Speed Reading - Mao Dun Volume

Author: Zhang Hong (Compiler)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-02-01
Features: This book is a part of the "Series on Speed Reading Masters and Famous Figures in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature." 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 land abundant in fish and rice since modern times, is one of China's most developed agricultural regions. It is adjacent to the modernized Shanghai and a place of great cultural and intellectual richness, which fostered Mao Dun's open and cosmopolitan cultural mindset and his meticulous writing style. He lost his father at the age of ten. Many Chinese writers and politicians were raised by their widowed mothers, and Mao Dun was nurtured by his own 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, becoming the chief critic of the Literary Research Association at that time. Subsequently, 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 head of the department. After the of the Kuomintang-Communist cooperation, he fled from Wuhan to Shanghai and Japan, where he began writing Disillusionment, Upheaval, Pursuit, and The Rainbow, thus taking up the pen of a novelist. This experience in high-level political struggles shaped his ability to generalize about his era and his broad societal perspective in literature, and the themes of his early works were often drawn from these experiences. During the League of Left-Wing Writers period, he wrote Fiction of the Time, Lin's Shop, and Spring Silkworms. During the War of Resistance, he moved between Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Yan'an, Chongqing, and Guilin, publishing works such as Corruption, Red Leaves Are Like February Flowers, and Hardening. 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' Association, Minister of Culture, and President of the Chinese Writers' Association, as well as Vice Chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, leaving little time for creative work. During the "unprecedented" era, 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 Path I Have Taken. He passed away in 1981.
In recent years, the literary history community has recognized Mao Dun as the master of the social analysis school of fiction. This school originates from the realist novels of 19th-century France and Russia and combines with traditional Chinese social novels. This can be clearly seen in the "continuation" of Red Leaves Are Like February Flowers, a draft written in the 1970s and never fully polished. Its Balzacian and Tolstoyan narrative style, along with the meticulous descriptions of the environment and characters' attire that reveal the charm of traditional storytelling, are unmistakable. 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 stronger focus on personal introspection gained prominence. This is not surprising, as Mao Dun, for most of the 20th century, played the role of such an "emerging" writer. It is impossible to bypass Mao Dun, and it is equally futile to elevate a great writer to an unreachable height. Moreover, each generation of literature is inherited in an "accumulative" manner. If the next generation only "bombards" the previous one with revolutionary fervor, using the "Aq" method of constant revolution—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, as some believe, completely expelled the realist school. Today, when we read the new works of young writers, we feel their "allegorical" structures while also recognizing that the basic elements of novels—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.