China and the West

Feng, Zongpu. Shi lun Mansifei'erde de xiao shuo yi shu [ID D30056].
"…Some critics hold the view that Katherine Mansfield effected a revolution in the short story comparable to that achieved by Joyce in the novel. Her revolution started with Prelude, and it never ceased developing. Her work is characterized by a unity of interior and exterior, a fusion of emotion and setting, an interdependence of suppression and expression. It succeeds in evoking an imaginary, poetic realm uniquely her own. In this realm she affects her readers with atmosphere and mood… Speaking of Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry claimed rightly that 'her affinities are rather with the English poets than with the English prose-writers. She was specially gifted at depicting a scene. It was more than a mere technique to her. She saw and felt in a scene what was not seen or felt by others… The blending of scenic description and expression of emotion gives Mansfield's work a special mood, and the reader derives from it the same pleasure as that obtained from reading poetry… There are two devices which reinforce the background in her writing. One is symbolism, an art of indicating something more than narration. The other is an art of exclusion and suggestion, a way of concealing meaning and leaving it to the reader to discover. The former is expression and the latter suppression… The exquisiteness of Mansfield's art of implication lies in withholding her artistic effect until the last moment. With the story unfolding gradually she would bring a sudden stop to her delineation of external events and turn inward… Although her heart responded turbulently to what she observed in her environment, Mansfield always managed to control herself, betraying few inner thoughts or emotions of her own in her work… Mansfield's suggestive style creates a spiritual ambience very similar to that of Chinese painting, where the croakings of frogs in a ten-acre field can be imagined from the simple drawing of a few tadpoles, or where a departing sail against the horizon, depicted on mere paper, can trigger off boundless wistfulness. It is a subtle aesthetic effect, and the key to Mansfield's 'secret' as well… Most of Mansfield's stories are events happening on a single day, such as a dinner party, a reunion, relating the events of a journey, or a visit to a doll's house…Her language is as purified and concise as the structure of her fiction, making her work crystal clear. Because she was ill, and because she lived in the shadow of death, the tragic events in some of her stories tended to be tinged with fatalism. In her eyes the tragedy of life was unavoidable."