Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

expressed his predicaments as a writer living in such a time. By the mid-1920s, as the political situation worsened, he came to believe that a revolution was required to change China but could not foresee how this would occur. His youthful hopes of bringing about social transformation through intellectual enterprises, and his reluctant agreement in mid-life to write about the predicament, evolved during the 1930s into the despairing conclusion that in such unstable and violent times there was no role for true literature.

Lu Xun’s response to the political violence that he encountered first hand in Guangzhou and then Shanghai was deep soul-searching and a turn leftward. He began studying Marxism and translated Marxist theorists; he authored several essays on the relationship of literature and revolution; and he cofounded the League of Left Wing Writers, becoming its most prominent spokesman. He aligned himself with the Communist Party because it seemed the most promising alternative to the brutality and incompetence of the government, but he neither joined the Party nor yielded up his right to independent judgment. In these last years of his life, he also encouraged the woodblock-printing movement, seeing in it a genre that could reach wider audiences than the written word; he continued to write essays and commentaries and to mentor younger writers; and he turned again to writing classical Chinese poetry, a genre that enabled him to articulate his thoughts in their fullness while still evading the less-educated government censors.⁹ When he died of tuberculosis on October 19, 1936, at the age of 55, he was China’s most famous writer.

His two collections of modern short stories, Call to Arms and Wandering, were written during only a brief eight-year period (approximately 1918–1926), yet they created his reputation as an outstanding author of modern fiction.¹⁰ There are twenty-five stories, and they vary widely in quality and type. Indeed, the English translation of the genre xiaoshuo as “short story” is somewhat misleading because several are better characterized