Modernism in Practice: Shi Zhecun's Psychoanalytic Fiction Writing

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MODERNISM IN PRACTICE: SHI ZHECUN’S PSYCHOANALYTIC FICTION WRITING

Yingyue Zhu

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2020

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Master’s Committee, we certify that we have read the thesis prepared by Yingyue Zhu, titled MODERNISM IN PRACTICE: SHI ZHECUN’S PSYCHOANALYTIC FICTION WRITING and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Master’s Degree.

Jun 29, 2020 ______Date: ______Dian Li

Fabio Lanza Jul 2, 2020 ______Date: ______Fabio Lanza

Jul 2, 2020 ______Date: ______Scott Gregory

Final approval and acceptance of this thesis is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the thesis to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this thesis prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the Master’s requirement.

Jun 29, 2020 ______Date: ______Dian Li Master’s Thesis Committee Chair East Asian Studies Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………5

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………. 6

Chapter One: Reforms and the New Literature………………………………………………… 16

Chapter Two: Shi Zhecun’s Literary Career in the Twenties and Thirties…...………………… 35

Chapter Three: Shi Zhecun’s Psychoanalytic Fiction Writing ………………………………….47

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….66

Glossary………………………………………………………………………………………….74

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………...87

List of Tables

Table 1. She Zhecun’s Short Stories by Year……………………………..…………………...... 35

Table 2. Shi Zhecun’s Psychoanalytic Stories by Year…………………………………...... 41

Table 3. Water Foam Bookstore’s Marxist Literary Theory Series……………………………...42

Abstract

Shi Zhecun (1905-2003) was among few Chinese writers in the New Literature who conscientiously illustrated the Freudian notions, such as the Eros and the Thanatos, the pleasure and the reality principles, and the sadism, in several of psychoanalytic stories written between

1928 and 1933. Adhering to the late Qing reformist and the May Fourth intellectual tradition to reconstruct a new National Character by a Westernized new fiction for the nation’s regeneration, the writer treated the profession seriously as to enlighten the people with progressive Western knowledge, especially the Freudian psychoanalytic propositions of the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and desires, via modernist devices such as the stream of consciousness, dual narrative, and the use of contrasting colors. Through an investigation of the literary trends since the late

Qing to the early thirties, the writer’s literary career, and his psychoanalytic historical and urban stories, I suggest that despite certain shortcomings, as well as being largely unappreciated and misunderstood by the literary circle around him, the writer’s modernist experiments practically introduced several Freudian concepts to Chinese readers in the period when the New Literature was dominated by the ideologically charged Realism and Romanticism schools.

Introduction

Short story writer, essayist, poet, literary translator, and scholar of classical Chinese poetry and stele inscriptions, Shi Zhecun was born in Hangzhou in the eastern and coastal

Zhejiang province in China’s Jiangnan region in 1905, the only child of Yu Tiaomei and Shi

Yizheng, who, as a government-sponsored student in Renhe county, would have dreamed a conventional career through the civil service examinations system if it had not been abolished for good as part of the late Qing reform movement.1 Now seeking alternative opportunities around,

Shi Yizheng at first found a librarian position in a public normal school at another notable city of the region in the neighboring Jiangsu province, Suzhou, in 1907. As the institution was forced to close after the Revolution of 1911 (Xinhai geming), he brought the family moving to Songjiang, a county town near Shanghai, in 1913, working as a stocking factory manager, where the child

Shi Zhecun had completed Westernized primary and secondary public schools.2

After graduation from high school in 1921, Shi Zhecun went to Hangzhou to attend the

Protestant Hangchow University (Zhijiang daxue) and met his longtime friends Dai Wangshu and Du Heng. As they created their own student literary association the Orchid Society (Lan she), Shi Zhucun began to mail his short stories to Shanghai’s popular literary magazines such as

The Saturday (Libai liu), The Semi-Monthly (Banyue), and The Week (Xingqi) for publication.

However, before long the youth was discharged from the Christian institution for engaging in anti-religious activities. In fall 1922, Shi Zhecun and Dai Wangshu went to Shanghai to study

Chinese literature at Shanghai University (Shanghai daxue), being a student in Mao Dun’s

1 The examinations system that had governed China’s sociopolitical scene more than a millennium was abandoned by the Qing court in 1905. 2 Poems 1, 2, & 12 in Fusheng za yong in Sha shang de jiaoji. Lu Xun made acrimonious comment on Shi Yizheng’s taking on the position, which was totally irrelevant to his classical training. 7 literature class.3 He self-published his first short story collection The Riverbank (Jianggan ji) that includes twenty-three stories in 1923. With Dai Wangshu and Du Heng, they self-published the literary journal Yingluo in 1925, and the three joined the Communist Youth League (Zhongguo gongchanzhuyi qingnian tuan) and the Nationalist Party (Zhongguo guomindang) in the same year.4 Nonetheless, frightened by atrocities in the April 12 Purge of 1927 (Si yi er shibian), they fled Shanghai.5

In summer 1927, Dai Wangshu traveled to Beijing and via an alumna of Shanghai

University, Ding Ling, met writers and poets of the New Literature (Xin wenxue) such as Yao

Pengzi, Feng Zhi, Wei Jinzhi, Shen Congwen, Feng Xuefeng, and Hu Yepin, and he later introduced them to Shi Zhucun, who began to teach Chinese linguistics and literature at a newly founded high school in Songjiang.6

1928 was a prolific year for the writer’s fiction writing. His story “Juanzi” (Juanzi) was published on the January issue of the Commercial Press’s (Shangwu yinshu guan) The Fiction

Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao), signifying him as an emerging writer of the New Literature;7 he completed the proletarian tale “Chase” (Zhui), the realistic story “Wife’s Birthday” (Qi zhi shengchen); and his most celebrated psychoanalytic masterpiece “An Evening of Spring Rain”

(Mieyu zhi xi).8 Besides, he worked as the weekend editor for the literary magazine The

3 Ying, “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” in Modern Chinese Writers’ Anthologies: Shi Zhecun, pp. 311-312. 4 Shi Zhecun, “Zhendan ernian” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 5-10. 5 Shi Zhecun, “Zuihou yige lao pengyou – Feng Xuefeng” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 122-123. 6 Ibid. 7 Ying, “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” in Modern Chinese Writers’ Anthologies: Shi Zhecun, p. 313. 8 Shi Zhecun, “‘Shangyuan deng’ gaibian zaiban zixu” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 791. 8

Trackless Train (Wugui lieche) at Liu Na’ou’s newly-founded Frontline Bookstore (Diyixian shudian).9

Shi Zhecun married Chen Huihua in October 1929. Many of his friends in the literary circle, including Feng Xuefeng, Yao Pengzi, Shen Congwen, Ding Ling, Hu Yepin, Liu Na’ou, and Dai Wangshu, especially traveled from Shanghai to Songjiang to attend their wedding ceremony.10 Onward to the January 28 Incident (Yi er ba shibian) of 1932, Shi Zhecun worked as an editor for the Water Foam Bookstore’s (Shuimo shudian) magazine The New Literary Art (Xin wenyi), emended the Ming novelist Dong Ruoyu’s A Supplement to the Journey to the West

(Xiyou bu), translated Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and several of Arthur Schnitzler’s psychoanalytic novels, and wrote stories of multiple styles from psychoanalytic tales

“Kumarajiva” (Jiumo’luoshi), “The General’s Head” (Jiangjun di tou), “Shi Xiu” (Shi Xiu), “At the Paris Theatre” (Zai Bali da xiyuan), and “Devil’s Way” (Mo dao), proletarian stories

“Flowers” (Hua) and “Ah Xiu” (Ah Xiu), to conventional urban housewife theme such as “The

Shield Soup” (Chun geng).11

After the Sino-Japanese military conflict, from March 1932 to the beginning of 1935, he was appointed by Shanghai’s Xiandai Book Company (Xiandai shuju) to create and edit the literary journal Les Contemporains (Xiandai zazhi) to introduce the Western, Soviet, and

Japanese literature and literary trends and publish Chinese writers’ literary thoughts and works.12

Meanwhile, he published three short story collections – The General’s Head (Jiangjun di tou) that comprises four historical psychoanalytic tales, An Evening of Spring Rain which includes

9 Ying, “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” in Modern Chinese Writers’ Anthologies: Shi Zhecun, p. 314. 10 Shi Zhecun, “Dianyun Puyu hua Congwen” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 132-133. 11 Ying, “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” in Modern Chinese Writers’ Anthologies: Shi Zhecun, pp. 314-315. 12 Shi Zhecun, “Xiandai za yi” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 26-29. 9 five urban psychoanalytic stories, and Exemplary Conduct of Virtuous Women (Shan nuren xingpin) that contains twelve stories of a variety of female figures from urban housewife, salesgirl, to country woman. Shi Zhucun’s last short story collection was released in 1936, the

Small Treasures (Xiao zhen ji) that consists of ten realistic mode stories, when he had left

Shanghai and taught a local female high school in Hangzhou, and his last story, the historical theme Master Huangxin (Huangxin dashi), was published in the spring of 1937 on the eve of the

Second Sino-Japanese War (Kangri zhanzheng). 13

During the consecutive war years,14 Shi Zhecun wrote prose essays, translated Arthur

Schnitzler’s and Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Yugoslav writers’ novels from the French or

English renditions into Chinese, and taught Chinese literature at Yun’nan University (Yun’nan daxue), Xiamen University (Xiamen daxue), Jiangsu College (Jiangsu xueyuan), Ji’nan

University (Ji’nan daxue), and Hujiang University (Hujiang daxue) in the southern provinces of

Yun’nan and Fujian and in Shanghai.

After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, by the Rearrangement of

College Departments policy (yuanxi tiaozheng), Shi Zhecun was allocated by the communist authority to East China Normal University (Huadong shifan daxue) in Shanghai in 1952 to teach

Chinese literature.15 He was classified as a “rightist” (youpai) in the Anti-Rightist Movement

(Fanyou yundong) in 1957. Though his case was “corrected” (zhaimao) in 1961, the final rehabilitation (pingfan) did not arrive till after the end of the Cultural Revolution (Wenhua dageming) in 1978, in the period of which he focused attention on the Tang poetry and the Qin

13 Ying, “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” in Modern Chinese Writers’ Anthologies: Shi Zhecun, pp. 316-318. 14 The Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945, and the Chinese Civil War 1946-1949. 15 The communist regime decided to imitate the Soviet model to rearrange college departments nationwide in 1952. 10 and Han bronze article and stone stele inscriptions research. Its fruitions, A Hundred Lectures on the Tang Poetry (Tangshi baihua) and The Records of Stone Stele Inscriptions of the

Commentary on the Book of Rivers (Shuijing zhu beilu), were published in 1986. 16 Shi Zhecun died at ninety-seven in 2003.

I come from the writer’s birthplace Hangzhou and belong to the generation that grew up in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Modern Chinese literature in my primary and secondary education was no more than battle cries and grievances against the old society by revolutionary writers such as Ai Qing, Zang Kejia, Guo Morou, and Xia Yan, not quite impressive and believable to an average student. However, Shi Zhecun’s Miscellaneous Poems about a Floating

Life (Fusheng za yong) written between 1974 and 1990 that reflect his growing experience and literary career in the early decades of the century that were intermittently released on the newspaper Guangming ribao’s literary supplement since the late 1980s attracted me and changed my view about the New Literature and common people’s lifestyles in the period. I saw a humanistic and exciting world different to what school textbooks had presented, and I observed family affection, genuine friendship, and personal struggles in the context of wars and revolutions. I thus began to pay attention to the writer’s other publications available in the city’s bookstores, including some reprints of his short story collections, The General’s Head, An

Evening of Spring Rain, and Exemplary Conduct of Virtuous Women. Nevertheless, not being trained in literary analysis, I could neither perceive the Freudian concepts used for their characterization, nor was I impressed by the realistic portrayal of ordinary female figures, and I soon put them aside.

16 Ying, “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” in Modern Chinese Writers’ Anthologies: Shi Zhecun, pp. 319-328. 11

Nonetheless, certain readings in my recent two years’ graduate classes – Leo Ou-Fan

Lee’s reflective essay about China’s modernity progress and Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the

Pleasure Principle – brought me back to the writer.17 I decided to conduct a research on the writer’s modernist practices to make his fiction writing, his person, and his time more comprehensible to me. I started the project by examining principal position papers by reform leaders and representative writers such as Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, Mao

Dun, Guo Morou, Yu Dafu, Cheng Fangwu, Liang Shiqiu, Hu Qiuyuan, and Su Wen to grasp the sociopolitical contexts from the late Qing reform, the New Cultural Movement (Xin wenhua yundong), to the “Third Category” debate in the early thirties that shaped the writer’s modernist experimentation.

In response to foreign imperialist pressure, in his 1902 essay “On the Relationship

Between Fiction and the Government of the People,” Liang Qichao advocated to reconstruct a new National Character via a renovated Westernized fiction for the country’s regeneration. As the new Republic failed to bring about thorough social reformations promised by the revolutionists, Chen Duxiu wrote “On Literary Revolution” in 1917 to proclaim the sociopolitical necessity to launch the New Culture Movement. Meanwhile, Hu Shi published

“Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” to proffer the forms and contents for the

New Literature, heralding the cultural environment Shi Zhecun would grow up with.

Since the early twenties, Realism and Romanticism became the two major literary schools led by the Association for Literary Studies (Wenxue yanjiu hui) and the Creation Society

(Chuangzao she) respectively. In 1922 article “Literature and Life,” Mao Dun analyzed the

17 Lee mentioned Shi Zhecun’s modernist practices of psychoanalytic fiction writing in “In search of Modernity: Some Reflections on a New Mode of Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Chinese History and Literature” in Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin L Schwartz, pp. 109-135. 12 relationship between literature and society and articulated realistic literary principles. On the other hand, Yu Dafu’s “Class Struggle in Literature” and Cheng Fangwu’s two essays “The

Mission of the New Literature” and “From a Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature” mapped the Creation Society’s trajectory from the early romanticist stage shifting to the proletarian literature phase.

In the debate about literary freedom in the early thirties, Hu Qiuyuan’s 1932 essay “Do

Not Encroach Upon Literary Art” attacked the Nationalist Literature School’s (Minzuzhuyi wenxue) political appeal on literature. In response, Du Heng proposed the term the “Third

Category” in “Regarding the Literary News and Hu Qiuyuan’s Literary Arguments” to refer to writers who were unaffiliated to political parties. Finally, Lu Xun concluded the debate with his

1933 essay “On the ‘Third Category,’” indicating that Du Heng’s proposition was a false term that did not exist in a class society.

Four chapters in the edited book An Intellectual History of Modern China – Charlotte

Furth’s “Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-

1920,” Benjamin Schwartz’s “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After,” and Leo

Ou-Fan Lee’s “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” and “Literary Trends:

The Road to Revolution, 1927-1949” – substantially contributed to the narrative of the intellectual history and literary trends in this project. John Fitzgerald’s Awakening China:

Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution traces China’s awakening history from individuals’ spontaneous awakening to the nation’s Machiavellian awakening to build a sovereign and independent state with the notion of an universal order, a single nation people, and a united and powerful state. It provides background information about the censorship under the

Nationalist Nanjing government and morals of the Chinese army in the period. 13

All Shi Zhecun’s eight psychoanalytic stories were written in the period while he worked as the editor for several literary journals in Shanghai, the center of the new style Chinese fiction.

Perry Link’s Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies carefully reviews hundreds of primary sources and secondary scholarship from the 1900s to the 1970s about the late Qing vernacular movement, the literary history in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the film industry, and the publishing and newspaper institutions in treat-port cities, especially in Shanghai. It supplies valuable information about how Shanghai’s semi-colonial sociocultural environment nurtured the modern fiction, and how it evolved from the reformist nation-building to time-killing and profit-seeking.

Leo Ou-Fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China,

1930-1945 displays the city’s film industry and new urban space in modern high-rises such as foreign banks, hotels, department stores, apartment houses, as well as cinemas, coffee houses, and dance halls, that created a concrete Westernized urban milieu for fiction writers. Two chapters in Shih Shu-Mei’s The Lure of Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China,

1917-1937 discuss the Les Contemporains under Shi Zhecun’s editorship as an apolitical journal to introduce foreign literature and literary trends and publish Chinese writers’ works from all schools in the New Literature. Besides, Andrew Jones’ reading of the historical tale “Shi Xiu” and Christopher Rosenmeier’s analysis of the writer’s woman stereotypes provided insights on how psychoanalysis, inner monologue, the stream of consciousness, and the first-person and third-person narrations were used for characterization.

