1. Mao Tun arrived in Japan nearly a year after the Wuhan retreat and the Canton Commune of 1927. There is a summary account of the shattering emotional impact on Mao Tun of these setbacks to the Chinese Communist movement in Chen, Yu-shih, “Mao Tun and the use of political allegory,” in Goldman, Merle (ed.), Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 265–71Google Scholar .

The situation of the CCP worsened in early 1928 when a member of the upper echelons of the Party informed on her comrades, which led in one instance to the arrest of the CCP Shanghai Branch Secretary, Lo Chüeh. One need not establish a documented argument to suggest that the motif of internal betrayal among “school-mates” in Ho Jo-hua's unexplained change of heart in “Haze” may very well be based on a brutal political reality which Mao Tun in his mental and spiritual agony preferred not to remember clearly. The informer's name in Lo Chüeh's case was Ho Chih-hua. See Kuo-t'ao, Chang, Wo ti hui-i (Memoirs) (Hongkong, 1971), Vol. II, pp. 759–64Google Scholar .

2. Many of the essays attacking The Eclipse and “From Ku-ling to Tokyo” were collected by Chih-ying, Fu in a volume called Mao Tun p'ing chuan (Critical and Biographical Essays on Mao Tun) (Preface dated Shanghai, 20 10 1931Google Scholar; reissued Hongkong: Nan-tao ch'u-pan-she, 1968). The most detailed literary criticism of The Eclipse, The Wild Roses and Rainbow in that volume was in an essay byYü-po, Ho, “Mao Tun ch'uang-tso ti k'ao-ch'a” (“A critical investigation of Mao Tun's creative works”), pp. 7–51Google Scholar, and the most controversial was an essay byHsing-ts'un, Ch'ien, “Mao Tun yü hsien-shih” (“Mao Tun and reality”), pp. 195–216Google Scholar. Hsing's, K'o “P'ing Mao Tun ti’Ts'ung Ku-ling tao Tung-ching'” (“ On Mao Tun's ‘From Ku-ling to Tokyo’”), pp. 217–43Google Scholar , and Hsingts'un's, Ch'ien “Ts'ung Tung-ching hui tao Wu-han” (“Returning from Tokyo to Wuhan”), pp. 255–314Google Scholar, typified the kind of literary polemics propounded by writers and critics on the radical left.

The direct and immediate bearing of communist politics on leftist literature and criticism of the period is attested in a statement written by Mao Tun during an interview with Yu-shih Chen in September 1977, when the latter asked him about the relationship of his fiction in the late 1920s and early 1930s to the situation of the Chinese Communist movement: “Literary polemics during the period (the later 1920s and early 1930s) were intimately related to the different outlooks on the situation of the revolution.…The reason is that when literature is at the service of revolution, different lines in party policy-making cannot but be concretely reflected in the subject matter and methods of creative writing.” The parenthesis is in the original.

3. Ch'ien Hsing-ts'un's three articles were collected together with a fourth, “Yeh ch'iang-wei” (“On The Wild Roses”), to form his famous long critique of Mao Tun, “Mao Tun and reality.” It was reprinted first in Ch'ien's own book of critical essays, Hsien-tai Chung-kuo wen-hsiieh tso-chia (Modern Chinese Literary Writers), (Shanghai: T'ai-tung t'u-shu-chü, 1930), Vol. II, pp. 113–73Google Scholar, and later inFuChih-ying, , Critical and Biographical Essays, 195–216Google Scholar. Tun's, Mao “Tu Ni Huanchih” (“On Reading Ni Huan-chih”) appeared in Wen-hsüeh chou-pao (Literary Weekly) Vol. 8, p. 20 (05 1929Google Scholar). It is collected inMao Tun p'ing-lun chi (Collected Critical Works of Mao Tun)(Tokyo, 1957–1960), Vol. I, pp. 64–80Google Scholar.

