Lu Xun is recognized as the greatest writer of modern Chinese literature and has a wide international reputation. But it was extremely difficult to introduce Lu Xun's achievements to Taiwanese readers, and his works were severely banned from reading in Taiwan for 37 years. For Taiwan's cultural circles, Lu Xun is still a rather unfamiliar field, and there is no basis to talk about.
The so-called experts in Taiwan's literary circles are mainly influenced by Xia Zhiqing, and there is also a prejudice against Lu Xun that is difficult to break. From the perspective of "form", they believe that Lu Xun only wrote two collections of short stories, but only twenty-five, and none of them; In addition, there is a collection of essays "Picking Up the Flowers" and a collection of prose poems "Wild Grass", which is said to be a lot of fine works and masterpieces in these works, how can it be regarded as a great writer? What's more, call him "great" or "giant"? These are all the results of the official god-making movement. In their eyes, Lu Xun's fourteen collections of essays were nothing at all.
There is an intellectual on the mainland who happens to have the opposite view. They believe that the official took advantage of Lu Xun's extensive reputation in the cultural world and narrowed Lu Xun's interpretation to it. Lu Xun's spirit far surpasses official dogma, and can in turn oppose official dogma.
What had a major impact on my view of Lu Xun was the views of Japanese scholars. Lu Xun's experts from Takeuchi Good, including Maruyama Sho, Kiyama Hero, Ito Toramaru, Maruo Tsuneki and others, talked about Lu Xun, almost respectfully, as if facing a modern oriental saint.
So, how to illustrate Lu Xun's unique qualities as a writer? I would like to start with my own reading experience. In the 1970s, I secretly photocopied a considerable anthology of Lu Xun's essays, but it did not bring much pleasure to read, and some chapters seemed to be incomprehensible. I bought the complete works of Lu Xun in the early nineties, and soon after, I fell into a mental predicament, mainly because my political stance became an absolute minority in Taiwan. At this time, I found that Lu Xun's works became one of my greatest comforts. Some of Lu Xun's works are full of despair, and when they are read, they resonate strongly with themselves. I have long been clear about this, because Lu Xun's dark side is recognized by everyone. However, strangely, such literature does not lead to total pessimism, does not discourage me to the point of losing my fighting spirit. On the contrary, I feel a desperate pleasure when reading, but I can slowly become tenacious after reading it. It's a very bizarre feeling. It's hard to imagine that a sentence like "despair is false is the same as hope" will have a revelatory effect and make you more courageous in facing reality. I think that from the perspective of living people, Lu Xun's works make us understand that no matter how difficult it is, you can't fool yourself and think that you can't bear it. Saying that you can't stand it is the behavior of the weak. Wang Hui's book on Lu Xun is called "Resisting Despair", which is very well titled, I think that in terms of life attitude, "resisting despair" is the enlightenment of Lu Xun's spirit to people.
The above is in terms of personal destiny, but Lu Xun is by no means just a writer who cares about personal destiny. When Lu Xun died, he was called the "soul of the nation", and he was China's toughest fighter in the face of the scourge of national demise. It seems strange, how can the most pessimistic writer become the toughest fighter?
Reading Lu Xun's novel, you will feel cold at first. For example, Xianglin's sister-in-law, how could a healthy and diligent peasant woman become a beggar in the prejudice of customs and the coldness of everyone, and finally die in vain. In "Medicine", the blood of a patriot who sacrificed for the country was dipped in steamed buns by a person suffering from tuberculosis and eaten as a secret recipe. A rural proletarian, Ah Q, is actually very capable of working, but in the contempt of everyone and his own self-deception, he inexplicably becomes someone else's substitute ghost. It seems that Chinese society has completely lacked humanity, and will only turn living people into zombies, without even the slightest breath of "life".
Lu Xun, like the leaders of other New Culture Movements, is not afraid to expose the cold and inhuman side of Chinese culture with the sharpest brushstrokes. But Lu Xun is still one of the most fervent patriots, which seems quite contradictory.
