Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

Through much of autobiography’s history in the West, there has been an implicit contract between writers and readers that autobiography would be a “useful, reliable, and true account[s]” of the author’s life and experience.⁵ In early twentieth-century China, autobiography modeled itself on the premises of the Western genre.⁶ Further, the “Preface” is a seductive narrative: its style is attractive, forceful, persuasive.

Nevertheless, the “Preface” is autobiography, not biography. Autobiography joins memory to history. It is the past recollected. It filters the lived events it records through memory.⁷ As autobiography, the “Preface” reshapes experience. Gilbert Rose in Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art speculated that all memory may rework experience so as to satisfy unacknowledged aesthetic criteria.⁸ On at least one occasion Lu Xun famously confessed to deliberately ignoring literal fact in order to intensify aesthetic satisfaction.⁹ The embedded structure of the slide-show scene and its pervasiveness in the “Preface” and short stories convincingly imply that criteria beyond historical accuracy were at work.

As life recalled and reshaped, autobiography evokes two levels distinct in time. The experience as reshaped by memory appears to predate the writer’s reflections on that experience. In fact, the reshaping and the reflection occur in the same moment—when the writer sets the words on the page. Still, the illusion is convincing. The “Preface” presents Lu Xun’s memory of the event at Sendai and his subsequent analysis of its pivotal significance, all in terms of his understanding in 1922 when he authored it. Whether the “Preface” also provides an accurate account of what Lu Xun actually experienced in the lecture room in 1906 can never be recovered.

These distinctions are significant because how the critic construes the fundamental nature of the “Preface” affects whether the critic privileges the purported history—what supposedly happened in the past, or the reshaped history—how the writer recalls what happened in the past. Evidence of aesthetic criteria at work abounds in the “Preface” and testifies to a craftsman at work. Approaching it as radically autobiographical