Welcome to my last lecture of this course, which I call In Search of the Chinese Soul with a subtitle, Lu Xun and the Chinese Tradition. I have chosen Lu Xun, the most famous modern chinese writer in the 21st century for several reasons. For one thing he has been canonized through out modern Chinese history down to the present. Only recently, in fact a couple of years ago, the Chinese government in Beijing decided that perhaps at long last, Lu Xun is out of date, so some of his essays and stories required in the textbooks are left out. I take some dissenting position to this, then I'll explain why I have to defend. Yet at the same time in the past couple of years there have been several books written in English. In fact Lu Xun is emerging as a major figure in the recent burgeoning field of world literature. So my question is especially to an English speaking audience, why does Lu Xun become so relevant still in the 21st century? But for my own reasons, especially for this course, I think Lu Xun is a perfect summation of Chinese tradition. His statements, his stories, his creative work represent what I would call a kind of deconstructive reassessment of the entire legacy of Chinese tradition. So in that sense I think he's a perfect figure for me to present to you. Of course there's a person in the region, some years ago I wrote a little book, Voices From the Iron House, which is a preliminary study of Lu Xun's work. Now why Lu Xun and Chinese tradition? Lu Xun has been known as China's foremost Iron Tide traditional intellectual. He has been regarded as an intellectual leader, at least one of the leaders of the May 4th movement. Which is a movement that basically expects to have western influences, western ideas, western forms in literature to replace traditional Chinese forms and traditional Chinese culture. This kind of a totalized ideology has been a major modern legacy in China. However, I think the situation is much more complicated. In my view, modern Chinese writers Lu Xun included have that very, very complex an entangled relationship was the entirety of China tradition. So when you say that modern China destroyed China tradition that statement is simply not true. So I would like to use Lu Xun's case, to unravel some aspects of that entanglement, since this is basically a course for beginning viewers and readers of Chinese literature and Chinese culture, let me try to go into some of it's most famous stories. I have here a book published, a bilingual edition, probably Lu Xun's most famous story, called The True Story of. I also like to discuss later on his other famous story, called The Diary of a Madman. Now these two stories have become, so to speak, foundational stories of modern Chinese literature. Every school student from probably primary school, but certainly in Chinese high schools, have read these two stories. I've seen western radios are becoming increasingly familiar through translations. We have several translations. I've used the standard English translation originally published by the foreign language press of Peking. Now let's take this story to begin with. Most Chinese scholars would argue that the soul of the Chinese people is embodied in the fiction of. Is an average person, a peasant. In fact, a laborer who has no name. He is only called a Q, and in the Chinese version, Q is written exactly in the Latin English way, namely Q as the capital letter. Some scholars, myself included, used to think that Q, the English character Q, represents a face without eyes and a queue on the back of the face because in traditional China before the 20th century most people wore Q's. So a Q becomes a kind of representative. And even nominally a figure of the Chinese people. And yet, is portrayed as a body without soul. So here we have the beginning irony. In trying to find a Chinese soul, which is the purpose of original sort of creative effort. He gives us a person without a soul. And that's precisely the kind of a deconstructive zeal that he tries to represent. But for this course I would like to go into the first part of the story. Especially the preface. Which I think is very, very important. Because, Lu Xun goes into elaborate effort to present a nobody to write a biography of a nobody by reference to all of the classical Chinese biographies. Especially the form of the biography. So he goes on to say that quote, I've tried in vain to interview people to find the true name for the figure, and I had conflicting ideas. Nobody knows why, how he's called a Q. So finally, after settled down to this, I tried to find his genealogy, where his parents come from, etc, etc. I have gone nowhere, etc, etc. So, he's trying to construct a kind of biography of nothing. Why such elaborate detail, or formalistic detail? Because he's using this form, the biographical form, the prologue of a biography, to deconstruct all the sort of tendacious biographies. Beginning, if you like, with the historian's own biography. His own preface. To his famous records of the grand historian, which we talked about in my first lecture. So in other words, fiction biography are combined to present a Chinese prototype. Or a type of the Chinese national character. That, so to speak, becomes extremely and condescendingly critical. Some contemporary readers of that time faulted Lu Xun for being so cynical. Others, of course led themselves into it. Maybe some of the trays are our cue. References to their own traits. That might have been one of Lu Xun's points. Namely, the Chinese national character is full of shall we say negative traits. As opposed to the kind of positive traits lauded by other Confuscianists. But that to me, is not sufficient, because after all, this course deals with classical Chinese tradition and culture. How can you say that this culture and this tradition has no represented soul, no spirit. That is not Lu Xun's point at all. I think he is trying to drive a wedge between form and content. What I think he criticizes is precisely the kind of ornamental, empty content of classical culture and literature. In the last three or four hundred years. That is to say, in the early modern period. So modernity for Lu Xun means to deconstruct tradition, not to destroy tradition. But to reassess