Novels, Deep-Read · Lu Xun · No.5
Short stories · Lu Xun · August 1923 · Xinchao Society, Beijing
A day late in autumn, the wind already cold. The landlord of the Xianheng Tavern is doing his accounts behind the counter when he hears a very quiet voice ask for a bowl of warmed wine. He looks up: nobody at the counter. He looks down: a man is sitting on the ground on a straw mat, pushing himself along the mud with both hands, inch by inch.
He drinks the wine and walks out again on his hands.
Somebody in the tavern laughs.
Nobody ever sees him again. Once a year, when the landlord takes down the chalkboard to settle the books, he says the same thing: that man still owes nineteen coppers.
A Chinese student of medicine in Japan watches a lantern slide in which a Chinese man is executed as a spy while a ring of other Chinese stand around him, healthy and blank-faced; he quits medicine and starts writing. A dozen years later he produces fourteen stories about the same people — worn down by decorum, by poverty, by being watched, dying with nobody bothering to check — and every one of them was standing in the crowd, laughing, while somebody else was ground down. He did not believe anyone could be woken. He shouted anyway.
Lu Xun (1881–1936), born Zhou Shuren in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. His grandfather was jailed over an examination scandal and his father died after a long illness; the family fell from comfort into hardship, and as a boy he shuttled daily between the pawnshop and the herbalist. He studied mining and railways in Nanjing, then medicine in Japan, and abandoned medicine for writing. In 1918 he published "A Madman's Diary" in New Youth, using the pen name Lu Xun for the first time.
Call to Arms (also translated Outcry) was published by the Xinchao Society in Beijing in August 1923, collecting fifteen stories written between 1918 and 1922. For a 1930 reprinting the author removed one of them, "Buzhou Mountain," retitled it "Mending Heaven," and moved it to Old Tales Retold. Every standard edition since has fourteen stories.
Its place is easy to name: modern Chinese fiction begins with this book — not with a novel, but with a stack of short stories. Don't mistake it for the Lu Xun of the school curriculum. In its original state this book is sharp, unaccommodating, and was written very fast.
The fourteen stories share no plot, but they share a world — the canal towns around Shaoxing, the taverns, the black-awning boats, the burial ground — and a single cast of types. What follows retells the ones that interlock, not in table-of-contents order; the remaining six ("An Incident," "The Story of Hair," "Storm in a Teacup," "The Dragon Boat Festival," "Rabbits and a Cat," "The Comedy of the Ducks") show other faces of the same town.
Start with the book's own story, because it is printed inside the book: the preface to Call to Arms is its first foundation stone.
In the mid-1910s, Zhou Shuren, in his thirties, is living in the Shaoxing hostel in Beijing, holding a harmless post at the Ministry of Education and spending his free time on the most useless activity available: copying out ancient stone inscriptions, character by character, for no reader he can name. His own explanation is that he is using the work to grind his life away. The schemes of his youth — a magazine, translations, saving the country — had all failed, and failed without anyone even objecting: like shouting once into an endless wasteland.
His friend Jin Xinyi (in life, Qian Xuantong) leafs through the copied inscriptions and asks what the point of them is; why not write something instead. And Zhou Shuren produces the metaphor that became the charter of modern Chinese literature: suppose there were an iron house with no windows, impossible to break, full of people fast asleep who will soon suffocate. Because they pass from sleep into death, they never feel it coming. Now you shout, and you wake the few who are sleeping lightest, and those unlucky few get to experience their own deaths fully conscious. Have you done right by them?Seed ①
"But since a few have woken, you cannot say there is definitely no hope of destroying that iron house."— Qian Xuantong, quoted in the preface to Call to Arms (my rendering)
That one sentence is the book's licence. Look at its shape: it does not say "there is hope," it says "you are not entitled to say there is none." Not confidence — a concession in logic. Zhou Shuren accepted the point and started writing. So the book is called Call to Arms not because its author believed anyone would wake, but because he could not prove nobody would.
