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"The Great Wall ends at the northernmost tip of China..., In March and April 1917, Kafka stayed in his small house in the narrow Jewish Old Town of Prague Here, he wrote a book-like novel "When the Great Wall Was Built". This novel is puzzling not only for its subject matter, but also for its meaning. The novel tells a fantasy and mysterious story: from an unimaginable distant era. , on the imperial land that cannot be covered by the sky, the Chinese began to build the Great Wall. It is said that the purpose of building the Great Wall was to defend against the invasion of northern nomads. The method of building the Great Wall was to build it in sections. The wonderful thing is not this miraculous project, but. It is the organization that completes this project. How is the overwhelming power gathered by countless individuals, the power to build the Tower of Babel, the Pyramid, and the Great Wall, how is the leader to mobilize the scattered energy in the individual? "Possibilities are all brought together for one purpose" to create a miracle? The key is to build it in sections. The Great Wall is a huge project, and no individual is too small to see its completion.
Texts and their symbols gain meaning in discourse. According to Foucault, discourse is a set of internally unified and interrelated expressions about a specific topic or object that implies specific disciplines and strategies. It provides assumptions, rules and expectations for thinking and speaking for individual texts. Said studied Orientalism or Orientalism based on Foucault's discourse theory and pointed out that Orientalism is a way of expressing the "Orient" as the "cultural other" in the West during the post-Enlightenment period. It not only contains the West's various bizarre imaginations about the East, but also implies a set of serious theoretical and practical systems and rules for the operation of power. It consists of "the distribution of regional political consciousness to aesthetics, economics, sociology, history and philosophy texts", forming a knowledge pedigree or concept group, stipulating the conceptual basis and meaning structure of individual writers' texts, and providing them with specific vocabulary, Imagery, rhetorical techniques and even types of motifs. Said believed that Foucault ignored the meaning of a single text or writer, and advocated using the method of "textual close reading" to reveal "the dynamic relationship between a single text or writer and the complex collection of texts to which it belongs." He summarized his research methods into "strategic positioning" and "strategic construction," "... strategic positioning, a method of describing the author's position in the text based on the works he wrote related to the East, and strategic construction, a method of analyzing the relationship between texts and groups of texts, and the ways in which text types assemble, condense, and acquire real-referential power within themselves and within larger cultural contexts. I use "strategy." "This concept simply serves to identify the problem faced by every writer who writes about Oriental subjects: how to grasp this subject, how to approach it, how to not be overwhelmed by its profundity, its scope, its formidable breadth. Frustrated or defeated. Anyone who writes about the East must position himself with the Orient as a coordinate; specifically for his works, this positioning includes the narrative perspective he adopts, the type of structure he constructs, and the flowing images in his works. , types of motifs - all of these combine to form a sophisticated and complex way of answering the readers' questions, discovering the inner meaning of the East, and finally, expressing the East or speaking on behalf of the East. However, none of this occurs in a vacuum. Every writer who writes about the East assumes the existence of some precursor, some previous knowledge of the East (even the writer who writes on Homer), and these things become his source of reference and basis. Foundation. In addition, every work about the East will closely link itself to other works, readers, public institutions, and the East itself. Therefore, there is a relationship between the work, the readers, and some special aspects of the East. The complex relationship as a whole forms a structure that can be analyzed..."
Although Said's Orientalism research does not include China, there is undoubtedly a set of expressions of the image of China in Western modern culture. Discourse, it can be called Sinology or Chineseism. It is composed of various mutually referential texts about China, providing Kafka's novels with basic materials, narrative angles, symbols and their meanings, as well as the historical depth of symbolic meanings. The text has no boundaries, it is just a knot in the network of discourse. In this way, Kafka's novels and the Western image discourse of China form a cycle of interpretation. The Western image of China provides meaning codes for interpreting the novel, and the novel becomes an index of specific aspects of the Western image of China. "The Great Wall ends at the northernmost tip of China, and the project starts from the southeast and southwest and stretches here to connect..." The beginning of the novel is reminiscent of the words in "Matteo Ricci's Notes on China" (Volume 5, Chapter 13 ): "The famous Great Wall ends at the northern end of China's western frontier." This Italian Jesuit missionary traveled from Italy to China more than three centuries ago and finally died in Beijing. Kafka never went further than Paris in his life. The way he imagines China is purely through traveling in texts. His writing is actually a process of "weaving" images and stories from various Western texts about China in his reading field. Perhaps the most obvious symbol of China is the Great Wall, just like Egypt is always associated with the pyramids.
