二十世纪中文小说一百强，是《亚洲周刊》于1999年6月仿效西方的“20世纪百大英文小说”而提出的20世纪中文小说书单
First Lu Xun's short story collection. Lu Xun (1881–1936, real name Zhou Shuren), the author of “The Diary of a Madman,”was later hailed as the founding father of modernChinese literature and the conscience of China. A native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, Lu Xun had an unhappy childhood, owing to his father’s untimely death from tuberculosis, and to his grandfather’s imprisonment under a charge of taking a bribe at a civil service examination. In 1902, he was awarded an official grant to study medicine in Japan, but changed his career plans in 1906, allegedly as the result of seeing a slide show that contained a famous scene in which a Chinese crowd idly watches as one of their compatriots is beheaded by Japanese soldiers for serving as a spy for the Russian army during the RussoJapanese war (1904–1905). Dumbfounded, Lu Xun realized that, before saving people’s bodies, he had first to save their souls; hence, before practicing ordinary medicine, he must first cure the spirit of China, using the medicine of literature.
The May 1918 issue of New Youth carried a short story of less than five thousand words entitled “The Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji). The story features the diary entries of a Madman who believes that he lives in a society of cannibals. At the climax of his diary, the Madman hopes there may still be children who have not eaten human flesh and cries, “Save the children!” This is framed by a context in which the Madman is said to be cured and to have rejoined the society he formerly condemned.
He may have drawn inspiration from Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman” and other foreign sources. Equally remarkable, however, is that this Madman may bear a Chinese genealogy traceable to the melancholy poet Qu Yuan of “Encountering Sorrow,” the eccentric hermits of the Zhuangzi, and the wayward free spirits of the Six Dynasties. But, for May Fourth readers, the Madman embodied a man with forbidden knowledge. Behind the fac¸ade of Confucianism lay an orgiastic ritual of barbarism.
After the success of “The Diary of a Madman,” Lu Xun went on to write a series of short stories. The True Story of AhQ (AhQ zhengzhuan) depicts in mockheroicstyle asmall-timehooliganthrivingonthe “methodofspiritual victory”: bullying the weak and cowering before the strong.
In his “homecoming” stories, such as “My Old Home” (Guxiang), “New Year’s Sacrifice” (Zhufu), and “In the Tavern” (Zai jiulou shang), he writes about the painful encounter between the inarticulate peasant and the guilt-ridden intellectual, and the “invisible wall” that makes all attempts at communication futile.
“Kong Yiji” (Kong Yiji) and “White Light” (Baiguang) both portray traditional literati trapped in a changing time.
In “Divorce” (Lihun) and “A Small Matter” (Yijian xiaoshi), Lu Xun caricatures human frailties and grotesqueries. These stories were later included in two collections, Call to Arms (Nahan, 1923) and Wandering (Panghuang, 1926).
Lu Xun’s modernist sensibility can be best appreciated in his ambivalent interaction with tradition. His project to reform the Chinese mind demonstrates a case of what Yu-sheng Lin calls the “cultural, intellectual- ¨ istic approach” to problems, by which he means the prevalent conviction that China’s problems stem solely from the break in cultural and intellectual coherence and can be solved only in immanent, holistic terms. To be sure, Lu Xun sets out to take issue with such an approach; for him, the sanctioned Chinese civilization has long been lost, or, worse, it never existed except as a pretext for a highly developed cannibalism. But, granted his vehement satiric intent, he betrays time and again both a longing to regain a coherent form of meaning and a skepticism about this longing. Out of his desire to “transform the spirit” of the Chinese people and his subsequent disavowal of the possibility of doing this emerges the basic dilemma of his search for modernity.