Scholarship on the Chinese side, Yao investigated the female types in essay “Urban

Alienation and Psychoanalysis: The Otherness of Shi Zhecun among the New Sensationalists

Seen via the Female Characters,” indicating that whereas the writer was skillful in the portrayal 14 of traditional woman figures such as housewife and salesgirl in modern urban setting that he was familiar with, however, devoid of life experience the writer was incapable of delving into modern urban women’s inner world but mystified and demonized them as supernatural beings. In

“Witches in the Process of De-witching: A Discussion on Traditional Elements in Shi Zhecun’s

Stories,” Peng pointed out that the bizarre, mysterious, and supernatural in the writer’s psychoanalytic stories were cautiously placed under scientific discourses. In “The Secular

Adaption of the Buddhist Themes and the Humane Interpretations to Historical Texts: Shi

Zhecun’s Buddhist Theme Fiction Writing,” Lu noticed that the writer secularized and thus humanized the Buddhist figures for modern readers’ comprehension. And in “Virtuous Women and the Romer: Women and Men in Shi Zhecun’s Stories,” Zhu perceived that the writer used the railway carriage and the bus cabin as a plot device to highlight them as modern social spaces.

Although in the 1931 preface to the collection The General’s Head, the writer rejected a nationalist reading of the same title story,18 in “A Failed Cultural Breakthrough: A Review of Shi

Zhecun’s ‘The General’s Head’ from Cultural Perspective,” Cao interpreted the Tibetan and

Tang civilizations in the story as symbols of the Western and Chinese cultures of the writer’s time, a plausible understanding valid within the semantic possibilities of the text. In “Shi Zhecun in the History of Modern Chinese Literature: In Memory of Shi Zhecun’s One Hundredth Birth

Anniversary,” Yang eulogized the writer’s psychoanalytic stories as a modernist school paralleling to the Realism and Romanticism schools in the New Literature, 19 an overestimation which the writer himself would have disagreed with.

18 Shi Zhecun, “‘Jiangjun di tou’ zixu” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 793. 19 他的現代主義文學創作和對現代派文學的推崇，創造了一支中國的現代派文學，使中國現代文學走出了現實主義一統天下的格局，從而形成了現實主義、浪漫主義、現代主義三足鼎立的局面。 “… his [Shi Zhecun] modernist literary creation and his advocacy of the modernist literary schools established a Chinese modernist literary school, breaking the monopoly of the Realism in modern Chinese literature, and thus creating the paralleling coexistence of Realism, Romantism, and Modernism.” Yang, “Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi shang de 15

In this thesis, through the investigation of the sociopolitical environment from the late

Qing period to the early thirties, Shi Zhecun’s literary career in Shanghai in the period, and his psychoanalytic stories, I suggest that the writer’s modernist practices literarily introduced the

Freudian notion of the unconscious mind to Chinese readers and enriched the literary scene dominated by the Realism and the Romanticism.

Chapter One discusses the sociopolitical and ideological context since the mid-nineteenth century that shaped the writer’s literary career and creation. Chapter Two deals with the writer’s literary career in the nineteen-twenties and thirties – the editorship for several literary magazines, his friendship and working relation with contemporary writers, and his short story publications.

Chapter Three is an analysis of the writer’s psychoanalytic stories based on the Freudian theory, the Western and Chinese scholarship, as well as my common sense.

Shi Zhecun: wei jinian Shi Zhecun danchen yibai zhounian er zuo,” p.102. All translations in this thesis are prepared by Yingyue Zhu, the author.

Chapter One: Reforms and the New Literature

In history, China held a high view about itself as the advanced universalistic civilization at top of the hierarchy of international relations manifested in the tributary system, by which, as a form of symbolic obedience, neighboring states like Japan, Korea, Ryukyu, and Vietnam regularly sent envoys with exotic indigenous products to the Chinese court to pay respect to the emperor, who in turn granted them gifts and permitted their rights to trade in the country.

However, the situation was not anymore since the mid-eighteenth century. The Qing’s rejection of the British and other industrializing states’ “opening up” demands finally led to a series of armed conflicts that concluded without exception with the its debacle by the superior foreign military technology and the concession to set up treaty-port cities for the European, American, and Japanese merchants, where extraterritorial rights were ceded to these trade states.

Meanwhile, ravaged by great revolts such as the Taiping Rebellion (Taiping tianguo zhiluan) and the Boxer Uprising (Yihetuan yundong), as well as struck by consecutive severe climate-induced famines, to the turn of the century, as foreign imperialist powers contended for “spheres of influence” (shili fanwei), the country was at risk of being “carved up like a melon” (guafen).

Efforts to modernize the nation

Originating in the fifth-century Latin word modernus to signify a different officially

Christian present from the Roman pagan past, the term modern was used to indicate an European superiority over pre-modern societies in the courses of the European discovery of the New

World, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the French Revolution, in which secular values of humanity and enlightenment were established as opposed to the Christian faith.20 To respond to the Western pressure, the provincially based Arsenal School (yangwu pai) launched

20 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, pp. 130-132. 17 the Self-Strengthening Movement (Yangwu yundong) in the eighteen-sixties to “learn barbarian

(the Western) methods to combat barbarian threats” (shi yi changji yi zhi yi) in an attempt to revamp the country’s military and industry.21 However, the annihilation of the modernized navy fleets – the Fujian Fleet (Fujian shuishi) in war with France in 1884 and the Northern Sea Fleet

(Beiyang shuishi) with Japan in 1895 – forced the Qing intellectuals to reconsider their path for the nation’s survival. They proposed different solutions, including a radical and complete

Westernization to abandon conventional claim of its cultural superiority and a modernization within its cultural traditions.

Surely, for a nation with a long-lasting cultural-centralism view, to fit into the European equal nation-states system was almost an impossible task.22 The reform activist Liang Qichao observed that the Chinese people had never identified themselves with a consistent national identity but recognized the country by a sequence of dynastic names such as Qin, Han, Tang,

Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing, which became a problem for its current survival. Liang Qichao and other reform leaders Kang Youwei and Tan Sitong thus propounded to synthesize the Social

Darwinian notion of evolutionary progress and the Chinese cultural essence to create a new

“National Character” (guoxing) for a “New People” (xinmin) for the nation’s rejuvenation. They believed that modernization should root in the cultural essence of the pre-Qin thoughts of

Confucius (Kong zi), Mencius (Meng zi), and Lao zi and the exemplary reign of the legendary sages of Yao, Shun, and the Duke of Zhou (Zhou gong) and meanwhile adopt the Western statecraft, science, and technology to build a constitutional monarchy for now and a

21 Wei Yuan, Hai guo tu zhi. 22 The modern nation-state was a Western invention that justified the state sovereignty in judiciary, military, religious, and educational systems and political organizations as the natural manifestation of a homogeneous national culture and history despite the real community diversity. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, “Nation/Nationalism” in Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, pp. 135-136. 18 cosmopolitan utopian “Great Harmonious” (tatong) Confucian state in the future.23 “Western learning for application, Chinese learning for essence” thus became a precept in the late Qing reform movement to proactively engage with Western states to learn their languages and advanced technology, and to adapt to Western trading system while preserving Chinese cultural quintessence with an emphasis on the morals of the government and the people.24 With opinion leaders in the National Essence Movement (Guocui yundong), i.e., Zhang Binglin and Liu

Shipei, the reformers advocated a binary “spiritual East” and “material West” system as a solution to the nation’s spiritual and structural problems,25 in which to renovate the National

Character via a renovated Westernized fiction was considered as an essential step toward it.

A renovated fiction to renovate the National Character

The idea of replacing the “poisonous” traditional novel (xiaoshuo) with a new

Westernized fiction that had positively influenced Western and Japanese societies to reeducate

Chinese people was first suggested by Yan Fu and Xia Cengyou in the article “Announcing Our

Policy to Publish a Fiction Supplement” released on the treaty-port Tianjin’s newspaper Guowen bao in 1897.26 In the 1902 essay “On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the People,” Liang Qichao claimed that all traditional novels were the imitation of The Water

Margin (Shuihu zhuan) and The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) that incited robbery

23 The reform leaders were well aware of the negative consequences in the European industrialization, such as moral decadence, enlarged income gaps, utilitarianism, and profit-seeking. Furth, “From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920” in An Intellectual History of Modern China,” p. 36. 24 Zhang Zhidong, “Quan xue pian.” 25 Furth, “From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 43. 26 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, pp. 145-146. 19 and lusts in people, and it was imperative to create a new-style fiction to promulgate Western progressive ideas for the nation’s good:

If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.

Therefore, to renovate morality, one must renovate fiction; to renovate religion, one must

renovate fiction; to renovate politics, one must renovate fiction; to renovate learning and

arts, one must renovate fiction; to renovate even the human mind and remold its

character, one must renovate fiction.27

Liang Qichao believed that traditional novels poisoned all walks of life from uneducated housewives and street peddlers to upper-class scholars and officials with dreams of examination success, romance between talented scholars and beautiful ladies, and superstitious tales about fox spirits and witches. It was culpable of the weak and sentimental National Character and people’s sympathy with secret brotherhood societies such as the Big Swords (Dadao hui) that led to the catastrophic consequences of the Boxer Uprising. However, he indicated that a Westernized idealistic (lixiang) and realistic (xieshi) fiction would satisfy people’s curiosity to explore things beyond their physical world in contact or explain motivations and reasons in human activities to broaden their perspectives and nurture new social norms.28

Liang Qichao went on stating that fiction has the powers of thurification (xun), immersion (jin), stimulation (ci), and lifting (ti) to influence people to the utmost level. While few people had access to the words of sages and philosophers to be edified, however, most of them would be easily swayed by detrimental elements in traditional novels, and if fiction was continually treated as lower art unworthy of the elite’s attention, it would be more fully

27 Liang Qichao, “On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the People” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, p. 74. 28 Ibid., 74-81. 20 controlled by inferior writers and profit-seeking merchants to the ruin of the people. Therefore, he claimed that social reforms should begin with the renovation of fiction to renew people’s mind.29 From the perspective of reformers such as Liang Qichao and Yan Fu, a renovated

Westernized fiction would instill a new moral vitality into the nation.

Modern journalism, publishing enterprises, and public schools

Modern journalism and publishing companies first appeared in China in major treaty-port cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Take Shanghai as an example, the city’s first new-style Chinese-language newspaper Shen bao and its vernacular language supplement Ming bao were founded in 1872 and 1876 by a British national Earnest Major, and its rival in the city

Xinwen bao was created in 1893, followed by Zhongguo baihua bao, the largest Chinese vernacular newspaper that included a variety of columns of current event, essay, history, biography, education, industry, drama, science fiction, etc. in 1903.30 To impose public pressure on the Qing government, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao’s Society for National Strengthening

(Qiangxue hui) founded Qiangxue bao and Shiwu bao in 1896 to propaganda their appeal to establish a constitutional monarchy. By 1906 there were 66 newspapers in Shanghai and 239 over the country.31

As the circulation increased, many newspapers began to issue fiction columns, first being

Shen bao‘s “Unfettered Talk” (Ziyou tan) in 1911, ensued by Xinwen bao’s “Forest of

Happiness” (Kuaihuo lin), and Shi bao’s “Surplus Spirit” (Yuxing). Stories published on these newspaper supplements had better chance to attract readers, and finally they surpassed popular

29 Ibid. 30 Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Cities, pp. 96-102. 31 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 144. 21 magazines to become the leading medium for the new-style fiction.32 Meanwhile, the first

Chinese-run modern publishing company, the Commercial Press that would have been gradually equipped with innovative foreign technology, such as the automatic type-casting oven, the colloid-plate printing machine, tin-plate printing, the Chinese typewriter, and the steel-engraved printing, was founded in Shanghai in 1897, followed by its rival companies in the city the

Zhonghua shuju in 1912 and the World Book Company (Shijie shuju) in 1917, all of which stimulated the new popular fiction writing. 33

During the period, as part of the education reform, the Qing government dictated each county to establish a Westernized primary school and each prefecture a secondary school in 1900 and 1901. Between the mid-1900s and the late 1910s, the Westernized public schools increased from 4,000 to 120,000, and the student population rose from around one hundred thousand in

1905 to five million by the early twenties. Meanwhile the treaty-port foreign authorities lifted ban to allow their schools to accept Chinese students.34 And the Ministry of Education of the

Republic prescribed the written vernacular (baihua) as the official language in public schools in

1920.35 Now, more novels were written in complete vernacular language, and readership of the new-style fiction extended to some of working class people who had reached minimal literacy in the education reform.

The colonized city and the new-style popular fiction

Shanghai was among the first five treaty-port cities stipulated by the Treaty of Nanking

(Nanjing tiaoyue) that concluded the First Opium War (Diyici yapian zhanzheng) in 1842. It was

32 Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Cities, pp. 117-118. 33 Ibid., 86-89. 34 Ibid., 10. 35 Schwartz, “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 97. 22 the first Chinese city that underwent Westernized urban modernization and witnessed the establishment of a series of modern transportation and communication facilities such as telegraph, daily Chinese-language newspapers, railroad, telephones, the Imperial Post Office, and automobiles and streetcars. 36 To the early 1930s, its population grew to more than a million and a half, and it was ranked as the world’s fifth largest city, thanks to the inflow of war refugees of the Taiping Rebellion, the legitimation of foreign manufacturing, textile, flour, and cigarettes industries by the Treaty of Shimonoseki (Maguan tiaoyue) with Japan in 1895, and the World

War I that weakened Western competitions in China market.37 People flocked to Shanghai in its modernization process for new career opportunities, including some of those who lost official career path via the civil service examinations to earn a living in fiction writing,38 and it became the center of several types of new-style fiction in the first two decades of the new century, first being the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School (Yuanyang hudie pai) love stories that explored marriage freedom as women’s emancipation and education drew national attention in the late Qing reforms, ensued by the detective, scandal, and knight-errant novels that reflected tumultuous sociopolitical status of the late 1910s and the early 1920s.39

Nonetheless, devoid of the faith to use fiction to enlighten people, the popular fiction writers wrote for personal financial gains, and their escapist pleasure-seeking tendency reflected their disillusion, insecurity, and alienation in the Westernized city.40 However, on the other hand, they would embellish their works with certain modern devices, such as the nuclear family, new-

36 Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Cities, pp. 79-80. 37 Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937, pp. 236-237, and Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Cities, p. 4. 38 Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Cities, p. 156. 39 Ibid., 22. 40 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 154. 23 style divorce, general education, and modern social activities, to provide city dwellers vicarious experiences of modern life to soothe their anxiety living in a dramatically changing urban environment, where individuals lost deep connections with one another as in a traditional community, and to assure them that the age-old values such as honesty, frugality, and respect for the elder and the supernatural could still be counted on.41 Serving urban middle class’s tastes, the popular fiction maintained a strong readership until being targeted by writers of the New

Literature, e.g., Mao Dun, Ba Jin, and Cao Yu, for its fun-seeking contents, semi-classical language, and conservative indifference to Western literary technique in the early twenties. 42

The New Literature

The Revolution of 1911 ended two thousand years’ imperial system and established the new Republic in China. However, the sudden downfall of the Qing caused the fragmentation and militarization of powers in regional warlords during the presidency of Yuan Shikai and his successors.43 As the administration failed to carry out thorough social reformations promised by the revolutionists, marked by the publication of the New Youth (Xin qingnian) in Shanghai in

September 1915, the new generation of intellectuals launched the New Culture Movement to create a Westernized egalitarian culture to pursue the “Mr. Science” (Sai xiansheng) and the

“Mr. Democracy” (De xiansheng) in lieu of Confucian traditions. In his 1917 iconoclastic essay

“On Literary Revolution,” Chen Duxiu called for a new national spirit for literary, moral, religious, and political revolutions:

41 Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Cities, p. 198. 42 Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Cities, p. 15, and Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 150. 43 Schwartz, “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 110. 24

(1) Down with the ornate, sycophantic literature of the aristocracy; up with the plain,

expressive literature of the people!

