Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose 9780804766227

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Rewriting Chinese

Rewriting Chinese STYLE AND INNOVATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINESE PROSE

Edward Gunn

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

1991

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1991 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data appear at the end of the book Published with the assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Preface

Since style is the term I use to discuss the formal features or language of writing, then I must at least acknowledge at the outset that this is the sort of study fraught with terminology. The terms used to describe this language are a matter of common interpretation among descriptive linguists or rhetoricians, not of scientific discovery procedures. Linguistics, as well as rhetoric, provides useful terminology and important methodology, but this study is not grounded in structural or generative theory. The most abstract framework I offer for style is a psychological one, suggesting that it determines certain inherent constituents of style and showing how these constituents may be manipulated to produce stylistic effects. In part this train of thought returns to elements of a framework that theorists of generative syntax decades ago found inadequate for the purposes of a generative theory of syntax. Yet the project of that generative theory, to produce "all and only the sentences" of a language, does not describe very well what writers do, at least Chinese writers. Alternatively, I suggest how the framework I adopt can contribute to the historical, comparative, and theoretical discussion of literature. Even so, I am equally concerned with the limits of this framework and with disclaiming any such framework as a system capable of generating style autonomously, apart from other social and cultural determinants of writing. Although I focus on prose writing, I also make use of a number of remarks on poetry and examples of it. My point is not to argue distinctions between prose and poetry. Rather, as a practical matter, I have sought to avoid taking responsibility for a systematic discussion of poetic texts to the same degree that I have assumed it for

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PREFACE

prose. Also, as a practical critic, I am more concerned with literary than nonliterary works of this past century. All the same, I have needed to survey writing outside as well as within the range of belles lettres, both pre-modern and contemporary. For this corpus I relied not solely on my own background but sought out and tried to follow up the suggestions of several scholars and writers, and I also adopted a practice of random selection of various types of writing from different centuries and from each decade of the twentieth century. This still results in a limited corpus of independent reading, and I am deeply indebted to the research of far more Chinese scholars and their counterparts overseas than I could reasonably list. In the end, the works cited in the notes and bibliography have been limited to the most immediately relevant sources for stylistic description. As for the individual writers whose work I discuss, I have no doubt that more could be written about any of them, and I hope it will be. My aim has been to introduce implications of the methods I have adopted, not to assert that these do justice to all aspects of a writer's work. Indeed, if I have at times assumed the manner of the austere critic, it is because I have found the challenge of this project itself to be as intimidating as it is irresistible. My commitment to it is thanks to the encouragement and expert advice of Professor Tsulin Mei, himself devoted to pre-modern Chinese historical linguistics. He was aware of my previous training in linguistics and urged me to make use of it at a time when I had neglected it. Even so, I would not have attempted to bring this type of research to bear on criticism without the opportunity to travel, collecting an assortment of documents and conversing with a range of Chinese writers, editors, and scholars. Both as respondents and informants they were patient, gracious, and thoughtful. They played a formative role in my understanding of what to them is worthy of attention in contemporary writing style and how they have reflected on it. They provided informed accounts of several historical events and helpfully directed my attention to various sources, from manuals of style to critical works and representative literary texts. This crucial aspect of my research was made possible through fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and through grants from the Hu Shih Memorial Fund and the Humanities Faculty Research Fund at Cornell

PREFACE

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University. Support from these institutions also allowed me to employ students from Taiwan and China as research assistants. They were tasked with scanning assigned groups of texts for one or another set of stylistic features to check hypotheses or extend the range of observations. Since I was frequently engaged in the same work, I know the tedium that they often had to endure and the value of their notes and comments. Their contributions, like those of the writers and editors who advised me, are embedded in the chapters of this book. I owe thanks also to those students who took an interest in style themselves when working with me in reading courses and seminars. Their independent work was a valuable guide to some of the limitations and advantages of one or another method discussed in this study and on occasion expanded my knowledge of the writers considered in this project. Finally, I would like to thank many of my colleagues in Chinese Literature who have expressed an interest in seeing the sort of technical anatomy of stylistic innovation that I have attempted. I hope the results prove worthy of the warm encouragement they have shown. Of course, beyond those few who have read the draft of the full text, no one could have foreseen the results of this project as they appear here, neither the writers interviewed, nor the research assistants, nor my colleagues. That ritual of acknowledgment must therefore be reiterated: Final responsibility for the errors of this study is mine alone. E.G.

Contents

I.

Introduction

2.

Formal Conventions of Style: A Social History

31

3· Conventions: Notes on Dating and Determinants

62

4· Aesthetic Prescriptions and Their Problems

71

5· Creative Stylists in Literature: 1918-42

95

6. Creative Stylists in Literature: 1943-86

134

Appendix: Innovative Constructions of the Twentieth Century, Cataloged by Type, Date, and Source

185

Glossary

297

Notes

301

Works Cited

315

Index

353

Rewriting Chinese

CHAPTER I

Introduction

Everyone who has studied the upheavals of modern China knows that one of them has taken place in Chinese writing. Anyone who has read Chinese texts has also eventually pondered the possible significance of this upheaval for understanding the text, and vice versa. This study is aimed at several aspects of these questions. The primary goal is to describe types of formal features innovative to Chinese writing. A second goal is to explore a framework for discussing the possible significance of these changes for criticism. Such a framework is inevitably largely historical. That is not to say that creativity in style is altogether historically determined. Innovations occur constantly, but habit and social pressure usually suppress them. When an invention does overcome such censorship to be honored as an aesthetic achievement or adopted into common practice, instantiated in writing, then there is a sociopolitical process with a history at work. The history discussed here is largely that of a Chinese educated elite following what they perceived as the example of foreign nations in creating a national language, and further debating the nature and role of that language in writing as part of a nation-building enterprise. This enterprise has also involved a much wider range of people as leaders or followers. The relationship of the educated elite to such larger groups of people in the development of writing provides the focus of the story presented in Chapter 2. A brief summary and review of special topics growing out of this chapter appear in Chapter J. There a review of methodologies for dating continues the diachronic emphasis of Chapter 2; then the emphasis on diachronic, social determinants for conventions of style is weighed against notions of synchronic, cog-

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INTRODUCTION

nitive determinants. Chapter 4 returns to the question of how Chinese themselves have written about writing, this time by reviewing various principles that have been promoted to evaluate prose and prescribe standards for composition. These principles are aesthetic ideals, familiar to the general reader, such as injunctions to avoid cliches but to be idiomatic, to be clear and economical, and to master the evocation of associations. Such abstract principles, presented in synchronic terms as invariable principles, are further discussed in terms of their limitations seen against competing diachronic and synchronic determinants. Together with the Introduction, Chapters 2-4 form the framework for discussing twentieth-century Chinese prose literature. This discussion develops in Chapters 5 and 6 as an attempt to integrate works of prose literature that represent various principles of composition into this historical and cognitive framework. The Appendix provides a list of historical innovations in formal features of style. There they are identified by the nomenclature of grammar, rhetoric, and sentence cohesion. These three types of features, together with vocabulary and the pragmatic concept of coherence, delimit what is meant by style in this study. Style could well be taken to mean any characteristic feature, from imagery to characterization, or even the structure of an entire work. All these characteristics, or techniques, are of interest, but they are not the central focus of this study. The notion of style pursued here is one that is inherent to all writing and so allows some range of both generalization and specific detail, all within one relatively systematic approach. A large body of research describing developments in Chinese writing has already grown up, to the point that it invites synthesis, critical review, and further elaboration in a summary work like this. The fact that most of this extensive research has remained purely at the descriptive level also invites an attempt to integrate this description with other types of studies about writing and literature. By pursuing these two tasks, filling out the descriptive study of forms and integrating it with social and aesthetic discourse, other tasks can be approached. The traditional, practical task of dating features becomes more accessible. The implications of such dating can be introduced. The relative strengths and weaknesses of various types of theoretical and practical discourse on writing can be assessed. Tensions of various types in the production

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3

of writing can be inferred, and speculation on the significance of features in particular texts can be introduced as literary criticism, rooted in this larger framework of issues. One inescapable tension is that surrounding the notion of a standard in writing. If no other institution, then law itself makes a standard crucial to a society. Yet literature, even that literature commonly read as an instrument for mastering a national language, is rarely composed according to any such standard. Take, for example, this comment on great European writers of the nineteenth century: It is generally agreed that Balzac wrote badly. He was a vulgar man (but was not his vulgarity an integral part of his genius?) and his prose was vulgar. It was prolix, pretentious and too often incorrect. Emile Faguet, a very distinguished critic, in his book on Balzac has given a whole chapter to the faults of taste, style, syntax and language of which the author was guilty. And indeed some of them are so gross that it needs no profound knowledge of French to perceive them. They are frankly shocking. Now it is admitted that Charles Dickens wrote English none too well, and I have been told by cultivated Russians that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrote Russian very indifferently. It is odd that the four greatest novelists the world has known should have written their respective languages so ill.'

