Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts Read online

  Like many Menippean satirists, Qian operates not from a fixed position but within a fluid mode that makes him more difficult to pin down. W. Scott Blanchard writes that “the Menippean satirist—though nearly always an immensely learned author—poses uneasily between the role of sage and anti-intellectual iconoclast, a wise fool who is one of literature’s most endearing pests. His attitude is . . . ‘Mock away at system-makers.’”20 Qian expresses his contempt for common sense parodically in mock encomia (a variety of Menippean satire) such as his praise of hypocrisy in “On Moral Instruction,” of luxury goods in “Windows,” and of hunger in “Eating,” and, conversely, the Devil’s endorsement of treaties over violence in “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu.” His mode is interrogative and dialogic, rather than purely expository, so that the reader’s happy insights may later be swept away,21 as with the Yuan Youchun profile, quoted earlier, which ends disingenuously: “All this, of course, was said by people who envied him, so naturally none of it could be taken seriously.”

  The mode of Menippean laughter we see in these early works is one of the keys to the complexity, inconsistency, and comedy in Qian’s literary vision. It provides us with a framework for interpreting his reliance on allusion, frequent inclusion of nonnarrative elements, and mirth-making attitude. In the passage from “Cat” quoted earlier, for example, the issue of fidelity between the fictional character and the satirized person is buried in a pastiche of images, compound similes, political and literary allusions, and medicinal and gastronomic references. Lin Yutang appears less as a target than as a pretext for authorial self-exhibition. This inversion of priorities works against the traditional expectation of continuous narrative progression in fiction. Like the back story of the cultural entrepreneur in “Inspiration” or numerous other examples, the profile of Yuan Youchun subordinates narrative to an accumulation of jokes.

  ABOUT THIS TRANSLATION

  The translations in this volume are based on the 1983 Fujian renmin chubanshe editions of Written in the Margins of Life and Human, Beast, Ghost, the last versions to which Qian made substantial alterations. These editions are preferable to those contained in Beijing Sanlian shudian’s posthumously published The Qian Zhongshu Collection (Qian Zhongshu ji , 2001 [hereafter referred to as the 2001 edition]) because the latter introduces a number of editorial errors but is otherwise not substantially different from the 1983 edition.22 The main text of this volume thus presents translations of the author’s final versions of his early works.

  Four of the translations included here have been published previously (“Cat,” “On Writers,” “Inspiration,” and “Souvenir”); of these, the latter three translations were based on earlier editions and have been updated to match the 1983 editions. All other translations are my own and are not individually credited.

  This book is designed to be at once accessible to the general reader and useful to the Qian Zhongshu scholar. Explanatory notes, often the bane of the literary translator, are absolutely essential for these works, which would otherwise be only partially comprehensible to any reader less familiar than the author with the Chinese and Western literary canons—that is to say, to all of us. To keep the main text uncluttered, however, the explanations of literary allusions; references to obscure people, places, and events; untranslatable plays on words; and the like are endnotes. Qian’s original footnotes to “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu” have been preserved. This volume also includes Qian’s prefaces to various editions of Margins and Human.

  EDITIONS AND REVISIONS

  My main goal with Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts is to share a pleasurable read. A subsidiary goal (and for a smaller audience) is to demonstrate how edition research (banbenkao )—a seemingly dry scholarly practice rarely encountered outside premodern fields—can enhance the pleasure of reading modern works. In addition to providing glosses and commentaries, endnotes identify places where Qian Zhongshu made significant cuts, additions, or alterations to his works. Qian tinkered with these pieces several times during the nearly six decades between their initial publications and his death, in 1998, leaving the two slim volumes with a rather complex revision history.23 I have been able to consult many, but not all, extant editions. “On Writers,” “Explaining Literary Blindness,” “A Prejudice,” and “On Laughter” were published individually, without titles, in the Kunming literary journal Criticism Today in 1939 before they were anthologized in Margins in 1941. “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Qian Zhongshu” is said to have first appeared in a literary supplement to Zhongyang ribao ,24 although I have not seen this version. I have also been unable to consult the earliest editions of “Cat” and “Inspiration,” which were first published in the literary journals Wenyi fuxing (Literary Renaissance 1, no. 1 [January 1, 1945]) and Xin yu (New Talk 1, nos. 1–2 [October 1945]), respectively. Subsequently, the collections have usually been published in their entirety, sometimes together.

