Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics 3030737292, 9783030737290

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CHINESE LITERATURE AND CULTURE IN THE WORLD

Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics

Ming Dong Gu

Chinese Literature and Culture in the World Series Editor Ban Wang Stanford University Stanford, CA, USA

As China is becoming an important player on the world stage, Chinese literature is poised to change and reshape the overlapping, shared cultural landscapes in the world. This series publishes books that reconsider Chinese literature, culture, criticism, and aesthetics in national and international contexts. While seeking studies that place China in geopolitical tensions and historical barriers among nations, we encourage projects that engage in empathetic and learning dialogue with other national traditions. Imbued with a desire for mutual relevance and sympathy, this dialogue aspires to a modest prospect of world culture. We seek theoretically informed studies of Chinese literature, classical and modern - works capable of rendering China’s classical heritage and modern accomplishments into a significant part of world culture. We promote works that cut across the modern and tradition divide and challenge the inequality and unevenness of the modern world by critiquing modernity. We look for projects that bring classical aesthetic notions to new interpretations of modern critical theory and its practice. We welcome works that register and analyze the vibrant contemporary scenes in the online forum, public sphere, and media. We encourage comparative studies that account for mutual parallels, contacts, influences, and inspirations. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14891

Ming Dong Gu

Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics

Ming Dong Gu School of Foreign Languages Shenzhen University Shenzhen, China School of Arts and Humanities The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX, USA

Chinese Literature and Culture in the World ISBN 978-3-030-73729-0    ISBN 978-3-030-73730-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Giordano Cipriani / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To The Memory of My Father Gu Shirong (1929–2000) My Mother Xu Hongzuo (1931–2000)

Preface

This book is a project that has taken two decades to complete. In fact, the initial idea for conceiving this project could be traced back to the late 1990s when I was completing my doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. In 2000, after the publication of an article in Comparative Literature Studies, I began earnestly to draw a plan for undertaking a comparative study of Chinese and Western language, literature, and poetics. As my scholarly interest broadened later on, the plan started to include topics related to aesthetics and metaphysics. Encouraged by some successes in placing a dozen articles in Philosophy East and West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Asian Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, I decided to finalize the plan of my research and set my objective as an effort to contribute to the fusion of critical horizons, Chinese and Western. Having a final plan is like having a blueprint for a house, but to turn the plan into a book is as complicated as building a house in accordance with a blueprint. In the past twenty years, I have been working intermittently on the book. By 2007, I had completed most of the research and written rough drafts for most of the planned chapters. For a time, I thought I would be able to bring the book to a completion in a year or two. But alas! “Man proposes, God disposes.” Just as I was ready to devote my full energy to the book project, I changed my job and moved to the University of Texas at Dallas. The new job brought with it new challenges in terms of teaching, service, administrative duties, and research orientations. When I was a graduate at the University of Chicago, I was toying with the idea of writing a dissertation that sought to focus on a study of vii

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Chinese and comparative literature from the postcolonial perspective, but due to various reasons, I gave up the initiative. The idea, however, never disappeared from my mind and my scholarly work has always moved in that direction since my graduate program. After moving to Dallas, a strong urge to write a postcolonial critique of China–West studies took priority over a comparative study of Chinese and Western literature and poetics. So, the present book was left on the back burner and I devoted my energy to finishing Sinologism: An Alternative to Orientalism and Postcolonial Studies (Routledge 2013). After its publication, I thought I would be able to refocus my efforts on the book and hoped to finish it, but once again, several new projects diverted my immediate attention. Two of them demanded most of my time, energy, and devotion. One is an edited volume on comparative philosophy, which was published as Why Traditional Chinese Philosophy Still Matters: The Relevance of Ancient Wisdom for the Global Age (Routledge 2018). The other is even more demanding in terms of time, energy, and scope. In late 2015, I was invited by the Routledge Press to edit a handbook of modern Chinese literature. Fully realizing the heavy workload of the project, I was hesitating for a while, but finally, two eminent scholars of modern Chinese literature, Prof. David De-wei Wang of Harvard University and Prof. Xudong Zhang of New York University, and my dean Prof. Dennis T. Kratz convinced me of the value of the project and persuaded me to accept the invitation. As the project involved nearly 50 scholars from universities around the world, it occupied most of my time. Thanks to the gracious cooperation of the participating scholars, the project was finally completed and appeared as the Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature (Routledge, 2019, pp. 768). With the completion of this project, I vowed that I would not be distracted by any other projects. After turning down a few projects, I devoted my full energy to the present book and with the support of a few institutions I have at long last brought a 20-year scholarly project to its finish. What a sense of relief! Richardson, TX, USA December 2020

Ming Dong Gu

Acknowledgments

Although this book project was relegated to a secondary place a couple of times, I have never displaced it from my mind. As I was unable to finish it at one go, I rewrote part of the drafts into articles and sent them to various journals. Some sections of Chap. 2 were taken from an article, “Reconceptualizing the Linguistic Divide: Chinese and Western Theories of the Written Sign,” in Comparative Literature Studies, 37. 2 (2000): 101–124. Chapter 5 appeared as a long article, “Is Mimetic Theory in Literature and Art Universal?” published in Poetics Today 26.3 (2005): 459–499. A substantial part of Chap. 6 appeared in an article, “Mimetic Theory in Chinese Literary Thought,” in New Literary History 36.3 (2005): 403–424. A few sections of Chap. 7 were published in Journal of Aesthetic Education, 42.3 (2008): 88–105. I would like to thank the editors of those journals for their permission to reuse the published materials in this book. In completing this book, I have been encouraged and supported by many scholars, colleagues, friends, and leaders of some institutions, to whom I have accumulated a great deal of intellectual debts. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the following scholars: my mentor the late Prof. Anthony C.  Yu, Carl Darling Buck Professor Emeritus in the Humanities of the University of Chicago, who read and commented on an earlier version of Chap. 8; Prof. W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art at the University of Chicago, who read and suggested revisions for Chap. 2; Prof. Ralph Cohen, William R.  Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Virginia and former editor of New Literary History, who ix

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edited a long version of Chap. 6 into a succinct journal article; Prof. Meir Sternberg, former editor of Poetics Today, who meticulously edited Chap. 5 and generously provided enough space to publish a long article in his journal. I would also like to thank Prof. J.  Hillis Miller, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California-Irvine; Profs. Martin Powers, Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures, University of Michigan; Kang-I Sun Chang, Malcolm G.  Chace ‘56 Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University; David Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University; Ban Wang, William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University; Haun Saussy, University Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago; Longxi Zhang, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at City University of Hong Kong; Eric Hayot, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University; David Porter, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Michigan; Michael Puett, the Walter C.  Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University; Thomas O. Beebee, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German at The Pennsylvania State University; Dennis Kratz, the Ignacy and Celina Rockover Professor of Humanities; Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities; and Nils Roemer, the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas, for their stimulating ideas, sagacious insights, and warm encouragement in different ways. I need to express my special thanks to Prof. Vincent B. Leitch, George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma, who has provided valuable advice and suggestions to improve the manuscript, and Rachel Jacobe, editor of literature of Palgrave Macmillan Press for her professional advice and editing. I’d also like to thank Drs. Chen Dandan, Duan Guozhong, Peng Xiuyin, and Feng Tao of Yangzhou University for their assistance in locating research materials and proof-reading the book. Finally, I must thank some institutions including Rhodes College, the University of Texas at Dallas, Nanjing University, Shenzhen University, and Yangzhou University for awarding faculty development grants and providing various kinds of assistance to complete the book project.

Praise for Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics “In this ambitious study, which should prove central to further work on these topics, Ming Dong Gu challenges the notion of a fundamental opposition between Western and Chinese aesthetics and undertakes a comparative study of a series of important issues in literary aesthetics, illuminating similarities and differences.” —Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, USA “Professor Ming Dong Gu has offered a most comprehensive investigation of Chinese and Western studies. His latest book sets a new ground for conceptual and scholarly inquiries into China-West humanities in language, metaphor, representation, aesthetics, and metaphysics, and proposes a paradigm shift from ethnocentric criticism to global aesthetics. Both erudite and provocative, Gu demonstrates a methodology that will inspire anyone interested in comparative studies.” —David Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University, USA “This is a timely study showing how to get beyond cultural nationalism in search of the most compelling values of civilizations, aesthetic values. In Chapters devoted to language, writing systems, metaphor, and mimesis, poetics and aesthetics, Professor Gu reveals the profound value of genuine dialogue, ‘with due respect paid to the distinctiveness of each tradition.’ Alongside choice insights into core aesthetic concepts, East and West, Gu offers a blueprint for a comparative method rooted in the sober recognition of a shared human condition.” —Martin Powers, Sally M. Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures, University of Michigan, USA “Comparative studies placing Chinese cultural productions in conversation with those emanating from “the West” all too often fall into simplistic and self-serving dichotomies. The bold ambition of this rigorously argued and wide-ranging study is to historicize and ultimately transcend dichotomous frameworks in order to establish common ground for more inclusive and eclectic visionings of literary and aesthetic theory. In its thorough and systematic analysis of deep-seated methodological habits, it provides both a timely corrective and an invaluable guidepost for future comparative work.” —David Porter, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, USA

Contents

1 Introduction: Aesthetic Divide and Vision of Global Aesthetics  1 Part I Language and Writing  21 2 Writing System and Linguistic Controversy 23 3 Reconceptualizing the Linguistic Divide  57

Part II Metaphor and Poetics  93 4 Chinese and Western Conceptions of Metaphor 95 5 Metaphor as Signs: Bi-Xing and Metaphor/Metonymy131 Part III Mimesis and Representation 165 6 Is Mimetic Theory Universal?167 7 Western Mimeticism and Chinese Mimetic Theory201 xiii

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Part IV Metaphysics and Aesthetics 235 8 Divine Thinking and Artistic Creation237 9 Lyricism and Mimeticism in Aesthetic Thought271 10 Conclusion: Toward World Criticism and Global Aesthetics309 Bibliography315 Index333

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Aesthetic Divide and Vision of Global Aesthetics

Contemporary globalization and telecommunications have drastically shrunk the geographical distance between the East and the West and made it possible for the migration of human, material, and intellectual resources and knowledge across continents. It has greatly facilitated exchanges between different cultures and traditions and turned what Goethe had envisioned as “world literature” into a reality. David Damrosch, an eminent scholar of world literature who has written the first book to examine the ways literary works mutate and transform as they move from national to global contexts, confirms the salutary effects of globalization on the internationalization of literature and its positive role in promoting world literature beyond national boundaries.1 The rise of world literature calls for the appearance of world criticism, world theory, and global aesthetics. In 2008, the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism edited by Vincent Leitch et al., changed the time-honored Western-centric editorial policy and made an epoch-making move to incorporate non-Western theorists from India, China, Japan, Arabia, Africa, and Latin America into a new edition of the anthology that used to include Western thinkers, aestheticians, and critics only.2 Although the editors admit that the anthology is still Western-centric,3 it should be viewed as a landmark on the road toward the fusion of aesthetic horizons. Moreover, it represents an admirable effort to challenge us to reflect on the possibility of world criticism and make concrete efforts to move toward global aesthetics. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_1

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Nearly half a century ago, when James J. Y. Liu, a professor at Stanford University, first introduced Chinese literary theory to the West in 1975, he talked about several goals of his endeavor in the introduction. Among them, the first and ultimate of his purposes is “to contribute to an eventual universal theory of literature by presenting the various theories of literature that can be derived from the long and, in the main, independent tradition of Chinese critical thought, thus making it possible to compare these with theories from other traditions.”4 Although he was aware that his declared purpose might raise the eyebrows of some sophisticated scholars, he believed in his vision and went on to argue that comparison of historically unrelated critical traditions might serve the purpose if they are conducted on the theoretical rather than practical level. He also believed that “comparisons of what writers and critics belonging to different cultural traditions have thought about literature may reveal what critical concepts are universal, what concepts are confined to certain cultural traditions, and what concepts are unique to a particular tradition” (ibid.), plus helping us discover universal features common to all literatures around the world. Forty years further back in time, Zhu Guangqian, a celebrated Chinese aesthetician, who was educated in Europe and became one of the founding members for modern Chinese aesthetics, expressed a similar view in 1936 by going beyond critical theory. Basing himself on his own educational background and critical experience both in China and Europe, he argued that aesthetics is not only a “science of literature and art” but may also offer global “scientific” approaches to and critical criteria for the studies of both Chinese and Western art, literary criticism, and critical theory. Furthermore, he believed that aesthetics as a “science” could locate ideas in Chinese art corresponding to its Western counterparts and help Chinese tradition make its own contributions to universal conceptions and understanding of literature and art.5 I am immensely inspired by Liu and Zhu’s visions. In many ways, this book is conceived with an aim to put what they had envisioned into practice and as a concrete move toward the realization of their vision.

State of the Field in Chinese and Western Aesthetics The road to world criticism, world theory, and global aesthetics is destined to be a long and tortuous march beset with different kinds of obstacles. Among the numerous obstacles, cultural differences and intellectual

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inertia have determined it to be a long-term enterprise which cannot be accomplished in a short period. In the development of aesthetics in the global context, Bernard Bosanquet’s ground-breaking History of Aesthetics (1892) is a magnum opus in the studies of philosophy of art, but regrettably it does not have any cursory reference to the ideas of beauty in the Eastern traditions, be it Indian, Chinese, or Japanese. Anticipating criticism for the “almost total absence of direct reference to Oriental art, whether in the ancient world or in modern China and Japan,” he defended his omission of Eastern aesthetic ideas in several ways. Besides his professed lack of competence in Oriental aesthetic knowledge, his principal reason for eliding Eastern aesthetics is his perception that the Oriental tradition had not yet formulated “an aesthetic consciousness which had not, to my knowledge, reached the point of being clarified into speculative theory.”6 Although he acknowledged the influence of Oriental art on the early Greek aesthetic thought and the charm and beauty of Chinese and Japanese art, he firmly believed that the Eastern consciousness of beauty is “something apart, and not well capable of being brought into the same connected story with the European feeling for the beautiful” (ibid.). Bosanquet’s defense imparts two messages. First, Eastern art, be it Chinese or Japanese, is exceptional to its Western counterpart. Second, the Eastern aesthetic feelings are incommensurable with those of the West. It is therefore necessary to leave it alone at best. Without doubt, Bosanquet treated Chinese and Eastern art and aesthetics as something alien to aesthetics. Bosanquet wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, the high period of colonialism, so it is perhaps understandable that he had a low opinion of Eastern art and did not consider it worthwhile to deal with the aesthetic ideas of the East. In his defense, however, he mentioned that his “omission is not without a positive ground.” By positive ground, he seemed to have meant, like most Western thinkers of his time, that Oriental art is deficient of certain fundamental features that are essential and necessary to connect Oriental art with European art: “The separation from the life of the progressive races, and the absence of a reflective theory of beauty, must surely have a fundamental connection with the non-architectural character pointed out by Mr. Morris in the art of China and Japan.”7 In his statement, he identified a nonsystematic character of Eastern art and attributed it to two reasons: one is the separation between Eastern and Western life, and the other is nonreflective nature of Eastern art. While we may object to his describing Eastern life as nonprogressive and Eastern art as nonsystematic, we must admit that the separation of the East and West

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in both material and intellectual life indeed contributed to the vast differences between Eastern and Western art. Today globalization has removed geographical barriers between East and West. The successes of globalization have also facilitated the comparative studies of Eastern and Western literatures and arts, especially in the field of China–West studies. A great deal of effort has been made to bring about dialogues between Chinese and Western humanities. Despite impressive achievements, however, the same striking differences between the two cultural traditions have continued to trouble scholars in the field in a similar way as they haunted Bosanquet in the beginning of the twentieth century. Though the same sense of incompatibility in Chinese and Western aesthetics has been substantially reduced in degrees of intensity, it has nevertheless generated new forms and adopted new perspectives that continue to perceive and conceive China as the antithesis of the West. In their attempt to deal with the distinctive differences between China and the West, scholars have abandoned the hegemonic discourse of Western-centrism and resorted to the anthropological theory of “cultural relativism,” which spawns a series of ideas that conceive of China as the “ultimate other” to the West. Even the irresistible trend of globalization seems unable to dampen its popularity. As cultural relativism has become the accepted paradigm for cultural and literary studies, it has become increasingly hard to find conceptual premises upon which to build bridges across different traditions and cultures. David Buck, a former editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, observes that cultural relativism is so predominant in East and West studies that “[c]utting across the disciplines are epistemological and methodological problems involving the issue of whether any conceptual tools exist to understand and interpret human behavior and meaning in ways that are intersubjectively valid.”8 In the postmodern age, when cultural relativism turns into radical forms, the enthusiasm for contrast rather than compatibility has given rise to a trend in theoretical studies of literature and art that sees China and the West as two distinct traditions radically set apart in history, language, politics, poetics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. This is especially so in the areas of Chinese and Western poetic theories. This situation has been aptly summarized by Longxi Zhang, a well-known scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, who finds it very unsatisfying: “[T]he East and the West are so distinctly different that ways of thinking and expression cannot be made intelligible from one to the other, and therefore the knowledge of one must be kept apart from that of the

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other.”9 This summary surely reminds us of Bosanquet’s view of Chinese and East art and aesthetics as exceptional or even anomaly in comparison with their Western counterpart. As a result of the perceived incompatibility between things Chinese and Western, a variety of differences between China and the West have been radicalized into a series of dichotomies in the humanistic fields including language, metaphor, literature, art, poetics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Whether influenced by cultural relativism or Western hegemonic discourse, the general perceived incompatibility has developed into an arch paradigm of binary oppositions and differences. Under the influence of this arch paradigm, various conceptual frameworks arise in different areas of China and West studies. In the areas of literature and art, there appeared an oppositional paradigm constructed on a series of dichotomies. It has been adequately summarized by Rey Chow, an eminent critic and theorist well versed in both Chinese and Western literature and criticism: “[T]he assertion of the Chinese difference tends often to operate from a set of binary oppositions in which the Western literary tradition is understood to be metaphorical, figurative, thematically concerned with transcendence, and referring to a realm that is beyond this world, whereas the Chinese literary tradition is said to be metonymic, literal, immanentist, and self-­ referential (with literary signs referring not to an otherworldly realm above but back to the cosmic order of which the literary universe is part…. Accordingly, if mimesis has been the chief characteristic of Western writing since time immemorial, then nonmimesis is the principle of Chinese writing.” 10 In contemplating what is responsible for the dichotomous ways of conceptualization, she attributes it to “an a priori surrender to Western perspectives and categories” (ibid.). The arch paradigm has spawned more dichotomies in other areas of Chinese and Western studies. Whereas Western language is highly abstract, Chinese language is barely capable of expressing abstraction; whereas Western literary writings are largely allegorical, Chinese literary writings are generally nonallegorical; whereas Western poetry emanates from ex nihilo creation, Chinese poetry grows out of immediate responses to real situations; whereas Western literature is founded on imaginative fictionality, Chinese literature as a whole is dominated by historical fidelity; whereas Western art is perceived to be the result of artificial making, Chinese art is the result of natural growth; whereas Chinese aesthetic theory is impressionistic, unsystematic, and lacking clearly defined terms, Western aesthetic theory is profound, systematic, couched in rigorous categories;

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whereas Chinese philosophy is predicated on intuitive concretization and sweeping generalization, Western philosophy is rooted in thoughtful abstraction and logical analysis. Regarding the root cause for the differences, some have attributed them to cultural values. It was argued that because ancient China lacked certain cultural determinants, its cultural legacy in the domains of thought, literature, art, and aesthetics should be treated as incommensurable with or exceptional to the Western counterpart. As I will show in Chap. 5, one scholar attributes the alleged contrast between Western mimesis and Chinese nonmimesis to the Chinese lack of certain cultural determinants to be found in the West.11 This view falls unwittingly in line with the Huntington thesis that there exist essential and durable differences in cultural identities and values between the West and “the Rest” and they are capable of generating cultural and civilizational conflicts and confrontations.12 What complicates the situation is that thinkers and scholars in China have subscribed to the arch paradigm and accepted openly or tacitly these perceived dichotomies as true and valid. Two examples suffice here. For the first example, Zhu Guangqian, who has a vision for universal theory of art and believes in the capability of aesthetics to locate corresponding ideas in different cultures, expresses a similar view of incompatibility between Chinese and Western aesthetic thought to that of Bosanquet. Although he vigorously defended the distinctiveness of traditional Chinese literature and art as having unique artistic value against the widespread belittlement by Westernized Chinese intellectuals in his time, he tacitly agreed that there is practically no Western-style philosophy or aesthetics in the Chinese tradition. In The Psychology of Tragedy, he argues that because of the simplicity of metaphysics and shallowness of religious feelings, ancient Chinese, Indian, and other non-Western traditions did not produce literary works informed by the concept of tragedy in the strict sense of the word.13 His view implies that Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, if they exist at all, are incompatible with their Western counterparts. Zhu Guangqian is not the only thinker who holds such a view. Up to the present day, there are quite a few Chinese and Western thinkers who believe that China has no philosophy in the true sense of the word. This situation is duly reflected in a statement by a scholar of philosophy at Peking University that he has, for many years, been struggling against the view that Chinese tradition has no philosophy. In an article entitled “There Is No Need for Zhongguo Zhexue [Chinese Philosophy] to Be Philosophy,” one Chinese scholar argues that “philosophy” is a Western cultural

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practice and cannot be used to designate traditional Chinese thought unless one views it from an analogical or metaphorical perspective.14 During his visit to China in 2001, Jacques Derrida also states: There is no problem with talking about Chinese thought, Chinese history, Chinese science, and so forth, but obviously, I have a problem with talking about the Chinese “philosophy” of this Chinese thought and culture … Philosophy in essence is not just thought… It is an ancient Greek invention… It is something European. There may be various kinds of thought and knowledge of equal integrity beyond Western European culture, but it is not reasonable to call them philosophy.15

Although Derrida had no intention to belittle Chinese and non-Western thought, his line of thinking aligns well with that of Hegel who believed that “philosophy” originated from ancient Greece and Eastern thought like Confucianism and Taoism is but a form of wisdom of life that had not yet risen to the level of systematic thinking with abstract speculation and spiritual consciousness. As I will show in later chapters, this kind of belief has constituted the ontological and epistemological basis for both Chinese and Western scholars to argue that the idiosyncratic nature of Chinese philosophy has determined the antithetical nature of a series of dichotomies in the comparative studies of Chinese and Western language, metaphor, representation, and aesthetics. For the second example, Ye Lang, an influential Chinese aesthetician, has conducted an examination of the major views on the nature and characteristic features of classical Chinese aesthetics vis-à-vis its Western counterpart and found some widely accepted views circulating among Chinese thinkers and scholars that constitute a consensus and conform to the perceived incompatibility between Chinese and Western aesthetics long conceived by scholars in the West.16 The consensus consists of four major ideas. First, it holds that “Western aesthetics emphasizes ‘representation’ and imitation and therefore developed a theory of typical characters under typical circumstances. Chinese aesthetics sets store by ‘expression’ and ‘lyricism,’ and therefore develops a theory of yijing (idea-realm).”17 Second, “Western aesthetics privileges epistemology in philosophy, preferring the unity of ‘beauty’ and ‘truth,’ while Chinese aesthetics privileges ethics, preferring the unity of ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness.’”18 Third, “Western aesthetics privileges formal theorization and is endowed with analytical and systematic qualities. By contrast, Chinese aesthetics privileges

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empirical exposition and is mostly random, impressionistic, and spontaneous, and endowed with qualities of intuition and empiricism.”19 Fourth, “Concepts in Chinese aesthetics are generally hollow and impressionistic adjectives devoid of definable substance.”20 While admitting some degrees of truthfulness in these views, Ye Lang methodically refutes the validity of each of them with solid evidence drawn from a wide range of Chinese aesthetic materials. He convincingly argues that the popular assessment of the nature and features of Chinese aesthetics in contradistinction to Western aesthetics does not stand on reasoned and solid ground and has oversimplified the complexity of Chinese aesthetic tradition.

The Arch Paradigm of Oppositions and Differences My foregoing critical review suggests that despite their different cultural backgrounds, scholars in both Chinese and Western studies of critical theory and aesthetics share one common ground, which is an oppositional and differential paradigm. Superficially, this paradigm may have risen under the influence of Western intellectual hegemony or cultural relativism, but in its deep structure, it grows out of a historical perception of the different patterns of human development and metaphysical conceptions of the differences between Chinese and Western thought. In historical development, the Chinese civilization is believed to have followed a pattern of continuity between past and present while the Western civilization is viewed as following a pattern of rupture. In modes of thinking, it is believed that while correlative thinking is predominant in Chinese thought, analytic thinking is the hallmark of Western thought. Metaphysically, Chinese thought is construed to be wholly monistic while Western thought is held to be disjunctively dualistic. While Western tradition is understood to be founded on a disjunction between nature and culture, Chinese tradition is perceived to be based on a continuum between the human and natural world. Whereas there is a creation God in the West, who is viewed as the creator of all things, it is widely believed that in the Chinese tradition, there is no creation god and Chinese religion is pantheistic, lacking religious feelings. In consequence, whereas the Western worldview displays a tragic tension between god and man, Chinese cosmology features a harmonious collaboration between the human and divine beings. In these series of dichotomies, we encounter a great irony. Cultural relativism is meant to counter cultural universalism, which often leads to ethnocentrism and cultural chauvinism, and to challenge Eurocentric

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hegemony as well as to correct the imposition of Western ideology on non-Western cultures, yet as a scholar of Indian culture perceptively points out: whether in the colonialist and imperialist eras of Rudyard Kipling or in our own time of postcolonialism, those who defend the Eastern difference and those who devalue it “share the most important descriptive presumptions, differing primarily in terms of evaluation,” and even those who “see themselves as struggling against imperialism, racism, and sexism share with their professed antagonists the bulk of relevant ideological beliefs.”21 Indeed, radical relativism is supposed to deflate the sense of superiority in Western cultures in cross-cultural studies, but the end result often turns out to be the opposite and reinforces Eurocentrism and Western superiority. Indeed, in the established dichotomies concerning China and the West, whether the Chinese terms are criticized as negative categories or celebrated as positive values, an implicit and sometimes even explicit bias is inscribed within their internal structure. A closer look at the series of binary oppositions reveals that they implicitly entail a hierarchy in which the Chinese term occupies the lower position. This bias is clearly seen in these typical contrasts: Western artifice, abstraction, figurative tropes, ex nihilo creation, transcendental spirituality, logical analysis, and rational systemacity versus Chinese naturalness, concreteness, literal fidelity, stimulus–response transcription, immanentist worldliness, random commentaries, and impressionistic generalization. This oppositional paradigm was not consciously conceived by a single theorist or scholar or developed in a single historical period. In fact, it gradually took shape in the scholarship and metaphysical speculations by many thinkers in both China and the West including philosophers like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Max Weber, Bertrand Russell, Liang Qichao, Yan Fu, Liang Shumin, Feng Youlan, and scholars like Gu Hongming, Hu Shi, Zhu Guangqian, Marcel Granet, Fredrick Mote, Benjamin Schwartz, Joseph Needham, K. C. Chang, Shih-hsiang Chen, A. C. Graham, David Hall, Roger Ames, Tu Wei-ming, David Keightly, and many others.22 It has exerted a profound impact upon Chinese and Western studies as well as general studies of human civilizations. Though it has evolved out of historical materials and scholarship, a self-conscious urge to build contrasts and dichotomies opens the paradigm to questioning. Not surprisingly, it has aroused much controversy and has been subjected to critical scrutiny. And in due time, most of the dichotomies have been found to be problematic or simply false and untenable.23 Even the

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view of China’s cultural legacy as exceptional in regard to Western or so-­ called universal values has been found problematic. Martin Powers, an eminent scholar of Chinese art and culture, employs a wide range of textual and visual evidence in political theory, literature, art, print culture, and public spaces in his most recent book, China and England: the Preindustrial Struggle for Justice in Word and Image, to argue that the humanly shared experience in those areas created common ground for transformative exchange between China and the West in early modern times and challenge the exceptional claim regarding Chinese cultural legacies.24

Crossing the Aesthetic Divide Although the oppositional paradigm has aroused a great deal of controversy in which many scholars have participated, the heated debates have not ended conclusively. Even those who argue against the oppositional paradigm accept its partial validity. This tricky situation cannot but compel us to consider: To what extent does the oppositional paradigm fit the real conditions of Chinese and Western studies? Is it capable of guiding us in our inquiry about the actual nature and conditions of Chinese and Western language, literature, and art? Can it offer sound theoretical frameworks for genuine dialogues between Chinese and Western humanities? And if we abandon the oppositional paradigm, what alternative paradigms can be conceived to facilitate genuine dialogues between Chinese and Western traditions? In what ways can we bring fundamental issues of Chinese language, literature, art, and thought into meaningful dialogues with their Western counterparts? Last but not least, what common ground can be located to reconceptualize differences in language, literature, poetics, aesthetics, and metaphysics from a cross-cultural perspective and move toward the fusion of aesthetic horizons East and West? In a book, Unexpected Affinities: Reading Across Cultures, which uncovers a wide range of thematic and conceptual similarities that unite literary and cultural traditions in the East and West, Longxi Zhang, unlike those who have subscribed to the oppositional paradigm of dichotomies, sagaciously “emphasizes affinity over difference and explores the relationship between East and West in terms of cultural homogeneity (with shared literary qualities as its signposts), challenging the traditional boundaries of cross-cultural study and comparative literature as a discipline.”25 The distinctive differences between Eastern and Western cultures, however,

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cannot be simply dismissed or will gradually disappear with the intensification of globalization and digital communications. Likewise, a fusion of aesthetic horizons in China–West studies will not come about naturally if we continue to accept the existing paradigms and approaches. For the fusion of aesthetic horizons, we need to locate common grounds for bridging the gap between Chinese and Western humanities and start with erecting groundwork for the fusion. We need to conduct genuine dialogues between Chinese and Western humanities and employ conceptual tools to reconceptualize the materials from both traditions, with due respect paid to the distinctiveness of each tradition. For this purpose, we must confront those dichotomies head-on and explore to what extent they are true or not true, and in what ways we can engage in meaningful comparative studies. Since China opened its door to the outside world in modern times, Chinese and Western aesthetics have been engaged in dialogues, but the exchange of ideas has been dominated by a one-way flow with the results that are largely sinicized Western discourses in Chinese academia, where the Chinese aesthetic tradition has lost its voice due to the inundation of Western aesthetic ideas, and effectively become a de facto branch of Western aesthetics. As a consequence, two situations remain in place in China–West studies: (1) Chinese and Western aesthetics are totally set apart with each keeping to its own distinct frameworks and systems and having random and superficial interactions; (2) Two traditions engage in pseudo-interactions with Chinese materials mainly serving as raw data to prove the value and validity of Western ideas and theories. How can we change the existent situations and bring about a genuine two-way dialogue between Chinese and Western aesthetic discourses, which pays due respects to the distinctiveness of each tradition and produces genuine universal value? I believe that we should challenge some commonly accepted views on China and West studies and open up the old issues to new modes of thinking and expression. Moreover, we should make systematic efforts to demystify and de-marginalize traditional Chinese thought, restore it to the mainstream theoretical discourse in Chinese and comparative studies, and enable the lost voice of a time-honored tradition to be heard in the ongoing discussions and theorizations of cross-cultural studies. For this purpose, I have been pondering the dichotomies between Chinese and Western conceptions of language, literature, poetics, and metaphysics for over a score of years, and made various attempts to locate a truly comparative rather than contrastive paradigm in Chinese and

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Western studies. Having scrutinized the oppositional paradigm for so long, I have come to the realization that the root cause for the failure of genuine dialogues is a series of perceived differences, cultural, conceptual, representational, and last but not least, linguistic, which have formed an epistemological divide. To cross this divide, I have, for the past decade, conducted research to locate solid scholarship as well as new theoretical frameworks for China and West studies. This constitutes the main purpose of this book. The objective is not to expose errors in the comparative studies of Chinese and Western traditions. It is concerned with how to bring about a paradigm shift, how to devise better and more effective methodologies for comparative studies, and how to build bridges across the epistemic divide. With this aim in mind, I have decided to focus my research and disquisition on some basic issues, a study of which may yield insights and solid scholarship for building a bridge across the divide.

Scope and Preview This book covers areas of language, writing, metaphor, metonymy, rhetoric, mimesis, representation, lyricism, expressionism, aesthetics, and metaphysics. It consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and eight chapters, which are grouped into four parts, each focusing on a related thematic cluster. The introductory chapter conducts a brief survey of the present-­ day condition of China–West studies and discusses the nature, objective, scope, and approach of the proposed study, sets the ground for conceptual and scholarly inquiries into a series of dichotomies in China–West studies of language, metaphor, representation, aesthetics, and metaphysics, and proposes a paradigm shift from ethnocentric criticism to global aesthetics. Part I addresses issues in the linguistic bases of Chinese and Western literature and art. It has two chapters. Chapter 2 examines the discussions and debates over the nature of Chinese language and writing in relation to Western alphabetic language. In the field of China–West studies, Chinese literature and culture have been viewed by not a few scholars as fundamentally different from their Western counterparts. The root cause of the difference has often been traced to the difference in language and writing, which has been further narrowed down to the nature of the writing symbol. By contrast, some scholars consider Chinese language not any different from alphabetic languages, because it is essentially a phonetic system of writing. In this chapter, I reexamine the debates over the nature of Chinese writing and bring theoretical discourses on the sign in Chinese

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and Western thought into a meaningful dialogue so as to acquire useful insights answering these questions: To what extent is the Chinese written sign different from the Western sign? Is there a huge gap between the Chinese written sign and the Western written sign? If the answer is yes, is there a common ground that can serve as a bridge across the gap? Or is there any analytical tool that can be used to create a bridge across the gap? And last but not least, what significance do the gap and common ground have for cross-cultural studies of literature and art? Chapter 3 reexamines the linguistic differences between Chinese ideographic language and Western alphabetic language. By conducting a study of traditional Chinese language theories in relation to Western theories of language, it provides a new way of looking at the linguistic differences. The aim of this chapter is not to systematize Chinese philosophy of language but to conduct comparison and contrast with Western theories of language. By demystifying various views about Chinese language in history and in present-day scholarship, the chapter demonstrates with evidence that despite the distinct contrast between the ideographic nature of Chinese writing and phono-centric nature of Western writing, Chinese language philosophy is not significantly different from its Western counterpart in the conceptions of linguistic sign. In addition, it explores feasible ways to reconceptualize the linguistic divide between Chinese and Western languages, especially the written signs in terms of contemporary theories of psycholinguistics and semiotics. Part II deals with another essential aspect of the comparative studies of literature and art, working on Chinese and Western conceptions and applications of metaphor in relation to its rhetorical use in poetry and poetics. Metaphor has been recognized as an essential part of everyday language that conditions and structures the ways we perceive, conceive, and behave. It is also at the heart of poetry and poetics. In the field of Chinese and comparative literature, scholars have observed a series of differences in Chinese and Western conceptions and uses of metaphor. On the perceived differences has been constructed a dichotomy between Western metaphoricity and Chinese nonmetaphoricity in poetry. Chapter 4 probes into the controversy surrounding Chinese metaphor and answers these questions: Is the Western conception of metaphor universal to all cultures? In the comparative study of Chinese and Western cultures, is the Western style metaphor alien to the Chinese tradition? Do the Chinese conceive and use metaphor in a similar way as their Western counterparts? If there are any

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differences, what are they? This chapter reconfirms the universal nature and features of metaphor in Chinese and Western poetry. Chapter 5 recognizes one fact that Chinese metaphor in poetry does have some special features in its concept bi-xing, a poetic method in the Chinese tradition. By examining bi-xing (inspired metaphor or metonymic metaphor) as a dual concept for poetic expression, it compares and contrasts it with Western metaphor/metonymy from an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates literary analysis, rhetorical study, and conceptual thinking. With the aid of recent achievements in research on metaphor and metonymy, it reconceptualizes Chinese notions of bi-xing and advances a new model of metaphor for understanding Chinese bi-xing in particular and metaphor and metonymy in general. Part III moves to the core issue in literary and artistic creations: mimesis and representation. Chapter 6 explores whether mimetic theory is unique to the Western tradition and whether it exists in Chinese critical discourse. Mimesis is one of the most fundamental ideas in Western poetics. Mimetic theories that grow out of it constitute a mainstream literary thought in Western aesthetics. In the comparative studies of Chinese and Western poetics, however, there exists a widely accepted opinion that views mimetic theory as a cultural invention unique to the Western tradition. This chapter reexamines the widely accepted view that while mimesis is the foundation of Western aesthetic thought, expression is the dominant mode of representation in Chinese literary thought. By examining ontological and epistemological issues concerning mimesis in the Chinese tradition in relation to conceptual insights in the West, Chapter 6 reaffirms imitation as a transcultural human instinct and mimetic theory in art as a universal thought across cultural traditions, arguing that the difference in the emphasis on mimesis and expression in Chinese and Western traditions is only one in degree, not in kind. Chapter 7 constructs a Chinese mimetic theory so as to lend further support to the conceptual inquiry into the universality of mimesis in Chap. 6. In the first introduction of Chinese literary thought to the West, James J. Y. Liu does not think that the Chinese tradition has a mimetic theory though ideas of mimesis are not totally absent. Scholars after James Liu have radicalized his position. They have not only proclaimed that mimetic theory is nonexistent in Chinese literary thought, but have also taken elaborate moves to argue that the cultural conditions necessary for the rise of mimetic theory did not exist in the Chinese tradition. Chapter 7 does not engage in a conceptual inquiry into the necessary conditions for the rise of

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mimetic theory since it has been dealt with in Chap. 6, but offers a complete system of Chinese mimetic theory that covers ideas of mimesis in the major areas of Chinese critical tradition: literary thought, poetry, drama, and fiction. From an evidential perspective, it disconfirms the view that the Chinese traditions do not possess the metaphysical and cultural determinants responsible for the appearance of Western mimetic theory and a mimetic view of literature and art. Part IV addresses some foundational issues of aesthetics and metaphysics in the Chinese and Western traditions. Chapter 8 answers these questions: What is responsible for artistic creation? What is an aesthetic ideal in art that is likely to be accepted by different cultural traditions? Is there an ultimate standard that people across cultures employ to judge the value and achievement of a work of literature or art? By focusing on a special way of thinking characterized by Goethe as “daemonic thinking” in the West and “divine thinking” posited by Liu Xie in China, this chapter explores critical and theoretical data on the divine, divine creation, and artistic creation. Assimilating insights from Plato’s idea of art as the result of “divine madness” and Freud’s rational understanding of art as unconscious creation, it argues that (1) the aesthetic ideal of the divine is still relevant to artistic creation today and (2) the traditional Chinese notion of “entering the divine” (rushen) may serve as an imaginative way of artistic creation and a universal aesthetic ideal across traditions. Chapter 9 inquires whether Chinese and Western aesthetic thought are compatible despite the consensus about the incommensurability of Chinese and Western aesthetic thought in terms of their ontological and epistemological grounds. This chapter chooses two groups of aesthetic thinkers: one group from the Chinese tradition, and the other group from the Western tradition and conducts a comparative study of such key issues as mimesis and representation, lyricism and expressionism, metaphysical foundations of art, and other topics. With both conceptual analysis and critical evidence, the chapter argues that the aesthetic consciousnesses of the Chinese and Western traditions are compatible though each tradition displays a different emphasis in the course of history and exhibits culture-­ specific characteristics. Through close analysis of ideas and views of the chosen thinkers and aestheticians, it has located the common ontological and epistemological foundations for the compatibility. Chinese and Western aesthetic thought are essentially the same in ontology and epistemology, differing in degrees of intensity and formal features across different historical periods.

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Having examined a series of dichotomies in Chinese and Western aesthetic thought and produced a large amount of critical and theoretical evidence, I conclude in the last chapter that, in spite of the cultural and linguistic differences, Chinese and Western traditions share broad common ground in aesthetic thought. The conclusion suggests ways to further open up avenues to bridging the divide and bringing about what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the “fusion of horizons.”

For a Humanistic Paradigm of Fusion For the fusion of critical horizons, I think we are in need of a paradigm shift in East–West studies from an oppositional or differential one to a humanistic one. In the comparative studies of Chinese and Western traditions, there are mainly three approaches: oppositional, differential, and affinity-based. The first and third approaches occupy the two poles while the second keeps a position in between. The oppositional approach insists on incommensurability, while the affinity approach privileges commonality. The differential approach recognizes similarity but emphasizes differences and variations. Each approach has its merits and demerits, but none seems wholly satisfying. I propose a humanistic paradigm of fusion inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory. Gadamer’s theory emphasizes a dialogic relationship between the horizon of the reader and that of the author through the interpretation of a text. Since a text is a historical artifact produced by an author having a particular aim and using a specific system of codes at a given historical time, it inscribes the author’s historicity and intentionality on his or her horizon in the text. In a likely manner, the reader’s horizon consists of his or her historicity and intentionality. As the interpretation starts, because of the difference in intentionality and distance between the two historicities, the text resists the reader’s efforts at interpretation. However, when the two kinds of intentionality meet in the encounter of reading, and when the two kinds of historicities are adequately noted, there appears a fusion of the author’s and reader’s horizons, which gives rise to an adequate interpretation.26 In my proposed fusion paradigm, the two horizons are not those of the author and reader but those of two aesthetic traditions. Each of the horizons has its historical, linguistic, philosophical, and cultural dimensions. The fusion of aesthetic horizons of both traditions depends upon the merging of both traditions’ multiple dimensions concerning the fundamental aesthetic issues. It requires a full recognition of

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the issues in terms of their affinities and commonality as well as differences and dichotomies. This paradigm of fusion has a common denominator, which is the human faculty for perception, conception, imagination, representation, and interpretation of the shared human experience in spite of the differences in race, class, ethnicity, and national origin. This paradigm will serve as a guiding principle for the examinations and discussions of the chosen issues in the comparative studies of the Chinese and Western traditions in the chapters to follow.

Notes 1. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 2. Vincent Leitch et al., eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2008). 3. Vincent Leitch et al., eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, p. xiv. 4. James J.  Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 2. 5. Zhu Guangqian, Wenyi xinlixue (Psychology of Literature and Art) (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1936), “introduction.” 6. Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetics (1892) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. x. 7. Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. x. 8. David Buck, Editor’s Introduction to “Forum on Universalism and Relativism in Asian Studies,” Journal of Asian Studies 50.1 (1991): 30. 9. Longxi Zhang, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. xvii. 10. Rey Chow, ed., Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 10. 11. Liang Shi, “The Leopardskin of Dao and the Icon of Truth: Natural Birth Versus Mimesis in Chinese and Western Literary Theories,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 31, No.2, 1994, pp. 162–163. 12. Samuel P.  Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 19–20. 13. Chu Kwang-Tsien (Zhu Guangqian), The Psychology of Tragedy: A Critical Study of Various Theories of Tragic Pleasure (Strasbourg: Librairie Universitaire d’Alsace, 1933); Chinese translation: Beiju xinlixue (Psychology of Tragedy) (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 2009).

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14. Min Ouyang, “There Is No Need for Zhongguo Zhexue to Be Philosophy,” Asian Philosophy 22.3 (2012): 199. 15. Quoted from Jing Haifeng, “From ‘Philosophy’ to ‘Chinese Philosophy’: Preliminary Thoughts in a Postcolonial Linguistic Context,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 37.1 (2005), pp. 60–61. 16. Ye Lang, Zhongguo meixue shi dagang (Outline of Chinese History of Aesthetics) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1985), pp. 10–16. 17. Ye Lang, Zhongguo meixue shi dagang (Outline of Chinese History of Aesthetics), p. 11. 18. Ye Lang, Zhongguo meixue shi dagang (Outline of Chinese History of Aesthetics), pp. 13–14. 19. Ye Lang, Zhongguo meixue shi dagang (Outline of Chinese History of Aesthetics), p. 14. 20. Ye Lang, Zhongguo meixue shi dagang (Outline of Chinese History of Aesthetics), p. 15. 21. Parrick C.  Hogan, and Lalita Pandit, eds. Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 6 and p. 8. 22. See G. W. Leibniz, Writings on China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1994), pp. 46–48; G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p.  220, and Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 112, 198–199, 201; Max Weber, The Religion of China (New York: Free Press, 1951), pp. 152–153, 226–227, 240–248; Marcel Granet, La Pensée chinoise (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1934), pp.  25–29, 279, 476–479; Benjamin Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” in Special issue of Daedalus (spring 1975), p. 3, “Transcendence in Ancient China,” pp. 67, 59–60, and The World of Thought in Ancient China, pp. 25, 302; Fredrick Mote, Intellectual Foundation of China ((New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), pp.  15–17; David Hall and Roger Ames, Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narrative of Chinese and Western Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), p. xiii, 257; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 2: 216–217, 280–287; K.  C. Chang, “Ancient China,” in Archeological Thought in America, ed., C. C. Lanberg-Karlovsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 161–165, and The Archaeology of Ancient China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 415–416, 418–421; A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), p. i and pp, 3–22, Yin-Yang and the Nature of Correlative Thinking, pp. 8–9; Tu WeiMing, Confucian Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New  York Press, 1985), p. 43; David Keightly, “Early Civilization in China,” in Paul

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S.  Ropp, ed., Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 20 and 32; Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 273–274. 23. For scholarship that disputes the oppositional paradigm in the comparative studies of Chinese and Western languages, literatures, and aesthetics, see Haun Saussy’s The Problem of A Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 13–73; Longxi Zhang’s Mighty Opposite: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 117–150; Ren Yong’s article, “Cosmogony, Fictionality, Poetic Creativity: Western and Traditional Chinese Cultural Perspectives,” Comparative Literature, 50.2 (Spring 1998), 98–119; and, Jonathan Chaves, “Forum: From the 1990 AAS Roundtable,” in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 13 (1991), 77–82; Martin Ekström, “Illusion, Lie, and Metaphor: The Paradox of Divergence in Early Chinese Poetics,” Poetics Today 23.2 (2002): 251–285. For scholarship that challenges the contrastive paradigm in historical patterns and metaphysical thinking, see Michael Puett’s two studies, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). The reader will find the conclusions to Puett’s books especially illuminating. 24. Martin Powers, China and England: the Preindustrial Struggle for Justice in Word and Image (London and New  York: Routledge, 2019), “Introduction,” and pp. 11–24. 25. Longxi Zhang, Unexpected Affinities: Reading Across Cultures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), quoted from the book’s description. 26. See Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” in Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, ed. Brice R.  Wachterhauser (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 377–396.

PART I

Language and Writing

CHAPTER 2

Writing System and Linguistic Controversy

Language and philosophy of language have occupied a prominent place in the field of human sciences in the twentieth century. Heidegger and Wittgenstein, two of the most influential philosophers in the world, cherished a profound interest in language and language theory. The former’s famous saying, “Language is the house of being” has been on the lips of numerous scholars in the field of human and social sciences. And the “linguistic turn” has not only changed the landscape of academia but also continued to exert its powerful impact on research in human sciences. For a book like the present one, which aims to explore the possibility of fusing aesthetic horizons between Chinese and Western traditions, it is natural to start with an inquiry into the nature and (in)compatibility of Chinese and Western languages and language theories. Since the Renaissance times, numerous Western scholars have evinced a profound interest in Chinese language and writing and turned out a large quantity of scholarship preoccupied with comparative studies of Chinese and Western languages. Despite the initial fascination, Western thinkers and scholars have gradually recognized the differences between Chinese and Western languages and conceived of a conceptual divide that sets Chinese and Western traditions apart. In the field of criticism and aesthetics, Chinese literature and art have been viewed by not a few scholars as fundamentally different from their Western counterparts. The root cause of the differences would

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_2

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invariably be traced to the difference in language and writing, which has been further narrowed down to the nature of the linguistic sign. Indeed, the difference of the written sign has, since medieval times, been viewed as a conceptual divide that separates the Chinese and Western languages. This view has found theoretical support in linguistic science. In his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure divided the world’s languages into two large groups: the ideographic system, in which “each word is represented by a single sign that is unrelated to the sounds of the word itself,” and the phonetic system, which “tries to reproduce the succession of sounds that make up a word.”1 Because in Chinese “each written sign stands for a whole word and, consequently, for the idea expressed by the word,”2 he identifies Chinese as an ideographic system. “The classic example of an ideographic system of writing,” Saussure declared, “is Chinese.”3 Needless to say, the alphabetic European languages belong to the phonetic system. Saussure further pointed out that in contrast to an ideographic system, phonetic systems of writing are “based on the irreducible elements used in speaking.” As Chinese writing employs characters rather than letters to represent phonemes and morphemes, there exists a recognized gap between Chinese and Western writing systems. Saussure’s classification was not only a summary of the similar views held by scholars in the field up to his time but also anticipated the dominant theme in the repeated debates concerning the nature of Chinese language and literature in the twentieth century: whether the Chinese language is semantically based in contradistinction to the phonetically oriented alphabetic languages.4 While acknowledging similar characteristics such as the substitution of written signs for the spoken ones in the mind in both systems, Saussure considered the Chinese writing as having a graphic quality that makes the substitution absolute. In a subtle way, he implied that the Chinese written sign has a visual quality that sets it apart from phonetic systems of writing.5 This subtle point was more bluntly amplified by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound into a much-disputed “pictorial nature” of the Chinese written sign for the advancement of their philosophical and aesthetic agendas.6 Perhaps because he was aware of the gap between the two systems of writing, Saussure limited his linguistic study to the phonetic system and claimed that his theory applies to nonphonetic systems as well. No one would dispute the claim that the Chinese written sign is different from the Western counterpart. The indisputable difference entails a

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series of questions in cross-cultural studies: To what extent is the Chinese written sign different from the Western sign? Is there a huge gap between the Chinese and the Western written signs? If the answer is yes, is there a common ground that can serve as a bridge across the gap? Or is there any analytical tool that can be used to envision the fusion of linguistic horizons? In the history of cultural encounters between China and the West, are there any efforts that have attempted to bridge or narrow the linguistic gap? If there are any, why have they failed? Last but not least, what insights can the failed attempts offer in our efforts to fuse the aesthetic horizons between the Chinese and Western traditions? These questions have attracted the attention of scholars in the field for several hundred years and given rise to many heated debates and exchanges of ideas. I believe, to answer the above questions, it is necessary to have an adequate understanding of the nature of Chinese language and writing in relation to the Western counterpart. In this chapter, I wish to reexamine the debates and controversies in history, but I do not want to take sides with any school of thought because I believe that the issues in question are amenable to investigations from multiple perspectives, and scholars in the debates are prone to looking from one perspective to the neglect of the humanly constructed nature of language and writing. Instead of tackling the large issue of language system, I assign myself the modest task of examining the building block of writing, the written sign, which happens to be perceived to be the root cause of differences. In the process of examination, I hope to bring theoretical discourses on the sign in Chinese and Western thought into a meaningful dialogue that may yield some useful insights for cross-cultural studies. As the topic involves a number of past controversies, which ended up inconclusively, my study is not meant as a final reassessment but represents a step to go beyond traditional considerations.

The Controversy Over Chinese Writing In a well-researched book, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, David Porter offers a fascinating study of the first European encounters with China in the early modern period through an in-depth examination of four major areas: linguistic, theological, aesthetic, and economic. In his study, Chinese language and writing serve as a pivot upon which Europe’s imaginative constructions of China revolved. This pivot is constituted by the Chinese ideograph or, to be more exact, by

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what he calls the “ideographic fantasy.” As he points out, “variations of the ideographic fantasy have engendered not only exotic vision of the East but also reassessment of the established ways of thinking in the West.”7 The ideographic fantasy refers to a “long standing, almost compulsive desire to read it [Chinese writing symbol] as an impossibly pure signification and to systematize its notions in a relentless quest for an originary and transcendental order.”8 This fantasy is endowed with so much explanatory power that it has a paradigmatic function in interpreting Chinese culture and determining Western responses to China. For my study, I see in this fantasy an oppositional dichotomy that conceives the fundamental difference between Chinese and European writings as one between ideographic and alphabetic writings as well as an illusory desire to locate a bridge across the linguistic divide. In a perceptively argued article on Chinese writing, Haun Saussy makes this sagacious observation: “The opposition of ideographic and alphabetic writing was a grand simplification and highly vulnerable to fact.”9 This remark may also be viewed as a pithy evaluation of the controversy over the nature of Chinese writing in European history. About the nature of Chinese writing, there are basically two opposing views in the West. One view argues that Chinese writing is a pictographic language or an ideographic language using pictograms and ideographs as linguistic symbols. This is an age-old view that can be traced to medieval times. A number of influential philosophers, linguists, and writers including G.  W. Leibniz, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Giambattista Vico, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, G. W. F. Hegel, W. V. Humboldt, Ferdinand de Saussure, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, and others, either adopted or favored this view. The other view opposes this argument, criticizing it as a silly and intolerable misrepresentation and proclaiming Chinese language to be essentially the same as all other languages. Here, I would just quote a few of the most vocal scholars in the more recent debate. John DeFrancis, a noted Sinologist, dismisses the “ideographic” view of Chinese as a myth in his book-length study of 1984.10 William Boltz, another scholar of ancient Chinese, agrees with DeFrancis and states in his review article of the former’s book, “the old drawing-room favorites about the quaintly quixotic and ‘ideographic’ nature of Chinese character are so much eyewash, and can no longer be countenanced. … Silly and untenable notions about the Chinese script are not limited, regrettably, to the bemused proposals of the ‘ideographs’ of the 1930s.”11 In 1989, DeFrancis again reiterates his view, “It is simply intolerable that Chinese writing continues to be misrepresented as

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‘pictographic,’ a level of intellectual muddle-headedness on a par with discoursing about astronomy in terms of astrology. It is also intolerable that the nature of writing—of all writing—continues to be misunderstood in large part because of the misrepresentation of Chinese.”12 I agree that an adequate understanding of the nature of Chinese writing has importance not just for Chinese language, but has a much wider significance for language and writing in general. But when he declares that “It should be apparent that there is much justification for considering the Chinese script to be basically—that is, more than anything else—a phonetic system of writing (italics mine),”13 this statement is tantamount to saying that Chinese writing has little or no differences from the phonocentric alphabetic languages. This view has aroused heated discussions and debates, which focus on one central question: Is Chinese writing an ideographic system or phonetic system? Scholars, most of whom are Sinologists, answer this question with an unequivocal “no” to ideographic system. The argument against the ideographic view, however, has met equally vehement opposition. Chad Hansen, a scholar on Chinese language philosophy, launches a counterattack and mounts a rigorous defense of the “ideographic” view: “... the ideographic character of Chinese explains a sound insight found in the Chinese view of language. We have good reason, therefore, to reject this prohibitionist analysis of ‘ideograph’ and to continue to call Chinese language ‘ideographic.’”14 This recent debate is in fact a revival of a heated debate between two renowned Sinologists, Herrlee Creel and Peter Boodberg, in the late 1930s.15 Despite the differences, the recent debate and its precursor are essentially overshadowed and determined by still another older debate over the nature of Chinese language between the detractors who view Chinese as an inferior language and the upholders of Chinese as a language richer than Western alphabetic languages. In the rank of the detractors are found several venerable Western philosophers and linguists like G.  W. F.  Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schlegel, F.  Bopp, A. Schleicher, H. Humphreys, and W. A. Mason. Among the upholders are G. W. Leibniz, Athanase Kircher, John Wilkins, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Cassirer. We may even include Derrida in the rank of defenders.16 The overshadowing of the older debate is clearly visible in the background of the 1930s’ debate. Creel who started the debate expressed in no uncertain terms that his purpose was to correct the Western prejudice with regard to the ideographic nature of Chinese: “It is a further and

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even more curious fact that we Occidentals have come, by long habitude, to think that any method of writing which consists merely of a graphic representation of thought, but which is not primarily a system for the graphic notation of some sounds, in some way falls short of what writing was foreordained to be, is not indeed writing in the full sense of the word.”17 In Creel’s statement, we could hear a distinct note that anticipates Derrida’s deconstruction of phonocentric and logocentric views of writing.

A Utopian Approach to the Linguistic Gap In world history, some Western thinkers and scholars who cherished the ambition to find a viable way to resolve cultural differences of different traditions using different writing systems enthusiastically embraced the ideographic view of Chinese writing as a possible way to bridge the linguistic gap across continents. Their enthusiastic efforts turned out to be totally utopian. This utopian act was started as early as the initial contact between Chinese and Western civilizations in the Renaissance period. Since then, the ideographic view has been used as either an exotic foil or an alien frame of reference for Western thinkers in their investigation of the nature of European languages in particular and world languages in general. For over two centuries, there has existed an extended exploration of the difference between Chinese and Western languages. In this section, I will examine how the ideographic view was employed to bridge the linguistic gap in European history, how it affected the European understanding of the nature of language and writing in general, and what legacy it left behind for cross-cultural studies of writing systems. My discussion starts with an examination of a utopian movement to promote Chinese language as a universal written language. In their early encounters with Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other peoples of Asian and Southeast Asian countries, Western missionaries and scholars found that those peoples, despite the fact that they do not know Chinese language, could nevertheless read books written in Chinese characters. This phenomenon fascinated them and made them believe that Chinese writing is a system that employs an ocular method of communication, which, entirely independent of speech and without the intervention of words, conveys ideas directly through the sense of vision to the mind. As a result of this belief, the nature of Chinese language was decided to be “ideographic” in contradistinction to “phonographic” or alphabetical European

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language. This belief naturally led to the conviction that Chinese writing was most likely a universal writing system, which might be promoted and used by all peoples on earth, and then people could read books written in Chinese ideograms like numerical figures or algebraic signs. Some missionaries went so far as to believe that Chinese language should be promoted throughout the world and the Bible should be translated into Chinese so that people all over the world could read it without the need to learn spoken Chinese and on the mere perusal of Chinese characters. The perception of Chinese as a universal language has proved to be utopian and the attempt to use Chinese writing as a way to bridge the linguistic gap was a total failure, but the intellectual exercise has produced an unintended legacy that finds its presence in the contrast between Chinese writing as an ideographic system and European writing as a phonographic system. Nowadays, scholars basically accept Saussure’s dual conception of world languages into two writing systems: the alphabetic languages that employ letters as linguistic signs and the ideographic languages that use ideograms as linguistic signs. According to this classification, Chinese language uses an ideographic system, because in contradistinction to Western alphabetic languages, whose aim is to imitate/record speech, Chinese language is one using ideograms to represent ideas; hence, the basis of Chinese is the script that represents meanings rather than sound as in alphabetic language. Saussure’s theory is indebted to the linguistic legacy of concept-script theory that can be traced back to the Renaissance period in the West. The earliest articulation of this idea may be traced to the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, made the following observation that may have expressed a prevalent view at that time with regard to the Chinese system of writing: And we understand further, that it is the use of China, and the kingdoms of the high Levant, to write in characters real, which express neither letter nor words in gross, but things or notions; insomuch as countries and provinces, which understand not one another’s language, can nevertheless read one another’s writings, because characters are accepted more generally than the languages do extend; and therefore they have a vast multitude of characters, as many, I suppose, as radical words.18

Bacon’s idea was accepted and further promoted by missionaries who went to and stayed in China and had direct contact with Chinese language. Father Cibot, a French missionary who stayed in Peking, published

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a controversial essay in the first volume of the Mémores concernant les Chinois, which proposed in effect an ideographic and pictographic view of Chinese writing: “The Chinese characters are composed of symbols and images, unconnected with any sound, and which may be read in all languages. They form a kind of intellectual, algebraical, metaphysical and ideal painting, which express thoughts, and represents them by analogy, by relation, by convention.”19 Since the fifteenth century until modern times, this idea had developed into an exotic view that unlike other writing systems, Chinese characters resemble mathematical symbols and represent directly ideas and concepts in the mind and only incidentally represent pronunciations. This view was even taken seriously by well-known linguistic theorists. In his study of the relationship between language and intellectual development (1836), Wilhelm von Humboldt, the German linguistic philosopher, refined the exotic view into a philosophically rigorous observation: Nobody can deny that the old style Chinese reveals a stirring dignity owing to the fact that important ideas impinge directly upon each other; it reveals a simple grandeur because, by discarding all useless secondary designations, it seems to take recourse in depicting pure thought via language.20

Clearly, Humboldt did not abandon the ideographic view that considers Chinese written signs as graphic expression of thought. In fact, his words remind us of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view of hieroglyphic symbol as something that “depicts the facts that it describes.”21 In his time, however, an entirely different view concerning the nature of Chinese language appeared and eventually developed into an opposition to the ideographic view of Chinese. Peter S. Du Ponceau, president of the American Philosophical Society, published a monograph, A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, in 1838.22 In his treatise, he argues that the concept-script premise of Chinese is a misconception based on inadequate knowledge of Chinese language that cannot stand close scrutiny and that a purely ideographical language independent of speech cannot exist, and that the Chinese system of writing, like all languages in the world, can be nothing less than “a servile representation of the spoken language, as far as visible signs can be made to represent audible sounds.”23 Obviously, his view came under the heavy influence of phonocentrism, which is the conceptual basis of alphabetic languages. Western linguistic theory holds that language is a representation of thinking and writing is

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only a copy of language, not a language per se. The philosophical foundation of this theory is the Western tradition’s logocentrism, which privileges presence over absence. Because spoken language is viewed as presence and writing as absence, speech is regarded as more important than writing, which is but a servant to language. This view of writing as an appendix to speech is the rationale for Du Ponceau’s view of Chinese characters as servants to spoken Chinese. We must admit that Du Ponceau’s criticism of the exaggerated total separation of speech from Chinese writing is certainly reasonable, but his rejection of Chinese script as ideographic (i.e., it represents ideas and not sounds) in nature evinces a strong phonocentric belief. His argument reveals his conviction in the universality of phonocentrism for all writings, because he holds that Chinese characters represent sounds in the same way as alphabetic languages and insists that “it is impossible that the Chinese character should be understood, unless the spoken language of China be understood at the same time.” True, European languages and other alphabetic languages are phonocentric, based on the idea that written symbols are linguistic holders of linguistic sounds, but phonocentrism is not the only principle for composing Chinese characters. In fact, it is not even the dominant principle, for the major principle for character-making is graphic and semantic. In language practice, the use of Chinese characters does not support his argument that “if the Chinese writing is read and understood in various countries in the vicinity of China, it is not in consequence of its supposed ideographic character; but either because the Chinese is also the language or one of the languages of the country, or because it is learned, and the meaning of the characters is acquired, through the words which they represent.”24 For it simply cannot explain the fact that numerous Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese before modern times could read Chinese texts without the ability to speak Chinese, or without ever making any effort to learn Chinese. His argument that Chinese writing is a handmaiden to spoken Chinese shows him to be a staunch believer in phonocentrism. Here, I will offer a critique of his phonocentric view and explain why it is not applicable to Chinese writing. According to phonocentrism in Western linguistic theory, writing is the record of speech and is therefore the handmaiden to speech. For those who have some knowledge of the historical development of Chinese language, Du Ponceau’s view of Chinese words as handmaidens to sounds is contrary to historical facts. In Chinese history, spoken Chinese has consistently been placed in a servile position to written

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Chinese, and the same is true of the relationship between classical Chinese (based on writing) and vernacular Chinese (based on speaking). In the beginning, the correspondence between spoken Chinese and written Chinese may have existed in the early stage of Chinese language development, for example, in the Han Dynasty (or much earlier) when Chinese language was formalized by the government. But since then, Chinese language has split into two systems: classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese. Although the two share some basic characteristic features, yet they are so different that the uneducated could hardly understand what the educated write even when what is written is read aloud to them. Just like the educated and uneducated who belong to two different classes, classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese form a master–servant relationship, but interestingly, contrary to the relationship conceived by phonocentrism in Western linguistic theory, the hierarchy is reversed. Classical Chinese is the master while vernacular Chinese is the servant because it is the former that controls and dominates the latter. The huge gap between classical and vernacular Chinese was brought about not solely by the language development. Rather, the major factor for the gap has much to do with the characteristic features in the Chinese writing system: Chinese has a more enhanced visual quality than alphabetic language and is essentially semantically oriented rather than phonetically based. Simply put, it was determined by the stability of the Chinese characters, or ideograms that represent meaning as well as sounds. Tang Lan, a highly respected Chinese linguist, points out: “Chinese philology is essentially a study of the shapes of characters. It should not include exegeses of sounds and rhyme of words. Although a character’s sound and meaning are related to its shape, but in essence, they belong to language. Strictly speaking, the meaning of a character is part of semantics; the sound of a character is part of phonetics. Sound and meaning should belong to linguistics.”25 Thus, one fundamental achievement of traditional Chinese linguistics is the understanding that Chinese linguistic discourse is character-­centered rather than grammar-centered. There is an inexact but sensible argument that Chinese has no grammar. A more exact way to describe the situation should be that Chinese has a weak external grammar but has a fully developed internal grammar, which is known to native speakers through (un)conscious assimilation. This has been proven by Chinese history. Chinese linguistic study produced many works like Shuowen jiezi (Explication of Characters and Words), but there was no such book comparable to Western “grammar” until modern times when

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Ma Jianzhong compiled the first Chinese grammar book using theories and methods of Western grammar. The visually and semantically based Chinese language system is endowed with an internal impetus to override speech. This inner tendency may be reworded as an idea: writing does not necessarily depend on speech; indeed, historical development has shown that classical Chinese is so different from vernacular Chinese that they practically formed two independent, albeit related systems. The two systems might have started at the same origin but followed two different routes of development in history. While classical Chinese develops through the route from thought to writing, vernacular followed the route from thought to speech. Because of the gap between the two systems, a few Western scholars were disposed to treat classical Chinese as a notational system rather than a fully developed language system. Because of the phonocentric view, Marcel Granet was the first to cast doubt on the nature of Chinese writing system as a language and suggests that it may be just a system of notation.”26 His view finds supporters even among those who support the view of Chinese writing as ideographic. Henry Rosemont, an ideograph holder, argues that written classical Chinese is a notational system that is only very indirectly related to a spoken language.27 Though their expressed doubt about classical Chinese as a language system is erroneous, it nevertheless confirms from the negative direction the fact that classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese are two independent and interdependent systems and the former is not a handmaiden to the latter.

Visual and Semantic Primacy in Chinese Writing In a Chinese article on Chinese language, I have pointed out that a writing symbol does not simply consist of sound and shape; it is made up of three related elements that can be conceptually analyzed. I call them “three Ss,” referring to “sound,” “shape,” and “sense.”28 My view is basically similar to those of many Chinese and Western linguists. For an example, the noted Chinese linguist Xu Tongqiang advances the same idea in his book What Is Language.29 But what I want to emphasize is that in different language systems, the three elements are valued differently. In European alphabetic languages, sound and sense are privileged over shape. In Chinese language, it is just the opposite: shape and sense are privileged over sound.30 Those scholars who accept phonocentrism in their study of Chinese language and writing do not seem to pay sufficient attention to

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the difference of emphasis in linguistic representation for Chinese and European languages. Moreover, some scholars do not seem to appreciate the difference in representational value that Chinese and European languages emphasize. The main function of Chinese writing is not to record exact sounds in speech, but to adequately convey what is to be expressed in thought. As an alphabetic language is mainly to record speech, it relies heavily on the medium of sounds. As a result, some scholars believe that thought and language are at least once removed from each other. By contrast, because Chinese language mainly serves the function of expressing thought, thinking and speaking have a less mediated relationship. Perhaps for this reason, some European thinkers considered Chinese language as a natural language, a language closer to God. John Webb may be the first Western scholar to give an account of the exquisite naturalness of the Chinese language: “Besides they are not troubled with variety of Declensions, Conjugations, Numbers, Genders, Moods, Tenses and the like grammatical niceties, but are absolutely free from all such perplexing accidents, having no other Rules in use than what the light nature has dictated unto them; whereby their language is plain, easie and simple as NATURAL speech ought to be.”31 Leibniz simply regarded Chinese as a language taught by God: “If God had taught man a language, that language would have been like Chinese.”32 He once compared Chinese and Western languages and came to the conclusion that Chinese characters form a writing system endowed with more rationality because people can gain an understanding of a character by examining and reflecting on the character itself. This is true to a certain extent. For example, when a person who has the mastery of Chinese writing comes across a character with an animal radical, he or she may guess correctly that it is an animal even though he or she does not know what animal it is. By contrast, a person who masters an alphabetic language cannot acquire an idea of a word by simply reflecting on the word itself. He or she must rely on the mediation of language. In his argument against the ideographic view of Chinese writing, Du Ponceau raised a loaded question: Which came first, writing or language? This is a chicken–egg question that can never be satisfactorily answered because it depends on what constitutes writing symbols. If we count the cave paintings of primitive people as early writing symbols, writing might have preceded speech as a system. Furthermore, there may be another possibility that speech and writing arose and developed simultaneously in high antiquity. Giambattista Vico, the well-known Italian philosopher and

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philologist who had devoted his entire life to the study of language and culture, maintained the view that speech and writing arose and developed at the same time in his magnum opus New Science. Vico conceived of three languages in the historical development of human language: (1) the hieroglyphic language; (2) the symbolic language; (3) the vernacular language. He found the three forms exist in all known nations of antiquity including Chinese civilization. On his meticulous research into languages across cultures, he categorically rejected other scholars’ views, saying that “The unfortunate reason for their error is obvious: they simply assumed that nations developed languages first, and then letters. Yet languages and letter were born as twins and developed at the same pace through all three kinds [languages].”33 After long-term arduous research on various languages, he proposed the idea that at the outset, the initial language of the humanity had no sounds and was constituted with gestures and symbolic markings: “The first dates from the age of families when pagan peoples had just embraced civilization. We find that it was a mute or wordless language which used gestures or physical objects bearing a natural relationship to the ideas they wanted to signify.”34 Some Chinese scholars like Guo Moruo also held similar views. Vico further explained why the first language had no sounds: “For speech was born in the mute age as a mental language which Strabo in a golden passage says existed before any spoken or articulated language: this is why in Greek logos means both word and idea … the first language employed by nations in their mute age must have originated with signs, gestures, or physical objects which had a natural relation to the ideas expressed.”35Most relevant to the ideograph versus phonograph debate, he mentioned that “the Chinese still use ideograms.”36 Du Ponceau did not seem to have heard of Vico’s view. In asking a loaded question, however, Du Ponceau meant to turn the ideographic view of Chinese writing into a fallacy that “a language was invented to suit the written characters after they were formed.”37 With the question and implied answer, Du Ponceau seemed to have thought that he has completely repudiated the ideographic view. But things are not as simple as that. Even if we take language as appearing before writing, there is still more than one possible way for writing to develop into mature forms. In view of the development of Chinese writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics, it is safe to speculate that at the very beginning, all writing systems were ideographic in nature. After all, “ideograph” is a word Champallion invented to characterize the nature of Egyptian hieroglyphics, even though

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he later found out that the word is not entirely appropriate, because many seemingly ideographic images of hieroglyphics turned out to represent phonemes rather than morphemes. But in my opinion, Egyptian hieroglyphics is already a sophisticated language that has undergone phoneticization. Based on the ideographic remnants, it is safe to speculate that in its early stages hieroglyphics must have resembled ancient Chinese characters that stand for meaning rather than for sounds. The historical developments of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphics suggest that all ancient writing systems must have first followed the single route of ideographic development and then diverged in two directions: while one follows a phonetic route as in alphabetic languages, the other continues in the ideographic direction and at the same time adds a phonetic dimension. Chinese writing system is the result of the development in the second direction. It is impossible now to know why Chinese language development followed the second route. Xunzi once said that in high antiquity there were many who engaged in created writing systems, but only Cang Jie’s system survived. This view should enable us to speculate on why Chinese followed the second route and why Chinese writing system was indeed separate from spoken language. Since there existed several writing systems in high antiquity while people at that time spoke the same or similar language, it is reasonable to believe that people adopted the most sophisticated and convenient writing system to represent the language. Since the language had different dialect forms, the writings could not but represent meaning rather than sound. The first Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang’s standardization of Chinese writing system is a case in point. Because the various kingdoms subjugated by the Kingdom of Qin spoke different dialects, the standard scripts could not represent sounds, because there would be total chaos. Therefore, the First Emperor imposed a writing system that must represent meaning. Thus, it is not a case in which “a language was invented to suit the written characters after they were formed,” but a case in which a writing system is adopted to represent the meaning of a language system with different dialects. Due to the act of privileging meaning to speech, writing formed a hegemony over speech and constituted the linguistic pillar for the great unification of the Chinese empire, thereby overruling the possibility of phonocentrism that dominates all alphabetic languages. Meng Hua, a Chinese linguist, has a vivid description of this situation:

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The semantic nature of Chinese characters turns Chinese writing into an independent system of signs with meaning. It lorded over all dialects and became the supreme force for cultural unification. That writing serves the function of recording speech was overturned in Chinese writing system: the development of Chinese language must first of all obey the demands of characters. Characters became an objective, while language became a means for characters to represent meaning … Chinese characters have constituted part of Chinese language and may be the decisive part.38

Having discussed the nature of Chinese writing so far, I want to emphasize two points. First, Chinese writing and Chinese language are both interdependent and independent. This idea finds support in the case of Japanese language. In ancient times, Japanese people spoke a language but did not have a writing system. They adopted the Chinese writing to record their language and speech. Since the Chinese writing characters were pronounced differently from those of Japanese words, the adopted Chinese writing system could only represent meaning. Therefore, many Chinese characters in Japanese writing are pronounced differently. Only when Chinese words were borrowed to represent ideas that did not exist in Japanese language, we can detect similarity in sounds. And there was a huge gap between speech and writing. Later on, the Japanese people invented two alphabetic systems using the radicals of Chinese characters. Only then did speech and writing have a full correspondence. Second, even when Chinese writing system is adopted to represent language as in the case of Japanese, the representational route is different from that which happens in alphabetic languages. While in alphabetic language representation proceeds from thought through sound to written words, in Chinese and Japanese languages, representation goes from thought through meaning to sound. This is the fundamental difference between Chinese and alphabetic representations. Many historical factors were responsible for this fundamental difference and they are lost, perhaps never to be retrieved, but the decisive factor seems to be the preference for the visual and semantic qualities to the phonetic qualities in writing symbols. There are quite a few speculations as to why Chinese writing did not follow the phonographic route and develop into an alphabetic language as most modern languages do. Humboldt’s speculation supports my view. My argument finds further support in Humboldt’s linguistic study of Chinese language. In his study of linguistic variability of many languages, both alphabetic and nonalphabetic, Humboldt discussed the reasons why

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Chinese did not develop into an alphabetic language as most present-day languages do. He gives two reasons, both of them are based on the actual conditions and development of Chinese language, and both of them argue against those scholars who treat Chinese language as one that fits into general language theory abstracted from the studies of alphabetic languages. And both of them support my argument for the visual emphasis and semantic orientation. The first reason is that Chinese language’s writing system relies on a minimal pictorial representation. Humboldt speculates that in the historical development, the “odd Chinese linguistic structure stems indisputably from the phonemic peculiarity of the people in earliest times, from their custom of keeping syllables rigorously apart in pronunciation, and from a deficiency in the motility with which one tone acts to modify another.”39 In this observation, we notice a weak role phonemes play in the sophistication of language system. Humboldt then argues that in order for the language to develop along a philosophical and scientific route based on reflections, inventions, and reason, it had to resort to a way of treatment that “had to retain the isolation of the tones in the speech of the people, but at the same time establish everything and distinguish precisely what was required in the more elevated use of the language for the clear presentation of an idea, even though it would be divested of accent and attitude or gesture.” He considers such a treatment had begun in early history because it “is revealed also in the slight but unmistakable traces of pictorial representation in Chinese writing.”40 After language development entered scientific stages of development, pictographic writing cannot survive long and the Chinese people would have been led into developing an alphabetic language as most peoples do, but this alphabetic turn did not happen because of two reasons: the weak role of phonemes, and the preference for visual representation of ideas: Because the ear perceived monographs [pictographic outlines] of the phoneme, the writing was modeled upon reproduction of these monograms. Using pictographic script as a point of departure, and without approaching alphabetical notation, the people devised an artistic, arbitrarily produced system of signs; this system is not without relationship between the individual symbols, but this relationship is always only in an ideal, never a phonetic context. Because the bent of understanding prevailed in the nation and in the language over the pleasure in phonetic change, these signs became indications of concepts more than of phonemes (Italics mine], save that to each

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sign there still corresponds a definite word since the concept attains fulfillment only through the word.41

Clearly, Humboldt’s speculations make good sense, and the pictographic quality is still observable in Chinese characters, and the semantically based feature of Chinese character is accepted without any controversy by Chinese linguists up to the present day.