(2) Down with stale, pompous classical literature; up with fresh, sincere realist literature!

(3) Down with obscure, abstruse eremitic literature; up with comprehensible, popularized

social literature! 44

Chen Duxiu compared the lively street speeches of the “Airs of the States” (Guofeng) in the

Book of Songs (Shijing) and the rustic expressions in the Elegies of Chu (Chuci) with the Han dynasty’s aristocratic and sycophantic Fu poetry, as well as the Yuan and Ming vernacular dramas and fictions with the classical works by the Ming literati, stating that literature of his time was the “flesh without bones” and “body without soul,” heir of the dead literary traditions that lost expressive and descriptive function to reflect the universe, human life, and society but pompously restated stories about kings, officials, ghosts, and the fate of individuals in vain, responsible for the sycophantic, self-aggrandizing, hypocritical, and impractical National

Character, and thus a literary revolution was necessary to generate spiritual powers for political reforms.45 Chen Duxiu’s proclaim echoed with Liang Qichao’s proposition to construct a new

National Character via a new-style fiction for political renewal in the beginning of the century.

He attributed the country’s weakness to its cultural traditions, especially the purported suppression of the youth and women in Confucian philosophy, to espouse Hu Shi’s anti-

Confucianism rhetoric.46

44 Chen Duxiu, “On Literary Revolution” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, p. 141. 45 Ibid., 140-145. 46 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 167. 25

Hu Shi propounded the eight-point suggestion for the contents and forms of the New

Literature in his 1917 essay “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” while he was studying abroad in the U.S.:

(1) Writing should have substance.

(2) Do not imitate the ancient.

(3) Emphasize the technique of writing.

(4) Do not moan without an illness.

(5) Eliminate hackneyed and formal language.

(6) Do not use allusions.

(7) Do not use parallelism.

(8) Do not avoid vulgar diction. 47

Obsessed by a metaphor that China was afflicted by a habitual spiritual disease unable to strengthen herself, writers of the New Literature emphasized contents rather than forms for literary and social revolution.48 Like the Qing reformist predecessors, they viewed fiction writing as a lofty profession to reflect social reality and voice people’s discontents to serve the nation.

As the Versailles Treaty which blatantly handed over the German Concessions in Shandong to

Japan despite China’s objection triggered the student-led May Fourth Movement (Wusi yundong) against Western imperialism and feudal warlords in 1919, the Social Darwinian evolutionary view about the country’s future was questioned by an upsurge of nationalism to mobilize people

47 Hu Shi, “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 121-139. 48 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, pp. 142-143. 26 for radical changes.49 Signaled by the switchover of the editorship of The Fiction Monthly from the fun-seeking Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School writers to the May Fourth youth Mao

Dun and Zheng Zhenduo in 1921, the New Literature came to forefront of the literary scene.

The literary scene in the twenties

Using complete vernacular language, paying more attention to psychological characterization, and taking pains to seek solutions to vexing social problems, the more Western- educated New Literature writers believed a progressive evolution in the European literature from the classicism, romanticism, realism, to naturalism and neo-romanticism. They felt that traditional Chinese literature was roughly matched with the European classicism and romanticism phases, so they decided the realism and naturalism to be the goals for literary practices.50

Led by Zhou Zuoren, Mao Dun, Zheng Zhenduo, and Ye Shengtao, the Association for

Literary Studies espoused the realistic “literature for life’s sake” (wenxue wei rensheng) principle. The association’s manifesto published on the first issue of The Fiction Monthly under

Mao Dun editorship denounced popular fiction writer’s attitude to treat literature as a form of amusement and proclaimed that the purpose of the New Literature was to spread advanced knowledge, especially that in foreign literature, to Chinese readers. 51 In the 1922 article

“Literature and Life,” Mao Dun argued that since the romanticism’s idealized world lacked social contexts, contemporary writers should use the realistic approach to reflect social reality.

He analyzed literature’s relationships with human life from four aspects:

49 Furth, “From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 93. 50 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, pp. 183-184. 51 Ibid., 164. 27

(1) The writer’s personality. Mao Dun agreed with French writer Anatole France’s claim

that literature was the writer’s autobiography, stating that a revolutionist and a nature

lover would produce completely different works.

(2) The race. Mao Dun stated that different races have different literatures. For instance,

the mystical and supernatural traits of the Oriental literature were different than the

tough, stoic, and moderate characteristics in German literature, as well as passions in

French love stories.

(3) The environment, which he meant the writer’s personal background, social

conventions, ideological trends, and political situations. Mao Dun insisted that only by

living within particular social conditions could the writer recreate them in their works.

For instance, Robert Burns’ pastoral poetry represented his interaction with his

surroundings, and, on the other hand, because Chinese writers of his time were unfamiliar

to the working class’s life, they were unable to act as their spokesmen.

(4) The era, which he indicated the Zeitgeist that governs politics, philosophy, literature,

and intellectual trends. Mao Dun stated that the spirit of the era had been shaped by

scientific pursuit of truth, and likewise realistic approach objectively observes and

describes social reality, so that the New Literature should adopt the Realism as its main

approach. 52

A senior member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Zhongguo gongchandang), Mao Dun sponsored the Realism to expose the dark side of the colonial, feudal, and capitalist society to awaken people to social revolutions.

52 Mao Dun, “Literature and Life” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 190- 195. 28

Another leading literary group in the twenties was the Creation Society guided by Guo

Moruo, Yu Dafu, and Cheng Fangwu that had underwent an early romanticist “art for art’s sake”

(wei yishu er yishu) stage to a leftist shifting, “from a literary revolution to a revolutionary literature” (cong wenxue geming dao geming wenxue). In the 1922 essay “The Mission of the

New Literature,” Cheng Fangwu indicated that literary creation was driven by demands of the heart unnecessarily linked to predetermined goals, and contemporary writers should engage in the following endeavors:

(1) Awaken people against the “brutal, morally decadent, profit-seeking, shameless, cold-

blooded epoch” and its social organizations and education system, and as disciples of

beauty, writers should battle against hypocrisy and iniquities for truth and goodness.

(2) Create a perfect vernacular language.

(3) Pursue perfection and beauty without utilitarian purposes. 53

However, little in common with that in the nineteenth-century European romanticism that pursued an inner reality in the mysterious and transcendent from the vulgar philistine tastes,

Cheng Fangwu’s appeal to literature’s aesthetic values emphasized on a humanistic and sociopolitical reading of the bourgeois decadence, and the Creation Society writers replaced traditional values with the sentimental love, passion, self-pity, and self-glorification in their works.54 For instance, in the preface to his translation of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Guo

53 Cheng Fangwu, “The Mission of the New Literature” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 247-256. 54 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, pp. 166-170. 29

Moruo expressed strong empathy with the hero’s hopeless love, emotionalism, pantheism, and the reverence of primitive life. 55

On the other hand, the Creation Society writers demonstrated a clear class consciousness in literature since its early stage. In the 1923 essay “Class Struggle in Literature,” Yu Dafu reviewed the European literature since the nineteenth century and stated that (i) the post-

Renaissance and neo-classical literature reflected the idle tastes of the degenerate aristocrats that denied proletarian participation; (ii) the romanticism expressed anger and disappointment toward ugly social reality and the monopoly of literature by the upper class; (iii) the French Decadent

School’s nihilism and anarchism denounced the absurdities in government, law, and morality that prevented the individual’s development; and (iv) the German Expressionism endeavored to turn capitalism upside down – all indicating class struggle in literature, which, however, became things of the past in the Soviet literature, where proletarian writers illustrated the essence of human life and modern spirit in their works.56

The Creation Society’s leftist turning was marked by Cheng Fangwu’s 1928 essay “From a Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature,” in which he lambasted the leading figures of the New Cultural Movement, e.g., Hu Shi, Zhang Dongsun, and Liang Shuming, failed to understand the era and its readers and to carry out the mission to negate old thoughts and create a new culture. By eulogizing the Creation Society writers’ critical role in attacking “false criticism” and perfecting vernacular language in correcting grammatical errors, adopting common idioms, expanding vernacular vocabulary, and using complicated syntax, he claimed

55 Guo Moruo, “Preface to The Sorrows of Young Werther” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 204-212. 56 Yu Dafu, “Class Struggle in Literature” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 263-268. 30 that writers should negate themselves once again – “the negation of negation” – with a class consciousness to use spoken language to serve workers and peasants and take a step forward to battle against capitalism with a revolutionary literature, in the course of which no one was allowed to be a bystander: one must take sides! 57

In the turbulent years between 1924 and 1927 while the First United Front (Lian’e ronggong) between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists made the intellectual participation of the anti-feudal warlord campaigns possible, leading members in the Creation Society and the

Sun Society (Taiyang she), e.g., Guo Morou, Cheng Fangwu, and Jiang Guangzu, began to assume the role as the revolutionist to inspire the people with a new proletarian literature.58

However, as the alliance was dissolved by Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi’s suppression of the

Communists in Shanghai in the April 12 Purge, and as the new Nationalist Nanjing government’s cultural tyranny alienated the leftists and many liberal intellectuals, instigated by the CCP and influenced by Lu Xun, the League of Left-Wing Writers (Zhongguo zuoyi zuojia lianmeng) was founded in Shanghai On March 2, 1930, to promote a proletarian literature for the communist cause, which generated heated ideological debates about the role of literature in the early to mid-thirties.

The “Third Category” debate

From the late twenties, the Creation and the Sun Societies’ leftist writers with Japanese educational background had been constantly at odds with the Anglo-American trained liberal writers in the Crescent Moon Society (Xinyue she), such as Hu Shi, Xu Zhimo, and Liang Shiqiu,

57 Cheng Fangwu, “From a Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 267-275. 58 Schwartz, “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 137. 31 who viewed health and dignity as the two guiding literary principles. To respond to Cheng

Fangwu’s revolutionary battle call, in the 1928 essay “Literature and Revolution,” Liang Shiqiu stated that from literary perspective there would be no such thing as a “revolutionary literature” or “majority literature” but perhaps a “literature of a revolutionary period.” He insisted that literary appreciation was not any social group’s privilege; instead only few people were endowed with aesthetic capability to understand literature either in the poor or rich social class, and literary creation should reflect the universal and eternal human nature and be judged by its inner artistic values beyond political coercion and class consideration.59

On the other hand, after the founding of the League of Left-Wing Writers, some pro- government rightist intellectuals, i.e., Zhang Ruogu, Fu Yanchang, Zhu Yingpeng, and Huang

Zhenxia, formed the Nationalist Literature School in June 1930 to promote a nationalistic consciousness in place of the proletarian view of social classes, which was rebutted by a leftist leaning liberal writer Hu Qiuyuan in the 1932 essay “Do Not Encroach Upon Literary Art,” in which the author indicated that literature was not political propaganda, and ideological concerns in literary works must represent people’s needs and the spirit of the era through most touching contents and appropriate forms, and he believed that besides the nationalist and the proletarian literature, all other literary schools – from the fun-seeking popular fiction, naturalism, romanticism, petit-bourgeois literature, to democratic literature – had their own rights to exist and prosper.60

59 Liang Shiqiu, “Literature and Revolution” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893- 1945, pp. 307-315. 60 Hu Qiuyuan, “Do Not Encroach Upon Literary Art” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 363-366. 32

By pseudonym Su Wen, Du Heng wrote the essay “Regarding the Literary News and Hu

Qiuyuan’s Literary Arguments” published on the Les Contemporains under Shi Zhecun’s editorship, in which he proposed the term the “Third Category” to refer to liberal writers who could not be subsumed under either the leftist or the rightist political category. Via an investigation of the leftist positions since Lu Xun and Mao Dun introduced Plekhanov’s and

Lunacharsky’s proletarian theories into China, Du Heng pointed out the differences between Hu

Qiuyuan’s scholarly anti-utilitarian Marxist stance and the mainstream leftist theorists’ utilitarian

Marxist-Leninist attitudes to view literature as implements to serve politics. He stated that the former’s pedantic leftist approach that focused on literature’s truth-seeking features was impractical and incompatible with the latter’s emphasis of practice and action to suffice the present needs, and that class consciousness had turned literature “from a virgin into a prostitute” that would sell itself to the capitalist one day and the proletariat the next, under the circumstances of which writers became propagandists to be faithful to one master. Du Heng believed that despite the oppression and dictation from the government and the League of Left-

Wing Writers, most authors fell into the “Third Category,” who did not take political sides but wrote for personal fame through their works’ artistic values. 61

Celebrated veteran writer Lu Xun, who had exerted a substantial influence on the first two decades of the New Literature, joined the debate with the 1933 essay “On the ‘Third

Category’” published on Shi Zhecun’s Les Contemporains. Previously in the revolutionary period of anti-warlord campaigns in the mid-twenties, Lu Xun proclaimed that what the era needed was revolutionists rather than a revolutionary literature as advocated by the leftist writers.

61 Su Wen, “Regarding the Literary News and Hu Qiuyuan’s Literary Arguments” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 367-375. 33

In spite of being disillusioned by the massacre of the April 12 Purge, he questioned the leftist claim of literature as the spokesman of the proletariat, instructing young members in the Creation and Sun Societies that great literature was never submissive to authoritarian orders as political propagandas but sprang from human heart, and although literature could be propaganda of a sort but vice versa was not the case.62 Meanwhile, he attacked both the Crescent Moon Society’s liberalism and the Nationalist Literature School’s cultural conservatism.

For the “Third Category” debate, Lu Xun at first expressed sympathy with the leftist writers’ being “persecuted, oppressed, imprisoned, and slaughtered” by the feudal-capitalist society, and then he criticized Du Heng’s term as that someone who wanted “to live in a time of wars yet to leave the battlefield and stand alone, to live in the present yet to write for the future,” a false categorization and an illusion in a class society. 63 Finally, the contention was concluded by a conciliatory statement drafted by Lu Xun’s disciple, the leftist theorist Feng Xuefeng, who stated that although the “Third Category” writers did not assume a proletarian view in literature, nonetheless, they were “fellow travelers” of the revolutionary causes in their opposing against the old ages and old society. 64

Chapter summary

Since the defeats in the two Opium Wars by the superior Western military forces in the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing reformers attempted a variety of reformist schemes, from

“learn barbarian methods to combat barbarian threats,” “Western learning for application,

Chinese learning for essence,” to the binary “spiritual East” and “material West” system to

62 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Road to Revolution 1927-1945” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, pp. 199- 200. 63 Lu Xun, “On the ‘Third Category’” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 383-386. 64 Lee, “Literary Trends: The Road to Revolution 1927-1945” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 212. 34 respond to the foreign military, economic, and cultural pressure. Realizing the utmost powers of fiction to penetrate the people’s mind, Liang Qichao proposed through renovating harmful traditional novels to renovate the National Character for the nation’s regeneration.

Benefiting from Westernized modern journalism and publishing enterprises, Shanghai became the center of a new-style popular fiction in the early decades of the new century, which, however, strayed away from the reformist cause of nation-building but became fun-and-profit- seeking. As the 1911 Revolution failed to bring about thorough social reformations, the new generation of intellectuals launched the New Culture Movement to replace Confucian cultural norms with Western democratic values, and gradually they became favoring a Marxist-Leninist solution to the nation’s problems, which was manifested in the ideological debates about the function of literature in the twenties and early thirties.

Growing up in the tumultuous time and actively interacting with principal writers of the

New Literature in Shanghai, Shi Zhecun’s literary career and fiction writing were substantially influenced and shaped by the political, cultural, and ideological contexts in the era.

Chapter 2: Shi Zhecun’s Literary Career in the Twenties and Thirties

As a high school student in Songjiang, at first Shi Zhecun was intrigued by classical poetry of the Tang and Song poets Du Fu, Li He, Wen Tingyun, and Su Shi. Before long, Hu

Shi’s Changshi ji and Guo Moruo’s The Goddess (Nushen), as well as translations of classical

European novels published on literary magazines in the New Culture Movement inspired him to attempt new poetry and short story writing.65 His first story “The Dream to Restore Reputation” was published on the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School’s magazine The Saturday in April

1922.66 To his last story “Master Huangxin” published on The Literary Magazine (Wenxue zazhi) in June 1937, the writer had a total eighty stories under his name, among which the eight psychoanalytic tales that employed the Freudian theory and modernist devices written between

1928 and 1933 were distinguishable in the New Literature.

