"Just so, the torrent of his stormy grief / He uttered in the sweetest poet's notes / And in the language of many colours." — Shelley, "Orpheus"[1]
I. The Time of Rage and Pain
Orpheus uttered his grief through the poetic lyre. In the same way, when an age is pressed down by rage and pain, it must also borrow some soul-shaking utterance to give vent to its accumulated emotion. It may be said that the rise, at the end of the 1920s, of the "fury fiction" and of Revolutionary Literature was precisely the product of the rage and pain of that particular age—the offspring of a violently agitated social consciousness, a violently agitated social mood. The defeat of the Great Revolution suddenly strangled the enthusiasm, the hopes, and the pursuits of progressive young intellectuals; and so, apart from a section who began stoutheartedly to step onto the road of practical struggle, the great majority of the young hesitated in a new darkness. This was a darkness more concentrated, more suffocating than the old, not only because it sought, with terrors of death and the redness of blood, to extinguish a light that had only just appeared, but also because it followed immediately upon the heat and the high-feeling that had preceded it. As a spiritual resistance to oppression, and as a continuation of the earlier enthusiasm, there arose a literature filled at once with revolutionary romantic passion and with the cries of disillusion and despair. These two strains supplemented and illuminated one another, lending a distinctive coloring to the literature of that special period. Although the former openly raised the banner of "Revolutionary Literature," in fact this romantic passion and this mood of disillusion bore a deep kinship; both were the spiritual products of intellectuals who pursued light and revolution but who could still only fumble in the dark, the products of that special age following the defeat of the Great Revolution.
Jiang Guangci's Jufen and The Last Smile depicted the fervent and despairing young men and women who resisted the bloody slaughter through assassination. Ye Shengtao's Ni Huanzhi narrated the tragedy of intellectuals seeking a true road of life, only to die under the White Terror. Ding Ling's Miss Sophia's Diary, which gave voice to the inner pain and contradictions of the young, drew and stirred many readers. These works differ in content and in ideological tendency, but a fervent feeling surges through all of them: an interweaving of pursuit and bewilderment, of dream and disappointment, of rage and grief. Their appearance one after the other in the literary world, and the enormous resonance they aroused, indicates the characteristic spiritual physiognomy and inner demand of many young people of that age.
As a writer whose pulse was bound to the pulse of his age, Mao Dun not only acutely perceived this characteristic of the time, but personally lived through its painful inner journey. The trilogy Eclipse was produced precisely from the writer's own pain, his thought, and indeed his entire heart's blood. This first work fully embodied Mao Dun's distinctive creative personality—a personality that had been forged in the burning fire of the Great Revolution and was therefore stamped with the unmistakable mark of the age.
II. The Subjective Imprint in the Work
Mao Dun had bound himself to literature already in the early days of the New Literature movement, but his fiction-writing in the true sense began only after the defeat of the Great Revolution. Before that, he had had his creative impulses, but they were not yet enough to constitute an irrepressible inner force. "At that time," he wrote, "my work brought me close to literature, but my own taste and the influence of many of my friends drew me close to social movement."[2] As a rational young man who had come into contact with revolutionary theory and practice early on, he had taken political struggle as the more urgent task. The great social convulsion of the defeated Great Revolution suddenly severed Mao Dun's direct link to revolutionary practice; the abrupt change brought him deep pain. The personal feeling stirred up with the social mood, and finally condensed into an irresistible passion. This not only became the powerful motivation for Mao Dun's turning to writing, but also formed a particular psychological set, a particular orientation of mind, that turned his attention and his sympathy from the very beginning toward those young intellectual men and women who had been buffeted and battered through the Great Revolution and its aftermath, toward their intermixture of hope and disappointment, of disillusion and pursuit, of pain and exhilaration, of clinging tenderness and of restless ardor.
