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“The Morning Calm” as the Transcendental Signifier in Percival Lowell's Chosn: The Land of The Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea Abstract JonggabKim Among many travel narratives written about Korea by Europeans in the late 19th century Percival Lowell's Chosn: The Land of The Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea deserves an especially critical attention and rhetorical analysis. His text rhetorically transforms “The Land of the Morning Calm,” the transliterated English form of Chosn, into the essence of Korea: a mere signifier becomes a transcendental signifier in line with the heliocentric tradition with the Europe at its center and Orient at the periphery. This heliocentric trope functions and serves as a narrative principle of problematizing and thematizing Korea in order to essentialize it into a coherent and transparent object of knowledge: Korea is a benighted country still sleeping a medieval slumber, lagging far behind European civilization. In Lowell's rhetorically conscious narrative all manners, cultures, and phenomena of Korea, whose alterity would have baffled him otherwise, are understood and explained in terms of “Morning Calm.” But “The Morning Calm” as a transcendental signifier, though clarifying everything Korean, cannot be clarified itself. As such, “Morning Calm,” this paper argues, becomes a metaphor of authorial blindness in Lowell's text. Lowell thinks he knows what he sees in Korea, but he does not know what he really sees. Korea whose essence he thinks he successfully deciphers is no other than his discursive formation constructed out of the web of Eurocentric and imperialistic ideologies. The truth of his travel narrative is more about Lowell himself or the heliocentric signifier rather than about its referent Chosun. The problems with his narrative is the problem of the learned eyes, of the theoretically mediated gaze. Lowell was the most intelligent and most aristocratic among those who visited Korea and his narrative was the most theoretical and rhetorical one. But Such a learned gaze interferes with and makes impossible the real encounter with the Other's gaze and voice. One uses magnifying theoretical glasses in order to see the object more clearly. But the very tool devised to show things as they are transform them into something else in the process of showing. Hence arises the necessity of critical reading of travel narratives focusing on and revealing the process and mechanism of such a systematic transformation.
