| The first-person tradition in modern Chinese fiction began with the publication of Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" in 1918, an event that marked the beginning of modern literature itself. The subsequent proliferation of I-narratives corresponded to an intense period of sociopolitical and ideological shifts that eventually transformed traditional China into a modern nation. Under the influence of Western literary traditions (in some cases via Japan) and the Western notions of the self, the first-person mode became a formal correlative of individualism and pluralism that modern writers embraced with enthusiasm. They sought to bring into literature those people whose subjectivity had been denied by the classics. Subjectivity in writing was thus translated into political reality and acquired an ideological significance that responded to a historical need: the reconfiguration of modern Chinese men and women as self-conscious subjects.;As the narrative mode helps the modern writer rewrite the stories of self, gender, and class in a modern context, it also mirrors his/her deeply-felt uneasiness with regard to the relation of the elite to the underprivileged. In seeking to give voice to the experience of the "other" (gender or class), writers find their own legitimacy problematized. The confrontation between the educated subject and the "other" is effectively dramatized by the use of the first person, as in the stories by Lu Xun and Yu Dafu. But even more problematized than that is the notion of subjectivity itself, for first-person narrative poses the question of self-knowledge through the very ambivalence of self-reflexive writing. The works of Ding Ling, Zhang Tianyi, and others exemplify the subject's difficult quest for the identity of self, whereas those of Xiao Hong, Wu Zuxiang, and Shen Congwen focus on the subject's ironic incapacity for self-understanding. Situating the subject in the problematic discourses of first-person narrative, modern writers critique the bourgeois individualism that originally inspired their rebellion against the classics. In so doing, their works achieve a high degree of self-consciousness and narrative sophistication. |
