CAN XUE'S SPATIALIZED VISION: BUILDINGS AND THE EXPLORATION OF 
THE SOUL 
      
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by 
 
POPO PI 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A THESIS 
 
Presented to the Interdisciplinary Studies Program: Asian Studies 
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon 
in partial fulfillment of the requirements 
for the degree of 
Master of Arts  
June 2012 
 ii 
THESIS APPROVAL PAGE 
 
Student: Popo Pi 
 
Title: Can Xue's Spatialized Vision: Buildings and the Exploration of the Soul 
 
This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for 
the Master of Arts degree in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program: Asian Studies by: 
 
Alison M.Groppe Chairperson 
Xin Huang Member 
Bryna Goodman Member 
 
and 
 
Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the 
Graduate School  
 
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. 
 
Degree awarded June 2012 
 iii 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
© 2012 Popo Pi   
       
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 iv 
THESIS ABSTRACT 
 
Popo Pi 
 
Master of Arts 
 
Interdisciplinary Studies Program: Asian Studies 
 
June 2012 
 
Title: Can Xue's Spatialized Vision: Buildings and the Exploration of the Soul 
 
 
This thesis centers on the question of how the representation of buildings opens 
up possibilities for investigating Can Xue's fiction as literature with universal concern 
about humanity. It explores the significance of Can Xue's employment of buildings in her 
works from three aspects. The first aspect regards buildings as the reflection of the 
structure of the soul. The second aspect situates buildings in their relationship with 
residents and explores the connection between the buildings/residents relationship and 
that of body and soul. The last aspect sees buildings as the microcosmic projection of Can 
Xue’s fictional space. This study places textual constitution at the center of investigation 
through the approach of close textual analysis. It marks an attempt to reconsider the 
method of literary investigation in the field of modern Chinese literature which has been 
dominated by cultural and historical approaches.   
 v 
CURRICULUM VITAE 
 
NAME OF AUTHOR:  Popo Pi 
 
 
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: 
 
 University of Oregon, Eugene 
 Huazhong Normal University, Wuhan, China 
       
       
 
 
DEGREES AWARDED: 
 
 Master of Arts, Asian Studies, 2012,University of Oregon 
 Bachelor of Arts, English, 2010, Huazhong Normal University 
       
       
 
 
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: 
 
 modern Chinese literature 
  
 East Asian cinema 
 
 
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: 
 
 Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2011-2012      
  
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 vi 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Chapter Page 
 
 
I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 
II. BUILDINGS AS THE REFLECTION OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE 
SOUL ........................................................................................................................... 17 
III. BUILDINGS IN CAN XUE'S CONCEPTION OF THE BODY/SOUL 
RELATIONSHIP ......................................................................................................... 37 
IV. BUILDINGS AS CAN XUE'S FICTIONAL SPACE .......................................... 51 
V. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 62 
REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 65 
  
 
 
1 
 
CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 
Can Xue has been noted for her distinctive style among contemporary Chinese 
writers. Her fiction is often captured by scholars as a surrealist dreamscape that is 
constituted by fragmentary storylines, bizarre characters, and sensational depiction in 
eerie details. The logic guiding Can Xue‘s fantastic fictional space is commonly seen as 
beyond the mode of reasoning that governs our world of experience. This condition 
seems to make her literary space a self-contained entity that resists deconstruction. Most 
critics thus resort to the external physical reality in search for an interpretive strategy
1
. 
However, that many scholars have maintained the scope of their investigation within a 
socio-historical perspective does not exclude the possibility that Can Xue‘s works can be 
comprehended from within. What is at stake in this trend of thinking is the relevance of 
literary aesthetics and its philosophical contemplation of humanity to the study of 
literature. The thesis thus provides a departure from existing research on Can Xue‘s 
fiction and initiates an act of probing introspectively into Can Xue‘s literary construction 
to examine the texts on their own terms. The approach of the thesis deviates from existing 
approaches to Can Xue‘s works which distracts attention away from the aesthetics of the 
fictions themselves as literature that expresses a concern for universal humanity. The 
                                                          
1
 For example, see Xiaobin Yang‘s discussion about Can Xue‘s traumatic response to the Cultural 
Revolution, ―Can Xue: Ever-Haunting Nightmares‖ (74-92) in The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and 
Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction; Ban Wang, ―The Sublime Subject of History and Desublimation in 
Contemporary Chinese Fiction." Comparative Literature 47 (1995): 330–353, in which he describes Can 
Xue as part of the trend to desublimate the sublime discourse that has been constructed in the Maoist era. 
An overview of major critical discussions on Can Xue will be introduced later in this chapter. 
2 
 
thesis will turn the gaze inward to examine how Can Xue uses her fiction as a tool for 
reaching deep into the soul, through which the motif of buildings plays a significant role. 
One crucial element in her fiction is the buildings, which appear frequently in her 
story and contribute significantly to her literary construction of a fantastic fictional space. 
These buildings usually feature spatial and temporal distortion, signs of life, such as 
capability of slight movement, and obsessive residents who behave suspiciously in a 
similar way as if in collusion. The role of the buildings is more than a composite of the 
fictional settings. They function as an organic part of Can Xue‘s art of fiction. The thesis 
is therefore devoted to the investigation the role of buildings as an important motif in 
supporting Can Xue‘s literary and philosophical exploration.  
The emphasis on buildings is a conscious choice in Can Xue‘s writing. She may 
have developed a special awareness of space as a child and drawn inspiration from her 
childhood experience in writing. In one short autobiographical piece titled ―Empty 
Rooms‖2, Can Xue describes her fascination with three empty rooms upstairs in the two-
story apartment building where she used to live. Although Can Xue does not mention the 
time in the piece, it could be inferred from the description of her fear of being captured 
by the ghosts or the secret agents jumping out from the empty rooms that the event most 
possibly took place in Can Xue‘s childhood. The structure of the building in ―Empty 
Rooms‖ features a hallway with rooms lining up on the two sides on each floor. As Can 
Xue‘s friend lives on the second floor, she often goes upstairs to seek her friend despite 
the eerie atmosphere surrounding her friend‘s home and the vacant rooms. She is most 
                                                          
2
 The article is included in Can Xue‘s collection of short stories and essays: Dance of the Dark Soul: Can 
Xue’s Self-Collection of Writings 黑暗灵魂的舞蹈: 残雪美文自选集. See 148-150. 
3 
 
concerned with the three empty rooms at the end of the hallway. Occasionally, she sees 
people moving into the rooms; but they all disappear in two or three days, leaving the 
rooms locked up like no one ever lived there. One time Can Xue even hears some noise 
which sounds like the head of a huge bird bumping onto the wall from one of the empty 
rooms. In her frequent dreams about the rooms, a person or two are always sorting out the 
luggage in the dark in one room while in another room, a skinny girl with wet hair worn 
down is sitting leg-crossed in a chair, running her fingers through the pages in a picture 
book under the light of a lamp. When Can Xue enters the room, the girl speaks through a 
hoarse voice ―I‘m the old resident here!‖ ―Empty Rooms‖ provides a look into Can Xue‘s 
early psychological experience with unknown space. Can Xue resorts to dreaming to 
explore the space with her subconscious imagination, which is later transcribed into 
literary exploration through her fiction.  
Can Xue‘s employment of buildings as a thematic and aesthetic tool for literature is 
not unprecedented in literary history. The link between architecture and literature has 
been explicitly explored by Ellen Eve Frank in her book
3
, who proposes the theory of 
literary architecture based on the works of the British critic Walter Pater. She first traces 
the etymological origin of the word ―building‖, which means ―to be, to exist, to grow‖(4). 
When taking historical meaning into account, the word ―building‖ takes on a 
metaphysical dimension. At the same time, the state of existence thus is accorded a 
structure, which transforms the abstract and complicated experience of being into a 
concrete construction of consciousness. Frank points out the spatial nature of human 
                                                          
3
 Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition: Walter Pater, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marcel Proust, 
Henry James. See Introduction in which she establishes the theoretical framework of literary architecture 
for details. 
4 
 
cognitive activities as she remarks that ―Our experience as an activity of being—entering 
and moving through interior space, seeing wall-boundaries, looking through windows, 
feeling stress—is governed by and utilizes the architectural structures we perceive, as we 
perceive them‖(4-5). She highlights the word ―experience‖ as a term designating not only 
the general human activity of being but also the specific  ―critical inquiry, methodology, 
reading‖ in literary study (4).  According to Frank, the basic act of perceiving is ―seeing 
through space‖(5). This could be taken further to imply that the essential activities 
constituting human experience of existence are based on spatial observation as Frank 
explains that although man and his environment all appear to be made of the similar 
materials that are or seemingly are spatial-temporal, man‘s major difference from the 
world is that ―he imagines his consciousness or experience to be bounded or located in 
particular space, within white walls, bodies, time, while what is outside his personal 
realm he imagines to be boundless as he thinks the universe is boundless, timeless as it is 
timeless‖(6). Since consciousness is the fundamental structure of existence and the world 
experienced by humans is essentially subjective, it possesses both ―spatial extension 
(architecture) in the physical world‖ and ―the language of spatial extension (literature) in 
the world of thought‖(7). Frank thus conceives a connection between architecture and 
literature. By connection, Frank does not mean a single bridge over the distance between 
the two conceptual realms, rather, she means the intricate building of relationships on all 
levels, which she terms as literary architecture. Frank‘s notion of the connection, or 
literary architecture, is a transcribed mental process of establishing correspondence, or 
more exactly, conversion, between the two art forms. The means of achieving this 
conversion is construction (on the part of the writer) and deconstruction (on the part of 
5 
 
the reader) of the architectural analogues in the text. Her discussion of the literary 
analogy in specific literary works is interwoven with the issue of memory, mind, and the 
body.  
As far as systematicity is concerned, Can Xue‘s principles have not taken the shape 
of a literary theory. But inspecting her ideas of literature and humanity could provide a 
valuable look into her artistic outlook, which is reflected in her fiction as of central 
concern. Can Xue is a writer with introspective vision.  She defines the mission of 
literature as the pursuit for self-knowledge
4
 (Dance of the Dark Soul 215). According to 
Can Xue, pure literature, a term which she used to designate her writing, should be 
judged by the spiritual depth it achieves in its exploration of the human soul
5
 (205). She 
interprets purity as depth, which entails darkness and implies breadth and liberty. Writers 
of pure literature engage themselves in transcending the world of experience to explore 
the boundless realm of the soul. Can Xue‘s philosophical contemplation of literature is 
thus interlinked with her understanding of human spirituality.  
Can Xue delineates a space in her fiction for spiritual activities through verbalization. 
She describes her purpose in writing as attempting to transform the sealed pure space of 
the spirit which refuses any ties to the real world into an open space for the actualization 
of human possibilities (199). In a sense, Can Xue visualizes her works as a vertical 
                                                          
4
  See Can Xue, ―Great Works in My Heart― (我心目中的伟大作品) 215-218, Dance of the Dark Soul. She 
says, ―Isn‘t literature the advanced human activity for the pursuit of self-knowledge?‖(215)  
5
 In her critical essays on literature, Can Xue uses the terms 灵魂 linghun(soul), 精神 jingshen(spirit), and 
心灵 xinling(heart/mind)  to designate the incorporeal existence of human beings as opposed to their 
physical existence. See essays in chapters ―Unconventional Realm‖(异端境界) and ―Eternal Traveling‖(永
恒的漂泊), Dance of the Dark Soul. 
6 
 
connection between the corporeal reality and the immaterial spiritual sphere, through 
which her readers might enter and join her exploration into the depth.  Furthermore, Can 
Xue often accentuates the concept of spatial gradation (层次 cengci)6 as an important 
property of things. She conceptualizes the language of the literature of the soul as having 
spatial levels that map onto its signified objects. This process of ―mirroring‖ represents 
the outside world inside the space of the mind. Can Xue summarizes her stories as 
retelling the same story of the soul, the world beyond, and the kingdom of art in different 
ways (192)
7
. She conceives the story of the soul as three-dimensional, through which the 
reader can be taken deeper and deeper down to the core. In Can Xue‘s view, in order to 
be able to understand and respond to the portrait of the soul in this kind of fiction, the 
reader has to possess the potential to have his or her soul structurally triggered by the 
writing. Readers and the writer are thus aligned on the same side of the explorer, 
cooperating for the same course of spiritual exploration. 
Buildings in Can Xue‘s fiction are what Frank identifies as architectural analogy for 
achieving the correspondence between language and architecture, consciousness and the 
physical world. Can Xue‘s conception of pure literature as a spatialized connection 
between the spiritual world and the corporeal reality is related to some extent to Frank‘s 
idea that the perceptual activity of literary architecture bridges the gap between literature 
as ―language of spatial extension‖ in the world of thought and architecture as the ―actual 
spatial extension‖ in physical world. The two both highlight a spot of transformation and 
                                                          
