No tags yet.
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 2 OF 5 - My Work Asks a New Question about this Medical Metaphor
The Psychological ‘Truth’ in Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q”
April 12, 2018
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.
2. However, my work asks a new question about this metaphor, and this is the second item in my presentation. What is it that makes my interpretive approach to his short stories unique?
Of innumerable scholars who have addressed the issue of his diagnosis of the Chinese spiritual illness and his analysis of its causes, almost without exception they have focused on his critiques of Chinese society and its Confucian roots. This is a logical outcome of Lu Xun’s explicit social concerns; it is an essential line of inquiry; and it also has its limitations.
My work asks this: if Lu Xun thought that he could change the spirits of the Chinese people with literature, did he also have an implicit psychological model of healing? Doesn’t the concept “spirit” also have an inner dimension? I have asked did he have a diagnosis; an etiology, that is an analysis of the causes, a notion of the therapeutic process—if he thought he could make changes he might have had an implicit idea of “how”, and a vision of the cured state. And what might one discover by thinking of spiritual cure as having a psychological dimension? Not surprisingly, posing a different question yields a different set of insights. Nevertheless, of course, an additional way of looking at these works, in no way diminishes or displaces other excellent interpretations. My work merely adds another dimension to the interpretative literature.
So how did I go about answering this question? My motivation in undertaking this study helps explain the choice of methodology.
The study began with an experience I had as a college sophomore in a course in modern Chinese literature in translation. We must have read several of Lu Xun’s iconic short stories, including “The True Story of Ah Q.” But one story sent me reeling: when I reached the end of “The New Year’s Sacrifice”-Chufu, I felt as if I had been punched. It was a visceral reaction. Why had I responded that way? I had never been to China and barely knew anyone who was Chinese. I won’t try to answer that question here—I do in the book. That question of why I had that reaction naturally propelled me towards self-reflection and an answer arising from psychology, my own as well as what might be implicit within that story.
Thus I was moved to ask about Lu Xun’s psychological model by personal experience, not primarily intellectual curiosity. Naturally, therefore, my study dwells very little on Chinese history and culture per se, although there is enough history and biography to enable a reader unfamiliar with both to understand the context. Also, unlike most studies, it is not about the man himself; it is a study of texts. Of course the man wrote the texts, and so they obviously trace back to Lu Xun, but the man and his biography are not central. Analogously, the work de-centers the content and focuses on structures: that is, I look to see the patterns that repeat and inform most of the stories—and in fact all of the famous ones, rather than on the content. Content is where nearly all critics direct their attention, sometimes on its relationship to the historical environment or more internal issues, such as how various features of the content reflect the author’s biography or thought.
My focus is elsewhere. Lu Xun was known for experimenting with a variety of narrative forms, so attention to structure is not an obvious approach. Nevertheless, careful attention to structure reveals that his short stories are very architectural; there is an identifiable pattern that repeats; and attention to this pattern is highly productive in generating new insights. Having identified the structure, which I name “a bipolar closed system viewed from an external point”—I’ll return to this briefly at the end—I tried to name that structure in the context of my two psychological questions: what did Lu Xun mean by curing the spirits of the Chinese people with literature and why did these stories move me so deeply.
...to be continued in the next post.