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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 3 OF 5 - The Third Element of this Presentation: the Work of Carl Jung
The Psychological ‘Truth’ in Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q”
April 12, 2018
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.
3. That is where the third element of this presentation comes in: the work of Carl Jung, who along with Sigmund Freud was the founder of modern Western psychology. You may be appropriately suspicious about whether the study imposes a Western framework on a Chinese writer—a kind of literary critical cultural imperialism. My answer is that the patterns emerged from a close reading of the text—another distinct feature of my work, although I’m told that the technique of close reading, so long discredited, has now returned to the classroom. I have used the work of Carl Jung to name what I was finding in the texts, not to impose a structure that wasn’t there. Although Carl Jung and Lu Xun were contemporaries, I do not argue—and I do not believe—that Jung influenced Lu Xun in any direct way. They did participate in the same international zeitgeist, but that is a different issue. Rather, I use his theories on the structure of the human psyche as a way of articulating what I was finding in the texts.
So a word about some of Jung’s key concepts that I found so illuminating.
Jung viewed the human psyche or Self as comprised of the conscious mind and the unconscious mind in dynamic interaction. The conscious mind is primarily composed of the ego; the unconscious mind has two parts, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Only the personal unconscious is germane to this study; it can also be called the shadow.
According to Jung, the ego is the part of the Self that we generally mean when we say “I.” It is responsible for the individual’s adaptation to the world. Further, it is often mistaken, and mistakes itself, as being the whole, which it is not. (Everyone who is aware of their dreams is aware that there are unconscious parts of the psyche over which they have little or no control.) The shadow is primarily made up of parts of the psyche or Self that the ego has rejected. In normal development, some parts of the Self are favored and approved, and others rejected. What is accepted or rejected tends to coincide with what one’s family and one’s society favor, although not inevitably. (One reason adults find children so charming, I think, is that they express what they feel and say what they mean, not yet having learned that some things are unacceptable socially.) In normal human development, the shadow tends to go underground, out of awareness, and may even be forgotten. But it never vanishes because no part of the whole, of the Self, can ever be destroyed.
Being unaware of the shadow self is normally not a problem unless the shadow intrudes on the ego, perhaps by undermining the ego’s conscious intention. Thus the ego may be surprised, puzzled, even angry when it discovers that the shadow has said or done something of which it, the ego, was unaware and did not approve. A minor instance is the “Freudian slip,” that embarrassing moment when some inappropriate unconscious thought erupts and says out loud in public something we—the ego--never intended to say.
One way that this disowned or shadow side of the Self may appear is through what is called the projection of the shadow. The psyche splits off or disowns a negative part of the Self (that is, a part it considers negative) and then attributes that characteristic to another person, and then may in anger or revulsion attack the other as something outside of the Self. That is, the psyche tries to destroy the unwelcome part of itself by embodying it in some person or object outside of it and then attacking. An amusing version of this is the young child who comes to school not having done her homework and tells the teacher that the dog ate the homework: the dog, who cannot defend himself, becomes the scapegoat for the fact that the child was negligent and failed to do the assignment. More seriously, this negative image can be projected onto entire groups. The community attributes the evils that have befallen it to a group with insufficient power to fight back and tries to contain or destroy it: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is one clear example of the political scapegoating of an entire group. I’m sure you can quickly create your own list.
But although a part of the Self can be forgotten and rendered unconscious, it cannot be destroyed because no part can be destroyed. Japanese Americans were Americans, not citizens of Japan. Further, Jung argued—and here he departed from Freud, the psyche has a natural impulse towards reintegration, towards healing, and that some part of it “wants” to reintegrate the shadow. (I’m happy to say that the wrong done to Japanese Americans was finally recognized and the government extended an apology.)
My book argues that one way of viewing the spiritual or psychological illness that Lu Xun defined as undermining China is to view his analysis as the split of the shadow from the ego within the whole Self and healing as the reintegration of these two parts. He investigates this process in the multiple domains of nation, community, family and private self and imagines different outcomes in each domain. One way to understand the psycho-dynamics at work in “The True Story of Ah Q” is to view the story as an investigation into what happens when the ego tries to split off and expel the unwanted, unacknowledged, despised shadow side of the Self and destroy it. Analyzing the “True Story of Ah Q” as a meditation on scapegoating, defined in terms of these Jungian concepts, reveals dimensions of that story not previously noticed.
...to be continued in the next post.