It is perhaps most appropriate to view Lu Xun as a critic who was aloof from both traditional China and the revolutions of his time that sought to overturn the old system; and who, as a consequence of his distance from the revolutionary movements, held significant sway to shape and correct them. Moreover, it is essential to note in Lu Xun the sympathy with which he treats many of his invented revolutionaries that he criticizes within his works. On one level, Lu Xun writes to express his frustration and doubt for the movements. Being a revolutionary himself, he shares a great deal of empathy with the problematic heroes he creates. Furthermore, it is impudent to conclude that Lu Xun had no shred of hope in the prospect of transforming those aspects of his society that he disliked, for why should he have written at all if he had already surrendered the battle? Certainly Lu Xun disapproved of most in what he saw as traditional Chinese values and customs. However, although it is the case that his works express the deep discontentment he felt for China’s outdated system, his writings would have lost so much of their profound depth if the content of them had ended there. What made his writing so pertinent then and so unique today is the manner in which he condemns traditional morals while at the same time criticizes the revolutionaries and their movement, the one of which he was a huge part. Above all else, Lu Xun describes the frequent failure of two opposing views to negotiate with one another by detailing the flaws of particular rebellious individuals and the shortcomings of their efforts.
One might suspect the simplest way to solve any bout of disaffection for one’s society is to plainly remove oneself from it, literally or figuratively. However, Lu Xun expounds upon the futility of this as a relevant solution by explaining the tragic consequences that follow several of his characters when they venture to reject their culture and heritage. Lu Xun was Chinese first and foremost, and despite his passion for the Western world and what he considered its supreme ideals he could not easily abandon his country. No matter what he most desired or where he chose to place himself on the globe, his heritage would never desert him. To live by an alternative lifestyle in disregard for one’s social environment is the equivalent of endeavoring to practice one’s ideas in a vacuum.
This is, however, exactly what Lu Xun’s character Juansheng attempts to do in ‘Regret for the Past.’ This is also his primary defect and the reason why he cannot realize his dreams at all. A Chinese romantic idealist who disagrees with the traditional boundaries of his society, Juansheng finds himself in the middle of a desolate civilization devoid of spirit. In response, the hero of the story has turned his back on his home to face the fantastic world of Shelley and Ibsen. Lu Xun divulges his error in judgment by illustrating its fatal consequences for his lover Zijun. Without paying attention to the impossibility of her living as her “own mistress” without his financial support, he implants in her head the same ideas and impulses he has himself (Regret for the Past 2). As a result of Juansheng’s detachment from society, he remains blind to its nature. Thus, when he decides they must separate if he is to live in liberty, she is cast back out into solitude and an unsympathetic sea that eventually kills her. It is here that Lu Xun analyzes the problem of living a Western lifestyle deep within the heart of the East. This in turn also discloses Lu Xun’s belief in the need for a synthesis between the old China and these new Western ideals. Although Juansheng idolizes Ibsen, it was not for or about the Chinese that Ibsen wrote. Lu Xun believes in the necessity of what the scholar Ching-Kiu Chan calls an “autonomous national-cultural identity” (Split China 72). It is no good for Juansheng to forsake his country and to parade about as if he were living in the middle of England or Germany. Lu Xun feels that a revolutionary must instead work to destruct the ancient barriers erected to protect China’s self-identity, which has grown stagnant and backwards. He views China as doomed to perish if not liberated to run with the flux of the world. The only means available to facilitate such a change is a negotiation between the two worldviews and the construction of a liberal Chinese intellectual who can address the issues unique to China. Until such a China is forged, Juansheng and many other intellectuals will strive continually towards fantasy, not the truth they seek.
In the title of his story, the “Regret” mentioned is meant, along with several other definitions, as a regret that belongs in the past. Immediately, this shows the reader that Juansheng is struggling to forget the events he describes and that by writing he is practicing a form of escapism from reality once again. Moreover, it demonstrates to us that he will fail to learn from his mistakes. Instead he will continue to blame Zijan for hindering his ability to “soar through the boundless sky,” failing to realize that her death was a product of his reckless and inconsiderate actions in the midst of a cold, barren society (Regret 5). Juansheng, while incapable of conciliating his Western ideals with China’s stark reality, also fails to reconcile individuality and love, even though both are forces he exalts. He deceives himself into believing one must be chosen over the other. One might find it necessary (as I did) to read through the story a second time before one is able to grasp what Lu Xun is trying to tell us. If given only a single reading, one runs the risk of falsely concluding that the story represents a conflict between living either an unfettered life of individual fulfillment or one spent slaving away to support one’s significant other. This false “dichotomy” contrived “to trap the reader” exhibits the complexity of Lu Xun’s work (Modern Selfhood 113). Unlike the protagonists of several Western novels, Juansheng does not in fact face such a dilemma. Rather, he symbolizes an intellectual’s failure to reconcile reality with the ideal.
