Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays

Famous though he is in China, Qian remains a relatively unknown writer in the English-speaking world, even though his acclaimed novel Fortress Besieged has been available in translation for thirty years. This neglect is due in part to the inaccessibility of the rest of Qian’s creative oeuvre, only fragments of which have been published. Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts is thus intended to afford readers a more comprehensive portrait of this remarkable writer by bringing together translations of his early works. Since detailed overviews of Qian’s life and works are already available in English, and since his early works have received little critical attention compared with Fortress Besieged and Limited Views, in this introduction I focus on the literary significance of the works contained in this volume.³

In September 1938, Qian Zhongshu boarded the French steamer Athos II bound for China with his wife and daughter after three years of literary studies in Oxford and Paris. The Second Sino-Japanese War, now in its second year, had forcibly displaced many of China’s schools of higher education, particularly those north of the Yangtze River. Three of China’s top universities—Beijing, Qinghua, and Nankai—joined to form a new institution, Southwestern United University, and established a campus in Changsha, Hunan province. War pressures soon forced the school to relocate to Kunming, in the southwestern province of Yunnan. Qian, a Qinghua graduate, had been recruited that summer to teach in Southwestern United’s Department of Foreign Languages, which he did from shortly after he landed in Hong Kong in October through the summer of 1939. During this time, he published a series of four essays in the Kunming literary journal Criticism Today (Jinri pinglun

) under the heading “Cold Room Jottings” (Lengwu suibi

). That summer, he rejoined his wife, Yang Jiang

(b. 1911), who, with their daughter, had continued on the boat to Shanghai. A few months later, he departed again for the interior, this time to Lantian National Teacher’s College, in the remote town of Baoqing, Hunan province, at the behest of his ailing father, who was on the faculty. During their separation, Yang collected ten of Qian’s recent short works—one short story and nine essays—into a book she entitled Written in the Margins of Life. Qian wrote a preface to the collection, dated February 1939, which suggests that he had completed all ten pieces by then, but the volume was not published (by Shanghai’s Kaiming shudian) until December 1941.⁴ By that time, Qian had returned to Shanghai, now under complete Japanese occupation, where he stayed with Yang and their daughter through the end of the war.

Poshek Fu has characterized the moral environment in occupied Shanghai as presenting intellectuals like Qian and Yang a choice between passivity, resistance, and collaboration.⁵ Qian Zhongshu’s wartime activities would seem to place him within the first of these categories, as he largely eschewed wartime politics and focused on his own scholarly and creative works. This time of financial hardship and political peril turned out to be an extremely productive one for Qian. While teaching at the French Catholic Aurora Women’s College in the French Concession, he continued work on a book of literary criticism that he had begun while teaching in the interior, Discourses on Art (Tan yi lu

, 1948). He also wrote four pieces of short fiction, which were published after the war as Human, Beast, Ghost.⁶ (I translate the title of the story collection in the singular, for reasons explained later.) Yang Jiang’s success in Shanghai as a commercial playwright in 1943 is said to have inspired Qian to undertake his most ambitious creative project, Fortress Besieged, subsequently recognized as one of modern China’s greatest novels.⁷ Fortress, which took Qian two years to complete, was serialized for one year in the Shanghai literary magazine Literary Renaissance (Wenyi fuxing

), beginning in February 1946, and published as a single volume in May 1947. In 1948, as the tide of the civil war was shifting in the Communists’ favor, Qian reportedly turned down job offers from Oxford, Taiwan University, and the University of Hong Kong to remain in China.⁸ A partially completed second novel, The Heart of the Artichoke (Le Coeur d’artichaut [Baihe xin ]), begun after the war, was lost in transit when Qian moved to Beijing to take up a position in Qinghua University’s Department of Foreign Languages in 1949. He was thirty-nine.

The authorial persona that emerges from Qian’s small body of pre-Fortress works is that of an intellectual aristocrat—an inheritor of a traditional Chinese scholarly legacy who has masterfully conjoined it with the vast territory of Western letters. These early writings are larded with an astonishing range of literary allusions and cultural references and—with the exception of the story “Souvenir” (Jinian

)—written in an aloof, satirical style that reserves particular contempt for fellow intellectuals. Edward Gunn has characterized Qian’s cutting satire, pessimistic remarks about humanity, and antihero protagonists as typifying an “antiromantic” trend in the literature of wartime Shanghai, which eschewed themes of self-realization for “individual failures caused by self-deception.”⁹ At the same time, Qian’s early works seem less concerned with probing the individual psyche than with using individuals or “types” as focal points for linguistic play. Written in the Margins of Life and Human, Beast, Ghost offer a number of insights into Qian Zhongshu’s worldview and literary style. I highlight three here.

