On a Chinese Screen · Chapter
LVII: A City Built on a Rock explained
The chapter vividly describes a grey, gloomy city built on a rock at the confluence of two rivers, with narrow, winding streets, a dense and noisy population, and a pervasive stench.
What happens
The chapter vividly describes a grey, gloomy city built on a rock at the confluence of two rivers, with narrow, winding streets, a dense and noisy population, and a pervasive stench. The narrator reflects on the impenetrable strangeness of the Chinese people, contrasting the inability to understand them with the familiarity of one's own culture. The chapter concludes with a haunting description of the surrounding graves, which seem to menace the living and foreshadow an eventual silence.
Themes in this chapter
Cultural Clash and Misunderstanding
The narrator explicitly states the inability to understand the Chinese people, emphasizing the profound cultural gap and the failure of imagination to bridge it.
Colonial Ennui and Isolation
The narrator's longing for silence and the overwhelming sensory chaos reflect the isolation and weariness of the foreigner in an alien environment.
Futility of Western Superiority
Despite Western assumptions of superiority, the narrator admits that sympathy and knowledge fail to provide any hold on the lives of the Chinese, rendering the observer powerless and baffled.
Characters to notice
- The Stranger
The narrator, a foreign observer, experiences the city's overwhelming sensory assault and reflects on the cultural divide.
Key passages
“You cannot tell what are the lives of these thousands who surge about you. Upon your own people sympathy and knowledge give you a hold; you can enter into their lives, at least imaginatively, and in a way really possess them. By the effort of your fancy you can make them after a fashion part of yourself. But these are as strange to you as you are strange to them. You have no clue to their mystery.”
The narrator feels completely alienated from the Chinese crowd, unable to understand their inner lives despite being able to empathize with people of his own culture.
This passage encapsulates the theme of cultural misunderstanding and the limits of empathy across cultural boundaries.
“It is as though they were laying siege to the city, with a sullen ruthlessness, biding their time; and as though in the end, encroaching irresistibly as fate, they would drive those seething throngs before them till the houses and the streets were covered by them, and the green mounds came down to the water gate.”
The countless graves surrounding the city seem to threaten the living, as if the dead will eventually overwhelm and cover the entire city.
This imagery reinforces the theme of mortality and the futility of human activity in the face of death.