Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. xxvi, 408 pp., [14] pp. of plates. US$35.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-07264-0.
In this eloquent book, an important subject has met a masterful interpreter. Lu Xun, the foremost writer of twentieth-century China, can be heard addressing himself to critical dilemmas not only in his own culture but in global literature more broadly. Davies’ skilled reconstruction of both the historical and literary contexts that shaped Lu Xun’s voice enables readers to hear afresh the political and creative struggles that shadow subtle minds in times of political violence. In fact, this book offers such a nuanced view of cultural productivity that one almost forgets how rancorous, vindictive and prejudiced Lu Xun could be in his own “revolutionary” circles during the 1930s.
Gloria Davies paints the canvass of Lu Xun’s last decade with dense details that honour the bewildering Nanjing decade of 1927–1937—which also corresponded to the brutal years of the White Terror. The book’s opening section, modestly titled “Guide and Chronology,” aligns key events during the 1920s and 1930s with the timing of Lu Xun’s writings. Not only are these concise pages a great help to historians and literary scholars (be they beginning students or seasoned researchers), they also shed light upon the parametres of thought in the midst of social chaos. In 1926, for example, Davies reminds us, several of Lu Xun’s students were killed on March 18th. Less than a month earlier, he published a sharply critical essay entitled “A bit of Metaphor.” In this confluence we glimpse a larger truth about modern China’s predicament in which literary allusions about carnage do not stay metaphorical for long. The cannibalism of social revolution keeps catching up with and surpassing the worst nightmares of writers, again and again. Similarly in 1935, just a few months after Lu Xun began the serious effort of translating Russian and Soviet fiction, Qu Qiubai was killed by Nationalist troops. Again, the project of cultural transmission was overwhelmed by grief and the demands of commemoration. Mourning and writing collide and reshape the inner landscape of a tired, ill and politically ambivalent leader of the leftist writers in Shanghai.
By evoking with narrative skill the complex terrain of revolutionary debates in the 1930s, Davies’ book stands as a powerful alternative to the “wooden officialese” (316) that characterizes Lu Xun’s rehabilitators on the Chinese mainland. Here, we have a vividly evoked thinker who tried to gain ethical and literary clarity against all odds. Gloria Davies is especially insightful in helping us re-read some of Lu Xun’s canonical essays with a deeper appreciation of the conflicts that coloured his “perspicacity.” Although this concept is a mouthful, it does justice to Lu Xun’s effort as reflected, for example, in his work “On Seeing with Eyes Wide Open.” Written barely six weeks after the killings of the “May 30th Movement” of 1925, this essay is part of the corpus of zagan (mixed impressions), which cannot be reduced to any one political point of view or any literary fad.
It is not only Lu Xun who comes to be seen more clearly in this book, but the larger project of vernacular literature as well. Davies’ focus is mostly on the intra-leftist debates about the role of writing when guns hold sway. Nonetheless, readers interested in the relationship between intellectuals and social consciousness will find important insights here. The baihua—plain talk—movement in China was never about language alone. It was, as Davies shows us, part of an ambivalent effort by classically educated men and women to turn the knife of cultural change against themselves. Davies’ sophisticated metaphor for this project centres on Ouboros, the self-devouring snake of ancient Greek mythology. Thirty-five years ago, when I first began to write about Lu Xun and revolutionary literature, I recall being infatuated with Gramsci, Sartre and Brecht and marveling at what they had termed the importance of being “willing in the face of necessity.” Now, after reading much of the new Chinese and Western scholarship about Lu Xun’s legacy, I find that Gloria Davies’s understanding of a “self-consuming encounter with literature” (271) has the ring of a historically seasoned truth that is absent in previous works.
Davies herself nods with familiarity toward various European literary theorists in order to place Lu Xun’s experimentations in a world critical context. Not surprisingly Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin and Heidegger appear as paradigms for the politically engaged yet self-reflective writer. More enriching than these theorists, in my view, are Davies’ reflections on the luminosity of literature, its unique ability to de-familiarize as well as to cherish the familiar. While Lu Xun was fully (and fiercely) engaged in the internecine squabbles of the Creation Society, Crescent Moon Society and the League of Left Wing Writers, Gloria Davies shows him to be also a kindred spirit to Jorge Luis Borges, who had observed that “we grow blind to the familiar objects in our midst because they ‘serve us like silent slaves’” (313). Even while shouting about the need to free the oppressed and to answer guns with words of fire, Davies’ Lu Xun is revealed as a man who warred against the silence of an unreflective mind. The price he paid for his inner struggles was that he became haunted by metaphorical and political demons—each of which is placed in a historical and literary framework that draws deeply upon classical Chinese culture.
In the end, however, this is a book not only for historians or literary scholars. It is not even limited to cultural critics looking for a dash of comparative elegance. It is about the boundaries of moral empathy in times of social upheaval. Expanding this empathy was not only one Chinese writer’s dilemma but remains a challenge for Western intellectuals today. Lu Xun had embraced this mission with the fullness of his heart and a towering mind. Gloria Davies matches her subject every step of the way.
Vera Schwarcz
Wesleyan University, Middletown, USA
pp. 837-839