Lu Xun's Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence

by Gloria Davies

Overview

Widely recognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the voice of a nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare and Tolstoy in stature and influence. Gloria Davies’s portrait now gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place.

In Davies’s vivid rendering, we encounter a writer passionately engaged with the heady arguments and intrigues of a country on the eve of revolution. She traces political tensions in Lu Xun’s works which reflect the larger conflict in modern Chinese thought between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses. During the last phase of Lu Xun’s career, the so-called “years on the left,” we see how fiercely he defended a literature in which the people would speak for themselves, and we come to understand why Lu Xun continues to inspire the debates shaping China today.

Although Lu Xun was never a Communist, his legacy was fully enlisted to support the Party in the decades following his death. Far from the apologist of political violence portrayed by Maoist interpreters, however, Lu Xun emerges here as an energetic opponent of despotism, a humanist for whom empathy, not ideological zeal, was the key to achieving revolutionary ends. Limned with precision and insight, Lu Xun’s Revolution is a major contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of this foundational figure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674072640
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/08/2013
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Gloria Davies is a literary scholar and historian of China at Monash University in Australia. She is also Adjunct Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter Two: The Shanghai Haze

On 11 September 1927, sixteen days before leaving Guangzhou for Shanghai, Lu Xun completed the essay “On ‘Intensity.’” He wrote it as an oblique commentary on the daily terrors of “Party purification” and included “words of warning to the young”: as if on the eve of his departure the author was fulfilling his final duties as a mentor. Using intensity to mean a display of revolutionary fervor, Lu Xun placed the word in quotation marks to highlight its ominous interpretability.

He advised his readers that as “the young seem especially prone to dying this year,” they should take special pains to avoid appearing “too intense.” This was so, he explained, because they lived in a society where “what is praised as right and proper one day can turn overnight into a crime punishable by caning.” Accordingly, it had become a risky liability to show intensity and he urged the young “to proceed with the utmost care.”

These cautionary words present a bitter reversal of the expectations placed on Lu Xun by the Guangzhou authorities and the students at Sun Yat-sen University. They had hoped that he would play a major part in nurturing a revolutionary spirit among young writers and critics. Instead, he now enjoined his charges to divest themselves of any desire for revolutionary change. In its place he offered erudite comments on discursive tactics inspired by the literary inquisitions during China’s imperial past, using these to allude to the modern perils of “dangerous writing” (weixian wenzi).

In particular, he warned young writers not to imagine they could procure any modicum of safety by pretending that they were only “letting out a sigh of regret” (ketan ye fu), and thereby ameliorate or in some way disguise their intense emotions. He wrote that while this tactic of “letting out a sigh” might have worked for their hoary predecessors in the Ming and Qing epochs, it was clearly unsuited for the treacherous modern age at hand. In this context, he advises: “the sighing of slaves might well be harmless but the master will feel nervous all the same.” Alluding to the self-censorship at work in his own writing, he instructs the reader to approach his essay as nothing more than “the letting out of a regretful sigh.”

In “How to Write,” completed around the same time and published in October 1927, Lu Xun utilized a similar form of indirect yet profoundly affective language to commemorate Bi Lei, the student who had celebrated Lu Xun’s arrival in Guangzhou by calling for an intensification of revolutionary shouting. Bi was arrested with forty other students on the campus of Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University on 18 April 1927. At the time, Lu Xun had pleaded unsuccessfully with the local authorities for the students’ release. He never saw Bi Lei again. In this essay, he recalls Bi as an energetic young man whom he had suspected of being the author of several essays written in praise of Communism, each published under a different pseudonym, and that Bi had once presented him with a dozen issues of a local Communist journal, Youthful Vanguard. He writes that, from these memories alone, “one can surmise that Mr Bi Lei was most probably a Communist Party member.” He then mourns the seventeen year-old with the simple words: “I suspect he has long departed from this world, that young man from Hunan, so slight and thin and with his wits about him.”

These elements from Lu Xun’s essays of late 1927 indicate the parameters of criticism he felt he could allow himself while the Nationalists were systematically widening their anti-Communist purge. In this context, his sparse words of mourning offer a useful example of his tacit criticism. By calling attention to Bi Lei’s slightness and alertness, he gestured to the ruthless barbarism that extinguished this young life.

Table of Contents

Note on Translation vii

Guide and Chronology ix

Introduction: The Sage of Modern China 1

1 Eyes Wide Open 22

2 The Shanghai Haze 66

3 Guns and Words 119

4 Debating Lu Xun 170

5 Lu Xun's Revolutionary Literature 228

6 Raising Revolutionary Specters 282

Notes 337

Acknowledgments 394

Index 396

Editorial Reviews

China’s prewar literary lion carries on a conflicted, fractious relationship with the gathering revolution in this tepid study. Historian and literary scholar Davies explores Lu’s career in the decade before his death in 1936, when he was a leading left-wing writer and polemicist in a period of intense strife between China’s Nationalist government and Communist Party. While Lu was canonized by Mao as an exponent of revolutionary violence, Davies emphasizes his antiauthoritarian humanist streak. (Mao also allowed that Lu would have been imprisoned under the Communist regime.) Through his vitriolic debates with Marxist opponents in literary journals, Davies traces Lu’s complex ideas as a believer in revolution who deplored its violence, a supporter of the masses who championed individual conscience, and a man of the left who resisted Party dogmas. In close exegeses of his writings, she teases out the links between his politics and his literary innovations, particularly his pioneering use of the baihua vernacular. Lu emerges as a vibrant writer grappling with leftist intellectual dilemmas. Unfortunately, Davies’s somewhat disorganized text and staid academic prose drain much of the drama from Lu’s story. Hers is a rather bloodless take on a powerful writer and his bloody times. Photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

