In 1930, Shen Dehong æ²å¾·é´», a.k.a. Shen Yanbing æ²éå° (1896â1981)â writing under his famous penname Mao Dun è ç¾âpublished a short story titled âStone Tabletâ (ç³ç¢£), which adopts the familiar âold stories retoldâ (æ äºæ°ç·¨) genre to reimagine the ending of the classic Ming novel The Water Margin (水滸å³). Relating a plot twist not present in the original novel, Mao Dunâs story describes how the workâs hundred and eight heroes discover a buried tablet that lists each of their names, in order of importance. The list basically confirms what the outlaws already intuited about their relative positions within the outlaw community, but does so under the authority of a message ostensibly delivered from heaven.
Students of modern Chinese literature may have had a similar reaction when, in the 1980s, a series of revelations helped cast new light on Mao Dunâs early fiction. First, freshly released Chinese Communist Party (CCP) archives provided new details concerning Mao Dunâs status as one of the partyâs earliest members in 1921, before he mysteriously âlost contactâ with the party after failure of the Communist Revolution of 1926â1927. Second, a woman named Qin Dejun published a series of memoirs detailing her previously unknown affair with Mao Dun in 1928 while he was in Japan, at a time when both she and he were already married to their respective spouses, and claimed that she was the inspiration for some of his subsequent literary works. These two sets of revelations provided valuable insight into the autobiographical dimensions of Mao Dunâs early novels, and specifically how they treat the interrelationship of politics and desireâor, as a popular literary subgenre from the period puts it, ârevolution plus love.â
Currently best known as one of the leading figures of the May Fourth movement, Mao Dun has worn many hats. In 1919 he began writing for the journal Womenâs Magazine (婦女éèª), and over the next several years he published prolifically on the topic of what was known as womenâs liberation. During this period, he also served as editor-in-chief of Fiction Monthly (å°èªªæå ±), and worked closely with a number of other journals as well. In 1926, he joined the Nationalist Partyâs Northern Expeditionâa campaign in which the Nationalists allied with the Communists in an attempt overthrow the warlords in the north. In July of 1927, however, the collapse of the first United Front between the Nationalists and the Communists led to the failure of the 1926â1927 Communist Revolution (also known as the Great Revolution), and it was at this point that Mao Dun left the CCP and became a professional novelist. In the summer of 1927 he wrote his first novella, Disillusionment (å¹»æ» ), which he published in Fiction Monthly under the pen name Mao Dun. Disillusionment was followed by two more novellas, Vacillation (åæ), and Pursuit (追æ±), which collectively came to be known as his Eclipse (è) trilogy. Over the next few years he published several more fictional works, including the novels Rainbow (è¹) in 1930 and Midnight (åå¤) in 1933. In 1949, Mao Dun was appointed as Chinaâs first Minister of Culture, and held the post until 1964. He was also appointed to serve as the inaugural chair of the China Writersâ Association, and held this position until his death in 1981. In 1982, the Mao Dun Literature Prize was established in his honor, and it is recognized as one of Chinaâs most prestigious awards for long fiction.
In this study, Jianhua Chen does not survey Mao Dunâs entire oeuvre, and instead focuses more narrowly on a cluster of works from near the beginning of his career as a professional authorâbeginning with the Eclipse trilogy and concluding with Rainbow. These works are all written in the virtual present and reference a variety of recent and contemporary eventsâincluding the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, when police opened fire on protesters in Shanghaiâs International Settlement, the Northern Expedition of 1926â1927, and the April 12 Incident of 1927, in which Nationalist forces in Shanghai cracked down on Communist organizations, resulting in the breakdown of the First United Front. If Mao Dunâs literary works from this period may be viewed as a sort of âhistory of the present,â one of Chenâs central concerns involves the way in which these works reflect on questions of temporality, and specifically a set of interrelated concepts that include the times (shidai æ代), timeliness (shidaixing æ代æ§), spirit of the times (shidai jingshen æ代精ç¥), and women of the times (shidai nüxing æ代女æ§). Chen argues that for Mao Dun this notion of timeliness was an emblem of modernity, which drove his attention with the complicated nexus of politics and literature. Chen examines how this theme of timeliness informs Mao Dunâs literary works from the late 1920s, including not only his interest in the possibility of revolution but also his fascination with the figure of the modern woman, or âwomen of the times.â
In translating Chenâs study, weâve made a variety of minor adjustments to the textâsuch as silently adding explanatory words or phrasesâto meet the needs of English-language readers. Also, Chenâs original study, following Chinese academic conventions, makes liberal use of scare quotes, including virtually every instance of common words such as ârevolutionâ (é©å½) and âfemininityâ (女æ§). In accordance with current trends in English-language scholarly publishing, however, we have tried to keep the use of scare quotes to a minimum (though we have preserved them in all embedded citations). More generally, we have tried to maximize the volumeâs utility for readers who know Chinese, while keeping it is accessible as possible for readers who donât. To this end, when generally use Chinese characters in place of pinyin romanization, and rarely include bothâon the logic that readers who know Chinese will find the Chinese characters more useful than pinyin, while those who donât will derive relatively little benefit from large amounts of transliterations. We make exceptions for Chinese words that are likely to be meaningful to readers who donât know Chinese (such as tianxia, meaning âall under heavenâ) and for terms that are referenced multiple times in the text (such as rufang, meaning âbreastâ). We provide the characters for the Chinese titles of all texts, except for articles and essays for which there is bibliographic information in a directly proximate endnote. We use pinyin for all proper names, except for those of historical figures who are conventionally known under a different spelling (such as Chiang Kai-shek, rather than Jiang Jieshi) and for Chinese scholars who publish in English under a different version of their name (such as Leo Ou-fan Lee, rather than Li Oufan). For scholars who publish under a preferred romanized version of their name, we always use that same version of their name, even when referencing works published in Chinese. For Chinese authors who publish under pennames, on the other hand, we cite their works under the name or penname under which that particular work published. For instance, in addition to his famous penname Mao Dun, Shen Yanbing also published under a variety of other monikers, including Yanbing éå°, He Lai ä½ç±, and Shen Xuanying æ²çè±, and works published under those names are cited accordingly in the endnotes. Throughout the main text, however, we have followed Chenâs practice of consistently referring to Shen Yanbing by his most famous penname, Mao Dun, which is homophonous with the Chinese term for âcontradictionâ (çç¾), and which thereby aptly captures the tensions and complexities of Mao Dunâs work that are the focus of this study.