Lu Xun's Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence

449 Pages·2013·2.523 MB·English

by  Gloria Davies

L U X U N ’ S R E V O L U T I O N
Writing in a Time of Violence
GLORIA DAVIES
Lu Xun’s Revolution

Lu Xun’s Revolution
WRITING IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE
Gloria Davies
harvard university press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2013
To John Davies and Jessie Trinh
Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
all rights reserved
printed in the united states of america
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Davies, Gloria
Lu Xun’s revolution : writing in a time of violence / Gloria Davies.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 07264- 0 (alk. paper)
1. Lu, Xun, 1881– 1936—Criticism and interpretation.
2. China— Intellectual life— 20th century.
I. Title.
PL2754.S5Z595126 2013
895.1'8509—dc23 2012031840
Contents
Note on Translation vii
Guide and Chronology ix
Introduction: The Sage of Modern China 1
1. Eyes Wide Open 22
2. The Shanghai Haze 66
3. Guns and Words 119
4. Debating Lu Xun 170
5. Lu Xun’s Revolutionary Literature 228
6. Raising Revolutionary Specters 282
Notes 337
Ac know ledg ments 394
Index 396

Note on Translation
Every translator of Lu Xun seeks to bring to life the unique qualities of
his language in a foreign tongue. Lu Xun’s erudite and inventive Chi-
nese poses a formidable challenge in this regard. That he was also fond of
using allusions and quotations, of which many are obscure, complicates
the task further. Moreover, Lu Xun’s essays are rich with intertextual
references, and this is particularly true of his polemical writings, which
frequently require a sustained engagement with his oeuvre as a w hole.
For these various reasons, Lu Xun’s Selected Works, translated by
husband-a nd-w ife team Yang Xianyi (1915–2 009) and Gladys Yang (1919–
1999), deserves special ack nowl edgm ent. First published in 1956, with
subsequent reprints and a third and fi nal edition appearing in 1980,
this four- volume anthology has played an unrivaled part in shaping
the reception of Lu Xun’s baihua writings in Eng lish. Comprising a
large majority of Lu Xun’s best-k nown essays, Selected Works remains
widely quoted, and it is no exaggeration to say that to this day, Lu Xun
“speaks” in En glish mainly through the Yangs’ elegant translation.
My own debt to Selected Works is enormous, for it was in these four
volumes that I fi rst encountered Lu Xun in my undergraduate years.
The infl uence of the Yangs’ En glish renderings of Lu Xun is refl ected
note on translation
viii
throughout this book, in the form of citations from Selected Works and
the Yangs’ many other single- volume translations of Lu Xun. In in-
stances in which I have taken only some of the wording from Selected
Works, I have cited both the original Chinese in Lu Xun quanji (LXQJ)
and Selected Works (SW). Where my translation differs entirely from that
of Selected Works, or where I have cited from a part of Lu Xun’s corpus
not previously translated, the reference is to LXQJ alone.
The complex cadences of Lu Xun’s language are always open to in-
terpretation, and over time many scholars have also diverged from the
Yangs in their readings of Lu Xun. Their translations, where appropri-
ate, have also been cited in this book. In my translation of Lu Xun, I
have adopted an approach that draws on his notion of “hard transla-
tion” (in the sense of an unyielding translation), which, by according
equal importance to the semantic and syntactic properties of the text,
seeks to highlight its literary and constructed nature. I hope by this
means to draw renewed attention to Lu Xun’s approach to writing as a
science and technology of reinvention. Above all, I seek to maintain a
fi delity to the subtle rigor of his baihua.
Guide and Chronology
Lu Xun’s published quarrels with his contemporaries w ere eagerly con-
sumed by the literati of his day and have remained a source of fascina-
tion for Chinese readers ever since. The bite and verve of these polemi-
cal writings and ripostes, together with the critical essays, reviews, and
published and unpublished correspondence that he produced from
the mid-1 920s onward, have come to defi ne the later Lu Xun. While
sympathetic readers see in these writings a heightened vigilance and
sensitivity to the dangers of orthodoxy, the less sympathetic perceive
an eminent writer squandering his literary talents in unproductive de-
bate. Some even contend that he allowed himself to become an instru-
ment of Communist orthodoxy.
To understand why Lu Xun continues to excite such passions, we
must delve into the contextual intricacies of his later writings. To help
in this pro cess, the chronological outline below provides a selection of
events and texts mentioned in or relevant to this book.
1902–1909
Lu Xun’s years in Japan; in 1902 Liang Qichao coins the term “literary
revolution”; Lu Xun produces literary translations and writes