Contenu du sommaire : Regard extérieur

The article analyzes the pictorial dispositif developped by Jean-François Lyotard in his communication in 1972, “Painting as a libidinal dispositif” and describes the objectification mechanisms of the psychoanalysis for his thinking about painting.

This study focuses on three singular works, all published between 1901 and 1911, and developed from the author's disease state. Nakae Chômin, stricken with a throat cancerous tumor, hastily embarked in One Year and a Half, the very same length of time that doctors left him to live. Masaoka Shiki, suffering from a painful bone tuberculosis, day after day sent from his Six Feet Long Bed of Illness short essays entitled A Drop of Ink to the Nihon Shinbun. Natsume Sôseki, just after surviving a stomach bleeding, published in the Asahi Shinbun serial essays under the title Things I Remember, as he wanted to keep a memory of the complex sensations he went through during this period. All three refused to resort to metaphors as a means to stigmatize or prettify. They invented a kind of “humoral” writing that was likely to open up to the world from the point of view of their sick bodies.

The body in Lu Xun's writings is rarely depicted. This absence allows the text to indirectly express the meaning of suffering in its multiple dimension (the shame felt in the face of China's historical crisis, which the national nature is held liable for, and the existential melancholy). However, the body is allegorized, and embodies the sign of a tradition that limits the emancipation of the individual. The liberation of the Chinese national voice requires symbolically destroying the inherited body, as well as subverting the sublime aesthetics of corporeality and the scientist paradigm of the body defined by the Chinese globalized modernity. The real physician impacts on the spirit by means of the writing, and not on the body or the material civilization. To ensure a greatest value to the heart rather than to the body is regarded by Lu Xun as a way to establish a project of modernity, by the metaphorization of the imported medicine.

As they internalize the aesthetic canons of the twenties and thirties based on grotesque, eroticism and nonsense, Edogawa Ranpo's detective stories are characterized by an abundance of dismembered and reconfigured bodies, especially women. Despite the violence pervading these stories, the description of the suffering body is surprisingly absent. Such a trait signals the author's attempt at twisting the techniques and the stereotypes of the detective fiction and proposing an original and almost interactive approach of the relations between author, text and reader instead of the display of suffering the reader is yearning for. The analysis of “The Caterpillar” (1929) provides us with a key to understand the ambiguity of Edogawa's work as to physical suffering.

The martial art novel usually stresses the necessity for the hero to have a strong body in order to defeat his enemies. Such is not the case, however, in The Smiling and Proud Wanderer (Xiao'ao jianghu), one of the works in which the famous novelist Jin Yong emphasizes the weakness of the main character, Linghu Chong, whose body can be interpreted as a symbolic battlefield between rival martial art schools. As far as one can read this novel as a parody of the Cultural Revolution, the hero's sick body turns out to be a metaphor for Chinese politics in a very chaotic period.

This study scrutinizes the representation of the body in Chinese literature since 1979. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, bodies perceive themselves as broken, impotent, and endangered. Far from fading out with the economic prosperity, such a recurring pattern grows more persistent in the 21st Century. The key to this phenomenon is to be found in the conflicting relation between individual and social body as a cause of long-lasting suffering.

“Tetsu no uo” (“Iron Fish”, 1976), a short story written by Kôno Taeko (1926-2015), a woman writer, tells the story of a war widow who has herself locked up at night in the museum (Yasukuni shrine) where her husband is revered as a god, and in the man-guided torpedo (the “fish” or kaiten) where he died. In the process by which she manages to take possession of her former late husband, a kamikaze pilot, whom she hardly knew and who didn't let her express herself, suffering alternates with enjoyment. The fish hereby symbolizes the war trauma such as perceived from a feminine point of view and subverts the official masculine historiography in favor of women's private and silent suffering.