There is a wealth of insights in Lu Xun's Revolution, and I applaud Gloria Davies for such thorough and conscientious efforts in plowing through all the sources of the later Lu Xun. Davies has not only carefully gone through all the controversies on the leftist literary front in Lu Xun's time; she has brought the relevance of Lu Xun's essays to the present world. I have always lamented the fact that many Lu Xun scholars, including myself, do not do full justice to the later Lu Xun. Now the record is being set straight.

Leo Ou-Fan Lee

As the recognized founder of modern Chinese literature and arguably the central intellectual figure in China and much of East Asia throughout the twentieth century and even up to the present day, the influence of Lu Xun is difficult to overestimate, and, so it logically follows, is the significance of this book. Gloria Davies has taken a tripartite approach: she assesses Lu Xun from a literary, linguistic, and intellectual angle and does so with elegant precision. No one has treated Lu Xun as an essayist—particularly in the last ten years of his life—as well and as sensitively as Davies has here.

Jon Eugene von Kowallis

For those who would like to find out about Lu Xun there is plenty of information in this copious literary and political biography...Lu Xun's Revolution is a formidable book.

Literary Review - Jonathan Mirsky

In Lu Xun's Revolution, Davies has created a fascinating account of the final years of the writer's life and the beginning of his literary afterlife.

Wall Street Journal - Julia Lovell

This richly documented study of China’s pre-eminent writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) by Gloria Davies cannot fail to provoke deep reflection on the issue of the creative writer, artist, philosopher, or scholar and his or her involvement in politics.

Australian Book Review - Mabel Lee

A groundbreaking work.

Times Higher Education - Eva Shan Chou

As the recognized founder of modern Chinese literature and arguably the central intellectual figure in China and much of East Asia throughout the twentieth century and even up to the present day, the influence of Lu Xun is difficult to overestimate, and, so it logically follows, is the significance of this book. Gloria Davies has taken a tripartite approach: she assesses Lu Xun from a literary, linguistic, and intellectual angle and does so with elegant precision. No one has treated Lu Xun as an essayist--particularly in the last ten years of his life--as well and as sensitively as Davies has here.

Jon Eugene Von Kowallis

Lu Xun (his pen name) (1881–1936) is best known for his short stories from China's New Culture period (1919–23), in which he mounted uncompromising satires of China's dead-end authoritarianism, of moribund Confucian culture for producing it, and of spineless intellectuals for accepting it. Davies (intellectual history, Monash Univ., Australia) here covers the essays and polemics of the following period, the "years on the left" (1927–36). Lu Xun argued that revolution was necessary but criticized "revolutionary literature" as "hit, hit, hit, kill, kill, kill, revolt, revolt, revolt," merely fodder for the propagandists. Davies brings to life the "hazy" intellectual politics in 1930's Shanghai; controversies with both leftist and elitist writers; the literary art of the new vernacular and denunciation of those who would deny its use to the masses; and Mao Zedong's misappropriation of his legacy. VERDICT General readers should start with the fiction, translated most recently by Julia Lovell, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, but Davies offers an accessible, absorbing, follow up.—Charles Hayford, Evanston, IL

Library Journal

A critical analysis of the political and polemical essays of Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), whose literary stature remains Olympian. Though Davies (Chinese Studies/Monash Univ.; Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry, 2009, etc.) doesn't focus closely on biographical details, numerous details about Lu Xun's life do emerge. (Very early, we learn his favorite brand of cigarettes; later, a bit about his married life and contentious relationship with his brother.) Davies focuses on Lu Xun's pioneering literary uses of baihua (the common language) and on his literary contributions to the revolutionary turmoil in China in the 1920s and '30s, a turmoil that eventually forced him to publish using as many as 140 pseudonyms. The author notes that his celebrity afforded him some safety in the most perilous times. Readers will discover almost immediately that Davies' is principally an academic work: The tone is scholarly, literary allusions populate her prose--Foucault, Heidegger, Jung, Sartre, Derrida and many others. She employs numerous block quotations and sometimes-dense diction: "In using ambulatory tropes to anthropomorphize language Lu Xun…transfigured the act of writing into an agon of self-reflection on the road to attaining humanness." However, the range of Davies' research is staggering, and her erudition is impressive as she glides through Lu Xun's literary career. She deals frankly and comprehensively with Lu Xun's most prominent critics and notes how he handled them with intensity and agility. She has much to say, as well, about his theories of writing--how he decried political rhetoric, despised romantic fiction and saw the moral ambiguity of revolutionary writing. She also reproduces his list of eight tips for aspiring writers--among them: "Don't force yourself to write when you feel you can't." A rich, scholarly work that will attract more academic than general readers.

Kirkus Reviews