NARRATIVES OF DISEASE AND THE MODERN SUBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE AVANT-GARDE LITERATURE (1985-2000)
Lan YouThe narrative of disease is one of the most preferred themes used by modern and contemporary Chinese writers. Disease narratives reflect the limitations of the modern individual’s state in different social and historical contexts. Chinese Avant-garde Literature, as a new literary movement, is considered to have emerged around 1985; during this time, it manifested itself through all different kinds of narrative forms of disease and trauma. Among these forms, narratives of a diseased state of mind as well as a diseased urban environment are the most typical ones observed. Narrative themes of the “disease of the mind” began commonly appearing in Chinese Avant-garde Literary works in the 1980s. These works often aimed at deconstructing the dominant ideological positon of the so-called New Enlightenment Rationality during the Chinese New Era (1976-1985) by admitting to the existence of the irrationality of human nature and its influences on the individual in society. The narrative of urban disease, on the other hand, began appearing during the 1990s when China began its acceleration of its newly formed market economy. In contrast to the previous disease narrative, the narrative of urban disease offered readers a mirror into urban society and gave them insight into the morbidity and decadence of a materialistic society. This article analyses the relationship between these disease narratives and the modern individual’s subjective consciousness through a close reading of some of the most influential works of Chinese Avant-garde literature.
HASTALIK ANLATISI VE AVANGARD ÇİN EDEBİYATI’NIN MODERN KONUSU (1985-2000)
Lan YouHastalık, modern ve çağdaş Çinli yazarlar tarafından en çok tercih edilen temalardan biridir. Hastalık anlatıları, modern konunun sınırlarını farklı sosyal ve tarihsel bağlamlarda yansıtmaktadır. 1985’te ortaya çıkan yeni bir edebiyat tarzı olan Çin Avangard edebiyatı her tür hastalık anlatısıyla doludur. Bunlar arasında zihinsel hastalık ve şehir hastalıklarının anlatısı en tipik olanlarıdır. Zihinsel hastalığın anlatısı çoğunlukla 1980’lerin Çin Avangard edebiyatında ortaya çıktı. Yeni Çağ literatüründe (1976-1985) Aydınlanma rasyonalitesinin baskın pozisyonunu, insan doğasında irrasyonalitenin varlığını kabul ederek yapılandırdı. Kentsel hastalıkların anlatımı 1990’larda, Çin’in piyasa ekonomisini geliştirmesini hızlandırdığı dönemde ortaya çıktı. Kentsel hastalığın anlatımı, okurlara materyalist bir toplumun ahlaki ve yıkılışı hakkında ahlaki bir yansıma ile içgörü sahibi olmaları için bir ayna sunmaktadır. Bu makale, Çin Avangard edebiyatının en etkili eserlerinin okunmasıyla hastalık anlatımı ve modern konu arasındaki ilişkiyi incelemektedir.
From the dialectic of Enlightenment in the mental disease narrative in the 1980s to the dialectic of desires in the urban disease narrative in the 1990s, we can see that the changing history of disease narrative in Chinese Avant-garde Literature is actually a history of the changing connotations of the modern subject from 1980 to 2000. Humanism and Enlightenment values, economic centrism and material modernization, sequentially become the dominant ideologies among the Chinese people after 1976 and quickly reveal their shortcomings and limitedness in the disease narrative of avant-garde literature, which reflects the spiritual traumas and emptiness of contemporary Chinese people after the Cultural Revolution. Grand beliefs such as the revolutionary ideology has lost all its validity. Likewise, other ideologies, such as those mentioned above, fail to rewrite the cultural connotations of the modern individual’s subjectivity as well. However, it does not mean the disappearance of the modern subject in its totality. Adversely, as Matei Clinescu writes in “Five Faces of Modernity”, it suggests the incompletion of the modern subject: “when modernity comes to oppose concepts without which it would have been inconceivable—it is simply pursuing its deepest vocation, its constitutive sense of creation through rupture and crisis”
