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The Eye and the Mirror: Visual Subjectivity in Chinese and American Literary Representations

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The Eye and the Mirror: Visual Subjectivity in Chinese and American Literary Representations THE EYE AND THE MIRROR: VISUAL SUBJECTIVITY IN CHINESE AND AMERICAN LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS by Guozhong Duan APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Ming Dong Gu, Chair ___________________________________________ David F. Channell ___________________________________________ Peter K. J. Park ___________________________________________ Dennis Walsh Copyright 2017 Guozhong Duan All Rights Reserved THE EYE AND THE MIRROR: VISUAL SUBJECTIVITY IN CHINESE AND AMERICAN LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS by GUOZHONG DUAN, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES—STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2017 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My sincerest gratitude first goes to Professor Ming Dong Gu, my supervisor, for his years of instructions and inspirations. This dissertation would not have been possible without the help from his insights and expertise in comparative literary studies and intellectual thoughts. His courses have introduced me to the interdisciplinary field of psychoanalysis, visual culture, and literary criticism, and have enabled me to conduct literary studies with a broader horizon. In addition to his help in academic training, his earnest attitude towards scholarship and persistent devotion to intellectual investigation have been and will be encouraging me in my own study. Professor David F. Channell’s course on space, time, and culture has provided me with knowledge of the Western intellectual history that is of great importance to my current comparative study. Professor Peter K. J. Park guided me through my field exams, for which he spent many afternoons with me on face-to-face instructions. His course on historiography of the European Enlightenment is an eye-opening experience for me and has initiated my interest in the history of ideas. Professor Dennis Walsh’s expertise in American literature is the root of my interest in the nineteenth-century American literature and my determination to make it a vital part of my dissertation. I also wish to thank my colleagues in the Confucius Institute at UT Dallas for their help in life and study, to my friends and classmates in UT Dallas and Yangzhou University, China, for their help in research materials and intellectual insights. This work is also dedicated to my parents, my wife Xiaofang Lu, my daughter Qingyan Duan, and my son Muyan Duan, for their precious love and lasting warmth that have been with me over the years. March 2017 iv THE EYE AND THE MIRROR: VISUAL SUBJECTIVITY IN CHINESE AND AMERICAN LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS Guozhong Duan, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2017 Supervising Professor: Ming Dong Gu This dissertation is a comparative study of the role visuality, particularly interpersonal visuality, plays in the constitution of human subjectivity in four masterworks of Chinese and American fiction in the light of conceptions of visuality and subjectivity in Eastern and Western thought. Images of the eye and mirror, along with other visual agencies for representing subjectivity, are abundant in the chosen masterpieces. My comparative study of these agencies reveals that there are both psychologically universalizable and culturally specific factors in the visual constitution of subject and subjectivity. What is shared by both traditions is the paradoxical self-other relationship in the visual field: while the visual other makes the self possible, it frequently alienates or annihilates the latter. This paradoxical situation can be reduced into a theorem: “I see and I am seen, therefore I am (not).” In the four novels, the psychological process of identification with the visual other in the “imaginary order” is a more fundamental way of constituting subjects than the discursive and institutional power in the “symbolic order.” The cultural differences pertaining to visual subjectivity are manifest in four different modes: the v symbolic, imaginary, transcendent, and dualistic. The first two are observable mainly in the two Chinese novels, and the last two tend to be predominant in the two American novels. The differences are rooted in the main intellectual thoughts that the authors are both representing and contesting—Chinese Confucianism and American Transcendentalism. Whereas Confucian immanent relationship brings about ethical intersubjective visuality in which ritualized seeing is the Way to maintain social harmony, American transcendentalism and individualism give rise to the “aloft” and the “dualistic” vision in the service of seeking Truth. Questioning their traditions, the Chinese novels represent tragic subjects as consequences of required identification with the mirror images in the imaginary order, or the patriarchal father in the symbolic order. The American novels represent similar tragic subjects, who are pursuing identification with the transcendent Soul, or the gazers as ideologically formative agents. The authors also present resolutions in accordance with specific modes of problematic visual subjectivity, mainly an ethical care of the other to curb the desire for identification, objectification, or assimilation of the other, which promises a less dangerous visual relationship between the seer and the seen. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………….…………………………………………………………iv ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS………………………………….…………………………...…. viii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1 THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO VISUAL SUBJECTIVITY…………...….29 CHAPTER 2 INTELLECTUAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE NOVELS.................................................................................................................60 CHAPTER 3 VISUAL POLITICS, NARCISSISTIC IMAGE, AND THE SIN OF SEEING IN THE PLUM IN THE GOLDEN VASE …………………………………….….…......96 CHAPTER 4 MIRROR HALL, SELF IDENTITY, AND TRAGIC VISION IN THE STORY OF THE STONE…………………………………………………..............................140 CHAPTER 5 TRANSCENDENTALIST VISION, VISUAL TRAP, AND CASTRATION IN MOBY DICK………………………......................................................................188 CHAPTER 6 DUALISTIC VISION, DISCIPLINARY GAZE, AND ETHICS IN THE SCARLET LETTER………….…………………………………………...............248 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………...…….295 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………...….301 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………...322 CURRICULUM VITAE vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS PV The Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chi Ping Mei SS The Story of the Stone MD Moby Dick SL The Scarlet Letter viii INTRODUCTION The subtlety of the ocular power has been an ever-fresh topic in studies of humanities due to the whimsical charisma hidden in the human eyes in epistemology and social interactions. Among the senses, eyes are believed to be “the noblest” in both the Chinese and the Western philosophical tradition. The Chinese credo “Bai wen bu ru yi jian (A hundred accounts of hearsay is not as good as one eyewitness)” may be paired with the Western one “seeing is believing.”1 The “ocularcentric” 2 rationalist philosopher Rene Descartes argues that “All the management of our lives depends on the senses, and since that of sight is the most comprehensive and the noblest of these, there is no doubt that the inventions which serve to augment its power are among the most useful that there can be.”3 The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid holds a similar idea that “Of the faculties called the five senses, sight is without doubt the noblest.”4 The visual is even believed to have initiated human civilizations, for which Freud argues in his Civilization and Its Discontent that civilization was “a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait; this made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provoked feelings of 1 See Bingfeng Yang, “Conceptualization and Visualization of the Invisible in Western and Chinese Thought and Literature” (PhD diss., The University of Texas at Dallas, 2015), 14. 2 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3. 3 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 65. 4 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1810), 152. 1 shame in him.”5 The feelings of shame derived from being seen by another help establish cultural superego that guarantees the regulations of libidinal flow and therefore the inauguration of civilization. However, human attitudes towards the eye have always been ambivalent. There are two pairs of contradictory attitudes: truth-revealing vs. visual-deceiving, and window-of-the-soul vs. trap-of-the-soul. For the first, Heraclitus (500 B.C.) wrote: “the eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears,” and “men are deceived over the recognition of visible things.”6 For the second, Otto Fenichel wrote: “…the eye plays a double part. It is not only actively sadistic (the person gazing puts a spell on his victim) but also passively receptive (the person who looks is fascinated by that which he sees).”7 This study is concerned with the consequences of both attitudes for the construction of subject, identity, and subjectivity in terms of the paradoxical relationship between the need for mutual visuality and the anxiety over other’s gaze:
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