A Failed Attempt to Narrow the Linguistic Gap For various reasons, phonocentrism of alphabetic languages has been perceived to be a valid theory capable of narrowing the linguistic gap in the minds of people both in China and abroad. To reform Chinese writing so as to facilitate modernizations, the Chinese government launched a national campaign to Romanize Chinese characters shortly after the founding of New China. The conceptual logic was phonocentrism though few had actually heard of the term. Outside China, Western sinologists have strongly supported the Romanization campaign with the Chinese term “pinyin,” literally meaning “to spell sounds.” Their support may be seen as a conscious effort to eradicate the ideographic concept of Chinese writing system once and for all. In an indirect way, their effort may be understood as a way to bridge the gap between Chinese and Western conceptions of language by overturning the division between the phonographic Western language and ideographic Chinese language. The efforts in and outside China to Romanize Chinese writing is certainly an ambitious and laudable endeavor, but by fitting the ideographic square pegs of Chinese writing into the phonocentric round holes of alphabetic language, the attempt at bridging the linguistic gap is a failure. Despite the claim that Chinese writing is basically a phonetic system of writing, it has little practical value for crossing the divide between ideographic Chinese writing and phonocentric Western languages. In Europe, Latin used to be a lingua franca, a common language adopted by educated European speakers. As the language of international communication, scholarship and science it served as a sort of linguistic bridge for Western European nations and regions well into the eighteenth century when it was supplanted by vernaculars. Interestingly, a similar phenomenon existed in the Far East before modern times. In the so-called Sinic world, Chinese language played a similar role to Latin. At least, Chinese writing served as something like a common language among

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nations like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Ryukyu kingdoms, and in a lesser extent among a few Southeastern Asian countries and regions. Even today, Chinese characters still play a remarkable role in Japanese language. It looks as though Chinese writing served as a linguistic bridge among people of various Far Eastern countries and regions who speak entirely different languages. When I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Korean student took a course of classical language with me. He does not know the Chinese language; in fact, he does not even speak a word of Chinese, but this fact does not prevent him from taking the course. The final assessment for the course was to translate a classical Chinese text into English, and the Korean student did a pretty good job. His performance left an indelible impression on my mind and kept me wondering what had enabled him to accomplish something like a remarkable feat to me. He explained to me: even though he could not read or speak Chinese, he can recognize Chinese characters. That is why he was able to understand the classical Chinese text and translate it into English. His case convinced me that Chinese writing is an ideographic system composed of characters that are endowed with a visual primacy and represent meaning more than sound. In other words, Chinese writing is ideographic in nature rather than phonocentric like European languages. However, those scholars who dismiss the ideographic nature of Chinese writing offer an entirely different way to explain why a Korean can understand a Chinese poem composed of some Chinese characters. One of the most vocal contemporary supporters of Du Ponceau’s view is William Boltz. Accepting Du Ponceau’s explanation of why a Korean understands Chinese characters wholeheartedly, he attacks a weak side of the ideographic conception of Chinese: the exaggerated claim that Chinese writing is independent of Chinese language, especially speech. He argues, “Du Ponceau’s conclusion, that ‘Chinese characters (when used to write Chinese, and not another language) can only be read by someone familiar with the oral language,’ stands, when seen in this light, as a reasonable and unremarkable observation. But in fact we still find respectable expressions of the mistaken conviction that Chinese characters are somehow unrelated to language.”42 He tries to remove a pillar in the ideographic conception by using a concrete example. It is directly related to my cited case in which a Korean student understands a Chinese text without knowing or speaking the Chinese language. To explain why a five-character poetic line in Chinese is readily comprehended by some Japanese or Korean readers,

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Boltz offers a lengthy analysis of how the Chinese poetic line is understood by a Japanese or Korea person. His reasoning is: “it is either because they have learned something of the Chinese language, or because the whole pattern has been borrowed into their language as an ossified and syntactically unanalyzable unit with its original Chinese meaning intact”; it is because “the Japanese or Korean readers are having recourse to a linguistic entity that correlates Japanese or Korean words with these characters, and meanings only in association with those words.”43 He draws a conclusion: “It has nothing to do with concepts, as reflected in a script or otherwise.” Ironically, he does not seem to realize that his argument in fact lends support to the ideographic view because it shows that Chinese characters can be independent of a language and are carriers of meaning even though it is mediated through another language. Moreover, like my cited example, in which the Korean student did not know or speak Chinese but knows the meaning of the Chinese text, his argument supports the view that Chinese writing can be somehow unrelated to language. The fact that in China, people from different dialect regions cannot understand each other’s speech but are able to read texts in Chinese characters strongly supports the view that Chinese writing and Chinese speech can be somehow unrelated. To most Mandarin Chinese speakers including me, Cantonese is almost a foreign language and we cannot understand each other even though we can read Chinese texts in Chinese script. This fact confirms the validity of possible separation between script and speech. To view Chinese writing as basically a phonetic system of writing, the ideograph rejecters may have cherished the noble wish to bridge the gap between Chinese characters and alphabetic writings, but their view is essentially based on phonocentrism, which cannot be confirmed by the theory and praxis of Chinese writing. In theory, the impact of phonocentrism that emphasizes the primacy of sound is reflected in Du Ponceau’s argument against the ideographic nature of Chinese writing, especially in his conclusion: I conclude that the Chinese system of writing is improperly called ideographic; it is a syllabic and lexigraphic alphabet. It is syllabic, because every character represents a syllable: it is lexigraphic, because every syllable is a significant word. I do not know of any other denomination that can be properly applied to it, and this appears to me to be sufficiently descriptive.44

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As Western language studies employ such concepts as “syllable,” “lexigraph,” and “alphabet,” Du Ponceau also used these terms to describe Chinese characters and writing, paying no attention to the distinctive nature and feature of Chinese writing with its native terms: wen (graph), zi (character), ci (roughly word), shu (writing). Xu Shen (58–147), compiler of the first Chinese dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi (Elucidations of Characters and Words), succinctly describes the differences among the terms, which reveal a distinctive difference from their Western counterparts: When Cang Jie first invented writing symbols, he probably imitated the forms of things according to their resemblances. Therefore, the created graphs were called wen or patterns. Later, writings were increased by combining the form (pictographs) and phonetics, the results were called zi or ‘compound graphs.’ ‘Wen’ means the root of the forms of things. ‘Compound graphs’ means reproduction and gradual increase. When they were put down on bamboo and silk, they were called shu or writing. Writing is imitation.45

In this statement, Xu Shen clearly identifies the imitative and semantic nature of Chinese writing. The “alphabet” is a Western term, which refers to a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) employed to record Western languages. It works on the basic principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the spoken language. It forms a striking contrast with other types of writing systems, which may use graphs to represents syllables and words, or use characters to represent morpheme and semantic unit. Nowhere in the Chinese writing system can we find even a near equivalent to the Western term “alphabet.” But this fact does not prevent Du Ponceau from using “alphabet” to describe Chinese writing. To use “alphabet” to describe Chinese writing is clearly fallacious, because Chinese writing has a vocabulary of tens and thousands of zi (characters). Chinese writing has too many characters to make a Western sense of “alphabet.” In language praxis, phonocentrism is impossible in Chinese writing. Mandarin Chinese has 21 initials, 38 finals, which, through combination, can only produce a little over four hundred syllables. Even with the variations made possible by adding four tones, there are altogether less than 1300 syllables. With such a small number of syllables to represent one of the largest vocabularies among the world’s languages, a large number of

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homophones is inevitable. It often happens that people do not know the meaning of a word without a clear context. As a result, there appear intended and unintended puns. But once a character is written down, even without a context, the meaning is unequivocal. The existence of large number of homophones rules out the feasibility for Chinese characters and words to represent sounds in the way alphabetic languages do. It has also made it impracticable for Chinese language to be alphabeticized. The attempt to Romanize Chinese language from ancient time to modern times is a total failure in spite of national campaign promoted by the government. The failure speaks eloquently of one truth: unlike the Greco-­ Roman and Judaic-Christian traditions in which what underlies language is the motto: “In the beginning was the word,” in the Chinese tradition, the core of the linguistic mechanism may be worded in a maxim: “In the beginning was wen (character or ideograph).” Although more than a century-­ long writing reform has increased the phonetic elements in Chinese writing, I am convinced that so long as Chinese writing system is NOT overhauled with a replacement of characters with a score of alphabetic letters or phonographs, it will remain a semantically dominant system with ideographic and visual primacy, and any attempt to bridge the linguistic divide between Chinese and alphabetic writings through phonocentric theories is bound to fail. And any scholarly research into the possibility of narrowing the linguistic gap will have no positive results unless we accept the ideographic nature of the Chinese written sign.

Chinese and Western Philosophy of Writing My foregoing discussion serves to show that a reliance on phonocentric theory in Western linguistics will not be able to help us cross the linguistic divide. I argue, however, that semiotics or the philosophy of language may help us better understand the nature of Chinese language and writing and enable us to gain insights for fusing the horizons of Chinese and Western languages. Although it is unlikely to locate a common ground in the local area of the written sign between Chinese and Western languages, we may find useful insights in Chinese notions of the linguistic sign and locate possible common grounding across the linguistic divide. In this last section, I will set a modest goal to find a possible common denominator between Chinese and Western language theory and on the basis of it to reconceptualize the linguistic divide. Since the writing symbol is the fundamental thing that sets Chinese and Western writing systems apart, I will examine

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traditional Chinese ideas of the linguistic sign in relation to modern language philosophy, compare and contrast them with those in the linguistic theories of alphabetic language, and attempt to see in what ways the Chinese notions of the linguistic sign are compatible with and different from those in Western linguistic theory. In language philosophy on the linguistic sign, the first common ground between Chinese ideographic sign and Western alphabetic sign may be located in the designation of signs. In both traditions, thinkers have groped in the dark in ancient times and eventually came to a similar view. In the West, people initially believed that the designation of linguistic sign came about as a result of the act of naming. The Biblical story of how Adam named animals is a famous story. In Chinese tradition, a similar idea existed in high antiquity as well. Early Chinese thinkers like Confucius, Xunzi, Mozi, Gongsun Longzi, and others made naming a central topic in their metaphysic thought. In their thinking, some believed that there is a natural correspondence between names and things. Liu Xi (c. 160 BC), an ancient Chinese philologist, states in his lexicographical compilation Shi Ming (Elucidation of Names) that “In the correspondence of name with reality, there is in each instance that which is right and proper. The common people use names every day, but they do not know the reasons why names are what they are.”46 This linguistic correspondence was believed to derive from a natural correspondence in cosmology. In his examination of Liu Xi’s work, Roy Andrew Miller observes: “Words, i.e. names were not simply arbitrary linguistic signs that had become attached to arbitrarily segmented parts of the real world through a gradually accumulating process of social convention. Rather, words were immutable cosmological entities, each one of which contained within itself a kernel of absolute moral and ethical principle; such principles in turn reflected much of what man was able to learn about the nature of the world and of the society in which he lived.”47 Based on his reading of “Shi Ming,” Miller regards the early Chinese conception of the connection between words and their referents as the unavoidable result of a spontaneous natural process. It is unlike the Western sign, in which the concrete signums and the abstract signatum coincide arbitrarily. In another essay, Miller further expounds this idea, “No name of anything, no word in the Chinese language, was thought to be of and in itself arbitrary, or in any way the result of an arbitrary agreement on the part of the society employing it. Everything in the cosmos and on earth was the way it was, and every word, or name, was the

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word or name it was, for a reason, and that reason was a reflection of cosmic order.”48 Miller’s characterization certainly contains elements of truth with regard to Chinese conception of the correspondence between signifier and signified in the process of naming things. In Chinese historical documents, there are Chinese equivalents to Adam’s naming of animals. For example, in Liji (Records of Rites and Rituals), the Yellow Emperor, the legendary ancestor of the Chinese nation, is described as giving proper names to things: “The Yellow Emperor assigned correct designations to various things.” In Chunqiu fanlu (The Profuse Dews of the Spring and Autumn Annals), Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BC), a Confucian scholar of the Han Dynasty, expresses a systematic idea of natural correspondence between names and rationale: Heaven and earth are the great meanings of names and appellations … Names as words come from calling and designating. Appellations as words come from proclamation through imitation. To proclaim in imitation of heaven and earth brings forth epithets. To call a thing so as to designate it gives rise to names. Names and appellations differ in sound but share the same origin; both are the results of calling and proclaiming to express the meaning of heaven. Heaven does not speak. So it makes people express its meaning. It does not make people act within it. If this is so, then names are that with which sages revealed the intentions of heaven.49

The instances of the natural correspondence between names and nature are abundant in ancient China, and it is unnecessary to cite more examples. Many ancient thinkers believed that Chinese words came into being as a result of the natural correspondence between things and their names. But there is another side to the linguistic picture. Beside the general view concerning naming, there are other ideas of naming that do not view naming as a result of the correspondence between objects and their words, but as linguistic designations by agreement and conventions. Dong Zhongshu’s treatise cited above contains a subtle implication of this idea. While the views on the natural correspondence come from legendary records, thinkers who were engaged in serious thinking about the nature of language held a view that is not any different from modern linguistics. In their discourses, we find an emphasis on agreement and conventions as the source of language. Because of this emphasis, their ideas come close to the modern linguistic idea of arbitrary designation.

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In modern linguistics, the first cardinal principle of general linguistics is the idea of the arbitrary designation of the sign proposed by Saussure. According to this theory, all linguistic signs, with the exception of onomatopoeia, are arbitrarily invented.50 In Saussure’s theory, this principle applies mainly to phonetic signs, but Saussure maintains that it is also applicable to written signs. With regard to phonetic signs in Chinese language, this principle of arbitrariness is largely true, but with regard to Chinese written signs, this principle fits uneasily because of the visual and semantic primacy of the Chinese scripts. Pictograms and ideographs in Chinese writing are not completely arbitrary. In fact, they possess a motivated relation to the things to be represented. I will discuss this point in detail in Chap. 3. In Chinese philosophy of language, the idea of linguistic arbitrariness figures prominently in some thinkers’ theories. Xunzi (c. 310–235 BC), who conducts extensive explorations of names and linguistic designations, expresses an arbitrary view of words, not any different from that of Saussure’s. He argues that names come into being as a result of agreement and convention. In his discourse on “The Rectification of Names,” he states: Names have no intrinsic appropriateness. One designates by naming in accordance with agreed conventions. Only when the convention is fixed and a usage is established does one speak of the ‘proper use’ of a name. If a name differs from the agreed convention, it is then called “inappropriate.” There is no fixed correspondence between names and realities. Only when the convention is fixed and a usage is established does one speak of a (correct) designation for a reality.51

Xunzi, who lived in approximately the same historical period as early Greek thinkers, expresses a similar idea held by Aristotle: “Names have their meaning by convention, for none of the names are by nature.”52 When we relate his idea to modern linguistics, Xunzi’s idea differs little from Saussure’s idea of the arbitrariness of linguistic sign. Hu Qiguang, a modern Chinese philologist, affirms the essential identity in an observation: “Xunzi’s thesis, ‘One designates by naming in accordance with agreed conventions,’ has two aspects of meanings: when one creates words, there is no absolute relation between names and reality, which is arbitrary; once a word is created to represent a specific object and a habitual use of it is formed, it is endowed with a compulsory restriction for the

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users.”53 Moreover, Hu Qiguang considers Xunzi’s idea as the first cornerstone of Chinese linguistics. His assessment coincides with the Western assessment of Saussure’s idea about the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. In view of the prevalence of natural correspondence in Chinese metaphysics and linguistics, Xunzi’s arbitrary view of linguistic designation represents another aspect of the Chinese view on naming in contradistinction with the natural correspondence in naming. Fully aware of natural correspondence and the ideographic nature of Chinese characters, his arbitrary view is only an effort to keep a balance between arbitrariness and natural motivation. On the one hand, he states that the designation of names for things is determined by conventions, but on the other hand, he also holds that the designation by convention is based on the actual content of things in the world. Xunzi’s balanced view not only confirms the linguistic insights of modern linguistic theory but also shows a remarkable sensitivity to the impact of Chinese metaphysics that emphasizes natural correspondence between names and things. Xunzi is but one of the ancient Chinese thinkers who grasped the idea of arbitrariness of linguistic signs. In the Wei-Jin period (220–420), the debates over the nature of language gave rise to a variety of views on linguistic theory. One of them is directly concerned with the relationship between sounds and their meanings. Xi Kang (223–262), one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, made a systematic examination of the relationship between humanly uttered sounds and the natural universe and composed a treatise, “Sounds Have No Sorrow or Joy.” Although it is not a treatise on language per se, it has a direct reference to the role of sounds in linguistic signification. In his treatise on whether music produces inherent ideas of joy and sorrow, Xi Kang vehemently denies the validity of a natural correspondence between sounds and meaning. In the treatise, he also touches upon the relationship between language and nature. He regards speech as humanly designated sounds, not naturally grown things: “Words are not natural and fixed things. In the five regions of the land, there are different customs, and same things have different appellations. People merely establish a name which serves as a distinctive sign.”54 About the same time as Xi Kang, Ouyang Jian (268–300 CE), a philosopher of the Western Jin period also disconfirms the natural correspondence between names and objects by examining the origin of words and implicitly affirms the artificial designation as the source of words. He states: “By tracing the origins and seeking the roots of objects, [one realizes that] an object does not have its natural name; nor does a rationale have its

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invariable epithet. If one wants to distinguish the substance of objects, one will coin different names; if one wants to express his ideas, he will establish their epithets.”55 I therefore may claim that Xi Kang and Ouyang Jian’s view anticipate Saussure’s theory of arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. In his study of the linguistic sign, Saussure divides a sign into two related categories in binary opposition: signifier and signified, and laid the foundation for an analytic study of linguistic phenomena. Are there any similar ideas in Chinese language theories? The answer is affirmative. Saussure’s binary opposition finds in Chinese thought the opposition between ming (name) and shi (object). This binary opposition has generally been examined from a metaphysical perspective on the relationship between subject and object, reality and unreality, but it has another dimension, which is linguistic or semiotic in nature. In metaphysical consideration of the relationship between subject and object, the binary opposition refers to the relationship between things and their appellations. But when we look at it from the perspective of language, the binary opposition moves internally and refers to the opposition between concept and the material aspects of linguistic sign, that is, sound or shape. Hu Qiguang sagaciously points out that the second dimension corresponds to Saussure’s binary division of the signifier and signified.56 The examples he cites in support of his argument comes from Modi (c. 470–c. 391 BC), a philosopher of early China, who left behind a philosophical work, Mozi (Writings of Master Modi). In his philosophical inquiry into nomenclature, he observes: “That by which one speaks (suoyiwei) is the name. That which is said (suowei) is the object. When the name corresponds with the object, the concept matches the referent.”57 In this statement, suoyiwei corresponds to Saussure’s “signifier,” while suowei is an equivalent to “signified.” Hu Qiguang rightly comments: “In this connection, the linguistic sign does not connect name and object but sound/shape and concept, i.e. the so-called ‘signifier’ and ‘signified.’ The close combination of signifier and signified constitutes the essence of linguistic signs.”58 In modern Chinese linguistics, linguists do not adopt the Chinese concepts suoyiwei and suowei as equivalent terms for signifier and signified. Instead, they have adopted another pair of terms to translate Saussure’s binary opposition between the signifier and signified. They are respectively called nengzhi (signifier) and suozhi (signified). Needless to say, both terms come from philosophical thought in early China. Specifically, they evolved out of another ancient philosopher Gongsun Long’s conception

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of a binary opposition between zhi (referent) and wu (object). Although Gongsun Long did not coin the modern terms nengzhi (signifier) and suozhi (signified), the modern terms, as I will show, evolved from his initial concepts and theorization. In addition to contributing to the coinage of the two fundamental terms for linguistic study, Gongsun Long’s discourse on the relationship between zhi (referent) and wu (object) discusses or anticipates similar ideas in modern linguistic theories of the sign. This is why I may claim that Gongsun Long initiated the Chinese theory of semiotics. Saussure views signified as a stable concept, but later linguists have disconfirmed his idea and affirmed signified as but another signifier that constantly slides on the chain of signification. Gongsun Long came to this understanding in early Chinese thinking. In his treatise on “Designating Things” (zhi wu lun), he opens his discourse with this thesis: “Nothing in the world is not a signified, but a signifier is not that which is signified” (wu mo fei zhi, erzhi fei zhi). In present-day linguistics, two of the Saussurean terms for the linguistic sign, “signifier” and “signified,” have been translated into Chinese as nengzhi (signifier) and suozhi (signified). Gongsun Long’s discourse not only explicitly addresses the nature and function of signs, but also provides root ideas for the coinage of the terms for modern linguistics. According to Wu Mingjiang, a scholar who annotates Gongsun Long’s discourse, the opening thesis in the chapter on objects and referents, the first zhi refers to suozhi (signified), while erzhi refers to nengzhi (signifier), because in ancient Chinese, er is mutually exchangeable with neng.59 In existing scholarship, scholars have attempted to interpret Gongsun Long’s discourse in terms of the metaphysics of dialectics, which views truth and untruth as mutually interchangeable. If we change our perspective and try to understand his discourse in terms of Saussurean linguistics, we will open a new vista. After the opening, his treatise continues: If there is no signifier in the world, people have nothing to designate things. The object that is not a signifier is the world. Could the object be called a signifier? A signifier is something that does not exist in the world; an object is something that exists in the world. If one employs that which exists to refer to that which does not exist, this will not do.60

This passage is concerned with the linguistic aspects of cognition, conception, and representation. Like a modern linguist or a philosopher of

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language, Gongsun Long points out that every object in the world is but the result of cognition. Cognition gives rise to conceptualization, which in turn gives rise to the need for representation. In this passage, a signifier is something designated, while an object in the world is something that is referred to. It is equivalent to a signified or concept or an idea. He seems to argue against using limited objects to represent unlimited ideas. He further states: There is no signified in the world, and objects cannot be said to be signifieds. That which cannot be said to be a signified is not a signifier. That which is not a signifier is because no objects are signifiers. There is no signified in the world, and an object cannot be called a signified because there is no non-signifier. Since there is no non-signifier, all objects are signifieds. If all objects are signifieds, signifiers are not signified.61

In spite of its metaphysic sophistry, the message of this passage is clear: signifieds or ideas do not exist in the world as objects do, but they are the results of human cognition and conception. While admitting that objects in the world are not concepts, Gongsun Long also recognizes that objects are not signifiers, either, because they are perceived to be existent. In this sense, he comes to an understanding that is similar to George Berkeley’s famous notion on cognition. Berkeley’s idealism argues that physical objects exist only if they are perceived by human beings. He reduces his thesis into a famous dictum: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived).62 While Berkeley’s conclusion to his philosophical inquiry that no object can exist without the mind is predicated on controversial premises, his dictum aptly captures from the subjective point of view the relationship between consciousness and the material world. As all objects are perceived to exist, the perceived objects are essentially signifieds or ideas. Basing himself on a similar understanding, Gongsun Long comes to a semiotic understanding of the reciprocal relationship between objects and ideas: That which is not a referent in the world is born out of the fact that every object has its name and does not stand for a referent. To call something that is not a referent as a referent is made possible by the fact that it serves as a non-referent at the same time. It will not do if one uses that which is not a referent to fit all the referents.63

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This passage may be understood to mean that since objects are not referents, if someone calls objects referents, it is because objects may stand for the dialectical opposition between objects and referent, or signifiers and signifieds in post-structuralist linguistic theory. Then, his treatise continues: Furthermore, what is referred to is shared by all under heaven. If all under heaven are not referents, an object cannot be said to have no reference. The reason why an object cannot be said to have no referent is not because it does not have a non-referent. Since no object has non-referent, all objects are referents. As a referent is not a non-referent, the referent and object are not what is referred to.64

Here, the passage does not just identify the linguistic potentiality of things and their referents to transform into each other; it also argues that the mutual transformation is respectively inscribed in each entity in the process of signification and representation. His treatise further goes on: If there is no object referent under heaven, who would call it a non-referent? If there are no objects under heaven, who would call object a referent? If there are referents and no object referents, who would call objects non-­ referents? Moreover, a referent by itself is not a referent. Why would it rely on an object to designate a referent?65

This passage may mean that a referent is not exactly an object, but it cannot be detached from objects. If there are no referents to things in the world, there is no point to talk about what a name refers to. It is not that there are no referents to talk about, but that referents are made possible by human designation. If there is nothing in the world, there is no point talking about referents. Gongsun Long is one of the most esoteric philosophers in ancient China. The reason why he is hard to understand is because as a logician, he enjoys the play upon words and always indulges in sophisticated arguments about the dialectics between truth and non-truth, name and substance, reality and non-reality, and other binary oppositions. In spite of the esoteric sophistry in his treatise on how things are designated, we may say that Gongsun Long’s discourse may be considered a cornerstone of Chinese semiotics. His contribution to Chinese semiotics is many-sided, but a significant aspect lies in his conceptualization of ideas that later became standard terms in Chinese linguistics. In his treatise, when

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Gongsun Long discusses the dialectical relationships between objects and referents, signifier and signified, he is not just indulging in metaphysical sophistry that equates truth with non-truth, right with wrong, nor is he advancing a dialectical notion that sees the mutual transformation of things. In my opinion, he is engaged in a semiotic exercise to understand the rationale of signification and representation. What is most remarkable is his noticing a slippage in signification and representation. In a way, he comes close to the post-structuralist conception of the relationship between signifier and signified in semiotics: a signified is not stable in meaning but it is another signifier, which is, in its own turn, but another signifier, ad infinitum. Contemporary semiotics calls this incessant mutation of signified into signifier and vice versa a sliding of the signifier on the chain of signification. Gongsun Long also astutely recognizes the reciprocal relationship between object and referent and comes up with an insight that views the mutation of referent as a result of its being inscribed in a non-referent. It differs little from the semiotic understanding of the slippery nature of the sign in the process of signification. In a historical perspective, Gongsun Long’s emphasis on the slippery nature of sign serves his immediate purpose of arguing for the relativity of truth and non-truth, subject and object, substance and emptiness, etc. in his debate with other thinkers on the relationship between human perception and conception. It aroused heated debates and incurred strong criticism from his opponents in his own time. In terms of linguistics, however, his argument is a view that comes close to the semiotic notion of the mutation between signifier and signified in modern linguistics. In the past, Gongsun Long’s discourse on the relationship between objects and referents has always been cited as an example of Chinese sophistry par excellence. In terms of modern linguistics, however, the sophistry of his argument testifies to his profound insights into the complexity of language, linguistic sign, signification, and representation. Gongsun Long’s discourse has been accepted as a foundational text in the development of Chinese logic. My rereading of his treatise from the perspective of language philosophy suggests that his discourse should also be considered as a treatise on Chinese semiotics. As I have shown, his contribution to Chinese semiotics is many-sided, but a significant aspect lies in his conception of ideas that later became standard terms in Chinese linguistics. The sophistication of his discourse easily reminds us of the complexity of post-­ structural discourses on language and signification by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Émile Benveniste, Julia Kristeva, and

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others. It is at the post-structuralist juncture of linguistic sign that the Chinese and Western philosophy of language may converge. And it is here that we may tease out insights to envision the fusion of horizons. My discussion of the Chinese theory of the sign reveals the compatibility of some Chinese ideas with its Western counterparts. It also points out a direction that I should take to locate a viable bridge across the linguistic divide. It is none other than the linguistic sign. Chapter 3 will focus on a comparative study of Chinese and Western writing symbols and engage in a reconception of the linguistic divide.

Notes 1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translated with an introduction and notes by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 25–26. 2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 26. 3. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 26. 4. I will only give a brief account of the debates in this paper. For detailed information, the reader can refer to the relevant articles and studies that I have documented in the endnotes. 5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 26. 6. See Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as A Medium For Poetry, edited by Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968). 7. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 242. 8. Porter, Ideographia, p. 9. 9. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), p. 58. 10. John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), pp. 130–48. 11. William Boltz, “Review of The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106.2 (1986): 405–7. 12. John DeFrancis, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), xi. 13. DeFrancis, Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), p. 111. 14. Chad Hansen, “Chinese Ideographs and Western Idea,” Journal of Asian Studies 52.2 (1993): 375. 15. For detailed information, see Creel’s “On the Nature of Chinese Ideography,” T’oung Pao 32 (1936): 85–161; Boodberg’s “Some

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Proleptical Remarks on the Evolution of Archaic Chinese,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 (1937): 329–372; Creel’s “On the Ideographic Element in Ancient Chinese,” T’oung Pao 34: 265–294; Boodberg’s “‘Ideography’ or Iconolatory?” T’oung Pao 35: 266–288. In spite of its scholarly intensity and vigor, the debate ended inconclusively. In 1984, John DeFrancis revives the debate in his book-length study of the Chinese language. He sides with Boodberg and rejects Creel’s view. See The Chinese Language: Fact And Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Harwaii Press, 1984), pp.  85–88; 133–148. Then Chad Hansen criticizes DeFrancis’s view. See “Chinese Ideographs and Western Idea,” Journal of Asian Studies 52.2 (1993): 375. 16. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammotology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 76–93. 17. Herrlee Creel, “On The Nature of Chinese Ideography,” T’oung Pao 32 (1936): 85. 18. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1605), pp. 136ff. 19. Quoted from Peter S.  Du Ponceau, A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, p. 8. 20. Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, translated by George C. Buck and Frithjof. A. Raven (Coral Cables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 124. 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D.G.  Pears and B.F.  McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 4.106. 22. Peter S. Du Ponceau, A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing: In A Letter to John Vaughan, Esq. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1838), Kessinger Publishing’s reprint, pp. 1–123. 23. Peter S. Du Ponceau, A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, Appendix A, p. 110. 24. Du Ponceau, “Letter to Captain Basil Hall,” July 7th, 1828, in A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, Appendix A, p. 115. 25. Tang Lan, Zhongguo wenzi xue (Chinese Philology) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanseh, 1979), p. 7. 26. Granet, “Quelques particcularités de la langue et de la pensée chinoise,” in his Etudes sociologiques sur la Chine, (Paris PUF, 1920), p.  99. English from Harbsmeier, p. 41. 27. Henry Rosemont, “On Representing Abstractions in Archaic Chinese,” Philosophy East and West, 24 (1974), pp. 71–88.

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28. See Ming Dong Gu, “Is Western Theory of Language Philosophy Universal?” In Journal of Peking University, (2013), no. 6, p. 147. 29. Xu Tongqiang, What Is Language? (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2207). 30. Ming Dong Gu, “Is Western Theory of Language Philosophy Universal?” In Journal of Peking University, (2013), no. 6, pp. 144–154. 31. John Webb, An Historical Essay Endeavouring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language (London: N. Brook, 1669), p. 192. 32. Cf. Lundbaek, T.  S. Bayer (1694–1738), Pioneer Sinologist (London: Curzon Press, 1986), pp. 97, 83, 103. 33. Vico, from New Science, in Vincent Leitch, et al., eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 320. 34. Vico, from New Science, in Vincent Leitch, et al., eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 319. 35. Ibid., p. 332. 36. Ibid., p. 320. 37. See Du Ponceau’s letter to Captain Basil Hall, in A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, Appendix A, p. 108. 38. Meng Hua, Theory of Semiotic Representation (Qingdao, Shandong: Zhongguo haiyang daxue chubanshe, 1999), p. 147. 39. Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 211–2. 40. Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, p. 212. 41. Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, p. 212. 42. William Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1994), p. 7. 43. William Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System, pp. 7–8. 44. Peter S. Du Ponceau, A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing: In A Letter to John Vaughan, Esq. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1838), Kessinger Publishing’s reprint, p. 36. 45. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937), Juan 15A, 1b. 46. English translation is quoted from Roy Andrew Miller’s descriptive essay, “Shih ming,” in Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of early China, University of Berkeley, 1993), p. 424. 47. Roy Andrew Miller, “Shih ming,” in Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, p. 425. 48. Miller, “The Far East,” in Current Trends in Linguistics, ed., by Thomas Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 1217, 1213–64.

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49. Dong Zhongshu, Chunqiu fanlu (Profuse Dews of the Spring and Autumn Annals), juan 10, in Ershi’er zi (Writings of Twenty-Two Masters), p. 791a. 50. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, pp. 67–69. 51. The English version is adapted from B. Watson’s translation in collation with John Knoblock’ translation. See Watson, Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 144; and Xunzi, Xunzi, translated into English by John Knoblock (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1999), p. 716. 52. Aristotle, De Interpretatione, 16a 28. 53. Hu Qiguang, Zhongguo xiaoxue shi (A History of Chinese Philology) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1987), p. 38. 54. Xi Kang, “Sheng wu ai le lun” (Sounds Have no Sorrow or Joy), in Zhongguo Meixue ziliao xuanbian (A Selected Collection of Materials on Chinese Aesthetics) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), p. 149. 55. Ouyang Jian, “Yan jin yi lun” (Words Can Exhaustively Express Ideas), requoted from Hu Qiguang’s Zhongguo xiaoxue shi (A History of Chinese Philology), p. 118. 56. Hu Qiguang, Zhongguo xiaoxue shi (A History of Chinese Philology), p. 26. 57. Mozi, Mozi, juan 10, in Ershi’er zi (Twenty-two Masters), p. 258b, 58. Hu Qiguang, Zhongguo xiaoxue shi (A History of Chinese Philology), p. 26. 59. See Gongsun Long, Gongsun Longzi jiaoshi (Gongsun Long’s Writings Collated and Annotated) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001), p. 16. 60. See Gongsun Long, Gongsun Longzi jiaoshi (Gongsun Long’s Writings Collated and Annotated) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001), p. 16. 61. Gongsun Long, Gongsun Longzi jiaoshi (Gongsun Long’s Writings Collated and Annotated), p. 18. 62. George Berkeley’s original words read: “For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.” In A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Chicago: Open Court, 1910), p. 31. 63. Gongsun Long, Gongsun Longzi jiaoshi (Gongsun Long’s Writings Collated and Annotated), pp. 16–17. 64. Gongsun Long, Gongsun Longzi jiaoshi (Gongsun Long’s Writings Collated and Annotated), p. 19. 65. Gongsun Long, Gongsun Longzi jiaoshi (Gongsun Long’s Writings Collated and Annotated), pp. 20–21.

CHAPTER 3

Reconceptualizing the Linguistic Divide

In Chap. 2, I have examined the debates over the nature of Chinese writing vis-à-vis European language and sought to find a ground on which Chinese and Western language philosophy can be meaningfully studied. While I have located in the philosophical inquiry into linguistic sign of both traditions a common ground, my critical review of the linguistic debates over the nature of Chinese writing may not convince all the parties involved. As I will show in the first section of this chapter, the debates will continue and the controversy arising from the wide array of different opinions has no immediate hope to be satisfactorily resolved in the foreseeable future. The modest success in locating a common ground in the semiotic conception of the linguistic sign, however, gives us an insight into which direction further inquiries may take. It is in language philosophy. Longxi Zhang, in his critique of Hegel’s debasement of Chinese writing, makes an apt observation: “[I]ntercultural comparisons would make no sense at all if the difference between Western and Chinese writings is absolute, and if problems of language and interpretation discussed in the Western A much shorter early version of this chapter is published as “Reconceptualizing the Linguistic Divide: Chinese and Western Theories of the Written Sign” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2000): 101–124. I am grateful to Professor W. J. T. Mitchell of the University of Chicago, who read and commented on an early version of that article. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_3

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philosophical tradition are thought to be uniquely Western and inconceivable on the same level when related to the language and philosophy of the East.”1 We are therefore required to reconceptualize the linguistic divide in terms of language philosophy.

The Root Cause of the Linguistic Controversy With the insight from Chap. 1, I think, we ought to situate the debates in a broader context of linguistic theory and against the larger background of history of thought. In the larger context, we will be able to see that the debates and controversy are overshadowed by a linguistic burden in the history of language philosophy and overdetermined by an unconscious motive to remove that burden. The linguistic burden once figured prominently in a well-known linguistic “theory” in the Western history of language philosophy. According to this “theory,” there were three stages in the development of writing: (1) pictographic or iconographic writing; (2) ideographic or hieroglyphic writing; and (3) phonetic writing.2 This theory entails a hierarchy of civilizational values explicitly expressed in Rousseau’s words: “These three ways of writing correspond almost exactly to three different stages according to which one can consider men gathered into a nation. The depicting of objects is appropriate to a savage people; signs of words and of propositions, to a barbaric people; and the alphabet to civilized people.”3 Since Chinese writing consists of ideographs, it was considered to belong to the second stage and hence inferior to European alphabetic languages. Following this line of thinking, Hegel expresses a similar view. As the ideographic Chinese writing does not express, as Western alphabetic languages do, individual sounds but represent the ideas themselves by signs, he considers it a typical example of an underdeveloped language.4 Those scholars who dismiss the ideographic nature of Chinese writing seem to have held the view that the perceived ideographic nature of Chinese writing is responsible for the debasement of Chinese language in particular and Chinese culture in general. Therefore, unlike Rousseau and Hegel, they proclaim an opposite view. In their opinion, the ideographic view not only distorts the nature of Chinese writing but also constitutes the root cause of the misconception that Chinese language is an inferior one, a view still held by some people and often seen online. To demolish this prejudice, what can be more effective than destroying the premise that Chinese is an ideographic language belonging to an inferior level of

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civilization. Therefore, in the most recent debate there are no detractors; all are defenders of Chinese; all hold the view that Chinese is a rich language. Despite their opposite orientations, the upholders and rejecters of the ideographic view implicitly and explicitly had the same objective: the demolition of the age-old misconception that Chinese is a writing system composed of picture-like characters and therefore inferior to phonetic writing. Creel expressed the upholders’ position in an explicit statement: “It is as natural for the Chinese to write ideographically as it is for us [Occidentals] to write phonetically.”5 The rejecters of the ideographic view set to their task of demolition out of an implicitly motivated reaction against the well-known linguistic “theory” in the West. Boodberg who engaged Creel in the 1930 debate implied that it was not enough to state that ideographic writing is as good as phonetic writing, for he detected in the ideographic view something that we might term an “Orientalist strain”: “[O]ne must deplore the general tendency …… of insisting that the Chinese in the development of their writing, as in the evolution of many other of their cultural complexes, followed some mysterious esoteric principles that set them apart from the rest of the human race.”6 He categorically stated: “The term ‘ideograph’ is, we believe, responsible for most of the misunderstanding of the [Chinese] writing. The sooner it is abandoned the better.”7 For a more recent example, one scholar, after deconstructing various Western myths about the Chinese language, has to adopt Western approaches to language to argue that Chinese has more or less the same linguistic mechanisms of an inflectional language.8 Obviously, this view represents an attempt to put Chinese language on a par with European languages. Outside the linguistic domain, the upholders of the ideographic view found some unexpected allies in some Western artists and philosophers who self-consciously claimed that Chinese is a rich language precisely because it is made up of pictograms and ideographs. It is unnecessary to recapitulate Fenollosa and Pound’s famous or notorious views in this connection. Even some postmodern theorists have found in the ideographic view some revolutionary potential for the advancement of their theoretical agendas. Derrida, for example, views Chinese writing as marking a “break” from the logocentric Western metaphysical tradition that arose from the metaphysical reflections on the nature of alphabetic languages.9 His deconstructive view in this regard is obviously predicated on Fenollosa and Pound’s glorification of ideographic Chinese character as a superior medium of poetic representation.

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The controversy over Chinese writing appears on and off in the studies of language and literature and seems destined to be an unending dispute. In 1995, William Hannas picks the issue and declares in no uncertain terms: “We can dismiss the fanciful notion that the units are icons of objects and concepts in the real and psychological worlds, i.e. that the symbols are pictographic. We also reject the untenable assumption that Chinese characters are ‘ideographic,’ that is, relate to meaning directly without the intervention of language.”10 A more recent case appears in an article published in Journal of Asian Studies (November 2009). Edward McDonald revisits the controversy over Chinese language and proclaims “many of the current understandings about Chinese characters to be mistaken.”11 In his article, he states his aim to be “an examination of various discourses within Chinese studies exhibiting the particular form of Sinologism that I have dubbed character fetishization (hanzi chongbaizhuyi)–that is, an exaggerated status given to Chinese characters in the interpretation of Chinese language, thought, and culture. This status is used to buttress ideological claims about the Chinese language that basically come down to posting the uniqueness of the Chinese worldview and its incommensurable differences from a supposed Western worldview.”12 McDonald professes not to take sides in the debates and instead, attempts to offer an alternative way out of the stalemate. But by criticizing ideographic supporters and endorsing the views of ideograph rejecters, he shows clearly that he takes the side of those Sinologists who view Chinese language as not any different from other languages. His unsympathetic attitude toward the ideographic view is revealed in the title of his essay “Getting over the Walls of Discourse: ‘Character Fetishization’ in Chinese Studies.” By characterizing the ideographic view held by Chinese and Western scholars as “character fetishization,” he does not seem to be aware of his Orientalist approach in the failure to examine Chinese materials on their own terms and impose Western theories on Chinese materials. Still less is he aware that by criticizing the ideographic view that has been held by Chinese scholars since ancient times as “character fetishization,” he unwittingly falls into the trap of what I call linguistic Sinologism: the practice of judging the value of the Chinese tradition’s accepted view of its own language by resorting to Western standard.13 In psychology, fetishism is a neurotic way of behavior with unhealthy motivations and actions. By describing the practice of attaching importance to Chinese characters as “character fetishization,” he unwittingly created a quasi-colonial discourse in the age of postcolonialism. As a consequence,

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a well-intended attempt to narrow the linguistic gap ends up in returning the controversy to where it started. In my view, the difficulty in finding resolutions of the controversy may have to do with the fact that the heated arguments rely more on common sense than on rigorous analysis in terms of linguistic and semiotic theories. I believe, we must get off the beaten track and engage in a truly meaningful comparison of Chinese and alphabetic writing systems that takes into consideration the internal similarities and differences of the Chinese and Western languages. Otherwise, we will be forever bogged down in long and protracted debates, of which I have only given a brief account in the foregoing discussions, and unable to see the significant insight that may be brought forth by the debates, still less to exploit it for cross-cultural studies. For any serious study of the differences of different writing systems, it will not do if it does not start an exploration from an examination of the writing symbols of each system. Since semiotics or semiology is a science of signs, I will, in this chapter, engage in a detailed analysis of the Chinese theories of the written sign in conjunction with Western semiotic theories, probing into its origin, evolution, modern development, and essential nature from a semiotic point of view. In the process of semiotic analysis, I hope to tease out some insights into the nature of the linguistic sign across cultures and gain some inspirations for resolving the controversy over the nature of Chinese writing.

Metaphysical Roots of the Controversy Before engaging in semiotic analysis, I am going to examine the conceptual contrast between Chinese and alphabetic writings in terms of language philosophy and enquire into the metaphysical foundation of the controversy. In conceptual terms, the core difference between Chinese and Western writings may be reduced to a contrast between ideographism and phonocentrism. Saussure is the first linguistic theorist to identify the contrast14 and most linguists have followed suit. Conceptually, while the alphabetic writing is created on the principle of phonocentrism, Chinese writing may be said to be guided by the principle of ideographism. Each came from a long tradition that put different emphases on sound and shape of the script. Western phonocentrism originated from the linguistic development of alphabetic languages and was promoted by philosophical conceptualizations of language practice. By contrast, Chinese ideographism originated from the ideographic use of Chinese language in history

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and underscored by metaphysical conceptions of the relationship between humans and the universe. Each has a different philosophical foundation. In Western metaphysics, the earliest source of phonocentrism may be traced to Plato’s conception of the distinction between essence and appearance. But Aristotle may be the first to conceive a notion of phonocentricism. In the relationship between speech and script, he voiced a view on the primacy of the spoken over the written: “What is spoken is a symbol (symbolon) of states (pathēmata) in the soul; what is written is a symbol of what is spoken.”15 Aristotle’s remark may be viewed as the start of Western phonocentrism. The phonocentric emphasis of language by Western scholars is deeply ingrained because of the phonographic emphasis in language philosophy. In modern language philosophy, all language theorists emphasize the primacy of sound over written form in both spoken and written language. As early as 1933, Leonard Bloomfield stated that writing must bear a “fixed relation” to linguistic form.16 George Trager, a later scholar, defines writing as “any conventional system of marks or drawings … that represents the utterances of a language as such.”17 Serruys expresses a similar opinion and views the graphs of writing as necessarily “integrated in a system” and “resulting in a visual representation of a language.”18 We must admit that phonocentrism is appropriate for Western alphabetic languages, but is it suitable in describing Chinese language? I think not. In contrast to phonocentrism in Western languages, ideographism in Chinese language is not only decided by the special graphic quality of the Chinese characters but also determined by Chinese metaphysical thinking concerning human beings’ relations with the universe. Perhaps, a more accurate way of stating this should be that the graphic quality of Chinese characters and the Chinese metaphysical thinking about the universe are inherently related. Just as Derrida has convincingly demonstrated that Western phonocentrism emanates from Western metaphysics since Plato that emphasizes the disjunction between appearance and essence, transcendental ideas and concrete reality, I am inclined to think that the graphic and semantic oriented Chinese characters are determined by Chinese metaphysical thinking that views the interrelatedness of myriad things in the universe, and the immanence of transcendental ideas in things in the universe. In structural linguistics, there are two related problems, which, as Voegelin identifies, are a revision of “the monolithic hypothesis of language” and a concern with “the interdependence of diverse structures

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within one language.”19 In his study of the relationship between language and poetics, Roman Jacobson points out: “No doubt, for any speech community, for any speaker, there exists a unity of language, but this over-all code represents a system of interconnected subcodes: each language encompasses several concurrent patterns which are each characterized by a different function.”20 We should draw a lesson from structural linguistics in studying Chinese language. Chinese has a total and totalizing nature that has developed through the millennia and is endowed with an inclusive tendency that would tolerate the absorption of new and alien features. It would be oversimplistic to define Chinese as a wholly phonographic language or a wholly ideographic language. Ancient Chinese thinker Guanzi saw the existence of both elements in language: “The heart/mind is such that it hides a heart/mind. Within the heart/mind (hsin) there is another heart/mind (hsin). As for this heart/mind (hsin) of the heart/mind (hisn), thought/communicative intention (i) precedes speech (yen). Only when there is articulated sound (yin), does it (i.e. thought) take shape. Only when it takes shapes is there speech. Only when there is speech is there internal control (shih). Only when there is internal control is there order.”21 Guanzi’s remark has a resonance that reminds one of the Western conceptions of the logos, which means both thought and speech in addition to its multiple meanings. In my opinion, Chinese is neither a purely phonographic language nor a purely ideographic language. It encompasses the characteristics of both systems with a visual and ideographic primacy. In the following sections, I will explore how the distinctive nature and features came about by critically examining the origin and evolution of Chinese writing from a semiotic point of view.

Semioticizing the Origins of the Chinese Writing In the Chinese tradition, there are a number of myths, legends, and records about the origin(s) of the written sign: Fu Xi invented the eight trigrams by observing shapes and patterns of the world around him; Shen Nong (the Divine Farmer) pioneered the use of rope-knots to keep records for his rule; the appearance of Hetu or the “Diagram of the Yellow River,” and Luoshu or the “Picture of the Luo River” gave Chinese ancestors the inspirations for creating writing symbols; and last but not least, Cang Jie created writing symbols in imitations of objects in the natural world.22 All these myths and legends have elements of plausibility. However, the legend of Cang Jie’s creation of writing symbols in imitation of natural

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objects is the most plausible even though scholars of early China generally believe that most probably there was never such a historical person. For the rationale pertaining to Cang Jie’s legend is not only traceable in the evolutionary history of Chinese writing system but also recorded in ancient treatises on the making of writing graphs. Xu Shen (58–147 CE), compiler of the first Chinese dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi (Elucidations of Characters and Words), states in his Postface: “When Cang Jie first invented writing symbols, he probably imitated the forms of things according to their resemblances. Therefore, the created graphs were called wen or patterns. Later, writings were increased by combining the form (pictographs) and phonetics, the results were called zi or ‘compound graphs.’ ‘Wen’ means the root of the forms of things. ‘Compound graphs’ means reproduction and gradual increase. When they were put down on bamboo and silk, they were called shu or writing.”23 I accept the mythic nature of the Cang Jie legend, but I have good reason to believe that the legend of Cang Jie’s creation of writing symbols represents a revolutionary stage in the early development of Chinese writing. The created graphs attributed to Cang Jie are imitations of objects, but they are not elaborate pictures. The principle for imitation is not one of copying, as in the cave paintings by primitive people. It is one of capturing the “resemblances” or essential features of objects to be represented. The product of such a principle is a material image with spiritual likeness residing in it. Take the graph of bird 鳥 for example; one could draw an elaborate picture of a bird with all its minute details. One could also draw in a few strokes the resemblance of a bird so long as the drawing captures its birdiness. From this point of view, ideographical representation is not total arbitrary representation. The signifier is motivated by and related to the category of birds through condensation. Cang Jie’s revolutionary move24 not only avoided the inconvenience and confusion of the trigrams but also spared the time and efforts poured into drawing a picture. The created graph is still a picture of a sort, but it is an abstracted picture with the maximum economy of representation. This economy of representation underlies the deep structure of Chinese aesthetics. It is not only the principle of visual representation, but also of verbal representation. Moreover, the pictograph is also a human construct arbitrarily created to a degree. To take the graph of the bird again for example, there are many kinds of birds. They are big and small, and differ from each other in appearances. The bird graph, however, only shows a constructed likeness

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with some salient features common to all birds. It is a universal symbol grounded in particulars. The abstract and totalized quality of the pictogram seems to warrant the suggestion that Chinese written character serves the function of ideas in the West, which fills the gap between alphabetic writing (sounds) and things. As one scholar suggests, “We [Westerners] try to explain the semantic relation between arbitrary sounds and things by postulating a mediating representation via a mental likeness. Ideas represent things in a way vaguely analogous to pictographic representation. Ideographic representation should thus be nonarbitrary representation. Here we see an obvious analogy between Chinese writing and ideas…. The characters do the work in Chinese theory that ideas try to do in Western theory. Both bridge between sounds and things as well as provide the interlinguistic connection between the conventional sounds of different regions.”25 However, the ideograph has a different ontological existence from that of the Western idea. The idea in its Platonic sense is a symbolic representation of some universal transcendences. As a symbol, the idea “assumes that the symbolized (the universals) is irreducible to the symbolizer (the markings).”26 The Chinese character differs from the Western idea because it is not a transcendental abstraction; it is an abstraction grounded in concrete details. In the case of “bird” 鳥, it not only refers to the idea of bird, but also to the image of bird that the character itself resembles. It signifies like a hieroglyphic script which, in Wittgenstein’s opinion, “depicts the facts that it describes.”27 In other words, it refers back to itself, thereby having what C. S. Peirce calls firstness of the icon. With Cang Jie’s ingenious creation, the conception of creating wen (marking, writing) underwent drastic changes. The wen rejected the absolute abstractedness and arbitrariness of the hexagrams, which, some scholars believe, were the precursors of pictograms,28 but does not abandon them altogether. The pictograph is both imagistic and abstract, arbitrary and motivated. In this gigantic leap, wen as a concept itself is no longer the perceived shapes and patterns but has become a semiotic function that aims at a correlation between that which represents and that which is represented. “He who talked of wen (patterns and patterning) promoted the teaching (of wen) and illuminated (the use of wen for) transforming (people) to the king.”29 In this statement, there are already the connotations of the later concepts such as wenhua (culture), and wenming (civilization).

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There is little doubt that, by this stage, wen had already become an abstract concept to denote writing. Now wen was no longer a reference to the tracks and markings left by birds and animals, nor was it a reference to patterns and shapes. It had become a concept whose signified was multivalent and far removed from its signifier. In this condition, wen stood for not only shapes and patterns, but also writing, writing system, acculturation, ritualization, and semiotics. But first and foremost, wen became synonymous with writing.

Chinese and Western Sign Theories If one is presented with specimens of both Chinese and Western writing, he or she will immediately recognize the most fundamental difference between the two writings systems: while the former employs characters or ideographs as linguistic sign, the latter uses alphabetic letters to form words as linguistic sign. To have an adequate understanding of the difference between Chinese and Western writing, we cannot find a better method than comparing and contrasting the inner mechanism for making linguistic signs in terms of modern semiotic theories. For this purpose, what comes into our mind immediately is Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign. Although his famous model of the sign is for phonetic signs, we may accept his claim that it is also applicable for written signs. At any rate, it can be used to analyze the structure of the Chinese character. Here is the Saussurean diagram of the written sign:

When we employ Saussure’s diagram to compare the Chinese and English word “tree,” we will have the following diagram:

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At first glance, the Saussurean model seems to apply well in the analysis of the Chinese character, but if a reader is careful enough, he or she will notice that the Chinese character resembles, or to be more exact, captures the image of a tree. Here is the fundamental difference between the alphabetic word and Chinese character. While the “tree” is a phonetic sign that is meant to be read aloud or subvocalized and heard as an acoustic event, the Chinese character is an image, a visual sign that is meant to represent the visual appearance of “tree,” in addition to a sound assigned to it. In the popular mind, the opposition between word and image is viewed as the basic division in the human experience of representations, presentations, and symbols. In his analysis of the conventional view, however, W. J. T. Mitchell invokes the Saussurean diagram of the dual structure of the linguistic sign to argue that the picture of the tree in the diagram is not a mere placeholder or token for an ideal entity, nor is its pictoriality a merely accidental or conveniently illustrative feature; but rather “the rendering of the signified concept as picture or what Saussure calls a ‘symbol’ constitutes a fundamental erosion in the Saussurean claim that ‘the linguistic sign is arbitrary’ (that is, the linguistic sign is ‘empty,’ ‘unmotivated,’ and without any ‘natural bond’ between signifier and signified.”30 By quoting Saussure’s second thought on the linguistic symbol, “One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary, it is not empty; for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between signifier and signified,”31 Mitchell concludes, “The word/image difference, in short, is not merely the name of a boundary between disciplines or media or kinds of art: it is a borderline that is internal to both language and visual representation, a space or gap that opens up even within the microstructure of the linguistic sign and that could be shown to emerge as well in the microstructure of the graphic mark.”32

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While I agree with Mitchell’s argument in general, I have found two issues that may have far-reaching significance. First, in Saussure’s theory of linguistics, the linguistic sign is a sound. We can use Saussure’s metaphor of a sheet of paper to cut the sign into two sides: a sound and a concept. Even if we treat sound as an acoustic image, we have to admit that the image is auditory and hence invisible. It can never appear on paper or in other visual representation. Secondly, post-Saussurean theorists have argued that Saussure was wrong to equate the signified with the thing or concept that the signifier is meant to represent. Lacan’s famous analysis of the toilet signs, “Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” argues that the signs on the toilet doors do not stand for the content of the signifier, which is the toilet, but for the chain of associative signifiers assigned by history, culture, and social mores separately and reciprocally to the sexual differentiation implied in them.33 What Lacan insists on seems to be that not only is the relation between signifier and signified arbitrary, but there is no one-toone correspondence between them at all, still less between the signifier and the thing referred to. As he puts it, “no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification.”34 In other words, the content of the signified is determined only by its relation to other signifiers on the signifying chain. Thus, in the process of signification, the sound of “tree” may not refer to the acoustic image of a real tree or any tree. For these two reasons, the irreducibility of “word” into “image” is present, not only in speaking but also in writing. The horizontal bar in the Saussurean model separating word and image represents the resistance to signification, in Lacan’s view. In Mitchell’s more positive view, it is a Peircean index, an indicator of the relationship in conceptual space that unites word and image. Either way, the gap between word and image is unbridgeable. The unbridgeability is illustrated by Mitchell with the following sketch of the empirical model of cognition:

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He presents the relations among the three categories thus: “A word is an image of an idea, and an idea is an image of a thing.” On account of this model, “we are to think of a word (such as “man”) as a “verbal image” twice removed from the original that it represents.”35 Citing Wittgenstein’s claim that the really important verbal image is the “picture” in “logical space” that is projected by a proposition, Mitchell replaces the captions for the same illustration with three words, “Picture,” “Pictogram,” and “Phonetic Sign.” As though conscious of the yawning gap between the pictogram and phonetic sign, he adds one more item to the illustration:

Mitchell persuades us to read this tableau “not as a movement from world to mind to language, but form one kind of sign to another, as an illustrated history of the development of systems of writing.”36 This evolutionary process from object to sign is the conceptual basis of alphabetic writing. It is also the theoretical basis on which many Sinologists view Chinese writing as a phonetic system. This illustration, however, accords well with the development of the Chinese written sign up to a point. At the last stage, it does not correspond with Chinese writing, because Chinese writing does not take the abrupt leap to abandon imagistic representation. To allow the image to make a smooth transition to the phonetic sign, he employs metonymy or synecdoche to replace the original impression. This rhetoric representation entails two explanations. On the one hand, the circle with an arrow may stand for a spear and a shield. To use the shield and spear for “man” is a metonymy. On the other hand, the circle with an arrow may stand for the male organ. To use it for “man” is a synecdoche. Although it makes sense to explain the transition from the image to the phonetic sign with the displacement of the original image by a synecdoche or metonymy,37 the sign and the object are related only in meaning, but not in formal representation. The gap between the image

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and word remains as wide as ever in alphabetic writing, for there is no motivated relationship conceived by Saussure between objects and written signs. The obviously unbridgeable gap between word and image in alphabetical language, however, is considerably reducible in Chinese writing symbols. Talking about the arbitrary nature of the writing symbol, Charles Sanders Peirce uses the English word “man” as an illustrating example. “These three letters are not in the least like a man”; he says, “nor is the sound with which they are associated. Neither is the word existentially connected with any man as an index.”38 His view is certainly right with regard to alphabetic language. But in Chinese, the character for “man” 人 is causally connected to the image of a man and is also a writing symbol for “man.” If we compare the evolution of the script “man” in Chinese writing with the French painter Jean-Francois Millet’s (1814–1875) famous painting “Gleaners,” we will find an amazing similarity:

Likewise, the Chinese character for tree 木 represents both the word of tree and the image of tree, for it evolved from the mental image of tree. Even in its present form, we can still discern the form of a tree. It is truly a case of an image turning into a word, or an illustration of the borderline case between word and image. In my opinion, if one wants to argue against the absolute division between word and image, the Chinese character is perhaps an excellent example. Indeed, throughout Chinese history, the accepted notion about the relationship between writing and painting is that writing and painting originated from the same source, which is pictorial representation. Zheng Qiao (1104–1160) made this representative statement: “Writing and painting came from the same source. Painting imitates shapes while writing imitates images; the former is elaborate while the latter is sketchy. All characters created with the pictorgraphic principle can be drawn. If they could not be drawn, their written forms would not have come into being.”39 Liu Shipei made a similar remark: “Pictograms are ancient paintings.”40 In the light of this notion and the above analysis of the Chinese character in terms of Saussure’s theory of the linguistic

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sign, it is reasonable to say that the pictographic quality of the Chinese character is not to be doubted. So far, Saussure’s theory has proved exceedingly useful for my investigation, but if we want to go further, it cannot help us any more, for in his study the linguistic sign is a phonetic sign rather than a written sign. In Saussure’s classification of writing systems, the Chinese language belongs to the ideographic and has a stronger tendency for the written word to replace the spoken in a speaker’s mind. Because of the difference in writing system, Saussure limits his study to phonetic systems.41 Although he claims that his theory on the phonetic sign is applicable to written signs, I have demonstrated that it is inadequate. Since the Chinese linguistic sign originated from pictographic imitation, Saussure’s theory has another insurmountable limitation. Saussure’s theory deals only with linguistic sign and does not include imagistic signs. In this connection, Peirce’s theory of the sign has an obvious advantage for it furnishes us with ways to deal with linguistic signs as well as visual signs such as paintings, photographic images, and visual signifiers generated by high-tech media in this age of telecommunications.

From Picture to Word: Chinese Graph-Making Principles Chinese writing symbols were made using six methods of graph formation called “liushu or six graphic principles.” Although the six principles have been accepted over history as the guiding theory and practical methods for making Chinese characters, opinions differ considerably as to how to draw a line between some of them. Later scholars have always complained that scholars before them had made faulty explanations. Sometimes, differences in opinions have led to confusion. I believe that this confusion may be resolved if we examine the six principles in relation to the Western theories of the sign, especially Peirce’s theory. Xu Shen’s discourse states that when Cang Jie first started to create writing symbols, his chief method was one of pictographic imitation. This is the first of the so-called six writing principles. And it is also the mother of other five principles, as Zheng Qiao put it: “The six writing principles all evolved from pictographic imitation.”42 In terms of Peirce’s theory of the sign, it is a principle of iconic representation. How did the other five writing principles come about? There are no indisputable historical data. But in Xu Shen’s account,

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there is some hint. We may recall Cang Jie “on looking at the tracks of birds and animals, realizing that certain patterns and forms were distinguishable.”43 The bird has flown, but it has left behind its footprints. The animal has fled, but it has left behind its tracks. These footprints not only show the erstwhile presence of the bird and animal, but also tell what sort of bird or animal used to walk here. In other words, by observing the different shapes of the footprints, one can tell which bird or which animal had once passed by. In a semiotic way, the birds are the cause; and the footprints are the effect. Because of the cause and effect relation, the footprints serve as indices. This indexical nature of the footprints may have inspired the Chinese ancestors to attain another leap in representation: the principle of indexical representation. Of the other five writing principles, three are of indexical nature. In his treatise on how Chinese characters are made, Xu Shen describes the six graph-making principles in the following order: (1) zhishi (indicate-­ condition); (2) xiangxing (imitate-shape); (3) xingsheng (shape-and-­ sound); (4) huiyi (grasp-meaning); (5) zhuanzhu (interchangeable notation), and (6) jiajie (loan-borrowing).44 In later versions, the order of the six principles is slightly altered. Most often, xiangxing (imitate-shape) is listed as the first principle. I think it justifiably should occupy the first place. Xu Shen’s ordering may have been due to the fact that he had already mentioned the principle earlier in his text and regarded it as the cardinal principle for creating graphs. In terms of Peirce’s three cardinal concepts of the sign, “icons,” “indices,” and “symbols,” we may see how the six principles correspond with and differ from the Western writing systems and to what extent the Western theory of the sign falls short of Chinese writing symbols. According to Peirce, the iconic sign is a sign that resembles its conceptual object in certain ways. It may carry with it certain of the properties that the object possesses, or it may duplicate the principles according to which that object is organized. The most common iconic signs are photos, paintings, sculptures, cinematic images, graphs, diagrams, and even algebraic equations. Since Chinese graphs formed in accordance with the principle of “imitating the form” are obvious images resembling the conceptual objects, they are iconic signs. A comparison with Xu Shen’s elucidation testifies to the validity of this idea: “The second is called xiangxing (imitate-­form). For this type one draws a picture of an object; thus the lines follow the natural shape. Ri (sun) and yue (moon) are of this sort.”

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Peirce defines the indexical sign as “a real thing or fact which is a sign of its object by virtue of being connected with it as a matter of fact and by also forcibly intruding upon the mind, quite regardless of its being interpreted as a sign.”45 Indices are easily confused with icons. For the sake of distinction, Peirce makes these observations: “Indices may be distinguished from other signs, or representations, by three characteristic marks: first, that they have no significant resemblance to their objects; second, that they refer to individuals, single units, single collections of units, or single continua; third, that they direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion.”46 Some of the indexical signs Peirce cites are weathervane, a pointing hand, and a symptom. In his explanation of the indices, Peirce stresses the existential bond (contiguity, association, cause and effect) between the indexical sign and its object. Kaja Silverman makes an apt explication of the existential bond, The signifying value of the weathervane resides not in its physical relationship to the wind, but in the concepts “wind” and “direction” which it permits the observer to link up. Similarly, the pointing finger functions as a sign not because of its adjacency to a given site, like Boston, but because it generates in the mind of the walker or the driver the conceptual terms “Boston” and “turn right.” Finally, the signifying capacity of the symptom inheres not in its physical residence within the patient’s body, but in its ability to assist the physician in making a diagnosis.47

If we compare Peirce’s definition and examples with Xu Shen’s elucidation of the principle of “indicate-condition,” it becomes clear that this Chinese principle is comparable to Peirce’s conception of the indexical signs: “The first is called zhishi (indicate-condition). When one sees a graph of this type it may be understood on seeing it; by inspection one sees the meaning. The graph “up” 上 and ‘down” 下 are of this sort.”48 Characters formed with this principle are symbols of abstract notions, not pictures of concrete objects. Ma Xulun, synthesizing various interpretations of this principle, points out, “Characters formed with the principle of ‘indicate conditions’ are those to which something is added so as to indicate what has happened in an object.”49 This interpretation may be viewed as a footnote to Peirce’s definition of indices. A weathervane can stand for wind because wind has caused it to make changes in directions. A pointing hand can stand for the direction pointed at because the direction has made it necessary to point in the indicated direction. A symptom

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is a sign of sickness because it indicates the sickness has caused certain changes in the physical body. The third of the Peirce’s triad is the “symbol.” Peirce defines the symbol as a sign whose relation to its conceptual object is entirely arbitrary: “A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object.”50 Peirce’s “symbol” is more or less the same as Saussure’s conception of the “sign” whose referential relation to the objects referred to is purely arbitrary, unmotivated by any other associations. In terms of this conception, I must say that of the six principles, only zhuanzhu and jiajie are comparable: The fifth is called zhuanzhu (interchangeable notation). For this type, one establishes a category, then puts other graphs with similar meanings under the category. [The two graphs for] kao (aged) and lao (old) are of this sort. The sixth is called jiajie (loan-borrowing). These are for words which originally had no graph of their own, and depend on the sounds to stand for something else. Ling (command) and zhang (leader) are of this sort.51

At the heart of Xu Shen’s conception of zhuanzhu (interchangeable notation) is the notion that a graph borrowed to refer to another spoken word does not have any relation to the object or condition that needs to be represented. This fits Peirce’s conception of the “symbol,” which is designated to refer to a relationship between two dissimilar elements. (We must not confuse Peirce’s symbol with Saussure’s symbol.) The “loan-­ borrowing” principle is, without much explanation a principle for creating symbols, because the borrowed graphs have no resemblance whatever to the represented object or condition except similarity in sound. The Chinese scholar Ma Xulun observes, “Picture is the essence of writing, especially of pictorial writings”52 This is an apt observation. Two of the four Chinese graphical principles we have discussed so far are pictorial, or to be more exact, iconic or imagistic. This gives a salient feature to the Chinese writing system. Because of the iconic nature of the Chinese written sign, Chinese language is endowed with some qualities that set Chinese language, signification, and representation apart from those of the West. These unique features are theoretically supported by Peirce who sets great store by the vital role played in all communication by the icon:

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The only way of directly communicating an idea is by means of an icon; and every indirect method of communicating an idea must depend for its establishment upon the use of an icon. Hence, every assertion must contain an icon or set of icons, or else must contain signs whose meaning is only explicable by icons.53

Furthermore, Peirce claims that the richest signs or signifiers are always those that combine iconic, indexical, and symbolic functions.54 Most of Chinese written symbols are precisely this kind of signs. From this point of view, Peirce’s claim seems to support Fenollosa and Pound’s much-­ disputed assertion. Although Chinese written language has evolved from a highly pictorial sign system to an abstracted writing system, much of the iconic and indexical nature remains. The fact that some scholars insist on calling the Chinese writing system ideographic is another way of saying that the Chinese written symbols retain the original qualities of icons and indices. This is why Chinese calligraphy has evolved into a highly abstract visual art, which is, at the same time, able to convey poetic meaning and complicated ideas. By contrast, alphabetic writing can also display a rich array of written form, but it is unable to develop into an independent art with aesthetic appeal that rivals other major genres of arts. I believe the major reason why calligraphy has been consistently regarded as the highest form of art in China is because it is a multifaceted sign system that fuses iconic, indexical, and symbolic representation into one integrated art form. In a way, Chinese poetic form, especially the traditional short lyric poetry also contains this distinctive feature rarely found in the poetic form of literary traditions that employ alphabetic writings as the medium of representation.

