Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

of scapegoating and the societal conditions that motivate this all too human phenomenon. The analysis gives precision to Ah Q’s signature feature of turning defeat into victory and demonstrates the continuity between Ah Q’s behavior and that of the residents of Wei village. “Medicine” explores the same psycho-social territory and marks the societal moment of transition from scapegoating to martyrdom.

Chapter 3, “Rehearsing the Paradigm,” illustrates how pervasively the paradigm structures most of the stories that are set within a small community. The literary technique of doubling and the complementary technique of splitting constitute additional techniques in Lu Xun’s toolbox and give literary voice to Jungian patterns. Even where it provides no dramatic new insight into individual stories, the paradigm reveals unsuspected commonalities among stories, commonalities otherwise disguised by differences of plot, narrative voice, character, and subject. Omitted are stories that do not draw on the paradigm in some substantive way.

The final chapter, which is chapter 4, “Healing Spirits,” contemplates the possibility of healing within the family and the self, articulates the therapeutic process, and presents Lu Xun’s definition of the cured state. It argues that his first story, “A Madman’s Diary,” carries seeds of his entire corpus of short stories, including hints of the cure. It would seem that Lu Xun’s experience and analysis of the social and political events of his time led him, in the latter part of his life, to conclude in logical steps that revolution was indeed necessary. His understanding of the psychological dimensions of spiritual illness similarly led in logical steps to his intuition that revolution, by itself, would never solve problems of the human heart.

The core four chapters of this study maintain steady attention on the texts themselves. As such, this analysis pays only incidental attention to Lu Xun the man. Furthermore, references to “Lu Xun” usually refer to his authorial presence within these texts and to hypotheses that can be drawn from there, but not to the fuller, historical human being. Although this study does take note of influences that have not been much noted,