IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship

Volume 13 – Issue 1 – 2024

The Sense of Floating and Finding Moorings in Xiaolu Guo’s A Lover’s
Discourse

Megha Solanki
The English and Foreign Languages University, India

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Abstract
This article analyses Xiaolu Guo’s 2020 novel A Lover’s Discourse. It follows the novel’s
unnamed protagonist, a young Chinese woman who moves to London, traces her journey
through the concept of mooring. The article examines this notion of mooring through theintimate connections that the protagonist makes with the place that she lives in and through her
relationship with her partner. Using the concept of moorings as a theoretical background, thearticle discusses what moorings mean for the protagonist. It focuses on the theme of floating
and the idea of home to outline a pursuit of finding mooring that rests in the protagonist’s desire
to belong in the world. Moorings, this article argues, are affective and represent an individual’s
desire to belong. This desire is affected by the individual’s experiences in life, influencing theirstate of being and ways of living. For the unnamed protagonist, the expectation of mooring isrooted in the possibilities of the future where her sense of living is not lost and is retained alongwith her sense of being together with her companion.
Keywords: A Lover’s Discourse, belonging, floating, mooring, Xiaolu Guo132

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Written with Brexit as its backdrop, Xiaolu Guo’s A Lover’s Discourse (2020) is a novel thathas, as its protagonist, an unnamed woman from South China who moves to London as a PhD
student. Guo’s unnamed protagonist arrives in England with the desire to become someone
who is of the world. This notion of being someone “of the world” relates to a sense of belonging
in the world where the protagonist desires to have a place and mooring in. Guo places thisnotion of belonging in the world in relation to their development in place – “Characters are tied
to their living spaces, and their development is tied to the changes in that space” (2023). Living
spaces become important for Guo’s characters as it is through these spaces that they can express
their desires. This notion of developing through the changes in space is reflected in Guo’s
earlier work, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), referred to hereafter as
Dictionary for Lovers, where the protagonist Z, by discovering her sense of self in a foreigncountry, finds herself moving away from the expectations of her parents and towards finding
her own place in the world. Angelia Poon (2013) looks at Z as someone who becomes a global
subject through the process of forming a self that stresses on emotion, affect, and the“possibilities of shared understanding and intimacy” (p. 9) in the space that she lives in. Similar
to Z, the unnamed protagonist of A Lover’s Discourse develops her sense of self and the
expectations of her future through her lived spaces. The protagonist’s bid to find a place in theworld is a development that happens in those specific spaces that she occupies and represents
her desire to find her mooring in space. The notion of mooring, for the protagonist, keeps
changing and developing as she moves through space, occupying different living spaces.
A Lover’s Discourse begins with its protagonist arriving in an England which itself is heading
towards a new development. The backdrop of Brexit and England’s own identity as a nationthat seeks to leave the EU is starkly similar to the protagonist’s own decision to leave China inorder to pursue her PhD in visual anthropology in England. To be a “woman of the world” (p.
7), she becomes an “outsider” who, even as she tries to make a space for herself in the world,
is not considered so because of her status as a Chinese immigrant. She is not a part of thecountry she comes to call her home nor a part of the home that she has left behind. There is asense of loneliness that persists through the novel as the protagonist navigates through theanxiety of not having a home and trying to seek a sense of home through people, places, andlanguage. ⽆语 wú yǔ and ⽆我 wú wǒ are two phrases the protagonist uses that stand as
markers of the feeling of rootlessness which comes through the sensation of buoying withouta mooring. The words wú yǔ are translated by the protagonist as “wordlessness” (p. 43) and“loss of language” (p. 43) and wú wǒ as “no self, no subject” (p. 126). The sense of loss in thecharacter ⽆ – the verb defined as “not have” “be without” (Pleco Basic Chinese-English
Dictionary, 2009) – situates the protagonist as one without a language or a self in the world.
The outsider in the world traverses through it losing their language and their sense of self as
they struggle to hold on to it, all the while negotiating with a new language and a new identity.
For the protagonist, this new language and identity that she has to negotiate is heavily
influenced by her relationship with her partner, a WASP – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant – an
Anglo-German man who becomes the point of the protagonist’s meditation on ideas of love,
desire, and belonging. The novel, named after Roland Barthes’s book of the same name is, at
its core, a dialogue on what love and desire are. These notions of love and desire form the133

