Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung by Carolyn Brown (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung by Carolyn Brown Ping Zhu Carolyn Brown. Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2018. 312p. Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung is the fruit of Carolyn Brown’s reading, thinking, and researching of Lu Xun in the past thirty years. Brown has found a recurring and clear paradigm in twenty-three out of the twenty-six stories in Lu Xun’s two short story collections, Call to Arms (1923) and Wandering (1926). Perfectly exemplified in the famous slide-show scene in “Preface to Call to Arms,” the paradigm consists of the victim, the persecutor, the onlookers, and an outside observer. Brown uses this to produce a radically autobiographical reading of “Preface to Call to Arms.” She discovers that the four most prominent scenes in the preface—namely the slide-show scene, the metaphor of the boundless desert, the vignette of the hanged woman, and the image of the iron house—all exhibit this same structure, and that they also represent four different phases in Lu Xun’s life. In each scene, the author occupies a different position in the structure, and this change not only shows the transformation of Lu Xun’s understanding of China’s problems and his deep feelings, but also registers the writer’s shifting focus from the nation, to the community, to the family and to the self. Brown later explains the shifting focus: as someone who started a literary career to heal the diseased spirit of Chinese people, Lu Xun could only imagine healing “within the domains of the family and the self but not within those of the nation or community” (211). This preoccupation with healing the spiritual disease connects Lu Xun with his contemporary Carl Jung, although there is no evidence that Lu Xun had read or discussed Jung. Brown proposes to apply Carl Jung’s theory of the human psyche to Lu Xun’s short stories, since Jung’s analysis presents a more dynamic interrelationship (compared with Freud’s theory) between the conscious and the unconscious, offering a useful model for understanding Lu Xun’s analysis of Chinese spiritual illness. Jung emphasized the psyche’s own impulse towards healing; that is, the conscious and the unconscious are pressed to integrate with each other into a greater wholeness. Viewed in this light, Lu Xun’s short stories are also narratives of healing. Brown has masterfully shown in all four chapters of her book how Lu Xun retold “the [End Page 316] same tale of an archetypal relationship of the conscious and the unconscious, of the need for and resistance to the coming into being of a whole Self ” (74) in order to create a potentially healing literary narrative for Chinese people. Lu Xun’s story-writing is thus therapeutic: it is his way of “working through” the cultural and personal realities in order to heal the social structure and the human heart. Except for Chapter One, which presents an exhaustive reading of “Preface to Call to Arms” as an autobiography of Lu Xun’s psyche, each of the other three chapters treats a cluster of Lu Xun’s short stories through the Jungian model. Chapter Two, “The True Story of Ah Q” and “Medicine” are two prophetic stories that show the conscious ego’s violent suppression, expulsion, and execution of the unconscious shadow. In this process of collective violence, Ah Q is scapegoated and the revolutionary Xia Yu becomes a martyr, and the old social order prevails. These two stories reveal the gloomy reality of China’s social malaise and Chinese people’s spiritual disease. Chapter Three offers a compelling close reading of “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” and discusses more than a dozen of Lu Xun’s short stories in Call to Arms and Wandering using the Jungian model. Brown argues that “The New Year’s Sacrifice” shows the failed dialogues between ego and shadow in the community arena. In this story Lu Xun projects himself imaginatively as both subject and object, victim and victimizer, which represents his attempt of healing by integrating the ego (the narrator) and the shadow (Xianglin’s Wife). All stories discussed in this chapter mark Lu...