Table 1. She Zhecun’s Short Stories by Year.

Publishing Year Collection Story

1922 “Huifu mingyu zhi meng” 恢復名譽之夢 [The dream to restore reputation] “Lao huashi” 老畫師 [The elder painter] “Jimo de jie” 寂寞的街 [The lonely street]

1923 Jianggan ji “Boshu zhi jian” 伯叔之間 [Between brothers] 江干集 “Lengdan de xin” 冷淡的心 [The cold heart] [The riverbank] “Yangyou” 洋油 [The foreign oil] “Shanghai lai de keren” 上海來的客人 [The guest from Shanghai] “Chuanchang zhu jincheng” 船廠主進城 [The shipyard owner in the town]

65 Shi Zhecun, “Wo de chuanzuo shenghuo zhi licheng” in Shi Zhecun sanwen xuanji, pp. 97-98. 66 Ying, “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” in Modern Chinese Writers’ Anthologies: Shi Zhecun, p. 312. 36

“Fu yu mu” 父與母 [Father and mother] “Libaitang nei” 禮拜堂内 [At the church] “Shoutao” 手套 [The gloves] “Jie di” 姐弟 [Sister and brother] “Fancun gelu” 梵邨歌侶 [Singers in Village Fan] “Huozhong de anfang” 火鐘的安放 [Placement of the fire bell] “Xiangren” 鄉人 [Villagers] “Liangri zhi chujia” 兩日之出家 [Two days being a monk] “Shisan ye ban” 十三頁半 [Thirteen and a half pages] “Luyi” 路役 [Road duties] “Xueqiao yuren tan” 雪橇御人談 [The sled driver’s talk] “Pin fu yu zhihui” 貧富與智慧 [The poor, the rich, and wisdom] “Shoujie zhe” 守節者 [The one who keeps integrity] “Duchuan” 渡船 [The ferry] “Tushuiju zhang” 屠稅局長 [The slaughter tax bureau chief] “Huanle zhi ye” 歡樂之夜 [The merry night] “Maotouying” 貓頭鷹 [The owl] “Gudu zhe” 孤獨者 [The loner]

1926 “Shangyuan deng” 上元燈 [The festival lanterns] “Zhou furen” 周夫人 [Mrs. Zhou]

1928 “Juanzi” 絹子 [Juanzi] “Ni’nong” 妮儂 [Ni’nong] “Zhui” 追 [Chase] “Meiyu zhi xi” 梅雨之夕 [An evening of spring rain] “Qi zhi shengchen” 妻之生辰 [Wife’s birthday] 37

1929 Shangyuan deng “Xin jiaoyu” 新教育 [The new education] 上元燈 “Jiumoluoshi” 鳩摩儸什 [Kumarajiva] [The festival “Fengyang nu” 鳳陽女 [The girl from Fengyang] lanterns]

1930 “Ah Xiu” 阿秀 [Ah Xiu] “Hua” 花 [The flowers] “Jiangjun di tou” 將軍底頭 [The general’s head]

1931 Li Shishi “Ah Lan gongzhu” 阿襤公主 [Princess ah Lan] 李師師 “Shi Xiu” 石秀 [Shi Xiu] [Li Shishi] “Chun geng” 蒓羹 [The shield soup] “Zai Bali da xiyuan” 在巴黎大戲院 [At the Paris theatre] “Mo dao” 魔道 [Devil’s way] “Li Shishi” 李師師 [Li Shishi]

1932 Jiangjun di tou “Shan”扇 [The fans] 將軍底頭 “Jiu meng”舊夢 [Old dreams] [The general’s “Taoyuan” 桃園 [The peach orchard] head] “Yuren He Changqing” 漁人何長慶 [Fishman He

Changqing] Shangyuan deng “Li yu” 栗芋 [Chestnuts and potatoes] (gaibian zaiban) 上元燈 (改編再 “Minhang qiuri jishi” 閔行秋日紀事 [Autumn days in Minhang] 版) “Shiren” 詩人 [The poet] [The festival lanterns (second “Hongzhi fashi de chujia” 宏智法師的出家 [The edition)] ordination of monk Hongzhi]

1933 Meiyu zhi xi “Lushe” 旅舍 [The hostel] 梅雨之夕 “Xiaoxing” 宵行 [Night trip] [An evening of “Bomu de wu’nu” 薄暮的舞女 [The dancing girl at spring rain] dusk] “Yecha” 夜叉 [The demon] 38

Shan nuren “Sixizi de shengyi” 四喜子的生意 [Sixizi’s business] xingpin “Xiongzhai” 凶宅 [The haunted house] 善女人行品 “Shizizuo liuxing” 獅子座流星 [The Leonid meteor [Exemplary shower] conduct of virtuous women] “Wu” 霧 [Fog] “Kangnei xiaojing” 港内小景 [Landscape inside the harbor] “Canqiu xia de xianyue” 殘秋下的弦月 [Waning moon in the deep autumn] “Chunyang” 春陽 [Spring sunshine] “Hudie furen” 蝴蝶夫人 [Madam butterfly] “Xiongji” 雄鷄 [The roosters] “Telu gu’niang” 特呂姑娘 [The salesgirl] “Sanbu” 散步 [Stroll]

1936 Xiao zhen ji “Zufen” 祖墳 [The ancestral grave] 小珍集 “Mingpian” 名片 [The name cards] [Small treasure] “Niunai” 牛奶 [The milk] “Qiche lu” 汽車路 [The motorway] “Shi ye” 失業 [Unemployment] “Ou” 鷗 [The seagulls] “Liehu ji” 獵虎記 [A story of hunting tigers] “Ta de lingying” 塔的霛應 [The omen of the stupa] “Diyi” 嫡裔 [The progeny] “Xin shenghuo” 新生活 [The new life] “Bing hou” 病後 [After illness]

1937 “Huangxin dashi” 黃心大師 [Master Huangxin]

Early literary career in Shanghai 39

Shi Zhecun’s literary career started with mailing short stories for publication to

Shanghai’s literary magazines like The Saturday, The Semi-Monthly, and The Week edited by the

Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School writers such as Bao Tianxiao and Zhou Soujuan.67

Influenced by the New Culture Movement’s call for advanced Western science, technology, and sociopolitical system, the writer began to pay attention to translations of European classical novels by Goethe, Dickens, Maupassant, and Turgenev published on the New Literature journals like The Fiction Monthly and the Creation Society’s Creation Quarterly (Chuanzao jikan). In

1923, he self-printed his first short story collection The Riverbank that includes twenty-three stories while studying at Shanghai University being a student in Mao Dun’s literature class.68 His early attempt to psychological characterization was seen in the two realistic mode romance stories “The Festival Lanterns” and “Mrs. Zhou” written in 1926. The former is about a sentimental first-person male narrator’s Werther-like love in a small town in the Jiangnan region during the Chinese New Year, and the latter is a story of a young sensitive widow’s secret desires toward her neighbor’s twelve-years-old boy, Weiguan, who somehow reminded her of her late husband.69

In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, half of Shanghai’s twenty-five square miles urban landscape was occupied by the British, American, French, and Japanese as the International

Settlement, the French Concession, and the unofficial Japanese Hongkou district with their own jurisdiction. As the cultural contact zone, the city provided Chinese writers physical and textual access to the metropolitan West through its modern high-rises, Western commercial facilities and service industries, and a number of bookstores that sold foreign books, magazines, and

67 Ying, “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” in Modern Chinese Writers’ Anthologies: Shi Zhecun, pp. 312-313. 68 Shi Zhecun, “Wo de diyiben shu” in Sha shang de jiaoji, p. 72. 69 Shi Zhecun, “Zhou furen” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, pp. 23-24. 40 newspapers,70 where Shi Zhecun gained theoretical supplies for his psychoanalytic friction writing.

As the progressive and adventurous May Fourth youth, Shi Zhecun, Dai Wangshu, and

Du Heng joined the Communist Youth League and the Nationalist Party while they were studying at the Aurora University (Zhendan daxue) in the French Concession in 1925, and they attended revolutionists’ secret gatherings and distributed anti-warlord leaflets in the neighborhood. In early spring 1927, Dai Wangshu and Du Heng were caught in the act by the colonial police at a communist party meeting place and were almost handed over to the local warlord authority to be executed if Dai Wangshu had not managed to inform Chen Zhigao, a schoolmate at the Aurora University, to entreat his father, a senior Chinese judge in the French

Concession court, to bail them out. Afterward, the horror of the massacre of thousands of communists and their sympathizers in the April 12 Purge shocked them, and, along with Liu

Na’ou, they fled Shanghai.71

The four friends previously had self-published a short-lived small journal Yingluo for their own literary works and translations in 1926. Now, returning to the city in 1928, Liu Na’ou invited Dai Wangshu to live with him in a rented three-story house in the Japanese Hongkou district to create a new literary journal, and Shi Zhecun, who was teaching high school in

Songjiang, joined them at weekends. A typical day for them in that summer started with discussing about topics such as the Soviet literature, Japanese popular literature, Marxist literary

70 The skyscraper first became possible in America in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to new technique of removing impurities from iron to create commercial steel, the invention of the elevator, and the use of compressed concrete. In the late 1920s Shanghai launched some thirty Art Deco style multi-stories projects of new bank buildings, hotels, department stores, and movie theatres that instilled the city a concrete modern feel. Soren, Art History, Popular Culture and the Cinema, p. 198, and Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, pp. 10-11. 71 Shi Zhecun, “Zhendan ernian” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 8-10. 41 theory, psychoanalysis, and German filmic techniques, followed by individual reading, writing, and translating activities. After lunch and a nap, they went swimming at a nearby facility and had cold drink in a Japanese shop. And evening was the time to go to the cinema to watch movies, and usually the day ended with ballroom dancing at midnight.72 It seemed that the summer experience stimulated Shi Zhecun to wrote the two proletarian stories “Chase” and “The New

Education” by imitating the Soviet proletarian stories73 and to complete his most celebrated modernist masterpiece “An Evening of Spring Rain” that employed psychoanalytic and sexual theories of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Marquis de Sade.74 In the following next few years, the writer continued his modernist practices and finished three psychoanalytic historical stories and other four psychoanalytic urban tales.

Table 2. Shi Zhecun’s Psychoanalytic Stories by Year.

Publishing Year Story

1928 “An Evening of Spring Rain”

1929 “Kumarajiva”

1930 “The General’s Head”

1931 “Shi Xiu” “Devil’s Way” “At the Paris Theatre”

1933 “The Hostel” “The Demon”

The Frontline and The Water Foam

72 Shi Zhecun, “Wo’men jingying guo de san’ge shudian” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 12-13. 73 Shi Zhecun, “Wo de diyiben shu” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 70-74. 74 Shi Zhecun, “Da Xinjiapo zuojia Liu Huijuan wen” in Sha shang de jiaoji, p. 175. 42

Invested by Liu Na’ou, the Frontline Bookstore was founded in Shanghai’s Chinese section in fall 1928, and Shi Zhecun, Dai Wangshu, and Du Heng joined editorship of its literary magazine The Trackless Train to publish like-minded writers’ works. Nonetheless, it was banned by the Nationalist government’s censorship for publishing radical articles, such as Feng

Xuefeng’s “Revolution and the Intellectual,” and the bookstore itself was forced to close two months later at the end of the year. However, they moved into the city’s International Settlement beyond the Nationalists’ control and reopened it with a new title, the Water Foam Bookstore. In

1929 and 1930, it published five poetry and story collections for the New Literature writers Dai

Wangshu, Yao Pengzi, Xu Xiacun, Liu Na’ou, and Shi Zhecun (the original edition of the collection The Festival Lanterns), Mu Shiying’s first published short story “Our World”

(Wo’men de shijie), works of leftist writers like Mao Dun and Ye Shengtao, and Shi Zhecun’s two psychoanalytic historical tales “Kumarajiva” and “The General’s Head” and his three proletarian stories “The Girl from Fengyang,” “Ah Xiu,” and “The Flowers.”75

To inform Chinese readers and writers with contemporary foreign literature and literary trends, the Water Foam published a variety of Western and Japanese literary translations, including Riichi Yokomitsu’s The Bridegroom’s Feeling translated by Guo Jianying, David

Herbert Laurence’s Two Green Birds rendered by Du Heng, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the West Front by Lin Yi, as well as those translated by Dai Wangshu, Xia Yan, and other translators. Shi Zhecun and his friends also contacted Lu Xun and Feng Xuefeng to publish a

Marxist literary theory translation series.76

Table 3. Water Foam Bookstore’s Marxist Literary Theory Series.

75 Shi Zhecun, “Wo’men jingying guo de san’ge shudian” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 15-16. 76 Ibid., 17-20. 43

Work Author Translator

New Arts Alexander Bogdanov Du Heng (pseud. Su Wen)

The Social Basis of Arts Anatoly Lunacharsky Feng Xuefeng

Arts and Social Life Georgi Plekhanov Feng Xuefeng

Literary Critics Franz Mehring Feng Xuefeng

Literary Arts and Critics Anatoly Lunacharsky Lu Xun

Nonetheless, unlike the first-level book companies in Shanghai, i.e., the Commercial

Press, the Zhonghua shuju, and the World Press, the Water Foam had to make substantial concessions to local bookdealers. For instance, they had to offer Henan’s Yuyuwen Bookstore

(Yuyuwen shuzhuang) seventy to seventy-five percent discount to sell their products, which was again only partly being paid off. As it kept losing money, Liu Na’ou was unable or unwilling to continue making investment, and it was reorganized as the Eastern China Bookstore (Donghua shudian), which finally stopped business during the January 28 Incident.77

The Les Contemporains

The Japanese aerial bombing on Shanghai’s Chinese section demolished the city’s major publishing facilities, such as the Commercial Press’s printing factory and library. After the incident, as many literary journals like The Fiction Monthly were still unable to resume publication, two investors of the Xiandai Book Company, Hong Xuefan and Zhang Jinglu,

77 Ibid. 24-25. 44 decided to create an apolitical periodical to attract readers to the company’s other products.

Formerly, it had published several unsuccessful politically oriented magazines: the leftist

People’s Literary Arts (Dazhong wenyi) and The Pioneers (Tuohuang zhe), which were banned by the government’s censorship, and the Nationalist Literature School’s Pioneers Monthly

(Qianfeng yuekan) that was just terminated in the Sino-Japanese military conflict. Learning the lesson, the management chose Shi Zhecun as candidate to prepare and edit the prospective journal, for they realized that he was an experienced editor, neither joined the League of Left-

Wing Writers, nor was affiliated with the government, and meanwhile maintained good relations with most New Literature writers. 78

With help of Dai Wangshu and Du Heng, Shi Zhecun released the first issue of the journal in May 1932, which was entitled by him with a French name the Les Contemporains, and on which, in accordance with the management’s intent, he stated that his editorial policy was based on a literary work’s artistic values without regarding factors of “literary trends and schools and political parties.” 79 Meanwhile, bearing the reformist and the May Fourth faith, he refused the periodical to cater to vulgar tastes to win profits as did the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies

School magazines but strived to make it as a platform to promulgate knowledge and progressive ideas.80

Nonetheless, as indicated by Cheng Fangwu and Lu Xun, it was impossible for men of letters to escape ideological involvement in this critical period, and Shi Zhecun was with no exception.81 The two fundamental position papers in the “Third Category” debate – Du Heng’s

78 Shi Zhecun, “Wo he Xiandai shuju” in Sha shang de jiaoji, p. 61. 79 Shi Zhecun, “Xiandai za yi” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 27-28. 80 Zhang, “Geren jingyan yu gonggong shijie: xiandai zazhi de yiyi,” p. 44. 81 See Cheng Fangwu, “From a Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature,” and Lu Xun, “On the ‘Third Category.’” 45

“Regarding the Literary News and Hu Qiuyuan’s Literary Arguments” and Lu Xun’s “On the

