遊記 lao Chengdu 老成都 Lao Lan 老懶 Lao She 老舍 Lei Bing 雷兵 li 里 Li Bai 李白 Li Boyuan 李伯元 Li Hanqiu 李涵秋 Li Jieren 李劼人 Li Jieren shuo Chengdu 李劼人說成都 Li Longji 李隆基 Li Mei 李眉 Li Shihua 李詩華 Li Shiwen 李士文 Li Yuancen 李遠岑 Liang Qichao 梁啓超 lianluo xiaoshuo 聯絡小說 Liao Guanyin 廖觀音 Liao Jiumei 廖九妹 Liehuo zhong yongsheng 烈火中永生 Lijiazhuang de bianqian 李家莊的變遷 Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 Lin Daojing 林道靜 chinese glossary 295

Lin Huiyin 林徽音 Lin Shu 林紓 lingchi 凌遲 Lingke 菱窠 Linhai xueyuan 林海雪原 Liu E 劉鶚 Liu Sanjin 劉三金 Liushahe 流沙河 Lu Ling 路翎 Lu Maolin 陸茂林 Lu Xun 魯迅 Lu You 路由 Lu Zuofu 盧作俘 Luo Guangbin 羅廣斌 Luo Lun 羅綸 Luo Shu 羅淑 Luo Waizui 羅歪嘴 Mancheng 滿城 Mao Dun 茅盾 Mao Zedong 毛澤東 Mei 梅 Miao 苗 min 民 mingshi 名士 minqi 民氣 Minsheng 民生 minzhong 民眾 Mu Shiying 穆時英 Mudan ting 牡丹亭 Niehai hua 孽海花 Ningqiang 寧強 Pan Jinlian 潘金蓮 paoge 袍哥 Peng Fen 彭芬 Peng Lancun 彭蘭村 Peng Xian 彭縣 Ping Zheng 平正 Pu Dianjun 蒲殿俊 Qian Xian’ai 騫先艾 Qin Nan 秦柟 296 chinese glossary

Qingchun zhi ge 青春之歌 qingong jianxue 勤工儉學 Qingyang Gong 青羊宮 Qu Bo 曲波 Quan Hansheng 全漢昇 qun 群 Qun Bao 群報 Qutang 瞿塘 Renmin Gongyuan 人民公園 Renmin ribao 人民日報 Renmin wenxue chubanshe 人民文學出版社 Renxin 人心 Rui Cheng 瑞澂 S.C. Yang 楊少荃 Sai Jinhua 賽金花 Sandushui 三渡水 Sanguo zhi yanyi 三國志演義 Sha Ting 沙汀 Shaanxi 陝西 “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日記 “Shafei riji dier bu (weiwan gao)” 莎菲日記第二部 (未完稿) Shanghai 上海 Shaocheng 少城 Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國 Shaonian Zhongguo xuehui 少年中國學會 shehui xiaoshuo 社會小說 Shen Congwen 沈從文 Sheng Xuanhuai 盛宣懷 Shi 蝕 Shi Tuo 師陀 Shi Zhecun 施蟄存 Shiji 史記 shishi 詩史 shiye jiuguo 實業救國 “Shizhong” 示眾 Shu 蜀 “Shu dao nan” 蜀道難 Shu Xincheng 舒新城 “Shui” 水 Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 chinese glossary 297

Shutong 蜀通 Shutong lun 蜀通輪 Shuwa 暑襪 Sichuan 四川 Sichuan baolu tongzhihui 四川保路同志會 Sichuan baolu tongzhihui baogao 四川保路同志會報告 Sichuan baolu yundong shiliao 四川保路運動史料 Sichuan ren zibao shangque shu 四川人自保商榷書 Sichuan ribao 四川日報 Sichuan Sheng Wenlian 四川省文聯 Sima Changfeng 司馬長風 Sima Qian 司馬遷 Sishengci 四聖祠 Sishui weilan 死水微瀾 Sun Yatang 孫雅堂 Sun Zepei 孫澤沛 Suzhou 蘇州 Tai Jingnong 臺靜農 taiping rizi 太平日子 Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang 太陽照在桑乾河上 Tan Xingguo 譚興國 Tang Shi 唐湜 Taotai(s) 道臺 Tian Zhengkui 田徵葵 Tianhui 天回 Tianhui Zhen 天回鎮 Tianmo wu 天魔舞 Tongmenghui 同盟會 Tongsu huabao 通俗畫報 Tongzhijun 同志軍 Wang Guangqi 王光祈 Wang Guowei 王國維 Wang Wenbing 王文炳 Wanxian 萬縣 Wei Yingtao 隗瀛濤 Wenming hezuoshe 文明合作社 Wenming xiaoshi 文明小史 Wentan wushi nian 文壇五十年 Wenxian 文縣 “Wo yi zoudaole nikeng de bianyuan shangle” 我已走到了泥坑的邊緣上了 298 chinese glossary

