Narrative Of Illness And Politics Of Body On Lu Xun's Imagination Of Nation-State

Lu Xun's life was almost a history of illness: He had a toothache when he was very young; His father fell ill and died; He learnt medicine in Japan in his youth; He suffered the toothache ,tummy bug and phthisic in his middle age and died of phthisic at last。 It is full of the imagines of illness and narrative of illness in his works. It is also easy for reader to read of the symptom.Lu Xun was firstly a patient, with the suffering of losing father and the body suffered the cureless phthisic. This was not only the impulse of his creation, but also the reason why he is a pessimist and nihilist. So we can answer the questions: Why is it full of the dark thoughts, disillusionary experience, homeless anxiety, particular susceptive to morbid heart and bred-in-the-bone skepticism in his works? Why is it full of the Andreev's eeriness and farewell to life world in his literature whose tenets are "for life" and rebuilding the character of country?The ill body perhaps was the start of Lu Xun's literature, but the narrative of illness was not the goal. For Lu Xun,it was only the strategy of discourse to construct a new oriental enlightened thought that was based on his own cultural context and new western idea in semi-colony and semi-feudal society. This means the narrative of illness was used as the metaphor and the rhetoric of the morbid society.But Lu Xun was not a "bodily writer", but a writer who tried to surpass the body. Meanwhile, he couldn't override the body, therefore he represented the socialized body same as Michael Focault to construct his doctor identity, enlightening myth and apologue. He was the same as the most historical Chinese literators, preferred "poem expresses ideal" to "poem expresses body". Lingering between "poem expresses ideal" and "poem expresses body", whether illness and body are present or absent, they were the true impulse of the creation in depth. Experiencing them, illness became an imago anywhere; Refusing and surpassing them, his personal poetics of illness shifted to the national "pathology of politics", formed Lu Xun's particular imagination of nation-state.