The Framing of Hardy’s Wessex Tales

 

     Each of Hardy’s Wessex Tales is set in the past, just at the point of vanishing from living memory.  Several are placed in frames with a local resident recounting the narrative as part of local lore.  Those who would prefer a regionalist and realistic author might think his goal was to preserve vestiges of long Dorset tradition before they vanished altogether, and indeed Hardy does include certain geographically and historically specific details: the fear of a French invasion, the domestic manufacture of mead, and the coastal practice of smuggling, for instance.  Yet the stories’ appeal seems almost entirely elsewhere.  Though Hardy is generally considered a realist, this distancing is part of a contrary tendency.  Hardy’s unlikely short story plots favor heavy dramatic ironies and conclusions colored by his characteristic pessimism far more than they do the convincing reporting of detail.

     What is bleak in his narrative world, though, is in part occluded by the retrospective view, as nostalgia colors the narration.  His tone is further warmed in the framed tales by the pretense that the stories are being told, as in Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka or ghost stories told around a campfire, in an intimate social setting, simply to pass the time.  The irony, poetic justice, and, in some cases, surprise endings provide reader satisfaction in spite of the darker implications of Hardy’s world-view.

     “The Three Strangers” does present a vivid vignette of country life in the shepherd’s celebration of his growing family as well as implying certain assumptions about local conditions with the shocking harshness of penalties for arson and yet the suggestion that the hayrick burning may have been motivated by partisanship for the poor and thus to some extent supported by the population.  There is gentle humor in the host’s happy hospitality and the guarded frugality of his wife and, though the hangman plays a role, he is cheated of his victim. 

     Yet the principal impact of the story depends on unlikely coincidence and heavy dramatic irony.  The fact that a condemned prisoner and his assigned executioner are drinking at each other’s elbow unawares is surely the principal plot element that strikes the reader, placing the story close to the ironic twists that please readers of de Maupassant, O. Henry, and Saki.  This story does deviate from Hardy’s modern tragedies as it concludes with the escape of the guilty party, but the tone lingers in the concluding paragraphs with the death (in one case, the aging to “a sere and yellow leaf”) of everyone concerned.

     The slighter ”A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four,” the very title of which alludes to its semi-legendary character, arises from local history, but this supposed glimpse of Napoleon himself doing reconnaissance [1] really has little to do with the wars of Britain and France.  Like “The Three Strangers” the plot turns on a subterfuge, a strategic disguise and the story is told not for patriotic reasons but simply as a small marvel to be relished for its own sake.  When Solomon Selby launches into his narration, it is clearly as a performer wishing to amuse his audience.  He has assumed “his narrative smile,” indicating his readiness to relate an entertaining story, the literal truth of which is of little concern to anyone.   This tale, too, ends by recognizing the inevitability of mortality: for ten years the storyteller has lain “beneath a simple headstone.” 

     “A Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion” is likewise based on commonly known facts of history.  This story, too, clearly depends on dramatic irony and the most unlikely chance of Phyllis’s being misled by what she overhears her fiancé saying and then deciding not to meet her German lover.  Thus the story turns out badly for all and ends, as did the others, in the graveyard.  Hardy is drawn to incidents illustrating the myriad mischances of love in which history may play an accidental part. 

     In “The Withered Arm” his willingness to use superstitious elements to build a compelling story is given free rein.  The “spectre” whom Rhoda seizes, the effect on Gertrude’s arm, and the intervention of the folk healer are all inexplicable in rational terms, more decidedly preternatural than those to which Mrs. Radcliffe’s readers were accustomed.  Gertrude dies in distress, Rhoda survives, though “bent” and “haggard,” and Farmer Lodge lives a solitary life.  The bastard child is another sympathetic convict, one of whom evn the executioner says “if ever a young fellow deserved to be let off, this one does; only just turned eighteen, and only present by chance when the rick was fired. However, there's not much risk of that, as they are obliged to make an example of him, there having been so much destruction of property that way lately.”  This again, apparently, a crime thought to be the work of a radical just as in “The Three Strangers.”  Instead of graves, the story ends with a reference to Rhoda’s “sombre thoughts.”

     Hardy’s characters seem never to be able to sort themselves out into satisfactory relationships.  In “Fellow Townsman” Barnet’s mésalliance is contrasted with Downes’ happy marriage.  When Downe’s wife dies, he is stricken with feeling of guilt and frustration, but then his thoughts turn to Lucy whom he had once rejected as inferior.  As it happens, the more fortunate Downes asks her first, leaving Barnet unsatisfied in another narrative in which love is for the main character elusive.