4. Tun, Mao, “Hsieh tsai Yeh ch'iang-wei ti ch'ien-mien” (“Foreword to The Wild Roses”). In Yeh ch'iang-wei (The Wild Roses) (Shanghai, 1929), pp. i–viiGoogle Scholar. See especially section three, and also the translations of pertinent passages on the “promissory notes” in this article. Mao Tun's self-admonishment appears inChen, Yushih, (transl.), “From Guling to Tokyo,” in Berninghausen, John and Huters, Ted (ed.), Revolutionary Literature in China: An Anthology (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1976), pp. 37–43Google Scholar, The relevant passages are on pp. 41 and 43.

5. Mao Tun had worked on mythology during the 1920s. He referred to it in his “Chi-chü chiu-hua” (“Remarks on the past”) (May 1933), saying that he had begun his research on Chinese myth sometime after April 1926. (SeeChen, Yu-shih in Goldman, , Modern Chinese Literature, p. 266Google Scholar). He also said, in specific reference to his research on world mythology: “The second half of 1928 was an exception. I was not sick at the time, but I was not writing novels either. At that time I wrote a few monographs on subjects of academic interest (I feel ashamed to mention this); for example, Chung-kuo shen-hua yen-chiu [A Study of Chinese Mythology].” “Wo ti hui-ku” (“ My Retrospect”), inMao Tun tzu-hsüan chi (Self Selected Works of Mao Tun) (Reissued Hong Kong: Hsin-yüeh ch'u-pan-she, 1962), p. 1Google Scholar. Between 1925 and 1930, Tun, Mao published several articles and two books on his mythological studies: Chung-kuo shen-hua A. B, C. (The A. B. C. of Chinese Mythology) (Shanghai: Shih-chieh shu-chü, n. d.)Google Scholar, and Pei-Ou shen-hua A. B. C. (The A. B. C. of Nordic Mythology) (Shanghai: Shih-chieh shu-chüGoogle Scholar, n. d.). He also publishedHsi-la shen-hua (Greek Mythology) (Shanghai: Shang-wu yin-shukuan, 1926Google Scholar), a translation of a work, presumably in English, that I have not yet identified.

It would be hard to show specifically how Mao Tun's research on mythology affected his thinking and his literary style. It is clear, however, that he was preoccupied with the subject in the mid to late 1920s, and therefore we may assume that his borrowing of mythical names for his fictional characters (see note 8 below) was conscious and deliberate.

My hypothesis about the significance of Chuang-tzu's philosophy and Ch'ü Yüan's tragic death for Mao Tun, at this point in his life, is advanced not because I am able to prove it, but because it explains a great deal about Mao Tun's early works and what he said about them in this particular period.

6. Yen-ping, Shen (ed.), Chuang-tzu (Shanghai: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1926)Google Scholarand Ch'u tz'u (Shanghai: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1926)Google Scholar.

There is a terse exposition of Chuang-tzu's “escapist” philosophy by Chün-shih in “Creation” which certainly reflects Mao Tun's own rejection of its view of the ultimate spiritual detachment of man in his world. But Mao Tun's most telling statement on the subject was in his “Preface to Chuang-tzu,” where he remarked on Chuang-tzu's lack of concern in times of disorder and concluded that he was “not revolutionary.” For a discussion on Mao Tun's involvement with Chuang-tzu studies in high school and later, seeGálik, Marián, “From Chuang-tzu to Lenin: Mao Tun's intellectual development,” Asian and African Studies (Bratislave) Vol. 3 (1967), pp. 98–109Google Scholar.

7. How Ch'ü Yüan died is still debated by some scholars. Mao Tun did not raise any question about the circumstances of Ch'ü Yüan's death when he included the biography of Ch'ü Yüan in Shih-chi in his Ch'u tz'u, nor did he make any comment. For a detailed discussion of the issues involved, seeHightower, James R., “Ch'ü Yüan Studies,” in Silver Jubilee Volume of the Zinbun-Kagaku-Kenkyusyo, Kyoto University (Kyoto, 1954), pp. 192–223Google Scholar.

