The Real Story of Ah-Q (3 page)

At the centre of this New Culture Movement lay far-reaching calls for a reformed literary style that would represent and speak directly to the masses. ‘Down with the ornate, obsequious literature of the aristocrats – up with the plain expressive literature of the people!’ shouted Chen Duxiu. ‘Down with the stale, ostentatious literature of the classics; up with the fresh, sincere literature of realism! Down with the pedantic, obscure literature of the recluse; up with the clear, popular literature of society!’
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The new literature was to be infused with individualism, paradoxically to serve the collective good: ‘What I would like most to see happen to you is a true and pure form of egocentrism,’ another celebrated reformer, Hu Shi, approvingly quoted Ibsen, ‘one that can sometimes give you the feeling that your own needs are the most important thing of all and that nothing else matters… If you wish to serve society, the best way to do it would be to put some effort into yourself.’
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In 1917, Lu Xun was roused from his despondency by a request from Qian Xuantong, an old friend and one of Chen’s co-editors on
New Youth
, to produce something for the magazine. ‘ “Imagine an iron house:” ’ Lu Xun gloomily argued back, ‘ “without windows or doors, utterly indestructible, and full of sound sleepers – all about to suffocate to death. Let them die in their sleep, and they will feel nothing. Is it right to cry out, to rouse the light sleepers among them, causing them inconsolable agony before they die?” ’ ‘ “But even if we succeed in waking only the few,” ’ Qian replied, ‘ “there is still hope – hope that the iron house may one day be destroyed.” ’ ‘He was right;’ Lu Xun relented. ‘[H]owever hard I tried, I couldn’t quite obliterate my own sense of hope’ (p.
19
). His first work of vernacular fiction, ‘Diary of a Madman’, resulted.

In content alone, ‘Diary’ reads as a neat propaganda piece for the anti-Confucian rebellion of the 1910s and 1920s: a forceful attack on traditional China, constructed as the journal of a provincial who believes he has made a terrible discovery – that the Chinese have for centuries been ‘eating people’ – and who, as a result, has been confined as insane by his family. But the formal complexity of the story makes it far more than a work of agitprop. Through the claustrophobic surrealism of his premise, through labelling (in the diary’s pompous classical Chinese Preface) his visionary narrator a madman, Lu Xun produced a profoundly unsettling denunciation of China’s past and present: a howl of despair at a civilization incapable of diagnosing its own state of crisis.

‘Diary’ challenged norms in its use of language as well as in its form and message. Lu Xun’s short story now declared to readers that the new vernacular fiction could serve sophisticated and intensely serious purposes. (Though Lu Xun was an early advocate of literary reform, his first attempt at fiction was in classical Chinese, hovering between the traditionalism of its language and the modernism of its ironic first-person narrator.) A few years after being offered to an untutored reading public, the elliptical experimentalism of ‘Diary’ had helped win Lu Xun acclaim as one of the leading literary rebels of the New Culture Movement: with its assault on tradition, its foreign inspiration (derived from Gogol’s story of the same name), and its skilful manipulation of narrative voice.

‘Diary’ began a two-volume oeuvre of realist fiction,
Outcry
(1922) and
Hesitation
(1925), twenty-five stories that ranged across the central social, political and cultural issues of Lu Xun’s time, and created characters who swiftly rooted themselves in the national imagination. In both his fiction and essays (a form at which he also excelled), Lu Xun distinguished himself from less disciplined contemporaries through the controlled craftsmanship of his narratives, his critical intelligence, and the sardonic humour that overlays his recounting of even the blackest episodes. The traces of Lu Xun’s cosmopolitan reading habits (in Chinese, Japanese and German translations) are in evidence throughout: in a lofty command of satire picked up from the Polish Sienkiewicz; in an eerie symbolism refined by his translations of the Russian Andreev. ‘Read no Chinese books,’ he once advised China’s youth. ‘Or as few as you can. But read more foreign books.’
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Lu Xun publicly regarded his fiction as a kind of cultural medicine, designed to draw the poison out of the Chinese national character. ‘As for why I wrote fiction,’ he reflected in 1933, ‘I still uphold the principle of “enlightenment” of more than a decade ago. I think it must “serve life” and furthermore reform life… Thus my subjects were often drawn from the unfortunates of this sick society; my aim was to expose the disease so as to draw attention to its cure.’
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And many of the stories collected in
Outcry
and
Hesitation
are, on one level, straightforwardly obsessed with China’s predicament. Lu Xun’s favoured narrative tone of supercilious irony appears designed to advance his stories’ therapeutic aspirations: distancing the reader from the people and events described, bolstering our faith in the objectivity of our literary doctor. Lu Xun’s early fiction is a search for subjects, situations and forms (character sketches, reminiscences, parodies, dense symbolic realism, melancholy nostalgia) by which to represent the national emergency.