In these writing we encounter a temperament, vision, and expressive capacity that are decidedly cosmopolitan. Qian returns again and again to the seemingly narrow topics of literary and critical practice, but the scope of his inquiry is anything but provincial, as it targets the modes of perception that shape human experience. Unlike many of his contemporaries who used their familiarity with multiple languages and cultural traditions to reify the boundary between East and West and play one off against the other in dualistic fashion, Qian’s writings created a multidimensional field in which languages and ideas interact in unexpected ways.

This phenomenon is most readily apparent in the stunning range of literary and cultural references that was to become a hallmark of Qian’s discursive style. In the essay “On Happiness,” for instance, the prophet Solomon, Stéphane Mallarmé, Su Dongpo, Wang Danlu, Novalis, Georges Rodenbach, and B. H. Brockes rub shoulders within the space of a paragraph. While such ostentatious displays of learning have dazzled many readers, they have also irritated others who have been unable to see past their superficial showiness. Qian would have been heartily amused, for instance, by a Western missionary’s guide to modern Chinese literature published in 1948, in which the exasperated reviewer of Fortress Besieged complains that “the author cannot refrain from being pedantic i.e. giving unnecessary and irrelevant foreign slogans and maxims (German, Spanish, French, Italian, etc.), a fact which repels most readers. Anybody could have done that by referring to a dictionary.”¹⁰ In fact, Qian’s comparisons are neither facile nor pointless, though they are certainly numerous.

These literary and cultural allusions deserve comment because in Qian’s early works their onslaught is even more fast and furious. Besides showing off his much-remarked-on erudition, however, Qian’s juxtaposition of ideas that may have no previous genealogical link also opens up an arena of contesting ideas without presupposing the superiority of one over another on account of its origins. This is an early iteration of Qian’s unique brand of comparative literature—the close integration of literary and critical practice that defined his style as a creative writer and underpinned the structure of Limited Views. This literary approach seems to meld the traditional Chinese commentarial practice of juxtaposing relevant texts sans explanatory “connective tissue” with the spontaneity and contemplativeness of the “baroque style” of seventeenth-century European literature.¹¹ The result of this combination is particularly notable for two reasons. First, its intellectual egalitarianism was (and is) a rare thing in a Chinese literary field hampered by polar political tendencies to either elevate or denigrate the foreign. Second, it challenges both Chinese and non-Chinese writers and comparatists to be competent in many languages and cultures. Qian did not just bring foreign ideas into China but also created a literary practice whose range remains unmatched by writers working only in European languages.

In Margins and Human, Qian also expresses cosmopolitanism negatively by repeatedly castigating humans for their narrowness of vision. Qian saw this as a particular occupational hazard for the man of letters. In “Explaining Literary Blindness,” he compares the worldview of linguists and philologists to “Gulliver in Brobdingnag gazing up at the jade-white bosom of the empress and seeing her hair follicles but not her skin,” and to a fly “flying from one pinch of garbage to another” unaware of any world other than what it can see out of its tiny eye sockets. In “God’s Dream,” God’s authorial vanity blinds him to the true nature of his creations, man and woman, who soon turn against him. In “Inspiration,” a Swedish specialist in Chinese phonology refuses to interpret the meaning of a Chinese novel (translated into Esperanto) for his fellow Nobel Literature Prize committee members, telling them that “your inquiry just now lies in the area of Chinese semantics, which is quite outside my field of specialization. Whether the Chinese language contains meaning is a topic I should not blindly pass judgment on before I have obtained unimpeachable evidence.” Deferring his colleagues’ praise about his scholarly circumspection, the Sinologist “insist[s] that he was nowhere close to the [Nobel-winning] American ophthalmologist . . . [who] specialized only in the left eye, and did not treat any malfunction of the right.” Qian later revived this theme in a self-deprecating sense by titling his critical masterwork Limited Views.

The use of multiple similes to convey a single idea is a technique philosophers use in an attempt to prevent the reader from becoming fixated on a particular analogy and clinging to it rather than the idea. . . . A quick give-and-take enlivens the mind. When analogies and illustrations are presented en masse, each vying to be the most apt or alluring, the insights keep shifting and according themselves to different vehicles. In this way, each analogy gives way to the next and none lingers, the writing flows and does not dwell on a single notion, and the thought penetrates to all aspects of the subject and does not guard a single corner.¹²

This observation alerts us to a tension in Qian’s prose between the multidirectional nature of figurative language and the singular truth posited by realism. Qian’s further observation, made during a discussion about poetry, that “the abundant use of imagery and similes . . . is cumulative and convergent”¹³ also aptly describes both his essays and his fiction. The extreme interpretation of Qian’s language play would be that he was a postmodern writer whose relativist treatment of languages and ideas created a realm of floating signifiers.¹⁴ Yet Qian at most skirted the bounds of the postmodern, because in playing with language’s malleability he reaffirmed its value. However tenuous the link between signifier and signified, Qian appreciated that words have meaning and impact.

