A Semiotic Reading of Nicholas Jose's Avenue of Eternal Peace

Abstract

Nicholas Jose has been advocating "transcultural writing" for more than three decades, with Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989) as an early part of his practice. In 1990, Avenue was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Prize but failed to win this Australian national award. Judged by Chinese semiotician Zhao Yiheng's reception model of narratives, this is a "message blocked" case. Using the framework of Roman Jakobson's communication model, this paper reinterprets the six constitutive factors and functions to investigate the elements that blocked the message. My main argument is that "contact", "context", and "code" jointly blocked the communication; the three Cs reflect three long-standing problems in Australian literature: the issue of cultural identity, the dark side of White Australian Dream, and the Orientalist representation of "the other" culture. The failure in literary communication analyzed also suggests that Wally's perception of China follows a Saussurean dichotomy which presupposes a closed linguistic system and excludes the role of the subject and the extra-semiotic object in signification. The Peircean trichotomy better captures the process of concept formation and is a better approach to transcultural writing in the contemporary postmodern situation. Transcultural writing challenges its readers; we need to transcend our confined nationality and persistent prejudice, and develop adequate "transnational literacy" to appreciate this new form of cultural production.