Wu Dasao 伍大嫂 Wu Fengwu 吳鳳梧 Wu Jianren 吳趼人 Wu Ping 伍平 Wu Qiang 吳強 Wu Song 武松 Wu Taipo 伍太婆 Wu Yuzhang 吳玉章 Wu Zuxiang 吳組緗 Wuchang 武昌 Wuhan 武漢 Wuhou ci 武侯祠 Xia Lianchi 下蓮池 Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑 xiang 鄉 xiangtu 鄉土 Xiao Hong 蕭紅 Xiao Jun 蕭軍 Xiao Qian 蕭乾 xiaoti dazuo 小題大做 Xiepu chao 歇浦潮 xieqing xiaoshuo 寫情小說 Ximen Qing 西門慶 Xindu 新都 Xinfan Xian 新繁縣 Xing Xing 星星 Xingshun 興順 Xinhai 辛亥 Xinhua 新華 Xinjin 新津 xinmin 新民 xinshi 信史 Xipu 犀浦 xiwen 戲文 Xiyu jie 西御街 Xu Qinwen 許欽文 Xueheng 學衡 xungen 尋根 yamen 衙門 Yan Fu 嚴復 chinese glossary 299

Yan Gang 閻綱 Yan’an 延安 Yang Hansheng 陽翰笙 Yang Lianfen 楊聯芬 Yang Mo 楊沫 Yang Yiyan 楊益言 Yaoshan 樂山 Ye Zi 葉紫 “Yi wen” 一吻 Yichang 宜昌 yinsheng yangshuai 陰盛陽衰 “Yiqianbabai dan” 一千八百擔 yitai xi 一臺戲 Yong 用 Yongshun 永順 yongwu 詠物 Youlian 友聯 “Youyuan hui” 游園會 Yu Dafu 郁達夫 Yu Xuntan 余勳坦 Yu Zongtong 于宗潼 yuansheng xiang 原生相 yuanyang hudie 鴛鴦蝴蝶 Zeng 曾 Zeng Ayi 曾阿義 Zeng Pu 曾樸 Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 Zhang Henshui 張恨水 Zhang Tianyi 張天翼 zhangfu qigai 丈夫氣概 zhanghui xiaoshuo 章回小說 Zhao Erfeng 趙爾豐 Zhao Jiabi 趙家壁 Zhao Shuli 趙樹理 Zhao Tuhu 趙屠户 Zhaodi 招弟 Zhenbang 振邦 Zhenguo 振國 zhengzhi xiaoshuo 政治小說 Zhili 直隸 300 chinese glossary

Zhou Hongdao 周宏道 Zhou Libo 周立波 Zhou Shanpei 周善培 Zhou Zuoren 周作人 Zhu Shan 朱山 Zhu Shouju 朱瘦菊 Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 Ziye 子夜 Zizhou 資州 Zongfu 總府 Zuojia chubanshe 作家出版社 Index

Ai Lu 140, 214, 318n ‘Chengdu massacre’ 37, 96, 99, 102–8, 117, Anderson, Benedict 16, 16n, 51, 91 136, 138–40, 142, 147–48, 187, 218, 226 Anderson, Marston 50, 50n, 117, 119 residents/people 78, 98, 110, 124, 126, 140, Anderson, Perry 244 142, 147, 166, 174, 186–87, 251, 252n Annales School 47n, 67, 115, 234 Chongqing 22, 33n, 71, 224, 228, 228n, 229n, anti-Rightist movement 23–24, 215–16, 221 233, 237–38, 241 Austen, Jane 76, 76n Chow, Rey 41n, 168n Christianity 77, 81–82 Ba Jin 6, 9, 19–20, 26, 26n, 32, 32n, 194 anti- 81–83, 157, 165 Baker, Keith 128 believer 2–3, 68–69, 74, 78, 81–83, 86–87, Bakhtin, Mikhail 62–63, 72, 72n, 242–43 164 Balzac, Honoré de 2, 4, 42–43, 45–47, 46n, church 69, 82–83, 86, 93, 157, 209 66, 66n, 75, 80, 159, 186, 191, 197–98, 254 clergy 77 La Cousine Bette 198 missionary xi, 79–80, 82 The Old Maid (La vieille fille) 80 chronotope 62–64, 68, 71–72, 72n, 74, 79, 85, The Human Comedy (La comédie humaine) 187, 189, 234 4 Cohen, Paul 82, 83n, 167n Barthes, Roland 159, 172 crowd 70, 73–74, 96, 103–7, 113–15, 117–18, Bazin, René 46–47, 52 120–21, 