6
  The Chinese word 层次 is used by Can Xue to refer to certain scaled structure that can be approached 
step by step towards the core. Here in the thesis 层次 is translated as ―structure.‖  
7
 See ―Dance of the Dark Soul‖ 190-193, Dance of the Dark Soul. 
7 
 
correspondence between the seemingly incompatible spaces as their loci of exploration. 
Nevertheless, pure literature in Can Xue‘s contemplation is more of the static locus where 
the confliction between the two exclusive worlds and the adventure for spiritual depth are 
condensed. While Frank also lifts her conception to an ontological level, her idea of 
literary architecture is more consciously leaned toward a process of building 
correspondence and performing conversion as a method for marrying the two arts on an 
aesthetic level. As Frank notes that ―Writers who select architecture as their art analogue 
dematerialize the more material art, architecture, that they may materialize the more 
immaterial art, literature‖ (7). Her emphasis is placed on the conversion between the two-
dimensional and the three-dimensional. Although both of the two aim to bring the 
intangible into contact with the tangible, Frank is more concerned with the significance of 
the artistic union between the two art forms, literature and architecture; while Can Xue is 
more engaged in the architectural construction of literary space as the philosophical site 
of tension between the two dimensions of being, the spiritual and the corporeal.  
Can Xue‘s buildings are more than physical constructions for human dwelling. They 
echo her spatialized framing of her fictional world and her thematic concerns. The thesis 
will revolve around three aspects of the significance of Can Xue‘s employment of 
buildings, which will be discussed respectively in the following three independent 
chapters. 
The first significance lies in the metaphorical space of buildings as the mirror image 
of the structure of the soul
8. As a result of Can Xue‘s spatialized vision, the structure of 
                                                          
8
 Can Xue elaborates the idea of the structure of the soul in her essay ―Structure of the Spirit‖(精神的层次), 
219-222, Dance of the Dark Soul.  
8 
 
pure literature is perceived as possessing a certain universal structure which echoes the 
mental structure of people‘s mind. This structure of the soul is innate to everyone across 
cultures, which enables the possibility of communication through literature across 
linguistic and national boundaries. However, not everyone is able to see the internal 
structure by his or her own strength. Can Xue places part of the task of reproducing the 
original image of spiritual structure on pure literature. She deems that the fundamental 
structure of various works of pure literature is the same. Readers have to figure out the 
basic structure of a work to be able to grasp the meaning of the work, during the process 
of which the structure of their own souls will surface and enlighten them in the pursuit of 
the essential state of the soul. Buildings in Can Xue‘s fiction symbolize this distinctive 
structure within the text, which mirrors the structure of readers‘ soul on the outside. The 
chapter will argue that characteristics of these buildings resemble the idiosyncrasies of 
the psyche. It will discuss the apartment buildings in ―Life Course‖(历程 licheng)9 to 
investigate how the story engages itself in the issue of memory and the split and 
multiplication of the self through the construction of buildings.  
The second aspect involves the relationship between buildings and people and how 
the relationship reflects Can Xue‘s concern of the dialectics of the body/soul relationship. 
Can Xue centralizes the dichotomy between the body and the spirit as the conflict 
between primitive instincts and reason in her discussion of literature. The body 
accommodates the activities of the soul while confining it with corporeal desires. Much 
as she privileges the spirit over the body, Can Xue admits that human beings cannot live 
                                                          
9
 The novella is included in Can Xue’s Self-Collection(残雪自选集), 2004. 
9 
 
completely within the spirit since the body is the dark place where the soul was born 
(187). Can Xue often wrote about people exploring a strange house or an apartment 
building and becoming trapped in it. The image of the protagonist wandering and 
searching in an unusual building evokes the figurative picture of the soul roaming within 
the boundary of the body, looking for an exit to its bewilderment caused by the physical 
constraints of the body.  On the other hand, the relationship between the body and the 
soul can be the reverse. Can Xue‘s self-reflection goes beyond merely capturing the 
conflicts internalized within a human being. She seeks to intensify the conflicts by 
mobilizing the soul against the body. She urges art to push the limits of the corporeal 
through negating and punishing the body with the rationality of the soul
10
. The more 
force in the body rebounding, the freer the literary expression (187). Following this logic, 
Can Xue interprets Kafka‘s castle as the incarnation of the will of the soul. The 
relationship between the protagonist K and the castle reflects the conflict between the 
body and the soul, instinct and reason. In this light, Can Xue‘s buildings can be the 
signifier of both the soul and its dwelling. The third chapter will analyze how the 
relationship between people and buildings is illustrated in short stories such as ―In the 
Wilderness‖(旷野里 kuangye li)11 and what the body and soul relationship constructed 
through buildings in Can Xue‘s fiction reveals about her vision of humanity. 
                                                          
10
 See  ―A Special Kind of Stories‖(一种特殊的小说) 186-189, Dance of the Dark Soul. Also see 199, 
―About The Last Lover: Some Words for the Reader‖ in the same book, in which she specifies human 
spiritual activities as a series of experiments to test the capacity of the body: ―在某种意义上来说，人的精
神活动就是由接连不断的实验构成的。即，试一试自己这僵硬的肉体还有多大的能动性…‖ 
11
  The story is included in the short story collection A Dreamscape that Has Never been Described 从未描
述过的梦境, 2004. 
10 
 
The last aspect of significance rests in how buildings serve as allegories of Can 
Xue‘s perspective on writing and readership and how they constitute her defense and 
governance of her literary space. The plot of people visiting or entering by accident some 
mysterious buildings occurs frequently in her fiction. Can Xue emphasizes the act of 
intruding by accident (闯入 chuangru)12 as the method for the potential reader to probe 
deep into her fiction. This echoes the way characters in her fiction enter the buildings. 
She thus conceives her fictional space within the framework of her fictional buildings. 
Under this conception, Can Xue‘s expectation for potential readers to join her spiritual 
exploration is transcribed into her fiction, in which the owner of a building is always 
there waiting for the protagonist to walk into his space. The last chapter will illustrate this 
aspect primarily through the short story: ―The Journey Back Home‖(归途 guitu)13 . 
Can Xue‘s style can be generally contextualized in the Chinese avant-garde 
movement during the 1980s. As mainstream literature in mainland China has become 
increasingly entrenched in the performance of power, a number of writers begin to 
explore a different path from the pragmatic and ideologically charged approach in literary 
creation
14
. The avant-garde school seeks to go beyond various concerns with the material 
world by experimenting with unconventional styles and contents that exhibit strong 
individual characteristics. Can Xue‘s peculiarity in writing thus can be understood in 
                                                          
12
  See 191 ―Dance of the Dark Soul,‖ Dance of the Dark Soul, in which Can Xue uses the word闯入 to 
describe the act of breaking into her fiction: ―它表面上没有结构，不合逻辑，内部却有隐藏得很深的
结构与逻辑，读者必须运用创造力去‗闯入‘，才能发现它们。‖ 
13
 The story is included in Dance of the Dark Soul. 
14
 See 124-136, Wu Liang, ―Re-Membering the Cultural Revolution: Chinese Avant-garde Literature of the 
1980s,‖ Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey. Ed. Chi, Pang-
Yuan, and David De-Wei Wang. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 
11 
 
terms of this literary movement. But just as Wu Liang puts it, ―A characteristic of avant-
garde literature is that it arouse from the memory of history and yet went beyond 
historical judgment; it raised questions about human existence and yet refrained from 
becoming involved in contemporary life‖(128 Wu), Can Xue‘s writing, despite being 
conditioned by its period, deserves investigation not just as a particular subject of specific 
social and cultural discursive construction.  
The following paragraphs introduce the critical context of existing scholarship on 
Can Xue. The discussion revolves around the issue of how to interpret Can Xue‘s 
distinctive style. As I have argued, the approach of recent studies on Can Xue differs 
from that of this thesis. Although recent critical examinations offer insights into Can 
Xue‘s unconventional manner of literary expression, they neglect the merits of the 
capacity of the texts to stand on their own as literature transcending historical contexts. 
As a result, the particular textual constitution of the texts has not been accorded enough 
close examination. This tendency runs the risk of reducing her works to a vague sketch of 
settings, main characters, and plots in literary analysis. 
Can Xue‘s style is often characterized as highly elusive, irrational, and imaginative. 
Her fiction deviates from literary conventions that stress the totality of narration and the 
link between representation and reality. Scholarly discussions of Can Xue‘s works tend to 
linger around the concerns with reality. Her fiction is thus seen as either exhibiting total 
indifference and negation of external reality or implying an internalized and dramatized 
response to the insanity of China‘s historical reality and the discourse central to that 
reality.  
12 
 
The former view suggests the impossibility of forming a coherent realist and 
aesthetic reading of Can Xue. In the words of one critic
15, she ―has no master and does 
not yield any master signifiers‖ and her ―fictional body is anarchy itself‖ since ―No law 
governs it, not even its owner, and certainly not nature‖ (Hout 30-31). Such a view not 
only denies any intrinsic value in Can Xue‘s works but also simplifies their dialogue with 
the real world as merely ―resistance against culture and language‖(29). Further 
investigation of the composition of these works thus is dismissed as superfluous and 
insignificant. 
On the other hand, the second view of her works regards Can Xue‘s incoherent style 
as grounded in Chinese social and historical reality. Xiaobin Yang interprets Can Xue‘s 
elusiveness as an inability to speak coherently of her traumatic memory of the Cultural 
Revolution during which rationality was replaced by the absurdity of Maoist discourse. 
Can Xue‘s fragmentary and paranoid narrative thus effectively captures the ethos of the 
period. Meanwhile, Ban Wang places Can Xue‘s into the category of schizophrenic 
writing that employs the concept of schizophrenic as a critical tool to deconstruct and 
thus desublimate the Chinese discourse of the sublime constructed through political and 
ideological manipulation. As Wang puts it, ―Instead of being chained to a unifying 
totality and narrative outside the body and to an autonomous self within, the unconscious 
flow and the bodily impulses in the schizophrenic can ‗deterritorialize‘ or deconstruct 
what has been rigidly definied as Nation, Family, Church, School, Party‖ (342). This line 
of reasoning carries further the idea that Can Xue‘s works signify a gesture of resistance 
                                                          
15
 See chapter 1, Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes, 2000. 
13 
 
and renders them as more aggressively engaged in subverting the Maoist discourse 
constructs.  
As Tonglin Lu observes from a gender perspective that Can Xue‘s status of being an 
exception to the literature dictated by patriarchal order has become a point for criticism, 
she interprets Can Xue‘s marginality as a result of her attempt to undermine the Chinese 
traditional patriarchal discourse without identifying herself closely with femininity
16
. 
This isolates both conventional readers and those who are interested in gender. Lu deems 
that the value of Can Xue‘s works lies not in the madness but instead in its lucidity in that 
the writings ―capture the reality of contemporary China through a ‗feminized‘ 
language‖17(180). So Lu meditates Can Xue‘s style against a masculinized tradition and 
understands the absence of master signifier in Can Xue‘s language as an advantage of 
fluidity as opposed to the rigidly structured patriarchal language. Can Xue‘s employment 
of fluidity is thus considered by Lu as ―an excellent tool for exploring the nightmarish 
situation in contemporary Chinese society‖(180).  
Dai Jinhua advocates for a socially grounded interpretation of Can Xue that 
compensates for the negligence of the social aspect of Can Xue‘s works in Chinese 
academia during the 1980s. She understands Can Xue‘s fictional world as a microcosm of 
a kind of generalized social power struggle that is not necessarily specific to certain time 
                                                          
