Lu Xun:
The Violence of Observation
The preeminent position that both Chinese and foreign critics of modern Chinese literature accord to the few short stories in Lu Xun's two collections Nahan
[1] Theodore D. Huters makes a similar observation about "New Year's Sacrifice" in his "Blossoms in the Snow."
dissection are evident in the formal experimentation of his fiction. But Lu Xun was not much interested in bringing the details of his personal life into his writings, and the self-dissection he practiced was not that of a frankly confessional writer like Yu Dafu. Instead, what Lu Xun constantly probed with his restless experimentation was his identity and responsibility as a writer. The same moral purpose that dictated the didactic element in his fiction—making it, at least superficially, an outcry against social injustices—at the same time compelled a reflexive examination of his own role as observer of Chinese society and dispenser of its literary representations. Though later writers were to approach the ethical and formal problems he broached with more fertile narrative imaginations, none wrote with the same degree of scrupulous self-examination.
Lu Xun's preface to the short stories collected in The Outcry narrates the awakening, deferral, and eventual expression of the moral purpose that informs his fiction. Its narrative form pointedly directs readers' attention away from a simple thematic approach to the stories toward a consideration of the author's personal investment in their composition. The psychological origin of Lu Xun's moral indignation is evoked in the story of his father's death from superstitious medical practices,[3] as a result of which Lu Xun undertook the study of Western medicine. How that indignation was redirected from somatic to spiritual concerns, specifically to literature, is recounted in a scene whose impact is at once political, aesthetic, and personal. In the scene Lu Xun, at the time a young medical student in Sendai, Japan, views a war slide depicting a Chinese bound and about to be hanged as a spy by the Japanese. Lu Xun is interested not so much in the physical brutality of the act depicted in the slide as in its social significance: the execution is performed above all for its informational value, "as a warning" to other Chinese. Regardless of his possible guilt or innocence, the victim's death is intended to symbolically impose a certain order on the social relations of the observers. Lu Xun's attention thus naturally turns to the Chinese audience within the slide whose potential reception of the message conveyed by this act of violence may be said to license it, and he is appalled by their moral obtuseness. Oblivious both to the individual tragedy being played out before them and
[3] See the discussion of Lu Xun's psychological makeup in Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Genesis of a Writer: Notes on Lu Xun's Educational Experience, 1881–1909" in Merle Goldman, Modern Chinese Literature , pp. 161–88, especially p. 168.
to the significance of their own role as witnesses, they have come simply to "enjoy the spectacle."
Besides the content of the slide, the unique circumstances of its viewing—in a microbiology class after the day's lessons are concluded—disturb Lu Xun. The classroom setting, as well as the coldly reproductive nature of the photographic medium, would seem to encourage Lu Xun to view the projected scene with the distancing, objectifying perspective of scientific observation—as a self-delimited fact, unavailable to the interference of its viewers. But unlike the microbes that are the class's usual viewing matter and which are indeed oblivious of their observers, the execution assumes the observers' presence and is enacted for their sake. Lu Xun is aware of two groups of observers, in both of which he participates but with whose responses to the slide he feels profoundly at odds. While national identity connects him most intimately with the Chinese audience within the slide, his recognition of their spiritual apathy makes him painfully sensible of the distance, both moral and physical, that separates him from his compatriots. Yet his physical presence in the audience of Japanese students compels him to feign pleasure at the sight of the slide ("I had to join in the clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students"),[4] involving him in a kind of bad faith perhaps even more reprehensible than the curiosity of the Chinese audience he censures. The scene thus encapsulates a double sense of one observer's alienation and complicity: while, as a Chinese, he too is targeted as a receptor of the warning the act is meant to convey, for survival's sake he must share the delight of its authors.
The young Lu Xun has violated the smooth transmission of the slide's message by his affective identification with the victim, but he silences that sympathy, realizing that its immediate expression would be equivalent to offering himself in substitution for the victim, a risk he is unwilling to run. Only at the level of his personal interpretive heresy is Lu Xun's true response registered; his failure to find an outlet for that response condemns him to years of embittered "loneliness," a private agony that Lu Xun wanly hopes the composition of short stories will purge. If this aim is to be accomplished, however, a troublesome aesthetic dilemma must be addressed: lest Lu Xun's own work
be guilty of further disseminating the spectacle of violence, the narration must, while faithfully rendering scenes of paradigmatic social significance such as that depicted in the slide, disallow the unthinking transmission of their original message. Lu Xun's frequent expression of concern for the "young people" who will constitute his audience is in fact motivated by an awareness of the dangers of transmission; doubtful that his readers will fare better than he has at breaking the chain of violence through which the message of social discipline is perpetuated, he fears that his work will "infect" them with the same lonely, because inoperative, consciousness of social injustice that has embittered his own life. As we shall see, Lu Xun attempts to prevent the possibility of his fiction's spreading such infection by introducing a discursive counterargument (or what might be called an interpretive static) to the violence of the work's histoire .
