ABSTRACT
Li Jieren was born in 1891 and died in 1962, living through a tumultuous era that witnessed massive social changes arising from the two regime-changing revolutions in 1911 and 1949. During his writing career, the literary revolution of the May Fourth New Culture Movement and his experience of cosmopolitanism of the post-WWI European literature left enduring imprints on his literary and creative minds. In 1919 Li joined the Young China Study Society (Shaonian Zhongguo xuehui) and participated in a work-study program in France. No sooner had the student movement of May Fourth in Beijing erupted than Li sailed for France where he spent five years between 1919 and 1924 in Paris and Montpellier studying French literature, making a living by writing and translating articles for periodicals in Shanghai and Chengdu. Notably, Li’s sojourn in France converged with the expatriate experiences of some of the great Western modernist writers – Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, to name just a few – who found in Paris after the First World War the literary capital and a fermenting ground of world literary trends. But the Sichuan student differed widely from the expatriate modernists. Li was preoccupied with “an altogether different world” 1 in literary sensitivity, historical experience, and political mentality compared with his European contemporaries. While in France, Li was much less attracted to the avant-garde writers than to nineteenth-century French realist and naturalist authors. He devoted himself to reading and translating the realist and regional fictions by Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, and Marcel Prévost. Li found in those French authors inspirations for realistic character portraits, particularly nuanced portrayals of human desires and the female psyche under the patriarchy of Chinese society and Confucian moral governance. The erotic tradition and a regional flavor of French fiction broadened the horizon of the young Sichuanese student as seen from his translating Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Salammbô (1862) and Maupassant’s Notre Coeur (1890) and Une Vie (1883). The intercultural experience permitted him to gaze critically back at his home place and later to transcribe more global literary sensibilities in his historical trilogy.
