Can Fate Escape:a Psychobiographical Analysis Of The Authenticity Seeking Under Yu Hua’s Ontological Anxiety

The COVID-19 has destroyed the stable,safe and orderly living environment that we have already established,which has led us to fall into the great existential anxiety of death,uncertainty,alienation,etc.How to deal with this existential anxiety is a problem that we need to discuss urgently.As a person born in the 1960 s,Yu Hua has experienced existential anxiety since childhood,loneliness in childhood,multiple death scenes in childhood,sense of unintentionalness in childhood,and uncertainty and absurdity caused by historical changes,but he is an individual living in harmony with this existential anxiety,In addition,the consistent "tragic" tone of his works and the "comedy" color of his personal life also form a huge contrast,and the life wisdom behind this inevitably arouses our curiosity.This research adopts the research orientation of psychobiography,and is based on two suspensive questions,namely:(1)Why did Yu Hua,who has a poor education foundation and has a stable job,embark on the road of literary adventure?(2)How to understand the extreme contrast between the "tragic" tone of death in Yu Hua’s works and the "comedy" color of real life? To describe Yu Hua’s psychological and historical development process of how to transform these existing anxieties into positive and dynamic forces of self-construction and achieve an internal balance.This study collected the first-hand and second-hand data related to Yu Hua,screened and sorted the published non-fiction works of Yu Hua with the "psychological saliency index",and used QSRNvivo11.0 to code the data to identify the core theme,while combining the fiction works created by Yu Hua for in-depth analysis.The results show that Yu Hua’s psychological history can be divided into the following stages:(1)In his childhood,due to his parents’ busy work and his own timidity,Yu Hua’s activities were limited to hospitals and home.This lonely experience shaped Yu Hua’s psychological sensitivity and gave him the inner experience of "spiritual freedom";(2)While in his youth,he experienced various death scenes,the collapse of the value system before and after the Cultural Revolution,and the boredom of being arranged to suppress work,which made him more sensitive to the existential anxiety of death,absurdity,and meaningless;(3)However,this existential anxiety is difficult to release under the situation that rational civilization dominates.The free form of literary creation has great advantages in expressing existential anxiety.So Yu Hua chose the path of literary creation dominated by violence and death images.(4)At the same time,literary creation has become a way for Yu Hua to integrate and build himself.First of all,the works created by Yu Hua have promoted his economic and social status in reality,which gives Yu Hua a great sense of achievement as a visible result of his subjectivity.Secondly,writing,as a kind of empathy process of emotion and reason,the long-term death narrative writing made Yu Hua produce a "sympathetic death experience".This psychological experience prompted Yu Hua to "die first",insight into the truth of existence,develop the courage of existence,form the consciousness of life,and finally reach the true existence.Through the description of Yu Hua’s psychological and historical path,the two suspensive questions put forward by this study are answered.To embark on the path of literary creation is a free choice to resist the fate arrangement and release the ontological anxiety.In fiction,"tragedy" and in reality,"comedy",he reveals the truth of human existence in the form of fictional tragedy art.At the same time,humor is his way to face the anxiety caused by the truth of existence with courage.These two seemingly extreme "keynote" have already reached unity in his body,and this unity stems from the manifestation of his own subjective power and self-construction in the process of literary narration.Yu Hua’s life story also gives us some enlightenment in the post-epidemic era.We can choose what attitude to face the external environment without changing the external environment,which is our absolute freedom.When the anxiety caused by the virus epidemic is our inescapable fate,we can obtain temporary transcendental experience in creation or other activities like Yu Hua to alleviate our anxiety.