Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

Chapter 1, “Deep Structure and Its Interpretation,” presents the structure of Lu Xun’s way of configuring fictional reality and proposes an interpretative framework for understanding its meaning. Part 1 teases out the implication of treating the “Preface” to Call to Arms as autobiography. It notices the shaping consciousness at work rather than the content of the life under scrutiny. It demonstrates that the symbolic pattern that structures the famous slide-show scene also structures three more images. That pattern, or paradigm, presents the problematic that he addressed, the several dimensions that trouble him, and the structure that he employs in so many of the short stories of Call to Arms and Wandering, and in all of those that are most famous.

Part 2 considers the strong parallels between the structure of Lu Xun’s inquiry and Carl Jung’s analysis of ego and shadow in the whole Self, arguing that there is a congruence of perception with Jung’s analytic psychology, but not that Jung directly influenced Lu Xun. (In this study, when the word “Self” is capitalized, it refers to this Jungian usage of the word; all other usages of “self” are not capitalized.) The paradigm is too deeply embedded and pervasive to be attributed primarily to external sources. Nevertheless, because Jung was the founder of modern analytic psychology, adopting his framework grounds the literary analysis in work validated within the field of psychology.

Each of the three subsequent chapters traces the presence of the paradigm, in whole or in part, in the two collections. Each addresses a cluster of stories whose symbolic locus lies in one of four distinct arenas, either the national arena, the community arena, or that of the family and of the self, these latter two treated as a single domain. In this they follow the general thrust of Lu Xun’s inquiry, whose trajectory moves in general, with notable exceptions, through the four arenas in approximately this order.

Chapter 2, “Anatomy of a Scapegoating: ‘The True Story of Ah Q,’” examines that famous story and the story “Medicine” (Yao 药). Studies of sacrificial victimage by Erich Neumann and René Girard name the psycho-dynamics