The Center Cannot Hold: Ambiguous Narrative Voices in Wu's The Journey to the West and Conrad's Heart of Darkness

American readers of literature are in general more familiar with Joseph Conrad and his modernist novel Heart of Darkness than with the Chinese author Wu Cheng-en (1500-1582) and his classical novel The Journey to the West. Readers' uneven acquaintance with the two authors makes it necessary to begin this essay with a short account of the background of Wu's novel and with a brief plot summary. Published in 1592, The Journey to the West is one of the four monumental novels of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the other three being The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, and The Golden Lotus. For over three hundred years, the author of The Journey to the West was thought to be a Taoist patriarch who lived during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), until the Chinese scholar Hu Shih confirmed Wu Cheng-en's authorship in 1923 (Yeh 17). Loosely based on the true story of Hsuan-tsang (596-664), a Chinese Buddhist monk who took seventeen years to travel to India and fetch Buddhist scriptures for his people, The Journey to the West depicts the fictional monk Tripitaka's journey to India to obtain Mahayana scriptures for the Tang Emperor. (1) In Sanskrit, the name Tripitaka, consisting of tri, which means three, and pitaka, which means basket, alludes to The Three Baskets, the title of the "most basic and possibly earliest body of sacred [Buddhist] writings" (Nigosian 142), made up of three collections or principles: theVinayana, the Sutta, and the Abhidhamma. The Buddhism represented in the novel is largely Mahayana Buddhism, which teaches crossing over to the other shore of salvation (Plaks 279). (2) The journey begins with Tripitaka and his first disciple Monkey, who, taking the shape of a monkey but bearing many humanlike and Godlike attributes, serves as Tripitaka's protector. As the journey progresses, more characters are converted and join it, and the pilgrims encounter all kinds of monsters, .ends, demons, and perils. Assisted by Monkey and various deities, however, notably Bodhisattva Kuan Yin, the pilgrims heroically overcome the obstacles, reach their destination, and fulfill their holy mission. At first glance, Heart of Darkness (1902) and The Journey to the West seem to have little in common. The former narrates an early twentieth-century English sailor's adventures in Africa on the Congo River; the latter delineates a seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk's pilgrimage to India. One has been assimilated into the canon of modern narrative; the other belongs to the subgenre of the so-called Chinese "literati novel." One involves a sailor-hero who serves the "great cause" of the British Empire; the other portrays a monk-hero acting as the messenger for an emperor of the Tang dynasty (618-907). Yet a close examination of both novels suggests that despite their apparent disparity, they share a remarkable textual affinity. Both authors employ narrative strategies to diffuse narrative centers (usually constituted by coherent and sometimes monolithic themes) and appeal to narrative voices that create ambiguous epistemological, religious, and ideological points of view. In Heart of Darkness, narrative ambiguity is deployed chiefly by Conrad's play with the textual symbol of "darkness," which is simultaneously aligned with conflicting epistemological and moral points of view; that is, darkness simultaneously evokes the moral decadence of imperialism and the inhuman abjection of primitive Africa. In The Journey to the West, narrative ambiguity is enacted by Wu's play with intricate, multilayered narrative episodes that simultaneously affirm and undercut multiple themes: Buddhist quest, romantic heroism, and indigenous Taoism and Confucianism. For this reason, Anthony Yu is right to caution that "the work [the novel] itself makes constant demand of its readers to heed the many levels of nonliteral meaning structured therein" ("Religion and Literature" 133).While narrative ambiguity in Heart of Darkness remains unresolved in the end, with such famously ambiguous words as "the horror, the horror" (68) and with such ambiguous references to Africa as "the uttermost ends of the earth . …