New Readings of Lu Xun

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)New Readings of Lu Xun: Critic of modernity and re-inventor of heterodoxyMore than any other modern writer, Lu Xun remains at the heart of intellectual discussions in China today. There are several reasons for this. One is that no sooner had Lu Xun breathed his last breath than the Chinese Communist Party began to build him into its own narrative of national revival, structured around the interpenetration of revolution and nationalism. Lu Xun's biography, which spanned the crucial juncture from late-imperial reformist gentry to nationalist revolution, the New Culture, and finally to the rise of communism as a response to many of the problems that had prevented China's full transformation into a modern democracy, began to serve as an explanatory model for the entire historical evolution of the first half of the twentieth century. The understanding of May Fourth in China today, at least outside academia, remains firmly anchored in the national narrative set out in the two CCP resolutions on Party history (1945 and 1981): the revolution is presented as a prerequisite for national revival, as also illustrated in the blockbuster Beginning of the Great Revival (Jian dang wei ye, 2011). The New Culture movement is thus reduced to the patriotic demonstrations of 1919, blotting out the ideological diversity that blossomed from 1915, encompassing anarchism, liberalism, and localism. As is well known, this instrumentalisation of Lu Xun in the service of reducing the historical complexity of his time peaked during the merciless exploitation of his name and works during the Cultural Revolution.The other, more substantive reason for Lu Xun's current relevance is that he confronted many of the dilemmas that China still faces today. Questions related to democracy, to Westernisation, and to the individual as the yardstick of a modern value system, have all been deferred rather than rendered obsolete by the historical events of the last 60 years. Lu Xun's reflections on these and other questions remain evocative to us because they are never ideological, but rather always seek to tease out the contradictions or tensions between different theories and approaches.Leaving aside the debates over his work that took place during his lifetime, Lu Xun has gone through three main phases of reception over the three quarters of a century since his death in 1936, all of which remain alive today.(1) The first phase consisted mainly of constructing what we may call the official of Lu Xun. Today, while he is no longer celebrated as the commander in chief of [China's] Cultural Revolution, Lu Xun continues to be read and taught in China as a revolutionary fighter and patriot rather than as a complex writer of fiction and poetry, with an overemphasis on his political journalism of the 1930s rather than his fiction of the 1920s. In January 2012, for example, Peking University Professor Kong Qingdong ... referred to Lu Xun's denunciation of xizai ... (Western fops) to justify his diatribe against Hongkongers' propensity to embrace Western-style rule of law and values, showing that this reading and its implied interpretation of the New Culture movement remain useful in China today.(2) In a post-World War Two context in which Lu Xun had become canonised on the mainland while remaining banned in Taiwan, where he was labelled a communist writer, the first alternative readings of Lu Xun, building on annotations and biographical writings by contemporaries such as Cao Juren ..., who came to Hong Kong in 1950, began to emerge in Western academia in the 1960s. The Hsia brothers, in particular T. A. Hsia's ... seminal The Gate of Darkness, first published in 1968, played a major role in unearthing the aestheticism in Lu Xun's works such as Wild Grass, as did the writing of Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans (pen name Simon Leys). Leo Ou-fan Lee's ...edited volume Lu Xun and his Legacy (1985) and his authoritative study Voices from the Iron House(1987) represent a culmination of scholarship undertaken in this perspective, in which psychological introspection, probing of gender roles, cosmopolitan connections, and nostalgia for vanishing local cultures take precedence over anti-colonialism and the celebration of left-wing martyrs. …