What this critic termed "style, syntax and language" is here gathered together under the term "style"; it is the implications raised by such a discussion, however, that will be pursued for Chinese writers. This agenda may explain the usefulness of the notion of style followed in this study. Nevertheless, it also raises a number of more abstract, general issues. These, in turn, have informed the entire critical approach taken in the historically defined focus adopted here. These are issues once largely confined to the humanities but currently taken up increasingly in linguistics and in studies contributing to a cognitive science as they concern themselves with the production of texts. These issues are numerous, beginning with the nature of style and whether it exists; how a given feature of style may be privileged with particular significance; and whether literature is a distinctive form of writing. Questions at this level of generalization cannot explain many of the particular features studied here. On the other hand, neither the immediate historical frame-

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INTRODUCTION

work of this story nor the formal features described as innovations are sufficient in themselves to generate the critical speculations presented here. Rather, this Introduction is assigned the task of outlining my approach to the general issues that licenses the critical discussion in later chapters. Introducing the elements of style used here, placing them in a conceptual framework, and following them through a recent history of Chinese writing all result in a style that is itself loaded with terminology and jargon. These are no more than the standard terms used by one or another field for studying writing or speech, and they are now greatly inflated in number as new fields of scholarship address themselves to new questions about the production of texts, or connected discourse. The jargon is, then, not presented as the scientific mastery of new and difficult concepts. Rather, the most accessible descriptions and generalizations are brought together here from both ancient and recent studies to discuss some of the possible tensions and pleasures of contemporary Chinese writing. To discuss, on the one hand, the emergence ofhistorical innovations and, on the other, a way of considering their possible significance, two things need sorting out. The first is how to describe the formal features that emerge within our historical context and are especially privileged with meaning for that reason. The second involves discussing what may be more enduring, abstract constituents of style. Enduring means that they are so ancient and so universal to writing as a whole that they are well beyond the horizon of any historical study. For that reason they are discussed as cognitive constituents. If we use these together with formal features that emerge historically, we can structure a dialogue. It is not a dialogue that asserts mastery of writing or even does justice to cognitive research, as will become evident. It is a framework that allows us to bring in a set of similar concerns in literary criticism and to open up a set of problems for consideration. Style is a set of formal features with no inherent unity, any more than the "organs of speech" in the human body, that happens to perform collectively a coordinated function in producing speech. Style, in its cognitive and social determinants, is a "collectivist phenomenon," in which the separate elements, however conceived and analyzed, do not predictably add up to style. The features,

INTRODUCTION

5

then, are studied according to notions of types that may be manifested separately but that in writing appear together, overlapping in form and function. These categories of types include the lexicon, grammar, rhetorical inventions, and sentence cohesion and coherence. Although I draw heavily on existing studies of lexical usage and discuss aspects of it, I do not attempt any systematic study of it here. Rather, the statements on lexical usage are included as a part of the more systematic study of grammar, rhetoric, and cohesion. These are features that are normally more stable historically than the lexicon, so that sudden, large-scale changes in grammar, rhetoric, and cohesion are taken to imply responses to other forms of sociocultural upheaval. Grammar Grammar as presented here is a study only of surface features in historical and regional terms. It is described after the fashion of School Grammar, the least theoretical and most widely known system of description. School Grammar was taken up by Chinese in the later Qing dynasty, based on Western textbooks of Latin. This study is visibly indebted to grammarians in China and Japan, such as Wang Li (1944; 1954) and Ota Tatsuo (1958), to name only two prominent scholars. Combing the sizable number of studies these scholars have produced has allowed me to synthesize a larger survey than has existed as well as to add or delete features through independent readings. In addition to revising and expanding on their work, I have tried, based in part on their studies, to date the appearance of innovations in grammar more precisely than has been done in previously published studies. Historical changes in grammar are accounted for largely by borrowing, based on a principle of analogy to the language providing the loan. This seems to account for virtually all of the changes in twentieth-century Chinese writing, taking into account the varieties of regional speech forms as well as foreign languages available as sources for borrowing. Theoretical linguists have noted, however, that, at least in other languages, historical changes in syntax have taken place that have no apparent origin in foreign loans and analogous constructions. David Lightfoot's Principles of Diachronic Syntax, for example, is a notable study explaining changes

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INTRODUCTION

not accounted for by such mechanisms. He introduces the theory of a "reanalysis," or change in the grammatical rules of a construction, triggered when change in one syntactic construction fortuitously creates an awkward complexity within another, apparently unrelated, syntactic construction. Appealing as it is in explaining why a particular construction should change and not another, such a theory also involves assumptions about the nature of language as a coherent system with a deep structure that are beyond what is needed for this discussion. In fact, whether there has been a compelling "rule change" of the sort described by reanalysis in twentieth-century Chinese writing is an issue apparently limited to very few modern structures.

Rhetorical Inventions Many of the grammatical innovations in wntmg have not, in fact, involved compulsory changes in the conventions of structures, but rather provided alternatives to existing practices. Most such innovations can be described by the terminology developed in the West for rhetorical inventions. In ancient China a loosely similar set of terms for inventions and techniques of composition developed and grew further in the medieval and late imperial periods. By the twentieth century Chinese students were being exposed to Western rhetorical terms, either in Japan or in the West itself. These Chinese students undertook their own surveys of Chinese traditions, Chen Wangdao's Xiuci xue fafan (An introduction to rhetoric; 1932) emerging as the most widely available landmark work of this type. 2 Again, I have sought to expand somewhat on existing studies, based on Chinese scholarship and on more comprehensive guides to Western rhetorical inventions, among them Richard Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (1968). His more theoretical work and that of his predecessors, as presented in The Motives of Eloquence (1976), also inform some observations here and provide the word "play" as a noun describing a fundamental notion of humans and their writing. Surveying pre-modern Chinese writing for rhetorical inventions reduces the number of twentieth-century innovations to a comparatively tidy grouping. Or, to put it the other way, it is safe to say that virtually all the larger categories used to label types of rhe-