The preface also explains the change of career. In a medical class in Sendai, a newsreel slide showed a Chinese man about to be beheaded as a Russian spy, with a ring of other Chinese standing around to watch, physically sound and entirely blank. He understood on the spot: however healthy the bodies, if they are fit only to be spectacle and spectators, curing them means nothing. Remember the faces in that ring — they are the master image, and all fourteen stories return to them.
"A Madman's Diary" opens with a short preface in classical Chinese: cool, brisk, administrative. Two brothers; one of them once suffered from a persecution mania; I have transcribed his diary for the use of medical men; as for the patient, he recovered long ago and has gone off to take up an official post.Seed ②
Then it cuts to the diary, in vernacular. A man notices that the whole village looks at him strangely: the way old Zhao's eyes move, the children whispering in the street, the doctor his elder brother brings in (an executioner in disguise, he decides), even the dog taking a second look. Frightened, sleepless, he opens a history book. It is full of the words benevolence, righteousness, morality. He stares at it half the night before he makes out two other words written between the lines, on every page — eat people.
What follows is the fastest chain of reasoning in the book. He remembers the cook who steamed his own son for a duke; a tenant farmer's story about a village that dug out a dead man's heart and liver and fried them; and then his own sister, dead at five, with his elder brother running the household and telling their mother not to cry. He goes cold: could his sister's flesh already have been mixed into his food, eaten by him? That is where the real damage is: this is not a lucid man denouncing cannibals, it is a man reasoning his way to the fact that he is one. The diary's last line is three words: save the children.
— Now go back to that classical-Chinese preface.Payoff ② ↑ On the way in it reads like boilerplate about the manuscript's provenance. Read it again after "save the children" and it has changed meaning entirely: the man who shouted "they eat people" got better, and went off to be an official. The structure is a closed ring — the outcry in the middle, both ends sealed. Sharper still, the outer layer is the old order's language and the inner layer is the new, barely walking one: the old wraps the new inside itself and declares it an illness. The first modern Chinese story made its own predicament into its form.
In the stories that follow there is not one villain, and everybody dies.
Kong Yiji. The Xianheng Tavern has a counter with an inside and an outside: men in short jackets drink standing at the counter, men in long gowns sit in the inner room. Kong Yiji alone wears the long gown and drinks standing — a gown so filthy and torn it looks as if it has gone a decade without washing or mending. He is literate; he knows four ways of writing one particular character and eagerly offers to teach them to the tavern's twelve-year-old serving boy, who walks off bored. When he has money he buys a saucer of aniseed beans, and when the neighbourhood children finish them and want more he spreads his fingers over the dish and says, in bookish classical phrasing, that there aren't many, not many at all. His crime is stealing books. Caught in the act, he goes red and argues:
"Taking a book cannot be called stealing."— "Kong Yiji" (my rendering)
A scholar's business is hardly theft. The whole tavern roars. The laughter in this book is always like that: not malicious, merely incapable of treating the other person as a person. Eventually he steals from the house of Ding, a provincial-examination graduate, is strung up and has his legs broken — which produces the scene this page opened with. And the man who narrates his whole life is that serving boy, a child who never went looking for him and never intended to:
"Kong Yiji is probably really dead."— closing line of "Kong Yiji" (my rendering)
"Probably" is a guess, "really" is a verdict; grammatically they should not sit together. But the sentence has to be built this way: nobody went to check, so it can only be "probably"; everyone knows the answer, so it is also "really." Hand the camera to the coldest pair of eyes available and sympathy has nowhere to go but into the reader.
Chen Shicheng ("The White Light") is a variant of the same death. Sixteen times he sits the county examination; sixteen times he fails. Coming home on the day the results are posted, with moonlight glaring white in his room, he hears the riddle his ancestors left ringing in his ears — measure the gold and silver, not by the bushel — takes up a hoe and digs up his own floor. He unearths a jawbone, grinning at him. The next day his body is pulled from a lake outside the city, all ten fingernails packed with mud from the bottom. The examination system did not kill him; the hole it left in his head did. Sixteen years after his last chance, he was still following its logic, having merely swapped the golden list of names for buried gold.