Kuriyagawa Hakuson's view of literature as "the symbol of mental anguish" is no doubt one-sided, but as a matter of fact the writer's subjective will is indeed the motive force of literary creation. It is precisely through writing that the writer alleviates the emotional, rational, and even unconscious contradictions within him, that he gives vent to his impulses, and so brings his psychology from imbalance toward equilibrium. Seen from this angle, it is precisely the writer's inner condition of imbalance that conditions his creation, that to a certain extent influences—indeed determines—the objects and modes of expression he consciously or unconsciously seeks out, those which best express his inner demand. Mao Dun's work bears witness to exactly this. Although he strove to render social history objectively, and to avoid "mixing the personal subjective in," and although he declared that "in Disillusion and Vacillation there is none of my own thinking; that is objective description,"[2] still the location of the author's attention and the location of his sympathy as the works disclose them give away the news of his thought and feeling. In Disillusion and Vacillation we likewise see that interweaving of "lingering melancholy and ardent fervor" that overflows in Pursuit. To be sure, Miss Hui's misanthropy and dissipation are the result of excessively high expectations dashed and excessively abundant enthusiasms thwarted; the repeated pursuits and disillusions of Miss Jing are a true portrait of a large part of intellectual youth during the Great Revolution. As Lu Xun later put it: "Revolution is painful; mixed in with it there must be filth and blood… So those who held romantic fantasies about revolution easily fall into disappointment once they come close to revolution, once revolution is being carried out."[3] Miss Jing's experience from pursuit to disillusion is historically fated; it is not the author's arbitrary fabrication, nor a personal feeling forcibly imposed upon the figures. But when Mao Dun depicted the wave-tossed feelings of these women with such great care and sympathy, he could not but share their joys and sorrows—they had been conceived, after all, in his own viscera. Above all, the urgent, dense rhythm of the work, generated by the sharp rises and falls of Miss Jing's mood and by the alternations of social atmosphere between tension and slackness, between bright and dim, displays Mao Dun's own psychological character. It is plainly the author's own restlessness, his agitation, his violently swinging mood that supplies this novella's emotional ground tone, that governs the direction and the rhythm of its imaginative thought. As for Pursuit, the writer has more than once acknowledged that it began in new hope, but that the process of writing again sank into pessimism and disappointment.
Of course one should not confuse the feeling experienced by the writer in the course of writing with the writer's own feeling: the two are at once distinct and related. On the one hand, the feeling experienced is not equal to the writer's own feeling; on the other hand, because the feeling experienced is the writer's own experience, it must pass through the filter, brewing, and fusion of the subject's emotion, and so necessarily bears the mark of the subject's emotional character. Taine held that all of Shakespeare's plays, from their overall structure down to their details, bear one and the same mark; an important meaning of this observation is precisely the necessity of this emotional connection. In the same way, the inner consistency and continuity of emotional ground tone running through the series of works Mao Dun produced not long after the failure of the Great Revolution—the trilogy, together with Suicide, A Woman, and Poetry and Prose—exhibits the imprint of the writer's personal emotional character. If we then further compare these "objective" novels with his roughly contemporaneous lyrical prose—Tofu-Vendor's Whistle, Fog, A Dream Under the Cold Frost—it becomes still more clear how similar the ground tone of intermingled clinging and ardor is in these otherwise utterly different works in form and content; they jointly tell the truth of Mao Dun's inner life.
For Mao Dun, who had once struggled in the eye of the revolutionary whirlwind, the life of being penned up in a snail-shell room was unbearable. He was distressed and stifled; he loathed the social atmosphere of dispirited withdrawal that surrounded him—an atmosphere like being mired in a swamp, like being lost in a misty fog without a path of struggle. All the more, then, did he long for the heroic struggle that had only just passed:
The sky was filled with dark cloud, eerie beyond words. From the ranks of the military-political academy cadets rose a tragic and stirring song; the dark vapors that ringed them round seemed shaken. A wind sprang up, no one knew from where, and the thousand and ten thousand banners all snapped and rustled in it. Suddenly, like a thunderclap, applause rose up; the band struck up; mixed in with it came many shouted slogans…
Only "cold wind and ice" could "stir people to rise up and struggle."[4] Only the tragic-heroic struggle could free him from the entanglements of pain and stagnation. Even a brief moment of remembrance was at last enough to let Mao Dun's feeling find lodging; the will to resist broke through the suffocating life-atmosphere, and passion and memory fused together.
