Writing of One's Own

ALTHOUGH I WRITE fiction and essays, I usually pay very little heed to theory. Recently, though, I suddenly feel as if I have a little something to say, so I have written it down here.'
I have always thought that literary theory comes after literary works. That is how it has been in the past, that is how it is in the present, and in the future I'm afraid it will remain the same. If we desire to enhance writers' awareness of their own craft, it would naturally be of some help to extrapolate-late theory from literary works themselves in order to use this knowledge as
'Chang initially wrote this essay in response to the prominent literary critic Fu Lei's criticisms of her serialized novella Lianhuan tao (Chained links). Fu Lei, a well-respected scholar and prolific translator of French literature, professed himself to be amazed by Chang's youthful talent. Writing under a pseudonym (Xun Yu) in an essay called "Lun Zhang Ailing de xiaoshuo" (On Eileen Chang's fiction), Fu first praises Chang's impeccable narrative techniques in stories such as "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City" and then moves on to criticize Lianhuan tao as trivial and "lacking in substance." Implicit in Fu's critique was a sense that Chang, in focusing on the "petty" and "passive" domestic lives and loves of largely female urbanites, was betraying the nationalistic and politically engaged ideals of earlier realist literature of the May Fourth Movement- Fu Lei's critique appeared in the same journal, Wanxiang (Phenomena), in which Lianhuan tao began its serialization in 1944. After producing this response to defend her work, Chang abruptly ended the serialization. The novella itself, about lower-class woman named Nixi who travels from one man to another and maintains her vitality and optimism against all odds, went unfinished.
 a gauge for further creation. But as we go about this process of gauging our creations, we must also remember that, in the process of literary development, work and theory are like two horses sharing the same yoke, jockeying back and forth as they drive each other forward. Theory is not a driver seated on high, brandishing a whip.
These days, it seems that literary works are impoverished, and so literary theory is impoverished as well. I have discovered that people who like to write literature usually concentrate on the uplifting and dynamic aspects of life and neglect those that are placid and static, though the latter is the ground of the former. That is, they concentrate for the most part on struggle and neglect the harmonious aspects of life. In reality, people only engage in struggle in order to attain harmony.
An emphasis on the uplifting and dynamic smacks more or less of the superman. Supermen are born of specific epochs. But the placid and static aspects of life have eternal significance: even if this sort of stability is often precarious and subject at regular intervals to destruction, it remains eternal. It exists in every epoch. It is the numinous essence of humanity, and one might also say it is the essence of femininity.
Very few works in the history of literature plainly sing in praise of the placid, while many emphasize the dynamic and uplifting aspects of human life. But in the best of these works, the uplifting aspects of human life are still portrayed against the background of its inherent placidity. Without this grounding, uplift is like so much froth. Many works are forceful enough to provide excitement but unable to offer any real revelation, and this failure results from not having grasped this notion of grounding.
Struggle is stirring because it is powerful and grand and yet at the same time bitterly distressing. Those who struggle have lost their harmony and are in search of a new harmony. Struggle for the sake of struggle lacks resonance and, when transformed into writing, will never produce great literary works.
I find that, in many works, strength predominates over beauty. Strength is jubilant and beauty is mournful, and neither can exist without the other. "Life and death are so far apart /I make my vow to you / and take your hand / to grow old together."2 This is a mournful poem, but how very affirmative is its posture toward human life. I do not like heroics. I like tragedy
2The line is from a poem titled "Beat the Drum" ("Jigu"), from Shijing (The classic of poetry), the earliest and most influential poetic anthology in the Chinese literary tradition- The same line is cited by the male protagonist Fan Liuyuan in Chang's novella "Love in a Fallen City" ("Qingcheng zhi lian").
 and, even better, desolation. Heroism has strength but no beauty and thus seems to lack humanity. Tragedy, however, resembles the matching of bright red with deep green: an intense and unequivocal contrast. And yet it is more exciting than truly revelatory. The reason desolation resonates far more profoundly is that it resembles the conjunction of scallion green with peach red, creating an equivocal contrast.
I like writing by way of equivocal contrast because it is relatively true to life. In "Love in a Fallen City," Liusu escapes from her corrupt traditional family, but the baptism of the Battle of Hong Kong does not transform her into a revolutionary. The Battle of Hong Kong does affect Fan Liuyuan in the sense that it steers him toward a more settled existence and finally marriage, but marriage does not make him a saint or compel him to abandon completely his old habits and ingrained tendencies. Thus, although Liusu and Liuyuan's marriage is healthy in some ways, it remains prosaic, earth-bound, and, given their situation, it could be nothing more.
There are very few people, after all, who are either extremely perverse or extremely enlightened. Times as weighty as these do not allow for easy enlightenment. In the past few years, people have gone on living their lives, and even their madness seems measured. So my fiction, with the exception of Cao Qiqiao in "The Golden Cangue," is populated with equivocal characters - They are not heroes, but they are of the majority who actually bear the weight of the times. As equivocal as they may be, they are also in earnest about their lives. They lack tragedy; all they have is desolation. Tragedy is a kind of closure, while desolation is a form of revelation.