INTRODUCTION

7

torical inventions were in use in pre-modern Chinese prose. 3 Those that were not, or were extremely rare, for the most part can be grouped into particular categories. Some kinds of wordplay did not occur in Chinese writing because of differences in either the writing system or speech: Chinese ideographs do not show lengthening or shortening of a vowel (diastole or systole), although these occur in speech, chanting, and singing. However, the term metaplasm for the manipulation of lexical and phrase features is certainly applicable to Chinese writing. Similarly, certain cultural features, such as "graecismus and hebraism" (use of Greek and Hebrew idioms) are not found in pre-modern Chinese, but the general term "barbarism" for terms borrowed from other languages applies quite well to the adoption of non-Chinese idioms in pre-modern Chinese writing. There is also the much noted absence of the syllogism in pre-modern Chinese argumentation, which otherwise explored virtually all types of argumentation known in the West. 4 That there is perhaps only one example of an invention approaching the syllogism in ancient Chinese texts may be regarded as a distinction of major cultural, rather than linguistic, significance. Finally, there are various rhetorical inventions that never gained currency in China prior to the twentieth century for reasons that are neither linguistic nor conceptual, but must reflect the sheer dominance of competing conventions. These are listed in the Appendix, including specific forms of anastrophe (transposition of words, phrases, and clauses in a sentence); repetitive constructions (conduplicatio, ploce, etc.); zeugma (gapping); periodicity (elaboration of sentence elements by embedding); metanoia (correcting an assertion); metaphorical constructions; and anthimeria (shifts in word class). It is important to note that all these existed in some form prior to foreign influence, and it is the particular forms they take today that have been innovative in the twentieth century. These have served both to adapt Chinese to more literal translations of foreign texts and to expand the rhetorical resources of writing, to allow it to compete with pre-modern conventions, which were deemed symptoms of a decadent, intellectually and morally bankrupt, civilization. Very few such old conventions were actually abolished from writing or totally devalued as play. One example is palindrome verse, in which sentence structures are reversed, character for char-

8

INTRODUCTION

acter. Most conventions have survived, slightly modified sometimes, and no longer privileged, but too resourceful to abandon entirely. Chiasmus, for example, inverts sentence structures, rather than repeats them, as in parallelism. Chiasmus epitomized formal play in the euphuistic prose style of pre-modem times, only a step removed from the extremes of palindrome verse. For example: f-,f;~ll!, ~ll!f-,f;o

Take every care of your precious self; of your precious self take every care. (Yuan Zhen, A.D. 9th c. Translation in Hsiung, 1936 [1968]: 279.) Stripped of the formal repetition of lexical items, the inversion of chiasmus has still served emotive intensity in memorable modem prose constructions: :tx:ffl-~1J®J:l"F~Jlli:tE:afr,*,

J!itiRJ ft!!. fF,JEt£-t~;:a-t!LP:lfo I longed for a bomb to drop on our home; even if I were to die with them, I still wanted it. (Zhang Ailing, 1945 (1969]: 152.) The resources of traditional rhetorical inventions persisted not only in such isolated examples of practice, but also through openly expressed admiration. Consider one of Mao Zedong's analogies, referring to the Ming-Qing "eight-legged" examination essay, almost thirty years after it was abolished and four decades after late Qing reformers had initiated a thorough rejection of it: "The ten years' revolutionary war we have fought may be surprising to other countries, but for us it is only like the presentation, amplification and preliminary exposition of the theme in an 'eight-legged essay' with many exciting paragraphs yet to follow" (1936: sec. 8). In practice as well as in pronouncement, Mao enjoyed the use of antithesis, leitmotif, and parallelism that are hallmarks of the eightlegged essay. At the same time it should be noted that he also adopted many formal innovations from abroad and the new fashion of syllogistic propositions: "When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone

INTRODUCTION

9

knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak?" (1930, "Fandui benbenzhuyi": 17). Only when Mao entered the debates on style, beginning in 1938, did he adopt the popular intellectual position that the eight-legged essay stood for a baneful formalism. Hence, for Mao as for many Chinese writers, modern rhetorical innovations served to enrich the resources of persuasion and of play. These have diluted or dispersed the deployment of traditional rhetorical figures, rather than replaced them altogether. Cohesion and Coherence The larger study of texts as rhetoric is certainly not bounded by the inventories of formal features discussed here, but the study of style is defined and delimited by the intrusion of techniques into formal features. Similarly, the study of relationships between sentences is hardly bound by formal features alone. It is well known that non sequiturs are common to writing, as they are to speech. 5 Moreover, relevant relationships may be inferred between sentences that have no links at the formal level of analysis (that is, share no cohesive features), while adjoining sentences containing formal features of cohesion may appear incoherent, irrelevant to each other. Given such highly variable phenomena, we may still construct a framework for discussing the issues of cohesion and coherence, the formal and inferential relationships respectively, of sentences as features of style. This framework assumes that texts are written and read by manipulating a set of expectations among an array of formal and nonverbal constituents. These constituents include: phrase structure, formal features of cohesion, context inferences, and conventions. Psychological theory emphasizes, among other things, the expectation of phrase structure and, in its absence, the ability to reconstruct a phrase structure through inference. Relationships between sentences may be inferred entirely by resort to a context of contiguous or associated constituents, as in the case of non sequiturs. In addition, pragmatics and aesthetics may instantiate notions of contexts as conventions, as short cuts for inference processing. Finally, as presented in the study Cohesion in English by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (1976), languages provide formal features within sentences that link sentences in ways collectively known as cohe-

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INTRODUCTION

sion. The same is true of writing, where these features have a history, and are important to study in style, with examples given in Appendix 5· Especially in literature, a major feature of style is the presence or absence of formal features of cohesion and the resulting emphases on types of linkage and types of disjunction. Where expectations are violated in disjunction, the reader may look to restore a missing element of phrase structure, or to attempt to construct a context or invoke a convention to restore a sense of semantic relevance, or coherence. 6 Non sequiturs may not be unique to literature, but repeated use of them, delaying information by which to construct a context, or recreating certain types of conventions are all distinctive of literature. Examples of developments in the use of cohesive features and disjunction are provided in Appendix 5·5· It is worth reviewing some of these features here, in addition to the comments made in later chapters. In pre-modern Chinese verse, folk and elite, disjunction was a part of conventions of writing and reading. In Chinese prose, disjunction has traditionally had its place most notably in the gongan anecdotes of Chan writing. Apart from these conventions, writing in narrative forms experimented traditionally with flashbacks (analepsis) and dream sequences that wrench episodes out of established temporal or social context.' However, these episodes are invariably mediated by narrative explanations, such as "Prior to this" in the case of analepsis, and "He woke up" in the case of dreams. From the early-twentieth-century Chinese prose narratives and drama, prose poems and essays adopted innovative uses of disjunction to create a feature of distinctive "literary language" in prose. Disjunctive techniques have drawn both from earlier Chinese sources in poetry and from foreign literatures. The appearance of disjunction in prose as an extension of a Chinese tradition in poetry may be distinguished in early-twentieth-century Chinese fiction by the juxtaposition of emotive passages with natural scenic description, after the manner of the poetic invention of qing 1J!f and jing :ll'l:. Passages from novels by Liu E and Su Manshu (5.5.a-b) each provide examples of metaphorical association between a character's emotions and features of nature. In Liu E's Lao Can you ji (The travels of Lao Ts'an; 1904-7), one passage develops a very traditional association of natural conditions with affairs of state.

INTRODUCTION

II

The development of this theme through an associative interior monologue has been described as the first example of stream-ofconsciousness writing to emerge in Chinese prose. 8 Indeed, the associative course taken in this passage does appear to be quite innovative compared with previous examples of interior monologues in Chinese fiction. The passage is distinguished from Western stream-of-consciousness monologues chiefly by the insertion of phrases introducing, or mediating, each shift in the narrator's flow of associations, such as "He recalled ... He thought to himself" and so forth. The passage from Su Manshu's Duan hong ling yan ji (The lone swan; 1912) (s.s.b) is also careful to have the first-person narrator explain that, in the middle of an erotically charged moment with a young woman, he "suddenly heard" the crashing of waves. Certainly the "crashing of waves" is a cliche in Western writing for sexual encounter, yet it does continue the Chinese convention of affect and scenic description. If it has been imported, the image is still rendered in prose dominated by four-character phrases in the euphuistic style of traditional pianli wen. The passages from these early-twentieth-century novels may be formal examples of what Jaroslav Prusek (1980) presented as the growing infusion of lyrical features in Chinese narrative since the late Qing. On the other hand, the appearance of disjunction derived from foreign sources appears to be formally distinct. These early novels not only preserve phrase structure and some mediating, cohesive feature, but they also refer to a convention and a context. Later works begin playing with these features in a more extreme fashion. The breakdown of rational thought in Lu Xun's "Kuangren riji" (A madman's diary; 1918) (s.s.c) provides the vehicle for such radical play. Entry 6, as cited in the Appendix, presents a series of similes of human characteristics as compared to animals: "The fierceness of a lion, the timidity of a rabbit, the craftiness of a fox .... " This may be taken as a reference to a long tradition of such similes, and thus to a convention of Chinese writing. However, in Lu Xun's piece the similes are presented in a fragmented state, without a full phrase structure, and they form a non sequitur in the immediate context. This makes all options problematic, and it demands a set of inferences more complex and tenuous than any previous prose text to establish either a cohesive or coherent relationship with the rest of the text. In sum, a traditional simile has

