>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:17 >> Qi Qiu: Hi, good afternoon. So, before we begin today's program I would like to ask you to please take a moment to check your cell phones and other electronic devices and set them to silent. Thank you. And for your reference, this afternoon's program is being filmed for placement on the Kluge Center website. As well as our YouTube and ITunes channels. And today's lecture is presented by the Asian Division and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Asian Division was founded in 1928 as the division of Chinese literature. So, this year actually marks 90 years anniversary of the Asian Division. Even though it was firstly named the Division of Chinese Literature, it had started collected Chinese and Japanese materials and received Mongolian and Tibetan gifts as early as the late 19th century. And from 1869 presentation of 933 volumes to the United States by the Emperor of China, the collections of the Asian Division have grown to represent one of the most comprehensive collection of Asian language materials in the world. Housed in the John Adams building across the street, as well as off site locations. The collection of the division include most subject fields and covering an area ranging from the south Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia to East Asia. The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress exists to help address the challenges facing democracy in the 21st century by bridging the gap between scholarship and policy makers. It does this by hosting top thinkers from the world to conduct research at the Library's massive collections and engage national leaders. So for more information about the Kluge Center, please visit loc.gov/kluge. So on today's program the program is titled, "Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung: Psychological "Truth" in Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q." So, here is a cover of the new book that Dr. Carolyn Brown has just newly published. Brown is a former director of the Kluge Center from 2006 to 2014. She held multiple positions during her nearly 24 year career at the Library, including that of associate librarian for cultural affairs, director of area studies collections and director of collections and services. Prior to coming to the Library, she served as the associate dean for the humanities at Howard University. She holds BA and MA degrees in Asian studies and Chinese literature respectively from Cornell University. And earned a PhD in literature at American University. During her academic career she published in several journals, including "Clear and Modern Chinese Literature and edited Psycho-sinology: The Universe of Dreams in Chinese Culture." She currently serves as a trustee of the Fetzer institute. Today Carolyn will discuss her just published book as shown here, "Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung," which offers a unique approach to the short stories of the most famous modern Chinese writer, Lu Xun. Brown uses foundational elements of the psychology of Carl Jung, who with Freud was the founder of modern western psychology, to illuminate key structures in the works of this great writer. Approaching this works from a unique direction, Brown's lecture will shed new light on the psychological patterns within Lu Xun's most famous story, "The True Story of Ah Q." Now please join me in welcoming Dr. Carolyn Brown. ^M00:04:46 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:51 >> Carolyn Brown: Well, thank you very much, Qi Qiu. It's a real pleasure to be invited to talk about my new book, "Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung," here at the Library of Congress. Where as you know I spent most of my professional career. And especially to talk about insights that arose from viewing his most famous story through a Xun Jung lens. If you decide after the lecture that you would like to have the book or you might decide you don't want to have the book, but if you decide you want to have the book, please take a minute to see my husband, Tim Eastman, who can give you a code the publisher's provided, that will give you a 25% discount. So, that's definitely worth it. Before I forget -- begin, I would like to thank a few people who've made the book possible. No book comes into fruition on its own. First, [foreign name] and the staff of the staff of the Asia Division, including our wonderful introducer today. The staff of the Kluge Center that were wonderful in helping me transition from being a director to being a scholar in the center. I must say being a scholar in the Center turned out even better than I said all the years that I was director. Really fabulous, fabulous place. Of course, thanks to James Billington who granted me the office, the former librarian. I'd also like to thank Mary Jane Dee and the staff of the African Middle eastern Division, who offered special accommodations over the last year or so. And to the other scholars and friends who helped bring the book to fruition. And I want to mention two people who were there at the beginning and are here at the end, my good friend Victoria Ronna Robinson, who just crept in the back and my son, Michael, who many decades ago it seems said to me, "If you don't finish this book, you won't die happy." So, I have finished it, but I'm not planning to die. And, of course, my husband, Tim Eastman, who did way too many things that I couldn't even mention them, but there would be no index without Tim. My presentation today will follow this outline. First, for those of you not familiar with the author, I will briefly introduce Lu Xun, who really is the most important early Chinese intellectual -- early 20th century Chinese intellectual and writer. Then explain what makes my approach unique among ways of interpreting his modern short stories. For those of you unfamiliar with Carl Jung, I will briefly sketch a few of the