123–27, 129–30, 137, 148, 155–58, Before the Tempest (Baofeng yuqian) 1–2, 6n, 160, 160n, 162–63, 166–67, 168n, 169–71, 24, 38, 51, 98, 150, 155, 157–58, 160, 173–74, 187–88, 223, 245. See also mob 163–64, 166, 169–70, 173–74, 217 cultural geography 3, 9, 33, 39 revision of 25, 163, 167n beheading 114, 163, 166, 168–72, 168n, 174, dahe xiaoshuo (great river novel) 45, 45n 240–43, 245 Dance of the Heavenly Devils (Tianmo wu) Beijing 8, 9, 11, 16n, 20–21, 63, 65–67, 78, 22 85–86, 98, 102 Darnton, Robert 11, 173 Government 228, 231–32 The Great Cat Massacre 173 Boxer Uprising 57, 65, 68, 78, 80–81, 85–86, Daruvala, Susan 9, 53 93, 98, 163–67, 226n Daudet, Alphonse 4 Davis, Natalie Zemon 11, 254 Cao Juren 6, 101n, 121, 197 The Return of Martin Guerre 254 Cao Yu 26, 194 decapitation. See beheading capital punishment 167, 169–70. See also de Maupassant, Guy 4, 42, 191–93 beheading Notre Cœur 4, 191–92, 191n changpian xiaoshuo (long novel) 16, 21, Une Vie 4 43–44, 48, 57, 61, 89, 256 Dickens, Charles 2, 14, 256 Chen Jianhua 13n, 131n, 183n David Copperfield 14, 256 Chengdu 1–5, 7–9, 7n, 11–12, 11n, 15n, 19–25, Ding Ling 26, 31, 117–18, 210–12, 210n, 211n 27, 30n, 33–34, 36–39, 42, 42n, 44, 54, Doleželová-Velingerová, Milena 17n, 50n 63–78, 85, 89–93, 96–98, 102–6, 108–9, Dostoevsky, Fyodor 119, 201n, 242 110, 112, 115 ,120, 124–25, 127, 129–133, 138, Dream of the Red Chamber, The (Honglou 140, 146–49, 153, 155–57, 163–66, 169, meng) 181–82, 256, 256n 178, 184–87, 190, 194, 199, 201, 208, 209, Duan Fang 39, 141, 225–29, 225n, 226n, 227n, 214–15, 221, 224–25, 224n, 228, 228n, 231–45, 232n 231–34, 237, 239, 241–43, 246, 251, 260 Duanmu Hongliang 6 302 index

Duara, Prasenjit 10, 55–56 143–44, 147, 152, 162, 174, 176–78, 182, Dumas, Alexandre 42, 45, 256 184–92, 196, 198, 200–201, 208, 213, 217–18, 217n, 219, 221n, 223, 225, 228, Elder Brother Society (Gelaohui) 52, 68, 81 230n, 231, 233, 236–39, 242–44, 250–51, elite 8–9, 8n, 22–23, 34, 49, 70, 75–77, 81, 89, 254–56 108, 117–18, 120–23, 125–26, 129–30, revision of 7, 11, 23–25, 27, 27n, 28–29, 134–36, 142, 155, 164–65, 168, 170, 174, 29n, 38, 142, 142n, 153, 176, 213, 215–18, 186–87, 198, 201, 260. See also gentry 217n, 219–25, 227, 229, 244–46, 250–51, ethnography 15, 54, 155, 166 252n, 253–58 ethnographer 29, 47, 251, 260 Guo Moruo 1, 5, 15, 19, 26, 100–101, 100n, 107, everydayness 13, 38, 48–49, 67–68, 89, 142, 123, 127, 136, 140, 194n 251, 259. See also quotidian everyday life 1, 11, 18, 28, 37, 47, 53, 60, 62, Halbwachs, Maurice 34, 111–12, 