Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

as reminiscences. Thus, Lu Xun’s reputation as a writer of modern short stories has been earned on only a limited number of excellent pieces.

These two collections constitute a very small part of his total corpus. In addition are essays, autobiographical sketches, short commentaries, translations, letters, diaries, prose poems—a form he invented and which seems never to have been duplicated—and a collection of fictions that recast traditional stories. He wrote more than sixty poems in classical Chinese, initially circulated only to friends; although this genre, inherited from the past, offered him private solace, he believed that the learning required to master it should not be inflicted upon the young. The 2005 edition of his complete works is comprised of eighteen volumes.¹¹

Critical Approaches

In the “Preface” (zi xu 自序) to this first collection of stories, Call to Arms, Lu Xun attributed his motivation for writing short stories to two sources, one outward facing, one internally driven: to encourage those young people who were bravely fighting against oppression and to release the memory of terrible experiences that he could not forget. Much of the commentary on his work leans towards one of these two directions suggested by Lu Xun himself—an analysis of the inhumane social patterns of behavior that needed to be overthrown, or an analysis of his personal thoughts and feelings as expressed and practiced in his writings.

The first direction leads naturally to interrogating Lu Xun’s relationship, often viewed in political terms, to the objective, external world, and it has tended to concern itself with the relationship of the literary object to the real world, often without a well-developed sense of the problematics of that relationship, which was too frequently assumed to be transparent.¹² In many instances this externally directed approach has carried the pragmatic hope, or even insistence, that in some way the works would illuminate and therefore ultimately affect lived reality. Those who understood the stories as addressing the external world had