Desire has a history and, for a literary criticism inflected by mimetic theory, novelistic prose fiction offers a privileged view of its unfolding. We study novelistic fiction, as opposed to various romance genres, to grasp that history, for what its authors have been able to see, understand, and dramatize—this is the procedural model, indeed the authority established by René Girard and that has largely governed such criticism thereafter.1 But of the three short fictions we consider here—two Chinese and one Canadian—only two are fully novelistic in character, in that they attempt to describe and diagnose—rather than merely express—emergent and changing desires. Students of Girard, of course, recognize here the distinction between the romanesque and romantique. to which one might add the understandings of genre developed by a number of other theorists.2However, we might also concede that all fictions are invariably and to some degree romantic—some desire, necessarily mediated, is always operative, in writers and readers alike, before or even as it is demystified, if indeed it is. Furthermore, a passionate fictional commitment to that which Girard boldly designated the mensonge romantique may actually reveal or clarify, at least for later readers, that which the author seeks half- or unconsciously to conceal. It is with this possibility in mind that we propose to consider our other subject fiction, “Miss Sophie's Diary” (莎菲女士的日记 sha fei nv shi de ri ji; 1927) by the pioneering Chinese woman writer Ding Ling (丁玲 ding ling).3 “Miss Sophie's Diary,” to be clear, is no simple romance; it is at least hybrid, and in its brave if perhaps only partially successful pursuit of the truth of desire, subtly revelatory. Miss Sophie ((莎菲 sha fei), chronically ill with tuberculosis and half-separated from a human world she both longs for and despises, with her aggrieved sense of superiority and desperate, shameful longing for those she passionately feels to be her inferiors, with her loquacious rationalizing and constant, perverse reversals of attitude, is a kind of Dostoyevskian “underground woman,” afflicted as well with a touch of the “nausea” later made prestigious by J.-P. Sartre.4 She is clearly a harbinger of her own culture's precipitation into the world of internally mediated, indeed, metaphysical desire, what we might also call the market world, the modernity Girard credits the great European novelists from Stendhal onward with diagnosing. This story has long been described as an unprecedented and “frank” revelation “of a Chinese woman's sexual feelings and contempt for conventional views,” expressing an “outspoken and unrelenting individualism.”5 At the same time, it has been seen as a product of the fatally compromised and ultimately unsuccessful May Fourth literary movement,6 and not necessarily representative of its author's overall fictional production. From an orthodox Girardian critical perspective, however, the crucial interpretative question might be the degree to which Ding Ling is aware of the sources of the newly enfranchised desires her heroine wrestles with, or, as we might also put it, the degree of separation between the author's understanding and that of Miss Sophie. But such a question is perhaps easily enough answered. Ding Ling clearly does not share Girard's “novelistic” perspective on the operation of desire. But from our current perspective, does her best-known work nonetheless offer, however imperfectly, certain now-recognizable insights into historical processes of desire that our other two writers more fully realize?“Miss Sophie's Diary” is famous in China for the delicacy, depth, and explicitness with which those bold and passionate sexual desires of Sophie are exposed, even as such desires are (perhaps reassuringly) defeated, or at least revealed as illusory. Clearly the story reflects a period of cultural and personal crisis. “I was extremely confused at that time,” she wrote in a later phase of self-critique. “On one hand, I was radically rebellious, believing blindly in social revolution; on the other hand, I indulged myself in a petty bourgeoisie sense, departing from revolution, so I was trapped in loneliness, struggle and misery . . . aside from fiction, I could not find a friend. So, I wrote fiction which was full of contempt for society and lonely spiritual struggle.”7 This now familiar condition has been productive in other contexts of an intensification of internal mediation, and so it is here. To feel contempt for society is to reject—claim to be unmoved by—its proffered desires, and specifically to spurn their pretensions to “external” authority and thus fall—tragically or redemptively, as one may judge—into an intensifying struggle with more proximate models. This variety of “lonely spiritual struggle,” as Miss Sophie's constant and obsessive fretting about her friends and potential lovers vividly illustrates, can only take place in an ever more crowded, indeed almost