Introduction

Home , Hu Feng, Liu Zaifu, Lu Xun, Merle Goldman, Xiao Jun

Introduction

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

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

ix X INTRODUCTION tically Marxist-Leninist-Maoist than some of the Party leaders of the 1930s. As a result, his thought is said to have paved the ideological way for Mao Zedong. In the successive campaigns since the 1950s, Lu Xun's name, together with excerpts from his writings, has been repeatedly invoked to "struggle against" enemies of all hues and to justify the political positions of different, even opposing, factions. (This process is succinctly surveyed in Merle Goldman's essay for this volume.) Since Mao's death in 1976, a subtle de-Maoification has been under way, but Lu Xun's reputa- tion remains unscathed: the current Party chairman, Hu Yaobang, eulo- gized him in a speech delivered to an invited audience of thousands on September 25, 1981, the hundredth anniversary of Lu Xun's birth. The overall effect of the Party-engineered idealization of Lu Xun is a narrowing of vision that has reduced the immense complexities of his personality and thought to a simplistic set of heroic traits. The final prod- uct of the official Lu Xun industry is a larger-than-life caricature of the real man. If we wish to de-deify Lu Xun, the first step is to recognize his internal paradoxes and contradictions. Lu Xun's writings reveal at least two conflicting personas. On the public side he may have deserved every bit of praise that his adoring disciples and friends have accorded him, especially for his unstinting sponsorship of young writers and artists (de- scribed in Howard Goldblatt's paper). In private, however, Lu Xun was relentlessly harsh on himself—a loner tormented with spiritual anguish, full of doubts, and obsessed with death. Lu Xun's unique collection of prose poetry, Wild Grass, offers us a rare glimpse into the dark recesses of his psyche, where ghostly figures roam over a symbolic landscape of decay and ruin. This artistic gem, discussed briefly by Lin Yii-sheng and myself, has until very recently been purposely neglected by Chinese Communist scholars because of its depressing tone and nihilistic content. Interestingly, Wild Grass drew the most enthusiastic applause from the conferees at Asilomar. For it is precisely the conflicts and contradictions the work embodies that make Lu Xun's writing so intriguingly rich and ambiguous. Almost half a century after his death and in spite of ideological distortions, Lu Xun still holds a special fascination for readers and scholars outside of China—not merely for his penetrating insights into the Chinese national character, society, and culture but also for the originality of his mind and of the technique with which he sought to translate his intellectual and psychological tensions into art. The first four papers in this volume are concerned with Lu Xun's literary creativity. Here we must wrestle, as must all Lu Xun scholars, with both the quality and the sheer quantity of the author's creative output: two short-story collections; sixteen volumes of zawen (miscellaneous essays); a volume each of reminiscences, prose poetry, and historical fiction; some sixty classical poems; and more than half a dozen scholarly works on INTRODUCTION xi traditional Chinese literature. I have attempted in my essay a general survey of most of these genres, but my analysis is by no means comprehen- sive. It views Lu Xun's originality against the background of the entire heritage of Chinese tradition. For I believe that of all the May Fourth writers of "New Literature," Lu Xun alone had engaged his creative re- sources in a searching examination of this literary tradition, and that in so confronting it he had also created the most profound literature. When we read—and reread—his stories, we are struck again and again by their daring experimentation, as if the author had been trying out a different innovative device in each story (and sometimes several new devices in the same story). This consciousness of technique in Lu Xun's fiction has re- ceived the major share of attention from Western scholars. Marston An- derson, in his contribution to this volume, analyzes the art of Lu Xun's stories from a perspective of Western, particularly European, theory that differs from previous studies of this genre. He has performed the intricate task of relating this Western-derived short-story form to the sociopolitical context in which Lu Xun and a later generation of Chinese writers prac- ticed it. Anderson's analysis offers a refreshing way of approaching the legacy of this essentially realistic mode of Lu Xun's fiction. Compared to Anderson's somewhat theoretical discussion, David E. Pollard