Seligey V. V.

Dnepropetrovsk National University named after Oles’ Honchar

The Reception of transcultural influences in Frank Chin’s novel “Gunga Din Highway” (1994)

Frank Chin’s novel “Gunga din Highway” (1994) exemplifies the unique portrayal of Chinese American culture as radically polyvalent, adding and appropriating various, originally dissimilar cultures. This interferential, transcultural entity appears the ideal subject for comparative research. This literature is well-studied in works of American (Werner Sollors, Shirley Lim, Lan Dong, Maria C. Zamora Geoffrey V. Davis), European (M. Epstein, N. Vysotska, D. Nalivaiko) and Chinese (Xu Ying-guo, Cheng Wei-wei, Ye Lei-lei) scholars. These works propose various attempts to conceptualize the worldview and poetics, fundamental for writings by Frank Chin, David Henry Hwang, Amy Tan concerning the problem of identity in current transcultural world. Such notions as “post-ethnic cosmopolitism” [6, р. 5], “transculture” [5, р. 328], “pluriversum” [1, c. 6] are proposed. Frank Chin’s mentioned novel with the only exception of E San Juan’s research “From Chinatown to Gunga Din Highway” (2000) [7], has been studied neither by American nor by Ukrainian scholars. The apparent reason for this diffidence is rare complicity of the object, diffusing Western and Eastern literary canons.

The composition and imagery of the novel requires careful analysis as a space of intertextual intercultural interaction. Its core character, contrasted to Sissy Helff’s theory of self-doubting transcultural character, questions nether his inner world nor identity, but the place and role of transnscultural conscience in the culturally multifaceted world. The dialogue with R. Kipling’s Gunga Din, numerous connections with cinema imagery (particularly films about Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu), constant attempts to create “Chinatown” epiphany in Joycean sense, deep interpretation of Homer’s Ulysses comprise the complicated entangling with western literature. Simultaneously, the novel doubtlessly appears as a kind of continuation of Chinese literary canon, keeping tune with Chinese literary trend of “seeking roots” literature (“xungen wenxue”). Major junctions of Chinese-ness are seen in allusions on the treatise on medieval military strategy “Thirty Six Stratagems” and Lo Guan-zhong’s novel “Three Kingdoms” no less vital for the plot than “western allusions”/ to continue this list, there are a lot more “small links” to Chinese canon, episodic in-texts, like re-thinking of Mu Lan, Sun-zi, Eight Immortals from Peach Garden.

Applying the set of comparative and analytic methods, combining the methods of distant and close reading, the analysis of intertextuality, are meant to outline transcultural quality of Frank Chin’s novel, proving its supra-ethnic, intercultural but by no means simplified meaning.

Among the objects of the comparative analysis, applied to the works by Frank Chin there are works of European (J. B. Shaw, B. Brecht, S. Bekkett, Ch. Dikkens, R. Kipling, J. Joyce), Chinese («Daodejing», «Sun Zi’s Art of War», «Thirty Six stratagems», «Three Kingdoms», «The River Margin») and American (Mark Twain, E. Albee, Tennessee Williams, J. Barth, L. Chu, M. X. Kingston, A. Tan, T. Pynchon) literature. Special attention The transcultural poetics and semantics of F. Chin’s writings is studied in its development from arguably ethnocentric concepts of «chinaman sensibility», multicultural eclectics and damnations of «fake» Chinese American culture, the implementation and synthesis of various cultural images an identities, portraying American Chinese-ness as a transcultural phenomenon.

Литература

1. Висоцька Н.О. Єдність множинного. Американська література кінця ХХ поч. ХХІ століть у контексті культурного плюралізму. – К.: Вид. центр КНЛУ, 2010. – 456 с.

2. Chin F. Bulletproof Buddhists and other essays /Chin Frank. − University of Hawaii Press, 1998.– 431p.

3. Chin F. Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake //Ono K. A. A companion to Asian American studies. – Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. - pp. 133 - 150.

4. Chin F. Gunga Din Highway. – Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1994. -
404 p.

5. Epstein М. Transculture: a broad way between globalism and multiculturalism. // The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2009. - Vol. 68. - № 1. - pр. 327–351.

6. Hollinger D.A. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. - N.Y.: Basic Books, 1995. - 208 p.

7. San Juan E. From Chinatown to Gunga Din Highway: Reflections on Frank Chin and the Representation of Chinese America/ E. San Juan Jr.. – Duke University Press, 2000. – 43 p.