Literary Remains: Death, Trauma, and Lu Xun's Refusal to Mourn

3. (Un)Faithful Biographers

58 3 (Un)Faithful Biographers Even if subjected to 10,000 deaths, what regret would I have! Sima Qian, “Letter to Ren An” I am beyond indignation. I shall sup deeply of the dark desolation that is not of the world of men, and present my deepest grief to this world that is not of men, letting it delight in my pain.This shall be the poor offering of one still living before the shrine of the dead. Lu Xun, “In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen”1 Despite the humiliation he suffered in his lifetime, the grand historian Sima Qian rested secure in the knowledge that he could hide his magisterial history in “a famous mountain and await the man who understands it.”2 He professed that the satisfaction he gained from this assurance—of both the successful transmission of his text and the posthumous recognition it would garner for his biographical subjects as well as for himself as biographer—outweighs the suffering he endured in his lifetime. Such certainty, however, eluded Lu Xun. He was skeptical that similarly magisterial works would be intelligible or even produced in the new culture of his time, and wary of the consequences of transmission. In an increasingly market-oriented cultural field, Lu Xun speculated that his writings would turn out to be nothing more than “pointless, paper noise.”3 And yet, reconstructing a lineage of marginalized literati from the past may have made Lu Xun’s own position as a frustrated and displaced intellectual more intelligible, and perhaps more livable. Situating himself as an inheritor of this tradition may also have given him a sense of mission: to use his writings as a means to right historical wrongs, and (Un)Faithful Biographers 59 to create a literary universe in which the words and actions of the marginalized , excluded, and unfairly wronged could be justly re-valuated and transmitted. By recording the lives of those who would otherwise be dismissed as unworthy in historical terms, he allows the abject to return in narrative form to expose the limitations of the textual histories that have rendered their lives invisible. This chapter focuses on Lu Xun’s biographical writings—in particular , his memorial tribute to his fellow Shaoxing native Fan Ainong (1883–1912), collected in Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk.4 In this essay and in a set of poems he wrote commemorating his friend,Lu Xun depicts Fan Ainong as a misanthropic misfit, reminiscent of Qu Yuan (340?– 270? BCE) and Ruan Ji (210–263). Figures resembling Fan Ainong also make more than an occasional appearance in Lu Xun’s stories,most notably in “Misanthrope” (Gudu zhe, 1925).5 By situating characters such as Fan Ainong within a tradition of marginalized scholars and casting himself as a recorder of their lives, Lu Xun’s biographical writings and fictional character studies continue Sima Qian’s mission in the biography section of The Records: to ensure that worthy individuals who have gone unrecognized in their lifetime would be given their just due in narrative form. Writing these accounts may have also helped Lu Xun to soldier on, despite bouts of despair and the survivor guilt he experienced as he witnessed the deaths of friends, students, and fellow intellectuals in the violent age of his time. Acutely aware of how narratives recounting the lives and deaths of others could be manipulated by self-serving writers, Lu Xun pays close scrutiny to the role of the biographer. In “The True Story of Ah Q,” he derided the practices of unfaithful biographers. Through the “mockbiography ” composed by a fictive modern biographer who arbitrarily imitates, adapts, and desecrates traditional literary conventions, the story simultaneously engages and challenges the conventions of biographical writing, as well as New Culture notions of a radical subjectivity free from the clutches of tradition.Yet Lu Xun’s homage to the dead and traditional literary practices were accompanied by a lingering sense of nostalgia and resignation, a sense that aspects of the traditional literati culture he cherished most were, even as he wrote, on the verge of vanishing, and that the unrecognized dead would remain forgotten in historical memory. This enduring sense of loss may have made his solitary vigil before the shrine of the dead all the more pressing. 60 Chapter 3 Immortal Transmissions: Sima Qian and Qu Yuan Alas! The gentleman was not born at the opportune time, gazing at his shadow in...