Lu Xun and His Legacy [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520334564

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Lu Xun and His Legacy

Lu Xun and His Legacy

ss

Edited with an I n t r o d u c t i o n by

Leo Ou-fan Lee

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles •

London

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1985 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Lu Xun and his legacy. Papers from a conference held at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, Calif., on Aug. 2 3 28, 1981. Includes index. 1. Lu, Hsiin, 1881-1936—Criticism and interpretation— Congresses. I. Lee, Leo Ou-fan. II. Series. PL2754.S5Z7567 1984 895.1'35 83-18048 ISBN 0-520-05158-0 Printed in the United States of America 123456789

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / VÜ INTRODUCTION / ix

PART ONE • LITERATURE 1. Tradition and Modernity in the Writings of Lu Xun Leo Ou-fan Lee 13 2. The Morality of Form: Lu X u n and the Modern Chinese Short Story Marston Anderson 132 3. Lu Xun's Zawen David E. Pollard! 54 4. Lu X u n as a Scholar of Traditional Chinese Literature John C. Y. Wang/90

PART TWO • THOUGHT AND POLITICS 105 5. T h e Morality of Mind and Immorality of Politics: Reflections on Lu X u n , the Intellectual Lin Yü-sheng/107 6. Hu Feng and the Critical Legacy of Lu Xun Theodore D. Hüters! 129 7. Lu X u n in the Period of 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 4 9 : The Making of a Chinese Gorki David Holm 1153 8. The Political Use of Lu X u n in the Cultural Revolution and After Merle Goldman! 180

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PART THREE • IMPACT A N D RECEPTION 197 9. Lu X u n and Patterns of Literary Sponsorship Howard Goldblattl 199 10. Lu X u n in Japan Maruyama Noboru/216 11. T h e Reception of Lu X u n in Europe and America: T h e Politics of Popularization and Scholarship Irene Eber/242 A Selective Bibliography of W o r k s by and about Lu X u n in Western Languages Irene Eber/275 Appendix: Titles of Lu X u n ' s W o r k s , with Chinese Transliterations and Characters/2S7 GLOSSARY OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE NAMES 1295 CONTRIBUTORS / 305 INDEX/307

Acknowledgments

The year 1981 marked the centennial of the birth of Lu Xun (1881 — 1936), modern China's foremost writer and intellectual. Among the worldwide commemorative activities was a scholarly conference held at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California, from August 23 to 28. More than thirty scholars and writers from the United States, Europe, Japan, Israel, and the People's Republic of China attended, and seventeen papers were presented. This volume represents a major part of the intellectual harvest of that conference. The conference was sponsored jointly by the Joint Committee on Contemporary China of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation. As organizer of the meeting I wish to express my gratitude to these two organizations and their capable representatives, Jason Parker and Sophie Sa, for their invaluable assistance. The initial planning committee consisted of myself and Professors Cyril Birch and Harriet Mills; I benefited immeasurably from their advice, and from that of Lin Yii-sheng, our consultant. The conference was honored by the presence of four eminent delegates from the People's Republic of China: two famous writers, Xiao Jun and Wu Zuxiang, and two leading Lu Xun scholars from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, Pu Liangpei and Ge Baoquan. The former presented a paper on the current state of Lu Xun scholarship in China, and the latter gave a long survey of names and titles connected with Lu Xun translation and research all over the world. (An English version of Ge's paper, titled "Lu Xun and World Literature," was published in Social Sciences in China 3 [1981]: 62—90.) The Chinese scholars brought with them a large number of recent publications, including the 1981 edition of vii

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edition of Lu Xun's complete works, recently annotated. The active.participation of our Chinese colleagues made the conference truly a rewarding experience of scholarly exchange. Needless to say, however, the opinions expressed in the individual papers of this volume, including my introduction, belong to their respective authors and do not reflect those of either the sponsoring organizations or our Chinese guests. Aside from those whose papers are included here, other participants who contributed either with papers or as discussants (and often both) were: Charles Alber, Cyril Birch, Kai-yu Hsu (who died shortly after in a tragic accident), W. J. F. Jenner, Perry Link, William Lyell, Harriet Mills, and Vera Schwarcz. Jon Kowallis and Christine Pfeil served capably as rapporteurs. The University of California Press—and in particular its copy editor, Joyce Coleman, and senior editor, Mary Lamprech—has provided efficient and conscientious service in facilitating the publication of this conference volume. Despite their efforts, minor errors and inconsistencies may still remain, for which I am responsible. Leo Ou-fan Lee March 10, 1984 Chicago

Introduction

Lu Xun's preeminent role in the history of modern Chinese literature and thought has long been recognized. The past four decades have seen the steady growth of a Lu Xun cult in China. Initiated by Mao Zedong himself, this process has resulted in the canonization of Lu Xun's writings and has established his fame as second only to that of Mao himself. The official Lu Xun "industry" in the People's Republic has turned out an impressive quantity of artifacts: at least three editions of his complete works, numerous collections of his individual works (some are reproductions of his original drafts), thousands of scholarly books, and tens of thousands of articles; museums and exhibitions; children's books and drawings; paintings, photographs, portraits, sketches, cartoons, slides, sculpture, films, music (including an opera and a ballet), plays, posters, bookmarks, coupons, and badges and pins of many sizes. It is hard to think of any other modern writer who has been so lavishly and laboriously honored by an entire nation. Even Soviet Russia's idealization of Gorki, with whom Lu Xun has often been compared, pales in scope and significance. For unlike Gorki, Lu Xun has been hailed by his country's leader not only as a great writer and intellectual but also as a great revolutionary. In this canonized view, Lu Xun was nothing less than the intellectual forefather of the Chinese Communist revolution, the man who blazed the revolutionary trail from the May Fourth Movement to the urban-centered struggles of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although he was not a Party member, Lu Xun has been seen as more authen-

The Chinese transliterations and characters for the titles of all the works by Lu Xun that are cited in this volume may be found in the Appendix. The pinyin system of romanization is used throughout. ix

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tically Marxist-Leninist-Maoist than some of the Party leaders of the 1930s. As a result, his thought is said to have paved the ideological way for M a o Zedong. In the successive campaigns since the 1950s, Lu Xun's name, together with excerpts from his writings, has been repeatedly invoked to "struggle against" enemies of all hues and to justify the political positions of different, even opposing, factions. (This process is succinctly surveyed in Merle G o l d m a n ' s essay for this volume.) Since M a o ' s death in 1976, a subtle de-Maoification has been under way, but Lu Xun's reputation remains unscathed: the current Party chairman, Hu Yaobang, eulogized him in a speech delivered to an invited audience of thousands on September 25, 1981, the hundredth anniversary of Lu Xun's birth. The overall effect of the Party-engineered idealization of Lu Xun is a narrowing of vision that has reduced the immense complexities of his personality and thought to a simplistic set of heroic traits. The final product of the official Lu X u n industry is a larger-than-life caricature of the real man. If we wish to de-deify Lu Xun, the first step is to recognize his internal paradoxes and contradictions. Lu Xun's writings reveal at least two conflicting personas. O n the public side he may have deserved every bit of praise that his adoring disciples and friends have accorded him, especially for his unstinting sponsorship of young writers and artists (described in H o w a r d Goldblatt's paper). In private, however, Lu Xun was relentlessly harsh on himself—a loner tormented with spiritual anguish, full of doubts, and obsessed with death. Lu Xun's unique collection of prose poetry, Wild Grass, offers us a rare glimpse into the dark recesses of his psyche, where ghostly figures roam over a symbolic landscape of decay and ruin. This artistic gem, discussed briefly by Lin Yii-sheng and myself, has until very recently been purposely neglected by Chinese Communist scholars because of its depressing tone and nihilistic content. Interestingly, Wild Grass drew the most enthusiastic applause from the conferees at Asilomar. For it is precisely the conflicts and contradictions the w o r k embodies that make Lu Xun's writing so intriguingly rich and ambiguous. Almost half a century after his death and in spite of ideological distortions, Lu Xun still holds a special fascination for readers and scholars outside of China—not merely for his penetrating insights into the Chinese national character, society, and culture but also for the originality of his mind and of the technique with which he sought to translate his intellectual and psychological tensions into art. The first four papers in this volume are concerned with Lu Xun's literary creativity. Here we must wrestle, as must all Lu Xun scholars, with both the quality and the sheer quantity of the author's creative output: two short-story collections; sixteen volumes of zawen (miscellaneous essays); a volume each of reminiscences, prose poetry, and historical fiction; some sixty classical poems; and more than half a dozen scholarly works on

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traditional Chinese literature. I have attempted in my essay a general survey of most of these genres, but my analysis is by no means comprehensive. It views Lu X u n ' s originality against the background of the entire heritage of Chinese tradition. For I believe that of all the M a y Fourth writers of " N e w Literature," Lu Xun alone had engaged his creative resources in a searching examination of this literary tradition, and that in so confronting it he had also created the most profound literature. When we read—and reread—his stories, w e are struck again and again by their daring experimentation, as if the author had been trying out a different innovative device in each story (and sometimes several new devices in the same story). This consciousness of technique in Lu X u n ' s fiction has received the major share of attention from Western scholars. Marston Anderson, in his contribution to this volume, analyzes the art of Lu X u n ' s stories from a perspective of Western, particularly European, theory that differs from previous studies of this genre. He has performed the intricate task of relating this Western-derived short-story form to the sociopolitical context in which Lu X u n and a later generation of Chinese writers practiced it. Anderson's analysis offers a refreshing w a y of approaching the legacy of this essentially realistic mode of Lu Xun's fiction. Compared to Anderson's somewhat theoretical discussion, David E. Pollard engages in a detailed reading of the massive corpus of Lu X u n ' s zawen writings. In general, Pollard pays more attention to the zawen works written in the early and middle periods of Lu Xun's career and to his last zawen collection. It is in these texts, rather than in the more politicized zawen of Lu Xun's leftist years, that Pollard finds his genius at work. Lu X u n seems to have owed much to the inspiration of the traditional Chinese categories of essay writing, including the infamous bagu (eight-legged) essay, at the same time as he consciously attempted to break away from them. It is precisely this intricate, often tension-ridden, interplay between the modernity of Lu Xun's artistic sensibility and the weight of the classical heritage that defines, in my view, Lu X u n ' s creativity. Thus most scholars, both in China and abroad, agree that Lu X u n ' s painstaking research into traditional Chinese fiction—the subject of John C . Y . Wang's paper—contributes not merely to the advancement of sinological scholarship itself but also to Lu X u n ' s own style of fiction writing. His Old Tales Retold is a fascinating collection of flawed experiments, a mixed genre in which Lu X u n tries to modernize ancient Chinese legends by recreating fictionally some of the material he has researched as a scholar. Lu X u n ' s originality as a creative artist—his efforts to be innovative in a literary tradition laden with precedents—is what makes him modern, as I argue in my essay. His borrowings from foreign literature, especially the short-story genre, fulfilled the same need. Yet the style he established in his profuse writings—a lyrical prose punctured with sardonic wit that was

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highly evocative, even allegorical—was not surpassed by any of his many imitators. His adroit use of ironic distance and of the role of narrator in his stories was a significant breakthrough in his time, but these techniques were not developed further by the fictional writers of the 1930s, who tended to confine themselves to the social realistic mode, which lacked psychological depth. Lu Xun's zawen was the most widely imitated but, as Pollard has noted, none of his followers matched his genius, let alone surpassed him. And his prose poetry has remained inimitable. To be sure, Taiwanese writers of the 1960s and 1970s eventually attained a mature technique in both fiction and poetry. But it is difficult to trace Lu Xun's direct influence in Taiwan, where he is officially banned. Thus, ironically, the literary legacy of this masterful innovator is the most problematic to assess, while his personality and subject matter have had a more tangible impact. To trace Lu Xun's legacy in the larger context of modern Chinese culture and politics is a formidable task; the scholar who attempts it must command a broad historical knowledge and understanding while at the same time remaining immune to the pressures of ideological dogma. The essays in the second section of this book are consequently more interdisciplinary and reflect the varied backgrounds of their authors. In general chronological order, these essays survey Lu Xun's impact from the 1930s to the present. One way in which the interpretive perspectives of this volume depart from the standard Chinese approach is that they eschew the usual paeans to Lu Xun's contributions to the CCP-led revolution. This is not to deny that Lu Xun, especially in the last phase of his life, committed himself to the ideals of revolution. Rather, the point is that Lu Xun's political commitment grew out of intellectual ruminations in a process that differed qualitatively from mere ideological conversion to Marxism. As Lin Yii-sheng points out in his thoughtful essay, Lu Xun's conception of political commitment is anchored in a humanistic moral ethos that does not allow for either personal chicanery or operational pragmatism. The internal logic of this moral orientation inevitably pitted him against the more professional politicians of both the Nationalist (KMT) and Communist parties. It is now well known that even as a leading polemicist on the leftist front during his last years, Lu Xun did not enjoy a harmonious relationship with the faction-torn CCP or with the League of Left-Wing Writers. His dedication to the cause of revolution was not inflamed by self-congratulating optimism; rather, it was buttressed by a deeply tragic view of life and society. He felt hemmed in by the forces of reaction and repression and harbored no clear prospect of victory for the revolution. Thus, paradoxically, amidst this "dark night" before the revolution he found renewed courage to fight on, not as a revolutionary vanguard but as

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a rearguard against the forces of darkness. Consequently, his profuse writings in this period, though avowedly more political than before and directed more at external enemies than at his own inner ghosts, are nevertheless imbued with anguish. In contrast to the externalized view of Lu Xun as an increasingly active revolutionary, both Lin Yii-sheng and Theodore D. Huters begin from within the author's mentality, delineating his sense of self and the process whereby he came to grips with external reality. It was his determination to avoid self-delusion, combined with his habit of ruthless self-scrutiny, that lay at the root of Lu Xun's integrity, a word that was mentioned again and again in the course of the conference. Lu Xun's morality, as Lin points out, formed the intellectual backbone of the author's commitment to his society and people. Lu Xun's morality was, therefore, not so much transcendent as humanistic. Lin suggests that the Chinese belief in tianren heyi (heaven and man are one) rules out the possibility of a transcendent morality derived, as in the Christian tradition, from a supreme God. Lu Xun's morality always evolved out of concrete human situations, as he looked facts in the face. This attitude explains Lu Xun's refusal to echo the optimistic effusions of the Creation and Sun society members about the rising revolutionary tide in China in the late 1920s. Lu Xun perceived no revolutionary prospects in China at that time, although he was tremendously impressed by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. He later changed his mind, as the result of a complicated process involving some painful decisions triggered by crucial incidents. Some of these decisions were not entirely consistent with the logic he had previously espoused, as Lin points out, and they exacted a great psychological toll on him personally. A case in point is, of course, the famous debate of the T w o Slogans in 1 9 3 6 , the last year of his life. Lu Xun's role in this battle, which was triggered by Zhou Yang's introduction of the slogan "National Defense Literature," is carefully analyzed, from different angles, by Theodore Huters and David Holm. In his meditative essay Huters indicates that Lu Xun resisted Zhou Yang's slogan, which he regarded as a moral compromise with the K M T . It is significant that Lu Xun responded in print to the vicious personal attack from X u Maoyong, a former disciple: in so doing Lu Xun was in fact taking a public stance against some CCP members of the leftist camp who had estranged him and used X u as their go-between. Holm demonstrates further that Zhou Yang acted in accordance with the wishes of the Moscow-based Comintern, which seemed able to communicate with the Shanghai-based CCP and the League of Left-Wing Writers more easily than with the rural headquarters of the Maoist wing. Whether or not Lu Xun's position in this debate was close to that of the rural CCP leadership, whose representative was presumably Feng Xuefeng, Lu Xun's friend and disciple, is subject to further research.

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One theme, however, remains clear in both Huters's and Holm's essays: to Lu Xun the debate involved a moral issue—he acted as a committed man who refused to compromise—whereas the followers of Zhou Yang and even some of Lu Xun's supporters tended to treat the slogan as a strategic maneuver in line with the newly declared United Front policy and the need for national unity against the common enemy, Japan. Interestingly, it seems that aside from Lu Xun only Hu Feng also refused to compromise. Lu Xun's behavior in the debate set an example for Hu Feng who, as Huters demonstrates, carried forward this legacy of unflinching independence. Hu Feng became one of the most intransigent participants in subsequent intraparty controversies. For instance, in the debate on national forms that took place in 1939 and 1940, Hu Feng played a prominent role in affirming the value of the more cosmopolitan May Fourth literature. Zhou Yang, who, ironically, may have been sympathetic to that stance, chose not to defend it—presumably in anticipation of Mao's wishes to downgrade that legacy in favor of the more rustic literary genres he considered proper national forms. From a literary point of view, the debate on national forms was more important than the battle of the Two Slogans. It implied that modern Chinese literature could either continue to absorb the best from the West or else become entirely absorbed in native traditions. Mao tended to favor the latter course, as shown by his injunctions at the Yan'an Forum on Art and Literature in 1942, whereas Lu Xun insisted on the former, as his volumes of translations eloquently demonstrate. The Yan'an syndrome of literary production represented perhaps not only a rural reaction against the urban-centered internationalism of the May Fourth tradition but also a rejection of the Lu Xun legacy. One of the most sensitive points of divergence between the Maoist and non-Maoist historians of modern Chinese literature lies precisely in this question of the literary relationship between Lu Xun and Mao. The official view from China is, of course, that Mao's Yan'an talks represented a further development of Lu Xun's thought. These scholars can cite both Lu Xun's avowedly Marxist affirmation, during his last years, of the class nature of literature and his endorsement of proletarian literary causes (such as the Latinization of written Chinese and the use of popular idioms). However, a major problem in studying Lu Xun's ideological changes is the lack of clear definition and in-depth analysis of what constituted a Marxist position on the leftist literary scene in China. Non-Maoist scholars argue that Lu Xun was not a Communist but a fellow traveler with the international leftist trend of the 1930s. He himself acknowledged that he had never read Das Kapital and was not versed in Marxist theory except through his translations of Plekhanov and Lunacharski. These two writers, some would contend, represented a side of the Marxist esthetic tradition

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that was less rigid and doctrinaire than some of Lenin's views or the Stalinist position in the 1930s or the literary theory of M a o Zedong. This thorny issue still awaits detailed study. But David Holm's essay clearly shows that in Yan'an the major leaders of Lu Xun research—such as Xiao Jun—were those who invoked his name to defend the right of the revolutionary writer to work toward the goals of the revolution without undue interference from Party bureaucrats. The extension of Party control over literature, in fact, is traceable only to Stalinist Russia; it is not contained in the programs of Marx and Engels. It is interesting, therefore, to note that in the two decades following Lu Xun's death the reigning epithet for the Chinese revolutionary writers was "realism" (which was sometimes broadened to include "critical realism," another term borrowed from Russia). Hu Feng was one of the leading advocates of realism, which to him harked back not only to the May Fourth tradition of realistic portrayal and social conscience but also to the nineteenth-century Russian legacy of humanistic criticism represented by the theorists Belinski and Chernyshevski and the masters of fiction such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gorki. The term "realism," as used by Hu and his colleagues, was of course as amorphous as such other once-prevalent terms as "revolutionary literature" and "proletarian literature." But comparison of Hu Feng's writings in the 1940s with M a o ' s formulations (and with those of his theoretician-followers such as Ai Siqi and Chen Boda) will reveal considerable divergence of literary orientations within the Chinese revolutionary movement. The fact that in the 1950s some of the major figures attacked or purged by the Party—including H u Feng, Feng Xuefeng, Ding Ling, Qin Zhaoyang, Ba Ren, and H u a n g Qiuyun—were all champions of realism and humanism is sufficient proof of the persistence of a critical tradition that varied with the Maoist orthodoxy, which Zhou Yang and his associates began imposing in the mid-1950s. It was also in the first half of the 1950s, when Soviet influence was at its height, that the phrase "socialist realism" became prevalent. (Although M a o himself had used the phrase in his Yan'an talks, Zhou Yang had been among the earliest to disseminate this Soviet doctrine, just as he had once translated Belinski and Chernyshevski.) With the criticism of H u Feng and later Qin Zhaoyang, realism became a bad word unless it was combined with the terms "socialist" or "revolutionary"—as in the slogan, put forth by Zhou Yang and Guo M o r u o in 1958: "The combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism." The complex literary history of the word realism remains to be written. But the brief survey above tends to reinforce Huters's conclusion that it was H u Feng w h o truly inherited Lu Xun's mantle, together with Xiao Jun and others. His moral ethos of the self, when translated into revolutionary theory and action in the 1940s, meant that the independence and rebel-

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liousness of the modern Chinese writer should never be taken away, that the doctrinaire politicization of literature should not be equated with the writer's commitment to the revolutionary goals in the name of which the literary commissars acted to silence him. But the unhappy fate that befell Hu and almost all of Lu Xun's disciples suggests the precariousness of this legacy of creative independence. The political use of Lu Xun in campaigns from the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution is succinctly surveyed in Merle Goldman's essay. Goldman makes clear that the rapid change in Party policies entailed frequent reinterpretations of several episodes in Lu Xun's life, specifically of the Two Slogans debate. At the height of the Gang of Four period, as the eminent writer Wu Zuxiang told us at the Asilomar conference, any person whose name Lu Xun had mentioned negatively was in danger of political reprisal from Jiang Qing and her cultural martinets. Lu Xun had once referred unfavorably to Wu in a letter, but Wu fortunately escaped attack because in another letter Lu Xun gave a more complimentary evaluation of him. Wu's personal testimony gives a valuable insight into what it must have meant to be either an erstwhile enemy or a close disciple of Lu Xun's, for Wu was only on the fringe of the leftist community of writers in the 1930s. Xiao Jun, of course, fared far worse both before and during the Cultural Revolution. The political motives underlying the excerpting and twisting of Lu Xun's words were sometimes blatantly obvious. More frequently, however, the subtle power plays and hidden messages and positions behind the official canonization of Lu Xun are harder to decipher. The art of manipulating Lu Xun quotations is an intriguing subject for study. Different quotations have been used at different junctures for different purposes. Just as the Gang of Four used Lu Xun's iconoclastic May Fourth—style essays during the AntiConfucius campaign of 1973—1974, so, as Goldman shows, has the present Deng-Hu campaign for the Four Modernizations taken quotations from a hitherto neglected essay by Lu Xun titled "Grabism." In that essay Lu Xun writes with some rhetorical emphasis in favor of grabbing everything good from foreign countries. And Hu Yaobang, in a speech commemorating Lu Xun's centennial, took Lu Xun's confessed habit of "self-scrutiny" ("I have often analyzed other people, but more often I have analyzed myself") and hoisted it on the new banner of "self-criticism"—the need to purge oneself of the errors of "bourgeois liberalization." The political struggles have also extended to Lu Xun scholarship. In 1981 the most carefully annotated edition of The Complete Works of Lu Xun was issued. Yet in the early 1970s the very suggestion of publishing a new complete edition was viewed with distrust, and an avowed Lu Xun scholar was as vulnerable to persecution as a former disciple—while the official Lu Xun cult flourished. It is only now, more than forty years after

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his death, that Chinese Lu Xun scholars are aiming at a more objective portrait of this great writer. Pu Liangpei, a leading younger scholar, has examined the less exemplary as well as the exemplary episodes in Lu Xun's life in a recent biography he coauthored with Liu Zaifu. Pu also gives a valuable summary of the present state of Chinese scholarship on Lu Xun. Partly out of disillusionment with the official canonization of Lu Xun, the younger generation of readers in post-Mao China may be less than enthusiastic about reading his works. It is as hard to assess Lu Xun's legacy after the Cultural Revolution as it was to sort through the ideological maze that preceded it. A general démythification of Lu Xun is certainly discernible. In one of the most successful recent adaptations of "The True Story of Ah Q , " by the veteran dramatist Chen Baichen, an actor playing Lu Xun appears onstage at the beginning and end of the play, making sardonic comments amidst puffs of smoke. Before Lu Xun leaves the stage, he says pensively that although Ah Q was known not to have any children, his offspring can actually be found in every corner of today's China. Chen Baichen seems to want not only to humanize Lu Xun but also to show his continued relevance in a new era. The play's final comment implies that the famous Ah Q traits—self-deception, self-rationalization, fence-sitting, compromises, bullying the weak while cowering before the strong, and so on—are still very much part of the Chinese national character in spite of the successive campaigns that have attempted to remold that character. The current official line explains these residual bad traits in socialist China as "remnants of feudalism"; these remnants also account for the evil practices of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. But what would Lu Xun think of these phenomena today? The contemporary writer Liu Binyan provided some corroboration of Chen Baichen's contention in a devastating piece of reportage, published in 1979, that faithfully documents corrupt behavior of more grandiose scope than Ah Q's. In fact, the entire literary trend toward "dark exposure" that has arisen since 1977 and of which Liu was a leading spokesman may be traced to Lu Xun's attitude that one must look facts in the face and reveal all the appalling aspects of Chinese society in order to find a proper cure. For it is above all Lu Xun's critical spirit that defines his personal integrity and his intellectual conscience. If the Lu Xun spirit is still needed today, it should inspire the entire populace to ask: What has gone wrong in the Chinese revolutionary path? But such a collective and ruthless soul-searching would surely prompt more scathing exposures of the socialist system and produce more psychological pain. It is thus highly unlikely that the current leadership will promote such a mental state, which would certainly not be conducive to the Four Modernizations effort. Such "dark" meditations, inspired by the observance of Lu Xun's cen-

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tennial, can offer little consolation to anyone, except perhaps to Lu Xun's ghostly alter ego in Wild Grass. For China and the world at large, Lu Xun is remembered in a better light. The last three essays in this volume deal with Lu Xun's reception. In Howard Goldblatt's historical portrait, Lu Xun emerges as a beloved mentor of young writers and artists in the 1930s. For all his self-torment, Lu Xun was extremely generous with those youths who sought his assistance and guidance, such as Xiao Jun and Xiao Hong. It is a life-sized picture—a notable contrast to the superhuman image of the posthumously deified Lu Xun. Irene Eber not only provides a broad survey of the Lu Xun scholarship in Western and Eastern Europe as well as the United States but also traces how Lu Xun's reception in these countries has changed as relations with revolutionary China have changed. (The selective bibliography appended to this volume is largely based on the much longer one Eber compiled for her paper.) Thus, the Chinese pattern of ideology and scholarship, politics and popularization, seems to have a world resonance. Eber convincingly demonstrates how each country, especially the Soviet Union and the Eastern European nations, has found a dimension of meaning in Lu Xun's writings that suits its own cultural and political climate and has read into Lu Xun a discussion of its own immediate concerns. But no foreign country has been as intensely absorbed with Lu Xun as Japan. As Maruyama Noboru carefully relates in his essay, from their first discovery of the author in the early 1920s, Japanese scholars, writers, and journalists have been obsessed with Lu Xun's work. This is partly due, of course, to the fact that Lu Xun spent his formative years studying in Japan. But the reasons go deeper. The Japanese, with their geographical and cultural proximity to China, have found a peculiar immediacy in Lu Xun's works—almost a mirror image of their own spiritual tribulations. And nowhere in Maruyama's group portrait of Japanese sinophiles can one find a more poignant, more dedicated Lu Xan scholar than the late Takeuchi Yoshimi. As Maruyama points out, it was Takeuchi who made Lu Xun profoundly meaningful to all subsequent generations of Japanese intellectuals. For Takeuchi, Lu Xun's writings not only provided a window on the soul of a people (in the same way as Lu Xun, while a young student in Japan, first read the stories of the East European writers he translated) but also assumed the stature of a sort of national conscience to generations of Japanese intellectuals, most of whom had shared the experience of a war with China. Maruyama Noboru has expanded on Takeuchi's work by seeking to pinpoint the concrete circumstances in which Lu Xun chose to act. Thus Maruyama has explored the theme of "literature and revolution"—a theme Takeuchi purposely avoided because of his distaste for Japanese politics. Maruyama concludes by pointing out that since the 1960s, Japa-

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nese disillusionment with aspects of the Chinese revolution has generated more diverse interpretations of Lu Xun. Eber's extensive data also reveals, interestingly, that relatively unbiased and pluralistic studies of Lu Xun are a recent phenomenon in the West as well. It may be said that Western scholars are in the beginning stages of research on Lu Xun and on modern Chinese literature in general. One commentator at the conference, Cyril Birch, suggested that a future workshop could be devoted to a single Lu Xun story, so far are we from a full understanding of his works. Though perhaps deliberately hyperbolic, Birch's comment was on target: after decades of ideological distortion the time has come for serious in-depth study of this most complex modern Chinese writer by an international community of Lu Xun scholars. The present volume, it is hoped, will be a first step in that direction. Leo Ou-fan Lee July 1 9 8 2 Bloomington, Indiana

1 Tradition and Modernity in the Writings of Lu Xun LEO OU-FAN LEE

Lu Xun was the major leader in the Chinese cultural revolution. He was not only a great writer but a great thinker and a great revolutionist.—Mao Zedong1

This celebrated triple accolade by Chairman M a o has governed Chinese perceptions of Lu X u n for half a century. According to this Maoist outlook, Lu X u n was a great thinker because he wanted to fashion a new world for the proletarian class, and he was a great writer because " i f a writer is truly great he must possess revolutionary thinking and faithfully serve the revolution." 2 Obviously, the key to understanding Lu X u n lies in the ethos and world view of the Chinese Communist revolution. T h e majority of Lu X u n scholars in China, despite their internecine squabbles, tend also to emphasize the revolutionary thinker and fighter at the expense of the writer. A n o n - M a o i s t , however, might contend that these modern characterizations do not necessarily reflect Lu X u n ' s own concept of himself. After he decided to give up medicine in 1 9 0 7 , Lu X u n remained dedicated to literature in spite of his later revolutionary sympathies. A writer in the M a y Fourth context, as I have demonstrated elsewhere,' was more than a spinner of words; with the emergence of new writers as a conscious social group and of the practice of literature as an independent profession, cre-

The edition of Lu Xun's works used here is Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun; hereafter cited as LXQJ), 20 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973). 1. Mao Zedong, "Xin minzhu zhuyi lun" (On new democracy), in Mao Zedong xuanji (Selected works of Mao Zedong) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1969), 2:658. 2. Wang Yao, "Lu Xun yanjiu de zhunsheng he zhizhen" (The standards and signposts of Lu Xun research), in Lu Xun yanjiu jikan (Compendium-journal of Lu Xun research) 1 (April 1979): 8. 3. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), chaps. 2, 12.

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ative writing assumed an intellectual significance far greater than that accorded such writing in America. A modern Chinese writer carries the self-imposed moral burden of being a critical conscience on behalf of society vis-a-vis the political establishment. At the same time he considers himself—especially in the May Fourth period—an originator, a creator of new literature in conscious reaction against tradition. In my view Lu Xun exemplified, perhaps more impressively than any other modern Chinese writer, these two crucial legacies. The relationship—historical or otherwise—between his stance and the development of the Chinese Communist revolution remains problematic. Thus the deification of Lu Xun as a predecessor of or counterpart to Mao is misleading: neither role does much justice to Lu Xun's greatness. The emphasis on the revolutionary effect of Lu Xun's thought ignores his profound originality and his original contributions to modern Chinese literature and culture. One way of gaining a deeper understanding of Lu Xun's originality as a writer, therefore, is to carefully analyze his literary technique. The term technique is used here in the broadest sense to mean the ways in which a writer's complexities are expressed in his work. I propose to explore the sources of Lu Xun's artistic creativity and to assess his overall contribution to modern Chinese literature. I will attempt to place his art in the larger context of Chinese culture rather than in the ideological frame that retroactively portrays Lu Xun's life and work as a progression through a number of neatly defined stages toward Marxism and revolution. The central issue here is, therefore, not why and how Lu Xun became a revolutionist but rather in what ways he is a modern Chinese writer. One of the most important aspects of Lu Xun's role as a modern writer was his quest to evolve something new and unprecedented in a literary tradition laden with precedents. As a member of the May Fourth intellectual vanguard, Lu Xun came to look at the totality of traditional Chinese culture from a radically new perspective. As Lin Yii-sheng has convincingly shown, Lu Xun's iconoclasm was more complex than that of most of his colleagues at Xin qingnian (New youth) magazine4; the many levels of his consciousness made him a less totalistic thinker and a far more profound writer. Lu Xun did not summarily dismiss Chinese tradition on merely ideological grounds; what seemed more crucial to him intellectually and psychologically was to find counter strains in and counter perspectives on the immensely rich legacy. The first calls for serious exploration from within the tradition, whereas the second requires the development of a critical consciousness and a creative point of view that enable the student 4. Lin Yii-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Fourth

Radical Iconoclasm

Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1 9 7 9 ) , chap. 5.

in the May

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to stand outside of that tradition. To some extent Lu Xun's literary experimentation—his consciousness of technique and his artistic presentation— may be seen as the necessary product of this bipartite quest for originality. I will confine myself in this paper to Lu Xun's creative writing, although his equally creative scholarship is another side of the same intellectual endeavor. In short, Lu Xun's art is grounded in a cultural consciousness that goes beyond pure estheticism (or, for that matter, pure ideological anti traditionalism). Such an analysis must begin with the major genres and forms of traditional Chinese literature that form the background for Lu Xun's various experiments as a writer. Lu Xun, through his family background and education, essentially inherited the two elitist genres of classical Chinese literature: poetry and prose. But he reworked both their style and content so creatively that he transformed the old genres into glittering new forms. He was not always successful, of course. The brilliance of conception in his Old Tales Retold, for example, did not carry through in execution, as Lu Xun himself admitted. 5 In these cases Lu Xun's achievement is clearly flawed, though a sympathetic reader may still attempt to gauge what remains unrealized in the author's intention. The present essay examines how Lu Xun succeeded in creatively transforming each genre he wrote in—not only his short stories and zawen but also his personal reminiscences, prose poetry, and classical-style poetry. T h e Short Story It is noteworthy that Lu Xun chose the short story as the principal literary form with which to make his debut as a creative writer. He evidently derived his knowledge of the form from the Russian and East European works he and his brother Zhou Zuoren read when they were in Japan. Obviously, the brevity of the form made it easier for them both to master it and to introduce it to their readers. (Their first translation effort, published in two volumes in 1909, was largely ignored by the public.) 6 At the turn of the century, moreover, the short story enjoyed great popularity and artistic vitality in European literature when fiction writers such as Andreev and Garshin, Lu Xun's early favorites, added a symbolic dimension to its basically realistic tradition, thereby making the genre more flexible in both meaning and form. Whatever the reasons, the decisive source of Lu Xun's inspiration came from abroad.

5. See Lu X u n ' s preface to Gushi xinbian (Old tales retold), LXQ], 2 : 4 4 9 - 4 5 1 . 6. Leo O u - f a n Lee, "Genesis of a Writer: N o t e s o n Lu X u n ' s Educational Experience, 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 0 9 , " in Merle G o l d m a n , ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, Mass.: H a r v a r d University Press, 1977), p. 186.

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But traditional Chinese literature also offered some generic precedents and contrasts. In his research on classical Chinese fiction—an undertaking that was itself a radical departure from the traditional concerns of a typical scholar—Lu Xun certainly noted the significance of Ming-Qing vernacular fiction, specifically the sanyan. Even more relevant in this regard were the long novels of the late Qing. As the Soviet scholar V. I. Semanov has shown, Lu Xun definitely surpassed his late Qing predecessors in both form and content. 7 Semanov's most significant point, for our purposes, is that Lu Xun felt a conscious need to depart from it. In his Brief History of Chinese Fiction he did not give high marks to late Qing fiction, contrary to the claims of Hu Shi and A Ying. Rather, his research on traditional fiction was concentrated basically on Tang and pre-Tang times. In these works he found a mythic and imaginative realm unfettered by Confucian moralism. Lu Xun's preference for these tales is also in line with his notion that the true source of literature and art lies in ancient myths and fables, and with his interest in popular drama and superstitions. The terse wenyan style of these early fictional works recalls the sparse classical prose (guwen) style in which Lu Xun became steeped under the influence of his teacher in Japan, Zhang Taiyan. The close connection in style between prose and fiction that characterized the elite litterateurs in the Tang and pre-Tang dynasties can also be discerned in Lu Xun's work. Whatever genre he chose, Lu Xun's writing always combines a terseness of style and language with imaginative and philosophical content—a result of his training in and predilection for Chinese classicism. Though the writing of fiction was an intellectual and ideological rebellion against the mainstream tradition, which upheld prose and poetry, Lu Xun's basic style nevertheless shows his debt to the past. For the younger Lu Xun the starting point of writing modern fiction remained the art of classical-style literary compositions (wenzhang)— which was, after all, one of the prerequisites of being cultured {wen). It is interesting that the earliest extant writings by Lu Xun consist of exercises in both classical compositions and classical poetry. During his Japanese years he continued to write poems and essays, and he later translated Western fiction in the classical style. Thus when he turned to fiction, it was natural for him to retain the influence of the classical composition. "Remembrance of the Past," written in 1911, is cast in the mode of an extended essay. But it assumes the contours of a fictional narrative in that it both tells a story of childhood memories and shows how the story is remembered. In other words, it already has the makings of a short story, a form that also contains a subjective point of view. As Jaroslav Prusek has 7. V. 1. Semanov, Lu Hsiin and His Predecessors, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1980).

trans. Charles Alber (White Plains,

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argued, "Remembrance" can be regarded as a precursor of modern Chinese fiction.8 Some of Lu Xun's subsequent stories indeed resemble fictionalized essays, because he was concerned not so much with plot as with making certain statements. The fictional dimension gave him the flexibility to make such a statement, while the brevity of the form appealed to his classical talent and temperament by forcing him to write succinctly yet profoundly. This formalistic economy, when coupled with a lyrical impulse, also explains why some of his stories resemble classical poetry in their emphasis on mood and metaphor over descriptive detail. Surely the most famous example of Lu Xun's transition from classical composition to the modern short story is his "Diary of a Madman" (1918), which has been hailed as China's first modern short story. The work's modernity stems not so much from its adoption of the modern vernacular (baibua) as from the novel way in which the story is told. The bulk of the story consists of a purposely fragmented diary in thirteen sections. Each section reads, on the surface, like a classical essay—but pieced together the fragments tell a story of such intense psychological impact as to surpass even its nominal model, Gogol's story of the same title. To be sure, the diary form itself is nothing new in traditional Chinese literature. Personal notes (biji) and travel accounts have been written since the Ming dynasty, if not earlier. But Lu Xun has invested this old form with an extremely subjective point of view that is unprecedented in Chinese diarist literature: it registers the ravings of an allegedly insane person suffering from a persecution complex. The diary is preceded by a pseudo-preface written in a typical classical style and voicing a conventional view. While titillating the reader's curiosity, the preface also allows the reader to disbelieve in the reality of the events recorded in the diary. Thus, this simple, brilliant device creates the effect of fiction while serving also as an ironic comment on the convention of the traditional preface. The irony produced by framing a text (the diary) within another text (the story) not only adds intensity to the tortures of Lu Xun's protagonist but also, insofar as the madman may be regarded as a version of Lu Xun's inner voice, serves to distance Lu Xun's own mentality from his readers. Lu Xun's engineering of a fictive text that protects a subtext of such shattering psychologism suggests that he did not really expect his contemporary readers to accept that subtext—certainly not the full range of the story's convoluted meaning. Whereas the external message of antitraditionalism is quite clear, the inner message of the story is imprisoned in a tragic paradox: the very process of gaining an acute con8. Jaroslav Prüsek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature, Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 9 8 0 ) , pp. 1 0 2 - 1 0 9 .

ed.

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sciousness dooms the enlightened individual (the madman) to alienation— to rejection by the very people he wishes to enlighten and change. The narrator in the preface announces that the madman was eventually cured and went on to seek office. This reassuring "happy ending" in fact accentuates the protagonist's failure. The only way out of this impasse is suggested by the diarist's final plea—"Save the children!" Lu Xun, with his conviction of evolutionism, offered this positive postscript to console his fellow warriors on the new cultural front. Thus, aside from its radical content, the heightened subjectivism and individualism manifested in "Diary of a M a d m a n " is, in my view, the defining characteristic that marks Lu Xun's passage from classical prose to modern fiction. One way of measuring Lu Xun's originality as a fiction writer, in an era in which modern fiction was yet to be fully developed, is, precisely, the degree to which he transformed his "prosaic" modes into fictional modes of expression. By this yardstick, his most successful stories are those in which he fully realized his most original conceptions. The less successful stories are those in which he did not entirely succeed in translating his thought or experience into innovative art. In the former category I would include such works as "Medicine," "Kong Yiji," " N e w Year's Sacrifice," " M y Old H o m e , " "In the Wineshop," " S o a p , " and " T h e True Story of Ah Q . " T h e latter category contains such pieces as " T h e Double Fifth Festival," " T h e Rabbits and the C a t , " " T h e Comedy of the Ducks," and "Village Opera." All of this last group were written in 1 9 2 2 and constitute, in my opinion, Lu Xun's least inspired fiction; they might belong to another collection. The in-between cases are either half-realized ingenious conceptions or brilliant techniques serving not-so-original conceptions; examples include " T h e White Light" (another, even more traumatic " M a d m a n " ) , "Brothers" (potentially Lu Xun's most radical portrait of psychological ambivalence), and " A Public Example" (which employs an effective cinematic technique—an exercise at sketching a conception). Other stories in this category can be characterized as overdrawn ("Regret for the Past," " T h e Misanthrope," "Storm in a Teacup," "Master G a o " ) , overly imitative ("A Happy Family"), or over-restrained ("A Small Incident," " T o m o r r o w " ) . 9 Chinese scholars have repeatedly pointed out Lu Xun's strong concern with characterization. Lu X u n himself remarked on the importance of describing the physical features—particularly the eyes—of his characters. While many of these characters, as Zhou Zuoren has informed us, are

9. These titles are taken from the standard English translation by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. The most up-to-date edition of their translation, which includes all the stories of the two collections, is The Complete Stories of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981; published in association with Foreign Languages Press, Beijing).

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based on real people Lu Xun knew, they are nevertheless composite portraits. "My characters are often a mixture," Lu Xun once stated, "of a mouth from Zhejiang, a face from Peking and clothes from Shanxi." 10 Most Chinese scholars argue that Lu Xun was aiming at typicality: his fictional characters are embodiments of social types, and their actions typical of their social group as a whole. These scholars go on to interpret the interactions of Lu Xun's characters as mirroring class antagonisms. Lu Xun's stories supposedly reflect the oppression and exploitation of the rural poor and dispossessed by the feudal landlord class. But in thus reading into Lu Xun a class-consciousness that he never espoused, his Chinese adulators have unintentionally ignored the true complexity of his intentions and hence the subtlety of his art. An obvious case in point is the debate about Ah Q. If he is an embodiment of the Chinese proletariat, why is he so despicable? Are his character traits typical of his class or of the whole Chinese people? If of the whole people, has Ah Q taken on the bad traits of his oppressors? In some ways, Ah Q is considered the most typical of all Lu Xun's characters. But this ideological oversimplification of Lu Xun's intentions fails to take into account the author's education in modern fiction writing. He shared the interest in nationalism that was fairly prevalent in late nineteenth-century European literature and that was advocated especially by such writers as Georg Brandes (whose treatises provided the Zhou brothers with their first secondary texts in Western literature). For Lu Xun the overriding question was: What is wrong with the Chinese national character?11 But Lu Xun did not become simply a nationalistic writer within the general realistic tradition, as Chinese scholars have opined. According to Patrick Hanan, D. W. Fokkema, and other Western scholars, Lu Xun was inclined less toward realism or naturalism per se than he was toward symbolism or symbolic realism. Especially in the early phase of his creative career, as Hanan has observed, "his taste for Andreev, who flirted with Symbolism, and for Gogol, Sienkiewicz, and Soseki, who specialized in satire and even irony, are indications of a search for a basically different method." 12 Thus, in his meticulous study of the technique of Lu Xun's fiction, Hanan has focused on his use of irony and satire. One could extend Hanan's analysis to characterization by arguing that the "high irony" employed in "The True Story of Ah Q " (which Lu Xun may have modeled after Sienkiewicz's Charcoal Sketches and Bartek the Victor)13 is 10. beidiao 11. 12. Studies 13.

Lu Xun, " W o zenmo zuoqi xiaoshuo lai" (How I came to write fiction), Nanqiang ji (Mixed accents), LXQJ, 5 : 1 0 8 . Lee, "Genesis of a Writer," p. 174. Patrick Hanan, "The Technique of Lu Xun's Fiction," Harvard Journal of Asiatic 34 (1974): 61. Ibid., pp. 6 8 - 7 1 .

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intended to convey a uniquely satirical conception of the Chinese national character. I have analyzed elsewhere Lu X u n ' s vision o f the alienating c o n f r o n t a tion between the gifted and insightful loner and the cruel and senseless crowd. 1 4 As the loner represents Lu X u n ' s notion of individualism, so the crowd is both the subject and o b j e c t o f his alienation—a fictional enactment of Lu X u n ' s deep-seated ambivalence toward his countrymen. " T h e True Story o f Ah Q " (the longest short story Lu X u n ever wrote) can be read as Lu X u n ' s s u m m a t i o n of the characteristics of the c r o w d ; in fact, Ah Q in his facial features (or lack t h e r e o f ) is literally and figuratively a face in the c r o w d . His governing spiritual trait is a total lack of spirituality; he is a body w i t h o u t an interior self and certainly a realization of Lu X u n ' s earlier impression o f the Chinese people in the famous news-slide incident in J a p a n . T h e story's ironic t o n e is as much an imitation of Sienkiewicz as it is a devastating m o c k e r y of the traditional Chinese biography. Again using the device of a pseudo-preface, Lu X u n introduces Ah Q with elaborate biographical detail that, however, adds up to nothing. O n e might also l o o k at the story's nine-chapter arrangement as a formalistic irony: the epic structure culminating in a grand finale encases only the meaningless life of one small m a n . T h e first five chapters of the story are organized around Ah Q ' s biological instincts, whereas the last four chapters catapult this most unheroic and insignificant figure into the chaos of the revolution. At the very end o f the story (the " g r a n d finale") Ah Q is being paraded to the execution ground; as he is watched by the jeering crowd, we suddenly b e c o m e aware of his aloneness. H e is subtly transformed from a face in the crowd into a loner besieged by his own erstwhile comrades. H e comes close to the first intellectual insight o f his life—about the true nature o f the crowd, his " a u d i e n c e " — b u t it is already t o o late. T h u s the elaborate symbolic structure of the story is the product of a complex ironic conception that turns idea into form and vice versa, and that turns Ah Q ' s typicality into a devastating c o m m e n t on the vapidity of the Chinese national character and the futility o f the 1 9 1 1 revolution. It is from this allegorical position that Lu X u n attempted to champion the M a y Fourth cause of radical i c o n o c l a s m and to level his critique at Chinese society. If characterization forms the core of Lu X u n ' s fiction, the art o f narrat i o n — t h e way in which characters and their interactions are i n t r o d u c e d — is the necessary c o m p l e m e n t in his technique. Lu X u n must be credited with initiating and consciously developing, for the first time in the history

14. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington:

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of Chinese literature, the complex role of the fictional narrator. 1 S The modern quality of "Diary of a M a d m a n , " we recall, lies in the unprecedented way in which the diarist's thoughts are framed within the pseudopreface supposedly written by a conventional narrator who adheres to the conventional value system. The story of " K o n g Y i j i " is told from the viewpoint of the waiter at the Prosperity Tavern. How sympathetic he is with the protagonist is left ambiguous, although the narrative gives the reader a generally negative impression of the crowd at the Tavern, whose value system the young waiter seems to share. In " N e w Year's Sacrifice" the initial passivity and insensitivity of the narrator serve to accentuate the suffering of the protagonist, a peasant whose misfortunes prompt her to raise profound questions of human existence with which the "intellectual" narrator should have been more concerned. In the course of narrating the peasant's story, however, the "unenlightened" narrator ends up in a similarly alienated situation himself. Through the narrator's varying roles and functions—omniscient or mediative, empathetic or obliquely objective—Lu Xun is able to bring into sharper relief the feelings and actions of his protagonist—whether madman, outmoded scholar, embittered cynic, persecuted peasant woman, or ineffectual modern intellectual. And the interaction between narrator and protagonist—conflict, confrontation, empathy, or sheer alienation—is fraught with subtle tensions. According to William Lyell and Zhu Tong, since Lu Xun's stories usually focus on interaction—between narrator and protagonist, or between two juxtaposed figures or events—his fiction can be seen as a kind of "story-theater." 1 6 It exerts a powerful impact on the audience by placing such crucial scenes in the foreground, whereas the background setting is often blurred, its realistic details kept to a minimum. Such fiction can be likened to the old Peking opera, in which the sets are more symbolic than naturalistic and the stage director, like the fictional narrator, moves back and forth through time and space to propel the dramatic action and engage the audience's attention. The setting of Lu Xun's story-theater is, of course, his hometown, Shaoxing and, often, its famous Prosperity Tavern, which act as a microcosm of traditional Chinese society. However, Lu Xun's symbolic theater can also be interpreted as interior

15. For a discussion of Lu Xun's development of the narrator's role, see William Lyell, Lu Hsiin's Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 2 6 7 - 2 8 7 . See also Marston Anderson's essay in this volume. 16. William Lyell, "The Short Story Theater of Lu Hsiin" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1971); Zhu Tong, Lu Xun zuopin de fenxi (Analysis of Lu Xun's works) (reprint ed., Hong Kong: Bowen shujii, 1972), 2:103—104. Zhu points out how Lu Xun satirizes the hypocrisy of his characters (in "Soap" and "Master Gao") by contrasting their behavior "front stage" and "back stage."

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drama: the actions and interactions of narrator and protagonist represent a "theatrical" way of sorting out Lu Xun's own feelings. The story "In the Wineshop," for instance, may be interpreted as one sustained dramatic dialogue between the protagonist and the narrator. The protagonist's account of his past contains so many episodes from Lu Xun's own experience that the narrator's empathetic inquiries come to seem a fictional device to elicit Lu Xun's inner thoughts and memories. In a sense the two men are both projections of Lu Xun's self, and their dialogue is a dramatization of the author's inner monologue. Speaking of the prose poetry of Baudelaire, Ralph Freedman has commented: "The poet detaches himself from the scene; one part of himself enacts the moral point in symbolic gestures, while the other part of himself functions as an observer who is detached at the very time that he is drawn into the scene." 17 This observation is equally pertinent to some of Lu Xun's prose poems and reminiscences. While his prose poetry exploits "the split between the narrator and hero" 18 metaphorically, Lu Xun's reminiscences are presented in a more factual manner: the middle-aged author is looking back on fragments of his personal background. Yet on closer inspection, we realize that these avowedly autobiographical accounts also contain fictionalized elements. In such well-known pieces as "Father's Illness" and "From the HundredPlant Garden to the Three-Flavored Study," the young Lu Xun has in fact become a fictional protagonist viewed by a somewhat bemused author. Through clever evocations of mood and fabrications of incidents (Lu Xun's father did not die as described here, according to Zhou Zuoren), 19 Lu Xun created a fictionalized autobiography, engaging in a kind of recherche du temps perdu with his youthful self. Thus even in his reminiscences Lu Xun's technique becomes a "lyrical device to portray simultaneously the poet-hero's inner drama and his consequent detachment." 20 Freedman has characterized the new European fiction since the early twentieth century as the "lyrical novel." It is "a hybrid genre that uses the novel to approach the functions of a poem" and in which "the usual scenery of fiction becomes a texture of imagery, and characters appear as personae for the self." 21 Of all the modern Chinese writers, Lu Xun and Yu Dafu come closest to this modernistic tradition of Hesse, Gide, Woolf, and, to some extent, James Joyce, though neither had any extensive knowledge of their European counterparts. Jaroslav Prusek also notes a 17. Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 32. 18. Ibid. 19. Zhou Zuoren, Zbitang huixiang lu (Memoirs of Zhou Zuoren) (Hong Kong: Ting tao chubanshe, 1970), 2:31. 20. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, p. 32. 21. Ibid., p. 1.

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"convergence" between modern Chinese and modern European literature: "The predominantly reminiscent and lyrical character of his writing brings Lu Hsiin, not into the tradition of realists of the nineteenth century, but into that of the markedly lyrical prose writers of Europe between the two world wars." 22 Prusek's underlying assumption in this rather extravagant claim is that Lu Xun had certainly inherited the dominant lyrical strain of classical Chinese poetry. This legacy led him to concentrate on mood, imagery, lyrical tableaux, and metaphorical landscapes at the expense of plot, background, and the sequential narrative characteristic of realist fiction. When we turn to Lu Xun's poetic works, this lyrical-modernist tendency becomes even more evident: it is the very core of his creativity. Prose Poetry a n d Classical Poetry Lu Xun wrote the prose poems in Wild Grass between 1924 and 1926, about the same time as he was writing his second collection of short stories, Wandering. Wild Grass remains a unique collection for both Lu Xun and modern Chinese literature: he was never able to repeat this tour de force of experimental writing in his later life, nor has any other modern Chinese writer attempted anything remotely like it. In the opinion of the late T. A. Hsia, most of the pieces are "genuine poetry in embryo: images imbued with strong emotional intensity, flowing and stopping in darkly glowing and oddly shaped lines, like molten metal failing to find a mold." 23 Lu Xun called them "small pale flowers" that blossom "on the rim of hell" 24 —crystallizations of the thoughts and feelings on the inner edge of his tormented psyche. Lu Xun gives artistic expression to his inner turmoil chiefly through imagery, which not only imbues his prose with its poetic quality but also, by departing daringly from the traditional imagery used in classical Chinese poetry, defines its modernity. Prûsek has argued that Lu Xun's prose poetry has a surrealism amazingly like that of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en prose.25 If Lu Xun's fiction is still anchored to a realistic base, despite its many symbolic attributes, his prose poetry is definitely conceived in symbolic structures. The collection's very first piece, "Autumn Night," ushers the reader into a nocturnal landscape that is also metaphorical. As the author's reverie progresses, the scenery suddenly comes alive: the sky becomes "distant and strange . . . about the corners of the sky's mouth 22. Prûsek, The Lyrical and the Epic, p. 109. 23. T. A. Hsia, "Aspects of the Power of Darkness in Lu Hsiin," in his The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), p. 150. 24. See Lu Xun's preface to the English edition of Erxin ji (Two hearts), LXQ], 4: 346. 25. Prûsek, The Lyrical and the Epic, p. 56.

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appears a smile"; the pink flowers begin to "dream of spring's arrival and of autumn's return"; the date trees, shorn of leaves, also "dream" of their past greening.26 Thus, imperceptibly, the natural courtyard is transformed into a garden of dreams. This dreamlike atmosphere pervades most of the other pieces in the collection. As T. A. Hsia has pointed out, Lu Xun's poetic dreams "have such a bizarre beauty and delirious terror that they are really nightmares. Even pieces not marked out as dreams have that nightmarish quality of inconsequence and the shock of misplaced reality." 27 Lu Xun's dream poems are not necessarily recapitulations of actual dreams; rather, they may be deliberate evocations of the subconscious processes.28 Several of the pieces begin: "I had a dream . . ." Like the pseudo-preface of "Diary of a Madman," the line both reassures the reader (it is, after all, merely a dream) and cajoles him out of his commonsensical reality. Lu Xun's artistic imagination is thus let loose to roam freely over the surrealistic horizons of absurdity. Written in the middle of the same decade as The Waste Land and Ulysses, Lu Xun's Wild Grass is perhaps modern China's only creative work that shows an inadvertent affinity to Western modernism. As in The Waste Land, the poetic imagery in Wild Grass contains metaphorical, even metaphysical meaning. Lu Xun turns concrete images into abstract metaphors through a most complex process. In a perceptive paper on Wild Grass, Charles Alber has identified its main structural principle as the interaction of oppositions couched in "symmetry and parallelism." 29 Lu Xun himself, in the inscription written after the collection was completed, reveals that its guiding theme was such contrasting pairs of images and concepts as emptiness and fullness, silence and sound, death and life, darkness and light, past and future, and despair and hope. These elements interact again and again in a series of enclosures formed by Lu Xun's use of parallelism, contrast, and repetition; it is as if he were spinning a web only to be caught in it himself. Thus Lu Xun's bipolar emotions and outlooks establish a vortex of paradoxes that offer no logical solution. It is a psychological impasse that mirrors Lu Xun's own suspension, at this critical juncture of his life, between hope and despair. The complex transmutation from image to metaphor, and from metaphor to metaphysical meaning, offers one clue to the appreciation of Lu 26. Lu Xun, Yecao (Wild grass), LXQJ, 1:465. 27. Hsia, Gate, p. 152. 28. Lu Xun was under the influence of the theories of Kuriyagawa Hakuson at the time he was writing Wild Grass. Kuriyagawa's book, Kumon no Shocho (Symbol of frustration), which Lu Xun translated into Chinese, had in turn been influenced by Freud and Bergson. I discuss this aspect of Wild Grass in my forthcoming book. 29. Charles Alber, "Wild Grass, Symmetry and Parallelism in Lu Hsiin's Prose Poems," in William H. Nienhauser, Jr., ed., Critical Essays on Chinese Literature (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1976), pp. 1 - 2 9 .

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Xun's genius in Wild Grass. Another clue may be found in its form and language. It is amazing to watch Lu Xun defy the conventions of traditional composition to evolve this mixed genre. It is true that the classical subgenre of fu may be considered prose poetry: it is capable of evocation and discourse, even of telling a story. But Lu Xun departs radically from the fu tradition, not only in his use of unprecedented imagery—which conjures up "a kind of terror and anxiety, an experience which we might call modern" 30 —but also by incorporating into his prose poetry such modern fictional devices as dialogue, shifting points of view (as in "The Dog's Retort" and "Tombstone Inscriptions"), and the complicated role of the narrator. "The Lost Good Hell," for instance, is narrated first by the implied author (in a dream) and then by the devil. In "The Dog's Retort" the author-narrator engages in a debate with the protagonist—a dog—that the dog eventually wins. In "Dead Fire" a paradoxical impasse is again described in a sustained dialogue. An earlier version of the same idea was written in 1919 as a "random talk" essay,31 and we can only marvel at the fictional elaboration that turned the essay into a fiction-flavored prose poem. In the only play of the collection, "The Passerby," Lu Xun offers an allegorical drama almost bereft of external action. It is a play of ideas enacted on a symbolic stage—a spatial representation of the protagonist's temporal anguish. He stops at a point of "nowhere" in his life's journey and engages in an exchange with two figures who represent the old and young generations. The total effect is curiously reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (though Lu Xun's play was written two or three decades earlier). As aspects of fiction and drama enter into Lu Xun's prose poetry, the language of his prose also takes on various shadings. T. A. Hsia has observed that Lu Xun managed to "let the bai-bua do things that it had never done before—things not even the best classical writers had ever thought of doing in wen-yan."31 Hsia cites one of the most impressive pieces, "Tombstone Inscriptions," as an example. In it Lu Xun combines both wenyan (the writing of the inscription) and baihua (in the serpent ghost's final command and in the narrator's description of the dream) to produce a magnificent audiovisual effect that fittingly underscores the poem's mixed temporal structure and its imagery of enclosure. Hsia also points out how Lu Xun achieved a "jaded and jerky rhythm" in his 30. Hsia, Gate, p. 151. 31. This piece, titled "Huo de bing" (Fire of ice), was originally published in 1919. It is one of the seven pieces under the general title "Ziyan ziyu" (Talking to myself) that have recently been discovered in China and reprinted in Lu Xun yanjiu xuehui, ed., Lu Xun yanjiu (Research on Lu Xun) 1 (1980): 16. 32. Hsia, Gate, p. 151.

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"Shadow's Leave-taking" by repeating the word ran'er (yet) derived from wenyan.33. Clearly, the intrusion of wenyan phrases and syntactic structures serves not to damage Lu Xun's baihua style but to enrich it. It lends a certain cadence to the prose while elevating it to the level of abstraction demanded by the surrealistic content. Some of the metaphorical phrases were coined for the purpose (e.g., wudi, "nowhere"; wuwu zbi zhen, "the midst of nothingness"); others were borrowed from Buddhism (sanjie, "the three realms"; da huanxi, "great joy" or "passion"). They give a philosophical weight to those pieces that have allegorical implications ("Such a Fighter," "Dead Fire," "Shadow's Leave-taking"). The two prose poems bearing the same title, "Revenge," are written with two different styles. The first poem is richly nuanced and intricately visual (especially in the first two paragraphs' description of human flesh and blood). The second is audibly cadenced as if meant to be chanted aloud (as a kind of sermon on the true meaning of Jesus' passion). Both incorporate a heavy dosage of metaphorical phrases. Genuine poetry can be found in the lyrical pieces of the collection, which subtly blend the poet's emotions into the mood of external nature to attain a state reminiscent of the best traditional Chinese poetry. Yet again Lu Xun's prose poetry does not exactly reproduce the qing-jing (emotional-visual) ideal of classical Chinese poetry. In the tradition of the Six Dynasties or the Tang, qing and jing are not wholly separate entities: self and nature or the universe interact and resonate with each other. 34 Although the poet transforms nature through his own consciousness, he does not intentionally distort nature through his own mind. Nature and the poet's subjective vision mingle in a kind of lyrical communion. In Lu Xun's lyrical pieces, on the other hand, the poet's subjective vision seems to take over completely. In "Autumn Night" the natural landscape is so transformed that it becomes a manifestation of the poet's inner landscape. In "Snow," the composition revolves around two contrasting evocations of snow south of the Yangtze and in the north, which stand for the poet's past youth and present age. The portrait of his youth is rich in colors: blood-red camellias, pale white plum blossoms tinged with green, golden bell-shaped flowers, cold green weeds, and the dazzling white snow Buddha. But the snow of the north, where the poet now resides, is colorless and drifting: it is "lonely snow, dead rain, the ghost of rain," 35 certainly a symbolic representation of the present Lu Xun— 33. Ibid., p. 150. 34. See Wong Siu-kit, "Ch'ing and Ching in Critical Writings of Wang Fu-chih," in Adele Austin Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 1 2 1 - 1 5 0 . 35. Lu Xun, Yecao, LXQ], 1 : 4 8 4 - 4 8 5 .

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lonely, detached, and alienated. In "The Good Story" Lu Xun conjures up the vision of a perfect world where all the beautiful elements merge and mingle—only to remind the reader that this "lovely, charming, enthralling story" is pure fiction. Nothing of the sort could exist in a world of irresolvable polarities. In a way, this good story offers the only good dream in a nightmarish collection. Analysis of these formalistic and linguistic features in Wild Grass clearly shows that it embodies a metaphorical lyricism unsurpassed even in Lu Xun's subsequent works. It stands in a kind of modernistic splendor almost alien to the Chinese tradition. While the form is shockingly new and Western, we have no firm evidence to support the view that Lu Xun was consciously imitating any Western work. One is tempted to consider it a product of pure genius, the artistic and original harvest of a brilliant mind wrestling with a convoluted psyche. Comparison with traditional Chinese literature reveals the true radicalism of Lu Xun's artistic intention. "Prose poetry" (sanwen shi) is a baihua term that manifestly links up the two major elite genres of traditional Chinese literature to form a new, hybrid genre. Like Freedman's lyrical novel in the West, sanwen shi uses prose to approach the functions of a poem while liberating poetry from its traditional shackles of rhyme and meter. One could also see Lu Xun's prose poetry as a special kind of prose—a poetic variation of the personal essay. Here again he has broken new ground: seldom in Chinese essay writing has there been such imagistic novelty and metaphysical depth. Perhaps Lu Xun conceived of his own work more in this second way. As he once modestly explained: "I could not escape from writing for a number of publications, and these writings I called 'random talks.' When I had some minor impressions and thoughts, I would write a few short compositions. More pretentiously, they were called 'prose poetry.' Later on they were published in one volume under the title of Wild Grass. When I could acquire more complete material, I continued to write short stories." 36 Perhaps due to the unconventional nature of his "minor impressions and thoughts," he had to invent an equally unconventional form to record them. While Lu Xun did not spell out clearly the difference between his "random talk" essays and his prose poetry, this statement suggests that the latter was more deeply personal than the former; in both the basic tool is prose. If, however, we prefer to view Lu Xun's prose poetry as basically poetry, it would be most interesting to discuss it in connection with a related genre, Lu Xun's classical-style poetry. The obvious question seems to be: After evolving the inventive mixed genre of prose poetry, why did Lu Xun 36. Lu Xun, "Zixuan ji zixu" (Preface to a personal selection), Nanqiang beidiao ji, LXQ], 4 : 5 0 - 5 1 .

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continue to write in the more conventional form of traditional poetry? Should we then consider his classical poetry inferior or insignificant? From a May Fourth perspective, we might also ask: Why write classical poetry at all? Why didn't Lu Xun write more poetry in the modern vernacular? Though Lu Xun did experiment with a number of baihua poems, they are, in my judgment, the least successful of all his writings. They seem to be doggerels penned on a flippant impulse. Perhaps Lu Xun intended to poke fun at the new poetry of his time, but in satirizing its tone and diction he ended up imitating it. And the bulk of the modern Chinese poetry written in the early 1920s is very bad indeed. Obviously, Lu Xun did not find it congenial to his sensibilities. On the other hand, Lu Xun's best classical poems reveal a certain inventiveness. He is, by general consensus, a very good classical poet, albeit a difficult one. For my purposes the most intriguing inquiry may well be: How did Lu Xun manage to be inventive even within this most restrictive of classical forms? Lu Xun's output of classical poetry was considerable, amounting to some sixty poems. 37 He once modestly disavowed any expertise in the art; he claimed that "all good poetry had been written by Tang times." Nevertheless, he could not resist "filling in a few lines from time to time; it's really laughable when I think about it." 3 8 This comment implies that classical-style poetry may have been tangential to Lu Xun's creative intention, but it does not necessarily mean that once he set about writing such poetry the same impulse that motivated his prose poetry was not at work. It has been pointed out that his classical poetry strictly observes every prosodic requirement in all but a few cases. Moreover, he seemed to prefer writing in the more succinct forms of jueju (quatrain) and His hi (regulated verse) in four or eight lines—a practice prevalent among Tang poets. His favorite classical poets were, apparently, Li He and Qu Yuan. 39 All this evidence indicates a certain classical taste and temperament that also influenced his interest in classical prose. But just as Lu Xun transformed his classically

37. Two recent translations are: Jon Kowallis, Lu Xun's Classical Chinese Verse: A Complete English Translation with Annotations and Commentary (unpublished manuscript), which includes sixty-four separate poems; and W. J. F. Jenner, Lu Xun: Selected Poems (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1982), which includes some forty selections. 38. Lu Xun, letter to Yang Jiyun, in Lu Xun shujian (Letters of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1953), 2:697. 39. For some typical discussions of Lu Xun's classical poetry and the influence of Qu Yuan and Li He, see Xi Jin, "Lu Xun yu shige" (Lu Xun and poetry), in Xin Zhongguo wenyi congkan Lu Xun jinian teji (Special Lu Xun memorial issue of New China Literary Journal) (Hong Kong; 1939), p. 81; Hu Jinxu, Lu Xun zuopin ji qita (Lu Xun's works and related issues) (Shanghai: Nitu she, 1950), pp. 1 4 - 1 7 . Hu's comments are based on the views of Lu Xun's friend Xu Shoushang. The literary historian Liu Dajie, however, considers Du Fu to be the model of Lu Xun's poetry. See his "Lu Xun di jiushi" (Lu Xun's old-style poetry), Wenyi bao 47 (5 November 1956): 65.

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inspired prose into fiction and prose poetry, he may have undertaken, consciously or not, a similar task in his classical-style poetry. Lu Xun's originality affects the content more than the form: despite the strict formal confines and the profuse poetic allusions, Lu Xun succeeded, if less strikingly than in his prose poetry, in his attempt "to give formal rendering to a kind of terror and anxiety, an experience which we might call modern" (to quote again T. A. Hsia's apt description).40 Let us examine one of his most succinct poems, an inscription on Wandering, his second collection of short stories: Forlorn and empty— the new literary garden. Still and calm— the old battleground. Somewhere between the two remains one soldier; Shouldering a lance, alone, and wandering. 4 1

According to Jon Kowallis, whose English translation is used here, the word panghuang, which occurs in the last line of this quatrain, should be rendered as "groping" to emphasize Lu Xun's sense of commitment, in line with the interpretation of Lu Xun's friend Xu Shoushang.42 But in my opinion the text evokes such a feeling of anxiety and indecision that it transcends the narrow scope of sociopolitical commitment. While "new literary garden" and "the old battleground" obviously refer to the May Fourth literary scene, the next line—"somewhere between the t w o " — evokes a vaguely existential feeling of void. If we juxtapose the mood of the poem with that of Lu Xun's poetic play, "The Passerby," the image of the lone soldier (another variation of Lu Xun's motif of the loner) appears in a larger philosophical and historical context: the poet's alter ego is caught in a no-man's-land between traditional and modern China. Lu Xun may be "groping" after a new cultural cause, but the poetic mood is rather that of "wandering" and searching for meaning. Like the fighter in his prose poem "Such a Fighter" (who also carries only a primitive lance), the lone foot-soldier is left to fight the battle of nothingness, the struggle of

4 0 . Here I disagree with T . A. Hsia's view that " L u Hsiin might have carried Chinese poetry, even in its classical form, into a new realm" but apparently did not. In formulating this preliminary analysis of Lu X u n ' s poetry, I have been indebted to the papers of two of my students: Indira Satyendra, " T h e Lyrical Lu Hsiin: The Search for the Self in Poetry" (unpublished M S , University of Chicago); and Gloria Shen, " L u Xun's Use of Allusions in His Classical Poetry" (unpublished M S . , Indiana University). 4 1 . Translation by Kowallis, Lu Xun's Classical Chinese Verse, p. 2 4 6 , with a minor revision by me in the last line. 4 2 . Ibid., pp. 2 4 2 - 2 4 7 .

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meaninglessness. Thus in this poem a cluster of specific references to the contemporary scene is subtly transformed into poetic metaphors carrying a broader and more profound resonance. The poem, like the title of Lu X u n ' s second story collection, was inspired by Qu Y u a n . The collection is prefaced with two famous lines from

Lisao:

Long, long had been my road and far, f a r was the journey: I w o u l d go up and d o w n to seek my heart's desire. 43

As most scholars have noted, Qu Y u a n is the major source of Lu Xun's poetic imagery and sentiment. The plant and flower images that pervade Lu X u n ' s classical poetry are evidence of that inspiration. Lu Xun's repeated allusions to Qu Y u a n in his poems show that he was interested in the kind of poetry in which the poet uses natural and fantastic images to express his o w n feelings. For both Qu Y u a n and Lu X u n , plants, flowers, and "beautiful figures" personify sentiments and values. But Lu X u n intentionally twisted the plant imagery he derived from Qu Yuan to make an ironic comment on modern times. The flowery poetic texture of his poems only accentuates the contours of a hard-edged, modern sensibility. T w o famous poems may be cited as fitting examples. I. With pepper put to flame and the cassia plucked up, comely men g r o w old. Only on the crags of hidden mountain gorges can orchids blossom forth their purity. Certainly w e can spare this fragrant flower for one from afar. M y native place seems drunk with its brambles and thorns. II. Formerly 'twas said the X i a n g River w a s bluer than indigo, But n o w one hears her waters are tainted with traces of rouge. T h e X i a n g Goddess, toilet all but done, casts her reflection on the river's surface, With the glowing whiteness of a pale moon peeking through crimson clouds. Solitary stillness on this lofty hill, fear and trembling deep in night. Fragrant grasses wither and fall, naught remains of spring.

43. Translation by David Hawkes in Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 1:56.

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Final notes, struck on an inlaid zither, are heard by none. Superficial signs of peace glut the Autumnal G a t e . 4 4

Each poem gives the impression of a beautiful ideal tarnished, an ancient paradise lost in the quagmire of contemporary'reality. The poet, bemoaning the loss, is left with a sense of dread: the last lines of the second poem turn a specific reference to Qu Yuan into "a kind of terror and anxiety" that is truly modern. The lost ideal in Qu Yuan's original version—"Saddened at not seeing the beautiful one on this hill" (At gaoqiu zhi wunii)45—now becomes "solitary stillness," a philosophical loneliness translated into "fear and trembling (song) deep in night." The legend of Qu Yuan is well known: the alienated patriot who had confidence in his abilities and felt a strong duty to serve his society, even though it rejected or misunderstood him. This sociopolitical side of Qu Yuan is echoed in Lu Xun's celebrated poem "Inscribed on a Small Photograph," written in 1903: In the spirit tower is no plan to elude divine arrows. Wind and rain, like giant flagstones, darken the old garden. Entrusting intentions to a cold lone star, . . . the Fragrant One considers them not. I take my blood and offer it up to X u a n Y u a n [the Yellow E m p e r o r ] . 4 6

The feeling of loneliness is more clearly directed at the "Fragrant O n e " — an allusion to the lord whom Qu Yuan wishes to serve, here transformed to mean the Chinese compatriots (the plant image of quart may be an extended pun on quanmin, or common people). As most critics have pointed out, the poem reflects the young Lu Xun's budding nationalism in Japan. However, a poetic self-portrait written three decades later reveals a different irony. The poem is titled "Self-Mockery":

44. The poems are titled: "For Mr. O. E. on the Occasion of His Return to Japan with Orchids" and "Ode to the Goddess of the Xiang River." Translation by Kowallis, Lu Xun's Classical Chinese Verse, pp. 100, 128; Chinese originals in Jiwai ji (Addenda collection), LXQJ, 7 : 5 0 7 - 5 0 9 . 45. According to Xu Shoushang, this is one of Lu Xun's favorite lines from Lisao. See his "Wangyu Lu Xun yinxiang ji" (Impressions of my deceased friend Lu Xun), in Zheng Zhenduo, Xu Shoushang, et al., Zuojia tan Lu Xun (Writers on Lu Xun) (Hong Kong: Wenxue yanjiu she, 1966), p. 9. 46. Jiwai ji shiyi (A supplement to the addenda collection), LXQJ, 7:861. English translation by Kowallis, Lu Xun's Classical Chinese Verse, p. 61.

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LEO OU-FAN LEE W h a t ' s left to do under an evil star, with such a change of luck; Before I had even dared to rise up, my head already struck. A w o r n - o u t hat to cover my face, I cross the busy market place; In a leaky boat loaded with w i n e — 'mid torrent float as though supine. Eyes askance, I cast a cold glance at the thousand pointing fingers. Head bowed, I gladly agree, an o x for the children to be. Inside a small house hidden away, I seek a unified life to obey. Of the outside world why care at a l l — be it winter, summer, spring or fall. 47

The most celebrated lines of this poem, immortalized by Chairman Mao, are of course the middle couplet: "Eyes askance, I cast a cold glance at the thousand pointing fingers. Head bowed, I gladly agree, an ox for the children to be." They have been read as displaying Lu Xun's "fighting spirit" and his willingness to serve the people.48 Yet reading the poem as a whole, we realize that this defiant attitude is couched in a series of ironic turns of poetic allusions. As Lu Xun himself explained, the "evil star" refers to the buagai constellation that, for monks, is a good omen: "they will become Bodhisattvas or attain Buddhahood. But for laymen it's disastrous: under the influence of the buagai stars, nothing seems to turn out right." 49 Lu Xun chose the unlucky term as the title of two zawen collections written during 1925 and 1926—a low ebb in his mood. The mockheroic portrait evoked by the line "A worn-out hat to cover my face, I cross the busy market place" does not necessarily refer to Lu Xun's desire for political caution and personal security, as Kowallis asserts.50 Rather, the image harks back to Lu Xun's recurring motif of the loner, who is here stripped of his genius and glory. The metaphoric action of crossing the busy marketplace reminds us also of Nietzsche's portrait of Zarathustra (Lu Xun translated the prologue of the book). Drifting in midcurrent in a leaky boat loaded with wine conjures up, of course, a precarious situation carried off, perhaps, with an air of nonchalance. But the two lines, which echo Du Fu and Du Mu, also read like an

47. Jiwai ji, LXQ], 7 : 5 1 0 ; English translation by Kowallis, Lu Xun's Classical Chinese Verse, p. 179, with my revision of two lines. 48. Mao Zedong, "Zai Yan'an wenyi zuotan hui shang di jianghua" (Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art," Mao Zedong xuanji, 3:833—834. 49. Kowallis, Lu Xun's Classical Chinese Verse, p. 180. 50. Ibid., pp. 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 .

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ironic twist of the lyrical state of drunkenness glorified in Su Dongpo's famous "Chibi fu" (Ode to the red cliff). The serene pleasure felt by the poet and his friend as they drifted midriver after hearty drinking and eating is no longer possible with a leaky boat. That vivid, gently satirical touch punctures the celebrated lyrical moment. As the poem nears its end, the poet's defiant gestures are not directed toward an external enemy— political or otherwise—but are rather turned inside into a desire to withdraw into a small house: xiaolou may refer equally to his house in Shanghai and to an inner realm, the "spirit tower" of his heart. The phrase in the next line—"I seek a unified life" (cheng yitong or, more colloquially, "zicheng yitong")—again becomes ironic, as a contrast to the original meaning of political unity after a dynastic conquest. Thus the overall theme of the poem is, in my view, Lu Xun's gentle mockery of his own past life. After experiencing a series of vicissitudes, he is in the mood to withdraw into his writing—into an artistic universe that ultimately defies the strictures and rhythms of the conventional world in which he lived. Whether this reading is accepted or not, there undeniably lurks behind Lu Xun's fighting persona a side of him that longs, like Qu Yuan, to break with society and withdraw into a private world. In Qu Yuan's Lisao the poet goes on a fantastic journey in search of beauty but eventually turns back to look at his homeland with sorrow. In the "Yuan yu" section of Chu ci, the poet leaves society altogether on a metaphysical search for self-realization. If Lu Xun was truly drawn to Qu Yuan, it would be natural for him to translate this conflict into modern terms. Lu Xun confessed to Xu Guangping that he had been torn between conflicting impulses toward individualism (withdrawing into his inner self) and humanitarianism (engaging the self to others and to society).51 It is my conjecture, based on his classical poetry and his letters, that this conflict persisted into Lu Xun's leftist years. He wrote more classical poems in the early 1930s than before, at a time when his busy political and polemical life would have left him little leisure for composing poetry. The conclusion must be that these poems were definitely not meant as pastimes but were written to express deep-seated feelings and thoughts that for some reason he could not express through his zawen. Thus in terms of content Lu Xun's classical poetry should also be categorized as a mixed genre: in it he combined classical allusions with contemporary realities in a way that vividly captures his personal anguish. Zawen Their sheer volume certainly gives Lu Xun's zawen a most significant position—overshadowing even his stories, prose poetry, and classical 51. See Lu Xun,

Liangdi shu (Letters

between two places),

LXQJ,

7:98.

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poetry. The pertinent question for our purposes, however, is: Are his zawen on an artistic par with his stories and prose poetry? T. A. Hsia obviously did not think so. Like William Schultz, Hsia marked the year 1926—when Lu Xun had completed his second story collection, Wandering, and his volume of prose poetry, Wild Grass—as "the end of his creative life." 52 Yet Lu Xun produced more than two-thirds of his total work after 1926, most of which was zawen. I would counter with Schultz's and Hsia's assessment by approaching Lu Xun's zawen corpus (basically his sixteen volumes of zawen collections) as a whole, in the same way as I have considered his other writing: that is, gauging the extent of his originality as a modern writer by comparing the work to the traditional heritage. In this regard, Lu Xun's zawen assumes enormous importance, if only because prose essays of various kinds claim a much larger share in China's literary heritage than do both poetry and fiction combined. As discussed above, Lu Xun's classical education was grounded squarely in this genre of writing. Accordingly, the influence of tradition should be even stronger in his zawen than in his short stories and prose poetry. Lu Xun acknowledged the traditional origins of the zawen, but he was not entirely specific in defining the form. To a large extent this is due to the miscellaneous nature of traditional Chinese prose writing. Under the one amorphous rubric can be placed such diverse forms as classical prose (,guwen), parallel prose (pianwen), personal prose (xiaopinwen), personal notes (biji), letters, diaries, and travel accounts as well as the more official memorials and the "eight-legged" essays (baguwen) used in the civilservice examination during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Following his teacher Zhang Taiyan's lead, Lu Xun apparently preferred the more ancient prose of the Wei-jin period. At the same time he seems to have been attracted to the unofficial histories and private accounts of sundry subjects gathered in the so-called congshu (miscellanea or collectanea). The first book Lu Xun ever bought was, reportedly, a collection of miscellaneous Tang works called Tangdai congshu.53 One of his definitions of zawen obviously refers to such miscellaneous collections written or edited by individual scholars. Lu Xun was also aware of the more recent literary species of the late Ming xiaopinwen (literary or personal essay), a favorite form of his brother Zhou Zuoren; in several instances he used the term almost interchangeably with zawen. But in his famous article "The Crisis of the Literary Essay," Lu Xun draws the examples used to illustrate the importance of such a genre from both the Ming and pre-Ming periods, thus extending the historical range of the term. 54 52. Hsia, Gate, p. 128. 53. Lee, "Genesis of a Writer," pp. 1 6 2 - 1 6 3 . 54. Lu Xun, Nanqiang beidiao ji, LXQJ, 5 : 1 6 9 - 1 7 3 .

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Obviously, xiaopinwen meant something different to Lu Xun than it did to Zhou Zuoren: instead of the bland elegance Zhou Zuoren attributes to the form, Lu Xun finds "satire, attack, and destruction," even in the supposedly decadent late Ming samples.55 In a similar way, he finds the "humor" and "elegance" of the English essay relevant to the zawen but not sufficient, since the former lacks the cutting edge and "fighting quality" of the latter.56 Thus, to Lu Xun zawen was not a generic term but a "catch-all name for all kinds of prose pieces written over a certain period of time and placed between two covers." 57 This broad definition allows his scholarly treatises, prose poetry, reminiscences, and various kinds of essays all to be included in his zawen; one collection, The Grave, represents precisely such a gathering. More specifically, however, the term zawen sprang from the related terms zagan (miscellaneous impressions or sundry thoughts) and zatan (miscellaneous discussion), both developed from Lu Xun's initial contributions to the suiganlu (random thoughts) column of New Youth magazine. The limited space of the column necessitated a succinctness that appealed to Lu Xun's "classical" predilections. At the same time, it provided an outlet for free discussion on any topic in any form, so long as the author was expressing his genuine thoughts and feelings. The practice was a conscious reaction against the stereotyped form and content of traditional prose. Lu Xun contributed a fair number of his "random thoughts" in support of this antitraditional stance. Thus, his zawen, it can be argued, followed a radical imperative: Lu Xun wanted the freedom to write about anything that came to his mind. At the same time, however, creative license did not entail a total disregard for form. As in his short stories, Lu Xun was a conscientious practitioner of the technique of zawen writing. The roots of the "Lu Xun style" lie in traditional Chinese literature. The specific legacy Lu Xun inherited, according to Wang Yao, is the classical prose (guwen) of the Wei-jin period and earlier.58 It may be called sanwen, as opposed to the more ornate and decorative pianwen (parallel prose). It was used often for exposition or argument, and Lu Xun admired its "clear and succinct" (qingjun) and "natural and untrammeled" (tongto) quality.59 Filtered through the scholarship of Zhang Taiyan, however, the guwen style was turned un55. Ibid., p. 171. For a close analysis of Zhou Zuoren's "bland" essay style, see David E. Pollard, A Chinese Look at Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), chap. 4. 56. Lu Xun, Nanqiang beidiao ji, LXQ], 5:172. 57. This is David Pollard's apt description; see his contribution to this volume, in which he also gives a detailed analysis of the individual volumes of Lu Xun's zawen. 58. Wang Yao, Lu Xun yu Zhongguo wenxue (Lu Xun and Chinese literature) (Shanghai: Pingming chubanshe, 1952), pp. 4 4 - 5 0 59. Ibid., p. 32.

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equivocally against the two styles of prose writing prevalent in the late Qing—those associated with the Tongcheng and Wenxuan schools. Zhang found both wanting in originality and rigor. Lu Xun's rejection of the Tongcheng style of Yan Fu and Lin Shu in favor of the guwen style of Zhang Taiyan was a major step of intellectual reorientation as well. For the guwen of the Wei-jin period was itself a distillation of the Han and pre-Han styles. Its use for exposition and argument can be traced to the pre-Qin philosophers. Its succinct verbal structure gives it intellectual density. A typical guwen essay by Zhang Taiyan or Lu Xun is difficult to read, because it compresses allusions into a seemingly disorganized whole. This somewhat contradictory combination of precision and chaos, conciseness and turgidity, was Zhang Taiyan's stylistic riposte to the prevailing schools of his time. In style and thought Zhang Taiyan perhaps differed most sharply from the school of Kang Youwei, whose disciple Liang Qichao continued to exert enormous impact at the time. That school was anchored in the "modern text" tradition and emphasized the unfolding of a single vision. 60 It may be that Zhang Taiyan's unorthodox traditionalism appealed to Lu Xun precisely because of its potential radicalism—its profound distrust of established systems of thought and styles of composition. Zhang's espousal of a more authentic ancient style, in contrast to recent vulgarizations, might also have promoted Lu Xun's classical preferences for pre-Song literature and thought. The seemingly directionless quality of Lu Xun's essays could be an adaptation of Zhang's guwen mode of expression in a modern form. And the profusion of wenyan phrases and quotations—some of them very abstruse—could likewise be attributed to Zhang's influence. However, the guwen influence on Lu Xun's zawen should not be overstressed, for Lu Xun also imitated in them, often satirically, several other styles, including the stilted "eight-legged" essay.61 Ultimately the crucial issue is how Lu Xun, steeped as he was in so pervasive a legacy of prose writing, nevertheless transcended its limitations and evolved something uniquely his own. When we examine his earliest baihua essays—the suiganlu pieces written in 1918—we are struck by a mixture of elements. Some of the longer pieces are filled with classical quotations, upon which he builds his arguments. This seems to be a standard way of writing "compositions of discourse" (yilun wen). On the other hand, the shorter pieces tend to be composed of aphoristic passages or conceived as parables (for instance, in suiganlu numbers 36, 38, 41, 49, and 66). 62 Their topics 60. I a m indebted to Wei-ming T u for the c o m m e n t s he made on the intellectual implications of Z h a n g T a i y a n ' s prose style at a w o r k s h o p on "Style as T h o u g h t in C h i n a " at the University of California, Berkeley, April 1980. 61. See Pollard's essay in this volume for a good illustration of Lu X u n ' s use of the "eight-legged" style in the essay "Exalting and U n d e r m i n i n g . " 62. Lu X u n , Refeng ( H o t wind), LXQJ, 2 : 2 6 - 2 7 , 3 0 - 3 4 , 4 3 - 4 6 , 5 8 - 6 0 , 8 7 - 8 8 .

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are vaguely philosophical: "egomania" vs. "group mania," biological evolution, the road to life, and so on. Most of these "random thoughts" are concerned with the Chinese national character, an obsession that is certainly in line with Lu Xun's conception of literature as a medium of inquiry into the soul of a people. As a result, he attains a higher level of abstraction and generality in a succinct form than can be found in typical traditional essays. To be sure, his use of aphorisms and parables may have been inspired by Zhuang Zi, one of his favorite Chinese writers and one said to have "poisoned" his mind. But his quotations from Nietzsche lead me to believe that the aphoristic mode may also have been drawn from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In any case, these early zawen clearly paved the way for a style of essay writing highly unusual among Lu Xun's contemporaries, who tended toward either polemical treatises (Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu) or sentimental portraits (Zhu Ziqing). I would call this unique feature of Lu Xun's early essays the metaphorical mode: a way of expressing unsystematized thoughts through generalized imagery that lends an allegorical dimension to the essay. In so abstract a context, images become metaphors implying complex levels of meaning. As noted earlier, it is a technique that Lu Xun developed most fully in his prose poetry. In his early essay collection, Hot Wind, however, it serves mainly to convey a general critique of Chinese culture and society. As the May Fourth iconoclastic zeal waned in the mid-1920s and as Lu Xun grew more skilled in essay writing, he used the metaphorical mode with greater dexterity. His two subsequent collections, Unlucky Star and Sequel to Unlucky Star, presented more diversity of form and content: letters, diaries, personal polemics (triggered by the famous Women's Normal University case), a public answer to a questionnaire ("An Essential Reading List for Youth"), as well as essays and commentaries. Lu Xun also continued to write his "random thoughts." The pieces called "Sudden Thoughts" and "Sundry Thoughts" include some of his celebrated aphorisms (such as, for instance, "Sudden Thoughts" number 3). 63 But he seemed emboldened to move away from concrete subjects toward a more metaphysical universe. The short piece "Warriors and Flies" is an exercise based on Nietzsche that Lu Xun later developed more fully in his prose poem "Revenge I." A later piece, "Sundry Thoughts," is even more impressive: it transforms a commentary on the condition of China into a highly abstract allegory and contains, in fact, the gist of the themes of Wild Grass.64 Similar sentiments, couched also in a metaphorical mode, can be found in passages of Lu Xun's moving elegy, "In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen." The narration of

6 3 . Lu X u n , Huagai ji (Unlucky Star), LXQJ, 6 4 . Ibid., 3 : 4 3 - 4 4 , 5 2 - 5 5 .

3:22-23.

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his student's death as a warlord's guards opened fire on a group of protesters is intertwined with descriptions of his heartfelt grief. Again, the expression of his inner pain prompted Lu Xun toward a metaphorical mode fraught with a kind of religious intensity: I a m b e y o n d indignation. I shall s a v o r deeply the dark desolation w h i c h is not of the w o r l d of m e n , and present m y deepest grief to this w o r l d of i n h u m a n i t y , letting it delight in m y p a i n . T h i s shall be the p o o r o f f e r i n g of one still living b e f o r e the shrine of the dead. T r u e fighters d a r e f a c e the s o r r o w s of h u m a n i t y , and look unflinchingly at the shedding of fresh b l o o d . W h a t s o r r o w and joy are theirs! But the C r e a t o r ' s c o m m o n device f o r the m u n d a n e people is to let the p a s s a g e of time w a s h a w a y o l d traces, leaving only pale-red bloodstains and a v a g u e p a i n ; a n d H e lets men live on ignobly amidst these to keep this q u a s i - h u m a n w o r l d g o i n g . I d o n o t k n o w w h e n this kind of w o r l d will c o m e to an end! 6 S

The metaphorical mode enters into Lu Xun's discourse at other such moments of emotional intensity or philosophical meditation. His early essay, "On Attending a Russian Opera," for instance, uses a vaguely stream-of-consciousness style to transport the author and the reader away from the actuality of a Russian opera company performing in Peking.66 Even in his public lecture "What Happens after Nora Leaves Home," Lu Xun occasionally waxed philosophical with paraphrases from Artzybashev on dreams and hope. 67 His first essay on "The Collapse of Leifeng Pagoda" is basically a parable about how conventional morality crushes instinctual desire.68 Thus Leifeng Pagoda becomes almost a totemic symbol of the cultural superego that suppresses the forces of eros or the id.69 In the second essay on the fall of the pagoda, Lu Xun intersperses a general discussion of the meaning of destruction with passages laden with metaphorical implications. 70 Lu Xun's use of metaphorical prose is but one of the introspective features of his zawen writing. It is a fundamentally lyrical and philosophical approach to social reality that soars from concrete details into the realms of parable and allegory with a seemingly effortless flow. I consider this mode a departure from all previous conventions of prose writing. This "abstractionist" tendency is also present in Lu Xun's prose poetry and 65. Lu Xun, Huagai ji xubian (Sequel to Unlucky Star), LXQJ, 3:257. English translation, with my minor revisions, by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, from Lu Xun: Selected Works, 2d ed. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), 2:268. 66. Lu Xun, Refeng, LXQ], 2 : 1 0 2 - 1 0 4 . 67. Lu Xun, Fen (The grave), LXQJ, 1:146. 68. Ibid., pp. 1 5 7 - 1 5 9 . 69. This Freudian reading is not as farfetched as it may seem, since Lu Xun did read Kuriyagawa Hakuson, who was deeply influenced by Freud. For Kuriyagawa, literary creation represented a kind of outburst from the repressed id, an idea that may have indirectly inspired Lu Xun's conception of the Leifeng Pagoda. 70. Lu Xun, Refeng, LXQJ, 1 : 1 7 6 - 1 8 1 .

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fiction, thus affirming his lack of interest in generic differences. His defiance of the rigidities of genres led to a creative blending of them: there is poetry in his prose and prose in his poetry, and the same motifs move back and forth among his prose, fiction, and prose poetry. This phenomenon is, of course, more characteristic of Lu Xun's writings before 1927. As he became more involved in revolutionary activities, first as a pained witness in Canton and then as an active participant in the leftist literary circles of Shanghai, the metaphorical and lyrical dimensions gradually receded from Lu Xun's zawen. Instead, he espoused the more "dagger and spear" style of "barbed" essay writing that his adulators celebrate as the true "Lu Xun trend" (Lu Xun feng) and his main legacy. Yet even in his avowedly political writings there are occasional flights of fancy and metaphor. For instance, in his polemic with Liang Shiqiu on translation, Lu Xun suddenly expressed his inner pain by comparing his endeavor to that of Prometheus. 71 His grief over the death of his favorite disciples, such as the famous Five Martyrs, also released a flood of lyricism: "In Memoriam in Order to Forget" is moving regardless of its political sympathies. 72 The major mode of Lu Xun's later zawen is bitter satire: cutting, pugnacious, devastating, even venomous, directed mainly against his real or imagined enemies. The typical devices of this style have been extensively discussed by Lu Xun scholars. Harriet Mills listed these devices as: reductio ad absurdum, the use of paradox, argument by analogy or authority, the repetition of key words or phrases, and finally the terse but lethal punch line that finishes off his opponent. 73 The effect is immediate: reading these works one experiences either a vicarious glee or pain, depending on whether or not one shares Lu Xun's personal and ideological beliefs. Yet despite their verbal brilliance, the enduring artistic value of these zawen is doubtful, now that their targets and the whole Shanghai literary scene have faded into history. The new generations of readers, both in China and abroad, are no longer tuned to the complexities of the personal and ideological squabbles of the early 1930s. Will they still be able to savor the full pungency of these combative essays? According to Chinese scholars of Lu Xun, these dagger-and-spear essays served a great revolutionary cause by annihilating his enemies. If by enemies they mean Lu Xun's literary foes—Chen Xiying and his gentlemen's clique, the theoreticians of the Crescent Moon Society and the Third Category of Men, and the proponents of national defense literature—then Lu Xun's victory was more apparent than real. Some of his former opponents

71. 72. 73. livered

Lu Xun, Erxin ji (Two hearts), LXQJ, 4:221. Lu Xun, Nanqiang beidiao ji, LXQJ, 5 : 7 2 - 8 5 . Harriet Mills, "The Essays: Some Observations on Form and Substance" paper deat the Association for Asian Studies' panel on Lu Xun, March 1972.

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who are alive today, such as Liang Shiqiu and Hu Qiuyuan, still refuse to acknowledge defeat; others, such as the "four tough guys" of the leftist front, have apologized for their errors in treating Lu Xun but have not necessarily denied the strategic viability of their line.74 In fact, from 1927 on Lu Xun repeatedly decried the powerlessness of the written word as a revolutionary weapon, and one finds a certain tragic irony in the fact that his dogged defense of the revolutionary stance arose as much from the real adversity of the situation as from his own somewhat paranoid sense of it. The more he felt the forces of darkness hemming him in, the more combative he became and the more frenzied was his writing activity. Thus the bulk of Lu Xun's zawen, at least fifty percent of his entire output, was written in the last three and a half years of his life. From a nonpartisan viewpoint, I am tempted to argue that the significance of Lu Xun's later essays has been overemphasized, since their inspiration was more pragmatic than artistic. These combative feuilletons (to use Qu Qiubai's fitting word) cover only the public side of Lu Xun. They tend to focus much more narrowly and on more concrete objects than his earlier essays, and a sense of vision and depth is consequently lost. It seems as if Lu Xun, as he wrote more and more feuilleton-type zawen, had established a convention from which—for a variety of reasons, including his reputation as a satirical essayist—he could not extricate himself. It was not until the last year of his life, as he recovered from intermittent illnesses and became increasingly aware of his own mortality, that a dimension of wisdom and a mellow intellectual tone were restored to his work. His last collection of zawen contains some of his best writings.75 In general, I consider the seven volumes of zawen Lu Xun wrote from 1925 to 1931 and in 1936 to be his major corpus of essays, ranking with his stories, reminiscences, and prose poetry.76 Mixed Accents, written from 1932 to 1933, also contains a number of fascinating pieces, such as those on 74. Zhou Yang, for instance, took precisely this position in a recent interview with Zhao Haosheng, published in Qishi niandai (The seventies) (Hong Kong) 104 (September 1978). See also Merle Goldman's essay in this volume. 75. In this I agree with Pollard's assessment in his essay. 76. Most Chinese scholars, of course, feel that all of Lu Xun's zawen are beyond criticism. The one exception is Li Changzhi's Lu Xun pipan (Critique of Lu Xun) (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1936), esp. chap. 4. After plowing through so many laudatory studies of Lu Xun's zawen, it is refreshing to read such early analyses by his contemporaries. However, the Maoist influence on scholarship now seems to be waning. Some of the most recent Chinese assessments of Lu Xun have been more balanced, with more attention paid to his art. See Pan Xulan, "Lu Xun zawen di yishu teshe" (The artistic characteristics of Lu Xun's essays), in Lu Xun yanjiu 1 (1980): 2 5 5 - 2 7 8 . While there has been no shortage of ideological analyses of Lu Xun's artistic characteristics, few have been either sophisticated or convincing. One possible exception is Ba Ren, Lun Lu Xun de zawen (On Lu Xun's essays) (Shanghai: Yuandong shujii, 1940). Lu Xun's own favorite scholar was, of course, Qu Qiubai, who wrote the famous preface to a selection of Lu Xun's zawen. He was also apparently the first critic to call Lu Xun a stylist, to Lu Xun's great satisfaction.

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G. B. Shaw, his o w n fictional technique, the crisis of the essay, and the amusing mock-classical essay on women's bound feet. The least interesting pieces, in my view, are contained in the two collections of 1933 (False Freedom and Quasi-Romances), another collection of his 1934 essays (Fringed Literature), and the first two volumes of his Essays from a SemiConcession (1934—1935), most of which are either articles published under pseudonyms (to combat censorship) or prefaces to other writers' works. The t w o Addenda Collections are valuable, as they contain Lu Xun's classical poetry and some of his writings dealing with foreign literatures. In focusing this survey on Lu Xun's role as a writer, I have tried to show the ways in which he broke new artistic ground. Lu Xun truly merits the epithet " m o d e r n writer," because from his confrontations with the multifaceted Chinese tradition he derived a fearless originality, reflected in the wide gamut of artistic constructions he explored. These in turn brought his complex mind to bear on the crisis of culture and society in the China of his time. Some of Lu Xun's experiments carried him to the avant-gardist horizons of modern Western literature, yet his direct indebtedness to foreign sources is limited. He was typically Chinese in his obsession with China—the burden of her past, the problems and turmoil of her present, and the uncertainty of her future. But Lu Xun went a step further: he gave artistic form to the experience of being a modern Chinese intellectual. His contributions to Chinese literature and culture in my mind overshadow his achievements as a revolutionary. The events since Lu X u n ' s death in 1936 have been so forceful that they suggest the fascinating but unanswerable question: W h a t would have happened to Lu X u n — o r , more correctly, h o w would Lu Xun have thought and acted—if he had lived through the last half century? Would he have continued writing or stopped writing altogether? Whatever might have happened, Lu Xun's " g h o s t " can rest assured that in "plucking out his heart and eating it," he has bequeathed to us a "taste" that vast numbers of his readers are still relishing, through his literature.