However eloquent his inquiry into the Chinese national character, there is one dimension Lu Xun remained reticent about, namely the romantic and erotic dynamic in May Fourth subjectivity. He was, of course, not unaware of the consequences of repressed and oppressed sexuality in traditional society. He himselfwas the victim of an arranged marriage. Although, out ofregard for his mother, he never divorced his wife, Lu Xun lived in celibacy for years until his affair with his student Xu Guangping (1898–1968). In his essays and letters, Lu Xun attacked conventional sexual mores violently. Essays like “What Happened after Nora’s Departure” (Nala zouhou zenyang, 1923) and “On the Collapse of the Leifeng Tower” (Lun Leifeng ta de daodiao, 1924) stress compellingly the social and ethical need to remold Chinese womanhood. In his fictional writings, however, Lu Xun rarely touches on eroticism and sexuality.
He employs multiple strategies in depicting the real: comic caricature (“Kong Yiji”), mock heroic (The True Story of Ah Q), sardonic interlude (“Divorce”), lyrical rendition (“My Old Home”), allegory (“Medicine”), and so on. Underlying all these writings, however, is a theory that emphasizes the representational link between mind and body, language and reality. But Lu Xun’s longing for a fully fledged representation of the real ironically nurtures itself on the “break” in this chain of referentiality, as emphatically symbolized by a beheaded body, a split personality (“The Diary of A Madman,” “New Year’s Sacrifice”), or a living corpse (“In the Tavern”). It is awareness of this break that fuels Lu Xun’s nostalgia for the semantic and somatic plenitude of Chinese reality and the polemical power of his writing.
Shen Congwen’s writing engendered not merely simple nostalgia but an imaginary nostalgia, a self-reflexive display of nostalgia as the fantastic inscription of a hometown and of the memory of a past that is always already mediated. His Border Town (Biancheng, 1934), perhaps the most popular piece of native-soil of twentieth-century China, is a pastoral about a young girl’s involvement with two boatman brothers against the ethereal backdrop of western Hunan scenery; this romance is nevertheless jeopardized by dark family memories, unhappy coincidences, and misunderstandings. The novella projects as much Shen’s longing for his hometown at its most romantic as it does his awareness of the contingency and unreality of that longing when thrown into the flux of time and history.
Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi, which ends with the narrator’s cynical condemnation of the once hardworking rickshaw puller as a “degenerate, selfish, unfortunate offspring of an ailing society,” was completed in 1937, its strident note signaling the changing ethos among even humanitarian writers.
Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing)
The title of Qian Zhongshu’s novel Fortress Besieged (Wei cheng) is a metaphor for the predicament of marriage: “People outside the fortress want to get in and people inside want to get out.” In matters of the heart, the protagonist Fang Hongjian always lands in an undesirable situation from which he cannot extricate himself. Although he is basically a good person, his relationships with his family, colleagues, and wife deteriorate over time because he is too shy to express his true feelings and too weak to take a stand. Against the backdrop of banal life, he becomes isolated and impotent. Fang’s peregrinations from Shanghai to the country’s interior and back suggest that another dimension of “fortress besieged” is that of going in circles. At the existential level, this dark picaresque novel is a commentary on the trapped condition of the modern man.
Fortress Besieged is a satire that spares no character, not even the children. The author uses figurative images extensively and turns familiar aphorisms into original analogies. For example, a scantily clad Miss Bao is referred to as “partial truth” since truth is supposed to be “naked.” Qian’s wit also manifests itself in puns. Courtship is described this way: “If an engagement ring is a lasso that catches him, a button is a pin that nails him.” Fortress Besieged was first serialized in Literary Renaissance from 1944 to 1946 before it was published in book form in 1947; it went through three editions in two years. Unavailable in Maoist China, the novel made a comeback in the 1980s and was made into a television series in 1990.
Midnight (Ziye, 1933) represents the climax of Mao Dun’s novelistic engagement before the Second Sino-Japanese War. A novel of epic scope, its central theme concerns the futile struggle of a group of Chinese capitalists to establish viable industries in competition with foreign economic powers and their involvement in a ferocious native game of stock market speculation. Mao Dun intends to make the world of Midnight the dark period before the dawn of revolution. He invests the novel with mythical capital that is the unexpected dividend of the entropic world of speculation and fictitious dealings. The capitalist world of Shanghai will fall, only to beget a new paradise. Speculation, therefore, in its extended sense, is not only a formidable force precipitating the fall of the world, but also part of the grand dialectic of history giving rise to the return of order.
