| Lu Xun, as one of the most famous writers in Chinese contemporary literature history, represented thoughtful and profound reflections on the social status of the special period as the transformation from pre-modernity to modernity, which cannot be ignored by current academic research. However, with the development of social outlook on certain aspects, it becomes harder for readers to understand and accept his works in the original way. That how do we connect with Lu when reading his words, spiritually and essentially, therefore, turns out to be the primary issue of current research. Namely, we have to figure out the significance that Lu's works bear on modern readers, diminishing the distinctions caused by cultural and social backgrounds, in order to help readers get better understandings toward his works, thereby acquire spiritual comforts and realization of inside hopes. These issues are possible to viewed in another way. For instance, Wang Hui and some other scholars claim that the spiritual essence of Lu's works is actually "Anti-Desperation". Then the quest to figure out the modern significance of his works turns out to be asking about the origin of his fighting spirit, as well as whether it could be learned by modern people, as a source of national soul or not. Based on his strong feelings of responsibility and highly tensed spirit, Lu Xun always treat chaos and details in daily life with the view of indifference, namely to ignore the lack in material and physical respects in harsh life, but to rich his spiritual life instead. As one of the toughest guy among individualists, he's lacking of individuality according to the facts above. With regard of this, the reason why Lu felt desperate presents weak correlation with his life status, but with the destiny of country and nation. Since he's powerless in changing the environment and destination of the nation, Lu needed more power from rationality and will, hence, to make his revolution of Anti-Desperation come true. According to Xu Shou shang, this power from rationality and will depends on Lu's special emotion of love and hate. On the one hand, the aspect of hate enables him to keep fighting with the darkness, after examining the domination by ancient rulers that reflected weakness, timid behaviors and coldness of Chinese. On the other hand, the aspect of love enables him to keep something warm deep inside to realize the responsibility upon country and nation. Only with the aid of this grasp of love and hate could we find the way to walk into Lu's spiritual world, exploring the secrets that support him to keep fighting with the darkness.Thus, to take love and hate as the subjects of this dissertation, firstly emphasizes that Lu existed as one individual that is special and unique in history; secondly emphasizes that as a human being, Lu existed as a real person with real flesh and blood in the real world. Consequently, we have to pay more attention to his life journey, instead of focusing on the timing of transformation in thought and outlook. Lu's life journey performed like a unceasingly running river of time, full of life details and chaos that might be useful to enlighten the research of his works. In addition, as a writer, Lu expressed his political and cultural thoughts through literary method poetically. We have to understand him via this poetic path to make it more appropriate for research on a writer. Moreover, to research from love and hate in his works has profound realistic significance that would be helpful to a better relation between modern and tradition, as well as with the western world.This dissertation aims at research on Lu Xun's texts, with close reading, psychological analysis, theory of ideology, etc., trying to approach his spiritual essence in a poetic way, in order to find out the method he used to convey how these factors influenced him. It's divided into four parts.In Chapter One, I would discuss the influence from Lu's childhood on his writings. It's crucial to Lu Xun literature research that we focus on the influence of his early years. According to memories of his brothers Zhou Shuren and Zhou Jianren, Lu xun modified his childhood memory in three ways. Firstly of all, to pasting fragments of memories, Lu collected characters and events in different periods of his childhood to concentrate them into one story, creating an atmosphere, which emphasizes the influence upon him. Secondly, he guessed and deducted events might happen and write them into stories. Moreover, he made adjustments to details in the events that have already happened. According to this, Lu combined his memories with the complaints towards issues in reality, always relating to the demands to express his feelings. As a consequence, the characters and stories in his works perform as products filtered from true characters and events in the real memories, mingled with Lu's personal emotion of happiness and anger.In addition, Lu wrote more about his childhood instead of other periods in his life, which indicates the importance of childhood. Derived from deep relation between human being and nature, Lu's words full of energy and richness of life, presents strong curiosity and creative spirit that always breaks the tradition out of date. This creative spirit helps Lu become a confident person, reflecting profoundly on social problems as allegory of humanity. Childhood is significant to Lu's life for conceiving standard of value judgment, which affects the judgment of people and events directly and essentially. Every harsh time he intended to come back to this peculiar period of his life to acquire spiritual support and prove the rightness and adjustment of his judgments, deepening emotions of love and hate. Thus, his works is actually fulfilled with characteristics of memorization. In the history of Chinese literature, memory and memorization are subjects that cannot be ignored, splitting in two respects (of course, sometimes they combine as one in different circumstances). On the one hand, he wanted to express yearn of the past by telling stories of his childhood. On the other, he attempted to criticize on social problems and the darkness by creating and adapting ancient stories, aiming at proposing solutions for the future. The most typical works that reflect this dimension are the adoption on traditional literature with modern styles and techniques, which makes his evolutionary faith and refuse to forget about the past together into one story. Therefore, his works of childhood memory could be regarded as the mirror of history. To memorize the ghost, firstly indicates that Lu Xun was such kind of person who consciously inspects into history and society and secondly, he was never arrogant for his profound introspection, but instead, he had tried all his life to overcome this orientation of writing about ghost and the past, by searching