137–38, 67, 68n, 75, 85, 97, 108, 143, 151, 154, 186, 225n 202n, 218, 249–50, 254, 258 Han, Suyin 142n, 252–53, 252n Harootunian, Harry 67, 67n, 68n, 225n Faulkner, William 2, 46, 46n heimu xiaoshuo 231 Fei Ming 6 history fengtu hua 46 cultural 11, 46, 54, 166, 235, 254 Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei 118, 211n cultural historian 12, 34, 108, 150, 170, flâneur 187, 189 220, 254, 256 Flaubert, Gustave 4, 6, 7n, 37, 42, 80, 82, macro- 25, 36–38, 219, 249–52, 255, 151–52, 152n, 159, 187, 191, 254 257–58 A Simple Heart 159 micro- 7, 11–13, 12n, 47, 143, 164, 249–51, Madame Bovary 4, 7n, 37, 80, 82, 84n, 152 255–58 Salammbô 4, 152, 152n social-cultural 29 The Sentimental Education 152, 187–88, Hsia, C. T. 6, 18n, 118 187n Huang Lansheng 109, 126, 130–32, 134–35, 178, 196–97 geming 129, 131, 131n, 135 Huang Ziping 31n, 32n geming lishi xiaoshuo (revolutionary Hubei 3, 79, 96, 131, 141, 226–27, 232 historical novel) 31, 31n, 221 Hunt, Lynn 128 gentry 2–3, 5, 20, 51, 71, 73, 75–77, 89, 96, Huters, Theodore 60 99–101, 101n, 103–4, 109–10, 117, 121, Hutton, Patrick 137–38 125–26, 129–32, 134–36, 139, 155, 163, 171, 173–74, 178–80, 182, 184–87, 192, 196–201, Jameson, Fredric 66, 66n, 80–81, 197 212, 220, 225, 232, 239. See also elite Joyce, James 48–49, 90n geopoetics 12, 18, 37–38, 52, 151, 185, 200, 224, 230n, 258 Kang Youwei 120, 226n Ginzburg, Carlo: The Cheese and the Kinkley, Jeffrey 10 Worms 254 Knight, Sabina 220, 259 Golden Lotus, The (Jin ping mei) 84, 181, 256, Kracauer, Siegfried x, 249 256n Goncourt, Edmond de 4, 42 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 11 Goncourt, Jules de 4, 42 Lao She 26 Great Wave, The (Dabo) 1–2, 4–7, 22–23, 25, Lee, Leo Ou-fan 48, 51, 134, 168n 25n, 29–30, 32, 36–38, 51, 65, 71, 78, leftist (fiction) 6, 26n, 51, 119, 222 97–98, 109, 110, 110n, 112, 114–15, 117, leftist writers 22, 50, 218–19, 234 119–21, 123–25, 128–34, 130n, 136, 138–41, Li Bai: “Shu dao nan” 235 index 303

Li Boyuan 15, 49, 79, 133, 159–60, 238 Ma Sen 152, 192, 201 A Brief History of Enlightenment (Wenming May Fourth movement 5, 8, 9–10, 13–14, 17, xiaoshi) 15, 49, 79, 159, 160n, 238 20–22, 26n, 36, 39, 44n, 48–52, 54, 56, The Bureaucrats: A Revelation (Guanchang 62, 89, 168, 183, 194–95, 194n, 237, 245, xianxing ji) 133 260 Li Hanqiu: The Tides of Yangzhou (Guangling May Thirtieth incident 118 chao) 16 memories/memory 2, 13, 17–19, 33, 35, Li, Mei 19, 216–17, 252n 37–38, 56–58, 107, 109, 129, 138, 142, 213, Liang Qichao 17, 17n, 120, 120n, 131n, 182 