Fourth Shan's Wife ("Tomorrow") is a widow who spins cotton, and her whole stake in the world is her three-year-old son Bao'er. When he falls ill she draws lots, burns incense, buys medicine; the child dies anyway. The coldest thing is not the death but the aftermath: helpers arrive one after another — coffin-bearers, cooks, the ones with the comforting phrases — and Blue-skinned Ah Wu volunteers to carry the boy's body mainly to get something out of it. When it is all done and everyone has gone, the room turns quiet, and too large, and too empty. She has one thing left to do: sleep, and perhaps dream of him. The story is called "Tomorrow," and the book never reaches it.
This is the technical summit of the collection.
In the small hours of an autumn night, Old Shuan, who runs a teahouse, gets up in the dark, takes out a packet of silver he has been saving a long time, and goes out. At the T-junction a crowd suddenly floods past him, necks craned long, like ducks held up by an invisible hand. He does not dare look. A man dressed all in black comes over holding a bright red steamed roll, red enough to be still dripping. The money changes hands, the roll changes hands. This is the medicine for his son Little Shuan's consumption: a roll soaked in human blood.Seed ③ Whose blood it is, Old Shuan does not ask and the story does not say. Little Shuan eats it. The cough continues.
The teahouse opens at daylight and Uncle Kang, who knows the executioner, holds forth on the news: the man killed was about twenty, surnamed Xia, given name Yu, a rebel. In jail he even tried to convert the warder, Red-eye Ah Yi, telling him this empire belongs to all of us. Ah Yi slapped him twice, and the young man said only that he pitied him — at which point the whole teahouse cracks up: a beaten man pitying the man who beat him; what is that if not madness? Uncle Kang adds the crucial line of accounting: the informer was the young man's own uncle, who collected twenty-five taels of pure silver. Little Shuan dies anyway.
The last section takes place in the burial ground at the spring festival for sweeping graves. A path divides the paupers' field in two: executed criminals and those who died in prison on the left, the poor on the right. Old Mrs Hua comes to her son's grave and sees another woman, just as aged, tottering to a fresh mound on the left side — Xia Yu's mother.Payoff ③ ↑ Only here is the question nobody asked in section one finally answered: the blood that was supposed to cure Little Shuan is this old woman's son's blood. Two mothers, one on each side, a path between them, neither knowing what she is to the other. The whole causal chain is fastened at a point nobody in the story ever says aloud: the revolutionary's blood was eaten as medicine by the very people he died for, and it did not work. The two family names, Hua and Xia, together form an old literary name for China. Lu Xun does not explain this once.
Two more things are in that graveyard. A ring of red and white flowers laid neatly around the top of Xia Yu's grave — not wild, placed there by someone; the old woman cannot make sense of it and says so over and over. And a crow on a branch. She speaks to the grave: if you are really here, if you can hear me, make that crow fly up onto your mound so I can see. The crow stands on the bare branch with its head drawn in, like something cast in iron, and does not move. The two old women turn to leave, and behind them comes a single harsh cry: the crow spreads its wings, braces, and shoots off toward the far sky like an arrow. The wreath is the hope he grants; the crow is his opinion of that hope — and where the wreath came from he later admitted himself, which is a bill we settle in section seven.
"The True Story of Ah Q" was serialized from late 1921 in a Beijing newspaper supplement and is the only novella in the collection.
Ah Q lives in the earth-god temple in Weizhuang. No family, no fixed work — cutting wheat, hulling rice, punting boats, whoever calls. Nobody can say what his surname is. When Squire Zhao's son passes the lowest examination degree, Ah Q, two bowls of wine in, announces that he is a Zhao too, and by generation ranks three above the new graduate. Summoned to the Zhao house the next day, he is slapped: How could you be a Zhao? What makes you fit to be a Zhao?Seed ④ Ah Q does not argue, and nobody raises the question of his surname again. In this village even a surname is property; you need permission to use one.
