Maoist Miniatures: The Proletarian Everyday,Visual Remediation,and the Politics of Revolutionary Form

Revolutionizing the Everyday

The formation and dissemination of short short forms as a distinct literary form was intimately tied to the participation of Chinese authors in the international proletarian literary movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The emergence across the world of a series of revolutionary writers’ organizations and movements provided the conditions for a series of wide-ranging discussions on the problem of cultural form, discussions that were only partly resolved with the formal declaration of socialist realism as the theoretical orientation of Soviet literature in 1934. The specificity of this conjuncture, consisting especially of the period 1928–1932, is marked within the Soviet Union by the “cultural revolution” and associated egalitarian enthusiasms of the early years of the First Five-Year Plan, and internationally by the dynamism with which emergent organizations on the cultural Left sought to locate forms and devices adequate to the task of forming a new, proletarian culture.

The wide-ranging discussions of this period were marked by a profound resistance to the long-form novel as the default literary mode for proletarian writing, and an orientation toward so-called “small forms,” characterized by a reduced length both in terms of the texts themselves but also of the temporal conditions of their production and consumption. As Katerina Clark (1978: 199) notes, then, in relation to developments within the Soviet Union during the cultural revolution, the insurgent literature of the period “was primarily a literature of ‘little forms’ (malye formy),” denoting forms that “could be rushed off quickly whenever a new achievement or policy was to be celebrated.” ⁴ At their most sophisticated and ambitious, however, theoretical debates on form in the late 1920s used an explicit critique of the hegemony of the bourgeois novel not only to meet the pressure of immediate demands of the kind enumerated by Clark but also as a starting point for calling basic literary concepts of authorship and fictionality into question. Famously, then, Sergei Tret’iakov explicitly posed, in opposition to the novel, the newspaper and its associated practices of reportage or “factography” as the basis of a proletarian culture that would rupture with traditional bourgeois forms, and render the novel and its associated practices of individual creativity obsolete. ⁵ Tret’iakov’s international reach in China remains unclear, and yet some sense of his connection with the international proletarian movement is given by the famous essay of Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in which Benjamin, citing Tret’iakov as an “operative writer” who intervened in the reconstruction of social relations, declared that “there have not always been novels in the past, they do not always have to exist in the future” (Benjamin, 1970: 85–86).

The enthusiasms of this brief but dynamic period were sufficient to engender an explicit defense of the novel from 1932 onward. In Germany, then, while avant-garde writers displayed an enthusiasm for “breaking-up traditional genre forms” through an embrace of “proletarian-specific operative genres” (Bivens, 2015: 40–44), in 1932 the Marxist theorist Gyorgy Lukács warned against premature declarations as to the death of the novel, which he continued to privilege as the primary form capable of embodying the totality of social relations in capitalist society (Lukács, 1980). In actual fact, as Clark also notes, most Soviet theorists of this period did not advance short forms with the aim of the abolition of the novel as such. Rather, they looked to short forms primarily as sites of pedagogy, whereby new proletarian writers might eventually gain proficiency in writing and engage in long-form fictional texts.

In the Japanese context, the short short form emerged specifically in the form of the “wall story” 壁小说, whose crucial point of emergence as a proletarian literary form Samuel Perry dates to February 1931, via the publication in the literary magazine Battle Flag 戦旗 of the wall story “Food in the Cafeteria” 食堂のめし by the authors Sata Ineko 佐多稲子 and Arai Mitsuko 新井光子. In its most effective form, in Perry’s account, the wall story would comprise “extremely short works of literature meant to be torn out of newsletters and magazines and posted up on public walls” (Perry, 2014: 70). The emergence of a distinct theoretical discourse around such forms would, in turn, emerge two months after the publication of the story “Food in the Cafeteria,” through the decisive essay by the famous proletarian author Kobayashi Takiji 小林多喜二, under the title “Wall Stories and ‘Short’ Short Stories.” Kobayashi sought to elucidate the possibilities of these emergent literary forms as follows:

I can offer several reasons why wall stories will find favor among people of the industrial and agricultural working classes. First, they are only a page or two in length, so they can be read quickly at any time, any place, and moreover, they let the reader grasp something solid and coherent. Second, wall stories will be posted in places where workers and famers congregate, and address topics of immediate concern to the masses. (Kobayashi, 2016: 254)

It may be surmised from the larger sweep of his account that Kobayashi did not imagine that such wall stories would necessarily replace the novel. Instead, they were privileged mainly for their pedagogical value, both in relation to their readers, but also in their capacity to incorporate emergent writers from among the working class who would later “graduate” into “higher” literary forms. He went on, then, to acknowledge their “low cultural level” as part of the impetus for these short short texts (Kobayashi, 2016: 255). Kobayashi’s intervention nonetheless pointed toward the basic tropes that would determine the genealogy of short texts in China from this point, namely, the emphasis on speed and the possibility of a collective mode of reading based around the sites of production in which workers and peasants would, in Kobayashi’s language, “congregate.”

Kobayashi’s essay was only translated into Chinese in 1936, in the periodical Eastern Flow 东流, associated with the Tokyo branch of the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, unlike his more famous novel, Crab Cannery Ship, which was translated and widely discussed in China subsequent to its Japanese publication in 1929. It is nonetheless a mark of the rapidity of transmission between the Japanese and Chinese proletarian literary movements that the first explicit references to the “wall story” emerged in China in 1931, the same year as Kobayashi’s own theoretical reflections. That the introduction of this form in the Chinese context had a direct relationship with its Japanese contemporaries is demonstrated by the persistent invocation of the “wall story” in early Chinese discussions around the short short form. The first explicit reference to this form was given in the resolution agreed upon at the November 1931 meeting of the Executive Committee of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which appeared under the title “New Tasks of China’s Proletarian Revolutionary Literature” 中国无产阶级革命文学的新任务. In addressing the problem of form, its author explicitly stated that

the choice of form should take simplicity, clarity, and ease of being understood by the worker-peasant masses as its basic principle, Currently, we must research and critically deploy China’s existing vernacular literature, as well as the reportage literature of Western Europe, propaganda art, wall stories 壁小说, mass recitation, and other such forms. (League of Left-Wing Writers, 1931: 6)

The reference to China’s “existing vernacular literature” and wall stories within the same category of forms of mass agitation marked the formation of an incipient category of small forms, which would subsequently be expanded in Yan’an.

The main creative and theoretical periodical of the League of Left-Wing Writers, Big Dipper 北斗, under the editorship of Ding Ling 丁玲, released its final issue in the middle of 1932, and in doing so brought new visibility to bear on the form of the wall story. In the first place, this issue contained a series of texts that were explicitly identified as “wall stories” 墙头小说 by the proletarian writer Bai Wei 白苇. These texts were of consistently short length, but there is nothing about their visual arrangement on the pages of the journal itself to indicate that they were to be deployed in the strict manner of the “wall stories” articulated by Kobayashi. This was to remain true more generally of texts identified as “wall stories,” insofar as texts of this kind were primarily, if not solely, printed in journals in the same arrangement as longer texts. More important, however, is that this same issue contained two important theoretical essays that expanded the significance of the wall story. Zhou Yang 周扬, who subsequently became a key cultural official under the People’s Republic of China, posed the category of “small forms” in his landmark essay “Concerning the Massification of Literature” 关于文学大众化, in which he explicitly privileged the central place of “short forms”—printed in English in the essay—on the basis that

they are straightforward, rapid, simple, dynamic, and heroic. They can quickly and directly reflect the life of struggle of the revolutionary proletariat at every moment. They are the best weapon of agitprop and propaganda. Novels that describe the class experience of the proletariat are indispensable, but at the current time, workers who must carry out manual labor for twelve or even fourteen or fifteen hours a day do not have the time or ability to read such long texts. (Zhou, 1984: 26–27)