fundamental, psychological insights I've used that are necessary to my interpretation. Number four, I'll draw some 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. And finally, I will point to other dimensions of this story, which I argue is a deeply insightful reflection on the psychological phenomena of scapegoating. And then briefly suggest the power that comes from using Jung's concepts as an interpretive lens for delivering new insights into Lu Xun's stories. And we should have time for questions. So, first a brief introduction. Lu Xun is a major Chinese intellectual of the early 20th century, he's generally considered the founder of modern Chinese literature and certainly the greatest writer of that period. He was a central figure in the tumultuous early decades of that century, both a product of the time and a person, an agent who shaped it. He was born in 1881, 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 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 imperial powers, he searched for ways to make China stronger. With a focus on asking what Chinese patterns and thought and perception might account for what he believes was China's insufficient response to the challenges arising from encounter with the west. He is still deeply appreciated for his penetrating critiques of social norms and conditions of Chinese society. He took what was known, familiar, accepted without question, looked at them in new ways and exposed these practices as cruel and inhumane. He opened his reader's eyes to seeing and understanding in new ways. He is still appreciated, and this is important, a 100 years later, he hasn't gone out of -- his insights have not gone out of style. He's still appreciated for his insights into Chinese society, his dedication to ending the Chinese people suffering, his deep moral integrity and his commitment to self-scrutiny. Fundamental elements of his critique still resonate today, which is exactly 2018, a 100 years since he published his very first modern short story. His legacy is enormous. He's -- and this is -- it's really extraordinary. He's memorialized in museums, his works are read in schools across the nation, at least they were until recently. They've inspired paintings, prints, drawings, plays, operas, ballets, films and so forth and literary sequels. His enormous reputation has commandeered -- has been commandeered from the political spectrum on both sides. On the left, Chairman [inaudible] praised him as a harbinger of the communist revolution. And on the right, commercial interests have created Aleutian theme park in Beijing. I really have to go some time and meet, I'm sure, the characters are walking around in costume. Research on Lu Xun would fill a small library and undoubtedly occupy a great deal of shelf space in the Asian division stacks. However, the sensitivity and complexity of the writer himself are frequently lost in the uses that others have made of him. He belonged to that pivotal generation, 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 in from China -- into China from Japan. Japan had opened up the western 1868. And by 1902 when Lu Xun went to Japan to study was well on his 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 probably enabled him to see with an analytic eye and at the same time from the inside with deep understanding of the culture and intense moral commitment. In Japan he enrolled in medical school, but in his second year and this is familiar to anyone in Chinese studies, his second year he abandoned the career, that career, for literature. Explaining what the Chinese people most needed was not to have their bodies healed, but to have their spirits changed. And many scholars have perceived this medical metaphor. So, the second part of my lecture is to talk about how my work asked a new question about this metaphor and what is it that makes my interpretation and my approach to these stories rather unique? Of enumerable scholars who have addressed the issue of his diagnosis of the Chinese spiritual illness and his crisis, his analysis of its causes. Almost without exception they focus on his critiques of Chinese society and its Confucian roots. This is a logical outcome of his explicit social concerns is an essential line of inquiry, but it also has some limitations. My work asks this, "If Lu Xun thought that he could change the spirits of the Chinese people with literature, did he have an implicit psychological model of healing?" Does the concept -- doesn't the concept spirit also have inner dimensions. 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 in the spirits, he must have had some 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, if you pose a new question, you usually get new insights. But nevertheless I do want to say that my work is in addition to a lot of other wonderful work that's been done and on which it certainly depends. ^M00:14:45 ^M00:14:46 So how am I going to answer my question about the, you know, the methodology? Why this is different. And I start with a personal experience. This study began when I was a college sophomore in a course in modern Chinese literature in translation. I think we probably read his most iconic stories, certainly true story of Ah Q. Undoubtedly "Regret for the Past," I don't remember. But I do know that when I read one of his stories, "The New Year Sacrifice," [inaudible] it was as someone had like hit me in the stomach and I thought, "What has happened here?" I had never been to China and I don't think I really knew anyone who was Chinese or certainly not well. But I do answer that question, but I'm not going to answer it here today. I do answer it in the book. But the question, my own reaction asked me to think both about my reaction and in a psychological sense and then to begin to wonder about what might be the psychological dimensions within the stories. Thus I was moved to ask about the psychological model by personal experience