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strongholds of the discourse on moorings that comes through the novel. The unnamed partnerof the protagonist is a landscape architect who is vastly different from the protagonist, not only
because of his identity as a European but also as someone whose idea of mooring and belonging
is rooted in a different conception than the protagonist’s. Yifan Jin states, “her lover, anAustralian-raised German of half-English descent who shows cultural affiliation with
continental Europe, cannot represent the British presence” (2024, p. 249). Like the unnamed
protagonist, he is also an outsider – “I know what you mean. I’m not from Britain either” (p.
19), he says in response to the protagonist’s feeling like an alien in London. However, while
they both feel like outsiders in this country they have decided to reside in, their expectations ofmaking a home there are different.
Where the protagonist seeks a house built with four walls, her lover finds a life based within
the four walls of an apartment confining and restrictive, preferring the gentle swaying of ahouseboat on the Canals with temporary moorings. The discourse on the space of the home, its
making and the structures that become home, provides contrasting notions of what a homeshould and could be. The way the idea of “house” can be read moves from a utilitarian
perspective towards a more affective meditation on what living in a particular space means forthe couple. The protagonist’s lover muses, “I often asked myself: would I be happy to live inthose buildings for the rest of my life? Deep down I’m ambivalent. I find those designs too
crude. Those monuments were born from the ego, but not for people. I would rather live in atree house, or on a boat, if I could” (p. 61). In contrast to her lover’s desire to live on a boat,
the protagonist thinks of the lock-keeper’s cottage that she had found by the canal and dreamsof living in, “That would be somewhere I would like to live, if I had to choose between a boat
and a house. I was not sure how I would feel, if the ground beneath my feet swayed a little
every day” (p. 63). For the unnamed lover, living on a boat represents an escape from thestructured, utilitarian monuments that he imagines are not truly for the people. The four wallsof an apartment represent, for him, a mechanical life imposed upon him. The lock-keeper’s
cottage, for the protagonist, reminds her of the hometown she has left behind and makes her
feel “less alien in this city” (p. 12). These distinct expectations of what they want from a homehighlight the ways of living that diverge into contrasting ideas of an escape from a mechanicalmethod of living to one that is filled with longing and desire. This notion of longing and desire
represents, what is introduced to the protagonist as, a Sehnsucht – a German word that translates
to desire or yearning and contains within it the notion of wistfulness (Cambridge Dictionary,n.d.). Life takes on a melancholic quality of yearning that for the protagonist and her loverreflects in the houses they desire to live in.
The idea of mooring, looked at through this notion of yearning, represents a desire to belongthat is reflected in the protagonist’s movements in life. For the protagonist, her embodied
experiences of the world are a reflection of her longing to belong. The loneliness that persists,even when together with her partner, coupled with feelings of love and anxiety of what the
future holds, depicts a narrative of the desire to be moored and the journey of seeking thesemoorings. The language of moorings adopted in the novel is presented through theprotagonist’s thoughts on love, desire and her understanding of house and home. As theprotagonist observes and submits to the experiences of the world and her body in the world,her perspective of the world and her own desires change. A world interpreted through loneliness,134

