An introductory yet trenchant exploration of select Chinese classic texts that cover the domains of classical literature, history, philosophy, and fine arts.
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Do curso por The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Classics of Chinese Humanities: Guided Readings
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Lecture 4: In Search of the Chinese Soul & Course Assignment
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Prof. Ou Fan Leo Lee 李歐梵Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture
Faculty of Arts
When we talk about these examples, or shall we say,
when we talk about Lu Hsun's overall attitude to Chinese tradition,
we are confronted with a series of paradoxes ourselves.
That is to say that,
on the one hand, he is deeply immersed in the classical tradition.
He said himself that he has been poisoned, or he has been hunted,
by the poison of several classical Chinese figures, particularly Dong Xu.
At the same time Lu Hsun Wong Tsu spearheaded the new culture
movement to declare war against China's tradition.
So between the two camps or the two positions, he's torn,
again, like a wanderer in his own portrait between the old and
the new, between tradition and modernity.
Now, that is the kind of position that everybody agrees nowadays
among Chinese Lu Hsun scholars.
But if we look at Lu Hsun's own works, again you will find that
this kind of a paradoxical position is not that simply put.
Here I want to make reference for those scholars among you to Lu Hsun's
one famous book, a study of classical Chinese fiction,
which the title of that book is called,
[FOREIGN], A Brief History of Chinese Fiction.
If you look at the table of contents,
you will find that two-thirds of the whole book are about ghosts.
In fact, Lu Hsun had this very important argument that literature
comes from legends and ghosts.
In other words, the dark side of Chinese tradition
is the source of inspiration for Chinese literary creativity.
Not the sunny side, not the moral side, not the social side.
I may be putting this too extremely, but I can give you fact against facts,
all kinds of documentation to show that Lu Hsun is deeply immersed
in what I will call the other side of Chinese tradition, the darker side.
Here again we can divide into two levels, so to speak.
On the more overt intellectual level, in Lu Hsun's essays,
he specifically talks about figures that he admires.
These are the intellectual figures who lived in tormented times,
who have alienated, who basically liked to drink,
liked to abandon themselves to the forces of nature.
In other words, they stand in a kind of counter
position to the orthodox stand of scholar officials.
They do not want to serve, or even if they do, they wanna retire right away.
So, Lu Hsun made specific references to the famous
Boys of the Bamboo Grove of the Chin dynasty.
He wrote a very famous essay which he derived from a public lecture he gave.
Scholars of Lu Hsun, of course, all know that.
Now what is the relevance of that kind of tradition?
I think the obvious point is that Chinese classical tradition
in terms of scholarly officials has undergone a great transformation,
was the end of the civil service examination system.
A lot of you say that scholars are no longer expected to serve the government,
there's no such channel anymore.
You can be educated, you can do any other things, you can also serve the government,
but of course, in Lu Hsun's times the government is corrupt.
So Lu Hsun in fact also represents the modern intellectual stance of alienation.
He's engaged with his people but
at the same time he's alienated from his people, from his society.
That post of alienation was very daring in the 1920s because it is so
alien to the Chinese tradition.
The most alienated intellectuals were probably the wage employees.
Pseudo employees, certainly not alienated.
He likes to be strong, he likes to be presently involved with Chinese nature,
with his friends, with daoists and monks.
But he certainly doesn't feel that, even in his worst period,
that he's alienated from his own country, even from the court.
Lu Hsun, of course, in that sense is modern.
At the same time, since I've just made reference to the dark forces of ghosts,
Lu Hsun has a particular fondness of folk tales depicting Chinese ghosts.
In his more lyrical reminiscences of his childhood, he in fact depicted,
he drew up some of the ghosts who move between the realms of the earth and
hell, or shall we say between the human realm and the ghostly realm.
As a child he participated in a village opera that reenacted one such ritual.
He played a little ghost, so the ghostly allure
becomes a source of artistic inspiration for Lu Hsun, and
then of course some of these ghosts reentered his most profound literary work.
If I have time to give maybe one another example from the same collection of
prose poetry, I can use the epitaph.
The epitaph is about a ghost.
The epitaph is the epitaph of a grave which holds a ghost,
and this ghost speaks in a monologue in classical Chinese to the dreamer,
and basically asks a paradoxical question.
Namely the ghost says, let me read the English translation,
which is passable but really not that superb.
The first part, depiction of ghosts.
There is a wandering spirit which takes the form of a serpent
with poisonous fangs.
Instead of biting others, it bites itself, and so he perishes.
And then, in the other side of the epitaph, the ghost,
this poisonous serpent biting into himself,
asks the same question, a typically paradoxical question.
I tore out my heart to eat it, wanting to know its true taste.
But the pain was so agonizing, how could I tell its taste?
When the pain subsided, I savored the heart slowly.
But since by then it was stale, how could I know its true taste?
Answer me or be gone.
Of course, nobody can answer that paradoxical question
nobody has a solution to it.
This is probably the darkest point that Lu Hsun had ever reached in his life.
Most scholars would simply leave that out when they discuss this point.
So you should, I would like to summarize
what I have to mind when I talk about Lu Hsun in the Chinese tradition.
The title In Search of the Chinese Soul is itself
a kind of ironical paradox, with examples from Lu Hsun.
That is to say that he attempts to find, in terms of the Chinese national
character, the soul of China, a political or cultural soul of China.
Failing that, he penetrates more deeply into the soul of literary form
in order to recreate or to establish
something new so that other readers
would be able to approximate the crisis of the Chinese soul.
In other words, there are several layers of paradox involved in Lu Hsun's effort.
And he uses various literary forms
to delineate the paradoxical layers in his work.
But of course, to unravel all of this again will take a long time,
perhaps another book, but I'm too old to write another book.
I think the interested readers should try to do your own reading in Lu Hsun.
So Lu Hsun is perpetually interesting and
he's perpetually relevant precisely because he's now referring to us.
We now live in what might be called a postmodern age, the age of globalization.
People have lost hope because of the problems of environment,
of the world, turmoil, or even of capitalism.
People are losing the sense of enchantment with the world that is benevolent.
So you have all kinds of dystopian dreams instead of utopian hopes.
So Lu Hsun has predicted that, if you like.
For him, enchantment of the Chinese tradition
has been turned by modernity into disenchantment, and yet,
he wants to reenchant us, through a very arduous, paradoxical way,
to show that, in fact, now tradition has something to show us,
although that something is not entirely helpful.
It is all of that paradox that he basically rechiseled,
a art form which remains with us today.
I am, of course, a Lu Hsun admirer, and
I will like to use this remark, however imperfect it is, as my end comment.
I want to thank you all for paying attention to my four lectures.
Thank you.
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