Outcry by Lu Xun

 Source of book: I own this.

 

I try to keep a regular rotation of books in translation in my reading list. I think it is part of a well rounded life to experience ideas and culture from outside one’s own nation and language. One of the things I have noticed is that there is both commonality - humans are largely the same everywhere - and difference - our culture develops in response to our situation and in coordination with those around us. 

 

This book is one of three collections in my Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. I decided to read each story collection individually rather than all at once - better to savor them. Outcry is the first of Lu’s story collections; in addition to the formal collection, this edition includes his early uncollected story, “Nostalgia.” 

Lu Xun is the pen name of Zhou Shuren, who lived straddling the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries - a time of great upheaval and change in China. His family had accumulated weath through a combination of landlording and government sinecures, but fell on increasingly hard times as Lu grew up. He was unable to afford the private schooling necessary to be trained in the Confucian tradition, which was necessary to pass the civil service exams and gain a stable government job. Instead, he studied at the “western” school, later in Japan, and finally settled into a career as a writer. 

 

At the same time, China was undergoing significant upheavals. The monarchy would soon end, and the early Communists were gaining popularity. Traditional Confucianism had ossified into an increasingly complex and self-referential and self-contained universe that functioned primarily to enforce class distinctions and enrich those with family connections; and predictably, the next generation was largely rejecting those values. Writers were switching from classical Chinese to the vernacular, and knowledge of Western ideas was spreading throughout the educated classes. 

 

Lu Xun came of age as the transition began, and indeed his writing has a foot in each world. He wrote in both classical and vernacular Chinese, his stories are primarily about the old world that was fading, viewed from the new perspective. He never joined the Communist Party, and would best be understood as a moderate leftist. He took part in some revolutionary activity, primarily in the form of writing and editing leftist magazines, and, after the monarchy fell, spent time teaching and working toward a new kind of Chinese literature: fiction. In that sense, his greatest accomplishment would be the establishment of a Chinese fiction tradition. 

 

Although Lu was not a Communist, he and his stories were greatly admired by Mao, and he ended up decades after his death being hailed as a saint of the Revolution, which probably says more about Mao than it does about Lu. 

 

The book contains an excellent and enlightening introduction, written by the translator, Julia Lovell, who is a scholar of modern Chinese history at University of London. (The translation is excellent too - she preserves a unique cadence while vastly improving on the stilted language of early translations.) The introduction, among other things, gives the background history that center the stories in the culture of the time and recent past. I don’t always recommend reading introductory material, but in this case, it really helps the stories come alive. 

 

Lu Xun hated the early Confucian education he received, as it seemed irrelevant and involved memorization of huge passages of text. 

 

‘To me, it was all so much gibberish,’ he remembered, contrasting the intellectual pedantry of the classroom with the liberating extravagance of China’s popular folk traditions: his illiterate nurse’s stories of ghosts and demons lurking in the back garden; the phantasmagoria of local operas; the bizarre, monstrous illustrations of the mythological compilation The Classic of Mountains and Seas.

 

There is a certain parallel it seems to me with other ossified traditions. The “classical” education model has been making a comeback in certain circles - white, conservative, homeschool - but it doesn’t take much to see that it has been and continues to be used much as the Confucian tradition: to maintain class distinctions. And I think that is kind of the appeal today. A working knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin isn’t nearly as useful in the modern world as, say, Spanish or Mandarin or Japanese. But it does allow you to be part of an elitist subculture. Nothing wrong with learning the old stuff - I probably read more than most - but if that becomes the focus of education and is viewed as somehow “superior,” chances are it is really about the same thing it always has been. It is the way aristocrats were educated, so that they can recognize each other and feel superior to the plebes. (The Ivory League here in the US functions in a similar manner.) And, as Boris Johnson and others illustrate, membership in the club has significant benefits, and those without membership almost need not apply. 

 

Likewise, I see a parallel with another dying tradition: white Evangelicalism. It is difficult to explain to outsiders the obsession with bible memorization, and the status one could get by being able to recite both “proof texts” and entire passages or books if you were really good. As with the “classics” and Confucian training, it served as a way to recognize fellow members of the club. 