Zhou goes on to stress that such short forms should draw on the possibilities of existing vernacular literature. Nor, however, does Zhou seek to reduce the difference between existent traditional forms and new international forms into a homogenous totality, as he holds out the prospect that the education of the masses through short forms will eventually diminish the role of traditional forms in the proletarian literary movement: “we cannot ignore the importance of the international element of form, and must do our utmost to draw on the new mass forms of international proletarian literature” (Zhou, 1984: 27). On the closing pages of his essay, Zhou refers explicitly to wall stories, and does so in the context of the role of worker correspondents in the German proletarian literary movement, noting that the solicitation of contributions by worker correspondents provides the basis on which to train working-class authors, through the use of short forms such as “simple reports, sketches, agitation poems, and wall stories” (Zhou, 1984: 29). In this respect, for Zhou as for Kobayashi, the function of wall stories was ultimately pedagogical, in relation both to the reader and emergent worker-writers, for whom short short forms would provide the basis of a literary training that pointed toward ever more complex literary forms, including, implicitly, the novel.

The assumed orientation toward the novel amid these early interventions masks, however, a decisive difference between the Chinese literary field and, for example, the Soviet, Japanese, or German contexts that provided the initial stimulus for an embrace of short short forms. That is, in China, the advocacy of these forms emerged not against the background of an already-existing tradition of modern novel writing but in a context where the modern novel itself remained a site of contestation. In this sense, the embrace of short short forms may well be understood as an anticipatory critique of the novel form, precisely at the moment of its historical emergence and sedimentation. It is possible, in these terms, to understand the way that the pedagogical conception of short short forms, in which the novel was assumed as a telos of literary development, was also contested from this point onward through the emergence of the “everyday” as an explicit part of the theoretical rationale for experimental cultural forms, a theoretical turn that would problematize any narrow understanding of short forms as merely transitional. Arguments of this order are intimated by a further article by Zheng Boqi 郑伯奇, entitled “The Massification of Literature and Mass Literature” 文学的大众化与大众文学, in which Zheng invoked a conceptual vocabulary of the everyday that marked the potential for a transformation in the lived social relations of the masses, without at the same time postulating a lack of cultural education or assuming the novel as the inevitable telos of cultural development for emergent worker-writers:

The proletarian literature of Russia, France, Japan, the United States, and other countries has already produced some relatively successful long-form creations, but these are not the kinds of texts that our present worker and peasant writers in China need to consult. What China currently needs is for worker and peasant writers to simply express their own life—their life of struggle and their everyday life 日常生活. In this respect, the most important materials for our consultation are factory and village correspondence, wall stories, reportage literature, and so on. (Zheng, 1988: 142)

Zheng’s explicit invocation of the problem of everyday life in this essay introduces a moment of tension within the discourse surrounding the development of short short forms up to this point. The problematic of everyday life gestures toward the demand for operative forms whose logic is not only to prepare the grounds for their own supersession, by training writers and readers in order that they might eventually access “higher” forms, but also to actively intervene in the reorganization of mass, everyday life. From this point onward, Chinese theorists would become increasingly insistent on the displacement of the novel as the given form of revolutionary literature, repeatedly evoking the everyday as the grounds of a different mode of cultural practice grounded in operative forms. The extension of this theoretical vocabulary in relation to the transformation of the everyday became further visible through the theoretical treatises of A Ying 阿英. Even before the formation of the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930, A Ying had been closely attuned to developments on the Japanese proletarian literary scene, especially the theoretical interventions of Kurahara Korehito 蔵原惟人, who served as one of the key conduits for the introduction of the Soviet avant-garde into the Chinese literary scene. In his 1932 treatise entitled Creation and Life 创作与生活, A Ying returned to the problem of artistic form and its relation to the everyday by urging writers to make full use of the available range of international forms. In his words, proletarian writers must

make use of international forms of mass literature, such as reportage literature, the situational story 情形小说, recital poetry, and so on. These forms are produced from amongst the working masses, and comprise a new form of the new literature that has sprouted and grown. These forms most directly reflect the life and struggles of the laboring masses. We must use the everyday life 日常生活 of the laboring masses together with their economic and political struggles as material for content, in conjunction with their clear and simple language and literary forms, to produce new mass literary works. (A Ying, 2003: 84)

The meaning of the “situational story” to which A Ying refers is clarified several pages later, when it becomes clear that it is an idiosyncratic term for the short short texts pioneered in Japan, but distinguished from other short forms, such as reportage literature, by the fact that

[the situational story] is a work of agitation, so that the things it grasps are necessarily immediate subject matter suitable to urgent events, so these works possess the task of agitprop and organization. With respect to length, these works are short, and in terms of the selection of content, they are appropriate, and economical—it is a concise and forceful work. (A Ying, 2003: 86)

That these works were in fact a summation of the short fictional texts that emerged from Japan is made clear by the fact that A Ying cites as an example the short text “A Thousand Stitch Belt” 千人针 ascribed to the Japanese writer Kubokawa Ineko 窪川稲子—an alternate name of Sata Ineko—with a translation also affixed as an appendix to A Ying’s text. ⁶ The problematic of the everyday as a central part of the theorization of the microstory across theorists such as Zheng Boqi and A Ying reached its fullest moment of articulation through the longer theoretical work A Theory of Literary Creation 文艺创作概论, published under the name Hua Di 华蒂. This important text marked the coalescence of the Japanese and German proletarian literary movements in China with respect to the problem of form. It emerged not only following the interventions among Japanese proletarian theorists on the possibilities of the wall story but also the translation in Chinese of the article “On The Question of Proletarian Revolutionary Literature in Germany” by Otto Biha, which had initially been published in the international multilingual literary journal run under the Soviet Union-entitled Literature of the World Revolution, and was cited explicitly by Hua Di. ⁷ In this article, Biha made an explicit distinction between “small” and “major” forms, arguing in relation to the former that

the small forms of agitation and propaganda literature are those sections of our literature which react most quickly and most directly to the militant slogans of the revolutionary proletariat. (Biha, 1931: 97)

This distinction provided much of the theoretical logic for Hua Di’s treatise. A section devoted entirely to the problem of short and long forms articulated a distinction between these forms according to the divergent problems and temporalities of the “epochal” 时代 and the “everyday” 日常. Hua Di argued that the distinction between the short short forms on the one hand and the novel on the other lay not in a simply arithmetical notion of length but rather in their temporal relation with the historical present:

The so-called works of small forms reflect contemporary problems and everyday affairs 日常事件 and comprise with these problems and events a simple, direct, and integrated work. For example, if you organize an action, and then in the course of the action dispatch a program or slogans, demonstrating the methods of the action, and then reflect this program and slogans in the literary work, and then immediately dispatch it in a paper or journal, or print a small booklet for distribution. (Hua, 1933: 102)

Hua Di’s account is further distinguished by the fact that it marks the probable emergence in Chinese of the specific term short short story 小小说, which was to remain the definitive term for short-form texts through the late 1950s. In these terms, then, Hua Di carefully distinguishes the Japan-derived wall story 墙头小说 from the short short story, and criticizes the use of the term wall story as a generic term that can cover all sorts of short forms, arguing that

those “wall stories” 墙头小说 that do not take a definite setting as their aim but are instead published in nationwide periodicals have in actual fact already lost their original significance. If one were to cut such stories out, and then post them on a wall in any given place, then what effect would there be to speak of? (Hua, 1933: 110)