It may be said that in the short and middle-length fiction and in the other works that opened Mao Dun's career, contradictory mental states, surging emotion, and intense impulses constituted an unmistakable coloring. This emotional condition, flowing through his early work, gave the works a distinctive power to move and to attract; but it also brought the author much misunderstanding and reproach. Not long after publication, there were those who pronounced that what the novels expressed was still "nothing other than grief and vacillation," that they "have the colors of a revolutionary age, but they are not works of revolutionary creation."[5] Later, the critics who affirmed the works strove instead to evade and even to suppress the emotional character of the author cast into the work itself. In fact, however, both sides of the criticism neglected the social content contained within the feeling and the substantive thought concealed there. The wounds that the failure of the Great Revolution inflicted upon progressive youth, upon revolutionaries, indeed upon the whole society, were severe; how could Mao Dun, who had committed himself wholly to the social movement and who had witnessed the bitter facts and lessons of its failure, not share in the pain of the age? It must be further pointed out that Mao Dun was not merely infected by the social mood of the age; he was clearly already acutely conscious of the grave danger of a leftist current that was emerging close on the heels of the rightist deviation. "In fact, from the very beginning I did not endorse what so many people had been shouting and crying out about a 'way out' over the past year."[2] Then where, in truth, lies the way out? The writer had not yet found it; he was searching; his pain, his "lingering melancholy and ardent fervor" are the emotional trace of this hard search. Hence Mao Dun's pain is the pain caused by the writer's attempt to transcend his age; its meaning and value far exceed the blind optimism of those critics who only followed the current and "shouted and cried out." At the same time, it is this very pain that gave the writer the motive force for self-renewal. As the writer himself said in his "Dedication to Eclipse":
The fire of life still burns ardently in my breast, the strength of youth still rushes through my veins, my eyes can still see clearly, my mind can still take things in, can still reflect; there should yet be an opportunity for me to repay the warm love of you, my readers, and of all the warriors of life in this world.
The author was sincere. Sure enough, before long, he had with this "fire of life" and this "strength of youth" offered to society, to humankind, still more brilliant fruits.
III. The Rational, Analytical Gaze
The sudden change of the Great Revolution from high tide to low ebb had once thrown Mao Dun into bewilderment. In a passage later deleted by the author, he sighs thus: human history "only ever grants you the briefest pause to discuss and consider; and before you have arrived at any conclusion, it has gone on continuing, so that you can never reach a satisfactory conclusion."[6] Bewilderment is not itself fearful, especially the bewilderment that arises when facing social history, for it is, after all, bound up with thought and exploration. The sudden change of the political situation did not cause Mao Dun to lose his self-mastery; the strong reason cultivated by long life could not be entirely washed away by the surging tide of a momentary pain and indignation. "My keen rationality will never permit me to fall into the realm of the metaphysical, will never let fantasy's caress soothe away the wounds of reality."[7] The author had been wrapped in suffocating fog; he had wandered bewildered in the face of dreamscapes; he had paced on sand strewn with the footprints of beasts; and yet, he was still resisting, still seeking, still doing his utmost to discern the road ahead.
In the short story "Creation" we can see Mao Dun's intense desire to go forward and his firm conviction of liberation. The Pursuit of the trilogy then displays clearly the traces of his hard-won search. So long as we connect it with the later novel Rainbow, it is not difficult to see that, although Mao Dun had not yet broken free of his pain, although he had not yet been able "to find a way out he himself could trust, and so point the way for all,"[2] still he was, by negating the various erroneous paths and modes of pursuit followed by petit-bourgeois intellectual youth, doing his utmost to find, to approach the correct revolutionary line. Without the negation of the pursuits of Zhang Qiuliu, Zhang Manqing, and Wang Zhongzhao, there could be no choice for Mei Xingsu, who in the end throws herself into the practical struggle of the masses. The fact is: while Mao Dun was conceiving Pursuit, Rainbow was already taking shape in his mind. Rainbow is the logical development of Eclipse; it is the inevitable result of the author's painful search.
