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

1. The Limits of Subjectivity: Death, Trauma, and the Refusal to Mourn

19 1 The Limits of Subjectivity Death, Trauma, and the Refusal to Mourn There is an ethical crux to all mourning, according to which the injustice potentially perpetrated by the mourner against the dead as a failure of memory stands for the injustice that may be done to the living other at any given moment. R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning Official histories are filled with accounts of heroes whose bravery and sacrifice are acknowledged posthumously. Yet the sacrifices of martyrs and revolutionaries in Lu Xun’s fiction and essays are ascribed no such noble meanings,nor relayed through coherent or logical narratives.What is highlighted is the forgettability and meaninglessness of their deaths. Lives recounted are sometimes of nameless, often faceless figures—the Chinese man in the decapitation slide, the madman, the ostracized revolutionary, Ah Q. Alongside Lu Xun’s eulogies to familiar public personages such as writers and revolutionaries is a cast of haunting characters —beggars,castaways,and the socially dislocated—who in historical terms would surely have been deemed marginal, if not unworthy figures. Indeed, as many scholars have noted, Lu Xun possessed an inordinate , if not morbid, fascination with death. Allusions to cannibalism, beheadings, and executions abound in his often macabre fictional world, as characters routinely die or are killed off. Imagery of death and decay looms large in his stories and his prose poem collection Wild Grass, and among his most moving essays are eulogies written to the dead.Why this fascination with death? T. A. Hsia links Lu Xun’s obsession with death to its function “as the symbol of a bygone age.”1 Unlike many hopeful New Culture intellectuals 20 Chapter 1 who severed ties to the past and heralded the coming of a new age, Lu Xun’s stories seem hopelessly mired in the past. His refusal to let go of a bygone era may have arisen in part from his awareness of the powerful force that the past continues to exert on the present. In many of his autobiographical essays, Lu Xun seems intent on exposing how his own actions and writings continued to be inscribed by the past in ways that he himself could not yet fully comprehend. He may have been wary of giving the past a premature burial lest the cannibalistic practices of old continue to be unwittingly replicated. Yet, in spite of his virulent criticisms of tradition, his writings often reflect a lingering attachment to aspects of a traditional literati culture that provided him an ethical framework and structured his views as an intellectual and writer. Indeed, the propensity to label Lu Xun as a “radical iconoclast” has in part contributed to the obscuring of his innovative experiments with traditional forms and conventions. The classical literary tradition continued to inspire his broad range of creative writing—be it in the form of parody, allusion, imitation,or adaptation—providing an illuminating lens for assessing the past and the present. Beyond the symbolic level, Lu Xun’s meditations on death were surely mediated by the violence of his age and the psychological effect of the deaths he encountered in his lifetime—the deaths, executions, and suicides of family members, friends, fellow writers, and students, as well as of public figures at large.The dead continued to haunt him and he kept them alive in memory and in print.While this may have been due in part to what Hu Ying has insightfully termed a “eulogistic imperative”deeply ingrained in the long tradition of Chinese historiography, Lu Xun’s need to perpetually keep the dead alive was accompanied by a stubborn refusal to mourn—at least not in the conventional sense of how mourning is understood—which is as striking a characteristic as the omnipresence of death in his work.2 How then might we read Lu Xun’s insistence on paying homage to the dead—in particular, to figures usually deemed, in literary and historical terms, forgettable? And how do we interpret his refusal to mourn? If mourning is understood as “a communally sanctioned and controlled requirement to protect [a] community”rather than “spontaneous outpourings of authentic affective pain,” then Lu Xun’s alternative mourning narratives could be construed as a rejection of communally sanctioned forms of meaning-making.3 Writing on behalf of the dead and being true to the The Limits of Subjectivity 21 fidelity of loss may have been an ethical claim for...