Totalizing fragments : the aesthetic life of national highway G318 in post-2000s Chinese road narrative

Post-2000s Chinese road narratives depict different people’s movement on the road, such as a middle-class driver or a migrant worker, in an era when national development increasingly depends on the mobility of its population. Focusing on literary representations of National Highway G318, this thesis examines how writers use the road to narrate mobile lives and mediate the relationship between individuals and the nation. It argues that G318 offers an aesthetic of “totalizing fragments”: it provides a totalizing form to narrate the fragments of individual experiences, while exposing how that fragmentation unfolds within mobile lives shaped by national development. This thesis examines visions of G318 through two types of mobile lives. Chapter 2 analyzes the middle-class driver in Han Han’s novel 1988: I Want to Talk with the World (2010), in which G318 is clearly named yet rarely described. Driving on G318 inspires an imagined autonomous self, which is dissolved in the scenes of stoppage and accidents. However, Han Han mobilizes the form of G318 to gather dispersed personal memories to restore an autonomous self, transforming his novel into an “automobile novel,” in which G318 is privatized as the psychological extension of the self. Chapter 3 turns to the migrant workers in Lu Nei’s novel Fog Walker (2020), where G318 is belatedly named in the final chapter. By tracing how the route of migrant workers is constructed by ID cards, warehouses, and roads, Lu Nei transforms G318 into a connective form to narrate fragmented migrant lives. This aesthetic of totalizing fragments of individual experiences, this study argues, emerges from the specific interaction between the road as a material condition and as a narrative form. While previous scholarship often treats the road as an abstract symbol of freedom or self-discovery, this study aims to offer an infrastructural approach to road narrative, foregrounding the material conditions on the road that enable and prescribe the characters’ mobilities and ways of representation. Reading these two novels, G318 becomes a site that brings the middle-class driver and the migrant worker into conversation, and thereby reveals how national development is simultaneously constituted and contested by individual movements.