Qian’s insistence on maintaining a critical breadth of vision testifies to his independence as a thinker, particularly his detachment from the intellectual and political imperatives of his day. Qian claims in the preface to Margins (discussed in the following section) that his book is simply a projection of individual sensibility, but we can nevertheless take “Cold Room Jottings,” the title of the series in which four Margins essays first appeared, as indicating not just the frigidness of Qian’s accommodations in wartime Kunming but also the critical ideal of dispassionate appraisal, which Qian believed could be best realized from a “marginal” position.¹⁵ One of the hallmarks of the human, Qian argues in “Explaining Literary Blindness,” is humans’ possession of a “trans-subjective point of view”: the ability “to divorce questions of right and wrong, authenticity and falsity from their own personal gain and loss, and separate questions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness from their individual likes and dislikes.” Indeed, the self-possession that allowed him to complete these creative works during the material deprivations and political pressures of World War II may well have later helped him filter out the distractions of the Mao years to complete his monumental reappraisal of the Chinese literary canon.

Another insight into Qian’s attitude toward literary-critical practice can be found in the innocuous preface to Written in the Margins of Life. Positing life as “one big book,” Qian proceeds to outline his view of how the book of life should be “read.” Distancing himself from the establishment (“book critic”) and its claims to authority, he celebrates the subjectivity of the individual response—the exclamation mark in the margins, the scribble between the lines. In doing so, Qian asserts his right to engage with his subject on his own terms without having to fit his thoughts and insights into a coherent grand narrative. He argues for the primacy of the discrete observation, waving aside the presumption that a critic must be consistent or systematic in his criticism.¹⁶ The studiedly casual, even tongue-in-cheek, tone belies the great degree to which this critical philosophy influenced Qian’s life and works.

Above all, it is a manifesto for independence. Reading emancipates new ideas, which are more easily attained and savored at a pace of leisurely browsing. While putting the world between two covers, as it were, Qian’s bookish metaphor implies that life’s inconsistencies and contradictions cannot be interpreted through a single idea. “Life-as-book” treats criticism of both life and literature as an ongoing dialogue, in which marginal scribblings expand the boundaries of the text itself. Furthermore, the metaphor advocates a mind-set open to free, wide-ranging language play. The posture invites the reader to lower his guard, to accept paradox and incongruity, and to join in the fun. As Qian tries to convince us at the end of “On Happiness,” “contradictions are the price of wisdom.”

The title theme of Margins was an enduring refrain in the careers of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang alike. The title Written in the Margins of Life was first proposed by Yang, herself a noted dramatist, translator, short-story writer, novelist, and memoirist. Half a century later, when the publishing house Sanlian was preparing to issue The Qian Zhongshu Collection, she revived this theme by grouping many of Qian’s other published essays under the title In the Margins of the Margins of Life (Rensheng bianshang de bianshang

). In 2007, at age ninety-six, Yang published a book of reflections on death and the afterlife under the title Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions (Zou dao rensheng bianshang: Zi wen zi da

). The title phrase, she wrote in her preface, had stuck in her mind and inspired her to write down her own answers to the questions that no one else could answer for her.

As much as he acquainted himself with the ideas of others, Qian Zhongshu, like Yang, searched for his own answers to life’s big questions. In his personal life, as in his writing, Qian never courted popularity. During his years working for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, according to Yang’s memoir, We Three (Women sa

, 2003), Qian attended the meetings he was obliged to attend but otherwise kept his head down and focused on his scholarship. He and Yang insisted that they “did not run with the herd” (bu hequn

) and in later years publicly avowed hermitage to ward off the well-wishers who only interrupted their reading regimen. In one instance, Qian is said to have brushed off an interview request with the line, “If you enjoy eating an egg, why bother to seek out the hen that laid it?” Self-marginalization afforded Qian the mental space to indulge his personal interests, which lay primarily in the realm of ideas. This is to say that Qian chose to pursue knowledge in the open field of literature rather than in the relatively closed society in which he lived many of his adult years. Whether or not his chosen isolation might have limited his cosmopolitan vision in any way, Qian’s inward turn indicates that he refused to be psychologically constrained by either the place or the time he happened to inhabit.