Underlying this plotline is a parodic review of the concept of revolutionand-romance. Not only do men and women in Shanghai’s high society gamble on the stock market; they even take romantic love as a kind of currency. They fall in and out of love as if betting on the value of each romance. At Mao Dun’s most polemical, he portrays even Communists as speculators in both personal and public spheres. Under the Li Lisan Line, a Party line calling for urban proletariat organization and violent action, these revolutionaries are seen as misinvesting their passion and action at a time least favorable to their agenda, so that their efforts are doomed from the beginning. As the first part of a grand plan that was never carried out, Midnight concludes with an open ending, leaving us uncertain as to the outcome of revolution
In 1965 he started writing stories that would be collectively known as Taipei People (Taibei ren). In the opening story, “The Eternal Snow Beauty” (Yongyuan de Yin Xueyan), Snow Beauty is a scandalous socialite from Shanghai who uncannily never ages. Throwing mahjong parties for recent mainland emigr ´ es, she is the perfect hostess, re-creating the elegance ´ and opulence of Old Shanghai down to the last detail. Her home in Taipei provides a cozy haven for those men and women who have lost everything: wealth and power, youth and beauty. Like a goddess watching mortals play their petty games, Snow Beauty is emotionally detached and subtly condescending to her “guests,” whose generous tips support her lifestyle. Her “coldness” is demonstrated by her affair with a middle-aged businessman, who is stabbed to death by a disgruntled employee. The evening after his funeral, at which she puts in a brief appearance, she hosts a mahjong game at her house; all is business as usual.
Ba Jin (1904–2005) brought the romantic sentiment in revolutionary fiction into full bloom. An anarchist from Sichuan, he wanted to write as a way of professing his conviction of love, equality, and solidarity in humankind, while acknowledging the violent undercurrent of his agenda. In early works such as Love Trilogy (Aiqing sanbuqu, 1928), revolutionaries martyr themselves as if dying for love unrequited. It is Family( Jia), PartOne of theTorrentTrilogy( Jiliu sanbuqu), that consummates all the elements of the revolution-and-romance formula. Published in 1933, Family is a saga about the Gao family of Sichuan during the May Fourth era, focusing on three Gao brothers in their battle against the feudal family system, their pursuit of love, and their consequent choices of either reconciliation or a total break with the family.
Family was an instant hit among readers, and in the next decades it was to become a celebrated primer for all who were yearning for revolutionary zeal and romantic passion. Compared with his peers, Ba Jin at this stage of his career is not a crafted writer; his narrative is flooded with unbridled passion, melodramatic plotting, and tendentious outcries. His “phenomenon” is not merely a matter of literary taste but a testimony to the shared need of one generation of readers to encode their emotional and ideological outputs. Indeed, Ba Jin embodies in both his works and his own image the symbolism of “youthful China” as envisioned by Liang Qichao and the May Fourth forerunners. A novel like Family, therefore, is realistic in the sense that it is not only a reflection of the cannibalistic nature of feudal society but also a timely engagement with the call for articulating the real – justice, love, revolution, and so on – in a strongly dramatic format.
One of the most important works published in wartime Hong Kong came from Xiao Hong (1911–1942). In 1938, she had broken up with her first husband Xiao Jun (1907–1988) and married Duanmu Hongliang. The couple arrived in Hong Kong in January 1940 and lived at No. 8 Locke (Ledao) Road in Tsimshasui ( Jianshazui), Kowloon. Here she wrote the autobiographical sketches that comprised Tales of Hulan River (Hulan he zhuan), the satire Ma Bole, and other pieces.
