Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

Lu Xun belonged to this cohort who had grown up in the old society, coming of age as the new one was beginning to emerge, and living into maturity in a world that his childhood self would have barely recognized. He was deeply schooled in the texts and methodologies of China’s premodern written culture and had excellent command of that literary tradition. In his late teens he changed direction and immersed himself in the new “Western learning” that was pouring into China from Europe, often via Japan, and blowing open new imaginative spaces for Chinese thought and action.

Historians looking back at that period recognize that, in the midst of the radical change which many of that era advocated and the strong ruptures with the past that occurred on their watch, the continuities with inherited Chinese culture and society were also influential in shaping the future, even when they were not so easily discerned. Fundamental cultural presuppositions characterized the thinking of even the radicals themselves, who in addition constituted only a tiny percentage of the overall population. In fact, the vast hinterland of China remained largely untouched by their concerns. Furthermore, even those urbanites who were exposed to Western modernity were not necessarily engaged by their issues or involved in their debates. A good many city dwellers were more attracted by the economic opportunities and commercialized pastimes that the influx of Western influence brought in its wake. Nevertheless, as Theodore Huters has pointed out in another context, the fact that intellectuals of the period could speak of the past as a weighty entity with which they had to contend in itself provides evidence of their sense that this period in China’s history inscribed a powerful break from the past and altered the field of possibilities, present and future.² Further, this small intellectual core of reformist leaders and thinkers has had enormous influence on Chinese culture and intellectual life well beyond that period. Throughout the twentieth century, in his own period and thereafter, Lu Xun was understood to be the dominating intellectual figure among this potent elite group. Today, among Chinese intellectuals