Tuberculosis and East Asian Modernism : Blood-drinking and Inter-subjectivity in Yokomitsu Riichi’s “Climax” (1923), Yi Taejun’s “Crows” (1936) and Lu Xun’s “Medicine” (1919)

초록

One of the most distinctive characteristics of modern East Asian literature that encompasses realist, modernist, romanticist and popular melodramatic literature is the recurrent theme of pulmonary tuberculosis (hereafter TB), the so-called modern epidemic. In this paper, I focus on a particular motif of blood-drinking in Yokomitsu Riichi’s “Climax” (1923), Yi Taejun’s “Crows” (1936) and Lu Xun’s “Medicine” (1919), which is the focus of this paper. I attempt to provide new insights into “Medicine” by approaching it from a broader scope of East Asian literature and from a biopolitical perspective. I compare drinking blood with bleeding and vomiting blood, and stress how the modernists’ corporeal illustration of blood defied realist and melodramatic representations of blood as a symbol. Such a physical approach to the infectious disease also creates subtle difference from the “conventional” modernist view of the subject. The motif of blood-drinking led the narratives into the exploration of inter-subjectivity rather than interior monologue. I read “Medicine” as an ironical exploration of communicability between subjects; between the selves; between the living and the dead; and between science and religion. In the story, Lu Xun’s description of eating the blood-soaked mantou maintains a tension between the sacred ritual and the body corporeal of orality.

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