16
 See chapter ―Can Xue: What is so Paranoid in Her Writing,‖ Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century 
Chinese Literature and Society, 1993. 
17
 Lu describes Can Xue‘s language as relatively ―feminized‖ when she places Can Xue against the literary 
field that is dominated by writers whose works follow the patriarchal establishment of literary conventions. 
For example, she says, ―Love in Can Xue‘s story can occur only in a fluid world of female subjectivity. 
This specificity of love deliberately marks a refusal to provide the male subject with a firm ground for its 
solidification by means of sexuality. In her world of transformation, the father‘s logic is absent‖(194). 
14 
 
period or place
18
. Her reading reveals a desperate world that is permeated with 
antagonistic emotions and actions and where mutual persecution is normalized and no 
redemption can be expected.  Although Dai Jinhua‘s analysis replaces the specific 
historical background of the Cultural Revolution which scholars tend to fit Can Xue‘s 
works into with a general context of human micro-political struggle, she still conceives 
her contextualization in relation to the lingering influence of the earlier period of the 
Cultural Revolution on the daily lives in the 1980s. 
In Rong Cai‘s analysis, although she investigates the plagued self in its persisting 
battle with the Other, the emphasis is still placed on decoding the debilitating relationship 
into the subjective experience of the absurdity of reality
19. Much as she contends that ―by 
turning anatagonism between the self and the Other into an existential pattern, Can Xue 
reveals a metaphysical truth of life beyond Mao‘s China,‖ (93) Rong Cai‘s investigation 
is confined to the discussion of how the seeming absurdity in Can Xue‘s fiction responds 
to the social conditions of the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The antagonism 
between self and Other is explored in relation to the general external context rather than 
the finer internal process. Under this conception, the self is simplified as a passive 
reacting agent against its environment. Can Xue‘s intense spiritual outlook that values the 
full complexity of the mind is not accorded enough attention in this kind of reading.  
                                                          
18
 See 286-293 in The Boat Wading across the Water: Chinese Women’s Writing and Women’s Culture in 
the New Age(涉渡之舟： 新时期中国女性写作与女性文化). Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2007. 
19
 See ―In the Madding Crowd: Self and Other in Can Xue‘s Fiction,‖ The Subject Crisis in Contemporary 
Chinese Literature, 2004. 
15 
 
Jon Solomon contextualizes Can Xue‘s resistance in a global frame of post-
colonialism
20. He locates Can Xue‘s effort in a broad trend of Chinese intellectuals‘ 
―reluctance to find a voice that could resist the hopeless dialectic movement between East 
and West and a formation of a putatively unified subjectivity implicated therein‖(―Taking 
Tiger Mountain‖ 238). Solomon‘s dissection of the problematic of the subjectivity 
represented in Can Xue‘s short story ―Skylight‖ in relation to Lu Xun‘s ―The True Story 
of Ah Q‖21 reveals an act of resistance in Can Xue‘s work against the unified subjectivity 
constructed by both the Maoist and the colonialist discourses. 
Generally speaking, Can Xue‘s distinctive style is comprehended by critics as a 
mechanism for coping with Chinese reality and its discourses. These analyses all rely 
invariably on a heightened awareness for the external context that envelopes the 
interiority of the text and informs its composition. Whether a boundary truly exists 
between text and physical world begs our question as our perception is inevitably 
confined to what may be observed from the interior. Although history also is, in essence, 
a subjective construction, it should not be the sole reference for literary analysis. Over-
historicizing will only reduce the distinctiveness of literature as a world in itself while 
being more than itself.  Therefore, the thesis will strive to open an alternative to what has 
already been explored.  
 
                                                          
20
 See Solomon‘s article in Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism, 1993. 
21
 Solomon interprets Ah Q‘s execution at the end of ―The True Story of Ah Q‖ as a representation of the 
execution of national subjectivity by Western imperialism. His discussion relates the breakdown of national 
subjectivity in ―The True Story of Ah Q‖ to Can Xue‘s deconstructive use of monologism. See 249-250. 
16 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
17 
 
CHAPTER II 
BUILDINGS AS THE REFLECTION OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE SOUL 
In her article ―The Structure of the Spirit,‖ Can Xue accords pure literature the 
mission of unveiling the exquisite structure of the spiritual realm, which is based on the 
conception that incorporeal spirit could be perceived through spatial structures. Can Xue 
sees the development of literature and the complication of the soul in a convoluted 
process of interaction. As she remarks, ―by the time when the complicated spiritual world 
appeared in a three-dimensional form, literature began its official specialization into 
different fields‖ the field of pure literature was born in the process of exploring the 
invisible spiritual realm by a group of writers who are discontent with the superficial 
peripheral structure of the mind and aim to delve into the depth
22
 (Dance of the Dark Soul 
219). Can Xue thus assumes that the capacity of the mind to present itself in three-
dimensional structure is a marker of acquiring a higher level of intelligence in the 
evolutionary process of human intellect. She attributes the clear structuring of the soul 
which we observe today to the successful development in science and in the in-depth 
quest into the human mind
23. In Can Xue‘s view, spatialization therefore is clearly an 
indication of sophistication; being able to grow in more than two directions into planes 
and branches is a signifier of infinite possibilities and potential. It is through this 
metaphorical abstraction of the neurological development of the human brain that Can 
Xue invests an expectation for literature. The soul‘s possession of a structure not only is a 
                                                          
22
 Here Can Xue is commenting generally on the overall course of the development of human civilization. 
See ―Structure of the Spirit‖(精神的层次). 
23
 See 219 Dance of the Dark Soul. 
18 
 
proof of its dynamic existence, but also is a confirmation that the incorporeal 
consciousness could be captured by art, the abstractional tool for human intellect to 
contemplate beyond what is physically present. This promise enables the process of what 
Frank identifies as the materialization of immaterial consciousness. For literature to 
deliver this process of the materialization of the immaterial soul, it has to devise an 
instrument to grasp the distinctiveness of the soul like a mental portrait.  
Frank has traced the origin of the word dwelling, which derives from a word 
meaning ―to rise in a cloud‖(12). The etymological meaning of dwelling thus implies to 
make visible by giving form to something incorporeal. Frank‘s investigation of dwelling 
therefore points to a solution: ―Constructing a building is bringing into being; 
constructing a dwelling is bringing of being into seeable form‖(12). Literary buildings 
become the promising instrument to realize the materialization of the spirit by inscribing 
the structure into clear seeable forms. Can Xue thus defines the works of a pure literature 
writer as ―a representation of the spiritual structure‖(Dance of the Dark Soul 205). To 
achieve this representation, Can Xue has to make her work almost a mirror that reflects 
the inner structure of the reader who is not able to see the structure from inside. The 
mirror image of the mind structure which literature contains takes the form of 
architecture in Can Xue‘s work. She constructs various forms of fantastic buildings as 
dwelling places for her characters. This chapter analyzes how Can Xue‘s literary 
buildings serve as reflections of the human psyche by incorporating the idiosyncrasies of 
the mind into their construction. It revolves around Can Xue‘s novella ―Life Course‖ as it 
penetratingly demonstrates how the mind is to be understood in terms of architectural 
constructs. 
19 
 
Can Xue‘s novella ―Life Course‖ embodies her attempt to delve deep into the soul in 
the form of a critical reflection of life. In the novella, her exploration is framed in the 
spatialized conception of time and the externalization of the mind structure. Buildings 
stand out as exquisite structures that accommodate the inquiry of the soul by representing 
the structure of the soul in their macrocosmic physical forms. In this sense, the literary 
architecture in the novella mirrors the human soul by taking on an ontological mission 
while the structure laying dormant in the reader‘s mind is to be triggered to map onto the 
given architecture in order to facilitate a correspondence in his/her search of meaning. 
The story of ―Life Course‖ thus unfolds through a revisit to the past in consciousness 
under the guise of the protagonist‘s first-time bewildering adventure into the fantastic 
building where he lives and into the mysterious small town secluded that is from the 
outside world. I will argue that the novella presents the spatialization of the protagonist‘s 
temporal experience of his life. His gradual awakening to the peculiarities of the 
apartment building and his move from the building to the town not only suggest his 
temporal progression from one stage of life to another, but also symbolize his spiritual 
development from an unreflective mode to a heightened awareness of his situation. This 
increasing awareness provokes him to search for the mysterious figure Miss Li. Through 
the process this search he gradually comes closer towards himself. In Can Xue‘s 
conception, this is an arduous but exciting journey into the immeasurable depth of one‘s 
soul. But the soul is not as unfathomable as it is immeasurable. By the architectural 
construction of time, Can Xue seeks to materialize what is intangible and locate/solidify 
the moment that is wearing away; while by the architectural externalization of the 
20 
 
microcosmic world of the psyche, Can Xue illustrates how the human consciousness is 
capable of performing critical self-dissection. 
―Life Course‖ is a representative piece that demonstrates Can Xue‘s spatialized 
vision in detail. It is densely crafted with symbols and allusions woven into its plot and 
characterization. The intricate interrelationships between characters are not based on 
conventional logic and thus are not to be taken literally without referring to the 
philosophical structure of the text.  The following paragraphs will briefly sketch out the 
plot of the novella and introduce the relationships between main characters.  
The story of ―Life Course‖ revolves around the entanglements of the protagonist, Pi 
Puzhun in a series of strange and supernatural events.  These events follow the 
unexpected visit to his apartment of a twenty-three year-old woman, Miss Li, who lives 
in the same apartment building with him. Pi Puzhun, the fifty-two year-old single man, 
has thereafter realized that Miss Li‘s visit has instigated some unknown passion in him 
that propels him to pursue her. Meanwhile, he encounters a chain of similarly eccentric 
residents that bring him into awareness of the peculiarities of the building in which he 
lives. One day during Pi Puzhun‘s search for Miss Li, whose whereabouts become 
increasingly mysterious and uncertain, he loses his way and becomes trapped in a 
secluded small town where everyone seems to have known him for a long time, though 
they treat him as an outsider. He makes acquaintances with several odd figures, who all 
behave suspiciously in a similar manner as the few residents in Pi Puzhun‘s apartment 
building. Although he is cautious at first with the seemingly on-going ―conspiracy‖ 
around him, Pi Puzhun later somehow learns to accept this situation and feels at home 
21 
 
with the town. The story ends with him reaching a new level of awareness of his 
circumstances under the guidance of a woman whom he works for. 
Characters in ―Life Course‖ are the typical obsessive individuals with unpredictable 
temperaments that appear throughout Can Xue‘s fiction. Before the drama takes place, 
the protagonist Pi Puzhun has been living his bachelor life complacently and 
unconcernedly as he repeats his daily routine, which takes him from his apartment on the 
eighth floor to his office. His primary hobby is telling other people, usually neighbors 
who come for a visit, about the news he read from gossip magazines which have long 
been piling up under his bed. He never seems to care if his guests are often offended by 
his prying manner of speaking, if he is aware of it at all. Pi Puzhun‘s unimpressive and 
unreflective life is to be transformed by Can Xue into a spiritual regeneration.  Miss Li is 
among the first to trigger his change by rekindling his fading desire for marriage. This 
realization is accompanied by his awareness that his old habit of letting his thoughts run 
unscrupulously has become increasingly intense recently. Finally, he is not able to sleep 
at night since the night of Miss Li‘s visit. Pi Puzhun later comes to know other strange 
residents in the building: Miss Li‘s ―parents‖ who are actually her uncle and aunt and 
have been living with her on the third floor; Old Wang, who lives with his son and wife 
on the seventh floor; and Old Zeng, who lives alone on the fourth floor and owns an 
apartment elsewhere with Miss Li. Miss Li is apparently vexed by Pi Puzhun‘s obsession 
with talking about his determination to remain single and about his findings from the 
gossip magazines on her first visit and their second encounter. Pi Puzhun then turns to her 
parents for help, and therefore becomes accepted as one of the son-in-laws by working 
for the old couple every day. The old couple is as emotionally unstable as Miss Li. They 
22 
 
ask Pi Puzhun to learn from them to catch the fleas from their old black cat and read the 
stories on his magazines sometimes to entertain them. Old Wang is a crucial character in 
the story as it is he who reveals the secrets of the building to Pi Puzhun. Old Zeng is a 
rich womanizer protagonist in one of Pi Puzhun‘s gossip stories. In a relationship with 
Miss Li, he often serves as a source of Miss Li‘s whereabouts for Pi Puzhun. There are 
two primary sites in ―Life Course,‖ the apartment building and the secluded town. The 
above are the main characters in the first site of the story. When Pi Puzhun later begins to 
live in the mysterious town, he becomes acquainted with a series of people in the town. 
The two sites symbolize two different stages of Pi Puzhun‘s journey into self-exploration. 
My analysis here focuses on the first site since architectural constructions are the primary 
concern of the thesis, the characters from the second site will only be briefly discussed 
later into the investigation.  
The apartment building in ―Life Course‖ is the site where the story unfolds and 
becomes complex. It pushes the plot forward by gradually ensnaring the protagonist in 
complete confusion. The weird behavior of the residents and the logic that makes up 
every seemingly similar discordant and irrelevant speech all appear to suggest a certain 
connection beneath what may be directly observed. Pi Puzhun‘s attention to the building 
itself is initiated by his second visit to Old Wang‘s apartment. To his surprise, he notices 
that Old Wang‘s home is just a small room of only about four square meters, not what he 
remembers as the big room connected to Old Wang‘s wife and son‘s bedrooms the night 
before yesterday. This propels Pi Puzhun to wonder what kind of structure the building 
really has, which is intersected with his amazement at how his encounter with Miss Li 
has triggered something unknown inside him. Old Wang‘s ability to move instantly from 
23 
 
