 Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you all here tonight first as is Appropriate I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional country of the nun and all people and Pay respects to elders past and present. I Recognize and respect their cultural heritage their beliefs and their relationship with the land I Also extend respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today Tonight is a very auspicious occasion we are going to be addressed by one of Australia's finest scholars of Chinese culture and literature Professor Gloria Davies Professor Davies is from Monash University From our point of view here at the Australian Center on China in the world She is a very old friend not only personally, but when the center was Invented she was one of the first to be invited on to our national management group So here she has seen the the birth and the growth and the flourishing of the center It's ups and it's downs and has been one of our most loyal and learned friends She has been a guiding force behind the China story project Behind the China story yearbooks and many of the activities that we've had here in the center More relevant tonight Gloria is one of the world's great scholars of Lu Xun In 2013 she published the highly acclaimed Lu Xun's revolution writing in a time of violence with Harvard University Press it received accolades from Scholarly journals reviews and also in those learned Papers such as the Times Higher Education Supplement. It's a fine book and Gloria is a terrific scholar. So I'm Really very pleased to be able to introduce her to a larger audience to deliver this public lecture hearing voices with Lu Xun It's an absolute pleasure to be at the ANU my alma mater This is where I began reading Lu Xun in fact so the paper that I'm going to be presenting tonight is part of New research that I've taken up this year Drawing on some of the things that I have written about Lu Xun over the years Okay, so what do I mean by hearing voices with Lu Xun? We think of reading as a silent activity yet a great deal of sub vocalization goes on when we read Reflecting on inner speech as an indispensable part of reading Robert Frost wrote in a letter in 1914 The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader I have known people who could read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers I readers we call them they can get the meaning by glances But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work Remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words It may even as an irony convey a meaning opposite to the words I wouldn't be writing all this if I didn't think it the most important thing. I know These remarks by Frost which I might add a abundantly quoted online a sure sign that they resonate with a lot of people offers us a Useful way of thinking about Lu Xun's literary art specifically and the significance of sub vocalization More generally and how we read and understand the text So in this evening's lecture, I will argue that Lu Xun's short stories and essays suggest That he had a heightened awareness of writing and reading as involving both Visual and auditory senses. I will argue that the evocative power of his writing Writings owes and large part to his talent for hearing voices distinctly Enabling him to then transpose the voices he heard into writing in this connection I will also suggest that even though Lu Xun never wrote about the phenomenon of sub vocalization per se he was evidently interested in its effects and that several of his compositions indicate that he regarded his own inner voice as by turns a source of positive guidance and a form of unwanted possession To dwell on the voices projected out of Lu Xun's writings is especially pertinent in relation to his by Huawei writings to his modern experimental written vernacular By Huawei as a language that Lu Xun helped to pioneer as a literary medium in the mid to late 1910s Was promoted as a literary revolution Quite explicitly that would render obsolete the pre-modern literary language classical Chinese of China's educated a lead when Yan Wen and by Huawei's producers had hoped to make written Chinese in Distinguishable from spoken Chinese to equip the citizens of the modern Chinese Republic founded in 1912 With a national mother tongue in which to express their everyday experience and courses was the great ideal by Huawei's produces dreamt of a democratic language and a language of the masses The voices Lu Xun projected out of his by where when by Huawei in writings Register his hopes fears and disappointments with this literary enterprise Lu Xun's by Huawei when writings are by no means easy to read as Zhu Yaren in this afternoon symposium Discussed and very convincingly drawing on the comments of people who read Lu Xun at school and and That was the saying that Yaren Quoted the three things we dread our classical Chinese Composition and Joe Shorin, which is Lu Xun's birth name given name He didn't use the pen name Lu Xun until 1918. He was born in 1881 So this saying is the result of people having first encountered Lu Xun's writings and particularly his short stories as prescribed textbook readings in other words as text that You never wanted to read and you never asked for to read Lu Xun to pass a test in Chinese language and literature is very different from reading Lu Xun for pleasure or as part of one's scholarly practice Textbook readings when they are badly put together impede reading and the multiple choice Example that Yaren gave this afternoon. I thought was just absolutely