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lack, and desires, gives for an interpretation of moorings that is situated in a conscious
experience of the world. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist thinks of the word spüren– a German verb translated as to feel (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.) – and contemplates on the“feeling of life,” imagining life as a sensation that she misses. This missing spüren encompasses
the notion of finding moorings in life. This article argues that the novel presents the idea ofmooring through the intimate connection between the protagonist and her lover, and in her
struggles to find a sense of home. As there is nothing that ties her back to her mother country,
her mooring in a foreign land is through her relationship with her partner. This article contends
that moorings for individuals are an affective process entrenched in the modes of living thatare based on intimate encounters with others. By analysing Guo’s novel, this article works
towards an understanding of the relationship between a sense of floating and the desire to finda mooring for a young woman who feels untethered in the world. This article outlines anindividual’s pursuit of life as located within certain aspects of mooring, where intimacy, lifeand living, the affective modes which contribute to different possibilities of future, influence
this pursuit.
On The Concept of Moorings
This article locates the notion of mooring in attachments. This sense of attachment is based on
an individual’s investment in a certain place. According to Charles Longino Jr., “Like boats toa mooring, persons are tied to their environment by investments in their property, by the many
community contexts in which they find meaning,” (1992, p. 23). Human relationships,
lifestyles, and experiences of the past, for Longino, tie persons to places. An attachment to aplace can thus be conceived through the access an individual gains to a place with the social
relationships they form within it. Holly R. Barcus and Stanley D. Brunn (2009) state that anindividual’s place attachments are intertwined in the discussion of roots/routes and moorings.
On the notion of place as roots, Per Gustafson states that roots “mean that place is somethinghighly specific, something literally irreplaceable” (2001, p. 673). This reinforces that within
the idea of roots, place attachments are tied to notions of emotional bonds and community.
Gustafson suggests that roots involve identification with a place that is based on theindividual’s long-term relations with the place and the people in it. The notion of long-term
relations gives the impression that roots mean that the individual is bound to a particular place,and mobility would hinder the sense of belonging that comes from long-term attachments. Here,
Gustafson looks at the notion of routes, contending that the routes theme “favors a multitudeof places […] reflecting an individual life path” (p. 674). Gustafson’s contention of place asroutes suggests that the individual’s life events, that is, their choices, successes, and failures,the events that shape the trajectories of their life, make place meaningful. It alludes to the ideathat mobility does not hamper one’s sense of belonging but rather favors attachments to belinked to a multitude of places that have influenced an individual’s life.
If the sense of rootedness is linked to attachments to a place, then the determinants of moorings,
too, as Longino asserts, become linked to the place where an individual finds a sense of
belonging. According to Bruce Moon, moorings are “as those social expressions which not
only allow a person to materialize his or her physical, psychological and emotional well-being
but also serve to bind a person to a particular place” (1995, p. 514). Moorings, for Moon, are135

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tied to the individual’s motivation for their own well-being along with the notion of place
attachments that come through the influential social relationships that the individual has formed
in a place. Moon’s conception of moorings places importance on the individual’s own
subjective perspective towards their sense of moorings. For Moon, “each mooring issue isperceived in relative terms, and so is value laden” (p. 515). This means that behind an
individual’s choice to consider a place as their mooring lies their own subjective experience
with the place which gives meaning to their sense of mooring. Mooring is value-laden because
it is linked to an individual’s sense of well-being, implying that their consideration of a placeas their mooring rests in their own relative desires that serve to add meaning to their own life.
Bell et al. tie this idea of an individual giving value to a place to an individual’s “place utility”(2019, p. 1). Helen Adams and W. Neil Adger consider place utility as a “function of place
attachment and place dependence” (2013, p. 2). Here, place dependence refers to those bonds
formed through place that aid an individual in fulfilling their desires. This connection between
mooring and place utility suggests that the individual’s relationship with place and their senseof mooring is not just tied to the affective bonds they form with and within the place but alsowith their expectations from the place. It highlights that facet of mobility where individual
motivations are emphasized.
Moorings, therefore, can be characterized by personal experience and the sense of place itself.
Dennis Conway, thus considers, the sense of mooring to explain how migrant decisions are
impacted based on individual experiences and bonds of kinship, community, and institutions.
Conway groups moorings as life course, cultural, spatial, and temporal (2007, p. 423),
reinforcing the notion that an individual’s sense of moorings is based on the patterns and eventsof their life, cultural attachments, spatial possibilities, and temporal notions of staying in aplace. This categorization hints towards an intensity of mooring with a particular place, as
owing to the degree of attachments and bonds, constituted by these groupings, an individual
would consider themselves to be moored to places with varying intensities. Minna Zechner(2019) borrows from Moon and Conway to assert that moorings have a relational dimension
and are based on an individual’s “sense of self” (p. 69). This echoes Gustafson’s perspective
on routes, as Zechner suggests that the life course of mobile individuals is characterized bymultiple moorings reflected in the places they feel a sense of belonging towards. The intensityof mooring thus can be formulated under this notion of multiple moorings where an individual’s
sense of self is realized in relation to the intensity they feel towards a particular place. Zechneralso considers moorings to be characterized by a sense of interdependency with members ofkin, where multiple moorings are considered on the basis of shared decision-making and“positive ways of making choices” (p. 69). Here, by placing moorings directly under the bondsof kinship that influence migrant decision-making, individual choices in terms of mooring to aplace can be linked to the intimate relationships of the individual that influences theirexperience and attachment to place. It allows for moorings for an individual to be framed also
as being influenced by the experiences of the people that they are close to.
Based on this characterization of moorings under the impressions of an individual’s
experiences in life, their sense of attachment to a place, and the intimate bonds that influence
the sense of space, coupled with their own personal motivation towards their well-being andtheir sense of self, this article moves forward in its analysis of Guo’s novel. The analysis’136

