by Lu Xun
Modern Chinese fiction was, from its inception, compromised by the motives of its inventors. In their calls for a ‘realist’ literature to save the country, intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu envisioned a kind of fiction that would both diagnose and cure the sickness of modern China. The New Culture Movement was aiming not so much for a distanced grasp of reality as for an instrument with which to reform it. Almost as soon as they seized upon realism as the key to China’s survival, Chinese writers began to soften their concept of mimesis, fearing that an ‘excessive’ stress on objectivity might prove ‘destructive’. ‘Merely to criticize without interpreting can cause melancholy and deep sorrow,’ counselled Mao Dun, one of the period’s leading exponents of literary realism and naturalism, ‘and these can lead to despondency.’13 (This was an anxiety that Lu Xun admitted to sharing, writing regretfully in his Preface to Outcry that ‘I often stooped to distortions and untruths: adding a fictitious wreath of flowers to Yu’er’s grave in “Medicine”; forbearing to write that Mrs Shan never dreams of her son in “Tomorrow”, because my generalissimos did not approve of pessimism. And I didn’t want to infect younger generations – dreaming the glorious dreams that I too had dreamed when I was young – with the loneliness that came to torment me’ (p. 20).)
The relationship between the (implicitly) intellectual, upper-class narrator and the lower-class protagonists that realist literary texts favoured soon became troubling to May Fourth writers. Quite apart from the difficulties of developing sufficient familiarity with a labouring milieu to write convincingly about it, such writers had to ponder awkward issues of narrative distance: how to prevent realism’s aura of objectivity morphing into contempt for the suffering masses for whom they felt instinctive sympathy. A self-confidence in the writer’s ability to doctor the nation (through a Europeanized literature incomprehensible to the Chinese masses) collided with an acute sense of intellectual guilt and a self-loathing urge to erase bourgeois authorship with a literature ‘of the people’. Lu Xun’s genius lay in his grasp of this paradox: in his ability both to express a critical vision of reality, and – through his handling of narrative form and perspective – to expose the limitations of China’s realist manifesto.14
To see this in action, we might return to ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’. Our condescending biographer, we realize, is a thoroughly compromised man who slips between the various worlds that he parodies: the flatulent Confucian literary tradition; the new learning; the parochial Weizhuang; the cannibalistic crowd. He can, as he pleases, keep his distance as an observer and yet gain privileged access to Ah-Q’s thought processes. When Ah-Q leaves Weizhuang for the city, our supposedly omniscient biographer unconventionally stays behind and waits for his subject to return before taking up the story again, merging himself into the ranks of the villagers. ‘I wrote “The Real Story”,’ Lu Xun once recalled, ‘with the intention of exposing the weakness of my fellow citizens – I did not specify whether or not I myself was included therein.’15 Throughout, his narrator’s satirical stance is made possible only by his mastery of the written word – by his collusion in an authoritarian literate tradition that delights in terrorizing illiterate plebeians, and that in the final courtroom scene at last crushes Ah-Q’s nerve. In Lu Xun’s grand finale, the reader himself – richly entertained over some fifty pages by Ah-Q’s idiocies – is drawn guiltily into the execution’s bestial audience: into its ‘monstrous coalition of eyes, gnawing into his soul’, ogling the horror of Ah-Q’s ritual sacrifice (p. 123).
Time and again, Lu Xun pulls this trick, drawing himself and his audience into his crowds of numb spectators. In ‘A Public Example’, the narration pans across the mob, leaving the reader a spectator of dehumanized surfaces. But it is in ‘New Year’s Sacrifice’ that he most unsettlingly implicates the intellectual narrator, the crowd and the reader in the violence of literary voyeurism. In telling the story of a peasant woman’s persecution to death by bad luck and social circumstance – the kind of material that would lend itself nicely to a Communist morality tale – Lu Xun averts the plot’s melodrama through framing her tale to expose the failures both of Confucian society and of the story’s progressive narrator, unable to bring a shred of comfort to a desperate beggar-woman near the end of her life. In a deliberate repetition of the account of the tragic death of the woman’s son, Lu Xun forces his readers to join Luzhen’s callous listeners, allowing us first to ‘chew deliciously’ on her sorrow then to share the townspeople’s sense of boredom, ‘spitting it out in disgust’ as dregs (p. 174). Recycling a device deployed at the end of ‘Upstairs in the Tavern’ and ‘The Loner’, the story ends with an incongruous exhalation of relief by the narrator, his spirits lifted by the recital just passed – a jibe at the moral cheapness of catharsis.
