NARRATIVE AND CRITIQUE: THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY IN MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE

Realist fiction, generally recognized as the dominant genre of modern Chinese literature, has yet to be fully characterized, due to a too-exclusive focus on the text's claim to mirror and extra-literary reality. Chinese writers of the May Fourth period, though they turned to Western literary modes such as realism as tools to help pry themselves free of tradition and forge cultural regeneration in China, inherited a traditional view of literature that emphasized its expressive and didactic value, and largely ignored the problem of mimesis. In their own writings, modern Chinese critics similarly devoted their attentions to questions of (1) the work's origins in the imagination of the author and (2) the work's reception and social utility. From the earliest advocacy of realism, they expressed discomfort with the mode's negativity and pessimism, and with the platform of independent critical observation that realism assumes. Moreover, this discomfort informs the fiction of all the major realists of the period, revealing itself in certain formal irregularities, the result of the authors' inability to mediate personal imperatives of social responsibility and ethical cultivation with the critical objectivity associated with realist fiction. Lu Xun equated that objectivity with the complicity of the uninvolved bystander, and employed irony and "distortions" to counter its presence in his own fiction. In Ye Shaojun's fiction, the divisive and revelatory powers of narrative itself seems to work counter to the high ethical standards of sincerity and fellow-feeling he embraced. Mao Dun, in his problems with length and closure, reveals a failed struggle to mediate the realist detail with the broader structuring principles of History. Zhang Tianyi used parody and satire to show how the arts themselves participate in the empty performative quality he observed in all social activity. In the late Thirties and early Forties writers such as Sha Ding, Ai Wu, and Wu Zuxiang labored to remain true to the descriptive principles of realism, while giving expression to new communal feelings through their representation of the crowd and through the creation of "realist heroes." Both critical realism and May Fourth experimentation with an independent kulturkritik of which it was an expression were finally banished from China after 1942 with the establishment of a new cultural orthodoxy.