Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun's Fiction

Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further information, see p. iv.

Hong Kong University Press

14/F Hing Wai Centre 7 Tin Wan Praya Road Aberdeen Hong Kong © Hong Kong University Press 2007 ISBN 978-962-209-824-4 (Hardback) ISBN 978-962-209-825-1 (Paperback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Secure On-line Ordering http://www.hkupress.org

Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co. Ltd., in Hong Kong, China.

Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose art explores the complex themes of language across cultures, has written the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy. This signals our commitment to cross-cultural thinking and the distinctive nature of our English-language books published in China. “At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be nothing more unusual than Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English words in the format of a square so they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read Square Word Calligraphy but cannot.Western viewers, however are surprised to find they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.” — Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing

Contents

Preface

vii

1.

Introduction: Lu Xun in Translation

1

2.

Lu Xun: The True Story

13

3.

On A Madman’s Diary

25

4.

A Call to Arms: On Memory

37

Kong Yiji Medicine Tomorrow A Small Incident The Story of Hair A Passing Storm Hometown 5.

Ah Q and Other Survivors The True Story of Ah Q Dragonboat Festival The White Light Some Rabbits and a Cat A Comedy of Ducks Village Opera

57

vi

6.

Contents

Wandering: Women and Survival

77

The New-Year Sacrifice In the Tavern A Happy Family Soap The Eternal Lamp A Warning to the People The Venerable Schoolmaster Gao 7.

‘Living Longer’: Concluding Wandering

97

The Misanthrope Regret for the Past Brothers Divorce Notes

113

Index of Names

125

Preface

The main draft of this book was completed as I left Hong Kong after eighteen years teaching in Comparative Literature. Early in that time I was introduced to the work of Lu Xun by my friend Gordon Osing, then from Memphis State University, who was on loan to our Department from 1989 to 1991, and with whom I travelled to Shanghai, and to Hangzhou and Shaoxing, where I was able to see where Lu Xun had lived, and to buy, in the Jinjiang hotel in Shanghai, the four-volume Selected Works, from which I have been working while writing. I could never have started thinking about Lu Xun otherwise, for I had certainly never come across his name in Britain. Many years later, Leo Ou-fan Lee, in conversation, and also on loan to our Department, told me that if I wanted to work on modern Chinese literature, I should go for Lu Xun, and I have taken his advice. Since starting to write, with the aid of a grant from the University of Hong Kong’s Louis Cha fund, which I am glad to acknowledge, I have been much in the debt of an ex-PhD student of mine, Lin Qingxin, of Peking University. He, among other things, took me to see the Lu Xun museum in Beijing, and the house where Lu Xun settled his mother and wife, and then, for further good measure, took me to the Lao She house in Beijing. Others who have helped with this writing have included Chan Wai-chung, Stephen Pang Ka-wing and Liam Liu Chi-shing, all of whom have bought to help me various editions of Lu Xun in various languages. Among research assistants who have been helpful, I must recall the names of Pablo Tsoi Tse-pang, an enthusiast for Lu Xun as much as for Joyce, which is his specialist area, Lee Chi-leung, and

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Ian Fong Ho-yin, whose help has been immeasurable. These have known better than me what I ought to be reading and have made it available to me, and have done much to make life smoother. Others who have helped me intellectually in the past two years, when this book was being written, include Q. S. Tong, and Paul Smethurst, and Stuart Christie, and Mao Sihui and Louis Lo Wai-chun: to all of these I give my thanks. And thanks to Dr Colin Day, the publisher: he has taken a gamble in publishing a work on Lu Xun that gives virtually no account of the Chinese of the text; his willingness, his vision, and his comments, and those of the readers for Hong Kong University Press, are much appreciated. And thanks to Phoebe Chan Sui-wah for expert editing for the Press. Completing the final draft of the book in England, in Manchester University, among new and very different and fine colleagues, but where there is inevitably much less awareness of Lu Xun, reminds me more of the function of this book: its only intention is to make his short stories as interesting to others as they have been to me; crucial texts within Chinese modernism. But as I complete, I thank not only those who made teaching and research in Hong Kong so rewarding, but all those named who helped specifically with writing on Lu Xun: I dedicate the book to them.

1 Introduction: Lu Xun in Translation

This book is not a complete study of Lu Xun, but only of his short stories, those which were written between 1918 and the end of 1925, which appeared first in magazines in Beijing and Shanghai. Reprinted in two books, translated in the standard version as A Call to Arms (1923) and Wandering (1926), they comprise an extraordinary addition to the production of knowledge about China, and, not least, to the short story form. Of course, Lu Xun wrote much more. He published A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (1924), since he knew Chinese narratives intimately; he translated texts; he produced Weeds (Yecao), prose-poems which he began writing in September 1924, and continued until April 1926, and he contributed essays (zawen).1 He also wrote other stories, Old Tales Retold, which he completed in 1935. But with none of these others will this book be concerned; it will engage, rather, with each of the modern stories in turn. The approach to these cannot be to take them simply as individual narratives, for they interlock, they construct an autobiography, they are a reading of a momentous period in the history of China, they reveal an unconscious history, and they have been influential in a discussion both creating and criticising the idea of a Chinese national character. The period that produced them was the end of the Qing dynasty and the revolution of 1911 that brought in a republic, and several moments of near anarchy and reaction combined with high idealism, until the full-scale civil war of 1927. It was one of China’s ‘interesting times’, and the intellectual rethinking caused a moment of exciting experimentation in writing, summed up by the name of the May Fourth movement of 1919, where there were calls for change from a classical literary and exclusive Chinese to one whose medium was the vernacular. Such changes, with a consequent new enabling of writing, take place in Lu Xun’s work. For a comparison, a European critic might think of Dante’s appeal for Italian to be used instead of Latin and his virtual creation of Italian as a language for use in the Divine Comedy.

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Madmen and Other Survivors

The Chinese short story writer and realist writer Mao Dun (the name means ‘contradiction’; his real name was Shen Yanbing [1896–1981]), read Lu Xun from the time when his stories were first published, and made the affirmation that ‘Lu Xun was a constant pioneer in creating new forms: nearly every one of the ten some stories in The Outcry [A Call to Arms: Nahan] has a unique form, and all of these new forms extensively influenced young writers.’2 Lu Xun’s originality as contributing to the formation of modern China, was recognised soon in China, while, in Europe, with The True Story of Ah Q translated into Russian, French and English, Lu Xun was considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.3 In 1933, I. A. Richards drew the attention of readers of Scrutiny, the critical journal edited by F. R. Leavis, to Lu Xun’s relevance to a ‘Chinese Renaissance’.4 Nonetheless, his work still remains largely unfamiliar outside China (if known, known only as a name), with not much sign of a change impending.5 For Fredric Jameson, ‘the neglect [of Lu Xun] in western cultural studies is a matter of shame which no excuse based on ignorance can rectify’.6 At the same time, and mainly since Jameson’s writing, Chinese scholars interested in cultural studies have started the re-reading of Lu Xun, in a way directed towards national appropriations of him, particularly, for instance, over the point that in creating Ah Q as a character, Lu Xun seems not only to have added to Chinese vocabulary, through the name Ah Q becoming as descriptive as ‘Dickensian’ or ‘Kafkaesque’, but to have helped in a prevalent construction of the ‘Chinese character’. There is an ongoing debate: Lu Xun is not a figure with a settled reputation, to be read in only one way, ignorance of whom in America and Europe is a misfortune. Awareness of this must inflect any new reading of his work.7 Perhaps no attempt to read the text which has not come out of a detailed knowledge of Chinese can make much difference, but the attempt has been made in the following pages, which makes no other claim than to respond to the interest in Lu Xun’s texts in as full a way as possible, using the critical theory that is by now common to cultural studies. Perhaps some readers will need no further convincing that the task needs to be undertaken, but what follows in the rest of this Introduction attempts to be a theoretical justification for the project. The insight that Jameson leads towards, that literary and cultural studies in America and Europe must learn to draw on Lu Xun to shake them out of their parochialism, and in order to read better — and differently — their own cultural situation, means reading his work in translation. In doing this, there is nothing exceptional. The work of many modernist writers is primarily known through different translations: an anglophone reader need only think of Proust, or Kafka, or Borges, or Brecht, or Bulgakov, to say nothing of

Introduction: Lu Xun in Translation

3

Tanizaki or Mishima. To discuss Lu Xun through translation is only less usual, but has the same logic as for these others, even if Chinese is less familiar to a readership more familiar with structures of French, or German or Spanish. Nonetheless, working in translation does allow for the competency of any commentator to be questioned more obviously than usual, and it raises the necessary question, what translations can be drawn on? The issue of the success of reading through translation can only be settled by the study itself, whether it justifies itself by generating new and interesting insight on Lu Xun, reading the texts in ways that might not be so available to a specialist on Lu Xun in Chinese; but two things also should be said. The first is, that some points of interpretation may be settled through a knowledge of the language, but not all can, and knowledge of the language is not by itself a good basis for claiming knowledge of a writer, because language changes, its terms translate themselves within themselves, and never quite exist in a text as they appear in a dictionary. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who has written much on translation, argues that ‘a text lives only if it lives on, and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable. ... Totally translatable, it disappears as text, as writing, as a body of language. Totally untranslatable, even within what is believed to be one language, it dies immediately. The triumphant translation is neither the life nor the death of the text, only or already its living on, its life after life, its life after death.’8 The text that cannot be translated, either within its own language, or into another, shows a form of death; the text which can be wholly translated was never alive, for one aspect of translation must be that all translations are partial, and bear witness in that to something in the text that can never be reached, never be fully accounted for, even through explication of the text in its original language — since any explication is also a translation of the terms of the text. Of course, that which cannot be accounted for is that which must be translated, and translation can never be completed: there is no definitive translation. The second point amplifies the first. While knowledge of Lu Xun’s Chinese is desirable, it is not possible to think of the Chinese text as an ‘original’ to which a translation must be a poor second. The idea of an original text may give the misleading impression that it is possible to know, or to recreate, the original meaning, the text as Lu Xun meant it to be. Many commentators on Lu Xun, including the best, write as though it was possible to establish Lu Xun’s meaning; for example, differentiating between the stories and the essays, as though the first gave the voice of a narrator, the second the authentic Lu Xun. But the essays are as much a dramatic performance as the stories, as much the projection and creation of a voice, which the reader is then

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encouraged to think of as having initiated the essay. The author is the product of the text, not its producer, nor the authority behind it. Saying ‘a voice’, too, is problematic: several voices are heard in literary texts, which Bahktin, the commentator on Dostoyevsky, who was one of Lu Xun’s interests, can refer to as ‘polyphonic’.9 The weave of voices in the text makes the attempt to identify a single Lu Xun a matter of interpretation; there is no originating single author. And reading is always translation, even for a Chinese reader with a Chinese text, who must, to be able to read, translate within her language. Historical difference is crucial here, as is the impossibility of knowing, finally, what valency a particular term had at any time. Reading Shakespeare in a western context may proceed with a certain amount of historical awareness, but there comes a time when the reader cannot say what valency any historical detail that the present has extrapolated from the past had for the text, if any, and at that point it becomes evident that to read Shakespeare is, actually, to read a parallel text, one that the modern reader constructs out of her own sense of the language and of the value to place on it, but she can have no final sense that she is reading as Shakespeare meant her to read. Nor can any reader read the whole text: however close the attention is paid to a text, it will still be a partial reading, which only enforces the point that reading is translation. The sense of a parallel text created unconsciously makes for the crucial recognition that texts are always being ‘carried across’ from one context which is finally unknowable, to another. In that new situation, the older text will take on new and different powers of signification, and to regret this, in the belief that the ‘original’ context is the one that is meaningful, only denies the point that this is how meanings come into being, by the constant modification of one text by another in a process of ‘intertextuality’, another term that may be traced to Bakhtin. Here it is not a matter of detecting sources and influences, as if their impact on the work in question could be determined and known, for what influence any work has had on a later assumes the ability to read that work as the author influenced by it read it. In reality, we read texts that influenced our authors of study through the later text, so that another process of translation takes place: we read an earlier text taking into it the values of the later. But detecting texts that can, in a positivistic way, be identified as influences is less interesting than knowing that texts are always within translation. Each text modifies what has gone before and is in process of translation, because it exists in an intertextual field where its own signification is modified as it is uttered, and as it continues to enter other, later or earlier, fields. The question then, of what translation to use of Lu Xun — or of any writer — is knotty, and not just because it impacts on questions of accuracy:

Introduction: Lu Xun in Translation

5

what is accurate is ultimately that which has to be interpreted. The familiar four-volume version of Lu Xun from Beijing Foreign Languages Press is by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. It first appeared in 1956, but contains only nineteen stories out of the twenty-five. The complete short stories from these translators are also, though less easily, available. These translations have been criticised for their rather British English, and failure to register the different modes in which Lu Xun writes literature in the vernacular, and by which he plays with Chinese literary language. Since 1990, there has been the excellently annotated and full version by William Lyell, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories.10 Lyell’s enthusiasm is marked, and it makes for a text which includes a number of different registers, even different typographies on the page — capital letters, italics — to convey the different modes in which narrative takes place. This is especially marked with Ah Q — The Real Story. Lyell’s way with the vernacular is fine, if the result occasionally looks like paraphrase, and the style is American, racy and slangy, as though that was an equivalent for Lu Xun’s China. Perhaps it is, but it also runs the danger of dating and of making Lu Xun quasi-American, and the version of democracy or of the society he wanted that which is of the language used in Lyell’s translation. That can only involve foreclosing — for the American reader, not for the much more self-conscious translator — on those elements in Lu Xun which are not American — perhaps, therefore, on everything in Lu Xun. Lyell has certainly put Lu Xun into an American context, which makes his scholarly footnotes, which are indeed helpful and knowledgeable about the Chinese contexts that he identifies as significant, contrast markedly with the translation. But here, another principle of translation may be articulated: that translation, as good reading, of which it is the model, is not a matter of transposing one older and different system into another, but also of letting the newer be translated by its relation to what it translates, of translating backwards. It is not primarily a question of finding American equivalents for Chinese, but, in translating Lu Xun, of making American English more Chinese. Insofar as the effect of any text should be — following the arguments of Russian formalism — to de-familiarise the reader, to make her feel that her customary terms of reference are inadequate to deal with the new text, so translation should be a work of de-familiarisation, making the reader feel the need to re-translate her own discursive terms, and discursive formation. Because Yang has a little more neutrality than Lyell, if it is also more dull, I have tended to use it for the short stories reprinted in the Beijing Selected Works, and to use Lyell when not. But in all cases, I have drawn freely on Lyell, being sensible and appreciative of the scholarship within the translation.

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Madmen and Other Survivors

I have also used whatever other translations could be found: there are surprisingly few of these, and what there are, to date, seem to be in the shadow of Yang.11 The idea cannot, certainly, be to make a Western writer out of Lu Xun, but also not to write in a way which adheres to old East/West comparative studies: setting an essentialised and ahistorical East versus an historically developing West; if it comes to lack of knowledge of Chinese short stories as a problem in contextualising Lu Xun, the writer would have to say that he is at least as ignorant of short stories in other parts of the world, including Russia, Latin America and America, all of which have had a rich short story tradition. Lu Xun, who taught a course at Peking University in 1920 on classic Chinese fiction, translated texts out of Russian and German and French, and knew Japanese. And one other contribution he made to the May Fourth movement should also be mentioned: his introduction of foreign woodcuts into that culture, in another democratizing move, or form of translation, which made visual images which were cheaply produced, more accessible. Significant here were Käthe Kollwitz’s prints of downtrodden peasants, those of the Belgian Frans Masereel, and such Soviet printmakers as Vladimir Favorsky, Alexander Kravchenko and Pavel Pavlinov. Lu Xun’s promotion of woodcuts took place in the years after 1929, when he was in Shanghai.12 No commentator, then, can better Lu Xun’s range of references, though she may bring cross-references that the historical author did not know: all commentary is bound to be partial, and that knowledge activates this study. Three further positive motivations are at work in this book. The first is a desire to say something about the short story in relation to Lu Xun. The whole distinctive art-form has received surprisingly little attention, and whatever the dangers of trying to ‘essentialise’ short stories into a genre, something should be said about it here. The ‘sketch’ (Washington Irving, Dickens, Turgenev), or ‘tale’ (Hawthorne) or ‘short story’ only gains a discrete existence in the nineteenth century, though in Europe there were earlier traditions of telling stories within a frame-narrative (Boccaccio’s Decameron), or of inserting shorter narratives into longer ones (Cervantes’s Don Quixote: the practice continues through Fielding’s Tom Jones, or the early Dickens of Pickwick Papers). The short story which stands alone comes later, or as one of several short stories making a cycle, perhaps situated in one place (Joyce’s Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson’s Wineburg Ohio, Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples), or stories put together in one volume, but not formally linked, as with Lu Xun. 13 The short story — the distinctiveness within the title indicating great self-consciousness — because it often takes as subject wandering, individualistic types, has been seen as Romantic in its intensity, but it is central to European ‘modernism’, shaping itself as impressionistic,

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and as having an absence of plot, as is evident in Chekhov, whom Reid quotes as having said ‘I think that when one has finished a short story one should delete the beginning and the end’ (Reid, pp. 62–63). The form is prominent in — to take some contrasted writers of the modern and postmodern — Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence, Woolf, Kafka, Hemingway, Borges, or Raymond Carver.14 One argument about the short story sees it working on a ‘dual principle’ where, ‘beyond the setting and the subject, another story begins to take shape’: ‘short stories juxtapose a “story” with what James would have called “the story in it”, or Joyce “an epiphany”. The former we know how to read and respond to from our previous acquaintance with the genre of stories: the latter gives us a new and unique experience’.15 Comments on ‘the short story’ as a genre though, however useful, run the danger of becoming formalist, or of being essentialist, as though there was the Platonic short story, and criticism could fix on questions of what is a plot, indirect narration, point of view, and — since the short story is predominantly modern — on the dissolution of realism in the face of a ‘modernism’ which replaces the authoritative narrator by the impressionistic. There is also the assumption which is frequently made, that there is such a thing as the short story in opposition to the novel, and that its differences from that can be noted; this of course, only leads to equally formalist discussion of what the novel is.16 Formalism, to parody only a little, tends to write about historical changes (from realism to naturalism to modernism) as though they were inherent to changes within literature, not produced within historical discursive shifts which change the very nature and significance of textual practices, while leaving them apparently unaltered.17 Another potentially unhelpful move that formalism produces when it becomes comparative, comes from the assumption that realism in European texts can be compared with the ‘realism’ in China that the May Fourth movement advocated. This lateral comparison is then complicated by the idea that in Europe and America, realism was under question by modernism, whereas Chinese ‘modernism’ was realist and naturalist — in 1920, Mao Dun advocated, for translation and study, writers such as Strindberg, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Zola, Maupassant, Shaw and Wells. 18 The names here, and the violent tensions between them (e.g. Turgenev and Dostoyesvky) suggest how unprofitable it would be to generalise about European ideas of realism or naturalism, and to essentialise a realism which could then be taken over and compared with the competing versions of realism in Chinese. Defining realism encourages the critic to become positivist, to produce a list of its identifying features, but it is limited in enabling the critic to read a specific text whose relation to that list remains always in question, and a matter of different interpretative possibilities.

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However, my second emphasis in taking Lu Xun is to say that though Edgar Allan Poe thought of the short story as exhibiting a ‘totality’, it might be better considered, like other forms of art, as a fragment, though this is sometimes veiled by an apparent completeness. In the case of Lu Xun, this fragmentary nature is increased by the point that each of the texts seem to refer or relate to each other, which means that the idea of each text as an individual artefact which can be studied through a variant of American ‘new criticism’ (just concentrating on what the single text says) is even less possible than it ever was before (a key critical text here against new criticism is, of course, Roland Barthes’s essay, ‘From Work to Text’.)19 This point leads into the second: the need is to read Lu Xun’s stories not in terms of a pre-given biography, where the life explains the work, but to see the texts as creating ‘Lu Xun’, not as a single knowable identity in charge of each individual text and to be discerned behind each text as its author, but rather as defined, and produced through texts of extraordinary range and self-reference. If the play of the text generates the author, this leads in to a third point, which will govern much discussion of the stories, and which in part generates the title of this study. That is, there is an evident fascination in the texts with forms of madness: open and obvious in A Madman’s Diary, implicit in The True Story of Ah Q, returning in The White Light. Other figures of it include Mr N (A Small Incident), and the ‘madman’ in The Eternal Lamp. The potential of madness survives even in Brothers.20 It is also apparent in the almost clinical sense of depression with which the ‘I’ who writes speaks of himself, when he does speak. Such melancholia is most marked in The Misanthrope. Perhaps one definition of psychosis that will serve is the loss of ego-boundaries, loss of a sense of self. The fascination, which associates with the fears of loss of identity, as in the diarist’s fear of being eaten, shows itself in Ah Q actually experiencing his own death: Lu Xun writes the impossible sentence as Ah Q is shot: ‘Help, help’ But Ah Q never uttered those words. All had turned black before his eyes, there was a buzzing in his ears, and he felt as if his whole body were being scattered like so much light dust. (XY 153, Y 112–113)

I will quote the passage also in Lyell (L 172): But before Ah Q could get it out, everything went black before his eyes, there was a loud ringing in his ears, and he felt his entire being crumble like so much dust.

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The text has required the narrator to say something that he cannot know (he cannot know that Ah Q tried to say ‘Help’), and that impossibility sorts with another, that the reader is asked to enter the experience of a man who dies and is dead, becoming a body in pieces (corps morcelé), the fantasy that the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1900–1981) discusses, of being fragmented, perhaps torn to pieces.21 It is as though there can be an experience of being dead. Ah Q, whose attitude to his own body is not necessarily to see it as one thing, as a unity, has thought throughout his story of people being decapitated (the practice of the Qing dynasty), but being shot by a firing squad is even more effective as a way of a way of morcellating the body. In the description, it is as if the text is playing with the experience of bodily identity being scattered, disseminated, and that is not the only instance of this: the same holds with the blood of the decapitated boy in the short story Medicine. The two volumes of stories which bear the name Lu Xun show a fascination not with identity as definable by an author writing a set of single texts, but with so many, plural, texts making up identity as always split, always in a state of having crumbled into fragments. The implications of what it means that The True Story of Ah Q in its original form was serialised, split between issue and issue, adds to this intuition, to the idea that there is no single Lu Xun. To connect Lu Xun’s texts to forms of breakdown, and to think that they may both be creative of madness as well as created by it, opposes the form of the short story (as organized, taut, marked by boundaries) against madness. To read these contrary stresses together, to see them in relationship with each other, will be the aim of what follows. What formalism detects in a text, its completeness, its unity, may be exactly the opposite of the fragmentation at work in them; if pressed to say what motivates that breakdown, which was inseparable from one political crisis after another within contemporary China, it would be this book’s argument to say that the short story form serves so well because it is the record, not always acknowledged within the text, of a crisis which is sexual — as perhaps short stories themselves may be (it may be what differentiates them from novels). At the same time, it is not just a record, because the short story form constructs life as series of break-downs, as the register of fragmentation, which affects both the body and sexuality. To be held by the short story form, as a writer, is to load an intensity into every little detail of life. The familiar features of the short story (banal details which suddenly turn out to be immensely significant, even epiphanic, or the power of the ending, which frequently has a twist within it) accord with a sense that shock may be one of the elements that constitutes everyday life in modernity, where modern life is not just potentially schizoid, but traumatic.22 The thesis of this book is, then, that the

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short story in Lu Xun both reads and precipitates a shock and a crisis, which is primarily sexual in character, whether it is recognised or no, and which seems to be linked to traumatic perception. The book tries to think through the idea living through trauma by putting the word ‘survivors’ into its title. By being called Madmen and Other Survivors, there is certainly the intention to suggest that madness may be one form of survival, while making the point that the word ‘survivor’ does not convey any triumphalism. The philosopher Lyotard (1924–1998), thinking of Auschwitz and the question of bearing testimony to what happened there, wrote that ‘survivor implies that an entity that is dead or ought to be is still alive’.23 ‘Survivor’ here implies that the person who ‘lives on’ (the term recalls Derrida’s essay, ‘Living On’ (‘Survivre’) which makes the point that translation is another form of survival), is not by that freed from death, but marked by it already, as another form of death, like the mad poet Lenz at the end of Georg Büchner’s short story of that name: ‘So lebte er hin’ — ‘so he lived on’, where madness and survival are the same.24 The account in the last paragraph of the ‘short story’ sounds as though I am returning to the idea that its existence constitutes a distinct genre. But while arguing that there was a new development of short story writings in a particular moment, which is associated with modernity, and for the sense that certain writers have placed themselves within a tradition which has given to the short story the appearance of a genre, my position is that there is no generic category for the short story, and least of all in the case of Lu Xun, whose stories move further and further into a singular mode. Jacques Derrida, in his essay ‘The Law of Genre’ points out how any text that wishes to indicate it belongs to a genre must contain within itself some extra quality by which it signals its loyalty to that, and this extra quality gives it a heterogeneity which means that it is a mixed genre (and if we think of genre as also meaning gender, we will understand how a mixed genre is no genre — or gender — at all). This principle of contamination of genre is what Derrida calls ‘the law of the law of genre’ — that no genre can be defined, save in terms which show that genre cannot exist.25 I assume, then, that these narratives of Lu Xun are to be read in terms which do not try to conform them to a non-existent taxonomy of the short story, which imposes on them the requirement of how they are to be read, but that they suggest to the reader the way in which they are to be taken, which, since they are documents of madness, and of estrangement, and of loneliness, means that they impose on the reader the demand that she suspend her readiness to fit them into previous models, and reads them as singular pieces, which cannot be fitted into previous modes of representation.

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To read the crisis, or crises, that may be intuited in Lu Xun’s fiction, requires not only reading each story carefully and for its singularity, but putting them into comparison with each other, reading them both in order, and against each other. Leo Ou-fan Lee, whose work on Lu Xun is remarkable and in many ways decisive for modern scholarship, has been comparatively dismissive of all but one of the last five of the collection Call to Arms (his exception is The White Light), calling them his ‘least inspired fiction; they might belong to another collection’.26 The critic therefore leaves them out. The assumption of knowing what a short story should be like, and so how good it is, gets in the way of reading those stories which seem to him, as to some others, to be slighter. I have not chosen such a method here. If Helen Vendler can write about each of Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets (and have learned them by heart too, according to her account), a critic of Lu Xun can do the same with these twenty-five stories plus preface.27 The slightest short story (and it need not be granted that any of these are slight or superfluous) changes perception of each other of the stories.

2 Lu Xun: The True Story

Lu Xun was born as Zhou Zhangshou, in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province, in the eastern part of China, just below Shanghai, in 1881.1 It was thirty years before the fall of the Qing dynasty, China’s last. His grandfather, Zhou Fuqing, was an imperial scholar, though his career had not prospered, and his father, Zhou Boyi, was also intended to become a scholar, but failed, and lived on without a post, on the rents from the land the family possessed. His mother’s name was Lu Rui. The father, Zhou Boyi, died in 1896, when Lu Xun was fifteen. A whiff of scandal attached itself to the grandfather, who could have been executed for corruption in the civil service exams in 1893: in the event, he was reprieved after 1901, dying in 1904, after his son. The scandal seems to have left a traumatic effect in Lu Xun’s life, reducing him to what he considered beggary: the humiliation compares interestingly with what happened to the boy Charles Dickens when his father was imprisoned when the boy was twelve, though the class basis was very different: Lu Xun’s family was gentry, not petit-bourgeois.2 During the scandal, the boy, aged thirteen, was sent into the country to his mother’s family, and felt that he was humiliated as a beggar. In the preface to A Call to Arms (1923), the text which presents himself as ‘Lu Xun’, and where he may be seen constructing his history, presenting himself as a particular kind of writer, he writes: ‘it is my belief that those who come down in the world will probably learn in the process what society is really like’ (XY 33, Y v). The statement is Dickensian. It is essential to begin with the point that to narrate the story of Lu Xun’s life means, usually, drawing on his own words in the preface, and in stories, many of which are autobiographical, and then supplementing these from further information. But the preface has also to be treated as fiction, at least in the sense that writing can make no distinction between events and their representation: in all writing, there is a contest for which representation will become the dominant. And while autobiography fictionalises, the function

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of autobiography here is to make the self a text to be read, as here, in the context of a history whose objective details may be known, but about which there is a conflict of representations, including how the May Fourth movement is to be taken, and how that movement represented the China and the Confucianism it vigorously opposed. The history of Lu Xun criticism shows that there is no consensus on how those representations are to be read, and no settled way of representing Lu Xun. In 1898, Lu Xun entered the Nanjing Naval Academy and changed his name to Zhou Shuren, according to David Pollard on the instructions of a great uncle there, who did not want him to “reflect dishonour on his clan by becoming a cadet’ (Pollard 17), and he transferred his study to the School of Mines and Railways. He described the period as the time when he began to confront medical science and evolutionary thought, such as T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (read in the Chinese translation of Yan Fu: the book is referred to in one of the later short stories, Regret for the Past). He realised, he said, that ‘the Japanese reformation owed its rise, to a great extent, to the introduction of Western medical science to Japan’ (XY 34,Y vi). Japan had been opened to the West since 1868 (the Meiji period), and had warred with China, taking Taiwan, in 1894–1895. When Lu Xun graduated in 1902, he was selected for further study in Japan, learned Japanese in Tokyo and went on to study medicine at Sendai University, in northeast Honshu. At that time (1903), he cut off his queue, an event narrated in The Story of Hair, the sixth of those stories collected in A Call to Arms. He tells of the controversy this led to and how Zou Rong (1885–1905), one of the ringleaders in cutting the hair of the overseas students’ supervisor, and author of an anti-Manchu paper called The Revolutionary Army had to be sent back to Shanghai, where he died in prison. The preface narrates seeing, in early 1906, a slide of a Chinese being executed by the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese war when Japan took Manchuria. Beginning in 1904, it ended with the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1906. Along with others documenting the war to encourage Japanese loyalty, the slide showed Chinese there who were ‘sturdy fellows’ but ‘completely apathetic’ who were standing round another bound Chinese man. According to the commentary, the one with his hands bound was a spy working for the Russians who was to be beheaded by the Japanese military as a warning to others [shizhong: the word is the title for the short story A Warning to Others], while the Chinese beside him had come to enjoy the spectacle: this slide convinced me that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and

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15

healthy they might be, could only serve to be made examples of or as witness to such futile spectacles; and it was not necessarily deplorable if many of them died of illness. The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit; and since at this time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I decided to promote a literary movement. (XY 35, Y vii)3

Hands bound: bound feet. This episode is presented as an originary, clarifying moment, which produced two things — a sense that the Chinese needed to have their spirit changed, and another that it was time to go over to literature, and not medicine, since this might make people physically strong, but it would do nothing about making the country’s spirit less weak-spirited. David Wang discusses the fascination with decapitation in Lu Xun (and in the younger Shen Congwen [1902–1988]), and, emphasising how Lu Xun’s fiction turns on breaks, finds in these an ‘imaginary nostalgia for the semantic and somatic plenitude of China’, as though the decapitation of the Chinese pointed to a break within China’s history, which now showed itself within a fragmented state.4 Such a fragmentation, written about in 1923, belongs not to the history of China after 1911, but to late Qing China as already fragmented, never in a state of plenitude. To see China as always in the moment of being divided, always already headless, seems to describe Lu Xun’s perception. The text reporting the witnessing of the slide, being sixteen years further on, comes from a ‘successful’ author who is explaining ‘how one becomes what one is’, in other words, it creates the past to show how that past has produced the present. Perhaps the episode symbolises a number of different moments.5 The episode is re-created fictionally at least twice, in Medicine and A Warning to Others, in such a way that continues to invest it with significance, as though the episode became more resonant, or traumatic, not less, and it gains newer significance when it is seen not chronologically, but in the light of later texts. As an episode, it is generated by a photographic image, so that the image and the decision go together, and the image has the value of what Freud calls ‘the primal scene’, but there is no first or original moment for the primal scene of trauma, as Derrida draws out of his meditation on ‘deferred reaction’ (Nachträglichkeit); the possibility of recognising an image lies in its repeatability, that seeing an image is seeing it again.6 Looking back on the photograph, then, from the standpoint of the preface to A Call to Arms means seeing something already seen, and trying, in memory to recreate it as a first time. The image of ritual killing becomes one which is not separate from other images, equally poignant, also circulating within Lu Xun’s fiction.