and I admit, as a former director of the Kluge Center, it wasn't driven by intellectual curiosity, essentially, but by my experience. So therefore naturally the study dwells very little on Chinese history and culture per se, although there's enough to help a reader who's not familiar with it. Also, unlike most studies, it's not primarily about the man himself, it's a study of text. Of course we know the man wrote the text, so they obviously trace back to the author himself, but that's not the central concern. Similarly the work decent is the content and focuses on the structures. That is, I look at the patterns that repeat in foremost of the stories. And, in fact, it shows up in all the famous ones. But I'm not focuses primarily on the content and content is where most of the critics direct their attention. So my focus is elsewhere. Lu Xun was known for experimenting with a variety of narrative forms. And so my attention to structure and commonalities in structure is not exactly intuitive. Nevertheless, careful attention to structure reveals that his stories are very architectural. There's an identifiable pattern that repeats and attention to this pattern turns out to be highly productive. Having identified the structure, which I name, and here's sort of the title, "A Bi-Polar Closed System Viewed from the Outside." Won't mean much in the abstract, but there it is. I tried to name the structure in the context of my two psychological questions. What did Lu Xun mean by wanting to cure the spirits of the Chinese people and why did these stories move me so deeply? And that is where the third element in the presentation comes in. The work of Carl Jung, who along with Sigmund Freud, who's much better known in China, was the founder of modern Chinese -- modern Western psychology. You might be appropriately suspicious and it really is appropriate, to wonder whether I might have imposed a western framework on a Chinese writer, which would be a kind of literary critical cultural imperialism. My answer to that, before you've asked the question perhaps, is that the pattern emerged from close reading of the text, which is another distinctive feature. Although I understand close reading is coming back into fashion. But I used Carl Jung to name what was immerging from the text. Not to impose a structure that wasn't there. And it's interesting, Carl Jung and Lu Xun were contemporaries. Jung was six years older. But I'm not arguing influence. I don't think there was any direct influence. They did participate in the same sort of international zeitgeist, but this is not a study of influence. I'm using Jung's concepts of the psyche as a model to explain what I was finding in the text. So I'll say my sort of third element here, a word about Jung. Jung viewed the human psyche or the self as comprised of the conscious mind and the unconscious mind in dynamic interaction. The conscious mind is primarily comprised of the ego. The unconscious has two parts. The personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. And needless to say I'm simplifying to be able to use this. And we're not even interested in the collective unconscious for this talk, just the personal unconscious. According to Jung, the ego is that part of the self that we generally mean when we say, "I is responsible for the individual's adaptation to the world and is often mistaken and sometimes mistakes itself as being the whole, which it is not." Anyone who thinks about their dreams is well aware that there are other parts of the mind that are not part of the ego of a conscious mind. The shadow, that is that element of the unconscious, is primarily made up of parts that the psyche or the ego, I'm sorry, the psyche -- the parts that the ego has rejected. It's in normal development some parts of the self are favored, approved and others are rejected. And what is favored tends to be what, you know, what your family likes, what society favors. Although not inevitably. I think one reason that adults find children so charming is they say what they think and what they mean and they don't know that some things are not socially accepted. They haven't learned that yet. In normal human development the shadow tends to go underground out of awareness and may even be forgotten. But it can't be destroyed, because it's part of the whole person, the whole self. Being aware of the shadow normally isn't a problem, unless it intrudes on the ego, perhaps by undermining the egos conscious intent. I'm sure this has happened to all of you. The ego may be surprised, puzzled, angry, when the shadow suddenly speaks up or does something that the ego was not aware of or didn't approve. And you're all probably familiar with that example of the Freudian slip. When something pops out of your mouth and you think, who said that? Couldn't have been me, I didn't mean that. Meant to hide it. Well, that's sort of your shadow speaking. One way that the disowned or shadow side of the self may appear is through what is called projection of the shadow. The psyche splits off or disowns a part of the self it considers negative and then it tributes that characteristic to another person. And then it may in anger attack the other as something outside of itself. That is the psyche tries to destroy the unwelcome part of itself by embodying it in some other person or object out there and then attacking. An amusing version of this, I'm sure many of you have heard this, is the young child who comes to school not having done her homework and says to the teacher, "The dog ate the homework." Right? 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 image can be projected onto entire groups. Where the community contributes some evil that has befallen it, to a group usually with insufficient power to fight back and tries to contain it. