Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
Outcry is Lu Xun’s first collection of short stories, gathering 14 short stories he personally wrote from 1918 to 1922, and is the crystallization of the spiritual and intellectual state of his early period.
“Outcry” is a verb; semantically it denotes a deliberately raised shout, an action-posture of intentional crying out. Using it as the title of the collection expresses the author’s psychology of wanting to do something. In 1933, Lu Xun said in “How I Came to Write Fiction”: “As for ‘why’ I write fiction, I still cling to the ‘enlightenment-ism’ of more than ten years ago, believing it must be ‘for life’… Therefore my materials are mostly taken from the unfortunate people in a diseased society, with the intention of exposing suffering and illness, to arouse attention to cure and relief.” This is precisely the reason he cries out.
However, before Lu Xun’s literary creation entered a self-conscious stage, this kind of “deliberate shouting” was still passive rather than spontaneous; it was to “humor the friends’ requests.” Before this, he anesthetized himself, copying ancient steles day after day in a desolate courtyard, escaping the present world. Not only did he believe that crying out in a silent China like an iron house was useless, he also pessimistically believed it was harmful, that it would make the small number of relatively clear-headed people feel “the unredeemable agony of the deathbed.” This is the famous image of “crying out in the iron house” reflected in the well-known “Preface” to Outcry.
But in the end Lu Xun was moved by Qian Xuantong’s rebuttal. “Yet since a few people have already risen, you cannot say there is absolutely no hope of destroying this iron house.” And thus came the first piece, “A Madman’s Diary.” From then on, “once started, it could not be stopped,” and Outcry gradually took shape.
In the lonely iron house, he let out a hopeful shout; in the end it gave birth to Outcry, lonely yet bearing a heavy hope, and at the same time it also constituted Lu Xun’s basic writing posture throughout his life.
Loneliness is the dominant tone of Outcry. The madman, a spiritually deranged person who believes others are eating people and that he himself is also eating people; Kong Yiji, the “surplus one” for whom “without him, others would still live the same”; the revolutionary Xia Yu, who seeks welfare for the masses yet is reduced to a human-blood steamed bun; the widow Shan Sishaozi, who has lost her son yet fantasizes that tomorrow will be better; the “I” who “looks down on people more and more each day”; Mr. N, who vents all his grievances on Double Tenth Day and is pessimistic about past, present, and future alike; the “I” who is “separated by a lamentable thick wall” from the childhood hometown in memory; Ah Q, who appears as an absurd figure, self-deceiving, humble and weak; Chen Shicheng, whose mind is ravaged by the imperial examination system and who finally goes mad and hallucinates; Eroshenko, who cannot bear the “desolation like a desert”; the “I” who longs for watching village opera in the countryside as a child; and so on—none is not lonely. This loneliness may stem from not being understood, or from no one trying to understand—stemming from the outside world’s indifference, or from nervous sensitivity, and so forth. But in any case, this loneliness is profound, deeply carved into these little people’s every gesture and movement.
The word “loneliness” appears a total of 15 times in the whole book, of which 10 occur in the later “Preface.” The loneliness of the characters in the book is in fact all the author’s own profound sense of loneliness. In the “Preface,” Lu Xun mentions the origin of Outcry, saying it came from “the bygone lonely times” that he was “pained by being unable to forget entirely”—specifically, the chill and warmth of human relations and the desolation of worldly affairs that he experienced from childhood, through his family’s decline and his studying away from home. Although the bright childhood memories in “Hometown” and “Village Opera” make one delighted, this delight ultimately sets off the author’s real loneliness in adulthood. Loneliness is like a great venomous snake, growing day by day, coiling around the author’s soul and making him feel sorrow.
Even though the author later fell silent for many years, indulging in copying ancient steles, anesthetizing himself, wearing away the generous fervor of youth, that deep sense of loneliness in his soul was still something he could not shake off. Just as a commemoration meant for forgetting is in fact something that cannot be forgotten, after years of silence, this artificially manufactured self-repression, once triggered by circumstances, was bound to rebound and give rise to an outcry. And once this outcry occurred, the human heart long suppressed would, like water released beneath a dam, let out its repression—after which it could not be stopped.
Hope was brought by Qian Xuantong and the magazine New Youth, as mentioned above, but this hope of awakening some people to break the iron house together was still faint; emotionally the author did not believe it existed, he merely found it hard to deny rationally. Therefore, what ultimately drove Lu Xun onto the road of creation was not hope but loneliness. For example, in the “Preface” he says: “Although I have my own conviction, when it comes to hope, it cannot be erased, because hope lies in the future, and one can never, by my proof that it must not exist, subdue what he calls that it may exist… As for myself, I originally thought that now I was already no longer a person who felt pressed and could not stop speaking; but perhaps I still have not been able to forget the sorrow of my loneliness in those days, so sometimes I still cannot help but cry out a few times.”
Lu Xun was by nature negative and passive; not only did he not believe he could take the lead in creating hope, he also fundamentally distrusted the so-called hope of the secular world. In Letters from Two Places, he said to Xu Guangping: “But my works are too dark, because I often feel that only ‘darkness and nothingness’ are ‘real existence’.” “Hope,” included in Wild Grass, writes at the beginning: “Hope, hope, using this shield of hope to resist the assault of that empty dark night, though behind the shield is still an empty dark night. Yet even so, it has successively exhausted my youth.” Then it says: “The illusoriness of despair is precisely the same as hope.” The implication is that hope and despair are no different; in essence both are illusory, empty—endless, meaningless. This line of thought has its sources; as early as “Hometown,” he wrote: “When I thought of hope, I suddenly grew afraid… I thought: hope was originally neither something that exists, nor something that does not exist.”
