The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Society's Reinvention of the Japanese Shishōsetsu (review)

Japanese and Chinese versions of the twentieth-century "I-novel" 私小說 (Jpn. shishōsetsu, Chin. sixiaoshuo) have usually been studied in not-so splendid isolation from one another, with but an occasional nod to cross-cultural influences or affinities within East Asia. This is particularly the case in Western-language scholarship on modern Chinese literature, as an extensive linguistic and literary grounding in both of the two leading national languages in East Asia is especially rare among literary scholars who speak neither as their native tongue. Compared with historians of modern China, their North American counterparts in modern Chinese literary studies have seldom exerted much effort to consult Japanese sinology; nor have the latter done much in the way of exploring affinities or influences between modern Japanese and Chinese writers, even when literary societies in both countries share the same name in sinographs, as in the Neo-Impressionist School 新感覺派 (Jpn. shinkankakuha, Chin. xinganjue pai).¹ Christopher T. Keaveney's valuable first monograph thus fills something of a lacuna in modern Chinese literary studies-along with providing scholars of the Japanese shishōsetsu with a firmer grasp of this genre's thematic range and structural tendencies when developed by non-Japanese writers overseas.

Keaveney's introduction argues that the subjective quality in much early May Fourth era fiction derives in part from the immersion of various Chinese writers in Taishō shishōsetsu while studying abroad in Japan for years on end. This was especially the case with Guo Moruo 郭沫若 and his fellow members of the romanticist literary coterie 創作社 (Creation Society), which they modeled on Japanese forerunners of these relatively egalitarian gatherings around a coterie magazine featuring short stories, essays in criticism, and serialized compositions. The introduction also points to the scholarly contributions of the sinologist It. Toramaru 伊藤虎丸, who has compiled an immense range of materials delving into the interconnections between the Creation Society and Japanese literature-along with various bilingual Chinese specialists in this area such as Xu Zidong 許子東, whose 1984 book on the Creation Society writer Yu Dafu 郁達夫 is especially noteworthy.

Chapter 1 succinctly outlines the origins and development of the Taishō shishōsetsu as a type of relatively unembellished semi-autobiographical narrative in which the protagonist greatly resembles the author and shares the same sort of social milieu. This self-referential approach to writing appealed to many May Fourth era Chinese writers, who shared their Japanese counterparts' desire for a more sincere and "authentic" mode of literary expression than what they had observed in intricately plotted and thus seemingly contrived Western fiction. Yet Chinese self-referential fiction writers tended to portray a broader cross-section of society in their fiction as compared with their Japanese counterparts, and this gulf between the two nations' writers kept increasing during the late 1920s and early 1930s as most of the Creation Society members converted to Marxism, itself a politicized form of romanticism. Self-referential fiction thus peaked in China during the early to mid-1920s, subsequently declining to the point that it was relatively rare by the 1930s, except among some Neo-Impressionist writers. However, this highly subjective approach to writing fiction has occasionally resurfaced in later periods when redefinitions of the self seemed in order, such as in the New Era fiction that emerged after Mao Zedong's death and the ensuing loosening of certain restrictions on writers.

Chapter 2 builds from the argument inspired by Patricia Spacks that the shishōsetsu represents a mere accentuation of the self-referentiality that is characteristic of all literature at some level; one might think of Flaubert's self-professed identification with Madame Bovary. Keaveney delves into various antecedents of self-referential narration in traditional Chinese literature, such as the self-absorbed poetic speaker in much of Qu Yuan's 屈原 verse, the zixu 自序 (self-introductory preface) that opens historical narratives such as Sima...