The Meandering Detection of Loss: On Melancholic Attachment in When We Were Orphans

The Meandering Detection of Loss: On Melancholic Attachment in When We Were Orphans

When We Were Orphans, framed within the detective fiction genre, serves as a trauma narrative wherein the protagonist-narrator attempts to master the trauma caused by being abruptly severed from his parents and Shanghai, his psychological“homeland,”through persistently re-enacting a childhood detective game. This article aims to manifest that the meandering process of the protagonist’s detection is not merely the repetitive acting out of his trauma but also the staging of an oedipal desire for prelapsarian plenitude—a point of origin. Critics hold diverging interpretations regarding whether Kazuo Ishiguro is describing a complete mourning process or means to imply a positive aspect of melancholia that identity politics tends to accentuate. In light of Dominick LaCapra and SlavojŽižek, the author of this article unveils the underlying conflation of transhistorical structural lack with historical loss, which causes enduring melancholia in the traumatized subject, and indicates that if the protagonist harbors any nostalgia for the International Settlement in Shanghai, it is not merely a symptom of this conflation, i.e., misplaced nostalgia, but also the manifestation of a prelapsarian fantasy that veils the absence of a fully unified community as a totality.