A New Category of Writing Symbol: Juxtaposign Peirce’s theory of the sign has been recognized by some scholars to have an advantage over Saussure’s theory of the sign, for the latter’s theory does not furnish us with ways to distinguish between linguistic signifiers, photographic signifiers, and signifiers generated by high-tech codes.55 By contrast, Peirce’s theory enables us to make valuable distinctions and to cope with the postmodern multi-medium representation. Peirce’s theory, however, is inadequate in another way. When I compare his theory of the sign with the Chinese theory of the sign, the making of wen, his theory is found to be wanting in one aspect. In my above analysis, I have only dealt

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with four of the six writing principles. The remaining two, huiyi and xingsheng simply cannot be put into the Peircean pigeonholes of icon, index, and symbol. We have to find new ways to deal with the two. Although Peirce stresses the fluid roles of icon, index, and symbol in performative situations, his functional classification of signs is concerned with the mutual support of icons and indices for the making of linguistic syntagms. In other words, his emphasis only deals with discourse composed of individual icons, indices, and symbols. When his theory is applied to individual Chinese characters, it is found to be inadequate in explaining two other Chinese writing principles. Here is Xu Shen’s account of the two principles: The third is called xingsheng (shape-and-sound). For this type, a name is made after considering (a relation of) things, i.e., a comparison is made by combination (of phonetic and classifier). Jiang (stream) and he (river) are of this sort. The fourth is called huiyi (grasp-meaning). For this type, suitable figures are compared and meanings joined, whereby appears what is indicated. Wu (warrior) and xin (trust) are of this sort.56

In the xingsheng category, as the name indicates, a graph is made of two component parts: one is a shape, the other a sound. The shape is a radical, or significant, which is often an iconic image while the sound is a phonetic. The juxtaposition of the two parts results in a new graph, a composite phonogram that uses the significant to indicate its meaning while using the phonetic to indicate its pronunciation. A character composed with the huiyi principle is also the result of sign combinations. A huiyi symbol combines two or more simple graphs to form a new character. The meaning of the new symbol is synthesized from the unity of the two graphs juxtaposed. Ma Xulun employs the metaphor of childbirth to explain how this principle works. Just as an embryo is conceived in the union of a sperm and an ovum from both parents, so the meaning of a huiyi character signifies as a crystallization of the essence of the component parts.57 In a way, xingsheng may also be viewed as a huiyi principle, because it involves the juxtaposition of component parts and the meaning of a xingsheng character depends on a synthetic understanding of the two combined parts. For this reason, I would like to classify the two principles under the category of juxtaposition, or rebus. If the two remaining Chinese graphic principles are not compatible with any of the three Peircean signs, the Western word game “rebus” provides a similar signifying mechanism.

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Indeed, the mechanism for these two graphical principles is quite similar to that of a rebus. This is the most interesting and most artistic of all the six graphic principles. It has exerted the most profound impact on the development of Chinese signification, representation, and aesthetics.58 It has attracted the attention of some Western scholars who, in their turn, made revolutionary leaps in their approaches to literature and art. Here I just want to mention in passing the montage technique of cinematography created by S. M. Eisenstein, and the idiogrammic method by Ezra Pound. Having examined the six Chinese graphical principles in conjunction with Peirce’s triad of icon, index, and symbol, I wish to say that we need to add a new category of signs. This is the huiyi-wen—characters created with the method of synthesized juxtaposition. For the sake of convenience, I have coined a neologism, Juxtaposign. Now I wish to make the following chart and offer a complete overview of the Chinese and Western theories of the sign: Peirce

Xu Shen

1. Iconic signs

1. Xiangxing: imitating forms

Sensory channels

1. Visual signs 2. Indexical signs 3. Symbolic signs

2. Zhishi: indicating conditions 3. Zhuanzhu: mutual defining 2. Phonetic signs

[4. Juxtapo-signs] (Rebus)

4. Jiajie: loans and borrowings 5. Xingsheng: sound-form compounds 3. Phono-visual signs 6. Huiyi: synthetic compounds

As individual unit, words of alphabetic languages can only fit into the symbolic signs on the left column. Chinese characters spread over the three Peircean categories and the newly coined category. Icons and indices are perceived through the visual channel. Symbols may be seen or heard. Phonetic symbols are to be perceived more through the auditory channel than the visual channel, hence phonocentric. This chart shows that Chinese characters are to be perceived somewhat differently from the alphabetic symbols. This insight has been confirmed by neuroscience. Modern neuroscientific research has ascertained that human beings use different regions of the brain to process visual/spatial and auditory/temporal functions. Although it takes the coordination of many regions in the brain to

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perform perception, cogitation, and motor function, the left hemisphere of the brain is largely responsible for recognition and production of sounds and sequences while the right hemisphere is largely concerned with the perception and creation of shapes and patterns. Some neuroscientific studies of aphasia carried out in Japan not only confirm the neuroscientific findings in the West but also facilitate our understanding of the nature of Chinese writing. They have discovered that the mastery of Chinese written sign is causally different from that of alphabetical sign.59 The Japanese writing system consists of two systems. One is the system of Chinese characters; the other a phonetic system using two sets of alphabets called respectively hinakana and katakana like the alphabets of the West. A patient suffering from Broca’s aphasia60 cannot spell a simple word like ink in the Japanese alphabets, but he can write the Chinese character “ink” standing for the same word. On the other hand, a patient inflicted with Wernicke’s aphasia61 has no problem in producing discourse using phonetic alphabets, but can only produce gibberish using Chinese characters. This finding suggests that Chinese characters still retain much of the original visual and spatial qualities of the picture. This finding may also find support in computing word processing. Chinese characters are processed not as acoustic letters but as graphics.

Reconceptualizing the Picture/Word Divide My comparative study in terms of linguistics, semiotics, and neuroscience has made it necessary for us to offer a different grouping of the linguistic signs, Chinese and Western. The iconic signs and indexical signs belong to one big category whose coding and decoding operate largely on the visual function of the mental apparatus. The symbolic signs are a category whose mental function is largely localized on the auditory plane. The juxtaposign is a special category that integrates the visual and auditory functions of the brain. It shares the basic composing principle of a rebus, which has been extensively explored by Freud in his interpretation of dream formation.62 Juxtaposign is artistically a richer sign than the other categories of signs because it embraces denotation and at the same time presupposes connotation. Its coding and decoding require a cooperation of the visual and auditory functions of the brain and an integration of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations. This regrouping is in keeping with the statistical data that tell us that a great majority of Chinese characters are composed with the xingsheng (shape-sound) principle. If we include characters

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composed with xiangxing, zhishi, and huiyi principles, an overwhelming majority of Chinese characters are imagistic in nature. My account above may show how the Chinese linguistic sign is different from the Western counterpart and why Western semiotic theories, especially Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign, are inadequate to explain the mechanism of Chinese characters. In his Course In General Linguistics, Saussure posits the first principle of linguistics, “the linguistic sign is arbitrary.”63 Saussure defines arbitrary nature as: “it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified.”64 He further postulates that the arbitrary nature of the sign applies to not only phonetic signs but also to written signs: “The signs used in writing are arbitrary.”65 This claim does not fit the conditions of Chinese written signs. As I have demonstrated, of the six principles for graph-making, only two of them can be said to show no motivated, natural connection between the signifier and the signified. The largely motivated nature of Chinese written sign is the most significant feature of Chinese written language and has affected Chinese conception of signification, representation, and aesthetics. The summary may also show why the upholders of the “ideographic” view of the Chinese character and rejecters of it are both partially correct. Since the Chinese linguistic sign is both visual and aural, both imagistic and conceptual in nature, the Chinese writing is both ideographic and phonetic. As for to what extent it is ideographic or phonetic, it depends on how one looks at it. If one stresses the phonetic part, he would agree with Karlgren (and Boodberg) and say: nine-tenths of Chinese characters are phonetic. If one stresses the imagistic part, he would side with Creel and say: nine-tenths of Chinese characters are ideographic. Or if he accepts Zheng Qiao’s view that all six writing principles evolved from pictographic imitation, he may even say that all Chinese characters are ideographic. The dual nature of the Chinese written sign may be illustrated with a look at the central issue in the debate between Creel and Boodberg. Creel challenged Karlgren’s claim that “nine-tenths of Chinese characters consist of one ‘signific’ and one ‘phonetic.’”66 The claim refers to xing-sheng characters, characters formed with a sound and an image. Since the formation is half and half, one could in principle stresses one half and subordinates the other half. It seems that the nature of Chinese character with the evolutionary history of Chinese writing system would subvert not only the Saussurean phonocentrism of the sign but also the logocentrism of transcendental metaphysics. Most important of all, it questions the post-Saussurean

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theory about the signified as one of the endless series of signifiers on the signifying chain by casting a great doubt on the origin and nature of words and ideas. This great doubt is, as Mitchell aptly puts it, “the suspicion that beneath words, beneath ideas, the ultimate reference in the mind is the image, the impression of outward experience printed, painted, or reflected in the surface of consciousness.”67 In an attempt to find a suitable model for historical criticism of the word-image difference, Mitchell cites Freud’s dichotomy between the manifest dream image and the latent, hidden meaning in dream interpretation as a possible choice.68 Here I wish to suggest that the graphic principles of Chinese character would qualify as an appropriate model. More significantly, the six graphic principles confirm from a conscious perspective what Freud has discovered in the unconscious mind. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud demonstrates that the dream language, as any primitive drawings, cannot express abstract ideas and logical connections. It has only one mode of expression, that is, juxtaposition. To produce the pictographic script of the dream, dream work employs four major techniques to distort the psychic content: condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, and secondary revision.69 A collation with the six principles of Chinese character formation reveals that Freud’s four techniques of dream representation are all used. The principle “imitate-form” produces characters that resemble dream images in such a way that it copies from reality but highlights the salient features to achieve representability. The principle of “indicate condition” resembles the techniques of dream distortion for emphasis and of secondary revision for clarity. The principle of “grasp-meaning,” like a dream scene, uses the dream technique of condensation by juxtaposing related elements to create an abstracted meaning. The principle of “shape-sound,” working like a rebus, employs the technique of juxtaposition, but what are juxtaposed are auditory and visual elements. The principle of “interchangeable notation” employs the technique of displacement, and comes close to a dream’s representation by symbols. The principle of “loan-­ borrowing” employs the technique that works like a dream’s klang association through homophones. In this connection, the consciously created six principles also confirm the correctness of a radical claim by Jacques Lacan that the two fundamental laws of the psyche, “condensation” and “displacement,” operate in the same way as everyday discourse.70 Herein lies the common, deep structure upon which we may build a bridge across the picture/word divide and the conceptual divide between Chinese and Western Languages.

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The Nature of Chinese Writing Based on the analysis of the constitution of Chinese characters in terms of modern linguistics and semiotic theory, I am in a position to draw a conclusion: Chinese writing is a multidimensional constructive system of signification and representation that employs the functions of primary signs such as icon, index, symbol, and synthetic signs and integrates the cognitive abilities of seeing, hearing, and thinking. In the classification of signs, phonetic writing sets great store by the arbitrary nature of symbols and rarely relies on iconic and indexical signs, still less integrated signs. Of course, phonetic writing also has visual form, but its iconic feature is negligible. Thus, phonetic writing may be said to be a two-dimensional sign system. In the process of signification and representation, phonetic writing represents first the phonemes of a language system, then conveys meanings within a language system through representing sounds, and last connects words with the world outside the language. This rationale is the linguistic basis of Jacques Derrida’s often misunderstood aphorism: “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” This saying has often been inadequately translated as “There is nothing outside the text,” but actually it means that words in a text will not produce meaning by themselves unless they refer to each other. Gayatri Spivak has therefore translated it as “there is no outsidetext.”71 Many Sinologists rely on this linguistic theory to argue that there is no essential difference between Chinese characters and phonetic writing and both kinds of writing are records of a phonetic system. But my semiotic analysis has shown that the signification and representation of Chinese writing are much more complicated than those of phonetic writing and its cognitive psychology involved in the production of meaning is richer and more colorful, because it not only must have direct connection with the world outside languages but also needs to have interaction inside words and within the writing system at multiple levels. It is therefore a three-­ dimensional sign system, which involves the first triad of sound, shape, and meaning at one level, the second triad of listening, seeing, and thinking at another level, the third triad of icon, index, symbol at still another level, and the fourth triad of intuition, intellect, and reason. In his philosophical inquiry, Immanuel Kant divides human cognitive abilities into three main types: perception, intellect, and reason. In accordance with Kant’s theory, the making of Chinese characters requires the integration of all three abilities at the same time. Compared with phonetic writings, the pictogram, ideogram, sound-shape composite, and multi-meaning

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composite in Chinese writing system do not rely as much as alphabetic writing on sound but rely more on the integration of sound and shape and through rational reflection on the components and engages in rational integration. Thus, Chinese characters are a kind of rich and colorful signs, for they are not only a kind of intuitive signs that requires the integration of visual and auditory abilities but also a kind of logic signs that requires the processing through intellect and reason. In the use of Chinese characters, one exercises one’s visual and audial perception, intellectual ability, and reasoning. The rationale for the constitution and function of Chinese characters can be illustrated with the following diagram:

The diagram suggests that the three abilities of visual-auditory perception, intellect, and reasoning can be found within the composition of a Chinese character. Of course, alphabetic writing signs also touch upon the three cognitive abilities, but due to the fact that alphabetic writing centers on sound and the meaning of a word is not independent but determined by the whole language system, it relies more on intellect and reasoning, therefore having a high level of abstraction. By contrast, a Chinese character is both abstract and concrete, appealing to both intuition, intellect, and

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reasoning, and capable of fusing such aesthetic and rhetorical functions as metaphysical thinking, imagination, correlation, representation, suggestion, analysis, and integration within the constitutive frame of a character. One can even gain a vague understanding of a word without previous knowledge and only by simply viewing it and reflect on its component parts. Precisely on this ground, Leibniz, after comparing Chinese and European writings, posited a romantic idea that Chinese writing is close to the language given by God and is a more rational writing system. Recent research on Chinese writing in China and Hong Kong has confirmed that the component parts of a Chinese character are endowed with syntactic functions. In this area, a Chinese linguist, Feng Shengli’s view on “syntactic functions of Chinese characters’ constitution”72 lends strong evidential support to my view of Chinese writing as a multidimensional sign system that combines sound, shape, and sense with visual, auditory, and cognitive functions.

Visual Primacy in Language Function I have provided enough visual and ideographic evidence of Chinese writing through analytic reasoning in the above. Now I want to provide more evidence in the use of Chinese writing in the area of dictionary compilation. All through Chinese history, dictionaries have been devised according to the shapes of a character. Only in modern times did dictionaries begin to be arranged in terms of sound. Moreover, the methods for looking up dictionaries, stroke number method and four-corner method, etc. all employ a method that relies on shapes rather than sounds. Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, is compiled by arranging the nearly 10,000 characters according to 540 graphic radicals. These radicals are recurring graphic elements in all the existing characters, and in the typical case they indicate the semantic class to which a word belongs. For example, any word that has to do with humans would have a human radical on one side of the character. In the dictionary, Xu Shen also preserves the pictographic origins of the characters. The radicals are arranged in semantic groups. In Chapter 10a of the dictionary, Xu Shen groups all the rodents under a category headed by the character “shu” (mouse). All 15 characters have the radical of “mouse” on one side.73 All other chapters adopt the same general principle, which is to group characters under one category headed by another character that serves as their identifying radical. Altogether he employs 540 radicals. Within each of the 540 radical

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groups, Xu Shen grouped together what were semantically related characters, often beginning with the more general category and proceeding to the more specific. In his definition of each character, Xu Shen emphasized two aspects: the internal graphic structure and the graphically relevant meaning of the character being defined. Overall, the organizing principle of the dictionary is visually based and semantically oriented, with some attention to the elements of sounds. Xu Shen set his main task as explaining the semantics of graphs and gave little phonetic glosses, only providing a near-homophonic character to indicate sound. Xu Shen’s graphic conception remained the predominant, and perhaps the only theoretical guideline for later dictionaries up to modern times. In Chinese history, there were dictionaries compiled with phonetic principles, but theses dictionaries were, as Harbsmeire rightly points out, “not intended as works of scientific phonological analysis but rather as practical handbooks for those who needed to know what rhymes and what does not rhyme in order to pass their examinations.”74 Another more prominent function of such phonetically oriented dictionaries is to find rhymes for poetic composition. Even these dictionaries are not, strictly speaking, phonetic dictionaries. Harbsmeier is right in saying that dictionaries like Jiyun (Collection of Rhymes) and Guangyun (Comprehensive Collection of Rhymes) “may be regarded as semantic dictionaries with a phonetic component.”75 All the dictionaries compiled with the phonetic principle have one common drawback: they are infuriatingly difficult to use. As a consequence, phonetic dictionaries were not popular among learners except for its use in finding rhymes. Eventually, dictionaries compiled with ideographic principle carried the day in pre-modern times. Mei Yingzuo (1570–1615), for example, reverted to Xu Shen’s graphic principle and arranged all the characters in his dictionary under 214 headings (bu). In his dictionary, Zihui (Compendium of Characters), his organizing principle is that of stroke order. Harbsmeier provides the reason why Mei reverted to Xu Shen’s principle of compiling dictionaries, which is facility and convenience: “Even more important was Mei’s recognition that the order of characters under each radical was essential for rapid use of the dictionary. He introduced the natural and efficient rule that characters under each radical are arranged by the number of strokes needed in addition to the radical.”76 Harbsmeier makes an apt observation on the semantic orientation of Xu Shen’s dictionary and praises it as the result of ancient semiotics: “Hsu

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Shen is not explaining words, he is explaining graphs in terms of the meaning relevant for a satisfactory explanation of the graphy. In other words, Hsu Shen is consciously and consistently doing the semiotics of the Chinese graphys. It is an extraordinary thought that so long before semiotics was recognised in the West as a crucially important philosophical and philological discipline, it was coherently practised in China and consistently applied to a large body of Chinese characters.”77 In his excellent study of Chinese language, Harbsmeier has provided a systematic study of the language with numerous insights. However, on the issues of the nature of Chinese characters, he adopts the Western phonocentric view. In his comment on Yang Xiong’s discourse on dialects Fangyan: “What the Fang Yen demonstrates without a shadow of doubt is that Chinese characters stand not for ideas or thoughts but for words of the spoken language.”78 I question Harbsmeier’s conclusion because he somehow contradicts his own views, especially in his observation of Xu Shen’s dictionary, and more simply because he provides no substantiation of his conclusion. His wavering between phonographic nature and ideographic nature reflects, on the one hand, the deeply entrenched Western phonocentrism in linguistics, and, on the other hand, may reflect the prevalence of phonographic view of Chinese writing in contemporary Sinological circles. Having analyzed the Chinese written sign in terms of rigorous linguistic analysis and practical aspects, I suggest that we need to reaffirm the ideographic and visual feature of Chinese characters, because it can explain the special features of Chinese language such as lack of tense, gender, case, number, voice, mood, and verbal conjugation. There is a hypothesis that in remote times, Chinese may have inflections, which became lost due to cultural interchanges, similar to those that have happened in the formation of Creole language. But I argue that all the distinct features in Chinese as an analytic language (a misnomer in some ways) came from the inherent conditions of the Chinese characters as a free-standing visual sign, in the sense of a Peircean icon. The iconic feature of Chinese written sign is reflected in the multivalence of a graph. Take the Chinese character ming 明 (brightness) for example; one can read it as a graph composed with huiyi principle: the combination of ri (sun) and yue (moon) produces the meaning of brightness. But we may also read the graph as showing moonlight coming through a window. The different readings come from a condition similar to that of viewing a picture and testify to the visual primacy of Chinese characters. The visual primary is a distinct quality that sets Chinese writing from alphabetic writings.

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Concluding Remarks: Beyond the Linguistic Divide Having emphasized the visual and ideographic features of Chinese writing, I must say in the concluding part that the Chinese written sign is a borderline sign in which the visual and the aural, the ideographic, and phonetic intermingle and interpenetrate. To a much more diminished extent, the alphabetic languages share this characteristic feature. A purely phonetic writing system is impossible, for once a word is recorded in signs (alphabetic or ideographic), it ceases to be entirely an acoustic sound. Linguistic signs in both ideographic and phonetic languages might have started with the same pictographic origin. Although they were set apart in their separate evolutionary processes, they all developed into highly sophisticated linguistic signs. While in the phonetic sign, visual representation was consistently downplayed over history until the “pictorial turn” in modern times, in the ideographic sign, pictographic qualities have been emphasized uninterruptedly from high antiquity to the present day. The Chinese linguistic sign, despite a series of mutations that it has undergone over history, has successfully resisted efforts at alphabetization and retains some fundamental characteristics of the picture: the visual and graphic qualities. It is truly a case in which picture has evolved into sign. The Western fascination with Chinese language may in great part be attributed to a strong interest in the visual and graphic qualities of the Chinese linguistic sign. The fascination, which culminated in high modernism, has been accused of adopting an essentialist, aestheticized, and even distorted view of the Chinese language with little regard for its modern and present-day conditions. But we must admit that it does locate something in the Chinese linguistic sign for revolutionary innovations in poetry, arts, film, philosophy, and critical methodology. Fenollosa, Pound, Eisenstein, Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier, and Derrida, all were able to make use of the ideographic difference to radicalize their poetic, artistic, critical, and philosophical undertakings with considerable success. In varying degrees, they found in the ideographic sign some principles that served as catalytic inspirations. If there were no pictographic elements in the ideograph, their innovations would have had no relation with the Chinese written sign. Take the graphic principle of huiyi or juxtaposign for example. It is a principle that appeals to both the eye and the ear and gestures beyond both. That the huiyi graphic principle is found (by some visual and plastic artists) to inhere in artistic techniques and forms like montage, vorticism, collage, and ideogrammic method suggests that the Chinese ideographic sign does have some visual qualities that have been minimized in

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the phonetic sign. It is worthwhile to point out that the ideas mentioned came under direct or indirect influence of the Chinese linguistic sign. Eisenstein acknowledged his indebtedness to Chinese character formation for his invention of the montage technique; Pound got the inspiration for his ideogrammic method of poetic composition from his study of Chinese characters, and Lewis’s idea of vorticism was indebted to the same source of inspiration.79 In a larger psycholinguistic context, the huiyi principle is compatible with the structuring principle found in the Western word game “rebus” and Freud’s psycholinguistic study of dream formation and interpretation. In conclusion, I have sufficient reason to say that the Chinese written sign is a double face. One face is that of the articulate sign in language utterances; the other is that of a visual and aural Gestalt on the page. It is an imagistic fabric woven with optical and acoustical images. The consistent emphasis on both the visual and aural aspects of the linguistic sign differentiates Chinese language thought from Western language philosophy in their respective developments. Because of the different degrees of emphasis on the visual, Western language philosophy traversed on a road from symbol to sign, while Chinese language theories traveled on a road from picture to sign. The Chinese discourses on wen (character, writing, literature, and art), through the shift in perception from images to words, reveal with remarkable clarity the transition from natural patterns to human constructs. In this chapter, I have only touched on some significance that the study of the Chinese written sign in relation to Western theories of the sign may yield. If we look beyond the conceptual divide and conduct our future research in conjunction with present-day linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, we may open up a new vista with unpredictable potentials. What I have done in this chapter is only a first step on the long march toward bridging the linguistic divide. My conceptual explanation of why Chinese characters fascinated Western poets, writers, artists, critics, and thinkers and contributed to their innovative art and thought may be of considerable value in fusing aesthetic horizons.

Notes 1. Longxi Zhang, The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics East and West (Durum and London: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 21. 2. See W.  A. Mason, The History of the Art of Writing (New York, 1920), pp. 49–50.

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3. J.-J. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origines des langues. The translation is requoted from Of Grammatology, p. 3. 4. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of History, translated by J. Sibree (New York: Willey, 1944), p. 103. 5. Herrlee Creel, “On The Nature of Chinese Ideography,” p. 160. 6. Peter Boodberg, “Some Proleptical Remarks on the Evolution of Archaic Chinese,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 (1937): 330. 7. Peter Boodberg, “Some Proleptical Remarks on the Evolution of Archaic Chinese,” p. 332. 8. Q. S. Tong, “Myths about the Chinese Language,” in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (1993), pp. 41–45. 9. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammotology, p. 92. 10. William Hannas, “The Cart and the Horse,” Georgetown University, unpublished manuscript (1995), p. 1. 11. Edward McDonald, “Getting over the Wall of Discourse: ‘Character Fetishization’ in Chinese Studies,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 68, no. 4 (2009), p. 1195. 12. Ibid., p. 1194. 13. Ming Dong Gu, “Sinologism in Language Philosophy: A Critique of the Controversy over Chinese Language,” in Philosophy East and West (2014), no. 3, pp. 708–712. 14. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 26. 15. Aristotle, Categories and De Interpretatione, translated by J.  L. Ackrill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 16A3. 16. Bloomfield, Language (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1933), p. 283. 17. George Trager, “Writing and writing systems,” in Current Trends in Linguistics 12 (1974): 377. 18. P.  L. M.  Serruys, Survey of the Chinese Language Reform and the Anti-­ illiteracy Movement in Communist China. Berkeley, CA: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of International Studies, University of California (1962: 455). 19. C.  F. Voegelin, “Casual and Non-casual Utterances within Unified Structures,” in T.  A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), p. 57. 20. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in T.A.  Seboek, ed. Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), p. 352. 21. Translation quoted from Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, in Science and Civilisation in China: (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 7, part 1, p. 48. 22. For these myths, legends, and records, one can start with a standard Chinese college textbook, Gu wenzi xue gangyao [Outlines of Ancient

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Chinese Philology], by Chen Weizhan and Tang Yuming (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, 1988), pp. 19–20. 23. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937), Juan 15A, 1b. 24. When I refer to Cang Jie’s name in this essay, I use it as a convenient marker. I do not mean that there was once a historical person by this name. 25. Chad Hansen, “Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas,” Journal of Asian Studies 52.2 (1993): 388. 26. Julia Kristeva, “From Symbol to Sign,” in The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 64. 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D.  G. Pears and B.  F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 4.106. 28. Liu Shipei, for one, holds this view. See his Jingxue jiaoke shu [Textbooks of Classics], Liu Shenshu xiansheng yishu (Posthumous Writings of Mr. Liu Shenshu) (Taipei: Daxin shuju, 1965), vol. 4, p. 2387. 29. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words], Juan 15A, p. 1a–b. 30. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Word and Image,” in Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 54. 31. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 68. 32. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Word and Image,” p. 54. 33. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 150–152. 34. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 150. 35. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 22. 36. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology, p. 27. 37. He says, “If we read the circle and arrow as pictures of a body and phallus, then the symbol is synecdochic, presenting part for whole; if we read it as a shield and a spear, then it is metonymic, substituting associated objects for the thing itself.” See Mitchell, Iconology, p. 27. 38. C. S. Peirce, Collected Works, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), vol. IV, p. 360. 39. Zheng Qiao (1104–1160), “Liushu lüe (Outlines of Six Graphic Principles),” in Tongzhi lüe (Outlines of General Records) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), p. 11. 40. Liu Shipei, Liu Shenshu xiansheng yishu (Posthumous Writings of Mr. Liu Shenshu), vol. 4, p. 2387. 41. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, pp. 25–26.

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42. Zheng Qiao, “Outlines of Six Graphic Principles,” p. 11. 43. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words], Juan 15A, p. 1a. 44. See Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words], Juan 15A, p. 1a–b. 45. C. S. Peirce, Collected Works, vol. IV, p. 359. 46. C. S. Peirce, Collected Works, vol. II, p. 172. 47. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 19. 48. Adapted from K. L. Thern’s translation, Postface of the Shuo-wen Chieh-­tzu, The First Comprehensive Chinese Dictionary, Wisconsin China Series, No. 1. (Madison, Wisconsin: Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1966), p. 10. 49. Ma Xulun, Zhongguo wenzi zhi yuanliu yu yanjiu fangfa zhi xinqingxiang [The Origins of Chinese Writing and New Tendencies in Research Methods] (Hong Kong: Longmeng shudian, 1969), p. 29. 50. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. II, pp. 143–44. 51. Adapted from K. L. Thern’s translation, Postface of the Shuo-wen Chieh-­tzu, The First Comprehensive Chinese Dictionary, pp. 10–11. 52. Ma Xulun, Zhongguo wenzi zhi yuanliu yu yanjiu fangfa zhi xinqingxiang [The Origins of Chinese Writing and New Tendencies in Research Methods], p.12. 53. C. S. Peirce, Collected Works, vol. II, p. 158 54. C. S. Peirce, Collected Works, vol. IV, p. 361 55. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 22. 56. Adapted from K. L. Thern’s translation, Postface of the Shuo-wen Chieh-­tzu, The First Comprehensive Chinese Dictionary, p. 10. 57. Ma Xulun, Zhongguo wenzi zhi yuanliu yu yanjiu fangfa zhi xinqingxiang [The Origins of Chinese Writing and New Tendencies in Research Methods], p. 29. 58. Since this is not the place to discuss such an important principle, I will leave it to another paper. 59. Ruth Lesser, Linguistic Investigation of Aphasia: Studies of Disorders of Communication (London: Edward Arnold LTD, 1989), 181. For details, see also S.  Sasamura, “Kana and kanji Processing in Japanese Aphasics,” Brain and Language 2: 369–83. 60. For a patient with Broca’s aphasia, spontaneous speech is non-fluent and slurred, with short sentences consisting mainly of nouns and main verbs. Comprehension is relatively well preserved except with sentences that can only be understood with syntactic analysis. The underlying disorder is believed to be mainly syntactic. Broca’s aphasia is associated with lesions in the inferior part of the left frontal lobe, supposedly responsible for auditory representation.

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61. For a patient with Wernicke’s aphasia, speech is fluent with correctly used grammatical structures, but auditory language comprehension is severely affected. The deficit is believed to be mainly at a semantic level, and the lesion usually involves the superior part of the left temporal lobe, supposedly responsible for visual representation. 62. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 312. 63. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 67. 64. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 69. 65. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 119. 66. Bernhard Karlgren, Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese (Paris, 1923), p. 4. 67. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology, p. 43. 68. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology, p. 45. 69. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 311–373, pp. 526–546. 70. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud,” in Écrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 159–171. 71. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 158–159. 72. Feng Shengli, “Syntactic Information in the Constitution of Ancient Writing,” Minsu dianji wenzi yanjiu (Studies of Folklore, Classical Texts, and Writing) (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2015), pp. 21–39. 73. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1999), p. 210. 74. Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, in Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilization in China, vol. 7, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 75. 75. Ibid., 76. 76. Ibid., 79. 77. Ibid., 73. 78. Ibid., 77. 79. Hugh Kenner gives a detailed study of these cases in his monumental book, The Pound Era. I just want to quote one passage here, “A Russian mind, applied ideographs in a time of Revolutionary propaganda, in conceiving montage has altered our understanding of ideographic potentialities. An American mind, brought to ideographs by an art historian of Spanish descent who had been exposed to Transcendentalism, derived Vorticism, the Cantos, and an ‘ideogrammic method’ that modifies our sense of what Chinese can be.” See The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 162.

PART II

Metaphor and Poetics

CHAPTER 4

Chinese and Western Conceptions of Metaphor

If language is the medium for literary creation, metaphor as an essential part of language lodges at the heart of poetry and poetics. Metaphor has since the eighteenth century been recognized as an essential part of everyday language that conditions and structures the ways we perceive, conceive, and behave. It is therefore indispensable in our efforts to fuse aesthetic horizons of Chinese and Western literature and critical thought. Among the large number of thinkers and scholars who have worked on metaphor, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, while affirming that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action,”1 have taken care to caution us that “every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presumptions” and we should not overlook the impact of cultural assumptions, values, and attitudes in our inquiry into metaphor.2 Their cautionary note prompts us to consider the topic of metaphor from a cross-cultural perspective and ask one fundamental question: Do people from different cultural traditions conceive and use metaphor in similar ways? This fundamental question, when spelled out in the field of Chinese and comparative literature, spawns a series of questions concerning metaphor: Is the Western conception of metaphor universal to all cultures? In the comparative study of Chinese and Western languages and literature, do the Chinese conceive and use metaphor in a similar way as their Western counterparts? Or to put it more

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_4

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simply, in the comparative study of Chinese and Western cultures, is there a figure of speech in the Chinese tradition that is equivalent to the Western metaphor?

The Dichotomy Between Literalness and Metaphoricity To most scholars, the Chinese equivalent to Western metaphor is bi (comparison) and its synonym yu (analogy). In modern Chinese, the equivalent term is biyu, a combination of the two. Quite a few scholars have conducted studies of this Chinese term in relation to Western conceptions of metaphor and made some claims or assertions that have exerted considerable impact upon the comparative studies of Chinese and Western literatures. By comparing and contrasting Chinese and Western uses of metaphor, they have effectively established a dichotomy between Chinese and Western poetics. One of their claims that support the dichotomy is that due to a variety of cultural, metaphysical, and aesthetic reasons, Chinese poetry inherently lacks metaphors, the prevalent trope in Western poetry employed to generate fresh meanings for analogies drawn between seemingly disparate objects. Consequently, Chinese poetry is fundamentally nonmetaphorical in contradistinction to the centrality of metaphor as the hallmark of Western poetry. The claimed nonmetaphoricity in Chinese poetry and the dichotomy between Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor have been challenged and contested by a number of other scholars,3 but the debates finally ended up inconclusively. Wai-lim Yip may be the earliest scholar to argue for the lack of metaphoricity in Chinese poetry. Although he does not state this idea explicitly, he lays out the phenomenological ground for such a claim: “Much of the art of Chinese poetry lies in the way in which the poet captures the visual events as they emerge and act themselves out before us, releasing them from the restrictive concept of time and space, letting them leap out directly from the undifferentiated mode of existence instead of standing between the reader and the events explaining them, analyzing them.”4 He suggests that the Chinese poet tends to hide himself behind nature, and presents objects literally so as to let objects impart ideas themselves. As a result of self-effacement, the Chinese poet does not “force the perspective of the ego upon” objects or “falsify their identity by turning them into puppets of some Grand Idea.”5 Instead he emphasizes “the acting–out of

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visual objects and events, letting them explain themselves by their coexisting, coextensive emergence from nature, letting the spatial tensions reflect conditions and situations rather than coercing these objects and events into some preconceived artificial orders by sheer human interpretative elaboration.”6 As a result of this spontaneous creativity, objects in a poem do not refer to something else other than themselves and are in the final analysis not substitutes for some other ideas.7 Classical Chinese poetry is therefore marked by a lack of metaphoricity. Like Yip, Stephen Owen also argues that Chinese poetry is fundamentally weak in metaphoricity but strong in metonymy. Owen did not write an extended discourse on the differences between Chinese and Western metaphor. His view on metaphor comes from his theorizing on the differences between Chinese and Western modes of literary reading. Nevertheless, he emphasizes the difference between Chinese and Western modes of reading as “deeply connected to the question of metaphor and the reader’s presumptions about the fictionality or nonfictionality of poems.” He makes a distinction between the Chinese and Western presumptions: “Presumptions of fictionality in the text and of a metaphorical Truth run throughout our modern western modes of literary reading. In Chinese poetry metaphor is more truly a ‘device,’ most comfortable in simile and usually confined to certain emblematic traditions and to certain subgenres.”8 In his book-length study of Chinese poetry, he further extends this view: “In the Chinese tradition of reading, the meaning of a poem as a whole is usually not taken as metaphorical (except in a limited number of subgenres). And within a poem, an image will be read as metaphorical only if generic codes encourages it and if the metaphorical reading is supported by a tradition of similar use of that particular image.”9 In his view, except for some emblematic images like the pine (for longevity or uprightness), the general tendency in Chinese poetic writing and reading is metonymic or synecdochic, because “the text is synecdoche for the world (not as substitution, but as diminishment and loss). It leads not to the ‘other’ meaning of metaphorical reading and the fictional text, but to the whole of which we see only a part in the text.”10 Owen does not deny the existence of analogical thinking, the basis of metaphor in Chinese poetry, but he suggests that Chinese analogical categories express a literal truth and Chinese poetry is therefore nonfictional. In his discussion of a well-known idea in the Book of Changes, “[In the Yi] the names given [to the hexagrams] are small, but their implications by categorical analogy are great,”11 Owen states: “Both lei 類, ‘categorical analogy,’ and the western

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concept of metaphor (closest perhaps to Chinese yü) are based upon analogy; however, metaphor is fictional and involves true substitution, while lei is an association that is ‘strictly true,’ based upon the order of the world.”12 Because of his belief in the ever presence of the poet in the poem, and in the poem as a text that transcribes a poet’s literal or empirical responses to the world, Owen claims, the Chinese poem expresses “not a metaphorical Truth but an immanent truth,”13 and readings of such poems “are qualitatively different from the disjunctive metaphorical operations of western poetics.”14 Although the two scholars only discussed Chinese metaphor in relation to other issues, their ideas about the nonmetaphoricity of Chinese poetry has pointed out a direction for later scholars and provided a paradigm for some more elaborate studies of Chinese and Western conceptions and uses of metaphor. In an article that focuses on the comparison of Chinese and Western metaphors, Pauline Yu adopts the line of thought suggested by Yip and Owen and turns their claim into a sophisticated argument about a dichotomy between Chinese and Western conceptions and uses of metaphor. Noting the fact that scholars of Chinese literature have taken for granted the existence of figures of speech in the Chinese tradition that are equivalent to those of metaphor in the West, she argues that the surface resemblances only hide crucial differences. She continues to argue that these differences “lie not so much on the level of the rhetorical figures themselves as in the conventions and world-views underlying them and in some basic assumptions about the poetic act.”15 What are the conventions that lead to the differences? Yu answers this question by conducting a critical analysis of a Chinese poem. Through the analysis, she puts forward some conceptual notions. She suggests that all of the images in the poem “refer to something other than themselves, the referents are not fundamental ‘other’; the images are parts of cultural conventions or of the object being described.” After an erudite review of the theories of metaphor by Western scholars from Aristotle, Philip Sidney, J.  C. Scaliger, Samuel Johnson, and Wordsworth, through John Middleton Murry, Heidegger, Roman Jacobson, and Christine Brooke-Rose, to Paul Ricoeur, Derrida, and Jonathan Culler, in relation to Chinese theories of bi and xing (rough equivalents to Western metaphor) by various theorists and scholars from Wei Hong, Mao Heng, Mao Chang, Zheng Xuan, Zhi Yu, Zhong Rong, Liu Xie, Jiao Ran, Li Zongmeng, Zhu Xi, and in conjunction with close readings of some selected Chinese poems and poetic lines

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containing bi and xing, she arrives at some claims or conclusions about Chinese conceptions of metaphor in particular and Chinese poetry in general. Yu’s article is densely packed with erudition and thought-provoking ideas, which are also reiterated in her other articles or book-length studies.16 At the risk of reduction I will summarize the major ideas. First, she agrees with other critics (Yip and Owen among them) that “Chinese poetry is at base nonmetaphorical”17 and the connections necessary for the appearance of metaphor in describing objects in Chinese poetry are based “more on metonymic contiguity than true metaphorical substitution.”18 Second, she suggests that Chinese poetry lacks the “motive for metaphor”—the desire to escape from reality by way of metaphor, which is the hallmark of Western poetry.19 Third, in contradistinction to the Western notion, “Metaphor is an act of fiction,” Chinese poetry has “none of the ‘metaphysics of metaphor’” and the aspiration to “transcend and transfigure the world of the sense.”20 Fourthly, because abstractions in Chinese poetry “were not seen as arbitrarily and artificially yoked to the concrete objects representing them—they were viewed as inhering in them,” and “almost all Chinese images … function not as metaphors in which the relationship is presumed to be contrived in some way, but as illustrations or embodiments—whether of their semantic category or of an intellectual or affective meaning implicit in them.”21 In formal representation, while “Metaphor in Western poetry is generally extended in a discursive, logical, or temporal fashion,”22 the Chinese presentation of tropes tends not to be sustained, developed in a sequential or discursive way23: there is “the rarity of truly extended tropes of comparison or substitution in Chinese poetry”24; “Images in Tang and pre-Tang poetry are generally isolated shots, or variations of the same shot, rather than the essentially discursive, extended comparisons of Western literature, because the poets were not working with the models of a metaphysical realm or a creation from nothing.”25 In artistic effects and affects, while Western metaphor tends to be fresh, innovative, and creative, the Chinese version of metaphor tends to be “derivative of some tradition,” and consists of stock phrases or cultural conventions. Yu has amplified previous scholars’ implicitly dichotomous views and in effect constructed a dichotomy between Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor. She supports her argument with a critical analysis of some poetic examples. On closer examination, most of the insights seem to be derived more from a formulated assumption than an analysis of

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contextualized readings. Let us first examine one of the cited poems by Li He (791–817), “Mengtian” (A Dream of Heaven). Yu renders it into English: Ancient hare and chilled toad weep the sky’s color.       老兔寒蟾泣天色 Cloudy towers partly open to walls of slanting white.       云樓半开壁斜白 The jade wheel crushes dew, wetting the globe’s gleam.      玉轮轧露濕团光 Bells and pendants meet each other on cassia-scented paths.    鸞珮相逢桂香陌 Yellow dust and clear water beneath the three Fairy Mountains   黄尘清水三山下 Shift with every thousand years, which pass like galloping steeds.  更变千年如走马 Gaze afar at the Middle Provinces: nine dots of smoke,      遥望齐州九点烟 And the single pool of ocean waters drained into a cup.     一泓海水杯中泄26

All good poems are compressed expressions of densely packed ideas. Chinese regulated poems are even more so. Moreover, due to the special features of Chinese poetic language, which has no formal indications of tense, gender, case, number, voice, verbal conjugation, and clear indication of subject position, etc., a poem may be read in many different ways. Yu’s reading is certainly a very sophisticated one, but it is very much the outcome of a preconceived interpretation that does not take into account its linguistic and cultural context. The reading therefore generates a twisted understanding of the poem in particular and Chinese metaphor in general. She argues, “Although he [the poet] never once mentions the word ‘moon,’ his heavy reliance on received traditions identifies it as his subject, not only in the first lines, but in the next three as well. … Nor is the ‘jade wheel’ an image of Li He’s own device; it is a conventional kenning, a combined, condensed metaphor and metonymy (with color as the defining field of association), thus not a pure substitution. Moreover, in presenting the moon as a jade-wheel orb compressing dew on its nightly circuit, Li He merely offers a reinterpretation of the source of its watery sheen, explained in the opening line as the tears of its hoary denizens.”27 Thus, she understands the poem’s subject to be one about the moon; despite a variety of expressions, all the images refer metaphorically or synecdochically to the moon. Basing herself on this understanding, she makes a claim about the poem’s way of representation: “Although all of these images, then, refer to something other than themselves, the referents are not fundamentally ‘other’; the images are parts of cultural conventions or of the object being described. Things and beings are depicted in familiar terms drawn from this world and, indeed, assumed to be a part of it, if distantly” (Ibid.).

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Furthermore, she suggests that the variations of images that refer to the same object, which is the moon, is based on a creative vision, which “is not developed in any sequential or discursive way.” In other words, the poem is composed in a repetitive way that does not show a narrative thrust or impart additional information: “These first four lines reiterate referents to the moon, so that by the fourth we do not really have any more information than we had in the first. They are simply collocated, slightly varied redescriptions of the same object, alternating between two perspectives. Similarly, the second half of the poem recapitulates the perceived minuteness of earthly space and time—when seen from above—in each couplets.”28 She contrasts Li He’s poem with a poem by Emily Dickinson and argues, “From ‘Liquor’ in the first line to ‘Tippler’ in the penultimate, virtually every image here develops the comparison between two very different ‘inebriating’ experiences.”29 By citing more examples from English poetry, she underscores the Western difference: “Metaphor in Western poetry is generally extended in a discursive, logical, or temporal fashion, something confirmed, for instance, by a glance at almost any Shakespearean sonnet.”30 By contrast, she says, “As in Li He’s ‘Dream of Heaven,’ the poet does not generally build on an image or idea but iterates it in various guise.”31 Perhaps, because of a self-conscious desire to build a dichotomy, Li He’s poem is somehow misread and its subject matter and theme misrepresented. I will show through a close reading that the poem was full of metaphors, whose metaphorical process differs little from Western metaphors. The poem’s title, “A Dream of Heaven” indicates that it has a definite subject position, which is that of the poet. The poet dreams of a series of scenes and events in the sky. These scenes and events are not similar tropes reiterating the same referent; they are disparate images imparting information about different details, which forms a narrative discourse. As a whole, the poem presents such a situation: the poet dreams of his experiences in the palace on the moon and the poem presents what he sees from the sky and expresses his feelings evoked by what he observes below. The first line describes the two legendary animals inhabiting the moon. The second line depicts what the poet sees in the moon palace. The third line describes his personal impression of the moon. The fourth line writes about the fairies adorned with jade pendants that clang; they meet each other on the fragrant paths. The fifth and sixth lines depict what the poet observes below: on the earth, yellow dust and clear water change and shift endlessly and swiftly. The seventh and eighth lines present the poet’s

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impression of what the land and sea look like: the land of the Middle Kingdom, which used to be divided into nine prefectures, look like nine dots of smoke, and the ocean water looks like the wine in a cup. Based on this understanding, the poem should be rendered very differently: Old hare and cold toad in the moon weep about the sky’s color. Cloudy towers half open to reveal the slanting white walls. The jade wheel rolls out dewdrops to wet the round light. Adorned with clanging pendants fairies meet on cassia-­scented paths. Yellow dust and clear water under the Three Mountains Eternally turn into their opposite as fast as a galloping horse. Gazing on high [I] find the Middle States nine dots of smoke; And an expanse of ocean water the wine drained into a cup.32

In this newly rendered version, metaphor and metonymy abound; all are created in a similar fashion to that of the West, either rhetorically or discursively. The hare and toad in the first line are not figures of speech that refer to the moon. Rather they are literal reference to the two animals figuring in Chinese legends about the moon. Nevertheless, there is a metaphor in the first line. It is the use of “weep,” which transfers a human action to animals. The cloudy tower in the second line is not synecdochic reference to the moon, either; it is again a literal presentation of what the poet is supposed to observe in his dream. The third line contains a few related metaphors in interaction. The “jade wheel” is a conventional metaphor for the moon as the moon resembles it in round shape and translucent color, but its use in the poetic line is by no means conventional. Indeed, coupled with other words and images, it facilitates the emergence of a few refreshing metaphors. The Chinese words “zha” (roll, run over, press) and “lu” (dew) combine to produce a conceit which consists of two metaphors. First, the moon resembles a cart wheel that rolls in the sky. At the same time, the rolling wheel presses on its path and squeezes out dew drops. With extraordinary imagination, the poet expresses the idea that the dew drops at night are from the trajectory of the moon rolling on its obit in the sky. The startling conceit is turned into an extended metaphor. The dew spun out of the jade wheel makes the moonlight wet as though someone had sprinkled water on it. There is still another metaphor: the round light refers to the moon as a round ball of brightness. In a single poetic line, the poet creates several metaphors: the moon as a cart wheel that rolls in the sky; as a compressor that squeezes out dew; and as a

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sprinkler that sprays water, and as a ball of light that rolls. Light is something that cannot get wet, but the poet’s extraordinary imagination makes the moonlight wet. What an extraordinary imagination! In the fourth line, luanpei may have two possible meanings. On the one hand, it may refer to phoenix-shaped jade pendant. On the other, it may refer to jade pendants that make clanging sounds as “luan” is a word for clanging sound. Here, we have a metonymy: the thing worn signifies the wearer. Thus, luanpei refers to people who wear jade pendants. In this poem, the wearers are fairies in the moon palace. The fifth and sixth lines form an extended sentence. “Yellow dust” and “clear water” are two entirely different substances, one is a dry matter while the other is a liquid. In the poet’s mind, they change and turn into each other in aeons of time, but paradoxically, in terms of the universe, the change that takes places in a thousand years recurs fast. The swift change is imparted through a simile. The last two lines form another extended sentence, in which the poet appears directly on the scene. Gazing from far above on the moon, the nine prefectures of the Middle Kingdom look like nine dots of smoke and the vast expanse of ocean appears to be merely a discharge of wine into a cup. Each of the last two lines contains a metaphor. Li He has always been credited with strange and fantastic ideas in his poetic composition. This poem alone testifies to his reputation. The metaphors and similes that he creates are startlingly fresh, and full of tension between the tenor and vehicle. They doubtless remind us of the strange conceits created by the English Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. Pauline Yu cites some more Chinese poetic lines to advance her idea about the differences between Chinese and Western uses of metaphor. She argues that the cited examples display a connection which is not true metaphorical substitution but metonymic contiguity. A close reading of her analysis reveals a method of reading that overlooks a characteristic feature of classical Chinese: the formal absence of “to be” in predication. A dominant form of predication in classical Chinese is the pattern: A zhe B ye A 者 B也 (A [is] B). In this pattern, “to be” does not appear in form but is understood to exist between the two predicated terms. In terms of this predication pattern, Yu’s cited poetic lines support her claim only through manipulated readings. Yu translates Li Bai’s poetic line, “Yue xia fei tian jing 月 下 飞 天 镜 ”33 into the English line: “The moon descends, a flying heavenly mirror.” She comments, “where Li Bai provides the materials for an act of replacement, he does not carry it out, as a Western poet might do, by eliminating the word ‘moon’ and referring to it simply as ‘the flying

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heavenly mirror.’”34 If we read the poetic line differently, we may locate two metaphorical relations. First, following Yu’s understanding, we may say that the action of the descending moon can be compared to the flying of a heavenly mirror. In this reading, the poet follows the Chinese practice of omitting the connective between tenor and vehicle and states an implicit comparison. Or, we can understand the poetic line in another way. The word “xia” may be a locative word. According to this understanding, the poetic line should be understood as: under the moonlight, the poet sees the reflection of the moon on the river as a heaven-sent mirror. The poetic line therefore should be rendered as: “Under the moonlight flies a heavenly mirror.” There are two metaphors involved. One is the analogy of the moon to a mirror; the other is the movement of flying. The flickering moon image on the water looks as though the image were flying. With regard to another cited poetic couplet by Li Bai: “floating clouds: a traveler’s thoughts; setting sun: an old friend’s feelings 浮云游子意, 落日故人 情,”35 the four terms are not simply juxtaposed together to signify a metonymic relationship. Between the four terms, there is an analogical predication which is clearly implied according to Chinese poetics albeit not stated in words. In a predicated sentence, the four terms can be written as: “floating clouds resemble a traveler’s thoughts; the setting sun represents an old friend’s feelings.” In still another cited example, Yu renders Meng Haoran’s (689–740) two poetic lines as: “The mast emerges: a tree within river; / Waves adjoin: mountains atop the sea 樯出江中樹。波連海上 山.”36 The two poetic lines contain two metaphors when we join the implied tenor and vehicle. “The mast of a ship appears to resemble a tree in the river; / Waves conjoin to resemble mountains atop the sea.” My analysis thus overturns Yu’s conclusion: “In all of these cases the presence of both objects within the same line bases the connection more on metonymic contiguity than true metaphorical substitution.”37

Metaphysical Inquiry of Chinese and Western Metaphor The foregoing section examines the dichotomous view of Chinese and Western metaphor mostly from the perspective of critical practice. This section will focus on the Chinese conception of metaphor from the metaphysical point of view. For my purpose, I will analyze a view that sees a radical distinction between Chinese and Western conceptions and uses of

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metaphor. This view is advanced in Michelle Yeh’s article, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics.”38 By examining the Chinese concept bi in relation to Western metaphor in terms of poetry, poetics, and intellectual thought in both traditions, Michelle Yeh has made some keen observations but at the same time drawn some conclusions similar to the dichotomous views expressed by Pauline Yu even though Yeh does not refer to Yu’s study. While Yu’s study lays more emphasis on comparative readings of Chinese and Western uses of metaphor, Yeh’s study puts more emphasis on poetic and intellectual thought. This is clear in one of her statements: “While metaphor plays a vital role in both Western and Chinese poetry, its philosophical ramifications show significant differences. The Western emphasis on tension, disparity, and incompatibility is inseparable from the cognitive function of metaphor and poetry and ultimately, can be related to a dualistic, transcendental way of thinking. In contrast, the Chinese affirmation of ontological affinity and compatibility of things and categories is predicated on the immanental, organic world view of Chinese culture.”39 Despite the different emphases, Yeh has arrived at some similar observations and conclusions as her argument exactly follows the pattern of dichotomous views established by previous scholars. For example, one of her observations reads: “It is also important to understand that whereas metaphor is the figure par excellence in Western poetics, it never attains quite the same status in Chinese poetics. When it is discussed in Chinese poetics, the emphasis is not on the novelty, boldness, or insightfulness of a particular metaphor, but, rather, on how successful a metaphor is in correlating the human subject and the external world, or feeling and scene, and creating a unified experience.”40 While recognizing some affinities between Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor, Yeh draws a radical conclusion that denies compatibility of Chinese bi with Western metaphor. Basing herself on her discussion of the literary and conceptual implications of bi in the Chinese tradition, she concludes: “It is clear that there is no true equivalent of metaphor in Chinese poetics. Rather, bi can be viewed as an alternative approach to metaphor, which, understood in a broad sense, is a comparison of two things or categories.”41 Clearly, Yeh’s study is conducted on a theoretical framework, which I may term oppositional paradigm in Chinese and Western studies, which emphasizes contrastive differences rather than compatibilities in the Chinese and Western cultural traditions. Her subscription to the oppositional paradigm is clearly indicated in her line of argument that emphasizes a series of oppositions between Chinese conceptions of bi and Western

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conceptions of metaphor. The first opposition is between Western transcendental conception of metaphor and Chinese immanentist view of bi. The second opposition is between Western emphasis on contrast and difference and Chinese emphasis on unity and similarity. The third opposition is the contrast between Chinese and Western ontology and epistemology, believed to lie at the roots of Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor. Finally, her adoption of the oppositional paradigm is evidenced in her acceptance of Stephen Owen’s theory of the differences in Chinese and Western conceptions of cosmology and poetics. She argues, “As Derrida has demonstrated from a philosophical point of view, the Western concept of metaphor is a metaphor or catachresis for the attempt to reach or recover an absolute, transcendental signified (be it Truth, Logos, God, being, idea, or self).”42 By contrast, the Chinese conception of bi is based on “an immanent mode of thinking”: “Truth lies within the world, not beyond it, and is to be realized and experienced in this world. Human beings and all things in the universe are grounded in the same ontological reality, whether it be called Heaven, the Way, or the Ultimate Supreme.”43 Immanentism gives rise to natural correspondences and organicism: “If immanentism is presupposed by organicism, then, organicism is presupposed by ontological correspondence or analogy.”44 Immanentism is the ontological source of analogical thinking, which in turn is the source of Chinese metaphor: “To be, to create an analogy or metaphor, is then to present a pair of images that are paradigmatic of the ontological correspondence or ‘resonance’ between things in the organic universe.” There appears a contrast between Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor: “Instead of the tension and disjunction that we have observed in the Western concept of metaphor, bi presumes affinity and complementarity. Whereas wen (‘literature’) as the ‘pattern of man’ reflects the ‘pattern of heaven and earth,’ bi reflects the correspondence between the constituents of that pattern.”45 In addition to the ontological differences in Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor, she also emphasizes the epistemological differences: “Bi and metaphor differ also in terms of epistemological import. Whereas Western metaphor introduces a new kind of knowledge, through the creative genius of the poet, the Chinese bi reiterates the extensive connections between things situated in a holistic pattern or an uncreated universe.”46 As a conceptual examination of Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor, Yeh’s study has revealed some perceptive insights into the cultural and intellectual conditions within which Chinese and Western ideas

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and praxis of metaphor arose. Her emphasis on the differences and contrast between Chinese bi and Western metaphor is certainly true to a point, but most of her claims are sustained on skewed interpretations of the so-­ called cultural determinants in the Chinese and Western traditions. As a result, many of her speculations are problematic to say the least and at times obviously erroneous. For example, in her claim to the Western emphasis on difference and tension in metaphor, she argues, “The tension that is generated from difference makes the juxtaposition both notable and valuable. The emphasis on tension also suggests that, although one can be used to describe the other, the two categories are two independent, mutually exclusive, self-contained entities. The relationship between them is essentially one of contrastive juxtaposition. This is exactly what we do not find in the Chinese bi.”47 Yeh employs Chinese philosophical ideas of the Dao (Tao) or Way and the theory of yin and yang to support her argument, but she fails to note that the binary opposition between yin and yang is precisely founded on a contrastive juxtaposition. She quotes a passage from Andrew Plaks’s exposition of the idea of “complementary bipolarity” to support her view: “Heaven and Earth are opposites, but their action is concerted. Man and woman are opposites, but they strive for union. All beings stand in opposition to one another; what they do takes on order thereby.”48 This quotation explicitly expresses a contrastive juxtaposition and therefore militates against Yeh’s argument. In conceptual dimensions, Yeh maintains that the Western conception of metaphor originates from an imaginative creation whereas the Chinese conception of bi is basically the result of an imagistic and analogical thinking. She cites hexagram images and their meanings as an illustrating example: “each hexagram can be seen as a configuration of images that are related to one another analogically, and all the hexagrams in the Book of Changes are analogues of the two fundamental material forces that bring about and perpetuate change, yin and yang.”49 Here is an overstatement about the imagistic correspondence in the hexagram images. Except for a few hexagram images, hexagrams statements have a referential relationship that came into being not as a result of imagistic or analogical thinking but of highly abstract thinking. Take Yeh’s cited example of qian for instance: “the first hexagram, qian (≡), is expressed by a series of analogies: heaven, the male, horse, dragon, head, mind/heart, etc., all of which share the common attribute of strength and activity.” Except for a faint resemblance to a stylized image of the sky, the hexagram image of qian has neither imagistic nor analogical relationship to the named terms, whose common

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attribute of strength is derived not from natural correspondence but through arbitrary designation. If the cited terms (horse, heaven, the male, dragon, etc.) share any analogy to the attribute of strength, it is because there is a metaphorical process at work that sees similarity in differences. It is bold, novel, highly imaginative, fitting into Aristotle’s general definition: “Metaphor is the application to one thing of a name belonging to another thing.” Without invoking any other use of metaphors in Chinese poetry and discourse, this example alone is sufficient to dispute Yeh’s claim with regard to the essential differences between Chinese bi and Western metaphor. In the aspect of etymology, Yeh claims: “Compared with Western metaphor, there is an essential difference in their etymological import. Whereas metaphor literally means ‘to carry (pherein) over (meta),’ thus underlining the movement of transference from the vehicle to the tenor, from the signifier to the signified, bi emphasizes affinity or intimacy (yi) and even sameness (matching).”50 The case of hexagram images and hexagram statements have called Yeh’s claim into question. As my inquiry unfolds further, we will see that Chinese bi contains both Aristotle’s emphasis on “an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar” and a movement of transference as well as connecting function. As in the West, bi or metaphor is the figure par excellence in Chinese poetics. And in the discussion of bi, the emphasis is, as in the West, on the freshness, boldness, and imaginative creation of new metaphors. It is not as Yeh and other scholars claim that Chinese bi or metaphor only emphasizes lei or natural correspondence. It is not as they have claimed either that “it never attains quite the same status in Chinese poetics.” Mao Heng, Zheng Xuan, Kong Yinda, Liu Xie, Zhong Rong,51 Sikong Tu, Zhu Xi, and many other poet-scholars discuss bi extensively in their poetic treatises. Liu Xie, in particular, provides a systematic inquiry into the definition, nature, and function of bi in his comprehensive poetics. He writes: “What do we really mean by pi [bi]? A description of things used to stand for ideas, and the use of figures of speech to intimate the nature of certain facts.”52 He cites a long list of examples to illustrate his definition: Thus gold and pewter are used to stand for illustrious virtue, a jade tally signifies an outstanding man, a caterpillar means education, cicadas and grasshoppers denote howling and shouting, washing clothes symbolizes sadness of heart, and the rolling up of a mat is used as a figure for firmness of will: these illustrate the meaning of the pi. As to lines such as, “Your hemp

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robe is like snow,” or “The two outside horses go as if they were dancing,” they all belong to the pi category.”53

In the above passage, the examples of metaphor cited by Liu Xie show a fresh and startling transference from the tenor to the vehicle as in the case of gold versus illustrious virtue, jade versus uprightness, and caterpillar and education, etc. He also discusses the form, function, and rationale of bi: “Pi involves reasoning by analogy. … When we reason by analogy, we group things by comparing their general characteristics … the pi [is] a consequence of reasoning by analogy. Formally, the pi is a linguistic expression charged with accumulated indignation.”54 In Chinese poetry and poetics, bi has as rich a variety of creation as the Western metaphor. As Liu Xie points out, “there is a variety of ways in which a pi, that is, a metaphor, may be made: it may employ similarity of sound, visual resemblance, compatibility to a mental content, or capacity of being illustrated by certain facts.” He illustrates his ideas with examples from literary works: Sung Yü, in his “Kao-t’ang fu,” wrote: “The mourning of the branches sounds like a yü [a wind organ]”; this is a pi comparing sounds. Mei Sheng said in his “T’u-yuan,” “Ablaze in confusion, [the birds] look like dust in the midst of white clouds”; this is a pi comparing appearances. Chia I, in his “fu-niao fu,” said, “Calamity and blessing are intertwined like the strands of a cord”; this is a pi comparing a physical pattern with a pattern of events. Wang Pao’s “Tung-hsiao” contains, [The sound of a flute] “is soft and warm, like the voice of a loving father speaking to his son”; this is a pi comparing the sounds of instrument with the feeling of the heart. Ma Yung’s “Ch’an-ti” has these lines: [The tune of the long horizontal flute] “is rich and continuous, like the eloquence of Fa [Chu] and Ts’ai [Tse]”; ths is a pi comparing the wealth of a sound pattern with the eloquence of argument. And Chang Heng, in his “Nan-tu fu,” said, “The dancers rose and danced a Cheng dance which was like the drawing of a silk thread from a cocoon”; this is a pi comparing the manners of things.55

Liu Xie gives us some more examples from ancient Chinese poetry: As for Yang [Hsiung], Pan [Ku], Ts’ao [Chih], Liu [Chen], and their group, they describe mountains and rivers, and the patterns of clouds and things. In these descriptions they wove metaphors into beautiful forms, capable of starting the ears and bewitching the eyes of the reader. This is their achievement. In An-jen’s [or P’an Yueh’s] “Ying-fu,” the line “Shooting gold in a

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sandy beach,” and in Chi-ying’s [or Chang Han’s] miscellaneous poems, the line “Green branches look like a bundle of jade” are both in the true spirit of the pi.56

All the illustrating examples show that Chinese bi is not only as colorful as Western metaphor but also as bold, inventive, and creative as the Western counterpart. They, too, reveal a remarkable degree of “tension, disparity, and incompatibility” as Western metaphor. As Liu Xie is self-consciously aware of the importance of metaphor, he himself employs them to expound his idea in his conceptual discussion, “the pi and the hsing of the Ancient Poets/ Are perfect perceptions resulting from their responses to the stimuli of facts./ Things which are as far apart as Hu [in the north] and Yüeh [in the south]/ May through their similarities be as close as the liver and the gall.”57 Thus, we have sufficient reason to dispute the claim that “there is no true equivalent of metaphor in Chinese poetics” and more reasons to make a contrary claim that bi is an adequate equivalent to Western metaphor in Chinese tradition, endowed with similar qualities as its Western counterpart. Due to the differences in cultural conditions, the Chinese and Western concepts of metaphor certainly have differences, which I will examine in detail in Chap. 5. In our comparative study of Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor, however, we should not let the differences blind our eyes to the preconceived notions based on the oppositional paradigm. An overemphasis on differences in Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor is not only untrue to the Chinese traditions but it sometimes implicitly carries a prejudiced value judgment. For example, Yeh suggests: “[Western] Metaphor emphasizes creativity and invention, while bi extends what is already known with available exemplars.”58 This remark contains an implicit bias that the Chinese bi lacks creative originality. Moreover, her comparison of the Chinese use of bi examples and Western use of metaphors is conducted on very limited and purposefully chosen analytic data according to her preset agenda and her observations and conclusion therefore are devoid of universal value. For example, she examines the image of peach tree in a poem from the Book of Songs in contrast to the image of pines discussed by S. T. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria and comes to a very unconvincing conclusion: “There, the metaphor was founded on the comparison and contrast between the tenor and vehicle. Here, there is no contrast, conceptual or imagistic, concomitant with the comparison. … Coleridge gave the pines human qualities and made them

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part of the psyche of the human perceiver. Here, the peach is not assimilated into the human world, nor is the human subject assimilated into the tree.”59 The reason for her conclusion is that: “The metaphor is twofold: it works in terms of analogy (between the bride and the peach) as well as contiguity (in relation to spring). The bride and the peach are two exemplars of a general pattern, namely, the creative or procreative process that naturally takes place in the universe. There is no presupposition of radical difference between the two. Quite on the contrary, they arise from the same empirical and conceptual context.”60 The problem with this kind of contrastive analysis is too obvious. To use an analogy, I may say that she makes the mistake of comparing an English apple with a Chinese orange. In subject matter, the Chinese poem and Coleridge’s poetic lines belong to different categories with entirely different moods and tones: one positive and the other negative. To be fair in comparison, the Chinese example should be matched with a poem with similar motifs and tones, like Robert Burns’s famous poem, “My love is like a red, red rose,/ That’s newly sprung in June./ My love is like a melody,/ That’s sweetly played in tune.” If we contrast Burns’s poem with Coleridge’s poetic lines in terms of Yeh’s logic, we may come to a similar conclusion with regard to the Chinese poem. However, if we choose another Chinese poem, say, Li Yu’s (937–978) famous poem “Yu mei-jen”: When will the last flower fall, the last moon fade? So many sorrows lie behind. Again last night the east wind filled my roomO gaze not on the lost kingdoms under this bright moon. Still in her light my palace gleams as jade (Only from bright cheeks beauty dies). To know the sum of human suffering Look at this river rolling eastward in the spring.61

This poem composed by a deposed emperor under house arrest is similar in mood and tone to the poetic lines analyzed by Coleridge. There are definitely comparison and contrast between the tenor (sorrow, suffering, lost kingdom,) and the vehicle (fallen flower, fading moon, fading beauty, rolling river). The images are certainly assimilated into the human world and implicitly, if not explicitly, predicated. And there is definitely a presupposition of radical differences and tensions between the tenors and vehicles as in the contrast between sorrow and fallen flower, suffering versus

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fading moon, lost kingdom and dead beauty, fond hope and east wind, and the endlessness of emotional pains and the torrential flowing of the river in spring.

Is Chinese Metaphor Less Creative? In previous scholars’ established dichotomy between the Chinese and Western metaphor, there are a series of contrasting differences. In ontology, Chinese metaphor is predicated on “the Chinese affirmation of ontological affinity and compatibility of things and categories,” while Western metaphor is based on “the Western emphasis on tension, disparity, and incompatibility.” In formal presentation, while Western metaphor is generally extended in a discursive and logical manner, Chinese metaphor tends to be isolated single shots or variations of the same shots that do not form a sustained line of thought. In artistic effects and affects, while Chinese metaphor firmly grounds reading and interpretation on historical reality, Western metaphor always directs the reader to another world or worlds. The dichotomy builders do not seem to be aware of the problematics of their arguments, still less realize that the dichotomy they have established carries with it an implicit value judgment. From Yeh’s observation: “Instead of the tension and disjunction that we have observed in the Western concept of metaphor, bi presumes affinity and complementarity,” one may logically deduce that Chinese metaphor is less novel and daring than its Western counterpart. From another of her observation, “Whereas Western metaphor produces a new kind of knowledge, through the creative genius of the poet, the Chinese bi reiterates the extensive connections between things situated in a holistic pattern of an uncreated universe”62, one may draw the conclusion that Chinese metaphor tends to be less fresh and creative than Western metaphor. Pauline Yu makes similar observations. Yu observes that Chinese poets often resort to preestablished cultural conventions and literary stock phrases in the creation of metaphor. This observation conveys the impression that compared with Western metaphor, Chinese metaphor is less creative and less original. By contrasting the Chinese poet who as a discoverer engages in discovering analogies that already exist in the universe with the Western poet who, as the artificer, engages in manufacturing new correspondences between things,63 she unwittingly expresses a value judgment that in their different uses of metaphor, the Chinese poet is a less creative

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artist than his Western counterpart. Her ending remark, which cites Wallace Stevens’s elaboration on the motives for and consequences of Western metaphor, conveys this message in no uncertain terms: “the [Chinese] poets were not working with the models of a metaphysical realm or a creation from nothing.”64 Unlike the central figure in Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” who is the “single artificer” and “maker,” Yu says, “no Chinese poet would claim to sing, as Stevens puts it in his opening line of ‘Key West,’ ‘beyond the genius of the sea.”65 After reading these dichotomous views, the reader will surely ask: Are these observations true to the conditions of Chinese metaphor in relation to its Western counterpart? To put it another way, the question may be rephrased into two related questions: (1) Is Chinese metaphor less daring? (2) Is Chinese metaphor less creative? A brief look at Western intellectual thought on metaphor will give us an entirely different picture. With regard to the first question, we can almost argue for the contrary: the Chinese boldness and Western timidity. In early intellectual thought, the Western metaphor in the Aristotelian conception aims at effecting a kind of transference from one thing to another. As Aristotle puts it in his Poetics: “A metaphor is the transfer of a name that belongs to something else either from the genus to the species, or from the species to the genus, or from one species to another, or according to analogy.”66 The Aristotelian concept of metaphor reflects the dominance of analytic rationality and logic order. We can argue that because of the emphasis on transference from the genus to the species, or from the species to the genus, or from one species to another, early Western conception of metaphor is also located within an organic field of unity. In early Western thinking about metaphor, poets and theoreticians do not seem to be bolder than their Chinese counterparts, as they do not approve the creation of daring metaphors with startling effects. As if afraid that a daring metaphor would incur criticism, they tend to be apologetic for any invention of new conceits. Longinus notes this in his discussion of metaphor: For the same reason Aristotle and Theophrastus say that there can be some softening of bold metaphors by inserting as if, and as it were, and if I may use the figure, and if I may be so bold as to say. The qualification, they say, atones for the boldness. I admit this, but yet, as I said in speaking of figures, the right antidote for number and violence of metaphor are well timed and vigorous emotion and noble excellence of style.67

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Poets and writers who did not obey this rule of moderation often incurred adverse criticism in Western history. Even Plato was not spared. He was “much censured, for again and again he is carried away as in some frenzy of diction into violent and intemperate metaphors and allegorical bombast.”68 A brief look at the history of English poetry tells us that poets who were fond of using bold and quaint metaphors often incurred censure from critics. The “Metaphysical” poets of the seventeenth century, to whom Anglo-American Modernist poets— among whom T. S. Eliot is a prominent case—were indebted, resembled ancient Chinese poets in their use of bold conceits. Qian Zhongshu, the Chinese erudite, highlights their shared penchant for conceits in his comparative studies of Chinese and Western poetics.69 For this, English Metaphysical poets were criticized as “obscure” and “quaint.” Dr. Johnson once spoke rather disapprovingly of Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley who enjoyed using fantastic conceits, accusing them of the fault that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”70 His criticism reminds us of the same charge that had been leveled at Anglo-American Modernist poets in the first two decades of the twentieth century and at some modern Chinese poets who were criticized for writing what were labeled “obscure poems” [menglong shi]. In contrast to the fate of English Metaphysical poets, ancient Chinese poets did not encounter as much adverse criticism for using startling metaphors. In fact, they were encouraged to create poetry with unexpected conceits, as can be seen from a famous Chinese poetic aphorism by Du Fu, China’s sage poet: “If I cannot create poems with startling effects, I won’t rest in peace even after death.” Also, in Chinese literary theory, it is widely believed that “Good poetry must have unexpected features.” If the reader cares to leaf through a Chinese anthology of the most popular and famous poems since ancient times, he or she will surely find that the most popular poems of enduring appeal are just those employing daring metaphors, strange conceits, and surprising juxtapositions. In a poem titled “Seeing Bao Haoran Off To Eastern Zhejiang,” the Song Dynasty poet Wang Guan writes: Rivers are the floating eye liquid.       水是眼波横, Mountains, a beauty’s arched brows.      山是眉峰聚. May I ask where you are going, sir?      欲問行人去哪边? To the place of charming eyes and brows.    眉眼盈盈处.71

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It would be difficult to speculate how Dr. Johnson would respond to the metaphors in this poem, but we can safely say that Anglo-American Modernist poets would endorse the metaphor in the poem. We can be certain of Pound’s endorsement, so can we be of Eliot’s approval. Eliot, who was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets, defends the use of “obscure” and “quaint” conceits and considers it an effective way to cure the poetic ailment of “dissociation of sensibilities” in English poetry. Eliot thinks that modern times demands original and difficult modes of presentation to express the modern sentiments: “We can only say that it appears that poets of our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”72 The important rule to remember is that the poet needs to digest various experiences and to perceive the apt relation between disparate things. Otherwise, a poet yoking disparate elements together by force would deserve Dr. Johnson’s condemnation: “The force of this [Dr. Johnson’s] impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united …. a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the mind is omnipresent in poetry.”73 Classic Chinese poets share the Metaphysical poets’ love of difficult and quaint conceits. Some of them deserve Eliot’s praises for the metaphysical poets, who “employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically ‘metaphysical’; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it.”74 Some Chinese poems composed with the omission of logical connections deserve Eliot’s remarks in the same essay: “… instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.”75 Qian Zhongshu points out that ancient Chinese poets were enamored by strange metaphors or conceits, which in the Chinese tradition is called quyu (tortuous metaphor). Famous Tang poets like Li Bai, Li He, and Li Shangyin were especially fond of creating conceits. In assessing the achievement of the “Metaphysical” poets, Eliot sums up a few points that modern poets may put to good use. These points parallel similar poetic knacks in classic Chinese poetry. For instance, Eliot appreciates the “elaboration of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can

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carry it.” He cites Cowley’s comparison of the world to a chessboard in “To Destiny” and Donne’s comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses in “A Valediction: Of Weeping.” Eliot admires those poets for their ability to create connections between disparate things, whose explication requires considerable mental agility on the part of the reader. In a discussion of Li He’s poetry, Qian Zhongshu arrives at similar insights into the making of conceits. He says: “In Li He’s depiction of objects, his method of creating metaphors is very tortuous …. When two objects are similar, one can use one object to compare with the other. But when the two objects resemble each other, they are similar only in part, not in the whole. If two objects resemble each other in the whole, they belong to the same category. Since they have the same roots, it is unnecessary to compare them. Li He often employed one end of similarity and expanded it to another end which has no resemblance in the original.”76 Citing Li He’s poem, “Song of Heaven,” Qian Zhonghsu makes a detailed analysis of two poetic lines. The first one is “Floating cloud is a silver stream that imitates the gurgling of water 银浦流云學水聲.”77 Qian notes that Li He first compared “cloud” to water in terms of a common expression: “floating cloud.” Then, he extends the analogy beyond water flow and gives it an auditory quality. As a result, the cloud resembles not only flowing water but also its sound. Qian cites another of Li He’s poems “King of Qin Drinks Wine” and analyzes one poetic line: ‘Xi He knocks at the sun and it emits the sound of glass 羲和敲日玻璃聲.”78 He observes: “That the sun is compared to a ball of colored glaze is because both radiate brightness. But when the sun comes to Li He’s pen, it resembles the light of glass as well as having the sound of glass” (Ibid.). Here, I am citing another poem by the Tang poet He Zhizhang as an illustration: A tall tree is decorated with clear jade;      Dangling with thousands of green silk braids.   I wonder who tailors fine leaves with scissors?   February’s spring wind cuts them into shape.  