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is one very clear example of political scapegoating of an entire group. And I'm sure it doesn't take much imagination for you to look around our current world and see it still happening. But although a part of the self can be forgotten and rendered unconscious, it cannot be destroyed, because it is part of the self. Japanese Americans were Americans, not citizens of Japan. And further Jung argued and here he departed from Freud significantly, the psyche has a natural impulse towards reintegration, towards healing and that some part of it, some part of the psyche actually wants the reintegration, wants wholeness. And I'm happy to say, as you all know, that the wrong done to Japanese Americans was finally recognized and the government extends an apology. That doesn't always happen of course. 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, this idea in multiple domains, that of the nation, the community, the family and the individual self and imagines different outcomes in each domain. So one way to understand the psycho dynamics in the true story of Ah Q, is to view the story as an investigation into what happens when the ego splits off and expels the unwanted, unacknowledged, despised shadow side of the self and then tries to destroy it? ^M00:24:59 ^M00:25:01 Analyzing the true story of Ah Q as a meditation on scapegoating, defined in terms of these union concepts, reveals dimensions of the stories, the story not previously noted. So, I get to the fourth part of my presentation. I want to provide a few examples that reveal how viewing the true story of Ah Q as a medication on scapegoating furthers our understanding of the story. The historical context depicted in the stories in 1911 revolution, which is the revolution that needed the last dynasty and established the Chinese republic. The story was written ten years after this event, so it was kind of recent history, it depicts incidents in the life of Ah Q, that's the name of the character. A day laborer in a small Chinese village. A man who has a tendency to get into fist fights, which he usually loses. But then he recasts his losses as psychological victories. When he oversteps the boundaries of sexual propriety, he's forced to leave the village for town. There he participates as a low level accomplice, in an act of petty thievery and returns later to the village. When ripples from the coming revolution arrive in his village he wants to enlist in the revolution, but the village elite will have none of it. They co-op the revolution, claim it as their own. The real social disruption arrives in the form of a theft of a very powerful person's goods. The authorities needing to hold somebody responsible, accuse Ah Q of the crime and execute him. Actually they shoot him, not cut his throat. Ah Q's signature feature, the one he's know for as a character, is his stunning capacity to turn physical defeat into spiritual victory. That is, when he's defeated in some kind of brawl he redefines the experience, such that he perceives himself as having achieved the upper hand morally and psychologically. At the time of its composition Ah Q's capacity to turn defeat into victory was read allegorically. Okay? It was read as a representation of China's failures to respond to the challenges brought by the west. The notion that a nation had a particular character, a national character was very current at the time, and there was considerable discussion about China's national character, what made it unique. And then given the problems, what deficiencies were in its -- in this character. Because if it was getting beaten up by the west, at least in its perception, it must have been deficient in some way. Lu Xun, viewing himself as a doctor rendering a diagnosis, looked at what was wrong with the patient, china, in order to move the body politic towards health and a better future. He himself declared a few years later that in creating the stories he had attempted to -- he had attempted to describe the souls of the Chinese people. So, from the beginning Ah Q was viewed as typical, not just a literary character, but typical of the Chinese national character. And what was considered his essential feature, was this capacity to turn defeat into victory. So, we should take a look at what that actually means. And I'm going to give you a few of the simpler examples from the story. Simplest one, Ah Q was out gambling, he's actually winning for a change, winning a big pile of silver, as it's described, and suddenly a fight breaks out, tables are overturned, there's a lot of hub bub and carrying on. When he looks around and comes to, all of his winnings, phht, caput. Are gone. Initially he's a little upset and bewildered and then he slaps his own face hard. What is he doing? Oh, I should say, slaps his face and he feels better, okay, makes him feel better. He is, in fact, split his psyche into the ego and the shadow. Treats the ego as if it were the whole self, the one that gave the slap and remember I mentioned that Jung noted that frequently the ego believes it is the entire self. So, this is not quite as bizarre it may seem. But then he disowns the part of himself that felt the pain and Lu Xun tells us, even though his face is still tingling, it works. He feels better, he's disowned the part that was hit, defeat into victory. Another example. Ah Q has ringworm scars. I've never seen a ringworm scar, but I gather they're not very attractive. And he's doesn't like them and he's tabooed all mention of them. So, the very act, if you think of it, the act of tabooing itself a part of your body that, you know, is there, is a way of trying to disown or to dismiss it. So, naturally when anyone mentions the ringworm scars he gets furious because the very fact of having to acknowledge the shadow that has been rejected, is what constitutes defeat. So, he gets really angry. So, just to be explicit as we move to my next example, scapegoating is envisioned by Lu Xun and by the Jung, proceeds by splitting the psyche, projecting the shadow a negative part, what