The essays and stories in this volume are propelled by a current of laughter. Fans of Fortress Besieged will find here a similarly dense concentration of inspired aphorisms, witticisms, similes, and wordplay. The very title of Qian’s short-story collection Human, Beast, Ghost, for instance, is something of a word game. On the surface, the title simply groups the stories’ protagonists into three categories. “God’s Dream” features a divine being who becomes disappointed with his human creations and eventually hastens their deaths. Darkie, the title feline in “Cat,” slinks into and out of the narrative of the longest story in the collection. The Writer, the protagonist in “Inspiration,” turns himself into a ghost through inadvertent authorial suicide and descends to Hell to face judgment before King Yama, only to pull off an unexpected reincarnation. In “Souvenir,” a pilot is martyred in battle after an affair with a lonely housewife, leaving her carrying his child. These stories exhibit a recurring focus on life, death, transmigration, and resurrection—in other words, of movement among these three categories.

Yet the title can also be interpreted as Qian’s conflating or blurring the lines between these three categories. The God in “God’s Dream” turns out to be all too human—even prehumanly infantile—while Aimo, in “Cat,” is repeatedly likened to her pet. Qian may be implying that each of us is part human, beast, and ghost. Or, given the contempt for evolutionist thought on display in “God’s Dream,” “Reading Aesop’s Fables,” and “On Moral Instruction,” “human, beast, ghost” may indeed posit mankind’s devolution. In Qian’s writings, we come to expect and enjoy such ambiguities. At the same time, the author alerts us that we are always on the cusp of falling prey to an authorial joke.

As this example suggests, Qian enjoys provoking laughter and reflection through playing with linguistic form. His familiar essays, for instance, frequently employ the structural device of contrasting necessity with surplus. In “Windows,” the second piece in Margins, Qian writes, “For a room’s inhabitant a door is a necessity, while a window is to some extent a luxury.” In “On Laughter” he points out that “if we hold that laughter is an expression of humor, then laughter must be regarded as nothing more than a waste product or luxury good, since not all of mankind has a need to laugh.” The loaded word “luxury” purposely misleads the reader to anticipate a moralizing attack on extravagance, but in fact it serves as the prologue to a paean to the aesthetic joys of the surplus, what the philosopher Zhuangzi called the “usefulness of uselessness.”

Such inversions are a symptom of Qian’s playful contrarianism, which itself can be taken as a type of self-marginalization. Distorting logic and common sense, these facetious riffs parody solemn discourse. Authorities are cited out of context, and quotations are misapplied in incongruous settings. By turning common wisdom on its head, Qian deconstructs logic and then reconstructs it in a recognizable but self-contradictory form. In doing so, he reveals how linguistic rules can lead one astray. Applying the same logic to two categories as seemingly parallel as the age of a man and the age of mankind results in absurdities such as the following chain of assertions in “Reading Aesop’s Fables”:

Looking at history in its entirety, antiquity corresponds to mankind’s childhood. Man began in infancy and, through several thousand years of advancement, slowly reached the modern age. The more ancient the era, the shorter man’s history, while the later the era, the deeper his accumulated experience and the greater his age. Thus, we are actually our grandfathers’ elders and the Three Dynasties of high antiquity cannot match the modern age in long standing. Our faith in and fondness for ancient things consequently takes on new meaning. Perhaps our admiration for antiquity is not necessarily esteem for our forebears but merely delight in children; not respect for age but the flaunting of age.

Qian thus does not stop at simply pointing out language’s potential for engendering logical fallacies, but instead inverts and subverts linguistic forms to create them.

The critic C. T. Hsia once generously wrote that “to lampoon intellectuals is not Qian Zhongshu’s central creative concern: it is rather to unfold the perennial drama of ordinary human beings in desperation, vainly seeking escape or attachment.”¹⁷ We see this broader scope of vision at work in dramatizations such as the relationship between Aimo, Jianhou, and Yigu in “Cat.” It must be noted, however, that Qian was not above ad hominem attacks. Consider his fictional incarnation of Lin Yutang in the same story, which revolves around an imaginary upper-class social circle in Beiping. Even a partial excerpt gives a sense of the complexity of Qian’s caricatures:

The man leaning back on the sofa with his legs crossed, smoking, was Yuan Youchun. . . . He believed that China’s old civilization was best represented by playthings, petty cleverness, and hack entertainment writers. In this sense, his enterprise was much like the Boxers’ cause of “Supporting the Qing and Eliminating the Western:” he shelved high-minded Western religious theory and began to promote the style of intellectual hangers-on, such as Chen Meigong and Wang Baigu. Reading his writing always felt like eating a substitute—margarine on bread or MSG in soup. It was even closer to the “chop suey” served in overseas Chinese restaurants: only those who had never sampled authentic Chinese cuisine could be tricked into thinking it was a real taste of China. . . . His pipe was famous. He mentioned it frequently in his articles, saying that his inspiration derived entirely from smoking, the same way Li Bai’s poems were all the product of his drinking. Some suggested that he must be smoking not pipe tobacco but opium, since reading his articles made one yawn, as with the onset of a habitual craving, or want to sleep, as if one had taken an anesthetic. It was suggested that his works be sold not in bookstores but in drugstores as sleeping pills, since they were more effective than Luminal and Ortal but had no side effects.