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division into the three particular themes of floating, dwelling, and affective moorings builds on
this outline of the concept of moorings. It approaches the idea of floating as the state of theindividual before they find their sense of mooring. This is followed by a discussion of dwellingon the notion of home, in relation to the protagonist’s movement as a step towards finding
moorings, and then the idea of affective moorings as that notion of place-attachments and being
moored that rests on the intimate bond between the protagonist and her partner.
Floating
As the section on moorings has outlined, an individual’s sense of being moored to a place istied to their sense of belonging. In connection to this notion of belonging, the following
deliberation on the theme of floating argues that the protagonist’s desire for a mooring comesthrough her desire to find her sense of belonging in her life. The feeling of life as illustrated in
the novel is situated in the feeling of floating. This notion of “floating” rests on two particular
aspects: 1) the status of the protagonist as a migrant and 2) her life with her partner on the boat
they name Misty. There is a connection between the states of floating and mooring that goesbeyond their relation to water and resides in the notions of life and movement. Lines from apoem by Li Bai, translated by the protagonist as she introduces the concept of fú shēng to her
partner, introduce the feeling of floating:Ah, this floating life, just a dream.
Happiness, a deceiving mirage! (p. 173)
Floating life or fú shēng – also translated as fleeting life (Pleco Basic Chinese-English
Dictionary, 2009) – places life as a fleeting existence that is simply a pursuit of a dream of
happiness, and still a dream that individuals pursue. The protagonist’s position as a migrantemphasizes this feeling of floating and her pursuit of happiness. This pursuit of happiness, forthe protagonist, is tied to her trying to find a place in the world.
The protagonist loses both her parents a few months before she is set to leave China for her
PhD and the death of her parents becomes her untethering from her native place – “I was […]a grown-up orphan […] condemned to be alone, whether in my native country or abroad” (p.
23). She considers “the umbilical cord” that tied her to China to be “cut, forever” (p. 93). This
state of aloneness the protagonist feels is exacerbated by her feeling that “didn’t need to bear
the heavy weight of this country,” (p. 94) and that she was just “passing through, like I was
passing through England” (p. 94). It contributes to the feeling of being untethered as she has
no sense of responsibility left towards her native land or to the ties that once existed in thisplace, illustrating that feeling of floating for the protagonist. Her pursuit of becoming “a womanof the world” and to “not be lost in it” (p. 7) is based on her feeling as if she has no roots in theworld. Her roots in China have disappeared with the passing of her parents, leaving her withno attachments to the country and no reason for her to return to it. Her sense of “passing
through,” makes her feel as if she is just a temporary visitor, both in her native place and in
England. This notion of passing through underlines the idea of not having a place to belong in
the world – the protagonist floats just like a boat without mooring. Her relationship with her

