Beyond the Iron House: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Literary FieldBy Saiyin Sun
Reviewed by Kirk A. Denton
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June, 2018)
http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kdenton/
Saiyin Sun,Beyond the Iron House: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Literary Field New York: Routledge, 2017. ix-xii + 212 pp. ISBN: 978-1-138-67082-2 (Hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-315-61743-5 (E-book).
In a 1936 essay entitled “Death” (死) written about a month before he died, Lu Xun included a sort of last will and testament in which he prescribed arrangements for his funeral and his legacy. It reads in part:
1. Do not, on account of the funeral, accept a penny from anyone—old friends exempted.
2. Just quickly put the body in the coffin and bury it at once.
3. Do not hold any commemorative activities.
4. Forget me and mind your own lives. If you don’t, you’re just fools. . .[1]
Once dead, of course, things were out of Lu Xun’s control. Against his wishes, his funeral became a highly scripted affair that garnered lavish attention in the Shanghai media, and commemorative events have been held every year on the anniversary of his death. Far from forgotten, Lu Xun has been remembered more than any other modern Chinese writer. That process of remembering Lu Xun has been a contested one, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and Chairman Mao himself—were key agents involved in the construction of Lu Xun into a “Chinese Gorki,” as David Holm puts it.[2] Lu Xun’s iconic status in China is best captured in the fact that there are no less than six museums—one each in Shaoxing, Nanjing, Beijing, Xiamen, Guangzhou, and Shanghai—devoted to commemorating his life and works.
Inevitably, in making Lu Xun serve the interests of the revolution and the new socialist state, his image and his writings have been retroactively reshaped to fit a rigid political mold. One of the consequences of this process was to turn Lu Xun into the leading spokesman for and literary representative of the May Fourth movement, which itself was intimately intertwined in state historical narratives with the birth of the CCP and the revolutionary movement that led to the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It also enshrined Lu Xun’s critique of Chinese tradition as “true” and his vituperative discursive style as de rigueur.
Reviewed by Kirk A. Denton
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June, 2018)
http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kdenton/
Saiyin Sun,Beyond the Iron House: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Literary Field New York: Routledge, 2017. ix-xii + 212 pp. ISBN: 978-1-138-67082-2 (Hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-315-61743-5 (E-book).
In a 1936 essay entitled “Death” (死) written about a month before he died, Lu Xun included a sort of last will and testament in which he prescribed arrangements for his funeral and his legacy. It reads in part:
1. Do not, on account of the funeral, accept a penny from anyone—old friends exempted.
2. Just quickly put the body in the coffin and bury it at once.
3. Do not hold any commemorative activities.
4. Forget me and mind your own lives. If you don’t, you’re just fools. . .[1]
Once dead, of course, things were out of Lu Xun’s control. Against his wishes, his funeral became a highly scripted affair that garnered lavish attention in the Shanghai media, and commemorative events have been held every year on the anniversary of his death. Far from forgotten, Lu Xun has been remembered more than any other modern Chinese writer. That process of remembering Lu Xun has been a contested one, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and Chairman Mao himself—were key agents involved in the construction of Lu Xun into a “Chinese Gorki,” as David Holm puts it.[2] Lu Xun’s iconic status in China is best captured in the fact that there are no less than six museums—one each in Shaoxing, Nanjing, Beijing, Xiamen, Guangzhou, and Shanghai—devoted to commemorating his life and works.
Inevitably, in making Lu Xun serve the interests of the revolution and the new socialist state, his image and his writings have been retroactively reshaped to fit a rigid political mold. One of the consequences of this process was to turn Lu Xun into the leading spokesman for and literary representative of the May Fourth movement, which itself was intimately intertwined in state historical narratives with the birth of the CCP and the revolutionary movement that led to the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It also enshrined Lu Xun’s critique of Chinese tradition as “true” and his vituperative discursive style as de rigueur.