China–India Myths in Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’
This chapter analyses the scholarship of prominent May Fourth writer Xu Dishan as gateway for understanding his fiction. A close examination of his engagement with Indian religions and mythology in his fiction constitutes a vision of a China–India literary horizon through a literary device termed as ‘transregional metonymy’: tropes that travelled between China and India through the cultural exchange of myths. The chapter elaborates on this literary device through a close reading of Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’ (1923). The reading shows how a shared China–India figurative domain emerges in the story to offer a new understanding of myths and how they function in modern life. It also suggests that instead of rewriting the past, myths can rewrite the present; instead of using myths to establish a national culture, literature can use myths to imagine a transregional horizon. Focusing on India to think about the nature of storytelling and the relationship between myth and reality, Xu Dishan undid the binary distinction between ancient India as a soul brother and colonial India as a cautionary tale.