This dissertation explores the dialogue between Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng 紅樓夢, Story of the Stone 石頭記) and Tang 唐 poetry, especially the works of Li He 李賀, Li Shangyin 李商隱, and Wen Tingyun 溫庭筠. Analytical tools and philosophical concepts are developed for approaching Hongloumeng as a deeply intertextual, highly symbolic novel, the specificity of its referential landscape being assessed and clarified. The works of these poets are explored in their capacity as classical inspiration for Hongloumeng’s remarkable, in some ways radical vision of alternative spaces where sexuality, gender, art, and identity can be explored freely and openly. It will be demonstrated how Hongloumeng engages with these poets’ works especially in terms of their critique of existing social hierarchies and of the dismal opportunities afforded for artistic and gender expression. The recurrence of gendered labor in the Tang poetic material that Hongloumeng references is treated with a view toward value production and social reproduction as historical phenomena. To develop an analytical framework capable of representing subtly transforming historical conceptions of dreams, desire, and identity, this work critically engages with notions of serendipity, chance, fate, and morality in Hongloumeng and Tang poetry, while reflexively developing new conceptions of artistic serendipity that can capture how meaning and non-meaning interact, and how dreams and desire interweave. In the process, this work attempts to articulate its theoretical and methodological positionality vis-à-vis Freudian psychoanalysis, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the post-structuralism of Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality, and liminality studies.

If hermetic texts are inherently “intertextual” as David Meakin has stated, then literary works referencing alchemy might also contain this same “intertextuality.” Reading such literary works together with alchemical texts would thus appear to be a fruitful endeavor. The significance of alchemy on literary works, however, has rarely been discussed, likely because a working knowledge of the hermetic art is required before undertaking any comprehensive analysis. The aim of this work is therefore to closely read several literary texts with the “will” to interpret them in what Karen Pinkus has termed a decidedly “alchemical key.”

The texts chosen falls into two general categories. First, texts that refer to alchemy explicitly: The Journey to the West, E. T. A. Hoffmann's “The Golden Pot,” and William Godwin's St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. Our investigation here will reveal that the extent of alchemy's significance in these texts would be lost to a reader who is not familiar with the alchemical tradition. Second, texts that do not refer to alchemy at all but, as we shall see, are in fact extremely alchemical: Ludwig Tieck's “The Runenberg,” Hoffmann's “The Mines of Falun,” Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo.

The analysis undertaken indicates that literary texts referencing alchemy appear to become “intertextual” once they refer to the hermetic art. To read such texts with knowledge of alchemy will both assist in an expanded understanding of the texts and also enrich the current scholarship. Knowledge of alchemy may, therefore, be useful for further explications of other texts containing hermetic references. Finally, we will discover that it is possible to take a comparative approach with respect to such disparate texts from the Chinese, English and German traditions, as all use one common alchemical idea to comment on the human condition, namely: the figure of the homunculus.

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.

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.