Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762) and G. Lowes Dickinson’s Letters from John Chinaman (1901), both employ the persona of a long-time Chinese resident in England to comment on contemporary English society. Similar as they are in structure, as both follow a pseudo-letter genre, these two works, however, differ significantly in their characterizations of the two disparate cultures they address: Citizen of the world tacitly endorses eighteenth century Engiand and Letters from John Chinaman castigates England and praises traditional China. That both, so different in tone and point of view, could nonetheless elicit strong sympathy from contemporary audiences suggests the significant changes which took place in the intellectual climate of England and America between the eignteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eighteenth century Europe with its empirical physics, secular philosophies and rapid technological advances saw a transition of world domination from East to West; western industrial might appeared without bounds, so Europeans in their sense of superiority could afford skepticism and critical self-examination. Yet the godless (and therefore directionless), post-Darwinian world of nineteenth century Europe contrasted to the traditional Christian view of history as linearly progressive (rather than circular) and led to a growing feeling among intellectuals that there may be no such thing as progress. Thus there was a strong tendency to re-evaluate of England’s position in the world.

Grappling with the predominant motif of personal cultivation, or the lack of it, in JPM, the current essay intends to scrutinize the coercive ambiance of the Ximen household—acts of voyeur, self-appointed spies and informants, rewards and punishments of domestic conduct, and the ubiquitous force of inhibition and surveillance by token of sight. It seeks to explore how education of a sort is viable amidst prohibition and repression, and to disclose the negotiable space open to the “social inferiors” of the Ximen household as an individuated form of agency to get socially and materially ahead. Using Pan Jinlian as the example of such a self-realization, it attests to the possibility of tapping into the covert dynamic of a Confucian panopticon and harnessing it to personal ends. It also calls into question the character of Yueniang as the official wife; her habitual resign and passive role are, in the author’s view, only superficial because her role serves a remedy to moral failures and internalizes the recuperative power of the familial hierarchy. Rejecting an either-or measure in judging JPM’s disparate characters, the essay contends the oversights of attributing their moral lapses or decay to inherent flaws in their individual conduct, psyche or intellect.

The Chinese Writer Lu Xun (魯迅 ,1880-1936), who had no access to Walter Benjamin’s theory of tragedy, is found in this study reaching a comparable conclusion: the tragic in literature is constituted by the perception of the irony of words (drama in Benjamin’s case and story narration in Lu Xun’s). In other words, whereas Benjamin believes that in experiencing sublimity tragic silence (the tragic hero’s inarticulateness) is far richer and much more profound than the tragic pathos, Lu Xun develops his conception of the tragic in terms of the impossibility of communication between the accused and the accuser. Lu Xun and Benjamin both base their assumptions on an understanding that the aesthetic tragic situation is always found in silence—a void of words, the moral inarticulateness of the tragic hero. That is, the tragic hero rejects the prevailing moral mores of the community, on the one hand, and the community accuses the tragic hero of doing so, on the other. This mutual negation leaves the tragic hero with no moral standpoint from which to defend himself. Since the prevailing moral attitudes are the expression of the powerful, the vanquished tragic hero “throws only the dumb shadow of his being, the self, as a sacrifice . . .” (Benjamin 109). Hence, it is not, as Hegel assumes it is, the conflict between two equally justifiable moral principles that situates tragedy. Nor is it, as Nietzsche asserts, the Dionysian tragic pathos. It is the irony of morals, the silence of the tragic hero in death, the irrational negation of history, that constitutes the tragic sublimity. The effort here to establish an affinity between Eastern and Western literatures is aimed at a more interesting and profound understanding of the work in question. Furthermore, perceiving the parallel between Lu Xun and Walter Benjamin as such suggests, in turn, a point of view important to East-West comparative literature which currently has been plagued by doubts about the existence of theoretical relation between the two traditions. That point of view is that, through a broader critical and theoretical understanding, the perceived cultural differences can from a certain perspective reveal themselves to be embedded in the same problematic.

Interpretation is coerced from us whenever we are faced with the text’s Unconscious—that part of (or space in) a text where we are faced with problems to which intratextuai voices remain entirely silent. Drawing on the theory of Pierre Macherey, this study looks at texts by Ibsen, Brecht, Doyle and Verne to reveal the multiple manifestations and extratextual implications of the textual Unconscious.

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