King Chulalongkorn’s Travel Writing and Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Bodily Perception

บทคัดย่อ

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposes in his renowned Phenomenology of Perception (1962[1945]) that perception, or the way in which we know the world, emerges through the dynamic operation of the sensory system of our body upon the physicality of the world. However, this ability to bodily perceive the world, as Merleau-Ponty has further argued, would also require a paralleling process of the self to be concentrated on the physical interaction with the worldly objects. In this paper, I use this philosophical idea of Merleau-Ponty to read Far from Home (1907), which is the travel journal of King Chulalongkorn of Siam, written while he was traveling to Europe for the second time to recover from the ailing health condition. Previous research has tended to treat Far From Home as a piece of historical “text” which can be interpreted to understand a broader history or the king’s literary genius. These views are problematic as they have overlooked the ontological significance of the writing, particularly the “lived quality” of the journal’s narrative which was meant to bodily engage the readers and to help the king express his travel experience. In this paper, I argue we can come to understand this lived experience of writing of Far From Home through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of bodily perception, and the application of this philosophical idea helps open up a new way of literary inquiry, at least the field of travel writing.