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Entropic Anxiety and the Allegory of Disappearance

This article examines the cultural anxieties and utopian impulse in the post-Mao early 1980s through a symptomatic reading of two paradigmatic texts of the “roots-searching” literature. Essential to the two novels is the pervasive obsession with the disappearance and evaporation of the river. Instead of reading the representations of the river in aesthetical terms, the article foregrounds the river as the central trope of symptom in testimony to post-Mao social, political, and ecological malaise and the utopian desire for redefining national identity. What is at issue in the inscription of the river as an “absent cause” is the problematic translation of the lack into a collective dreamscape for rejuvenation through the dream scenario. By way of Freud-Žižek's pschoanalytical readings of the dream, the article decodes the sociopolitical unconscious that structures such an allegorical vision of the river.