| Chapter 1: | Deep Structure and Its Interpretation |
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I had to join my classmates in clapping and cheering in the lecture hall. One day suddenly among the slides I saw some of my Chinese compatriots, none of whom I had seen for long time. One of them, bound, was in the center and the rest were standing to the right and left of him. All were strong in body but appeared lifeless in spirit.1
The commentary explained that the Japanese military was about to behead the bound man, a Chinese spy alleged to be working for the Russians, as a warning to others. In the next paragraph Lu Xun reflects on the scene he has just described. “Before the term was over,” he comments, he decided that a career in medicine was not as important a patriotic endeavor as he had thought.
The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they might be, could only serve to be made examples of or as witnesses of such futile spectacles; and it was not necessarily deplorable if many of them died of illness. The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirits.2
Believing at the time that literature was the best means to that ends, he decides to return to Tokyo and take up this new mission.
Scholars have frequently treated this famous passage as biography, as if it were an accurate account of events as they happened. Of course, they recognized this as the author’s statement about his artistic development, but generally they focused on the content proffered, not on its structure. Understandably critics have hungered for the information it seems to provide about an author who wrote little about his personal life. Certainly, the account delivers a compelling glimpse into Lu Xun’s thinking during these years.3
Not surprisingly, then, many critics have treated the “Preface” as if it were almost biography, that is, as an historical, largely accurate account of events in the past, and they have tended to limit their inquiry to the purported history, the actual events of Lu Xun’s life, even when they acknowledge that it is autobiography.4 This is perfectly understandable.