     Likewise in “Interlopers at the Knap” Farmer Darton is hesitant to marry Sally and, after dithering, selects the indigent Helena when her husband dies.  This choice turns out to be unsatisfying and, after Helena dies, he attempts unsuccessfully to renew his relationship to Sally, but she will not have him then.  Once again, the windings of fate seem not only inevitable but hostile to the protagonist’s happiness.

     In the final story of the collection, “The Distracted Preacher,” a Methodist is sent to a remote town where he is attracted to Lizzie, but their relationship founders when he discovers that she assists the local smugglers.  Here again is a genuine element of local lore and some mild humor at the upright minister’s shock at finding many of his parishioners including the woman who has claimed his interest are complicit in illegal activity.  An endnote following the story informs the reader that the happy ending in which the couple do wed and move away from the site of the bride’s misdeeds was forced upon the author by editorial mandate, though he would have preferred that Lizzie marry “Jim the smuggler” and emigrate with him to Wisconsin which he says is “corresponds more closely to the true incidents of which the tale is a vague and flickering shadow.”  Here, for once, Hardy’s pessimism was overruled by commercial considerations. 

     Hardy might be said to have viewed fate as hostile rather than indifferent as his denouements are so often characterized by frustration and pathos.  The author’s existential anxieties after he had abandoned his Christian upbringing are doubtless an influence as is his ambivalent relationship with his first wife and her death shortly before the publication of The Wessex Tales.  His radical politics may have caused him to feel further alienated.  Life, in Hardy’s view. Tends to deal most people a bad hand.  Art can be in some degree redemptive, as the Greek tragedians knew.  Just as ancient Athenians were reassured by the artfulness in which the dreadful circumstances of human life were portrayed, Hardy knew he could depend on the reassuring conventions of story-telling to please his readers and sell his work.  Perhaps more significantly, he sought thereby to convince himself and his readers that the disorderly and often depressing succession of human experiences must make in the end some sort of sense, even if life ends with death.  Relating the incidents of lived experience can still serve to pass an idle evening around a warming fire with our fellow mortals, and, for the moment, we are diverted, though author, narrator, and readers find themselves all in the same slowly sinking boat.    

 

 

 

1.  I was reminded of the similarly mysterious appearances of George Washington in Cooper’s The Spy. 

2.  His wish to retain some measure of the supernatural is clear is his interest in spiritualism and even in seeking, as some do today, metaphysical solace in the physics of relativity.  Several critics have analyzed the Hardy’s use of Gothic conventions.  See James F. Scott, “Thomas Hardy's Use of the Gothic: An Examination of Five Representative Works,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Mar., 1963) and Thomas Hardy and the Gothic: Restructuring the Gothic Prison in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Negeen N. Nikravesh, “Thomas Hardy and the Gothic: Restructuring the Gothic Prison in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Victoriographies, Volume 13, Issue 1.

Zweig’s Obsessive Protagonists

 

 

     Apart from folk stories, most ancient and medieval narratives concerned gods or aristocrats undergoing major upheavals.  Novel writers found drama then in bourgeois and sometimes even proletarian milieux.  By the time of Chekhov overt drama came to seem unnecessary.  Character could be revealed by the smallest of events, a vague impression, a velleity, a trivial accident.  With the insights of Freud the significance of matters of apparently little consequence emerged, justifying attention to details that could sometimes generate major crises.

     Stefan Zweig was a good friend of Freud’s, corresponding with him and visiting for decades.  In a letter of October 21, 1932, Zweig wrote: “Everything that I write bears your influence and perhaps you can tell that the strength to tell the truth, possibly the essential element in my work, is due to you.  You have provided a model for an entire generation.” [1]  Zweig’s stories depict more or less ordinary protagonists, driven by one stimulus or another into odd and extreme cathexes, producing overmastering obsessive-compulsive behaviors that come to dominate their lives.

     In the world of Stefan Zweig’s stories, a façade of stable respectability (not unlike that that marked most of Freud’s patients) masks turbulent emotions, usually erotic, that prove uncontrollable and ultimately ruinous.  The psychoanalytic influence is evident, but in no formulaic application but rather in the general sense of a more or less calm-looking ego fronting, as long as possible, for a cyclonic id.  In one novelle after another the reader finds minds in extremis, helpless to manage obsession.  Whether the psychological structure mirrors the apparent cultured bourgeois satisfaction of the Vienna of the author’s youth thrown into the madness of Nazism or not is debatable, but the parallel seems apt.

