Rereading Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" and Its Madman from a Disability Studies Perspective

Focusing on the representational politics of insanity, this paper rereads Lu Xun's (1881-1936) "Diary of a Madman" (1918) and its madman protagonist in light of emerging insights and perspectives from Disability Studies. Drawing on his state of the art medical knowledge, Lu Xun presents his madman protagonist as diagnosed with "persecutory delusion." In this paper, I juxtapose Lu Xun's story with other contemporary materials, such as newspapers and memoirs, which on the contrary present a more nuanced traditional attitude toward the madman as familiar neighborhood type. This paper analyses how the fictional narrative devises a framework for non-insane readers to read madness as metaphor and seek a symbolic significance unrelated to actual madness while ignoring the social exclusion and stigma of mental illness already depicted in great detail in the narrative. I demonstrate how the madman in "Diary of a Madman" has been identified, symbolized, metaphorized and "realized" during the ongoing processes of writing and reading. I also analyze how the fictional madman as a "patient" diagnosed according to western medical categories and treated by Chinese doctors has experienced "the labors of representation" and taken on excessive meanings, both in the fiction itself and in the readings thereafter. I argue that, as the modern literary device criticizes a traditional Chinese moral violence (depicted as "eating people") via a realistic madman who also functions symbolically, the actual violence toward the madman was eaten by modern literature as part of its "realistic" modernity.