oppressively busy social field. The story's narrative is an extended sequence of anticipated visits, strained exchanges, obsessive musings about acquaintances and friends, choices of suitors, conversations and reflections on conversations. By her own telling, its protagonist occupies the center of a tight, even obsessed circle of acquaintances, friends, and supplicants—if she's lonely, it's not for lack of human company. Sophie's struggle is for identity, in short, an instance of modernity's own struggle with internally mediated desire, rendered here with the power and freshness of novelty, even revelation.The diary begins on the note of the protagonist's mixed impatience with and dependence upon the social world around her. Other human voices are “coarse” and “monotonous,” yet she is “terrifyingly lonely” (14–15) when she cannot hear them.8 She “can't find anything that isn't disgusting” but worries that “perhaps” she is “the only person affected this way” (15). But even this distinction seems unstable, and she longs for firmer ones, to “find something new to get miserable over and fed up with,” before once again collapsing into doubt: “everything new, whether good or bad, is too far away from me” (15). This might be diagnostic, but when the various other characters are introduced their overall mediocrity by comparison to her victimized sensitivity and perceptiveness bears unmistakable witness to the story's investment in her heroic difference. Wei (苇 wei), a young man who is courting her, seems weak-spirited and pathetic, plausibly disqualified by Sophie as “stupid” for the fault of making a “sincere parade of his devotion” (16)—a telling formulation. Sincerity itself is read as something “paraded,” that is, performed for the purpose of attracting admiration and desire, which of course, having been detected as such, it necessarily fails to do, either for her or for the reader. For us as well as for Sophie, this truly is an “incompetence in love” (17). She likewise rejects (as she absorbs) the care of her family, seeing in it another kind of discernably mediated devotion—poisoned by its traditional, that is to say, externally mediated origin. She wants to be treasured for her uniqueness! Even her good friends Yunlin (云霖 yun lin) and Yufang (毓芳 yu fang) are characterized as obtuse, faintly ridiculous—“some people,” Sophie archly observes, “would despise this sort of ordinariness”—as she attributes their happiness with each other to the lack of a “greater wish” (21) and later invokes their capture by a kind of mindless, feudal “asceticism” (28)—a blind refusal of the larger, more modern triumphs she believes her own uniqueness puts within reach. Her contempt extends to a set of cheerful girls she encounters in the cinema: instead of being infected by their happiness, she is “sick of all those routine dimpled smiles” (18). To Sophie's blighted eye, there can be no authenticity where there is commonality, repetition, the “routines” blindly followed by other people. They must be imitating each other! The authentic is that which imitates no one, that is self-originating, or at least apprehended as such. This is the truth of the underground man: “I am unlike everyone else, and everyone else is unlike me.”9Alternately pushed and pulled, lonely and contemptuous, Miss Sophie laments, “I really don't know how to analyze myself” (19), even as she continually does just that, again and again looking for (and finding) ways to better reframe her differences through the mediation of the people drawn into her orbit. Even so, her dedication to her own “greater wish,” as she herself recognizes, is far from absolute—this in fact is a key to our acceptance of her posture, which might otherwise, if maintained too forcefully and consistently, have prompted resistance and demystification. Her demonstrated and self-aware vulnerability, what we might also call her sympathetic human weakness, in a way inoculates her against readerly resentment. She, like us (and we may presume like her creator), cannot always defend herself against the modeling of others’ desires. One who at least temporarily penetrates her self-sufficiency is a woman named Jianru ( 剑如 jian ru), who resembles a girl Sophie has previously idolized—a notable fictional displacement that also functions to occlude the sources of desire. This newer version of the model now ignores the many letters Sophie sends to try to win her favor, “hurting” Sophie's “self-respect” (17). Forced by her friends to encounter her, Sophie, “so angry” she “wants to weep” but nonetheless “laughing aloud” (17), bitterly interprets Jianru's every ostensibly innocuous action for its duplicitous intent with regard to herself. But Ding Ling does not allow the full implications of her protagonist's hostility to be seen and thus undermine her heroic resistance to mimetic effects. After their meeting, Jianru is reported to have fallen ill because of her, and Sophie exults, offering that frank response as