鲁迅与中国现代文场：英文(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：孙赛茵

出版社：清华大学出版社

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内容简介

本书是作者在英国剑桥大学的博士研究成果。全书英文行文，通过详尽的史料研究，以独特的角度分析鲁迅及其同时代文人作家在中国现代文场中的地位、形象以及影响。

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of my PhD dissertation at Trinity College, the University of Cambridge. I would like to thank, first of all, Susan Daruvala for her trust and unfailing guidance. I am grateful too to Julia Lovell, Natasha Gentz and Hans van de Ven for their generous advice and insights. Without these advisors, this book would not have taken the shape it has. I would also like to thank the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Tsinghua University for providing a pleasant and inspiring working environment since my return to China in 2010. The revision and finalising of the book would not have been so enjoyable without such a supportive environment. Thanks are also due to my book editors at Tsinghua University Press. Their patience and professional work no doubt contributed enormously to the eventual publication of the book. Last but not least, I thank my family for their faith in me, and for their understanding over the years. I dedicate this book to my mother, Zhao Xiufeng.

Preface

I first read Sun Saiyin's eye-opening work on Lu Xun when I was finishing my translation of Lu Xun's complete short stories. For months, I had been absorbed in Lu Xun's fictional language: in trying to understand his choice of words and tone, and trying to replicate them faithfully in English. Saiyin's work drew me back outside Lu Xun's abstract, fictional worlds, pushing me to re-engage with the writer as an individual and with his context.

Lu Xun is broadly acknowledged both in China and in Western sinology as one of the paradigmatic figures of 20th-century Chinese literature, celebrated for his powerful diagnoses of his nation's social and political crisis, and for his achievements in reinventing the vernacular as a literary language during the radical New Culture Movement of the late 1910s and 1920s. Like many radical intellectuals of his time, Lu Xun began to look leftwards after the rise to power of the right-wing Nationalist Party in the late 1920s. During the Mao era, Lu Xun was arguably deified as the stand-out, infallibly correct figure in modern Chinese literature. During the “Cultural Revolution,” anyone the writer had criticised in his prolific speeches, essays or letters was vulnerable to persecution. Sun's great contribution is to reconstruct the man behind the political hagiography: to contextualise Lu Xun's political and personal judgements, and to illuminate his engagements with the highly fractious literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s.

Sun Saiyin's careful research into Lu Xun's career stands alongside other thought-provoking rereadings of Lu Xun's life and work that have been published in English since 2000: Bonnie McDougall's 2002 analysis of Lu Xun's personal life in Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping; Eva Chou's 2012 Memory, Violence, Queues: Lu Xun Interprets China. Sun's project of re-examining—in their local context—the ways in which Lu Xun wrote and argued with his contemporaries is thus timely, astutely chosen, and original. By posing, in an independent and thoroughly documented way, the issue of how we should evaluate a paradigmatic figure such as Lu Xun, she opens out the issue of a modern Chinese canon, persuasively recommending additional study of new, previously neglected writers such as Gao Changhong, the young writer-critic whose conflict with Lu Xun forms the centrepiece of the book.

In many respects, Sun has gone back to first principles in making her sociological assessment of Lu Xun's private and public persona, stripping away the assumptions and sources of bias inherent in existing scholarship, and plotting out her own conclusions, drawn from intricate and painstaking detective work on the mass of journals, letters and diaries generated by Lu Xun and his contemporaries. She demonstrates an impressive tenacity in, for example, tracing out influence, friendships and exchanges of correspondence, and in discovering the identities hiding behind the many pseudonyms used by writers of the 1920s. Through reconstructing both sides of disputes in which Lu Xun (sometimes vituperatively) engaged, she offers evidence for doubting Lu Xun's quasi-mythical infallibility, both as a social and literary critic, and as an original artist.

To carry out such a study shows significant intellectual courage. Given Lu Xun's canonical status both inside and outside China, undertaking a reappraisal of the man and of his place in literary history is a task that would daunt many scholars. There is an intimidating mass of material already produced upon Lu Xun, in both Chinese and Western languages; it is a very considerable feat of scholarship and independent thinking to absorb this body of work, to look so carefully at original materials, and to draw fresh conclusions. In English, Bonnie McDougall began the task of looking behind political myth-making, to depict Lu Xun as a flesh-and-blood figure, in her study of the letters exchanged between Lu Xun and his partner, Xu Guangping. Sun valuably continues this enterprise by reconsidering, even more radically, received wisdom on the nature of Lu Xun's personality and interactions with his contemporaries.

Sun makes especial efforts to challenge portrayals of Lu Xun as a uniquely creative, original figure amongst his immediate peers, and to trace out the process by which he came to be acclaimed a “literary authority” during and after his lifetime. Her analysis raises very important questions about the construction of a modern Chinese literary canon, implicitly urging a careful re-evaluation of Lu Xun's creative achievements and bringing other, less-studied writers (such as Gao Changhong) to critical attention. During the post-Mao period, literary scholars have been working to broaden understanding of the range of literary voices that made up 20th-century Chinese literature—a diversity that for years was obscured by the triumph of the Maoist literary line between 1949 and the late 1970s. Sun excitingly extends this wider academic project. Her research suggests many new and fruitful avenues for investigation into the richness of Chinese literature in the 1920s and 1930s: into the oeuvre of the tragic figure of Gao Changhong, and that of others like him.

Beyond the Iron House, therefore, is a fascinating study: for its fresh insights into Lu Xun's life and times, and for the new possibilities for modern Chinese literature that it suggests. It is a crucial text for anyone interested in China's 20th-century literary canon and its plurality of possibilities.Julia LovellAugust 2014

Chapter One The State of the Field

This book is a critical study of a crucial period in the life and work of Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936), a writer who has been regarded as “the inevitable figure in every canon of modern Chinese literature,”and “the greatest of twentieth-century Chinese writers” “by common consent.”He stands as the most read modern author in China's school textbooks for the past few decades. There are several hundred academics in universities or similar institutions who specialize in research on Lu Xun, dozens of museums and academies named after him, and more than a score of biographies written on him. It could easily take a scholar's lifetime to go through the tens of thousands of books and papers dedicated to him. In the words of Leo Ou-fan Lee: “It is hard to think of any modern writer in the world so extravagantly honoured by an entire nation.”

Despite his extraordinary status in literary historiography, many of the most important questions about Lu Xun's literary and intellectual achievement remain to be answered. How was the author received and perceived during his own lifetime, for instance, in Beijing in the 1920s and in Shanghai in the 1930s? Did he enjoy an outstanding fame that shadowed all his contemporaries even then? How unique, original and experimental was he as a modern writer? How influential and inspirational were his literary output and intellectual philosophy at the historical moments of their production, in comparison with other contemporaries? What were his relationships with them? How did he grow into a prominent and dominant figure as the “paradigmatic writer and intellectual” of modern China? When did this transformation take place? Who and what elements might have contributed to it? While it is beyond the scope of this book to answer all the above questions satisfactorily, my study, with a thorough historical investigation into the earlier period of Lu Xun's literary and intellectual career, sets out to provide answers to at least some of the urgent ones.

Born on 25 September 1881 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, Lu Xun, whose real name was Zhou Shuren 周树人, had a traditional education in his childhood and then went to a new-style school in Nanjing. Supported by a government scholarship, he went to Japan in 1902, where he became interested in literature and published in classical Chinese some essays and translations of western literature. He returned to China in 1909 without any academic degrees and worked as a teacher both in his hometown and in the provincial capital Hangzhou. He moved to Beijing in 1912 to serve as a petty official in the Ministry of Education and spent his spare time in traditional textual study and art collection. At the persuasion of a friend, he started to write to Xin Qingnian 新青年 (New Youth), a major journal for China's New Culture movement that started around 1917.It is widely believed that he suddenly achieved literary success in 1918 with the story “Kuangren riji” (Diary of a madman), which has been “hailed as China's first modern story because of its use of the vernacular and its highly subjective and devastating critique of traditional Chinese culture.”After settling in Shanghai in 1927, and with the changes of China's political situation, Lu Xun turned toward the left, culminating in his becoming a founding member of the League of Chinese Leftwing Writers (Zhongguo Zuoyi Zuojia Lianmeng), established in March 1930. He died of tuberculosis on 19 October 1936, when a nation-wide anti-Japanese war was imminent.

In a speech given at the author's first death anniversary, Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1893-1976) hailed Lu Xun as “the sage of China's modern era,” and in his 1940 article “Xin minzhu zhuyi lun” (On new democracy), Mao gave Lu Xun a unique endorsement as “the greatest and the most courageous standard-bearer of the new cultural force,” “the chief commander of China's ‘Cultural Revolution,’” “a great man of letters” and “a great thinker and revolutionary.”From then on up to the late 1970s, there was virtually only one possible interpretation of all aspects of Lu Xun in China, and this was not open to question. This applied especially during the devastating ten years of the “Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976) when of all his contemporaries, only Lu Xun's works were “legal reading.” There were, for instance, hardly any studies of his brother Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885-1967) until the late 1980s, even though the latter had enjoyed a high literary reputation in the 1920s—a claim that shall be substantiated in the later chapters of the book.

In recent years, alongside the debate about the role that politics has played in Lu Xun's eminence and consequent doubts about the real literary and artistic value of his works, critics of a younger generation have boldly voiced the view that Lu Xun is just an old block of stone in the Chinese literary world. They maintain that he is standing in the way of the emergence of new writers, and that only by burying him and saying farewell to the past with its so-called “literary masters” can Chinese literature have new hope and really develop.Not too surprisingly, such views are scorned by many established critics as not only radical but also irrational, naive, and superficial.And, since China's economic reform and the introduction of the market economy in the early 1980s, in the literary and cultural sphere there has been a wave of new interest in Lu Xun and his works. The publication of his eighteen-volume complete works in 2005 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the author's death is only the latest reminder of Lu Xun's apparently incomparable status.

