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

Introduction: History, or What Remains in the Present

3 Introduction History, or What Remains in the Present Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present. Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture1 I am well aware that the past has already passed and that there is no way to chase after ghosts and spirits. Yet one cannot break with the past so absolutely. I still want to gather the remains, build small, new graves, burying and memorializing at once. Lu Xun, Preface to Graves Political canonization can have bizarre consequences for a writer’s literary afterlife: key aspects of his works that contradict official narratives may be elided; some of the writer’s most outstanding attributes may be overlooked. Lu Xun—the pen name by which Zhou Shuren (1881–1936) is known—is a case in point.2 In spite of his affinity for darkness and images of death, Lu Xun, the “soul of the nation,” has often been appropriated as a symbol of light. Since his death, he has been lionized by the Chinese Communist Party as a revolutionary hero par excellence. In the annals of literary history, he has been depicted as the quintessential embodiment of May Fourth iconoclasm and a pioneer of the New Culture movement. During the inception of the movement, usually dated to 1915 with the founding of the progressive journal Youth Magazine (Qingnian zazhi), new-style intellectuals called for a radical break with tradition and the abolition of classical language (wenyan) and literary forms; in their stead, they promoted a new literature written in the vernacular (baihua) that would pave the way for a cultural renaissance. As the prevailing literary history would have it, these 4 Introduction developments led to the birth of “Modern Chinese Literature,” Lu Xun its acknowledged forefather with the publication of his first vernacular short story, “Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren riji, 1918). This version of literary history—which views the modern as a radical break from the past—and the narratives informed by it, however, often obscure what are arguably Lu Xun’s most remarkable contributions as a writer: he was one of the most astute critics of the process of modernization , as well as a radical innovator who actively transformed traditional forms, styles, and conventions in his “modern” literary works. His creative writings—eclectic fusions of indigenous and foreign conventions, plagued by contradictions and uncertainties—simultaneously represent and replicate China’s tumultuous encounter with the larger world in the early twentieth century, both in content and in form. Indeed, the ambiguity that lies at the heart of Lu Xun’s literary experiments captures an aspect of Chinese modernity that most haunted him—that is,as a fundamentally alienating and traumatic process of cultural disintegration. Lu Xun’s ruminations on cultural devastation were inextricably linked to the cataclysmic transformations of his time. The period spanning from his birth in 1881 to his prime adult years coincided with the turbulent last decades of the Qing empire.The toppling of the last imperial dynasty in 1911 by a series of revolutionary insurrections was abetted by a process that can well be described as a self-implosion. Beginning in the mid–nineteenth century, the Qing government was confronted with natural catastrophes and uprisings of unprecedented scale, including the Taiping (1851–1864) and the Boxer (1899–1901) rebellions.The empire, successively defeated in conflicts with foreign colonial powers beginning with the First Opium War (1839–1842), signed a series of unequal treaties , paying indemnities and ceding territories to the victors.The institution of a new Republican government in 1912 did little to stem the tide; a country already fractured by colonial “spheres of influence” disintegrated into warlordism. Repeated incursions from foreign powers brought the larger world outside to the forefront of Chinese attention. A blossoming curiosity about the West and Japan, by then a de facto Western power, emerged in intellectual circles beginning in the late Qing.3 Students embarked on overseas studies in unprecedented numbers, translations of foreign works proliferated on the literary scene, and foreign ideas, texts, and technology were imported on a large scale, creating a vibrant period of cultural Introduction 5 exchange and experimentation.4 This cultural ferment, however, was also accompanied by the destruction of fundamental elements of traditional culture, a complex process that came to define Chinese modernity. As Edward Said...