‘It is true that I dissect other people all the time,’ Lu Xun once wrote. ‘But I dissect myself far more often, and far more savagely.’16 (It cannot be accidental that his anatomizations always take place in transparently autobiographical landscapes: in Luzhen, a fictional version of his birthplace, Shaoxing, and its satellite villages; or in Beijing, Lu Xun’s adopted hometown between 1912 and 1926.) In his movement between irony, despair and hope, and with his talent for diagnosis but refusal to prescribe, he engineered a meditation on the ethics of reading and writing – and laid bare the dilemmas of China’s modern literature.
Lu Xun’s outward radicalism through these years stood at curious odds with his conservative private life. In 1906, he had submitted to a loveless marriage arranged by his mother. Although the match was possibly never consummated, for years he kept up a façade of marital cohabitation, and supported his wife financially throughout his lifetime. For all the energy that he expended on attacking Confucian values, he was himself a devotedly filial son, setting up home in 1919 with his mother, his wife, his two brothers and their Japanese wives. (He enjoyed an especially close relationship with his essayist brother Zhou Zuoren. Returning to Japan in 1906 after his marriage, Lu Xun took back with him not his new wife but Zhou, enabling them to embark upon various ill-fated early literary collaborations.) Several of the lighter pieces in Outcry and Hesitation offer snapshots of the extended family’s intriguing menage: the eccentricities of his sister-in-law’s rabbit rearing in ‘A Cat among the Rabbits’, the household’s trickle of bohemian visitors in ‘A Comedy of Ducks’. On his arranged marriage, though, Lu Xun publicly maintained a stolid silence.
In 1923, however, Lu Xun and Zhou became mysteriously estranged from each other, the older brother moving his mother and wife out to a separate Beijing residence. Although neither brother convincingly explained the causes of the rift, Zhou’s Japanese wife accused her brother-in-law of making sexual advances at her. (Through the 1910s and early 1920s, Lu Xun may well have remained largely celibate; according to one account, he refused to wear padded trousers through Beijing’s bitter winters in order to freeze out his sexual frustration.17
Whatever the truth behind the split, within another couple of years Lu Xun had found emotional solace in, at last, a meaningful romantic attachment: with Xu Guangping, a former student who would give birth to his only son in 1929. Conjugal happiness seems rather to have blunted his creative impulse: while the seven years from 1918 to 1925 produced two short-story collections and a darkly surreal prose-poetry sequence, Wild Grass, his remaining eleven years yielded only one further volume of fiction. Domestic pleasures did little, however, to temper his professional and personal belligerence. Throughout his working life, he had a habit of falling out with colleagues and acquaintances, abandoning most of his teaching jobs and publishing projects a few months after beginning them. Having somehow survived at the Ministry of Education for fourteen years, he was forced out in 1926 after a noisy vendetta against his minister. Though capable of generously mentoring younger writers, he could also violently overreact to perceived criticisms or slights. One analysis of his correspondence estimates that the fingers of one hand would not be needed to count the number of Lu Xun�
�s peers that he managed to be consistently kind about.18 After 1925, his instinctive spikiness was further sharpened by paranoid suspicions about gossip over his adulterous liaison with a woman sixteen years his junior (divorce from his arranged marriage was, apparently, out of the question). When Xu Guangping was expelled for radical insubordination on her Student Committee, Lu Xun saved some of his most chilling public vitriol for her college principal, whom he denounced – with perplexing misogyny, given the sympathy he expressed in his fiction and essays for Chinese women – as a withered, twisted widow, stirring up slander about his beloved.19
As the middle years of the 1920s firmly established Lu Xun as a literary celebrity – through his polemical essays and editing of prestigious literary magazines – he energetically kept up his profile in aggressive quarrels with writers, scholars and politicians. China’s new-style, post-May Fourth intellectuals were much given to temper and melodrama: one noted writer, Yu Dafu, considered drowning himself after his proficiency in German was questioned by a rival; when one of Lu Xun’s poems was rejected by a newspaper’s editor-in-chief, a junior editor (and promoter of Lu Xun’s work) slapped his boss in the face and resigned. Lu Xun’s abundant capacity for grudges (eleven years after a Beijing professor criticized him for failing to acknowledge a source, Lu Xun was still publicly sniping at the ‘lying dog’ who accused him of plagiarism) did little to cool this overheated world.
