Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

world represents only part of his analysis and a truncated view of his literary therapeutics.

If instead one temporarily decenters his social commentary and lifts up the “dream” component of his literary imperative, focusing on the inwardness out of which the stories emerge, it becomes clear that indeed Lu Xun had an implicit therapeutic model and a definition of the cure.

How can Lu Xun’s literary therapeutics be discerned?

A second distinctive feature of my study, therefore, is its methodology. Beginning with a set of spiritual/psychological questions shifts attention away from the relationship of the fictions to the historic realities of China and of Lu Xun’s biography, and toward the deep structures of Lu Xun’s thought during this period. Rather than spotlight the cultural moment and Lu Xun’s place in it, this study seeks to reveal Lu Xun’s way of configuring that cultural moment and of projecting himself as an actor within it. It reveals the underlying framework that gives his vision and his discourse its unique form. By examining his symbolic representations of the Chinese reality, it attempts to reconstitute the deep structure of his thinking, to identify the axis around which his perplexities revolve.

Whereas the bulk of the criticism that takes Lu Xun’s subjectivity as its concern parses the content of his reflections and analysis or speaks about general qualities, this study gives greater scrutiny to formal elements of how the stories are put together and demonstrates, through close attention to the text, that a clear pattern structures most of the stories and in fact all of his most famous stories. Certainly, other critics have looked at major elements of his toolkit, especially the manipulation of narrative voice in his stories, and this study does so as well, but it also surfaces other fundamental structural features.

Lu Xun’s fictions reveal an author with fine command of structure and technique, as Leo Oufan Lee has noted.³⁴ Perhaps it is for this reason that careful attention to how he constructed his stories is particularly fruitful in revealing his thinking. A less architectural author might have been less