8. These allusions later reappeared and became even more pointed in two novelettes he wrote shortly after his return to Shanghai, Road (1930) and In Company of Three (1930–31). The names of the principal characters in Road are Hsing, Tu-jo, and (Chiang) Yung, all flowers in Ch'u tz'u. There is even an explicit reference, though it is made in joking allusion to one line in a Ch'u tz'u poem about wading the river to pick the yung flowers. SeeTun, Mao, Road (Shanghai: Wen-hua sheng-huo ch'u-pan-she, 1935), p. 32Google Scholar. Hsing (graph identical with the Hsing in Road), Hsü's girlfriend in In Company of Three and Ch'iu-chü (autumn chrysanthemum), the maid who commits suicide, in particular carry definite Ch'u tz'u overtones, as do the names of Ch'iung-hua in “A Woman” and Kuei in “Poetry and Prose” in The Wild Roses. There are many other mythical and historical references in the names of Mao Tun's characters; see, for example, note 40 below.

9. Hsing-ts'un, Ch'ien, “Mao Tun and reality,” in his Modern Chinese Literary Writers, Vol. II, p. 172Google Scholar; also inChih-ying, Fu, Critical and Biographical Essays, p. 215Google Scholar.

10. “Foreword,” pp. i–ii.

11. In Greek myth, Lachesis measures the thread of life spun by Clotho and determines its length. Mao Tun, however, describes her as “twisting together the thread of life. Her wrist-power is at times strong and at times weak; that explains why man's life-force varies in degree of strength.” As a revolutionary, Mao Tun naturally was more concerned with the strength than the length of life when the issue at stake was power in the political as well as the military field; but it is impossible to say whether he changed the myth deliberately or inadvertently. My guess is that he did it deliberately. (“Foreword,” p. i.)

For a short account of the Greek fates, see Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Vol. I (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1955), p. 48Google Scholar.

12. Ibid. p. ii.

Mao Tun's version of the Nordic fates probably also contains elements of free variation of his own. I have not been able to find a description of Urd, Verdandi and Skuld that conforms closely to his concept of mythological time. In Brian Branston's Gods of the North, the sisters’ being symbols of the Present, Past and Future is there, but not the open relationship between man and his fate in mythological time. Instead, the following is said about the fates: (“The names of the three Nornir are Urdr, Verdandi and Skuld, words which may be translated Past, Present and Future: so that when ‘the three giant maids came from Giantland’ they brought with them time; then the timeless existence of the youthful gods in the Ancient Asgard ceased, and they put off their immortality. From the ‘coming of the women’ the predestined events must take place one after the other until the Doom of the Gods.”Branston, Brian, Gods of the North (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1955), p. 209Google Scholar. Larousse, World Mythology (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1965) gives a slightly different version of “the mistresses of human destiny” (pp. 390–91)Google Scholar, but not close to Mao Tun's either.

Mao Tun might have seen an early illustrated edition of the Nordic myth which I have not seen. Since I have not been able to locate his A. B. C. of Nordic Mythology, I do not know his sources.

13. Chen, Yu-shih (transl.), “From Guling to Tokyo,” in Berninghausen and Huters, Revolutionary Literature, p. 39:Google Scholar

“The basic tone of Pursuit is extremely pessimistic; the large and small goals pursued by the characters in the book are, without exceptions, thwarted. I even went so far as to describe the failure of a cynic's attempted suicide — the most minimal kind of pursuit. I admit that this basic tone of extreme pessimism is my own, although the dissatisfaction with the existing situation, the frustration and the searching for a way out on the part of the young people in the book are objective reality. If one says that this shows how my thoughts are backward, then I do not understand why blindly crashing like flies against a window pane should not also be considered backward. Likewise, I will admit to the charge that I am only negative and do not give my characters a way out; but I myself cannot believe that making oneself into a gramophone shouting ‘This is the way out, come this way!’ has any value or can leave one with an easy conscience. It is precisely because I do not wish to stifle my conscience and say things I do not believe, and because I am also not a great genius who can discover a trustworthy way and point it out to everybody, that I cannot make the characters in my novelette find a way out. People say that this is because I vacillate in my ideas. I also do not wish to argue or protest this. To my mind, I have not in fact vacillated. From the beginning I have never approved of what many people have for the last year or so emphatically called ‘the way out.’ Hasn't it now already been proved clearly that this way out has become almost a ‘dead end’?”