it regards as negative, onto another group and then attacking that person for inciting their anger. I should note that Lu Xun himself and this is really interesting, about five years after he wrote the story, had an intuition that the story was not about the past or the present, as people said, but that it was about the future. And even several decades in the future. So, he himself had a sense that there was a pattern going on here. But he didn't obviously he was a writer, not a literary critique, so he didn't look for the pattern, but he sensed the pattern. And I think the pattern shows most clearly in a simple way, in this famous incident with a woman servant named Ama Wu [assumed spelling]. Okay. So, at this point in the story Ah Q's sexuality is aroused when he pinches a young nun. I won't go into that part. Offended though the nun hurls a curse at him and she says, "Ah Q, may you die sonless." And not to have children in a culture that values filial relationships is really bad. However, Ah Q considers the comment and thinks that indeed he should take a wife, which is the social context in which ones sexual appetite or expression of it is appropriate, right? So, shortly after he's sitting with a female servant, they're both working in the house of one of these village elite, Ama Wu, and she's innocently chatting away about this and that. And out of nowhere Ah Q says to her, "Sleep with me." She screams, goes running from the room, big room, big hullaballoo, and has to be persuaded by the head of the household that she shouldn't think about committing suicide. Okay. So, Ah Q's ego speaks of marriage. His shadow speaks of sexual intercourse. When the man of the house comes after Ah Q, big step, to beat him for this gross transgression, Ah Q does not understand that he himself has initiated the uproar. He thinks, like, "Hmm, wonder what's happening here." That is to say he has so disowned the shadow self, which caused the uproar, that he doesn't even recognize it as his own self. Further, and this is important, the woman, who has in no way provoked his proposition, she's just, you know, jibber jabber, chatter, chatter, behaves as if she were in fact responsible, so contemplates suicide, which is the socially appropriate response. Ah Q has -- Lu Xun has revealed that Ah Q, having disowned his sexuality, has projected it onto Ama Wu, and she is merely the recipient of the shadow projection. ^M00:34:08 ^M00:34:12 But she responds as if the society will agree that she's to blame. In fact, that she is the -- so that he has attempted to scapegoat her. Lu Xun made the same argument in another story, which is much overlooked, "Soap." That is he also showed there that society has encouraged men to disown their sexuality, project their desires onto women and then accuse women of having incited it. Certainly he viewed this as an issue of power as well, but also in psychological terms. So, Ah Q's behavior only seems exaggerated, because he masks the normal covers that society creates to hide it, to hide the -- to hide the shadow projection. So, my example of the Japanese, there was some equivalence made, they were dangerous, because they might have connections with the Japanese government that was attacking us, etc. So, there's usually an excuse to mask the projection. But in Ah Q, the story of Ah Q, there's no excuse, he doesn't know he needs to make one. When the revolution comes to the village, the same scapegoating process is enacting on the social scale, on the societal scale. And it's interesting seeing the perils between Ah Q's behavior and that of the village elite is particularly important. Okay, why is it important? Because over the decades the critics have understood Ah Q is a type, as I said, And trying to determine what he is typical of, have looked outside of the story for answers. It was particularly a challenge for critics working under [inaudible] constraints, because Chairman [inaudible] had praise Ah Q in such extraordinary -- I'm sorry, has praised Lu Xun in such extraordinary ways. So, in the context of class struggle, which I guess you will remember as one of these major elements in that period, Ah Q, the peasant is he a good figure, he's a peasant? Or a bad figure? And then how to explain his cowardice in turning physical defeat into moral victory. And what was he typical of, was he typical of China before 1949 or was he in some way typical, could he be typical of the great life that happened after 1949. So, it created a lot of problems. I'm sure the critics did very well in trying to deal with what had been set up for them. But even critics not laboring under such ideological constraints, looked outside of Lu Xun's text to try to understand typicality. And in a way I would say the writer has thrown them a curve, because in naming the story, the true story of Ah Q, you're naturally going to focus on Ah Q. But if you look at the entire story through the lens of ego and shadow and the whole self, then you can see that his behavior and that of the other villages, are in fact just the same. That they too are trying to turn defeat into victory, except they have more power so they can sometimes do it in the external world. So, few more words about how that works. In the story Lu Xun treats the revolution in [inaudible] terms, and you may not have noticed this. When the revolutionary arrives, power holders, that is the social ego, try to coop it, they get the badges, they get the banners, you know, all of the paraphernalia. And managed to remain in power. But in the text when Lu Xun describes them he notes that there are bad revolutionaries who are always off somewhere else, never seen, you only hear about them, and they are out there really disrupting society. He never calls the local elite good revolutionaries, but the others are bad revolutionaries. So, he's already set up a kind of union dynamic there. ^M00:38:35 ^M00:38:39 What's so wonderful about this technique is