The extent of Lu Xun’s identification with the cause of the revolutionists who worked to bring about the 1911 Revolution has been the subject of debate among scholars ever since the year after his death when his brother Zhou Zuoren emphatically denied his membership in the Guangfu Hui. The scholars who think he did join (and actively participate in) that revolutionary organization rely on attributions to Lu Xun by third parties who conversed with him late in his life, but Lu Xun never actually addressed this question in his written or published works and, despite his student-teacher relationship with Zhang Taiyan (and therefore by inference the Tokyo and Zhejiang branches of the Guangfu Hui), no one has ever brought forth archival evidence to support the claim of his membership. Here I will examine the classical-style poetry Lu Xun wrote before and after the event in order to gauge through first-hand evidence his disposition toward the Republican revolution and the historic transition it signaled for China.

Focusing on literary tradition and innovation, this paper examines Lu Xun’s poetics as represented in his early treatise On the Power of Mara Poetry (Moluo shi li shuo). As a leading writer and thinker deeply engaged in the dramatic social and cultural transformations taking place in early twentieth- century China, Lu Xun was very concerned about how to build up the New Man and new society via new literature. Advocating Maratic poets who are full of the spirit of revolt and nonconformity, Lu Xun endeavored to disturb and reinvigorate Chinese minds by bringing in foreign dynamics and energies based upon modern individualism and humanism. At the same time, Lu Xun insisted that, while moving toward a bright future, people should constantly consider China’s prosperous past. For Lu Xun, tradition was still of great relevance in creating and nurturing new poetry, new men, and a new society. To simply lump Lu Xun together with pure anti-traditionalists is problematic. Lu Xun is commonly seen as an iconoclastic pioneer in modern China; however, I argue that Lu Xun demonstrated a dialectical reflection on the relationship between tradition and modernity. Actually, Lu Xun envisioned a process by which, galvanized by imported Maratic spirit, selected cultural legacies would undergo modern reconfiguration and revitalization.

Shin Eon-jun and Karashima interacted with Lu Xun during a similar period but their relationships with him proceeded in different directions. Shin Eon-jun participated in the independence movements in Korea, introduced Lu Xun from the progressive position, and actively reported the political situation and philosophical trends in China. On the other hand, Karashima put his major focus on Lu Xun and left wing literature, when introducing the new literature of China, but gradually revealed an opportunistic attitude and actively participated in promoting Japan’s “National Policy.”

A subtle aspect of Lu Xun’s writing, running through several of his works of fiction, is his animalistic portrayal of some of his most well-known characters. Scraping away their humanity as he writes, Lu Xun depicts Kong Yiji, Xianglin Sao, and the infamous Madman crawling on their hands and knees, working like draught animals, and abandoning all rational thought. In short, all three end up occupying an ambiguous space between the realms of human and animal. This paper attempts to examine how Lu Xun’s description and situation of these characters suggests, aside from the standard agendas of May Fourth writing in general, a certain, shared metaphysical conundrum. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben to take the hiatus between human and animal as an occasion for ontological possibility, I will investigate how the dehumanized portrayal of these characters situates them at the threshold of a new becoming: one which has not yet been realized, but which is also rendered impossible either through the character’s death or return to health. Examining Lu Xun’s works in this way not only recognizes his major emphasis on social critique, but suggests both that his thought on Chinese society pierces through to the level of metaphysical inquiry, and that the relationship between human and animal marks a productive entry point for this sort of questioning.

With his insistence upon the literal rendering in Chinese of foreign texts, especially regarding syntax, Lu Xun’s understanding of “literal translation” strikes a rather distinct note in the modern Chinese literary scene. The intention behind this method, namely, the aim to “retain the tone of the original,” reveals a generative perception of language that takes language as not just the bearer of the already existent thought, but as the formative element of thought that has meaning in itself. This paper seeks to delineate the structural constitution of the materiality of language as grasped by Lu Xun. By comparing the notion of the “tone” to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s notion of the “inner form of language” and situating it within the genealogy of qi, as well as tracing its link with Zhang Taiyan’s idea of “zhiyan,” I will attempt to reveal the philosophical and historical basis of Lu Xun’s principle of “literal translation” and its significance for Chinese literary modernity in general.

It has been argued that, starting in the late 1920s, Lu Xun’s intellectual development underwent a significant transformation constituting what the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has termed an “epistemological break.” Some of the explicitly more positive comments about the masses that Lu Xun made in his later years have been used to demonstrate this point. However, the existence of such a “break” is still debatable, and a detailed examination of Lu Xun’s apparently optimistic comments reveals that Lu Xun possessed a more sophisticated understanding of the masses and the Chinese people. His understanding was informed by the concept of “national character.” This paper attempts to demonstrate the consistency of Lu Xun’s view of the masses and the Chinese people and to resolve an apparent self-contradiction in Lu Xun’s arguments.

Ever since Derrida’s appropriation of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” and the deconstruction of the traditional notion of translation as an unequivocal communication of meaning, “translation” has become a powerful conceptual means in many fields of the humanities to underscore the agency of the subalterns in the context of colonialism, imperialism, or globalization, and to emphasize historical contingency over against necessity. As a matter of consequence, however, the question of the historically specific condition of the possibility of such “translation” has been largely neglected. In this essay I will argue, that a profound understanding of the processes of social and cultural transformation, which have been conceptualized in terms of “translation,” can not be achieved unless global capitalism and its specific temporal dynamics are taken into consideration more seriously. Finally, this approach will also enable us to re-read Benjamin, and to reassess the significance of his “Task” for a more powerful critique of a social formation, “which produces commodities.”