"Shi zhong"
In its portrayal of crowd dynamics "A Public Example" employs, as Patrick Hanan has observed, a "cinematic" technique,[7] but this is less a point of similarity with the slide-viewing incident discussed above, as he suggests, than the mark of its difference. Where the slide had presented a static view, here the rapid movement of the narrator's observing eye as he moves among the crowd of onlookers is what one first notices on reading the story. At times, as if trying to follow a complicated sequence of rapidly edited closeups, readers become disoriented: to whom do the red nose, bald head, or straw hat belong? As a result readers, though their quality of observation retains the clinical exteriority of the camera, feel themselves pressed into the crowd, unable to attain the equanimity of a distanced view. The disorienting cinematic technique of "A Public Example" thus forces on readers an unwilling identification with the crowd. To the extent that they resist such identification on ethical grounds, they are compelled to scrutinize their own processes of observation. Readers' complicity in the observation of the criminal has already been suggested by the title, whose literal meaning ("show crowd") could refer either to the narrated exhibition of the criminal or to the act that the story itself represents of putting the crowd on display to its audience of readers.
The most developed treatment of ritual victimization in Lu Xun's works is the final scene of his best-known story, "Ah Q zhengzhuan"
[7] Patrick Hanan, "The Technique of Lu Hsün's Fiction," p. 89.
[8] See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred , especially the chapters entitled "The Origins of Myth and Ritual," pp. 89–119, and "Sacrificial Substitution," pp. 250–73.
position in a society where individuals are most powerfully conjoined through familial ties, but his claim, however unreliable, that his surname is in fact Zhao
[9] See Zhou Zuoren (Zhou Xiashou), Lu Xun xiaoshuo li de renwu , p. 41.
[10] In this connection see Lin Yü-sheng's discussion of Ah Q's "lack of an interior self" in The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness , p. 129.
someone else.[11] By playing both parts at once, Ah Q makes himself his own scapegoat. To the extent that he is a Chinese everyman, Ah Q's behavior typifies the arbitrary and self-divisive modes of social operation that Lu Xun believed characterized Chinese civilization.
If at his execution Ah Q is technically scapegoated for a crime he has not committed, the text is careful to prevent readers from sentimentally identifying with him as a hapless victim. They know he is guilty of similar crimes, and as he disingenuously admits to his accusers, he had wanted to take part in the crime of which he is accused (523); readers also recall how he had once relished the spectacle of another's execution (509). As he is being paraded about as a public example before his execution, Ah Q is wise enough not to protest his innocence ("It seemed to him that in this world it was probably the fate of everybody at some time to have his head cut off" [525]) but to simply try to satisfy the crowd's expectations of his behavior. Again in conformity with the anthropological model of the sacrificial victim, Ah Q, in spite of his very real fear of death, perceives his execution to be an honor. As the primary participant in the ultimate spectacle of social reinforcement, in which the community's reciprocal violence is concentrated on a single victim, he basks in what the narrator has earlier termed "reflected glory": "It may have been like the case of the sacrificial beef in the Confucian temple; although the beef was in the same category as pork and mutton, being of animal origin just as they were, later Confucians did not dare touch it since the sage had enjoyed it" (494–95).
Ah Q faces his execution with aplomb until near the end, when Lu Xun introduces one of his favorite and most extreme images to revive a sense of the execution's cruelty and violence. In the last moments of his life, Ah Q grows dizzy and sees before him only a sea of eyes, which are "eager to devour more than his flesh and blood." The eyes then merge into one, "biting into his soul" (526). The same image was used in "Yao"
1918), where the protagonist senses the cannibalistic desires of relatives and fellow villagers primarily through their gazes. Much of the story "A Public Example" also follows the eyes of the crowd, whose scrutiny of the criminal takes on a particularly vicious quality. But in that story and in "The Diary of a Madman" the victim's own glance meets the gaze of the crowd at moments, with interesting results. At one point in "A Public Example" the character called "Fat Boy" looks up at the prisoner's eyes, which "seemed to be fixed on his head," and then hastily averts his glance.[13] Later Fat Boy notices the criminal staring at his chest and nervously inspects himself to see what is wrong.