14. “Foreword,” p. iii.

15. Ibid. p. iii. I have used John Berninghausen's translation of this sentence from his conference paper, “Mao Tun's early fiction: a dialectic between politics and love,” which was revised and published as “The central contradiction in Mao Tun's earliest fiction,” inGoldman, , Modern Chinese Literature, pp. 233–59Google Scholar. In the published version, the long quotation is considerably cut (see pp. 242–43). Translations of other passages from the “Foreword” are my own.

16. “Foreword,” p. vii.

17. The interpretation of the dramatic personalities in the stories as metaphors for flowers is my own; the phrase and the idea of a “rose-flower crown” is in the text. I made a simple inference.

18. “ Foreword,” p. vii.

19. Ibid. pp. iii-iv.

20. “Suicide,” The Wild Roses, p. 75.

21. Ibid. p. 76.

22. Ibid. p. 77.

23. Hsia, C. T., A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 140–64 (p. 161)Google Scholar.

24. Berninghausen, John, “Central contradiction,” in Goldman, Modern Chinese Literature, 233–59Google Scholar.

25. Ch'ien Hsing-ts'un, Vol. II, p. 161; also Fu Chih-ying, p. 204.

26. Ch'ien Hsing-ts'un, Vol. II, pp. 161–62; also Fu Chih-ying, pp. 204–205.

27. This view is represented by C. T. Hsia's statement, cited in supra n. 23. Hsia regards Mao Tun's characterization of Miss Huan in essentially the same way as Wayne Booth looks upon Henry James's characterization of the governess in “The Turn of the Screw.” SeeBooth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 312Google Scholar. I findBooth's, chapters on “The price of impersonal narration, Ch. I: Confusion of Distance,” (pp. 311–19)Google Scholarand “Ch. II: Henry James and the Unreliable Narrator” (pp. 339–46) helpful in understanding similar technical problems confronting Mao Tun in his characterization of Miss Huan and other women in The Wild Roses.

28. Cf. n. 21. Berninghausen's position can be challenged by invoking Booth's discussion of the use of the “unreliable narrator” as a device in fiction to effect a double focus – the unreliable narrator (in this case, Miss Huan) as the protagonist, and the author (Mao Tun) uncontrollably “breaking out” of his narrative to speak on a different level. (Cf. Booth, , Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 346Google Scholar). Applying Booth's analysis of Henry James to Mao Tun in “Suicide,” we can see that ambivalence about revolution, freedom, love, or women's emancipation does not necessarily have to be a part of Miss Huan's dramatic character, nor a part of Mao Tun's personal feeling as the author. It can very well reside in the fictional device of the unreliable narrator. What Mao Tun wants his dénouement in “Suicide” to address is the nature and structure of commitment and its betrayal. The ambivalence reflected in Miss Huan's situation can be resolved once we begin to see it in that perspective.

29. The theoretical issues involved in the uses of “telling” and “showing” in realistic fiction are many and complicated. Mao Tun obviously employed some device like the double focus discussed in n. 28 to communicate on more than one level of reality. Cf. Booth, Wayne, “Telling and Showing,” in his Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 3–20Google Scholar.

30. “Foreword,” p. v.31.

