Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

attentive to the possibilities and limitations of various narrative strategies, such as narrative voice or the tension between the sequence of events in the narrative and the chronology of events retold, or the manipulation of quotation and summary, of reported events and dramatized events, all of the narrative tricks of the trade which, one might speculate, Lu Xun learned from his study of Western and premodern Chinese literature. In several of the most powerful of Lu Xun’s fictions, as others have observed,³⁵ meaning is in part a function of the structure, and the “what” of his ideas cannot be separated from the “how” of their transmission without great loss of meaning. This study not only considers formal elements of his narrative procedures but also explores the symbolically significant structure of particular images.

Further, in describing with some precision Lu Xun’s therapeutic model, I adopt as my hypothesis the notion that everything an author writes reflects who he is. In some way, every piece of writing is autobiographical. Writers, like all human beings, have a lens through which they view the world, a perceptual framework through which they give order to the chaotic realities they encounter. If one could discern the structuring framework as it is encoded in the writer’s fictions, then one would achieve expanded autobiographical insight into the author’s subjectivity. If there were a pattern encoded in the formal elements of the fictional construction (e.g., in the details of plot, structure, character, narrative voice, and so forth), that pattern would offer a special, intimate glimpse into the mind and spirit of the artist during the period of composition. Instead of seeking to understand the author through examining only the external factors of his life and historical context, one would seek to understand the consciousness that projects itself into the symbolic structures of the writing. Instead of looking into his eyes, one would imaginatively look out through his eyes. In Lu Xun’s case this methodology turns out to be extremely productive because a very clear signifying system emerges from this process, one that provides new understandings of his stories, of their relationship to one another, and of the man who constructed them.