| This dissertation discusses the concept of verisimilitude in the fiction of two Chinese realists, Mao Tun (1896-1981) and Lao She (1899-1966). "Verisimilitude" is taken to mean the effect of the "real" in a text not merely as a mimetic recording of the objective world (a "naive" definition of nineteenth century realism), but also as the activation of cultural and ideological motivations deeply ingrained in the text. Unlike mimesis which attempts an illusion of referential transparency, verisimilitude points to a network of conventions underlying the perception of the "real." Accordingly, I construe two narrative conventions constituting "verisimilar discourse" in classical Chinese fiction: the simulated contexts of storytelling and historiography. Both were perennially used not because they represented objective reality so much as because they reitereated the moral and cultural values that ensure a text's diegetic and semantic coherence.I concentrate my study on Mao Tun and Lao She for two reasons: first, they highlight the way in which linguistic, aesthetic, cultural, and ideological motivations interact dynamically in modern Chinese realism second, they indicate how, in an era of radical anti-traditionalism, the conventions of classical Chinese fiction are not thrown away but integrated with those of nineteenth century European realism to form "new" visions of reality. Whereas Lao She, inspired by Dickensian comedy of grotesques, parodies the classical storytelling context and the value system it celebrates Mao Tun seeks to imitate Zola and Tolstoy, only to find that he is never far away from the influence of historiographical discourse. More ironic is my discovery that, despite his conservative image, Lao She's hilarious comedy reveals radical impulses amounting to a macabre flirtation with chaos and irrationality while Mao Tun, well known as an avant-garde communist, writes a tendentious "naturalist" novel in terms of old-fashioned moral structures he professes to reject. Given these complex phenomena, I thus come to the conclusion that a textual representation of "reality" is not an "innocent" replica on the contrary, it always hinges on the intertextual and intratextual sources of an interpretation of reality. |