further evidence of her victorious immunity to routine social attitudes. A bit bizarrely, she even praises her own generosity, observing how reluctant she has previously been about taking the revenge she is now happy to embrace. Her friends obediently stop speaking of this one-time model-obstacle, and she drops from the story.But other threats to Sophie's unstable equilibrium cannot be turned away so easily, and these are posed, unsurprisingly, by sexuality, the perennial wild card in games of desire. Sexual desire is only to an (always enigmatic) degree mimetically mediated, so the kinds of defenses Sophie erects in the rest of her social life are even more vulnerable to compromise or violation here. The challenge becomes to redirect or reprocess the abjection caused by sexual desire to larger purposes, her version of the “shattering triumphs and pleasures”10 described by Girard, that greater and distinguishing desire which is, finally, immunity from desire, the position of the model. Meeting this challenge is the very purpose of writing a diary—imagining it read by others prefigures the attainment of such centrality—and is likewise and in parallel the fundamental business of the story's narrative.11Sophie's responses to Jianru, like that to Mengru (梦如 meng ru), a puzzling and only once-mentioned figure who turns up later,12 are intense, even overdetermined, allowing some readers to see a romantic or homoerotic dimension. This is perhaps unverifiable, although Sophie's recollections of her lost female friend Yun (蕴 yun) do suggest a strong emotional attachment. She recalls having “exploited” her own illness, her victimhood, to make Yun care for and “caress” (抚摩 fu mo) her (50), and summons up idyllic memories that include references to The Peony Pavilion, an opera thematizing intense—albeit entirely heterosexual—female romantic passion.13 But Yun has died, apparently of disappointment (over an unworthy husband whose love has faded), and while Sophie attributes her own woes to the loss of this relationship—if Yun “hadn't been tricked by God into loving that pasty-faced man” Sophie says she would never have “drifted” into her current predicament (50)—Yun's martyrdom now acts as a buttress, rather than an undermining, of her posture of independence from current desire. Sophie is a victim of fate, perhaps, but the scale of her loss also inoculates her against other influences, reinforcing her lonely eminence, her superiority. “When I think of Yun I really ought to go and weep the way I used to when I was acting the spoiled child for her. But this last year I've learned too much” (50). Other people wouldn't understand, or wouldn't measure up. To be the protagonist of tragedy—or, from a less committed perspective, melodrama—is a source of redemptive pride.14But the next challenge to her position is more serious yet, and its resolution one way or another will be the pivot of the story. The hackneyed adoration of Wei only reinforces Sophie's sense of her own singularity, but when a more suave and thus more genuinely attractive man enters the equation, the odds change. This is the tall stranger from Singapore, Ling Jishi (凌吉士 ling ji shi), whose combination of “male beauty” and “elegance” (21), his “incredibly relaxed” (22) manner, is for a time decisive. Sophie's responses reveal with some precision both the story's insights into the operations of desire, and their limitations. Against her immediate physical “longing”—repeatedly and emphatically expressed throughout the rest of the story—she is able to rally her own heroic difference: “They,” the others, will prevent her from acting on her authentic desire. “In this society,” she tells herself, “I'll never be allowed to take what I want . . . I had to control myself, keep my head down” (22). But true as this might in some ways be, Ding Ling is wise enough to recognize the stakes in what is also going to be a struggle for the high mimetic ground. The smitten protagonist immediately starts to wonder if the man “deliberately came to make a fool” of her and has to “force [her]self to resist his attractions” (22). Ling's coolness or confidence, his seeming indifference to her, wrests the model's position away from her: she imitates his own apparent desire for himself. The external mediation of the friends and family promoting Wei has none of the power of the rivalrous, immediate, “internal” effects of this dynamic combination of the appetitive and the mediated. Worse still, the haughtily individualist Sophie is quickly reduced to a servile snob, cruelly contrasting the loyal Yunlin with the ostensibly sophisticated Ling, who makes the former “look so petty and stupid. Goodness knows what Yufang must feel when she compares the two men, the tall one and the short one” (21). This is just what Girard diagnoses in Dostoevsky's anti-hero: “an inextricable mixture of pride and meanness,” the “snobbism” that itself “defines metaphysical desire.”15But Ding Ling cannot abandon her