Middle School Language and Literature: Diverse Interpretations of Masterpieces

Author: Wang Li / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Around the May Fourth Movement, the cultural value of a few intellectuals in China began to undergo a fundamental change. If we look at the deep-seated shifts in consciousness, Lu Xun was perhaps one of the most intense and profound among them. If we delve into Lu Xun's inner spiritual experiences, we would realize that the "madman" in The Diary of a Madman is another self within his consciousness, an aspect of himself that could not be fully expressed in reality. How does a person survive in a cultural environment and form certain relationships with other members of society? They must be organized within their cultural environment by some basic cultural value. This shared cultural understanding is embodied in various forms of linguistic symbols. People interact and form relationships based on roughly the same decoding methods and abilities for these symbols. In the face of these shared cultural value, whether as enemies or friends, people cannot object; otherwise, they would be like conversing in two completely different and incomprehensible languages, making communication and understanding difficult. Precisely because people in the same cultural environment share basic cultural value and standards, they regard each other as rational and sound individuals, regardless of whether they are enemies or friends. However, the intellectuals of the May Fourth era, especially Lu Xun, questioned and rejected a series of basic value of traditional feudal Chinese culture. They believed that it was the absurdity of these value that led to China's poverty and backwardness. To make the Chinese nation strong and independent in the world, it was necessary to establish new value. Due to this fundamental change in value, Lu Xun felt that his inner self had detached itself from the cultural environment he was in, losing the basic coordination and adaptation with it, which was precisely the behavior of a madman. A spiritual rebel and a madman are completely identical in their inability to harmonize and adapt to their cultural environment. Therefore, their status, roles, and destinies within their cultural environment would also be identical. Moreover, a rational spiritual rebel is even less capable of embodying the traits of a complete spiritual rebel than a madman. The so-called "rationality" means that one still understands the old cultural value to some extent, can speak and act according to the value standards recognized by the majority in their cultural environment, and can be seen by others as a normal person. A true, complete spiritual rebel, however, cannot even achieve this, making their traits resemble those of a pure madman. It is clear that within Lu Xun's consciousness, the spiritual rebel of traditional feudal Chinese culture and the mental patient share the same nature. But this sameness is like that between a "pine tree" and a "hero," or between a "spring flower" and a "beautiful woman," rather than an objective identity. In summary, the "madman" is a symbol of another "self" in Lu Xun's inner consciousness, an artistic image, a subjective creation. Objectively, the two "madmen" cannot be completely unified. The "madman" is a subjective creation of the author, but this does not mean it has no objective basis. Here, we need to understand mental patients from the perspective of modern psychoanalysis. Modern psychoanalytic theory holds that mental patients are caused by mental repression. A person has various instinctual desires, leading to life instincts rooted in these desires. However, due to social and cultural constraints, some instinctual desires cannot find a cultural value standard to express them, cannot be sublimated to the level of consciousness, and are restrained and suppressed by the "superego" and "ego," settling in the subconscious. Repression leads to mental distress. Once this repressed distress is released from its constraints due to specific reasons, the person falls into a state of mental fragmentation, where the control of the "superego" and "ego" fails, the cultural value of society disintegrates, and the coordination with their cultural environment is lost. Of course, Lu Xun may not have been directly influenced by Freud's psychoanalytic theory at the time, but he clearly felt that the mental repression he experienced from traditional feudal Chinese culture was something that people throughout Chinese history had also felt. However, due to the suppression of old cultural value, they were unable to rise to a rational level, and their madness might have indirectly or directly expressed these repressed desires. In other words, the image of the "madman" should have an objective basis, but it is still impossible to directly find such mental patients in reality, and they are not of the same nature as spiritual rebels in real life. By setting the mental patient as a "paranoid," Lu Xun gave him more traits in common with a spiritual rebel. The cultural self-awareness of modern Chinese intellectuals ultimately stems from their recognition of the inhuman nature of traditional feudal Chinese culture. Its inhuman nature made modern Chinese intellectuals deeply feel that the survival security of the Chinese people had no basic guarantee, and their spiritual lives were being suppressed and destroyed invisibly. This fear before traditional Chinese culture is exactly the same as the fear felt by paranoid patients. The "madman" is a product of Lu Xun's subjective imagination. To distinguish it from characters in realistic works, I will call it an "image" rather than a "figure."