Uncertainties

After we got back from New Zealand I put the Collected Fiction of Lu Xun to one side for a while. Partly this was due to suddenly having more stuff to deal with and partly because I wasn't so familiar with the stories from the second short story collection Lu Xun published, Hesitation I think it's called, and began to find them slightly harder going than the earlier better-known classics, despite their obvious excellence. However, I've regained more momentum in the last few days and am now approaching the end of this collection.

The story I've just read, In Memoriam, seems to me to some degree typical of this period of the writer's work. Very downbeat, to the point of real despair. Painful to read, in the best sense. In some ways obvious in its effects - an in-your-face portrait of a failing marriage - yet in some respects puzzling, at least for this reader. I know that something is being said relating to gender within Chinese culture, or at least that culture as it manifested itself to LX at the time of writing, and I know that in some ways this is a story about Romantic possibilities. But I can't quite grasp where those ways lead.

I love being in this state of sort-of-confusion over a text. Being knocked sideways, but not being quite sure why. There's the pleasure of positively wanting to reread the story and the exciting uncertainty that a rereading won't prove illuminating allied to the certainty that the impact will be as strong, if not stronger, than the first time round. Of course, it's satisfying to feel one has grasped the essentials of a poem or play, or novel, or story, but that's so often accompanied by an odd sense of diminishment.