The Sideways Gaze: Roland Barthes’s Travels in China reviewed by Dora Zhang
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type&id=714&fulltext=1&media
Barthes’s position in all of this is anomalous, since he does not fall neatly into any category of leftist Sinophile. Travels in China contains no great insights into the geopolitical situation of the time; Barthes realizes quite early on that their tightly-monitored trip will yield nothing of the kind, even if he were the right reader to discover them, which is doubtful. In many ways it’s his acknowledgment of the pitfalls of trying to understand the other that is most insightful. After lunch with a group of Europeans who have lived in China for a long time, Barthes identifies two perspectives on the part of the foreigners. One attempts to speak “from the inside: clothes, rejection of the foreign restaurant, bus and not taxi, Chinese ‘comrades’, etc.” At the other end of the spectrum is the perspective that continues to see China from the point of view of the West. “These two gazes are, for me, wrong. The right gaze is a sideways gaze.”
Comments
Oops, guess I don't need to read this book after all…
Eric Abrahamsen, June 29, 2012, 4:36a.m.
I find it interesting that someone like Barthes, who displayed such an ability to read, would find China, which to me displays endless possibilities for reading, so unreadable.
I do agree that the right gaze is a sideways gaze.
Lucas
Lucas Klein, June 30, 2012, 8:28a.m.
But I can completely believe that China, as presented to Barthes on that trip, was pretty unreadable.
If you're pootling around China these days, the "official narrative" is so half-hearted and intermittent you can easily ignore it, or re-interpret as you please. But back then, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, and given the level of control exercised over that trip, I'm not surprised at all that Barthes couldn't see anything but this opaque, sterile wall of language. I can imagine how asphyxiating that must have felt.
Eric Abrahamsen, July 1, 2012, 5:29a.m.
This is the typical polarity between foreigners who go "native" and reject their roots in an attempt to blend in with their new country, and those who are comfortable living in a foreign country while remaining outsiders.
Of course, the dichotomy is partly false. Going native is a "romantic" decision that involves, in some part, denying who you are and where you come from. Such people are in a way artificial since they deliberately put on blinkers in order to carry through their world view while denying the obvious. (Believe me, I've done it, although not in China.)
The people that Barthes describes as seeing China from the point of view of the West are not necessarily the opposite extreme that he seems to think they are. Since they'd lived in China a long time, they would have adapted themselves to their environment, but they were unlikely to have been so "romantic" as to pretend that they couldn't interpret what they saw to a compatriot in terms that he could understand. By "interpreting" they merely kept a foot in their original camp, helping to meet half way, which is not the same as being a total outsider. Anyway, that is my humble opinion.
Khanbaliqist, July 3, 2012, 2:56p.m.