The overt Maoist distortions of Lu Xun's image contributed a great deal to his canonical status in new China (1949-) but they should not be held as the sole or even major elements responsible for the author's unusual status in modern literary history. His literary talent and output, and his role as a modern experimental writer, have long been recognised and praised by many independent scholars, both inside and outside China. The few short stories Lu Xun wrote during the earlier period of his literary career have been accorded a “preeminent position” by “both Chinese and foreign critics of modern Chinese literature.”Leo Lee, who claimed that his reading of Lu Xun was free from Maoist politics, asserted that the author succeeded in creatively transforming each genre he wrote in—not only his short stories and zawen (miscellaneous essays) but also his personal reminiscences, prose poetry, and classical-style poetry.Like many scholars, Lee held that it was “Diary of a madman” published in New Youth in 1918 that “catapulted” the author into “nationwide prominence as a writer and a leader of ‘New Literature’.”

All these views contribute to our understanding or misunderstanding of Lu Xun, but it is still far from clear who he really is. Through a thorough historical investigation, this book aims to argue four main points. First, Lu Xun was recognised in the literary field much later than has hitherto been argued; second, in comparison with his contemporaries, neither was his literary work as original and unique as many have claimed, nor were his ideas and “discourse” as popular and influential as many have believed; third, like many other agents in the field, Lu Xun was actively involved in power struggles over what is at stake in the field; and fourth, he was later built into an iconic figure and the blind worship of his intellectual ideas and arguments hindered a better and more historical understanding of the literary and intellectual fields.

Before drawing deep into this investigation, I shall, in the rest of this chapter, deal with three issues. I shall first discuss the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the literary field and consider how it might be useful in providing the broad theoretical background to my project. I shall then discuss the “sociological approach” based on Bourdieu's theories that has been developed in recent years in the research of modern Chinese literature. Following this, I shall give a brief review of Lu Xun's publications and financial income to give a preliminary and more general understanding of the rise and fall of Lu Xun's fame and fortune.

1. The Literary Field

According to Bourdieu, the invention of the writer, in the modern sense of the term, is inseparable from the progressive invention of a particular social game, which he terms the literary field and which is constituted as it establishes its autonomy within the field of power (economic and political). Bourdieu defines the literary field as an independent social universe with its own specific laws of functioning, which is neither a vague social background nor even a milieu artistique like a universe of personal relations between writers.

Bourdieu indicated that writers were among the least professionalized occupations and were “able to exercise what they regard as their main occupation only on condition that they have a secondary occupation which provides their main income.”In view of the historical reality of nineteen-century France, Bourdieu pointed out that “to come into the world with money (inheritance)” was “absolutely indispensable to anyone who wants to get anywhere in art.” For artists to be able to distance themselves from the economic necessity, to be “disinterested,” economic insurance was a pre-condition to enable a writer's freedom to grow. It was “still (inherited) money that assures freedom from money.”

The literary field, in a simpler formulation of Bourdieu's, constitutes an “economic world reversed.” It is based on two fundamental principles: one is the heteronomous and the other autonomous. The heteronomous principle is subject to laws of another (especially those of the economic field) and its measurement of hierarchization is success, as judged by indices such as book sales, print runs or awards and honours etc. If this fundamental principle were allowed to reign unchallenged, it would lead to the loss of all autonomy in the literary field and eventually to its disappearance. In the extreme situation of a totally heteronomous field, writers would simply become subject to the ordinary laws prevailing in the field of power (the political) or the economic field. The autonomous principle, on the other hand, is hierarchized by internal consecration of literary prestige. This autonomous principle would reign unchallenged if the field were to achieve total autonomy with respect to the laws of the market. The more autonomous the field becomes, the more favourable the symbolic power balance is to the most autonomous producers. A totally autonomous field would become a game of “loser wins” (a reversed economic world), not only excluding the pursuit of profit and with no guarantee of any sort of correspondence between investment and monetary gains, but also condemning honours and temporary greatness.In other words, whereas in the economic field, money and profit are taken as the most important measurement for success, the literary field has to have its own internal value (or autonomy) as its criterion for the distribution of symbolic capital. Just writing for money, popularity or commercial success is meant to reduce the products’ literary value, or the producer's symbolic capital.

Although literary practice in China has a tradition that is almost as long as its history, the formation of a literary field in the Bourdieusian sense of the term is a modern phenomenon that was promoted by profound changes in the structure of the society. Michel Hockx, one of the first scholars to apply Bourdieu's theory to the study of modern Chinese literature, suggests that the Chinese literary field may have come into existence as early as the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), but that profound changes in the nineteenth century contributed to the formation of the literary field of the modern period as “the ‘interest community’ of writers, book sellers, critics and educators.”

In Hockx's view, the “modern Chinese literary practice does not allow itself to be schematised as easily in terms of only two conflicting principles” and thus introduces a third “political principle” into the Chinese field. He defines the principle as “partly but not fully heteronomous, which motivates modern Chinese writers to consider, as part of their practice, the well-being of their country and their people.”

Towards these propositions I have two reservations. First, I would prefer not to label this principle as “political” since the modern conception of “politics” and “political” (as defined in the OED: of or relating to the government or public affairs of a country; relating to the ideas or strategies of a particular party or group in politics) is significantly different from the concern for the “well-being of their country and their people” referred to by Hockx, a mentality that has a long tradition in the practice of the Chinese literati. The “poet sage” Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770), who would feel content living under a freezing shabby shed as long as there were “warm shelters for everyone else,” is one classic example for this mentality. Essayist Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989-1052), the author of the famous lines such as “feel worried before the world starts to worry, and feel happy after the world has rejoiced,” is another one. To call such a mentality “political” is to ignore these characteristics of the Chinese literary field, which consist of the writers’ constant concern for their moral, social responsibilities and in more recent times, national and patriotic sentiments, and their desire and obligation to convey such concerns and sentiments in their works.

My other reservation towards Hockx's explanatory scheme is his introduction of these “Chinese characteristics” as a “third” principle of the field. Duality, and struggles and opposing tensions between positive and negative poles are vital in generating a relational field of dynamics, and it is one of Bourdieu's fundamental hypotheses for the very concept of the “field.” A third principle would simply bring in stability and balance, which undermines the concept of the field. Therefore, while acknowledging social and political concern as being particularly acute in literary practice in China, I argue that these elements, instead of forming a new principle, took part in shaping the two principles of the field: either autonomous or heteronomous. Compared with Flaubert's France, which Bourdieu used as his case study, the modern Chinese literary field is highly heteronomous, so that it becomes the principle in dominance, or in other words, elements in the heteronomous principle to a great degree decide the symbolic value of the literary works.

Hockx considers it as incorrect to view these concerns of the literati as part of the autonomous principle because “overly utilitarian writing has never been accorded high literary value by the Chinese literary community.”I would push this line of thinking the other way and argue that “overly literary writing” has never really been accorded high value by the Chinese literary community either. Would this justify the claim that “literary value” should be excluded from the autonomous principle as well? Probably not. In my view, it is just that in the case of modern Chinese literature, the heteronomous principle occupies a more positive and dominant role in evaluating literary works. In comparison to France, Chinese have a significantly different definition for “literature” itself. Bourdieu also made it clear that the specific economy of the cultural field is based on a particular form of belief concerning what constitutes a literary work and its aesthetic or social value,while aesthetic value, itself socially constituted, is radically contingent on a very complex and constantly changing set of circumstances involving multiple social and institutional factors.

The discussion of the connotations and the very meaning of the Chinese word “literature” (wenxue) is a perfect illustration of my assertion that social and moral concerns are inseparable elements that take part in the functioning of the Chinese literary field, or in the forming of “literary” values. The traditional meaning of wenxue was, according to Confucius, “humane letters in general.” Although the term was borrowed back in the 1890s from Japan as the equivalent to the English term “literature,” its old meaning remained. Throughout the twentieth century, wenxue was, to use the words of Theodore Huters, “called into service in a remarkably wide variety of social and political situations,” a corollary of which is that “the literary, academic, intellectual and political fields have often interacted with each other, or overlapped in personnel.”Bridget Fowler in her discussion of Bourdieu makes a useful point in speaking of a relational splitting which has symbolic and ideological meaning. On the one hand, there is the legitimate aesthetic valorization of pure form; on the other, in the popular aesthetic, a valorization of pure content (natural beauty or political or moral worth).An autonomous literary field in Bourdieu's mind is capable of formulating and imposing its own values and its own principles of legitimacy while at the same time rejecting external sanctions and demands. The modern Chinese literary field, I would suggest, simply internalizes the social, moral and political values and makes them into constituent elements of the autonomous principle (a heteronomized autonomous principle).

In his analysis of the literary field in Flaubert's time, Bourdieu came to the conclusion that the literary field, which lies within the field of power (political or economic power), is highly dependent on it.Though external political (and economic) influences in the Chinese literary field in the 1920s were clearly felt, the field was, in my view, relatively independent of the field of power—it was more independent of these influences (but less autonomous) compared with the French literary field analysed by Bourdieu. Bourdieu points out that in Flaubert's time “the political world and the Emperor's family exercised direct control over the literary and artistic field through sanctions on publishing and also through material or symbolic benefits.” In China's case in the 1920s, there is no similar political power that managed to exert such direct and firm control over the literary field, as the frequent changeover of warlord governments was too weak and different forces balanced themselves out. Even the united government of the Nationalist Party formed in 1927 could only exercise rather weak controls over the literary field.However, this more independent modern Chinese literary field was at the same time a less autonomous one due to the dominance of the heteronomous principle (or the internalization of heteronomous elements into the autonomous within the literary field itself) and the financial restrictions on individual agents, who were more subject to economic pressures and more bound to the market.