I know that people are urgent in their demand for closure and, if they cannot have it, will be only be satisfied by further excitement. They seem to be impatient with revelation in its own right. But I cannot write in any other way. I think that writing in this manner is more true to life. I know that my works lack strength, but since I am a writer of fiction, the only the authority I have is to give expression to the inherent strength of my characters and not to fabricate strength on their behalf. Moreover, I believe that although they are merely weak and ordinary people and cannot aspire to heroic feats of strength, it is precisely these ordinary people who can serve more accurately than heroes as a measure of the times.
In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being born. But until this historical era reaches its culmination, all certainty will remain an exception. People sense that everything about their everyday lives is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree. All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. In order to confirm
 our own existence, we need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental, and to that end we seek the help of an ancient memory, the memory of a humanity that has lived through every era, a memory clearer and closer to our hearts than anything we might see gazing far into the future. And this gives rise to a strange apprehension about the reality surrounding us. We begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, dark and bright at the same time. Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies, producing a solemn but subtle agitation, an intense but as yet indefinable struggle.
There is an unfinished sculpture by Michelangelo, called Dawn, in which the human figure is only very roughly hewn and even the facial features are indistinct. But its expansive spirit symbolizes the imminent advent of a new era. If such works were to be produced today, one would be entranced, but none exist, nor indeed can they exist, because we are still unable to struggle free of the nightmare of the era.
And it is this era that constitutes my artistic material, one for which I believe the technique of equivocal contrast is appropriate. I use this method to portray the kinds of memories left behind by humanity as it has lived through each and every historical epoch. And by these means, I provide to the reality that surrounds me a revelation. This is my intention, although I do not know if I have accomplished it. I am incapable of writing the kind of work that people usually refer to as a "monument to an era" and I do not plan to try, because it seems that the concentration of objective material needed for such a project has yet to become available. And, in fact, all I really write about are some of the trivial things that happen between men and women. There is no war and no revolution in my works. I think that people are more straight-forward and unguarded in love than they are in war or revolution. War and revolution, by their very nature, make more urgent demands of rationality than sensibility. Works that portray war and revolution often fail precisely because their technical prowess outstrips their artistry. In contrast with the unguarded freedom of love, war is inexorably imposed on us from the outside, whereas revolution often forces the individual to drive forward by dint of will alone. A real revolution or a revolutionary war, I believe, should be as emotionally unguarded and as able to penetrate into every aspect of one's life as romantic love. And it should bring one back into a state of harmony.
I like forthright simplicity, but I must portray the rich duplicity and elaborate designs of modern people in order to set them off against the ground of life's simplicity. This is why my writing is too easily seen by some readers as overly lush or even decadent. But I do not think it possible to use the elemental approach of a book like the Old Testament. This is the altar on
 which Tolstoy was sacrificed in his waning years. Nor do I approve of the aesthetes who advocate Beauty above all else. I think that their problem lies not in their beauty but in their failure to provide the figure of Beauty with a ground. The water in a mountain stream is merely light and frolicsome, but seawater, though it may seem to ripple in much the same way, also contains within it the prospect of vast oceanic swells. Beautiful things are not necessarily grand, but grand things are always beautiful. And yet I do not place truthfulness and hypocrisy in direct and unequivocal contrast; instead, I utilize equivocal contrast as a means of writing the truth beneath the hypocrisy of modern people and the simplicity underneath the frivolity, and this is why I have all too easily been seen as overly indulgent and criticized for lingering over these beguiling surfaces. Even so, I continue to write in my own style and can only feel ashamed that I have yet to perfect my art. I am, after all, just a neophyte when it comes to literature.
When readers of the old school read my works, they find them rather diverting but also more unsettling than they should be. New-style people find them reasonably absorbing but not quite as serious as they might be. But that is the best I can do, and I am confident that my art is not compromised. I only demand of myself that I should strive for an even greater degree of realism.
Further, because I rely on a particular conception of equivocal contrast in my writing, I do not like to adopt the classicist manner in which good and evil, spirit and flesh, are always posed against each other in stark conflict, and thus the theme of my works may sometimes seem vague and unsatisfactory. I think the theory that a literary work needs a main theme could do with some revision. In writing fiction, one ought to have a story. It is better to let that story speak for itself than fabricating a plot in order to fit a certain theme. Readers often pay very little heed to the original themes of the great works that have come down to us through the ages, because times have changed, and those concerns no longer have the power to engage us. Yet readers of these works may at any time extract new revelations from the stories themselves, and it is only thus that the eternal life of any given work is assured. Take War and Peace, for instance. Originally, Tolstoy intended his story to revolve around the religious and collectivist philosophies of life that were popular at the time, but, as it turned out, the unfolding of the story itself eventually vanquished his predetermined theme. This is a work that was rewritten seven times, and with each revision the predetermined theme was forfeited still further. In the end, what remained of the theme was little more than an aside, becoming in fact the most awkward section of the novel, and there was no new main theme to replace it. This is why Tolstoy
 felt himself somewhat at a loss after having finished the novel. In comparison with Resurrection, the main theme of War and Peace does seem rather indistinct, but it remains much the greater work. Even now, every inch of the text comes alive as we read. The difference between modern literary works and those that came before also seems to rest on this distinction. No more does the emphasis lie principally on a main theme; instead, the story is allowed to give what it can and readers to take what they are able.
