不爲人知的魯迅:開現代小說先河的中國作家(2)
Though they were all of them perfectly sturdy physical specimens, every face was utterly, stupidly blank. . . . I no longer believed in the overwhelming importance of medical science. However rude a nation was in physical health, if its people were intellectually feeble, they would never become anything other than cannon fodder or gawping spectators. . . . The first task was to change their spirit; and I decided that literature and the arts were the best means to this end.
“他們一樣是強壯的體格，而顯出麻木的神情...我便覺得醫學並非一件緊要事。凡是愚弱的國民，即使體格如何健全，如何茁壯，也只能做毫無意義的示衆的材料和看客...所以我們的第一要務，是在改變他們的精神，而善於改變精神的是，我那時以爲當然要推文藝。”Shortly after this Damascene conversion, Lu Xun abandoned his medical degree and began a career as China's self-appointed literary and spiritual physician岸although he did not find his voice and audience until he became one of the luminaries of the New Culture Movement more than a decade later.
在這次徹底轉變後不久，魯迅放棄學醫，轉而開始寫作生涯，以期醫治中國的精神頑疾。然而，直到十餘年之後，在成爲新文化運動的領導者之一時，他才得以讓人們聽到他的聲音、被讀者所認識。
At its first publication, Lu Xun's fiction was rebellious in both language and message. Until the 1910s, aspiring literati typically devoted themselves to poetry, in an opaque classical Chinese steeped in allusions, while vernacular fiction was held in disdain. Lu Xun took a different view. To him, imperial China's antiquarianism was a means of silencing the uneducated majority. Composed in a Westernized idiom, his short stories demonstrated that fiction could serve sophisticated, serious purposes.
在初版之時，魯迅的小說在語言和內容上均是反傳統的。在1910年代以前，滿懷抱負的文人滿篇引經據典、專注於以晦澀古文作詩，白話小說則被人嗤之以鼻。魯迅的看法則不同，在他看來，中國舊王朝的尚古主義是一種壓制未受教育的大多數百姓的手段。他的短篇小說以西化語言寫成，表明小說也可以服務於深刻嚴肅的目的。Ms. Davies picks up Lu Xun's story in detail in the second half of the 1920s, when the right-wing Nationalist Party began a purge against actual and suspected communists. Many of China's radical intellectuals turned leftward in response, simplistically acclaiming literature to be 'a tool of revolutionary violence.' Lu Xun was less certain. He scorned the egotism of born-again literary Marxists, whom he accused of posturing in revolutionary cafes: 'In front of each is a cup of steaming hot proletarian coffee while in the remote distance there's 'the great unwashed岸the peasants and workers.' ' Yet Lu Xun was also tough on writers who protested that literature should be apolitical, denouncing them for espousing a vapid humanism.
黃樂嫣詳細描述了魯迅在20年代後半段的經歷，當時右翼的國民黨對共產黨員和疑似共產黨員展開清洗。許多中國激進知識分子因而轉向左翼，簡單化地聲稱文學就是“革命暴力的工具”，對此魯迅則不是那麼確定。他對那些重生的馬克思主義革命文學家的自大大加嘲諷，指責他們鑽進革命咖啡店裝模作樣：“...（每個人）面前是一大杯熱氣蒸騰的無產階級咖啡，遠處是許許多多齷齪的農工大衆”。另一方面，魯迅對那些抗議說文學應當脫離政治的作家也毫不留情，抨擊他們是支持乏味枯燥的人文主義。Eventually, in 1930, Lu Xun sided with the communist cultural establishment by becoming titular head of the newly formed League of Left-wing Writers. But we can detect his doubts about a socialist aesthetic in his vituperative, elitist essays, which fueled sectarian feuds among leftist literati during the early 1930s. Shanghai's revolutionary writers, he concluded, were 'a thoroughly useless lot.' (He was even-handedly nasty about literati across the political spectrum: Those with right-wing connections were 'pampered pugs'; feral leftists were 'mangy dogs.')