He has a complete technique for living, known ever since as the spiritual victory: beaten, he tells himself he has been beaten by his own son, and thus he has won; forced to agree that he is a worm, he agrees and then reflects that he is the foremost man in the world at self-abasement — strike out "self-abasement" and "foremost" is still his, so he has won again. It is a process for converting each defeat into a victory on the spot: extremely efficient, free, and it costs only the possibility of ever changing anything. Nor does he only take blows — he pinches a young nun's face, he wrestles for half an hour with Little D, who is weaker than he is. The first thing a humiliated man wants is not to overturn the table but to find someone who deserves humiliating more.
The turn comes from one sentence. Hulling rice at the Zhao house, he drops to his knees in front of the maid Wu Ma and says he wants to sleep with her. She raises the roof, the young graduate comes at him with a bamboo pole, and Ah Q pays in money, in his jacket, and in a rule that he may never enter the Zhao house again. After that nobody in Weizhuang will hire him; his livelihood ended in that one sentence. He goes to the city, returns flush, and is briefly treated with respect by Squire Zhao himself — until people work out that he was only the man holding the sack outside a wall for a gang of thieves, at which point his stock drops back to where it was.
Then the revolution arrives. In 1911 the city changes its flag and Weizhuang panics. Ah Q is thrilled by the news that the revolutionaries are coming, because in his head revolution means whatever I want is mine: the graduate's wife's carved bed moved into his temple; anyone who has crossed me killed first. But when he goes to sign up he finds the temple's imperial tablet already smashed and its bronze censer already taken — by the Zhao graduate and the Fake Foreign Devil, the Qian family's son who studied abroad, cut off his queue and now wears a false one. Ah Q gets half a sentence out before the man raises his stick and shouts at him to get out. He is not permitted to be a revolutionary.Payoff ④ ↑ The earlier slap said "you are not fit to be a Zhao"; this one says "you are not fit to revolt." New dynasty, new flag, same hand — in fact the same men, since the Zhao graduate is a revolutionary now. The one thing the revolution did not change is who gets to decide what other people are fit for.
Days later the Zhao house is robbed. Arrests require somebody to arrest, and Ah Q is dragged out of the temple. He has no idea what he is charged with. Told to sign his confession, unused to a brush, he resolves to draw a perfect circle; his hand jerks and it comes out shaped like a melon seed, and this shames him deeply. On the way to the execution ground he suddenly remembers a starving wolf he met four years earlier at the foot of a hill: it followed him at a fixed distance, its eyes fierce and frightened at once, glinting like two points of ghost-fire. Now the road is lined with spectators' eyes, blunt and sharp together, eyes that have already chewed his words and mean to chew whatever lies beyond his skin, following him at exactly that same fixed distance. Only now is he afraid.
After the shot, opinion in Weizhuang is unanimous that Ah Q was bad — being shot is the proof of it. The city's verdict is simpler: poor entertainment. Beheading is worth watching; a shooting is nothing, and this condemned man paraded for that long without singing so much as one line of opera. The circle closes here: in this book, everybody's last appearance is as somebody else's show.
The last two stories look back, and are the only place this hard book softens.
In "My Old Home" the narrator travels through bitter cold to the village he left more than twenty years ago, in order to sell the family house and take his mother to the city. The boat lands under a yellowish sky with a few desolate villages strung along beneath it, without a trace of life in them. His mother mentions that Runtu is coming, and instantly a picture rises: a deep blue sky with a full golden moon in it, sand by the sea below, an endless stretch of green watermelons, and in the middle a boy of eleven or twelve with a round, ruddy face, a small felt cap, a gleaming silver collar round his neck, driving a pitchfork down at a badger-like animal.Seed ⑤ That is Runtu thirty years ago — the boy who taught him to trap birds in the snow and told him about the five-coloured shells on the beach. When they parted, both children cried.