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partner and her building her life around this relationship is an attempt to find the sense of
belonging that has been lost as soon as she finds herself orphaned.
The protagonist, despite trying to build her life with her partner, still finds herself floating in
the world, a feeling she voices by comparing herself to the rootless generation – “they usedrootless generation to describe the current twenty- and thirty-something people who grow up
in urban spaces […] And I felt we are that generation […] And this kind of life made me feeleven more rootless” (p. 116). There are two distinct facets to this feeling of rootlessness thatthe protagonist mentions – the rootlessness of urban life and a particular kind of lifestyle that
contributes to the feeling of rootlessness. The rootless generation, a term coined by writer Li
Yihua in the novel Again the Palm Trees, is symbolic of endless wandering (Hsien-Yung, 1976).
Shuyu Kong (2016), in tracing diaspora in modern Chinese literature, talks about the feelingof rootlessness that is expressed by Modern Chinese writers as their characters travel to theWest. Rootlessness, as highlighted by Kong, is covered with nostalgia for what was left behindand yet, for some, it is also about the journey taken to find a way of life. For the protagonist,
her journey has been similar to this notion of the rootless generation. She is one of the rootless
youths who has found herself living in an urban space stuck with just the nostalgia of her life
in her native country and nothing to go back to. At the same time, this sense of rootlessness has
also marked the beginnings of a new journey towards finding her sense of roots. The boat life,
however, exacerbates the sense of rootlessness for the protagonist who considers this life “acamping life, a childish life, a life without roots,” (p. 115), that is, for her, it represents a lifethat goes nowhere. The boat life, for the protagonist, does not represent her desires nor fulfils
the expectations she had when she arrived in this foreign country. Her identification with therootless generation comes through the sense of going nowhere – resembling an endlesswandering without purpose – in this boat life.
In contrast to her feeling of rootlessness, her partner counters, “I don’t feel I’m rootless. And
I’m passing my mid-thirties” (p. 116). His feeling of being rooted in this urban landscape theyboth occupy comes primarily from his desire to live his life away from the confines of the
expected notions of society. As the protagonist claims, “This floating life suited him perfectly”(p. 78). He finds himself unrestricted, comfortable in the boat that he mends and designs to suit
his needs. The boat represents a space that is his own. Where he finds his motivation for livingin this boat in the freedom of movement that it gives him, the protagonist is left feeling stagnant.
“So colorful, so full of life. This was something I didn’t have […] the vitality” (p. 95). The
floating lives of the protagonist and her partner are starkly different from each other, eventhough these lives are lived in the same space. Where her partner finds himself free from theconfines of a concrete, urban life, the protagonist feels stuck in this floating state. Like the boatthat floats in the Canal, going nowhere, finding mooring in the stagnant water filled with algae,
the protagonist, too, finds herself stagnating in this life.
Ghassan Hage (2009) uses the term “stuckedness” to describe the immobility that surrounds
the state of “going-ness” of an individual. It is the feeling of waiting and the lost “capacity toimagine [a] future” (Moderbacher, 2020, p. 165). The boat life for the protagonist represents
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I felt (Ich spürte) I was some nameless peasant wife […] Instead of reading and writing,or thinking about my project, all the time I worried about basic things – filling up thewater container, checking the gas bottles. I would never just take a walk for the pleasureof it. (p. 69)
The routine of the boat life makes her feel like a peasant wife rather than the woman of theworld that she had set out to be. The basic things that fill her life make it hard for her to imagine
the future that she had aspired for when she left for England. Rather than caring about her own
well-being, her life is configured in the routines of maintaining their boat life. The protagonist
is in this ‘stucked’ state as she finds herself immobile living a stagnant life. As she lives on theboat with her partner, her desire to find a place to belong, to find her mooring, places her in analmost contradictory state of being stuck.
Home
The protagonist’s life on the boat is built according to the desires of her partner who prefers
the floating life over those designs of houses he believes are not built for people. This notionof living/building life in accordance with one’s own interpretation of the idea of a house, thenleads the discussion of finding a sense of belonging in place. Here, this section considers thenotion of place to be tied to the idea of houses that the protagonist lives in. The protagonist’sboat life further contributes to another aspect of mooring – the idea of a home. As mooring isassumed to be linked to place attachments and the notion of building a life in a certain place,the idea of home also becomes tied to the expectation of mooring. For the protagonist, the ideaof home is connected with ownership – “My flat did not feel like home at all […] I owned
nothing in this country” (p. 43). Their boat becomes the first home she owns with her partner– “It belonged to you and me. A home, a jiā” (p. 74). The character for jiā, 家 as she explains
to her partner, consists of two radicals, one symbolizing pig and the other a roof, signifyingthat “a family is self-sufficient” (p. 74). For the protagonist who arrived in England with nosense of belonging, the boat becomes the first step towards self-sufficiency, of having a family,
and of putting down her roots. However, as the earlier section highlights, despite owning a boat,
she feels as if she is floating and stagnating in it.
Owning a house is directly linked to the protagonist’s identity, as she can only call herself as aperson who belongs if she legally owns a home in this foreign land. Shigehiro Oishi (2010) ties
an individual’s residence to their “lifespace”, that is, the interconnected world of an individual’ssocial and psychological environment. For Oishi, an individual’s residence affects their
behaviors, emotions, and formation of interpersonal relations. It also influences an individual’s
decision to move, as Oishi locates mobility in the individual’s decision to choose their wellbeing that is related to their residence’s environment. Turning back to the conception ofmooring as expressions that allow the individual to conceive the expectations of their own wellbeing, further helps in understanding the protagonist’s position in relation to the boat as
something that she truly does not consider as her mooring. “Living on a boat was like nothaving a home any more. No roots, no land. I was deserting the solid earth, because of you,and launching myself onto an unstable surface” (p. 66). She chooses to live a life on thisunstable surface only because of her partner. It adds to the notion of belonging that is not only139