wonderful. It just demonstrates that point you You don't see any Lu Xun in it At all, right? It's just a case of identifying Kong Yi Chi according to the the textbook requirements Um the chosen text in Terms of, you know, a badly put together textbook, right? It's instrumentalized as an object of instruction through set forms of analysis and summary by confining the reader to the task of reproducing an institutionally approved account of what a Story like the New Year's sacrifice of the true story of acu means This study guide or cliff cliff's notes approach actively discourages the reader from reading the work independently Only slow reading independently pursued affords us the relative silence in which to hear Lu Xun's rightly voice and the many voices projected out of that rightly voice in my referring to Lu Xun's rightly voice You may ask is this author's voice singular? Does he and he's in the present tense for me as voice does he or did he? The historical author have different voices Contingent on genre and subject matter and my answer to you would be both yes and no Lu Xun's Baihua when voice is Recognizably his own even when it is used to channel other voices and this is very clear in his use of vocabulary the prosody the the style of His formulations in contrast the far more rule bound our cake language of his Gowon poetry and he wrote in Gowon and his early Gowon essays project sentence sounds to recall Robert Frost's word That being highly formal and conventional accommodate far fewer personal or Indicient in individual traits and in saying there's a haze hastened to add that I'm not suggesting that his Gowon writings like originality for their contents are highly original in fact Like many other types of Gowon writing Because the form of Gowon is Constitutively restrictive it serves to heighten by contrast the individuality or the originality of the content Right and and when you do in one instance describe that as sort of you know dancing and fetters Shortly I want to discuss a few of the voices that haunt my readings of Lu Xun but first I want to say a bit about listening or Hearing and there is a difference between the two that I will come to later as a topic of intellectual inquiry The last two decades or so have seen an increasing focus on voice and literary scholarship voice is a complex and problematic category to quote Richard Axel because it is an entity attributed to silent written texts and this is an article in a 1998 special issue in new literary history on voice Moreover and here I'm quoting Richard Axel the question of who speaks in narrative discourse Invites the further question of whether texts can really be said to speak at all And if so, what are the theoretical motivations and implications of the metaphor of speech for writing and a quote? Reading speech as a metaphor for writing allows Axel to sidestep the question of whether and how in a speech might affect how a reader learns to recognize an author's voice Axel's article published in 1998 Predated by more than a decade the findings of neuroscience researchers on sub vocalization Using fMRI magnetic resonance imaging and eye tracking technology to examine brain activity patterns produced during reading These researchers have found compelling evidence of the auditory phenomenon of inner speech or the inner voice Describing reading as I quote a multimodal mental experience involving both auditory and visual modalities They are neuroscience researchers the co-authors of a Well-known 2012 article title how silent is silent reading? Interest cerebral evidence for top-down activation of temple voice areas during reading. That's the title Report that our experience of hearing our own inner voice pronouncing words mentally shows up on fMRI scans as Quote increased metabolic activity in the auditory cortex including voice selective areas and More importantly for my purposes. They also noted that Sustain inner voice activation is not an automatic process occurring systematically in response to any written word it is clearly enhanced when participants read attentively to understand and memorize sentences and Minimize when words are not processed attentively This neuroscience evidence for Robert Frost's claim a century earlier That bad readers are eye readers allows us to now more fully consider what it means to hear Lucien's voice When we read his Biowaren writings To begin with when I say that I hear Lucien's voice Is this in fact my inner voice that I hear sounding the sentence as I read I Can't distinguish between the tonality or the sound quality of this Inner voice in my head and the one in which I rehearse arguments and excuses make plans or tell myself off in my head for a whole range of situations daily encountered yet in the act of reading the words on the page Acquire a phonic presence that takes over my inner voice and at this point Let me quote Stephanie Bishop because she is very eloquent on this experience So this is Stephanie Bishop's voice talking about her inner voice It is not another voice that I hear when I read but my own inner voice heard back to me My inner voice is subject to the architecture of the author's voice The voice that I hear when I read is my inner voice Reshape by the features of the text the written words sculpt my inward hearing of myself It is not a fictional voice that I hear when I read but a new and adapted experience of my own inner voice And so ends the introduction of my lecture and I will now proceed To discuss hearing voices with Lucien in three sections. The first is titled heteronomy obeying