‘Third Category’” – were both published on the Les Contemporains under Shi Zhecun’s editorship, who especially made an obscure comment on the event at its November 1932 Issue, stating that although progressive writers were not necessarily to be directly affiliated to politics, however, based on their understanding of the social reality, they must have had certain answers in their mind, which the editor suggested a socialist solution as the only means to the nation’s problems.82 Moreover, after Hu Yeping and other four young writers associated with the League of Left-Wing Writers were secretly executed by the Nationalist authority in Shanghai in

February 1931, when he heard the news that Ding Ling was arrested from her home in May

1933, he continually posted readers’ opinions about the incident on the journal’s June through

August issues to impose public pressure on the government.83

Despite avoiding involving in revolutionary activities since the April 12 Purge, as well as his modernist practices being largely unappreciated by general readers and attacked by leftist critics,84 Shi Zhecun’s literary endeavor in the twenties and thirties had not slipped into the escapist fun-and-profit seeking as did the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School writers. In a conversation in his later years, he stated that “scholars of literature, history, and philosophy are representatives of the spirit of their times…[and] they must respect the profession and

82 Shi Zhecun, “Xiandai za yi” in Sha shang de jiaoji, pp. 33-34. 83 Ibid., 42-45. 84 For instance, the leftist critic Lou Shiyi blamed his two psychoanalytic urban tales, “At the Paris Theatre” and “The Devil’s Way,” as the literature for the idle capitalist class, who lived on bank interests to pursue the bizarre and mysterious to kill time. Lou Shiyi urged the writer to keep on writing proletarian stories like “Chase” and “Ah Xiu” to serve the working-class people. Lou Shiyi, “Shi Zhecun de xin’ganjue zhuyi” in Zhongguo xiandai zuojia xuanji: Shi Zhecun, pp. 305-306, and Liang Shiqiu, “Literature and Revolution” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 307-315. 46 understand their historical responsibilities of inheriting and renewing the nation’s culture.”85 He further confessed his attitude on the relationship between literature and politics in an interview with two writers from Taiwan:

I believe that politics and literature are two different realms. However, I have not

opposed against the idea that literature should serve politics so long as it is done by the

writer’s freewill. Indeed, literature has always served politics in an unobtrusive way. A

writer is impossible to escape the political environments that have surrounded him.86

Chapter summary

Influenced by European classical novel translations published on Shanghai’s New

Literature journals, the young writer recognized the difference between the fun-seeking

Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies novels and serious fictional works that reflected social realities and spoke for people’s needs. The westernized semi-colonial modern city Shanghai provided him virtual and textual access to the metropolitan West and inspired his psychoanalytic fiction writing. Although staying away from political activities since the April 12 Purge, Shi Zhecun had never neglected the lofty reformist mission to enlighten people and serve the country through his literary endeavors.

85 Yang, “Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi shang de Shi Zhecun: wei jinian Shi Zhecun danchen yibai zhounian er zuo,” p. 110. 86 我一直深知政治歸政治，文學歸文學，我也不反對文學為政治服務，但是必須作家出諸自願。事實上，文學時常不知不覺的在爲政治服務的，一個作家是無法逃離政治氛圍的。 Shi Zhucun, “Da Taiwan zuojia Zheng Mingli, Lin Yaode wen” in Sha shang de jiaoji, p. 171. 47

Chapter 3: Shi Zhecun’s Psychoanalytic Fiction Writing

Many writers of the New Literature had studied abroad in youth. Shi Zhecun classified those who received education in America, England, the Continental Europe, Japan, or in missionary schools in China into three language groups: the English language group (e.g., Hu

Shi, Liang Shiqiu, Xu Zhimo), the Japanese language group (e.g., Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu,

Feng Xuefeng), and the French-German language group (e.g., Dai Wangshu and the writer himself).87 Whereas his early realistic mode stories were influenced by Chinese translations of

European classical novels, his English and French language abilities acquired in the Presbyterian

Hangchow University and the Catholic Aurora University allowed him to study sexual theories of Havelock Ellis and Marquis de Sade in original texts and the Freudian psychoanalysis and

Arthur Schnitzler’s psychoanalytic stories in English or French translations for his psychoanalytic story writing, sparing him from oftentimes problematic Chinese renditions.

The Eros and the Thanatos and different readings

“Kumarajiva” is Shi Zhecun’s first psychoanalytic historical tale written in 1929 about the conflict between erotic love and religious belief. 88 Based on the Freudian notion of the sexual instinct, the Eros, the writer created a psychological foundation for the legendary late fourth and early fifth-century Buddhist missionary through his marital life and relations with prostitutes to demystify and secularize him in a modern humanistic sense.89 Similarly, the conflict theme and the Freudian notion appear in the historical story “The General’s Head” written in 1930 that sets the tempestuous years of the mid-eighth century as background.90

87 Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, p. 129. 88 Shi Zhecun, “‘Jiangjun di tou’ zixu” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 793. 89 See Lu, “Fojiao ticai de shisu gaixie yu lishi wenben de renxing jiedu: lun Shi Zhecun fojiao ticai xiaoshuo chuangzuo,” p. 116. 90 Shi Zhecun, “‘Jiangjun di tou’ zixu” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 793. 48

In history, General Hua Jingding was a subordinate to Chengdu Governor Cui

Guangyuan. He proved military prowess in the quick crackdown of a local military strongman

Duan Zizhang’s revolt in the larger context of the An Lushan Rebellion (Anshi zhiluan).

However, during the campaign, the undisciplined troop raided and killed several thousand civilians. The Tang court therefore punished and demoted Governor Cui, who soon died of illness.91 The poet-historian Du Fu wrote two well-known poems concerning the general, one of which satirized his transgressive use of the Tang court music for personal amusement.92 Troop brutality also was a problem in the writer’s time. For instance, due to embezzlement and incapability of military officers, in the First Eastern Expedition Campaign (Diyici dongzheng) in

Guangdong province, Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi’s soldiers were unable to get sufficient lodging and provisions, and they attacked civilians, occupied their houses, and fought one another for available foods.93 However, unlike General Hua, the Generalissimo finally managed to institute a disciplinary regime on the troop and drove out the warlords in the Northern Expedition (Beifa zhanzheng). Shi Zhecun’s story subtly reflected the social reality of the early decades in the

Republic.

In the story, endowed with a mix ethnicity being the grandson of a Tibetan warrior who followed the Tang emissary to Chengdu and married a Chinese woman in the peaceful years of the Tang-Tibet relations, General Hua was on a mission to defend a western border town harassed by the Tibetan troops. Distressed by his Han Chinese soldiers’ cupidity and Governor

91 Liu Xu, “Liechuan diliushiyi” in Jiu Tangshu. 92 “Zeng Huaqing” 贈花卿 [To Mr. Hua]: 錦城絲管日紛紛，/ 半入江風半入雲。/ 此曲只應天上有，/ 人間能得幾回聞。 Orchestral music was played on and on in Chengdu, / half elevated into the river wind and half into the clouds. / Such melodies should have only been enjoyed by heavenly beings, / How could people on the earth hear of it? Dufu shixuan, p. 136. 93 Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution, pp. 292-293. 49

Cui’s death, he was pondering to defect to the “upright and brave” Tibetan warriors spoken by his late grandfather.94 The night his detachment arrived at the outpost, one of his Han Chinese subordinate was caught in the act for attempted rape of a Han Chinese girl. He was infuriated and ordered the decapitation of the offender. Nevertheless, the general soon found himself infatuated with the victim girl in a Freudian hallucination of the beheaded soldier’s rape juxtaposed with his own offense. In the battleground the next day, distracted by the image of the girl for an instant, he was beheaded by a Tibetan soldier, yet he still instinctively decapitated the enemy, holding the Tibetan’s head to the front of his lover before his headless torso fell dead.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, depending on biological evolutionary evidence, Freud postulates that every living being is impelled by instincts to return to its earlier conditions, and the death instinct, the Thanatos, predominantly drives an organism to the lifeless state, in the course of which other preservative instincts, especially the sexual instinct, the Eros, are interacting with surrounding environments to assimilate forced alterations and safeguard the life to prevent its inanimate return done in a short circuit.95 Whereas the general’s sexual fantasy toward the village girl was apparently stirred up by forces in the Eros, the story hardly supports a reading of the hero’s death as the unfolding of the Thanatos to culminate his sexual instinct,96 since it does not seem to exist such a direct causal relation between the two. If so, then the demise of other minor and foil characters, i.e. the beheaded Chinese soldier and the Tibetan, the victim girl’s brother, and Governor Cui, could also be understood as such, which is not backed

94 Shi Zhecun, “Jiangjun di tou” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 45. 95 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 26-29. 96 Leo-Fan Lee’s reading, in Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, p. 160. 50 up by the text. As per the writer’s claim, a reading of the death of the general as an incident by his own distraction would appear more sensible. 97

Nevertheless, on the other hand, although the writer rejected a political reading of the story,98 the analysis of the Tibet and the Tang as representations of the promising Western culture and the decadent Chinese society in the early decades of the twentieth century to suggest

China’s hope lying on its unpolluted rural communities symbolized by the village girl and the militia sounds reasonable.99 As indicated by Jacques Derrida, a created text as the signifier becomes a self-sufficient existence that conveys meanings within its semantic range open to multiple interpretations.100 Whereas we have no idea about authors of many ancient texts, it does not prevent us to understand them in a variety of ways. Take the first four lines of “Guanju” as an example:

Ospreys chirrup “guan, guan”

on the river islet.

A demure and decent lady,

the gentleman’s good companion.101

In the Ming drama The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting), while Maid Chunxiang’s distortion to make fun of the Confucian pedant Chen Zuiliang makes nonsense of the verse, however, both

Tutor Chen’s conventional interpretation as to “shine the virtues of ancient queen and consort”

97 The writer stated that the story’s theme was about the conflict between love and ethnicity. Shi Zhecun, “‘Jiangjun di tou’ zixu” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 793. 98 Ibid. 99 See Cao, Yici shibai de kunjing tuwei: cong wenhua shiye shenshi Shi Zhecun Jiangjun di tou, pp. 37-38. 100 A written sign subsists “in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it.” Derrida, “Signature Event Context” in Limited INC, p. 9. 101 關關雎鳩 / 在河之洲 / 窈窕淑女 / 君子好逑, Shijing, p. 1. 51 and the heroine Du Li’niang’s experiential reading of it as a love affair are justifiable within the its semantic range.102 Shi Zhecun’s denial of a nationalistic reading was probably caused by his struggle to maintain an apolitical stance under the ideological pressure from both the leftist and rightist sides in the early thirties so that he overlooked or deliberately ignored such an interpretation.

Besides, the story itself exists some plot and structure shortcomings. While readers were informed that it was the general’s first time to fall in love in his thirty-four years’ life, we are not given much clue why the hero’s Eros awakened so late except for a cursory explanation about his personality being “straight and upright” to commit to “wine and war” as the destiny.103 In hindsight, it would be easy to find general reasons such as alcohol abuse, traumatic experiences, depression, overexertion, etc. to explicate his case of sexual apathy. Careful readers who treated the writer’s modernist experiments as high art to enlighten them with Western knowledge would want to know motivations and causes of characters’ behavior and activities as indicated by Liang

Qichao.104 Further, as suggested by a critic in the 1930s, the story suffers a structural inconsistency.105 Whereas its former part focuses on the hero’s ethnic identity struggle, the latter diverts to portray his psychological entanglement with the village girl that led to his surrealistic ending, and they appear to be two separate sections, failing to fully demonstrate the claimed theme about the conflict between love and race.

102 Chunxiang twisted the line “zai he zhi zhou” 在河之洲 [on the river islet] as “yiqu qule He zhi zhou jia” 一去去了何知州家 […went to the residence of Prefecture He], which is beyond linguistic possibilities of the verse. Tang Xianzu, Mudan ting, p. 254. 103 Shi Zhecun, “Jiangjun di tou” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 160. 104 Liang Qichao, “On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the People” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, pp. 74-81. 105 It was indicated by Shu Ming, a critic in the early 1930s, in “Ping ‘Jiangju di tou’” in Zhongguo xiandai zuojia xuanji: Shi Zhecun, pp. 302-303. 52

Abnormal Sexuality

“Shi Xiu” was the writer’s another historical tale written in 1931. It was adapted from an episode in the Ming multichapter novel The Water Margin, in which Shi Zhecun used the

Freudian concept of sadism to expound the hero’s psychology in the murder of the heroine and other minor characters. The story starts with the sleepless night as Shi Xiu moved into his sworn brother Yang Xiong’s house to work at his butcher shop. The hero appreciated the host’s generosity and straightforwardness but meanwhile was afflicted by the envy toward his well-off household and his young, seductive wife Pan Qiaoyun. Committed to brotherhood honor code,

Shi Xiu consciously suppressed the erotic desires and kept the lady at a distance at the moment.

However, in a visit to a brothel, his latent sadistic pleasure was aroused as he saw the prostitute’s bleeding finger cut by accident. After detecting the hostess’s affair with a Buddhist monk, he ambushed and murdered him and his disciple out of jealousy and manipulated his sworn brother to dismember his wife and her maid to satiate the ill-disposed desires.

As noted by Jones and Shih, a “sadistic fixation on women’s blood” was functioned as an outlet to bypass social norm and transform the hero’s repressed Eros into a “phallic dagger” to find pleasure in killing. 106 According to Freud, the sadistic components in sexual life that aim at the ruin of the object of desire originate in the Thanatos to guide the libidinous elements in the sexual instincts,107 and due to the conglomeration of the repetition-compulsion and other motives to attain pleasure, sadism manifests in various forms.108 Following what an extreme sadistic case could have been, the writer employed a stream of consciousness narrative to portray the hero’s

106 Jones, “The Violence of Text: Reading Yu Hua and Shi Zhecun,” p. 579, and Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937, p. 365 107 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 40-41. 108 Ibid., 14. 53 psychic world. As a twenty-eight-year-old young man from countryside who had never experienced love, Shi Xiu at first felt an inferiority toward the captivating Pan Qiaoyun.109

Blaming himself to be enchanted by ladies (including the maid) of his sworn brother’s household, he denounced them as the “poisoned wine,” “shining swords,” and “forest fire,” charming but dangerous.110 Overhearing that the hostess used to be a low-class singsong girl made him feel more equal to her, and he regretted not taking advantage while she had teased him another day. Then Shi Xiu decided to develop an affair with her but, however, was deterred by

Yang Xiong’s headdress – a symbol of brotherhood – at the scene. Finally, his repressed desires found an alternative in sadistic manslaughter in the name of brotherhood righteousness.

Neither a neurologist nor a patient of the mental illnesses, the writer’s knowledge about the Freudianism lacked empirical experiences, which restricted his thorough application to the story. The writer seemed to neglect to provide ample evidence to show how the mechanism worked through Shi Xiu’s psychology to justify his belief that “killing is the most, most happy thing under the heaven” and that “since I love her [Pan Qiaoyun], so I will kill her.”111 Whereas it is not uncommon that people may hate what they once loved, but the reversal usually does not occur in a simple step, particularly regarding to murder. Readers need to know more sounding psychological grounds for the hero’s behavior. From today’s perspective, perhaps the writer might as well avail other common psychoanalytic notions (e.g., that past experiences in the unconscious, especially those of childhood, have shaped one’s personality and meanwhile caused

109 Shi Zhecun, “Shi Xiu” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 175. 110 Ibid., 176-179. 111 “天下一切事情，殺人是最最愉快的”; “因爲愛她，所以要殺她.” Shi Zhecun, “Shi Xiu” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 203. 54 trouble to it) to explore the hero’s perhaps traumatic past life to account for his aberrant activities.

Further, the description of other minor and foil characters in the story was almost left underdeveloped as those in the Ming novel. Pan Qiaoyun was portrayed as the kind of women such as Yan Xijiao in Song Jiang’s episode and Pan Jinlian in Wu Song’s story, whose former courtesan past led them astray, and whose life ended tragically as the reprimand from the heaven.

