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

6. The Journey Home

140 6 The Journey Home We look back to old familiar landscapes in the fear that the comforts of the past may be vanishing before our eyes. David Lowenthal, “Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory” To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory Guxiang, the native place, plays a prominent role in Lu Xun’s writings. Fourteen of the twenty-five short stories collected in Call to Arms and Hesitation have the hometown as a background.1 All but one of the essays in Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk are set in Lu Xun’s native home of Shaoxing. Local customs and literati from his native place were an ongoing source of interest for Lu Xun. The prominence of the hometown in his stories and essays, along with his theoretical writings on the subject, has led scholars to identify Lu Xun as one of the earliest practitioners, if not the originator, of “native-place literature” (xiangtu wenxue).2 Attachment to one’s hometown, however, is hardly a modern literary theme. As a common thematic trope in Chinese literature, it figures prominently in classical poetry. Lu Xun was well versed with the theme of yearning for home and composed several classical poems in its vein upon first leaving Shaoxing.The guxiang in his early poems is associated with rustic simplicity and the warm affective ties commonly found in classical poetry. Over a decade after his return to China from Japan, the journey home again surfaces as a prevalent theme, this time in his short The Journey Home 141 stories.3 Unlike his early classical poems, however, the traveler’s homecoming invariably turns out to be disappointing. Often the only form of consolation and cause for celebration is the prospect of imminent departure .How then do we reconcile these disparate images of the guxiang—as a place of familiarity and belonging in his early poems, and as a site of poverty and misery in his stories? This chapter examines Lu Xun’s representations of the native place in his classical poems and fiction. Of his stories, it touches on “New Year’s Sacrifice” (Zhufu, 1924), “In the Tavern” (Zai jiulou shang, 1924), and “A Passing Storm” (Fengbo, 1921), focusing in particular on “My Old Home”(Guxiang, 1921). For Lu Xun, portraying the fictional hometown as a veritable dystopia served a rhetorical purpose: to provide a corrective to the idealized vision of a native place in the traditional literary imaginary , which continued to be perpetuated in modern narratives. At the same time, Lu Xun’s thematic insistence on the journey home in his stories gestures toward a critique of modern narratives of progress. Finding their lives in spatially “progressive” towns and cities lacking, his narrators journey to their native place in hopes of recovering a sense of belonging . By depicting the encounter with home as an alienating one, Lu Xun exposes the precarious plight of his intellectual travelers: as wanderers without a home in the world. Yet, however dismal his depictions of the hometown, Lu Xun’s fictional and nonfictional returns to the guxiang, as a symbol of tradition, also have an enabling function. Returning to the native place and recontextualizing it as a site of disintegration, misery, and oppression allowed him to confront and articulate in writing the trauma of destruction—of one’s home, identity, and sense of belonging—that accompanies the process of urban displacement and the emergence of a new world order. In his compulsive return to the native place, he suggests that experiences of trauma and loss must be dealt with head on. For it is only by confronting loss,real and imagined,however traumatic the experience may turn out to be, that one can truly recognize one’s predicament in the present world, and in so doing, hope to transcend it. Nostalgia and Native Place Yearning for home is a common thematic trope in classical Chinese poetry. The sorrow (xiangchou) that arises from one’s separation from 142 Chapter 6 home may result from a variety of circumstances.In the poem “Gathering Vetch” (Cai wei), collected in the Book of Odes (Shi jing) and analyzed in Chapter 7, conscripted soldiers on the frontier pine for news of home.4 In Qu...