Politics of Time as Poetics of Being: A Critical Analysis of Lu Xun's Style

This article examines the politics of time in Lu Xun's 鲁迅(1881-1936) essays. The author argues that the binary of memory and forgetting provides an entry point into interpreting and reconstructing the temporal configuration pertaining to Lu Xun's concept of being. From this point onwards, as the article seeks to show, the politics of time serves as the narrative and critical energy that propels and inspires Lu Xun's writing, enabling it to engage in a radical nihilism that both refutes and redeems historical time by making it full, more stressful and more productive. The politics of time in Lu Xun is divided into three domains in this analysis. First, the author examines the cosmic politics of time in Lu Xun's appropriation of evolutionary theory via Yan Fu's 严复(1854-1921) translation of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics. In this domain, the key factor is not Lu Xun's second-hand and approximate understanding of Darwin's notion of evolution, but rather his early exposure to Western experimental and mathematical science, his training in geology, mining, engineering, and, eventually, in biology and Western medicine in Japan.This scientific worldview is intertwined with the natural law of evolution as a cosmic order in Lu Xun's literary representation, narrative, and politics, which retain a metaphysical, thus apolitical, ahistorical, and indeed atemporal stance vis-a-vis concrete social politics as something to be negated and superseded in "the chain of evolution" constituted solely by the "intermediate form" or "what is in-between." Based on this atemporal politics of time, Lu Xun develops the second aspect of his politics of time as a necessity, urgency, and primacy of existence, of life blazing its own path no matter what, pu mie 扑灭(wiping out or breaking down) everything and anything in the way. The third and the innermost aspect of Lu Xun's politics of time lies within his essayistic style as a writing of writing, a self-consciousness of the writerly consciousness, which is symbolically made possible by a strategic and deliberate "mixed styles" approach(a central feature of his essay production, as the author argues);and by a secondarily constructed form exemplified by his numerous prefaces and afterwords to his collections of essays. The author points out that it is in these moments that we can identify the "second birth" or "second coming" of Lu Xun's work, that is, after the May-Fourth-era fiction and propaganda pieces under the rubric of Enlightenment.It is through this narrow strait between the first, more "natural" birth of Lu Xun's fiction work and the second, more politicized, self-conscious, mixed, and secondarily constructed style that we can critically locate and analyze Lu Xun's literary production as the true origin of modern Chinese literature, its historicity, aesthetic ambition, and its existential politics, which is ultimately a politics by which to work out the dialectical relationship between the past, present, and future.