The political pressure that immediately followed the failure of the Great Revolution made some of the intellectuals who had once aspired to revolution withdraw their just-extended foot, retreat into empty dreams or into individual joys and sorrows, and there construct an "ivory tower." Not so Mao Dun. He was not a penguin paralyzed in the storm. The actual environment might force him from political movement to literary creation, but it could not sever his heart from the cause of revolution.
The defeat of the Great Revolution in 1927 pained me to the core; it forced me to stop and to think: where, after all, was the revolution going?… What road should the Chinese revolution take?[2]
An outstanding writer needs acute perception; he also needs the power of profound thought—above all at the very moment when he must make a new choice at a crossroads of mind. For Mao Dun, it was precisely the reflection and analysis of these questions that made him. If the agitated emotion constitutes one obvious feature of his work in this period, then the deep, rational reflection and analysis is a more inner, more important feature. It permeates the very process of creation and lends the work its outstanding individuality.
The psychological orientation toward understanding history, analyzing society, interpreting human life, and exploring revolution did not turn Mao Dun's writings into the illustration of subjective ideas. Rather, it improved the writer's overall psychological functioning, raised the level of his entire artistic thinking, and so enabled Mao Dun, at a higher plane, to grasp the social reality of the Great Revolution, and to raise in his works questions of compelling depth.
Among the earliest fictions to reflect the Great Revolution directly should be reckoned Jiang Guangci's The Short-Pants Party. Although objectively the work reveals certain problems in the struggle, the author's subjective intention is clear: he aimed above all to celebrate, with full enthusiasm, the fighting spirit of the revolutionaries. Ye Zi's story collection Harvest and his novella Star bring out vividly the sharp and intense class struggle of the rural areas during the Great Revolution and the difficult journey of the peasants' own awakening. Hei Yan declared in his preface to The Front that he wished to depict "the many-sided truth" of the Great Revolution; as a matter of fact, however, his attention concentrated only upon certain phenomena of corruption and darkness inside the National Revolutionary Army. These descriptions, to a certain degree, expose the inner grounds upon which that "revolutionary army" eventually devolved into a reactionary force. Lou Shiyi's The Salt Field, apart from depicting the struggle of the impoverished salt-workers against the dragon-head bosses, also touches upon the heavy lesson of how the right-deviationist line wasted the revolutionary opportunity. But here too critique is not yet what the writer takes to heart. The above works, from various angles and with varying depth, reflect the reality of the Great Revolution. They share one common feature: a relatively single-angle vision, a relatively single line of contradiction-and-conflict, and a stroke of the brush somewhat rushed by the press of passion. The writers were as if so stirred and so attracted by the tragic and heroic struggle they had personally experienced or seen and heard, that they had no time for deep reflection and could only rush their experience down onto the page. In Mao Dun's writing, however, we see a more complex orientation. He too has surging passion, but he goes far beyond mere passion. In Pursuit he was already laying open the "contradiction in human life" of "on the one hand a tense revolutionary atmosphere, on the other hand a widespread weariness and stagnation." Vacillation depicts a yet more complex and intricate reality.