2 The Morality of Form: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Short Story MARSTON ANDERSON

Few works in literary history occupy as crucial a junction as the twentyfive short stories collected in Lu Xun's The Outcry (or Call to Arms, 1923) and Hesitation (or Wandering, 1926). They simultaneously made real the call for a new colloquial language in fiction, convincingly naturalized a foreign literary form, and fundamentally redefined for a generation of Chinese writers the value of the enterprise of fiction. It is toward an appraisal of this last achievement that I will direct my argument here, but first it will be necessary to attempt a general characterization of Lu Xun's stories. This is not an easy task, in spite of the shortness of this body of work. To one astute critic the stories are "satiric realist"; 1 to another, equally astute scholar they are "predominantly reminiscent and lyrical." 2 It is a mark of the complexity of the work that neither description can be easily dismissed. Lu Xun himself attributed the influence of his stories not to their content but to his introduction of new forms from the West: Because they were thought to have "depth of expression and uniqueness of f o r m , " they created a stir a m o n g some youthful readers. But this stir was in

I have standardized translations of titles of Lu Xun's works in this volume, with two exceptions. Marston Anderson translates Nahati as The Outcry and Panghuang as Hesitation. These titles are cited elsewhere as Call to Arms and Wandering, respectively. As Anderson's translations are essential to his thesis, they have been allowed to stand.—Ed. 1. Patrick Hanan, "The Technique of Lu Hsun's Fiction," Harvard Journal of Astatic Studies 34 (1974): 95. 2. J. Prusek, "Lu Hsun's Huai Chiu: A Precursor of Modern Chinese Literature," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 29 (1969): 1 6 9 - 1 7 6 .

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THE MORALITY OF FORM fact d u e t o earlier n e g l e c t in i n t r o d u c i n g literature f r o m the mainland.3

33 European

Translators such as Lin Shu had, in fact, introduced a wide if rather miscellaneous selection of Western novels to the Chinese reading public in the late Qing. But Lu Xun was critical of the translators' bias toward popular and sentimental works, "stories of detectives, adventurers, English ladies and African savages" that "titillate the surfeited senses of those who have eaten and drunk their fill."4 As early as 1909, with the compilation of Stories from Foreign Countries, Lu Xun had directed his attention instead to short stories written by Russians and other "oppressed peoples," particularly those of Eastern Europe. 5 When in 1918 he began to write his own fiction, it was to these stories that he looked for inspiration: "I must have relied entirely on the hundred or more foreign stories I had read and a smattering of medical knowledge." 6 Translation was perhaps the most consistent aspect of Lu Xun's literary career: he was still pleading for complete translations of Ibsen, Chekhov, and Maupassant in 1934 7 and was working on a translation of Dead Souls at the time of his death. Lu Xun's stories must, I believe, be viewed in the context of his lifelong commitment to the introduction of foreign literary forms. As a base from which to examine Lu Xun's use of the literature he introduced from the West, I should like to offer a working description of the stories as experiments in the realist short story form. By "realist" I do not mean "realistic"—faithful to observed reality. The term simply refers to the body of formal characteristics common to mid- to late-nineteenth-century European fiction and employed most typically in the short story by Chekhov and Maupassant. Primary among these characteristics are: (1) nonheroic protagonists from the middle or lower classes; (2) a plot whose primary 3. Lu Xun, " Z h o n g g u o xin wenxue daxi xiaoshuo er ji xu" (Preface to the second collection of fiction for A Comprehensive Anthology of the New Literature of China), in Qiejieting zawen er ji (Essays from a semi-concession, II), Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun; hereafter cited as LXQJ) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 6:238. 4. Lu Xun, "Zhu Zhong E wenxue zhi jiao" (The ties between Chinese and Russian literatures), in Nanqiang beidiao ji (Mixed accents), LXQJ, 4:460. The translations of Lu Xun given here generally follow those of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, where available, in their Lu Xun: Selected Works, 4 vols. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980). 5. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Genesis of a Writer," in Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Movement (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 185; and Wang Yao, "Lun Lu Xun zuopin yu wayguo wenxue de guanxi" (On the relationship between Lu Xun's works and foreign literature), in Lu Xun yanjiu (Research on Lu Xun) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1980), 1 : 5 9 - 6 0 . 6. Lu Xun, "Wo zenmo zuoqi xiaoshuo lai" (How I came to write fiction), in Nanqiang beidiao ji, LXQJ, 4:512. 7. Lu Xun, "Du jiben shu" (Let us do a little reading), in Huabian wenxue (Fringed literature), LXQJ, 5:471.

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gesture is an unveiling of some kind, the stripping away of one level of meaning that the text codes as artificial or hypocritical to establish a more fundamental level of meaning (in practice the story tends to focus on a hope or desire that is then frustrated or, in longer works, on the gradual degeneration of the protagonist's fortune or character by the forces of "society" or "fate"); and (3) the concealment of the work's fictionality by the absence of overt authorial intervention and the avoidance of fantastic or supernatural elements. This last point does not rule out the use of symbols, which, as Georg Lukács argues, is in fact a distinguishing characteristic of late realism and of naturalism.8 Some may object that while these characteristics are generally present in Lu Xun's stories, they do not sufficiently describe the works, which also show the influence of such forms as the reminiscence or sketch and of the traditional vernacular tale. Yet important as these influences are to the interpretation of individual stories by Lu Xun, they reveal themselves only intermittently in the collection as a whole and are not pervasive enough to be genre-determining. Moreover, Lu Xun made direct experiments with the autobiographical sketch and the vernacular story in Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk and Old Tales Retold, respectively. If we are to maintain the distinction between these works and the stories collected in The Outcry and Hesitation, we must, I think, admit the latter's fundamental kinship with the Western realist short story. Lu Xun's stories are, of course, much more than mere imitations of Western realism, and it is ultimately the points of divergence with Western tradition that most repay investigation. For this reason—and to avoid the dangers of a reductive taxonomy—I have emphasized the experimental nature of his stories. Perhaps the two most striking things about the stories on a first reading are the diversity of tone and the variety of narrative stances employed. Mao Dun wrote, "Lu Xun was a constant pioneer in creating new forms: nearly every one of the ten some stories in The Outcry has a unique form, and all of these new forms extensively influenced 8. See, particularly, Georg Lukács, "Narrate or Describe?", in Writer and Critic (London: Merlin Press, 1978). To simplify his argument unmercifully: Lukács contends that the early realists (of whom Balzac is representative) organized their narration around characters, which had the effect of tying descriptive details to the plot and giving them human and social significance. Later realists, such as Flaubert and Zola, frequently described at length objects or events that had no integral relation to the characters or plot of their novels. Such descriptions required an artificial structure, such as symbolism, to infuse them with meaning. Zola's frequent use of symbols and other rhetorical contrivances is thus seen as a natural result of his method, though one that seemingly contradicts his appeal for objectivity. Lu Xun's use of symbols in some early stories, though I believe that use has been frequently overemphasized, has been correctly traced to Andreev, who, Lu Xun observed, mixed "realistic" and "symbolic impressionist" techniques. Yet Andreev's stories do not fundamentally break with the realist short story form as I describe it here. I have thus preferred to refer to Chekhov and Maupassant in my discussion of the short story—despite Lu Xun's evident preference for Gogol and Andreev—because they present the form in its purest state. Lu Xun's indebtedness to Gogol and Andreev was, 1 would suggest, more a matter of tone than of form.

THE MORALITY OF FORM

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young writers." 9 N o d o u b t one of the primary attractions of the short story form for Lu X u n was the prospect of multiple beginnings. Longer forms such as the novel would have demanded a commitment to a sustained narrative approach that he was unprepared to make. The p r o f u n dity of Lu X u n ' s w o r k arises, however, from the fact that his formal experiments are not shallow exercises in technique but rather the artistic working-out of deep psychological and ideological conflicts. T o approach an analysis of these conflicts, it will first be necessary to look closely at the nature of the short story form itself and at the mutations the form underwent in Lu Xun's hands. A glance at the surprisingly small body of critical literature on the short story shows t w o frequently reiterated observations that at first seem contradictory. The first portrays the short story as a "slice of life," more fundamentally realistic (in the sense of "true to life") than the novel since "it is short enough to need n o structuring in its presentation of a moment of existence." 1 0 The second view, which may perhaps be traced back to Poe's prescription that a s t o r y should produce a "unity of impression," 1 1 asserts the short story's kinship to the lyric: " T h e story should have the valid central emotion and inner spontaneity of the lyric: it should magnetize the emotion and give pleasure—of however disturbing, painful, or complex a kind. The story should be composed, in a plastic sense, and as visual as a picture." 1 2 We may perhaps resolve this apparent conflict between the utterly unmediated slice of life and the completely composed lyric by attending first to the short story's defining characteristic: its brevity, which has the effect of focusing the reader's attention on the conditions of its production and thus on its artificiality. "There is no time, in reading a short w o r k , to forget it is only literature, and not life." 13 The story lacks the cumulative naturalizing techniques of the novel, which gradually persuade the reader of the comprehensiveness and authority of the world being presented. Consequently, the d r a m a to which the reader responds in the short story is not so much that of the protagonist's struggle with a fictional world (as is the case in the novel). Rather, it is the drama of the author's relation to the "slice of life" he is narrating. The short-story reader asks immediately

9. M a o D u n , " D u N a h a n " (On reading The Outcry), in Mao Dun lun wenyi ( M a o D u n ' s essays on literature and art) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1980), p. 109. 10. George J. Becker, Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 2 4 8 . O r see A. L. Bader, " T h e Structure of the M o d e r n Short Story," in Charles E. M a y , ed., Short Story Theories (Columbus: O h i o University Press, 1976), pp. 1 0 7 - 1 1 5 , for a similar a r g u m e n t . 11. Edgar Allen Poe, "Review of Twice-Told Tales," in M a y , Short Story Theories, p. 47. 12. Elizabeth Bowen, " T h e Faber Book of M o d e r n Short Stories," in M a y , Short Story Theories, p. 157. 13. Tzvetan T o d o r o v , The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard H o w a r d (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 143.

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questions that are deferred, if they are asked at all, by the reader of the novel: Why has this life-segment been selected? With what tone does the author approach it? In short, the reader of the short story is more keenly aware of the fiction's origins in the subjectivity of the author, and it is this fact that underlies our sense of the story's kinship to the lyric. As with the poetic lyric, the drama of the short story rests on the relation between feeling subject (author) and resistant object (the world, society, the loved one, etc.). But while the lyric poet conventionally projects himself toward the object to encapsulate and possess it (one may take the odes of Keats here as paradigmatic), the author of the short story withdraws from the life-segment into a pose of objectivity. This pose involves a polarization of the author/subject and the world/object, and the resultant alienation of the object—its apparent independence from the subject's totalizing will—makes it appear arbitrary, or meaningless. It is precisely the object's resistance to meaning that gives it its "reality effect" 14 and that convinces the reader he is encountering an unmediated slice of life. It is not, however, the mere selection and delimitation of a "meaningless" life-segment that creates form. If this were the case, the story would sacrifice itself to the meaninglessness of the object, eliciting merely the response "So what?"—a response against which, as William Labov has demonstrated, even the most naive narratives must protect themselves.15 It is rather the subject's struggle with the object's resistance to meaning and his final attempt to recuperate the alienated life-fragment through the language of his fiction that grants the work its sense of form. This recuperation is generally effected in the short story through an emotional ("lyric") highlighting of some kind (Joyce's "epiphanies" are such moments dramatized in the subjectivity of his protagonists) or, perhaps more representatively, by an ironic reversal or deflation, of which many examples could be cited in the stories of Chekhov and Maupassant. It is important to notice, however, that the short story's closure brings neither the amplitude of meaning with which the traditional tale or conte (in either the Western or Chinese tradition) concludes, nor that hard-won resignation to a world where immanence of meaning is impossible with which the novel leaves its readers.16 The short story attains instead a 14. Cf. Roland Barthes, "L'Effet de réel," Communications 11 (1968): 8 4 - 8 9 . 15. See the discussion of Labov's work in Jonathan Culler, "Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative," Poetics Today 1:3 (spring 1980): 3 5 - 3 6 . 16. Cf. Georg Lukâcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: M.l.T. Press, 1971), p. 71. My argument on the short story owes a great deal to Lukâcs's discussion on pp. 5 0 - 5 2 of this book. There he suggests that the short story possesses the lyricism of "pure selection": "such lyricism must entirely conceal itself behind the hard outlines of the event. . . . It sees absurdity in all its undisguised and unadorned nakedness, and the exorcising power of this view, without fear or hope, gives it the consecration of form; meaninglessness as meaninglessness becomes form." 1 differ with Lukâcs in stressing that the subject's resistance to the meaninglessness of the object is the essential form-producing element in the short story.

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37

highly unstable equilibrium, a temporary reconciliation of subject and object, of author/reader and world, which is promptly fractured again as the subject moves on to strike at the next life-segment in his effort to "disentangle himself from men and things"—to quote Sartre's formulation of the final aim of the realist enterprise.17 With this understanding of the form Lu Xun chose to work with, we can attempt a fuller characterization of the stories. Thematically, Lu Xun's stories opened up the two major preoccupations of modern Chinese fiction: the victimization of the peasants and the role of the intellectual in Chinese society. Yet it is important to notice Lu Xun's approach to these themes. His stories about peasants focus less on their undoubted sufferings than on their numbness, their incomprehension of and unresponsiveness to the revolutionary currents in society. This is surely the unifying theme of The Outcry: one may point to "Medicine," "Storm in a Teacup," "My Old Home," and even "The True Story of Ah Q . " Lu Xun's stories of intellectuals focus on their impotence to effect real change and their concomitant moral vacillation. This was a principal theme of Hesitation; the protagonists of "New Year's Sacrifice," "In the Wineshop," "The Misanthrope," and "Regret for the Past" are all disappointed reformers. In several of the "Random Thoughts" of 1919 Lu Xun complains that "no ideology has any effect on China." 18 China's resistance to any structure of meaning is precisely the problem with which Lu Xun's stories grapple: the inability of the intellectuals to find or produce meaning and the failure of the peasants to receive and actualize it. In the highly convoluted statement of his motives for writing that makes up the preface to The Outcry, Lu Xun opens with a very personal account of the stories' origins: W h e n I was young, I, too, had many dreams. M o s t of them I later forgot, but I see nothing in this to regret. For although recalling the past may bring happiness, at times it cannot but bring loneliness, and what is the point of clinging in spirit to lonely bygone days? However, my trouble is that I c a n n o t forget completely, and these stories stem from those things which I have been unable to forget. 1 9

Past events, resistant to the totalizing schemes of his youth, have inscribed themselves indelibly on the author's memory, and it is these events to which the author has turned for his materials. The social justification for the composition of the stories to which the author then moves in no way obviates the choice of such private materials, and one is left to assume that 17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1962), p. 130. IB. Lu Xun, "Suiganlu, 59: 'sheng wu' " (Random thoughts, 59: "martial and sagacious"), in Refeng (Hot wind), LXQ], 1:354. 19. Lu Xun, "Nahan zi x u " (Preface to The Outcry), LXQ] 1:415.

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Lu Xun turned to these materials almost obsessively, that the composition of the stories represents a very personal attempt to objectify, and thus distance, these stubborn memories through the act of writing. It is largely to this subjective struggle with "meaningless" realities—that is, with events that have resisted the author's attempt to impart meaning to them—that we are responding when we call the stories lyrical. There is already evident in Lu Xun's account of the stories' origins a profound ambivalence toward their value. It would have been better, the author seems to say, if his dreams had already been forgotten; he thus seems to negate the conditions of the stories' composition. This ambivalence contaminates even more radically the social motive for writing that Lu Xun gives toward the end of the preface. I refer to the visit of Lu Xun's friend, Jin Xinyi, whose expression of "hope" shames Lu Xun out of the silence that had enveloped him after the failure of his magazine, Xin sheng (New life) and his subsequent return from Tokyo. Maruyama Noboru is surely correct that Lu Xun's fellow-feeling for the young reformers of the time (a fellow-feeling not unmixed with cynicism about the likely outcome of their efforts) was the primary justification for his venturing into the literary arena again in 1918. 20 Like Lu Xun in Tokyo, the young reformers were editing a magazine to which "there seemed to have been no reaction." By not writing he would be condemning them to the loneliness he himself had experienced after his failure in Tokyo. But once Lu Xun had made the decision to take up the pen, he was faced with the fear that what he wrote would, contrary to his intentions, "infect with the loneliness I had found so bitter those young people who were still dreaming pleasant dreams." That is, he feared the exorcism of his own dreams would, by "blotting out hope," prove more damaging to the others than if he had remained silent. Lu Xun's frequent pose as the put-upon hack whose works are all "milked" or "squeezed" from him21 was not mere modesty. It was, rather, an attempt to avoid full moral responsibility for the stories by grounding their origin in the community of reformers instead of in his own tortured consciousness. In his "Postscript to The Grave" Lu Xun wrote that out of fear that his writings might prove "damaging to my readers, I am frequently more prudent in composition, more cautious." 22 It is this insecurity about the

20. Maruyama Noboru, Rojiti, sono bungaku to kakumei (Lu Xun, his literature and revolution) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1965), pp. 1 3 3 - 1 3 7 . 21. See for example Lu Xun, "Bingfei xianhua, 3 " (Not idle thoughts, 3), in Huagai ji (Unlucky star), LXQJ, 3 : 1 4 8 ; or see Lu Xun, " 'A Q zheng zhuan' de chengyin" (How "The True Story of Ah Q " was written), in Huagai ji xubian (Sequel to Unlucky Star), LXQ], 3:376. 22. Lu Xun, "Xie zai Fen houmian" (Postscript to The Grave), in Fen (The grave), LXQJ, 1:284.

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39

effect of his writing on his readers that, Lu Xun says, forces him to resort to certain "distortions" (literally qubi, "crooked pen") 23 to cancel the pessimistic effect of the stories collected in The Outcry. Lu Xun cites the wreath at the son's grave in "Medicine" and his allowing Fourth Shan's Wife in "Tomorrow" to at least dream of her dead child as examples of these "distortions." One might also note the cry "Save the children!" at the end of "Diary of a Madman" or the vision of the children's "new life" at the conclusion of "My Old Home." Significantly, Lu Xun sees these as appendages, outside the formal integrity of the stories as such; because of them his stories "fall far short of being works of art." He has resorted to these "distortions" out of obedience to "my general's orders." Elsewhere Lu Xun makes clear whom he means by "my general": "[The Outcry] might also be described as 'written to order.' But the orders I carried out were those issued by the revolutionary vanguard of that time, which I was glad to obey." 2 4 Again Lu Xun refuses to take complete responsibility for the stories, but here refuses in order to justify what he sees as the stories' formal defects. Thus both Lu Xun's statement of his motives in the preface and the form of the stories in The Outcry reveal a profound uncertainty about the social value of the personal project (the exorcism of disappointed dreams) Lu Xun has undertaken as well as about the form (the Western short story) he has chosen to work in. This uncertainty is reflected in the two English translations of the title Nahan that have been advanced: the aggressive, transitive "call to arms" and the personal, intransitive "outcry." Patrick Hanan has observed that Lu Xun's "pleas" for the future, which we have here analyzed formally as "distortions," are to be found only in The Outcry.2s The closures of the stories in Hesitation display a different pattern. In those that employ a mediating narrator—one who, though generally playing a minimal role in the narrated event, receives and transmits the story to the reader—the story closes with the narrator's sudden statement of his emotional response, a response that often seems incongruous to the events he has narrated. The narrator of "New Year's Sacrifice" is suddenly freed of all the doubts that had plagued him as he considered Xianglin Sao's tragic story: "I felt only that the saints of heaven and earth had accepted the sacrifice and incense and were reeling with intoxication in the sky, preparing to give Luzhen's people boundless good fortune." 26 23. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang translate the word as "innuendoes" (Lu Xun: Selected Works, 1:38), but this is deceptive: qubi refers to deliberate distortions of the truth made in historical works to avoid the wrath of the powerful. 24. Lu Xun, " Z i xuan ji zi x u " (Preface to My Selected Works), in Nanqiang beidiao ji, LXQJ, 4 : 4 8 6 . 25. Hanan, "The Technique of Lu Hsiin's Fiction," p. 93. 26. Lu Xun, "Zhufu" (New year's sacrifice), in Panghuang (Hesitation), LXQ], 2 : 2 1 .

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After the narrator of "In the Wineshop" hears his friend Lii Weifu's confession of complete disillusionment, he walks away from the hotel feeling "refreshed." 27 The narrator of "The Misanthrope" unexpectedly cries out in "anger and sorrow mingled with agony" upon seeing his friend Wei Lianshu's corpse laid out, but "then my heart felt lighter, and I paced calmly on along the damp cobbled road under the moon." 28 These "lyric" passages can only represent the cathartic moment in which the disappointed dream, the stubbornly enduring memory, the alien life-fragment is exorcized. But the reader's response to these moments is complicated by their being dramatized in the consciousness of the narrator, a narrator from whom the author has maintained a distinct ironic distance. Before determining the significance of these ironic epiphanies let us consider the role of the mediating narrator in Lu Xun's stories. The classical "omniscient" realist narrator denies his own subjectivity, but as we saw in our discussion of the short story form, this act of withdrawal is in fact part of a strategy of recuperation and mastery. The major European realists have used such metaphors as "godlike" and "magisterial" to describe the artist's command over his created world.29 This quest for mastery is nowhere more evident than in the omniscient narrator's privileged position vis-à-vis his characters, whose privacy he is perpetually invading and whose blindness to the overall significance of their own stories he is careful to ensure, jealously reserving full comprehension, and thus the right of judgment, for himself. Roughly half the stories in The Outcry and Hesitation employ an omniscient narrator, and Lu Xun was quite capable, especially in his satirical stories, of staging a reductive attack on his characters. I suggest, however, that the use of more complex narrative structures in the stories under discussion allowed Lu Xun to explore a personal discomfort with the role of domineering, objective narrator. He was later to write, " 'Objectivity' is really a cold glance from above, 'pity' is only a futile almsgiving."30 Even in those stories that do employ an omniscient narrator we find some evidence of this discomfort (one might point to the repeated ironic references to Fourth Shan's Wife in "Tomorrow" as "only a simple woman"), but the presence of the mediating narrator allows him to make this discomfort self-conscious. 27. Lu Xun, "Zai jiulou shang" (In the wineshop), in Panghuang, LXQ], 2:34. 28. Lu Xun, "Guduzhe" (The misanthrope), in Panghuatig, LXQ], 2:108. 29. Gustave Flaubert: "The artist ought to be in his work like god in creation, invisible and omnipotent. He should be felt everywhere but not seen" (Letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 March 1857; in Becker, Documents, p. 94). Emile Zola: "We novelists are the examining magistrates of men and their passions. . . . the naturalistic novelists observe and e x p e r i m e n t . . . in order to analyze the facts and become master of them" ("The Experimental Novel," in Becker, Documents, pp. 1 6 8 - 1 6 9 ) . 30. Lu Xun, "Guanyu xiaoshuo ticai de tongxin" (An exchange of letters on subject matter in fiction), in Erxin ji (Two hearts), LXQ], 4:368.

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These mediating narrators have to varying extents been equated with the author himself, but the significant point of resemblance is their shared class status, which allowed them access to the written language by which they could give a voice to "silent China." This tool endows them with the power to narrate the life of the other classes, and thereby to inscribe meaning on the social body as a whole. But because these narrators and their class have failed in this task of writing, the Chinese people are "like a great dish of loose sand." 31 Lu Xun effectively dramatizes this failure in those stories in which the narrator directly encounters a member of the lower classes. When the "I" of "My Old Home" encounters the now "stupefied" friend of his youth, the peasant Runtu, it is not simply the economic gap that appals him but also their mutual failure to find a language with which to bridge that gap. The "invisible high wall" that separates them is above all the barrier of writing, of which the children as yet remain innocent. The confrontation of Xianglin Sao with the "I" of "New Year's Sacrifice" is perhaps the paradigmatic dramatization of this crisis of writing in Lu Xun's work. When Xianglin Sao begs the narrator to, in essence, solve the riddle of her life, he gives her contradictory answers and finally evades the issue with "that most useful phrase," "I am not sure," by which one can "achieve blissful immunity from reproach." 32 Xianglin Sao as presented in the story is an essentially mute character: her rote repetitions of the at first "rather effective" acount of her child's death end by making her a laughing stock. The "I" who narrates her story is not in any direct sense responsible for her sufferings (he remains peripheral to the plot), but he has the power that she lacks to vocalize her grief, and has done so forcibly for the reader. Yet his failure to go a step further and use this power to grant meaning to her story makes him, the text implies, a guilty accomplice of the superstition-ridden society that has produced her tragedy. The narrator rationalizes his evasion: "She hoped for life after death. . . . Why increase the sufferings of someone with a wretched life? For her sake, I thought I'd better say there was [an afterlife]." This rationalization exactly duplicates Lu Xun's justification, in the preface to The Outcry, of his expressions of hope: "I could not blot out hope. . . . I did not want to infect [these young people] with . . . loneliness." The narrative structure of "In the Wineshop" appears to be very different from that of "New Year's Sacrifice." Rather than a confrontation between narrator and protagonist, there is a virtual inflation of narrative levels distancing the narrator from the event. The narrative heart of the 31. Lu Xun, "Wusheng de Zhongguo" (Silent China), in LXQJ, 4:12. 32. Lu Xun, " Z h u f u , " LXQ], 2:8.

Sanxian ji

(Three leisures),

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story (i.e., the strand of this c o m p l e x story that most resembles a conventional narrative) 3 3 is the simple tale of the b o a t m a n ' s daughter, Ashun, w h o grows ill and dies after learning o f her arranged marriage. T h e circumstances o f her death are told to the narrator's friend, Lii W e i f u , by the b o a t m a n ' s neighbor; Lii Weifu then relates them to the " I " of the narrative. N o n e of these narrators has a direct role in Ashun's tragedy, and they are only very tenuously related to each other (Lii Weifu, though a f r i e n d — " i f such he would still let me call h i m " — o f the narrator, has been out of touch for ten years and runs into the narrator purely by chance). It is as though Lu X u n had set up these narrative layers out of an extraordinary moral delicacy in approaching his lower-class protagonist. It is a moral delicacy not unlike that o f Lii W e i f u , w h o hesitates to call on Ashun to bring her the sprigs of artificial flowers she once desired: " Y o u have no idea h o w I dread calling on people, much more so than in the old days. Because I k n o w w h a t a nuisance I am, I am even sick of myself; so, knowing this, why inflict myself on o t h e r s ? " 3 4 But this delicacy in fact masks a fear that direct involvement with Ashun will force Lii Weifu to face the moral dilemma that their class separation entails, a confrontation he feels unable to endure. T h e m a n y layers of narration that Lu X u n employs in " I n the W i n e s h o p " succeed, finally, not in shielding the narrator from Ashun's tragedy but in extending the range of responsibility for it. T h e b o a t m a n ' s neighbor ignorantly blames her story on " f a t e " ; Lii Weifu dismisses it as " a futile a f f a i r " and returns to his instruction of the Confucian classics. B o t h , though touched by her story, ultimately reinstate it in a system of meaning (superstition in the case of the neighbor, the Confucian social system in the case of Lii Weifu) that can only continue to reproduce such stories. Both of them are thus tainted by a kind of moral contamination that irradiates from the story of her death. But as the primary narrator, the " I " of the narration, walks away from his encounter with Lii Weifu feeling " r e freshed," having succeeded in his intention to " e s c a p e the b o r e d o m " of his stay precisely by being entertained with the story of Ashun, the perceptive reader c a n n o t but see that his narrative, the story " I n the W i n e s h o p " itself, has not escaped that c o n t a m i n a t i o n . It is as much a violation of Ashun as the t w o narratives that it mediates.

33. It is perhaps not superfluous to stress here that my readings of "In the Wineshop" and the other stories are only partial ones. A full reading of "In the Wineshop" would have to give equal weight to Lii Weifu's disinterment of his brother's remains, and to consider the relationship of this incident to the story of Ashun. For a more thorough treatment of the moral and intellectual tensions animating this story, see Lin Yii-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 1 4 3 - 1 5 1 . 34. Lu Xun, "Zai jiulou shang," LXQJ, 2 : 8 .

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Here we may return to our discussion of the "epiphanies" with which many of the stories in Hesitation conclude. While the reader shares to some extent the emotional satisfaction that the telling of the story has given its narrator, he remains acutely aware of that narrator's moral failure. Because he has failed to provide a structure of meaning that would justify the narrative, that narrative itself ends up being a violation of its characters and an accomplice to the social cruelty the author intends to decry. By imitating at a formal level the relation of oppressor to oppressed, the realist narrative is captive to the logic of that oppression and ends by merely reproducing it. Lu Xun, sensing this, has written into his stories, through his "distortions" and ironic epiphanies, a radical critique of his own method and of the realist project in general. As the title of his second collection suggests, many of Lu Xun's experiments in the short story form turn in on themselves and hesitate between speech and silence, between transitivity and intransitivity. When in 1 9 3 2 the young writers Ai Wu (b. 1 9 0 4 ) and Sha Ding (b. 1 9 0 4 ) wrote to Lu Xun for literary advice, it was significantly to express their own doubts: W e have written several short stories with the following themes: one of us specializes in using satirical techniques to show both the apparent and the hidden weaknesses of the petty bourgeois youth with whom he is familiar; the other specializes in taking lower class figures of his acquaintance, figures washed aside by the great currents of modern times, and depicting in his works their intense yearning for life and their vague impulse to revolt under the heavy burden of life. W e wonder, can works of such content be said finally to make some kind of contribution to the present time? At first we hesitate, and even after we pick up the pen we falter. 3 5

Lu Xun's response to this plea for guidance was more ideological than literary. He first pointed to the likely discrepancy between the class status of the two authors and the class in whose interest they wrote. If they were themselves "militant proletarians," then their works would by definition have social value (though Lu Xun here characteristically equivocated, "provided what they've written can be said to be works of art"). But because of the authors' class status, works critical of their own class run the risk of being " a family affair, like a brighter, more talented son's hatred for his unpromising brothers," and their works about the lower classes will be "cold glances from above," offering at best an empty pity. Neither was of any use in the present struggle. While Lu Xun encouraged his correspondents to keep writing on their chosen subjects (as we have seen, he was ever reluctant to discourage young reformers), he urged them

35. In Lu Xun, "Guanyu xiaoshuo ticai de tongxin," LXQJ,

4:366.

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to declass themselves, to "be at one" with the proletariat. With strength of purpose, he hoped, they would be able to "gradually overcome their own life and consciousness, and see a new road." Lu Xun was assigning these authors a task of self-transformation he himself was unable to accomplish, at least through the writing of the short stories under consideration here. In his speech "Literature of a Revolutionary Period," given in 1927—two years after the completion of the last story in Hesitation—Lu Xun proclaimed that literature disappears during a time of revolution and is replaced by silence, and that "only when revolutionaries start writing can there be revolutionary literature." 36 Lu Xun, who repeatedly denied himself the title of "revolutionary," 37 had hoped in his stories to lend his voice to his mute compatriots, the oppressed who made up "silent China." But he discovered everywhere only the echoes of his own voice. Lu Xun's stories did not, then, simply offer a new formal model to Chinese writers; they posed a fundamental problematic of writing. Because of its apparent impotence as a revolutionary weapon, the realist short story form Lu Xun had wielded so effectively risked the accusation that it was as much a toy of the intellectuals as the forms it had dislodged, and its continued use required justification. The attacks launched after 1928 on Lu Xun and Mao Dun by members of the Creation and Sun societies focused precisely on this question of revolutionary purity, decrying the determinism and fatalism inherent in "naturalist" fiction. By the late 1920s writers such as Jiang Guangci (1901—1931) were producing a kind of voluntaristic "proletarian" fiction that purported to escape these dangers. In this fiction the author simply overrode the problems of perspective and voice so painfully probed in Lu Xun's stories, and through an unabashedly romantic act of will coupled his spirit with the "masses." By this gesture he simultaneously assuaged his class guilt and aligned his work with the progressive forces of history. Committed leftists who continued to write in the realist form after 1928 and who eschewed such voluntaristic models would be both asserting a measure of autonomy for the author's personal observation of the world and risking a certain taint of moral impurity. Ai Wu and Sha Ding, in the letter quoted above, emphasize that they are writing about

36. Lu Xun, "Geming shidai de wenxue" (Literature of a revolutionary period), in Eryi ji (And that's that), LXQJ, 3 : 4 1 7 - 4 2 4 . 37. As early as his preface to The Outcry, Lu Xun had written, "I was definitely not the heroic type who could rally multitudes at his call" {LXQJ, 1:417-418). He later told Masuda Wataru, "If I were a real revolutionary, 1 would long ago have been killed. That I'm still living, still saying things people don't want to hear is proof that I'm not a real revolutionary" (related in Masuda Wataru, Lu Xun de yinxiang [An impression of Lu Xun] [Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1980], p. 46).

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classes that are familiar to them personally, by which they mean to suggest that their works are more fundamentally the product of observation than of imagination: Although we have read a few works by proletarian writers, we don't want to take a few fictitious characters and have them stand up and make revolution; we prefer to seize on a few familiar models and depict them truthfully.

But this project of observation was complicated by the necessity, already making itself felt in Lu Xun's stories, to justify at a formal level the platform of the observer ("point of view" perilously implying class status here) and the social uses of his observations. Perhaps the most common way to accomplish this justification was the introduction of "positive" elements into the story. This trend had its roots in Lu Xun's "distortions," but in the political atmosphere of the 1930s it took on a more and more ideological tone. Mao Dun's (1896—1981) "Chun can" trilogy (Spring silkworms, 1932—1933) and Ye Zi's "Fengshou" (Harvest, 1933) are essentially realist depictions of rural China afflicted by the economic depression of the early 1930s, but both very consciously introduce a "positive" element in the form of a rebellious character of the younger generation. Both Mao Dun's "Qiushou" (Autumn harvest) and Ye Zi's "Harvest" conclude with an old peasant recognizing on his deathbed that his rebellious son's activities are justifiable—implying the death of the old, oppressive order and the birth of the new. We object as readers to such closures, less because of their improbability than because of their lack of fidelity to the realist form to which the story has otherwise remained faithful. Such closures disperse the energies of the story by pointing outside the form to forces in society that will remedy (and since for the reader the story operates in the past tense, already have remedied) the troubled state of the world the story has presented. Lu Xun's "distortions" were carefully placed not to interfere with the epiphany or ironic closure of his stories; he saw them, we recall, as "supplementary" to the form. But the "positive" elements in these stories by Mao Dun and Ye Zi replace the expected closures and leave the reader not stirred by the call to action in the real world, as intended, but with a finally unconvincing assurance that the world is on the mend. Many of the writers who continued to work in realist forms in the 1930s and early 1940s concentrated on works of satire. Zhang Tianyi (b. 1906), Sha Ding, Mao Dun, and Lao She ( 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 6 6 ) produced many works in the satirical vein of such Lu Xun stories as "Soap," "The Double Fifth Festival," "A Happy Family," and "Master Gao." Satire, though it employs exaggeration as a fundamental technique, is not at odds with realism, because it involves the same kind of unveiling (of hypocrisy, pretension, or romantic delusion) that is basic to the realist plot. In his several

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brief articles on the subject, Lu Xun took pains to establish the kinship between realism and satire. He insisted that "truth is the life of satire" and called satire a kind of photojournalism that unearths "irrational, ridiculous, disgusting, or even detestable" events that are public or commonplace but generally passed over. 3 8 This rummaging of society for unpleasant truths was increasingly constrained by political considerations in the 1930s. Unlike Lu X u n , most later writers directed their satirical barbs exclusively at bourgeois and upper-class figures, thus justifying their work as a contribution to those classes' demise. But as long as they avoided direct attacks on the lower classes, 39 satire offered these writers a defensible platform from which to continue Lu Xun's scathing critique of Chinese society while avoiding sentimental didacticism. T h e popularity and relative artistic success of satirical works during this period owed much as well, certainly, to the rich native satirical tradition, epitomized in the eighteenth-century novel Rutin waishi (The scholars) and still very vigorous in the late Qing. In the new fiction, Westernized intellectuals, rapacious businessmen, and unscrupulous Guomindang bureaucrats replaced the corrupt Confucian literati as targets of the satire. But more significantly, where traditional satire castigated the literati for their failure to discharge a social function still seen as essential to the maintenance of a healthy society, the modern satirists attack the new bureaucrats and intellectuals for their complete irrelevance as a class. These works repeatedly expose all the intellectual and moral defenses of such characters as mere weapons in a very brutish struggle for survival at the expense of their fellows. In a perceptive article on Zhang Tianyi, the most strident of the 1930s satirists, Hu Feng records his reception in the early part of that decade as a new type of writer, one who had exchanged the subjectivism and idealism of much late 1 9 2 0 s fiction for a vigorous realism. 40 Hu goes on to complain, however, that Zhang Tianyi's relentless focus on his characters' physical and social characteristics, as well as his excessive use of exaggeration, make for lack of depth and nuance in his stories. Lu Xun, though generally very supportive of Zhang Tianyi, agreed that his stories were " t o o jocular" and " t o o wordy." 4 1 However damaging such criticisms are to a final appraisal of Zhang Tianyi's achievement, it is important to recognize first that Zhang's use of caricature—as well as his abrupt style,

38. Lu Xun, "Shenme shi 'fengci'?" (What is "satire"?), in Qiejieting zawen er ji (Essays from a semi-concession, II), LXQJ, 6 : 3 2 8 - 3 3 0 . 39. See C. T. Hsia's discussion of the response to Zhang Tianyi's "Little Peter" in his A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 2 2 7 . 4 0 . Hu Feng "Zhang Tianyi lun" (On Zhang Tianyi), published as a preface to Zhang Tianyi xuanji (Selected works of Zhang Tianyi) (Shanghai: Wanjia shuwu, 1936). 41. Lu Xun, Letter to Zhang Tianyi, 1 February 1933, LXQJ, 12:144.

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with its many vulgarities and comic-book expletives—represented an intentional assault on the literary expectations of a cultured readership. By refusing to treat respectfully the soul-searching of the intellectuals and by stubbornly locating reality in physical and social manifestations, Zhang Tianyi brought a new objectivism to modern Chinese literature. Few of his works operate in the highly mediated past of the Lu Xun stories discussed above. They strive instead for an immediacy that never permits the reader to forget his own involvement in the social order and its moral dilemmas. Despite this attempt to ensure his fiction's relevance by the use of aggressive stylistic devices, certain of Zhang Tianyi's works reveal an ironic probing of the value and uses of the realist short story form similar to that we discovered in Lu Xun's stories. In "Yige ticai" (A subject matter, 1936), for example, Zhang Tianyi effectively dramatized the relationship of the realist narrator to his characters in all its moral ambiguity. In this story the narrator, an author by profession, returns to his hometown during a period of artistic infertility. One day he is visited by a distant relative, Auntie Qing Er, an illiterate but wily old woman who has survived since her husband's early death by moneylending and by collecting taxes for a wealthy landlord family. She offers an interesting contract to the narrator: marveling that he has discovered a way to make money that "needs no capital," she asks him to write down a story of her own composition and help her sell it. He consents, suggesting she use her own life story. But as the old woman talks, he presses her ever harder to reveal the details of her vicious moneylending practices and, finally, of her illicit relationship with the son of the landlord family for whom she works. Only after Auntie Qing Er confesses that she was "frequently raped" by the landlord's son does the narrator agree that they have sufficient material for a story. But as Auntie Qing Er departs, she suddenly turns to the narrator and whispers, "You mustn't let anyone know about what I've told you here today." 42 The narrator's power to pry out Auntie Qing Er's life story, the confession of which makes up the "subject matter" of his story, results entirely from his possession of the written word. On one level his use of this power to discover her secret might be justified as it leads to an exposure of her moral corruption, the guilt for which largely reverts to the molesting landlord's son. On another level, however, it is merely a demonstration of the narrator's salacious curiosity, a curiosity identical with that of the reader who, the narrator insists, will only be satisfied if the story has an illicit,

42. Zhang Tianyi's "Yige ticai" (A subject matter) was originally published in Chun fetig (Spring wind) (Shanghai: Wenhua shenghuo, 1936). It has recently been reprinted in Zhongguo xiandai duanpian xiaoshuo xuan (A selection of modern Chinese short stories) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1980), 3 : 3 0 5 - 3 1 9 .

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erotic conclusion. The narrator's designing calculation in his detective work immediately alerts the reader to the dubiousness of his moral position, but most disconcerting is the fact that he already knows her story from rumors. Her great secret is, in fact, "that affair everyone talks about." Her confession gives the narrator no new information; it merely humiliates her into retracting the story in the final line. It is this retraction that enables the narrator to appropriate her story and present it to us as his own. Auntie Qing Er's failed narrative contract—and her sordid life story itself—is a lucky find for the narrator: it is the "capital" that enables him to break through his period of artistic infertility. An author who displays a sensibility even closer to Lu Xun's is Wu Zuxiang (b. 1908). Like Lu Xun's stories, many of Wu's works concern the village life with which he was familiar as a child; like Lu Xun, he is sensitive both to social problems and to such personal problems as the decay of the child's integrated vision of the world. "Wanzi jinyinhua" (Gardenia flowers, 1933), for example, is the story of the narrator's chance meeting with an abandoned pregnant woman; he discovers she was once the child with whom, years before, he had spent an idyllic day. The story clearly resembles "My Old Home" both structurally and thematically. Such longer stories as "Tianxia taiping" (Let there be peace, 1934) and "Fanjia pu" (Fan village, 1934) are effective if conventionally realist portraits of lower-class protagonists forced by dire economic and social conditions into anarchic acts of theft and murder. Unlike Lu Xun, who generally prefers to close his stories with an understatement, Wu tends toward violent or apocalyptic endings. Witness the vengeful peasant rebellions with which both "Fan Village" and "Yiqian babai dan" (Eighteen hundred piculs of rice, 1933) conclude, or the moment of quasi-religious transcendence that the protagonist of "Let There Be Peace" attains at the conclusion of the story. Several other stories also end with the protagonist suddenly losing consciousness,43 as though by this melodramatic gesture Wu can save them the pain of the realist conclusion that his plotting has contrived for them. In "Guanguan de bupin" (Young Master gets his tonic, 1932), Wu Zuxiang made a unique experiment with an ironic narrator. Through this structural device Wu achieved a powerful dramatization of the "human cannibalism" that, according to Lu Xun, lay at the root of traditional Chi43. For example, "Wanzi jinyinhua" (Gardenia flowers), "Jin xiaojie yu Xue guniang" (Miss Jin and Miss Xue), and also the original ending of "Fanjia pu" (Fan village). Mao Dun complained that the original ending of "Fan Village," in which the protagonist cries "Mother!" and faints, showed a "bookworm's (or a girl's) delicacy." This critique apparently induced Wu Zuxiang to change the story's conclusion (see Mao Dun, Mao Dun lun wenyi, p. 293). All of these stories are collected in Wu Zuxiang, Wu Zuxiang xiaoshuo sanwen ji (A collection of Wu Zuxiang's fiction and essays) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1954).

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nese society. The story consists of three vignettes, in each of which the effete landlord family of " Y o u n g Master" perpetrates a direct, bodily invasion of the robust peasant family of the Chens. In the first scene the sickly Young Master of the title is given a " t o n i c " of human milk bought for next to nothing from Baldy Chen's nursing wife. The second scene recounts in flashback the transfusion of Baldy Chen's blood that Young Master had received after a traffic accident in Shanghai. The third vignette depicts Baldy's execution as a scapegoat on a trumped-up charge of banditry. The story's power results not so much from the symbolic depiction of the landlord family's parasitism but from the use of Young Master as narrator. We have seen how Lu Xun used ironic mediating narrators in several of his stories, but unlike those tortured moral consciousnesses, Young Master is a completely amoral creature. Yet he is not a deliberate oppressor: none of the exploitative acts recounted in the story are schemes of his own invention, though their outcome is to ensure his survival. The tonic and transfusion are the brainstorms of his elders and are procured for him through the offices of a meddling family servant and an obsequious foreign doctor, respectively. As a narrator, Young Master reports the exploitation of the Chens with a mixture of naive curiosity and a kind of nasty sensual satisfaction. The alarming thing, however, is what an excellent realist narrator he is: with no moral position to defend, his report of the events in the village is both straightforward and convincing. Like the narrator of "A Subject M a t t e r , " he moves in directly to get the "real" story, to report the infamous, the erotic, and the violent. The one time he slips up, when he starts to relate a long political argument on the sources of China's economic problems, he stops suddenly and announces, " T o tell you the truth, I haven't the slightest interest in this kind of discussion." 4 4 The reader must admit he too has been waiting impatiently for Young Master to get on with the story and is in fact grateful for the superficiality he displays here. As readers of fiction, we share Young Master's sensationalistic interests. Like him, we would far rather "watch a troupe of acrobats from Shandong interrogated as expert cat-burglars" than listen to these interminable discussions. In the end the reader is left to wonder how his own use of the peasants to pass an idle hour in reading differs from Young Master's tonic and whether the introduction of the peasant into fiction after the May Fourth movement was not itself simply an exploitative transfusion of their robust energies into the effete discourse of Chinese literature. Finally, we shall consider the early fiction of Ai Wu, an author who tried in life as well as in literature to close the gap between his subject 44. "Guanguan de bupin" (Young Master gets his tonic), trans. Cyril Birch, in Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas 1919-1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 3 7 9 .

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matter, lower-class figures "washed aside by the great currents of modern times," and himself as author. In a sense, Lu Xun's advice to Ai Wu in the letter quoted above was tardy: Ai Wu had already gone to considerable lengths to "declass" himself. The son of a Sichuan primary school teacher, Ai Wu had hoped as an adolescent to attend Peking University and take part in the progressive social movements brewing in the capital, but he was unable to gather the funds. Instead he determined to "go into the world and rely on my own hands and labor." 4 5 For the next few years he traveled around southwest China and Burma, taking on odd jobs for survival wages. When in 1 9 3 0 he was finally deported from Burma for political activity, he returned to Shanghai, where he began to write stories based on his experiences in the south. These stories depart somewhat from the realist form as described above. Their rambling, coincidence-strewn plots remind one of traditional fiction, and their exotic settings, as well as the consistent presence of a largely unmediated authorial alter ego as narrator, has caused some critics to deem them "romantic." 4 6 But as evidenced by the letter to Lu Xun quoted earlier, Ai Wu was committed above all to objective observation and was intent on avoiding subjectivism and intrusive ideological disquisitions in his work. As a result, the narrative alter ego in the stories generally plays a highly restrained role. Ai Wu's stories are perhaps most reminiscent of Turgenev's Hunter's Album. But while Turgenev's aristocratic narrator has an essentially anthropological, if benevolent, interest in the peasants he describes, the narrator of Ai Wu's Nanxing ji (A journey to the south, 1935) and of the volumes that follow it attempts a complete identification with his lowerclass protagonists. In "Rensheng zhexue de yike" (A lesson in life, 1931), the first and most clearly autobiographical of these stories, the narrator undergoes an initiation into the world of those protagonists. A runaway arriving in Kunming with his resources depleted, the narrator suffers a series of semicomical misadventures as he tries to find work and survive in this new environment. But perhaps his greatest trial is having to share his bed in a seedy inn, first with a scabied peasant and the second night with another beggared stranger. His experiences during the intervening day, however, have taught him to feel empathy for this second bedmate. Instead of being disgusted at the stranger's odor, "ordinarily enough to make one retch," he simply "savors his laborious travels, his painful toil, and his tragic disappointments." 4 7 45. Ai Wu, Ai Wu duanpian xiaoshuo xuan (A selection of Ai Wu's short stories) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1978), p. 2. 46. See Tan Xingguo, "Lun Ai Wu de duchuangxing" (On Ai Wu's originality), Wenyibao 6 (1981): 2 8 - 3 2 . 47. Ai Wu, "Rensheng zhexue de yike" (A lesson in life), in Nanxing ji (A journey to the south) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1980), p. 22.

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It is this initiation that qualifies the narrator of the later stories to speak of " w e whom the world has abandoned" and thus to avoid the lofty glance against which Lu Xun was later to warn. But, in fact, this identification of narrator and protagonist remains problematic. In another, more accomplished story, "Shanxia zhong" (In the mountain gorge), the narrator takes up with a group of traveling thieves and even assists them in one of their heists. That evening, as they camp at a deserted temple by a gorge, the leader of the gang suddenly launches into a tirade about the book that the narrator has taken out to read: " W h a t ' s that you're reading? W h a t good's that nonsense in books? N o t worth a cent. Burn it and it's not worth this stick of w o o d . Listen, and I'll teach you something. . . . Our learning's not written down on paper for those fools to read. . . . In a word, it's 'fear nothing' and 'lie'. . . . If you want to go along with us, w h a t are you carrying those books f o r ? " 4 8

The fact of the narrator's literacy creates a gap so fundamental that even his sharing of the other men's physical sufferings cannot bridge it. Like many of the stories in Ai Wu's early collections, "In the Mountain Gorge" ends with the narrator parting company with the temporary companions who have made up the characters of his story. He wakes one morning to find them gone, but curiously they have left three silver dollars in his book. By this act the thieves prove their good nature and perhaps signal their forgiveness of the narrator's literary ambitions. But the act also points directly to the cause of his estrangement from them (the book), and the narrator is left in a melancholy mood: "Vague, dismal fancies rose in my heart like strands of mist." Ai Wu's narrative alter ego has attempted to declass himself entirely, but his very possession of the medium that makes possible his fiction (writing) has defeated the attempt. Roland Barthes has written that while language and style are blind forces over which an author has, finally, no control, it is in the choice of form that an author commits himself: "Writing is thus essentially the morality of f o r m . " 4 9 Lu Xun was attracted to the realist short story form by what he perceived as its ethical utility: with it he hoped to diagnose the sources of China's social infirmity and to grant a voice to his oppressed compatriots. But from the beginning, as we have seen, the realist form encountered a problem of self-justification, which in various ways inscribed itself in the form of many realist works of the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, this ethical insecurity about the realist form must be traced back to the author's guilty realization of his class position and of the gap between his subject and his public. After Lu Xun, the realist writer could never

48. Ai Wu, "Shanxia zhong" (In the mountain gorge), in Nanxing ji, pp. 2 6 - 2 7 . 49. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 15.

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forget that while he wrote about and (in an ethical sense) for the illiterate masses, his work both stemmed from and returned to the bourgeois and upper classes. As a discourse closed off from the masses, who were seen as the proprietors of final ethical purity, it was imprinted from the start with a moral taint. Most of the formal solutions arrived at by realist writers of the 1930s and 1940s, in their attempt to absolve themselves of this moral taint, were developments of elements already present in Lu Xun's stories. Many authors contrived "positive" closures similar to Lu Xun's "distortions," in order to combat realism's deterministic tendencies. Others concentrated on satirical attacks against the bourgeois and intellectual classes. But perhaps the most interesting realist works of the period were those that made highly individual use of irony and lyricism to explore the relationship of the realist narrator to his characters. The ramifications of these explorations extend in many directions. They raise important esthetic and epistemological questions (about narrative authority and about the relation between perceiving subject and observed object). But, more significantly in the Chinese context, they also opened an arena for the self-conscious probing of the moral crisis generated by the intellectual class's growing sense of its parasitism on (or, to use Lu Xun's term, "cannibalism" of) the disadvantaged in Chinese society. Realism developed in the West with the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the Western realist spoke confidently to an audience of his own class, upbraiding its members for their hypocrisies and romantic delusions and coldly exposing to them the more sordid aspects of their everyday existence. By repeatedly transgressing the rules and manners of the society in which they lived, such writers gave their work an air of rebellion and dared to bring on themselves the charge of "infamy." s 0 With few exceptions, the Chinese writers of the May Fourth period were the sons and daughters of China's lettered aristocracy, a class that had for centuries viewed its possession of writing as the substantiation of its ethical legitimacy. It is perhaps not to be wondered at that Chinese writers could not lightly risk a charge of "infamy" in their writing. For a brief time, however, authors such as those discussed here dared to take a thoroughly critical stance toward their society's values, questioning even the legitimacy of writing itself. In the chaotic political environment of the 1930s and 1940s, such a stance, with its negative, individualistic connotations, became less and less tenable morally. Finally, with the establishment of a new social orthodoxy that re-

50. See Michel Foucault's discussion of Western literature since the seventeenth century as a "discourse of infamy" in "The Life of Infamous Men," in Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, eds., Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979), pp. 90-91.

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quired its writers once again to assume the role of moral exemplar and to assist in the dissemination of social values, the realist short story form as described here met its demise. But the problems Lu Xun first probed in his experiments in its form—questions of the transitivity of literature and of its insertion in the social order—are hardly dead. They raise their head again each time a political thaw generates another call for greater "realism" in Chinese fiction.

3 Lu Xun's Zawen DAVID E. POLLARD

In its first issue of 1980, China's official organ for literary theory and criticism, Wenyi bao (Literary gazette), opened a column for zawen. In its third 1980 issue it reported the proceedings of a forum called to discuss this move. Jiang Deming's contribution deplored the neglect of zawen in the study of modern literary history. Lyrical prose (shuqing sanwen), he said, had attracted more notice than zawen; in fact, many writers of zawen had "not yet got onto the agenda," despite the fact that this "sharp and handy weapon" had seen continuous service from the time of Xin qingnian (La Jeunesse, or New youth) magazine (1918) right up to the Liberation and had been taken up by novelists, poets, and dramatists. Even in "this age" (post-Liberation) it had been applied to resolve many "internal" problems of thought. Jiang thought the time had come to sum up the experience and "law of development" of zawen for the two thirty-year periods before and after the Liberation.1 The lack of adequate surveys of the zawen field may be deplorable, but it is understandable, in view of the meaning of the term—"miscellaneous writings." An individual's occasional pieces may be lumped together in one volume and be known collectively as zawen, but the volume may include discursive, reminiscent, scholarly, anecdotal, and introspective pieces as well as lectures and correspondence. In his prefaces to his own collections Lu Xun himself distinguished the varieties of lunwen (treatises), suibi (essays), and duanping (short commentaries) among their contents, but called the whole zagan (sundry thoughts) or, after 1932, zawen. In this reading zawen is not a generic term but rather a catch-all 1. Jiang Deming, "Xiwang zawen chuangzuo chuxian xinde shengqi" (In hope that zawen writing will show signs of new vitality), Wenyi bao (Literary gazette), 3 (1980): 58.

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name for all kinds of prose pieces written over a certain period of time and placed between two covers. T o Lu Xun's mind their diversity (za) was a positive virtue, in that such collections left for the later reader a picture of the times in which they were written, while for the writer they consolidated the present, firming the ground for the next step into the future. 2 T o further this end, Lu Xun published the arguments of the other side along with his own. Yet such a view itself has implications for the nature of the material. In the same preface in which he expressed it, written at the end of 1935, he spoke not of his zawen being intended to get people's backs up or as worthless, as he had done elsewhere, but as figuring in the context of the writer's duty in "these so pressing times" to "instantaneously respond to and oppose harmful things," to be a "reflexive nerve," to "twin together attack and defence." 3 The topical and combative functions here prescribed for zawen are also retrospective, in that they underlay the form's mushroom growth in the early 1930s, in the newspaper supplements that had then proliferated. The term zawen has still not lost these connotations. Nearly all those who participated in the Literary Gazette forum in 1 9 8 0 presumed that such works are inherently contentious, and therefore dangerous. As Feng Yidai remarked, "writers of zawen mostly come to a sticky end." 4 From the "miscellaneous writings" that are zawen in the broad sense, then, emerged the dissentive commentary to sail under the same name and gradually, as a distinctive form of writing, expropriate the name. T o Lu Xun's contemporaries zagan was still the more particular term, as the following quotation from a critic of Lu Xun, writing in October 1933, shows: Recently, lots of magazines have been promoting short compositions. Shenbao yuekati, Dongfang zazhi, and Xiandai all have a column for "stray thoughts" and "essays." It looks as if 1933 will be the year for short compositions. The fact that at present writers of zagan are so numerous in China, far in excess of former times, can probably be ascribed to the efforts of Lu Xun alone. . . . For a long time Lu Xun has published no creative writing; apart from translating some Russian "black bread," the rest has been zagan compositions. Zagan compositions, limited to a paltry thousand words, can naturally be done in one sweep of the brush. You catch at a thought, and in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette your thousand words are produced and

2. Lu Xun, " X u yan" (Preface) to Qiejieting zawen (Essays from a semi-concession), Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun; hereafter cited as LXQJ) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1958 ff.), 6:3. 3. Ibid. 4. Feng Yidai, "Zawen ruhe geng hao chuji renmin neibu maodun?" (How can zawen better approach internal contradictions among the people?), Wenyi bao 3 (1980): 58.

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DAVID E. POLLARD you have earned ten dollars. There is just one formula for zagan compositions: either heated abuse o r cold sarcasm. If you can append a word or two of cold sarcasm to the heated abuse, o r insert some heated abuse amidst the cold sarcasm, that is all to the good. 5

In 1938 Zhou Li'an confirmed the leading role of Lu Xun in encouraging this kind of article, but he called them zawen: The establishment of zawen and its winning a place in the realm of literature is owed to Lu X u n . It was Lu X u n w h o after the suiganlu [impromptu reflections] of the New Youth magazine took up the stance of suigan in Ziyou tan [Free talk—the Shenbao supplement for which Lu X u n started writing in 1 9 3 3 ] , Thereafter those w h o wrote them multiplied. . . . So zawen in the n a r r o w sense c a n n o t be divorced from Lu X u n . " 6

Again in 1980, the Taiwan critic Zhou Lili attributed the proliferation of zawen in the early 1930s to Lu Xun, though since zawen were a bad thing, it was as "arch-culprit" that he figured.7 Yet the same critic says that the previous high tide of what can now be called zawen, on the eve of the Northern Expedition, had been fuelled by indignation against warlords, imperialists, and feudalism, and had swept along with it normally mild and conservative writers.8 In principle it is more likely that a similar ground swell in public opinion, following on the Japanese military actions in Manchuria, Shanghai, and North China, rather than any individual, would have been responsible for the second wave. The provision of extra space in the press must also have given impetus to the wave, as has been suggested. Editors were delighted then as now when polemics were conducted in their papers, and some went so far as to engineer them. That is not to deny that Lu Xun was already highly influential before the Japanese depradations began, though his reputation had been severely damaged by the left-wing campaign against him in 1928 and 1929. 9 Nor is it to say that fledgling writers from far and near did not take their lead from him. He also could and did raise Cain unaided. In sum, there is no reason to dissent from Zhou Li'an's judgment that among individuals Lu Xun played the chief role in making a place and creating an identity for zawen, both through the sheer bulk of his output and through his style. Hard to classify as zawen are, they do have to demonstrate a way with 5. Zhou, "Zagan," quoted in Lu Xun, "Houji" (Postface) to Zbun fengyue tan (Quasiromances), LXQJ, 5 : 3 2 7 . 6. Zhou Li'an, " W o yu zawen" (Zawen and me), Huafa ji (Grey hair) (Shanghai: Fengxi shuwu, n.d.), p. 1. 7. Zhou Lili, Zhongguo xiandai sanwen de fazhan (The development of modern Chinese prose) (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1980), p. 72. 8. Ibid., p. 42. 9. Lu Xun tells how he was ostracized by leftists in his preface to Sanxian ji (Three leisures), LXQ], 4:4.

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words, they do have to have "style." To their detractors they may only present the visage of "frowning brows and angry eyes," as they did to the "elders" Lou Qi referred to in 1946. But their supporters, like Lou Qi himself, expected a great deal more from them. 10 Lou was dissatisfied with current zawen, which were almost all "political treatises in disguise" or "direct diatribes"; as a result, their satirical character was diminished and their pungency lost. 11 Naturally, there are higher things than technique— "the essence of the zawen is in its satire, in the penetration and profundity of the author's insight"—but the form "sorely needs writing skill." 12 To him Lu Xun was unmatched in his possession of all the desiderata of "depth, breadth, satire and pungency" 13 and necessarily, one would have thought, in the "writing skill" needed to make these virtues felt. Having had some taste of the critical consensus, let us now try to determine for ourselves what the famous "Lu Xun style" was and how it developed. With development in mind, we will have to pay what may be a disproportionate amount of attention to his early collections. I

Lu Xun's apprentice pieces were contributions to the "Impromptu reflections" column of New Youth magazine, as has been mentioned. 14 On the whole he was "prompted" to attack and defend what the New Culture Movement as a whole respectively abominated and cherished: a whole range of conservative, "barbaric," and superstitious practices, and faults in the national character on the one hand, and science, progress, vision, iconoclasm, and humanism on the other. Most of the pieces are not much over a page in length (as printed in the Complete Works); some take less than a page. The few relatively long ones owe their length to extensive quotations. Although these were apprentice pieces, Lu Xun composed them when he was already a mature man and an experienced writer, albeit in the medium of classical Chinese. He could be expected to have some rhetorical shot in his locker. Indeed, it is the case that plain statement or refutation is quite rare, though present: no. 48, against half-measures, and no. 49, in favor of the old giving way to the young, are examples. They make their 10. Lou Qi, Fanchu ji (Ruminations) (Hong Kong: Wensheng chubanshe, 1946), pp. 8 1 82.

11. Ibid., p. 2. 12. Ibid., p. 4. 13. Ibid., p. 2. 14. Of the 133 suiganlu published in New Youth, 27 were written by Lu Xun. His first was no. 25, in September 1918; his last was no. 66. That means he contributed 27 out of the 42 published over the stretch he was active. These works were reprinted in Refeng (Hot wind), LXQJ, vol. 1.

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point (a single one) clearly and briefly enough, but could have been written by anyone in the progressive camp; they qualify for Ba Ren's description of "direct and without finesse."15 Others are already carefully wrought. The shorter they are, the more artful their composition. No. 36, for instance, has an arresting beginning: "Many people have a great fear; I too have a great fear." The first fear—that the name "Chinese" will disappear—and the second fear—that the Chinese will survive as a race but be inconsequential in the community of nations—are stated. An objection is raised and countered, and his own fear reaffirmed. The logical progression is succinct and is made to seem inexorable by the two thereupons in succession that lead to his conclusion. The strongest impression the essay makes, though, is of cohesion and sturdiness. That impression is promoted by the use, three times within five of the sixteen lines, of the phrase "strain nerve and sinew"; "absolutely no cause to strain nerve and sinew," "dire need to strain nerve and sinew," and "especially have to strain nerve and sinew." Repetition is a rhetorical device that Lu Xun would constantly resort to. In the example above it only serves to point the difference between a negative and a positive stance—between vain anxiety and purposeful exertion. It has a structural function in two other essays. No. 35 bears more directly on the subject of "preserving the national essence." Having innocently taken the slogan at face value, and pointed out that if uniqueness is all that is meant, then a tumor on the face or a boil on the forehead also make for uniqueness, Lu Xun puts up three alternative hypotheses to explain the case for "national essence." Each is given its own paragraph, each begins "Supposing it is said . . ." and each ends with either "the old school" or "even the ancients" giving way to sighing at the hopelessness of the mess they were in when the national essence was still undiluted. Inevitably, the sighs spill over onto the feebleness of the propositions. (We might note in passing the "feint" at the beginning, before the serious contest is engaged; this also is typical of Lu Xun's method.) No. 59 again has three consecutive paragraphs that end with the same words. Here Lu Xun argues that men's supreme objective, attainable in the position of emperor, had historically been "gratification of purely animal desires," and observes: "I fear that people of the present day are still governed by this ideal." When the shadow of death falls across their path, men begin to search for communion with immortal beings: "I fear that people of the present day are still governed by this ideal." Finally, when the immortals fail to materialize, men construct tombs to claim a piece of this earth in perpetuity: "I fear that people of the present day are still 15. Ba Ren, Lun Lu Xun de zawen (On Lu Xun's zawen) (Shanghai: Yuandong shudian, 1940), p. 47.

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governed by this ideal." The reiterated judgment that here punctuates the argument takes on the doleful tone of an oracle, resigned to contemplating inanities. In the use of the refrain, however, Lu Xun may have been less deliberately guileful than instinctively following classical precedent. The pattern of repetition, common in classical argumentation, goes back to the Warring States period. In the "Pian mu" (Webbed toes) chapter of Zhuangzi, for instance, there are two heavily stressed patterns. In the first a series of propositions is followed by "Do you deny it? B u t . . ." (such and such a person did it); the second resolves a succession of disparate cases by finding their point in common: "in X they are on a par." 16 The choice of Zhuangzi is suggested by Lu Xun's weakness for that book; there is hardly a text that would not yield its own examples. The essay on preserving the national essence referred to above reveals in addition that Lu Xun had the good sense to make slogans and dogmatic statements his target, rather than to meet the reasoning behind them— unless he could formulate the reasoning himself, and make of it a caricature. It is a caricature he presents of what motivated the stand for national essence at the end of the Qing dynasty: on the part of patriots, to restore the old things; on the part of high officials who had toured abroad, to dissuade students from cutting off their pigtails. 17 In no. 57 he chooses to direct his fire on one of those sweeping statements that his opponents so often in their intemperateness or maladroitness offered as sitting targets, namely: "The vernacular is common and vulgar; it does not merit even the contempt of the cognoscenti." 18 It is easy enough for him to sidestep the real issue, pretend to commiserate with the "cognoscenti" when they are forced to descend to "common and vulgar language" whenever they want to make themselves understood, and find "excruciatingly lamentable" the fact that what comes out of the mouths of four hundred million people "does not merit contempt." Though Lu Xun was to make a specialty of dismantling the sayings of his adversaries and reassembling them in contexts that suited him, the tactic is familiar to all debaters. Where he showed his inventiveness was rather in the coining of terms for syndromes that he feared or detested. A good example in these "impromptus" is the expression "lai le!" (it's coming!) in no. 56, 19 which seems to stand for the wave of panic and reaction that occurs when something new threatens and which has associations of 16. I a m indebted t o Professor A. C. G r a h a m for his advice o n Zhuangzi. I have borr o w e d f r o m his new translation, Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters, and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), pp. 2 0 0 - 2 0 3 . 17. Lu X u n , "suiganlu no. 3 5 , " LXQJ, 1:382. 18. Lu X u n , " X i a n z a i de t u s h a z h e " (The butchers of today), LXQJ, 1:420. 19. Lu X u n , "Lai le" (It's coming), LXQJ, 1:418.

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repression and destruction. Because it is vague and symbolic rather than defining, it is the more alarming. Even where he does provide a definition, a simple everyday expression can take on a life of its own as it is dangled before the reader. Thus ruci ("like this") in no. 59, as used originally by Liu Bang, is explained as referring to the rewards of supreme power, but every time it is used it seems to gain in its promise of surfeit and indulgence. Similarly, in the same piece, Xiang Yu's qu bi ("supplant that one") is more pregnant and ominous than abstractions like "ambition" or "envy" would have been. The invention/adoption and manipulation of an emblematic phrase as the motif for an essay became a Lu Xun hallmark. Cryptic phrases like those above invite the reader to clothe them with his own lurid imaginings. As the cryptic shades into the nebulous, we move into the realm of humor. So the key phrase in no. 61, "Discontent," is not a phrase at all. Having asked and been told what signaled the bankruptcy of humanitarianism on the part of the world powers, Lu Xun continues: But to pursue the question, what is the state of humanitarianism amongst us Chinese? T h e answer, one would imagine, could only be " " Humanitarianism could never descend upon the heads of people w h o can only " " about humanitarianism. 2 0

These are the things that raised some of Lu Xun's apprentice pieces above the level of simple tracts. As yet his writing has little humor (despite the passage just quoted) and is not particularly abrasive, and his attacks are not personalized. The only trace of vulgarity is in no. 39, where he maintains that if the idealist says a mucky garden stinks, the pragmatists will reply that they have always relieved themselves there, so how can it be cleaned up?21 Politically these pieces are not much more sophisticated than Lu Xun's student essays. The bold individual carries the sword for mankind. "All progress comes from those with a touch of madness who set themselves apart from the herd." 22 Nietzsche, not surprisingly in view of the foregoing, is quoted more than once. Youth is exhorted. The enemy is "the Chinese." Xiao Hong is reported to have said of Lu Xun and his fiction: "As a self-conscious intellectual, Lu Xun commiserated with his creations from on high"; his creations "suffered unthinkingly, while he suffered with them in all awareness." 23 Commiseration appears occasionally in these suigan (in no. 25 for example), but denigration holds the whip hand. 20. Lu Xun, "Bu man" (Discontent), LXQJ, 1:426. 21. Lu Xun, "Suiganlu no. 3 9 , " LXQJ, 1:394. 22. Lu Xun, "Suiganlu no. 3 8 , " LXQJ, 1:387. 23. Nie Gannu, "Huiyi wo he Xiao Hong de yi ci tanhua" (Recalling a conversation between Xiao Hong and myself), Xiti wenxue shiliao, 1 (1981): 186.

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The years 1918 and 1919 saw two long essays by Lu Xun to balance these short articles, namely "My Views on Chastity" and "What Is Expected of Us as Fathers Today." Both were published in New Youth and signed Tang Si. Here we will look only at the first, which shows that given the space and the right frame of mind, Lu Xun can argue a case closely and systematically. A certain amount of patience and politeness may be required for this kind of exercise, and at this stage he was gentlemanly enough to observe these restraints. The target of "Chastity" is the proposal to extol chastity so as to improve the moral climate. But Lu Xun starts with the broader issue of "the world is going to the dogs." Extolling chastity takes its place under this umbrella alongside unsavory companions, like constitutional monarchy and a spiritualist movement presided over by the ghost of Mencius— both discredited ways of setting the world to rights. (The technique of damning by association.) The umbrella itself is shabby enough, having been borrowed by "murderers, arsonists, whorehounds and swindlers." Lu Xun begins the subject proper by explaining the terminology (always a strong suit with him), and summarizes the opposition's argument like this: If a w o m a n loses her husband, then she remains a widow for life, o r dies; if she is violated, she dies; when such persons are accorded some acclaim, manners and morals are put right, and China is saved. This is the general idea. 2 4

The art of such stripping down to essentials is to divest one's opponent of enough of his habit to expose him to a cold draft, while leaving enough on him to preserve recognizability. Lu Xun then proceeds to question these assumptions, to interpret their history, and to examine their consequences. Throughout the course of the essay Lu Xun posts signs to tell the reader what he is doing. Clarity of exposition is further ensured by the question and answer technique (three queries, two questions, and three more queries at the end). This method is universal, but particularly favored in China, being built into the "recorded sayings" (yulu) of the philosophers but also habitual in treatises of all kinds. In fact it deserves the name of "national commodity" (guohuo). Lu Xun shed this inheritance as his style loosened up: one reaches the conclusion of the typical longer essay of his later period without quite knowing what route has led one there. However, the allied practice of numerical classification, to be seen in "Chastity" (e.g., dividing women into three kinds on the basis of the chastity theory), stayed with him; indeed, enumeration is a friend few essayists forsake. One of its uses (and there are 24. Lu Xun, " W o zhi jielieguan" (My views on chastity), Fen (The grave), LXQ],

1:236.

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many) is that if you make the list long enough you progress quite logically into absurdity. So here the third class of women is those whose husbands are still alive and who have not been violated: in other words, those whose virtue has not been tested. Lu Xun mischievously pictures them as morosely nursing their grievance, condemned to the status of second-class citizen for their natural life.25 The other trait important for Lu Xun's style to be seen in this essay is the adventurous use of words. The word translated as "chastity," jielie, is actually a combination of "integrity" (keeping to the marriage pledge) and "steadfastness in the face of death" (being a martyr to virtue). Lu Xun splits the combination and uses each element as a verb, contrary to all known practice: T h e earlier t h e h u s b a n d d i e s , t h e p o o r e r the f a m i l y , the better the i n t e g r i t y - i n g . T h e m o r e tragic, the m o r e p a i n f u l t h e d e a t h , t h e better the m a r t y r - i n g . 2 6

Unlike the English translation, the Chinese is neat and tidy, as the alien elements click smoothly into the right grammatical slot, but it is also prankish. It makes the whole thing seem like a performance, which was presumably the intention. In another essay Lu Xun emasculates the expression "national essence" (guocui) in the same way, cutting the "essence" element loose to struggle desperately for survival on its own: essence without substance. 27 The trick of irreverently treating a noun, or a whole collocation, as a verb is used sparingly by good conversationalists. Aptness and surprise are the elements that determine its effectiveness. The display of erudition in the historical section in this essay should not go without mention. Lu Xun's reading was so voluminous that he was able to write his own history. But his reputation for being able to pick out of the air a suitable historical or literary allusion or parallel is so well known that it needs no elaboration here. A good start, then, but the years that immediately followed hardly fulfilled the promise of these first essays. The early 1920s were bleak for Lu Xun. His topical commentaries were desultory; some were niggling, havering, and snide. The longest run was twelve pieces for the Chen bao (Morning news) supplement, signed Feng Sheng. "National learning" (,guoxue) drew his fire more than any other subject, the chief objective being to show the experts that they were not up to the job. Things began to look up toward the end of 1924. In November 1924 Yu si (Threads of 25. Ibid., p. 2 3 8 . 26. Ibid., p. 2 3 6 . 27. Lu X u n , "Suiganlu no. 3 6 , " LXQ], 1:384. For m o r e examples of word-splitting, see Z h u T o n g , Lu Xun chuangzuo de yishu jiqtao (The artistic technique of Lu X u n ' s creative writing) (Shanghai: Xin wenyi c h u b a n s h e , 1958), p. 127.

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talk) magazine was founded. In April 1925 the first issue of Mang yuan (Wasteland) came out. Lu Xun was a founder-member and frequent contributor to the first (though he took no part in editorial matters while it was published in Peking) and editor of the second. At the same time he wrote for newspaper supplements. To step up the tempo even more, in May 1925 he entered into the controversy over the Woman's Normal University (see below), where the woman principal was in conflict with some of the students, and this quickly led to a running battle with Chen Xiying (Chen Yuan); it was years before these two champions returned to their respective tents. The essays Lu Xun wrote in 1925 form a large part of The Grave (published in 1927) and all of Unlucky Star (published in 1926). Lu Xun's basic stance in The Grave was the same as in his May Fourth days—that the Chinese people would have to regenerate themselves if they wanted to survive—and he still occasionally came out with exhortations to the younger generation to shoulder this responsibility, but the initial impetus had been spent, the elite corps that had spearheaded the movement for a cultural revolution had broken up, some going abroad, some being absorbed into the establishment, others into the Communist Party, with the result that his sense of isolation and vacuity, never far away, had come to envelop him. Hence the gloom of the "grave." That the hand that held his brush was not stilled was because writing seemed to make him feel alive, and because of the strength of his rancor. As he confessed in mid-1925, "I hate too many things; I should in turn attract hatred: only then would I get the feeling of living among men." 28 That rancor was increasingly directed at individuals who to his mind embodied national sins or were infected by some sort of regressive disease (hence the remark that it was not the person but what the person stood for that he attacked). 29 But it would be more true to say that any enjoyment of privilege and power or social success irked him. 30 The Peking intellectual establishment was, moreover, dominated by people who had studied in the West, and with them Lu Xun felt no affinity. His attitude is summed up in his saying that fondling scars of wounds sustained from standing exposed in the desert to the buffeting of sandstorms was not necessarily duller than eating bread and butter with Shakespeare along with Chinese literary gents.31 Corporately these men of urbanity and public rectitude (poets excepted) 28. Lu Xun, "Wode 'ji' he 'xi' " (My "place of origin" and "department"), Huagai ji, (Unlucky star), LXQ], 3:65. 29. Ba Ren, Lun Lu Xun de zaweti, p. 92. 30. See, for example, Liang Xihua, Xu Zhimo xin zhuan (New biography of Xu Zhimo) (Taipei: Lianjing chuben shiye gongsi, 1979), pp. 7 6 - 1 0 0 , for Lu Xun's dislike of the Anglophile poet Xu Zhimo. 31. Lu Xun, "Tiji" (Preface), Huagai ji, LXQ], 3:4.

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were the foreignized contingent among the "proper men" (zhengren junzi) Lu Xun freely abused. Together with their native counterparts they generated in him an anathema that was easily translated into class hatred—and the latter is, as we know, half of the emotional equipment of the Communist. Class love was still a long way away. At this stage the masses continued to get a bad press from him, though as victims they had his sympathy. Otherwise they were included in his sweeping condemnations of Chinese ways, as before. Being more visible and articulate, however, the top people bore the brunt. The essays in The Grave reprinted from Threads of Talk and Wasteland justify the description used by friend and foe alike, "twisting and turning." They are on the whole too self-indulgent and ostentatiously clever. Some are bantering and some comical (as Lu Xun later insisted that China had no "humor," 32 one has to be wary of using that word). Others, equally, are grim or impassioned. Or there may be an uncomfortable mix between the two. What these essays say is that Lu Xun's fellow countrymen are punk, or in more staid language, base and cowardly. Either expression may render beiqie, his favorite word. Cutting through the verbiage, he sees the history of the Chinese people as dividing into two kinds of ages: 1. 2.

Times when they sought to be slaves but failed; Times when they were temporarily secure in their slavery. 33

Their habit of self-deception shows "the timidity, sloth, and also the artfulness of the national character." 34 Each layer of Chinese society brutalizes the layer below. And the bottom layer? For it there still are more lowly wives, and even weaker children.35 The buccaneers of the spirit,36 left over from Lu Xun's student days, are still waiting in the wings to come out and scourge the world, but they are thought to be very few and would likely "be drowned in the spittle of the multitude." 37 When the writer wants to harangue his readers in this way, he may approach his subject head-on. This Lu Xun does in "On Looking Facts in the Face." 38 He states his point of view, which is of course that the Chinese have never had the courage to face up to things squarely, and concen32. Lu Xun, "Cong fengci dao youmo" (From satire to humor), Wei ziyou shu (False freedom), LXQJ, 5:36. 33. Lu Xun, "Dengxia manbi" (Jottings by lamplight), Fen, LXQJ, 1:312. 34. Lu Xun, "Lun zhengle yan kan" (On looking facts in the face), Fen, LXQJ, 1:331. 35. Lu Xun, "Dengxia manbi," p. 315. 36. Lu Xun, "Lun zhengle yan kan," p. 332; here these types are called "generals of the vanguard." 37. Lu Xun, "Zai lun Leifeng Ta de daodiao" (More thoughts on the collapse of Leifeng Pagoda), Fen, LXQJ, 1:296. 38. See n. 34.

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trates his argument on how literature deflects facts in life or history that would be too sobering if confronted. In the process he draws upon old saws and modern instances. But that is not his preferred method. He was inclined not to make his theme immediately apparent. When he did come to the theme, he preferred to deal with it in terms of an image or analogue, which normally derived from the indirect beginning. The image may be a common enough metaphor for the condition, in which case the effect depends upon how vividly the image comes across. "Jottings by Lamplight, 2 , " for example, begins with Yuseke Tsurumi's reflections on the charm of China, shared with a Westerner over a banquet in Peking. It is the banquet that provides the motif for Lu Xun's own reflections that follow, on how the Chinese have feasted their conquerors but also among themselves have feasted on each other, leading to the midway conclusion that " T h a t which is known as China is in reality no more than a kitchen for preparing these feasts of human flesh." 3 9 As if this were not gruesome enough, he returns to the image at the end of the essay: since all are separately animated by the ambition to dominate and " e a t " others, they put out of their mind the fact that one day their time will come to be consumed, so it is an atmosphere of fatuous jollity that prevails, "drowning the harrowing howls of the weak, not to speak of those of women and children." 4 0 The use of analogues may be illustrated by the essay " M o r e Thoughts on the Collapse of Leifeng Pagoda." The author has reverted to this subject, it seems, because of a claim that the collapse of the pagoda was due to the pilfering of its bricks by the local people. It gradually emerges that this nibbling away at the edifice of the pagoda is symptomatic of petty and underhand sabotage of a universal kind. At last the parallel is drawn explicitly: "It is scarcely only a matter of what the country people do with the Leifeng Pagoda: god knows how many slaves are every day eating away at the pillars of the Chinese Republic!" 4 1 A more imaginative analogue is that drawn from the world of nature in "Idle Chat at the End of Spring." The prospect of summer brings to mind the slim-waisted wasp that bears reluctant caterpillars to its nest, paralyzes them with its sting, and stores them as fresh food for its larvae. The intentions of the wasp call first for playful musing, set off by a popular superstition that sees the tug-of-war between wasp and caterpillar as kindly mother remonstrating with refractory daughter. But the "detestable foreigners" have shattered this illusion, proving that the wasp is a "cold-blooded killer, as well as an anatomist of very superior learning and skill." 4 2 Eroshenko's vision of a 39. 40. 41. 42.

Lu Xun, "Dengxia manbi," p. 315. Ibid., p. 316. Lu Xun, "Zai lun Leifeng Ta de daodiao," p. 298. Lu Xun, "Chunmo xiantan" (Idle chat at the end of spring), Fen, LXQJ,

1:305.

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future in which a wonder drug would reduce a man to an automaton provides the bridge to the general thesis that Chinese rulers have always cherished this ultimate docility as the ideal condition for their subjects. The "superior skill" of the wasp is used as a yardstick to measure the wiles of the ruler as the thesis is elaborated. Perhaps because the standard of reference for one human activity is not another mundane human activity but a state of nature that ranks as symbolic in its perfection, the analogue in this case takes on the character of the poetic device known as xing—the resplendent or pregnant image that sets the mood for a poem. The poem would not, of course, spell out the significance of the image, as the essay as a form of expository writing almost inevitably does; the similarity resides in the way the coloring—more than the import—of the analogue spreads by association throughout the piece. "Idle Chat" maintains the pretense of espousing a point of view that the author actually dissents from: he sheds crocodile tears over the frustration of the schemes of the mighty to keep their subjects working but stop them thinking. (In Chinese this is known as mao ku laoshu, "the cat crying over the [dead] mouse.") To keep up such a pose requires a suavity of manner that Lu Xun later had not the patience to sustain. Even at the time, the mild, concessive, fair-minded opening gambit, blatantly insincere but typical of the Chinese manner, more often gave way to excoriation. The latter progression is and has long been familiar as a tactic; the formulas for it are yu qin xian zong ("letting loose in order to capture") and hou fa zhi ren ("holding back in order to subdue"). Lu Xun resorted so regularly to this tactic that it too became part of the "Lu Xun style." But prolongation of the artifice has its advantages: it gives license to fantasy, for example. In his search for tractable subjects, Lu Xun conjures up the headless monster Xing Tian, who "used its dugs for eyes and navel for a mouth," though even this monster got above itself in "dancing with shield and battle axe." 43 This has to count as comical in anybody's book. Lu Xun's knowledge of history and his own long and generally bitter experience had trained his eye to read signs, to see in seemingly trivial or isolated matters a significance that raised them to the plane of relevance to the state of the nation. Whereas Zhou Zuoren and he, to make an obvious comparison, chose very much the same range of targets, Zhou Zouren at that time would normally fire off a short burst and be done with it. Lu Xun would shift his sights to well above the immediate target. Hot Wind had included an essay whose title sums up this tendency, "Seeing the Great in the Small." It linked the fate of a student protester who had sunk into oblivion after being expelled with the common lot of national martyrs. If it was an adversary whom he transported up into the stratosphere, however, 43. Ibid., p. 308.

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the intention was to bring him down again, with a bump. " T h e Philosophy of Fortification and Denudation of the Countryside," for instance, was occasioned by a report that a female student had been forbidden from frequenting fairgrounds and parks because of the danger of " a f f r o n t s to public morals." The position of the authorities is inflated by erecting it into a "philosophy," that of the title, which is grand enough. It is then punctured by being translated into the bluntest terms: " L o c k 'em u p ! " 4 4 Rhetorically, this progression exploits the potential of the sudden switch in key, which is typical of Lu Xun's style. Another example from the same essay: N a t u r a l l y I can m a k e n o claim to k n o w l e d g e of the truth or o t h e r w i s e of this m a t t e r ; n o r h a v e I seen the original of the decree as p r o m u l g a t e d . I do not u n d e r s t a n d , either, the intention of the educational authorities, w h e t h e r it is that incidents that " a f f r o n t public m o r a l s " in places of public entertainment h a v e been instigated by girl students and therefore they are f o r b i d d e n to attend, or that as l o n g as girl students do not attend, other people will not instigate t h e m — o r even if they do instigate them, w h o gives a m o n k e y ' s . 4 5

The careful reasoning and punctilious phrasing suggests that the authorities, on their part, have also considered the question studiously and conscientiously. The abrupt change of expression to vulgar insouciance shatters that illusion and points to blind prejudice behind the decree. Since by pure chance w e have returned to the question of vulgarity, let us now admit that Lu X u n uses it freely on his own behalf. T a k e the essay " F r o m Whiskers to Teeth." As he had already written twice before on the subject of whiskers, a " f a m o u s professor" at Peking University had made the wisecrack that if he kept on in the same vein he would end up talking about the backside. Lu X u n ' s first counter is that on that analogy the nimble-minded scholar would on seeing a man washing his face immediately infer that if he kept on washing he would end up washing his backside. After a diversion he reverts to the theme: " O n e reflects how demeaning it must have been to strip the women of their veils in far-off Turkey after the revolution. Alack! N o w they show their kissers to the world, in future they will surely be walking the streets with buttocks bared!" 4 6 That is funny, and should have been enough. But when the subject gets round to teeth, Lu X u n remarks that if you carry on down the gullet you get to the rectum, and to make matters worse the rectum is uncomfortably close to the bladder, " a l a c k . " 4 7 That is not funny, merely tiresome. Lu X u n went to exceptional lengths to make sure he had the last word in any altercation.

44. Lu Xun, "Jianbi qingye zhuyi" (The philosophy of fortification and denudation of the countryside), Fen, LXQ], 1:343. 45. Ibid., p. 342. 46. Lu Xun, " C o n g huxu shuodao yachi" (From whiskers to teeth), Fen, LXQ], 1:334. 47. Ibid., p. 336.

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In his afterword to The Grave, dated November 1926, Lu Xun alludes to an article by Zhu Guangqian that argues that mastery of the classical language is necessary to write well in the modern language, citing him as an example.48 The thought alarms him, but he acknowledges that his phrasing and style is much influenced by "old books," and resolves to draw more widely on the spoken language. His resolution was not on the whole carried out, which was fortunate, for much of the effect on his essays derives from his ability to glide across the whole keyboard of the Chinese language, selecting his register at will. Particular settings call forth a particular kind of language: "gentlemen," for instance, are paid in their own coin. Linking words and phrases in the classical language may also convey a pomposity that is deliberate. But undoubtedly, too, he used classical forms because they were more convenient, and classical phrases because they were the currency for his thought. That is to leave aside direct quotation and allusion, which could be copious. Nevertheless, his medium is the vernacular, and quite idiomatic at that. The waters are occasionally muddied by his carrying over a Japanese word into Chinese,49 but compared with that of Xu Guangping, who was a student at the time, his style is plainness itself.50 The pieces in Unlucky Star were contemporaneous with the Grave essays discussed above. Lu Xun describes them in his foreword as zagan, and in direct line of succession from his first impromptu pieces published in New Youth. Their compass tends to be limited. He himself regrets that he has neglected the great events, explaining that he is by nature inclined to get embroiled in trivial issues. Very large subjects, to do with the Chinese temperament and the lessons of Chinese history, are still represented, but it is true that the overwhelming majority of the pieces in the collection take issue with other men of letters. According to him, the two that stirred up the most trouble for him were a criticism of current ways of translating foreign names and a recommendation that Chinese books should not be read by young people. But what caused him most expense of spirit was surely the running battle with the Xiandai pinglun (Modern critic) group, centered on the Women's Normal University fracas, but also including ad hominem attacks on unrelated issues. The only "great event" to get notice was the May 30 incident in Shanghai. Always one to see himself as the innocent party, Lu Xun not surprisingly felt beleaguered, traduced, squashed, "like a wasp with wet wings

48. Lu Xun, "Xie zai Fen houmian" (Postscript to The Grave), Fen, LXQJ, 1:363. 49. Tang Tao, "Lu Xun de zawen" (Lu Xun's zawen), Lu Xun feng (Lu Xun trend) 1 ( 1 1 January 1939). 50. Their epistolary styles can be compared in Lu Xun, Liangdi shu (Letters between two places), LXQJ, vol. 9.

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crawling about in the mud," s l though he still declared himself willing to go through fire and brimstone." Privately his troubles included being relieved of his post at the Ministry of Education in August 1925 (he was reinstated in January 1926). In these pages we see Lu Xun haunted and distressed. Some of the pieces look like rejects from the Wild Grass collection of prose poems, several of which were nightmare visions. Before the aggravations just mentioned beset him, his disillusion had mounted to the point where he was within a hairsbreadth of embracing the "nothing new under the sun" (gu yi you zhi) philosophy, in view of the evidence that China of the present day was sinking into the decay and barbarism it had sunk into so many times before. 53 Despite the distress that his personal involvement in the Women's Normal University issue occasioned, it brought animation too. In the longer term it marked a turning point in his life, drew him from the terraces into the arena, gave him a taste for battle, caused him to be looked on as a "revolutionary." That he was no hero and did not intend to be a martyr he stated often enough at the time; what he did not realize was that the other options were imperceptibly being foreclosed. To move out of his despair Lu Xun had to take sides, to back one faction against another within his society and to back his people against external enemies. He had not gone so far in 1925, as his reaction to the May 30 incident shows. The killing of demonstrators in the International Settlement he describes as "willful slaughter," 54 to be sure, but his attention focuses on the Chinese response to the incident, which he regards as inappropriate and pusillanimous: it hands him another stick to beat the Chinese with. He takes a more open and balanced view of the British. Similarly, when foreign archeologists flocked to despoil China of its ancient treasures, he blamed them less than his fellow countrymen who colluded in the enterprise.55 Lu Xun was no doubt right to relate current humiliations to abiding weaknesses, but such a broad view is accompanied by shaking of the head rather than the fist. His brother, Zhou Zuoren, continued to take the broad view and ended in the conservative camp. The Women's Normal University controversy was not a general issue (though all issues have general implications) but a nakedly factional dispute. Lined up on one side was the Anglo-American establishment, with Modern Critic as its organ; on the other was the liberal-progressive group that published in Threads of Talk, with the Chekiang "mafia" as its core. Each had a base in departments at Peking University. The leading antago51. Lu Xun, " T i j i , " p. 3. 52. Lu Xun, "Beijing tongxin" (Correspondence from Peking), Huagai ji, LXQ}, 3 : 4 0 . 53. See, for example, these essays in Huagai ji: "Huran xiangdao, 4 " (Sudden thoughts, 4); "Changcheng" (The Great Waif); "Daoshi" (Tutor); "Tongxun, 2 " (Dispatches, 2). 54. Lu Xun, "Huran xiangdao, 10," Huagai ji, LXQ], 3 : 6 9 . 55. Lu Xun, "Huran xiangdao, 6 , " Huagai ji, LXQ], 3 : 3 5 - 3 6 .

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nists were Chen Xiying (Chen Yuan) on the first side and Lu Xun on the second (though Zhou Zuoren ran him close). Chen was friendly with Zhang Shizhao, the minister of education who backed the principal, Yang Yinyu, in her expulsion of student activists; he also came from the same town as Yang (a fact that Lu Xun made much of), though initially he was not acquainted with her. The personal connection on Lu Xun's side, never declared, was with Xu Guangping, one of the students expelled. She had begun a busy correspondence with Lu Xun on March 11 and by June 2 was signing herself familiarly as xiao gui (little imp). Later she became his wife. She was expelled on May 9; Lu Xun fired his first shot in print on May 12. 56 Each side was convinced of its rectitude and regarded the opposition's tactics as scurrilous. Accusations of rumor-mongering were traded back and forth. Arguments grew increasingly petty. In their outlook on social and educational questions in general, the two parties were actually not very far apart. Chen's cast of mind, however, was different from Lu Xun's, as their reactions to the May 30 incident demonstrated: whereas Lu Xun turned to seek the enemy within, Chen thought about what could be done—strikes, boycotts, propaganda abroad, etc. Chen saw himself as a fair man, criticizing without fear or favor; indeed, he did reprove his own friends, including Zhang Shizhao and Hu Shi.57 It was in this spirit of impartiality, bearing the sword and scales of justice, that he broached the Women's Normal University question. The educational authorities should investigate the student unrest there, he wrote, and "If the fault lies with the principal, she should be replaced immediately; if the fault is with the students, the appropriate punishment cannot be dispensed with." 58 He might, of course, have been deluding himself about his impartiality, but in his later letter to Xu Zhimo he claimed with patent sincerity that he had played straight and Lu Xun crooked. 59 On the other hand, the fact that Lu Xun quoted extensively from the same letter and refuted it point by point shows that he was equally convinced that it was he who had been calumniated.60 Who was right and who was wrong is not for me to judge. In any case, the crucial question—What went on behind the scenes?—will never be 56. See their letters in Liangdi shu. For Lu Xun's first shot, see "Huran xiangdao, 7 , " Huagai ji, LXQJ, 3:47. 57. See Chen Xiying, "Zai lun xianzhuangshu" (Returning to the subject of threadbound books) and "Liyou" (Reasons), in Xiying xianhua (Causeries of Xiying) (Shanghai: Xinyue shudian, 1928), pp. 134, 2 9 1 - 2 9 2 . 58. Chen Xiying, "Fenshua maoce" (Whitewashed latrines), in Xiying xianhua, p. 71. 59. The letter was published in Chenbao fukan (Morning news supplement), 30 January 1926. 60. Lu Xun, "Bu shi xin" (A nonletter), Huagai ji xubian (Sequel to Unlucky Star), LXQJ, 3 : 1 5 9 - 1 7 2 .

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answered. From our viewpoint the controversy is instructive as a clash of styles, in the broadest sense. I have already described Chen Xiying's idea of himself. His somewhat stodgy respectability, his very soundness, was not likely to endear him to Lu Xun, and his writing style in no way suggests they could ever have been soul brothers. Chen's essays follow a straight progression; sentence formulation is plain; his irony, when employed, is rather ponderous; there are no flashes of cleverness. The contrast with Lu Xun's style is nearly complete. As to the image that Lu Xun projected, he was described at the time, and continued to be described thereafter, as typical of the "Shaoxing scribe" (shiye), a kind of chief clerk in local government. This casting has often been brushed off, but it merits serious consideration. An anonymous contribution to the magazine Lu Xun feng (Lu Xun trend) gives a description of this scribe: There is a saying that in the old days the scribes of renown used to make a point of rolling up their bedding in the morning, so that they could move out if they were rubbed up the wrong way. Though this is a figure of speech, some intellectuals were indeed inclined this way—they would lick no man's boots. If they could not stomach what was said they would invariably offer an uncivil rebuttal, or make their displeasure unmistakable in their countenance; or else they would adopt the tactic of avoidance. They thought this entirely consistent with morality. They had an extreme obsession with purity, and seemed to be nervous of any spot attaching to their persons. . . . The life they led was for the most part "hermitical." This character may be put down to the "aloof scholar" syndrome, but may also have some connection with the lesson learned from the defeat of the resistance of previous men of letters to the Manchu dynasty. 6 1

(This last is a reference to the spirit of "non-surrender, non-cooperation" that was the only kind of resistance such men could offer to their conquerors.) The author of this piece, a native of Shaoxing himself, seems a sensible man with no axe to grind. Though his text does not tie these general characteristics in directly with Lu Xun, his title is "Lu Xun's home ground," so thoughts of him could not have been very far away. Lu Xun's rigorous self-discipline and ascetic life-style, attested to by more than one of his close associates, 62 certainly fits into the picture drawn here. And Tang Tao, the disciple whose essays were thought to most closely resemble Lu Xun's, had no inhibition about stating that Lu Xun's writing was replete with "the spirit of 'paying off scores and avenging insults' and

61. Anon., "Lu Xun de guxiang" (Lu Xun's home ground), Lu Xun feng 14 (20 M a y 1939): 288. 62. For example, Xu Shoushang, "Wangyou Lu Xun yinxiang ji (Impressions of my late friend Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1953), pp. 9 9 - 1 0 4 .

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'clean blade going in and red blade coming o u t ' typical of people from East Chekiang." 6 3 T o this local coloring were added dyes from the national culture. In the same article T a n g T a o refers to the " d u d g e o n " (fenshi) of Xi Kang that Lu Xun had absorbed, and Lu X u n himself confessed that he had learned bad habits from Zhuangzi and H a n Fei. 64 The particular habit he was alluding to was that of being " n o w nonchalant, n o w precipitate." An example of the precipitate from Zhuangzi that takes us back from prickly personalities to the kind of things that needled them is this, from the chapter entitled "Zai y o u " (Keep it in place and within bounds): In the present age the condemned to death lie back to back, the shackled in cangues and stocks are elbow to elbow, there is always a mutilated man somewhere in sight, yet it is just now that the Confucians and Mohists start putting on airs and come flipping back their sleeves among the fettered and manacled. Alas, it passes belief, their impudence and shamelessness passes belief! I am inclined to think that sagehood and knowledge are the wedges of the stocks and the cangue, that Goodwill and Duty are the pin and hole of fetters and manacles. H o w do I know that Tseng and Shih (men of rectitude) are not the whistling arrows which signal the attack of tyrant Chieh and robber Chih? 65

It seems to me that w h a t enraged Lu Xun about the "proper m e n " he inveighed against was the way they "put on airs and flipped back their sleeves" amidst the carnage and devastation about them. And when they preached the civic virtues of their own age, Lu Xun saw them too as the front men for tyrants and robbers. 6 6 His o w n metaphor was of goats that wear bells ("the badge of the intellectual") leading sheep to the slaughter. 6 7 The difference in mentality between Lu Xun and the "proper m e n " is summed up by their reactions to the call for a "literature of blood and iron" after the M a y 30 incident. Chen Xiying was repelled by writers w h o would praise w a r and celebrate the flow of blood for their irresponsibility. 68 Lu Xun thought they were fakes. 6 9 The W o m e n ' s N o r m a l University episode involved Lu Xun in his first large-scale polemic. During its course he perfected his technique of turning his opponents' words against them. It seems he kept a mental file of

63. T a n g T a o , "Lu X u n de z a w e n , " pp. 3 - 4 . 64. Lu X u n , "Xie zai Fen h o u m i a n , " p. 3 6 4 . 65. Zhuangzi jijie (Book of Z h u a n g z i , with collated notes), in Zhu zi ji cheng (Compendium of the philosophers) (Beijing: Z h o n g h u a shuju, 1959), 3:64. The translation is f r o m G r a h a m , Chuang-tzu, p. 2 1 3 . 66. Lu X u n , "Bing fei x i a n h u a " (The reverse of idle chat), Huagai ji, LXQJ, 3:62. 67. Lu X u n , "Yidian b i y u " (By w a y of analogy), Huagai ji xubian, LXQJ, 3 : 1 5 6 . 68. Chen Xiying, " Z h i s h i jieji" (Intelligentsia), in Xiying xianhua, p. 112. 69. Lu X u n , " L u n zhengle yan k a n . " LXQ], 1:332.

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their particularly bombastic or cutting remarks and waited his moment to return these with interest. His memory was aided by a collection of newspaper clippings that came to fill trunks. Again the technique is used by all polemicists, but Lu Xun practiced it so indefatigably that it became distinctive. A few zawen in Unlucky Star mark a new departure (though there are some parallels among the prose poems of Wild Grass) by speaking entirely in figures. These are "Warriors and Flies," "Three Summer Insects," and "The Great Wall." In the first the warrior derives his monumental stature from the contrast with the flies that feed on his wounds (this piece Li Changzhi rightly described as Nietzschean).70 The second is more loosely strung; here men come off worse in comparison with flies—and mosquitoes, and fleas. Walls were not, as it turns out, very inspirational to Lu Xun: half a page at a stretch. A more entertaining innovation is the dramatized pieces: the dramatic monologue of the philanthropist who would take the trousers off a down-and-out71 and a succession of twenty-one responses to one exclamation, namely, "A-a-a-ch!" 72 The latter's title, "The Convolutions of the Critical Mind" (Pingxin diaolong) parodies that of the classic Wenxin diaolong (The convolutions of the literary mind). Lu Xun's "Convolutions" is a brilliantly sustained satire on contemporary comments that had greeted his work and that of others, mixed in with general prejudices. They include some in deliberately mangled classical Chinese, to mock the advocates of the classical language who did not know how to use it correctly. The foreignized ch ending to the exclamation is a stroke of genius: it gives rise to the comment (among others), "He is filching a vocable of the foreigners, translating. Hey, why don't you go off and do some creative writing?"—which harks back to the Creation Society's denigration of translation. Another critic who peddles dictionaries accuses Lu Xun of propagating a fallacy, as his vade mecum only lists the form ach. Since zawen could accommodate characterization of the order displayed in the picture of the philanthropist and allow scope for the comic invention of the "Convolutions," one can understand why it need not have been much of a wrench for Lu Xun to turn to writing zawen exclusively, which he did around this time (with minor exceptions). These zawen are indeed "creative writing" and as such depend on inspiration, but in this same collection Lu Xun stamped out a matrix for zawen in the narrower sense that could keep them rolling off the production line. 70. 131. 71. 72. LXQ],

Li Changzhi, Lu Xun pipan

(Critique of Lu Xun) (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1935), p.

