The worlds of multiglossia in modern Chinese fiction : Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’ and the ‘Shaky House’

Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’ (1918) is regarded as the first instance of modern Chinese fiction written in the vernacular. Rydholm shows how Lu Xun made use of both diglossia and multiglossia in this short story to stage the battle between languages and ideologies at the time, hoping to reform the ‘real’ world. The narrative structure stages a diglossic battle between the juxtaposed Preface, written in the classical, literary language embodying the traditional, Confucian cosmopolitan worldview, and the Diary, written in the contemporary vernacular, the vehicle of the New Culture Movement’s national-language-nation-building discourse. Rydholm’s study reveals how the binary opposition between the Preface and the Diary is undermined, ideologically and linguistically, by what may be called ‘translingual practice’ (Liu, 1995). Rydholm concludes that Lu Xun thrived in the ‘Shaky House’ (Zhou, 2011), the situation of linguistic experimentation in contemporary literature, and that his literary worlds of multiglossia contributed to the development of a new elite ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ in China to replace the classical, cosmopolitan literary language