In that crucial “economic” respect discussed by Bourdieu, the modern Chinese literary field is also significantly different in that very few of its agents were “heirs” free from financial restrictions. Throughout 1920s and into 1930s, the literary field saw a rise in the number of writers who had to depend on their publications for a living, which led to the increasing professionalization and commercialization of writers. This identity is different from that of their traditional counterparts who were engaged in literary and artistic practice and had at its origin significant changes in social, political and economic structures in modern China that had contributed to the formation of the modern field: the abolition of the civil service exam (keju) system in 1905, the collapse of the Qing Empire in 1911, the ongoing civil wars that followed and the threat and challenge engendered by the presence of western powers.

Economic and social changes affected the literary field indirectly especially through the growth in the cultivated audience or the potential readership, which is linked to increased schooling. The expansion of vernacular education at school since the early 1920s guaranteed a steady readership of the new literature, which allowed an expanding market and promoted the development of the press. It also allowed the number of writers to grow and encouraged the growth of such literary forms as short (critical) essays and works of fiction that did not require a long production period. The flourishing of literary journals and supplements, and the popularity of literary forms such as fiction, zawen and random thoughts among writers are striking characteristics of modern Chinese literature. When modern Chinese literature was heading for a culture of publishing in journals, “the seemingly most heteronomous forms of cultural production,” it was at the same time submitting to the domination of the heteronomous principle: sales, readership etc. inevitably became major stakes of the field.

The changes in the social and political environment from late 1920s to 1930s brought significant changes to the literary and intellectual fields: in particular it brought about the more intensified heteronomizing of the field, or in other words, the more drastic internalization of the less literary criteria (e.g. social, political) in judging a writer. It is important to note here that the urgency of the social, intellectual and political concerns is highly contingent and each of these general concepts (being varieties of symbolic capital) has different specific factors to define its true meaning in a specific historical context or at a specific moment. After all, many literary works, especially those produced in modern China, have been judged not only as expressions of “literary” and “aesthetic” values, but of approved social, moral and (even) political values. For instance, while being an advocate of vernacular literature was not a favourable contributing factor to a writer's symbolic capital in the late nineteen century, it certainly was in the 1920s. Similarly, if Shanghai of the early 1930s is compared with Beijing's literary field in the early 1920s, being on the leftist side or with revolutionary sympathy was certainly a more positive factor in forming a writer's symbolic capital. All this may sound obvious but it was so often overlooked in judging historical figures and we often fail to historicize values themselves and bring values of a different (often later) period into our consideration of a writer's symbolic capital at an historical moment.

According to Bourdieu's model, the positive autonomous pole of the field is based on symbolic capital and subject only to internal demands while the negative heteronomous pole is based on economic capital. However, the heteronomizing process of the Chinese literary field, or the internalization of “non-literary” criteria, kept intensifying from late 1920s onward. Compared with the “literariness” and “creativity,” social concern and political activism became more and more dominant in the formation of symbolic capital until reaching its extreme during the “Cultural Revolution” when the question of political stand became the foremost and only criterion in judging literary works.

In her book Contingencies of Value, which is heavily indebted to Bourdieu, Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues that “all value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things but, rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting variable.”Literary value itself, Smith claims, is radically relative and constantly variable. Dismissing the concept of objective value as vacuous, Smith quickly points out that the terms of “contingent,” and “relative,” are not equivalent to “subjective,” as the former terms indicate a changing function of multiple variables while the latter means “personally whimsical, locked into the consciousness of individual subjects and/or without interest or value for other people.”Smith believes that concepts such as “intrinsic,” “objective,” “absolute,” “universal,” and “transcendent” are dubious and have obscured the dynamics of value.What is commonly referred to as “the test of time” is not, as the figure implies, an impersonal and impartial mechanism; the cultural institutions through which it operates (schools, libraries, theatres, museums, publishing and printing houses, editorial boards, prize-awarding commissions, state censors, and so forth) are, of course, all managed by persons (who, by definition, are those with cultural power and commonly other forms of power as well); and, since the texts that are selected and preserved by “time” will always tend to be those which “fit” (and, indeed, have often been designed to fit) their characteristic needs, interests, resources, and purposes, that testing mechanism has its own built-in partialities accumulated in and thus intensified by time.

The concept of “value,” or more specifically, “the literary value” in Smith's discussion, is very close to “symbolic capital” in Bourdieu model and her analysis into its contingencies and historical situatedness is a helpful insight into the theoretical understanding of the particularity of the Chinese literary field and of Lu Xun's positions in it. This perspective needs not to be limited to “text” only, which was the focus of Smith's analysis. In fact, it would be useful to the understanding of “writers” themselves as well. If we take both Lu Xun's literary works and the author himself as the products of the literary field, then their “value,” or “symbolic capital,” is contingent, relative and variable, rather than constant, absolute and unchanging. It is true that Lu Xun's name has carried a huge amount of symbolic capital in China for the past half century (although even for these more recent decades the exact situation is also fluid and has varied from time to time). The author's reputation and public image in late 1910s and 1920s’ Beijing is a matter subject to historical analysis of the variables both of his symbolic capital and of the constituents of the symbolic capital itself. With this in mind, let me repeat some of the questions asked earlier: has Lu Xun always been as “great” as he is taken to be? Have his works always been as highly regarded as they are? In light of Smith's views, and indeed to the spirit of Bourdieu's theory of the literary field, the answers should not be readily positive. Rather the answers will depend on an investigation into, among others, the “contingent values” of a given historical time.

Hockx, based on his modified “three principled” field, argues that “the most acclaimed literary producers are those who seemingly effortlessly combine ‘literary excellence’ with political efficacy and economic success, while never giving the impression that they sacrificed the first principle for the other two, or the second for the third.” He singled Lu Xun out as “the best example” of such achievement and asserted that “perhaps exactly for these reasons,” the author is also “considered to be modern China's finest.”Putting aside the “third” principle debate discussed above, Hockx's formulation takes for granted two things. One is that Lu Xun never, at least by impression, sacrificed “literary” value to gain economic or political success; the other is that Lu Xun has always been considered to be “modern China's finest.”

In contrast to his emphasis on and impressive application of an historical approach into other areas of his research, which rightly alerts us not to take any canon or mainstream view for granted, Hockx's readiness to endorse the canonical status of Lu Xun is not only striking but representative of the general mood and scholarship in modern Chinese literature. It is indeed a fact that Lu Xun has long been regarded as “the greatest of twentieth-century Chinese writers” simply by “common consent,”but is it true that this “common consent” was formed as early as almost a century ago, in 1918? What was the historical status of the author in the earlier period of his literary career? How different was it from his later years in Shanghai and from the following decades since his death? These are the chiselling-in questions of my research and as the rest of the book would show, my investigation into the earlier period of the author's literary career would strongly suggest that this “consent” was formed much later than has been commonly argued so far.

Lu Xun, who seemed to have harvested both symbolic and economic capital in the last decade of his life, did not defy the basic law of the field. In the relatively more autonomous field in the first half of 1920s, the constituent elements that went into the forming of symbolic capital were relatively more literary, cultural, intellectual, educational and social, while politics, especially party politics was held in contempt in the literary and intellectual circle. More importantly, the most heteronomous element of all, that of “economic standing,” or money, did not play a prominent role in an agent's identity as a writer: up to mid-1920s, none of the May Fourth writers, Lu Xun included, depended on their writings for a living. Lu Xun's symbolic capital was low during this period. Not only that his literary works were not as highly recognised as we later thought, but also that the recognition of his cultural and intellectual contributions (or the constituent elements of symbolic capital) was not as overwhelming as we believed either. To put it simply: during the May Fourth period (1917-1925),Lu Xun did not have as much symbolic capital as he has been generally endowed so far and he was recognised much later in the field.

As Randal Johnson rightly notes, Bourdieu's theory “necessarily” allows different levels of analysis that explains different aspects of literary and cultural practices, “ranging from the relationship between the cultural field and the broader field of power to the strategies, trajectories and works of individual agents.”It is true that in order to gain a full understanding of the literary field, all levels of analysis, each composed of multiple components, should be taken into consideration. However, it is neither necessary nor possible to carry out such an analysis of the modern Chinese literary field in the limited scope of this book. The focus and basic objective of this study is to examine Lu Xun's public image and reputation in the earlier period of his literary career.

My introduction here of Bourdieu's idea of the literary field is neither to endorse his theory in totality nor to commit myself to a rigid application of his framework throughout the study. Rather, inspired by and interested in Bourdieu's emphasis of “the relational” and “the historical” sides of the literary field, I take it as a useful “method” and carry out my historical investigation into Lu Xun's interactions with many of his contemporaries such as his brother, colleagues, students and “disciples,” his “rivals,” editors and publishers. Compared with the (internal) formalist or the (external) Marxist sociological readings, this idea of the field opens new perspectives on the study of Lu Xun (and indeed for that matter on many other aspects of modern Chinese literature). Although general observations are made on broader issues concerning the field, this book is not primarily a theorization of the Chinese literary field. Rather, it is intended to make very specific arguments about Lu Xun, the subject of this study, and the “corner stone” of modern Chinese literary historiography.

