Madman's Diary was Lu Xun's first short story. It is also the first story written in modern Chinese and as such was ground breaking in itself. It still is pertinent today. Recently an article in the Op-Ed section of the sunday LA Times quoted the last line from this story. That article was about the recent revelations about orphanages in China. The last line from the story is
Save the Children.The story tells of the narrator's visit to his old friend. He learns that his friend's brother had had some mental problems but got better and took a job in another city. During the time of his illness the brother kept a diary that the narrator was allowed to read. This is the Madman's Diary of the title and makes up the bulk of the story.
The brother's diary tells of his growing obsession with cannabalism. He begins to think that everyone around is a cannibal and that his time is coming up next, to either eat or be eaten. He prefers the later and becomes resigned to his fate. The last line he states that there are children who have not yet eaten human flesh. Save the Children.
The thought provoking part of the story is: just how crazy is the madman? His paranoia went too far but the instigation for his paranoia was real. Not all that long before the time of this story human flesh was being sold and eaten, because during the Taiping rebellion human meat was abundent whereas beef or pork was not. Cities survived on human meat. Also there were instances where enemies were killed and eaten, kind of like the ultimate revenge and degradation of the person. I have even heard that this happened during the cultural revolution of the 1960's. I'm sure everyone who read this story knew of tales of cannabalism of one sort or another. In most write-ups about Lu Xun, and this story in particular, he is described as having exposed the "cannabalistic feudal society" of pre-revolution China. This seems to imply that the cannabalism in his story was symbolic. I think it was that, but also maybe more than that. Lu Xun's stories are best understood in the context of the revolutionary time of great change taking place in China at that time, but even alone the story stands.
In his essay Fan Ainong, Lu Xun writes about a real case of cannabalism that took place (found in the collection Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk ). When Lu Xun was still a young man studying in Japan one of their former fellow Chinese scholars in Japan had returned to China. His name was Xu Xilin. He assasinated the Governor of Anhui province and was captured. The Governor's bodyguards tore out Xu's heart and ate it. Here is an example of real cannabalism involving a person Lu Xun knew. The cannabalism of A Madman's Diary is more than solely symbolic.
You may notice the same name, A Madman's Diary, as the Nikolai Gogol story Diary of a Madman. I think Lu Xun was inspired by him and may have taken the name and the device of writing the story as if it were the diary of someone with mental problems from Gogol. I say this because Lu Xun translated Gogol's works into Chinese and was undoubtably familar with Gogol's story. But the title is where the similarities end. Gogal's story concerns an office worker who comes to believe he is the King of Spain. He misinterprets reactions to his delusion as if the reactions were due to his being the King of Spain. It is quite humorous. For example when he tells his co-workers he is the King of Spain they react to this announcement as anyone would react to a crazy man saying something crazy--they shy away. The madman of course attributes this to deference they are now showing him as they now are aware of his lofty royal position. Lu Xun's story is more befitting his time and is unsettling rather than humorous. I haven't read what Lu Xun wrote (if anything) about the story. I would like to do so.
Thanks to Tan Hsiao Wei for putting it up.