As the reader, we want to know Pei Ruhai’s motivation to risk life day in and day out to date Pan

Qiaoyun, the way he arranged his disciple to spy Yang Xiong’s absence, as well as their abnormal submissiveness to death while being caught by Shi Xiu.112 A more convincing psychological narrative was expected to avoid these characters to fall into the category which

Chen Duxiu described as the “flesh without bones” and “body without soul.”113

The pleasure and reality principles

After “Shi Xiu,” Shi Zhecun’s modernist practices shifted focus from historical stories to the modern theme about middle-class urbanites’ psychic struggle relating to the rapidly modernized and westernized city of Shanghai. 114 From 1931 to 1933, he completed four psychoanalytic urban tales, i.e., “Devil’s Way,” “At the Paris Theatre,” “Hostel,” and “The

Demon.” Nevertheless, his most well-known psychoanalytic story in the entire short story oeuvre is “An Evening of Spring Rain” written in 1928.

The protagonist in the story was a young frugal office clerk, a walking commuter who was reluctant to spend money to buy a rain jacket for wet weather. After working overtime one

112 Shi Zhecun, “Shi Xiu” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, pp. 201-203. 113 Chen Duxiu, “On Literary Revolution” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, p. 141. 114 The writer plainly said that he was at wits’ end to write more historical stories after completing “Shi Xiu.” Shi Zhecun, “Xu” in Zhongguo xiandai zuojia xuanji: Shi Zhecun, p. 2. 55 spring afternoon, he strolled home in the rain along Shanghai’s business district with an umbrella in the hand, watching traffic moving to and fro in the streetlights and enjoying the extraordinary sound effects while people talking in the heavy rain. Such poetic ambience reminds of that in Dai

Wangshu’s celebrated 1927 poem “The Rainy Alley” (Yuxiang):

Holding an oil-paper umbrella alone,

I wandered through a long, long,

desolate alley in the rain,

Wishing to come across

a lilac-like,

doleful girl. 115

The rainy background in the two works established a separate social space away from quotidian life that allowed the speaker’s and the protagonist’s erotic adventures.116 In the story, noticing a slender, well-proportioned, and good-looking girl getting off a trolley bus that happened to stop by him, the first-person narrator was attracted by her elegant bearings. Unable to continue journey in the chilly evening shower without a rain gear, the lady stepped to the front of a furniture shop to take shelter under the awning, which aroused the protagonist’s sympathy, and he involuntarily moved to her side to accompany the “object of beauty who was in predicament” for over an hour and then realized that he could find a rickshaw for her or walk her home with

115 撐著油紙傘，獨自/ 彷徨在悠長，悠長 / 又寂寥的雨巷，/ 我希望逢著 / 一個丁香一樣地 / 結著愁怨的姑娘。Dai Wangshu, “Yuxiang.” 116 Rosenmeier, “Women Stereotypes in Shi Zhecun’s Short Stories,” p. 52. 56 his umbrella.117 Fearing his good intent could be mistaken – since the city was “a bad place where people did not trust one another” – he hesitated for a moment before plucking up courage to make the offer, and she accepted with a Suzhou dialect. 118

As they started walking, the protagonist noticed people inside a street shop seemed to gaze at them suspiciously, and he lowered the umbrella to block their sight. Under the aegis of the rain and the rain gear he peeped at his companion, whose profile incited an illusion that she was his schoolmate, neighbor, and first girlfriend in Suzhou seven years ago when she was fourteen years old. Once more, he noted a woman leaning on a street shop counter appeared to watch them miserably, and in hallucination she became his wife who was waiting for him at home for dinner. As the lady beside him turned her face to avoid a sudden gust of breeze, her poise reminded him of the image of an imperial court lady in the evening rain on a Japanese painting. Now the rain stopped, and the lady insisted on him not accompanying her anymore and disappeared in the street. Awakening from the daydream, the protagonist hired a rickshaw back home and lied to his wife that he ran into an acquaintance to have had some snacks in a restaurant together for being late.

The story skillfully illustrates the Freudian concept of the pleasure and the reality principles, by which, although the strong tendency to reduce quantity of excitations in psychic life to the lowest level is checked by practical conditions under the directive of delayed gratification for self-preservation, the pleasure tendency which is driven by the unconscious id

117 面前有著一個美的對象，而又是在一重困難之中，孤寂地隻身呆立著望這永遠地，永遠地垂下來的梅雨，只爲了這些緣故，我不自覺地移動了脚步站在她旁邊了。 “Facing an object of beauty in predicament that stood lonely staring at the incessant rain, I involuntarily moved to her side.” Shi Zhecun, “Meiyu zhi xi” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, pp. 250-251. 118 上海是個坏地方，人與人都用了一種不信任的思想交際著！ Ibid., 253. 57 always seeks possible paths to prevail to the harm of the organism.119 Being instinctively urged by the unconscious forces, the protagonist edged toward the lady of attraction who was under the awning of the furniture shop for a long hour to reduce excitations in his psychic world. But, urban middle-class social norm at first suppressed the idea of accosting an unfamiliar lady in the street, and then it forced him to lower the umbrella to cover their faces being recognized. As soon as the rain stopped and the umbrella was put down, the isolated social space created for the erotic adventure disappeared, and social reality came back to him.

The story as well demonstrated a modern version of a valued teaching by Confucius about a gentleman’s attitude toward seeking virtuous spouses that “[if your love is fulfilled,] feel pleasure but not to the point of excessiveness; [if not,] express sorrows but not to the extent of self-harm” (le er bu yin, ai er bu shang),120 as well as a later comment on the Varied Airs

(bianfeng) that love “originates in human emotions, yet a gentleman should regulate it as per rituals and righteousness” (fa hu qing zhi hu liyi).121 In the story, whereas the protagonist enjoyed the adventure, he did not seem to feel too bad after its ending. Instead, he made a white lie to restrict it in that particular dreamscape and prevent it from damaging his marriage. The

“emotions” (qing) sought for “pleasure” (le) but finally submitted to the middle-class social norm (liyi).

Nonetheless, based on limited case studies on a few patients, the Freudianism is highly subjective and difficult to be empirically tested and generalized to a wider population.

Oftentimes, it allows itself to be applied to alternate or even opposite situations at the user’s

119 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 2-3. 120 The Analects 3.20. in Zhu Xi, Sishu zhangju jizhu, p. 77. 121 A later anonymous comment in the “Preface of the Book of Songs by Master Mao’s Annotations.” See “Mao shi xu.” 58 discretion. For instance, the pleasure and reality principles also could be used to legitimate a nonoccurrence or further evolvement of the incident in the story, and sometimes the writer appeared to be somewhat overzealous to illustrate the Freudian concept to readers’ discomfort.

Written in 1931, “At the Paris Theater” is about a flirtatious episode between a sensitive married male and a young lady during a trip to one of Shanghai’s modern movie theatres according to the pleasure and reality principles. In the beginning of the story, as the girl companion went to buy their tickets, the hero felt people seemed to show contempt to him to let a lady to rush to the box office, and his masculinity was hurt. Entering the theatre, at first he feared that they would be recognized by acquaintances, but as the lights were out, he confessed via his inner monologue that he was to use the dark surrounding to do something else regarding the lady, who was aware that he had a wife in the countryside.122 And whilst his fingers were tainted by the ice cream snack he bought for them, she passed him a handkerchief. Here, we read his stream of consciousness narrative:

Well, all lights are out. The movie continues. It is a good opportunity to suck it [the

handkerchief] as I want … Here is salty. Is this her sweat? … But what is that? So sharp

and fishy… Her phlegm and snot, perhaps? Yes, they are phlegm and snot, so sticky. It

really tastes innovatively delicious! A little tingling feeling comes up to the tip of my

tongue. Strange. As though I were holding her naked body. 123

122 本來，在我們這種情形裏，如果大家真的規規矩矩地呆看著銀幕，那還有什麽意味！乾脆的，到這裏來縂不過是利用一些黑暗罷了。有許多動作和説話的確是需要黑暗的。 Actually, if we really stare at the silver screen seriously in this situation, it would be so boring! Honestly, we come here to avail the darkness. Many actions and speeches need darkness. Shi Zhecun, “Zai Bali da xiyuan” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 265. 123 好，電燈一齊熄了，影戯繼續了。這時機倒很不錯，讓我盡量地吮吸一下吧。… 這裏很鹹，這是她汗的味道吧？ … 但這裏是什麽呢，這樣地腥辣？… 恐怕痰和鼻涕吧？是的，確是痰和鼻涕，怪粘膩的。這真是新發明的美味啊！我舌尖上好像起了一種微妙的麻顫。奇怪，我好像有了抱著她裸體的感覺了。 Ibid., 267. 59

In the dim setting isolated from social restraints, his repressed desires came into effect with the handkerchief, the fetish, for gratification. However, such a blunt erotic exposition alienates sensitive readers. Finally, the story leaves a rather obscure ending. After walking out of the theatre near midnight, the girl changed her mind and refused the hero to accompany her home but rode a rickshaw by her own.

Modernist devices

Apart from the illustration of the Freudian concepts, Shi Zhecun’s psychoanalytic stories are characteristic of the employment of modernist devices such as the stream of consciousness, contrasting colors, and dual narrative, which could be seen in his other two tales written in 1931 and 1933 about male urbanites’ persecutory delusive disorder relating to the mysterious and supernatural in modern urban setting, “Devil’s Way” and “The Demon.”

As the first-person narrator, the protagonist in “Devil’s Way” took train from Shanghai to a nearby city to spend weekend with his friend Mr. Chen, a horticulturalist and entomologist.

Under the influence of medication to treat neurasthenia and in the midst reading Sax Rohmer’s

The Romance of Sorcery (a brief history about Western occults) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s horror stories, the narrator was deeply upset by a black-clad old woman with a deformed back and ugly face sitting opposite him and suspected her as a witch. After arriving at his friend’s Western style house at the suburb of the city, he was obsessed by a series of hallucinations: he misrecognized a black stain on the windowpane as the “witch” woman on the train, saw visions of a white-clad concubine mummy beside a red imperial coffin bound by golden chains, fantasized himself kissing his friend’s wife, and mistook a country woman as the “witch” again. As he returned to

Shanghai the next day afternoon, he felt several black-clad and white-clad women he ran into were incarnations of that “witch.” The story concludes abruptly with the narrator’s receiving a 60 midnight telegram to inform him his three-year-old daughter had just died while he saw a black- clad woman creep into a dark alley in front of his apartment.

To highlight the protagonist’s pathological misgivings, Shi Zhecun availed a series of interrogative sentences with newly introduced question mark to build up suspense,124 such as in the railway carriage as the narrator noticed the black-clad woman sitting opposite him: “I became terrified. Why should I sit here? Why did not people come over to take these empty seats beside me? Had they seen something at it? Why did this old woman come to sit at my opposite?” 125

With the color black as the dominant color contrasted by red, white, and golden, the protagonist’s narrative creates a striking visual effect:

Various colors were jiggling before my eyes. The glorious rays of the sunset really could

not be looked at directly. I saw a scarlet red coffin with golden chains were remotely

arrayed on the horizon. […] But what was that black stuff? So dense, so glossy, and so

transparent! That was a stain… a stain, who said that? Did I mean it was the stain on the

[Mr. Chen’s] windowpane? Above all, what was that? Was Mr. Chen recently addicted

to opium? Obviously, it was a tiny piece of opium thickly stuck on the window, and only

opium appeared so glossy … Absolutely, it was not black ink stain, ha ha! All valuables

were black: big black pearls of India. What else? Could not remember that much. Heard

that there were black jades in Tibet … but after all black women were not precious, even

though they could dance Hula. White women were always better … There was a black

124 The western-style question mark was introduced by the Ministry of Education during the language reform in 1920. Schwartz, “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, p. 97. 125 我恐怖起來了，爲什麽我要坐在這裏？爲什麽剛才人家都不來占據我這裏的空位？他們難道都曾在這個座位上看見了什麽嗎？爲什麽這個老婦人要來與我對面坐著? Shi Zhecun, “Mo dao” in Shinian chuanzuo ji, p. 272. 61

cloud in the sky. Well, it was disappearing. Thus, there was no opium in the sky. But I

did not understand whether an old evil witch would come out of from the cloud. 126

The protagonist’s fractured, illogical train of thoughts jumped from one colored object to another by a stream of consciousness narrative that represents his delusional conditions. In the writer’s next psychoanalytic tale “The Demon,” white becomes the governing color – from a white-clad lady whom the hero encountered in the suburb of Hangzhou, the white-clad victim countrywoman, the hero’s friend’s cousin who wore white clothes, the white hare in the silver moonlight in the mountain, to the white walls, doors and the nurses’ white uniform in the hospital – to establish an gruesome and alienating atmosphere. And the story shows another prominent feature, the use of dual narrative to subject the mysterious and supernatural under the scientific discourse as the plot unfolds.127

Obeying the doctor’s order, the first first-person narrator put off a hospital visit until the hero, Bian Shiming, made a remarkable recovery three weeks later from his nervous breakdown, during which the hero as the second first-person narrator disclosed his horrible journey to

Hangzhou to arrange his grandmother’s burial.

In an outing to a suburban water resort of the city, the hero saw a white-clad young lady inside a skiff who aroused his erotic desires. After reading a ghost tale in the gazetteer, he

126 種種顔色在我眼前晃動著。落日的光芒真是不可逼視的，我看見朱紅的棺材和金黃的鏈，遼遠地陳列在地平綫上。[ …] 但是，那一塊黑色的是什麽呢？這樣地濃厚，這樣地光澤，又好似這樣地透明！這是一個斑點，-- 斑點，誰説的？我的意思是不是説玻璃窗上那個斑點？那究竟是一點什麽東西呢？… 難道陳君近來有了鴉片癮嗎？那明明是一點鴉片，濃厚地粘在玻璃窗上的。而且惟有鴉片才這樣地光澤。… 決不是墨汁，黑的，哈哈！貴重的東西都是黑色的。印度的大黑珠，還有呢，記不起許多了，聽説西藏有玄玉 … 但總之黑色的女人是并不貴重的，即使她們會舞 Hula，女人總是以白色爲妙… 那是一朵黑雲。對了，它在消淡下去了。天上原來沒有什麽鴉片。但是 --- 我不懂，雲裏會不會現出一個老妖婦來的呢？Shi Zhecun, “Mo dao” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 280. 127 Peng observed a dominant scientific narrative in the story. Peng, “Tuo’mei zhong de wumei: lun Shi Zhecun xiaoshou zhong de chuantong yinsu,” p. 131. 62 suspected that lady as a “yecha,” a shape changing demon, and was haunted by her image.

Having drunk a lot of wine at dinner, still half-intoxicated, he took a stroll along the mountain trails in the moonlight and misrecognized a white-clad dumb and deaf countrywoman who went to meet her secret lover as the “demon” and followed and strangled her to death before realizing the blunder. The hero then rushed back to Shanghai. However, at three different locations, on the train, in a department store in Shanghai, and at his friend’s house, he came across a white-clad lady three times – who actually was his friend’s cousin whom he did not realize, and the hero felt being haunted and lost his mind.

The hero’s friend’s narration of the German doctor’s diagnosis of the case as a mental disorder caused by accountable personal and environmental factors at the beginning of the story unconditionally nullifies Bian Shiming’s succeeding mystical narration, and while the hero was troubled by the illusive image of the white-clad woman in the Hangzhou journey, he at first believed it was his eye problem and planned to see an ophthalmologist when he returned to

Shanghai, and finally his recuperation occurred in a modern hospital staffed by Western doctors.

The story by and large bespeaks the spirit of the time – the triumph of Western science over superstitious old tradition.

The realistic writing mode

Shi Zhecun’s modernist practices stopped in 1933 with the publication of another psychoanalytic modern tale “The Hostel.” Nonetheless, onward to 1937 he continued short story writing and released other twenty-five stories in a largely traditional realistic mode. He would have started a full-length novel in the background of the growth of the city of Hangzhou as the

Southern Song capital if it had not been thwarted by the Second Sino-Japanese War (Kangri zhanzheng) that forced him to leave Shanghai, the familiar social environment, to teach 63 universities in the southern provinces.128 Whereas he appeared to be difficult in exploring modern women’s inner world in the psychoanalytic tales but alienating, demonizing, and symbolizing them as the “other,” however, the writer was skilled to portray traditional female figures, e.g., housewife, salesgirl, maiden of a conventional family, in his realistic stories. 129

“Madam Butterfly” is a story in the 1933 collection Exemplary Conduct of Virtuous

Women about an entomology professor’s first year’s marital life told in an omniscient third- person narrative. Specializing in Western and Chinese butterfly specimens categorization,

Professor John Li felt his new wife spend too much money after their wedding, and he lost patience to accompany her to go shopping, watch movie, play pelota, and attend other social activities but became more concentrated on his studies. The professor generously allowed her to develop a social relation to play tennis and visit department store with his colleague, a sports professor for several months. One spring morning after teaching class, the husband came up the idea to take the wife for an outing, but he could not find her. Strolling past a neighborhood park, he suddenly saw her and his colleague sit together, chatting and joking, and walk away. The story ends with no clue of what would be the next of their relations, and it seems that the writer simply presented what he had observed in life as they were.

