Modern China has produced many talented writers, with the usual division of critical opinion concerning them. There is, however, almost universal agreement on one authentic genius: Lu Xun. Few writers of fiction have gained so much fame for such a small amount of work. His reputation rests mostly on twenty-five stories released between 1918 and 1926 … This small body of stories offers a bleak portrayal of a culture that, despite its failures, continues to capture the modern Chinese imagination. Whether the older culture had indeed failed is less important here than Lu Xun’s powerful representation of it and the deep chord of response that his work has touched in Chinese readers. Luzon was a controlled ironist and a craftsman whose narrative skill far exceeded that of most of his contemporaries; yet beneath his stylistic mastery the reader senses the depth of his anger at traditional culture.
1B: “Diary of a Madman,” Lu Xun’s earliest story in modern Chinese, opens with a preface in mannered classical Chinese, giving an account of the discovery of the diary. Such ironic use of classical Chinese to suggest a falsely polite world of social appearances had been common in traditional Chinese fiction. Usually its presence suggested, however, the alternative possibility, of immediate, direct, and genuine language, a language of the heart that showed up the language of society. Here, the diary that follows the preface is indeed immediate, direct, and genuine, but it is also deluded and twisted. The diarist becomes increasingly convinced that everyone around him wants to eat him; after observing the growing circle of cannibals in the present, the diarist then turns to examine old texts, where he discovers that the history of the culture has been one of secret cannibalism. Beneath societies false politeness, the veneer of such decorous forms as the voice in the preface, he detects a brutality lurking, a hunger to assimilate others, to “eat men.”
One way of reading “Diary of a Madman” is as an “angry,” “bleak,” and “ironic” attack on traditional Chinese society and culture prior to its revolutionary overthrow during the Chinese Civil War, which began in 1927 and ended with the Chinese Communist Party taking control of the country in 1949. In response to 1A and 1B, consider the ways in which the text of the story supports this point of view. In other words, consider the ways in which the text of the story supports a point of view in which readers should accept the primary meaning of the story comes from taking the point of view of the younger brother and diarists straightforwardly and sympathetically – which is to say from taking the younger brother and diarist as a social and cultural prophet or visionary and not simply or at all as a “madman.”
2: As the diary progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the diarist, who sees himself as a potential victim, recapitulates the flaws and dangers of the society he describes, assimilating everyone around him into his fixed view of the world. His reading of ancient texts to discover evidence of cannibalism, with its distorting discovery of “secret meanings” that only serve to confirm beliefs already held, works in part as a parody of traditional Confucian scholarship. His is a world closed in on itself, one that survives by feeding on itself and its young. Yet the story opens itself to other interpretations: some see the madman as understanding the truth to which everyone else in the tale is blind, while others have noted that the madman’s possible cannibalism undermines his apparent vision and that in any case his account is suspect because he is awaiting appointment to an official position.
Another way of reading the “Diary” is to see the younger brother or diarist as in some sense a genuine “madman” – in other words as someone who, whatever his prophetic or visionary insights may be, is nonetheless also equally as infected by the social and cultural madness he describes as “cannibalism” as everyone around him. The text of the story gives grounds for this possible reading in Section 9 when the younger brother or diarist recognizes that the same people he labels as “cannibals” may also live in fear or being “cannibalized,” just as he does, such that we as readers are left to wonder if he himself may harbor some “cannibalistic” appetites of this own: “They want to eat others and at the same time they’re afraid that other people are going to eat them. That’s why they’re always watching each other with such suspicious looks in their eyes.” If you choose to respond to Excerpt 2, discuss the ways in which the story’s irony and criticism may include the younger brother and diarist himself and not just those around him – in other words, the ways in which there may be limits to how much sympathy we feel for him and how straightforwardly we take the point of view in his diary.