When the real Runtu comes in, the narrator barely recognizes him: grey-yellow face, deep lines, eyes swollen red, a broken felt cap, hands split open like pine bark. A crowd of things rushes up to be said and none of them gets out, because Runtu has stopped, with joy and desolation together in his face, and moved his lips, and finally addressed him respectfully as:
"Master! ..."— "My Old Home" (my rendering)
The narrator goes cold.Payoff ⑤ ↑ The boy with the pitchfork under the moon and the stooping man saying "master" are one person; what killed the first was not time but the fact that he finally learned where he was supposed to stand. There was an unhesitating freedom in the way that fork went down, and it is exactly that which has been taken. Later, offered the leftovers of the household, Runtu picks an incense burner and candlesticks, and the narrator's private comment is ungenerous: he wants idols, only his are nearer. But the narrator does not spare himself either — he immediately concedes that his own "hope" is an idol too, just further off.
"There was never a road; a road is what appears when enough people walk there."— closing lines of "My Old Home" (my rendering)
That sentence has to be read back against the iron house in the preface.Payoff ① ↑ It is not saying the future is bright. It is saying hope can be proved neither present nor absent, so the only form its existence can take is walking — walk and there is one, don't and there isn't, and asking whether there "is" one is the wrong question. This is Qian Xuantong's concession, worked out at length: the most famous ending in modern Chinese fiction is a man doing arithmetic with his own despair.
The book closes with "Village Opera": a boatload of children poling a white-awninged boat across the water at night to see an opera in the next village, the moon hazy, the smell of beans and river-weed coming off both banks, the distant stage in its lamplight looking like something out of a fairy tale. The opera is not good and the children start yawning; hungry on the way back, they go ashore to steal broad beans, and one boy scoops a handful from his own family's field and says, take ours, ours are much bigger. The last line of the book: never since that night has the narrator eaten beans that good, or seen an opera that good. Ending a book that began with "they eat people" on that note is deliberate: after thirteen stories of indictment, the fourteenth concedes that the indicted world also held good things, and that they are gone. It does not retract anything. It puts the accuser back onto the ground he has been accusing.
Wound together, all fourteen run off one fuse: it is not that a country is sick, it is that a population learned to stand beside someone being ground down, watch, and think nothing of it. The ring of blank faces on that lantern slide is the spark; everything after is aftershock — the laugh in the tavern aimed at a man with broken legs, the craned duck-necks outside the execution ground, the teahouse table that howled at the news of a beaten revolutionary, the city people annoyed that a shooting is less fun than a beheading. Same ring of people, standing somewhere else. Which is why the title is Call to Arms: faced with a ring of people who are not actually looking at you, all you can do is shout, knowing it will probably not work.
The last section of "Medicine" has almost no plot; it is all staging. Two mothers approach their graves on either side of the path, and the reader understands what they are to each other before they do — the truth sits entirely on the reader's side, and the two people on stage will never have it. The irony is assembled by the reader, which is why it holds better than any commentary could.
Then the timing. The old woman asks the crow for a sign, and Lu Xun makes her wait, and makes us wait: the bird stands there "as if cast in iron," and that phrase pins time down. Only after the two women have turned away, after the expectation has already failed, does the cry break out. A late noise answers no question; it only proves the world does move, just not for you. Had the crow flown to the mound on request, this would be a ghost story; had it never moved, the scene would be inert. Sending it the other way, after they leave, is the precise choice.
Ah Q is brought in to make his mark. He cannot read; he knows only that a circle is wanted, and he resolves to make it a good one — a man hours from execution, spending every scrap of his mental resources on that circle. His hand jerks, the shape comes out like a melon seed, and he is mortified.
The force of it is the failure of proportion. The thing he should fear — why am I here, I am about to die — he has no capacity to think, because thinking it would require concepts he has never possessed: rights, procedure, injustice, self. What he does have is a ready-made standard: do the job properly. The spiritual victory is still running at the last minute; it simply has no opponent left to defeat, so it turns and closes on him. Lu Xun spends very few words on the death and takes his time over the circle: he does not want an execution scene, he wants us to watch how it happens that a man can die without ever learning what happened to him.
There is no speculative premise here to work out, but there is one machine the book uses over and over, and the whole thing is built on it.
At the centre, someone suffering. Around them, a ring of spectators who never lay a hand on anyone; they only watch, and afterwards rate the quality of the show. Outside that, the reader. The geometry comes from the lantern slide — the man being beheaded was Chinese, the ring watching was Chinese, and the student in the lecture hall looking at the photograph was Chinese too. Lu Xun hands the reader the exact seat he was sitting in.