Chinese tradition in a totally different way, in order to find new resources to construct a literature that is modern, that is relevant to the contemporary intellectual needs. I think this is what he's trying to do. But having said that, it is very difficult to delineate the process whereby that creative literature is produced. We have evidence, of course, from various primary sources, Lu Xun's diary other friends recollections, etc., etc. But somehow literature or the original word has it's own power. So what I would like to do today is to devote myself only to the text. As you say, only to a close reading of certain aspects of Lu Xun's written words to squeeze out certain aspects of his own creativity, which I think is entirely modern. Let's look at Lu Xun's other famous story, The Diary of a Madman. First published in 1918. This is in fact China's first modern short story. The storyline is very simple. As the title suggests, it's about a person who grows increasingly crazy. He thinks that everybody, his neighbors, his family, including his brother, are going to eat him. So it's a classic syndrome of paranoia. Yet, if we pay close attention to the preface, we realize that Lu Xun narrator states from the very beginning that this is a case of paranoia. And he starts from there. That is to say that he is trying to attempt a kind of diagnosis, a kind of analysis of this psychologically stricken person. Not through western medicine, which he studied in Japan, but through literature, through the creative means of form and language. And that's why the prologue or the preface is extremely important. That prologue actually is written in classical language, not in the modern vernacular. The question obviously is why. Why for China's first modern writer, who champions the use of modern vernacular, wants to begin his first story in the classical language. One could say that, well he's used to it, he's steeped in the classical tradition. But actually, I think the choice is very very conscious. He uses the prologue very much in the same way that he uses the prologue in The True Story of Q. To make references to classical prologues, classical prefaces. Again, these prefaces are written for mostly illustrious people. People who have established great deeds or great virtue. Here, of course, Lu Xun is trying to depict a tormented man, an intellectual, who is perhaps 30-some years old, who has no name. He preface with the narrator or the author himself. Going back to his hometown to locate a diary. And this diary is written in very chaotic form. So typically Lu Xun uses another device from Lei Chang fiction, namely that he will represent the text In total, without change, so as to preserve his authenticity. But of course, the whole device is contrived. And yet, the classical language never employs, is rather pedestrian, in other words, there's nothing special about it. For someone who studied classical language. All his first 20 years or so. This was again an intentional device to show the mediocrity of views among his contemporaries, who are all steeped in classical Chinese culture. And yet, who have no insight whatsoever. In fact, the only person who has a penetrating insight to his own tradition, is the mad man. So in one strike, so to speak, Lu Xun has established perhaps the most subjective figure in modern Chinese literature. And he does it entirely through what I would call textual means. That is to say, he establishes, he creates a text. A fragmented text. Some scholars, for instance, would immediately jump to the position that here we have China's first modern author who is also a postmodernist. Because he's using the text to make fun of other texts, and he's trying to show how that text is created. Namely, the diary. Well we don't need to bother about such theatrical negotiations but if we read the entries of the diary you will find that the language shifts to the modern. It begins with very simple sentences. And then it becomes increasingly abstract, or shall we say, allegorical. I think somewhere near the end, Lu Xun begins to quote the German philosopher, Nietzsche. Which, for the Chinese contemporary reader, must have been a puzzle. What exactly is the author driving at? I think if you know something about biography, of course, you realize at this point Lu Xun had already at least one famous tech, through Japanese translations Namely, thus spoke. And that famous Nietzsche work is also written in parable or allegorical form. So here we have a kind of equivalence between a German philosophical figure. Who, shall we say, is to some extent very deconstructive of the Western tradition. And the Chinese writer with no philosophical background, who uses the richer to deconstruct his own tradition. Now, I once said before that, I think in my second lecture, that what really counts for Chinese intellectuals is not really the personal upbringing or the personal background or even personal virtue but actually is the words they wrote. Words, literature, philosophy, history, once written down, have a potential to become eternal. To outlast the changes of time and history. So Lu Xun, in choosing to write modern China's first story, pays tribute to that long-standing tradition of the written word. In fact, he asks all the readers to pay closer attention to every single word of this mad man's diary. So it really becomes a kind of textual play. And countless scholars have tried to unravel its mysteries. I really don't have time to go into it. That would take hours and people can argue about this and that. But it's a very rich text. Because it has a prologue, then when we come to the ending, the ending, shall we say, is a slightly hopeful ending because the mad man's last cry is save the children, save the younger generation from this continuous vicious cycle of man eating man. But that hope is negated by the very last paragraph of the prologue in which the narrator says, actually the mad man has been killed. He has gone somewhere to seek office. In other words, he has become a member of the mediocrity, of the average majority. So, what's the sense of writing a potentially revolutionary work, and not giving readers a hopeful ending, thus precisely the paradox, illusion is creativity.
