Outcry & Obliviousness
The world is oblivious to the Word of Christ. [Isaiah 53:1-9; Jeremiah 5:18-31; 1 Corinthians 2:6-16; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; 2 Peter 1:1-9] Unwilling to submit to Him, they blind themselves to the Lord and His gospel so that they may live their unbelieving lives unabated. This obliviousness does not stop with words on a page, as living as the Word is, but expresses itself in everyday life. The saints, being sinners, too hide from parts of the Word that they are unwilling to accept on behalf of Christ. We are alienated and disconnected from our fellow men, and we turn our face away from the world around us. In our self-centered approach to life, we cannot even see what we ourselves are doing clearly. In Outcry, Lu Xun paints a picture of village China in its tumultuous growing pains into a (supposedly) Maoist nation through the rise of Communist ideology and the establishment of the Republic of China, marking the end of dynasty in the nation, all in the twilight of the twentieth century; among other things, obliviousness marks all of its inhabitants.
Most people in the villages are ignorant of the goings-on of the country's leadership, et cetera. Consider Ah-Q, the village idiot and eponymous character of "The Real Story of Ah-Q." Ah-Q actually has the privilege of watching one of the republican rebels be executed by the Qing dynasty. Ah-Q's knowledge of the ordeal is vague, "an intuition – he couldn't say why – that these revolutionaries were rebelling against the established order of things, and that rebellion would make his life difficult. . ."[1] but he changes his tune on account of another popular townsman he knows being scared of them. He decides to "join" the revolution – read as "put his hair up and go around saying violent things for no reason" – on account of this. Of course, he has no real center for doing these things. Ah-Q frankly never has any idea what is going on. The hair thing is somewhat important. For most, a change in government to them usually boils down to persecution for hair style, with little underlying respect for the reason behind the persecution among the village people. Mr. N of the story "Hair" puts the entire phenomenon concisely: "Remember that for us Chinese, our hair is our pride and fall. How many pointless victims has it claimed over the years, I wonder?" Mr. N later says, "I cut off my queue [a hair style involving a braided ponytail] – just because I couldn't be bothered with it. But the diehards among my classmates were furious – and the supervisor the government had sent to keep an eye on us." As his story progresses a few years, "First thing I did when I got to Shanghai was buy myself a false queue. . .the minute they [anyone] worked out it was false, they'd smirk and start plotting to turn me in to the authorities for immediate decapitation."[2] This hair business is important; it affects a lot of the characters, and all of the other characters featured in Outcry have even less knowledge than Mr. N's vague awareness and intentional obscurity. Consider also Mr. Zhao's admonishment of Mr. Seven-Pounds in "A Passing Storm:"
"'But where, might I ask, is your queue, Mr Seven Pounds? This is no laughing matter. Remember the Taiping Rebellion! If you kept your hair, you lost your head; lose your hair, and the head stayed on. . .'
"As neither Seven-Pounds nor his wife had been to school, the profundity of this historical allusion floated some way over their heads."[3]
A "historical allusion" of one of the deadliest wars in China ever, even to this day one of the deadliest events in human history, one that happened not even one hundred years ago at the time of the story. Ms. Seven Pounds catches on to the peril, but generally ignores her husband's plight and discomfort and saves face in front of Mr. Zhao, going so far as to harass her other villagers when they threaten her face-saving in any way. Of course, likely the villagers are not educated on the matters being fought about in the capitals in the same way they are uneducated on historical rebellions. In this story, Mr. Seven-Pound is lauded merely for leaving the village sometimes and is always asked for the news in town, so the village people don't have much of a world outside of their village. This is itself likely a reflection of the fallen state of the society the people find themselves in. Sin is cruel and ubiquitous and does not require your permission or submission to rule your life. When it is said "no sin is 'just personal,'" this is what is meant by that.
This last example also shows somewhat that people are therefore also unaware of what happens within their own communities. Consider again Ah-Q's story. Before his rebellion phase, one of the things Ah-Q comes to realize is that he is alone. He desires to have a wife. Unfortunately, Ah-Q's solution to this problem is to ask a servant of the biggest family in his village to have sex with him. This does not go over well, but Ah-Q cannot figure out quite why. His excursion creates quite the scene, and Ah-Q returns to see what the commotion is about.
