China and the West

Herman Melville and China : general.
Yang Jincai : In the late 1970s wide interest in Melville occurred when China slowly walked away from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. Throughout the 1980s, Melville studies in China were characterized by little reference to American scholarship. The Chinese critical fervor during the period featured a focus on the 'gloominess of Melville'. From the 1990s on, comparative studies of Melville and his contemporaries or disciples began to claim a fuller place in Chinese academe. These comparative approaches render a wealth of literary material that has helped readers in China understand Melville's writing. The most ambitious Melville publishing venture of the 1990s was the translation of Moby Dick. Heading into the twenty-first century, Melville scholarship in China has advanced in varied ways. The brisk publication of Melville's works has augmented Chinese scholars' unrelenting efforts in Melville studies. In contrast with the comparative approaches, critics now depart from the traditional trajectory of biographical and historicist approaches and focus on Melville's artistic project including his manipulation of narration, characterization, and writing technique.

Norman Michael Bock : Melville, Herman. Moby Dick : Chinese do not tend, at least not to the extant westerners do, to accord divinity to a single, conscious being. The Judeo-Christian assumption of monotheism encounters constant challenge even in China today, where small family temples may contain side-by-side statues of Christ, the Buddha, and Guanyin – all of whom are perceived as coequal manifestations of the same diffuse metaphysical presence. As the novel progresses, Ishmael moves away from the most extreme Western proclivity for assuming an anthropomorphized, antagonistic god, but appearances notwithstanding, he does not move toward the Chinese sensibility. Traditional Chinese scholars did not assume that the world is indifferent and nonpurposive, as Melville does. They saw the universe, on balance, as benevolent. At the end of the chase, when Ishmael, the sole survivor of the Pequod's crew, is finally alone in the timelessly rolling ocean, buoyed by the coffin of his lost comrade Queequeg, confrontated by the same heartless immensity that drove Pig mad, the narrator can react constructively to the woe he has felt all along. Ishmael now appreciates himself as representative of the archetypal wandering orphan of Judeo-Christian myth, waiting to be picked up by the Rachel to begin life anew on the lee shore. Chinese readers, accustomed to Chinese novels that detail the protagonist's involvement with the ethical concerns presented by the quotidian, will question why Moby Dick ends at this point.
Melville, Herman. The bell-tower : Chinese readers will appreciate the continuities, and subtle differences between Hawthorne' The birthmark and Melville's The bell-tower. Both tales focus on a prideful inventor who seeks to create an object that stands beyond the limitations and imperfections of historical existence. Although Melville warns against what he perceived as a misguided American tendency to strive to transcend the realm of historical limitations, he also recognizes that dreamers such as Bannadonna achieve certain precious perspectives on human experience. For Chinese readers, this paradox repeats a point made in Moby Dick and defines a key feature of American culture.
Melville, Herman. Bartleby the scrivener : This tale has proven tremendously intriguing to the generation of Chinese students that passed the first National University Entrance Exam conducted after the Cultural Revolution. These readers often attribute to Bartleby a heroic nihilism. Some Chinese students inclined to find evidence of Bartleby's redemption have argued that the protagonist, in dying, seems to fertilize the prison yard, so that 'by some magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by the birds, has sprung'. Bartleby the scivener provoked a cult of interest among Chinese undergraduates. Many intellectuals who had lost years of educational opportunity to the tumult of the Cultural Revolution now channeled their previously unarticulated inclinations toward nihilism into their readings of this work.