engages in a detailed reading of the massive corpus of Lu Xun's zawen writings. In general, Pollard pays more attention to the zawen works written in the early and middle periods of Lu Xun's career and to his last zawen collection. It is in these texts, rather than in the more politicized zawen of Lu Xun's leftist years, that Pollard finds his genius at work. Lu Xun seems to have owed much to the inspiration of the traditional Chinese categories of essay writing, including the infamous bagu (eight-legged) essay, at the same time as he consciously attempted to break away from them. It is precisely this intricate, often tension-ridden, inter- play between the modernity of Lu Xun's artistic sensibility and the weight of the classical heritage that defines, in my view, Lu Xun's creativity. Thus most scholars, both in China and abroad, agree that Lu Xun's painstaking research into traditional Chinese fiction—the subject of John C. Y. Wang's paper—contributes not merely to the advancement of sinological scholarship itself but also to Lu Xun's own style of fiction writing. His Old Tales Retold is a fascinating collection of flawed experiments, a mixed genre in which Lu Xun tries to modernize ancient Chinese legends by recreating fictionally some of the material he has researched as a scholar. Lu Xun's originality as a creative artist—his efforts to be innovative in a literary tradition laden with precedents—is what makes him modern, as I argue in my essay. His borrowings from foreign literature, especially the short-story genre, fulfilled the same need. Yet the style he established in his profuse writings—a lyrical prose punctured with sardonic wit that was xii INTRODUCTION highly evocative, even allegorical—was not surpassed by any of his many imitators. His adroit use of ironic distance and of the role of narrator in his stories was a significant breakthrough in his time, but these techniques were not developed further by the fictional writers of the 1930s, who tended to confine themselves to the social realistic mode, which lacked psychological depth. Lu Xun's zawen was the most widely imitated but, as Pollard has noted, none of his followers matched his genius, let alone surpassed him. And his prose poetry has remained inimitable. To be sure, Taiwanese writers of the 1960s and 1970s eventually attained a mature technique in both fiction and poetry. But it is difficult to trace Lu Xun's direct influence in Taiwan, where he is officially banned. Thus, ironically, the literary legacy of this masterful innovator is the most problematic to assess, while his personality and subject matter have had a more tangible impact. To trace Lu Xun's legacy in the larger context of modern Chinese culture and politics is a formidable task; the scholar who attempts it must command a broad historical knowledge and understanding while at the same time remaining immune to the pressures of ideological dogma. The essays in the second section of this book are consequently more interdis- ciplinary and reflect the varied backgrounds of their authors. In general chronological order, these essays survey Lu Xun's impact from the 1930s to the present. One way in which the interpretive perspectives of this volume depart from the standard Chinese approach is that they eschew the usual paeans to Lu Xun's contributions to the CCP-led revolution. This is not to deny that Lu Xun, especially in the last phase of his life, committed himself to the ideals of revolution. Rather, the point is that Lu Xun's political commitment grew out of intellectual ruminations in a process that differed qualitatively from mere ideological conversion to Marxism. As Lin Yii-sheng points out in his thoughtful essay, Lu Xun's conception of political commitment is anchored in a humanistic moral ethos that does not allow for either personal chicanery or operational pragmatism. The internal logic of this moral orientation inevitably pitted him against the more professional politicians of both the Nationalist (KMT) and Communist parties. It is now well known that even as a leading polemicist on the leftist front during his last years, Lu Xun did not enjoy a harmonious relationship with the faction-torn CCP or with the League of Left-Wing Writers. His dedication to the cause of revolution was not inflamed by self-congratulating optimism; rather, it was buttressed by a deeply tragic view of life and society. He felt hemmed in by the forces of reaction and repression and harbored no clear prospect of victory for the revolution. Thus, paradoxically, amidst this "dark night" before the revolution he found renewed courage to fight on, not as a revolutionary vanguard but as INTRODUCTION xiii