Lu Xun, "Xisheng m o " (A plan for sacrifice), Huagai ji, LXQJ, 3 : 2 6 - 2 9 . Lu Xun, "Pingxin diaolong" (The convolutions of the critical mind), Huagai 3:99-101.

ji,

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If " M y Views on Chastity" was in the style of the treatise, this type of short zawen followed the formal conventions of the old "eight-legged essay" (baguwen). In baguwen, the examination essay in late imperial times, conventions were clear-cut and had to be followed rigidly, but some canny thinking had to go into them. As Li Yu wrote in the seventeenth century, examiners used to judge by the first few lines whether the essay was going to be any good or not: if it did not arrest their attention they would throw it aside. So the beginning must lure the reader into the writer's trap, must startle or intrigue.73 With like shrewdness, Lu Xun would begin his own baguwen with a staggering generalization of his own devising, or he would stand an accepted maxim on its head, or he would take a piece of conventional wisdom and go one better, or he would present a perplexing saying from the classics. We will see how the story progresses if we scrutinize the essay entitled "Exalting and Undermining." 74 I give the baguwen name for each section as we come to it: 75 1.

2.

Lu X u n " b r o a c h e s the t o p i c " like this: " W h e n the Chinese people have encountered a personage w h o bears disquieting portents for them, they have always behaved in one o f t w o ways: grind him down, o r raise him up (pengqilai)"—the staggering generalization. As Li Yu says, the opening gambit must encapsulate the main purport, but enigmatically: it prefigures, merely, the n e x t section. " T a k i n g up the t h e m e " expands and clarifies. Lu X u n ' s clarification is that the Chinese people use the old morality or government authority to repress, so t h a t the "lonely warrior of the spirit" perishes even though he is fighting for the g o o d of the people. If they c a n n o t repress, they seek to avoid trouble by exalting, by sating the appetite of the person w h o threatens.

3.

"Initiating the e x p o s i t i o n . " T h e first step in his reasoning is to argue that people w h o exalt do so for the most part out o f fear, hence " n i n e out of ten o f those exalted are r o t t e r s . " Since they are rotters, they will do precisely the opposite o f w h a t is hoped of them. Peace c a n n o t be bought, because h u m a n desires are not easily gratified. But people have still not w o k e n up to this fact.

4.

"Initial l e g . " Lu X u n recalls the j o k e a b o u t the magistrate, born in the

73. Li Yu, Xianqing ouji (Lackadaisical observations) (Shanghai: Beiye shanfang, 1936), p. 61. 74. Lu Xun, "Zheige yu neige, 2: Peng yu wa" (This and that, 2: Exalting and undermining), Huagaiji, LXQ], 3 : 1 0 4 - 1 0 6 . 75. The baguwen essay normally had eight divisions, as given here, but could be expanded. The "eight legs" proper formed four of these divisions, consisting of pairs of sentences that are exactly parallel; for these Lu Xun substitutes illustrations. For the structure of baguwen, see Lu Qian, Baguwen xiaoshi (A short history of baguwen) (Shanghai: Shanqwu, 1937), chap. 2. The only treatment of the subject in English known to me is Ching-I Tu, "The Chinese Examination Essay: Some Literary Considerations," in Monumenta Serica 31 ( 1 9 7 4 - 1 9 7 5 ) : 3 9 3 - 4 0 6 , which Professor Cyril Birch was kind enough to point out to me.

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year of the rat, w h o was presented with a rat cast in gold by his subordinates. H e later announced in public that his wife had been born in the year of the o x . 5.

" M i n o r leg." A modern instance this time: Lu X u n recalls from his own experience the governor of Shaoxing appointed in 1 9 1 2 w h o was a good sort to start with but was spoiled by the exaltation of gentry and commoners alike. H e ended up grabbing all he could.

6.

"Central leg." N o w comes the key analogy that will introduce a constructive proposal. Exalting the height of river dikes has had the effect in the north of raising the riverbed above the level of the houses, thus posing an ever-growing threat. If the riverbed had been dredged in the beginning all would have been well.

7.

"Final leg." The exalted should not be given a dead rat, let alone a gold one.

8.

" G r a n d finale." T h e argument is summed up: "the root of the trouble the Chinese bring upon themselves is in exalting; the way to attract 'manifold blessings' is to undermine." Lu X u n ends with the comment, "Actually, although the amount of labor is about the same, people indolent by nature will nevertheless see exalting as less of a s w e a t . "

The conclusion does not perhaps come up to Li Yu's requirement that the last words of a baguwen should mesmerize or tantalize, so that the examiner is loath to put the paper down, but it does carry a note of despondency that shows the matter matters to the author. That this essay fits the baguwen pattern so neatly will be unwelcome news to those who exalt Lu Xun, as baguwen is commonly regarded as the means by which wicked rulers controlled the thought of the intelligentsia in the past, comparable to the golden fillet that bound the brow of the Monkey King in the Xiyou ji (Journey to the west). It must be remembered, however, that Lu Xun had practiced baguwen in his youth, and it would be surprising if no residue was left. More important, the baguwen form is a codification of a way of dealing with a topic that evolved over a very long period of time—a natural growth, though unnaturally arrested.76 It could be very effective and was in Lun Xun's hands, in an updated version. Furthermore, some of its features, at least, are relevant to literary composition in general. Li Yu was, after all, not writing about examination essays in the passage cited, but about plays; he mentioned baguwen only because it exemplified virtues that he wanted playwrights to cultivate. Lu Xun simply brought together traditional tactics of discourse that he had long drawn on separately to reassemble a model that would serve him

76. Prototypes for baguwen have been discerned in the Confucian classics—which fact determined that the design would not be lost. The first fully operational model, so to speak, appeared in the Song dynasty. See Zhu Zicui, "Baguwen yanjiu" (A study of baguwen) in Wenxue 3:1 (1 July 1934).

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well, with variations, for many of the shorter, topic-oriented zaiven he was yet to write. II By the end of 1925 Lu X u n ' s virtuosity as an essayist had been displayed in its fullness. His output over the ten remaining years to his death contributed more to the story of his life and times than to the development of his zaiven in the literary sense. Obviously, new tones consonant with the experiences to come would be heard, his essays would vary in weight according to the gravity of the matters dealt with, and in directness according to the degree of censorship exercised; but his repertoire of formal arrangements and technical devices had more or less been played through. In the world of letters new battles took the place of that with Chen Xiying, which fizzled out with the Northern Expedition. Those initiated by him were against Liang Shiqiu, Nationalistic (minzu) literature, the Third Class of writers, and Lin Yutang. H e defended himself against the Creation Society and its allies, and individual snipers. As before he was apt to overreact to personal aspersions and could be silly at times, but he cut deep, too. T o be the object of a Lu X u n attack was clearly a devastating experience, except when it was deliberately provoked to gain notoriety. The course of the last decade of Lu X u n ' s life was decided by a rapid succession of events: the M a r c h 18 incident in 1926, his flight from Peking three months later, and his reception in Canton as a revolutionary hero. The new overlords in Peking—Wu Peifu and, behind him, Z h a n g Zuolin— were m a d e of sterner stuff than were the much abused Duan Qirui and Z h a n g Shizhao. Ironically, both Lu X u n and they took refuge from Wu in the diplomatic quarter at about the same time. Having sealed his reputation as a troublemaker with a batch of essays on the massacre of the innocents on M a r c h 18, Lu X u n had to get away. Again it was a personal link that had committed him wholeheartedly to the fray—the fact that some of the student victims had been known to him. A whole chorus of horrified protest and lamentation had arisen, but Lu X u n ' s voice was the most persistent. N o t having been there at the time, he was perhaps better able to separate in his mind's eye the cheerful heroism on the one side and the callous brutality on the other from the general confusion experienced by those w h o had been there: things imagined often make a deeper impression than things witnessed. Of all the essays prompted by the incident, Lu X u n ' s on Liu Hezhen was probably the most forceful. It must have contributed significantly to the reputation that preceded him to Canton. Lu X u n felt this reputation put him in a false position, and was uncomfortable from the start in Canton. The "white terror" unleashed in April 1927 hardly improved matters. He freely confessed that he was terrified by

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the blood that flowed, and described his writing at the time as "pussyfooting, lacking the courage to speak plainly." 77 On passing on to Shanghai he was "beleaguered" by new and rejuvenated leftists and by the "proper gentlemen" of the Crescent Society.78 With the founding of the League of Left-Wing Writers, however, he had a relatively secure base, and knew which side he was on. He was able to lay about him as freely as censorship allowed.79 A number of his essays were cut or rejected by the press censor, but the cuts were restored when they were published in book form, as they very quickly were. In Lu Xun's own estimation, his most "barbed" (fengli) writing was contained in the collection Two Hearts (1930). 80 Barbed, venomous, pugnacious—these descriptions would fit much of his remaining work, too, but relaxed, sportive, even kindly find their place as well. The essays written at the end of his life especially bring wisdom and scholarship to bear. As it is impossible to comment comprehensively on these collections, all that can be done is to pick on a few items in the hope of filling some of the gaps left. Sententiousness is a quality so far unmentioned. It is embodied in some of Lu Xun's late condemnatory pieces, but an early example is the essay "In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen." 81 Sententiousness is best housed among architecture of note: appropriately, the seven sections into which the essay is divided all have their own design. Overall unity is conferred by the ever-present sight and smell of blood. Readers would agree, I think, that the gravity of the occasion is matched by the weight of the words; but as words can have very little weight separately, where does the sense of weightiness come from? Probably from the chains that bind them together; and the clank of the chains is heard in the rhythm of the words. In a recent article, Liang Xihua has shown that once the essay's "filler" words are set apart, certain passages fall naturally into lines of even length, and these lines have the measured cadence of verse. In addition, there are numerous examples of strict parallelism within and between sentences.82 There seems to be no disputing Liang's judgment that behind Lu Xun's instinctive ease in forging these chains lies his early grounding in pianwen (parallel prose).

77. Lu Xun, " X u y a n " (Preface), in Sanxian ji (Three leisures), LXQ], 4:4. 78. Ibid. 79. Nie Gannu reported that when he was editing Dongxiang (Trend) in 1934, censorship was ony fitful: "as long as you did not openly abuse the Guomindang, Chiang Kaishek or Wang Jingwei, you were left alone." See "Nie Gannu tan Dongxiang he Haiyan" (Nie Gannu on the subject of Trend and Stormy Petrel), Xin wenxue shiliao 4 (1981): 2 3 1 . 80. Lu Xun, Letter to Xiao Jun, 23 April 1935, in Xu Guangping, ed., Lu Xun sbujian (Letters of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Lu Xun quanji chubanshe, 1952), 2 : 8 0 7 . 81. Lu Xun, "Jinian Liu Hezhen jun" (In memory of Miss Liu Hezhen), Huagai ji xubian, LXQ], 3 : 1 9 6 - 2 0 1 . 82. Liang Xihua, "Lu Xun de 'Jinian Liu Hezhen jun'," Nanyang shangbao, 26-30 March 1981.

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His was the last generation, it may be remembered, to submit itself to this discipline. Next we should note the outright diatribe. Taking Lu Xun's own hint, we look for his most cutting criticism in Two Hearts. We find the animal, particularly dog, population quite high there. Zhu Tong has made an inventory of Lu Xun's dogs.83 He names four kinds of hunting dogs (or hounds) in the service of imperialists or the ruling cliques in China; then Pekinese, which are the yapping men of letters; Pekes (ba'er), apparently a term of endearment, but standing for the type that nips you when you are not expecting it; dogs like cats, that snuggle in their owners' laps; "mangy curs," that ferret into everything; and the famous "winded running dog that has lost its home," a phrase coined to describe Liang Shiqiu.84 It is as "pet hounds" that the exponents of nationalistic literature figure in the 1931 essay "The Job and the Fate of Nationalistic Literature." The words can speak for themselves: A m o n g the literature of the pet hound school, the one that bangs drums and clashes cymbals most energetically is the so-called "nationalistic literature." But their service pales in comparison with the manifestly meritorious kind of spies, police, and hangmen. The reason is that they still only bark, and have not yet got down to sinking their teeth in. Furthermore, they have not for the most part got the guts and drive of the drifters and desperadoes: they are merely drifting corpses floating on the tide. Still, this is precisely the mark of "nationalistic literature," this is the way they stay " p e t s . " Leaf through their publications and you will see that all sorts of people w h o previously paraded all sorts of ideologies have strangely enough all floated together. Is this the giant hand of "nationalism" that has hauled them in? N o t at all. The fact is that these are the drifting corpses that have been bobbing up and down alongside the Shanghai Bund for ages; at first they were strung out, but when a squall blew up they floated together, piling up on top of each other, and owing to the putrid state of each, they now give out a more cloying stench. 8 5

This invective is only the preliminary to argument, but it is sustained to a degree untypical of Lu Xun's work as a whole. It could hardly be more offensive. Li Changzhi notes that in Two Hearts Lu Xun's mode of expression shifts from the incisive (jianke) to the torrential (qingzhu); this passage 83. Zhu Tong, Lu Xun chuangzuo de yishu jiqiao, p. 82. 84. Thus did Lu Xun breathe life into Feng Naichao's empty epithet, "capitalist running dog." See Liu Zaifu, "Lun Lu Xun zagan wenxue zhong de 'shehui xiang' yu 'leixing xingxiang' " (On "social snapshots" and "typical figures" in Lu Xun's zagan literature), Wenxue pinglun 5 (1981): 41. 85. Lu Xun, " 'Minzuzhuyi wenxue' de renwu he yunming" (The job and the fate of Nationalist Literature), Erxin ji (Two hearts), LXQ], 4:245.

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would support that view. But Li also contends elsewhere that a state of composure ( c o n g r o n g ) is necessary for free flow and flexibility; for that reason ranking the " i n m e m o r i a m " essay on R o u Shi above that on Liu Hezhen. 8 6 T h e subject of violent death (Rou Shi was shot) is indeed a test of composure. Another is atrocity. Lu X u n could deal with atrocities remarkably calmly. F o r instance, he quotes a report telling how a military commander who favored long hair for girls took over from a rival commander w h o had favored short hair: " W h e n a girl with short hair was encountered they slowly pulled her hair out by the roots; they then went on to cut off her breasts." His comment is: "Getting rid of women's breasts is a means of making them look more like men and at the same time a warning against having the folly to imitate m e n . " 8 7 By drawing attention to this contradiction (meretricious though it is), Lu X u n drains emotion away from the terrible fact. Similarly, he remembers seeing a letter from a young person who had been tortured in prison by having chili sauce poured into his nostrils; the young man wrote that the hot sauce flowed into his lungs and heart, leaving him permanently disabled. Lu X u n comments: " T h i s person was an army cadet, and did not understand the structure of the internal organs. Actually, if you are hung upside down and stuff is poured into your nostrils, it can enter the lungs via the respiratory tract, and prove fatal; it cannot, however, enter the heart. Probably because he was in pain at the time his senses were distraught, and so he was deceived into thinking it had reached his heart." 8 8 T h e blatant inaptitude of reproaching the victim for getting his facts wrong is again an impressive example of self-control. By seeming quite insensitive himself, Lu X u n leaves it to the reader to feel abhorrence, both on his own part and on behalf of the author. But it is a dangerous game for an author to play and Lu X u n ' s judgment was not always perfect. 8 9 T h o u g h Lu X u n wrote a lot about himself in his zawen, it was usually to use his experiences to make a general point or to justify himself. Only relatively rarely did he write under the apprehension that his personal fads or idiosyncrasies were worth recording as part of the rich tapestry of life, or that the confession of individual follies or foibles was either piquant or revelatory of a c o m m o n human nature. 9 0 When Lin Yutang's magazines 86. Li Changzhi, Lu Xun pipan, p. 134. 87. Lu Xun, "You tianru" (Worried by "natural breasts"), in Eryi ji (And that's that), LXQJ, 3:354. 88. Lu Xun, "Dian de libi" (The pros and cons of electricity), Wei ziyou shu, LXQJ, 5:12. 89. As, for example, in "Changong daguan" (The grand spectacle of rooting out the Communists), Sanxian ji, LXQJ, 4 : 8 4 - 8 5 , where Lu Xun deflects attention from the public display of corpses onto his own private quarrels. 90. These rare instances might include the "diary" entries in Huagai ji xubian: "Mashang riji" (Horseback diary) and "Mashang zhiriji" (Horseback sub-diary), LXQJ, 3:223—250.

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dealing in this vein with "man in his humors" came out in the early 1930s, Lu Xun was not seduced, but he did contribute some articles. Three appeared in Lunyu (Analects) between February 16 and March 16, 1 9 3 3 . " The first includes a satirical poem; the second cleverly lists twelve contradictions in the Chinese response to Bernard Shaw; the third explains itself in its title: "To Reach the Conclusion from Women's Feet That Chinese People Do Not Follow the Golden Mean, and Thence Further to Conclude That Confucius Suffered from His Stomach." All three essays make serious points, but their witty manner, while not exactly foreign to Lu Xun, was no doubt adopted to suit the habitat of the "humorous" magazine they were appearing in. Lu Xun's last contribution to Analects was by way of a notice of quittance. Written after a six-month gap and not with very good grace—on the "command" of Lin Yutang—"A Year of Analects" plainly states Lu Xun's objections to the magazine's philosophy.92 They are in essence that the Chinese have no concept of humor, do not have the tolerance to accommodate humor, and do not generally enjoy the state of well-being in which humor is appreciable. The next month Lu Xun published, in another magazine, an essay denigrating the other major cause that Lin Yutang promoted, xiaopinwen (the literary essay).93 By 1935 he had taken to ridiculing everything that Lin said. The two were bound to fall out sooner or later; one can be thankful that when they did it was over interesting issues where their philosophies were in genuine conflict. Lu Xun's view of laughter was that in the context of his time it should be satirical: satire, being rooted in reality, served a purpose. Nevertheless, there are examples in his own work of true "humor," as he understood it in the Japanese rendering that translates as "comedy of the affections"— or, literally, of the "humors." His essay on "A Jin" is precisely of this kind.94 The odious amah from across the street who managed to disrupt the rhythm of his life during her short but enterprising term of office caused him, he says ruefully, to revise his long-held opinion that it was wrong to blame women for all the troubles in the world. All the same, there is no denying that most of Lu Xun's funny stuff, in line with his own prescription, was satirical, both in the sphere of charac91. Lu Xun, "Xuesheng he Yufo" (Students and the Jade Buddha); "Sheide maodun" (Whose contradiction?); and "You Zhongguo niiren de jiao tuiding Zhongguo ren de fei zhongyong you youci tuiding Kung fuzi you weibing" (To reach the conclusion from women's feet that Chinese people do not follow the Golden Mean, and thence further to conclude that Confucius suffered from his stomach). All are in Nanqiang beidiao ji (Mixed accents), LXQJ, vol. 4. 92. Lu Xun, "Lunyu yi nian" (A year of Analects), Nanqiang beidiao ji, LXQJ, 4 : 4 3 5 439. 93. Lu Xun, "Xiaopinwen de weiji" (The crisis of the literary essay), Nanqiang beidiao ji, LXQJ, 4 : 4 4 0 - 4 4 3 . 94. Lu Xun, "A Jin," Qiejieting zawen, LXQJ, 6 : 1 5 5 - 1 5 9 .

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terization and of argumentation. Two little caricatures from 1935 can serve as an illustration.95 The subject is the dreams that people cherish: One person longs for everyone in the world to depart this life, just leaving himself and a good-looking w o m a n , but not forgetting a seller of flatbreads; another hankers for autumn twilights, where, coughing half a mouthful of blood, he may be helped ailing onto the steps by t w o maidservants and view the autumn-flowering crab apple. . . . The second gentleman's "half a mouthful of b l o o d " has got a great deal of sense to it. It is in the nature of genius to be prone to sickness, but " p r o n e " as he might be, it must not be t o o serious. If with each cough it comes up in bucketfuls, how long can a person's blood last out? Before many days are past he would have to say goodbye to gentility.

The description of the first person, the man of gross appetites, might count as humorous, but it is over the second person that Lu Xun lingers, and it is wit that is at play here, if we take wit as tending to be malicious. By the same token wit must be the word for the type of argumentation that seeks to be amusing as well as subversive. Such a blending is done to particularly good effect in "The Evolution of Man."' 6 The evolution in question relates to men's treatment of women. Traced through the stages of forcible rape, buying of favors, and monopoly through marriage, it culminates in "scientific chastity," the latest doctrine invented to keep women in thrall. There is wit in the phrasing, certainly, but it is evident too in the overall conception of the piece—which is to commend the superiority of men over the beasts in devising better and better ways of exercising "special rights" over the female, and in the dexterity with which he selects the facts that form his chain of evolution. However, in the end Lu Xun lost his fight against humor. The consensus among contemporary Chinese critics is that his funny writing is: humorous. Lu Xun's last collection of essays contains some of his best. His heavy guns thunder when they can be rolled out, as in the piece written for the English-language China Today, "Ghosts and Ghouls in the Chinese Literary World." 9 7 Mockery and persiflage continue unabated. But there is a greater ease and assurance than before, which brings him close to his brother, Zhou Zuoren. The past is revived for the lessons it can teach the present, as formerly, but also for its own fascination. The scholar returns to follow a scent, as in the two essays on literary inquisitions in the early 95. Lu Xun, "Binghou zatan" (Sundry remarks after illness), Qiejieting zawen, LXQ], 6:128. 96. Lu Xun, "Nanren de jinhua" (The evolution of man), Zhun fengyue tan, LXQ], 5:224-226. 97. Lu Xun, "Zhongguo wentanshang de guimei" (Ghosts and ghouls in the Chinese literary world), Qiejieting zawen, LXQ], 6:119—125.

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Qing dynasty. These generously share with the reader the testimony he had unearthed to the mentality of men who crossed the line of toleration.98 On contemporary matters he often writes less in anger than in sorrow, setting himself above the fray. And he does on occasion strike the chord that made the sweetest music to his brother's ears, that mild and patient tone described as pingdan, as in "Skimming." 99 With this mellowness goes evidence, previously seen only in obituaries, of a degree of compassion to match the aversion Lu Xun was so given to expressing. The way he treats an actress's suicide, apparently caused by "loose talk," is a shining example of sympathy and understanding.100 Even Confucius gets the benefit of his breadth of mind.101 At the same time as his writing was flowing like a broad river, Lu Xun did not forget what zawen are supposed to be about. He defends zawen against orthodox forms of literature on account of their being "pertinent to the present, and vital; lively, beneficial, and capable of causing a shift in people's feelings." 102 He likes to read zawen and knows they are popular because they "have substance" (yan zhi youwu)—the classic prescription for prose writing. Zaiven embrace suibi (the essay)103 and apparently lectures and "fables," too, 104 but are contrasted with "art for art's sake" works.105 This brings us back to our starting point. Lu Xun seems to be affirming that everything in his own collections is indeed zawen, as he understands the term (in 1935). From the low opinion he expresses in the same place of "theories of literature" and genre distinctions, one can infer that differences in form were unimportant to him. This inference is borne out by his own practice of bringing what could loosely be called "the art of letters" to bear on everything he wrote: the same care in composition, the same rhetorical skills were applied to his zawen as to his short stories, prose poems, retelling of history, and recollections of childhood; at their borders these tend to merge together. In a sense, it was all wen to him. But in practical terms the law he wanted to lay down for zawen was more clear-cut. After all, not every writer is called upon to deliver public lectures, nor is everyone capable of writing fables. In effect, for lesser men his

98. Lu Xun, " G e m o " (Estrangement), Qiejieting zawen, LXQ], 6 : 3 4 - 3 7 , and "Mai Xiaoxue daquan ji" (How I bought The Compendium of Philology), LXQ], 6 : 4 2 - 4 7 . 99. Lu Xun, "Suibian fanfan" (Skimming), Qiejieting zawen, LXQ], 6 : 1 0 7 - 1 1 0 . 100. Lu Xun, "Lun renyan kewei" (A fearful thing is talk), Qiejieting zawen er ji, LXQ], 6:261-264. 101. Lu Xun, "Zai xiandai Zhongguo de Kong fuzi" (Confucius in present-day China), Qiejieting zawen er ji, LXQ], 6 : 2 4 8 - 2 5 4 . 102. Lu Xun, " X u Maoyong zuo 'Daza ji' x u " (Preface to "Odd-jobs," by Xu Maoyong), Qiejieting zawen er ji, LXQ], 6 : 2 3 2 . 103. Ibid., p. 2 3 1 : suibi, Lu Xun says, is "one of the forms of zawen." 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., p. 2 3 2 .

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remarks can be interpreted as giving his blessing to the topical essay; and it may be assumed that "lively" stands for contentious and "beneficial" for populist. For those who came after and took their lead from him, the choice was between following the Lu X u n style or the Lu X u n spirit. The Lu Xun style was not inimitable. Nineteen thirty-three was a good year for look-alikes. Lu X u n himself drew attention to the erroneous ascription to himself of Tang T a o ' s " X i n lianpu" (New range of theatrical masks). 1 0 6 Tang's zawen develops a theme Lu Xun had touched on several times, that the same kind of motley crew occupied the public stage as ever. It holds throughout to the metaphor announced in the title: the same roles are performed by the strutting actors, but they are tarted up in new degenerate ways. There has been a swapping of masks and new casting, so that former greatness is "boyed in the posture of a whore" (to borrow a phrase); and a new mask has been made for playing the foreigner (which is aimed at Chinese aping of Western manners). There are similarities with Lu Xun's style on a verbal level: a strong physicality in the descriptions (e.g., "screwing up the nose and pleading poverty"); a balanced, tight phrasing for general propositions; and a predilection for certain adverbs. But perhaps the main thing is that the meaning is all expressed figuratively, in a veiled way. As Lu Xun confessed, his writing at that time was "frequently very obscure (buise)," 1 0 7 by which he seemed to mean oblique or indirect. It was probably this indirectness that put the "hounds" on the false trail, apart from a reference to the practice of "firing arrows from ambush," which was something of an obsession with Lu Xun. If Lu X u n had laid claim to this essay, I doubt if anyone would have questioned it. As is now well known—though the fact was not made public till the 1 9 5 0 s — h e did include in his collections, without acknowledgment, twelve pieces written by Qu Qiubai. 1 0 8 Looked at as a whole, these both converge with and diverge from Lu Xun's practice. Though each piece is different, and generalization is therefore difficult, overall they align with the transformations that Lu Xun's zawen underwent. There are examples, for instance, of sustained invective, of persistent irony, of doggerel verse, of seizing on a phrase and worrying it to death, of citing old novels and quoting traditional maxims; and there is a skit in dramatic form. Points of divergence include the devotion of an entire essay to purely political questions, virulence without pain in the diatribes, fewer twists and turns, and the use of political jargon. The last is the one thing 106. The essay is reprinted in Tang Tao, Tang Tao zawen xuan (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), pp. 4 - 5 . 107. Lu Xun, "Qianji" (Foreward) to Wei ziyou shu, LXQJ, 5:4. 108. See Tang Tao, "Yingyinben 'Shenbao: Ziyoutan' xu" (Preface to facsimile edition of Shenbao's "Free Talk"), in Xin wenxue shiliao 3 (1981): 36.

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that might have given the game away, had anyone realized that a game was being played. It speaks volumes not only for the convergence of styles between Qu and Lu Xun but also for Qu's talent independently, that the perceptive critic Li Changzhi should have picked out Qu's sardonic essay "Daguanyuan de rencai" (The stars of the Prospect Garden) as the best in the whole collection False Freedom.109 Individual pieces could be assimilated to Lu Xun, but a whole collection would betray its authorship.110 Even within the confines of one piece, close scrutiny would show up identifying characteristics. These would probably have less to do with wencai (literary highlights)—the active ingredients, so to speak—than with the carrier medium of plain language itself. Surprising as it may seem after all the attention we have paid to wencai (and Lu Xun would not have had us do otherwise, as it was his own criterion for separating those who made the grade from those who did not),111 it is in the inconspicuous ways that make for fluency that he showed he could write essays. The diction of his late essays is in its bulk unpretentious, even popular. When in 1935 he required the writer to "transfer onto paper live words taken from the lips of living people," 112 he could by that stage speak with a clear conscience. The use of inchoate popular expressions plays a part in this, but the more constant basis for the impression is syntactical: his language has a relatively low density. Its high incidence of aspectual particles, verb complements, verbal measures, and other "moving parts" keep the substantive words well spaced out. Modal adverbs like ye, hai, and zong give tone to the voice. As a rider to the prescript quoted above, Lu Xun adds that to complement the colloquial, the "revival of old expressions and giving currency to dialectisms are of course essential." 113 "Old expressions" most often take the form of set phrases (chengyu). Lu Xun uses these sparingly, no more often than an educated person might use them in conversation. Perhaps it is a sign of maturity in an essayist to know when to eschew them. In an appreciable number of essays written in his last year or two, Lu Xun seems to have forgotten his rider. As his complete formula implies, a piece of writing can have all the vitality of speech and can flow as easily as speech is credited with flowing, without being the same as speech—which, indeed, no reader expects it to be. To tip the balance too far toward the colloquial is to fall into diffuseness. That, 109. Li Changzhi, Lu Xun pipan, p. 162. 110. Another example of mistaken identity: no less a judge than Lin Yutang mistook an essay of Xu Maoyong's for Lu Xun's, in 1934. See Xu Maoyong, "Huiyilu, 3 " (Memoirs, 3) in Xin wenxue sbiliao 3 (1981): 36. 111. Lu Xun, "Cong bangmang dao chedan" (From helping to talking tripe), Qiejieting zawen er ji, LXQJ, 6:273. 112. Lu Xun, "Rensheng shizi hutu shi" (When people can read, confusion reigns), Qiejieting zawen er ji, LXQJ, 6:235. 113. Ibid.

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however, is by the way. The main point is that Lu Xun's way with common words is as important in the makeup of his style as is his rhetoric, and more difficult to imitate. Qu Qiubai was executed in 1935, but Tang Tao and other left-wing writers who had grown up in Lu Xun's shadow carried on his tradition of zawen after his death in 1936. Tang, Ke Ling (both from Lu Xun's province of Chekiang), and Nie Gannu are generally considered the ablest members of his school. 114 But the boom in zawen was nearing its end. The War of Resistance that broke out in 1937 temporarily suspended the internal hostilities on which zawen had thrived. But it was not long before Lu Xun's name was conspicuously invoked again, this time to sustain a corporate endeavor. This was the magazine Lu Xun feng (Lu Xun trend), published in the "isolated island" of Shanghai in 1939. 115 It had set out to publish zawen principally, in keeping with the Lu Xun "trend," 116 but it soon had to settle for the role of a general-purpose literary magazine. Its relationship with Lu Xun was defined in the first issue by Xu Guangping (writing under the name of Jing Song). The intention was not to idolize the dead but to try to improve existing conditions, as he had done. Being so protean, he had led the way in so many directions that to be courageous, forward-looking, and self-exacting was tribute enough. The best prescription for dealing with the Japanese invaders, whose conduct was worse than bestial, was Lu Xun's forcefulness and steadfastness; he tore the masks off hypocrites, locked firmly onto targets and took setbacks in his stride.117 Despite the clearness of this declaration, it had to be repeated in the fourth issue that, contrary to what its detractors were saying, the purpose of the magazine was not to imitate Lu Xun but to emulate his fighting spirit.118 The article in question contends that no Shanghai writer of zawen now resembles Lu Xun. Fengzi (Tang Tao) has been mistaken for him, but the style of his "Tribute to Lu Xun" is quite different from Lu Xun's; its passionate accusation is, in the author's own words, "in the manner of Ba Jin." Wen Zaidao, Zhou Muzhai, Zhou Li'an, Ba Ren, and Ke Ling are then listed for their distinctive features. For none of them is the quality pola (pungency, forcefulness) claimed; it is not without cause that the editor calls for more of this in issue no. 7, nor did Shi Dagang later complain unjustifiably that contributors to Lu Xun Trend had not 114. See, for example, Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi xubian (Sequel to The Compendium of Modern Chinese literature) (Hong Kong: Xianggang wenxue yanjiusuo, n.d.), 7 : 1 4 . 115. For information on Lu Xun feng, see Jin Xingyao, "Lu Xun feng duoyi" (Retrieved memories of Lu Xun Trend), in Xin wenxue shiliao 4 (1980): 1 3 3 - 1 3 6 . 116. Editorial in Lu Xun feng 1 (January 1930). 117. Jing Song, "Lu Xen feng yu Lu X u n " (The Lu Xun trend and Lu Xun), Lu Xun feng 1 (January 1930): 3. 118. Song Jue, "Wenxue de zhanshulun, xia" (Tactical theories of literature, part 2), Lu Xun feng 4 (1 February 1939).

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learned Lu Xun's art of invective.119 On the whole, a reedy and merely querulous tone dominates in the mazagine. There is a good deal of armchair philosophizing and of going over the past; the exhortations lack conviction. The comparatively few sharp and effective zawen that were printed were signed with unknown names. Personalities apart, the situation in Shanghai must have been very deflating. There was everything to complain about but, apparently, few to listen. It was said that in that depraved city there remained only one or two papers with serious content. 120 Inevitably, the atmosphere in the isolated enclave of the International Settlement was claustrophobic, and writers felt cut off from what they imagined to be the soul-stirring events being enacted in the interior. As Dongfang Xi put it, "we fundamentally lack the kind of raw material that it would be worth writing up." 121 Lu Xun Trend did enter into some current controversies, such as that provoked by Liang Shiqiu's snub to "War of Resistance baguwen," but— doubtless aware that they were more spectators than participants—the supporters did not pursue their causes very energetically. The lack of impact of Lu Xun Trend can be put down to three causes: no future, no firebrands, public indifference. Because of the unique situation in wartime Shanghai, its performance as a vehicle for zawen cannot be assessed by means of comparison. Wild Grass (1946) does, however, offer one parallel, in that it too was published outside the fire zone, under foreign rule in Hong Kong. Wild Grass was a revival of the magazine that had started life in Guilin in 1940 and that had gone under in 1943. The editorial board consisted of Xia Yan, Song Yunbin, Meng Chao, Nie Gannu, and Qin Si. Qin Mu's is another famous name that appeared in its pages. No homage was paid to the Lu Xun tradition, and no article appeared on him until the tenth anniversary of his death. Perhaps for this very reason, the zawen in Wild Grass could be unself-conscious in following his example. Whether deliberately or not, a conspicuous number of them do in the event bear Lu Xun trademarks: they move on from a small item in the press to pronounce on the state of the nation; they make much use of parallels from history and literature; quotations are judiciously inserted; cavalier simplifications masquerade as facts; crocodile tears course down the authors' cheeks; pictures are drawn of massed souls in torment. No holds were barred in this magazine: rudeness and personal attacks were all in a day's work. Lu Xun came in for odium in his lifetime, the anniversary article says, because he "dared to laugh, dared to cry,

119. Quoted in Yi Shi, "Lianpu zhuyizhe" (Those who believe in theatrical masks), Lu Xun feng 15 (5 June 1939). 120. Yiren, "Lehuo pian" (On joys and tragedies), Lu Xun feng 6 (15 February 1939). 121. Dongfang Xi, "Tan 'Gudao wenyi' de fazhan" (On the development of "Isolated Island" literature), Lu Xun feng 15.

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dared to rage, dared to smite, dared to curse." 122 Wild Grass did all those things, too. Setting personalities aside again, Wild Grass succeeded (in the present reader's eyes) where Lu Xun Trend failed because it had purposeful backing (of the Communist Party, it seems); it could identify its readership and had a sense of solidarity with it; and it saw a prospect of realizing its goals. Lu Xun's own zawen were more in the "Lu Xun spirit" when he also enjoyed support and felt he was speaking for many voiceless compatriots. Those who sought to be true only to their own lights and who formed no alliances would, according to this reasoning, write essays that bore very little resemblance to Lu Xun's zawen. The more genuine the persona of the author, the less prescribed the stance, the more diversity one could expect. Liberals like Zhou Zuoren, Lin Yutang, and Liang Shiqiu put their own stamp on their occasional essays, which differ from each other only somewhat less than they differ from Lu Xun's. If any of these is to be compared with Lu Xun, it should be Zhou Zuoren. Zhou Zuoren's personal bond with his brother was very close up to 1923, and their community of viewpoint continued until the Northern Expedition. It seems, though, that by 1923 Zhou had sensed that they would take very different paths as writers. In that year he described the two contrasting trends in Chekiang writing: one took on the tone of the magistrate meting out sentence, pungent in expression, trenchant in diction; the other, which he gravitated toward, favored the unaffected ease of the cultivated man, distanced from mundane matters; it alternated the serious with the diverting, and gave pleasure even in the absence of any "brilliant ideas." 123 Zhou's picture of a civilized world was one where "life's unnecessary sacrifices and conflicts are reduced to a minimum"; 124 the opposite of Lu Xun's need to lock horns. Nevertheless, Zhou was a leading progressive in the 1920s and was in the thick of controversy during his management of Threads of Talk magazine in 1926 and 1927. Then he spoke out boldly, while Lu Xun minced his words. Zhou also showed himself capable of using a controlled irony as deadly as Lu Xun's. In "Renliche yu zhanjue" (Rickshaws and decapitation) Zhou, adopting a tone of polite perplexity, put Hu Shi to shame for speaking about the uncivilized nature of rickshaws while turning a blind eye to the "hardly less civilized" practice of decapitating "Reds." 1 2 5 Irony was about Zhou's 122. Si Mu, "Zawen de yixie wenti" (Some questions about zawen), Yecao xin erhao (Wild grass, new series) 2 : 4 6 - 4 7 . The words quoted come from Lu Xun; see "Huran xiangdao, 5 " (Sudden thoughts, 5), Huagai ji, LXQJ, 3:34. 123. Zhou Zuoren, "Difang yu wenxue" (Place and literature), Tan long ji (Talking to dragons) (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1927), p. 13. 124. Zhou Zuoren, "Guanyu yaoshu" (On witchcraft), Yongri ji (Everlasting days) (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1929), p. 251. 125. Zhou Zuoren, "Renliche yu zhanjue" (Rickshaws and decapitation), Tan hu ji shang (Talking of tigers, part 1) (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1928), pp. 2 8 7 - 2 9 0 .

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only rhetorical device. He did not play with words, and caricature was beyond his grasp. His expectations of his fellow human beings were low, and temperamentally he was slow to anger. Perhaps for that reason, when his flashpoint was reached he was the more inclined to consume himself in the flame of his indignation, abandoning all finesse in his outbursts. These fulminations were directed against things that denied the basic values he did seek to salvage. Through volumes of sincere and reasoned essays he had made it clear what things he stood for, while scrupulously refraining from pronouncing on matters beyond his competence. The authority that his essays carried was therefore finally dependent not on skill of disputation but on trust in an author who was sensible, steady, and fair. Zhou had no need to do more than speak plainly, while Lu Xun seemed to think he had to win. It has been rightly said that Zhou put himself on a level with his reader, talking person to person, with none of the dignity of the pedagogue. 126 Indeed, it was not a disembodied intelligence like Lu Xun's that he brought to bear in his essays but the confessedly imperfect vision of a man speaking for himself. His relationship with his reader admitted frankness and allowed displays of bad temper, but it also demanded modesty and delicacy. N o t surprisingly, when he sought to amuse it took the form of humor rather than comicality, most often the humor of understatement, 127 but including impressions of a world that was slightly dotty—to which he nevertheless belonged. 128 When a new age dawned with the Liberation, Lu Xun was canonized and Zhou Zuoren confined to the dustbin of history. But Lu Xun's voice was not long heard in the land; and when in 1 9 6 1 a small group of like-minded men decided they had to break silence it was, ironically, the manner of Zhou Zuoren they adopted: mild, patient, reticent, fair-minded. 129 Unable, even had they been so inclined, to brandish dagger or javelin, they pleaded for good sense and toleration. The most eminent among them, Deng Tuo and Wu Han, both make a powerful impression of breadth and independence of mind. Their learning, like Zhou's, was profound but carried lightly; their language, simple; their comments, banal but subtly subversive of the current

126. Xu Zhiying, "Lun Zhou Zuoren zaoqi sanwen de yishu chengjiu" (On the artistic accomplishment of Zhou Zuoren's early prose), Wenxue pinglun 6 (1981): 116. 127. Zhou defined humor as "reluctance to exaggerate—that is, the expression of sophrosyne": "Shanghai qi" (The Shanghai style), Tan long ji, p. 159. 128. See, for example, Zhou Zuoren, "Lun baguwen" (On baguwen), Kan yun ji (Cloud gazing), (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1932), pp. 1 4 3 - 1 5 2 . 129. I refer to the essays by Deng Tuo in the "Yanshan yehua" (Yanshan nocturnes) column of Beijing wanbao (from March 1961); the "San jia cun zhaji" (Letters from ThreeFamily Village) column in Qianxian (from October 1961), written by Deng Tuo, Wu Han, and Liao Mosha; and the "Changduanlu" (Long and short pieces) in Renmin ribao (from May 1962).

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order and dogma. The implications of the historical episodes or exemplars they chose to disinter, or of the contemporary issues they made their subject, were more far-reaching than they spelled out. In this they conformed to the pattern that Zhou Zuoren's essays had fallen into in the 1930s: making quotations from "men of old" the centerpiece of an essay and alerting the reader in a brief conclusion to the kind of lesson that should be learned from them. Essentially, the essays of Deng and Wu were inspiriting for they testified to a long tradition of decency, of strength of character, of generosity; but they took light from the whited sepulchers of their own day and were uprooted as poisonous weeds. Now Zhou Zuoren's early essays are reprinted, and Lu Xun's complete works reissued untampered-with. Each may affiliate to opposite wings of the local Chekiang tradition; yet Chekiang is part of China, and China is part of the world. In the end, neither author is limited to his place or time. If they can be read they will reinforce the proclivities to which they appeal. If they cannot be read, then—given access to knowledge and a minimum of freedom of expression—new Lu Xuns and Zhou Zuorens will emerge spontaneously, though in China it will be Lu Xun in mufti, not in spiked armor.

4 Lu Xun as a Scholar of Traditional Chinese Literature J O H N C. Y. W A N G

Anyone familiar with Lu Xun's works cannot fail to notice his unusually strong and close ties with traditional Chinese literature. While these ties are visible enough in his frequent use of classical Chinese, notably in his several dozen old-style poems, and indeed even in his zawen and short stories, 1 they are of course most readily seen in the works he devoted specifically to the study of old literature. 2 The purpose of this essay is to examine these works to gain a better understanding of an important area in Lu Xun's many-faceted career—his contributions to the study of traditional Chinese literature. Like many men of letters during the May Fourth period, Lu Xun re-

1. For a discussion of Lu Xun's old-style poems and of his indebtedness to traditional Chinese literature in his zawen and short stories, see Leo Ou-fan Lee's and David E. Pollard's articles in this volume. But the one scholar who has probed most deeply into the subject is probably Wang Yao. See his "Lu Xun duiyu Zhongguo wenxue yichan de taidu he ta suoshou Zhongguo wenxue de yingxiang" (Lu Xun's attitude toward China's literary heritage and the influence he received from Chinese literature), in his Lu Xun yu Zhongguo wenxue (Lu Xun and Chinese literature) (Shanghai: Pingming chubanshe, 1952), pp. 1 - 5 9 ; and his "Lun Lu Xun zuopin yu Zhongguo gudian wenxue de lishi lianxi" (On the historical connection between Lu Xun's works and classical Chinese literature), Wenyi bao (Literary gazette) 19 (1956): 1 1 - 1 8 . 2. See Chinese Department of Xiamen University, ed., Lu Xun lun Zhongguo gudian wenxue (Lu Xun on classical Chinese literature) (Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1979). This work conveniently gathers together and categorizes the remarks on traditional Chinese literature that Lu Xun scattered throughout his writings. It also contains, chronologically arranged, full-length articles and the prefaces Lu Xun wrote to special collections or editions of old works. For other notable efforts to assess Lu Xun's overall achievement as a student of traditional Chinese literature, see Jin Canran, "Lu Xun yu guogu" (Lu Xun and traditional learning), Lu Xun yanjiu congkan (Series in the study of Lu Xun) (Yanan: Xinhua shudian, 1941) no. 1, pp. 1 3 8 - 1 4 8 ; and Liu Panxi et al., Lu Xun yanjiu (Research in Lu Xun) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1957), pp. 2 8 7 - 3 1 7 .

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ceived a good schooling in the classics and in old literature generally. Unlike those of his contemporaries who advocated a total rejection of traditional Chinese culture, however, Lu Xun, even in his most iconoclastic moments, never lost sight of the tenacious connection between the past and the present. "There is no new art," he stated in a letter to Wei Mengke dated April 9, 1934, that may be said "to have simply sprung up without a root or a base. It always has a heritage to receive. Some young people think that adoption means surrender [to the past]. That's because they have confused 'adoption' with 'imitation.' " 3 Thus, while characterizing China's traditional culture as "cannibalistic" in his epoch-making short story, "Diary of a Madman" (1918), Lu Xun could at the same time produce a meticulously researched essay, in exquisite classical Chinese, about an inscription found in the tomb of Lii Chao of Southern Qi (479— 502), of the Six Dynasties period.4 Lu Xun may have advised young people in 1925 to "read as few Chinese books as possible, or even not at all, but instead read more foreign books"; 5 but as he admits in his preface to Call to Arms (1922), reading old literature functioned as almost a spiritual catharsis for him whenever the reality of China became too depressing.6 As a matter of fact, he had started his work in traditional literature long before he launched his career as a short story writer, and he continued that work uninterrupted almost to the very end of his life, long after the peak of his creative career seems to have passed. Lu Xun's first serious effort in the area of traditional literature was the compilation of Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered, over five hundred pages of anecdotes collated from widely scattered texts of the Han to Sui times. Started probably in 1912, the work was not published until 1938, two years after Lu Xun's death.7 Thus Lu Xun may well have meant to work more on it, but as published it does not give the authorship or dating for the individual collections included. Despite this shortcoming, however, it remains the most comprehensive and most carefully collated anthology of its kind, and an essential reference work for anyone doing serious research on traditional Chinese fiction.8 3. Excerpted in Lu Xun lun Zhongguo gudian wenxue, p. 17. 4. See Lu Xun nianpu Group of Fudan University et al., ed., Lu Xun nianpu (A chronological biography of Lu Xun) (Hefei: Anhui renmin chubanshe, 1979), 1:143. 5. Lu Xun, "Qingnian bidu shu" (An essential reading list for youth), Huagai ji (Unlucky star), Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun; hereafter cited as LXQJ) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), 3:18. 6. LXQJ, 1 : 2 7 3 - 2 7 4 . 7. See Lin Chen, "Guanyu Gu xiaoshuo gouchen de jilu niandai" (On the time when the Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered was compiled), in Renmin wenxue (People's literature) 3:2 (December 1950): 4 3 - 4 4 . 8. For an intelligent and knowledgeable review of this anthology, see Zhao Jingshen, "Pingjie Lu Xun de Gu xiaoshuo gouchen" (Lu Xun's Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered: a critique and introduction, 1938), in his Zhongguo xiaoshuo congkao (Textual studies in

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At about the time he was completing the compilation of Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered, Lu Xun started collecting and collating short stories written in classical Chinese during the Tang and Song periods. This work continued off and on until 1927, when A Collection of Tales of Tang and Song was published. A second volume appeared one year later,9 and in 1934 both volumes were issued together as a single book. 10 Probably intended as a sequel to Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered,u it is made all the more valuable by its lengthy and well-researched notes on the tales' editions, authorship, sources, and development. It paved the way for Wang Guoyuan's Tangren xiaoshuo (Stories of Tang, 1936) and Wang Mengou's four-volume Tangren xiaoshuo yanjiu (Studies in Tang stories, 1971 — 1978), both now considered standard reference works on the literary tales of the Tang period.12 In 1920 Lu Xun was invited to teach a course on the history of Chinese fiction at Peking University and later at some other institutions of higher learning in Peking. With typical conscientiousness, Lu Xun spent his spare time away from the Ministry of Education reading old stories and novels and copying from the various collections of traditional writers. He later grouped and published these passages under the title A Collection of Old Notes on Fiction.13 A similar and more comprehensive work by Jiang Ruizao, called Xiaoshuo kaozheng (Textual studies in fiction), was already in print. But as Lu Xun tells us in the preface to his collection, although he had been greatly helped by Jiang's work, he had found many discrepancies between its passages and the originals. He therefore decided to make his own collection. Its contents, he says, "were all taken directly from the works themselves, and not copied from some second-hand sources." 14 The result, as pointed out by Zheng Zhenduo, was a far more accurate and systematic collection of the writings on Chinese fiction by traditional Chinese critics themselves. Kong Lingjing's extremely useful Zhongguo xiaoshuo shiliao (Source materials for Chinese fiction, 1936) can be regarded as merely an expansion of what Lu Xun had already done.15

Chinese fiction) (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1980), pp. 1 2 - 2 1 . For other reviews of this anthology, see Y. W. Ma, "Lun Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue buyi zhushi ji qita" (On why A Brief History of Chinese Fiction shouldn't be annotated, etc.), in Dousou 46 (September 1981): 28, n. 12. 9. See Xu Shoushang, Lu Xun xiansheng nianpu (A chronological biography of Lu Xun), LXQJ, 20: 6 2 5 - 6 2 6 . 10. See Lu Xun nianpu, 2 : 6 2 3 . 11. See Lu Xun's own preface to this collection, LXQJ, 10:190. 12. For a critique of Lu Xun's Tang Song chuanqi ji, see Dai Wangshu, " T a n g Song chuanqi ji jiaodu ji" (A review of A Collection of Tales of Tang and Song), in his Xiaoshuo xiqu lunji (Essays on fiction and drama) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1958), pp. 39—50. 13. Later revised and expanded somewhat in a 1935 edition. 14. LXQ], 10:15. 15. For a comparison of Lu Xun's work with that of Jiang Ruizao's and a discussion of how Kong's work was built on the foundation laid by Lu Xun, see Zheng Zhenduo's preface to the 1936 edition of Kong's work.

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Lu Xun's course on Chinese fiction at Peking University proved a tremendous success. The lecture notes that he mimeographed and distributed beforehand were later issued as a single volume under the title An Outline History of Fiction (ca. 1921). They also formed the basis for his Brief History of Chinese Fiction (hereafter Brief History), which was undoubtedly Lu Xun's single most important contribution to the study of traditional Chinese literature.16 Brief History was originally published in two parts: Chapters 1—15 appeared in 1923 and Chapters 16—28 in 1924. The first part was reprinted in early 1925, and both parts then underwent some revisions and were put out as a single volume in September 1925. 1 7 This 1925 singlevolume edition went through five reprintings before it was again revised and reissued in 1931. 1 8 Lu Xun made more revisions in the text before yet another reprinting in 1935. Most subsequent versions of the work have been based on this 1935 edition. While Lu Xun was busy writing up the two parts of Brief History for publication in 1923 and 1924, he continued to furnish lecture notes for his classes at Peking University and other schools in the city. At about the same time as the first part of Brief History was published, these notes were also printed (apparently for use in his classes only) under the title An Outline History of Chinese Fiction.19 This work resembles Brief History far more than does the earlier, mimeographed Outline History of Fiction. It may be regarded as Brief History's immediate predecessor.20 Lu Xun would have made his lasting mark on the study of Chinese literature if Brief History had been the only work he ever wrote. To be sure, as a pioneering work it exhibits obvious shortcomings. As early as 1945 Zhao Jingshen pointed out a number of inaccuracies and factual 16. An Outline History of Fiction is now available in two editions. One is contained in Editorial Department of Shehui kexue zhanxian, ed., Lu Xun yanjiu luncong (A collection of studies on Lu Xun) (Changchun: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 1980), pp. 1 - 8 8 . The second was published as a single volume by Shaanxi renmin chubanshe (Xian, 1981). For a comparison of An Outline History of Fiction and Brief History, as well as the latter's publication history, see Lu Shulun's excellent article, "Luetan Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue banbenshang de yixie wenti" (A brief discussion of some problems with regard to the editions of Brief History), in Lu Xun yanjiu luncong, pp. 1 1 3 - 1 3 8 . Other good studies on the writing and revision of Brief History include Bao Ziyan, " Z h o n g g u o xiaoshuo shilue suoji" (Random notes on Brief History), and Tai Zhi, "Guanyu Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue de dinggao shijian" (On the time when the final version of Brief History was made), both in Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao (Research materials on Lu Xun) 4 (1980): 2 5 9 - 2 7 2 and 2 7 3 - 2 7 9 , respectively. 17. Most people thought that the two parts were simply put together without any changes in the text, which is not true. See Lu Shulun, "Luetan Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue banbenshang de yixie wenti." 18. Most people wrongly thought that the 1930 edition was the revised one. See Lu Shulun, "Luetan Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue banbenshang de yixie wenti." 19. Ibid. 20. For a comparison of the two, see Lu Gong, "Cong Zongguo xiaoshuo shi dalue dao Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue" (From An Outline History of Chinese Fiction to A Brief History of Chinese Fiction), in Wenwu (Cultural relics) (May 1972) 4 6 - 4 8 .

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errors.21

More

recently,

Y. W .

Ma

has e n u m e r a t e d further

inaccuracies

a n d o t h e r k i n d s o f d e f e c t s in t h e w o r k . 2 2 Y e t in t h e m o r e t h a n fifty y e a r s s i n c e its p u b l i c a t i o n ,

although

p a r t i c u l a r l y o n t h e bianwen,

there have been m a n y excellent

studies,

v e r n a c u l a r stories, and certain individual nov-

els, n o c o m p r e h e n s i v e h i s t o r y o f C h i n a ' s fiction h a s b e e n s u p e r i o r t o History.23 and

Students of Chinese

insights.

Zheng

fiction

Zhenduo,

p o p u l a r l i t e r a t u r e , w r o t e o f Brief Renmin

wenxue

Brief

t o d a y still g o t o it f o r i n f o r m a t i o n

h i m s e l f a g i a n t in t h e s t u d y o f History

Chinese

in 1 9 4 9 in t h e i n a u g u r a l issue o f

(People's literature):

This is a great pioneering work. N o t until the publication of this masterpiece did students of traditional fiction have a solid and reliable basis to go on. M o s t of the problems [encountered by such students] are solved here, and a lot of impressionistic views and specious arguments are cleared away. For the past thirty years there have been many doing research on traditional fiction, but there hasn't been another one like M r . Lu X u n who could conceive of such a grand design and with one stroke set the general direction for research as well as provide such great and correct guidelines [for the study of Chinese fiction].24 W h a t is it t h a t m a k e s Brief

History

so significant a n d enduring a w o r k ?

T h e b o o k s e e m s t o m e t o h a v e five s p e c i a l m e r i t s . T o b e g i n w i t h , it w a s t h e first

full-fledged l i t e r a r y h i s t o r y o f C h i n a d e v o t e d e x c l u s i v e l y t o

fiction.

C h i n a is a h i s t o r y - c o n s c i o u s n a t i o n a n d h a s k e p t r e c o r d s o f all k i n d s . B u t it w a s n o t until t h e t u r n o f t h e p r e s e n t c e n t u r y , a n d l a r g e l y u n d e r t h e influence of the W e s t e r n a n d J a p a n e s e e x a m p l e s , t h a t any serious a t t e m p t s were m a d e at a formal treatment of the evolution and development Chinese literature.25 Due to the general neglect of

fiction

in

of

traditional

21. Zhao Jingshen, " Z h o n g g u o xiaoshuo shilue kanwu" (Correcting the errors in Brief History), Yinzi ji (Essays on fiction) (Shanghai: Yongxiang yinshuguan, 1946), pp. 1 3 0 - 1 4 0 . A revised version of this essay, retitled "Guanyu Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue" (Concerning Brief History), is included in Zhao's Zhongguo xiaoshuo congkao, pp. 5 - 1 1 . 22. Among the shortcomings pointed out by Y. W. Ma are Brief History's disproportionate emphasis on the early forms of fiction; it merely glosses over such important later forms as the bianwen and vernacular short stories. Ma also points out that Brief History fails to discuss some very important works and sometimes quotes works under discussion at too great length. 23. For a succinct discussion of the inferiority of some of the literary histories written after Brief History, see Y. W. Ma, "Lun Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue buyi zhushi ji qita," p. 30. 24. Zheng Zhenduo, "Zhongguo xiaoshuo shijia de Lu Xun" (Lu Xun, historian of Chinese fiction), Renmin wenxue 1 (October 1949): 56. For similar praise from other scholars, see Y. W. Ma, "Lun Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue buyi zhushi ji qita," p. 27 n. 4, p. 30 n. 20, and passim. 25. The first history of Chinese literature written in Chinese was probably that by Lin Chuanjia, published in 1904. Xie Wuliang's Zhongguo da wenxue shi (A great history of Chinese literature) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1918) was probably the best early work on Chinese literary history. See Liang Rongruo, Zhongguo wenxue shi yanjiu (Studies in Chinese literary history) (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1967), pp. 1 2 0 - 1 6 6 , for a description and critique of eleven histories of Chinese literature.

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China, however, most of these pioneering works of literary history either did not include fiction or mentioned it only in passing. For extensive discussions of fictional genres and works, one had to turn to literary histories written by foreign scholars. 26 One notable exception was Zhang Jinglu's four-volume Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi dagang (An outline of the history of Chinese fiction).27 Hu Shi also produced highly acclaimed studies on several individual novels. 28 But Zhang's work is marred by factual errors and huge gaps, while Hu concentrated on only a few works. For all practical purposes, therefore, Lu Xun's Brief History was the first comprehensive and systematic history of Chinese fiction in any language. 29 One literary history by a foreign scholar that paid a good deal of attention to traditional fiction was Shionoya On's Shina bungaku gairon kowa (Lectures on a general history of Chinese literature, 1919). N o less than 175 out of its 4 8 6 pages are devoted to an extensive, though not always reliable, examination of Chinese fiction from the early myths to Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber). Lu Xun's 1923 preface to Brief History suggests that he knew Shinoya's work. 30 If so, it may have given him the idea for a more specialized history of Chinese fiction. In any case, there is a great deal of similarity between the formats of Brief History and of Chapter 16 of Shinoya's book—so much so that Lu Xun's detractors accused him of plagiarism. Even a cursory comparison be-

26. T w o notable examples are Herbert A. Giles, A History of Chinese Literature (London, 1 9 0 1 ; reprint ed., New York: Grove Press, 1958), and Shionoya On, Shina bungaku gairon kowa (Lectures on a general history of Chinese literature) (Tokyo, 1919). Shionoya's work was rendered into Chinese by Sun Lianggong under the title Zhongguo wenxue gailun jianghua (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1929). 27. Shanghai: Taidong tushuju, 1920. 28. By the time Brief History was reissued in a combined volume in 1925, Hu Shi had already published three studies on Shuihu zhuan ("Shuihu zhuan kaozheng" [A textual study of Outlaws of the Marsh], 1920; " S h u i h u zhuan houkao" [Sequel to a textual study of Outlaws of the Marsh], 1 9 2 1 ; and "Shuihu xuji liangzhong x u " [Preface to two sequels to Outlaws of the Marsh], 1923); two on the Honglou meng ("Honglou meng kaozheng [A textual study of Dream of the Red Chamber], 1921, and "Ba Honglou meng kaozheng" [Postscript to a textual study of Dream of the Red Chamber], 1922); one on the Sanguo zhi yanyi ("Sanguo zhi yanyi x u " [Preface to Romance of the Three Kingdoms], 1922); one on the Sanxia wuyi ("Sanxia wuyi x u " [Preface to Three Knights-Errant and Five Altruists], 1925); and one on the Jinghua yuan ("Jinghua yuan yinlun" [Introduction to Flowers in the Mirror], 1923). Hu Shi acknowledged, however, that he had consulted Lu Xun's lecture notes on fiction when writing the study on the Sanguo zhi yanyi. All these studies are included in the four-volume Hu shi wencun (The collected works of Hu Shi) (Taipei: Yuandong tushu gongsi, 1953). 29. For a sampling of writings about traditional fiction from the late Qing to just before the appearance of Brief History, see Huang Qiang, " Z h o n g g u o xiaoshuo shilue bianxie qian xueshu jie duiyu gudian xiaoshuo lunshu ziliao zhebian" (Selections from writings about classical fiction before the writing of Brief History), in Lu Xun yanjiu tuncong, pp. 1 5 0 - 1 7 4 . 30. "There has never been a history of Chinese fiction, if we except the account in the histories of Chinese literature written by foreigners" ( L X Q J , 9 : 1 4 9 ) (trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang).

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tween the two, however, reveals not only that Brief History is much more detailed but also that Lu Xun has a much firmer grasp of the subject matter. Lu Xun was fully vindicated when the Japanese translation of Brief History appeared in 1935. As he writes in the postface to Essays from a Semi-Concession, II: "With Professor Shionoya's book rendered into Chinese a long time ago [in 1929] and my book available in Japanese translation, readers in both countries can now see for themselves. Has anyone pointed out my 'plagiarism'?" 31 The second special merit of Brief History is that it is both grand in design and minute in execution. Although modestly called a brief history, it provides at once a panoramic overview and a fairly detailed delineation of the development of Chinese fiction from the early myths and legends through the zhiguai stories of the Six Dynasties, the chuanqi stories of the Tang and Song, and the vernacular short stories of subsequent dynasties, all the way down to the novels of the late Qing period. Reading the book will give one not only a clear picture of the overall development of Chinese fiction and of the general characteristics of its major subgenres but also a firm grasp of the meaning and significance of an amazing number of major as well as minor individual works. Gaps had to be filled (such as the emergence of the bianwen stories in Tang) and conclusions revised when new materials were discovered; but a bold outline had been drawn and a sound methodology established, both of which were to be followed by practically every later historian of Chinese fiction. Brief History's third special merit is that it is a model for a balanced approach to the subject of literary history. While different critical schools tend to emphasize different aspects of literature, a good literary historian should take into consideration the historical context, the audience, the artist, and the work itself.32 This is exactly what Lu Xun did in Brief History. Particularly noteworthy is his attention to the audience, an element most literary historians tend to ignore. His first chapter, "The Historians' Accounts and Evaluations of Fiction," for example, offers a succinct account of how both the literati and the common people received fictional works in early China. Similarly, in his treatment of the major novels of later periods, he often summarized past interpretations before advancing his own reading. To illustrate Lu Xun's balanced approach as a literary historian, let us take a closer look at his treatment of the famous seventeenth-century novel, Jin Ping Mei (The golden lotus). After categorizing it as a novel of manners, briefly discussing its publication and authorship, and summariz31. LXQJ, 6 : 4 4 2 - 4 4 3 . 32. See Hayden White, "The Problem of Change in Literary History," New History 7:1 (1975): 97.

Literary

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ing its story, he quotes two passages from the novel to illustrate its style. He expresses his disagreement with the moralistic view that the novel was written to teach debauchery. Rather, he continues, the work is a superbly written critique of contemporary life and society. "The writer," he says, "shows the most profound understanding of the life of his time, his descriptions are clear yet subtle, penetrating yet highly suggestive, and for the sake of contrast he sometimes portrays two quite different aspects of life. His writing holds such a variety of human interest that no novel of that period could surpass it." 3 3 Unfortunately, Lu Xun laments, readers tend to notice the pornographic elements in the work while ignoring its serious social message and artistic achievement. In fact, Lu Xun goes on to argue, pornographic descriptions in novels of manners were quite common during the Ming period: A c t u a l l y , at that time, such descriptions w e r e the f a s h i o n . D u r i n g the second half of the fifteenth century the alchemist Li T z u [Li Z i ] and m o n k C h i - h s i a o [Ji X i a o ] rose to eminence by teaching the arts of love, w h i l e in the sixteenth century T a o C h u n g - w e n [ D a o Z h o n g w e n ] w o n the e m p e r o r ' s f a v o r by prescribing a p h r o d i s i a c s and f o r this w a s p r o m o t e d to the rank of minister and e n n o b l e d . T h i s d e c a d e n t trend by degrees spread to scholars too: Chief C e n sor S h e n g T u a n - m i n g [Sheng D u a n m i n g ] and H i g h C o m m i s s i o n e r K u K o hsiieh [ G u K e x u e ] b e c a m e officials by passing the e x a m i n a t i o n s , but a c h i e v e d high r a n k by presenting recipes f o r a p h r o d i s i a c s . Since such sudden p r o s p e r i t y g a v e rise to e n v y , other men tried by every m e a n s to p r o c u r e r e m a r k a b l e d r u g s and talk a b o u t the art of love and the use of aphrodisiacs w a s quite o p e n . T h i s v o g u e left its m a r k on literature: the h o n o r in w h i c h alchemists w e r e held and the general use of drugs w e r e a c c o m p a n i e d by m o r a l laxity a n d d e b a u c h e r y . T h u s the fiction of that p e r i o d deals either with g o d s and d e m o n s o r with a m o r o u s arts. 3 4

Thus, in less than six pages, Lu Xun has provided the reader with all the essential information about The Golden Lotus while never losing sight of the novel itself. According to Hayden White, the central problem facing the literary historian is "how to cut into the universe of literary artifacts in ways that will permit us to remain responsible to historical consciousness and at the same time maintain the sacred quality of the work of art." 3 5 In Brief History Lu Xun seems to have overcome precisely such a problem. Therein lies his success as a literary historian. The book's fourth special merit is its solid scholarship. Because in general fiction was not taken seriously in traditional China, materials in this 33. 34. 35. (1970):

LXQJ, 9:325 (trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang). LXQJ, 9:328 (trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang). Hayden White, "Literary History: The Point of It All," New Literary 174.

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area were not well preserved, and the authors or compilers of many stories and novels chose to remain anonymous. As a result, publishers and later editors felt free to alter the texts to suit their own purposes. Thus establishing a work's authorship, text, and dating is a very difficult and a very important part of any serious study of traditional Chinese fiction. Lu Xun seemed to be fully aware of this challenge. As we have seen, long before he was invited to lecture at Peking University he had begun serious research on Chinese fiction with the compilation of Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered and A Collection of Tales of Tang and Song. To prepare for his lectures, he painstakingly compiled A Collection of Old Notes on Fiction. By the time he was ready to write Brief History he had already accumulated a great deal of first-hand research. The solid scholarship behind Brief History shows in the tremendous number of original sources consulted and in Lu Xun's citations of both the first- and second-hand material on which he based his observations. (Unfortunately, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang left these references out of their otherwise admirable English translation.) Finally, Brief History's fifth special merit lies in Lu Xun's skill as a literary critic. As important as it is, scholarship alone does not make a good literary history. The author's critical acumen and literary sensibility are at least equally, if not more, important. And it is here that Brief History seems particularly to excel. Lu Xun's talent and experience as a short story writer seems to have stood him in good stead as a critic. While the scholarship in the work can be, and in many instances has been, superseded by new discoveries, students of Chinese fiction today can still go to Lu Xun's work for judicious comments on the literary qualities of many stories and novels. Y. W. Ma cites Lu Xun's comments on Xiyou bu (A sequel to The Journey to the West) and Dream of the Red Chamber as examples of such insightful and still useful discussions. Valuable critical insights can be found even in seemingly casual remarks about individual works. Speaking of the Fengshen zhuan (Canonization of the gods), for instance, Lu Xun says, "As it lacks the realism of Shui Hu Chuan [Shuihu zhuan, or Outlaws of the marsh] and the imaginative brilliance of the Pilgrimage to the West [i.e., Xiyou ji, or The journey to the west] it has never been ranked equal with these two romances." 36 It would be hard to find an apter and more concise characterization of the Canonization of the Gods. Another indication of Lu Xun's fine sensibility as a critic is his classification of the Chinese novels, which is still followed by most scholars

36. LXQ], 9 : 3 1 2 - 3 1 3 (trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang).

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today. 3 7 A revealing example is his distinction between novels of satire (,fengci xiaoshuo) and novels of exposure (qianzi xiaosbuo). In An Outline History of Fiction, Lu Xun groups Rulin waishi (The scholars) and Laocan youji (The travels of Lao Ts'an) together as novels of exposure. In Brief History, however, he treats the former as representative of the novel of satire and the latter as the novel of exposure. What are the differences between these two types of novels? " T h e Scholars," Lu X u n explains, "is the first novel in which a writer criticizes social abuses without any personal malice. . . . the style is warm and humorous, gentle and ironical. This must rank as China's first novel of social satire." 3 8 By contrast, the aim of the novels of exposure "was to expose social abuses and lash out at contemporary politics, sometimes at social conventions as well. Though this attack on abuses has something in common with the novels of satire, the criticisms were made openly without innuendo, sometimes even exaggerated to suit the popular mood, and the spirit of these works is intolerant." 3 9 This distinction is an interesting one, although his choice of The Travels of Lao Ts'an as a novel of exposure is not fully justifiable. 40 After Brief History Lu X u n wrote a number of articles on Chinese fiction.41 These are best viewed as clarifications or further elaborations of points made in Brief History, just as the Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered, A

Collection

of Tales of Tang and Song, and A Collection of Old Notes on

Fiction, as we have seen, may be considered as constituting its source materials. If Brief History was Lu Xun's greatest triumph as a critic and literary historian, Xi Kang ji (Works of Xi Kang), a painstakingly collated edition of all the known works by Xi Kang (223—262), has to be considered a highlight of his life as a scholar. He certainly spent more time and care on it than on almost any other work: he started the project no later than 1 9 1 3 4 2 and kept at it until 1931. 4 3 His dedication to so time-consuming an undertaking betrays his predilection for literature of the Wei and Jin peri-

37. For example, C. T. Hsia's celebrated designation of Li Ruzhen (author of the Jinqhua yuan [Flowers in the mirror]) as a "scholar-novelist" was admittedly inspired by Lu Xun's characterization of Jinghua yuan and similar works of the Qing period as novels of "erudition and/or literary elegance." See C. T. Hsia, "The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture: A Reappraisal of Ching-hua yuan (Jinghua yuan)," in Andrew Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 269. 38. LXQJ, 9 : 3 6 6 (trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang). 39. LXQJ, 9 : 4 3 4 (trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang). 40. See C. T. Hsia, " T h e Travels of Lao Ts'an: An Exploration of Its Art and Meaning," Tsing-hua Journal of Chinese Studies n.s. 7:2 (August 1969): 4 0 - 6 6 , esp. n. 8. 41. See Lu Xun lun Zhongguo gudian wenxue for a list and collection of these articles. 42. A postface to a hand-transcribed version of the work is dated 1913 (LXQJ, 9:133). See also Lun Xun nianpu, 1 : 1 1 4 - 1 1 5 . 43. See Lu Xun nianpu, 2:482.

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ods in general and for the personality and writings of Xi Kang in particular.44 Lu Xun based his compilation on a version transcribed by Wu Kuan in Ming times, which he collated against five other editions, plus a host of history books, collectanea, and anthologies. His preface (dated 1924) and postface (dated 1913) explain his procedure, and two postscripts discuss old bibliographies on Xi Kang and works by him that are no longer extant. The Works of Xi Kang was the most authoritative edition of that author from its publication in 1938 until 1962, when Dai Mingyang's Xi Kang ji jiaozbu (A collated and annotated edition of Xi Kang) was published.45 Dai's version, while superior to its predecessor, benefited greatly from it. In 1926 Lu Xun transferred from Peking University to Xiamen (Amoy) University, which had asked him to teach a course on the history of Chinese literature. Again, he began to write lecture notes for his classes, which he hoped would comprise a history of the entire Chinese literary tradition. Lu Xun's abrupt departure from Xiamen University toward the end of 1926, however, interrupted this project. The lecture notes he had finished were gathered into a volume, probably in 1927, and published as An Outline of Chinese Literary History. The work consists of only ten chapters outlining the development of Chinese literature from the invention of Chinese writing down to Sima Xiangru (179—117 B.C.) and Sima Qian (145—86? B.C.) of Han times. In view of Lu Xun's accomplishment in Brief History, one can only wonder what he would have achieved had he been able to complete this project. Lu Xun's most important writing on Chinese literature after Brief History was the article "On the Behavior and Writing of Writers of the Wei and Jin Periods and Their Relationship with Drugs and Wine," originally a lecture given in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1927. 46 This article shows clearly Lu Xun's belief that the social, cultural, and political environment has a deciding influence on literature. He characterizes the literary style of the Wei and Jin periods as laconic (qingjun) and spontaneous (tongtuo), on the one hand, and as ornate (huali) and heroic (zhuangda), on the other. All of these characteristics, he argues, can be attributed to the political and social conditions of the time, in general, and to the influence of the fatherson team, Cao Cao (155—220) and Cao Pi (187—226), in particular. According to Lu Xun, to restore order to a period of political upheaval 44. For a discussion of Lu Xun's preference for Xi Kang and other writers of the Wei and Jin periods and of their influence on his own writing, see Wang Yao, Lu Xun yu Zhongguo wenxue, pp. 30—35, 5 0 - 5 2 . 45. Dai Mingyang, ed., Xi Kang ji jiaozhu (A collated and annotated edition of Xi Kang) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1962). 46. Collected in Eryi ji (And that's that), LXQJ, 3 : 4 8 6 - 5 0 7 .

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Cao Cao introduced very strict laws, which resulted in an emphasis on a concise style in writing. And tired of stuffy and pedantic behavior, he promoted naturalness and straightforwardness, which resulted in a spontaneous style of writing. By the time of Cao Pi, however, literary writing had become self-conscious—a new attitude of "art for art's sake" had set in. In his famous "Lun wen" (Essay on literature), therefore, Cao Pi proposed ornateness and heroicness as stylistic goals for all writers. Finally, due perhaps to the precarious position of writers at that time, the literature they produced was for the most part marked by turbulence, sarcasm, and rebelliousness. Toward the latter part of the Jin (Eastern Jin), however, as conditions began to return to normal and as Buddhism began to exert a pervasive influence in China, literary writings—as represented by Tao Qian (365—427)—became quieter and more peaceful in tone. Perhaps the most interesting part of the article is Lu Xun's discussion of the widespread use of drugs and wine among the literati of the Wei and Jin and of its responsibility for their sometimes eccentric behavior. For example, a favorite drug at this time was wushi san, a kind of arsenic that was supposed to make a person strong. The person who took the drug had to take long and vigorous walks to work it through their system and not get killed. Hence the frequent references to walks in contemporary poetry. Once the drug had been absorbed, Lu Xun (who had studied medicine) tells us, the addict would feel hot and cold in turn. He had then to take cold showers, eat cold food, drink warm wine, and wear light clothes. Hence the seemingly outrageous behavior of the addict who wined and dined on cold food during the mourning period, when one was supposed to fast and abstain. Moreover, according to Lu Xun, the skin of a person under the influence of this drug was very tender. It thus became a fad to wear large and loose garments instead of tight clothes, and slippers instead of shoes. In fact, the user of wushi san actually preferred unwashed and worn-out clothes because they were more comfortable. Hence the strange and repugnant habit among the more eccentric of "shooting the breeze while killing lice between their thumbnails" (men shi er tan). And finally, their use of wushi san gave many literati of the Wei and Jin periods their bad tempers, arrogance, and unconventionality. Lu Xun may here be placing too much emphasis on external factors in explaining the literary style of a historical period. But many of his observations are as revealing as they are thought-provoking. This essay became the basis for Wang Yao's famous series of monographs on the literature and writers of the Six Dynasties period: Zhonggu wenxue sixiang (Literary thoughts of the medieval period), Zhonggu wenxue fengmao (Literary style of the medieval period), and Zhonggu wenren shenghuo (Lives of the literati of the medieval period), all completed in 1948, but perhaps not published until 1951.

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Viewed as a whole, what do Lu Xun's literary histories tell us about him as a scholar and critic? First, everything he did was done conscientiously and to the best of his abilities. This is clearly demonstrated not only by the fact that his various collections became standard reference works but also by the long years he spent compiling a definitive edition of Xi Kang and on the numerous revisions of Brief History. Second, Lu Xun emphasized the importance of studying a subject—be it an author, a period, a work, or a genre—as a whole. "I always feel," he wrote, "that in discussing a piece of literary writing it is best that we take into consideration the piece in its entirety. We should also take into consideration the author as a complete person as well as the social conditions under which he lived. Only then can we be closer to the truth. Otherwise, it is very easy to become far-fetched." 47 Thus, he cautioned readers that anthologies provide only partial or even slanted views of the authors included.48 This perception may explain in part why he was willing to spend so much time compiling the complete works of Xi Kang and why he seemed to prefer writing the history of China's entire literary tradition rather than studies on individual works in the style of Hu Shi. Third, Lu Xun as a scholar is both honest and humble—in sharp contrast to the sometimes quarrelsome Lu Xun found in the zawen. Although he drew on seventy-six titles in the compilation of A Collection of OldNotes on Fiction, he still apologized for his lack of learning and for not having completely read every title cited in the bibliography. Most of his generalizations in Brief History are clearly annotated, and he is careful to mention when he is using other people's research. He gladly acknowledged his mistake if new evidence pointed to a different conclusion or if someone else made a sounder judgment. In his preface to the Japanese version of Brief History, for example, he points out that Zheng Zhenduo's account of the textual evolution of The Journey to the West has superseded his own.49 Finally, Lu Xun is a discerning critic with a fiercely independent mind. He was never satisfied with the mere surface meaning or the view of the day. This attitude is visible in Brief History and even clearer in his seminal article on the writers of the Wei and Jin periods. Cao Cao, he maintains at the beginning of that aticle, was not the villain he is portrayed as in Sanguo zbi yanyi (Romance of the three kingdoms) or on the popular stage; he was actually a very capable person and an admirable hero. so Similarly, Lu Xun feels that Xi Kang and Ruan Ji (210—263) had been 47. Lu Xun, "Ti weiding cao, 7 " (Without a title—a draft, 7), Qiejieting zawen er ji, LXQJ, 6 : 4 2 5 . 48. See Lu Xun, "Xuan ben" (On anthologies), Jiwat ji (Addenda collection), LXQ], 7:502—505. See also his "Ti weiding cao, 6 , " Qiejieting zawen er ji, LXQJ, 6 : 4 1 4 - 4 1 5 . 49. Lu Xun, Qiejieting zawen er ji, LXQ], 6 : 3 4 3 - 3 4 4 . 50. LXQJ, 3 : 4 8 7 .

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inaccurately labeled as iconoclasts, because very often their iconoclasm was a mere pose or a form of protest against the hypocritical behavior of those in power. The fatherly advice Xi Kang gave to his son in " J i a x u n " (Household admonitions), for example, is anything but iconoclastic in nature. 51 If Lu X u n had produced only his compilations and studies of traditional Chinese literature, he would have been assured of a secure place among modern China's men of letters. But, of course, he is even better known as one of the first and foremost practitioners of modern Chinese fiction and as the inventor and grand master of the versatile zawen. His career as a creative writer may have overshadowed his career as a scholar/critic. But as long as he is studied as a creative writer, the outstanding example he set as a scholar/critic will also be remembered. In the final analysis, the short story, the zawen, and literary scholarship are the three main areas in which Lu Xun left his most significant and lasting legacy. 51. LXQJ,

3:502-504.

5 The Morality of Mind and Immorality of Politics: Reflections on Lu Xun, the Intellectual LIN Y U - S H E N G

I. L u X u n , t h e I n t e l l e c t u a l F r o m M i c h a e l Polanyi's epistemological insight into the nature of creativity, scientific as well as artistic, we k n o w that when the creative imagination goes into action, it is " n o t only more intense but also more concrete, m o r e specific." 1 O f course, one can single out the concrete and the specific only within a general knowledge of the nature of things. T h e richer and deeper the general k n o w l e d g e — t h e general frame of reference that one a c q u i r e s — t h e m o r e o n e is prepared to be concrete and specific. Y e t general b a c k g r o u n d knowledge itself c a n n o t substitute for creativity, which is always informed by a particular sense of concreteness. Arising out of an era of great ideological ferment, in which he himself fully participated, the genius of Lu X u n was marked by an unusual combination of a sharp sense of logic and a vivid sense of the concrete and the specific vis-à-vis the unprecedented crisis of China. It was by virtue of his keen mind and his rich sense of c o n t a c t with realities that he contributed substantially to the c o n t e n t of the M a y Fourth radical antitraditionalism. And it w a s also due to these intellectual and spiritual resources that he was able to resist the pressures of conformity and platitude inherent in the ideological movements during and after the M a y Fourth period ( 1 9 1 5 — 1 9 2 7 ) . In other words, Lu X u n ' s unusually sharp sense of logic and vivid sense of concreteness were m a j o r resources with which he made penetrating and telling descriptions of some of the specific social and cultural evils of Chinese tradition, o f which his readers might not otherwise have been 1. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning 1975), p. 58.

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clearly aware. T o these resources Lu Xun also owed his creative ideas, which are sometimes at variance with his ideological stance. Lu Xun's combination of totalistic iconoclasm as an ideological commitment with truthful, concrete understanding of some of the specifically positive elements of the Chinese tradition gave rise to agonizing intellectual contradictions and spiritual tensions in his consciousness. In this regard, whereas his complex consciousness testifies to the profundity of twentieth-century China's crisis of culture, it was least representative of the May Fourth intelligentsia. His sense of despair, reached through a realistic understanding of China's problems, and his opposition to any simplistic formula of solutions—he realized that China's problems were far larger and more complex than any proposal could embrace and resolve—were incongruous with the forward-looking ideological temper of the age. On the other hand, Lu X u n felt the pulse of his times and was deeply dedicated to the solution of China's ills. During his student days in Japan, he realized that the Manchu government had to be overthrown in order to bring about a national rejuvenation. Whether or not he had formally joined the Guangfu hui (Restoration Society), there is no question that he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Republican revolution. During the May Fourth period, he was one of the most important spokesmen for the New Culture movement, articulating both its negative calls for radical rejection of the Chinese past and its positive calls to seek enlightenment through freedom and knowledge. Though his conversion to the leftist movement led by the Chinese Communist Party was quite torturous, once he was involved he resolutely plunged himself into the whirlpool of polemical debates on behalf of the leftist cause. He was in many ways a resolute fighter, standing at the forefront of each movement. In this respect Lu X u n was one of the most representative figures of the M a y Fourth intelligentsia. However, Lu X u n always harbored second thoughts about whatever political and intellectual causes to which he committed himself. In his student days in Japan, he saw enough of the shallowness and sometimes the downright hypocrisy of his fellow students, who were clamoring for revolution, and witnessed enough backbiting among their different factions to feel uncertain about the revolutionary movement's outcome. While he was briefly elated at the outbreak of the 1 9 1 1 revolution, its consequences—the disintegration of the sociopolitical and cultural-moral orders, the demoralization of almost every sector of Chinese society, and the dominance of Yuan Shikai and warlord politics—confirmed his worst fears and reduced him to utter despair. Lu Xun's despair did not stem from a Taoist perspective of the eventual futility of worldly affairs, although he was influenced in part by Taoism, especially the Zhuang Zi. It resulted from the interaction between his dear

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sense of concrete realities and the logic of his cultural-intellectualistic approach, which was a traditionally derived, holistic mode of thinking that led him to diagnose China's ills in terms of a disease of the Chinese mind. 2 Consequently, his despair was all the more powerful and indelible. For Lu Xun, the most realistic assessment of China's future pointed toward nothing less than a sense of total hopelessness. Lu Xun had earlier identified the deplorable character of the Chinese people as the fundamental cause of the country's problems. Such an attitude implied that the only solution was to change the nature of his people through intellectual and spiritual revolution. Political revolution could change only the external forms of government; it could not render the truly essential renovation for a better future. Yet, precisely because Lu Xun had specified the primary cause of China's weakness in intellectual and moral terms, his findings led him to profound despair. After extensive discussions with X u Shoushang in Japan, Lu Xun found that the greatest deficiency of the Chinese people was their "lack of sincerity and love; in other words, the Chinese had been deeply infected by hypocrisy, shamelessness, and suspicion." 3 The fundamental task that faced him was to cure the spiritual disease of his people through intellectual and spiritual revolution. But how could an intellectually and spiritually diseased people recognize the true source of disease, let alone change their intellect and spirit? Lu Xun could of course make an effort to enlighten them, but the result would remain uncertain at best. Thus Lu Xun already had a latent sense of exasperation and pessimism well before the 1 9 1 1 revolution. The failure of the revolution merely released it. In sum, though Lu Xun shared with other contemporary Chinese intellectuals the same intellectualistic-holistic mode of thinking and arrived at the same notion of the priority of intellectual and spiritual revolution, he diverged from others who, repeating time and again the assumed belief in the power of ideas, saw a hopeful future; Lu Xun, by following through the inherent logic of that belief, came to his conclusion of utter despair. His famous image of the Chinese people—locked in an iron house without windows, left to suffocate—can, therefore, be said to have been implied by the logic of his holistic demand for intellectual and spiritual revolution. But to say that Lu Xun's despair was entailed by the thrust of his logic does not mean that sheer reasoning enabled him to create his literary masterpieces of dark pessimism. The actual creation of these works was 2. For a delineation of the cultural-intellectualistic approach and of its influence on Lu Xun's totalistic attack on Chinese tradition, see Lin Yii-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), pp. 2 6 - 5 5 , 1 0 4 - 1 5 1 . 3. Xu Shoushang, Wosuo renshi de Lu Xun (The Lu Xun that I know) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1952), pp. 18—19.

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spurred in part by his concrete sense of the reprehensible aspects of Chinese reality. Of all the May Fourth writers, Lu Xun provided the most telling, specific description of the deplorable nature of the Chinese people. "Diary of a Madman," whether or not it actually appeared as his first baihua (vernacular) piece of creative writing, was of artistic and intellectual necessity the first instance of his pessimistic, iconoclastic totalism, because it represents his first confrontation with a major contradiction. If the Chinese people are so intellectually and spiritually diseased as not to recognize their "mutual cannibalism"—if their minds are so "dark and confused" 4 that they enjoy oppressing others in the midst of their own undoing—then how can one individual who was reared in the same Chinese environment and who shares with his compatriots the same nature of Chineseness be an exception? The answer is: He cannot, unless he is "insane." In "Diary of a Madman" Lu Xun employs the modern psychological concept of schizophrenia to delineate the madman's systematic and highly developed delusion, so that the story provides a sense of fidelity to the insanity of the madman. Lu Xun's profound pessimism and subtle irony are disclosed in his allegorical exploitation of this realism. The madman is not aware of his madness, much less capable of curing himself or of making a decision to move between the worlds of sanity and insanity. If he were able to do so, he would not be truly mad and therefore, according to the internal logic of the story, would not be able to see the true nature (i.e., the cannibalism) of the Chinese people. For though everyone in Chinese society is, consciously or unconsciously, a cannibal, it takes an "insane" person to break through the barriers that obstruct vision and penetrate to reality. But such a clear vision makes him incapable of communicating with his fellow Chinese—thus rendering his effort completely ineffective, for his language and mental categories are now generically different from theirs. From the perspective of the madman, the others in the story are mad, not he; and vice versa, of course. But there is a crucial difference between the madman's vision and that of others. For the madman the world is one, but for the others there are two worlds: the world of madness, in which the madman lives, and the world of sanity, in which they live. Since he believes that he lives in the same world as the others, the madman does not know that they regard him as mad and therefore will not listen to him. For the madman there is no alternative but to tell the 4. Lu Xun, "Suiganlu sanshiba" (Random thoughts, 38), Xin qingnian (photoreprints of original issues; Tokyo: Kyuko shoin, 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 1 ) (15 October [sic; should read November] 1918) 5.5: 517, or in Refeng (Hot wind), Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun; hereafter cited as LXQj) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 1:313. For a discussion of the textual problems of this piece, see Lin, Crisis, p. 116 n. 27.

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truth he has discovered and to hope that the power of truth will persuade the others to break out of the vicious circle of cannibalism. But because the other people think the madman is living in his own insane world, there is no way for them to take his words seriously—to understand (and benefit from) the words of the madman as he means them. The last statement— "Save the children!"—is a desperate cry, but no inference can be drawn from the internal logic of the piece to indicate a realistic chance of saving the children. On the contrary, the madman feels that the children whom he has encountered all harbor cannibalistic intentions, since they have been reared and socialized in a cannibalistic society. In the words of the madman, "They must have learned it from their parents." 5 Whether consciously or unconsciously, every member of Chinese society was a cannibal, and there existed no inner resources that could generate an intellectual and spiritual change toward a more humane society. Ironically, only by becoming "insane" could one grasp the true nature of Chinese society and culture. But precisely because he was awakened, the story's protagonist was dismissed as a madman by the " n o r m a l " members of society. Without awareness of the nature of Chinese society and culture, and without liberation from its effects, one could not break through the cannibalism of Chinese tradition; yet the very awareness of the need for liberation nullified one's ability to change Chinese society and culture. In addition to posing this dreadful, unresolvable paradox, Lu Xun was moved to ask what specific characteristics of the Chinese people that were concretely expressed in traditional Chinese culture and society. It was Lu Xun's understanding of the concrete realities of the Chinese people that gave substance to his radical iconoclasm. In other words, though the iconoclastic movement was a dominant trend in the May Fourth period and one in which most radical intellectuals participated, it was Lu Xun's creative writings that provided the iconoclastic attacks with "material" strength. One of Lu Xun's best pieces remains " T h e True Story of Ah Q . " It derives its power from the author's vivid characterization of the "concrete" nature of Ah Q . In addition to Ah Q's vileness, cowardice, cunning, megalomania, and habit of rationalizing humiliation, which enable him to survive the bullying of others and make him bully the weak, two basic characteristics emerge: Ah Q lacks an interior self and a feeling for life—indeed, his callousness evinces even an enjoyment of the destruction of lives. Ah Q is a creature who lives mostly by natural instinct (including, of course, instincts absorbed through being socialized as a Chinese). He has conditioned reflexes but lacks self-awareness and the ability to change. Living mostly by instinct, he is immune to inspiration from external stimuli. His innocence 5 . Lu X u n , " K u a n g r e n r i j i " (Diary of a madman), Nahan

(Call to arms), LXQJ,

1:423.

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and naiveté are, in fact, striking indicators of his lack of an interior self. Without self-awareness, he is incapable of self-cultivation and of intellectual or moral improvement. Neither his innocence nor his rationalizations can save him from destruction or can arouse him to fight oppression in "a war of resistance in despair" (in Lu Xun's memorable phrase). 6 They serve only to keep Ah Q from realizing why he is being put to death. And, ironically, only death itself brings to him a flicker of self-awareness. Yet for all his totalistic rejection of the Chinese cultural tradition, Lu Xun's sense of concreteness led him to recognize, appreciate, and adapt a number of moral values from the Chinese tradition without violating their authenticity. 7 However, he was not inspired, on the basis of these values, to transcend his totalistic iconoclasm, although, theoretically, the possibility was there. Thus he was torn by a divided vision and the resultant sense of guilt. He remained overwhelmingly pessimistic about the future of China, because he saw no resources within the grasp of the Chinese people with which they could better themselves and overcome the tyranny of tradition. This sense of utter despair easily led him to his "nihilism." As expressed by some of his prose poems in Wild Grass, nothing was perceived to be trustworthy and believable. But Lu Xun's "nihilism" must be carefully distinguished from the nihilism portrayed by Turgenev and the younger Dostoevski. The Russian nihilist, who lives without any beliefs, feels no obligations or restrictions of any kind. By contrast, Lu Xun's "nihilism" did not lead to such a logical conclusion. Indeed, one of the major themes of his writings in the later part of the May Fourth period was his inner struggle to keep alive his avowed commitment to the cause of China's rejuvenation and to find meaning in life amidst his dark sense of nihilism. It is quite unusual to find a writer like Lu Xun in world literature—a writer who combined a nihilistic notion of the world with a personal search for meaning and a commitment to enlightenment. In a letter to his student (and future common-law wife) Xu Guangping, dated March 18, 1 9 2 5 , Lu Xun said that "my works are too dark because I often feel that only 'darkness and emptiness' are 'reality.' I am determined, however, to launch a war of resistance in despair against them." 8 In his prose poems—which are, as Lu Xun put it, "small and pale flowers" that blossom "on the rim of hell," 9 —his feelings of depression and empti6. Lu Xun, Letter to Xu Guangping, 18 March 1925, Liangdi shu (Letters between two places), LXQJ, 11:21. 7. For an explication of one such traditional value, tiianjiu (roughly, "cherishing old ties"), see Lin, Crisis, pp. 1 4 8 - 1 5 0 . 8. Lu Xun, Letter to Xu Guangping, 18 March 1925, pp. 2 0 - 2 1 . 9. Lu Xun, " Y e c a o yingwen yiben x u " (Preface to the English edition of Wild Grass), Erxin ji (Two hearts), LXQ], 4 : 3 5 6 .

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ness were given poignant expression. Conjuring up a host of images that serve in one way or another as his alter ego, he tried to express metaphorically various thoughts. In "Shadow's Leave-taking" his distrust of everything—including the vision of a future good society painted by any one of the ideologies then current in China—comes across most vividly: There is something I dislike in heaven; 1 do not want to go there. There is something I dislike in hell; I do not want to go there. There is something I dislike in your future golden world; I do not want to go there. It is you, though, that I dislike. Friend, I'll no longer follow you; I do not want to stay here. I do not want to! Ah, no! I do not want to. I would rather wander in nothingness. 1 0

In the midst of this nihilism, in which nothing is trusted and nothing is believed, Lu Xun had, characteristically, second thoughts. Having depicted hope as nothing but a device to withstand the "dark night of emptiness," he concludes, quoting his favorite poet, Sandor Petofi, that "despair, like hope, is also but vanity." 11 For despair is a surrender to the past or, more precisely, to a rational calculation based on past experience. Lu Xun's agonized tension between hope and despair led him to emphasize will—the will to strive to answer the call of life. Here he placed an existentialist stress on the meaning of human will, a stress that was, however, inspired not by the European notion that God is dead but by the Chinese notion that one can find meaning in life here and now. This search for the way out through the exertion of will can further be illustrated by the poetic play "The Passerby." 12 Supposedly ten years in its conception, the play may be read as Lu Xun's personal allegory of his life. The protagonist of the play—the passerby—clearly looks like Lu Xun: "Thirty to forty years of age. Tired and yet obstinate in appearance. His eyes dark and sunken, his beard black and hair rumpled." The setting is essentially "a spatial representation of a temporal dilemma." 13 In his journey from the past to the future along a "trace that seems to be a road," the passerby stops in the barren and desolate landscape of the present. The traveler meets an old man of seventy and a young girl of ten—the personifications of past and future—and is asked by the old man 10. Lu Xun, "Ying de gaobie" (Shadow's Leave-taking), Yecao (Wild grass), LXQJ, 2:165. 11. Lu Xun, "Xi wang" (Hope), Yecao, LXQJ, 2:177-178. 12. Lu Xun, "Guoke" (The passerby), Yecao, LXQJ, 2:188-194. 13. Leo Ou-fan Lee, "The Tragic Vision of Lu Hsiin: Hope and Despair in the Wild Grass," paper presented at the twenty-ninth annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, 2 April 1974, Boston. My brief treatment of Lu Xun's "Passerby" has largely drawn on Lee's perceptive paper.

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where he is going. " I don't k n o w , " the passerby replies, "ever since I can remember, I have been walking like this, on my way to some place ahead. All I can remember is that I have walked a long way, and now I have arrived here. I shall push on that way ahead [pointing west]." T h e passerby is offered a cup of water. He thanks the man and the girl, and asks, " W h a t kind of place lies a h e a d ? " Old man: Passerby: Young Girl:

Ahead? Ahead is the grave. (Startled) The grave? N o , no, no. There are many wild lilies and wild roses.

Noticing that the traveler is tired and his feet wounded, the old man advises him to turn back because " i f you keep on, you may never reach the end of the j o u r n e y . " " I must go o n , " replies the passerby, " i f I go back, there's not a single place without its title, its landlord, its pursuers and prison, its pretended smiles and hypocritical tears. I hate them all. I will never turn b a c k . " So the passerby resolves to walk on, adding, "Besides, there is a voice ahead urging me on and calling me so that I cannot rest." Thus in the midst of his nihilistic distrust of almost everything, Lu X u n felt that, in the final analysis, he must keep going toward his uncertain destiny. In fact, his tough-minded suspicions about the viability of China and other matters nurtured a sense of guilt that he could assuage only by reasserting his patriotic dedication and sacrifice, which had been a chief preoccupation with him since his student days in Japan. 1 4 This raises an important question of the nature of Lu X u n ' s nihilism and existentialism. For all his suspicion and distrust, Lu X u n belonged to that turn-of-the-century generation of Chinese revolutionary intellectuals for whom patriotism was a matter of course, requiring no justification or elaboration. Furthermore, despite the breakdown of the traditional framework, many deep-rooted elements of traditional Chinese culture survived, especially some of the cultural and intellectual predispositions that had been taken for granted down through the centuries. One of the most

14. These passions are evident in Lu Xun's famous classical poem, written in 1903, "Ziti

xiaoxiang" (Self-portrait), Jiwai ji shiyi (A supplement to Addenda Collection), 7:423:

M y heart has n o t a c t i c to dodge the m a g i c a r r o w s [loosed by love o f my c o u n t r y ] ; M y h o m e l a n d is darkened in the s t o r m s which weigh d o w n like boulders. Conveying my thoughts to the chilling stars, my people u n a w a r e o f my s o r r o w s , I sacrifice my b l o o d t o [the land o f the Emperor] Xuanyuan.

LXQ],

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important elements of the traditional Chinese world view is the idea of the unity of Heaven and man (tianren heyi), which implies that transcendental reality is immanent in the cosmos of which man is an integral part. This view contrasts with the Cartesian epistemological subjectivism and the naturalistic reductionism of the modern West, in which man is alienated from the cosmos and hence can gain the meaning of life only through his own subjective thinking and volition.15 (Of course, I refer here only to a dominant trend in modern Western thought. One could cite a number of exceptions, including Leibniz, Spinoza, Goethe, and—among recent philosophers—A. N. Whitehead and Michael Polanyi.) The Chinese view also contrasts with the Protestant ethic derived from the Calvinist doctrine that man is completely cut off from contact with the divine because of "the absolute transcendentality of God." Such an isolated individual can relieve his sense of loneliness, moral failure, and spiritual estrangement only by directing his efforts to the outside, material world. 16 The Confucian conception of the unity of Heaven and man (or of the unity of the mind of Tao and the mind of man) entails that transcendental meaning is immanent in human life and is to be found by human effort rather than created by human will and thinking. The Confucian man is not separated from the cosmos; the Tao has both an objective aspect in the cosmos and a subjective aspect in man's mind. Since man, whose nature partakes of the nature of Tao (or Heaven), is endowed with innate moral and intellectual energy and judgment by which he can recognize the meaning of Tao in the cosmos, his effort to find meaning will never be an alienated act—an effort solely within the subjective self in confrontation with a blind and meaningless world. As is well known, Lu Xun received a rigorous and excellent classical Chinese education in his early years. He admitted himself that he was so steeped in classical Chinese culture that he could not help being pro15. See Benjamin I. Schwartz, "On the Absence of Reductionism in Chinese Thought," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 1 (1973): 2 7 - 4 4 . 16. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner's, 1958). The Calvinist doctrine of "the absolute transcendentality of God" is derived from the logical necessity of Calvin's thought; therefore, "its importance increases with every increase in the logical consistency of that religious thought" (p. 102). Under the impact of this doctrine, which maintained that "a real penetration of the human soul by the divine was made impossible by the absolute transcendentality of God compared to the flesh: finitum non est capax infiniti" (p. 113), "the Father in heaven of the New Testament, so human and understanding, who rejoices over the repentance of a sinner as a woman over the lost piece of silver she has found, is gone. His place has been taken by a transcendental being beyond the reach of human understanding" (p. 103). In short, Calvinism succeeded in completely suppressing the whole mystical-emotional side of religion and human experience. As Weber notes, the "extreme inhumanity of this doctrine" could lead only to "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual" (p. 104), an inner loneliness he attempted to fill by a compulsive yet systematic and ascetic pursuit of worldly gains.

