Call to Arms (Nahan)

Lu Xun's 1923 first major short-story collection

Tradition: Modern Chinese literature / May Fourth Movement

Lu Xun's 1923 first major short-story collection

Call to Arms (Nahan, 呐喊, 1923) is Lu Xun's (Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936) first major short-story collection — fifteen stories composed 1918-1922 and published in Beijing in 1923. It is the foundational text of modern Chinese literature and includes 'A Madman's Diary' (Kuangren Riji, 1918, the first major short story in baihua-vernacular modern Chinese), 'The True Story of Ah Q' (Ah Q Zhengzhuan, 1921-22, the most-famous Chinese short novella of the twentieth century), 'Kong Yiji,' 'Medicine' (Yao), 'Hometown' (Guxiang), 'A Small Incident,' 'The White Light,' 'The Storm in a Teacup,' and others. The collection is animated by the May-Fourth-Movement (1919) critique of Confucian-feudal-traditional Chinese society: Lu Xun's famous 'iron house' metaphor in the Preface — a sealed iron house in which the inhabitants are suffocating to death in their sleep, and the writer's duty is to shout loudly enough to wake at least some of them so that they can break out — frames the collection's task. 'A Madman's Diary' adapts Gogol's framing to argue that traditional Chinese society is 'man-eating' (chiren) — that beneath its Confucian-civilisational facade lies the literal cannibalism of the human spirit by patriarchal ritual order. 'Ah Q' anatomises Chinese national character through the buffoonish-pathetic figure of Ah Q, whose 'spiritual victory' strategy for converting humiliations into imagined triumphs became a permanent reference-point in Chinese self-criticism. The collection is foundational for modern Chinese literature, was canonised under Maoist literary policy (with Mao calling Lu Xun the 'commander of China's cultural revolution'), continues to be taught at every level of Chinese schooling, and exercises continuing influence on Chinese-language fiction across Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and diaspora contexts.