碧玉妝成一樹高, 万條垂下綠絲绦. 不知細葉谁裁出, 二月春风似剪刀.79

In this poem there are a series of metaphors, which come into being as a result of the poet’s perception of similarities in color (blue jade for green leave), shape (dangling branches for girls’ braids), texture (silk for the leave’s sheen), agent (tailor for February), and function (scissors for spring wind). All the tenors and vehicles are so disparate that one has to admire the poet’s imagination in creating connections.

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Metaphor is an effective means to objectify abstract ideas and conditions such as joy, sorrow, and human emotions. Through startling metaphors, some Chinese poets were able to objectify the mental state of confusion, sorrow, and melancholia. In Li Qingzhao’s poem, sorrow is objectified as a disorderly ball of yarn: “scissors cannot cut it, nor can it be sorted out.” In Li Yu’s poem, it is compared to the torrential spring river: “How much sorrow do you have, Sir?/ It is a spring river rolling eastward.” In one of Li Bai’s poems, the magnitude of sorrow is measured by a hyperbolic length of white hair: Three thousand yards of white hair Equals the length of my sorrow. I don’t know how autumn frost Suddenly appears in the bright mirror.80

In their use of bold metaphors, classical Chinese poets pioneered a way of creating images admired and emulated by the Modernist poets in the West. Eliot’s depiction of a languid evening as “a patient etherized on a table” and Prufrock’s life as an existence “measured out in coffee spoons” has often been cited as characterizing Modernist way of presentation. In fact, the same technique of presentation was used by the English Metaphysical poets in the seventeenth century and by classic Chinese poets since high antiquity. Li Shangyin is another famous Tang poet who frequently used Eliotian conceits. It is worth noting that like Li He, he has always been characterized as having a penchant for using “obscure,” “quaint,” and “difficult” metaphors—the same words used to describe the Metaphysical poets and Modernist poets. Li Shangyin is particularly good at describing acute feelings of lovesickness. In a poem, he objectifies the undying love of a person in two poetic lines with two unusual metaphors: “a spring silkworm won’t die until it spits out its silk;/ a candle will stop shedding tears only after it is burnt 春蠶到死丝方尽, 臘炬成灰泪且干.” In another poem, he employs a conceit to describe the acute lovesickness of a girl who, confined to her boudoir, can only while away her monotonous life by burning incense and pining away. The poem ends with these two lines: My spring heart ought not to vie with flowers:      春心莫与花爭发, An inch of lovesickness is an inch of incense ash.     一寸相思一寸灰.81

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Li Shangyin’s associating “lovesickness” to “incense ash” is precisely the same as Eliot’s relating Prufrock’s futile, meaningless way of existence to “coffee spoons.” The way of presentation is truly to yoke two unrelated experiences together as a means of making what is internal and invisible visible and perceptible with startling associations. While the meaninglessness of Prufrock’s life is objectified by the number of coffees he drinks, Li Shangyin measures the magnitude of the girl’s lovesickness by the length of accumulated incense ash. If there is any difference between Eliot’s metaphor and the Chinese poets’ metaphor, it is that Eliot’s description implies a criticism of that kind of existence. By contrast, the Chinese girl’s self-admonition contains an indignant protest. In Chinese culture, incense is always associated with things sacred and holy. By associating the burning of incense into ashes with unfulfilled love, the poet not only objectifies the girl’s intangible emotion, but also alludes to the destruction of noble feelings and beautiful things, thus giving the poem a kind of tragic sublimity. The metaphorical formula, “an inch of something abstract is an inch of something tangible” is frequently used in classic Chinese poetry. A common saying has these two lines: “An inch of time is worth an inch of gold,/ But an inch of gold cannot buy an inch of time.” The originality of Li Shangyin’s poem lies in his yoking together two entirely unrelated subjects. His usage is beyond ordinary imagination, hence daring in perception, startling in effects, and aesthetically creative and powerful. In the comparative studies of Chinese and Western poetry, there is a claim that suggests that while Western poetry tends to use more metaphor, Chinese poetry tends to prefer simile. Since in some people’s view, simile is a less powerful figure of speech than metaphor, this claim contains an implicit value judgment. This judgment does not stand for two reasons. First, the Chinese poetic tradition uses a lot of metaphors. Second, a simile is not necessarily weaker than a metaphor in a given context. The evocative power of a trope depends on its use in a context. Oftentimes, a simile is more evocative than a metaphor. The grammarian’s distinction between metaphor and simile and privileging the former over the latter is theoretically untenable. Recent studies of metaphor have problematized the traditional dichotomy between metaphors and similes and proposed to erase the privileging of former over latter. As the introduction to a special issue on metaphor in Poetics Today points out, “recent metaphor studies have tended to diminish this contrast between metaphor and simile. Instead of seeing similes as explicated metaphors (this is still the traditional viewpoint), both simile and metaphor can be considered members of the same

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cognitive category.”82 Wheelwright argues strongly against the grammarian’s distinction between metaphor and simile and calls for its rejection. He cites Burns’s poetic line, “My love is like a red, red rose” as an example and argues that despite the fact it is a simile in terms grammatical analysis, it is endowed with more “metaphorical vitality” than its metaphoric form, “love is a red rose.” In the Chinese tradition, there are numerous powerful and evocative similes. In many ways, similes can convey some subtle ideas that cannot be imparted by metaphors. For example, there is an expression depicting the relationship between devoted Chinese couples as “respecting each other like guests.” This expression is more subtle than a metaphorical expression: “respect each other as guests.” If a married couple treats each other as guests, then there is a distance between them. By contrast, the simile suggests that they respect each other in the way a host and a guest interact but at the same time they are not guests. Thus, the simile conveys more intimacy than a metaphor.

Conceptual Groundings of Metaphor In my foregoing analysis of the views on Chinese and Western metaphor from the critical perspective, I have observed that scholars who hold a dichotomous view have invariably attributed the differences between Chinese and Western conceptions and uses of metaphor to the differences in philosophical thought. This makes it necessary to examine the metaphysical foundation of metaphor and see whether Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor are indeed founded on different conceptual groundings as some scholars have claimed. Since metaphor is directly related to language, I will examine the conceptual groundings in terms of both language philosophy and metaphysics. In my studies of views on Chinese metaphor, I notice an interesting phenomenon. While some Western thinkers who have had minimal knowledge of Chinese language and literature viewed Chinese conception of metaphor as not any different from that of the West, some specialists of Chinese culture tend to dichotomize Chinese and Western metaphors and locate the root cause of the differences in conceptions of language and thought. Metaphor is a figurative use of language. In his comparative study of Chinese and Greek thought, the French thinker Francois Jullien states: “figurative meaning cannot be conceived of independently from a certain worldview.”83 Because of the belief in the vital connection between cosmology and figurative language, some Sinologists hold the opinion that in early China,

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inchoate language theory, like early poetics, came under the heavy influence of cosmological thought pattern. In early Chinese poetics, spontaneous growth of literary expression characterizes early Chinese poetry. In some Sinologists’ view, spontaneity in lyric inspiration is not conducive to premeditation, nor is it helpful for the appearance of figurative language. But unlike Sinologists, some Western thinkers like Rousseau, Condillac, Warburton, and Vico held the view that the language of early people, Chinese or Western, is figurative as a rule. In the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau raised a proposition “That the First Language Had to be Figurative.”84 Derrida is correct in pointing out that Rousseau was indebted to other scholars, such as Vico, Condillac, and Warburton, for his proposition.85 Nowadays there is little disagreement on Rousseau’s proposition. The word “figurative” has its primary dictionary definition as “representing or represented by a figure or resemblance.”86 Condillac, to whom Rousseau is indebted for his proposition, located the link between written language and visual picture, which has been supported by the evolution of Chinese written characters. The inherent relationship between pictorial representation and poetic representation is still visible in oriental languages such as Chinese. Rousseau observed, The genius of oriental languages, the oldest known, absolutely refutes the assumption of a didactic progression in their development. These languages are not at all systematic or rational. They are vital and figurative. The language of the first men is represented to us as the tongues of geometers, but we see that they were the tongues of poets.87

By oriental languages, he meant Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese ideograms both of which use pictorial and ideographic representation. From Condillac’s “picture” to Rousseau’s “figurative,” from “the tongues of geometers” to “the tongues of poets,” we can see the lost trail linking imagistic representation to poetic representation through figurative language. Instead of using their terminology, Derrida employs “metaphorical,” a term more closely associated with literary art. He says, “Epic or lyric, story or song, archaic speech is necessarily poetic. Poetry, the first literary form, is metaphorical in essence.”88 Metaphor, the hallmark of poetic language, is the intermediary between thought and poetic representation. Warburton, to whom Rousseau is also indebted for his proposition, did not think that the originary metaphor comes from “the warmth of a Poetic Fancy, as is commonly supposed.” He maintained, “The

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Metaphor arose as evidently from the Rusticity of Conception.”89 Thus, metaphor is the primeval way to mediate between reality and abstraction. Warburton used the Chinese language to illustrate the evolution from image through writing to metaphor, This way of Speaking by simile, we may conceive to answer to the Chinese Marks or Characters in Writing; and as from such Marks proceeded the abbreviated Method of Alphabetic Letters, so from the Similitude, to make Language still more expedite and elegant, came the METAPHOR; which is indeed but a Similitude in little; For Men so conversant in matter still wanted sensible Images to convey abstract Ideas.”90

Thus, conceptually, Western thinkers of ancient times, despite their limited knowledge of Chinese language and poetry, argue for the similarity in conceptions of language and metaphor irrespective of race, ethnicity, culture, or forms of writing. Their opinion coincides with contemporary theories of metaphor and language. Scholars on metaphor have now come to the consensus that metaphor is not just a special use of language but an integral condition of language, and metaphorical thinking is a fundamental form of verbal conceiving for all people, primitive or otherwise. If, as Lakoff and Johnson suggest, “our conceptual system is largely metaphorical,” and if we cannot locate the root of difference in language, where lies the root cause for the dichotomy between Chinese and Western metaphor? Previous scholars who have established the dichotomy between Chinese nonmetaphoricity and Western metaphorical thinking generally have located the root cause in the differences in worldviews and cosmology. Martin Ekstroem aptly sums up the reason for the dichotomy: “With remarkable synergy, the notion of correlative cosmology has come to define the fundamental difference between the Chinese and the Western systems of thought. Against the Occidental, Platonic division of the world into phenomena and ideas, sinologists post a cosmology whereby things of the same category (lei) constantly interact and exert influence on one another. According to this model, the Occidental notion of metaphor is inapplicable to the Chinese figure of speech that to the untrained eye may resemble it.”91 In his long article, Ekstroem studies the relationship between some early Chinese texts concerning aural and optical illusions and the Confucian scholar Mao Heng’s exegesis of the Book of Songs, and argues that early Chinese poetics displayed a strong interest in metaphoricity and the philosophical discourses on the phenomenon of illusion, that

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is, the deceptive resemblance (si 似) between disparate objects, the discrepancy between appearance and actuality, not only facilitated the creation of metaphor but also gave rise to the abundance of metaphors in early Chinese poetry. In a footnote, he points out: “if we were to switch from an ontological to an epistemological perspective, some early Chinese comments on figurative language sound remarkably, and perhaps disappointedly [for those dichotomy creators, my note] like Aristotle’s comment about observing the similar in the dissimilar.”92 It seems that the basic reason for the emergence of the dichotomy is not just linguistic or rhetorical; it is at the base metaphysical. Metaphysically, scholars have viewed Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor as based on two different models of epistemology. The Western conception of metaphor is predicated on the Cartesian separation between the observing subject and the observed object, a disjunction between a transcendental realm and an immanent realm. By contrast, the Chinese conception is believed to rest on a unity of heaven and man, and a lack of transcendental realm in Chinese metaphysics. In Pauline Yu’s study, she asks us to bear in mind the “assumption of a fundamental dualism between the physical and the metaphysical” in the Western conception of metaphor and the monism in the Chinese tradition.93 On the metaphysical level, she attributes the differences to a metaphysical dichotomy between the Chinese and the Western worldview or cosmology, and differences between Chinese and Western epistemology. First, in the Chinese tradition, “There was no rationally reconstructable, alternative, or ideal universe to be imitated in the poem or created by the author, because the universe was assumed to be uncreated and ‘organismic.’ Human, natural, and even spiritual beings partook of the same principle, were made of the same substance, and were subject to identical process.”94 Quoting an idea of Zhuangzi about the omnipresence of the Dao, she suggests, “The transcendental was not beyond, but immanent in all things: as Zhuangzi explained to Master Dongguo in a frequently cited passage, the Tao is everywhere—in the grass, the tile shards, and even the shit and the piss. And there was no established model of creation ex nihilo. In contrast to the injunctions of Western didacticism, … the moralistic thrust in Chinese poetry and poetics did not invoke the construction of a better—because ideal and universal—world, but rather specific comment on and criticism of this one; the world is presented not as it might be or ought to be, but as it is.”95 Similarly, Michelle Yeh also invokes Zhuangzi’s idea of the equality of

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things in the world as metaphysical basis for the nonexistence of Western-­ style metaphor.96 Second, in their opinion, the Chinese metaphorical mind does not wish to reach a transcendental realm because there is no such realm for the mind to reach: “Movement beyond a Chinese poem is metonymical, occurring, as Wellek and Warren put it, ‘within a single world of discourse.’ It does not head toward another, transcendental realm that is autonomous and different in kind from the sensory world of the poet and his readers, simply because such a realm was not held to exist.”97 In the following passage, Ekstroem adequately summarizes how the perceived differences in cosmology and natural growth of poetry allow scholars to argue for the nonmetaphoricity of Chinese poetry: In Western poetics, the ontological difference between the earthly chair and the ideal chair yields the division of the metaphor into sensuous vehicle and abstract tenor: “The metaphorical exists only within the boundaries of [Western] metaphysics” (Heidegger’s Der Satz vom Grund, quoted approvingly by Yu 1987: 17). In creating a metaphor, the Western poet thus abstracts meaning from one domain and imports it to another. By contrast, since Chinese cosmology not only lacks the notion of a “higher reality” but also assumes that all things spontaneously slot into natural categories, Chinese lyric can only link (images of) objects metonymically, hence also the gulf in the appreciation of the “literary work.”98

I venture to suggest that the differences in cosmology cannot be used to support the dichotomy, because, on the one hand, in the history of Western thought, there have been similar views on the unity of things, and on the other hand, there have been conceptions of dualism between transcendental realm and immanent realm in Chinese thought. In the West, the idea about the unity of all things in the universe may be traced to pre-­ Socratic times. In his philosophical as well as philological study of Heraclitus’s fragments on the Logos, Heidegger comes to this understanding of the Logos: “[I]t is wise to listen to the pronouncement of the Λóγoς and to heed the meaning of what is pronounced, while repeating what one has heard in the statement: One is All. There is Λóγoς. It has something to relate. Then there is also that which it relates, to wit, that everything is one.”99 Richardson offers further clarification of Heidegger’s understanding of Heraclitus’s idea of the Logos. As ῝Εν Πάντα is the One, the Only, that unifies all beings in themselves, insofar as it gathers them

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into themselves, letting them lie forth in non-concealment as themselves. Since the Logos is One, it may be called the utterly Simple.100 Here we can see a striking similarity between Heraclitus’s idea of the Logos and Zhuangzi’s understanding of the Dao. We should also dispute the claim that objects in Chinese poetry do not stand for something else other than themselves because of a lack of transcendental realm and a strong emphasis on immanent presence of ideas in concrete things. In the Chinese tradition, it is not that there is no first principle nor transcendental realm in Chinese thought. As I have argued in an article, the Chinese concept, the Dao (or Taiji) is a transcendental first principle equivalent to Western first principles like God, Idea, Logos, even though it is also immanent in concrete things.101 The Zhouyi (Book of Changes) states, “That which rises above tangible shapes is called the Dao; that which exists in tangible shapes is called object.”102 This statement clearly puts forward a distinction between a transcendental principle and concrete objects and affirms that there is a distinction between the first principle and tangible things, and the opposition between a transcendental realm and immanent space is indicative of the dualist thinking fundamental to the creation of metaphors. Thus, even from a philosophical point of view, the Chinese and Western dichotomy on metaphor does not have a valid conceptual leg to stand on. Alongside Chinese monism, some scholars have also attributed the dichotomous view to ideas of organicism and correlative thinking, because of which Chinese metaphor is founded on natural correspondences. It seems that they have overlooked another fact that organicism and correlative thinking are not alien to Western thought either. In his recounting of ideas concerning metaphor in the middle ages, Terence Hawkes states, “in the Middle Ages, a fundamental metaphor was that the world was a book written by God and like any other book, it could and did ‘mean’ more than it apparently ‘said’. In fact, the world was full of metaphors, constructed by God to communicate a meaning when ‘interpreted’ properly.”103 There is a claim by previous scholars that the Chinese poet who creates metaphors is not so much a creator of metaphors as a discoverer of correlations among things. Interestingly, this view of the poet as the discoverer of analogies is very much an important idea in the Western thought: “the relationships that the metaphor establishes are created in the first place by God; the poet merely discovers them.”104 As a discoverer, the poet is engaged in spontaneous creation similar to the Chinese view of poetry: “far from expressing his own view of the world, and decorating it

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to suit his own delight, the poet’s task is ultimately one of discovering God’s meaning, and his metaphors are means to that end.”105 The dichotomy holders do think that Chinese tradition has Western-­ style metaphors. Pauline Yu identifies in Buddhist literature a mode of poetic representation close to the Western use of metaphor in its sustained use of analogy, but she qualifies her idea with the claim that “Although these may look like Western metaphors, their provenance identifies them rather as elements of cultural or religious codes.”106 Moreover, she emphasizes the organicism and nondualism shared by Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist thought, and makes the assertion that “even the Buddhist poet is not alluding to a realm that is fundamentally other from this one or establishing correspondences de ̄ novo ̄ between the sensible and the suprasensible. Analogies already exist, to be discovered by the poet, not manufactured. Because he is affirming correlations, and not creating or asserting them, he is not ‘teaching’ us something new in the way his Western counterpart is presumed to be doing.”107 The idea of organicism is not alien to the West either. The rise of Romanticism in the West proliferated and amplified Plato’s artistic principle of organic unity. In the Phaedrus, he states that every discourse should be constructed like a “living creature.” Coleridge’s view is typical of the Romantic view. As Hawkes points out: “The fundamental principle of Coleridge’s philosophy is organicism. Like a true Platonist, he wished to discover the organic connection of all things, and to destroy the artificial boundaries between them constructed by Aristotelian analysis. In this, he can be said to have inherited the distinction between Classical and Romantic art that came to him from Germany through the work of the Schlegel, Goethe, and Schiller.”108

The Universality of Metaphor I have demonstrated through critical analysis and close reading that the so-called Western-style metaphor is ubiquitous in Chinese poetry. In numerous studies of Chinese figures of speech, Chinese scholars, through a functional analysis of a large number of poetic examples, have arrived at a similar conclusion held by Western scholars of metaphor: the ubiquitous presence of metaphor in everyday language and literary discourse.109 In most practical studies of Chinese poetic techniques, we will find three main categories of metaphor, mingyu (transparent metaphor), yinyu (hidden metaphor), and jieyu (borrowed metaphor).110 In addition to the

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three main categories, scholars have found that over history, poets created some other variations of functional metaphor such as lianguan bi (chain metaphor), also called boyu (comprehensive metaphor), lianxiang bi (associational metaphor), also known as quyu (literally, twisted metaphor), shuangguan bi (punning metaphor), also known as yingdai bi (metaphor within a metaphor), and chentuo bi (complementary metaphor), also known as mibi (riddle metaphor).111 In my conceptual and critical analysis of Chinese and Western metaphors from a combined perspective of syntax, rhetoric, and aesthetics, I have demonstrated that the Chinese tradition not only abounds in Western-style metaphor but also has some special forms of metaphor, which will open our minds to new horizons in the study of metaphor and poetry. I end this chapter with the conclusion: There is no tenable dichotomy between Chinese and Western metaphor and metaphor is universal in poetic compositions across cultures.

Notes 1. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 3. 2. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 57. 3. An incomplete list of names would include Longxi Zhang, Haun Saussy, Eugene Ouyang, and others. 4. Wai-lim Yip, Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 11. 5. Yip, Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres, p. 19 and p. 24. 6. Yip, Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres, pp. 23–24. 7. Yip, Hiding the Universe: Poems by Wang Wei (New York: Grossman, 1972), p. vi. 8. Stephen Owen, “Transparences: Reading the Tang Lyric,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 39.2 (1979), p. 233. 9. Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 56–7. 10. Owen, “Transparences: Reading the Tang Lyric,” p. 237 11. Owen’s translation. 12. Owen, “Transparences: Reading the Tang Lyric,” p. 237. 13. Owen, “Transparences: Reading the Tang Lyric,” 251. 14. Owen, “Transparences: Reading the Tang Lyric,” p. 239. 15. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 3.2 (1981), p. 205.

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16. See Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 17. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 208. 18. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 217. 19. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 213. 20. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 217. 21. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 220. 22. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 212. 23. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 206. 24. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 221. 25. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 224. 26. Quan Tang shi (Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty), reprint (Taipei: Minglun, 1971), p. 4396. 27. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 206. 28. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” pp. 206–7. 29. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 212. 30. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 212. 31. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 221. 32. My own translation. 33. Li Bai, Li Taibai quanji (Complete Works of Li Bai) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), “Du Jingmen songbie (Farewell on Crossing Jingmen). 34. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 218. 35. Quoted from Li Taibai quanji (Complete Works of Li Bai) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), “Song youren” (Sending off a Friend), vol. 2, p. 837. My own translation. 36. Meng Haoran, “Guangling song Xue Ba” (Sending off Xue Ba in Guangling), in Quan Tang shi (Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty), reprint (Taipei: Minglun, 1971), juan 160, no. 56. 37. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 218. 38. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” Comparative Literature, vol. 39, no. 3 (1987): 237–54. 39. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 252. 40. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 252. 41. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 252. 42. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 245. 43. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 249. 44. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 250. 45. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 250. 46. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 250. 47. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 247. 48. Andrew Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in The Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 43–53.

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49. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 252. 50. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 246. 51. Zhong Rong, Shipin xu (Preface to The Ranking of Poetry), Lidai shihua (Poetics Talks through the Dynasties), p. 3. 52. Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, p. 277. 53. Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, p. 277. 54. Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, p. 276. 55. Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, p. 278. 56. Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, p. 279. 57. Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, pp. 279–80. 58. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 250. 59. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 251. 60. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 251. 61. Translated by Cyril Birch, taken from Anthology of Chinese Literature from Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, edited by Cyril Birch (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 352. 62. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 250. 63. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 224. 64. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 224. 65. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 224. 66. Allan H.  Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism: Plato To Dryden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), p. 99. 67. Allan H. Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism, p. 183. 68. Allan H. Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism, p. 184. 69. Qian Zhongshu, Tanyi lu (Discourses on Art) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), juan 5, section 53. 70. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950), p. 243. 71. Tang Song mingjia cixuan (Selected Poems by Famous Poets of the Tang and Song Dynasties) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980), English translation is mine. 72. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 248. 73. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 243. 74. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 242. 75. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 242. 76. Qian Zhongshu, Tanyi lu (Discourses on Art) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), p. 51. 77. Quoted from Quan Tang shi (Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty), reprint (Taipei: Minglun, 1971), Tianshangyao (Song of Heaven) by Li He. My own translation. 78. Quoted from Quan Tang shi (Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty), “Qinwang yinjiu” (King of Qin Drinks Wine) by Li Shangyin. My own translation.

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79. Quoted from Quan Tang shi (Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty), “Yongliu” (Ode to the Willow Tree) by He Zhizhang. My own translation. 80. Li Bai, “Qiupu ge 17” (17 Songs of Autumn River), in Li Taibai quanji (Complete Works of Li Bai) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), no. 15. 81. Quoted from Quan Tang shi (Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty), “Wuti” (A Poem with No title) by Li Shangyin. My own translation. 82. Monika Fludernik et  al., “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction,” Poetics Today, 20.3 (1999): p. 384. 83. Francois Jullen, Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, tr., Sopphie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 166. 84. J.J.  Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, in On The Origin Of Language, trans. John H.  Moran and Alexander Gode, New  York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966, p.12. 85. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 272. 86. Webster’s Third New World Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged (Springfield, MA: G.C. Merrian Co., 1976), p. 848. 87. Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, p.11. 88. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p.271. 89. William Warburton, The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton (London: Hansord and Sons, 1811), vol. 4, p. 170. 90. William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (London: Fletcher Gyles, 1741), vol. 2, part 1, p. 94. 91. Martin Svensson Ekstroem, “Illusion, Lie, and Metaphor: The Paradox of Divergence in Early Chinese Poetics,” Poetics Today, 23.2 (2002), p. 255. 92. Martin Svensson Ekstroem, “Illusion, Lie, and Metaphor: The Paradox of Divergence in Early Chinese Poetics,” Poetics Today, 23.2 (2002), p. 256, Note 14. 93. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, pp. 17–19. 94. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 221. 95. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 221. 96. Michelle Yeh, “Metaphor and Bi: Western and Chinese Poetics,” p. 249. 97. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 220. 98. Ekstroem, “Illusion, Lie, Metaphor,” p. 256. 99. See Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, pp. 69–70. 100. W.  J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology To Thought (The Hague, M. Nijhoff, 1963), pp. 492–93. 101. See Ming Dong Gu, “The Universal ‘One’: Towards A Common Conceptual Basis for Chinese and Western Studies,” Diacritics, 32.2 (2002): 86–105.

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102. Zhouyi zhengyi (Correct Meanings of the Book of Changes), juan 7, in Shisanjing zhushu (Thirteen Classics Annotated) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), p. 83a. 103. Terence Hawkes, Metaphor (London: Methuen and Co., 1972), p. 17. 104. Hawkes, Metaphor, p. 20. 105. Hawkes, Metaphor, p. 18. 106. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 223. 107. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” p. 224. 108. Hawkes, Metaphor, p. 44. 109. Among them, Chen Wangdao’s study is the most influential. Indeed, his Xiucixue fafan (Fundamental of Rhetoric) is the first systematic study of Chinese figures of speech and has exerted a lasting impact. 110. See Chen Wangdao, Xiucixue fafan (Fundamentals of Rhetoric), chs. 5 and 6; Lin Donghai, Shifa juyu (Illuminating Examples of Poetic Methods) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1981), pp. 109–123; Zhou Shengya, Gudai shige xiuci (Rhetoric of Ancient Poetry) (Beijing: Yuwen chubanshe, 1995), pp. 14–19. 111. See Lin Donghai, Shifa juyu (Illuminating Examples of Poetic Methods) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1981), pp. 113–122.

CHAPTER 5

Metaphor as Signs: Bi-Xing and Metaphor/ Metonymy

In the previous chapter, I have examined Chinese and Western conceptions and uses of metaphor and demonstrated with critical analysis that metaphor is universal and there are no fundamental differences in Chinese and Western conceptions and uses of metaphor. Having reconfirmed the universality of metaphor for Chinese and Western traditions, this chapter aims to answer these questions: Are there any salient features in Chinese and Western traditions that distinguish Chinese and Western metaphor? If there are any, what are they? Do the salient features constitute a dichotomy in Chinese and Western conception of metaphor? What is the rationale, if any, for the distinctive differences between Chinese and Western metaphors? And how can we make use of the common ground and differences for conceiving ways to bridge the aesthetic gap between cultures? I believe that Chinese metaphor in poetry does have some special features. They are to be found in the inner mechanism of the Chinese dual concept bi-xing (inspired metaphor or metonymic metaphor). In this chapter, I will focus on a conceptual analysis of the dual concept in relation to its Western counterpart. Specifically, I will compare and contrast Chinese bi-­xing with Western metaphor/metonymy from an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates literary analysis, rhetorical study, and conceptual thinking. With the aid of recent achievements in research on metaphor and metonymy,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_5

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I will reconceptualize Chinese notions of bi-xing, and on the basis of the reconception, advance a new model for understanding Chinese metaphor in particular and metaphor and metonymy in general.

Integrating Rhetorical and Philosophical Approaches to Metaphor Conceptually, there are two approaches to the studies of metaphor: rhetorical and philosophical approaches. In his “Commentary” on the main articles in a special issue on metaphor in New Literary History, Jonathan Culler identifies two primary modes of thinking involved in the creation and interpretation of metaphor: the via philosophia and the via rhetorica: The former locates metaphor in the gap between sense and reference, in the process of thinking of an object as something. The latter situates metaphor in the space between one meaning and another, between the literal or ‘proper’ verbal expression and its periphrastic substitute. And so whereas the former makes metaphor a necessary and pervasive feature of all language, which with its verbal detours gestures obliquely towards a world of objects, the latter makes it a special use of language which can be isolated and studied against the background of a non-metaphoric use of language.1

The two ways of thinking may explain one of the two reasons for viewing Chinese metaphor differently from its Western counterpart. The first reason is the separation of two critical approaches to the study of metaphor. In her article on Chinese metaphor and poetry, Pauline Yu is keenly aware of the consequences of separating metaphysical and rhetorical approaches to metaphor. She correctly points out that scholars who study metaphor and Chinese poetry using Western theories of metaphor “generally preferred one of Culler’s two hypothetical roads over the other.”2 A cursory view of the field informs us that scholars indeed tend to focus more on a rhetoric approach than on a philosophical approach. This view is confirmed by an opinion expressed by Stephen Owen in his article on reading Chinese poetry that relates Chinese metaphor with Western tropes. Owen also identifies two approaches in the study of Chinese poetry: “One is close to the western rhetorical tropes of metonymy and synecdoche (not as substitution tropes, but as associative relationships)”; and “The second form of reading the world lies in perceiving its analogical links.” He sagaciously calls for a combination of the two approaches: “The movement to

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general significance occurs through the analogical repetitions, but it is often necessary to expand the metonymic relationships of the physical world before the analogical links can be made.”3 This sagacious opinion suggests that the dichotomous view on Chinese and Western metaphor and poetry arose at least in part from a separation between metaphysics and rhetoric. To a large extent, it is precisely this separation of metaphysics from rhetoric, metaphor from metonymy that has created problems for us to understand the nature of Chinese metaphor in relation to Western metaphor. I therefore suggest that we ought to adopt a cognitive approach to metaphor, which has gained considerable new ground recently and integrate the via philosophia and the via rhetorica, on the one hand, and metaphor and metonymy, on the other hand. The second reason may be attributed to the separation of metaphor and metonymy in poetical analysis. Stephen Owen expresses an opinion that, except for some emblematic images in the Chinese tradition, Chinese poets and readers tend to prefer a metonymic or synecdochic approach than a metaphoric approach to writing and reading, because for them, “the text is synecdoche for the world (not as substitution, but as diminishment and loss). It leads not to the ‘other’ meaning of metaphorical reading and the fictional text, but to the whole of which we see only a part in the text.”4 Pauline Yu also agrees on this view as her close reading of Li He’s poem in Chap. 4 shows. In the classical notion of rhetoric, there is a neat separation of metaphor and metonymy. But post-structuralist inquiries and analysis have proven that metaphor and metonymy cannot be neatly separated. Even in classical rhetoric, there was already an awareness of the close relationship between metaphor and metonymy. In his inquiry into poetic metaphysics, Vico identifies the reason of how metonymy and metaphor arise: “the early poetic peoples named things in two ways: (1) by using sensible ideas, which are the source of metonymy; and (2) by using particular ideas which are the source of synecdoche.”5 He notes an inseparable relationship between metaphor and synecdoche: “Synecdoche became metaphor when people raised particulars to universals or united parts to form wholes” (Ibid.). As an initial position to start my inquiry into the differences between Chinese and Western metaphor, I suggest that the separation of metaphysics from rhetoric, metaphor from metonymy is responsible for the status of the field in which Chinese conceptions of metaphor have been inadequately understood vis-à-vis Western metaphor. In my opinion, metaphorical thinking is neither purely conceptual nor rhetorical. It is an integration

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of the two ways of thinking, which finds its converging ground in perception, cognition, and creation. In the following sections, I therefore will combine metaphysics and rhetoric and adopt a multiple approach to metaphor, informed by psycholinguistics, semiotics, and post-structuralist discourse analysis. By examining metaphor and metonymy together, and by comparing Chinese bi-xing with Western metaphor/metonymy, I hope to find insights for understanding metaphor and metonym across cultural differences.

Metaphor and Predication From a metaphysical point of view, the Chinese mind engaged in metaphorical thinking differs little from the Western mind. The metaphorical process in both traditions involves the same mental procedures such as making connection, translation, substitution, transference, and above all, analogy. What distinguishes the Chinese and Western metaphorical thinking is not so much a matter of perception, conception, and interpretation than a matter of rhetorical representation due to the differences in language use, especially in the creation of poetry. In the previous chapter, I have demonstrated that the dichotomous view of Chinese and Western metaphor has a good deal to do with the fact that while Western language has the verbal predication “to be,” in classical Chinese language, “to be” is not formally presented in a discourse, but implicitly stated, especially in poetic representation. This point may be responsible for the major differences between Chinese and Western uses of metaphor. In Western studies of metaphor, one of the most influential theories is I. A. Richards’s schema that comprises tenor, vehicle, and ground.6 More recently, however, Richards’s celebrated schema has been subjected to deconstructive analysis. Some metaphor theoreticians have replaced Richards’s three terms with source domain, target domain, and the mapping of source on target. To me, at least, the deconstruction of Richards’s schema does not seem to fundamentally alter the basic assumptions and rationale of the schema. Another influential theory of metaphor is more relevant to account for the Chinese and Western differences. This is Paul Ricoeur’s view of metaphor as a process of “predicative assimilation.” Ricoeur puts forward this assertion: “metaphor is an act of predication rather than denomination.”7 In a way, Ricoeur is indebted to Aristotle and his idea is a reconception of Aristotle’s celebrated notions. In his discussion of metaphor in terms of analogy, Aristotle states: “Analogy or proportion is when the second term

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is to the first as the fourth to the third. We may then use the fourth for the second, or the second for the fourth. Sometimes too we qualify the metaphor by adding the term to which the proper word is relative.”8 The four terms in Aristotle’s conception of metaphor, A, B, C, and D are predicated in a relationship in which A is to B as C is to D. To illustrate his point, Aristotle provides some concrete examples, which are frequently discussed by later scholars: Thus the cup is to Dionysus as the shield to Ares. The cup may, therefore, be called “the shield of Dionysus,” and the shield, “the cup of Ares.” Or again, as old age is to life, so is evening to day. Evening may therefore be called “the old age of the day,” and old age, “the evening of life,” or, in the phrases of Empedocles, “life’s setting sun.” (Ibid.)

Aristotle meant to say, just as a cup stands in the same relationship to Dionysus as a shield does to Ares, so a cup may be called “the shield of Dionysus,” and a shield may be called ‘the cup of Ares.” In his essay on the metaphorical process, Paul Ricoeur reaffirms Aristotle’s insight but gives the latter’s view a new turn and throws a new light on an old issue. Ricoeur agrees with Aristotle on the basis of metaphor, which is the contemplation of likeness in dissimilar things. He brings in the role of imagination in the making of metaphor and posits that the “insight into likeness is both a thinking and a seeing.”9 Thinking “effects a restructuration of semantic fields,” while imaginative seeing brings about a categorical transference. Ricoeur employs Aristotle’s example to explicate his proposition and to ascribe to the imagination the function of predicative assimilation: But this thinking is a seeing, to the extent that the insight consists of the instantaneous grasping of the combinatory possibilities offered by the proportionality and consequently the establishment of the proportionality by the rapprochement between the two ratios. I suggest we call this productive character of the insight predicative assimilation. But we miss entirely its semantic role if we interpret it in terms of the old association by resemblance.10

Ricoeur attributes the predicative assimilation to cognition, imagination, and feeling, and identifies it as having a paradoxical character: “The predicative assimilation involves, in a way, a specific kind of tension which is not so much between a subject and a predicate as between semantic incongruence and congruence. The insight into likeness is the perception of the

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conflict between the previous incompatibility and the new compatibility. ‘Remoteness’ is preserved within ‘proximity.’ To see the like is to see the same in spite of, and through, the different. This tension between sameness and difference characterizes the logical structure of likeness. Imagination, accordingly, is this ability to produce new kinds by assimilation and to produce them not above the differences, as in the concept, but in spite of and through the differences” (Ibid). Ricoeur’s emphasis on the role of imagination in the creation and interpretation of metaphor has a good deal of conceptual value. After all, it is imagination that is responsible for what Aristotle calls “intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.”11 Precisely on this point, the Chinese imagination displays a distinctive feature, which is to be found in the structure of many Chinese examples of metaphor. In creating a metaphor for a poem, the Chinese poet imagines a structure of comparison conceptually, but syntactically, there is neither a connective (like) nor a formal predication (be). This point may constitute a salient feature that distinguishes Chinese metaphor from Western metaphor in its mode of expression due to the differences in language. While in a given English metaphor, the two things compared are in most cases predicated syntactically, in a Chinese metaphor, especially in classic Chinese poetry, predicative relations are not always clearly spelled out because there is often no predication marker. The reader has to imagine it in terms of Ricoeur’s view. When this feature is extended beyond a single poetic line or two adjacent lines, the comparative relation becomes vague or latent. The result is a poetic expression based on juxtaposition of objects, images, and poetic lines. One of the poems in the Book of Songs describes the emotional turmoil of a girl whose family wants to marry her off against her will. The persona says: Tossed is that cypress boat, Wave-tossed it floats. My heart is in turmoil, I cannot sleep.12

The stanza means to convey the idea that “my heart is in as turbulent a condition as a little boat tossed up and down by waves,” but there is no word to denote overt comparison or yntactic predication. This kind of comparison is widely used in traditional Chinese poetry. In traditional Chinese poetics, this mode of presentation is called xing (literally, stimulus), an elusive term that has been diversely understood as a concept, a

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trope, a literary genre, a generic convention, or a practical way of starting a poem. In formal presentation, a xing involves two categories in a poem. While one category refers to the natural world, the other category concerns the human world. As for the relationship between the two categories, some of them are easy to see while others are difficult to discern. Some are plainly comparative like a simile or metaphor. Some are less clear as to the comparison. Xing is closely related to metaphor; indeed, in Chinese poetics, it is often mentioned together as a dual concept, bi-xing, which literally means “comparison and stimulation.” As a special form of metaphor, it has attracted numerous scholars both Chinese and Western. Even Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and other English poets were attracted to this peculiar form of Chinese metaphor and approvingly discussed it in their comments on Chinese poetry. While it implies a metaphorical relationship between two categories, it is endowed with implications that belong to the domains of metonymy or synecdoche in Western tropes. I therefore have good reasons to translate it as “metaphoric metonymy” or “metonymic metaphor.” An in-depth study of this concept will provide us with deeper insights into Chinese metaphor in particular and metaphor in general. Richards and Recoeur’s theories of metaphor have been widely used in studies of Chinese metaphor, and helped produced fresh insights into Chinese conceptions of metaphor. Another influential theory widely used in the study of Chinese metaphor is Roman Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy. For various reasons, I feel that the application of the Western theories to the conditions of Chinese metaphor has only provided partial conceptual reasons to account for the differences between Western theory and Chinese practice and is unable to explain the differences between Chinese and Western conceptions of poetry. In an article on Chinese poetry, I have shown that some scholars who have studied bi-xing in Chinese poetry and poetics tend to view Chinese metaphor as metonymic or synecdochic representation of things. In their studies, they have separated bi from xing, which has been discussed either as a special form of metaphor or a special form of metonymy. Seldom have they been studied in an integrated manner. I suggest that the lack of an adequate understanding of Chinese metaphor may be attributed to the separation of bi from xing or metaphor from metonymy.13 Rhetorically, we can separate the two tropes, but in the actual creation or reading of a poem, an adequate understanding is dependent on taking both into account. In the West, all the excellent studies of metaphor also discuss metonymy. Suffice it to cite Vico,

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Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Paul Recoeur, Terence Hawkes, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. In ancient China, bi and xing are viewed as a dual concept—bi-xing. And ancient scholars generally mentioned and discussed the two concepts together as though they were one concept. But despite that fact in the Chinese tradition, scholars engaged in comparative studies of Chinese metaphor more often than not tend to separate them with the consequence that bi is overlooked because of a privileging of xing. In a likely manner, previous scholars have adopted an approach that separates metaphor from metonymy and argued that Chinese poetry is basically more metonymic than metaphoric. Ostensibly, they seem to have taken the hint from Roman Jakobson’s separation of metaphor and metonymy, similarity, and contiguity, or the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships in linguistics, but in fact, Jakobson’s theory does not espouse such a separation. For in terms of Jakobson’s theory, parallel to the opposition between similarity and contiguity are the opposition between poetry and prose. While poetry (especially lyric poetry) is intrinsically more metaphorical, prose (especially realistic fiction) is more metonymic. In terms of this theorizing, the claim that ancient Chinese poetry is dominated by lyricism should lead to a logical conclusion that Chinese poetry is more metaphorical than metonymic, but the existent view is just the opposite. It is widely believed that Chinese poetry is more metonymic than metaphorical. Jakobson’s theory clearly militates against this claim. Moreover, the metonymic claim is based on a partial understanding of Jakobson’s theory. For Jakobson’s central thesis states that “the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.”14 This formulation in fact contains an explicit idea that subverts any neat separation of metaphor and metonymy. In the wake of Jakobson, Lacan’s study of the unconscious that combines Freudian psychoanalysis with Saussure’s structural linguistics has demonstrated that metaphor and metonymy are so inherently related that it is impossible to neatly separate them. In literary criticism, deconstructive analyses of metaphor and metonymy, especially in Paul de Man’s15 and Gérard Gennette’s16 theoretical work, have demonstrated that metaphor operates by metonymic features and that metonymy is subtended by a metaphoric substrate. Thus, there is virtually a total erasure of the dichotomy between metaphor and metonymy. In the sections to follow, I will demonstrate that a separation of metaphor from metonymy is untenable and that a purely rhetorical approach is unable to understand the nature of Chinese and Western metaphor.

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Limitations of a Rhetorical Approach In rhetorical analysis of metaphor, the influential schema of vehicle, tenor, and ground formulated by Richards is a powerful paradigm,17 but in the analysis of metaphor in classical Chinese poetry, especially regarding the poetic theory of bi (metaphor) and xing (metaphor with metonymy), neither Richards’s tenor/vehicle schema nor the deconstructive model of mapping is fully effective. For in the Chinese tradition, tenor often does not appear or is only alluded to. As I have already shown, predication in Chinese poetry is always implied and simply omitted. This is especially prominent in a kind of Chinese metaphor called “jieyu” (literally, borrowed metaphor). In many Chinese metaphors, the tenor is allusive, flexible, or simply uncertain. The same is true in the Western tradition. As Wheelwright puts it, “Sometimes the element of comparison drops still further out of sight. Instead of saying that A is like B or that A is B, the poet simply talks about B, without making any overt reference to A at all. You know, however, that he intends A all the time, or better say that you know he intends an A; for you may not have a very clear idea of what A is and even if you have got an idea, somebody else may have a different one.”18 The description of metaphor in Chinese poetry in terms of the tenor-first vehicle-second sequential order may be true with regard to the genesis of bi in the mind of a poet, but when the actual bi is written down, the flexibility and fluidity of Chinese syntax makes it possible for the Chinese poet to place his vehicle before the tenor without affecting the meaning or evocative power of his poetic line. In Western discourse, sequence is important in the making of metaphor. A famous poetic line by Robert Burns is a typical case in point: “My luve is like a red, red rose.” One scholar uses this example to demonstrate the significance of word order or tenor/vehicle sequence and to rule out the possibility of inverting tenor and vehicle in Chinese xing. In its inverted sequence, however, the Chinese line, “A red, red rose is like my love,” still makes sense though the meaning is different. Without the predicate word “is,” “A red, red rose like my love” is awkward in English and may be understood to convey a different meaning. But in many Chinese poetic lines containing a metaphor, the tenor and vehicle may be inverted while there is no significant change in expression. Let us examine a poetic couplet from Li Bai’s poem “Seeing Off A Friend”: Floating clouds [are like] a wanderer’s thoughts; The setting sun [is like] an old friends’ sentiments.19

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Because classical Chinese does not have predication marker or specify the connective “like,” the couplet may be recast into the following without altering the basic meaning: A wanderer’s thoughts [are like] floating clouds; An old friends’ sentiments [are like] the setting sun.

The two versions convey basically the same denotations: “a person eager to travel cherishes the desire like floating clouds” and “an old friend who tries to detain the traveler displays a reluctance to part from his friend like the lingering sun-set.” They express similar connotations: “floating clouds” implicitly alludes to the aimlessness and uncertainty of the traveler’s trip and the reluctance of “setting sun” to disappear duplicates a friend’s unwillingness to bid farewell. My analysis of the above poetic lines also reveals the limitations of Recoeur’s predication theory, at least for Chinese metaphor. For in Chinese poetry, Li Bai’s poetic lines can simply be stated as “floating clouds a wanderer’s thought” and “the setting sun an old friend’s sentiments.” As I will show below, this kind of implied predication is made possible not only by the special feature of classical Chinese but moreover by the creative imagination of the poetic mind, which astutely perceives “similarity in dissimilar things,” as Aristotle aptly put it. As the Chinese concept xing (metaphor with metonymy) is concerned with the poetic mind in the process of creative imagination, there is no absolute need for clear, formal predication. Although it is still a concept operated by the principle of “predicative assimilation,” the Chinese process of predicative assimilation differs from its Western counterpart due to the lack of predication marker. Predication in common sense involves the verb “to be” in a Western language, which can be spelled out as: A is B. In a metaphor, it is written as: the tenor is the vehicle. In classical or literary Chinese, a common predication leaves the equivalent “be” out, as in the classical pattern of predication: A zhe B ye (A [is] B). This feature is reflected in many cases of Chinese metaphor in poetry. In such a case, tenor and vehicle may both appear, but the predication marker, shi (be), is almost always unstated but implied. There is still an analogical relationship between the tenor and vehicle, but unlike the Western metaphor, the analogical relation is often left unsaid by the speaker and has to be inferred by the listener/reader. In other words, to fully appreciate this kind of metaphor, one needs to use his or her imagination, as Recoeur has suggested.

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This leaves the analogical relationship between the tenor and vehicle in a metaphor indeterminable, and the hermeneutic space of a metaphor widely open. This may be the fundamental difference between Chinese bi-xing and Western metaphor and metonymy. In Modernist poetry, which received considerable influence from classical Chinese poetry, this feature is very pronounced. Pound, for example, rewrote a long poem “In A Station of the Metro” a couple of times until he finally condensed it into a short poem with only two lines: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.20

This poem is Pound’s first use of juxtaposition as a structural device for poetic composition. Instead of using an overt predication, he indicated it by an implied analogy. As such, the poem is built on a metaphorical equivalence, in which the tenor is “the apparition of these faces” and the vehicle “petals on a wet, black bough.” This kind of metaphor is called “diaphor,” a term coined by Wheelwright, who refers to it as “the creation of new meaning by juxtaposition and synthesis.” In Pound’s poem, there is another kind of metaphor, “epiphor,” another term coined by Wheelwright, who refers to it as “standing for the outreach and extension of meaning through comparison.”21 Pound’s poem may be read as a case of Chinese bi-xing with a stimulus and poetic affects. In the image, “the apparition of these faces,” the faces of passengers in the crowd on an underground train display an odd impression, when the train rushes through lighted and unlighted tunnels, which reminds one of the appearances and disappearances of phantoms. At the same time, the faces produce a tender feeling in the poet, who sees similarity between the faces and petals of flowers on the one hand, and between the train through the dark and damp underground tunnels and a wet, black bough. What is novel in the poem is the juxtaposition and the unspecified relationship between the disparate images thrown together by juxtaposition. When Pound published this poem, which employs juxtaposition of images with an implied analogy but without actually specifying the predicated comparison, it created a little stir in the Anglo-American literary circles. But in the Chinese poetic tradition, this is only a common poetic practice. The Shijing, or Book of Songs contains numerous poems written in this unspecified predication with analogical relations ambiguous, unstated or simply missing. Because of this, many scholars suggest that the unspecified

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predication in bi-xing does not contain an analogical relation, but is an oral formula to start a poem or is simply a meaningless stock phrase. Among venerable Chinese scholars, Gu Jiegang, for example, contended in his polemics concerning the nature of xing that many of the xing lines in the Shijing are simply “meaningless.”22 In his interpretation of Liu Xie’s “Bi-xing” chapter, Zhou Zhengfu also mentions the view that the object used to start a poem in xing has no intended meaning.23 In a different light, the sinologist Marcel Granet asserts that natural images like xing are actually stock descriptions, “formulae to be introduced ready-made into the songs.”24 Shih-hsiang Chen, in his etymological exploration of the archaic meaning of xing, identifies the term as a “stock phrase” that evolved from the opening ceremony of primitive dancing, “it was a term for oral elocution regulated by music and …it signified in a ceremonial sense the start of dancing.”25 He agrees with Liu Xie that “the [true] meaning of hsing had been lost” but holds a view that differs from Liu Xie in what brought about the loss.26 Continuing and going beyond this idea, Wang Ching-hsien argues that xing in the Shijing is a mode of oral formulaic composition.27 I respectfully disagree with these expressed opinions. I argue that the Chinese xing contains a metaphorical relation explicitly or implicitly. Often the analogical relation is so deeply hidden that the image leading to the unfolding of a poem looks like a meaningless stock phrase or oral formula. My idea will become clearer if we recall Recoeur’s insight into the role of imagination in the making of metaphor: the “insight into likeness is both a thinking and a seeing.”28 In Recoeur’s conception of predicated assimilation, thinking “effects a restructuration of semantic fields” while imaginative seeing brings about a categorical transference. The Chinese xing works in precisely this manner. I will use the first stanza of Poem No. 9 of the Shijing to illustrate my idea. For the purpose of analysis, I will quote it in a different format: The Yangtze River is so long; / One cannot sail it in a raft. At the Han is a wandering girl; / One cannot go after her. The Han River is so broad; / One cannot swim across it. The Yangtze River is so long; / One cannot sail it in a raft.29

My reformatting highlights the analogical predication in the stanza. There are a series of analogical relations in the stanza, which differ little from an Aristotelian analogy of proportion, or an analogy in Graduate Record Examinations. In a way, I may say that the imagination of ancient Chinese

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poet in fact devised a GRE analogy pattern 3000 years ago. In a purely formal way, the basic pattern of a xing example may be reduced to a familiar mathematical formula called ratio pattern: A : B # C : D.  It can be reworded like Aristotle’s formula for metaphor: “A is to B what C is to D.” Employing this analogy pattern, we can rewrite the first stanza of Poem 9 as follows: In the south is an arbor tree;    A : B    At the Han is a wandering girl;   C : D   The Han River is so broad;     E : F    The Yangtze River is so long;    G : H  

One cannot shelter under it. One cannot go after her. One cannot swim across it. One cannot sail it in a raft.

In a predicated assimilation, we may rewrite the stanza as: “Just as a sparse arbor tree provides no shelter, so a wandering girl is not an easy love object; just as the broad Han is not easy to swim across, so the long Yangtze is not easy to sail in a raft.” There is a clear pattern of analogy. The pattern may, in fact, be extended like a mathematical formula to more terms: “A is to B what C is to D and E is to F and G is to H.” But there are some differences between the Chinese xing analogy and GRE analogy. First, the analogy pattern is not clearly indicated. Second, the analogical relation between the tenor and vehicle is opaque. But this opaque pattern evinces a literary advantage, for it does not impose the poet’s imagination on the reader directly, but invites the reader to join the poet in a subtle game of imagination and compels, without brute force, the reader to be an imaginative detective, hunting for the possible relations among the elements in metaphorical process. The analogical pattern in Poem 9 is relatively easy to see, but in some poems with xing, the analogy is not easily discernable. Since xing is more concerned with the state of mind, a pure rhetorical approach divorced from the via philosophia cannot fully account for the complexity of metaphor in general and Chinese xing in particular. A ­metaphor or metonymy is a sign that consists of the opposition between signifier and signified. And the relationship between the terms is that of a sign endowed with secondness and thirdness. As a sign, a metaphor or metonymy entails a process of signification that involves inherent sliding of the signifier on the signification chain and the openness of interpretation. The Chinese concept xing adequately captures the elusive nature of a sign and reveals the inadequacy of both the tenor-vehicle model and the predication theory. Here, I will examine Poem 6 “Peach Tree” in the Book of Songs to illustrate this point:

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Buxom is the peach-tree; How its flowers blaze! Our lady going home Brings good to family and house. Buxom is the peach-tree; How its fruits wells! Our lady going home Brings good to family and house. Buxom is the peach-tree; How thick its leaves! Our lady going home Brings good to the people of her house.30

In the poem, the peach tree and the lady stand for two entirely different categories, but they are related to each other through a series of common features. The plumpness and flowers of the tree indicate her youth, health, and beauty; the big fruits allude to her fertility; the thick leaves represent her potential of giving birth to many children. This theme was taken up by later poets and became a famous saying in Chinese culture: “Green leaves form a shade hiding branches full of fruits.” (绿叶成荫子满枝) This saying is a poetic way of describing a man’s erstwhile beloved who is already married and has children. Thus, the peach tree and the lady constitute an analogical relationship. Instead of using a connective “like” or “resemble” to link the two different categories, the poem simply juxtaposes the phenomena of the two categories together. The analogical relationship should be discerned by the reader. Hence, a predication is implied rather than explicitly stated. If we are to reduce the ground for the metaphorical relationship into some essential elements, the following relationship can be established: Peach tree + its flowers + fruits + leaves = fertility + good fortune

When we render poetic lines into a complete, predicated sentence, the poem may be rewritten as: As the tree is plump with dazzling flowers, big fruits, and thick leaves, So the lady with youth, beauty, and fertility will bring good fortunes.31

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My analysis shows, in poetic Chinese, the total absence of predication is a false impression. Implied predication is made possible by the unique Chinese way of juxtaposition. My analysis also demonstrates that juxtaposition in poetic Chinese is not simply putting any words together. There are inherent logical processes working in the mind of the poet or reader. When Liu Xie discusses bi and xing in his poetics, he observes the ground of equivalence effected by imagination: “The bi and xing of the Ancient poets / Are perfect perceptions resulting from their responses to the stimuli of facts./ Things which are as far apart as Hu [in the north] and Yue [in the south] / May through their similarities be as close as the liver and the gall. / For a writer to be able to be faithful to the original in his representation depends on the working of his mind.”32 Through imaginative comparison, the distance between north and south may be seen as close as that between the liver and gall in a person. Liu Xie was clearly aware of what Ricoeur calls the contemplation of likeness that involves both thinking and seeing. If one disregards the inner relationships of words juxtaposed, what comes out of such juxtaposition may be gibberish or a madman’s words. Since the inherent working processes operate unseen in the mind of the poet or reader, juxtaposition in Chinese poetry is not a simple formal move or rhetorical expression. It is essentially a psycholinguistic process. Bi and xing are but the surface manifestations of such a process. Like the tip of an iceberg, what we see in the formal discourse of the poem is only a small part of the poet’s psyche and of poetic creation. The Chinese poetic examples and the poetic concepts contain within themselves implicit ideas that align more with recent theories of metaphor than with Richards’s schema. Richards’s schema conceives the tenor of a metaphor (my love for example) as constitutive and treats the metaphoric expression “red rose” as the vehicle meant to convey the idea of beauty, which is the ground for the comparison. Recent cognitive approach to metaphor replaces Richards’s tenor, vehicle, and ground respectively with the target domain, source domain, and the mapping of source onto target. It begins with the vehicle as the source of comparison and proceeds to show how the source is mapped onto the target domain (my love). In a way that is just the reversal of Richards’s schema, the cognitive approach locates some typical features associated with a red rose such as purity, beauty, and tenderness, and then projects those qualities onto the target domain. Instead of emphasizing the common ground between a red rose and my love, “the source-target model foregrounds both the mapping process and the creative exploitation of a source schema for the purposes

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of characterizing the topic of discourse, the target of the conceptual transfer.”33 The cognitive model is not restricted by the word order of tenor and vehicle and calls for treating metaphorical process as a blending, a “mechanism of creativity” that creates emergent structure that exists neither in the source nor the target domains, but in the imagination of the poet or reader. This model is more effective in analyzing the standard Chinese xing as well as other special forms like middle xing (image in the middle of a poem) and final xing (image at the end of a poem)

Reconceptualizing Bi and Xing My critical analysis above has shown the existent views to be unable to account fully for the different varieties of bi and xing in Chinese poetry. To have a full understanding of the differences between bi and xing in relation to Western metaphor and metonymy, I am going to engage in a reconception of Chinese metaphor using an approach that integrates discourse analysis, semiotics, psychology, and cognitive science. Taking hints from Saussure’s theory of the sign, Jakobson’s theory of linguistics and poetics, Freud’s idea of the unconscious, Lacan’s metatheory of metaphor and metonymy, and Derrida’s language philosophy, I venture to argue that bi and xing are essentially one and the same concept whose differences are determined formally by another Chinese poetic concept fu [exposition or presentation] and psychologically by mental processes in poetic composition. They are both figures of “equivalence” in terms of Jakobson’s putative notion since both cite a different entity (vehicle) as having “equivalent” status to another entity that forms the major subject (tenor). Their relationship is one between the two sides of a sheet of paper, to borrow a saying from Saussure who describes the relationship between signifier and signified in a sign. In terms of Saussure’s linguistic theory of the sign, bi and xing constitute a relationship between the two terms in a sign: signifier (vehicle) and signified (tenor), which is not one of “equality” but one of “equivalence.”34 In creating or understanding bi and xing, we do not attempt to seek in the relationship between the signifier and signified a sequential ordering whereby one term leads to the other, but a correlation that joins them. Together with fu (exposition), they form a creative matrix, which is at the core of image-making and poetry-making. Both bi and xing require juxtaposition of selected signifiers that share some inherent qualities. The qualities may be similar, different, or even opposite, but they must be related to each other by a common ground. The differences

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between bi and xing reside not so much in essence as in their discourse presentation or formal exposition structured by the poetic exposition (fu). Bi presents the common factor in a straightforward way using such connectives as “like,” “as if,” or other predicatives. Xing expresses the immanent common ground in a more subtle and often obscure manner. It goes through a process of difference and delay. The tenor and vehicle in xing are related through a signifying process which can be explained using the Derridean theory of “différance.” Derrida agrees with Saussure’s view of language as a system based on differentiation, but extends the latter’s idea further by arguing that meaning is never present in words themselves. The meaning of a word is always dependent on everything that is not the word. In other words, meaning is constantly deferred and generated in a relationship among other words, a potential space that he calls “différance.” The meanings of this coined neologism are too complicated to be explained here fully, but it is helpful to note that its basic meaning is derived from the coincidence of meanings in the verb différer: to differ (in space) and to defer (to put off in time, to postpone presence). The word does not function simply either as différence (difference) or as différance in the usual sense (deferral), but plays on both meanings at the same time.35 What is of more relevance to my study is that Derrida points out that “The two apparently different values of différance are tied together in the Freudian theory: to differ as discernibility, distinction, separation, diastem, spacing; and to defer as detour, relay, reserve, temporization.”36 Derrida’s différance is meant originally to explain signification of a word. I may extend it to discourse and employ it to explain xing. The signifying process of a xing example (metonymic metaphor) can be adequately explained in terms the Derridean différance. On the chain of ­signification in a xing example, the relationship between the tenor and vehicle corresponds with the Derrida’s idea, “One is but the other different and deferred, one differing and deferring the other. One is the other in différance, one is the différance of the other.”37 They differ from each other and defer the meaning of each other. Their relationship undergoes a sliding, and their common ground remains deferred until an anchoring point, which is called by Lacan as points de caption,38 is reached. I will use the first stanza of Poem 181 “Hongyan” (Wild Geese) to illustrate the operation of bi and xing in terms of the Derridean theory of différance:

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The wild geese are flying;       鸿雁于飞, Swiss, swiss fluttering the wings.     肃肃其羽. These conscripts are on the march;    之子于征, Assiduously they toil in the wilderness.   劬劳于野. Their pains are shared by sad others;    爰及矜人, Who are pitifully left home alone.     哀此鳏寡.39

This poem describes a group of conscripted laborers or soldiers who are forced to leave their families to build defense works in the wilderness. It starts with an image, the wild goose. The bird is a xing image because it starts the poem in exactly the way a xing image is supposed to work. But its function is not simply to start the poem. In the stanza, the theme may be reductively explained as “the wild goose flying in the sky is like the conscripted laborers marching in the wilderness.” While “geese” is the vehicle, “conscripts” are the tenor. The two images differ from each other as the wild goose and the persona belong to different categories, one from the natural world and the other from the human world. But their difference is smoothed over by an analogy that relates the wild goose to the personae in the poem. The common ground that connects the two different categories is the long, hard toil to be found in the long flight of the wild geese and endless labor of the conscripts. Thus, the metaphorical relationship is grounded in the similar action by both the birds and humans. The implication of the connection, however, is not spelled out in the first two lines, which are only juxtaposed side-by-side. The reader at first does not know the comparison is made with a positive or negative connotation. Therefore, the purpose of the juxtaposition of two different categories is deferred. The full implications of the analogy remain deferred until the whole stanza comes to the end. The full stop at the end of the stanza is what Lacan calls a point de caption. The end of the stanza indicates that the bird and the human share a common ground in long toil and loneness. By the end of the stanza, the analogy becomes completely clear as the full meaning of the stanza is revealed after a process of differing and deferring in meaning. Ancient Chinese scholars intuitively understood this process. Zhu Xi made an apt observation: “Xing is to use one object to refer to another object. At the beginning of a poem, one uses xing to start it; in what follows lies the actual intent of the poem.” 40 My analysis demonstrates that the xing image does not simply play the role of starting a poem. It is an essential part of poetic imagination. The movement from the initial image to the final image involves a complete

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process of signification that operates invisibly in the mind of the poet (and reader when it comes to interpretation) and can be better understood with the aid of psycholinguistic theories by Freud, Jakobson, and Lacan. Before bringing Freud’s and Lacan’s theories to bear on our discussion, I need to review briefly the commonly accepted notion that bi and xing roughly correspond to the Western figures of speech: metaphor and metonymy. One scholar offers a way of differentiating bi and xing based on the Western linguistic theory of metaphor and metonymy. He argues that bi employs “analogous association” and therefore is a metaphor, while xing uses “contiguous association” and therefore is a metonymy.41 By contrast, another scholar argues against this explanation: “It is true that in many of the xing cases similarity (in the sense that two semes are identifiable between the two terms of a relation) can hardly be established even as a ground. But like presence, similarity or contiguity does not necessarily become a dividing ridge between xing and bi.”42 The first scholar’s idea becomes vulnerable to the second scholar’s criticism when it limits the relationship between the tenor and vehicle in a xing case to similarity. In fact, a metaphoric relation does not necessarily need to confine itself to similarity only. Christine Brooke-Rose posits that metaphor is “any replacement of one word by another, or any identification of one thing, concept or person with any other.”43 Jakobson who views selection as the basis of metaphor argues: “The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antinomy.”44 Adopting Brooke-Rose and Jakobson’s ideas, two other Chinese scholars make a more relevant assumption, “[A] metaphoric relation holds when two words or phrases interact by virtue of their similarity or dissimilarity in meaning.”45 This is a common practice in classical Chinese poetry. In Poem 26, “Cypress Boat,” for example, a woman voices her grievances in her family life: “My heart is not a stone;/ It cannot be rolled./ My heart is not a mat;/ It cannot be folded away.”46 Moreover, two terms in a metaphor may be linked together by a striking contrast. I cite Poem 150 in the Book of Songs as an illustration: Wings of the mayfly—     蜉蝣之羽, Dress so bright and new.     衣裳楚楚. My heart is grieving       心之忧矣, Over no home to go.47     於我归处.

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The bright and beautiful wings of the insect form a striking contrast with the miserable heart of the persona who has no idea of how he can find his physical and emotional home. In this poetic stanza, there are two connections: one is that of comparison, the other of contrast. In the former, since the insect has a short life, its brevity resembles the shortness of human life. In the latter, the short but colorful life of the insect contrasts with the long and colorless life of the persona. Here, I need to briefly review the linguistic theory of metaphor and metonymy held by Roman Jakobson, Saussure, and Charles Sander Peirce. Jakobson posits that any linguistic sign involves two methods of arrangement: combination and contexture, and selection and substitution. He further states that “combination and contexture are faces of the same operation” and “selection and substitution are faces of the same operation.”48 Saussure used similar terms: concatenation and concurrence. Peirce’s postulation of two possible interpretants of the sign provides a different form of the same theory.49 In interpretation, there are always two interpretants. One refers to code and the other to the context of the message. The interpretant referring to the code is linked to it by similarity (metaphor), and the interpretant referring to the message is linked to it by contiguity (metonymy). In metaphor, one topic leads to another through their similarity; in metonymy, one topic leads to another through their contiguity. In other words, metaphor is related to similarity and to selection, “A selection between alternatives implies the possibility of substituting one for another.”50 Metonymy is related to contiguity and combination, the combination of sign to sign in a context. We must note that Jakobson was close to saying that metaphor and metonymy are essentially two aspects of the same operation. His statement “Thus in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic ‘displacement’ and synecdochic ‘condensation’) or on similarity (Freud’s ‘identification and symbolism’)”51 does not differ much from Lacan’s analysis as I shall examine below. In his The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduced the concept of psychic juxtaposition. He showed that dream language cannot express abstract ideas. It certainly cannot express the idea of predication. It has only one mode of expression: juxtaposition. Whether two things are the same, similar, or opposite, or different, the dream language can only put the two things compared or contrasted in juxtaposition. The relationship between the two things is to be deduced from the whole context. In

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juxtaposition, the dream work of the psychic apparatus employs four major techniques to distort the psychic content to produce the pictographic script of the dream: condensation,52 displacement,53 considerations of representability, and secondary revision.54 My analysis of the Chinese poems in the above shows that the syntax of classical Chinese relies on juxtaposition to compose a poem and to create an analogical relationship. Moreover, juxtaposition is not simply a formal presentation or rhetorical representation. It is a complete cognitive process in which the external reality of the natural world, the psychic reality in the poet’s mind’s eye, and the perceived reality in the poem by the reader converge on a nodal point and are brought into a relational and hermeneutic space. The process is made possible precisely through psychic juxtaposition that involves the psychological principles of “condensation” (metaphor or bi), “displacement” (metonymy or xing), and “consideration of representability” (presentation or fu) in Freud’s theory of dream interpretation. Jacques Lacan has synthesized Saussure’s theory of signification, Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy, and Freud’s theory of condensation and displacement to argue for an idea similar to Vico’s view that metonymy can be turned into a metaphor.55 Reinterpreted Freud’s ideas of “condensation” and “displacement” in terms of Saussure’s linguistic model of the sign, Lacan connects metaphor to the replacement of one word for another, and relates this substituting process to the Freudian concept of condensation. Then, he links metonymy to the word-to-word connection, and relates the connecting process to the Freudian concept of displacement. He suggests that the two basic forms of representation, “metaphor” and “metonymy,” can be interpreted in terms of Freud’s psychological concept of “condensation” and “displacement.”56 He employs mathematics logic to illustrate his idea, arguing that metonymy represents the connection of “word to word” (mot a mot) in the signifying chain, or the combination of signifier to signifier (S…S′), and represents the subject’s desire; and that metaphor is the substitution of “one word for another one” in which the first signifier is occulted and falls to the level of the signified while retaining its metonymic connection with the rest of the chain. It represents the symptomatic passage across the algorithm (S′/S). While employing Saussure’s linguistic theory of the sign, Lacan also benefits from Roman Jakobson’s linguistic view that regards metaphor and metonymy as almost the same. Jakobson sees metaphor and metonymy as the characteristic modes of binary oppositions that underlie the

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twofold process of selection and combination. Meanings are constructed by a combination of a “horizontal” movement, which combines words together, and a “vertical” movement, which selects the particular words from the “inner storehouse” of language. The combinative (or syntagmatic) process manifests itself in contiguity and the resultant mode is metonymic. The selective (or associative) process manifests itself in similarity and the resultant mode is metaphoric. In poetry, however, the poetic language draws from both the selective and combinative modes as a way to promote “equivalence”: “The poetic function [of language] projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.”57 As a result, “In Poetry where similarity is superinduced upon contiguity, any metonymy is slightly metaphorical and any metaphor has a metonymical tint.”58 Based on an innovative use of Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy, Lacan comes to a similar view to Vico’s that the essence of metaphor and metonymy is the same except for the means of representation.59 In the context of Chinese poetry and poetics, Lacan’s theory of metaphor and metonymy lends conceptual support to my suggestion that bi and xing are essentially the same depending on how fu (presentation) operates. Here, I will spend a little more time to explain how Lacan’s theory supports my argument. Lacan does not deny the formal difference between metaphor and metonymy, and explains their distinction in terms of signification, attributing their differences to the two sides of the signifier: “I shall designate as metonymy, then, the one side of (versant) of the effective field constituted by the signifier, so that meaning can emerge there. The other side is metaphor.”60Lacan corrects one common misconception in rhetoric that metaphor is the replacement of one image for another image, while metonymy is the substitution of a part of an image for the whole or vice versa. Lacan argues that in the familiar saying in which “thirty sails” stand for thirty ships, one ship may have more than one sail. He then expresses a different view that in metaphor and metonymy the elements involved are not actual images but words or signifiers.61 To use the analysis of the poem “Peach Tree” as an example, the plumpness of the tree is not an image but a signifier for the tree’s fertility and the lady’s desirability. Based on his innovative argument, Lacan redraws a definition for metonymy and metaphor: “[I]t is in the word-to-word connection that metonymy is based”62 and “One word for another: that is the formula for the metaphor.”63 In his analysis of Victor Hugo’s poetic line “His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful,” Lacan shows that a metaphor may

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contain within its chain of signification a metonymy or vice versa. By identifying an obvious metaphor and a hidden metonymy within this line, Lacan clinches the signifying equivalence between metaphor and metonymy: The creative spark of the metaphor does not spring from the presentation of two images, that is, of two signifiers equally actualized. It flashes between two signifiers one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connection with the rest of the chain.64

In traditional Chinese poetry, the dual concept of bi-xing works in exactly the same way. Take Poem 129 “Reed Leaves” in the Book of Songs for an example. It is full of bi-xing images, which combine metonymic relations with metaphoric ones. I will only discuss the first stanza of the poem: Green, green grow the reed leaves;     蒹葭苍苍, Their white dew turns to frost.       白露为霜. The person of my heart         所谓伊人, Is on the other side of the stream.    在水一方. Up the stream I follow her,       溯洄从之, The road is hard and long.       道阻且长. Down the stream I follow her,      溯游从之, She seems to be in the mid-water.65   宛在水中央.