If you compare Hu Shi and Zhou Zuoren with Lu Xun, you can see Lu Xun's greatness. Hu Shi yearned for everything in Western culture (especially American culture), believing that as long as he admitted that he was inferior to others, as long as he learned from others, China would be saved. Like Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren was so desperate for traditional Chinese society that he completely lost his national self-confidence, and finally did not think that resistance would have any effect, preferring to be the obedient people of the invaders rather than the slightest self-sacrifice.
Lu Xun is also very different from many patriots, he rarely criticizes foreign invaders, but only his own people. It is not that he does not have the slightest hatred for the aggressor, and he is in no way weaker than others. But the national shame hurt him even more. He seems to think that it is better to hate himself than to hate others—rather than hating the strong who often bully him, it is better to hate why he is always "crooked" and "crooked". Lu Xun hated the lack of growth of his own nation and had a hot blood qi, and he knew that only by condensing this blood qi into a fighting spirit that could not be turned back could China find the way to rebirth. They will only admire others, they will only despise themselves, and in the end, they will despise themselves and bow to the strong.
Lu Xun advised Chinese youth to "read less—or not at all—Chinese books," and "read fewer Chinese books, and the result is just not to write essays." But now the most important thing for young people is "deeds" rather than "words". As long as it's a living person, it's a big deal if you can't write an essay." In the worst environment, bravely facing reality, truly "living", not deceiving himself, Lu Xun believes that it is the top priority. Only blaming others for bullying themselves, or always carrying the ancestor's god card to show off from me, self-satisfaction, are all standard Q, not the way to save themselves.
Lu Xun also advocated the "take-ism", everything in foreign countries can be taken over, which does not mean that everything is good with foreign things and can be used when they are taken, but to "want or use, or store, or destroy", to make themselves the "new master" of these things, not to become a slave of these foreign things, everything is good, everything is followed. It is necessary to be "calm, courageous, discerning, and not selfish", so that you can become the "new master" of foreign things and make yourself a "new person".
To put it simply, Lu Xun did not want Chinese youth to become slaves of his ancestors, nor did he want Chinese youth to become slaves of foreign things. A nation has fallen into the abyss, and if it cannot stand up bravely, no matter how much it prays for the blessing of its ancestors, no matter how much it scolds the inhumanity of the aggressor, it is useless. Everything is on your own. This is Lu Xun's flesh, so he is not afraid to self-criticize with the harshest attitude, and his self-criticism is by no means self-contemptuous, in order to fall at the feet of foreign invaders, like Zhou Zuoren; Or, like some Chinese intellectuals now, they even believe that China can only be modernized if it is completely colonized by foreign countries.
Just because he saw this, Chinese would say that Lu Xun did not have a flattering bone, or Lu Xun was all arrogant. It is this arrogance that allows Chinese to be reborn from all kinds of disasters. Throughout modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun's spirit has played the greatest enlightening role in Chinese youth, and no one can compare with him, so he has become the only grandmaster of modern Chinese literature.
The defeated Japanese were surprised that Chinese finally "stood up" and suddenly woke up to Lu Xun's greatness. Lu Xun's superficially strong spirit of self-criticism is actually the strongest resistance to Western civilization, and his doctrine ultimately proves that China can find a unique way to save itself. On the contrary, the Japanese are ostensibly model students of the West, but in the end they become mere imitations of the West, and even its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" is nothing more than a clumsy second-class commodity of Western colonial imperialism. The most unbearable thing is that it has become its main enemy, the partner of the United States in Asia, and the "big steward" of the United States in Asia. As a result of "leaving Asia and joining Europe," Japan has become the most important partner of the United States, but everyone knows who is the real master.
Lu Xun's bumpy life is also a life of hard struggle, and his pain and his courage to fight finally proved his extraordinary wisdom. China has finally regained its footing in the world, and he has an indelible contribution, and this is one of his great achievements.
