The dialectical tension between “Stargazing Discourse” and “Everyday Narrative” in The Vastness of Stars——On the structural irony of the dual healing discourse in Wu Yiwei’s children’s novels
《星辰辽阔》中“星空话语”与“日常叙事”的辩证张力——论吴依薇儿童小说中双重疗愈话语的结构性反讽

摘要

吴依薇的儿童长篇小说《星辰辽阔》以12岁女孩沈玉瑶丧母后的心理修复为叙事核心，构建了“星空”与“日常”两套并行的疗愈话语体系。然而在叙述的缝隙中，作品存在一个尚未被充分讨论的结构性反讽：文本的表层叙事倡导“仰望星空、超越琐碎”，但实际运作的治愈机制恰恰是那些被星空哲学要求超越的日常琐事。本文借助朱迪斯·赫尔曼的创伤恢复理论、项飙的“附近”概念以及温尼科特的过渡性客体理论，分三个层次展开论证：其一，母亲殉职后“星空话语”的暂时失效与创伤触发；其二，日常琐事以其不崇高性将主人公拽回当下，完成心理学意义上的日常结构重建；其三，经由日常经验的积淀，“星空”在文末被重新赋义，从“逃离日常”转化为“携带日常的全部重量去仰望”。这一双重话语的辩证运动构成了《星辰辽阔》区别于同类儿童成长小说的核心美学特征，也为当下现实题材儿童文学的创伤书写提供了新的叙事范式。

Abstract

Wu Yiwei’s children’s novel The Vastness of Stars centers on the psychological recovery of Shen Yuyao, a twelve-year-old girl, after the sudden death of her mother, a grassroots surveyor who once gave her a telescope and taught her to look beyond life’s trivialities by gazing at the stars. Through close reading, this paper identifies a structural irony that has not been fully addressed in existing criticism: while the novel’s surface narrative advocates transcending the mundane through stargazing, the healing mechanism that actually operates within the text is precisely those everyday trivialities that the “stargazing philosophy” urges the protagonist to rise above. Drawing on Judith Herman’s trauma recovery theory, Xiang Biao’s concept of “the nearby,” and Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects, the paper advances its argument in three stages. First, it demonstrates how the “stargazing discourse” temporarily fails after the mother’s death, as the stellar imagery transforms from a source of comfort into a trauma trigger. Second, it argues that everyday incidents, pull the protagonist back into the present through their sheer unglamorous urgency, functioning as what trauma psychology terms “grounding” and rebuilding what Xiang Biao calls “the nearby.” Third, it shows that by the novel’s conclusion, the stargazing imagery regains its efficacy, but its meaning has been fundamentally rewritten by the weight of lived experience, the stars no longer negate the mundane but contain it. This dialectical movement, from a negating sublime to an encompassing sublime, constitutes the novel’s distinctive aesthetic contribution to contemporary Chinese realist children’s literature on trauma, offering a narrative paradigm that resists both premature closure and facile transcendence.