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The Journey To The West: Cultural Dialogism

1214 Words5 Pages

“Carnivalization in The Journey to the West: Cultural Dialogism in Fictional Festivity”, is an essay written by college professor, Zuyan Zhou explaining how Monkey and the other characters and stories of The Journey to the West share many parallels with Western carnival in “season, duration, form and influence”(Zhou 69). While analyzing the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Zhou comes to many conclusions regarding the idea that The Journey to the West, a well known Chinese novel, is a representation of carnivalistic style and energy. He claims that the story of Monkey’s journey is a representation of many aspects of the carnival celebration, he states that Monkey is a character created with the vision of the clown from the carnival masqueraded dances. …show more content…

We see him transform into this more human like appearance and man status through the events of the story and eventually witness him reach illumination at the end of Journey (301). Over the course of his quest we see him switching from monkey to man depending on the circumstances, this can be seen as a form of masquerade because Monkey uses the idea of being human to cover up the fact that he is indeed a monkey, this masquerade eventually leads to a metamorphosis as Monkey realizes what and who he wants to be throughout the story. Monkey many times loses his masquerade of human qualities, an example of this being when he visits Heaven and her Majesty the Queen of Heaven is throwing a banquet and Monkey is in charge of watching the peaches. He gets over joyed when he sees the peaches and “[takes] off his court hat and robes” and begins to climb the tree to reach the peaches that were the most ripe and largest fruits on the tree (54). This reminds us that carnival in its self is a masquerade of reality, and how when that masquerade is removed we are left with who he truly …show more content…

He brings up the poetic style most often used at the time of the books writing, and explained how rhyme, rhythm and tune played quite a large part of the poetic style and the basic ways of story telling. Zhou points out how the author went against the typical ways of writing and not only incorporated the carnival style and atmosphere into the story but also into the writing style of the text itself (76). This was a very interesting detail to notice and helped Zhou to show just how much the carnival spirit and season aided Wu Cheng-en in the writing and story telling of The Journey to the West. The writing of the story progressed showing forms of metamorphosis as the world slowly reverted back to the normal ways, where monks are brave and un afraid of death, and how the scrolls being taken back to India can represent the return of social standards and normalities being flipped back to their everyday place, or their original

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