Chuang Tsu(Chuang Tse in ‘the Lathe of Heaven’)’s ‘a butterfly’s dream’(???? )
Posted on September 16, 2005 by JunHi, it’s Jun. Sorry to remain silent in the class. But it will take some more weeks for me to be able to join the discussion freely, because my English speaking is little bit slow and unclear yet. So for now, I think, posting my thoughts here is a better way for me to join our class’ discussion.
Chuang Tsu was an ancient Chinese Philosopher (died in about BC 250), he and Lao Tsu are two major masters in Taoism. They are well known to the people in East Asian countries like China, Korea, and Japan. And I think, in these days, they are very well known to western people too. But I’m not sure ‘a butterfly’s dream’ is also familiar to you. So I would like to introduce you the story. Le guin keep quoted his and Lao tsu’s epigrams, but she did not introduce this story in her novel. (But I’m sure she got some motif from it) The story goes like this: One day Chuang tsu had a long long dream, (long dreams are very popular motif in ancient Asian stories, and they are too long so the dreamer can not realize easily they were just dreams) in the dream, he became a butterfly. He had fun while he was flying from flowers to flowers. After he woke up, he could not make himself sure, whether he became butterfly in his dream, or a butterfly became Chuang tsu in the butterfly’s dream. There was nobody who can prove that he’s not in a butterfly’s dream but a butterfly was in his dream. By that he realized there is no distinction between dream and reality.
This story is one of the most famous and popular one among Chuang Tsu’s stories to Korean people, and it became more famous when the ‘Matrix the movie’ hit the Market, because so many movie critics in Seoul quoted it. The other critics, of course, referred to Jacques Lacan or Derrida.
In this story, Chuang tsu wants to break down the distinction between dream and reality. He even says that there is no use of that kind of distinction. It is what he and postmodern philosophers agree. I think that’s why so many post modern philosophers keep refer to Taoism.
And I think Le guin got her motif for <the Lathe of Heaven> from the story. In the end of novel, distinction between dream and reality means nothing to Orr. After all the events, he would think that ‘Oops, I have a bad reality this morning’, just like we, ordinary people, think that ‘Ooops, I had a bad dream this morning.’ This is what he admitted. He admitted, that dream and reality are not different things to him anymore.
‘’‘’And also I want to add my thoughts referring to Derrida and Lacan. (I enjoyed Le guin’s novel!)
Derrida said that, in the preface of ‘Of Grammatology’, ‘The future will be monstrous’. Even though some modernists or modern novelists describe dystopia in their works, they still have a ‘metaphysical’ concept of ‘Utopia’ in their mind, but to the postmodernist, the world is only monstrous, because they don’t have, borrowing Derrida’s word, a ‘frame’ to see the world within (I think this topic came up in the class). They do not have distinction between a good world and a bad world.
Lacan in his late times said, or by referring him Slavoj ZIZEK said that, if you want to make a ‘perfect whole’ you have to alienate something from the ‘whole’. That is the concept of Lacan’s ‘the symbolic’. And if you want to get to Lacan’s ‘the Real’, then you have to call back what alienated to the ‘whole’ and make it kind of a ‘mess’ again. I think ‘Aliens’ in this novel is a very good metaphor of that thinking. Orr made ‘aliens’ to make a perfect world, and in his ‘real’ world, he make aliens came to his world and he and they make the world a mess. That is, I think, postmodern dystopia. It is not an opposite of Utopia. Although they are ‘dystopia’, it is not ‘that bad’ to postmodernists, because they would refuse to retain ‘metaphysical’ distinction between good and bad.