The same realistic approach was used in “Fog” and “Spring Sunshine,” two stories in the same collection. The heroine in the former, Miss Suzhen, was a twenty-eight-year-old unmarried daughter of a village pastor. During her travel to Shanghai to attend her cousin’s wedding, she encountered an educated young gentleman in the railway carriage, the modern social space, 130

128 Shi Zhecun, “Da Taiwan zuojia Zheng Mingli, Lin Yaode wen” in Sha shang de jiaoji, p. 170. 129 See Yao’s article, “Chengshi gemo yu xinli tanxun: cong nuxing gouxing kan Shi Zhecun za ixinganjue-pai zhong de linglei xing,” pp. 50-52. 130 Recognized by Zhu, in “Shan nuren he manyou zhe: Shi Zhecun bixia de nuren he nanren,” p. 78. 64 that matched her criteria for an ideal husband she established by reading traditional romantic literature such as Romance of Western Chamber (Xixiang ji). Before their parting, the young man handed her a name card for future contact, which later surprised her cousins at her uncle’s house, for they recognized the card owner as a famous movie star, a most admirable profession in modern time. Nonetheless, it ironically shattered the heroine’s reverie, since from her traditional

Chinese worldview, an actor was a lower-end occupation unworthy of respect. Likewise, Auntie

Chan (Chan ayi) in the latter story, a middle-aged widow that inherited a big fortune via a ritual marriage to her dead finance years ago, went to Shanghai to withdraw life expenses. The warm spring sunshine in the city’s bustling streets awakened her sexual energy. She fantasied to walk with a handsome gentleman to enjoy modern urban life and projected the desire onto a young bank clerk who had served her earlier in the morning. But while she went back to double-check her bank safe locker, the daydream was broken as the same youth politely but professionally kept her at a distance.

Other than the game of love, life is more about routines of everyday life, especially concerning financial issues. Written in 1928, “Wife’s Birthday” tells a moving incident between a newly wedded urban couple. The husband, a young clerk, as the first-person narrator told his wife that he would bring her a gift the next day for her first birthday after their wedding, and as an exchange she should prepare noodles for them as her birthday dinner. However, later they only found out that after paying the electric bill and the tailor, the money left was just enough for buying food for the rest of the month, and they could not afford anything else before the husband’s next paycheck arrived. No complaint, the empathic wife did not show any disappointment, and she quietly prepared and enjoyed her birthday noodles with her husband: 65

Despondent spring rain was drizzling from the gloomy sky. In the lamplight we sat

opposite the dinner table eating her birthday noodles. As though it were a normal meal,

she peaceably chewed them bit by bit, sipping the soup. I knew she had prepared these

white, slim noodles for us on her own, but I could not tell how they tasted. I lifted my

bowl to the eyebrows to block her seeing my tearful eyes. 131

By the first-person hero’s inner monologue, Shi Zhecun demonstrated his mastery of choosing most touching life material with most appropriate artistic form to portray the couple’s emotional support in their financial predicament.

In the writer’s next and the last short story collection Small Treasure released in 1936, people from different walks of life – low-ranking bureaucrats (“The Name Cards”), bank clerks

(“Unemployment” and “The Seagulls”), peasants (“The Milk” and “The Motorway”), hunters

(“A Story of Hunting Tigers”), Buddhist monks (“The Omen of the Stupa”), wealthy small town residents (“The Progeny”), and food peddler and policemen (“The New Life”), were faithfully portrayed in its nine realistic stories.

131 愁悶的春雨從昏黑了的天上瀟瀟淅淅地降下來了。燈前，我和妻對坐著，吃著代替了晚飯的妻的壽麵。她是如同每晚用飯似的，安閑地一口一口地咀嚼著，啜著湯。而我，雖然是她手煮的細白的面，卻縂也嘗不出什麽美味來，但我把盛麵的碗側得很高，碗邊遮過了我的雙眉，讓她看不見我的飽滿了眼淚的雙眼。 Shi Zhecun, “Qi zhi shengchen” in Shinian chuangzuo ji, p. 436. 66

Conclusion

Influenced by the new-style popular fiction and translations of European classical realistic masterpieces on newspapers’ fiction supplements and literary journals, Shi Zhecun began practicing short story writing as a high school student. From 1922 to 1937, the writer studied at universities and worked as editor for literary magazines and meanwhile had completed a total eighty stories of a variety of styles, among which the eight psychoanalytic tales written between 1928 and 1933 literarily illustrated principal concepts of the Freudianism to Chinese readers. In a time of social reformations and revolutions to decide the country’s future, the progressive intellectual movements and literary trends shaped his literary career and fiction writing.

The creation of a new-style fiction to enlighten people with advanced Western knowledge was related to the reformist appeal for the nation’s regeneration. Under the foreign economic, military, and cultural pressure since the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing government attempted a series of reform movements. The late Qing intellectual leaders Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Liu Shipei proposed a binary “spiritual East” and “material West” system to endorse a modernization scheme to embrace Western science, technology, and statecraft while adhering to the age-old Chinese moral essence in the pre-Qin thoughts, and the reconstruction of a new

National Character via a renovated fiction was considered as an essential procedure towards the goal. In the 1902 essay “On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the

People,” Liang Qichao indicated that poisonous elements in traditional novels stirred up robbery and lusts in people’s heart and were responsible for the weak and sentimental National Character and the proliferation of brotherhood societies that caused the disastrous consequences of the

Boxer uprising. Warning that traditional novels would eventually ruin the people and the nation 67 if they were continually left to the hand of inferior writers and the marketplace, he advocated to create a westernized new-style fiction to broaden people’s perspectives and nurture new social norms.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the initiation and growth of modern journalism and publishing institutions in the treaty-port cities technically supported the rise of the new-style fiction, and the nationwide introduction of westernized public education system in the 1900s and the vernacular language reform in the 1910s expanded its readership into working class people.

As the first Chinese city that underwent urban modernization, Shanghai became the center of several types of the new-style popular fiction in the early decades of the new century. However, lacking the reformist faith to use fiction writing to educate people, the fun-seeking popular novels largely reflected their writers’ escapist tendency living in the colonized modern city. As the new Republic failed to carry out social reforms promised by the revolutionists, a new generation of intellectuals launched the New Culture Movement to appeal to Western values of

“Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” in lieu of Confucian traditions for political, religious, moral, and literary renewal. In the 1917 essay “On Literary Revolution,” Chen Duxiu argued for vernacular literature that reflected social reality and people’s life as the spiritual power for societal regenerations. Meanwhile, Hu Shi published the article “Some Modest Proposals for the

Reform of Literature,” proposing to use spoken language to express people’s thoughts and universal emotions instead of imitating ancient classical authors.

The changeover of the editorship of the Commercial Press’s literary journal The Fiction

Monthly from the popular Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School novelists to the young writers

Mao Dun and Zheng Zhenduo in 1921 marked the New Literature came to the fore of the literary scene. Committing to the “literature for life’s sake” precept, the Association for Literature 68

Studies members denounced the popular fiction writers’ fun-seeking escapism and believed that literature should bespeak the spirit of the era, reflect social reality, and promulgate the progressive Western knowledge. On the other hand, espousing the “art for art’s sake” romanticist creed and favoring a humanistic and sociopolitical reading of the bourgeois decadence in the nineteenth-century European romanticism, the Creation Society underwent a leftist shifting from the early romanticist phase to the proletarian literature. In the 1928 essay “From a Literary

Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature,” Cheng Fangwu emphasized the class consciousness in literature to use vernacular language to serve workers and peasants. Nonetheless, viewing health and dignity as two predominant literary principles, in “Literature and Revolution,” the Crescent

Moon Society writer Liang Shiqiu stated that literary creation should not be placed under extraliterary coercions, and a literary work must be judged by intrinsic artistic values without class consideration.

A notable ideological debate in the early thirties that Shi Zhecun peripherally engaged in was about the term of the “Third Category.” To counteract the influence of the League of the

Left-Wing Writers, several pro-government writers founded the Nationalist Literature School to promote a nationalistic consciousness in literature instead the proletarian class struggle, which was rebutted by a leftist-leaning liberal writer Hu Qiuyuan in the 1932 essay “Do Not Encroach

Upon Literary Art,” stating that literature must represent the pulse of the era and social reality via proper forms, and, not being political propaganda, various literary schools of the time, e.g., the popular fun-seeking fiction, naturalism, romanticism, proletarian literature, and nationalist literature, all had their own rights to prosper. Du Heng then proposed the term the “Third

Category” in an article published on the Les Contemporains under Shi Zhecun’s editorship to refer to writers who were not affiliated with political parties, claiming that most writers wrote for 69 their personal reputation by their works’ artistic values. Finally, Lu Xun criticized Du Heng’s categorization in the 1933 essay published on the same journal, indicating that the “Third

Category” did not exist in a class society.

Shi Zhecun was the first generation in the country that attended westernized primary and secondary public schools. After graduation from high school in Songjiang in 1921, he studied at

Western and Chinese universities and stayed in Shanghai until on the eve of the Second Sino-

Japanese War. With the youthful revolutionary enthusiasm, he and his two intimate friends Dai

Wangshu and Du Heng joined the Communist Youth League and the Nationalist Party in 1925.

However, shocked and disillusioned by atrocities in the April 12 Purge, they decided to stay away from politics to focus on their literary endeavors.

Shanghai’s westernized architecture and commercial and recreation facilities, as well as its modern journalism, publishing institutions, and bookstores, allowed Chinese writers to gain virtual and textual access to the metropolitan West. Shi Zhecun was particularly intrigued by the

Freudianism, sexual theories of Havelock Ellis and Marquis de Sade, and psychoanalytic stories by Arthur Schnitzler. Embracing the Qing reformist and the May Fourth idea of using the powers of fiction to enlighten the people, the writer treated the profession as to reflect China’s social realities through the lens of Western theoretical frameworks and literary devices.132 In 1928, Shi

132 In an essay wrote in his later days, he stated, “I believe that we should neither uncritically pursue nor indiscriminately reject new literary devices. We can always use them if they help characterization or strengthen theme. However, we should not forget that we are Chinese, and we write to reflect the social realities of our country. It will not prosper if we simply go after foreign techniques and forms. We need seriously study and digest the essences of “the imported” so that we are influenced but not restricted by them, and then we can plant ourselves deeply into the Chinese soil to create innovative, nationalized works.” 我感到對一些新的創作方法的運用既不能一味追求，也不可一概排斥，只要有助於表現人物，加强主題，就可拿來爲我所用，不過有一點不能忘卻，這就是別忘記自己是個中國人，是在寫反應中國國情的作品。如果在創作中單純追求某些外來的形式，這是沒出息的，要使作品有持久的生命力，需要的是認真吸取這種“進口貨”中的精華，受其影響，又擺脫其影響，然後才能植根於中國的土壤中，創作出既創新又有民族特點的作品。 Wenhui bao 文匯報 October 18, 1983, as cited in Yang’s “Lun Shi Zhecun xiaoshuo yu waiguo wenxue de guanxi,” p. 10. 70

Zhecun completed his first psychoanalytic tale “An Evening in the Spring Rain,” and in the subsequent five years, he wrote another seven short stories that explored characters’ psychic worlds.

In “The General’s Head,” the Tang soldiers’ loose morals were reminiscent of the undisciplined troops in the early decades of the Republic. The writer exhibited how the Eros and the Thanatos led to the hero’s inevitable conflict between love and race. However, Shi Zhecun might need further clarify why the general’s Eros awakened so late as it was his first time in his thirty-four years’ life that he fell in love with a woman. As indicated by a critic in the early

1930s, the story suffers a structural inconsistency as its first part focuses on the hero’s struggle on his ethnic identity whereas the latter diverts to his emotional entanglement with the village girl, as if they were two separate parts lacking necessary connection. And although the writer himself rejected a nationalistic reading, indeed its text allows the interpretation by a contemporary Chinese scholar that the Tibet and the Tang were symbols of the aggressive West and the weak China in the writer’s time.

“Shi Xiu” was adapted from an episode in the Ming novel The Water Margin, in which the writer employed the Freudian concept of sadism to construct the hero’s abnormal sexuality.

In the conflict between erotic love and brotherhood loyalty, the hero’s repressed desire finally found an outlet in the sadistic fixation on bloodshed and murder. Nevertheless, again, the writer might need further convince readers how the sadistic mechanism worked through the incident.

On the other hand, the psychology of the minor and foil characters in the story appears to be implausible since it all was remained unexplored as it was in the traditional novel. As indicated by another Chinese scholar, the writer seemed to have difficulty in portraying female figures’ 71 inner world in his psychoanalytic stories but demonized and symbolized them as inscrutable and mysterious existence.

In the five psychoanalytic urban tales, the writer illustrated young middle-class male urbanites’ unsettling mental state in the rapidly westernized city of Shanghai. The rainy background in “An Evening of Spring Rain” created a dreamscape isolated from everyday social norms to reduce the hero’s psychic excitations as per the pleasure and reality principles. The hero used the umbrella to block people’s sight from recognizing him to walk with an unfamiliar lady, and as the rain stopped and he had to put down the rain gear, his erotic adventure thus ended. So did the movie theatre’s dark surrounding in “At the Paris Theatre” that allowed the protagonist to gratify his erotic desires suppressed by social constraints. Nonetheless, the writer appeared to be somewhat overenthusiastic to literally demonstrate the Freudian concept to the point of distastefulness in portrayal of the protagonist’s fetishism to suck the girl companion’s dirty handkerchief.

Finally, in “Devil’s Way” and “The Demon,” the stream of consciousness narrative, dual narrative, and contrasting colors were used to highlight the two protagonists’ persecutory delusion, as well as the victory of the scientific discourse over traditional superstition – the protagonist’s illogical, jumping thoughts from one colored object to another in the former story, and Bian Shiming’s first-person narration of his mysterious experience being cancelled out by his friend’s first-person narration concerning his condition as mental illness in Western medical term.

Shi Zhecun was among few Chinese writers in the New Literature who conscientiously applied the Freudianism to their works. Under the foreign economic, military, technological, and cultural pressure on the country, his fiction writing was influenced by the Western and Japanese 72 presence in the city of Shanghai, as well as Chinese government’s and intellectuals’ reaction to the West manifested in political and cultural policies and ideological debates in the twenties and thirties. Whereas Western and Chinese scholarship about the author has conducted ample examinations of each of his psychanalytic stories, however, some other areas remain uncharted.

Arthur Schnitzler was one of the key figures that inspired the writer’s modernist practices. A comparative study between the two would help understand how and to what extent

Shi Zhecun had been influenced by him. Likewise, a comparative study between “Shi Xiu” and

Chapters 44 and 45 of The Water Margin may demonstrate the degree of the writer’s adherence to and innovations of the traditional novel.

The writer maintained close relations with the literary circle around him in Shanghai during the period. He was a student in Mao Dun’s literary class at Shanghai University; he maintained lifelong friendship with Dai Wangshu and was a longtime friend of Du Heng; his father befriended Lu Xun, who, on the one hand, patronized his Marxist literary theory translation series, and, on the other hand, derided him as the “evil dandy in the foreign colony”

(yangchang e shao).133 What and how had they impacted or not impacted on his short story writing? Further, starting with Lou Shiyi in the early thirties, a substantial portion of Chinese scholarship would classify the writer’s modernist practices into the so called “New

Sensationalism School” (Xin ganjue pai), 134 whose major members includes Shi Zhecun’s other two friends Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying, a classification which was disdained by the writer.135

133 Shi Zhecun, Poem 68 in Fusheng za yong in Sha shang de jiaoji. 134 Lou Shiyi, “Shi Zhecun de xin’ganjuezhuyi” in Zhongguo xiandai zuojia xuanji: Shi Zhecun. 135 Shi Zhecun rejected this classification and said that such a school did not exist in the New Literature, in “Da Taiwan zuojia Zheng Mingli, Lin Yaode wen” in Sha shang de jiaoji. 73

While it is futile to argue about such a categorization, nonetheless, the relation between the three writers could be further investigated.

