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IN a certain sense, the origin of spiritual “modernity” in China can be traced to a hope and call for “an ego for each individual”. One of the major denunciations of the traditional Chinese culture by the May Fourth New Cultural Movement was that the traditional culture strangles the individual character or ego of man. Before China can really enter into modernity, the establishment of “individuality” or “self” must be treated, first and foremost, as an important task: “Ego must be made absolutely free”, and “self must be made into the centre as well as the ultimate.” This is the wish and demand of the modern Chinese culture made by Lu Xun, a representative figure in the May Fourth era, in his early essay entitled “On Cultural Paranoia” (文化偏至论 wenhua pianzhi lun), written in the classic Chinese language, when he was reporting some philosophical thoughts from the West. In the eyes of Lu Xun, as long as the “individual character” gets promoted, and as long as each individual has his/her own “ego”, China, a “country built currently on loose sand”, will be transformed into a “country backed by all her people.”(1)
However, if Lu Xun thought that in traditional China or within the realm of the Chinese tradition, no man had had “his own ego”, then when would man be able to “acquire it”? This is a hard question.
“A Madman’s Diary”, the first story written in vernacular language in modern Chinese literature, seems to be an attempt made by Lu Xun to “resolve” that difficult problem. In order to let himself acquire, in a sense, some sort of “self” yet to be born, “I” must go mad and get lost in some kind of hallucination first. In this state of mind (what might be called “the paranoiac delusion of persecution”), “I” would find that he was surrounded by the others who were both deeply scared of him and extremely malicious toward him. These others are here regarded as those intending to eat “me”, that is to say, they are the persecutors of “me”. And being eaten means, of course, that “I” could retain his “ego” no more, or it signifies the end of “I” being “I”. What is tricky, however, is that it is in this state of delusion in which “I” feels extremely horrified at the prospect of being persecuted by the others, or “I” is extremely concerned as to whether he could live for himself or for his own “ego” that “I” seems to begin to feel his own existence, and make sure that I am I, and an irreplaceable I at that. In other words, this means that it is the others who are regarded by “I” as persecutors that have caused “I” to produce an “ego” for himself, an “ego” that is scared of the others persecuting “him”.
Sometime later, Lu Xun expressed explicitly that his writing of “A Madman’s Diary” is “aimed at exposing the evils of the clan system and feudal ethics”. These evils are symbolically generalized in the story as “man-eating”: the madman feels that all the people around him are colluded with each other in an attempt to eat him. To “figure out” this terrible reality, the madman goes to consult history books. To his surprise, however, he has found only two words, that is, “man eating”, between the lines of Chinese history that are devoted to “the humaneness, righteousness, morality and ethics” on every page. In addition, the madman has made two new discoveries: the first one is that it is his elder brother who is organizing people to eat him! Although he is eaten, he is “still the younger brother of a man eater!”(2) The second discovery is that he himself has eaten man! “I came to understand today that I have been involved for quite a few years in this place that has been eating man in the past 4,000 years. As my elder brother takes charge of our family’s day-to-day business, he has probably mixed my dead sister into our dishes and made us eat her without telling us about it. And I have probably eaten some slices of my sister’s flesh without knowing it.” This discovery makes the madman, who has hitherto cherished the hope to persuade the others that they should stop eating man, feel deeply ashamed: “I, with a history of man eating of 4,000 years, am really ashamed to see a true man, although I did not know it before. But I know it now!” In acknowledging this shame, the madman, as a matter of fact, also admits to the inevitable connection between him and this history of “man eating”: it is impossible for him to stand innocently opposite this history of “man eating”. “A Madman’s Diary” ends with an ambiguous call: “Maybe there are still some children who have not eaten man yet. Save these children…” It seems that the madman, or the writer of the story himself, is not sure as to whether there are still children who have not eaten man yet, or whether there will be a future without man eating man. The issue has thus, in some very profound sense, turned into a new question: is it still impossible to avoid “man eating” that has been denounced by Lu Xun in the form of a madman suffering from paranoiac delusion of persecution?
The situation might be like this: what the madman has seen in his paranoiac delusion of persecution is none other than the “essence” of “I” as an ego or as a subject. I, in the capacity of “I”, must be unavoidably persecuted by the others. The fundamental significance of this persecution, however, lies in the intention that I must be made into I, or into someone responsible for the others, even for the persecution or eating of “I” by the others. It is probably due to the shocking power in the insight of this hallucination that the madman has retreated and returned, in the end, to the “normal” life tainted by forgetfulness before he went mad. In order to understand this insight better, let us make some concrete analysis of the madman’s paranoiac delusion of persecution.
According to his diary, we see that the hallucination of the madman seems to have originated in some kind of abrupt awakening: seeing the “moon” that he has not seen for “some 30 years”, he suddenly realizes that he has been leading a “stuporous existence” in the past. With restored or intensified sensitivity, he comes to be aware of the strange “eyes” and “faces” when the others look at him. The others who are not me, I am sure, have always been looking at me as a matter of fact. When I become aware of this fact, I start to see some kind of dubious expressions in the eyes of the others looking at me: they seem to be scared of me, and they seem to intend to hurt me.” In other words, the madman has seen or sees once again a fundamental distance in the relations between the others and “himself” which he has been taught to believe as being “intimate”, a distance that is bound to set “him” and the others apart. The others exclude me, and I am different from the others. Therefore, to “me”, the others are inevitably hard to understand. It is also inevitable that “I” detect some kind of dubious looks in the eyes and faces of the other people. The others are scared of me because I can plot to hurt the others; the others want to hurt me because I want to be “me”, or a “me” that is totally not influenced by the others, or an absolute “me”. And the others are those who would not allow me to acquire an entire “self” because the others have been, as a matter of fact, “obsessing” me from the very beginning. Faced with the others, I must first of all make unconditional responses and promises. The others, in their capacity as the others, make me assume unavoidable and inescapable responsibilities without any reason. I, in that capacity, am the hostage of the others; I, in that capacity, am required by the others to sacrifice everything, even myself or my life.(3) Therefore, the others, in the capacity of being the others, have always served as roadblocks that prevent me from returning completely to myself and becoming an independent me. In this sense, we can say that the madman created by Lu Xun is actually not wrong in seeing the others, in their capacity as the others, as the very persecutors of “me”.
Influenced by his paranoiac delusion of persecution, the madman has thus told us the inevitable situation in which I have become...
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1. See The Complete Works of Lu Xun, Vol. 1, Beijing, People’s Literature Publishing House, 1981, p. 51.
2. I have attempted to explain, from the perspective of psychiatry, why in “A Madman’s Diary”, a story written during the May Fourth era (an era that can be called, in some sense, a spiritual father-killing era), the main persecutor of “me” is the elder brother rather than the father. Refer to my paper entitled “Hallucination, Narcissism, Melancholy and Sacrifice”, in Today, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1992, pp. 171-190.
3. “Réponse”, “responsabilité”, “an-archiquement”, “obsession” and “otage”, etc. are all concepts proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas. See my detailed discussion of Lévinas in the body of this paper below.
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