"What is Self" is probably the most mystifying and chased question. The oracles at Delphi used to say, "Know thyself,” which presupposes that there is always something to be known beyond our name. After all, name is merely a language unit by which a person or thing is known. While ‘Self’ is itself an object of knowledge, wherein the knower can know himself and knowing himself, he can know himself as the knower. “Self” aka, "I" is the consciousness of our own identity. Precisely, it is the psychological or cultural conception of an individual's identity or sense of human particularity. But, what self discovers while looking in the glass and what others think about him/her has been scholastically deemed in various ways like polar opposites.
It's same as weighing the importance of social tradition on one hand and the values that individual carry on the other. Tradition is a socially or culturally established, inherited or customary pattern of thought, action or behavior; while individual is significant in his/her own right, rather than having his/her significance subsumed by the general needs in society. The process of man singing himself out of the objective world-- awareness of his relation to the world, awareness of himself as a personality, of his behavior, actions, thoughts, feelings, desires and interests-- has been eloquently spotlighted in Lun Xun's Mad Man's Diary. A mad man is presented to us whose consciousness of the past, present and future is "confused and incoherent" and who makes many "wild statements." But still, we as the reader get a feeling that the madman is not really insane. Actually it is a modernist voice against repressive tradition. The mad man cuts his consciousness into separate pieces to make a minute and critical analysis of the affairs, and at the same time he becomes more aware of his self. But it is not his ego, for one's self doesn't resemble his ego or any singular psychological/cultural trait.
The psychological school of thought affiliated to Carl Jung also holds a belief that "the self is always experienced as something apart from the ego, the contemplating subject. But, the self embraces and stands at the centre of the personality"(Lawson, 216). The mad man's personality is such that in faint and feeble manner, he stands as a critique of Chinese national character. His self is obsessed with future, which appears bleak. His diary is "uniformly and manifestly delusional from beginning to end." The centre of the story dwells in the sensational interplay between insanity and sanity, madness and rationality, illusion and reality, and on the same conflict, the madman's self perpetuates. The short story Mad Man's Diary by Lu Xun--not a new name in modern Chinese literature-- as the title promises, presents the disjointed and often imaginative writing of a deranged personality- a paranoiac, who insists that all those around him are either masked or unabashed cannibals, waiting to prey on him. It presents a kind of battle between society and individual but in such a manner that that it mediates on the idea of living or not living, of enduring or not enduring, and on the implication of the act of rebellion. It also poses a question, an individual who thinks that society needs reform be declared as a lunatic?
It is an examination of a so-called madman’s ‘inner- self’ wherein we see the lunatic trying to exercise his liberty on one hand, but it afflicted by the terror on the other, while making an endeavor to discover the principal of existence. The subjectivity (which is an individual persona’s impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts) of Lu Xun's fiction is something different from autobiographical confessions however. His meditating subjective consciousness in the text is a paranoid madman whose self is problematic and in a state of crisis over its own identity. The sanity of the madman is at stake as he struggles to sort out what the external world is, a world that he is trying to decipher: "Everything requires careful consideration if one is to understand it," as he notes more than once. Lu Xun's madman is inverting the normal civilized society into an abnormal and savage one and is intended to be a sane spokesman for the repressed history. Behind Lu Xun's madman is a heroic spirit obsessed with the future (however bleaker the future would look like). Diary of a madman hence stresses the danger of historical consciousness. Key to the plot is the madman's loss of a sense of time and distortion of historical parameters. He overreads temporal experiences and brings disaster upon himself by looking for signs of historical redemption: "Yet fathers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers, friends, teachers and students, sworn enemies and even strangers, have all joined in this conspiracy, discouraging and preventing each other from taking this step".
