Comisión de faltas que dan lugar a la desheredación

The novel One Year is a work that concentrates on the efforts of several bourgeois characters to pull themselves up the slippery ladder of official advancement. Though they occasionally meet with success, this success is transitory and often self-delusory. The short stories ‘The Leather Belt', ‘Predestination and

Prognostication' and to a certain extent 'Battalion Commander "Monk1' 1 also fall into this category. Yet another category is the class of Zhang's fiction that hovers between fantasy and farce. These stories which are more or less realistic include the long work 'A Diary of Ghostland', the children's story 'Big Lin and Little Lin', and the satirical short story 'Lackadaisical Love Story'. The novel The Pulse of the Age does not fit happily into any of the above categories, describing as it does the student movement that came into existence in answer to Japanese aggression in China in 1931 and 1932.

Such an analysis and division into various thematic classes is admittedly arbitrary and obscures the range of Zhang's fiction during the years 1929 to 1 9 3 2 , but does provide us with various categories against which we can compare and contrast Zhang's subsequent writings and assess his development as a writer in the following years.

1 The large volume of Zhang's writings of this kind can best be accounted for by the type of employment he was engaged in at this time. His many different jobs as office clerk, minor functionary, etc. during the years 1929-1931 must have provided him with much grist for his creative mill.

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Another guide to Whang's development as a writer of fiction is the narrative technique used in his works* YJe have already- observed that Shang used several different techniques to

narrate the stories analysed above* As the nature of his material demanded , he would choose either a first or third- person narrative technique to present his story* This together with the influence of narrative technique on narrative style — whether the choice of one narrative technique in preference to another dictates the style of the narrative, or whether the narrative style dictates the choice of narrative technique — will be discussed in detail in a later chapter*

Chapter Four

Whang's writings (1933,“1934*) Introduction

A large proportion of Zhang*s corpus of writings was written during the years 1933"1934*. the summer of 1 9 3 3 , finding himself without a job, and living at the time in his sister*s house in Nanjing, Zhang resolved to devote all his time to writing. Zhang taught briefly m Hangzhou in the summer of 1934-, but with this brief exception, he was engaged full-time on his writing from the summer of 1933 until August 1933» when at the invitation of Zheng Zhenduo , he went to

teach the history of modern Chinese literature at Jinan University fijf) 7^\ Shanghai* ^

To live by on e ’s pen alone in 1930s China was no easy task* Payments for manuscripts at this time were limited to 3 dollars per thousand characters in Shanghai, an average of 3 dollars per thousand characters in Beijing. In order to support the humblest of existences, a Shanghai writer would have needed to earn 4-0 dollars per month, which would have meant writing and selling more than 1 3 ,0 0 0 characters1 worth of manuscript to make ends

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meet. The exigency of earning enough to live must have been in some cases a powerful incentive and in others a powerful disincentive to young men wishing to earn a living by writing fiction. The need to make ends meet must have prompted some writers to write quickly and at length, whilst others were forced to supplement the money they earned from writing by taking on a

h

part-time job. In either case the quality of writing was likely to suffer; those living by their pen alone were more preoccupied with quantity than quality, whilst those in employ­ ment could devote only a small part of their time to writing.

1 Shen et a l . , 'Zhang Tianyi wenxue huodong nianbiao', 2 7 6 . 2 Shen, ibid., 2 7 6 .

3 Wei Jingbo, h & / / k / i A - in Lu Xun feng 16 (20. 6 . 1939) 223.

4- Tang Tao for instance worked in the mornings in the Post Office; his writing was done in his spare time. That this is a universal problem can be illustrated by the example of Trollope who rose early each day to write for a few hours before going out to do a day's work.

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Zhang's circumstances would appear to have been more favourable than those of many of his fellow-writers. First, during the years 19^8 and 1929 after leaving Peking University (Spring 1927) and moving South, Zhang moved frequently in the area around Shanghai and Nanjing and held jobs in quick success­ ion as family tutor, copy-clerk, reporter, newspaper editor and

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office clerk. This brought Zhang into contact with people of all classes such as business people, factory workers, primary school teachers, ricksha pullers, apprentices, soldiers, playboys,

2 landlords, dockworkers, servants, maids and unemployed persons. Zhang's experiences and social intercourse during the years 1928 and 1929 provided the raw material for many subsequent stories. Other sources of material were stories told by friends over a

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meal and some drinks in restaurants. The material for stories such as 'The Twenty-one', 'The Poad', 'The Leather Belt' probably owes a good deal to stories recounted to Zhang by his friend

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Jiang Muliang who had served in the army.

Secondly, Zhang was able to live quite frugally in his sister's home in Nanjing, thus avoiding the expense of maintaining himself in a big city like Shanghai.

Thirdly, Zhang's working conditions for at least part of this period were particularly favourable. For a time Zhang and Jiang Muliang worked together in the same office in Nanjing as clerks. Since work was slack they were able to devote their afternoons to reading, writing stories and discussing their

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