In the politically oriented criticism of fantastic literature, the fantastic is situated in a negative relation to the dominant cultural frame of reference which constructs and legitimates what is real. Paying close attention to the negative relationality of Chinese fantastic texts vis-a-vis the symbolic order of Chinese culture under the Communist regime, the paper proposes that only by approaching the Chinese fantastic in subversive terms can we assess adequately its sharp political efficacy and avoid what is often called the “transcendentalist theory”, which regards the fantastic merely as a secondary, Utopian world of pure fantasy and desire.

In this light the Chinese fantastic can be seen as an attempt to subvert the hypostasis of the prevailing epistemological and ideological frame of reference by which the totalitarian regime sustains its political and ideological hegemony. The paper will focus on the two fantastic texts written by Yu Hua, which puts under scrutiny two major notions about the real and history. The first text sets out to play on the conceptual limits of realism, and constitutes a textual and structural disruption of the textual apparatus of socialist realism. The second text aims at the officially sanctioned notion and collective forgetfullness about China’s past. By evoking the fantastic and surreal return of the brutal past in the person of a self-torturing madman, the text lays bare the arbitary and frail distinction drawn by the prevailing discourse between the past and the present.

fantastic literature, negative relationality, real, madness, socialist realism, uncanny, Foucault, supernatural, counter-discourse