235, 259 Liao Guanyin (Goddess-of-Mercy Liao) 163, collective 30, 34, 34n, 36, 38, 98, 109, 165–67, 165n 120, 166, 200, 225, 225n, 235, 251, 258, Lin Huiyin 6 260n Lin Shu 14 geopoetic 18, 185. See also geopoetics lingchi 169, 169n local 30, 35–36, 38, 98, 133, 142, 166, 251, linked novel (lianluo xiaoshuo) 44–45 260 Liu E: The Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji) ‘memory crisis’ 98, 98n, 141 15, 230–31 memory-work 109, 137–38 Liushahe 23–24, 23n, 213–14 place-memory 33–34 Liu Zaifu 11n, 236n politics of/memoropolitics 23, 34, 38–39, localism 1, 12–13, 39, 53 109, 136–37, 142, 251, 258 locality 3–4, 7, 9, 11, 13–14, 34, 37–38, 52–53, private 19, 29, 61, 109, 125, 133, 137, 178, 55–58, 60–61, 63–64, 66, 68, 71, 79, 86, 189 89–91, 98, 112, 122, 143, 161, 174, 218, 231, ‘site(s) of memory’ (lieux de mémoire) 234, 240, 259 33, 33n, 138, 260 longue durée 39, 47, 47n, 67, 186, 220, 234, mentalité(s) 2, 11, 26, 37, 42n, 44–45, 52, 80, 235n 110, 113, 115–17, 120, 122, 129, 137–40, Lukács, Georg 87, 152n, 200, 244n 140n, 143, 150, 152, 155, 161, 168, 174, 211, Lu Ling 26n, 182–83, 183n, 195 214, 230, 234, 238, 251, 254 Children of the Rich (Caizhu de ernümen) metropolis 47, 51 183, 183n Mitchell, Margaret 5 Hungry Guo Su’e (Ji’e de Guo Su’e) 195 mob 105, 121, 155–56, 158–59, 162, 173, 223, Lu Xun 6, 26, 55–57, 59, 74, 133–34, 163, 246. See also crowd 167–70, 168n, 173 monumentality 1, 11, 42–43, 60, 62, 67, 90, Luo Shu 6 152n, 166, 218, 255 Lyell, William 134 Moretti, Franco 76n, 89–90, 90n, 240 Morson, Gary Saul 201n, 257 ‘Mandarin and Butterfly’ (yuanyang hudie) Mu Shiying 6 13 Manzoni, Alessandro 153–54, 153n, 154n native soil fiction 56–57, 59, 61 On the Historical Novel 153, 154n naturalism 5, 65–66, 110, 151–52, 178, 193–94, The Betrothed (I promessi sposi) 153 193n, 194n, 218, 224, 250 Mao Dun 5, 6, 9, 26, 50, 50n, 51n, 59, 90–91, narrative in 37, 66–67 118–19, 183, 183n, 193, 193n, 234 naturalist writer 4–5, 42, 47, 151–52, 193, Eclipse (Shi) 26, 183 224 Midnight (Ziye) 6, 50–51, 51n, 90 New Culture Movement 20 Rainbow (Hong) 9, 118, 183, 234 Ng, Mau-sang 219 Marx, Karl: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Nora, Pierre 138, 260 Bonaparte 244 North China Herald, The 103–4, 123 304 index nostalgia 54–57, 152, 200, 222 Cultural Revolution 15n Novick, Peter 151, 151n French Revolution 98n, 99, 123, 128, 130, 173, 187n, 198, 245 Ozouf, Mona 123, 123n, 124n Republican Revolution 81n, 134, 250 ‘revolution plus love’ (geming jia lian’ai) 201, Paris 2, 42n, 46, 