12

INTRODUCTION

been wrenched from context, its structure, cohesion, and coherence made problematic. Style has asserted itself as a statement, rendering tradition problematic. Subsequently, Chinese prose develops a disjunction that is progressively divorced from any conventional Chinese referential scheme. It is more sustained as a technique and represents more invention. In Feng Wenbing's novella, Moxuyou xiansheng zhuan (The biography of Mr. Neverwas; 1930), a passage of which is presented in Appendix 5.5.d, non sequiturs in the dialogue of two characters are combined with associative, stream-of-consciousness monologues that are often unmediated. The allusions to Chinese referents are constantly juxtaposed with foreign or psychologically ill-defined referents. In a passage from Mu Shiying's fiction "Shanghai de hubuwu" (The Shanghai foxtrot; 1933) (s.s.e), any relationship to a traditional Chinese referent or convention is absent, replaced by the theme of the city of Shanghai as a cosmopolitan center. The passage follows a writer and his thoughts as he walks through the streets at night, taking off on an associational track, unstructured by grammar or punctuation, mediated by only one parenthetical introduction, and interrupted by interjections and incomplete utterances. The writer thus presents minimal explanation of context and cohesion while breaking down phrase structure and abolishing convention. By contrast, as well as comparison, a passage from a prose poem by He Qifang, "Ai ge" (Lament; 1936) (s.s.f), presents another challenge for the reader. Here the poet-persona explicitly negates any Chinese referent or convention, but provides no context. Not only are the phrase structures intact, but cohesive features are also presented that have no apparent function in linking sentences: "And then, why do I see a black shadow ... ?" Why indeed? The reader is left to try to develop a context that explains why non sequiturs are linked by "And then," or to conclude simply that the writer is calling attention to such a mystifying use of a cohesive phrase to emphasize that he is thinking in associative rather than in sequential, logical, or other terms. The breakup of context and the development of stream-ofconsciousness interior monologue was also brought into fiction dominated by objectified realism and sequential time frames, such as Xiao Qian's novel Meng zhi gu (Valley of dreams; 1937) (s.s.g).

INTRODUCTION

13

The dominant context of the first-person narrator is repeatedly broken by flashback episodes (analepsis), created by various sensual associations (visual in the passage cited), and unmarked by authorial mediation, but graphically set off by smaller print. In this novel of a young man's search for his boyhood sweetheart, the emotional intensity of his search and its initial significance are suggested through such flashback associations. The disjunctive technique employed no longer involves any consideration of conventions but is stable in developing context and phrase structure. The examples offered from later works (s.s.h-k) have furthered techniques of disjunction, if at all, by creating multiple contexts simultaneously, instead of diachronically as in flashback. The result is a formal polyphony of utterances, each representing a separate context and developing images of social disorder and lack of cohesion. These and other examples of disjunction are taken up in later chapters within more specific contexts. Here, they demonstrate that even working with a minimal number of formal features is not a mechanical process; instead, the most fundamental attempts to describe and account for such features are still linked to complex and problematic considerations. Caveats If cohesion is essentially a formal concept, it is clearly also tied to historical questions of conventions and cognitive notions of coherence. The study of style in general as the manipulation of formal features described by grammars, rhetorical inventions, or cohesive features has such limitations and problems. Analysis of grammar as pure structure often leads to problematic lexico-semantic analyses that have no easily identifiable ground in structural stability. Likewise, in rhetoric two fundamental figures, such as metonymy and metaphor, do not have formal distinctions, and discussion of them is thrown back on surveying historical conventions or cognitive theories. No unified framework, let alone theory, currently exists for all these features and their multiple determinants. The best that can be done here is to review certain psychological notions and their limitations as a heuristic principle, and then tum to historical considerations. Style, as described in this Introduction, is certainly inherent to all

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INTRODUCTION

writing, and the question for the theory of literature is whether there is anything distinctive of style that appears in literature. Certainly literature is read as a distinct form of writing, one in which constructions are seen as an inventory of techniques not only to create propositions but also to provide an analogue of human experience. 9 There is no attempt here to reduce literature or its evaluation to the study of style. It is, after all, essential that readers read "through" style, making inferences and creating associations, to evoke contexts and images that have not been verbalized and to assemble meanings from them. And it is well known in the social history of literature that many Chinese readers have shown themselves to be remarkably adaptive to a wide range of styles and generally quite indifferent in preferring one over another. 10 The point about style here is that it involves the ways in which writers guess at and attempt to manipulate their own and others' expectations, attention, and cognitive and affective constituents. A Look Back at Gestalt and Information Theories Definitions of style have proved elusive for both philosophical and psychological studies. In the history of philosophical disputes, notions of style have remained mired in contradictions. In psychology, observations have been both limited and disparate. For example, no unified theory of perception has been achieved. One long-standing disparity has remained between Gestalt theory, according to which we perceive things as wholes, and Information theory, according to which we perceive things by grouping elements.11 The inadequacies of these concepts have long been noted, but the result of later studies has been less to dismiss such concepts and more to accept that humans are adapted to more than one mode of perception. 12 There is some heuristic advantage in reviewing notions of style, including its philosophically contradictory aspects, by applying these theories. To be considered in terms of Gestalt theory, style must contain within itself those distinctions that the theory predicts are necessary to perception, that is, a basis for distinguishing figure and ground. 13 What is figure and what is ground are arbitrary distinctions and may remain ambiguous, but for our purposes there must be an essential set of features by which the necessary act of distinc-

INTRODUCTION

15

tion can be made. It is, perhaps, the philosophical tradition that provides such distinctions through the history of its disputes over rhetoric and meaning. If we see rhetoric as a set of inventions imposed upon otherwise inherent features of writing, such as lexical and grammatical constructions, then we have created distinctions necessary for a Gestalt, a figure and a ground, however arbitrary. Alternatively, if even plain style (aphelia), free of all but inherent lexico-grammatical features, is seen itself as a rhetorical technique, then we consign writing totally to rhetorical play as an endless game, divorced from serious, purposeful activity. 14 In terms of Gestalt, this is not a tenable view for reading, since it does not allow the reader to organize a response out of this solipsistic inventory, and lacking an orientation by which to respond, the reader will not respond. Conversely, if all writing is read as serious and if rhetorical invention is dismissed as a plausible distinction, then the reader is left without fundamental means to interpret the relationships inherent to argumentation, figures of speech, etc. Turning from rhetoric to semantics, style has been discussed as constructions that have a fixed meaning even when altered in form and also, to the contrary, as unique constructions that cannot be paraphrased without altering meaning. Both propositions have survived to the present as alternatives readily employed by writers and readers in a self-contradictory manner, now insisting on a reading that permits paraphrase and now on a reading that denies its validity. 15 As in the deliberations over rhetoric, either choice leads to an abyss: constructions as so unique that there is no way to determine their relationship to any other; constructions as paraphrasable beyond any prospect of limiting an endless array of alternatives carried on indefinitely with no displacement of meaning. Structural linguistics offers a theory of phrase structure whereby sentences contain propositions (which may be paraphrased by alternative syntax) and attitudes (assertion, denial, question, focus), and this view offers some response to the contradictory assumptions of traditional philosophies by assigning distinct properties, some of which permit paraphrase and some of which may not. Yet this is only a partial response, skirting the grand chasm of semantics, and here, too, we find a necessary resort to a notion of distinctions (proposition and attitude), which suggest a Gestalt perception. The arbitrariness and contradictions described above are articu-