     In Zweig’s “Chess Story” (“Schachnovelle”) the political analogy is explicit as the protagonist is forced into a kind of madness by Nazi persecution.   To escape the irrational lunacy of a criminal government, he mentally retreats to the ordered if competitive world of the chess, a realm entirely abstract and idealized, empty equally of virtue and wickedness.  The ego is entirely overpowered by his absorption in this world of the mind, producing a total breakdown.

     In “The Man who Ran Amok” (“Amoklaufer”) a doctor already strained by long service in a tropical colony hesitates to perform an illegal abortion for a respectable lady who consults him.  When she then dies after resorting to a back-alley practitioner, he is overcome with regret and himself commits suicide.  Doubtless his reaction would have been milder had his sensitive nerves not been affected by long colonial service, but he is also aware that his initial rejection of her request was in part due to his resentment of her position among the elite.  Thus it is his own inhumanity rather than her suffering that disturbs him.  The use of the Malay term amok highlights the fact that the cultivated European is every bit as capable of mad behavior as the Asian tribesman.

     In both these stories there is a narrative frame; the story is told to another character as though to hear it directly from the mouth of the neurotic would be too agonizing.  The frame stories insulate the reader from too hot a point of passion, placing the reader at a safe remove from the mental maelstrom of the protagonists.

     “The Burning Secret” (“Brennendes Geheimnis”) has a simple third person omniscient narrator.  The main character is a baron identified as a “ladykiller” (“Frauenjäger”) who pursues liaisons as a sort of sport.  Cynically cultivating a relationship with the son of a lady in whom he is interested, he offends the child who, realizing he is simply being used, resolves to frustrate the would-be lover.  Here the main character experiences only frustration from his compulsive and selfish romancing.  Though powered by the dynamo of erotic desire, the baron’s game is in fact altogether ego-centered.  Such men as he “are always burdened with passion, but not that of a lover, rather that of a player, cold, calculating, and dangerous.” [2]  With his thoughtless attempt to use the child Edgar, the baron condemns his own project.  If he cannot bear to be alone [3], it is perhaps because he feels so strongly the ugliness of his own soul.

    “Angst” (“Fear” or “Anxiety), the single word that best defines the Zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century, is the title of a Novelle with a typical bourgeoise as protagonist.  She resembles a case study by Freud with her comfortable, respectable home and social standing.  Yet her sexual desire leads her to an affair that she might have initially considered a mere peccadillo but which comes to occupy her constantly, bringing ceaseless anxiety.  A surprise twist in the end produces what might seem even more surprising: a somewhat optimistic ending. 

 

She distinctly recognized the boy’s voice and felt surprised how much it was like his father’s.  A gentle smile came to her lips and rested there quietly.  With eyes closed she lay that she might all the more deeply enjoy the thought of what her life was and her happiness as well.  There remained a bit of pain within but it was a promising one, glowing and yet mild, just as wounds burn before they scar over for good. 

 

     The first-person narrator of “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (“Brief einer Unbekannten”) has dedicated her entire life since the age of thirteen to her passion for a writer, though he is never really aware of her existence.  She says “I will tell you my whole life, that truly began only on the day that I came to know you.” [5]  She even bears him a child that dies as she does as well, without his ever recognizing her.  She describes her passion as dominating her entirely, “hopeless, servile, submissive,” and as “slavish, dog-like, and devoted.” [6]  Clearly she suffers from what an observer would call an obsessive, abnormal fixation, yet to her it is altogether inevitable and even the writer, for whom she has not existed until she had died, seems in the end to accept the love-offering. 

 

He could feel a death and an immortal love.  Something broke internally in his soul and he thought of that invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate like music in the distance. [7]

 

     In each of these stories someone is driven by overpowering emotion to a desperate state of mind.  In most cases the impetus is sexual, though the chess player responding to unjust imprisonment is an exception. [8]  For Zweig civilization and rationality are shallow and deceptive and the ego is in the last analysis impotent, unable to control the passions.  In the past Zweig was once very highly thought of, particularly toward the end of his lifetime (though a rediscovery has occurred in recent years on a small scale), but he has always had his critics.  A reviewer finds him “fake” and “stiltedly extreme,” a “schematic grand guignol.”  The author himself admits to a “preference . . . for intense, intemperate characters.” [9]  Perhaps the reader must have at least glimpsed a life out of control to realize that the irrational is as central to our minds’ operation as what we generally consider to be logic, and for the most part more so.  Zweig’s artful prose describes the psychic disorder that can an any moment overcome even those who seem the most sensible and proper among us.  The author’s suicide during World War II suggests that the danger of such mental storms does not belong to fiction alone.