a rearguard against the forces of darkness. Consequently, his profuse writings in this period, though avowedly more political than before and di- rected more at external enemies than at his own inner ghosts, are neverthe- less imbued with anguish. In contrast to the externalized view of Lu Xun as an increasingly active revolutionary, both Lin Yii-sheng and Theodore D. Huters begin from within the author's mentality, delineating his sense of self and the process whereby he came to grips with external reality. It was his determination to avoid self-delusion, combined with his habit of ruthless self-scrutiny, that lay at the root of Lu Xun's integrity, a word that was mentioned again and again in the course of the conference. Lu Xun's morality, as Lin points out, formed the intellectual backbone of the author's commitment to his society and people. Lu Xun's morality was, therefore, not so much transcendent as humanistic. Lin suggests that the Chinese belief in tianren heyi (heaven and man are one) rules out the possibility of a transcendent morality derived, as in the Christian tradition, from a supreme God. Lu Xun's morality always evolved out of concrete human situations, as he looked facts in the face. This attitude explains Lu Xun's refusal to echo the optimistic effusions of the Creation and Sun society members about the rising revolutionary tide in China in the late 1920s. Lu Xun perceived no revolutionary prospects in China at that time, although he was tremen- dously impressed by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. He later changed his mind, as the result of a complicated process involving some painful decisions triggered by crucial incidents. Some of these decisions were not entirely consistent with the logic he had previously espoused, as Lin points out, and they exacted a great psychological toll on him personally. A case in point is, of course, the famous debate of the Two Slogans in 1936, the last year of his life. Lu Xun's role in this battle, which was triggered by Zhou Yang's introduction of the slogan "National Defense Literature," is carefully analyzed, from different angles, by Theodore Huters and David Holm. In his meditative essay Huters indicates that Lu Xun resisted Zhou Yang's slogan, which he regarded as a moral compromise with the KMT. It is significant that Lu Xun responded in print to the vicious personal attack from Xu Maoyong, a former disciple: in so doing Lu Xun was in fact taking a public stance against some CCP members of the leftist camp who had estranged him and used Xu as their go-between. Holm demonstrates further that Zhou Yang acted in accordance with the wishes of the Moscow-based Comintern, which seemed able to communi- cate with the Shanghai-based CCP and the League of Left-Wing Writers more easily than with the rural headquarters of the Maoist wing. Whether or not Lu Xun's position in this debate was close to that of the rural CCP leadership, whose representative was presumably Feng Xuefeng, Lu Xun's friend and disciple, is subject to further research. XIV INTRODUCTION

One theme, however, remains clear in both Huters's and Holm's essays: to Lu Xun the debate involved a moral issue—he acted as a committed man who refused to compromise—whereas the followers of Zhou Yang and even some of Lu Xun's supporters tended to treat the slogan as a strategic maneuver in line with the newly declared United Front policy and the need for national unity against the common enemy, Japan. Interest- ingly, it seems that aside from Lu Xun only Hu Feng also refused to compromise. Lu Xun's behavior in the debate set an example for Hu Feng who, as Huters demonstrates, carried forward this legacy of unflinching independence. Hu Feng became one of the most intransigent participants in subsequent intraparty controversies. For instance, in the debate on national forms that took place in 1939 and 1940, Hu Feng played a promi- nent role in affirming the value of the more cosmopolitan May Fourth literature. Zhou Yang, who, ironically, may have been sympathetic to that stance, chose not to defend it—presumably in anticipation of Mao's wishes to downgrade that legacy in favor of the more rustic literary genres he considered proper national forms. From a literary point of view, the debate on national forms was more important than the battle of the Two Slogans. It implied that modern Chinese literature could either continue to absorb the best from the West or else become entirely absorbed in native traditions. Mao tended to favor the latter course, as shown by his injunctions at the Yan'an Forum on Art and Literature in 1942, whereas Lu Xun insisted on the former, as his volumes of translations eloquently demonstrate. The Yan'an syndrome of literary production represented perhaps not only a rural reaction against the urban-centered internationalism of