| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 中國文學系所 === 106 === After publishing “Xi-Xia Hotel”, which is highly praised in Taiwan, the Taiwanese novelist, Lou, Yi-Chun released his novel, “The Daughter”, in 2014. This work summons and shapes many existential forms of women. The following question has inspired this thesis that If there is a kernel of writing in numerous female stories of novelist’s “The Daughter”, what the kernel is. When Lou, Yi-Chun claimed the theme of his work is about “a healing young goddess/daughter”, we can’t help but be suspicious and discovers its antithesis: a story about “traumatized father”. That is, no matter how this novel attempts to sublime or terrorize females, all those descriptions eventually turn out to simply uncover the trauma of the male subject.
This thesis also points out that “Wife” is one of the factors of the trauma. She guides her husband to search for his narrative subject while giving interruptions at the same time. She is the constitutive obstacle that fails the narrator and prevents the him from the path to success in this novel. By looking carefully at the relation of “Wife” and “Trauma”, the following questions that why “The Daughter” exists in this novel, who/what is “The Daughter”, why “The Daughter” is significant to “Healing”, what is the highly fundamental meaning of “Healing” to the novelist will all be properly answered. By the school of Lacanian psychoanalytic by Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), and the perspective of subject theory by his successor, Slavoj Žižek (1949-) , this thesis therefore focuses on subject existence, the traumatic Real and death drive, and aims to reveal the subject’s traumatic problem caused by the encounter with the Others. Additionally, with the reference to the Real, a complex concept seen in Lacan’s late studies, an attempt in this thesis was also made to release the possibilities of subjectivity as the subject encounters with its traumatic Real.
This thesis consists of four parts. Chapter 2 correlates closely with Lou’s aesthetics and the narrative of “The Daughter”. The two traits of the Wife, who shows her sublime and the monstrous character are shown in Chapter 3 after the fact is pointed out that Wife is actually “The Daughter”, and that its femininity makes the subject unbearable. Chapter 4 turns to the male character so as to sort out a phallic narrative about “Father” and the narrator. Chapter 5 integrates two parts of feminine narratives and the phallic narrative in order to define the meaning of “The Daughter”, which also inspired the title of this thesis that the daughter does not exist. So far, instead of asking about what “the Daughter” is, the thesis has focused on what the constitutive platform of the Daughter’s being present is. By these two perspectives (the wife and the husband), this thesis reconstructed preconditions of the Daughter’s presence. In the end, this thesis intends to establish the concept of “The Daughter”, by providing further questions on how to turn the wounds to love, how to look directly at the wounds of civilization itself to see the real healing and salvation. If that so, the answer seems to be that “The Daughter” is not a story of healing or repairing, but a story about how to coexist with injury. Healing is not of the medical treatment to the wound, but of a difficult lesson on learning how to coexist with the unhealed. Trauma is of healing.
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