 

 

1.  “In Alles was ich schreibe ist von Ihnen beeindruckt und vielleicht spȗren Sie, dass der Mut zur Wahrhaftigkeit, der möglicherweise das Wesentliche meiner Bücher ist, von  Ihnen stammt: Sie haben ein ganzen Generation ein Vorbild gegeben.”

2.  “Sie sind immer geladen mit Leidenschaft, aber nicht der des Liebenden, sondern der des Spielers, der kalten, berechnenden und gefährlichen.”

3.  “Although he was not lacking in inner resources, he had an entirely sociable nature, and his nature was entirely sociable for which he was well-liked and his inability to be alone was well-known.”  (“Er war, obwohl innerer Befähigung nicht entbehrend, eine durchaus gesellschaftliche Natur, als solche beliebt, in allen Kreisen gern gesehen und sich seiner Unfähigkeit zur Einsamkeit voll bewußt.”)

4.  “Deutlich erkannte sie die Stimme des Knaben und spürte erstaunt zum erstenmal, wie sehr sie der seines Vaters glich. Leise flog ein Lächeln auf ihre Lippen und rastete dort still. Mit geschlossenen Augen lag sie, um all dies tiefer zu genießen, was ihr Leben war und nun auch ihr Glück. Innen tat noch leise etwas weh, aber es war ein verheißender Schmerz, glühend und doch lind, so wie Wunden brennen, ehe sie für immer vernarben wollen.”

 5.  “Mein ganzes Leben will ich Dir verraten, dies Leben, das wahrhaft erst begann mit dem Tage, da ich Dich kannte.”

 6.  “Hoffnungslos, so dienend, so unterwürfig,” and “sklavisch, so hündisch, so hingebungsvoll geliebt.”

 7.  “Er spürte einen Tod und spürte unsterbliche Liebe: innen brach etwas auf in seiner Seele, und er dachte an die Unsichtbare körperlos und leidenschaftlich wie an eine ferne Musik.”

8.  The doctor in “The Man who Ran Amok” originally acts out of pride, but many readers, especially those inclined toward Freud, will see eros in the immediate background.

9.  Michael Hofmann “Vermicular Dither,” London Review of Books XXXII:2  (28 January, 2010). 

Rereading the Classics [Kleist]

Kleist’s drama is also rewarding but not nearly as immediately entertaining as the stories. I hope to treat his plays in a future post.


Kleist is the great narrator of self-consciousness. His essay “On the Puppet Theater” suggests that, since the Fall, humans are at something of a loss, having lost the absolute rightness of animals [1] without gaining in compensation the omniscience of the divine. Though the opinions are given with ironic distance through the persons of a dialogue, the author seems in fact to have felt Angst bordering on despair until his death in a suicide pact with Henriette Vogel in 1811 when the writer was thirty-four. Some biographers say the poet came to the conviction that life was not worth living based on his reading of Kant which left him a helpless skeptic. Others have made a good deal of what might reasonably be taken to be partially repressed homosexuality and his close relationship with his cross-dressing half-sister Ulrike. His existential sensibility, though, was doubtless natural to him, of a piece with his Poe-like interest in the Gothic and his fiercely painful sense of irony.

The form of the Novelle is most appropriate for Kleist’s imagination. In a phrase often used to characterize the form, Goethe said that the Novelle should detail a “strange, unheard-of experience.” [2] With this license as well as the era’s taste for the supernatural, Kleist could compose with a very free hand, and he excelled at plotting. Of course, most of the world’s stories have been told with little regard for verisimilitude. Folk tales, fables, allegories, parables, Longus, the Legenda Aurea, Boccaccio, Margaret of Navarre, through the great German Novelle of the nineteenth century, none had much concern with direct representation of everyday events.