In the West, narratives about China have long been associated with the Great Wall. "Marco Polo's Travels" (1298?) did not mention the Great Wall, which became an important basis for people to doubt its reliability. If Marco Polo had indeed been to China, he could not have missed such an obvious sign. This question was raised by Italian writers in the 17th century and British researchers in the 20th century. Later travelers rarely made such mistakes. The Portuguese Pinto's "Oriental Insights" (1569-1580) talks about the Chinese king sending prisoners to build the Great Wall, and the Spanish Mendoza's "The Great Chinese Empire" (1585) specifically introduces the "500 leagues long" "The Great Wall": "There is a 500 league long fortification, the city wall, in this country. It starts from Suzhou City, which is located on a high mountain, and extends from west to east. The king who built the wall is called Qin Shihuang, and it was built to guard against the Tatars. ..." In 1655, Johannhof accompanied the Dutch envoy to Beijing. He mentioned in his published travelogue "The Dutch Envoy's Visit to China" (1665): "Chinese farmers told us that people can calmly travel in one day. You can ride to the Great Wall and back again." Pinto, Mendoza and Johnnyhoff only heard about the Great Wall directly or indirectly, but the Italian missionary Wei Kuangguo's "New Picture of China" (1665) proved that he saw it with his own eyes. To the legendary Great Wall. More and more missionaries and envoys are coming to China, and more and more news or praise about the Great Wall is spreading to the West. Father Nan Huairen said, "The seven wonders of the world combined cannot compare to the Great Wall of China. The descriptions of the Great Wall in all European publications are not enough to describe the magnificence of the Great Wall that I have seen." (1685)
From the legends and discoveries of the Renaissance era to the testimony and admiration of the Enlightenment era, the Great Wall, as a miracle, has gradually become a symbol of China in the Western perspective. The "General History of the Chinese Empire" (1735) compiled by Father Doucheid is called an encyclopedia about China during the Enlightenment era. It also describes that "in 215 BC, under the order of Qin Shihuang, the huge project of the Great Wall was built to protect The empire is not invaded by the Tatars..." Duheid did not express too much enthusiasm for the Great Wall, but to the Enlightenment philosophers, the Great Wall became an admirable miracle. Diderot's "Encyclopedia" (1765) compared the Great Wall to the Pyramids. Voltaire's "On Customs" (1756) stated that the Great Wall was "a great building exceeding the Egyptian pyramids" "in terms of its purpose and scale". Since the Age of Enlightenment, the Great Wall has not only enjoyed a high reputation in the West, but has also gradually become a symbol of Chinese civilization. Whatever that sign means. Boswell's "Life of Johnson" records that Dr. Johnson once expressed enthusiasm for visiting the Great Wall of China and considered it a true honor. Another famous Englishman, Defoe, expressed a different view in "The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe" (the sequel to "Robinson Crusoe"). Although the Great Wall "is a very great project", it is "too big to be built." ", because it could not even stop the ragtag Tatar soldiers. The Great Wall has become a symbol of Chinese civilization and has gradually been given different and even opposite meanings. It may symbolize the greatness or strength of Chinese civilization, or it may symbolize the conservatism or weakness of Chinese civilization. The Macartney delegation visited China and witnessed the magnificence of the Great Wall with their own eyes. In "Records of the British Envoy's Visit to Qianlong" (1797), Deputy Envoy Standong praised "Such a huge project is really thrilling", while also calmly analyzing the true significance of the Great Wall. If this huge wall is indeed historically significant, It once blocked foreign invasions, but now, its significance is only to restrict the migration of Chinese people. Walls can block foreigners and shut down Chinese people. Captain Barreto, who accompanied the regiment, observed the structure of the Great Wall in detail with a professional soldier's perspective. More than 40 years later, the British army invaded China from the sea, and the Great Wall completely became a historical relic. After the Opium War, Westerners traveled to and from China, and many people went to the Great Wall for sightseeing. While they admired the majesty of the Great Wall, they also reflected on the Chinese civilization that created this miracle. From a Western perspective, the Great Wall has gradually transformed from a building in historical reality into a cultural symbol with an obvious exotic or oriental flavor. This process of mythologizing occurred before and after the Romanticism movement in the 19th century.
The Great Wall has become a symbol of Chinese civilization, and its mythological significance has gradually replaced its historical significance. According to Roland Barthes, myth is a way of signification and a language chosen by history. A form suddenly has some rich, practical, seemingly natural and indisputable meaning, which completely depends on some deep connection established by history between form and meaning, even though this connection is often arbitrary and changing. of. The so-called randomness is because the partially similar signification process between form and history is not fully rational. Why is the Great Wall a symbol of Chinese civilization? What are the characteristics of Chinese civilization? Change refers to the fact that the form does not change under the conceptual background of different times, but the meaning does. Mendoza and Voltaire regarded the Great Wall as a symbol of China's strength, while Defoe and later Schlegel regarded the Great Wall as a symbol of the weakness of Chinese civilization. The Great Wall is a building, which in reality is just a fortification in ancient China. But in the history of the image of China in the West, it first changed from an exotic building to a cultural symbol that needs to be interpreted and "invented". People gradually established specious analogies between the Great Wall and certain "Chinese characteristics" The relationship between the Great Wall and a vast empire, a closed and conservative, stagnant and spatialized, highly organized and enslaved civilization, etc., has led to the mythification of the Great Wall.
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In Western culture, China’s reality has become a text to be interpreted, or a system of symbols with specific meanings, the most expressive of which is a certain core Symbols, because symbolic expressions possess both the clarity and richness of rhetorical meaning, serve as "clichés" in the public imagination and have a particularly wide-ranging influence. For example, the pyramids are not only ancient buildings, but also symbols of Egyptian civilization. The Great Wall gradually has a specific textual meaning and has become a symbol in historical time?/divgt;