the May Fourth tradition but also a rejection of the Lu Xun legacy. One of the most sensitive points of divergence between the Maoist and non-Maoist historians of modern Chinese literature lies precisely in this question of the literary relationship between Lu Xun and Mao. The official view from China is, of course, that Mao's Yan'an talks represented a further development of Lu Xun's thought. These scholars can cite both Lu Xun's avowedly Marxist affirmation, during his last years, of the class nature of literature and his endorsement of proletarian literary causes (such as the Latinization of written Chinese and the use of popular id- ioms). However, a major problem in studying Lu Xun's ideological changes is the lack of clear definition and in-depth analysis of what constituted a Marxist position on the leftist literary scene in China. Non-Maoist scholars argue that Lu Xun was not a Communist but a fellow traveler with the international leftist trend of the 1930s. He himself acknowledged that he had never read Das Kapital and was not versed in Marxist theory except through his translations of Plekhanov and Lunacharski. These two writers, some would contend, represented a side of the Marxist esthetic tradition INTRODUCTION xv that was less rigid and doctrinaire than some of Lenin's views or the Stalinist position in the 1930s or the literary theory of Mao Zedong. This thorny issue still awaits detailed study. But David Holm's essay clearly shows that in Yan'an the major leaders of Lu Xun research—such as Xiao Jun—were those who invoked his name to defend the right of the revolutionary writer to work toward the goals of the revolution with- out undue interference from Party bureaucrats. The extension of Party control over literature, in fact, is traceable only to Stalinist Russia; it is not contained in the programs of Marx and Engels. It is interesting, therefore, to note that in the two decades following Lu Xun's death the reigning epithet for the Chinese revolutionary writers was "realism" (which was sometimes broadened to include "critical realism," another term borrowed from Russia). Hu Feng was one of the leading advocates of realism, which to him harked back not only to the May Fourth tradition of realistic portrayal and social conscience but also to the nineteenth-century Russian legacy of humanistic criticism represented by the theorists Belinski and Chernyshev- ski and the masters of fiction such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gorki. The term "realism," as used by Hu and his colleagues, was of course as amor- phous as such other once-prevalent terms as "revolutionary literature" and "proletarian literature." But comparison of Hu Feng's writings in the 1940s with Mao's formulations (and with those of his theoretician-followers such as Ai Siqi and Chen Boda) will reveal considerable divergence of literary orientations within the Chinese revolutionary movement. The fact that in the 1950s some of the major figures attacked or purged by the Party—including Hu Feng, Feng Xuefeng, Ding Ling, Qin Zhaoyang, Ba Ren, and Huang Qiuyun—were all champions of realism and humanism is sufficient proof of the persistence of a critical tradition that varied with the Maoist orthodoxy, which Zhou Yang and his associates began imposing in the mid-1950s. It was also in the first half of the 1950s, when Soviet influence was at its height, that the phrase "socialist realism" became prevalent. (Although Mao himself had used the phrase in his Yan'an talks, Zhou Yang had been among the earliest to disseminate this Soviet doc- trine, just as he had once translated Belinski and Chernyshevski.) With the criticism of Hu Feng and later Qin Zhaoyang, realism became a bad word unless it was combined with the terms "socialist" or "revolutionary"—as in the slogan, put forth by Zhou Yang and Guo Moruo in 1958: "The combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism." The complex literary history of the word realism remains to be written. But the brief survey above tends to reinforce Huters's conclusion that it was Hu Feng who truly inherited Lu Xun's mantle, together with Xiao Jun and others. His moral ethos of the self, when translated into revolutionary theory and action in the 1940s, meant that the independence and rebel- xvi INTRODUCTION liousness of the modern Chinese writer should never be taken away, that the doctrinaire politicization of literature should not be equated with the writer's commitment to the revolutionary goals in the name of which the literary commissars acted to silence him. But the unhappy fate that befell Hu and almost all of Lu Xun's disciples suggests the precariousness of this legacy of creative independence. The political use of Lu Xun in campaigns from the 1950s