Introduction

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 coun- try'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 in- voked 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 scholar- ship 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.

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