Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

This study does not argue that this structuring pattern defines in any comprehensive way Lu Xun’s take on reality. Although many stories evidence the entire pattern, as I will show, and elements of it occur in most stories, there are exceptions among the fictions. Further, his writings in other genres from this period are structured on different models, and because these are not germane to my argument, they are omitted from the discussion here as are works written at other periods of his life. Still, a deeply embedded, repeating pattern inevitably suggests something significant about the shaping consciousness. To label the pattern “autobiographical,” as I have done in this study, is merely to extrapolate back from the fictions to the governing intelligence that created the works.

This study’s focus on an inferable iterative pattern is not intended as a reductive assertion that the structuring framework constitutes the essential core of this complex man’s vision or that this is the only useful way to read the stories. On the contrary, I agree with Ming Dong Gu on the essential openness of Lu Xun’s fictions and their availability to multiple interpretations.³⁶ This study offers just one elucidation among a multitude.

My preliminary strategy is temporarily to release the stories from their historical context and temporarily decenter the author’s social intent. Understanding the works of this socially committed moral voice calling out in a troubled time requires reintegrating insights emerging from this psychological exploration back into the authorial, historical, and social context. The exploration of his symbolic forms inevitably leads back around, but from another direction, to his preeminent role as intellectual leader and foundational author of modern Chinese literature. It facilitates inquiry into the multivalent influences on his work, his agency in shaping modern China’s discourse around modernity, and offers another avenue for imagining a continuing resonance for these works with new readers even as the motivating, overt social conditions recede from memory.