The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The twentieth century has on the whole been a terrible time for Chinese writers. For most of the century repressive govern- ments, civil and international wars, poverty and social disloca- tion, and outright political repression have choked off the careers of many writers, killed some, and turned many others into party-spokesmen hacks. Chinese literature has only begun within the past few years to recover from these onslaughts.

Lu Hsьn [Lu Xun] had the good fortune to spend the prime of his life in the 1920S, when a modernist movement briefly flourished in China before it was killed in adolescence. He was a leading light of what is known as the May Fourth Movement, named for a student-led demonstration on May 4, 1919 protesting pro-Japanese provisions in the Treaty of Versailles. This protest movement came to symbolize a decade or so of relative intellectual and artistic freedom, during which young writers and thinkers questioned traditional Chinese cul- ture and society and found them wanting, and began to look for substitutes to take their place. (The pro-democracy stu- dents who protested and died in Tiananmen Square in 1989 consciously modeled themselves on the students of the May Fourth generation.)

Lu Hsьn's real name was Chou Shu-jen [Zhou Shuren]. He was born into a prosperous and socially progressive family and, along with his brothers, studied Western science and medi­cine. (His brother Chou Tso-jen [Zhou Zuoren] became a psy- chologist, and translated the works of Havelock Ellis into

Chinese; Chou Chien-jen [Zhou Jianren] was a biologist and eugenicist, the first translator of Darwin into Chinese.) Lu Hsьn abandoned his medicai studies to play a full-time role in the May Fourth Movement as a pioneering writer of mod- ernist, socially criticai fiction. His reputation was assured with the publication in 1918 of "Diary of a Madman" (the title deliberately taken from Gogol [74]), which depicted Chinese society through the madman^ eyes as cannibalistic. His story collection Call to Arrns, published in 1923, included his most famous story, "The True Story of Ah Q," in which a hopelessly befuddled Chinese everyman bumbles his way through life until he is eventually dragged off to the execution ground for reasons he cannot understand; this is plainly an allegory for a traditional Chinese culture that, in Lu Hsьn's eyes, has left China utterly unprepared to deal with the impact of Western culture and technology.

Beginning in the mid-ig20S Lu Hsьn closely associated himself with the nascent Chinese Communist Party, but infuri- ated the party's leadership by refusing to join the party for- mally. A resolute independent at a time when it was extremely difficult for people to avoid choosing sides in Chinas growing civil conflict, Lu Hsьn maintained his status as an independent but leftist artist. Perhaps it is fortunate in some respects that he died before the Japanese invasion of China and then the Communist-Nationalist civil war would have made his inde- pendence insupportable. Since his death he has proven his independence by making ali political factions in China slightly nervous about his legacy. But from our point of view his legacy is plain: No matter who claims or repudiates him politically, he is China's greatest twentieth-century writer.

There are many translated editions of Lu Hsьn's selected or collected stories; read "Diary of a Madman," "The True Story of Ah Q," and a good sampling of others. You will find him a deft and entertaining storyteller as well as a penetrating social critic.

J.S.M.

JAMES JOYCE

1882-I94I Ulysses

With Ulysses we at last meet a novel that seems impenetrable. It is best to admit that this mountain cannot be scaled with a single leap. Still, it is scaleable; and from the top you are granted a view of incomparable richness.

Here are five simple statements. They will not help you to enjoy or understand Ulysses. I list them merely to remove from your mind any notion that this book is a huge joke, or a huge obscenity, or the work of a demented genius, or the altar of a cult. Here is what a large majority of intelligent critics and readers have come to believe about Ulysses since its publica­tion in 1922.

It is probably the most completely organized, thought-out work of literature since The Divine Comedy [30].

It is the most influential novel (call it that for lack of a better term) published in our century. The influence is indirect— through other writers.

It is one of the most original works of imagination in the lan- guage. It broke not one trail, but hundreds.

There is some disagreement here, but the prevailing view is that it is not "decadent" or "immoral" or "pessimistic.'^, Like the work of most of the supreme artists listed in the Plan, it proposes a vision of life as seen by a powerful mind that has risen above the partial, the sentimental, and the self-defen- sive.