UC Riverside

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.