But Lu Xun was by no means just a narrow nationalist, as evidenced by many of his actions and all his works throughout his life. At the beginning of his determination to pursue a career in literature, he began by translating foreign literary works. His translation focused on the literature of the weak peoples of Eastern Europe, rather than the literature of Western Europe, which was at the top of the trend of world literature. On the one hand, he believes that the literature of the same oppressed and invaded nations has a personal relationship with China, and on the other hand, he widely sympathizes with the people of all oppressed nations in the world.
The basis of the nationalism of a weak country is that under the aggression of imperialism, the vast majority of the weak people fall into the abyss, and only a few people who hold political and economic power can cooperate with the aggressor and seize greater benefits from it. No matter how ignorant Lu Xun's depiction of China's peasants in his novels, he never loses sympathy. Just like the A Q who was ridiculed by him from beginning to end, because he was always bullied, Lu Xun still sympathized. The novel was translated into French, Roman. Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was very moved after reading it, because Romain Rolland. Roland understood Lu Xun's compassion for the weak. Jaroslav Prusek (1906-1980) of the Czech Republic also felt this sentiment in Lu Xun's work, which was soon translated into Czech and published. When he talked to Lu Xun about royalties, Lu Xun replied that when people translate his works, he has never taken royalties. Lu Xun's literary undertaking is worldwide and is part of the great cause of the masses of the people belonging to the invaded nation joining hands to resist the imperialist aggressors.
The glorious achievements of modern Western civilization are undeniable, but Western countries carry the power of this civilization to wantonly encroach on other people's land (the highest record is 83% of the earth's land), slave people, and plunder other people's resources, thus causing the greatest disaster in human history. When we talk about modern and modern literature in the world, its achievements from a Western point of view, or its achievements from a non-Western point of view, the results are completely different. When the West began to plunder all parts of the world, people around the world never stopped resisting, and the literature of resistance was included in the rebellion.
If we look at how the people of the world rebelled against them after the rise of modern capitalist imperialism in the West, and how these rebellions were expressed in literature, then we will have a completely different perspective on the history of modern and modern world literature. If you want to write such a history of modern and modern world literature, Lu Xun must have a prominent position in it. This is the basis of Lu Xun's international prestige, but this international prestige is far different from the Western-centric international prestige that we have always recognized. As one of the writers of the oppressed and invaded nations in the anti-colonial struggle in modern and modern times, Lu Xun's personality and his works have won everyone's respect and admiration, which is Lu Xun's most glorious achievement.
Many people say that Lu Xun's works, except for some novels, a few essays and the prose poetry book "Weeds", have little artistry. This is something that is said entirely from the aesthetic point of view of the West after the rise of modernism. I remember that the mainland novelist Wang Anyi once said: Lu Xun's novels are satirical, and what he mocks is often typical, so this kind of novel must be written very little, in order not to repeat, he only writes each typical once. That's very precise. We only need to experience the twenty-five novels in "The Scream" and "Wandering" to know that Lu Xun has not written two identical novels, and each of his novels deserves our careful analysis (as Japanese scholars do). From here, we can see Lu Xun's painstaking management.
There are still more people who say that Lu Xun's essay is not artistic, which is pure slander, a lie told to offset the influence of Lu Xun's essay. If Lu Xun's essays are not artistic, how can they affect thousands of Chinese youth, and they still have an impact today. When we can't explain the artistry of these works with established aesthetic norms, and the influence of these works is so obvious, is there something wrong with the aesthetic standards by which we judge? Or what? We can only say that Lu Xun created a new literary style, so that literary experts hold all the measuring rulers in their hands, but they are not powerful at all, does this not in turn prove that Lu Xun has extremely high artistic originality?
To express a new content that has never been seen before, it is necessary to create new means that have never been seen before. Lu Xun stood in the general trend of anti-colonial resistance in the world, and in order to fight the needs, he created a literary form that people are not accustomed to so far, but the influence is so obvious, this is not Lu Xun's great achievement, what else can it be?
Text/Lu Zhenghui