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tied to an understanding of belonging through place but also belonging through people. 家translates not just to home but also family and the protagonist’s decision to live on a boat resides
in this idea of 家, of a belonging that comes through making a family with her partner.
Kimberly Dovey distinguishes between the concepts of a home and a house by conceiving
home as “a kind of relationship between people and their environment” (1985, p. 34). While
the protagonist works towards making the boat her home, she is never truly satisfied with herlife in it. Separated from the city and its buildings, her stake of a claim in the world – this boat
and their life on it – keeps her away from the world itself. In her endeavor to escape from thisstagnancy, the protagonist suggests moving out of the boat and to an apartment. This suggestion
comes at a time where she discovers that she is pregnant. “I quietly hoped you would not be
too sad to lose the boat. Perhaps it was time for you to build a real home for us. A real home.
A house with solid walls and proper roofs” (p. 191). Her desire for a house with walls and aroof emanates from her desire to be a part of the world and through it a part of the stable groundthat she has left behind. Her desire stands in stark contrast with that of her partner, who finds
himself walled and confined in the flat they rent after they let go of their boat life – “You know
I want to live with you, but not in a flat. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I want tolive in a Bauernhaus” (p. 203).
The Bauernhaus, a farmhouse, that they buy in the German countryside, represents the new
possibility of a stable ground for the couple. This, too, is a house fixed according to her
partner’s wants – “you were fulfilling your fantasy by projecting our future onto that piece ofland. What about me though? Would I fulfil any of my desires through this project?” (p. 261).
However, as the protagonist’s partner sets his expectations of the future upon this land, theprotagonist herself is left questioning her own lost desires. Like the boat, this house becomesa place that has no vitality, where she is stagnating – “I couldn’t see myself staying here—with
the peace around me becoming like the silence of a graveyard […] After only a few months ofliving in this valley, like a fish out of water, I was gasping for life” (p. 264). The farmhouse,
just like the boat, remains a place of confinement for her dreams and aspirations. It keeps her
isolated from the connections of the world that she seeks – “It was so still […] simply too quiet.
Where were the people?” (p. 264). She desires to return to London, where she can “feel thevigour of life […] I wanted movement […] I missed the human world, the feeling of struggling
and living among other people” (p. 265). The protagonist’s partner agrees to move back andtogether they decide to find a house near the canal like she had desired.
MooringElisabetta Giuliano, in her analysis of A Lover’s Discourse, contends that “language andcommunication between lovers” (p. 458) are the fundamental elements of the novel. In contrast,
Eunju Hwang (2013) contends that the protagonist of Guo’s Dictionary for Lovers and her
relationship with her partner deteriorates because of failed communication. Hwang argues thatthe relationship crumbles because of “the unwillingness of Z’s lover to compromise on his
beliefs and values and because of Z’s inability to accept the possibility of other ways of life”(p. 82). As Giuliano notes, the concept of “yuanfen 缘分 (fate)” (p. 465) seems to be a shared140