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As the only Chinese watching Chinese being humiliated and punished, the self is made other, alienated, forced into a position where it must identify with the camera which is looking at the Chinese. But the camera is held by a Japanese; the Chinese subject who looks at the photograph suffers a threeway split in identity, as looking through the eyes of the dominant at the dominated, with whom he also associates himself, being both the man undergoing execution, and the detached, apathetic Chinese who are looking on. The person looking on has no other possibility than to identify with the dominant. To draw attention to a conception of Chinese ‘national character’, such as Lu Xun seems to have been fascinated by, means, then, showing that Chinese subject as split, constituted not inherently and from the inside, but as under the eye of the other, under the power of the camera and the power of reproducibility. The Chinese subject is constructed as such by the colonial other — Japan, fighting Russian on Chinse soil — there is no national identity save as a reactive formation to a critique from the other who defines. Further, the subject is inherently traumatized; it is the moment when decapitation is about to take place, but has not, so that it attracts the voyeur’s attention to the literally split second afterwards, the indescribable moment of what Jacques Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis calls ‘the real’ — the impossible moment, outside symbolisation. The choice of this picture as a crisis-moment marking a new beginning puts the Chinese who is looking at the picture who must identify with the objectified Chinese about to be decapitated, into a posthumous condition, held by that moment of severance and by the fascination to know what is post-severance. Because the photograph shows the split second before execution, not the impossible splitting moment of severance, all attention focuses on that second of living on before the break. The ‘author’ then, who explains ‘how he has become what he is’ (the reference is, of course, to the subtitle of Nietzsche’s ‘autobiography’, Ecce Homo), defines himself not as successful, but as traumatized, held by something that has dictated his every movement.7 That includes commitment to writing, writing as repetition, and as a reaction to a perception of people whose reality is not the same as they look — as ‘sturdy fellows’, the truth of them is not what is to be seen. Further, there are two scenes of looking. The Chinese looking in the lecture-room becomes aware of his privileged vantage point (seeing the screen) while he is also aware of his own marginalisation. On the screen, the decapitation of the Chinese is repeated in the cut made by the camera-shutter; the photograph is a record of death, as it denies life and movement in the person it objectifies, it repeats the action of the executioner. It makes the act of representation the art of death, so that it brings into question the possibility of story-telling if this is

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the act of describing, or explaining, because it says that to represent something is an act of fixing, freezing, killing. The point needs to be considered in any account of Lu Xun that thinks of his work as realist representation. At the same time, the photograph of decapitation fascinates with the possibility of narration as an impossible event, carrying what Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) calls ‘the instant of my death’ within it. Blanchot, in a very short story called The Instant of My Death, describes somebody (probably himself) being lined up against the wall to be shot as a French Resistance fighter against the Germans. (In different circumstances, virtually the same experience befell Dostoyevsky, who shows, in The Idiot, a similar fascination with the moment preceding execution.) The shooting of Blanchot, if it was he, did not take place, because the soldiers suddenly had to deal with another emergency, and Blanchot describes the self as having ‘l’instance de ma mort désormais toujours en instance’: that is, the moment of my death henceforth always suspended, or, always in process, always insisting, in the self.8 Death continues to work inside, obliterating everything of knowledge, destroying the self as a fully selfconscious entity. Something of that, perhaps, works in Lu Xun’s writings, through identification with a photograph, or, more precisely, with an image seen on the screen, which gives it much more immediacy, and makes it much more akin to the mirror that Jacques Lacan argues is the basis for giving identity: identity based on an act of identification with the imaginary image.9 All these points — the subject as split or fragmented, and held by the power of trauma — will return in discussion of the stories; but for now, to resume the biography: leaving Sendai in March 1906, Lu Xun began studying German in Tokyo, and started a literary magazine, which failed for lack of funds, which had the Dantean name Vita Nova (‘New Life’). And that, it may be noted, was the name of the book in which Dante began his own distinctive form of poetry. The same year, he went back to Shaoxing to take part in a marriage which his mother had made for him with Zhu An (1878–1947), an uneducated woman, and the victim of foot-binding. The marriage seems never to have been consummated. He returned to Tokyo with his younger brother, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1966). The journal failed, and he describes the feeling of ‘loneliness’, ‘groundless sadness’ — melancholia, which he endured and which made him lose ‘the enthusiasm and fervour of my youth’ (XY 36, Y viii). It was a period also of translation, for example, of Russian stories by V. Garshin and by L. Andreev.10 Three years later, Lu Xun returned to China, to teach at Hangzhou, the provincial capital near Shaoxing, and he moved to Shaoxing the following year, a period of time which is remembered in the short story In the Tavern. In 1911, the year of the revolution that ended the Qing dynasty (10 October, the ‘double ten’ date began with a military

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uprising in Wuchang), he wrote his first short story in classical Chinese. It has been translated by Lyell with the title Remembrance of the Past (Huai jiu: ‘Looking to the Past’). Under the pen-name of Zhou Chuo, which was one used by his brother Zhou Xuoren, it was published in The Short Story Magazine in 1913, but not acknowledged by Lu Xun to be his until 1934.11 The Czech critic Jaroslav Pru° s˘ ek discusses this text as Lu Xun’s — and China’s — emergence into modern literature. He finds one of its details — the absence of plot, which is advertised by the fact that what plot there is in it turns out to be mere rumour, unsubstantiated news, and so a non-event — basic to later Lu Xun stories, notably A Passing Storm.12 Lu Xun moved to Nanjing in February 1912, which, on 1 January, had become the capital of the new Republic, with Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) at its head. He had been invited to work in the Ministry of Education, so invited by Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), the educationalist who had just returned from five years in Germany.13 Two months after Lu Xun’s arrival, however, Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), ‘father of the warlords’, and the leader of the Beiyang army, the military of northern China, which, unlike the southern provinces, had not accepted the Revolution so easily, assumed the first presidency of the Republic. He was given this by Sun Yat-sen, who thought it would pacify the Beiyang Army. Yuan Shikai moved the capital back to Beijing, and Lu Xun followed with the Ministry. His time in Beijing is described in the later short story A Small Incident. Yuan Shikai weakened the revolutionary movement by having the KMT leader, Song Jiaoren, assassinated in March 1913, and then proceeded to abolish the parliament. A ‘Second Revolution’ against him that year failed. In February 1914 he ordered the whole country to worship Heaven and Confucius, and he went on at the end of December 1915, to attempt to declare himself Emperor, in which he was, however, opposed by the military. He was followed by other short-term military leaders: Li Yuanhong, and Feng Guozhang, and Xu Shichang. The latter will be discussed in the story Dragonboat Festival. After Yuan Shikai’s death, Cai Yuanpei, who had left China again for Germany and France, became Chancellor of Peking University, China’s first modern University, founded in 1898 and instrumental in the founding of the ‘New Culture Movement’. Cai Yuanpei was also important for the Shanghaibased monthly magazine, New Youth (Xin qingnian), which was run by Humanities teachers at Peking University. New Youth had begun in 1915 by the Dean of the College of Literature Chen Duxiu, (1879–1942), who was to become one of the founders of the Communist Party, and who was imprisoned for three months in 1919.14 But it later had five further editors. These were Hu Shi (1891–1962), who had gone to America in 1909 and

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studied with John Dewey and returned to China in 1917, Qian Xuantong (1887–1939), the Marxist and University librarian Li Dazhao (1889–1927), killed in the year when China came under the domination of the warlords, and Liu Bannong (1891–1934) and Shen Yinmo (1883–1971). Lu Xun’s first story for New Youth was A Madman’s Diary, and it was the first time he used the name Lu Xun, which combines in itself, perhaps, the two ideas of ‘stupid’ and ‘fast’. David Pollard (pp. 51–52) comments that Lu Xun gradually supplanted his real name: He even used it to sign private letters. You could say his old self faded away and a new man emerged. The smouldering fire that had built up in Zhou Shuren burst into flame when he became Lu Xun. The indignities and hurts Zhou Shuren had suffered, the resentment and indignation ... were all expressed by Lu Xun — to people who were listening this time. It was the collective strategy of the New Men to attack the old order right across the board, from the high culture of the elite to the habits and values deep rooted in Chinese society.

Lu Xun, then, becomes a name expressive of being part of ‘new youth’, newly emerging. It is a translation from the name and identity of Zhou Zhangzhou into something else which is associated with the mother, and so, interestingly, not with the father, not with patriarchy. The figure of the narrator’s mother appears often in the text of the stories, and will be noted as it appears in each of them. At the same time, what is to be said of the father? On this, the comment of the Japanese scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi may be noted, that Lu Xun’s life was an atonement for his father’s death.15 But the life differs from the writings, except that the writings — for example the short stories — seem the attempt to create a new life, a form of ‘living longer’, of survival, as translation is also the attempt to make a text live longer, within another medium. The term ‘living longer’ comes from one of Lu Xun’s most extraordinary narratives, The Misanthrope, which will be discussed in the last chapter, and which asks about the possibility of continuing to live after going through a sense of death. The condition of living on in Lu Xun’s texts seems to be the exclusion of the father from the signature, that is, from what the person who signs is prepared to take responsibility for. But such a repression of the father also carries death in its living on, because it advertises what has been excluded as well. To think about what is involved in a signature, it is relevant again to draw on the work of Jacques Derrida, who argues that all signatures are countersignatures, acceptances of the point that the self has already been named and

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identified. To sign letters with a new name, a name used as the signature to texts, is the attempt to assume an identity which has been given by those texts, but Derrida emphasises that just as there is no first signing, because to sign is to countersign, so, too, there is no unique signature, because a signature assumes iterability, the possibility of repetition. In other words, to sign is to take up a position within a structure of repetition, to affirm not uniqueness, but the possibility of reaffirming a constant position.16 And what identity is confirmed or reaffirmed by A Madman’s Diary, that text to which the name Lu Xun is the countersignature? The text will be discussed below, but it implies a plural identity, in the same way that the photograph of the decapitation imposed a split identity, because there are two narrators in that text, and at least one of them may or may not be lacking a single identity, in being mad. The following year in Lu Xun’s life, 1919, produced the May Fourth incident, a demonstration by the Peking University students. It followed on from the reactionary presidency of Yuan Shikai, who had made concessions of land, for example in Manchuria, to Japan in 1915 following that country’s Twenty-One demands, and then again, at the Treaty of Versailles. At that moment, it seemed that the Western powers had betrayed China by conceding Germany’s ‘rights’ in Shandong province again to the Japanese, who had expelled the Germans in 1914, after agreements made with Britain, France and Italy.17 To discuss the results of the May Fourth movement, with its questioning of Confucianism and Chinese tradition, its construction of a Chinese national character which it opposed, is to discuss virtually all the issues which are raised by Lu Xun’s stories, but the statement of the writer Yu Dafu (1896–1945), made in 1935, should be quoted: ‘the greatest success of the May Fourth movement should be considered the discovery of the “individual”’.18 Perhaps this is so, and it is a contrast to the authoritarian and feudal structures which had been in place before, and which still threatened China, but the statement contains its irony, too, because to become an individual, as Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Foucault (1926–1984) both argue, also imposes on that person the requirement to take responsibility, and to think of itself in a consistent and unified way, and in terms of a single gender. It is the fulfilment of the European ‘Romanticism’ which gives to the ‘individual’ such a free and independent status and which makes Shelley the poet whose portrait is displayed in Regret for the Past. In Foucault, apparent invitations to liberation and tolerance are only more subtle ways of breeding and policing the subject who is thereby made ‘docile’. In Lu Xun, the loneliness, and the melancholia are part of being an individual, as are the states of madness of which he writes, which testify to the unbearable qualities which can also be part of being treated as a single person.

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21

Zhou Zuoren had been teaching full time in Peking University since 1917, and Lu Xun was appointed as a lecturer in Chinese literature at Peking University in 1919. He had moved out of the hostel in August 1919, when he bought a house, and went back that December to bring his mother, wife and brothers with their wives and children to Beijing, describing his selling of the family home in the short story Hometown. The sense of a large household is given in the short story which Lyell translates as Some Rabbits and a Cat, where the ‘Third Missus’ is Habuto Yushiko, the Japanese-born wife of Zhou Jianren, Lu Xun’s youngest brother, and the younger sister of Zhou Zuoren’s wife, Habuto Nobuko. The ‘Third Missus’ marriage came to an end when Zhou Jianren left in September 1921 to find work in Shanghai and never returned. A little later came another split, when, in July 1923, Lu Xun broke decisively with Zhou Zuoren, and moved out, taking his mother and Zhu An with him. He found another house, of which he took permanent possession in May 1924. In 1925, he began a relationship with a student at Peking Woman’s Normal College, where he was also teaching part-time, this was Xu Guangping (1907–1968): she had begun writing to him that March.19 The second collection of stories, Wandering, or Wavering, or Hesitation, or in Lyell, Wondering Where to Turn (Panghuang), were begun in February 1924, over a year after the completion of A Call to Arms. But there was no ‘hesitation’ in the China that forms the context of these stories. In the 1920s, it was divided, both north/south, and politically. In Beijing, Xu Shichang was followed as President by Li Yuanhong, who had been president earlier (1916–1917), and then by Cao Kun (1 October 1923–2 November 1924), and Duan Qirui until 20 April 1926, and then by Yan Huiping. There was the killing of a Chinese worker by Japanese in a textile factory on 15 May 1925, which produced a strike and further massacre (30 May 1925) and foreign intervention by Britain, as well as Japan, against the Chinese in Shanghai. On 18 March 1926, soldiers fired on students in Tiananmen Square; they had been protesting against Japanese intimidation. Among those killed were two from the Women’s Normal College where Lu Xun taught. The demonstration produced further protests, and the opportunity for Duan Qirui to be pushed out, to be replaced by further warlords, Zhang Zuolin and Wu Peifu. In this atmosphere, Lu Xun left Beijing, as did Xu Guangping.20 He went to Xiamen and then on to Guangzhou, which was Xu Guangping’s hometown, and from there moved to Shanghai, where he was to live with her. In the south, Sun Yat-sen had been elected president of a national government in Guangzhou in 1921, and had established in 1923 the Whampoa Military Academy nearby, installing Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975)

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as commandant the following year, with the intention of moving against the warlords commanding northern China (one of these warlords is a subject in the story The Misanthrope). Freed of constraint by the death of Sun, Chiang Kai-shek was to attack further the Communists, establish a government in Nanjing in 1927 and take Beijing in 1928, but he was neither able to defeat the warlords nor the Communists. Lu Xun’s second group of stories, eleven in all, whose title implies a lack of direction, needs to be read against this sense of increasing anarchy in Beijing, and of there being no world elsewhere in China. The rest of Lu Xun’s life, set against the context of the breakout of civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, may be told briefly, being outside the context of the short stories discussed here. His and Xu Guangping’s son (Haiying) was born in 1930; he himself became closely identified with Marxism, if he never joined the Chinese Communist Party, which had been founded in Shanghai in July1921; he continued writing, in 1931 he began to organise artists to study print-making with the younger brother of his Japanese friend Uchiyama Kanzo, and he died in 1936, of tuberculosis, like his father.21 We have discussed the preface to A Call to Arms already, but before proceeding to the stories, something more may be said about it because of the way it segues into A Madman’s Diary, the theme of the next chapter, and the other thirteen short stories which comprised A Call to Arms, and which came out ten years after Remembrances of the Past came out under the name Zhou Chuo. A Call to Arms is Wang’s translation: Lyell translates it more positively as Cheering from the Sidelines. Another translation that has been given is Outcry, which is more passive and injured in tone.22 The preface has already been quoted from as a source for Lu Xun’s life, as an autobiographical document, written at the end of 1922. But it now needs more attention, and not just for the way it leads into A Madman’s Diary. The opening line is crucial, ‘when I was young, I too had many dreams’. The qualifier ‘too’ is relevant. He speaks as one who is not now young, in comparison to the May Fourth students, but he associates himself with them, as the new dreamers, and the key word for the piece, ‘loneliness’, key indeed for all the short stories (The Misanthrope being the ultimate example), is first found in the opening paragraph: When I was young, I, too, had many dreams. Most of them I later forgot, but I see in this nothing 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 cannot forget completely, and these stories stem from those things which I have been unable to forget. (XY 33, Y v)

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23

The times of dreaming were lonely, the time of remembrance will also be lonely, it seems. Youth, then — the subject-matter of the preface, a subject which runs throughout the short stories, to the very last, Divorce — is a period of loneliness. The preface discusses youth in that it focuses on his education, the desire to produce the journal called Vita Nova, the depression he sank into, and the story he tells about himself in the hostel at Beijing, a site alluded to in Some Rabbits and a Cat and returned to in Regret for the Past, being the location of a past suicide which had left the place deserted. Isolation continued until Jin Xinyi (a name of Qian Xuantong), a friend who had known him in Japan, urged him not to copy old inscriptions but to write: I understood. They were bringing out New Youth, but since there did not seem to have been any reaction, favourable or otherwise, no doubt they felt lonely. However, I said: ‘Imagine an iron house having not a single window and virtually indestructible, with all its inmates sound asleep and about to die of suffocation. Dying in their sleep, they won’t feel the pain of death. Now if you raise a shout to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making these unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you really think you are doing them a good turn?’ ‘But if a few of them wake up, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house’. True, in spite of my own conviction, I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future. ... (XY, 37–38, Y ix)

He offers this as the reason for writing A Madman’s Diary and adds that as far as he was concerned, ‘I no longer feel any great need to express myself, yet because I have not forgotten the grief of my past loneliness, I sometimes call out to encourage those fighters who are galloping on in loneliness, so that they do not lose heart.’ These others are those who have just brought out New Youth, and who he surmises must be feeling lonely because of the absence of reaction (as he had an absence of reaction). He says that this is ‘a call to arms’, meaning, perhaps that he has been called to write by Jin Xinyi, and by ‘our chiefs’ and that his call was to call to others, to cheer them on, in a spirit not that of pessimism. But, at the end of the preface, he says that he has decided to call the entire collection of stories A Call to Arms. This gives the term more than one valency. As the title for a collection appearing in 1923, it recalls a period of his life when he was induced to write. But it also implies that he is calling to himself, out of his loneliness, to his loneliness, or, perhaps, that writing has the ability to call out to loneliness. The title recalls his

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loneliness, his sense of being outside the iron house (which seems the logic of the illustration he uses, as if the iron house was a prison, or concentration camp). But it is not clear that he is outside. The link made by Elias Canetti between devouring — that prime image in Lu Xun — and incarceration is significant.23 It would be better to ask, is there an outside to the iron house? In the photograph of the decapitation, the Chinese being executed is enclosed in the middle of a circle, but what of those Chinese who form the circumference, and who look on? Are they outside, or are they inside? And, to continue the association of devouring with incarceration, are not the looks of these spectators, who by ringing the prisoner, form a wall, also devouring? The point will be reiterated throughout Lu Xun’s fiction. There are numerous suggestions of people looking on at someone suffering in their midst: The New Year Sacrifice and Warning to the People being outstanding examples. The idea that they are devouring becomes graphic at the moment of Ah Q’s execution. The point implies that there can be no outside; that he who writes is inside, which is the basis on which he knows what the conditions were, and so he is calling to himself and to others as on the inside, the condition of loneliness. And if there is no outside the iron house, whose texture makes it a complete image for repression and forgetting of dreams, that also implies that beyond the iron house is something else, equally devouring, equally imprisoning. In the third place, the title for the collection reflects ironically, and also non-ironically, on himself, as the self that he has constructed in writing his autobiography: is such a person to write for others? His stories remain, however, calls to arms. Written for the benefit of others, they proclaim their own limitation, for instance, that there was a constraint placed upon him as to what he could and could not say, to lift up others and to keep them from pessimism.

3 On A Madman’s Diary

This chapter is given over to a reading of A Madman’s Diary, the first, and one of the most influential of Lu Xun’s short stories.1 It seems that two possible sources for A Madman’s Diary (Kuangren Riji) were personal: Leo Lee suggests that the ‘feverish intensity’ of the mental state of the madman ‘recalls Lu Xun’s description of his father on his deathbed’, which Lu Xun wrote about in an essay, ‘Father’s Illness’.2 There was another incident, which one of Lu Xun’s biographers narrates: in October 1916 a maternal cousin of Lu Xun’s arrived in Beijing from Shanxi, where he had been the assistant to an official. He had suddenly developed a form of persecution complex, thinking that all the people there were plotting to murder him, and hurriedly fled to Beijing. But this was no help, for he still suspected that he was being followed. At first he stayed in an inn, but though he changed rooms several times he still could not set his mind at rest, feeling as though he had been caught in a dragnet, and had no way of escaping. Early one morning, however, he came to knock at Lu Xun’s door window. When Lu Xun asked what was wrong, he said, “Today I’m going to be dragged out and beheaded!” He sounded very wretched, and he had a written farewell letter which he asked Lu Xun to send to his family. ... Dear Mother: I am writing you this letter with tears in my eyes. Magistrate Zhang of Fanzhi county, being of a weak character, often entrusted elder brother with the task of making decisions for him on daily affairs. Therefore, many people have come to bear elder brother a grudge. This time the local gentry and merchants have secretly decided to plot a frame-up against elder brother and me, and they have each donated money to bribe all the officials on the way that they might put us to death. I won’t tell

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you all the details, for there will be an account in the newspaper later on ... Lu Xun ... took [his cousin] to the Japanese-run Ikeda hospital. On the way to the hospital, the sight of the armed policemen on sentry duty made the invalid so scared that his face turned ghastly pale and his eyes filled with terror. He stayed at Ikeda hospital for about a week without any improvement, so Lu Xun sent someone to accompany him to his hometown, Shaoxing.3

This real-life paranoia, where everything that happens becomes circumstantial evidence to prove that the person is being persecuted, demonstrates the loneliness involved in madness, which in the case of A Madman’s Diary shows itself in the way the ‘madman’ has wanted to write everything down, as if trying to avoid his loneliness that way. Madness is an extreme form of the iron house. The text of A Madman’s Diary contains two forms of writing, first, a preface, written in classical Chinese, told by a narrator who has been given two volumes of one brother’s diary by another, older, brother.4 It is followed by diary entries in a vernacular Chinese, which contest the hierarchical form of the classical mode; is more modern than that can be. The younger brother, it seems, has been mad. There are thirteen actual diary entries — ‘confused’ — ‘incoherent’, ‘wild’, and undated, so that only by the colour of the ink and the differences in writing is it apparent that they were written at different times. Their theme is the fear the diarist has of being eaten, whether by humans or their dogs.5 In the preface, the narrator says that he has learned that the younger brother had been ill, but has recovered, and left his local town, not to take up an official post, but, as the translation of Lyell indicates, ‘to await a substantive official appointment’, that is, to be in place for the time when the office would be vacated by its present incumbent. The younger brother, in other words, has, it seems, effectively been disposed of by sending him off to somewhere else, an idea which resonates with the loneliness that is discussed in the preface. The older brother hands over the diaries with a smile (Lyell), or as the Xianyi/Wang translation says, ‘laughing’. Whatever the gesture, it is one of superiority, and if we imagine him smiling while he is laughing, there is already the slightest hint of what the diary implies: that this society eats people. The official post, far from being a solution, is what will continue to create the brother’s problems. For in the text which has influenced this one, the short story, The Diary of a Madman (1835), by Gogol (1809–1852), the diarist, like Bashmachkin, the narrator in Gogol’s story The Overcoat (‘we all came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat’ Dostoyevsky wrote) is one of those

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who works in the ninth rank in Russia’s complex civil service structure. This had been set up by Peter the Great between 1711 and 1722, and the system lasted till 1917. Number fourteen was the bottom rank, and its minimal chances of promotion and its dead-endedness casts its shadow over Lu Xun’s text. The origin of the title, then is said to be the ‘madman’s’, after he has recovered, or been ‘normalised’. Or it may be the title which he has given to show that he considers himself still mad, (mad to be working in China’s bureaucracy still), strange, in that way self-ironising. The narrator deduces from reading the diaries that the writer has suffered from a ‘persecution complex’; from this and his language of tradition, and the point that he has copied out only a section of the diaries — his editing thus being a censoring — we can see that he represents the power of the normal, whose reaction to madness is not to think of its content nor of how it is symptomatic of a society, but to copy it out as a topic for medical research. The alienated, abstracted, state of medicine, which implies an objectifying knowledge, returns in the text in sections IV and V, where the diarist feels that he is under the scrutiny of Mr Ho, who is either an executioner or a doctor, but in any case a product of the practices of Chinese medicine, which he thinks licenses eating people. The critique of the bureaucracy, of surveillance, of the power of medicine and of the power of normality to assert itself through the power of defining people as mad obviously derives from, and compares with, Foucault on modernity’s techniques of surveillance and of power. The diary entries, in contrast, work by commenting on the preface, in several ways: first, on their language, for in them, the madman says that twenty years ago, when he was seventeen (a youth), he trod on Gu Jiu’s old ledgers in an opposition to feudalism (section II). The latter’s name translates as ‘Ancient times’, and the accounts go back many years ago; the diarist has been attacking the traditions of feudal oppression. A memory of the power of tradition operates as he reflects that ‘since it had always been so, men should be eaten’ (X). The modernity of the tone is plain: it recalls Marx on the impossibility of breaking away from the past: ‘the tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living’.6 Where tradition replaces history, there is nothing but inertia. He says he recollects that in ancient times people often ate humans, but is hazy about it, and when he tried to look it up, he discovered that his history-book had no chronology, and that scrawled over each page were the words ‘Confucian Virtue and Morality’. Still, reading between the lines of the book he could see the two words written throughout, ‘Eat people’ (III). There is the ideology within the text of history, and there is a sub-text, which he reads because he is in a traumatised state.

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Second, the entries comment on the elder brother, saying that he is giving him a strange look that combines fear and a desire to murder (III). In fact, the elder brother is the theme of the narrative, for his marking of his compositions in a way that vindicated the bad and pulled down the good, and for when he brings an old man to examine the madman. This old man has a murderous gleam in his eye, and seems to say to the brother about him, ‘To be eaten at once’ (IV). The brother has taught him, while instructing him in reading, ‘People exchange their sons to eat’ (V). By section VII, the diarist is sure that his brother is a man-eater, and confronts him with it in section X. In sections XI and XII, he reflects that his brother must have eaten his sister, and recalls his brother telling him at the age of four or five that when a man’s parents were ill, he should cut a bit of his flesh and boil it for them. Fear of being eaten is a paranoia, and the third form of commentary the diaries perform is to relocate the paranoia, which has been referred to in the preface, and which is the text’s subject, not in the younger brother, but in the community, which ‘wants to eat men’ but at the same time is afraid of being eaten (IX). It is an image for the national fears that drive nations to war: when Lu Xun wrote, the First World War was in its last year. The technique that the paranoid community employs is to drive its victim towards suicide (VII): suicide will be the theme of the short story The White Light. Paranoia in the community works by creating paranoia in the other, in the person it deems mad. It should be stressed how new as a diagnosis paranoia was: Freud’s first discussion of it appeared in 1911, only seven years earlier, in the Schreber case (Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia [Dementia Paranoides]). This Latin phrase translates, effectively, as paranoid schizophrenia; the last word, which was Eugen Bleuler’s term, had been first used between 1908 and 1911. In English, the word ‘paranoia’ with a general meaning of ‘derangement’, appeared early in the nineteenth century, but not till 1892 with the sense of ‘fear of persecution’ (so OED). Paranoia in this text works through an insistence on being looked at, starting with the moon and the dog (I), and then, specifically, through the eyes, which are referred to in virtually every section, including fish’s eyes, white and hard, which stare at the diarist who, after eating, vomits, uncertain as to what he has taken in, as though whatever it is threatens his identity, his being, making him abject, unable to maintain his individual subjectivity. The latter is threatened throughout through the fear of cannibalism, which is, of course, the ultimate in the removal of those bodily borders which define the self.7 The preface to Call to Arms and A Madman’s Diary illuminate each other. The preface is full of the subject of youth as that which loses its dreams and finds nothing but loneliness. The madman of the diary, though he says, in

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the context of looking at the new moon, that he is over thirty (I) — Lu Xun was now thirty-seven — is also defined by youth, being a younger brother, and he remembers a still younger sister. His ending, ‘Save the children’ (XIII), which is powerful in the context of the publication in New Youth, appeals on behalf of those still younger than him. The young man of section VIII, smiling like his brother, and only twenty, he thinks is already inured to eating flesh, so that youth may be a lost cause. The paranoia is the concomitant of the melancholia. He is locked in his room (III) just as Lu Xun’s preface says that he is the man in the iron house, and the image of confinement is maintained in sections X and XI, where it is said that the door is never opened. Gogol’s short stories follow hard on the heels of Tales of Belkin (1830) by Pushkin (1799–1837), who, writing in prose, gave Russian vernacular literature a new direction; but whereas Pushkin’s world is aristocratic, Gogol, five years later, deals with the dehumanised nonentity, the clerk.8 The Diary of a Madman is the only narrative of Gogol’s which has, like Lu Xun’s, a sustained first-person narrator: in both the Russian and Chinese writers, the short story method, the first person, and madness all come together. Gogol’s narrator, Proprishchin, is a bachelor aged forty-two, no higher than a titular Counsellor, and he is fantasising about the Director’s daughter, Sophie, whose dog, Madgie, he also fantasises as talking to and exchanging letters with another dog, Fidèle. According to the diary entry for 12 November, he takes these letters from her dog-basket, incurring a bite in the process. These ‘letters’ turn out to be about Sophie’s admiration for a Kammerjunker, Treplov, and her non-admiration for the clerk in the front-office, who spends his days sharpening quills. On 5 December the diarist starts to fantasise that he is the King of Spain, and ends in a madhouse, where he is evidently violently treated, and at the end has delirious imaginings of running away, finishing with ‘Mother, have pity on your sick little child’, a line recalled at the end of A Madman’s Diary, and having a traumatised evocativeness which runs throughout Lu Xun’s stories. But that line is not the end: the coda is this last question, commenting indirectly on the sexual and political humiliations of Charles X of France (driven out in the July revolution of 1830), ‘And did you know that the king of France has a wart right under his nose?’9 Proprishchin’s madness takes the form of inverting everything that happens to him (every humiliation is a success) and of fantasising about the dogs, whose ‘dialogue’ shows the text’s relation to Cervantes’s Dialogue of the Dogs. Cervantes wrote this conversation (not exchange of letters) as one of his Exemplary Stories, and it influenced Gogol, and through him, if unconsciously, Lu Xun.10 In the madhouse, Proprishchin thinks that Spain and China are the same, which is a way of fantasising his power within China,

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and he has mad imaginings about the moon, and noses living on the moon. It is probable that these need to be read, like all the text, in terms of sexual inadequacy with regard to the woman; Sophie is the unattainable, and to construct a romance about being in love with her is a way of avoidance of other women, it guarantees that he will never have to confront them. At the same time, his own fantasies take the form of writing as — not a woman, but — a bitch, a female dog sending letters — i.e. literature — to another. Writing as a dog enables, for the madman, both the fantasy, and the mask, of being feminine, and also the self-hatred by which the dog criticises him as the clerk who is made fun of by Sophie. The moon is the unattainable woman, and the nose is a displacement for the phallic, as so often in Gogol.11 If we think of Gogol’s text registering, perhaps unconsciously, a crisis within nineteenth-century masculinity, the clerk first preferring to be feminine, or being a male like the King of Spain with unquestioned phallic authority, this perhaps because his male desire takes homosexual forms, then it seems that madness and inarticulable states within gender may correlate. Reading A Madman’s Diary in the light of Gogol’s story, which has so enabled Lu Xun’s, is to note how much has been translated: the moon, the dogs, and the mode of the story, which works by the inversion of every idea, so that everything may, perhaps, be read against its stated sense. Further, the madman in Gogol is confined at the end, but that is not stated; the reader has to deduce it; in Lu Xun, the sense of being a public exhibition in a madhouse is implied in section X, but not stated. In Gogol’s story, there is the sense of a person utterly lost and confined, while, at the end he is calling to the mother, the unattainable female, in utter desperation. It transfers into the cry with which Lu Xun’s text finishes, and with the irony that the children have not been spared, that the only ‘salvation’ that has taken place is that the narrator has been rehabilitated, brought back into ‘normal’ life, so that he might not even recognise the cry he made before. The call to the mother is echoed by the mother’s weeping in Lu Xun (XI), which becomes also a subject of the close of the short story Medicine. The moon in Lu Xun’s text, of course, while it is associated with madness, because of its changes, equally associates with women, and its presence and its non-presence in this text may be read as a sign of femininity, perhaps of the diarist’s. The mother’s weeping is repressed, however, and the mother in section III, who is punishing her son and saying she could eat him, makes the feminine that which is disappearing. Here it is worth recalling some comments by Fredric Jameson, who points out that ‘the libidinal centre of Lu Xun’s text is ... not sexuality but the oral stage’, though arguing that the language of the sexual is inseparable from the language of eating.12 The fear of being eaten, then, corresponds to

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the absence of women in the text, or the absence of femininity. It inscribes the Diary as a text of alienated sexuality, where madness — as in Gogol — is a failure in the male to relate to sexuality, save on the basis of fearing its devouring qualities. It is necessary, however, not to read this text too schematically. There seems in it something more complex that derives from Gogol, which makes A Madman’s Diary both difficult, and not a text with a single thesis: i.e. that this is a story whose theme is the alienation produced within China, with the fear that its progress is really regression, or that its Confucianism is the prevention of any development. In this text it is not a question of a binary opposition between society and the ‘madman’ but of a quality of excess in the text which overflows both. An example from section III shows the younger brother thrusting out his fists to the doctor, Mr Ho, and the old man telling him not to let his imagination run away with him. The diarist considers: The whole lot of them wanting to eat people yet stealthily trying to keep up appearances, not daring to do it outright, was really enough to make me die of laughter. I couldn’t help it, I nearly split my sides, I was so amused. I knew that this laughter voiced courage and integrity. Both the old man and my brother turned pale, awed by my courage and integrity. But my courage just makes them all the more eager to eat me, to acquire some of my courage for themselves. The old man went out of the gate, but before he had gone far, he said to my brother in a low voice, “To be eaten at once!” My brother nodded. So you are in it too! This stupendous discovery, though it came as a shock, is no more than I might expect: the accomplice eating me is my elder brother! The eater of human flesh is my elder brother! I am the younger brother of an eater of human flesh! I, who will probably be eaten by others, am the younger brother of an eater of human flesh! (III. XY 43–44, Y 5–6).