75, 99, 173, 186–87, 187n, 201n, 202 191–92 Rigney, Ann 30, 99, 138, 217n, 255 Passos, John Dos: USA 48 riot 4, 39, 79, 96, 99, 100–101, 104, 106, 110, 115, Peng Fen 103, 136 118, 123, 131, 139–40, 160, 162, 187, 223, Peony Pavilion, The (Mudan ting) 181 246 place-writing 7, 12–13, 18, 27, 35, 90, 225, 251 1895 93, 155–58 political novel (zhengzhi xiaoshuo) 17, 17n, Chengdu. See also 1895 90 Ripples on Dead Water (Sishui weilan) 1–2, Prévost, Marcel 4, 42, 193n 6n, 7n, 24–25, 37, 51, 61, 61n, 63, 63n, 65, Proust, Marcel 43 67–69, 71–72, 76–80, 82, 84–86, 89–90, provinciality 3–4, 15, 46, 52, 63–73, 76–77, 92–95, 98, 150, 156n, 158n, 186, 188, 79–81, 86, 90–91, 96–97, 120, 178, 186, 210–13, 217, 250 191, 224n, 258 revision of 25, 210n, 212–13 Průšek, Jaroslav 15n, 164 Rolland, Romain: Jean-Christophe 43, 43n, 256 quotidian 15, 15n, 28, 35, 48–49, 65, 68, 90, roman-fleuve (river-novel) 4, 16, 37, 42–45, 98, 119, 174, 177–78, 184, 213, 221, 223, 43n, 45n, 47, 51, 54, 66, 89–91, 162, 200, 249–50, 254. See also everydayness 258, 258n Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The (Sanguo realism 1, 21, 26, 28–29, 32, 42, 59n, 66n, 72, zhi yanyi) 18n, 216, 235, 236n, 256 75, 117, 150–52, 159, 171–73, 178, 183, 193, 193n, 211, 221, 223, 234, 237, 243, 244n, Schor, Naomi 159 246, 250, 255–56 Scott, Walter 30, 82, 90, 154n, 200, 249, 254 fiction of 4, 13, 16n, 33, 42, 44, 46–47, 59, sentimental novel (xieqing xiaoshuo) 5 64, 66, 70, 124, 130, 140, 159, 164, 172, 183, sexuality 5, 71, 84–85, 180–82, 190, 194–95, 186, 197 197–98, 221–22, 225 ‘reality effect’ 159, 172 sexual relationship 5, 71–73, 80–81, 83, Red Lantern (Hongdengzhao) 38, 163–67, 85, 178, 180–82, 193–94, 196, 200, 221 167n sexual allure 110, 167, 179, 184, 187, 190–91, revolution 4, 5, 9, 19, 25–33, 35–36, 38–39, 194–95, 201 42, 50–51, 65, 68, 81n, 86–87, 89, 96, Sha Ting 32, 89, 117, 213–14, 215n 98–104, 113, 117–18, 122, 124, 126, 131–36, Shen Congwen 6, 10–11, 26, 89 131n, 139–43, 142n, 150, 174, 182, 184–87, Shih, Shu-mei 49 189–90, 197, 199–202, 211–12, 213, 218, Shi Tuo 6, 26, 57, 59–62, 59n, 89 220–225, 232–33, 237, 242–46, 250, Shi Zhecun 6 253–54 Shu culture 3, 153 1911 (Xinhai Revolution) xii, 2, 3, 7, 19, 25, “Shu dao nan.” See Li Bai: “Shu dao nan;” 33, 34n, 57, 60, 91, 97, 100, 101n, 102, Wang Guowei: “Shu dao nan” 102n, 108, 112, 134, 142n, 178, 203, 212, Shu Xincheng 135n 212n, 252, 252n Sichuan 1–4, 8–9, 11, 15, 19, 21–23, 33–34, activists of 2, 19, 20, 23, 31, 39, 89, 99–100, 34n, 37, 39, 44n, 46–47, 47n, 63–65, 102, 105, 109, 116, 123, 128–29, 130n, 131n, 68–69, 71, 81, 85–86, 91, 96–99, 101–2, 132, 134–36, 140–41, 162, 170, 183, 197–98, 105, 108, 112, 114, 116, 120, 126, 132, 136, 204, 221–22, 224, 230, 239–41, 243 138–41, 142n, 143, 147, 164–65, 195n, 199, index 305