Old Zeng‘s room to another room two floors below without using the stairway further 
dumbfounds him until Old Wang imparts to him the secrets of the building. It happens 
the night when Pi Puzhun follows Old Wang into a room on the fourth floor and walks 
many steps upward in the dark until he feels that they have almost climbed more than ten 
floors above. Then Old Wang opens a door and Pi Puzhun finds himself in Old Wang‘s 
room. Old Wang tells him that when he first moved into the building, his family members 
were the only residents there and he was nearly crushed by the loneliness at night. So he 
spent every night imagining the structure of the building: the shapes of the rooms, 
staircases, and hallways, and the location of the bathrooms and kitchens. As Old Wang 
recalls, ―Soon I got tired of this game, because in this way, my brain itself has become a 
building. When I go inside, doors and windows will open automatically. There in the 
empty rooms mice are running. Next to the stairway a fire extinguisher is exhaling 
bubbles. A tap water pipe keeps making the noise ‗tongtongtong‘‖ (Can Xue’s Self-
Collection 86)
24
.   
Old Wang‘s metaphor illustrates how brain and building could be equivalences by 
hinting at the spatialized nature of perception. The act of ―going inside‖ immediately 
complicates the issue of subjectivity as it not only spatializes the cognitive activity of 
self-reflection but also indicates the need to identify a specific agent of action. Who goes 
inside? It would be hasty to identity the ―I‖ as the agent because, ―I‖, the unified form of 
consciousness disintegrates the moment when a spatial structure of consciousness erects 
to let itself in. To look introspectively is thus to materialize and externalize part of what 
                                                          
24
 All the English translations of Can Xue‘s fiction and critical essays in this thesis are mine. 
24 
 
is called consciousness into spatial constructions and personify the rest as physical people 
who possess the ability to transgress spatial boundaries in order to enable self-perception. 
The totality of the identification of the self, the material that is thought to make up 
consciousness is therefore broken down.  
What is more disturbing about this outlook is that immaterial subjectivity splits into 
two parts: one is only to some extent solidified as static architecture waiting to be 
explored, the other also to a certain degree remains fluid, so as to be able to spatially 
transgress into and out of the other part. It appears that consciousness is deprived of 
unlimited freedom when it turns the gaze inward into itself under this conception. But 
Can Xue will prove that it is this tension created through this self-seclusion that pushes 
the self further and deeper into its inquiry into human nature. In her artistic principles, 
conflicts always constitute the eternal battle for self-knowledge and remain the key to 
elevating the struggle to a new level
25
. This aspect will be further elaborated in the next 
chapter. 
Old Wang‘s conception of his brain as a building is to be understood in terms of the 
structural correspondence between the two entities. He reveals that secret passages have 
been multiplying year by year and that they now have almost taken up all the space inside 
the building: ―As night falls, rooms disappear and every single corner in the building is 
taken by these dark narrow stairways. When you are walking on these paths, you can hear 
some indistinct footsteps far away. But as soon as you approach the source, the sound of 
footsteps would disappear. This is the secret between us three: me, Old Zeng, and Miss Li‖ 
                                                          
25
 See ―Kafka‘s Career‖ (卡夫卡的事业) in Dance of the Dark Soul and ―Spirit and Body: Reading Divine 
Comedy‖(精神与肉体—读神曲) in Can Xue’s Self Collection. 
25 
 
(89). The secret stairways through which Old Wang and others could reach his museum 
and shuttle between different floors and rooms unrestrainedly are symbolic of the 
networks of human consciousness. Old Wang‘s museum that stores Pi Puzhun‘s stuff 
such as the magazines, the broken flashlight, and other things that have been either stolen 
from Pi Puzhun‘s room or discarded by Pi Puzhun himself could be seen as the locus of 
long-term memory. What is special about Pi Puzhun is that he is the only ―outsider‖ to 
the building who has accidentally gotten involved in the secret circle of the Li, Wang, 
and Zeng families. Old Wang comments to Pi Puzhun that in all these years among all the 
normal residents, no one has ever noticed or talked about the hidden passages, even if he 
sometimes mentioned them in his talk. These people, according to Old Wang, only 
thought that he was spreading rumors and did not take him seriously. What Old Wang is 
hinting at in his complaints points to the problem that people seldom revisit their past 
experiences and simply let the memories rest permanently in some secret corner of their 
consciousness until they lose the access to the storage completely. ―I pick up this stuff 
and keep them here. If owners of the stuff come to ask for them someday, I‘ll return them 
intact. But it‘s a pity that this kind of thing never happens. Once people throw them away, 
they‘ll never care,‖ Old Wang says, ―You‘re the only one who remembers what you‘ve 
thrown away‖26 (89).  
Old Wang‘s critique of people‘s attitudes towards memory reflects Can Xue‘s 
notion of time as an indispensible component in the making of identity and one‘s 
contemplation of it. Jianguo Chen‘s interpretation of Can Xue engages itself in the 
                                                          
26
 Old Wang says this because Pi Puzhun remembers the piece of wood he got from a farmer which he had 
discarded long time ago. 
26 
 
discussion of time by pointing out that Can Xue‘s fiction is located in a metaphorical 
present in which the narrative past and imaginary future are condensed (354)
27
. He 
conceives the metaphorical present as ―informed by a lack of a manifest historical place 
and time‖ and thus further contemplates that Can Xue‘s fictions ―take place in a scenario 
of timelessness without specific topography‖ (354). Chen‘s analysis is partly based on 
Can Xue‘s speech at the International Writers Workshop in which she remarked that ―I 
think I am a person without memory…therefore, [I] do not think of, nor even bother to 
think of, the past. I always think of ‗the present‘‖(quoted in Chen 354).  
Although Chen‘s discussion of the metaphorical present insightfully indicates that 
Can Xue handles the matter of time by a fictional distortion of the linearity of temporal 
progression, he does not distinguish in Can Xue‘s reasoning between a unified experience 
of historical time and the individual experience of one‘s lifetime, even if he emphasizes 
individual experience as a central concern of Can Xue‘s exploration. In his elaboration of 
the concept of metaphorical present, he thus does not pay attention to the wording, or 
clarify what he means by ―timelessness‖ is in terms of historical time. When Can Xue 
mentions that she is a person without memory, she is referring to the lack of temporal and 
spatial markers of history in the setting of her fiction, which stands in stark contrast to 
mainstream realist writing. According to her interview with Laura McCandlish, Can Xue 
herself is not interested in relating her fiction to historical and political context; she is 
more concerned with personal experience of the inner world. But this does not 
necessarily means that Can Xue has no concern for individual experience of time and 
                                                          
27
 See Chen‘s article ―The Aesthetics of the Transposition of Reality, Dream, and Mirror: A Comparative 
Perspective on Can Xue.‖ 
27 
 
memory. On the contrary, in her autobiographical collection Movement towards the Light: 
Revisting the Spiritual Scene of Childhood
28
, Can Xue expresses a deep concern for the 
importance of reconstructing/resurrecting childhood, the earliest time experienced by 
individuals.  
In the preface of the book, Can Xue highlights childhood as the origin of art and 
only by re-experiencing childhood through the means of art could people claim a 
history
29
. She criticizes the Chinese people as having no real childhood because they 
never revisit the initial phase. ―Certain miraculous light appears only once in one‘s 
lifetime and then vanishes in the dark. If one does not search for her thereafter during his 
lifetime, it would be the same as if she never comes‖ (2). Can Xue contrasts the Chinese 
condition with the West by commenting that ―Western people have always been 
recollecting, which is the real recollecting. So their time is full of secret passages, one 
after another. They revisit through literature, through painting, through each discipline. 
How wonderful is that performance, how natural the representation is‖ (1). Although she 
explicitly doubts the reliability of human memory, Can Xue is clearly not against 
temporalizing one‘s conception of his/her life through the act of recollecting one‘s past. 
Her disinterest in the collective experience of time does not prevent her from engaging 
actively in the philosophizing of the personal experience of time.  
                                                          
28
 Movement Towards the Light: Revisiting the Spiritual Scene of Childhood(趋光运动—回溯童年的精
神图景). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2008. 
29
 Movement Towards the Light is a collection of Can Xue‘s biographical essays about her early life, in 
which she combines her reflection on her early experiences and her personality with her ideas on literary 
writing. The history which Can Xue talks about in the preface may be seen as more of a personal one. In 
the case of Can Xue herself, it is how she traces the origin and the development of her love for literature 
and her principles of writing through recollecting her childhood in this book. 
28 
 
What is striking about her perspective is the method she chooses to approach the 
past. She provides an alternative to what has been taken for guaranteed as recollecting 
through memory. According to Can Xue, true enlightenment from childhood is achieved 
by recollecting through the abstract means of art. Can Xue thus distinguishes her concept 
of personal history by seeing it not as a natural product of time but as an intentional 
construction made through exploring the traces left through time. ―Things from the depth 
are always connected by some clues with things on the surface, which I might as well call 
them ‗traces‘. As long as you keep searching for them from the place you took off, you 
would eventually find those ‗traces‘. At first, these ‗traces‘ appear to be not what they 
really are. They have to be relying on your gaze at them to become time, to become your 
history. The world of childhood is the world of ‗traces‘‖(2).  
The process of reconstructing one‘s past thus resembles the process of solving a 
jigsaw puzzle. What is special about this picture puzzle is that it is not flat but is like a 
hologram. ―I‘ve come to know that the world I see is like a three-dimensional picture 
after a long long time. That is to say, I‘ve always been seeing the world through a three-
dimensionalized vision‖(Movement Towards the Light 141) 30 . By differentiating her 
vision as three-dimensional, Can Xue is implying that many people observe the world in 
a literal, if not a reductive, way. She distinguishes the three-dimensional inner logic of 
her work from the flat logic and the bizarre appearance on the surface and points out 
imagination as the means of the gaze in order to capture the structural logic inside.  
                                                          
30
 See ― The State of Three-Dimensional Painting―(三维画的境界). 
29 
 
In ―Life Course‖, beneath all the erratic occurrences rests a deep structure of logic 
that reveals a path towards the reconstruction of time, and specifically speaking, towards 
the making of the personal history of the protagonist. The structurality of Can Xue‘s 
interior logic thus requires a corresponding structuralization of the perception of time. As 
the apartment building embodies a part of consciousness, it also incarnates the perception 
of time by means of spatialization. The hidden passages inside the building that multiply 
through time echo what Can Xue suggests as the ones built inside western artists‘ space 
of time as a means of revisiting the childhood. ―Life Course‖ lays down a holographic 
puzzle about time through the textual construction of the apartment building.  
The small town that Pi Puzhun enters marks his progression from a lower level of 
awareness into a higher level. Space again takes on a special connotation in relation to a 
broader framing of time. Since one‘s subjective experience of time as part of 
consciousness can be structuralized to become physical entities in ―Life Course,‖ its 
concrete spatialized representations can vary according to the conditions of the 
experience of time. So representation of experience can also be perceived by the category 
of stages. As Pi Puzhun walks out of the apartment building which represents a certain 
phase of transition from confusion to a certain awareness, he is moving towards another 
stage of consciousness marked by time. This time, the physical containment of his 
struggle transforms into a secluded town where every resident is engaged in pursuing a 
certain agenda. Pi Puzhun is told that no one in the town sleeps at night which is the 
liveliest time of the town. This implies that Pi Puzhun has entered a purer state of 
consciousness, where he still needs to figure out his situation. Pi Puzhun‘s contact with 
several residents gradually brings him closer to enlightenment. 
30 
 
The first realization comes when he is asked to wait in a small tile-roofed house by a 
white-haired woman who claims to be Miss Li. ―The old woman will not come back, it is 
just himself who has replaced her to occupy this house in the wilderness‖ is his 
conclusion after waiting till the next day morning (102). At the same time, he discovers 
that the house is not located in the wilderness but in a lively town, where he is to 
gradually let go of his anxiety for a way back to his former location. As Pi Puzhun begins 
to work for a woman who sells fish, he also starts to receive guidance from the woman 
through their task of making maps. There he learns to accept his situation and no longer 
thinks about returning. He now becomes inspired by the exercise of perceiving in the 
dark:  
Pi Puzhun sits in the small and dim house with thoughts running on like a 
horse… In those thoughts, he never has once thought about returning to 
Wuli Street. There seems to be an invisible hand that has made a cut 
through his dark mind, letting in a shaft of light. He feels that he becomes 
gradually relaxed…the small town is all within his sight…He clearly feels 
that he has been living here in this town for all his life. (116) 
The change in Pi Puzhun‘s thinking reflects a departure from his entanglements in 
the past when he lives in the apartment building on Wuli Street. But still he is to be taken 
further in his realization of his puzzling situation. The woman questions his 
understanding of the word ―travel‖ when he is expecting to travel to the ―outside.‖ What 
she is implying is that travel does not necessarily mean to ―go out‖. This corresponds to 
Can Xue‘s advocation of a spiritual exploration which is directed inward. What awaits Pi 
31 
 
