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 5 OF 5 - The General Value of the Jungian Interpretative Lens
The Psychological ‘Truth’ in Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q”
April 12, 2018
5. My final point—the general value of the Jungian interpretative lens in viewing the stories.
At the beginning of the lecture I talked about a pattern that repeats throughout Lu Xun’s short story corpus and informs all of the best stories—the bipoplar closed system viewed from an external point. I can only suggest briefly how that pattern informs “The True Story of “Ah Q.” The events that I have outlined are told by a narrator who begins his story after the events have concluded and Ah Q is dead. Thus the temporal structure of the story is circular—it is closed. The juxtaposition of Ah Q and the village elite comprise opposite forces—the bipolarity--within this temporal enclosure. The ironic nature of the story and the narrative voice of the opening chapters create an external position from which to view the events. This greatly oversimplifies how the structure shows up in “The True Story of Ah Q” but I hope gives you a hint of how it works. In variably patterns that appear in other stories are, in “Ah Q” more complex.
What I demonstrate throughout the book is that this structure, the bipolar closed system viewed from an exterior point, informs four images in Lu Xun famous “Preface” to his first collection of stories, and informs his most famous stories, including “Madman’s Diary,” “Regret for the Past,” “The New Year’s Sacrifice”—the story that set me on this trajectory, and indeed shape most of the others. I show that interpreting this structure through Jung’s conceptual framework shows that Lu Xun had a clear but implicit model of the psychological or spiritual illness and its causes; that in some venues he could imagine the therapeutic process unfolding, although not in “The True Story of Ah Q,” and that he even embedded in several stories a vision of the cured state which, however, he could only imagine as occurring within the family—only sometimes within the family, and within the private world of the inner self. The Jungian approach, combined with a focus on the structure of the stories, gives new meaning to Lu Xun decision to take up the profession of literature in his hope of healing the spirits of the Chinese people.