Based on representative essays by leading intellectuals of the late Qing reform and the

New Culture Movement, position papers from writers of the New Literature in the twenties and thirties, as well as recent Western and Chinese scholarship about the writer, this thesis analyzes

Shi Zhecun’s modernist practices in the time of revolution and reformation to save the country from the feudal militarism and foreign imperialism. The writer’s eight psychoanalytic historical and modern urban tales written between 1928 and 1933 literally illustrated principal Freudian concepts, such as the Eros and the Thanatos, the pleasure and the reality principles, and the abnormal sexuality. Despite some shortcomings in these works, as well as largely being unappreciated during the period, Shi Zhecun’s modernist experiment substantially informed

Chinese readers of the new psychic realm in human unconsciousness and enriched the New

Literature dominated by the Realism and Romanticism schools.

Glossary

Ai Qing 艾青

Anshi zhiluan 安史之亂 baihua 白話

Ba Jin 巴金

Banyue 半月

Bao Tianxiao 包天笑

Beifa zhanzheng 北伐戰爭

Beijing 北京

Beiyang shuishi 北洋水師

Bianfeng 變風

Bian Shiming 卞士明

Cao Yu 曹禺

Chan ayi 嬋阿姨

Changshi ji 嘗試集

Chen Huihua 陳慧華

Chen Zhigao 陳志皋

Chen Zuiliang 陳最良 75

Chengdu 成都

Chuci 楚辭

Chuangzao jikan 創造季刊

Chuangzao she 創造社

Chunxiang 春香 ci 刺 cong wenxue geming dao geming wenxue 從文學革命到革命文學

Dadao hui 大刀會 datong 大同

Dazhong wenyi 大衆文藝

De xiansheng 德先生

Diyici dongzheng 第一次東征

Diyici yapian zhanzheng 第一次鴉片戰爭

Diyixian shudian 第一綫書店

Ding Ling 丁玲

Donghua shudian 東華書店

Dong Ruoyu 董若雨 76

Du Heng 杜衡

Du Li’niang 杜麗娘

Duan Zizhang 段子璋 fa hu qing zhi hu liyi 發乎情止乎禮義

Fanyou yundong 反右運動

Feng Zhi 馮志

Fu 賦

Fujian 福建

Fujian shuishi 福建水師

Fu Yanchang 傅彥長

Guanju 關雎

Guangdong 廣東

Guangming ribao 光明日報

Guocui yundong 國粹運動

Guofeng 國風

Guo Jianying 郭建英

Guowen bao 國聞報 77 guoxing 國性

Han 漢

Hangzhou 杭州

Hongkou 虹口

Honglou meng 紅樓夢

Hong Xuefan 洪雪帆

Hu Yepin 胡也頻

Hua Jingding 花驚定

Huangxin dashi 黃心大師

Huang Zhenxia 黃震霞

Hujiang daxue 滬江大學

Ji’nan daxue 暨南大學

Jiang Guangzu 蔣光祖

Jiang Jieshi 蔣介石

Jiangnan 江南

Jiangsu 江蘇

Jiangsu xueyuan 江蘇學院 78 jin 浸

Kangri zhanzheng 抗日戰爭

Kang Youwei 康有爲

Kong zi 孔子

Kuaihuo lin 快活林

Kunming 昆明

Lan she 蘭社

Lao zi 老子 le er bu yin ai er bu shang 樂而不淫哀而不傷

Li He 李賀

Lian’e ronggong 聯俄容共

Liang Shuming 梁漱溟

Libai liu 禮拜六 lixiang 理想

Lin Yi 林疑

Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅

Liu Na’ou 劉呐鷗 79

Liu Shipei 劉師培

Maguan tiaoyue 馬關條約

Meng zi 孟子

Minzu zhuyi wenxue 民族主義文學

Ming 明

Ming bao 明報

Mu Shiying 穆時英

Nanjing tiaoyue 南京條約

Nushen 女神

Pan Jinlian 潘金蓮

Pan Qiaoyun 潘巧雲

Pei Ruhai 裴如海 pingfan 平反

Qianfeng yuekan 前鋒月刊

Qiangxue bao 強學報

Qiangxue hui 強學會

Qin 秦 80

Qing 清

Renhe 仁和

Sai xiansheng 賽先生

Shandong 山東

Shanghai 上海

Shanghai daxue 上海大學

Shangwu yinshu guan 商務印書舘

Shen bao 申報

Shen Congwen 沈從文

Shi bao 時報

Shijie shuju 世界書局

Shiwu bao 時務報 shi yi changji yi zhi yi 師夷長技以制夷

Shi Yizheng 施亦政

Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳

Shuijing zhu beilu 水經注碑錄

Shuimo shudian 水沫書店 81

Shun 舜

Si yi er shibian 四一二事變

Song 宋

Song Jiang 宋江

Songjiang 松江

Su Shi 蘇軾

Suzhen 素貞

Suzhou 蘇州

Taiping tianguo zhi luan 太平天國之亂

Taiwan 台灣

Taiyang she 太陽社

Tan Sitong 譚嗣同

Tang 唐

Tangshi baihua 唐詩百話 ti 提

Tianjin 天津

Tuohuang zhe 拓荒者 82

Weiguan 微官

Wei Jinzhi 魏金枝 wei yishu er yishu 為藝術而藝術

Wen Tingyun 溫庭筠

Wenhua da geming 文化大革命 wenxue wei rensheng 文學為人生

Wenxue yanjiu hui 文學研究會

Wenxue zazhi 文學雜志

Wo’men de shijie 我們的世界

Wugui lieche 無軌列車

Wusi yundong 五四運動

Wu Song 武松

Xixiang ji 西廂記

Xiyou bu 西游補

Xia Cengyou 夏曾佑

Xiamen daxue 廈門大學

Xia Yan 夏衍 83

Xiandai shuju 現代書局 xiaoshuo 小説

Xiaoshuo yuebao 小説月報 xieshi 寫實

Xin ganjue pai 新感覺派

Xinhai geming 辛亥革命 xinmin 新民

Xin qingnian 新青年

Xinwen bao 新聞報

Xin wenhua yundong 新文化運動

Xin wenxue 新文學

Xin wenyi 新文藝

Xingqi 星期

Xinyue she 新月社

Xu Xiacun 徐霞村

Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 xun 熏 84

Yan Fu 嚴復

Yan Xijiao 閻惜嬌 yangchang e shao 洋場惡少

Yangwu pai 洋務派

Yangwu yundong 洋務運動

Yang Xiong 楊雄

Yao 堯

Yao Pengzi 姚蓬子

Ye Shengtao 葉聖陶

Yi er ba shibian 一二八事變

Yihetuan yundong 義和團運動

Yingluo 瓔珞 youpai 右派

Yuxing 餘興

Yu Tiaomei 喻調梅

Yuyuwen shuzhuang 豫郁文書莊

Yuan 元 85

Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 yuanxi tiaozheng 院系調整

Yuanyang hudie pai 鴛鴦蝴蝶派

Yun’nan 雲南

Yun’nan daxue 雲南大學

Zang Kejia 臧克家 zhaimao 摘帽

Zhang Binglin 章炳麟

Zhang Dongsun 張東蓀

Zhang Jinglu 張靜盧

Zhang Ruogu 張若谷

Zhang Tianyi 張天翼

Zhejiang 浙江

Zhendan daxue 震旦大學

Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸

Zhijiang daxue 之江大學

Zhongguo baihua bao 中國白話報 86

Zhongguo gongchan dang 中國共產黨

Zhongguo gongchanzhuyi qingnian tuan 中國共產主義青年團

Zhongguo guomindang 中國國民黨

Zhongguo zuoyi zuojia lianmeng 中國左翼作家聯盟

Zhonghua shuju 中華書局

Zhou gong 周公

Zhou Soujuan 周廋鵑

Zhou Zuoren 周作人

Zhu Yingpeng 朱應鵬

Ziyoutan 自由談

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十年創作集 [Creative works in the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe,

1996, 247-258. Print.

______. “Mo dao” 魔道 [Devil’s way]. Shinian chuangzuo ji 十年創作集 [Creative

works in the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996, 271-88. Print.

______. “Qi zhi shengchen” 妻之生辰 [Wife’s birthday]. Shinian chuangzuo ji 十年

創作集 [Creative works in the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe,

1996, 432-436. Print.

______. “‘Shangyuan deng’ chuban zixu” 上元燈初版自序. [Author’s preface to

the first edition ‘Festival lanterns’]. Shinian chuangzuo ji 十年創作集 [Creative works in

the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996, 790. Print.

______. “‘Shangyuan deng’ gaiban zixu” 上元燈改編再版自序. [Author’s preface

to another edition of ‘Festival lantern’]. Shinian chuangzuo ji 十年創作集 [Creative

works in the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996, 791-792. Print.

______. “Shi Xiu” 石秀 [Shi Xiu]. Shinian chuangzuo ji 十年創作集 [Creative

works in the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996, 172-211. Print.

______. “Wo de chuanzuo shenghuo zhi licheng” 我的創作生活之歷程 [My

writing experiences]. Shi Zhecun sanwen xuanji 施蟄存散文選集 [Shi Zhecun’s prose 93

selection], edited by Ying Guojing 應國靖. Tianjing: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 96-104.

Print.

______. “Wo de diyiben shu” 我的第一本書 [My first book]. Sha shang de jiaoji

沙上的脚跡 [Footprints in the sand]. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995, 70-74.

Print.

______. “Wo he Xiandai shuju” 我和現代書局 [I and the Xiandai book company].

Sha shang de jiaoji 沙上的脚跡 [Footprints in the sand]. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu

chubanshe, 1995, 58-65. Print.

______. “Wo’men jingying guo de san’ge shudian” 我們經營過的三個書店 [The

three bookstores we had dealt with]. Sha shang de jiaoji 沙上的脚跡 [Footprints in the

sand]. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995, 12-25. Print.

______. “Xiandai za yi” 現代雜憶 [“Miscellaneous memories on the Les

Contemporains”]. Sha shang de jiaoji 沙上的脚跡 [Footprints in the sand]. Shenyang:

Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995, 26-57. Print.

______. “Xu” 序 [Author’s preface]. Zhongguo xiandai zuojia xuanji: Shi Zhecun

中國現代作家選集: 施蟄存 [Anthologies of modern Chinese writers: Shi Zhecun],

edited by Ying Guojing 應國靖. Hongkong: Sanlian shudian, 1988, 1-3. Print.

______. “Yecha” 夜叉 [The demon]. Shinian chuangzuo ji 十年創作集 [Creative

works in the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996, 327-340. Print. 94

______. “Zai Bali da xiyuan” 在巴黎大戲院. [At the Paris theatre]. Shinian

chuangzuo ji 十年創作集 [Creative works in the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan

daxue chubanshe, 1996, 259-270. Print.

______. “Zhendan ernian” 震旦二年 [The two years at the Aurora University]. Sha

shang de jiaoji 沙上的脚跡 [Footprints in the sand]. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu

chubanshe, 1995, 2-25. Print.

______. “Zhou furen” 周夫人 [Mrs. Zhou]. Shinian chuangzuo ji 十年創作集

[Creative works in the decade]. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996, 21-

28. Print.

______. “Zuihou yige lao pengyou – Feng Xuefeng” 最後一個老朋友—馮雪峰

[“My last remaining old friend, Feng Xuefeng]. Sha shang de jiaoji 沙上的脚跡

[Footprints in the sand]. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995, 122-30. Print.

Shih, Shu-Mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937.

University of California Press, 2001. eBook.

Shu Ming 叔明. “Ping ‘Jiangju di tou’” 評將軍底頭 [Discuss on ‘The general’s head’].

Zhongguo xiandai zuojia xuanji: Shi Zhecun 中國現代作家選集: 施蟄存 [Anthologies

of modern Chinese writers: Shi Zhecun], edited by Ying Guojing 應國靖. Hongkong:

Sanlian shudian, 1988, 300-304. Print.

Soren, David. Art History, Popular Culture and the Cinema. Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing

Company, 2018. Print.

Su Wen (pseud.) 蘇汶. “Regarding the Literary News and Hu Qiuyuan’s Literary Arguments.”

Translated by Jane Parish Yang. Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on 95

Literature 1893-1945, edited by Kirk A. Denton, Standford University Press, 1996, 367-

375. Print.

Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖. Mudan ting 牡丹亭 [The peony pavilion]. Taipei: Jiusi chuban gongsi,

1979. Print.

Wei Yuan 魏源. Hai guo tu zhi 海國圖志. [The illustrated treatises on the maritime kingdoms].

Zhongguo zhexieshu dianzihua jihua 中國哲學書電子化計劃 [Wiki Chinese Text

Project]. Web.

Yang, Yingping 楊迎平. “Lun Shi Zhecun xiaoshuo yu waiguo wenxue de guanxi” 論施蟄存小

説與外國文學的關係 [The relations between Shi Zhecun’s short stories and foreign

literature]. Wenyi lilun yanjiu 文藝理論研究 1 (2004): 10-16. Web.

______. “Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi shang de Shi Zhecun: wei jinian Shi

Zhecun danchen yibai zhounian er zuo” 中國現代文學史上的施蟄存: 爲紀念施蟄存誕

辰一百周年而作 [Shi Zhecun in the history of modern Chinese literature: in memory of

Shi Zhecun’s one hundredth birth anniversary]. Wenyi lilun yanjiu 文藝理論研究 6

(2005): 102-110. Web.

Yao, Daimei 姚玳玫. “Chengshi gemo yu xinli tanxun: cong nuxing gouxing kan Shi Zhecun za

ixinganjue-pai zhong de linglei xing” 城市隔膜與心理探尋: 從女性構型看施蟄存在新

感覺派中的另類性 [Urban alienation and psychoanalysis: the otherness of Shi Zhecun

among the new sensationalists seen via the female characters”]. Wenyi yanjiu 文藝研究 2

(2004): 49-55. Web.

Ying, Guojing 應國靖. “Shi Zhecun nianbiao” 施蟄存年表 [Chronology for Shi Zhecun].

Zhongguo xiandai zuojia xuanji: Shi Zhecun 中國現代作家選集: 施蟄存 [Anthologies 96

of modern Chinese writers: Shi Zhecun], edited by Ying Guojing 應國靖. Hongkong:

Sanlian shudian, 1988, 311-328. Print.

Yu Dafu 郁達夫. “Class Struggle in Literature.” Translated by Haili Kong and Howard

Goldblatt. Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, edited

by Kirk A. Denton, Standford University Press, 1996, 263-268. Print.

Zhang, Fuming 張芙鳴. “Geren jingyan yu gonggong shijie: xiandai zazhi de yiyi” 個人經驗與

公共世界: 現代雜志的意義 [Personal experience and public sphere: the significance of

the Les Contemporains]. Wenyi lilun yanjiu 文藝理論研究 3 (2004), 43-49. Web.

Zhang Zhidong 張之洞. “Quan xue pian” 勸學篇 [Exhortation to study]. Zhongguo zhexieshu

dianzihua jihua 中國哲學書電子化計劃 [Wiki Chinese Text Project]. Web.

Zhu, Li 朱麗. “Shan nuren yu manyou zhe: Shi Zhecun bixia de nuren he nanren” 善女人和漫

游者: 施蟄存筆下的女人和男人 [“Virtuous women and the romers: women and men in

Shi Zhecun’s stories]. Nanjing shifan daxue wenxueyuan xuebao 南京師範大學文學院

學報 2 (2007 June): 76-82. Web.

Zhu Xi 朱熹. Sishu zhangju jizhu 四書章句集注 [Collected annotations for The Four Books].

Shanghai: Shanghaiguji chubanshe, 2001. Print.