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foundly influenced by it. It seems plain that as a Chinese thinker he still moved within a cultural orbit in which it was impossible for a genuine European-style crisis of existential identity to arise. For all his existentialist leaning and nihilistic observations, Lu Xun's stress on the human will in the face of uncertainty and difficulty remained a stress on the will to find—not the will to create—meaning. For the tacit belief that something positive and beautiful can be found in life was never shaken in the deeper layers of Lu Xun's consciousness. In view of the sharp logic he did not hesitate to apply in his totalistic antitraditionalism, it is all the more striking that Lu Xun stopped short of drawing the logical conclusion of nihilism. This fact is a further indication of his inheritance of one of the fundamental principles of Chinese civilization (despite the breakdown of its structure): an attitude, derived from the organismic cosmology of the unity of Heaven and man, of reaching the transcendent in the immanent, the divine in the human. Moreover, his nationalist commitment to China's rejuvenation and his faith in the power of ideas (to which he, as a writer, could make some contribution) to transform human life—a faith that occasionally faltered under the pressure of harsh realities but that on the whole held quite steadily—all reinforced this inherited element from the Chinese world view in preventing him from following through the logic of his nihilism. Amid repeated frustrations and profound despair, Lu Xun's unswerving dedication to and participation in China's reconstruction, as part of his general search for life's meaning in the here and now, bespeak the conscience of a genuine modern Chinese intellectual.

II. Lu Xun and Politics In his replies to requests from young people for guidance in life, Lu Xun always disclaimed any authority in such matters. But one thing he did know was that life should be given a chance to develop to its fullest possible extent, which is, by definition, above and beyond politics. "If someone asks me what goals in life the youth should pursue," said Lu Xun, "then, my reply is, first, to live; second, to be warmly clothed and well-fed; third, to develop oneself. If there is anyone who dares to obstruct the fulfillment of these goals, we must resist him and destroy him! But, I must add some qualifications to avoid misunderstanding: What I mean by 'to live' is not to live at the expense of principles or honor, 'to be warmly clothed and well-fed' is not extravagance, and 'to develop oneself is not to do whatever one's whims lead to." 17 It is ironic that Lu Xun, whose subtle

17. Lu X u n , "Beijing t o n g x i n " (Correspondence from Peking), 3:51-52.

LXQJ,

Huagai ji

(Unlucky star),

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and complex mind manifested itself with full force in his negative ideas of antitraditionalism, could formulate his positive answer to this important question only in such simple terms. Yet the simplicity and directness of the answer express how firmly it was rooted in his concrete notion of what life should be, a notion that he would not allow to be swayed by any ideology. To Lu Xun, politics was primarily a form of struggle for power among selfish and unscrupulous manipulators of human affairs. In an important speech entitled "The Divergent Roads of Literature and Politics," he pointed out that politics is inherently conservative because politicans can best gain their selfish interest by preserving the status quo. Politicians dislike those who think and who want to express what they think; literature is therefore bound to clash with politics—for good literature is thoughtful, and politicians necessarily regard ideas as subversive. This selfinterested conservativism characterizes politicians of any party, including those of a revolutionary party. The revolutionary politician usually agrees with the writer before the revolution succeeds; they are equally discontent with existing conditions. "However, after the success of revolution," said Lu Xun with foresight no less than hindsight, the revolutionary politician implements the same old methods which he opposed before. Such an act will arouse opposition again from the writer who would likewise be driven out and killed. . . . It can be said that the nineteenth century was an age of revolution. Revolution is here meant to refer to an act by all those who are discontented and dissatisfied with the present. The literature that presses for gradual destruction of the old is also revolutionary in nature. (The new can arise only after the old has been eliminated.) The fate of the writer, however, has not been changed by virtue of his participation in revolution. Everywhere he still knocks against nails. Now, the revolutionary forces have reached Xuzhou. The writers north of Xuzhou cannot stand on safe ground. Yet, the writers south of Xuzhou cannot stand on safe ground either, even though the territory south of Xuzhou has been brought under the rule of communism [lit., "even though having been communized," ji gongle chan]. Revolutionary writers and revolutionists can be said to be two entirely different kinds of beings.18

This speech, given on December 21, 1927, and transcribed by Cao Juren, was first published in Shanghai's Xinwenbao (Daily news) for January 2 9 - 3 0 , 1928. Lu Xun proofread it himself in late 1934 before it was published again in his Addenda Collection in 1935. 19 It discloses an unre18. Lu Xun, "Wenyi yu zhengzhi de qitu" (The divergent roads of literature and politics), jiwaiji (Addenda collection), LXQJ, 7 : 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 . 19. See Cao Juren, Lu Xun niartpu (A chronological biography of Lu Xun) (Hong Kong: Sanyu tushu wenju gongsi, 1967), p. 87. For Lu Xun's involvement in the proofreading of ]iwai ji and his authorization of Cao's transcription, see Lu Xun's letters (nos. 3 4 1 2 1 1 and 3 4 1 2 1 9 ) to the editor of Jiwai ji, Yang Jiyun, dated 11 and 19 December 1934. Lu Xun, Shuxin (Letters), LXQJ, 1 2 : 5 9 6 , 611. There is another, shorter transcribed version of this speech; for this version and a textual account of the two versions, see Wang Xirong, "Lu Xun

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served contempt for politics of any sort from the point of view of the conscientious writer. It is curious that in this address Lu Xun referred to the territory south of Xuzhou—which had been taken over from the northern warlord Zhang Zongchang five days before (on December 16) by a column of Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition forces under the command of General He Yingqin 2 0 —as "having been brought under the rule of communism." In fact, military forces commanded by or affiliated with Chiang Kai-shek had started the anti-Communist coup in Shanghai on April 12 and in Canton on April 15; throughout 1 9 2 7 Chiang Kai-shek had been consolidating his control by attacking the warlords and purging the Communists. In July the leftist Guomindang in Hankou and Wuchang had started its own purge of the Chinese Communists, and by August 19 the leftist Guomindang had capitulated to Nanjing. Thus the "split of Ning [Nanjing] and Han [Wuchang and H a n k o u ] " had come to an end. Lu Xun was in Canton during the bloody purge of April 15, 1 9 2 7 , which shocked and pained him deeply, especially because some of his own students died. While he himself was not involved on either side and may have been quite confused by the year's maelstrom of drastic events, he always felt deep sympathy for the downtrodden. By December 2 1 it was clear for some time that the "revolution" started by a coalition of the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang had been sabotaged by Chiang Kai-shek. Thus Lu Xun's reference to the territory south of Xuzhou, recently conquered by Chiang Kai-shek's antiCommunist forces, as "having been brought under the rule of communism" quite likely meant ironically that that territory was still not a safe place for writers, who were bound to clash with the new rulers, even though these rulers had earlier declared their commitment to communism. Nevertheless, it seems odd that Lu Xun (who was usually very meticulous in textual matters) allowed this phrase, which is directly contrary to fact, to remain intact when he proofread the text of this speech in December 1 9 3 4 . It is thus open to a possible reading that he then disdained the 'Wenyi yu zhengzhi de qitu' de liangzhong jilu" (Two transcriptions of Lu Xun's "The Divergent Roads of Literature and Politics"), in Research Unit at the Beijing Lu Xun Museum, ed., Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao (Source materials for Lu Xun studies) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1980), 7:231—244. A close comparison of the two versions indicates, as Wang Xirong suggests, that Cao's version is "richer, . . . more colloquial [hence closer to the original speech], and contains more illustrating examples and more original words [of the speech] that have been skipped by the shorter version" (ibid., p. 238). Yang Jiyun later told Wang Xirong that he first learned about this speech from Cao Juren and used a newspaper clipping of Cao's transcription for the manuscript of Jiwai ji, which was proofread and approved by Lu Xun before its publication; see ibid., p. 239. 20. For the events surrounding the takeover of Xuzhou by Chiang Kai-shek's forces, see Zhongguo dashi ji (A chronology of twentiety-century China, 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 4 9 ) (Washington, D.C.: Center for Chinese Research Materials, Association of Research Libraries, 1973), 4 : 3 9 2 - 3 9 3 (entries for 16 and 2 0 December 1927).

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Communists and the Guomindang alike as "foxes of the same hole" (yi qiu zhi he; lit., "badgers from the same mound") and thus felt no differentiation needed to be made between them. Those who do not know the historical context in which Lu Xun spoke might interpret the phrase quite literally, as meaning that writers would still not be safe in the territory that had been brought under Communist rule. (By late 1934 Lu Xun was well acquainted with the political manipulations and intrigues of the Communist commissar Zhou Yang and his cohorts, and felt very bitter about them.21 Could Lu Xun's contempt for these men be one of the reasons that led him, despite his nominal leadership in the Communist-affiliated League of Left-Wing Writers, to leave the phrase in the text as it was?) Whether or not Lu Xun was referring to the Guomindang ironically (as renegades rather than true revolutionaries), the important point is that the explicit, literal meaning of the sentence in question fits in with Lu Xun's general rejection of politics of any kind, revolutionary or otherwise, from a categorical stance of the writer's artistic and moral integrity and independence, which are the main themes of this speech. More specifically, Lu Xun chose to illustrate the inherent incompatibility of literature and politics by citing the example of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Since the October revolution was then the "ideal type" of Communist revolution among leftist Chinese intellectuals, this speech cannot simply be dismissed as Lu Xun's ironical criticism of the Guomindang. It must be taken seriously as a general statement. From this "ideal" revolution Lu Xun further chose the cases of the suicides of S. A. Yesenin ( 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 2 5 ) and A. Soboly ( 1 8 8 8 - 1 9 2 6 ) to illustrate his point. These two Russian writers were intensely discontented with the conditions in their homeland before the October revolution; they had called for a revolution and contributed to it when it came. However, the injustice and suffering resulting from the revolution disillusioned them so profoundly that they both committed suicide. The following is Lu Xun's assessment: During the era of revolution, the writers have a dream in which they imagine how beautiful the world after the success of revolution would be. They find after the success of revolution, however, that the matter is entirely different from what they have dreamed. Hence they have to suffer again. They cry out but will not succeed. They cannot succeed by going either forward or backward. It is their destiny to witness the inconsistency between ideal and reality. . . . So a literature which has called itself revolutionary literature is definitely not revolutionary literature. Unless a writer has taken anesthetic drugs,

21. See, for example, Lu Xun's letters to X i a o j u n and Xiao H o n g (no. 341206b) dated 6 December 1934, and to Yang Jiyun (no. 341218a) dated 18 December 1934, Shuxin, LXQJ, 12:584, 606.

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can there ever be in the world a revolutionary literature that is satisfied with the existing condition? Before the Russian revolution, there were two writers, Yesenin and Soboly, w h o all had sung for the coming of revolution. Afterwards, they crashed themselves to death on the stone tablet of the reality of revolution for which they once sang the paeans of hope. At that time, the Soviet [government] had already been established! 22

Clearly, Lu Xun in this speech upholds the writer's moral and artistic autonomy vis-a-vis politics, which is so mired in the conservatism and manipulation of selfish men that it cannot be transformed by becoming involved in revolution. Precisely because a writer must follow his conscience, he is destined to have a tragic life, and the paths of literature and politics inevitably diverge. T o bring his view of politics into sharper focus, Lu X u n did not choose the usual conservative variety as manifested by warlords and the politicians associated with them for illustration. Instead, he chose the politics of the Communist revolution as a specific example. If revolutionary politics, despite its lofty claims and ideals, cannot liberate itself f r o m the general nature of politics—i.e., conservatism and manipulation—much less can the usual kind of politics do so. Here Lu Xun defines revolutionary literature in terms of the writer's integrity, which necessarily leads him to be discontented with any existing condition of h u m a n society and to stand in defiance of politics, including revolutionary politics. Hence, Lu X u n maintains, "revolutionary writers and revolutionists can be said to be t w o entirely different kinds of beings." I believe that if pressed, Lu Xun would not have used discontent as the only criterion of revolutionary literature but would nevertheless regard an intense discontent with the existing conditions of society as a chief defining characteristic of the revolutionary writer. In sharp contrast to this straightforward identification of the meaning and role of revolutionary literature in terms of its criticism of the existing conditions of society, Lu X u n ' s ideas about revolutionary literature—as expressed in another speech, "Literature of a Revolutionary Period," delivered to the cadets of the H u a n g p u (Whampoa) Military Academy on April 8, 1927—can be at best described only as ambiguous. In this earlier speech he assigned literature a small, perhaps insignificant, role in the making of revolution. H e began by indicating that literature is "most useless" and that "only the weak and useless people talk about literature; those w h o are strong d o not talk, but kill." 2 3 He still upheld the principle of literary a u t o n o m y , stating that "few good works of literature have been written to order; instead they flow naturally from the heart with no regard 22. Lu Xun, "Wenyi yu zhengzhi de qitu," Jiwai ji, LXQ], 7:119. 23. Lu Xun, "Geming shidai de wenxue" (Literature of a revolutionary period), Eryi ji (And that's that), LXQ], 3 : 4 1 7 .

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for possible consequences." 2 4 But he voiced strong reservations about what literature can do in a revolutionary situation, in contrast to some prevailing notions of the time, which claimed that literature could play a major role as propaganda in the making of revolution. Lu Xun conceived of three literary stages in the revolutionary process. In the first stage, the period before revolution, nearly all literature expresses dissatisfaction with current social conditions, voicing suffering and indignation. But it cannot make a revolution, for mere complaints are powerless. However, when the literary lamentations change into roars of anger that give voice to the inner strength of a nation, such a literature heralds revolt. The works written just before the outbreak of revolution often reveal this fury. (Here Lu Xun is somewhat ambiguous about his notion of the complete uselessness of literature. If revolution is made by the "inner strength of a nation" and literature is a vehicle for the expression of this strength, then literature can make some contribution to revolution by expressing the "roars of anger" well.) In the second stage, the period of revolution itself, action supersedes writing. Everyone is so busy making the revolution and is so hard pressed by difficult living conditions that no time is available for literary activities. Only in the postrevolutionary stage can literature reemerge in two forms: one extolling the success of the revolution and singing its praises, the other lamenting the destruction of the old society and culture. On the basis of this scheme, Lu Xun denies the validity of the concept of "revolutionary literature," since literature has little to do with making a revolution. "Revolutionary literature" as a category can only be a formalistic one: the literature written by revolutionaries can be called revolutionary literature. As for the literature in the future after the success of a true revolution, Lu X u n suggests that it would be a "people's literature" (pingmitt wenxue), for the world would belong to the people as a result of the revolution. 25 Lu Xun's encouraging tone in his address to the cadets of the Huangpu Military Academy—whose graduates had already won battles against the warlords (news that Lu Xun received with "great pleasure") 2 6 —may be partly due to the local circumstances and to the revolutionary euphoria of 1926—1927. T o encourage his young hearers, who would soon become revolutionary fighters, Lu Xun noted that what China needed at the time was revolutionary men 2 7 rather than the so-called revolutionary literature. " T h e present situation in China is such," said Lu Xun, "that only the

24. 25. 26. 27.

Ibid., p. 418. Ibid., pp. 4 1 9 - 4 2 1 . Lu Xun, letter to Xu Guangping, 14 September 1926, Liangdi shu, LXQJ, Lu Xun, "Geming shidai de wenxue," Eryi ji, LXQJ, 3:418.

11:117.

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actual revolutionary w a r counts. . . . I k n o w some people think literature has a great influence on revolution, but personally I doubt this. . . . I myself would rather hear the roar of guns." 2 8 Nevertheless, such a tone was quite congruent with Lu Xun's recently developed attitude of placing more weight on the role of military and political actions in immediate political changes and of deemphasizing the role of literature. This attitude had emerged under the impact of such harsh realities as the massacre of women students in Peking by the warlord government in 1926. 2 9 The coalition of the Guomindang and the Chinese Communists under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen had also prompted Lu X u n to hope that some immediate changes could indeed be carried out by "fire and sword." 3 0 Lu X u n continued to voice this train of thought in an article published as late as four days before his December 21 speech in Shanghai. In " O n the Bell T o w e r , " published December 17, 1927, he cited the suicides of Yesenin and Soboly, but instead of using them to affirm the artistic and moral integrity of the writer in defiance of politics, revolutionary or otherwise, Lu X u n confirmed the value of the October revolution at the expense of the writers. T o Lu X u n , then, the very fact that Yesenin and Soboly committed suicide out of disillusionment with the October revolution indicated that revolution had indeed taken place in Russia. For revolution exacts suffering and sacrifice from a people; that many people suffered and sacrificed during and after the October revolution proved that it was a genuine revolution. Hence, Lu Xun said, any revolutionary poets who have illusions or ideals before the revolution are likely to suffer the fate of crashing themselves to death on the reality for which they have sung paeans of hope. Yet, if the reality of revolution does 28. Ibid., p. 4 2 3 . 29. See Lu X u n , "Jinian Liu H e z h e n j u n " (In m e m o r y of Miss Liu Hezhen), H u a g a i ji xubian (Sequel to Unlucky Star), LXQ], 3:273-278. 30. Lu X u n , letter to Xu G u a n g p i n g , 8 April 1925, Liangdi shu, LXQ], 11:39. For Lu X u n ' s respect of D r . Sun Yat-sen as a m a n of action, see Lu X u n , " Z h o n g s h a n xiansheng shishihou yi zhou n i a n " (One year after M r . Sun Z h o n g s h a n ' s [Yat-senl death), Jiwai ji shiyi, LXQJ, 7:293-295. This respect for a leader of political revolution seems to contradict his call for intellectual revolution. Yet the t w o f o r m s are not incompatible if political revolution is viewed as a response t o an immediate need, not as the ultimate source of the betterment of Chinese society. This feeling predisposed Lu X u n to give m o r e credit to men of action t h a n he usually accorded politicians of any party, and tended to m a k e him disregard his o w n occasional suspicions of Sun. For instance, in his letter to Yang Jiyun (no. 3 5 0 2 2 4 b ) , dated 24 February 1935 ( S h u x i n , LXQ], 13:65), Lu X u n conceded that Sun might be regarded as a " g o o d m a n " o n a c c o u n t of his persistence in revolutionary activities—"even t h o u g h , " he continued, n o t w i t h o u t a touch of sarcasm, Sun "traveled only in foreign countries or p o r t cities in China a n d never t r o d on any d a n g e r o u s g r o u n d s in his life." T h u s Lu X u n sometimes set aside his distrust of politicians, especially w h e n he despaired at the prospect of intellectual revolution, a n d a c k n o w l e d g e d that political and military leaders could bring progressive change for C h i n a .

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not pulverize the illusions or ideals of such poets, then this revolution is nothing but empty talk. Yesenin and Soboly should not be blamed t o o much, they had fulfilled themselves by singing an elegy for themselves. They used their o w n deaths t o prove that the revolution had been going f o r w a r d . 3 1

Against the background formed by this article and by the speech that Lu Xun gave at the Huangpu Military Academy some eight months earlier, the Shanghai speech turns out to be a crucial and incongruous oddity. It was more in line with his position during the early May Fourth period, when he stressed the necessary role the writer must play for revolutionary change and the value of intellectual and moral autonomy above and beyond politics. Might it be that the tension between his earlier commitment to the autonomy of the writer and his later advocacy of the writer's subservient role in the revolutionary politics of class struggle was so great that he sought to relieve it momentarily by paying a last tribute to his earlier stance before it was too late? Might it also be that at this juncture in time (December 2 1 , 1927), when the external signs of his movement to the Left had not yet been entirely clear, his fear of the ideological simplification that, he sensed, would be unavoidable once he was to assume a role of service to the cause of leftist politics forced him to articulate for the last time the meaning of the artistic and intellectual autonomy of the writer? Whatever psychological and other causes led to his Shanghai speech, there remains the critical question of why and how Lu Xun eventually ignored his own injunction, so forcefully and unequivocally expressed in that speech, against revolutionary politics of any sort, including communism, whose leaders would become oppressive politicians after the success of revolution. Tackling this question may yield a more cogent understanding of a crucial aspect of Lu Xun's intellectual life, especially in his later period ( 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 3 6 ) . In Confucian China, politics was never considered an independent realm, within which the activities of politicians should be judged in terms of what M a x Weber calls "the ethics of responsibility" rather than "the ethics of intentions (or ultimate ends)." Weber's classic analysis of the nature of politics deals with both the logical and the practical implications of the two different attitudes. 32 Based on a cosmic rationalism by which one believes that good intentions bring about good results, or that sincerity of will enhances the harmony of the world, the ethics of intentions maintains that every act in the chain of political actions must be pure in moral

31. LXQJ, 32. trans., 1978),

Lu Xun, "Zai zhonglou shang" (On the bell tower), Sanxian ji (Three leisures), 4:36. M a x Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in W. G. Runciman, ed., and Eric Matthews, Max Weber: Selections in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 2 1 2 - 2 2 5 .

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motives, and the only logical course open to this attitude is to repudiate any activity that involves the use of morally dubious means. In practice, however, the man who enters the political realm with an ethic of intentions does not know how to deal with unexpected, sometimes even harmful, consequences resulting from the actions of his good intentions. He is prone to place the blame not on himself but on the inadequacy or injustice of the world, the stupidity of other men, the fate of history, or the will of God. Moreover, it often happens that by virtue of intensely glorifying his intentions the believer in the ethics of intentions can easily and suddenly turn himself, at the expense of logical consistency, into a millenarian prophet who envisions the achievement of great moral ends through drastically immoral means. Thus, in order to achieve the greatest ends the most unscrupulous means can be justified and used. By contrast, the man who upholds the ethics of responsibility is sensitive to the irrationality and imperfectability of the world and aware of the fact that the best possible intentions can have consequences exactly opposite to the original goals. He understands that politics is a relatively autonomous realm within which actions as means should not always be judged purely in moralistic terms, yet he holds himself answerable for the foreseeable consequences of his actions. Insofar as he can foresee empirically that certain actions can bring about certain consequences that are parts of the desirable moral ends, he is willing to compromise and to use means that a moral purist would find dubious but that are morally neutral from the perspective of the autonomy of politics. Since he is constantly mindful of the foreseeable consequences of his actions, for which he takes responsibility, his use of morally dubious means must be distinguished both from that of the millenarian prophet, who sanctifies the employment of evil means in the name of lofty ends without any realistic sense of his responsibility for the forseeable consequences, and that of the power politician, who knows nothing in life except selfishness and who pursues power for its own sake by whatever means he finds useful. In traditional China, at least in its orthodox line of thought, the state, while playing the role of maintaining social peace and harmony, was essentially moral in its purpose: the "teaching and transforming" (jiao hua) of the people through the charisma of virtue that had been granted by the Mandate of Heaven to the universal king on the merit of his personal moral qualities. (In practice the king's officials, whom he selected for their moral and cultural qualities, performed many duties on his behalf.) Politics was understood in terms of the ethics of intentions. However, because of the lack of strong prophetic resources (notwithstanding the New Text school, which was, in any case, rediscovered very late), this tendency did not give rise to millenarian movements. These movements, when they arose, had to draw on heterodox elements outside the mainstream of

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Chinese tradition before they could utilize the universalistic implications of the idea of the Mandate of Heaven (hence such slogans for peasant rebellions as "To carry out the Tao on behalf of Heaven" [ti tian xingdao]). Because the actual ruler was often not the true king, since the times of Confucius a counter-motif within Confucianism had advocated that one should follow the Tao rather than one's ruler if the ruler deviated from the Tao. Yet this was nothing more than a defense of the integrity of the Tao against the discrepancy between actuality and ideal. It had not altered the monistic idea that the unity of politics and morality was embodied in the virtue of the true king. The Tao in politics in traditional China could not find any other institutional anchorage than the universal kingship. Though within the spectrum of Confucian thought the school of statecraft paid special attention to considerations of the immediate utility of various political practices and institutions, it still assumed that the state was primarily moral in its purpose. Hence the school of statecraft's emphasis on utility must be defined as a second-level concern that did not challenge the basic premise of the unity of politics and morality. In direct opposition to the moralization of politics by Confucianism, Legalism advocated a total immoralization—rather than amoralization-— of politics, at least in the sharpened form of some ideas in the Han Fei Zz. It pursued power—in the Han Fei Zi, even through the brutalization of life and the elimination of culture—only to serve the interest of the ruler. Legalism also did not develop any sensitivity toward the irrationality and imperfectability of the world, still less an awareness of the need to find a way to deal with the discrepancy between intentions and consequences. In fact, Legalism shared with Confucianism the same assumption of a rationalist cosmos in which intentions (immoral rather than moral, in this case) could be realized with intended results. Thus it did not ponder the meaning and function of using morally dubious political means to realize goals for which one takes moral responsibility and did not give rise to a mental category of the autonomy of politics. In spite of his conscious rejection and critical examination of many traditional elements, Lu Xun, in a fundamental layer of his consciousness, seemed still to have taken for granted the traditional Chinese notion of politics nurtured by the dichotomy between Confucianism and Legalism. Without a mental category that saw certain aspects of politics in terms of an ethic of responsibility, Lu Xun could only see the actuality of politics as a perpetual game of chicanery played out by heartless men for selfish gains. Thus he, no less than traditional Confucians, felt that politics was condemnable and despicable. As a candid description of politics, this picture differs little from the Legalist notion. It can be concluded, therefore, that (though he himself might not have been fully aware of it) Lu Xun affirmed the Confucian ideal of politics as

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based on the ethics of intentions in pursuit of moral ends, while he also confirmed through concrete observation the Legalist understanding of the actuality of politics as immoral action for immoral ends. Thus, politics for Lu Xun was either moral or immoral but never amoral. This dichotomy rules out not only the Weberian alternative of politics in terms of the ethics of responsibility but also a view of politics developed by some British philosophers in a social theory that stressed the effects of relatively independent institutions. It is interesting to recall that it was Bernard Mandeville's idea—"the worst of all the multitude did something for the common good" 33 —that provided a basis for the approach to social philosophy by David Hume and his successors. Hume, also a skeptic regarding human affairs, developed a notion, in the words of F. A. Hayek, that "it was not from the goodness of men but from institutions which 'made it the interest even of bad men, to act for the public good' that he [Hume] expected peace, liberty, and justice." 34 By contrast, Lu Xun approached the problem of politics through his moral commitment. It was a moral duty for Lu Xun to keep going on a road when even he was not sure where it would lead.35 Politics was a moral drama and the Chinese Communist revolution was a lofty enterprise for the future, which was tinged with intense moral color. Its ugly aspects—as revealed, for instance, in the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—could not have been imagined then. It seems inevitable that Lu Xun, as a moral man in search of a path yet thoroughly alienated from existing political conditions, would commit himself to take that path as a moral act, regardless of his own injunctions against politics. Lu Xun was quite acquainted with the Marxist theory of literature. Trotsky's interpretation of that theory, in fact, formed the theoretical background of Lu Xun's speech at the Huangpu Military Academy, and he was also familiar, at the time of his movement toward the Left, with the theories of art and literature developed by Plekhanov and Lunacharski.36 His knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, however, was sporadic. Lu Xun's conversion to the Left was not based on a comprehensive and systematic study of the literature of Marxism-Leninism, nor was it provoked by a 33. Quoted in F. A. Hayek, "Dr. Bernard Mandeville," in his New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 251. 34. F. A. Hayek, "The Legal and Political Philosophy of David Hume," in his Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 121. The Hume quotation is from David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (London, 1875), 1:99. 35. Lu Xun stated this point on many occasions. See his "Guoke," Yecao, LXQ], 2:188— 194; his letter to Xu Guangping, 11 March 1925, Liangdi shu, LXQ], 1 1 : 1 3 - 1 6 ; "Xie zai fen de houmian" (Postscript to The Grave), Fen (The grave), LXQ), 1:284; "Beijing tongxin" (Correspondence from Peking), Huagai ji, LXQ), 3:51. 36. Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Literature on the Eve of Revolution: Reflections on Lu Xun's Leftist Years, 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 3 6 , " Modern China 2:3 (July 1976): 2 9 1 - 3 2 4 .

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chiliastic vision of the transformation of history. His concrete sense of realities, sharp logic, and mental despair prevented that. But Lu Xun always felt deep sympathy for the oppressed. He found Marxist class analysis a tool for understanding society and history that was congenial to his outlook. In this sense, his conversion to the Left involved some crucial intellectual changes. Primarily, however, it was a moral act, prompted initially by his alienation from the existing political conditions. Precisely because Lu X u n did not see his conversion to the leftist cause as a political act, it sowed the seeds of tragedy. Politics as such was for Lu Xun a dirty game to be condemned rather than joined. His very disapproval of politics prevented him from ever attempting to understand its complexity. Once he had denounced politics totally, he could only reject it as politics or accept it as not politics. 37 He entered the realm of politics to serve a moral cause, not realizing that politics involves gaining and allocating power, and thus throwing away his chance to involve himself in that process. By default, he left politics to the leadership of others, who took it not as morality but as politics. Morally, he dedicated himself to a cause, but politically, he played a role of service that was static and passive—to follow the call and directives of the political leadership. In the end he did little to improve the quality of politics either as a relatively autonomous realm of behavior or as a set of institutions. What he could and did do was to play his part within his capacities under the general direction of the leadership. 38 Moreover, by joining the leftist cause as a moral act, Lu X u n left his prestige and literary works open to political manipulation, which from his point of view was an immoral act that he would not have hesitated to denounce. T h e Chinese Communist Party's whole effort at idolizing Lu Xun and politicizing the interpretation of his works flew in the face of Lu Xun's lifelong dedication to moral and intellectual integrity. He would certainly have disapproved of his works being made political tools. While he cannot, of course, be held responsible for what others have done to his works, it is tragic and ironic that by so idealistically committing himself to

37. My comparison of Lu Xun's notions of politics with those of other Chinese and Western thinkers is not meant to suggest that had Lu Xun been equipped with the Weberian and Humean concepts he would have clarified all the problems in China. Nor am I unaware that the Weberian and Humean notions of politics themselves give rise to difficult problems. But this comparative perspective allows us to understand more sharply how Lu Xun's eitheror notion of politics reflected the influence of a traditional Chinese dichotomy. 38. Many of the zawen (miscellaneous essays) Lu Xun wrote during his years on the Left were polemical in nature, intended more to serve the political cause or to demolish his opponents than to search for truth. As usual, he displayed remarkable erudition in many of these essays, but his epigrams, irony, and sarcastic allusions occasionally displayed more cleverness than they did a spirit of free inquiry or openness. Some of these zawen do not stand up well when examined with historical hindsight.

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politics as a moral act, he made his prestige and his works subject to so much political manipulation. Still, we can only decribe rather than judge Lu Xun's dilemma. As a Chinese intellectual whose dedication to nationalistic goals was a matter of course, he had to take a stand on political issues, and the polarization of politics between the Right and the Left from 1 9 2 7 on gave him few options from which to choose. As mentioned above, Lu Xun's disdain for politics was sustained by his concrete and specific awareness of the realities of politics. Yet, without a new category of analysis to cope with the realities of politics, his sense of concreteness could only reinforce the "systematic" understanding of the nature of things he had arrived at earlier. A sense of concreteness, however sharp and lively, was not itself enough to meet the challenge of the crisis of modern China, which required substantively more creative as well as systematic responses. Having discussed the tragic implications of Lu Xun's views of politics, we must end by offering a sincere tribute to his moral and intellectual stature. Precisely because he joined the leftist political movement as a moral act, he finally used his own moral and intellectual resources to confront political manipulations when their stark nature became known to him. The now-famous story of his stormy and bitter relationship with Zhou Yang, the cultural commissar of the CCP, and of his—and his student Hu Feng's—defiance of Party directives in the Battle of the T w o Slogans in 1 9 3 6 attest to Lu Xun's personal integrity as an intellectual. In the last year of his life, in fact, he reverted to his own resources as a writer, emancipating himself from political pressures. It was at this juncture that his literary creativity reappeared. The genius that informs such a piece as " T h e Ghost of the Hanged W o m a n " 3 9 gives eloquent testimony to the resilience of Lu Xun's intellectual and moral fiber amidst the crisis of his times and the tragedy of his view of politics.

39. Lu Xun, "Niidiao" (The ghost of the hanged woman), Qiejieting zawen (Essays from a semi-concession, the last collection), LXQJ, 6 : 6 1 4 - 6 1 9 .

mobian

6 Hu Feng and the Critical Legacy of Lu Xun THEODORE D. HUTERS

I. Lu X u n ' s D i l e m m a At the beginning of the self-criticism that Hu Feng wrote at the Communist Party's behest in the winter of 1954—1955, he admits that " a t the root of my errors there is the fact that I mistook a petty bourgeois revolutionary nature and stand for a working class revolutionary nature and stand." T h e consequence of this mistake, he says, has been "the limiting of myself to a narrow practical viewpoint and thus [my inability] to look at problems on the basis of political principles." 1 As early as 1 9 3 7 Hu had admitted that his famous distaste for empty theorizing was partly derived from Lu X u n . In an essay entitled "Guanyu Lu Xun jingshen de er-san jidian" (Two or three fundamental points about the spirit of Lu Xun), Hu outlined the advantages of what he saw as Lu Xun's nonsystematic view of literature. He acknowledges that "Lu Xun did not create an integral system of thought" 2 but implies that any such intellectual system would inevitably be an unacceptable abstraction of accumulated human wisdom. Hu makes his position quite clear by invidiously citing the conservative thought of Kang Youwei and Liang Shuming as the only sort of system that could be developed in China. Hu underscores the danger of such abstraction by pointing out that "because those in the intellectual movement only conceptually grasp

1. Hu Feng, "My Self-Criticism," in Donald Gibbs, ed., "Dissonant Voices in Chinese Literature: Hu Feng," Chinese Studies in Literature 1:1 (winter 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 0 ) : 65. 2. Hu Feng, "Guanyu Lu Xun jingshen de er-san jidian" (Two or three fundamental points about the spirit of Lu Xun), in Minzu zhanzheng yu wenyi xingge (The national war and the character of literature) (Chongqing: Xiwang she, n.d.), p. 169.

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'thought,' it is both easy to remember and easy to lose." In Lu Xun's work, however, "there is almost no trace of the conceptual terminology of the thought itself," because the older writer was "able to make the thought part of himself." The strength of Lu Xun's critique of the old society lay precisely in the union he managed to effect between a personal appropriation of ideas and a realistic appreciation of the "variety of stratagems of the forces of the old." In Hu Feng's view, only such a calculated determination to resist the attractions of set systems of thought allowed the older writer to avoid "falling into the embrace of the old society," 3 something both men regarded as the unfortunate resolution of most reform attempts that are guided by an abstract program. The key words in Hu Feng's analysis are: "because those in the intellectual movement only conceptually grasp 'thought,' it is both easy to remember and easy to lose." The formulation pithily captures the central paradox of much reformist and revolutionary thought: to the extent that someone adopts a whole system uncritically, he is provided with ready-made answers that substitute for hard-won individual perceptions. And unless the convert pays rigorous attention to detail, his faith in the suddenly acquired system will mask large areas of unconscious adherence to the basic belief patterns inculcated by the traditional milieu in which he was educated. According to Lin Yii-sheng, this had become a very important idea in China after 1911, when "the Chinese tradition was attacked as an organismic whole whose nature was infected by the disease of the traditional Chinese mind." 4 The determination to avoid the traps that inhere in conceptual systems resonates throughout Lu Xun's writings. But the lack of positive continuity that resulted from this ad-hoc approach seems to pose an equally grave threat to the ultimate significance of Lu Xun's critique of China. Indeed, in the essay quoted above, Hu Feng addressed himself to the widely shared sense that Lu Xun was guilty of a negativity that reduced his writings to a series of fragmented emotional responses linked only by a strong sense of self.5 But if anything in Lu Xun's writings is more obvious than wariness of systems, it is the steadfast determination to avoid indulging the self.6 Thus, the essence of Lu Xun's critical thought must be sought in the uncertain space left by his avoidance of the pitfalls of system on the one hand and of self-complacency on the other. The heart of Lu Xun's critique of his homeland lay in his conviction that no matter what superficial changes came to China, ultimately the old 3. Ibid., p. 170. 4. Lin Yii-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-traditionalism in the May Fourth Era ( M a d i s o n : University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), p. 29. 5. See, for instance, T . A. Hsia, "Aspects of the Power of Darkness in Lu Hsiin," in The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle: University of W a s h i n g t o n Press, 1968), p p . 1 6 1 - 6 2 . 6. For a partial selection of Lu X u n ' s m a n y c o m m e n t s along this line, see Lu Xun lun wenyi (Lu X u n on literature) ( W u h a n : H u b e i renmin wenxue, 1979), pp. 4 7 5 - 4 8 0 .

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order endured in the popular mind. This being the case, simply freeing the ego of external constraints only uncovered a deeper fidelity to the old ways. The root of both errors—overemphasizing the self and relying on an external system—was the relationship of mind to tradition. The complex links between the two was something close to an obsession throughout Lu Xun's authorial career. Many of the "Suiganlu" (Random thoughts) he published in Xin qingnian (New youth) as early as 1918 focus on this question, and it resounds like a continuo under much of the critical writing he produced during the remainder of his life. In his essay, "The Popular Mind Is Ancient"—ironically published at the very time of the outbreak of the May Fourth movement, in 1919—Lu Xun commented that "even after all these years, [our] opinions are still the same. The modern mind is in fact extremely ancient." 7 For, as he had written some months earlier, "although the names are new, the opinions are as they always were. . . . [The Chinese may] wish to have their skills be new, [but] they want their thought to be old." 8 It is almost as if unconscious adherence to traditional values constituted for Lu Xun a more serious problem than openly espoused conservative ideology, since the heart of the matter is that the old dispensation lacked any theoretical underpinning (and was that much stronger because of its subconscious grip). "So," says Lu Xun, "no matter what the doctrine (zbuyi), it cannot disturb China; I have not heard that any doctrine has caused any of the disturbances from ancient times until now." 9 Elsewhere he wrote: "The totality of [Chinese history] is made up of two qualities—the fire and the sword; 'they're here' is its title." 10 The implication is that society can never change, as there are no agencies by which any leverage can be gained on it. Given this core of traditional behavior, all the more compelling for being inexplicit, it is no wonder that Lu Xun laments: "What a pity it is that the moment foreign things reach China they change their color as if they had fallen into a vat of black dye." 11 The problem with reformist systems of thought, then, is that they are erected upon the substratum of tradition and cannot move away from it. The old does not disappear but becomes the foundation for everything that is later built upon it: "It seems that all around us are things with two or three or even more levels, with each level being in contradiction with the others. All people are [caught] in these contradictions and they live their lives complaining. This is to no one's advantage." 12 The 7. Lu X u n , " R e n x i n hen g u " (The p o p u l a r mind is ancient), Refeng ( H o t wind), Lu Xun quanji (The complete w o r k s of Lu X u n ; hereafter cited as LXQJ) (Beijing: Renmin w e n x u e , 1981), 1:352. 8. Lu X u n , "Suiganlu no. 4 8 " ( R a n d o m thoughts no. 48), LXQJ, 1:336. 9. Lu X u n , "Suiganlu no. 5 6 , " LXQJ, 1:347. 10. Lu X u n , "Suiganlu no. 5 9 , " LXQJ, 1:355. Translated in Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, trans., Selected Works of Lu Hstin (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1 9 5 6 - 1 9 6 0 ) , 2 : 4 8 . 11. Lu X u n , "Suiganlu no. 4 3 , " Refeng, LXQJ 1:330; Selected Works, 2 : 3 7 . 12. Lu X u n , "Suiganlu no. 5 4 , " Refeng, LXQJ, 1:345.

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essence of Lu Xun's critique of his society is thus a paradox: since the past is all-pervasive, one's rejection of it must be total; but that very totality and the universal, nonreasoning adherence to tradition make the replacement of that past a practical impossibility. Lu Xun's vision of the omnipresence of the past might suggest that he saw no meaningful distinction between self and society. But a case can be made that he went to great lengths to establish at least the heuristic basis for such a division, in the two collections of short stories that constituted his main cultural criticism prior to 1925. Although he was notoriously reluctant to comment seriously on his own work, the remarks Lu Xun made on "The True Story of Ah Q , " in a letter he wrote to a periodical in 1934, illuminate the reasons for his extraordinary care in constructing his narrative efforts: "My method is to make the reader unable to tell who this character can be apart from himself, so that he cannot back away to become a bystander but rather suspects that this is a portrait of himself as well as everyone [in China], A road to self-examination may therefore be opened to him." 13 The technical device he employs to ensure the proper audience response indicates the depth of the central problem of juxtaposing self and society: [I]n all my fiction, I seldom specify place. M o s t Chinese are the sort of heroes w h o love their native places and mock anyplace else (Ah Q is of that temperament). So, at the time, I thought that if I wrote a work of exposure and set it in a particular location, the people of that location would be inspired to irreconcilable hatred, while people not from there would be able to look on with complete indifference; and neither would have occasion for self-reflection. 1 4

Lu Xun thus reveals the two poles of his concern: those forced into identification will respond with a subjectivity so intense as to make serious reflection impossible, while those allowed to escape identification will look on with an objectivity so remote as to allow no real impression to penetrate. The full extent of the difficulty can be seen when one realizes that these two types of behavior are simply the mirror images in the reader of the writer's dual temptations to indulge himself and to resort to a facile system. Lu Xun's characteristic mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar is his basic narrative strategy for overcoming this impasse, while the unreliable firstperson narrator is the technical device by which he simultaneously brings the reader into the story and prevents too close an identification.15 13. Lu Xun, "Da Xi zhoukan bianzhe xin" (In reply to the editor of Theater magazine), Qiejieting zawen (Essays from a semi-concession), LXQ], 6:146. Translated in Lin Yu-sheng, Crisis, p. 124, and in Selected Works, 4:139. 14. Lu Xun, "Da Xi Zhoukan bianzhe xin," LXQ], 6:145; Selected Works, 4 : 1 3 8 . 15. For more on this theme, see my "Blossoms in the Snow: Lu Xun and the Dilemma of Modern Chinese Literature" Modern China, 10.1 (January 1984): 4 9 - 7 7 .

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In fact, this desire to disorient the reader extends to all of Lu Xun's writings. The brevity of his articles and essays, their rapid shifting of subject, pace, and tone, his constant resort to hyperbole, and his efforts to puncture conventional wisdom all give evidence of this goal, as does his frequently expressed wish to avoid being taken as an authority. 16 The essence of these rhetorical strategies was a fear of being misunderstood. In the letter of 1 9 3 4 quoted above, for example, Lu Xun outlined the effect he had sought to achieve in "Ah Q , " then added bitterly: "But I see that not a single critic has heretofore paid any attention to this point." 1 7 In fact, Lu Xun was terrified not so much of writing as of being misread, of being submerged into the long and ongoing discourse of Chinese culture and interpreted in its capacious terms. The lifelong frustration with critics that edged toward fury as he neared death was a response to their attempts to incorporate him into the tradition. Over the years critical reaction to Lu Xun's work did indeed tend to fall into a familiar pattern: it was either overly involved and hysterical or overly detached and abstract, regardless of the critics' conscious political leanings. The conservatives, for instance, who interpreted his writings (for all his protestations to the contrary) as personal attacks 18 were reacting with essentially the same parochial zeal as the young leftist critics in the confused period from 1 9 2 8 to 1 9 3 0 who persisted in seeing Lu Xun as a dedicated foe of the proletariat. On the other hand, those who approach Lu Xun from the standpoint of system do equal damage to his legacy. The continuing custom of depicting Lu Xun as a lifelong and consistent believer in a single revolutionary purpose makes him (deliberately, one suspects) predictable and therefore safe. He becomes merely another stage in an ineluctable historical progression, as nonproblematic and objective as a rock. 1 9

16. Perhaps the best example of Lu Xun's disclaimers of authority occurs in his "Geming shidai de wenxue" (Literature of a revolutionary period), Eryt ji (And that's that), LXQJ, 3 : 4 1 7 ; Selected Works, 2 : 3 2 6 . 17. Lu Xun, "Da Xi zhoukan bianzhe xin," LXQJ, 6 : 1 4 6 ; Selected Works, 4 : 1 3 9 . 18. For the most vivid account of a reader misconstruing a story, see Lu Xun, " 'Ah Q zheng zhuan' de chengyin" (How "The True Story of Ah Q " was written), Huagai ji xubian de xubian (Sequel to the sequel to Unlucky Star), LXQJ, 3:377—379; Selected Works, 2:306-308. 19. Writing in the early war years, the critic Ba Ren (Wang Renshu) made the most sophisticated case for treating Lu Xun as a constant utilitarian. Ba Ren maintains that at the beginning of the May Fourth movement the "expressive" (yan zhi) and "didactic" (zai dao) schools of literature united to overthrow traditional literary practice. Once the movement had gained some breathing space, however, it branched off into its two constituent elements. Zhou Zuoren and the young men of the Creation Society were conspicuous among those who moved toward a rather narrow individualism, while Lu Xun took up the task of instruction. See Ba Ren, "Lu Xun xiansheng de yishu guan" (Mr. Lu Xun's views on art), in his Lun Lu Xun de zawen (On Lu Xun's zawen) (n.p.: Yuandong shudian, 1940), pp. 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 .

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II. Transformation by Politics For all his pessimism before 1925, Lu Xun had consciously clung to a scientistic faith in the power of evolution. While he realized that evolution could not guarantee China's survival, he felt it at least implied that the old order would collapse, sooner or later. 20 As a corollary to this faith, Lu Xun believed that a younger generation less infected than his own by old ideas would eventually emerge to participate in the process. His portrayal of young people in such stories as "Kong Yiji," "Regret for the Past," and even "Diary of a Madman" suggests that he was never misled by this belief into a naive optimism.21 Yet the belief did lead him to take a hopeful view of the young and of the departures from tradition that they advocated after May Fourth. But Lu Xun's perception of himself as someone who had been influenced in incalculable ways by his exposure to traditional learning lay at the heart of his reservations both about the young and about the possibilities for real change. As he says in his postscript of 1926 to The Grave: "Because I feel I often have in mind the hateful ideas written down by the ancients, I have absolutely no confidence in whether or not I can fight them off. I often curse these ideas of mine and hope that they will not be seen again in the youth of the future." The sense of hollowness entailed by his inability to isolate the specific source of infection led him to confess: "Last year when I bade young people to read fewer Chinese books, or even to read none at all, 22 it was a truth that cost me a good deal of pain; it was not a casual pleasantry, nor a joke, nor words spoken simply in the heat of the moment." 23 Fantasize as he would, it was obviously impossible to isolate young people from traditional ways; thus Lu Xun was obliged to regard young writers with some of the same wariness that he applied to himself. Behind this caution lay his sense that China's intellectual leaders must bear ultimate responsibility for the durability of traditional society. And as a charter member of that group, Lu Xun could not in good conscience set himself up as an unimpeachable authority who had found a way to wholly transcend his own roots. As early as 1922 Lu Xun had outlined the only way he saw of coming to grips with unconscious domination by old ideas. Addressing literary critics, he wrote with a tentativeness that suggests both his pessimism and 20. Harriet C. Mills, "Literature and Revolution—from Mara to Marx," in Merle Goldman, ed., Modem Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 197. 21. For more detail, see my "Blossoms in the Snow," pp. 6 0 - 6 2 . 22. This admonition appears in "Qingnian bidu shu" (An essential reading list for youth), Huagaiji (Unlucky star), LXQJ, 3:12. 23. Lu Xun, " X i e zai Fen houmian" (Postface to The Grave), Fen (The grave), LXQJ, 1:286.

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his fervor: "I dare not hope that before dissecting and passing judgment on other people's work critics will first dissect and pass judgment on themselves, to see whether they are in any way shallow, mean or mistaken. That would be asking too much." 24 Lu Xun did, however, apply these strictures to himself, as he admits in the postscript to The Grave: Readers with a predilection for my works often say approvingly that my writing tells the truth. Actually this is too complimentary and they say it merely because of their predilection. Of course, I have no particular desire to deceive people, but I have never told all that was in my heart just as it was either. . . . It is quite true that I often dissect other people, but even more o f t e n — a n d even more ruthlessly—I dissect myself. 2 5

Overall, then, Lu Xun's attitudes before 1925 were based on his perception that China had a stagnant social and political order. His consequent determination to resist ill-considered action arose from his awareness that analysis of the personal and individual sources of action is an almost infinitely complex process and that most action is almost sure to be selfdefeating. To put it more simply, Lu Xun in these years was not favorably disposed to political initiatives. His well-known reaction to the charade represented by the 1911 revolution was probably the original source of his feelings in this regard, but nothing that happened later had served to change his mind. The ambivalence that Lu Xun admits feeling, in the preface to his first collection of stories, about their potential political impact provides the best illustration of his hesitations about praxis.26 His reservations move beyond the fear of being misread: they reveal the profoundest apprehension about allowing his intricately balanced personal reflections into the wider realm in which narrative representation inevitably involves itself. The nearly ethereal quality that Lu Xun's concerns over his own fiction has taken on for later readers is a measure of the magnitude of the crisis forced upon him by the political upheavals that began in 1925. His almost existential concern with the nature and sources of personal behavior was supplanted by an urgent need to come to grips with a looming political reality. The disorientation caused in Lu Xun by this process cannot be overestimated. Not only did he cease to write fiction after this period, but he wrote very little of anything from 1927 to 1929, and what he did write is marked by a tentativeness and inconsistency that must be considered less 24. Lu Xun, "Duiyu pipingjia de xiwang" (What I ask of the critics) Refeng, LXQJ, 1:401; Selected Works, 2:76. 25. Lu Xun, "Xie zai Fen houmian, LXQJ, 1 : 2 8 3 - 2 8 4 ; translated by William A. Lyell, Lu Hsiin's Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 187. 26. See Lu Xun, " N a h a n zi xu" (preface to Call to Arms), LXQJ, 2 : 4 1 8 - 4 1 9 ; Selected Works, 1 : 5 - 6 .

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a rhetorical strategy than a symptom of genuine confusion. Characteristically, Lu X u n blamed himself for this. 27 Compounding the problem was the fact that events in 1 9 2 6 and 1 9 2 7 seemed to bear out most of his worst fears about the durability of traditional ways; he noted in a letter how seeing the young in revolutionary Canton behave just as viciously as their elders had "terrified" him into silence. 28 This enforced shift from the personal to the public arena of concern had an equally cataclysmic effect on Lu Xun's attitudes toward literature. Previously, literature had been centered upon mental processes in a stagnant society, and he had been a recognized master. Now social chaos had removed whatever certainty of direction there had been to the craft and left him only his reputation, a heightened one at that. Ironically, this always reluctant writer was constantly pressed in these years to deliver authoritative utterances on the nature of literature in the new age of revolution. Lu Xun's yawing back and forth on the issue represents a necessary part of his search for answers. But for all the confusion, these events forced Lu Xun to analyze the nature of literature in a way that he never had before, and it is no coincidence that his speeches and writings from these years offer some of his best thoughts on the subject. Occasionally he seemed to give up in the face of the objective powers of society, as in his speech at Whampoa in April 1 9 2 7 : My experience in Peking during the last few years is beginning to shake my faith in the old literary theories on which I was brought up. That was the time when students were shot and there was cruel censorship, when to my mind only the weakest, most useless people talked about literature. Those w h o are strong do not talk, they kill. 29

But later that year, in a speech at Jinan University in Shanghai, he came close to glorifying the subjective powers of the writer, exalting authors as the instigators of social disorder and therefore as crucial agents in the evolutionary process. 3 0 The dominant theme in all Lu Xun's pronouncements from these years, however, is that politics will have its way regardless of what literature does. 31 Even in his Jinan University speech, " T h e Divergent Roads of Literature and Politics," he admitted this truth in a backhanded way: 27. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Literature on the Eve of Revolution: Reflections on Lu Xun's Leftist Years, 1 9 2 7 - 3 6 , " Modern China 2:3 (July 1976): 281. 28. Lu Xun, "Da Youheng xiansheng" (In reply to Mr. Youheng), Eryi ji, LXQ], 3 : 4 5 3 454. 29. Lu Xun, "Geming shidai de wenxue," LXQ], 3:417; Selected Works, 2:326. 30. Lu Xun, "Wenyi yu zhengzhi de qitu" (The divergent roads of literature and politics), Jiwai ji (Addenda collection), LXQ], 7 : 1 1 3 - 1 1 5 . 31. Liu Dajie makes this point in "Lu Xun yu xieshizhuyi" (Lu Xun and realism), in Lu Xun xiansheng jinian ji (Collection in commemoration of Lu Xun) (reprint ed., Hong Kong: Po Wen, 1979), p. 164.

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"society will have revolution even if the writers are executed." 3 2 The turn that the 1 9 2 7 revolution took to the right, even as it was achieving power, complicated this matter, of course. The change forced Lu Xun to a simultaneous realization: a revolutionary writer, to be worthy of the name, must resist all forms of constituted authority, 33 but if such a resistance begins to show any signs of success, the writer will be instantly destroyed. 34 Only stark alternatives remain once a writer has committed himself to such a world view. He can envision a literature that rarely touches any nerves, since it is produced by a group of people determined to avoid confronting reality. He also sees that if writers do engage themselves in the struggles of the day, they will either be ignored or removed from the scene, in the unlikely event that a significant number of people pay them any heed. Furthermore, there is the ever-present risk that writers will abandon any pretense of opposition to the powers that be and retreat to simple praise of the winners. 35 One way out of this impasse would be to somehow combine the objective overview of politics with the critical posture essential to the good writer. Or, in other words, to somehow mix the subjective and objective viewpoints, retaining their best features and discarding their worst. Before 1 9 2 8 , however, this had seemed impossible to Lu Xun because of his perception that all politicians were innately opportunistic and that writers had an infinite capacity for self-delusion and rhetorical hollowness. It is no wonder, then that—whatever his motivation for studying Marxism had been originally 3 6 —Lu X u n came to feel, as he wrote Wei Suyuan in July 1 9 2 8 , that " b o o k s using historical materialism to criticize literature . . . are straight and to the point and can elucidate a number of unclear and difficult-to-explain problems." 3 7 For if one accepts the thesis that Lu Xun was obsessed by the inertia of society and by its ability to condition all individual responses to itself, then a radical historical discontinuity must have seemed to him more likely than evolution to force everyone in society, particularly those who had become habituated to occupying a dominant position in it, to look hard both at their relationship with that society and at themselves. The key to his developing a sense that real change might indeed be 32. Lu Xun, "Wenyi yu zhengzhi de qitu," LXQJ, 7:116. 33. Ibid., p. 119. 34. Lu Xun, "Da Youheng xiansheng," LXQ], 3:457. 35. Lu Xun, "Wenyi yu zhengzhi de qitu," LXQ], 7 : 1 1 7 - 1 1 8 ; see also "Geming wenxue" (Revolutionary literature), Eryi ji LXQJ, 3:543. 36. In "Lu Hsiin: 1 9 2 7 - 3 6 : The Years on the Left" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1963), pp. 1 2 3 - 1 2 8 , Harriet Mills makes the point that much of Lu Xun's motivation for his involvement with Marxist theory lay in a desire to give young self-styled Marxists some substantial idea of what they were talking about. See also Lu Xun, "Sanxian ji xu" (Preface to Three Leisures), LXQJ, 4 : 6 ; Selected Works, 3 : 1 4 7 - 1 4 8 . 37. Lu Xun, "Zhi Wei Suyuan" (Letter to Wei Suyuan), 22 July 1927, LXQJ, 11:629.

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possible was the image of one class taking over from another. This process would at last allow a break from what Walter Benjamin called "homogeneous, empty time," in which progress is regarded as mechanical and human behavior as fundamentally immutable, and in which writers will continue to delude themselves just as politicians will continue to be corrupted. The ascent of a new class would allow for an end to this stagnation: " T h e awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action." 3 8 Lu Xun immediately seized upon the opportunity for collective authorial self-scrutiny occasioned by this move to rigorous sociology. In his famous address at the inaugural meeting of the League of Left-Wing Writers, he devoted most of his time to scolding his own side rather than to attacking the enemy. He warned against the dangers of "this notion that poets or writers are superior beings, and their work nobler than any other w o r k " and of writers shutting themselves up "behind glass windows to write or study instead of keeping in touch with actual social conflicts." 3 9 The assumption that this sense of superiority allows a writer to abstract himself from reality clearly links these two attitudes—it was just such attitudes that had prevented the newly leftist Creation Society from making any significant contribution to either literature or politics. Lu Xun had brought himself to the seemingly paradoxical view that only by putting oneself at the service of others can one arrive at true introspection: only this can ensure that one is neither too close to nor too far from the course of events. III. L i t e r a t u r e and the Party As T. A. Hsia has shown, however, the sense of personal witness that Lu Xun brought to the revolution did not always sit well with the compromises the Party was forced to make during its long struggle for power. 4 0 It is evident that, for all his commitment to historical materialism, Lu Xun regarded many of the Shanghai Party functionaries as little better than the cultural politicians whom he had always so sternly opposed. Before 1 9 3 6 , however, the radical politics of the Party suited Lu Xun's hopes for fundamental change, and he was thus willing to put aside his reservations (at least in public). The Comintern's adoption of the united front policy in 38. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 261. For a detailed account of Lu Xun's relationship with Marxist literary theory, see Lee, "Literature on the Eve," pp. 291—314. 39. Lu Xun, "Duiyu zuoyi zuojia lianmeng de yijian" (Thoughts on the League of LeftWing Writers), Erxin ji (Two hearts), LXQJ, 4 : 2 3 3 - 2 3 4 ; Selected Works, 3 : 9 3 - 9 4 . 40. T. A. Hsia, "Lu Hsiin and the Dissolution of the League of Leftist Writers," in Gate, pp. 1 1 2 - 1 1 9 .

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August 1 9 3 5 , the Chinese Party's subsequent change of emphasis from class struggle to national defense, and the eventual de-emphasis of efforts to revise the world view of the urban intellectuals, however, were bound to irritate the Lu Xun who had said in 1931 that "in a society like China today, the best we can hope for is the appearance of works showing the revolt of the petty-bourgeoisie against their own class, or works of exposure." 4 1 From the standpoint of Lu Xun, the feud that subsequently developed between him and the Party authorities illustrated one of the major weaknesses of Leninist theory: if the "vanguard" of the working class must come from rebellious sections of the dominating classes, there was no way to ensure that this vanguard would not be imbued with the ideology of the classes from which they came. Considering Lu Xun's longstanding concern with precisely this issue, an extreme reaction to this shift in party line was only to be expected. As Zhou Yang, the long-time Party official in charge of cultural affairs, said in an interview granted to an overseas visitor in 1 9 7 8 , the Shanghai Party organization decided to disband the League of Left-Wing Writers in early 1 9 3 6 after it received a letter that the Chinese representative to the Third International, Wang Ming, had sent via Xiao San at the end of 1 9 3 5 . Ironically, Lu Xun is said to have passed the letter on after its initial delivery to him. 42 The decision to do away with the League was made on the grounds that it was too political, too closely identified with the Party, and too guilty of a "closed-door" (or "subjectivist") mentality that frightened away would-be sympathizers with the united front. The slogan " N a tional Defense Literature," which was adopted at about the same time, expressed a desire to cast the net of alliance more widely and to switch the emphasis in left-wing literature from class struggle to anti-imperialism. As Shanghai was cut off from communication with the Communist capital of Baoan at the time, none of the various advocates in the debate that ensued could appeal very convincingly to high authority. The argument was all the more bitter for being free from ultimate dictation. While much of the ensuing strife over the "National Defense Literature" slogan can be attributed to personal animosity between, on the one side, Lu Xun, Hu Feng, and Feng Xuefeng, and on the other, Zhou Yang and his group, there were profound, substantive issues behind it as well. T o sum up the debate, 43 the radical group that came eventually to be led by Lu Xun objected to the compromise on the question of class standpoint represented 41. Lu Xun, "Shanghai wenyi zhi yipie" (A glance at the Shanghai literary scene), Erxin ji, LXQJ, 4 : 3 0 0 ; Selected Works, 3 : 1 2 4 . 42. Zhao Haosheng, "Zhou Yang xiaotan lishi gongguo" (Zhou Yang chats about historical achievements and mistakes), Qishi niandai (The seventies) 104 (September 1978): 29a. 43. The most detailed summary of the debate in English remains T. A. Hsia, "Dissolution," pp. 1 1 9 - 1 4 5 .

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by Zhou Yang's call to accept literature produced outside the revolutionary tradition that followed May Fourth. As Zhou Yang put it, "We must admit that a broad middle literature exists outside the realm of revolutionary literature [and] possesses the vast majority of readers." 44 Although reserving the right to criticize any of these works' shortcomings from a Marxist viewpoint, Zhou called on the movement to accept this middle literature as long as it in some way assisted in national defense. As a justification for recognizing more than one sort of literature, Zhou claimed that, although "we do not in the slightest take frivolously the enlightenment offered by the progressive world-view, neither can we overlook the education provided by reality itself." 45 The magnitude of the reversal of long-standing Party policy represented by this acceptance of anything other than revolutionary literature was exceeded only by Zhou's tacit admission that Marxism may not be the clearest vector for human perception. If we accept that the sense of breakthrough was vital to Lu Xun's newly accepted political and literary mission, then the depth of his feeling about National Defense Literature becomes understandable. The compromise proposed by Zhou Yang would have destroyed Lu Xun's sense of real departure from the past by threatening to return the left to the multilayered system of ideas that Lu Xun had so decried back in 1919. If several levels of values came to exist, he feared, the traditional values he was so anxious to supplant would be the only ones with any real strength. The danger that the old ways would emerge within the ranks of the revolutionaries—a prospect that had so horrified Lu Xun in the dark days of 1927 and 1928—became present again during the search for compromise that began almost as soon as the debate itself. The radical response to Zhou Yang was formulated most dramatically by Hu Feng (with the assistance of Feng Xuefeng and Lu Xun) 46 in the alternate slogan, "Mass Literature of the National Revolutionary War." Hu differed with Zhou in arguing that any concessions to conservatives only facilitated the encroachments of imperialism that the united front policy was designed to resist. Hu was also steadfast in the belief that continuation of the new tradition of left-wing literature was not merely one way to mobilize the masses, as Zhou had maintained, but was the only

44. Zhou Yang, "Guanyu guofang wenxue" (Concerning national defense literature), in Guofang wenxue lunzhan (The polemic on national defense literature) (Shanghai: Xinchao, 1936), p. 124. 45. Ibid., p. 128. 46. For more on this collaboration, see Feng Xuefeng, "Youguan 1936 nian Zhou Yang dengren de xingdong yiji Lu Xun tichu 'minzu geming de dazhong wenxue' kouhao de jingguo" (Concerning the 1936 activities of Zhou Yang and others and the Mass Literature of the Revolutionary War slogan put forth by Lu Xun), Xin wenxue shiliao (Materials on the new literature) 2 (February 1979): 2 4 8 - 2 5 8 .

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way. 47 Two of the most famous contemporary writers, Guo Moruo and Mao Dun, undertook almost immediately to mediate between the two factions. In an essay that was otherwise supportive of Zhou Yang, Guo recommended that the slogan be expanded to "National Defense Literature and Art" and be treated as "a standard of relations between authors and not as a standard of artistic principles." 48 Theoretically, this concept would have the slogan function only as a vague standard of political relations among authors, allowing both leftists and centrists the freedom to pursue their own artistic bents, as long as what they produced was not "traitorous." Soon after, Mao Dun seized upon Guo's compromise as a way of resolving the increasingly acrimonious debate: "I now think that this slogan, 'National Defense Literature and Art,' lacks clarity if used for creative work; furthermore, if we take this slogan as a general one to cover creative work, there is a danger of 'closed-doorism' and 'sectarianism.' " 4 9 It was fit only to be a vague banner under which writers of various persuasions could gather. Because the slogan "Mass Literature of the National Revolutionary War," however, was specific, Mao Dun advocated taking it as an artistic guide for the left. After all, as Lu Xun had pointed out in his first pronouncement on the subject, 50 the new slogan summarized the essence of the League's struggle for proletarian literature. Mao Dun was offering a compromise on Lu Xun's compromise on Hu Feng's original call. Hu had sought to totally replace the National Defense slogan with the one concocted by himself, Feng Xuefeng, and Lu Xun; Lu Xun had later offered to allow both slogans to exist but to have the leftist formulation dominate; and Mao Dun finally offered to reserve the designation "mass literature" solely for writers of proletarian literature. None of these offers satisfied Zhou Yang, however. He now believed that "the slogan of national defense literature should be a standard for creative activity; it should exhort all authors to write works concerned with national defense. If a literary slogan has no relation to creative activity, it becomes a thing of no significance." 51 In saying this, Zhou Yang effectively shifted his ground; eschewing the apparent liberalism of a few months earlier, when he had proposed to unite all types of writers, he now 47. Hu Feng, "Renmin dazhong xiang wenxue yaoqiu shenma?" (What do the masses want from literature?), in Guofang wenxue lunzhan, pp. 151—155. 4 8 . Guo Moruo, "Guofang, wuchi, lianyu" (National defense, the foul pond, purgatory), in Guofang wenxue lunzhan, p. 132. 4 9 . M a o Dun, "Guanyu yinqi jiufen de liangge kouhao" (Concerning the two slogans that have stirred up dispute), in Guofang wenxue lunzhan, p. 3 3 8 . 50. Lu Xun, "Lun xianzai women de wenxue yundong" (On our literary movement at present), in Guofang wenxue lunzhan, p. 2 6 0 . 51. Zhou Yang, " Y u M a o Dun xiansheng lun guofang wenxue de kouhao" (Discussing the national defense literature with Mr. Mao Dun), in Guofang wenxue lunzhan, p. 3 4 6 .

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sharply limited literature to only two roles: serving national defense or "betrayal." In essence, Zhou turned the League's rigid insistence on a class-based literature into an equally rigid insistence on patriotic writing. But where the one was a policy rooted in Marxist theory, the other was built simply on political expedience. It is easy to see how writers who had submerged a certain number of private scruples about submitting to Party dictation in the interests of creating a new world view would be most disturbed when they saw the new world view being de-emphasized and only the dictation remaining. It did not require intense paranoia to see in Zhou Yang's ex-cathedra pronouncements the recrudescence of some of the claims of the traditional state. This sense of the damage done to the proletarian revolution by the policies of the united front was felt not only in China. George Orwell commented at about the same time upon the situation in Spain: Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but bourgeois democracy. 5 2

While misgivings never became this explicit in China and a compromise was effected before Lu Xun died in October 1 9 3 6 , it is understandable that some of the principals in the T w o Slogans debate—notably Lu Xun, Feng Xuefeng, and Hu Feng—were deeply troubled by its implications. Lu Xun was, to say the least, aware of the damage the squabble inflicted on his health. 53 Feng Xuefeng "retired from politics in 1937 and led the life of a recluse for a time in his native province of Chekiang." 5 4 T. A. Hsia attributes this move to the fall from the Party's grace that Feng's mishandling of the debate probably occasioned, but it may with equal logic be explained by his personal disquiet about the way things had worked out. 55 Hu Feng, however, was most clearly affected: after 1 9 3 6 his writings came increasingly to chronicle the internal dynamics of the leftist literary scene itself. IV. H u Feng There was to be no debate in literary circles after 1 9 3 8 in which Hu Feng did not take an active role. Part of the reason he seemed so intent on shifting his attention to the debate within the Left was the very success of 52. 53. 54. 55. 1971),

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harvest, 1952), p. 51. T. A. Hsia, "Dissolution," p. 138. Ibid., p. 125, n. 66. Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China (New York: Atheneum, p. 14.

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the united front policy: with so many more writers engaged in the Left's activities, the whole scope of discussion had changed. There was no literary right wing of any consequence to do battle with any longer. But from Hu's standpoint there was another aspect to this development: as the Left expanded, the same questions about the nature of revolutionary literature that had come up in 1936 were bound to surface again and again, and at each critical juncture Hu felt it incumbent upon himself to defend the integrity of the literary ethos of the League days. 56 The first attempt to water the ethos down that emerged after the war had begun was the National Forms debate of 1939 and 1940. Like the Two Slogans debate before it, the discussion on national forms resulted from an initiative of the Communist Party, in this case Mao Zedong's report to the Party's Sixth Plenary Session in October 1938, "Zhongguo gongchandang zai minzu zhanzheng zhong de diwei" (The role of the Chinese Communist Party in the national war). While Mao was addressing himself to the general problem of how to adapt Marxism to China, he made the following pronouncement, which came to be applied almost immediately to literature: Foreign stereotypes must be abolished, there must be less singing of empty, abstract tunes, and dogmatism must be laid to rest; they must be replaced by the fresh, lively Chinese style and spirit which the c o m m o n people of China love. T o separate internationalist content from national form is the practice of those w h o do not understand the first thing about internationalism. We, on the contrary, must link the t w o closely. 5 7

The critic Xiang Linbing (Zhao Jibin) soon produced the formulation: "The new originates in the womb of the old through the process of selfnegation of the old. This gives rise to an independent existence of the new." 58 This idea came to serve as a basic truism for the movement to apply Mao's idea to literature. The movement's leaders, Xiang and Zhou Yang, attempted to minimize the importance of the foreign influence on the May Fourth tradition, asserting that the main line of progressive literature in the 1920s and 1930s had had its roots in traditional popular (i.e., vernacular) literature. 56. See, for example, Hu Feng, Lun minzu xingshi wenti (On the question of national form) (Shanghai: Haiyan, 1947), p. 16: "The literary movement. . . brings with it the traditions of May Fourth literature. Without it, the movement comes empty-handed to serve the war effort." 57. Mao Tse-tung, [Mao Zedong], "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War," in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 2:209-210. 58. Quoted in Marian Galik, "Main Issues in the Discussion on 'National Forms' in Modern Chinese Literature," Asian and African Studies 10 (1974): 100. My discussion of the course of the debate owes much to this article.

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This position had long had its attractions for Chinese nationalists: a case in point is Hu Shi's attempts to show that China had a long tradition of vernacular literature. But the effort, inspired by the united front, to reconcile May Fourth writing with traditional popular forms could not help running up against the ghost of the leftists' attempt in the early 1930s to adopt a strictly nontraditional demotic for literature. As Qu Qiubai had written in 1932, this was to be "the modern vernacular spoken by living Chinese . . . , especially the language spoken by the proletariat." Adoption of this new medium required an effort "not only [to] continue to clean out the remnants of the classical language and overthrow the so-called vernacular or new classical [i.e., May Fourth baihua], but. . . also [to] firmly oppose the vernacular used in traditional fiction, because, in fact, it is a dead language" (emphasis in the original).59 The need to reconcile this past iconoclasm both with May Fourth prose and with the new move to find roots in premodern sources accounts for the hedging and contradictions found in most of the arguments for national forms. Hu Feng pounced on these inconsistencies to illustrate his claim that the whole issue exemplified the "pursuit of theory" even in cases where "lacking a factual explanation, there can be no theoretical explanation." 60 In a series of articles written in late 1940, Hu took issue with the various ideas set forth by the advocates of national forms. At the time he was living in a suburb of Chongqing and editing and publishing the journal Qiyue (July). The articles were published in a single volume in 1941 in an attempt to clear the air. Of the pieces in the collection, the most noteworthy are "Duiyu wusi geming chuantong de yi lijie" (An understanding of the revolutionary tradition in May Fourth literature) and "Duiyu minjian wenxue de yi lijie" (An understanding of popular literature).61 Hu begins the former by reviewing the main points in favor of national forms. The principal argument is that of Xiang Linbing to the effect that the May Fourth movement was directed against the Tongcheng and Wenxuan schools, the two leading theories of literary composition in the early years of the century, and supported traditional vernacular writing, as represented by the zhanghui novel. According to Zhou Yang, May Fourth literature was thus an affirmation and continuation of the natural development of popular forms. Xiang and others, however, admitted that foreign literature had at least served as a catalyst to this "natural development." Hu Feng maintains that this simultaneous adherence to two opposed ideas—natural development and foreign 59. Qu Qiubai, "The Question of Popular Literature and Art," trans. Paul Pickowicz, in John Berninghausen and Ted Huters, eds., Revolutionary Literature in China: An Anthology (White Plains, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1976), p. 49a. 60. Hu Feng, Lun minzu xingshi wenti, pp. 53, 50. 61. These two articles are to be found in Hu Feng, Lun minzu xingshi wenti, pp. 3 3 - 4 4 and 45—58, respectively.

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influence—epitomizes the central contradiction of the whole theory of national forms: one must either stand steadfastly for purely autochthonous development or be candid about the crucial significance of external influences. Few supporters of national forms could bring themselves to take either course. 62 The vehemence of Hu Feng's argument must be placed beside the rather benign remarks that Lu Xun had made in 1934 in favor of the adoption of certain facets of old forms. In rebutting Nie Gannu's assertion that modern attempts to employ traditional forms verged on "opportunism" and "virtual surrender," Lu Xun set forth an idea very similar to that of Xiang Linbing: the development of new forms, Lu Xun said, must involve "the adoption of [certain] old forms, a step which is at the same time the beginning of new forms and the transformation of the old." 6 3 In fact, the only significant difference between Lu Xun's position and that of the advocates of national forms in the early war years was the latter's insistence upon depicting the development of these forms as an inevitable part of a grand historical progression; this sort of argument had always irked Lu Xun and accounts for much of Hu Feng's animus. The Party spokesmen's presumption that literary change manifested objective laws of development was a prime example of what Hu Feng saw as the barren manipulation of superficial meanings. He called this tendency "formulaic dialectics" and regarded it as the besetting sin of the debaters and, by extension, of the whole contemporary literary scene. It caused critics to forget to undertake to comprehend and to solve problems through the process of actual struggle. This, on the one hand, prevents the true face of the "national f o r m s " question from showing itself and, on the other, concentrates the greater part of the literary stage's energy on abstract discussion, while placing the urgent tasks of the struggle off to one side. 6 4

To further demonstrate the importance of foreign influence, Hu points out that the authors most strongly associated with traditional form, such as Yu Pingbo, had the least enduring influence on the new literature. Hu's main point is that the twentieth-century urban revolution put China, for the first time, in the mainstream of cosmopolitan culture, where it could take advantage of "the world tradition of progressive literature which has 62. Galik, "Main Issues," p. 103, asserts that Zhou Yang completely denies foreign influence, but in "Dui jiu xingshi liyong zai wenxueshang de yige kanfa" (An opinion on using old forms in literature), in Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shi catikao ziliao (Research materials on contemporary Chinese literature) (Beijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu, 1959), 1:732, Zhou appears to vacillate on the question. It was this hedging that annoyed Hu Feng more than anything else. 63. Lu Xun, "Lun 'jiu xingshi de caiyong' " (On the adoption of old forms), Qiejieting zawen, LXQ], 6:22, 25; Selected Works, 4:36. 64. Hu Feng, Lun minzu xingshi wenti, p. 106.

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been accumulating over the past several hundred years." 6 5 He maintains that the basis for revolutionary literature must be its relationship to actual society, rather than to any set form; it must, in other words, agree to use whatever it can to achieve its goals. Hu Feng concludes by arguing that the literature that came after May Fourth and drew on a wide variety of sources represented a true revolutionary tradition. Xiang Linbing had maintained that one reason for the failure of May Fourth literature was the fact that its authors were "new people directly nurtured under the influence of literature from the advanced countries." Hu rebuts this claim by pointing out, correctly, that such writers as Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, and Yu Dafu were actually rebels who had undergone the most rigorous sort of traditional Chinese education. Hu asserts that the proponents of national forms, in trying to deny this revolutionary tradition and its multiplicity of sources, are merely echoing the arguments of the conservatives of the early 1920s, who had sought to restore the past. The debate over the use of popular forms was even more pointed. Even the most strenuous advocates of national forms accepted that new forms suitable to new circumstances could evolve, as long as they had indigenous components. Popular forms, however, were by definition preexisting; even their proponents had to admit that they contained a generous portion of "feudal" elements. The first premise of Zhou Yang's call to use old forms was that they were "an indispensable and powerful weapon of political propaganda in the War of Resistance. This cannot be doubted and there can be no room for contention o v e r j t . " 6 6 As with National Defense literature, popular forms were called upon only because of their built-in mass appeal and not at all because of their political nature. This attitude prompted Hu Feng to the bitter comment that "this simply echoes the reactionary position that 'whatever exists is rational' and has nothing whatsoever in common with scientific truth." If familiarity to the crowd becomes the sole criterion by which to judge literature, then "literary history can only be an unbroken chain of forms that the audience has 'long seen and often heard,' " 6 7 and hopes for fundamental change must continue to be deferred. Zhou and his allies, on the one side, and Hu Feng, on the other, also differed seriously over the relationship between content and form. While both factions believed that content determines form, 68 Zhou defined the latter so loosely that, for him, "popular old forms" could evolve to contain

65. 66. 67. 68. 732.

Ibid., p. 41. Zhou Yang, "Dui jiu xingshi liyong zai wenxueshang de yige kanfa," p. 3 7 0 . Hu Feng, Lun minzu xingshi wenti, pp. 55, 60. Ibid., p. 5 1 ; Zhou Yang, "Dui jiu xingshi liyong zai wenxueshang de yige kanfa," p.

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new content. 6 9 Hu cites this opinion, along with that of the national-forms advocates who called simultaneously for modification and retention of the old forms, as examples of the sort of thinking that leaves the whole question in limbo. For his part, Hu linked content and form almost as closely as Terry Eagleton, who claims that "the true bearers of ideology in art are the very forms, rather than the abstractable content, of the work itself." 7 0 In this analysis, the notion that content determines form comes to mean that, since traditional literary forms (and the content that has given them meaning) embody the social relations of the times that produced them, any nontrivial use of these forms can only help to perpetuate the social order that they express. Hu does not, however, wish simply to consign the old forms to the dustbin of history. He admits their power of attraction, derived precisely from the pervasive endurance of the old society. Yet he calls not for their wholesale readoption but for their use in "understanding the life of the masses and in analyzing patterns of popular ideas." Taking the pieces individually and anatomizing them carefully before even thinking of using them, he feels, is the only way to avoid what Lu Xun called the modern writer's propensity " t o slip in some old ideas to suit the traditional Chinese temperament." 7 1 Compared with even the most polemical writings of Lu Xun, however, these critical essays of Hu Feng seem rather pale and querulous. The obvious explanation is difference in talent, but there are reasons to suspect that Hu Feng was in fact misapplying his substantial skills in this style of writing. The most notable of these is the literary arena's pronounced shift, after 1 9 3 7 , to the more practical concerns that arose out of the political focus of the wartime Communist base area. The united front policy, the alliance with the nationalists, and the war itself made a number of issues that had been regarded casually become more sensitive. Now that a unified leftist literary bureaucracy was taking shape, individual writers had less latitude to formulate original ideas, even as they were under more pressure to help expound the current line. Like Lu Xun, in the private letters he wrote during his last years and in the public debate over National Defense literature, Hu Feng was constantly put in the position of having to respond to the initiatives of others rather than formulating his own. Yet he could not give up his attachment to Marxist ideology, as it represented to him the only political hope for any sort of basic change. That the literary sector of the ideology had fallen into the hands of a group that, Hu considered, continually threatened to transpose it into a traditional key was all the 69. Zhou Yang, "Dui jiu xingshi liyong zai wenxueshang de yige kanfa," pp. 7 3 3 - 7 3 4 . 70. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 24. 71. Lu Xun, "Wei you tiancai zhi qian" (Waiting for genius), Fen, LXQJ, 1 : 1 6 8 ; Selected Works, 2 : 7 9 .

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more reason to exercise constant intellectual vigilance. If the price of that vigilance was a tendency to petty squabbling over what seems in retrospect to be somewhat minor points, Hu at least attempted to see these in their larger theoretical context. To Hu's perpetual frustration, the focus of the debate continued to drift ever farther from the core theoretical issues of self and society. He worked ever harder to pin contingent matters to the underlying ideology, and thus was created a self-generating cycle of endless contention. What Hu Feng sensed as the continuing compromises with reactionary ideas in the cause of the united front and its constant emphasis on patriotism took a toll on him over the course of the war. Always irascible and sensitive to criticism, he felt himself increasingly isolated as the years went by. Sometime in 1941 he left Chongqing for Hong Kong. It was there, in October of that year, that he composed "Ruguo ta hai huozhe" (If he were still alive) in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of Lu Xun's death. Unlike most of Hu's writing from the war period, this essay is marked by an uncluttered lyrical style that perfectly matches its contemplative tone. He remarks how Lu Xun's penchant for biting self-criticism seemed to be out of fashion in the enthusiastic early days of the war: "He was silent at last and would no longer tell us things to dampen our spirits. We were, at any rate, sure that he would have been as excited as anyone else and have felt that China had completely changed for the better." 72 But despite all indications to the contrary, it is times like the early 1940s, when "it is only permitted to sing the praises of victory, to sing the praises of China's old and glorious culture and how the Chinese people are both fortunate and free," that particularly call for Lu Xun's spirit of self-examination. The contrast, during the war, of speech and the reality behind it had brought about unprecedented hypocrisy. Hu is not optimistic about how Lu Xun would have been received in this atmosphere: "in accordance with the strategies of a few 'gentlemen'—a national essence73 strategy that seems new but is in fact 'something long possessed'—how could [Lu Xun] help but be placed in the category of 'new style traitor' or 'fifth columnist'?" 74 It need hardly be added that the "gentlemen" Hu Feng was referring to were anything but the old-school conservatives of the 1920s.

72. Hu Feng, "Ruguo ta hai huozhe" (If he were still alive), in his Zai hunluan limian (In confusion) (Shanghai: Zuojia, 1949), p. 72. 73. "National essence" was the conservative doctrine, advanced in the early part of the twentieth century, that claimed China should maintain an autonomous culture. For a detailed discussion, see Laurence A. Schneider, "National Essence and the New Intelligentsia," in Charlotte Furth, ed., The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 5 7 - 8 9 . 74. Hu Feng, "Ruguo ta hai huozhe," p. 76.

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Having identified himself with Lu Xun, however, Hu Feng pulls his exposition up short: Suddenly there came upon me an access of guilt. For spoiled men of culture like us, or at least like me, since we cannot be spoken of as having the fervent depth of his thought and his firm will to battle, how can we ever be said to have experienced his deep pain? W h a t is most in fashion these days is a smug complacency based on w h o knows what. This is at best an optimism in which most of us discard our responsibilities, along with laments through which we can also discard them. It is probably not people like us w h o can remember him. It seems as if someone once said that self-reflection was the behavior of the weakling, that he can gain absolution only through this. I think this saying may be correct, as that access of guilt which came upon me just n o w settled me d o w n ; it was as if something heavy that had been pressing upon my heart were removed. 7 5

This passage most eloquently poses the dilemma of revolutionary consciousness. On the one hand, total lack of self-consciousness is obviously as perilous as ever. In the past it had blinded people to the wrongs of the old society. But in the present it allows would-be reformers to talk of change without making any real moves toward coping with the substance of the problem, and is thus in a sense even more dangerous. On the other hand, Hu implies, infinite self-consciousness runs a parallel risk: a selfinvolvement so great that the indulger spends his time either working out any problem solipsistically in his own mind or peeling off layer after layer of motive until there are no grounds left for action. Ironically, both extremes lead to the same result: lack of contact with the social process. The passage also demonstrates Hu Feng's continuing fidelity to Lu Xun's balanced critique of self and society: the echoes from the endings of "New Year's Sacrifice," "In the Wineshop," and "The Misanthrope" are perhaps intentional. But such a careful balance left no more scope for action than it had in 1925. Hu's response was, characteristically, to transpose these practical insights onto a theoretical plane; "smug complacency" was to become "subjective formalism," the root cause of unwillingness to take a hard look at reality. 76 In thus allowing prevailing ways to go unchallenged, this formalism obscures the force of the legitimate subject. 77 The ascription to the literary officials of failures of both objective and subjective perception illustrates the main problem that Hu Feng faced: the comprehensive claims of the Party over Marxist theory. That Hu Feng felt

75. 76. 1951), 77.

Ibid., pp. 7 8 - 7 9 . Hu Feng, Lun xianshizhuyi de lu (About the way of realism) (Shanghai: Nitu she, p. 12. Ibid., p. 40.

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obliged to attack both subjective utopianism and bureaucratic conservatism in the same breath offers a backhanded testimony to the extent to which the Party had filled the vacuum of political thought that had so tormented Lu Xun in 1918 and 1919. It was Hu Feng's conviction, however, that the apparatus of Party theory had only made more secure many of the traditional patterns of behavior that had always exercised silent dominion. Beyond countering with a point-by-point critique of the Party's literary policy, Hu Feng was left with little ground of his own. While motivated by this sense of isolation, his eventual choice to emphasize the subjective self's powers of judgment—a choice enunciated in his 1943 essay, "Xianshizhuyi zai jintian" (Realism today)—was not simplistic. "This integration or fusing of subjective spirit with objective truth," he wrote, "has given birth to the militance of the new literature and we call it realism." 78 That one sentence, which almost became Hu's motto in the years that followed, includes in its scope introspection, a balance of the self with external reality, vigilance against the dangers of a recrudescence of the old mentality in himself or in society at large, and awareness of the ever-present possibility of the rebirth of a sclerotic bureaucracy. In a sense, in being forced to return to the idea of the powers of individual perception, Hu Feng had almost come full circle, back to the concerns of the pre-1925 Lu Xun. By this time, however, the scope for permissible argument had narrowed and the new climate of opinion made it harder for those who would direct attention to the sources of personal motivation both to find the right phrasing and to gain recognition. Hu's critics in Communist China could thus easily dismiss his appeal simply as "a mistaken theory of subjective idealism." 79 As such, it was judged to be symptomatic of an unregenerate petit-bourgeois mentality at odds with the ideology of the new state after 1949 and, consequently, to offer grounds for excluding Hu from all literary activity. V. Conclusion For all the genuine commitment that Hu Feng's writings of this period evince, they also display a certain claustrophobia. Lu Xun's thinking had developed in an earlier period, when the greatest threat was posed by a tradition that, however tenacious, was generally perceived as moribund. The famous iron house was the perfect symbol of that tradition: the fact 78. Hu Feng, "Xianshizhuyi zai jintian" (Realism today), in Zai hunluan limian, p. 57. Paul Pickowicz has translated the whole article in Kai-yu Hsu, ed., Literature in the People's Republic of China (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 6 3 - 6 7 . 79. Lin Zhihao, ed., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shi (History of modern Chinese literature) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1979), 2:654.

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that the sleepers inside would soon die of suffocation suggested the intellectual vacuum in which they functioned. In such an atmosphere (or lack thereof) it was possible to build structures of meaning intricate enough to do justice to the complexities of the situation. The move to engagement after 1929 represented a trade-off: in exchange for a certain intellectual and literary coarsening, Lu Xun gained a sense that concerted human action would gradually fill the vacuum in some necessarily uncertain but definitely new way. He never had to deal with all the ramifications of this view, however; he was allowed the luxury of pressing for change without ever really having to face and be obliged to dissent from definite and binding policy decisions about literature made by the revolutionaries. The National Defense Literature debate was something of an exception, but, more to the point, Lu Xun's extreme reaction to it, combined with his immense prestige, were the only things that could force the people in charge of the campaign to an eventual compromise. At any rate, the debate marked a turning point in the relationship of the Party to literary theory, and Lu Xun's death not long after separated him physically from his legacy just at the point where that legacy began to undergo its most severe trials. During the war years, the radicals came to hope for the fundamental transformation of Chinese culture and society through overall political control, rather than simply through domination of the thought patterns of the progressive intellectuals. In retrospect, it is clear that drastic compromise with the theoretical purity so cherished by Lu Xun was a necessary constituent of Communist success, but the compromise eventually effected was as different as it could be from the 1927 Guomindang retreat into the vacuum of the past. The Communist combination of institutionalization with Utopian ideas of incessant and inevitable progress was unprecedented in Chinese history and had the profoundest implications for all aspects of culture. In a sense, the Communists fused the two extremes of traditional Chinese thought—the conservatism of the line functionary and the radicalism of the fundamentalist neo-Confucian visionary. A bureaucracy thus armed with an ideology of hope and change was undoubtedly a potent instrument, and one that accounts for much of the energy set free in China in the fifteen or twenty years after 1937. But there was a darker side to this combination, too, of which Hu Feng was the most perceptive analyst. Following in the steps of Lu Xun, he saw that radical rhetoric was merely the content and that the form holding that content was a traditional pattern of organization. For Hu, the most obvious symptom of this condition was that the structure of literary authority was assembled in a very traditional fashion. Protests against such a state of affairs, however, were apt to sound thin and plaintive to any observer not immediately involved; since on the surface Hu Feng and the Party shared a

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common ideology, a critic in those euphoric days could only point to contradictions between theory and practice that could possibly become serious sooner or later. If, like Hu Feng, the critic chose to argue each point on the basis of theory and thereby to attempt to keep alive the ideological hope for fundamental change, his voice would sound that much shriller. The critical legacy of Lu X u n thus proved to be a fragile vessel. Had his ideas remained unattached and as deeply problematic as they had been before 1 9 2 6 , they would have been largely irrelevant in the years of political turmoil that followed. But even when he became engaged, Lu Xun's approach to literature and society was self-limiting, at its best as a device of negation. There was bound to be trouble as he himself forsaw, when that approach touched on any sort of official policy. In assessing Hu Feng's limitations, then, it is difficult to say where he could have made a more substantial impact, faithful as he was to his mentor. By carefully occupying the whole of the intellectual ground, the Party left as little space for effective dissent within itself as without.

7 Lu Xun in the Period 1936-1949: The Making of a Chinese Gorki DAVID HOLM

Lu Xun's death on October 19, 1 9 3 6 , after a long and tragic struggle against tuberculosis, marked the end of an era in modern Chinese literature. M a j o r changes were in fact already under way, to which Lu Xun's death lent an air of finality. In literary circles the League of Left-Wing Writers, under Lu Xun's aegis since 1 9 3 0 , had been disbanded by the leaders of the Party fraction, provoking bitter quarrels between Lu Xun and his former colleagues. On the wider stage, the long period of uneasy peace was shortly to give way to full-scale war with Japan, which daily seemed more imminent. For Lu Xun's friends and followers, who needed his leadership more than ever, his death could not have come at a worse time. T h e unresolved divisions between his former colleagues and associates led to inconclusive debates about and conflicting interpretations of Lu Xun and his work. Commemorated as a national hero, Lu Xun was also a name to be invoked for fractional purposes. During the war years Lu Xun's legacy was not only an oeuvre of recognized size and shape—an object of esthetic appreciation and of scholarly devotion—but also a battleground, an ideological terrain that various contestants sought to occupy. For the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Lu Xun's reputation as a writer and as the former figurehead of the Party-organized League of Left-Wing Writers meant that the interpretation of his legacy was far too important to leave in the hands of just anyone. It was necessary, rather, to "construct" that legacy. A legacy in this sense is, of course, very different from the unsystematic nexus of artistic influence, private remembrance, detached scholarly comment and reflection, and even fierce but free-ranging controversy that we would normally associate with the legacy of an important writer recently dead. In wartime China, however, it became progressively harder for even well-known 153

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writers to make a living at their craft without becoming dependent on political patronage. For better or worse, the CCP's official line in culture gradually became a major force in intellectual life throughout China. L u X u n a n d the N a t i o n a l D e f e n s e Literature D e b a t e How then are we to approach the study of Lu Xun's legacy in the war years? What, indeed, were the important issues? Because so much about the history of Chinese literature in the late 1930s and the 1940s remains uncharted territory, only a major research effort is likely to come up with reliable answers: the present study is more by way of a preliminary investigation. A number of observations can be made, however, on the basis of existing scholarship. One may confidently expect, for example, that the acrimonious quarrel that erupted between Lu Xun and the Party's cultural leadership in Shanghai during the final months of his life was bound to have repercussions long afterward, particularly as the debate over the T w o Slogans was never completely resolved during Lu Xun's lifetime. One would expect that the Party leadership would seek to cover up all traces of the dispute or at least to downplay its significance and implications. On a less public level, one would expect to find among writers on the Left some lingering doubt about the sincerity of Party leaders and Party policy objectives. Many aspects of the National Defense Literature debate still remain obscure. Western scholarship has usually seen the debates as a conflict between independent-minded leftist writers and a monolithic and opportunistic Party apparatus. It has usually been taken for granted that Zhou Yang, leader of the Party fraction in the League, was simply following Mao's (or "the Party's") orders. 1 Evidence has come to light since 1 9 6 7 , however, that points to a more complicated situation, and recent discussion in China has resulted in another round of reassessment. Through this it has become increasingly clear that Zhou Yang and his followers were not following M a o ' s line but, rather, were operating independently on the basis of directives from the Comintern. After all, the Internationalist group under Wang Ming had close links with the Shanghai Party leadership. It is well to remember also that Shanghai was, in terms of ease and speed of communications, much closer to Moscow than it was to Yan'an. 2 If this was the case, then, our whole understanding of the course of this

1. See, especially, T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 1 0 1 - 1 4 5 ; and Amitendranath Tagore, Literary Debates in Modern China, 1918-1937 (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1967), pp. 1 6 7 - 2 1 3 . 2. Feng Xuefeng, "Youguan yijiusanliunian Zhou Yang deng ren de xingdong yiji Lu Xun tichu 'Minzu geming zhanzheng de dazhong wenxue' kouhao de jingguo" (On the activities of Zhou Yang and others in 1936 and Lu Xun's espousal of the slogan "Mass Literature of the National Revolutionary War"), Xin ivenxue shiliao (Historical materials on the new literature) 2 (1979): 258.

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debate and of who represented whom must be radically restructured. It is almost certain that when Feng Xuefeng arrived in Shanghai in April 1936 from Yan'an and proceeded to give his qualified support to Lu Xun, he was representing the viewpoint of the Yan'an leadership in doing so. His credentials as an emissary of Party Central were impugned by the Shanghai leadership under Zhou Yang, which accused him of colluding with Hu Feng and exceeding his authority. A careful reading of Feng Xuefeng's published articles on the National Defense issue, however, suggests that he did not lend uncritical support to Hu Feng and his activities.3 It is probably a mistake, then, to link Feng and Hu together in a single anti—Zhou Yang faction. After Feng's intervention had precipitated the Battle of the Slogans, Party Central made a number of attempts to heal the rift. In October 1936, for instance, an article appeared in the magazine Zuojia (Author) under the name Mo Wenhua. The author, who has since been identified as Liu Shaoqi, 4 presented an authoritative overview of the debate and an assessment that was by no means entirely favorable to the Zhou Yang group. In fact, he endorsed the theoretical position of Lu Xun and Mao Dun while censuring both Zhou Yang and Hu Feng for factionalism. The correct position, Mo argued, was that both slogans were correct: they were complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Also rather surprisingly, in view of received Western opinion, Mo argued that the debate had produced many positive gains: the arguments had become more concrete and the issues overall, considerably clearer. The main accomplishment had been a victory over factionalism and "closed-doorism", 5 that is, over the work style of Zhou Yang and his Party fraction. All this new information puts Lu Xun's "quarrel with the Party" in an altogether different light. Party Central was clearly at some pains to maintain its links with Lu Xun and Mao Dun, above all, and it is Zhou Yang's relationship to the Maoist leadership that requires some explanation. In fact, there is very little evidence of any personal links between Zhou and what later became Mao's circle of ideologists in Yan'an; 6 it seems that his 3. See, for instance, Lii Keyu [Feng Xuefeng], "Duiyu wenxue yundong jige wenti de yijian" (An opinion on several questions facing the literary movement), Zuojia (Author) 1:6 (15 September 1936). 4. Renmin ribao (People's daily), 16 September 1967. 5. Mo Wenhua, " W o guan zheici wenyi lunzhan de yijian" (My view on the present literary debate), Zuojia 2:1 (15 October 1936): 2 7 2 - 2 7 5 . 6. Many of Mao's closest advisers on ideology during the Yan'an period had been active in Chen Boda's New Enlightenment movement of 1935—1936: see Raymond F. Wylie, The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch'en Po-ta and the Search for Chinese Theory, 1935-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980). Zhou Yang seems to have had little connection with this group, except that he did appear as one of the discussants in a seminar, "Xian jieduan de Zhongguo sixiang yundong" (The Chinese intellectual movement in the present stage), in Xia Zhengnong, ed., Xian jieduan de Zhongguo sixiang yundong (Chinese intellectual movements of the current stage) (Shanghai: Yiban shudian, 1937), p. 1. Other participants included Ai Siqi, Xia Zhengnong, and He Ganzhi, all leading lights in the New Enlightenment movement.

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own theoretical bent, which at this time closely followed trends in Japan and the Soviet Union, would actually have inclined him more toward the Internationalists. 7 These are not idle thoughts, for Zhou Yang, as the ranking Party spokesman for professional artists and higher intellectuals during the war period and beyond, became one of the chief architects of the Party's official interpretation of Lu Xun. Once we start looking more closely at the 1930s, however, we begin to realize just how little we know about the internal politics of the League of Left-Wing Writers or about the development of Marxist literary theory overall. The left-wing decade has recently been undergoing a reappraisal in Chinese literary circles, as part of a general reassessment of "leftism," and some articles have referred to the pervasive influence within the League of Fukumotoism. 8 This tendency was named after Fukumoto Kazuo, who dominated the Japanese Proletarian Literary Arts League during the late 1920s. An "intellectual distortion of Marxism," Fukumotoism maintained that it was more important to purify the vanguard body by means of a series of epistemological and methodological disputes than to develop the proletarian base or mass struggles in the factories. 9 This idea was dominant within the JPLA for some years, and very probably was transplanted to China, where the early 1930s witnessed endless theoretical battles in left-wing circles and a similar neglect of practical work. In fact, many of the leading theoreticians within the League's Party group, including Zhou Yang, Hu Feng, and Xia Yan, had all begun their study of Marxist literary theory in Japan and kept in close touch with developments there. The whole international dimension of the League of Left-Wing Writers needs to be explored much more thoroughly. It is not often recognized by students of modern Chinese literature that the Chinese League was merely one of a large number of national left-wing writers' associations set up in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the support of the Comintern. 10 Many of the features that are now viewed in isolation, as somehow distinctively Chinese, may, in fact, be part of a wider pattern of political movement and method. Indeed, this may be true of Lu Xun's own position within the League. Even a superficial acquaintance with the history of the left-wing movement 7. Feng Xuefeng notes in his article "Youguan Zhou Yang," however, that he had uncovered no trace of any organizational links between the Internationalist leadership and Zhou Yang. 8. Xia Yan, " 'Zuolian' chengli qianhou" (Before and after the foundation of the Left League), Wenxue pinglun (Literary criticism) 2 (1980): 3. 9. Robert A. Scalapino, The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920-1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 26 ff. 10. For Japan, see G. T. Shea, Left-Wing Literature in Japan (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 1964); for the U.S., see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

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in other countries reveals their common tendency to elevate certain writers to the status of figurehead, model, and hero. In the Soviet Union the writer par excellence was Gorki; in the United States, first J a c k London and then John Reed; in Germany, the artists Georg Grosz and Käthe Kollwitz. This cult of the individual as a "personification of the struggle" was not an accidental development but part of a deliberate strategy. This strategy had more to do with vulgar Marxism and with the Soviet work-style as it developed in the 1 9 2 0 s and 1930s than with Marxist theory in any pure sense, and its appeal was not entirely rational, involving as it did manipulations of preexisting notions of "common sense" and modes of sentimentality for short- and medium-term political advantage. With Lu Xun, as with Gorki, a writer was chosen who had an independent reputation and readership before his "conversion" to the cause of revolutionary communism and who could, therefore, speak with independent authority to the as-yet unconverted and lend the weight of his authenticity, sincerity, and intellectual respectability to the Party's cause. The writer could thus be taken as a living example of the progress from independent progressive and public-minded citizen to committed Communist and revolutionary, and indeed provide living proof, as it were, of the inevitability of such a progression for all serious thinking people. This, in a nutshell, was the essence of the cult of M a x i m Gorki in the Soviet Union; it was also the central issue in the cult of Lu Xun that the Chinese Party fostered both before and after his death.