Tales of Hulan River, about life in a Manchurian village, is told by a child from a landlord family and portrays the suffering of men and women as a result of superstition and blind conformity to tradition. The bleakness of this world is alleviated only by the joy of the child spending time with her kind and wise grandfather, who teaches her how to read and how to live.
Liu E’s The Travels of Lao Can (1906) is one of the most popular novels of the late Qing. Lao Can is a doctor by profession and by avocation a chivalric knight, an enlightened intellectual and a conservative ideologue.Through Lao Can’s lonely adventures across natural and human landscapes, as he wanders among different social milieux and engages his friends in debates on political and philosophical issues, the author presents a panorama of late Qing society at the moment before its total disintegration. The Travels of Lao Can has been read variously as a great novel of expose, an intricate allegorical narrative, a unique Chinese picaresque novel, a lyrical novel, and a political novel.
Not unlike his hero, Liu E led a life full of contradictions, being both a self-styled entrepreneur and a conservative scholar, both a connoisseur of ancient curios and a comprador for foreign investors. Fiction writing was never his primary activity, yet The Travels of Lao Can places him among the most sensitive literary minds of his time, one who can capture the full spectrum of resentments, frustrations, dreams, and fantasies of a generation of Chinese intellectuals in the face of national crisis.
The Travels of Lao Can has often been cited as a rare example of the late Qing writer’s ability to deal with a character’s psychology. Lao Can’s sorrow at his country’s fate, his indignation at innocent suffering, and his lyrical fascination with natural subjects all show a sensitive soul’s response to external stimuli. But the novel is at its most powerful when it describes the hero’s frustration and amazement as he tries in vain to penetrate beyond the treacherous surface of a givensituation.Why arethe incorruptible judges more dangerousthanthe corruptible ones? Why do Chinese people persecute those who can provide the most ready cures for the country’s diseases? Such questions function as leitmotifs recurring throughout the novel. They drive the narrator (and the reader) again and again out of Lao Can’s inner world to refocus on the outer problems that make Lao Can what he is
his last novel, Cold Night (Han ye). Written between 1944 and 1946 and published in 1947, Cold Night revolves around a middle-class family of four inChongqing.The triangularrelationships between the main characters – husband, wife, and mother-in-law – lead to tragedy; life for each is suffused with an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, especially on the part of the husband, who is too meek and inarticulate to resolve the escalating tension between his wife and his mother. None of the characters is a “bad person,” but they are bound ultimately by their personalities, whichresult in clashing needs and aspirations. In the end, the wife comes back without marrying her boss, but her husband has died of tuberculosis, and her son and her mother-in-law have moved away
Li Boyuan was a friend of Wu Jianren and another important late Qing satirist. His Exposure of Officialdom appeared in serialization in 1903. Unlike Eyewitness Reports, which aims at the wholesale ridicule of late Qing society, Exposure emphasizes one social stratum – officialdom – treating it as a selfcontained miniature world. The novel enumerates the outrageous practices of officials, such as bribery, mismanagement, embezzlement, and, above all, the buying and selling of posts, concluding that these practices have undermined the millennia-old system of civil service examinations and bureaucratic governance.
Lu Ling started writing the novel Children of the Rich (Caizhu de ernu men) at the age of eighteen. The plot revolves around the three sons of the wealthy Jiang family in Suzhou in decline and disintegration. The eldest son is handsome and smart, but he is too weak to confront his wife’s greed and promiscuity. Driven to madness, he burns down the family mansion and drowns himself in a river. The second son loses to his scheming sister-in-law in the fight for the family fortune and turns into a cultural conservative. The youngest son is proud and idealistic; he tries to carve out a new path for himself but experiences nothing but disillusionment and loss of love. He dies alone in a village in Chongqing.
An anti-Bildungsroman,Children oftheRichpaints a bleak picture of lost youth in a time of national crisis. Under the influence of Hu Feng, who opposed shallowromanticism and formulaicwriting, Lu Ling developed an unflinching realism in all of his characters.