Ever-present – in the boorish inhumanity of the drinkers in the Universal Prosperity Tavern, for example, or the bestial gurning of the villagers in ‘Diary of a Madman’ – is the Crowd, a collective illustration of China’s moral bankruptcy. Within years of his creation, Ah-Q – Lu Xun’s most extended denunciation of the idiotic, able-bodied everyman – had begun to enter the language as expressive shorthand for every imaginable blemish on the national character: its obsession with face; its superiority complex; its servility before authority and cruelty towards the weak; its conceited delight in ignorance. (According to one account, Lu Xun chose the Roman letter of his hero’s name for its resemblance to a blank face with a pigtail – an all-purpose signifier for Chinese manhood.) Lu Xun’s mock-biography seems determined to channel the reader’s contempt at the abject Ah-Q: in the narrator’s facetious struggles to fit his subject into the parameters of respectable historiography; in the sardonic chapter headings; in the convolutions by which Ah-Q takes his ‘moral victories’.

But Lu Xun’s complexity as a writer goes beyond the bitterness of his vision of China; beyond a self-righteous condemnation of the backward Chinese masses. At the heart of the catechisms of
Outcry
and
Hesitation
lies a string of unreliable narrators who transform his stories into shrewdly crafted vehicles for casting doubt on literature’s ability to shoulder the political burdens it had taken on at the start of the century.

Modern Chinese fiction was, from its inception, compromised by the motives of its inventors. In their calls for a ‘realist’ literature to save the country, intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu envisioned a kind of fiction that would both diagnose and cure the sickness of modern China. The New Culture Movement was aiming not so much for a distanced grasp of reality as for an instrument with which to reform it. Almost as soon as they seized upon realism as the key to China’s survival, Chinese writers began to soften their concept of mimesis, fearing that an ‘excessive’ stress on objectivity might prove ‘destructive’. ‘Merely to criticize without interpreting can cause melancholy and deep sorrow,’ counselled Mao Dun, one of the period’s leading exponents of literary realism and naturalism, ‘and these can lead to despondency.’
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(This was an anxiety that Lu Xun admitted to sharing, writing regretfully in his Preface to
Outcry
that ‘I often stooped to distortions and untruths: adding a fictitious wreath of flowers to Yu’er’s grave in “Medicine”; forbearing to write that Mrs Shan never dreams of her son in “Tomorrow”, because my generalissimos did not approve of pessimism. And I didn’t want to infect younger generations – dreaming the glorious dreams that I too had dreamed when I was young – with the loneliness that came to torment me’ (p.
20
).)

The relationship between the (implicitly) intellectual, upper-class narrator and the lower-class protagonists that realist literary texts favoured soon became troubling to May Fourth writers. Quite apart from the difficulties of developing sufficient familiarity with a labouring milieu to write convincingly about it, such writers had to ponder awkward issues of narrative distance: how to prevent realism’s aura of objectivity morphing into contempt for the suffering masses for whom they felt instinctive sympathy. A self-confidence in the writer’s ability to doctor the nation (through a Europeanized literature incomprehensible to the Chinese masses) collided with an acute sense of intellectual guilt and a self-loathing urge to erase bourgeois authorship with a literature ‘of the people’. Lu Xun’s genius lay in his grasp of this paradox: in his ability both to express a critical vision of reality, and – through his handling of narrative form and perspective – to expose the limitations of China’s realist manifesto.
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To see this in action, we might return to ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’. Our condescending biographer, we realize, is a thoroughly compromised man who slips between the various worlds that he parodies: the flatulent Confucian literary tradition; the new learning; the parochial Weizhuang; the cannibalistic crowd. He can, as he pleases, keep his distance as an observer and yet gain privileged access to Ah-Q’s thought processes. When Ah-Q leaves Weizhuang for the city, our supposedly omniscient biographer unconventionally stays behind and waits for his subject to return before taking up the story again, merging himself into the ranks of the villagers. ‘I wrote “The Real Story”,’ Lu Xun once recalled, ‘with the intention of exposing the weakness of my fellow citizens – I did not specify whether or not I myself was included therein.’
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Throughout, his narrator’s satirical stance is made possible only by his mastery of the written word – by his collusion in an authoritarian literate tradition that delights in terrorizing illiterate plebeians, and that in the final courtroom scene at last crushes Ah-Q’s nerve. In Lu Xun’s grand finale, the reader himself – richly entertained over some fifty pages by Ah-Q’s idiocies – is drawn guiltily into the execution’s bestial audience: into its ‘monstrous coalition of eyes, gnawing into his soul’, ogling the horror of Ah-Q’s ritual sacrifice (p.
123
).

