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Literary Remains: Death, Trauma, and Lu Xun's Refusal to Mourn, by Eileen Cheng. Honolulu: Hawai'i University Press, 2013. Pp. 328. $54.00 (hardcover).
In his effort to rescue history from the nation (History), Prasenjit Duara has interrogated modern Chinese historians and writers for their complicity in promoting linear narratives. Yet Duara singles out Lu Xun as an exception in that Lu Xun deploys literary techniques to "undermine the totalizing monologic of the Historical voice."1 Lu Xun's "practice of history" is genealogical, i.e. to "see history as projecting back from one's present location" (47). This post-structuralist episteme exemplified by Duara's work has for the past few decades informed scholars in the field of modern Chinese studies. With this significant move to deconstruct official history and as such to recuperate alternative narratives, the field has taken a self-reflective and sometimes counterintuitive turn in attempting to revise and challenge its preexisting theses, readings, conceptualizations, and epistemes. The arbitrary demarcation between the "modern" and "premodern," for example, has been rightly questioned, and Eileen J. Cheng's Literary Remains is a welcome contribution to this revisionary turn in modern Chinese studies.
Cheng understands the persistence of the past in Lu Xun's writings to be a symptom of his critical reaction to the Chinese experience of modernity and to its resultant "process of cultural transformation and disintegration" (7). Lu Xun's practice of history and his use of historical resources do not constitute a determined dismissal of the past; instead Cheng's book shows that Lu Xun's "literary [both form and content] encounter with the modern" entails a "sustained engagement with the past" (6). The often irreconcilable contradiction of modernity generates a creative and dialectical tension in Lu Xun's writings, as well as a representational mode that calls for a "dialogical interplay between the past and the present" (6). Cheng's book not only re-reads Lu Xun in a more dialogical fashion, but also sheds some theoretical light on the deep contradictions of modernity itself. Manifest in Lu Xun's sustained self-dissection as well as his multi-layered fiction, this self-conscious tension reveals his self-chosen ontological status-in the manner of what Wang Hui calls "inbetweenness" (zhongjian wu)-demonstrating a kind of what Wang Ban terms "critical historical consciousness." Cheng's intertexual re-readings of Lu Xun's poems, fiction, essays,...