“The Tribe of Generals” (Jiangjun zu). In the last story, the two protagonists do not even have names: the middle-aged veteran from the mainland is known by his nickname Triangle Face, while the young girl from south Taiwan, with a limp from polio, is simply called “she” and “skinny little girl.” They first meet as members of a traveling band. Triangle Face learns that the girl had been sold by her family to a pimp but ran away and became a clown in the band. One morning he leaves her his entire pension to pay off her family debt and disappears. Five years later, they meet again in a marching band; fully grown now, she is a baton twirler. He learns that his pension did not save her as he had intended; instead, she was sold off to another pimp, who blinded her in one eye and forced her to work as a prostitute. Eventually, she saved enough money to redeem herself and went looking for him so that she could pay him back. The next morning, their dead bodies are discovered in the field, lying side by side, dressed in their shining band uniforms.
Romantic passion was first fully expressed in the works of Yu Dafu (1896– 1945). Like Lu Xun, Yu Dafu studied in Japan and this overseas experience propelled him to write. But whereas Lu Xun was traumatized by China’s fate, which he had seen as embodied in the slide showing the decapitation, Yu Dafu occupied himself with romantic longings and sexual frustration. In his first short story, “Sinking” (Chenlun, 1921), a young Chinese student studying in Japan yearns for love, but his romantic longings are continually thwarted by frustrated patriotism, hypochondria, and an inferiority complex. Finally, the protagonist walks into the sea, blaming his impending death on his nation: “O China, my China, you are the cause of my death . . . I wish you could become rich and strong soon! . . . Many, many of your children are still suffering.”
“Sinking”scandalized thereaders of1920sChinawith its unabashed impulse toward confession and its explicit descriptions of erotic fantasy, masturbation, and prostitution. Yu creates a different kind of Madman, one deeply troubled by his libidinous drive, which can become as ferocious as cannibalism. The story presents an almost promiscuous mixture of literary heritages, including the confessional style of the Japanese I-novel, the “superfluous man” of nineteenth-century Russian fiction (such as Rudin), and the rebellious posture of Rousseauistic narrative. Yu’s predilection for classical Chinese poetry, particularly that which deals with exile and estrangement, lends his narrative a mannerism reminiscent of traditional elite culture.
Roots-searching literature found a powerful representation in King of Chess (Qi wang) by Ah Cheng. Published in the July 1984 issue of Shanghai Literature, the novella features Wang Yisheng, whose given name means literally “one life” or “one student.” An “educated youth” raised by a widowed mother, Wang is only interested in two things in life: having enough to eat and playing chess. In contrast to the other chess players in the story, Wang is not bound by book learning or motivated by the desire for success and fame. Like a Daoist, he does not “discriminate” and learns from “people everywhere,” especially the old garbage collector who tells him, “Playing chess nourishes your nature, and your livelihood could damage your nature.” By living in the simplest form and “playing Daoist chess,” Wang is ready to embark on a spiritual journey.
In the climax of the story, Wang plays against nine finalists in a championship game: “[He] was sitting alone in the room facing us, his hands on his knees, a slender pillar of iron that seemed to hear and see nothing.” “Nothing” evokes the Daoist mind of nonbeing and noninterference, the shedding of egotism and forgetting of all worldly concerns. It is at this moment that Wang has completed theself-transformation from a “chess freak” (qichi) at the beginning of the story to a “chess king.”
Wang began to work on his first novel Family Catastrophe ( Jia bian) in 1966 and published it in 1973. The work sparked controversy for both its form and its content. The “catastrophe” in the title ostensibly refers to the disappearance of the protagonist’s aging father, who walks out on his wife and son with nothing but the shirt on his back. The fruitless search for his whereabouts is interspersed with vignettes from the past, which reveal the escalating tension between the man and his son, who has come to see him as a failure and the family system as hypocritical and oppressive. Ironically, in the absence of the father, the family thrives.
Family Catastrophe was criticized for its “heretical” ideas as well as for its experimental language that was sprinkled with neologisms, erratic syntax, and Chinese phonetic symbols.