From this point onward, the short short story became the primary term of reference for short short forms that were published in periodicals intended for a wide dissemination, as distinct from the highly specific and contextualized intended readership that informed the wall story. Yet even while Hua Di sought to tease out the distinctions between the short short story and the wall story as short-form fictional texts that differed in their modes of dissemination, he also acknowledged that various kinds of short short forms could easily become exchangeable with each other. This was true above all of the relations between short-form fictional texts and reportage literature, which theorists such as Zhou Yang had readily included among the examples of international small forms. Hua Di stated, then, that

all those literary forms that reflect immediate affairs, such as the short short story, or the wall story, can in fact also be included within the category of reportage literature; therefore, the concept of reportage literature is extraordinarily broad. (Hua, 1933: 108–9)

The relation between reportage literature and other short forms was never fully resolved, with both sharing a common trajectory of having arisen amid the international proletarian literary movement as conscious alternatives to the novel. In anticipation of what follows, however, and unacknowledged by Hua Di, is that the emergent theoretical language around reportage also generated a set of visual tropes that would subsequently be incorporated into the short short story. The article “Kirsch and his Reportage Literature” by Theodore Balk, for example, was published as part of the Soviet journal International Literature, successor to Literature of the World Revolution, in 1933, before appearing in China for the first time in 1939. Balk explicitly posited the relationship between reportage and film by arguing that reportage would enable writers to “report swiftly about a world where the today and the tomorrow change the face of the world with the speed of a film” (quoted in Wagner, 1992: 329). ⁸ The specifically visual or cinematic dimensions of the short short story, while not prominent in the 1930s, would become increasingly influential in subsequent stages of emergence.

The temporary suspension of this line of development might well be understood through the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan, which generated a progressive indigenization of the form on the basis of the expanded category of “short forms” 小形式, whose locus was not the urban context of Shanghai but the rural hinterland. In his 1938 essay “Literature in the Period of the War of Resistance” 抗战时期的文学, Zhou Yang argued that one of the specific features of cultural production amid wartime conditions was the fact that “works in short forms that take the themes of resistance and the struggle for national survival as their subject matter have already gained a superior and even hegemonic position” (Zhou, 1998: 2). The content of these “short forms” encompassed but was by no means limited to those that Zhou himself had articulated in the early 1930s, so that, in Zhou’s terms,

The short story is the most important form of China’s new literature, and yet today we are making use of forms that are even shorter than the short story. Those that are seen periodically in various kinds of newspapers and publications include correspondence reports of wartime events from the frontline, reportage literature, wall stories 墙头小说, street plays, and so on, all of which are texts written to order, without having gone through much deliberation and consideration, such that they all have a propagandistic and agitational character. (Zhou, 1998: 3)

The significance of wartime interventions of this order as distinct from the earlier discussions that had arisen under the aegis of the League of Left-Wing Writers is that Zhou’s emphasis on the mobilizing capacities of short forms in the late 1930s emerged subsequent to the official codification of socialist realism in the Soviet Union and the putative closure of the earlier debates around operative forms that had arisen in the German proletarian literary movement and elsewhere. The exigencies of wartime therefore compelled a further and ongoing displacement of the novel, whereby the merging of the problem of the everyday and the accelerated temporal conditions of wartime lent short forms a new and more urgent justification. This opening salvo was closely accompanied by a further article by Zhou Yang under the title “The New Reality and the New Tasks of Literature” 新的现实与文学上的新的任务, in which he posed the deferral and suspension of the novel in more explicit terms:

In actual fact, since the beginning of the War of Resistance, long forms 长篇形式 have already retreated to a position of secondary importance, as those works that have performed the most lively role in the literary scene of the period of resistance are small-scale works 小型作品 on the model of reportage. (Zhou, 1979: 45)

Zhou Yang’s formulation also marked the expansion of the problem of “small forms” under wartime and, more specifically, in rural conditions, whereby “short forms” came to encompass not only those experiments in form that had been drawn from the international proletarian movement, but also the emergent discussions around “national” 民族形式 or “old” 旧形式 forms, denoting those forms of peasant cultural practice that became sites for propaganda work during the wartime period. This, then, marks a significant modification of the category of “small forms” as it had existed in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, whereby in China the short short story came to exist together with “folk” peasant forms, altogether comprising a set of cultural practices that would be able to effectively intervene at the level of the everyday across different cultural and sociohistorical spaces. The privileging of small forms would, in turn, demand a transformation in the cultural practice of revolutionary writers, further distancing them from the novel as the primary form of cultural production. ⁹

The conclusion of the first cycle of theoretical discussions around the microstory formed in Yan’an in 1940, whereby Sun Li 孙犁 gestured toward the wall story as a privileged cultural form in the base area. In doing so, he also reemphasized its Japanese history, albeit in terms that once again reexpanded the term “wall story,” whereby it came to denote cultural practices that were not strictly limited to the use of the wall as a site for reading, as distinct from Hua Di’s relatively more restricted deployment of the wall story and its distinction from the short short story. In his 1940 essay explicitly entitled “Concerning the Wall Story” 关于墙头小说, Sun Li stressed that “the term ‘wall story’ was transmitted [to China] from Japan,” only to correctly note that while Japanese proletarian authors were called upon to “quickly write up the events that had occurred in their environment and to post them up nearby,” in actual fact “the works that were published in periodicals far outnumbered those posted on walls.” So too in China, Sun Li stresses, “as far as this author is aware, this movement [for wall stories] never fully developed on ‘walls’ themselves.”

While Sun Li therefore reduced the technical difference between the wall story and the short short story, by indicating that the term wall story could also incorporate forms and texts with no direct relationship to any actual wall as the site of publication and reading, he also, to a greater extent than previous theorists, stressed the difference between the small-form fictional text and reportage literature. He indicated that these fictional texts were “more direct, more concrete” than reportage, insofar as they were responses to specific events, and also in their capacity to incorporate “fabulation and imagination,” therefore no longer being bound to the standards of referentiality and accuracy that constrained reportage as a form. In these terms, then, as compared to reportage,

[The wall story] should be a literary tool of political mobilization before an action, or else a literary tool of criticism after an action. It should, in terms of form, more closely possess a beginning and end, should be lively, and geared toward the masses. So too should it more greatly possess a national 民族 form and style. (Sun, 2013: 261)

The emphasis on the national content of “wall stories,” here operating as a category that would encompass otherwise varied short-form fictional texts, combined with Sun Li’s explicit acknowledgment of the Japanese history of the wall story as an international literary form situated within a larger context of international forms, allowed for the wall story to emerge as that decisive short form that, as well as being adequate for the practice of political mobilization and intervention into the fabric of the everyday, also moved in a dialectic between the “old” or “national” forms and the forms derived from the lessons of the international proletarian literary movement. The admission on the part of Sun Li that such texts should be written in a “national form and style” provided the theoretical justification for short short stories to be incorporated into the panoply of national forms, even with Sun Li acknowledging the Japanese derivation of this form. Rendered absent from the 1940s explication of the short short story was any suggestion that such forms would be primarily limited to a merely pedagogical function, pending a shift toward more “advanced” literary forms such as the novel.