for something that unifies people faithfully. To understand Lu better, we have to pay attention to his unfaithfulness though, the aspect of belief turns out to be as important too.In Chapter Two, I intend to uncover the particular way that young Lu Xun conveyed his feelings of love and hate. In his early period of composition, Lu presented styles like translated novels by Lin Shu, which translated works according to their meanings or modified a great deal based on personal propaganda aims, instead of fully understanding of the original texts. As to the content of the novel, he added intentional criticism into the translation work, based on his own demands of propaganda. Similarly, as to the form of the novel, he adapted and modified the foreign works with narrative ways of Chinese traditional novels. By diminishing the distance between foreign cultures and modern readers, the works translated by Lu Xun provide familiar styles of narration with reading habits.If his works composed before the May4th Movement (1919) are full of excitement and justice, the works after that perform more power of laughter. Almost each novel in the corpus Nahan contains factors of comedy, which directly form the special angels of narration and structure of time and space. He described several comedy scenes in ceasing time and limited space, by imitating the ironic style of Rulinwaishi. However, his works also express deep feelings of tragedy and sadness. The combination of comedy and tragedy fiercely confirms his intentionality of persuading readers and helps his words to influence them, deepening their understanding of social problems and the darkness, as well as the weakness of personality. Readers are supposed to understand him better, then, with more passion and enthusiasm, as well as determination in actions of social revolution.Essays in this period are more likely to be speeches in terms of its genre. To persuade readers, Lu made more efforts to write in clear logic and serious deduction, to provide readers with precise statements. But the most important is, he enlightened readers with the deduction of logic narrations, by construing the contrast between the enlightened and the barbaric, and the conflict between the old and the new. Although to emphasize the distinction between China and the western world is common among composition of writers in the same period with Lu Xun, he was still distinguished for enormous generalization and symbolization. He was truly good at grasping the nature of objects quickly, and describing it with the most precise words. As a result, his works are full of characters with power of expression and influence.I examine the solitude status of middle-aged Lu Xun in Chapter Three, as well as his endeavor of breaking through. Lu was such kind of person who loved night pretty much, since night helps him recognize truth in life, and introspect into the weakness and darkness deeply inside human soul. He realized the influence brought by revolution to Chinese society and the tragedy that people cannot know themselves truly. These provide him with huge emptiness, broadening the distance between himself and outside environment. To change this psychological status, Lu adopted conversation as narrative way of his works, like the ones in Panghuang, completing his task of revenge to mass, abandoning the responsibility, and realizing the awful consequence of these behaviors in his imagination fictionally. He claims his choice of abandoning two ways above by conveying it in the conversation among characters in the end of the article. It indicates that Lu was unable to discard love and care for others forever, and acquire the spiritual motivation of Anti-Desperation, which constitute the peculiar characteristics and artistic styles of his works. Because of this, he is regarded as the modern writer with special individual creativity.I discuss the unique living style of the aged Lu Xun in Chapter Four. To some extent, love and hate as the consequence of value judgment reflect certain characteristics of the era. Represented by essay composition, Lu is regarded to be as in the middle of love and hate, which not only absorbs traditional culture from the perspective of modernism critically, but also accept and refuse certain aspects of western culture from the perspective of Chinese. To outline the changing process of love and hate, therefore, identifies and reflects time and social changes, which is helpful for us to understand the construction of modern culture better and approach an appropriate attitude of issues and solutions between modern and tradition, as well as China and the western world. The representative novel named Gushixinbian is similar to the seriocomic style mentioned by Bakhtin in his theory of carnival, namely the literary genre, which is serious and facetious simultaneously, for their objects both reflect typical characteristics of time in an ironic way. Instead of getting respect from the readers by borrowing ancient stories, he de-construed sacredness of myth and legend by intentionally composing fictions freely, relying on experience. He refused to use identification style of epic, tragedy, poem and argument, but emphasizing nonidentity and polyphony. Consequently, the ideal to reconstruct nation and dialectical abandon traditional culture has been fully presented in his works.Additionally, as a writer with specific consciousness of genre, Lu Xun performed as a pioneer of narration in modern literary, in the realm of usage of meta-narration, parody and paste, as well as other writing skills. What' crucial here, is that these skills and narrative styles are not enough to prove the perfection of Lu better that western writers of post-modernism, since these skills are not formed on the basis of imitation of the western world, namely on the foundation of development of Chinese society in unique philosophy and economy, as well as cultural aspects, but being based on the dialectical absorbing and abandoning of Chinese traditional writing theory in the ancient time. Moreover, Japanese scholars take Lu as the typical representative of keeping national style in writing in modern literary composition is reasonable, which also gets positive resonance in Lu's work back. The two voices constitute so significant relation of communication and conversation that need us to examine exactly.In conclusion, the life style of Lu Xun, namely never abandoning the focus toward reality and simultaneously reflecting the attention in a poetic way, separates him with the Left-Wing writers, providing us with an improved measure of dealing with the relation between literature and reality. It performs unique and valuable significance especially in the current circumstances that our faith toward reality and life confronts with the crisis of Fetishism. |
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