Modernism in Practice: Shi Zhecun's Psychoanalytic Fiction Writing

Abstract

Shi Zhecun (1905-2003) was among few Chinese writers in the New Literature who conscientiously illustrated the Freudian notions, such as the Eros and the Thanatos, the pleasure and the reality principles, and the sadism, in several of psychoanalytic stories written between 1928 and 1933. Adhering to the late Qing reformist and the May Fourth intellectual tradition to reconstruct a new National Character by a Westernized new fiction for the nation’s regeneration, the writer treated the profession seriously as to enlighten the people with progressive Western knowledge, especially the Freudian psychoanalytic propositions of the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and desires, via modernist devices such as the stream of consciousness, dual narrative, and the use of contrasting colors. Through an investigation of the literary trends since the late Qing to the early thirties, the writer’s literary career, and his psychoanalytic historical and urban stories, I suggest that despite certain shortcomings, as well as being largely unappreciated and misunderstood by the literary circle around him, the writer’s modernist experiments practically introduced several Freudian concepts to Chinese readers in the period when the New Literature was dominated by the ideologically charged Realism and Romanticism schools.