Although emotionally Lu Xun harbored deep doubts about hope, the reason he did not refuse Qian Xuantong and the subsequent, successive solicitations from friends was also because emotionally he did not accept loneliness and sought to break free from it. Lu Xun believed that “to cry out alone among living people, and the living people have no response—neither approval nor opposition—like being placed in a boundless wasteland, at a loss,” this is true loneliness. And at that time New Youth had not yet established its influence, and its situation was quite lonely; Lu Xun felt emotional identification and was willing to write for them, but it was only to “obey the commanding general,” and “as for whether my cries are brave or sorrowful, hateful or laughable, there is no time to attend to that.”
Although the creation of Outcry originated in Lu Xun’s profound loneliness, it cannot be said to lack even the slightest hope or reliance; it is just that the author was far from harboring the lofty ambition to break the “iron house.” As cited at the beginning, Lu Xun’s “hope” at this time was of the enlightenment-ism type. Toward the characters under his pen (often peasants) he “pitied their misfortune and was angry at their failure to strive,” because he knew well that his literary creation could not directly change this group’s living habits; his fiction was for the intellectual strata of society, especially educated youth, to read, hoping to draw their attention and have them engage in the work of improving society, or, taking a step back, “to comfort those fierce warriors galloping in loneliness, so that they would not shrink from being the vanguard.”
But this hope was also extremely weak in Lu Xun himself; it was “comforting one’s feelings, better than nothing.” In fact, although he declared in the “Preface” that he must “obey the commanding general,” and in creation used indirect strokes (“in Medicine he added out of thin air a wreath on Yu’er’s grave; in Tomorrow he also did not narrate that Shan Sishaozi in the end failed to realize the dream of seeing her son”), to reduce the negativity of the works, the text of Outcry itself still presents to the reader a picture of an old force that is ignorant, indifferent, cruel, hard to change, and powerfully entrenched. This old force did not disappear or change because of the establishment of the Republic of China; it still dominated the behavioral patterns and ways of life inside that “iron house” of China at the time. Under such circumstances, even enlightenment work would be hard to achieve quick results.
In a letter to Xu Guangping (Letters from Two Places), Lu Xun wrote:
Speaking of the events of the first year of the Republic, at that time it truly was much brighter; I too was then in the Ministry of Education in Nanjing, and felt that China’s future was very hopeful. Naturally, there were indeed vile elements then as well, but they always failed. Once the Second Revolution failed in the second year, it gradually deteriorated, worse and worse, and thus became the present situation. In fact, this is not newly added badness; rather, the decorative new paint has peeled off completely, and the old appearance has shown itself again… The initial revolution was to expel the Manchus, easy to do; the next reform was to reform one’s own bad roots, and then they would not do it. Therefore what is most important afterward is to reform the national character; otherwise, whether autocracy or republic, whatever it is—though the signboard changes, the goods remain the same—it will all not do.
In Outcry, the madman who cries out about a history of “eating people,” who calls “save the children,” ultimately “recovers,” and “goes to some place to await appointment,” revealing the enormous assimilative power of Chinese society—a “great dye vat”; the ignorant and backward Ah Q stages a farcical “revolution” and finally loses his life in the farce, reflecting an absurd and chaotic old society and old order; Kong Yiji, the sour and pedantic scholar, amid others’ lack of sympathy, finally dies in his own empty loftiness; the revolutionary martyr Xia Yu’s blood in the end is used by the masses to make human-blood steamed buns; the weak and ignorant Shan Sishaozi, the reader Chen Shicheng tamed by the old system, the peasant Runtu, the group of intellectuals after the Republic who harbor malice and prejudice toward society, the crowd that trims its sails to the wind, and the meaningless retro revival uproar… In the “Preface,” Lu Xun states that he is “unwilling to infect the youth who, like me in my younger days, are just having good dreams, with the loneliness that I myself deem bitter.” Therefore Outcry is not a novel that advocates revolution, that upon reading will make the reader’s cold blood boil and itch to reform society; rather, it is a novel that reveals the darkness of society and the hardships of improving society. In other words, Lu Xun, entering middle age, may already have lacked the generous fervor of youth, naively believing in “saving the nation through literature and art.”
“Hope” begins by writing: “My heart is exceptionally lonely. Yet my heart is very peaceful: no love or hatred, no sorrow or joy, and no colors and sounds either.” This peaceful heart is in fact a kind of “helpless, self-deceiving hope.” The author writing Outcry was a middle-aged man who had been silent for many years, worldly and taciturn yet hot-blooded; on the surface he had already lost the generous fervor of youth. He no longer, as in youth, one-sidedly believed in the power of writing, but he had loneliness he could not shake off, and an urge to express that he suppressed yet that flowed without end; he had his tenacity, and he could not find any other more effective way to break the “iron house”—and so, amid various coincidences of causes and conditions, after wandering and wavering, he set foot on the road of no return on the path of writing. Deep down, the “him who cries out in the iron house” was in fact resisting a kind of numbed despair.
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