The madman in "The Diary of a Madman" also mentions several times how his gaze disturbs those he believes are persecuting him. In the exchange of glances between oppressor and victim the direction of violence is momentarily inverted: however briefly, the observed (the arbitrarily chosen public example) becomes the observer, and the observer (the Chinese crowd, and by extension the readers themselves) becomes the observed. For a moment readers sense that the crowd's violence is rooted in just the feeling of terror their actions arouse in their victim.
Ah Q is not awarded a return glance, but at the crucial moment of his death, a sudden break in the narrative accomplishes a similar bringing-to-consciousness of the nature of his sacrifice and the observer's role in it. Just when Ah Q feels himself consumed by the eyes of the crowd, now conflated into a single monstrous eye, the psychological narration is suddenly broken by the cry "Jiu ming
[13] Lu Xun, "Shi zhong," p. 69.
allowing him to present his personal plea for Ah Q's salvation. Ah Q is incapable of achieving the degree of self-consciousness implicit in the cry, so the narrator must help him to the thought. If this latter interpretation is correct, the narrative, which to this point has depicted the social order as a seamless web in which all are guiltily enmeshed, is here rent to allow the direct expression of an indignation that originates outside the narrated social world in the critical consciousness of the narrator.
Whether we perceive the thought as originating in the narrator's or Ah Q's mind may in the end matter little, however, considering the particular nature of the relationship between narrator and protagonist in the story. As is clear from the opening chapter, the narrator shares with Ah Q an identification that runs far deeper than the affective bonding of pity. The narrator complains that he has long felt "possessed" by his subject and observes that his own fate as an author is intimately entwined with Ah Q's: the subject of a biography "becomes known to posterity through the writing and the writing known to posterity through the subject—until finally it is not clear who is making whom known." Or more literally translated: "It is finally unclear whether people are made known through writing, or writing is made known through people
is, the story as understood through the critical consciousness of the narrator) from a culturally subservient narrative of ritual violence, or what we might call, using an equally likely translation of the term zhengzhuan , the "story proper."[14]
Chinese society, as depicted in the stories we have discussed, is a field of arbitrary significations that nevertheless exerts a binding, tyrannical influence over the lives of its individual members. Its oppressive effect is less the result of the willful manipulation of one class—whether defined in sociological or ethical terms—by another than of the impersonal, enmeshing authority of culture and tradition.[15] This authority is consolidated through acts of ritual violence, but perpetuated on a daily basis through textual governance, that is, through the intimidating power of the written word.[16] More frequently than they are made into examples through execution or public display, the characters in Lu Xun's stories are brought to submission through obedience to the written manifestations of Chinese culture: in the story "Kong Yiji"
[14] As the narrator points out at the beginning of the story, the term zhengzhuan derives from a stock phrase of the traditional novelist: "Enough of this digression, and back to the story proper " (488; my italics).
Double fifth festival, 1922), Teacher Fang Xuanchuo's
Clearly Lu Xun hoped that he was not himself guilty of this kind of bad faith and that his own compositions, by serving as a formal vehicle for the dissemination of a critical social consciousness, could avoid contributing to the social oppression whose textual agency they so frequently evoke. But as Lu Xun was acutely aware, representational art risks making the victim into a mere object of the reader's curiosity or pity; in the process of reading, these emotions, which significantly are those of the observer, are satisfied, thereby camouflaging the true nature of the reader's involvement with the victim. We have seen how Lu Xun employed a cinematic technique and the image of the devouring eye to establish an uncomfortable identification between reader and crowd in several of his stories. More commonly in his early stories, however, Lu Xun attempted to counter the purgative effect of representational art by using what in the preface to The Outcry he calls qubi
referred to deliberate misrepresentations of the truth by historians to avoid the wrath of the powerful. As Lu Xun describes them, these distortions are introduced at the closure of some of his stories to cancel their pessimistic effect. He cites the wreath that appears on the son's grave in "Medicine" and the possibility that Shan Si Saozi
Lu Xun's distortions are never integrated into the work's histoire but operate only at the discursive or symbolic level of the text. They can indicate hope only if we assent to the intervention of the author's extrinsic symbolic imagination. The willed nature of such significations is apparent, for example, in the symbolic structure of "Medicine," not only with the wreath that Lu Xun mentions but also with the two other images that dominate the story: the blood-soaked bun that is used as a medicine and the crow that also "appears from nowhere" at the grave side. As Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova[*] has observed of the crow, these images must be given a dual interpretation: the original superstitious interpretation is replaced at closure with a "hopeful" radical one.[19] To accomplish this hermeneutical inversion, however, the story resorts to a dual strategy involving both the discursive and narrative levels of the text. The superstitious belief that an execution victim's blood will cure a child's body is disabused through emplotment (the child dies), while the hope that the revolutionary through his execution may be proffering a medicine for the country's soul is advanced symbolically. The discursive level of the
[19] See Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova, "Lu Xun's 'Medicine,'" in Merle Goldman, Modern Chinese Literature , pp. 221–32.
