Translating Yu Hua's realist trauma literature through psychoanalysis : using brothers and to live as examples of acting out and working through

Abstract

From avant-gardism to realism, the transformation of Yu Hua’s literary style parallels China’s tectonic transition from the aftermath of the cultural revolution to a new market economy. Having adopted an unadorned and minimal style of narration, Yu Hua’s brand of realism employs vocabulary that is simple, down-to-earth, at times even repetitive. With the Cultural Revolution as a reoccurring theme of Yu Hua’s decade-long foray into China’s traumatic past, he has been constantly grappling with the issue of how to represent China’s traumatic history and ever-changing reality in the most fitting manner possible. As an author, Yu Hua’s goal of writing as he himself once described in an interview is to “look out upon the world with sympathetic eyes,” which gave rise to the realist style we see today. Instead of attributing his stylistic shift to commercialisation and the mass appeal of popular fiction, an argument endorsed by most scholars in the Chinese literary sphere, I maintain that it is a conscious choice made by the author to take a balanced approach to narrating trauma. With the help of psychoanalytic and trauma theories, this thesis contends that the concision and simplicity as emblematic of Yu Hua’s brand of realism is a daring yet fruitful attempt at documenting trauma, from the phase of (1) acting out where it is repetitively obsessed over, to when it is eventually (2) worked through.