Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

good evidence for their views. First, that was a substantial part of Lu Xun’s intent. Jaroslav Průšek has pointed out that in striving to break the false morality and stereotyped notions of human feeling and behavior, the May 4th–generation writers sought to portray people’s real behavior and genuine inner lives.¹³ Realistic portrayal seemed a perfect vehicle. In fact, the stories resonated deeply with Lu Xun’s contemporary readers’ sense of reality as they experienced it.

Commentators writing in the Maoist period had similarly pragmatic expectations but of a narrower kind. Leo Oufan Lee, writing of the Maoist period, noted that “the majority of Lu Xun scholars in China … emphasize the revolutionary thinker and fighter at the expense of the writer,” and execute Mao’s pronouncement that “the road he took was the very road of China’s national culture.”¹⁴ Despite these limitations, excellent work was accomplished. Fine scholars of that period carried out the hard documentary work of tracking biographical details and creating research tools, activities of great value that entailed little political risk.¹⁵ Since the early 1980s, critics in China again have had far greater leeway to expand their inquiries and incorporate practices emerging from the Western field of literary theory or even to initiate their own.¹⁶ Yet, at least in terms of volume, the locus of concern apparently remains on the relationship of the stories to the external world.¹⁷

Lu Xun’s second motivation arose, he confessed, from the pressure of dreams that he could not forget. This impetus has engendered a second major line of inquiry, one that approaches the stories, and the works more generally, as products of his subjectivity, as the works of a sensitive artist coming to terms with a tumultuous historical environment. Until late in the twentieth century, only scholars residing in the West were free to pursue this line of research and to approach the stories as emerging out of the complexities, ambiguities, and optimisms but far more frequently pessimisms, anxieties, and despair that defined his experience in wrestling bravely with the events of his time. They also directed their attention to the textual evidence that the meaning of the