There have been significant changes in the study of modern Chinese literature over the past couple of decades, a “changing paradigm” or “paradigm shift” as some scholars call it. One of the most important consequences of this shift is, in the words of Michel Hockx, “the realization that much valuable literary writing of the period had been marginalized by a canon of mainly politically progressive writing,” which has in turn “led both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars to question the programmatic nature of the literary views associated with that canon.” Hockx rightly points out that what is in urgent need is more of a “proper evaluation” of modern literature rather than a “re-evaluation” as many believed. Literary histories that are written with highly political and ideological preoccupations could seldom give a true picture of historical events and moments. Much inspiring work has been done in recent years by scholars who have emphasised an historical perspective and cautioned against taking any kind of canon or mainstream for granted.

While Jaroslav 1957 article “Subjectivism and individualism in modern Chinese literature” is generally regarded as the pioneer of “a new approach to the relations between modern and premodern Chinese literary conventions,” Patrick Hanan's book The Chinese Vernacular Story (1981) is thought to be among the earliest to have challenged “the antagonistic dichotomy between the classical and vernacular Chinese discourses held by the May Fourth practitioners of literature.”The rethinking of the validity of May Fourth canons “from thematics to stylistics, from authorial intention to ideological concerns” also began in early 1990s, notably by scholars such as Marston Anderson and David Wang.A number of more recent works, such as those by Prasenjit Duara, Wang Hui, Lydia Liu and Joan Judge, have probed “the discrepancies between received views concerning the May Fourth era and actual results” and questioned “the movement's claims to be the voice of enlightenment, progress, science, nation, feminism, and the like.”Meanwhile, along with critical scrutiny of the perception that Chinese literary modernity represents a radical rupture with tradition, scholars have been paying more attention to alternative, counter, lost or repressed voices of Chinese modernity that radically defied the mainstream May Fourth narrative— Daruvala's Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity is but one inspiring example of this effort, Gimpel's work on the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao 小说月报 (The Short Story Magazine) is another.

In this exciting scene, one could not help but notice one curious phenomenon: the “ignoring” of Lu Xun, the so-called “first and foremost” modern writer and the “paradigmatic May Fourth intellectual.” Of course, when it comes to modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun can hardly be ignored. What I mean is that neither a “re-evaluation” nor a “proper” one has been attempted on this author, despite the widespread acknowledgement that both his works and his image have been highly manipulated. It is true that some scholars did give inspiring and revisionist views on some of Lu Xun's works but only as an example for a wider argument, such as Lydia Liu in her book Translingual Practice. A couple more recent research articles on Lu Xun's image and the reception of the author's works have also attracted some attention.But, it is still held by eminent scholars that Lu Xun's historical status and his “position as the most perceptive, innovative and challenging figure in modern Chinese literature remains undisputed.”David Pollard, in his recent biography of Lu Xun, claimed that his book “tried to strike a balance, offering neither a flattering view, nor in reaction an unduly negative one.”However, we still find him talking of the author as a figure that “answered the call of the New Culture movement in 1918, and emerged to become the most prominent of China's dissident intellectuals.” “His personal importance was that he contributed as much as an unempowered individual could to the direction his country took.”

Compared with the “importance” of Lu Xun, such little attempt and interest in a “proper” or “re-evaluation” of the author with the significantly changed perspectives and methodologies in the scholarship is strikingly curious. While the power and legitimacy of the historiographical “May Fourth paradigm” have been vigorously challenged, questioning voices of this “paradigmatic figure” of the May Fourth have been largely absent. Researchers into modern Chinese literature conveniently use Lu Xun as the “old paradigm,” against which they carry out their alternative readings on areas of their own interest. But the question is: how real was this “paradigm” itself? Since when did this “paradigm” come into being? Were the year 1918 and the short story “Diary of a madman” as significant in forming Lu Xun's status as we think?

As Daruvala has demonstrated in her book, the “teleological narratives” applied to Chinese literary history have kept Zhou Zuoren's works from being properly understood.I wonder if these narratives have not done similar things to Lu Xun and his works, albeit with opposite effect. Is Lu Xun's status as “the paradigmatic May Fourth intellectual” and the voice of the “dominant May Fourth discourse” a justifiable historical situation,or rather, a much later formation and appropriation? Could we be quite mistaken or misled about the historical status of Lu Xun and therefore the intellectual and literary scene in the 1920s Beijing? What was really dominant and what were the alternatives during the May Fourth period and soon after?

A more thorough historical examination into this “paradigm” itself is both significant and intriguing. Neither the assertion that “Lu Xun is untouchable” nor the argument that “an excessive amount of research is being done on him inside China” can convincingly explain the absence of such an attempt. I believe that without a “proper” evaluation of Lu Xun, we are still taking too much “for granted” in the study of modern Chinese literature. By exploring a large quantity of historical material, my work goes back to the 1920s Beijing, where Lu Xun earned his early fame, and looks closely into the author's historical influence. It aims to provide the basis for a “proper” evaluation of Lu Xun and of the development of Chinese literature in the early twentieth century, as well as a case study in the interplay between literary and non-literary factors in the forming of a writer's reputation and the wider effects of such a reputation on the literary field.

Given the complexity and magnitude of “Lu Xun studies,” my undertaking is only a small step inspired and prompted by the recent research theories and methodologies, notably the “sociological approach” based on Bourdieu's theories of the literary field and pioneered by Michel Hockx in its application to the study of modern Chinese literature. According to Hockx, the sociological approach to literature differs from “most other approaches both in aim and in method” and it rarely takes as its ultimate aim “to make any contribution to the analysis of the text as such.” Neither is it to be understood as “those branches of the sociology of literature that take the literary text as point of departure and use it to obtain information about social reality.”The sociological approach does not only require attempts to maintain distance from one's topic. It also requires one to be, initially, as broad-minded as possible about the question of what might and what might not belong to the institution of literature in a given place and time. After all, even if there appears to be almost total consensus within a given literary community that a certain set of works is more literary than another, this consensus is still arrived at by comparison. As soon as canons are handed down, the other types of writing that the canonical works were supposed to differ from are often forgotten, leading eventually to a distortion of the historical perspective.

Although most are related to specific historical incidents or figures, Lu Xun's works are notorious for their obscure language, which, out of their historical context, would leave the readers at a loss as to what he was referring to or hinting at. The reading of Lu Xun's works through Lu Xun quanji (LXQJ, Complete Works of Lu Xun), which is the normative source for researching him, consigns the introduction and interpretation of historical background entirely to the annotations. Despite their length (out of the eighteen volumes of LXQJ, annotations themselves take up more than half), these notes often fail to provide a balanced account of the context. Given their place and purpose in a monumental complete edition, it is not surprising that these annotations, especially those illustrating Lu Xun's (rival) contemporaries, are so often one-sided and quote the contemporary authors out of context, not to mention at times introducing twists and fabrications.It is only fair to see the arguments from all sides in their historical context; only in this way can we reach a just judgement of Lu Xun and his works, of other writers of his time, and of a more authentic understanding of the literary, intellectual and cultural scenes at the time.

A unique characteristic of modern Chinese literature is the crucial role played by literary journals and related societies in enabling writers to carry out their literary activities; as a renowned scholar noted, “in modern China, the impact of a forceful literary journal is more powerful and more lasting than a university.”A powerful way of seeing the historical context of Lu Xun, and indeed of the literary scene in the early twentieth-century, is to examine writers’ works against the backcloth of the literary journals and newspaper supplements where they originally appeared before being re-published in collections. Almost all of Lu Xun's works made their first appearance in either journals or newspaper supplements. In fact, the same goes for almost all the writers in modern Chinese literary history.

It is true that Lu Xun in his lifetime re-published many of his own works in collected form. Collections of works themselves could of course form “the artistic and thematic unit,” in the context of which a meaningful interpretation could be carried out,as indeed the vast majority of Lu Xun studies have been done. However, the journals in which the individual works first appeared are the more original and authentic context and a reading of them in such a context, as I shall show in the following chapters of this study, is extremely rewarding, especially when taking into consideration, following Hockx, the “horizontal” publications by other authors in the same space and time.

The important role of literary journals can hardly be over-emphasised in the “sociological approach” to literature, given their characteristics such as historicity and immediacy and their dominance on the literary scene of modern China. In Hockx's words, they occupied “a much more central place in the structure of the literary field than [they do] in the West” and they were “the essential, dominant medium of literary production” in modern China, with almost every single work of every writer being first published in journals or newspaper supplements before it came out in book form.Despite their different focus, researches done recently in a “sociological” direction are mostly concerned with a certain journal or group. While fully acknowledging the inspiration these works have offered me, I attempt in this study to take individual writers and their publications as my focus, with the journals and supplements as the backcloth.

2. Fame and Fortune

In the literary field, the positive autonomous principle is based on symbolic capital and subject only to internal demands while the negative heteronomous principle is subject to the demands of economic capital. Between these two poles are spectrums of literary practice that combine these two principles of hierarchization to various degrees. If symbolic capital indicates a writer's fame and reputation and economic capital that of financial and commercial success, it is then against the very logic of the field for a writer to harvest both capitals at the same time to an excessive degree. However, these two principles, especially that of autonomy, are by no means universal and are contingent on the specific context and historical moment of analysis. After all, struggles for the legitimate definition of literature and literary practice constitute the dynamic of change in the literary field.

By conventional understanding, and as asserted by Hockx, Lu Xun seems to have defied this very logic of the field. The argument of this thesis is that in actual fact, he did not. Lu Xun might seem to have harvested both at some stage, but only as a result of a highly heteronomized autonomous principle of the field. Between late 1910s and early 1920s, when the autonomous elements of literary and artistic values were more dominant (and social, cultural, educational were in play too), Lu Xun produced some of his most “literary” and “creative” works. If, and I try to demonstrate in this study it is the case, his works were not as immediately and highly recognised by the field as we thought, the socially, culturally and politically rather inactive Lu Xun could not have gained much symbolic capital. From the mid-1920s to the 1930s, together with the intensified commercialization of the field, social and political values began to play an increasingly important part in forming an author's symbolic capital. By editing journals of his own and for other newspaper supplements, through a drastic increase in the number of writings he produced for the periodicals, and with a style and content that were often polemical, provocative and sometimes controversial and political, Lu Xun's social, cultural, intellectual and political varieties of capital increased considerably from mid-1920s onwards and especially sharply when he was in Shanghai.

