Lu Xun: Conscience Bites

Response Paper Week 3: Conscience Bites

In Wild Grass (or Weeds) Lu Xun explores the colorings and valences of the prose-poem genre, creating Kafka-esque snippets ranging from visceral symbolic nightmares, or visions (as in the case of “Si Hou/After Death” or “Fuchou/Revenge” and its more religious sequel) contemplations that bring us back to the very heart of the writer’s art, poems and polemics. These pieces are pithy, at times delicious, painful and ragged. The use of the prose poem allows the writing to sit precariously on the edge between Lu Xun’s bitter and deadly essay writing and his satirical but craft-conscious short stories and novellas. The format also formally bridges the gap between the traditional elements and motifs in Lu Xun’s writings and his own condemnation of the past, a tension that has proved to be rich in creative power for this writer. Ye Cao portrays a man alienated from society by a complex mesh of choice and necessity…a traveler, a writer in the dark of night. These are pieces packed with passion and meaning, both political and emotional, outlining the ragged shape of the wounds that Lu Xun must lick and tend in private.

Lu Xun’s “modernity”, or lack of same is often debated. The fact is that a neat dividing line between modern and classical simply doesn’t exist in the creative milieu in which he wrote even as it was expounded. In “Xin Qingnian” or “Yu Si” among others we see articles that are “wenyanwen-ish” (M.Hockx and B.Fuehrer’s phrase, god love ‘em), with Hu Shi’s article on the merits of baihua being a good example. Lu Xun is a product of his time and his education and he will no better completely escape his place in the on-looking crowd than his protagonist in Kuangren Riji actually succeeded in crushing an ancient account book.
In Lu Xun’s letters, as quoted in The Gate of Darkness we see his repeated struggle to balance his political conscience and consciousness, one that could not readily be fit into the mold of the Communist exercises of the day with some kind of self preservation, and thus to balance his often conflicting urges to speak and remain silent. He writes of not wanting to write anymore, not being able to write anymore, and advises others that it is better to act than write, better not to write at all, perhaps. Whether we view this as a symptom of his bitterness and personal disgust or a moment of the feelings of philosophical futility that engulfed the man who saw himself as awake in an iron house of sleeping bodies, or perhaps a combination of the two, it must be acknowledged that this tensions between knowing, writing, and saying is ever present in Lu Xun’s work; he advises us all to embrace the beauty of nothingness in our lives even as we hoist our javelin in the contradiction of peaceful combat and to reply to it all with an echoing “HAhaha Heee hee”.

Within the pages of YeCao he exploits and describes this self same tension: the form as I have described above is pithy, short, even for Lu Xun, a master of brevity. They are vision-like, they are not in the business of playing extensively with language or sound, in short they are often about silent moments: death, writing in the middle of the night, contemplating the changing seasons, reading a stone tablet, and their form and length are built for maximum impact. The inability to speak or move, muteness, unknowing, and nothingness especially are all major themes in these works. Perhaps this is reflective of the political quandary in which Lu Xun found himself at the time. I is treated in a variety of different ways, as empowering and beautiful, as simply blank and hollow, as bitter, or impotent, or futile. Since nothingness, choosing of speech, acknowledgement of knowledge or forgetfulness are all aspects of the discursive process in Lu Xun’s work it can easily be said that these are also the basic parameters of his politics of writing as well as his politics of silence. Such a complex, nuanced and changeable view stands in sharp contrast with the edicts of Mao’s talks at Yan’an that take literature as a tool to be used, formed and directed in certain ways and not others, even as Lu Xun’s political fervor overlaps with that of the CCP. While I think it is interesting and important to examine the personal correspondance of Lu Xun on this score, the question of how Lu Xun “really” felt about the CCP is liable to be consistently fraught with difficulties while he remains canonized in the red heavens. There is always going to be someone who want to reveal that he was secretly a democrat or an anarchist, or even a capitalist, a traditionalist or a fake. I think the answer to these questions in the terms that it is important that we know them as scholars of literature rather than biographers or historians in large part lies in his writing, and its creative context. Whether we believe that Lu Xun should be the smiling father of modern Chinese literature, or whether he, this strange tubercular king should be toppled from his throne it must be admitted that no one quite writes like Lu Xun, because no one quite thinks like Lu Xun, Which is perhaps one of the reasons that his brilliance is tamed, reified and officially gloried in, and also one of the reasons he still remains an unlikely communist hero, despite his love of the masses…an oddly placed jigsaw piece whose muse is tension.