  Most of Qian’s revisions and self-edits are minor, and to mark all of them would result in thousands of additional notes that would be of limited use to most readers. In “Souvenir,” the least-altered story in Human, Beast, Ghost, for instance, I count more than 250 differences between the 1946 and 1983 editions alone. My two selection criteria for notes have been the length of the change (usually one or more sentences) and its materiality (that is, significant alteration of the meaning of a passage). Philip F. Williams completed the edition comparison for “On Writers,” one of the most heavily bowdlerized pieces in Margins. Typos, clarifications, and minor rephrasings I have left for true zealots to seek out on their own.

  Many of these authorial interventions tighten the narrative flow of the original works by cutting out citations, allusions, and asides. All provide insight into how Qian regarded his own writings, constituting a type of self-critique. As much as Qian belittles his early works in his joint preface to the 1983 editions, he also tried to improve them. On the whole, Qian made minimal changes to his works between their first appearances in journals and their later collection in book form. (A list of editions is included in an appendix.) The most significant changes occur between the 1940s Kaiming editions (1941 for Margins and 1946 for Human) and the 1983 Fujian renmin editions, though I note some others as well. A few salient patterns of revision are worth discussing here.

  In his joint preface to the 1983 Fujian editions, Qian, with characteristic understatement, claims to have “limit[ed] myself to only a few minor edits. As these books had pretty much already transformed into historical materials, I was not at liberty to make deletions and additions as I saw fit or to flat out rewrite them. But, as they were, after all, in my name, I still reserved some sovereign rights, so I took the liberty of making a few piecemeal cuts and minor enhancements.”

  The majority of these “piecemeal cuts” appear to be the elder Qian’s reining in his younger self ’s enthusiasm for piling up allusions and doling out sarcastic abuse. In “Cat,” for example, Qian cut the following italicized lines from his lengthy caricature of the japanophile Lu Bolin:

  He never claimed to smoke pipe tobacco, but that was the only possible explanation for the color of his face. Not only did the black circles under his eyes seem to be the effect of smoke, but even their shape was like smoke, curling about and calling for deep thought. As for the dark redness of the tip of his nose, it could only be likened to that of steamed shrimps or crabs. Otherwise, we’d have to say that the black circles under his eyes were marks of libertinism or insomnia, and that his red nose was a sign of hard drinking or constipation. Malicious speculation of this sort would be dishonest, however, and would furthermore contain too many hypotheses to accord with the scientific method.

  The elder Qian also excised numerous allusions that he felt were superfluous or redundant, effectively hiding the evidence for some of his claims. In the 1939 and 1941 editions of “On Laughter,” for instance, he had originally followed his memorable line that Germans are “a sausage-making peop
le who mistakenly believe that humor is like ground meat and can be wrapped up into tidy parcels of ready-made spiritual nourishment” with a pair of concrete examples: “For instance, the preface to Jean Paul Richter’s [1763–1825] humorous novel Quintus Fixlein describes humor as an airtight, uniform worldview. Yet even the Germans appreciated that such a view would result in humor’s annihilation: a paper on German humor presented at the September 13, 1846, Literary Forum (Blatter fur Literarische Unterhalttung [sic]) long ago criticized Richter for going against common sense.” These lines disappear in the 1983 edition, and—from a literary point of view—for the better. The most extensive cuts of this sort are to “On Writers” and “Cat,” though no piece went untouched. Later versions of the stories and essays on the whole tend to be slightly shorter.