Which makes the murderers hard to name. Nobody kills Kong Yiji; laughter wears him away. Xia Yu does not die of the blade but of the consensus that he must have gone mad. Ah Q takes a bullet, but what convicts him is the reasoning that being shot proves you were bad. The frightening property of this machine is that it needs no malice — only that everybody involved considers himself a bystander.
With only the first layer this book would be a clever man sneering at fools, which would be far too light. The second design is to pull the "I" into the ring: the madman's reasoning ends in his own guilt; the narrator of "My Old Home" concedes that his hope and Runtu's incense burner are the same kind of object; "An Incident" is nothing but the narrator's shame in front of a rickshaw puller. The "I" is always someone who left and came back — able to see the problem, and for that very reason unable to fix anything.
Writing fiction in the vernacular in 1918 was a political act: classical Chinese was the language of the examinations, the magistrate's court, the clan rules and the genealogy; the vernacular was the language of the market and of children. Putting a classical preface around a vernacular diary makes that war into the story's skeleton. Then look at two phrases. "Taking a book cannot be called stealing" — Kong Yiji uses a literary word to launder a plain one; not a single book is un-stolen, but he feels his standing preserved. He is killed by that language and is still using it on the way out. And "probably really" is a deliberate foul committed in the vernacular's first years. What Call to Arms is about is how hard it is, and how much it costs, to start speaking in a different language.
Take "don't shout" at its strongest first. This is not cowardice, it is a hard piece of ethical reasoning: if the outcome cannot change, then the only effect of waking anyone is to convert a painless death into a painful one. Medicine supplies the analogy — for a patient who cannot be treated and is not suffering, what does full disclosure of the prognosis buy beyond a few extra months of dread? The right to know rests on being able to do something with the knowledge; strip that away and disclosure is just distributing pain. And the one who shouts bears none of it: he shouts and leaves, and the people he woke stay in the house. Making other people lucid is a thing other people pay for.
Now take "shout" at its strongest. First, the premise is suspect: who certified that the house has no windows and cannot be broken? The man inside it, who has never once tried the wall. Treating "I can't break it" as "it can't be broken" is the substitution every despair makes. Second, "let him die without pain" is still a decision somebody took on his behalf, and he was never asked. You fear presuming to wake others — but choosing silence is equally a decision made for everyone, and a less visible, less accountable one. Silence is not neutrality; it is power exercised without a sound.
The problem is everywhere now: whether to tell a friend his marriage is failing when you cannot live his life for him; whether to give the real state of the company to a delighted new hire. Every time, you are deciding how conscious someone else gets to be — and nobody granted you that authority. Note Lu Xun's own handling: he never answers the question. What he does is put a price tag on the shouting, and shout anyway.
The standard answer — a national defect, to be cured — is not wrong, but it is cheap: it places every reader automatically on the opposite side from Ah Q, which is the last thing this story wants.
Take the defence to its strongest. For a man who owns nothing, the spiritual victory may be the only analgesic he can afford. Ah Q has no land, no surname, no family, no name at all (even the "Q" is a placeholder the narrator settles on), and every route out of his position is closed. To demand under those conditions that he "face reality" is to demand that he feel his own worthlessness clearly every day, with no compensation offered. Turning inward when the outside will not move is not a Chinese peculiarity; it is what people in pain do everywhere. The same manoeuvre is called wisdom in a person with options and numbness in a person without; the difference is not in the manoeuvre, it is in the options.
The rebuttal is just as hard. Its real cost is not that he deceives himself but that he stops needing anyone else. Every conversion lays another layer of wadding between him and his situation, until he can feel neither pain nor kinship — which is why he pinches the young nun and goes after Little D without hesitation. He does not want justice, he wants a victory redeemable on demand, and the easiest place to redeem one is always someone weaker. Taken long enough, the painkiller becomes the reason not to seek treatment.
