The Unfinished Text or Literature as Palimpsest towards Lu Xun and His Relevance to the Present*

Abstract

The fact that Lu Xun is no longer regarded as the most important Chinese writer of the 20th century raises many questions. Is there only one benchmark for good literature, or are there different norms? To what extent are these norms dictated by the market? Questions like these relate to the issue of evaluation. Is literature still evaluated according to the internationally recognized definition of “modernity” that prevailed before World War II, or is it unfair to judge contemporary writers according to standards that dominated before 1949? The reason why contemporary Chinese literature (after 1949) might sometimes seem somehow lacking in comparison with modern Chinese literature (1912–49) might be found in historical changes in the role of the narrator in the novel. Literature after 1949 often returns to the omnipresent narrator, whose comments can be taken for granted. But, in the works of Lu Xun, the reader is often confronted with a narrator who is not reliable. In this way, the literature becomes ambivalent, and it is precisely this ambivalence that makes the literature “modern,” as the reader has to decide which voice he or she is going to trust. It is also ambivalence which turns a narrating “I” into a fictional character, which cannot be equated with the (real) author.

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