The category of “short forms” came to designate the conditions of possibility for a total transformation of culture, one that intersected closely with the Maoist formulation of life 生活 as the dialectical grounds for the production of a new revolutionary subject (Kindler, 2020). In his 1946 article “Promoting Short Forms” 提倡小形式, Chen Yong 陈勇 explicitly argued that writing or performing long works “is not only not permitted by our environment and temporal conditions, but is also not permitted by readers and audiences,” therefore calling for a panoply of short forms:

Thus, the problem of small forms has become very important under present conditions. I believe that we should actively promote all those short forms that we can deploy, or which are suitable for experimenting in creation: couplets, slogans, small-scale yang’ge operas, small-scale living newspapers, vaudeville, small ditties, storytelling, drumming, street poetry, street murals, peep shows, shadow puppets, wall stories 墙头小说, palm-of-the-hand stories 掌篇小说, and so on. (Chen, 2015: 1176)

While the contents of this fascinating list suggest a continued orientation toward folk forms in line with the “national form” debate, the figure of the international proletarian movement did not disappear. Chen Yong draws out the significance of these forms via the example of the Soviet poet Mayakovsky and his own public deployment of poetry and visual art, thereby situating the possibilities of short forms within the international history of the avant-garde. The persistence and intensification of an orientation toward these short forms, in other words, gestures toward an ongoing deferral of the novel as the given form for revolutionary literature. If, in the 1930s and early 1940s, this deferral was motivated by the exigencies of wartime, then the full-fledged emergence of the short short story after 1949 would instead be compelled by the temporal pressures of socialist industrialization.

Writing on Speed

The brief period of experimentation around the wall story in Japan around 1931, and its afterlives in China over the remainder of the 1930s, is dwarfed by the cultural innovations of the GLF in China, especially the pivotal year of 1958. This period and its associated drive for the total transformation of social relations generated new possibilities for formal experimentation in art and literature, heavily orientated toward “short forms.” These forms were by no means limited to fiction, and included, for example, street-level plays and other instances of agitprop drama that demonstrated contemporary political problems, domestic and international, in a highly mobile and compressed form.

Throughout this period, the renewed emphasis on “short forms” was overdetermined in the way it marked the shift away from the professional culture worker as the given arbiter of socialist cultural production toward the new figure of the amateur or mass writer whose literary practice would coincide in time and space with the site of labor. Yet so too were these demands linked to new conditions of readership and audience, in which cultural consumption demanded an accelerated temporality so as to support rather than inhibit the imperatives of an accelerated tempo of labor. In tandem with this process, the short short story underwent a process of total indigenization, whereby it was removed from the category of “international forms” and presented as a revolutionary new form that had arisen in the context of the GLF itself, being therefore endogenous to China’s revolutionary conditions as a type of “national” form. This erasure of an international history was marked by the discursive monopoly of the term short short story, which henceforth supplanted the wall story. During the GLF, key national literary journals, especially those hosting the work of worker-peasant writers, such as Sprouts 萌芽, New Harbor 新港, Changjiang Art and Literature 长江文艺, and Liberation Army Art and Literature 解放军文艺, made a decisive turn toward the short short story as a primary focus of their publishing efforts over the course of the GLF.

The short short story of the GLF also marked an explicit reversal of the pedagogical conception of the short short story that had arisen in the early 1930s, whereby writers would eventually “graduate” into longer and therefore more difficult literary forms such as the novel. In the GLF this structure of pedagogy was reversed, whereby the short short story generated demands for professional culture workers to reject their commitment to the novel as the most privileged form in favor of the new and more intense demands of short fictional forms. In this strain of argument, writers were called upon to adopt a new economy of language, which would in turn encompass a reduced temporality of writing and reading. The foremost theorist associated with this turn was, suggestively, Lao She 老舍, who, in 1958, provided a rationale for the short short story. The first and most revelatory articulation of the short short story as a form emerged through his article “We Must Write More Short Short Stories” 多写小小说, published in the combined February/March 1958 issue of New Harbor. Lao She’s emphasis in this text and throughout much of the theoretical discourse around short short stories during the GLF was that long-form texts did not in and of themselves embody greater literary value, and that they could, instead, lend themselves to a proliferation and excess of language:

Writing with economy has its advantages. First of all, with respect to writers, there are some people who believe that the longer a literary work is the better it is, and so they can easily push out a work of several tens of thousands of characters. But the actual facts demonstrate that the value of a work is not determined by its length. Within these tens of thousands of characters there may well be much superfluous language 废话. (Lao, 1958a: 4)

The more intense demands generated by an orientation toward short forms from the perspective of professional writers emerged as a problem to which Lao She would repeatedly return. In his separate article published in People’s Literature 人民文学, under the suggestive title “The Shorter, the More Difficult” 越短越难, which offered a further rebuke to the conceit of “the longer the work the better it is,” Lao She stated in no uncertain terms that “with respect to structure, a literary work must have an orderly structure, and cannot resemble a sheet of loose sand. Yet, because the novel is after all long, even if it has some places in which it is not tightly structured, this can be tolerated. As for short texts, they are only a few thousand characters in length, so it is impossible for there to be some places where the language is too extended [and] others where it is too brief or altogether insufficiently focused, balanced, or composed” (Lao, 1958b: 21–22).

The implication of these remarks was a call for a totalizing transformation in the relationship between professional writers and language itself, to the point of calling into question basic tropes of literary creation, such as talent, inspiration, and the singularity of the literary creator. At the extreme, however, the short short story of the GLF put pressure on narrativity as such as a category of literary creation. For Mao Dun 茅盾, as for previous theorists such as Sun Li, this involved teasing out the distinctions between the short short story and the more conventional short story, as well as those other instances of short forms such as reportage. Mao Dun therefore posited that

first of all, the narratives of short short stories are very simple, often to the point of not having a narrative, consisting solely of the episodic actions of a character within a definite context. In the second place, this kind of “camera shot” 镜头 sketches out the bearing and spiritual world of this character. In terms of the narratives of short short stories being not entirely fictional, they are different from the creation process of short stories; but in terms of the fact that their portrayed characters are not real-world people but are rather more summary than depiction of real people, they are also different from “sketches.” (Mao, 1959: 4–7)

The passing reference to the function of the short short story as being akin to a camera shot in its intervention within a specific context and the limited breadth of its narrative scope assumes a wider significance insofar as it registers the continued relationship between the short short story and other “small forms” that circulated in the 1930s, and with which the short short story therefore continued to be entangled. This is true above all of reportage literature, which, as noted in the previous section, was also theorized specifically in terms of its cinematic mode of presentation in the 1930s. While Mao Dun’s comments hint in the direction of the adoption of certain formal techniques of cinema, the relevance of the cinematic dimensions of the short short story became a major concern in the GLF primarily insofar as these dimensions were said to lend themselves to a transformed practice of reading. Hu Qingpo 胡青坡, writing in Changjiang Art and Literature under the title “We Support Writing Short Short Stories” 我们提倡写小小说, took up the language of a cinematic mode of literary portrayal in terms yet stronger than Mao Dun, arguing that in writing short short stories,

Writers have a responsibility to extract their topics from life, and rapidly and intensely reflect such topics. There are certain characters and affairs within life that we might well say are common occurrences, but if they are expressed in a concentrated way, like a “close-up” camera lens in a film, so that they become prominent and are enlarged, then the audience 观众 will see more clearly, and the significance will become clearer. (Hu, 1958: 56–57)

The articulation of short short stories in these terms, whereby reading is conceptualized in terms of the collective experience of being an audience directly akin to that of cinema, therefore gestured toward the reconfiguration of reading in terms that approximated a cinematic encounter, in the highly focalized narrative dynamics of the short stories and in the possibility of a practice of reading vastly reduced in temporal duration, and even approximating the collective nature of cinematic spectatorship. Returning, then, to Lao She’s initial article, “We Must Write More Short Short Stories,” having called for a transformed relationship between writers and language, he further argued that, under the accelerated rhythms of labor of the GLF,

Short literary works are better able to reflect in good time the reality of our leaping forward, and educate the masses of readers. To write a long-form text requires time, and so too does reading a long-form text require time, such that short-form texts are able to exercise a greater effect. (Lao, 1958a: 4)

