Trauma, Lu Xun, and the Specter of the Taiping Civil War

Conventional characterizations of Lu Xun (1881–1936) as an “iconoclast” overlook his skepticism of the ways in which May Fourth conceptions of modernity privilege one particular trauma in Chinese history —foreign imperialism — over others of equal or arguably even greater significance. This essay investigates this other Lu Xun through a reading of his short story “Looking Back to the Past” ( Huaijiu, 1913), which depicts traumas provoked by the Taiping Civil War (1850–1864). I show that this story captures a discursive system whose major components — be it the classic tradition-modernity dichotomy or leading alternative paradigms — all prove incapable of fully assimilating the epistemological, historical, and human violence constituted by the War. Seen in this light, Chinese modernity represents not the clean break with the past envisioned in May Fourth ideology but rather a continued effort to work through the past that even Lu Xun cannot bring to completion. In nuancing our understanding of Lu Xun and the dominant discourses of his era, this essay ultimately also challenges discourses dominant in our own era — above all, our stubbornly Westernized notions of what made modern Chinese literature “modern.”