While China’s fractious literati squabbled, the country was embarking on a further bloody phase of its intermittent twentieth-century revolution. In 1923, the Soviet Union brokered – and financed – an improbable United Front between the young Chinese Communist Party (founded in 1921 by the New Culture luminaries Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao) and the right-wing Nationalist Party. By helping to defeat the warlords who had carved China up among themselves, the theory went, the Soviets would drive forward the national bourgeois revolution which would in turn provide a launching pad for Communism. But in 1927, with the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek on the brink of taking the great urban prizes of Shanghai and Nanjing, and with the Communists becoming, in Chiang’s eyes, unacceptably radical in their efforts to mobilize against landowners and businessmen, the alliance ruptured. On 12 April, he set an armed force of some one thousand men at Shanghai’s labour unions; one hundred unionists were gunned down at a single protest rally alone. Later that year, forces rallied by the Communists were similarly massacred in Changsha, Wuhan, Nanchang and, finally, Guangzhou, where leftists, quickly identified by the dye marks left round their necks from their red kerchiefs, were drowned in bundles of ten or twelve in the river by the city.
‘I am terrorized,’ wrote Lu Xun in the immediate aftermath, temporarily paralysed by the horror of it. ‘A kind of terror I have never experienced before… I have nothing to say… What is to come, I do not know, though I fear it will be no good.’20 Other radicals responded by plunging leftward into a romantic Marxism that claimed a central role for literature as the ‘vanguard of the Revolution’, recasting the revolutionary intelligentsia as proletarian warriors against the right-wing bourgeois oppressors. Through sheer force of will, they preached, the enlightened writer could ‘approach the spoken language of the worker and peasant masses… Overcome your own petit-bourgeois qualities; turn your back on the class that is soon to be abolished. Start walking toward the ragged mass of workers and peasants!… By so doing, you can ensure final victory, you will achieve outstanding merit, and you will not be ashamed to call yourself a warrior.’21
Although their protestations betrayed the left’s anxiety to find a role for the literary intellectual in an era of violent proletarian revolution, they provided few practical insights for those concerned about the uses of literature in a context of national crisis. If the Europeanized vernacular of the New Culture Movement had been, as political thinkers now set about declaring, ‘a waste of time’ with regard to popularization, how was the elitist written word to represent, reach and reform the undereducated masses?22
Enraged by the cheap opportunism of the Marxist converts – whom he accused of posturing in revolutionary coffee houses, of being drunk on their own slogans – Lu Xun began by pointing out the ‘divergent paths of literature and politics’. Some claim, he wrote,
that literature has a great part to play in revolution; that it can be used, for instance, to propagandize, encourage, spur on, speed up and accomplish revolution. But to my mind, writing of this kind lacks vigour, for few good works of literature have been written to order… During a great revolution, literature disappears and there is silence for… all are so busy making revolution that there is no time to talk of literature… Some writers today use the common people – workers and peasants – as material for their novels and poems, and this has also been called people’s literature when actually it is nothing of the sort, for the people have not yet opened their mouths.23
Yet after three years of translating and reflecting on Soviet literary theory, Lu Xun had taken his own leftward turn, as if – caught between two unappealing alternatives (the arrogance of the extreme left wing and the vapidity, as he intolerantly saw it, of a universalistic humanism) – he decided to select the lesser of two evils. In 1930 he embraced his ideological change of direction with oddly simplistic resolution, declaring that ‘our pioneering young intellectuals have raised a battle-cry’.
Our proletarian literature will continue to grow, because it belongs to the broad masses of revolutionary toilers; and as long as the people exist and gain in strength, so long will this revolutionary literature grow.