In that small county town in Hubei caught up in the eye of the revolutionary whirlwind, the revolutionary struggle had only just reached high tide when it faced new crises; all contradictions seemed to reach a sharpness, a velocity of change, never before seen. Peasants formed a self-defense corps; shop assistants set up a clerks' union; they knocked down the airs of the evil gentry and shop bosses, began to fight for their own power, raised their heads at last. The evil gentry and shop bosses, having lost their old authority, were obliged in the midst of these shifting winds to change their tactics, sometimes co-opting and buying off ruffians, sometimes spreading rumors and unsettling the public mood. The evil gentryman Hu Guoguang is more cunning still: he infiltrates the revolution with two-faced tactics and seriously sows confusion within the revolutionary camp itself. Once the reactionary army arrives at the city walls, he directly throws himself upon the side of the reactionaries and joins in injuring the revolutionaries. Of course, the sudden reversal of the revolutionary situation in this small county is not solely due to the approach of the counter-revolutionary army, nor solely due to the cunning and the audacity of the reactionary forces represented by Hu Guoguang; it is also due to the problems existing inside the revolutionary camp itself. Fang Luolan is a heavyweight figure in the county party committee, yet he vacillates between the interests of shop clerks and shop owners, vacillates between revolutionary force and reactionary force. When he sees the henchmen of the bullying gentry making trouble, he "cannot but clench his fist and mutter to himself: 'If we do not suppress them, how is this to be borne?'"—and yet he is afraid all the while of being denounced as one who "approves of Communism." Such an ambiguous and vacillating attitude toward revolutionary struggle inevitably drives him daily further to the right and finally to harm the revolution. In addition, the backward consciousness of the shop clerks and the peasants surfaces with the rising of the revolutionary spirit and sets up obstacles to their own revolutionary movement. Mao Dun is not merely reflecting and presenting all of this; he is, as it were, standing at a height and looking down upon this struggle of tangled contradictions, scrutinizing, analyzing these intricate contradictions, trying to bring them to clarity. These depictions of the Great Revolution achieve at once an unprecedented breadth and a new depth. In them we can plainly see Mao Dun's hard-won reflection, set into the very substance of the work: it is through a multidimensional re-thinking of the Great Revolution, through critique of it, that he strives to trace out the cause of its defeat. Mao Dun once said:
Living in society, we human beings are small, while society is vast and complex. If we, like ants, see only one part of social life and make our judgments on that basis, then we have become those pitiful ants crawling on a stone statue.[8]
To perceive the external world from the whole, to analyze and understand and reflect the external world out of its total interconnection—this is the mode of feeling and the mode of thinking, distinctive of Mao Dun, by which he achieved his characteristic breadth and depth: a truly "modern" psychological mode in the genuine sense. This subjective psychological character not only enabled Mao Dun to grasp broad social history panoramically, to fuse together and to unfold in orderly form the contradictions and struggles of society, to create historical canvases of grand scale; it also gave him a still more penetrating insight, providing the possibility of shaping figures rich in inner content and of disclosing deep social contradictions. From this aspect, the rich social-historical content of Eclipse, its deep digging into the causes of the Great Revolution's defeat, and the vivid fullness of the artistic figures of Miss Jing, Fang Luolan, Sun Wuyang, Zhang Qiuliu, and others are all inseparable from this distinctive psychological character, this distinctive individuality. This trait was already showing itself in Mao Dun's first fictions, and it was to develop further in the writings that followed.
IV. Mao Dun and Lu Xun
Mao Dun was washed by the rains and winds of two great ages—the May Fourth and the Great Revolution; but from a certain angle, he belongs more to the latter. When, with the rationality awakened by May Fourth, he looked over society as a whole, he very quickly found himself in the heart of the white-hot political struggle that followed close behind. In 1927 the writer "underwent a deeper and broader experience of life than before. Not only did he see still more of the contradictions between revolution and counter-revolution; he saw also the contradictions inside the revolutionary camp; above all he came to know clearly the contradictions of the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia in this age of great change; and, naturally, he could not but see that there were also great contradictions in his own life and in his own thinking."[2] This should be reckoned Mao Dun's good fortune. The dazzling struggle gave him both rich and lively material of life and broadened his bosom, refining and casting his soul. He grew habituated to seizing on the current political event, to analyzing and synthesizing acutely its various contradictions, to penetrating quickly through the various social phenomena to the political and economic roots beneath them, and to opening his whole bosom to take in the storm and thunder of an age that had stirred and attracted him. If Lu Xun's critique of the Xinhai Revolution has left us a great spiritual fortune for our understanding of history, then Mao Dun's critique of the Great Revolution, in the social-historical content it contains, likewise still awaits a fuller reckoning today.