T h e P u b l i c a t i o n o f Lu X u n ' s W o r k s The rather simplified view of Lu Xun required for such a cult, however, did not command universal support, even if the Party came eventually to occupy a position of dominance in this as in other matters of public opinion. Rather, in the war years Lu Xun was the object of a multiplicity of interpretations, some public, some private, some sincere, and some proclaimed for ulterior motives. A useful starting place, and one that provides an instructive contrast with the acrimony that surrounded Lu Xun in his last months, was the publication and scholarly investigation of his works. The most ambitious of such efforts was undoubtedly the publication of Lu Xun quattji (The complete works of Lu Xun) in enemy-occupied Shanghai during the first stage of the war. Indeed, it might well be that the colleagues, friends, and other interested groups who participated in this project secured for Lu Xun's works a wider audience in the later 1 9 3 0 s and the 1 9 4 0 s than they had had during his lifetime. The organization responsible for publishing the twenty-volume collection was the Fushe (Recovery Society), a small and clandestine group whose members were

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constantly on the run from the Japanese military police.11 The editing of the collection, however, was a task that drew in people from a wide cross section of the Shanghai intellectual community. The project was set in motion just after Lu Xun's death, when the depth of public feeling resulted in many demands for the publication of a complete and authoritative edition of the author's works. From the start Lu Xun's widow, Xu Guangping, played a pivotal role in organizing the writer's papers. Help in collating a number of unpublished works was forthcoming from the author's old friends Xu Shoushang and Feng Xuefeng. In spring of 1937 the writer Tai Jingnong visited Lu Xun's old home and cast the contents into rough order; at his suggestion, an editorial committee was formed that included Cai Yuanpei, Mao Dun, and Zhou Zuoren, among others. In fact, the most remarkable thing about the project was the range of personalities and talents it drew in. A Ying (Qian Xingcun), for instance, a former antagonist of Lu Xun's, searched his own library to ensure that nothing was left out of the collection and provided copies of a number of rare articles. The articles "Treatise on Art," "Art and Criticism," and "Art Policy" were hunted down by Zhou Wen and Hu Yuzhi, two of Lu Xun's former colleagues in the League of Left-Wing Writers. Other manuscripts in the hands of Zhou Zuoren were sent from Peking via Kunming and Hong Kong. Other contributors were Cao Jinghua, Li Jiye, Tang Tao, Liu Yazi, Zhou Jianren, Wang Renshu (Ba Ren), and Zheng Zhenduo. The list includes not only personal friends of Lu Xun but also former antagonists and a wide range of writers, traditional sinologists, publishers, and businessmen.12 The publication of the Complete Works seems to have had an immediate and profound effect on Lu Xun studies in China. The collection went through two editions during the war years—1938 and 1946—and became widely available in the interior.13 It immediately became the standard text for reference: even in the Yan'an newspaper Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), articles on Lu Xun frequently referred readers to the Complete Works, and it is clear that at least one copy was held in the central research library there. One important question is: To what extent was the Party involved in the project? Certain key members of the enterprise, notably Hu Yuzhi, had also been active in the League of Left-Wing Writers, and other participants were also Party members: A Ying, Zhou Wen, Feng Xuefeng, Cao Jinghua, 11. Edward Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937— J 945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 2 2 - 2 3 . 12. Cai Yuanpei et al., "Lu Xun quanji bianjiao houji" (Postscript to the editing of The Complete Works of Lu Xun), Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun; hereafter cited as LXQJ) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), 2 0 : 6 4 7 - 6 6 4 . 13. According to ibid., p. 661, the initial press run was 1,500 copies.

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and probably also Wang Renshu. Both in motivation and organization, however, the project was nonsectarian, an expression of national unity in the face of the Japanese menace, and Party considerations played a minimal role. Friendship or family relation with Lu X u n was more important. It is highly significant that neither of the t w o major literary factions in the Party—the Z h o u Y a n g group and the Hu Feng group—was represented at any stage in the project. This absence was due only partly, one suspects, to accidents of geography. In view of the later development of Party ideology in Y a n ' a n , the fact is ironic. The participants w h o put a great deal of time, effort, and money into the task of republishing Lu X u n ' s works were clearly motivated by something much more than personal friendship. H o w , then, did these people assess Lu X u n ' s greatness and his position in Chinese literary history? One important expression of their feeling was Cai Yuanpei's preface to the collection. In his opening paragraph, Cai compares Lu Xun with the great men of letters in Chinese history and identifies him as the one w h o "blazed the trail for the new literature." Cai goes on to emphasize the manysidedness of Lu X u n ' s contribution to Chinese letters: Lu X u n , he says, was not just an author, a writer of fiction, but also an outstanding scholar in the Qing Confucian tradition; a prolific translator of foreign literature and literary theory; a trailblazer in the areas of graphic arts, research on the decorative art of H a n steles, and the history of Chinese fiction; and a patron of young talent. On Lu X u n ' s greatness as a writer, Cai w a x e s lyrical: W h a t a great multiplicity of works he produced in twelve years' time! W h a t richness of feeling and thought, w h a t profundity of perception, w h a t endurance of artistic conception, w h a t aptness of words and phrases! W h a t other people obtained with difficulty after bitter thought and strenuous search, he w o u l d write d o w n

quite naturally. W h a t a genius! and w h a t power of

learning! 1 4

It was not just genius, however, but also hard w o r k that lay behind Lu X u n ' s achievement. Lu X u n himself and his family held a rather different view of his "genius." X u Guangping recalled: M r . L u X u n once said: "In reality I have no need to say anything more, for everything that I've ever wanted to say is all there, in tens of volumes of writings." H e didn't admit to having genius, and said on another occasion, " W h e r e ' s the genius in it? I simply use the time for w o r k that other people take drinking c o f f e e . " H e really did study uninterruptedly, and w a s continually striving. W h e n he w a s harboring his illness, friends urged him to rest. H e

1 4 . Cai Yuanpei, " L u Xun quanji xu" (Preface to The Complete LXQJ, 1 : 3 .

Works of Lu

Xun),

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said, " W h a t is this 'rest'? I don't understand it, and as for amusing myself, I can't d o that at all." And some people thought he was "leisured"! 1 5

It is of course characteristic of Lu Xun that he should want no part in any mystification about his "greatness." The admiration of his friends and colleagues, at least, was based on an appreciation of the many-side nature of his talent. Throughout the war period most of the people involved in the publication project continued to write about Lu Xun and to keep this tradition alive. Their writings took the form mainly of reminiscences and of scholarly articles and monographs, and they lived and published mainly in the Shanghai concessions, in Hong Kong, and later in the Nationalist ( K M T ) areas. T h e G r o w t h o f an Official C u l t The Communist Party's exercises in Lu Xun propaganda were in a completely different mode. In broadest terms, the Party encouraged the growth of a cult of Lu X u n as a culture hero, or as a patron saint of literature. There were three strands to the activities surrounding this cult: first, the level of ritual, of large-scale public meetings, memorials, and iconography; second, the level of ideology, of official discourse, newspaper editorials, and political speeches by Party leaders; and third, the level of more elevated scholarly or quasi-scholarly comment. Or, to pursue the analogy with religion, there were liturgy, sermons, and theology. O f these three strands, both ritual and scholarly comment to some extent antedated the development of an official Party view and remained partly autonomous, but the ideological strand came gradually to dominate and to inform the content of the other two aspects of the cult. The most important occasion for the Lu Xun ritual was the commemoration meeting. Every year from 1 9 3 7 on, Lu Xun's death was commemorated on October 19 with mass rallies or private gatherings all over China, while newspaper supplements were filled with articles on Lu Xun. These activities took place in Wuhan, Chongqing, and Guilin as well as in Yan'an and the CCP's Border Regions, and were positively encouraged by the CCP authorities. The archetype for these gatherings was Lu Xun's funeral in 1 9 3 6 , when hundreds of writers, artists, and publicists were joined by delegations of Shanghai residents and primary-school pupils in a massive cortege, carrying funeral inscriptions, wreaths, and portraits of the dead writer and singing specially composed songs of mourning. Important elements in the

15. Cai Xuanpei et al., "Lu Xun quattji bianjiao houji," LXQ],

20:663.

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ceremony included the placing of banners (bearing the legend "Soul of the N a t i o n " ) on the coffin by representatives of various groups at the graveside and funeral orations by such luminaries as Cai Yuanpei, Song Qingling, and Zou Taofen. There was an outpouring of obituaries and reminiscences in the press, and representatives of prominent literary magazines attended the funeral. 16 Similarly, in Yan'an during the war years, October 19 was marked by commemorative meetings attended by writers and artists, students and literary youth, members of cultural organizations and representatives from the masses. Amateur and professional artists painted large-scale portraits of Lu Xun, prominent Party leaders made speeches, and newspapers and cultural magazines printed spates of articles. These general features were constant, but the actual content of what was said varied each year with the prevailing ideological climate. The Party leadership had a major hand in the creation of this climate from very early in the war period. T o this influence we must now turn. It is important to note at the outset that the official interpretation of Lu Xun was always an integral part of the Party's cultural policy, a reflection of general policy in the specific realm of " L u Xun research." Cultural policy itself, moreover, was not an independent variable but increasingly part of the revolutionary strategy as a whole. Thus, even though writings on Lu X u n often took on a scholarly form or masqueraded as theory, it would be wrong to take these claims at face value and to analyze such writings without reference to the wider political context. As with other areas of public discourse and propaganda, the Party's pronouncements on Lu Xun were pitched with a definite "receptive target" or constituency in mind. In the case of Lu Xun discourse, as the great mass of policy pronouncements makes clear, the constituency was not the worker and peasant masses but rather petit-bourgeois intellectuals—meaning the intellectuals who came primarily from the large treaty-port cities, who had at least a modicum of modern Western-style education, and who had been exposed to cosmopolitan culture. Within this group two subgroups can be distinguished: the higher intellectuals (professional writers and artists, for instance) and the much larger group usually referred to as "literary youth." W e can distill some notion—even if one-sided and stereotyped—of the collective psychology of this latter group by reading between the lines of Party pronouncements and literary criticism. There they 16. Xiao Jun, "Lu Xun xiansheng shishi jingguo liieji" (A brief record of the death of Mr. Lu Xun), in Lu Xun xiansheng jinian weiyuanhui (Mr. Lu Xun Remembrance Committee), ed., Lu Xun xiansheng jinian ji (Writings in commemoration of Mr. Lu Xun). Reprinted in Xiao Jun, Lu Xun xiansheng jinian shiliao jicun xuanlu (Historical materials on the commemoration of Mr. Lu Xun: a collection of surviving documents) (unpublished material prepared by Mr. Xiao Jun specifically for this conference, Beijing, 1981), pp. 9 1 - 9 2 .

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appear as Left-leaning, romantic, impulsive, dogmatically cosmopolitan, and deeply imbued with the mystique of Literature and with the ambition to become famous as artistic geniuses. The overall objectives of cultural policy were, first, to attract large numbers of these "literary youth" from other parts of China to the Party's Border Regions and, after their arrival, to train and motivate them for United Front work or for cultural work in close contact with the masses and the war effort. Between these objectives, however, there were latent contradictions, which were exacerbated by the Party's excessive pragmatism. During the early years of the war the first objective was foremost, and students making the journey to Yan'an were offered a free place in a middle school, college, or a research institute; a maintenance allowance; and free clothing—in short, an opportunity to continue their studies and to pursue their chosen vocations.17 Many of the youth recruited in this way were politically uncommitted; hence, patriotic and democratic appeals were more important in Party propaganda during this stage than they were to be later. When its priorities changed, however, the Party found itself faced with the necessity of a major reeducation effort before it could deploy city youth at the village level for mass work. The Party established the broad outlines of its picture of Lu Xun early in the war. Indeed, most of the major statements on this subject by high Party leaders were made between 1938 and 1940. Some of these were included in a collection entitled Lu Xun xin lun (New essays on Lu Xun), published in Hong Kong in early 1938. In it we find essays by Wang Ming, Mao Zedong, Xiao San, Qu Qiubai, Feng Xuefeng, Chen Duxiu, Ouyang Fanhai, and Zhou Zuoren. These essays demonstrate the existence of a rough consensus among Party leaders, but they also bear witness to a striking divergence of views between Mao and his chief rivals, the Internationalists.18 The short essay Wang Ming wrote on the occasion of Lu Xun's death gives us a glimpse at the Internationalists' line on Lu Xun. 19 Wang begins by informing his readers that he is writing from Moscow, where he has read the news of Lu Xun's death in Pravda. He repeatedly hails Lu Xun as "China's Gorki"—an identification made easier by the death of Gorki in August of the same year—and compares him with the great international writers of modern times, Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse. Like them, Lu Xun was remarkable for his "inexhaustible love for the people of his 17. See D. L. Holm, "Art and Ideology in the Yenan Period, 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 4 5 " (D. Phil, dissertation, Oxford University, 1979), pp. 2 6 - 2 8 . 18. On this rivalry, see Gregor Benton, "The 'Second Wang Ming Line,' " China Quarterly 61 (March 1975): 6 1 - 9 4 . 19. Wang Ming, "Zhongguo renmin de weida sunshi" (A great loss to the Chinese people), in Wang Ming et al., Lu Xun xin lun (New essays on Lu Xun) (n.p.: Xin wen chubanshe, 1938), pp. 1 - 8 .

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own country, for mankind, for justice, for truth, for freedom, for enlightenment—and especially for the class that is still the most exploited and the most oppressed throughout the greater part of the world today . . . the proletariat." 2 0 Wang is equally confident in pronouncing Lu Xun's greatness, describing him as " a n epoch-making and talented revolutionary writer" who turned Chinese literature into " a weapon reflecting the lives of people of the lowest station and working for the liberation of the great majority of the Chinese people." His death, therefore, is a loss not only to intellectuals, or to the Party, or to literary youth but to the whole of China and the whole of mankind. At the same time, Wang emphasizes the practical support Lu Xun had given the Party: he had made substantial donations from his private earnings and at considerable personal risk had harbored such known revolutionaries as Qu Qiubai during the White Terror of the 1930s. Much is also made of Lu Xun's role as a translator of Soviet literature and literary theory. Indeed, national concerns are linked to internationalism and to support for the Soviet Union in almost every paragraph. Here is a characteristic passage: " C h i n a ' s G o r k i " died t o o e a r l y ! R i g h t up until the d a y he died he h a d never lived in an e n v i r o n m e n t in w h i c h he c o u l d say w h a t he t h o u g h t a n d w r i t e w h a t he w a n t e d t o w r i t e . H e k n e w t h a t there w a s o n e c o u n t r y in the w o r l d w h e r e he c o u l d say a n d d o w h a t e v e r he wished, b u t b e c a u s e o f his illness a n d o t h e r r e a s o n s he w a s n e v e r able t o fulfill his h o p e s a n d g o there o n a visit. A t the s a m e time, he k n e w t h a t t h e r e w a s also a p l a c e within C h i n a w h e r e he c o u l d enjoy t h e s a m e s o r t o f g l o r y t h a t the Soviet g o v e r n m e n t b e s t o w e d o n G o r k i . . . b u t he k n e w also t h a t the forces o f d a r k n e s s w o u l d never let h i m go there.21

This is 1 9 3 0 s vulgar Marxism at its most sentimental. Elsewhere Wang refers to the international mourning for Lu Xun: progressive authors not only in the Soviet Union but also in France and America have been deeply moved, and from Paris the World Society for the Support of Culture sent a telegram to Lu Xun's funeral on behalf of all the progressive writers of the world. 2 2 It is noteworthy that Wang Ming makes no reference to Lu Xun's quarrel with the Party leadership in Shanghai; it may well be that he was simply unaware of it. In any case, he says, "When the Chinese Communist Party promulgated its new policy of establishing a United Front to resist Japan and save the country, Lu Xun from beginning to end indicated that he warmly supported it." This claim was true, of course, as far as it went, 20. Ibid., p. 3. 21. Ibid., pp. 4 - 5 . 22. Ibid., p. 7.

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but Lu X u n was hardly an advocate of the policy later attributed to Wang: "Everything through the United Front." Many of the same points were repeated and amplified in a long article by the writer and poet X i a o San commemorating the first anniversary of Lu Xun's death. 23 Like Wang Ming, X i a o San was writing from the Soviet Union. A brief glance over his subheads will provide an outline of Lu Xun's legacy, as expounded by this school of thought: 1. 2. 3.

The life and times of Lu X u n (Lu X u n ' s progress from medicine to literature and from idealism to materialism) Lu X u n — a great realist author and founder of China's N e w Literature Lu X u n — a fighting political theorist

4. 5.

Lu X u n — m a t e r i a l i s t thinker and critic Lu X u n — p a r t i c i p a n t in social movements, revolutionary, fighter

6. 7. 8.

Lu X u n — a great son of the great Chinese people Lu X u n — a l l y of the Chinese Communist Party Lu X u n — n o n - P a r t y Bolshevik

9. 10.

Lu X u n — b e s t friend of the Soviet Union Lu X u n — i n t r o d u c e r of foreign literature and especially of Russian literature

11.

Lu Xun—internationalist, fighter Lu X u n — C h i n a ' s Gorki

12.

opponent of imperialist war,

anti-Fascist

The text in each of these sections consists mainly of quotations from the works of Lu Xun, selected so as to give substance to the characterizations in the subheads. There is no space here to go into details, but we should note the combination of nationalistic appeal (in section 6) with international rhetoric and, in particular, with an emphasis on friendship with the Soviet Union (sections 9—12). For literary youth in China, of course, the latter policy could not have any direct implications for action, but it served to legitimize the leadership of those best equipped to interpret the Soviet revolutionary experience—that is, the Internationalists under Wang Ming. Curiously enough, X i a o San does raise, obliquely, the issue of the Battle of the Slogans. Averring that if Lu Xun had lived longer he would willingly have gone to the front and sacrificed himself to prevent the occupation of his country by the Japanese, X i a o quotes from Lu Xun's famous letter to Xu Maoyong: "When this pen has become useless, I am quite confident that I will certainly not be inferior to X u Maoyong and his ilk in the use of other weapons!" 2 4 X i a o says nothing more specific about the affair, but from the way he goes on to concur in this judgment, one may imagine that he sup-

23. Xiao San, "Jinian Lu Xun" (In commemoration of Lu Xun), in Lu Xun xin lun, pp. 15-55. 24. Ibid., p. 20.

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ported Lu Xun against the Zhou Yang faction. Caution is necessary, however: it is possible that Xiao San, in Moscow, was simply unaware of the link between Xu Maoyong and the Party cultural leadership in Shanghai. This effort by the Internationalists to mould Lu Xun in their image was not to go unchallenged by Mao and his supporters. On the first anniversary of Lu Xun's death, October 19, 1937, Mao himself spoke to an assembly at the North Shaanxi Public School in Yan'an. Notes of this speech have come down to us under the title "Lu Xun lun" (On Lu Xun). 2S This was to be Mao's most extensive comment on the writer. As with most of his speeches, Mao set out his policy objectives clearly at the beginning. Here, his goal was to mould intellectual youth and students like those at the school into a vanguard, "a large body of activist elements to step forward and lead. . . . This vanguard will be frank and open-hearted, faithful and sincere, active and impartial," Mao says. "[T]hey will not fear hardship, . . . they will not be arrogant elements or opportunists but will be people with their feet firmly on solid ground and rich in practical spirit." 26 The model for this exemplary behavior was, of course, Lu Xun, and in this regard Lu Xun the writer was less important than Lu Xun the man of integrity and farsightedness. 27 M a o goes on to single out three special characteristics of Lu Xun for special comment. First is his long-range political vision; Lu Xun, as Mao puts it, "observed society through a microscope and a telescope." As an example, Mao points to Lu Xun's prediction, in the last year of his life, that the Chinese Trotskyites might collaborate with puppet governments and the Japanese. It was precisely in relation to this point that Mao went on to assess Lu Xun's "greatness": "The value of Lu Xun to China," Mao proclaims, "is that he should be regarded as the number one sage of China. Confucius was the sage of the feudal society; Lu Xun is the sage of the New China." 2 8 Lu Xun's second salient characteristic is his "fighting spirit." Mao contrasts Lu Xun the stalwart revolutionary with such people as Kautsky and Plekhanov, who began as revolutionaries but started making compromises and ended up by selling out on their comrades. The third characteristic is Lu Xun's "spirit of sacrifice," his fearless determination in the face of threats and his stubbornness in the face of obstacles. This resoluteness and hatred of compromise carried over into his attitude toward his enemies, his lack of false pity and false gentleness. Mao quotes with approval Lu Xun's senti25. M a o Zedong, "Lu Xun lun" (On Lu Xun), in Mo Takuto shu bunken shiryo kenkyu-kai, ed., Mo Takuto shii (The collected works of Mao Zedong) (Tokyo: Hokuma sha, 1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 2 ) , 5 : 2 7 9 - 2 8 3 . 26. Ibid., p. 279. 27. Ibid., p. 280. 28. Ibid., p. 281.

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ments on beating dogs that had fallen into the water. Taken together, these three characteristics combined to make the great "Lu Xun spirit" and enabled Lu Xun to become "a wonderful writer and an outstanding and seasoned element in the revolutionary ranks." It was this spirit, says Mao, that the youth of China should emulate in every sphere of resistance work. Although Mao made no reference to Lu Xun's quarrel with Zhou Yang (it would have been out of place to do so), his emphasis in this speech would seem to suggest that he supported Lu Xun's intransigence and hatred of compromise in that dispute rather than the opportunism implicit in the Zhou Yang line and in Zhou's rapprochement with former bourgeois elements and political enemies. But the speech gives no clear indication of Mao's personal opinion on the matter or even of his intra-Party position. His sentiments may very well have had the effect, however, of strengthening May Fourth—style iconoclasm among literary youth, and it was not long before the hatred of compromise he professed to admire in Lu Xun was to cause him serious problems in Yan'an. The "On Lu Xun" speech was not formally published at the time Mao delivered it and was not included in Mao's Selected Works.29 His remarks on Lu Xun in a later speech, "On New Democracy" (1940), received much wider coverage and later became the locus classicus for the subject of Lu Xun's greatness and his place in the New China. Speaking of Lu Xun's role in the May Fourth New Culture movement, Mao wrote: Lu X u n was the greatest and most courageous standard-bearer of this new cultural force. T h e chief c o m m a n d e r of China's cultural revolution, he was not only a great man of unyielding integrity, free from all sycophancy . . . he was also the bravest and most correct, the firmest, the most loyal and the most ardent national hero, a hero without parallel in our history. The road he took was the very road of China's new national culture. 3 0

In other words, all that was valuable in the May Fourth movement was encapsulated in the experience of this one man and in his progress from patriot and enlightener to committed Marxist and revolutionary. The point was, of course, that in Mao's view the New Culture movement was itself "New Democratic," that is, it took place or should have taken place under the leadership of the Communist Party and the proletariat. Thus, although Mao's assessment was not intended to break any new theoretical ground, it implied a maximalist, politically partisan claim by the CCP to the heritage of Lu Xun. There is a clear contrast, then, between how Mao Zedong and his rivals in the Internationalist faction wrote about Lu Xun. The former empha29. Notes of the speech appeared, at the time of its delivery, in Qiyue (July) 10 (1 March 1938): 2 8 9 - 2 9 0 , under the title " M a o Zedong lun Lu Xun" (Mao Zedong on Lu Xun); and in Kangzhan jianguo ziliao (Materials on the resistance war and national reconstruction) (n.p.: Fengu shuwu, 1938). 30. Mao Tse-tung [Mao Zedong], Selected Works, 2:372.

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sized Lu Xun as the vanguard of the Chinese New Culture movement; the latter depicted him as the Chinese Gorki and the friend of the Soviet Union. The Internationalist rhetoric, though it was designed to appeal to those with cosmopolitan and politically avant-garde leanings and perhaps to capture their loyalties for the Chinese Communist Party, remained essentially unfocused and passive—that is, it entailed no clear and straightforward consequences for individual conduct or political action. Mao, on the other hand, was much more interested in social construction and base-building, and hence in the conscious development of a revolutionary vanguard to carry out these tasks. His remarks on Lu Xun were intended to outline the essential characteristics of the true revolutionary character and had immediate, active, and prescriptive implications. Yet despite this contrast, and despite the underlying factional struggle, these two views of Lu Xun were not mutually exclusive. During and after the political triumph Mao achieved over Wang Ming in the Rectification campaign of 1942—1944, a synthesis was produced and elements of both viewpoints became part of the Party's repertoire of Lu Xun propaganda. Political use of Lu Xun, however, was not confined to articles and speeches written specifically about him. Such was his importance for modern Chinese literature and so broad was his talent that discourse on virtually any literary or cultural issue was bound, sooner or later, to develop a Lu Xun component. This was certainly true of the National Forms debates that swept through Yan'an, Chongqing, and other literary centers after October 1938. 31 For the Maoist Party leadership the central problem was how to advocate the use of indigenous Chinese forms of art and an end to "foreign eight-legged essays" without appearing to condemn the May Fourth movement as a whole. The fictional works and satirical essays of Lu Xun became here a point of particular difficulty. Written in a terse and difficult style, they could by no means be said to have gained a wide readership among even semieducated workers and peasants. Severe reservations about using Lu Xun as a literary model under wartime conditions were expressed by none other than Chen Boda, at that time Mao's political secretary and a leading figure among the cultural populist group in Yan'an. Though Chen did not hesitate to pay tribute to Lu Xun's standing as a "writer of world significance," he shrank from designating his works models of national form. 32 This was not so, however, with the writers at the Lu Xun Academy of Arts in Yan'an, who, under the leadership of Zhou Yang, were concerned 31. On these debates, see D. L. Holm, "National Form and the Popularisation of Literature in Yenan," in Fondation Singer-Polignac, éd., La Littérature chinoise au temps de la guerre de résistance contre le Japon (de 1937 à 1945) (Limoges: L'Imprimerie Bontemps, 1982), pp. 2 1 5 - 2 3 5 . 32. Chen Boda, "Guanyu wenyi de minzu xingshi zaji" (Random notes on national form in literature and art), Wenyi zhanxian (Literary front) 1:3 (16 April 1939): 2 4 - 2 6 .

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to protect the future of the New Literature against the populist onslaught and particularly to maintain the place of prose fiction as the queen of the arts under Party guidance. For these writers, Lu Xun became the prime example of the new national forms in the making. This group emphasized the positive aspects of the New Literature movement since May Fourth and argued that it was already "sinified." According to Zhou Yang, then, Lu Xun's characters were "full-blooded Chinese" in spite of the fact that Lu Xun was profoundly influenced by Gogol and other foreign writers, and his style was "a full-blooded Chinese style": the new national forms should take "quality" (zhi) as the starting point, and begin from Lu Xun's stories. 33 This was probably the majority view among the writers and artists, and indeed among the literary youth, in Yan'an. These individuals were each imbued, to a greater or lesser extent, with the mystique of becoming a "great author" and of producing works "of a world standard." In following the example of Lu Xun they all too often showed themselves to be unwilling to compromise on "quality" or on what they regarded as matters of principle, even if the effectiveness of mass education was at stake. The example of Lu Xun can in this sense be said to have contributed to the petit-bourgeois intransigence and elitism of a generation of aspiring revolutionary writers. The Party in Yan'an advertised its connection with Lu Xun in other ways as well. Besides setting up a Lu Xun Library and a Lu Xun Teachers' College, it established a Lu Xun Academy of Art and Literature in April 1938 to train cultural specialists. In fact, this institution was the counterpart of the Gorki School of Art that the rural wing of the CCP had set up in the Jiangxi Soviet during the early 1930s. Lu Xun was honored through his widow, Xu Guangping, who was co-opted onto the honorary board of governors. Behind enemy lines, in the southeast Shaanxi base area, a Lu Xun Art School was established in 1939, under Li Bozhao. Many other cultural organizations were also named after Lu Xun, including cultural work teams, woodcut print factories, and propaganda troupes. Plaster of Paris busts of Lu Xun and woodcut portraits were among the first articles produced by the Fine Art Department at the Lu Xun Academy in Yan'an. 34 Elevation a n d Rectification The homage paid to Lu Xun in Yan'an developed a more scholarly aspect only after 1940, during a period of increasing cultural specialization and a shift of emphasis away from the "guerrilla style" of the early war 33. Zhou Yang, "Jiu xingshi zai wenxueshang de liyong de yige kanfa" (An opinion on the use of old forms in literature), Zhongguo wenhua (Chinese culture) 1:1 (15 February 1940): 3 4 - 4 0 . 34. Xin Zhonghua bao (New China news) (Yan'an), 25 June 1940, p. 1.

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years. The same First Congress of the Border Region Cultural Association that heard Mao deliver his address "On New Democracy" concluded that the basic task for the cultural movement was the "elevation of Chinese culture." More specifically, it declared: "We must critically develop old Chinese culture and imbibe what is excellent in foreign culture, but it is even more necessary to carry on the tradition of Lu Xun."35 As one concrete method of fostering the "Lu Xun spirit," the Cultural Association Congress, at the instigation of Luo Fu, the Internationalists' chief spokesman on cultural matters, proposed that a Lu Xun yanjiuhui (Society for Lu Xun Research) be established.36 The Society was finally founded in January 1941 and was highly active in promoting research and "scholarly" writing on Lu Xun. One of its main achievements was the publication of a series of special studies, which included the following titles: Lu Xun Research Series, no. 1 Lu Xun Research Special Issue no. 1, Collected Essays on Ah Q Selected Works of Mr. Lu Xun Studies on the Thought of Lu Xun Don Quixote and Lu Xun From the start, a leading role in the Society was played by Xiao Jun, the writer from the Northeast whose novel Bayue de xiangcun (Village in August) had won him the support of Lu Xun in the late 1930s. Xiao arrived in Yan'an from the KMT areas sometime in the middle of 1940, at virtually the same time as other writers of the Northeastern group, such as Shu Qun and Bai Lang. Like them, he was attached not to the Lu Xun Academy but to the Cultural Association, and later on to the writers' union (the Wenkang [Literary Resistance]) in the village of Lanjiaping north of Yan'an. Xiao soon became one of the chief interpreters of Lu Xun in Yan'an literary circles and indeed in the latter half of 1941 and early 1942 made a bid to assume Lu Xun's mantle as literary adviser to and mentor of youth. During the first flush of enthusiasm, Xiao Jun's Society attracted a number of Party cultural leaders, including Ai Siqi, Chen Boda, Zhou Wen, Ding Ling, Zhou Yang, and Zhou Libo. It very quickly embarked on an ambitious program of research, publication, and extension work. 37 The Society also went out of its way to promote the more ceremonial aspects of the Lu

35. Ibid., 17 January 1940, p. 1. 36. Xiao Jun, "Lu Xun yanjiuhui chengli jingguo" (The process of founding the Society for Lu Xun Research), in Xiao Jun, "Jinian shiliao," p. 36. 37. "Yan'an Lu Xun yanjiuhui chengli yaoji" (Notes on the founding of the Society for Lu Xun Research in Yan'an), Wenyi yuebao (Literature monthly) 2 (1 February 1941); reprinted in Xiao Jun, "Jinian shiliao," pp. 7 - 8 .

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Xun cult, commissioning such items as a special emblem for the Society, large portraits on cloth for mass rallies, and plaster of Paris statues. The high point of the Society's activities was, doubtless, the meeting to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Lu Xun's death, held on an unprecedented scale in the Central Auditorium in Yan'an and attended by over one thousand people. The assembly elected an honorary presidium, saluted Lu Xun's portrait, and sang the "Lu Xun Commemoration Song." It listened to speeches by Xiao San and Ding Ling and to a report outlining the achievements of the Society for Lu Xun Research over the past year. Particular cause for regret was that October 19 had not yet been designated a national holiday, "Lu Xun day," and that Lu Xun Research Groups had not yet been set up on a wide scale among the masses.38 During the meeting the organizers, led by Xiao Jun, also handed out copies of a special issue of commemorative articles and a booklet entitled Quotations from Mr. Lu Xun. The latter, especially, was a remarkable production. Like the "little red book" of the 1960s and the Cultural Revolution period, it was a pocket-sized vade mecum containing short passages, mainly epigrams and maxims, culled from the works of the writer. A few selections gave advice on the craft of writing; a slightly larger number can only be described as generalized moral sentiments; but the vast majority expressed Lu Xun's merciless attitude to his enemies and his uncompromising "spirit of struggle." 39 This "spirit of struggle," of course, could be double-edged, as both Xiao Jun and the Party leadership discovered not long afterward. The Society's publication program, at least, was going reasonably well. Xiao Jun's prefaces to the special issue on Ah Q and to Lu Xun Research Series, No. 1 were reprinted in Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily). The Ah Q collection consisted of nine review articles written during the 1920s and 1930s with a reprint of "The True Story of Ah Q " as an appendix.40 Such a collection was needed, argued Xiao Jun, because Ah Q was Lu Xun's most representative character—something of a "national hero," in one sense—and also because it was still far from clear whether the age of Ah Q had passed into history. This judgment had rather somber implications, and the choice of Ah Q, among all of Lu Xun's works, was not politically neutral. This implicit criticism of atavistic survivals in the new society was

38. "Yan'an gejie juxing dahui jinian Lu Xun shishi wuzhounian" (Big meeting held by all circles in Yan'an to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Lu Xun's death), jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), 21 October 1941, p. 4. 39. See Xiao Jun, "Jinian shiliao," pp. 5 4 - 5 8 , for details and some sample pages. Of the fourteen available quotations, eight belong in the last-named category, four in the second, and two in the first. The tone of the collection is rather bloodthirsty; fortunately, it did not achieve popularity. 40. For the table of contents, see jiefang ribao, 27 May 1941.

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combined with a particularly effusive brand of humanism. In language that would be unpublishable one short year later, Xiao Jun observed that every great author invariably gave mankind at least one immortal character. "Just as Cervantes left mankind with Don Quixote and Shakespeare bequeathed Hamlet to the world, so did Lu Xun produce the unforgettable character of Ah Q. . . . They—great authors—are forever the teachers of mankind, forever the nurses of mankind's soul," just as "they—their characters—all belong to mankind and are all immortal." 41 Organizationally, however, all was not well with the Society. After its foundation Xiao Jun and his associates managed to recruit a number of other writers and artists to take part in its publication program, but later on almost all the new members were people like Ai Qing, Luo Feng, and Ouyang Shan, who had just arrived in Yan'an from the "Greater Rear Area." People close to Mao in the top Party leadership—Chen Boda, Ai Siqi, Zhou Wen, and Fan Wenlan—increasingly stayed away, as did the Lu Xun Academy group—Zhou Yang, Zhou Libo and Jiang Feng—and Ding Ling. As time went by, more of the work of the Society was concentrated in the hands of Xiao Jun. Clearly, some strong personal animosities were involved: Ding Ling has recently referred to her difficulties in collaborating with Xiao and his close friend Shu Qun during this period, and Zhou Yang is also said to have refused his cooperation on a project that involved working with Xiao. 4 2 Perhaps more important, the Society quickly became a meeting point for writers recently arrived from Chongqing and a focus for feelings of dissatisfaction with life in Yan'an. Mao himself is now known to have sent a letter to Xiao Jun chiding him for his overly critical attitude toward "bad phenomena" and for his lack of any spirit of self-criticism.43 The activities of Xiao Jun and his group of writers may also have been connected with the publication in Liberation Daily of a three-part article by Zhou Yang on the subject of Lu Xun's early thought.44 Entitled "Jingshenjie de zhanshi" (A fighter in the realm of the spirit), it was ostensibly written for the sixtieth anniversary of Lu Xun's birth, but it also provides evidence of an antimaterialist and antipopulist opposition in Yan'an. Zhou Yang's essays centered on the interpretation of Lu Xun's proposal, expressed in his 1907 essays "On Extremities in Culture" and "On the

41. Jiefang ribao, 23 October 1941, p. 4. 42. Ding Ling, "Yan'an wenyi zuotanhui de qianqian houhou" (Before and after the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art), Xin wenxue shiliao 2 (1982): 40. Ding Ling also gives evidence to suggest that Xiao Jun had a certain amount of backing from Luo Fu. 43. Mao Zedong, "Gei Xiao Jun de xin" (A letter to Xiao Jun), 2 August 1941, in Wenyibao (Literary gazette) 6 (1982): 4. 44. Zhou Yang, "Jingshenjie de zhanshi" (A fighter in the realm of the spirit), Jiefang ribao, 1 2 - 1 4 August 1941.

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Power of M a r a Poetry," to "explode materialism and develop the mind, [to] give free reign to the individual and shut out the masses." These sentiments, said Zhou, had been seized upon and subjected to the "vulgar" interpretation that Lu Xun opposed materialism and the masses and had adopted an elitist and idealist viewpoint not unlike that of Nietzsche. The potential long-term effects of such a view in wartime Yan'an were very worrying to the Party, striking as they did at the validity of MarxismLeninism and therefore at the legitimacy of the Party's authority. The Party leaders would have been particularly worried because such notions were similar to other "distortions" and tendencies that were just beginning to surface among the literary youth as a result of the Party's "elevation" policy. Zhou Yang's method in this essay was to situate Lu Xun's arguments in the context of his times and to point to the underlying continuities between Lu Xun's social thought in his early period and the Marxist-Leninist ethos of his later years. Zhou quotes from Lu Xun's works to prove that Lu Xun was condemning not philosophical materialism but rather the crass materialism of the late Qing Westernization Clique and the comprador capitalists. He argues that, on the contrary, Lu Xun was a keen advocate of the scientific method, as seen in his article "Teaching Material on the History of Science." Similarly, the masses so despised by Lu Xun were not "the people" but rather the "vulgar crowd." T o Zhou Yang this and Lu Xun's espousal of "freedom of thought," "dignity of the individual," and "human w o r t h " did indeed place Lu Xun firmly in the idealist camp, but they were also the hallmark of an "embattled enlightener" and a "great national democratic revolutionary." Moreover, Lu Xun's enthusiasm for the enlightenment movement was precisely the basis for his later development in the direction of Marxism-Leninism. 4 5 It is worth noting that Zhou Yang was a self-proclaimed disciple of the nineteenth-century Russian democratic revolutionary critic Chernyshevski, whose views, together with those of Belinski and Dobrolyubov, had been adopted in the Soviet Union during the late 1 9 2 0 s as one of the foundations for official Soviet literary theory. 46 Zhou was, therefore, well positioned to make the case for Lu Xun as an enlightener and to initiate a swing of emphasis in Party cultural policy in a way that prefigured the "face-the-masses orientation" of 1 9 4 2 . It was perhaps no surprise, then, that as the Rectification campaign gathered momentum in early 1 9 4 2 , the Society for Lu Xun Research came

45. Ibid. 46. See, for instance, A. Lunacharski, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), pp. 22—70. Lunacharski was Commissar for Education and Enlightenment during the 1920s and one of the major architects of Soviet literary policy.

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under heavy pressure. Like all other cultural organizations, it was required to re-register with the newly reorganized Cultural Work Committee of the Border Region Government.47 Its application, submitted in late March 1942, 48 was apparently not accepted, for nothing more was heard of the Society. Xiao Jun himself published no more articles on Lu Xun after May 1942, until his departure from Yan'an in late 1945. 49 The Party's attitude toward criticism of life in Yan'an, however, was not one of straightforward suppression, at least during the early stages of Rectification. Rather, the Maoist leadership positively encouraged authors to write satirical essays for the Party press in the style of Lu Xun, partly in the hope that they could be used to expose the bureaucratism and hyperMarxist pedantry of Mao's rivals in the International faction. And indeed, the latter half of 1941 and the first half of 1942 produced a minor flowering of zawen that coincided neatly with the Party's warm-up campaign against bureaucratism and subjectivism, announced by Ai Siqi in September 1941. 50 In an article in Liberation Daily's Literary Column on October 23 of that year, Ding Ling, the column's editor, launched an appeal for authors to produce zawen. She argued that such essays would help to expose the truth about Chinese society in the Border Regions and would create an atmosphere of free debate in which the inchoate democratic forms could be advanced and consolidated. As might be expected, she referred directly to the example of Lu Xun. 51 Following this call, the incipient literary opposition in the writers' union and elsewhere found in Lu Xun one of its main sources of inspiration in attacking the dark side of life in Yan'an. Wang Shiwei, the revolutionary writer and translator, took the lead in encouraging this tendency and was later singled out as a target by the Party leadership.52 Not only did Wang closely model his satirical essays on those of Lu Xun—indeed, one Party spokesman claimed that Wang's "Ye baihehua" (Wild lily flowers) was deliberately patterned on Lu Xun's "Roses without Flowers" of 1926 5 3 — but he also hit upon the Achilles' heel of the Party's Lu Xun cult when, in his essay "Statesmen-Artists," he drew attention to Lu Xun's quarrel with the Party faction led by Zhou Yang: 47. See David Holm, "The Literary Rectification in Yan'an," in W. Kubin and R. Wagner, eds., Essays in Modern Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1982), pp. 2 7 2 - 3 0 8 . 48. Xiao Jun, "Jinian shiliao," p. 84. 49. Ibid., p. 96. 50. Ai Siqi, "Fandui zhuguanzhuyi" (Oppose subjectivism), Jiefang ribao, 1 9 - 2 0 September 1941. 51. Ding Ling, "Women xuyao zawen" (We need zawen), Jiefang ribao, 23 October 1941. 5 2 . Holm, "Literary Rectification," pp. 2 8 7 ff. 53. Zhou Wen, "Cong Lu Xun de zawen tandao Wang Shiwei" (On Wang Shiwei from the standpoint of Lu Xun's essays), jiefang ribao, 16 June 1942.

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M r . L u X u n w a s a fighter all his life, b u t p e o p l e w h o s e u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f him w a s a bit m o r e p r o f o u n d w o u l d h a v e b e c o m e a w a r e t h a t in the m i d s t o f battles h e w a s i n w a r d l y r a t h e r lonely. H e f o u g h t , b e c a u s e he u n d e r s t o o d t h e l a w s o f social d e v e l o p m e n t

a n d w a s c o n f i d e n t t h a t the future w o u l d

be

b r i g h t e r t h a n the p r e s e n t ; b u t he w a s lonely, b e c a u s e he s a w t h a t t h e r e w e r e still d a r k a n d filthy c o r n e r s in t h e souls o f his c o m r a d e s - i n - a r m s . 5 4

The Party's counterattack came when Mao delivered the conclusion to his Yan'an talks on May 23. Mao, not unnaturally, sought to reassure his audience that there was still a place for zawen in the new society but sought to limit the targets of such "cold ridicule and burning satire" to "the enemies of the people." The people's shortcomings could also be criticized, but because the political and social background had changed, the style of critical essays need not be as obscure as that of Lu Xun. The masses should be able to understand it, and the writer should "speak from genuine identification with the people." 55 There was clearly a large dose of political sleight of hand in this judgment: it allowed the Party to put pressure on its critics and at the same time to maintain that it was "still the age of the zawen." The intention was, perhaps, to turn the zawen into a weapon against the KMT, for one of the strategic aims of the Rectification campaign then in progress was to prepare the Border Regions for eventual civil war.56 On the other hand, there was also some real point to Mao's conclusion, for the Party's main critics—Wang Shiwei, Luo Feng, Ai Qing, and Xiao Jun—betrayed a contempt for the Chinese common people and for the indigenous forms of Chinese popular culture that was quite alien to Lu Xun's more generous and practical spirit.57 Placing ill-defined limits on the expression of public criticism, however, was only one aspect of the Party's response to its critics and to their interpretation of the Lu Xun heritage. The leadership's own answer to the challenge was to remake Lu Xun into a straightforward advocate of Rectification and the Party spirit. Indeed, the launching of the Rectification campaign was the first time in Party history that Lu Xun's thought—in a highly selective form, of course—was from the outset an integral part of the ideological underpinning for a Party-sponsored mass movement. This was to set the pattern for 5 4 . Wang Shiwei, "Zhengzhijia-yishujia" (Statesmen-artists), quoted in ibid. 5 5 . See Bonnie S. McDougall, M a o Zedong's "Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and A r t " : A Translation of the 1 9 4 3 Text with Commentary, Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1980), pp. 80-81. 5 6 . This was probably the purpose behind the information blackout imposed on Yan'an and the rest of the base area from around May 1 9 4 2 . There had, of course, been periodic friction along the border since 1 9 3 9 . 57. Holm, "Art and Ideology," pp. 8 8 - 9 1 , 9 6 - 1 0 1 .

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later years, including the years after 1949. For a start, Lu Xun's "My View of the League of Left-Wing Writers," a speech given in 1930, was reprinted in the Party newspaper Liberation Daily at a crucial stage in the campaign, complete with a note from the editor that it was a "correct statement on the orientation of left-wing writers and intellectuals and on the tasks of the literature and art front," and could be "used in entirety" and without alteration. 58 Lu Xun also found his way into the Rectification Documents, a collection that was required reading for all Party and government cadres: here, Lu Xun's "What is Necessary for Good Writing?" was included in the section dealing with propaganda policy. 59 Likewise, on the literary side of Rectification, Lu Xun's writings formed a major portion of the texts in Zhou Yang's important anthology, Makesizhuyi yu wenyi (Marxism and literature). Lu Xun thus took his place alongside Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao as an important thinker in the realm of Marxist literary theory. 60 The most authoritative expression of the new official Party view on Lu Xun, however, was to be found in the articles by Zhou Wen published in Liberation Daily. Zhou Wen was in a unique position to argue the Party viewpoint. During the 1930s he had collaborated closely with Lu Xun on one of the only popular-reading-materials projects ever carried out by the League of Left-Wing Writers. 61 Moreover, during the early war years he had served as chairman of the Masses' Reading Materials Society in Yan'an and as editor of the Border Region Masses' Newspaper. These activities put him firmly in the camp of the cultural populists, and he rose rapidly within the cultural apparatus, becoming Minister for Education for the Border Region Government in the summer of 1941 and then SecretaryGeneral at the end of the year. 62 Zhou's chief task was to paint a stark contrast between the satirical style of Lu Xun and that of Wang Shiwei, and to reassure his readers that there had never been any rift between Lu Xun and the Party. In doing so, he could not avoid commenting on the "loneliness" issue and on Lu Xun's 1936 quarrel with the Zhou Yang group. His main text, appropriately 58. Jiefang ribao, 20 May 1942. 59. Lu Xun, "What's Necessary for Good Writing?" in Boyd Compton, Mao's China: Party Reform Documents, 1942-44 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1952), pp. 252-253. 60. Zhou Yang, Makesizhuyi yu wenyi (Marxism and literature) (Yan'an: Jiefang she, 1944). Excerpts from Zhou's anthology began appearing in Jiefang ribao in May 1942, however, while the Yan'an Forum was in progress. 61. Zhou Wen, "Dazhonghua yundong lishi de niaokan" (A bird's-eye view of the history of the popularization movement), in Zhou Wen xuanji (Selected Works of Zhou Wen) (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1980), p. 484. This essay originally appeared in the Yan'an magazine Dazhong xizuo (Writing practice for the masses) 1 (1940). 62. Zhongguo wenxuejia cidian, vol. 2: Xiandai di'er fence (Dictionary of Chinese writers, vol. 2: Modern period) (Hong Kong: Wenhua ziliao gongyingshe, 1980), p. 504.

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enough, was Lu Xun's "Reply to a Letter from the Trotskyites" of 1936; the Party after all had singled out Wang Shiwei as a target mainly because of his former Trotskyite connections.63 The chief point to emphasize, as far as Zhou was concerned, was that Lu Xun had rejected overtures from the Trotskyites and had declared his continuing loyalty to the Communist Party "in spite of the fact that he was highly dissatisfied at the time with a certain few 'comrades-in-arms.' " 6 4 Lu Xun was, thus, a man of high moral principle who knew how to keep personal disputes in perspective. The same qualities, Zhou argues, were demonstrated in Lu Xun's unsparing but measured and objective criticism of Xu Maoyong's "incorrect tendencies." 65 Zhou dismisses Wang Shiwei's suggestion that Lu Xun had been lonely as "errant nonsense" and "a gross slander." Lu Xun, he argues, had indeed been lonely for a period after the breakup of the New Youth group in the early 1920s. But he had always taken a positive view of his comrades during the Left League years: "Although he was somewhat dissatisfied with the errors of a minority of them, and hoped that they would reform, he always regarded the majority with boundless comradely love," as could be seen from his articles honoring his fallen comrades. 66 Zhou thus sides with Lu Xun's position in the 1936 Battle of the Slogans, while at the same time emphasizing that the contradiction was not antagonistic. Zhou Wen does not mention Zhou Yang by name, but there are indications that in early 1942 Zhou Yang was under fire from other quarters for his part in fostering the tendency toward "elevation behind closed doors" at the Lu Xun Academy.67 Meanwhile, Zhou Wen's authoritative judgment signaled an end to open debate on this issue. All the elements of the new official viewpoint were thus in place by October 1942, when the sixth anniversary of Lu Xun's death was commemorated in the Party newspaper with a spate of articles, reprints, and a special editorial entitled "Jinian Lu Xun xiansheng" (Remember Mr. Lu Xun). In line with the new disposition, this editorial stated emphatically that not only writers and artists but also every patriotic Chinese should follow Lu Xun's example. This example involved: being a humble servant of the Party and the people ("Head bowed I'm glad to be an ox for little children"); fierce hatred of the Trotskyites; a measured and constructive attitude toward shortcomings in the revolutionary ranks; and a serious and self-conscious resolve to serve the proletariat and to overcome the 63. 64. Jwfang 65. 66. 67.

Holm, "Literary Rectification," pp. 287 ff. Zhou Wen, "Lu Xun xiansheng de dangxing" (On the Party spirit of Lu Xun), ribao, 22 June 1942. Zhou Wen, "Cong Lu Xun de zawen tandao Wang Shiwei." Ibid. Holm, "Art and Ideology," pp. 79 ff.

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remnants of petit-bourgeois thinking. 68 A special address by Wu Yuzhang, reprinted in Liberation Daily a few days later along with Lu Xun's "Reply to a Letter from the Trotskyites," reinforced these points again: Lu Xun sought to establish the new thought with a revolution in thought, the new society with a social revolution, and the new literature with a literary revolution. Thus, Lu Xun's "direction" was in itself the "direction for the Chinese nation's new culture." 69 The message was unambiguous. The capstone in this ideological edifice was put in place a year later, when the next anniversary of Lu Xun's death was made the occasion for the long-delayed publication in Liberation Daily of Mao's Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art. Conclusion The publication of Mao's Talks completed the transformation of Lu Xun's heritage into an instrument for inculcating loyalty to the Party and for fanning opposition to the KMT. During the years of resistance, uneasy peace, and civil war that followed, every October 19 continued to be celebrated as "Lu Xun Day," with the usual fanfare of speeches by Party leaders and eminent writers. Gone, as far as we can see, were the spontaneous interest and the uncommissioned articles on Lu Xun written from a critical or semiautonomous viewpoint. By 1943 most of the writers were directing their attention elsewhere, to producing new-style folk plays for the Yangge movement, to teaching elementary school, to writing basiclevel reportage on the progress of Party policy in the villages, or to organizing extension work and writers' cooperatives among soldiers, peasants, and factory workers. These activities, too, had been part of the program Lu Xun had envisioned for cultural revolution in China. Perhaps the main use to which Lu Xun was put in these later years was in attacking the Party's main domestic rival, the KMT. This role, of course, would have sat more easily with the actual Lu Xun than would the role of fellow traveler under the guidance of his "comrades-in-arms." The Party seems to have exploited the name of Lu Xun, and especially the large-scale annual commemoration meetings, very skillfully, particularly in the big cities of KMT China. In 1946, Liberation Daily reported that a rally of unprecedented proportions had been held in Shanghai under the auspices of the National Cultural Association. Over 2,000 people had attended, including such prominent writers and public figures as Guo

68. "Shelun: Jinian Lu Xun xiansheng" (Editorial: Remember Mr. Lu Xun), Jiefang ribao, 19 October 1942. 69. Wu Yuzhang, "Jinian Lu Xun xiansheng shishi liu zhounian" (Commemorating the sixth anniversary of the death of Mr. Lu Xun), Jiefang ribao, 26 October 1942.

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M o r u o , M a o Dun, Ye Shengtao, Xu Guangping, and Z h o u Enlai. 70 The following day, people gathered again and marched in procession to the W a n g u o Cemetery for a ceremonial sweeping of Lu Xun's grave. The crowd was accompanied by the CCP's Shanghai Delegation, and speeches reminded them of Lu X u n ' s resolute struggle against the enemy. Activities like this put the K M T authorities in a quandary: allowed to continue, they might undermine K M T authority, but their suppression might alienate educated public opinion even further. In any case, it was clear by this time that the Chinese C o m m u n i s t Party had succeeded not only in monopolizing the name of Lu X u n but also in transforming it into an effective weapon. Looking back on the period as a whole, we can see that the development of the Party's official cult of Lu Xun, complete with its attendant ceremonial and shifting ideology, was a complicated process. This development has certainly had its darker side, as, for instance, in the distortion and simplification of Lu Xun's thought and character, in the political chicanery and horse trading involved in the production of an ideological package to suit varying political purposes, and in the stifling of domestic criticism. Yet it remains an ambivalent phenomenon, for the war period also saw the widespread preliminary implementation, under government direction, of many of Lu Xun's ideas for popular education and cultural revolution. M u c h of this task, moreover, was in the hands of dedicated individuals w h o , like Z h o u Wen, had k n o w n Lu Xun during the 1930s in Shanghai and had drawn inspiration from him. W h o , then, were the true heirs to the heritage of Lu Xun? The two years 1941 and 1942, like other periods of relative relaxation in Party cultural policy since 1949, saw the resurgence of a genuine interest in Lu Xun and a flurry of satirical essays written in his style. Was this the real "Lu X u n spirit," welling up from an unbroken tradition that lay just beneath the surface of public life in China? One is tempted to say yes. O n the other hand, it is also true that those w h o came forward to assume the mantle of Lu Xun, in 1942 and after, have all too often lacked his breadth of vision as well as his power to move. Part of this deficiency may have been due to upbringing—the younger generations simply did not have Lu X u n ' s erudition or his roots in the traditional culture of China. Part of it, too, may have been due to the proximity to authority and to the habit of accommodation with authority that has been the lot of writers since the war period. The revivals, then, have tended to be pale reflections of the true Lu Xun, much less memorable in literary terms than the writings and the personality from which they drew their inspiration. 70. "Lu Xun shishi shi zhounian ji zai Shanghai" (Commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Lu Xun's death is held in Shanghai), Jiefang ribao, 26 October 1946.

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One might also ask: Was the Party's claim on the heritage of Lu Xun entirely meretricious? Again, one is tempted to say yes. The cult of Lu Xun was clearly the product of a pragmatic and utilitarian attitude to cultural reconstruction, and much of the official discourse on the author reeks of manipulation and emotionalism. Lu Xun would not have approved of such a "keep-the-people-ignorant" policy. On the other hand, the Party did make a start in implementing many of Lu Xun's ideas for popular education and for the modernization of Chinese culture, even if in doing so it often chose authoritarian means to these nonauthoritarian ends. This too is an important part of the Lu Xun heritage. In suggesting the use of such media as serial picture books and New Year pictures to teach basic literacy and hygiene, Lu Xun had always allowed that such measures would only be effective on a nationwide basis, with governmental support. In other words, the Party's full-scale implementation of its "face-the-masses orientation" in cultural work cannot really be faulted solely on the grounds that the basic-level extension work that resulted was Party- and governmentsponsored. Patriotic Chinese in the 1940s, writers and artists included, really had very little choice if they wished to contribute their energies to this cultural transformation. The real problem, one suspects, lay in the way that the Party's own work style and ideological manipulations so often worked against the full implementation of these policies.

8 The Political Use of Lu Xun in the Cultural Revolution and After MERLE GOLDMAN

Like the traditional Chinese dynasties, the Chinese Communist Party has often used famous figures for its own political purposes. And, more than any other person in the twentieth century, perhaps, the Party has used the prestige of China's preeminent modern writer, Lu Xun, for a wide variety of political, ideological, and factional purposes. Since Lu Xun died in October 1 9 3 6 his life and work have been reinterpreted over and over again to legitimize the various mutations in Party policy. And when the Party became factionalized after the Great Leap Forward, each of the different political factions used Lu Xun to represent its particular position. Nevertheless, some elements in the Party's treatment of Lu Xun have persisted. His life and work have been twisted to symbolize values that do not reflect—and that have at times been diametrically opposed to—the ones he truly supported. Although he exposed the ills, impotence, and inhumanity of the Chinese society of his time in a style that was both critical and sardonic, the Party has depicted his work as a blueprint of the Communist future. At the end of his life he fiercely criticized the Party organization in Shanghai as well as the Guomindang, but he has been presented as an obedient follower of both the Party and M a o . Though he prized his independence as a writer and an individual, the Party has portrayed him as willingly subordinate to its political direction. Because the Party has emphasized folk literature and national forms in order to appeal to the masses, it has downplayed the fact that Lu Xun epitomized the cosmopolitan M a y Fourth intellectual immersed in the heterogeneous, westernized urban culture of the early decades of the twentieth century. Since to the Party and M a o , beginning with M a o ' s Yan'an talks of 1 9 4 2 , literature's role was to uphold the status quo and present an ideal Communist vision, they deprecated the view of Lu Xun and his fellow May 180

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Fourth writers that literature was a weapon with which to fight injustice, inequality, and government wrongdoing. In the 1920s and early 1930s Lu Xun and his disciples gathered in cafés, bookstores, journal and newspaper offices, publishing houses, and informal groups to debate, relatively freely, about intellectual questions and foreign literary experiments. In the mid-1930s the Party sought to control these gathering places and to select the issues that were discussed. Though Lu Xun was able to rebel against this control in Shanghai, starting with the Yan'an Rectification of 1942, his disciples, such as Xiao Jun, Hu Feng, and Feng Xuefeng, were ruthlessly purged for trying to maintain a similar independence under the Party's increasing control. At the same time that the Party was purging his disciples, it was deifying Lu Xun as part of its effort to win Lu Xun's readership—intellectuals, students, professionals, and the middle class—to its side. Mao eulogized Lu Xun in "Xin minzhuzhuyi lun" (On new democracy, 1940): "The chief commander of China's cultural revolution, he was not only a great man of letters, but a great thinker and revolutionary. . . . On the cultural front, he was the bravest and most correct, the firmest, the most loyal, and the most ardent national hero, a hero without parallel in our history." 1 Yet while Lu Xun was deified, the Party explicitly rejected his satirical style of writing. Satire was appropriate for life under the Guomindang but inappropriate for life in a Communist society. Mao, in his Yan'an talks, said of Lu Xun's zawen (miscellaneous satiric essays): Living under the dark forces and deprived of the freedom of speech, Lu X u n used burning satire and freezing irony, cast in the form of essays, to do battle; and he was entirely right. [But in the Communist areas,] where dem o c r a c y and freedom are granted in full to revolutionary writers and artists and witheld only from counter-revolutionaries, the style of the essay should not simply be like Lu X u n ' s . Here we can shout at the top of our voices and have no need for veiled and round-about expressions, which are hard for the people to understand. . . . T o criticize the people's shortcomings is necessary, as we have already said, but in doing so we must truly take the stand of the people and speak o u t of wholehearted eagerness to protect and educate them. T o treat comrades like enemies is to go over to the stand of the enemy. . . . W e are not opposed to satire in general, what we must abolish is the abuse of satire. 2

The view of literature presented in the Yan'an talks is, in fact, implicitly opposed to that of Lu Xun. Where Lu Xun had promoted Western styles

1. Mao Zedong, "On New Democracy," Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 2 : 3 7 2 . 2. Mao Zedong, "Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art," Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 3:92.

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and ideas, M a o urged writers to return to traditional folk styles so that the masses could better understand their writings. Lu Xun's work had exposed the dark side of society and derided the masses as well as the elite for their apathy, backwardness, corruption, and injustice. M a o emphasized instead the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism, which mandated an optimistic, heroic literature that served the Party's goals and extolled the masses. Writers were no longer to criticize reality, as Lu Xun had done but to depict the Party's view of reality. N o longer was literature to reflect life as it is or as the individual saw it exemplified in Lu Xun's work, but as it will be and as the Party and M a o saw it. M a o exhorted writers to "learn from the example of Lu X u n and be 'oxen' for the proletariat and masses." 3 But Lu Xun himself was not an " o x " for any specific political line. Thus while he became a great revolutionary hero, his life, work, and style were implicitly rejected as unsuited to the new Communist society. The writers, intellectuals, and, eventually, the nation as a whole were directed to follow Lu Xun's example, but the example the Party held up for emulation had little resemblance to the real person. T h e Use o f L u X u n in the C u l t u r a l R e v o l u t i o n The distortion of Lu X u n for political purposes reached its height during the Cultural Revolution, when M a o and his supporters—Jiang Qing and the radical ideologues—wanted to purge Mao's "enemies" in the Party's Propaganda Department for insufficiently suppressing intellectuals who had criticized M a o ' s Great Leap Forward policies. The radicals used the controversy in which Lu X u n was involved in 1 9 3 6 as a weapon to attack the propaganda officials. In 1 9 3 6 the Party in Shanghai, under the direction of Wang Ming, who was on orders from Moscow, called for a United Front. Zhou Yang, the Party's chief cultural official in Shanghai, disbanded the League of Left-Wing Writers without consulting Lu X u n , the group's nominal leader. He replaced it with another organization, the United Association of Chinese Writers, that was to promote the United Front in cultural circles. This group brandished the slogan "Literature for National Defense" and welcomed writers with non-Marxist views. The only condition for participation, in fact, was opposition to Japan; the Association was to unite writers of all political persuasions on a nationwide scale. Though M a o was later to claim that he had opposed the Wang Ming line all along, he actually went along with the United Front and expressed no opposition to this organization. The works M a o published in the late 1 9 3 0 s instructed the press, cinema, theater, and the arts to conform to the policy of opposition to Japan. While reluctantly accepting the United Front policy, Lu Xun and his 3.

Ibid.

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disciples feared the dilution of revolutionary spirit if nonleftists were incorporated into the writers' association. Thus his group set up its own organization, which they called the Chinese Literary Workers. And in an essay published on March 9. 1936, Lu Xun's disciple, Hu Feng, presented a more revolutionary-sounding slogan: "People's Literature of National Revolutionary Struggle." Lu Xun's group was not as tightly knit as Zhou Yang's, but it included some of China's most famous writers, such as the novelist Ba Jin and the playwright Cao Yu. The refusal of Lu Xun's group to conform to Party policy and its rebellion against the Party's literary directives provoked vehement polemics. Though the Party's cultural leaders in Shanghai—particularly Zhou Yang and his close associates, Tian Han, Xia Yan, and Yang Hansheng— ostensibly proclaimed a more liberal position, they would not tolerate an alternative organization and slogan. They enticed Xu Maoyong, a close associate of Lu Xun's, to write him a letter insinuating that Hu Feng and his associates were working against the Party. Lu Xun replied by publishing Xu's letter with an angry retort in which he defended Hu Feng and accused Zhou Yang and his associates of labeling people "traitors" merely to enhance their own positions. Literary warfare raged between Lu Xun's and Zhou Yang's groups until Lu Xun's death in October 1936. These events were rewritten after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Zhou Yang and his associates, who were now in charge of implementing the Party's cultural line and of imposing ideological orthodoxy, played down the clash between Lu Xun and the Party's cultural officials. Lu Xun's bitter letters and sarcastic articles against them were not included in the collections of his works published in the 1950s. Zhou Yang's associates used their position to purge Lu Xun's few remaining disciples, their erstwhile opponents from the 1930s, in the cultural hierarchy. The 1936 controversy did not become an important issue until the purge of Feng Xuefeng in the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, when Xia Yan attacked Feng for his role in that controversy. Zhou Yang and his associates in the cultural bureaucracy, among them Lin Mohan and Shao Quanlin, accused Feng of dividing the leftist cultural movement in the 1930s by his unwillingness to accept the Party's united cultural front. At one anti-Feng meeting Zhou charged that "this sectarian blow dealt by Feng Xuefeng led to the split of the revolutionary literary and art cause at that time. This was an act that seriously undermined the principles of the Party and damaged the interests of the revolution." 4 As Lu Xun had also rejected the Party's cultural policy, such charges against Feng were implicit attacks on Lu Xun as well. Since Zhou Yang obediently carried out Mao's cultural line until the 4. Xu Guangping, "Zhou Yang is not allowed to attack and disparage Lu Xun," Hongqi 12, (1966), SCMM # 5 4 4 , p. 6.

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early 1960s, there is no reason to believe that Mao had not sanctioned this indirect attack on Lu Xun's rebellion against Party directives and officials. Moreover, Mao had played a leading role in the criticism of Hu Feng, another Lu Xun disciple who was the center of a blistering campaign against intellectuals in 1955. But the especially vehement attacks on Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng, as well as the effort to erase Lu Xun's involvement both with them and with the 1936 controversy, had more to do with Hu's and Feng's personal rivalries with Zhou's group. Mao set the general direction of the campaigns, but Zhou and his cohorts chose their particular emphases. The campaigns had as much to do with factional issues as with ideological ones. They gave these cultural officials the opportunity to get rid of rivals and to enhance their own positions as well as to impose the latest Party line. During the Cultural Revolution the 1936 controversy was reinterpreted once again. Mao, and the campaign, turned first against the intellectuals and then against the Party organization in charge of the intellectuals— specificially against Zhou Yang and his associates, the very people whom Lu Xun had rebelled against in Shanghai. Thus Lu Xun's earlier rebellion was hailed, as he became a surrogate for Mao. Again, Mao set the general course of the campaign, but now the implementer was not Zhou Yang but Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, with her assistants Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan. Jiang Qing's attack on these officials was personal as well as ideological. Like Mao, she saw Lu Xun's erstwhile enemies as her own— particularly Zhou Yang, Xia Yan, Tian Han, and Yang Hansheng, whom she labeled the Four Villains. As leaders of Shanghai's cinema and theater, Jiang believed, these men had thwarted her career by denying her the parts she desired. Thus Lu Xun also became a surrogate for Jiang Qing. As a result, the Party officials' dastardly treatment of Lu Xun in Shanghai became an emotionally charged and central issue of the Cultural Revolution. Lu Xun's letters and articles criticizing Zhou Yang and his followers had not been included in the 1958 edition of Lu Xun's collected works because Zhou dominated the media. Now that the radicals had taken over the media, Lu Xun's abuse of the Party's cultural officials was reprinted in full, aptly expressing Jiang Qing's own enmity toward her old adversaries. In one letter Lu Xun had exclaimed: "Those so-called 'men of letters' of Shanghai are really rotten. . . . I really want to write an article of at least 50 or 60 thousand words to spell out all the unspoken vexations I have suffered these past years." 5 In another letter he said of the cultural officials: "They are banded together as a group for seditious purposes.

5. Yao Wenyuan, "Commemorate Lu Xun and carry the revolution through to the end," Beijing Review, 4 November 1966, p. 13.

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They hold sway in literary circles and make a mess of things." 6 In a letter written four days before his death, Lu Xun wrote: "These fellows are very mean and large in number and they are very harmful to the minds of the people." 7 By the fall of 1966 Lu Xun's Shanghai enemies had been purged and the Cultural Revolution had moved on to the top leadership of the party, particularly Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Lu Xun's denunciation of Party officials was now used to express Mao's feelings about being betrayed by his own colleagues. Lu Xun had written to a friend, for example, that enemies such as Chiang Kai-shek need not be feared: "What is to be feared most is the so-called 'comrades-in-arms' who say yes but mean no. . . . When a man in my own camp disguises himself and stabs me from behind, it is natural that I should hate and despise him more than I do the avowed enemy." 8 The public was urged to emulate this intense hatred that Lu Xun had directed at the internal enemy. At a rally of seventy thousand people held in Peking in October 1966 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Lu Xun's death, Chen Boda, who had been one of the author's detractors in 1936, hailed Lu Xun's vindictive and intolerant attitude toward his enemies. None of Lu Xun's disciples and only one of the May Fourth writers participated in the anniversary. All were either purged or dead, except the one attendee, Mao's sycophant Guo Moruo, who had also clashed repeatedly with Lu Xun. A Hongqi (Red flag) editorial on the occasion exalted Lu Xun because he had "dared to declare war on all enemies and to thrust his sharp-edged pen" at their very hearts. 9 He had felt no mercy and had never forgiven his enemies, because he knew they might rise up again. While Lu Xun was praised for his hatred of two-faced adversaries and for his unremitting criticism of officials, he was also honored for his "boundless esteem and love for Chairman Mao." 1 0 Though he had rebelled against the Party bureaucrats, Lu Xun had supposedly followed Mao's policies like "a foot solider." 11 Concomitantly, Zhou Yang was denounced because he attributed Lu Xun's attraction to the Chinese Communist Party not to his love of Mao or to the transformation of his thought by Marxism6. Y u a n M i n g and Y u a n Ruoying, "A secret a r r o w of Z h o u Yang's t h a t transposes history"; q u o t e f r o m Lu X u n ' s correspondence, 2, Hongqi (Red flag), 1 July 1966, in S C M M # 5 3 3 , pp. 1 2 - 1 3 . 7. Li Fan, "Develop Lu X u n ' s t h o r o u g h g o i n g revolutionary spirit on the cultural f r o n t , " Renmin ribao, 2 3 O c t o b e r 1 9 6 6 , S C M P # 3 8 1 3 , p. 17. 8. Yao Xu, "Pull d o w n the black flag of Z h o u Yang's capitulationist line of literature and art of the 1 9 3 0 s , " N C N A , 2 3 August 1966, S C M P # 3 7 1 1 , p.2. 9. "In m e m o r y of Lu X u n , o u r forerunner in the Cultural Revolution," Hongqi 14 (1966), in S C M M # 5 5 0 , p. 4. 10. Ibid., p. 6. 11. Ibid.

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Leninism, but to his absorption in Western culture—specifically, "to the impact of nineteenth-century Western literature on him." 1 2 Actually, Z h o u was closer to the truth than were Lu Xun's Cultural Revolution interpreters. Lu X u n had been only slightly aware of M a o , let alone obedient to his policies. He had not studied the thought of M a o Zedong, nor was he well versed in Marxism-Leninism. The only direct contact he is k n o w n to have had with M a o was a telegram of congratulations he sent with M a o Dun to all the survivors of the Long March on their arrival in northern Shaanxi. The Lu X u n w h o "loved" M a o and " h a t e d " Party officials was a caricature, like the simplistic devotees to M a o ' s thought w h o peopled Jiang Qing's model revolutionary operas. Everything identified with Lu Xun—except his vindictive nature—was repudiated during the Cultural Revolution. N o t only his enemies but also his friends, living and dead, were denounced. His associates in the May Fourth literary circles over which he had presided epitomized the questioning, westernized Chinese intelligentsia. The man singled out for the most vehement abuse was Q u Qiubai, the Party's cultural leader in the early 1930s. Q u was made to represent the liberal intellectual w h o vacillated between his commitment to the revolution and to his work. He exemplified the kind of intellectual ambivalence that the Cultural Revolution sought to reject. Like China's present-day intellectuals, Qu had participated in the revolution but supposedly had become alienated at a critical point and turned against it. Q u ' s final work, "Superfluous W o r d s , " written just before his death, was cited as an example of this vacillation. Dismissing the poignance of Q u ' s delineation of the conflict among the political, intellectual, and personal spheres of his life, the Cultural Revolution writers unsympathetically quoted Qu's statements to prove his ambivalence, chosing such passages as: "Although I have some interest in political problems, sometimes I long for literature and art and feel disappointed in my hopes" and, f r o m a letter to his wife, "I feel empty, lonely, and bored. H o w I wish to fly to your side." 13 Ironically, Qu's ambivalence toward the revolution was Lu X u n ' s ambivalence as well. Though his Cultural Revolution interpreters claimed he was committed to the revolution, Lu X u n had in reality also been torn by doubt, despair, and individualistic desires in the 1930s. The Cultural Revolution was just as antagonistic to Western culture, which Lu Xun had played a leading role in introducing to China, as it was to its exponents. In its initial stages, from late 1965 until the summer of

12. Zhou Jianren, "Learn from Lu Xun; repudiate revisionism," Chinese Literature 6 (1971): 85. 13. "Renegade Qu Qiubai," Denounce Qu Combat Bulletin, 6 May 1967, in SCMPS # 2 3 8 , p. 34.

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1 9 6 6 , the Cultural Revolution was what its name implied—an effort to destroy once and for all the May Fourth culture that was still strongly influencing intellectuals in the People's Republic. In part, the repudiation of what the radicals called the "literature of the 1 9 3 0 s " reflected M a o ' s and Jiang Qing's factional struggle with Zhou Yang and his associates. M a j o r targets of criticism were the nineteenth-century Russian literary critics, Belinski, Dobrolyubov, and Chernyshevski, whose literary theories Jiang Qing and the radicals denounced as "bourgeois" and as the theoretical basis for the literature of the 1930s. Their influence in China was directly identified with Zhou Yang because he had translated Chernyshevski and had been instrumental in introducing their theories to Chinese intellectuals in the 1 9 3 0 s . The denunciation of Western culture, however, went beyond a factional struggle. The Cultural Revolution was iconoclastic in its effort to create a new culture of the Maoist era. Jiang Qing and the radicals repudiated as elitist not only traditional Chinese culture but also thé cosmopolitan, pluralistic, Western-oriented literature of the 1920s and 1930s. They also rejected the great European writers of the nineteenth century, among them Balzac, Zola, Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Gogol, whom Lu Xun had helped introduce into China. They charged that the "critical realism" and "Western humanism" of these writers had induced the May Fourth writers to "glorify" alienation and individualism. These values were opposed to the self-sacrifice, collectivism, and ideological commitment that supposedly characterized the masses and the Cultural Revolution. This rejection of all May Fourth culture as diametrically opposed to the Cultural Revolution's model revolutionary productions, with their emphasis on revolutionary romanticism and class struggle served also to repudiate implicitly Lu Xun and his work. Thus Lu Xun's choice as a figure to be emulated in the Cultural Revolution was double-edged. His attack on Zhou Yang and the cultural bureaucracy was a useful precedent, but his unwillingness to accept any authority over his own work and activities could subvert Mao's and the radicals' attempts to impose their own culture and authority. His "militant, left-wing literature" 1 4 was declared to be the only good literature of the 1930s, but his biting, subtle stories represented an approach entirely unlike the positive, simplistic revolutionary operas. His fiction rejected the old society but did not depict a new, revolutionary society. Lu Xun, as much as his May Fourth colleagues, sought to assimilate cosmopolitan Western culture. Ironically, his view of literature was even more opposed to Mao's ideological view of literature as a tool of the political system than were the views of the Party's 14. "Minutes of Forum on literature and Art in the Armed Forces convened by Jiang Qing," 2 - 2 0 February 1966, SCMP # 3 9 5 6 , p. 10.

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cultural officials. They were willing to accept some controls over creative work; in fact, they had criticized Lu Xun's fiction as gloomy and pessimistic. Wenyi bao (Literary gazette), under their control, pointed out in 1962 that Lu Xun's "prose poems particularly express desolateness and nihilism." 15 The Party's cultural officials praised primarily the essays Lu Xun wrote after he had identified himself with the Communist movement. Few would have gone as far as Lu Xun, who said that "good literature always refuses the orders from outside; it never cares about practical considerations; it springs spontaneously from the heart." 16 These fundamental qualities of Lu Xun's life and work were ignored. In fact, his stories could not be bought in Peking during the Cultural Revolution. As the Cultural Revolution turned into a large-scale power struggle during the winter of 1967, Lu Xun's rebellion against the Party organization in Shanghai continued to be used as a symbol of Mao's rebellion against the Party, but Lu Xun no longer held center stage. Though still extolled as the penultimate hero, he was given less attention as the campaign moved from cultural issues to political ones. The Cultural Revolution waned in the late 1960s, and in the early 1970s Zhou Enlai took over the management of government and began to bring back purged Party leaders. In this period the radicals once again used Lu Xun, but this time against Zhou Enlai. The Cultural Revolution radicals were now led by the Shanghai wing of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan; the other wing, formerly at the Philosophy and Social Sciences Department of the Chinese Academy of Science, had been purged by Mao in the Cultural Revolution. The Shanghai group had been pushed out of political decision-making positions and now primarily dominated the cultural arena—the national media, creative arts, and a number of elite universities. Blaming Zhou Enlai and the returning bureaucratic leaders for pushing them to the periphery of power, this group used Lu Xun to undermine Zhou Enlai as they had earlier used him to undermine the Zhou Yang group. While Lu Xun was not the focus of this attack, as he had been of the earlier one, his views were sprinkled throughout the campaigns that the Shanghai group carried out from 1973 to 1976 against Zhou Enlai and the bureaucratic leaders. In fact, as early as 1971 their writing group in Shanghai, under the pseudonym of Luo Siding, had used a paraphrase of Lu Xun's condemnation of the Confucian emphasis on benevolence to criticize Zhou's effort to moderate the violence of the Cultural Revolution era. "In reality, no benevolent rule has ever existed in China," they wrote. 15. Wenyi bao (Literary gazette) 10 (1962): 42. 16. Lu Xun, "Geming shidai de wenxue" (Literature of a revolutionary period), Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1963), 3 : 3 1 3 .

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"Anyone who holds that such benevolent rule still exists today is an idealist." 17 "Luo" charged that Liu Shaoqi and other political swindlers (by which were meant Zhou Enlai and the bureaucratic leaders) "have negated Lu Xun's fighting merit in toppling the Confucian shop." 18 Lu Xun's remarks against Confucianism were quoted at length in the AntiConfucian campaign, from the fall of 1973 to the fall of 1974. The implicit target was Zhou Enlai's efforts to return the country to pre—Cultural Revolution practices. For example, Lu Xun had praised Qin Shih Huang's book burning as his attempt to unify the thought of his day. This same argument was used to resist Zhou Enlai's moves to reintroduce more conventional educational measures. Paraphrases of Lu Xun's denunciation of Confucian political views were also used to block Zhou's attempt to rebuild political institutions. An article in Guangming ribao (Guangming daily) pointed out that "Confucius did work out plans for governing the state. But these were methods for the powerholders to rule the people. None was designed for the sake of the people." 19 The Dictatorship of the Proletariat campaign that followed the AntiConfucian campaign made little use of Lu Xun, because he had said little about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Shuihu zhuart (Water margin) campaign in the fall of 1975, however, once again made use of Lu Xun's statements on the famous novel as an implicit attack on Zhou Enlai and on Deng Xiaoping, who had returned to power in 1973 as vice premier. These campaigns, attempts by the Shanghai group to regain the offensive against the bureaucratic leaders, had moved from broad ideological issues to issues of power and succession by 1975. In the Anti-Confucian campaign Lu Xun had been used to criticize the emphasis on moderation and normalization rather than on conflict and class struggle; in the Water Margin campaign he was used to insinuate that the top bureaucratic leaders intended to suppress the revolution and its radical leaders—which, of course, meant the Shanghai group itself. Specifically, the Shanghai group cited Lu Xun's article "The Evolution of Rascals" (January 1930), in which Lu Xun, who generally approved of Water Margin, criticized the abridged verson of the novel for deleting the section where the rebels led by Song Jiang accept amnesty from the emperor and go off to fight other rebels. Mao's criticism of Water Margin in the summer of 1975 appeared to be a paraphrase of Lu Xun. Liang Xiao, the Peking writing group associated with the Shanghai group, declared that "Lu Xun as a militant Marxist strongly detested such capitulationists as 17. Luo Siding, "Learn the thoroughgoing revolutionary spirit with which Lu Xun criticized the Confucius shop," Renmin ribao, 25 September 1971. FBIS, 29 September 1971, p. B2. 18. Ibid., p. B6. 19. Guangming ribao, 2 November 1973.

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Song Jiang w h o perpetrated counter-revolutionary acts while taking the posture of a revolutionary." Lu Xun's article, Liang Xiao continued, "was a militant manifesto and criticism of the capitulationist faction of the time and we still feel it is correct when read today." 2 0 Lu Xun was again extolled because he had pointed out that revolutions are undermined not by external enemies but by internal subversives—apparently an allusion to Z h o u Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. Lu Xun was repeatedly quoted to the effect that "in most cases a revolution is ended with the infiltration of opportunists. This also means that its insides have been eaten through by worms." 2 1 As Red Flag said in its September 1975 issue, Lu Xun taught that there is a "category of people w h o under the cloak of being revolutionaries, enthusiastically encircle and suppress the real revolutionaries." 2 2 Thus, as in the Cultural Revolution, Lu Xun was praised because he had recognized the internal threat to the revolution. Yet unlike the Cultural Revolution, when the Party organization was entirely suppressed, the early 1970s was a period of political factionalism. Z h o u Enlai and the bureaucratic leaders were able to use Lu Xun against the Shanghai group as the group had used Lu Xun against them—instead of using him alternately, factions were n o w using Lu Xun simultaneously. In 1971, with the approval of M a o , w h o straddled the Shanghai and the bureaucratic factions in the post—Cultural Revolution period, Z h o u Enlai called a national meeting to give priority to compiling and publishing Lu Xun's complete works. All of his stories, poems, essays, letters, diaries, and translations, as well as the ancient books he had published, were to be collected. These works included denunciations not only of Z h o u Yang and his associates but also of members of the Shanghai group. In 1934 Lu Xun had written letters criticizing Yao Wenyuan's father, Yao Pengzi. More damaging, Lu Xun h a d also clashed directly with Z h a n g Chunqiao in the 1930s. Under the pen n a m e Di Ke, Z h a n g in late 1935 had criticized Lu Xun's disciple Xiao Jun for misrepresenting the Northeast in his novel Bayue de xiangcun (Village in August). Lu Xun blisteringly retorted, in March 1936, that Di Ke was "one w h o feigns revolution in order to oppose the revolution." 2 3 This was the same charge that the Shanghai group had made against the Party's cultural officials in the mid-1960s and against Z h o u Enlai during the Water Margin campaign.

20. Liang Xiao, "Lu Xun has effectively criticized Water Margin—a study of 'The Evolution of Rascals,' " Guangming ribao, 30 August 1975, p. 2. 21. Zheng Qishan, "About the offer of a plan by Hou Meng," Guangming ribao, 28 November 1975, SPRCP # 5 9 9 9 , p. 161. 22. Fang Yanliang, "Let all people know the capitulationists—study Lu Xun's commentary on Water Margin," Hongqi 9 (1975), FB1S, 4 September 1975, p. E6. 23. Frederic Wakeman, "Historiography in China," China Quarterly 76 (December 1978): 899.

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Like Z h o u Y a n g and his associates in the 1 9 5 0 s , in the early 1 9 7 0 s the Shanghai group, n o w dominant in the cultural sphere, moved to protect themselves by hindering publication of Lu X u n ' s complete works. They struck out particular pieces; they opposed annotations that would have explained w h o Lu X u n was criticizing; and they vetoed inclusion of certain letters, with the excuse that they were addressed to people who had been condemned as counter-revolutionaries. Though the compilation was completed in 1 9 7 4 , Lu X u n ' s son Z h o u Haiying complained to M a o in October 1 9 7 5 that numerous problems had delayed the publication. He also suggested that a number of Lu X u n ' s old friends could help identify important people and events discussed in Lu X u n ' s writings. This may have been an effort to rehabilitate the M a y Fourth writers; unlike the Party bureaucrats, w h o had been returning in large numbers, these men had not yet been rehabilitated in the early 1 9 7 0 s . M a o ordered Z h o u Haiying's letter disseminated, but the Shanghai group prevented it from being made public. They did not relay the letter to the lower levels, complaining that it was the work of a "behind-the-scenes b o s s , " apparently an allusion to Z h o u Enlai or Deng Xiaoping. Since the bureaucratic leaders could only insert themselves into the media at critical points, primarily with the sanction of M a o , their opposition to the Shanghai group was neither as public nor as persistent as the Shanghai group's opposition to them. They worked in such roundabout ways as promoting the compilation of Lu X u n ' s works. Nevertheless, they were sometimes able to criticize the Shanghai group's economic positions through the media. With M a o ' s apparent blessing, they used Lu X u n to counter the Shanghai group's argument that Western technology and culture would destroy the uniqueness of China's form of socialism. In contrast to the radicals' image of Lu X u n as rejecting both traditional Chinese and Western culture, the bureaucratic leaders depicted him as selectively assimilating aspects of Western culture. Lu X u n , one writer noted, was " m o s t familiar with both Chinese and Western things," and his creative writings were " n o t only different from those of foreign countries but also different from the Chinese classical style of writing." 2 4 Lu X u n was thus made to represent the combined use of Western and Chinese culture to produce something new but still Chinese. Even with the fall of the Shanghai group in October 1 9 7 6 , a month after M a o ' s death, the bureaucratic leaders continued to use Lu X u n to denigrate the group and its remaining followers. As in the Cultural Revolution Lu X u n had been characterized as the first to see the treachery of Z h o u Y a n g and his associates, so in the p o s t - M a o era he was depicted as 2 4 . Hu X i n g , " C a n we do away with electric lights and trains?" Renmin 1 9 7 7 , SPRCP # 6 3 8 2 , p. 7.

ribao,

3 July

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the first to have seen the treachery of the Shanghai group. Excerpts from Lu Xun's criticism of Di Ke for attacking Xiao Jun, which the Shanghai group had blocked from publication, were printed in November 1 9 7 6 to show that Lu X u n had discovered Zhang's treacherous nature in 1 9 3 6 . The implication was that Zhang and his cohorts should be severely punished for their past as well as their recent wrongdoings. Thus, even after M a o ' s death, Lu Xun's "judgments" continued to be cited to legitimize the purging of political opponents. T h e U s e o f Lu X u n in the P o s t - M a o E r a As the movement against the Shanghai group waned in the late 1970s, the view of Lu X u n began to grow more realistic. The Shanghai group, it was charged, had distorted Lu X u n and his works past recognition. There was less of a tendency to overpraise and overinterpret Lu Xun for factional purposes. He was put back into his context and reassociated with his M a y Fourth colleagues, who were gradually rehabilitated—even those who were purged before the Cultural Revolution. Feng Xuefeng (purged in 1957) was honored posthumously, and X i a o Jun (purged in 1948) and Hu Feng (purged in 1 9 5 5 ) were once again allowed to participate in China's cultural life. Yet Lu X u n ' s old enemies from the Shanghai of the 1930s, Zhou Yang and his colleagues, were also rehabilitated and once again held important positions in the cultural hierarchy, much higher than those accorded Lu Xun's old disciples. Zhou became chairman of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and a vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Once again he issued official pronouncements on all questions in the social sciences, creative arts, and ideology. Ironically, he also played a major role in the réévaluation of Lu Xun, presiding over the meeting of M a y 1 9 7 9 that established the Society for the Study of Lu Xun's Works. T h e meeting was attended by Zhou Yang's cohorts in the 1 9 3 6 controversy, as well as by some of Lu Xun's old disciples. Zhou, Xia Yan, and Yang Hansheng were on the executive committee of the Society, along with Hu Qiaomu and Ba Jin. At the inaugural meeting, Zhou Yang charged that the Shanghai group had greatly distorted Lu Xun's image and called for elimination of such a politicized approach to Lu Xun. He demanded that " o n e seek truth from fact" when evaluating Lu Xun. Yet it is not clear that Zhou, who had formerly used Lu Xun and his disciples for his own political purposes, had himself dispensed with that politicized approach. He now downplayed, though he did not ignore, his own conflict with Lu X u n and his associates in the 1930s. In his speech of 1 9 8 0 commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the League of Left-Wing Writers, Zhou expressed semi-repentence for his activities against Lu

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Xun's close associates. Though he himself had led the movement to purge Feng Xuefeng in 1 9 5 7 , he now praised Feng for his translations of Communist doctrine. Zhou also extolled Qu Qiubai, whom he had criticized in the past, for his positive role in introducing Marxist literary theory and for his close friendship with Lu Xun. In the 1950s his appraisal of M a y Fourth literature had been lukewarn, but now he eulogized it: "Judging from the breadth and depth to which life is reflected, the vividness and richness of the plots, the variety of images and typicalness of characters, left-wing literary works from the 1 9 3 0 s reached a new level." 2 5 Yet despite his praise of their works, Zhou claimed that the M a y Fourth writers' "leftist infantile disorder" had caused sectarianism—not, however, in 1 9 3 6 but primarily in the late 1920s, during the conflict between Lu Xun and members of the Creation and Sun societies. Zhou points out that Lu X u n had criticized the participants as "petty bourgeoisie" who had learned Marxism from books and had not integrated with the masses. Zhou Yang admits that "many of us have failed to understand Lu X u n , " 2 6 but his confession applies to the late 1920s not the mid-1930s, when he was directly involved. In order to end the sectarianism, the League of Left-Wing Writers was formed, in which not only Lu Xun, Qu Qiubai, and Feng Xuefeng but also Zhou's old cronies Xia Yan and Yang Hansheng had played leading roles. But if the sectarianism of the late 1 9 2 0 s was a prelude to the League, Zhou acknowledges, the 1 9 3 6 controversy marked the League's end. With an implied self-criticism, he grants that both slogans should have been used, as Lu Xun had suggested. But comrades on both sides (among whom he avoids explicitly including himself) had been unwilling to accept Lu Xun's suggestion. Zhou acknowledges that the debate weakened the solidarity and militancy of left-wing writers, but he does not condemn the 1 9 3 6 controversy as sharply as he does the conflicts of the late 1920s. He does not claim that the participants in the later debate suffered from immaturity and shortcomings, like the earlier disputants. Moreover, while Zhou urges writers to continue the left-wing revolutionary culture of the 1 9 3 0 s and to establish Marxist literary and art theory, he asserts, as he had done in the 1 9 3 0 s in contradiction to Lu Xun and his colleagues, that present-day culture should emphasize China's own national characteristics—that is, the native folk style of the masses. Despite Zhou Yang's downplaying of the 1 9 3 6 controversy, there is no question that in the late 1 9 7 0 s Lu Xun was reduced from the godlike stature he had enjoyed in the Cultural Revolution to life size. Yet even this effort had a political purpose: as Lu Xun had been a surrogate for M a o in 25. Zhou Yang, "Inherit and carry forward the revolutionary tradition of the left-wing cultural movement," Renmin ribao, 2 April 1980, p. 5. 26. Ibid.

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the Cultural Revolution, like M a o he had to be shrunk to realistic proportions in the post-Mao era. Hu Qiaomu, president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a close associate of Deng Xiaoping, explained at the fiftieth anniversary of Lu Xun's death that "even the great commander of the revolutionary culture of the 1 9 3 0 s , Lu Xun, was a man and not a god, and therefore not without shortcomings and mistakes." 2 7 M a o Dun derided those who believed that "whomever Lu Xun criticized was bad and whomever he praised was thoroughly good." 2 8 This attack, which may have been an indirect defense of Zhou Yang and his colleagues, suggests that the effort to view Lu Xun more realistically had distinct political purposes. While the literature of the 1 9 2 0 s and 1930s was hailed in the late 1970s as the fount from which present-day Chinese culture had sprung, it was described more in the Yan'an tradition than in the May Fourth tradition. Although in his commemorative speech Hu Qiaomu referred to current Chinese literature and art as " a continuatiqp of the revolutionary cultural movement of the 1 9 3 0 s " and declared that " L u Xun's banner remains our banner today," 2 9 he still pointed to M a o ' s Yan'an talks as the guiding force in China's creative life. Hu claimed that the orientation M a o gave to literature in these talks was based on Lu Xun and the literature of the 1930s. In reality, however, M a o had been seeking to move China's writers away from Lu Xun's sardonic style and away from the May Fourth critical view of society toward upholding M a o ' s and the Party's view of society. Zhou Yang's and Hu Qiaomu's more realistic yet still politicized view characterized most discussions of Lu Xun in the late 1970s. Their approach may have reflected the contention within the leadership between those who wanted a more open society and those who wanted to strengthen Party control. It also may have reflected the contradictions between Deng Xiaoping's desire to expose the ills of society and the bureaucracy and to maintain Party authority. Whatever the reason, there is no question that China's literate population was confronted with a variety of conflicting views on Lu Xun. Lu Xun's stories, along with the works of other M a y Fourth writers who had been condemned during the Cultural Revolution, were reprinted and extolled in a society that had been almost culturally barren for over twenty years. These authors' somber, complicated perceptions of society were acclaimed because they were more realistic than the revolutionary romantic works of the Cultural Revolution. Lu Xun's calls for criticism of the establishment were quoted, such as this statement of 1 9 2 7 : "Politics has a tendency to maintain the status quo and

27. Hu Qiaomu, "Let us join hands, life," Renmin ribao, 7 April 1 9 8 0 , FBIS, 28. Renmin ribao, 17 October 1979, 29. Hu Qiaomu, FBIS, 8 April 1980,

sing heartily, inspire people to build a new socialist 8 April 1980, p. L4. p. 6. p. L4.

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therefore is moving toward a clash with literature and art which reflect discontent with the status quo." 3 0 Such quotations, however, were usually followed by explanations that Lu Xun was referring to reactionary political and economic systems. His writing had revealed the dark side of society and condemned social evils in order to "shake the foundation of the political system," but the role of literature at present is to uphold and not clash with the political system. "Some policies that are correct at one time and place may turn out to be invalid at another time and place." 31 These qualifications demonstrate that in the post-Mao era Lu Xun is as much of a potential threat to the authority of such pragmatists as Deng Xiaoping as he was to that of such radicals as Jiang Qing. His work challenges not only the radicals' demand for ideological conformity but also the bureaucratic leaders' demands for organizational discipline and strong Party authority. His life and literature, which expressed resistance to any political directives, represent a threat to the Party's efforts to reimpose its political authority and control. The return of his close disciples may be equally threatening. Though they may be too old and enfeebled to rebel again against Party strictures, these living examples of people who criticized Party leaders for deviating from Marxist principles and who demanded an area of autonomous creative activity over which the Party should exercise little control may keep alive Lu Xun's true legacy. Moreover, it was not the Shanghai group but the Party itself—and the very same powerful cultural leaders—that had purged these men before. Lu Xun's stories exposing the dark side of society may inspire literary exposés of the Cultural Revolution that could help prevent such movements in the future. But how can the Party guarantee that writers will depict the dark side of life during only the Cultural Revolution and neither before nor after, during periods when the Party was in control? The zawen genre popularized by Lu Xun was praised in 1978 and 1979 for "criticizing shortcomings and extending justice." It was said that zawen "can still play the deserved positive role." 32 Yet this genre—whether in Shanghai in the 1930s, in Yan'an in the 1940s, or in the People's Republic during the Hundred Flowers and the early 1960s—has invariably been used to criticize the shortcomings of the Party's leadership and organization. By the late 1970s, literary works by established as well as underground writers were criticizing not only Mao and the Cultural Revolution but also the Party and its political system. As the Party sought to tighten controls, particularly over the intellectual

30. Guo Fengqi, Fang Bojing, and Fan Hongbing, "Literary and art works cannot be separated from politics," Tianjin xingang, March 1980, pp. 7 9 - 8 3 , 91, JPRS # 7 7 0 7 4 , p. 34. 31. Ibid., p. 36. 32. Su Shuangbi, "Criticize Yao Wenyuan's 'Comments on the Three-Family Village,' " Hongqi, 2 February 1979, pp. 4 1 - 4 8 , JPRS # 0 7 3 3 0 4 , p. 87.

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community, in the early 1 9 8 0 s , it made use once again of Lu Xun. Hu Yaobang's speech in September 1 9 8 1 at the centennial celebration of Lu Xun's birth fully politicized the author, as the radicals had done at the start of the Cultural Revolution. But while the radicals had depicted him as totally loyal to M a o , Hu portrayed Lu Xun as conforming to the Party's will. He asserted that Lu X u n "forcefully debunked such theories as that which considered literature and art as an outburst of individual 'inspiration.' He pointed out that it was a delusion to want to leave the battlefield during a battle to be independent." 3 3 Emulation not only of Lu Xun's rejection of individuality but also of his sharp, unrelenting method of literary criticism would help rid present-day literature of certain "unhealthy, negative features which harm people." Hu called on the participants to criticize and to be on guard against people who practice this kind of "negative" literature, "however few and exceptional they are." 3 4 By that measure, Hu and the Party should have been on guard against Lu X u n , who exemplified the very qualities Hu condemned. Lu Xun's writing expressed individual criticism and dissatisfaction and did not endorse a specific political line, ideological formula, or patriotic creed. Another irony was that Zhou Yang, the man whom Lu Xun had called the internal enemy and whose actions had enraged him in his dying days, was made chairman of the China Society of Lu X u n , the committee formed to honor Lu Xun. However, the use of Lu X u n for political purposes may produce effects opposite to those intended. Lu Xun can be quoted handily in factional conflicts since he denounced one and all, but his work and life history must otherwise undermine any political authority, whether radicals or pragmatists, that seeks dominance. Perhaps even more threatening to political control have been the constant shifts in the official view of Lu X u n — h e has gone from conformist to rebel and back again, from May Fourth writer to non—May Fourth writer and back again. Over the years the public has been confronted with many divergent interpretations, sometimes at the same time, making it virtually impossible for any one view to be accepted as definitive. Such conflicting and shifting interpretations of Confucianism and Marxism have led the public to formulate their own conceptions, and it is likely that the differing interpretations of Lu X u n have also led individuals to pick and choose from among them the conception of Lu X u n that best suits their own predilections. Because the differing interpretations have been so highly politicized, they have most likely evoked a variety of views not only on China's intellectual and creative life but also on its political life. 33. Beijing Review, 15 October 1981, p. 13. 34. Ibid., p. 14.

9 Lu Xun and Patterns of Literary Sponsorship HOWARD GOLDBLATT

Lu Xun, dressed in his customary Chinese gown, is seated in a wicker armchair, legs crossed, a lighted cigarette in his hand, as he holds forth to an enraptured audience. Seated around him at a respectful distance are four or five young men neatly attired in Western suits; they are on the edges of their chairs as they strain to absorb their patron's wisdom. This visual representation of Lu Xun in his heralded role as mentor to a whole generation of Chinese youth is certainly accurate, if occasionally exaggerated and misunderstood. 1 It is a role in which Lu Xun privately took comfort while publicly downplaying its significance. But there is more to Lu Xun's dealings with China's youth—and with young writers and artists in particular—than meets the eye, and neither he nor his protégés were always satisfied with the complex relationship. Although in this paper I am primarily concerned with examining Lu Xun's sponsorship of literary activities and of a new generation of writers, I shall also try to put the issue of his championship of youth in general into perspective. Finally, in the interest of adding a more contemporary dimension to Lu Xun, I shall briefly examine his philosophical legacy in light of the political fortunes of those who were closest to him during his later years in Shanghai.

" S a v e the C h i l d r e n ! " It is not surprising that unanimity has not been reached on the subject of Lu Xun's dedication to the values and potential of China's youth; what 1. Several such illustrations can be found in Ouyang Wenli, éd., Lu Xun huazhuan (A pictorial biography of Lu Xun) (Hong Kong: Fuzhou tushu gongsi, 1975), pp. 1 9 2 - 1 9 6 , 364-365.

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is surprising is how close to unanimity published opinion comes. Lu Xun has his detractors, but they usually concentrate on his leftist politics (if politics is the right word), on his merciless dissection of enemies (such as Chen Yuan and Liang Shiqiu) 2 and even on his literary skills. Few of the people who knew or were directly influenced by him have ever ventured to attack his motives or moral leadership. A notable exception is Su Xuelin, whose often intemperate remarks have established her as the leader of the anti—Lu X u n faction. 3 Su characterizes Lu Xun as a hateful person ("His attitude toward people never deviated from one word: hate . . . hate . . . " ) 4 who was on a constant ego trip. According to her: All his life Lu X u n demanded that other people sing his praises and support him unconditionally. Fulsome and extravagant flattery was music to his ears; the more cringing and debased the performance, the more it pleased him. He made a big show of advocating unrestrained independence among the youth, while in fact he demanded total puppylike subservience. 5

Although there may be kernels of truth in Su's diatribe, vitriol of this nature, which lacks the wit and subtlety of Lu Xun's own personal attacks, makes one question the author's motives and speculate on the possible origins of such unbridled loathing. Conversely, the uncritical and often functional praise heaped upon Lu Xun in China over the decades since his death borders on mythification, making the interpretation of his personal and professional relationships difficult and engendering a measure of understandable skepticism. One of the more reasoned objections to the canonization of Lu Xun as the champion of China's youth comes from his friend and biographer, Cao Juren, who explodes the myth that Lu Xun had a blind spot where China's young people were concerned. A close reading of Lu Xun's correspondence and published writings on the subject gives the impression that on occasion his plea to "Save the children!" might be modified by the addition of "in spite of themselves." He sometimes had the feeling that he was being used or manipulated by his aspiring acolytes, whose lack of consideration and rampant opportunism he found exasperating. 6 2. See, for example, T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), p. 115; and Harriet Mills, "Lu Hsiin: 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 3 6 . The Years on the Left" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1963), pp. 5 8 - 6 3 . 3. See, for example, Su Xuelin, Wo lun Lu Xun (My views on Lu Xun) (n.p., n.d.). 4. Su Xuelin, " W o dui Lu Xun you qinjing dao fandui di liyou" (Why my attitude toward Lu Xun changed from respect to opposition), Wentan huajiu (Aspects of the past literary arena) (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1969), p. 27. 5. Ibid., pp. 2 5 - 2 6 . 6. See, for example, Cao Juren, Lu Xun pingzhuan (A critical biography of Lu Xun) (Hong Kong: Xianggang xinwenhua chubanshe, 1965), pp. 195, 199, 347; on the last of these pages appears as strong a criticism as any Lu Xun made on any subject.

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This might be partly attributable to the absence of any emotional distance between him and the young people he met, a condition that made him highly vulnerable to disappointment. As Cao Juren has noted, Hu Shi, who kept his young followers at arm's length, had more success with young people than did the more sensitive Lu Xun. But if Lu Xun's frustrations were more frequent, his successes were more spectacular and his legacy is more apparent. Whatever his disenchantments with young people, Lu Xun has been almost universally revered by Chinese youth of his own as well as of succeeding generations. The origins of this reverence probably lie in his final years in Peking, where he aligned himself with the students of Peking Women's Normal College in their opposition to the minister of education, Zhang Shizhao, who had closed the college. This led to a confrontation (in 1926) between the students and government troops, which resulted in the deaths of several students. A similar confrontation, with like results, occurred a year later, when Lu Xun was a professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Canton. These incidents led to a number of public lectures and essays in which Lu Xun addressed the predicament of China's youth and exhorted them to dedicate their vigor and budding talents to righting China's social ills. Typical of his remarks are the following: I am loathe to advise the youth of today to follow the path I have taken, for not only do w e differ in age and circumstances, but our thinking is far from identical. But if you insist on having my opinion regarding the goals that y o u n g people should seek, I can only repeat what I have said to others, and that is: First, y o u must survive; second, you must demand food to eat and clothes to wear; and, third, you must develop. Should anyone stand in the way of these three demands, whoever that person may be, w e shall oppose and exterminate him! But I must elaborate upon these demands to eliminate any possible misunderstanding: What I mean by surviving must not be construed as living an ignoble existence; f o o d and clothes do not simply mean extravagance; and development does not allow for indulgence. 7

Not all took his advice, however; Lu Xun later lamented the fact that many of China's young people were every bit as cruel and arrogant as their elders, causing him occasionally to despair over the nation's future. 8 Nonetheless, he remained true to his keenly felt responsibility to dispense useful advice to young people whenever it was sought. This he did most often in personal correspondence. According to one estimate, he received letters 7. "Beijing tongxin" (A communiqué from Peking), in Huagai ji (Unlucky star), Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 3:51— 52. 8. See, for example, Mills, "Lu Hsiin," pp. 81-82, 8 7 - 8 8 .

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from more than 1,200 young people and personally wrote in excess of 3,500 responses to their inquiries.9 Ba Jin has characterized Lu Xun not as youth's mentor or as saint (Mao Zedong's word), but as their friend. Most of his friends and associates were years younger than he, and as a result he too became more youthful.10 Yet he was constantly aware that he was fated to serve the youth, not join them, and he willingly accepted the challenge: As long as I can raise one flower, I have no objection to serving as the grass that rots to form c o m p o s t . 1 1

T h e New Warriors Lu Xun was not a young man at the time his first modern short story was published—"Diary of a Madman" appeared in Xin qingnian (New youth) in 1918, when he was 38 years old.12 But his literary activities began years before when, as a student in Japan, he translated Jules Verne's De la terre a la lune (published in 1903) and other works into Chinese, wrote and published several essays in the Zhejiang chao (Chekiang tide) and, with his brother, Zhou Zuoren, launched a magazine called Xinsbeng (New life).13 Moreover, Lu Xun's career as a writer of fiction ended only a few years after it had begun, while his work as a translator, editor, essayist, and founder of periodicals not only continued up until his death but also proved to be one of his major contributions to Chinese letters. Few of the young writers who gravitated toward Lu Xun, particularly in Shanghai during the final decade of his life, were drawn to him by his short stories; they came for support—moral, financial, or literary—and they were seldom disappointed. Lu Xun's literary sponsorship can be divided into three major categories: general (leadership of literary organizations; book and magazine publication and editing); individual (personal correspondence; manuscript critiquing, correcting, and forwarding to publishers or periodicals); and personal (financial loans; providing sanctuary and moral support). Although unquestionably interrelated, the three categories are worth examining individually.

9. Wang Shiqing, Lu Xun zhuan (A biography of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1959), p. 272. Only a small number of Lu Xun's letters has been preserved. 10. Ba Jin, " W o renshi de Lu Xun xiansheng" (The Lu Xun I knew), in Song Qingling, Zhou Zuoren, Mao Dun, et al., Lu Xun huiyilu (Reminiscences of Lu Xun) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1 9 7 8 - 1 9 7 9 ) , 2 : 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 . 11. Taken from Chih Pien, "Here Lies the Hope," Chinese Literature, July 1976, p. 99. 12. The story "Huaijiu" (Remembrance of the past), written in classical Chinese, was published in Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short story monthly) in 1913. 13. See, for example, William A. Lyell, Jr., Lu Hsiin's Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 6 3 - 6 8 , 8 5 - 8 8 .

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Lu Xun was an outspoken supporter, defender, or opponent of many literary organizations, from the Literary Research Association (which he never joined but was close to) through the League of Left-Wing Writers (of which he was the titular head) to the Creation Society and Crescent Moon Society (whose members he engaged in a series of heated battles). In his estimation, one of the prime functions of these associations was to be the cultivation of a new generation of writers. In his own words: "I have always thought it important to train a younger generation of warriors, and have formed several literary groups in my time, though none of them amounted to much." 1 4 He made a pointed plea to this effect at the inaugural meeting of the League of Left-Wing Writers on March 2, 1 9 3 0 : W e o u g h t t o bring up a host of new warriors, for t o d a y we are truly shorthanded. W e have several magazines, and quite a few books are published; but because they all h a v e the same few writers, the contents are bound t o be thin. 1 5

His plea did not fall on deaf ears, for as one scholar has pointed out, "the membership of the . . . League was almost all very young. Most members . . . were in their early twenties." 1 6 Yet although he was responsible for bringing many new writers, such as Ai Wu and Sha Ding, into the group, 17 his disappointment with the League in its later years led him to advise such writers as X i a o Jun not to join it. 18 Part of his disappointment with the League no doubt stemmed from the execution of five writers (Rou Shi, Hu Yepin, Feng Keng, Li Weisen, and Yin Fu) in 1 9 3 1 and of Qu Qiubai, his close friend and the behind-the-scenes leader of the League, in mid-1935. Lu Xun commemorated the deaths of the "five martyrs" two years later in one of his most emotional essays, "Written for the Sake of Forgetting." In it he gave free rein to his agony over the plight of activist youths and to some of his frustrations over his dealings with young people. 19 About his feelings of helplessness he wrote: It is not the young w h o are writing obituaries for the old, but during the last thirty years with my o w n eyes I have seen the blood shed by so m a n y young people steadily mounting up until n o w I am submerged and c a n n o t breathe.

14. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, trans., Lu Xun: Selected Works (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), 3 : 1 0 9 . (Hereafter cited as LXSW.) 15. Ibid., 3 : 1 0 6 - 1 0 7 . 16. Mills, "Lu Hsun," p.162. 17. Lu Xun xiansheng jinianji (Lu Xun memorial volume) (Hong Kong: Po Wen Book Company, 1979; orig. pub. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1937), p. 4 3 3 . 18. Letter to Hu Feng, Lu Xun shujian (Lu Xun's correspondence) (Hong Kong: Xianggang baixin tushu wenju gongsi), 2 : 9 4 6 - 9 4 7 . 19. In a shorter essay entitled "The Revolutionary Literature of the Chinese Proletariat and the Blood of the Pioneers" (1931), Lu Xun lamented the persecution of leftist writers, including the "five martyrs." See LXSW, 3 : 1 1 9 - 1 2 1 .

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All I can do is take up my pen and write a few articles, as if to make a small hole in the mud through which I can draw a few more wretched breaths. What sort of world is this? The night is so long, the way so long, perhaps I had better forget and remain silent. But I know, if I do not do so, a time will come when others will remember them and speak of them. 20

The bulk of the essay is given over to a clarification of Lu Xun's relationship with two of the martyred writers, a young poet/translator named Bai Mang (Yin Fu), 21 whom Lu Xun had met but a few times, and Rou Shi, of whom Lu Xun was particularly fond. 22 While praising the latter, Lu Xun expressed the difficulty he experienced in relating to China's youth: I knew from long experience that nine out of ten young people, especially young writers, were hypersensitive and took themselves tremendously seriously. If you were not very careful, misunderstandings tended to arise. So in general I avoided them. Even if we met I was naturally too nervous to dream of asking any favors. 23

In the final analysis, however, it was factionalism within the League and a series of personal squabbles that ensured both the alienation of Lu Xun and the League's ultimate demise. 24 It was Lu Xun's final association with a formal literary organization and far from the most satisfying. The organization and sponsorship of literary societies, more than any other endeavor, represents the multifaceted nature of Lu Xun's literary contributions. As the founder, leading figure, and mainstay of several such societies (which, his modesty notwithstanding, did amount to quite a bit), he nurtured many new writers, translators, and editors, created and edited several important magazines, published book series, and helped establish bookstores. Virtually all of these societies took their names from the magazine or the book series they published. The earliest, Yusi, often translated as "Threads of Talk," was launched in 1924 by Lu Xun's student Sun Fuyuan. It was one of the most successful ventures with which Lu Xun was associated. Blessed with a long list of contributors, including such May Fourth pioneers as Qian Xuantong and Liu Bannong, and younger writers such as Xu Qinwen, 2S Yusi served as 20. LXSW, 3:245-246. 21. Both n a m e s are p s e u d o n y m s of X u Bai, w h o was most generally k n o w n as Yin Fu. Lu X u n later w r o t e a preface for Yin Fu's poetry anthology Haier ta (The children's p a g o d a , 1936). 22. For a discussion of Lu X u n and Rou Shi, see T. A. Hsia, Gate, pp. 191—192. 23. LXSW, 3:237. 24. This issue is treated in much greater detail in ibid., particularly p. 119. 25. See Mills, "Lu H s u n , " pp. 54—55, for a fairly comprehensive list of contributors. For i n f o r m a t i o n on Yusi see C h u a n D a o , "Yi Lu X u n xiansheng he Yusi" (Recalling Lu X u n and Yusi), in Song et al., Lu Xun huiyilu, 1:98—107.

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the showplace for much of Lu Xun's finest nonfiction writing and as the vehicle for the first literary efforts of several of his protégés. Sun's successor as editor of the magazine, Li Xiaofeng, branched out, with Lu Xun's help, into the bookselling business, with the establishment of the Beixin Book store. Although Lu Xun was occasionally displeased with Li's business practices, he published several of his own books through Beixin and recommended many others, for he was always partial to any book merchant who was willing to publish high-quality literature.26 With this experience behind him, Lu Xun turned his attention to another venture, the creation of a new journal called Mangyuan (Wilderness), which began publication in 1925. His purpose in this venture was in keeping with his view of the need for young writers: I have long hoped to see China's youth stand on their own t w o feet and to be bold critics of China's society and culture. T o this end I edited the monthly magazine Wilderness to give them a platform to air their views. 2 7

Wilderness's staff, with Lu Xun at its center, was a much more closely knit group of young people than Yusi's, and Lu Xun put his stamp on this magazine in a way he was unable to do with its predecessor. Wilderness was much more concerned with social criticism and was under Lu Xun's direct control. Unfortunately, he was soon attacked by some of the younger founders over a personal matter, so that the Wilderness experience left him with unpleasant memories. The opposite was true with the Weiming she (Unnamed society), which included many of the same writers and translators as Wilderness,28 As one scholar has noted: Of all the literary societies and groups with which Lu Hsiin [Lu X u n ] was associated in his life, this was the one that was closest to his heart. In the brief five years of its existence, the group not only played a major role in introducing Russian literature in translation to China, but also made an important contribution to modern Chinese literature and publishing. 29

The Unnamed Society published over twenty titles, including some by Lu Xun; most of the volumes were translations, an area in which Lu Xun had an 26. Zang Kejia, "Lu Xun xiansheng yu bianji chuban gongzuo" (Lu Xun's editing and publishing work), in Zhang Jinglu, éd., Zhongguo xiandai chuban shiliao (Historical materials on modern Chinese publishing), 2:260. See also Ma Tiji, éd., Xu Guangping yi Lu Xun (Xu Guangping remembers Lu Xun) (Guangdong: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1979), p. 237. 27. Lin Chen, Lu Xun shiji kao (Studies on Lu Xun's achievements) (Shanghai: Xinwenyi chubanshe, 1957), p. 51. 28. Both Wilderness and the Unnamed Society are treated in Lu Xun, preface to vol. 4 of Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi (Compendium of modern Chinese literature) (1936); see Ma, Xu Guangping yi Lu Xun; Mills, "Lu Hsiin"; and Cao Juren, Lu Xun pingzhuan. 29. Mills, "Lu Hsiin," p. 65.

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abiding interest. (The society actually published two series: the translations were called the Unnamed Series, while the creative works were included in the Wuhe Series.) Lu X u n was never more diligent than when checking and correcting the translations executed by young contributors to magazines or translation series. According to his wife, he invariably checked the translations against the originals, and when his understanding of the source language was insufficient to the task he sought out others' assistance. 30 This attitude carried over to other editorial responsibilities: his corrections or changes on manuscripts, while conscientiously and carefully made, were never arbitrary or emasculating; when his opinions were at variance with the author's, he took pains to explain his comments and to consult with the author. 3 1 He even went so far as to recommend other periodicals to authors of pieces that were inappropriate for the journal that he represented. 32 In all, Lu X u n undertook editorial responsibilities for more than ten journals 3 3 and was the initiator or a prime moving force in several book series. 34 This work took a high toll on him financially, physically, and emotionally but, convinced that literature was an effective weapon in the battle to improve society, he was willing to pay the price. The fact that he turned over as many editorial and publishing duties as possible to younger men and women, and that he contributed a large number of articles and essays under pseudonyms unknown to the reading public, is solid evidence that social commitment rather than ego gratification (as some charge) was the bedrock upon which his activities in this arena were based. He felt that, given his experience, personal contacts, and energies, his involvement was a fundamental and essential ingredient for the success of these publishing efforts. One hates to think of the loss to modern Chinese literature had he not placed such importance on the works of young writers and on the need to make these works readily available in the most professional manner possible. 35 30. Ma, Xu Guangping yi Lu Xun, pp. 3 9 7 - 3 9 8 . 31. See, for example, Zhao Jiabi, "Huiyi Lu Xun bianxuan Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi, xiaoshuo erji" (Recalling Lu Xun's editing of "Fiction, volume 2 " of Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature), in Song et al., Lu Xun huiyilu, 2:68. 32. Ma, Xu Guangping yi Lu Xun, p. 398. 33. These journals were: Mangyuan (Wilderness), Yusi (Thread of talk), Beixin banyuekan (Beixin semimonthly), Jingbao fukan (Jingbao literary supplement), Haiyan (The petrel), Mengya (The sprout), Benliu (The torrent), Zhaohua zhoukan (Dawn blossoms weekly), Boting (The skiff), Qianshao (The outpost), Wenxue daobao (Literature guide), Shizi jietou (The intersection), Baer di shan (Partisan), and Yiwen (Translations). 34. In addition to those already mentioned, Lu Xun played a major role in the Nulishe (Slave society) series, which published Fengshou (Harvest) by Ye Zi, Bayue de xiangcun (Village in August) by Xiao Jun, and Shengsi cbang (The field of life and death) by Xiao Hong in 1935. Lu Xun's role is described in Xiao Yun, "Lu Xun he Nulishe" (Lu Xun and the Slave Society), Wenyi baijia 1 (1979): 1 0 7 - 1 1 3 . 35. Lu Xun's attention to covers, illustrations, paper quality, binding, printing, and the like needs no elaboration here; one might only point out that this attention often proved to be one of the major features of magazines he edited.

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Lu Xun stated his conception of the editor's role in the following words: An editor m u s t be a clear thinker . . . and should k n o w m o r e than a writer; although he m a y not have the depth of thought of a writer, he must have a grasp of the whole picture. An editor can neither indiscriminately lavish praise on a writer n o r use his position t o arbitrarily suppress the w o r k s of an a u t h o r . This is f u n d a m e n t a l . 3 6

Knowingly or not, in dealing with those who shared his ideological views and those who were established or aspiring members of his personal circle, Lu Xun seems to have violated the letter if not the spirit of his own pronouncement. Some of the works published under his auspices or through his intervention could not possibly have measured up to his personal literary standards. This complaisance suggests either a sense of personal loyalty or an unwavering belief that those who had once received his patronage were to be given unconditional entrée to publications; he may have felt that their "importance" transcended the occasional poor quality of the writing. This particular flaw—if indeed it was a flaw—was adequately compensated for by Lu Xun's treatment of those with whom he had personal or ideological differences. Nowhere is his fairness better exemplified than in his work on volume 4 of Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi (Compendium of modern Chinese literature).37 Lu Xun's public disdain for Chen Yuan did not prevent him from including a story by Chen's wife, Ling Shuhua, or from praising her literary talents in the book's preface. The same holds true for Yuan Jun (the sister of Feng Youlan and the wife of Lu Kanru), who had gained prominence as a contributor to Creation Society journals, and for Xiang Peiliang, a young man with whom Lu Xun was on extremely poor terms owing to a personal feud.38 Lu Xun included three of Xiang's works and accorded them high praise in the preface, concrete evidence of his spirit of fair play and impartiality. At a time when factionalism often hindered the advancement of Chinese literature, Lu Xun stood almost alone in giving all writers their due. A Nonpatronizing Patron If Lu Xun is respected for his indefatigable, relatively selfless, and conscientious work on journals and with literary societies, he is virtually venerated for the individual attention he paid to young writers and artists. 36. Tang Tao, Huiyi shujian sattji (Recollections, correspondence, miscellanea) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1979), p. 51. 37. Lu Xun's work on this volume is described in detail in Zhao Jiabi, "Huiyu Lu Xun bianxuan," pp. 5 4 - 7 1 . 38. See, for example, Ma, Xu Guangping yi Lu Xun, pp. 2 2 8 - 2 2 9 .

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If anything, this effort was more taxing than any other. One need only read Lu Xun's letters to aspiring authors, many of whom were completely unknown to him, to see how seriously he took his role as a champion of modern Chinese literature. One concrete means of expressing support was to write prefaces for book manuscripts sent to him. He was well aware of the value his prefaces gave to works by new authors: not only were sales enhanced but the author's importance was also virtually assured. Some publishers may have made such a preface a condition for publication. Lu Xun was sparing but not stingy in his use of this prerogative. The success of the three volumes published in the Slave Society series, Fengsbou (Harvest) by Ye Zi, Bayue de xiangcun (Village in August) by Xiao Jun, and Shengsi cbang (The field of life and death) by Xiao Hong, can in large part be attributed to Lu Xun's support in general and to his prefaces in particular. To this day it is difficult to find a relatively lengthy reference to any of these works that does not cite Lu Xun's prefatory comments as proof of the work's significance and literary excellence. Understandably, Lu Xun usually reserved his prefaces for the works of writers in his circle, young men and women to whom he felt a close personal attachment; besides Ye Zi and the "Two Xiaos," there were Haier ta (The children's pagoda) by the martyred Bai Mang (Yin Fu); Qu Qiubai's Haishang shulin (Literary criticism from abroad, which Lu Xun edited following Qu's death); Ye Yongqin's Xiaoxiao shinian (A short ten years, 1929); Xu Maoyong's Dazaji (Miscellaneous essays);39 and others. Lu Xun's notably brief prefaces are a blend of praise (never overdone) with general observations, to which was sometimes added a measure of personal sentiment, particularly in the cases of authors who had died or been killed. Unlike many other literary figures who merely lend their names to a new work via a preface, Lu Xun also expended much time and energy in editing, correcting, and proofreading manuscripts sent to him by young authors. According to one estimate, the total number of manuscripts that carried his stamp approached 120; 4 0 although this figure includes his own works—fiction, essays, and translations—as well as magazines and journals, that leaves a considerable number authored or translated by others. An examination of his collected letters and his diary shows not only how many such manuscripts he reviewed, corrected, and proofread but also how much work he put into them and what this work cost him. The following example, related by Xiao Hong, is typical: 39. Ironically, within a year Xu was the victim of one of Lu Xun's most withering public attacks. See T. A. Hsia, Gate, pp. 1 3 2 - 1 4 4 . 40. Zang Kejia, "Lu Xun xiansheng yu bianji chuban gongzuo," p. 269.

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Throughout the winter of 1935 and the spring of 1936, Lu Xun worked constantly on the proofreading of Qu Qiubai's Literary Criticism from Abroad. He had to read the several-hundred-thousand-word manuscript three times, and since the printers sent him copies in installments of eight or ten pages, he always felt a sense of urgency regarding it.41

Not all of Lu Xun's work correcting unpublished manuscripts or editing and proofreading anthologies took this much time, partly because he hadn't that much leisure to devote to such work and partly because it was his custom to retain as much of the author's style as possible. Nonetheless, it was exhausting work; according to his friend Li Jiye, he once complained that following a night of proofreading a manuscript by Gao Changhong (with whom he later had a long personal feud), he had coughed up blood. 42 Not all of his sacrifices were appreciated, as the following episodes make clear: One young writer [Xu Qinwen] asked Lu Xun to edit a collection of his short stories. When the book was published, the brisk sales turned the writer into an overnight sensation. Sensing the opportunity to make a financial killing, he gathered the stories not included in the first work into a second collection, which he then published. [Lu Xun] reacted to this with a shake of his head and a sigh. "I put a lot of work into selecting stories for the first collection," he said, "choosing the most representative works. The stories I left out weren't very good ones and needed more work. Only people who can accept the selection process can expect to make a real contribution." . . . Lu Xun put a great deal of effort into compiling a selection of stories by another writer [Gao Changhong]. After he completed his proofreading and the book was published, the young man complained: "He deleted all the best stories and chose only the weaker ones." 43

For the most part, however, Lu Xun's labors were appreciated and very often resulted in the establishment of the authors as important literary figures. Perhaps, it can be argued, he was seeking to create a coterie of young writers who did his bidding because they owed their success to his efforts on their behalf. However, his frequent calls for a new generation of talented and socially engaged writers, the fact that virtually all these manuscripts came to him unsolicited, and the quality of much of the works with which he was involved belie this charge. He certainly expected, perhaps even demanded, loyalty from those in his inner circle, but that did not stop

41. Xiao Hong, Huiyi Lu Xun xiansheng (A remembrance of Lu Xun) (Shanghai: Shenghuo shudian, 1940), p. 35. My translation of this remembrance appears in Renditions 15, pp. 169-191. 42. Lu Xun xiansheng jinianji, p. 171. 43. Ma, Xu Guangping yi Lu Xun, p. 228.

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him from supporting or promoting high-quality literature written by those who kept their distance from him. As we have seen earlier, Lu Xun occasionally forwarded manuscripts to other magazines when he found them inappropriate for the magazine he was editing. Even more frequently, in a noneditorial role, he sent manuscripts from young writers to various magazines with the recommendation that they be published. His recommendation evidently carried a great deal of weight (it must be admitted that many of the editors to whom he sent these manuscripts were friends and even protégés), for the stories got published and the authors were given the exposure they needed. Lu Xun's collected letters and his diary are filled with examples. The case of Duanmu Hongliang is typical. Lu Xun, whose only contact with Duanmu had been the exchange of a few letters, sent DuanmuV'Yeye weishemma buchi gaoliangmi zhou?" (Granddad, why can't we eat sorghum porridge?) to Zuojia yuekan (Writer's monthly), where it was published. He also made several perceptive comments about flaws in the work. 4 4 Lu Xun even played a role in the publication of Lao She's first novel, Lao Zhang de zhexue (The philosophy of Lao Zhang). 4 5 In sum, Lu Xun was a true patron of young writers: he read, corrected, and made recommendations on their manuscripts, then got the works published and often defended them against their critics. This last aspect can be illustrated by his essay "Zujie sanyue" (The International Settlement in March), which is a heated rebuttal to an attack by Di Ke (a pseudonym used by Zhang Chunqiao) on Xiao Jun's Village in August.*6 Lu Xun considered an attack on one of his friends or protégés to be an attack on himself, as Xu Maoyong and others learned the hard way. In his later years, when his health was failing and his position in leftist literary circles was insecure, Lu Xun's apparent vindictiveness may have had its paranoiac side. But his unwavering protectiveness of those who had gravitated toward him is evidence that in his view, loyalty was not a one-way street. T h e Personal T o u c h Lu Xun's support for young writers and artists often carried into the personal realm. At a time when writers were seldom able to make a living from their writings, when they lived under a constant cloud of suspicion from governments of every stripe, when murder, execution, harassment,

44. Lu Xun xiansheng jinianji, pp. 5 1 0 - 5 1 1 . 45. Hu Jinquan, Lao She he tade zuopin (Lao She and his works) (Hong Kong: Wenhua shenghuo chubanshe, 1977), pp. 5 0 - 5 1 . 46. LXSW, 4 : 2 7 5 - 2 7 8 .

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and intimidation were the lot of many writers, and when living conditions often seriously impaired their health, Lu Xun (who himself lived under such conditions) freely gave assistance whenever possible. Lu Xun's home was on several occasions a sanctuary for writers who were being sought by the authorities. Most prominent among those he sheltered were Qu Qiubai and Feng Xuefeng. 4 7 More commonly, his young colleagues came for financial assistance. Xiao Jun, to whom Lu Xun had lent money on at least one occasion 4 8 and who had first met his benefactor at a dinner hosted by the famous author for Xiao and his wife soon after their arrival in Shanghai, 4 9 relates the story of how on another occasion he, X i a o Hong, and Ye Zi conspired to get Lu Xun to treat them to a decent meal when their money had run out. Lu Xun gladly accommodated them. 5 0 He also gave financial aid to needy students and assumed responsibility for their medical costs. 51 Both the writer Ai Wu and the artist Yi Qun borrowed or received money from Lu Xun on various occasions. 5 2 He was, it seems, more than a patron; he assumed the roles of protector and defender, serving as a sort of spiritual force that commanded great loyalty and inspired many young writers to work with increased dedication. After Lu Xun's death, his protégés remained loyal (as do those who are still around today), although disputes arose as some of them vied for the right to wear their patron's mantle. None, however, was able to command the following Lu X u n had enjoyed. The reasons for this certainly include the shifting political winds and the concomitant changes in literary policy and practice, as well as the increased factionalism among the younger writers. But the root cause is still to be found in the uniqueness of Lu Xun himself, in his unmatched willingness to expend his energies in promoting, nurturing, and defending promising writers and in the charisma that he apparently had for young intellectuals. " I f L u X u n W e r e Alive T o d a y . . . " A perennially hot topic of conversation is: What would Lu Xun's status have been if he had lived into the 1950s and 1960s? A reputedly popular poem goes:

10.

47. Lu Xun xiansheng

jinianji, p. 573, and Xiao Hong, Huiyi Lu Xun xiansheng,

pp. 9—

48. See Lu Xun shujian, 2:777. 49. Xiao Jun, "Women diyici yingyao canjiale Lu Xun xiansheng de yanhui" (Our first acceptance of Lu Xun's dinner invitation), Renmin wenxue 5 (1979): 2 1 - 2 6 . 50. Xiao Yun, pp. 1 0 8 - 1 0 9 . 51. Pearl Chen, The Social Thought of Lu Hsiïn, 1881-1936 (New York: Vantage Press, 1976), p. 39. 52. Lu Xun xiansheng jinianji, pp. 433, 463.

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If L u X u n were alive today His head w o u l d roll in T i a n a n m e n S q u a r e . 5 3

A moot point, perhaps, but over the years many articles have been written to support or refute this conjecture. The discussion invariably touches or focuses upon Lu Xun's circle of friends, on their activities while Lu Xun was alive and their fates following his death. Although not a prime concern of this paper, a brief examination of the composition and experiences of Lu Xun's circle of friends and associates may bring us closer to an understanding of his activities as a sponsor of young writers. Lu Xun's circle was a large one by any standard. The number of letters he wrote, visitors he entertained, and meetings—social and professional— he attended, particularly during his Shanghai years, is staggering. 54 Obviously, only a small percentage of the people in his life could be considered close. Available evidence indicates that many of his most intimate friendships dated from his Peking and Japan days; he was also very close to such Japanese friends as Uchiyama Kanzo, Dr. Sudô, and Masuda Wataru. He himself admitted as late as two months before his death that Hu Feng, Huang Yuan, and Ba Jin (who had only met Lu Xun a dozen or so times but was one of the central figures in his withering attack against his "fallen" disciple, X u Maoyong) 5 5 were not yet "close" friends. 56 According to C a o Juren, Lu Xun's closest friends were Sun Fuyuan, Lin Yutang, Chen Yuan, Chen Gongxia, and Yu Dafu. S 7 This is a highly debatable list. But perhaps we should differentiate between "friends" and "associates." Most of Lu Xun's closest associates, it seems, were young writers and artists. These included Feng Xuefeng, Hu Feng, Xiao Jun, Xiao Hong, Ye Zi, Huang Yuan, Rou Shi, Q u Qiubai, Wei Suyuan, and a few others. Although this list is far from comprehensive, it is interesting to note that two of the people on it (Rou Shi and Q u Qiubai) were executed by the K M T as Communists, three (Xiao Hong, Ye Zi, and Wei Suyuan) died in their early thirties, and three of the others (Feng Xuefeng, Hu Feng, and Xiao Jun) eventually were major targets of criticism in the various literary rectification campaigns that the Party mounted from 1942 through the 1970s. Some of those, such as Ding Ling, who were not as close as the others to Lu Xun but were close to his protégés, suffered a similar fate. The name of Zhou Yang figures most prominently in these events; Lu 5 3 . Y a n Shui " P i n g s a n s h i n i a n d a i L u X u n z h o u w e i r e n w u de m i n g y u n " (A critical l o o k at the f a t e s of the p e o p l e a r o u n d L u X u n in the 1 9 3 0 s ) , Jingbao (The mirror) 4 ( 1 9 8 0 ) : 4 0 . 5 4 . P r o b a b l y the m o s t c o m p r e h e n s i v e list o f L u X u n ' s friends, c o l l e a g u e s , protégés, dinner g u e s t s , a n d v i s i t o r s is p r o v i d e d in Z h e n g X u e j i a , Lu Xun zhengzhuart ( T h e true story of Lu X u n ) ( T a i p e i : S h i b a o c h u b a n g o n g s i , 1 9 7 8 ) , p p . 3 5 8 - 4 2 9 . 5 5 . S o n g et al., Lu Xun huiyilu, 2 : 1 0 0 . 5 6 . LXSW, 4:294. 5 7 . C a o J u r e n , Lu Xun pingzhuan, p p . 3 3 6 ff.

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X u n , of course, fought his final major battle—over the National Defense Literature slogan—with Z h o u . It is tempting to speculate on what might have happened had Lu X u n lived, for he was a much more formidable opponent than any of his disciples. Given his political philosophy and his humanistic bent, the outcome might have been essentially the same, but the battle would surely have been more spectacular. Whether, as Feng Xuefeng asserts, these young writers had a strong influence on Lu X u n (which Feng and Q u Qiubai did) 58 or whether the influence more often traveled in the other direction, there was undoubtedly a mutual attraction between Lu X u n and his fiercely independent protégés. It is no accident that, as Harold Isaacs writes, his " m o s t intimate friends and associates played the most prominent roles—ultimately as targets and victims—in the long series of collisions that took place between writers and the literary apparatus of the Party intent upon bringing them under its total control."59 With the purged writers n o w rehabilitated (many of them posthumously), and with younger writers now expressing opposition against Party d o m i n a t i o n — m o r e often than not with direct references to Lu X u n and his works 6 0 —there can be no doubt that Lu X u n ' s legacy lives on. Conclusion Lu X u n ' s sponsorship of young writers is such an emotional issue that writers sometimes seem to be competing over who can pen the most evocative simile or metaphor. T h e scholar may not be particularly well served by such comments as " L u X u n . . . was like a farmer, who not only helped young writers till their fields, but also assisted in the irrigation and fertilization," 6 1 but one cannot totally ignore such sentiments, for they give an indication of the esteem in which he is held. Lu X u n ' s dedication to young writers and artists and the promise he saw in them (faith that, if not unalloyed, was nonetheless irrepressible) had its origins in a simple chronological fact: the writers of his generation, who were born in the waning years of the nineteenth century, belonged to " o l d C h i n a " and t o o often were unable to handle the contradictions between feudal and revolutionary goals and traditions. H e had little hope that even 58. Ibid., p. 334. 59. Harold Isaacs, "Introduction," in Isaacs, ed., Straw Sandals: Chinese Short Stories 1918-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1974), p. xiv. 60. One notable example is the collection of writings by young people that were the first instances of anti-Cultural Revolution literature, Can you geyin dongdiai (Dare to sing a song that moves the earth) (Hong Kong: Qishiniandai chubanshe, 1974). The title comes from one of Lu Xun's poems. 61. Ling Yang, "Guanyu Ye Zi" (About Ye Zi), Kaijuan (Book reviews monthly) 3 (1979): 95.

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the more "progressive" of them—himself included—would prove capable of leading the struggle to forge a new China and earn for her a place in the society of modern nations. Lu Xun did occasionally despair over the impatience, arrogance, intolerance, duplicity, and opportunism of some of the younger generation, and he was himself given to a go-slow approach that exasperated some of his more impetuous protégés. Nonetheless, he believed that these young writers were blessed with the opportunity of seeing the fruits of their labors. As one disciple recalls: Lu X u n was seated in a front-row balcony seat of the X X movie theater; I've forgotten which movie w a s being shown, but I recall that the newsreel s h o w e d a Russian M a y Day celebration in Red Square. "I'm afraid that's a sight I'll never see. But someday you'll witness it," Lu Xun said to those of us round him. 6 2

He considered himself and others of his generation to be primarily fitted for the task of ridding China of its antiquated, stultifying, and oppressive traditions (that is, for demolition work); the task of reconstruction he left to those who would follow. Yet as a teacher and, to some extent, a visionary, he played a significant role in the training of this generation of builders. That the structure that eventually took shape seems to vary from his personal blueprint is largely due to historical events over which he had no control and that he did not live to see. In his public speeches and published essays Lu Xun constantly exhorted young people to dedicate themselves to national survival. Irrespective of the labels others have placed upon him, he viewed the contributions of others in nationalistic and humanistic terms, and surrounded himself with younger writers of like persuasion. Many of the latter paid a high price for their insistence upon these ideals. On a more personal level, Lu Xun demanded loyalty, courage, and self-reliance from his protégés. He knew how easy it would be for others to come to rely upon him, ultimately to their own detriment. Toward the end of his life he often responded to those seeking his advice with comments such as, "You look into the matter yourselves and do what has to be done. What if I weren't around?" 6 3 Even in matters that vitally concerned him, he realized the importance of turning the reins over to others. After initiating the magazine Yitven (Translations) and putting out the first three issues almost single-handedly, he turned the editorial responsibilities over to Huang Yuan and others. "This is the last issue I'll edit," he said. "From now on, it's up to you. You've graduated now." 64 62. 63. 64. jinianji,

Xiao Hong, Huiyi Lu Xun xiansheng, p. 11. Ibid., p. 54. Yiwen she, "Lu Xun xiansheng yu Yiwen" (Lu Xun and Yiwen), Lu Xun p. 421.

xiansheng

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The teacher/pupil metaphor is particularly apt, for not only were many of Lu Xun's disciples first drawn to him after listening to his lectures and speeches but his public pronouncements also put him squarely on the side of youth. He counseled them not to be ashamed of their immaturity and inexperience, for that was proof of their capacity to absorb and put into practice new ideas and skills. He warned them of the evils of censorship, taught them to be iconoclasts, turned them into editors, translators, and writers, and was their staunchest defender. Lu Xun's most noteworthy achievements in literary sponsorship occurred during his years in Shanghai. These were hard times for Lu Xun, who was beleaguered by ill health, public attacks from the Left and the Right, and a sense of mission that drained his energies. Although his circle was perhaps not the largest or the most important at the time, he was generally aligned with the majority of influential literary figures of the day, including Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Ding Ling, Yu Dafu, and others. In retrospect, the accomplishments of his protégés do not suffer in comparison with those of their contemporaries of any stripe. His was a fairly eclectic group—geographically, temperamentally, and philosophically—which made it virtually impossible for the Lu Xun "clique" (as some have called it) to continue as an entity after Lu Xun's death. To many of Lu Xun's disciples he was a father figure; most referred to him not by his literary name but as Zhou xiansheng (Mr. Zhou). For some, like Xiao Hong, the surrogate-father image fits particularly well; according to friends, Xiao Jun was denied entrance to Lu Xun's home for a time in 1936 because of his shabby treatment of Xiao Hong. Yet Lu Xun was vindictive only to those who betrayed his trust; he had given too much of himself to the cause of creating a corps of writers and artists dedicated to both national salvation and artistic excellence to brook attacks from within. Looking at a legacy like this, it is difficult to agree with the scholar who labels Lu Xun "an egregious case of great talent most stupidly wasted." 65 In fact, few men have left as indelible an imprint on their nation's literature as did Lu Xun. 65. T. A. Hsia, Gates, p. l i é .

10 Lu Xun in Japan MARUYAMA N O B O R U

The aim of this article is to trace how Lu Xun's works and ideas have been translated, studied, and received in Japan and what the salient characteristics of Japanese scholarship on Lu Xun have been. I The first Japanese to mention Lu Xun's name in Japan was Aoki Masaru, in his three-part article " K o Teki o chushin ni uzumaite iru bungaku kakumei" (Literary revolution whirling around Hu Shi and others, 1920). "As a writer," Aoki said, Lu X u n has a promising future. "Diary of a M a d m a n , " which depicts the terrifying hallucinations of one suffering from a persecution mania, proves that Lu X u n has stepped into a new realm of Chinese literature that had never been explored by any other traditional writer. 1

Judging from the date of the article ("Written on October 10 in the ninth year of T a i s h o " ) , Aoki seems to have read most of Lu Xun's fiction that had so far been published: " K o n g Y i j i , " "Medicine," " T o m o r r o w , " " A Small Incident," and "Diary of a M a d m a n . " That Aoki was able to predict Lu Xun's great future after reading only these early literary works reveals his clear-sightedness as a critic. Although Aoki first mentioned Lu Xun by name in the third part of his article, he happened to touch upon Lu Xun's

Translated from Japanese by Koko Tanzawa, edited by Leo Ou-fan Lee and Joyce Coleman. 1. Aoki Masaru, "Ko Teki o chushin ni uzumaite iru bungaku kakumei" (Literary revolution whirling around Hu Shi and others) Shinagaku (Sinology) vol. 1, no. 3 (November, 1920): 2 1 8 - 2 1 9 .

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poems in the preceding part. Speaking of a vernacular poem that Lu Xun had published under the pseudonym of Tang Si, Aoki commented: Another new fact is that vernacular poetry has several practitioners. Poets such as Shen Yinmo, Liu Bannong, and Tang Si are among them. . . . Tang has a tendency to treat unpoetical subjects quite lightly with little poetical inspiration. . . . In short, his poems are banal. 2

When he wrote this, Aoki did not know that Tang Si and Lu Xun were one and the same person. It is interesting that the first critical evaluation given to Lu Xun in Japan described him as "banal." A graduate student at Tokyo University, Fujii Shózo, has recently discovered a much earlier mention of Lu Xun's work: a reference to the publication of Lu Xun's Stories from Foreign Countries in 1909. While going through old magazines issued in the Meiji era to study the influence of Japanese publications on the early Lu Xun, Fujii came upon the following passage: Today European literature is very popular in this country. So it is true with young Chinese students staying in Japan. Two of them, brothers with the surname of Zhou, both in their mid-twenties, have read a lot of these Western works, in English and German. They plan to publish a series of translation works entitled Stories from Foreign Countries in Tokyo and sell them in China. Its first volume has already appeared. The translation was of course Chinese and those works were meant for Chinese. The works they favor most are revolutionary or nihilistic stories of Russia, followed by German and Polish works. They care little for French stories. 3

This is the first Japanese response to Lu Xun's work, and one of the earliest in world literature. The first Japanese translation of Lu Xun was Zhou Zuoren's version of "Kong Yiji." It appeared in the nineteenth issue of Pekin shühó (Peking weekly review), a magazine published by some Japanese staying in Peking.4 This magazine was closely associated with Lu Xun and published other works of his, such as "The Rabbits and the Cat" (in Lu Xun's own translation) and the first half of A Brief History of Chinese Fiction,5 as well as three 2. Ibid., Sbinagaku vol. 1, no. 2, (October 1920): 123. 3. Nihon oyobi Nihonjin (Japan and Japanese) 508 (May 1909): 80; and Fujii Shózo, "Riben jieshao Lu Xun wenxue huodong zuizao de wenzi" (The earliest introductory work on Lu Xun's literary activities written in Japanese), Fudan xuebao (Journal of Fudan University) 2 (March 1980): 9 1 - 9 2 . 4. Iikura Shohei, "Pekin shühó shijó de no Chügoku gendai bungaku no shókai ni tsuite" (Introduction of modern Chinese literature in Peking Weekly Review magazine), Daian, April 1967; and Ge Baoquan, "Lu Xun de zhuzuo zai Riben" (Lu Xun's works in Japan), in Lu Xun yanjiu (Research on Lu Xun) (Shanghai: wenyi chubanshe) 1 (February 1980). 5. Kojima Reiitsu, "Pekin shühó to Fujiwara Kamae" (Peking Weekly Review and Fujiwara Kamae), Ajia Keizai (Asian economics) 13:12 (1972); Iikura Shohei, "Pekin Shühó to Junten Jiho," in Takeuchi Yoshimi and Hashikawa Bunzo, eds., Kindai nihon to Chügoku (Modern Japan and China), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1974).

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short essays, based on interviews with Lu Xun, which were not known until recently.6 This magazine's interest in Lu Xun's writings derived from its progressive editors, Fujiwara Kamae and Maruyama Koichiro (Konmei). Its influence was limited to the small circle of Japanese who lived in Peking. Shimizu Yasuzo, who was running a girls' high school in Peking at the time, also wrote several articles introducing Lu Xun and the new current of Chinese literature. These were collected in a book and published in Japan with an introductory essay by Yoshino Sakuzo, an outstanding leader of opinion in Japan. 7 The book should thus have been comparatively well read by the Japanese, but the influence it exerted remained small. In October 1929 the first translation of "My Old Home" appeared in a special issue of the magazine Daichowa (The great harmony) devoted to Asian culture. The "Biography of Liu Yi," from Tang chuanqi, Guo Moruo's "Revolution and Literature," and a piece by Hu Shi on Bodhidharma were also presented. The editor of the magazine was Mushanokoji Saneatsu. The translator of Lu Xun's story is still unknown, but the work contains a number of errors. Considering the level of instruction in Chinese among the Japanese at that time, such mistakes were inevitable in the first translation attempt. The magazine briefly reviewed Lu Xun's personal background and commented that he was "a short story writer of the first rank in China." Mushanokoji had had some previous contact with Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren: they translated his work "A Young Man's Dream," to which he added a preface. Mushanokoji did not seem to have any particular interest in Lu Xun at that time, however. Nevertheless, the publication of Lu Xun's story as well as works by some other Chinese writers in such a general magazine was in itself significant. It suggests that toward the end of the 1920s China's new cultural movement had begun to attract the attention of Japanese intellectuals. As the proletarian literary movement emerged in Japan, it quickly responded to the left-wing literary movement in China that had grown out of such successive social upheavals as the Northern Expedition, the development under its aegis of the Chinese Communist revolution, and that revolution's sudden breakdown with Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist coup on April 12, 1927. During this period, some left-wing Japanese writers visited China and wrote reports on the country. When the "five 6. See also Iikura Shohei, " P e k i n shiiho shijo. . . and Ge Baoquan, "Lu Xun yu Riwen Beijing zhoubao," (Lu Xun and the Japanese Pekin shuho), Lu Xun yanjiu ztliao 3 (February 1979). 7. Shimizu Yasuzo,_Shina shinjin to reimei undo (Chinese new people and the movement of dawning) (Osaka: Osakayago shoten,_1924); also in Shina todai sbinjinbutsu (The new people of contemporary China) (Osaka: Osakayago shoten, 1924).

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martyrs" were executed in 1931 NAPF, the journal of the Japanese Federation of Proletarian Art, published the translation of the manifesto of the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, along with Lu Xun's article "The Revolutionary Literature of the Chinese Proletariat and the Blood of the Pioneers." In return, when a left-wing Japanese writer, Kobayashi Takiji, was tortured to death by the police in 1933, Lu Xun sent a telegram of condolence.8 Yet none of these works from the Japanese left-wing movement showed a profound or even a correct understanding of Lu Xun's literature and thought. Most of them blindly followed the critical assessment of Lu Xun formed by the Creation and Sun societies during the 1928 debate on revolutionary literature. It was an extremely leftist position that saw Lu Xun only as a "petit bourgeois writer." Such biased Japanese criticism of Lu Xun can be found in the works of Fujieda Takeo, who wrote on modern Chinese literature in Kokusai bunka (International culture); of Ouchi Takao, who was associated with the magazine Mammo (Manchuria and Mongolia); and of Otaka Iwao.9 In the midst of such unfavorable impressions of Lu Xun, Yamagami Masayoshi, a correspondent stationed in Guangzhou, showed an exceptional understanding of his works. Yamagami's article "On Lu Xun," which appeared in a literary magazine in Japan, was the first serious piece on the writer himself. It gives a vivid portrait of Lu Xun in his Guangzhou days, and even today its freshness appeals to readers. It is particularly valuable as an eye-witness account of Lu Xun's thoughts and feelings just after Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist coup in 1927. 10 In Guangzhou, Yamagami, later with Lu Xun's permission, translated and published "The True Story of Ah Q " in the fall of 1931. 11 Lu Xun annotated Yamagami's translation with eighty-five footnotes, as was discovered in 1975, when a reprint was also published in China.12 Yamagami's preface to his book Lu Xun and His Works itself contains a remarkable analysis of "Ah Q . " 8. Lu Xun, "Wen Xiaolin tongzhi zhi si" (On hearing of the death of Comrade Kobayashi Takiji), Lu Xun quanji (The collected works of Lu Xun; hereafter cited as LXQJ) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 8:337. 9. Fujieda Takeo, "Chugoku ni okeru sayoku shuppambutsu" (Left-wing publications in China), Kokusai bunka (International culture) 1 (November 1928); Ouchi Takao, "Rojin to sono jidai" (Lu Xun and his age), Mammo (Manchuria and Mongolia), January 1931; and Otaka Iwao, "Rojin Saigimmi" (Lu Xun reconsidered), Mammo, September 1932. 10. Yamagami Masayoshi, "Rojin o kataru" (On Lu Xun), Shincho (New tides), March 1928; published in Chinese as "Yamagami Masayoshi tan Lu Xun," trans. Li Mang and Ge Baoquan, Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe), 21 (November 1977): 1 7 7 196. 11. Lin Shou-ren [Yamagami Masayoshi], trans., "Shina shosetsusshu 'Ah-Q seiden'" ("The True Story of Ah Q " : Chinese short stories) (Tokyo: Shiroku shoin, 1931). 12. Lu Xun Ah Q zhengzhuan Riyiben zhushi sbougao (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1975).

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Since I have already written a book about Yamagami,' 3 I will only briefly refer to his background here. Yamagami published a series of haiku poems entitled "On the Morning of the Strike" in the magazine Tanemaku hito (The sower), which was circulated in the early period of the left-wing literary movement in Japan. He was one of the Gyomin Communists who were arrested for handing out antimilitary leaflets, shortly before the formation of the Japanese Communist Party, and sentenced to eight months of imprisonment. After he was released, Yamagami went to China as a journalist. There he wrote a play, Three Days That Shook China, which was inspired by the Canton Uprising of 1927. Together with Ozaki Hotsumi and Agnes Smedley, he also supported China's left-wing literary movement, which was then in its infancy. It is interesting that the first article to shed light on Lu Xun was written by a man with such a background. What made Yamagami's work a distinguished record of Lu Xun's attitude toward the anti-Communist coup was none other than the feelings of indignation and sorrow that he shared with Lu Xun. His accurate interpretation of "The True Story of Ah Q " is in sharp contrast to most other Japanese accounts. While later writers noted only Lu Xun's criticism of the "method of winning a psychological victory," Yamagami penetrated into Lu Xun's true feelings and his negative view of the 1911 revolution, which is well reflected in the execution scene that ends the story. All of these achievements are inseparable from Yamagami's ideological stand and his personal history. These two opposing views of Lu Xun—one regarding him only as a petit bourgeois writer and Yamagami's showing him as a writer of deep insight and understanding—sprang from the same left-wing movement. This fact suggests both the advantage and the disadvantage of ideological and class-oriented analyses. The increasingly severe repression of the Japanese left-wing literary movement brought it before long to an impasse, and finally to dissolution. These difficult conditions left no room for left-wing writers to concern themselves with Chinese literature. As a result, the critical works on Lu Xun written during the left-wing literary movement did not exert much influence on Japanese readers. In the course of time the name of Yamagami was forgotten, until he was rediscovered and reevaluated in the 1970s. Shortly after the left-wing literary movement, Sato Haruo and Masuda Wataru both published significant translations of Lu Xun. These works marked a milestone in the history of Lu Xun studies in Japan. In January 13. Maruyama Noboru, Aru Chiigoku tokuhain—Yamagami Masayoshi to Rojin (A special correspondent in China—Yamagami Masayoshi and Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 1976).

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1932 Sato's translation of "My Old Home" and his brief comment on the author appeared in Chuo Koron (Central review). Masuda's "Rojin den" (Biography of Lu Xun) was also published in April in the magazine Kaizo (Reform). Another translation by Sato, of "The Misanthrope," appeared in July. Lu Xun's "The Comedy of the Ducks," "The White Light," and "Kong Yiji" had in fact been translated into Japanese already. But they had been published in magazines with specialized and limited readerships. In 1929 Gurotesku (Grotesque) published "Ah Q " in a translation by Inoue Kobai. The magazine, designed to feature grotesque and sensual subjects, also distorted Lu Xun's story, as one can guess from its Japanese title, which translates as "A Life of a Grotesque Man Involved in the Chinese Revolution." Inoue's version of "Ah Q " does not deserve to be called a work of literature. In 1931 Nagae Yo's translation of the same story appeared in serialized form in Mammo. In September of the same year two different translations of "Ah Q " were issued in book form, one by Matsuura Keizo and the other by Lin Shouren (Yamagami Masayoshi). However, since all these works were published either in special magazines or by little-known publishers, they gained only a very limited readership. The publication of translations by Sato, a well-known and first-rate writer of the day, and of Masuda's works on Lu Xun meant that the name of Lu Xun was gaining wide currency among educated readers who had, until then, remained outside the small circle of scholars of Chinese literature and specialists who were engaged in Chinese affairs. Sato was attracted to Lu Xun because his works successfully integrated the old tradition of Chinese poetry, which Sato deeply loved, into a genuine modern literature. By 1932 Sato had written several stories based on material borrowed from Chinese classics. His love of the Chinese tradition and culture helped Sato understand Lu Xun more deeply, because despite Lu Xun's harsh attacks on traditional Chinese culture, his works are deeply rooted in that heritage. It has been a formidable task for Lu Xun scholars to understand the dialectical relationship between his perceptions of the reality of his own age and his cultural heritage: how each conflicted with the other and how each influenced Lu Xun's thought and literature. Sato, whose main interest was Lu Xun's relationship with Chinese tradition, did not fully appreciate Lu Xun's deepseated social and political concerns. Masuda Wataru, who was an assistant to Sato, eventually surpassed Sato in his works on Lu Xun. Masuda was initiated into Chinese literature through reading Sato's literary works. He began helping Sato when he was a student of Chinese literature at Tokyo University. In 1931 he went to Shanghai with a letter of introduction from Sato to Uchiyama Kanzo. Uchiyama introduced Masuda to Lu Xun.

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Masuda not only acknowledged Lu Xun as an excellent writer but also respected him as a scholar who wrote such outstanding academic works as A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. After meeting Masuda several times at the Uchiyama Bookstore, Lu Xun invited the young man to his home. There, over a ten-month period, Masuda heard Lu Xun discuss his own works, such as Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, A Brief History, Call to Arms, and Wandering. Lu Xun probably favored Masuda because he was neither a frivolous youth dazzled by Lu Xun's literary fame nor a fanatic who clamored about his political missions. Masuda was a quiet young man interested in study, and that appealed to Lu Xun. Masuda started his "Biography of Lu Xun" while in China, basing it on what he learned from Lu Xun personally. Lu Xun inspected the work when it was done. The article explains Lu Xun's personal background and the sociopolitical nature of his literature fairly well. It seems that Masuda succeeded despite his limited knowledge of Lu Xun's writings and the current situation of China, just because he had listened to Lu Xun's conversations carefully and with an unprejudiced mind.14 I would also like to mention briefly another work by Masuda, Rojin no insho (An impression of Lu Xun), which was published after the Pacific War. 15 The book is based on his memories of Lu Xun, with whom he kept up correspondence after his return to Japan. Though the anecdotes and episodes are strung together in a rather fragmentary fashion, the work reveals many phases of Lu Xun's personality that are not mentioned in other scholarly books on the author. Some fifty-eight letters from Lu Xun to Masuda are also included.16 Uchiyama Kanzo also contributed to the Japanese scholarship on Lu Xun. He ran the Uchiyama Bookstore in Shanghai and supported Lu Xun in many ways. Lu Xun, in return, trusted Uchiyama deeply. Uchiyama later published many short pieces on Lu Xun. Written from the perspective of a merchant and a man of experience, these pieces give many valuable insights on Lu Xun. 17 In 1930, when the translations by Sato and Masuda appeared in the 14. Masuda Wataru, Rojin den (Biography of Lu Xun). A Chinese translation of Masuda's book, by Bian Liqiang, was included in Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe), 2 (November 1977). 15. Masuda Wataru, Rojin no insho (An impression of Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1948; rev. ed., Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1970). The essential parts of Masuda's book were translated into Chinese by Zhong Jingwen as Lu Xun de yinxiang (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1980). 16. A Chinese translation of these letters can be found in Lu Xun zbi Masuda sbuxin xuan (A selection of Lu Xun's letters to Masuda) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1975). Fiftythree of the fifty-eight letters are photogravure copies. 17. Uchiyama Kanzo, Rojin no omoide (Recollections of Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Shakaishisosha, 1979).

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Child Koron and Kaizo, Inoue Kobai was also working on a translation of Lu Xun's works. His Rojin zenshii (The complete works of Lu Xun) was published in November 1932. 1 8 In those years the word zenshii, which means "complete works," was often used for collections that contained only some of an author's productions, and Inoue's Rojin zenshii was no exception: it contained only Call to Arms and Wandering. Lu Xun trusted neither Inoue nor his work and in his letters to Masuda expressed harsh criticism of Inoue.19 Whether it deserved its title or not, however, the appearance of the Collected Works indicates that Lu Xun was gradually coming into the publishing world of Japan. In 1935 Sato and Masuda's Rojin senshu (Selected works of Lu Xun) was issued in the Iwanami bunko (Iwanami library) series of pocket-sized books. Founded in 1927 after the example of Reclams Universal Bibliotek, Iwanami bunko has made a great contribution in disseminating large numbers of great books, Japanese and foreign, old and new, among Japanese intellectuals. Selected Works included such writings of Lu Xun as "Kong Yiji," "Storm in a Teacup," "My Old Home," "The True Story of Ah Q," "The Comedy of the Ducks," "Soap," "Master Gao," "The Misanthrope," "Mr. Fujino," "On the Behavior and Writing of Writers of the Wei and Jin Periods and Their Relationship with Drugs and Wine," and "A Glance at the Shanghai Literary Scene," along with the appendix of Masuda's Biography. The Iwanami bunko edition won Lu Xun a great reputation among a wide range of readers. Many Japanese intellectuals encountered Lu Xun for the first time through this work. For example, Nakamura Mitsuo, a leading literary critic of postwar Japan, used this edition when comparing the despair of the protagonists of "The Misanthrope" by Lu Xun and of "Ukigumo" (Floating clouds) by Futabatei. 20 One result of the popularity of Selected Works was the discovery that Dr. Fujino, Lu Xun's teacher when he was a medical student at Sendai and the subject of one of his pieces, was still alive in Fukui prefecture.21 Unfortunately, Lu Xun had been dead six months when this news came out. In accord with the increasing fame and popularity of Lu Xun in Japan, many writers visited him in Shanghai during his last years. Among these were Hayashi Fumiko, Nagayo Yoshiro, Noguchi Yonejiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Mushanokoji Saneatsu. Prior to this, another Japanese poet, 18. Inoue Kobai, trans., Rojin zenshii (The complete works of Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Kaizosha, 1932). 19. The letters were sent out on 7 November and 19 December of 1932, respectively. 20. Nakamura Mitsuo, "Rojin to Futabatei," Bungei (Literature) (Tokyo: Kaizosha, 1936). 21. Fujino Genroku recalled his acquaintance with Lu Xun in "Tsutshushinde Shu Jujin sama o omou" (In memory of the respectful Mr. Chou Shu-ren), Bungaku annai (Guidebook to literature), 12 March 1937.

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Kaneko Mitsuharu, visited Shanghai on his way to Europe. He stayed there from November 1928 to May 1929 and had personal contact with Lu Xun. These visits offer an interesting contrast to the Peking period (1912—1926), when most of Lu Xun's Japanese visitors were either specialists in Chinese literature or Japanese who were living in China. But these later visits do not necessarily indicate a more profound understanding of Lu Xun. Some reports by Japanese writers aroused strong dissatisfaction in Lu Xun, who commented: I have a rather pessimistic view about the future of mutual understanding between Japanese and Chinese writers. T o begin with, the social backgrounds and the ways of life between us are too different. 2 2

Many newspapers in Japan devoted ample coverage to Lu Xun's death in 1936. Aside from reports of his death, they featured essays about and commemorations of Lu Xun by many Japanese writers and critics. Some of the monthly magazines also responded quickly to the event, publishing special issues in memory of Lu Xun. Shortly after Lu Xun's death, Dai Rojin zenshu (The great collection of the complete works of Lu Xun) was published in seven volumes by Kaizo Sha. It was only a year before Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun) came out in China. The director of the company, Yamamoto Sanehiko, had had some personal contact with Lu Xun. Mao Dun, Hu Feng, and Xu Guangping (Lu Xun's widow) served on the project as editorial advisers, together with Uchiyama Kanzo and Sato Haruo. Kaizo Sha, whose two magazines Kaizo (Reform) and Bungei (Literature) also actively introduced translations of modern Chinese writers such as Xiao Jun and Ai Wu, played a remarkable role in introducing Lu Xun and other contemporary Chinese writers to Japanese readers in the prewar period. Yet despite its title, the Great Collection only contained selected works of Lu Xun and was full of translation mistakes. It was by no means comparable to the Chinese Complete Works, which reached the highest quality possible at that point. The Great Collection did, however, expose Japanese readers for the first time to Lu Xun's zawen (selected largely by Hu Feng). The Great Collection inspired Nakano Shigeharu to write a remarkable critical essay on Lu Xun. A left-wing poet, writer, and critic, Nakano had been under police surveillance since he was released from a two-year confinement in 1934 upon becoming a political "convert." He was not a specialist in Chinese literature and did not speak Chinese. But his understanding of Lu Xun and his literature was not superficial. A fine example of his keen insight is his article "Rojin den" (Biography of Lu Xun), which

22. Masuda Wataru had received a letter from Lu Xun sent on 3 April 1936.

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appeared in 193 9. 2 3 It was actually not so much a biography as an argument for the necessity of one. Nakano pointed out that Lu Xun's zawen about the March 18 incident, in which the government of warlord Duan Qirui severely suppressed students and citizens, bring poetry and political commentary to a perfect harmony and that for Lu Xun, being a literary man and a political man was one and the same thing. Such a profound and accurate understanding of the political and ideological dimension of Lu Xun's thought stands out as a rarity among prewar judgments. Encouraged by Nakano's article, Oda Takeo in 1941 published his Rojin den, the first biography of Lu Xun to appear in book form. 24 Oda adopted a rather peculiar methodology for this biography. He collected all the biographical elements in Lu Xun's literary works, such as Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk and "Preface to Call to Arms," and arranged them in chronological order, adding some explanations on the social background of each stage of Lu Xun's life. In the postscript of his book Oda explained that he had had to resort to Lu Xun's own works because there was so little reference material on the author's life. Oda admitted that although he had tried to avoid subjective interpretations or personal bias, his description of Lu Xun was centered on the writer's patriotism. Oda wrote: Since his youth and throughout his later life Lu X u n had an intense hatred and antagonism t o w a r d the rulers and the power-holders of his time; however, even this originated from his true patriotic spirit. 2 5

Some complicated social and historical factors underlie Oda's use of the term "patriotic spirit." The "patriotic" atmosphere of Japan was then reaching a peak, just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Oda himself was undeniably affected by that atmosphere. By using the term "patriotic spirit" and thus affirming the temper of the age, Oda may also have hoped to avoid troubles with the authorities over the publication of the biography of a left-wing writer such as Lu Xun. But the mention of a Chinese's "patriotic spirit" would also encourage the Japanese to acknowledge and respect the spirit of nationalism among the Chinese people, which had for so long been ignored and forgotten. In this regard, Oda's emphasis on Lu Xun's "patriotic spirit" was quite significant. In a memorial piece on Lu Xun, Oda again touched upon this theme.

23. Nakano Shigeharu, "Rojin den" (Biography of Lu Xun), Bungakusha (Men of letters), October 1939; reprinted in Nakano Shigeharu zenshu (The complete works of Nakano Shigeharu) vol. 20 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1977). 24. Oda Takeo, Rojin den (Biography of Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1941); reprint ed., Tokyo: Yamato shobo, 1966. Fan Quan published a Chinese translation in 1947, which was reprinted by Erya she, Hong Kong, 1978. 25. Ibid.; see especially its postscript.

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Beneath Lu Xun's sarcasm, Oda wrote, one could discern his deep sympathy and love for his fellow countrymen. Oda continued: This patriotism of Lu X u n can be partly attributed to the fact that he was born in one of the weak nations. Indeed, his literary works are nothing but expressions of the anger and sorrow that derive from the bitter destiny of a weak nation. It was through my encounter with Lu X u n that I c a m e to realize for the first time that Japanese literature belonged rather to the category of "literature of a strong nation." In comparison with Lu X u n ' s melancholy and suffering, which c a m e from such a background, h o w can any of us Japanese writers complain about our own sorrows and suffering? 2 6

What Oda calls a "weak nation" we would probably call an "oppressed nation" today. Oda was able to see in Lu Xun's literature a reflection of the anger and sorrow that came from the destiny of the "weak nation." His reading of Lu Xun also implies a criticism of Japanese literature, which inevitably bore the imprint of the imperialistic culture of a "strong nation." This perspective deserves our recognition. Nevertheless, Oda's methodology caused his work to have several defects as a biography. In the first place, Oda paid little heed to the fact that many of Lu Xun's works are fictional, as is the case even with Dawn Blossoms. Though written in the style of a reminiscence, the work is for the most part fiction. In the second place, Oda was not quite aware of the distance Lu Xun maintained between his artistic persona and his true self. When Lu Xun talked about himself, he sometimes simplified issues that were actually complex and many-sided; or he would narrate a matter of great significance in an indifferent and playful manner. These facts are well known to today's readers, so we do not take literally what Lu Xun said about himself in his works. To this fictional aspect of Lu Xun's selfportrait Oda paid no attention. Considering the disadvantage he worked under—the lack of important biographical materials—his defects may be tolerated. However, his work cannot be considered satisfactory by those who are eager to know the truth about Lu Xun's life and inner reality. II In 1944, three years after Oda's work, Takeuchi Yoshimi's Rojin (Lu Xun) appeared.27 This was the book that exerted a decisive impact on the study of Lu Xun in Japan. Every succeeding student of Lu Xun has been 26. Oda Takeo, "Rojin o shinobu" (In memory of Lu Xun), Jiji shinpo, October 1936, pp. 2 1 - 2 2 . 27. Takeuchi Yoshimi, Rojin (Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha, 1944; reprint ed., Tokyo: Miraisha, 1961). The work is also available in Takeuchi Yoshimi zenshu (The complete works of Takeuchi Yoshimi), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1980).

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influenced by this pioneering work in one way or another; it has provided the starting point of even those whose viewpoints and conclusions differed from his. Hardly anyone has pursued this study independently of Takeuchi. Thus it is necessary to examine in some detail the basic features of Lu Xun and the political and cultural background that informed Takeuchi's great work. Takeuchi was the first man to doubt the authenticity of the story that Lu Xun had decided to abandon his studies at the Sendai Medical School and to concentrate on literature instead when he saw a news-slide in which a Chinese was being executed by the Japanese army. It was such a popular anecdote that both Masuda and Oda had adopted it in their biographies. Takeuchi insisted that it was only a legend and had no historical evidence: L u X u n did n o t leave Sendai a r m e d with the great ambition that he w o u l d s a l v a g e the spiritual p o v e r t y of his fellow c o u n t r y m e n through his literature. It w a s m o r e likely that he t o o k leave of the city smitten by a feeling of humiliation and indignation. H e must not h a v e had the l u x u r y to think, " A l t h o u g h medical science has failed me, I will do much better in literat u r e . " . . . In a n y case I a m inclined to conclude that the slide incident had n o direct bearing u p o n his transfer to literature. 2 8

Furthermore, he says: I d o not consider L u X u n ' s literature to be in its essence utilitarian. N o r d o I consider it as a literature to serve s o m e definite p u r p o s e — s a y , f o r the sake of life, o r p e o p l e , o r patriotism. It is indeed true that Lu X u n w a s an honest m a n of life, an enthusiastic nationalist and patriot. Y e t he never depended on the n o n l i t e r a r y , ulterior f a c t o r s as main s u p p o r t f o r his literature. O n the c o n t r a r y , he a c c o m p l i s h e d his creative literature by rejecting them. 2 9

Needless to say, Takeuchi did not mean to assert that what Lu Xun had written in his prefaces to Call to Arms and " M r . Fujino" was entirely untrue. Instead, he was trying to bring out two important points. First, he argued that there is a definite distance between what Lu Xun wrote in his work and what he actually experienced. Readers, Takeuchi claimed, would get a naive and distorted image of Lu Xun if they did not understand his literary inclination to treat matters of significance in a casual way. Oda and Masuda had both erred in this fashion. Takeuchi suggested that one must learn how to interpret a literary work before seeking historical facts in a work of literature. Takeuchi's second point involved the relationship between Lu Xun's literature and his political ideas. Takeuchi neither denied the political nature of Lu Xun's work nor regarded him as an advocate of art for art's sake. His approach acknowledged a subtle and complex interaction between Lu Xun's politics and literature: 28. Ibid. (Miraisha edition), p. 70. 29. Ibid., p. 71.

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Politics and literature are not in a relationship of mutual subordination or exclusiveness. Any literature that caters to or trifles with politics should not be called literature. . . . The soil from which a literature springs forth ought to be always surrounded by politics. It is, so to speak, a harsh natural environment that nurtures the flowers of literature to bloom. W e a k flowers cannot survive the hardship, and those exposed to hard conditions obtain a longer life. I find a fine example of such a case in Lu X u n and modern Chinese literature. 3 0

To fully understand Takeuchi's view, we must review his personal history and also the spiritual background of Japan during the Pacific War. Takeuchi was a leader and a founding member of the Society for the Study of Chinese Literature, which was formed in 1934 by a group of young scholars who wanted to study modern Chinese literature. They were dissatisfied with the traditional scholarship on Chinese literature practiced at two main schools, Tokyo University and Kyoto University. They also maintained a critical attitude toward the research done on China by the left-wing scholars of the Institute of Proletarian Science, which had been founded as a part of the proletarian cultural movement in Japan. Before it was dissolved in 1943, the Society published ninety-two issues of its journal, Cbugoku bungaku (Chinese literature), and successfully promoted the study of contemporary Chinese literature in Japan. Most of today's famous scholars and specialists in this field were, in their youth, direct or indirect disciples of the original members of this group. Before the establishment of the Society in 1934, the left-wing movement in Japan had been the target of severe governmental repression. After successive retreats and dissolutions, the movement finally came to the stage of the so-called tenko (ideological "departure" from Marxism). In February 1934 the Japanese Proletarian Writers' League, which was the only left-wing organization then surviving, was forced to dissolve. The majority of leftist writers had only one choice: tenko or imprisonment. Lu Xun was referring to these events when he said in a letter to Xiao Jun and Xiao Hong, " O f all Japanese left-wing writers only two (Kurahara and Miyamoto) are left unconverted at present." 31 During this period, when Japanese militarism began to be actively engaged in the invasion of China, the political organizations that could have resisted this overwhelming national movement were all brought to a halt. Only a few democratic and cultural movements were carried on, sporadically, by some conscientious intellectuals. Many of the members of the Society for the Study of Chinese Literature, including Takeuchi himself, had been involved with the leftwing movement. In this sense, the Society was their attempt to reestablish a firm foundation for their literary and ideological positions. But as the militarization of Japan steadily proceeded, the suppression of 30. Ibid., pp. 1 6 3 - 1 6 4 . 31. Lu Xun, letter of 17 November 1934, LXQJ,

12:566.

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the freedom of expression became intense. Not only were Marxist and socialist ideas targeted for censorship but even democratic and liberal opinions came under the control of the government. Soon, literature that upheld art for art's sake was banned, not to mention left-wing literature. In the end, only one type of literature—that which advocated militarism—was allowed to exist. What strikes today's reader is the fact that the ultranationalists had gone beyond merely advocating militarism to the extreme position of condemning all less rightist attitudes as remnants of Marxism and liberalism. Under this oppressive regime, many former Marxist and liberal writers were mobilized as "war reporters" and forced to write articles in praise of the war with China and later of the Pacific War. Some of those writers at first only pretended to support the war, yet the adoption of such a disguise necessarily brought about some inner changes. With the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1 9 4 1 , the government's interference in literature reached a critical point. In 1 9 4 2 the Nihon bungaku hokokukai (Japanese Writers Association for Patriotism) was formed, and all the writers in Japan were urged to take part in this organization. In the same year, the Great Asian Congress of Writers was held in Tokyo. Many writers from the various Asian countries occupied by Japan were invited to this meeting. In the midst of such a militaristic atmosphere, Takeuchi and the Society for the Study of Chinese Literature had to take a zigzag course. Although they had already been deprived of freedom of expression, many of the members had maintained a critical attitude toward the Sino-Japanese War. Curiously enough, however, when the Pacific War began, Takeuchi and his group suddenly announced that they supported the war. The manifesto calling for a consolidated war effort was published by the Society, and it was Takeuchi who wrote the draft. 32 Of course the inconsistency of his action is obvious today, but such a response was fairly common among the Japanese intellectuals of that time. This is not the place to discuss the interesting question of why this was so. In any case, Takeuchi completely changed his attitude a year later, refusing to participate in the Great Asian Congress. This is his explanation: The Greater East Asian Congress may be a fitting event for the members of the Japanese Writers Association for Patriotism, but it is not so for the Society for the Study of Chinese Literature. O u r refusal to take part in this meeting does not mean that we do not want to welcome Chinese writers. On the contrary, we strongly believe that such an international exchange ought to be held in a most genuine and spontaneous way by both sides. I am not sure of other countries, but as far as Japan and China are concerned, I am not convinced that the delegates from the t w o countries are truly representative. I insist on this dissatisfaction for the honor of Japanese literature. . . . 32. "Dai Toa senso to warera no ketsui (sengen)" (The East Asian War and our determination [proclamation]), Chugoku bungaku (Chinese literature) 80 (January 1942).

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I hope it will be so recorded in history and so remembered in Japanese literature a hundred years from now that on such a day in such a month in the seventeenth year of Showa a certain meeting was held under the sponsorship of the Japanese Writers Association for Patriotism and we did not approve of this event, because we believed that this was the best thing we could do at that moment. 3 3

In the spring of 1943, soon after he published this official statement, Takeuchi started on Lu Xun. He completed the work in November of the same year. He wrote the book as an expression of his revulsion for the mainstream of Japanese literature, which had been diverted completely to serve the purposes of the war. By that time a number of writers not only were willingly taking part in propagandistic activities but did not even hesitate to forge a theory that modern European literature would soon be replaced by a new literature that would serve the causes of the war and the state. Most Japanese writers and scholars felt entirely overwhelmed by this imperialistic current. Nobody could raise a voice of resistance, either politically or ideologically, in such a militaristic atmosphere. Takeuchi himself was on the point of being carried away by this violent stream. In a sense Lu Xun was his defense against the tyranny of the age. "I do not consider Lu Xun's literature to be in its essence utilitarian," he wrote. "Nor do I consider it as a literature for the sake of life and patriotism." This statement eloquently reveals Takeuchi's vehement opposition to the misuse of literature by politics, a misuse from which he had to suffer tremendously. Takeuchi's bitter experiences with these social and political events stongly affected his attitudes toward thought and ideology. We can recognize this in his reluctance to label Lu Xun's thought with any established definition such as "Marxism" or "Darwinism." On this point he says: Many critics insist that Lu X u n underwent a radical change in his ideas during this period [the early 1930s]. . . . With regard to the nature of this change, opinions vary. Some say that it is a change from evolutionism to a class-oriented thought. Others say that it is from nihilism to hope. I do not deny that these changes might in fact have taken place in Lu Xun. However, I strongly disagree that these were precisely the factors that led Lu Xun to a decisive change. 3 4

He goes on to insist: What concerns me is not how Lu Xun changed but how he did not change despite these potentialities for change. Indeed Lu Xun changed in the course 3 3 . Takeuchi Yoshimi, "Dai Toa bungakusha taikai ni tsuite" (Concerning the writers of the East Asian Congress), Chugoku bungaku 8 9 (November 1 9 4 2 ) . 3 4 . Tokeuchi Yoshimi, Rojtn, p. 1 3 2 .

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o f t i m e , b u t still he d i d n o t c h a n g e in the true s e n s e o f the w o r d . I see a true f a c e of L u X u n in his u n c h a n g e a b l e a s p e c t s . 3 S

Takeuchi admitted that Lu Xun experienced some changes as he went through each stage of his life. In the process of learning he encountered many different ideas and accepted some of them. Takeuchi was not blind to this fact, but at the same time he believed that "something" in Lu Xun allowed him to remain unchanged throughout his life. Takeuchi tried to define this "something" by such phrases as " a core in the middle of change" or "the conscientiousness of a man of letters." But these are not very clear; after all, this "something" was close to Lu Xun's character or temperament and therefore difficult to capture. Takeuchi could not give a satisfactory definition of what he meant. At any rate, it is quite natural and inevitable that he was wondering about what stays with a man and keeps him going even after his failures in life. Since Takeuchi did witness with his own eyes so many so-called thinkers, including Marxists and liberals, easily give up their ideas and change into militarists, he knew the frailty of ideology and the difficulty of persisting in one's beliefs. This experience led him to sympathize with Lu Xun, who had, as he himself said, been repeatedly "struck by this experience, that such a change could happen even to comrades in the same camp." 3 6 After Lu Xun was completed but before it was published, Takeuchi was drafted into military service and sent to the battlefront in central China. His Rojin shows an admirable unity between the attempt to focus on Lu Xun's inner reality and Takeuchi's own spirit of resistance toward the social milieu of his day. As is suggested by the currency of the term "Takeuchi Rojin," this work exerted a profound impact on the writers and scholars of later generations. In Takeuchi's view, the relationship between politics and literature was very complex, and he persistently commented in his later works on the futility of setting up the very framework of politics and literature. Nevertheless, the central theme of the book is politics and literature, as can be seen by the fact that Takeuchi placed the idea of the "conscientiousness of a man of letters" at the center of his work. His sensitivity to Lu Xun and the complexities that surrounded him were well illustrated by the controversy over whether Lu Xun had in his youth joined the Anti-Manchu revolutionary group called Guangfu hui. Xu Shoushang said that he had, Zhou Zuoren that he had not. After examining both opinions, Takeuchi sided with Zhou Zuoren, on the grounds that it was more consistent with the basic character of Lu Xun's literature for him not to join the group. It

35. Ibid., p. 47. 36. Lu Xun, "Z/ xuatt ji zixu" (Preface to Self-selected

Works),

LXQJ,

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was not until the 1960s that conceptions of Lu Xun different from Takeuchi's were presented. Ill After the Pacific War Lu Xun was widely read and accepted by the Japanese through Takeuchi's translations. 37 Postwar Japan suffered severe shortages of goods and commodities; as a result, the living conditions of scholars and writers were too poor for them to undertake any scholarly activities. There was hardly any translation or research work done on Chinese literature during this period. Before long, however, a plan to publish a three-volume Rojin sakuhinshu (Collection of Lu Xun's works) was made, and Masuda's translation of "The True Story of Ah Q " and of six other stories, with Matsueda Shigeo's "Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk," were published. 38 However, they had a limited circulation since they were issued by a small publisher, and the planned third volume, Lu Xun's Selected Essays translated by Kaji Wataru, was not published. Another reason for the stagnancy of academic works on Chinese literature during this period was the control exercised over publishing by the United States occupation forces. It was only after 1952, when the Peace Treaty between Japan and the Allied nations came into effect and when Japan recovered its autonomy, that Takeuchi's translations of Lu Xun were republished and made available to a wide circle of readers. Lu Xun won great popularity in postwar Japan due, first, to the growing Japanese interest in the Chinese revolution and the new People's Republic of China and, secondly and most importantly, to the popularity of Takeuchi's works on Lu Xun. Along with a second book called Rojin,19 Takeuchi wrote a number of critical essays on modern thought and literature in both China and Japan. Modern Japanese culture, Takeuchi explained, lacked a creative, inwardly derived spontaneity. It depended heavily on authority and on standards derived from without, mainly from the West. Japan's rapid assimilation of Western models—its so-called modernization—was, in this sense, only a result of the weakness of its cultural and traditional foundation. Yet such sudden "modernization" could not completely eliminate some pre-

37. Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans., Rojin sakuhinshu (Collections of Lu Xun's works) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1953); and Rojin hyoronshu (The critical essays of Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1953). 38. Masuda Wataru, trans., "Ah Q seiden" (The true story of Ah Q), Rojin sakuhinshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Tozai shuppansha, 1946); and Matsueda Shigeo, trans., "Choka sekishu" (Dawn blossoms plucked at dusk), Rojin sakuhinshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Tozai shuppansha, 1947). 39. Takeuchi Yoshimi, Rojin (Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Sekai hyoronsha, 1948).

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modern elements in Japanese culture. In contrast to the cultural ambivalence of modern Japan, China's pervasive and deep-rooted feudal system and traditional culture oppressed the people so harshly that they forged a new, spontaneous movement to overthrow that system and culture. T o Takeuchi, the so-called modernization epitomized in the Japan of his day and its culture had a negative connotation. Even Japanese Marxists, who ought to take a leading role as social and political reformers as well as critics, were also corrupted by the influence of such "modernism," Takeuchi complained. In comparison with such Japanese intellectuals, he said, Lu X u n was a true man of letters and a thinker who had emerged from a totally different cultural soil, modern China, whose thought and literature constituted, in essence, a sharp critique of modern Japan. Takeuchi owed a part of this idea to John Dewey, who had written a series of eyewitness reports on the May Fourth movement. Ironically, it was the outcome of the Pacific War—Japan's surrender to the Allied nations and China's glorious rebirth—that led Takeuchi to conceive these opinions. Reflecting on the war, Takeuchi raised serious questions about Japan's intellectuals. Why, he asked, did Japan's " m o d e r n " ideas not have enough strength and consistency to prevent the growth of militarism and the outbreak of an aggressive war? Why could they not resist such currents, why did they do nothing until the very last moment of catastrophe? Above all, he blamed " m o d e r n " Japanese literature for advocating and willingly serving the cause of the war with one miserable work after another. By contrast, China endured the aggression of Japan and eventually created a new nation out of the strong bond forged among its people by their experiences in the war against Japan. During the Sino-Japanese War, moreover, Chinese literature had grown and produced remarkable achievements. 40 What was the source of this crucial difference between the two countries? Takeuchi suggested that there were serious problems in the way that Japan had modernized. He wondered what was the secret of the energy that enabled China to achieve a modernization different from that of Japan. Why did Japanese people see China only as a backward country? Takeuchi's final answer to all these questions was that Japan was contaminated by the prejudices born of its own modernization. These were precisely the ques4 0 . After the war, during which all scholarship had been suspended, Japanese men of letters b e c a m e attracted to the following works by contemporary Chinese writers: Ding Ling's " W o zai X i a c u n de s h i h o u " (When 1 was in X i a village), Luo Binji's "Beiwangyuan de c h u n t i a n " (Spring in N o r t h w a r d - V i e w Garden), and M a o Dun's Fushi (Putrefaction). J a p a nese critics, impressed by the fresh outlook of Chinese writers, came out with several valuable analyses; see, for instance, Iizuka Akira, " L u o Binji to sono sakuhin" (Luo Binji and his works, 1 9 4 8 ) , collected in his Koruri no bahen (Scraps of lapis lazuli) (Osaka: Ianokai, January 1 9 8 1 ) ; and O k a z a k i T o s h i o , " T r a n s l a t o r ' s postscript to 'When I was in X i a Village' " ( T o k y o : Shikisha, 1 9 5 1 ) .

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tions that many Japanese intellectuals confronted in one way or another after the war. Takeuchi's challenging views of Japan and China exerted a powerful impact upon Japanese intellectuals, who saw in him a representative of their own ideas and feelings. Thus the view that Lu Xun symbolically embodied the power of modern China became prevalent among Japanese readers. Takeuchi's Rojin byoronshii (The collected essays of Lu Xun) 4 1 and Rojin sakuhinshii (The collected works of Lu Xun) 4 2 were the first works to be widely accepted and read by the postwar Japanese. Their success can be attributed to the reputation Takeuchi gained with his soul-searching essays. Along with Takeuchi's criticism of modern Japan and his affirmation of China, which became popular toward the end of the 1940s and stayed so in the 1 9 5 0 s , another subject concerned Japanese students of modern Chinese literature: the policies of the United States occupation forces. Following Japan's surrender, the Americans instituted a series of measures to dissolve Japanese militarism. These were welcomed by Japanese intellectuals. But toward the end of the 1940s, as the People's Republic of China was established, the main concern of the occupation forces seemed to shift from the democratization of Japan to its inclusion in the antiCommunist line of defense. Before long all criticism of this policy was banned. Even the publication of information unfavorable to the occupation forces was regarded as an offense and exposed one to the risk of being brought before the military court. These actions by the occupation forces made the Japanese understand for the first time what it means to be an oppressed nation. Novels depicting China's resistance movement against Japanese militarism, as well as French resistance novels, were widely read and evoked great sympathy among many Japanese. They suddenly perceived Lu X u n as a kindred spirit. Kaino Michitaka gave eloquent testimony to the atmosphere of this period: Recently Lu X u n ' s novels appeal to me greatly. . . . He describes China, which used to exist so far away from our reality, . . . yet now, everything is different. . . . Yesterday, his words of criticism seemed spoken by a stranger; today, they are our own words. Japan has superseded the old China that Lu X u n had depicted a long time a g o . 4 3

As a result of this rapid growth of interest in Lu Xun, a more comprehensive translation appeared: the twelve-volume Rojin senshu (Selected 41. Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans., Rojin hydronshu (The collected essays of Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1953). 42. Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans., Rojin sakuhinshii (The collected works of Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1953). 43. Kaino Michitaka, in Mainichi shinbun (Daily news), evening ed., 17 June 1954.

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works of Lu Xun), translated by Masuda, Matsueda, and Takeuchi. 44 The Selected Works is still considered the most complete and comprehensive collection of Lu Xun's works in Japan. IV Until the mid-1950s, Japanese studies of Lu Xun proceeded from a common set of motives. The next stage of Japanese scholarship on Lu Xun lasted from the mid-1950s until the Cultural Revolution. It involved the diversification of views on both Lu Xun and Chinese literature in general and the emergence of a new generation of scholars. There seems to be two reasons for the new approaches to Lu Xun and to modern Chinese literature. The first was that the rapid growth of Japan's new capitalist economy began to re-open the social and economic distance between Japan and China. Their awareness of this distance made it difficult for the Japanese to feel the same comradeship with oppressed races as they had in the early 1950s. Secondly, several tendencies in China's Anti-Rightist campaign baffled and alienated the Japanese. For some time after the establishment of the People's Republic, Chinese literature and literary policy were greeted positively by Japanese scholars and readers. To most Japanese readers, the Chinese literature produced after Mao's Yan'an talks seemed rather unsophisticated and obscure. Yet they continued to believe that the Chinese revolution was a new force that would usher in a new literature—something different from Japanese literature, which tends to be preoccupied with the inward workings of the psyche. The Japanese reaction to the treatment of Xiao Jun and Hu Feng was ambiguous. They scarcely had enough information to judge Xiao's situation; but the majority of Japanese could not but feel some resistance to the method and the reasoning of the campaign against Hu, though the charge that he was an "agent of Guomindang and a counter-revolutionary element" quieted some Japanese doubts. The glory of New China was too brilliant for them to have any suspicion of this indictment. Most Japanese scholars of Chinese literature convinced themselves that there must have been decisive evidence to justify such a charge against Hu Feng. But the ideological turmoils that soon after disrupted the international scene—Krushchev's criticism of Stalin, and the Hungarian uprising— made the Japanese react more cautiously toward the Anti-Rightist campaign. They noted that all those who were singled out for attack by the Party were writers—Ding Ling, Ai Qing, and Feng Xuefeng. They were all

4 4 . M a s u d a W a t a r u , Matsueda Shigeo, and Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans., Rojin lected works of Lu X u n ) 1 2 vols, (expanded ed., T o k y o : Iwanami shoten, 1 9 6 4 ) .

senshu

(Se-

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well known in Japan, especially Ding Ling, who in the early 1950s was the second most popular Chinese writer in Japan (after Lu Xun). The Party's choice of targets reinforced the suspicion felt by Japanese writers and scholars about the campaign. In the field of Lu Xun studies this suspicion finally came out in the open as a result of the official Chinese view concerning the Battle of the Two Slogans in Lu Xun's last years. After the Anti-Rightist campaign, China's official position was that only "Literature for National Defense" was justified and that the other slogan, "Mass Literature of the National Revolutionary War," had been engineered by Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng to provoke dissension. Japanese scholars who were familiar with Lu Xun's writings and letters on this matter were able to discredit the Party's view. From this time forward, the Japanese became somewhat dissatisfied with and suspicious of the official Chinese interpretations of Lu Xun. Inevitably, these doubts changed the attitudes and methods of the Japanese scholars who studied modern Chinese literature, affecting not only their political and ideological stance but also the subject and scope of their research. The diversification of Lu Xun studies is the result of this complicated process. The second source of new perspectives on Lu Xun and on modern Chinese literature was the new generation of young scholars. Many of these were involved in the Rojin kenkyu kai (Society for Lu Xun Research) and the group that published Hokuto (Dipper). The Society for Lu Xun Research started in 1952 as a study group of mainly graduate students and assistant instructors at Tokyo University. From January 1953 to May 1966 they published their journal, Rojin kenkyu (Lu Xun research), numbering altogether thirty-five issues. The Hokuto group was made up of young scholars from various universities around Tokyo, with scholars from Tokyo Metropolitan University playing a leading role. Their organ, Dipper, was published from October 1954 to July 1959, numbering altogether nineteen issues. Except for some residents of Kyoto, Osaka, and Kyushu, most of today's scholars of Chinese literature and of Lu Xun used to belong to one of these two groups. While the Society for Lu Xun Research concentrated on Lu Xun, the Hokuto group studied a wide variety of Chinese authors, including Lu Xun. Though the two groups certainly differed in approach and methodology, these younger scholars all shared, more or less, a sympathy for the Chinese revolution and idealistic expectations of New China. Their experiences as either participants in or sympathizers with the student movement of the late 1940s to early 1950s left them with an outlook close to Marxism. Their attitudes toward post-Liberation Chinese literature were also similar. Basically, they agreed as to its general direction but were not quite satisfied with the actual works that came out of China. In par-

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ticular, the formulaic and narrowly political orientation of China's literary criticism struck them as questionable and distasteful. Finally, they were all strongly influenced by Takeuchi's works; even if some of them had different ideas and opinions, the substance and degree of their difference from Takeuchi are not necessarily the same. Among the significant works on Lu Xun produced by this generation are Rojin shiso no keisei—sono kodoku to teiko (The formation of Lu Xun's thought—his solitude and resistance) by Imamura Yoshio, 45 of the Hokuto group; "Rojin to Nietzsche" (Lu Xun and Nietzsche) by Onoe Kanehide,46 of the Society for Lu Xun Research; and Rojin—sono bungaku to kakumei (Lu Xun—his literature and revolution) by Maruyama Noboru. 47 Maruyama's work is a biography of Lu Xun through the late 1920s. It is not a complete biographical work. If there is something new in this work, it lies in its unique approach to Lu Xun. As I have pointed out before, Maruyama's distinguished predecessor, Takeuchi, had seen the essence of Lu Xun in his self-identification as a "man of letters"; this concept also supported Takeuchi in his resistance to Japan's imperialism during the Pacific War. By contrast, Maruyama's main concern was to reconstruct Lu Xun's life and the social and political background of his times in order to trace how he arrived at his decisions in various situations. In short, Maruyama tried to locate the essence of Lu Xun's thought in the functioning of his active mind. In recreating the concrete reality in which Lu Xun lived and in visualizing the struggles he fought, Maruyama showed that the kind of "literary movement" the young Lu Xun had aspired to was essentially inseparable from politics and that for Lu Xun "politics does not exist outside of literature, but literature by its nature implies politics." According to Maruyama, politics was perfectly integrated into the core of Lu Xun's literature, because in modern China every problem inevitably involved politics. Maruyama's work thus constituted a critique of the overly philosophical and sometimes even mystical tendencies of Japanese studies of Lu Xun, for which Takeuchi must be held responsible. Since the late 1960s scholars such as Imamura Yoshio, Hiyama Hisao, Ueno Koshi, Ito Toramaru, Yamada Keizo, Takeuchi Minoru, Niijima 45. Imamura Yoshio, " R o j i n shiso no keisei—sono kodoku to teiko (The formation of Lu Xun's thought—his solitude and resistance), in Koza—Kindai Ajia shisdshi—Chugoku hen, 1 (Lectures—history of modern Asian thought—part 1, China) (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1960). 46. Onoe Kanehide, "Rojin to Nietzsche" (Lu Xun and Nietzsche), Nihon Chugoku gakkai ho (Journal of the Japanese Sinological Society) 13 (October 1961). 47. Maruyama Noboru, Rojin—sono bungaku to kakumei (Lu Xun—his literature and revolution) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1965).

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Atsuyoshi, and Iikura Shôhei have published their views and critical essays on Lu Xun. 4 8 In Rojin shiwa (Notes on Lu Xun's poems), Takata Atsushi seeks an image of Lu X u n through annotations and interpretations of his classical-style poems. 4 9 Hayashida Shinnosuke published a work on the long-neglected subject of Lu Xun's relationship to classical Chinese literature, 50 and a group of Lu Xun devotees published a report on Lu Xun's life in Sendai. The last work is based on a careful search of old documents and on other information about Sendai Medical School, the social conditions of the period, and Lu Xun's relations with his teacher, Mr. Fujino. 5 1 It uncovered a number of new facts and historical materials about Lu Xun and is considered an important work. Remarkably, that work was done not by scholars and specialists but a group of general readers who love Lu Xun's literature. It is impossible to enumerate all of these works and their characteristics. I would like, however, to point out some common features. In all of them the empirical, positivist inclination is undeniably dominant. The same tendency is also found in Chinese scholarship on Lu Xun, but in the case of Japan it is made somewhat more problematic by an awareness of the distance between the two countries. Japanese scholars had to find a way to bridge the gap separating them from Lu Xun and Chinese literature. This Japanese positivism was put to the test by the Cultural Revolution. The ideas and views of Lu Xun raised in China in that period were actually the opposite of positivism; and, without enough information to judge those assertions, some Japanese scholars accepted them uncritically. Those who had strongly doubted the reliability of China's authorized views on Lu Xun since the time of the Anti-Rightist campaign now generally affirmed the Cultural Revolution's view of Zhou Yang, which declared that Zhou had in fact been on the opposite side from Lu Xun in the T w o Slogans

48. Imamura Yoshio, Rojin to dento (Lu Xun and tradition) (Tokyo: Keiso shobo, 1967); Hiyama Hisao, Rojin (Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1970); Maruyama Noboru, Rojin to kakumei bungaku (Lu Xun and revolutionary literature) (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1972); Ueno Koshi, Rojin (Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Sanichi shobo, 1974); Ito Toramaru, Rojin to shiimatsuron (Lu Xun and eschatology) (Tokyo: Ryukei shosha, 1975); Hiyama Hisao, Rojin to Soseki (Lu Xun and Soseki) (Tokyo: Daisanbunmeisha, 1977); Yamada Keizo, Rojin no sekai (Lu Xun's world) (Tokyo: Taishukan, 1977); Takeuchi Minoru, Rojin enkei (Lu Xun's perspective) (Tokyo: Tabata shoten, 1978); Niijima Atsuyoshi, Rojin o yomu (A reading of Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Shobunsha, 1979); Iikura Shohei, Rojin (Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980); Takeuchi Minoru, Rojin shuhen (Lu Xun's environment) (Tokyo: Tabata shoten, 1981). 49. Takata Atsushi, Rojin shiwa (Notes on Lu Xun's poems) (Tokyo: Chuo Koron sha, 1971). 50. Hayashida Shinnosuke, Rojin no naka no koten (Classics in Lu Xun's mind) (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1981). 51. Sendai ni okeru Rojin no kiroku (Documents concerning Lu Xun in Sendai) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1978).

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debate. However, a new wave of critical reaction began to emerge among Japanese scholars who were skeptical of the new official Chinese interpretation of the debate and of the Cultural Revolution itself. They found it necessary to question the entire "theory of the Cultural Revolution" by reexamining the so-called facts about the debate and attempting to discover new facts about it. This positivistic approach of carefully verifying historical facts is also being applied to other Chinese writers, thus broadening the scope of research. Japanese studies of modern Chinese literature have often been criticized as too much centered on Lu Xun. In comparison with the popularity of Lu Xun studies, research on other writers carried little weight. Now Lu Xun studies in Japan are playing a more proportionate role in relation to the entire span of modern Chinese literature. Like the topics, the methodologies are also becoming more varied. Lastly, important works on Lu Xun are continually being written, though some are not yet in book form. One of the most noteworthy is Kitaoka Masako's outstanding work on the origins of Lu Xun's early essay "On the Power of Mara Poetry." 52 Kitaoka's extensive research has enabled her to identify the sources of this essay, which was based on materials Lu Xun had obtained while in Japan, and to elucidate Lu Xun's original way of handling them. Some new translations, mostly of Lu Xun's representative works, have also appeared since the 1960s. Of these, special mention should be made of Rojin bunsbii (The literary works of Lu Xun), edited by Takeuchi Yoshimi. 53 This work does not match in volume the Iwanami Selected Works (1956; revised and expanded ed., 1964), but the quality of Literary Works, which is a revision of Takeuchi's previous translations, is second to none. It has raised the standard for Lu Xun translations. The last of the scheduled seven volumes never appeared, due to Takeuchi's death in March 1977. A further tragic loss befell at the funeral ceremony for Takeuchi: while reading his eulogy of the deceased, Masuda Wataru suddenly collapsed and died. This incident is inscribed in the history of Lu Xun studies in Japan as a sad and unforgettable event. At the present moment, plans are under way to translate the entire sixteen-volume Lu Xun quanji, which was published in China in 1981. Scholars in their forties and fifties are engaged in the translation task; publication commenced in November 1984.

52. Kitaoka Masako, " 'Mara Shiryoku setsu' zaigenkô noto" (Notes on the sources of "On the Power of Mara Poetry"), Yasô (Wild grass), nos. 9 (October 1972) through 2 7 (1981), unfinished. 5 3 . Takeuchi Yoshimi, ed. and trans., Rojin bunsbii (The literary works of Lu Xun), 6 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1 9 7 6 - 1 9 7 8 ) .

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V Scholarly translators and critics are not the only Japanese who have taken an interest in Lu Xun. His works have become increasingly popular as well among children and ordinary citizens. Before the war Lu Xun was known only to a limited number of Japanese. It was the inclusion of his works in junior and senior high school textbooks that made the name of Lu Xun well known among common readers in postwar Japan. Translations of "Mr. Fujino," "A Small Incident," "Storm in a Teacup," and, especially, "My Old Home" have been frequently used for language and literature education in junior high schools, ever since the 1950s. More than twenty million Japanese have read "My Old Home" as part of their high school education. This is an amazing number, even if some of these people later forgot Lu Xun's name. Two biographies and several translations of Lu Xun's works have also appeared in formats addressed to children.54 Lu Xun's enthusiastic Japanese readers regard him as a spiritual teacher who gives guidance to their lives and thoughts. The Rojin tomo no kai (Association for the Readers of Lu Xun) was organized by common readers in 1953, with the support of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Before its dissolution at Takeuchi's death, the group issued sixty-nine bulletins. In October 1979 some of the Association's former members created another organization for Lu Xun fans. The Rojin no kai (Society of Lu Xun) has published eight bulletins so far. Nowadays it is said that the young people in Japan read only comics and do not care for literary works. The hero of one of those comic books is a glamorized version of Lu Xun. 55 In one (fictitious) episode, Mr. Fujino, who has a second-degree black belt in kendo, helps Lu Xun escape being beaten by an evil Japanese student. Finally, I would like to briefly discuss Lu Xun's influence upon Japanese writers. Such effects are difficult to trace. The more creative and imaginative a writer is, the more subtly and inconspicuously do influences from other sources function in his or her work. With this in mind, let us look at several Japanese writers in whose works Lu Xun's influence is discernable. Dazai Osamu, one of the most popular writers in postwar Japan, used Lu Xun as a model for a character in his novel Sekibetsu (Farewell, 1945). In the work Lu Xun, a one-time student at Sendai Medical School, is recalled by a doctor who was his friend. However, the Lu Xun depicted by Dazai often seems too much like Dazai himself, a fact that suggests he lacked a deep understanding of Lu Xun. Miyamoto Ken, the representative playwright of modern Japan, wrote a 54. Maruyama Noboru, Rojin (Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Komine shoten, 1968); Shinmura Toru, Rojin no kokoro (Lu Xun's heart) (Tokyo: Rironsha, 1970). 55. Kitano Hideaki, Rojin (Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Ushio shuppansha, 1976).