The aspiration toward a transformed experience of reading through short short stories, based around a compressed temporality adequate to the demands of labor, became visible beyond Lao She and Mao Dun’s initial theoretical articles through explicit celebrations of the new small-scale periodicals that flourished during the first year of the GLF, their “small” character designating their physical characteristics as well as the length of the texts themselves. An extended discussion on these new cultural practices published in the Art and Literary Gazette 文艺报 under the title “Celebrating the Release of Many Small-Scale Cultural Periodicals” 为新创办的许多小型文艺报刊欢呼 therefore observed that such periodicals and their contents “are small, they can be carried in the pocket, and when there is a moment of rest from labor in the workshop or in the fields, people can easily take them out to read by themselves or read them out loud 朗诵” (Zhu, 1958: 9). The author went on to remark that “we greatly need short short stories that can be read in three or five minutes” (Zhu, 1958: 10). These interventions denote the aspiration that short short stories would engender a new kind of recursive relationship between cultural production and manual labor, in which writers would undertake to write short short stories on the basis of their own immediate experience of labor, in order that these texts would provide the conditions for a collective experience of reading at the site of production. Reading would, in turn, stimulate a new commitment to extended and intensified temporalities of production during the GLF. The figuring of short short stories in these terms recurs throughout other theoretical texts, with an emphasis on the temporal intersection between reading and manual labor. In Song Shuang’s 送爽 1959 “A Brief Discussion of the Short Short Story” 浅论‘小小说,’” then, it was asserted that

because they are short and lively, and generally consist of works concerning the newest and most beautiful life, feelings, and thoughts, they can also be appreciated by the laboring masses even outside and during the process of strenuous labor, and in doing so rapidly and directly become a force of agitation and propaganda. It can be said without exaggeration that the short short story is a “new genre with its own specific character” that accompanies labor. (Song, 1959: 17)

The theoretical limits of the short short story and its associated practices of reading and writing were ultimately marked by the profound ambiguity and hesitancy over whether such short-form texts might eventually supersede the novel as the definitive form of communist writing, with its associated demands on the reader. There was, in any case, a resistance to the logic of pedagogy that had informed most interest in short forms in the 1930s. Xu Ming 徐明, writing in 1959, stressed, therefore, that “if we believe that the short short story is only a transitional method of training the masses in creation, then this would demean its significance. When experienced writers instruct beginners, they often say: ‘writing should best begin from short stories, rather than with novellas and novels.’ This is beneficial encouragement and comes from experience. But people should not therefore assume that the short story can only be seen as a transitional method toward the novel, and so too does the short short story have its own significance” (Xu, 1959). In a further article included in Changjiang Art and Literature, just as Hu Qingpo evoked the “close-up” as a basis on which to understand the narrative devices of short short stories, Feng Fang 冯放, in the brief article “Concerning Short Short Stories” 关于小小说, argued in suggestive albeit confusing terms against certain common views in the literary world on the historic significance of short short stories:

There are some who say: people will most greatly welcome the novel in the future communist society because they will have plentiful time to appreciate art—this I agree with, but such people also say: the promotion of short short stories is solely because of the specific requirements of our era, because production and construction are intense; or in other words, this promotion is simply a strategy to do with a “transfer of power,” and this perspective I do not condone. (Feng, 1958: 69)

The ambiguities in statements such as these mark the key connection between the short short story during the GLF and the availability of time for reading, whereby it was anticipated that the prospect of dramatic transformations in the productive forces would open up more time for reading, and in doing so also introduce new readers to the novel, with its extended demands on leisure time and concentration. Unlike, say, Walter Benjamin, then, they did not envisage the disappearance of the novel as form. This vision does not, for Feng Mang as for Xu Ming, position the short short story as a merely transitional and contingent form. It marks an underlying critique toward and skepticism of the novel as a form drawn from the bourgeois literary tradition, and the process of communist revolution as requiring the production of its own aesthetic and literary forms. There is, here, an intimation of the production of new “operative forms” as a legacy of the interwar literary movement. Drawing together the diverse and sophisticated dimensions of GLF discussions around the short short story, then, the significance of this form lay in its specific capacity to challenge the division of readers from one another by formulating new practices of collective reading that would be temporally and spatially linked with the site of labor. It is in this sense that the short short stories of the GLF sustained the problem of the everyday, not only at the level of the content of texts themselves but through a new envisaged practice of reading, whereby reading would take on a new, collective significance, becoming an audience-centered collective practice, conceived of in quasi-visual terms.

In view of the recurrence of these visual tropes with respect to the practice of reading, there is a strikingly persistent emphasis across different texts of problems of mediation, whereby the short short stories stage an encounter with another form of media, especially visual media. This is true less of film—which, as we shall see, became central to the formal construction of the reform-era microstory—as such but rather of big-character posters, which make a frequent appearance in short short stories as methods of working through social contradictions. In “An Unusual Big-Character Poster” 一张不平常的大字报 by Cao Yanyi 曹炎义, for example, which was published in Sprouts in 1958, a public missing-person report is posted in a rural commune with the knowledge that the supposedly missing person has gone to the village of a family member in order to avoid labor. Hilarity ensues when, returning from their visit, they encounter the missing person report only to realize it is about themselves (Cao, 1958). In view of the fact that the short short stories of the GLF were, generally speaking, not meant to be posted in public spaces, being instead published in nationwide periodicals, the appearance of the big-character poster as part of their narrative content marks not only an important relation to the immediate context of the GLF but also a gesture toward the genesis of the form itself, in the wall stories of the Japanese proletarian literary movement.

Across the enormous quantity of short short stories that were published during the GLF, there is perhaps no better example of the possibilities opened up by the form than a story crafted by Lao She himself, published in New Harbor under the title “Telephone” 电话. A full translation of this story is as follows, with minor edits for clarity:

Wang Erleng was quite a character indeed. Even when making a telephone call, he did it his own way: First he would light a cigarette, and before the cigarette had been entirely finished, already the cigarette would be hanging down from the corner of his mouth; even with ash falling all over his shirt and trousers he didn’t give a damn; sometimes his clothes even got burned, but he still didn’t care, that was his way. When puffing away, his mouth was twisted, so his speech was far from clear. Well, who gives a damn! Wang Erleng has the freedom to spit out words unclearly, doesn’t he?

His way of making phone calls was also quite something. He didn’t use his fingers but rather a stubby pencil. He absolutely believed in the sensation of his pencil, as flexible and reliable as a finger. He trusted the pencil so much that even when dialing a number he would often be staring at an illustrated calendar or some other object. Not only did he look elsewhere, but he would also chat with his mates, so that he would often assuredly dial the wrong number. He would dial wrongly only to be wrong again, and then he would quarrel with whoever answered the phone. Ah, look how busy he is, dialing phone calls to no end!

Having dialed wrongly eight times, Wang Erleng became even more of a character: he pushed his hat back and straightened his chest, at which point the cigarette ash also fell from his chest. Resolving himself, he wouldn’t look at “you,” but would look to see if he had gotten through or not. He wouldn’t look at the illustrated calendar, but rather at the ceiling.

“Heya, Old Wu? Mate! . . . what? I’m looking for Old Wu! . . . he’s not there? Fuck! What? What are you talking about? Stop talking crap! Are you saying I can’t even make a phone call? Who am I? Where? Don’t worry about that!” He slammed down the receiver and added—“how rude!”

“You . . . what? What? The ninth detachment of the fire brigade? We don’t have a fire here!”

“Wang, the file!” called out a colleague.