  Qian also corrects mistakes. In the 1939 and 1941 editions of “On Laughter,” Qian identifies Rabelais as the first person to use laughter to distinguish man from beast, citing the latter’s well-known claim that “rire est le propre de l’homme” (laughter is man’s distinguishing feature). In the 1983 edition, he sets the clock on this insight back eighteen hundred years to Aristotle.

  Qian’s “minor enhancements” also contain occasional surprises. In the 1983 edition of “On Writers,” for example, he inserts a line about Goethe’s refusing to “roar battle cries” from his study—a sardonic reference to Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) short-story collection Roaring Battle Cries (Na han , 1923). The revision is in line with the spirit of the essay as a whole, reiterating Qian’s point that writers make inflated claims about the power of their products. Although the specific target was by then long dead, the allusion is clearly a swipe at one of modern Chinese literature’s sacred cows.

  It should also be noted that revision was not a linear process. Some lines from the 1946 edition of Human, Beast, Ghost disappear in the 1983 edition, only to reappear in the 2001 edition, for instance, suggesting that in making revisions in the 1990s Qian (or his editors) did not rely solely on his 1980s edits but also consulted the 1940s versions of the stories.

  These and many more of the self-revisions documented in this volume make for a richer reading experience, imbuing each text with an internal dialogue. They show us how Qian’s temperament and sensibilities changed over time, but perhaps more often reveal their constancy. If revision is an act of creation, these changes may indeed represent Qian’s last true “creative writings,” a set of artifacts worthy of further scholarly exploration. After all, Qian anticipated this authorial afterlife in 1941, remarking wryly in “Reading Aesop’s Fables” that “great writers who were unable to provide for themselves while alive will have a whole group of people living off them after they die, such as relatives and friends writing sentimental reminiscences”—adding, forty years later, “and critics and scholars writing research theses.”

  REAPPRAISING QIAN ZHONGSHU

  With Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, the hope is to introduce Qian Zhongshu to new readers and, on the centenary of his birth, invite a broader reappraisal of an author who has often been hailed as a genius. Qian is very much a scholar’s writer, and it is no surprise that his manifest learning overawes literary enthusiasts. Critics’ tendency to put Qian on a pedestal was observed in the late 1970s by Theodore Huters, who cautioned: “The image being created of ‘leading man of letters’ and cultural giant, no matter how true, runs the danger of submerging that side of him that would have gleefully and pointedly lampooned such adulation had it happened to someone else.”25 Indeed, in the story “Inspiration,” as elsewhere, Qian ruthlessly mocks the notion of genius by acclamation. His own opinions on the matter, however, have done nothing to undercut his ever-growing prestige.

  In these early works, we see Qian making mistakes, recycling ideas,26 and making repeated personal attacks on contemporaries such as Lin Yutang (or perhaps just the idea of Lin Yutang), with whom he may have had more in common than he cared to admit.27 In the last regard, Qian may well have been influenced by the zawen polemics popularized by Lu Xun in the late 1920s and 1930s, which valued rhetoric over truth. These works brim with the competitiveness, and even sexual anxiety, of a young man. Qian’s harping on women’s vanity (in “God’s Dream,” “Cat,” and “Souvenir”), for instance, comes across less as democratic disgust for all hypocrisy and more as a personal prejudice against the female sex. (Notably, Qian cut a few unflattering comments about women from later editions.) In many cases, his attacks are a useful corrective that promotes tolerance; at other times, their ethos is the antithesis of live-and-let-live humanism. Qian, of course, never claimed to be a humanist, and he would point out that he anticipated charges of this sort in the preface to Margins, in which he allows that the “impressions” of a casual reader-writer like himself “may contradict one another or go overboard.” To critique Qian by the standards of present-day morality is a dangerous, and likely misguided, proposition.

