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Psychological ‘Truth’ in Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q
Last month, the Library of Congress's Asian Division and Kluge Center afforded me the opportunity to speak with an engaging audience regarding my evaluation of psychological patterns within Lu Xun's most famous story, "The True Story of Ah Q." Here I share what I presented - I would love to keep the conversation going, so feel free to leave comments.
POST 1 OF 5 - A Brief Introduction to Lu Xun
The Psychological ‘Truth’ in Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q”
April 12, 2018
It is a great pleasure to be invited to talk about my new book “Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung,” to do so here at the Library of Congress where I spent most of my professional career, and especially to talk about new insights that arise from viewing Lu Xun’s most famous story “The True Story of Ah Q” through a Jungian lens.
Before I begin, I would like to thank some of the people who made the book possible and who are present here today: Dongfang Shao and staff of the Asian Division; the Kluge Center and it’s staff who helped me transition from being the director of the Center to being a scholar in the Center—and of course to the former Librarian of Congress, James Billington who granted me an office there. Thanks to Mary Jane Deeb and staff of the African and Middle Eastern Division, who offered special accommodations over the last year or more; to scholars and friends who are helped bring the book to fruition, and of course my husband Tim Eastman, who helped in ways too many to innumerate.
My presentation today will follow this outline:
1. First, for those of you unfamiliar with him, I will briefly introduce Lu Xun, this most important early 20th C. Chinese intellectual and writer, then
2. Explain what makes my approach unique among ways of interpreting his modern short stories;
3. For those of you unfamiliar with Carl Jung, I will briefly sketch a few of his fundamental psychological insights that are necessary to my interpretation of Lu Xun.
4. Then, I will draw a few examples from “The True Story of Ah Q,” as a way of demonstrating why a psychological reading deserves a place among the multiple, more familiar historical, cultural, and biographical readings of this masterpiece.
5. Finally, I will point to other dimensions of this story, which I argue is a deeply insightful reflection on the psychological phenomenon of scapegoating, and then briefly suggest the power that comes from using Jung’s concepts as an interpretative lens for delivering new insights into Lu Xun’s stories.
We will have time for questions.
1. So first, a brief introduction to Lu Xun.
Lu Xun is a major Chinese intellectual of the early 20th century; he is generally considered the founder of modern Chinese literature and the greatest writer of that period. He was a central figure in the tumultuous early decades of that century, both a product of his time and an agent who shaped it. Born in 1881 (he died in 1936) he was of that pivotal generation that lived through the singular historical moment when China was transforming from an ancient kingdom to a modern state. He was also a scholar, a teacher, a journal editor, and an active participant in the intellectual life of Beijing and then Shanghai. His two collections of modern short stories, “Call to Arms” and “Wandering” broke new ground in their content and form; and along with his essays addressed contemporary concerns with penetrating insight. Living at a time when China was under assault by Western imperialist powers, he searched for ways to make China stronger, with a focus on asking what Chinese patterns in thought and perception might account for what he believed was China’s insufficient response to the challenges arising from forced encounter with the West.
He is still deeply appreciated for his penetrating critiques of the social norms and conditions of Chinese society. He took what was known, familiar, and accepted without question in society, looked at them in new ways, and exposed these practices as being cruel and inhumane. He opened his readers’ eyes to seeing and understanding in new ways. He is still appreciated for his insights into Chinese society, his dedication to ending the Chinese people’s suffering, his deep moral integrity, and his commitment to self-scrutiny. Fundamental elements of his critique still resonate today, exactly 100 years after he wrote his first modern short story, “A Madman’s Diary,” which launched modern Chinese literature.
His legacy is enormous. He is memorialized in museums; his works are read in schools across the nation, at least the were until recently; they have inspired paintings, prints, drawings, plays, operas, ballets, films, and so forth and even literary sequels. His enormous reputation has been commandeered from all sides of the political spectrum: on the left, Chairman Mao praised him as a harbinger of the Communist Revolution, and on the right, commercial interests have created a Lu Xun theme park in Beijing. Research on Lu Xun would fill a small library and undoubtedly occupies a great deal of shelf space in the Asian Division’s stacks. However, the sensitivity and complexity of the writer himself are frequently lost in the uses that others have made of him.
Lu Xun belonged to that pivotal generation, with one foot in each world, the old and the new,—trained in the classical tradition and as a teenager embracing Western knowledge as it flooded into China from Japan. Japan had opened up to Western knowledge in 1868, and by 1902, when Lu Xun went to Japan to study, was well on its way to becoming a power in its own right. Going to Japan thrust Lu Xun outside of his own culture, and I think that is what enabled him to view it from the outside with an analytic eye and at the same time from the inside with deep understanding of the culture and intense moral commitment to his nation’s welfare. In Japan Lu Xun enrolled in medical school, but in his second year abandoned that career for literature, explaining that what the Chinese most needed was not to have their bodies healed but to have their spirits changed. Many scholars have pursued this medical metaphor.
...to be continued in the next post.