“Where is it? Where? Hey, ninth detachment, wait! Wait a second . . . ah, here!” Wang both asked the fire brigade to wait a moment, and also scuttled around for a file on his desk—which was burned by a cigarette end dropping from his mouth. “Hey, hey! No problems! There’s no huge fire, there’s only a hole in the file, nothing to worry about!” Wang was very satisfied, and confidently instructed his colleagues: “Look, it’s not such a bad thing to dial the wrong number! If there should be a fire, then at least the fire brigade will get here straight away, ha!”

Wang lit another cigarette, and threw the match into the trash. “Hey, Old Wu? You . . . where is he? Find Old Wu! What, you again? How weird! Speak politely! With socialist morality you have to help others, don’t you know! Humph!”

As soon as Wang put his pencil back into the hole of the telephone dial, a comrade said: “Wang, I’m going to write a big-character poster about you!”

“What are you criticizing me for, again?”

“Think about it yourself! How much time do you waste every day, and how often do you interfere with other people’s work? You’re sitting on the line of the fire brigade, who probably have to get to places where a fire has broken out, and if they’re a second late it causes a lot of damage! You might also dial through to a writer . . .”

“What a coincidence!”

“Do you think people are only here to fool around with you, wait on you?”

“Hey, Old Wu?” Wang had once again gotten through on the phone. “. . . it’s not you? You’re a writer? I’ve interrupted your chain of thought, so you probably won’t be able to resume for a while . . . well then you should hang up! What are you waiting for?” Wang thought it was very funny. He said to the comrade who wanted to write a big-character poster: “What a coincidence, that I should really get through to a writer . . .”

“It’s smoking again!” someone shouted. “The waste basket!” “Wang, call the fire brigade!”

“I don’t remember the number, it was a coincidence just now!” Wang rummaged around in the waste basket, with great panache. (Lao, 1958c: 3)

The value of this short short story—bearing in mind its exceptional character, as the product of a professional writer—lies in the way it mobilizes humor in conjunction with those forms of narrative economy that Lao She himself theorized as being necessary for a new practice of writing during the GLF. The pursuit of narrative economy is embodied in the way the story only narrates one side of the phone conversation, as if the reader were positioned among those colleagues who were party to Wang’s lack of concern for the values of socialist discipline. It does not in any way preclude an understanding of the humor and absurdity of these encounters. Nor does it require a “filling-in” of the other side of the conversation, such as would result in a considerable lengthening of the story, because the reader can quite easily imagine the responses on the other end from the brief interjections of Wang himself. The character of Old Wu, then, is left entirely unexplained in the narrative, and yet this character—their background, relation to Wang, and where, ultimately, they might be found—requires no further narrative information or context in order for the story to achieve its intended function as a disclosure of the deleterious and occasionally hilarious effects of an undisciplined, unconscientious worker like Wang. The salience of this dimension of the short short story in practice, whereby the reader is called upon to provide or imagine those dimensions of the narrative that are not given explicitly, would subsequently become a privileged dimension of the short short story in its reform-era iteration, as the following section will show.

In its narrative details, however, this short short story is also characterized by a highly suggestive topos, namely the figure of the writer, whose “chain of thought” is disrupted by Wang’s foolery. Its humorous content aside, the significance of this topos lies in the way it functions as a meta-literary device in relation to the conceptions of literary practice that surrounded the short short story in its GLF manifestation. The invocation of a writer whose concentration might be broken as a result of Wang’s phone call is striking because it seems to reconjure precisely the problem of time and accelerated temporalities that underpinned the theorization of the short short story during the GLF, by marking a tension between a general pattern of mobilization and the irreducible temporal requirements of literary practice itself. The reappearance of something like a “traditional” figure of the writer whose cultural practice cannot be reduced to a temporality of total mobilization provides, in turn, the condition for a more reflexive understanding even of Lao She’s own theoretical discourse on the short short story. Recalling Lao She’s suggestion that achieving an effective economy of language might require great writerly skill, as distinct from the lack of concision permitted by the novel, this would seem to re-pose the question of writerly craft, and thereby account for why, even amid the GLF, the most successful examples of the short short story were those of professional authors such as Lao She. This ghostly topos would recur in one of the most interesting short texts of the reform period, amid a new set of hypermodern demands on the capacity of the form itself.

Out of Time

The proliferation of short short stories from 1978 onward far outstripped the output of this literary form over the preceding period with respect to quantity, and this trend of interest in short short stories has continued to the present day, with yearbooks of short short stories being published on annual bases, and encompassing short short publications from the Sinosphere as well as mainland China. The expanded publication of short forms was linked to a problematic of the everyday, but an everyday increasingly colonized by the economic, in which the short short story was presented as aligned with a post-socialist moment characterized by an increasingly rapid “rhythm” of economic development. So too were short short texts increasingly theorized in terms of a wholesale remediation by technologized visuality, whereby these texts would function as the most effective means for the transmission of “information,” an effect that could be achieved through the modeling of the texts themselves around a set of visual narrative and descriptive techniques drawn directly from cinema, specifically montage.

It is also, in turn, the contemporary development of the short short story that has provided the point of departure for contemporary scholarship on this literary form, especially that published in the English-language academy. The obliteration of the revolutionary history of the form in contemporary scholarship has its own discursive and material basis insofar as it corresponds precisely to the very theoretical discourse that emerged around the short short story in the early reform period itself, that is, in the 1980s. This critical discourse has had the effect of subsuming the short short story into a new set of tropes and associated practices of reading, ones diametrically opposed to the revolutionary configuration of the short short story during previous moments of development. The reconfiguration of the short short story in these terms depended for its legitimation on a series of space-clearing gestures that sundered from its revolutionary articulations. The necessity and logic of such gestures came into visibility through the influential article by Jiang Zengpei 江曾培 entitled “An Initial Theory of Microstories” 微型小说初论, first published in 1981 in the journal Fiction World 小说界, of which Jiang was also the editor. The effect of this article and others like it was to re-stabilize the term for short fictional texts around the “microstory” 微型小说 (translated here as “microstory” in order to convey its scientistic and visual connotations).

The theorization of the microstory that emerged out of Jiang’s article followed a seemingly contradictory logic, whereby Jiang posited that the history of this form could be traced to the premodern period, emblematized by, for example, Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Jiang, 1982: 230). Yet this dehistoricizing inflation of the category was accompanied by the trope of the microstory being determined by the requirements of a new developmental logic, in such a way as to reposition the development of the microstory in relation to capitalist modernization. This formal logic, whereby the reform-era construction of the short short story marked a denial of its own historicity as literary form, emerges as closely homologous to the commodity form itself, whose fetishistic character encompasses a similarly dehistoricizing and abstracting tendency. In Jiang’s own words, therefore,

Recently, with the rapid development of science and technology, and the rhythm of time having accelerated, the kind of microstory that is suitable to a reading time of “cooking an egg, dialling the phone, or waiting at the bus stop . . .” has already undergone an extensive development in foreign countries. (Jiang, 1982: 236)

The reference to “foreign countries” denoted, for Jiang, specifically the developments of literary commercialism in Taiwan and Japan. That this should be so denotes a tragic historical irony, in that the emergence of the Chinese short short story did, in fact, include a specific historical relationship with Japan, but namely in the form of proletarian art and literature, which is altogether rendered invisible during the reform period. Other early theorists cohered closely with Jiang in emphasizing a new practice of reading that would meet the demands of readers whose lives were structured by an accelerated rhythm of labor. Ling Huanxin 凌焕新, in a 1983 article entitled “An Exploration of the Microstory” 微型小说探胜, therefore argued that, with the quickening of the era,

The urgent demand of the mass of readers consists precisely in “briefness.” They—workers, peasants, students, cadres, and so on—eke out a small portion of time on the docks, in the waiting room, in the dormitory, or in a restaurant, so that at the same time as they munch on a bun they also read a story, from which they consider the truth of life, providing them with a great deal of spiritual benefit within a brief period of time. (Ling, 1992: 579)

These passing references to the contexts in which short short stories might be read, across Jiang, Ling, and other writers, are significant for the way they register a practice of reading that takes place in the interstices of other practices of everyday life, which gesture toward the necessity of preparing for or traveling to the site of labor, in the case of cooking an egg and waiting for public transport, respectively. Yet so too does this envisaged reading practice differ radically from that of the GLF, in which reading short texts was to become a collective and potentially oral practice rooted in the immediate site of labor itself.

