LU XUN

Pseudonym for Zhou Shu-ren. Nationality: Chinese. Born: Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, China, 1881. Education: Kiangnan Naval Academy, Nanjing, 1898-99; School of Railways and Mines, Nanjing, 1899-1902; studied Japanese language in Japan, 1902-04, and medicine at Sendai Provincial Medical School, Japan, 1904-06; continued private studies in Japan, 1906-09. Career: Teacher in Shao-xing, 1910-11; served in the Ministry of Education, Beijing, 1912-26; taught Chinese literature at National Beijing University, 1920-26; taught at Amoy University, 1926; taught at University of Canton, 1927; then lived in international settlement of Shanghai; editor, Ben-lin (The Torrent), 1928, and Yiwen (Translation), 1934; also a translator of Japanese and Western works, and a draftsman/designer. Died: 19 October 1936.

Publications

Collections

Hsienshang chuanchi [Complete Works]. 20 vols., 1938; supplements edited by Tang Tao, 2 vols., 1942-52.

Selected Works. 4 vols., 1956-60.

Chuan ji [Complete Works]. 10 vols., 1957-58.

The Complete Stories. 1981.

Short Stories

Na han. 1923; as Call to Arms, 1981.

Pang huang. 1925; as Wandering, 1981.

Gushi xin bian. 1935; as Old Tales Retold, 1961.

Ah Q and Others: Selected Stories. 1941.

Selected Stories. 1954.

Wild Grass (prose poems). 1974.

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. 1990.

Other

Zhong gno xiaoshuo shi lueh. 1924; as A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, 1959.

Silent China: Selected Writings, edited by Gladys Yang. 1973.

Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk. 1976.

*

Bibliography:

in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 1917-1957 by C. T. Hsia, 1961.

Critical Studies:

Lu Hsün and the New Culture Movement of Modern China by Huang Sung-k'ang, 1957; Gate of Darkness by T. A. Hsia, 1974; "The Technique of Lu Hsun's Fiction" by Patrick D. Hanan, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 34, 1974; The Social Thought of Lu Hsün 1881-1936 by Pearl Hsia Chen, 1976; in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, edited by Merle Goldman, 1977; Lu Hsün's Vision of Reality by William A. Lyell, 1976; The Style of Lu Hsun by Raymond S. W. Hsu, 1979; Lu Xun and His Legacy edited by Leo Ou-fan Lee, 1985, and Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun by Lee, 1987; The Lyrical Lu Xun by Jon Eugene Kowallis, 1996; Lu Xun and Evolution by James Reeve Pusey, 1998.

* * *

The first modern Chinese author to write Western-style fiction, Lu Xun, is acknowledged as the country's preeminent twentieth-century man of letters. In addition to writing fiction, he was a prolific essayist, literary critic and theorist, and translator.

In 1902 Lu Xun went to Japan to study medicine, but after profound introspection he decided instead on a literary career. Along with his brother, he published two volumes of translations of European short stories and launched a Chinese literary magazine. Here and in other writings he forcefully argued that China was suffering from profound moral and spiritual decay. If it were to successfully regenerate itself, he believed, it must understand the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest and, like Japan, modernize. China could effect such a rebirth, a Nietzschean heroic endeavor, if, among other things, it discarded its slavish, retrograde attachment to a past whose principles had been reduced to little more than empty sham and meaningless piety. With the failure of his various literary ventures, Lu Xun returned to China in 1909, becoming a biology teacher and later a civil servant and writing in his spare time.

During this period China was passing through some of the most tumultuous political milestones in its modern history. These included the dissolution of the corrupt Qing dynasty in 1911, the establishment of the republic in 1912, and the seminal May Fourth Movement of 1919, initially a student protest against the Versailles Peace Conference's recognition of Japanese territorial claims in China. The movement, however, came to presage other major political and intellectual developments, including the rise of the Communist party. These events, individually and cumulatively, profoundly affected Lu Xun, who was in the midst of a highly creative period during which he wrote his finest literary works, the 25 short stories that appeared in the collections Call to Arms (Na han; 1921) and Wandering (Pang huang; 1925).

Disillusioned by the republicans' false promises of major political, social, and economic reform in China, Lu Xun became committed to the Marxist idea that literature should be used as a powerful means of social and political change. Though never formally a member of the Communist party, he espoused its utilitarian notion of literature throughout his writing career. An overarching theme of his stories is the dichotomy between the high-sounding sentiments preached by traditional Chinese writers and thinkers and the degrading state of poverty and adversity in which the common Chinese person, the overwhelming majority of the population, subsisted. The stark, overwhelming realism in these works is reminiscent of nineteenth-century Russian writers, many of whom Lu Xun had read and, in one important instance, even consciously imitated.

Lu Xun's first important short story, "Diary of a Madman" ("Kuangren riji"; 1918), caused a major literary stir. Now considered a defining, epoch-making work, it was daring, even revolutionary, in its use of colloquial (pai hua), as opposed to classical (wen-yen), language. The work legitimized the colloquial as a viable—even desirable—vehicle for literary expression. In fact, Lu Xun uses both types of language in the story, the classical in a brief two-paragraph introduction and the colloquial in the remaining 13 sections.

