Call to Arms: The Iron House, Spectators, and Hope Not Yet Extinguished

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 48

# Call to Arms: The Iron House, Spectators, and Hope Not Yet Extinguished

This guide introduces the first edition, established contents, major stories, narrative methods, and enlightenment dilemma of Call to Arms. It does not replace the collection. Later sections discuss cannibalism imagery, execution, illness, death, suicide, child death, and collective violence.

One-minute introduction

A man called mad reads cannibalism between the lines of history. The impoverished scholar Kong Yiji slowly vanishes amid tavern laughter. A mother buys a bun dipped in human blood as medicine, while nobody understands the revolutionary whose blood it contains. The childhood friend Runtu becomes a poor farmer who addresses the narrator as Master. Ah Q converts every humiliation into an imaginary victory until revolution uses him as an expendable body. Written from 1918 to 1922, Lu Xun's first collection presents late Qing and post-1911 society as an iron house whose sleepers cannot escape. The author doubts that shouting will save them, yet refuses to use his own despair as proof that the future contains no hope.

Essential facts and editions

  • Author: Lu Xun, pen name of Zhou Shuren (1881–1936), fiction writer, essayist, translator, and foundational figure of modern Chinese literature.
  • First edition: published in August 1923 by Peking University's Xinchao Press, with a Preface and fifteen stories.
  • Change: the 1930 Shanghai Beixin edition removed “Buzhou Mountain”, later revised as “Mending Heaven” in Old Tales Retold. Standard Call to Arms therefore contains fourteen stories.
  • Fourteen stories: “A Madman's Diary”, “Kong Yiji”, “Medicine”, “Tomorrow”, “An Incident”, “The Story of Hair”, “Storm in a Teacup”, “My Old Home”, “The True Story of Ah Q”, “The Double Fifth Festival”, “The White Light”, “Rabbits and Cat”, “The Comedy of the Ducks”, and “Village Opera”.
  • Literary position: “A Madman's Diary”, published in New Youth in 1918, is a pioneering modern vernacular story. “The True Story of Ah Q”, serialised in 1921–22, is the longest work.
  • Period: late-Qing reform, the 1911 Revolution, the early Republic, and the New Culture movement. Political events enter villages, households, classrooms, taverns, and ordinary vocabulary.
  • English title: usually Call to Arms, sometimes Outcry. Selected English volumes often combine Call to Arms, Wandering, and Old Tales Retold, so check contents.

The Preface: why shout if shouting may fail?

Lu Xun recalls his father's illness, modern schooling in Nanjing, and medical study in Japan. He believed medicine could improve Chinese bodies. A classroom slide showing Chinese spectators at a compatriot's execution persuaded him that spiritual numbness was more urgent, and he turned towards literature. This account organises years of change retrospectively rather than documenting one instant conversion.

After failed literary activity, he copied ancient inscriptions in a Beijing hostel and withdrew. Qian Xuantong invited him to write for New Youth. Lu Xun answered with the iron house: windowless and almost impossible to destroy, filled with sleepers who will suffocate without feeling the approach of death. Is waking a few only to experience unavoidable agony an act of cruelty?

Qian replies that the presence of awakened people means destruction cannot be declared impossible. Lu Xun does not become an optimist. He accepts that present pessimism cannot close the uncertainty of future action. Diagnosis must remain severe; hope must not pretend to be a guarantee.

Representative stories and endings

“A Madman's Diary”: who defines sanity?

A classical preface reports that a man suffered persecution mania, recovered, and has become a candidate for office. The diary itself is vernacular. The patient reads threat in neighbours' eyes, dogs, medicine, and his brother, then sees cannibalism underneath thousands of years of benevolence and morality. He suspects his brother in a sister's death and ends by pleading to save the children.

Clinically, his reasoning is delusional; socially, he sees violence normal people refuse to name. Recovery and entry into office may mean renewed adaptation to cannibal society. The novel does not turn every suspicion into fact. It uses abnormal speech to expose normal violence.

“Kong Yiji”: laughter participates in disappearance

At the Prosperity Tavern, Kong wears a scholar's gown but drinks standing with labourers. Neither labouring poor nor successful scholar, he speaks classical phrases, knows characters, and sometimes steals books. Customers make him entertainment. The child narrator remembers him teaching variants of the character for fennel and sharing beans, while absorbing adult ridicule.

After stealing from a successful examination graduate, Kong has his legs broken. He returns by moving on his hands and then disappears. The manager remembers him as unpaid debt. The phrase that he “probably was certainly dead” shows a community knowing the result without needing confirmation. The beating is one cause; spectators converting suffering into humour are another.

“Medicine”: two families cannot interpret each other's deaths

Old Shuan buys a bun dipped in executed revolutionary Xia Yu's blood to cure his tubercular son. Tavern customers call Xia insane for telling a jailer that the realm belongs to all, after a relative denounces him. The treatment fails, and the mothers of the two dead sons meet at the cemetery.

A red-and-white wreath appears on Xia's grave, an unexplained sign of hope. The revolutionary's blood becomes a folk cure for people he hoped to free. Poverty and medical scarcity contextualise superstition. Revolution without a shared language with its supposed beneficiaries becomes another “medicine”.

“Tomorrow” and “An Incident”: aid is not automatic

In “Tomorrow”, the widow Fourth Shan raises her sick child alone, seeks a physician, and loses him. Neighbours watch and provide limited help; life resumes the next morning. Tomorrow is her hope and society's postponement of response.

In “An Incident”, a rickshaw puller stops after apparently brushing an old woman and takes her towards police assistance. The passenger initially suspects fraud and resents delay, then feels morally diminished before the labourer's receding figure. Ethical learning comes from somebody the intellectual had placed below himself.