Several comments may be made about this. First, this is not the first time that the younger brother has had such suspicions of his brother: they appeared earlier in section III as well as later in the earlier part of section IV. Second, however much the younger brother harps on cannibalism, he remains untouched by the end, and there is no hint of anyone else being eaten. Then, his obsessionalism perhaps makes him misinterpret what the doctor — if he is one — says: ‘to be eaten at once’ may refer to the medicine, not to the diarist. It also makes him think first that he will be eaten by his brother (Lyell’s

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translation is not so sure about that, ending the first paragraph cited here as: ‘My own elder brother had thrown in with the very people who wanted to eat me’ [34]). But then, in the last paragraph, he thinks that he will be eaten by others. In other words, his obsession is that he will be eaten, which by this becomes almost a desire, and his obsession is his brother: hence the turning around of the idea in the last three brief sentences, which are also paragraphs. It is as if he is so fascinated, half-in-love with, the idea of being eaten by his brother that he must turn it round in as many ways as he can. This as a pleasure is inseparable from a display of what he calls courage, and righteousness, which means that he actually gains something from the fantasy of being eaten. In Freud’s terms, the idea of ‘incorporation’ is that by which the self consumes the other to enlarge its own ego.13 ‘Incorporation’ is the word Freud uses to discuss a form of love which ‘is consistent with abolishing the object’s separate existence’, and which is therefore ambivalent, since it could also be called hatred. Here, however, the person to be eaten gains a more powerful ego, which he feels intimidates the others. Who is eating whom, especially when the younger brother lets out a laugh which is aggressive in quality? The laughter, which he feels exhibits the courage that he feels they will be jealous of, does much to qualify the sense that the diarist is the innocent self victimised by his society. Like Gogol’s madman, there seems a megalomania evident whose excess makes him take everything for signs. The moon is very bright in section I, giving him, therefore, high spirits which are completely unjustified by the rest of the text, and unheard of again. In section II there is no moon — a bad omen, leading, perhaps, to the opening of III: ‘I can’t sleep at night’ and to the short no. VI: Pitch dark. I don’t know whether it is day or night. The Zhaos’ dog has started barking again. The fierceness of a lion, the timidity of a rabbit, the craftiness of a fox ... (XY 45, Y 6–7)

Here it is not clear whether the darkness is objective (because he is imprisoned) or his obsession, any more than it is clear what the third sentence refers to: to the people all around him? Or himself? Or is it just to animals, and a mistake to apply it to humans? In section XI, the sun has stopped shining, and while this may have an objective meaning, in terms of the prison, it also seems to compare with the loss of the moon in section II, and it could be seen as a further loss of reality on the part of the diarist. Though the moon has not quite disappeared: in section VIII, the young man, already discussed, is smiling and in the face of the question from the diarist, ‘Is it right to eat human beings?’

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responds that the diarist is fond of a joke, adding that ‘it is very fine today’, upon which the diarist replies, ‘It is fine, and the moon is very bright.’ Perhaps it is forcing the translation to make the diarist mean that the moon is bright in the daytime, but the brightness of the moon, in contrast to the darkness of the situation, figures excess, and the obsessionalism of the diarist: how much time has moved on since he first noted the moon was bright: how many days, weeks, or months? Obsessionalism means that everything stands out in too vivid detail, just as in the next moment he says that they are killing people in the village, and ‘you can see it written all over the books, in fresh red ink’, making the young man to whom he speaks grow ‘ghastly pale’. The three colours, the yellow moon, the red ink, which is also blood, and the whiteness of the face are all part of the diarist’s perception. The moon’s brightness, if it is real, could also associate with the smile of the young man, but it is a moment of excess within the text, that which makes it Gogol-like in quality. It tips the text towards comedy; it makes the point that if this society is carnivorous, the perception does not come from someone able to make a critique of it, but from a person whose own insights are all in excess and too single, too focussed on one point which is offered without explanation or development to become a critique. It shows that there is no truth to be learned from the narrative, this also being a point associated with the fragmented nature of the text, and it allows the reader to take the text both as the crazed loneliness of the diarist, which works itself out in these visions of excess, and as a comment on China, or as neither of these. But at the end of the text, that is, in chronological terms, the beginning, the preface, the excess seems to have disappeared, and the brother tamed. There will no longer be such perceptions of society, and the loss of excess itself is that which is to be feared. As much as Gogol, Nietzsche has been cited as a source for A Madman’s Diary.14 The passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra which Lu Xun took begins with Zarathustra in the prologue to his book saying to the people: I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All things so far have created something beyond themselves; and so you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even to go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is much more ape than any ape. Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost ... 15

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Zarathustra’s words use the imagery of evolution not to support it, but to show, perhaps contra Darwin, whose schematicism Nietzsche opposes, or rather, corrects, that all types are hybrids, crossings between one species and another. Nietzsche believes no more in the category of the species than he does in that of the individual. Hence he is against ‘the origin of species’. Whereas evolutionary thought, because it is teleological, concentrates on the end of the process, the perfected type, or species, Nietzsche is interested in the in-between, on what is becoming. In a note of 1881, Nietzsche says that ‘there are no species, but only different kinds of individuals! ... Nature does not desire to “preserve the species”’!16 In terms of the specific quotation, the ape, which teases humanity because of its power of imitation, may be seen as the supreme imitator, and an example of the ‘herd’ animal, as opposed to the predatory animal. The ape indeed because it is only imitative, not initiating anything, is a type in Nietzsche of cruelty: To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure. This severe statement expresses an old, powerful, human, all too human sentiment — though the monkeys [apes] too might endorse it, for it is reported that they heralded and preluded man in the devising of bizarre cruelties. There is no feast without cruelty, as man’s entire history attests. Punishment, too, has its festive features. (Genealogy of Morals 2.6, 198)

It may be no exaggeration to say that this statement could be placed as an interpretive key at the heart of Lu Xun’s writings. The only difference is that the ‘herd animal’ in Lu Xun is not the ape, but the wolf, or, as will also be seen, the dog. We will have to consider throughout this study how this idea of the herd animal which delights in cruelty, and constructs its festivities around it, helps in a reading of Lu Xun. Whereas both the Western bourgeois and the Chinese neo-Confucian think in their different ways in a self-satisfied mode of ‘man’ as a completed, and perfected species, the culmination of everything, so that fixed rules and standards may be laid down for him, evolutionary theory can be used, perhaps against Darwin, to see man as not a single achieved thing, but a split between a plant (vegetable life) and a ghost (someone who thinks of themselves as no more than spirit). In the same way, the post-Nietzschean philosophers Deleuze and Guattari write that they ‘avoid defining a body by its organs and function, [and] we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects’.17 (And by affects, they mean ‘intensities’, i.e. intense energies, which ‘come from external parts or from the individual’s own parts. Affects are becomings’ — in other words, they are not pre-definable emotions.) If man is considered

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as not an achieved finality, with, for instance, emotions that can be known and pre-described and — important for literary writing, represented, but is instead thought as only as in process, and so not definable and not representable, that requires a certain kind of madness. It is this, positively, which Lu Xun’s diarist takes on himself when he incorporates Zarathustra’s words into his speech to his elder brother: Brother, probably all primitive people ate a little human flesh to begin with. Later, because their views altered some of them stopped and tried so hard to do what was right that they changed into men ... but some are still eating people — just like reptiles. Some have changed into fish, birds, monkeys and finally men ... when those who eat men compare themselves with those who don’t, how ashamed they must be ... (XY 48)

The text shows the ability to transpose the Nietzschean context into the Chinese, and to make it re-signify. The Nietzschean form of madness joins with Gogol’s, so that the diarist seems to suffer from two sorts of madness; being both feng (mad in the sense of being mentally ill) and kuang (mad in the sense of Nietzschean self-affirmation, conflicting with ordinary society). That both words are used in the text is relevant. Gogol’s madman in this Chinese translation, is also kuang. It is not a question of the sources of madness, but the recognition that all forms of madness are plural states, forms of excess, not productive of a single crisis, not to be spoken of in single terms. Nietzsche’s sense can be taken further, that the human cannot be taken as a fixed subject, or as complete, that it needs to be brought into question. In the case of Lu Xun, it would go outside a context that would limit him to giving a critique of pre-modern China (or rather, of post-1911 China failing to move out of pre-modernity). Jacques Derrida, in an interview with the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘“Eating Well”, Or, The Calculation of the Subject’ uses the neologism ‘carnophallogocentrism’, a term which implies that the humanist subject of modern Western philosophy centres itself and its belief in itself as a privileged consciousness through eating flesh, taking possession of nature (Derrida says that no head of state could ever present himself as a vegetarian: he connects headship with the right to eat, through the very word chef — chief, and cook). For Derrida, ‘this subject does not want just to master and possess nature actively. In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh’.18 Hence the psychoanalytic language of incorporation, and of appropriation. Derrida’s argument is that eating others is intrinsic to the humanist subject, since eating founds a community (‘one never eats entirely on one’s own’ [282]) — we may think of the place given to ‘hospitality’ in culture — and that eating, if considered as a consumption of

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the other, challenges the belief in the privilege of the humanist subject.19 In that sense, A Madman’s Diary is much more modern in its challenging of humanism than has so far been considered, and the madness in it refers not just to the nightmare vision of the younger brother, but is likely to be applied to any who would try to rethink the grounds upon which traditional Western (as well as Chinese) humanism has centred itself.

4 A Call to Arms: On Memory

Kong Yiji The title of the second of Lu Xun’s stories, written in March 1919, and first published in New Youth in May 1919, is given to a person, a shadow of a Falstaff, so an older man, whose speech is frequently said to be full of archaisms, and whose death is imminent, and who contrasts both with the madman in the previous narrative, and with the narrator in this story. Kong Yiji’s family name suggests Confucius. His other name implies the elementary characters acquired in the early stages of learning to write Chinese. His name, it seems, embodies Chineseness, and how one gets into any national ideology, which is by writing its language, a task taught through the agencies of patriarchy, but which is internalised, taken on spontaneously, so that the narrator, when he is asked by Kong Yiji if he knows the part of the Chinese character that is necessary for writing the word ‘aniseed-peas’, is irritated that he might be thought to be someone who needs to be taught such a thing (and, it is implied, by someone so down on his luck as this scholar is). Kong Yiji has studied the classics, but never passed the official examinations, and can only make a living by copying calligraphy, in which he is not much of a success. The narrator begins in an almost anthropological manner to describe the taverns in Luzhen; the technique is employed much more fully in the later story, The New-Year Sacrifice. Luzhen as a name implies Lu Xun himself, and the family name of the mother; it is partly his way of identifying himself with the rural existence he speaks of, and partly his way of indicating that China is held by a past from which it cannot escape. He remembers himself as a waiter in the tavern with the ironically chosen name ‘Prosperity’.1 It is an utopian title, even a Marxist one, but at the end of the story, the man whose biography is hinted at, with many gaps and incompletenesses in it (the technique will be much more developed in The Misanthrope) will be unable to afford to pay.

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His death, like that of the woman in Regret for the Past, will be left doubtful: suicide, or simply death from poverty? And there is no prosperity in any other than the crassest sense in the tavern. The waiter at the time of the incident was twelve. He proceeds for two years after that in what seems a monotonous job. The period of time is marked by two Mid-Autumn Festivals, and extends beyond that by half a year, going up to and beyond the following Lunar New Year. He says that these events happened twenty-plus years ago, so that the action dates to the last decade of the Qing dynasty, or, indeed, to the end of the nineteenth century, as though Kong Yiji dies with the beginning of the twentieth century. (The civil service examinations, which this man has failed, were abolished in 1905, a point which will be referred to by Ah Q.) He starts, in the narrative standing up, and the only man in the bar who drinks standing, but he finishes on the floor, crawling, a Samuel Beckett-like figure, after which he disappears altogether, and is assumed dead. In between, he seems to have been beaten up frequently (for committing minor thefts: he has to live somehow), and the sense of a cycle of violence in which he is always passive, always beaten, suggests issues that will be more fully developed in The True Story of Ah Q. The narrator’s point of view comes out in the callousness with which he records the death of Kong Yiji — and in noting that, the loneliness which was the topic of the preface returns, as does the sense that youth is bound to repeat the failures of the older man. The callousness is that of the narrator, which, as in A Madman’s Diary is to be assumed to be a dramatic voice, but, as said before, the choice of name means that Lu Xun, whose fictional identity is being created through these texts that bear his name, does not wish to dissociate himself from this waiter: in other words, the text is confessional, so long as it is remembered that the character who appears in confessional terms is also a fiction, so that any confession needs also to be ‘read’ critically; it should not be accepted on its own terms. The point is that the waiter cannot be separated from Kong Yiji, except by what Freud calls ‘the narcissism of minor differences’,2 that is, the need to assert difference from the other and hence antagonism, out of a spirit of ressentiment, Nietzsche’s term for the envy, or rancour, felt by the self (especially the petit-bourgeois self) against the other who is felt to threaten his own sense of status or well-being.3 Such a narcissism even shows up in the first line of the text, which says that the layout in the taverns in Luzhen is unique — i.e. it is not paralleled in all China. On such bases distinction rests. In such a community of ressentiment, with the boss a ‘grim-faced man’ and the customers not much pleasanter, the important thing is that a man pays. The boss notes, when he is ‘slowly’ — and his ponderousness is important — making up accounts at the Mid-Autumn festival, that Kong Yiji has not

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appeared for a long time and still owes nineteen coppers, and he notes the point again at the end of the Chinese year. Kong Yiji in any comparable setting with wine and a reputation for being a thief as well as a heavy drinker would be a figure of carnival, not only witty, but the source that wit is in others, as Shakespeare’s Falstaff says about himself (2 Henry IV. 1.2.8–9). Certainly, the only comedy around is that which occurs when Kong Yiji comes into the tavern, but it is people laughing at him, not with him, scapegoating him, another version of the idea that people eat each other, and at the point when Kong Yiji has been introduced fully, the narrator says ‘that was how Kong Yiji contributed to our enjoyment, but we got along all right without him too’ (XY 56, Y 16). There is nothing of Bakhtin’s spirit of carnival here, and none of the excess that marked out even A Madman’s Diary. A dead person at the end is not spoken of (significantly, the tavernkeeper stops mentioning the money that is owed) because in this society there is a disavowal of death, because there is not enough life to go round. The spirit which laughs is also the spirit that mourns.

Medicine The third of Lu Xun’s stories appeared also in New Youth in May 1919, just after the uprising of the students on May Fourth, who were disgusted with the Chinese representatives who at the Versailles conference of 1919 at the end of the First World War, had conceded Japanese rights to Shantung. With the writing of Medicine, it is possible to see the flexibility of Lu Xun’s approach in the writing of short stories.4 The ambiguity of the voices in A Madman’s Diary, and the willingness to render an obsessive state, endlessly repeating itself, makes that text extraordinarily modern, the more so since the subject of the text is a society which has failed to modernise. Kong Yiji reads like a personal reminiscence, creating glimpses of a life through the narrowest of windows: the impressions given by the young boy of Kong Yiji on the occasions when he sees him, and, in commenting on him, saying something also about the society that laughs at him. In Medicine (Yào), there is something different again. This short story, which Lyell makes the deliberate choice to render in the present tense, as if emphasising that it does not assume that there is a single, settled knowledge from which the story originates and to which it is directed, needs reading several times before it unfolds itself. It is not easy to see what action is taking place in it, and there is certainly no relationship between the way the narrative proceeds and the significance of the events; in that sense, the short story form — as here, at its best — challenges conventional forms

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of narrative. The formal point, however, is at the service of something else, in that the short story creates a society unable to read significance, unable to see the meaning of the signs it lives by, and that is the newness of the text. The narrator, who is unvoiced, unlike the two ‘I’s of the first story, or of the second, is omniscient, but in concealing narrative connections, which a realist novelist would supply, leaves the text as fragmented, incomplete, its details to be worked out by a reader who by that is drawn into the text, made active. Medicine divides into four parts. In the first, Old Shuan goes out to buy something in the early hours of the morning, the lamp shedding a ‘ghostly light’, the symbolism of which works throughout the text, as if suggesting that there is no prospect of survival here, when everything is dead, ghostly already. His wife gives him the money; the sound of his son coughing is also heard. What he buys is a roll of steamed bread with crimson drops dripping to the ground. In the second part, the parents give the food to Little Shuan. The third part is set in Old Shuan’s shop. There is a greybearded person in the shop, and a hunchback, who was introduced as someone who spends all his time in tea-houses, and who implies the carnival aspect of the narrative, and then a heavy-jowled man, who is called Uncle Kang, and who, it is learned, is the executioner. He begins by saying openly that the mantou (roll) dipped in blood is the cure for any consumption (tuberculosis): one meaning of the title now comes clear. Tuberculosis, as one of Lu Xun’s father’s ailments, binds this text to Lu Xun, making him, perhaps, by writing, father to his own dying father, just as in the previous story, the figure of Kong Yuji recalls Lu Xun’s ancestry, and tells a story of past failure. Kang has articulated one part of the story clearly, and then proceeds to narrate what happened with the criminal who was killed that morning: he was the son of Widow Xia, and he had been informed upon by his uncle, who was fearful that his own family would have been executed and their property seized. ‘But instead? Silver’ (XY 64, Y 24). The uncle of the ‘criminal’ has pocketed the entire reward of twenty-five pieces of silver. The jailer is talked about, and called Red-eye, and it seems that the fault of Xia was that ‘he said the great Qing empire belongs to us!’ The text of this third section allows the reader to pick up the association of ideas, though it is not stated openly: the blood of Xia has been used for Shuan’s cure; that was what was bought by the father in the first section, when the execution was very distantly described. It will be recalled how Lu Xun’s own turning away from medicine came, according to the preface, when he watched the news-slide of a fellow Chinese being executed. The form in which the story is told makes the events of the trial and execution of Xia, (call these events B) which are actually prior to and then

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coincidental with the events with which the narrative begins, are given at a point, then, which is subsequent in the narration of events A (the story of Old Shuan and his son). The effect of this slippage is to deny the connections between the death of Xia, killed to satisfy predatory demands, and the death of Shuan who is, of course, not revived by the blood of the other boy. It also has the effect that the reader thinks that events A are the crucial ones, whereas events B, partially repressed or hidden, as in the first section, are at least as important, and public, affecting the political scene, as events A apparently do not, save, of course, that illnesses are also part of political life. The reader has to learn to undo the priority which the narrative gives. And the two names, it has often been pointed out, of Hua (given at the very beginning of the story, when Old Shuan’s name is given in full, and then given in section 4), and of Xia, make up an ancient name for China; but, if that is the case, so that it links the two dead boys, and their two mothers, it must be said that it is still a fragmented, not a complete, China. The fourth part of the story comes later, at Qing Ming Festival (an occasion for cleaning graves, and taking place in April, which is six months after the opening of the story). Here, two mothers are seen at two graves. The graves on the left in the cemetery are for executed criminals. Those on the right of the ‘natural boundary line’ (XY 65, Y 25) — a line which asserts again ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ — are for paupers. Boundaries must be observed. The two mothers are Mrs Xia and Mrs Shuan, who has clearly lost her son to tuberculosis, and Mrs Shuan steps over the boundary to the other woman, who is grieving for her son who has been executed. The act is, literally, one of transgression, a ‘stepping over’, which is what that word means, crossing the border, the limit, the law. In that way, hope for the future lies in such transgressiveness. The grave of Xia has a wreath of flowers, and the surprised mother feels that it means her son has worked a wonder. She says that if her son can hear her, the crow on the tree should fly down to the grave. The story ends with the two women going and the crow flying away, ‘like an arrow towards the far horizon’ (XY 67, Y 27). By ending with the mourning mothers, the narrative returns to Gogol, and to the appeal that finished that text: ‘Mother! have pity on your sick little child!’ Medicine recalls A Madman’s Diary in obvious ways. The sick boy, his sickness obviously expressive of the society’s impoverishment in every sense, is to be fed the blood of another. The execution is not described in the first half in order to indicate how little significance it has for the people who profit from it, how little its real cost matters. In the third part, the appalling Uncle Kang becomes enthusiastic as he talks about the way the jailer, Red-eye, took

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the clothes from Xia (he has a grudging admiration for Red-eye’s dexterity), and how the Third Uncle Xia pocketed the reward. (Uncle Kang’s spirit is an intensification of the meanness of spirit of the people in the tavern in Kong Yiji.) The predatory nature of a society where everyone eats the other, which is a literal subject in A Madman’s Diary — because the diarist takes the metaphor as literal — is both literal and metaphorical here, and it gives to the text the sense of a development from A Madman’s Diary. It seems that the earlier vision, which was clearly obsessive, excessive, comic and horrifying at the same time has become ‘normal’; for instance, Old Shuan hurries out of the shop to buy the mantou, and as he goes towards the place of execution, so his spirits revive, ‘as if he had suddenly grown younger and possessed some miraculous life-giving power’ (XY 59). So much for going to see a man killed. Significantly, Old Shuan is not mentioned in the fourth part; his place as a parent is taken by his wife. Similarly, one of the people in the crowd has eyes (the word returns from the Diary) which ‘shone with a lustful light, like a famished person’s at the sight of food’. Life revives with the death of another. Nietzsche, it has been seen, has made the point: punishment was, and typically is, a carnival event for those watching it: ‘punishment has its festive features’ is how the last line of The Genealogy of Morals (Essay 2, section 6) concludes. Old Shuan feels nausea at holding the mantou; his son’s coughing is mentioned several times, but the boy is only focused on once, when he is made to eat the mantou: ‘he had the oddest feeling, as if he were holding his own life in his hands. ... Soon it was all eaten, the flavour completely forgotten, only the empty plate left’ (XY 61–62, Y 22). Memory becomes a crucial theme here; the point being that this society cannot remember (loss of cultural and personal memory is a subject which makes the text unmistakably modern). Memory returns as topic in the cemetery, when the mother of Xia says about the flowers on her son’s grave, ‘Son, they all wronged you, and you do not forget’ (XY 67, Y 27). The memory of injustice survives, and becomes a motivation for telling this story of the last days of the Qing dynasty. It survives, too, oddly, in the point that the words of Xia are recounted by Uncle Kang, in the purest example of Bakhtinian dialogism, and which indicates a debt to Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic novel: the ideal language of revolutionary utopia is expressed in the language of the other, which keeps it, however unconsciously, alive: my comments in square brackets within the text, attempt to bring out this dialogism. ‘... he even tried to incite the jailer to revolt.’ ‘No! The idea of it!’ A man in his twenties [part of Lu Xun’s interest in youth], sitting in the back row, expressed indignation. ‘You know, Red-eye went to sound him out, but he started chatting

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with him. He said that the great Qing empire belonged to us. Just think: Is that kind of talk rational? Red-eye knew he had only an old mother at home [the passage shows how even Kang must take on the language of the other — i.e. he has to enter into the experience of the Xias], but had never imagined he was so poor. He couldn’t squeeze anything out of him; he was already good and angry, and then the young fool would “scratch the tiger’s head”, so he gave him a couple of slaps.’ ‘Red-eye is a good boxer. Those slaps must have hurt!’ The hunchback in the corner by the wall exulted. ‘The rotter was not afraid of being beaten. He even said how sorry he was.’ ‘Nothing to be sorry about in beating a wretch like that,’ said Greybeard. Kang looked at him superciliously and said disdainfully, ‘You misunderstood. The way he said it, he was sorry for Red-eye.’ [In being forced to explain, he has to put himself into the situation of the other.] His listener’s eyes took on a glazed look, and no one spoke. Little Shuan had finished his rice, and was perspiring profusely, his head steaming. ‘Sorry for Red-eye — crazy! He must have been crazy!’ said Greybeard, as if he suddenly saw light. (XY 64, Y 24–25).

The passage is, in spite of its subject-matter, wonderful grotesque comedy in the dramatic situation it presents. It shows Kang being ‘othered’ in being forced to explain Xia. The narrative of what Xia replied to Red-eye is so extraordinary, utopian, non-rational, that though he understands it, he cannot make himself understood. In having to explain in the language of the other what Xia meant, he opens the way for his audience (note the reference to the ‘back row’) to grasp also the force of this utopian language, the force of this craziness (which, for all the differences, aligns Xia with the diarist). It opens the way for Greybeard really to ‘see the light’, and though this does not happen in an Utopian sense, the text still preserves it as a moment of openness, as if the moon, Chinese symbol of enlightenment, could rise on Greybeard, as it does on the Diarist. It cannot be forgotten that Xia in prison has uttered a Marxist statement, nor that he appreciated that Red-eye was under the power of a dominant ideology, so that in a sense even more profound than the Christianity which is also brought into the dialogism of the piece, Red-eye is one of those who ‘know not what they do’ (Luke 23.34) in crucifying Christ. This is not to align Lu Xun with Christianity, but to show how that (colonial) discourse, also at work in modern China, is also made to become part of a series of texts that may be used to critique a closed ideology from

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the outside. Kang has become the narrator, in that sense following the narrator who tells the whole story. That narrator does not show the signs of understanding what it is that he is telling; Kang is in a more extreme case of saying something without knowing what he does, but in doing so, he is nonetheless putting a Marxist and utopian idea into circulation, as a carnival possibility, a carnival which would replace the carnival of punishment.5 The dialogue ends with Kang telling the young Shuan that what he has eaten is a guaranteed cure: the hunchback comes in at that point with the word ‘crazy’, and it is left to the reader to reflect where the real craziness lies: in the belief in such cures, and the imperception which creates them. Kang also spells out what goes through the mind of Red-eye; he is angry because he had not imagined that the boy could be so poor. The boy’s Marxist statement — which evokes the idea of ‘Prosperity’ in the previous story — only angers him further, scratches his tiger’s head, as Kang puts it, by trying to get him to revolt. Red-eye hits the boy because the sentiment expressed is one that comes too close to him: he needs money, the Empire possesses it and he does not. His anger is an unconscious expression of the point that he has internalised Xia’s point. His violence is displaced; he hits the boy instead of directing it at those who keep him and Xia in poverty. Kang shows more than a half-awareness of the politics of what is going on in reporting it, just as he also shows up the rapaciousness within the jailer. It needs only be added that the passage shows a sequence of people identifying with the wrong person — with the jailer, with the authorities, with, in fact, the Qing Empire — against poverty and helplessness, and in that inversion of values, reading the world upside-down, it becomes apparent that a Marxist revolution, which gave the empire to everyone, would by its own inversion, re-carnivalise what is a black and bitter carnival already. Lu Xun’s method, it was noted in A Madman’s Diary was to follow Gogol by inverting values, making the reader understand in the sense opposite to that given. The literary technique of inversion, and the politics of inversion come together, and what combines them is the willingness to be mad (as Xia was) or to cross boundaries (as the woman does at the end). Kang, then, memorialises the character of Xia, just as some unknown person, or people, has left a memorial of flowers on the grave; it is another aspect of the text’s openness that who has done this is not specified. The end of the story is similarly open. The crow perched on the tree does not fly down to the grave-mound as a sign that the boy Xia is present in spirit. As the women turn to go, Xia’s mother still wondering about the presence of the flowers, they hear a ‘caw’ and they watch the crow ‘stretch its wings, brace itself to take off, then fly like an arrow towards the far horizon’. The bird’s

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presence and action is uninterpretable, and the mother is in error in thinking she can give it a meaning, but at the same time, by closing with it, the text allows for the possibility of letting go, of mourning not simply becoming melancholia.6 Perhaps it also implies revolution; action for the future, not a staying with the past. Certainly, in the poise of the bird, and in the comparison with the outgoing arrow, there is something suggestive for the women leaving the cemetery.7

Tomorrow Tomorrow (Míngtian) — whose title seems to echo the meaning of the flight of the crow in Medicine — appeared in Xin chao (The Renaissance) in October 1919. With this fourth story, Lu Xun returns to the small-town atmosphere of such a place as Shaoxing, called, as in Kong Yiji, Luzhen. The town is twice called ‘old fashioned’ (XY 68, 72, Y 28, 32), and the point enforces its limitations. The ‘Prosperity’ bar reappears, and this time it is given a geography, placed next door to the house of Fourth Shan’s wife. The association is important: with the two men drinking in the bar, both of them half-attracted to the woman who lives next door, and listening as they drink and sing in a maudlin way to the sound of the loom next door, which, even at midnight is usually still working, since Fourth Shan’s wife is so poor. But the loom is silent (silence is significant in this text, whose subject is simply the death of the child) because the woman is nursing her sick child. The first line, which is dialogue, Red-nosed Gong saying ‘Not a sound — what’s wrong with the kid?’, emphasises lack of knowledge as a way in to the text: the non-knowledge of the men in the bar, of the woman, of the doctor, of the pharmacist. After the funeral and the wake, ‘the sun made it clear that it was about to set, and the guests made it clear that they were about to leave’ (XY 74, Y 33). Actions are ingrained, ideologically fixed in the unconscious — this is the force of saying that the town is old-fashioned — and there is no space for a knowledge which goes outside the mind-set of the people. In line with this general non-knowledge, it is significant that the narrator of Kong Yiji, who knew only certain things, has gone too, and is replaced by an apparently omniscient narrator — but all omniscience contains its own repression of knowledge — as in Medicine. Like this latter text, Tomorrow writes particularly about the experiences of the mother, and it knows there can be no outcry — or call to arms — which pleads ‘Save the children’. She is called ‘simple’ — cubèn — (XY 69, twice, 70, 75, twice, Y 29, 30, 34), which Lyell translates as ‘coarse and uneducated’ and which Lau (73) glosses as ‘uneducated

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and not bright (both components suggest clumsily), slow-witted’. This may make the narrator’s tone superior; however it is usually followed by a qualifier, such as the word ‘but’ making her simple-mindedness something which does not stop her from doing something or knowing something. The only time there is no qualifier is the first. She has just been thinking that after doing everything else (e.g. going to the shrine) she may, in the morning, have to go to the doctor (Lu Xun presents doing this, and the deceptiveness of the prescription, as a disaster). ‘But maybe Bao’er’s only bad at night; when the sun comes out tomorrow his fever may go .... a lot of illnesses are like that.’ This desperate optimism, which associates with the first use in the text of the title-word, is followed by the narrator’s comment: Fourth Shan’s Wife was a simple woman, who did not know what a fearful word ‘but’ is. Thanks to this ‘but’, many bad things turn out well, many good things turn out badly. (XY 69, Y 29)

This assumes superiority over the woman who will discover this truth for herself; however it is also sententious, for it says nothing, only that nothing is certain, that events contain their own ironies. Such non-knowledge makes Ninth Aunt Wang, after she has examined the dying child, nod her head twice then shake it twice (XY 71, Y 31). The narrative runs over three nights, implies three tomorrows. In the first, the woman nurses her dying child and thinks about ‘tomorrow’ when the child may be better. In the second, the child has died, and the coffin is being made up, and the mother cannot quite accept what has happened. The third is after the funeral when the mother is alone in the house and is in touch with its silence, and remembers the tomorrow that the boy had envisaged for himself. She only comprehends the child’s death on the basis of his absence; when he was present in the coffin, the previous day, she kept taking a look so that they could not put the lid on it. Now she has a new knowledge which is not shared by the men in the bar next door: Red-nosed Gong staggers out of Prosperity tavern singing falsetto: ‘I pity you, my darling — all alone’. This feminine shrillness may have elements in it of a misplaced carnival, but it also implies heterosexual inadequacy, which compares with what has been said about A Madman’s Diary. The sentiment and the desire are more than ever inadequate. But the gender-implications of singing falsetto also align him, unconsciously, dialogically, with the grieving mother. Luzhen was sunk in utter silence. Only the night, eager to change into the morrow, was journeying on in the silence, and, hidden in the darkness, a few dogs were barking. (XY 75)

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The ending implies a desire to change, but with the dogs barking — a reminder of the Diarist’s wolves — also a sense that change will be impossible; that the irony within the word ‘tomorrow’ is that it will be marked by no difference, making the word redundant. Only the possibility of the irony within events can change that.8

A Small Incident An Unimportant Affair, as Lyell translates the title, appeared on 1 December 1919, in the Beijing Morning Post Expanded Anniversary Supplement. Like A Passing Storm, the story that follows, after one intervening other, it is a title apt for a short story, which as a mode of discourse characteristically takes one happening, and makes that its substance. This text is written as a fragment of an autobiography, so, once again, Lu Xun is creating his self; recording the six years he has spent in Beijing, from 1912 onwards, when he became a councillor in the Ministry of Education. The incident he describes he says happened in the sixth year of the Republic, i.e. in 1917; it is something he is still thinking about two years later. It tells of being taken for a ride in a rickshaw which knocks over an old woman; the driver acts contrary to type in insisting that the woman should have what is due to her, and in turning himself in at the police-station. (How impoverished the status of a rickshaw puller is, appears quite casually on the first page of the later story, Dragonboat Festival.) The ‘I’ of the narrative is so surprised with this behaviour, so much ‘othered’, that he gives to the police some coins to be passed on to the rickshaw driver. It is evident that being in the capital city, Beijing, does not make the ‘I’ less prejudiced initially than the people who live in the provincial cities such as Lushen; but at the same time, the man has to learn, and he does so, both through the incident, and, as he says, by remembering it, and writing it. The date of the incident compares interestingly with the preface to A Madman’s Diary, which in Lyell (the words are not to be found in Yang) signs off with ‘Recorded this 22nd day in the 7th year of the Republic’ (L 29). Lyell makes this 2 April 1918, which would be the time of writing A Madman’s Diary. It may be that Lu Xun reads himself as the narrator who writes classical Chinese at the beginning of A Madman’s Diary, just as much as he is also the diarist: making himself a split subject indeed, repeating in that, or doubling, the madness of the diarist. (Yet of course, these are different forms of madness, one that is both in favour of classical order, and one that reads the predatory spirit that operates beneath classical order and tradition.) An evidence of that

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may be that the events of A Small Incident, taking place one year before the incident of writing A Madman’s Diary, but written after that text has appeared, criticise severely the ‘I’ appearing within that text. He reads himself as petty, as unsympathetic to others, as small-minded, full of resentment towards the woman (and the gender may be significant here). It is almost as if the story is a palinode for the attitude of mind of the narrator in A Madman’s Diary, as if he is thinking about ways in which he can criticise himself. For which reason it seems unfair to see the story as an example of ‘sentimental didacticism’ as C. T. Hsia does.9 Though it is true that the story ends with a commitment to ‘courage and hope’, it may not be true to see the text as quite so sure of its moral ground, because it is born out of a sense of some form of failure that it is not necessary to identify with; it is quite easy to read the text as recording a person’s sense of not knowing what to feel. Perhaps more relevant than the ending, where he says he feels ashamed, and wants to change, is the sense that the incident is relevant because it is unimportant. It retains the quality of being open-ended, because it has the power to come back to him, more important than it was in real life, which means that writing the incident is more significant than living it. The sense of something resonating that cannot be articulated — which makes the ending a rationalisation of feelings, not the actual feelings themselves — also makes this urban narrative intensely modern. And even more relevant is that this narrative articulates with what he says in the preface to Call to Arms — that his trouble is that ‘I cannot forget completely, and these stories stem from those things which I have been unable to forget’ (XY 33, Y v). That memory, far from being a Wordsworthian source of joy should be a source of crisis associates him with the age of psychoanalysis. For Freud, ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’.10 They are caught in a past which cannot be laid aside; in that way Freud agrees with Nietzsche, and Lu Xun with both, for Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, in its second essay, called ‘Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters’, makes memory in modern society a disciplinary power at work which induces feelings of guilt. He contrasts that with ‘active oblivion’. ‘There can be no happiness, no serenity, no hope, no pride, no present, without oblivion. A man in whom this screen is damaged and inoperative is like a dyspeptic ... he can’t be done with anything.’11 Lu Xun, unable to forget, is a victim of that invisible disciplinary technology which makes memory confirmatory of identity, and potentially traumatic. The Soviet scholar V. I. Semanov, who reads the stories in Call to Arms as novels of exposure, makes a nice point in drawing attention to the common, everyday objects appearing in these texts. In A Small Incident it is the use of the wind, mentioned five times.