Puzhun at the end of the story is the woman‘s revelation about how the stages of life are 
to be conceived: 
―There‘ll be one day when you will walk out of this house and keep 
straight forward along the street. Then you‘ll meet a person who sells 
won-ton. After you say hello to him and keep on walking, the street will 
disappear after you. The noise of the fire-crackers will also become 
indistinct. At last, you reach a new town. A yellow dog is on solemn guard 
at the entrance of the street.‖(120) 
The spatialized conception of a lifetime visualizes the fluid and intangible index of 
time as a series of independent but interconnected spatial containments. The map that the 
woman has been working on marks all the stages of Pi Puzhun‘s life. Now Pi Puzhun has 
only to accept the overwhelming fact that there is really no exit to his journey, because 
from the very start he has been trapped in the convoluted structure of his own 
consciousness. ―His vision is clear. His ears are vigilant to sounds from everywhere. But 
his body could not move a bit. Facing the woman, he sees clearly, through her indifferent 
eyes, the house that has been deserted at the roadside. From the start he has been 
imprisoned there‖ (120). The abandoned house is the structuralized interiority which has 
long been resting inside him without his awareness. Now he discovers that he has always 
been regulated by an inner structure, which pushes him towards self-dissection by 
throwing him into utter confusion. Can Xue depicts this revelation as painfully disturbing 
to Pi Puzhun. As Welldellsborg has pointed out, the dreamscape created by Can Xue 
transforms the imagined into reality by its totality which denies the possibility of waking 
32 
 
up from it (25)
31
. Thus Pi Puzhun‘s situation offers no resolution to all the drama that he 
has experienced in the story. He has to choose to remain on his journey of life and dive 
deeper and deeper into his own consciousness to perform self-reflection since the 
woman‘s look tells him that he has nowhere to hide (Can Xue’s Self-Collection 120). The 
only problem facing him now is whether he is ready to commit himself to the adventure.  
Previous discussion has revealed that Can Xue‘s magical building is not a rigid 
structure but one that is constantly in motion with dynamic possibilities. The following 
section will explore another aspect of the source of the metaphorical architectural 
dynamism. By turning towards the residents of the building, the discussion will march 
further into how the idiosyncrasies of the mind translate into architecture in Can Xue‘s 
literary imagination.  
The peculiarities of the building are not confined to its physical/inorganic structure. 
As shelter for human beings, building relates to human not only in a physical sense of 
containment but also in a psychological sense which derives from the former. In Can 
Xue‘s contemplation of a metaphysical architecture of the mind, the situation can be seen 
in reverse: the psychological turning becomes the physical. The inner dynamics of the 
building attest to the complexity of the mind structure even in its reflection. However, 
there is more inside the mind than its architectural structure. The eccentric residents of 
the building are an indispensible part of its composition since they act as the force that 
drives the protagonist into contemplation. The apartment building thus becomes more of 
                                                          
31
 See Wedell-Wedellsborg, A. "Haunted Fiction: Modern Chinese Literature and the Supernatural." 
International Fiction Review. 32 (2005): 21-31. Print. 
33 
 
a spiritual dwelling than a physical shelter. The existence of these residents further 
suggests that the architecture of the soul entails a flexible understanding of its nature. 
The eccentric residents like Old Wang, Old Zeng, Miss Li and her family are 
incorporated as an organic component of the dwelling since they all push Pi Puzhun to 
explore and reflect on the unusual features of the building. They are the 
personification/incarnation of the consciousness which is split between a relatively 
unreflective portion that presents the conscious self-identification and the portion below 
the surface consciousness that constantly goes against the other as a reflective agent. 
These characters represent the multi-faceted nature of the sophisticated soul, which 
incorporates the antagonism of various elements within. The idiosyncrasies of these 
characters thus mirror the idiosyncrasies of the mind, which is capable of self-dissection. 
The frequent interrogation and condemnation of the moral integrity of Pi Puzhun by these 
people could be seen as a form of critical reflection of oneself.  
 The story revolves around Pi Puzhun‘s search for Miss Li. She is the first to 
interrupt Pi Puzhun‘s unreflective life. To Pi Puzhun, she is what Can Xue identifies as 
the ―certain miraculous light‖ to be pursued by people in an effort to revisit the past and 
construct a personal history. Pi Puzhun‘s fading sexual drive is not only a marker of his 
aging body, but also a signifier of his declining passion for life. His contentment with his 
single life precludes the possibility of stepping out of his daily routine to examine his life 
critically. Miss Li‘s appearance breaks the pattern and intrigues him to begin nighttime 
exploration in the building. Miss Li repeatedly emphasizes her young age as an asset. She 
34 
 
personifies the impulse that comes from the very early phase of life and sends out an 
invitation to the fifty-two year-old Pi Puzhun for a critical revisit of time.  
Old Wang serves as a collector of Pi Puzhun‘s belongings and a guide for his 
spiritual awakening in the first half of the story. He collects Pi Puzhun‘s magazines and 
many things which he has lost in the past. Pi Puzhun‘s magazines are a frequent concern 
in the characters‘ dialogues. They function as journals that record Pi Puzhun‘s life. As 
Old Wang says to Pi Puzhun 
―It is only when I mentioned it that you remembered it. If didn‘t, then it 
never existed to you. The pencil box now lies in my museum. You made a 
record of this on that magazine of yours. It‘s a pity that you were not 
careful when you read it and so haven‘t found the part till now. You have 
to calm down to read meticulously…Every small happening has been 
recorded on journals. It‘s a pity that you just let them go when you read. 
You have thrown away your history completely. But those magazines 
have recorded it without you knowing it. And now you can‘t make any 
sense of them at all.‖ (Can Xue Self-Collection 94) 
Old Wang reveals that the magazines provide a guide for Pi Puzhun to retrieve his 
lost experiences. The pencil box, the piece of incense wood which an old farmer gives to 
him, and many other things which he has either lost or discarded are an indication of the 
missing components that make up one‘s identity. The linear temporal property of past 
experiences is distorted since the items that condense these experiences are displayed in a 
space of the present tense (i.e. the museum). The only obstacle that prevents access to 
35 
 
them takes the form of a spatial trick that denies direct physical transgression rather than 
the impossibility of temporal reversion.  The unknown stairways stretching 
unrestrainedly inside a limited space of walls and floors frame the past in a magical 
sphere of the present. Old Wang‘s ability to move freely inside the fantastic space and his 
control over the access to Pi Puzhun‘s museum indicates his mastery of the rules of the 
mind structure. He is one among these residents who demonstrates familiarity with Pi 
Puzhun‘s whole life. But, unlike most of these people, he is relatively less critical about 
Pi Puzhun‘s behavior. This could be accounted for by the fact that Old Wang takes upon 
himself the task of transforming people like Pi Puzhun, who possesses the potential to 
initiate an inward adventure into the architecture of his consciousness.  
However, this does not rule out Old Wang as part of the on-going ―conspiracy‖ 
against Pi Puzhun. Framing this ―conspiracy‖ in the historical reference to the political 
persecution and ideological control during Cultural Revolution or even contemporary 
China would be diminishing the sophistication of Can Xue‘s fiction as literature per se. 
The ―conspiracy‖ reveals the extricate pattern of the dynamism within the consciousness 
since it is essentially an internal war that is waged by the mind against itself, in an 
attempt to undermine the rule of the unreflective self. If there is an ultimate plotter behind 
all these ―conspiracies‖ it should be the subconscious ego that is dissatisfied with itself 
and pushes towards a clearer realization of existence. The interrogations by other 
characters to the protagonist thus become a form of self-questioning, a provocative 
dialogue within the consciousness. Can Xue affirms the power of the creative human 
mind to perform self-probation by employing architecture as an analytical tool to 
introduce this process.  
36 
 
This chapter demonstrates that what Can Xue targets at is not necessarily political 
discourse and its enforcement. But rather, an unreflective mode of living if only the 
textual context is concerned. Through ―Life Course‖ we may catch a glimpse of how life 
is conceived by Can Xue and how the philosophical issue of existence is at the center of 
Can Xue‘s aesthetics. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
37 
 
CHAPTER III 
BUILDINGS IN CAN XUE’S CONCEPTION OF THE BODY/SOUL 
RELATIONSHIP 
Chapter Ⅱ emphasized Can Xue‘s projection of the structure of the mind into her 
fiction as architecture. It explored the possibility that the structuralized mind in Can 
Xue‘s aesthetic conception is may be dissected on the temporal scale. It seems that Can 
Xue‘s approach to consciousness entails a pluralist vision of the self as composed of 
multi-faceted and antagonistic fragments. However, it might be risky to assume that the 
structural self, reflected through the architecture, is total or can be traced back to the 
origin of a complete unity. David L. Hall‘s analysis of Taoism as a solution to the crux of 
the postmodern deconstruction of the self 
32
is enlightening for clarifying the fundamental 
philosophical outlook of the current discussion. Hall is quick to reveal that although the 
postmodern conception of the self is illuminating in its appreciation of the aesthetic 
contrast and intensity derived from the fragmentation of self and in its view of the self as 
a temporal process, postmodernism somehow misses the point of enabling a meaningful 
development of the very idea of self-difference which it brings up by denying ―the need 
for a logos, pattern, or structure that makes the self present to itself‖ (224).  To resolve 
the chaos resulting from the postmodern dismantling of an interpretive system of 
selfhood, Hall proposes a cross-cultural recourse to the Taoist framework. While the 
western approach to the self builds fundamentally on a presumed wholeness that has been 
problematized by the postmodernist vision, Taoism is based on an analogical mode that 
                                                          
32
 See 213-234 ―To Be or Not to Be: The Postmodern Self and the Wu-Forms of Taoism‖ in Self As Person 
in Asian Theory and Practice. Ed. Roger T. Ames et al. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 
38 
 
explores the ―correlation of elements with presumed similarities of structure, character, or 
function without the necessity to presume holistic context‖ (229). When discussing Can 
Xue‘s conception of self, the Taoist method of correlativity is instructive for maintaining 
an open and flexible approach to Can Xue‘s architectural construction. The previous 
chapter explored Can Xue‘s building as a reflection of the structure of the soul. This 
should not serve to close the discussion by identifying it as the only paradigm available. 
This chapter resorts to a correlative perspective of an interactive relationship between 
body and soul to examine the significance of Can Xue‘s employment of architecture. The 
two perspectives are related not as complementary components within an assumed 
totality of exploration but as correlative substances that contribute to interpretation 
without postulating a boundary. 
Can Xue‘s artistic principle is firmly grounded in an antagonism between the body 
and the soul, which she deems as essential to artistic creation. Body and soul, the 
corporeal and the immaterial, both are indispensible constituents of her metaphysical 
exploration. ―Humans cannot live whole-heartedly in pure spirit,‖ Can Xue remarks, ―the 
birthplace of the pure spirit is the very dark fleshly body of ours‖(Dance of the Dark Soul 
187)
33
. Can Xue does not consider the distinction between body and soul as a natural 
result from observation. Rather, it is a process to be perpetuated through the internal 
opposition within the entity of human. Can Xue spots the dynamic interaction between 
body and soul as a source of her inspiration. The desire to defend the integrity of the 
spiritual world conflicts with the inextinguishable desire for an earthly life, from which 
                                                          
33
 See ―A Special Kind of Fiction‖(一种特殊的小说). 
39 
 
derives the intense rupture between the soul and the body. Can Xue summarizes what she 
has learned from her experience of years of literary creation as: ―success is due to strong 
rationality of a writer himself/herself, which resembles a killing-machine. The greater the 
force of punishment by rationality, the greater the force the body rebounds with, so that 
the works would soar across the sky like an unrestrained horse. These works, although 
seem to be unfathomable, possess strict inner logic‖ (187). Can Xue considers Kafka as 
the master of this art of the splitting of the self. She investigates Kafka‘s novel The Castle 
to illustrate the significance of the contradiction between the physical composition of 
human beings and the intangible mass that transcends physical description without 
transgressing the bodily boundary. The relationship between the protagonist K and the 
castle represents the eternal conflict between the body and the soul, which signifies the 
tension between the primitive and irrational drive of human beings and its rational 
counterpart
34
.  
In the context of Can Xue‘s architectural construction, the image of people 
exploring the building evokes the body/soul dynamism. The interpretation of this image 
can be two-fold. On the one hand, buildings as physical dwellings that accommodate 
humans are naturally associated with the human body which contains spiritual activities; 
residents with their status of being inside and their mobility thus correspondingly acquire 
the signification of the mind. With this allusion, the carrier of self-consciousness is 
identified as the residents who represent spirituality. On the other hand, however, the 
situation may be the reverse. Can Xue‘s understanding of the body/soul relationship is 
                                                          