The departure from the collective mode of reading of an earlier moment extended to the problem of the visual. Reform-era theorists linked the rise of the microstory to the rise of visual media in terms that invoked a notion of historical novelty, in which the allegedly recent dissemination of optical media was said to have contributed to the emergence of the short short story as a literary form. Typical in these terms was Xiao Zhang’s 晓钟 article “My Humble Observations on the Microstory” 微型小说刍议, which was one of a series of such articles to appear in 1985. His reflections on the supposed history of the short short story can be quoted at length:

Only in the late 1970s did the microstory truly emerge in China. This is directly related to the fact that before the 1970s there was a lack of concern for economic construction and development, such that the slow pace of the rhythm of life could not give rise to the microstory. The limited spread of film, television, and other forms of modern optical media also led to difficulties for the emergence [of the microstory]. With authors facing the arrival of the “information society,” and it being necessary to find new artistic forms to reflect objective reality and express subjective ideas, there emerged the “serial novel,” and so too did the microstory make its voice heard. (Xiao, 1985: 101)

To a far greater extent than the incipient invocation of the camera in the discourse of the GLF, the linking of the microstory to visual media in the reform era had implications for the narrative of these texts, whereby prospective authors were enjoined to directly incorporate the formal devices of film into their writing. This was true, above all, of montage, which marks a precise difference from the notion of the “camera lens” or “close-up” that informed the short short story during the GLF. ¹⁰ Jia Zongpei 郏宗培, also writing in 1985 when Xiao Zhong’s 晓钟 theoretical treatise emerged, explicitly argued in his “Some Thoughts Concerning the Microstory” 关于微型小说的思考 that the acceleration of the era and the dissemination of visual media had produced a new category of reader, one that no longer desired the slower temporalities and explicit directives of traditional narrative.

Film, television, music, painting, and other arts have a powerful capacity to influence people’s aesthetic tastes and the speed with which they can comprehend different kinds of literary information. Their brain memory regularly maintains a lot of literary information, and their capacity for imagination is such that they can participate in the creation of works under the inspiration of the author, so that it is no longer necessary for the author to use descriptive techniques of personification, or familiar language, or the old methods that possess an idyllic, slow beat or which lack aesthetic freshness. (Jia, 1985: 80)

Jia went on to posit that it was precisely the short short story that could approximate the demands of readers in a context where visual media had rendered traditional modes of narrative redundant. There is, here, then, an emergent crisis of literature under the effects of visuality, marking a considerable alteration in the relations between textual and visual forms of media as compared to earlier periods. This crisis was itself theorized through a theoretical vocabulary of “information,” which, as Liu Xiao has expertly demonstrated, served as the legitimation in the 1980s for a range of different cultural practices (Liu, 2019).

More suggestive still is the observation of Jia Zongpei that readers might come to “participate in the creation of works under the inspiration of the author.” The notion of the coproduction of the literary work between author and reader, and hence the challenge to the bifurcation between the two, marks, here, a novel part of the theoretical discourse of the microstory in the reform era. Within the larger scope of informational aesthetics that prevailed during the 1980s, the theorization of “literary information” in relation to the microstory had a specific site of theoretical departure, one that was, in fact, linked not to Japan, but rather to the introduction of new ideas from Eastern Europe during this period, and more specifically to the Hungarian theorist István Örkény, whose book One-Minute Stories made its first appearance in China in 1981 in the form of an article under the title “One-Minute Stories,” which included a Chinese-authored editorial introduction, the “explanandum” 说明 authored by Örkény for the book, as well as several “one-minute stories” authored by Örkény himself, prior to the publication of the book in full in 1989. That Örkény exercised a formative influence on the theorization of the microstory from the early 1980s onward is apparent from the fact that the examples invoked by Jiang Zengpei of how readers might read short short stories, such as that of reading while “cooking an egg,” occur verbatim in Örkény’s explanandum. Beyond Jiang’s uncited borrowing from Örkény’s explanandum, however, the most visible effect of this article lay in the Chinese editorial introduction, which ascribed to Örkény a specific conception of the relationship between the reader and writer, one in which, strikingly, the reader is said to co-participate in the process of literary creation itself, as a result of provocation or implication by the writer. In the words of the editorial introduction:

As pointed out by the Hungarian literary criticism sphere when assessing Örkény’s “one-minute stories,” the primary achievement of the writer’s use of the absurd is to draw the reader into the process of creation by getting the reader to think. Örkény himself has used a “mathematical equation” to summarize this specific feature: “The use of the smallest possible quantity of information on the part of the author to produce the greatest possible quantity of imagination on the part of the reader.” To get the reader to think is the greatest specific feature of Örkény’s “one-minute stories.” (E’erkaini, 1981: 119)

It was, then, Örkény’s notion of the reduction or minimization of literary information that informed, for example, Jia Zongpei’s rejection of traditional methods of description. There is, here, a reformulation of Lao She’s critique of “superfluous language” in the novel, but repackaged through a new theoretical discourse of “information.”

The single most detailed condensation of the different discourses that fed into the reform-era microstory was, however, that of Zhang Yuguang, with whom this article began. Writing in 1987 in his article “The Aesthetic Needs of Striding Toward the Information Age” 走向信息时代的审美要求, Zhang posited a totalizing transformation in relations between the reader and author, one rooted in the characteristics of the “information age.” As a result of the formation of new aesthetic tastes and needs, there emerged the risk of a total divorce between traditional modes of authorial practice and literary narrative on the one hand and the demands of new communities of readers on the other, such that, in his own words, “between the creative subject and the subject of reception there emerged at some point a truly shocking fracture” (Zhang, 1987: 125). For Zhang, the development of new aesthetic tastes was the result of a number of social forces, of which the most important were the disintegration of traditional unified cultural communities, and above all the acceleration of the rhythm of the epoch, marking, then, the further extension of those discursive tropes that surrounded the microstory of the early reform period. Zhang linked the theme of acceleration to the constant replacement of old information by new, and did so in terms of a series of metaphors that inadvertently pointed toward the abstraction of social life under the aegis of the commodity form as a defining characteristic of the early postsocialist period. In a highly revealing set of images, therefore, Zhang posited that

the computer is not only an instrument of labor, at the same time there also exists a computational language, a computational mode of thought, and even a computational mode of life 计算机生活方式. (Zhang, 1987: 127)

This “mode of life” is said to render a leisurely mode of reading impossible under conditions of high capitalist modernity, hence the rejection of the “ideal” of “reading at night in the company of a maiden” (Zhang, 1987: 127). The envisaging of a “computational mode of life” in these terms marks the emptying out of a revolutionary conception of the everyday in the reform period and its colonization by the economic, which in turn provides, for Zhang and others, the material conditions for the microstory and its associated practices of reading. Zhang’s most apposite remarks bear reading at length, whereby he argued that, under conditions of modernity,

through second-rate rapid reading or skim reading, the text flashes past through the field of vision rather than through the mind. . . . In this connection, there have also emerged various kinds of “digests” and “selections of texts” in considerable numbers, because they suit this kind of aesthetic style that demands the rapid transmission [of information] within a single moment. As evidence, consider the emergence of “one-sentence” news on the screen, the rise of the microstory, the birth of the clustered novel 集束小说, and the ways in which serialized novels have broken the long-form novel into fragments in order to win the readers of traditional long-form novels. (Zhang, 1987: 127)