that within the text in keeping them never dramatized, they're always sort of like off stage, you hear about them second hand through something. It's kind of mimicking the way in which the shadow is actually experienced psychologically. So, those of you who know literature in this period often know that, you know, have a clash of good and evil, but Lu Xun is swifter than that. He doesn't set it up that way. When the revolution actually does reach the village, Ah Q tries to sign up and he's shushed away. Then a serious theft occurs. Which may or may not have been -- we don't know who committed the revolutionaries or who. But there's a serious theft. The captain, now he's from the town, who's in charge with solving, not just this crime, but several others, hasn't been able to solve any of them. And he's feeling pretty embarrassed and he's probably worried about his job, although is ay that's my addition. Lu Xun doesn't actually say that. So, he has -- he looks at Ah Q and he says, "Aha, got a culprit." People think he's been a thief, you know, there he is, let's nail him. He's clearly innocent, he even has an alibi, most of the villagers believe he's not a thief who will steal again. There is a trial, barely a trial, and he's executed as a public example. So, I want to go back to my earlier metaphor. This is very much the example of the dog that ate the homework. While it is very plausible that the dog indeed could have eaten the homework, it's the least likely explanation. And, so, Ah Q is a very plausible thief and he's illiterate and not very clear headed and is about as good at defending himself as the dog would be. Looking at the story through a [inaudible] lens then reveals the conceptual unity of the plot. The early part focused on Ah Q and the latter part. And it also makes apparent that the same psychodynamic is reenacted by the other clans in the village and one of the great things about this story is reading again for this talk, I saw again, it's not just that it's enacting within the village, but it's also enacted within the town. Keep seeing more things. So that when those at the higher level of power are faced with a crime and a problem that they can't deal with, they resort to scapegoating as well, just as Ah Q has, as the local elite have and now the people in the town. So he's executed because they can't find the real culprit. Almost overlooked and I'll just say a few more things about Ah Q, is that Lu Xun has provided six different perspectives on this execution. And I'll just name them. You can look for yourself at a later point. The soldiers who come to arrest Ah Q, the judge who presides at the trial, the man whose goods are stolen, who naturally just wants them back, the local -- and he's related to the local elite. The captain who arrests him. Ah Q himself, he has a perspective on this, which might surprise you. And the general population witnessed the execution. Also often overlooked are the last two paragraphs of the story and there's a lot in there, but I just want to know here that Lu Xun makes very clear that the bad revolutionaries, as it were, are still out there. So, executing the scapegoat, it may give you temporary relief, but the real folks are still there. I just want to mention one other dimension, which I certainly can't go into here, but I do go into in the book in some detail is there's another really important critic, Rene Girard, who spends a lot of his several books talking about violence and how human societies try to contain and prevent violence. And his focus is on different stages in scapegoating. What tends to cause it, how the process unfolds, who the victims usually are, etc. And his very useful insight is that scapegoating at a societal level tends to occur when the rule of law is not in place. This is not to say that there are no scapegoats when you have the rule of law. But that when the society, as a society goes into scapegoating, it tends to be because the rule of law is weakened. And, of course, what is a revolution, but a destruction of the rule of law. It's interesting, Girard mentions four stages in scapegoating, but if you look carefully at Ah Q, not only has Lu Xun built into his story all four, but they're really two more. And I won't get into that. It's sort of based on what Girard was looking at. So, when I looked at this and I saw this pattern of scapegoating, and remembered that Lu Xun had intuited that there was a pattern in his story, but he didn't know what it was, I'm wondering if that's in fact what he intuited. My final point, which is to say something about using a union interpretation as a way of looking not just at this story and other stories. I called it a bi-polar closed system feud from an exterior point. Right, that's of the abstract description. And just briefly to take a look at how that shows up in the true story of Ah Q. I should say in Ah Q, no matter what you have in other stories, it always seems to be more complicated and intricate, but just briefly that pattern. Closed system, okay. The events that I've outlined take place within a narrative frame where you have a narrator at the beginning and the -- an overt narrate in the beginning. And the story begins, that is the narrator's story begins after Ah Q has been executed. So, there's a temporal closure, a temporal circle. If you juxtapose Ah Q and the village elite, you have the bi-polarity there. And, of course, it changes, as I said, the story's complicated, but there's bi-polarity through all. And then the external view, initially it's the narrator, but I think primarily it's the use of irony throughout the story that creates the external vision. And I haven't even talked about the irony. I certainly didn't have time to get that in. So, that pattern informs Ah Q, it's in, I think I mentioned, all the major stories. It's in four images in the preface, to the first collection of short stories. It's in a Mad Man's Diary. I mentioned this is