34
 See ―Kafka‘s Career―(卡夫卡的事业) in Dance of the Dark Soul. 
40 
 
flexible. In her reading of The Castle, Can Xue extends the locus of self-consciousness to 
the castle and identifies K as the bearer of the primitive instinct that is associated with the 
body: ―K‘s behavior is not dictated by the brain but is actualized through the instinctual 
impulse‖ (Can Xue’s Self-Collection 549). Can Xue accords the initiative of critical self-
examination to the castle by phrasing its performance as the will of the castle. K‘s 
journey of attempting to enter the castle thus is framed as the struggle of the instinct of 
the body against the rationality of the mind that constantly restricts and reproaches bodily 
behavior. Simply put, antagonism between the body and the soul embodies a sustained 
progress of ―becoming‖ towards the completeness of the self by realizing the 
communication between the two different dimensions. Thus, Can Xue‘s notion of the self 
seeks meaning from both the physical and metaphysical dimensions of being as they 
combine to sustain self-consciousness. Buildings in Can Xue‘s fiction therefore could be 
explored in terms of a dynamic relationship with their residents.  
However, this relationship should not be understood as a dualist mind-body 
dichotomy. In this thesis, ―mind‖, ―soul‖, and ―spirit‖ are used interchangeably as Can 
Xue herself does not distinguish between these words in her critical essays, despite the 
different connotations these words possess in the western context. While dualism regards 
the mental and the physical realms as fundamentally different and separate from each 
other, Can Xue views them as intertwining and inseparable, which together contribute to 
the self-consciousness. Even though Descartes proposes the third mode of existence, 
sensation, as the result of the union of the two modes: the mind and the body as its 
extension, his notion of the union does not entail an equal merge between the two. 
Marleen Rozemond has resolved the seemingly inconsistency in Descartes‘ view by 
41 
 
pointing out that Descartes ―regards sensations as modes of the mind as united to the 
body‖ instead of advocating a trialistic interpretation of sensation as an independent third 
mode that results from the union (201)
35
. The nature of this mode of sensations thus 
differs from Can Xue‘s notion of an antagonistic ―merge‖ between the mind the body.  
Buildings as carrier of the human will materialize what has been seen as the 
incorporeal mind, whose mobility is both limited and infinite: limited in the sense that the 
structure is confined to its physical sphere; infinite in the sense that by reaching out to the 
corporeal the mind architecture extends its potential of self-inspection. This chapter thus 
investigates Can Xue‘s building in terms of its relationship with its residents as the 
relationship between the soul and the body and seeks to reveal how the body/soul 
dynamism is central to Can Xue‘s aesthetic of literary creation. 
The following discussion will be devoted to two of Can Xue‘s short stories: ―In the 
Wilderness‖ and ―The Rainscape‖.  While the former sketches out the picture of two 
solitary beings wandering in the dark in a large house which is full of empty rooms, the 
latter portrays the image of a person lingering outside a granite building in search of 
answers to the incongruity between body and mind. Analysis of the two positional 
relationships between characters and architecture will demonstrate the intertwinement of 
body and soul and what it reveals about human existence.  
―In the Wilderness‖ speaks of the bewilderment and pain of bodily confinement in 
its sensational depiction of a couple‘s struggle inside a house at night. The language 
                                                          
35
 See Rozemond‘s book Descartes’s Dualism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998. 
Relevant discussion can be found in Chapter 6 ―Sensation and the Union of Mind and Body‖ 172-213. 
42 
 
accentuates the pungent sensory details that evoke the imagination of physical pain. Yang 
Xiaobin has called attention to the frequent image of swelling in Can Xue‘s works. He 
interprets the depiction of swelling as a bodily reaction to the unreasonable violence 
during China‘s political chaos (76)36. What is relevant to the current discussion is that the 
emphasis on physical injuries such as swelling connotes more than physical experience of 
pain: to Yang Xiaobin, it is the mental trauma that has been inflicted by the dark period 
of persecution; but for this discussion, it is the spirit that imposes the experience of pain 
on the body. Rather than Yang‘s emphasis on what has been derived from it, physical 
deterioration itself may deserve more attention. In her analysis of Dante‘s Divine 
Comedy
37
, Can Xue explains the necessity for the spirit to torture the body in an attempt 
to transform it to better accommodate spiritual development. Pure rational performance 
of self-reflection is believed by Can Xue to be insufficient for reaching a ground-
breaking level of self-awareness. In her view, Divine Comedy epitomizes the tale of the 
everlasting artistic struggle between the spirit and the body as it captures the beauty of 
the strength of both the spirit and the body in their passionate confrontation with each 
other. The fire that boils the bitumen of the inferno in which the bodies of the ghosts are 
tormented is considered by Can Xue as the art of God. The desperate revolt of the body 
under the tyranny of the spirit would then transform into a ferocious beast to seek 
revenge. According to Can Xue, it is the ―body which appears in the ‗adverse‘ role that 
dictates the structure of the spirit‖ since ―the greedier and crueler the she-wolves, 
                                                          
36
 See chapter 5 ―Can Xue: Ever-Haunting Nightmares‖, The Chinese Postmodernism: Trauma and Irony 
in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction. 
37
 See ―Spirit and Body: Reading Divine Comedy― (精神与肉体—读残雪), Can Xue’s Self-Collection. 
43 
 
leopards, and lions are, the more complicated and developed the world created by the 
spirit is‖ (Can Xue’s Self-Collection 643-644). Physical affliction thus becomes a promise 
for spiritual enlightenment.  
―In the Wilderness‖ substantiates the agony experienced by the body by amplifying 
the physical sensations when two individuals are placed under the same roof. The story 
starts with the wandering of the wife, unable to sleep, who discovers her husband 
similarly wandering in the dark one night. The two are apparently surprised and 
frightened by each other‘s existence during night and begin to wander in the big house 
like two ghosts every night ever since. Their dialogues do not seem to perform the 
function of normal communication as they talk on completely different planes. The 
husband often speaks of his imagination of his physical experience outside the house in 
the present tense as if he was right out in the wilderness at the time. For instance, he says 
to his wife, ―You know, at night, there is freezing rain in the wilderness. I‘m rambling 
there, with my back completely soaked, on which freezes an ice shell. From where a 
stranger‘s footsteps are resounding, and who is walking there?‖(A Dreamscape that has 
Never Been Described 27). While the husband is fascinated by the space outside the 
house, the wife refuses any imagination of the outside and constantly fears what is inside, 
especially the big shiny hypodermic needle on the rubber tourniquet that her husband 
always plays with. Her anxiety resides in what is beyond immediate perception as she 
compares the dream that has been chasing her to a shark that devours humans.  
The woman and her husband‘s difference may be discerned in their attitudes towards 
their house. At the beginning when the husband moved in, he merrily filled up each 
44 
 
empty room with boxwood plants on the windowsills. But he never watered them and so 
he had to throw them all away after they died, leaving the empty pots looking like 
skeletons at night. He therefore loathes the infertility of the place and resorts to 
daydreaming for relief. The wife, having been living there since childhood, is content 
with seeking shelter inside the barren house. Her biggest concern is with her husband‘s 
eerie behavior such as chewing his rubber tourniquet during sleep. The function of the 
house thus is two-fold: a place of imprisonment for the husband and a protective shelter 
for the wife before her tranquility is ruined by her husband‘s intrusion. This inconsistency 
is at first temporarily resolved by each making his or her footsteps louder to avoid 
accidentally bumping into each other in the dark. 
Their presence inside the building may be understood directly as souls exploring 
within the boundary of the body. The conflict between the two on the one hand indicates 
the controversy within one personality and on the other posits the impossibility of a real 
spiritual union between two individuals. If the husband‘s move-in could be seen as an act 
of infringement upon the independence of the other‘s spiritual world, the physical 
breakdown of the wife and the gruesome solidarity facing the husband at the end suggests 
how much they have risked by attempting to fit into one shell as one.  
Yet the story could also be approached from the opposite side of the body/soul 
relationship. The sterility of the house exposes the couple‘s vulnerability by bringing 
them into a direct confrontation. In the context of Can Xue‘s belief in the critical power 
generated by the tyrant-rebel relationship of the two dimensions of being, the infertility of 
the building denotes a means of punishment of the two physical beings by the building as 
45 
 
incarnation of the rational spirit. The severity of their bodily affliction thus is to be 
appreciated for its rich texture of experience as a gesture of resistance. The wife‘s 
experience of fear is embedded in her perception of the tangible environment. When they 
are dreaming awake, she observes that ―his feet stretch that long, to the extent of 
strangeness. An ice-cold foot palm with big knuckles has touched her pillow. One of the 
fingers is swelling like a carrot‖(28). It is the sight of the sensational scene of corporeal 
disfigurement that pushes her towards her own deterioration. As she watches dark blood 
dripping from the needle on the wall and the rubber tourniquet convulsing and squeezing 
the fluid inside, the wife is transposed to the wilderness where she walks in the freezing 
rain with her whole body swelling and water oozing from her fingers. However, Can Xue 
does not describe her subjective feeling of pain on this occasion. The woman is numbed 
by her desire for sleep and can barely stay awake while walking. Instead, she writes, ―She 
moves clumsily towards the groaning while dozing, tramping on one puddle after another 
who cry out their pain‖ (29). In this case, the experience of pain is transferred from the 
immediate subject to the environment. It indicates that bodily suffering can transcend the 
physical origin to afflict on the larger context that conceives its components.  
―In the Wilderness‖ contemplates the fantastic space where the mind subsumes the 
corporeal with its metaphysical power of imagination. The depressing architectural space 
contributes to the imagination of the wilderness by igniting the bodily desire to go 
beyond its boundary. The wife has been resisting the temptation until near the end of the 
story when she is appalled by the bloody scene in the room. Her body is horrifyingly 
transfigured as she attempts to reconfigure the corporeal to fit into the metaphysical 
substance that constitutes the space of the wilderness. But she is no longer afraid of 
46 
 
physical punishment since it is now the nonphysical environment that feels the pain of 
her body. She further seeks revenge on her husband, who tortures her with his aspiration 
for the wilderness. Her presence in the wilderness becomes transparent as a result of her 
physical deterioration. She approaches the man with the sound of her footsteps. He then 
can no longer maintain his composure in the wilderness and cries ―This is but a dream, 
the dream I wish!‖(29). He then finds himself alone and the sound of his wife‘s footstep 
appears only to be his imagination while ―the imaginative footsteps stop by his side‖(29). 
Although he cannot see or hear her, he still feels that an invisible hand is touching his 
foot toes and causing him pain.  
The last paragraph of the story goes: ―The wall clock breaks on the last strike. Gears 
fly towards the sky like a flock of small birds. The twisted rubber tourniquet sticks tightly 
to the dirty wall. On the ground splashes a pool of poignant back blood‖ (29). The ending 
signals the disintegration of the forward movement of time within the space of the house. 
Thus, the house is trapped in the eternal darkness of the night, which in turn suggests a 
new state of spirituality as the mind is not constrained by the clear sight under the 
daylight. Blood in the story does not apply to bodily injuries. The transformation of the 
wife‘s body is accompanied by water, instead of blood, exuding from her body as a result 
of swelling. Only when the hypodermic injector is attached to the wall does blood appear. 
In this sense it seems that the body is less corporeal as the mind is less incorporeal. The 
transformation of both the body and the mind is embodied in the intertwining relationship 
between the resident and the architecture. ―In the Wilderness‖ thus reflects on the 
antagonistic union between mind and body by showing how each can be transfigured in 
the battle against each other. At the end of the story, the boundary between the physical 
47 
 
and the spiritual is no longer distinct. The wife is released from her fear of physical 
torture and acquires a new dimension of life that is invisible to the husband while the 
house and the wilderness suffer from physical affliction and stops being subjected to the 
perception of time. The story thus recognizes the role of both the mind and the body in 
the contribution to spiritual exploration by concretizing the two in the relationship 
between architecture and people.  
―The Rainscape‖ presents a different picture of the body/soul relationship by 
relating the attempt of the body to bridge the gap with the mind in terms of the 
experience of time. Rather than elaborating on the general confrontation between body 
and soul as in ―In the Wilderness,‖ it approaches the relationship through the focal point 
of the perception of time. It seeks to reveal the incongruity in time perception between 
the two without providing a solution to resolve the difference.  
The story revolves around the protagonist‘s attempt to understand the grey granite 
building which she has been ingoring for years. The building, which is located about a 
hundred meters away from the window of the protagonist‘s room, embodies the boundary 
between the physical and the spiritual dimensions of experience. The brand new golden 
lock hole on the small black gate in front of the building indicates how few visits to the 
building have been made, which corresponds with the protagonist‘s years of negligence.  
The protagonist‘s inquiry into the mysterious building centers on what she refers to 
as the huge time difference between the inside and the outside of the building. As the 
protagonist‘s exploration of the building unfolds through her reflection upon the leaving 
of her second little brother, the time difference leads her to ask herself the question 
48 
 