The theme of the poem is a search for the beloved, a desirable person, or a goal in life. Whatever the object of the search is, the poem contains several metaphorical and metonymic connections in the images between reed and the beloved, “white frost” and “reed leaves,” river and search. The first two lines produce a xing, but it does not simply start the poem. They contain an implicit relation of comparison between the reed and the beloved. The luxuriant greenness of the reed is comparable to the youthfulness of the beloved, thus signifying a metaphorical relation. Through this relationship, the reed stands for the beloved. The second line does not simply describe a change in temperature. It suggests a metonymic connection. Now that the reed stands for the beloved, the white dew signifies her beautiful hue. After all, in most cultures, the tender facial feature of a female is often compared to morning dew. What comes into my mind immediately is the English metaphysical poet Andrew Marvel’s “To His

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Coy Mistress,” in which the poet employs the metaphor of “morning dew” to depict the lady’s youthful hue. Thus, the white dew on the reed leaves symbolizes the tender beauty of the beloved. But the poetic image shows a metonymic displacement as the morning dew turns to frost, indicating the aloofness of the beloved. Among the four terms: reed, reed leaves, white dew, frost, and the beloved, we observe both a contiguous relationship and a process of displacement characteristic of the formation of metonymy and synecdoche. In “white dew turns to frost,” we may find another metonymic connection: the change of the facial color from tenderness to coldness signifies added inaccessibility of the beloved. The inaccessibility is further intensified by another metaphorical connection: the beloved seems to be in the middle of the stream. To summarize my analysis, I may say that the stanza is structured on a series of bi-xing images, which implicitly and explicitly integrate metaphor with metonymy. Conceptually, we may employ Lacan’s formulated mathematical formula of metaphor and metonymy to understand bi-xing. His metonymy formula runs:

Metonymy : f ( S … S ′ ) = S ( − ) s



His metonymic structure indicates “the connexion between signifier and signifier that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-­ being in the object relation, using the value of ‘reference back’ possessed by signification in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports.”66 His metaphoric function is presented below:



Metaphor : S ′ f (−) S = S (+) s S

This function indicates “the substitution of signifier that an effect of signification is produced that is creative or poetic, in other words, which is the advent of the signification in question.”67 In the metonymic structure, the symbol “—” marks “the irreducibility of in the relations between signifier and signified” and “resistance of signification.” In the metaphoric structure, the symbol “+” represents the “crossing of the bar—and the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of signification” and expresses “the condition of passage of the signifier into the signified.” In

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terms of Lacan’s mathematic functions, we can recast the metonymic and metaphoric relationships in “Peach Tree” in terms of Lacan’s metaphoric and metonymic signification formulas: Metonymic relation : flowers + fruits + leaves … beauty and fertility = peach tree − good fortune Metaphoric relation : peach tree = flowers / fruits / leaves + human fertility good fortune



My analysis using Lacan’s algorithms illustrates that the common basis of bi and xing is resemblance or comparison. This corresponds with ancient Chinese poet’s idea that “a xing is made through resemblance.”68 Thus, both Lacan’s theory and the traditional idea confirm my viewpoint. From a different perspective, Lacan explored the differences between metaphor and metonymy in terms of their affects, “For the symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy, however funny people may find the idea.”69 In a poem, a metaphor denotes that the poet has objectified his desire by finding what T.S. Eliot called an “objective correlative,” 70 while a metonymy implies that the poet does not wish to or is unable to objectify his desire and hence is content with allowing it to remain latent. Bi or metaphor links the poet to his state of being while xing links him to a lack of being. Having reconsidered bi and xing in terms of psycholinguistic theory and critical analysis of specific poetic examples, I am able to draw a conclusion: a bi may be equivalent to the Western concept of metaphor, but a xing is larger than a metonymy or metaphor. A xing complex may consist of one or more metaphors and metonymies. It may be a metonymy with an implied reference to a metaphor or a metaphor serving as the nodal point of a few contiguous categories. My view corresponds well with the ancient Chinese scholar Zhu Xi’s idea, “the osprey and unicorn’s hoof are similar to bi but are both xing with bi,”71 and with the intuitive classification of Yan Can who in his Shiji (Edited Collection of Poetry) talked about “xing with bi “ and “xing without bi,” and with the pseudo-Kong Anguo commentary that defines xing as “drawing forth a comparison and linking the corresponding category.” In a word, bi is a static, single

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metaphor, while xing is a dynamic, multivalent metaphor. Bi may be a metaphor with finite meaning, but xing is not a rigid concept with finite and self-contained meanings. It is a dynamic, total, totalizing metaphor similar to Pound’s idea of “Image,” Eliot’s “objective correlative,” William’s “total metaphor,” and Freud’s idea of “rebus.” In the final analysis, xing is a spontaneous act of making connection between the (un) consciousness of the poet and the external world, which presupposes his/ her sensitive perception of and (un)conscious response to external stimuli, the psycholinguistic transformation of his perceptions and emotions, and the potential power of a finished poem to inspire the reader. In conclusion, my analysis corroborates the correctness of the intuitive understanding by ancient Chinese scholars, especially Kong Yingda’s exegesis. As Kong argued in his exegesis of the Book of Songs, the six categories of poetry (fu, bi, xing, feng, ya, song) were formally concerned with the making of poetry. Since a single principle could not cover the whole poetic creation, six categories were devised to explain it: “They are separate concepts in form but are of one function in essence.”72 With my foregoing conceptual discussion and analysis, Kong’s observation that has caused much confusion in history should be clear by now. The operation of fu, bi, and xing depends on a sequential use of equivalence. As such, it not only concerns poetry, but also touches signification, if we recall Jakobson’s observation: “[M]etalangauge also makes a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentence … in metalangauge the sequence is used to build an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence.”73 This seems to suggest that although ancient Chinese scholars did not form a rigorous theory of poetic signification, the triadic concept of fu, bi, and xing represents an intuitive understanding of the signifying process not only for poetic creation but also for language and thinking.

Toward A Sign Model of Metaphor In psycholinguistic theorization of metaphor, we may consider condensation as responsible for the appearance of metaphor and displacement for metonymy. Condensation involves space; while displacement involves time. From this point of view, the core difference between a metaphor and metonymy rests upon the mind’s perception and conception in terms of space or time. Metaphor is perceived through the sense of space while metonymy is perceived through the sense of time. In Derrida’s idea of

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différance, meaning is constantly deferred and generated in a relationship among other words, thereby giving rise to a play of signification in a potential space. My study of Chinese bi-xing (metaphoric metonymy) offers us not just insights into the rationale of how meaning is produced in reading and interpretation; it may also offer us insights into metaphorical thinking and the production of metaphors. But we need to reverse the signifying direction in these theories. The production of meaning involves two mental processes: to differ (in space) and to defer (to put off in time, to postpone presence). In metaphor, while one refers to a spatial perception of relations among things, the other refers to a temporal perception of relations among things. In the creation or interpretation of a metaphor, the mind does not simply perceive difference; it also realizes that there are potential relations among things. To the ordinary mind, the perception of difference always comes to the fore, but the mind of the creative poet always searches for inherent connections between and among things. T.  S. Eliot observes in “The Metaphysical Poets” that to the ordinary people, there is no relationship between falling in love and reading Spinoza, between the noise of a typewriter and the smell of cooking, but in the poetic mind, these unrelated experiences “are always forming new wholes” and interact to produce a novel connection.74 Indeed, the metaphoric process does not function simply as a perceiver of difference (difference) or as a perceiver of différance in the usual sense (deferral), but juggles both meanings at the same time. Xing is a complicated metaphor that incorporates both metaphor and metonymy and involves both senses of space and time. From the combined perspective of space and time, the literal translation of xing as “stimulus” is an apt one because a poetic image can indeed stimulate a reader to contemplate on the action of the image in the dimension of space, which at the same time moves through dimension of time. What distinguishes Chinese and Western conceptions of metaphor and metonymy is that while the Western analytic thinking tends to separate the two tropes, the Chinese holistic thinking tends to combine the two tropes into one category, xing, which incorporates both metaphor and metonymy and thereby entails an open creative and hermeneutic space. The Chinese metaphoric thinking in the case of bi-xing has great potential for theoretical value. The absence of surface predication in Chinese bi-xing examples prompts me to advance a new idea about the relationship between tenor and vehicle in the classical conception of metaphor. In my conception, the relationship between tenor (target domain), vehicle

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(source domain), and ground (mapping) ought to be replaced by a relationship between the signifier and signified united by the totality of the sign. The ground for this conception is that the relationship between tenor and vehicle is not stable but fluid, just like the oppositional relationship between signifier and signified in a sign. But instead of viewing the tenor as potentially another new vehicle, in the way the signified is understood as potentially another signifier, I view the relationship between tenor and vehicle in the opposition between conscious signifier and unconscious signified in Lacan’s reconception. In Saussure’s model of the sign, the line between the signifier and signified represents a union of opposites, but in Lacan’s conception, the line represents the separation between conscious and unconscious mental activities. In Saussure’s original conception, the sign appears as the vertical extension of signification in depth: “the signified is, as it were behind the signifier, and can be reached only through it.”75 Lacan differs from Saussure on two accounts as Barthes summarizes: “(i) the signifier (S) is global, made up of a multi-leveled chain (metaphorical chain): signifier and signified have only a floating relationship and coincide only at certain anchorage points; (ii) the line between the signifier (S) and the signified (s) has its own value (which does not exist in Saussure): it represents the repression of the signified.”76 Lacan’s reconception of the Saussurean model may help us better understand Chinese bi-xing metaphors and offer us further insights for the construction of a new model for metaphor. In a way, we may say that Li Bai’s poetic line, “floating clouds / wanderer’s thoughts” is both literally and figuratively structured as a sign. Syntactically, the slash (/) indicates no predication in verbal presentation, but cognitively, it is like the bar in Saussure’s model of the sign. This is clear when we rewrite the poetic line in the following schema:    signifier       floating clouds sign  ----------   xing  ----------------------   signified       wanderer’s thoughts

In terms of Lacan’s reconception, the slash in a Chinese xing metaphor has its own value: the potentiality of meaningful relations. Lacan’s idea of the signifier as a spherical entity, made up of a multileveled chain (metaphorical chain) adequately captures the floating relationship, which shows tenor and vehicle to match only at certain anchorage points. The absence of overt predication in discourse represents a kind of repression. But in a

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poem, the repression of the tenor is already on the verge of being overcome. Or as is the case in Li Bai’s poetic line, the repression is already overcome and the latent “wanderer’s thought” comes to the surface to match “setting sun.” In other words, the resistance to signification in the poet’s mind is already removed. Whether it is the same for the reader depends upon the education and sagacity of each individual. My reconception of bi-xing in terms of the existing theories on metaphor may be of value for understanding metaphor in general. In poetic cases of metaphor where tenor and vehicle are both identifiable, my reconception of tenor and vehicle as signifier and signified may have limited use for creative understanding of a metaphor. In cases of metaphor where only vehicle appears and tenor lays hidden, the reconception in terms of the sign model may help the reader find potentially new tenors for vehicles in the context of a poem or literary work, thereby enlarging the hermeneutic space. In everyday discourse, my reconception has even greater potential value. As early as the 1930s, Richards, in his objection to the distinction between dead and living metaphors, observed, “however stone dead such metaphors seem, we can easily wake them up.”77 Recent cognitive research has indeed abolished the distinction and declared the death of dead metaphors.78 As some scholars aptly put it: “Since all language is embodied, dead metaphors need no longer be regarded as ‘dead.’ Indeed, lexical entries such as table leg or bottleneck now function as traces of the intrinsic metaphoricity of linguistic expression per se.”79 Poets of all traditions enjoy reviving or creatively using dead metaphors. Christina Rossetti’s song deliberately plays on the revival of dead metaphors: “A pin has a head, but no hair; / A clock has a face, but no mouth there; / Needles have eyes, but they cannot see.”80 An outstanding example is the resurrection of the original meaning for the word “crusade.” After the September 11 terrorist attack on New  York, former President Bush vowed to launch a crusade against global terrorism, but little did he realize at the time of making his speech that he revived the root meaning of the word. Derived from Latin, crux (cross), a crusade is one of the wars that European Christians in medieval times undertook to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims for the honor of the cross. In modern times, “crusade” has often been used in its metaphorical sense for a campaign, as in everyday discourse, people may talk about conducting a “crusade” against certain vices or adversary. But as the terrorists who attacked New York are all Muslims from the Middle East, Bush inadvertently revived the original meaning of the word and unwittingly aroused fear in the heart of Muslims

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around the world for a war against Islamic believers. With the resurrection of dead metaphor, it is reasonable to believe that the vehicle in a metaphor indeed has the potentiality of being viewed as but one of a series of signifier on a signifying chain. I may conclude by suggesting that in the sign model of metaphor, we may find the common ground for metaphors irrespective of differences in language, tradition, culture. What is so good about the sign model is that the terms in a metaphor are signifiers, which do not necessarily entail a clearly definable signifier.

Notes 1. Jonathan Culler, “Commentary,” New Literary History, 6.1 (1974), p. 219. 2. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 3.2 (1981), p. 208. 3. Stephen Owen, “Transparences: Reading the Tang Lyric,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 39, no. 2 (Dec., 1979), p. 244. 4. Owen, “Transparences: Reading the Tang Lyric,” p. 237. 5. Vico, from New Science, in Vincent Leitch, et al, eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 334. 6. I. A. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 96–101. 7. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, p. 156. 8. Aristotle, Poetics, in Adam, ed., Critical Theory since Plato (San Diego: HBJ, 1971), pp. 60–61. 9. Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” p. 145. 10. Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, p. 146. 11. Aristotle, Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 1459. 12. Quoted from the Book of Songs, translated by Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 23. 13. Ming Dong Gu, “Fu-Bi-Xing: A Metatheory of Poetry-Making,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 19 (1997): 1–22. 14. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas A.  Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), p. 358. 15. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism, ed., Josué V.  Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 121–40.

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16. Gérard Gennette, “Métonymie chez Proust,” in Figures III (Paris: Minuit, 1872), pp. 41–64. 17. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 97–98. 18. Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, p. 107. 19. This couplet is taken from Li Bai’s poem “Seeing A Friend Off,” in Li Taibai quanji (Complete Works of Li Bai) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), Vol. 2, p. 837. 20. Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (April 1913), p. 12. 21. Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 70–91. 22. Gu Jiegang, Gushi bien (Debates on Ancient History) (Hong Kong: Taiping shuju, 1962–1963), vol.3, section 2, pp. 672–705. 23. See Zhou Zhengfu, Wenxin diaolong jingyi (Modern Translation of the Literary Mind and Carving of Dragons) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), p. 319. 24. Marcel Granet, Festivals and Songs of Ancient China, trans. E. D. Edwards (London: George Routledge, 1932), p. 86. 25. Chen Shih-hsiang, “Shih Ching: Its Generic Significance in Chinese Literary History and Poetics,” in Cyril Burch, ed., Studies in Chinese Literary Genres (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California Press, 1974), 384. For detailed information about his theory, see pp. 383–388. 26. Liu Xie was of the opinion that the meaning of xing was lost because poets were no longer interested in its political and allegorical function. 27. Wang Ching-hsien, The Bell and The Drum, Shih Ching as Formulaic Poetry in an Oral Tradition (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1974), p. 14. 28. Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” p. 145. 29. Quoted from Shijing (Book of Songs) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), no. 9, “Hanguang.” 30. Quoted from The Book of Songs, translated by Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 8. 31. Some modern translators of the Shijing offer similar renditions. Ma Chiying, for example, translates each stanza of the first poem using the sentence pattern “just as…so…” See his Shijing jingzhu jingshi [A Modern Annotation and Interpretation of the Book of Songs] (Taipei: Shangwu yingshuguan, 1978), p. 3–4. 32. Quoted from Vincent Shih’s translation with slight modifications. See The Literary Mind and The Carving of Dragons, p. 198.

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33. For a concise summary of the source-target model approach to metaphor, see Monika Fludernik, Donald C.  Freeman, and Margaret H.  Freeman, “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction,” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 386. 34. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), p. 112. 35. For a full understanding of this term, refer to Derrida’s “La différance” in Marges De La Philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), 1–29. English translation: Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1–27. 36. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 18. 37. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 18. 38. Lacan argued that the realms of signifier and signified are never united in Saussure’s cut of the sign. There is also an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier. Arguing against the linearity of Saussure’s model Lacan put forward the notion that there are “anchoring points” (points de capiton) at certain important moments of a discourse, when a letter dominates the subject. According to Lacan’s theory, to produce a stable signification at certain anchoring points, the signifier has to stop the sliding-under of the signified. These are junctures of “tightening up,” which are marked by a letter that dominates and transforms the subject. Often, they are moments of “punctuation” in the discourse. 39. Quoted from Shijing (Book of Songs) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), no. 181. English translation is mine. 40. Zhu Xi, Zhuzi yulei (Compendium of Zhu Xi’s Sayings) (Taipei: Zhengzhong shuju, 1962), p. 3345. 41. Wang Ching-chih, Shijing tongshi (General Interpretations of the Shijing) (Taipei: Fu-jen, 1968), p. 59. 42. Dai Wei-jun, “Xing Again: A Formal Re-investigation,” in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 13 (1991): 13. 43. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), p. 23. 44. Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in T.A.  Seboek ed., Style in Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 358. 45. Yu-kung Kao and Tsu-lin Mei, “Meaning, Metaphor, and Allusion in T’ang Poetry,” p. 289. 46. Quoted from The Book of Songs, translated by Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 24. 47. Quoted from Shijing (Book of Songs) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), no. 150. The translation is a modified version of Arthur Waley’s Book of Songs, p. 116.

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48. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Jakobson and M.  Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), p. 60. 49. Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language, p. 61. 50. Jakobson and M. Halle, The Fundamentals of Language, p. 60. 51. Roman Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language, p. 81. 52. Freud conceived of condensation as “an inclination to form fresh unities out of elements which in our waking thoughts we should certainly have kept separate. As a consequence of this, a single element of the manifest dream often stands for a whole number of latent dream-thoughts, as though it were a combined allusion to all of them.” See An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Ch. 5. 53. Freud’s notion of displacement can be seen in the following: “there has occurred in the process of dream-formation a transference and displacement of the psychic intensities of the individual elements, from which results the textual difference between the dream-content and the thought-content. The process which we here assume to be operative is actually the most essential part of the dream-work; it may fitly be called dream-displacement.” See The Interpretation of Dreams, Ch. 6. 54. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 311–373, pp. 526–546. 55. Vico, from New Science, in Vincent Leitch, et al, eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 334. 56. Lacan, “The Agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud,” in Ecrits: A Selection, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 160. 57. Roman Jakobson, “Closing statement: linguistics and poetics,” in Thomas A.  Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), p. 358. 58. Jakobson, “Closing statement: linguistics and poetics,” p. 370. 59. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, pp.160–61. 60. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 156. 61. Lacan, Écrits, 156: “The part taken for the whole, we said to ourselves, and if the thing is to be taken seriously, we are left with very little idea of the importance of this fleet, which ‘thirty sails’ is precisely supposed to give us: for each ship to have just one sail is in fact the least likely possibility. By which we see that the connection between ship and sail is nowhere but in the signifier.” 62. Lacan, Écrits, p. 156. 63. Lacan, Écrits, p. 157. 64. Lacan, Écrits, p. 157. 65. Quoted from Shijing (Book of Songs) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), no. 129. The translation is mine.

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66. Lacan, Écrits, p. 164. 67. Lacan, Écrits, p. 164. 68. Zhouli Zhengzhu (Rites and Rituals of the Zhou annotated by Zheng Xuan), facsimile edition (Taibei: Zhonghua shuju, 1970), p. 7.4b. 69. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 175. 70. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Selected Essays (London: Baber & Faber, 1959), pp. 145–146. 71. Zhu Xi, Zhuzi yulei (Compendium of Zhu Xi’s Sayings), pp. 3345–46. 72. Maoshi Zhengyi (Correct Exegeses of Mao’s Edition of the Book of Songs), in Shisanjing zhu (Thirteen Classics Annotated (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), vol. 1, p. 271. 73. Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” p. 358. 74. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 966. 75. Barthes, Elements of Semiology, p. 49. 76. Barthes, Elements of Semiology, p. 49. 77. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 101. 78. See George Lakoff, “The Death of Dead Metaphor,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, Volume 2.2 (1987): 143–147. 79. Monika Fludernik et  al., “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction,” Poetics Today, 20.3 (1999): 385. 80. Christina G.  Rossetti, Sing-song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London and New York: Macmillan, 1893), p. 56.

PART III

Mimesis and Representation

CHAPTER 6

Is Mimetic Theory Universal?

Mimesis is one of the oldest and most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. In a full reassessment of the foundations of mimesis to date, Stephen Halliwell begins with an assertion few would question: “The concept of mimesis lies at the core of the entire history of Western attempts to make sense of representational art and its values.”1 Since its initial appearance in Plato’s Republic2 and reformulation in Aristotle’s Poetics,3 mimetic theory has been indispensable to Western studies of the nature, function, and techniques of literature and art. As M. H. Abrams points out, after the rediscovery of the Poetics in the sixteenth century, aesthetic theory in the West cannot avoid discussing mimesis or “imitation” or its parallel terms such as “reflection,” “representation,” “counterfeiting,” “feigning,” “copy,” and “image.” 4 Although mimetic theory went through a period of eclipse following the rise of romantic expressive theories in the eighteenth century, the mimetic view of literature and art has prevailed and served as the theoretical underpinning upon which theorists of fiction built their defense of realism.5 Thus, the centrality of mimesis in Western aesthetic thought may be said to be a given. This cannot but make us wonder whether mimetic theory in literature and art is universal. This topic is of great theoretical importance for comparative studies because, if mimetic theory were not universal, comparative studies of Western and non-Western poetics would have to be conducted on other theoretical grounds. The topic also has © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_6

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considerable urgency, for it is widely believed in a time-honored non-­ Western tradition that mimetic theory is a unique Western cultural invention and some fundamental differences between the West and its Eastern other can be traced to the fact that while one tradition has mimetic theory, the other tradition does not. A number of scholars have expressed their dissatisfaction with this symmetrical opposition.6 Rey Chow summarizes their critique into a fundamental dichotomy between Chinese and Western literary traditions: “[I]f mimesis has been the chief characteristic of Western writing since time immemorial, then nonmimesis is the principle of Chinese writing.” 7 In her opinion, this dichotomy represents not just a surrender by scholars of Chinese and comparative studies to Western perspectives and categories; more fundamentally, she identifies it as the basis for “a set of binary oppositions in which the Western literary tradition is understood to be metaphorical, figurative, thematically concerned with transcendence, and referring to a realm that is beyond this world, whereas the Chinese literary tradition is said to be metonymic, literal, immanentist, and self-referential (with literary signs referring not to an otherworldly realm above but back to the cosmic order of which the literary universe is part)” (Ibid). The dichotomy between Western mimesis and Chinese nonmimesis has survived rigorous scrutiny and critique and continues to stand as a conceptual pillar in the theoretical framework of Chinese and Western poetics.8 The scholarly consensus both in China and the West still holds that mimetic theory is nonexistent or minimal in the Chinese tradition. Two factors have contributed to the status quo. On the one hand, except for some brief remarks by a few scholars in China, who argue against the dichotomy between Chinese lyricism/expressionism and Western imitation/representation,9 there is little well-documented research that attempts to construct a Chinese mimetic theory. On the other hand, except for a few critical comments, there is no sustained theoretical inquiry that attempts to critique the conceptual basis of the perceived nonmimesis of Chinese literature. The lack of well-documented research concerning mimesis in the Chinese tradition creates a conspicuous gap that needs to be filled, and it should be filled with urgency because the lack, as I will show in the following, has been cited as evidence to support a theoretical claim that the concept of mimesis is a cultural invention unique to the Western tradition. This chapter, however, is not intended as an effort to document Chinese ideas of mimesis.10 Rather, it is a conceptual inquiry into whether mimetic theory is universal in different cultures through a

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case study of relevant Chinese and Western materials. It is concerned with the questions: Is mimetic theory a specific cultural invention unique to the Western tradition? What is the ontological or epistemological basis of mimesis? Is disjunction between transcendence and immanence a conceptual prerequisite for mimesis? Is a creation god absolutely necessary for the rise of mimetic theory? Why did theories of representation not become as central in Chinese literary thought as in its Western counterpart? How is the artistic ideal in representation conceived in Chinese and Western traditions? Finally, what is the conceptual significance for the comparative studies of Western and non-Western literatures and arts? In his authoritative study, Halliwell convincingly demonstrates that in its history of development, mimesis has always been a much more complex and convoluted concept than its modern equivalent “imitation” can possibly convey. About its usage in the pre-Platonic period alone, he documents five categories.11 It is impossible and unnecessary to recount the huge body of scholarship concerning the complex meanings of mimesis. For the purpose of this chapter, I am going to approach the concept in two ways. First, in the history of ideas, mimesis bifurcates into two categories: a literal mimesis that is “a copying of the concrete world, accessible to the senses” and a metaphysical mimesis that is “a copying of the eternal forms, accessible only to intellect and reason.”12 In terms of this bifurcation, I adopt a view of mimesis that incorporates the Platonic copying of ideal forms and sensuous reality, the Aristotelian representation of the universal patterns of human life, and the neoclassical imitation of canonized literary models.13 Second, I am going to emphasize mimesis as a creative process in which an artistic work models after an original, be it an object, a scene, a person, an action, or a sequence of events. In his definitive study of Lessing’s Laokoon, Meir Sternberg defines this process: “Mimesis, as the umbrella term for representation, presupposes a world out there (actual or fictional) to be imitated and a discourse that imitates it by fashioning an image, a coded (re)semblance: one that bears in principle no more and no less resemblance to the imitated world … than the very idea of semblance entails…. [M]imesis is a relation of likeness between image and object— act, thing, figure, universe—whereby one represents the other through some vehicle.”14 In terms of this definition, I will use “mimesis” as an umbrella term to cover its derivatives and equivalents such as “image,” “copy,” “imitation,” “iconicity,” “reflection,” “representation,” “reproducing,” “miming,” “mimicking,” “mirroring,” “enacting,” “counterfeiting,” and “feigning,” in this chapter.

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Is Mimetic Theory a Unique Western Cultural Invention? If we take the centrality of mimetic theory to Western literary thought as a rule, the Chinese tradition seems to be an exception, for in the field of Chinese and comparative studies, practically all scholars uphold the belief that mimetic theory of literature is absent or minimal in Chinese literary thought. In the first introductory work on Chinese theories of literature in the West, James J.  Y. Liu classifies traditional Chinese thought into as many as six categories of theories.15 He recognizes that the idea of imitation is not totally absent in Chinese literary thought, but his conclusion is that, on the one hand, it did not form the basis of any theory of literature and, on the other hand, it only concerns imitation in the secondary sense, that is, imitation of ancient masters. Therefore, he does not think that there is a mimetic theory in Chinese literary thought. Stephen Owen adopts a similar view of the issue. In his reading of the time-honored Chinese conception of literature in Liu Xie’s (465–522 CE) Wenxin diaolong [the Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], the first comprehensive theory of literature in Chinese history, he observes that the idea of imitation exists in Liu Xie’s discourse, but it is only restricted to the discussion of visual arts, which are set in a mimetic relation to the natural world: “Insofar as the visual arts merely imitate nature’s wen,16 they are subject to the Platonic critique of art as a secondary (or tertiary) phenomenon. But in this formulation literature is not truly mimetic: rather it is the final stage in a process of manifestation; and the writer, instead of ‘re-­ presenting’ the outer world, is in fact only the medium for this last phase of the world’s coming-to-be.” 17 In presenting a similar idea to the Platonic one that a good poet composes his poetry because he is inspired and possessed, Owen draws a conclusion that “literature emerge[s] naturally from the conjunction of a particular aspect of the world and a particular human consciousness,” thereby reaffirming the dominant view in the Chinese tradition that literature is a spontaneous growth. In her study of imagery in Chinese poetry, Pauline Yu arrives at a similar view. While she notes that the discourse on image in the Book of Changes (the first book in the Confucian canon) bears similar elements to the Western discussions of mimesis, she determines that the resemblance is delusory, because the Chinese tradition lacks a fundamental ontological disjunction between the transcendental reality and the concrete, historical reality, a dualism

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necessary for the rise of mimetic theory.18 In an analysis of the same discourse by Liu Xie on the notion of poetry, she comes to the conclusion: “Instead of the mimetic view that poetry is the imitation of an action, then, it is seen here as a literal reaction of the poet to the world around him and of which he is an integral part.”19 Accordingly, she suggests that traditional Chinese poets generally write poetry “based on a stimulusresponse method of poetic production rather than a mimetic one.” 20 Andrew Plaks, in his conceptual inquiry into Chinese narrative, points out that “Liu’s famous discussion of the origin of literary forms in the imitation of patterns observed in the natural world seems at first sight to suggest the emphasis on the mimetic function of narrative literature found in Western theory,” but on closer examination, since Liu’s idea of wen or literature does not emphasize the “mimesis of action,” his idea of imitation of patterns, it is stated in Plaks’s theorizing, is not the Western idea of imitation originating from Aristotle and further developed by Auerbach and Frye.21 In a study of Chinese and Greek ways of conveying meaning, François Jullien identifies a fundamental difference in the Chinese conception of poetry and expresses a more point-blank view of nonmimesis in early Chinese lyricism: “Chinese poetry is … perceived as a phenomenon of incitement and has not embraced representation.”22 While the above scholars hold similarly nonmimetic views of Chinese literature with an admirable sensitivity to the complexity of the issue, some other scholars are much more daring but much less subtle in their approach. They have gone so far as to proclaim that the idea of mimesis is totally alien to the literary thought of the Chinese tradition. Among these latecomers, some argue that due to the lack of a God of creation, the Platonic idea of mimesis related to the dichotomy between the world of literary creation and the world of ideas does not exist in China. Other scholars argue that even the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, the idea that a piece of literary work grows out of an imitation of the natural world or human society, is missing in Chinese literary thought. As an essay in an authoritative companion to traditional Chinese literature states: “In China there were no concepts comparable to Aristotelian mimesis or Christian figura, both of which are bound to the representation of action in time.”23 Still others argue from a metaphysical perspective that all the ontological and epistemological prerequisites necessary for the construction of a mimetic theory in Chinese literary thought are missing. A representative view is expressed in an award-winning article, published in a journal of

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comparative literature. Citing Owen’s final statement and endorsing it as a “right understanding,” the author proclaims that because literature (human wen) is directly connected with natural wen, the distinction between original and copy does not exist, and a mimetic theory of literature therefore does not exist in Chinese literary thought.24 The article is not content with proclaiming the nonexistence of mimetic theory in Chinese thought. It goes a step further to explore why mimetic theory is nonexistent. By analyzing some of the “cultural determinants that are responsible for the emergence of nonmimetic literary theory in China in contrast to the concept of mimesis in the West,” he concludes: “The three factors responsible in bringing about the mimetic theory in literature—the duality of transcendence and immanence, the dichotomy of subject and object, and the visualized concept of truth—all represent the most fundamental principles of Western epistemological structure, and all are missing from Chinese culture. No wonder, then, that the concept of mimesis is consequently missing in Chinese literary theory” (Ibid., 163). On the basis of the study of the Chinese case, it makes a general claim: “the Western concept of mimesis is a specific cultural invention” (Ibid., 162). The sum and total of the subtle views and radical assertions in the above are tantamount to claiming that the concept of mimesis is a unique cultural invention specific to the Greco-Roman Judaic-Christian West and alien to other non-Western traditions. Indeed, as the radical view rules out the essential cultural determinants for the rise of mimesis, it is almost claiming that there is no mimetic instinct in ancient China, at least not in its literary thought. Like Rey Chow and others, I am not persuaded by the nonmimesis in the Chinese tradition. True, the Chinese idea of mimesis is different from its Western counterpart, but the difference can be measured only in degree, not in kind. In the following sections, I will argue that all the essential cultural determinants for the rise of mimetic theory exist in the Chinese tradition and that the accepted view with regard to the contrast between Western mimesis and the Chinese lack of it is a misconception that grew out of a preconceived notion about the cultural differences between China and the West. Methodologically, it resulted from a narrow view of some conceptual underpinnings of mimetic theory and an insufficient attention to mimetic insights in the mainstream as well as undercurrents of traditional Chinese thought.

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The Universality of Mimetic Instinct In his study of Western literary thought, Abrams views mimetic theory as “probably the most primitive aesthetic theory.”25 By “primitive” he seems to mean that mimesis is a basic idea emanating from the innate human nature for imitation. In his Republic, Plato observed that imitations start in childhood, continue into life, eventually grow into habits, and become second nature in the body, speech, and mind.26 In his Poetics, Aristotle not only conceived poetry as an art originating from the instinct of imitation, but also viewed the instinct of imitation as something lying deep in our nature: “It can be seen that poetry was broadly engendered by a pair of causes, both natural. For it is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to engaged in mimesis (indeed, this distinguishes them from other animals: man is the most mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis that he develops his earliest understanding); and equally natural that everyone enjoys mimetic objects.” 27 Human beings are animals most skillful in imitation, and the instinct of imitation is therefore no exception to any tradition. It is as strong in the Chinese tradition as in any other traditions, and its evidence is abundant in Chinese records from high antiquity. In the beginning of Chinese civilization, one of the earliest cultural accomplishments is the invention of eight trigrams of the Book of Changes by the famed cultural hero Fu Xi. Xu Shen (58–147 BC), compiler of the first Chinese dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words], tells of how Fu Xi invented the eight trigrams in an iconic manner of imitation: In ancient times Bao Shi [Fu Xi] was the ruler of all under heaven. Looking up, he contemplated the images (xiang) in the sky, and looking down, the markings [fa] on the earth. He observed the patterns [wen] on birds and animals and their adaptations to the earth. From nearby, he took some hint from his own body, and elsewhere from other things. Then he began to make [zuo] the “eight trigrams” of the Book of Changes, to pass on the model images [xianxiang] to later times.28

As a form of imitation, iconicity, according to Sternberg’s definition, “entails a relation of likeness between marker and thing, signifier and signified.”29 Luo Genze, a Chinese scholar of literary thought, views Xu Shen’s passage as an expression of the idea that writing (and hence literature) imitates Nature.30 In his interpretation of this legend, however,

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James J. Y. Liu rejects the idea that Fu Xi’s invention of the eight trigrams is mimetic. He states: “The legend about Fuxi’s invention of the Eight Trigrams, which became the prototype of the Chinese script, does not have a mimetic conception of writing, because … the trigrams do not represent actual objects but symbolize the dynamic principles [of the yin and yang] underlying the cosmos.” 31 Here, he clearly overlooks the fact that the yin line (a broken line - -) and the yang line (a whole line —) are respectively stylized images of the land and sky. Gao Heng, a noted scholar of the Book of Changes in China, explains: “When the ancients watched the boundless oneness of the sky and earth with no distinction between the two, they used one full line to represent the sky. Since the earth is divided into land and water, they used a broken line to represent it.”32 The eight trigrams were believed to have evolved from images that imitated phenomena in the world and a few with stylized images still possess visible resemblances to actual things. For example, kan, which represents “water,” still retains the shape of flowing water; li, which represents “net” still looks like a net; and even qian, which symbolizes heaven, still recalls skylines. The eight trigrams form the core of the Zhouyi [the Book of Changes], one of the main sources from which Chinese aesthetic thought draws its inspiration and materials. Fu Xi’s invention of the eight trigrams was accomplished in the most primitive and most original way of imitation by modeling after the images of the sky and earth, patterns left behind by birds and animals, and the shapes of the human body. Xu Shen’s description clearly conveys an idea of imitation, but it is more concerned with the iconicity of signs than a view of mimesis in literary studies. This is understandable because he was preoccupied with compiling a dictionary of Chinese writing symbols. Xu Shen’s passage almost duplicates a passage from the Xicizhuan (Appendixes to the Book of Changes, ca. fourth century BC), but it did not include the two lines from its source: “Then he began to make (zuo) the ‘eight trigrams’ of the Book of Changes, so as to connect [human life] with the virtues of the Divine Luminosity and to simulate the conditions of myriad things.”33 With the last two lines, the mimetic view is no longer exclusively concerned with the iconicity of the sign; it becomes a theory of imitation not much different from the Platonic mimesis. “The Divine Luminosity” refers to the underlying principle of the universe, which, in the Chinese tradition, is the Dao, roughly equivalent to Plato’s Idea or Form. “To simulate the conditions of myriad things” is to represent the operations of the universe through a highly abstract system. The Xicizhuan further affirms that the hexagrams, each of which consists of six broken or whole lines, were the result of

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imitation of the universe by sages: “The sages were able to discover the complex rationale behind the phenomena under the sky. So, they imitated (ni) the shapes (xing) and appearances (rong) of the universe to represent [xiang] the meanings appropriate to a particular object. This was how the imitations came to be called images (xiang).”34 In this statement, words such as “ni” [imitate], “xing” [shape], “rong” [appearance], and “xiang” [represent, literally, to draw an image] are all variations on the idea of “imitation.”35 The Xicizhuan further affirms that “yao,” the line image (broken or connected lines) of the hexagrams, also originated from imitation: “The ‘Yao’ is to model after the objects of this world; the ‘xiang’ is to imitate the images of the universe.” 36 The Xicizhuan is full of different expressions for the idea of “imitation.” The various Chinese terms for imitation evolved out of the different expressions. The Xicizhuan comprises a series of appended verbalizations to the Book of Changes. As a system of representation, the Book of Changes grew out of the imitation of the universe. It is a system that was created as a microcosm modeled after the operations of the macrocosm of the universe and believed to be able to represent and explain the operations of the universe. The Xicizhuan affirms this simulation: “The Zhouyi [Book of Changes] is equivalent to heaven and earth and it is therefore capable of comprehensively encompass the principle of heaven and earth.” 37 Ge Zhaoguang, a leading historian of Chinese thought, also points out the mimetic origin and function of divination: “They [the ancients] believed that the universe came into being like this, and the divination by tortoise shells and milfoil stalks is an imitation of the structure and genesis of the universe. Naturally, the function of divination should be believed.” 38 Likewise, the Chinese writing system (wen) came into being as a result of imitation. The Chinese word, wen, is a polysemous term, which means “marks” and “pattern” in its most literal sense and refers to “literature,” “culture,” and other civil aspects of society. It also refers to Chinese writing symbols, or Chinese characters. The symbols of Chinese writing system were also believed to have been invented in a mimetic manner. In Xu Shen’s postface, he narrated how Cang Jie invented Chinese writing: Cang Jie, scribe for the Yellow Emperor39 (accession ca. 2697 B.C.), by observing the tracks of fleeting birds and animals, came to the realization that the patterns and forms of the tracks can distinguish different birds and animals. [Inspired by this observation,] he began to invent [zao] writing graphs, so that all kinds of professions could be regulated, and people of all walks of life could be distinguished.40

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James Liu, however, rejects the mimetic notion of this legend: “the legend that Cang Jie invented Chinese characters after observing footprints of birds and beasts indicates only that he was inspired by such footprints, not that he invented characters to represent them” (1988: 24). For unknown reasons, Mr. Liu, a learned scholar, completely ignores the fact that the main method for creating Chinese characters is a method of imitation. In the Chinese writing system, there are six graph-making methods (liushu). Of the six graphic methods, the first one, xiangxing (literally, imitating shapes) is a principle of imitation. In his discussion of the six methods, Xu Shen stated: “When Cang Jie first invented writing symbols, he probably imitated the forms of things according to their appearances.” 41 Four of the other methods are more or less derived from the first method and therefore have varying degrees of imitations. Zheng Qiao (1103–1162 AD), a traditional scholar of the Song dynasty, points out: “All the six methods for creating Chinese characters are variations on the method of imitation.” 42 Scholars generally believe that in high antiquity, writing and painting were not distinguished and both resulted from imitation of forms. Zhang Yanyuan’s (815–875 AD) Lidai ming hua ji [Records of Famous Paintings through the Dynasties] makes a special mention of this feature. It also records the saying of a scholar who viewed the eight trigrams, Chinese writing, and painting as all based on the principle of imitation: “There are three kinds transmission by imitation. The first is to imitate the principle. The hexagram images are such imitations. The second is to imitate knowledge. Writing is such an imitation. The third is to imitate shapes. Painting is such an imitation.”43 Here, Zhang Yanyuan listed three kinds of imitation. Two of them are iconic representation of abstract ideas and one of them is imitation of concrete images. Thus, I may conclude this section by saying that the instinct of imitation was as strong in Chinese ancients and as essential to the Chinese tradition as in the West.

Conceptual Basis for Mimesis: Disjunction or Duality? Scholars who hold a nonmimetic view of Chinese literature believe that in Western literary thought, mimesis is supposed to be derived from a fundamental disjunction between a transcendental realm and an immanent realm. In Plato’s conception of the three worlds: the world of ideas created by God, the world of appearance in Nature, and the world of art

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created by the artist, the world of art models after the world of appearance and the world of appearance after the world of ideas.44 In the Aristotelian conceptions of mimesis, the Platonic tripartite mimetic structure is simplified into a dualism between the world of universals, on the one hand, and the world of art, on the other hand.45 Scholars who believe in the nonexistence of mimeticism in the Chinese tradition consider the former as an abstract realm of transcendence and the latter as a concrete realm of immanence. The two realms are separate, unrelated, and absolutely opposed to each other. Upon the disjunction, they believe, rests the theory of mimesis: “Mimesis is, after all, predicated on a fundamental ontological dualism—the assumption that there is a truer reality transcendent to the concrete, historical real in which we live, and the relationship between the two is replicated in the creative act and artifact.”46 This belief may be the theoretical basis for the radical claim that the concept of mimesis is missing in Chinese literary theory because “the Chinese literary tradition lacks one of the fundamental cultural determinants: the duality of transcendence and immanence.”47 I argue that mimetic theory does not have to depend on a duality between a transcendental realm and an immanent realm and a disjunction between the two terms is not the precondition for the rise of mimetic theory. So long as there are conditions for a duality between the model and the copy, an imitation may arise. And the model may take various forms, the natural world, human life, or abstract principles of the universe like God or the Platonic Idea. In Chinese culture, the comparable concept to the Platonic Idea or God is the Dao [Tao or translated as the Way], the first principle that controls the operations of the universe. Of course, this broad comparison leaves out other implications of the Dao. Unlike the Western first principle, the Dao as the first philosophical principle in China is both a transcendent concept and an immanent concept. The dual nature is found in the dual conception of the Dao in Chinese thought as both a transcendental entity and an immanent idea. This dual conception has had a profound impact upon traditional Chinese aesthetic thought. In Lao Zi’s Daode jing [The Classic of the Way and Its Power], the most important canonic work in Daoism, the Dao is represented as something unnamable and indescribable. For the sake of metaphysical inquiry, it is tentatively called the Dao, sometimes also named Shen (the divine).48 In his magnum opus on Chinese literary thought, the Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Liu Xie (465–522 AD) introduced the dual conception of the Dao into his literary thought. While recognizing the existence of the

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objective world, he believed that beyond the objective world there exists a mysterious, supernatural entity born before heaven and earth. In chapter 37, “kuashi” (Hyperbole), Liu Xie began with a dual conceptualization of imitation: That which rises above tangible shapes is called the Dao; that which exist in tangible shapes is called object. The divine Dao is difficult to imitate, for even most refined language cannot capture its ultimate form. Tangible objects are easy to depict, for robust words are capable of representing their real conditions.49

In this statement, a theory of imitation exists beyond doubt. Liu Xie constructed an opposition between two entirely different categories. One is visible, tangible, and describable while the other is invisible, intangible, and indescribable. He did not just make a distinction between the transcendental Dao and tangible Qi (object). He conceived of two kinds of imitation. While one imitates a transcendental idea, the other represents physical objects. We need to note the adjective that modifies the Dao, “shen or divine” and relate the divine Dao with shenli (divine principle) that Liu Xie conceived of as a mysterious and supernatural entity (shenli or Divine Principle) responsible for the appearance of the natural world, human beings, and literature and culture.50 Liu Xie did not conceive a personal god responsible for the creation of the universe, but he posited a divine principle, similar to Plato’s first principle, the Idea. The divine nature of the concept suggests a process of reification of the unknown and unnamable that gives the Dao a transcendental quality independent of the visible and describable Qi. Thus, the opposition between the Dao and Qi is similar to the Platonic duality between the world of ideas and the world of appearances. Unlike Plato’s Idea or Form, however, the Dao is not just an absolute idea of transcendence; it is also immanent in the Qi or things. In answering a question about where the Dao exists, Zhuangzi replied: the Dao exists in everything and everywhere; it is in ants, weeds, potsherd, and even in excrement and urine.51 The idea of immanence gives rise to the natural birth of literature and art because it conceives literary creation as something that arises naturally from the patterns of the Dao. The idea of transcendence facilitates the emergence of imitation because it conceives of the Dao as a model for humans to imitate and emulate. The difference from the absolute transcendental nature of the similar Western concepts such as the Platonic Idea, Logos, God, etc. allows for multiple

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conceptions with regard to the rise of literature and culture. As a transcendental principle, the Dao, like the Platonic Idea, is the ultimate source of all imitations, be they hexagrams, writing, or literature. When in Liu Xie’s concluding statement, people imitate the patterns of heaven, which are the manifestations of the Dao, the imitation is similar to the Platonic imitation of the first order: the world of appearance imitates the world of Ideas. When Fu Xi invented the eight trigrams, Cang Jie created Chinese writing, and writers created literary writings, the imitation is similar to Aristotle’s idea of mimesis: a copy imitates a model and a writing represents an action. The title of Liu Xie’s poetics offers an insight into his dual conception of literature. Nowadays the popular translation is “The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.” But the original Chinese title is open to different interpretations. Owen, for example, thinks that the title may be read as a single sentence, “the literary mind carves dragons,” which means “the way in which the more philosophical and psychological aspects of the tradition are realized in technical craft.”52 This reading makes sense in view of the totality of Liu Xie’s poetics. It suggests that literature is an art born of craft and affirms its representational nature. “Dragon,” which stands for artistic work in Liu Xie’s title, is not a real animal. In the Chinese tradition, it may refer to many things, some concrete and some abstract, but in general it refers to a highly revered divine creature. When the literary mind is connected with dragons, something interesting emerges. In Liu Xie’s postface to his poetics, he explained wenxin as: “The literary mind is the mind that one exercises in creating writing/literature.”53 Carving dragons is a highly regarded sculptural art in ancient China. Anyone who visits the Forbidden City will not miss the images of dragons carved in wood, ivory, stone, or metal. In carving a dragon, the sculptor needs a great deal of skill and imagination. He is engaged in an artistic activity that requires him not only to imitate a variety of real animals whose component parts form the composite image of a dragon but also to convey the ethereal divinity that the animal is believed to possess. Thus, the creative act involves both literal imitation of concrete details and imaginative representation of abstract ideas. From the representational point of view, the “dragon” in Liu Xie’s title stands for the artistic ideal in literary representation. Thus, it is reasonable to suggest that in Liu Xie’s magnum opus, which covers all aspects of literary conception and craft, he conceived of literature as a result of both expression and imitation.

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I therefore argue both the idea of natural growth of literature and the notion of mimetic genesis exist in the Chinese tradition. They do not form an absolute duality but were derived from a transcendental-immanent view of the Dao. Here, I would propose that the standard view in Chinese studies that literature is a natural and spontaneous growth54 should be modified. A more complete view should be that the Chinese conception of literature’s origin encompasses both a theory of spontaneous genesis and a theory of representation. The dual conception of the first principle of the universe as both a transcendental and immanent principle in the Chinese tradition has shaped Chinese mimetic theory in such a way that it is both commensurate with and different from its Western counterpart. It gave rise to a symbiosis of the idea of natural growth and the idea of mimetic creation. The symbiosis in turn constitutes two trends in Chinese theories of literature. While natural growth is the mainstream, mimetic creation is an undercurrent. The mainstream and undercurrent do not exclude one another. In fact, they complement each other. In chapter 44, “Wuse” (the Physical world) of Liu Xie’s poetics, the two ideas exist in a symbiotic state. In addition to describing the rise of poetry as a spontaneous response to the natural world, Liu Xie touched upon the idea of poetry as an imitation of the observed world: In responding to things, the Ancient Poets operated on the principle of endless association of ideas. They lost themselves in the myriads of things, completely absorbed in the visual and auditory sensations. On the one hand, they depicted the atmosphere and painted the appearances of things in perfect harmony with their changing aspects; and on the other, the linguistic and tonal patterns they used closely corresponded with their perceptions.55

This passage shows that Liu Xie’s theory of poetic creation is predicated on a dual conception of affective expression and mimetic representation. In this passage, imitation has two related meanings. First, imitation is an imitation of the natural world that stimulates and inspires the poet. Second, imitation is an imitation of the natural world in linguistic correspondences of sounds and tones. In this passage, Liu Xie touched upon two aspects of mimesis: the object and medium of imitation. In some other chapters, he discussed the epistemological status and technical aspect of mimesis in more details. For the compelling reason of space constraint, I will refrain from analyzing such examples.56 The symbiosis of natural growth and imitation is a distinctive feature in Chinese aesthetic thought whether it concerns poetry, drama, fiction,

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painting, calligraphy, or other arts. This can be more clearly seen in the poetic theories by scholars after Liu Xie. In Xie Zheng’s (1495–1575 AD) poetic theory, for example, he talked about both aspects with ease. In a discussion of the relationship between poetry and the natural world, he first reiterated the traditional view of poetry as a result of human response to the natural world: “Scenes observed are the matchmaker of poetry; desires are the fetus of poetry: an integration of the two gives birth to poetry.” Then, he went on to view poetry as a vehicle for imitation: “Poetry is a tool for imitating and describing scenes and desires.”57 In his poetic criticism, Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692 AD) came to a realization that not all poetry arose from spontaneous growth and some grew out of conscious imitation: “One method of composing poetry is surely to establish a host in control of the guests and effortlessly describe the scenes before the eye.”58 Here, the “host” and “guest” may be understood respectively as the subject and object. In this statement, there is an obvious tension between spontaneous growth and conscious imitation. It posits a dichotomy between the subject and object and also views poetry as a spontaneous way of imitation. In his further comments on the poetry of Music Bureau,59 Wang Fuzhi regarded it as having attained a verisimilitude because of imitation: “Life-likeness is the very best achievement of the poems which sing the praises of objects in the Music Bureau poetry.”60 At times, he privileged imitation over arduous efforts at contemplation: “The subtle ingenuity of poetry originates from taking the scenes and consigning them to rhythm; it does not lie in deliberate contemplation” (Ibid., 276). He made an unequivocal claim that writing results from imitation of objects: “When an object exists, its form will come into being. The form is its substance. When a form is born, an image will imitate it. What is imitated is writing/literature. So long as there is a form, an image will be completed. An image is the result of imitating the form of an object” (Ibid., 272). In this statement, he seemed to say that an object reveals its essence through its form. When a writer conceives an image of the object, his imitation succeeds in capturing its essence.

From Secondary Imitation to Representation In the Western tradition, imitation has two meanings or objects in aesthetic thought. Its primary meaning lies in the direct imitation of Nature, universe, or social life. Its secondary meaning refers to the imitation of ancient masters and classical writings. The two meanings are related. In

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the neoclassical period, discussions of secondary imitation flourished. John Dryden upheld the classical masters as patterns of imitation (Adams 1971: 231–4). Alexander Pope expressed the famous idea that to imitate Nature and to imitate ancients are one and the same thing.61 Boileau articulated the definitive neoclassical idea that the surest way to imitate nature is to imitate the classics.62 Interestingly enough, the Chinese tradition has a similar phenomenon. As I have pointed out in the opening of this essay, James Liu recognizes the theoretical inquiry into the imitation of previous masters in the Chinese tradition, but he overlooked the fact that as in the West, the primary and secondary imitation in the Chinese tradition are intrinsically related. The secondary view of imitation advocates the imitation of previous masters, their subject matter, and especially their modes of writing. The primary view opposes imitating ancient masters and advocates taking Nature as the master. During the Tang dynasty, the well-­ known treatise on painting theory Lidai minghua ji [Records of Famous Paintings through the Dynasties] records a famous saying by Zhang Zao: “By taking Nature (the Creator) as my master, I have acquired my source of creation internally.” 63 We may find an amazingly parallel idea in the neo-Platonic aesthetician Plotinus’s similar idea that the artist goes back to the wisdom in nature, which is embodied in the artist himself.64 More pertinently, it reminds us of a similar idea in Paul de Man’s critique of Heidegger’s reading of a famous poem by Höldelin: “The text says that Being (nature) educates (erzieht) the poet: nature is for him an example of a state he wishes to attain and imitate. This imitation is not the Aristotelian mimesis but rather the Romantic Bildung: initiation through the conscious experience of Being…. The poet is one who accepts nature (the immediate unity of Being) as his guide instead of submitting to some institution that accepts and perpetuates the separation between man and Being.”65 De Man’s idea may be used to characterize a prominent feature of Chinese poetic imitation. Because of the predominant view of literature as a spontaneous growth, the Chinese idea of imitation is always colored by a romantic vision of self-conscious initiation. Zhang Zao’s notion has established itself as a time-honored aphorism in Chinese aesthetic thought. In his saying, to take Nature as master is, without doubt, to imitate nature, and to declare that an artist obtains his source of creation from Nature is to acknowledge that mimesis is a source for art. Among later theorists, imitation of Nature was also emphasized by a number of scholar-poets. Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610 AD), a prominent poetscholar of the Ming dynasty, expressed some brilliant opinions on the

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matter of imitation in both its primary and secondary senses. He completely rejected slavish imitation of ancient masters. Instead, he called on writers to imitate nature: “He who is good at painting does not take painters but objects as his master. He who is good at learning does not take the Dao but his heart as his master. He who is good at writing poetry does not take previous poets but the myriad things in Nature as his master.”66 His idea of imitating Nature showed visible influence of Zhang Zao’s idea, but he enlarged the latter’s idea of imitation to include poetry and learning. In the Qing dynasty, Ye Xie (1627–1703 AD), a classical Chinese literary theorist, wrote one of the few systematic discourses on literature in ancient China, Yuanshi [The Origin of Poetry]. In his theoretic inquiry into poetic creation, he opposed slavishly imitating the ancients and advocated imitation of Nature. He said, “I do not privilege ancients writers. It is not because they do not have much worthy of learning. The heaven and earth are endowed with Nature’s pattern [ziran zhi wenzhang], which comes to express itself in accordance with my response to what is observed. There must be writings that imitate Nature in all its details so as to establish the ultimate standards for perfect literature.”67 Ye Xie did not object to imitating the ancients altogether. He only opposed viewing the ancients’ writings as the standards by which literary works are to be measured. In his opinion, imitation of the ancients must ultimately be judged by the standard in the imitation of nature. Whether a poet imitates the ancients or not, he must be equipped with discernment, an insight that ultimately comes from observations of Nature. This discernment will give a poet the courage to create literary works without worrying over whether he violates standards of excellence set by the ancients: “With discerning knowledge, one will have the courage that allows one to express what he wants to express without fear. Whether he speaks in this way or that way, what he says will be fitting and proper on the left and right. It would be as though he had the creator in his hands and nothing he says will not resemble the observed objects” (Ibid., 25). We find in Ye Xie’s view implications of Alexander Pope’s famous saying that imitation of Homer and imitation of nature are one and the same thing. At the same time, we also observe an expressionist view of the artist as the creator in the process of imitation. We may recall Stephen Owen’s nonmimetic evaluation of Liu Xie’s discourse. Interestingly, he finds a mimetic view in Ye Xie’s poetics: “However deeply Yeh Hsieh’s [Ye Xie] version of ‘Nature’ belongs to the Chinese tradition, at least part of the notion of literary art presented here leads inescapably to a version of mimêsis. Mimêsis is hidden in the seemingly

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innocuous phrase ‘catch the semblance of,’ k’o-hsiao, which also carries implications of ‘doing justice to.’”68 This observation confirms my view that Ye Xie’s poetics is characterized by a dualism of spontaneous creation and artful imitation. Ye Xie’s view is, of course, a continuation of Liu Xie’s dual conception of the ontological conditions of literature. Like Liu Xie, Ye Xie connected the natural birth of literature to the artificial birth in imitation. In conceptualizing the relationship between the world and the artist, Ye Xie posited two series of terms. The first series has three terms, li (principle), shi (event), and qing (condition). They address the internal operations of the universe. The second series has four terms, cai (talent), dan (courage), shi (learning), and li (energy). They address the creative consciousness in a writer’s mind responsible for the genesis of a literary work. “All shapes and colors, sounds and appearances,” he said, “depend on these four qualities to rise and propagate, and to become known and manifest” (Ibid., 23) By relating the triad in nature with the quartet in a writer’s mind, Ye Xie proposed a view of literary creation that has a dimension that should be appropriately called “representation.”69 Representation, a term often used interchangeably with “imitation” in literary studies,70 is “the process by which language constructs and conveys meaning.”71 This definition has to do with the process of world-­ imaging through language, a process in which “words (texts) refer, or create pointers to, the external world” (ibid). Ye Xie’s theorizing on literary creation displays an aspect of representation. He conceived of two worlds. There is the world of Nature lying outside and there is the world of art lying in the mind of the poet. Nature has its own literature (wenzhang/ patterns); so does the poet. When the poet uses his rational faculties to contemplate the conditions of the outer world, the world of Nature and the world of the poet become integrated. Then the poet represents the conditions of this integration through language and representation emerges. Through language representation, the literature of Nature becomes the literature of the poet, known to other human beings and measurable by the standards of Nature. In a dualistic way, Ye Xie viewed literature both as a natural growth of the universe and as a human act of representation of Nature. Hence, literature is a result of both expression and representation. To complement the expressive view of literature, Ye Xie unequivocally proposed a representational view: “Literature is that which represents (biao) the emotions and conditions of myriad things in the universe.”72

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Creation God and the Divine in Mimesis The Chinese tradition is generally believed to lack a creation god, comparable to the personal God in the West. Frederic Mote expresses a representative view in his Intellectual Foundations of China: “The basic point which outsiders have found so hard to detect is that the Chinese, among all peoples ancient and recent, primitive and modern, are apparently unique in having no creation myth; that is, they have regarded the world and man as uncreated, as constituting the central features of a spontaneous self-generating cosmos having no creator, god, ultimate cause or will external to itself.”73 Many scholars believe that this lack accounts for some vital differences between Chinese and Western aesthetic theories, for example, Chinese monism versus Western dualism, Western ex nihilo literary creation of imagined world versus Chinese stimulus–response transcription of empirical experiences, Western fictionality in literary creation versus Chinese lack of it, Western mimetic theory of arts versus Chinese nonmimetic view of literature, etc.74 In an article that reexamines these fundamental issues in Chinese and comparative literature, Yong Ren persuasively argues against the accepted view by questioning a narrow definition of the creation god and challenging the accepted view that cosmogony determines critical thinking about creativity in Chinese culture.75 In this section, my aim is not to show the existence of a comparable concept to the Western divine in Chinese aesthetic thought, but to examine the ontological and epistemological conditions of the Chinese idea of divinity and to inquire how they have shaped Chinese theory of mimesis in ways comparable to and different from those in Western aesthetic thought. Although sufficient scholarly evidence has proved that there are creation gods in Chinese thought and the view of a writer as a minor creation god does exist in Chinese literary theory,76 I still wish to pursue this issue beyond the defensive line. I want to ask: Even without creation gods, is it still possible for a tradition to develop a mimetic theory? Those scholars who hold a nonmimetic view of literature do not seem to think so because they have accepted Plato’s conception of God’s making as the ultimate basis of artistic imitation and overlooked the nontheistic dimension of Plato’s conception of mimesis. Let us recall how Plato expounded his conception of three worlds with the parable of couches. There are three kinds of couches: “one, that in nature, which… God produces,” a second bed “which the carpenter made,” and a third bed which is made by the painter. Along with the three kinds of couches, he conceived of three kinds of

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artists who make them: God, the carpenter, and the painter. Among the three artists, there are two orders of imitation: the carpenter imitates the couch in nature; the painter imitates the carpenter’s couch. All the imitators are makers of couches. The carpenter’s couch and painter’s couch are possible to human beings, but the couch in nature is made by God, no one else can be the maker. Thus, the first order of making is unattainable to human beings. An artist is only an imitator whose creation is a product of imitation three times removed from nature.77 Aristotle abandons Plato’s first order of imitation partly because he did not share Plato’s derogative view of imitation and partly because it is irrelevant to the art of imitation in nontheistic and empirical terms. There is a dimension in Plato’s fable of the three couches that has been overlooked by scholars who hold a nonmimetic view of Chinese literature. Although Plato’s idea of couch has a strong theistic color, it is also a reified idea in rational terms, abstracted from all couches. In his preparation for the argument leading up to the idea of couch, he stated: “We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name.”78 We may compare this statement with another translated version of the same passage: “Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume that there is one corresponding idea or form.”79 The second version may serve as an illumination, which tells in a more abstracted way that when he said that the idea of couch cannot be created by humans, his remark may be understood to mean that there cannot be a couch that incorporates the essence of all couches. In the abstract sense, his idea of the couch created by God as a separate entity independent of any real couch in the world comes close to the central thesis of Gongsun Long (b. 380 BCE?), an ancient Chinese philosopher, known for his theory of names. Feng Youlan, a modern Chinese philosopher, gives us an apt summary of Gongsun Long’s thesis: “Kung-sun Lung’s main thesis appears to be that particular things in the universe are made up of an infinite number of ‘universal’ (to speak in modern philosophical language), which remain ever unchanging and distinct from one another, although the physical object in which they are temporarily manifested and combined, may change or disappear.”80 Like Plato, Gongsun Long cited concrete examples to prove his thesis. One of the examples is found in his famous statement: “A white horse is not a horse.”81 The central argument in this statement is that while a white horse refers to a particular kind of horse, “horse” is a general name that refers to an abstracted idea of all horses. As an annotation to the treatise reads: “In the

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comparison and contrast between a white horse and a horse, a horse refers to a general denominator while a white horse refers to a specific designator” (Ibid., 7). The former deals with individuality whereas the latter involves generality. The common ground shared by Plato and Gongsun Long is that both make a distinction between the general and particular, the abstract and the concrete, and reify the general and abstract into an absolute and permanent entity independent of concrete things. In his introductory book on Chinese philosophy for Western readers, Feng Youlan identifies the similarity in the Greek and Chinese philosophers who happened to be contemporaries: “Kung-sun Lung emphasized that names are absolute and permanent. In this way he arrived at the same conception of Platonic ideas or universals that has been so conspicuous in Western philosophy.”82 Thus, when Plato said that God’s couch is impossible to create by humans, he meant that in the final analysis, the original source of imitation is the idea of couch, and a real couch or a represented couch cannot capture the original source of imitation. Insofar as the idea of couch is meant to represent the essence of “couch,” it comes close to the Chinese notion, shen, which has the dual meanings of the divine and the spiritual essence of an object or a person. In the Chinese tradition, the concept shen and the Dao are intricately connected. Chen Liangyun, a renowned specialist in Chinese poetics, views the two concepts as interchangeable: “‘shen’ is essentially the pneuma [jingqi] floating between heaven and earth. This pneuma may also be ‘named the Dao,’ [Laozi’s words]. Thus, this idea connects with Laozi’s idea that where there is the ‘Dao,’ there is the ‘divine.’”83 We have already mentioned that the Chinese concept, the Dao, is both transcendental and immanent in nature. Shen, similar to the Dao, is both transcendental and immanent and has its subjective as well as objective forms. Its transcendental nature is revealed in a time-honored definition. The Xicizhuan defines the divine as “yin yang buce zhi wei shen” (that the transformations of the yin and yang cannot be predicted is called the divine). Han Kangbo, a scholar of the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 AD), identified the immanentist features as well as its transcendental nature in his annotation of this saying: “The divine is the ultimate form of transformations. As a way of expression it intricately describes myriad things, but it cannot be investigated and interrogated. Hence the saying, ‘the transformations of the yin and yang principles cannot be predicted.’”84 In the following, I will explain the subjective-objective form of this concept as well as its transcendental-immanentist nature.

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The Chinese concept, shen, has a variety of meanings and implications in the Chinese tradition. It is impossible to conduct an elaborate discussion of this concept here. For comparative purposes, I will focus on a major aspect of the concept, which may enable the Chinese idea to have a dialogue not only with Plato’s Idea or Form of objects but also with Aristotle’s artistic ideal and ideas indebted to them. As a transcendental concept, it is like Plato’s Idea or Form. Shen, however, differs from Plato’s Idea in that while Platonic conception conceives of the Idea as a separable entity that transcends objects that are imitations of it, the Chinese conception conceives of shen as something both transcendental to the human mind and immanent in objects and intellect. Then how can we connect the Chinese concept with Plato’s Idea and Aristotle’s artistic ideal? Let us examine the Western notion of artistic ideal first. In his discussion of mimetic theories, Abrams attributes the central notion that art is ideal to two sources respectively in Plato’s and Aristotle’s original ideas: The first [class] is an empirical theory of the artistic ideal, of which the Poetics of Aristotle was the prototype; it maintains that the models and forms for artistic imitation are selected or abstracted from the objects of sense-­ perception. The other is a transcendental theory, deriving from Plato, or more accurately, from later philosophers whose aesthetic theory is made in part with building-blocks hewn out of the Platonic dialogues. This theory specifies the proper objects of art to be Ideas or Forms which are perhaps approachable by way of the world of sense, but are ultimately trans-­empirical, maintaining an independent existence in their own ideal space, and available only to the eye of the mind.85

Abrams’s categorization provides a convenient way to look at the connection between the Chinese and Western ideas of imitation. In the Chinese tradition, I venture to suggest that in accordance with the transcendental and immanent nature of the first principle in Chinese metaphysics, the Dao, the Chinese artistic ideal in imitation is both an empirical concept and a transcendental concept in the way the neoclassical artistic ideal is both empirical and transcendental. It is the quintessence of what Liu Xie calls shenli (divine principle). The divine principle is the rationale of the divine. In the Chinese tradition, the divine is an invisible force that makes things be themselves. Xun Zi (c. 313 BC–c. 238 BC) regarded the force behind the visible phenomena of nature as the divine. He states: “Stars revolve one after another; the

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sun and moon shine in turns; the four seasons replace each other in dominance; the yin and yang transform on a large scale; wind blows and rain falls profusely; myriads of things each obtain its harmony and comes into life, and each receives nurture and grows into maturity. That whose operation is invisible but its effect is visible is called the divine.”86 In terms of this definition of the divine, the shenli in Liu Xie’s conception is a transcendental idea because it is invisible, rising above the visible patterns of the universe and can be accessed only through divination by means of milfoil stems and tortoise shell. It is also an empirical ideal because it is the source and standard of all imitations. In its dual status, the Chinese concept comes close to Plotinus’s revisionist reconception of Plato’s Ideas in terms of Aristotle’s empirical artistic Ideal.

Why Is Mimesis Not Central to Chinese Poetics? In this section, I attempt to examine a few questions concerning Chinese and Western mimesis in terms of theory formation and generic development: Why has mimetic theory been perceived to be absent from the Chinese tradition? How did it fail to occupy a major position in Chinese literary thought in contradistinction to its mainstream status in Western aesthetic thought? What are the major differences between Chinese and Western mimetic theory and what accounts for the striking contrast? It seems to me, the perceived absence of mimetic theory arose not because of the absence of certain cultural determinants, but mainly because of different emphases laid on literature and art in the historical development in China and the West. Literary theories are generally derived from studies of existent literature. The presence or absence of certain ideas in a culture’s literary thought is largely determined by preoccupations with certain aspects of the literary phenomena. Earl Miner has pointed out that the centrality of mimesis in the West was largely due to the important position of drama within Greek culture at the beginning of the Western tradition.87 Imitation appeared as a cardinal critical principle in the Western critical tradition largely because in the beginning, epic and drama happened to be the focus of theoretical inquiry. By contrast, the idea of imitation did not occupy a central place in critical discourses in the Chinese tradition because lyric poetry happened to be the dominant literary genre until modern times. As the main object of theoretical consideration is different, conceptions of literature are invariably different.