最終，魯迅在1930年成爲新成立的左翼作家聯盟名義上的旗幟人物，站在了共產黨文化組織的一邊。不過，我們還是能在他那些精英做派的罵文中察覺到他對社會主義審美趣味的質疑，這些文章也在30年代初期激化了左翼文學界的派別紛爭。他說上海的革命作家是一幫一無是處的廢物。（他對整個政界的文人全部一視同仁，比如他罵與右翼有關聯的文人是“叭兒狗”，某些兇狠的左翼文人則是“賴皮狗”。）Through his last years, Lu Xun continued to shelter in Shanghai's urbane, privileged foreign enclaves: enjoying family life, browsing favorite bookshops, hosting dinners, going to Tarzan movies. In 1927, he admitted that he would rather sit down with 'a glass of reconstituted evaporated milk' than join a revolution. When Lu Xun died of tuberculosis in Shanghai in 1936, he was mired in quarrels with left-wing functionaries and especially with Zhou Yang, the literary politico who would become Mao's cultural czar after 1949.
魯迅在整個晚年一直住在上海都市化並享有特權的外國租界中：享受天倫之樂，逛逛自己最喜歡的書店，舉辦晚宴或者是看看《人猿泰山》(Tarzan)的電影。1927年，他承認與參加革命相比，他倒寧願“靜靜地坐下，調給一杯罐頭牛奶喝”。在1936年因結核病去世前，他正身陷於和一羣左翼陣營的官員特別是文人政客周揚的論戰中，後者在1949年後成爲了毛澤東在文化事務上的幫兇。But as soon as Lu Xun was safely dead of tuberculosis, he was adopted by Mao Zedong as an exemplary Servant of the Proletariat. Lu Xun was a fine trophy: the lampooner-in-chief of early 20th-century China who failed to live long enough to say anything nasty about Mao's brave new world. Because Mao claimed him for communism, a Lu Xun industry has developed on the mainland岸museums, plaster busts, spinoff books, journals, television adaptations, even a musical岸lionizing the writer as a great proletarian revolutionary. Ms. Davies does an admirable job of reclaiming the literary, psychological and political complexities that Mao did his best to erase. Far from just an angry polemicist, Ms. Davies's Lu Xun is also an exceptional prose poet, 'creating a turbulent aesthetics' out of vernacular Chinese.
就在魯迅因結核病平靜地去世後不久，他就被毛澤東奉爲無產階級公僕的典型代表。確實，魯迅是一個上佳的門面人物：這位20世紀初期首屈一指的諷刺作家壽命不長，因此還來不及對毛澤東描繪的美好新世界說出任何令人惱怒的話。由於毛澤東稱讚他有共產主義精神，與其相關的產業也在中國大陸興起，比如他的紀念館、半身石膏像、衍生作品、雜誌和改編的電視劇等，甚至還有將其捧爲偉大的無產階級革命家的音樂劇。黃樂嫣做了一項令人敬佩的工作，那就是她復原了毛澤東竭力想抹去的魯迅在文學、心理和政治上的複雜性。她筆下的魯迅絕非只是一個憤慨好辯之人，還是一個卓越的散文詩人，藉助中國白話文“營造出一種動盪不安之美”。In later decades, Mao quoted from Lu Xun's vendettas to validate his own intellectual purges. It would be unfair to blame Lu Xun for the posthumous distortion of his words. Yet there is an uncomfortable link of some sort between the writer's literary pugilism and Mao's later justification of violence, a connection perhaps underplayed by Ms. Davies. But it is a testament to Lu Xun's importance as a writer and thinker that there are multiple ways of reading his legacy to Chinese letters. In 'Lu Xun's Revolution,' Ms. Davies has created a fascinating account of the final years of the writer's life and the beginning of his literary afterlife.
在後來數十年間，毛澤東借魯迅與他人的恩怨爲他自己對知識界的肅清做佐證。魯迅的言語在死後被人歪曲，若將錯誤歸咎於魯迅，則有失公允。然而，這位作家與他人的文學交鋒和毛澤東日後對暴力的辯護存在某種令人不安的關聯，這個關係似乎被黃樂嫣淡化處理了。但是，它是對魯迅作爲作家和思想家的重要地位的印證。有多種方法去解讀他給中國文學留下的遺產。總之，在《魯迅的革命》一書中，黃樂嫣對這位作家的晚年生活及其文學新生命開端的敘述算得上引人入勝。