another's voice in 1922 Lucien likened his by far one stories to acts of calling out nahi Which was the title? There it is. That's from one of the early editions of nahi in the 1920s The title that he gave to his very first anthology of short stories and the 1922 preface to this anthology He figured China as a hermeticly sealed iron house Dauless and windowless who sleeping inhabitants were consigned to death by suffocation I think most of you here are familiar with that story His close friend Qian Feng had invited him to write for Xinqing Nian new youth magazine the leading vehicle for the bio movement at the time Lucien replied that the Chinese were imprisoned by the millennia old ideas of dynastic China and he asked Qian Should the wakeful attempt to rouse the sleeping to alert them to the agony of irrevocable death as opposed to allowing them to die in peaceful ignorance Qian's response was but of a few wake up You can't say there's no hope of destroying the tie wall right the iron house Lucien credited Qian with persuading him to call out Nahan to urge for radical change By the time he wrote this preface Lucien had achieved national fame for his bio one short stories and his essays He explained his decision to continue writing and bio in the following way and That's the Chinese there that I have emphasised I don't have the leisure to worry whether my cry is brave and bold or sad and tragic or whether it is repellent or ridiculous Since this is a call to arms. I must naturally obey my general's orders These remarks by Lucien on calling out revolved around the concept of voice and literature Although he did not elaborate on what he meant by my general's orders He nonetheless alluded to his decision to write as the result of heeding another's voice Here the general as a figure of military authority Serves to highlight that it was in response to a commanding voice that the author wrote in bio one and Precisely because he felt he could not disobey this voice It was only natural that he put aside all social anxieties of how he might sound to his readers whether it's brave and bold or sad and tragic repellent or ridiculous and it was Lucien's way I feel of signalling a higher sub vocalic authority at work in his text Lucien never indicated whether his general spoken by Hua Wen or Wen Yan Wen or a mixture of both or You know whether it had he had a Shaoxing dialect probably did because Lucien had And he certainly never called it sub vocalic My interpretation of it he merely noted that he was conscious of making a special effort to write positively For this was what the commanding general of the time demanded and hence he dared not in fact his readers with his own pessimism And he evidently liked these lines, you know about the general's orders and the call to arms because he repeated them again In his 1932 preface 10 years later to a volume of his selected writings noting in this later work that The orders I obeyed came from the revolutionary vanguard of the time These were orders. I willingly obeyed. They were most definitely not sacred decrees and I submitted to them neither for money nor under threat Lucien's references to a commanding voice at work in his thoughts leading him to write partakes of the qualities of an interior monologue But there is an important difference here between his his formulations and the idea of interior monologue as a literary device The interior monologue refers merely to the direct representation of a person's thoughts It can but does not usually entail the idea that the thoughts that we presume to be ours Are in fact unavoidably entangled with the thoughts of others being voiced in our heads In this regard Lucien's attentiveness to the inaudible voices that direct one's thinking such as his general's orders Makes him in my view a thinker of heteronomy or counter autonomy He was wary of the celebratory claims of individualism and intellectual independence among the proponents of new culture Preferring instead to highlight the conditioned nature of people's speech and actions Not least his own and this is very clear when you compare his writings So you know 19 the early 1920s say with the types of publications in which people were proclaiming you know Declaming their their creative genius and their independence such as in you know the creation monthly for instance So Lucien's stories and essays are written in ways that encourage readers to ponder the hidden authorities behind their own thinking The workings of heteronomy of being subjected to another's will is perhaps most explicitly dramatized in his 1925 play script orker The Wayfarer In which the protagonist Wayfarer feels compelled despite exhaustion to keep traveling toward An unknown destination because a voice up ahead Is urging and summoning me to keep on going The play features three characters the shabbily dressed Wayfarer aged between 30 and 40 And two people living in a mud hut whom he whom he meets along the way and old man in his 70s and a girl of 10 So all three characters are presented as age-based archetypes they're nameless And the whole play revolves around a conversation between the Wayfarer and the old man The Wayfarer discovers that the old man had also heard the same voice Years earlier but had chosen to ignore it When the old man says it stopped calling and I no longer remember it clearly The Wayfarer responds. Oh, how could you have ignored it? The Wayfarer remarks that though his feet have bloodied and blistered He feels compelled to obey this disembodied voice and from a letter to his student Xiao Qiwen written shortly