16

INTRODUCTION

lated in terms of their development in Western civilization, yet they are not absent from Chinese civilization either. Of course, Chinese discourse hardly provides a neat parallel historically with that of the West, and style differs markedly in points of emphasis and linguistic constraints. However, there were controversies over the stylistic principles of Confucian texts, for which theories were developed that assigned unique meaning to particular stylistic features of those texts. The classic example is the interpretation of the Chunqiu (Spring and autumn annals; 5th? c. B.C.) as implying moral judgments through stylistic features: The keys by which the Ch'un-ch'iu entries are made to yield ethical judgments are chiefly two: firstly, speculation over the omission or inclusion of some particular information, and secondly, speculation over the choice of a particular word, for example, 'kill' or 'exterminate' or 'dispose of' instead of 'murder.' With the aid of these keys an enormous exegetical literature has been built up by the Kung-yang and Ku-liang schools. 16

In addition to such concern with style in the Confucian tradition, there were also distinctly different approaches to language and style in the Mohist and Logician schools of thought. Rhetoric was treated with more than a touch of internal contradiction within a number of influential works of various persuasions. The Confucian Lun yu (Analects), on the one hand, assures readers that the clarity of plain speech is all: ~jiffiiE*. On the other hand, there is the caution that words without embellishment will not go far: 152.1!\f;:t, rrz.:..r~~- Lao Zi has a fine Platonic scorn for language and dismisses rhetoric: Credible words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not credible ({a§+~. ~§::>f'Fa). Yet this epigram is rendered with characteristic additional rhetorical refinement, here an antithetical couplet further linked by anadiplosis. When Mencius warns, "Let not embellishment harm your words, nor words harm your meaning" (::>GtJ Y::'l§:~. "f~tJ~'l§:,f; ), the passage reads as an excellent example of rhetorical point rendered in parallel structure. 17 In sum, enduring contradictions and arbitrary distinctions in the theory and practice of style themselves provide the conditions for a Gestalt, an entity seen as a whole, composed of figure and ground, to be interpreted by the reader guided by his culture, if not dominated by its teachings. The theory of Gestalt perception observes that the practice is inherent to humans and further learned

INTRODUCTION

17

and guided by their development in culture. So we may argue that style is inherently perceived in cultures, while the terms and interpretations applied to that perception have varied, guided by sociopolitical events. In such a context, style is the manipulation of necessary, if relative and arbitrary, distinctions according to means that writers and readers have found rewarding, or tried to find rewarding, in both psychological and social terms. As for literature, in brief, it exists in the contradictory expectations of readers that literature provide at once truth and reality, but that they be transformed and subsumed through the artifice of an autonomous aesthetic. Literature, as such, exists as the figure and ground of these contradictions. So literary style exists as the manipulation of formal features to sustain these expectations. To move from the grand view of Gestalt to the elemental terms of Information theory is itself analogous to creating a Gestalt: distinguishing the notion of an unquantifiable whole from quantifiable elements taken in sequence. 18 The expectations we bring to writing as a whole are constantly worked through adjustments, processed as information, redundancy, and noise. These are probabilistic entities, not the deterministic entities of Gestalt, which are defined by a system-a system that presents itself through the accumulation of sequences. In any sequence there are elements belonging to the system but not predictable by the sequence itself (information, uncertainty), or predictable by the sequence (redundancy, overdetermination), and outside the system in any sequence (noise, randomization). As one early calculation of redundancy put it: "The redundancy of ordinary English [writing], not considering statistical structure over greater distances than about eight letters, is roughly 50%. This means that when we write English half of what we write is determined by the structure of the language (i.e. the language and the writing system) and half is chosen freely." 19 We know further that such calculations apply to Chinese writing as well, and that, in psychological terms, readers of either English or Chinese assume redundancy in reading: readers scan a written sign, romanized or ideographic, only to the extent that they decide that they can predict the rest. 20 Redundancy as the predictable, the overdetermined, appears in linguistic structure in the assumption of phrase structure, the existence of rules for propositions and attendant attitudes. 21 At the

18

INTRODUCTION

level of phrase structure, the possible permutations of variable elements in the structure can create indeterminacy, information, and the unpredictable. Embedded in phrase structures are semantic, cohesive, and rhetorical features that, while constrained by phrase structure, are determined by nonverbal concepts. These determine the relationships of sentences in sequences and form contexts. 22 In this way the sentence, as a formal feature, becomes the problematic interface between linguistic determinants, forming at least a loose system with internal coherence, and nonverbal elements, which may be interpreted by one or more of an array of logical, pragmatic, or aesthetic means. Here we have reached the limits of style in an information-based system, proceeding from its identification with morphological, lexical, and grammatical systems to an array of formal features-rhetorical inventions, cohesive words and phrases-that provide the formal manifestation of nonverbal determinants of relationships and context beyond the sentence. This also means beyond any internally coherent system, unless one is constructed on the basis of semiotic systems, rules of inference, principles of relevance, and the like. 23 Nonverbal Determinants A further step that one might take in defining style as part of an information system is to suppose that not only are the formal features verbally present in the text read under the assumption that they will contain elements of information and redundancy, but also that the nonverbal determinants are read under the assumption of the presence of information and redundancy. That is, expectations of uncertainty and of overdetermination are also present in readers and writers through the pragmatics of social or aesthetic contexts. No approach to style based on Gestalt and Information theories can dismiss the phenomenon of "noise," of randomization of signals in a message, or, as phrased above, the appearance of elements outside what is assumed to be a system or systems present in a given sequence. The complexity of this issue for writing is profound, as may be outlined, if not defined, by the following considerations. First, there is an assumption that the model of informationredundancy applies to both those features that are linguistically de-

INTRODUCTION

19

termined and those features determined by a nonverbal context. This means that some portion of the nonverbal context we may predict as being determined by expectations of sociocultural conventions and some portion as being controlled by the person producing the text. No one producing a text, be it writer or reader, can be expected to represent an ideal information system, either linguistically or contextually, since expectations and capacity for attention vary within the individual and between individuals. Hence, the presence of noise in the linguistic system and the context seems inevitable. Nevertheless, given a focus of attention on the part of someone producing a text, perception inherently proceeds by grouping and filtering, by creating patterns and suppressing noise. Indeed, the ability to perceive noise at all presumes the presence of a pattern-generating focus of attention and perception, and the absence of the ability to generate them is a profoundly disturbing, disorienting state of dysfunction. Hence, production of a text inherently involves expectations of a pattern that subsumes noise as dependent on it. Perception of a nonverbal context as an aesthetic pattern may be discussed as being guided by expectations of information and redundancy. Perception of nonverbal context as an aesthetic pattern is guided by an array of culturally conditioned cognitive conventions, together with affective responses. These can be manipulated by the writer in an attempt to arouse attention. The conventions include habituation, orientation, and association. The stylistic features that may complement them are stylization, variation and repetition, and metonymic or metaphoric relationships. This is not to say that any given stylistic feature serves one and only one function. On the contrary, readers' expectations are multiple, and style is subject to such multiple determinants. There are allusions here to elements of both cognitive and formalist theory, either of which are open to criticisms and deconstructive arguments. 24 Yet the basis for appeal to these elements is less to the total models in which they appear and more to the suggestion that they represent parallel concerns in cognitive science and theories of writing and literature. To take the first of these parallel concerns: stylization is selection of features acquired by habituation. Intertextual, or pretextual, stylization, habits acquired from those of previous texts, accounts for an overwhelming majority of stylistic features, because it in

20

INTRODUCTION

turn accounts for the speed with which they can be produced and the degree to which filtering of attention may be shared among readers and writers. At the level of macro-text they help define genre, and with that a set of expectations and associations that create predictability, a sense of knowing what one is reading. At the range of micro-text the adoption of certain lexica-semantic features may further trigger specific, marked grammatical constructions. For example: ft!!frHt~in~i'IltJlf.'fo'J•L.•tjlj, ~T!M~Jt-f:\Lf,t;jlfP,"ltl:J 13 C.~JT~~E!G1'fif8'Jil!X~f£i'J'uJ, 1llliff.\t1'f*l".P'J>il'-Jf>i1tf,-t£.~g-J IE!llURk'!\~!!s'J~;f~. illtjlJIJCf!lfUW7~~~1!~~.

ilH:!Wi :.

