2 - Tradition and Hybridity in Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying

Summary

Both Shi Zhecun 施蟄存 and Mu Shiying 穆時英 are fairly well known today for their modernist short stories from the 1930s. Shi Zhecun worked as an author, translator and poet, as well as the editor-in-chief of Les Contemporains (Xiandai 現代, 1932–1935), a Shanghai journal that aimed to introduce a cosmopolitan educated readership to the latest trends in literature and art from China and abroad. His fiction combined and juxtaposed various sources and genres of foreign and Chinese literature, drawing upon Freudian ideas of the subconscious, neurasthenia, dreams and irrationality. Mu Shiying was a protégé of Shi's and a frequent contributor to Les Contemporains. His modernist short stories set in Shanghai experiment with various styles and typographical elements to achieve jarring fragmented effects that break with normal narrative flows and notions of plot progression.

Alongside primarily Liu Na'ou 劉吶鷗 (1905–1940), Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying are usually considered members of the ‘New Sensationist’ (‘xinganjuepai’ 新感覺派) group. Like some of the terms discussed in the previous chapter, this label originated as an insult. It designated a group of Japanese writers (shinkankaku ha) who were inspired during the 1920s by Western avantgardist art movements such as Futurism, Expressionism and Dadaism. The leftist literary critic Lou Shiyi 樓適夷 (1905–2001) was the first to use the name to designate Chinese authors. In a dismissive critique of two of Shi Zhecun's short stories written in 1931, Lou argues that Shi was influenced by Japanese New Sensationism and that this aesthetic was inseparable from the ‘Erotic’ and the ‘Grotesque’. Shi's fiction was ‘the literature of those who live by reaping the interests of money capitalism’.

The Shanghai modernist writers of the 1930s entered a contentious literary field. The most prominent literary organisation of the day was the Chinese League of Left-wing Writers (Zhongguo zuoyi zuojia lianmeng 中國左翼作家聯盟) founded in Shanghai in March 1930 under the leadership of the august Lu Xun 魯迅. The League called upon writers to produce literature supporting the socialist revolutionary cause, taking a hostile stance towards independent writers. A resolution adopted in 1931 demanded that themes reflecting ‘trivial everyday matters’ were to be rejected, and proletarian art was promoted to influence the masses.