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4 A Call to Arms: On Memory Kong Yiji The title of the second of Lu Xun’s stories, written in March 1919, and first published in New Youth in May 1919, is given to a person, a shadow of a Falstaff, so an older man, whose speech is frequently said to be full of archaisms, and whose death is imminent, and who contrasts both with the madman in the previous narrative, and with the narrator in this story. Kong Yiji’s family name suggests Confucius. His other name implies the elementary characters acquired in the early stages of learning to write Chinese. His name, it seems, embodies Chineseness, and how one gets into any national ideology, which is by writing its language, a task taught through the agencies of patriarchy, but which is internalised, taken on spontaneously, so that the narrator, when he is asked by Kong Yiji if he knows the part of the Chinese character that is necessary for writing the word ‘aniseed-peas’, is irritated that he might be thought to be someone who needs to be taught such a thing (and, it is implied, by someone so down on his luck as this scholar is). Kong Yiji has studied the classics, but never passed the official examinations, and can only make a living by copying calligraphy, in which he is not much of a success. The narrator begins in an almost anthropological manner to describe the taverns in Luzhen; the technique is employed much more fully in the later story, The New-Year Sacrifice. Luzhen as a name implies Lu Xun himself, and the family name of the mother; it is partly his way of identifying himself with the rural existence he speaks of, and partly his way of indicating that China is held by a past from which it cannot escape. He remembers himself as a waiter in the tavern with the ironically chosen name ‘Prosperity’.1 It is an utopian title, even a Marxist one, but at the end of the story, the man whose biography is hinted at, with many gaps and incompletenesses in it (the technique will be much more developed in The Misanthrope) will be unable to afford to pay. 38 Madmen and Other Survivors His death, like that of the woman in Regret for the Past, will be left doubtful: suicide, or simply death from poverty? And there is no prosperity in any other than the crassest sense in the tavern. The waiter at the time of the incident was twelve. He proceeds for two years after that in what seems a monotonous job. The period of time is marked by two Mid-Autumn Festivals, and extends beyond that by half a year, going up to and beyond the following Lunar New Year. He says that these events happened twenty-plus years ago, so that the action dates to the last decade of the Qing dynasty, or, indeed, to the end of the nineteenth century, as though Kong Yiji dies with the beginning of the twentieth century. (The civil service examinations, which this man has failed, were abolished in 1905, a point which will be referred to by Ah Q.) He starts, in the narrative standing up, and the only man in the bar who drinks standing, but he finishes on the floor, crawling, a Samuel Beckett-like figure, after which he disappears altogether, and is assumed dead. In between, he seems to have been beaten up frequently (for committing minor thefts: he has to live somehow), and the sense of a cycle of violence in which he is always passive, always beaten, suggests issues that will be more fully developed in The True Story of Ah Q. The narrator’s point of view comes out in the callousness with which he records the death of Kong Yiji — and in noting that, the loneliness which was the topic of the preface returns, as does the sense that youth is bound to repeat the failures of the older man. The callousness is that of the narrator, which, as in A Madman’s Diary is to be assumed to be a dramatic voice, but, as said before, the choice of name means that Lu Xun, whose fictional identity is being created through these texts that bear his name, does not wish to dissociate himself from this waiter: in other words, the text is confessional, so long as it is remembered that the character who appears in confessional terms is also a...

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