Trading Relations, the Evil of violence and the Ungrievability of the Other in David Mitchell's: The One Thousand Autumms of Jacob de Zoet

• Autores: Susana Onega Jaén
• Localización: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievality in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction / coord. por Susana Onega Jaén, Jean-Michel Ganteau, 2023, ISBN 978-1-03-238976-9, págs. 15-35
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The One Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) offers a multiperspectival account of the confrontation of European and Japanese cultures at the turn of the nineteenth century, when European countries were fighting for national pre-eminence and Japan was immersed in the isolationism of the Edo period, its only window to Europe being the Dutch trading post on Dejima. The arrival at this post of Jacob de Zoet, an enlightened clerk with strong religious convictions, brings to the fore the cruelty and violence routinely exerted by the Dutch officers on their social, racial and/or gender inferiors, making Jacob realise that the true barbarians on Dejima are not the slaves but their “civilised” masters. Less extreme forms of institutionalised cruelty are exerted, both by Europeans and Japanese, on socially inferiors, women and mixed-race children. The analysis seeks to demonstrate that, while Jacob’s agapeic love for slaves and beggars and the midwife Aibagawa Orito’s compassion for women in need represent ethical responses to the demand for attention made by the ungrievable others of their own patriarchal societies, Dr Lucas Marinus and the Nagasaki Magistrate are engaged in a supernatural struggle against evil Lord Abbot Enomoto consonant with the cosmic duality of yin/yang.