J&, ~·~i;tJ'!fJ:} 1'f.'J, :J.t~~~:JG'U~o They will even wait with great anticipation to hear a certain performer sing a famous passage in Kabuki that they already know so well and cherish, and sometimes a remarkable performance can also draw enthusiastic cheers from the audience. This phenomenon is no different from that among our own theater enthusiasts, and the reason that art is undying rests herein.

(Lin Wenyue, 1971: 29.) The italicized portion of the English passage above indicates a stylistic shift in the Chinese text from a Modern Standard Chinese to archaic literary wenyan wen. A motivation for this shift in style appears to rest in the invocation of a principle that is eternal ("art is undying"), which finds a stylistic correlative in wenyan as the form of writing associated with continuity perpetuated through historical change. This passage is presented as a simple example of stylization, since the embedding of literary constructions and features such as these within an otherwise vernacular text is common to much Chinese prose of the twentieth century. It is habitual to associations with notions of historical continuity and tradition and topics associated with the tradition, such as appreciation of landscape. Competent readers hardly notice such features, if they notice them at all, any more than writers. Given that it is presented as an example of stylization in Chinese, it is also presented in terms of association and variation. That is, a habit of writing may be accounted for by recognizable principles of association. That this is presented as a habitual act also suggests that formal variation evoked by verbal and nonverbal determinants is inherent

INTRODUCTION

21

as a habit of much style. This may be accounted for in the work of D. E. Berlyne, 25 who applied the notion that diversity and complexity in moderation are intrinsically rewarding and motivating activities. He applied this observation to art and literature, with the result that we may view moderate diversity and complexity in style as possessing a positive "hedonic value" of pleasurable arousal. The hedonic response to such a stimulus is nonlinear, that is, it follows a curve with a threshold and a peak. A stimulus such as diversity must be strong enough (in breaking habits, arousing associations, repeating a stimulus) to cross a threshold of attention, from which it may induce a rising degree of pleasurable response, beyond which the response peaks and responds to increased intensity with discomfort, displeasure, or inattention. Certainly this modd is abstract to a degree that cannot adequately explain concrete examples without further resort to culture-specific and individual response constituents. By itself the naivete of such a theory, extended from biological observations of cellular response to stimulation to the complexity of human response, does not invalidate its place as an essential observation of the aesthetics of style. To return to the example above, as part of a stylized form of habitual practice within the range of conventional associations and formal diversity, the features of this example have not crossed a threshold of stimulation that signals any relationships beyond those within the micro-text. The topic of variation and repetition as stylistic constituents does open up the question of an aesthetic threshold, however. It is given that style proceeds in a progressive, unidirectional sequence, but that those who produce text read "through" style to a context with both progressive and recursive features, such as a situation, experience, or entity outside the formal features of writing. Therefore, style also involves the manipulation of formal features to suggest an orientation to both progressive and recursive constituents, so that the progression of features proceeds by grouping elements. Variation and repetition of stylistic features may play a role in the manipulation of this orientation. That is to say, first, that variation and repetition of features have a potential role in stylization by addressing readers' expectations of information and redundancy within both the linguistic conventions and the production of nonverbal context. Second, variation and repetition beyond these re-

22

INTRODUCTION

quirements may cross a threshold of attention to create another layer of redundancy and overdetermination, and also of information and uncertainty. This process creates yet another set of expectations about context and relationships. Because this process involves extending expectations of a context, attempting to illustrate this in a brief example will not entirely succeed. Nevertheless, I will still cite a passage from a famous story by a prominent writer addicted to repetition: rflilJjfi[tiJ~~Ji:8!, l!illtLll!::~~HiU o.n1E~~T-i:ft~j.;:·ljg'W,ff:l~o

r~Tii:-r oJ=. +~~n'J A. i!Li:Yt~kli!fB':J.ilto

r.5~ff:l~~. f~)(ffl.l±\i5~. ~~~llli*o'H~i!1~1'f;l!!llltll, #tili~WB'J'&t~B'J~ffli!PJ, tE1Jf.ftE-M1HI!JtiTB'JIVFf 1:, tE ~~B'J~~B'JtE~Wffllt!llJll~~Am~B'J.&~-M~~B'J~~**~B'JPPJ,§c ~f:J}jB'J~~jl',B'Jffl~PPJ 0

Ding Ning sighed deeply, like a virgin girl secretly guarding, cherishing the mysterious, sweet feelings of love secreted within her lovely, glass-like heart, bending over a curved balustrade, with a faint bitterness, savoring that sentimental, precious feeling that is unknown to others and without a beloved to acknowledge and receive it. (Duanmu Hongliang, 1939 (1948): 203.)

4.z Transposition (Anastrophe) The late Qing and early Republican periods witnessed the expansion of specific features of anastrophe (Appendix 3.4). With the growing trend toward literal translation following 1918, transposition of sentence elements increased dramatically, resulting in distinctively new constructions. In addition to a great increase in the frequency of transposed causal clauses, new forms of transposition appeared for conditional, concessive, conditional-concessive, and temporal clauses (4.2.1). Main clauses introducing or mediating speech appeared embedded or postposed in sentences, where previously they had always appeared in initial position (4.2.2). Adverbial phrases previously positioned between subject and predicate were moved in front of subjects or postposed after predicate constructions (4.2.3). In imitation of foreign preposed participial constructions, Chinese prose adopted a Verb-Object-Subject-Verb construction (VO SV), where the Subject governs both Verbs (4.2.4). Scholars have also noted the occasional use of unusual Verb-Subject constructions (4.2.5). 4.2. 1 Subordinate Clauses a. tEft!!int*, ~~~:fUH\!if, 310~~$:, ~T~3'H~tE:tt~tto

In their view, they felt we were truly good, and they were very moved because we agreed to let Xiaoquan stay in our home. (Zhao Jingshen, 1923: 9.)

240

b.

APPENDIX

)iJj' I;( IDtftfF~ /GJM!& iPJ ff:fiiJ -~IJ.iHI':J ~.Ill!., ret~ill:!!o!;;~ Jll!. '11~1!\IJI'R::®11: 5Hfi' ITfi f~,

-

fi~iJii{tS9j)flJl.jffjBo

So I say that we need not be angry toward the theoretical doctrine of any school, since these doctrines, upon individual analysis, turn out to be a manifestation of what is already widespread. (Jin Mancheng, 1925: 9.) C. f'f~~i/il($~~QJit, §!!t*fjg;l'IJ!ijj"i3;ito

In poetry as in any undertaking it must be so (one must experiment], even though it may not turn out as successfully as one desires. (Hu Shi, 1919, "Changshi ji zixu" [ 1953]: 204.) ~ 13•oo•*~S9T~~--~~~S9~~T.~~••*~m•-~~~S9~• ~0

Snow-white hair still ran its lengthy cut down the lower portions of the faces of some, although it was soaked by ocean water so that it tapered to a point like a white poplar leaf. (Lu Xun, 1922 [ 1938]: 458.) e.

~1ffJW!:13~tt-iii1iii~fJtiOJ~fl(JIH~, ~lffJG7i(7i(1f,\S'.~~fJt8'!JIOJ~o

Actually I've never written any fiction exposing incisive issues, even though they're on my mind day after day. (Dai Houying, 1980: 334.) f.

~tJ.~@S9Jltii~Jl:,

@S9Jf5t\:, R::J6~~~S9T o~lln~~lfi¥-*o

I thought that his toes and his ears were bound to fall off-even if at this point they were still there. (Wang Sidian, 1923: 2.)

g.

