On The Body Narrative In Yu Hua’s Novels

As one of the most significant cultural landscapes in contemporary,the body is playing a crucial role in thought content and narrative features of Yu Hua’s novels.Life forms such as hunger,disease,and death all occur in the body,historical tragedies and comedies are inscribed on the body,everything in real life revolves around the body.Whether it is an intuitive physiological phenomenon or a cultural rhetoric,the body in Yu Hua’s novels is intertwined with the discourse of society,history,culture and humanity.Body shapes and physical awareness always exist in his novels as important way of expressing the spiritual world.Yu Hua communicates with the world through the body,looks for historical and cultural memories behind the colorful scenes of the body,and shows concern for human survival.Therefore,the purpose of this paper is to discuss how Yu Hua observes and understands the world through the body,and reflects the personalized writing characteristics.Apart from the introduction and conclusion part,this paper consists of four chapters.Chapter 1 mainly analyzes Yu Hua’s description of physiological body dilemma from three aspects: hunger,death,and homelessness.As the origin of existence,the body connects to the basic world of human life.However,the life forms of hunger,death,and body without shelter indicates that the physical survival is in serious crisis,and the strong physical anxiety may cause severe mental distortion.Chapter 2 explores Yu Hua’s contradictory cognition of family relationship from the perspective of the relationship between body and ethical emotion.Yu Hua places the body in the character’s journey of "leaving" and "returning".The characters’ departure is a metaphor for the collapse of the family ethics system,but Yu Hua reconstructs the ethics system with the "returning" of the characters.When Yu Hua is trying to build a bridge of human physical communication,he is also calling for the return of rustic ethical emotion.The chapter 3 focuses on the ups and downs of the” body” in social context in Yu Hua’s novels.The body is imprisoned,the physical appearance is changed,and the physical desire is strongly suppressed.Anyway,the body exists as a regulated object during the "Cultural Revolution".However,the insulted and damaged body gradually becomes the subject of construction under the opportunity of marketization,and establishes a conspiracy with a new social form—consuming society thorough self-appreciation and self-performance.The chapter 4 analyzes the reasons why Yu Hua is passionate about the body narrative,the value and limitations of his body narrative.First of all,this paper discusses the reason why Yu Hua chose the body as the object of narration in terms of Chinese and foreign literary traditions,the era context,personal experience.Secondly,this paper explains the uniqueness of Yu Hua’s body narrative from the perspective of objective thinking,humorous narrative tone,the narrative idea of combining fiction and reality,the chaotic aesthetic characteristics.At last,this paper points out the deficiencies of body narrative in Yu Hua’s novels,such as the absence of female physical experience,lack of breath of life.This paper centered around the body,focuses on the body and behavior in Yu Hua’s novels,and interprets its rich connotations to reveals the uniqueness of body narrative in Yu Hua’s novels.Yu Hua engages the body in the narrative of the novels,lets the body bear the weight of the narrative.This is not only a rebellion against creation standard of literature before the 1980 s and 1990 s,but also is a reflection on the status of the body in cultural practice.Yu Hua’s body narrative has important value and significance at both the literary and cultural level,and containstheauthor’s strong critical consciousness and heavy human care between the lines.