Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

Since life differs according to the author who looks at it and a work differs according to the reader of it, then the eyes of a [non-Chinese] reader, who has not the slightest sense of ‘our traditional way of thought,’ will perhaps see reflected in this work yet another kind of narrative. This seems very appealing to me.²⁹

Although Lu Xun wrote these words for a different context, he might well have been describing my undergraduate experience and the nature of this book. I may be one of those readers.

Direction and Methodology of this Study

In the “Preface” to that first collection of short stories, Lu Xun said that he had abandoned medical studies for literature because at that time he believed that what the Chinese people needed most was not to have their bodies healed but to have their spirits changed, and literature seemed the best means to that end. His “Preface” will be examined more closely in chapter 1, but for now let us consider his analogy.

First, what, for instance, did he mean by “spirits”? Wendy Larson has provided a helpful analysis of the word for “spirit,” jingshen 精神, as understood in Lu Xun’s time. “Spirit,” a concept that encompassed both the emotional and intellectual dimensions of personhood, was understood, she argued, as the generative core, the quality or perspective, that mediates between the person and the external world. Chinese cosmology understood human life as embedded in a cosmological order, and the individual person as an expression of that order. “Generally,” she wrote, “Confucianism required that human beings improve themselves through effort, or self-cultivation, thereby contributing to the improvement of the social order.”³⁰ In that context, Chinese reformers of the early twentieth century logically could attribute the power of the West to its “spirit” and blame national failures in the military, political, and economic realms on deficiencies in the Chinese “spirit.” The concept of “spirit” did not primarily point inward, although that was not foreclosed, but rather its