In search of the meaning of writing: A study of modern Chinese diary fiction.

Abstract

The current study is a critical exploration into the unique ways in which diary fiction from the May Fourth period participated in the ideological structuring of the modern Chinese consciousness. This critical project is carried out through close readings of selected representative texts, focusing on the way they interrogate various kinetic relationships between the fictive diarist's life and his diary writing, and through which certain ideological assumptions about the self and society are promoted. First, in metanarrative diary fiction, writing is dramatized as a failing mirror that cannot integrate the underlying chaos of the self. Accordingly, the efficacy of writing is repeatedly questioned and discredited, and the writing self is abandoned to an incurable solipsis. On the other hand, based upon an implicit faith in a sustained relation of mimesis between text and reality whereby the diary documents a knowable reality, expressive diary fiction can be further divided into transformative and static types, depending on whether the diary writing engages the diarist in such a way that she manages to break out into the objective world, or remains encased in the private world of her ego. Finally, transcendental diary fiction pursues writing as a means for engendering dialogical relationships among people who are split in terms of gender, class, and other social denominations. All four types of modern Chinese diary fiction register a metaphysical impetus toward social re-integration through self-discovery, but in the dramatic world of Chinese diary fiction, self-discovery in its genuine meaning occurs only when the diarist gets out of his self-cloistered mentality and defines himself according to the communal context that he has awakened to. Originally initiated as a novelistic means to conceptualize individual freedom of an unreserved kind, modern Chinese diary fiction ended up promoting a holistic perspective that emphasizes the functioning of the individual in society as a means of identifying the self; the ego is not something separate and to be preserved for its own sake but finds its true meaning and home through expansion into the communal setting.