204, 210, 213, 218, 222–23, 225–41, 226n, Wang, David Der-wei 5, 8, 10, 14n, 17n, 85, 228n, 232n, 243, 250, 252, 252n 193n Sichuan Railway Protection Comrades Wang, Di 11, 108, 125, 189–90 League (Sichuan baolu tongzhihui) Wang Guowei: “Shu dao nan” 243 96, 126, 218 Water Margin, The (Shuihu zhuan) 32, 84, Sichuan Railway Protection Movement 3n, 182, 245, 256, 256n 19, 34, 37, 96–102, 97n 108, 110, 116, 123, West China Missionary News 102, 105 136, 140, 142n, 149, 178, 218, 226n, 231 White, Hayden 28, 28n, 175–76, 244, 244n, Sima Changfeng 6, 45n 253 Sima Qian 14, 29 Wuchang 79, 108, 131, 226–27 Sino-Japanese war 2, 22, 57, 68, 80, 97n Wuchang Uprising 108, 112, 131, 140–41, 142n, small town 3, 9, 49, 54, 56–57, 59–65, 67–69, 233, 238 71–72, 80, 85, 88, 90, 186 Wu Jianren 5, 15, 18, 18n, 192n, 256 social novel (shehui xiaoshuo) 2, 14, 16, 16n Wu Zuxiang 10, 89, 117–18 social panorama(s) 2, 14–16, 38, 42, 46, 48, 79, 109, 160, 171, 177, 220, 223 Xia Zengyou 17, 18n spatiality 9, 11, 16, 36, 38, 51, 58, 217 Xiao Hong 10, 57–61, 89 Stapleton, Kristin 3, 11, 69, 78, 199, 224n Yan Fu 17, 18n, 120 Tan Xingguo 30n, 214–15, 221, 221n Yangzi River 8, 9, 22, 227–230, 229n, 234–35, temporality 14–15, 33, 49–51, 49n, 56, 58–59, 247–48 61, 67, 143, 201n, 217–18, 257 Young China Study Society (Shaonian teleology 8, 27, 35–36, 50–51, 89–91, 112, 115, Zhongguo xuehui) 20 119, 139, 141, 213, 225, 234, 244, 257–58 Tianhui 64–65, 67, 69, 71–73, 75, 90–91, Zeng Pu 14, 14n, 191 94–95 Zhang Ailing 10, 11n, 25n, 26, 29n Tolstoy, Leo 6, 29, 29n, 172–73, 193n, 201n, Zhang Tianyi 26, 117, 218, 218n 243–44, 244n, 256–57, 256n, 258n Zhao Erfeng 96, 99, 101, 103–4, 106–7, 119–20, War and Peace 29, 29n, 154n, 172–73, 123, 127, 136, 140–41, 147–48, 226–27, 172n, 243, 256–57, 256n 232, 236, 239, 242–43 Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Zhao Jiabi 48 Alliance) 99–100 Zhong, Xueping 196, 196n topography 10, 15n, 50, 54, 62, 65, 69n, 70, 72, Zhou Shanpei 30, 105–6, 136, 242 79, 89–90, 185–89, 234–35 Zhou Zuoren 9, 52, 89 Zhu Shouju: The Tides of Shanghai Umitani, Hiroshi 150 (Xiepu chao) 16 Zola, Émile 4–5, 42–43, 45, 151–52, 193, verisimilitude 37, 56, 66n, 123, 159, 237, 244, 193n, 194n, 224, 256 252 Rougon-Macquart 4, 194, 194n