This is how I have and will continue to write Chained Links. In that work, the absence of a main theme is conspicuous, but I hope that people will like it for the story alone. My original idea was very simple: I would describe these sorts of things because they exist. Modern people for the most part are exhausted, and the modern marriage system is irrational as well. Thus silence reigns between husbands and wives. There are those who look for relief by engaging in sophisticated flirtation, so as to avoid having to take responsibility for their actions, and those who revert to animal desires by patronizing prostitutes (but these are only beastly men and not beasts and are thus all the more horrifying). Then there is cohabitation, which is not as serious a bond as marriage, involves more responsibility than sophisticated flirtation, and is not so lacking in humanity as whoring. People who go to extremes are, in the final analysis, the minority, and so living together out of wedlock has become a very common phenomenon in recent years.
The social status of the men who support these kinds of arrangements is roughly middle class or below; they work hard and live thriftily. They can't afford to let themselves go but aren't so reserved that they are willing to let themselves sink into boredom, either. They need vibrant, down-to-earth relationships with women, relationships that are just as vibrant and down-to-earth as the other aspects of their lives. They need women to look after their homes and are consequently less perverse in their dealings with them. In Chained Links, Yaheya is the proprietor of a midsized silk shop who still must work the counter himself. If Nixi could get along with him in peace, peace would continue to reign in their relationship for years to come and nothing would prevent the two from growing old and gray together The failure of their life together out of wedlock arises from Nixi's own character flaws. Her second lover, Dou Yaofang, is the relatively prosperous owner of an herbal medicine shop, but he lacks the swanky air of a big-time capitalist. The petty official with whom Nixi lives has no more than a touch of the bureaucrat about him. Neither man is especially perverse when it comes to Nixi. What transpires between her and them is very human. And thus it should come as no surprise that these relationships are full of genuine affection.
 As for women who live with men out of wedlock, their social position necessarily starts out somewhat lower than that of men, but most of them possess a fiery will to live. Still, the seductive power they have over their lovers is no more and no less than the charm of a healthy woman. If they were really as perverse as they are often imagined to be, they would not satisfy the needs of these men. Such women can work for attention, can be jealous, show off, and fight; they can be quite savage but never hysterical. They have only one problem: that their status remains forever in doubt. And because of this gnawing insecurity, they become grasping and selfish as time goes on.
This sort of cohabitation is more prevalent in China than it is in the West, but no one has yet attempted to write about it. The Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers find these types of people lacking in the sentimentality traditionally evoked by "talented scholar and beautiful maiden" romances.3 The new-style writers, on the other hand, dislike that these relationships seem to resemble neither love nor prostitution and are thus neither healthy enough nor sufficiently perverse to lend themselves to the articulation of an unmistakably clear main theme.
What moves me about Nixi's story is her unalloyed passion for material life, a material life that she must struggle with all her might to retain. She wants the love of men but also desires security, cannot have both simultaneously, and ends up in possession of neither. She feels she can depend on nothing and invests everything in her children, hoping thereby to reap the bounty of their labor: a most inhuman sort of reward.
It is not that Nixi lacks feeling. She wants to love this world but never finds an opening. Nor is it the case that she is unloved, but the love she receives is merely the leftover stew and cold table scraps from someone else's meal, as in Du Fu's poem: "Leftover stew and cold scraps / every-where bitterness concealed."4 But she is above all a vital, healthy woman and never resorts to beggarliness. She resembles instead someone who chews greedily on soybean meal: even though she has a very strong constitution and the meal has a modicum of nutritional value, she'll still end up with an upset stomach. That a human being is made to eat fodder intended for beasts is ultimately the real tragedy.
As for the fact that I have adopted phrases and diction from traditional
3A Chinese narrative tradition based in part on the thirteenth-century vernacular drama Xixiang ji (The story of the western wing)-
4Chang is misquoting from the Tang poet Du Fu's 719 poem "Respectfully Presented to Venerable Mr- Wei: Twenty Couplets" ("Fengzeng Wei zuo chengzhang ershi yun")-
 fiction in writing Chained Links-where Cantonese and foreigners of fifty years ago speak like characters from The Golden Lotus or when the Chinese people in Pearl Buck's fiction sound just like characters from old English literature when they open their mouths to speak-all these borrowings were for the sake of expedience and less than ideal as such. My original intention was this: the romantic ambience of Hong Kong as envisioned by Shanghai people would set up one sort of distance and the temporal divide between the present and the Hong Kong of fifty years ago would create another. So I adopted an already antiquated sort of diction in order to rep-resent better these two kinds of distance. There are times when it may seem contrived and overdone. I think I will be able to make some corrections in the future.