Time and again, Lu Xun pulls this trick, drawing himself and his audience into his crowds of numb spectators. In ‘A Public Example’, the narration pans across the mob, leaving the reader a spectator of dehumanized surfaces. But it is in ‘New Year’s Sacrifice’ that he most unsettlingly implicates the intellectual narrator, the crowd and the reader in the violence of literary voyeurism. In telling the story of a peasant woman’s persecution to death by bad luck and social circumstance – the kind of material that would lend itself nicely to a Communist morality tale – Lu Xun averts the plot’s melodrama through framing her tale to expose the failures both of Confucian society and of the story’s progressive narrator, unable to bring a shred of comfort to a desperate beggar-woman near the end of her life. In a deliberate repetition of the account of the tragic death of the woman’s son, Lu Xun forces his readers to join Luzhen’s callous listeners, allowing us first to ‘chew deliciously’ on her sorrow then to share the townspeople’s sense of boredom, ‘spitting it out in disgust’ as dregs (p.
174
). Recycling a device deployed at the end of ‘Upstairs in the Tavern’ and ‘The Loner’, the story ends with an incongruous exhalation of relief by the narrator, his spirits lifted by the recital just passed – a jibe at the moral cheapness of catharsis.

‘It is true that I dissect other people all the time,’ Lu Xun once wrote. ‘But I dissect myself far more often, and far more savagely.’
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(It cannot be accidental that his anatomizations always take place in transparently autobiographical landscapes: in Luzhen, a fictional version of his birthplace, Shaoxing, and its satellite villages; or in Beijing, Lu Xun’s adopted hometown between 1912 and 1926.) In his movement between irony, despair and hope, and with his talent for diagnosis but refusal to prescribe, he engineered a meditation on the ethics of reading and writing – and laid bare the dilemmas of China’s modern literature.

Lu Xun’s outward radicalism through these years stood at curious odds with his conservative private life. In 1906, he had submitted to a loveless marriage arranged by his mother. Although the match was possibly never consummated, for years he kept up a façade of marital cohabitation, and supported his wife financially throughout his lifetime. For all the energy that he expended on attacking Confucian values, he was himself a devotedly filial son, setting up home in 1919 with his mother, his wife, his two brothers and their Japanese wives. (He enjoyed an especially close relationship with his essayist brother Zhou Zuoren. Returning to Japan in 1906 after his marriage, Lu Xun took back with him not his new wife but Zhou, enabling them to embark upon various ill-fated early literary collaborations.) Several of the lighter pieces in
Outcry
and
Hesitation
offer snapshots of the extended family’s intriguing menage: the eccentricities of his sister-in-law’s rabbit rearing in ‘A Cat among the Rabbits’, the household’s trickle of bohemian visitors in ‘A Comedy of Ducks’. On his arranged marriage, though, Lu Xun publicly maintained a stolid silence.

In 1923, however, Lu Xun and Zhou became mysteriously estranged from each other, the older brother moving his mother and wife out to a separate Beijing residence. Although neither brother convincingly explained the causes of the rift, Zhou’s Japanese wife accused her brother-in-law of making sexual advances at her. (Through the 1910s and early 1920s, Lu Xun may well have remained largely celibate; according to one account, he refused to wear padded trousers through Beijing’s bitter winters in order to freeze out his sexual frustration.
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