31. Ibid. p. v.

32. Mao Tun puts them in two separate groups of character types in section 4 of his “Foreword.” Miss Huan is presented as a “weak” character, and Ch'iunghua as a victim of egocentrism who once was innocent and loving. It would be difficult to argue, merely from their different outlooks on love or their different kinds of tragic ending, that they actually represent on the allegorical level two different party lines under different circumstances and in different periods of revolutionary struggle. Nonetheless, Miss Huan's suicidal psychology could be interpreted as the lesson Mao Tun wanted all to learn about the putschist tendencies in late 1927 and early 1928 that cost the lives of many of his long-time comrades and caused large casualties among the rank and file of the party: both (Miss Huan and the putschist advocates) mistook the road to death for the road out of a critical situation. By the same token, Ch'iung-hua's “egocentrism” could also be regarded as another lesson on the deadly consequences of the politically egocentric “Li Li-san Line,” which was obsessed with the idea of making comebacks by capturing large urban centres, despite the fact that CCP military forces were not equipped for such large-scale undertakings after the setbacks of 1927. It is tempting to speculate in this direction, especially when we ask the reason for Mao Tun's preoccupation with suicide and sickness-unto-death motifs in his stories. Moreover, it is difficult to understand otherwise what Mao Tun meant by “egocentrism” in Ch'iung-hua: the story itself hardly supports such a description.

33. In the story, she is frequently shown to be lonely for love. See “A Woman,” The Wild Roses, pp. 90–92, 100 and 112–14.

34. Ibid. p. 162.

35. Hsiu-hsia, Tsu, “Mao Tun ti ‘I-ko nu-hsing’” (“Mao Tun's ‘A Woman’”), in Fu Chih-ying, p. 130Google Scholar.

36. In Mao Tun's early fiction, the image of the mother is invariably projected as warm and comforting, and she plays a positive role in the lives of the protagonists. “Mother” seems to stand for a relationship between the revolution and its goal that is ever spontaneous, natural, loving, healing and rejuvenating. Miss Ching in Disillusionment yearns for her mother whenever in distress, and so does Ch'iung-hua in “A Woman.” The latter's will to survive after the fire largely springs from her concern for her ageing mother. By comparison, the father figure in Mao Tun's early fiction (with the notable exception of Yün's peasant father in In Company of Three) fares less well. Miss Chang's father in “Haze” is an ugly tyrant, and Dean Ching in Road behaves even worse.

37. “Haze,” The Wild Roses, p. 184.

38. I take exception to Mao Tun's critical remarks about Miss Chang in section four of his “Foreword.” He was probably thinking either of the catastrophe of the 1927 Canton Commune or the possibility of Miss Chang's using her decision to go to “Canton” to disguise her deeper deserter's psychology when he wrote of the potential danger in Miss Chang's “bureaucratic” background and of her not being a truly revolutionary character. Mao Tun obviously did not want overzealous readers to take her decision as an heroic gesture, a decision that bore dangerously close resemblance to what had touched off the adventurism in 1927–28 in the CCP policy. Mao Tun must be in mortal fear that such incidents might recur – a fear real enough and strong enough to motivate him to group Miss Chang together with Miss Huan in his “Foreword” in the same character-type. But surely the recurrence of suicidal incidents like the Canton uprising is only one possibility; it is equally possible that Miss Chang, once she cut her ties to the past, will become another Madame Kuei in Canton. The story itself seems to lend greater support to the latter possibility. In the passage cited in n. 37, we can see that Miss Chang had in fact reflected on the possibility of revenge (like Ch'iunghua) and the possibility of suicide (like Huan) but acted on neither. The direction in which her thoughts were leading towards the end was more positive, more concrete, practical and feasible. And what finally triggered her decision was the thought of her mother. In all indication, “Haze” is not a pessimistic or negative story. Since the story ends with Miss Chang's decision and does not follow her to Canton to test her revolutionary urge with concrete situation, I prefer to interpret Mao Tun's remarks in the “Foreword” as nothing more than a warning to those who share her dilemma and her thoughts that they must be careful lest they be entrapped with the tragic fate of a Miss Huan.