As can be seen from my elaboration so far, my reading of Lu Xun is more “sociological” and “historical” than a “literary” one. This is not to imply that I would back away from a judgement of the author's “creative” or “literary” contributions, which are considered by many to be what makes the author famous in the first place. Rather I tackle this issue with a different method from an internal appreciation of the texts themselves and illustrate the interplay between literary and non-literary factors in forming a writer's reputation. Adjectives such as “famous,” “prominent,” or “preeminent,” mean by their very definition that the subject they modify is something or someone that is well-known, has caused excited interest, or drew great public attention (and these words are highly “contingent” as well). I believe, in the light of the historical evidence, that Lu Xun remained quite an obscure figure during the May Fourth period, contrary to the common perception that he “took the new literary scene by storm” and was “catapulted” into “nationwide prominence as a writer and a leader of ‘New Literature’” in 1918, with the publication of his short story “Diary of a madman” or that by 1920, his “reputation as a writer was firmly established.”

Based on the observation that only a handful of articles were written on Lu Xun between 1918 and 1923, Eva Shan Chou found that far from an immediate success, Lu Xun's early stories were not widely recognised as important until several years later. Despite the fact that Lu Xun had been publishing for more than five years by 1923, the earliest “contemporary” views on Lu Xun were mostly from 1923 or 1924. “Time was required to learn to read Lu Xun” was Chou's conclusion.Chou suggested that the silence on Lu Xun “ended” in 1923 with the publication of the author's fiction collection Nahan (Outcry), but her finding that “in the beginning, the numbers were still small: three reviews were published in 1923 and a dozen or so in 1924” in effect contradicts such an assertion.Chou's study, thought provoking as it is, did not intend to question Lu Xun's “pre-eminent” historical role for China's new literature. Her more recent study on Lu Xun, however, actually shows her willingness to endorse it. In her 2005 article on the “literary evidence of the continuities from Zhou Shuren to Lu Xun,” she asserted:Almost from the first, the caustic tone and electrifying images of his essays and stories marked him as the most striking voice of the new iconoclasm and made him an influential force in the social and moral criticism that the New Literature took as its mission. Within a few short years, he had assumed a leading position in the emerging literary world, a pre-eminence that he is still accorded today.

I would argue that neither “Diary of a madman” nor Nahan had “catapulted” Lu Xun into “pre-eminence” or “nationwide prominence.” Even with the appearance of Nahan published by Xinchao she 新潮社 (New Tides Society)in August 1923, attention to Lu Xun was still scarce. Nothing at all was written on the book (or indeed on Lu Xun) in Beijing's press in that year, and all the three review articles mentioned by Chou were published in certain newspaper supplements in Shanghai, one being Mao Dun's 茅盾(1896-1981) “Reading Nahan.”Even in 1924, while Shanghai media produced a couple more comments on Nahan (one by Cheng Fangwu 成仿吾 (1897-1984)), the Beijing literary world remained indifferent to Lu Xun and his book, with the only exception of a short review in Chenbao 晨报(Morning Post) supplement written by a young student Feng Wenbing (Fei Ming) 冯文炳 (废名) (1901-1967).

What contributed significantly to the public image of Lu Xun, or to earning him the “nationwide prominence” was not marked by any appearance of his literary works but by the founding of several literary journals and newspaper supplements between late 1924 and early 1925 such as Yusi 语丝 (Threads of Talk) (founded November 1924), Jingbao 京报(Beijing Post) supplement (founded December 1924), and Mangyuan 莽原 (The Wildness) (founded April 1925). Before I elaborate on my arguments in the following chapters, it would be helpful to first look at what I call “Lu Xun publications,” i.e. both Lu Xun's own publications records and publications on Lu Xun written by others.A combined reading of both is a direct indicator of how “famous” Lu Xun was in the field. Following this is a section on the sources and changing situations of Lu Xun's financial income both in his Beijing and Shanghai years and the statistics would help demonstrate the ultimate incompatibility between “literary excellence,” “political efficacy,” and “economic success.”

Lu Xun Publications

Lu Xun's earliest works known so far were three articles published in 1903 in Zhejiang chao 浙江潮 (Zhejiang Tides), a journal set up in Tokyo. Between 1907 and 1912, he published altogether about a dozen pieces in the Tokyo based journal Henan 河南 and a local daily newspaper in Shaoxing. The year 1913 saw the birth of the author's first work of fiction titled “Huaijiu” (Nostalgia). All of these works were written in literary Chinese (wenyan) and published under pennames. After five years of total silence, Lu Xun's literary inspirations burst out in 1918 and eleven pieces of his work appeared in five issues of a single journal—the New Youth: one work of fiction, five poems and five short items of random thoughts. However, while all the rest were published under the penname Tang Si 唐俟, the name “Lu Xun” made debut as the author of the short story “Diary of a madman.”

In 1919 Lu Xun continued his contribution of random thoughts and short essays to New Youth and a couple of other newspapers or journals, but consistently used pen names other than “Lu Xun,” which was adopted only for four short stories published this year. The year 1920 only saw two other short stories, both of which used the name “Lu Xun.” In May 1921 the author published his last piece in New Youth with the short story “Guxiang” (Hometown), again using the name “Lu Xun,” while the Chenbao supplement became the place where Lu Xun published for the rest of the year: five zawen, all under the name Feng Sheng 风声; and from December to February the next year, the supplement published his short story “A Q zhengzhuan” (The true story of Ah Q), under the pen name Ba Ren 巴人. It is worth noting that the author consistently used “Lu Xun” for all his short stories but adopted other pennames for almost all his non-fiction publications in New Youth. It is safe to conclude that even for the general readers of New Youth, the name “Lu Xun” was more likely to be associated with “a short stories writer.”

In 1922, still in the Chenbao supplement, Lu Xun published altogether ten pieces of zawen, mostly under the names of either Feng Sheng or Mou Shengzhe某生者, only twice using “Lu Xun.” He also wrote five more pieces of fiction during this year, all under the name Lu Xun. In 1923 Lu Xun hardly published anything, with only one story “Xingfu de jiating” (Happy family) in Funü zazhi 妇女杂志 (Women's Journal) and his preface to Nahan (and two other small items) in Chenbao supplement. In August and December of this year, however, two of his book collections, Nahan and Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction) were published by New Tides society, with the latter being a lecture series given at Peking University (Beida).

In 1924 before Yusi was launched (in November), Lu Xun published about a dozen items in Chenbao supplement using various pennames. Between late 1924 and 1925, however, Lu Xun's publications in Yusi (founded November 1924), Jingbao supplement (December 1924) and Mangyuan (April 1925) reached over one hundred pieces, more than the total combination of the previous two decades. It is thus not surprising that Gao Changhong 高长虹 (1898-1954), when he arrived in Beijing in autumn 1924, should take “Lu Xun” as just a penname of Zhou Jianren 周建人 (1888-1984), who happened to be Lu Xun's third brother.As Gao was by no means ignorant about the world of new literature at that time, with dozens of his works published in places such as Xiaoshuo yuebao, Chenbao supplement and Funü zazhi, Gao's impression that Lu Xun was a far less famous name than his second brother Zhou Zuoren, at least up to the time when Yusi was founded, was probably a more credible description of the historical situation than thought hitherto.

The launching of journals and supplements themselves did not contribute directly to the public knowledge of Lu Xun's name. It was the high-profile arguments and quarrels between him (always under the name “Lu Xun”) and some of his contemporaries carried in these periodicals in and after 1925 that considerably publicised his name, but not necessarily in a positive light. Up to at least 1924, Lu Xun may well have been recognised as a good short story writer but there was no evidence of him being as “sensational” as literary history told us, or indeed any evidence of his works causing any kind of public “stir” or interest. In other words, Lu Xun's symbolic capital up till now, which was mostly “literary,” was not as rich as generally perceived. The open arguments and quarrels carried in journals and newspapers between 1925 and 1926 contributed to his “social and cultural” capital considerably and he was a much better-known name by the time he left Beijing. After he settled down in Shanghai in 1927, where he turned increasingly to the left and published numerous highly political polemics in such popular newspaper as Shenbao 申报 (Shanghai Post), Lu Xun's symbolic capital rose significantly as a result of the increase of his political capital, which was fast internalized as a necessary element in “literary” works. The Lu Xun we know today as China's most famous modern writer whose literary achievement was highly celebrated was much the result of both political and social appropriations later on, especially after the author's death.

In contrast to the pitiful attention paid to Lu Xun and his works before 1925, a sharp increase in the number of articles related to him in that year marked the beginning of the author's journey to “nationwide prominence.” While altogether less than 30 items with any mention of Lu Xun or his works were in the public domain from 1903 to 1924, the number increased to 25 in 1925 alone, including a portrayal of Lu Xun, letters to him, or discussions of his fiction or writing styles, all of which appeared in Beijing in either Jingbao supplement, Yusi, Mangyuan, or in the “rival” journal Xiandai pinglun 现代评论 (Contemporary Review) and Chenbao supplement. In 1926, the number increased sharply to 56, with a considerable amount resulting from his conflict with Gao Changhong. The first book specifically dedicated to the “study” of Lu Xun, Guanyu Lu Xun jiqi zhuzuo (About Lu Xun and His Works) edited by Tai Jingnong 台静农 (1903-1990), was also published this year.