‘Now, in China,’ he resumed the following year, ‘the revolutionary literary movement of the proletariat is, in fact, the only literary movement.’24 Lu Xun witnessed at first hand the brutality of the Nationalist White Terror (in which close personal friends and associates were executed); perhaps he thought, like Western European converts to Stalinism in the 1930s, that Marxism was the only credible weapon against global fascism. An ambivalent choice forced on him by circumstances, Lu Xun’s conversion can also be read as the natural outcome of his earlier fiction’s undercurrent of intellectual guilt. For by throwing in his lot with the Communist establishment, Lu Xun submitted to an authoritarian literary principle whose final logic would be to annihilate not just literary freedom, but the very category of the author. It is hard to believe that a commentator as clear-sighted as Lu Xun – who had, after all, predicted only three years previously that a real revolution would obliterate literature (a prediction largely borne out in Mao’s post-1949 Republic) – could not see past the soft focus of Shanghai Marxism to the tyranny of Maoist socialist realism. Perhaps amid the disunity of the early 1930s, Lu Xun was unable to glimpse even the possibility of an absolutist Party line on literature.
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We can infer Lu Xun’s doubts about this revolutionary aesthetic from his own creative contribution to it. Through and beyond his embrace of a literature of the ‘broad masses of revolutionary toilers’, Lu Xun continued to shelter in Shanghai’s urbane foreign concessions: enjoying family life, browsing favourite bookshops, hosting dinners, going to Tarzan movies. While he called for the intelligentsia to ‘branch out’ against their own class, to become as one with the proletariat, while he helped aspiring writers of proletarian origin and encouraged the development of alternative media (films, lectures, drama, woodcut illustrations) to popularize cultural and political messages, he channelled most of his own literary energies into vituperative essays that he deployed as ‘daggers, or spears’ in the ideological contretemps fizzling within the ranks of Communist literati during the early 1930s.25 Though in 1935 he sent a congratulatory telegram on hearing of the conclusion of the Communist Long March in Yan’an, he declined the Communist Party’s invitation to write a long novel set in the rural revolution, pleading a lack of knowledge (ignorance that he did not make any attempt to remedy).
Far from promoting a revolutionary future, his fiction in these years retreated deep into the Chinese past. In 1935,
he completed the eight reworkings of ancient legends that made up his last collection, Old Stories Retold. A gentle counter-perspective on Chinese history spiked by moments of contemporary satire, Old Stories is a final expression of Lu Xun’s career-long migrations between present, future and past. ‘I cannot shake off the ancient ghosts that I carry on my back,’ he revealed in 1925 – six years after he had triumphantly announced that ‘the road of life is progressive, ever ascending the infinite hypotenuse of a spiritual triangle; nothing can obstruct it’.26
While preparing – in the quietude of his post-1911 depression – his two-volume Brief History of Chinese Fiction (one of the first attempts to privilege this previously denigrated form with a general scholarly history), Lu Xun developed a fascination with the fictional resources of the Chinese past: not only novels and stories, but also unofficial histories, biographies, romances, legends, myths and fables. In his academic research, essays and late fiction, China’s wider literary heritage came to offer Lu Xun a buffer against both the stolidity of late-Qing Confucianism, and the socio-political concerns of his own time.
But even as Lu Xun looked backwards, his thoughts seem to have returned restlessly to the present, in thinly disguised contemporary intrusions on to his ancient fictional landscapes: the parody of the anti-romantic critic in ‘Mending Heaven’; the clash with Feng Meng (a stab at a disciple-turned-literary antagonist) in ‘Flight to the Moon’. ‘And so I began the slippery descent into facetiousness – the arch-enemy of literary creation,’ Lu Xun wrote in his Preface to the collection. ‘I still hate myself for it.’ A few lines down, however, he contradictorily attacked himself for indulging his creativity too much, for his trivial delight in extrapolating ‘one tiny scrap of a fact… into a story of sorts’, rather than toiling to produce a work of historical substance (pp. 295–6). Old Stories Retold is a curious miscellany: an escapist regression from the Marxist wrangles that consumed him in his final years, periodically shanghaied by provincial jibes.