investment in Sophie's difference, and even her protagonist's struggles and failures are finally turned to account. These are certainly substantial, nor are we justified in discounting the difficulties and sufferings they produce—the life of internally mediated desire is not a comfortable one, as victory is both constantly imaginable and ever elusive. The bulk of the Ding Ling's narrative feelingly evokes genuine strain and sorrow. Like the underground man, Sophie tries to cling to the residue of her former desire: She “wants to become the Other and still remain [her]self.”16 Remaining herself means maintaining the posture in which she began the diary, her half-triumphant, half-victimized independence from the social world and its desires. The effort involves various contortions and maneuvers, including a resort to alcohol and a return to her invalid condition in the hospital, elements of a rhetoric of self-destructiveness with which modernity has become only too familiar. Her overt logic is the danger of sex itself in that “society,” with its attendant prohibitions and repressions. The (partly) hidden logic is her need to win the struggle of metaphysical desire with her model. In both these struggles she oscillates between the “masochistic” and “sadistic” modes, as Girard describes them. Her defeat—compromised health, hospitalization—regularly turns into its ostensible opposite: the enjoyment not just of a procession of worried friends, but of the jealous admiration of a nurse when the handsome Ling visits her there. Other distresses and delights follow. When she successfully pretends to him that she has a daughter, her achievement and its results are very precisely seen: “I'd actually fooled him. I felt triumphant in my dishonesty. This triumph seemed to make him less charming and handsome” (31).But it is not at last Sophie herself who robs Ling of his charms, but Ding Ling. The tall expatriate—Sophie takes to referring to him as that “Straits Chinese (海峡华人 hai xia hua ren)” (26)17 with a whiff of nativist contempt one suspects the author shares—is progressively revealed as weaker and weaker, less and less desirable to readers, even as Sophie claims her obsession does not abate. It turns out, for example, that he is already married, and frequents prostitutes. He models old-fashioned benefits of money and family.18 Worse, he is intellectually vacuous, or lacking in patriotism—he tellingly quotes Woodrow Wilson to her.19 And then, finally, fatally, he starts to practice the same contemptible forms of wooing as the naive Wei did. She is alone with him in her rooms at night—it is the climactic moment. Even after he has earned her “contempt” for making such conventional appeals to her, even after she has seen him as truly “pathetic,” (62) she finally lets him kiss her: But when that warm, moist soft thing was on my face what was my heart getting? I would never swoon like some women in the arms of their lovers. I was looking at him, my eyes wide open, thinking, “I've won! I've won!” It was because when he kissed me I knew the taste of what it was that bewitched me, and at the same time I despised myself. That's why I suddenly felt miserable, pushed him away and started crying.Perhaps he paid no attention to my tears and thought that his lips had given me such warmth, softness and tenderness that my heart was too intoxicated to know what it was doing. That was why he sat down beside me again and went on saying a lot of nauseating things that are supposed to be expressions of love. (63)A moist “thing . . . on my face (东西放在我放到我脸上 dong xi fang zai wo lian shang)”—less romantic descriptions of a man's kiss are hard to imagine.20 She begins, even, to “feel sorry for him,” although of course her “mind is made up” (64). She chooses, or pretends to choose, individuality over love. (Pretends, because what is at stake is less individuality—or love—than power, and Ling's debasement has given her that.) But her diary also arguably, daringly leaves open the possibility that she then nonetheless avails herself of the physical consummation she has craved. Even after his definitive rejection as a true romantic interest, the “disgruntled” Ling, she tells us, “wouldn't leave me alone. ‘Why are you being so stubborn?’ I wondered. He didn't go till 12:30 a.m.” (64). The original Chinese text here specifies that the “you” in question encompasses both of them—“you also (你也 ni ye)”—and of course various things might or might not have taken place in the interval before his emphatically late departure.21 But if she does seize the opportunity, she must do so in a spirit of contempt, even exploitation, and when he is gone, he is certainly gone for good. There follow a few conventional expressions of remorse, or victimhood—“I've ruined myself” and claims that she is her own worst enemy (64)—that might or might not refer directly to sexual transgression but are otherwise rather hard to explain in the aftermath of a supposed rejection of Ling's persistent advances. (Her previously expressed views on the naturalness of acting upon sexual urges—she “couldn't help laughing at” Yunlin and Yufang for having abstained (28)—do make it sound rather odd for her to be speaking this way of the outcome of one unpleasant kiss.) More pointedly, we find phrasing neither of our translations seems to encompass, and that we would render as “How will I ever avenge myself and restore what I have lost? (这有什么法子去报复而偿还一切的损失 zhe you shen mo fa zi qu bao fu er chang huan yi qie de sun shi).” But either way, these remarks feel ironic. This again is what “society” is telling her she should feel at such a moment, and so, in a passively aggressive gesture so open that it almost amounts to sarcasm, she embraces the prescribed fate: The final notes of the story are of her “laughing wildly with self-pity” (64) and solemnly (or mockingly) telling herself—in a quoted admonition of otherwise unexplained origin—how sorry she feels for herself. She has, actually, converted putative helplessness to omnipotence; from vanity to conceit, from schism to unity, she has converted a masochistic anxiety to supreme contempt for her model(s). But her obvious partner in the operation has been Ding Ling. One can only imagine a fiction in which Sophie's opponent is more her equal, or more like her.With Sophie, in the context of Chinese cultural history, Ding Ling perhaps really did rip off the veil covering the inner operation of female desire, and challenge male discursive authority—a major contribution. Her descriptions of women's sufferings, including the emotional contradictions Sophie experiences, brilliantly dramatized new divisions, disputes, and claims. But the narrative relies on what has become (in various cultural and historical contexts, and perhaps earlier in some) a standard strategy of demystification: the feckless Ling Jishi joins a long fictional parade of unworthy men courting superior women. Her creator, we might say, is not fully immune to the snobbism that infects Sophie. Or, the commitment to her gender-specific project may itself have prevented a fuller and deeper revelation of the mechanisms of modern desire, mechanisms that play no such favorites, imply no such victories, even partial ones like Sophie's. For that sort of revelation, a little more history may have needed to unfold, and writers who had lived through it to emerge.The striking similarities of structure, detail, and theme in Alice Munro's “To Reach Japan” (2012) and Eileen Chang's “Sealed Off” (张爱玲的《封锁》zhang ai ling de <feng suo>, 1943)22 seem warmly to invite comparative analysis. Both narrate temporary respites from dreary lives, morally and metaphysically ambiguous suspensions of an oppressive normality. The main actions take place in temporarily enclosed but moving spaces—a train and a city tram—and the two protagonists are both literary women: Munro's Greta a poet and Chang's Wu Cuiyuan (吴翠远 wu cui yuan) an English teacher who majored in literature. In “Sealed Off,” admittedly, a significant male character is also presented and from the omniscient narrator's perspective, whereas the men in “To Reach Japan,” like those in “Miss Sophie's Diary,” are secondary and entirely experienced through the protagonist's point of view. But in both stories the special opportunities offered by a hiatus in the continuum of social and temporal reality allow for a remarkably revelatory experience of modern desire.As the narratives begin, Greta and Cuiyuan, like Sophie, are dissatisfied, that is, consciously subject to desires rather than confidently modeling them. But there are considerable differences in the narrative perspectives that reflect themselves in the sources of their discontents. While Sophie was literally ill, misunderstood, painfully but we are to believe genuinely different, filled with fierce hungers that the human world around her cannot satisfy, the latter two protagonists are more vaguely oppressed, and by circumstances considerably more benign, at least by most objective measures. Readers are thus less encouraged to identify or see injustice and left more free to reflect on the sources of these discontents. The restless and artistic Greta—in a pattern Munro obsessively works through in her fiction, with variations—is married to a likeable and attractive practical man whose differences of perspective and interests do not obviously or directly consign him to the dismal territory occupied by Sophie's Wei or Ling Jishi. Lu Zongzhen (吕宗桢 lu zong zhen), the man with whom Chang's unmarried protagonist is briefly in love, is perhaps modestly enough endowed with desirable qualities, but the fact that his inner life is directly revealed humanizes him to a degree—whatever his limitations, he is also perceptibly what the great British novelist George Eliot called “an equivalent center of self,”23 a status certainly denied Sophie's male foils.In both stories, the women are trammeled by familiar configurations of