“Masterminds of Madness: Representations of Mental Illness and their Treatment in Chinese Fiction”

The theme of madness in literature has long been a domain of Western literary and culture studies. Indeed, compared with the West (and other traditions as well), representations of literary madness remain rather monolithic, focusing mostly on feigned madness, madness as a voice of dissent, and madness as an expression of trauma. Conspicuously absent are stories of the mad genius, the struggle with addiction, artistic self-realization, madness as a mode of subjective introspection, crime and guilt, and the representation of mental illness itself in fiction, poetry, or “autopathographies” (Stephen Moran)— illness narratives told by the patient him/herself. In many other literary traditions, fiction has profited extensively from the psychological, medical, and philosophical discourses about madness and medicine (Monika Schmitz-Emans). Chinese writers, however, are less engaged in the interdisciplinary nexus of medicine and literature. There is a pronounced tendency toward portraying socio-somatic taxonomies rather than introspective thought-processes, and toward narrating the ‘psycho-mimetic’ rather than the ‘psycho-diegetic.’ There are a few writers, however, who discuss mental illnesses and their treatments in their fiction and offer valuable insights into what it might feel like to be considered mentally ill. This presentation discusses Elegy of a Psychotic (1943) by Xu Xu (1908-80), “An Idiot’s Epic” by Ge Fei (b. 1964), and Chen Ran’s novel A Private Life (1996) with a focus on perception and treatment of mental illnesses and the significance of such writing for the field of cross-cultural Medical Humanities.