Given the freedom allowed by the form, Kleist proceeded to bend circumstance beyond coincidence into paradox. “The Marquise of O--” opens with a bizarre notion: a high-minded and aristocratic lady is advertising publicly to find who might be the father of her baby. No sooner has the reader swallowed this notion then the narration is suddenly swept up in the madness of war with flames, explosions, and soldiers bent on rape. The story works out at somewhat greater length than strict economy might suggest and, at the end, just when the neat denouement is imminent, the Marquise rejects her reappeared lover, This proves a mere hiccup as she accepts him eventually, but the reader wonders what further oscillations might occur beyond the tale’s horizon.

In “The Duel” the innocent Littegarde similarly finds herself unjustly maligned; even the divine verdict seems to have condemned her. She suffers the moral equivalent of Job’s afflictions, appearing guilty without having sinned.
Michael Kohlhaas, hero of what is doubtless Kleist’s best-known story, was, the reader learns at the outset, “one of the most upright and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day” which sounds a bit like what one might have said of Old John Brown of Osawatamie. Philosophically, the principled horse-dealer enacts the disaster of idealism. His refusal to accommodate to the gravely flawed institutions of his day leads inevitably to his death. Still, his integrity remains a powerful statement both of the inevitably “failed” society around us and of the all-but-foolhardy rectitude of those who challenge it. Who will not cheer when Kohlhaas issues manifestos from the provisional Capital of the World? But who would join him?

In Kleist’s world (as indeed in all times) the wheel of fortune can turn exceedingly swiftly. The students in “Cecilia” change in a moment from light-hearted though anti-clerical to morbidly serious and pious. In “The Foundling” a kindly act leads to destruction as the most benevolent of men is drawn by circumstance into gradual brutalization until he actually embraces hell. In “The Earthquake in Chile” the dramatic noose is pulled tight from the very start. Love brings tyranny; love’s persistence brings a couple of death penalties. The lovers are miraculously saved, though thousands of other lives are lost in the process. Finally, their victory proves illusory, or at any rate temporary, and they are killed by a post-apocalyptic mob among the city’s ruins, a mob that fancies itself doing God’s work by killing a pair of lovers.

“The Beggarwoman of Locarno” is a simple little karmic haunt, illustrating how what dangers threaten the soul of the proprietor of a wealthy estate. Its primary appeal is Poe-like, a pure relish for the creepy.

Kafka thought so highly of Kleist that he described his predecessor as a “blood-relation.” In a rare public performance, he chose to read aloud from “Michael Kohlhaas.” The earlier writer’s influence, in both world-view and narrative style, led Oskar Walzel, in an early review of “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”) and “Die Heizer” (“The Stoker”), to find “etwas Kleistisches.” [3] Though Kleist may have thought himself the loser in his contention with an Olympian Goethe, he now seems prescient, like Byron a Romantic existentialist. Kleist’s essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking” anticipates the concept of the unconscious, recognizes the strength of the irrational, and portrays language as a tool for the discovery of knowledge but as one which is always to some extent inadequate.

The space between readings is politically evident. Kleist’s military service, described as the result of family coercion by most biographers, seemed exemplary to the Nazis. The playwright’s characters who might be today considered Existentialist “men of action” in an absurd world struck the Third Reich as admirably nationalistic. After a performance of The Prince of Homburg Goebbels said of him “What a man!” [4] In some respects a mirror image of this distortion was provided by East German critics who, primarily because of “Michael Kohlhaas” made him a proto-socialist. In fact Kleist adopted the progressive politics of most Romantics. For instance, he applauded the French Revolution, considering it a beneficial if insufficient opening toward liberation.

His rhetoric is consistent with the carnival ride of his plotting. Kleist took full advantage of the ability of his German language, just when a sentence may seem to be coming to a natural conclusion, to throw off new clauses with dependent phrases hanging in clusters, yet, realizing that all effects are heightened by contrast, he also employed the barest paratactic annal-like phrases to convey his hairpin narrative turns. His stories resemble folk narrative in their dependence on incident and the deadpan lack of affect. The reader is virtually never told what goes on in a character’s mind yet there is never any doubt.

For all his apparent sensationalism and singularity, all his neuroses and depression, indeed, to a large extent because of these characteristics, he portrayed a world recognizable to most of us in the twenty-first century.



1. The speaker tells a marvelous story, worthy of Zhuangzi, of a fencer’s duel with a bear whose unerring responses never fail to block the human’s artfully cultivated moves.

2. In one of the conversations with Eckermann. The German phrase is a “seltsamen, unerhörten Ereignis.”

3. Walzel found “something Kleist-like.” "The Stoker” is the opening chapter of the unfinished novel Amerika.

4. In fact, two twentieth century members of his family, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin and his son, though still maintaining the military tradition, participated in plots to assassinate Hitler.

