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

Epilogue: Remembrance, Forgetting, and Radical Hope

219 Epilogue Remembrance, Forgetting, and Radical Hope The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is to attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia Only for the cause of those who have no hope is hope given to us. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” In an essay titled “Death” (Si, 1936), Lu Xun claims not to have contemplated the prospect of death much until the twilight of his own life.1 The presence of death, however, is ubiquitous in his writings. As I noted in Chapter 1, beyond the function of death as a symbol of a bygone age, Lu Xun’s representations of death were mediated by the violence of his age and the psychological effect of the deaths he encountered during his lifetime—the deaths,executions,and suicides of family members,friends, fellow writers, and students, as well as public figures at large. Like the experiences of “enchantment” examined in Chapter 8, death functioned as a subject of aesthetic and philosophic contemplation; it gestures to an “elsewhere” representing the unknown and the mystical that when confronted throw common conceptions of the world awry, making them radically uncertain.2 Lu Xun’s refusal to mourn, his insistence on keeping the past and the deceased alive in his writings, was a reflection of his conviction of the need to be true to the memory of loss. To be sure, his form of remembrance was often accompanied by a lingering sense of nostalgia for certain aspects of traditional culture that continued to structure his worldview and mission as a writer, and a sense of resignation to the fact that traces 220 Epilogue of the memories of the lives he eulogized were, even as he wrote, on the verge of vanishing. This enduring sense of loss, however, may have made his “vigil before the shrine of the dead” all the more pressing.3 His constant confrontation with death in literal and allegorical terms—be it the deaths of others, a bygone era, the radically unknown, his own mortality —was registered in the dark and macabre tone of his writings, most notably in his collection of prose poems, Wild Grass (Yecao, 1927).4 In Wild Grass, images of death and decay—such as the rotting corpse—serve as reminders of the ephemerality of life. They also reflect Lu Xun’s struggles with the meaning of the act of narrative representation , that is, his doubts over the ability of writing to capture the essence of a past and present in the midst of disappearing. Yet, while his prose poems underscore the violence of language and the limits of representation , they also contain an urgent, almost desperate plea: for the need to bear testimony to loss and the imperative of commemoration. At the heart of the ambiguous images and competing impulses of remembrance and forgetting in Wild Grass lies the notion of radical hope, a persistent faith that in spite of his doubts over the efficacy of writing, his inscriptions , like the epitaphs in the graveyards of the past, might somehow capture the spirit of the once living.5 Lu Xun harbored the hope that in the hands of a discerning reader, his works, like the texts of the literary precursors that inspired his own, would allow specters of the past to yet flicker alive, as sources of inspiration that might illuminate the past and the present. The Corpse, the Text, and the Violence of Commemoration In a makeshift will written in the twilight of his life, Lu Xun requested that he be forgotten after his death.6 This was not a mere self-deprecatory move.By the time he emerged as one of the leading figures of the League of Left-wing Writers in the 1930s, he was well aware of his own literary stature and used it to promote the leftist cause even though he was neither convinced by its agenda nor persuaded of its potential for success. In his lifetime, he made concerted efforts to order and preserve his writings , leaving voluminous published works for posterity. Why, then, this deathbed wish to be forgotten? Peter Brooks writes that it is “at death that a life first assumes transmissible form—becomes a completed and significant statement—so that Epilogue 221 it is death that provides the authority or ‘sanction’of narrative.”7 In other...