the 100th anniversary. It's in -- that pattern informs the New Year's sacrifice, which is the story that got me at the beginning when I was a student. I just realized as I was writing this that I read the story at about the same age that Lu Xun went to Japan and I thought, "Oh, yeah," that's when your mind gets opened. ^M00:47:01 ^M00:47:06 In the book I show that interpreting this structure through Jung's conceptual framework shows that indeed Lu Xun had an implicit model of psychological illnesses and its causes. That in some venues he could imagine that therapeutic process unfolding, although not in the true story of Ah Q, and that he even imbedded in several of his stories a vision of the cure. And, again, those of you who know the literate know that in terms of the social environment, there wasn't a vision of the cure, but within the -- he could envision it within the family, not always, sometimes, but he could envision it in the family and he could envision it in the private self. And that's all encoded in the structure of the stories as you read them through a union lens. So, the union approach combined with a focus on the structure, gives new meaning to Lu Xun's decision to take up the profession of literature in his hope of healing the spirits of the Chinese people. So, I'll stop there. I think we have time for questions. Although I was, yep, little bit. I meant to have more. Yes. >> Thank you very much. I just want to add that [inaudible] architects, [inaudible] anonymous seem to be also applicable here, because [inaudible] society, as you know. >> Right. >> I'm sure you [inaudible] rejection of the, I don't know, [inaudible] psyche. And how that would be part of the social malady of [inaudible], I was wondering how much Lu Xun addressed himself to that particular sexist component of the [inaudible]? >> Well, it's really interesting because he -- and thank you for that comment, because, you know, I wondered about Anima and Animus and I had so much to do and I was trying to pull it all together, so I decided I'm not going to go down that route. But he really thought a lot about the role of women in that society. And he thought about it I would say differently from a lot of his colleagues. He has a famous essay that's called, "What happens after Nora leaves home?" Alluding to Henrik Ibsen, "A Doll's House." And he argues that in China she leaves home, either she's going to have to -- either she's going to starve to death or she's going to have to return. And he has a story, which follows the structure, but which I argue really ask the question, people are always trying to figure out what his answer was. I think the story, it's called, "Regret for the Past in English," what it looks at that question. But of great interested, a greater interest I think is his story, "Soap." Which was usually overlooked because it doesn't have that overtly, that kind of social content, that social critical content. But in "Soap" he creates a woman who is married to an old fashioned man. I won't try to go into the whole story. But she figures out in the course of a dinner conversation that he's been oogling a young woman on the street and directing his sexual attentions to her. She says nothing until for various reasons he goes after the child. It's a very good view of a woman really. And then she comes out after him. But what Lu Xun has done is he's given in -- at a time when most of the male writers were using women, female figures as part of their argument about social realities, so kind of using them as tokens, he has created a woman who speaks her own mind in her own voice, terrifies her husband, because he's not expecting, because usually she's very behaving. And has actually written in a character who is as powerful in rereading the Confucian text, you know, which you see in other stories. But the woman rereading what gets called the performative text, the way people behave, through a whole new lens, and this is one of the stories that shows healing, because after her husband recovers from this attack, she uses the gift. He's brought here a gift of soap and it implies that, in fact, she has succeeded in redirecting his sexual interest to her person. And there's a little detail in there that after she uses that for six months, a new aroma pops up. Sandalwood soap. And thanks to my wonderful research assistant, Dushaya [assumed spelling], I've understood, came to understand that sandalwood soap was a special, more expensive soap. So, she went. It's not -- they both win. And that's the point, that when ego and shadow come together and the knowledge is integrated, everybody wins, in fact, but it's one of his best, most well crafted stories. It's not an excess word in it. And it's just -- it's jut brilliant. It's really, it's really brilliant. So, thank you for that question. >> Is there a [inaudible] solution or therapy in [inaudible]? >> No. Because what happens-- so the way I looked at the stories is I looked at the stories that seemed to function primarily -- they seemed to be mostly about what happens at the national state. And that's Ah Q and another national level, another story of medicine. And then what tends to happen at the community level, what may happen within the family and what may happen within the self, at the national level that shadow figure ends up dead. Community level the shadow figure often ends up dead, but no one has killed the person. It's been neglect, it's been poverty, it's been all the things that are in the social system. At the family level a lot of times doesn't work very well, but he does have -- this story, "Soap" that I've talked about, where you have spiritual healing and then there's another story, which people argue is influenced by Freudian thinking. These early ones I'm pretty sure were not - that's a longer story. But anyway, where the person's encounters their shadow in a dream and takes in the knowledge of their own evil and then very very subtly