In laboring to forget his regret, Juansheng exposes his own stagnation, for the person described during the events of his story is almost entirely identical to the one writing them down. If indeed “poets are those who disturb people’s minds,” then Juansheng is by no means a rebel (Mara Poetry 102). He cannot even stand shaking his own. His reason for recording the events of his life involving Zijan is the alleviation of the guilt he feels so that he may carry on. However, by leaving his past behind Juansheng cannot grow spiritually or intellectually. Rather than starting forward again on a pursuit for truth, he moves back to the person he was originally, much like the “unchanged mouldering wall and wooden bed beside it” (Regret 1). Therefore, Juansheng remains constant, just as the society he claims to abhor. Through this aspect of Juansheng, Lu Xun communicates his belief that unwillingness in any ‘progressive’ thinker to reconsider his views on progress is nearly as deficient and ineffective as the collective Chinese society that is too stubborn to evolve at all.
In Lu Xun’s most celebrated and comprehensive story, the foolish simpleton Ah Q depicts the Chinese people at the low-end, the oppressed and humiliated. Ah Q is one side of the coin, while the villagers – those who abuse and derive satisfaction from witnessing another’s suffering – compose the other. Neither side portrays China in a positive light. Ah Q’s ‘moral victories’ represent the practice of the Chinese, when humiliated by foreigners, of asserting their ‘superiority’ even if it means belittling themselves. When Ah Q proclaims, “it is as if being beaten by my own son,” he makes a statement parallel to ‘although you may have bloodied us up, your culture still remains far inferior to our own and so you have now only embarrassed yourself by showing no respect to your masters’ (Ah Q 5). Where Ah Q is the China in its most pathetic state, the villagers are the Chinese at their most ignoble, persecuting the weak and helpless.
Additionally, Lu Xun utilizes Ah Q as a manifestation of a subconscious desire resting in the hearts of the common Chinese people, an expression of their collective soul one might say. Ah Q wants change, yet is barred from the revolution. Here begins Lu Xun’s criticism of the 1911 movement. Ah Q’s desire to join the revolution and his forbiddance to participate mark a failure, once again, to reconcile the desires and views of two vastly different people. If Ah Q represents the usual, suffering masses, and at the same time he is not allowed to partake in revolutionary activity, how can this movement for the benefit of the people be successful? By barring Ah Q from the revolution, Lu Xun criticizes the intellectuals and elites for failing to incorporate the common people in a movement that was begun predominately for their sake.
Lu Xun writes to expose the hypocrisy in the intellectual’s revolt. The rebels charge to annihilate the long-established, oppressive boundaries so they can spread liberal ideas to all. Nevertheless, by failing to include the majority, the elitists work only to erase old lines to make room for new ones, rather than disbanding all divisions. Moreover, they may be struggling to reform government for the advancement of all China, but by participating in esoteric activities that excluded regular peasants, they created a rift between the two groups. Consequently, there is the chance that the sentiments of the reformers and those of the masses will grow further apart rather than joining in conciliation. In fact, the progressives seem to overlook one of the most fundamental ideas in liberal thought: a government should be founded by and for the people, only with the people’s consent.
Lu Xun describes the failure of the two forces – traditional Chinese morals and liberal idealism – to negotiate is shown closely in the chaos that is prevalent during the story’s finale. Towards the end of the work, the newly formed military and justice system is behaving as badly and probably even worse than the one recently overthrown. The captain’s words “punish one to awe one hundred” echo Lu Xun’s Madman’s paranoid fear of people eating people (30). The magnitude of the revolution’s failure to restructure society is encapsulated by both the responses of Ah Q and the townspeople at the scene of his execution and the moments prior to. First, Lu Xun presents the reader with the image of Ah Q attempting to draw a perfect circle, for he was never taught how to read or write, in substitute for a signature. The common people’s illiteracy is another example of the rebel’s estrangement from them. Furthermore, the fact that Ah Q is most concerned with keeping face even under such vastly skewed conditions demonstrates how unsuccessful the revolution has been in reshaping traditional values. Worst of all, China’s spiteful nature persists. From the beginning of the story on, the villagers frequently derived a sense of pleasure at watching the poor, pitiful Ah Q fail in his daily endeavors; they even taunted him and worked to push him down. After the revolution, Ah Q still detects this malice, which he compares to the hunger of a wolf, concealed within the people, “eager to devour something beyond his flesh” (32). Hence, the people, “dissatisfied” for having only the opportunity to witness a shooting and “not such a fine spectacle as a decapitation,” along with Ah Q’s constant character, represent the failure of the revolution to transform China’s value system. The revolution they had hoped for, a cultural coup d'état, ends up principally as a re-concentration of power from the hands of a closed upper class to a small group of elite intellectuals.