39. Place names in Mao Tun's fiction are always linked to politics. Canton is the legendary cradle of modern Chinese revolutionary movements, and it serves Mao Tun as a symbol of the home base of the Chinese Communist movement; it is so used at the end of both Disillusionment and “Autumn in Ku-ling.” Peiping (Peking) and Chinling (Nanking), on the other hand, have very different political associations; they are the bases of the warlords and the KMT respectively. Pao-su in Disillusionment is an agent from Chinling, and Ping's girl cousin in “Poetry and Prose,” his tie to the conservative past, finally goes with her father to Peiping. Thus, it is auspicious for the revolution that Miss Chang decides to go to Canton at the thought of her mother and her homeland. She does not think of marrying someone in Chinling, nor of leaving for Peiping; she does not betray herself.

40. Chün-shih was the courtesy-name of Ssu-ma Kuang (1018–1086), the author of Tzu-chih t'ung-chien (Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government), a monu-mental history of traditional China from 403 B.C. to A.D. 959. Mao Tun had a purpose in using the name here; there is a clear symbolic association between the two men's creative masterpieces and their political functions. In light of the long account of Chün-shih's own intellectual and political history in the first half of “Creation,” we must understand his creation – Hsien-hsien – as a symbol of the general history of modern China from the late 19th century to the birth of the Chinese Communist movement in the 1920s. Hsien-hsien's leftist-communist identity and activities have already been uncovered byHsia, C. T. in his “On the ‘scientific’ study of modern Chinese literature, a reply to Professor Prusek,” T'oung Pao, L. 4–5 (1963), pp. 466–67Google Scholar.

41. “Poetry and Prose,” The Wild Roses, p. 145.

42. “Mao Tun and Reality,” Modern Chinese Literary Writers, Ch. II, p. 162; also Fu Chih-ying, p. 205–206.

43. Chün-shih's characterization conforms closely to the concept of “humours” in western comedy. Northrop Frye's definition of humours and his penetrating study of the sources of absurdity in the role of humours in a changing society as: reflected in the works of Dickens shed a great deal of light on Mao Tun's conception of his comic characters in The Wild Roses, such as Chün-shih and young man Ping: “The humour is a character identified with a characteristic, like the miser, the hypochondriac, the braggart, the parasite, or the pedant. He is obsessed; with whatever it is that makes him a humour, and the sense of our superiority to an obsessed person, someone bound to an invariable ritual habit, is, according to Bergson, one of the chief sources of laughter. But it is not because he is incidentally funny that the humour is important in New Comedy: he is important: because his obsession is the feature that creates the conditions of the action, and the opposition of the two [congenial and obstructing] societies.”Frye, Northrop, “Dickens and the comedy of humours,” in his The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Cornell Paperback; Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 223Google Scholar.

Frye's observation further on about the possibility for “comic action” to overcome or evade the sinister forces in a highly structured society bears cogently on the social and political function of the combined role of Chün-shih and Hsienhsien in “Creation,” and Ping and Madame Kuei in “Poetry and Prose”: “In most of the best Victorian novels, apart from Dickens, the society described is organized by its institutions: the church, the government, the professions, the rural squirearchy, business and the trade unions. It is a highly structured society, and the characters function from within those structures. But in Dickens we get a much more free-wheeling and anarchistic social outlook. For him the structures of society, as structures, belong almost entirely to the absurd, obsessed, sinister aspect of it, the aspect that is overcome or evaded by the comic action. The comic action itself moves toward the regrouping of society around the only social unit that Dickens really regards as genuine, the family.…” (pp. 227–28).

44. “ Foreword,” pp. iv–v.

45. Ibid. p. iv.

46. Ibid. p. v.

47. Ibid. p. vi.

48. “Creation,” 3 February 1928 (following Disillusionment, September-October 1927; and Vacillation, November-December 1927).

“Suicide,” 8 July 1928 (following Pursuit, April-May 1928; and departure for Japan in June 1928).

