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 4 OF 5 - Viewing “The True Story of Ah Q” as a Meditation of Scapegoating furthers Understanding of the Story

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The Psychological ‘Truth’ in Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q”

April 12, 2018

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.

4. In this fourth part of my presentation, I will provide a few examples that reveal how viewing “The True Story of Ah Q” as a meditation of scapegoating furthers understanding of the story. The historical context depicted in the story is the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the last dynasty and established the Chinese Republic. Written ten years after this monumental event, the story presents incidents in the life of Ah Q, a day laborer in a small Chinese village, a man who has a tendency to get involved in fistfights, which he usually loses but then recasts as psychological victories. When he oversteps the boundaries of sexual propriety, he is forced to leave the village for town. There he participates as a low level accomplice in an act of petty thievery; then he returns to his village. When ripples from the coming revolution arrive in his village, he wants to enlist in that revolution but the village elite claim the revolution as their own and attempt to preserve the status quo. Real social disruption arrives in the form of a theft of a powerful person’s goods. The authorities, needing to hold someone responsible, accuse Ah Q of the crime and execute him as an example. But the disruptions continue.

Ah Q’s signature feature is his stunning capacity to turn physical defeat into a spiritual victory. That is, when he is defeated in some kind of a 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 as a representation of China’s failures to respond effectively to the challenges of Western confrontation and modernization. The notion that each nation had a specific character was current at the time. There was considerable discussion about what made China unique and different from Western countries, what was the Chinese national character. In that context, many intellectuals, Lu Xun included, viewed China’s national character as deficient because China was falling prey to the West. Lu Xun, viewing himself as a doctor rendering a diagnosis, looked at what was wrong with the patient in order to move the body politic towards health and a better future. Lu Xun himself declared a few years later that in creating the story he had attempted to describe the souls of the Chinese people. And from the beginning, Ah Q was viewed as typical of the Chinese national character.

Thus the protagonist of a story has been considered not merely a fictional character but a meaningful “type,” and the term “Ah Qism” became a term that signified deficiencies in the Chinese nation. Turning defeat into victory was seen as Ah Q’s signature feature and the quintessential definition of his typicality.

What does it mean to turn defeat into victory?

The simplest instance of this occurs early in the story. Ah Q has been gambling and winning handsomely when suddenly a brawl breaks out, tables are overturned, the game is disrupted, and he loses all. The man is really impoverished so this is a big deal. But his response to this devastating loss is to, after briefly feeling bewilderment and loss, slap his own face; then he feels better. What has happened? He splits his psyche into the ego and shadow, treats the ego as if it were the whole Self—the one who gave the slap (we note Jung’s comment that frequently the ego in fact believes it is the entire Self), and then disowns the part of himself that felt the loss, the pain, the humiliations His ego has successfully expelled the shadow and relieved the pain of losing by shedding the part of the Self that experienced the hurt.—even though, as Lu Xun tells us, his face was still tingling. Defeat into victory.

Another simple example. Ah Q has ringworm scars and is very defensive about their presence. He has tabooed all mention of these scars, and he flies into a rage when anyone alludes to them. The very act of tabooing what is self-evidently a part of Ah Q’s physical body itself comprises an attempt to disown a shadow element, to remove it from awareness. Naturally, when the local guys who hang out in the street want to provoke him, they allude to the scars. The fact of being made aware of this shadow element of the Self undoes the denial, constitutes defeat, and so is sufficient to ignite his fury.

To be explicit, scapegoating as envisioned by Lu Xun and Jungians, proceeds by spitting the psyche, projecting the shadow or negative part (that is, what the ego regards as negative) onto another object or person, and then attacking that person for being responsible for inciting the attack. I should note that Lu Xun himself intuited a pattern that he anticipated would repeat decades in the future, but as an artist, not a theoretician, did not spell out what it was. The incident with the woman servant, Amah Wu shows the entire scapegoating process in action.

In the story, Ah Q’s sexuality is aroused when he pinches a young nun. Offended, the nun hurls a terrible curse—“Ah Q, may you die sonless!” Ah Q considers this comment and thinks that indeed he should take a wife, the social context in which sexual satisfaction is appropriate. Shortly after, he is sitting with a female servant in the home of one of the village elite, the Zhaos, where both of them work, and Amah Wu is innocently chatting about the local gossip. Suddenly out of nowhere Ah Q says to her, “sleep with me,” and she runs screaming from the room, and has to be persuaded not to contemplate committing suicide. Ah Q’s ego speaks of marriage, his shadow speaks of sexual intercourse. When the man of the house comes after Ah Q to beat him for this gross transgression, Ah Q does not understand that he himself initiated the uproar. He has so disowned his shadow, the part of the Self that caused the uproar, that he does not recognize it as himself.

Further, the woman, who in no way provoked his offensive proposition, behaves as if she were, in fact, in responsible and so contemplates suicide, the socially appropriate response. Lu Xun has just revealed that Ah Q, having disowned his sexuality, has projected it onto Amah Wu, and she who is merely the recipient of this shadow projection, indeed responds as if the society will agree and blame her—will scapegoat her—for his advances. Lu Xun made the same argument in another story the much overlooked “Soap”. That is, he also showed that society has encouraged men to disown their sexuality, project their desires onto women, and then punish women for inciting the desire, when they were merely the recipients of the projection. Certainly he viewed this as an issue of power, but he also understood it in psychological terms. Ah Q’s behavior only seems exaggerated because he does not mask the projection. The scapegoating dynamic still plagues us today and no doubt will plague our children and grandchildren well into the future.