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The first time it creates a framework and allows the narrator to be incorporated into the action (‘the north wind was raging but I had to make a living’). The second time it explains why the carriage was moving along so swiftly (‘after a while the wind subsided’). The third time it, so to speak, identifies the cause of her misfortune (‘her tattered jacket, unbuttoned and fluttering in the wind, had caught in the shaft’). Fourthly, it underscores the honesty of the rickshaw puller who took it upon himself to go to the police station (‘because of the high wind there was no one outside’). And finally ... the silence puts the narrator into a pensive mood (‘the wind had subsided completely, but the road was still quiet’).12

Semanov’s analysis could be extended. The narrator notes the wind blowing but that he has to go to work early (this implies speed); his self-reference cutting out the rickshaw puller who must also work, in the teeth of the wind, and who pulls slowly. This northern wind subsides only after it has blown away ‘every last speck of dust, leaving a spotlessly clean thoroughfare stretched out before us’ (L 67), and so helping the puller to go faster. The third reference draws attention to a ‘breeze’ which ‘caught’ the tattered jacket ‘at the last moment’, as though the woman was a scarecrow, dominated by ill-fitting clothes over which she has no control. Everything here is slow — the rickshaw slowing down, the woman’s slow fall, her slow rescue, the narrator’s implicit reason for anger: that his journey has been slowed down. The fourth reference implicitly contrasts the police, all out of the wind, in the only interior space in the text, and the rickshaw puller. Absence of wind at the end lets the narrator carry on by walking in silent streets, and thinking about the impulses of behaviour — the ‘affects’ — that like the breeze in the third reference have activated everything — the accident, his annoyance, the puller’s spontaneity, and the narrator being pulled out his numbness and stillness and suspension of thought outside the station. He thought viciously when reacting to the woman; after that, he was not thinking; then, without thinking, he hands over money and continues thinking; and ends by saying that he often thinks of that affair. The title of the later story, A Passing Storm supplements these references to wind, making the wind a figure for the short stories that Lu Xun writes. The wind — wholly secular, with no Western sense of inspiration added to it — opposes thought while it also spurs it on in a different way. Writing the story is writing the wind, and the wind, becoming less powerful as the story moves on, but powerful in its effects even when it is absent, figures that which makes the story differ from itself, become something else, in the way it moves.

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The Story of Hair As with A Small Incident, the text translated as The Story of Hair is profoundly autobiographical, while fictional. It was published in the Lamp of Learning Supplement of the Shanghai periodical China Times, on 10 October 1920, the anniversary of the Republican Revolution. In that sense it is an ‘occasional text’, as much as, say Hardy’s poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’, commissioned for the first day of 1900 by the London Times. But in this narrative, obviously written some days earlier, the ‘I’ speaks as though it is already 10 October, and as located in Beijing, not in Shanghai, the place of publication. The piece is written to bring back a sense of what an anniversary is for, and to mark the point that the date made a difference. The person who speaks to the narrator, and whose conversation is the substance of the text is someone of the generation one above the narrator. Nonetheless, he speaks of experiences which he has gone through that parallel those of Lu Xun. In other words, the ‘I’ of the story is Lu Xun, and a person the older narrator calls an idealist (L 75), or ‘visionary’ (Wang, 63), but Lu Xun is also this older narrator, a man with a ‘feisty disposition’ (a ‘perverse temperament’ — Wang, 59) — who ‘would often fly off the handle for no particular reasons, and say things that revealed a profound naiveté about the ways of the world’ (L 70). Which means that Mr N is the idealist, and that the younger ‘I’ who says this about him is the realist, the person who knows that revolutions may not change that much. The agnosticism then, of the older narrator, Mr N, which recalls the equal agnosticism of Tomorrow, is significant: ‘“They don’t bother to remember [the anniversary] — so what? You do remember — so what?”’ Identity is plural, existing in the swap-over between the I who writes and the Mr N who talks, and who was said, by Zhou Zuoren, to be based on Xia Huiqing, who was Lu Xun’s superior at the Ministry of Education. Identity is not single, nor unified, but decentred, divided, and the lightness of touch of the piece should not conceal the point that the writing here enables subjectivity to exhibit itself in all its splittings. The Story of Hair returns to the ‘preface’ in that it becomes a way of reading the history of China, as fascinated by punishment and mutilation, as much as Foucault describes it in relation to the Europe of the ancien regime in Discipline and Punish. It may be taken as a way of reading the history of the Qing dynasty, and of looking at the resistance to it, which was compromised by a desperate need to conform to tradition, defined in terms of whether the hair had been cut off or not. It is also a way of giving a reading of the reaction to the revolution of 1911. The narrative draws to a close with the older narrator

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commenting on women who want to bob their hair. These are women who want to assert their right to be like a man, while the men have not yet learned to be men. Satire against those neo-Confucians who make fun of such women appears in the later short story, Soap. The first of the Manchu rulers, Dorgon, had first announced how Chinese men were to wear their hair, in 1644, as an easy and visible form of social control, whose offensiveness was that it fought against Confucian ideas that to cut the hair was to mutilate the body which belonged to the parents. To shave the front of the head, which was a sign of humiliation, and to grow the back into a pigtail was offensive, in a culture valuing long hair at the front (previously, the hair was bound into a coil). The queue minimised personal expression; it standardised the male, it was incompatible with colourful fashions in clothes. It marked subordination to a foreign occupying power. It impeded physical mobility; as the nineteenth century wore on, it was apparent that it made Chinese look ‘inferior’ to Western males: the Japanese, by contrast, in the Meiji period, had taken to Western-style dressing. And yet it was apparent that even after the Revolution, it caused wide splits of feeling, and that the tradition could even be read as Confucian and Chinese, not as specifically Qing. 13 One warlord narrates in his autobiography that his men wept uncontrollably when their queues were cut on orders from Yuan Shikai, to whom it will be remembered that Sun Yat-sen had ceded power as president, and who, after the failure of a Second Revolution mounted against him in 1913, announced himself in 1915 emperor of a new dynasty.14 In such a context, when even hair cannot be other than a matter of contention, but is instead connected to questions of who runs China, N closes with a question, which is quoted from Mikhail Artzybashev (1878–1927). He was author of a novel popular in China, Sanin (1907), a novel of youth emancipating itself anarchistically — and sexually — from bourgeois life. (The free sexuality was deeply disapproved of by Gorky.) The quotation, however, comes not from Sanin, but from the short story Sheviriof (1907) which Lu Xun began translating in October 1920, and which it has been argued influences some of Lu Xun’s texts, and most of all the later story, Regret for the Past.15 Written after the failed Russian revolution of 1905, Sheviriof contains a gunbattle between a terrorist, Sheviriof, and the police, ending with him taking a private revenge on society, opening fire from a theatre box on the audience below. Mr N poses the question that Sheviriof asks the Tolstoyan idealist revolutionary, Aladief: Mr N has become like Sheviriof, though it should be noticed that he mistakenly thinks that Sheviriof’s words voice what the text argues; that is, he monologises the text’s discourse:

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I’d like to put to you idealists the same question that Artzybashev asks: ‘You promise a golden age to these people’s sons and grandsons, but what do you have to offer them here and now?’ As long as the creator’s whip doesn’t fall hard across China’s back she’ll always stay the same, unwilling to budge a single hair on her body. Since you people don’t have any poisonous fangs, why do you insist on sticking a ‘poisonous snake’ label on your foreheads, inviting any beggar to come along and beat you to death? (L 75)

Despite the simplification of assuming that Sheviriof is Artzybashev, the logic is as evocative about the failure of revolution as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The revolutionaries are not really revolutionary; they have no power to change anything, though they present themselves as such and invite the unfriendly solicitations of any beggar snake-catcher. In the context, this refers to the forces of reaction after 1911, but the point throughout is that the revolutionaries themselves are reactionary, as shown in the point that they are unable even to make a clean break with the queues which the Manchus had made them grow. When revolutionaries are so fangless, what good is the rhetoric of the future, which says it will save the children? Yet at the same time, N’s rhetoric is disturbing, for he says that China will remain unchanged until the Creator’s whip falls on its back. He can only use the language of punishment that the reactionaries themselves use, hence the irony of the parallel: the Creator’s whip, or the stick of the beggar snake-catchers. Can there be a revolution which does not require such language of punishment?

A Passing Storm The issues of The Story of Hair reappear in the next short story, Feng bo, variously translated as Cloud over Luchen (Wang) — a reminder that, with its tavern ‘Prosperity’ mentioned, this is the same town as appears in Kong Yiji and Tomorrow — or even as Storm in a Teacup or Gust of Wind.16 Published in New Youth (September 1920), it discusses not even the provincial town, but the village, where every event of significance has been reduced to triviality, and every trivial event has become a crisis. The worker who travels to the town every day for work, as Seven Catty does, is respected for the news he brings; Seventh Master Zhao who owns a wineshop in a neighbouring village, is regarded as a man of learning, and carries with him ‘the nostalgic air of a minister of state left over from a previous dynasty’ (L 84). His arrival onto the scene starts off the minor crisis, where women argue and the mother takes out her anger at the other woman on her daughter: a detail which recalls Lu

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Xun’s attack on parental discipline in A Madman’s Diary (XY 41, Y 3). By the end of the short story, the daughter has had her feet bound. The irony is pervasive: because of nostalgia, China cannot become modern, and the historical events which are recorded here, that in the summer of 1917, General Zhang Xun (1863–1923), tried to restore the Manchu dynasty, is presented as though the Emperor was back on the Dragon throne. Zhang had risen through the ranks through the Sino-French war of 1884–5, and, as Commander of the Army in Jiangsu under Yuan Shikai, had put down Nanjing’s Second Revolution very bloodily in 1913. According to Seventh Master Zhao, the first people to be punished from this reimposition of order would be those who had cut off their queues: Seventh Master Zhao shook his head. ‘Won’t make a bit of difference. The punishment for not having a queue is written down in a book, plain as can be. Doesn’t make any difference how many people are in the family.’ (L 83)

The fascination with punishment recalls the preface, and Medicine. We may compare this fascination with the recoil and horror felt by the English novelist Thackeray in an essay, ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’ describing a hanging of 1840, and Dickens writing to The Times about how public hanging disgraced the crowds who watched (yet Dickens made up the number).17 In Britain, public executions were ended only in 1867. The dogged insistence on punishment is compounded by the idea that it is all in a book somewhere, so that punishment has the power of law written down, and of tradition. Seventh Master Zhao has himself, after 1911, coiled his queue round his head, like the students that N refers to in The Story of Hair (L 72), but now he has gone back to his old ways, by shaving the front half of his hair, while creating a queue at the back of his head. He comes into the midst of the village and is asked about the concessions or general amnesty that might be introduced, but he is much more interested in the story of hair: ‘Remember back in the time of the Long Hairs how people used to say, “Keep your hair and lose your head or keep your head and lose your hair”’ (L 82). Lyell’s note refers to the Taiping rebels (1851–1864) against the Manchus, who let their hair grow free and were called Long Hairs. The proverb, which seems to go back to the beginning of the Qing dynasty, makes losing the queue and losing the head equivalent: Ming loyalists had replied ‘To cut off my hair would be difficult. To cut off my head would be easy’.18 Master Zhao’s use of history and of literature is entirely in the sphere of on dit — what ‘they say’; garbled messages from the past, scrambled together into material suggestive of what Joyce draws on in Ulysses, and both this history and literature are the source of oppression, and

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of a refusal to be able to think of the future, which pairs with the pessimism of the seventy-nine year old grandmother. Significantly, blame for cutting the hair is laid at the door of the influence of the town, as the place for modernity (L 84). Seven Catty, who was rash enough to cut his queue, only gets back into his wife’s favour, at the end of the story, when she notices that Zhao has curled his queue round his head again, a sign, she takes it, that the Emperor is not actually back on his throne. The narrative ends with the sense that nothing will ever change. To align hair-cutting with losing the head is simple, but if we make this association, Freud makes another, for he aligns the fantasy of decapitation with castration-fears.19 The Long Hairs, memories of who persist in so many of the stories, resist the threat to their masculinity, only by not fitting into the order which proclaims that they have been utterly socialised. For the pig-tail speaks of a tamed male, brought under discipline, and in this way, the text speaks of an abundant power of taming within a society, whether or not the hair has been gathered into a pig-tail. The word ‘taming’ suggests the dog. The second essay of The Genealogy of Morals begins with the task of discipline and education being ‘to breed an animal with the right to make promises’. To be able to make promises means not to be thought of as mad, to be held to be consistent from day to day, year to year, and that means being treated as an individual. The word ‘breed’ describes the dog, which as the obedient servant of man, has been bred to be tame — not like the wolf, but still with some of its associations. The Chinese queue implies a self that has been bred tame: it indicates that breeding, production of what Foucault calls the ‘docile body’, comes about through the threat of punishment, which may be gentle, as Foucault thinks of it in Discipline and Punish, but may extend so far as to capital punishment.20

Hometown Hometown (Guxiang) followed A Passing Storm in New Youth eight months later, in May, 1921, the year of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. A Passing Storm had narrated the life of the village from the standpoint of one non-incident — the visit of Mr Zhao and his news — but this is only one element in an impressionistic narrative which has four sections, the first setting the mood, the second giving the incident, the third giving its non-consequences in events happening a few days after, and the last making clear the ironic distance in the events by giving a sense of the village one year on, showing that nothing has actually changed, that all the events lacked

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significance, except as they showed up the provincial nature of the people. Irony assumes a position of cultural superiority, which is taken away in Hometown, which is narrated by an ‘I’ going back to his home (six hundred miles away) after not seeing it for twenty years. The autobiographical reference in the story has already been discussed, but it should be noted that the ‘I’ is specifically called Xun in the text (XY 96, 98, Y 60, 62), so identifying him with the author who signs the story: the created persona Lu Xun. In this story, the ‘I’ criticises his own nostaglia, where he has to admit that ‘no concrete image’ could be evoked to describe what he liked in his remembrance of it (L 89). Even the animal that his friend, Runtu, used to catch, or not catch, and about which stories have accreted, he cannot remember the name of (XY 93, Y 58). The ‘strange picture’ which flashes into his mind when he hears about Runtu (XY 91, Y 56) turns out at the end to be only a mirage, so that at the end he leaves the town without regret: I only felt that all round me was an invisible high wall, cutting me off from my fellows, and this depressed me thoroughly. [This evokes the iron house of the preface to A Call to Arms.] The vision of that small hero with the silver necklet among the watermelons had formerly been as clear as day, but now it had suddenly blurred, adding to my depression. (XY 100, Y 64)

The depression, too is part of the loneliness that the preface discussed, as being his leading characteristic. What seemed real in memory has shown itself to be an artificial memory, and this split between present and a never real past is compounded by another, which is now obvious, between people, Runtu and himself. So he turns to hope for the next generation, Runtu’s child and his nephew, and it will be remembered how ‘dreams’ were what the preface started with: I hope they will not be like us, that they will not allow a barrier to grow up between them. ... They should have a new life, a life we have never experienced. The access of hope made me suddenly afraid. When Runtu had asked for the incense burner and candlesticks I had laughed up my sleeve at him, to think that he was still worshipping idols and would never put them out of his mind. Yet what I now called hope was no more than an idol I had created myself. The only difference was that what he desired, while what I desired was less easily recognised. (XY 100–101, Y 65)

The story shows the loss of ability to remember the past, and the sense that there is nothing to say about it; in many senses, it is a farewell. It is the mother

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herself, significantly, who points out that Xun has forgotten things (XY 95, Y 60). Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936) discusses the loss in the twentieth century of the ability to narrate, since story-telling has now been replaced by a culture of information.21 The short story form has often been seen as the triumph of the oral mode over written culture, and while this distinction is perhaps untenable, it is relevant to point to the Russian skaz which the Russian formalist critic B. M. Eichenbaum, thinking of Leskov (the short-story writer also discussed by Benjamin) speaks of as ‘that form of narrative prose which, in its lexicon, syntax and selection of intonations, reveals an orientation towards the oral speech of a narrator’.22 Homecoming is storytelling in a different age, synthetic, in the knowledge that there can be no spontaneous memory, or narrative, that a split exists between the people of the town as it was, and the ‘I’ who speaks, and that the former life never truly existed as a spontaneous thing anyway, being, instead, a dream (the dream that makes hope only a tremulous possibility). The narrator is split from Runtu in every way, by class, by locale (Runtu was not even from the hometown, but from the countryside, and the sea), and by experience, including sexual experience. The two boys have diverged into different kinds of men, whose reaction to sexuality has been different. Runtu has married, and has children. It is to be noted that the wife Lu Xun actually had is not mentioned here, only the mother, as if cutting out all thought of the sexual, which thus has the force of a symptom within the text, showing that its problematic structure exists at a level which cannot quite be recognised. The nephew he mentions parallels the five children of Runtu, who, nonetheless, is no figure of virility, but already broken down. Neither spontaneous sexual experience, nor its lack, seem to have anything to commend them; both the boy who remembers the boy Runtu and the man and the Runtu he describes now are both figures of loss.

5 Ah Q and Other Survivors

The True Story of Ah Q The True Story of Ah Q (Ah Q zhengzhuan), unlike the other short stories in A Call to Arms, was written for serial publication, and not as a single unity. Its nine chapters appeared under another pen name, Ba Ren (‘crude fellow’) in the literary supplement to the Beijing Morning Post. The first installment was on 4 December 1921, and from then on, episodes appeared weekly or fortnightly until 12 February 1922. Lu Xun, the already fictional identity of the author, becomes in The Story of Ah Q an even more plural figure, first, because Ba Ren as narrator parodies him, and second because a figure like Lu Xun, a fake foreign devil appears, recognisably, in chapter 3, as Mr Qian’s eldest son, who has been educated in Japan, and who has cut his queue. This fake foreign devil differs from Lu Xun in the way his wife is spoken of — she is not a good woman because she has not jumped into the well for a fourth time in shame over her husband’s false queue — but he has just the same method of dealing with enemies that Lu Xun had: he attacks them with his stick (XY 115–116, Y 42, compare The Story of Hair, L 73). Towards the end of Ah Q it becomes apparent that this fake foreign devil is indeed a fake, and that adds to the comprehensiveness of the piece, and the sense that this may also be the true story of Lu Xun — a fictional identity. Ah Q started life in the supplement’s ‘Humour’ section, where the appropriate line to convey its comedy is certainly from the end of Gogol’s play, The Government Inspector, where the Mayor of the little Russian town, who has been thoroughly fooled, says: ‘What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves, that’s what!’ (The line is addressed both to the people on stage, and the audience.) Just one moment before that, the Mayor has said that ‘all I can see [in front of me] is a mass of pigs’ snouts, instead of faces, just pigs’ snouts’.1 Translated into something more like tragedy, that line seems to be remembered at the

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end of The Story of Ah Q: at any rate, Lu Xun moves in the same atmosphere as Gogol. The text was soon moved to another section, ‘New Literature’, and that reflects how the comic note cannot be sustained. Ah Q as a character flatters no one, but the text in which he appears is not easy to read. One criticism says that Lu Xun in this ‘scathing’ short story ‘made no attempt to hide his contempt for the self-beguiling common man, the petty thief and would-be revolutionary’.2 Perhaps, but it is hard to know what would count as evidence here, as the narrative is given by someone who cannot inspire respect, indeed, who occasionally evokes something almost like contempt, which means that nothing that is said about Ah Q can be thought outside the discourse that creates him. Certainly no ‘author’s voice’ outside the play of the text is heard here. The title ‘true story’ Lyell translates as ‘orthodox transmission’: public ideology, public history, therefore, not true, that which must be read, as Walter Benjamin suggests, ‘against the grain’, against the way the text is narrated.3 Behind the irony of the ‘true story’ is the sense that the text offers a counter-history, a counter-memory. And that is its richness, because that other history is there as much as the satire on the Chinese ‘national character’, which, whatever the author’s intention might have been, it is not essential to read in the text, since there is no single identity with Ah Q, quite apart from the idea of this being a counter-history, to access which is the task of reading. Ah Q is not necessarily the embodiment of national character any more than Falstaff is — the difference with Falstaff is that the latter is a little more intelligent. Ah Q is neither a single possible person nor a national identity, but the impossibility of both. And to continue with the title: ‘Ah’ as a name is given as a prefix to a Chinese name, and ‘Q’ follows, apparently chosen because it looks like the outline of an (empty) head with a queue. A queue, from the Latin ‘coda’ (a tail) has nothing to do with the Q from the roman alphabet, but the pun in English on queue and Q is a reminder that the story of hair is still present. Perhaps the decoration in the letter, supplementing the O makes it feminine, as does the point that without its u, Q is, in the West, incomplete. Since ‘coda’ in Italian has also another, slang meaning, perhaps the queue in the Q is phallic, with all forms of slangy associations between the pig-tail and masculinity, then, that hardly need be spelled out. Certainly, the idea that behind the featureless figure is a small appendage whose insignificance, however, gives meaning to everything, making the Q not an O, not a cipher, indicates that sexual difference cuts across everything else in this text. Certainly, Ah Q signs with a Q: asked at his trial to sign, and unable to write, he is told to draw a circle:

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Afraid people would laugh at him, he determined to make the circle round; however, not only was that wretched brush very heavy, but it would not do his bidding. Instead it wobbled from side to side; and just as the line was about to close it swerved out again, making a shape like a melon-seed. (XY 150, Y 109)

It seems evident that he has drawn a Q, being unable to complete an O, which would be the sign of a complete identity, if that of a cypher, and, for Ah Q, the sign of being ‘a perfect idiot’. The Q for the O is unintentional heroism; the queue in the Q being the mark of difference, that there is something that resists Ah Q being spoken of in single terms. The narrator of the true story presents himself as a fussy Confucian and so a traditionalist, putting together a life from no documents and making fun of Chen Duxiu, who had begun New Youth, and that year had founded the Communist Party, and also of Hu Shi, the much more conservative figure who is parodied here as a bogus radical writer, whose pedantry appears in saying that he has a ‘weakness for historical research coupled with an addiction to textual criticism’ (L 106–107). Behind this reference there may be a comment on the dissolution of New Youth, which had happened in 1921, as some members had become central to the Communist Party; but certainly, the narrator shows his ignorance of Chen Duxiu’s actual political influence. He is more near to understanding Hu Shi, who had given himself over to a scholarship which was actually conservative in nature. But there is more than that to the citation. The parodying of the possibility of writing history is apparent throughout the preface, (‘authentic history’ appears twice, and ‘distortion of history’ also). Once past the preface, it becomes apparent that this narrator with all his contradictions, may repeat the contradictory aspects of Ah Q. But it is not clear whether the narrator has any sense or not that his true history is schizoid. And that is part of the point, even the intention within the satire: to write something that shows up the impossibility of thinking that there could ever be an authoritative narrator. No history could possibly write Ah Q, because history is committed to a single narrative where contradictions are only apparent and are capable of synthesis. We may be reminded of Derrida’s point that it is impossible for the mad to write a history of themselves, because history must be committed to the logos, to reason.4 The limitations of Hu Shi are apparent: not only is he pedantic, which is Lyell’s point in his footnote, but he is the kind of historian that would want, desperately, to ‘normalise’ the subject of his research — the point recalls the opening section of A Madman’s Diary. But people who want to normalise, it seems, carry their own madness about with them.

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What sort is the narrator, then? The answer is that he is a mass of contradictions, like Ah Q himself, a mixture of pedantries and obscure traditions, which take over his prose and his thoughts, and someone who without realising it, by writing the life of Ah Q, shows that history lies in the documents that historians have discarded (hence there are no records for Ah Q). Hence everything in the narrator is digressive, the opposite of what is expected from a true story. As for Ah Q, he is a peasant living in Weizhuang (‘not yet village’) whose imperception, and ignorance of urban experience is marked, and he is presented as someone who never knows what is happening, at the same time as being beaten, taking a delight in mistreating those below himself. The first chapter describes him, though he has already been seen in the preface, being beaten up by Mr Zhao, for saying that he belongs to his family. Ah Q is taking part in what Freud calls a ‘family romance’, which Freud sees as a child’s failed neurotic tendency to fantasise having a father more exalted and noble than his own. Freud concludes his essay by saying that in dreams, the Emperor and Empress stand for the dreamer’s mother and father.5 Freud must have meant the Austro-Hungarian empire, but the point applies to Ah Q and to the end of the Qing dynasty. For Ah Q’s desire is to be connected to the family which has won a little success in the examination system, which ultimately connects to the Emperor’s throne. It is like Gogol’s madman thinking he is the king of Spain. In chapter 1, Ah Q is sure that his own sons, when he has them, will succeed even better than the sons of the Zhao and Qian families, who have both got sons who are successful students. He is horrified, in chapter 3, to hear that the examinations have been abolished. For such an abolition separates him from the exalted father, and makes him feel he has lost status (for he still fantasises that he belongs to the Zhaos, who because of the abolition, he sees as having been degraded). Ah Q lives simultaneously in the past (‘we used to be much better off than you’ [XY 107, Y 70], and in the future: ‘My sons may be much greater’ [XY 108, Y 71]). He is a reactionary, yet associated with the revolution, and at the end he is shot by the Revolution in a way which makes him its victim. When marched off to execution, he feels that he owes a performance to the crowd, for his life is defined by what others say and think. His pomposity makes him the double of the narrator, who feeds on an orotund, sonorous and digressive tradition in Chinese writing, and who says that ‘I am obviously not Ah Q’ (XY 102, Y 66), a statement which only affirms the point that he just may be, in effect, and that the text is what he says it is not, an unconscious and unself-aware autobiography. Only someone a little like an Ah Q — better educated formally — could write about an Ah Q, while showing at the same time, that he is completely unaware of the affinities between him and his

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subject, that make both of them split subjects. And what causes such splittings of character? No life can be thought outside the history it is part of, because history makes lives what they are, and alters them violently. For this reason, the contradictions in Ah Q’s behaviour, those already noted, and those yet to be discussed, are to be read through what is offstage. At the end of chapter 5, Ah Q disappears to the town, and when he comes back again with a new prosperity that allows him to throw down his silver onto the bar (the episode recalls, in general, Kong Yiji), the question is where has he been and what has he done. He has been a petty thief, he has seen a revolutionary beheaded, so he gains a new respect. In the following chapter 7, ‘The Revolution’, the revolutionaries enter the town (on the night of 4 November 1911, the day when the revolution reached Shaoxing). Ah Q, dissatisfied because newly hard up, and drunk, feels he has become a revolutionary. In chapter 8, ‘Barred from the Revolution’, the opening paragraph establishes that the revolution does not mean much. It contains a reference to the cutting of Sevenpounder’s queue, so going back to and quoting from, A Passing Storm, associating these texts, and in that way acting as a signature which assumes responsibility for writing both stories. Ah Q feels he has been kept out of the revolution; at the end of the chapter he witnesses a robbery at Old Master Zhao’s house, and is killed for it by the revolutionaries, as a public example, in the final chapter, ‘The Grand Finale’. The point of these last incidents is never clear. The history that makes the textbooks happens offstage, and so how it marks Ah Q is decisive but at the same time, never revealed. Ah Q is a symptom of something that is never quite readable, so that the contradictions, which are real, are put together by forces which cannot be known. The short story form has been seen as in general an impressionistic or subjective genre, but this formalist description is inadequate in this case to cover the point that the withdrawal of an ability to explain in this case comes from the point that a powerful history works in the lives of its subjects, while being opaque to them so that they have no vocabulary to articulate what little they know. The theme is the same in A Passing Storm, where rumour substitutes for knowledge, making the short story short precisely because nothing longer can be said. Hu Shi’s ‘weakness for historical research coupled with an addiction to textual criticism’ sounds, in this context, more ironic than ever, as does the parody of scholarship acquired from Western methods in chapter 6: When the womenfolk met they would say to each other, ‘Mrs Zou bought a blue silk shirt from Ah Q. Although it was old, it only cost ninety cents. And Zhao Baiyan’s mother (this has yet to be verified, because some say it was Zhao Sichen’s mother) bought a child’s costume of crimson foreign calico ...’ (XY 131–132, Y 93)

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For this reason, it seems inadequate to follow Leo Lee — however useful his work is elsewhere — in seeing Ah Q as a ‘composite characterisation — an ambitious representation of a national type ... something of an Everyman in rural China, and the most vacuous “typical character” Lu Xun ever created’.6 (The criticism itself is typical of much Lu Xun scholarship.) There is no value in comparing Ah Q with Everyman (a figure from late medieval European morality drama). Everyman contains all the contradictions of sinful man before God, who has the power to see him as a single being, and to make him become a consistent Christian. Everyman as an ideological creation ignores class and gender differences. Ah Q is neither a single realist character nor a composite. The first suggestion needs to consider further the psychoanalytic point that there is no single subject, but that each being is crossed and re-crossed by competing and opposing discourses, whose origin cannot be known. These discourses only arrive in the form of rumour and counter-rumour, in the form of the on dit. If schizophrenia is at the heart of modern literature, consciously or not, that is because it bears witness to how the self is forced to combine those contradictions within itself as though they did totalise into a single meaning. Nor is Ah Q a composite, because there can be no single composition of different classes, nor can there be one that effaces the gender distinctions that modernity has done so much to enforce, if not to create. Ah Q then becomes an extreme form of walking contradiction, a demonstration of what modern China, and the China that it recreates as traditional, is capable of producing. He is as mad as the narrator, and only more overtly mad than Hu Shi, and the reader can only note the discourses that speak through him and not try to unite them. Certainly, Ah Q’s character is not capable of a single explanation. This is not because he is an allegory of all China, under the aggression of foreign powers such as Japan, and concealing its humiliation by a belief in its own superiority, but because he is a split subject. He is a schizoid figure whose story — a collection of recycled texts which make up what ‘they say’ — is narrated by someone nearly as mad as he is if less openly, who certainly believes in the spiritual values of that China (XY 117, Y 80) while mocking Ah Q who has the same belief in his own spiritual value. The text to be narrated of Ah Q’s life, where there are no records, because he is the record, and the text which represents that, are both mad. Contradictions of identity are repeated in Ah Q’s body, as if he has the greatest problem in seeing himself as a unified person, or as if he cannot see that his whole body is him. He wins psychological victories from being beaten by saying that he has been beaten by his son, as if that confirms him in the idea that the world is on a downward path. After he has had silver stolen from him, he tastes something of the bitterness of defeat, which includes the defeat

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that there is no one there to give him a beating, as there is normally. ‘But presently he changed defeat into victory. Raising his right hand he slapped his own face hard, twice, so that it tingled with pain. After this slapping his heart felt lighter, for it seemed as if the one who had given the slap was himself, the one slapped someone else’ (XY 111–112, Y 75). His body is as if incomplete, both grotesque and self-divided, and the action contains several contradictions, as if (a) he is punishing a rebellious son, the future, in contrast to what normally — in his reading — happens to him, or (b) as if he is acting out the part of the rebellious son. If the latter of these is the case it obviously demonstrates his own desire for punishment. He makes himself both father and son in this action which combines action and passivity. One text that helps in reading the ambivalence in Ah Q derives from Freud’s essay ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915), which has as its theme ambivalence, itself a then new word. Freud discusses instincts as having a passive goal, even if they have to be active in order to bring about a passive state, and says that sexual instincts reverse into their opposites: sadism into masochism and scopophilia (the aggressive desire to look, an active impulse) into exhibitionism (the desire to be looked at). Both these feature in Ah Q, in his voyeurism with women, and in his desire to be an exhibition as he walks to the execution-ground. The point for Ah Q is that this is a study of a man with no family, and no son, and feeling he needs the sex that he conspicuously lacks (he seems to die a virgin). His prudishness appears in the way he refers to his body with its shiny marks on his head, in chapter 2. What Freud makes of shiny marks is conveyed in his essay on ‘Fetishism’, discussing the man who fantasised a shine on his nose. ‘The nose was thus the fetish, which, incidentally, he endowed at will with the luminous shine which was not perceptible to others’.7 The nose has been discussed before in relation to Gogol: its shine is a marker of the sexual. Ah Q disavows the sexual, and he gives aggressive furious glares at other people. Lyell translates these as ‘dirty looks’, and the reading is suggestive for the idea of sexual prudery. At the end of chapter 3, after he has insulted the Buddhist nun, she wishes that he should die childless, and this leads into chapter 4, called ‘The Tragedy of Love’, a title which demonstrates the narrator’s irony and his imperception, the irony being imperception since he cannot see how much Ah Q’s attitudes to the sexual are representative. At this point, contact with the woman’s skin has made a strange erotic impression on Ah Q and this and the nun’s curse set him thinking that he needs a woman. The narrator’s voice intrudes to say how Chinese men have always been ruined by women, and then returns to Ah Q’s ‘strict morals’:

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Who could tell that close on thirty, when a man should ‘stand firm’, he would lose his head like this over a little nun?