story, with its revolutionary symbolism, may be said to resist the pessimism of the plot, in which traditional cultural significations are impugned.
Patrick Hanan has observed that Lu Xun's "pleas" for the future, which we have here analyzed as distortions, are to be found only in Lu Xun's first volume of stories, The Outcry .[20] The stories in his second volume, Hesitation , however, accomplish the same goal in a more sophisticated way, through the use of ironical mediating narrators. As we shall see, these narrators allow Lu Xun to posit the opening of a full critical illumination of the social order and to explore its consequences. The narrators and protagonists who are granted moments of illumination assume a particular role in the social order as it is described in Lu Xun's stories: they are all intellectual onlookers, situated morally between the crowd and its victims. "The Diary of a Madman," one of Lu Xun's earliest stories, had, of course, also taken the bearer of a full critical consciousness as a protagonist, but there the madman had been treated as a full-fledged victim of the social order. The intellectuals who people Lu Xun's later stories represent a third party, who because of their intimation of the true nature of traditional society feel a degree of alienation from it but who also continue to enjoy, however indirectly, the benefits it accords to members of the elite classes. The nature of their alienation is tested in the course of the story, often through direct confrontation with one of society's victims.[21]
The encounter between the narrator of "New Year's Sacrifice" and the character Xianglin Sao
[20] Patrick Hanan, "The Technique of Lu Hsün's Fiction," p. 93.
[21] For another treatment of the alienated loner in Lu Xun's stories and his or her relationship with the crowd see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House , pp. 69–88. My emphasis here differs somewhat from Lee's in that I see the fundamental social configuration behind the stories not as a dyadic one (of loner and crowd) but as a triadic one (of intellectual, crowd, and victim). The intellectual feels caught between the crowd and its prey: his sense of alienation (born in part of self-pity) accords him a measure of sympathy for the victim, but as a relatively privileged member of society, he cannot avoid a sense of complicity with the crowd. The alienation that interested Lu Xun was not that of the misunderstood or frustrated individualist but that of the moral coward. All of his loners are intellectuals who achieve a degree of insight into the cannibalism of Chinese society, only to discover that they do not have the courage or the wherewithal to act on their ethical instincts.
