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        Dreaming From the Crescent Moon Group to the Beijing School 139 Xiaopin wen and cartoons are richest in dreamlike qualities among forms of creation; images in dreams, no matter how false, or how real the feelings, remind one of the special consciousness of xiaopin wen and cartoons. From this it can be surmised that good xiaopin wen and cartoons must bring the reader or viewer into a hypnotic state, a state of mind just like dreaming. Put another way, the closer the content of xiaopin wen and cartoon are to a dream, the more valuable they are as works and the more able they are to move people.1 —Sun Langgong,“Xiaopin wen, Cartoons, and Dreams” The dream is a literary trope familiar to the Chinese reader. From earliest times, the dream has been invoked in Chinese writing to present philosophical skepticism about the self/world opposition and other dichotomies (Zhuangzian Daoism), to suggest the illusory quality of life, suffering, and desire (Buddhism), to imagine a bridge or a line of communication between the living and the dead, between spirits in the heavens, under the seas, or in the underworld (folk culture, vernacular fiction). The dream has been associated with literature at the margins of the intellectual, social, and moral norms of Confucianism—the literatures of hermits, eccentrics , and poets of unusual imagination and lyrical vision, particularly in the late imperial period, when works of fiction, drama, and essays that elaborate the trope of the dream were particularly numerous. I have illustrated in chapter 1 how central such dream literature was to the tradition of leisure literature , and especially how moderns like Zhou Zuoren and Zhu Jianmang understood and explained it. What makes the dream differ from wandering, indulgence in enjoyment, and humor (though not from learning), is that its elaboration in prose essays is rarely done for the sake of amusement. Among the activities I have used to define the various types of modern essay, in fact, dreaming may be said to be the most serious and the paradigm that lends itself best to the creation of lasting works of literary art. The elaboration of difference between the so-called Beijing and Shanghai schools has complicated the grouping of modern Chinese writers; where before writers had been grouped mainly by social affiliation, publishing house/bookstore, or membership in a literary association, the later geographical distinction added a new layer to this mix. Additionally, the Shanghai/Beijing split is not geographic in the sense of origin, since Beijing school writers were not generally from Beijing, and Shanghai school writers were not from Shanghai.2 The Beijing school is especially hard to pin down. This is readily understandable when you see that the various ways of defining the Beijing school all share some form of affiliation with institutions of higher learning in Beijing .3 This category includes writers from a number of different groupings, by virtue of the fact that they were attracted as students or as faculty to the premier educational institutions in the land. Higher education affiliations in Beijing characterize the group around Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren (the Threads of Conversation group); the Anglo-American-oriented writers of the Crescent Moon and Contemporary Review groups were also made up mainly of university faculty; many Chinese Literary Association writers who became critical of the “pure literature” emphasis of the second group were also affiliated with universities in Beijing (Zhu Ziqing and Wen Yiduo at Tsinghua, for instance). And I have observed that the core of the Analects group shared an academic profile in Shanghai, although many had been schooled in Beijing. Another thing these groups had in common was the belief that artistic creation should be more or less independent of politics, a belief manifested in a variety of different ways. Thus all the various subgroups of the Beijing school tended to take the essay more seriously as an art form than other groups of modern Chinese writers. Since I have already treated the Threads of Conversation and the White Horse Lake groups above, in this chapter I will concentrate on what may be considered the origin or core of the Beijing school—the Crescent Moon group, which would continue through the 1930s and beyond. I only treat them now for two reasons: First, with the exception of Xu Zhimo, members of this group only began to take writing artistic essays seriously relatively late, in the mid-1930s.4 Their intervention in...

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