Women, Mothers, Wombs and Ghosts: an Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Novel Jinhui 锦灰 (Sheng Keyi, 2018) and Its Resemantization of the Feminine

It has often been said in different ways, that people live and give their lives, not for objective certainties, not for things, houses, wealth, but for opinions, for the imaginary, secret bond which links and bonds the world and things deep in the consciousness, thus giving a meaning to death.Not only do people live and die for ideas, but the deaths of people are absolved by images. (Gilbert Durand, The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary, 1963) 做一个活在书里的女鬼, 挺有意思的。 (盛可以, 锦灰, 2018) Being a ghost woman living in a book is extremely interesting. (Sheng Keyi, Jinhui, 2018) This paper analyses the novel Jinhui 锦灰 (2018) by Sheng Keyi 盛可以 (born in 1973). Its protagonist, Yao Minzhu, is a female journalist with a fondness for metaphors. She is confined to a clinic to treat “rhetorical disorders,” but refuses treatment and falls victim to therapeutic doggedness. The narrative seems to begin with her death, or the loss of consciousness preceding it, and tells a dreamlike journey through the places and stories of Fuyinzhen (Gospel Town). For Yao Minzhu, this journey is an opportunity to reappropriate her memories and reimagine those of her parents. As for Sheng Keyi, it is a chance to construct new and powerful metaphors of Chinese history and to question the position of women – both in the recent past and in today’s society – through the resemantization of their bodies and roles. The textual analysis includes two complementary methodological paradigms: an anthropological one, based on archetypal structures of the Chinese imaginary as identified by Sun Chaoying in the wake of Gilbert Durand’s studies, and a psychoanalytic paradigm, infusing reflections by Massimo Recalcati regarding the concepts of taboo and lalangue. With this dual approach, the analysis shows how Sheng Keyi’s use of metaphor allows her narrative to deviate from (yet still reference) reality more directly, free from symbolic mediation. This technique is considered the sine-qua-non of the aforementioned resemantization.