social expectation, approval and disapproval, the desires of their relatives, of “society” more generally. Cuiyuan's “good” but philistine parents want their educated daughter to marry a rich businessman. Greta's creative individuality is of course insufficiently appreciated either in the snobbish world of literary folk or in her family circle. But their sufferings are not particularly intense or heroic, the assaults on their individualities not nearly as sustained or forceful as those made upon Sophie or her ilk, and there is a certain passivity in the stances of both—things happen to them, most particularly things, the impingement of other people, that trigger, briefly, fitfully, their desires. Beyond a vague dissatisfaction—nothing like the fierce impatience of Sophie—they seem not indeed to be self-originating in terms of desire. These are both stories, in short, informed by a more thoroughgoingly romanesque perspective.Greta, an aspiring poet with few publications, attends a literary party in Vancouver, gets drunk, and forms a crush on the Toronto journalist who helps her up off the floor and drives her home. The other partygoers have treated her disrespectfully, and familiar notes are sounded as to the failure of early-sixties North America to desire women for what they were now (many of them) wishing to be desired for—although Munro does note in passing that it was then somewhat “safer” for a woman to be a poet than it might be for a man (6). But as a standard bearer for a new vanguard, like most of Munro's subtly delineated heroines, the unassertive Greta is something less than ideal. Absorbed in daydreams about the journalist Harris Bennett, her poetic labors lapse, and when opportunity offers itself to go to Toronto and possibly see him, her approach seems both girlishly unpractical and ethically disconnected. On the train east with her pre-school-age daughter Katy, she instead has an (again, drunken) once-off affair with a considerably younger actor. While thus engaged in his sleeping berth, she fails to watch over Katy, who wanders dangerously away, to be found after a frightening interval sitting disconsolately alone in the passageway between the moving carriages. In another writer (or another era) this little trauma might have triggered a moral recognition, an epiphany or éclaircissement. But this is not and rarely is Munro's design, which is usually more complicated, and unsettling—arriving in Union Station in Toronto, Greta is unexpectedly greeted and kissed by Harris. For Greta this produces a “tumbling” and then “an immense settling” (30). The final words of the story, however, are devoted to the child Katy, who, seeing this kiss, pulls forcefully away from her mother but doesn't—how could she?—“try to escape.” Instead, she hovers nearby, “waiting for whatever had to come next” (30). We have been shown earlier in the story Katy's strong, even anxious attachment to her father and the family, and the concluding point of the story is surely unmistakable: it will be the child, and the children, who must bear the brunt of this prospective settlement, this new dispensation of female desire, who will not get what they want. Readers who have not found themselves fully imitating the desires Greta models—and the story certainly complicates that operation—must instead negotiate this morally tricky new territory in the company of a protagonist, albeit likeable, and indeed understandably at odds with her era and situation, but whose lack of maturity, self-knowledge, or force of character is hard not to register.Cuiyuan, a few years earlier and in another cultural world—although one beginning to feel some of the same developments—also has a love affair of sorts, but hers is even more temporary, and is platonic, almost indeed imaginary. This encounter only for the briefest interval releases her from the limitations of her life, modeling only in the most ambiguous or evanescent ways a different kind of desire. “Sealed Off,” it might directly be noted, is a subtle and highly wrought work of literary art, more densely symbolic than Munro's relatively late story perhaps aspires to be. Chang's imagery evokes not just ethical and psychological ambivalence but a kind of illegibility—desire is surely mimetic here, but in the manner of a fun-house maze rather than the reflections of a single mirror. The tram in which the protagonists are riding has apparently been sealed off from the outside, and stopped, by the Japanese occupiers of wartime Shanghai. It would otherwise “have gone on forever” (237), its passage through “time and space” signaled by a monotonous and unintelligible sequence of dinging sounds from the tram bell, each “like a small, cold dot: dot after dot” (237): a code, except not one, like Morse, that anyone can interpret—this is modern, everyday life, at least as the occupants of the vehicle experience it. But now, in the hiatus, cut off from the external stimuli and other people who are prohibited