“A Woman,” 20–25 August 1928 (following “From Ku-ling to Tokyo,” 16 July 1928).

“Poetry and Prose,” 15 December 1928 (following “Sound of the Bean-Curd Seller's Whistle,” “Maple Leaves,” “Knocking” and “Fog”).

“Haze,” 9 March 1929 (following “Colour-blindness,” 3 March 1929).

“Foreword to The Wild Roses” (following “Muddiness,” 3 April 1929; and “On Reading Ni Huan-chih,” 4 May 1929).

It is interesting to note that “Creation” was written immediately after Disillusionment and Vacillation (or at about the same time as Vacillation), before Mao Tun became aware of the events that threw him into the despair of Pursuit. In these three works he was quite optimistic about the future and was convinced of the value and reality of love and courage. Then death and despair struck. In the period of Pursuit, “Suicide,” and “From Ku-ling to Tokyo,” spontaneous love and courageous struggle had become the road to sickness and death. In Japan, physical distance from the centre of revolutionary struggle created the initial elegiac mood of an “outcast from home” reflected in his personal lyrical essays in the first half of his stay on the one hand, and the more productive attempt at psychological distancing from history reflected in the neither-love-nor-hate philosophy of “A Woman” on the other. The direction in which Mao Tun was striving was captured for a moment in “Poetry and Prose,” in Madame Kuei's bold, uninhibited mode of sexuality and life. Biographically, the creation of Madame Kuei in the image of Hsien-hsien implies that Mao Tun had not yet given up the future envisioned in “Creation,” and Disillusionment. Finally, there was “Haze.” The decision to recommit himself to continue on his original revolutionary course was conclusive, despite his reservations about a possible reversion to earlier “suicidal” tendencies among friends, “schoolmates” and loved ones. If nothing else, “Haze” is a declaration of the renewed courage to take risks.

After “Haze,” Mao Tun's writings, whether in fictional or essay form, became more spirited. “Muddiness” looks ahead to his three historical tales; and “On Reading Ni Huan-chih” and “Foreword to The Wild Roses,” written only five days apart, almost predict the appearance of Road and In Company of Three.

49. Seesupra, n. 38.

50. “My Retrospect,” Self-Selected Works, pp. 4–5: “Afterward [i.e., after The Eclipse and ‘Creation’], I wrote four or five short pieces, such as ‘Suicide.’ In subject matter and technique they all belong to the same kind of writing. It is a waste indeed of brush and ink.…In subject matter, ‘The Top’is not any different from ‘Creation’ and the others.…”

51. “Wu” (“Fog”), in Su-mang (Shanghai: K'ai-ming shu-tien, 1931), pp. 125–27Google Scholar.

52. “Hung Yeh” (“Maple Leaves”), ibid. pp. 130–33. “The Sound of the Bean-Curd Seller's Whistle,” ibid. p. 124: “In an outcast like me, without home, without motherland, refined sentiments like homesickness do not facilely spread in the heart.”

53. “K'ou men” (“Knocking”), ibid. pp. 121–23.

54. “Ch'iu ti kung-yüan” (“Autumn in the Public Park”), in Mao Tun san-wen chi (Collected Essays of Mao Tun) (Shanghai: T'ien-ma shu-tien, 1933)Google Scholar; reissued asMao Tun Tzu-hsüan san-wen chi (Self-Selected Essays of Mao Tun) (Hong Kong, 1954), pp. 77–82Google Scholar.

“Chi-chieh sung” (“Odes to Machines”), ibid. pp. 25–39.

“Tsai kung-yüan li” (“In the Public Park”), ibid. p. 88.

“Wu-yüeh san-shih-jih ti hsia-wu” (“The Afternoon of May Thirtieth”), in Mao Tun hsüan chi (Selected Works of Mao Tun) (Shanghai: Hsien-tai ch'uang-tso wen-k'u edition, 1933), pp. 259–62Google Scholar.