Lu Xun’s “Madman” provides us with a window through which we can view the true state of China’s soul. While all the characters of the story live underneath the long-held moral system, blind to its inner-workings, the madman serves a the moral conscience, labeling the evils of the society that surrounds him. The fact that he is depicted as insane is the author’s way of demonstrating the obscurity to which one is subjected when one lives outside of customary norms or attempts to rebel against the conventional values. The madman tries to understand the reasons why his society holds such destructive beliefs, sometimes even alerting others of his discoveries. However, his estrangement from society completely isolates him in the story. He stands alone against an overwhelming force that seeks to silence his individual voice. The madman’s suffering illustrates the anguish the revolutionary voice must endure. At the same time, the story is written as a means for Lu Xun to vent the frustration and discouragement he often encountered. The misery one must experience is immeasurable, and so often times the rebel, reaching a point of such despair, gives in. Obviously, the two opposing views shown in ‘A Madman’s Diary’ do not ever come to terms with each other. Rather, the madman’s individuality, constantly battered by an oppressive society, is swept into a homogenous sea of apathy, or cannibalized if you like. One set of values terminates the other and becomes the only one in existence, leaving room for no dissent. With ‘A Madman’s Diary’ Lu Xun delivers a fairly heavy dose of pessimism, leaving one to question his hope. The fact that this was his first story written after a long period of despair serves to explain his negative outlook. However, though he is growing despondent it is not accurate to say he feels absolute desperation. He has a feeble hope, as is proved by his recollections in the ‘Preface to Call to Arms.’ He retains a sense of hope due to the “lack of evidence able to refute” the possibility that those few individuals awake inside the “iron house” might have the power to destroy it from the inside out (Preface 241).
The bulk of Lu Xun’s ‘New Year’s Sacrifice’ focuses upon Hsiang Lin’s Wife and serves as criticism of China’s old values. However, the introduction and conclusion of the story delve into the failure of an intellectual to take a stand and assert himself. Perhaps fearing an outcome similar to the ‘madman’s’ the narrator of this story founders when confronted by the forces he disdains and fails to put his ideas into practice. When the decaying, ragged Hsiang Lin’s Wife asks him whether a person “turns into a ghost or not” upon death, he is provided with an opportunity to use his authority to make an impact (Sacrifice 2). Instead, he is nervous, embarrassed, and ambiguous in his answer; he does not commit to any single response and thus takes no moral stance. The narrator’s greatest flaw is his fear of causing a disturbance. Like Juansheng, he cannot be called a true revolutionary for Chinese values are still too ingrained in his thinking, as seen by the way he continues to follow the motto “Don’t disturb anyone’s mind” (Mara Poetry 101). The problems of the flawed narrator help the reader to understand the difficulty of remaining courageous in the face of such an insensitive void. To assert himself firmly is to put himself in risk of being persecuted by his cannibalistic countrymen, something the ‘madman’ knows all too well. However, in remaining silent he forfeits his chance to awaken a mind or two to the truth. The narrator, similar to Juansheng, practices his ideas in a vacuum, never seeing them actualized in reality. Where Juansheng fails is in his detachment from reality, the narrator of ‘Sacrifice’ is unsuccessful due to his reluctance to completely depart from an outdated system that still provides him with some comforts. In light of the fact that the narrator will not, out of a dislike for disruption, share his opinions, the minds of those around him will remain ignorant. He cannot hope for reconciliation between his ideas and those of the masses if the two never eating meet: the commoner’s are never even permitted a moment’s glance to the elite liberal ideas.
Yet alas, the narrator chooses not to disturb the comfortable gloom of the Lu village, a name that suggests Lu Xun may very well be relating a few of his own particular shortfalls, nor even his own mind. The narrator suffers complete and utter defeat at the end of the story as he turns for consolation to an image he knows at heart to be pure fantasy. Comparable to Juansheng, the narrator seeks to forget events of his past. Feeling troubled by the death of Hsiang Lin’s Wife, he tricks himself into believing the comforting, long-held conviction that the New Year’s sacrifice will “give the people of Luchen boundless good fortune” (Sacrifice 14). |