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Epic and drama may be written in verse form, but their difference from lyric poetry is many-sided. The most significant difference is that while lyric poetry is short and mainly expresses the overflow of emotions, epic and drama narrate coherent stories or connected sequence of events. Aristotle’s idea of mimesis was certainly derived from his study of the Greek epic and drama popular in his time. Although lyric poetry was also a widely practiced literary genre, it did not receive as much attention as epic and drama in theoretical discourse. Aristotle made a mere mention of it in his Poetics. Had he or other literary theorist of his time or of the Western tradition derived a poetics from a study of lyric poetry, the emphasis in early mimetic theory might have been entirely different. The rise of Romantic expressive theory in the West testifies to this speculation. Wordsworth is both a poet and a theorist. In the formulation of his literary theory, his major object of examination is lyric poetry, not narrative poetry. As a result, he came to an expressive conception of poetry, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”88 This conception is quite different from Aristotle’s mimetic conception of poetry but comes very close to the Chinese conception of literature as natural and spontaneous growth. Wordsworth, however, did not abandon the mimetic conception altogether. In the same preface, he also viewed poetry as “the image of man and nature” because the “mind of man” is “naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature” (Ibid., 438 and 439). This conception of poetry will surely remind the reader of Liu Xie’s conception of writing as the “wen of the Dao.” In my comparative study of Chinese and Western mimesis, there exist obvious differences between Chinese and Western mimetic theories. What is the most fundamental difference? The major difference, I contend, is that while in the Chinese tradition, mimesis is more concerned with the imitation of objects, scenes, moods, and phenomena that tend to be weak in sequence, in the Western tradition, mimesis is more concerned with the imitation of events, action, processes, and phenomena that tend to be sequence oriented. My view on the difference needs a new research project to demonstrate its validity, but here I will only discuss it briefly. In my opinion, the basic difference grew out of the different degrees in which narration plays a role in the mainstreams of literary thought and practice. Narration involves a temporal process: “A narration is the symbolic presentation of a sequencing of events connected by subject matter and related by time. Without temporal relation we have only a list. Without continuity of subject matter we have another kind of list.”89 Many Chinese

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lyric poems are just a list of words and phrases with their syntactic relationships only implicitly suggested. Suffice it to mention Ma Zhiyuan’s (1250?–1324?) well-known poem, “Tianjingsha-Autumn Thought.”90 It is a lyric poem composed with almost all noun phrases with a minimal degree of narration. Western mimetic theory started with Plato who conceived of mimesis ultimately as an imitation of the Idea or Form, but it is Aristotle’s reconception of mimesis as an imitation of actions and events by an artistic medium that dominated Western literary thought. In my opinion, although Plato was hostile to artistic imitation, his mimetic theory is more friendly to painting, sculpture, and lyric poetry. Had previous studies focused on Plato’s theory of imitation, the situation might have been quite different. While Plato’s conception tends to stress a changeless permanence in imitation, Aristotle’s reconception emphasizes the temporal process of change. This can be seen quite clearly in their different focuses on the objects of imitation. Whereas Plato was more interested in discussing imitations concerning painting, Aristotle directed his attention almost exclusively to narratives. To view Chinese mimetic theory as a whole, I venture to suggest that it is closer to the Platonic view than the Aristotelian view. I say so for a number of reasons. First, Chinese mimetic theory has its origin in studies of images and paintings, and theories of painting have had a formative impact on literary theories. Second, lyricism was the dominant literary form throughout the premodern periods. Lyric poetry is essentially congeries of emotions, impressions, and perceptions, etc. Lyric poetry has a minimal degree of narration and therefore is not conducive to the rise of narrative discourse. The minimal use of narration may explain why sequence-­ oriented mimesis is not the dominant subject in Chinese literary thought. Third, like Plato, Chinese mimetic theory views mimesis in literature and art as ultimately an imitation of the changeless cosmic principle, the Dao. As a result, mimetic view of literature as a representation of sequence-­ oriented events did not appear until after literary thinkers started to have an interest in narrative poetry, drama, and fiction. In his study of Chinese literary theory, Chen Liangyun correctly points out that the artistic technique comparable to the Western idea of “imitation” and “representation” came to maturity in the fu [rhyme-prose] writings.91 Fu is a literary genre halfway between prose and poetry, popular between second and sixth century BC. Unlike short lyric poems, a fu-style writing may extend to hundreds of lines and is capable of narrating a

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sequence of events like a narrative poem. In the chapter “Quanfu” (Elucidation of Fu), Liu Xie systematically described the rise, evolution, and maturity of the fu-style poetry and most significantly, its mimetic and narrative function: “The rhyme prose originated from lyric poetry/ And bifurcated into major and minor forms./ In depicting objects and picturing appearances/ It resembles sculpture and painting in its colorful texture./ It is capable of describing convolution in easy-to-understand manners/ And narrating the commonplace in untrammeled language.”92 In traditional commentaries on drama and fiction, commentators explicitly declared that representation of life is the raison d’être of drama and fiction. I have written a long article on this subject, but here, I will only present a few representative views. Wang Jide (?–1623 AD), who wrote a systematic treatise on dramatic art, Qulü [The Principles of Drama] (1610), emphasized the mimetic nature of drama: “Drama imitates and describes events and situations in life; it should reveal character and values through natural and subtle means of action rather than relying on fancy words.”93 Some fiction commentators explicitly declared fiction to be a representation of life. They actually used terms like “imitation” and stressed the verisimilitude of representation. Xiling Sanren, pseudonym of an unknown critic, wrote in the preface to a novel: “How can it be easy to talk about fiction. Its use of language is vernacular. A word from a character must sound as though it had just come out fresh from that person’s mouth, so that the representation of him is able to capture his inner spirit. Events in fiction are trivial. A scene must be described in such a way that makes one feel that the author seems to have personally encountered it, its twists and turns adequately reflecting what he sees.”94 Since ideas of imitation abound in traditional Chinese literary thought, my final question is: Why has their existence failed to gain adequate recognition in existent scholarship? In my opinion, this status quo grows out of conceptual and methodological blindness. Conceptually, there is a preconceived notion of the dichotomy between Chinese and Western traditions and thought. Scholars who believe in the nonexistence of mimetic theory in Chinese literary thought have been heavily influenced by a popular belief in the field of literary and cultural studies, that is: the East and the West are so distinctly different from each other that modes of thinking and expression must differ from each other. This preconceived notion easily leads to a dichotomy between the Chinese idea of natural growth and the Western idea of mimetic genesis. Methodologically, some of those scholars have treated Chinese literary thought as a monolithic whole with little

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varieties and without undercurrents or countercurrents. Their view is based on a single major current of Chinese literary thought and the data collected are often purposefully selected to suit a preconceived notion with a blindness to the existence of other ideas and notions.

Conclusion: Mimetic Theory Is Universal Abrams refers to mimetic theory as the most primitive theory. Being “primitive” also means that it is the most basic and most originary. Admittedly, Chinese mimetic theory did not occupy as important a position as its Western counterpart in their respective traditions, but as I have shown, it is as “primitive” and hence as originary as its Western counterpart. In a way, it constitutes a nodal point that connects strands of ideas in literary theory as well as ideas in language, philosophy, calligraphy, painting, and sculpture. In my study of Chinese mimetic theory, we can see a red thread of imitation that runs from the imitation of heaven and earth and human body in the creation of the eight trigrams, through the imitation of birds tracks and animal footprints in the invention of Chinese writing, to imitation of objects in painting and representation of Nature and social life in literary works. Chinese art, be it verbal, visual, or plastic, was deeply rooted in the mimetic principle governing the creation of Chinese writing. Chinese characters may not be “short-hand pictures of actions and processes” in Fenollosa’s controversial view,95 but the cardinal principle governing the creation of Chinese characters—that of imitating the outer appearances of things—is fundamental to Chinese literature and art. Though Chinese mimetic theory has never occupied a dominant position in Chinese aesthetic thought, it may nevertheless be regarded as the root of all Chinese arts. There is an irony for mimetic theory in the Chinese and Western traditions. Mimetic theory occupied such an important place in Western history, and yet it started as a pejorative view. In the Chinese tradition, though mimetic theory never occupied a central position, it was positively valued. After Aristotle’s Poetics, Western aesthetic thought relegated inquiries into the possibility of capturing essence of things in imitation to a secondary position; by contrast, Chinese aesthetic thought showed a great deal of interest in this topic and developed it into an aesthetic category that views the representation of the spiritual essence as the highest order in artistic imitation. Having explored various conceptual issues of mimesis from a cross-­ cultural perspective, I am going to draw a conclusion with regard to the

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universality of mimetic theory. In his study of mimesis, Halliwell posits two models of mimetic theory: “a ‘world-reflecting’ model (for which the ‘mirror’ has been a common though far from straightforward metaphorical emblem)” and “a ‘world-simulating’ or ‘world-creating’ conception of artistic representation.”96 Both models exist in Chinese aesthetic thought, but the emphasis seems to rest on the second model. Mimetic theory should exist in any literary tradition that has formed a system of aesthetic thought because imitation is a basic human instinct. The cultural conditions for the rise of mimetic theory may vary from tradition to tradition; so may the ontological and epistemological conceptualizations. But the conceptual rationale for mimetic theory is basically the same irrespective of cultural differences: mimesis in art occurs when a representation is made of a prior model, be that model an abstract idea, the natural world, or the social world. It does not have to depend on a disjunction between transcendence and immanence; nor does it depend on a god of creation. It is certainly not a cultural invention unique to the West. Although I did not examine data from other traditions, it is reasonable to draw a conclusion on the basis of the comparative study of Chinese and Western cases: mimetic theory is universal in literature and art, at least in Chinese and Western traditions.

Notes 1. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. vii. 2. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 630–661; 819–844. 3. Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 4. M.  H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and The Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1953), p. 11. 5. See Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953); and Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism (1981), Realism in Our Time (1964), Studies in European Realism (1964), and Theory of the Novel (1971). For conceptual reaffirmation of mimesis, see Paul Riceour, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, translated by Robert Czerny and others (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 39; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth

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and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Second revised edition (New York: Continuum, 1999), pp. 101–169. 6. See Haun Saussy’s The Problem of A Chinese Aesthetic, pp. 1–12; Longxi Zhang’s Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China, pp. 1–18; and Svensson Ekström’s article, “A Second Look at the Great Preface on the Way to a New Understanding of Early Chinese Poetics,” in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 21 (1999): 1–33. 7. Rey Chow, ed., Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 10. 8. In Rey Chow’s critique of the various dichotomies between China and the West, she cited many research sources to support her argument, but on the issue of mimetic/nonmimetic dichotomy, she cited nothing. This is not a miss in her scholarship, but simply because up to the time of her critique, except for some passing critical remarks, there is no relevant research to cite. 9. See Ye Lang, Zhongguo meixueshi dagang [Outline of Chinese History of Aesthetics] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1985), p. 11 10. I have conducted an evidential research on this topic. See Chap. 7. 11. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, p. 15. 12. Irena R. Makaryk, ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 591. 13. I adopted this conceptualization from the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 576. 14. Meir Sternberg, “‘The Laokoon’ Today: Interart Relations, Modern Projects and Projections,” Poetics Today (1999)20.2: 291–379. 15. James J.Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 48–49. 16. Wen is a polysemous word in Chinese. It means “pattern” in its most general sense but refers to “literature” in its aesthetic sense. It also covers culture, cultivated virtue, civilization, and civil aspects of society, etc. 17. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 20. 18. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 39. 19. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, p. 35. 20. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, p. 82. 21. Andrew Plaks, “Towards A Critical theory of Chinese Narrative,” in Chinese Narrative, Critical and Theoretical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 311.

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22. François Jullien (1995), Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, tr., Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2000), p. 164. 23. Craig Fisk, “Literary Criticism,” in William Nienhauser, ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1986), p. 49. 24. Liang Shi, “The Leopardskin of Dao and the Icon of Truth: Natural Birth Versus Mimesis in Chinese and Western Literary Theories,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 31, No.2, 1994, p. 159. 25. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 8. 26. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, p. 640. 27. Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Stephen Halliwell, p. 37. 28. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi, edited by Xu Xuan, Juan 15a (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, n.d.), p. 314. Henceforward, unless indicated otherwise, all quotations from Chinese sources are my own translation. 29. Meir Sternberg, “‘The Laokoon’ Today: Interart Relations, Modern Projects and Projections,” p. 296. 30. Luo Genze, Zhongguo wenxue pipingshi [History of Chinese Literary Criticism], Vol. 1 (Beijing: 1958), p. 53. 31. James Liu, Language Paradox and Poetics: A Chinese Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 23–24. 32. Gao Heng, Zhouyi Dazhuan tongshuo [A General Discourse on the Great Commentary to the Zhouyi], quoted from Zhongguo shixue tixilun [The Chinese System of Poetics] (Beijing: Zhongguo sheke chubanshe, 1992), p. 167. 33. Huang Shouqi and Zhang Shanwen, Zhouyi yizhu [The Zhouyi Annotated and Translated] (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1989), p. 592. 34. Zhouyi zhengyi [The Correct Meaning of the Zhouyi], annotated by Kong Yingda (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, n.d.), ce 3, juan 7, 19a. 35. Zhouyi Zhengyi (Correction Interpretation of the Book of Changes), ce 3, juan 7, 19a. 36. Huang Shouqi and Zhang Shanwen, Zhouyi yizhu [The Zhouyi Annotated and Translated], p. 569. 37. Huang Shouqi and Zhang Shanwen, Zhouyi yizhu [The Zhouyi Annotated and Translated], p. 535. 38. Ge Zhaoguang, Zhongguo sixiangshi [History of Chinese Thought], (Shanghai: Fudan danxue chubanshe, 2001), Vol. 1, p. 73. 39. The Yellow Emperor, a quasi-mythological figure, is believed to be an ancestor of the Chinese nation. 40. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937), juan 15a, p. 1a. 41. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words], Juan 15A, 1b.

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42. Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi lue [Outline of General Records] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), Ce 4, p.11. 43. Zhang Yanyuan, Lidai minghua ji [Records of Famous Paintings through the Dynasties] in Zhongguo hualun leibian [Classified Collections of Chinese Theories of Painting] (Taipei: Huazheng shuju, 1977), p. 27. 44. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 819–844. 45. Abrams offers a concise account of how Plato constructed a relationship among the three worlds and how Aristotle simplified it by “shorn[ing] away the other world of criterion-Ideas.” The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 8–10. 46. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, p. 5. 47. See Liang Shi, “The Leopardskin of Dao and the Icon of Truth,” p. 163. 48. Laozi elaborated on this idea in a number of places in his Daode Jing [The Classic of Way and Virtue], annotated by Guo Xiang (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995), see chs. 1, 4, 6. 49. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], annotated by Lu Kanru and Mu Shijin, p. 452. 50. Adapted from Vincent Shih’s translation, The Literary Mind and Carving of Drogons (Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), p. 10. 51. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi [Writings of Zhuangzi] (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1995), chap. 22, p. 233. 52. Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1992), p. 185. 53. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], p. 602. 54. For a canonization of this view, see James J.  Y. Liu’s Chinese Theories of Literature, p.  69, and Stephen Owen’s Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, p. 37. 55. Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 349. 56. An interested reader may read beginning of chap. 37, and all of chaps. 8 and 46. 57. Xie Zhen, Siming shihua [Poetic Talks by Siming], in Zhongguo meixue shi ziliao xuanbian [A Selected Collection of Materials on Chinese History of Aesthetics] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), p. 112. 58. Wang Fuzhi, Jiangzhai shihua [Poetic Talk of Jiangzhai], Zhongguo meixue shi ziliao xuanbian, p. 277. 59. A collection of Chinese ballads folk songs dating from antiquity to the Tang dynasty, compiled by Guo Maoqian in the twelfth century. 60. Zhongguo meixue shi ziliao xuanbian, p. 275. 61. Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 279. 62. Nicolas Boileau, Art Poétique, in Oeuvres Complètes de Boileau (Paris: Société Les Belles Lettres, 1967), pp. 81–117.

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63. Zhongguo meixue shi ziliao xuanbian, p. 281. 64. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 109. 65. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 258–9. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of Poetics Today for calling my attention to this parallel idea. 66. Yuan Hongdao, Yuan Zhonglang wenxuan [Selected Writings of Yuan Zhonglang] (Shanghai: Fanggu shudian, 1937), p. 210. 67. Ye Xie, Yuanshi [The Origin of Poetry] (Beijing: renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979), p. 25. 68. This translation is quoted from Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, p. 516. 69. Ye Xie, Yuanshi [The Origin of Poetry], 23–24. 70. For example, W. J. T. Mitchell writes in his article, “Representation”: “the founding fathers of literary theory, Plato and Aristotle, regarded literature as simply one form of representation. Aristotle defined all the arts—verbal, visual, and musical—as modes of representation.” See Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, p. 11. 71. Alex Preminger and T.V. F. Brogan, eds., New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 1037. 72. Ye Xie, Yuanshi [The Origin of Poetry], p. 21. 73. Frederic Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 17–18. 74. See Michael Puett’s book-length study, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Dvinization in Early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002); and Yong Ren’s summary in his article “Cosmogony, Fictionality, Poetic Creativity: Western and Traditional Chinese Cultural Perspectives,” Comparative Literature, 50.2 (Spring, 1998), 98–117. 75. Yong Ren, “Cosmogony, Fictionality, Poetic Creativity: Western and Traditional Chinese Cultural Perspectives,” Comparative Literature, 50.2 (Spring, 1998), p. 101. 76. See Yong Ren, “Cosmogony, Fictionality, Poetic Creativity: Western and Traditional Chinese Cultural Perspectives,” Comparative Literature, 50.2 (1998): 98–119. 77. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 821–823. 78. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 820. 79. Plato, Republic, Book X, in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 33. On the same page, there is a footnote that suggests perhaps a better translation: “we have been accustomed to assume that there is one single idea correspond-

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ing to each group of particulars; and to these we give the same name (as we give the idea).” 80. Feng Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, translated by Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 1, p. 203. 81. Gongsun Long, Gongsun Longzi jiaoshi [Kongsun Long’s Writings Collated and Annotated], annotated by Wu Yujiang (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 2001), pp. 1–2. 82. Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1948), p. 87. 83. Chen Liangyun, Zhonggo shixue tixi lun (The Chinese System of Poetics) (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui kexue chubashe, 1992), pp. 338–9. 84. Quoted from Wang Bi’s annotation of the Zhouyi, in Wang Bi ji jiaoshi [Wang Bi’s Collecte Works Annotated and Collated], vol. 2: 543. 85. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 36. 86. Xunzi, Xunzi yizhu [Xunzi Annotated and Translated], annotated and translated by Zhang Jue (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995), p. 347. 87. Earl Miner, “On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems,” Part I, in Critical Inquiry, 5.2 (Winter1978), p. 350. 88. William Wordsworth (1850), “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in William Wordsworth: Selected Prose, ed., John O.  Hayden (Harmondswroth: Penguin, 1988), p. 297. 89. Robert Scholes, “Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative,” in W.  J. T.  Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 205. 90. Ma Zhiyuan sanqu zhu (Ma Zhiyuan’s Dramatic Lyrics Annotated) (Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1989), 22. 91. Chen Liangyun, Zhonggo shixue tixi lun (The Chinese System of Poetics), p. 183. 92. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], p. 168. 93. Faye Chunfang Fei, ed., and tr., Chinese Theories of Theatre and Performance from Confucius to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 62. 94. Cai Zongxiang et al., Zongguo wenxue lilun shi [History of Chinese Literary Theories], 5 vols. (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1987), vol. 4, p. 629. 95. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, edited by Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968), p. 9. 96. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, p. 33.

CHAPTER 7

Western Mimeticism and Chinese Mimetic Theory

Chapter 5 has confirmed the universality of mimesis as an aesthetic concept in literature and art irrespective of Eastern or Western cultural traditions. The confirmation, however, has been made mostly in terms of metaphysical and conceptual considerations. In the West, although the idea of mimesis first arose in early Greek thought, it developed into a mimetic theory that has become the foundation and mainstream of Western literary thought and the elaborate reconceptions and explorations of it in history eventually gave rise to what is called by some scholars “mimeticism,” an aesthetics of mimesis and representation.1 In view of its significant impact, people may ask: If mimetic theory is so fundamental to Western literary thought, can we find a similar mimetic theory in other time-honored literary traditions like China? Since this book has the major focus on the fusion of aesthetic horizons, we may ask: Is there a mimetic theory comparable to that of the West in traditional Chinese thought? A reply based on the scholarly consensus is negative. In the field of Chinese and comparative literature, the consensus is that the idea of mimesis is not entirely absent, but mimetic theory of literature is nonexistent in Chinese literary thought. In Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago 1975), the first introduction of Chinese literary thought to the West, James J. Y. Liu, inspired by M. H. Abram’s analytic scheme in classifying literary theories, has constructed six kinds of theories out of traditional Chinese literary thought. He maintains: “I have discerned in traditional Chinese criticism © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_7

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six kinds of theories of literature, which I have decided to designate metaphysical, deterministic, expressive, technical, aesthetic, and pragmatic respectively.”2 Nevertheless, he does not think that the Chinese tradition has a mimetic theory. One may ask: Why does he think so? In his opinion, though Chinese metaphysical theory seems to share some elements of Western mimetic theory “in so far as both kinds of theories are primarily oriented towards the ‘universe,’” among the three meanings of the “universe” in the Western tradition: the natural world, human society, and the transcendental world, only the last was faintly mentioned in the Chinese metaphysical theory. And even here, he points out some subtle differences. One of the differences is that while the Transcendental Idea is supposed to exist in some superlunar world and in the mind of the artist in the Western metaphysical tradition, in Chinese metaphysical theory, the Dao, a Chinese equivalent to the Platonic Idea is immanent in everything in the universe.3 The other more important difference is that in the interrelations among the universe, the writer, and the literary work, Chinese metaphysical theory shows no process of imitation in the creation of a literary work by the writer in imitation of Nature, or human society, or transcendental idea. By contrast, “in Western mimetic theories the poet is either conceived of as consciously imitating Nature or human society, as in Aristotelian and neoclassical theories, or as being possessed by the Divine and unconsciously uttering oracles, as described by Plato in the Ion, whereas in Chinese metaphysical theories the poet is conceived of neither as consciously imitating Nature nor yet as reflecting the Tao in a purely unconscious manner.”4 He admits that the idea of imitation is not totally absent in Chinese literary thought, but his conclusion is that, on the one hand, it did not form the basis of any theory of literature and, on the other hand, it only concerns imitation in the secondary sense, that is, imitation of ancient masters. In view of these differences and of the literal meaning of “mimetic,” he refrains from using “mimetic” to describe any of the Chinese theories of literature in his fairly systematic introduction. Scholars after James Liu have radicalized his position. They have not only proclaimed that mimetic theory is nonexistent in Chinese literary thought, but also taken elaborate moves to argue that the cultural conditions necessary for the rise of mimetic theory did not exist in the Chinese tradition. Time and again, we hear scholars proclaim in academic conferences or writings that the idea of mimesis is alien to the literary thought of the Chinese tradition. Among these scholars, some argue that due to the

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lack of a God of creation, the Platonic idea of mimesis based on the dichotomy between the world of literary creation and the other world of Ideas does not exist in China.5 Other scholars argue that the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, the idea that a piece of literary work grows out of an imitation of the natural world or human society, is also nonexistent in Chinese literary thought because the cultural determinants necessary for the rise of a mimetic theory are missing. In Chap. 6, I have examined how a scholar starts with an analysis of the “cultural determinants that are responsible for the emergence of nonmimetic literary theory in China in contrast to the concept of mimesis in the West,” and ends with the claim that all the cultural determinants indispensable for the rise of mimetic theory are missing from Chinese culture and the conclusion that “the concept of mimesis is consequently missing in Chinese literary theory.”6 What is most intriguing is that some scholars who hold a nonmimetic view of literature in Chinese literary thought entangle themselves in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, they argue that Chinese literary thought does not subscribe to Greek mimesis: literature imitates a prior reality but, on the other hand, they have taken pains to prove that what Chinese poetry represents is literally true. Stephen Owen, who suggests that Chinese poetry does not imitate or feign reality, argues that the categorical correspondences in Chinese poetry are “strictly true,” and because the genesis of poetry is conceived of as “a virtual transfer of substance” from experience to words and from words to reader,” “poems were authentic presentations of historical experience.”7 Pauline Yu, who argues that Chinese literary thought does not hold “the mimetic view that poetry is the imitation of an action,”8 and Chinese poets write poetry using “a stimulus-response method of poetic production rather than a mimetic one,”9 suggests that in the Chinese literary universe, “[t]here are no disjuctures between true reality and concrete reality, nor between concrete reality and literary work,” and poetry “is seen here as a literal reaction of the poet to the world around him and of which he is an integral part.”10 Michael Fuller also attests to the truthfulness of Chinese poetry: “In the classical Chinese tradition, all poems are true by their very existence; the only questions are how they are true and if their truth is of any significance.”11 As Haun Saussy aptly sums up the argument: “the claim is that Chinese representation, unlike Greek mimesis, is always true.”12 If Chinese representation is always true, why could it not rise to the status of Greek mimesis? Anticipating this question, Pauline Yu offers an answer: Mimesis should not be misconstrued “as aiming for the

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proto-photographic representation of sensible reality. For the Renaissance poet, on the contrary, imitation involved not a literal replication but rather the artful embellishment and ordering of nature, whether based on Platonic ideal Forms or Aristotelian universals.”13 In the opinions of these scholars, Chinese representation cannot be regarded as a mimetic theory comparable to Greek mimesis because it lacks these conceptual prerequisites: (1) the disjunction between transcendence and immanence; (2) a divine model of creation; (3) a conception of the poet as a maker of fiction.14 Because of the absence of these prerequisites, even though Chinese representation attains an artful truthfulness comparable to modern representation in realism and naturalism, it cannot be regarded as mimesis, still less forming a mimetic theory. I agree that Chinese mimetic theory is different from its Western counterpart, but to insist on certain features of Greek mimesis so as to argue for the nonexistence of mimetic theory in the Chinese tradition is to lose sight of what constitutes mimesis in its original conception. Mimetic theory is, in simple terms, a view that conceptualizes art as essentially an imitation of aspects of the universe. It was initially connected with the idea of the divine but eventually lost its divine dimension. In his Republic, Plato makes a distinction among three worlds: the world of Ideas created by God, the world of appearance in Nature, and the world of art created by the artist. Out of the three worlds, he constructs two levels of imitation: the world of art models after the world of appearance and the world of appearance after the world of Ideas.15 In his Poetics, Aristotle abandons the world of Ideas and directs his attention to the relationship between the phenomenal world and the world of art, consequently simplifying the idea of mimesis. He expresses the idea that most forms of art, lyric poetry, epic, tragedy, comedy, and even music are in their general conception modes of imitation, which occurs when a copy is made of a model.16 Despite Aristotle’s reformulation, in both Plato’s Dialogues and Aristotle’s Poetics, mimesis means that a work of art is constructed in accordance with a prior model or models, be they transcendental ideas in the superlunar world or social realities in the natural world. In this chapter, I am not going to engage in a conceptual inquiry into the necessary conditions for the rise of mimetic theory since I have conducted such a research in Chap. 6, but will attempt to construct a Chinese mimetic theory, explore how it is comparable to and different from its Western counterpart, and suggest reasons why it has been overlooked by existent scholarship.

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From Imagistic Imitation to Representation Mimetic Theory in the Chinese tradition originated from ideas concerning imitations of the natural and social world in visual arts. It was then enriched and further developed by conceptual inquiries in the verbal arts. Mimetic theory in Chinese literary thought as a whole was heavily indebted to theories of imitation in painting. The close relationship between poetic mimesis and painterly mimesis is not difficult to understand, for Chinese poetry comprises predominantly short lyric poems that resemble painting in its depiction of image, scenes, and moods in a nonlinear, nonsequential manner. A number of painting theories influenced Chinese literary thought. One of them is stated in “Liufa” (the Six Methods of Painting) by Xie He (fl. 490) in his Guhua pinlu [Records of Ancient Paintings]. According to tradition, Xie He did not propose the six methods but summarized similar views before him. Of the six methods, two are concerned with imitation: (3) yingwu xiangxing (to imitate an object by following its shapes) and (6) chuanyi moxie (to transmit the essence of an object by imitating it).17 In his Bifa ji [Methods of Painting Strokes], Jing Hao (fl. 920), another theorist of painting, made a distinction between si (resemblance) and zhen (verisimilitude) in imitation and privileged the latter. Through the mouth of an old man, he expounded his theory with two ideas. The first one reads: “A painting is a picture of beauty, but it values resemblance and faithful representation.” The second states: “A painting is to paint. It obtains its verisimilitude by contemplating the image of an object.”18 When asked “what is resemblance and what is verisimilitude?” the old man answered: “Resemblance grasps the appearance but loses the pneuma. Verisimilitude flourishes in both pneuma and substance.”19 This view sets forth a dialectical relationship between formal resemblance and spiritual resemblance, a central idea in Chinese aesthetic thought first proposed by Gu Kaizhi (346–407 AD), a master painter of the Jin dynasty. Gu Kaizhi’s notion of “using formal resemblance to impart spiritual resemblance”20 has exerted profound influence on Chinese mimetic theory. In the history of Chinese literary thought, however, there was at first a flourishing interest in formal imitation. It gave rise to a fad of formal resemblance in lyric poetry in the Wei Jin and Southern dynasties periods, which in turn affected literary criticism. In discussions of the dialectical relationship between formal resemblance and spiritual resemblance, the former was emphasized and praised as a positive quality and did not become a concept with negative connotations until long after the Tang.

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For example, Shen Yue (441–513 AD) praised “Sima Xiangru’s deftness in creating formal resemblance in his use of language for description.”21 Zhong Rong (468–c. 518 AD) praised Zhang Xie for “skillfully constructing formal resemblance in words”22 and endorsed Bao Zhao for “his skill in writing poetry that imitates appearance and depict objects.”23 In chapter 46 of Liu Xie’s Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, he viewed the overflowing interest in imagistic representation as a trend that flaunts and sets great store by formal resemblance. This kind of discourse on formal resemblance is primarily confined to the imitation of objects and scenes, and not devoted to long and extended actions or events, but it differs little in nature from the idea of realistic representation. In Plato’s conception of imitation, he speaks lowly of formal resemblance, comparing it to reflections produced by a mirror, which can never hope to capture the essence of objects. In Chinese literary thought, mirror is also a trope frequently used in the discussions of formal resemblance. Fan Wen, a scholar of the Song, made these remarks: “Ancient people discussed formal resemblances, comparing it to a mirror that reflects the shapes of objects and a lamp that projects the shadow of an object.”24 Thus, as late as the Song, formal resemblance still did not take on derogative connotations in Chinese literary thought. Even in later discussions of imitation, it was viewed as a necessary basis for a higher order of representation, which is the transmission of spiritual essence. One of the fundamental differences between Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of imitation may be that the latter abandons the former’s imitation of Ideas. Conceptually, however, I think that this difference is one in focus. While Plato is more concerned with the ontology of imitation (what is imitation), Aristotle is more preoccupied with the epistemology of imitation (how imitation occurs). In a way, the different emphases in Plato and Aristotle’s conceptions are determined by the objects and media of imitation. While Plato was more interested in painting and lyric poetry, which are space oriented and weak in narration, Aristotle was more fascinated by epic and drama, which are time-centered narratives. In the Chinese tradition, the dominance of lyric poetry impeded the rise of a full-­ fledged mimetic theory and the short length of lyric poetry made it hard to imitate extended events. This limitation was not overcome until after the rise of drama and fiction, but it decreased with the appearance of longer literary genres. A sophisticated view of formal imitation rose with the rise of poetic genres of longer length such as the sao (southern song) and fu (rhyme-prose). Liu Xie noticed this developmental trend:

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By the time the Li-sao came upon the scene, types of description had multiplied, and it was practically impossible to depict all the aspects of things with faithfulness to their nature. For it had then been found necessary to describe the same things in a variety of forms. So various terms to describe craggy height, or to describe luxuriant growth, came to be collected. Ch’ang-ch’ing [or Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju] and his group adopted a pretentious style and extraordinary tonal patterns, and their descriptions of mountains and waters consist of strings of words in rows, like columns of fish.25

In his study of Chinese literary theory, Chen Liangyun correctly points out that the artistic technique comparable to the Western idea of “imitation” and “representation” came to maturity in the fu [rhyme-prose] writings.26 We must note that it is Liu Xie again who first conducted a systematic inquiry into the conditions of imitation and representation in the fu-style writings. In the chapter “Quanfu” (Elucidation of Fu), Liu Xie systematically described the rise, evolution, and maturity of the fu-­ style poetry and most significantly, its mimetic and narrative function: “The rhyme prose originated from lyric poetry/ And bifurcated into major and minor forms./ In depicting objects and picturing appearances/ It resembles sculpture and painting in its colorful texture./ It is capable of describing convolution in easy-to-understand manners/ And narrating the commonplace in untrammeled language.”27 Though he did not regard it as highly as shi poetry, he nevertheless emphasized its function as a form of literary representation: As to those works whose themes are plants, animals, and other miscellaneous things, they express feelings which arise in response to external situations, feelings which are reactions to chance experiences with various scenes. In describing the external situations, the language should be delicate and closely knit; and in forging metaphors in relation to the nature of things, appropriateness in principle should be emphasized. These are in the realm of minor works, but are crucial points in the achievement of the qualities of the wondrous and the skillful.28

Here, we should note that Liu Xie quoted the exact wording about imitation and representation from the Xicizhuan. His quotation not only affirms the mimetic nature of the expressions in the Xicizhuan but expands its denotation of representation far beyond the scope of iconicity and symbolism of the hexagrams. Longer as these styles of lyric poetry are than short lyrics, they are still not a narrative poetry that can extend to

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hundreds of lines. Nor do they narrate connected sequence of events as fiction and drama do. To a large extent, the underdevelopment of mimetic theory in Chinese literary thought arose from the fact that the dominance of short, lyric poetry completely overshadowed narratives in both verse and prose. Only a few poets were interested in writing extended narrative poetry. Du Fu, China’s poet-sage, was one of them. Generally believed to represent the realistic tradition in Chinese poetry, he wrote quite a few narrative poems. As those poems narrate sequences of connected events, they come close to Western narrative poems in that they follow a mimetic principle of composition that emphasizes verisimilitude and faithful representation. According to some poetic criticism, Du Fu acted like a modern-­ day newspaper reporter, or to be more exact, a writer of realistic fiction, who takes all the trouble to represent the ethos of a scene. Li Xin, a scholar of the Song, quoted a remark by Fan Yuanshi who revealed Du Fu’s penchant for faithful representation: “When the ancient people talk about formal resemblance, they would record the events as what they truly are and would not brook any changes. Therefore, before Du Fu composed a poem about a scene, he would, as a rule, go to that place in person. He knew how to present the scene with ingenuity.”29

Mimetic Theory in Chinese Poetics Up to modern times, Chinese literature was dominated by lyric poetry, the rationale of which has been conceived by traditional theorists as a natural or spontaneous growth. Because of its contrast to the dominance of narration in Western epic, drama, and fiction, modern scholars of Chinese and comparative literature tend to view Chinese and Western literary thought in terms of a dichotomy between the Chinese emphasis on expression and the Western emphasis on imitation, the Chinese view of literature as spontaneous growth and the Western view of literature as conscious representation. This dichotomous view, as I will show in this chapter, is largely responsible for the nonmimetic view of Chinese literature and literary thought. However, as Chinese lyric poetry emphasizes the presentation of images and scenes, and as Chinese thought is preoccupied with the rationale of imagistic representation, there is an abundance of mimetic insights in Chinese poetics. In early Chinese thought, there is no lack of conceptual inquiries into the rationale of images, imagistic representations, and even imitations. Confucius (551–479 BC), Laozi (fl. sixth century BC), Zhuangzi

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(369–286 BC), Wang Bi (226–249 AD) and other ancient thinkers conducted extensive discussions of the relationship among images, language, and thinking, but these discussions are more preoccupied with iconicity and the abstraction of natural phenomena into ideas than concerned with imagistic representations of things and events. The Xicizhuan (Appendixes to the Book of Changes) has a statement that offers perhaps the earliest conceptual terms for imitation or representation: “The sages were able to display (discover) the complex rationale behind the phenomena under the sky and imitate images and shapes of the universe to symbolize the meanings appropriate to a particular object. This was how hexagram images came to be designated.”30 In this statement, words such as “ni” [imitate], “xing” [shape], “rong” [outward appearance], and “xiang” [to draw the image] are all variations on the idea of “imitation” in China. The ideas in the discussions of images are certainly concerned with imitation. Nevertheless, as Chen Liangyun points out, the images in question are mostly not sensuous objects presented in their physical resemblances.31 As a result, the mimetic view growing out of these discussions is more concerned with iconicity than with imagistic representation of outward appearances of objects or physical conditions of things and events. Does this characteristic feature mean that in high antiquity there was no idea of imitation in the Western sense of the word? Certainly not. In the Zuozhuan [Zuo Qiuming’s Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals], which records the histories from 722 BC to 454 BC, there is a passage: King Yu of the Xia collected metals from the nine prefectures and had them cast into nine quadripods on which were represented the images of hundred things. King Ding sent Wangsun Man on a diplomatic mission to pay tribute to Chuzi. Chuzi made inquiries about the size and weight of the quadripods. Wangsun Man replied, “The value does not lie in the quadripods themselves but in the virtues they possess. In the past, the land of the Xia had virtues. Distant lands wanted to know the resemblances of things. They contributed metals from the nine prefectures. The metals were cast into quadripods with images of things represented on them. Consequently, hundreds of things had their images established for reference. The objective was to allow people to distinguish between the divine and the wicked. When people entered valleys, rivers, mountains, and forests, they would not encounter [unrecognized things]. Nor would they encounter demons and monsters. Talented people were employed to coordinate the high and low strata of society so as to receive the heavenly blessings.32

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This is perhaps one of the earliest statements about imagistic representations. Imitation is related to the divine, but it is utilitarian in purpose. This statement shows a characteristic of Chinese mimetic theory: it originated from visual and plastic arts. By the Western Han, the term xingxiang (formal image) came to be used. The Shangshu [Book of Documents] records an event about imagistic representation. King Wuding of the Late Shang dynasty dreamed that the God in heaven recommended to him a worthy talent to assist him. When he woke up, he ordered that a picture of the person be painted according to his description and then a search for the person be conducted. In his annotation, Kong Anguo described how the imagistic representation occurred: “The King described in detail the person in his dream and ordered a xingxiang [formal image] of him carved. Then a search through the four quarters of society was conducted for the person in the picture.”33 Since then, xingxiang [formal image] has become a term for representing the outer appearances of persons and objects. By the Eastern Han, the literary term, yixiang (idea-image) came into being.34 In comparison with the Western tradition, conceptual inquiries into imitation and representation in literature started relatively late. However, we may find an elaborate discussion of imagistic representation in literature in Lu Ji’s (261–303 AD) Wenfu [Rhyme-Prose on Literature]. In a series of poetic lines, he contemplated on the difficulty in representing things in literary writings. The forms of things differ in myriad ways, For them there is no common measure. Jumbled and jostled in a ceaseless flux, Living shapes to all their imitations bid defiance. Diction reveals one’s talent in a contest of artfulness. Right choice of ideas determines one’s craftsmanship. The poet’s mind toils between being and non-being. Deep or shallow, it won’t give up seeking perfection. Though it may depart from the dictates of circle or square, He hopes to exhaust shapes and fully imitate appearances.35

This may be the first systematic attempt in Chinese literary history to examine the epistemological conditions of representation. Lu Ji recognized the complexity of representing the shapes and appearances of things, but he was not pessimistic about the possibility of adequate representation. He seemed to have believed that a full representation is possible so

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long as the poet meets these conditions: recognizing the complicated conditions of the objects to be represented, displaying artfulness in the use of diction, conceiving his representation with ingenuity, persevering in search for the right form, and daring to deviate from accepted conventions. Liu Xie (ca. 523), the greatest literary theorist in traditional China, addressed the issues of imitation and representation from both ontological and epistemological perspectives. In his systematic and comprehensive poetics, Wenxin diaolong [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], he discussed the genesis, nature, function, and technique of mimesis. The first chapter, “Yuan Dao” (The Origin of the Dao) has often been cited as evidence to support the truism that the rise of literature and art in China was conceived as naturally growing out of the Dao, the first principle of the universe, and not the outcome of imitation of either the divine idea or the natural world. The conception of literature and art as spontaneous growth is certainly the central theme in Liu Xie’s system (and in Chinese tradition as well), but I venture to argue that Liu Xie proposed a dual conception of the ontological conditions of literature: spontaneous growth and mimetic creation. While the former is the dominant idea, the latter is a secondary notion. Because of the unified oneness or uninterrupted connection between the subjective and objective worlds in Chinese conceptual thinking, spontaneous growth and mimetic creation are but two interconnected processes of literary creation. This view finds a most concentrated expression in chapter 46, “Wuse” (the Physical World). Liu began the chapter with how the physical world moves the writer and stimulates him into a creative mood and then discussed in detail how mimetic creation follows spontaneous growth: In responding to things, the Ancient Poets operated on the principle of endless association of ideas. They lost themselves in the myriads of things, completely absorbed in the visual and auditory sensations. On the one hand, they depicted the atmosphere and painted the appearances of things in perfect harmony with their changing aspects; and on the other, the linguistic and tonal patterns they used closely corresponded with their perceptions.36

Then Liu Xie enumerated instances of how ancient poets successfully created perfectly realistic descriptions of the appearances and conditions of the physical world. There is no need to quote his enumeration and I only wish to quote his summary: “In all these expressions, they have used a part to sum up the whole, leaving nothing whether in their feelings or in the

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appearances of things undescribed.” He then continued to give examples of how writers imitate the physical world. In his characterization, he coined a Chinese expression for imitation, mushan fanshui [literally, to imitate mountains and model after rivers]. Chen Liangyun, a modern scholar of Chinese poetics, recognizes the mimetic nature of this expression: “‘To imitate mountains and model after rivers’ is to take mountains and rivers as prior model and as targets of imitation. It aims at resembling objective targets with poet’s subjective feelings added into imitation.”37 In the rest of the chapter, Liu Xie described a mimetic trend that flaunts and sets great store by formal resemblance: Since recent times, literary writings have emphasized formal resemblance. They pierce through to the inner structure of a landscape and penetrate the appearance of plants. Whatever their theme, they usually succeed in expressing something deep and profound in their poetry. To achieve perfection in the description of things depends on an intimate knowledge of the fitness of terms for certain specific descriptive purposes. This perfect aptness of the happy expression to the form of things may be likened to the relation between a seal and ink print, for the impression made reproduces the seal exactly to the minutest detail without further carving and cutting. Because of such skill, we are able to see the appearance of things through the descriptive words, or to experience the season through the diction.38

Liu Xie’s vivid characterization warrants me to say that there was a time in Chinese literature when writers pursued a mode of writing that differs little in conception from the realistic mode of representation in modern fiction. The analogy of the seal and its impression faithfully conveys the mimetic idea of a model and its copy. The emphasis on formal resemblance reproduces a literary world, which is the result of imitation of the natural world with its flora and fauna, landscape and seasons. The imitation is so vividly accurate that no sooner had one read the described scenes than he evokes in his mind’s eye a world that comes to life. The significance of this chapter does not simply lie in raising a view of imagistic representation. Liu Xie practically acknowledged representation as a source of literature, which can be seen from the following passage: Mountains, forests, plateaus, and plains are certainly the ultimate source of literary thought. But if described too briefly, the writing appears sketchy; and if described in too much detail, it sounds wordy. However, the reason

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why Ch’ü P’ing was able to capture the spirit of feng and sao in the e­ xpression of feeling is that he was amply helped by his experience of the rivers and mountains.39

The focus on the appropriateness of description of the natural world suggests that the view of Nature as the source of literary creation is not one that conceives of nature as the source of creative inspiration but one that conceives of imitation of Nature as the source of literature. Moreover, it advocates a theory of representation that aims at transmitting the spiritual essence of Nature beyond the formal resemblances: “When one is able through his work to induce in the reader a mood that persists beyond the limit of the description of the physical things, he may be considered a man who completely understands the art of writing.”40 It is no exaggeration to say that the whole chapter centers on imitation, but because it is one of the last few chapters and its emphasis is on technical aspects of imitation, this chapter has not received as much attention as the first chapter. Even in Liu Xie’s first chapter, which focuses on the spontaneous growth of literature, ideas of imitation are not nonexistent. In one of the passages, Liu Xie talked about the myth of Fu Xi’s invention of the eight trigrams: Human pattern [writing/literature] originated in the Supreme, the Ultimate. “Mysteriously assisting the gods,” the images of the Changes are the earliest representation of this pattern. Pao Hsi began [the Book of Changes] by drawing [the eight trigrams], and Confucius completed it by writing the “Wings” [Appendixes to the Book of Changes].41

In this passage, after dwelling on the natural growth of literature and writing, Liu Xie turned in another direction and subtly acknowledged another source of literature by alluding to Fu Xi’s invention of the eight trigrams through imitation. By attributing Fu Xi’s invention to an imitation of the patterns of the Great Ultimate, the first principle in Chinese philosophy, he basically viewed Fu Xi’s imitation as an act comparable to the Platonic imitation of the Idea or Form. In another passage of the same chapter, Liu Xie alluded to Cang Jie’s creation of Chinese writing by imitating the patterns left by birds and animals: “When bird’s markings replaced knotted cords, writing first emerged.”42 In still another passage, he also touched upon the idea of imitation as the origin of literature and culture:

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From the time of Master Feng to the time of Confucius, both Feng, the first sage, who invented writing, and the “King Without Crown,” who transmitted the teachings, drew their literary embellishments from the mind of Tao, and both taught by reference to divine principle. Both took images from the Yellow River Map and the Lo River Writing, and both divined by means of milfoil stems and tortoise shells. Both observed heavenly patterns in order to comprehend their changes exhaustively, and both studied human patterns of behavior in order to transform them.43

In this passage, there is an unmistakable mention of imitation in the sentence, “Both took images from the Yellow River Map and the Lo River Writing.” In the concluding poem to the chapter, Liu Xie further stated: “The Map the dragon carried presents the substance,/ And the Writing the tortoise brought makes manifest the form./ Here may be seen the patterns of heaven/ Which serve as models for all people to imitate.”44 In the context of this passage, the word “xiao” (imitation) is used in a broad sense, and the idea of imitation expressed is more in the sense of behavioral imitation than the textual imitation of an action. But people imitated the heavenly patterns to create cultural systems and artifacts. And in the context of Liu Xie’s discourse, which is a systematic study of the literary mind and techniques of literature, what is created out of imitation certainly covers literature and arts. In Chap. 3, Liu Xie discussed the nature and function of classics: The works dealing with the universal principles of the Great Trinity [heaven, earth, and man] are known as the classics. By classics we mean an expression of the absolute or constant Tao or principle, that great teaching which is unalterable. Therefore, the classics faithfully reflect heaven and earth, spirits and gods. They help to articulate the order of things and to set up the rules governing human affairs. They penetrate into the deep recesses of the human soul and exhaustively reveal the very bone and marrow of fine literature.45

In this passage, we again come across the same words for imitation, xiang and xiao. Now, imitation is not concerned with the creation of words and diagrams but with the creation of classics and literary writings. Liu Xie affirmed imitation as sources of literary and nonliterary writings. Here, the objects of imitation cover not only the natural world but also the Dao, the first principle in Chinese philosophy. Conceptually, his view of writing as an imitation of the Dao is basically similar to Plato’s view of art as an

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imitation of the Idea. In Chap. 4, Liu Xie further emphasized the mimetic nature of literature and art: The divine Tao is plain and yet hidden; the Mandate of Heaven is subtle and yet manifest. Following the emergence of the horse-dragon, there developed the Book of Changes; and with the appearance of the divine tortoise, the “Hung-fan” saw the light of day. For this reason, “Hsi-tz’u” says: “From the Yellow River comes the diagram and from the River Lo comes the Book, and these the Sage imitated (ze) as principles.”46

In this passage, we come across the word ze, another term for imitation. Here, Liu Xie elaborated on the principle of imitation abstracted from the legends of the horse-dragon and the divine tortoise. Having identified through close reading the ideas of imitation neglected by previous scholarship, I may say that in Liu Xie’s poetics, there is a mimetic view of literature and art and the absolute dualism repeatedly proclaimed by some scholars between natural growth and mimetic creation does not stand. In a way, I may suggest that though on the surface level, Liu Xie viewed the birth of literature as a self-generating process, in the deep structure, he conceived of literature as a multiple process of imitation quite like Plato’s conception of mimesis as ultimately an imitation of the Idea or Form. We may recall Plato’s process of imitation: the painter imitates a real bed, which is made by a carpenter, who imitates the idea of bed. In an oblique way, Liu describes a similar process of imitation: The writer imitates the universe, which is the manifested form of the Dao, the unchanging and immutable cosmic principle. While in Plato’s conception, the two levels of imitation are disjuncted, in Liu Xie’s conception they form a continued process with the two stages connected. Nevertheless, Liu Xie acknowledged the different degrees of difficulty involved in the imitation of the divine Dao and the natural world. In chapter 37, Liu Xie stated: That which rises above tangible shapes is called the Dao; that which exits in tangible shapes is called object. The divine Dao is difficult to imitate, for even most refined language cannot capture its ultimate form. Tangible objects are easy to depict, for robust words are capable of representing their real conditions. 47

This passage distinguishes two kinds of imitation: the imitation of the Dao, the first principle, and the imitation of tangible objects in the natural

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world. It is more than a discussion of the difficulties in imitation. It presents two different ideas of imitation. The first is comparable to the Platonic mimesis of the Idea, while the second may be said to be an Aristotelian concept of imitation. In later treatises on Chinese poetics, some scholar-poets expressed some views of literature, similar to Liu Xie’s dual conception of literature as both natural growth and mimetic creation. Here, I will only cite a representative view. Ye Xie (1627–1703), a renowned Chinese literary theorist, expounded a mimetic view of literature in his poetic treatise, Yuanshi [The Origin of Poetry]. In his discussion on imitation of ancient masters, he said, “I do not privilege the ancients, not because they do not have much worth learning. The heaven and earth are endowed with literature of Nature, which comes to express itself in accordance with my response to what is observed. There must be writings that imitate Nature in all its details so as to establish the ultimate standards for the perfect literature.”48 Like Liu Xie, Ye Xie held a dual conception of the ontological conditions of literature. He conceived of two worlds comparable to Plato’s conception. There is the world of Nature and the world of art. Nature has its own literature (wenzhang/ patterns); so does the poet. The literature of Nature expresses itself through the poet. The poet also imitates the literature of Nature, thereby making it known and measurable. In an effortless move, he viewed literature both as a natural growth of heaven and earth and as a reflection of Nature. Thus, literature is conceived of as a result of both expression and representation. In another statement, Ye Xie categorically expressed a representational view of literature: “Literature is that which represents the emotions and conditions of myriad things in the universe.”49

Mimetic Theory in Chinese Dramatic Criticism The transition from imagistic imitation to narrative representation was not completed until the appearance of comments on drama and fiction. What made the transition possible is a change in literary form brought about by different modes of imitation. Aristotle regards all literary forms as modes of imitation, but he fine-tunes his view with this remark: “They differ, however, from one another in three respects—the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.”50 Aristotle emphasizes the last category because different forms of art may imitate the same objects and modes of imitation distinguish one literary genre from

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another. Drama, for example, imitates by narration and a dramatist presents his characters as living and moving before the audience. In Chinese history, a few discerning scholars were also aware that different genres result from different modes of imitation, which in turn produce different effects. Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), for one, made a distinction between lyric poetry and historical narrative in modes of imitation: Poetry consists of two kinds: one narrates events; the other narrates words. It is a kind of writing more difficult than history. A historian demonstrates artistic brilliance by tailoring already existent events and it is naturally easier to consign real facts to pen. By contrast, poetry generates emotions by responding to immediate events and describes conditions by using words on the tip of one’s tongue. Once a poet employs historical methods, the moving effects no longer reside in prolonged words and harmonious sounds and the way of poetry is abandoned … Du Fu defied this restraint in composing his “The Petty Official of the Shihao Village”51 and aimed at close imitation of events. Every detail he delineated evinced a special feature of life-likeness through close resemblance. Nevertheless, I feel that it has surplus value as history but is inadequate as poetry.52

Wang Fuzhi’s belittlement of narrative poetry is consistent with the trend in Chinese tradition, but his opinion reveals a sensitive awareness of the differences between lyric poetry and narrative fiction. Technically, Aristotle’s idea of mimesis was abstracted from his observation of epic poetry and dramatic poetry. He practically did not discuss mimesis in lyric poetry. To find a mimetic theory that addresses the imitation of actions and events, we ought to search through Chinese literary thought dealing with epic and drama. In the Chinese tradition, however, there was no epic comparable to Odyssey and Ulyssess. In a way, Chinese dynastic histories and historical novels are comparable to epics. Andrew Plaks is right in pointing out: “In effect, one might say that historiography replaces epic among the Chinese narrative genres, providing not only a set of complex techniques of structuration and characterization, but also a conceptual model for the perception of significance within the outlines of human events.”53 Since both history and fiction are concerned with the imitation of actions and events, mimetic theory in history and mimetic theory in fiction are comparable. In the Chinese tradition, Liu Zhiji (661–721 AD) wrote a systematic discourse on the writing of history, Shitong [General Principles of History]. Interestingly, there is a chapter titled “Moni” (Imitation). In this chapter,

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Liu Zhiji’s idea of mimesis mainly deals with a topic similar to the focus in the neoclassical theorists of mimesis in the West, that is, imitation of previous masters. Liu Zhiji opened this chapter with this statement: “Writers model after one another. This has been so since ancient times.”54 He showed how a number of famous writers in Chinese history before his time imitated previous masters. In this respect, his idea comes close to Alexander Pope’s opinion that an imitation of Homer is the same as an imitation of nature.55 Nevertheless, Liu Zhiji did discuss modes of imitation: “There are two approaches to imitation: first, similarity in appearance but difference in essence; second, difference in appearance but similarity in essence …. The first approach is of a higher order while the second is of lower order.”56 In this respect, his idea comes close to Edward Young’s idea of imitation in the Western tradition. Young accepted the idea that imitation is the imitation of other authors, mainly the ancients. However, Young added a twist to the imitation of ancient masters. For him, the proper object of imitation is not the work of an ancient master, but his “spirit” and “taste.” He proclaimed: “Let us build our compositions with the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients; but not with their materials.”57 Liu Zhiji also talked about the first-order imitation: A writer with perspicacious insight acts differently. Why? What he imitates is not like the faithful representation of painting or the imagistic reproduction of objects in metal casting, which are surface resemblances. The reason why his imitation resembles things is because he effects the union of spirit and skill and captures the mysterious sameness of the principles. This is their knack.58

Here, Liu Zhiji revealed a change of emphasis in Chinese mimesis, which started in the Tang to privilege shensi (spiritual resemblance) over xingsi (formal resemblance). Liu Zhiji’s theory of narrative deals with the subject of official history, which stresses truth and facts. It is not quite a theory abstracted from studies of narrative genres in literature like fiction and drama. As far as narration goes, drama and fiction are superior to lyric poetry. In the Chinese tradition, lyric poetry dominated the mainstream of Chinese literature. Corresponding to the lyric domination is the dominant view of expressive theory in traditional Chinese literary thought. Even in studies of narrative forms of literature such as drama, expressive theory

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prevails. As late as the sixteenth century, long after drama became a mature and popular literary form in China, scholars still employed expressive theory to discuss the origin and ontology of drama. But scholars who focused on the study of drama gradually came to a realization that drama differs from lyric poetry, and expressive theory alone could not adequately account for its genesis and nature. Wang Jide (?–1623), who devoted the best time of his literary career to drama and wrote a systematic treatise on dramatic art, Qulü [The Principles of Drama] (1610), was perhaps the first theorist who became aware of the differences between lyric poetry and narrative drama in the imitation of extended events: Someone in the Jin dynasty once said that a silk-stringed music instrument is not as good as a bamboo-made woodwind instrument and the latter not as good as singing with pure voice, because pure singing comes close to nature. I say that the shi-poetry is not as good as the ci-poetry, because the latter is more capable of depicting human feelings. The shi-poetry is restricted by prosody and meter, which means that it cannot fully express one’s desires. A poet cannot add a word even though he wants his poem to benefit from the addition of that word. The ci-poetry is restricted by tunes, which means that it cannot fully describe objects. A writer cannot add a phrase even though he wishes his poem to benefit from the addition. As for drama, it can employ tunes one after another, and add words to express subtle meanings. The shi-poetry and ci-poetry cannot use jocular language and dialects. By contrast, in drama, so long as desires in my mind reach my mouth for expression, be it vertical or horizontal, coming or going, whatever that appears will not be rejected. This is why I say that nothing can surpass drama in satisfying human desires for expression.59

On his keen observation of the differences, he formulated a view of drama that emphasizes the mimetic nature of dramatic art. What is the ontological status of drama? Wang Jide stated: “Drama imitates conditions of objects and represents human reasons. What it takes [as subject matter] is subtle and tortuous events in life rather than mere words. Once it touches fancy words, its original nature becomes beclouded.”60 While Wang Jide recognized the mimetic nature of drama and its difference from lyric poetry through his observations of dramatic language, Meng Chenxun (fl. 1663) discovered the mimetic nature of drama and its differences from lyric poetry through a conceptual examination of the ontological conditions of drama:

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The ingenuity of poetry may be reduced to conveying emotions and depicting scenes. When one views the representations of emotions and scenes, they are no more than the changing conditions of smoke and clouds, flowers and birds, and the different situations of sorrow and happiness, anger and joy. The represented scenes are restricted to those before the eye, and the emotions are inspired by chance happenings. People good at writing are all able to accomplish this achievement. When it comes to the ingenuity of drama, it fully represents the beautiful and the ugly, the noble and the base, separation and reunion, life and death in the past and present. It creates action according to events and presents images according to things. It is sometimes serious and sometimes humorous in language. A lonely old male character and a beautiful young female lead may gather together with a bunch of puppets on the stage to simulate similar situations in the past thousand years. When they laugh, the audience hears laughter; when they cry, the audience sees tears; when they are happy, the audience sees them in high spirits; when they sigh, the audience hears their breath. Had the dramatist not placed his body in the flux and reflux of hundred things and connected his heart with the animated sources of all human desires, how can the drama be so ingenious?61

In this passage, Meng Chenshun not only acknowledged drama as a mimetic medium but also recognized its differences in the mode of imitation from lyric poetry. In his opinion, the major difference lies in that while poetry adopts a lyric mode of imitation that can only represent a limited range of things, persons, scenes, and emotions, drama employs a narrative mode of imitation that can represent a broad spectrum of social life and reveal the complexity of the human world. Moreover, drama sets great store by faithful representation and values realistic effects. More scholars confirmed the mimetic nature of drama either through general observation or through studies of individual works. In his preface to the Yuan drama, Zang Moxun (?–1621), made this general observation on the mimetic nature of drama: The high and low in social status in the world, the beautiful and the ugly, the mysterious and obvious, the reason for separation and reunion—these take on more than hundreds and thousands of conditions. In representing characters, a dramatic writer must study the vernacular language spoken by them. In representing events, he must imitate the original conditions of things. The imitated situations must not gesture into other situations; the imitated language must not depend on superficial means …… A skilful player will perform according to the conditions of the situation, none of

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which is not imitated to its minutest detail. He acts as though he himself existed in that situation and almost forgot that what he enacts is non-­ existent. This kind of acting can make an amused person streaking his beard, an indignant person holding his wrist in anger, a sorry-stricken person weep with his face covered, and an admiring person brighten up with flying facial colors. Only when performers imitate life as skillfully as You Meng [youmeng yiguan], the brilliant actor in history, can dramatic effects reach this height.62

Here, the Chinese expression of dramatic imitation, youmeng yiguan, requires a little explanation. This expression comes from a story in Sima Qian’s Shiji [Records of the Grand Historian]. You Meng was a master actor in the Spring and Autumn period. He was a good friend of Sun Shu’ao, a prime minister of the Chu state. After Sun Shu’ao’s death, his son was helplessly poverty-stricken. You Meng decided to help him. He dressed himself in the clothes of the dead prime minister and appeared before the king of the state. He imitated the ways Sun Shu’ao talked and deported himself when he was alive. The acting was so lifelike that the king was greatly moved and gave Sun Shu’ao’s son a feoffment.63 Since then, youmeng yiguan has become a Chinese expression for faithful imitation. Shen Jifei (fl. 1636), a contemporary dramatic critic, expressed a dramatic theory of imitation surprisingly close to Aristotle’s mimetic theory. In his comments on Mudanting [the Peony Pavilion], a dramatic work by Tang Xianzu, known as China’s Shakespeare, he wrote: The language of several hundred years later imitates (mu) the human affairs of several hundred years earlier. What is imitated does not necessarily have a prior existence, but once it is represented as having existed, it shows scenes and feelings that cannot but exist, and make the credible incredible and the incredible credible, turn life into death and vice versa …Tang Xianzu composed the words of Mudanting, which are not words but pictures. Though they are not [real] pictures, pictures cannot rival them in vividness of imitation. They are not pictures but scenes of verisimilitude.64

Liang Tingdan (1796–1861), a dramatist of the Qing also identified mimesis as the essential nature of drama. In his comment on Chinese drama in general, he was aware that whether it was Northern drama or Southern drama, the compositional principle is one of mimesis: “The Northern and Southern Drama re-stage past events with fine actors and actresses. They dress themselves in ancient headwear and clothing, and

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imitate ancient personages’ voices and laughing demeanor. When the acting imitates the ancients in every detail, its capacity to move people is especially strong.”65 In his comment on a specific drama, the Peach Blossom Fan, he reaffirmed the mimetic nature of drama and emphasized realistic effects: The writing style of the Peach Blossom Fan is briskly refreshing. It narrates historical personages of the previous dynasty with every word imitating the shadows and sounds of past events. Its language is superb. Where it describes ornate scenes, it resembles peach blossom braving the wind; where it presents sorrowful events, it resembles pear flowers drenched by rain. It certainly is a masterpiece of its time.66

In the views of these scholars, there are a number of points that coincide with Aristotle’s theory of mimesis. First, they all directly employed the word mu (imitate) and affirmed drama as an art form that imitates human life. Second, what is imitated in drama may not necessarily have existed in history, but may be imagined to have happened. This idea corresponds to Aristotle’s idea of probability. Third, even though drama is a verbal art, it follows the mimetic principle for painting. This last point reaffirms the iconic origin of traditional Chinese mimetic theory. Because what is imitated conforms to the law of probability, it is endowed with an artistic quality that blurs the boundaries between the credible and incredible, real and unreal, life and death.

Mimetic Theory in Chinese Fictional Criticism In the Chinese tradition, the Confucian disparagement of fiction not only hindered the rise of extended fiction but also stunted theories of fiction. Serious studies of fiction did not arise until the Ming and Qing. Among those who studied fiction, many scholars came to a similar view of fiction as a reflection or representation of human society and social life. In the Ming dynasty, a scholar with the pseudonym, Tiandu Waichen (fl. 1584) wrote in a preface to the Shuihu zhuan (the Water Margin) on the mimetic nature of fiction. He first talked about the comprehensiveness of the novel in its imitation of history, culture, and social life: “When one reads the novel, it covers every aspect of life, places, people, events, and human emotions. Nothings is missed,” and then praised its mode of imitation: “The novelist excels in picturing events like an excellent historian. The

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thick and thin of color, distance and closeness of perspectives, and single stroke and broad stroke were all nicely done.”67 Another scholar with the pseudonym Xiaohua Zhuren wrote a preface to a collection of fictional works. In the preface, he reviewed the development of Chinese fiction from its inception to the rise of the novel and especially emphasized the mimetic achievement of some fictional works: “The stories imitate the multifarious facets of human feelings and conditions of the world and describe the complexity of joy and sorrow, separation and reunion in a comprehensive manner.”68 Some fiction commentators explicitly declared fiction to be a representation of life. They actually used such words as “imitation” and stressed the verisimilitude of representation. Xiling Sanren wrote in the preface to a fictional work: How can it be easy to talk about fiction. Its use of language is vernacular. A word from a character must sound as though it had just come out fresh from that person’s mouth, so that the representation of him is able to capture his inner spirit. Events in fiction are trivial. A scene must be described in such a way that makes one feel as though he personally experienced it, its twists and turns adequately reflecting what he sees.69

Chinese theories of fiction matured in the Ming with the rise of the four great novels. Scholars like Ye Zhou (fl. 1594–1625) and Feng Menglong (1574–1645) made great contributions to the maturity of fiction theories. In critical theories on fiction, the mimetic nature of fiction was taken for granted by many scholars. Ye Zhou, who made pioneering contributions to Chinese theories of fiction, emphasized the mimetic nature of fiction and discussed it extensively. He unequivocally affirmed that fiction originated from imitations of life. In his criticism of the novel the Water Margin, he stated: There was at first a book of the Shuihu zhuan in the world. Then Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong created it with their pen. When it talks about someone who has a certain surname and given name, all this was pure fabrication that comes out of nowhere but serves the purpose of concretizing observed events. For example, there were licentious women before the authors represented them in Yang Xiong’s wife and Wu Song’s sister-in-law. There were bawds in the world before the authors represented them in the character of Madame Wang. There were instances in the world in which a male servant has illicit affairs with his master’s wife before the authors represented them

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in the characters of Lu Junyi’s wife and his butler Li Gu. As for other characters like the camp manager, yanmen runner, Dong Chao, Xue Ba, Fu An, Lu Qian, they were characterized in such a faithful way that they speak and laugh as though they were alive. Had there been no such events, even though the authors may face a wall, imaging for ten years with much blood vomited, how could they invent the events with so superb results. This is why the Shuihu zhuan can last as long as the heaven and earth. 70

Perhaps, we cannot find a more pronounced expression of mimetic theory of fiction in traditional Chinese literary thought. A number of points are worth noting. First, even though this passage is taken from a commentary on a specific novel, it was actually meant to address the relationship between life and art in general from the perspective of narrative literature. Second, Ye Zhou conceived of life as a great book and fiction as but another book that artfully copies from that model book. This conception of imitation corresponds with the Aristotelian theory of imitation. Life is the model and fiction the copy. This conception reminds me of D. H. Lawrence’s similar conception of the relationship between life and the novel: “The novel is the one bright book of life.”71 Ye Zhou affirmed the source of fiction, which is life. Without the great book of life, a fiction writer cannot turn out his book of art however hard he tries. Third, fiction is not mechanical records of life, but fictitious accounts based on real events in real life. Ye Zhou correctly pointed out the relationship between artistic truth and historical truth in imitation: “Events in the Shuihu zhuan are all fictitious, but they are narrated as though they were real. This is why its artistry is brilliant.”72 Bizhen (close to the real; true to life) is the central idea in Ye Zhou’s fictional theory. The word appears numerous times in his commentary. What he means by “close to the real” is faithful representation and realistic effects, which are illustrated in the following passage: In describing a licentious woman, it presents a life-like image of a licentious woman. In describing a man of fiery disposition, it presents a life-like image of a man of fiery disposition. In describing an idiot, it presents a life-like image of an idiot. In describing a bawd, it presents a life-like image of a bawd. In describing a little mischief, it presents a life-like image of a little mischief. No sooner has one read the narrative than he feels as though the images of a licentious woman, a man of fiery disposition, an idiot, a bawd, and a small monkey appeared before his eyes and their voices lingered in his ears. He completely forgets about the language that sustains the narrative.73

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Where does the art of imitation lie? Ye Zhou identified it as lying in an Aristotelian probability: “Its artistry lies in following the rationale of human existence and things.” Ye Zhou’s commentary on the Shuihu zhuan amounts to not only a theory of fiction in its modern sense but also a theory of imitation. In his theory, he did not stop at lifelike imitation. As is characteristic of Chinese theory of imitation, he emphasized capturing the spirit that lies beyond formal resemblances. In his comment on Chapter 21 of the Water Margin, he stated: In this chapter, the language is life-like and imitates objects with superb skill. The mimetic representation of Song Jiang and Yan Poxi not only paints what appears before the eye but also what lodges at heart. More than painting what lodges at heart, it also paints what is implied beyond one’s mind. How come that Gu Kaizhi and Wu Daozi have arrived here! As for its intricate pivotal points, I am afraid, even the two writers did not anticipate their marvelous results. I dare say that they must have been helped by gods and ghosts.74

Here, we can see visible influence of Chinese poetic and painting theories on Ye Zhou’s theory of imitation. The comparison of fictional work’s characterization with Gu Kaizhi and Wu Daozi’s superb painting skills indicates that Ye Zhou’s theory of imitation is the time-honored theory of imitation in painting transferred to the art of fiction. Ye Zhou’s theory of imitation is thus a continuation from Chinese theories of imitation in poetry and painting. In his theory of imitation, however, he was consciously aware of the difference between poetic imitation and narrative imitation. Poetic imitation aims at creating a mood pregnant scene, yixiang (idea-image) or yijing (idea-realm) while narrative imitation seeks to create lifelike characters. Ye Zhou valued both formal resemblance and spiritual resemblance, but regarded the latter as a higher order of imitation. A character that attains both formal and spiritual resemblance in narration is no longer a two-dimensional picture but a multiple-­dimensional person with life and blood. Ye Zhou’s idea of imitation goes far beyond imitating the contour and texture of things, scenes, events, and characters’ actions. While emphasizing the importance of xiaowu (imitating things) and bizhen (close to the real), he privileged chuanshen (transmitting the spirit), a kind of aesthetic suggestiveness that reveals the inner spirit of represented objects. By claiming that the writers of the Water Margin had been aided by gods and ghosts, he seemed to have believed in the

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existence of divine madness in literary creation and in the possibility of harnessing it for creating superb narrative art. In the introduction to this chapter, I mentioned one of the major reasons why some scholars do not think there is a mimetic theory in traditional Chinese literary thought: that it is “a proto-photographic representation of sensible reality” without an “artful embellishment and ordering of nature.” This view overlooks the theoretical explorations of the dialectical relationship between faithful representation of reality, on the one hand, and creative fictionality, on the other hand, in the traditional discourses on poetry and fiction. Ye Zhou’s contemporary, Feng Menglong, expressed a view about fictionality in the imitation of social reality that displays an admirable insight into the dialectical relationship between fictional truth and life’s truth. He was of the opinion that the value of fiction does not lie in the truthfulness or falsity of imitated persons and actions but lies in whether what a fictional work represents is true to the law of human existence: Must historical fiction be all true? I reply: not necessarily so. Must it all be false? I reply: not necessarily so. Then, should one rid the false and keep the real? I reply: not necessarily so. … In fiction writing, a character may not necessarily have a real model in life, and the described events may not necessarily serve to beautify a person in real life … If an event described is real, its rationale must not be false. In other words, even if an event is fictitious, its rationale should be real.75

Ye Zhou’s own insight is more systematic and more admirable. As Ye Lang, a Chinese aesthetician, points out, “The views on the truthfulness of fiction held by fictional theorists after Ye Zhou are generally related to the question of creative fictionality. Their discussions of fictional truthfulness became in large measures a discussion of the relationship between fictional truth and fictionality.”76 Ye Lang conducts a detailed analysis of this discussion. Here I will only cite a few representative views. Ye Zhou, who emphasized the importance of fictional truthfulness, did not reject creative fictionality at all. In a comment on the Water Margin, he said, “Writings under heaven should place priority on literary interest. Since literary interest comes first, why must a writing be based on real events and real persons.” In his general comment on the novel, he made a distinction between two kinds of falsity. One is what he called “pure invention out of the blue.” It is “false” because there is no prior happening in real life. But

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because “Its artistry lies in following the rationale of human existence and things” this kind of falsity is really creative fictionality. This view comes surprisingly close to Aristotle’s idea of probability in the imitation of an action and the modern conception of representation. Ye Zhou presented another kind of falsity, which could not happen by the rationale of human existence. He made a contrast between the two kinds of falsity in a number of places. In his comment on chapter 10, he wrote: “In this chapter, the love life of Li Xiao’er and his wife is depicted as life-like as a picture. But when it comes to later chapters in which the heavenly battle formations and the like are presented, what is narrated is pure falsehood. Even though the writer made pains-taking efforts, it is not worth reading.”77 He endorsed the first kind and belittled the second, because the first kind conforms to the rationale of human life while the second deviates from the law of probability.

Concluding Remarks I have constructed a mimetic theory in the Chinese tradition and partially explained why it has been overlooked by previous scholarship. In this concluding section, I attempt to find answers to a few questions concerning Chinese and Western mimesis. First, why did the abundance of mimetic insights in the Chinese tradition fail to form a mimetic theory and to occupy a major position in Chinese aesthetic thought while mimetic theory has always been the mainstream in Western aesthetic thought? It seems to me, this striking contrast arose not because of the absence of certain cultural determinants, but mainly because of different emphases laid on literature and art in the historical development in China and the West. Literary theories are generally derived from studies of existent literature. The presence or absence of certain ideas in a culture’s literary thought is largely determined by preoccupations with certain aspects of the literary phenomena. Earl Miner has pointed out that the centrality of mimesis in the West was largely due to the important position of drama within Greek culture at the beginning of the Western tradition.78 In other words, imitation appeared as a cardinal critical principle in the Western critical tradition largely because in the beginning, epic and drama happened to be the focus of theoretical inquiry. By contrast, the idea of imitation did not occupy a center place in critical discourses in the Chinese tradition because lyric poetry happened to be the dominant literary genre until modern times. As

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the main object of theoretical consideration is different, conceptions of literature are invariably different. Epic and drama may be written in poetic forms, but their difference from lyric poetry is many-sided. The most significant difference is that while lyric poetry is short and mainly expresses emotions, epic and drama narrate coherent stories or connected sequence of events. Aristotle’s idea of mimesis was certainly derived from his study of the Greek epic and drama popular in his time. Although lyric poetry was also a widely circulated literary activity, it did not receive as much attention as epic and drama. Aristotle makes a mere mention of it in his Poetics. Had he or other literary theorist of his time or of the Western tradition derived a poetics from a study of lyric poetry, the conception of mimesis might have been entirely different. The rise of expressive theory in the West testifies to this speculation. Wordsworth is both a poet and a theorist. In the formulation of his literary theory, his object of examination is lyric poetry, not narrative poetry. As a result, he came to an expressive conception of poetry, which is very different from Aristotle’s mimetic theory but very close to the Chinese conception of literature as natural and spontaneous growth. In my comparative study of Chinese and Western mimesis, there exist obvious differences between Chinese and Western mimetic theories. What is the most fundamental difference? The major difference, I contend, is that while in the Chinese tradition, mimesis is more concerned with the imitation of objects, scenes, moods, and phenomena that tend to be weak in sequence, in the Western tradition, mimesis is more concerned with the imitation of events, action, processes, and phenomena that tend to be sequence oriented. This basic difference grew out of the different degrees to which narration plays a role in the mainstream of literary thought. Narration involves a temporal process: “A narration is the symbolic presentation of a sequencing of events connected by subject matter and related by time. Without temporal relations we have only a list. Without continuity of subject matter we have another kind of list.”79 Western mimetic theory started with Plato who conceived of mimesis ultimately as an imitation of the Idea or Form, but it is Aristotle’s reconception of mimesis as an imitation of actions and events by an artistic medium that dominated Western literary thought. Although Plato was hostile to artistic imitation, his mimetic theory is more friendly to painting, sculpture, and lyric poetry. Had previous studies focused on Plato’s theory of imitation, the situation might have been quite different. While Plato’s conception tends to stress a changeless permanence in imitation, Aristotle’s

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reconception emphasizes temporal process. This can be seen quite clearly in their different focuses on the objects of imitation. Whereas Plato was more interested in discussing imitations concerning painting, Aristotle directed his attention almost exclusively to narratives. To view Chinese mimetic theory as a whole, I venture to suggest that it is closer to the Platonic view than the Aristotelian view. I say so for a number of reasons. First, Chinese mimetic theory has its origin in studies of images and paintings, and theories of painting have had a formative impact on literary theories. Second, lyricism was the dominant literary form throughout the premodern periods. Lyric poetry is essentially a congeries of emotions, impressions, and perceptions, etc. Lyric poetry has a minimal degree of narration and therefore is not conducive to the rise of narrative discourse. The minimal use of narration may explain why sequence-­ oriented mimesis is not the dominant subject in Chinese literary thought. Third, like Plato, Chinese mimetic theory views mimesis in literature and art as ultimately an imitation of the changeless cosmic principle, the Dao. As a result, mimetic view of literature as a representation of sequence-­ oriented events did not appear until after literary thinkers started to have in interest in drama and fiction. Since ideas of imitation abound in traditional Chinese literary thought, my final question is: What has caused previous scholarship to overlook its existence? In my opinion, the neglect grows out of conceptual and epistemological blindness. Conceptually, there is a preconceived notion of the dichotomy between Chinese and Western traditions and thought. Scholars who believe in the nonexistence of mimetic theory in Chinese literary thought have been heavily influenced by a popular belief in the field of literary and cultural studies, that is, the East and the West are so distinctly different from each other that modes of thinking and expression must differ from each other. This preconceived notion easily leads to a dichotomy between the Chinese idea of natural growth and the Western idea of mimetic genesis. Epistemologically, some of those scholars have treated Chinese literary thought as a monolithic whole with little varieties and without undercurrents or countercurrents. Their view is based on a single major current of Chinese literary thought and the data collected are often so purposefully selected to suit a preconceived notion with a blindness to the existence of other ideas and notions. My conclusion is: there is a mimetic theory in Chinese literary thought, which is similar to the Western counterpart in most premises and differs from the latter only in degree, but not in kind. The horizons of representation between Chinese and

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Western traditions were converged from the beginning of each tradition and what we need to do is to bring Chinese and Western mimetic theories into mutually enriching and empowering dialogues in modern times.