to the Cul- tural Revolution is succinctly surveyed in Merle Goldman's essay. Gold- man makes clear that the rapid change in Party policies entailed frequent reinterpretations of several episodes in Lu Xun's life, specifically of the Two Slogans debate. At the height of the Gang of Four period, as the eminent writer Wu Zuxiang told us at the Asilomar conference, any per- son whose name Lu Xun had mentioned negatively was in danger of political reprisal from Jiang Qing and her cultural martinets. Lu Xun had once referred unfavorably to Wu in a letter, but Wu fortunately escaped attack because in another letter Lu Xun gave a more complimentary eval- uation of him. Wu's personal testimony gives a valuable insight into what it must have meant to be either an erstwhile enemy or a close disciple of Lu Xun's, for Wu was only on the fringe of the leftist community of writers in the 1930s. Xiao Jun, of course, fared far worse both before and during the Cultural Revolution. The political motives underlying the excerpting and twisting of Lu Xun's words were sometimes blatantly obvious. More frequently, however, the subtle power plays and hidden messages and positions behind the official canonization of Lu Xun are harder to decipher. The art of manipulating Lu Xun quotations is an intriguing subject for study. Different quotations have been used at different junctures for different purposes. Just as the Gang of Four used Lu Xun's iconoclastic May Fourth—style essays during the Anti- Confucius campaign of 1973—1974, so, as Goldman shows, has the present Deng-Hu campaign for the Four Modernizations taken quotations from a hitherto neglected essay by Lu Xun titled "Grabism." In that essay Lu Xun writes with some rhetorical emphasis in favor of grabbing everything good from foreign countries. And Hu Yaobang, in a speech commemorating Lu Xun's centennial, took Lu Xun's confessed habit of "self-scrutiny" ("I have often analyzed other people, but more often I have analyzed myself") and hoisted it on the new banner of "self-criticism"—the need to purge oneself of the errors of "bourgeois liberalization." The political struggles have also extended to Lu Xun scholarship. In 1981 the most carefully annotated edition of The Complete Works of Lu Xun was issued. Yet in the early 1970s the very suggestion of publishing a new complete edition was viewed with distrust, and an avowed Lu Xun scholar was as vulnerable to persecution as a former disciple—while the official Lu Xun cult flourished. It is only now, more than forty years after INTRODUCTION xvii his death, that Chinese Lu Xun scholars are aiming at a more objective portrait of this great writer. Pu Liangpei, a leading younger scholar, has examined the less exemplary as well as the exemplary episodes in Lu Xun's life in a recent biography he coauthored with Liu Zaifu. Pu also gives a valuable summary of the present state of Chinese scholarship on Lu Xun. Partly out of disillusionment with the official canonization of Lu Xun, the younger generation of readers in post-Mao China may be less than enthusiastic about reading his works. It is as hard to assess Lu Xun's legacy after the Cultural Revolution as it was to sort through the ideological maze that preceded it. A general démythification of Lu Xun is certainly discernible. In one of the most successful recent adaptations of "The True Story of Ah Q," by the veteran dramatist Chen Baichen, an actor playing Lu Xun appears onstage at the beginning and end of the play, making sardonic comments amidst puffs of smoke. Before Lu Xun leaves the stage, he says pensively that although Ah Q was known not to have any children, his offspring can actually be found in every corner of today's China. Chen Baichen seems to want not only to humanize Lu Xun but also to show his continued relevance in a new era. The play's final comment implies that the famous Ah Q traits—self-deception, self-rationalization, fence-sitting, compromises, bullying the weak while cowering before the strong, and so on—are still very much part of the Chinese national character in spite of the successive campaigns that have attempted to remold that character. The current official line explains these residual bad traits in socialist China as "remnants of feudalism"; these remnants also account for the evil prac- tices of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. But what would Lu Xun think of these phenomena today? The contemporary writer Liu Binyan provided some corroboration of Chen Baichen's contention in a devastating piece of reportage, published in 1979, that faithfully documents corrupt behavior of more grandiose scope than Ah Q's. In fact, the entire literary trend toward "dark exposure" that has arisen since 1977 and of which Liu was a leading