after he completed the play We know that Lucian wrote the Wayfarer as an as an allegory of his commitment to developing by Huawei for common use As with my general's orders the summoning voice in the Wayfarer is a source of unquestioned authority to the hero However, as Lucian points out in relation to the old man who had stopped hearing this summoning voice Listening for utterances that strike one as true requires an effort For one must constantly be alert to the effects of these utterances on one's ear Discriminating between what one should heed and what one should reject And this effort of mutual discriminant of moral discrimination In turn strikes a chord with the mentioned idea of knowing what to discard and what to preserve Shear and true, right? Shear, sheng, shui, yi In the mentions with the implication that someone of noble character Should prefer to die rather than to lead a craven life In being and time Martin Heidegger offers us the insight that hearing is a mode of understanding as he puts it Initially we never hear noises and complexes of sound But the creaking wagon the motorcycle We hear the column on the march the north wind the woodpecker tapping the crackling fire I've given you here the characters of shi sheng, shui, yi because as someone of Lucian's generation steeped in the classics You know this this is what they hear automatically As clearly as one might hear the creaking wagon when you hear a particular sort of sound, right? So we hear words as sounding either familiar or foreign and not as a multiplicity of tone data We are constantly discriminating between sounds In his writing solution often highlighted the importance of knowing what to listen for He likened by why when in one instance to an attempt to restore speech to this china, which has been silent for centuries Suggesting that because dynastic culture had made the china the chinese strangest the spontaneous expression The success of by why one would be to quote him like ordering a dead a dead man to live again He added that though. I know nothing of religion. I fancy this approximate Approximates to what people to what believers call a miracle Okay, so the remarks that I've drawn on were made by lu xun during a speech in hong kong in february 1927 Which was subsequently published as Wu Sheng the chong guo voiceless china which has more commonly been translated as silent china but ted huiters and This recent publication called an anthology of trans translations of lu xun's essays Jottings under lamp light has translated it very accurately. I think captured it as voiceless china because that's what wuxiang means And and again, you know, that's the importance of translation of listening That that was what lu xun meant So This was a speech february 1927 that he gave in hong kong Where he argued hyperbolically that he found it difficult to hear the real voices of flesh and blood living breathing chinese He explained that china had become largely voiceless Because and here i'm going to quote him at length using ted huiters translation Making one's ideas and feelings known to a broad Audience requires writing but as things stand now most chinese still aren't able to express themselves this way This is no fault of ours because our written script is a terrifying legacy passed down to us by our ancestors Even after years of effort expanded at learning it. It's still difficult to use properly Because of its difficulty many people don't even bother with it to the point that some don't even know Whether the character for their surname chang is written as chang or chang Or simply don't know how to write it at all but can only say chang So although people can speak only a few can hear them and those far away have no idea what was said So it's tantamount to being without a voice The primary difference between the civilized and the barbarians Is that the civilized have a system of writing and can use it to transmit ideas and feelings both to the masses and to Posterity so although china has a system of writing It has now become irrelevant to the majority of the people since it uses a difficult to understand archaic language Good only for expressing ancient and obsolete ideas All the sounds in this language are outmoded and that does tantamount to having none at all People are therefore unable to understand one another and are like a big platter of loose sand And that very last sentence is one where he quotes sun yet sen yi pan yi pan sansha and in terms of outmoded ideas Or ancient and obsolete ideas You know one might also think that there are modern ideas That bear no relation to how people live For instance party slogans or you know the tea farm The correct way in which to formulate a party slogan Anyway, these remarks by lucian are sufficient to indicate His acute self-consciousness about his use of language as some as someone who's steep in the terrifying legacy to use His words of one young one And let me comment now on what I have just quoted from lucian in a critical academic register of the 21st century in english To highlight a broader insight into language that I discern in his words What I've learned from lucian then is that language is organic To think and speak in chinese is to have received ways of seeing And understanding the world through received sayings of which the most influential for every person are the ones They remember best or I want to quote to others because they hear them readily in their own heads However, if one is incapable of reflecting reflecting on how the words that come out of one's mouth Are effectively a