Call to Arms

The subtractive test finds things to take, and that is what holds this axis lowest of the twelve. The major stories resist it: “Kong Yiji” has nothing idle in a few pages, the boy waiter, the counter, the fennel beans and the debt chalked on the board each bearing weight to the last line; “Medicine” is built in four sections, each required, from the dark street of the execution to the grave; “A Madman’s Diary” needs both its classical frame and its vernacular diary. But the book is an assembly of four years’ magazine work, and it could lose “The Rabbits and the Cat”, “The Comedy of the Ducks” and “A Small Incident”, a moral anecdote that states its lesson, with little loss; “The Story of Hair” is a monologue on queues that “Storm in a Teacup” dramatises better. Necessity is high in the parts and lower in the whole.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. An order of “仁义道德”
(benevolence and righteousness) feeds on the people it governs, and the governed take part in the feeding. The madman reads his history and finds between the lines two words, “吃人”
(eat people), and then finds that he has eaten too. “Medicine” makes it literal. The second disclosure is the spectator, the crowd that comes to watch a Chinese die; the third is self-deception, Ah Q beaten and content. That 1911 changed the queue and nothing under it is disclosed in four stories. The thesis is enacted, not stated: the madman, the tavern boy and the narrator of “My Old Home” each find the fault in themselves. It falls short of the top only in that the disclosure is one condition seen from several sides, not a world.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Elevation here is cold, and the book more often punctures transport than permits it. It rises: the madman’s terror as the eyes of the village and the dog turn on him, and his last words, “救救孩子”
(save the children); the two mothers at two graves in “Medicine”, the wreath no one can account for, and the crow that will not answer the mother’s prayer but flies off; Kong Yiji coming for the last time to the tavern on his hands, his legs broken; in “My Old Home” the friend of childhood saying “老爷”
(Master), and a wall standing between them. What holds it here is frequency: the elevation thins in the middle and lighter pieces, and “Village Opera” closes the book on a gentle nostalgia rather than a height.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Built, not evoked, in the two strongest stories. Cannibalism in “A Madman’s Diary” is not an allusion laid over the story but its structure: the madman’s discovery that he too may have eaten his sister’s flesh turns the old figure of the sacrificial meal into the law of a civilisation, and the frame, in which he has recovered and gone to wait for an official post, closes the circle by returning the seer to the feast. “Medicine” builds a communion in reverse: the martyr’s blood is eaten without faith or knowledge, and the sign of resurrection, the wreath and the crow, is offered and withheld. Ah Q is built into a type, a nobody with a name half foreign and half missing. Below the top because in the other stories the archetype is evoked rather than load-bearing, and Ah Q’s typicality is satire as much as myth.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance was the classical language and the old fiction: the chapter novel (章回小说), the anecdote, the biography (传) of the dynastic histories. The turn was total: the first-person diary, the short story built on a single situation, the ironic narrator, drawn from Gogol, whose “Diary of a Madman” gives the first story its title, from Andreyev and Chekhov and the Japanese and Russian fiction Lu Xun had translated, and made in a vernacular still being invented. Ah Q’s first chapter parodies the categories of the classical biography, searching for the kind of 传 this nobody deserves. The stake was the preface’s wager, whether to wake the sleepers in an iron house they cannot leave. It is short of the top because the forms were borrowed whole: the departure, total within Chinese, was a transplant from abroad rather than an invention of form.