Today's equivalents are easy to find: "not worth arguing with him," "I'm being the bigger person," "honestly, opting out is fine." Sometimes those are genuine wisdom and sometimes they are anaesthetic. The test is not what you said but whether, having said it, you did one less thing you should have done.
This is not a question imposed on Lu Xun; it is a bill he settles himself in the preface. Because the people around New Youth were against pessimism, he says, he obeyed that expectation and did not shrink from writing crookedly: he added, out of nothing, the wreath on Xia Yu's grave, and in "Tomorrow" he refrained from stating that Fourth Shan's Wife never did manage to dream of her son. He knew the flowers were false and laid them anyway.
The defence goes far. Writing is not a lab report and readers are not observed samples. The young people reading "Medicine" in 1919 were deciding whether to do what Xia Yu did; a story with no gap left in it might kill, with precision, exactly the people it meant to rouse. Hope here is not a finding, it is a precondition for action — it does not have to be true, it has to be usable. And he did not lie all the way: he gave the wreath and had the crow refuse the sign, which is "someone remembers" and "the sky does not answer" issued together.
The objection is equally strong. Honesty is the one thing a writer cannot trade. Once "for the reader's good" may override "what I actually saw," who sets the limit? Add a wreath today so nobody despairs, and tomorrow cut a truth so nobody wavers. Worse, false hope accrues interest: whoever stood up on it collapses harder on the day the truth arrives. Lu Xun clearly stands on this side himself — he wrote the admission into his own preface in something close to the tone of a confession, effectively pinning a label to his own masterpiece: forgery here.
Bring it back to your week: how much of the prognosis to give a patient, whether to leave a loose end when explaining something bad to a child, whether to open with the good part when reviewing a collapsing employee's work. Everyone lays the wreath. The only question is whether, afterwards, you say plainly — as he did — that you laid it.
Line his work up and one obsession keeps recurring: and after you wake, what then? Almost all of his strength went into that "after."
Call to Arms does the waking; three years later Wandering (1926) settles the bill. In "In the Tavern," Lü Weifu — once the fiercest young radical of them all — is doing work he despises and describes himself as a bee that flew a full circle and came back to where it started. In "The New Year's Sacrifice," Xianglin's Wife asks the sharpest question in his fiction: is there a soul after death? She needs an answer to know how to face her whole life, and the educated narrator mumbles that he cannot say for sure and gets out of there. His intellectuals are never heroes; they are people who can see the problem and are, for that reason, all the clearer about their own uselessness.
The other line is his doubt about himself. In Wild Grass (1927) a shadow bidding farewell to the body it belongs to says it will live neither in the light nor in the darkness, and would rather wander in no place at all. He classified himself as an "intermediate thing": not a man of the new age but a rotting stretch of the old one, fit only to serve as a bridge for whoever comes next. That is the true noise floor under Call to Arms: a man who does not believe he is on the right side, asking all the right questions.
Without any boosterism, there are things worth arguing about in this book and in how it has been received:
1. The book's licence is not "there is hope" but "you cannot say there is none" — modern Chinese literature starts from a concession in logic.
2. The cruelest stroke in "A Madman's Diary" is not the accusation but the madman reasoning his way to his own guilt.
3. Classical preface, vernacular diary: the man who shouted the truth recovered, and went off to be an official.
4. "Kong Yiji is probably really dead" is not bad grammar: nobody checked, hence "probably"; everyone knows, hence "really."
5. The loudest line in "Medicine" is never spoken — two mothers on either side of a path, neither knowing whose son's blood fed whose.
6. The wreath is the hope the author grants; the crow is his opinion of it. He issues "someone remembers" and "the sky does not answer" together.
7. Ah Q's tragedy is not the bullet; it is dying without ever learning what happened, still ashamed that his circle came out crooked.
8. The spiritual victory is wisdom in a person with options and numbness in a person without — the difference is the options, not the act.
9. The real murderer is a machine that requires no malice: someone suffering in the middle, a ring of people merely watching, and you outside that.
10. A book that opens with "they eat people" ends on beans that were never that good again — the accuser conceding he grew out of the same ground.