bequeath vocabulary and grammar rather than one's own words One merely serves the dominant language echoing what others have said the authoritative statements of the day But which the language the dominant language exists as a vehicle One has no voice of one's own one speaks, but is nonetheless voiceless On this point, we should note that though lucian encouraged others to find their own voice. He never claimed to have his own Instead he described himself as someone who was choked under the crushing weight of extremely ancient phantoms Being so choked and crushed. However, also allowed him to reinvent the extremely ancient phantoms that haunted him In his 1919 essay how should we be as far as today? He made the following statement twice First toward the start and then at the end of the essay And those of you who've read lucian will know this very well this particular statement Despite carrying an enormous burden of old customs and traditions A person can nonetheless Hold out the gate of darkness Bearing its weight on his shoulders to let the children out so that they may Enter the vast and bright world beyond and lead happy lives thereafter as decent and reasonable human beings The particular phantom lucian invoked in this image of a superhuman figure holding up the gate of darkness Is that of xiong kuohai and sort of created as as a palimpsest here that's xiong kuohai Who first appeared in the popular seventh century work of fiction and lucian was an aficionado of you know popular pre-modern popular fiction the life stories of the tang dynasty shuo tang shuo tang全傳 So this is where xiong kuohai first appears and the legend of xiong kuohai remains widely known to this day to readers Um and viewers, you know, because it gets recreated in martial arts movies too of chinese martial arts romances, right? xiong is a storybook hero who led a band of outlaws at the time of the suiyang emperor um date 5 6 9 to 6 1 7 in yangzhou xiong kuohai and his men found themselves trapped by the imperial troops as the story goes And already injured xiong gave up his life so that others could escape by popping up the Thousand pound city gate on his shoulders and there you can see him popping it up and others are sort of fleeing, right? Once his fellow rebels had slipped through this physical giant let the gate fall on him and was crushed to death And so this was the source of lucian's statement about what we as fathers Should do today today So lucian's reference to the extremely ancient Phantoms that encumbered him Allows us to now imagine his inner speech as haunted by a vast repository of words and phrases axioms and provosts from classical chinese As well as lively personalities like xiong kuohai from pre-modern popular culture In one sense he saw saw not so much to exercise these phantoms By writing and by huaowen because he saw that as an impossibility Hence his you know sort of comments about i'm choked to death by these phantoms Instead he strove to show how these phantoms Conditioned chinese habits of speech and writing as a profound legacy of china's dynastic past Profound because it was millennia old He wrote that this pre-modern legacy meant That even modern educated chinese like himself The per-per-pervaders of modern isms 现代主义 as he called As he referred to it in one instance were incapable of experiencing something entirely new This was because they couldn't shake the habits of their cultural past Now remind you here of heidegger's observation about the effects of pre-understanding That shape our everyday experience We hear familiar noises. We hear the motorcycle the creaking wagon Well, we don't hear the creaking wagon. We hear Motor cars, you know, we hear smartphones. We hear people chatting away, you know, having intimate conversations, you know on the train Reflecting on the effects of pre-understanding in a 1926 essay lu shun road And again, this is something that I think Ya-yun also showed on a slide in his presentation This afternoon In the 1926 essay lu shun road Is there any place in my thinking that isn't somewhat infected by the poison of Zhuangzi Of course, there's a well-known painting of Zhuangzi and han fei sir Tried to find one of han fei sir, but they all look so do of that I thought we stick with Zhuangzi of oscillating between an easy manner and quickness to anger, right And again, these sort of saying These have a kind of, you know, they have a weight they have a sort of a gravitas if you've been educated in the language it resonates for you How then did lu shun imagine that people might understand and hear things anew He was mostly pessimistic about the achievements of Bai huawen in this regard At the time of the may 4th movement in 1919 And it's really interesting when you check the dates of his writings as essays Against major events in China modern Chinese history So in May 1919, you know, as there was all of this clamoring about, you know, democracy signs Individualism and lightening man He had this to say If we if we say the proponents of new ideas are people who start fires They will require other people to be spirited enough to fuel the flames If we call them loot players, others will need hard strings to hear the sounds being struck If they are sound makers, others will also need to be sound makers that they may resonate together The Chinese are in many ways quite unlike and thus don't seek Common cause among themselves and I had great difficulty translating Xianggan because Xianggan, you know Refers to sort of coherence. So there's a kind of, you know, a sound wave image attached to Xianggan But