Lyell and Wang both gloss this through the Analects: ‘At thirty I stood firm.’ Standing firm is what perfect (Confucian) masculinity does, but it has its unconscious, in referring to ‘phallogocentrism’, which we may define as belief in the value of single truth, presided over by the power of patriarchy which believes in its own sexual power. Wang’s translation ‘lose his head’ while it is interpretation rather than literal, relates, curiously, to the images of decapitation in this novella as in others, and to the link with castration, as though the male who believes in his power to stand firm sexually is also liable to suffer castration, another morcellating of the body. Standing firm and losing the head combines action and passivity, masculinity and femininity; to be seduced by a woman means becoming feminine, fear of which produces the ‘dirtylookism’ (L 125) that makes Ah Q despise the sexual, suspecting its existence everywhere, while also attempting to seduce. The text shows contradictory discourses of sexuality at work in the male, operating at all social levels of patriarchy. The chapter shows Ah Q working at Old Master Zhao’s house. His wife (the Old Missus) has to go without because the husband is about to buy a concubine, while the Young Missus is about to have a baby. So the maid Amah Wu says, just before Ah Q propositions her, an act of aggression which is followed by his being beaten. Zhao’s Young Missus expects a baby, and this is put against Ah Q’s inability to father anybody, the seriousness of which is indicated by the quotation from Confucius: ‘There are three forms of unfilial conduct, of which the worst is to have no descendants’ for it is ‘one of the tragedies of life that “spirits without descendants go hungry” ’ (XY 118, Y 80–81). So the older generation feeds on the younger. When Lu Xun wrote this, he was forty, and had no descendants: in that sense Ah Q is a text which could be read as mirroring him. However, in its polyphonic character — quoting Confucius as though this citation was for unquestioned acceptance and thereby showing its craziness as it is inserted into a text whose marks are all those of contradiction — the passage illustrates the madness of a society which believes that failing to be a father is failing to be filial. The contradiction makes an attitude to the future (wondering whether to have children or not) an attitude to the past; it means that patriarchy can never be more than servility, a proof of adherence to the past. Becoming a father in these circumstances can never be more than a reaction of guilt. Such servility runs through Ah Q, and because of it means that his attitudes to those even less privileged than himself are hostile, demanding the patriarchal obedience that Zhao expects from his women.

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The Confucian quotations appear as surrounding Ah Q, but they are in him as well. In the following chapter, ‘The Problem of Making a Living’, he is on his way to attack another pauper, Young D, who seems to have gained a slight advantage in getting odd jobs that used to go to Ah Q. This time Ah Q’s indignation was greater than usual, and going on his way, fuming, he suddenly raised his arm, and sang: Steel mace in hand I shall trounce you ...’ (XY 125, Y 87)

The man is made a machine, both by the gesture, and by the sudden explosion of Chinese opera onto his lips. He is constructed by quotations, and the ludicrous martiality of this one is obvious. The song returns at the end as, on his way to death, he becomes ashamed of his lack of spirit, because he had not sung any lines from a Chinese opera. His thoughts revolved like a whirlwind. [The writing here is the cliché of popular representations of the masculine hero who thinks fast, like a whirlwind, making a contrast with how the wind appears in A Small Incident]: The Young Widow at her Husband’s Grave was not heroic enough ... ‘Steel mace in hand I shall trounce you’ was still the best. (XY 152, Y 111–112)

But he cannot raise his arms, which are bound. Machine-like before, never quite aware of himself, so that blows always fall on him unexpectedly, inexplicably, as if he cannot make his own history, he has now become truly a machine. He feels he ought to play the part of a hero, or a heroine, since one of the songs he feels he must sing is from The Young Widow at her Husband’s Grave. (The passage, mocking the performance of the ego that inflates itself by singing, makes Western and Chinese opera uncannily alike in effect, as favoured modes to express, and to enjoy, a false consciousness.) Perhaps the first song indicates that he feels he must be the weeping survivor of his own death, as it has already been noted that the passage is fascinated by the idea of describing a state after the fragmentation of the body, a state to which the text seems drawn. Certainly, it is a reminder of a femininity which associates with the passivity already described. In this moment, ‘the roar of the crowd sounded like the growl of a wolf’ and this auditory image is succeeded by the phantasmatic memory of the hungry wolf: He had never forgotten that wolf’s eyes, fierce yet cowardly, gleaming like two will o’ the wisps [fiendish flames — Lyell 170], as if boring into him from a distance. Now he saw eyes more terrible even than the wolf’s:

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dull yet penetrating eyes that having devoured his words seemed eager to devour something beyond his flesh and blood. And these eyes kept following him at a set distance. These eyes seemed to have merged into one, biting his soul. ‘Help! help!’ (XY 153, Y 112)

‘Fierce yet cowardly’ repeats the terms of ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, for, active and passive at once, as Ah Q has been, the wolf only mirrors Ah Q. The cannibalism returns to A Madman’s Diary and recasts Ah Q as the diarist there, while the oppressiveness of the eyes also repeats that text. Hence the last words of Ah Q, which do not come out, because he is already dead, recall the words ‘Save the children’ at the end of A Madman’s Diary too, as well as going back to the line from Gogol. The roar of the crowd has changed into eyes looking, which recall his eyes which glared at people in a way combining aggression and voyeurism, but now there is the idea of the eyes consuming what they look at, like the eye of envy, ‘the eye of voracity’. So Lacan writes of the eye, thinking of it having the power ‘to separate’, to alienate; the eye not looking at the world from an embodied state within the world, but as opposite to the world.8 In that sense, the human eye exists within discourse as different from the eye of the animal, but in this case, this difference does not exist, for Ah Q thinks the wolf looks from a hostile position, throwing a look that would burn the body from afar. Now the eyes have become the people’s, both sharp and dull at the same time (like ‘fierce yet cowardly’), and as eyes, they turn into bullets. Devouring, they get at not just the words of Ah Q, which they kill before they can be uttered, but tear into something beyond flesh and bone. The implications of this are not clear though they are suggestive, but it is as if the eyes, which are also the bores of the rifles, eyes on sticks, as it were, and the bullets too, have power to annihilate him completely, as if getting beyond the body as the wholly despised thing. The gun technology that is employed in modern-day shooting indicates how fully a gunshot negates everything of the body. Not so much fun, as public opinion asserts, in the last paragraph, as beheading, which exactly, as it were, suits the body, but machine-technology has now gone much further than those days.9 Certainly the eyes of the executioner who decapitated, in the Qing dynasty, were just as vicious and castrating — ‘eyes like daggers, making old Shuan shrink to half his normal size’ (Medicine, XY 60, Y 20).

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Dragonboat Festival As was noted before, 1921 saw the breakup of the New Youth group, and in 1922, Lu Xun wrote five stories which are more occasional and seem to indicate his isolation: the first, Dragonboat Festival, written in June 1922, which appeared in the magazine, The Short Story Monthly, in the September of that year. The journal, which had begun in Shanghai in 1910, was now edited by Mao Dun, and its policy, shaped by the Beijing Literary Research Association (January 1921), was to publish solely literature in the vernacular. At the same time, came The White Light, also written in June, but appearing earlier than Dragonboat Festival in the Shanghai Eastern Miscellany in that July. Some Rabbits and a Cat appeared, like The Story of Hair, to mark the anniversary of the Revolution in the Beijing Morning Post, 10 October 1922. Also in that October Lu Xun wrote A Comedy of Ducks, which appeared in December in the Shanghai periodical The Ladies’ Journal. And Village Opera, also in October, for The Short Story Magazine, in that December. These completed the fourteen that made up the volume A Call to Arms. The title Dragonboat Festival, whose subtlety and understatement makes it easy to underestimate, refers to the ‘double fifth’ — the fifth day of the fifth month when debts are, traditionally, repaid. According to Lyell’s note, citing Zhou Zuoren, the main character in this short story, Fang Xuanchuo, reflects Lu Xun. This makes it another instance of a text being thought of as constructing an autobiography, as if the text was encouraging the reader to think of this as a confession. But there are differences: Fang is married with a family, and his wife is essential to the text: this being the first time that the short stories have discussed marriage, and, apart from Tomorrow, this being almost the first time when a woman has been obviously significant in the text. Another difference is that Fang has not received a modern education (L 176), whereas Lu Xun had. Lyell’s analysis refers to how the warlord government in Beijing had borrowed vast sums of money from abroad and gleaned taxes at home to carry on a civil war; hence it was often behind in the payment of its officials and teachers, Fang being both of these.10 In the same way, Lu Xun was both working for the Ministry of Education, the job he had taken in 1912, and also teaching at Peking University. The narrative begins when the teachers at the (unspecified) University gather together to demand their back-pay. Fang does not join then, feeling that they are lacking discretion. ‘It wasn’t until he heard his fellow officials openly ridiculing professors that his sense of injustice was aroused, albeit ever so slightly’ (L 175). The character is split; belonging to both forms of employment, and both professions, he can identify wholly with neither. The

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slight discomfort he feels is supplemented when talking to his wife later on: she acts as a conscience to him, bringing out to him how much he has to repress in himself. The incident is followed up with a reference to an actual incident of 3 June 1921, when government troops beat up some of the teachers in front of the Presidential palace. The President, Xu Shichang (1855–1939), an ex-Qing bureaucrat and ally of Yuan Shikai, and President from 10 October 1918 till 2 June 1922, issued a statement that they had brought this on themselves by demonstrating there. And yet, a little later, the government paid the teachers, and so Fang is pictured in the text as receiving the reward without having joined in the dispute. At this stage, the second form of action begins: the officials, who have also not been paid, are transformed into ‘doughty generals’ (L 178) when they start to press for their money. ‘Now the local daily began to print articles in which the officials came in for their share of scorn and mockery ... Fang was not in the least surprised ... for he knew that the newsmen only did this because they were still drawing their salaries’. But again, he fails to join in the dispute, sitting in his yamen (office). He fears that people will think he feels ‘too good’ to do so, but he feels himself that it is something he is — in his own words — ‘not very good at’. He also feels (to what extent this indirect free discourse means that the narrator is saying this, or Fang is making his own justifications, is for interpretation): a positive dread of having to go see people in positions of financial power. Granted, when such people fell from their lofty perches ... they would of course be full gentle, meek, and mild; but so long as they were sure in their positions, they wore expressions that would have done credit to the King of Hell ... (L 178)

Compromising, then, he goes home just before the Dragonboat Festival to meet the anger and sarcasm of his wife, and unpaid bills to settle, and the pair eat their meal (the second in the story) in silence. Going out, he returns home again with the news that the money will be paid, but the banks are closed and the money cannot be claimed till after the holiday. He describes how he had tried to borrow money of a not-close friend, and had been turned down. He resolves the issue by sending the one servant they have (having a servant keeps them just inside the middle-class), to buy some wine on credit: He knew the wineseller would be hoping that his customers would clear up their tabs the next day and would, in all likelihood, not dare refuse him, for if he did, he ran the risk of bringing down such bad luck on himself that none of his customers would pay him back so much as half a cent tomorrow, and it would serve him right too! (L 181–182)

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With debts not paid, but wine drunk, he settles down to read Experiments, a book of poetry in the colloquial language by Hu Shi, published in 1920 in Shanghai. His wife tries to think of other means for him to make money, including writing for newspapers, but her eventual fearful solution is to buy a lottery ticket. He refuses angrily, and snobbishly, but he is unable to complete his sentence (stopping with the word ‘uneducated’ to describe her), but the reason for failing to complete his sentence (it contrasts with his interest in literary language) is that he has suddenly remembered something that afternoon that he had repressed, which is why it is only now told, outside the chronology of the text. The memory is, that coming back disconsolate, after trying to borrow money, he had seen a lottery advertisement, which had caused him great excitement, till he recalled that he only had sixty cents left. He will not risk it, but walks on by with ‘courage and determination’ (a reminder of the Confucian ‘At thirty I stood firm’). His wife, thinking he has only attacked her lack of education, and not knowing how the issue of the lottery ticket has been too near to him for him to be rational about it, leaves the room, while he reads from Experiments, reading literature in this context being an act of repression of his past, and an acknowledgement that there can be no communication off the page with someone else. The story is a study in repression, and may be motivated by a certain selfhatred which it produces, as Fang is seen in the lecture-room attacking students and youth — both crucial to the May Fourth movement — and showing himself as an intellectual whose favourite phrase, repeated obsessively, ‘There’s not much difference’ means that he lacks on the surface any capacity for discrimination, though this apathy is only apparent, because at work he is called a ‘neurotic’ (L 175). The narrator in The New-Year Sacrifice later on, shows his kinship with this description by applying it to himself (XY 172). His phrase is the attempt to cover over those splits within modernity which make someone simultaneously a victim (an unpaid teacher, an unpaid official) and an oppressor (an official laughing at a teacher, a husband dominating his wife). They were the same splits as coexisted in Ah Q, slapping himself on the face. The splits, which must be repressed, make for the defensive idea which Fang keeps announcing, that there is no difference. Discussing Kong Yiji, Freud’s formula ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ was mentioned, and it may be said that the various rivalries (husband / wife, officials / teachers) bring out the reality of that; minor differences work themselves out in all relationships, and structure them all by ‘resentment’ (L 175). The word evokes Nietzsche’s ressentiment as at the basis of all modern social relationships, and being the spirit which defines ‘good’ and ‘evil’, making the former a reaction to what it sees as the latter, and not the expression of anything spontaneous in the self. To

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get beyond this reading of good and evil, where goodness is a reactive, and so negative quality, inspired by rancour, to overcome such a feeling, is the task; Lu Xun’s text begins it by describing it. Fang has two ways of escaping or repressing his confrontation with reality. As a teacher, it is through literature. As an official, it is by a ritualism in his work, scrupulously keeping to his own place and minding his own business. He is the perfect civil servant official, that type described by Gogol and by Dostoyevsky, in The Double and in Notes from Underground, and perhaps it may be said that he is what the madman in A Madman’s Diary is destined to become when he takes up his official position.

The White Light In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written two years before The White Light, and presumably not available to Lu Xun, there is discussion of the fort! da! game, when the child repeatedly pushes something away from him, as if throwing it away, and then retrieves it: as though in a structure of going out, and coming back.11 The same structure is built into the first sentence of The White Light: Though he had left home quite early in the morning, it was already afternoon when Cheng Shicheng came back from looking through the list of successful candidates in the district examinations. (L 184)

The symbolism of the ‘afternoon’ is amplified by reference to ‘his short and greying hair’ and by the time of year — the early winter. The White Light is virtually devoted to this one person, whose dreams of becoming a successful civil servant — a ‘scholar official’ — go through his head only to be dashed each time he fails the exam. He has repeated failure sixteen times, and in Freud’s terms in that essay, each attempt, which may even at some level be a will to failure, is a movement towards death, just as the compound he comes back to is like a cemetery. The story is a study in schizophrenia, and describes something even more lonely than A Madman’s Diary, for the winning names on the examination board turn into heads which oppress him, and then he hears voices, which turn out to come from himself, as a split being, who both laughs and is indignant at what has happened to him. He feels he is being laughed at even by the chickens — the point will recall the quotation from Gogol’s The Government Inspector, quoted in discussing Ah Q. As the night falls, the point of the title begins, when the moon, which again recalls A

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Madman’s Diary, shines on and through him, taking possession of him. A voice speaks to him telling him to turn left and to turn right, in what he remembers was a riddle told him by his grandmother, that there was treasure hidden somewhere in the family compound. The riddle, ‘Right turn, left turn, / Forward and back ...’ (L 187) again is based upon Frend’s sense of life as repetition: forward and back being a reminder of the story’s first sentence. Each time he has come back from the exams he has tried to do the same: dig for that treasure, the debris left offering ‘mute testimony to the various states of shock that had followed in the wake of past examination failures’. The shock makes each failure traumatic, giving to the examination system the sense of having the power to madden. This time he digs and comes up with a grinning jawbone, which mocks him as ‘All washed up again’ (L 189). The voice then tells him again to go to the mountains to find the treasure: Off in the distance the moon had already disappeared behind Highpeak West. Standing black and erect against the sky, Highpeak West looked like one of those wooden tablets high officials carried to court when summoned by the emperor. From behind it, a shimmering white light flooded out in all directions. (L 189)

He goes out, under the impulse of this death-drive, and the oil in the room is consumed, at the same time as he goes out at the West Gate, to commit suicide in the Wanliu Lake. As with Ah Q, attention focuses on what is said after his death, as if this was what the text is fascinated by: reconstructing what could have gone on in the mind of this traumatised being. The body has been stripped by whoever found him, in a minor case of quasi-cannibalistic practices. (There are many parallel examples in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, where boatmen row up and down the Thames looking for corpses they can rifle.) The coroner’s final words draw attention to the divided nature of the subject, perhaps suicidal under the influence of his voices, and yet fighting for his life, as if in a structure of fort! da!, throwing his life away yet trying to regain it, passive and active at the same time, like Ah Q slapping himself, wanting to be both suicide and survivor. The man has been going towards death right through, yet resisting it too, and to note that is to see how the text records a tragedy. While the body cannot be positively identified as Chen Shicheng: The coroner proved that the male in question had been alive when he fell into the lake. There was riverbottom mud embedded under every fingernail, clear evidence that he had fought for his life after falling in. (L 190)

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Lyell’s footnote to this story discusses the relationship of Chen to Zhou Zijing, a brother to Lu Xun’s successful grandfather, who had ended by taking his life after repeatedly failing his examinations. As with Kong Yiji, with which this text has some parallels, the narrative has returned to a past before the end of the Qing dynasty, going back to a time much more primal in his memory to unearth a trauma, while contrasting the fate of the scholar then with the fate of the scholar after the revolution. The despair implied in such a fate requires a change of setting, which appears in the last three stories in the collection.

Some Rabbits and a Cat In some ways Some Rabbits and a Cat seems merely anecdotal, and more like an impressionistic essay than a short story.12 The sense that there is a renewed interest in autobiography runs through all these last three stories, as it was present in Dragonboat Festival. But perhaps this narrative is also like an allegory, in ways that will need to discussed. It is different from an essay in the way that the title puts together two opposing principles — the rabbits which have just been bought and which are still naive and trusting, because only just separated from their mother, and the big black cat which watches the rabbits with savage eyes. Beginning with the absent rabbits’ mother, the piece contrasts mothers — the fussy and indulgent and over-intense Third Missus, second, the presence of Lu Xun’s mother, as she is rendered in the text, and who refers to the narrator as Xun (this repeats something similar in Hometown), and third, the rabbit when it becomes a mother, and neglects its offspring. The rabbit has two litters: of the first, only two survive and they die, presumed eaten by the cat, of the second, the rabbit refuses to look after them at all until forced to do so by the Third Missus, in a way which is so fussy that Xun’s mother (so to call her) says that she ought to be included in the Register of Eccentrics, written or collected by Jin Guliang of the Qing dynasty (see Y 132). In this contrast of mothers — one too motherly, one too little, and with Xun’s mother in the midst — it becomes apparent that mothering is not so natural, or that what it means to be a mother is soon forgotten in captivity, just as the dog loses his will to bark at the marauding cat in such a situation. The narrator says that he finds this discovery a source of loneliness, thinking how lives are lost so easily. He recalls other examples of animal life being lost without any regard, and thinks that the Creator has been ‘too

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prodigal in the creation of life and too prodigal in its destruction’. But that attitude turns into another: a desire to revenge the dead rabbits in an act of ‘provoked aggression’, which intrudes human motivation onto the scene where humans have already been interfering. ‘The Creator is really too reckless. I shall have to oppose him, although perhaps I shall really be helping him’ (L 196). The piece ends with him ‘almost unconsciously’ (Lyell 333) looking at a bottle of poison for the cat. The unconscious act, which makes aggression a law, and which is not completely separate from earlier intuitions of cannibalism, is offered as a self-critique, a meditation on the opposite danger he has from the over-protective Third Missus, that of being too cruel. In such circumstances, the emphasis falls on the narrator’s mother, who seems to be his guard against such cruelty and the ambiguous behaviour it causes, when he replies to her so ‘in such an ambiguous — almost contentious — fashion’: ‘Xun-er, is that you mistreating the cats again?’ ‘No, they’re laying into each other. Why in the world would I hit them?’ (L 196)

The answer is that the ambiguity and the lack of motivation are part of behaviour that rises almost unconsciously, and which the arrival of the rabbits have caused him to notice. The difference between the dog at the beginning of the story, and the cat(s) at the end is that the dog, in Nietzsche’s terms, although it might be thought of as a predator, is actually part of the herd — hence its slavish obedience, hence its readiness to bark in chorus. The herd animal goes for mediocrity. The cat, in contrast to the dog is a predator and not part of the herd: Nietzsche associates women with cats: ‘woman is not capable of friendship. Cats, are women still ...’ (‘The Friend’ in Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 169).13 Lu Xun writes about animals because he does not make a humanist distinction between man and the animal world, and if the rabbits (which might be regarded as in some ways like cats in their furriness, and which, of course, breed) are destroyed by a cat, or cats, also furry and also, at the end, breeding, that does not so much comment on the human world, as re-situate it. Perhaps the anger against the cat at the end is directed against feminine sexuality. Perhaps it is directed against predatoriness which both cats and humans share. The dog is less significant as a threat to the human than the predator, and that wildness is what Lu Xun fears, and reacts against in a way which is also cunning and deceptive.

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A Comedy of Ducks This second narrative which treats of animals, is given a context by being a portrait of, and a memory of, Vasily Eroshenko (1889–1952), a Ukrainian blind poet and teacher of Esperanto, who had been in Japan, and arrived in Beijing to teach at the University, staying with Lu Xun in the early spring and summer of 1922, until he headed off for ‘Mother Russia’. He then stayed again when he returned in the winter and spring of 1922 and 1923. The text gains its playfulness, its comedy, from the point that it depends on the arrival of an other, a figure who comes from outside, stays in the family compound as if this was a picture of China, and then goes. Even more autobiographical than the previous story, it discusses Zhou Zuoren (as Zhongmi, one of his names) and his wife, who is persuaded to buy chicks (ducklings) at the same time that Eroshenko buys tadpoles with a view to getting them to become frogs who will create music by croaking. Blind, he notes something lonely about Beijing, and in saying so, he makes a contrast with Burma, where he had also been. The solitude he wakens the narrator to recalls the loneliness evoked in the ‘preface’; it makes him aware that he has been traumatised, in that he has lost the sense of hearing, as if his life has been mutilated. As blind, Eroshenko notices the absence of sound, which constitutes for him the loneliness, but in this way he stimulates the writer to remember what his consciousness has blocked out, that Beijing has the sounds of frogs croaking in the drains, itself an interesting and not simple image. In that way, the blind figure arouses memory. This very short text includes the detail of how Eroshenko wrote a story based on Zhongmi’s wife’s experiences in raising the chicks, called The Chick’s Tragedy which Lu Xun translated out of Japanese and had published in the October version of The Ladies’ Journal (two months before The Comedy of Ducks appeared in the same periodical). In Lu Xun’s narrative, the chicks take to the water and consume the tadpoles before some fish can be bought for them, but the effect of their arrival is also to bring out the reality of the seasons, which at the beginning of the story, Lu Xun had commented were not marked clearly; being simply summer and winter. This attractive anecdote of the ducklings taking over, and bringing out by their presence the sound of the nearby frogs, is more a comedy than an essay: there are no propositions to be learned from it, nor arguments, but it becomes a way to think of a family which is not to be defined in any narrow terms, but by the presence of the other and by the animals. Perhaps Lu Xun again follows Nietzsche in the way that his texts, as in Thus Spake Zarathustra are full of animals, for the writer who is aware of evolution and that nothing

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can be thought of in fixed terms — certainly not fixed Confucian standards — knows too that no single distinctions can be made between what is human and what is not. The Russian poet and the duckling are, alike, guests, and their presence indicates the otherness of the life that comes and stays for a time.

Village Opera The last three stories in A Call to Arms have shown something of a retreat, from human engagements to engagements with animals, and a concentration on the figure of the mother, present in Some Rabbits and a Cat, implicit in the growth-images of A Comedy of Ducks, and, in Village Opera, seen on her own ground, when she goes back to stay with her own mother at Pingqiao village. Lu Xun signs himself within the text as the son of his mother when he is called ‘Brother Xun’ by Old Liu Yi (XY 166, Y 148); the text wholly excludes the father, and significantly, it represents a re-creation of the prepubescent childhood of Lu Xun, who goes to see the opera at the age of the age of eleven or twelve (XY 159, Y 141 — Lyell, 207, scales this down to ten or eleven). The last time that Xun appears is in the following story, The New-Year Sacrifice. This story contrasts with Hometown, which dismissed the memory of the past, not least because it could not be fulfilled in the present. The reader is left to speculate on the reason for the reversal back into something akin to childhood innocence, and for the non-sexualised atmosphere with which the stories conclude. In the first pages of the narrative, Lu Xun shows his distaste for Chinese opera as performed in Beijing: the conditions for it seem akin to torture (XY 155), and as Lyell translates his reaction to the first occasion of seeing Chinese opera (the passage seems much weaker in Wang), ‘whenever I thought back on it later, this experience struck me as bordering on the bizarre: that opera must have been singularly bad — the only other explanation would be that I had somehow become “unfitted” for existence in front of stages’ (L 203). The second occasion when he sees the opera has the same evolutionary conclusion: ‘Everything conspired and pushed me to the verge of a sudden enlightenment: I was not “fitted” to exist in such an environment’ (L 204). As with the previous story, the Beijing episodes show his alienation from the city; in that narrative there is not enough sound, in this one, there is too much; the sound of Chinese opera is brought too close, made too commanding. Unlike the Darwinianly successful frogs who live in the drains, he cannot survive, and the existence he is fitted for is with his mother, and her mother,

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in a pre-sexual and sustaining non-urban environment, a mingling of water and of agricultural land, where Chinese opera is part of ‘a ritual drama for the late spring festival’ (XY 159, Y 142), part of everyday life, experienced at a distance, not close-up to, just as a Japanese book on Chinese opera which he has read says it should be. Lu Xun says that he has forgotten the name of the book, but it stands as a synecdoche for the way in which he reads China through Japan, constructing and knowing Chinese culture through the values of the other, more dominant culture: in that way Lu Xun represents himself as simultaneously both more modern and non-Chinese, and less fitted for modern China and wishing to go back to an earlier existence. In some ways, then, this piece which concludes A Call to Arms sounds a retreat. The texts that have appeared before have begun with one which pleaded to save the children: the children are saved in the last memory which the narrator of Village Opera has. In Medicine there was the death of the boy, murdered by the state on indefensible charges, and his blood being used in a fertility-ritual — unlike village opera — which fails to save anyone, least of all the other boy. The violence, which is generational, working from the fathers to the sons, and the ignorance which sustains it, reads, like the description of the execution in the preface which it echoes, like the ‘primal scene’ for these narratives: the nightmare of execution is that to which all else returns. Because it is not quite acknowledged, not quite seen, not quite described, this violence remains to haunt and to traumatise the present. The schizoid behaviour it generates is felt throughout the stories, and it can only be faced through the eyes of another ideology into which the subject thrusts himself, the Japanese. This, while enabling a reading of the Chinese cultural situation, also makes the Chinese reader feel the more alienated, and more liable to self-hatred in being made to seeing his culture through foreign eyes. In the last few stories in A Call to Arms, the crisis can only be faced by an attention on the non-human, the animal world, and by a return to childhood. The stories have hardly given a single narrative, but they indicate some very disturbed situations, which the writer by the end of the volume is hardly in a position to transcend.

6 Wandering: Women and Survival

The New-Year Sacrifice Unlike A Call to Arms, there is no preface to Wandering (1926): these short stories are much more orphaned than the ones in the previous collection. Marston Anderson says that the heroes of many of this second group are ‘disappointed reformers’. 1 David Pollard finds the new stories ‘more contemporary and more urban ... more about intellectuals than village folk but if anything ... more gloomy’ (Pollard, 89). Hesitation, as another translation for Wandering, describes the state of mind which accounts for Lu Xun’s description of his uncertain response to Jin Xinyi telling him to write, as described in the preface to A Call to Arms. That state is continued here, especially with the narrators who speak in this collection, but who cannot resolve their attitudes to the various people whose deaths are recorded within it.2 For these eleven stories are full of deaths: The New-Year Sacrifice and In the Tavern and A Warning to the People and with what may be the most astonishing story of all, The Misanthrope, and then Regret for the Past. Though no actual death takes place in Brothers, it does in fantasy. The narrator in each case is hesitant, because he has no conviction that he is living himself, but we shall need to consider the narrating voice in relation to specific stories, noting that the emphasis in this collection is put on the narrator in a way that was not so obvious in A Call to Arms. The New-Year Sacrifice, a title which has in it the sense of ‘blessing’ or ‘benediction’, (Zhu fu), first appeared in the Shanghai Eastern Miscellany in March 1924. And, like Hometown, it is based on the visit that Lu Xun made in December 1919 to Shandong to sell the family home (the same applies to the later story, In the Tavern). The narrator is a spectator, and accounts of the text usually speak of his ‘detachment’,3 but he identifies himself through his clansman Mr Lu, his Fourth Uncle, of a previous generation, who attacked

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the reformists of 1898, such as Kang Youwei (1858–1927), who wanted to reform China while keeping the imperial government. The uncle shows his outdatedness and his inability to understand what is reactionary and what reformist. The narrator begins (as he finishes) in an anthropological, or even journalistic mode, reporting on Chinese New Year festivals, as if writing for those who do not know them, or as if reporting on another, older, rural China. He also says that he has not been in this part of the world ‘for some time’ (XY 168, Y 153), a detail whose significance emerges later: it is a period of some five years. The fertility rituals designed to bring in the New Year take place over the next two days after his arrival, and the narrator — for the first time — plans his return, presumably to Beijing, defeated by the pile of Confucian textbooks he sees in his uncle’s study, but more, thinking about the meeting he had had with Sister Xianglin the previous afternoon. The encounter he records with her, thinking that he saw her five years previously, and that she is now white-haired and become a beggar, quite exceeds all realism, even though it has the logic of the peasant asking information from the authority figure, the scholar. And indeed, it has that social significance, which reprises the encounter of the narrator with the peasant Runtu in Hometown, and before that, with the rickshaw-puller in A Small Incident, bringing out the impotence of the scholar.4 Yet the encounter is more like Oedipus before the Sphinx; it has the uncanniness of Macbeth’s encounter with the Weird Sisters, when a man encounters his destiny. As if echoing Macbeth, with its three witches, there are three questions, where to question is the power of the woman, who tests masculinity, just as the witches do. The resonances of the question run through the entire collection, constructing it, unconsciously, just as they reactivate a reading of the stories in A Call to Arms. And her question is preceded by another one, which is perhaps implicit only, but which also asks about the identity of the person to whom she talks: is there an identity there? ‘So you’re back?’ were her first words. ‘Yes.’ ‘That’s good. You’re a scholar who’s travelled, and seen the world. There’s something I want to ask you.’ A sudden gleam lit up her lacklustre eyes. This was so unexpected that surprise rooted me to the spot. ‘It’s this.’ She drew two paces nearer and lowered her voice, as if letting me into a secret. ‘Do dead people turn into ghosts or not?’

