Speed Reading - Mao Dun Volume

Author: Zhang Hong
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-02-01
Features: This book is a part of the "Series of Rapid Reading on Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literary Masters and Prominent Figures." It is reviewed by renowned scholars and writers and recommended by authoritative professors from Peking University. Mao Dun, originally named Shen Dehong, styled Yanbing, was born on July 4, 1896, in Wuzhen, Tongxiang County, Zhejiang Province. This southern part of Lake Taihu, a fertile land in modern China, is close to the modernized Shanghai and a place of rich cultural heritage. This has shaped Mao Dun's open cultural mindset toward the world and his meticulous writing style. He lost his father at the age of ten. Many Chinese writers and politicians were "teachers" to their widowed mothers, and Mao Dun was raised by his mother. After completing his preparatory studies at Peking University, unable to afford further education, he joined the Commercial Press in Shanghai, reforming the long-established Story Monthly and becoming the chief critic of the Literary Research Association. It was during this time that he joined the Shanghai Communist Group, helped establish the Communist Party of China, went to Guangzhou for the second National Congress of the Kuomintang, and served as a secretary in the Central Propaganda Department of the Kuomintang, with Mao Zedong as the acting minister of propaganda. After the of the Kuomintang-Communist cooperation, he fled from Wuhan to Shanghai and Japan, where he began writing Disillusionment, The Trembling, The Pursuit, and The Rainbow, thus picking up the pen of a novelist. This experience in high-level political struggles shaped his ability to generalize about his era and his broad literary perspective on society, with the themes of his early works often drawn from these experiences. During the League of Left-Wing Writers period, he wrote The Midnight, Lin's Shop, and Spring Silkworms. During the War of Resistance against Japan, he moved between Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Yan'an, Chongqing, and Guilin, publishing works such as Corruption, Red Leaves Are Like February Flowers, and Exercising. The literary world celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and his fame continued to grow. After the founding of the People's Republic, he served as vice president of the Chinese Writers' Federation, minister of culture, president of the Writers' Association of China, and vice chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, leaving little time for creative work. During the "" period, he was criticized and sidelined, but when things slightly stabilized, he secretly wrote the "continuation" of Red Leaves Are Like February Flowers and his memoir The Road I Have Walked. He passed away in 1981.
In recent years, literary historians have widely recognized Mao Dun as the master of the social analysis school of fiction. This school originated from the realist novels of 19th-century France and Russia and combined with the traditional Chinese genre of social novels. The "continuation" of Red Leaves Are Like February Flowers, a manuscript written in the 1970s without final revision, clearly demonstrates this. Its Balzacian and Tolstoyan narrative style, along with the meticulous depiction of the environment and characters' attire, reveals the charm of traditional Chinese storytelling. Mao Dun represents an entire generation of novelists. Until the rise of avant-garde modernist novels in the 1980s, a new generation of writers with a more personal and introspective narrative style came to prominence. This is not surprising, as Mao Dun, for most of this century, played the role of an "emerging" writer. It is impossible to bypass Mao Dun, and it is equally futile to elevate a great writer to an untouchable status. Moreover, each generation of literature inherits in an "accumulative" manner. If the next generation only engages in "bombardment" of the previous one, adopting the "A Q" approach of revolution, counter-revolution, and counter-counter-revolution, you will end up with nothing but a single ear of corn split by a bear. We will always have to pay a high "tuition fee" to acquire modern knowledge. In reality, postmodernist works and critiques have not completely swept away everything about modernism! Modernism has not expelled the realist school as people might think. Today, when we read the new works of young writers, while feeling their "allegorical" structures, we also notice that the basic elements of a novel—such as plot, setting, and characters—remain vibrant. They may transform, but they do not disappear entirely. The significance of Mao Dun's novels lies here.