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thread in both of Guo’s novels as the protagonists fall in love with the partners at first sight. As
the protagonist claims, “The decision was made without me or you knowing it. And yet, I still
had not met you then. You were there, somewhere not far from the water, looking in mydirection, without seeing me and without my seeing you” (p. 267). This idea of pre-destinedconnection between lovers seems to undermine the will of the lovers. However, the two
separate trajectories that the two relationships take highlights that there is something more thanfate that ties the lovers together. This something, this section would argue, is the notion ofmooring that resides in the affect between lovers.
Unlike the protagonist of Dictionary for Lovers, the protagonist of A Lover’s Discourse
compromises with the expectations of her lover – to live on a boat and later, to move to a remotecountryside of East Germany. Similarly, her lover, too, gives up on the boat life – moving backinto the confines of a flat – and returns with her to London, from the farmhouse he had built.
They both feel equally bound to each other’s expectations of life. Their opposing desires could
have led to a crumbling relationship just like the pair in Dictionary for Lovers. However, theyremain tied to each other. Giuliano argues that though Guo’s lovers demonstrate a struggle intheir relationship, in the end, they look for a “possible coexistence, a balance” (p. 466). This
notion of balance resides in an understanding of mooring. “Aren’t you worried about having tochange the mooring all the time?” And here was your answer: “Not really, you are my mooring”(p. 64). In this conversation between the couple, the idea of mooring is situated in the notionof a person. The relationship between the two and their decision to lead a life together marks
the conception of a mooring that is rooted in affect. It is an idea of mooring based on notionsof desires, love, and intimacy. “My love for you was to do with this boat life, this water, thislandscape, and where we would finally moor” (p. 87). The feeling of being together – the ideaof “we” – is what roots the protagonist and gives way to the protagonist’s imaginings of thepossibilities of her future. There is a sense of boundedness in the protagonist’s conception oflove.
The sense of uncertainty that follows the protagonist upon her arrival in England is eased when
she starts thinking of her future in relation to her partner. There is a sense of fixity in therelationship with her partner. Maria Borovnik divides the idea of fixity into two categories –immobilities and moorings where, immobilities have “aspects of distance, monotony anduncertainty” and moorings are “linked to shared experiences, predictability and some certainty”(2012, p. 60). Her life on the boat reflects this sense of monotony and uncertainty, while thecertainty of her relationship with her partner, their shared experiences of life together represent
their mooring in each other. Finding a mooring, or an anchoring to a place for people can beconsidered as “an accomplishment” (Martini, 2021, p. 60). Envisioning a clearer future feels
like an accomplishment for the protagonist who feels as if she is constantly floating and stuck
without moving forward. When the couple decide to get married after they find themselves
pregnant, the notion of an uncertain future disappears further, and the sense of belonging
becomes a fixity for the protagonist through marriage and their future child – “Perhaps happy
was not a right word. But my future now seemed much clearer. My visa, my legal stay in Britain,
all this could be solved very quickly” (p. 191). The anxiety of an uncertain future disappears
as the possibility of a change in status through marriage presents a means for the protagonist
to change her temporary position of stay to a fixed mooring. Mooring, through this act of141

