Title: The Confessant as Analysand in Yu Dafu's Confessional Narratives
Abstract: Yu Dafu's contemporaries famously read his short stories and novellas as confessional or autobiographical. Some later critics mimick Yu's first audience in an attempt to inhabit position of the Chinese reader circa 1920, while other typically more Westernized critics prefer to read Yu's work as ironic. Rather than taking a stand on either side of this autobiography/irony divide, I attempt to show its irrelevance through a discussion of confession as ritual practice and speech-act that demonstrates how, for Yu Dafu, self-expression and self-description were part of a single confessional process that intertwined emotional outpouring with selfanalysis.In this light layer of cloud, undulating away, floating and drifting, my was transformed into two, one drifting in this layer of cloud, and one original body, still sitting under green glow of electric light, keeping watch from afar over me within blue smoke.1- Yu Dafu, Qing yan Wjffl (Blue smoke), 1923.In these lines from a highly impressionistic piece, May Fourth era writer Yu Dafu (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) (1896-1945) rewards careful reader with an illustration of his version of self-knowledge and self-expression. The first-person narrator is picture of contemplation: he sits alone, smoking and daydreaming. Yet object of his musing is not an external one, for of blue smoke - in which his divides and in which his miniature body floats - is self-generated, product of many cigarettes, and within this pale light layer of cloud his gaze turns inward to examine what to his mind has become a second self. The narrator's contemplative pose unites key elements of Yu Dafu's vision of self-knowledge and self-expression: narrator's original contemplative self divides into an observed self, who represents pure subjective expression, and an observing self, who reflects on observed self with cool analytic detachment. Given that Yu Dafu so ably unites two modes of expressive and reflective in a single image, it is strange that Western criticism of his creative work tends to diverge into two camps that confine Yu's writing to one mode or other.Critics disagree about extent to which Yu Dafu should be identified with protagonists and narrators of his short stories and novellas, with some reading his work as highly autobiographical and others finding an ironic distance between author and/or narrator and protagonist. In an article on Yu's early short story Chenlun I/lfe (Sinking), Kirk Denton adroitly describes two critical positions as follows:The first, represented by C. T. Hsia, interprets story without irony, as straight autobiography, with little distinction between protagonist and author. Onto this rather conventional Chinese autobiographical reading Hsia imposes a standard of Western psychological realism, a perspective from which story can only appear as mawkish sentimentality. The second approach salvages story from this irksome mawkishness with irony. For Western reader it is all but impossible, if we are to accept story as a valuable piece of 'high' literature, to read it without disassociating emotionalism and patriotism of protagonist from both narrator and author... By bringing irony to our reading we engage in a secret communion with imagined author behind back of unknowing protagonist whom we transform into a pitiable mock hero. By directing attention to story's inner structural dynamic, irony invites reader to disregard any direct relationship between real author, and historical context in which he was writing, and fictional world. The story is thus enshrouded in literariness and given a universal appeal.2In other words, either Yu Dafu' s writing is highly autobiographical, and we are to read emotions of protagonist as a lyrically rendered expression of author's own feelings, or Yu Dafu takes an ironic stance toward his protagonist, and is thus no longer personally implicated in melancholia, sentimentality or patriotism (! …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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