Abstract
Dealing with the question of friendship, Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 and the first three famous statements of Analects by Confucius differ from each other: the former, as literature, appears to be obsessed with the pains arising from emotional conflicts, while the latter, as a quasi-philosophical discourse, seems focused solely on ethical spiritual values. Standing alone, each of these two texts looks incomplete, making each of the speakers's ecstatic feeling arising from an imagined meeting with a friend deeply mysterious. Juxtaposed and read together in trans-textual terms, however, the two works shed light upon each other, the silenced part of each being told by the other. Despite a vast difference in time and space, Shakespeare and Confucius's texts are grounded indeed on a strikingly similar idea of friendship. Both of them present the reader with a genuine friendship deriving not so much from identity as from difference between 'I' and the other, the I's otherness enabling the subject to be separated from such 'everydayness' of life as grief, anger, and other bodily desires. The notion of 'otherness' as used in this paper is partly indebted to Emmanuel Levinas. His idea of 'soi(selt)' detached from 'moi(ego)' has been particularly useful, since the psychic state of the soi, a being detached from the moi immersed in the everyday world, is arguably similar to a psychic state in which Shakespeare and Confucius are involved each in one's own unique way: this is the state in which 'I' and the other are able to face each other peacefully, a state hardly possible except in terms of the difference between I and the other. This paper further considers the friendship between Hamlet and Horatio as his ideal other in Hamlet. Hamlet's identification with Horatio is doubtful in its authenticity, since it complicates rather than reveals the substance of Horatio about whose role in Hamlet Shakespeare appears to be strangely undecided.
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