Notes 1. See Stephen Halliwell’s highly acclaimed book, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), especially, pp. 263–286. 2. James J.Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 14. 3. James J.Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature, pp. 47–48. 4. James J.Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature, pp. 48–49. 5. Craig Fisk writes in a companion to traditional Chinese literature: “In China there were no concepts comparable to Aristotelian mimesis or Christian figura, both of which are bound to the representation of action in time.” “Literary Criticism,” in William Nienhauser, ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1986), p. 49. 6. Liang Shi, “The Leopardskin of Dao and the Icon of Truth: Natural Birth Versus Mimesis in Chinese and Western Literary Theories,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1994, pp. 162–3. 7. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 15–16, 57–59. 8. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, p. 35. 9. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, p. 82. 10. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, p. 35. 11. Michale Fuller, “Pursuing the Complete Bamboo in the Breast: Reflections on a Chinese Image for Immediacy,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53 (1993), p. 21. 12. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), p. 59. 13. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, p. 6. 14. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition, pp. 5–6. 15. Plato, Republic, Book X, in Hazard Adams, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato (San Diego: HBJ, 1971), pp. 33–37. 16. Aristotle, Poetics, in Hazard Adams, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato, pp. 48–52. 17. Zhongguo hualun leibian [Classified Collection of Chinese Theories of Painting], p. 355.

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18. Jing Hao, “Bifa ji” (Records of Painting Methods), in Zhongguo hualun leibian, p. 605. 19. Ibid. 20. Zhongguo meixueshi ziliao xuan, Vol. 1, p. 175. 21. Shen Yue, “Xie Lingyun zhuanlun (Biography of Xie Lingyun),” in Song Shu [History of the Song Dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), Vol. 6, p. 1778. 22. Zhong Rong, Shipin [Gradations of Poetry], in Lidai shihua [Poetic Talks through the Dynasties], p. 9. 23. Zhong Rong, Shipin [Gradations of Poetry], in Lidai shihua [Poetic Talks through the Dynasties], p. 14. 24. Requoted from Min Ze, Zhongguo wenxue lilun piping shi (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), p. 129. 25. Vincent Shi’s translation, p. 350. 26. Chen Liangyun, Zhongguo shixue tixi lun [The Chinese System of Poetics], p. 183. 27. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong [Literary Mind and The Carving of Dragons], p. 168. 28. Adapted from Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 64. 29. Li Xin, Gujin shihua [Poetic Talks Ancient and Modern], in Song shihua jiyi [Compilation of Lost Poetic Talks of the Song Dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), Vol. 1, p. 260. 30. Zhouyi zhengyi [The Correct Meaning of the Zhouyi], annotated by Kong Yingda (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, n.d.), ce 3, juan 7, 19a. 31. Chen Liangyun, Zhongguo shixue tixi lun [The Chinese System of Poetics] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1988), p. 170. 32. Shisanjing zhushu [Thirteen Classics Annotated] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), Vol. 2, p. 1869. 33. Shangshu [The Book of Documents], in Shisanjing zhushu, p. 174b-c. 34. See Chen Liangyun’s Zhongguo shixue tixilun, pp. 173–5. 35. Lu Ji, Wenfu [Rhyme-Prose on Literature], in Wenxuan [Selections of Refined Literature] (Taipei: Qiming shuju, 1960), p.  225. The English version is adapted from Shih-hsiang Chen’s translation in Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 207–8. 36. Vincent Shih, trans., Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), p. 349. 37. Chen Liangyun, Zhongguo shixue tixi lun [The Chinese System of Poetics], p. 202. 38. Slightly adapted from Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 351. 39. Slightly modified from Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 352. 40. Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 352. 41. Slightly adapted from Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 10.

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42. Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 11. 43. Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 12. 44. Slightly adapted from Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 13. 45. Adapted from Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 21. 46. Slightly adapted from Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 29. 47. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], annotated by Lu Kanru and Mu Shijin, p. 452 48. Ye Xie, Yuanshi [Origin of Poetry] (Beijing: renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979), p. 25. 49. Ye Xie, Yuanshi [The Origin of Poetry], p. 21. 50. Aristotle, Poetics, in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 48. 51. A narrative poem by Du Fu, known for its moving story of how a poor family suffered from forced conscription during the war years. 52. Zhongguo meixue shi ziliao xuanbian, p. 286. 53. Andrew Plaks, “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative,” in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 314. 54. Liu Zhiji, Shitong [General Principles of History] (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1978), Vol. 1, p. 219. 55. Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 279. 56. Liu Zhiji, Shitong, p. 219 and p. 224. 57. Edward Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 341. 58. Liu Zhiji, Shitong, pp. 221–222. 59. Wang Jide, Qulü, Juan 4, p. 4b, in Guangcang xuequn congshu. 60. Wang Jide, Qulü, Juan 2, p. 21b, in Guangcang xuequn congshu. 61. Requoted from Zhongguo wenxue lilun shi, Vol. 3, pp. 307–8. 62. Zang Moxun, “Second Preface” to Yuan qu xuan [Selected Yuan Plays] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958), p. 4. 63. See Sima Qian, Shiji [Records of the Grand Historian], Juan 126, p. 64. Tang Xianzu ji [Collected Writings of Tang Xianzu] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1973), p. 1540. 65. Liang Tingdan, Tenghua ting quhua [Drama Talks of Tenghua Pavilion] (Suzhou: Jingyi tang, 1830), Juan 3, p. 1b. 66. Liang Tingdan, Tenghua ting quhua [Drama Talks of Tenghua Pavilion], Juan 3, p. 11a. 67. Shuihu pinglun ziliao [Source Materials on the Water Margin], p. 94. 68. “Preface” to Jingu qiguan [Spectaclar Stories Anicent and Modern] (Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1935), pp. 1–2. 69. Requoted from Cai Zongxiang, et al. Zhongguo wenxue lilun shi [History of Chinese Literary Theories], vol. 4, p. 629.

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70. Shuihu pinglun ziliao [Source Materials on the Water Margin] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1975), p. 102. 71. D. H. Lawrence, “Why The Novel Matters,” in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 535. 72. Ming Rongyutang ke Shuihuzhuan [Ming Rongyutang Carved Edition of the Water Margin] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1975), comment at the end of Ch. 1. 73. Ming Rongyutang ke Shuihuzhuan, comment at the end of Ch. 24. 74. Ming Rongyutang ke Shuihuzhuan, comment at the end of Ch. 21. 75. Feng Menglong, “Preface” to Jingshi tongyan [Cautionary Stories] (Taipei: Dingwen shuju, 1974), p. 1a. 76. Ye Lang, Zhongguo meixueshi dagang [Outline of Chinese Aesthetic History] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1985), p. 366. 77. Ming Rongyutang ke Shuihuzhuan, comment at the end of Ch. 10. 78. Earl Miner, “On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems,” Part I, in Critical Inquiry, 5.2 (Winter 1978), p. 350. 79. Robert Scholes, “Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative,” in On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 205.

PART IV

Metaphysics and Aesthetics

CHAPTER 8

Divine Thinking and Artistic Creation

In previous chapters, I have dealt with some topics essential for the study of aesthetics. In the remaining chapters, I will move to the core issues of aesthetics. In Chaps. 6 and 7, I have affirmed the centrality of mimesis in literature and art and the existence of mimetic theory in Chinese aesthetic thought. In this chapter, I will move from mimesis to the aesthetic conception of representation and conduct a comparative study of critical discourses on imagination and inspiration for artistic creation in Chinese and Western aesthetic thought. My inquiry focuses on these questions: What inspires and determines the conditions of artistic representation? How is the popular belief in the divine as the sources of art related to aesthetics and art criticism? What is the rationale behind the popular belief? Is the idea of the divine still relevant today to our conceptions of the aesthetic ideal in artistic representation? Is there an ultimate standard by which people from different cultural traditions may employ to judge the value and achievement of a work of literature or art? These are big aesthetic questions that thinkers and scholars have been wrestling with for ages from the metaphysical viewpoint. Instead of answering these questions in terms of purely conceptual speculations, I will examine an aesthetic thesis found in common sense practice upheld by people across cultural traditions. Despite the differences in race and culture, people would attribute the creation of artistic work to the inspirations of gods and praise an excellent work of art as having attained the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_8

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status of the divine. This practice has a long history dating from the ancient past to the present day and has given rise to a way of thinking characterized by Goethe as “daemonic thinking” in the West and “divine thinking” described by Liu Xie in China. This seemingly naïve way of thinking, however, reveals a subtle dimension of artistic creation first intuitively examined by Plato as “divine madness” and then rationally explored by Sigmund Freud as unconscious creation. At the same time, it offers an intriguing conception of the aesthetic ideal in artistic creation irrespective of class, race, culture, and tradition.

Cross-Cultural Belief in the Divine Source of Art Artistic creativity is a human endeavor, but in major literary traditions, creativity is believed to relate to the divine. In Greek mythology, creativity is attributed to the Muses, daughters of the supreme god Zeus.1 In early Greek thought, Plato considered literary creativity as a kind of divine madness that possesses the poet.2 In classical times, Julius Caesar Scaliger, influenced by Plato’s idea of divine inspirations, proclaims: “while they [other arts] … represent things just as they are, in some sense like a speaking picture, the poet depicts quite another sort of nature, and a variety of fortunes; in fact, by so doing, he transforms himself almost into a second deity.”3 This line of thought continued into the Age of Enlightenment. In his magnum opus, New Science, a treatise supposed to probe into history, language, poetry, and human sciences in rationalist terms, Vico suggests that poetic “wisdom began with the Muse, whom Homer in a golden passage of the Odyssey, defines as the knowledge of good and evil or what was later called divination … This popular wisdom contemplated God in the attributes of His providence, so that from divinari, to divine, his essence was called divinity.”4 Up to our own time, people across cultures are fond of using god or gods as the ultimate yardstick for measuring the artistic achievement of an artist. A most common practice is to view the relationship between the artist and his creation in terms of an analogy that treats the latter as a god. As a result, the divine continues to be the aesthetic ideal in artistic representation. In the Chinese tradition, a similar situation existed as early as high antiquity and throughout ancient Chinese history. In early Chinese thought, there is a parable in Zhuangzi’s (369–286  BC) philosophical writing. It narrates how a skillful carpenter was commissioned by a king to make an ornate music stand. When the stand was finished, people, struck

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by the lifelikeness of the carved birds and animals on the stand, people believed that he was endowed with the power of gods.5 In Chinese history of art, Gu Kaizhi (346–407 AD), a master painter, calligrapher, and art theorist, considered the divine as the highest order of the visual art and even believed that a supreme painting is endowed with divine quality. An anecdote in his biography informs us that he once entrusted a box of his best paintings to a friend. The latter stole all the paintings in the box but denied having done so. Gu Kaizhi did not suspect the theft and only said, “Miraculous paintings are connected with the divine. They may have transformed themselves and flown away just like a person who has become an immortal.”6 This belief in the divine source for artistic creation was so prevalent in Chinese history that Yan Yu (fl. 1180–1235), a literary theorist whose views have exerted a lasting impact on Chinese poetry and poetics, proclaimed the divine to be the ultimate standard for the poetic art: “There is only one ultimate achievement in poetry: it is called ‘entering the divine.’ When poetry enters the domain of the divine, it has reached its perfection and limit. Nothing can be added to it!”7 In other traditions, if people want to pass the highest praise for an excellent work of art, a simple exclamation, “That is divine!” would be sufficient. Therefore, across cultures, art has been related to the divine in both popular wisdom and critical thinking. Without reference to it, aesthetic conceptions of art and artistic creation would not have been what they are today. This is because in all traditions, the divine is viewed as the ultimate aesthetic ideal, and aesthetics is full of notions, ideas, and concepts related to the divine, without which artistic criticism would be in a much-­ impoverished state. The divine in art, however, is a slippery category in aesthetics that has been taken for granted since high antiquity. In an inquiry into aesthetics, we should not be content with popular wisdom and common sense. In the following sections, I will examine the major critical and theoretical data on the divine, divine creation, and divine spirit in artistic representation from the Chinese and Western traditions in terms of logical analysis and try to obtain a rational understanding of the relationship between artistic creation and the divine. On the basis of a rational understanding, I will explore to what extent the divine is still relevant to present-day aesthetics and in what ways an aesthetic ideal may be conceived on ideas of the divine in artistic representation. As the Chinese and Western traditions do not attach as much importance to creation myth and a personal God of creation, I also wish to explore to what extent the

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two traditions’ conceptions of the divine in aesthetic thought are similar to and different from each other.

Western Conceptions of the Divine in Art Despite vast differences in aesthetics, Chinese and Western traditions have a similar answer to the question: What is the aesthetic ideal in artistic representation? Both traditions believe that the artistic ideal is a divine creation by a deity who is the creator of myriad things in the world. However, each tradition evinces intriguing differences in contemplations of the aesthetic ideal. In the Western tradition, Plato who conceived of a dichotomy between the world of appearance and that of essence is the first to posit the divine creation as the aesthetic ideal. In his conception, the divine has two aspects of meanings. The first aspect refers to the conception of a personal god who is the creator of things in the world. The second aspect refers to the essence inherent in things. The two aspects are related in Plato’s conception of the three worlds with the parable of couch. He conceived of three kinds of couch: “one existing in nature, which is made by God,” a second “which is the work of the carpenter,” and a third which is the “work of the painter.” The three kinds of couch are the product of three kinds of artists: God, the carpenter, and the painter. Among the three artists, there are two orders of imitation: the painter imitates the carpenter’s couch; the carpenter imitates the couch in nature, which is created by God.8 It is generally believed that in his effort to devalue art, Plato ranked the artist’s product as the lowest and the god’s creation as the highest. I suggest from a different angle that Plato was realistic about the inadequacy of art in representing the essence of things. Although his idea of couch has a strong theistic color, in rational terms, the divine form of “couch” is a reified idea abstracted from all couches. From this perspective, when he said that the idea of couch could not be created by humans, he meant that there cannot be a couch that incorporates the essence of all couches. In his preparation for the argument leading up to the parable of the couch, he stated: “Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume that there is one corresponding idea or form.”9 This suggests that when he said that the idea of couch cannot be created by humans, he evidently meant that there cannot be a couch that incorporates the essence of all couches. Plato’s conception of the divine in art left behind a big question in Western studies of mimesis: Can imitation capture the spiritual

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essence of an object? In nontheistic terms, the question becomes: Is imitation capable of capturing the essence of a represented object? Plato considered artistic imitation incapable of representing the divine likeness or spiritual essence of the represented objects.10 His negative view is based on his distinction between two kinds of imitation: one aims at “an imitation of things as they are” and another at an imitation of things “as they appear.”11 Mimetic art is designed to imitate the appearances of things and is “an inferior thing cohabiting with an inferior and engendering inferior offspring.”12 By contrast, God is the creator of all things and only He is capable of representing the spiritual essence of things. His representation is therefore of the highest order. Human beings can only engage in lower orders of imitation, which reproduces the superficial resemblance of objects, not their essence. In representing the essence of things, Plato was rather pessimistic about emulating the divine. He believed that only when an artist is somehow possessed by the divine through a kind of divine madness is he capable of capturing the essence of things.13 Plato thus created an absolute dichotomy between appearance and essence, which are tangentially related but inherently disjuncted. In artistic imitation, the appearance of an object can only touch the superficial aspects of objects like the image in a mirror, and can never hope to capture the essence. Since Plato, the dichotomy between appearance and essence has remained a central question in the Western explorations of imitation. In nontheistic terms, Plato explained the reason why imitation cannot capture the essence of things: “the imitator is a long way off the truth, and can reproduce all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image.”14 Thus, he attributed the impossibility of capturing the essence of things to the limitation of the artistic media in fully representing objects. Although he was pessimistic about the adequacy of representation, Plato identified two central issues: the relationship between appearance and essence and the limitation of artistic media. On each of the issues, I will demonstrate that Chinese thinkers differ from him. But for the time being, I will only mention that on the first issue, Chinese thinkers view the relationship between appearance and essence as a dialectical dualism, not a distinct dichotomy. On the second issue, Chinese thinkers recognize the limitation of media but believed that a first-rate artist is capable of finding ingenious ways to turn what Plato viewed as a limitation to an advantage. The central difference between Plato and Chinese thinkers is that while the former believed that human beings cannot emulate the divine, the latter viewed a first-rate artist as a

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minor deity whose creation is capable of capturing the spiritual essence of representation. There is another reason why Plato was pessimistic about emulating the divine. It is because he viewed artistic talent as a kind of divine inspiration imparted by gods, not a craft that can be perfected through practice.15 His aesthetic ideal is thus truly divine in its theological sense. In rational terms, his idea of divine madness seems to refer to inborn talent and unconscious creation and has a touch of stimulus–response behaviorism as is suggested by his use of the magnetic stone to describe artistic effects.16 Aristotle also set great store by innate talent but he considered art as a result of both inspiration and craftsmanship, and his aesthetic ideal is an earthly and empirical one. Aristotle did not examine the Platonic dichotomy between essence and appearance but changed the topic of representation to a technical issue. He avoided conceptual discussion of whether imitation is capable of capturing the essence of things. He shifted his concern from a representation of essence to an imitation of action and explored the technical aspects of imitation: the medium, objects, and manner of imitation.17 In so doing, however, he arrived at a similarly optimistic view as the Chinese thinkers. In his Poetics, he implicitly suggested that the imitation of appearance is capable of capturing the essence of things: “The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects—things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.”18 Considering that he regarded poetry as superior to history because it expresses the universal through the representation of a particular, we may say that he implied that art is capable of capturing the essence of represented objects or events.19 If we compare the cited passage with Plato’s view that an artist cannot imitate things as they are and can only imitate things as they appear, Aristotle’s optimistic view of representation is beyond doubt. Aristotle adopted a different approach to the divine that serves to pave the way for later thinkers to explore the aesthetic ideal in nontheistic and rational terms and sowed the seeds of convergence with the Chinese aesthetic ideal. Later thinkers like Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Philip Sidney, and Joshua Reynolds followed Plato’s footstep in exploring the dichotomy between appearance and essence but did it in an Aristotelian way characterized by a dual concern with both metaphysical reasoning and technical craft. Aquinas, for example, confronted Plato’s absolute dichotomy directly and expressed a different view from the Greek thinker. In his interlocutions with the views that argue against representing divine truths

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through the likeness of corporeal things, Aquinas justified the expression of the divine and spiritual truth by means of employing apt materials things. He did not view the relationship between the divine truth and material representation as an absolute dichotomy: “For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Scripture spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things.”20 In this reasoning, he suggested that rather than a complete disjunction between transcendence and immanence, the essence of the divine is partially immanent in material things. In his reply to an objection that argues against “putting forward divine truths under the likeness of corporeal things,” he stated: “The ray of the divine revelation is not extinguished by the sensible imagery wherewith it is veiled, as Dionysus says; and its truth so far remains that it does not allow the minds of those to whom the revelation has been made, to rest in the likenesses, but raises them to the knowledge of intelligible truths; and through those to whom the revelation has been made others also may receive instruction in these matters.”21 Thus, he expressed an idea of suggestiveness, which happens to be the hallmark of the Chinese conception of attaining the divine. In later ages, thinkers completely abandoned the Platonic devaluation of art as a superficial image of the world that only shows the appearance and positively viewed literature as a mirror held up to nature, capable of revealing things as they are. The Aristotelian mimetic theory descends through Julius Caesar Scaliger, Philip Sidney, Alexander Pope, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, and others and implies and sometimes boldly declares that the poet is a lesser God, and creates an alternative, mirror-universe in which he at least is capable of enclosing or trapping shadows of reality that reflects truth.22 Scaliger, still accepting Plato’s idea of poetic inspirations as divine madness, nevertheless deviated from him to declare: “while they [other arts] … represent things just as they are, in some sense like a speaking picture, the poet depicts quite another sort of nature, and a variety of fortunes; in fact, by so doing, he transforms himself almost into a second deity.”23 Not only did he view the poet as a god but moreover he considered him a creative god: “since poetry fashions images of those things which are not, as well as images more beautiful than life of those things which are, it seems unlike other literary forms, such as history, which confine themselves to actual events, and rather to be another god, and to create.”24

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Scaliger’s idea was taken up by Sidney, who reaffirmed Aristotle’s view of poetry as an art of imitation, considered it the poet’s duty to “imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God.”25 Adopting Scaliger’s new-­Platonic idea that the poet improves on appearances, Sidney amplified the Aristotelian idea that the poet is capable of bringing to completion that which Nature is always in the process of completing: “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done—neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.”26 Here, Sidney suggested that the artist may not only emulate God but also rival and even surpass Him in artistic excellence. The change in wording from a personal God to a pantheistic Nature has changed the fundamental nature of the divine in representation. As I will show, this change is the ontological and epistemological converging point between Chinese and Western conceptions of the divine. After Sidney, Joshua Reynolds further demystified the divine in art by revising Plato’s idea of Form. With the aid of English empiricist philosophy, he succeeded in shifting the divine in art from heaven to earth and locating it in the artist. He optimistically claimed that “There are excellencies in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature … a mere copier of nature can never produce anything great; can never raise and enlarge the conception, or warm the heart of the spectator …. the genuine painter … must endeavor to improve them by the grandeur of his ideas.”27 Reynolds still subscribed to the idea of the divine in art, but his divine ideal is an “idea of the perfect state of nature, which the artist calls the ideal beauty,” “which has acquired, and which seems to have a right to the epithet of divine, as it may be said to preside, like a supreme judge, over all the production of nature; appearing to be possessed of the will and intention of the Creator.”28 This empiricist view of the divine ideal forms a bridge over the gap between Chinese and Western ideas of the divine in art and makes it easier for us to compare and contrast the aesthetic ideal in Chinese and Western traditions.

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Chinese Conceptions of the Divine and Its Relation to Art Compared with the Western tradition, the Chinese notion of the divine has less theological implications but is broader in denotations and connotations. In Chinese culture, the concept comparable to the Western divine is shen (divinity), which in different circumstances may mean “god,” “spirits,” and “essence,” etc. In the Chinese tradition, the divine has these meanings: (1) gods and deities in heaven; (2) souls of departed people; (3) the mysterious rationale of the universe; (4) human mind and spirit; (5) outward expression of a person.29 Since high antiquity, the Chinese have adopted a nontheological, secular, and practical approach to the divine. In the Analects of Confucius, the Chinese sage is presented as having little inclination to discuss the divine, consigning it to the same realm as those undesirable categories like strange, violence, and disorder. Nevertheless, he did believe in the existence of spirits and gods. In his analects, he advised people to “sacrifice to the spirits and gods as though they were present.”30 But he admonished people to “respect spirits and gods but keep them at a distance.”31 Perhaps because of this admonition, it was relatively late for Chinese thinkers to consciously relate the divine to artistic representation. Although the divine frequently appeared in early discourses on various arts, it was not until the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties period (220–589 AD) that the divine became a self-­ conscious aesthetic category. Unlike the ancient Greeks, who conceived of a group of nine Muses as gods for the various arts, the Chinese tradition does not have a single god of art in its history. Though poetry became a most revered artistic creation since the beginning of its civilization, the Chinese tradition did not even have a god of poetry in high antiquity. In earliest conceptions of poetry, gods and humans are perceived to be separate. It is through the function of poetry that they are brought into harmony and cooperation: “Poetry expresses the intent of the mind. Songs prolong articulated words. Prolonged words are coordinated with high and low pitches. When the tunes of all musical instruments are harmonized and do not disrupt their designated order, the gods and men are brought into harmony.”32 Without the Western notion of divine inspiration, poetic genesis is conceived as a voluntary response to a situation that moves the poet: “Poetry appears where an intent arises.” The time-honored discourse on poetry, the Great Preface to the Book of Songs, posits an expressive rise of poetry and exerted

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a long-lasting influence on the active role of the poet in poetic creation: “Poetry is where the intent of the mind goes. Lodged at heart it is intent; expressed in words, it is poetry.”33 The discourse does discuss the relation of poetry to gods. Nevertheless, it is not the poet who is inspired by gods but the gods who are moved by poetry: “Nothing comes closer than poetry in shaking heaven and earth, and moving ghosts and gods.” Instead of the role to serve gods, one of the functions of poetry is to keep gods informed of earthly successes and to ensure their blessing and protection: “The Song poems are songs that sing praises of the good conditions of flourishing virtue and inform the divine luminosity of the achievements and meritorious deeds.”34 Thus, in early Chinese literary theories, gods are not directly related to poetic creation, nor did they become an aesthetic ideal. However, just as in the Western tradition, the divine constitutes an essential part of metaphysical discourse on the universe, in the Chinese tradition, it gradually became a standard for measuring artistic excellence precisely on account of its ineffable nature and omnipotent transformations. In metaphysical thinking, Guanzi (d. 645 BC) provided perhaps the earliest rational definition of the divine: “An object capable of transformations is said to be divine”35 Mencius (371 BC–289 BC) viewed the divine as a power greater than that of a sage: “He who is great in effecting transformations is called a sage. The sage whose power is unfathomable is called a god.”36 The Xicizhuan (Appended Verbalizations to the Book of Changes) defines the divine thus: “that the transformations of the yin and yang cannot be predicted is called the divine.”37 Han Kangbo (220–280 AD), who annotated this definition further elucidated: “The divine is the ultimate form of transformations. As a way of expression it intricately describes myriad things, but it cannot be investigated and interrogated. Hence the saying, ‘the transformations of the yin and yang principles cannot be predicted.’”38 The Xicizhuan provides a further definition of the divine: “The divine is that which makes myriads things miraculous and articulates for them”39 Another of Han Kangbo’s annotations elucidates the divine more clearly in relation to this definition: “The divine is the ultimate form of transformations, which makes myriads things miraculous and articulates for them. It is something that cannot be investigated in terms of tangible shapes.”40 What exactly is the divine besides the popular view of it as a supernatural and superhuman force? How does it differ in meaning from its Western counterpart? In an annotation of the definition, “The divine is that which

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makes myriads things miraculous and articulates for them,” a study of the Book of Changes viewed the divine as Di (supreme being). It quotes Liang Yin, an ancient scholar of the Xicizhuan as saying: “The Supreme Being is the substance of the divine. The divine is the function of the Supreme Being. Hence, the master in charge of myriad things is the Supreme Being. Therefore, that which makes myriad things miraculous is the divine of the supreme being”41 This passage provides a sophisticated view of the relationship between the supreme being in the universe and the divine. Then the question arises: What is the Supreme Being? In the passage immediately preceding the definition of the divine, the Xicizhuan states: “The Supreme Being arises from zhen … myriad things arise from zhen”42 In the Book of Changes, zhen, one of the eight trigams, represents thunder, the most powerful atmospheric force between heaven and earth. In the sentence immediately following the definition of the divine, the Xicizhuan states: “Nothing moves as fast as thunder in stimulating myriad things.”43 Thus, in the Chinese tradition, the Supreme Being is a god of thunder. We can find an interesting coincidence between the Chinese and Western conceptions of the Supreme Being. The supreme being in Western mythology is Zeus, father of the Muses and the god of atmospheric phenomenon, especially of thunder and lightening. Edith Hamilton, the author of Mythology, notes: “Zeus became the supreme ruler. He was Lord of the Sky, the rain-god and the Cloud-gatherer, who wielded the awful thunderbolt. His power was greater than that of all the other divinities together.”44 In the Chinese tradition, the Shuowen jiezi (Elucidations of Characters and Words), the earliest Chinese dictionary, defines shen (dinivity) as: “The heavenly god brings about myriad things. The character evolved from shi (display) and shen (thunder)”45 Yang Shuda, a well-known Chinese philologist, explicates shen thus: “Nothings is as divine as thunder in displaying the miraculousness of celestial images. Thus, in ancient writings, ‘display,’ ‘thunder,’ and ‘divine’ are the same character.”46 The Chinese character for “thunder” has a rain radical. The Shuowen jiezi defines it as: “the yin and yang are stimulated into incandescent brightness. The characters have evolved from ‘rain’ and ‘thunder’”47 The amazing similarities in Chinese denotations and Greek mythology are not just pure accident. The intriguing coincidence suggests that in high antiquity, people from different cultures arrived at similar understandings of the supreme power in the universe via similar ways of observations. One may ask: in rational terms, what does the divine mean in the Chinese tradition? Chen Liangyu, a scholar of Chinese aesthetic thought,

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after conducting an extensive study of the divine in the Chinese tradition, defines the Chinese concept of the divine as a “quintessential pneuma between heaven and earth.”48 It may lodge in the humans as well as in natural objects. When it appears in things, it is the objective divine; when it lodges in a person, it is the subjective divine. In my opinion, however, the division between the subjective and objective divine is correct only up to a point. For in analytic terms, the divine is neither purely subjective nor purely objective. It is a category growing out of the subjective perception of the objective quintessence in a person or things. The Xicizhuan quotes Confucius as saying: “Confucius said that he who knows the changes and transformations of the Dao may perhaps know the laws of the divine.”49 This statement suggests that the divine is inseparably dependent on human perception. In another statement, the Xicizhuan quotes Confucius again as saying: “He who knows the intricate laws of the universe may perhaps be considered divine”50 This statement implies that human beings may become divine. It effects a fundamental shift, through which the divine has come down from heaven to earth. As a consequence, the divine is no longer as enigmatic and ineffable as people generally think. The Xicizhuan notes: “If one exhaustively study the divine he will thoroughly understand the transformations.”51 If this saying still shows an uncertain tone, another statement suggests that a human being may become a deity under certain conditions: “He who studies the meaning of the universe with uttermost dedication will be able to enter the realm of the divine, thereby making his knowledge useful.”52 The Book of Changes considers its cardinal concept Yi (the Change), the system of hexagrams and statements, as having a divine power: The Yi is comparable to heaven and earth. It is therefore capable of comprehensively covering the laws of heaven and earth. With it, he who raises his head to observe the celestial patterns and lowers his head to observe terrestrial markings will know the rationale of visible and invisible things. He who explores the final outcome of things by tracing back to their origins will understand the laws of life and death. He who observes how the quintessential pneuma becomes myriad things and how roaming souls undergo transformations will know the conditions of spirits and gods. The Yi defines and delimits the changes of heaven and earth without lopsided excess, intricately brings myriad things into completion with nothing left out, and creates knowledge that connects with the way of days and nights. Hence it is said that just as the divine is not confined to finite quarters, so the transformations of the Yi are not restricted to one form.53

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This passage explicitly declares that since the Yi (the Change) has all the power and characteristic features of the divine, it is equivalent to the divine. The last sentence of the above passage explicates the divine in relation to changes in the universe. Shao Yong (1011–1077), an influential scholar of the Book of Changes, explains the last sentence in terms of a relationship between power and control, form and function: “The divine is the master of changes. So, it has no perimeters. Changes are the function of the divine. So, they have no form. The expression ‘just as the divine is not confined to finite quarters, so the transformations of the Yi is not restricted to one form’ means that if something is restricted to a quarter and cannot have transformations, it is no divine. ”54 Shao Yong also notes, “Therefore that which creates things is the divine. The divine does not die. That which are subject to changes are the four seasons.” (Ibid.) In this sense, the divine is another name for Mother Nature. Since the Yi (Book of Changes) has the function of the divine, who endows it with the divine power? The Xicizhuan informs us: That which exhaustively probes the profundity under heaven is stored in the hexagrams. That which stimulates the actions under heaven is stored in hexagram statements. What transforms and orders things is stored in changes. What pushes people into action is stored in connections. What illuminates things like a god is stored in Man.55

The divine in the Yi is here seen ultimately as a subjective understanding of the objective power reserved in Nature by exceptional human beings who are sages. In rational terms, the sages invented hexagrams and hexagram statements to expound the complex rationale of the universe and used their understanding of the rationale to guide people’s life. Because of their special power, they serve as a kind of intermediary between the divine and humans. The Xicizhuan confirms that in high antiquity, Fu Xi, the legendary king of the Chinese race, “invented the eight trigrams so as to connect with the virtue of the divine luminosity and to simulate the conditions of myriad things.”56 Liu Xie, in his magna opus on Chinese poetics, the Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, also points out that the reason why the Book of Changes is endowed with a divine power is because of the sagacity of human intelligence: “The Book of Changes deals with heaven; it has penetrated the divine order and performed miscellaneous functions. Accordingly, the Xicizhuan says that it has boundless implications, its critical judgments are of high literary quality, its language is

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accurate, and its symbolism deep.”57 This line of thought means that though the divine is a kind of quintessential pneuma floating in the universe, it may be lodged in both humans and things, and that ultimately some exceptional human beings are endowed by Nature with divine power and become deities in actuality. This way of conceptualization laid the metaphysical foundation for the conception of superb artists as deities who rival and surpass gods with their supreme art. On the nature of the divine, the Chinese conception shares both similarities to and differences from its Western counterpart. While both traditions view the divine as a supernatural power beyond human ken, they differ as to how the divine is related to human beings. Whereas in the West, the divine is always humanized as a personal god responsible for the creation of the world, the Chinese divine is seldom a personal god who creates everything in Nature, but always an invisible, all-present, and ineffable force that makes thing be themselves. In analytic terms, the Chinese divine comes close to the Platonic Idea or Form and converges with the neo-Platonic conception of the divine as the spiritual essence of an entity, human or natural. When the Chinese divine is humanized, it is not monotheistic but polytheistic or pantheistic. Anything and everything may be endowed with the quintessential pneuma between heaven and earth and become a god with supernatural powers. This way of thinking makes it easier for the Chinese to attribute divine powers to humans and to conceive of the artist as a minor deity who creates an art work that rivals Nature.

Chinese and Western Notions of the Artist as a Deity Since art is mainly a representation of the observed universe or an expression of inner experiences resulting from observing the universe, conceptions of artistic creation is invariably related to conceptions of humankind’s relation to the universe or Nature. Each cultural tradition’s approach to the universe is predicated on certain conceptual models: “all the definitions of nature and of the human are given in terms of models, models filled by divine, evolutionary, or merely human will.”58 The creationist model, which conceives of God as the primal maker of the world is one of them. It has exerted a profound impact upon conceptions of art as well as upon the relationship between nature and humanity in Western culture. Aware of the power of conceptual models, some comparative scholars claim that the formation of aesthetic systems is heavily dependent upon

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metaphysical conceptions of the universe, especially models of cosmogony. Stephen Owen, an eminent scholar of Chinese and comparative literature suggests: “Cosmogony dramatizes the structure of nature, and the canonical cosmogonies of a civilization assure its members on what grounds rests the world which they inhabit. As the world was formed, so it will be known and understood.”59 In his opinion, the fundamental difference between Chinese aesthetic system and its Western counterpart is largely determined by the historical fact that each tradition followed a different model of cosmogony in high antiquity. In the West, the model of cosmogony is a creationist one based on the Christian conception that God created all living creatures in the world including humans: “Humankind was humankind not in its differentiation from the beasts, but had its identity from a divine model, which it replicated prolifically.”60 He argues that even after Darwin’s theory of evolution forced many people to abandon the divine model of cosmogony, the creationist model has had considerable impact upon human conception of teleology and entelechy in metaphysical thinking. By contrast, the Chinese followed a different model of cosmogony, in which the world was conceived to begin differently than that in the creationist model. The world in ancient Chinese conception “simply happened, uncreated either by transcendent plan or empirical necessity …. there was once a totality that quite spontaneously divided itself into balanced opposition, and out of that initial division there began a continuous process of binary subdivision that culminated in the manifold particularity of the universe in which we dwell. When the entities of the universe went forth to multiply, they did not mass-produce a model, but instead evinced a melancholy tendency to further division, a failure to replicate, and endless chain of increasing identities, each one threatened by further subdivisions.”61 The different models of cosmogony also determined the differences in modes of thinking in the process of creation: “The most significant difference between the created world and the uncreated world is that in the former, any entity or species is defined by the primal model which lies beyond the particular: the idea of autonomous model runs through most of the religious, philosophical, and scientific variations of Western civilization. But in the uncreated world, an entity is defined by its differentiation from a series of correlatives and counterparts; likewise, a totality is the combination of two essential parts.”62 In Owen’s conceptualization, while the Western creationist model conceived of a created universe, the Chinese natural model conceived of an

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uncreated universe. The fundamental difference in cosmogony determines the differences in aesthetic conceptions of the artist and his artistic creation: Irreconcilable differences separate the mutating, uncreated world from the created world; the same differences also divide the lesser cosmogonies of literary “creation” and the shih’s [poetry] “uncreation.” In the created world of the little “makers,” the poets, bear a strange relation to the primal Maker, and their vaunted singularity in humankind apes a divine singularity. With no creative deity to emulate, the poet of the shih does not think to make the world anew; he participates in the nature that is; and in being of this world, he lacks the “creative” poet’s aura of isolated divinity.63

The difference in creative models gave rise to some further differences in poetic creations in the Chinese and Western traditions. In the created world of the West, “The model of a transcendent and hidden Plan, which may end the world as it was begun, authorizes the little ‘makers’ to fabricated their fictions and metaphors, and the secret meanings of these lesser creations belong to the ‘maker’ alone: theirs is the power to begin, direct, and end their stories, and their little creatures run through strictly guided paces under the guise of free will” (Ibid.). By contrast, in the Chinese tradition, “In the uncreated world such willful fabrication is perverse, a mere deception: the poet is concerned with the authentic presentation of ‘what is,’ either interior experience or exterior percept. The shih poet’s function is to see the order in the world, the pattern behind its infinite division; like Confucius, he ‘transmits but does not create.’”64 In other words, the poet in the Chinese conception is only a transmitter, not a maker in the Greek conception, still less a creator, a minor deity. Owen’s conceptualization has made a pioneering contribution to the comparative studies of the differences between Chinese and Western poetics. It has also made an important connection between Chinese and Western literatures and will continue to inspire innovative approaches in this field. I fully agree that models of cosmogony may have their impact upon conceptions of artistic creation and aesthetics, but I venture to question the claim that the presence or absence of a divine model of cosmogony in a tradition determines the conception of the artist as a creator or transmitter. I argue that there are subtle ironies and paradoxes in the Chinese and Western conceptualizations of the divine and art. In the West, God is believed to be the primal Maker who created human beings in His

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image. But the irony is just the opposite. As Marx astutely pointed out, it is not God who created humankind in His image but humankind who created God in their image. In the Chinese conception of the divine as personalities, although Chinese thinkers did not explicitly claim that human beings created gods in their images, they made implicit conceptions in this vein. For in the Chinese tradition, everything and anything can receive the quintessential pneuma floating in the universe and become a god with personalities. In the popular mind, the sky, the earth, mountains, rivers, forests, valleys, even the kitchen and toilet at home may have a god. Human beings can become gods as well. Yuhuang Dadi (the Great Jade Emperor), the Supreme God in Chinese mythology who is the leader of all gods in heaven, was a legendary prince before he attained divinity through arduous cultivations.65 Even real historical persons may become gods and receive sacrifice and worshipping. Guan Yu, a historical person of the Eastern Han, became the Chinese god of war and fortune. Qing Qiong and Yuchi Gong, two generals of the Tang Dynasty became the guardian gods of the house. Zhong Kui, a warrior who committed suicide after he failed a martial examination, became another guardian god who specialized in catching ghosts.66 The Chinese penchant for creating gods in human image has complicated the relationship between men and gods in literature, and the source of literary creativity. Although the Chinese tradition seldom attributes literary creativity to a goddess as the Greek tradition does, there is no lack of instances in which literary writings are viewed as the results inspired by a goddess. In the Warring State period, Song Yu (c. 290 BC–c. 223 BC), a famous court poet wrote a lyric exposition titled “Shennü fu” (rhyme-­ prose on the goddess). Over history, scholars have paid much attention to its lavish use of ornate language in the description of the goddess, but few have paid any attention to its source of inspiration. The writing is accompanied by a preface, which gives a detailed account of how the writing came to be written. According to the preface, King Xiang of Chu and Song Yu had a visit to the Yunmeng Lake. The king ordered Song Yu to write a rhyme prose on the legendary goddess of Gao Tang. That evening, the king dreamt of an encounter with the goddess. The next day, the king told Song Yu of his unusual dream. Song Yu inquired about the details of the dream, but the king said that as he was in a dazed state of mind, inflicted by both joy and a sense of loss, he could only faintly remember seeing an extraordinary lady in his dream. After he awoke from his sleep, he could not remember her appearance and therefore felt very unhappy.

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Hearing this account, Song Yu put his imagination to work and was able to re-present what the king had dreamt. He gave the king a brief description of the goddess and the king asked him to write down the account in detail. Hence the birth of a brilliant rhyme-prose on the goddess, a lyric writing that has had a lasting impact on the imagination of Chinese writers in history.67 This legend offers us an insight into the relationship between the divine and literary creation in the Chinese tradition. As a rule, Chinese creative writers do not view god or goddess as the maker of a literary writing, but they accept them as a source of creative inspiration. In their mind, the humans are responsible for the rise of literature and art although they do not deny the inspirational role played by the divine in literary creation. Thus, in the final analysis, the ultimate maker of literature and art is the human, not the divine. And the world of the divine created with this conception fully reflects the pre-dominance of rational spirit predicated on Confucianism and historical empiricism. Self-consciously or otherwise, the divine world in Chinese literature and art is an objectification of the human spirit. Li Zehou, the celebrated Chinese aesthetician, makes an apt observation on the relationship between the human world and the divine counterpart: The world of men and that of gods have maintained a direct and complex relationship, not in reality but in imagination; not in conceptual thinking but in artistic fantasy. The inseparable unity of men and gods in dream fantasies of primitive art and reality became a unity of senses and desires in the world of imagination. It is no longer a world of primitive art in which gods were invited to coerce and control the human world, but a world in which human beings attempted to ascend to heaven to participate in and share the joy of gods.68

The objectification of the human spirit in the Chinese tradition gave rise to a literary phenomenon rarely found in the literature and art of the West: it is not gods who created the humans but the humans who created gods. Here, I will only cite a legendary account. In Chinese literary history, Cao Zhi (192–232), the literary genius of the Wei Dynasty, wrote a poetic piece, “Luoshen fu” (Rhyming Prose on the Goddess of River Luo). The preface to the poetic composition narrates a real account of unfulfilled love, and the poetic composition presents an intriguing case in which a poet turns a fellow human being into a goddess. According to the preface,

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towards the end of the Eastern Han, Cao Zhi fell in love with Zhen Fu, a daughter of a noble man Zhen Yi, and wanted to marry her. But his wish was not fulfilled for his father married Zhen Fu to Cao Zhi’s brother, Cao Pi who became the Emperor of the Wei Dynasty. Cao Zhi was so lovesick that he often forgot food and sleep. After many years, Cao Zhi went to the capital to see his brother. The latter showed him a jade pillow inlaid with gold filets, which belonged to Zhen Fu. At the sight of the pillow, Cao Zhi could not help shedding tears. The woman was already dead due to an imperial concubine’s persecution. The emperor bestowed the pillow to Cao Zhi, who traveled back to his home. On his way, he stopped at the River Luo at night. Thinking of the departed beauty, Cao Zhi could not fall asleep. Just as he was about to doze off, the beauty appeared and told him that she was in deep love with him and wanted to be his wife, but fate separated them. While expressing her undying love for Cao Zhi, she gave the latter the pillow, which was part of her dowry. They slept together on the pillow and shared each other’s tender affections. They wanted to live together forever, but the divide between humans and spirits separated them. Overcome by the joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation, Cao Zhi composed the poetic prose. In the prose, Cao Zhi merged Zhen Fu with a goddess of the river in another famous literary man’s poetic writing.69 Thereafter, Zhen Fu became the Goddess of River Luo in Chinese mythology. The prose presents a vivid account of the interaction between the human and the divine. Through artistic imagination, Cao Zhi created a river goddess out of a real person. This poetic composition is a typical example, which reveals an irony in Chinese tradition: the artist may not be a god himself, but he is capable of creating a god. Thus, although the Chinese tradition does not have a strong belief in gods as the primal maker of arts, it believed in the human creation of gods both in life and art. By contrast, although the conception of gods as the ultimate maker of arts is embedded in the Western tradition, it is not a guarantee for the rise of the conception of the artist as a creation god. In fact, it may be an impediment if it is taken too literally. By simple logic, the Greco-Roman conception of the Muses as goddess for arts makes it difficult to attribute the sources of artistic creativity to humans. The Judeo-Christian theology of monotheism made it even more difficult for ancient Western thinkers to conceive of the artist as a god who is the ultimate creator of his art. In my early discussions, I have mentioned Scaliger’s well-known idea that by depicting another sort of nature, the poet “transforms himself almost into a second deity.”70 While he heartily agreed with the Greeks in defining the

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poet as the maker and a creative maker at that, Scaliger took a step backward, admitting that “its common title was furnished, not by the agreement of men, but by the provident wisdom of nature.”71 He eventually reverted to the Platonic idea of divine inspiration and regarded artists as servants to gods: “Plato first, and then Aristotle, said that there are diversities of inspiration, for some men are born inspired, while others, born ignorant and rude, and even averse to the art, are seized on by the divine madness, and wrested from their lowliness. It is the work of the gods, who, though divine, use even these as their servants. Thus Plato himself, in the Ion, calls such men the interpreters and expounders of the gods.”72 In the final analysis, the poet is able to create because he is driven by the gods: “The poets invoke the Muses, that the divine madness may imbue them to do their work” (Ibid.). Thus, the ultimate makers are still gods who created all forms of art. In Chinese literary thought, thinkers conceive of poetry as emanating from the work of genius and even admit its relation to the creative work by gods or nature, but they firmly believe in its human origin. Jiaoran, a poet-scholar of the Tang Dynasty, says in his study of poetry: Poetry is the flower and fruit of all miraculous plants, and the spirit and essence of the six classics. Although it is not the work of a sage, its ingenuity rivals that of the sage. It is the deep mystery of heaven, earth, and primal creation; and the subtle murkiness of ghosts and gods …. Although it is obtained from inside a person’s heart, it looks as though it were conferred by gods. Poetic lines infused with natural naivete and vital power may compete with the creator. One can contemplate on them but would find it hard to represent their condition. This only the poet knows.73

Here, Jiaoran thinks that poetry originates from the work of heaven, earth, and nature, and even expresses an idea close to Plato’s divine possession, but he stops short of accepting poetry as the creation by gods. No sooner has he talked about the divine endowment than he reaffirms the origin of poetry in the mind of the poet. My comparison suggests an intriguing irony in the Chinese and Western tradition on the matter of the divine in art. Because of the creation God, the Western tradition could not go all the way to view the artist as the ultimate creator. At most, it will only accept the conception of the artist as a minor deity, second to the primal God, who can only serve to show the almighty power of the primal Maker. By contrast, though the Chinese

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tradition does have ideas of creation gods, yet, precisely because it does not set great store by a creation god, it was able to conceive of the artist as a deity, a creative maker. In philosophical as well as creative discourses of the Chinese tradition, there are numerous statements that suggest that it is not nature that drives the artist into creation but the artist who, like a god, drives nature to work for him. There are numerous instances in Chinese metaphysics and aesthetic thought in which the artist is viewed both implicitly and explicitly as a creative god. In the remaining pages, I will provide some illustrations to argue against the view that because the Chinese tradition lacks a creation god, there is no creative model to conceive the poet as a creative maker. Xie Zheng (1495–1575), a poetic critic of the Ming dynasty, posited a creative model of poetic composition: Poetry is a creation of myriad things. If one poetic line is not skillfully created, the whole poem is not pure. This is because the creation is not perfect. The secret of creation is accessible to those who have attained an enlightenment. Let us compare writing a poem to giving birth to a baby. Though it has a body, it must not be without a voice. Zhao Wangzhen expresses the same idea in a different way: “If the whole poem is well-written but not dynamic, there is no iota of divine pneuma in it.” This is another way of saying that the creation is not perfect.74

In Chinese history, there are many stories of how a superb artist observes different specimens of bird, fish, or flower for years and is finally able to represent the birdiness, fishiness, and essence of a particular flower. When an art object acquires that essence, it is said to have transmitted chuanshen (the divine spirit) or entered the divine (rushen). In the opening of this article, I mentioned Zhuangzi’s parable of the master carpenter in the first section. Now, I will closely analyze it to show the similarity and difference in the Chinese and Western conception of the divine. In the parable, the Marquis of Lu contracted Carpenter Qing to make an ornate music stand with carved birds and animals. When the stand was finished, people saw the life-likeness of the carved birds and animals and suspected that he must have been a god. The Marquis inquired how he acquired his divine skills. The carpenter replied: When your humble subject was about to make the bell and drum stand, I did not dare to waste my energy. I had to abstain from pleasure to tranquil-

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ize my heart. After three days of abstention, I no longer dared to think of celebrations and awards, official post, and wealth. After five days of ­abstention, I no longer dared to consider fame or notoriety, skillfulness or clumsiness. After seven days of abstention, I gingerly forgot that I have four limbs and a body. By this time, I ceased to have your court in my heart. Once my skill was focused on my task, external interference disappeared. Then, I entered the mountains and forests, observing the natural qualities of wood. After the timber was transported to my place, I drew an outline on the timber. Only then did I start to lay my hands on the carving work. If I did not do these preparations, I would not have started the job. I was using nature to meet nature. Isn’t this the reason why the stand makes people suspect that I was a god?75

This parable suggests that contrary to Plato’s claim that the idea of an object can only be created by God, Chinese mimetic theory believes that so long as an artist absorbs himself in his creative act and leaves no stones unturned in his observation of objects, cultivation of his creative imagination, and perfection of his skills, he will be able to rival the Creator and represent his subject as though he was aided by the divine. Clearly, the Chinese belief locates the divine not in heaven but on earth. This belief in locating the divine in art is not alien to the Western theories of representation. It finds a similar expression in Joshua Reynolds’s Platonism, an empiricist revision of Plato’s original Idea or Form. Reynolds examined the Platonic belief that all the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior to what is found in individual objects in nature and the artist is supposed to ascend heaven and to furnish his mind with the perfect idea of beauty. Like Carpenter Qing in Zhuangzi’s parable, Reynolds believed that the divine ideal in art should be sought in the artist. He did not completely reject the Platonic idea of divine inspiration, “The artist is supposed to have ascended the celestial regions, to furnish his mind with this perfect idea of beauty.” But he declared: “This great ideal of perfection and beauty are not to be sought in the heaven, but upon the earth. They are about us, and upon every side of us.”76 And the way of finding the divine is also similar to that in the Chinese parable. It is the cultivation of the eye, which, through “a long habit of observing what any set of objects of the same kind have in common, has acquired the power of discerning what each wants in particular,” and enabled the artist to form “an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original.”77 As a summary, Reynolds stated: “Thus it is from a reiterated

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experience, and a close comparison of the objects in nature, that an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form,” which is “the abstract of the various individual forms belonging to the class.”78 Reynolds considered an artist who has achieved the “idea of the perfect state of nature” as having “a right to the epithet of divine,” because “it may be said to preside, like a supreme judge, over all the production of nature; appearing to be possessed of the will and intention of the Creator.”79 In Chinese literary thought, there are many famous sayings and poetic lines, which suggest that even though the artist is not a god, he could, through a combination of innate talent and post-natal practice, emulate gods and accomplish their supreme creations: qiaoduo tiangong (acquisition of skills and achievements that rival Nature). In his comment on some superb poetic lines, Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) said: “The ingenuity of poetry is like the delicate touches of a painter. From this, one knows that writing can compete with the creator in skills.”80 Some poets expressed similar ideas in their poetics lines. Du Fu (712–770), China’s sage poet, expressed an idea of the divine in quite a number of his poems. Here are some of the poetic lines containing this idea: After reading books over ten thousand volumes, I feel as though aided by the divine in my composition. Intoxicated by wine I was a passive guest. Poems completed, I feel possessed by God. Welding a pen, gorgeous brocade flies in the wind. Your writings appear to possess the divine. Composing poems among the guests,/And wielding his brush to shake eight bounds;/ Known as a master-hand of the time,/He is ever more divine in power with old age.81

In a comment on the first couplet in the above poetic lines by Du Fu, Wu Dashou, a literary critic of the Qing Dynasty, remarked: Writings of poetry and prose will not go far without divine power. The divine is the living pneuma in my body. Du Fu said, “Having read books over ten thousand volumes,/I feel as though aided by the divine in my composition.” When the divine in my body connects with poetry, my god has arrived and I feel as though I were assisted by a supreme being. Why should we consider being inspired by the zither playing of the goddess of River Xiang as the only form of divine assistance?82

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This statement affirms that a superb writer is a creative being endowed with inner divine power, which does not necessarily come from without. In other poetic lines by Du Fu, we may find the divine in the subject as well as in the object. When a poet feels aided by the divine, he may be said to be in a subjective state described by Plato as possessed by God. When a poetic composition is said to be endowed with the divine, it is believed to have captured the divine in the objective world. Whether it is a subjective state of the mind or an objective state of an object, the divine in Chinese aesthetic theory has a transcendental nature, which coincides with Plato’s Idea of an object. Nevertheless, it is also immanent in the represented object. Sikong Tu (837–908) in his Twenty Four Forms of Poetry characterized it as something that objectively transcends outward appearance and subjectively exists in the artist’s mind: “It rises beyond the image,/And yet is obtainable within a poet’s contemplation.”83 By now, the fundamental difference between ancient Western and Chinese thinkers on the divine in art is clear. Western thinkers believed that human beings are not divine and therefore cannot emulate gods; hence the divine can only serve as the ultimate aesthetic ideal beyond the reach of human artists who can only approximate it. By contrast, Chinese thinkers believed that the divine is not alien to humans. A first-rate artist is a creative deity whose creation is capable of capturing the spiritual essence of representation and rival nature. This conception of the artist started with metaphysical inquiries into the relationship between Man and the universe, was transposed into inquiries into literature and art, and continued to be upheld by thinkers and artists throughout the dynastic history of China. Here, I will cite another ancient Chinese thinker’s view as an illustration. Ye Xie (1627–1703), a scholar-poet of the Qing Dynasty, further enriched the line of thought pioneered by his predecessors in metaphysical and aesthetic inquiries. Like his predecessors, he continued to think of the relationship between nature and art in terms of the divine: “Wind, clouds, rain, and thunder constitute the great pattern/literature (wen) of heaven and earth. They change and transform in such an unpredictable manner that no one can envisage their bounds. They are therefore the ultimate gods of heaven and earth and also the ultimate pattern/literature.”84 He viewed the universe as an entity with divine luminosity and art as a creation resulting from the joint work of nature and man. He rejected a popular view of literature as a result of following certain mechanical rules but located the law of literary creation in divine luminosity: “I say that poetic composition requires another method, which lies in the divine

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luminosity, but beyond skilled competence. It is the so-called method in which changes and transformations give birth to a creative mind.”85 In conceptualizing the relationship between the world and the artist, Ye Xie posited two series of terms to discuss the subjective and objective conditions of literary creativity, which correspond respectively with the subjective and objective divine advanced by his predecessors. Furthermore, he explored how the integration of the two turns the writer into a godlike creator. He first discussed the objective divine in the universe: “The three terms, li (principle), shi (event), and qing (situation), can exhaustively encompass the transformations of myriad things in the world. No shapes, colors, sounds, or appearances can exist independent of them. When we talk about their presence in things, there is nothing that can escape from them.”86 Evidently, these three terms cover the internal operations of the universe. Then he discussed the subjective divine: “The four other terms, cai (talent), dan (courage), shi (learning), and li (energy), can exhaustively encompass the divine luminosity in the mind. All shapes and colors, sounds and appearances, depend on these four qualities to rise and propagate, and to become known and manifest” (Ibid.). These four terms concern the creative consciousness of a writer’s mind in the creation of a literary work. When the subjective divine meets the objective divine, the writer becomes a god-like person who creates a world that rivals the natural world: When all of the four terms in the self are transformed into words, none of them may come forth through other channels than the writer’s mind. If one employs the four qualities in the self to contemplate the three aspects of the outside world, the integration of the inner self and the outer world will produce a creative writing. Among people who compose songs, arias, hymns, and chants for categories as big as the warp and woof of heaven and earth, and for things as small as flora and fauna, no one can deviate from this rationale of producing words.87

Ye Xie’s conception explores how the subjective and objective divine relate to each other in the triple relationship of the artist, art, and the world. It exemplifies an aesthetic condition called shensi, literally, “divine thinking”; figuratively, “imaginative thinking” or “daemonic thinking” in Goethe’s conception of poetic creation. Liu Xie, who wrote the first comprehensive poetics in the Chinese tradition, defines shensi (divine ­thinking)thus:

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An ancient said, “One may be on the rivers and sea in body, but his mind remains at the palace gate.” This is what I mean by shensi, or divine thinking. One who is engaged in literary thought travels far in spirit. Quietly absorbed in contemplation, his thinking reaches back one thousand years; and with only the slightest movement of his countenance, his vision penetrates ten thousand li; he creates the music of pearls and jade between his poetic lines, and he witnesses the rolling of wind and clouds right before his brows and lashes. These things are possible because of the work of the imagination.88

A few hundred years before Liu Xie, Lu Ji (261–303) gave a brilliant account of how it works: “Here is how it begins:/Withdrawing his vision and reversing his hearing;/Absorbed in his thought and searching in all directions,/The poet’s spirit gallops to the world’s eight limits,/And his mind roams ten thousand feet high.”89 Then, he describes the magnitude and depth of the imaginative thinking and ends with this remark about the outcome of divine thinking: “He observes the past and present in a single moment,/Caressing the four oceans in the blink of an eye” (Ibid.). Thus, divine thinking is a creative process through which the subjective spirit in the artist grasps the objective essence in the universe and brings about a fusion of the two. Through “divine thinking,” an artist enters the realm of the divine, an imaginative space constructed on the subjective perception of the objective essence in an object and creates a representational totality that encompasses the subjective divine in the artist and the objective divine in the world. By penetrating the secret of the divine order, the artist may be considered to have achieved the highest order of artistic creation in the Chinese tradition and attained the stature of a creative god.

The Chinese Aesthetic Ideal: Entering the Divine Having compared and contrasted the idea of the divine in Chinese and Western aesthetic thought, I deem it necessary to explore what may serve as an aesthetic ideal on the basis of the insights drawn from both traditions. In the Western tradition, the idea of the divine in artistic representation consists of two aspects of meanings. First, it is a personal god that possesses the artist who in his turn is endowed with the divine spirit and becomes a minor deity. Second, it is the essence residing in a person or object to be represented. In the Chinese tradition, the divine consists of two similar meanings. First, it is an impersonal but omnipresent force of nature that gives things their being. Second, it is the spiritual essence in a

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person or object that gives the person or object its most salient aura and moves the artist to conduct a representation. In spite of subtle differences, they share a basic common ground. If we leave aside the theological differences, the commonality lies in the fact that both traditions conceive of the artistic divine as having two related aspects of meanings: the subjective divine in the artist and the objective divine in the represented object. Except for Plato’s negative view, both traditions believe that if an art work adequately represents the essence of an object, it may be said to have attained the status of the divine. The fundamental difference between the Chinese and Western conceptions of the divine in art is that while the Chinese concept is both subjective and objective, transcendent and immanent in a totality, the Western conception displays a separation between appearance and essence, and entails a disjunction between the subjective and objective divine. In my exploration of the divine in art in Chinese and Western traditions, I notice a lack in both traditions, i.e. the existent conceptions have not paid sufficient attention to how the subjective and objective divine relate to each other in the quadruple relationship of the artist, art object, the connoisseur, and the world. I wish to reconceptualize the divine in relation to the quartet. In my opinion, the divine is not a quality that resides purely in the subject, nor entirely in the object. It is a kind of creative totality that results from a subjective perception of the most salient features in an object and a most adequate representation of the perception through an artistic means. When an artistic work adequately represents this creative totality, it may be said to have penetrated the secret of the divine order and attained an aesthetic condition, which is the highest order of artistic creation in the Chinese tradition: rushen (entering the divine). In the opening section of this article, I have mentioned this aesthetic ideal. What exactly does “entering the divine” mean? Yan Yu did not elaborate in conceptual terms. Instead, he elucidated his idea in a poetic way and gave a series of analogies to show in what way a poem may be said to have entered the divine realm: Poetry is what sings of one’s emotion and nature. The poets of the High T’ang [8th century] relied only on inspired feelings [hsing-chü], like the antelope that hangs by its horns, leaving no traces to be found. Therefore, the miraculousness of their poetry lies in its transparent luminosity, which cannot be pieced together; it is like sound in the air, color in appearances, the moon in water, or an image in the mirror; it has limited words but unlimited meaning.90

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Through a series of images borrowed from various aspects of life, Yan Yu attempted to elucidate the elusive and ineffable nature of the poetry that he thought has entered the realm of the divine. The last sentence, “it has limited words but unlimited meaning,” has over history been regarded as the hallmark of whether a poem has entered the divine spirit. It is not difficult to see why unlimited meaning is regarded as a hallmark of entering the divine. For, the divine, be it a personal god in the Western tradition or an impersonal force in the Chinese tradition, is a creative power that endows an excellent work of art with unlimited possibilities of signification. An artistic work that has entered the divine spirit is not only an adequate representation of the most salient features of an object; but also has the potential of producing unlimited affects and effects, which, in terms of Peirce’s semiotic theory, means unlimited semiosis. In the final analysis, entering the divine in artistic activities creates a totality that incorporates the quartet of art, artist, the connoisseur, and the world in artistic creation and appreciation. It is achieved through Liu Xie’s idea, shensi, which means “divine thinking,” “imaginative thinking” or “daemonic thinking” in Goethe’s conception of poetic creation. Divine thinking is a creative process through which the subjective divine in the artist grasps the objective divine in the universe and brings about a fusion of the two. Through “divine thinking,” an artist enters the realm of the divine, which is an imaginative space constructed on the subjective perception of the objective essence in an object, giving rise to a material representation that embodies the subjective divine of the artist and the objective divine in the object. Plato’s idea of “divine madness” certainly contains a notion of the integration of the two forms of the divine. Nevertheless, because Plato’s conception rests on a notion of unconscious creativity, it implies that the artist is a passive receptor that waits for the divine to possess him. By contrast, the Chinese notion of “entering the divine” advocates an active search for the fusion of the subjective divine in the artist and the objective divine in the world. It is, in my view, a more desirable artistic ideal than Plato’s divine possession.

Concluding Remarks On the nature of the divine and the relationship between the human world and the divine world, the Chinese conception shares both similarities to and differences from its Western counterpart. While both traditions view the divine as a supernatural power beyond human ken, they differ as to

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how the divine is related to human beings. Whereas in the West, the divine is always humanized as a personal god responsible for the creation of the world, the Chinese divine is not always a personal god who creates everything in Nature, but often an invisible, all-present, and ineffable force that makes things be themselves. In analytic terms, the Chinese divine comes close to the Platonic Idea or Form and converges with the neo-Platonic conception of the divine as the spiritual essence of an entity, human or natural. When the Chinese divine is humanized, it is not monotheistic but polytheistic or pantheistic. Anything and everything may be endowed with the quintessential pneuma between heaven and earth and become a god with supernatural powers. This way of thinking makes it easier for the Chinese to attribute divine powers to humans and to conceive of the artist as a minor deity who creates an art work that rivals Nature. But ultimately, the Chinese and Western traditions share one common conception of the divine, aptly described by Northrop Frye as an unlimited projection of the human potential through creative imagination. And the artist as god is, in the final analysis, a creator of a literary universe centering on “a universal man” who is also “a divine being conceived in anthropomorphic terms.”91 This is the ultimate source of compatibility of Chinese and Western conceptions of the divine and creativity in aesthetics.

Notes 1. See Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York: Mentor Book, 1969), p. 37. 2. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 220. 3. J. C. Scaliger, Poetics, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 139. 4. Vico, New Science, 325. 5. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi (Zhuangzi’s Writings) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995), pp. 210–11. 6. Zhongguo hualun lei bian (Classified Collection of Chinese Theories of Painting) (Taipei: Huazheng shuju, 1977), p. 349. 7. Yan Yu, “Canglang shihua,” (Poetics Remarks of Canglang) in Lidai shihua (Poetic Remarks from Various Dynasties) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981) vol. 2, p. 687. 8. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 819–30. 9. Plato, Republic, Book X, in Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams (San Diego: HBJ, 1971), p. 33. On the same page, there is a footnote which suggests perhaps a better translation: “we have been accus-

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tomed to assume that there is one single idea corresponding to each group of particulars; and to these we give the same name (as we give the idea.” 10. Plato, Republic, Book X, pp. 33–35. 11. Plato, Republic, Book X, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 35. 12. Plato, Republic, Book X, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, p. 829. 13. Plato, Republic, Book X, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 819–830. 14. Plato, Republic, Book X, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 35. 15. Plato, Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 219–20. 16. Plato, Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 219–20. 17. Aristotle, Poetics, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 48. 18. Aristotle, Poetics, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 64. 19. Aristotle, Poetics, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 53. 20. Thomas Aquinas, “Whether Holy Scripture Should Use Metaphors?” in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 117. 21. Thomas Aquinas, “Whether Holy Scripture Should Use Metaphors?” in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 118. 22. Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory since Plato, 155–77, 329–336, 278–286. 23. J. C. Scaliger, Poetics, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 139. 24. J. C. Scaliger, Poetics, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 140. 25. Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 158. 26. Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 157. 27. Joshua Reynolds, Discourse on Art, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 354. 28. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 355–56. 29. See Ciyuan (Origins of Words) (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1988), p. 1231. 30. Kongzi, Lunyu (The Analects of Confucius) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987), p. 11. 31. Kongzi, Lunyu (The Analects of Confucius), p. 25. 32. Quoted from the Shujing (Book of Document) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987), p. 9. 33. Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan (Selected Writings of Chinese Literary Theories from Various Dynasties), vol. 1, p. 63. 34. Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan (Selected Writings of Chinese Literary Theories from Various Dynasties), vol. 1, p. 63. 35. Guan Zhong, Guanzi (Writings of Master Guan), in Ershi’er zi (Writings of Twenty-Two Masters) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), p. 155a. 36. Mencius, Mengzi zhushu (Mencius Annotated), in Shisanjing zhushu (Thirteen Classics Annotated) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), p. 2775c.

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37. The Xicizhuan (Appended Verbalizations to the Book of Changes), in Zhouyi yizhu (The Book of Changes Annotated and Translated) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989), p. 538. 38. Quoted from Wang Bi’s annotation of the Zhouyi, in Wang Bi ji jiaoshi (Wang Bi’s Collected Writings Annotated) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), vol. 2, p. 543. 39. Xicizhuan, in Zhouyi yizhu, p. 624. 40. Requoted from Zhouyi yizhu, p. 610. 41. Li Guandi et al., Zhouyi zhezhong (Eclecticism of the Book of Changes). Requoted from Zhouyi yizhu, p. 625. 42. Xicizhuan, in Zhouyi yizhu, p. 620. 43. Xicizhuan, in Zhouyi yizhu, p. 624. 44. Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless tales of Gods and Heroes, p. 27. 45. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi (Words and Characters Annotated and Explained) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963), p. 8a. 46. Yang Shuda, Xiaoxue jinshi luncong (Collected Writings on Philology and Inscriptions on Metals and Stones), p. 16. 47. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi (Words and Characters Annotated and Explained), p. 241a. 48. Chen Liangyun, Zhongguo shixue tixi lun (Chinese System of Poetics), pp. 335–40. 49. Xicizhuan, in Zhouyi yizhu, p. 549. 50. Xicizhuan, in Zhouyi yizhu, p. 582. 51. Xicizhuan, Zhouyi yizhu, p. 581. 52. Xicizhuan, Zhouyi yizhu, p. 581. 53. Xicizhuan, in Zhouyi yizhu, p. 535. 54. Requoted from Zhang Dainian’s Zhongguo zhexue dagang (An Outline of Chinese Philosophy) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1982), p. 133. 55. Xicizhuan, in Zhouyi yizhu, p. 583–4. 56. Xicizhuan, in Zhouyi yizhu, p. 572. 57. Slightly adapted from Vincent Shih’s translation, Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, p. 22. 58. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 83. 59. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, pp. 85–6. 60. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, p. 82. 61. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, p. 83. 62. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, pp. 84–85. 63. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, p. 84. 64. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, p. 84.

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65. See Zhongguo wenhua cidian (A Dictionary of Chinese Culture) (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1987), pp. 1068–9. 66. See Zhongguo wenhua cidian (A Dictionary of Chinese Culture), p. 1089. 67. Song Yu, “Shennü fu” (Rhyme-prose on the Goddess), in Xiao Tong, comp., Wenxuan (Selections of Refined Writings), pp. 252–3. 68. Li Zehou, Mei de licheng (A Journey of Beauty) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1984), pp. 90–91. 69. See Cao Zhi’s “Luoshen fu” (Rhyming Prose on the Goddess of River Luo), in Xiao Tong, comp., Wenxuan (Selections of Refined Writings) (Taipei: Qiming shuju, 1960), pp. 254–56. 70. J. C. Scaliger, Poetics, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 139. 71. J. C. Scaliger, Poetics, in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 140. 72. Ibid. 73. Shi Jiaoran, Shishi jiaozhu (Poetic Methods Annotated) (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1987), p. 1. 74. Xie Zhen, Siming shihua (Poetic Remarks of Siming), requoted from Zhongguo meixue shi ziliao xuanbian, vol. 2, p. 114. 75. Zhuangzi, The Zhuangzi, annotated by Kuo Xian, pp. 210–11. 76. Joshua Reynolds, Discourse on Art, in Critical Theory since Plato, pp. 354–55. 77. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 355. 78. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, in Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 356. 79. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, in Critical Theory Since Plato, pp. 355–56. 80. Ouyang Xiu, “Wen Tingyun Yan Wei shi” (Poems by Wen Tingyun and Yan Wei), in Zhongguo meixueshi ziliaoxuan, vol. 2, p. 6. 81. All the poetic lines are quoted from Qian zhu Dushi (Du Fu’s Poetry Annotated by Qian Qianyi) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958), p. 1, p. 321. 82. Wu Dashou, Shihua (Poetic Remarks), requoted from Chen Liangyun, Zhongguo shixue tixi lun (Chinese System of Poetics) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992), p. 371. 83. Sikong Tu, Twenty Four Forms of Poetry, in He Wenhuan, ed., Lidai Shihua (Poetic Talks from Various Dynasties) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), p.  38. Previous scholarship has annotated “huanzhong” as referring to Zhuangzi’s metaphorical state of emptiness and transcendence. I have adopted its literal meaning, “dunei” (in one’s contemplation). 84. Ye Xie, Yuanshi (Origins of Poetry) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979), p. 22. 85. Ye Xie, Yuanshi (Origins of Poetry), p. 21. 86. Ye Xie, Yuanshi (Origins of Poetry), p. 23. 87. Ye Xie, Yuanshi (Origins of Poetry), pp. 24.