When the revolution comes to the village, this same scapegoating process is enacted on a societal scale. And the same process is now enacted by the society with the projection landing on Ah Q, who becomes the society’s scapegoat.

Seeing the parallels between Ah Q’s behavior and that of the village elite is particularly important because over the decades, the critics, understanding Ah Q as a type, have tried to determine what he is typical of, and have looked outside of the story for their answers.

This issue was particularly a problem for the critics writing under the constraints of Chairman Mao’s extraordinary praise for Lu Xun. In the context of class struggle, is Ah Q the peasant a good figure or a bad one, given his fake bravura and cowardice in turning physical defeat into moral victory? Was he still typical even after the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic or was his typicality local to a particular time and place. Even critics not laboring under ideological constraints have looked outside of Lu Xun’s text to understand typicality. In a way Lu Xun had thrown them off the scent by featuring Ah Q’s name in the title of the story. But in fact, if one views the entire story through the lens of scapegoating, through the dynamics of ego and shadow, then Ah Q’s behavior and that of the village power holders can be understood as exactly the same. The only difference between them is that usually the village elite have more power to execute it in the physical world, but even this distinction does not always hold. Thus, in fact, there is no necessary requirement to look outside of the text to locate “typicality.” The village elite also try to turn defeat into victory.

How does that work? Lu Xun treats the revolution itself in Jungian terms. When the revolution arrives, the village power holders—the figures of the social ego--try to co-opt it by becoming revolutionaries themselves, changing titles, taking on revolutionary badges, but remaining in power and control. However, Lu Xun also notes that there are “bad” revolutionaries, off somewhere else, never seen, heard only by report, disrupting the social hierarchy. He never names the local power elite as “good” revolutionaries; the default connotation of the word “revolutionaries” has become good. But the other revolutionaries, the real ones, who in fact threaten to upend the elite’s power and control, are labeled “bad.”

Here Lu Xun’s literary technique is brilliant: he could have dramatized these competing forces as a clash of good versus evil, but instead, true to the psychological nature of the shadow, the bad, the shadow revolutionaries never actually appear and always remain mysterious and invisible to the ego figures—the local elite. In fact, this is the way the shadow is usually experienced psychologically by the ego.

When the revolution actually does reach the village, Ah Q approaches the power holders (the good revolutionaries) and asks to join, but they unceremoniously chase him away. Then a serious theft occurs in the village, which may or may not have been committed by the shadow-revolutionaries—Lu Xun never lets the reader know for sure. The captain, who is also charged with solving several other crimes, is frustrated and embarrassed by not having arrested any of the culprits. Although Ah Q is a barely plausible suspect, he is arrested and accused of committing the theft he didn’t commit. He is clearly innocent: he has an alibi and the villagers widely believe that he’ll won’t steal again. After the barest of trials, he is executed as a public example.

This is very much like the example of the dog that ate the homework. While it is barely plausible that the dog in fact might have eaten the homework, it is the least likely explanation. And Ah Q, barely plausible as a thief, is illiterate and completely inarticulate, and is no better positioned to mount a defense than is the dog.

Looking at the story through a Jungian lens thus reveals the conceptual unity in a plot that appears to be episodic in structure. Further, it makes apparent the evidence that the same psycho-dynamics that manifest in Ah Q’s thought and behavior in the story’s early chapters are re-enacted by the power holders, the dominant village clans, in the later ones. And when the real revolution comes, their power too is insufficient. When those at the next higher level of power, at the level of the town not the village, are unable to apprehend the party that is actually guilty of the crime, they project the social shadow onto Ah Q. They too attempt to turn defeat into victory by pretending to have executed the real culprit.

Almost always overlooked by the critics is the fact Lu Xun provides 6 different perspectives on Ah Q’s execution: that of the soldiers who come to arrest him; the judge who presides over the trial; the man whose goods have been stolen—a man seemingly related to the Zhao family, to the local elite; the captain who oversees the arrest; Ah Q himself; and the general population that witnesses the execution. Also often overlooked but actually essential are the last 2 paragraphs of the story that, among other things, make clear that the bad revolutionaries, still barely seen or heard, the social shadow, are still out there undermining the ego’s hierarchal power and order. The reader knows that, in fact, historically, the revolutionaries indeed re-surface; no part of the body politic can be eliminated.

There is much more to say about “The True Story of Ah Q” as a quintessential example of scapegoating. I will just give you a few additional hints. The critic Rene Girard has studied the issue of violence in small-scale societies across the globe as it is presented in written literature or in anthropological studies. He has examined scapegoating in terms of its stages, how it develops and unfolds; he theorizes about the social conditions that encourage it, the unconscious forces that drive it, and the type of people or groups who become its victims. He understands scapegoating as a method that societies that do not function under the rule of law repeatedly use as a method of preventing violence from escalating. And of course one essential feature of revolution is that it undermines the rule of law. In the book I build on Girard’s work and show that Lu Xun exquisitely details six stages in the process of scapegoating. Is this the patterns that he intuited? That analysis demonstrates that Lu Xun both exemplifies and expands the critic’s model.

...to be continued in next post.

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