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My flesh crept. ... Personally I had never bothered myself in the least about whether spirits existed or not; but what was the best answer to give her now? I hesitated for a moment, reflecting that the people here still believed in spirits, but she seemed to have her doubts, or rather, hopes — she hoped for life after death and dreaded it at the same time. Why increase the sufferings of someone with a wretched life? For her sake, I thought, I’d better say there was. ‘Quite possibly, I’d say,’ I told her falteringly. ‘That means there must be a hell too?’ ‘What, hell?’ I faltered, very taken aback. ‘Hell? Logically speaking there should be too — but not necessarily. Who cares anyway?’ ‘Then will the members of a family meet again after death?’ ‘Well, as to whether they’ll meet again or not ...’ I realised now what an utter fool I was. All my hesitation and manoeuvring had been no match for her three questions. Promptly taking fright, I decided to recant ... (XY 170–171, Y 155–156)

The narrator attempts, in this account to engage the reader on his side, as though trying to make his reactions — novelettish, safe, bourgeois — the standard ones. It is a narrative that tries to exclude the woman, already a figure of exclusion. Telling her he does not know if there are ghosts or not (but her appearance should already have reminded him that there are ghosts), and full of ‘hesitation’, a word which may compare with the title of this collection of stories, he retreats, thoroughly confounded over the ‘chance meeting’ that casts him, in his worry, as ‘neurotic’. That, and saying that he is not sure replays the public indifference of Fang in Dragonboat Festival. The point is that a woman — who is here not named, only given the patriarchal name of her dead husband, in a contrast to Lu Xun, who bears the name of the mother — now takes centre-stage in Lu Xun’s fiction. She is identified with the power of the question which upsets male certainty, the scholar who knows what a reactionary is, and what is wrong with Confucianism. He also feels she has had some premonition (XY 171, Y 156). The narrator nearly recovers his equipoise enough, however, on the day after, to think about planning a meal for himself on the next day (he has, therefore, planned to go, and then planned to stay one more day) until he hears that Sister Xianglin has died ‘of poverty’ either the previous night (after he met her) or that self-same day. At that point he thinks that ‘his premonition’ had happened (XY 173, Y 158 — Lyell translates more neutrally: ‘my own agitation turned out to be but a momentary

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thing, for right after the servant left, I felt that what was bound to happen had already come and gone’ — L 225). Perhaps the point is that he and the woman have had in common a momentary sense of the uncanny, of having, or being aware of, something more than ordinary knowledge. But, in contrast to her, he is unable to ask any questions at all (XY 173, Y 158). Nonetheless, he is not at ease, but feels that he ought to go, feeling that he is under his uncle’s disapproval — a sense which confirms that the point that, despite his distance, he is strangely akin to the woman he has met. Perhaps being neurotic is, in the context of this story, a feminine condition. Nonetheless, her death, he is almost able to persuade himself, after some rationalisation, is ‘just as well’ for her and others. The point leads him to a reconstruction of her life, which begins in the second section. It goes back fourteen years, to when the woman first appeared, as a young widow, to work in the uncle’s family, brought there by Mrs Wei, whose home is in the hills, where the woman comes from, and who acts as a go-between. This section includes the memory of how she was abducted by her dead husband’s family, under the authority of her mother-in-law, just after the New Year. The third section burrows further into the memory, by coming up with what, the following New Year, was said to have happened to Sister Xianglin. The narrator is Mrs Wei, who says how the mother-inlaw married Sister Xianglin to the ‘sixth son of the Ho family in Ho Glen’ (XY 178, Y 162), against the fiercest resistance of the bride. A further memory follows, when two New Years later, Sister Xianglin is brought back to the Lu house by Mrs Wei. The explanation follows: the husband, Ho, has died, and the child of the marriage, Amao, has been eaten by a wolf. Lu Xun literalises the image of flesh-eating that he had used in the first story of the previous collection, in A Madman’s Diary. Sister Xianglin has failed to ‘save the children’. The woman herself, the bereaved mother, provides the narration of how she found that her child had been eaten. The section continues with Sister Xianglin working again for the family, but it is clear that she has been traumatised, as appears in her ‘face like a death mask’ (XY 181, Y 165), which means that she is ‘living on’ beyond death, and in her constant reminiscing about the death of the child. She speaks about it as though she was an automaton, or as if beyond change, repeating the story over and over again (the narrative of the death is presented twice in the story). Further, she is regarded as unfitted for much of the work in the house, that which has to do with ancestral sacrifices, because she is regarded as unlucky (a widow twice over, a bereaved mother). Further still, she comes to be ostracised by the women of the village. When the New Year comes round

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again, the supplementary servant in the house, Amah Liu, criticises her for having married again, for not committing suicide, and for having been sexually willing towards her second husband. She says that in hell, her two husbands will fight over her, and the King of Hell will have to saw her in two and divide her between them. It is another example of Lu Xun’s fascination with the afterdeath, with the body in pieces, with the state which is beyond life: the woman in hell will be dismembered like the decapitated Chinese in the slide Lu Xun saw. Amah Liu suggests that the woman buys a threshold for the Temple of the Tutelary God, so that she may be trampled on now by proxy as a punishment prior to death, turning herself into an inanimate block (of wood or stone), matching the state of her feelings, which have turned to stone. At the end, after the next New Year she sits ‘stupidly as if carved out of wood’ (XY 187, Y 170), and her hair has turned grey. Now useless within the family, they make a decision: There was no change in her, no sign that she would ever recover her wits. [The narrative declares its interest in madness, this time, woman’s madness.] So they decided to get rid of her and tell her to go back to Old Mrs Wei. That was what they were saying, at least, while I was there; and judging by subsequent developments, this is evidently what they must have done. But whether she started begging as soon as she left my uncle’s house, or whether she went first to Old Mrs Wei and later became a beggar, I do not know. (XY 187, Y 170)

The passage closes the third, longest section. The gap in the narrative needs to be supplied: when the narrator saw the woman, as told at the beginning of the story, he had everything that could tell him the significance of her questions, which are, actually, not uncanny at all, when given a doublereading, but may be perfectly practical. Do dead people turn into ghosts, is a question about her son. Is there a hell, responds to the taunting of Amah Liu. Will the families meet again after death responds to the idea that she will be torn in two (inevitably punished after death after being punished in life) because she will then have two husbands, both of whom will claim her. Her question includes in it the query whether the family has the power to exist as a structure after death, as much as it has been a torment in life. In this, her challenge to Confucian familial piety is much more complete, even though implicit, than the narrator’s intellectual dissent. The narrator had enough information to read her questions then, but just as then, he now fails to read them. Instead, the text turns to the last, short section, when the firecrackers are heard just before dawn celebrating the New Year festival, and:

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the doubt which had preyed on my mind from dawn till night was swept clean away by the festive atmosphere, and I felt only that the saints of heaven and earth had accepted the sacrifice [the unacknowledged sacrifice, if that word is to be used, is, of course, the woman’s death] and were reeling with intoxication in the sky, preparing to give Luzhen’s people boundless good fortune. (XY 188–8, Y 171)

It seems as if he will stay; the doubt, which went with his premonition, has gone, he says. This ending is puzzling. If he is momentarily swept out of his doubts into a celebratory mood, allowing himself to set that new mood down implies and illustrates his inability to think about the woman, to make connections, and shows his inadequacy. In piecing together her story, where elements of that have been scattered through the text, like the fragmented body of her son that the wolves have left, he leaves out his own knowledge of her, which is nonetheless brought out in the woman’s first words, actually a first question, ‘So you’re back?’. It is not just that he knows something of her from seeing her five years previously, but that the meeting is not for the first time, it implies a repetition. And that is indeed the pattern: examples being the two husbands, the two times the woman appears to work for the Lu family, the repeated telling of the story of her son’s death, the repeated pattern of the narrator about to go and then staying, and the woman’s sense of the afterdeath state as a repetition of what has happened before. The repeated pattern in the narrator’s existence — coming back to this town and leaving — associates with that in the woman’s. Neither person is free, which may be why the writer draws back from the implications of his knowledge of her, and finishes with an account of a ceremony which gives a delusive sense of freedom. He can go no further himself, and for certain could not continue to draw out the implications of the story. Hence his last words about the woman: ‘I do not know’, and the earlier moment when he reflects that it is better that the woman has died, when his agnosticism is again expressed: ‘Whether spirits existed or not I did not know’ (XY 174, Y 158). The narrator, however, is part of the text, which includes him and his attitudes, and frames and ‘places’ them. The text also shows that the questions the woman has posed require the foreclosures that he makes, because they remain uncanny. They are not, after all, simply practical questions which the later part of the story offers an explanation as to why she should have asked them (or, why she will have asked them). If they were, that would imply that if she had no practical need to ask them, they would not, even could not, be posed as questions. But the questions far outweigh any practical cause she may

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have for asking them. The narrator pieces together the fragments of her life as if trying to complete these, but fragments remain just that. They do not explain the questions completely, but leave them uncanny, more powerful than can be explained, and in doing so, leave the woman’s life as that which he is excluded from, along with the other people whose reactions to the woman are merely instrumental. If fragments do not explain a life, that is illustrative of what happens in the short story as a fragment: it points to something but knows that explanation of that something is impossible. But there is more than one short story here. The male narrator has the privilege of telling something which covers over his neurosis. The woman, however, is not allowed to tell her story without it becoming the subject of parody, which is itself the source of trauma. Her fate contrasts with what happens in Freudian psychoanalysis, which early on was called, by Anna O, one of its patients, ‘the talking cure’.5 The woman’s story is told for her, and when she tells it, it is not told, because the meaning in it, acceptance of which might free her from its burden, cannot be accessed. If the narrator has experienced something, i.e. has had the encounter with the woman, but has missed its meaning, the same is the case with the woman whose narrative of Amao’s death includes the crucial detail that she just missed the boy being taken by a wolf. Her need to repeat, and, implicitly his need, in that he tells both his story and hers, may be seen as the attempt to reach that kernel of meaning, whose elusiveness has a traumatic effect. Jacques Lacan defines trauma as rising from a ‘missed encounter’, which is ‘with a real which eludes us’.6 The point is not, of course, reducible to the point that the woman has missed the encounter with the wolf, but rather that what the wolf means has a significance in Lu Xun that cannot be explained common-sensically; the wolf is a repeated image in Lu Xun, as with the wolf that Ah Q remembers with its eyes ‘fierce yet cowardly’, (XY 153, Y 112). The text repeats itself from story to story as if under the sign of trauma itself. The image of the wolf becomes something that eludes conceptualisation, not because the woman misses seeing the wolf, but because it is symptomatic that she should have missed it: the real eludes us, and that means that it — whatever the ‘it’ of the real is — has the power to question the subject. And the narrator has also missed something, even though he thinks he can piece together all the bits of her life. She in her narrative keeps saying how stupid she was (XY 180, 182, 183, Y 164, 166, 167). Does the narrator have the perception to know that he missed something when he talked to her, so that her death, which results ‘of poverty, of course’ (XY 173, Y 150), was something he should have seen, but which eluded him? Certainly she has died of poverty, but also out of the trauma that she has missed something: he too has missed something,

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which means that something of her life now survives in him, disturbing him, producing the rationalisations that work through his utterance.

In the Tavern The New Year Sacrifice is dated 7 February, In the Tavern 16 February and A Happy Family 18 February. The stories need to be kept together, as representing a single burst of energy and a common purpose. In the Tavern (Zai jiulu shang, Lyell: Upstairs in a Wineshop) appeared in the Shanghai Short Story Magazine, a different outlet than for either of the others. It replays the issues of Hometown, in that the narrator has come back to his old town, and finds himself talking to Lü Weifu, a friend whom he had known from ten years back, who had moved away to Jinan (Shandong province) and then to Taiyan (Shanxi province), and had taken his mother with him (XY 196, Y 174), thus repeating the experience of Lu Xun at the end of 1919. Both the narrator, and the narrator within the story contribute to Lu Xun’s autobiography. Both these narrators are in the town over the New Year, which, therefore, forms a link with the previous short story, and as in that one (XY 169), the snow is falling (‘covering earth in forgetful snow’, as T. S. Eliot writes in The Waste Land [1922] ). The first narrator, upstairs in the tavern, is able to look out on the deserted garden which he has seen before, sometimes in snowy weather. Several old plum trees in full bloom were braving the snow as if oblivious of the depth of winter; while among the thick dark foliage of a camellia beside the crumbling pavilion, a dozen crimson blossoms blazed bright as flame in the snow, indignant and arrogant, as if despising the wanderer’s wanderlust. At this I suddenly remembered the moistness of the heaped-up snow here, clinging, glistening and shining ... (XY 190, Y 173)

The plum trees are evocative of China; the garden’s desertedness makes him feel ‘loneliness’, while the second narrator ‘hesitates’ (XY 191, Y 174) before joining the first. This second narrator has something of the character of Sister Xianglin, in the lack of spark in his eyes, an emptiness (or futility, a word repeated several times in the story, (XY 192, 193 [twice], 195, 200 [twice], Y 175, 178, 181, 182) but unlike Sister Xianglin — whose case is glanced at again in Ashun, the character in this short story who has died — there is still potential there. The narrator writes: ‘at sight of the deserted garden [his eyes] suddenly flashed with the same piercing light I had seen so often at school’ (XY 191, Y 174). At that moment, they become like the crimson blossoms.

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The futility the second narrator feels is represented by two things he came back to do: one, to rebury his dead brother, the other, to buy an artificial flower. Both things he has been asked to do by his mother, with whom he lives: she has sent him back. The first circumstance is because of the fear that the brother’s tomb is about to subside into the river; the mother’s solicitation for the dead child recalls both Medicine, and the cry ‘Save the children’. When he excavates the tomb — again there is the fascination with what is after life and post-death — he finds there is nothing there, no sign of the body; the tomb has been a sarcophagus indeed (in the etymological sense: it ‘eats the flesh’). Having a new coffin is futile and so is re-burying it, which he has done the day before, adding in a brick vault, the pointlessness being that he is burying something which is empty. Weifu could not remember his brother, but it turns out that there is no place of, or for, memory; memory cannot be supported by anything outside itself, by anything artificial. This point connects with the second circumstance, which corresponds to something he has done that day. A former neighbour, Changfu, had a daughter, Ashun, who lost her mother when she was in her teens, and brought up her younger brother and sister. She had wanted a red velvet flower for her hair (obviously, an artificial flower), and had been beaten by her father for it. Weifu’s mother, who knew of this, has told him to buy Ashun one, which he is pleased to do on account of a memory he had of some buckwheat mush she had cooked for him. He says that he went to Jinan to buy the flowers, and at that point, the text breaks: There was a rustle outside the window as a pile of snow slithered off the camellia which had been bending beneath its weight; then the branches of the tree straightened themselves, flaunting their thick dark foliage and blood-red flowers even more clearly. The sky had grown even more leaden. Sparrows were twittering ... (XY 197, Y 179)

Weifu then goes back to saying how he went to Jinan to buy the flowers. Having stayed on an extra day in order to give them, he goes to Changfu’s house to see the brother and younger sister (Azhao). The brother ‘looked fierce enough to fling himself at me and bite me’, which makes him return and to discover from a neighbour (a third narrator) that Ashun has died, it seems of tuberculosis, like her mother, on the eve of an arranged wedding, about which her uncle has been contemptuous. That made her the more willing to die, since he has so devalued her future husband. Weifu describes himself as left with the flowers, which he asks the neighbour to give to Azhao who ‘had fled at the sight of me as if I were a wolf or a monster’ (XY 199, Y 181). He says he will be able to tell his mother that the flowers were given to Ashun.

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As the tuberculosis may memorialize Lu Xun’s father in a feminine way (as existing in both the second mother of the story, and her daughter), so the artificial flowers suggest a memory which is also artificial, this being pointed by Weifu deceiving his mother twice over: about the coffin, that this preserved the brother’s body, and about Ashun, that she was still alive. Whereas he has been contemptuous of Confucianism (XY 195, Y 177), he is now teaching it, including its patriarchal texts, such as the ‘Canon for Girls’. The narrators separate, and the first concludes with the words: as I walked back alone to my hotel, the cold wind buffeted my face with snowflakes, but I found this thoroughly refreshing. I saw that the sky, already dark, had interwoven with the houses and streets in the white, shifting web of thick snow. (XY 201, Y 183)

The view from the tavern and the scene at the end both give a double sense of the power of oblivion (the snow, clinging, whiting out everything), and the power of the red flowers, which contrast with the two sprays of artificial flowers, one red, one pink. The assertions of life, and death, go together, and comprise something else to qualify and, as already seen, even relieve the other speaker’s pessimism. The two moments where he has discovered emptiness — neither a dead brother’s body nor a live woman to whom to give artificial flowers — are allegories of a culture which wants to evoke a past which if it was revealed, would be as empty, and constituted as real by fresh inventions of it (the new grave, the story to be told to the mother that Ashun is alive and has received the flowers). Such a culture, which is constituted by fear, a mutual sense of the other as the wolf, or of the past consuming the present, has to sustain itself in this way, and it both evokes and is contrasted by the deserted garden. The narrator’s response at the end has been discussed by Theodore Huters, who comments that ‘a focus on the inadequacies of perception is, in fact, the common denominator of all four first person stories in Lu Xun’s second collection of stories’. He includes, as an example here, The New-Year Sacrifice, whose narrator I have already discussed, and the story under consideration here, In the Tavern. He also includes the later stories The Misanthrope and Regret for the Past, which will be discussed in their turn. He finds an ‘access of lyricism’ and a ‘narratorial callousness’ in the end of In the Tavern.7 A page later, he speaks of a ‘compromised narrator’ and of Lu Xun’s ability, through his narrator, to ‘force self-scrutiny’, which he sees as marking out Lu Xun’s distinctive marker in writing short stories. But apart from the real danger in thinking that the problems of the narrator’s attitude are the same in different stories, and that they can be generalised from, the problem in

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finding something inappropriate in the narrator’s response is that it requires judging by standards which have been pre-decided on as normative. Three small points then, might be made about this ending. First, in realist terms, the primary experience within the text is that of the first narrator, and what he goes through, however influenced by Weifu’s experience, is separate from it. Second, the coldness throughout is refreshing, because it belongs to another force than the deadness and artificiality that has subjected the two narrators. The wind, which recalls the one which blows in A Small Incident, evokes an otherness whose difference is outside the bleakness and dreariness which makes the stories, on one reading ‘without hope for a better tomorrow for society or the fictional characters in the story’ (Jian Xu, p. 74). They lift the depression and melancholia. But to find the wind refreshing indicates that there is no normative standard which applies here; the narrator is as alienated as Weifu is, and in a way, he is his mirror. In this way, all behaviours are strange, normal behaviours included. The conditions of living in this China are those which make all reactions a matter of remark; the awareness of this gives point to what short stories typically do: they show that there is no behaviour which characters’ behaviours ought to follow. Normal behaviour, expected reactions, are also aberrant; there are no patterns of behaviour which can be thought of in general terms, only singularities. It is this discovery that constitutes Lu Xun’s difference, and makes for his interest.

A Happy Family The stories that follow and which this chapter discusses, are not, perhaps, with the exception of A Warning to Others, written with such intensity as The NewYear Sacrifice and In the Tavern. Nonetheless, they are full of interest. The first to be discussed, which as said before, was the third story to be written in February 1924, is a pendant to the other two, and first appeared in The Ladies’ Journal in March 1924. Lyell’s translation prints the postscript which appeared with the original: that Lu Xun had read in 1923 Xu Qinwen’s The Ideal Mate in the literary supplement to the Morning Post, and felt like writing something in the manner of it. According to Lyell, ‘Xu’s story ... begins with the arrival of the narrator’s friend, who tells him about [a] contest [to write about the ideal mate]. The narrator then suggests that his friend describe his ideal mate while the narrator carefully notes down what he says. The rest of Xu’s tale consists of the narrator’s record of what his friend says’ (L 263). The suggested title is related to Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895), a comedy about British political corruption, where the feminist wishes to have a husband who

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is as pure and free from stain as the Victorian woman was supposed to be. This had been serialised in New Youth in 1915, thanks to the enthusiasm of Chen Duxiu (‘Is there some outstanding writer in our own national literature who will take on the role of China’s Hugo, Zola, Goethe, Hauptmann, Dickens, or Wilde?’).8 But to the would-be writer whose failure to write A Happy Family is the substance of A Happy Family (the short story being about, therefore, its failure to be written), it is so much unknown, save as a title, that it is called not a play but a novel (XY 208, Y 190). The centre of A Happy Family is a writer who has been married for five years, which implies the period of time since the May Fourth movement. His work is all for the market but he talks about writing ‘as one feels’, and is actually motivated by cash constraints, and so wants to write for Happy Monthly because they pay well. However, since they have a limited selection of topics he must find some moralistic subject for ‘the younger generation’ on the subject of love, marriage and the family. Why such a magazine must have such a limited range is obvious from the difficulties in thinking of a setting for the ideal family: everything has to be repressed because China is war-torn, and it is not possible to think of a suitable urban setting for his bourgeois family, except to call it A. The short story satirises art attempting to be bourgeois: in his attempted portrayal of a happy family, the man is to be a writer, and the woman a writer, or a lover of literature, or a poet, while the man is ‘a respecter of womanhood’ (XY 127, Y 188). The house furnishings are tasteful, as with the ‘elmwood bed made by the convicts of Number One prison’. The writer is fairly successful in keeping out reality, and in attempting to imagine his family eating, but he has phantasmagoric images: ‘Beside the bookcase behind him had appeared a mound of cabbages, three at the bottom, two above, and one at the top, confronting him like a larger letter A’ (XY 207, Y 189) and at the end, while trying to put an end to all distracting thoughts — to reality itself — ‘he saw passing before him a flat, round, black-freckled flower, with an orange centre, which floated from the left of his left eye right over to the opposite side where it disappeared; then a bright green flower, with a dark green centre, and finally a pile of six cabbages which formed themselves before him into an enormous letter A’ (XY 210). Words, which mean money, and are therefore beautiful, pass before his eyes; the greenness perhaps implying a reference to Wilde, who was associated with the colour, and who makes his Salome, in his play of that name, say that she will give Narraboth a green flower.9 Last, comes the reality of cabbages, also green: a crazy or grotesque detail suggestive of Gogol, who with Wilde — not as the author of a politically correct text, but as more strange, more perverse figure — helps to construct this last little scene which blights the happy family. The phantasmagoria is a

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reminder that such repression as is described here can only be productive of madness, while it also suggests how much of other forms of reality are required to be left out through the attempt to be inside bourgeois ideology.

Soap Soap followed A Happy Family a month later, like it, satirising the family, but whereas the earlier tale has as its contexts China’s politics and the poverty of its people, the second focuses more on the impact of new social ideas and reaction against them. Soap, which as far as the plot goes, records only an ordinary evening in an unspecified Chinese city, first appeared in the literary supplement of the Beijing Morning Post in two installments at the end of March 1924. At the beginning, Siming’s wife and her daughter, Xiu’er, are pasting paper coins for the dead; there is another daughter, Zhao’er, and a son, Xuecheng, also busy with Confucian activities, and who is practising Hexagram Boxing. Siming has come back with some (foreign) soap for his wife, and a question for his son: what does ‘o-du-fu’ (old fool) mean: it was an expression directed at himself in the language of ‘foreign devils’ by a teenager in the shop. His son has no idea, and thinks it means a ‘fierce woman’, which in a way is right. Later he comes up with the meaning ‘odd fellow’ which is also appropriate. The father is an old Confucian who in the time of Guang Fu (up to 1908) was in favour of opening schools for boys, which would teach English, but he feels himself out of these developments (and much opposed to the implications of education for girls) and reacts by antagonism to the ‘New Culture’ movement. ‘The students have no morals, society has no morals. Unless we find some panacea, China will really be finished’ (XY 216, Y 197). At this point he talks for the first time (the story will emerge three times in all) about the filial girl he saw that day who was begging with her blind grandmother, ‘filial’ even though he knew that ‘it’s most improper to beg at that age’ (XY 216, Y 198). One sexist comment that had been passed about her in the street was that ‘if you buy her two cakes of soap and give her a good scrubbing, the result won’t be bad at all’. It turns out that seeing the beggar had prompted the man to buy two bars of soap, one which he gave to the girl, the other to his wife. The wife draws the conclusion that the soap was really primarily for the girl, and is not slow to draw the conclusion of what was going through his mind, and what was meant by the phrase ‘if you buy her two cakes of soap and give her a good scrubbing, the result won’t be

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bad at all’ (his wife, and then his daughter, repeats the phrase): the soap implies the power of the sexual. Siming is indeed what the students called him in the shop: an old fool, and he is not conscious enough of the point to repress repeating the statements, unaware of how he is giving himself away. (He also repeats the story of what was said about the two cakes of soap later on when his male friends arrive: they are more aware of the implications and he shows his anger towards them as before he has shown it to his family.) When he is rescued from the comments of his wife about the soap and the filial daugher, by the arrival of He Daotong, famous for his loud voice which symbolises his vacuousness, the two men, aided by Bu Weiyuan, start drafting a paper intended to promote the Confucian classics, and the worship of Mencius’s mother, in order to preserve ‘our national character’ (XY 221, Y 202). At that point discussion of the ‘filial daughter’ begins, and Bu Weiyuan decides that the beggar is no good to base an essay on, since she ‘isn’t from these parts, and I couldn’t understand her dialect’. The provincialism contrasts, neatly, with the contrasted moves towards modernity which, like the soap, is having a slow effect, and which even Siming cannot be wholly separate from. The soap brings out some contradictions which construct further what is interesting in the piece. Described as ‘sunflower green’ (L 264) and redolent of olive, it is not insignificant as an emblem of new life, and it takes several forms: for, at the end, there is a different soap, which is of sandalwood. As applied to the beggar girl, the joking statement by the men whose look objectifies her has a quadruple valency: it would clean her (which is something she needs) and it would also make her sexually attractive (and it would turn the man on who scrubbed her). It also reminds the man that his wife is actually as dirty as the beggar: in other words, the soap is a reminder that the status of Chinese women is not so different from each other. The guardian of the purity of China’s morals has been made aware that morality has not done anything for his wife’s dirty neck. Mrs Siming notes an equivalent ambiguity, or contradiction, within her husband when she says ‘if you men aren’t cursing eighteen or nineteen-year-old girl students, you’re praising eighteen or nineteen-year old girl beggars: such dirty minds you have’ (XY 220). The beggar is praised for being filial, of course: for staying obedient, as opposed to being like the students who are able to learn, which implies acquiring the modernity which associates with the possession of soap. The woman (the beggar) can only be praised on the grounds that she has first been humiliated, brought down to the dust (it is noticeable that none of the men seem to be giving her money). At the same time, soap acts as the panacea, or solution, that the man thinks that China ought to have: while in a way he wants the import of Western ideas, and modernisation, which he considered important

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once, and in a way still desires, since he buys the soap, yet it also stands for trying to clean up the place, restoring ‘morality’ at the level of hypocrisy (can there be a set morality which is not hypocrisy?) This Pecksniffism is evident in the sexual unconscious (which is conscious to his wife) involved in giving the other of the two cakes of soap to the eighteen-year old beggar girl, on the ideology of her being the symbol of a ‘filial daughter’. The hypocrisy persists, and is evident in the way that the narrative of the text persists with the man, who at the end walks into the yard: The moonlight on the ground was like seamless white gauze, and the moon — quite full — seemed a jade disc among the bright clouds. He felt not a little depressed, as if he, like the filial daughter, was ‘utterly forlorn and alone’. That night he slept very late. (XY 223, Y 204)

He thinks of himself as a figure out of the Book of Rites. But the moonlight in this context, is a little dangerous, as it evokes the moon in A Madman’s Diary. The stress on cleanness and purity will be noted: the man has shielded himself from the knowledge of his contradictoriness. His wife, as already seen, realises more than he does, when she asks him why he keeps losing his temper: ‘Even at supper you can’t stop hitting the hen while pointing at the dog’ (XY 219, Y 200). The accusation is a reminder of Ah Q as another, earlier figure who lacks any integrative power, and it also suggests what fascinates within the text, which is the awareness of subjectivity as split, and of masculinity characterised, to a degree that the women are not (at the end, the woman uses the soap) by a ressentiment which takes the form of anger at the thought of not being in control. The anger has to be interpreted as everyone else having lost a sense of morality. It is also the frustration of someone who knows that even with the Revolution, China has not modernised itself, that even its soap is imported, and that the price of modernisation within China is colonisation. The discussion of national purity within morals is an irrelevance in relation to this point, which, because it is not articulated, is stronger.

The Eternal Lamp Written virtually a year after Soap, The Eternal Lamp was published serially, 5–8 March 1925, in the literary supplement of the Beijing Republican Daily News, a few days before the death of Sun Yat-sen (12 March). And that death was just after a significant event in Lu Xun’s life: his student Xu Guangping started writing letters to him the day before, 11 March. The woman, as in the short stories in this collection, has the power to challenge masculine authority.

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As with the next story, translated by Lyell with the title A Warning to the People, one of the subjects of this comic satire is the crowd. The story divides into four sections. The first is set in a the village tearoom — the setting for the executioner’s story in Medicine — where various people are assembled; they can hear the faint sound of a voice saying ‘put it out’, quoted in the opening paragraph, and this is the subject of their discussion; the voice is of someone never named but called ‘he’ and identified as a madman. The temple is a source of tourism, and villagers want the madman who would blow out the flame charged with being ‘unfilial’, a word which resonates from Soap, and which could, it seems, result in the son being killed by the villagers, by them all hitting him at once, in order that — so the precedent for this states — no one murderer would have to take responsibility (L 287). The madman wants to put out the eternal map burning in the temple: as the woman who runs the tearoom explains, ‘“it all started one day when his granddad took him to the village temple and told him to pay his respects to the Temple God, the God of Plagues, and the Guardian God of the Temple Gate. He got scared, wouldn’t worship ...” and he says now that “once the lamp’s out, there’ll be no more locusts and no more epidemics”’ (L 281). Terrible things are threatened if the lamp goes out, but it is easy to see that the madman is right, that these gods are there to be worshipped in the temple by the aid of the lamp in order to institutionalise social control: the gods come after the plagues, not before them, but they are there to make people think that if they are respected, there will be no danger. This licenses the superstition and conformity of the village and its state of ‘hibernation’. In the second section, they all go to view the temple, and see the ‘madman’ (so called for the first time). The temple gate is shut but he wants to get in and blow out the lamp, and get the gods out, the one with three heads and six arms, the one with the triple eye, and the others. Getting rid of the gods, for him, and blowing out the lamp, is the first move towards eliminating the plagues. And indeed, there is no interest in eliminating the plagues as long as the gods and the temple are in place. The text returns to the theme Lu Xun had developed much earlier, of why he wanted to study medicine, and do so in Japan. The madman’s further scheme is to set the temple on fire. In the third section, the crowd go to the maternal uncle of the madman, Fourth Master, his only relative, who thinks that the madman’s existence is a retribution for his father’s lack of belief (his father being Fourth Master’s younger brother). He is being addressed by Guo Laowa ‘a man as eminent in virtue as rich in years’ who is saying that the madman must be tied up and put in the City Temple. Fourth Master is not keen on having the madman

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confined in his house, which is what the villagers have suggested, and recommends that the madman is imprisoned in a room in the temple. In the fourth section, this has happened (how it took place is not told; the action is unrecorded in the gap between the final sections). The ending is given to the children — who have not been ‘saved’. The madman, inside the temple, wants to get out and set the temple on fire, and it is said that ‘a pair of fiery eyes flashes from between the bars’ (L 290). These eyes contrast with the lamp. The madman, it seems, represents the power of fire, and from the description, the power of alienation, which makes him frightening. Those eyes have been seen so often in Lu Xun’s fiction, for instance with the eyes of Weifu in In the Tavern. Before, the madman’s eyes were described as having ‘a strange flickering light. He is a man who can stare and stare at you without blinking. His eyes are a mixture of sadness and indignation, touched with fear’ (L 283). Now, they imply a new and non-human energy which brings into question what is meant by the ‘human’ and by humanism. The irony of the temple, as the place of otherness, being used to repress and contain that which is other, makes up a potent image for this short story. The temple has become like the ‘iron house’ of the preface to A Call to Arms. The picture of confinement leads straight into the next narrative, A Warning to the People.

