The challenge of verily comprehending Monkey; I don’t believe I was ready for this task when I started it. I usually read out loud to myself when I am able. Cadence and rhythm align themselves with our breathing and voice. Narrative needs vocal folds to come alive sometimes. The epic-folk-narrative Monkey, much like the character it is named for, is a difficult creature to diagnose.
I am unsure where to pin this difficultly. Is it the translation?
Regardless, Monkey is certainly expressing traits of the trickster. Seen cross-culturally the trickster is a character that regularly breaks community norms and channels personal gain through folly and mischief. Neither always evil nor always good, the trickster often times befalls hard times due to his or her own frivolity. Jung would label the trickster an archetype. Joseph Campbell describes the American First Nation trickster as
[…] the great rabbit and coyote, the ravens and blue jay. And there’s a
very special property in the trickster: he always breaks in, just as the
unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. (Campbell, 39)
I’m not sure how Freud would value the trickster. I would hazard to say that perhaps Freud would deign Monkey as a projection of the Id; the antics and violent outbursts reveal the harsh and ugly animal that human desire creates (if you are a Freudian).
However our hominid Equal to Heaven anti-hero is more complicated then a trickster. His outbursts and refusal to recognize his conscienceless behavior transmogrifies into a new being when he speaks to Pigsy:
‘Brother,’ laughed Monkey, ‘don’t scold him. It is we who
are to blame, for never having told him that we were going
to get scriptures. (Waley 164)
Finally the Dear Monkey is recognizing not only his desire for immortality; not only his struggle to become a powerful force of heaven; The Monkey realizes that he has been given responsibility. Of course, Monkey’s growth came a price of his freedom with the help of a spell and a gold fillet band for his head.
I see Monkey partially as a kept reflection of the development of humans and civilization. The gold fillet band could be the thick concept of restraint hiding behind this physical manifestation. It can be no mere coincidence that Monkey’s epiphany comes on a religious journey.
The refinement and sophistication of the co-operation required by all of us is what my beloved Dear Monkey eventually informs me. These human constructs require me to live perhaps not as I would like to live. Maybe I would prefer walking campus in a bathrobe with Kleenex boxes for shoes and pancakes for mittens. I am free to do this. But the social pressures for me to conform are constantly there. Monkey feels them, too.
These pressures that we experience together and adhere to together are fascinating. Taboo is an especially magnetic subject among sociologists and anthropologists. It is their car wreck on the freeway that they cannot turn their head from as they slowly pass.
Appiah discusses taboo and in doing so mentions a term I like very much: “Open Texture”. This concept is heavily embedded into the US American legal system. Reviewing both Plessy v. Ferguson with “Separate but Equal” and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the eternal “With all deliberate speed”, a lovely turn of a phrase originated with the reverend Oliver Wendell Holmes come to my mind most immediately.
Sources:
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. (W.W. Norton, NYC, 2007)
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. No. 1. Supreme Ct. of the US. May 17, 1954.
Campbell, Joseph, and Toms, Michael. and Briggs, Dennie. and Maher, John M. An open life / Joseph Campbell in conversation with Michael Toms ; foreword by Jean Erdman Campbell ; selected and edited by John M. Maher and Dennie Briggs Perennial Library, New York : 1990
Plessy v. Ferguson. No. 210. Supreme Ct. of the US. May 18, 1896.
Wu Ch’eng En. Monkey. Trans. Arthur Waley. (New York: Grove Press, 1943).