Lu Xun on fire

For China watchers, Lǔ Xùn 鲁迅, pen name of Zhōu Shùrén 周树人 (1881-1936) — anointed “the sage of modern China” by Chairman Mao — will always be relevant. The “father of modern Chinese literature” and writer of national allegories is detached, clinical, and China-obsessed, as critical about his society and people as he was of himself. An adjective commonly used to describe Lu Xun and his writings is lěng 冷 — cold.

But where is the human behind the titan? Is there a way to go beyond the platitudes we recycle and see his works afresh? To use an analogy from Lu Xun’s short piece “Dead Fire” — which I translated and is excerpted below — how about the fiery flame burning inside that ice?

Lu Xun was most certainly a brilliant writer, restlessly experimenting with diverse linguistic registers and literary forms. But his engagement with art was all-encompassing and went far beyond the short stories he is most known for. He was a classical Chinese poet and scholar of classical Chinese literature, writing a textbook and editing anthologies of classical Chinese fiction. A calligrapher and designer, he paid close attention to cover art. He illustrated some of his own books and for others. He collected, exhibited, and avidly promoted woodcut art — mostly Eastern European — and sponsored woodcut-making workshops for local artists, revitalizing a native art form in the process. A significant portion of his vast collection of books included Buddhists texts and world literature.

Perhaps his most overlooked literary contributions are his translations. Attuned to the need for “new voices” to inspire local art, he was a prolific translator. His translations exceeded his own voluminous literary output. His first, Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865) was published in 1903, translated from the Japanese version, itself rendered from English. On his deathbed, he was translating Nikolai Gogol’s Mjórtvyje dúshi (Dead Souls, 1842), unfinished, from the German and Japanese renderings.

Translation was a painful process. Lu Xun describes his role as a translator through his revision of the myth of Prometheus: He stole the foreign fire to cook his own flesh so that this flesh might be chewed on by his readers. But the labor of the creative act — as translator, extending to Lu Xun’s work as writer and artist — is not simply an exercise in sadomasochism. This self-incineration recalls another myth: A phoenix emerging out of the fire. Art, engaged with purpose, transforms and revitalizes, potentially awakening others in the process. Immersing himself in art made Lu Xun’s difficult life more bearable, infusing it with a sense of beauty, wonder, and meaning. Yet the all-consuming labor of that engaging — widely, deeply, and critically — along with his furious work pace, likely hastened his death. What kept Lu Xun’s flame alive was his faith in the regenerative power of art — its power to shake us to the core, to awaken us to our entrapment in a cruel and unjust world; yet this same art can also push us to see beyond it, embedding sparks of hope in the future, enabling us to imagine a different way of seeing and being in the world.

Lu Xun’s radically experimental Wild Grass — landscapes populated by flora and fauna, where dreamers might come face-to-face with their own corpses or a flame encased in ice — reflects just such a world beyond. The pieces within engage widely with world literature — from the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire and Ivan Turgenev, the fairytales of the Dutch writer Frederik Van Eeden, the aphorisms of Friedrich Nietzsche, the experimental stories and essays of Natsume Sōseki and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, to the poetry of Hungarian Petőfi Sándor among others. A testimony to his immense intellect and virtuosity, Lu Xun was able to put the diverse forms and ideas of foreign writers into conversation with those of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist texts. Among the themes explored in Wild Grass: our shared predicament of a difficult and ephemeral existence in an inhospitable world, and the need for self-cultivation and care for others to create a world that might be otherwise. The result is a brilliant and bizarre collection of what might be regarded as a true specimen of world art.

Facing censorship and persecution, which intensified in the last decade of his life, Lu Xun was preoccupied with a few questions: “To write or not to write?” and whether to engage art and life with full passion, knowing the high price they might exact. These dilemmas are allegorized in “Dead Fire,” excerpted below, through the choices faced by the flame encased in ice: Should he stay trapped in the valley of ice and remain frozen, or leave the valley and burn out?” Lu Xun’s answer is the same as that of the once frozen flame: Burn! The reader, too, is asked to consider this existential conundrum: Confronted with the inevitability of death, what life would you choose to live?

Dead Fire

死火

Excerpted from Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk by Lu Xun, translated by Eileen J. Cheng, edited by Theodore Huters, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

I dreamed of myself sprinting on an ice-mountain.

It is a tall, imposing ice-mountain, reaching up to the icy sky. The sky is filled with frozen clouds, each shimmering like a fish scale. At the foot of the mountain is an ice-forest, branches and leaves of its trees resembling pine and cypress. All is icy cold, all is ash white.

But all of a sudden, I fall into a valley of ice.

Above, below, all around is icy cold and ash white. But on the ash white ice are countless red shadows, tangled together like a web of corals. I look down under my feet — a flame is there.

It is a dead fire. Fiery in form but immobile, it is completely frozen, like a coral branch. On the tip of the flame is a puff of congealed black smoke, its charred and withered appearance leading me to suspect that it had just been released from the inferno of existence. And so, the flame’s reflections on the surrounding walls of ice reflected back on one another, transforming into innumerable shadows, turning the valley of ice into a coral red.

Ha ha!

When I was a child, I was fond of gazing at the foamy waves stirred up by motorboats and the fiery flames shooting up from blazing furnaces. Not only was I fond of gazing at them, I also wanted to see them clearly. Alas, they were ever-changing, never keeping a fixed form. No matter how intently I stared, I could never retain a fixed image.

Dead flame, I finally have you now!

I pick up the dead fire. As I am about to examine it closely, its icy cold burns my fingers. But I simply endure the pain and stuff it into my pocket. In an instant, the entire valley of ice turns ash white. At the same time, I think about how to get out of the valley of ice.

A stream of black smoke shoots out from my body, coiling up like a collared reed snake. In an instant, the entire valley of ice is engulfed in surging red flames, like a great conflagration hemming me in. I look down — the dead fire, now ignited, burns a hole through my robe and flows out onto the icy ground.

“Hey, friend! You awakened me with your warmth,” he says.

I greet him immediately and ask his name.

“I was first abandoned in the valley of ice,” he replies off-topic. “Those who abandoned me have long perished and gone. I was nearly frozen to death by the ice. If you hadn’t reignited me with your warmth, I would have perished before too long.”

“Your awakening pleases me. I was just thinking about how to get out of the valley of ice. I’d like to bring you along so that you never have to freeze again and so you can burn on for eternity.”

“Oh, no! Then I’ll burn out!”

“Your burning out would make me sad, so I’ll just leave you here then.”

“Oh, no! Then I’ll freeze to death!”

“Then, what’s to be done?”

“But what about you, what will you do then?” he asks back.

“As I’ve said: I want to get out of this valley of ice…”

“Then I might as well burn out!”

All of a sudden, he shoots up like a red comet and we both leave the valley of ice. A large stone cart speeds over unexpectedly and I am, in the end, crushed to death under its wheels — but not before seeing the cart tumble into the valley of ice.

“Ha ha! None of you will come across the dead fire ever again!” I said with a smug laugh, as if this were just what I wanted.