spokesman may be traced to Lu Xun's attitude that one must look facts in the face and reveal all the appalling aspects of Chinese society in order to find a proper cure. For it is above all Lu Xun's critical spirit that defines his personal integrity and his intellectual conscience. If the Lu Xun spirit is still needed today, it should inspire the entire populace to ask: What has gone wrong in the Chinese revolutionary path? But such a collective and ruthless soul-searching would surely prompt more scathing exposures of the socialist system and produce more psychological pain. It is thus highly unlikely that the current leadership will promote such a mental state, which would certainly not be conducive to the Four Modernizations effort. Such "dark" meditations, inspired by the observance of Lu Xun's cen- XVlll INTRODUCTION tennial, can offer little consolation to anyone, except perhaps to Lu Xun's ghostly alter ego in Wild Grass. For China and the world at large, Lu Xun is remembered in a better light. The last three essays in this volume deal with Lu Xun's reception. In Howard Goldblatt's historical portrait, Lu Xun emerges as a beloved men- tor of young writers and artists in the 1930s. For all his self-torment, Lu Xun was extremely generous with those youths who sought his assistance and guidance, such as Xiao Jun and Xiao Hong. It is a life-sized picture—a notable contrast to the superhuman image of the posthumously deified Lu Xun. Irene Eber not only provides a broad survey of the Lu Xun scholarship in Western and Eastern Europe as well as the United States but also traces how Lu Xun's reception in these countries has changed as relations with revolutionary China have changed. (The selective bibliography ap- pended to this volume is largely based on the much longer one Eber compiled for her paper.) Thus, the Chinese pattern of ideology and scholarship, politics and popularization, seems to have a world resonance. Eber convincingly demonstrates how each country, especially the Soviet Union and the Eastern European nations, has found a dimension of meaning in Lu Xun's writings that suits its own cultural and political climate and has read into Lu Xun a discussion of its own immediate concerns. But no foreign country has been as intensely absorbed with Lu Xun as Japan. As Maruyama Noboru carefully relates in his essay, from their first discovery of the author in the early 1920s, Japanese scholars, writers, and journalists have been obsessed with Lu Xun's work. This is partly due, of course, to the fact that Lu Xun spent his formative years studying in Japan. But the reasons go deeper. The Japanese, with their geographical and cultural proximity to China, have found a peculiar immediacy in Lu Xun's works—almost a mirror image of their own spiritual tribulations. And nowhere in Maruyama's group portrait of Japanese sinophiles can one find a more poignant, more dedicated Lu Xan scholar than the late Takeuchi Yoshimi. As Maruyama points out, it was Takeuchi who made Lu Xun profoundly meaningful to all subsequent generations of Japanese intellectuals. For Takeuchi, Lu Xun's writings not only provided a window on the soul of a people (in the same way as Lu Xun, while a young student in Japan, first read the stories of the East European writers he translated) but also assumed the stature of a sort of national conscience to generations of Japanese intellectuals, most of whom had shared the experience of a war with China. Maruyama Noboru has expanded on Takeuchi's work by seeking to pinpoint the concrete circumstances in which Lu Xun chose to act. Thus Maruyama has explored the theme of "literature and revolution"—a theme Takeuchi purposely avoided because of his distaste for Japanese politics. Maruyama concludes by pointing out that since the 1960s, Japa- INTRODUCTION xix nese disillusionment with aspects of the Chinese revolution has generated more diverse interpretations of Lu Xun. Eber's extensive data also reveals, interestingly, that relatively unbiased and pluralistic studies of Lu Xun are a recent phenomenon in the West as well. It may be said that Western scholars are in the beginning stages of research on Lu Xun and on modern Chinese literature in general. One commentator at the conference, Cyril Birch, suggested that a future workshop could be devoted to a single Lu Xun story, so far are we from a full understanding of his works. Though perhaps deliberately hyperbolic, Birch's comment was on target: after decades of ideological distortion the time has come for serious in-depth study of this most complex modern Chinese writer by an international community of Lu Xun scholars. The present volume, it is hoped, will be a first step in that direction.

Leo Ou-fan Lee July 1982 Bloomington, Indiana