Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

Chapter 1

Deep Structure and Its Interpretation

Part 1: The “Preface” as Autobiography

The Slide-show scene

In 1922 Lu Xun assembled the short fictions that he had written over the previous four years into a single volume, Call to Arms, and headed the collection with the widely quoted “Preface,” which provides Lu Xun’s most complete explanation of his motivation and purposes in becoming a writer. Its famous slide-show scene, in which he recalls his moment of epiphany, is justly recognized for this explanation. However, the significance of the scene lies not just in his recall of the pivotal moment during his second year of medical school in Japan when he decided to abandon medicine for a literary career. Equally important, but largely overlooked, is the structure of the image itself.

The transformative event took place at the end of a medical lecture when, to fill in the remaining time, the professor showed slides of news about the then-raging Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).