Such “set pieces” are the mark of a particular encyclopedic mode of laughter known as Menippean satire, which derives its name from the Greek philosopher and Cynic Menippus. This classical European form differs from both plain satire and the novel in its intellectual orientation. Although definitions of the genre vary,¹⁸ its salient features include a mixture of prose genres, often with verse mixed in; an erudite demeanor combined with a taste for derision; play with paradox; and a penchant for heaping, list making, and other forms of accumulation. The distinction between the novelist and the Menippean satirist, according to Northrop Frye, is that the former “sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect.” As such, he “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.”¹⁹ Goals of the Menippean satirist are to expose the inadequacies in others’ thinking through dissection and analysis, and to demonstrate his own superior intellect. His most conspicuous technique is the repeated and exuberant display of learning.

Like many Menippean satirists, Qian operates not from a fixed position but within a fluid mode that makes him more difficult to pin down. W. Scott Blanchard writes that “the Menippean satirist—though nearly always an immensely learned author—poses uneasily between the role of sage and anti-intellectual iconoclast, a wise fool who is one of literature’s most endearing pests. His attitude is . . . ‘Mock away at system-makers.’”²⁰ Qian expresses his contempt for common sense parodically in mock encomia (a variety of Menippean satire) such as his praise of hypocrisy in “On Moral Instruction,” of luxury goods in “Windows,” and of hunger in “Eating,” and, conversely, the Devil’s endorsement of treaties over violence in “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu.” His mode is interrogative and dialogic, rather than purely expository, so that the reader’s happy insights may later be swept away,²¹ as with the Yuan Youchun profile, quoted earlier, which ends disingenuously: “All this, of course, was said by people who envied him, so naturally none of it could be taken seriously.”

The mode of Menippean laughter we see in these early works is one of the keys to the complexity, inconsistency, and comedy in Qian’s literary vision. It provides us with a framework for interpreting his reliance on allusion, frequent inclusion of nonnarrative elements, and mirth-making attitude. In the passage from “Cat” quoted earlier, for example, the issue of fidelity between the fictional character and the satirized person is buried in a pastiche of images, compound similes, political and literary allusions, and medicinal and gastronomic references. Lin Yutang appears less as a target than as a pretext for authorial self-exhibition. This inversion of priorities works against the traditional expectation of continuous narrative progression in fiction. Like the back story of the cultural entrepreneur in “Inspiration” or numerous other examples, the profile of Yuan Youchun subordinates narrative to an accumulation of jokes.

The translations in this volume are based on the 1983 Fujian renmin chubanshe editions of Written in the Margins of Life and Human, Beast, Ghost, the last versions to which Qian made substantial alterations. These editions are preferable to those contained in Beijing Sanlian shudian’s posthumously published The Qian Zhongshu Collection (Qian Zhongshu ji

, 2001 [hereafter referred to as the 2001 edition]) because the latter introduces a number of editorial errors but is otherwise not substantially different from the 1983 edition.²² The main text of this volume thus presents translations of the author’s final versions of his early works.

This book is designed to be at once accessible to the general reader and useful to the Qian Zhongshu scholar. Explanatory notes, often the bane of the literary translator, are absolutely essential for these works, which would otherwise be only partially comprehensible to any reader less familiar than the author with the Chinese and Western literary canons—that is to say, to all of us. To keep the main text uncluttered, however, the explanations of literary allusions; references to obscure people, places, and events; untranslatable plays on words; and the like are endnotes. Qian’s original footnotes to “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu” have been preserved. This volume also includes Qian’s prefaces to various editions of Margins and Human.

My main goal with Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts is to share a pleasurable read. A subsidiary goal (and for a smaller audience) is to demonstrate how edition research (banbenkao )—a seemingly dry scholarly practice rarely encountered outside premodern fields—can enhance the pleasure of reading modern works. In addition to providing glosses and commentaries, endnotes identify places where Qian Zhongshu made significant cuts, additions, or alterations to his works. Qian tinkered with these pieces several times during the nearly six decades between their initial publications and his death, in 1998, leaving the two slim volumes with a rather complex revision history.²³ I have been able to consult many, but not all, extant editions. “On Writers,” “Explaining Literary Blindness,” “A Prejudice,” and “On Laughter” were published individually, without titles, in the Kunming literary journal Criticism Today in 1939 before they were anthologized in Margins in 1941. “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Qian Zhongshu” is said to have first appeared in a literary supplement to Zhongyang ribao ,²⁴ although I have not seen this version. I have also been unable to consult the earliest editions of “Cat” and “Inspiration,” which were first published in the literary journals Wenyi fuxing

(Literary Renaissance 1, no. 1 [January 1, 1945]) and Xin yu (New Talk 1, nos. 1–2 [October 1945]), respectively. Subsequently, the collections have usually been published in their entirety, sometimes together.