Hair and restoration: what did revolution alter?

“The Story of Hair” makes the queue into body politics. Cutting it under Qing rule could provoke punishment; retaining it in the Republic signifies backwardness. N recalls revolutionary sacrifices while anniversaries become empty ceremony. Hair is neutral, but regimes turn it into evidence of loyalty.

In “Storm in a Teacup”, news of imperial restoration reaches a village. The queue-less boatman Sevenpound fears punishment, while classical authority Zhao the Seventh puts on a robe associated with the old order and intimidates neighbours. When restoration fails, ordinary life resumes and the robe disappears. Political weather changes posture without transforming local knowledge and hierarchy.

“My Old Home”: why does a friend say Master?

The narrator returns to sell the family home and remembers Runtu as a bright child beneath the moon, guarding melons with a fork and opening a vast sensory world. Adult Runtu is burdened by children, famine, taxation, soldiers, bandits, and officials. He addresses his former friend as Master. Time alone has not faded friendship; class and survival have recoded it.

Sharp-tongued Sister Yang is comic and opportunistic but likewise lives inside decline. The narrator hopes the next generation will avoid estrangement. Hope resembles a path: none exists at first, but many feet make one. Progress is not waiting to be discovered; repeated shared practice produces it.

“The True Story of Ah Q”: imaginary victory and failed revolution

Ah Q lives in Weizhuang's temple and works casually, without stable name, household, or status. Humiliated by the Zhao clan and townsmen, he declares inward victory by imagining the attacker as a son or by embracing his own lowliness. Towards people weaker than himself—Little D, Wang the Beard, a nun—he becomes violent. Spiritual victory is not an eternal national essence but a psychological technology used when reality cannot be changed; it also transfers oppression downwards.

News of the 1911 Revolution first terrifies and then excites him. He imagines acquiring possessions and women. The Zhao household and Fake Foreign Devil rapidly appropriate revolutionary identity while excluding Ah Q. After a robbery, authorities need a result and arrest him. He cannot understand the proceedings, fails to draw a perfect circle as signature, and is executed.

Spectators complain that shooting is less entertaining than decapitation and that Ah Q did not sing opera. A changed flag preserves power and spectator psychology. Ah Q is ridiculous, harmful, and pitiable. Treating him only as a stupid commoner places the reader among the spectators and loses the story's inclusion of “us”.

Intellectual self-deception and examination ghosts

In “The Double Fifth Festival”, Fang Xuanchuo explains everything as “more or less the same”. He criticises society but withholds a servant's wages and waits for his own salary. Enlightenment speakers remain within the diagnosis.

In “The White Light”, Chen Shicheng repeatedly fails the civil examination and imagines buried silver from books and family rumour. A spectral white light guides his digging and wandering until he drowns. Although the examination system is abolished, its ethic of success governs desire after institutional death.

Rabbits, ducks, and village opera

“Rabbits and Cat” moves from children raising rabbits to a cat killing them. The narrator's wish for revenge exposes how readily “nature” excuses the strong consuming the weak. “The Comedy of the Ducks” follows the blind Russian poet Eroshenko raising tadpoles in Beijing until ducks eat them, combining friendship with gentle disappointment.

“Village Opera” remembers a boy's night boat journey with rural companions, an unimpressive performance, stolen beans, and return beneath the stars. The show is less important than children's cooperation and sensory freedom. Memory idealises, yet preserves a life not entirely occupied by cannibal logic.

Is Lu Xun writing “national character”?

Lu Xun repeatedly portrays numbness, spectatorship, servility, and self-deception. Calling them immutable Chinese essence removes historical criticism. Behaviour is connected to examination, lineage, poverty, courts, gender, and failed revolution. If character were biologically fixed, shouting would be pointless.

National-character discourse can also place educated readers safely above Ah Q and Kong Yiji. The stories disrupt that security: narrators watch, revolutionaries fail to communicate, intellectuals withhold pay, and children learn laughter. The question is not only why “they” are numb but how “we” make superiority from another's pain.

Central themes

Cannibalism is relational structure

It means literal imagery and the sacrifice of persons to ritual, reputation, economy, and hierarchy. Victims may consume those below them, so monsters do not form one external group.

Spectatorship is action

Tavern laughter, execution crowds, and village gossip turn pain into spectacle and ease violence. Not striking the blow does not mean having no role.

Enlightenment has a translation problem

Xia Yu, the madman, and modern intellectuals perceive injury but cannot necessarily be understood. Treating people as objects of rescue repeats hierarchy. Change requires shared language and practice.

Hope is not prediction

Wreath, children, path, and village memory remain fragile. Hope does not prove a good future. It refuses to let present failure monopolise the future and becomes an ethic of action.

A practical reading method

Read the Preface, then the fourteen stories in order. For each, note the victim's language, the spectator's language, and the narrator's reliability. Watch who possesses authority to call another mad, thief, or revolutionary.

Do not isolate famous aphorisms. Return cannibalism, spiritual victory, and the path to specific voices, narrative layers, and endings, so that an anti-label work does not become a new source of labels.

Questions for reflection

1. Does the madman's illness weaken or strengthen his discovery about morality? 2. What responsibility belongs to manager, drinkers, graduate, and child in Kong Yiji's death? 3. Why can Xia Yu not build language with those he wants to free? 4. Is Ah Q's victory method a flaw, a survival mechanism, or transferred oppression? 5. Why must hope in “My Old Home” be made by later walkers? 6. How can readers criticise spectators without becoming spectators at another level?

Sources and editions

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This series returns to primary texts for their contexts, structures, characters, and ideas. Browse every instalment in the 100 Works of World Literature series directory.

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