The rejection of the traditional long-form novel on the basis of the accelerated temporal demands of capitalist modernization and the reconfiguration of the human sensorium around technologized visuality (as distinct from the “mind”) marks the final moment of a historical trajectory, here presented in terms radically different from the debates around form and reading that characterized the war period as well as the GLF. In the final part of his article, Zhang invokes the language of information in terms that restate the vision, derived from Örkény, of the reader as an active constituent in the process of literary creation through the readerly capacity to fill in those gaps, suggestions, and silences that are generated by a radical economy of language, marking, in Örkény’s terms, a capacity to generate imagination through a reduced quantity of writerly information. Zhang therefore locates among the narrative strategies of microstories the introduction of “fissures” that compel the reader to “use their own imagination to fill in the limited gaps in information” within the text (Zhang, 1987: 132).

It is only appropriate to end here with an example of a reform-era microstory. The story “! ---?” was published by author Wang Qingwei 王青伟 in 1982, and widely discussed and serialized during the 1980s as an example of the experimental character of the microstory. A full translation is given as follows:

The night appeared extremely quiet, desolate, Starry 星星 gazed at this great, ancient city from the distant horizon . . .

Suddenly, a series of sharp and piercing sounds shattered the tranquility of the night . . .

A – The Driver.

A teasing smile floated on his deceitful lips, and his eyes exuded a triumphant gleam. The truck was gliding smoothly forwards. His hands tenaciously withdrew from the horn . . .

B – The General.

The snow-white bedcover was thrust aside by a pair of strong hands. The old general swiftly descended from his bed, as if he had returned to the 1930s, working underground in the city and hearing the howls of police cars. Slipping into his shoes, he stood at the foot of his bed with a bitter smile, shaking his head, before lying down again, because tomorrow there was still a great deal of work awaiting him. He ordered himself to close his eyes, and yet could not go back to sleep . . .

C – The Writer.

He avoided the bustle of the daytime like the plague, but now he furrowed his brow, covering his ears and pacing around his room in deep annoyance . . . he felt unusually exhausted, and so stretched out in his rattan chair and nodded off. When he awoke from his dream, and gazed at the draft lying askew on his table, he could no longer remember the beautiful ideas that had left him in such a state of excitement the previous evening. He exhaled, and slowly stretched out his hands, ripping the draft pages to shreds—perhaps this might have been a masterpiece, but now he was left only with a blank . . .

D – Mother and Daughter

“Oh my little darling, please don’t cry!”

The young mother pressed her hand with melancholy to the forehead of her child, and felt it burning, the baby’s fever not having receded. Several times she glanced out of the window with protesting eyes, as the waves of hysterical howling tortured her. She sought to use a white shirt to cover the mouth of child, but the child only cried all the more vigorously.

“Oh little darling, won’t you go to sleep . . .”

The lullaby was covered by the sharp “sonata” of the vehicle,

E – The Judge

He was in the midst of expecting a case, when, with a “bam!” sound, the old judge closed the file, and knocked his shiny black pipe against the table a number of times, thinking: we should use the law to restrict these people utterly lacking in morality . . .

F – Starry

! ----?

She winked her eyes . . . (Wang, 1987: 305–306)

The experimental character of this microstory demonstrates both the drive to actualize new forms of visual media and cinematic technique at the level of form, and the aspiration that the reader might take part in the construction of literary meaning. The opening frame of the story leaves open the question of whether “Starry” is to be read as the diminutive name of a human character or as an anthropomorphized depiction of stars overlooking the city, a doubt that re-emerges at the end of the story with the elusive one-line reference to Starry. The larger content of the story, however, is suggestive for the way that a singular event—the unscrupulous driver pressing their horn in the middle of the night, we are given to understand—causes a series of subsequent events and responses across different social positions that are presented to the reader in the visual mode of a cinematic montage. Each of these “frames” is presented in the mode of a contained series of bodily actions and affective responses that permit no elaborate contextualization in relation to their respective figures, and therefore may be said to invite that process of intervention and imagination on the part of the reader that theorists such as Jia theorized as central to the microstory.

Yet more significant, however, are the ways that this text also invites readings that go against the grain of its own discursive preconditions, and which, in turn, provide ironic echoes of earlier self-critical moments, such as those which emerge from Lao She’s story. This is true above all of the curious reappearance of the topos of the writer whose attention is disrupted. If, as we have seen, the theoretical imagining of the microstory relied on modernizing tropes of speed and visuality, which were constructed largely in terms of the reader, then the reappearance in this text of the writer and concentration provides a reminder of the problem of cultural production and the irreducibility of its temporality to any set of modernist demands and tropes of acceleration, whether in the reform period or at the earlier juncture of the GLF. The montage-like formal arrangement of the text then becomes open to critique on much the same grounds, whereby the rapid shifting between individual figures or “shots” united only by their disparate responses to the malevolent driver who sets the story in motion does not provide access to any notion of epistemological or narrative totality, such as film montage might be expected to engender, but rather simulates a fragmentation of the social and a reduction of attention that is all too familiar to our contemporary moment.

Conclusion: Lukács’s Ghost

This article has examined the repeated reconfiguration of the short-form fictional text as a central but thus far understudied part of Chinese literary modernity. It has done so not in a historicist mode, that is, in order to show the stable development of a singular form over time, but with a view toward the dramatic and violent forms of remediation, whereby a set of literary experiments that had their origins in the international proletarian literary movement were retheorized and renamed over an extended historical period. Yet lest these different historical moments and their modes of writing be rendered wholly autonomous from each other, it can be said in closing that the appeal of the short short textual form arose from a conjuncture that is ultimately best understood as modernity itself, that is, modernity in the singular, or, in the terminology of Frederic Jameson, a singular modernity, defined by those elements of sensory experience that also conditioned the theorization of the short text—the contraction of temporality, the impetus to transform everyday life, and the visual remediation of literature. If, in the socialist period, the aspiration toward modernity took the form of a radical anti-capitalist reading of the modern, then the unavoidability of the intense temporal demands that emerge amid the GLF made possible, in turn, the reformulation of the microstory according to the tropes of modernization and acceleration in the reform period, in conjunction with an informational aesthetics, which occurred in conjunction with the reintegration of China with the world market and its attendant temporalities of capital accumulation.

The language of speed and visuality that came to characterize the microstory in the 1980s anticipates nothing so much as the direct and total incorporation of reading on the part of digital media, through the proliferation of screen devices together with the accompanying attention economy that comprises the dominant mode of textual encounter under late capitalism, in and beyond China. The breaking and constant rerouting of attention—encountered by the figures of the writers in the two fictional texts examined in full in this article—has been generalized as an epistemological and social condition. In these conditions, the constant shortening of possibilities for reading, and indeed of human attention spans, forces us once again to address the problem of time and literary form. If, over the long revolutionary trajectory of the 1920s to the 1970s, the rejection of the long-form novel and its accompanying practices of reading marked a series of projects designed as envisaging new textual forms adequate to a new, revolutionary culture, then today we may well have reason to revisit the old-fashioned form of the novel, with its attendant practices of reading and writing, and classical arguments concerning the capacity of long textual forms to encompass the complex totality of social relations. In doing so, we may also find it urgently necessary to insist, against Zhang Yuguang, on the time to read, according to a time of our choosing—including, indeed, by candlelight.