course of the story Xianglin Sao has been kidnapped and physically abused by peers from her village, but her final ruin is brought on by the symbolic and spiritual abuse more insidiously practiced by the narrator's own family. After she is forced into a second marriage, her employers treat her as contaminated, prohibiting her participation in the family sacrifices, and through idle comments awakening her doubts about an afterlife. In a crucial scene Xianglin Sao shocks the narrator, who has been educated abroad and prides himself on his enlightened thinking, by cornering him and asking, "Do dead people have souls or not?"[22] This question, though apparently superstitious, directly addresses the question of the cannibalized victim's fate: can those sacrificed for the maintenance of an orderly society be simply buried and forgotten, or does the violence of their deaths leave ineradicable scars on the social body? Can such as Ah Q in fact be saved? The intellectual, in evading the victim's question ("I am not sure" [8]), exposes both his intellectual poverty and, more profoundly, his moral cowardice. Xianglin Sao's question, by undermining the authority of the intellectual's social position, which is predicated on both moral and intellectual leadership, momentarily awakens in him an intimation of his complicity in the collective act of violence against her. But the intellectual, as always in Lu Xun's stories, proves unfaithful both to the victim and to his own insight. By pitying Xianglin Sao, he reduces his understanding of her situation to a purely affective involvement, which may then be purged through catharsis. At the end of the story, the narrator is suddenly freed of all the doubts that had plagued him as he considered Xianglin Sao's tragic story: "I felt only that the saints of heaven and earth had accepted the sacrifice and incense and were reeling with intoxication in the sky, preparing to give Luzhen's
Such moments of purgation, in which the intellectual narrator feels a sudden uplift that is often incongruous with the events related in the story, are common at the conclusions of Lu Xun's later stories. After the narrator of "Zai jiulou shang"
tor of "The Misanthrope" unexpectedly cries out in "anger and sorrow mingled with agony" upon seeing his friend Wei Lianshu's
These questions are explored in a resonant way in one of Lu Xun's most troubling stories, "In the Wineshop." The narrative heart of the story is the simple tale of a boatman's daughter, Ashun
on Ashun to bring her the sprigs of artificial flowers she once desired: "You have no idea how I dread calling on people, much more so than in the old days. Because I know what a nuisance I am, I am even sick of myself; so knowing this, why inflict myself on others?"[26] But Lü Weifu's delicacy in fact masks a fear that direct involvement with Ashun will force him to face the moral dilemma that their class separation entails, a confrontation to which he does not feel equal.
The many layers of narration that Lu Xun employs in "In the Wineshop" succeed, finally, not in shielding the narrator from Ashun's tragedy but in extending the range of responsibility for it. The boatman's neighbor ignorantly blames her story on "fate"; Lü Weifu dismisses it as "a futile affair" and returns to giving instruction in the Confucian classics. Both, although touched by Ashun's story, ultimately reinstate it in a system of meaning (superstition in the case of the neighbor, Confucianism in the case of Lü Weifu) that can only continue to reproduce such stories. Both of them are thus touched by the moral contamination that irradiates from the story of her death. But since the primary narrator, the "I" of the narration, walks away from his encounter with Lü Weifu feeling "refreshed," having succeeded in his intention to "escape the boredom" of his stay precisely be being entertained with the story of Ashun, perceptive readers cannot but see that his narrative, the story "In the Wineshop" itself, has not escaped that contamination. It is as much a violation of Ashun as the two narratives that it mediates.
By self-consciously exposing the cathartic operation of realist fiction through his ironical epiphanies, Lu Xun offers in these stories a radical critique of his own method and of the realist project in general. Realism, he implies, risks making authors accomplices to the social cruelty they intend to decry. The realist narrative, by imitating at a formal level the relation of oppressor to oppressed, is captive to the logic of that oppression and ends by merely reproducing it. As the title of his second collection suggests, many of Lu Xun's experiments in the short story form turn in on themselves and hesitate between speech and silence, between the assertive act of fictional creation and a metafictional retraction of that act. This hesitation mirrors formally the emotional vacillation of which Lu Xun frequently complained.
[26] Lu Xun, "Zai jiulou shang," p. 8.
Though he several times admitted that he found "only darkness and nothingness" to be real[27] and that it was "only by coming down in the world that one learned what society was really like,"[28] he was unwilling in his writings to submit entirely to the "darkness" of reality. In the story "Tomorrow" the narrator observes: "Fourth Shan's Wife was a simple woman who did not know what a fearful word but is. Thanks to this but , many bad things turn out well and many good things turn out badly."[29] Lu Xun's stories are in fact predicated on this but : in "Tomorrow," Fourth Shan's Wife uses the word to express a superstitious hope that fate will spare her child from suffering ("But maybe Bao'er
The gate to critical consciousness that Lu Xun's stories wish to open is a revolving door hinged on the adversative but from which, once entered, the reader can never escape. Wavering between disillusionment and hope, Lu Xun exposes and obstructs the fictional effects he introduces. His ruthless introspection ends by disturbing the model of realist fiction he adopted from the West by undermining both the assured objectivity of the observer and the complacency of the reader's cathartic response. In his postscript to The Grave , Lu Xun asks whether he is building a monument in his essays or digging his own grave.[30] So too his stories appear at once constructive and destructive (or deconstructive) of both the larger cultural heritage and of their own effect on the reader. As other writers inherited the new fictional model Lu Xun's stories presented, they took on as well the profound moral doubts and formal uncertainties that inform them.
[28] Lu Xun, "Zi xu," p. 415.
[30] Lu Xun, "Xie zai Fen houmian," p. 282.