―When a person disappears through the wall like a shaft of light, what exactly is time to 
him?‖(307). Her concern with the first time traveling of her second little brother stirs up 
the memory of the death of her first little brother unconsciously, which is realized 
through her first visit to the building. There she finds a person crying in the dark empty 
corridor who says to her, ―You witnessed the happening of that event on the 18th of April‖ 
(306). But his face remains in shadow no matter how close she gets. Despite the fact that 
she cannot recognize him, the protagonist instinctively identifies him as her second little 
brother and she begs him not to leave her. The encounter ends as the man dashes out 
when all the doors along the hallway suddenly open. The date of the 18
th
 April later turns 
out to be the date of her first little brother‘s death when she asks her husband about it. 
Facing her husband‘s surprise at her forgetfulness, she simply replies ―During the night, 
people forget everything completely‖ (307).  
Although the protagonist, as the first-person narrator, refrains from relating any 
feeling towards the loss of her first little brother, her anxiety over her second brother‘s 
departure and her curiosity for the experience of time reveals the impact of her first 
brother‘s death on her perception. Her forgetfulness about the date of the death and her 
inability to explain the time difference between the inside and the outside of the 
architecture suggests a state of disconnection between her and the building. The conflict 
between body and mind thus is embodied in the difference senses of time. The 
protagonist‘s experience inside the building implies the lingering of the memory of her 
brother‘s death which has been forgotten by her for years, which indicates how the event 
constitutes the flow of time inside. On the outside, however, she appears to have no 
49 
 
concern about it until the leaving of her second little brother kindles her desire to connect 
with the happenings which she has left inside the building.  
The incongruity between her experiences of time indoors and outdoors of the 
architecture alludes to a conflict between the physical and incorporeal dimensions of 
being through the matter of time. A young couple, a tall man and a woman with a limp, 
who she has seen passing the building, later turn out in a second visit, to be a middle-
aged man with a wig and an old man. This finding serves as a telling suggestion of the 
discrepancy between different chronological planes of experience. When the exterior 
sensation peels off, the interior is exposed to be at a disparate moment of time. The 
protagonist‘s misperception serves as an expression of the rupture between her own body 
and mind. As she gets close to her spiritual entity which takes the shape of the building, 
her observation of the signs of time transforms. Her perception of her second little 
brother‘s leaving also changes while she wonders how the two people can adapt to the 
huge time difference inside the building if they are not ghosts. She comes to the 
understanding that her brother‘s leaving is only a surface impression, not an essential 
reality as she thinks to herself: ―He left by bus. But that is only the surface phenomenon, 
which stays in the parents‘ mind‖ (310). On the one hand, her perception suggests her 
acceptance of what the second brother‘s leaving implicitly points to: the impact of her 
first little brother‘s death on her psyche. On the other, her realization hints at the cause of 
the time difference between the internal mind and the external body: the lingering mental 
impression leads the spiritual sensation of time to develop at a different pace from the 
physical procession of time.  
50 
 
To the protagonist, mortal human beings cannot adjust to the time difference of the 
inside because his/her existence is realized through both of the two realms of the 
corporeal and the spiritual while a ghost lives through only the intangible realm. The 
incongruity between the two presupposes a state of conflict, which is amplified through 
the lens of time experience in the story. The death of the protagonist‘s brother stimulates 
her to reflect on what time means to the dead since the body ceases to be subjected to the 
passing of time at the point of physical disintegration. The intangible soul, in contrast, 
lives on according to its own rules of time.  
Can Xue does not offer a closure to this state of incongruity between the bodily and 
mental perceptions of time. At the end of the story, the protagonist continues her 
wonderment at the mysterious building while facing it every day through the window. 
The building serves as a barrier between the two spaces, each of which runs according to 
its own clock. It indicates the impossibility of synchronizing the physical and the spiritual 
experience within an individual while revealing the corporeal desire for a more 
harmonious union. By bringing out this conflict through the construction of the granite 
building, ―The Rainscape‖ probes into the nature of the body/soul relationship and 
discloses the crux of the irreconcilability between the two. Together with ―In the 
Wilderness,‖ ―The Rainscape‖ explores how Can Xue‘s architecture functions to flesh 
out the exploration of various issues at the heart of human existence. 
 
 
 
51 
 
CHAPTER IV  
BUILDING AS CAN XUE’S FICTIONAL SPACE 
The previous two chapters have established Can Xue‘s employment of the 
architectural metaphor of buildings in the context of the explorations of human 
metaphysical existence. This chapter takes a step back to examine how buildings can 
symbolize Can Xue‘s fictional space as a whole. Can Xue uses her fictionally constructed 
architecture on another level to incorporate the interaction between reader, text, and 
author into her narrative universe. By internalizing the reading process which operates in 
the intermediate zone between text and people within the system of her fiction, Can Xue 
comments on the relationship between reader and author on a textual level and transforms 
her fiction into a transcription of her conceptualization of the reading process. She thus 
unites the two dimensions of space in embedding the extratextual mechanism into the 
architectural framework in her works. In so doing, Can Xue reinforces her defense of her 
fictional world.  
Can Xue‘s stories often feature the plot of people visiting or entering by accident 
some strange buildings, which serves to accentuate the act of intruding by accident (闯
入). This narrative focus on the act of unexpected entering could be traced to Can Xue‘s 
reflection on the reader‘s role in textual exploration with the author. As Can Xue arms 
her fictional space with intricate spatial structures which have been invested with deep 
philosophical concerns, she places heavy emphasis on readers‘ creative ability to break 
into the convoluted structure of her work to join her exploration of the human psyche.  In 
her essays about her reflections on literary writing, she often discusses her intended 
52 
 
readership. She remarks that ―the relationship between reader and author becomes that of 
collaborators during the process of extending the meaning of the works‖ and that 
―passive reading is completely rejected‖ (Dance of the Dark Soul 221)38. Although Can 
Xue recognizes that her works may not be accepted by the majority, she maintains hope 
for an increasing readership that comes from a variety of backgrounds and who are 
willing to follow the inner desire in themselves to contemplate on their spiritual existence 
despite the changing modern environment that may have forced them to lose their old 
beliefs and faiths.  
One term Can Xue often uses to describe her potential readers is the ―modern 
person‖(现代人), which is defined as ―people who always concentrate on their souls and 
listen to their souls‖ (Dance of the Dark Soul 196). Her wording for this term implies a 
determination to break through the traditional bondages of humans that have distanced 
people from their souls as well as an ambition to cater to a growing mass of readers in a 
new metaphysical context of human existence. Can Xue‘s conception of the idea of 
―modern person‖ as her intended reader can be associated with her reflection on literary 
writing in mainland China, in which she points out the problem for mainland literary 
practitioners to be the lack of aspiration for personal spiritual independence (Dance of the 
Dark Soul 217-218)
39
. She criticizes the banal desire to embody the concern for reality in 
literary expression that, according to her, has little to contribute to real literary creation. 
Since Can Xue places individuality at the heart of the many standards for truly significant 
                                                          
38
 See ―Structure of the Spirit ―(精神的层次). 
39
 See ―Great Works in My Heart‖. 
53 
 
literature, she considers material reality which blurs individual spiritual distinction and 
constrains spiritual freedom as unworthy of literary exploration. What intrigues her is the 
world that transcends daily experience and extends beyond what may be imagined. Her 
elaboration reveals her awareness of the need to defend personal spiritual integrity in 
literary creation against the mundanization of literature that chains us to the immediately 
available world of the corporeal. Can Xue‘s defense of her fictional world is constituted 
by not only the elusive language and logic that permeate every line of her fiction but also 
the architecture that metaphorizes her fictional space in general. In many of her stories 
about the experiences of visiting some mysterious buildings, Can Xue provides the 
possibility for the first person narrator to enter her buildings while limiting his/her 
freedom inside the space with surrealist entrapment. Can Xue‘s claim that her fiction is 
open to all despite its strong exclusiveness (196) suggests her intention to incorporate the 
reader into her exploration while maintaining a certain authorial control over the textual 
space. By guarding her fictional space with a surreal barrier that filters out the influence 
of uninspiring material reality, Can Xue manages to maintain her unique mental 
landscape that perpetuates through her fiction.  
The following analysis will focus on the short story ―The Journey back Home‖ to 
illustrate how Can Xue projects the external reading process into the fiction itself by 
allegorizing the building as her body of fictions. As in her other stories about visits to 
fantastic buildings, the story adopts the first person narrator. The perspective from a 
bewildered visitor presumes limited access to knowledge about the house in ―The 
Journey back Home‖ and serves to echo readers‘ experience of entering Can Xue‘s 
bizarre spiritual landscape that is not subject to everyday sensibility. By revealing the 
54 
 
fantastic transcendental landscape meditated within the house, the story demonstrates the 
potential of what the reader-author interaction can bring to the normality of the 
commonsensical world.  
The story begins with the narrator setting out on a routine trip to a house on the edge 
of a large meadow on a dark moonless night. But the trip turns out to be different from 
the previous ones. In his past trips, the protagonist would drop by the house to have tea 
with the host. After that the host would see the protagonist off till a turn and then the 
protagonist would move on to a forest of banana trees. This time the narrator walks into a 
subtle situation since he/she only feels his/her way by instinct due to the surrounding 
darkness. By the time the protagonist reaches the house, there is no light indoors and the 
host confesses to him that he had been hiding the fact that the house is actually located on 
the edge of a cliff and that it is dangerous to light the house.  
The host refers to the protagonist‘s entering by the word ―闯入‖ (intruding by 
accident) , which alludes to Can Xue‘s expectation of the manner in which her readers 
make their way into her fiction. ―The Journey back Home‖ further elucidates how 
intrusion can be realized by depicting the mental process of the protagonist when he/she 
makes the act unintentionally. At the beginning of the story, the narrator emphasizes 
his/her familiarity with the place as he/she recalls one experiment he/she has made with 
his/her little brother: they walked for ten minutes on the meadow with eyes closed and 
did not stumble. The protagonist‘s familiarity with the neighborhood leads him/her to 
take the visit for granted and expect nothing more than a brief drop-in as usual. His/her 
sense of security allows him/her to let down his/her rational guard and follow his/her 
55 
 
instincts when the surroundings are too dark to rely on the commonsensical logic of the 
day. Can Xue makes it clear that one difficulty facing a new reader may be the absence of 
the conventional objects of reference during reading. She expects the reader to turn the 
gaze inward to take his/her heart as the sole reference (196). When the external world 
loses its significance as the world of reference, the wall surrounding the internal soul 
dissolves and sets it free.  
Can Xue sees her works in terms of not only the text itself but also the extension that 
results from the metaphoric connection built between texts and extratextual entities. She 
predicts a gradual process in which the source of metaphor will shift from the outside to 
the inside. What Can Xue suggests by this process is not a case of textual withdrawal 
from external referentiality, which constricts the horizons of her fictional realm, but 
instead a mode of expansion to the transcendental sphere, which is unbounded by the 
ideologies of the physical world. Through this process, Can Xue attempts to remove the 
extraneous forces that claim significance in the narrative universe and thus strengthen her 
control over the space. In the case of ―The Journey back Home,‖ Can Xue sets the rule 
that once a person gets into the house by means of intrusion he/she will never be able to 
get out. When the protagonist tries to stand up and walk, he/she falls to the ground as if 
he/she is tripped by some supernatural force. Can Xue subsumes the architectural space 
under the spell of the self-regenerating impulse of her imagination that entraps the first 
person narrator ―I‖. The ―I‖‘s entrapment is particularly manifested in the change of the 
landscape outside the house. As the protagonist attempts to escape by crawling out of the 
house, what meets his/her eyes is not the meadow but some unknown thing that keeps 
moving underfoot. No matter which direction the protagonist goes, he/she cannot reach 
56 
 
the meadow. Only when he/she arrives at the cliff does the protagonist realize that his/her 
previous impression of the landscape ceases to apply as a reliable referent for his/her 
action. That the different directions all lead to the same end suggests a state of self-
containment that forbids transgression not by limiting the spatial mobility in the fictive 
world but by directing all the efforts to the same destination. Furthermore, the 
protagonist‘s freedom to move through space transforms into a freedom of imagination 
when he/she becomes trapped in the house. Previous description of the environment 
around the house is later replaced by the narrator and the house owner‘s envisioning of 
the landscape and events outside the house the narrator‘s dream and during their 
inconsistent dialogues.  
One central topic of their conversation is the former house owner. The current host 
of the house tells the protagonist that the former owner who built this house must have 
jumped off the cliff and that the current house owner him/herself only came to the house 
by accident. But his/her narrative is full of contradictions and inconsistencies. According 
to his/her words, that the former owner has jumped off the cliff is his/her speculation. 
After the protagonist secretly illuminates the room with a lighter, the present owner 
comments on the destruction in the room after the explosion which is only observed by 
him/her. S/He then starts to talk about a shipwreck in which the killed fisherman might be 
the former owner. However, his/her conjecture then shifts naturally to an affirmation of 
hearsay that the owner died with his face buried in the bottom of the water instead of 
upward towards the house on the cliff.  
57 
 
