This essay explores a novel by Liu Ta-jen which interweaves the political themes of exile and betrayal with the psychological themes of madness. The recurring image of the cuckoo is tied to the sad legend of King Tu Yu’s dethronement; the motif of madness and cannibalism link this story to Lu Hsün’s “Diary of a Madman,” which exposes the hypocrisy of traditional China where the strong feel morally justified in “butchering” the weak. Thus this novel’s climactic scene, in which the crazed Comrade Feng devours the heart of Lo To-ch’ang, is “merely one more episode in a long tradition of socially sanctioned cannibalism.” It seems then that no one is “immune to the barbarism that seems always to lurk behind the facade of civilized Chinese society.”

The fact that Lu Hsün rarely discussed his fictional writings in his essays leads to the possibility that he might have actually made comments on some of his own fiction through fiction. A study of his repeated appropriation of the same narrative pattern in his short stories may indicate that in “The New Year Sacrifice” of the second collection he is most probably parodying some aspects of “My Old Home”’ in the first collection. Both stories are narrated by “an in-between intellectual” and both treat his confrontation with peasants and the harsh realities of rural life. However, if in “My Old Home” we can still find a faint glimmer of hope in the ability of the Chinese intellectuals to improve society, in “New Year Sacrifice” Lu Hsün shows a profound awareness not only of their impotence to effect real change but also of their moral inadequacy to assume such great social responsibility. This paradox effect is achieved mainly through the use of “ironic epiphany” in “New Year Sacrifice” and other stories in the second collection as against the “distortion” device used at the end of some of the first collection stories including ‘My Old Home.” But writing fiction for Lu Hsün was also an agonizing process of self-scrutiny. The shifting of moral emphasis in the second collection also indicates the author’s growing tendency to turn inward. Rewriting a previous story from a parodic perspective then, could be for him another way to understand himself better in his prolonged confrontation with the traditional intellectual dilemma of social responsibility and moral failure.

This essay discusses the Chinese literary femme fatale, the seductive woman who, in the folk tradition changed into animal form, captures her human lover’s power and life. The earliest femme fatale texts were dynastic histories and chih-kuai, short narratives compiled in the 3rd to 6th centuries. Although later, during the T’ang Dynasty, a consciously fictional narrative art developed, the most destructive femmes fatale appear in the earlier histories and chih-kuai texts—that is, in narrative contexts of belief. The extent to which the image of the femme fatale is informed by actual belief marks the extent to which such behavior is described as an actual threat to social stability. Thus the strategy here is to explore the connection between narrative art and its social context by looking at the assigned truth-value of these “belief tales.”

This essay attempts to use theories of psychoanalysis to analyze some dream narratives in the Chinese vernacular novel, Feng Meng-lungs San Yen in the late-Ming period. As the author points out, a popular model of dream romances as a paradigm in popular fiction during this period is called “gifted scholars and beautiful ladies.” Worthy of our special notice for these dream narratives is that the beautiful ladies are usually courtesans who express their hidden love wish to the scholars they lovethrough the dream as a framework in the story. Ina sense, the dream narratives in San Yen are used to reflect the courtesans’ longing for love and their hope for normal marriage. A careful reading of these stories reveals another perspective of the courtesans, completely different from the stereotype, in the fact that they seek intellectual understanding rather than sexual fulfillment, and sincere sentiments instead of money.

An intertextual study of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, an Italian opera written in 1904 and David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, a Broadway hit in 1988, reveals very interestingly a “cross-cultural and cross-generic reinterpretation” by the latter of the Western fantasy of a submissive and vulnerable Orient as feminine. According to the author, Hwang’s recasting the Japanese geisha into a female impersonator in a Peking opera usually played by a man and thus changing ironically the American sailor into a homosexual French diplomat highlights the central theme of East/Western androgyny motif in the play. The author argues that by the reinterpretation, the Western fantasy and racism are exposed to ridicule and satire while at the same time the Western superiority is transgressed and subverted in the revelation of homosexuality.

This is the first of two essays arguing that the logicians Kung-sun Lung and Hui Shih are more subtle and complex than they appear to be in the text of the Chuang-tzu. Here I look at the traditional “Platonic realist? interpretation and Graham’s “nominalist” reading of Kung-sun Lung’s Chih Wu Lun. The former takes the chih-pointers as universals which, naming things in the world, themselves subsist outside the world, unnamed and perhaps ungrounded, vulnerable to an infinite regress of signifying metalanguages. (I compare Kung-sun Lung’s picture here with Plato’s reflection on formthing relationships in the later dialogues.) Graham on the other hand takes Kung-sun Lung’s central dilemma to be that when we try to point out the “world” (totality of things) we can’t point out any-“thing” at all and thus can’t point, can’t “mean.” My conclusion is that this text whose first line announces “Meaning is not meaning” has finally no single, determinate sense: rather it is pervaded by the self-difference of meaning (language). No one interpretation could be unequivocally true or exhaustive, since the “logician” Kung-sun Lung is playfully undermining the ground of univocal meaning.