  Nevertheless, the mean-spiritedness that sometimes creeps into Qian’s prose is not easily dismissed as simply a man in his humor. Arch cynicism, which often accompanies Menippean satire, is not unlike the know-it-all pride that undoes the Creator in “God’s Dream,” and its pettiness somewhat limits the scope of Qian’s literary vision. Such criticisms notwithstanding, the best measure of Qian’s literary accomplishment, to me, is the rereadability of his works, which yield new insights and revelations with each perusal. As for Qian’s politics, the true significance of his extreme individualism emerges only when read against the conformist cultural imperatives of both the wartime period in which he wrote and the Mao years that followed. In a repressive environment, the engaged and freethinking individual, however cynical, offers vastly more than the run-of-the-mill writer who time and again falls back on cliché, common sense, and the party line. Qian was not a political dissident in the traditional sense, but his composure, self-assuredness, and creativity enabled him to pioneer a uniquely comic model of literary cosmopolitanism within a nationalistic and deadly serious cultural climate.

  In these early works, then, we find the paradoxes, quirks, enthusiasms, and partialities that have inspired both admiration and ambivalence among Qian’s readers. Throughout, we are drawn into a dialogue with one of the most original and provocative literary minds of the twentieth century.

  NOTES

  1. If we take “On ‘Vulgarity’” (Lun ‘suqi’ 1933) to be Qian’s first piece of “creative prose,” then his creative writing career began long before the Second Sino-Japanese War; however, his most productive period was from 1937, when he wrote “Discussing Friendship” (Tan jiaoyou January 1937), to mid-1949, when he is said to have misplaced the partial manuscript of a second novel in progress, Le Coeur d’artichaut (Baihe xin [The Heart of the Artichoke]). See Theodore Huters, Qian Zhongshu, World Authors 660 (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 8–9.

  2. Qian also wrote poems and numerous critical essays during the 1930s and 1940s. Of his essays, “On ‘Vulgarity,’” first published in Dagong bao on November 4, 1933, and “Discussing Friendship” are closest to the informal style of Margins, blending literary criticism and philosophical ruminations. “Discussing Friendship” was written while Qian was at Oxford and first published in Zhu Guangqian’s (1897–1986) Literary Magazine (Wenxue zazhi in May 1937. These essays are collected in In the Margins of the Margins of Life (Rensheng bianshang de bianshang ), in The Qian Zhongshu Collection (Qian Zhongshu ji ) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2002), 65–72, 73–81, respectively.

  3. See the bibliography at the end of this volume. Qian’s biographers, with the notable exception of Huters (Qian Zhongshu), mostly gloss over Written in the Margins of Life. Human, Beast, Ghost has garnered more scholarly attention but tends to be appraised primarily in evolutionistic terms as a proto–Fortress Besieged.

  4. As Ma Guangyu notes, it is unclear exactly where and when Qian wrote these ten items, though the author himself states in his 1983 preface that he did not write them in Shanghai. Some scholars have claimed that some essays were written in E
ngland, though pieces with explicit allusions to conditions in the interior (for example, “Devil” and “Windows”) suggest that they were written in Kunming. Kaiming shudian reprinted Margins three times after the war, in 1946, 1947, and 1948, around the time that Human, Beast, Ghost and Fortress Besieged were published. For a review of scholarship on Margins up to 1991, see Ma Guangyu , “Xie zai rensheng bian shang yanjiu zongshu” (A Summary of Studies on Written in the Margins of Life), in Qian Zhongshu yanjiu caiji (Qian Zhongshu Studies), ed. Lu Wenhu (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1992), 1:268.

  5. Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).

  6. For a review of scholarship on Human up to 1991, see Ma Guangyu, “Ren shou gui yanjiu zongshu” (A Summary of Studies on Human, Beast, Ghost), in Qian Zhongshu yanjiu caiji, 1:276–91.

  7. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 441.

  8. “Qian Zhongshu nianbiao” (Qian Zhongshu Chronology), in Qian Zhongshu Yang Jiang yanjiu ziliao (Research Materials on Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang), ed. Tian Huilan et al. (Wuchang: Huazhong shifan daxue, 1997), 13. As Huters and others have noted, this was neither the first nor the last time that Qian passed up prestigious and remunerative offers from foreign universities.