Change And Perseverance: A Study Of Mao Dun’s Works In The Context Of The Revolutionary Literary Debates

For a long time,researchers usually regard the controversy of “Revolutionary Literature” as an important turning point in Mao Dun’s entire literary career from a macro perspective,tacitly acknowledging that this controversy prompted Mao Dun to continuously reshape his own literary conceptions and to return to the camp of left-wing literature.This article takes a different direction,starting from a microscopic perspective and re-examines the changes and persistence of Mao Dun’s creation before and after the controversy through careful reading of the text and sorting out of historical data,and on this basis,explore a possibility to explain the relationship between Mao Dun and the controversy of “Revolutionary Literature”.The first chapter explores the changes of Mao Dun’s writing in the context of the“Revolutionary Literature” debates.The first section takes the timing of the publication of From Guling to Tokyo and Commentary on Ni Huanzhi as an entry point to discover that Mao Dun did not respond passively to his opponents’ censure,but took the initiative to engage in this debate in order to better position himself within the internal divisions of the revolutionary literary camp,thus expressing his different views.The second section under the grasp of the theoretical logic of both sides of the debate,found that Mao Dun added the color of class analysisto his understanding of “realism” in Commentary on Ni Huanzhi,while he also began to formally use the term “ideology” in a self-conscious manner,and they are all centrally interpreted in the concept of “epochal character”.It was under the armour of “ideology” that Mao Dun accepted his opponents’ theoretical preconceptions with the concept of “epochal character”,and his understanding of the role of literature changed from “mirror” to “axe”,even used this discussion to incorporate the trilogy of Eclipse into his own adjusted literary theory system in the form of“unfinished works”.The third section examines the revolutionary choice between “outlet” and“desperation” in Mao Dun’s literary creation before and after the controversy.This process of change not only profoundly reflects the specific impact of the controversy on Mao Dun’s literary creation,but also shows that Mao Dun began to apply the criterion of “epochal character” in his literary creation,with the intention of achieving breakthrough from his ideological and creative dilemmas.The second chapter discusses Mao Dun’s heterogeneous expression in literary creation in the context of “Revolutionary Literature” debates.Although Mao Dun drew closer to the theoretical logic of the revolutionary literary camp in debates and began to consciously submit his creative work to the authority of “ideology”,his political rationality was still plagued by irrationality,and the contradiction between the two made it difficult for him to eliminate the heterogeneous expressions in his works.The first section analyses Mao Dun’s use of psychological realism in his works of this period.He intertwines illusion and reality and constantly makes them gaze into their souls and engage in self-arguments,thus giving the work a certain “polyphonic” quality,finally achieves an organic blend of psychology and reality.The second section explores how Mao Dun unconsciously deviated from the “historical imperative”when writing about the revolution.The strong intervention of “ideology” not only fails to cover up the decadent eroticism,but also fails to give real expression to the class discourse,and the driving force of history remains absent.The third section examines how Mao Dun uses the narrative mode of “revolution + love” to convey his self-political dilemmas in his work.The act of “abandonment” and the sentiment of “staying away” were not entirely abandoned by his proactive approach to the revolutionary literary camp,and the unfinished state of Rainbow further implies concerns for his relationship with the Party.The third chapter reflects on the unfinished phenomenon of Mao Dun’s creative changes in the context of “Revolutionary Literature” debates.The first section analyses the seemingly contradictory literary thesis,recognising that Mao Dun,as always in the debate,focuses on literature itself and shifts his attention to the revolutionary literature recipient-the petty bourgeoisie,with the intention of redesigning a path to building revolutionary literature,in other words through continuously absorbing this group,and continuously expand the territory of revolutionary literature and art in order to lead to proletarian literature and art.That is to say,there was no sudden change in Mao Dun,but merely an internal restructuring.For Mao Dun himself and his polemic opponents,however,this change is unfinished because of the absence of textual class discourse.The second section further explores the specific impact of this “turn but no turn” on his literary output.It marked the beginning of Mao Dun’s positive approach to the contradiction between literature and politics,while his repeatedly failed creations announced his reluctance and inability to abandon aesthetics altogether.The third section analyses how Mao Dun’s “turning without turning” in his writing before and after the controversy is essentially an outward manifestation of the use of certain verbal strategies.He continues to reinforce the impression in the literary world that he has completed his transformation through reflective self-declarations,in order to find a “legitimate” identity to make his voice heard and to work continuously for the construction of left-wing literature.