The Mad Woman Of Nanking:Psychic Mourning And Collective Melancholia In Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem

Reading Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem in the contexts of the work on psychic and social mourning by theorists including Freud, Eric Santner, Dominick LaCapra, and Judith Butler, this thesis undertakes to examine the negotiations of collective and private loss in the novel, with a particular emphasis on how it imagines the dynamic interplay of the two kinds of loss.The thesis performs a symptomatic reading of the novel, revealing the symptoms of diasporic melancholy and loss in the novel as well as the symptoms of national loss. These two sets of symptoms are both exhibited without being consciously reflected upon and worked through. In his treatment of the direct victims like Yulan the madwoman, Ha Jin failed confront her ambivalence as a psychic object of loss and the frame that precludes her mournability. The priority in Nanjing Requiem is given to the narrative mourning to repair diasporic identity, rather than to work through the event on collective level. Under such circumstance, the Massacre cannot be acknowledged as a historical loss to be critically engaged but became projections of desire. In this sense, it is argued that, the lack of self-reflexivity in Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem this own transferential relationship to the Massacre underlies its failure to put the victims at rest. In this reading the book serves as a testament to a set of rhetoric and narrative norms in representations of the Massacre in the Chinese diaspora, norms that block, rather than facilitate, the process of collective mourning even as they lay bare the psychic burdens of diaspora.Moreover, the thesis also intends to shed light on some of the ethical and political pitfalls in the post-1990s Nanjing representations, especially the diasporic writings. On the one hand, the desymbolizing attempts to go beyond national and racial barriers and make the Massacre "an international experience" are perpetually undermined by uncritically assimilation of the western hierarchy of the human and the colonial discourses. On the other hand, in going beyond the barriers, the (direct) victims, the collaborator, the perpetrator, and the rescuer in the post-1990s counter-narratives are too often collapsed and equalized as the victim in redemptive gestures as to make the category of the victim vacuous. In this sense, the novel also becomes an allegory for the failure of collective mourning over the Massacre and illuminates the particular impasse characterizing cultural memory of the Massacre.