The theme, too, was remarkable. To an extent "Diary of a Madman" was modeled, something the author later acknowledged, on the 1834 story of the same name by Gogol. The protagonists in both works are officials. Gogol's Poprishchin comes to believe that he is the king of Spain, and Lu Xun's unnamed, institutionalized madman is eventually released and goes off somewhere to accept an "official post," in traditional Confucian thinking work reserved for learned, right-thinking men. This kind of irony is typical of Lu Xun's stories. His protagonist is obsessed with cannibalism, fearing that people, even his family, want to eat him. He even discovers by reading a book that the dominant note throughout Chinese history has been, in spite of its revered espousal of piety and righteousness, "Eat people." Cannibalism is a particularly powerful, evocative concept among the Chinese, possibly because of its periodic appearance in times of war, famine, and turmoil, and it reappears in many of Lu Xun's later works. In "Medicine" ("Yao"; 1919), for example, which centers on the traditional Chinese idea that consumption can be cured by feeding the patient human blood, consumptive Little Shuan is given the blood of a young executed revolutionary. But the cure does not work, and he dies. Later the mothers of the two sons meet in the cemetery where they have come to pay traditional respects to their dead children in, ironically, the very kind of rite the ideology of the dead revolutionary seeks to destroy.

"The True Story of Ah Q" ("Ah Q zheng zhuan"; 1921) is considered by many critics to be the acme of Lu Xun's literary art. The first of his works to achieve popularity in the West, the story not only added a new icon to Chinese popular culture but also a new word to the language. "Ah Q-ism" came to be the name for the ability to rationalize humiliation and degradation, treating them as their opposite. In trenchant satire posing as clownish burlesque, the story presents the outrageous antics of the vile, cunning Ah Q, whose power of reasoning is compromised. Bullied by the powerful, he then mistreats those who are weaker than he is. Lacking self-awareness and the ability to see things as they really are, he believes, for example, that China is the most supremely moral country in the world and that the Chinese Revolution of 1911-12 was a success. He is eventually executed for a crime he did not commit, just when he might, finally, have come to a real understanding of the world around him, namely, that China was morally corrupt and that, politically, little had changed except the labels by which the new oppressors called themselves. On the surface the story is humorous, even mirthful, but at its deeper levels it is profoundly sad and disturbing.

"Soap" ("Feizao"; 1924) satirically depicts the duplicity and dishonesty of Siming, a member of a right-wing group that seeks to reinstate the Confucian classics in Chinese education, while he himself sends his son to a progressive school where the boy is learning English. Siming also represses his reactions to a dirty but pretty beggar girl he sees on the street. It is obscenely suggested among the men ogling her that, scrubbed down with two bars of soap, she could easily be taken home as a "servant." Displacing the beggar girl in his consciousness, he purchases a single bar of soap for his unwashed, unkempt wife. The soap will thus not only make his wife clean, but the seemingly generous gift will cleanse his lust as well.

"Zhufu" (1924), translated into English as both "New Year's Sacrifice" and "Benediction," is characteristic of Lu Xun's unsentimental clarity in depicting the misery of peasants, especially women. The unnamed narrator, a kindly, educated man, has come to visit his well-to-do family a few days before the New Year and meets a family servant, Xianglin's wife, on the street. Terrified and disoriented, she wants to know for sure whether dead people assume the form of ghosts. Her story is gradually revealed. Widowed, she ran away from her dead husband's family because of abuse. After remarrying, she lost her second husband as well as her baby son, who was eaten by a marauding wolf. She came to work as a servant in the narrator's family home, where she showed herself to be an excellent worker. A fellow servant, smugly self-righteous in her profession of Buddhism, suggested to the family that Xianglin's wife not be allowed to help prepare the holiday festivities for fear that she would bring the family bad luck. The household chores of Xianglin's wife were gradually reduced, and she has been dismissed just prior to meeting the narrator on the street. She dies shortly thereafter, alone and unmourned, the New Year's sacrifice of the title. The work has a profound sense of numbing futility and tragic inevitability about it, for the chasm between the sensitive intellectual and the suffering peasant seems insuperable.

Women's issues are raised in "Divorce" ("Lihun"; 1925), in which Aigu, a strong-willed, articulate woman, has refused on several occasions to divorce her philandering husband. Summoned from her village to his town, she is accompanied only by an elderly uncle, since no one else from her family, including her many brothers, can accompany her. There, facing a tribunal of elders, her husband, and all of his relatives—all men—she is browbeaten and harassed into accepting the divorce. Throughout, various educated men hurl pious Confucian sayings to support their actions and decisions, which, of course, favor themselves and other men. In the end she has not received a fair hearing, not to mention justice.

Lu Xun's stories grimly and unsentimentally chronicle the spiritual and mental turmoil that he and his contemporaries experienced as they revolted against their past. His works, which have profoundly affected virtually all subsequent Chinese fiction in the twentieth century, are bitter but sensitive indictments of a China, caught between tradition and modernity, gambling with its very soul.

—Carlo Coppola

See the essays on "Regret for the Past" and "The True Story of Ah Q."