he shows that they've changed just a little bit. So you get the way that they behave at work, the certain arrogance and, "Boy, our family's great, we do this, that and the other." And at the end when he absorbs the knowledge of his own -- we would say evil, Chinese wouldn't say evil -- his own shadow. He's more humble and compassionate. But it's very subtle. So, no, at the national -- at that national level shadow's finished, executed, killed. Yeah, Mary Jane. >> Thank you, [inaudible]. Fascinating. Did Lu Xun have the concept of the function of literature? In other words, when he was writing was he thinking of making society look at itself, individuals look at themselves, or was he trying to change the existing format of literature? Did it have a function beyond the literary the telling of a story in terms of the society? Did he see his literature as an instrument of change or self-recognition or? >> Yeah, no, his main ambition was to change society and to change the way people thought. Because, and I'm going to make a gross statement about the Chinese culture that somebody can probably shoot me for, but I think there's a tendency there to think that the thought, the way you think is the central part that's going to help change the world, the -- I'm trying to think of the language. Chairman [inaudible] thought to change the thinking, so you change the exterior. I think westerners tend to change the exterior and hope the thought will follow. But anyway, yes, his intention was to change the society, to change it by revealing what was wrong and looking at those patterns and showing that the patterns that everybody had been following for who knows how long. I mean, obviously he's only living in a -- but, certain time, but the tradition, as he met it in the early 20th century, to show that some of the things that people said about humanity and filial piety and the things that come from the -- now, of course, I'm blanking on some of the other language -- that if you looked under the hood, as it were, what you saw was cruelty and misery and inhumanity. And that wasn't necessary. I think that was the point. It wasn't necessary and therefore, you could change it and things would be better. But you can't change it if you don't know what it is. So, he's trying to put it on the table and say, "Hey, look, you thought this was so great, it's killing people." I mean, I'm being sort of dramatic here. So, that was the intent. Initially he thought he -- and this sort of collapsed -- his first hope in taking up literature was he was going to do translation and that if society -- and, of course, we're just talking about an intellectual elite, right, we're not talking about the whole society. That if the leadership could see in new ways then they could do things in new ways and it would be helpful to have western knowledge coming in, because it gives you not necessarily that you adopt it, because he was smart enough not to know you don't adopt things wholesale, but it gives you an angle of vision to look at what your own culture is and then you can see what needs to be changed. And although he doesn't talk about what works, you know, there's always what works. So, he's trying to heal the illness, it's not cut off a working limb in some way, yeah. ^M00:58:51 ^M00:58:55 I think, oh, maybe last question. >> How would you say that Lu Xun's message is relevant for today? >> Oh, that's a tricky one. >> There's a plant in the audience. >> Yeah, there's a plant in the audience. ^M00:59:09 ^M00:59:14 Well, I'll say a couple things and I'm not going to -- I don't think it's my place as a westerner who hasn't spent a lot of time in China to talk about what China should and shouldn't do. But I will say that it's really important to understand scapegoating. It happens all the time. It's happening in our current political culture. You know, rather than paying attention to what are the real causes of things, it's much easier to point at -- there's a lot pointing at groups right now and say, "They're causing the problem." And maybe a few people in the group may be causing the problem, but a few people in your own group are also causing problems. So, it's a lot easier to scapegoat others than to actually try to figure out what's really going wrong, what the causes are and then heaven forbid actually do something about it. So, to me the whole -- and I will say in my life the learning to understand that I too have a shadow. I do things, say things occasionally, try not to say things, a little easier, but do things that come out of, you know, a part of myself that's not -- that's not my best self. And the trick, of course, is to catch it before you do it so that you can integrate that knowledge into who you are and become a more whole, more integrated, usually more compassionate person. Because once you see, I'll just -- this is -- when I was in graduate school I discovered in a moment of fear that I get very belligerent when threatened and I might even be capable of murder. I don't know that, but I've been in other situations where I've wondered. If I, you know, had. So, that's really useful knowledge. No, I'm not going to shoot you all. It's -- it helps you understand that other people, right, who don't have the resources of intellect and money and time and all the privileges that we have, and maybe have a gun available, can fire off really fast. And that doesn't mean somehow you're not responsible for what you do, but it complicates it and I think it makes you more compassionate and we can certainly use more compassion, more understanding. Which doesn't mean, as I said, it doesn't mean you're not responsible, but you see more and you're probably a little more humble. And I say in the shadow of the capital, a little more humility and self-reflection. So, we a little after 5 and I was supposed to stop at 5? Let's -- >> Thank you, Dr. Brown, wonderful. >> Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:02:34