Lu Xun left Beijing in August 1926 and after some brief time in Xiamen (Amoy) and Guangzhou (Canton), he settled down in Shanghai in October 1927. The three years between 1927 and 1929 saw altogether nearly one hundred “Lu Xun related” articles appearing in various periodicals in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.But a dramatic rise of interest was seen in October 1936 after the author's death, with nearly 300 items of memoirs, obituaries and news reports dedicated to him within just three months. However, all these are only a fraction compared with the many thousands of monographs and articles interpreting Lu Xun in the subsequent decades.

The politicization and institutionalization of modern historiography played an especially crucial role in the canonization of Lu Xun, but an investigation into the historiography itself is beyond the scope of this study. However, it is helpful to note that literary historiography as a scholarly subject in China, as Zhang Yingjin has pointed out, did not see its first book until 1910, and gradually attracted academic attention in the following decades, with hundreds of books published between 1910 and 1980. While the early period of the history of modern Chinese literature was by and large the product of individual undertakings, where various theories and practices competed with each other, histories of the later phase (from 1950 on) were characterized by collective collaboration, textbook orientation, political correctness and canon formation.

Lu Xun's Income

In accordance with the rise of Lu Xun's social “fame” went the increase of his financial “success.” Although seldom looked into, Lu Xun's changing economic situation offers some fascinating insight into the understanding of both the commercialization of the literary field and the professionalization of the writer in the 1920s China, and of course into Lu Xun's own literary career. Lu Xun's day-to-day diaries, which were notoriously dull and uninformative, recorded, among other things, his income and spending from 1920 until the very last month of his life in October 1936 (with 1922 missing). They stand as the best primary source for looking into this matter and some recently published research has also made the jobless laborious.

Lu Xun remarked in late 1923 in his by-now-widely read article (a speech actually) “Nala zouhou zenyang” (What happened after Nora left home) that “dreams are good; otherwise, money is essential,” “the word ‘money’ sounds vulgar and may be laughed at by the noble gentlemen,” but “money, —or to put it elegantly, finance (jingji), is the most important. Freedom surely cannot be bought with money, but can be sold for it.”Did Lu Xun ever have to compromise his freedom or autonomy for money? If so, how far did he go? Let us first have a brief review of Lu Xun's sources of income over the last 25 years of his life and see how some scholars have tried to account for the unity between Lu Xun's huge fortune and his independence as a writer.

In the 1920s, the monthly income of a professor at Peking University was around three hundred yuan, which was a generous amount and enough to maintain a comfortable lifestyle even for a sizable family. According to the survey conducted by Sidney Gamble, in Beijing in 1926, for schoolteachers, the top salary was eighty yuan a month.At that time, for an average household of four, twenty yuan would be more than enough to cover a month's living expenses (food, rent and transportation) for the whole family. Even for a more affluent family such as Lu Xun's four-person household (mother, wife and servant), the expenses would not have exceeded eighty yuan. The average rent per month for a siheyuan (courtyard with houses on four sides) with eight to ten rooms was around twenty yuan. Lu Xun paid just eight yuan per month to rent his home at Zhuanta Alley and he paid his servant a salary of two to three yuan a month (with free boarding and lodging). A rickshaw ride cost just one jiao (0.1 yuan) and 10 yuan would be enough to have a chartered one for a whole month.

From 1912 to 1926 during his Beijing years, Lu Xun, who served as a full time government official in the Minister of Education, had an average monthly income of around 245 yuan (yinyang, silver dollars). His average income during his time in Xiamen and Guangzhou was roughly 417 yuan (guobi, national currency) per month. During the time in Shanghai between 1927 and 1936, Lu Xun's average income was 697 yuan (guobi / fabi, legal tender first issued in 1935) per month. In other words, Lu Xun's total income from 1912 to 1936 was around 120,000 yuan.How much did Lu Xun's writings contribute to his income over the years? The following is an analysis of the sources of the author's financial income during the different periods of his life and particular attention is paid to the proportion that his writings claimed.

The earliest record of Lu Xun's income derived from his writings was the one hundred yuan paid for the five articles he published between 1907 and 1908 in the journal Henan in Tokyo, at the paying rate of two yuan per thousand words. Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren earned altogether two hundred yuan or so from their collaborated translations done in Japan.From 1918 to 1922, there was no record in his diary of any income from his writings and he probably did not receive much either: starting from 1918, New Youth stopped paying its contributors and between 1918 and 1920 almost all of Lu Xun's works were published in this journal.In 1921 and 1922, Chenbao supplement became the place where Lu Xun got most of his writings published and he must have got paid for them; but these were not his productive years and the income was probably too insignificant to be worth recording.

The year 1923 saw in his diaries the first consistent records of income from his writings: altogether sixty-nine yuan, which accounted for a mere 3% of his total annual income; earnings from his teaching jobs that year took up 6.1% while the rest of it was from his salary in the Ministry of Education. In 1924 his income from writings and royalties was 703.28 yuan, which made up 26.9% of his annual income, while earnings from his teaching jobs accounted for 31.6%. It is worth noting that in this year his total income from writing and part-time teaching (58.5%) actually overtook his proper job pay from the Ministry of Education (41.5%), although income from writings alone made up just a bit over a quarter of the total.In 1925, however, official job pay from the Ministry reclaimed its dominance as the major source of income (58%), while writing (17%) and teaching (25%) earned Lu Xun an extra 475 and 705.5 yuan respectively. This trend continued in 1926 before his departure from Beijing in August: earnings from writings were 27.6% (1,177 yuan), from teaching 9.4% (401.82 yuan) and government salary accounted for 63% of the author's total income.It is clear that during his Beijing years from early 1912 to August 1926, earnings from writing never played a significant role in Lu Xun's financial life. He profited none at all during his New Youth years and only a faction in 1923; for the following couple of years up to the time he left Beijing, the highest annual proportion that writings claimed was just a bit over a quarter.

Lu Xun's decision to leave Beijing, and thus to resign from the Ministry of Education, changed his financial situation significantly. In August 1926, at the recommendation of Lin Yutang林语堂 (1895-1976), Lu Xun went to teach at Xiamen University and became a professor at the Chinese Department. His salary in Xiamen was 400 yuan per month, a considerable increase to his official pay in Beijing. In February 1927, with a further increased salary of 500 yuan, Lu Xun went to Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University in Guangzhou and was made Dean of the Department of Literature.In this year, the amount earned from writings (royalties and editorial fees) was 570 yuan (15.1%) and from teaching 2,500 yuan (66.3%, which is the five months’ salary from Sun Yat-sen University).However, Lu Xun's decision to leave the academic profession and to settle down in Shanghai in autumn 1927 saw even more significant changes in the components of his financial income.

In 1928, the first full year Lu Xun spent in Shanghai, all of his income (5,971 yuan) was virtually generated from his writings and royalties, 55% of which was pay from the Education Academy as its “special copywriter.” The year 1929 saw a huge increase in Lu Xun's income: a staggering 15,382 yuan in total, almost three times as much as the previous year, and except for the 4,200 yuan (for 14 months) from the Education Academy, all the rest or 73% were from his writing and royalties. The amount of income in 1930 was about the same as in 1929, with a total of 15,128 yuan.In 1931, Lu Xun's total income dropped to 8,909 yuan, about half of which was from the Education Academy while the other half was from writing, royalties and editorship. After his employment with the Academy terminated, Lu Xun's total income in 1932 dropped further still to 4,788 yuan, all from earnings related to writing. In 1933, however, the publication of Liangdi shu (Letters Between Two Places, for which Lu Xun was paid over 1,000 yuan) and more importantly, his huge number of publications (see appendix) in the “Ziyoutan” (Free talk) column in Shenbao, saw his income soar to over 10,300 yuan. In both 1934 and 1935, Lu Xun's income was around 5,600 yuan; and in 1936 before his death in October, Lu Xun received 2,575 yuan in total.It is clear that for the last decade of his life in Shanghai, Lu Xun depended entirely on his writings and royalties for living and made an incredibly profitable career as a professional writer, if not a commercial one.

In view of Lu Xun's lucrative financial gains through his writing career, Chen, very interestingly, commented that it firmly secured Lu Xun as a member of the “middle class” and enabled him to maintain his “freedom of thought” (sixiang ziyou) and “independent character” (duli renge) and thus an everlasting role model for all cultural persons (wenhua ren).Chen made the point that May Fourth intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (1879-1942), Li Dazhao 李大钊 (1889-1927) and Lu Xun made up the earliest modern “middle class intellectuals” (zhongchan zhishi jieceng). Chen went on to argue that it was this free economic condition, which he claimed was attached to neither the “political” (guan) nor the “commercial” (shang), that guaranteed their freedom of expression.“Lu Xun's freelance position, which transcends ‘power’ (quan) and ‘money’ (qian), provided a steady financial guarantee for his independent character and freedom of thought,” and made him “clear of political pressures and commercial attachments and strings.” Chen claimed.

This is of course a Marxist attempt (in the context of Marxist analysis of China and its “middle class”) at idealizing Lu Xun and justifying the unity between money and intellectual and artistic freedom. However, in a more striking way than it seems, this line of reasoning bears resemblance to Hockx's argument about Lu Xun's “seemingly effortlessness” in combining “literary excellence,” “political efficacy,” and “economic success.” They both took one thing for granted: that historically, Lu Xun had been recognised by the literary field as highly as they assumed—an assumption this study aims to undermine. As the statistical analysis shows, one crucial factor that contributed to Lu Xun's lucrative financial gain is closely related to the politicization and commercialization of literary activities and is precisely the result of his attachment to the modern print media. To make 1933 one of his most profitable year, for example, Lu Xun apparently made a certain sort of contract with Shenbao by writing for the newspaper about a dozen articles each month (see Appendix). It is no accident that the author's more literary (and by now best-regarded) works were produced for no or very little financial reward in the earlier period of his Beijing years when he did not have to rely on his writings for a living. “Money” or “economics” played a crucial role in shaping the field of the new literature (xin wenxue).

