Sickening Narratives of Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman

• In Event: Reconfiguring Marginality: Discourse and Embodiment in 20th-Century Japanese and Chinese Literature and Performance - Sponsored by the AAS Council of Conferences (COC)

Abstract

In the inaugural, September 15th, 1915, issue of his New Youth journal, seminal revolutionary Chen Duxiu could not help but propose biological analogies based on Western science to illuminate his ideas for national reform. He imagined new youths as “fresh and vital cells” who would weed out “old and rotten cells” to make the whole organism of society healthy and flourishing. Arguably, revolutionaries such as Chen saw Western ideology and science as panacea for the long-ailing Chinese nation. This essay investigates the ethics of such forms of diagnosis and “readings” of Chinese bodies taking into consideration Lu Xun’s critique of diagnostic methods of reading in his short story “Diary of a Madman” (1918). I argue that Lu Xun’s work shows a strong resistance to the universalization of scientific discourse and the persistent fear of degeneration founded in a nuanced study of evolutionary theory. By contextualizing Lu Xun’s engagement with the scientific debates surrounding social Darwinism and eugenic theory in T.H. Huxley’s incredibly popular Evolution and Ethics—a text with with which Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries engaged—I assert that Lu Xun saw in neither science nor writing a cure for the ills of the nation. Instead, he reveals the madman’s diary as a constructed narrative relevant for understanding the impact of a scientific discourse meant to serve a singular underlying purpose: to pathologize.

Author

• Rae X. Yan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill