The Real Story of Ah-Q (4 page)

Whatever the truth behind the split, within another couple of years Lu Xun had found emotional solace in, at last, a meaningful romantic attachment: with Xu Guangping, a former student who would give birth to his only son in 1929. Conjugal happiness seems rather to have blunted his creative impulse: while the seven years from 1918 to 1925 produced two short-story collections and a darkly surreal prose-poetry sequence,
Wild Grass
, his remaining eleven years yielded only one further volume of fiction. Domestic pleasures did little, however, to temper his professional and personal belligerence. Throughout his working life, he had a habit of falling out with colleagues and acquaintances, abandoning most of his teaching jobs and publishing projects a few months after beginning them. Having somehow survived at the Ministry of Education for fourteen years, he was forced out in 1926 after a noisy vendetta against his minister. Though capable of generously mentoring younger writers, he could also violently overreact to perceived criticisms or slights. One analysis of his correspondence estimates that the fingers of one hand would not be needed to count the number of Lu Xun’s peers that he managed to be consistently kind about.
¹⁸
After 1925, his instinctive spikiness was further sharpened by paranoid suspicions about gossip over his adulterous liaison with a woman sixteen years his junior (divorce from his arranged marriage was, apparently, out of the question). When Xu Guangping was expelled for radical insubordination on her Student Committee, Lu Xun saved some of his most chilling public vitriol for her college principal, whom he denounced – with perplexing misogyny, given the sympathy he expressed in his fiction and essays for Chinese women – as a withered, twisted widow, stirring up slander about his beloved.
¹⁹

As the middle years of the 1920s firmly established Lu Xun as a literary celebrity – through his polemical essays and editing of prestigious literary magazines – he energetically kept up his profile in aggressive quarrels with writers, scholars and politicians. China’s new-style, post-May Fourth intellectuals were much given to temper and melodrama: one noted writer, Yu Dafu, considered drowning himself after his proficiency in German was questioned by a rival; when one of Lu Xun’s poems was rejected by a newspaper’s editor-in-chief, a junior editor (and promoter of Lu Xun’s work) slapped his boss in the face and resigned. Lu Xun’s abundant capacity for grudges (eleven years after a Beijing professor criticized him for failing to acknowledge a source, Lu Xun was still publicly sniping at the ‘lying dog’ who accused him of plagiarism) did little to cool this overheated world.

While China’s fractious literati squabbled, the country was embarking on a further bloody phase of its intermittent twentieth-century revolution. In 1923, the Soviet Union brokered – and financed – an improbable United Front between the young Chinese Communist Party (founded in 1921 by the New Culture luminaries Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao) and the right-wing Nationalist Party. By helping to defeat the warlords who had carved China up among themselves, the theory went, the Soviets would drive forward the national bourgeois revolution which would in turn provide a launching pad for Communism. But in 1927, with the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek on the brink of taking the great urban prizes of Shanghai and Nanjing, and with the Communists becoming, in Chiang’s eyes, unacceptably radical in their efforts to mobilize against landowners and businessmen, the alliance ruptured. On 12 April, he set an armed force of some one thousand men at Shanghai’s labour unions; one hundred unionists were gunned down at a single protest rally alone. Later that year, forces rallied by the Communists were similarly massacred in Changsha, Wuhan, Nanchang and, finally, Guangzhou, where leftists, quickly identified by the dye marks left round their necks from their red kerchiefs, were drowned in bundles of ten or twelve in the river by the city.

‘I am terrorized,’ wrote Lu Xun in the immediate aftermath, temporarily paralysed by the horror of it. ‘A kind of terror I have never experienced before… I have nothing to say… What is to come, I do not know, though I fear it will be no good.’
²⁰
Other radicals responded by plunging leftward into a romantic Marxism that claimed a central role for literature as the ‘vanguard of the Revolution’, recasting the revolutionary intelligentsia as proletarian warriors against the right-wing bourgeois oppressors. Through sheer force of will, they preached, the enlightened writer could ‘approach the spoken language of the worker and peasant masses… Overcome your own petit-bourgeois qualities; turn your back on the class that is soon to be abolished. Start walking toward the ragged mass of workers and peasants!… By so doing, you can ensure final victory, you will achieve outstanding merit, and you will not be ashamed to call yourself a warrior.’
²¹

Although their protestations betrayed the left’s anxiety to find a role for the literary intellectual in an era of violent proletarian revolution, they provided few practical insights for those concerned about the uses of literature in a context of national crisis. If the Europeanized vernacular of the New Culture Movement had been, as political thinkers now set about declaring, ‘a waste of time’ with regard to popularization, how
was
the elitist written word to represent, reach and reform the undereducated masses?
²²

Enraged by the cheap opportunism of the Marxist converts – whom he accused of posturing in revolutionary coffee houses, of being drunk on their own slogans – Lu Xun began by pointing out the ‘divergent paths of literature and politics’. Some claim, he wrote,

Yet after three years of translating and reflecting on Soviet literary theory, Lu Xun had taken his own leftward turn, as if – caught between two unappealing alternatives (the arrogance of the extreme left wing and the vapidity, as he intolerantly saw it, of a universalistic humanism) – he decided to select the lesser of two evils. In 1930 he embraced his ideological change of direction with oddly simplistic resolution, declaring that ‘our pioneering young intellectuals have raised a battle-cry’.