Lu Xun took part personally in the struggle of the May Fourth between old and new culture; he tasted to the full the pain of the May Fourth age. Because he understood the history of the old culture of the Chinese nation thoroughly, and because in actual struggle he came to perceive that the truly powerful opponent was not the old culture itself but the passive, backward national-cultural psychology that the old feudal culture had shaped, the storm of the May Fourth New Culture movement had only swept away the old feudal culture and had not yet at all shaken that deepest enemy hidden in the soul of the nation. His pain, therefore, was much heavier than that of others, his sorrow and indignation much deeper and broader. This psychological character determined that Lu Xun should have an exceptional sensitivity to, and an exceptional penetration of, those phenomena that manifested the passive, backward national-cultural psychology. He used virtually every weapon at his disposal—fiction, prose, poetry, essays—to wage ceaseless combat with this powerful but formless enemy. His ability to "take past events to explain present events, to foretell the events that are still to come,"[9] his ability to "grasp the totality of an age,"[5] derives in important part from his profound insight into national-cultural psychology, from his having seen through and grasped the fundamental character of those "children of old China" who run through every age and every soul; this is what lends his works their enormous power of generalization, their deep critical force, and their wise foresight.
By the age in which Mao Dun took up fiction-writing, things had already changed enormously. Although Mao Dun, like Lu Xun, continued in works such as "Mire" to criticize those benumbed and ignorant "children of old China," what seems to have attracted him still more were the other new elements coming into view, the elements still in the midst of contradiction and change. The storm of the Great Revolution had swept all classes and strata into the great currents of social transformation; the revolutionary energy long slumbering in the laboring masses had suddenly burst forth, and along with their strengths their congenital infirmities were displayed simultaneously. Mao Dun caught with extreme speed these features that had only just appeared in the agitated waves of the age. In Vacillation the writer depicts for us at once the shop clerks of the small town organizing a union, arresting profiteers, and unfolding a revolutionary movement of "a force that shakes the whole city," and at the same time depicts their susceptibility to manipulation and bewitchment, their blindness and immaturity. He depicts at once the peasants' self-defense corps "with long spears braided, with their broad bamboo hats slung over their shoulders," "with firm step," patrolling the streets and maintaining order, and at the same time depicts the rural peasants gathering before the village earth-god temple in a noisy "share-out-the-wives" assembly. These analyses of the contradiction between the revolutionary character and the blind character of the shop clerks—and especially of the peasants—already presage that this revolution led by the peasants must necessarily pass through an extremely tortuous course of suffering.
Blind ardor and benumbed insensibility are twin sisters: both bred out of ignorance, and yet at the same time the seedbed of leftist currents. At the high tide of revolution, blind ardor may for a moment serve as a force for sweeping away the old powers, but it leaves behind long-lingering after-effects, for which the revolution must continually pay a high price. It must be said that what brings the revolution again and again into the mire of rightist deviation—and especially of leftist deviation—is not principally certain individuals, but the heavy congenital deficiencies of the revolutionary class itself. At the time, when our Party had only just become conscious of the heavy losses the rightist line had brought to the revolution, Mao Dun had already, through concrete figures, simultaneously made plain the grave danger both of the rightist tendency and of the still-latent leftist tendency, objectively pointing to the historical necessity of the swing from one error to its opposite. This depth is inseparable from the writer's acute receptiveness and from his powerful force of thought.
The relevance of a literary work to its age does not consist solely in accurately reproducing the social life and the scenes of social struggle that have the breath of the age; nor solely in expressing truthfully the more visible social moods of the time. It consists also in seizing the social-historical demand of a particular period that lies hidden. When Mao Dun threw himself wholeheartedly into the actual struggle of the Great Revolution, when he had passed through a refining of blood and fire, of exhilaration and pain, and when, with the keen perception, the emotional condition, and the spiritual mode of his own that bore the unmistakable mark of the age, he came to embrace and to reproduce the whole external world, then his perceptions and reflections, saturated through with the pain of the age, were able to touch the deepest layers of social reality, to understand the inner demand of the age; his writing thereby attained a still more unmistakable relevance to its time.
