Books: "Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters"

Theodore Huters, Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters, (PhD dissertation, Stanford, 1977)

Crisis after crisis afflicts the minds of men aiming to build and preserve cultural unity, moral unity, linguistic unity; the search for unity plagues Chinese history. Such is Huters's gloomy theme in the first section of his doctoral dissertation (Chapter 1, part I, pp. 1-38). A few of the major propositions involved in this perspective on shifts in literary value:

The most ancient gesture of breaking cultural unity is the emergence of literary language out of epic. The world of the epic is unitary, while the world of the literary is one author's view of things, and so in the moment of transition culture faces a crisis.

In China, this crisis occurs when the system of the rites 禮 yields to the system of the written word, but Chinese masters do not admit of transformation between epic and literary, between constative and performative. Rather the very choice of what to canonize -- laws and miscellany, rather than myth -- reveals the effort to make the Chinese literary 文 "produce what is meant," though it does not.

And yet, strands of subjective perspectives exist, as we can trace from Wang Yangming. It's just that there is always a conservative reaction, such as the Qing empiricists, who take objective perspectives to "paper over" the gaps between the constative and the performative. (14)

Confucian humanism decided that man created civilization and language, but can't quite explain why they don't work. The effort to explain is an obstructionist historicism, the well-known Chinese tendency towards archaism. Chinese literature always, always was cornered into commentary; pure literature ever remained "a light residue in a didactic mass." (18)

And yet, private forms did develop; most notable is the lyric poem 詩. Zhuangzi privileged privacy too, or at least the sense of intuition. But again the Chinese subjective is vulnerable to attack by thinkers who say all language should be right and true and belong to no one. 言公 (22)

In the West, the early gesture of severance sheared the literary from other things, eventually resulting in our genre concept. The Chinese "mechanical sense of genre" gives one form per age, and treats the novel as "non-entity." (26) The Chinese novel languished in the form of "the masque:" procedural, essentially conservative.

Wang Yangming's "left wing" subjectivity was developed by his follower Wang Ji in the concept of innate knowledge 良知. Li Zhi went to prison for his own elaborations on innate knowledge. In the wake of this, the three Yuan brothers cultivated a marketable sensibility of "primitivism." It was shallow, though. (30)

The Tongcheng thinkers faced the dilemma of approaching literary affect severed from constative statements once again. And failed again.

The dream of writing like the Wenxuan, like the Han -- like the most ancient of ancients -- is a final, poignant attempt to keep written language 文 performative.

The central crisis of Chinese literature arrived before the Westerners. (36-7)

Selected reading list:

• Lin Yutang, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1930)
• Zhou Zuoren, 中國文學的源流  (1934)中國文學的要求 (1930s?)
• Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford, 1953)
• Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957)
• Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Oxford, 1966)
• Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction" (1971)
• Iser, "The Reality of Fiction" (1975)