Score: 8.9 / 10

In the major stories the form is the knowledge. “A Madman’s Diary” set in two languages says what no single register could: the classical frame is the voice of the cured and of the order, the vernacular diary the voice that saw, so the form itself enacts the madman’s reabsorption. In “Kong Yiji” the narrator is the boy who poured the wine and laughed with the customers, telling it twenty years later without much remorse, so that the reader stands where the tavern stood, a spectator. The mock biography of Ah Q, with its fussy chapter headings and a grand reunion that is a beheading, turns a genre of honour into a record of humiliation. What holds it here is the book as a whole: as a sequence it is an arrangement rather than a form, and the lighter pieces could be moved without the book knowing less.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence, not promise: a century of return in Chinese, and a large one abroad. The stories have been read as revolutionary documents, as national allegory (the madman stands at the centre of a much argued essay of 1986 by Fredric Jameson), as modernist irony, and as confessions of the intellectual’s own complicity, and each reading has been contested from the text. The questions stay open: whether the madman is cured or defeated, and whether the frame is irony or despair; whether Ah Q is China, the peasant or the reader; whether the narrators of “My Old Home” and “A Small Incident” are credited or judged; whether the preface’s hope is held or performed. Short pieces return more than their length suggests, because the irony is never resolved in one direction.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is Chinese literature of the twentieth century, and the intrinsic force is the reorganisation of it: the book showed that the vernacular could carry a literature of the first rank and that the short story could be the instrument of a nation’s examination of itself, and nearly every possibility of modern Chinese fiction, the satire of the village, the native soil story, the intellectual’s confession, the ironic narrator, is here in germ. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the native soil fiction of the 1920s took its village from “My Old Home” and “Storm in a Teacup”; Ah Q and 阿Q精神 entered the language as names for a habit of mind; Mo Yan and Yu Hua have named Lu Xun as the source they write against and from; in Japan Takeuchi Yoshimi built a reading of modernity on him, and Ōe Kenzaburō called him a master. The field is one language’s, which is why the figure stops at 9.1.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Survival over a hundred and three years, which places the work in the span from seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, in the author’s final arrangement; the removal of “Mount Buzhou” was his own and costs nothing. Presence is continuous and very wide: read and taught in Chinese schools for most of a century, translated into many languages, staged and filmed, Ah Q above all. The presence is charged in part, and that charge holds it short of the widest figure: much of it has been official, the book carried by a state that made its author a saint and so read him narrowly, and his place in the school syllabus has been argued over in this century. The surface is fixed to a moment, the queue and the events of 1911 and 1917, but as setting, not as dependence; the condition outlives it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Lu Xun’s Chinese. The command is of compression and irony: a story told in a few pages through one telling detail after another, Kong Yiji counting out his fennel beans and saying “多乎哉？不多也”
(Much? Not much), mangled from the Analects, and pleading “窃书不能算偷”
(stealing books cannot be counted as theft); the narrator of Ah Q aping the pedant’s gravity; the cold, exact close. The vernacular is new and made, mixing classical turns and Europeanised syntax, sometimes stiffly, and the mixture is part of the meaning in the madman’s diary. Against the top: “The Story of Hair” and “A Small Incident” are worked thinner, the Beijing sketches loosely, and Ah Q’s middle chapters run on satire’s momentum rather than its necessity.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs the major stories: the gaze of a people on its own victims, and a narrator who sees and cannot act, or acts too late. Take the two most distant elements, the classical frame of the madman’s diary and “Village Opera” at the close, a remembered night on a boat watching a play in the countryside. They obey the law loosely: the opera is another spectacle and another memory the narrator cannot return to, but its warmth is a different physics from the cannibal feast. The tones range from horror to farce, in “The Double Fifth Festival”, whose official shelters in “差不多”
(much the same), to idyll, and the light pieces of 1922 sit outside the law rather than bend it. Coherent across a wide range, but not across the whole of it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged as a book of short stories. It holds consciousness, the madman’s and that of the narrator of “My Old Home”; the family and the clan, the elder brother and the mothers of “Medicine” and “Tomorrow”; labour and poverty, Runtu, Ah Q’s day labour, the rickshaw man; the examination system and its ruin, Kong Yiji, and Chen Shicheng in “The White Light”, failing for the sixteenth time and drowning after buried silver; the state and history, 1911, the queue, the restoration of 1917 in “Storm in a Teacup”, the revolution that executes Ah Q; the sacred as folk belief and cure; the village and the city. They are held in one examination of one society, not listed. What holds it here: the natural order and love are thinly held, and each order is seen through brief episodes.

Score: 8.3 / 10