:fX:Jt/G:M1f~Jt~:7f-S9)1JHtM2n, ~®~rlfll2.lJl.1f•~'f:tXmfll2~IDlRo

I never guessed that here of all places I should unexpectedly meet a friend-if such he would still let me call him. (Lu Xun, 1924, "Zaijiulou shang" (1938]: 165.)

h. Iff A~:;IE)g\AS9f'¥!9i, W~rllff AH~·iER'frl)g\All11\~olff.C-'~1E!H'l:S9!ilt:ffi, W~rl lffL•RR::$J::~, llS!ml, ~f:mo The good are the captives of the evil, if the good do not stand for principle and fight the evil. Good intentions are suicidal arsenic, if good intentions are no more than weak, passive, and timid. (Lao She, 1926: 2.)

APPENDIX 1.

241

~l!B:'F~~1:frlitt:J~~. ~lffill!lt00T~1=.frli~IQ.~i'i~T tH+. m.mBI'.IT~f:I'J;l.Eiil.f! B':JBJG;J.E{JIFjJ!iJjB':J~o

Dreams are not a copy of waking life, but if removed from waking life dreams have no material, no matter whether what is produced is a dream of reaction or wish fulfillment. (Zhou Zuoren, 1925: 175.) j.

JJII1~tl1;

:tE:1tJ?::!BtJt 1!I.'iJ~l:t~mflftlffi:'BIJ~(J9tEJill, ¥';t!f~3IU'iJo

In Beijing that lane could be regarded as rather elegant and unique, when spring arrived. (Wang Tongzhao, 1922, "Yi Ian zhi ge": 46.)

Yes, he's around, and he's always around, ever since I began to realize that I hate that man. (Zhang Wentian, 1923: 6.) 1.

:of'~,

llt!liJL{llfj:)(¥J/., ;.tjt;J.E)(¥Jl.r1Jt*~i5(J91lif@::o

However, she liked her father, especially when he told jokes. (Qiong Yao, 1963 [1981): 55.) Main Clauses Whereas unmediated speech occurred in Buddhist texts and some medieval pinghua fictional narratives, clauses mediating either speech or thought prior to the twentieth century were placed initially in the sentence. Embedding and postposing of these clauses appeared after I 9 1 8. 4.2.2

a. r~~wf~-Ji!:ili5, flltl1l:lf:~Tli:T oJ1tl3iH·i:l't~::ktl'tf!:l(l9~o r~T!i!:T oJ=-t-~~(l9A illtl't~::ktl'tEI':I;jj?;o

"Sorry for Red-eye-crazy. He simply went crazy," Graybeard said, as if suddenly seeing the light. "Went crazy," the man in his twenties said as if suddenly he also saw the light. (Lu Xun, 1919 [ 1938): 306.)

b.

r!tf?J~Il1::1:lf.\T, r{;J;I!'FI!U::ll'ii\J!fif~P.~?-··J

"Fine?" The old farmer lost his temper. "You didn't hear shots last night?" (Chen Weimo, 1925: 155.)

242

c.

APPENDIX

tE~il:~.

{)];{F,:Ji!::%13:ll:l'l9, /Gftt!Olf''i¥;I~-j!lo

In prison, you are aware, it cannot be as it is normally in a factory. (Wang Tongzhao, 1922, "Weixiao": 22.)

d.

'1i~;'Y~fB~:Jll-:f!Hf1~~.

ilt-f'Jifi, :fHJ~o

I too have witnessed the sight of "Thunderpeak Pagoda at sunset," and it's not that grand, I think. (Lu Xun, 1924, "Lun Leifeng ta de daodiao" [1938): 157.) e. lllti:!~*/GlcffB, ft:W, R~±'i:!JJ*'Illl!:!! The only ones who say that they are bad, I think, are the local bullies and bad gentry. (Mao Zedong, 1927? [1972]: 249.)

f.

:Jiib!i]~~ftm'Wd:~rp9N:!ifBJiAA'fB)(~*· i!lftm~. trl'BMAf'l9~tmf1JH?::i!ir%',

%'.!ttl

~ t±:l **fi**~·-t;o 0

Among the writers who have recently expressed their views on social issues, as I am aware, there are four commentaries that are notable, and I will develop these for all to view. (Shen Yanbing, 1921: 2.)

4.2.3 Abverbs a.

~~.lttl¥!.J~:fll,\!H!HjH~t~f,\IJT o

Gradually, objects and thoughts became blurred. (Shen Zemin, 1921: 83.)

b.

fe,~fB'lll''*:t!!¥1J,l'riliJJ!i\UI'LO:i-:::!!Cti"!mfOI t: t

~

t

lPt(l)t:.~,-:Jf::o

-~fljil!J~r.5i!fi(lt), lJ.i](J::'l[:tJ(lt)~~~ilfilf, ~*fil!~i'l{R nJ:n:o When he considered that it was his brother who painted the store front and hung up the electric lights, Amo thought of how reliable he was. (Lu Xun, 1923, "Yu youxiaozhe" [1938]: 468.)

APPENDIX

245

b. /f?c?--t"5:Hf:J;t£;&!1t:!!fr,rf:IPt.¥, 'IUZ.Jn&~B'J.R~~~iiil~!frffl?l{B'JtH~T o Unwilling to affront their kindness altogether, I finally leafed through some short poems I had brought from the hospital. (Bing Xin, 1924 [1930]: II8.) C.

&1fll}fpftl!ij)t~.::::1t]~li, :ft{l!!fH.aJit!:@l}Eo Without adding another sentence, I turned around and went back. (Lao She, 1933, Mao chengji [1947]: 188.)

d. -J'IJ*~.!It:!!£tfHUt'i:** fo Once in my hometown, she lived with my family. (Dai Houying, 1980: 21.) e. IJIHoill;ltlli'f~?Jili£, j;@~"J5EB9$, ft{JJ~IIfl~T -§o

Realizing that the situation was inevitable and was dictated by the course of events, I heaved a sigh nonetheless. (Chen Ruoxi, 1975 [ 1976]: 181.) 4.2.5 Verb-Subject Sentences

Poetry has for millennia allowed the inversion of subject and predicate, and this has continued into the twentieth century (a). Prose has limited this construction to certain standard arrangements. Prior to the twentieth century, the requirement that verbs of, for example, appearance could be followed by a subject only if the subject were indefinite was met in a rhetorical fashion (b) by placing an indefinite particle before a proper name. After 1918, however, several writers of the 1920's experimented with verbsubject transposition, ignoring previous rules (c, d, e). Although largely abandoned in the 193o's and thereafter, critics have produced examples of such inverted sentences for criticism in later decades (f, g). a.

-P~!f~:kr~o

Now the cock has crowed and all under heaven is bright. (Mao Zedong, 1950.)

b.

"JJlj?J{Tf!lli'£:#!J~o

As luck would have it, in came one Shi Xiangyun. (Cao Xueqin, 1792: chap. 49.)

246

APPENDIX

No sooner had the door opened than in walked Shevrov. (Lu Xun, 1921, Gongren Suihuiliiifu (1938]: II: 684.)

d.

~~1:/Mff. fltfr,=+~iliV'-o

So lived we twenty-six. (Qu Qiubai, "Ershiliuge he yige" (1959]: 173.) e. VIE~, W.lllli39#illi; VIE~, *lf..ll8'J,\l:,~o

Flow on, the gentle ripples; flow on, the touching sentiments. (Xu Zhimo, 1921 (1969]: 198. Cited in Beijing shifan xueyuan Zhangwen xi, 1959: 173.) f.