The madman's self seeks the modern Chinese identity and his statements--though wild and fragmented-- resembles the May Fourth Movement. "Individualism" is considered as the discovery of the May Fourth Movement. The movement was launched by the Peking University students in 1919. Critiquing the traditional roles and values of traditional China, the movement had questioned Confucianism and Chinese tradition, its construction of a Chinese national character which it opposed. All these issues have been raised by Lu Xun's Mad Man's Diary. The diary itself stands in a sharp contrast to the authoritarianism and feudal structures which had been in place before and which still threatened China, but the statement contains its irony too, because "to become an individual as Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Foucault (`1926-1984) both argues, also imposes on that person the requirement to take responsibility and to think of itself in a consistent and unified way, and in terms of a single gender"(Tambling, 26). It is the fulfillment of the European Romanticism which gives to the 'individual' such a free and independent status. In Foucault, apparent invitations to liberation and tolerance are only more subtle ways of breeding and policing the subject who is thereby made 'docile' In Lu Xun's story, the loneliness, and the melancholia are part of being an individual, as are the states of madness of which he writes, which testify to the unbearable qualities which can also be part of being treated as a single person. The opening line is crucial: "When i was young i too had many dreams". The qualifier too is relevant. He speaks as one who is not now young, in comparison to the May Fourth students but he associates himself with them, as the new dreamers. The real-life paranoia, where everything that happens becomes circumstantial evidence to prove that person is being persecuted, demonstrates the loneliness involved in madness, which in the case of Mad Man's Diary shows itself in the wary the madness has wanted to write everything down, as if trying to avoid his loneliness that way. Inside the story there are thirteen actual diary entries--confused, incoherent, wild and undated. They were written at different times. "The writing was most confused and incoherent, and he had made many wild statements; moreover he had omitted to give any dates, so that only by the colour of the ink and the differences in the writing could one tell that it was not written at one time". Their theme is the fear that the diarist has of being eaten, whether by humans or their dogs. The diarist feels that he under the scrutiny of Mr Ho, who is either an executioner or a doctor, but in any case a product of the practices of Chinese medicine, which he thinks licenses eating people. "The critique of the bureaucracy, of surveillance, of the power of medicine and of the power of normality to assert itself through the power of defining people as mad obviously derives from, and compares with Foucault on modernity's techniques of surveillance and of power." (Tambling, 27). A memory of the power of tradition operates as he reflects that "since it had always been so, men should be eaten"(x). The modernity of the tone is plain: "the tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living." Where tradition replaces history, there is nothing but inertia. He says he recollects that in ancient times people often ate humans, but is hazy about it, and when he tried to look it up, he discovered that his history-book had no chronology, and that scrawled over each page were the words " Confucian virtue and morality." Still reading between the lines of the book he could see the two words written throughout," Eat people"(III). There is the ideology within the text of history, and there is a sub-text, which he reads because he is in a traumatised state. By section VII, the diarist is sure that his brother is a man-eater, and confronts him with it in section X. In section Xi and Xii, he reflects that his brother must have eaten his sister and recalls his brother telling him at the age of four or five, that when a man's parents were ill, he should cut a bit of his flesh and boil it for them. Fear of being eaten is a paranoia, and the third form of commentary the diaries perform is to relocate the paranoia, which has been referred to in the preface, and which is the text's subject , not in the younger brother, but in the community, which " wants to eat men" but at the same time is afraid of being eaten(ix). It is an image of the national fears. When Lu Xun wrote this, the First World War was in its last year. The technique that the paranoid community employs is to derive its victim toward suicide (VII). Paranoia in the community works by creating paranoia in the other, in the person it deems mad. ( Note: Freud's first discussion of Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia appeared in 1911, only seven years earlier) Paranoia in this text works through an insistence in being looked at, starting with the moon and the dog (i) an then specifically through the eyes, which are referred to in virtually every section, including fish's eyes, white and hard, which stare at the diarist who, after eating, vomits, uncertain as to what he has taken in, as though whatever it is threatens his identity, his being, making him abject, unable to maintain his individual subjectivity. The latter is threatened throughout through the fear of cannibalism, which is of course, the ultimate in the removal of those bodily borders which define the self.
In the story, Lu Xun employs the modern psychological concept of schizophrenia to delineate the madman's systematic and highly developed delusion, so that the story provides a sense of fidelity to the insanity of the madman. The madman is not aware of his madness, much less capable of curing himself or of making a decision to move between the worlds of sanity and insanity. If he were able to do so, he would not be truly mad and therefore, according to the internal logic of the story would not be able to see the true nature (i.e. the cannibalism) of the Chinese people. For though everyone in Chinese society is consciously or unconsciously, a cannibal, it takes an "insane" person to break through the barriers that obstruct vision and penetrate to reality. But such a clear vision makes him incapable of communicating with his fellow Chinese, thus rendering his effort completely ineffective, for his language and mental categories are generically different from theirs. From the perspective of the madman the others in the story are mad not he and vice verse, of course. But there is crucial difference between the madman's vision and that of others. On the modern conception, the subject defines its principle of self-realization for itself, from its own resources, so to speak, and not from a ready-made order of being.
According to Taylor, there are two basic models of self-defining subjectivity at play in modern culture. One of them construes self-definition instrumentally, and the other, which arose historically as a reaction to the first model, conceives self-definition expressively (Smith, 8).In the story, the position and the function of the I-narrator as the 'centre of consciousness' vary from one incident to the other as the events unfold. According to Lacan, self- consciousness arises in the following manner: By internalizing the way the other sees one; by assimilating the other's approving and disapproving looks and comments. One learns to see oneself as the other sees one, to know oneself as the other knows one (Fink, 108). But Lu Xun's paranoid madman constructs his individual identity by critiquing the Chinese national culture. Despite of Lu Xun's admission that he was "mercilessly dissecting" (Feuerwerker, 61) himself in his writings should not be encourage us to take his fictional representations as simply reflections of himself. In fact, what his stories strongly dramatize is the complex relationship or the fluctuating distance between the historical author and fictional self representation that much of recent western criticism has been emphasizing. Psychoanalytic theories on the preconscious or the unconscious, behavioral theories about role-playing according to social setting have challenged all notions of a coherent, unified, clearly identifiable entity that once might have been confidently labeled an individual. These ideas about split selves have combined with post-Saussurian linguistic theories to emphasize a provisional discursively constructed self, a self that comes into being in each instance of language.
For Carl Jung, "the term self is an inclusive term that embraces our whole living organism. It not only contains the deposit and totality of all past life, but is also a point of departure, the fertile soil from which all future life will spring." The ending "Save the Children"( XIII) in the story appeals on behalf of those still younger than him. The young man of Section VIII smiling like his brother, and only twenty, he thinks is already inured to eating flesh, so that youth may be a lost cause. The paranoia is the concomitant of the melancholia. It is the self, according to Jung that derives us towards consciousness. "Save the children …," is a sanguine call, which means a consciousness or desire to rescue the future generation from becoming a cannibal, has not died yet.
In the nutshell, the madman’s self has been dissected in such a manner that he is ready to revolt against the repressive Chinese tradition represented by Cannibalism in the story. His consciousness has been dissected in such a style that the madman stands as a social critic, who distastes the Chinese national character. The one who is deemed as a lunatic by the society is actually a modernist and a humanist, whose madness is a kind of sanity. The madman's ideas represent a spirit of progress and reform at both the personal and social levels; the rejection of an oppressive traditionalism, ignorance, and conformity. According to Albert Camus, a rebel chooses what is preferable to what is not. He puts self-respect above everything else and proclaims that it is preferable to life itself. He identifies with humanity in general. As a rebel, the diarist decries the "cannibalistic" nature of Chinese tradition, which is actually a political allegory critiquing traditional Chinese feudalism. Cannibalism is a metaphor for the oppressive feudalistic society of China at the time. He condemns the oppressive nature of Chinese Confucian culture as a "man-eating" society where the strong devour the weak. The madman's reading of ancient texts to discover evidence of cannibalism is a parody of traditional Confucian scholarship. In a sense, the madman is a rebel and social critic whose madness is a kind of sanity. The story also reveals Lu Xun's interest in changing society -- in converting people from "cannibalism" to a higher level of humanity. The madman's ideas represent a spirit of progress and reform at both the personal and social levels; the rejection of an oppressive traditionalism, ignorance, and conformity. Actually, Lu Xun's stories are best understood in the context of the revolutionary changes taking place in China during the early 20th century. The Madman's madness not only expresses a self-consciousness that is radically modern in its break with traditional hypocrisies, but also demarcates a new, oppositional symbolic order and practice. As Hegel has said, the experience of self-consciousness is no longer considered the original one. "It results from the experience of interaction in which I see myself through the eyes of other subjects" (Rauch, 207). Madman also evaluates his condition in comparison to others and discovers that his identity is seeking a kind of departure from the traditional roles and values of traditional China.
Bibliography
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Rauch, Leo & David Sherman. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Self-consciousness. Albany: State University of New York Press,1999.
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