From the fact that Miss Jing ultimately cannot calm herself to read, and cannot lose herself in personal love either, and so falls again and again into disillusion; from the fact that Fang Luolan cannot but vacillate between the clerks and the shop bosses—we can feel that the demand of the age always influences each person in one form or another, governs each person's desire and action. In the same way, the young set who in the parlor offer their impassioned arguments, who joke and curse to their hearts' content, although flung out of the main current of actual life, still have their joys and sorrows tied to the pulse of the age. Zhang Qiuliu is the woman most easily misunderstood in all of Eclipse. She lives a dissipated life, going in and out of dance halls and movie houses all day, pursuing sensory pleasure. The one effort she makes is to try, with what she calls her "love," to change the life of Shi Xun, that "philosopher of doubt." But on closer inspection it is not difficult to find that her decadence is not the decadence of fin-de-siècle ennui; she is not pursuing pleasure to the full because she fears that her good days will not last, or that her best moments will not return; nor is she, in any ordinary sense, pursuing the liberation of the individual—her thinking is already far above that. It is rather a case of a burning life-force pressed by the environment and forced to assume a deviant mode of expression. "Our blood is boiling, every moment, every instant—yet we have nothing to do." Zhang Qiuliu is unwilling to accept "the position of having nothing to do," unwilling, in an age of great change, to let her own existence "equal zero." The enthusiasm that the Great Revolution had ignited in her, once it had gathered into current, had to rush down by its own inertia. She forms societies, falls in love, dances, laughs and cries out wildly—and all of it is precisely to prove the existence of her own life. Yet against the gloomy, stifling society all of this appears soft and powerless, of no significance whatsoever. She hates the existing society but cannot destroy it; this destructive force can finally only turn upon herself, in self-destruction. Zhang Qiuliu is no "great hero" who can accord with the age's demand by her own valorous attack. Nor is she a benumbed and ignorant person who can keep her distance from the suffering of the age. She is sensitive; although she cannot clearly recognize the age's demand, and even less can she take firm steps to act it out, yet in fact this demand is constantly pressing her, governing her, never letting her rest. In this sense Zhang Qiuliu's decadence and dissipation contain a far more positive substance than the "saving the country through education" of Zhang Manqing, the "half-step-ism" of Wang Zhongzhao, or the "philosophy of doubt" of Shi Xun. It is for this very reason that Mao Dun cannot help showing a special preference for Zhang Qiuliu; while he repeatedly puts Zhang Manqing, Wang Zhongzhao, and Shi Xun under sarcastic mockery, he reserves a great deal of his sympathy for her.
Mao Dun himself bore through his own person the pain of the age, and so he was able to express that pain truthfully. Mao Dun himself had fought for the mission of the age, and so he was able to discern keenly the different effects that the demand of the age would have upon different sorts of person; even in the case of a group who had stepped out of the great current of the age, he was always able to see through to, and to suggest, the umbilical relation by which they were still tied to it.
Mao Dun's creative work began after the great social convulsion of the Great Revolution, and the age has left an unmistakable mark upon his works. Although these earliest works are perhaps tinged with a slightly low tone, they nevertheless display an important coloring of that particular time. The author's resentment, his ardor, his thought, his desire—all gathered in these works—are inseparable from the age; and so the author was able quickly to keep pace with the age. When the goddess of hope finally wiped from his mind its scars and its mist and threw her radiance upon him, the writer in turn gave back to the world more brilliant works. In these new works the clinging melancholy of his earlier work is swept away, the color brightens, the atmosphere broadens; the swelling subjective feeling of the early work gradually withdraws. And yet the imprint that the Great Revolution had left upon the age cannot be wiped away: it had, after all, refined the writer's aesthetic temper, had once shaken his whole soul.