Most of Qian’s revisions and self-edits are minor, and to mark all of them would result in thousands of additional notes that would be of limited use to most readers. In “Souvenir,” the least-altered story in Human, Beast, Ghost, for instance, I count more than 250 differences between the 1946 and 1983 editions alone. My two selection criteria for notes have been the length of the change (usually one or more sentences) and its materiality (that is, significant alteration of the meaning of a passage). Philip F. Williams completed the edition comparison for “On Writers,” one of the most heavily bowdlerized pieces in Margins. Typos, clarifications, and minor rephrasings I have left for true zealots to seek out on their own.

Many of these authorial interventions tighten the narrative flow of the original works by cutting out citations, allusions, and asides. All provide insight into how Qian regarded his own writings, constituting a type of self-critique. As much as Qian belittles his early works in his joint preface to the 1983 editions, he also tried to improve them. On the whole, Qian made minimal changes to his works between their first appearances in journals and their later collection in book form. (A list of editions is included in an appendix.) The most significant changes occur between the 1940s Kaiming editions (1941 for Margins and 1946 for Human) and the 1983 Fujian renmin editions, though I note some others as well. A few salient patterns of revision are worth discussing here.

In his joint preface to the 1983 Fujian editions, Qian, with characteristic understatement, claims to have “limit[ed] myself to only a few minor edits. As these books had pretty much already transformed into historical materials, I was not at liberty to make deletions and additions as I saw fit or to flat out rewrite them. But, as they were, after all, in my name, I still reserved some sovereign rights, so I took the liberty of making a few piecemeal cuts and minor enhancements.”

He never claimed to smoke pipe tobacco, but that was the only possible explanation for the color of his face. Not only did the black circles under his eyes seem to be the effect of smoke, but even their shape was like smoke, curling about and calling for deep thought. As for the dark redness of the tip of his nose, it could only be likened to that of steamed shrimps or crabs. Otherwise, we’d have to say that the black circles under his eyes were marks of libertinism or insomnia, and that his red nose was a sign of hard drinking or constipation. Malicious speculation of this sort would be dishonest, however, and would furthermore contain too many hypotheses to accord with the scientific method.

The elder Qian also excised numerous allusions that he felt were superfluous or redundant, effectively hiding the evidence for some of his claims. In the 1939 and 1941 editions of “On Laughter,” for instance, he had originally followed his memorable line that Germans are “a sausage-making people who mistakenly believe that humor is like ground meat and can be wrapped up into tidy parcels of ready-made spiritual nourishment” with a pair of concrete examples: “For instance, the preface to Jean Paul Richter’s [1763–1825] humorous novel Quintus Fixlein describes humor as an airtight, uniform worldview. Yet even the Germans appreciated that such a view would result in humor’s annihilation: a paper on German humor presented at the September 13, 1846, Literary Forum (Blatter fur Literarische Unterhalttung [sic]) long ago criticized Richter for going against common sense.” These lines disappear in the 1983 edition, and—from a literary point of view—for the better. The most extensive cuts of this sort are to “On Writers” and “Cat,” though no piece went untouched. Later versions of the stories and essays on the whole tend to be slightly shorter.

Qian also corrects mistakes. In the 1939 and 1941 editions of “On Laughter,” Qian identifies Rabelais as the first person to use laughter to distinguish man from beast, citing the latter’s well-known claim that “rire est le propre de l’homme” (laughter is man’s distinguishing feature). In the 1983 edition, he sets the clock on this insight back eighteen hundred years to Aristotle.

Qian’s “minor enhancements” also contain occasional surprises. In the 1983 edition of “On Writers,” for example, he inserts a line about Goethe’s refusing to “roar battle cries” from his study—a sardonic reference to Lu Xun’s

(1881–1936) short-story collection Roaring Battle Cries (Na han

, 1923). The revision is in line with the spirit of the essay as a whole, reiterating Qian’s point that writers make inflated claims about the power of their products. Although the specific target was by then long dead, the allusion is clearly a swipe at one of modern Chinese literature’s sacred cows.

