＂I Revolt, Therefore We Are to Come＂: Imaginary M/Other in The Assassin and The Grandmaster

Yuh-yi Tan

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 45卷2期 (2019/09) Pp. 27-54

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.201909_45(2).0002

摘要

This study puts forward a critical investigation of two chivalrous swordswomen, Nie Yinniang in The Assassin (2015) and Gong Er in The Grandmaster (2013), applying Julia Kristeva's writing on ＂intimate revolt,＂ a psychoanalytic concept that deals with a revival of inner psychic experience based on timelessness. In the triadic relationship of female subjectivity among the self, mother, and imaginary father, the characters constantly question themselves while facing life-and-death dilemmas. Their self-questioning reinvents heterogeneous visual images of the maternal to create the strengthened vitality of female empowerment. Yinniang's ＂multiple maternal identity＂ disorder is tinged with Asperger's syndrome, but the spell of difficult verbal communication is eventually broken through her inner probing of the archaic past that triggers a renewal of her psychic life. Lacking access to maternal care, Wong Kar-wai's Gong Er identifies with the imaginary father. Coupled with her father Gong Baosen and his successor Ip Man, she doubles herself as a father-mother conglomerate and reclaims her father's name. Whereas Yinniang's external-and-internal transformation silently redirects energy from external maternal figures that are reborn from the interior, Gong Er's internal-and-external maternal eroticism is reproduced from the inside to contend with the paternal hegemony. They both, however, retrieve the forgotten zone of the body in lost time to find their future recalled by the imaginary father/other. Finding an archaic inner world of the mother and searching for a future imaginary father shape retrospective temporality and future expectation to create a female heritage.

關鍵字

intimate revolt ； the maternal ； imaginary father ； pre-oedipal ； archaic ； future ； temporality

參考文獻

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“The Assassin by Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Culture, 30 Sept. 2015, english.moc.gov.tw/information_256_77489.html. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.

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