China and Its Other: The Economy of Writing in Dai Sijie’s Le Complexe de Di

The French-language novel Le Complexe de Di (“Di’s complex” and also “The Oedipus complex”), by the recently-acclaimed Chinese writer Dai Sijie, is playful, “complex” and, on the reading suggested here, inherently duplicitous. Dai looks at China from a French perspective and at France (or Europe) from a Chinese one, showing the cultural and linguistic limitations of both perspectives. Among the many Western commodities which now dominate the global marketplace are French intellectual traditions (the theories of Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Levi-Strauss and Derrida) which do not always accommodate contemporary China and yet which, along with the French language, are often pursed by Chinese intellectuals themselves, including the expatriated Dai. This paper argues that, by bringing these theories into play within the narrative structure of the novel, the author engages in parody by pointing to the limits or ruptures of the theoretical paradigms when considered within a sharply cross-cultural perspective. In other words, Dai’s “treacherous” writing at once reinforces and mocks, confirms and revises these theories, thereby complicating their use-value when applied to a global reality inflected by the experience of migration.