These and many more of the self-revisions documented in this volume make for a richer reading experience, imbuing each text with an internal dialogue. They show us how Qian’s temperament and sensibilities changed over time, but perhaps more often reveal their constancy. If revision is an act of creation, these changes may indeed represent Qian’s last true “creative writings,” a set of artifacts worthy of further scholarly exploration. After all, Qian anticipated this authorial afterlife in 1941, remarking wryly in “Reading Aesop’s Fables” that “great writers who were unable to provide for themselves while alive will have a whole group of people living off them after they die, such as relatives and friends writing sentimental reminiscences”—adding, forty years later, “and critics and scholars writing research theses.”

With Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, the hope is to introduce Qian Zhongshu to new readers and, on the centenary of his birth, invite a broader reappraisal of an author who has often been hailed as a genius. Qian is very much a scholar’s writer, and it is no surprise that his manifest learning overawes literary enthusiasts. Critics’ tendency to put Qian on a pedestal was observed in the late 1970s by Theodore Huters, who cautioned: “The image being created of ‘leading man of letters’ and cultural giant, no matter how true, runs the danger of submerging that side of him that would have gleefully and pointedly lampooned such adulation had it happened to someone else.”²⁵ Indeed, in the story “Inspiration,” as elsewhere, Qian ruthlessly mocks the notion of genius by acclamation. His own opinions on the matter, however, have done nothing to undercut his ever-growing prestige.

In these early works, we see Qian making mistakes, recycling ideas,²⁶ and making repeated personal attacks on contemporaries such as Lin Yutang (or perhaps just the idea of Lin Yutang), with whom he may have had more in common than he cared to admit.²⁷ In the last regard, Qian may well have been influenced by the zawen polemics popularized by Lu Xun in the late 1920s and 1930s, which valued rhetoric over truth. These works brim with the competitiveness, and even sexual anxiety, of a young man. Qian’s harping on women’s vanity (in “God’s Dream,” “Cat,” and “Souvenir”), for instance, comes across less as democratic disgust for all hypocrisy and more as a personal prejudice against the female sex. (Notably, Qian cut a few unflattering comments about women from later editions.) In many cases, his attacks are a useful corrective that promotes tolerance; at other times, their ethos is the antithesis of live-and-let-live humanism. Qian, of course, never claimed to be a humanist, and he would point out that he anticipated charges of this sort in the preface to Margins, in which he allows that the “impressions” of a casual reader-writer like himself “may contradict one another or go overboard.” To critique Qian by the standards of present-day morality is a dangerous, and likely misguided, proposition.

Nevertheless, the mean-spiritedness that sometimes creeps into Qian’s prose is not easily dismissed as simply a man in his humor. Arch cynicism, which often accompanies Menippean satire, is not unlike the know-it-all pride that undoes the Creator in “God’s Dream,” and its pettiness somewhat limits the scope of Qian’s literary vision. Such criticisms notwithstanding, the best measure of Qian’s literary accomplishment, to me, is the rereadability of his works, which yield new insights and revelations with each perusal. As for Qian’s politics, the true significance of his extreme individualism emerges only when read against the conformist cultural imperatives of both the wartime period in which he wrote and the Mao years that followed. In a repressive environment, the engaged and freethinking individual, however cynical, offers vastly more than the run-of-the-mill writer who time and again falls back on cliché, common sense, and the party line. Qian was not a political dissident in the traditional sense, but his composure, self-assuredness, and creativity enabled him to pioneer a uniquely comic model of literary cosmopolitanism within a nationalistic and deadly serious cultural climate.

1. If we take “On ‘Vulgarity’” (Lun ‘suqi’

1933) to be Qian’s first piece of “creative prose,” then his creative writing career began long before the Second Sino-Japanese War; however, his most productive period was from 1937, when he wrote “Discussing Friendship” (Tan jiaoyou

January 1937), to mid-1949, when he is said to have misplaced the partial manuscript of a second novel in progress, Le Coeur d’artichaut (Baihe xin

[The Heart of the Artichoke]). See Theodore Huters, Qian Zhongshu, World Authors 660 (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 8–9.

2. Qian also wrote poems and numerous critical essays during the 1930s and 1940s. Of his essays, “On ‘Vulgarity,’” first published in Dagong bao on November 4, 1933, and “Discussing Friendship” are closest to the informal style of Margins, blending literary criticism and philosophical ruminations. “Discussing Friendship” was written while Qian was at Oxford and first published in Zhu Guangqian’s

(1897–1986) Literary Magazine (Wenxue zazhi

in May 1937. These essays are collected in In the Margins of the Margins of Life (Rensheng bianshang de bianshang

), in The Qian Zhongshu Collection (Qian Zhongshu ji

) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2002), 65–72, 73–81, respectively.