that's sort of, you know Anachronistic So I've gone with common cause in translating this bit Lucian's ample use of metaphors of sound in these remarks indicate the importance he accorded to listening as a critical skill He implies that if Baihua win is to develop into a genuinely egalitarian language, a language belonging to everyone Then people need it to be alert as much to how they hear others as to how they are being heard by others And the French philosopher John Luc Nonsi offers, I think, a helpful distinction between two types of auditory experiences By distinguishing between hearing and listening, and of course these are synonyms, but Philosophically he's done something interesting in separating them so that we can think of the difference He writes that in the act of reading a literary text A voice resounds and does so in a manner that invites both hearing and listening In his words, whereas We never hear anything, but the already coded which we decode and that's like the Heideggerian idea of, you know We're already decoding what we hear Listening is an entirely different activity Perhaps we never listen to anything, but the voice is a different activity But the non-coded, what is not yet framed in the system of signifying reference So we listen with fear, we can listen with apprehension What's that? Okay, to hear is to have already understood what something means in the sense of 听见,听懂, right, because it's already there, you know, the voices are in your head saying, yep, grab that meaning And therefore very important in Chinese, 听话, right To obey as well as to listen Listening, however, is perhaps best expressed in Chinese terms of 文 or 文, right, 文, which is the classical term for listen As in strange tales, you know, 以文, for instance Having figured the proponents of new ideas as fire starters, loot players and sound makers Lu Xun then suggested in this very same essay that people who fear new ideas who are comfortable with the status quo Are likely to react as if these ideas threatened their lives He wrote that this was a reaction that Chinese history had fostered and in his words All in all, there's nothing in Chinese history resembling an idea or principle. There are only two material properties Fire and the blade. It's here. Laila is that common name. So something strange Is heard you encounter something strange. Laila, you know, that's a kind of a reaction that you have in fear So Lu Xun thus argued that for the Chinese to properly understand foreign ideas as 自由, liberty, equality,平等, mutual help and coexistence They would need to first Free themselves from these fear driven cries of it's here. And this is actually from the essay One of his mixed impressions is zhakan, right, which is also subtitled shengwu because there was this comment about how You know, if you're Chinese, you know that that's the title that all of the emperors, you know the sort of The usurpers of the throne give themselves that they are sagely and martial, right and And I was going to so in fact I was sort of rather tempted to Well, not only tempted I actually Checked on the internet to see if shengwu had been used in relation to Xi Jinping, but Not yet Not yet, but it may happen Okay Okay, I think I will just Keep on the slide for now So let's now move to autonomy having discussed heteronomy How does one listen to Free expression known as baihua that is yet to arrive In this 1925 wild grass composition the tremor of the debased lines, that's my translation of it Lu shun presented what was arguably his most poetic and experimental depiction of a truly liberated by huawen The text consists of two dream scenarios both of which take the form of a dream within a dream But the second serving is a continuation of the first. So the first dreamscape Is set late at night in the Oh, excuse me in the interior of a tightly sealed cottage He likes these, you know suffocating sort of Spaces with dense stone crop on the roof reflecting its state of this repair the dream opens with the scene Lit by the glow of a kerosene lamp of two bodies pressed together a hairy Well-built stranger lies on top of a slight and delicate body that trembles with hunger pain shock humiliation and pleasure This suggestion of a woman forced to prostitute herself as deep and through the subsequent introduction of a hungry two-year-old girl Whom the trembling woman seeks to comfort with promises of sesame cakes upon the pyman's arrival As she clutches a hard-earned silver coin in her hand. This is a very short composition That consists of two dreamscapes and that's the first the second dreamscape Escape is presented as the continuation many years later of the first The woman described in the first dream as young but haggard with a complexion glowing like lead painted with liquid Rooch has now grown old A young couple and their offspring accuse her of wrecking their lives with the youngest child brandishing a dry reed as a make-belief sword As he shouts kill the narrative continues with the old man calmly leaving the cottage to walk out into the night She keeps walking until she reaches the boundless wasteland and that's surrounded by a barren landscape She stands stark naked like a stone statue She recalls her entire life trembling and convolting at memories of And i'm kind of running my pros and my my words with lucians here So these are his words loving attachment and total estrangement Uh adoration and revenge nurture and annihilation Blessings and curses and she then proceeds Lucian again with every ounce of her energy to raise both hands towards the sky As the