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play called Ah Q gaidert (The unofficial story of Ah Q) in 1969. Based on Lu Xun's personal history and literature, it focuses on the serious problem of revolution and the masses. His treatment of the subject matter reveals Miyamoto's sympathy with and interest in Lu Xun's thought. Hanada Kiyoteru's Koji shinpen (1975) is a new arrangement of Lu Xun's Old Tales Retold. Three other Japanese playwrights have also adapted this work, each highlighting his own thematic and methodological concerns. Besides dramatizing "The True Story of Ah Q," Shimokawa Onji wrote a play about the relationship between Lu Xun and Mr. Fujino, Ganchu no hito (The beloved person). He also related Lu Xun's life story in his five series of Rojin den. The title of Hasegawa Shiro's Aku Tadashi no banashi (The words of Aku Tadashi, 1955) suggests Lu Xun's influence; however, the play itself has little to do with Lu Xun and his "Ah Q." It is a story about the life and death of a typical modern Japanese citizen, Aku Tadashi. In a way he is a Japanese counterpart of Ah Q, who can be seen as a representative of the Chinese people. The different realities of China and Japan, however, make the two works totally different. Aku Tadashi is, therefore, not a mere parody of "Ah Q " but a work with its own, original value. The influence of "The True Story of Ah Q " is also visible in the work of a Korean writer resident in Japan, Kim Talsu's Bakutal no saiban (The trial of Bakutal). Of all Japanese writers, Takeda Taijun has been the most influenced by Lu Xun. He was one of the founders of the Society for the Study of Chinese Literature, along with Takeuchi Yoshimi. He started his writing career after the war and is considered one of the major Japanese writers of today. The protagonist of his novel Shufii shufu hito o shusatsu su (Saddened by the autumn wind, 1968) is modeled after the famous woman revolutionary Qiu Jin. Another work, Fubaika (Pollen-filled flower, 1952), depicts the lives of members of the Society and the social conditions of Japanese intellectuals in the 1950s, when China and its revolutionary ideology were more or less the chief object of their concern. Both works show a strong influence of Lu Xun, both in choice of subjects and in philosophy. Other Japanese writers have also been affected, directly or indirectly, by Lu Xun, particularly those who regard war and revolution as important literary themes. Hotta Yoshie is a good case in point. Recently, modern Japanese literature has come to be known in the Western countries. But only a few writers, such as Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, have so far been introduced. Other writers who are less typically "Japanese" have been excluded from this boom in Japanese literature. Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, however, are not the best representatives of the spiritual life of postwar Japanese intellectuals. The writers mentioned in this essay offer better illustrations and thus deserve more attention. I hope that the works of these writers will be translated and become better known to other countries in the near future.

11 The Reception of Lu Xun In Europe and America: The Politics of Popularization and Scholarship IRENE EBER

That Lu Xun has achieved a worldwide reception as a writer is obvious. His works have been translated into over fifty languages, including twenty-five European languages and twenty-one spoken by nationalities of the USSR. Aside from the translations, scholars and critics have produced many books and articles about the man and his literary craft. These discussions are very diverse, but most, in one way or another, reflect the personal political attitudes of the writers together with the political attitudes prevalent in their countries. Therefore, the reception accorded Lu Xun's works often reflects the thaws and freezes in international relations. The translation of Lu Xun's works and the criticism of his art, furthermore, imply larger assumptions about modern Chinese history. Most popular and scholarly discussions of Lu Xun can be seen as an attempt to understand this history, and Lu Xun's place in it, in terms of the characteristic ideological proclivities and political assumptions of the critic's own country. This essay will examine Lu Xun's reception in several countries: Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany among the socialist countries and Italy, West Germany, England, and the United States among the non-

I w o u l d like to express my gratitude for the research f u n d s m a d e available t o me by the Mansfield Freeman F u n d for East Asian Studies, the Kadoorie Fund, and the Faculty Fund at the H e b r e w University of Jerusalem. T h e following individuals have contributed generous assistance: Charles J. Alber of the University of South Carolina; Elisabeth Eide at the Royal University Library of Oslo; Professor H a r o l d R. Isaacs; Dr. Eva Kraft at the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin; D r . W o l f g a n g Kubin at the Freie Universität of Berlin; Dr. Irma Peters; Frank J. Shulman of the University of M a r y l a n d ; Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik at the R u h r Universität B o c h u m ; and Dr. W e r n e r at the Berliner Stadtbibliothek.

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socialist countries. 1 The essay has three distinct parts. In the first I survey the political factors that constitute the background to the interest in Lu Xun, together with the availability of the facilities and people needed to translate this interest into practice. In the second part I discuss the types of popular (often propagandistic) works available about Lu Xun and the way in which they handle information. The third part is a survey of the scholarly-critical discussions of his life, several of his stories, and his art. In this part, more than in the second, I emphasize the views of Marxists and the less well known views of Italian and German scholars. T h e Political Implications of Lu X u n Studies The reception of Lu Xun's works in Western countries involves at least three nonliterary factors. First, political considerations and world events have been of singular importance in shaping the interest in modern Chinese literature and in Lu Xun's works. The Western countries paid relatively little attention to the writer and his works before 1949. But once China's literary establishment hailed Lu Xun as a precursor and hero of China's successful revolution, Western sympathizers and critics both began to pay closer attention. The reverberations of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 and thereafter extended to leftist circles throughout Europe and America, and adulatory Chinese writings about Lu Xun were either copied or translated by Western would-be cultural revolutionists. Second, the training of translators, the presence of academic institutions, and the availability of scholars interested in modern Chinese literature are major considerations. Prior to the 1950s the study of Chinese history, culture, and literature as an academic enterprise was neglected in both Europe and America. After World War II, and especially after 1949, the study of China was initiated at many institutions of higher education. The new interest was in some measure motivated by the views that China was lost because of her revolution (the nonsocialist countries) or that China was gained (the socialist countries). The long-delayed recognition of the close relationship of politics and literary creation was an impetus for the academic study of modern Chinese literature and Lu Xun. Third, Chinese translators and scholars proficient in European languages were of utmost significance in bringing Lu Xun's works to the 1. French scholars have made a significant contribution in translating and critically studying portions of Lu Xun's works, as shown in "A Selective Bibliography of Works by and about Lu Xun in Western Languages" (in this volume). I decided nonetheless to discuss German scholarship and popular works both because of space limitations and because, generally, students of China have a sounder acquaintance with French than with German works. I do, however, offer a brief overview of French scholarship below.

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attention of Western readers, though their importance is usually overlooked. Interest in Lu Xun's works was sparked by the availability of translations, especially English-language translations, though their reception was related to political considerations. In the 1 9 4 0 s the wide publicity given Wang Chi-chen's English translation of Lu Xun's short stories was associated with the American efforts to develop popular support for China's wartime role. In the 1950s, the Soviet and East-bloc friendship with China, and the West's Cold War politics, affected the reception of Lu Xun's works. M a o Zedong's description of him as "the chief commander of China's cultural revolution [and] the bravest and most correct, the firmest, the most loyal and the most ardent national h e r o " became the watchword for translators and critics in the socialist countries. But the Sino-Soviet conflict in the 1960s and 1 9 7 0 s nearly ended popular and scholarly interest in Lu Xun in both Poland and East Germany. In the Soviet Union, translations and critical studies fell off; though, no longer bound by M a o ' s pronouncement, those that appeared in the 1 9 6 0 s were characterized by more thorough and sophisticated analysis. There were new editions of translations, but no significant new critical works were published in the 1970s. The Cultural Revolution prompted several highly politicized examinations of Lu Xun, both in the Soviet Union and in East Germany, which were written more to condemn the Cultural Revolution than to reexamine Lu Xun. Czech scholarly and popular work, which had continued in the 1 9 6 0 s at the relatively independent Oriental Institute in Prague, stopped completely after 1 9 6 8 . In England and the United States there were significant changes in the 1960s. Chinese studies as an academic field gradually developed, attitudes toward the People's Republic of China became more flexible, and the radicalism of the late 1 9 6 0 s and early 1 9 7 0 s led to an untoward enthusiasm for China's Cultural Revolution. 2 The results of these changes were evident in the studies published in the 1970s. Italy and West Germany further illustrate the extent to which political considerations affect scholarship. Italy's foreign policy was as much influenced by Cold War politics as was West Germany's, but Italy was deeply polarized on this issue, whereas West Germany was not. The Italian Left was strong throughout the thirty 2. See, for example, Pearl Hsia Chen, The Social Thought of Lu Hsiin, 1881—1936: A Mirror of the Intellectual Current of Modern China (New York: Vantage Press, 1976). This, a revision of her doctoral dissertation, clearly reflects the ideology of the Cultural Revolution. See also Edoarda Masi, ed., La falsa libertà (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1968), p. vii; and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, "Lu Xun und das 'Prinzip Hoffnung,' Eine Untersuchung seiner Rezeption der Theorien von Huxley und Nietzsche" (Lu Xun and the "principle of hope," an examination of his reception of the theories of Huxley and Nietzsche), Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung (Bochum: Studienverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeyer, 1980), p. 414. Both these authors note that popular recognition of Lu Xun as a writer came during the Cultural Revolution, when Western Maoists started reading Mao's works and the Peking Review.

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years under consideration and maintained its own publishing houses, which issued translations of Lu Xun's works. In cultural and literary matters leftist Italian scholars assumed a relatively independent stance. Thus studies and translations of Lu Xun's works have proceeded apace in Italy for the past three decades, whereas in West Germany Lu X u n has received serious attention only in recent years. The existence of academic institutions, trained translators, and scholars actively interested in modern Chinese literature must be briefly examined. In the Soviet Union, prior to World War II, there was little interest in modern Chinese literature. 3 B. A. Vasil'ev was an exception. He visited China in 1 9 2 5 , read " T h e True Story of Ah Q , " and translated it. His translation, together with seven other stories from Nahan (Call to arms), translated by A. A. Shtukin and Z. V. Kazakevich, was published in Leningrad in 1 9 2 9 . Another collection of stories, including "Ah Q , " was published that same year in Moscow. 4 These and subsequent Russian translations were produced by Russian scholars (with Chinese collaboration), in contrast to most English-language translations, which have been produced by Chinese translators. Although still another collection of stories appeared in the 1930s, 5 the translated works apparently did not stimulate much literary attention. Prior to World War II there was only Vasil'ev's study, in which Lu X u n was described as a petit bourgeois radical who did not understand the proletariat. 6 Numerous Russian translations of Lu Xun's works appeared in the 1950s and early 1960s, but since the mid1 9 6 0 s both scholarly and popular works have been far fewer in number. As in the Soviet Union, the study of modern Chinese literature in Czechoslovakia and Poland was taken up by a group of younger scholars. 7 In Prague, Berta Krebsova emerged as the major translator and critic of Lu Xun's works. Between 1 9 5 4 and 1 9 6 4 , Krebsova translated into Czech two collections of short stories, Lu Xun's prose poems and reminiscences, and a 3. F o r a survey of Chinese studies in the Soviet Union, see Helmut Martin, Chinakunde in der Sowjetunion nach Sowjetischen Quellen (Chinese studies in the Soviet Union according to Soviet sources) (Hamburg: Mitteilungen des Instituts fur Asienkunde, 1 9 7 2 ) . 4 . Charles J Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsun ( 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 3 6 ) " (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1 9 7 1 ) , pp. 3 0 - 3 1 . 5 . Sbornik statei i perevodov posviashchennyi pamiati velikogo pisatelia sovremennogo Kitaia (A collection of articles and translations devoted to the remembrance of the great writer of contemporary China) ( M o s c o w : Izdatel'stvo ANSSSR, 1 9 3 8 ) . The articles and translations were prepared by various scholars who, like A. A. Shtukin and A. G. Shprinzin, suffered under Stalinist persecution; their names were often expunged from Russian bibliographical references. 6. Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsiin," pp. 2 7 - 4 7 . 7. For a survey of Chinese studies in Czechoslovakia, see J. Prusek, "Fifty Years of Oriental Studies in Czechoslovakia," Archiv Orientalni 3 6 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 5 2 9 - 5 3 4 . F o r a similar survey in Poland, see Wlodzimierz Zaj^czkowski, "Orientalistyka Polska w latach 1 9 1 8 — 1 9 6 8 " (Polish Oriental studies in the years 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 6 8 ) , Przegiqd Orientalisticzny (henceforth PO) 1 : 7 3 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 4 1 - 5 1 .

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volume of essays written between 1918 and 1929. 8 Although Lu Xun figured prominently in Jaroslav Prüsek's studies on modern Chinese literature, Krebsovä must be considered the major Czech translator and scholar. There have also been two Slovak translations of Lu Xun's short stories and poems, based on Russian and Esperanto sources.9 Lu Xun's works were not systematically translated into Polish, nor did any one person have a sustained interest in Lu Xun. Two collections of short stories (one translated from Russian) were produced for popular reading. Additional translated stories and essays were published in Przeglqd Orientalisticzny and in various popular literary journals. Nearly all date from the 1950s and several were prepared from secondary languages. Polish scholars have repeatedly voiced concern over the lack of interested and skilled translators and the poor quality of the published translations.10 Thus far no analytical works on Lu Xun have been written by either Polish scholars or literary critics. The development of Chinese studies took a different course in East and West Germany, following the disruption of World War II.11 In the 1950s the East German translator Johanna Herzfeldt published several volumes of stories and wrote numerous brief articles in popular periodicals and newspaper supplements. Two younger scholars, Irma Peters and Fritz Grüner, began work on Lu Xun in the late 1950s but produced nothing in the 1960s. Peters completed her doctoral dissertation on Lu Xun's essays in 1971. East German scholars have published a large number of popular articles but few scholarly items. Chinese studies developed at a much slower pace in West Germany; until the last decade, there was only limited scholarly interest in contemporary Chinese affairs and in China's modern literature.12 One volume of Lu 8. A planned second volume of essays never appeared, because Krebsovä turned to studies in the Tao Te Ching, the results of which she published in 1971. She passed away in 1973. 9. Biele Svetlo (White light) was based on three Russian sources—Radnoje Selo (Native Village) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1950), Rasskazy (Stories) (Moscow, 1950), and Rasskazy i stat'ji (Stories and essays), (Moscow, 1950)—and two Esperanto ones—Eklektikaj noveloj, Orienta Kuriero kaj Vocoj el Oriento (Hong Kong, 1939), and Sovaga Herbaro (Wild grass) (Sanhaja Esperantista Ligo, 1951). Ohen a kvety (Fire and flowers) (Bratislava: Praca, 1960) was translated from Russian sources only. 10. See Leszek Cyrzyk, " W sprawie bibliografii przekladow nowozytnej literatury Chiriskiej na j?zyk Polski" (Concerning the bibliography of translations of modern Chinese literature into the Polish language), PO 54 (1965); 1 5 4 - 1 6 1 ; and Roman Slawiriski, " Z problematyki Sinologicznej w pismiennictwie Polskim" (Sinological problems in Polish written materials), PO 4 : 1 0 0 (1976): 4 2 1 - 4 2 7 . 11. See, for example, Erich Haenisch, "Die Sinologie an der Berliner Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in den Jahren 1 8 8 9 - 1 9 4 5 , " Studium Berolinense (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1960), pp. 5 5 4 - 5 6 6 : and Hellmut Wilhelm, "German Sinology Today," Far Eastern Quarterly 8:3 (May 1949): 3 1 9 - 3 2 2 . 12. For developments in West Germany, see Fritz Opitz, Die Asienforschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Hamburg: Institut fur Asienkunde, 1971); and Hans Henle, "Chinese Studies in West Germany," Eastern Horizon 2:1 (1962): 21—25.

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Xun's stories appeared in 1947 and another in 1955. Both were translated by Joseph Kalmer. A collection of essays was published after a lapse of eighteen years, 13 and since then three volumes of Lu Xun's works have been issued by the Peking Foreign Languages Press. In recent years there has been a growing interest in both translation and critical analysis, for which Wolfgang Kubin must take the major credit. Italian scholars have steadily carried on translating and critical work in the past three decades. This sustained interest in modern Chinese literature and in Lu Xun reflects in part, no doubt, Italy's political climate. Most of Lu X u n ' s stories have been translated and published in book form and some have also appeared in the periodical Cina. A considerable selection of essays is available in La falsa libertà, edited by Edoarda Masi. 1 4 Martin Benedikter and S. M . Carletti have written significant critical articles. Especially noteworthy is the latter's massive essay on Lu Xun's correspondence, which provides an annotated, chronological listing of the 1,038 letters in print at the time of writing. The w o r k of the Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans, w h o wrote in French, must be mentioned, especially his 1975 translation of Wild Grass. In his widely read Ombres chinoises, published in 1974—at a time when all criticism was suppressed in China—he did not hesitate to remind readers of Lu Xun's critical attitude, including his views of Westerners w h o idealize China's backward features. 1 5 The 1929 French translation of "Kong Yiji" and " M y Old H o m e " is among the earliest Western-language versions of Lu Xun's works. 1 6 This was followed by Tchang Tien-ya's (Zhang Tianya) Choix de nouvelles de Lou Sun in 1932. Translations of individual short stories appeared in a variety of journals f r o m the 1950s through the 1970s. Old Tales Retold was translated by Li Tche-houa (Li Zhihua) in 1959, and a selection of poems and essays translated by Michelle Loi and Martine Vallette-Hémery appeared in 1973. Whereas English-language critical works began to appear only in the 1950s, P. Henri van Boven's French study of modern Chinese literature was published in 1946. The book discusses Lu Xun and his significance as a writer in considerable detail, assigning him a central place in contempo13. Joachim Schickel, Kursbuch 15 (Frankfurt/Main: Insel Verlag, 1968). Andreas Donath, ed., China Erzählt (Frankfurt/Main, 1964) apparently contains some stories by Lu Xun, but I have been unable to obtain more precise information about this publication. 14. It is not clear whether Masi, a well-known leftist sinologist in Italy, translated these essays. 15. Pierre Ryckmans, Ombres chinoises (Paris: Union générale d'Editions, 1974). English edition: Simon Leys [Pierre Ryckmans], Chinese Shadows (New York: Viking, 1977). 16. Kyn Yn Yu J. B. [Chin Yin-yii], trans., Anthologie des conteurs chinois modernes (Paris: Rieder, 1929). Translated in English as The Tragedy of Ah Qui and Other Modem Chinese Stories (London: Routledge and Sons, 1930).

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rary Chinese literature. 17 Robert Ruhlman published two articles of interest, in 1962 and 1964. One appears in a three-volume collection of articles on Chinese history and culture; it is a useful, if rather general, introduction to the man and some of his works. The second article includes a critical discussion of "Kong Yiji" and "The True Story of Ah Q." China's Cultural Revolution had considerable repercussions among French scholars of China. A significant work from this period is Michelle Loi's 1977 study, Un Intellectuel dans la révolution chinoise.™ Several other European countries might be briefly mentioned. Jef Last translated a number of Lu Xun's short stories into Dutch; Danish scholars have translated some of his essays, prose poems, and short stories, including "Ah Q " ; and there are Swedish and Norwegian versions of various essays and short stories. N o scholarly works seem to have been produced in the Scandinavian languages; the several critical articles that came to my notice are of a semipopular nature. Most of the translations and commentaries date from the 1970s, a fact that, no doubt, reflects the development of Chinese studies in these countries and the interests of the professors who were appointed to their posts in the latter half of the 1960s. 19 Vibeke Bordahl has been most active among the new generation of scholars and translators. The situation is similar in Israel, the only country in the Middle East with an active Chinese studies program, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1982 a small group of scholars and graduates of the department published a volume of modern Chinese short stories, including five by Lu Xun. The growth and development of Chinese studies in England and America is well known. As elsewhere, the study of modern Chinese literature and Lu Xun in these countries has been influenced by political attitudes prevalent over the past thirty years. 20 Unlike the Soviet versions of Lu Xun's work, which were translated by Russians, the English versions were, with a few exceptions (notably those by George Kennedy in the China Forum), prepared by Chinese translators. By 1950 all of the short stories were available in one or more English translations. Lu Xun's prose poems, poems, and essays received scant attention, even from Wang Chi-chen, 17. P. Henri van Boven, Histoire de la littérature chinoise moderne (Peiping: Scheut Editions, series I, 1946). 18. This work was not available to me at the time of writing, nor was I able to see Loi's criticism of Ryckmans's translation and interpretation of Wild Grass. See Pour Luxun. Réponse à Pierre Ryckmans (Lausanne: Alfred Eibel, 1975). 19. Elisabeth Eide, of the Royal University Library in Oslo, writes that not much work was done in any of the Scandinavian countries before 1966. Although Karlgren was, of course, in Stockholm, Lu Xun was hardly his main concern. (Personal communication, 17 March 1980). 20. See Michael Gotz, "The Development of Modern Chinese Literature Studies in the West: A Critical View," Modern China 2:3 (July 1976): 3 9 7 - 4 1 4 .

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who played a major role in translating Lu Xun's stories in the 1930s and 1940s. There are no critical scholarly works from before the 1950s. The several articles by Edgar Snow and others in Asia (New York) and The Voice of China (Shanghai) were all addressed to the general reader. George Kin Leung's (Liang Shegan) 1926 translation of "Ah Q " and Snow's 1937 work Living China were not widely reviewed. However, Wang Chi-chen's Ah Q and Others, published in 1941, received many reviews, which must have brought Lu Xun to the attention of readers at large. Lu Xun's works began to receive some scholarly attention in the 1950s, for the most part from Chinese students who were then living in Western countries.21 The important studies by T. A. Hsia and Harriet Mills were not published until the late 1960s. Thus the major change in Chinese studies in the 1970s may be considered the greater diversity of approaches and the increasing number of Chinese and Western scholars who began focusing on Lu Xun and his art. In the past three decades almost no popular articles have appeared on Lu Xun in general literary journals. Chinese scholars and writers have played a major role in the reception of Lu Xun's works in the West. It was they who translated the bulk of his works into English and who did much of the pioneering scholarly work. The first dissertation in any Western language was written by Wang Zhengru (Wang Cheng-ju) in 1939 in Germany; 22 European scholars after the war often referred to Wang's ground-breaking work. 23 This brief survey has demonstrated how the reception of Lu Xun and his works takes place within the larger framework of political freezes and thaws. The considerable interest in Lu Xun felt in the socialist countries during the 1950s declined gradually in the mid-1960s until it ceased altogether or continued, as in the Soviet Union, only on a greatly reduced scale. In the Western countries, with the exception of Italy, Lu Xun re21. The discussion by Yi-tsi Mei (Feuerwerker) in 1955 appears to be the earliest. See her "Tradition and Experiment in Modern Chinese Literature," in Horst Frenz and G. L. Anderson, eds., Indiana Conference on Oriental-Western Literary Relations, UNCSL Papers, no. 13 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1955), pp. 1 0 7 - 1 2 1 . At the eighth annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Philadelphia in 1956, Liu Chun-jo read a paper on "The Heroes of Modern Chinese Fiction: From Ah Q to Wu Tzu-hsu," which was later published in the Journal of Asian Studies 16:2 (February 1957): 2 0 1 - 2 1 1 . In 1959, at the AAS's eleventh annual meeting in Washington, Harriet Mills read a paper on Lu Xun. No papers on Lu Xun were read in panel discussions until the 1970s. 22. Aside from the brief biographical sketch in the dissertation itself, I was unable to discover anything about Wang Zhengru. She studied at Zhungshan University. From 1933 to 1934 she was the secretary for the women's division of the Shanghai KMT. In 1936 she came to Germany, where she studied in Berlin, Cologne, and Bonn. 23. See, for example, Wolfgang Franke's review of Berta Krebsova's book, Lu Sun, sa vie et son oeuvre, in Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 3—4 (1955): 170—175. Franke points out that Krebsova's translations, omissions, and even mistakes often coincide with those in Wang's dissertation.

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ceived serious attention only after attitudes toward the People's Republic of China began to change. Whereas in the socialist countries Lu Xun was translated largely by native speakers, the translations into English were for the most part prepared by Chinese translators. The question that must be addressed next is: H o w were Lu Xun and his works presented to the general reader? T h e P o p u l a r i z a t i o n of L u X u n Discussions of Lu Xun and his works addressed to a general audience exist in a variety of forms. Translations into Western languages can be considered popular works, as they are aimed at readers who do not know Chinese. The introductions to the translations furnish background information on the author and his times, and on the literary merit of the translated work, or explain why these translations are important to the country in which the work is being published. Another type of popular work is the informative or critical articles written by either specialists or nonspecialists and published in popular and semipopular journals. Such articles discuss the author's works, explain the world literary interest in him, or compare his works with those of other authors. Newspapers sometimes print brief biographical, informative, and commemorative items. Finally, book reviews of the translated works are published in popular reading matter and newspapers. The tone of the popular writings differs in the socialist and the nonsocialist countries. In the former they tend to be propagandistic and apparently aim at creating an image of a writer hero of unfailing revolutionary zeal. Little is said about Lu Xun the artist and the man. In the latter the ideological inclinations of the authors (prosocialist, anti-Japanese, p r o Cultural Revolution, etc.) color their views of Lu Xun. The following discussion will examine the various types of popular notice that Lu Xun and his works have received. Popular writings from the socialist countries have a number of themes in common. Lu Xun is usually characterized as a progressive leader who pointed out the correct revolutionary path. He never wavered in his love for youth and in his faith in their revolutionary potential. Lu Xun was a leader of the M a y Fourth movement and, because the movement itself was either influenced by, or echoed the October revolution, Lu Xun too was subject to its influences. Lu Xun's interest in Russian and Soviet literature and his translation of literary works are usually stressed, as is his friendship for the Soviet Union and his serious study of Marxism-Leninism. He is compared to Chekhov, referred to as the Chinese Gorki, and portrayed as a revolutionary activist. His short stories are described as works of realism, critical realism, or revolutionary realism, with some verging on

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socialist realism. The "polemical" works—that is, the essays—are much praised, as is Lu Xun's great interest and support of wood-block art. And finally, Lu Xun is hailed as the fighter who introduced the spoken language into literature. According to the noted Polish philologist Witold Jabioriski, for example, Lu Xun "quickly assumed a leading position in the 'literary revolution.' His initial pessimism, which resulted from the bankruptcy of the bourgeois revolution, was gradually transformed into the revolutionary optimism of the activist." 24 The Russian scholar L. D. Pozdneeva also describes Lu Xun as a "fiery fighter for the national idea and the general liberation of the Chinese people." He "loved wholeheartedly the progressive youth of China and supported all its undertakings." 25 The literary aspects of the stories are mentioned only briefly. N. T. Fedorenko, in his introduction to the 1952 edition of lzbrannoe (Selections), refers to "Ah Q " and "Kong Yiji," but in superficial terms.26 Neither Prusek nor Krebsova nor Richard Jung deal with the literary aspects of their translations. 27 The introductions usually mention only the peak events in Lu Xun's life, such as his years in Japan, his flight from Peking, and his residence in Shanghai. Johanna Herzfeldt, however, tried to convey aspects of the struggle in Lu Xun's life; her postscript stressed the difficult years after 1925. 2 8 The introductions usually credit Lu Xun with being the first to use the vernacular in literature. The role of Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu is mentioned only by Richard Jung. 29 The fact that these introductions are relatively unsophisticated, and that they underscore the political rather than the artistic side of Lu Xun, must be seen in the proper context. Scholarship is bureaucratically controlled in the socialist countries, and a significant part of scholarly work consists of popularization, as demanded by the institutes and academies where the translators work. 30 Thus the introductions are not meant to be scholarly or 24. Olgierd Wojtasiewicz, trans., Pewnej nocy (A certain night) (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1954), pp. 10—11; and Witold Jabioriski, trans, and ed., Antologia literatury Chinskiej (Anthology of Chinese literature) (Warsaw: Paristwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1956), p. 16. 25. In the Polish translation by M. Witwiriska, Wies rodzinna (My old home) (Warsaw: Nasza Ksi?garnia, 1951), pp. 5 - 1 0 . 26. V. N. Rogov, ed., lzbrannoe (Selections) (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1952), pp. 3 - 1 6 . 27. J. Prusek and B. Krebsova, trans., "Lu Hsun: Rodna ves" (Lu Xun: my old home), Novy Orient (henceforth NO) 4 : 1 0 (1949): 229. See also Krebsova's introduction to "Denik psany narychlo" (A slapdash diary), N O 15:6 (1960): 141, in which she points out Lu Xun's mastery of the feuilleton style. Herta Nan and Richard Jung, trans., Die Wahre Geschichte des Ah Queh von Lu Hsin (Leipzig: List, 1954), pp. 5—11. 28. Johanna Herzfeldt, trans., Morgenbliiten Abends Gepfliickt (Dawn blossoms plucked at dusk) (Berlin: Riitten and Loening, 1958), pp. 7 0 8 - 7 1 9 . 29. See Nan and Jung, Die Wahre Geschichte, p. 8. 30. See, for example, Wlodzimierz Zaj^czkpwski, "Orientalistyka Polska w latach 1 9 1 8 1 9 6 8 " (Polish Oriental studies in the years 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 6 8 ) , PO 1:73 (1970): 48.

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critical. They are addressed to the "people out there." The intellectual capacities of the intended readers are underestimated; it is assumed they are more interested in the politics of literature than in its literary qualities. Readers are apparently expected to be more moved by a great revolutionary fighter than by a great literary figure. Popular articles make similar assumptions. Krebsová pointed out that Lu Xun called China's youth to revolution and indicated to them how to implement it. It is certain, wrote Krebsová, that Lu Xun's life and works changed and determined the course of the Chinese revolution.31 In a biographical article that Krebsová co-authored with Prusek, the intent was to describe not the evolution of a literary genius but the growth of a political revolutionary who also happened to be a writer. Lu Xun, according to Prusek and Krebsová, used literature to advance the revolutionary struggle. He was an educator and leader of Chinese youth. While in Japan, he was preoccupied with European democratic revolutionary movements (neither Nietzsche nor Byron is mentioned by name). May Fourth marked the emergence of the proletariat, the Communist Party, and the dissemination of Marxism-Leninism. It was, therefore, the beginning of Lu Xun's revolutionary development, from a petit bourgeois intellectual to a fighter for society and the father of China's new culture. The year 1927 was the turning point in his life: instead of giving in to despair, he gathered strength and took a new road with the study of Marxism-Leninism.32 Prusek and Krebsová's piece presented readers with the story of an exemplary life. V. F. Sorokin's address to the Conference of Writers from Asian and African Countries aimed at a bird's-eye view of the main drift of Soviet literary criticism. Beginning with "Remembrance of the Past," Sorokin pointed out that Lu Xun learned from Russian literature how to deal with the relationship of oppressor and oppressed. "Diary of a Madman," inspired by the October revolution, already contained a socialist ideal: the hope for the appearance of the true man (nastoiasbchii chelovek). In works such as "The True Story of Ah Q , " "My Old Home," and "New Year's Sacrifice," Lu Xun criticizes the bourgeois-democratic revolution. He "takes the position of the working masses of China, first of all, the position of the peasantry. He calls for a new revolution in which the people will show their strength," says Sorokin. The masses are portrayed sympathetically, and even when he shows them as hostile, indifferent, and prejudiced, Lu Xun intends to express his love for the people (narod) and his revolutionary patriotism. "A Small Incident" portrays the positive hero,

31. Berta Krebsová, "Lu Siin a Revoluce" (Lu Xun and revolution), N O 7:8 (1952): 128-130. 32. J. Prusek and B. Krebsová, "Lu Sün, nejvétsi spisovatel nové Ciny (Lu Xun, the greatest writer of new China)", Novy Zivot 11 (1951): 1 7 2 7 - 1 7 3 8 .

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demonstrating the spiritual strength and moral beauty of the people. Among such people X i a Yu in "Medicine" is most important. Lu Xun's later writings may be considered works of socialist realism, with their figures of Communists and fighters, concludes Sorokin. 3 3 In still another lecture from East Germany, delivered in 1 9 5 5 to a nonacademic audience, Lu Xun is credited with starting the real development of the new Chinese literature after 1 9 2 7 . In that year Lu Xun "changed from a skillful critical-realist writer, who recognized the suffering and misery of the simple people and the contradictions and injustices of the feudal social order . . . to a great revolutionary thinker and leader. He studied Marxism-Leninism." Lu Xun's work, believed the lecturer, was being carried on by China's young writers. 34 Irma Peters, who wrote her article from Peking in 1 9 5 9 , on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the May Fourth movement, tried to trace the stages by which Lu X u n developed as a revolutionary writer. Unlike other authors of popular articles, she points out the importance of the evolutionary theory in Lu Xun's early development. His belief in evolution, she believes, caused Lu X u n to underestimate both the Ah Quism of the masses and the power of the people, and she describes Lu Xun's ideological change from petit-bourgeois democrat to revolutionary as a long and complex process. O f special interest is Peters's mention of Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng, their "disorienting" influences on Lu Xun in 1 9 3 6 , and the distorted image of him that they conveyed. 35 As she was in China at the time, Peters was no doubt aware of the reverberations of the recent purge of Hu and Feng. This semipopular article follows the outlines of her scholarly paper, which she presented at the twenty-fifth International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow. On occasion, however, politics and revolution are muted in the popular literature, and there is an attempt to convey the artistic merit of Lu Xun's work. Thus the East German Charles Humboldt, who is not a China specialist, compared Lu Xun to Chekhov and hesitated to label Lu X u n the "great mentor of the Chinese revolution" or a writer of socialist realism. Humboldt found Lu Xun's stories to be closer to critical realism. For example, writes Humboldt, Ah Q is not the representative of any one class but a universal character; he is a dreamer who, as a member of the working class, has no business dreaming. 36 Humboldt's

33. V. F. Sorokin, " O realizme Lu Sinia" (About Lu Xun's realism), Voprosy Literatury, 7 (July 1958): 5 - 2 2 . 34. Joan Becker, Uber die Neue Chinesische Literatur (Vortrage zur Verbreitung Wissenschaftlicher Kenntnisse, 77; Leipzig, Jena: Urania Verlag, 1955). 35. Irma Peters, "Lu Hsiin, der Chinesische Gorki," Wissen und Leben 12 (1959): 8 8 6 890. 36. Charles Humboldt, "Die Kunst Lu Hsiins," Greifenalmanacb fiir 1959 (Rudolfstadt: Greifenverlag, 1958), pp. 3 2 1 - 3 3 6 .

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article is interesting for its attempt to get at some of the literary implications in the stories. The result, however, is half-hearted Marxism and stunted criticism. The brief notices that appeared in newspapers or popular literary journals were usually written to commemorate Lu Xun's birthday or the anniversary of his death. Often, a specific theme was pursued and the biographical matter was minimal. Marian Galik, writing in Slovak, pointed out Lu Xun's special sympathy for the young. Konstantin Simonov, the Soviet writer and poet, emphasized Lu Xun's role as translator of Russian works. Johanna Herzfeldt and Heinz Lorenz also stressed the importance of Lu Xun's Russian translations; Herzfeldt ascribed the popularity of his stories to their Volkstümlichkeit (nativism). Alfred Antkowiak wrote that Lu Xun fashioned tragedy in order to give new hope.37 Like the longer articles, these brief notices emphasized Lu Xun's revolutionary and political role. Although the various popular discussions are superficial and repetitious, they are significant for having publicized Lu Xun's name. The tribute paid the author in newspapers such as Smena or the Berliner Zeitung and in popular journals such as Novy Orient and Der Schriftsteller reached large numbers of readers. The Lu Xun who emerged was not a man from another world. He was a heroic figure, whose ideological passage resembled that of other contemporary socialist writers; he followed the "correct" path in reaching a Marxist-Leninist world view. By joining his name to those of Gorki and Chekhov, these articles put him in a world context, namely, the world of Russian and socialist literature. All the popular pieces employed the political terminology with which readers were familiar. This political vocabulary can serve a universalizing function. Lu Xun may be a Chinese writer who lived before the revolution, but his life and his ideological conversion earned him a place in the socialist world. The emphasis on the importance of Russian and Soviet works in Lu Xun's creative and intellectual development helped reaffirm the bond that this writer of another time and place shared with the contemporary socialist reader. Popular writings on Lu Xun in the nonsocialist countries are not

37. Marian Gälik, "Lu Sün—priatel mlädeze" (Lu Xun—a friend of youth), Smena (Shift), 20 September 1956; Konstantin Simonov, "Reflections on Lu Hsün," New World Review 34:11 (December 1966): 4 2 - 4 4 (translated from Literaturnaia Cazeta, 18 October 1966), Johanna Herzfeldt, "Die 4-Mai Bewegung und Lu Hsün," Der Schriftsteller 7 (1952): 7 - 9 , and "Wir werden den Teufel bei den Hörnern packen, zur Wiederkehr des Todestages von Lu Hsün am 18 Oktober 1 9 5 6 , " Sonntag 44 (28 October 1956): 8; Heinz Lorenz, "Der Kühnste Bannerträger: Der Gorki Chinas 'Lu Hsün'," Forum 28 (1952): 9; Alfred Antkowiak, "Die Hoffnung liegt in der Zukunft, zum 20. Todestag von Lu Hsün," Berliner Zeitung 248 (23 October 1956): 3.

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plentiful. 38 They follow no particular pattern and are difficult to characterize. Lu Xun is mentioned in some popular books on China and has figured in general accounts about China's literary scene. More popular accounts and reviews of his works appeared before 1949 than after. In the 1970s the popularity of the Cultural Revolution made his name familiar to readers of Mao Zedong's works. Most of the English-language articles in the 1930s and 1940s were written by Chinese writers in Shanghai English-language publications. Several of these are eulogies. Those articles that appeared in the United States usually linked Lu Xun's name with China's anti-Japanese resistance. Lu Xun's name was apparently familiar in U.S. leftist circles, because in 1932 he was nominated to the honorary presidium of the John Reed Clubs. 39 But it is doubtful that anyone connected with the clubs had read Lu Xun's writings by 1932. Aside from the stories published in China Forum (edited by Harold R. Isaacs in Shanghai), translations of his works did not begin to appear either in Shanghai magazines or in the New Y o r k based Asia until the mid-1930s. It is hard to know how wide a circulation was achieved by the early translations, such as George Kin Leung's 1926 translation of "Ah Q," Kyn Yn Yu's 1930 English translation of three stories, and Wang Chi-chen's Hong Kong volume of short stories of 1930. A brief description of Lu Xun the man in Current History may have been more widely read by those who had an interest in China. 40 One can safely say, however, that the first significant introduction of Lu Xun to the English reader, aside from the earlier stories in the China Forum, was Edgar Snow's article of 1935 in Asia and his 1937 collection of short stories in Living China. Snow introduced Lu Xun as China's most important writer and as a militant socialist. Whereas others mellowed into conservatives as they got older, wrote Snow, Lu Xun became a radical. Although he championed the proletarian cause, Lu Xun, like Gorki, was not a political activist but an individualist who believed that literature serves propagandistic ends. For

38. Except for Karl Mundstock's "China: Volksleben und Literatur," Texte und Zeichen 3:2 (1957): 2 1 1 - 2 1 8 , which discusses Lu Xun at length, I was unable to find popular articles in West Germany or other German-speaking countries. The recent publication by Egbert Baque and Heinz Spreitz, eds., Lu Xun, Zeitgenosse, 2 vols. (Berlin: Leibniz Gesellschaft für Kulturellen Austausch, 1979), was prepared for general readers. It was published to accompany the Lu Xun exhibit at the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. 39. See Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left, Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961) pp. 3 7 - 4 1 , 6 6 - 6 7 , 2 1 3 - 2 1 4 , 224. The John Reed Clubs were developed in 1929 for young proletarian writers by the radical literary magazine The New Masses. John Reed was a socialist writer who died of typhus in Russia. His book, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), made him a legend. 40. Robert M. Bartlett, "Intellectual Leaders of the Chinese Revolution," Current History 27:1 (October 1927): 4 9 - 5 9 .

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Snow the genius of Lu Xun's laughter, his humor "poised between pathos and mirth," was the most significant characteristic of his art.41 In 1936 Lu Xun's death inspired a number of commemorative articles, which appeared in the Shanghai English-language publications The Voice of China, Tien Hsia Monthly, and China Critic. The tenor and vocabulary of these articles usually reflected the political proclivities of the writer.42 Two articles by Yao Xinnong (Yao Ke, a non-Communist popularizer) regarded Lu Xun's leftism and radicalism as neither destructive nor dangerous.43 Wartime writings usually made a connection between Lu Xun and the resistance to Japan. Thus Wang Chi-chen, writing in 1939, credited Lu Xun with destroying Ah Quism and being the first to attack Chinese defeatist tendencies. Agnes Smedley's popular Battle Hymn of China presented a vivid portrait of Lu Xun. "His manner, his speech, and his every gesture radiated the indefinable harmony and charm of a perfectly integrated personality," she wrote. Katherine Woods commented in the New York Times that Lu Xun was a revolutionary "only in the sense that all great writers of the past of any vitality and influence were revolutionaries." But Lin Yutang, who was extremely popular with American wartime readers, was unwilling to bury old quarrels. Ridiculing Lu Xun's leftism, he wrote that the war in China proved Lu Xun's views "shallow and unsound. " 4 4 In the 1950s and 1960s the Peking Foreign Languages Press published translations of Lu Xun's works with critical introductions. But neither these nor the introduction to the 1973 edition, Silent China, pretended to address the general, nonleftist reader. Therefore, as one reader has observed, these introductions were hardly designed to awaken wider interest in Lu Xun's works.45 Articles about Lu Xun in the various U.S.-China Friendship newsletters presented the image of a revolutionary activist, as 4 1 . Edgar Snow, " L u Shun, Master of Pai-hua," Asia 3 5 (January 1 9 3 5 ) : 4 0 - 4 3 . With slight changes in the introductory portion, which was apparently based on an interview, this article was reprinted in Living China as an introduction to Lu X u n ' s stories, pp. 2 1 - 2 8 . 4 2 . See, for example, Tsa Fu, " H i s Last Appearance," The Voice of China, 1 : 1 6 (1 November 1 9 3 6 ) : 5 - 6 ; and Anon., "Immortal Is Lu Hsiin," ibid., pp. 1 - 2 . 4 3 . Y a o Hsin-nung [Xinnong], " L u Hsiin as I Know H i m , " China Critic 15(?), no. 5 (29 October 1 9 3 6 ) : 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 ; and " L u Hsiin: His Life and W o r k s , " T'ien Hsia Monthly 3 : 4 (November 1 9 3 6 ) : 3 4 8 - 3 5 7 . 4 4 . W a n g Chi-chen, "Lusin: A Chronological Record: 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 3 6 , " China Institute Bulletin 3 : 4 (January 1 9 3 9 ) : 9 9 - 1 2 5 ; Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (New Y o r k : Knopf, 1 9 4 3 ) , pp. 7 7 - 8 6 . Smedley's portrait contrasts with that of an anonymous reviewer in the China Institute Bulletin 2 : 3 ( 1 9 3 7 ) : 86—88, who wrote that Lu Xun's correspondence reveals a person beset by magnified fears, mistrustful, and with an ambitious and domineering ego. See also Katherine W o o d s , review of Ah Q and Others, New York Times, 2 0 July 1 9 4 1 , p. 7 ; and Lin Yutang, " T h e Epigrams of Lusin," Asia 4 2 (December 1 9 4 2 ) : 6 8 7 - 6 8 9 . 4 5 . J . B. H a n s o n - L o w e , " 'Lu Hsiin and the True Story of Ah Q , ' " Meanjin 14 ( 1 9 5 5 ) : 208-217.

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did a series of biographical articles by Ruth Weiss in the Hong Kong magazine Eastern Horizon, which appeared from 1975 to 1976. The English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's popular The Long March (1958) was some improvement on the above,46 but the description of Lu Xun constitutes only a small part of a book devoted to many other matters. Obviously, these few popular articles and notices of the past three decades reached only a limited audience. The socialist countries made a much more concerted effort to bring Lu Xun's name to a large reading public, by means of popular introductions and discussions in general literary journals, newspapers, and reviews. Popularization as such really never took place elsewhere. To be sure, Americans engaged in some discussions about Lu Xun as supporters first tried to generate sympathy for China's war, and later when the United States entered World War II, but these were not continued in general literary magazines. Aside from enthusiasts for the Cultural Revolution, the name of Lu Xun was for all practical purposes unknown, and his works were read only by a slowly growing circle of scholars and students. The most significant work published before 1976 was Straw Sandals, with a thoughtful and balanced introduction by Harold R. Isaacs and stories by Lu Xun, in the translations made forty years earlier by George Kennedy. Scholarly Research on Lu Xun Scholarly writings about Lu Xun over the past three decades have combined biographical approaches with discussions of his works or have addressed specific problems in the life of the author and in his works. Similar questions have often engaged the attention of both Marxist and nonMarxist scholars. Until the beginning of the Sino-Soviet conflict, scholars from the socialist countries had to take into consideration Mao Zedong's views about Lu Xun. These bows in the direction of Mao no longer appear in the works of the 1960s. Though Marxist scholars agree about events in the author's life, especially about the degree of his Marxist commitment, they have considerable differences about parts of his early years and the interpretation of his works. These differences follow the lines of the two major streams of Marxist criticism, one tending toward greater flexibility, the other toward more doctrinaire interpretations. The former tendency, 46. See, for example, the articles in China and Us 5:6 (November—December 1976): 3 8. Ruth Weiss met Lu Xun in the 1930s through Agnes Smedley. Her articles are: "The Early Years of Lu Hsiin," Eastern Horizon 14:5 (1975): 7 - 1 6 ; "Closer to the Revolution," Eastern Horizon 15:2 (1976): 4 5 - 5 5 ; "The Last Decade of Lu Hsiin's Life," Eastern Horizon 15:4 (1976): 45—56; "Lu Hsiin—Today More Topical Than Ever," Eastern Horizon 15:6 (1976): 1 8 - 2 9 . Simone de Beauvoir, The Long March (Cleveland: World, 1958), pp. 2 9 5 - 3 0 2 . The book is based on her 1955 trip to China.

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which George Steiner terms "Engelsian," emphasizes the integrity of the work of art without, however, neglecting the role of economic forces and of the artist's world view in conditioning the creative act. As will be seen, such critics as Italy's Masi, Czechoslovakia's Prusek, and Russia's V. I. Semanov may be said to follow this line of criticism. The doctrinaire tendency derives more directly from the Leninist conception that art should promote political ends and that esthetic criteria are unimportant. According to this view, there can be only class literature in times of class struggle. 47 Critics such as Pozdneeva reflect the Leninist conception of art. Although the volume of Marxist scholarship has been greater than that of non-Marxist scholarship, the increasing interest in modern Chinese literature has led in recent years to new and more specialized studies by nonMarxist scholars. These recent works are characterized by a high degree of expertise and meticulous scholarship. Some of Lu Xun's works have received more attention than others. The two collections of short stories have been studied extensively by both Marxist and non-Marxist scholars, but only Krebsova has dealt in depth with Old Tales Retold. Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk has been discussed by the Hungarian scholar E. Galla and Wild Grass by C. J. Alber and M. Benedikter. As yet there are no adequate studies of either the essays or the correspondence. Marxist scholars have not resorted extensively to these materials in their studies. Lu Xun's translations from Russian and Soviet literature have received greater attention in Soviet studies, but a comprehensive work covering all his translating interests is still lacking. The following discussion will examine four topics that most scholars have dealt with in one form or another: (1) Lu Xun's ideological development and the factors involved in his acceptance of Marxism; (2) his participation in the League of Left-Wing Writers; (3) the significance of the short stories; and (4) evaluations of Lu Xun as a writer. 1. Lu Xun's Ideological Development All major works on Lu Xun have dealt with the writer's ideological development, that is, the steps that led him from evolutionism to Marxism. Among these, the studies by Harriet Mills and William Lyell are well known and need not be described here in detail. The work of Marxist critics and Italian scholars, as well as some recent studies in German, are, however, less well known. The following discussion will deal principally with the latter works, referring to the better-known non-Marxist works only in passing. An implicit assumption of Marxist criticism is that Lu Xun's ideological 47. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 3 0 5 - 3 1 9 .

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development tended inevitably toward Marxism. This may have been a direct progression, as Pozdneeva asserted, or it may have developed contradictions at different stages, as V. V. Petrov maintains. 48 But as Prusek succinctly states: " L u Hsiin was a revolutionary with his whole heart, and fundamentally the development of his ideas was the development of his revolutionary consciousness. All theses which distort this unified development of his character must be rejected." 4 9 Only V. I. Semanov seems to take a more independent stand, although he never explicitly rejects the assumption of revolutionary inevitability. Indeed, he praises Krebsova for understanding "the rules of his evolution" and criticizes Huang Songkang for fearing to admit "the role of progressive ideas in the evolution of the writer." 5 0 O f the non-Marxist writers, Lyell, too (according to WeigelinSchwiedrzik), emphasized continuity of development and treated Lu Xun's doubts and insecurities more as digressions than as part of the process. 51 Besides inevitability, Lu Xun's ideological development involved a host of other considerations, such as his optimism and pessimism, his attitude toward Chinese tradition, and the stages of his transition to Marxism. Scholars have held various views on these questions. Although his early childhood would seem to have been important to Lu Xun's development, no Marxist critics have attempted anything along the lines of the psychological interpretation developed by Leo Ou-fan Lee. 5 2 Still, it is significant that Semanov rejects the idea that Lu Xun was alienated from the traditional social and cultural life in his native Shaoxing and that, as a young adult, he dissociated himself from the reformist political and cultural currents in Nanjing. Even the sojourn in Japan was not a time of revolutionary development; according to Semanov, Lu Xun in those years showed rather romantic predispositons. 53 In eclectic fashion, Lu Xun combined Byronian romanticism, Nietzschean idealism, and the notion of human perfectability with science and a Darwinian evolutionism infused with Huxley's ethical implications. Lu Xun was not an original thinker, wrote William Schultz; his ideas followed closely those of other thinkers and the Zeitgeist in Japan. 5 4 Prusek saw Lu Xun's attraction to European 48. Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsiin," pp. 221—223. 49. J . Prusek, "Lu Hsiin the Revolutionary and the Artist," Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 5 5 (1959): 2 3 6 . Review of Huang Songkang's book (see n. 66). 50. V. I. Semanov, "Dve knigi o Lu Sine" (Two books about Lu Xun), Narody Azii i Afriki (henceforth NAA) 5 (1961): 195, 199. 51. See Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, "Lu Xun und das 'Prinzip Hoffnung' " p. 4 1 6 . 52. Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Genesis of a Writer: Notes on Lu Xun's Educational Experience, 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 0 9 , " in Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 1 6 1 - 1 8 8 . 53. V. I. Semanov, Lu Hsiin and His Predecessors, ed. and trans. Charles J. Alber (White Plains: Sharpe, 1980), pp. 5 - 9 , 19. 54. William R. Schultz, "Lu Hsiin: The Creative Years" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1955), pp. 3 1 4 - 3 1 9 .

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thinkers such as Byron and Shelley in a different light. He used these writers because he opposed "counterfeit democracy." They "personified European rebellion against feudal fetters as well as against bourgeois mediocrity and stupidity." Therefore, his evolutionism must not be exaggerated, warns Prusek.55 But Martin Benedikter credits Lu Xun with a larger vision. Lu Xun turned to Western writers because he, like they, perceived the problem of Western culture and a world crisis, "which between Weltschmerz and evolutionism, between asocial solitude of the superman and the tragic solitude of Ibsen's bourgeoisie, invests the society of the period." 56 Lu Xun's interest in Nietzsche during this period has been noted in different ways. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik relates this interest to the principle of hope and remarks that Nietzsche's superman was for Lu Xun a model and an awakener of the people. For Gàlik the notion of Nietzsche's genius led to revolution; Krebsovà notes the influence of Nietzsche's individualism. According the Semanov, Lu Xun and Nietzsche shared common perspectives, and Pozdneeva believes that Lu Xun used the notion of superman in reacting to materialism.57 J. D. Chinnery argues that Nietzsche's importance lay in his application of Darwinian biological theory to spiritual and social questions. Thus Lu Xun could overcome his pessimism by fostering the belief that "the future would be better than the present and the young better than the old." 58 The question of Lu Xun's optimism is important in relationship to Lu Xun's revolutionary disposition, and it has been discussed by all Soviet critics. Semanov suggests that Lu Xun translated stories by V. Garshin and L. Andreev while in Japan because of their pessimistic attitudes. This theory is rejected by M. E. Shneider, who writes that Lu Xun was attracted by the stories' humanistic and realistic features, and especially by Garshin's antimilitarism. Elsewhere, Semanov chides Krebsovà for overrating the pessimism in Lu Xun's works, but he commends her for combatting the simplistic view that Lu Xun's optimism led him directly to socialist realism.59 Scholars generally agree that the May Fourth movement was a turning 55. Prusek, "Lu Hsiin the Revolutionary and the Artist," p. 231. 56. Martin Benedikter, "Socialità e solitudine di Lu Hsiin," Cina 4 (1958): 45. 57. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, "Lu Xun und das 'Prinzip Hoffnung,' " pp. 420, 422. Marian Gàlik, The Genesis of Modem Chinese Literary Criticism, 1917-1930 (London: Curzon Press, 1980), p. 2 6 0 ; Berta Krebsovà, Lu Siin, sa vie et son oeuvre (Prague: Nakladatelstvi Ceskoslovenske Akademie Véd, 1953), p. 14; V. I. Semanov, "Lu Sin' o zarubezhnoi literature" (Lu Xun about foreign literature), NAA 5 (1965): 109; and Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsiin," p. 115. 58. J. D. Chinnery, "The Influence of Western Literature on Lu Hsiin's 'Diary of a Madman,' " Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 23 (1959): 319. 59. Semanov, Lu Hsiin and His Predecessors, p. 21; "Lu Sin' o zarubezhnoi literature," p. 110; and M. E. Shneider, Russkaia klassika v Kitae: perevody, otsenki, tvorcheskoe osvoenie (Russian classics in China: translations, appreciations, and creative appropriations) (Moscow: Nauka Glavnaia Redaktsiia Vostochnoi Literatury, 1977), p. 21; Semanov, "Dve knigi o Lu Sine," p. 197; Krebsovà, Lu Sun, sa vie et son oeuvre, pp. 74, 83.

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point in Lu Xun's life, although, as Harriet Mills points out, his actual contribution to the movement was minor.60 To some, the events of May Fourth and their aftermath signified the assumption of a radical iconoclastic position, accompanied by profound intellectual and spiritual struggles. Massimo Scaligero believes this to be a "titanic struggle" of a suffering humanism (humanitas dolorante), similar to Christianity's dualism of Christ and anti-Christ. Lin Yii-sheng emphasizes Lu Xun's inability to free himself from the shackles of the past, but Benedikter considers Lu Xun's decisive break with tradition at this time to be an affirmation: a rejection of sterile pessimism and false optimism.61 In E. Masi's analysis the act of rejecting a destructive tradition is not what counts. All May Fourth intellectuals, whether of a radical or conservative bent, did this by accepting Western traditions as instruments of revolution. Lu Xun differed from the others by being consciously aware of the destructive possibilities of a revolution that makes an end of tradition.62 Wang Zhengru, whose dissertation returns time and again to Lu Xun's "revolutionaries," assumes that from 1919 on, Lu Xun's creative and polemical work was determined by revolutionary ideas.63 Semanov does not meet the question of tradition head on, nor is he really interested in pinpointing the moments of Lu Xun's ideological transitions. His major work, Lu Hsiïn and His Predecessors, aims at showing Lu Xun's indebtedness to literary tradition and the areas in which he was an innovator. The popular articles usually emphasize the influence of the October revolution on Lu Xun's development. But the scholarly works, even those by Shneider and Semanov that trace Lu Xun's interest in foreign and especially Russian and Soviet literature, do not consider the October revolution of crucial importance in shaping his interests. Indeed, Z. Berzing injects a note of caution. Lu Xun's choice of works to translate, he writes, was sometimes determined more by availability than by ideological convictions. At times he did not even understand the ideological and political implications of the works he translated.64 The events of 1925 to 1927, some scholars argue, were of the greatest

60. Harriet C. Mills, "Lu Xun: Literature and Revolution," in Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, p. 196. 61. Massimo Scaligero, "Lu Hsiin e la crisi de 'Superuomo' " Cina 3 (1957): 1 8 - 2 6 ; Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), pp. 1 0 4 - 1 5 1 ; and Benedikter, "Socialità e solitudine," pp. 4 5 - 4 7 . 62. Masi, La falsa libertà, p. xvii. 63. Wang Cheng-ju [Zhengru], "Lu Hsiin, sein Leben und sein Werk: Ein Beitrag zur Chinesischen Revolution (Ph.D. dissertation, Friedrich Wilhelms Universität, Bonn), p. 3. 64. Z. Berzing, "Nekotorye soobrazheniia otnositel'no deiatel'nosti Lu Sinia kak perevodchika" (Some views on Lu Xun's activities as translator), in Teoreticheskie problemy vostochnykh literatur (Theoretical problems of Oriental literature) (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), pp. 2 2 9 - 2 3 2 .

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significance in Lu Xun's ideological transition to Marxism. 65 By the time he assumed leadership of the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930, this transition had been completed. Most Marxist critics, therefore, pay little attention to the last six years of his life and his conflicts with members of the Chinese Communist Party. Although Marxist scholars see his development between 1925 and 1930 as inevitable, they do not necessarily agree on the nature of Lu Xun's outlook between 1925 and 1927 and between 1927 and 1930. It is generally assumed that Lu Xun's transition to Marxism was motivated by his loss of faith in evolutionism. In 1927, writes Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, evolution seemed no longer a useful means of understanding the present and anticipating the future. According to Huang Songkang, however, as of 1929 Lu Xun had still not committed himself to Marxism, and he did not renounce evolution until 1930. 6 6 Masi also asserts the bankruptcy of evolutionism in the post—May Fourth period, and she like Huang argues for a period of hesitation before Lu Xun's commitment to Marxism. 67 Irma Peters's systematic treatment of the period from 1927 to 1930 traces Lu Xun's transition to Marxism and his commitment to the proletarian cause. This transition, in her analysis, paralleled his changing views on the relationship of literature to revolution. In 1927, writes Peters, Lu Xun had neither a Marxist nor a proletarian point of view, but he no longer had faith in evolutionism. By 1928, however, partly as a result of his controversy with Liang Shiqiu, he had realized that both society and the writer are determined by class. This perception, in turn, led him to perceive the class content of the democratic revolution under proletarian leadership and to the insistence that literature is part of the battle for the liberation of the proletariat. This development, states Peters, was the logical consequence of Lu Xun's earlier humanist and patriotic ideas.68 Peters agrees with Petrov, who wrote that Lu Xun took a consistent position only in 1928 and 1929, under the influence of Marxist theory. Petrov also sees Lu Xun's ideological development as the gradual rejection of evolutionism and as a logical progression from patriot and "lover of the people" (narodoliubets) to a class-conscious Marxist. Pozdneeva places the turning point earlier, in spring 1926, when Lu Xun wrote "In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen" after the tragedy of the student demonstrations. According to Gälik, the second half of 1926 and the first half of 1927 were crucial 65. Mills ("Lu Xun: Literature and Revolution," p. 199) believes that the events between autumn 1924 and summer 1926 were crucial. The importance of acting became clear to Lu Xun in those two years. 66. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, "Lu Xun und das 'Prinzip Hoffnung,' " p. 429; Huang Sungk'ang [Songkang] Lu Hsün and the New Culture Movement of Modern China (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1957), pp. 1 2 0 - 1 2 2 . 67. Masi, La falsa libertà, p. xxii. 68. Irma Peters, "Die Ansichten Lu Hsüns über das Verhältnis von Literatur und Revolution in der Zeit von 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 3 0 , " International Congress of Orientalists 5 (1960): 1 4 9 - 1 5 7 .

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months, following which Lu Xun abandoned evolutionism, began to master Marxist literary theory, and, by 1930, recognized the function of literature as a weapon in class struggle. 69 Semanov neither supports nor rejects these formulations; he merely states that after 1928 Lu Xun's socialist and internationalist proclivities grew. 70 Jef Last objects to all schematic formulations; his Lu Hsun—Dichter und Idol seeks to expose the fallacy of describing Lu Xun as leading an unwavering life. Last notes Lu Xun's ideological change between 1928 and 1930, but he questions Lu Xun's dedication to Marxism, in view of the leftist attacks on Lu Xun until 1932. There is no evidence in Lu Xun's writings, states Last, that he understood historical materialism, the dialectical model, or M a r x ' s economic theories. Twenty years earlier than Last, Wang Zhengru had wrestled with similar questions, but she had had to be more circumspect. Writing in Nazi Germany in 1939, she had addressed herself to the problem of Lu Xun's antifeudalism rather than his Marxism, and had concluded that its source lay in Lu Xun's humanism. 7 1 Their assumption of the inevitability of Lu Xun's turn to Marxism weakens the Soviet scholars' analyses, especially for the years 1925 through 1930. the Italian scholars' attempts to provide a broader philosophical context for Lu Xun's development is noteworthy, and Scaligero's discussion relating Lu Xun's ideological struggles to similar struggles in the West merits attention. Masi views Lu Xun within the intellectual ferment of the May Fourth movement, but her account attributes too much omniscience to the author. N o n e of the scholarly discussions clearly sets forth the relationship between Lu Xun's Marxist and non-Marxist readings, on the one hand, and his utterances in letters, on the other, or the disagreements he had with his leftist critics. For this reason, the careful studies by Mills and Lee are especially valuable. 72 They have laid the groundwork for a more rigorous evaluation of Lu Xun's leftism. Writers 2. Lu Xun's Participation in the League of Left-Wing The years between 1930 and 1936 are still insufficiently explored. Marxist critics maintain that Lu Xun's ideological transition was complete 69. V. V. Petrov, Lu Sin: ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva (Lu X u n : a survey of his life and works) ( M o s c o w : G o s u d a r s t v e n n o e Isdatel'stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1950), p. 2 7 7 ; Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu H s u n , " pp. 2 3 0 - 2 3 1 ; Galik, Genesis, pp. 2 6 0 - 2 7 8 . 70. V. I. Semanov, "Lu Sin' i d o g m a t i k i " (Lu X u n and the dogmatics), NAA 2 (1968): 65-66. 71. Jef Last, Lu Hsun—Dichter und Idol, zur Geistesgeschichte des Neuen China (Frankf u r t / M a i n : M e t z n e r , 1959), pp. 3 1 - 3 4 . Yang En-lin, in his review of this w o r k in Deutsche Literaturzeitung 8 3 : 4 (April 1962): 3 0 0 - 3 0 4 , criticizes Last for insufficient use of Chinese materials. See also W a n g Cheng-ju, "Lu Hsiin, sein Leben and sein W e r k , " pp. 3 4 - 3 5 . 72. Leo O u - f a n Lee, "Literature on the Eve of Revolution, Reflections on Lu X u n ' s Leftist Years, 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 3 6 , " Modern China 2 : 3 (July 1976): 2 9 3 - 3 0 6 ; Harriet C. Mills, "Lu Hsiin and the C o m m u n i s t Party," China Quarterly 4 ( O c t o b e r - D e c e m b e r 1960): 1 7 - 2 1 ; and Mills, "Lu X u n : Literature and Revolution," pp. 2 1 1 - 2 2 0 .

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by 1930; his leadership in the League was, therefore, a logical consequence of his previous development. The disagreements he had with the leftists until 1932, his relationship with Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng, and his explosive outburst over the National Defense Literature slogan have not been dealt with either critically or in sufficient detail. Except for the accounts by Mills and T. A. Hsia, the events of these years have not received the treatment they deserve. Whereas most critics hold that Lu Xun joined (or even organized) the League because of his commitment to Marxism, Masi notes that he was, after all, the most senior writer in Shanghai. She also points out that while Lu Xun enjoyed greater prestige than the younger activists, he was less important in the League than they. Masi feels that Lu Xun's reason for joining in the first place was the sharpening of his ideas on the educational function of literature and the perception that his role was to be of "service to the people." Masi argues that the young leftist writers were important because of their political activism, not their literary creativity. The League, furthermore, was an instrument of the Communist Party, designed less to organize writers than to wage political struggle. Lu Xun recognized that the time had passed when revolution and revolutionary literature could be identified with one another. The era of revolutionary literature ceased when the historical phase of which it was a part ended. In the new period, Masi suggests, Lu Xun refused to participate in the power structure because participation signified a return to literati status. He wanted nothing less than the elimination of the intellectual class of privilege. Thus he refused to join the Party, hoped to confront the people directly (through the League), and developed a concept of "service to the people" akin to that of Mao Zedong. 73 Huang Songkang (who completed her work in Europe), however, does not believe that philosophical considerations played a role in Lu Xun's decision. Rather, his patriotism led him to revolutionary optimism, which denied the validity of adopting a neutral position in the national emergency. Between 1930 and 1936, according to Huang, "Lu Hsiin played a role on the ideological front equal to that played by Mao Tse-tung on the political front of the Chinese revolution." 74 Mills's focus is different: her analysis attempts to establish a more precise correlation between actual events and Lu Xun's changing literary concerns. She points out that it was after the execution of the five martyrs that his view radically changed. The spring of 1931 saw Lu Xun's first 73. Masi, La Falsa libertà, pp. xxiv-xxvi. 74. Huang, Lu Hsiin and the New Culture Movement, pp. 1 2 6 - 1 2 8 . See also Mills's review in the Journal of Asian Studies 18:2 (February 1959): 2 8 8 - 2 8 9 .

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positive discussion of proletarian literature, although he maintained that bourgeois writers would be its authors. 75 In a seminal paper, T . A. Hsia has discussed the United Front, the National Defense Literature slogan, and Lu Xun's counter-proposal, together with the exchange of letters between X u Maoyong and Lu Xun before the League's demise. But Hsia has little sympathy for Lu Xun's activities in his last years. Pearl Hsia Chen's work need not be considered here; her uncritical acceptance of the Cultural Revolution propaganda materials that she used to revise her University of Chicago dissertation invalidates her analysis. 76 Soviet critics have carefully avoided delving into the problems of the League, especially the antagonisms that marked its end. Shneider, for example, points only to Lu Xun's positive contribution in attracting revolutionary sympathizers by translating Marxist and Soviet esthetic theory. In regard to the slogans, L. E. Cherkasskii maintains that they were not antagonistic but, rather, complementary: the national defense slogan was tactical while the mass literature slogan was strategic. 77 Semanov's discussion of the League is, in fact, a critical appraisal of the Cultural Revolution. Lu Xun's problems with the members of the League provided Semanov the opportunity of attacking and exposing the false revolutionaries of the 1 9 3 0 s and 1960s. Lu Xun's adversaries in the League were the "dogmatics," ultrarevolutionaries, ultraleftists, and "Marxist vulgarizers," comparable to the radicals in the Cultural Revolution. 7 8 Even in 1 9 6 8 , apparently, Semanov could not deal with the real issue—Lu Xun's perception of his own leftism. This perception was at the heart of his quarrels with members of the League, his insistence on the writer's freedom to create, and his rejection of the political control of literature. 3. The Significance of the Short Stories O f all Lu Xun's works, his short stories have received by far the greatest attention. But scholarly criticism has been unevenly apportioned: some stories, such as " T h e True Story of Ah Q , " "Diary of a M a d m a n , " "Medicine," and "Remembrance of the Past," have been discussed more extensively than others. Numerous questions have been raised about the stories, and for Marxist scholars the interpretation of Lu Xun's works is closely 75. Mills, "Lu Xun: Literature and Revolution," pp. 2 1 5 - 2 1 6 . 76. T. A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 1 0 1 - 1 4 5 ; Pearl Hsia Chen, The Social Thought of Lu Hsün. 77. M. E. Shneider, "Perevody trudov po marksistskoi estetike v Kitae v 2 0 - 3 0 - e gody" (Marxist esthetics in China in the 1920s and 1930s), NAA 5 (1961): 1 8 8 - 1 9 4 ; L. E. Cherkasskii, Novaia Kitaiskaia poeziia (20-30-e gody) (Modern Chinese poetry in the 1920s and 1930s) (Moscow: Nauka, Glavnaia Redaktsiia Vostochnoi Literatury, 1972), pp. 4 1 2 - 4 1 3 . 78. Semanov, "Lu Sin' i dogmatiki," pp. 6 5 - 7 3 .

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related to the question of Lu X u n ' s ideological stand. For example, the role of the people, the masses, Lu X u n ' s " l o v e for the p e o p l e , " and his criticism of their weaknesses are all crucial considerations. T h e positive hero and the precise points at which he appears in Lu X u n ' s works are similarly i m p o r t a n t matters, as is the issue of the hero's typicalness. N o n M a r x i s t writers have been more concerned with such literary factors as technique, style, language, and the stories' artistic merits. Lyell's analysis of story types, Patrick H a n a n ' s investigation of satiric technique, M i l e n a Dolezelova-Velingerova's discussion o f structure, and R a y m o n d S. W . Hsu's analysis o f style are well k n o w n and need not be discussed in detail here. T h e following discussion, therefore, will be devoted chiefly to the works o f M a r x i s t critics and to some of the less well k n o w n studies by n o n - M a r x i s t writers. Prusek notes that a m o n g modern writers, Lu X u n was the greatest experimenter with subjective fiction. " I believe," writes Prusek, " t h a t the greatest and most original contribution t o modern Chinese literature is the type of lyrical short story shaped by Lu Hsiin, where in a few strokes of the brush he evokes a certain reality, a m a n ' s life, the author's attitude, and the w h o l e atmosphere. Lu Hsiin in this genre brought the traditions of Chinese lyric writing up to date and created a new and original p a t t e r n . " 7 9 T h e lyrical element is precisely the criterion that makes " R e m e m b r a n c e of the P a s t " a modern story, argues Prusek, because lyrical elements penetrate the epic and break up its traditional form. T h e use of these elements, moreover, brought Lu X u n into the tradition of the lyrical European prose writers between the wars and not into the tradition of nineteenth-century realists. According to Prusek, Lu X u n substituted reminiscence for plot, thus w e a k e n i n g the function of dialogue in plot development, and dispensed with direct description. 8 0 Like Prusek, S e m a n o v stresses that " R e m e m b r a n c e of the P a s t " "did not begin a new era of Chinese literature; it only hailed the approach of o n e . " Lu X u n masked his attitudes toward his characters and, unlike his direct precursors, the authors of novels of censure, did not express his political opinions openly. In this story, Semanov believes, critical realism began t o take the place o f enlightened didacticism. According to Pozdneeva, " R e m e m b r a n c e o f the P a s t " is an important story because it shows Lu X u n ' s ideological and artistic development. It betrays Lu X u n ' s incipient revolutionary sentiments because one finds in it already the social divisions into rich and p o o r and negative and positive characters. Petrov is 79. Prusek, "A Few Notes on the Literary Aspects of the May Fourth Movement in China," in The May Fourth Movement in China: Major Papers Prepared for the X X International Congress of Chinese Studies, Prague, 1968 (Prague: Orientalni Ustav, 1968), p. 161. 80. J. Prusek, "Lu Hsun's Huai Chiu: A Precursor of Modern Chinese Literature," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 9 (1969): 1 6 9 - 1 7 6 .

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more cautious; he does not think that the people in the story are portrayed as consciously revolutionary. 8 1 Both William Lyell and Wolfgang Kubin have paid attention to this story. Lyell considers the content more important than the form; he sees the core of Lu Xun's message as a criticism of "the lackluster, hypocritical, opportunistic traditions of the establishment." Kubin follows Prüsek in directing attention to traditional subjective and lyrical elements and the relative unimportance of plot. Both writers point out Lu Xun's method of juxtaposing contrasting elements: master and servant, the plantain tree and the study, and—in Lyell's words—oppressor and oppressed. But Alber justifiably rejects Lyell's interpretation here, noting that the juxtaposition of oppressor and oppressed, while obvious in the later stories, is as yet not developed in " R e m e m b r a n c e . " 8 2 "Diary of a M a d m a n " is generally thought to stand at the beginning of the development of modern Chinese literature. But there is no consensus on its interpretation. Semanov's statement that its appearance "shattered traditional ethics" points to the far-reaching cultural significance of the story. Pozdneeva sees the attack on cannibalism as politically significant. Fedorenko considers it the first organic synthesis of the new ideology and realistic portrayal. Fedorenko, like Pozdneeva, was primarily concerned with the political and propagandistic aspects of "Diary." Sorokin sees some of the broader implications when he describes it as a social and psychological drama. 8 3 Benedikter finds " D i a r y " an excellent example of the juxtaposition of sociability and solitude. The gregariousness of the setting highlights the profound loneliness of the madman. Chinnery also notes the madman's isolation and loneliness, which he thinks reflects both Lu Xun's own feelings and his faith in the reform of the individual. Jerome F. Seaton points out a contradiction here: the madman recovers from sanity and rejoins the cannibalistic world, thus negating the individual's reform. But Benedikter suggests a wider significance for the condition of solitude. Lu Xun's portrayal of solitude, he argues, was a demand for its opposite. The problem 81. Scmanov, Lu Hsiin and His Predecessors, pp. 27—31; Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsiin," pp. 1 1 5 - 1 2 4 , 186; Petrov, Lu Sin, p. 47. 82. William A. Lyell, Jr., Lu Hsün's Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 117; Wolfgang Kubin, trans, and ed., Die Methode wilde Tiere abzurichten Erzählungen, Essays, Gedichte (Berlin: Oberbaumverlag, 1979), pp. 6 7 - 8 0 ; and C. J. Alber's review of Lyell's Lu Hsiin in Literature East and West 1 9 : 1 - 4 (January-December 1975): 226-235. 83. Semanov, Lu Hsün and His Predecessors, p. 41; Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsiin," pp. 132—133, and introduction to V. S. Kolokolova et al., eds., Lu Xun, Sobranie sochinenii (Collected works) (Moscow: Goslitizdat; 1 9 5 4 - 1 9 5 6 ) , 1 : 2 2 - 2 3 ; and V. F. Sorokin, Formirovanie mirovozzrenia Lu Sinia: ranniaia publitsistiva i Klich (The formation of Lu Xun's world outlook: early essays and the collection Call to Arms) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1958), p. 98.

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of Chinese life and culture will be solved, according to Benedikter, only when the genius emerges from seclusion and isolation and turns to cooperation and sacrifice for the good of the whole. 84 Soviet critics have paid little attention to the issue of solitude. Lone heroes with no relationship to society are a problem in Marxist criticism, because if they are alone they cannot be positive. Marxist critics have attempted to identify only the positive heroes in Lu Xun's works. The search for positive heroes in Lu Xun's fiction is thus an ideological concern. Although Soviet critics acknowledge that Lu Xun's transition to Marxism occurred after he stopped writing creative works (except for Old Tales Retold), they claim that the ideological roots were present earlier. "A Small Incident" is often singled out as an example. According to Pozdneeva, the rickshaw driver is portrayed as a positive hero. Petrov considers him a progressive figure; Sorokin sees him as a symbol of the best qualities of the people; and Semanov refers to him as the strong hero. Still, for Semanov, the rickshaw driver is not as important as the intellectual, the narrator, who observes the driver's sterling qualities. Thus Semanov does not consider the encounter between the intellectual and the driver as a conflict, as does Sorokin. 85 Xia Yu, the executed revolutionary in "Medicine," is considered the second positive hero in Lu Xun's early fiction, and the story is thought to be important in Lu Xun's development. "The True Story of Ah Q " is important in all critical evaluations. One recurring issue is Ah Q's personality: What kind of person was he meant to be? Other issues are Lu Xun's attitude toward his fictional character and the relationship of author to narrator. What was Lu Xun's view of the people (the masses), and did he intend to criticize them? Soviet scholars especially recognize the story's complexities, and their conclusions have been provocative. Most critics assume that Ah Q is not a simple literary character. Whereas Marxist critics resort to social and class analysis, non-Marxist critics often tend toward philosophical and psychological interpretations. Sometimes these two aspects are said to reflect Lu Xun's own struggle with the persistence of the past in the present and the discontinuity of the past in the future. The past as an abstraction in the present, argues Scaligero, is evil because it is mistaken as real. When this happens, people are incapable of positive and concerted action. Thus Ah Q is portrayed as neither completely conscious of his function nor capable of exercising his will. The unreality of his circumstances stops him from effective action. Lawrence 84. Benedikter, "Socialità e solitudine," p. 47; Chinnery, "The Influence of Western Literature," pp. 3 1 6 - 3 1 7 ; Jerome F. Seaton, "On Lu Hsiin," Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 12:1 (1970): 76. 85. Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsiin," pp. 142, 162, 195, 271; Semanov, Lu Hsiin and His Predecessors, pp. 87, 9 9 - 1 0 0 .

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W. Chisholm attempts a more psychological approach. Ah Q has no past, he argues, and he is continually reinvented by others; his inner life is not continuous and therefore he cannot learn from experience. He is killed by the forces of the past, but he never had a future because the connection between past and present had been severed.86 Whether or not Ah Q was meant to arouse sympathy in the reader has been a major issue. Some writers maintain that he is portrayed sympathetically—as a "proletarian vagabond," for example; 87 others believe that Lu Xun had no sympathy for Ah Q. Marxist critics often maintain that Ah Q has a dual personality. Among the Soviet scholars, Pozdneeva's approach to "The True Story of Ah Q " is the weakest. She dismisses Ah Q as a negative character for whom Lu Xun had no sympathy. Petrov, on the other hand, carefully considers the duality of the fictional character; he finds Ah Q a "sympathetic figure by virtue of his class affiliation with the peasantry." Ah Q's duality consists in the fact that he became a revolutionary but did not stop being himself; he came to the revolution with unacceptable motives, but at least he came. He had an "instinctive" tendency toward revolution, even if this tendency was very primitive. Sorokin too stresses Ah Q's duality; he is incapable of protest but instinctively hates the oppressor. More important, however, was the notion of "moral victory," 88 the propensity for self-deception that makes Ah Q see reality only in terms favorable to himself. Shneider identifies the idea of moral victory with Ah Q-ism. Ah Q-ism is the attribute of a madcap; Ah Q is a fool (iurodivi), and his moral victory is a form of self-defense, a common psychological mechanism that people use to disprove the superiority of others. Therefore, the moral victory of Ah Q (Ah Q's Ah Q-ism) is conditioned by social factors. When literary heroes in Russian fiction invoke this defense mechanism, writes Shneider, they suffer. Ah Q does not. The figure of Ah Q reflects Chinese reality and represents the high point of typicalness in modern Chinese literature.89 Semanov is also concerned with the question of Ah Q's duality and the issue of moral victory. More significant, however, is his recognition of the viewpoint of the narrator. Ah Q's fate is intimately linked to the revolution. But the story, Semanov points out, deals not only with revolution; 86. Scaligero, "Lu Hsiin e la crisi de 'Superuomo,' " pp. 20, 23; Lawrence W. Chisholm, "Lu Hsiin and the Revolution in Modern China," Yak French Studies 39 (1968): 2 3 8 - 2 3 9 . See also John H. Weakland, "Lusin's 'Ah Q': A Rejected Image of Chinese Character," Pacific Spectator 10:2 (1956): 1 3 7 - 1 4 6 . Although not a professional critic, Weakland also notes the strong focus on the present. 87. Krebsova, Lu Sun, sa vie et son oeuvre, p. 80. 88. Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsun," pp. 1 4 7 - 1 5 1 , 2 0 2 - 2 0 7 ; Sorokin, Formirovanie, pp. 1 6 5 - 1 7 0 ; Petrov, Lu Sin, p. 127. 89. Shneider, Russkaia klassika v Kitae, pp. 1 4 7 - 1 5 0 .

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there is also the reaction. Ah Q hankers after revolution, but he is the victim of the reaction. Both Ah Q and the gentry want to join the revolution, but Lu Xun had a different attitude toward each faction. He pitied and ridiculed the former and mercilessly reviled the latter. 90 What was Lu Xun's attitude toward the masses? If Lu Xun loved the people, then how is one to explain his unfavorable portrayal of the crowd in "The True Story of Ah Q " and in other stories? Or does the crowd, as one critic has it, in effect convey "the revolutionary potential of the masses"? 91 Chinnery refers to Lu Xun's problematic conception of the crowd and to the influence of Nietzsche's view of the masses as an abstract force, a point also made by Semanov. 92 But Semanov aside, Soviet critics have not been concerned with Nietzschean overtones; rather, they have concentrated on Lu Xun's perception of the crowd as a carrier of revolutionary consciousness. B. A. Vasil'ev, the earliest critic of Lu Xun's work, attributed the author's negative attitude toward the masses to his individualism and to the influence of Dickens. Pozdneeva, however, rejects Vasil'ev's view, claiming that Lu Xun in fact drew ever closer to the people. Petrov is more explicit: he assumes that Lu Xun intended to show the masses as backward in "Medicine," while simultaneously portraying their awakening by means of the wreath on the revolutionary's grave. Sorokin agrees with Petrov but criticizes Lu Xun for failing to show a revolution-minded peasantry. Semanov believes that Lu Xun sympathized with the little people and for that reason criticized their weaknesses. 93 But Semanov, together with Krebsova and Lyell, also stresses the indifference of the crowd, for which executions provide a sinister distraction. According to Semanov, it is the ordinariness of "the stupidly cackling crowd" that gives it the potential of turning on one of its members. 94 The crowd, the people, and the masses, in these critics' view, is the narod or Volk. It is the common, little people and not the gentry. It was for the gentry, the main oppressor, the critics believe, that Lu Xun reserved his major condemnation and hate. No matter how oppressive the people's conduct, Lu Xun dealt with them as a humanist, and he hoped that, ultimately, they would change.

90. Semanov, Lu Hsiin and His Predecessors, pp. 4, 84, 90. 91. Jürgen Rühle, Literature and Revolution: A Critical Study of the Writers and Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 409 (German edition, Köln: Kiepenheuer und Wietsch, 1960). 92. Chinnery, "The Influence of Western Literature," p. 318; Semanov, Lu Hsiin and His Predecessors, p. 87. 93. Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu Hsün," pp. 37—43, 66, 192, 268, 283; Sorokin, Formirovanie, p. 179; Petrov, Lu Sin, pp. 8 4 - 8 5 . 94. Lyell, Lu Hsiin's Vision of Reality, pp. 246, 255; Krebsova, Lu Sün, sa vie et son oeuvre, p. 75; Semanov, Lu Hsün and His Predecessors, p. 85.

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4. Evaluations of Lu Xun as a Writer It is difficult, and quite likely impossible, to separate Lu Xun the writer from the other roles he played during his life. The critics do not question the greatness of the man nor his importance in the making of modern China. But as to what kind of writer he was, especially what kind of creative writer—satirist, realist, or socialist realist—and what kind of artist and stylist, on these questions there is no unanimity. T o understand Lu Xun's reception and his legacy, we must glance, at least briefly, at how his art was interpreted by scholars in the West. C. T . Hsia and T . A. Hsia are too readily remembered for their adverse criticism of the later Lu Xun, while C. T. Hsia's praise of the short stories is often forgotten. 95 But C. T. Hsia was no doubt hasty in concluding that as a satirist Lu Xun does not measure up to the great Western practitioners. Like the Hsias, William Schultz expresses reservations regarding Lu Xun's creative genius; Masi also notes that Lu Xun did not produce masterpieces and that his work appears fragmented. 96 Lu Xun's art is often described as realistic, but Schultz observes a strong subjective element; according to Prusek, this subjectivism, together with the use of lyrical elements, was precisely Lu Xun's greatest contribution to the modern Chinese short story. Krebsova writes that Lu Xun's inclusion of innuendo, allusion, allegory, and symbols—the apparatus of traditional Chinese poetry—in the prose form of the short story was his outstanding accomplishment as a writer. He created a new literary genre and a new literary language, and he introduced the concepts of society and class into Chinese literature. 97 But these evaluations, whether favorable or not, are vague and imprecisely formulated. Some specialized studies explain more precisely why Lu Xun was a great writer; examples are Semanov's work on Lu Xun's indebtedness to late traditional literature, Alber's on his use of structural and syntactical parallelism in Wild Grass, Hsu's on style, and Hanan's on technique. Because literature and language are, after all, interdependent, Hsu is very convincing when he writes that no other modern writer achieved Lu Xun's breadth of vocabulary. 98 Because the appeal of literature depends also on how the story is told, Hanan's study of Lu

95. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 2 8 - 5 4 ; T. A. Hsia, Gate, p. 128. 96. Schultz, "Lu Hsiin: The Creative Years," pp. 3 8 3 - 3 8 4 ; Masi, La Falsa liberta, p. XXXV.

97. Schultz, "Lu Hsiin: The Creative Years," p. 365; Prusek, "A Few Notes," p. 161; Krebsova, "Lu Hsiin's Contribution to Modern Chinese Thought and Literature," New Orient Bimonthly 7:1 (February 1968): 13, and Lu Sun, sa vie et son oeuvre, p. 67. 98. Raymond S. W. Hsu, The Style of Lu Hsiin, Vocabulary and Usage (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, Centre of Asian Studies, 1979), p. 246. Basing his analysis on a selection of prose works, including letters, Hsu compares Lu Xun with twenty other authors. But I can only report Hsu's findings; I am not qualified to pass judgment on his methodology.

272

I R E N E EBER

Xun's techniques persuades us of the careful and consummate artistry of these works. The stories, writes H a n a n , are "the most powerfully expressive art in modern Chinese literature." 9 9 But even if Lu X u n ' s place in China's literary history is assured, there remains the question of his position in world literary history. It may very well be that the Soviet critics emphasize his humanism in an attempt to win him a place in world literature. 1 0 0 Similarly, by describing Lu Xun as a writer of socialist realism, they may be trying to establish his position within the socialist literary world. But the argument for neither humanism nor socialist realism is convincingly developed. Krebsová takes a cautious approach to the issue of Lu X u n ' s place in world literature; she writes that he had the " M a r x i s t scientific view of a modern historian and a progressive thinker" and that his stories have their counterpart in world literature. 101 Krebsová's evaluation separates the man from the writer. Along with Lyell's suggestion that Lu X u n belongs among the " M a r a poets," Prüsek's evaluation merits attention. Of the elements that mark Lu Xun as an innovator, Prusek emphasizes his ability to express a fact of universal validity by means of a specific p h e n o m e n o n . Like Semanov, Prusek points out the difference between Lu Xun's art and the art of the early-twentieth-century Chinese novel, which dealt only with individual phenomena without grasping the "boundless multiplicity of living experience." 1 0 2 But, obviously, a systematic study of Lu Xun the writer and a comprehensive definition of his art are still lacking in a Western language. His contribution to Chinese literary history is now understood in part, but his position in world literature remains less clear. Studies such as those of Hsü and H a n a n allow us n o w to easily dismiss the negative appraisals of earlier critics. But the true appreciation of Lu Xun's art within the context of world literature will depend on further careful and politically unencumbered investigations. The interest in Lu X u n and the popular and scholarly analyses of his works must be seen in relationship to the broader issues of modern Chinese literature, international politics, and the political attitudes of individuals. The popular items, as has been shown, give greater importance to Lu Xun, the political and historically relevant figure. The writers of these pieces, whether resident in East Germany or elsewhere, describe Lu Xun as 99. Patrick H a n a n , " T h e T e c h n i q u e of Lu H s ü n ' s Fiction," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 3 4 (1974): 5 3 - 9 6 . 100. Alber, "Soviet Criticism of Lu H s ü n , " pp. 7 0 - 7 1 . 101. Krebsová, "Lu Hsiin and His Collection Old Tales Retold," Archiv Orientalni 29 (1961): 3 0 9 . 102. Lyell, Lu Hsün's Vision of Reality, pp. 3 0 9 , 3 1 2 ; Jaroslav Prusek, "Basic Problems of the History of M o d e r n Chinese Literature: A Review of C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction," in Leo O u - f a n Lee, ed., The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 2 1 2 - 2 1 7 .

RECEPTION OF LU XUN IN EUROPE AND AMERICA

273

a man w h o used his art t o w a r d political ends, and they maintain that Lu X u n the writer w a s motivated by Lu X u n the revolutionary. M a r x i s t scholars have tried to achieve a balance between politics and art in their studies. Some, such as S e m a n o v and Prusek, are obviously more successful than others. N o n - M a r x i s t scholarship has had various tendencies. H o w ever, as this essay has repeatedly stressed, the recent studies that address specific problems in L u X u n ' s life and w o r k s are characterized by rigorous and innovative approaches. Scholars do not feel constrained by set canons of criticism and are not pressed to define the man and his art within his historical context. T h u s these recent w o r k s are more open-ended and more tentative, a l l o w i n g f o r the kind of creative discourse that seems necessary f o r the proper understanding of Lu X u n ' s legacy.

A Selective Bibliography of Works by and about Lu Xun in Western Languages IRENE EBER

This bibliography was prepared in order to convey to the reader the range of languages into which Lu Xun's works have been translated and the variety of critics who have discussed the man and his works. There are few listings beyond 1 9 7 6 , because Index Translationum, the major source for book-length translations, has not as yet appeared beyond that date. Works in English are not included: these can be easily located in various bibliographies, especially D. A. Gibbs, A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature, 1918—1942 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). Translations of Lu Xun's stories and essays appeared in many issues of Chinese Literature; see index by D. A. Gibbs, Subject and Author Index to Chinese Literature Monthly (1951—1976) (New Haven: Far Eastern Publications, Yale University, 1 9 7 8 ) . Materials in Russian and in the numerous other languages of the USSR are also not included: these can be located in the bibliography by J. K. Glagoleva, Lu Sin': Bibliograficheskii Ukazatel' (Moscow: kniga, 1977). Additional works in Hungarian may be found in the bibliography compiled by Lidia Wendelin, Kinai-Magyar Bibliografia (Budapest: Orszagos Szechenyi konyvtar, 1959). The following lists are arranged by country. Authors who wrote in several languages appear in the list of their native country. ALBANIA Translations: Books Misha, P., trans. Tregime (Old tales retold). Tirane: Nairn Frasheri, 1974. Pasko, Dhimiter, trans. Vepra te zgjedhura (Selected works). Tirane: N.SH. e B., 1 9 5 7 . (From Russian.) ARGENTINA Translations: Books Galer, Julio, trans. Diario de un loco (Diary of a madman). Buenos Aires: Lautaro, 1 9 5 7 . (From English.)

275

276

IRENE EBER BELGIUM

Translations:

Books

Goedertier, J o z e f Pater, trans. Wroeging Poorte, 1 9 4 9 .

(Remorse). Antwerpen: Boekengilde Die

BRAZIL

Translations:

Books

De M o r a e s , A n t o n i e t a Dias, trans. Diaria de um loco Paulo: Z u m b i , 1 9 5 7 . (From Chinese?)

(Diary of a m a d m a n ) . Sao

BULGARIA

Translations:

Books

M e t e v a , D o r a , trans. Stastlivo semejstvo (izbrani razkazi) (A happy family, selected stories). Sofia: N a r . Kultura, 1 9 5 5 . (From Russian.) Velcev, L j u b e n , et al., trans. Vik (razkazi, 1923 g.) (Call to arms, stories from 1 9 2 3 ) . Sofia: N a r . Kultura, 1 9 5 3 . (From Russian.)

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Translations:

Books

Frlicka, J a n , and Eduard V . T v a r o z e k , trans. Biele lava: M a r t i n , 1 9 5 2 . (Slovak.)

svetlo

(The white light). Bratis-

Krebsova, Berta, trans. Ranni kvety sebrane v podvecer—Stare pfibehy v novem rouse ( D a w n b l o s s o m s plucked at d u s k — O l d tales retold). Prague: S N K L M U , 1956. , trans. Eseje (Essays), vol. 1. Prague: S N K L M U , 1 9 6 4 . and J a r o s l a v Prusek, trans. Vfava—Point trdva (Call to a r m s — W i l d grass). Prague, 1 9 5 1 . , a n d Erich Herold, trans. Tapani

(Wandering). Prague: S N K L M U ,

Prusek, J a r o s l a v , a n d V l a s t a N o v o t n a , trans. Vfava Kultura, 1 9 3 7 . Vlckova, A n n a , trans. Ohen (Slovak.)

a kvety

1954.

(Call to arms). Prague: Lidova

(Fire and flowers). Bratislava: Praca, 1 9 6 0 .

Translations: In Periodicals Krebsova, B e r t a , trans. " Z k a z k a o v l a s e c h " (The story of hair). Novy 3 (1949): 4 3 - 4 4 . , trans. " V e n k o v s k e d i v a d l o " (Village opera). Novy

Orient

Orient,

5:2—

5 (1950): 201—

204. , trans. "Pousteni d r a k a " (Kite). Novy

Orient

6 : 2 - 3 (1951): 39.

, trans. " Z Lu Siinovych literarnich stati: C o to je ' s a t i r a ' ? " (From Lu X u n ' s literary remains: W h a t is " s a t i r e " ? ) . Novy Orient 1 3 : 8 ( 1 9 5 8 ) : 1 5 4 - 1 5 5 . , trans. (1962):

"Vedeni

186-187.

je z l o c i n "

(Knowledge is a crime). Novy

Orient

17:8

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

277

, and I Urwin, trans. " L u Hsiin: Thoughts and R e m i n i s c e n c e s . " New Orient 2 (1961): 1 6 1 - 1 6 3 . Prusek, J a r o s l a v , and B . Krebsovâ, trans. " L u Hsiin: R o d n â v e s " (Lu X u n : M y old h o m e ) . Novy Orient 4 : 1 0 ( 1 9 4 9 ) : 2 2 9 - 2 3 1 , and 5 : 1 ( 1 9 4 9 ) : 5 - 8 . Studies:

Books

Krebsovâ, Berta. Lu Sun; sa vie et son oeuvre (Lu X u n , his life and his works). Prague: Nakladatelstvi Ceskoslovenske Akademie Vëd, 1 9 5 3 . (Supplement to Archiv Orientalni, vol. 1). Studies: Articles Gâlik, M a r i a n , " M e d z i l i t e r â r n e aspekty prvych Lu Siinovych poviedok ( 1 9 1 8 — 1 9 1 9 ) " (Interliterary aspects o f Lu X u n ' s first short stories). Slavica Slovaca, Rocnik 17 ( 1 9 8 2 ) : 2 8 3 - 2 9 5 . Kalvodova, D a n a . " T h e Village T h e a t r e o f Shao-Hsing in Lu Hsiin's W o r k . " Acta Vniversitatis Carolinae—Philosophica et Historica 3 , Theatralia 4 (1976): 123-132. Krebsovâ, Berta. " L u Hsiin and His Collection Old Tales Retold," Archiv Orientalni 2 8 : 2 - 4 ( 1 9 6 0 ) : 2 2 5 - 2 8 1 , 6 4 0 - 6 5 6 , and 2 9 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 2 6 8 - 3 1 0 . Prusek, J a r o s l a v . " L u Hsiin's Huai Chiu: A Precursor of M o d e r n Chinese Literat u r e . " Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 9 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 1 6 9 - 1 7 6 . Popular Articles Gâlik, M â r i a n . " L u Siin—priatel mlâdeze" (Lu X u n — a friend o f youth). (Shift), 2 0 September 1 9 5 6 . (Slovak.) Krebsovâ, Berta. " L u Siin a r e v o l u c e " (Lu X u n and revolution). Novy (1952): 1 2 8 - 1 3 0 .

Orient

Smena 7:8

Prusek, J a r o s l a v , and B . Krebsovâ. " L u Siin, nejvëtsi spisovatel nové C i n y " (Lu X u n , the greatest writer o f new China). Novy Zivot (New life) 11 ( 1 9 5 1 ) : 1727-1738. Dissertations Krebsovâ, Berta. " L u Hsiin and His Collection Old Tales sita K a r l o v a , 1 9 6 0 / 1 9 6 1 .

Retold."

Prague: Univer-

DENMARK Translations:

Books

B a r d a h l , V i b e k e , trans. Nytârsfest 1973.

( N e w Year's sacrifice). Copenhagen: D e m o s ,

Brams, Paul, and Anders, T y c h o , trans. Ah Q ' s virkelige Ah Q ) . C o p e n h a g e n : Hasselbalch, 1 9 5 3 . Larsen, M a r i a n n e , trans. Ukrudt, prosadigte 1924-1926 1 9 2 4 - 1 9 2 6 ) . C o p e n h a g e n : Swing, 1 9 7 6 . Translations: In Anthologies Bordahl, V i b e k e , and Liu Baisha, trans. Kinesisk Copenhagen: Borgen, 1 9 7 1 .

noveller

historié

(The true story o f

(Wild grass, prose poems

(Chinese short stories).

IRENE EBER

278

FINLAND Translations: Books Sinerva, Elvi, trans. Uudenvuoden uhri ja muita kertomuksia (New year's sacrifice and other stories). Helsinki: Kansankultuuri, 1960. (From English.) FRANCE Translations: Books Anon., trans. Nouvelles chinoises (Chinese stories). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1974. Jamati, Paul, trans. La Véritable Histoire de Ah Q par Lou Sin (The true story of Ah Q by Lu Xun). Paris: Editeurs Français Réunis, 1953. Loi, Michelle, and Martine Vallette-Hémery, trans. Un Combattant comme ça: Choix de poèmes et essais (Such a fighter: Poems and essays). Paris: Ed. du Centenaire, 1973. Ryckman, P., trans. La Mauvaise Herbe (Wild grass). Paris: Union Générale d'Edition, 1975. Translations: In Periodicals Anon., trans. "Tempête dans une tasse de thé [par] Lou Hsin" (Storm in a teacup). Cahiers franco-chinois 10 (June 1961): 8 4 - 9 4 . Seigner, Jacques, trans. "Une Histoire de nattes" (The story of hair). France-Asie, December 1953, pp. 5 1 - 5 5 . Ying Sen, trans. "Le Remède" (Medicine). Europe 33 (August-September 1955): 12-22. Studies: Articles Brière, O. "Un Ecrivain populaire: Lou Sin ( 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 3 6 ) " (A popular writer: Lu Xun [ 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 3 6 ] ) . Bulletin de l'Université l'Aurore, set. 3, 7 (1946): 5 1 - 7 8 . Ruhlman, Robert. "Les Nouvelles de Lou Siun" (Lu Xun's short stories), in Etienne Balazs et al., eds., Aspects de la Chine, vol. 3: Epoque contemporaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 2 , pp. 6 1 7 - 6 2 8 . . "Lou Siun, grand écrivain chinois du X X e siècle" (Lu Xun, the great Chinese writer of the twentieth century). Comptes Rendus Mensuels des Séances 24 (1964): 3 6 3 - 3 7 9 Studies: Books Loi, Michelle, Un Intellectuel

dans la révolution

chinoise.

Paris: Maspero, 1977.

Dissertations Charbonnière, Jean. "Lu Xun et la libération de l'homme" (Lu Xun and the liberation of man). Paris VII, 1972. Julien, François. "Lu Xun: écriture et révolution" (Lu Xun: writing and revolution). Paris VII, 1978. GERMANY, PRE-PARTITION Translations: Books Anon., trans. "Am Pranger" (At the whipping post). Ostasiatische (1937): 1 3 2 - 1 3 3 .

Rundschau

18:5

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

279

Eggert, H e i n r i c h , trans. " T r a u e r um eine T o t e " ( M o u r n i n g a dead w o m a n ) . Ostasiatische Rundschau 17:2 (1936): 3 2 2 - 3 2 9 . H o f f m a n , Alfred, trans. " K u n g I - g i " (Kong Yiji). Ostasiatische Rundschau 16:12 (1935): 3 2 4 - 3 2 6 . Studies: Articles W a n g Cheng-ju, " L u Hsün, sein Leben und sein W e r k : Ein Beitrag zur Chinesischen R e v o l u t i o n " (Lu X u n , his life and his w o r k s : A contribution to the Chinese revolution). Mitteilungen der Ausland Hochschule (MSOS) 4 2 (1939): 5 7 - 1 2 4 .

EAST GERMANY Translations: Books Herzfeldt, J o h a n n a , trans. Morgenblüten Abends Gepflückt (eine Auswahl aus seinem Werk) ( D a w n blossoms plucked at dusk). Berlin: Rütten und Loening, 1958. , trans. Das Neujahrsopfer, Erzählungen stories from China). Leipzig: R e c l a m , 1 9 5 9 .

aus China

(New Year's sacrifice,

, trans. Die Flucht auf den Mond, Alte Geschichten neu erzählt (The flight to the m o o n , O l d tales retold). Berlin: V E B Rütten und Loening, 1 9 6 0 . N a n , H e r t a , and R i c h a r d J u n g , trans. Die Wahre Geschichte des Ah Queh von Lu Hsin ( T h e true story o f Ah Q by Lu X u n ) . Leipzig: List, 1 9 5 4 ; 2 d ed., Leipzig: Reclam, 1957. von Koskull, J o s i , trans. Erzählungen Rütten und Loening, 1 9 5 2 . Translations: In Periodicals Benl, O . , trans. " D i e H e i m a t " (August 1 9 4 8 ) : 2 3 .

aus

China

(Stories from China). Berlin:

( M y old home). Story!Erzähler

des

Auslands

3

Herzfeldt, J o h a n n a , trans. " I c h begriisse die Chinesisch-Russischen Literarischen Beziehungen" (China's debt to Russian literature). Aufbau 3 - 4 (1957): 309— 312. , trans. " S c h m e r z l i c h e r Ausgang, aus D s c h a n Scheng's Aufzeichnungen" (Painful ending, from notes by Chan Sheng). Aufbau 3 - 4 (1957): 312—329. Reisiger, H . , trans. " W i e der W i n d w e h t " (As the wind blows [ " M a s t e r G a o " ] ) . Story!Erzähler des Auslands, 2 (November 1 9 4 7 ) : 2 8 . Richter, C h a r l o t t e , trans. " E i n e Glückliche F a m i l i e " (A happy family). Aufbau (July 1 9 5 4 ) : 7 0 2 - 7 0 7 .