Lu Xun

I wrote this piece about thirty-five years ago for what could, I think, properly be called an ultra-left publication, though I suppose I knew that my style was too individualistic to fit well there. Lu remains worth reading. Julia Lovell's translation of Ah Q published by Penguin Classics is markedly better than the old Foreign Languages Press version and is, of course, more widely available.

     Now that the fantasy of people’s rock and roll has faded around the bend following folk music, and religious hypocrites seem to have cornered all the tribal rituals but football, where is people’s culture? Old anthologies of socialist poetry tend to seem like Alfred Lord Tennyson in his cups, and the new Chinese opera sounds rather like Russian movie sound tracks imitating Hollywood. Such vestigial fingerlings of outworn style are short-lived, lasting only until the artists’ cadences are redefined to fit the next new scene. As in any evolutionary process, the first shoots of new growth are peculiarly instructive. Anyone looking for new ways of reading or writing literature can learn from Lu Xun (Hsun before the days of pin-yin) whom Mao called “the bravest and most correct on the cultural front.”
     The pattern of his life is significant and familiar, almost an archetype of growth: born in 1881 with semi-genteel village origins (though he was later mythologized as dirt-poor) he had wide interests and liberal ambitions and set out to study of Western medicine in imperial Japan. He turned then to the reformist avant-garde literary work ending in breakdown, anomie, and solipsism resolved finally in communist rebirth. His youthful affinities with the “progressive” West are reflected in the early stories’ reminiscences of Chekhov, Gogol, and Joyce, but these associations wither as the depth of his involvement with his own village and its people deepens and grows profound.
     His story “A Madman’s Diary” is a fancy dress paranoid terror trip that would be existential were it more trivial. But listen! This paranoid’s delusions are true. He describes a world of people set on devouring one another. Right now, out in the street, he sees the tell-tale glow in their eyes, the predatory gleam and the answering fear. And it’s true. We all see that look daily. The Internationale asks, “how many on our flesh have fattened?” As a surreal image of Angst it couldn’t have gotten much further than Night of the Living Dead done with class, but fleshed out in the real world it’s a frightening vision of individualist economics and all the psychological corollaries ride along gratuit. The most frightening phantoms are the real ones.
     The central character in “The True Story of Ah Q” is one of the most brutalized of village street people. At first the story struck me as similar to Cossery or the Bowles/Muhammed Mrabat tales (and see their new piece “Hadidan Aharam” for a startling apocalypse of the social order in blood), but it soon develops to a new pitch of implications under the uncompromising pressure of Lu’s social analysis. The picaresque adventures of this beggarly lumpen are detailed now humorously, now poignantly, while social upheaval rumbles in the background like far-off thunder. The revolution, it seems, reached Ah Q’s time and place in grotesquely distorted disguises, so, apart from the wry commentaries on the shapes, it takes little direct role in the plot. The people are not aware of their possibilities, but it isn’t very long before the reader realizes with a shock that those grotesques have portrayed the old order with such burning accuracy that a portion of Ah Q’s experience has become one’s own. Just as the relations of the lowest, most wretched of the townspeople present only a naked parody of the voracious thievery and genteel violence going on over their heads, so the revolution itself enters only in motley.
     For the moment, Ah Q, with a fragmentary glimpse of revolutionary potential can imagine only revenge and role reversal. A larval revolutionary, he sets himself up to be killed like a real one, taking a rap for the town gentry who have installed themselves as the new “communist” regime. He dies under the voracious wolf-like eyes of his fellow townspeople who can’t yet distinguish their comrades and friends from their natural enemies.
     These and sixteen other stories, all revealing and suggestive, are included in the Selected Stories in a smooth enough translation from Beijing for something like $1.50. Read them, think about them, write a story of your own. The Bicentennial would be an appropriate time for some new flashes of American culture.
     Lu Xun did not limit himself to the Zhdanov brand of “socialist realism.” His Old Tales Retold tropes on Chinese traditional lore from mythology and history in an unpredictable variety of ways: some are delivered straight; others are turned inside out or slyly rapiered in close embrace. Another good cheap book. And should you wish to explore the whole field of Chinese fiction which was, from its origins, antagonistic to the court and scorned by the scholars, you might have a look at Lu’s history of the genre, so far as I know, the only such work available in English.