"As he sidled over to Zhao Sichen, in the hope of learning more, he became swiftly aware of a rapid approach from Mr Zhao, who was holding a thick bamboo stick of his own. Reminded of the thrashing he had not long ago received from Zhao junior, he deduced that the present lively situation has something to do with him."[4]
If Ah-Q's situation seems comedic, he would be alone in finding anything funny, and the consequences of his actions have no humor, even if they seem bewildering to him. In "Dragon Boat Festival," we are able to see the perspective of someone who suffers this ignorance from others. The protagonist of this story, Fang Xuanchou, is a civil servant and a teacher at a unversity. In the story, the teachers' pay is held back because of the strike the teacher's union partakes in. After this is resolved, the government begins to not pay the civil servants their salaries. Fang is able to see both sides of these phenomenon because of his situation. When the teachers' strike first starts, he lashes out at his wife and, among other things, says "'They've started saying it's undignified for teachers to ask to be paid. They don't seem to understand people need to eat rice, and rice costs money. It's not exactly a complicated idea.'"[5] The simplicity might be what makes it so easy and people so willing to subvert and ignore it. Later, when the government stops paying its employees,
"Month upon month of unpaid salaries stacked up, until eventually a sizeable portion of those fine upstanding government employees who, in previous existences, had despised those importunately money-grubbing teachers, were pressed by circumstance into intemperate radicalism at mass protest meetings."[6]
Such is the hypocrisy of values. Perhaps, though, the issue is that the other civil servants were unaware of what their own values even were.
Perhaps the greatest blindness is shown when the people want to look into their own hearts. This is shown at the front end of the book in an extreme fashion with "Diary of a Madman." Some combination of innate disorders and life stressors break the eponymous madman's last strands of sanity. He talks to people about his illusions, and people treat him weirdly because he is having illusions, and the madman's illusions are fueled because people treat him weirdly. He eventually comes to believe the village wants to eat him. They have no such desires, but their dislike of him contributes to his madness. The madman is blinded to his own condition, so he cannot put his peers' behavior towards himself in their proper context. He is ignorant of it. The madman's emphatic plea at the end of his diary, "Are there children who have not yet eaten human flesh? Save the children. . ."[7] too distances himself greatly from his peers, who generally hold no kind of remorse for anyone, not even themselves. The protagonist in "A Cat Among Rabbits," a story about pet rabbits and a cat that terrorizes them, ponders on his own sense of negligence:
"I'd got up one morning to discover, beneath a large locust tree, a scattered heap of pigeon feathers – the leftovers of a hawk's feast. By noon, the servant had swept the yard clean again, removing all traces of the massacre. Another time, passing by Xisi Arch, I saw a small dog close to death after being run over by a cart. But when I came by later, its body had been tidied away, with pedestrians passing unknowingly over the spot where a life had been ended. On summer nights, I would sometimes listen to the long whines of flies – bitten by spiders, I expect. But I soon forgot about them; and no one else ever even heard them."[8]
Notice once again the blame put on society as a system at the mention of the dog – the people walking over the spot have no conceivable way to know better than to walk over a spot of death, to ignore the suffering, but still, they share the blame as much as the servant who cleans away the feathers and the protagonist who barely recalls the flies. Their society has created this phenomenon. The protagonist eventually decides to participate in this violence, to give in to the nature of his world, to his base instincts, to his sin, and sets the cat who killed the baby rabbits in his sights.
Society itself is self-centered. All the people are only concerned with themselves in the brief and vague moments they can compel themselves to do even this much of a good thing. We all turn away, so we all have our heads turned away. We ignore everyone else and isolate ourselves and are ignored and excommunicated in kind. We are disconnected. The only thing anyone wishes to be is an island. Even without these stories and the examples they provide, it is obvious to all the world the negative consequences societies such as this (such as ours) give unto its inhabitants, unto itself. It has consumed itself with sin in seeking to be oblivious to Christ and His glory. It has turned its back on Him, and has known no thing, not even itself. It has long ago let go of any grounding to stand on and embraced oblivion. Frank Stagg says it well:
"This is the 'Adamic' sin. (Gen., ch. 3) It is the way of self-love, self-trust, self-assertion. It is also the way of self-destruction. In the Genesis story, Adam doubted God. He doubted the goodness of God, fearing that to trust him might lead to loss. Possibly God could withhold from him some good. . . Meaning to save himself, he [Adam] actually destroyed himself.
"Egocentricity is the core of all evil. To nourish it is to open the way to all evil. To radically reject it is to cut the tap root to all evil."[9]
May the Christian always know that to be egocentric is to die, is to kill. It is ethically unsound. Christ has made us to put ourselves in the wider context of our brothers and sisters, to put our siblings with ourselves, to be tissue in the living Body.