Hesitation by Lu Xun (1925)

Lu Xun's first collection of short stories is Outcry (1922), why is this second collection Hesitation? I looked for signs of a post-May Fourth hangover within the collection but I ended up giving up such a reductionist reading. (Admittedly, Outcry is also not written in the mood of a drunken orgy either, the first-person narration device in all the stories in Outcry allows Lu Xun to express his ambivalent attitude.) While some of the stories demonstrates this post-revolutionary fatigue and pessimism ("Upstairs in the Tavern"), others seem to be irreconciliable with this paradigm.

Some Stories:

New Year's Sacrifice

The bourgeois and educated narrator returns to his hometown Luzhen for New Year's. We hear the story of the miserable, unfortunate Xianglin's wife (whose personal name is never revealed), a woman who has slipped through the cracks of safety of various Chinese social structures (e.g. family) and is left alone, helpless, and begging for a living. 

A strange moment occurs when the narrator re-encounters Xianglin's wife, she asks him:

"'After a person's died,' she spoke with a soft, secretive urgency, coming a few steps closer, 'after a person's died --does their soul go on living?'" 

This fills the narrator "with terror" and induces a "blind panic" (p. 163) in him; he feels guilt at the inadequacy of his response to the uneducated Xianglin's wife, and comforts himself as he ended his response with 'I don't know'--an abdication of responsibility.

Lu Xun may have been thinking about himself and other educated elites who sympathized with their poor Chinese countrymen; what kind of responsibility, what kind of relationship did they have with the great majority of China?

Our Learned Friend

Satirical portrait of an intellectual (not sure if Lu Xun was attempting a general diagnosis). Yuan Liaofan (who changed his name to Gao Erchu, an attempt to show kinship with Gao Erji or the Russian Gorky), starts his new job at an all-female school (a progressive development for that time). He laments the fact that he has to lecture on Eastern Jin, and not the Three Kingdoms, he had read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and figured himself familiar with that historical period. (Note: Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a popular novel about that period of Chinese history.)

He doesn't prepare properly for his first lecture, feels the mocking eyes of his female students, and at the end of the story, concludes that all-female schools are a plight to society while he goes and gambles with his friends.

The Loner

The educated intellectual in the first-person considers his friendship with Wei Lianshu, a similarly educated type who is the eccentric stranger in the town. One of the better stories, but I need a closer reading before being able to write anything substantial.

In Memoriam

The first-person protagonist writes about his relationship with Zijun. As a modern, educated couple they decide to live together. Their circumstances become precarious and the narrator decides to split from her, perhaps partially responsible for her later death.

Interesting story because of the existentialist undertones (and this was pre-Sartre):

"Desolation and the silence of the grave were everywhere about me. I seemed to see the lonely darkness of all who had died a loveless death and hear their bitter, despairing struggles."

"I spent my days sitting or lying in the cavernous emptiness of the apartment, allowing the deathly silence to eat at my soul."

"This time, everything that had brought me happiness, love, life  was now gone, replaced only by hollowness, a hollowness that I had created with the truth."

I wonder if this is the despair that Japanese literary critic Takeuchi Yoshimi spoke of in his reading of Lu Xun's novels.

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