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1 Prologue The Owl Of this owl I asked, “Where will I go? If auspicious, tell me, If ominous, speak of the disaster, Will my life span long or short?— State when my time is up.” The owl let out a sigh, It raised its head, spread its wings. Its mouth incapable of words . . . Jia Yi, “Rhapsody on the Owl”1 Lu Xun was fond of owls.2 An illustration he designed for his essay collection Graves (Fen, 1926) prominently features an owl.3 The owl is perched on a square insignia, embossed on four sides.4 On the bottom right corner of the ornate frame are two trees, next to the numbers 1907–25 encrypted in black, the years in which the essays in the collection were written. Inscribed inside the insignia, which resembles a tombstone, are the following characters: “Lu Xun”魯迅 above the slightly larger “grave”墳. Lu Xun often employed symbols with ambiguous meanings in his works.5 In popular Chinese lore, the nocturnal owl is an inauspicious sign, a harbinger of death.6 Along these lines, the owl illustration has been interpreted as a metaphor for the death of the old culture.7 The “tombstone” with Lu Xun’s name suggests that the author and his book are to be buried along with it. In Greek mythology, a subject Lu Xun was well versed in, the owl is a symbol for the goddess of wisdom, Athena.8 The owl, whose penetrating gaze pierces through darkness, may well be an image of the prescient author witnessing his own death and the passing of an age (1907–1925).9 In that case, the inscriptions in the book serve as literary remains, a written testament of the destruction that has already occurred. 2 Prologue Such a reading is consistent with Lu Xun’s other self-representations. In the postscript to Graves, he refused the titles “mentor”and “elder”that others were eager to bestow upon him; he claimed that he himself was still searching for his own path and certain of only one destination: the grave.10 In a poetic essay, “Ode to the Night” (Ye song, 1933), Lu Xun professed to be a lover of the night, whose discerning eyes and ears are adeptly tuned to see and hear in the dark.11 In the preface to the second volume of Essays from the Semi-concessions (Qiejie ting zawen er ji, 1935), he compared his words to “the cries of an owl, reporting the inauspicious . . . heralding people’s misfortune.”12 In which case, the cartoonishlooking owl in the Graves illustration, its head cocked to one side with only one eye visible, together with the ornate frame of the insignia, may well be examples of the playful gestures or “distortions” (qubi) that Lu Xun frequently deployed in his works to mitigate the gravitas of his message.13 Regardless of how one interprets the illustration, it points to recurrent symbols and themes that fascinated Lu Xun as a writer: darkness , death, and life in the midst of destruction. ...

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