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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Dwelling in Dreams: A Comparative Study of Dream of the Red Chamber and Finnegans Wake Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wm6d7xg Author Zhang, Mingming Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Dwelling in Dreams: A Comparative Study of Dream of the Red Chamber and Finnegans Wake A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Mingming Zhang December 2009 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Yenna Wu, Co-Chairperson Dr. Kimberly J. Devlin, Co-Chairperson Dr. Mariam Beevi Lam Copyright by Mingming Zhang 2009 The Dissertation of Mingming Zhang is approved: _________________________________________ _________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson _________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements This dissertation benefited from the generous help of many people to whom I feel greatly indebted. First of all, this work is a result of the insightful comments, unreserved support, and kind patience of the three members of my dissertation committee. I owe a great deal to Prof. Yenna Wu, who provided vision, direction, much-needed advice and encouragement throughout this work. Her scrupulous and ground-breaking scholarship in traditional Chinese fiction has inspired me to do the best work I could. I consider myself extremely fortunate in working with Prof. Kimberly J. Devlin, whose profound understanding of Freud and Lacan helped shape my theoretical framework and whose perceptive reading of James Joyce has made me a confirmed Joyce fan. Without her guidance, encouragement, generosity to loan me materials and to offer to meet with me outside of her office hours and even school days, my chapters on Finnegans Wake would not have been possible. I am also grateful to Prof. Mariam Beevi Lam for her unfailing help and insightful advice on the general structure of this work. I must extend my deep gratitude to Prof. Yang Ye for mentoring me during the early stage of my doctoral studies as well as enouraging me and helping me get financial aid during the later stage of my dissertation. Thanks are also due to Prof. David Danow for boosting my morale in this project. I am also indebted to Prof. Parama Roy, Prof. Carole-Anne Tyler, and Prof. Ginger Cheng-Chi Hsu who showed me their intellecutal generosity, spent time talking with me and from whom I learned a lot about theories and iv art. Prof. Roy also gave me a generous gift of books. I greatly appreciate Prof. Tyler’s interest in discussing my Chinese novel with me and also her perceptive advice on the creative use of theories to read specific texts. Last but not least, I wish to express my deeply felt gratitude to my parents, my mother-in-law, and my husband Dr. Tao Wei for their love, encouragement, and patience throughout my graduate studies. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Dwelling in Dreams: A Comparative Study of Dream of the Red Chamber and Finnegans Wake by Mingming Zhang Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, December 2009 Dr. Yenna Wu, Co-Chairperson Dr. Kimberly J. Devlin, Co-Chairperson Both the Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng ) and James Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegans Wake are dream fictions in that they employ dreams as both their frameworks and subject matters. While Finnegans Wake is a fictional representation of its assumed dreamer’s dream during one night, Dream of the Red Chamber portrays its protagonist’s life as a dream in the metaphorical sense. The two works share a predominant interest in probing and representing, through dreams and literary devices, the often elusive workings of the human psyche. This dissertation investigates the psychic mechanisms in terms of how they contribute to the issue of subjectivity formation. vi The theoretical approach employed is psychoanalytical theories, especially Sigmund Freud’s dream theories and Jacques Lacan’s concepts of the mirror stage, the symbolic order, and the gaze. Freud’s theorization of the dream language as an arena where the unconscious struggles against the conscious to express itself is also applicable to poetic devices. This dissertation argues that the subject’s enthrallment to the Other’s approving gaze is paradoxically both a necessary and a fictitious means of self-confirmation. The first two chapters on Dream of the Red Chamber apply the principles of the dream work to literary devices as well as dreams to map out its protagonist Jia Baoyu’s psychic dynamics. Jia Baoyu’s behavior can be traced back to the psychic trauma inflicted on him by the Great Mother and explore the issue of (mis)recognition by the (m)other. The following two chapters on Finnegans Wake study the dreamer’s desires and anxieties related to his precarious status as the patriarch of his family. In both narratives, the subject is brought into being, or the drama of the dream is set into motion, by (the subject’s response to) the Other’s gaze. Both narratives also show that the other’s gaze, which the subject desires and depends on for an image of wholeness and power, is imaginary. vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements...................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents....................................................................................................... viii Abbreviations............................................................................................................... ix Introduction....................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Mirrors and the Mirror Stage in Dream of the Red Chamber ...................21 Chapter 2 The Gaze, (Mis)recognition and the Problematic of Gender in Dream of the Red Chamber ...............................................................................................................52 Chapter 3 The Patriarchal Symbolic in Finnegans Wake ..........................................81 Chapter 4 The Gaze and Visual Dynamics in Finnegans Wake ..............................115 Conclusion .................................................................................................................135 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................144 viii Abbreviations AFW Roland McHugh. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1991. Only page numbers are given. FW James Joyce. Finnegans Wake . New York: Penguin Books, 1999. For example, “FW 547.4” means page 547, line 4. HLM Cao Xueqin and Gao E. Honglou meng ( The Dream of the Red Chamber ). 2 vols. continuous pagination. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000. For example, “ HLM 99.1086” means chapter 99, page 1086 of this edition. Letters Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking, 1957. Vols. 2-3, eds. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1966. SS Cao Xueqin and Gao E. The Story of the Stone . Vols. 1-3, trans. David Hawkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973-1980. Vols. 4-5, trans. John Minford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982-1986. For example, “ SS 117.304” means chapter 117, page 304 of this translation. U James Joyce. Ulysses . New York: Random House, 1986. ZYZ Chen Qinghao , ed. Xinbian Shitouji Zhiyanzhai pingyu jijiao zengdingben . Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1986. ix Introduction In Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures , 1 a collection of the four “Alexander Lectures” he delivered at the University of Toronto in 2005, Longxi Zhang refutes cultural relativism or incommensurability, the ghost of which still lingers in academia today, and also dexterously presents some encyclopedically informed case studies of close textual readings across the cultures of China and Europe. What he accomplishes in that book is consciously putting into practice what Jorge Luis Borges envisages as a new dimension of literary criticism, with its focus on bridge-building between works from different cultural traditions. Borges proposes that the business of the critics is to invent the connections between authors: “they select two dissimilar works—the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights , say—attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de letters. ”2 While the two works he randomly chooses here both come from the Orient, Borges in another essay lists Han Yu (768-824), a great essayist and poet from China’s Tang Dynasty, among Zeno, Kierkegaard, and Robert Browning as Kafka’s literary 1 Longxi Zhang, Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 2 Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby eds., James E. Irby trans., Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964), p.13. Also quoted in Longxi Zhang, Unexpected Affinities , p. 6. 1 “precursors.” 3 In other words, Borges as well as Longxi Zhang 4 strongly advocates the necessity to read literary texts through a globalized multicultural perspective. Following Borges’s open-minded critical spirit and Longxi Zhang’s enlightening examples of cross-cultural