~~m:J~Jj}jl~J'I't,f)!:o

Thus began the massacre. (Siguo, 1972 [ 1984]: 176. Cited in criticism of this construction.) g. @.'t-El' ~&1Jfjg~1UIJ 'Elf-'! But "the Master said" in the end cannot be Europeanized into "said the Master!" (Liu Bannong, 1921. Cited in Lu Xun, 1934 (1938]: 576.) 4.2.6 Locative Phrases with Zai The position of locative phrases introduced by zai tE has varied in sentences with SVO construction depending on regional speech patterns. Especially from the 1920's and early 1930's, there are a substantial number of examples in which the locative occurs after the object (a, b), probably under the influence of Wu dialect. Yet, even as writers strove to conform to the new standard Mandarin rule placing the locative phrase prior to the VO construction, European influence encouraged stylistic variation that has not gone out of use (c-f). *a.

fltfnii}$·~1Mii\l1Jili!S91JU T:tE~Jl:

We offer some further clear examples here: (Sun Lianggong, 1925 (1929]: 69.) ~- ~*S9-·B~TM+:tE~S9ffi.To

A gigantic calamity has left its seeds in your field. (Ye Shengtao, 1923. Cited in Zhu Yongyi, 1982: 187.)

APPENDIX

247

Several shops with lamps glowing spread some warmth and light on this cold winter evening. (BaJin, 1931-32 [Shi bao, Apr. 20, 1931].) d. 1M&, 1£-mjii~t§Jifl, ~~HE.iili'Wk To Suddenly, in the corner of a fence, this little life was extinguished. (Xiao Qian, 1937 [ 1938): 106.) e. ~Ml1M*:Jl!:.I1Hfli':J-:t£~~o This was the best means-in Cat Country. (Lao She, 1933, Mao chengji [1947): 109.)

f.

j(~Gfjg~~ftl!B'Ji'fjgo (Zhao Jingshen, 1928: 288.) #5E-.(;IJ,IJ!lZIJAilit"lfjg1N~£:11!!.i'Eft~f'F::t To

(Lu Li, 1937 [ 1957 ]: 44.) Deny everything and you may easily pass for a clever person.

260

APPENDIX

1. ft!!.•L.'JttP., -t!l.~tft!!.7"G~l'Tif(®JI~g¥tl':i001~L (Zhao Jingshen, ibid., p. 294.) t!!. it~fl!!A}1il.?lt~~¥tl T fl!!.iiJtm- ,~ filn' T fi¥®Jii5lffi'!Efl':Jt'Uiio

(Lu Li, ibid., p. 58.) Perhaps in his heart he may suddenly have realized that he did not understand Natalya at all. m . .1f~if:!Oi'tl:tll*!Jtl;/]a':J*i1!i, t!!.iiJflg;ff~f!PZ:::;itiio

Some works that are politically downright reactionary may have a certain artistic quality. (Mao Zedong, 1942, "Zai Yan'an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua" [I972]: 139.) The elaboration of keneng in the adverbial forms jin keneng and hen kenengdi, and the auxiliary form hen keneng (andji keneng), also emerged in the 1930's, not only in literary works but also in newspaper editorials and reports, as newspapers shifted to greater use of the vernacular following the start of the War of Resistance to Japan. n. ~ttffl'fit1h{:ET~, l'fPJfjgf'r':J!?i!Jm'o

Quickly we covered up our faces with our hands, trying as much as possible to avoid the sand. (Duanmu Hongliang, 1936 [I937]: 53.) o. ~mm~~~lli*el'~~~~.~~aOJtJg~7"£~1'fflo

Therefore characters such as these that are unintelligible when read aloud should be avoided as much as possible. (Qu Qiubai, I93I, "Lun wenxue geming ji yuyan wenzi wenti" [ 1953]: 648.) p. ii7!~iiJfjgiliJ!ti!rT-~:JJt~-@-flfl':lfl¥~o

Establish methods to provide a relatively reasonable answer as rapidly as possible. (Xinhua she wenjian ziliao xuan bian, Mar. I949· In Xinhua she xinwen yanjiu bu, 1984, vol. I: 48.) q.

~~8Mft~Jf')Em:'fU'lOff831i*, ill~ oJfjg~1.mlll:~JIUJ~~~imJ!tlo

Although these remarks are not sufficient to cause the American government the slightest loss, they may very well add to the chaos of the situation in the Far East. (Zhongyang ribao, "Shelun," Oct. 3 I, I938.)

APPENDIX

261

[. f[fiiJfj~f"i1;Jfjf$14'~;t~']l~o

It may well be that the Marco Polo Bridge Incident has lighted the fuse. (Sha Ting, 1938 [ 1978]: 76.) s.

ft\J.1NOJ111§/15-s~a

He may well live for a hundred years. (Shi Tuo, 1943 [1946]: 189.) t. ili~E A±~il. -tt~F,~Jn-~. it;, ~~~tiOJ111§tE~ 13 t) ~i]gtjl6A:@:~l£fB~

i!!iil'J*fto But White House officials revealed that Truman has warned that Britain, France, Italy, and other nations will most likely be plunged into grave economic problems prior to that date. (Dagong bao, Jan. 5, 1948: 3.)

u.

ilift\J.:tl\1NOJ111§:i;p~IIJiif!fii)lXT a

But he thought that it might well be that the pain had dissipated. (Bai Xianyong, 1965: 68.)

4.8.1.1 You kenengfbiyao

In this construction, keneng ("possibility") and biyao ("need/ necessity") as nouns are shifted from positions as heads of attributives (you + attributive de + kenengfbiyao) to a position next to the verb you, with attributive shifted to the right as a complement. An early use of this construction appears in the work of Qu Qiubai in 1932 (4.5. 1.f), and it is possible that it was his invention (cf. his postposed attributive construction in 4.2.7). a. ~JIJ::t::fi /f'f§ JL, i5tl1!i~~'\Jfl.~!SXA~ilil>!Ja

I just got a note saying that the enemy may be about to go into action west of here. (YuanJing et al., 1949 [1977]: 72.)

b.

ft!rW:f~~~·'*l!(:f:~i.~-i-~. fHI!llilfJl:- TJ.2\:Jj)j~J3,ij8(]}!}5la

He felt there was a need to search out Old Xiao for a talk and to study this promising proposal carefully. (Luo Guangbin, 1961 [1977]: 544.)

4.8.2 Verb Phrases

+ Yu

Traditionally, Chinese employed a number of bisyllabic verbs followed by the coverb yu If,;, such as congshi yu 1if:$1f,; ("to be en-

262

APPENDIX

gaged in") andfuhe yu r.fifln ("to conform to"). Japanese imitated this construction, reversing the order of the construction and employing ni for yu (ni juji suru ':fJE$-t ~. ni Juga suru '=~it-t~. etc.). In the late 189o's and early 1900's, as Chinese began borrowing heavily from Japanese vocabulary and as grammar developed to handle European styles, Chinese writing expanded the use of the VP yu construction in imitation of the Japanese. Sometimes this meant a slight adjustment grammatically to an already existing vocabulary item, as in example (a), where a yu is appended to the verb fucong ijfifJ£ ·("to obey"), which traditionally did not employ a coverb. In other cases, loan words from Japanese were inserted into the VP yu construction. Sometimes this developed gradually, as in the case of tongqing IPJM', which Liang Qichao adapted as the noun "sympathy" ("to express sympathy") and which was later converted into a verb itself (b, c, d). Another example isfuwu yu ("to serve"), which evolves in its usage from "to serve in" (e) to "to be of service to, to serve" (f). Other frequent examples of the VP yu construction derived from Japanese style include shiyong yu j§fflin ("applicable, suitable to/for"), qingxiang yu mrP1m- ("tend toward/ to"), and xiguan yu ~t!ltln ("accustomed to, used to"). a.

JltJt:J;oijfifJE!n&lf.fiiTI~tm;ltft!!o

They know how to serve the government but "have no time" for involvement beyond that. (Min bao, no. 9 [ 1908]: 3939.) b. fLl~ h t 0) '::IP]'t~"t"l····)

Wasn't it dangerous for Shaw to sympathize with such a miscreant as "The Devil's Disciple," making him the hero of the play? (Lu Xun, 1921, "Chenmo zhi ta" [ 1938): 442. The Japanese original is given in parentheses.)

d.

~