“Symptom of an Era”: Dung Kai-Cheung’s Histories of Time

Abstract

This essay uses the notion of a symptom to examine the ways in which temporality is deployed in Hong Kong author Dung Kai-Cheung’s 2007 novel, Histories of Time . In particular, the essay follows Dung’s own lead, in Histories of Time , and considers the peculiar temporality implicit in the concept of figuration in Biblical hermeneutics, wherein the “figure” mediates between the two distinct—yet structurally related—temporalities of the Old and the New Testaments: the “prefiguration” of the Old Testament and the “fulfillment of figuration” of the New Testament. I propose that a literary “figure,” in Dung’s work, similarly mediates between the different temporal planes within his novel, while at the same time mediating between the fictional space of the novel and the historical era within which the work is positioned. Just as a symptom is simultaneously a function of—but also structurally external to—the underlying condition that it signifies, this sort of literary figure may similarly be seen as a function of—but simultaneously external to—the historical era to which it corresponds. This sort of literary figure, accordingly, marks a point of rupture within the temporality of the novel and its corresponding era, while at the same time providing the ground on which that temporal continuum is established in the first place.