A Warning to the People A Public Example (Shi zhong — ‘show crowd’ ) was published on 13 April 1925 in the Beijing weekly Fragments, or Threads of Talk (Yusi), which had been founded in November 1924 at Peking University, with Zhou Zuoren as the chief editor. Despite the estrangement between the two brothers, Lu Xun published his essays, the zawen, in this journal, as well as the ‘symbolic prose poems’ called Weeds, which he was to begin in September 1924 (Pollard, 89–92). Beijing is known here as the ‘Realm of the Highest Good’ and the story starts with the silence and heat of midsummer and then fills out as a policeman brings up a prisoner on the end of a rope. A boy selling mantous and baozi (the mantou is not the only echo here of the first part at least of Medicine, and the interest in consumption is also symptomatic), tries to look but suddenly finds a crowd of people gathering round the prisoner. The latter has his hat pulled down around his eyes so that he is not quite visible, and he wears a white vest with Chinese characters written on it which explain the nature of his crime. But the person who is trying to read them, Baldy, is unable to deliver anything more than unintelligible half-words. Later, Baldy is equally

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intrigued by ‘four white characters on a red board nailed to the telephone pole’ (L 295), but what these are remains equally unknown. This public example is actually almost invisible, and a workman who comes up to ask what crime he has committed is greeted with stunned surprise, making him feel thoroughly uncomfortable, so that he slips away, as if he had committed the crime. At the end there is more notice taken of a rickshaw puller who has had a fall, which diverts the crowd’s attention. The episode, which shows a narrative which fails to deliver itself as a discrete incident, because of the crowd, replays the issues of the slide that was shown at the medical school at Sendai. Marston Anderson, discussing this story, and how the crowd, seen as no more than fragments of bodies and clothing, is put on display as much as the ‘criminal’, quotes from a speech of Lu Xun of 1923. This, a reminder of how the subject has been created through awareness of crowd-behaviour in Sendai, seen both in the photograph and in the lecture-hall, indicates how much Lu Xun signs himself in acknowledgment of a split identity which is recognised there: The masses, especially in China, are always spectators at a drama. If the victim on the stage acts heroically, they are watching a tragedy; if he shivers and shakes, they are watching a comedy. Before the mutton shops in Peking a few people often gather to gape, with evident enjoyment, at the skinning of the sheep. And this is all they get out of it if a man lays down his life. Moreover, after walking a few steps away from the scene they forget even this modicum of enjoyment. There is nothing you can do with such people; the only way to save them is to give them no drama to watch.10

Looking at the skinning of a sheep repeats the voyeuristic fascination with what is beyond death, which has been noticed before, and which In the Tavern shows with Weifu’s unconscious desire to excavate his brother’s coffin. In A Warning to Others, there is no position outside the crowd, which of course means that there is no space for a narrative voice which is detached. Those who are outside are struggling to get in, those inside the crowd are struggling to get nearer, those on its most innermost part are still unable to see, or to read, the signs, which are all that there is to see: the prisoner, who recalls the figure in the slide, is not wholly visible. The writing is inseparable from this sense that there is no vantage-point, no representation possible: in that way, the episode reverses the writing of the lecture-hall at Sendai, which provides a sure position from which to watch (the camera’s eye, the seat in the lecture-room). The subject-position that was imposed there also implied a split state, and the present text responds to that by being one from which

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all ability to construct the self as s subject looking has been taken away. The absence of such a position takes away all sense of an event, if by that is meant something that is describable: it is taken away even more radically than it was obscured in Medicine. But to say there is no describable event means that there may be something else, that which is the ‘real’, which Lacan says ‘eludes’ the gaze, and which is an event in another sense: it cannot be inserted into any narrative. It is the sense of that which is other, but which is seen here even less than the eyes of the madman in the previous story.

The Venerable Schoolmaster Gao The satire which follows, The Venerable Schoolmaster Gao, which returns to some of the issues of education raised in Soap, appeared in Fragments in May 1925. It is a piece about the making, and unmaking (the fragmentation) of identity, which, as in the psychoanalysis of Lacan, is given from outside, from identification with the other, as for example, the image of the other seen in the mirror. In the first part, Gao at the beginning is looking in the mirror, having created himself as a new identity (called ‘he’, the reader is never given his previous name) as he has published an article in the Great China Daily News, called ‘The Duty of Every Citizen in the Chinese Republic to Aid in the Study and Systematisation of our National Heritage’ (L 299). Now, with the new name of Orky Gao (Gao Erchu, Y 223), as though he was a follower of the naturalist writer Gorky (1868–1936), and has assumed his identity, he has been taken on to lecture at a woman’s college. He is starting mid-term, as the previous history teacher has left half way through; there is not much conviction around about the power of history. However, there is a contrasted episode in his life (the story is built up on contrasts) as appears when he is ragged for his change of profession by his friend Third Huang, who has come to see him because he wants him to help cheat someone out of their money by playing mahjong that evening. Quite clearly, he is split between different identities. Further, his grasp on Chinese history is so shaky that there is no identity to be acquired from there, and part of the critique of the text is that the teaching of Chinese history simply alienates its students from it and from their ‘national heritage’. The school, which is reactionary in all its details, with a school attendant ‘more dead than alive’ (L 302, 308) is seen in the second section, along with its Dean of Studies, Wan Yaopu. He makes it clear that while it is part of a movement towards modernisation, the school is intended to ‘nip any erroneous tendencies in the bud’ (L 305). Wan Yaopu clearly knows nothing,

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which makes him servile to Gao, and his methods of writing poetry — the revelation of which forms the contrasted episode in his life — involve spiritism, and are fairly suspect. Gao is taken to the class to lecture on ‘The Rise and Fall of the Eastern Jin’, a subject he knows nothing about. He feels throughout the lecture that he is being looked at by female students giggling at him, stumbles through the topic inadequately, and finishes early. Even in this piece, paranoia is not missing, because what identity Gao has, has been brought into question: imagining he is being laughed at means that he repeats the history which he is trying to teach, of Fu Jian, the commander who lost a battle in the year 383 because he mistook the trees on the hills for enemy soldiers. The last section sees him looking in his mirror again, ‘as though half his soul were missing’ (L 309), and indignant at the state of modernity which allows girls — as a prime example of the threatening Other — to be educated; he is determined to quit, repeating the history of the previous history teacher. As with The New-Year Sacrifice, and Soap, the emphasis so far in this new collection of stories has been on the woman’s power to destabilise the man who would stand firm. Gao cheers up, however, over the game of mahjong, which reestablishes an identity based on male camaraderie.

7 ‘Living Longer’: Concluding Wandering

The Misanthrope The Loner, as Lyell translates the title (Gudu zhe), was finished on 17 October 1925, but it was not published before it appeared as part of Wandering. The title implies solitude and loneliness, and so something autobiographical, and it applies to at least two characters, the narrator, and, more obviously, Wei Lianshu, whose story is being told in five chapters. Both men are to be assumed as teaching in Shaoxing, and Lianshu is obviously a divided subject: he is a biologist teaching history (there seems to be a political idealism here: certainly, the history teaching will not be like that of Mr Gao). Further, he is someone who treated others in cavalier fashion yet liked to concern himself with their affairs, and ‘while maintaining that the family system should be abolished, he would remit his salary to his grandmother’ (XY 225, Y 252). He has come from a remote mountain village, Hanshishan, and in the first part, the villagers anticipate that he will want things done in a ‘modern’ way at his grandmother’s funeral. He reacts, however, by assenting to all the traditional ways, surprising everyone, however by the way he weeps after the funeral, ‘the loner surrounded by a crowd’ as Leo Ou-fan Lee points out.1 It is a significant detail. ‘He burst into a long wail like a wounded wolf howling in the wilderness at the dead of night, anger and sorrow mingled with his agony’ (XY 228, Y 234–235). He laments while he is also ‘motionless as an iron statue’ — a figure of life and death together, anticipating his own death, indicating that death already works in him, as it does with all those others in the ‘iron house’. The narrator has already drawn attention to the point that he first met Wei Lianshu at this funeral, and met him for the last time at another (and the dominance of the funeral will be recollected from the story Tomorrow). This funeral was Lianshu’s own, and as he goes away from Lianshu’s funeral at the end, exactly the same words are used about the recurrence of the wolf-howl,

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preceded by: ‘Something struggled in my ears, and after a long time, burst out. It was like a long howl, the howl of a wounded wolf crying in the wilderness in the depth of night, anger and sorrow mingled in its agony.’ (XY 248, Y 253). At the end, is the narrator crying, or has he been possessed by Lianshu, so that what comes from him is spectral, the sound of his ghost? But equally puzzling is the last line of the story, which follows that sound of the wolf. ‘Then my heart felt lighter, and I paced calmly on along the damp cobbled road under the moon.’ Is this acceptance of death? I shall return to this line later, for further discussion. The narrator meets Lianshu once more, briefly, after the first funeral, but the second chapter opens with the third meeting, early that winter, which initiates many more. By now, the narrator has lost his job, while Lianshu is friendly with his landlord’s children, whose innocence he believes in (showing the spirit of ‘Save the children’). The narrator is not so optimistic, and a rift of three months follows, after which Lianshu calls, having obviously changed his mind about children, having watched a child pretending to kill him with a reed (the detail is a reappearance from the end of The Eternal Lamp). He shows, too, a cynical attitude towards his relatives. When the narrator finishes the dialogue by asking him why he does not get married, ‘he looked at me in surprise, then dropped his gaze to his knees and started smoking. I received no answer to my question’ (XY 233, Y 239). Disbelief in the family? Or in children? Or in the future? Or homosexuality? Or because he does not know why he should, or should not? The text leaves the question open. The third chapter takes place after Lianshu has been attacked in the papers for the articles he has written. While the narrator is hoping to get a new teaching post in Shanyang, Lianshu is about to lose his post. He speaks about his grandmother, saying that he has already bewailed his fate together with hers, adding that it was through the funeral that the two men became friends: a friendship confirmed by death. He adds that the grandmother was not his own, but his grandfather’s second wife (the detail repeats things which were true of Lu Xun’s relationship with his grandmother, Zhou Funqing’s second wife, who died in 1910). Lianshu speaks of himself as divided between two grandmothers, the one with a faint smile on her lips who is a photographic image, and the new grandmother who seldom smiled. The exclusion of the grandfather, and the father is significant; there is no mention even of the mother, as though she was connected with the father. Attention is paid solely to the grandmother as an outsider, not an actual mother, but the image of the mother. She ‘created loneliness for herself and tasted [life’s] bitterness’. He says he feels that there are many like that, and that weeping for her was weeping for one like himself, even though his actual feelings for her, since

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he had grown up, had cooled (part of his own indifference). However, after a gap when he is ‘lost in thought’, he adds ‘it is hard to live so that no no one will mourn for your death’ (XY 238, Y 244). Any form of life necessitates mourning, if only because in that mourning there is something proleptic, awareness of the death of the mourner. But mourning also then becomes impossible, because it is not the other who is mourned, but the self, as if the self exists on the basis of the other’s death.2 And this insight perhaps gives meaning to the image of the wounded wolf whose howl was heard in the mourning, for the act of mourning ironically consumes the other while also taking leave of that person. The conversation ends with another pause and a breaking off from a sentence which has been started. The narrator closes the section saying, ‘When I left him, the full moon was high in the sky and the night was very still.’ The sentence echoes the opening of A Madman’s Diary, another text of isolation, and it finishes with the stillness of death. The fourth chapter shows the narrator about to leave Shanyan, and with Lianshu coming to see him in poverty, stuttering out the words, which remain with the narrator, ‘I have to live a little longer’ (XY 239, Y 245), and which echo in his ears. To say these words seems to assume knowledge of being dead, or being at the point of death, as if Wei is thinking how he can arrive at his death, in a series of ‘hesitations’, or of fort! da! movements, going forwards and then backwards, deferring, but slowly reaching, death. 3 Certainly, it is the last time he is seen alive within the text, though the narrator gets a sense of him in three other ways as if he was going gradually out of life, staging his slow disappearance. (But was he ever wholly alive?). The first is through an image the narrator has of him. He describes midwinter snow (there are echoes of In the Tavern throughout this text): I closed my eyes and sat there in the dim lamplight, doing nothing, imagining the snowflakes falling to augment the boundless drifts of snow. It would be busy New Year at home too, and everyone would be busy. I saw myself a child again, making myself a snowman with a group of children on the level ground in the back-yard. The eyes of the snowman, made of jet-black fragments of coal, suddenly turned into Wei’s eyes. ‘I have to live a little longer.’ The same voice again. ‘What for?’ I asked inadvertently, aware immediately of the ineptitude of my remark. (XY 240, Y 245)

The snowman as a figure of death, as a figure disappearing as it is made, contrasts in its whiteness (the colour of mourning, as has been insisted on in this text) with the eyes whose coal-quality threatens to make them fiery, like

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the madman’s in The Eternal Lamp. The eyes will persist when the body has melted away. The ‘ridiculous’ question which the narrator asks ‘without thinking’ (L 327) shows how the narrator thinks of himself, and of Wei, as superfluous men. The ‘superfluous man’ was a title which the Russian writer Turgenev (1818–1883) used in 1850 for the dying hero, Chulkaturin, who calls himself that in the short story The Diary of a Superfluous Man. The ‘superfluous man’ is a failure in sexual and political terms: he can make no difference, despite his education, to the world around him; Turgenev was thinking of the period of political stasis that Russia was going through in the reign of the Czar, Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 to 1855.4 From Turgenev, the idea passes to Dostoyevsky, with the sense that the fate of being an intellectual is to be a non-producer. The narrator’s question unconsciously, automatically, positions Wei and himself in that position: the dream, if it is that, of Wei as the snowman is, of course, a dream of himself, produced by himself. Why should what is superfluous live on? But then to think of the self as superfluous is to accept the discourse of another, and it means that the self has to think of itself as better off dead, living on as superfluous (the idea will recur at the end of the short story, when the narrator is the survivor, surviving being a superfluous state). It also means that the short story itself, insofar as it deals with superfluous men, is itself superfluous. It lacks a reason to be; in writing it, Lu Xun takes up the cause of the superfluous, by writing a text whose subject: mourning the passing of the superfluous man, actually vindicates him. How far Lu Xun has moved forward from the time when he wrote about Ah Q, a superfluous man who yet could be seen as a marginal figure, to positioning superfluity — through the figures of the woman in The New-Year Sacrifice and Wei here — at the very centre of things in China, should now become apparent. Lu Xun starts writing with the theme of the madman; in Divorce, the last story, he ends with the most minor and ignorable of characters — the wife in the provinces in the late Qing period, a forgotten time, but not forgotten in the writing. We may return, with these points, to The Misanthrope. This vision of the snowman leads in, uncannily, like a premonition, to the letter that Wei addresses to him — the second way he shows himself — calling him Shenfei. The letter, in this second moment of revelation, seems to offer variations on the words ‘I have to live a little longer’ — ‘there was someone who wanted me to live a little longer, and I wished it too’ — ‘I must go on living ... Shall I then live on?’ ... ‘The one who wanted me to live a little longer could not live himself ...’ ...‘that one person wanted me to live on, proved extremely potent ...’, ‘I do not deserve to live’ and so on. Acting out the contradictions

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already noticed within him, Wei says that he has become an adviser to a warlord, General Du and now has a salary. One detail that also emerges is that he is consumptive (compare XY 247, Y 251), hence it is unlikely he will live more than a little longer: in that way, he replays what Ashun stood for in In the Tavern. He ends by saying that he is ‘well’, and the detail recalls the madman who was ‘cured’ in A Madman’s Diary, making his past existence a parallel to the madman’s: also mad. The chapter ends in May, with the narrator going from Shanyang, and with rumours appearing in the press about him, as though he is going the same way as Wei, who had equal rumours spread about him, as appeared in the narrative’s chapter 3. The last chapter gives the third sense of Wei that the narrator has. In it, the narrator, after half a year, returns to Shaoxing. He steps cautiously past ‘many sleeping dogs’ (XY 244, Y 249) on his way to his door, but only to find that Wei has died, and that — ironically, and again, uncannily — he has come to attend to his funeral. The grandmother who let him the rooms tells how he had changed. That it is a grandmother is significant, as is, also, the point that she tells a story about Lianshu, as he had told a story about his grandmother. He used to play with her grandchildren, ‘making them bark like dogs, or make a thumping kowtow’ (XY 246, Y 251). This may be read in one of two ways: either the children are being brought back to the idea of society as self-consuming, like the dogs in A Madman’s Diary, or it may be seen as the ultimate failure of the future: there is to be no saving of the children. The grandmother speculates on Wei ‘wandering lonely in the nether world now’: this detail recalls the speculation about hell made by the woman who did not live a little longer, in The New-Year Sacrifice. The narrator sees Wei’s body — and this is the third way he is manifested to him — dressed in full military uniform for his funeral, and lying with ‘an ironical smile on his lips, mocking the ridiculous corpse’ (XY 248, Y 253; Lyell, 336, translates with ‘an ice-cold smile’). It is as if head and body are dissociated from each other, even, or especially, in death: as if the dead body (head and the rest) could be seen now as they had been always, that is, separated from each other. In such a way, Lu Xun’s pervasive image of decapitation returns, as a severance of what the head stands for from what the body is. The smile ironises the uniform and the politics it represents, while it ironises the stiff body in its unyielding uniform, and while it also ironises the idea that the self can be known in death. All forms of writing which assume they know an other, effectively kill that other. Lu Xun’s writing indicates, through the dead smile, that the assumption of superiority of knowledge which permits irony, is also the victim of irony, because there are forms of knowledge that the ironic self is unaware of, and which make it a victim in

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its turn. A superior knowledge is a dead knowledge, and perhaps irony is always dead, when its nature is to assume a complete knowledge, a complete subjective awareness. The narrator who regards the dead smile cannot, therefore, afford any irony himself, for no more than the subject can know his own body can the self know an other, whether that other is alive or dead. And in that way, this is not an ironic text, that is, it is not one that assumes it knows the lives of other people, just as its narrator does not know his own life. As the wailing of the funeral starts, he walks away, to the accompaniment of the wolf-sound, and in the light of the moon, reference to which recalls the end of chapter 3 of the short story. Both recurrences compound the sense of the story turning into a structure of repetition, as fugal, with one man following the flight towards death of the other. But such repetition, as Freud indicates, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, only means that the self is passive, held by a force — that of repetition — which cannot be known by the conscious self. Death works in this text in its pauses and gaps; at the end it is hardly possible to say that a complete sense has emerged of the ‘loner’. Whoever the other male friend was, of whom he writes in his letter, is irrelevant: a life cannot be known, and defeats any voyeuristic speculation. His life seems to disappear from the text, as does that of the narrator, who suffers from as many oppressions as the person he is writing about, so that he is alienated from any sense of himself. The wolf’s cry, in the last moments of the story, hardly comes from his autonomous self; it is ‘other’ to him, it may even be the other man ‘living on’ in him. The calmness that succeeds is equally alien, equally uncanny: is it madness, as the reference to the moon might imply, or the calmness of apatheia, intense lack of feeling that is part of the state of ‘living on’? Certainly, it can only be quarrelled with as a problematic response by critics who feel they know what a normal response is or should be. Even more than In the Tavern, this text questions whether there can be any record of anything more than singular states. This fiction certainly comments on the collapse of hopes within the 1920s, and this gives point to the characterisations of the two men, but this story goes so much further than others that it is necessary to find other ways of thinking about it. It seems to be more accurately described as ‘postmodern’ than either realist or even modernist, and this term may be glossed by saying that there is in it a movement away from what the French writer Maurice Blanchot, in the essay ‘Song of the Sirens’ (1954) calls a roman, which may be thought of as telling a story, and constantly diverting its course as it ‘makes a game of human time’. The change from the roman is towards something else he calls a récit, which has as subject ‘the true telling of an exceptional event

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which has taken place’. But ‘the tale (récit) is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen ... the tale is a movement towards a point, a point which is not only unknown, obscure, foreign, but such that apart from this movement it does not seem to have any sort of real prior existence, and yet it is so imperious that the tale derives its power of attraction only from that point, so that it cannot even “begin” before reaching it’.5 Blanchot’s argument suggests the difference between narrative as reporting, representing, and describing discrete events, and writing which moves towards, but then begins from, a point which is unknown, outside the possibility of being narrated or described. In the récit, death, as that which is outside representation, is the condition for telling. It is illustrated by The Misanthrope which begins from the point of view of the strangeness of the friendship with Wei Lianshu, and referring to two funerals. It does not say that one of those funerals is Wei’s, and this absence is not a trick of realist narrative, which characteristically conceals crucial details, but is because the funerals are not specifiable: it may be said that the first is for Wei, and the second is for the narrator, or that both are for both, which would do something to explain the calmness of the narrator in the last line of the story. It is as if the funerals belong to no chronology, they are reversible. The récit continues with Wei’s oddness of behaviour. The strangeness of behaviour of the narrator is not mentioned here, but he is equally under the sign of death, so much so that it is as if one unknowable person, barely named, his motivations unknowable even at the end — as that last line indicates — discusses another unknowable, who is nonetheless deeply inside him, as the wolf’s sound indicates, and as the writing of the short story about this other person also indicates. And the text respects this sense of the other as other. It begins with a sense of unreachability in Wei, which nothing in the text resolves; if anything he becomes stranger, confirmed at the last by the ironic smile. It moves into further areas of pauses and gaps, statements which cannot be resolved, questions which once posed, are not answered. A tale which shows one man writing about another affirms the point that the subject is an other, not complete, always containing the other within its structure, whose survival means that mourning — a subject of so many of the narratives in Wandering — can, and indeed should, never be completed. The Misanthrope marks a moment which contrasts with Lu Xun’s biography, as will be discussed in the next section, on the story Regret for the Past. The year 1925 virtually concludes the writing of these short stories, and it is not to suggest that there was any change in Lu Xun caused by his association with Xu Guangping, for us to mark the possible significance of

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this conjunction of factors. Perhaps the short story form registers a crisis to do with the mother, but seen in this text as the grandmother, no longer as the mother, more withdrawn from the ‘loner’ than the mother has ever been in previous stories. The father is not present in this story, but it is interesting that the last time the ‘loner’ is seen is in full military uniform, in death, and the combination of these two ideas is worth considering: death as the final mode of uniformity, or conformity to masculinity, to the law of the father. In such a dress, the man conforms, homosocially, to the power of patriarchy. The first funeral, gives in displaced form the end of the mother, and the second, the conformity to a rigid pattern of the past, whose name is patriarchy. There is no resolution from this crisis; no sense of ‘look, we have come through’ (the title of one of D. H. Lawrence’s collection of poems, when he had found and gone off with Frieda Weekley, who became the woman in his life). Rather, the presence of this story, this récit, marks the point that there are very few narratives left, and that these will appear with greater hesitancies.

Regret for the Past The text that succeeds The Misanthrope was completed four days after it, and like it, was first published in Wandering.6 Chronologically, it relates to the moment when Lu Xun and Xu Guangping seem to have become lovers (Pollard, 96); the sexual relation, outside marriage, is at the heart of the story, just as much as its possibility is disallowed in The Misanthrope. Like the earlier story, this one indicates appalling poverty and diminution of life-chances. Lyell translates the title (Shang-shi) as Mourning the Dead, and, in his discussion of it, as Remorse.7 Subtitled ‘Juansheng’s notes’, it comprises fragments, eighteen in Lyell’s translation, which are there to record remorse and grief, in the face of ‘oblivion’, a word, and an idea, which keeps recurring. Juansheng writes in a hostel, a huiguan, similar to the one Lu Xun stayed in from 1912 to 1919; he has returned to this after leaving it with Zijun, the woman he was in love with. The story looks at the themes that preoccupy a Chinese Western-looking intellectual: ‘the tyranny of the family, the need to break with tradition, the equality of men and women, Ibsen, Tagore and Shelley’ (XY 250, Y 255). But at the same time, this list of interests is limited, and suggests a certain naïveté, which extends to the way that the male narrator thinks about the woman, as for instance when he says ‘I was unspeakably happy to know that Chinese women were not as hopeless as the pessimists made out, and that we should see in the not too distant future the splendour of the dawn’ (XY 251, Y 256). Juansheng and Zijun move out of the hostel to a house in Lucky Lane (XY 253, Y 258), and settle down together to an

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unconventional existence with animals — chickens, and a dog, called Asui (in a return to the spirit of A Comedy of Ducks). In the fifth section, there are signs of strain with Zijun, in the work that she does, and in the following, set on the anniversary of the October Tenth revolution, he loses his government job, so that he has to work freelance as a writer, in a situation where he loses his ‘train of thought’ (XY 259, Y 262) when called to meals by Zijun. She is unaware of this; there seems a split developing between their different consciousnesses, and their different scales of values. In the next section, they eat the chickens and forcibly lose the dog because they cannot afford to keep him, and the result is a growing indifference and emptiness, which in the next section, set in the winter, leads him to think that she has forgotten the evolutionary principle that he is much aware of, that ‘the first thing in life is to make a living, and that to do this people must advance hand in hand or else soldier on alone’ (XY 263, Y 261). He tells her he no longer loves her, a statement he for ever after regrets, since he will feel that by saying so, he has placed truth as a value higher than love. In the following section, he anticipates life after she has gone, after she has left ‘without a sense of grievance’, a reverse of Ibsen’s Nora leaving the doll’s house. The vision of life without her, presumably inspired by films, as earlier film has shaped his courtship (XY 252, Y 257) is of Western urban modernity, of him floating above ‘mountain ranges, mighty oceans, sky-scrapers, battlefields, motor-cars, thoroughfares, rich men’s mansions, bright, busy shopping centres, and the dark night ... I foresaw that this new life was just round the corner’ (XY 265, Y 268). The words ‘new life’ recall the title of the magazine written in Japan, which failed. Two sections later, the inevitable happens: Zijun’s father, from the country, has taken her away, and the narrator is left with emptiness (a recurrent word), though also with a fantasy of escape — ‘high mountains and marshlands, thoroughfares, brightly lit banquets, trenches, pitch-black night, the thrust of a sharp night, utterly noiseless footsteps’, which makes him think about ‘travelling expenses’ (XY 266, Y 269). But this American-style escape is followed by a vision of ‘a pile of groceries, then Zijun’s ashen face ... gazing at me beseechingly with childlike eyes’. He thinks of the sullen fate that Zijun is likely to face from her father, ‘and the cold looks of bystanders, colder than frost or ice’ (XY 267, Y 270). These looks, familiar from A Madman’s Diary, and many others now, assort with patriarchy, and with the power of the past which has caught up with them both. News, in fact, reaches him that Zijun is dead, and the absence of explanation of her death is part of the flatness, but more, part of a universal indifference, the only thing which rescues it being the return of the dog, Asui. He returns to the hostel from where he had started.

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The last section but one returns to themes from The Misanthrope, confronting the problem of ‘still living’, or surviving, but with this difference: in the previous story, which was not written as a self-conscious fragment, the cause for the subject’s melancholia is withheld, here, the source is known, and it is a sexual failure, where the man is patriarchal towards the woman only slightly less obviously than her father. The piece records a possible failure of the May Fourth movement in regard to women: in this way recalling the callousness of the narrator within The New-Year Sacrifice, while being the antithesis of The Misanthrope: The early spring nights are as long as ever. Sitting idle as the time drags, I recall a funeral procession I saw in the street this morning. There were paper figures and paper horses in front and behind, weeping like singing. Now I see how clever they are — this is so simple. (XY 270, Y 273)

He imagines Zijun’s funeral in comparison: the woman’s fate recalls, of course, that of Sister Xianglin: both women fail to survive physically, whereas the man does, in each of these stories. The comparison suggests that both men in The Misanthrope may be seen as feminine; in which case the ambiguity about Wei Lianshu becoming a secretary to a warlord, which implies in his case an enforced commitment to masculinity, and the meaning of the wolves’ cry — where wolves are so ‘fierce yet cowardly’ — becomes richer, and points to irresolvable ambivalences between masculinity and femininity in these texts, where ‘masculinity’ seems a forced requirement towards the assumption of a single identity. The narrator here concludes with a determination that sounds masculine, but while that is true, it also recalls the language of the preface to A Call to Arms: since I am living, I must make a fresh start. And the first step is just to record my remorse and grief, for Zijun’s sake as well as for my own. All I have is weeping like singing as I mourn for Zijun, burying her in oblivion. I must make a fresh start in life. Hiding the truth deep in my wounded heart, I must advance silently, taking oblivion and falsehood as my guide. (XY 270-271, Y 273)

The passage indicates a certain egotism which makes him speak of finding a new road, ‘hiding the truth within my heart’s deepest wound and taking falsehood and forgetfulness as my guides’ (L 362). The desire to record his grief is the reverse of the opening paragraph of the preface to A Call to Arms, which dismissed the idea of recalling the past. But here, the grief is personal;

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there is no sense of the self having preserved the other within himself; in that sense he may be a survivor in the accepted sense of that term (someone who goes on), rather than a survivor in Lyotard’s sense: someone marked by death, someone who has gone through death. Perhaps the contrast between the misanthrope(s) and the ‘I’ of this story is that the latter has started with the belief in a whole, non-fragmented, heart, a full self, whereas Wei Lianshu has always started from the knowledge of death, the ‘instance of his death’ working within him (to recall the title of Blanchot’s récit, discussed in chapter 2): hence his mourning. In this story, even though he is writing in fragments, the ‘I’ here remains fluent, and it is less problematic (though it is still not quite possible) to pick out the story, even across the fragments. But the previous narrative, The Misanthrope, was not given as fragments, yet remained opaque, half within oblivion. The self who is presented in Regret for the Past, a masculine idealist of the May Fourth movement, may therefore still be the subject of criticism, insofar as he attempts to hold his life together as a consistent story, but of Wei Lianshu, subject of The Misanthrope this cannot be said, despite what happens him politically, as perhaps it cannot be said either of his narrator.

Brothers Brothers appeared in February 1926 in a fortnightly journal, Wilderness. It is set in Beijing, and, apart from A Comedy of Ducks, is the only narrative among all in the two collections to include a foreigner, a German doctor, who is brought in to treat a case of measles in a brother who is suspected to have scarlet fever, and to be dying (so diagnosed by a Chinese doctor). The signs of a modern city are implicit in the references to cars, and they contrast with the sense of Chinese medicine as dated. The story opens and closes, in a framing mode, at the Bureau of Public Welfare, where the clerks are sitting and discussing two brothers who have fallen out over money. This leads into comment on one clerk, Zhang Peijun, and about his younger brother, Jingfu, a teacher. This is the brother who is ill, but who comes through measles. The piece reads as an anecdote, save for the rendering of the state of mind of Peijun, who has to think about the possibility of supporting not only his children but Jingfu’s too, if he should die: the subject of ‘brothers’ extends itself over more than one generation, just as, of course, it extends itself through any society which is interested in affirming social welfare (it is just as important for a society that denies such welfare). After he has received news that his brother is better, he has fantasies again, of ‘a child standing before his bed, her whole face dripping with blood. He was just about to strike her when in a flash this

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image faded away ...’ (L 371). The fascination with the face, to which, as suffering, he responds to in a cruel mode, could be read in comparison to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). For Levinas, writing post-1945, the question of the possibility of an ethical relation turns on my response to the other. ‘The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face’.8 The face is the challenge, as that which is not-me. Here, however, the face is feminine, suiting the pattern that runs through Wandering, and though this face may have associations with his brother’s children, it is truly other. Back with his brother, ‘dream fragments’ again come into his mind which raise the question which was posed in the previous two stories: how is it possible to mourn in such a way that to survive mourning is not simply to dismiss, or to forget the one who has died? Here it is his brother who is dead, and he is carrying the coffin on his back, and is being praised by others for his brotherly spirit. The regressive sense in the dream is confirmed by the sense that he is back in the south (near Shaoxing). But the brother’s children assert both themselves and their demands to be looked after, and he imagines striking one of them, Hensheng, in the face, with a hand hard as iron. The child jumps up onto the sacrificial altar with others, only some of whom Peijun knows. ‘He realised they had all come to attack him’ and he defends himself against the ‘lies’ of a mere child, while at the same time he is about to hit the child again. As ever, the ‘save the children’ theme is uppermost, but it seems that the need to save such can only be realised by those whose identities are already lost, as is the case with him at this moment, when he has become aware, in the fragmentary nature of his dreaming, of his self-dividing ambivalence: ‘I’d certainly never sink so low as to turn a deaf ear to the promptings of my own conscience,’ he told [the attackers]. ‘Don’t be taken in by the lies of a mere child.’ He heard his own voice saying these things. Hesheng was next to him now, and Peijun raised his steely palm once again ...’ (L 373)

The splits between the voice and the ear that hears, and the hand that is upraised — recalling Ah Q hitting himself — shows the body in pieces again: it affirms that any act of kindness towards a brother contains something other within it, whose aggressiveness and masochism together make problematic a communal sense of brotherhood. In A Madman’s Diary, the younger brother had the sense of the elder brother as the eater of flesh. In this text, the elder brother has the same perception of himself as the younger had had: that is to say, in this text, the experience of the elder brother in the earlier text is given,

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acknowledged. The point binds these stories together, as mutually interrelated. When Peijun returns to the office after the crisis of illness, it is with a new sense of de-familiarisation (L 374): he has gained a new sense of what identity means; that is, he has learned how it is split; he has learned what is uncanny in brotherly relations.

