Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

What becomes clear is that Lu Xun worked through his model of spiritual therapeutics in his short stories. He puzzled over the nature of the spiritual problem. He articulated multiple levels and facets and analyzed a range of personal interactions among people. The structure that he used to articulate his model of spiritual therapeutics is anticipated in his description of the seminal moment in the “Preface” in which he recounts his decision to abandon medicine for literature, and it is reiterated in its various configurations throughout the stories of this period. That recollection poses his problematic and provides the map to his inner landscape, to the form and content of most of the short stories and, in fact, to some of the prose poems of Wild Grass (Ye Cao 野草; 1927) as well, which were written during the same period.

In addition to the multiple, external stimuli for his work, his creative burst was also fueled by an inner imperative to solve the problem of suffering, not just in a social but also in a psychological framework: what caused and constituted spiritual illness, what were its presenting symptoms, how and under what circumstances might it be cured, and how might a spiritually healthy person behave. Approached from this direction, the stories and prose poems written from 1918 to late 1925 reveal Lu Xun’s successful efforts at working through this problem. The need to resolve the harrowing predicament, China’s and his own, is at least part of what drove his creativity. When he had succeeded in fully understanding the problem and embedding the solution in his fictions, he stopped writing short stories. This is a matter of sequence, not necessarily of causality. We can only speculate on why a person acts as he does. But it stands next to other speculations about the reasons for this otherwise mystifying cessation.

The Structure of this Study

This book has four central chapters. Each chapter interrogates a different body of texts as it develops the argument.