7

Studies: Articles Grüner, Fritz. "Erzählungen Lu X u n s im Lichte der Gegenwärtigen Maoistischen Literaturkritik in der V R C h i n a " (The stories o f Lu X u n in the light o f contemporary M a o i s t literary criticism in the P R C ) . In Sladkovsky, pp. 1 2 5 - 1 3 3 .

Festschrift

(1976),

Peters, Irma. " D i e Ansichten Lu Hsüns über das Verhältnis von Literatur und Revolution in der Z e i t von 1 9 2 7 — 1 9 3 0 " (Lu X u n ' s views on the relations between literature and revolution between 1 9 2 7 and 1 9 3 0 ) . International gress of Orientalists 5 (1960): 1 4 9 - 1 5 7 .

Con-

280

IRENE EBER

Popular Articles Antkowiak, Alfred. "Die Hoffnung liegt in der Zukunft, zum 20. Todestag von Lu Hsün" (Hope lies in the future, on the twentieth anniversary of Lu Xun's death). Berliner Zeitung 248 (23 October 1956): 3. Herzfeldt, Johanna. "Die 4-Mai Bewegung und Lu Hsün" (The May Fourth movement and Lu Xun) ; Der Schriftsteller 7 (1952): 7 - 9 . Humboldt, Charles. "Die Kunst Lu Hsiins" (The art of Lu Xun). Greifenalmanach fir 1959. Das Vierzigste Jahr. Rudolfstadt: Greifenverlag, 1958, pp. 3 2 1 - 3 3 6 . Lorenz, Heinz. "Der Kühnste Bannerträger: Der Gorki Chinas 'Lu Hsün' " (The most courageous standard bearer: the Gorki of China "Lu Xun"). Forum 28 (1952): 9. Peters, Irma. "Lu Hsün, der Chinesische Gorki" (Lu Xun, the Chinese Gorki). Wissen und Leben 12 (1959): 8 8 6 - 8 9 0 . Theses and Dissertations Grüner, Fritz. "Ubersetzung und Kommentierung von Lu Hsüns Artikel 'Die Kraft der Romantischen Poesie,' Abschnitt 1—3" (Translation of and comment on Lu Xun's article "On the Power of Mara Poetry," sections 1—3). Staatsexamenarbeit, Leipzig, 1957. Peters, Irma. "Behandlung alter Sagenstoffe durch Lu Xun" (Lu Xun's treatment of old legendary materials). Staatsexamenarbeit, Leipzig, 1957. . "Zur Ideologischen Entwicklung des Chinesischen Schriftstellers Lu Xun (1881—1936)—Eine Untersuchung anhand seiner Künstlerischen Publizistik" (Toward the ideological development of the Chinese author Lu Xun [ 1 8 8 1 1936]—-an investigation by means of his creative political journalism). Dissertationsschrift zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades doctor philosophiae (Dr. phil). Berlin, Humboldt-Universität 1971. WEST GERMANY Translations: Books Baque, Egbert, and Heinz Spreitz, eds. Lu Xun, Zeitgenosse (Lu Xun, a contemporary), 2 vols. Berlin: Leibniz Gesellschaft für Kulturellen Austausch, 1979. (Various translators and contributors.) Buch, Hans C., and May Wong, trans. Der Einsturz der Lei-feng Pagode: Essays über Literatur und Revolution in China (The collapse of Leifeng Pagoda: Essays about literature and revolution in China). Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowolt, 1973. Kalmer, Joseph, trans. Segen (Benediction). Herrliberg-Zurich: Buhl Verlag, 1947. , trans. Die Reise ist Lang, Gessamelte Erzählungen von Lu Hsün (The journey is long, Call to arms by Lu Xun). Düsseldorf: Progress Verlag, 1955. Kubin, Wolfgang, trans. Die Methode wilde Tiere abzurichten, Erzählungen, Essays, Gedichte (The method for slaughtering wild animals; stories, essays, and poems). Berlin: Oberbaumverlag, 1979. Mausbach, F., ed. Die Grosse Mauer: 21 Politische und Literarische Essays aus dem China der 20er und 30er Jahre (The great wall: 21 political and literary essays from the China of the 1920s and 1930s). Worms, 1980.

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

281

Translations: In Periodicals Schramm, Gottfried, trans. "Lu Hsiin: über das Chinesische Feuer" (Lu Xun: About Chinese fire). Forschungen und Fortschritte 35 (10 October 1961): 3 0 1 302. Studies: Articles Kubin, Wolfgang. "Die Rolle der Literaturwissenschaft in den Politischen Kampagnen der VR China der letzten Jahre. Dargestellt am Beispiel der Rezeption Lu Xuns in den Tageszeitungen Renmin Ribao und Guangming Ribao 1975— 1 9 7 8 " (The role of literature in the political campaigns of the PRC in recent years. Illustrated with the example of Lu Xun's reception in Renmin ribao and Guangming ribao 1975—1978). In Helmut Franz, ed., China unter Neuer Führung (China under a new leadership). Bochum, Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1978, pp. 2 4 0 - 2 6 3 . Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne. "Lu Xun und das 'Prinzip Hoffnung,' Eine Untersuchung seiner Rezeption der Theorien von Huxley und Nietzsche" (Lu Xun and the "principle of hope," an examination of his reception of the theories of Huxley and Nietzsche). Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung. Bochum: Studienverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeyer, 1980, pp. 4 1 4 - 4 3 1 . Peking Foreign Languages Press Anon., trans., Einige Erzählungen von Lu Hsiin (Some stories by Lu Xun). Beijing: Verlag für Fremdsprachige Literatur, 1974. Anon., trans. Morgenblüten Abends Gepflückt (Dawn blossoms plucked at dusk). Beijing: Verlag für Fremdsprachige Literatur, 1978. (Wild grass, prose poems). Beijing: Anon., trans. Wilde Gräser, Prosagedichte Verlag für Fremdsprachige Literatur, 1978. HOLLAND

Translations: Books De Vries, Theun, trans. De waarachtige historie van Ah Q (The true story of Ah Q). Amsterdam: Pegasus, 1959. Goedertier, Josef, trans. Wroeging (Remorse). Amsterdam: Wereld Bibliotheek, 1953. Last, Jef, trans. Een kleine gebeurtenis [door] Lu Hsun (A small incident [by] Lu Xun). Amsterdam: Wereld Bibliotheekvereniging, 1965. , trans. Te wapen (Call to arms). Utrecht: Bruna, 1970. Studies: Books Huang Sung-K'ang. Lu Hsun and the New Culture Movement of Modern China. Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1957. Last, Jef. Lu Hsün—Dichter und Idol, zur Geistesgeschichte des Neuen China. Frankfurt/Main: Metzner, 1959. Schriften des Instituts für Asienkunde in Hamburg, 5. Dissertations Huang Sung-K'ang. "Lu Hsun and the New Culture Movement of Modern China." Rijksuniversitet te Utrecht, 1957.

282

IRENE EBER

Last, Josephus C. F. Der Wandel in der Beurteilung Lu Hsüns und seine Ursachen (The change in the criticism of Lu Xun and the reasons for this). Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 1957. HUNGARY

Translations: Books Bakonyi, Vali, with Imre Makai et al., trans. A-Q hiteles torténete. (välogatott elbeszélések). (The true story of Ah Q, Selected stories). Budapest: Uj Magyar Kiadó, 1956. Gyöngyi, Laszlo, and Laszlo Magos, trans. Szülöföldem (Elbeszélések). (My old home, stories). Budapest: Szépirod Kiadó, 1951. Tökei, Ferenc, trans. Règi mesék mai szemmel (Old tales retold). Budapest: Europa, 1959. , trans. Vadßrek (Wild grass). Budapest: Helikon, 1961. Studies: Articles Galla, Endre. "Ch'ao-hua Hsi-she—Morgenblumen Abends Gepflückt" (Dawn blossoms plucked at dusk). Acta Orientalia 29:1 (1975): 7 - 1 3 . ISRAEL

Translations Daor, Dan, trans. "Siporo ha'amiti shel Ah Q " (The true story of Ah Q). Siman Kri'a 14 (June 1981): 6 4 - 8 9 . Studies Litvin, Rina. "Lu Xun tahat etz ha'shita" (Lu Xun under the locust tree), Ha'aretz, 1 January 1982, p. 25. ITALY

Translations: Books Bianciardi, Luciano, trans. La vera storia di Ah Q e altri racconti (The true story of Ah Q and other stories). Milano: Feltrinelli, 1955; 2d ed., 1970. Gigliesi, Primerose, trans. Fuga sulla luna (The flight to the Moon). Milano: Garzanti, 1973. Masi, Edoarda, trans. La falsa libertà (False freedom). Torino: G. Einaudi, 1968. Pavolini, Luca, and Gaetano Viviani, trans. Storia della letteratura Cinese, vol. 1: La prosa (The history of Chinese literature, vol. 1: Prose). Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1960. Translations: In Periodicals Anon., trans. "Confucio nella Cina moderna" (Confucius in modem China). Vento dell'Est 35-36 (December 1974): 1 3 6 - 1 3 9 . Benedikter, Martin, trans. "Trasalimento, Yeh-ts'ao (Erba)" (The awakening, Wild Grass). Cina 2 (1957): 2 1 - 2 3 .

283

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

, trans. "Mendicanti Yeh-ts'ao (Erba)"

(Beggars from Wild Grass). Cina 2

(1957): 2 4 - 2 5 . Bianciardi, L u c i a n o , trans. " D i a r i o di un p a z z o " (Diary o f a m a d m a n ) . Cina (1957): 2 7 - 3 7 . Gigliesi, Primerose, trans. " S a p o n e " (Soap). Cina

3

7 (1963): 109—120.

Studies Benedikter, M a r t i n . " A n n o t a z i o n i alla lettura di Erba

di Lu H s i i n " (Notes on the

reading of Wild Grass by Lu Xun). Cina 2 (1957): 12-20. . "Socialità e Solitudine di Lu H s i i n " (Sociability and solitude in Lu X u n ) . Cina 4 ( 1 9 5 8 ) ; 4 4 - 4 9 . C a d e t t i , Sandra M a r i n a . " L ' e p i s t o l a r i o di Lu X u n " (The correspondence o f Lu

Xun). Rivista degli Studi Orientali 43:1 (1968): 73-117; 43:3 (1968): 2 5 7 310. Scaligero, M a s s i m o . " L u Hsiin e la crisi de ' s u p e r u o m o ' " (Lu X u n and the crisis o f the " s u p e r m a n " ) . Cina 3 ( 1 9 5 7 ) : 1 8 - 2 6 . MEXICO

Studies: Articles M a Sen. " L u X u n , inciador de la literatura China m o d e r n a " (Lu X u n , the initiator of m o d e m Chinese literature). Estudios Orientales 3 (1968): 255—274.

NORWAY

Translations:

Books

Bordahl, V i b e k e , and Liu Baisha, trans. Kinesiske noveller, fra Lu Xun til kulturrevolutionen (Chinese short stories, from Lu X u n to the Cultural Revolution). O s l o : Pax/Borgen, 1 9 7 1 .

Translations: In Periodicals Risa, E. O . , trans. " F e m dikt av Lu H s u n " (Five poems by Lu X u n ) . Profil (1979): 4 6 - 4 7 .

4

Popular Articles Beckman, Harald. "Dagsaktuell (1978): 3 0 - 3 1 .

stridsmann"

(A present-day

fighter).

Profil,

1

Bordahl, V i b e k e , " L u X u n — h v i l k e n Lu X u n ? " (Lu X u n — w h a t sort o f Lu X u n ? ) .

Aftenposten,

12 March 1979.

. " L u X u n . Banebryter for en ny k u l t u r " (Lu X u n , groundbreaker for a new culture). Kina og Vi 1 ( 1 9 7 9 ) : 4 - 5 .

POLAND

Translations:

Books

Witwiriska, M . , trans. Wies rodzinna (My old home). W a r s a w Nasza Ksiçgarnia, 1 9 5 1 . (From Russian.) W o j t a s i e w i c z , Olgierd, and W a n d a Kindler, trans. Lu Sun, opowiadania (Lu X u n , stories). W a r s a w : Czytelnik, 1 9 5 1 ; 2 d ed., 1 9 5 3 .

284

IRENE EBER Translations:

In

Periodicals

1 . SCHOLARLY JOURNALS

Smisniewicz-Andrzejewska, H a l i n a , trans. " S n i e g " (Snow). Przeglqd Orientalisticzny, 4 (32) ( 1 9 5 9 ) : 4 0 3 - 4 0 4 . Z b i k o w s k i , T a d e u s z , trans. " O p o w i e s c o w l o s a c h . " (The story o f hair). Przeglqd Orientalisticzny 3 (87) (1973): 223-227. 2 . POPULAR JOURNALS

A n o n . , trans. " M o j a wies r o d z i n n a " ( M y old home). W Obronie Pokoju 4 ( 1 9 5 4 ) : 44-54. Derenicz, M . , trans. " M ^ d r y , glupi, i n i e w o l n i k " (The wise man, the fool, and the slave). Szpilki 2 6 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 7. G o r s k a - D z i k o w s k a , E., and J . S i e - G r a b o w s k i , trans. " O d e s z i a " (She went away). Chiny 1 0 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 1 0 - 1 2 , 2 9 - 3 2 . M e t a n o m s k i , M . , trans. " L a t a w i e c " (Kite). Iskry 4 4 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 3 . (Indirect translation.) , trans. " S n i e g " (Snow). Iskry 4 4 ( 1 9 5 6 ) : 3 . (Indirect translation.) W i r t h , A., trans. " R a d a " (Advice). Przeglcid Kulturalny 3 9 ( 1 9 5 3 ) : 6. (Indirect translation.) Also in Wiersze

na Kolbach.

W a r s a w : M O N , 1 9 5 5 , p. 2 .

W o j t a s i e w i c z , Olgierd, trans. " L e k a r s t w o " (Medicine). Zoinierz

Polski

21 (1957):

4-5. Studies: Articles W o j t a s i e w i c z , Olgierd. " L u S u n . " Chiny

1 0 ( 1 9 6 1 ) : 9.

PORTUGAL Translations: Books D e S e a b r a , M a n u e l , trans. Divorcio (From Chinese.)

(The divorce). Lisbon: Clube Editex,

1958.

RUMANIA Translations:

Books

Berindei, T a t i a n a , with Ada Steinberg et al., trans. Povestiri E . S . P . L . A . , 1 9 5 5 . ( F r o m English.) R a l e a , I o n a , and M i h a i R a l e a , trans. Opere

alese

(Stories) Bucharest:

(Selected works), vol. 1. Bucha-

rest: E . S . P . L . A . , 1 9 5 9 . ( F r o m English.) , and

, trans. Opere

alese

(Selected w o r k s ) , vol. 2 . Bucharest: Editura

Pentru Literatura Universala, 1 9 6 2 . (From English.) , and

, trans. Adevarata

poveste

a lui AQ (The true story of Ah Q ) ,

2 d ed. B u c h a r e s t : Univers, 1 9 7 2 . (From English.) SPAIN Translations: Books Pitol, Sergio, trans. Diario 1 9 7 1 . ( F r o m Chinese.)

de un loco

(Diary o f a m a d m a n ) . Barcelona: Tusquets,

285

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY SWEDEN

Translations: Books Anon., trans. Den sanna historien om Ah Q och andra berdttelser (The true story o f Ah Q and o t h e r stories). Staffanstorp: Cavefors; Solna: Selig, 1 9 7 2 . Almberg, Shiu-pang, T o m a s Almberg, and L. Lundberg, trans. Hoppet tilhôr tiden (Hope belongs to the future). S t o c k h o l m : Oktoberfôrlaget, 1 9 7 8 .

fratn-

Ekner, Reidar, trans. Den sanna historien om Ah Q och andra berdttelser (The true story o f Ah Q and other stories). S t o c k h o l m : Cavefors, 1 9 6 4 .

, trans. Den sanna historien om Ah Q och andra berdttelser frân det garnie Kina (The true story o f Ah Q and other stories from old China). Lund: Cavefors, 1 9 7 3 .

Kinnemark, Britta, and Goran Sommardal, trans. I de matta spâren av blod.

Essder

och prosa stycken, 1918—1936. (In the dull footprints of blood. Essays and prose, 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 3 6 . ) S t o c k h o l m : Cavefors, 1 9 7 8 .

SYRIA

Translations:

Books

Ayoub, Souheil, trans. Qissatu Ah Q al-haqiqiya cus: Ministère de l ' I n f o r m a t i o n , 1 9 7 3 .

(The true story o f Ah Q ) . D a m a s -

TURKEY

Translations:

Books

T o k a t h , Erdogan, trans. Çighk (Call to arms). Istanbul: H a s m e t M a t b a a s i , 1 9 6 8 . (From Chinese?)

YUGOSLAVIA

Translations:

Books

Akrap, M a r i j a , trans. Odabrane 1 9 5 8 . (From Chinese.)

Curcija, Petar, trans. Kovanje

pripovijetke

(Selected stories). Z a g r e b : N a p r i j e d ,

maca i druge priporetke

(Forging the swords and

other stories). Belgrad: N o l i t . , 1 9 5 7 . (From English.)

Maksimovic, Desanka, trans. Istinita istorija A-Keja i druge priporetke (The true story o f Ah Q and other stories). Belgrad: Prosveta, 1 9 5 0 . Minelciceva, M i r a , trans. Resnicna zgodba o A Kjuju (The true story o f Ah Q ) . L j u b l j a n a : Drzavna Z a l o z b a Slovenije, 1 9 5 7 . (Slovene, from Russian.)

Appendix: Chinese Transliterations and Characters of Lu Xun's Works

Addenda Collection . . . Jiwai ji IHHifc Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered . . . Gu xiaoshuo gouchen And That's That. . . Eryi ji ¡TffB^ Art and Criticism . . . Wenyi yu piping Art Policy . . . Wenyi chengce

it

;£§iffi#tlf

-¿HiEic^fi

"Autumn N i g h t " . . . " Q i u y e "

Ik^

A Brief History of Chinese Fiction . . . Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue "Brothers" . . . "Dixiong"

4,H3/JxKii!.B8

s&ft

" T h e Butchers of T o d a y " . . . " X i a n z a i de tushazhe" " B y W a y of Analogy" . . . "Yidian biyu"

Call to Arms [The Outcry] . . . Nahan

HiE&SS:^

-^Jt"^

"ft®

" T h e Collapse of Leifeng Pagoda" . . . "Lun Leifeng ta de daodiao"

A Collection of Old Notes on Fiction . . . Xiaoshuo jiuwen chao 'htSfSMi^ A Collection of Tales of Tang and Song . . . Tang Song chuanqi ji S^fll^ifc " T h e Comedy o f the D u c k s " . . . " Y a de x i j u " HG^IfJglJ

The Complete

Works of Lu Xun . . . Lu Xun quanji

H-ifi^ifi

" T h e Convolutions of the Critical M i n d " . . . "Pingxin diaolong"

If-DHSf!

"Correspondence from Peking" . . . "Beijing tongxin" " T h e Crisis of the Literary Essay" . . . "Xiaopinwen de weiji"

Dawn Blossoms

Plucked at Dusk . . . Zhaohua xishi

" D e a d Fire" . . . "Si h u o "

%-X

"Diary o f a M a d m a n " . . . "Kuangren riji" "Discontent" . . . "Bu man" "Dispatches" . . . " T o n g x u n "

SIP.

287

2AHIE

ifi^^Jn

'hrini&^jE:®

288

APPENDIX

"The Divergent Roads of Literature and Politics" . . . "Wenyi yu zhengzhi de qitu" "The Divorce" . . . "Lihun" 8£$f "The Dog's Retort" . . . "Gou de bojie"

filft&SS

"The Double Fifth Festival" . . . "Duanwu jie" Jg^PlP Essays from a Semi-Concession

. . . Qiejieting

zawen

Essays from a Semi-Concession,

II. . . Qiejieting zawen er ji

Essays from a Semi-Concession,

the last collection

. . . Qiejieting zawen

mobian

i "An Essential Reading List for Youth" . . . "Qingnian bidu shu" "Estrangement" . . . "Gemo"

pf^-'&IMM

Pi91

"The Evolution of Man" . . . "Nanren de jinhua" "The Evolution of Rascals" . . . "Liumang de bianqian"

MtR&lWM

"An Exchange of Letters on Subject Matter in Fiction" . . . "Guanyu xiaoshuo ticai de tongxin" False Freedom

BSJ^J^^gt&iifS'

. . . Wei ziyou shu

IS El iH

"Father's Illness" . . . "Fuqin de bing" "A Fearful Thing Is Talk" . . . "Lun renyan kewei"

MiAB b7I§:

"Fire of Ice" . . . "Huo de bing" "The Flight to the M o o n " . . . "Ben yue" "Forging the Swords" . . . "Zhu jian"

gglj

"For Mr. O. E. on the Occasion of His Return to Japan with Orchids" . . . "Song O.E. jun xi lan gui guo" Fringed Literature

. . . Huabian

.jBO.E.WMtfMffl wenxue

"From Helping to Talking Tripe" . . . "Cong bangmang dao chedan" «EHHtfUifcR "From Satire to Humor" . . . "Cong fengci dao youmo"

HiW P P l i t

"From the Hundred-Plant Garden to the Three-Flavored Study" . . . "Cong Baicaoyuan dao Sanwei shuwu"

M

"From Whiskers to Teeth" . . . "Cong huxu shuodao yachi"

iltSMBtiOf^

"The Ghost of the Hanged Woman" . . . "Nudiao" "Ghosts and Ghouls in the Chinese Literary World" . . . "Zhongguo wentanshang de guimei" "A Glance at the Shanghai Literary Scene" . . . "Shanghai wenyi zhi yipie" i J i i B ^ H » "The Good Story" . . . "Hao de gushi" "Grabism" . . . "Nalai zhuyi"

if

• jfciig

"The Grand Spectacle of Rooting Out the Communists" . . . "Changong daguan"

289

APPENDIX The Grave . . . Fen

ig

"The Great Wall" . . . "Chang cheng"

ft«

"A Happy Family" . . . "Xingfu de jiating"

^fcgttjMM

"Hope" . . . " X i wang" "Horseback Diary" . . . "Mashang riji"

.^±0lE

"Horseback Sub-Diary" . . . "Mashang zhiriji" Hot Wind . . . Refeng

BM

"How I Bought the Compendium

of Philology"

. . . "Mai Xiaoxue daquan ji"

"How I Came to Write Fiction" . . . "Wo zenmo zuoqi xiaoshuo lai" aiESEttie*»* "How 'The True Story of Ah Q' Was Written" . . . " 'A Q zheng zhuan' de chengyin"

H Q I « W B

"Idle Chat at the End of Spring" . . . "Chunmo xiantan" "In Memoriam in Order to Forget" . . . "Weile wangque de jinian" "In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen" . . . "Jinian Liu Hezhen jun"

¡¡e&SOiP^S

"In Reply to Mr. Youheng" . . . "Da Youheng xiansheng" "In Reply to the Editor of Theater Magazine" . . . "Da 'xi' zhoukan bianzhe xin"

g

"«T

iifUS^iS

"Inscribed on a Small Photograph" . . . "Zi ti xiaoxiang"

¡=3 SI'Mi;

"In the Wineshop" . . . "Zai jiulou shang" "It's Coming" . . . "Lai le" "The Job and the Fate of Nationalistic Literature" . . . " 'Minzuzhuyi wenxue' de renwu he yunming" "Jottings by Lamplight" . . . "Dengxia manbi"

®Tif B

"Kite" . . . "Fengzheng" "Knowledge Is a Crime" . . . "Zhishi ji zuie" "KongYiji"

^WtSWWM

iLZiB

"The Lamp That Was Kept Alight" . . . "Changming deng" "Letter to Wei Suyuan" . . . "Zhi Wei Suyuan" Letters between

Two Places . . . Liangdi shu

Letters of Lu Xun . . . Lu Xun shujian

^ t£H

HiEilf®]

"Let Us Do a Little Reading" . . . "Du jiben shu" "Literature of a Revolutionary Period" . . . "Geming shidai de wenxue" "The Lost Good Hell" . . . "Shidiao de hao diyu" "Master Gao" . . . "Gao laofuzi" "Medicine" . . . " Y a o "

£

"Mending Heaven" . . . "Butian"

fci&Gif

teWi

290

APPENDIX

"The M i s a n t h r o p e " . . . " G u d u z h e "

Ms=g

Mixed Accents

ji

. . . Nanqiang

beidiao

" M o r e T h o u g h t s on the Collapse of Leifeng P a g o d a " . . . " Z a i lun Leifeng T a de daodiao" " M r . F u j i n o " . . . "Tengye xiansheng"

jjjlfj^fc^

" M y Old H o m e " . . . " G u x i a n g " " M y 'Place of Origin' and ' D e p a r t m e n t ' " . . . " W o d e 'ji' he 'xi' " My Selected

Works

. . . Zi xuan ji

t'1 M M

" M y Views on Chastity" . . . " W o zhi jielieguan" New Life (magazine) . . . Xin sheng " N e w Year's Sacrifice" . . . " Z h u f u " "A N o n l e t t e r " . . . "Bu shi x i n "

^.¿ipf'IM

ifrifc MM

^Jtfa

" N o t Idle T h o u g h t s , 3 " . . . "Bingfei xianhua, 3 "

M^MIS

" O d e to the Goddess of the Xiang River" . . . "Xiang ling ge" ifflillifc Old Tales Retold

. . . Gushi xinbian

" O n Anthologies" . . . " X u a n b e n "

SfciTOiS 31*

" O n Attending a Russian O p e r a " . . . "Wei Eguo gejii t u a n " " O n Extremities in C u l t u r e " . . . " W e n h u a pianzhi l u n "

Hfc^IUB

iCitl(ISImi

" O n e Year after M r . Sun Z h o n g s h a n ' s D e a t h " . . . " Z h o n g s h a n xiansheng shishihou yi zhou n i a n " " O n Hearing of the Death of C o m r a d e Kobayashi Takiji" . . . "Wen Xiaolin tongzhi zhi si"

M'httla]*^

" O n Looking Facts in the Face" . . . "Lun zhengle yan k a n "

InPPTlBif

" O n O u r Literary M o v e m e n t at Present" . . . "Lun xianzai women de wenxue yundong"

m

^

m

m

^

m

" O n the Adoption of Old F o r m s " . . . "Lun 'jiu xingshi de caiyong' " " O n the Behavior and Writing of Writers of the Wei and Jin Periods and Their Relationship with Drugs and W i n e " . . . "Wei Jin fengdu ji wenzhang yu yao ji jiu zhi g u a n x i " " O n the Bell T o w e r " . . . " Z a i zhonglou shang" " O n the Power of M a r a Poetry" . . . " M o l u o shili s h u o " An Outline

History

of Chinese Fiction . . . Zhongguo

An Outline

History

of Fiction . . . Xiaoshuo

An Outline

of Chinese

Literary

"The Passerby" . . . " G u o k e "

History

^MKtlM

xiaoshuo

shi dalue

. . . Han wenxue

shi dalue

'Mtt^A'SS shi

qangyao

jig

" T h e Philosophy of Fortification and Denudation of the Countryside" . . . "Jianbi qingye zhuyi"

SMitifi»

291

APPENDIX "A Plan for Sacrifice" . . . "Xisheng mo"

m

"The Popular Mind is Ancient" . . . "Renxin hen gu" A'lMfli' "Postscript to The Grave" . . . "Xie zai Fen houmian" "Preface to Call to Arms/The "Preface to My Selected "Preface to Odd-Jobs

Outcry" . . . "Nahan zi xu" " r t ^ t S f f

Works"

. . . "Zi xuan ji zi xu" 0

0 ff

by Xu Maoyong" . . . "Xu Maoyong zuo Daza ji xu"

mmir'ftmm-ft "Preface to the English Edition of Wild Grass" . . . "Yecao yingwen yiben xu" "Preface to the Second Collection of Fiction for A Comprehensive the New Literature

of China" . . . "Zhongguo

Anthology

xu" "Preface to Three Leisures"

. . . "Sanxian ji xu" ELfklMFf

"The Pros and Cons of Electricity" . . . "Dian de libi" "A Public Example" . . . "Shizhong" ^ffc Quasi-Romances

. . . Zhun fengyue

tan

"The Rabbits and the Cat" . . . "Tu he mao"

^ifflfgi

"Random Thoughts, 59: 'Martial and Sagacious' " . . . "Suiganlu, 59: 'sheng wu'" "Regret for the Past" . . . "Shang shi" "Remembrance of the Past" . . . "Huaijiu" fHU "Reply to a letter from the Trotskyites" . . . "Da Tuoluosiji pai de xin" gttmmmmm "Revenge" . . . "Fuchou"

igfil

"The Reverse of Idle Chat" . . . "Bing fei xianhua"

SUF-IWK

"Revolutionary Literature" . . . "Geming wenxue" "The Revolutionary Literature of the Chinese Proletariat and the Blood of the Pioneers" "Zhongguo wuchanjieji geming wenxue he qianqu de xie" "Seeing the Great in the Small" . . . "Ji xiao jian da" BP'J^M^C "Self-Mockery" . . . "Zichao" Sequel to Unlucky Star . . . Huagai ji xubian

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"Silent China" . . . "Wusheng de Zhongguo" "Skimming" . . . "Suibian fanfan"

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ji

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292

APPENDIX

" T h e Story of H a i r " . . . " T o u f a de gushi" "Students and the J a d e Buddha" . . . "Xuesheng he Y u f o " "Such a Fighter" . . . " Z h e y a n g de zhanshi" "Sudden T h o u g h t s " . . . " H u r a n x i a n g d a o " "Sundry Remarks after Illness" . . . "Binghou zatan" "Sundry T h o u g h t s " . . . " Z a g a n "

it®

A Supplement to the Addenda Collection . . . Jiwai ji shiyi "Talking to M y s e l f " . . . " Z i y a n ziyu"

IfS ii-ifi-jfufi

g s g |§

"Teaching Material on the History of Science" . . . "Kexue shi jiaopian"

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"This and That, 2 : Exalting and Digging Out [Undermining]" . . . "Zheige yu neige, 2 : Peng yu w a "

if{@ifi|Stf{@2:

"Thoughts on the League o f Left-Wing Writers" . . . "Duiyu zuoyi zuojia lianmeng de yijian"

Wf

Three Leisures . . . Sanxian ji HRflHl "Three Summer Insects" . . . " X i a san c h o n g "

JEHU

" T h e Ties between Chinese and Russian Literatures" . . . " Z h u Zhong E wenzi zhijiao" Inscriptions" . . . " M u jie w e n "

"Tombstone "Tomorrow" . . . "Mingtian"

" T o Reach the Conclusion from W o m e n ' s Feet T h a t Chinese People Do Not Follow the Golden M e a n , and Thence Further to Conclude T h a t Confucius Suffered from His S t o m a c h " . . . " Y o u Zhongguo niiren de jiao tuiding Zhongguo ren zhi fei zhongyong you youci tuiding Kungfuzi you weibing"

a < K m m m ^ m K-^J

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¿sammi*^ m

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" T h e True Story of Ah Q " . . . "Ah Q zheng zhuan"

psfQ JEW

"Tutor" . . . "Daoshi"

Two Hearts . . . Erxin ji X'kifi Unlucky Star . . . Huagai ji "Village O p e r a " . . . " S h e x i "

St®

"Waiting for Genius" . . . " W e i you tiancai zhi qian"

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Wandering [Hesitation] . . . Panghuang "Warriors and Flies" . . . " Z h a n s h i he cangying" " W h a t Happens after N o r a Leaves H o m e " . . . " N u o l a zouhou zenyang"

m&^mM

" W h a t I Ask of the Critics" . . . "Duiyu pipingjia de xiwang"

f^FittifiC^^

" W h a t Is Expected of Us as Fathers T o d a y " . . . " W o m e n xianzai zenyang zuo fuqin"

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" W h a t Is 'Satire'?" . . . " S h e n m e shi 'fengci'?"

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293

APPENDIX "When People Can Read, Confusion Reigns" . . . "Rensheng shizi hutu shi" A^m^mmtà "The White Light" . . . "Bai guang" (Êjft "Whose Contradiction?" . . . "Sheide m a o d u n "

jfêfô^lË

Wild Grass . . . Yecao "The Wise M a n , the Fool, and the Slave" . . . "Congming ren he shazi he nucai" mwAmm^mixt "Without a Title—A Draft, 7 " . . . "Ti weiding cao, 7 " "Worried by 'Natural Breasts' " . . . "You tianru" "A Year of Analects" . . . "Lunyu yi nian"

|«§g—^

S ^ H

Glossary of Chinese and Japanese Names

A Shun A Ying Ai Qing Ai Siqi Ai Wu Aku Tadasbi Aoki Masaru Ba Jin Ba Ren Bai Lang Bai Mang [Yin Fu] Cai Yuanpei Cao Cao Cao Jinghua Cao Juren Cao Pi Cao Yu Chen Baichen Chen Boda Chen Duxiu 295

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296

GLOSSARY

Chen Gongxia Chen Yuan [Chen Xiying]

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297

GLOSSARY

Han Fei Hanada Kiyoteru VcWY&W Hasegawa Shiro ) 11 ElP Hashikawa Bunzo ISJIIiH Hayashi Fumiko fa^Uti Hayashida Shinnosuke ftffl'K^ittJ He Ganzhi He Yingqin Hiyama Hisao Hokuto Hoita Yoshie MmWffi Hu Feng i f l f f l , Hm Qiaomu Hm Qiuyuan Hu Shi Hw Yaobang

#3ffl#C

Hu Yepin MthJS Hu Yuzhi WMZ. Huang Qiuyun Huang Songkang (Huang Sung-kiang) 1S.MM Huang Yuan SK /¿¿«n* Shohei Imamura Yoshio Inoue Kobai ltd Toramaru Iwanami bunko Jiang Denting Jiang Feng Jiang Guangci Jiang Qing Jiang Ruizao Jin Xinyi Jing Song

ffc^R^ fi iPMrftA 'efaicM

MitM

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GLOSSARY

298

Kaino

Micbitaka Kaizo sba Kaneko Mitsuharu Kang Youwei Kawabata Yasunari Ke Ling Kim Talsu Kitano Hideaki Kitaoka Masako Kobayasbi Takiji Kojima Reiitsu Kong Lingjing Kurahara Korebito Kuriyagawa Hakuson Kyn Yn Yu Langjiaping Lao She Leung, George Kin Li Bozbao Li Changzhi Li He Li Jiye Li Tche-boua (Li Zhibua) Li Weisen Li Xiaofeng Li Yu Liang Rongruo Liang Shiqiu Liang Sbuming Liang Xiao Liang Xihua Liao Mosba Lin Biao Lin Chuanjia

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299

GLOSSARY

Lm Mohan Lin Sbouren Lin Shu Lin Yutang Ling Shuhua Liu Bang Liu

Bannong

Liu Binyan

«J

ft

»j^ft

mtm

Liu Dajie Liu

Hezhen

Liu Shaoqi Liu Yazi Liu Zaifu Lou Qi Lu Kanru

gijfn^

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smm ms maw

Lu Xun Lu Xun Yanjiu hui Lu Chao Lu Weifu

s s B U S

Luo Binji Luo Feng Luo Fu Luo Siding

s i t

m «Bfflf

Luzhen Mao Dun Mao Zedong Maruyama Kóichiró

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[Konmei]

Maruyama

Noboru

Masuda Wataru Matsueda Matsuura

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Shigeo Keizó

Meng Cbao Mishima Yokio

SS HftÈÌE^

300

GLOSSARY

Miyamoto Ken Miyamoto Kenji Mo Wenhua Mushanokoji Saneatsu Nagae Yo Nagayo Yosbiro Nakamura Mitsuo Nakano Shigebaru Natsume Soseki Nie Gannu Nihon bungaku hokokukai Niijima Atsuyoshi Nogucbi Yonejiro Oda Takeo Okazaki Tosbio Onoe Kanebide Otaka Iwao Oucbi Takao Ouyang Fanbai Ouyang Shan Ozaki Hotsumi Pan Xulan Pu Liangpei Qian Xuantong Qin Mu Qin Si Qin Zbaoyang Qing Er boniang Qiu Jin Qu Qiubai Qu Yuan

^Wth

mmn

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«fell »Rift

is&e

m-

GLOSSARY

301

Rojin kenkyu kai Rojin no kai ®-ifi Rojin tomo no kai ^-jBS® Rou Shi Ruan Ji Etc® Runtu Sato

Haruo Sendai Sha Ding Shao Quanlin Shen Yinmo Shi Dagang Shimizu Yasuzo Shimokawa Onji Shinmura Torn Shionoya On Shu Qun Sima Qian Sima Xiangru Song Jiang Song Qingling Song Yunbin Su Dongpo Su Xuelin Dr. Sudo Sun Fuyuan Sun Zhongshan [Yat-sen] Tai Jingnong Takada Atsushi Takeda Taijun Takeuchi Minoru

IWo

•m

ffi&'iZ H

iii-fiifi

nmma SfEfll 51mm

Btttt

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SfPH

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302

GLOSSARY

Takeucbi

Yoshimi Tang Si Tang Tao Tanizaki Junichiro Tao Qian Tian Han Tongcheng Uchiyama Kanzo Ueno Koshi Wang Chi-chen Wang Guoyuan Wang Mengou Wang Ming Wang Renshu Wang Shiwei Wang Xirong Wang Yao Wang Zbengru [Wang Chengru] Wei Liansbu Wei Mengke Wei Suyuan Weiming she Wen Zaidao Wenkang Wenxuan Wu Han Wu Kuan Wu Peifu Wu Yuzhang Wu Zuxiang Xi Kang Xia Yan

tfrrti?

mm JSS

pseit

mm mm rtlUTtB

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¡--.w-m Eft®

mm T.J6

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303

GLOSSARY

Xia Yu Mst Xia Zbengnong HiEft Xiang Linbing [Zhao Jibin] fatti* Mft«] Xiang Peiliang [»JtiiH. Xiang Yu ^M Xianglin Sao Xiao Hong Xiao ]un Xiao San H-Xie Wuliang Mitm Xu Guangping >rFJ8i:¥ Xu Maoyong &M1M Xu Qinwen i&iXSc Xu Sbiying liffrgS Xu Sboushang I Xu Zbimo fctM Yantada Keizó Yamagami Masayoshi Yamamoto Sanehiko Yan Fu Yang Hansbeng Yang Jiyun Yang Xianyi Yang Yinyu Yao Pengzi Yao Wenyuan Yao Xinnong [Yao Ke] Ye Shengtao Ye Yongqin Ye Zi Yi Qun Yin Fu Yokomitsu Riichi

ULJEBifcH OJ±jE«

mu mmm «¡BR

mm? m^cTc m^m mmm mm mm am m* mxm-

304

GLOSSARY

Yoshino Sakuzo Yu Dafu Yu Pingbo Yuan Jun urn Yuan Shikai s t i r f l Yuseke Tsurumi « M t f i l Zhang Chunqiao Zhang Jinglu Zhang Shizhao Zhang Taiyan Zhang Tianyi Zhang Zongchang Zhang Zuolin Zhao Haosheng Zhao Jingshen Zheng Zhenduo Zhou Enlai Zhou Haiying Zhou Jianren Zhou Li'an Zhou Libo Zhou Lili Zhou Muzhai Zhou Wen Zhou Yang Zhou Zuoren Zhu Guangqian Zhu Tong Zhu Ziqing Zhuang Zi Zou Taofen

»±||J

36 flF*

mmt iffllta& mmm mmrn mmA mmfe fflWM msn JS1SI fflftA

zntm im ¡ui

Contributors

Marston Anderson: Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Irene Eber: Associate professor of Chinese, Hebrew University, Israel. Howard Goldblatt: Associate professor of Chinese, San Francisco State University. Merle Goldman: Professor of Chinese history, Boston University. David Holm: Lecturer in Chinese, Macquarie University, Australia. Theodore D. Huters: Assistant professor of Chinese literature, University of Minnesota. Leo Ou-fan Lee: Professor of Chinese literature, University of Chicago. Lin Yü-sheng: Professor of History and East Asian languages and literatures, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Maruyama Noboru: Professor of Chinese literature, Tokyo University. David E. Pollard: Professor of Chinese, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. John C. Y. Wang: Professor of Chinese literature, Stanford University.

305

Index

Academy of Sciences, Chinese, 188 Academy of Social Sciences, Chinese, 192, 194 Addenda Collections {zawen; Lu Xun), 31,117 Ah Q-ism, 253, 256, 269. See also "True Tale of Ah Q, The" Ai Quing, 174, 235 Ai Sigi, 171, 173; and literary orientation of Chinese revolution, xv; in New Enlightenment movement, 155n; and Society for Lu Xun Research, 169 Ai Wu, 224; as disciple of Lu Xun, 43, 4 4 - 4 5 , 203, 211; stories of, 4 9 - 5 1 Alber, C. J., 14, 258, 271 All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, 192 Analects (Lunyu, Lu Xun), 80 Analogues, use of, in zawen, 65—66 Ancient Anecdotes Uncovered (Lu Xun), 9 1 - 9 2 , 98, 99 Andreev, L.: as model for Lu Xun, 5, 9, 34n; translated by Lu Xun, 260 Anti-Cpnfucius campaign, xvi, 189 Anti-Rightist Campaign, 235—36, 238 Antkowiak, Alfred, 254 Aoki Masaru, 216—17

307

"Art and Criticism" (translation; Lu Xun), 158 "Art Policy" (translation; Lu Xun), 158 Artzybashev, M. P., 28 Asia, 249, 255 Atrocity, described in zawen, 79 "Autumn Night" (prose poem; Lu Xun), 1 3 - 1 4 , 16 A Ying (Qian Xingcun), 6, 158 baguwen ("eight-legged essays), 24, 26, 74-75 baihua, Lu Xun's use of, in prose poetry, 1 5 - 1 6 , 18 Bai Lang, 169 Bai Mang (Yin Fu), 203, 204, 208 Ba Jin, 192; Lu Xun's association with, 202, 212, 215; in United Front, 183 Balzac, Honoré de, 34n, 187 Barbusse, Henri, 162 Ba Ren (Wang Renshu), xv, 103n; and publication of Lu Xun's works, 158, 159; and zawen form, 58, 85 Barthes, Roland, 51 Baudelaire, Charles, prose poetry of, 12, 13 Beauvoir, Simone de, 257

308

INDEX

Beckett, Samuel, 15 Beixin Book store, 205 Belgium, Lu Xun studies in, 247 Belinski, V. G., xv, 172, 187 Benedikter, Martin, study of Lu Xun by, 247, 258, 261, 2 6 7 - 6 8 Benjamin, Walter, 138 Berliner Zeitung (newspaper), 254 Berzing, Z., 261 bianwen stories (Tang dynasty), 96 "Biography of Liu Yi," Japanese publication of, 218 Bolshevik Revolution. See October Revolution Berdahl, Vibeke, study of Lu Xun by, 248 Boven, P. Henri van, study of Lu Xun by, 2 4 7 - 4 8 Brandes, Georg, 9 Brief History of Chinese Fiction, A (Lu Xun), 6, 9 3 - 9 9 , 100, 102, 217, 222; balanced approach of, 96—97; distinction between novels of satire and novels of exposure, 99; level of execution, 96; compared with other studies of Chinese literature, 9 5 - 9 6 ; printing history of, 93; scholarship of, 9 7 - 9 8 ; shortcomings of, 9 3 - 9 4 "Brothers" (short story; Lu Xun), 8 Bungei (magazine), 2 2 4 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 252, 259, 2 6 0 Cai Yuanpei, commemoration of Lu Xun by, 158, 159, 161 Call to Arms. See Outcry, The Calvinism, Chinese world view compared with, 115 Canonization of the Gods, 98 Canton, China: Lu Xun's reception as hero in, 76—77; revolutionary activities in, 136; Sun Yat-Sen University incident at, 201; "white terror" in, 7 6 - 7 7 Cao Cao, Lu Xun's study of, 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 , 102

Cao Jinghua, 158 Cao Juren, 117, 118n; on Lu Xun's friendship, 212; on Lu Xun's stance toward youth, 2 0 0 - 2 0 1 Cao Pi, Lu Xun's study of, 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 Cao Yu, in United Front, 183 Carletti, S. M., studies of Lu Xun by, 246 Chekhov, Anton, 33, 34n, 187; Lu Xun compared with, 250, 253, 254 Chekiang province, 9, 85, 142; writing tradition of, 89 Chen, Pearl Hsia, 265 Chen Baichen, xvii Chen bao (newspaper supplement), zawen in, 62 Chen Boda, xv, 167, 171; in Cultural Revolution, 185; and New Enlightenment movement, 155n; and Society for Lu Xun Research, 169 Chen Duxiu, 27, 162, 251 Chen Gongxia, 212 Chen Xiying, 76, 207, 212; Lu Xun's running battle with, 29, 63, 200; style of, 71, in Woman's Normal University incident, 7 0 - 7 2 Chen Yuan. See Chen Xiying Cherkasskii, L. E., 265 Chernyshevski, N. G., xv, 172, 187 Chiang Kai-shek, 118, 185, 218 Chi-hsiao (Ji Xiao), 97 China Critic (English-language publication; Shanghai), 256 China Forum (English-language publication; Shanghai), 255 China Today (English-language publication), 81 China Society of Lu Xun, 196 Chinese Communist Party, ix—x, xii, 108, 138; and control over literature, xv, 1 3 8 - 4 2 , 1 5 3 - 5 4 , 1 5 8 - 5 9 , 180; and cult of Lu Xun, 1 6 0 - 6 8 ; and League of Left-Wing Writers, 139, 264; literary factions in, 159; use of Lu Xun by, 1 6 0 - 6 8 , 1 8 0 96. See also Lu Xun, activities of

INDEX

Chinese Literary Workers, 183 Chinnery, H. D., study of Lu Xun by, 260, 267, 268 Chisholm, Lawrence W., 269 Chongqing, China, 144, 148; commemoration meeting at, 160; National Forms debate in, 167 chuanqi stories (Tang and Song dynasties), 96 Chüó Kóron (Japanese review), 221, 223 Cina (Italian periodical), 247 Classical poetry of Lu Xun. See Lu Xun, classical poetry of Cold War, and Western interest in Lu Xun, 244 "Collapse of Leifeng Pagoda, The" (zawen; Lu Xun), 28 Collection of Old Notes on Fiction, A (Lu Xun), 92, 98, 99, 102 Collection of Tales of Tang and Song, A (Lu Xun), 92, 98, 99 "Comedy of the Ducks, The" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 221, 223 Comintern, xiii; and National Defense Literature debate, 1 5 4 - 5 5 ; role in League of Left-Wing Writers, 156; and United Front policy, 1 3 8 - 3 9 Conference of Writers from Asia and African Countries, 252 Confucianism, 82, 115; attacked in Cultural Revolution, xvi, 189; politics of, 1 2 3 - 2 8 "Convolutions of the Critical Mind" {zawen; Lu Xun), 73 Creation Society, Lu Xun's battle with, xiii, 44, 76, 133n, 138, 193, 203, 207, 219 Crescent Moon Society, Lu Xun's battle with, 29, 77, 203 "Crisis of the Literary Essay, The" (zawen; Lu Xun), 24 Cultural Revolution, xvi, 126, 238; Anti-Confucian campaign, xvi, 189; attack on Western culture, 1 8 6 - 8 7 ; use of Lu Xun in, xvi, xvii, 182—

309

92; and Western interest in Lu Xun, 243, 244, 248, 255 Current History, 255 Czechoslovakia, reception of Lu Xun in, 242, 244, 2 4 5 - 4 6 Daichówa (magazine), 218 Dai Mingyang, 100 Darwin, Charles, 259, 260 Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk (reminiscences; Lu Xun), 34, 222, 225, 258 Dazai Osamu, 240 "Dead Fire" (prose poem; Lu Xun), 15, 16 Dead Souls (Gogol), 33 De la terre à la lune (Verne), 202 Deng Tuo, Lu Xun compared with, 88-89 Deng Xiaoping, xvi, 194, 195; in Cultural Revolution, 185, 189, 190, 191 Despair, as theme of zawen, 69, 112— 13 "Diary of a Madman" (short story, Lu Xun), 14, 39, 91, 134, 202, 252; Chinese national character depicted in, 110—11; Japanese reception of, 216; research on, 265, 267—68; as transition to modern story, 7 - 8 ; use of narrator, 11 Dickens, Charles, 270 Di Ke (pseud., Zhang Chunqiao), 188, 190, 192, 210 Ding Ling, 173; friendship with Lu Xun, 212, 215; Japanese interest in, 233n; persecution and purge of, xv, 235, 236; and Society for Lu Xun Research, 169, 170 "Divergent Roads of Literature and Politics, The" (speech; Lu Xun), 117-18 Dobrolyubov, N. A., 172, 187 "Dog's Retort, The" (prose poetry; Lu Xun), 15 Dolezelovà-Velingerovà, Milena, 266

310

INDEX

Dongfang Xi, 86 Dongfang zazhi (magazine), 55 Dostoevski, F., 112 "Double Fifth Festival, The" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 45 Dream of the Red Chamber. See Honglou Meng Duanmu Hongliang, 2 1 0 Duan Qirui, 76, 225 Du Fu, as model for Lu Xun's poetry, 18n, 22 Du Mu, echoed in Lu Xun's poetry, 22 Eagleton, Terry, 147 Eastern Horizon (magazine, Hong Kong), 257 Education, of Lu Xun, 91, 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 134 Engels, Friedrich, 175, 258 England, reception of Lu Xun in, 242, 244, 2 4 8 - 4 9 Essays from a Semi-Concession {zawen; Lu Xun), 31 "Essential Reading List for Youth, An" {zawen; Lu Xun), 27 Ethics of intention, and ethics of responsibility, compared, 1 2 3 - 2 4 , 126 Europe, literature of, 12—13 Evolution, Lu Xun's view of, 8, 134, 253, 259, 262 "Evolution of Man, The" (zawen; Lu Xun), 81 "Exalting and Undermining" (zawen; Lu Xun), 7 4 - 7 5 Existentialism, in Lu Xun's thought, 114-16 False Freedom (zawen; Lu Xun), 31, 84 Fan Wenlan, 171 "Father's Illness" (reminiscence; Lu Xun), 12 Federenko, N. T., evaluation of Lu Xun by, 251, 267 Feng Keng, 203 Feng Sheng (pseud., Lu Xun), 62

Fengshen zhuan (Canonization of the Gods), Lu Xun comment on, 98 Feng Xuefeng, xiii, 158, 162; and National Defense Literature debate, 1 3 9 - 4 2 , 155; purge of, xv, 142, 181, 183, 184, 193, 235, 236; rehabilitation of, 192; relations with Lu Xun, 211, 212, 213, 253, 264 Feng Yidai, 55 Feng Youlan, 207 Fengzi (Tang Tao), 85 First Congress of the Border Region Cultural Association, 169 "Five Martyrs," 29, 2 0 3 - 4 , 2 1 8 - 1 9 , 264 Flaubert Gustave: as realistic writer, 34n; on role of artist, 40n Fokkema, D. W., 9 Foreign Language Press (Beijing), 247, 256 Form, and form-content dichotomy, in National Forms debate, 1 4 3 - 4 8 Four Modernizations campaign, xvi, xvii France, research on Lu Xun in, 243n, 247, 248 Freedman, Ralph, on Western fiction, 12, 17 Freud, Sigmund, influence on Lu Xun of, 28n Fringed Literature (zawen; Lu Xun), 31 "From the Hundred-Plant Garden to the Three-Flavored Study" (reminiscence; Lu Xun), 12 "From Whiskers to Teeth" (zawen; Lu Xun), 67 fu (poetic subgenre), 15 Fujieda Takeo, 219 Fujii Shozo, 217 Fujino, Dr. (Lu Xun's teacher), 223, 238, 241 Fujiwara Kamae, 218 Fukumoto Kazuo, 156 Fukumotoism, 156 Fushe (Recovery Society), 1 5 7 - 5 8 Futabatei Shimei, 223

INDEX

Gälik, Marian, study of Lu Xun by, 254, 260; on ideology of Lu Xun, 263-64 Galla, E., study of Lu Xun by, 258 Gao Changhong, 209 Gang of Four, xvi, xvii Garshin, V., 5, 260 Germany, Democratic Republic of, reception of Lu Xun in, 242, 244, 246, 2 5 3 - 5 4 Germany, Federal Republic of, reception of Lu Xun in, 157, 242, 244, 245, 2 4 6 - 4 7 "Ghost of the Hanged Woman, The" (reminiscence; Lu Xun), 128 "Ghosts and Ghouls in the Chinese Literary World" (zawen; Lu Xun), 81-82 Gide, André, 12 "Glance at the Shanghai Literary Scene, A" (zawen; Lu Xun), 223 Goethe, J. W. von, 115 Gogol, N., 7, 34n, 187; influence on Lu Xun of, 9, 168 Golden Lotus, The (Jin Ping Mei), 96-97 "Good Story, The" (prose poem; Lu Xun), 17 Gorki, M., xv, 157; Lu Xun compared with, ix, 250, 254 Gorki School of Art, 168 Grave, The (zawen; Lu Xun), 25, 63— 64, 68, 1 3 4 - 1 3 5 Great Asian Congress of Writers, 229 Great Leap Forward, and factional use of Lu Xun, 180, 182 Grosz, Georg, idolization of, 157 Grüner, Fritz, study of Lu Xun by, 246 Guangfu hui (Restoration Society), 108, 2 3 1 - 3 2 Guomindang (KMT; Nationalist Party), 118, 119, 122; Lu Xun writings used in Chinese Communist Party attacks on, xiii, 174, 1 7 7 - 7 8 Guo Moruo, 1 7 7 - 7 8 , 218; in National Defense Literature debate, 141; in

311

National Forms debate, 146; in Cultural Revolution, 185; on "socialist realism," xv Gurotesku (Japanese magazine), "Ah Q " published in, 221 guwen, styles of, use by Lu Xun of, 2 5 - 2 6 ; Han and pre-Han sources of, 26 Hanada Kiyoteru, 241 Hanan, P., studies of Lu Xun by, 9, 266, 2 7 1 - 7 2 Han dynasty, literature of, 26, 91—92 Han Fei, 72 Han Fei zi, 125 Hankou, China, purge in, 118 "Happy Family, A" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 45 Hasegawa Shirô, 241 Hayashida Shinnosuke, 238 Hayashi Fumiko, 223 Hayek, F. A., 126 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studies of Lu Xun at, 248 He Ganzhi, and New Enlightenment movement, 155n Herzfeldt, Johanna, studies of Lu Xun by, 246, 251, 254 Hesitation (Wandering; short stories; Lu Xun), 13, 19, 24, 32, 34, 44, 222; "epiphanies" at end of stories, 39, 43; intellectuals as subjects of, 37; narrator's role, 40; pattern of stories, 39 Hesse, H., 12 He Yingqin, 118 Hiyama Hisao, 237 Hokuto (Dipper), 236 Hokuto group (Japan), 236—37 Hongqi (Red Flag), 185, 190 Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber), 95; Lu Xun's comments on, 98 Hotta Yoshie, 241 Hot Wind (zawen; Lu Xun), 27, 66—67 Hsia, C. T., 99n, 271

312

INDEX

Hsia, T. A.: on Lu Xun's writings, 13, 14, 1 5 - 1 6 , 19, 24, 249, 271; and political activities of Lu Xun and colleagues, 138, 142, 264, 265 Hsu, Raymond S. W., study of Lu Xun by, 266, 271 Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy, Lu Xun's speech at (1927), 120-23, 126, 136 Huang Quiyun, xv Huang Songkang, on Lu Xun's politics, 259, 262, 264 Huang Yuan, 212, 214 Hu Feng, 46, 128, 129-52, 224, 235; in League of Left-Wing Writers, 156; literary and personal relations with Lu Xun, 129, 181, 212, 253, 264; purge and rehabilitation, xv, 182, 184, 192; advocates realism in fiction, xv—xvi; role in literary debates, 139-50, 155, 159, 183; selfcriticism of 129; writing evaluated, 150-52; writings compared with those of Lu Xun, 1 4 7 - 5 0 Humboldt, Charles, 2 5 3 - 5 4 Hume, David, 126, 127n Humor, in zawen, 7 9 - 8 1 Hundred Flowers campaign, 195 Hungarian uprising, 235 Hunter's Album (Turgenev), 50 Hu Qiaomu, 192, 194 Hu Qiuyuan, 30 Hu Shi, 70, 87, 102, 144, 218; success with youth compared to Lu Xun's, 201; polemical treatises by, 27; role in Lu Xun's career, 251; study of Chinese literature by, 6, 95, 144 Huxley, Aldous, 260 Hu Yaobang, x, xvi, 196 Hu Yepin, 203 Hu Yuzhi, 158 Ibsen, H., 33 "Idle Chat at the End of Spring" (zawen; Lu Xun), 6 5 - 6 6 Iikura Shôhei, 238

Iizuka Akira, 233n Imagery, in Lu Xun's works, 13-14, 2 0 - 2 1 , 22 Imamura Yoshio, 237 "In Memoriam in Order to Forget" (zawen; Lu Xun), 29 "In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen" (zawen; Lu Xun), 2 7 - 2 8 , 77, 262 Inoue Kóbai, 221 "Inscribed on a Small Photograph" (poem; Lu Xun), 21 Intellectual, role of, as subject of Lu Xun's short stories, 37 Internationalists, and Lu Xun cult, 161-67 "In the Wineshop" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 12, 37, 40, 149; narrative structure, 41—42 Inventiveness, in zawen, 59—60 Irony, in Lu Xun's writings, xii, 9 - 1 0 , 22—23; and Zhou Zuoren's style, compared, 87—88 Isaacs, Harold, 213, 255, 257 Israel, Lu Xun studies in, 248 Italy, reception of Lu Xun in, 242, 2 4 4 - 4 5 , 247 Ito Toramaru, 237 Iwanami bunko books, 223, 239 Jablonski, Witold, 251 Japan, xiv; left-wing literary movement in, 2 1 9 - 2 0 , 2 2 8 - 2 9 ; Lu Xun's influence on writers in, 240—41; Lu Xun's student years in, 5, 6, 38, 108, 202, 251; reception of Lu Xun in, xviii—xix, 216—41; U.S. occupation policy, 234 Japanese Communist Party, 220 Japanese Federation of Proletarian Art, 219 Japanese Proletarian Literary Arts League, 156 Japanese Proletarian Writers' League, 228 Japanese Writers Association for Patriotism, 229

313

INDEX

Jiang Deming, 54 Jiang Feng, 171 Jiang Guangci, 44 Jiang Qing, xvi, 182, 184, 187, 188, 195 Jiang Ruizao, 92 Jiangxi Soviet, 168 Jiefang ribao. See Liberation Daily Jinan University, 1 3 6 - 3 7 Jing Song (pseud., Xu Guangping), 85 Jin period, Lu Xun's study of, 9 9 - 1 0 1 Jin Ping Mei (Golden Lotus), 9 6 - 9 7 Jin Xinyi, 38 "Job and Fate of Nationalistic Literature, The" (zawen; Lu Xun), 78 John Reed Clubs, 255 Journey to the West, The (Xiyou ji; Lu Xun), 102 Joyce, James, 12, 136 Jung, Richard, study of Lu Xun by, 251 Kainö Michitaka, 234 Kaizö (magazine), 223, 2 2 4 Kaizö Sha, 224 Kaji Wataru, 2 3 2 Kalmer, Joseph, study of Lu Xun by, 247 Kaneko Mitsuharu, 224 Kang Youwei, 26, 129 Kapital, Das (Marx), xiv Kautsky, Karl, 165 Kawabata Yasunari, 241 Kazakevich, Z. V., study of Lu Xun by, 245 Keats, John, 36 Ke Ling, 85 Kennedy, George, 248, 257 Khrushchev, N., 235 Kim Talsu, 241 Kitaoka Masako, study of Lu Xun by, 239 KMT. See Guomindang Kobayashi Takiji, 219 Kokusai bunka (Japanese journal), 219 Kollwitz, Käthe, idolization of, 157

Kong Lingjing, 92 "Kong Yiji" (short story; Lu Xan), 8, 134, 247, 248, 251; Japanese publication of, 216, 217, 221, 223; narrator in, 11 Kowallis, Jon, 19, 22 Krebsovä, Berta: evaluation of Lu Xun, 271, 272; and ideology of Lu Xun, 259, 260; study of Lu Xun by, 2 4 5 - 4 6 , 251, 252, 258 Kubin, Wolfgang, study of Lu Xun by, 247, 267 Ku Ko-hsiieh (Gu Kexue), 97 Kurahara Korehito, 228 Kuriyagawa Hakuson, 28n Kyoto University, 228 Kyn Yn Yu, 255 Labov, William, 36 Lanjiaping village, China, 169 Laocan youji (Travels of Laocan), Lu Xun's treatment of, 99 Lao She, 45, 210 Last, Jef, study of Lu Xun by, 248, 263 League of Left-Wing Writers, xiii, 77, 119, 138, 142, 156, 158, 175, 192, 204; disbanding of, 139, 153, 182; Japanese interest in, 219; Lu Xun's relations with, xii, 203, 262, 263-65 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 259 Legalism, in Chinese politics, 125 Leibniz, G. W., 115 Leifeng Pagoda, symbolic meaning of,

28

Lenin, V. I., xv, 175; and Marxist use of literature, 258 Leung, George Kin (Liang Shegan), 249, 256 Liang Qichao, 26 Liang Shiqiu, 29, 30 87; Lu Xun's literary battles with, 76, 78, 200, 262 Liang Shuming, 129 Liang Xiao, 1 8 9 - 9 0 Liang Xihua, 77

314

INDEX

Liberation Daily (Jiefans ribao), 158, 171, 173, 175, 177 Li Bozhao, 168 Li Changzhi, 73, 7 8 - 7 9 , 84 Li He, 18 Li Jiye, 158, 209 Lin Biao, xvii Ling Shuhua, 207 Lin Mohan, 183 Lin Shouren (Yamagami Masayoshi), 221 Lin Shu, 26, 33 Lin Yii-sheng, 4, 130, 261; and Lu Xun's political commitment, xii, xiii Lin Yutang, 7 9 - 8 0 , 84n, 256; Lu Xun's relations with, 76, 212; zawert by, 87 Li Ruzhen, 99n Lisao (Qu Yuan), 20, 21, 23 Li Tche-houa (Li Chehua), 247 Literary Gazette (Wenyi bao), 54, 55, 188 Literary Research Association, 203 Literary sponsorship, by Lu Xun, 199— 215 Literature: Marxist theory of, 1 2 6 - 2 7 , 258; National Forms debate, 1 4 2 48; politics and, in Takeuchi's view, 2 3 1 - 3 2 . See also under Lu Xun, views of "Literature of a Revolutionary Period" (speech; Lu Xun), 44, 1 2 0 - 2 3 Li Tzu (Li Zi), 97 Liu Bang, 60 Liu Bannong, 204, 217 Liu Binyan, xvii Liu Dajie, 18n Liu Hezhen, 76, 79 Liu Shaoqui, 155, 185, 189 Liu Yazi, 158 Liu Zaifu, xvii Living China (Snow), 249 Li Weisen, 203 Li Xiaofeng, 205 Li Yu, 75 Loi, Michelle, 247, 248 London, Jack, idolization of, 157

Long March, The (de Beauvoir), 257 Lorenz, Heinz, study of Lu Xun by, 254 "Lost Good Hell, The" (prose poem; Lu Xun), 15 Lou Qi, 57 Lii Chao, 91 Lukacs, Georg, 34, 364 Lu Kanru, 207 Lunacharski, A. V., xiv, 126 Lunyu (Analects; Lu Xun), 80 Luo Binji, 233n Luo Feng, 171, 174 Luo Siding (pseud., Shanghai group, in Cultural Revolution), 1 8 8 - 8 9 Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren): commemoration at time of death, 85, 153, 1 6 0 68; commemoration in Yan'an, 167-73, 1 8 1 - 8 2 ; death, 153; as editor, 2 0 6 - 1 0 ; education of, 91, 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 134; ideology of, x, x i v xv, 258-63; intellectual characteristics of, 1 0 7 - 1 6 , 1 2 9 - 3 3 ; publication of works in China, 157—60, 190—91; scholarship on, xvi—xvii, 259—73. See also Lu Xun, Activities of; Lu Xun, and Classical poetry; Lu Xun, and prose poetry; Lu Xun, Reception of; Lu Xun, his short stories; Lu Xun, his translations; Lu Xun, views of; Lu Xun, works of; Zawen; and individual works and movements by name Lu Xun, activities of: —debates with left-wing writers and organizations, xiii, 2 9 - 3 0 , 44, 56, 1 3 9 - 4 2 , 203, 219, 264; summary of literary and political battles, 76— 77. See also individual writers and movements by name —in political movements: generally, 2 9 - 3 0 , 108, 2 3 1 - 3 2 ; and debate over National Defense Literature, 1 3 9 - 4 2 ; role in May Fourth Movement, assessed, 2 6 0 - 6 1 ; and United Front Movement, 1 8 2 - 8 3

INDEX

—political uses of Lu Xun: after Cultural Revolution, xvi, 192—96; before Cultural Revolution, xvi, 22, 127, 1 5 3 - 7 9 ; during Cultural Revolution, xvi, 1 8 2 - 9 2 —relations with Chinese Communist Party, i x - x , xii, xiv-xv, 3, 108, 128, 1 3 8 - 4 2 , 180, 181 —relations with disciples, xiii, 4 3 - 4 4 , 1 9 9 - 2 1 5 ; Hu Feng and, 1 2 9 - 5 2 . See also individual writers by name —role in League of Left-Wing Writers, xii, 77, 119, 138, 139, 1 5 6 - 5 7 , 182, 2 0 3 - 4 , 262, 2 6 3 - 6 5 —role in Women's Normal University incident, 27, 63, 6 8 - 7 3 , 201 Lu Xun, classical poetry by, 13—23; loner image in, 22, 23; output of, 18; preferred forms, 18; sources and inspiration, 18, 20 Lu Xun, prose poetry by, x 1 3 - 2 3 ; form and language of, 1 5 - 1 6 ; imagery in, 13—14; lyricism of, 16— 17; subjective vision of, 1 6 - 1 7 ; traditional Chinese poetry compared with, 1 6 - 1 7 Lu Xun, reception of, xviii—xix, 216— 73; in China, 1 5 3 - 7 9 ; in Japan, 216—41; in nonsocialist countries, 242-45, 246-50, 254-57, 25873; response to political climate, 241, 243, 244, 247, 2 4 9 - 5 0 ; in socialist countries, xviii, 242, 244, 2 4 5 - 4 7 , 2 4 9 - 5 0 , 2 5 0 - 5 5 , 258, 273 Lu Xun, short stories by, xi, 5 - 1 3 , 3 2 - 5 3 , 2 5 0 - 5 1 , 2 6 5 - 7 0 ; characterization in, 8—10; closure of, 36— 37, 45; evaluation of, 8, 35, 258, 265—70; form, 6 - 7 , 3 3 - 3 7 ; introduction of "positive" elements, 45; Lu Xun's compilation of traditional works, 92; narrator's role in, 1 0 11, 3 9 - 4 2 ; problematic of writing posed in, 44; realism in, 3 3 - 3 4 , 4 4 - 5 3 ; satire in, 4 5 - 4 6 ; as "slice

315

of life" vs. lyric, 35—36; sources of, 5—6, 3 7 - 3 8 ; subjectivism and individualism in, 7—8, 36; symbolism in, 9, 34; thematic content, 37; transition to modern form, 6 - 7 ; use of irony, 9—10; Western literature and, 3 2 - 3 3 Lu Xun, translations by: of Russian and Soviet writers, xiv, xv, 33, 250, 260, 265; of Western writers, 22, 33, 202, 217 Lu Xun, views of: on Chinese national character, 9 - 1 0 , 58, 59, 62, 6 4 - 6 5 , 109, 130—31; on contemporary Chinese society, 59, 60, 1 0 9 - 1 2 , 1 3 0 - 3 1 , 135, 201; on how to write fiction, 6 - 7 , 10—11, 15; on Soviet writers, 1 1 9 - 2 0 , 122; on traditional Chinese literature, 18, 82, 9 0 - 1 0 3 , 214 —on politics, xii, 1 0 8 - 9 , 1 1 6 - 2 8 , 134—38; his condemnation of politics, 1 2 7 - 2 8 ; and Confucian ideal, 125—26; his despair at impossibility of change, 1 0 8 - 1 0 ; in short stories, 3 7 - 3 8 —on relation between revolution and literature, xiii, xv-xvi, 3, 44, 1 1 7 18, 1 1 9 - 2 6 , 1 3 6 - 4 2 , 1 9 4 - 9 5 , 2 2 7 - 2 8 , 252, 2 5 3 - 5 4 , 265; and Marxist theory of literature, 1 2 6 27; and Party's view, contrasted, 181-82 Lu Xun, works of: popularity of, 250— 57; prefaces by Lu Xun for works of young writers, 208; prose poetry and classical poetry, x, 1 3 - 2 3 , 90n; reminiscences, 6 - 7 , 12; short stories. See Lu Xun, short stories by; study of traditional literature, xi, 6, 24, 90—103; translations. See Lu Xun, translations by; zawen, xi, 2 3 - 3 1 , 5 4 - 8 9 . See also individual works by name. Lu Xun Academy of Arts (Yan'an), 1 6 7 - 6 8 , 171

316

INDEX

Lu Xun Art School (Shaanxi area), 168 Lu Xun feng (Lu Xun trend), 29, 71, 85-87 Lu Xun Library (Yan'an), 168 "Lu Xun lun" (Mao Zedong), 165 Lu Xun quanji (Complete works of Lu Xun), 1 5 7 - 5 8 Lu Xun Teachers' College (Yan'an), 168 Lu Xun xin lun (New essays on Lu Xun; collection), 162 Lyell, William: analysis of stories, 266, 267; evaluation of Lu Xun, 272; study of Lu Xun by, 11, 258, 259 Lyricism, in Lu Xun's prose poetry, 16-17 Ma, Y. W., 94, 98 Mammö, (magazine), 219, 221 Mandeville, Bernard, 126 Mang yuan (Wasteland; magazine), 63, 64 Mao Dun, 44, 45, 158, 178, 186, 194, 224; Japanese interest in, 233n; Lu Xun's association with, 215; in National Defense Literature debates, 141, 155 Mao Zedong, 175, 1 9 3 - 9 4 , 255, 264; and cult of Lu Xun, ix, 3, 181; literary relations with Lu Xun, xiv— xv; on Lu Xun and youth, 202; Lu Xun as ideological trailblazer for, x; and National Forms debate, xiv, 143; purge of enemies by, in Cultural Revolution, 182—86, 191; uses of Lu Xun by, 22, 162, 1 6 5 - 6 7 , 177, 1 8 0 - 8 2 ; view of Lu Xun held by, as determinant of attitude taken by scholars toward Lu Xun, 30n, 171, 2 5 7 - 5 8 ; Yan'an talks of (1942), 177, 180, 1 8 1 - 8 2 Maruyama Köichirö, 218 Maruyama Noboru, xviii—xix, 38, 237 Marx, Karl, and Marxism-Leninism, 143, 175; literary criticism of, 126—

27, 257—58; Lu Xun's knowledge of, xiv, 1 2 6 - 2 7 , 1 3 7 - 3 8 , 186, 250, 258-63 Masi, Edoarda: evaluation of Lu Xun by, 271; and May Fourth Movement, 261, 262 263, 264; study of Lu Xun by, 247, 258 Masses' Reading Materials Society, 175 "Master Gao" (short story; Lu Xun), 45, 223 Masuda Wataru, 44n, 2 2 0 - 2 3 , 239; Lu Xun's association with, 212, 227; translation of Lu Xun by, 2 2 0 - 2 1 , 232, 235 Matsueda Shigeo, 232, 235 Matsuura Keizo, 221 Maupassant, Guy de, 33, 36 May Fourth Movement, xiv, 18, 250; Lu Xun in, ix, 3, 4, 10, 1 0 7 - 8 , 260—61; in post-Cultural Revolution period, 199; and National Forms debate, 1 4 4 - 4 5 "Medicine" (short story; Lu Xan), 8, 37, 39, 216, 253, 270; research on, 265, 268 Mencius, 61 Meng Chao, 86 Mills, Harriet, 29, 249; and League of Left-Wing Writers, 2 6 4 - 6 5 ; on Lu Xun's ideological development, 258; and Marxist theory, 137n Ming dynasty: literary forms of, 6, 7, 24, 25; Lu Xun's analysis of, 97 "Misanthrope, The" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 37, 40, 149; Japanese translation of, 221, 223 Mishima Yukio, 241 "Mr. Fujino" (zawen; Lu Xun), 223, 227, 240 Mixed Accents {zawen; Lu Xun), 30-31 Miyamoto Ken, 228, 2 4 0 - 4 1 Modern Critic, 69 Modernization, Japanese, Takeuchi on, 232-34

INDEX

317

"More Thoughts on the Collapse of Leifeng Pagoda" (zawen; Lu Xun), 65 Mo Wenhua (pseud., Liu Shaoqi), 155 Mushanoköji Saneatsu, 218, 223 "My Old Home" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 37, 39, 40, 48, 247, 252; Japanese translation of, 218, 223, 240 "My Views on Chastity" {zawen; Lu Xun), 74

260, 261; translated by Lu Xun, 22; view of masses, 270 Nihilism, in Lu Xun's thought, 112— 16; denounced in Cultural Revolution, 188 Niijima Atsuyoshi, 237—38 Noguchi Yonejiró, 223 Northern Expedition, 56, 76, 87, 218 Norway, Lu Xun studies in, 248 Novy Orient (journal), 254

Nagae Yö, 221 Nagayo Yoshirö, 223 Nakamura Mitsuo, 223 Nakano Shigeharu, 224—25 NAPF (Journal of the Japanese Federation of Proletarian Art), 219 Narrator: Lu Xun's use of, in short stories, 1 0 - 1 1 , 3 9 - 4 2 ; in works of other authors, 4 8 - 4 9 National character, Chinese, as subject of Lu Xun stories, 9 - 1 0 , 1 0 9 - 1 1 , 130—31. See also under Lu Xun, views of National Cultural Association, 1 7 7 - 7 8 National Defense Literature debate, 1 3 9 - 4 2 , 151, 182; Comintern role, 1 5 4 - 5 5 ; Lu Xun and, 1 5 4 - 5 7 , 213, 264, 265 National Forms debate, xiv, 1 4 3 - 4 8 , 167 Nationalistic literature, Lu Xun's battle against, 76, 78 Nationalist (KMT) Party. See Guomindang Natsume Söseki, 9 Netherlands, Lu Xun studies in, 248 New Culture Movement, 57, 108, 166 New Enlightenment Movement, 155n New Text school, 124 "New Year's Sacrifice" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 11, 37, 39, 41, 149, 252 New Youth. See Xin qingnian Nie Gannu, 85, 145 Nietzsche, F. W., 172, 252; influence on Lu Xun of, 27, 60, 73, 259,

October Revolution, 1 2 2 - 2 3 , 250, 261; Lu Xun treats as "ideal" revolution, 1 1 9 - 2 0 Oda Takeo, 2 2 5 - 2 6 , 227 Okazaki Toshio, 233n Old Tales Retold (short stories; Lu Xun), xi, 5, 34, 258, 268 "On Attending a Russian Opera" (zawen; Lu Xun), 28 "On New Democracy" (Mao Zedong), 166 Onoe Kanehide, 237 "On the Behavior and Writing of Writers of the Wei and Jin Periods and Their Relationship with Drugs and Wine" (Lu Xun), 100-101, 123 "On the Bell Tower" (zawen; Lu Xun), 122-23 Oriental Institute, 244 Orwell, George, 142 Ótaka Iwao, 219 Óuchi Takao, 219 Outcry, The (Call to Arms; short stories; Lu Xun), 32, 34, 44n, 91, 222, 227, 254; form in, 3 4 - 3 5 ; origins of stories, 37; narrator's role, 40; peasantry as subject of, 37; social values of, 39 Outline of Chinese Literary History, An (Lu Xun), 100 Outline of the History of Fiction, An (Lu Xun), 93, 99 Ouyang Fanhai, 162 Ouyang Shan, 171 Ozaki Hatsumi, 220

318

INDEX

Pacific War, study of Lu Xun in Japan during, 2 2 9 - 3 1 "Passerby, The" (play, Lu Xun), 15, 19, 1 1 3 - 1 4 Patriotism, Lu Xun and, 2 2 5 - 2 6 Peasantry, as subject of Lu Xun short stories, 37 Peking, 67, 122, 185, 2 1 7 - 1 8 ; Lu Xun's career in, 9 2 - 9 3 , 98, 100, 251 Pekin shühö, 2 1 7 - 1 8 Peters, Irma, study of Lu Xun by, 246, 253, 262 Petits Poèmes en prose (Baudelaire), 13 Petöfi, Sândor, 113 Petrov, V. V., study of Lu Xun by, 259, 262, 269, 270 "Philosophy of Fortification and Denudation of the Countryside, The" (.zawen; Lu Xun), 67 Pilgrimage of the West. See Xiyou ji Plekhanov, G. V., xiv, 126, 165 Poe, Edgar Allen, 35 Poetry. See Lu Xun, classical poetry by; Lu Xun, prose poetry by Poland, reception of Lu Xun in, 242, 244 Polanyi, Michael, 107, 115 Polemics, Lu Xun's use in zawen, 72-73 Politics: literature and, in Takeuchi's view, 231—32; Lu Xun's condemnation of, 127—28; Lu Xun's views on, 127—28, 134—38; moralization vs. immoralization of, in Chinese tradition, 125. See also under Lu Xun, views of "Popular Mind Is Ancient, The" (essay; Lu Xun), 131 Positivism, in Japanese and Chinese Lu Xun scholarship, 238, 239 Pozdneeva, L. D., study of Lu Xun by, 251, 258, 266; evaluation of Lu Xun, 251; on ideology, 259, 260, 262; on short stories, 266, 267, 269, 270

Prose poetry, x, 1 3 - 2 3 ; form and language, 1 5 - 1 6 ; imagery, 1 3 - 1 4 ; lyricism, 1 6 - 1 7 ; subjective vision, 16—17; traditional Chinese poetry compared with, 16—17 Protestant ethic, Chinese view compared with, 115 Prusek, Jaroslav, study of Lu Xun by, 246, 251, 252, 2 5 8 - 6 0 ; evaluation of Lu Xun, 271, 272, 273; on prose poetry, 13; on "Remembrance," 6 7; on short stories, 266, 267; on ' similarity of Chinese and European literature, 12—13 Przeglqd Orientalisticzny (Polish journal), 246 "Public Example, A" (short story; Lu Xun), 8 Pu Liangpei, xvii Qian Xuantong, 204 Qing dynasty, 33, 46, 59, 82; prose styles in, 6, 24, 26; stories from, 96 Qing-jing ideal (classical poetry), 16 Qin Mu, 86 Qin Shih Huang, 189 Qin Si, 86 Qin Zhaoyang, xv Qiu Jin, 241 Qi yue, 144 Quasi-Romances (zawen; Lu Xun), 31 Quotations from Mr. Lu Xun (booklet distributed by Society for Lu Xun Research), 170 Qu Qiubai, 30, 144, 162, 163, 186, 193; execution of, 85, 203; relations with Lu Xun, 209, 211, 212, 213; zawen by, 8 3 - 8 4 Qu Yuan: as model for Lu Xun's poetry, 18, 20, 21; withdrawal in poetry of, 23 "Rabbits and the Cat, The" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 217 "Random Thoughts" (zawen; Lu Xun), 37

INDEX Realism in fiction: attacked by Cultural Revolution, 187; characteristics of, 33—34; as hallmark of revolutionary writers in China, xv; Lu Xun and, xv-xvi, 51—52; satire and, 4 5 - 4 6 ; in short stories, 4 4 45; socialist realism and, xv; in Western literature, 3 3 - 3 4 Reception of Lu Xun. See Lu Xun, reception of Reclams Universal Bibliotek, 223 Rectification campaign, 167, 1 7 2 - 7 3 , 177, 181 Red Flag. See Honggi Reed, John, idolization of, 157 "Regret for [Remembrance of] the Past" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 37, 134, 252; study of, 265, 2 6 6 - 6 7 Renmin wenxue (People's literature; journal), 94 "Revenge" (prose poems; Lu Xun), 16, 27 Revolution, Chinese: literary orientation of, xiv—xv, 137; Lu Xun as intellectual forefather, ix; Lu Xun on, 108, 109, 121; "revolutionary literature," 121. See also under Lu Xun, views of Rolland, Romain, 162 Rou Shi, 79, 203, 204, 212 Ruan Ji, 1 0 2 - 3 Ruhlman, Robert, 248 Rulin waishi (The Scholars; eighteenthcentury novel), 46, 99 Russia, legacy of realism in literature of, xv, 187. See also Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Ryckmans, Pierre, 247 Sanyart (collections of traditional vernacular fiction), 6 Sartre, J.-P., 37 Satire, in short stories and zawen, 29— 30, 4 5 - 4 6 , 8 0 - 8 1 Sato Haruo, 2 2 0 - 2 3 , 224 Scaligero, Massimo, 261, 268

319

Schriftsteller, Der (journal), 254 Schultz, William, evaluation of Lu Xun by, 24, 259, 271 Seaton, Jerome F., 267 "Self-Mockery" (classical poem; Lu Xun), 2 1 - 2 2 Self-society distinction, in Lu Xun's thought, 132, 149 Semanov, V. I.: evaluation of Lu Xun by, 271; on ideology, 259, 260, 261, 263; on League of Left-Wing Writers, 265; on short stories, 6, 266, 268, 2 6 9 - 7 0 ; study of Lu Xun by, 6, 258 Sendai Medical School, Lu Xun's studies at, 227, 238, 240 Sha Ding, 43, 4 4 - 4 5 , 203 "Shadow's Leave-Taking" (prose poem; Lu Xun), 16 Shakespeare, William, 63 Shanghai, China, 215, 2 2 3 - 2 4 , 251; anti-Communist coup (1927) in, 118; Jinan University speech in, 1 3 6 - 3 7 ; League of Left-Wing Writers in, 139; Lu Xun's participation in leftist groups in, 29, 138; Lu Xun's speech on art and revolution (1927) at, 1 2 2 - 2 3 ; May 30 incident in, 68, 70, 72; National Cultural Association rally at, 1 7 7 - 7 8 ; publication of Lu Xun feng in, 85—86; Shanghai group, in Cultural Revolution, 188, 1 9 0 - 9 1 , 192; United Front policy promoted in, 182—83 Shao Quanlin, 183 Shaw, George Bernard, 31, 80 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 260 Shenbao yuekan (magazine), 55 Sheng Tuan-ming (Sheng Duanming), 97 Shen Yinmo, 217 Shi Dagang, 85 Shimizu Yasuzô, 218 Shimokawa Onji, 241 Shina bungaku gairoti kowa (Shionoya On), 95 Shionoya On, 9 5 - 9 6

320

INDEX

Shneider, M. E., study of Lu Xun by, 260, 261, 265, 269 Short stories, xi, 5—13, 32—53, 250— 51, 265—70; characterization in, 8— 10; closure of, 36—37, 45; evaluation of, 8, 35, 258, 2 6 5 - 7 0 ; form, 6—7, 33—37; introduction of "positive" elements, 45; Lu Xun's compilation of traditional works, 92; narrator's role, 1 0 - 1 1 , 3 9 - 4 2 ; problematic of writing posed in, 4 4 ; realism in, 3 3 - 3 4 , 4 4 - 5 3 ; satire in, 4 5 - 4 6 ; as "slice of life" or lyric, compared, 35—36; sources of, 5—6, 37—38; subjectivism and individualism in, 7 - 8 , 36; symbolism in, 9, 34; thematic content, 37; transition to modern form, 6 - 7 ; use of irony, 9— 10; Western literature and, 32—33 Shtukin, A. A., 245 Shuihu Zhuart (Outlaws of the marsh, or Water margin; novel), 98; campaign about, 189, 190 Shuihu zhuan campaign, 189 Shu Qun, 169, 171 Sienkiewicz, H., 9 Silent China (translation of Lu Xun's work), 256 Sima Qian, 100 Sima Xiangru, 100 Simonov, Konstantin, 254 Sino-Soviet conflict, and interest in Lu Xun, 244 Six Dynasties period, 16, 96, 101 "Skimming" (zawen; Lu Xun), 82 "Small Incident, A " (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 216, 240, 2 5 2 - 5 3 Smedley, Agnes, 220, 256 Smena (newspaper), 2 5 4 "Snow" (prose poem; Lu Xun), 16 Snow, Edgar, study of Lu Xun by, 249, 2 5 5 - 5 6 "Soap" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 45, 223 Soboly, A., 1 1 9 - 2 0 , 122, 123 "Socialist realism," xv

Society for Lu Xun Research, 1 6 9 - 7 3 , 236, 237 Society for the Study of Chinese Literature (Japan), 228, 229, 241 Society for the Study of Lu Xun's Works, 192 Song dynasty, 92, 96 Song Jiang, 190 Song Qingling, 161 Song Yunbin, 86 Sorokin, V. F.: study of Lu Xun by, 2 5 2 - 5 3 ; on short stories, 267, 269, 270 Spain, United Front in, 142 Spinoza, B., 115 Stalin, J., xv, 175, 235 Steiner, George, 258 "Storm in a Teacup" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 37, 223, 240 Straw Sandals, 257 "Such a Fighter" (poem; Lu Xun), 16, 19 "Sudden Thoughts" {zawen; Lu Xun), 27 Sudo, Dr., 212 Su Dongpo, 2 2 - 2 3 Sui dynasty, 9 1 - 9 2 "Suiganlu" [zawen; Lu Xun), 131 "Sundry Thoughts" (short story; Lu Xun), 27 Sun Fuyuan, 2 0 4 - 5 , 212 Sun Lianggong, 95n Sun Society, xiii, 44, 193, 219 Sun Yat-sen, 122 Sun Yat-sen University (Canton), 201 Su Xuelin, 200 Sweden, study of Lu Xun in, 248 Symbolism, in Lu Xun's stories, 9, 34 Tai Jingnong, 158 Taiwan, Lu Xun's influence in, xii Takata Atsushi, 238 Takeda Taijun, 241 Takeuchi Minoru, 237 Takeuchi Yoshimi: analysis of Japanese cultural models, 2 3 2 - 3 3 ; and liter-

INDEX ary activities during war, 229—31; and modernization of Japan, 232— 34; on political-literary relations, 2 2 1 - 2 2 ; study of Lu Xun by, xviii, 2 2 6 - 3 4 , 237, 240; translations by, 235, 239 Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art (Mao Zedong), xiv, 177 Tanemaku hito (The sower; magazine), 220 Tangdai congshu (collection of miscellaneous Tang works), 24 Tang dynasty, 16, 18; stories from, 92, 96 Tang Si (pseud., Lu Xun), 61, 217 Tang Tao, 158; on zawen, 7 1 - 7 2 , 83, 85 Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, 241 Tao Chung-wen (Dao Zhongwen), 97 Taoism, 1 0 8 - 9 , 115, 125 Tao Qian, 101 Tchang Tien-ya (Zhang Tianya), 247 Third Category of Men, Lu Xun's attacks on, 29, 76 Threads of Talk. See Yusi Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 27 Tian Han, 183, 184 T'ien Hsia Monthly (English-language publication, Shanghai), 256 Tokyo University, Chinese literature studies at, 228, 236 Tolstoi, L., xv, 187 "Tombstone Inscriptions" (poem, Lu Xun), 15 "Tomorrow" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 39, 40, 216 Tongcheng school (Qing period), 2 6 , 1 4 4 Translations, denigration of, by Creation Society, 73. See also Lu Xun, translations by Travels of Lao Ts'an, The. See Laocan youji "Treatise on Art" (translation; Lu Xun), 158

321

Trotsky, L., and Marxist theory of literature, 126 "True Story of Ah Q, The" (short story; Lu Xun), xvii, 8, 37, 132, 133, 1 7 0 - 7 1 , 252; on Chinese national character, 1 1 1 - 1 2 ; characterization in, 8—10; influence on Japanese literature, 241; Japanese translation of, 2 1 9 - 2 1 , 223, 232; research on, 248, 265, 2 6 8 - 7 0 ; Soviet translation of, 245, 251 Turgenev, I. W., xv, 50, 112, 187 Tu, Wei-ming, 26n Two Hearts {zawen; Lu Xun), 77, 78-79 Two Slogans debate, xiii—xiv, xvi, 128, 143, 154, 155, 164, 236, 239 Uchiyama Bookstore (Shanghai), 222 Uchiyama Kanzö, 212, 2 2 1 - 2 2 , 224 Ueno Köshi, 237 Ulysses (Joyce), Wild Grass compared with, 14 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, xiii; idolization of writers by left in, 157; interest in Chinese literature, 2 4 5 - 4 7 ; reception of Lu Xun in, xviii, 242, 2 5 0 - 5 7 , 265; and United Front strategy, 142 United Association of Western Writers, 182 United Front policy, xiv, 1 8 2 - 8 3 , 265; Comintern adoption of, 138— 39; effect on Hu Feng, 1 4 2 - 4 3 ; and National Defense Literature movement, 138—42; "rewriting" of events, 183 United States: idolization of writers by left in, 157; occupation of Japan by, 232, 234; reception of Lu Xun in, xviii, 242, 243, 244, 2 4 8 - 4 9 , 255-57 Unlucky Star (zawen; Lu Xun), 2 7 - 2 8 , 63, 68, 73 Unnamed Society (Weiming she), Lu Xun and, 205—6

322

INDEX

Vallette-Hemery, Martine, 247 Vasil'ev, B. A., 245, 270 Verne, Jules, 202 "Village Opera" (short story; Lu Xun),

8 Voice of China, The (journal, Shanghai), 249, 256 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 15 Wandering. See Hesitation Wang Chi-chen, 244, 248-49, 255, 256 Wang Guoyuan, 92 Wang Mengou, 92 Wang Ming, 154, 1 6 2 - 6 4 ; and call for United Front, 182; and disbanding of League of Left-Wing Writers, 139; and Rectification Campaign, 167 Wang Renshu. See Ba Ren Wang Shiwei, 1 7 3 - 7 4 , 1 7 5 - 7 6 Wanguo Cemetery, 178 Wang Xirong, 118n Wang Yao, 25, 90, 101 Wang Zhengru (Wang Cheng-ju), 249, 261, 263 "Wanzi jinyinhua" (Wu Zuxiang), 48 War of Resistance (1937), 85, 146 Warring States period, 59 "Warriors and Flies" (zawen; Lu Xun), 27 Wasteland. See Mang yuan Waste Land, The (Eliot), Wild Grass compared with, 14 Water Margin. See Shuihu zuan Weber, Max: on nature of politics, 123—24, 126, 127n; on transcendental content of Protestant ethic, 115n Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne, 259,

262 Wei-jin period, prose of, 24, 25; Lu Xun's studies of, 9 9 - 1 0 0 Wei Mengke, 91 Weiming she (Unnamed Society), Lu Xun and, 2 0 5 - 6 Weiss, Ruth, 257 Wei Suyuan, 137, 212

Wenxin dialong (Convolutions of the Literary Mind), 73 Wenxuan School (Qing), 26, 144 wenyan style, 6, 1 5 - 1 6 Wenyi bao (Literary Gazette), 54, 55, 188 Wen Zaido, 85 Wenzhang, influence on Lu Xun of style, 6 Whampoa (Huangpu) speech, 1 2 0 - 2 3 , 126, 136 "What Happens after Nora Leaves Home" (speech; Lu Xun), 28 White, Hayden, 97 Whitehead, Alfred North, 115 "White Light, The" (short story; Lu Xun), 8, 221 Wild Grass (prose poetry; Lu Xun), x, xviii, 1 3 - 1 7 , 24, 69, 73, 247; form and language, 1 5 - 1 6 ; nihilism in, 112; success of, 86—87; study of, 258, 271; themes of, in zawen, 27 Woolf, Virginia, 12 Women's Normal University (Peking) incident, Lu Xun and, 27, 63, 68, 6 9 - 7 3 , 201 Wood-block art, Lu Xun's interest in, 251 Woods, Katherine, 256 Works of Lu Xun. See Lu Xun, works of, individual genres by name World Society for the Support of Culture, 163 Wuchang, China, purge in (1927), 118 Wu Han, 88, 89 Wuhan, China, commemoration meeting at, 160 Wu Kuan, 100 Wu Peifu, 76 Wu Yuzhang, 177 Wu Zuxiang, xvi, 4 8 - 4 9 Xiamen (Amoy) University, Lu Xun at,

100 Xiandai (magazine), 55 Xiandai pinglun group, 68 Xiang Linbing (Zhao Jibin), 1 4 3 - 4 6

INDEX

Xiang Peiliang, 207 Xiang Yu, 60 Xiao Hong, 60, 215, 228; on Lu Xun's editing, 2 0 8 - 9 ; Lu Xun's relations with, xviii, 208, 211, 212 Xiao Jun, xv, 170, 184, 190, 192, 224, 228; Japanese view of, 235; Lu Xun's relations with, xv, xviii, 181, 203, 208, 210, 211, 212, 215; purge and rehabilitation, xvi, 181, 192; and Society for Lu Xun Research, 169, 171, 173 Xiaopinwen (Ming prose form), 24, 25 Xiao San, 139, 162, 1 6 4 - 6 5 , 176 Xia Yan, 183, 192, 193; in League of Left-Wing Writers, 156 Xia Zhengnong, 155n Xi Kang, 72, 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 1 0 2 - 3 Xi Kang ji, works of Xi Kang ( 2 2 3 262) edited by Lu Xun, 9 9 - 1 0 0 Xing (poetic stylistic device), 66 Xin qingnian (New youth; magazine), 4, 54, 131, 262; Lu Zun zawen in 57, 61, 68, 176 Xin sheng (New life; magazine), 38,

202

Xinwenbao (Daily news; Shanghai), 117 Xiyou bu (sequel to Journey to the West; novel), 98 Xiyou ji (Journey to the west, or Pilgrimage to the West; novel), 75, 98, 102 Xu Guangping, 23, 68, 70, 112, 1 5 9 60, 168, 178, 224; and Lu Xun feng, 85; and publication of Lu Xun works, 158 Xu Maoyong, 84n, 164, 208, 210, 212, 265; criticism of Lu Xun by, xiii, 183 Xu Qinwen, 204, 209 Xu Shoushang: and Lu Xun's poetry, 18n, 19, 21n; on Lu Xun's political activities, 231; Lu Xun's view of Chinese national character, 109; and publication of Lu Xun's works, 158 Xu Zhimo, and Women's Normal University incident, 70

323

Yamada Keizo, 237 Yamagami Masayoshi, 2 1 9 - 2 0 Yamamoto Sanehiko, 224 Yan'an, China, 194, 195; commemoration of Lu Xun at, 161, 1 6 7 - 6 9 ; Mao's talks, 1 8 1 - 8 2 ; National Forms debate, 167; and Rectification Campaign, 173, 181; Society for Lu Xun Research, 1 6 9 - 7 3 Yan'an Forum of Art and Literature, xiv Yan Fu, 26 Yang, Gladys, 98 Yangge Movement, 177 Yang Hansheng, 183, 184, 192, 193 Yang Xianyi, 98 Yang Yinyu, 70 Yao Ke, 256 Yao Pengzi, 190 Yao Wenyuan, 188, 190 Yao Xinnong, 256 Yesenin, S. A., 1 1 9 - 2 0 , 122, 123 Ye Shengtao, 178 Ye Yongqin, 208 Ye Zi, 45, 208, 211, 212 Yin Fu (Bai Mang), 203, 204, 208 Yi Qun, 211 Yiwen (Translations; magazine), 214 Yokomitsu Riichi, 223 Yoshino Sakuzo, 218 Youth, Lu Xun's protrayal of and involvement with, 1 1 6 - 1 7 , 134, 1 9 9 215, 252, 254; youth as target of Party's cult of Lu Xun, 1 6 1 - 6 2 Yuan Jun, 207 Yuan Shikai, 108 Yu Dafu, 12, 146, 212, 215 Yu Pingbo, 145 Yuseke Tsurumi, 65 Yusi (Threads of talk; magazine), 6 2 63, 64, 69, 87, 2 0 4 - 5 zagan (term used for zawen), 54, 5 5 56, 68 zawen, xii, 2 3 - 3 1 , 5 4 - 8 9 ; abstractionism of, 28—29; adventurous use of

324

INDEX

words, 62; analogies in, 6 5 - 6 6 ; atrocity described in, 79; confusion between Lu Xun's essays and those of other authors, 84; debate over, in Rectification Campaign, 173—74; devices of style in, 29; diatribe in, 78; diction of later essays, 84—85; early essays, 62—63; "eight-legged" essay, 26, 74—75; evaluation of, 30—31; form of, 24—25; functions of, 55—56; humor in, 79—81; Lu Xun fetig and Wild Grass, compared, 85—87; Lu Xun's personal life reflected in, 6 8 - 6 9 , 7 9 - 8 0 ; Lu Xun's tradition carried on after his death, 85—86; Lu Xun's writings about, 82—83; Mao's praise for, 181; meaning of term, 54—55; metaphysical mode of early essays, 2 7 - 2 9 ; political uses of, 2 9 - 3 0 , 60; promotion of, 56; question and answer technique, 61—62; repetition as device in, 58—59; satire in, 29— 30, 80—81; sententiousness in, 77— 78; traditional Chinese literature compared with, 24; volume of, x, 2 3 - 2 4 , 76; vulgarity in, 67 Zhang Chunqiao (Di Ke), 188, 190, 192, 210 Zhang Jinglu, 95 Zhang Shizhao, 70, 76, 201 Zhang Taiyan, 6; prose style of, 24, 25-26 Zhang Tianya, 247 Zhang Tianyi, satire in stories of, 45, 46-48 Zhang Zongchang, 118 Zhang Zuolin, 76 Zhao Jingshen, 9 3 - 9 4 Zhejiang chao (Chekiang tide; journal),

202

Zheng Zhenduo, 92, 94, 102, 158 zhiguai stories (Six Dynasties), 96 Zhou Enlai, 178; in Cultural Revolu-

tion, 189, 190, 191; Lu Xun used against, 188 Zhou Haiying (son of Lu Xun), 191 Zhou Jianren, 158 Zhou Li'an, 56, 85 Zhou Libo, 169, 171 Zhou Lili, 56 Zhou Muzhai, 85 Zhou Wen, 169, 171, 1 7 5 - 7 6 , 178 Zhou Yang, xv, 19, 30n, 139, 171, 174; and Cultural Revolution, 1 8 3 88, 1 9 0 - 9 1 ; and disbanding of League of Left-Wing Writers, 1 8 2 83; essays on Lu Xun's early thought by, 1 7 1 - 7 2 ; Japanese interpretation of, 238—39; and Lu Xun Academy of Arts, 1 6 7 - 6 8 ; Lu Xun's relations with, 128, 212—13; Marxism anthology by, 175; and National Defense Literature debate, xiii-xiv, 1 3 9 - 4 2 , 1 5 4 - 5 6 , 2 1 2 13; and National Forms debate, 1 4 3 - 4 4 , 1 4 6 - 4 7 ; party faction of, 159, 1 6 5 - 6 6 , 1 7 5 - 7 6 ; rehabilitation of, 1 9 2 - 9 4 , 196; and Society for Lu Xun Research, 169 Zhou Zuoren (Lu Xun's brother), 5, 8, 9, 12, 70, 133n, 202, 231; activities in Japan, 217, 218; essay on Lu Xun by, 162; preferred literary forms of, 24, 25; and publication of Lu Xun's works, 158; style and writings compared to those of Lu Xun, 66, 69, 8 1 - 8 2 , 8 7 - 8 9 ; zawen by, 87 Zhuang Zi, 27 Zhuangzi (Sayings of Zhuangzi), 59, 72 Zhu Guangqian, 68 Zhu Tong, 11, 78 Zhu Ziqing, 27 Zola, Emile, 34n, 40, 187 Zou Taofen, 161 Zuojia (author, magazine), 155 Zuojia yuekan (Writer's monthly; magazine), 210

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