If the above analysis is mostly theoretical and statistical, in the following chapters I carry out my historical investigations into Lu Xun's early literary career in relation to his many contemporaries in the literary field in 1920s Beijing. The structure for the rest of the book is as follows:

Chapter Two begins with a more detailed biographical account of Lu Xun, putting emphasis on his close relationship with his brother Zhou Zuoren up to July 1923. I then re-examine the cause and consequences of the split between the two brothers and demonstrate how the preoccupation of making Lu Xun a great figure has hindered our knowledge not only of the incident itself but of the impact on both brothers as writers. This is followed by a discussion of the founding of Yusi, a literary journal that played a significant part in both brothers’ literary careers. By reading some of Lu Xun's works in relation to other authors’ publications in Yusi, including that of his brother's, I raise questions about the legitimacy and foundations of Lu Xun's major discourses of social critique.

Chapter Three looks into the impact of literary journals and supplements on the 1920s literary field and reconstructs some of Lu Xun's polemical articles in their original “journal-istic” context. The author's works will be read in relation to other “horizontal” publications, which I hope to offer an alternative perspective on the perceptions of some iconic social and intellectual discussions of the time. I wish not only to achieve a more authentic understanding of Lu Xun but also to call for a “proper evaluation” of his so-called “rivals,” many of whom were misunderstood, marginalized or even eliminated later from literary history for their “conflicts” with Lu Xun. I conclude that at least by mid-1920s Lu Xun and the ideas he advocated were not as influential as have been held so far. The deification of Lu Xun that took place over the next decades and the blind worship of the author's personal style and views may have had a more negative and even disastrous effect on the literary and intellectual fields.

Chapter Four is concerned with Gao Changhong, and his cooperation and conflict with Lu Xun. It is usually thought that, if there was influence between the two writers, it must have been from Lu Xun to Gao. I demonstrate that, on the contrary, in view of the chronology and other evidence, Gao's works are likely to have directly influenced Lu Xun in the very aspects of his writing that have been considered to be uniquely experimental. While Lu Xun and his followers made use of journals and newspaper supplements in their attempt to establish him as the leading writer of the time, a major cause of Gao's falling out with his friend was an awareness and dislike of how Lu Xun was letting himself be advertised as an “authority in the thinking world.”

Chapter Five investigates the content and historical context of the arguments between Gao Changhong and the Zhou brothers. I wish to demonstrate that Gao Changhong as an historical figure made significant contributions to the literary and intellectual world. Gao's debates with Lu Xun (and Zhou Zuoren to a lesser degree), and the conflict between the younger Kuangbiao 狂飙(The Tempest) society members and the May Fourth “established” writers had wider intellectual and literary implications. On the level of the field, it is also a perfect illustration of the power struggles between “the consecrated” writers and “the avant-garde.” I go on to consider how, in the context of the turbulent politics of the time, Lu Xun's extraordinary status was formed and cemented while Gao's voice was gradually silenced and his literary endeavours and contributions ignored. This study ends with a brief summary conclusion that recapitulates the major arguments of this dissertation. Despite Lu Xun's poignant depiction of all the many ills of Chinese society, he and more importantly his promoters managed to reinforce some of the worst sides of the intellectual traditions they inherited and they are at least partly responsible for a loss of individual intellectual independence and dignity, spirit and character in twentieth-century China and beyond.

Chapter Two Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren

It is one of the biggest mysteries in modern Chinese literary history that Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, the two most intimate brothers and distinctive figures of China's new literature, should break up so suddenly and completely. Despite all the guesses and some scholars’ attempts to say the last word on this matter, the mystery has remained and even grown with time. The great disparity between the two brothers’ status in contemporary China, one a national hero, the other a traitor, no doubt adds to the difficulty of tackling this issue. The exact truth of the matter may never be known, because all the parties directly concerned remained silent on it in their lifetimes, and, probably, just as they wished and had promised each other, took the truth to their graves. It does not follow, however, that we cannot get nearer to the truth. After all, Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren were no ordinary people but two of the most productive writers in modern history, leaving behind millions of written words for us to decipher, including their day-to-day private diaries that were made available to the public relatively recently.

In this chapter I shall re-examine the relationship between the two brothers and probe the causes for their split and the impact resulting from it; I demonstrate how they collaborated in setting up the journal Yusi after their breakup and how reading Lu Xun's works against the backcloth of the journal can help understand the author and his thought from a fresh angle. I hope the investigation into the relationship of the two brothers will not only give a more authentic understanding of Lu Xun's biographical background but also demonstrate that the preoccupation of making Lu Xun a great figure has hindered our knowledge not only of the split itself but of the impact on both brothers as writers. This will also help highlight the unity and disparity between the two in “fighting” with their literary rivals, an important theme to be covered in the later parts of the book.

1. The Zhou Brothers

Kindred Spirits

Lu Xun's real name was Zhou Shuren, the first child of the Zhou family in Shaoxing. Less than four years his junior, Zhou Zuoren was born in January 1885. A third brother Zhou Jianren was a biologist, a fourth one died at the age of seven and a sister died aged one. The Zhou brothers (by whom I mean Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren) had a normal childhood, receiving a classical education, playing in the garden and being mischievous together.As scholar-gentry in the late Qing period, there were several choices they could make for their future career. Passing the keju (civil service examinations) was still the number one “correct route” (zhenglu) to take. The alternatives were to become a shushi (private tutor), yishi (medical doctor), shiye (legal assistant) or to go into business, while the last, was to go to a “new-style” school (xuetang), regarded as a “crooked route” (wailu) even though it provided free education with food subsidies. Between 1898 and 1899, both Lu Xun and Zhou attempted the preliminary parts of the civil service examinations, but Lu Xun abandoned them in the end and decided to go to a new-style mining school in Nanjing.

During the time his elder brother was in Nanjing, Zhou Zuoren, according to his memoirs, became aimless and even mingled with local yobs in the street, and “almost became a little hooligan.” He did not enjoy the routine chores of adding up bills and calculating the change for buying groceries or the unreasonably severe discipline of his grandfather. He wanted to escape somewhere but wanted to “discuss this with elder brother” first. Zhou wrote to Lu Xun asking for advice and support, and with Lu Xun's help succeeded in securing a place in Jiangnan Naval School in the same city with Lu Xun. Zhou arrived in Nanjing in autumn 1901, two years after Lu Xun.By then Lu Xun was no longer in the Naval School, which he had entered in 1898 but left for the Mining School after only half a year. Lu Xun found the Mining School disappointing too. Though described as a “new-style” school, it was neither inspiring nor interesting. Zhou recalled that once in the Chinese class, students were asked by the school administrators to write an article on (George) Washington. Their Chinese teacher, however, anxiously asked the students “What is this washington?” So students began to devour new books on their own. Tianyanlun (Evolution and Ethics) translated by Yan Fu 严复 (1854-1921) and published in 1898 was among the most popular.

Zhou too was dissatisfied with the poor teaching at the school, and was living a rather idle student's life during the first few months. One day in February 1902, however, “elder brother suddenly arrived, bringing with him a copy of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, which was translated very well. (We) together read Subao 苏报(Jiangsu Post) and others, and did not go to bed until midnight.”The two brothers thus began to devour all sorts of new books. Often the elder introduced or sent good books to the younger: Adam Smith's On Wealth, Liang Qichao's 梁启超(1873-1929) Xinmin shuo (On the New Citizen), Xin xiaoshuo (New Fiction), and the progressive newspaper Xinmin bao新民报(New Citizen Post) etc. It is not surprising that Zhou refused to comply when required by his family to carry on with the civil service examinations, just as Lu Xun had done a couple of years earlier.

During his five years’ study in Nanjing, Zhou learned English (while Lu Xun learned German), read widely all sorts of books: western humanism, revolutionary thought, nihilism, etc., all “mixed up together.” He wrote classical poems and even tried his hand at creative writing, albeit with a considerable amount of “borrowing” from foreign sources. Following his brother's footsteps, Zhou won a government scholarship to Japan upon graduation, and in June 1906, aged 21, arrived in Tokyo with Lu Xun, who had returned to Shaoxing briefly to get married at his mother's instigation. Lu Xun first came to Tokyo in 1902 but left for Sendai in 1904 to study medicine, only to give it up again two years later to return to Tokyo at the age of 25. Zhou Zuoren recalled that his student life in Tokyo was “most pleasant,” not only thanks to the fact that his elder brother Lu Xun took care of “almost all the necessary dealings with troublesome mundane matters” and Zhou “never needed to worry,” but also because he fell in love with the subtle Japanese culture immediately and always considered Tokyo his “second home-town.”

Both brothers frequented their local bookstores and took full advantage of the diverse and up-to-date publications available in Japan. Lu Xun was attracted to authors such as Darwin, E. Haechel, G. Cuvier, Nietzsche and the “Mara poets” such as Byron, Shelley, Pushkin, Mickiewicz and Pet?fi. Between 1907 and 1908, he wrote (in literary language of course) on subjects like “Ren zhi lishi” (History of man), “Kexue shijiao pian” (History of science), “Wenhua pianzhilun” (On cultural excessiveness), and “Moluo shilishuo” (On Mara poets), all published in Henan, a journal set up by some Chinese students in Tokyo. Zhou Zuoren on the other hand was much attracted to J. G. Frazer, Andrew Lang, Havelock Ellis, Westermarck, Gilbert White and Hartland. Zhou was particularly interested in Ellis, and named Psychology of Sex as his “book of enlightenment.”