language falls from her lips both human and animal but unlike any existing human language wordless In this figure of an alien tongue yet to find the words to fully express human pain Lucian offers a powerful allegory of the egalitarian ideal he envisaged for Bai huawen And that translation of the story yang xianyi and gladdice yang gave it the english title Tremors of degradation. So what they had was just this tui bai the zhan Dong right Missing out the Xian because it's sort of the next Well doesn't sort of really make sense. You know why I have lines there And thereby reducing lucian's phrase to Just tremors of degradation. However that emission of xian of lines this character here From the translated title makes a crucial difference to how we read the text In effect the emission reduces the text to a surreal narrative depicting human suffering A modernist tale of the oppressed yet once we take into account This character. I mean why would he have you know, it's no accident. Why did he you know stick this character in right? His deliberate reference to Tui Bai xian debased lines the prospect of writing as language wounded and driven into inchoate As yet inchoate expression assumes a pivotal importance Lucian instructs us to read the anonymous woman not only as giving voice to her suffering But as finding the capacity to do so only after leaving home to walk into the wilderness Once the woman gives Uference to these to the emotions that consumed her As she stood alone in the wasteland her wasted and decaying yet statuette's frame began to tremble This tremble was like a myriad of quivering fish scales as each scale rose and fell Like water boiling away over a hot flame the air at once grew turbulent and became like violent storm waves Crashing in a remote ocean she then raised her eyes to the sky Her wordless utterances ceased and silence ensued. There was only the trembling radiating like sunlight and Causing the heaving air to whirl like a cyclone sweeping its way across the boundless wasteland And you could say that you know that wonderful sort of lyrical passage there is entirely about resonance Right, which is about sounds about vibrations If we recall Lucian's view of Wen Yanwen as an outmoded language Ill-equipped for common expression what he projects in this text is a language That seeks to make itself heard across the wasteland that Wen Yanwen has created So this is first and foremost a language of emotional expression An alien tongue whose revolutionary force can only be felt But not articulated Moreover, it can only be felt outside society in the wasteland or as yet Unknown linguistic terrain, right? So the wasteland has all of these Different connotations or can be read as having these different connotations in Lu Xun's work It is as if the text implores the reader Listen, let this passionate human animal Resonate with you, right? Hence all of that there Nine years later, he commented much more prosaically with optimism on the sounds of Bai Hua That he heard around him as follows At present on the docs and government offices and on university campuses There is already something resembling a common language, a pu-tonghua What people are speaking is neither Guoyu, the national language nor the language of the capital Rather they speak with the different accents and diction of the hometowns, yet their communications are not in dialogue Although this language puts a strain on speakers and listeners alike, all the same we can all make out what's been said If we tidy it up a bit to help it along, it could form part of the language of the masses And who knows, it may even end up being its main strength Okay, so Just think of that and then think of the cultural revolution and what Bai Hua Wen became You know during the cultural revolution and you know, you're kind of you just feel this sort of acute poignancy You know when you read this Okay, so The final part Listening with Lu Xun and what do I mean by that? In reading and rereading Lu Xun over the years I have become more aware of hearing how his words sound in my head And of the different senses that they have made to me contingent on time place and occasion In reading him attacking Wen Yanwen for separating the Chinese from other people by several iron walls That's one of the things that he wrote so iron walls iron house, you know, that's a recurring sort of figure I hear the extent to which his voice as a written voice Draws from the same deep classical well that he condemns I often hear myself Automatically translating his Chinese into English And I noticed that these anglophone sounds in my head carry a great deal of yang xi an yi And Gladys yang's wordings of Lu Xun for my first readings of Lu Xun were their translations of his short stories Moreover as my life experience has changed me it has also altered the sayings of my inner voice And this has also changed how Lu Xun sounds in my head when I read him now So for large numbers of mainland Chinese Of my age and older Who first read Lu Xun during the cultural revolution years The changes and their sub vocalizations of Lu Xun are undoubtedly far more dramatic Here is how Qian Lutrin expressed the difference between between Maoist and post Maoist soundings of Lu Xun During a lecture that he presented at the National Chengzhi University in Taipei last year We who were the youth of the cultural revolution read only Mao Zedong or Lu Xun During the cultural revolution Lu Xun was completely distorted. He became a means to an end Truly a brick to knock on the door to open other doors Truly a rock to bash people's