SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The dissertation studies the fictional journey of Zhang Xianliang from the viewpoint of political unconscious. Zhang has been under different kinds of labour reform and re-education in mainland China for twenty-two years. The experience is too painful to recall, yet too feared to be forgotten. The repressed trauma of Zhang is therefore displaced and disguised in the fictional language of reform, remembrance, love, sex and death. Each language fulfils one layer of Zhang's hidden wishes. Yet the desiring chain moves on with new forms of substitutions until death. The study investigates his unconscious psyche from the Historical subtexts of conflicting impulses between body and mind, self and Other, individual and socialist Ideological State Apparatuses, and the residual, dominant and emerging modes of production.