After some immeasurable amount of time as the space of the house persists through 
everlasting night that makes the calculation of time impossible, the current host of the 
house begins to start every conversation with the statement that the boat of the former 
house owner has arrived, which contradicts his/her previous claim that the house owner 
has died in an accident. This capricious declaration on the part of the current owner of the 
house confounds the temporal thread of the story of the former house owner and expands 
the narrative possibility horizontally through the repetition and distortion of time as the 
narrative axis. It thus allows spatial development to exert greater command over the 
narrative flow. As the protagonist gradually frees his/her thoughts from everyday logic 
and synchronizes with the idiosyncrasies of the architectural space, he/she starts to 
participate in the imagination of what the former house owner might do when he passes 
by and contributes to the exploration by relating his/her trancelike meditation over the 
route that leads to the house. As opposed to his/her previous attempts to escape, the 
narrator reflects on his/her effort to search for the only road to the meadow every time 
he/she came for a visit in retrospect. The shift of attention from the way out of the 
enigmatic space to the way into it points to a significant change in the protagonist‘s 
contemplation of his/her relationship with the seemingly restraining space of the house. 
Moreover, the language of his/her narrative becomes increasingly imaginative and 
elusive. His/her recollection is mystified by his/her dreamlike experience of being chased 
by a flamingo which appears to be running without moving forward. The recollection 
ends with the narrator‘s conviction that there is more than one way to approach the house 
as he/she asks him/herself the question whether the flamingo will come.  
58 
 
The protagonist‘s perspective resembles the process by which a reader probes into 
the Can Xue‘s fictional space. The recollection of the protagonist suggests that his/her 
entering occurs in fact not by chance but as a result of his/her subconscious aspiration for 
the house. This alludes to Can Xue‘s idea that her works ―remain open to the readers 
while being exclusive at the same time since they send out invitations directly to those 
minds who have spiritual pursuits disregard the gaps of identity, class, and so on‖ (Dance 
of the Dark Soul 205)
40. In ―The Journey back Home‖ the protagonist is the only one, 
according to the host, who enters the reflective space. The host has received many guests 
who merely pass by as the protagonist did before. But the protagonist manages to 
penetrate the invisible barrier that dissolves at night by following his/her impulse and 
exploring the route to the house hundreds of times. This indicates Can Xue‘s expectation 
for the reader to be persistent in his/her attempts to search for the path into her fictional 
space which takes the form of the fantastic buildings that are perplexing to the 
newcomers. Can Xue allegorizes the relationship between reader and author as that 
between guest and host. This conception suggests Can Xue‘s insistence on her control 
over the space in order to maintain its singularity and integrity by fending off forces of 
commonsensical rationality which might accompany the reader‘s entrance. The host‘s 
provocative power over the conversation attests to Can Xue‘s incorporation of her 
presence into the text. However, Can Xue also suggests that her presence is not supposed 
to be that of a dictator who exerts exclusive control over the development of her narrative. 
Although Can Xue declares that she only writes her story, she understands that her fiction 
could only exist through the process of communicating with the reader (201). Her 
                                                          
40
 See ―The Minority of Literature‖(文学的少数派). 
59 
 
adoption of the first-person narrator corresponds with her idea that her ―experience of 
time must be attested through reader‘s experience of time‖ (201). In ―The Journey back 
Home‖ the first-person narrator as the reader accentuates reader‘s presence and presents 
his/her experience of the textual space. It thus demonstrates how the reader, as a visitor, 
can contribute to the conception of the transcendental space.  
The title ―The Journey back Home‖ is a suggestive point for reflecting on the 
thematic context of Can Xue‘s story. The title may first appear to be contradictory since 
literally in the story the protagonist is trapped in a place that is away from home. By 
describing the protagonist‘s metaphysical journey to the house as the journey back home, 
Can Xue envisions her fiction as the dwelling that accommodates spiritual exploration. 
At the same time, she also suggests that the metaphorical house should be a point of 
departure instead of a destination. The imagination of the protagonist and the current 
house owner about the previous owner who builds the house points to Can Xue‘s hope 
that she and her reader can explore the past of humanity and thus open themselves up to 
new potential which will carry them further in their quest into humanity (201). In ―The 
Journey back Home‖ the former house owner is imagined in relation to the sea below the 
cliff on which the house is located. This association is linked to Can Xue‘s view of the 
history of spiritual exploration, as she remarks ―in the spiritual realm of humans, down at 
the hell at the bottom, there really exists such a long river of history‖ (221). To Can Xue 
this ancient river persists through the efforts of numerous predecessors who vitalize the 
water with their spiritual power. The story thus frames the reader-author exploration in 
the historical development of the literature of the soul. As the characters picture how the 
former owner has died and how he has been living on as a fisherman, the story of ―The 
60 
 
Journey back Home‖ initiates a revisit to the past of the contemplative experience and 
revives the moments of artistic epiphany achieved by the precursors. In this context, Can 
Xue resigns from the position of the designer of the building and assumes the role of a 
host who inherits the building from her predecessor. She therefore takes the responsibility 
of receiving people like the protagonist who are drawn into the fantastic architectural 
space and guiding them to adapt to the new life inside. ―The Journey back Home‖ thus 
presents the journey into the interiority of Can Xue‘s fictional universe by capturing the 
process within a visit to the building in the story.  
Other stories written by Can Xue also echo this concern with the microscopic 
projection of the interaction between reader, text, and author into the textual construction 
of the buildings in her fictional space. In ―The Bizarre Wooden Building‖ the 
protagonist‘s visit to a person who lives on the top floor of a high-rise wooden building 
which is erected into the clouds resembles the plot of ―The Journey back Home,‖ though 
is less explicitly manifested. All the puzzles around the building similarly compel the 
first-person narrator to think about the reasons beneath the incredible appearance. 
However, unlike ―The Journey back Home‖ in which the protagonist manages to be 
incorporated to the transcendental space of the building, this story presents the possibility 
in which the protagonist fails to break through the mechanism that controls the entrance 
into the reflective architectural space. By providing a countering case, Can Xue 
demonstrates the rigor of her fictional sphere. Architecture thus assumes the role of a 
protective fortress that maintains the order inside while testing the strength of the 
intruders to determine who are eligible to enter as long-term residents. This chapter 
discusses the broader implication of the motif of buildings on Can Xue‘s fiction and 
61 
 
reveals how the extratextual context is embedded within the textual constitution through 
the employment of buildings. The significance of this microcosmic projection rests in the 
manifestation of the potential of Can Xue‘s narrative in terms of its reflective capacity on 
literary creation and interpretation. It complements the relative detachment in respect to 
the external context in the outlook of her fiction. Can Xue‘s motivation to render her 
narrative space a locus of transformation of the reading agents on the one hand 
demarcates the boundary of her textual realm while on the other absorbs the usually 
extraneous negotiating process between reader, author, and text into the composition of 
her fictional realm. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
62 
 
CHAPTER V  
CONCLUSION 
Previous chapters have probed into the significance of Can Xue‘s construction of 
buildings in her fiction. The first aspect has been illustrated through the representational 
power of the design of the apartment building in reflecting the mind structure that is 
entrenched in the flow of time in the novella Life Course. The exquisite structure of the 
building embodies the solidification of the fluid and irreversible axis of time in mental 
perception by means of spatial representation. In this process, the internally conceived 
human consciousness is captured in a split between an externalized architectural entity 
and a personified agent, which together forge the reflective power of the mind. The 
second aspect of significance originates from a correlative perspective that situates the 
metaphysical function of buildings in Can Xue‘s philosophical contemplation of the 
antagonism between body and soul by relating buildings to human beings. Discussion of 
―In the Wilderness‖ explored two possible patterns of the mapping between the 
relationship between buildings and people and the relationship between body and soul, 
which suggests Can Xue‘s flexibility in employing architecture to facilitate the 
transformative interaction between body and soul. ―The Rainscape,‖ on the other hand, 
focuses on the incongruity between body and soul in terms of the experience of time 
which is revealed through the protagonist‘s attempt to harmonize with the building of her 
mind. The last aspect of significance of Can Xue‘s buildings emerges when buildings are 
examined against the backdrop of the fictional space. Stories like ―The Journey back 
Home‖ project the experience of probing into the narrative containment into a 
63 
 
microcosmic visit to the building within the containment and thus add another layer to the 
function of architectural construction in her works. This suggests a meditative attempt on 
the part of the fiction at conceiving its configuration on the extratextual level, which 
resembles a process of self-dissection.  
This study of Can Xue‘s construction of buildings in her fiction takes a step away 
from the historicization of textual meaning which dominates current debates on Can 
Xue‘s fictional works. The tendency of resorting to historical context for interpretive 
strategies is part of the general trend which has been taking place in the studies of modern 
Chinese literature in the United States. Wendy Larson has noted that the wide application 
of a variety of approaches developed through critical theory in literary studies, such as 
new historicism and cultural studies, has marked a substantial move away from literary 
text as the essential source of interpretation
41
. She discerns the danger of substituting 
aesthetic interpretation with social and historical contextualization and advocates for a 
balance between the two as both allow for profound exploration of literature. This study 
echoes Larson‘s thought by exploring an alternative to the sociohistorical framing of 
literary text. It posits the mechanism of the text as a significant locus of meaning which is 
no less intricate and provoking than its connection with specific sociohistorical context. 
The motif of buildings manifests the aesthetic constitution of the text, from which derives 
the philosophical reflection on issues around human subjectivity as well as on literary 
creation. While sociohistorical approaches offer insightful revelation of the literary 
expression of human social condition by examining the text in terms of its embeddedness 
                                                          
41
 See ―Conclusion: History and Literary Aesthetics in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature‖, From AhQ 
to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20
th
 Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 
2009. 
64 
 
in the societal context, they alone are insufficient to carry the investigation further 
beyond what is sensationally present in human existence realized through literature. The 
various textual impulses that contribute to a broad transcendental contemplation of the 
themes and issues concerning human experience exhibit distinct aesthetic patterns that 
are worth close study by themselves.  
This study of Can Xue further stirs up what Rey Chow has illustrated as the problem 
of the obsession with ―Chineseness‖ in the study of Chinese literature42. She observes the 
tendency for scholars in North America to centralize the Chinese genealogical dimension 
in the discussion of all kinds of issues in the field as opposed to the downplaying of area 
conditions in the study of western cultures. According to Chow, it is common that studies 
of western cultures ―are thought to deal with intellectual or theoretical issues‖ while those 
of non-western ones ―even when they are dealing with intellectual or theoretical issues, 
are compulsorily required to characterize such issues with geopolitical realism, to 
stabilize and fix their intellectual and theoretical content by way of a national, ethnic, or 
cultural location‖(3). Although Chow‘s discussion is framed in the post-colonialist 
context of the West versus non-West dichotomy, her critique of the essentialist practice 
of always channeling literary analysis through the label of the Chinese condition opens 
up the reflection on what is not captured in this categorization. As this study is concerned 
with the capacity of the literary text itself in generating meaning, it marks an attempt to 
reestablish the complexity of literature as an art form in order to balance the relocation of 
the focus in modern Chinese literary studies.  
                                                          
42
 See ―Introduction‖ 2-7, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: 
Reimagining a Field. 
65 
 
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