heads in with Because of sayings like Beat a drowning dog So Sayings of Lu Xun or you know Wordings by Lu Xun that was sort of completely ripped out of context and then used As terms of abuse and that were then used to sort of you know justify physically abusing other people We were not allowed to read books other than those written by Mao and so everyone turned to Lu Xun if they wanted a different path This was particularly common in the later period of the cultural revolution As we were all under the influence of the cultural revolution's earlier period, we misread Lu Xun However, we began to reflect on our reading in the later period And this mainly took the form of people acquiring their own independent understanding of Lu Xun end of quote Our inner voice is arguably the most intimate of the human voices we encounter And yet it is also very likely the most uncanny For the inaudible soundings it produces are both automatic beyond our control in the two Areas of the human brain the name for paul brokker and kahl burning That's how we you know That there may yet come a day when you know, there may be a happy marriage between Neuroscience and you know, psychology And the result of education upbringing and lived experience To live with one's inner voice on automatic pilot is to hear and to decode a great deal To recall the distinction that john mcgnancy makes between hearing and listening To attempt to transcribe what one hears is the great achievement of modernist literature In every language in the world In the form of stream of consciousness representations to attend as much to words As the sounds and rhythms they make in our heads the musicality of language To listen to one's inner voice is to discover that it's tomber. That's Textures resembles one speaking voice Yet carries a host of other people's thoughts. We are always well and truly possessed by other people's words Lucian dramatized the workings of inner speech to chilling effect Towards the end of the true story of rq as rq faced the crowd that had gathered on the execution ground and here i quote from rq And that's a scene from the film So yaya new and i are on the same wave wavelength So Okay, so this is the scene Ideas turned in his mind like a whirlwind the young widow at husband's grave isn't grand enough I regret to have killed in the battle of dragon and tiger lax impact. So that leaves steel mason hand I shall trounce you but when he wanted to raise this hand he remembered that they were bound together And so did not sing steel mason hand either In 20 years, I shall be another in a state of panic arc you are uttered Half a saying and this is the bit that I've highlighted in red In a state of panic arc you are uttered half a saying he had never used before as if he somehow knew it even though no one had taught it to him right and It's this idea of something that resonates You know The crowd's roar good Sounded like the growl of a wolf To listen intently is to discern beyond the known formulations of one's favorite authors and anonymous summons how one resonates with their intimate sonorous authority exceeds the language of logic and reason For the soundings of conscience or liangxin right are often in poetry um So to You know, it's kind of to listen always to to how Things sound in your head, you know, if you do it too much. Well, there's a balance that could be quite pathological but Poetically, you know The things that resonate with people go beyond logic and reason that's sort of basically what I'm trying to say here And I think that, you know, again, this is something that lu xun exemplifies in his writing and That these soundings I think of something like conscience or liangxin as it's, you know Known in in chinese and that it is often in poetry And I think he had a sort of a keen sense of that. So let me end now by Inviting you to listen to lu xun's 1924 prose poem and he wrote this yin de gaobie Which again, I think you're all quite familiar with The shadows farewell in which the poet pays homage to that indwelling sense of Existential wonder about the point of being alive and he wrote this at a time when You know, there were cries of revolution everywhere and you know, soon yet since kmt was you know, sort of going Going from strength to strength and The the plans for the northern expedition were being made right against the warlords to reunify china so That indwelling sense of existential wonder is ineffable But we gesture toward it when we give it such names as conscience or soul or spirit or liangxin and That at least is how I like to read this poem by lu xun and shadow Rather than, you know, soul or spirit. What was his preferred word? So what I have there in chinese I shall now translate into english And I couldn't find an appropriate sort of image to use as a palimpsest So if you sell the door dailies and through pomorphic echo, which I thought sort of made sense There is something I dislike in your heaven. I do not want to go there There is something I dislike in your hell. I do not want to go there There is something I dislike in your future golden world. I do not want to go there It is you though that I dislike friend. I'll no longer follow you I don't want to stay here. Ah, no, I don't want to I prefer to wonder in emptiness I am entering darkness to wonder in a non-place. You want a gift from me, but what can I offer you? There is simply nothing other than darkness and emptiness I wish you nothing but darkness Though it may disappear in your dark daylight. I wish you only empty emptiness Because it will never possess your heart