‘Now, in China,’ he resumed the following year, ‘the revolutionary literary movement of the proletariat is, in fact, the
only
literary movement.’
²⁴
Lu Xun witnessed at first hand the brutality of the Nationalist White Terror (in which close personal friends and associates were executed); perhaps he thought, like Western European converts to Stalinism in the 1930s, that Marxism was the only credible weapon against global fascism. An ambivalent choice forced on him by circumstances, Lu Xun’s conversion can also be read as the natural outcome of his earlier fiction’s undercurrent of intellectual guilt. For by throwing in his lot with the Communist establishment, Lu Xun submitted to an authoritarian literary principle whose final logic would be to annihilate not just literary freedom, but the very category of the author. It is hard to believe that a commentator as clear-sighted as Lu Xun – who had, after all, predicted only three years previously that a real revolution would obliterate literature (a prediction largely borne out in Mao’s post-1949 Republic) – could not see past the soft focus of Shanghai Marxism to the tyranny of Maoist socialist realism. Perhaps amid the disunity of the early 1930s, Lu Xun was unable to glimpse even the possibility of an absolutist Party line on literature.

*

We can infer Lu Xun’s doubts about this revolutionary aesthetic from his own creative contribution to it. Through and beyond his embrace of a literature of the ‘broad masses of revolutionary toilers’, Lu Xun continued to shelter in Shanghai’s urbane foreign concessions: enjoying family life, browsing favourite bookshops, hosting dinners, going to Tarzan movies. While he called for the intelligentsia to ‘branch out’ against their own class, to become as one with the proletariat, while he helped aspiring writers of proletarian origin and encouraged the development of alternative media (films, lectures, drama, woodcut illustrations) to popularize cultural and political messages, he channelled most of his own literary energies into vituperative essays that he deployed as ‘daggers, or spears’ in the ideological contretemps fizzling within the ranks of Communist literati during the early 1930s.
²⁵
Though in 1935 he sent a congratulatory telegram on hearing of the conclusion of the Communist Long March in Yan’an, he declined the Communist Party’s invitation to write a long novel set in the rural revolution, pleading a lack of knowledge (ignorance that he did not make any attempt to remedy).

Far from promoting a revolutionary future, his fiction in these years retreated deep into the Chinese past. In 1935, he completed the eight reworkings of ancient legends that made up his last collection,
Old Stories Retold
. A gentle counter-perspective on Chinese history spiked by moments of contemporary satire,
Old Stories
is a final expression of Lu Xun’s career-long migrations between present, future and past. ‘I cannot shake off the ancient ghosts that I carry on my back,’ he revealed in 1925 – six years after he had triumphantly announced that ‘the road of life is progressive, ever ascending the infinite hypotenuse of a spiritual triangle; nothing can obstruct it’.
²⁶

While preparing – in the quietude of his post-1911 depression – his two-volume
Brief History of Chinese Fiction
(one of the first attempts to privilege this previously denigrated form with a general scholarly history), Lu Xun developed a fascination with the fictional resources of the Chinese past: not only novels and stories, but also unofficial histories, biographies, romances, legends, myths and fables. In his academic research, essays and late fiction, China’s wider literary heritage came to offer Lu Xun a buffer against both the stolidity of late-Qing Confucianism, and the socio-political concerns of his own time.

But even as Lu Xun looked backwards, his thoughts seem to have returned restlessly to the present, in thinly disguised contemporary intrusions on to his ancient fictional landscapes: the parody of the anti-romantic critic in ‘Mending Heaven’; the clash with Feng Meng (a stab at a disciple-turned-literary antagonist) in ‘Flight to the Moon’. ‘And so I began the slippery descent into facetiousness – the arch-enemy of literary creation,’ Lu Xun wrote in his Preface to the collection. ‘I still hate myself for it.’ A few lines down, however, he contradictorily attacked himself for indulging his creativity too much, for his trivial delight in extrapolating ‘one tiny scrap of a fact… into a story of sorts’, rather than toiling to produce a work of historical substance (pp. 295–6).
Old Stories Retold
is a curious miscellany: an escapist regression from the Marxist wrangles that consumed him in his final years, periodically shanghaied by provincial jibes.

Considered as creative attempts to re-imagine the mythical resources of the Chinese past in the modern short story, two of the earliest pieces are perhaps the most successful.
²⁷
‘Mending Heaven’ (1922) meditates fantastically on the irreconcilability of nature and civilization, painting the goddess of creation and her universe with lush, languorous strokes, in contrast with the swarming pettiness of her human creations. ‘Forging the Swords’ (1926) builds a brief Song text into an extended, baldly surrealistic exploration – stripped of all mimetic realism – of the grotesque mechanics of the impulse to revenge, of the alienation of the rebel, and of the gawping sycophancy of the crowd. While the remaining stories do not sustain the intensity of these first two pieces, they entertain us with an irreverent gallery of character and material, enlivened by flashes of wit. ‘Flight to the Moon’ reworks the heroic Yi the Archer as a henpecked husband and inadequate hunter-gatherer, while ‘Taming the Floods’ mocks the ivory-tower pomposity of academe.

Despite the tones of self-loathing in which Lu Xun described his periodic lapses ‘into the quicksands of facetiousness’, as often as not his contemporary references can be easily interpreted by the general reader as universal satires (pp. 296–7). The sermonizing critic in ‘Mending Heaven’, for example, underscores the story’s intended divergence between primeval freedom and the fussy strictures of society. Scattered throughout are reiterations of broader themes – confrontations between the individual and the collective, and between the individual and authority (‘Forging the Swords’, ‘Picking Ferns’, ‘Leaving the Pass’) – cut loose from the local particulars of the earlier, realist stories. Through it all, Lu Xun reserves the right to poke fun as and when he chooses. Favourite targets are the philosophical inadequacies of his intellectual heroes: the toothless, quietist Laozi, defeated by the problem of heaving his ox over the city wall; the righteous Bo Yi, undone by his own indiscretion; and the ebulliently conceited Zhuangzi, lecturing ghosts on their deficient understanding of death.