Though each had a different focus, the two brothers’ common interest in literature and their determination to translate western literature and get published are unquestionable. At the initiative of Lu Xun, in 1906 they and their friend Xu Shoushang 许寿裳 (1883-1948) worked passionately towards launching their own literary journal Xinsheng 新生 (New Life) (a fourth member Yuan Wensou袁文薮(1873-1934?) soon dropped out and went to study in England). But for lack of funding, the journal never got off the ground. Lu Xun was frustrated at this failure. Recalling this turn of events seventeen years later, he said at that time he had felt as if he were “put in the middle of a vast wasteland, not knowing what to do,” and he was seized with a deep sense of failure and loneliness.Zhou Zuoren's company and unfailing support was no doubt a great source of comfort to Lu Xun. The two started to translate literary works, mainly fiction. “In the cold and damp winter” and in their shabby empty room, Zhou was responsible for drafting while Lu Xun did the revising and polishing. They “felt neither tired nor cold but laughed, chatted and discussed the stories with great interest.” Although sometimes their translations were turned down by the publishers, they frequently got their works accepted and actually earned a substantial amount of money.

The highlight of the two brothers’ literary cooperation was the publication of the two-volume, Yuwai xiaoshuoji (Collected Fiction from Other Lands) in 1909, with 37 translated stories included. The sales, however, were rather pitiful: a mere 20 copies or so sold in each place in Tokyo and Shanghai. Meanwhile, Zhou and Lu Xun also wrote articles on the more urgent topics of the time for journals such as Henan, Zhejiang chao and Tianyi bao 天义报, the last of which was one of the earliest Chinese periodicals devoted to disseminating anarchism. The two brothers’ relationship was such that sometimes they published under the other's name or shared the same pen name.

With the consent and blessing of Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, at the age of 24, married a Japanese woman Hata Nobuko 羽太信子 (1887-1962) in August 1909. Soon after this, Lu Xun returned to China for financial reasons. Lu Xun then took up in succession several teaching posts at schools and colleges in both Hangzhou and Shaoxing. After the revolution broke out in 1911 and the Qing imperial reign in China ended, Lu Xun got a job in early 1912 in the new Republican government's Ministry of Education, whose first Minster was Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868-1940), a man from the same town as Lu Xun. Lu Xun served in Nanjing briefly and was soon transferred to Beijing, where he remained until 1926. Zhou returned to China with his wife in the autumn of 1911. Despite the on-going revolution, Zhou preferred to stay at home in Shaoxing and did not even venture out much.

Between 1912 and 1917, Zhou worked first as a school inspector, then director of the Shaoxing Educational Association, and later as an English teacher. Meanwhile, he helped Lu Xun in copying and doing research on Guxiaoshuo gouchen (Annotated Compilation of Ancient Fiction) and Guijijun gushu zaji (Miscellaneous Collection of Ancient Books of Guiji) and published in local newspapers a number of translations and essays introducing foreign literature. In March 1917, Zhou was invited by Cai Yuanpei, who was then the innovative President of Peking University, to teach English and Greek literature there. Zhou arrived in Beijing on 1 April 1917 and lived with Lu Xun in the Shaoxing hostel (huiguan). He was employed as Professor of Humanities, and started working there straight away. At that time, with the scholars and students of Beida at the centre, the cultural and intellectual reform later known as the New Culture movement was taking place. Both Zhou and Lu Xun joined in some of the debates, and published several articles in the radical journal New Youth. But they were never activists or at the forefront.

In August 1919, the Zhou family sold their property in Shaoxing and bought a large house with three sets of rooms, located on Badaowan Alley (hutong) in the northwest of Beijing.By the end of the same year, the whole family were reunited at eleven Badaowan: their mother Lu Rui 鲁瑞 (1857-1943), Lu Xun's wife Zhu An 朱安 (1878-1947), Zhou's wife Hata Nobuko and their children, and their third brother Zhou Jianren's family, and set up a joint household.Both Lu Xun and Zhou had substantial incomes. In addition to their basic jobs, both brothers later took up part-time teaching posts at other academic institutions, and their writing careers were also developing, with constant publications, which gradually earned both of them reputation as leading writers and intellectuals in the New Culture movement.

The Split

In 1923, however, these two intimate and mutually supportive brothers suddenly split up. Lu Xun moved out of Badaowan and the two never apparently had any contact thereafter. The incident happened in mid-July and it is helpful to first look at Lu Xun's diaries around that date (in the diary Zhou was mostly referred to as Erdi, i.e. second younger brother):26 June: …in the morning went to have a tooth pulled out. Then went to Lumicang to visit Fengju…Erdi already there, so had meal together and talked until late in the afternoon…29 June: ...had lunch with Li Xiaofeng, Sun Fuyuan and Erdi at the canteen [at Peking University]…3 July: …together with Erdi, we went to Dongan market, then to the bookstore at Dongjiao minxiang, then to the Yamamoto photograph studio…13 July: Clear. Bath at night.14 July: ...from tonight on changed to eating in my own room, prepared a dish myself, this is worth noting down.19 July: …Qimeng [Zhou] came with a letter in the morning, later [I] invited him to come in for a talk, yet he wouldn’t come…26 July: …went in the morning to look at the house at Zhuanta hutong, put books into my suitcase in the afternoon.31 July: …packing up luggage in the afternoon.2 August: Rain, clear afternoon. Moved to 61 Zhuanta hutong with my wife (xiefu qianju).

In Zhou Zuoren's diaries, we read “15 July…Hata sick and Ikegami (family doctor) came to see her.” “16 July…Ikegami came to see her tonight…” “17 July…Ikegami came to see her in the morning…” and there is noticeably a line of blank space in that day's record (it is a photo-offset copy). More than four decades later Zhou admitted that it was because he “cut off about ten words” with scissors that he had originally written in that day's entry. The next day he composed a letter, and on the morning of 19 July, he carried the letter to Lu Xun in person. “2 August…in the afternoon the L couple moved to Zhuanta hutong…”

From the two's diary records, we know that something must have happened on 13 or 14 July 1923, Zhou gave Lu Xun a letter on the 19th, Lu Xun started to look for a new place soon after and eventually moved out of the house with his wife on 2 August. The letter that Zhou wrote should hold important clues to the incident and it is worth quoting in its entirety:Mr. Lu Xun: I've only got to know [this] yesterday—but there is no need to talk about what happened. I’m not a Christian, but fortunately I can still bear it, and do not want to accuse anyone either—we are all poor creatures. My previous rosy dreams are mere illusions after all, and perhaps what I see now is real life. I want to correct my thoughts and ideas (sixiang) and enter a new life. Please from now on, do not come to the back courtyard any more. No other words. Wishing you peace of mind, and self-respect (zizhong). 18 July, Zuoren.

Then it was all “normal” again as far as the two brothers’ diaries are concerned, except for records in Lu Xun's diary of their mother's frequent visits from Badaowan, and of course the complete disappearance of Erdi's name from the diary or that of Dage's in Zhou's case. Almost a year later on 11 June 1924, however, the following record, probably the longest entry of all, appeared in Lu Xun's diary after he paid a visit to the old house:…went to Badaowan to fetch books and things. As I was entering the west wing, Qimeng [Zhou] and his wife suddenly came at me, cursing and swearing (mali ouda). They then phoned to ask Chongjiu, Zhang Fengju, and Xu Yaochen to come over, to whom his wife listed my crimes (zuizhuang), using obscene language. Where her story was not consistent, Qimeng helped make it up. Still, [I] collected the books and things and came out.

This clash was reflected in Zhou's diary as well, albeit a much simpler version:11 June: slept a bit in the morning. L [Lu Xun] came in the afternoon and made a scene (nao). Mr. Zhang and Mr. Xu came…

Even though by now we have a much better idea of the intensity of the incident, we still do not know exactly what happened. However we are not left in complete darkness either. In fact, the following conclusions can be safely drawn. First, it was a sudden incident or discovery that caused the split and the two brothers’ relationship was perfectly normal until at least early July 1923; second, things started to go wrong in the family after 14 July at the latest, as it was on this day that Lu Xun “changed to eating alone in his own room,” instead of having meals with the rest of the family as usual; it must have been something rather serious too, as Lu Xun did not decide to “eat alone” just for one or two days but “from tonight on” (zi shiye shi)—he must have felt that it was neither possible nor comfortable to eat with or face some member(s) of the family. Although Zhou must have felt puzzled at his brother's sudden withdrawal from the dinner table, he probably did not find out what was going on until 17 July, part of this day's diary Zhou later destroyed, so the split was not caused by direct clash between the two brothers themselves, but by a third person.

This person is almost certainly Zhou's wife Hata Nobuko. For the couple of days between 14 and 16 July, Zhou must have felt really mystified at the strange atmosphere in the house: his elder brother suddenly stopped coming to family meals and his wife fell ill. Naturally, he would ask questions, most likely ask his wife, and “only got to know” (presumably) the real cause of the whole thing on the 17th. On finding out the truth, Zhou composed the above letter to Lu Xun, telling him, among other things, “not to come to the back courtyard any more,” where Zhou and his wife lived. From then on, Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, who had been such intimate brothers and kindred spirits, severed all contact with each other.

But what could Hata have done to cause such destruction? The most widespread explanation was that it was due to a financial dispute in the family. The most used evidence in support of this version was mostly provided by Xu Guangping 许广平 (1898-1968), Lu Xun's partner during his last decade of life in Shanghai. She recalled in the 1970s in her memoir that Lu Xun had complained to her that he had

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