4. As Ma Guangyu notes, it is unclear exactly where and when Qian wrote these ten items, though the author himself states in his 1983 preface that he did not write them in Shanghai. Some scholars have claimed that some essays were written in England, though pieces with explicit allusions to conditions in the interior (for example, “Devil” and “Windows”) suggest that they were written in Kunming. Kaiming shudian reprinted Margins three times after the war, in 1946, 1947, and 1948, around the time that Human, Beast, Ghost and Fortress Besieged were published. For a review of scholarship on Margins up to 1991, see Ma Guangyu

, “Xie zai rensheng bian shang yanjiu zongshu”

(A Summary of Studies on Written in the Margins of Life), in Qian Zhongshu yanjiu caiji

(Qian Zhongshu Studies), ed. Lu Wenhu

(Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1992), 1:268.

8. “Qian Zhongshu nianbiao”

(Qian Zhongshu Chronology), in Qian Zhongshu Yang Jiang yanjiu ziliao

(Research Materials on Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang), ed. Tian Huilan

et al. (Wuchang: Huazhong shifan daxue, 1997), 13. As Huters and others have noted, this was neither the first nor the last time that Qian passed up prestigious and remunerative offers from foreign universities.

14. “God’s Dream,” in which the authorlike Creator dreams of inadvertently destroying his creations (man and woman) after discovering that they have stopped obeying his will, has inspired at least one productive reading along these lines, though it stops short of branding Qian a postmodernist. See Sheng-Tai Chang, “Reading Qian Zhongshu’s ‘God’s Dream’ as a Postmodern Text,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 16 (1994): 93–110.

15. In a one-line preface to the series, which began in vol. 1, no. 3 of Criticism Today (Jinri pinglun ) (January 15, 1939), Qian explained: “‘Cold’ because the room I’m renting is freezing; ‘jottings’ because I let my pen wander freely. That’s the truth, and that’s my preface” (14). Zhang Wenjiang

, one of Qian’s biographers, hypothesizes that “cold” implies “to take a detached point of view” (literally, “to watch cold-eyed from the sidelines” [lengyan pangguan

]). See Zhang Wenjiang, Wenhua kunlun

(Cultural Giant: A Biography of Qian Zhongshu) (Taipei: Yeqiang, 1993), 56.

18. See, for example, Ingrid A. R. De Smet, Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581–1655 (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (London: Associated University Presses, 1995).

23. For a detailed, if idiosyncratic, study of edition issues up to the 1990 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences edition of Written in the Margins of Life, see Wang Ziping

, “‘Xie zai rensheng bianshang’ banben kao”

(Edition Research on Written in the Margins of Life), in Liaodong Miusi zhi hun: Qian Zhongshu de wenxue shijie

(Stirring the Muses: The Literary World of Qian Zhongshu), ed. Xin Guangwei

and Li Hongyan

, 85–106, Qian Zhongshu yanjiu congshu

(Collected Studies on Qian Zhongshu) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995).

26. To note just a few brief examples of derivativeness: In “The Devil Pays a Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu,” the Devil remarks, “At art exhibitions I talk about connoisseurship and at banquets I talk about the culinary arts. But that’s not all. Sometimes I instead talk politics with scientists and art with archaeologists; after all, they don’t understand a word I say and I’m happy to let them pass off my phrases as their own.” In “Reading Aesop’s Fables” Qian repeats this pattern: “A bat pretends to be a crow when he encounters a crow and pretends to be a land animal when he encounters a land animal. Man, being much smarter than a bat, employs the bat’s method conversely. . . . He parades refinement before soldiers and plays the hero to men of letters. Among the upper classes he is a poor and tough commoner, but among common people he becomes a condescending man of culture.” In “God’s Dream” God flashes a lightning smile from behind a cloud and issues thunderous laughter, repeating an allusion from “On Laughter.” Liang Yuchun

(1906–1932) had also incorporated the old joke about Plato and the plucked chicken into one of his essays over a decade before Qian used it in “A Prejudice.” See Liang Yuchun, “Zui zhong meng hua (yi)”

(Drunken Dream Talk [1], 1927), in Liang Yuchun sanwen ji

(Collected Prose of Liang Yuchun), ed. Qin Xianci

(Taipei: Hongfan shudian, 1979), 16.

27. Lin Yutang

(1895–1976), founder of the humor magazine Analects Fortnightly (Lunyu banyuekan , 1932–1937), was a prominent, bilingual intellectual in both China and the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. He appears as a satirical target in “On Laughter,” “Cat” (as Yuan Youchun), and Fortress Besieged (which places his book My Country and My People on the bookshelf of a Westernized Shanghai businessman along such “other immortal classics” as the Bible and Teach Yourself Photography). “Cat” also contains caricatures of Zhou Zuoren, Shen Congwen, and Luo Longji, as noted in Huters, Qian Zhongshu, 113–14.