Divorce The last of the stories, Divorce (Li-hun) appeared first in Fragments in November 1925; Lu Xun wrote no more after its completion on 6 November. The text has returned to the countryside, where travel is by water, and to the time of the Qing dynasty, and to the provincialism of life in the villages, away from the ‘great world’ of Beijing (XY 274, Y 288). Zhuang Musan and his daughter Aigu, whose bound feet are alluded to, are on their way to Pang village to settle the question of Aigu’s divorce from Young Shi (the Young Beast), after three years’ dissension, and after her family have terrorised the husband’s family by tearing down their kitchen-range the previous year. During the story, the focus sharpens itself more and more on Aigu, and though she does not seem attractive, it is important that she is the person whose feelings are described. The Shi family are celebrating their New Year, and it is hoped that a settlement can be reached with the aid of Mr Wei, who has been acting as a peace-maker, and with Seventh Master, a ‘champion of justice’ and a local — provincial — scholar and antiquarian and snuff-taker. There seems to be a continuity between him and the jade stopper which he holds, which survives from a burial ceremony in the Han period, when jade was used to stop up the orifices of the dead — this one, the anus. He is a figure of comedy within the text, like much else in it, putting snuff up his nose and then rubbing the side of his nose with the jade stopper after he has sneezed, but beyond this, Marston Anderson notes him as also a representative of ‘the impersonal, enmeshing authority of culture and tradition’. Hence Aigu’s discovery at the end of her protests against her husband is of ‘the full power of the Seventh Master ... she repented bitterly, and found herself saying, “I always meant to accept Seventh Master’s decision ...”’ (XY 281, Y 294). Anderson says that he is an example of ‘the way power works in Lu Xun’s stories: its effect is realised less through its aggressive employment than through the fear it inspires in its victims, assisted by the complacency of bystanders’.9 The stress on the crowd, which goes throughout these narratives, almost from the time of Kung Yiji, is significant: Aigu is ‘hemmed in’ (L 381), and at the same time ‘completely isolated’ (XY 279, Y 292), replicating the state of many figures in this second

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collection. Despite the comic mode, the story speaks of the destiny of women in the countryside, a theme glanced at in Regret for the Past, and coming round full circle, in this volume of stories, to the way that the woman in The NewYear Sacrifice was treated, finishing with an example of injustice only half recognised as such. The jade stopper in this narrative is a reminder of how life is built up on forgotten and dead lives. In returning, for this last story, to the late Qing, and to scenes of his own childhood, Lu Xun memorialises the detail of dead lives, which however unmemorable, support the present, and make it not simply the present but a present which has the past as other within it — however much the jade stopper may now just be an antiquarian toy, or Freudian fetish, or unconscious phallic signifier for Seventh Master. This story, which, after the collection has looked at so many male melancholics, returns to the plight of the woman, is a reminder not just of how many different ways of writing appear in these texts, but of Lu Xun’s realism. To explain this, it may be said that as the story goes back in date, so it goes back in mode, from Brothers, and from the three stories in this collection which show material whose potential breaks the limits of the ‘short story’ — that is, The New-Year Sacrifice, In the Tavern, and The Misanthrope. These, and particularly the last, seem the most ‘modern’ in Lu Xun, and the others in the collection, while all of them are necessary, are those which enable them to be written. For the present writer, The Misanthrope, which depends so much on A Madman’s Diary and The True Story of Ah Q, is perhaps the text of Lu Xun which is most unusual, most drawing away from anything recognisable as ‘realism’ towards a writing which goes beyond itself in ceasing to be representation and becoming an event in itself, the writing not separable from the subject-matter, not representing that subject matter as though it knew how to describe a life, and could represent another person, but, rather, showing in its hesitancies and gaps and absences, the impossibility of representation. The woman who wants to tell her own story in The New-Year Sacrifice, but who cannot, because there is a missing kernel within it (the unrepresentable event), shows in what way these texts are moving: towards intuition of a traumatic crisis which cannot be represented because to do so would indicate that the person is now outside that crisis. And the writer cannot describe the trauma of another without taking on the confidence of assuming he knows how another’s trauma feels. No text now, then, can do other than bear witness to the impossibility of writing. The narrator who writes must be as much a part of the problem, because he knows he cannot represent anything of the other without bad faith, and hence his inability, whether recognised by him or not, to do other than mirror the crisis within the

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narration. This becomes progressively more evident in Lu Xun, from A Madman’s Diary onwards, through Kung Yiji, through The True Story of Ah Q, and into the magnificent examples of the second collection. In The Misanthrope, everything said about one person bears witness to the other, the narrator, whose identity is strangely connected with the misanthrope, and equally ‘other’, as if the misanthrope was an allegory for the narrator, or the narrator an allegory for the misanthrope, the text not a record of another life, but one life seen as split between two, who are dead and alive at the same time, and a third hinted at, as if emphasising asymmetrical knowledge. These texts become events in themselves, not representations of events, bearing witness to the impossibility of describing what has been produced by the China which was brought into being after 1911. A last emphasis that could be made in thinking about the significance of these stories is that it is more relevant, in considering them, not to rank-order them in terms of preference, or genre, but to see them as fragments which work with each other. In the analysis that has been given, no single story has proved discussable without cross-referencing to other stories in both collections, which means that all the stories may be seen as connected, elusive parts of a jigsaw which do not quite fit with each other. Images and patterns of incidents and of dialogue repeat and recur because they are reworkings of something that may be considered a shadow of the ‘primal scene’, so long as this term is stripped of any idea that it may have a chronological existence in terms of being prior to other events, and so long, too, as it is not considered that the ‘primal scene’ is other than a reconstruction of something beyond recall, a reconstruction which advertises its non-original, non-primal nature. Primal scenes, indeed, may be a better term. These recurring fragments within fragmented lives may be articulated with the history of China which is partly visible, partly offstage in the stories, and which is intuited in terms of recurrent images: of looking, of becoming the dog, or the wolf, or the cat, or of being threatened by such familiar shapes of otherness becoming the self, images of decapitation or loss of masculinity, whether in weak or strong forms. Fears that surface throughout the texts, of being devoured, or that devouring has already taken place, and that the self is cannibalistic, fears of the self being engulfed or rendered superfluous, or being lost in those areas of the home country, away from Beijing, that the text returns to again and again, fears of being lost in the past, fears of the power of the seductive power of the moon, are too persistent to allow the stories, despite their formal neatness, to stand separate from each other. Each story, in the language of the alternative titles of Panghuang, shows a ‘wondering where to turn’ where ‘wondering’ and ‘wandering’ associate with each other; or show a ‘hesitation’ which has been described before as a

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‘deferral’. Perhaps such a ‘hesitation’ resembles a form of différance, the word that Derrida creates and evokes to combine in it the actions of ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’.10 Language defers yielding up meaning; and contains such difference within it that it makes it impossible to attain to whole, single, unsplit meaning. Realisation of that point dawns as we read these stories culmulatively, seeing how they differ so subtly from each other. The sense of not knowing where to turn articulates with the self intuited as haunted, in different ways by both father and mother. Forms of madness, as a kind of death, and yet also as a form of survival, of living a little longer, bear witness to survival as the problem. The madman of A Madman’s Diary: did he survive madness, or — assuming that his madness was his sanity — will he survive being cured? Ah Q, of course, survives in no sense at all. The question of survival asks whether it is possible to go beyond some event which has been intuited rather than directly and knowably experienced, and in danger of re-appearing, like the jade stopper in Divorce, there to show up this society’s homosociality. The latter story shows that going back in time, as the story does, does not lessen the power of history to reassert itself, to insist in the life of the present.11 Because it cannot quite be spoken of, it may be deduced that the event cannot be worked through: in that sense, the gaps and silences within The Misanthrope are paradigmatic for the stories altogether, which despite their formal completeness and tightness, comprise fragments of a narrative which does not cohere into a whole, and which cannot be survived in any triumphal sense; the only survival being within writing.

Notes

Chapter 1 1.

On Lu Xun as an essayist, and for examples of his essays: ‘Three Summer Pests’ (1925), ‘The Evolution of the Male Sex’ (1933) ‘Ah Jin’ (1935) and ‘Confucius in Modern China’ (1935), see David E. Pollard (editor and translator), The Chinese Essay (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong 1999), pp. 137– 157. For examples of the debate about Lu Xun in contemporary China, see the articles by Lin Qingxin, Xie Yong, Wang Shuo and Chen Shuyu in Critical Zone 2 (Hong Kong University Press and Nanjing University Press, 2006). 2. Quoted, Marston Anderson, ‘The Morality of Form: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Short Story’, in Leo Lee (ed.), Lu Xun and His Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985), pp. 34–35. 3. On this, see Paul B. Foster, ‘The Ironic Inflation of Chinese National Character: Lu Xun’s International Reputation, Romain Rolland’s Critique of “The True Story of Ah Q” and the Nobel Prize’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13 (2001), 140–168. 4. See Margery Sabin, ‘Lu Xun: Individual Talent and Revolution’, Raritan 9 (1989), 41–67, see pp. 44–45. 5. See Ge Baoquan, ‘Lu Xun and World Literature’, Social Sciences in China 2 (1981), 62–90, for the reputation of Lu Xun. 6. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (1986), 65–88, (pp. 69–70). 7. See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity — China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995) pp. 45–77, who argues that the Western nineteenth century concept of ‘national character’ was promoted by the American missionary in China, Arthur Smith, whose Chinese Characteristics (1889) was translated into Japanese and became the basis of an ‘Orientalist’ discourse, which took over Lu Xun, who had read Smith’s work in Japanese. This approach relates to a rethinking of the anger against Chinese national identity as constituted by Confucianism that marked

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8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes to pp. 3–7

the May Fourth movement: see Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1979). See also David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press 1992). Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Deconstruction and Criticism (1979, London: Continuum 2004) p. 82. See Mikhail Bahktin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984). For reviews of Lyell’s work, beginning with his monograph, Lu Hsun’s Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press 1976), see Lin Yü-sheng in Journal of Asian Studies 38.2 (1979), 365–368; Hilary Chung, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 55 (1992), 169–170, Kirk A. Denton, CLEAR, 15 (1993), 174–176, Jon Kowallis, China Quarterly 137 (1994), 283– 284. Notations in the text: Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 1990). This is given as L plus page reference. XY plus page reference refers to the short stories translated by Yan Xianyi and Gladys Yang in Lu Xun: Selected Works vol. 1 (of four) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press 1956). The entire collection, as The Complete Stories of Lu Xun, translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, appeared from Indiana University Press in 1981, and is referenced throughout as Y plus page reference. (I assume, from my own experience, that this version is less easy of access.) For another English translation, referenced as Wang, see Chi-chen Wang, Ah Q and Others, Selected Stories of Lusin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941). For a French translation, see La vie et la mort injustes des femmes: Anthologie, texts de Luxun traduits du chinois et présentés par Michelle Loi et le groupe « Luxun » de l’Université de Paris VIII (Paris: Mercure de France, 1985). A complete French translation of Call to Arms exists as Luxun: Cris: Nouvelles, traduites du chinois par Joël Bellassen, Feng Hanjin, Jean Join et Michelle Loi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). The French title of the second collection is Errances (see La vie et la mort … p. 83). See Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988) pp. 7–18, Julia F. Andrews and Kuiy Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of TwentiethCentury China (New York: Guggenheim Museum 1998) pp. 213–225. Ian Reid, The Short Story (London: Methuen 1977) gives an excellent short history, pointing out that ‘short story’ only gained meaning in America in the 1880s (p. 27), while the term does not appear in OED until 1933 (p. 1). See for a good anthology of criticism, Charles E. May, The New Short Story Theories (Athens: Ohio University Press 1994) p. 87. The essay by Eichenbaum, discussed below, included by May, is relevant; while the oral modes of the short story are brought out in another essay in the same volume by Mary Louise

Notes to pp. 7–9

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

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Pratt (pp. 107); her essay is interesting for the argument she makes for the short story being related to decolonization, for which she takes as evidence its popularity in nineteenth century America as opposed to Britain (pp. 104–105). Julio Cortázar, in the same volume, ‘Some Aspects of the Short Story’, equally points out that the form is Latin American, as opposed to French or Spanish (p. 245). He defines the form by its intensity, as Eichenbaum says that what distinguishes it is its ending, for which everything in it exists. Brander Matthews, in ‘The Philosophy of the Short Story’ quotes R. L Stevenson for the same point (p. 79), and it is implicit in Poe’s essay, reviewing Hawthorne’s ‘Twice Told Tales’, where the intensity, and the ‘totality’ evident in the short story is of its essence (p. 61). May’s approach to the short story relies on it as impressionistic and subjective. All these comments are suggestive for further study. John Bayley, The Short Story: Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen (Brighton: Harvester Press 1988) pp. 179–180. See Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980 (London: Macmillan 1985), and her edited volume, Reading the Short Story (New York: St Martin’s Press 1989). William Boyd, ‘Brief Encounters: How to Tell Tales’, Guardian 2 October 2004, discusses the economics that produced and published short-story writing and kept it going through much of the twentieth century, and gives seven types of short story. These are: the event-plot story, the Chekhovian (‘to look at life in all its banality and all its tragic comedy and refuse to make a judgement’), the Modernist (especially, here, Hemingway), the cryptic-ludic, the mini-novel, the poetic-mythic, and last, the biographical. As I suggest throughout this book, this kind of taxonomy may have an initial value in helping readers to explore texts, but makes texts belong to what Roland Barthes in S/Z would call the déjà lu: the already read; to read is to explore the text’s difference from its generic mode. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press 1990) p. 31. Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image-Music-Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: 1977) pp. 155–164. For an interesting account of Lu Xun as melancholic, see Bonnie S. McDougall, ‘Lu Xun Hates China: Lu Xun Hates Lu Xun’, in Wolfgang Kubin (ed.), Symbols of Anguish: In Search of Melancholy in China (Bern: Peter Lang 2001) pp. 385–440. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock 1977) p. 4, 11. This argument about shock is made by Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973) p. 132.

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Notes to pp. 10–17

23. Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts, Toward the Postmodern (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press 1993), p. 144. 24. For a development of the theme of posthumous living, survival after death, see my Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2001). 25. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature (London: Routledge 1992), p. 227. 26. ‘Tradition and Modernity in the Writings of Lu Xun’, in Leo Ou-fan Lee (ed.), Lu Xun and his Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985) p. 8. 27. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1997). Chapter 2 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

For a useful biography, see David E. Pollard, The True Story of Lu Xun (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press 2002): this contains a good bibliography, but does not attempt to discuss the short stories. See the account of Dickens by Edmund Wilson, ‘Dickens: the Two Scrooges’, in The Wound and the Bow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947). For a full reading of this episode, see Yomi Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) pp.34–40. See also David D. W. Wang, ‘Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Decapitation’, in Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 174–187. David D. W. Wang, ‘Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Decapitation’, in Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (eds.), Politics, Ideology and Literary Discourse on Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press 1993) p. 179. Lydia H. Liu (see chapter 1, footnote 6) reprints a picture (p. 62) of what may well be the original of what Lu Xun describes, and also discusses Lu Xun’s later essay, ‘Professor Fujono’ (1926), about the Professor of Bacteriology at Sendai, where he draws attention to his own complicity: Chinese were watching on the slide, ‘but in the lecture hall there was another Chinese watching. It was I, myself’ (p. 63). In this way, he stages his own relation to the national identity that he also creates. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 246–291. For discussion of autobiography, and Ecce Homo, see my Becoming Posthumous (see chapter 1 note 24). Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, with commentary by Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000) pp. 10–11. See Lacan, as referenced in chapter 1 note 21.

Notes to pp. 17–22

117

10. See Marián Gálik, on Lu Xun’s ‘creative confrontation’ with Garshin, Andreev and Nietzsche in Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986), pp. 19–41. 11. Pollard, p. 43. There is an earlier translation of the text in William A. Lyell, jr, Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press 1976) pp. 315–328. v 12. Jaroslav Pru° sek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980) pp. 102– 109. 13. On Cai Yuanpei, see William J. Duiker, Ts’ai Yüan-p’ei: Educator of Modern China (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press 1977). 14. For Chen Duxiu, see Gregor Benton (ed.), Chen Duxiu’s Last Article and Letters, 1937–1942 (Richmond: Curzon 1998), and Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 15. Bonnie McDougall (see chapter 1, footnote 17) quotes the statement from Leo Ou-fan Lee, p. 390. Lee himself sees Lu Xun moving away from his father in a series of stages for which he draws on Erik Erickson. The model, however, because drawn from ego-psychology, supports the idea of moving towards an identity which is single, not split, and for this reason I prefer to use a way of thinking which is Freudian, or Lacanian and which does not presume that the ego could, or should be, a unified structure. 16. For this theme in Derrida, see Derek Attridge, Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), especially pp. 18–20, 315–316, 371. 17. A prime text of scholarship on this is Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1960). 18. Quoted, Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, ‘Text, Intertext, and the Representation of the Writing Self in Lu Xun, Yu Dafu and Wang Meng’, in Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (eds.), From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1993), p. 169. 19. For the relationship between the two, see Bonnie McDougall, Love Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002). 20. Lu Xun’s reactions to the shooting in his writings are discussed by Marián Málik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917–1930), trans. Peter Tkácv (Bratislvav: Veda, 1980), pp. 259–261. 21. For the fortunes of Lu Xun’s reputation in China after his death, see Merle Goldman, ‘The Political Use of Lu Xun’, The China Quarterly 91 (1982), 446– 461. 22. McDougall (see chapter 1, footnote 17) says that the titles as translated in the Selected Works ‘tend to be excessively positive’ (p. 401). On the other hand, Pollard translates Nahan, the first volume of stories, as Battlecries (Pollard,

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Notes to pp. 24–29

p. 52). The theme of ‘loneliness’ in Lu Xun should be compared with the use of ‘solitude in Latin American literature’; for this, see Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961). 23. Lun-Kee Sun, ‘To Be or Not to be “Eaten”: Lu Xun’s Dilemma of Political Engagement’, Modern China 12 (1986), pp. 465, 481 quotes Canetti, Crowds and Power (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1962 p. 209) on ‘teeth [as] the armed guardians of the mouth, and the mouth is indeed a strait place, the prototype of all prisons. Whatever goes in there is lost, and much goes in while still alive ...’ Chapter 3 1.

For reception of these stories, see Eva Shan Chou, ‘Learning to Read Lu Xun, 1918–1923: The Emergence of a Readership’, China Quarterly 17 (2002), 1042– 1064. 2. Leo Ou-fan Lee, ‘Genesis of a Writer: Notes on Lu Xun’s Educational Experience, 1881–1909’, in Merle Goldman (ed.), Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1977), p. 187. 3. Wang Shiqing, Lu Xun: A Biography (Beijing: Foreign Language Press 1984), pp. 98–99. 4. On this text, see Ziaobing Tang, ‘Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” and a Chinese Modernism’, PMLA 107 (1992), 1222–1234. 5. On this, see Gang Yue, ‘Lu Xun and Cannibalism’, in The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1999). 6. Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings vol. 2, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 146. 7. Abjection as a recoil from the body of the other (specifically the mother) in an attempt to establish subjectivity and bodily borders, is the subject of Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press 1982). 8. For the Russian short story, see Victor Terras’s article on the years 1830–1850, Julian Connolly on Chekhov, discussing the years 1880–1917, and Connolly and Rudolpf Neuhäuser on Gorky, in Charles A. Moser, The Russian Short Story: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne, 1986). 9. Nikolai Gogol: Plays and Petersburg Tales, trans. Christopher English (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995) p. 178. 10. The Novelas ejemplares were published in 1613: see Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Stories, trans. Lesley Lipson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998) pp. 250–305: the previous story in the collection, ‘The Deceitful Marriage’

Notes to pp. 30–39

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

119

should also be read because it leads into this one, and discusses the fictiveness of all writing, and how no writing can be other than the writing of illusion, or lying. On Gogol, see Robert A. Maguire, Exploring Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1994) pp. 49–66; for the idea that Gogol’s work is to be read in light of homosexuality, see Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1976): this would help with the sexual ‘inadequacy’ in this text. For links between madness in Russian literature and a tradition of political / social criticism, see Richard Peace, ‘The Logic of Madness: Gogol’s Zapiski sumasshedshego, Oxford Slavonic Papers, no. 9 (1976), 44. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (1986) p. 72. On incorporation, see Freud’s essay, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, in On Metapsychology: The Penguin Freud 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 136–137. See on this, Chiu-yee Cheung, Lu Xun: The Chinese “Gentle” Nietzsche (New York: Peter Lang 2001) pp. 147–151. The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 124. Quoted, Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Nietzsche Contra Darwin’, in Daniel W. Conway and Peter S. Groff, Nietzsche: Critical Assessments vol.4: Between the Last Man and the Overman, The Question of Nietzsche’s Politics (London: Routledge 1999), p. 15. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press 1988) p. 257. Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1994) p. 281. For discussion of Derrida, see David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger (Oxford: Polity Press 2002) pp. 135–152.

Chapter 4 1. 2. 3.

4.

‘Prosperity to all’ — translation by D. C. Lau, Lu Xun Xiao Shuo Ji: Selected Short Stories of Lu Xun (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press 1987), p. 41. The term appears first in 1918, in ‘The Taboo of Virginity’; On Sexuality: The Penguin Freud vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 272. The term is basic to The Genealogy of Morals (1887); see Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor 1956), which translates the word as ‘rancor’, p. 170. o On this short story, see Milena Dolezelová-Velingerová, ‘Lu Xun’s Medicine’, in Merle Goldman (ed.), pp. 221–232.

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5.

6. 7.

Notes to pp. 44–51

On the subject of carnival, which implies the world turned upside down, and individual subjectivity replaced by a new spirit of community, and whose spirit is summed up in its postive attitude to the grotesque body, see Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and his World, translated by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1968). On this distinction, see Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology, (see chapter 3 note 13). For the Nietzschean implications of the arrow which by ‘outgoing’ evokes going beyond, see Rilke, The Duino Elegies: Ist es nicht Zeit, daß wir liebend, uns vom Geliebten befrein und es bebend bestehn: wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im Absprung mehr zu sein als er selbst. [ Is it not time that, in loving, we freed ourselves from the loved one, and, quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering out-leap, something more than itself?]

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

See Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The First Elegy,’ Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975). The discussion of Patrick Hanan, ‘The Technique of Lu Hsün’s Fiction’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 34 (1974) 53–96, stresses irony in Lu Xun (p. 80), as well as seeing, as a ‘near obsession’ in Lu Xun — ‘the appropriate use of conscience’ (87). C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1961), p. 45. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, Vol. 3, The Penguin Freud (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974), p. 58. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (see note 3), p. 189. V. I. Semanov, Lu Hsun and His Predecessors, trans. and ed. Charles J. Alber (New York: M.E. Sharpe 1980), pp. 106–107. Alber’s introduction ends by being ‘astounded’ that ‘there has been so little systematic research on Lu Xun in English, and above all, no index to his writings’ (p. xxvi). See Weikun Cheng, ‘Politics of the Queue: Agitation and Resistance in the Beginning and End of Qing China’, in Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara D. Miller (eds.), Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures (New York: SUNY Press 1998), pp. 123–142. See Ernest P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shi-k’ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1977), p. 78. See also p. 205 for the controversy over hair-cutting. Mau-sang Ng, The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press 1988), p. 240. Chapter 7 of this book discusses Lu Xun. The

Notes to pp. 52–62

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

121

story has been translated into English: see M. Artzibashef, Tales of the Revolution, trans. Percy Pinkerton (London: Martin Secker 1917), pp. 11–108. (Quotation from page 73.) The version in Harold R. Isaacs (ed.), Straw Sandals: Chinese Short Stories (1918– 1933) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1974) pp. 33–44. For an interesting account of and review of this book, see William A. Lyell, China Quarterly 66 (1976), 390–392. See my Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 129–154. Quoted in James Watson, ‘Long-haired destitutes in Colonial Hong Kong’, in Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara D. Miller (eds.), Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures (see note 13), p. 190. Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head,’ Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press) 24 volumes; vol. 18, p. 273. For the Nietzsche quotation, see The Genealogy of Morals (see note 3), p. 189. The references to Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) are to the chapter-titles of those parts dealing with Western nineteenth-century methods of putting prisoners under surveillance: ‘the gentle way in punishment’ (part 2 chapter 2), ‘docile bodies’ (part 3 chapter 1). Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape 1970) pp. 85–110. Eichenbaum’s definition is included in his essay ‘O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story’, in Charles E. May, The New Short Story Theories (Athens: Ohio University Press 1994) p. 87.

Chapter 5 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

Nikolai Gogol: Plays and Petersburg Tales, trans. Christopher English (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995) pp. 333, 334. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986), pp. 121–122. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape 1970) p. 259. See Derrida’s essay ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978). Derrida calls the logos ‘the language of objectification’ (p. 37). The essay is, of course, a controversial review of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie, translated as Madness and Civilization. Freud, ‘Family Romances’, in On Sexuality (see chapter 4 note 2), pp. 221– 225. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 76.

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

Notes to pp. 63–86

Freud, ‘Fetishism’, On Sexuality, p. 351. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977), p. 113. Lu Xun’s comments on capital punishment in ‘How “The True Story of Ah Q” Was Written’ in Selected Works, Vol. 2, pp. 305–313, are worth reading (the essay is of 1926). William A. Lyell, Jr., Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press 1976), p. 172. Freud, in On Metapsychology (see chapter 3 note 13), pp. 283–287. Lyell gives an earlier translation of the text in his Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality, pp. 328–333, which is worth comparing with his later, more American one (L 191–196). See the discussion of cats by Martha Kendal Woodruff, and of dogs by Gary Shapiro, in Christa David Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora, A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal (Lanham, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield, 2004) pp. 251–264, and 53–60. Woodruff notes the association of cats with the moon in Nietzsche, p. 252, taking this from Zarathustra, Basic Writings, p. 234. If Lu Xun knew this passage, it would give an interesting new sense of the moon as deceptive and feminine in the madman’s discourse.

Chapter 6 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

Marston Anderson in Lu Xun and his Legacy, p. 37. See on this Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 2005), pp. 259–264. See the discussion by Carolyn T. Brown, ‘The Paradigm of the Iron House: Shouting and Silence in Lu Hsun’s Short Stories’, CLEAR 6 (1984), 101–119. The comparisons are made in Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker’s chapter, ‘Lu Xun and the Crisis of the Writing Self’, in Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant ‘Other’ in Modern Chinese Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998) pp. 53–99. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, Vol. 3, The Penguin Freud (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974), p. 95. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (see chapter 5 note 8), pp. 53, 55. Theodore Huters, ‘Blossoms in the Snow: Lu Xun and the Dilemma of Modern Chinese Literature’, Modern China 10 (1984), 49–77, quotations p. 71. The point is expanded by Jian Xu, ‘The Will to the Transaesthetic: The Truth Content of Lu Xun’s Fiction’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11 (1999), 61–92, who cites Huters, as well as Leo Ou-fan Lee saying that ‘Lu Xun must be accredited with initiating and consciously developing, for the first time in the history of Chinese literature, the complex art of the fictional narrator’ (from

Notes to pp. 88–99

123

Voices from the Iron House, p. 63), quoted p. 63. Jian Xu argues for a deliberate ‘disunifying’ moment within Lu Xun’s texts (67) which is compared to Adorno on the fragmented nature of the modern artwork, in conditions of extreme alienation, as discussed in his Aesthetic Theory. Jian Xu finds a moment of ‘epiphany’ at the end of The Misanthrope, and In the Tavern as well as The NewYear Sacrifice, saying about the present story that ‘we are struck by the inappropriateness of the narrator’s sense of relief’ (p. 75). 8. Quoted, Bonnie S. McDougall, Fictional Authors: Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press 2003), p. 77. 9. The Oxford Authors, Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989), p. 306. The editor’s note thinks this is an allusion to Wilde’s green carnation. See McDougall p. 85 for translations of this play. 10. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press 1990), p. 80, quoting Leo Oufan Lee, Voices from the Iron House, p. 72, from where I have taken the full quotation, from ‘Random Thought no. 38’. Chapter 7 1. 2.

3.

Voices from the Iron House p. 84. Discussion of the impossibility of mourning should include Freud on ‘incorporating’ or ‘devouring’ the other in the essay ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’, On Metapsychology (see chapter 3 note 13), p. 136, a process which is associated with mourning the other; with his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (ibid p. 253) where the ‘reality principle’ finally triumphs over the other who has died and persuades the mourner to go on living, and the discussions of mourning by Jacques Derrida in Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press 1986), pp. 5–43, which is a meditation on the idea of mourning as ‘impossible’ because of the sense that if it is successful, it devours the other. Derrida’s interest in mourning first appeared in 1976, in his Introduction, ‘Fors’, to Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986). Abraham and Torok contrast introjection and incorporation as forms of mourning; the first allows for a growth in the ego as the other is included in it, the second refuses to recognise that the other has been lost. Derrida argues that both are necessary, the second being necessary to preserve the otherness of the other. Only the first would lead to a triumphalism over the dead person. Freud’s ‘normal mourning’ would lead to a denial of pain and finitude. For the fort/da game, which shows the compulsive power of repetition, and which Freud uses to show the self trying to negotiate a process towards death, see Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in On Metapsychology (see chapter 3 note 13), pp. 283–287.

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4.

Notes to pp. 100–112

The ‘superfluous man’ calls himself that in an entry in his diary of 23 March: see The Diary of a Superfluous Man, in Elizabeth Cheresh Allen (ed.), The Essential Turgenev (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1994), p. 110. See Ellen B. Chances, Conformity’s Children: An Approach to the Superfluous Man in Russian Literature (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1978). 5. Maurice Blanchot: The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press 1981), pp. 108, 109. 6. On this text, see Mao Chen, ‘The Formation of the Reader in Hu Shi, Lu Xun and Mao Dun’, in Between Tradition and Change: The Hermeneutics of May Fourth Literature (Lanham: University Press of America, 1997), pp. 98–102, and Chiu-yee Cheung, Lu Xun: The Chinese ‘Gentle’ Nietzsche (New York: Peter Lang 2001), pp. 158–173. 7. Lu Xun’s Vision of Reality, pp. 203–209. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonse Lingis (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press 1969), p. 50. 9. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism, p. 85. 10. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982), pp. 3–27. 11. The word ‘insist’ returns to the title of the récit by Blanchot (see chapter 2 footnote 8). Lacan’s Ecrits (p. 146) contain the essay-title ‘The Agency (l’instance) of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud’, which is similar to Blanchot; the ‘instance’ implies the insisting of the letter (language) within the unconscious; or its entreaty, or its persistence in remaining within the unconscious. The idea of unconscious urgency is within Blanchot’s sense of death standing within life, always ‘in instance’. See above, p. 17. The reference to ‘homosociality’ here and on p. 104 refers to the quasi-homosexual bonding between males within patriarchy, which is the theme of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

Index of Names

Lu Xun and his translators are not listed here, nor are bare mentions of a name, nor names which appear only as references in the endnotes. Anderson, Marston, 77, 94, 109, 113, 115, 122, 123, 124 Artzybashev, Mikhail, 51, 52 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 39, 42 Barthes, Roland, 8, 115 Benjamin, Walter, 56, 58, 115, 121 Blanchot, Maurice, 17, 102, 103, 107, 116, 124 Boyd, William, 115 Cai Yuanpei, 18, 117 Canetti, Elias, 24, 118 Cervantes, Miguel de, 6, 29, 118 Chekhov, Anton, 7, 115, 118 Chen Duxiu, 18, 59, 88, 117 Chiang Kai-shek, 21, 22 Confucius (551–479 BCE), and Confucianism, 14, 18, 20, 27, 31, 34, 37, 51, 59, 64, 65, 69, 75, 78, 79, 81, 86, 89, 90, 113

Cortázar, Julio, 115 Dante, Dante Alighieri, 1, 17 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix, 34, 118 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 10, 15, 19, 20, 35, 59, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124 Dickens, Charles, 2, 13, 53, 71, 88, 116, 121 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 4, 7, 17, 26, 42, 70, 100, 114 Eichenbaum, Boris Mikhailovich, 56, 114, 115, 121 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 84 Eroshenko, Vasily, 74 Foucault, Michel, 20, 27, 50, 54, 121 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 28, 32, 38, 48, 54, 60, 63, 69, 70, 71, 83, 102, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124

126

Index of Names

Gogol, Nikolai, 7, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 41, 44, 57, 58, 60, 63, 66, 70, 88, 118, 119, 121 Gorky, Maxim, 7, 51, 95, 118

Shakespeare, William, 4, 11, 37, 39, 58, 78 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 20, 58, 104 Sun Yat-sen, 18, 21, 22, 51, 91

Hemingway, Ernest, 7,115 Huters, Theodore, 86, 122 Hu Shi, 18, 59, 61, 62, 69, 124

Turgenev, Ivan, 6, 7, 100, 124

Ibsen, Henrik, 7, 104, 105

Xu Guangping, 21, 22, 91, 103, 104, 117 Xu, Jian, 87, 122, 123 Xu Shichang, 18, 21, 68

Jameson, Fredric, 2, 30, 113 Joyce, James, 6, 7, 53 Kang Youwei, 78 Kristeva, Julia, 118 Lacan, Jacques, 9, 16, 17, 66, 83, 95, 115, 116, 117, 122, 124 Lawrence, David Herbert, 9, 104 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 11, 25, 62, 97, 113, 117, 118, 121, 122 Levinas, Emmanuel, 109, 124 Liu, Lydia H., 113, 116 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 10, 107, 116 Mao Dun, 2, 7, 67, 114, 124 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 19, 22, 27, 37, 43, 44, 52, 118 McDougall, Bonnie, 115, 117, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 20, 33, 34, 35, 38, 42, 48, 69, 73, 74, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124 Poe, Edgar Allan, 8, 115 Pollard, David, 14, 19, 77, 93, 104, 113, 116, 117 Pratt, Mary Louise, 114–115 Pushkin, Alexander, 29 Qian Xuantong, 19, 23 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 124 Semanov, V. I., 48, 49, 120

Wilde, Oscar, 87, 88, 123

Yu Dafu, 20, 117 Yuan Shikai, 18, 20, 51, 53, 68 Zhou Zuoren, 17, 21, 50, 67, 74, 93 Zhou Jianren, 21 Zhu An, 17, 21