Illness Narratives In The Novels Of Lu Min

Disease, as an important motif of literature narration, has been applied by so many writers throughout history. Lu Min, a 70’s female writer, has focused a lot on people’s physical and mental illnesses in her novels, and contributed to the contemporary literature a number of texts with her "disease narration", such as the series of the East Dam, the urban bourgeoisie, and the city north area etc.. In the series of the East Dam, the subject of disease narration goes from criticizing the general disorder of the rural ethnics, to creating a "thin and sorrowful", paper Utopia. Lu, by listing and describing diseases, conveys the East Dam residents’ simple yet pure, happy and contented attitude toward life. While in the series about urban bourgeoisie living, Lu mostly describes the doleful living conditions of urban middle class. By showing how the industrialized civilization "defamiliarize" human body and mind, Lu provide a profound display of their anxious, restless souls. The novels of the city north area concentrate on the the immigrants, speaking for them of their struggling, yet unsuccessful effort against the predicaments in survival. All of these works are deeply immersed in Lu’s sympathy towards the underclass powerless group, and her inner compassionate ethnic feelings for all mankind.In addition, Lu Min is devoted to portray misshapen families an abnormal family members:fathers that died early to illnesses, psychopathic mothers and children with unmentionable diseases. Those families can not provide children with any spiritual outlet and peace of mind, instead become the source of their sicknesses, bring forth emotional complexes that make them disgusted with their mother, love and resent their fathers at the same time. In Lu Min’s fictional texts, love is closely related to diseases. Illness either endows love with transcendence and artistic features, or symbolizes the punishment on a pragmatistic view of love. Lu Min thereby, consciously or unconsciously, expresses her own unique ethical attitude towards love.Lu Min’s "disease complex" on one hand comes from the experiences of the writer herself and her relatives, on the other hand is explicitly branded with the stigma of the time. The writer is not only concerned with writing of her own life, but also turns her worrying, gazing eyes to the sickened society. The disease narration of Lu Min’s novels is of distinct artistic features, it mostly refers to her habit of applying the sick people’s perspective to tell the story. And the sick people’s perspective holds high poetic values, mainly in four levels: creating a new, defamiliarized world, deepening the themes, challenging the old aesthetic tastes and producing an effect of language defamiliarization.Disease originally belongs to the medical field. But in Lu Min’s novels, disease has surpassed the medical field and more leading to social history and moral culture, reflecting various aspects of social life. In her texts, disease helps constructing the plot, promoting its development, meantime itself has become the object of concentration, obtaining a particular meaning. Disease, in Lu Min’s moves has been subjectivated, become a crucial method of displaying characters’mental activity, molding the characters’ images, revealing the works’ themes, moreover providing us a special viewpoint to comprehend Lu’s writing philosophy.