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marriage, becomes layered – with the protagonist attaining a sense of belonging not just inplace but, through the legal implications of marrying a European, also in those affective bondsof kinship that tie her to her partner.
Mooring, as posited through this section’s explorations, exists as a sense of possibilities rooted
in intimate relationships. This sense of intimacy is also tied to the notion of belonging – abelonging that comes through the relationship with another individual and the space they findthemselves situated in. Matthew Ratcliffe’s conception of the idea of existential feelings as
feelings that constitute an individual’s “sense of the belonging of the world” (2012, p. 24),
structuring their reality through a felt sense of the experiences of the individual contributes tothis understanding of moorings. The nature of possibilities for the protagonist, who finds
herself simultaneously constricted by her relationship and freed from the anxiety of a temporary
future, highlights a felt state of life that is constantly being reconfigured according to her
experiences. There is a tangible feeling to the possibilities that open up to her as she looks at
her future with her partner. This future rests in not just the possibility of them together but also
her own individual personhood with her own desires. The idea of belonging of the world, is an“affect” based notion of pursuing possibilities of life and living, borne through experiences of
the world. To find a mooring is to, therefore, find a sense of being in the world, a constantpursuit of the sense of self and identity, an accomplishment in establishing one’s personhood
through the social and intimate relationships that transform them.
As the protagonist searches for ways of living, she finds herself placing a sense of belonging
to a world that she has claimed – “Still, London was the place I had begun my adult life, theplace I had finally realized that I had forever lost my parents and my home country” (p. 265).
London becomes a mooring of her identity as an adult in the world, marked by her loss of apast identity. She cannot go back to her home country as she is not of that world anymore –there are no moorings she can find there, no family to return to. London, this urban space,becomes the place of her transformation – from a young woman to an adult, from someone
who called herself a peasant to a city dweller, and as someone with a new family that she has
built on her own. The protagonist’s desire to find a mooring and her looking at London as aplace that she can go back to and live is the expression of finding a mooring that is based in therelational affects and place experiences of the life that she has lived and will continue to live.
England would be our Western Chamber, and the German farm would be our Eastern
Chamber. At least this way, you said, you would feel better, knowing there was a wild
land waiting for us to return to, if the city life became too hard to live in one day. (p.
266)
The protagonist had, at a point, sectioned their boat, inspired by The Romance of the Western
Chamber, into the Western Chamber and Eastern Chamber. The Western Chamber, which she
claimed was hers, where she spent her time reading, sleeping, working on her thesis, andlooking at the views of the canal through her window, was reminiscent of the ancient westernchambers where girls spent their whole lives. The Eastern Chamber was the men’s territory,
and on the boat, it was where their deck and living room were located, a space where her partner
built and designed their home according to his preferences. The marked spaces underline the142

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different expectations of living as it stands for the protagonist and her partner. The life that they
had imagined before meeting each other was different, and the life they build together isentrenched in the compromises they make to sustain their relationship and overcome thesedifferences of expectations. Their sense of mooring, thus, becomes tied not simply to a place
but living in a place together.
Conclusion
This article has looked at the idea of mooring in Guo’s A Lover’s Discourse primarily throughthe feeling of floating, connecting it to the protagonist’s idea of home and a sense of belonging
that resides as much in the protagonist’s relationship with her partner as in the homes they findthemselves living in. As it reaches the concluding section, this article turns back to the notionof a sense of self discussed in the theoretical outline of the concept of mooring. The sense of
self was argued to be connected to an intensity of mooring which is tied to the notion of anindividual having multiple moorings in life. In A Lover’s Discourse, the protagonist could besaid to have lost her first sense of mooring when she loses her parents and becomes an orphan,her next mooring comes through her partner. The intensity of her mooring in this relationshipwith her partner has underlined her moorings in place. The boat, the farmhouse, the flat – theplaces they reside in – reflect her attempts to find mooring in place, and the varying intensitiesof these attempts to find moorings are also connected to her desire of living a life filled withvitality. These attempts may leave her feeling as if she is stuck in stagnancy, however, they also
represent her will to keep persisting. The compromises the protagonist and her partner makeadds to this notion of pursuing moorings together, changing their moorings in place if it does
not satisfy them.
The beginning of this article had talked about the character ⽆ – the notion to “be without” or
to “not have”. By the end of the novel, the protagonist possesses a house by the canal, a family,
and a sense of self that is tied to both the place that she has chosen to reside in and in the bondsof intimacy that she has forged in this place. She is not an orphan anymore and her yearning
feels as if it is fulfilled. The experiences of place and people influence her, she grows, as she
claims, as an adult. “In Chinese, we say liu shui bu fu—flowing water does not rot” (p. 225),
the protagonist’s words reflect that contrasting notion of floating and moorings that this article
has outlined. While the feeling of stagnancy in the protagonist’s life seems as if it would persist,it does not. Instead, what is given way to is a movement from one place to another in an attempt
to escape stagnancy and to find stable ground. The protagonist’s life, thus, resembles this notionof flowing water, that is, a life lived in movements, finding vitality and a sense of belonging
that does not confine but instead reflects a feeling of life.

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Corresponding author: Megha Solanki
Contact email: solankimeghaphdiwl19@efluniversity.ac.in145