 

Another interesting parallel in the introduction was way that outside ideas tend to shatter one’s certainty - and indeed one’s sense of place in the world. When your world expands, you rarely find that you, or your tribe, are the center anymore. Lu’s discovery of modern reformist intellectuals such as Yan Fu and Liang Quchao shifted his worldview substantially. I recognize the feeling. 

 

It was Yan and Liang’s sense of a modern, international world that threw late-imperial Confucianism into a provincial, complacent light, convincing Lu Xun and others like him that China was no longer the centre of the civilized world, but one nation among many struggling for survival in a global system dominated by the West. 

 

Ever since the end of World War Two, the United States has been experiencing a similar unpleasant truth. The myth of American invincibility has been crumbling since then, even as a great many people insist on believing it. From Vietnam on down (or maybe Korea?), we have found that our ability to break stuff and kill people remains strong, but no matter how much we do that, we have been utter failures at winning a meaningful peace. 

 

Lu Xun observed the effects of this breakdown of illusions, and saw a moral brutishness among his fellow citizens that appalled him. His stories in this first collection reflect that. 

 

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 nationa character: it’s obsession with face; its superiority complex; its servility before authority and cruelty towards the weak; its conceited delight in ignorance. 

 

Honestly, that isn’t a bad description of the American Right, and for the same reasons. It is unpleasant to realize the world no longer revolves around you, and it is easier to delight in ignorance and show cruelty towards the weak than to look realistically at one’s self and one’s tribe and find a way that doesn’t require dominance. 

 

So, about the stories themselves. In this collection, Lu Xun mostly focuses on down-and-out characters. Ah-Q is representative of the sympathetic yet not-sympathetic sort of character that is seen throughout. He is both victim and perpetrator, bullied and bully, and both part and prey of the bestial society he lives in. This story is the longest - it almost reaches novella length. 

 

The other stories range from vignettes to longer episodes, usually tragic, although there are some humorous ones as well. They are set in a kind of “every-village,” and although the names sometimes change, the people and scenes are the same sorts. There is the village tavern, the local aristocrat, the brothel, the migrant laborers, and so on. Sometimes political events upset the equilibrium, as in “Nostalgia,” “A Passing Storm,” and “Hair.” These put a humorous but pointed spin on the way that successive victories by the traditionalists and the revolutionaries upset social hierarchies, and put innocent people at risk for something as mundane ias hair style. Sometimes the story is about a particular incident involving people, as in the brutal bullying of a former scholar unable to support himself in “Kong Yiji.” “Diary of Madman” is justly famous, a tale of paranoia told by the madman himself, who becomes convinced of a cannibal conspiracy involving everyone. There are a couple of stories centering on the tragedy of “traditional” medicine - characters die of tuberculosis while traditional doctors leach the last pennies from impoverished people who cannot afford it. 

 

There are also some gentler stories. “A Cat Among the Rabbits” and “A Comedy of Ducks” are darkly humorous. “The Dragon Boat Festival” is a great satire on the crumbling of the old civil service system. “My Old Home” and “A Village Opera” are poignant nostalgia pieces drawn in part from Lu Xun’s childhood. 

 

While the culture of the stories is fairly unfamiliar, the humans seem quite real. Lu Xun, while keeping a certain distance from his characters, still creates the empathy that draws the reader into the stories. His descriptions are often amazing, and a few words can create an unforgettable picture, as in the line from “Nostalgia.” 

 

Under the bright moonlight, their exposed teeth looked like rows of decaying bone dice.

 

He also writes with a considerable degree of sarcasm, which feels at home 100 years later. In “Dragon Boat Festival,” for example, the teachers are not getting paid, and finally start agitating for money - they have to eat. But, as it is in our own time, certain professions are supposed to be doing it “for love,” not money, and therefore can just be left without support. Teachers are certainly in this category, as you find out whenever they agitate for pay more commensurate with their education. Artists and musicians even more so, perhaps. In our own consumer culture, I would say we value things over services as a general rule. Anyway, this is my favorite line from the story. 

 

‘They’ve started saying it’s undignified for teachers to ask to be paid. They don’t seem to understand people need to eat rice, and rice costs money. It’s not exactly a complicated idea.’

 

It will be interesting to see what the later stories are like - I imagine his writing evolved over time, given the social upheaval. His stories are fascinating, well written, and a window into a time and place unfamiliar to most of us Americans. Among other things, they give a bit of a glimpse of why China chose communism.