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88. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong (Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1995), p. 359. English version is slightly adapted from Vincent Shih’ translation, The Literary Mind and The Carving of Dragons (Taipei: Chung Hwa Book Co., 1975), p. 216. 89. Lu Ji, “Rhyming Discourse on Literature,” in Guo Shaoyu, ed., Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan (Selected Writings of Chinese Literary Thought through the Dynasties) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979), p. 170. English translation is mine. 90. Yan Yu, “Canglang shihua” (Poetic Remarks of Canglang), in Lidai shihua, vol. 2, 688. English translation is from James J.  Y. Liu’s Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 39. 91. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 120.

CHAPTER 9

Lyricism and Mimeticism in Aesthetic Thought

In the previous chapters, I have addressed a series of perceived dichotomies in the studies of Chinese and Western humanities. In this chapter, I am going to examine a crucial issue in the study of Chinese and Western poetics: the incompatibility of Chinese and Western aesthetic thought. In the minds of many Western aestheticians in colonial times, the aesthetic thought in the Chinese tradition, despite its time-honored richness and variety is only a discourse of intuitive insights arising from a mode of thinking called “Oriental mysticism” and difficult to bring into logical and conceptual comparison with its Western counterpart. In the introduction of this book, I have mentioned the English aesthetician Bernard Bosanquet’s view of incompatibility of the aesthetic consciousness of the Orient including China with the European counterpart1 and the Chinese aesthetician Zhu Guangqian’s similar observation.2 To a large extent, the incompatibility of Chinese and Western aesthetic thought may be regarded as the ontological and epistemological ground for the dichotomies for the study of Chinese and Western aesthetic traditions that I have examined in the previous chapters. In this chapter, I will choose two groups of aesthetic thinkers: Laozi, Guanzi, Zhuangzi, Mencius, Wei Hong, Cao Pi, Lu Ji, Gu Kaizhi, Liu Xie, Su Shi, Li Jian, Ye Xie, Liu Dakui, and others from the Chinese tradition and Plato,  Aristotle, Plotinus, Longinus, William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Dennis, F.  W. J. von Schelling, Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, M. H. Abrams, Jacques Derrida, and others from the Western © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_9

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tradition and conduct a comparative study of mimesis and lyricism, representation and expression, metaphysical foundations of art, and other issues to argue that the aesthetic consciousness of both traditions are compatible though each tradition displays different emphases in history. And through a close analysis of the chosen thinkers and aestheticians, I hope to locate the ontological and epistemological grounds for the compatibility.

The Lamp in the Mirror or Expression in Representation Because of the dichotomous paradigm, the studies of Chinese and Western poetic and aesthetic theories have split into two basic schools in China. One is the traditional school that studies aesthetic and poetic materials from ancient times, using the traditional approaches based on evidential criticism and traditional exegeses. The other is the modern school, which employs Western approaches introduced into China and focuses on topics and materials in Western criticism and theory, paying a minimal attention to analytic materials from the Chinese past. In a way, we may even say that modern Chinese aesthetics is a de facto branch of Western aesthetics. The two Chinese schools seldom engage in dialogues and exchanges of ideas as though they were two trains traveling on two parallel and yet separate railway tracks. Some Chinese aestheticians have made efforts to bridge the gap between traditional and modern aesthetic thought, but they admit the vast differences between the two aesthetic traditions and adopt another dichotomous view on Chinese and Western aesthetics. Essentially, this view suggests that while the Western tradition, predicated on the idea of mimesis, orients toward representation of the world, be it realistic, modernist, and postmodern, the Chinese aesthetic tradition, predicated on lyricism, orients toward expression, which tends to faithfully vent human feelings stimulated by the natural world. This dichotomous view may be simply reduced to a contrast between Chinese lyric expression and Western mimetic representation in aesthetics. In terms of this contrastive thinking, while the Western tradition is predominantly one of realistic imitation, the Chinese tradition of literature and art has been viewed largely as a tradition dominated by lyricism. Shih-hsiang Chen (1912–1971), professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of California-­ Berkeley, was the first to propose a view of the Chinese tradition as one of lyricism in a speech made on a panel of comparative literature at the 1971

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annual conference of Association of Asian Studies.3 This view was further developed by other scholars of Chinese literature like Yu-kung Kao and has acquired a substantial following in the field of Chinese and comparative literature. It continues to exert a significant impact on the studies of Chinese and comparative literature both in China and abroad up to the present day. In recent years, however, it has given rise to several Chinese articles that reexamine the view of lyrical tradition. While giving this view its due validity, those studies have criticized it as a reductive effort to fit the complex condition of Chinese literary tradition into the pigeonhole of Western lyricism growing out of Romanticism.4 A brief overview of the Chinese and Western literature and art up to the eighteenth century, however, seems to confirm the basic premise of a contrastive view. In the Chinese tradition, literature and art up to the end of eighteenth century was indeed dominated by lyrical poetry and art of expression, while drama and fiction were relegated to a lowly position as entertainment, not fit to be admitted into the pantheon of refined arts. In the Western tradition, though lyrical poetry is an important branch of literature, yet it cannot rival narrative poetry, fiction, and drama. Since criticism and theory always lag behind literary creation, the situation in which mimesis or imitation predominated in the West and lyricism or expression occupied the hegemonic position in China continued to much later days in the critical traditions of both China and the West. The contrast between expression and imitation seems to reveal a fundamental difference in ways of critical thinking, which is aptly described by M. H. Abrams with two antithetic metaphors of the mind: “one comparing the mind to a reflector of the external object, the other to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives.”5 Using this analogy as an aid, Abrams continues to summarize the two basic trends in Western tradition: “The first of these was characteristic of much of the thinking from Plato to the eighteenth century; the second typifies the prevailing romantic conception of the poetic mind.” He admits that both ways of thinking are present in the creation of literature and art, but he believes and uses his whole book to argue that “the shift from neo-­ classical to romantic criticism can be formulated, in a preliminary way, as a radical alteration in the typical metaphors of critical discourse” (ibid.). In China, there seems to have appeared an opposite shift from lyrical expression to narrative representation, which began in the eighteenth century and gathered momentum until the former gave up its hegemony at the turn of the twentieth century, first with the publication of Cao Xueqin’s

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masterpiece of fiction (1791), The Story of the Stone or A Dream of Red Mansions, and then with Liang Qichao’s call for a “Revolution of Fiction” (1902). With the completion of both shifts in China and the West, both the Chinese and Western traditions of literature seem to be characterized by a mixture of both mimesis and expression, a situation that can be better described by a rephrasing of Abram’s famous analogy into “the lamp in the mirror.” Despite the fact that the opposite shifts in Chinese and Western critical traditions started about the same time in the eighteenth century, I wish to argue that the mixed modes of thinking in aesthetic thought are to be found in the critical traditions of both China and the West in the bulk of the historical periods. I therefore suggest that the notion of “mirror in the lamp or lamp in the mirror” may be employed to bridge the gap between Chinese and Western aesthetic consciousness in poetry and art. In Chaps. 6 and 7, I have employed both conceptual and critical materials to prove the existence of a theory of mimesis in the Chinese tradition. In his book, Abrams has also proved the presence of the ideas of expressionism in the Western critical tradition and traced the earliest appearance to the first century AD in the aesthetic treatise by Longinus: “The consonance of his treatise with the familiar romantic tradition is the reason why many latter-­ day students of criticism who find Aristotle schematic, Horace worldly, and the rhetoricians trivial, respond to Longinus as animating and ‘modern.’” (74) In the Chinese tradition, the earliest critical evidence that set up the expressionist tradition of lyricism is found in the time-honored “Great Preface to The Book of Songs”: Poetry is where the intent of the mind goes. Lodged in the heart it is intent; expressed in words, it is poetry. When an emotion moves within one’s heart, it will take its form in words. If words are inadequate to express it, one will sigh over it. If sighing is not adequate, he will express it in a song. If a song is still not adequate, he will dance it by moving his hands and tap it out by stamping his feet.6

If we want to find the earliest definition of poetry in the Chinese tradition, this is the one definitive version. Although its origin has various sources, it comes from a treatise that can be dated with relative assurance in the first century AD. For it is believed to be finally composed by a scholar named Wei Hong7 (c. 25–57) in the Eastern Han Dynasty who synthesized

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various sources on the exegeses of the Shijing or Book of Songs, the first anthology of Chinese poetry. What merits our attention is the fact that this quotation not only concerns poetry but also other art forms like music and dance. It is therefore an aesthetic thought on the origin of literature as well as art. If we compare it with the earliest Western aesthetic thought, we cannot find a similar view either in early Greek aesthetic thought or even in Aristotle’s Poetics. Nevertheless, we may find a distant echo in Plato’s idea of “divine madness” in his view about the origin of art. On close analysis, however, we can still discern a basic difference. Plato thought that the poet creates poetry because he is possessed by gods. In rational terms, this idea of “divine madness” should be understood as an expression of unconscious creation of art in Freud’s psychological view. By contrast, the “Great Preface” locates the origin of artistic creation in the pent-up emotion, which gathers momentum until it cannot be repressed any longer and bursts out of the mind to be expressed in the various forms of poetry, music, and dance. The critical method employed by the “Great Preface” is similar to that used by Aristotle in his writing of Poetics, for both take the route of arriving at aesthetic thought through critical analysis of literary works. One major difference lies in the fact that while Aristotle’s Poetics grew out of his analysis of Greek epic and drama, giving rise to the Aristotelian theory of mimesis that views art as an imitation of action, narrative in nature, the “Great Preface” produces a poetics on the basis of an analysis of an anthology of lyrical poems and laid the cornerstone for the lyrical expressionist theory in Chinese critical tradition. Due to this difference, Aristotle’s Poetics pioneered a mimetic school of aesthetic thought in the West, which dominated literary theory and art criticism until it was challenged by the rise of Romanticism in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it continues to occupy a predominant position in Western aesthetic thought. By contrast, the “Great Preface” pioneered a lyrical expressionism that continued to dominate Chinese literature and art as well as critical thought until modern times. In his Poetics, Aristotle did mention lyric poetry in passing, but its cursory treatment relegates lyricism to an unimportant position and sets the tone for the mimetic dominance in the Western critical tradition until the advent of Romanticism in the eighteenth century. In his study of the Romantic theory, Abrams points out that lyricism did not become a primary topic in critical theory until Wordsworth’s time. When Wordsworth viewed good poetry as the spontaneous overflow of feeling, he was not referring to the mimetic poetry of epic and drama as Aristotle did, but to

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lyric poetry, and in his generation, “the lyric has become the essentially poetic form, and usually, the type whose attributes are predicated of poetry in general.”8 He also implies that lyricism was rejected in the critical discourse of Western aesthetic thought until the eighteenth century: “By a gradual and natural progression, the stone rejected by early theorists has become the headstone of the corner of the temple of art” (ibid.). By contrast, the lyrical domination started from the very beginning of Chinese literary tradition. In spite of the time difference, lyricism in the Chinese and Western traditions are similar in almost every sense of the word. Indeed, the Chinese view of poetry shares with the romantic concept of poetry such a prerequisite, which, according to Abrams, “is the expression of feeling, or of the human spirit, or of an impassioned state of mind and imagination.”9 At the core of the lyric conception is passion, which is also the core of Western romantic poetry. John Dennis, who made a distinction between poetry and prose, identified passion as the hallmark of poetry: “Passion, then, is the Characteristical Mark of Poetry, and, consequently, must be every where…For without Passion there can be no Poetry, nor more than there can be Painting.”10 This kind of emphasis on the role of passion in artistic creation paved the way for the appearance of the expressionist view of poetry in the Eighteenth century, a most famous version of which is William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.11

What connects Wordsworth’s definition to the Chinese definition of poetry covers contemplation, mental response to external stimuli, powerful passion, and spontaneous overflow of emotion, etc. In a word, poetry is the product of a mind seized by passion. What differentiates Wei Hong’s definition and Wordsworth’s definition has two major points. First, while the Chinese definition broadly covers the origin of art as well as poetry, Wordsworth’s definition focuses on poetry exclusively. Second, while the former emphasizes the pent-up nature of feelings because of repression, the latter stresses the shift from tranquil contemplation to overflow of emotion. In terms of Abrams’s conceptual framework of four key elements in artistic creation: artist, work, universe, and audience,12 both Wei Hong

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and Wordsworth focus their attention on the connection between the author and the work in contrast with the Aristotelian preoccupation with the relationship between the work and the world. If we want to narrow the focus further, we have good reasons to say that for both Wei Hong and Wordsworth, the primary target of critical attention is the author rather than the world. The author as the center of critical attention is one of the characteristic features in the Chinese aesthetic thought. Cao Pi, who arguably started the first self-conscious examination of literary creation, wrote a discourse “On Literature.” In the discourse, after unifying the linguistic concept wen (literature, writing) with the metaphysical concept qi (vital energy, material force), formulated one of the most influential aesthetic concepts in Chinese critical theory, wenqi (literary pneuma or patterned pneuma). His theory of literary pneuma, deeply rooted in Chinese philosophical thought, has taken one of the key metaphysical concept qi as its conceptual grounding. With this theory, he pioneered a critical approach to literature and art that became a mainstream Chinese aesthetic thought. His theory shares with Western Romantic theory the emphasis on the relationship between the author and the work and the value of spontaneous creation. In his discourse, Cao Pi wrote: “Literature is governed by the qi, whose clearness or murkiness has predetermined forms. It cannot be brought forth by strenuous efforts. … Although a father may have it, he cannot impart it to his son; nor can an elder brother transmit it to his younger brother.”13 His theory of pneuma reminds me of Longinus’s aesthetic thought in his analysis of sublimity. Longinus’s idea on the loftiness of tone is particularly relevant: “A lofty tone, says one, is innate, and does not come by teaching; nature is the only art that can compass it.”14 In his treatise on literary pneuma, Cao Pi also thinks that literary creativity is a natural thing which cannot be imparted from father to son, or brother to brother. Influenced by the Chinese metaphysics, Cao Pi posits the ubiquitous qi as the origin and essence of the phenomenal world with its two basic sources, yin and yang, as the generative principles for myriad things, including literature. As I argue in an article, because Cao Pi employs the concept of qi to explain the nature and achievements of the most prominent authors of his time, his idea of wenqi may be interpreted as a manifestation of a writer’s natural given, or caiqi (inborn talent) in Chinese terminology.15 His theory is therefore an author-centered aesthetic thought. When Abrams identifies “the lyric as the paradigm for poetic theory” in the eighteenth century of Wordsworth’s generation, he finds “a tendency to convert the lyric ‘I’ from what Coleridge called the ‘I-representative’ to the poet in his proper person.”16 This is a transition from the idea of the

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author as an imitator of nature to that of the poet as a vehicle of his own emotions, imagination, and personal spirit in relation to the world. In the Chinese tradition, the idea of the poet as a vehicle for expressing his own inner feelings started from the outset, as seen in the “Great Preface” and has been consistently promoted in critical discourses from Cao Pi, Lu Ji, Liu Xie to many others until modern times. There is no need to pile up critical materials. Suffice it here to quote Lu Ji’s theory about the origin of literary creation: He [the poet] stands in the very center, observes in the darkness,/ Nourishes feeling (ch’ing) and intent (chih) in the ancient cannons./ He moves along with the four seasons and sighs at their passing on,/ Peers on all the things of the world, broods on their profusion,/ Grieves for the falling leaves in strong autumn,/ Rejoices in the pliant branches in sweet spring; /His mind shivers, taking the frost to heart;/ His intent is remote, looking down on the clouds./ He sings of the blazing splendor of moral power (te) inherited by this age,/ Chants of the pure fragrance (or ‘reputation”) of predecessors,/ Roams in the groves and treasure houses of literary works,/ Admires the perfect balance of their intricate and lovely craft./ With strong feelings he puts aside the book and takes his writing brush/ To make it manifest in literature.17

This account unequivocally puts the poet at the center of the universe and turns him into a vehicle for expressing his observations of the world, his inner feeling stimulated by nature, and the results arising from his contemplations. This author-centered conception of literary creativity is inspired by Cao Pi’s idea of literary pneuma, which plays a role in giving a literary work its content as well as form. The natural integration of content and form as a result of the creative energy of literary pneuma shares with Coleridge’s conception of organic unity with its internal consistency, which finds its expression in a statement about the organic form resulting from the animating qi in a Chinese critic’s remark: A writing cannot dispense with four requisites: 1) structural form; 2) authorial intention; 3) literary pneuma; and 4) rhythm…. A writing without a structural form is like a person without ears, eyes, a mouth, and a nose. Such a person cannot be counted as a person. A writing without literary pneuma is like a person who knows how to see, hear, smell, and taste, but whose blood does not fill his body from within and whose hands and feet cannot defend against encroachment from without. Such a person is like a gravely sick man, crippled and haggard, with little will to life…. Only when a writing has all the four categories can it be called a whole piece.18

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In this statement, Li Jian, a Song Dynasty scholar-poet, views wenqi as an animating force that gives life to literary writings. It is interesting to observe the affinity to Coleridge’s organic unity in his analogy of a writing to a person in the West from Longinus to Coleridge. In Longinus’s conception of “sublimity” in art, though he views a lofty tone as a force “flashing forth at the right moment” that “scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt,” yet it depends on the wholeness of composition, a kind of organic unity: “Among the chief causes of the sublime in speech, as in the structure of the human body, is the collocation of members, a single one of which if severed from another possesses in itself nothing remarkable, but all united together make a full and perfect organism.”19

The Ontology of Art: A Transcendental Immanence Lyrical and expressive conceptions of literature in the eighteenth century, according to Abrams, “are to be found in almost all the important critics of the period, and in more or less easy conjunction with philosophical theories as disparate as Wordsworth’s sensationalism and Shelley’s Platonism, and the organic idealism of Coleridge and the positivism of John Stuart Mill.”20 Abrams, offers a comprehensive study of lyricism in the English tradition and also discusses some European thinkers in passing. As his focus is on European Romanticism, it is understandable for him not to go beyond the European tradition to cover aesthetical thought of non-European traditions. In this section, I am going to conduct an in-­ depth study of some Chinese and European thinkers, not exactly for the purpose of showing the commensurability of lyrical thought in Chinese and Western tradition, but for a broader purpose of effecting a dialogue in aesthetic thought between Chinese and Western traditions. For the latter purpose, I will engage in a comparative study of some major European thinkers and bring them into a meaningful dialogue with a few traditional Chinese theorists. Among the major Western thinkers who have exerted considerable influence on the development of Western aesthetic thought, Plotinus and Schelling are especially pertinent to the Chinese and Western dialogue on aesthetics. In my opinion, while Plotinus’s neo-Platonism may lay the foundation for a narrow bridge across the China–West divide, Schelling who exerted an immense influence on the Romantic tradition of Western literature and art may be regarded as a brilliant architect who plotted a grand blue print for a broader bridge. I will start with Plotinus first.

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In the previous chapters, my discussions of the Western ideas of representation in contrast to the Chinese counterpart seem to suggest that the two traditions have very different orientations in aesthetic thought. As a matter of fact, however, the two traditions share more common grounds than differences, especially in some of the post-Greek thinkers’ discourses on aesthetics. Of all the post-Platonic aestheticians, Plotinus may be the one whose conception of the aesthetic principle and ideal comes closest to the Chinese counterpart. In a way, we may even say that he is very much like the Chinese theorist Liu Xie, and his treatise shares much similarity with the latter’s magnum opus, Wenxin diaolong (Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) (c. early sixth century). In this section, I will conduct an extensive discussion of his ideas in comparison with Liu Xie’s ideas. Plotinus is a neo-Platonic philosopher, but, unlike his master, he did not belittle art just because it is an imitation of the visible world. In my opinion, he is, among classical Western theorists, the closest to Liu Xie in the metaphysical contemplation of the nature of man, art, and the universe. First, like Liu Xie, he views Man as both the product of Nature and the center of Nature, because he possesses intellect. Second, both considered intellect as transcendental and empirical, subjective and objective. Third and the most fundamental, like Liu Xie, who views literature as something growing out of the Dao or shenli (the divine principle), Plotinus views art as emanating from the “very first reason-principle,” the ultimately unknowable “divine One.”21 In my view, this is the pivot upon which the Chinese and Western conceptions of the relationship between art and the world seem to converge. In Western thought, “One” is often viewed as an equivalent to the Logos. In his reading of Heraclitus’ fragments on the “Logos,” Heidegger, after an elaborate analysis, draws a conclusion that One and the Logos are the same concept: “‘One is everything’ says what the Logos is. The Logos says how ‘One is everything’ essentially occurs. Both are the same.”22 Heidegger also observes: “[I]t is wise to listen to the pronouncement of the Λóγoς and to heed the meaning of what is pronounced, while repeating what one has heard in the statement: One is All. There is Λóγoς. It has something to relate. Then there is also that which it relates, to wit, that everything is one.”23 Heidegger’s philological-cum-philosophical inquiry into the meanings of the Logos allows us to see the connection clearly. Although Plotinus did not use “logos” for One, his discourse implicitly means that. For he repeatedly said that “One is All” in his treatise.24 Heidegger’s reading provides the connection between Plotinus’s discourse

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and early Greek thought on the Logos. It also enables us to understand better Plotinus’s as well as Liu Xie’s dual idea that the intellect is both transcendental and empirical, subjective and objective. Interestingly enough, in both the Chinese and Western traditions, the first principle, the Chinese Dao and Western Logos, respectively are called by the same name, “One.”25 In Plotinus’s conception, the One manifests itself in a triad: the Good, the Intellect and its knowledge, and the intellectual principle. In Liu Xie’s conception, the One (Dao) manifests itself through virtue, the sages, and human spirituality. In his discourse, although he talked about the divine, his conception of divinity has little implication of a personal god of creation in the Judaic-Christian sense. In a similar vein, Plotinus’s discussion of gods is largely conducted in a symbolic manner. In his mimetic theory, he does talk about gods as prior models for artistic imitation, but these gods are just perfect forms like Plato’s Idea or Aristotle’s artistic ideals, objects for the highest order of imitation. In many ways, Plotinus’s conception of gods represents a metaphysical notion that comprises both Plato’s divine Idea and Aristotle’s empirical Ideal. In common parlance, aesthetics is a study of beauty. In Greek tradition, Helen, Aphrodite, and other gods are universally acknowledged images of beauty. Where does their beauty come from? Plotinus answers this question with a series of rhetorical questions meant as answers: “Is not this beauty everywhere form, which comes from the maker upon that which he has brought into being, as in the arts it was said to come from the arts upon their works? Well, then, are the things made and the forming principle in matter beautiful, but the forming principle which is not in matter but in the maker, the first immaterial one, is that not beauty?”26 The forming principle is rooted in intellect and is both transcendental and immanent, subjective and objective: “There is therefore in nature a rational forming principle which is the archetype of the beauty in body, and the rational principle in soul is more beautiful than that in nature, and is also the source of that in nature.” 27 The subjective and objective duality also underlies the Chinese conception of beauty in art. In traditional China, popular belief holds that everything in the universe is endowed with shen (the divine or essence). Mountains, rivers, forests, and land, each has a god (or spirit) who is often personified. Philosophers hold a similar view albeit in impersonal and nontheological terms. Guanzi (d. 645 BC), for example, said: “The essence of myriad objects can transform to give life. On earth, it generates five grains. In heaven it gave rise to various stars. When it floats between heaven and

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earth, it is called ghosts and the divine. Hidden in a person’s heart, it turns him into a sage.”28 In this passage, shen or the divine obviously refers to the essence of myriad things in the universe, as well as to the intellect and its knowledge in the mind. This Chinese conception comes even closer to Abrams’s view of Platonism in the Renaissance, which connects the Idea in the individual mind with the universal Idea in nature. Here, we need to pay a special attention to the choice of words in Guanzi’s wording. The divine essence is like a floating energy, which flows to and resides in myriad things in the universe. This energy is also called qi (literally “air,” metaphysically “pneuma,” variously translated as “vital energy” or “materials force”), a key metaphysical concept in Chinese philosophical thinking, and wenqi (literary pneuma) [a compound word that combines wen and qi] in aesthetic thought. In the former category, Mencius described this qi as a boundlessly flowing air [haoran zhi qi], which is “infinitely grand and powerful; nurturing and harmless, it will fill the space between heaven and earth.”29 In the aesthetic realm, Cao Pi (187–226), who wrote the treatise “On Literature,” views qi or pneuma as the foundation of creative writing: “The qi is the master of a literary work.”30 What is the relationship between shen (the divine) and qi (pneuma)? Liu Dakui (1698–1779 AD), a Qing dynasty poet-scholar, gives a description that represents the widely accepted view: “The divine is the master of pneuma. The pneuma is the function of the divine. The divine is the essence of pneuma.”31 What he means is that the divine controls literary creativity and literary works represent the outward manifestation of the divine. The ultimate source of creativity is the divine. Here again, we see the duality of transcendence and immanence in qi and the divine. Renaissance Platonism also regards the divine Idea as something that flows in the universe. Only, while the Chinese use the analogy of air, the Renaissance aestheticians employ an optical analogy, “according to which rays of archetypal beauty, streaming from the countenance of God, are reflected in three mirrors, one in the angels, a second in the souls of men, a third in the material world.”32 Plotinus’s view of the artist/nature relationship and Liu Xie’s view of the same relationship are mutually illuminating. From one direction, Plotinus’s view provides an insight into the Chinese conception of the relationship between the Dao and literature, first posited by Liu Xie and continuously expounded by later theorists like Ye Xie and others. The relationship was first conveyed in Liu Xie’s inventive concept, “wen of the Dao” (pattern of the Dao), which operates on shenli (the divine principle),

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and integrates the objective world of nature and the subjective world of the artist. In Plotinus’s view, there are two kinds of wisdom involved in artistic imitation: the wisdom of nature and the wisdom of the artist. The wisdom of nature, which presides at artistic making, is everywhere: “Some wisdom makes all the things which have come into being, whether they are products of art or nature, and everywhere it is a wisdom which is in charge of their making.”33 Plotinus views it as coming from the ultimately unknowable One. In this sense, the first kind of wisdom resembles and illuminates Liu Xie’s shenli (divine principle), which is responsible for all creations in the universe. Plotinus recognizes the wisdom of the artist as a separate category, but he also views it as inseparably bound to the wisdom of nature: “But the craftsman goes back again to the wisdom of nature, according to which he has come into existence, a wisdom which is no longer composed of theorems, but is one thing as a whole, not the wisdom made into one out of many components, but rather resolved into multiplicity from one.”34 He calls it “primal wisdom” or “intellectual principle.” It is to be found in nature, and nature itself is its source. After devoting some lengths to exploring how nature comes to possess it, whether nature obtains it from some other source, and whether it is self-generative, he draws the conclusion that “The true wisdom … is substance, and the true substance is wisdom; and the worth of substance comes from wisdom, and it is because it comes from wisdom that it is true substance.”35 From the other direction, Liu Xie’s concept, daoxin (the mind of the Dao), offers an insight into Plotinus’s intellectual principle: “The mind of the Dao is intricately subtle,/ And formed by the instructions of the divine principle./ It gives glory and brilliance to great sages,/ and makes humanity and filial piety shine in splendor.”36 In this statement, Liu Xie expresses the same paradoxical but profound idea expressed by Plotinus: the mind of the Dao, like the intellectual principle, is both subjective and objective, transcendental and empirical. Because of this paradoxical relatedness, the mind of the Dao (daoxin) is also the mind of literature (wenxin), the very term that Liu Xie employed in the first part of the title for his magnum opus. A later Chinese theorist Ye Xie regards it as the totality of the creative consciousness that integrates the triad of li (principle), shi (event), and qing (condition) in the universe with the quartet of cai (talent), dan (courage), shi (learning), and li (energy) in the poet into an act of representation.37 In Ye Xie’s conception, the series of concepts cover all the elements in literary creation and critical categories in lyricism and mimeticism.

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In the actual process of representation, however, Plotinus argues against viewing the realm of the intellect as a universe of abstraction. Instead, he conceives it as a world of supremely real beings, and the higher wisdom of intellect as a consciousness that knows realities more like concrete images than abstract propositions: “One must not then suppose that the gods or the ‘exceedingly blessed spectators’ in the higher world contemplate propositions, but all the Forms we speak about are beautiful images in that world, of the kind which someone imaged to exist in the soul of the wise man, images not painted but real. This is why the ancients said that the Ideas were realities and substances.”38 Plotinus employs Egyptian hieroglyphics as an example: when the wise Egyptians wanted to signify ideas, they did not use alphabets that imitate sounds and enunciations of philosophical abstractions but drew images to inscribe abstract ideas in concrete forms. In my opinion, he makes this observation not only to illustrate nondiscursive thinking but also to endorse a mode of representation that transmits universals through particulars. In a way, we may view his idea as the conceptual basis of Ezra Pound’s famous ideogrammic method of poetic representation.39 As a significant contribution to Modernist modes of poetic perception and expression, the ideogrammic method makes a significant contribution to curing the poetic disease of “dissociation of sensibilities” identified by T. S. Eliot by creating poetic works that allow the reader to visualize the concrete details of represented images while at the same time grasping abstract ideas. Interestingly, Pound invented the ideogrammic method under the inspiration of Chinese ideograph making. In his Cantos, he widely used this method to ground his poetic theory and practice in concrete historical particulars and universal ideas.40 The insight from hieroglyphics connects with the mode of imitation in the making of Chinese characters. Chinese writing came into being as a result of imitating the shapes of the body, tracks left by birds and animals, and patterns of the myriad natural objects in the world, and eventually developed into an abstract writing system.41 The denotations and connotations of the Chinese word wen, a polysemous word, which means mark, shape, pattern, writing, literature, culture, civil aspects of social life, etc., may throw fresh light on Plotinus’s hieroglyphic example. We may find such a point in Liu Xie’s expressive-representational view of literature in his “wen of the Dao”: “The Dao hands down wen through the sages, and the sages make the Dao manifest through their own wen [writings]. This principle may be extended to all aspects of life without any obstruction and will not exhaust itself through daily use. The Book of Changes states:

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‘That which stimulates all movements under heaven rests in ci [writings].’ The reason that ci is capable of stimulating everything under heaven is because it is the wen of the Dao.”42 Liu Xie’s “wen of the Dao” is a most important and original idea in Chinese aesthetics that has not been given sufficient attention. I have studied this concept and tried to bring out its aesthetics implications in an article. I argue that “With the appearance of Liu Xie’ idea “wen of the Dao” 道之文 (patterns of the Tao), the two cardinal concepts in Chinese metaphysics and art, dao and wen, became self-consciously connected, marking the conceptual fusion of philosophy and art, and the beginning of self-conscious inquiry into the mechanism of literature and art.”43 The quoted statement at the end of Liu Xie’s discourse may be taken as a succinct summing-up of the Chinese conception of writing and literature. “The Dao hands down wen through the sages” expresses an age-old idea: writing/literature is a result of natural transmission. The nature’s act of handing it down to the world through the sages imparts one side of the picture: a view of spontaneous genesis. But “the sages make the Dao manifest through their own wen” conveys the other side of the picture. That the sages utilized wen to make the Dao manifest is an act of representation. This representational view of writing/literature eventually developed into Liu Xie’s most original idea about literary creation: “wen of Dao” (patterns of the Dao), which captures various similar but less discerning expressions in the Chinese tradition about the nature and function of literature. The most well-known is the time-honored maxim in the Chinese tradition: “Wen yi zai Dao (Writing/literature is a vehicle to convey the Dao).” Whether the Dao here represents Nature (the Daoist view), or moral truth (the Confucian view), the Void (the Buddhist view), or spirit of the universe (natural religion), this maxim suggests a representational view of writing/literature in the Aristotelian sense. Although this maxim is the better known, it is not as aesthetically perceptive as Liu Xie’s “pattern of the Dao,” because this saying offers an instrumental view of the relationship between wen and dao and entails a dualism: dao is the principle while wen is its application. But in Liu Xie’s conception, wen is not an instrument for carrying the Dao; nor is it an application of the rationale of the Dao. Dao is the law of nature, and is immanent in wen while wen is the concrete manifestation of the spirit of the Dao. In such a transcendental-cum-immanent relationship, wen of the Dao is aesthetically an immanent transcendence. Indeed, wen and dao are interdependent upon each other and are at one with each other. In a way, we may say that wen and dao are one the same thing like the two sides of the same

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coin though they are two categories with two names. In Chinese metaphysics, Zhuangzi used myriad things in the natural world like heaven, earth, grass, ants, tile shard, and even feces to illustrate the transcendentally immanent nature of the Dao. Liu Xie employed the myriad shapes and patterns in the natural and human world to propose his innovative idea: the wen of the Dao. The two thinkers were engaged in a similar conceptual endeavor, though one was more interested in metaphysics and the other more preoccupied with aesthetics. Liu Xie’s “pattern of the Dao” integrates the metaphysical concept of Dao with the linguistic concept of wen, thereby linking the natural world with the human world and reveals where literary creation originates and how it operates. It shares an ontological affinity with Plotinus’s intellectual principle and conception of aesthetics.

The Epistemological Grounding of Art Having discussed the ontological aesthetic grounding shared by Plotinus and Liu Xie who lived in different historical times and social settings, I wish to examine the epistemic ground covered by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) and Liu Xie. Schelling’s philosophical work exerted a great impact on English romanticism through Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who introduced his ideas into England in the Biographia Literaria. Schelling’s aesthetic philosophy of nature, especially his discourse on the relation of nature to the intellectual life is directly relevant to Liu Xie’s discussions of the relationship between metaphysics (the Dao) and literature (wen). In his influential treatise, “On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature,” Schelling proposes a theory of art whose ontology and epistemology differs so much from the European aesthetic thought before him and shares so much common ground with Chinese aesthetic thought that we are tempted to wonder whether he had received any direct or indirect influence from the Chinese tradition in his philosophical inquiry, because in the historical period before his lifetime, Chinoiseries, which first appeared in the seventeenth century and reached its peak in the eighteenth century due to an immense interest in Chinese thought, literature, and culture, was a popular cultural movement that had swept the European continent. Moreover, in his study of the philosophy of mythology, he devoted much space to a discussion of the Chinese people, language, writing, religion, and mythology. 44 Although he expressed similar Orientalist views on these issues to those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

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Hegel and Johann Gottfried Herder, he articulated a series of ideas that share affinities to Chinese aesthetics. In the following sections, I will examine the theoretical grounds of Schelling and Liu Xie’s aesthetic thought to tease out some insights for the fusion of aesthetics between Chinese and Western traditions. Art as the Unconscious Creation of Nature First and foremost, Schelling and Chinese thinkers both conceive of literature and art as a result of the unconscious creativity of nature. In his treatise “Origin of Literature/writing,” Liu Xie conceives of a naturalistic rise of literature and art. He opens his magnum opus with this statement: Wen, or pattern, is a very great power indeed. It is born together with heaven and earth. Why do we say this? Because all color-patterns are mixed of black and yellow, and all shape-patterns are differentiated by round and square. The sun and moon like two pieces of jade manifest the pattern of heaven; mountains and rivers in their beauty display the pattern of earth. These, are in fact, the wen of Tao itself.45 (9)

In the Chinese tradition, wen as a polysemous word, has the denotations and connotations of pattern, writing, literature, culture, human creation, and last but not least, art. The Dao (Tao), the first metaphysical principle in Chinese thought, is the primal power that gives birth to all things in the universe. It is therefore analogous to the Judaic-Christian concept of God and the modern concept of nature. It is perhaps for the latter reason that in an English translation of the Laozi’s Daode jing, a scholar renders the Dao as “nature.” In Liu Xie’s treatise, literature/art is not created by a personal god, but by nature in an unconscious way. Schelling, believed to have coined the word “unconscious,” also advances a similar conception of nature’s unconscious creativity to that of Liu Xie: The sublimest arithmetic and geometry are innate in the stars, and unconsciously displayed by them in their motions. More distinctly, but still beyond their grasp, the living cognition appears in animals; and thus we see them, though wandering about without reflection, bring about innumerable results far more excellent than themselves: the bird that, intoxicated with music, transcends itself in soullike tones; the little artistic creature, that, without practice or instruction, accomplishes light works of architecture;

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but all directed by an overpowering spirit, that lightens in them already with single flashes of knowledge, but as yet appears nowhere as the full sun, as in man.46

Like Liu Xie, Schelling views the celestial bodies as the unconscious manifestation of nature’s creativity. The only difference is that he employs the scientific language of arithmetic and geometry. Just as Schelling views the wonderful world of animals as the outcome of nature’s empowering, Liu Xie considers the flora and fauna as the creative work of the Dao, the humanly conceived expression of nature: When we extend our observations, we find that all things, both animals and plants, have patterns of their own. Dragons and phoenixes portend wondrous events through the picturesqueness of their appearance, and tigers and leopards recall the individuality of virtuous men in their striped and spotted variegation. The sculptured colors of clouds surpass paintings in their beauty, and the blossoms of plants depend on no embroiderers for their marvelous grace. Can these features be due to external adornment? No, they are all natural. Furthermore, the sounds of the forest wind blend to produce melody comparable to that of a reed pipe or lute, and the music created when a spring strikes upon a rock is as melodious as the ringing tone of a jade instrument or bell. Therefore, just as when nature expresses itself in physical bodies there is plastic pattern, so also, when it expresses itself in sound, there is musical pattern.47

In Schelling’s conception of the unconscious creativity of nature, he admits that all things are directed by the omnipresent power of nature, but he views nature’s unconscious creativity most powerful and meaningful in human beings. This is because nature only endows human beings with intelligence to form ideas: “All other creatures are driven by the mere force of nature, and through it maintain their individuality; in man alone, as the central point, arises the soul, without which the world would be like the natural universe without the sun.”48 In Chinese aesthetic thought, Liu Xie arrives at a similar idea of Man as a spiritual being: “In his appearance, man resembles heaven and earth, and he is naturally endowed with five talents; his ear and eyes are comparable to the sun and moon; his voice and breath are like the wind and thunder; yet, as he transcends all things, he is really spiritual.”49 Furthermore, Liu Xie regards Man as the center of the universe in relation to heaven, earth, flora, and fauna:

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And as one sees above the sparkling heavenly bodies, and below the manifold forms of earth, there is established a difference between high and low estate, giving rise to the two archetypal Forms. Man, and man alone, forms with these the Great Trinity, and he does so because he alone is endowed with spirituality. He is the refined essence of the five elements—indeed, the mind of the universe.50

In Liu Xie’s conception, Man is part of Nature and yet independent of Nature. He is endowed by Nature with a spirituality that distinguishes him from other living creatures on the earth and is destined to occupy the center of the universe. The main reason why humans are superior to other creatures is that humans are endowed by Nature with the intelligence that enables them to engage in contemplation and the creation of arts. Liu Xie considers it natural for humans to create: “Now with the emergence of mind, language is created, and when language is created, writing appears. This is natural…. Now if things which are devoid of consciousness express themselves so extremely decoratively, can that which is endowed with mind lack a pattern proper to itself?” Liu Xie then cites a series of human creations in Chinese culture that range from the Great Ultimate through the hexagrams to writing and literature and reiterates the idea that all these human creations are the results of Nature’s unconscious creation: “Was anyone responsible for all these? No, they are but the natural expression of the divine principle.”51 Liu Xie’s concept of the “divine principle” finds a similar idea in Schelling’s treatise. Schelling calls it “the eternal idea”: “This formative science in nature and art is the link that connects idea and form, body and soul. Before everything stands an eternal idea, formed in the infinite understanding.”52 Although he subscribes to the conception of nature’s unconscious creativity, like Liu Xie, he does not reject the initiative of the artist. In fact, he deems it the fundamental means by which an excellent work of art is created: “By what means does this idea pass into actuality and embodiment? Only through the creative science that is as necessarily connected with infinite understanding, as in the artist the principle that seizes the idea of unsensuous beauty is linked with that which sets it forth to the senses.”53 Thus, in the relationship between Nature and the artist, he combines the idea of unconscious creativity in Nature with an idea of the artist’s active participation in the activity of Nature. Thus, this conception marks an almost unperceivable shift from Nature’s unconscious activity to Man’s conscious creativity. Schelling explains why he shifts from

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unconscious creativity to conscious participation: “[I]n all things in nature, the living idea shows itself only blindly active; were it so also in the artist, he would be in nothing distinct from nature.” In so doing, he raises a view that joins the subject and object together in an intimate relation through aesthetic activity. The act of joining is a creative act by the artist. In artistic endeavors, the mind of the artist joins the subject and object, finite and infinite, body and soul together. Liu Xie offers a similar understanding of the relationship: “From the time of Master Feng to the time of Confucius, both Feng, the first sage, who invented writing, and the ‘King without Crown,’ who transmitted teachings, drew their literary embellishments from the mind of the Tao, and both taught by reference to divine principles.”54 Liu Xie conceives of a cooperative relationship between nature and the artist as well. By observing how various sages in Chinese antiquity invented miscellaneous cultural heritages including writing and literature, Liu Xie declares: “From these things we know that Tao is handed down in writing through sages, and that sages makes Tao manifest in their writings.”55 He especially points out that the reason why the hexagram statements in the Book of Changes are endowed with the power to stimulate the movements of the universe is precisely because the words in the statements are the manifested patterns of the Dao. Liu Xie’s idea of writing as the carrier of the divine principle of the Dao is based on the Daoist epistemology. In his reply to a question: Where is the Dao? Zhuangzi, the second founder of Daoist school of thought, said that the Dao is omnipresent, existing in everything in nature, including ants, weeds, potsherd, and even excrement and urine.56 This immanent view of the transcendental first principle is the epistemological foundation of the Chinese expressive theory of literature, from which arises the poetic mode of bi-xing, the basis for metaphor, metonymy, and symbolism that I have discussed in Chap. 5. Mimeticism in Expressionism Mimetic theory is the foundation of Western aesthetic thought. As Abram’s convincingly shows, the strategic juncture at which Western aesthetic thought turns from mimeticism to romanticism, symbolism, modernism, and eventually postmodernism appeared in the eighteenth century. But I may think that Schelling’s theoretical inquiry laid the conceptual foundation for the rise of Romanticism and the eclipse of mimeticism. In Schelling’s treatise, he does not reject imitation as a mode of artistic

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expression altogether, but he does not believe it to be fully capable of capturing truth, beauty, or the essence of things. He proposes a complementary alternative to imitation: “This spirit of nature working at the core of things, and speaking through form and shape as by symbols only, the artist must certainly follow with emulation; and only so far as he seizes this with genial imitation has he himself produced anything genuine.”57 He then goes on to prove the new option by asking some discerning questions relating to imitation: “[T]o every tolerably cultivated taste, imitations of the so-called actual, even though carried to deception appear in the last degree untrue—nay, produce the impression specters; whilst a work in which the idea is predominant strikes us with the full force of truth, conveying us then only to the genuinely actual world? Whence comes it if not from the more or less obscure feeling which tells us that the idea alone is the living principle in things, but all else unessential and vain shadow?” (449) To these questions, he provides the answer: “For works produced by aggregation, even of forms beautiful in themselves, would still be destitute of all beauty, since that, through which the work on the whole is truly beautiful, cannot be mere form. It is above form—it is essence, the universal, the look and expression of the indwelling spirit of nature.”58 Schelling shares a degree of mistrust of imitation with Plato who considers imitation only capable of representing the surface resemblances of things and incapable of capturing the inner essence of things. But Schelling’s new option is based neither on the Platonic Idea/Form that presupposes a disjunction between the world of appearance and the world of essence, form, and spirit, nor on the theological conception of the divine as the ultimate essence of things. His philosophical foundation is a conception of the interrelatedness and interpenetration of form and essence made possible by the spirit of Nature. In this, he shares the same philosophical foundation as the Chinese conception of the ultimate source of literature and art, expounded in Liu Xie’s treatise on the origin of literature: Human pattern (writing, literature, and culture) originated in the Great Ultimate (the first principle of the universe). “Profoundly elucidating the divine luminosity,” the hexagram images are the earliest expressions of this rationale. Baoshi began the Book of Changes by drawing the eight trigrams, and Confucius completed it by writing the ‘Appended Verbalizations.’ Of these so-called “Ten Wings,” the “Wenyan” (Words with Pattern/embellishment) was written especially to explain Qian and Kun, the two foundational hexagrams. The pattern of human expression (embellished writing) is indeed the mind of the heaven and earth!59

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Just as Liu Xie conceives of literature as human representation of the soul and essence of the universe, Schelling makes a similar observation in the relationship between the art, artist, and nature: “Plastic art, therefore, evidently stands as a uniting link between the soul and nature, and can be apprehended only in the living center of both. Indeed, since plastic art has its relation to the soul in common with every other art, and particularly with poetry, that by which it is connected with nature, and like nature, a productive force, remains as its sole peculiarity.”60 Then, the question arises: What constitutes the soul in the creation of art? Avoiding the use of theological and religious ideas, he conceives the soul of the artist as a conscious invention: “[I]n a work of art, the soul of the artist is seen as invention in the detail, and in the total result as the unity that hovers over the work in serene stillness. But the soul must be visible in objective representation, as the primeval energy of thought, in portraitures of human beings, altogether filled by an idea, by a noble contemplation; or as indwelling, essential goodness.”61 Thus, Schelling does not locate the artistic soul in the idea of God’s creation, but in the Platonic idea of divine inspiration, which is really the unconscious source of creation. As a result, although he does not completely abandon the idea of divine creation, he only regards gods as the inspiration for creative spirit and energy. In his treatise, he frequently says that the ultimate source of art is divine quality in the artist as it is mediated through the divine in nature: “Art springs only from that powerful striving of the inmost powers of the heart and the spirit, which we call inspiration…. the artist, like every spiritual laborer, can follow only the law that God and nature have written in his heart.”62 Thus, like ancient Chinese thinkers, the divine does not reside in heaven but has its abode on earth. In his study of sculpture, Schelling also implies that it is not gods who inspired artists into creation but artists who created gods: “Sculpture, therefore, can reach its true summit only in the representation of those natures in whose constitution it is implied that they actually embody all that is contained in their idea or soul; thus only in divine natures. So that sculpture, even if no mythology had preceded it, would of itself have come upon gods, and have invented such if it found none.”63 In a way, this idea may be viewed as anticipating Feuerbach and Marx’s theory of religion, in which it is not God who created Man in his own image, but Man who created God in his own image. 64 In his nonreligious conception, the divine is not a personal god or gods, but refers to the spiritual essence of things or the soul of Nature. Influenced by the scientific thinking at his time, his conception of the divine is a rational and logical understanding of the

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invisible and ineffable power of Nature that makes things be themselves. In this respect, his conception is not any different from the Chinese conception of the divine. In Liu Xie’s treatise, though he views literary creation as inspired and controlled by shenli (the divine principle), he makes it very clear that his conception of the divine has nothing to do with a personal God, but refers to the first metaphysical principle of nature, which is the Dao. Schelling does not shun the use of such concepts as “god,” “divine,” and “divinity,” but his idea of the divine really refers to the unconscious creativity of nature in the conscious creations of the artist. This way of thinking seems to make a connection to Plato’s idea of divine madness, but his idea of divine source of creativity is only a gift that Nature bestows on some exceptional human beings. Like ancient Chinese thinkers, he posits a view of divine creativity in which God merges with or is replaced by Nature. Thus, his view of the divine is similar to the Chinese conception of the divine as the spiritual essence of Nature. He rejects the view of nature as “a hollow scaffolding of forms” or “hollow image,” having nothing divine in it, and endorses the view of ancient Greeks “who everywhere felt the presence of a vitally efficient principle, genuine gods arose out of nature.” (446) Thus, it is not gods who created Nature but nature that gives rise to gods. His naturalistic conception of gods and of Nature as a vital principle of energy comes surprisingly close to the Chinese conception of pantheism and of Nature as the first principle of the Dao, which operates on the transformations of qi or the vital energy. In his examination of the best works of the Renaissance art, he concludes regarding the ultimate source of art: “We have seen how the work of art, springing up out of the depths of nature, begins with determinateness and limitation, unfolds its inward plenitude and infinity, is finally transfigured in grace, and at last attains to soul. But we can conceive only in detail what, in the creative act of mature art, is but one operation. No theory and no rules can give this spiritual, creative power. It is the pure gift of nature.”65 Like Liu Xie who views Nature as having a life of its own and writing as only a manifestation of nature’s inner workings, Schelling rejects the conception of nature as a dead, lifeless, objective conglomerate of heaven, earth, flora, and fauna, but considers Nature as an artist in itself who strives for shape: “Thus, to one, nature is nothing more than the lifeless aggregate of an indeterminable crowd of objects, or the space in which, as in a vessel, he imagines things placed; to another, only the soil from which he draws his nourishment and support; to the inspired seeker alone, the holy,

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ever-creative original energy of the world, which generates and busily evolves all things out of itself” (446). This passage resonates with Liu Xie’s passage on the spirituality of nature in both spirit and details. Schelling agrees that art is the result of imitation of nature, but he does not accept slavish imitation of nature, because in his view, both the perfect and imperfect things mix in nature and art should imitate the perfect. “What is the perfection of a thing? Nothing else than the creative life in it, its power to exist” (447). Imitation involves a relationship between form and spiritual essence. Schelling posits a dialectical relationship between form and spirit, not much different from that in Chinese thought. In his view, art, plastic or verbal, “is to express spiritual thoughts—conceptions whose source is the soul” (446). The only difference lies in that while verbal art expresses spirit by speech, plastic art by shape and form. He admits that art must imitate the actual forms of things, but the imitation of actual forms should fill the art work with spirits. To infuse a work of art with the spirit of nature, he emphasizes the initiative and inspiration and disdains servile imitation: “In the place of nature were substituted the sublime works of antiquity, whose outward forms the pupils busied themselves in imitating, but without the spirit that fills them. These forms, however, are as unapproachable, nay, more so, than the works of nature, and leave us yet colder if we bring not to them the spiritual eye to penetrate through the veil and feel the stirring energy within” (447). The Dialectics of Form and Essence Since literature and art are human expressions, and since a human expression takes a form, both Liu Xie and Schelling extensively discuss the relationship between form and essence. In their approaches to this relationship, though both propose an opposition between form and essence, yet, both consider the two categories to be bound together just like the body and soul in a living person. Liu Xie, in his discussion of form and spirit, proposes a well-known notion “fenggu” (literally the wind and bone of writing). In a metaphorical way, he compares the relationship between form and spirit of a writing in terms of human anatomy: Literary expressions are conditioned by the bone in much the same way as the standing posture of a body is conditioned by its skeleton; feeling gives form to the wind very much as a physical body envelops the pneuma which animates it. When expressions are organized on the right principles, literary

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bone is completed; and when the idea and pneuma embodied are swift and free, there we find the purity of the literary wind. If a literary piece has nothing but rich and brilliant colors, without wind and bone to keep it air-borne, then one shaking is enough to destroy its splendor, lacking as it does the vigor which can justify fame.66

In a surprisingly similar way, Schelling employs a similar analogy of physiology to expound the relationship between form and spirit: That most excellent critic, to whom the gods have given sway over nature as well as art, compares the characteristic in its relation to beauty, with the skeleton in its relation to the living form. Were we to interpret this striking simile in our sense, we should say that the skeleton, in nature, is not, as in our thought, detached from the living whole; that the firm and the yielding, the determining and the determined, mutually presuppose each other, and can exist only together; thus that the vitally characteristic is already the whole form, the result of the action and reaction of bone and flesh, of active and passive.67

Like Liu Xie, Schelling does not consider form and essence, shape and beauty as excluding each other. Between form and essence, he conceives of a dialectical relationship: “The outer side or basis of all beauty is beauty of form. But as form cannot exist without essence, wherever form is, there also is character, whether in visible presence or only perceptible in its effects….Essence may, indeed, outgrow form, but even then the characteristic remains as the still efficient groundwork of the beautiful” (ibid.). He considers it possible for the artist to transmit the spirit through form: “art…strives from the form to come at the essence” (447). When a work of art attains a miracle by which the limited should be raised to the unlimited, “the human become divine” (447). How can art overcome its limitations so that the artist becomes divine? Schelling declares, “We must transcend form, in order to gain it again as intelligible, living, and truly felt” (ibid.). His reason is that “that, through which the work on the whole is truly beautiful, cannot be mere form. It is above form—it is essence, the universal, the look and expression the indwelling spirit of nature” (449). He admits that form has its limitations but he is of the opinion that if form is organically infused with essence, it can overcome its limitations: “Form would indeed be a limitation of the essence if it existed independent of it. But if it exists with and by means of the essence, how could this feel itself limited by that which it has itself created?”68

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The relationship between form and content is a central issue in artistic representation across cultural traditions. At the center of the relationship between form and content is the dialectics between formal and spiritual likeness in representation. In the Chinese tradition, there are many treatises on the dialectical relationship between formal resemblance and spiritual resemblance in the creation of art. Although critics emphasize the importance of formal resemblance, form is only regarded as a vehicle to convey the spirit of things. Spiritual resemblance is privileged over formal resemblance. Gu Kaizhi (c. 346–407), a superb painter and art theorist, states in his discussions of how to paint a person: “The beauty or plainness of the body is not the essential thing in painting a person. The key to convey the spirit of a person is nowhere to be found but in the eyes.” 69 To capture the spirit of things, he proposes a famous dictum in art: “The use of form to convey the spirit.” It has evolved into an aesthetic tenet in Chinese art: “To use formal resemblance to transmit spiritual likeness.” Gu Kaizhi’s ideas certainly come from his own artistic practices in poetry, calligraphy, and painting, but they are also the concentrated expressions of aesthetic thought on the dialectical relationship between form and content, formal resemblance and spiritual resemblance before and after his own times. For a famous example after him, Su Shi, a master of poetry, calligraphy, and painting of the Song Dynasty, put the transmission of spirit way above formal resemblance. He composed a poem to convey his idea, which has two well-known poetic lines: “If a painting excels in formal resemblance; it should only be shown to your neighbor’s children.”70 Thus, in the Chinese aesthetic thought, spiritual likeness is much preferred to formal resemblance. Schelling also spends a good deal of ink on the dialectical relationship between form and spirit. He offers a systematic study of the two categories and emphasizes their relatedness: “It is not mere contiguous existence, but the manner of it, that makes form; and this can be determined only by a positive force, which is even opposed to separateness, and subordinates the manifoldness of the parts to the unity of one idea.”71 Like Liu Xie and other Chinese thinkers, he views form as an existential manifestation of a creative force in nature and the artist, or in technical terms as the unity of disparate parts to an idea. Then, he relates the creative force in nature to the artist and defines spirit of art in terms of essence of things and the revelation of the soul: “The spirit of nature is only in appearance opposed to the soul; essentially, it is the instrument of its revelation; it brings about

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indeed the antagonism that exists in all things, but only that the one essence may come forth, as the utmost benignity, and the reconciliation of all the forces.”72 Like Chinese thinkers, he does not set great store by formal resemblance in the discussion of beauty but by a perfect unity of form and spirit: “Works produced by aggregation, even of forms beautiful in themselves, would still be destitute of all beauty, since that, through which the work on the whole is truly beautiful, cannot be mere form. It is above form—it is essence, the universal, the look and expression of the indwelling spirit of nature.”73 To arrive at a full understanding of the spirit, Schelling posits an innovative idea of the relationship between soul and grace. Soul is the essence of form and Man. Grace comes from essence. Grace is the fully developed form, the soul of form, and of nature: “wherever, in a fully developed form, grace appears, the work is complete on the side of nature; nothing more is wanting; all demands are satisfied. Here, already, soul and body are in complete harmony; body is form, grace is soul, although not soul in itself, but the soul of form, nor the soul of nature.” Out of the trinity of beauty, soul, and grace, Schelling conceives of the highest aesthetic ideal: “the beauty of the soul in itself, joined to sensuous grace, is the highest apotheosis of nature.”74 Technically, he views form and essence as intimately related: “Not only… as active principle, but as spirit and effective science, must the essence appear to us in the form, in order that we may truly apprehend it. For all unity must be spiritual in nature and origin” (448). What connects form and essence? Schelling comes to an understanding like the Chinese metaphysical principle of the Dao: “This formative science in nature and art is the link that connects idea and form, body and soul. Before everything stands an eternal idea, formed in the infinite understanding; but by what means does this idea pass into actuality and embodiment? Only through the creative science that is as necessarily connected with the infinite understanding, as in the artist the principle that seizes the idea of unsensuous beauty is linked with that which sets it forth to the senses.”75 In the previous section, I have reconceptualized Liu Xie’s “wen of the Dao” as an aesthetic principle that unifies transcendence and immanence. Although this principle entails a dualism, yet it does not replicate the dualism in Plato’s theory of the Form and Western aesthetics, nor does it contain implications in the Western dichotomy between spirit and its representation. In a complementary dualism, the two terms are

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interdependent and mutually define each other. In a way, we may say that wen is dao in a concrete sense while dao is wen in an abstract sense. In philosophical language, wen is an immanent dao while dao is a transcendent wen. This idea finds an interesting echo in Schelling’s oft-quoted saying: “Nature should be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature. It is here, therefore, in the absolute identity of spirit within us and nature outside us, that the problem of how a nature outside us is possible must be solved.”76 As a further illustration to show Schelling’s similar understanding of the dialectical relationship between transcendence and immanence, I will compare other concerns in Schelling’s aesthetic thought with the Chinese metaphysical idea of transcendence in immanence in Chinese philosophy and Liu Xie’s “wen of the Dao” in aesthetics may offer a new understanding of other concerns in Schelling’s aesthetic thought. I will discuss his idea of duality, which has an interesting relationship to the idea of complementarity in Chinese thought. In Chinese metaphysics, the view of relativity of things is the predominant way of thinking. The relative thinking permeates Laozi’s Daode jing (The Way and Its Virtue) and Zhuangzi’s writings. Zhuangzi delights in showing the relativity of things. Here is a concentrated expression in Zhuangzi’s writing: There is nothing that is not the “that” and there is nothing that is not the “this.” Things do not know that they are the “that” of other things; they only know what they themselves know. Therefore I say that the “that” is produced by the “this” and the “this” is also caused by the “that.” This is the theory of mutual production. Nevertheless, when there is life there is death, and when there is death there is life. When there is possibility, there is impossibility, and when there is impossibility, there is possibility. Because of the right, there is the wrong, and because of the wrong, there is the right.77

The relativist thinking underlies the correlative thinking in Chinese thought and feeds into conceptualization of literature and art. Liu Xie observes on the mutually complementary nature of things in the world and its manifestation in literary form and writing style: Nature, creating living beings, endows them with limbs in pairs. The divine reason operates in such a way that nothing stands alone. The mind creates literary language, and in doing this it organizes and shapes one hundred different thoughts, making what is high supplement what is low, and spontaneously producing linguistic parallelism.78

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Liu Xie reiterates the complementarity of opposites in aesthetic creations. Schelling comes to an amazingly similar understanding of the complementary nature of things, an understanding that I believe anticipates the binary opposition in deconstruction. It is conveyed in his epistemological belief in the capability of the particular and individual to represent the general and universal: In nature and art the essence strives first after actualization, or exhibition of itself in the particular. Thus in each the utmost severity is manifested at the commencement; for without bound, the boundless could not appear; without severity, gentleness could not exist; and if unity is to be perceptible, it can only be through particularity, detachment, and opposition.”79

We can easily hear the echoes of Zhuangzi’s idea in this passage. We know Western thought since Plato also conceives a duality of things, but the duality exists in a binary opposition, which is described by Derrida as the “metaphysics of presence,” an expression that has now often been simply equated with “metaphysics” in Western philosophy. In his book Limited Inc., Derrida states: All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.80

Derrida’s passage resonates with Zhuangzi’s passage even more resoundingly. Derrida launched a deconstructive criticism of Western metaphysics of presence for conceiving a series of dualisms and establishing hierarchies that always privileges one term in a dualism, and ignores or marginalizes the opposite term in that dualism. Contrary to the binary opposition in Western metaphysics, Schelling displays a faint deconstructive tendency toward a relativist epistemology predicated on the bipolar complementary duality of things and takes an initial way to explore the complementary duality of universals and particulars, abstraction and concretion, individual and collective. He believes that the particular, the concrete, and the individual can represent the general, the abstract, and the collective. His belief deviates from that of theorists before him. Samuel Johnson and Joshua

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Reynolds, for example, argued for the particular to express the universal from a scientific perspective by identifying universality with generality. Schelling rejects a negative view of the particular and individual as limited and limiting but affirms their independent existential power not unlike a connection in transcendental immanence: “[N]o particular exists by means of its limitation, but through the indwelling force with which it maintains itself as a particular whole, in distinction from the universe.” Schelling argues that the particular can express the universal because it is a concrete manifestation of the general principle: “Commonly, indeed, the shape of a body seems a confinement; but could we behold the creative energy it would reveal itself as the measure that this energy imposes upon itself, and in which it shows itself a truly intelligent force; for in everything is the power of self-rule allowed to be an excellence, and one of the highest.”81 As for how the particular can represent the universal in actual artistic practice, he points out that the artist does not attempt to show “the empty shell or limitation of the individual” but grasps the vital idea: “[C]ertainly we desire to see not merely the individual, but, more than this, its vital idea. But if the artist has seized the inward creative spirit and essence of the idea, and sets this forth, he makes the individual a world in itself, a class, an eternal prototype; and he who has grasped the essential character needs not to fear hardness and severity, for these are the conditions of life.”82 This statement is reminiscent of William Blake’s famous poetic lines: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour. ”83 It also resonates with Liu Xie’s “wen of the Dao” in Chinese aesthetic thought, which proposes to use formal resemblance to represent the essence of an object to be represented. In a discussion of the relationship between part and whole, Liu Xie explores how some Chinese poets probed into the depth of the fundamental nature of things by using apt images and expressions: “they have used a part to sum up the whole, leaving nothing whether in their feeling or in the appearance of things undescribed. In spite of the thousand years of thought that have gone into this matter of poetic diction, no alteration can be made without difficulty.”84 Sikong Tu (c.720–790), a scholar-poet of the Tang Dynasty, offers a poetic passage for us to understand Liu Xie and Schelling’s dialectical view of the particular and the universal: “Dust in the sky roams to and fro;/ Foams in the sea come and go;/ Shallow or deep, gathering or dispersing:/ Of myriad things seen only one is taken.” 85 By picking a most salient part to represent the whole or a particular to

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represent the universal, a created art work is like the tip of an iceberg which has its bulk submerged underwater. In the Chinese tradition, these ideas are predicated on the metaphysical conception of the transcendental idea in the immanent concrete things. From an entirely different cultural background, Schelling arrives at a transcendental-immanentist view of art similar to that of ancient Chinese thinkers: “Here art, as it were, transcends itself, and again becomes means only. On this summit sensuous grace becomes in turn only the husk and body of a higher life; what was before a whole is treated as a part, and the highest relation of art and nature is reached in this—that it makes nature the medium of manifesting the soul which it contains.”86 Compatibility of Aesthetic Affects and Effects My comparative study of Plato, Longinus, Plotinus, Wordsworth, and Schelling with some Chinese theorists and scholar-artists shows that despite the differences in time, place, and cultural tradition, they share similar aesthetic ideas concerning the ontology and epistemology, form and essence of art. The compatibility of their ideas, views, and conceptual reflections enables me to say that aesthetic thought of different traditions may differ in actual conceptions and vary in forms and features from culture to culture, but Chinese and Western aesthetic thought is similar at the roots. Both grow out of similar ontology and epistemology and even share similar concerns with the standard of value judgment of an art work in terms of the affects and effects. In Chinese aesthetic thought, one much treasured criterion to judge the value of an art work is whether it can generate subtle and infinite affects and effects. This is known as aesthetic suggestiveness, an idea that I have discussed extensively in an article.87 In the West, it is the idea of hermeneutic openness in the sense of multivalence and polysemy. Although it appeared rather late in the Western tradition, it is not completely absent in early aesthetic theories. Longinus, for example, argues that if something “does not leave in the mind [of a man well-versed in literature] more food for reflection than the words seem to convey … it cannot rank as true sublimity because it does not survive a first hearing. For that is really great which bears a repeated examination.”88 It is interesting to note that Schelling is a precursor of aesthetic openness. And like the Chinese counterpart, he discusses the idea from a metaphysical perspective.

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The Chinese aesthetic thought on suggestiveness is based on the metaphysics of Chinese thought. In Laozi’s explication of the Dao, he employed the term “wuwei” (no taste): “The way (Dao) in its passage through the mouth is without flavor./ It cannot be seen, /It cannot be heard,/ Yet it cannot be exhausted by use.”89 The Dao is a universal quality existing in everything under heaven, but it is not any of the tangible things. It therefore does not confine itself to the qualities of any material thing. The quality of the Dao is like the tastelessness of all tastes. When the idea of tastelessness enters the discourse of artistic creation, it becomes aesthetic openness. Schelling discusses beauty with ideas similar to those in Daoist metaphysics. He endorses Winckelman’s comparison of beauty to water drawn from the depths of the spring: “the less taste it has, the wholesomer it is esteemed.” This idea comes close to the Chinese idea of xuanjiu (mysterious wine) and the metaphysical concept, wuwei (tastelessness), the aesthetic concept, yiwei (lingering taste). In an ancient text, “Yueji” (Records of Music), there is a statement: “The etiquette of the great sacrificial feast sets great store by the use of xuanjiu (original or mysterious wine) [i.e. pure water] and the display of uncooked fish and meat. The great broth is not blended [with the five tastes], so it has a lasting flavor.”90 The “original/mysterious wine” was in fact pure water. The ancient Chinese discourse displays a metaphysical wit in calling pure water “original/mysterious wine.” Because it is pure water, it is colorless and has a bland taste that can be associated with all kinds of wines. In a similar way, the offering at sacrifice that consists of uncooked fish and meat retains the original taste, and they could be associated with any flavors. As a result, the great broth has lingering taste in people’s imagination. Schelling displays similar metaphysical wit. He extends the metaphor to form a concept of open form in art: “It is true that the highest beauty is characterless, but so we say of the universe that it has no determinate dimension, neither length, breadth nor depth, since it has all in equal infinity; nor that the art of creative nature is formless because she herself is subjected to no form.”91 The last sentence is almost a replica of Laozi’s saying: “A great image has no form.” Schelling’s concept of no form not only shares with Laozi’s idea of the Dao the infinitude of formlessness but also anticipates the modern notion of aesthetic openness. Schelling considers the suggestiveness of open form to be the highest aesthetic form of Greek art: “In this and in no other sense can we say that Grecian art in its highest development rises into the characterless” (450). Thus, ultimately, he shares with ancient Chinese thinkers the view that aesthetic suggestiveness is the hallmark of the first-rate art.

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Notes 1. Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetics (New York, Macmillan & Co., 1892), p. xii. 2. Chu Kwang-Tsien (Zhu Guangqian), The Psychology of Tragedy: A Critical Study of Various Theories of Tragic Pleasure (Strasbourg: Librairie Universitaire d’Alsace, 1933); Chinese translation: Beiju xinlixue (Psychology of Tragedy) (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 2009). 3. Shih-hsiang Chen, “On Chinese Lyrical Tradition: Opening Address to Panel on Comparative Literature, AAS Meeting, 1971,” Tamkang Review 2. 2 & 3. 1 (1971. 10–1972. 4): pp. 17–24. 4. Wang Huaiyi, “Hanshi ‘yuanshi er fa’ de quanshi jieyu yu Zhongguo shixue chuantong—Dui ‘Zhongguo shuqing chuantong’ guan de yige jiantao” (A Critical Reconsideration of the View of ‘Chinese Lyrical Tradition,’” in Wenxue pinglun (Literary Review) (2016), no. 4, pp. 129–138; Yang Dong, “’Shuqing chuantong’ de lingyi mian” (Another Side of “Lyrical Tradition’), Wenyi zhengming (Contentions in Literature and Art) (2016), no. 9, pp. 88–92; Zhang Guanfu, “Shuqing de dianfu yu chonggou” (Subversion and Reconstruction of “Lyrical Tradition”) Qiushi xuekan (Journal of Seeking Truth), (2017), no. 3, pp. 111–119; Li Zixiong, “’Shuqing chuantong lun’ de ‘hanxue zhuyi’ lilun fanshi de fansi” (Critical Reflections of the Sinologist Paradigm in the View of ‘Lyrical Tradition,’” Tianfu xinlun (New Views of Sichuan), (2018), no. 5, pp. 89–96. 5. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958), p. vi. 6. The Chinese text of the Preface is quoted in full from Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan (Selected Writings of Literary Theory and Criticism through Dynasties), vol. 1, pp. 63–64. 7. Opinions differ as to the author of the “Great Preface,” and there is no definitive answer. The possible authors include Confucius, Confucius’s student Zixia, and Wei Hong. But one thing is relatively certain that Wei Hong is the person who finalized the Preface by synthesizing various source in history. 8. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 97–98. 9. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 70–71. 10. John Dennis, The Critical Work of John Dennis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins press, 1939), vol. 1, p. 215. 11. William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” in Vincent Leitch, et al., eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 573. 12. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 6.

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13. Cao Pi, “Dilun- lunwen,” (Discourse on Literature), in Xiao Tong, comp., Wenxuan (Selections of Refined Writings) (Taipei: Qiming shuju, 1960), p. 720. 14. Longinus, “On the Sublime,” in Hazard Adam, ed., Critical Theory since Plato (San Diego and New York: HBJ, 1971), p. 78. 15. Ming Dong Gu, “From Yuanqi (Primal Energy) to Wenqi (Literary Pneuma): A Philosophical Study of a Chinese Aesthetic,” in Philosophy East & West, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2009): 22. 16. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 98. 17. English translation is quoted from Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yen-ching Institute, 1992), pp. 87, 90, 92, 94. 18. Li Jian, Jinan ji (Collected Writings of Jinan), juan 8, in Xu Zhongyu et al., comps., Yishu bianzhengfa bian, p. 8. 19. Longinus, “On The Sublime,” in Hazard Adam, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 77 and p. 99. 20. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 101. 21. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” in Plotinus, translated by A.  H. Armstrong, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 263–265. 22. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 71. 23. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, pp. 69–70. 24. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” pp. 265–267. 25. For a detailed account of the equivalence between the Dao and One, the Logos and One, see Gu (2002): 86–105. 26. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” p. 243. 27. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” p. 245. 28. Guanzi, Guanzi [Writings of Master Guan], in Ershi’er zi [Writings of Twenty-Two Masters] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986.). pp. 154c. 29. Mengzi, Mengzi zhushu (Mencius Writings Annotated) in Shisanjing zhushu (Thirteen Classics Annotated) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), p. 2685c. 30. Cao Pi, “Dianlun-lunwen” (On Literature), in Wenxuan [Selections of Refined Literature] (Taipei: Qiming shuju, 1960). pp. 720. 31. Liu, Dakui, “Lunwen ouji” (A Random Note on Literary Discussions], in Zhongguo liedai wenlun xuan [Selections of Chinese Literary Theories through the Dynasties] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963), p. 137. 32. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 44. 33. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” p. 253.

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34. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” pp. 253–255. 35. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” p. 255. 36. Liu, Xie, Wenxin diaolong [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], annotated by Lu Kanru and Mu Shijin (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1995), p. 102. 37. Ye Xie, Yuanshi (Origin of Poetry) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979), pp. 22–23. 38. Plotinus, “On the Intellectual Beauty,” p. 255. 39. See László K.  Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 40. For a discussion of how Chinese ideograph-making helped Pound to formulate the ideogrammic method, see Gu “Classical Chinese Poetry: A Catalytic ‘Other’ for Anglo-American Modernist Poetry,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature vol. 23, no. 4 (1996): 1006–1009. 41. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi [Elucidations of Characters and Words], edited by Xu Xuan (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963), p. 314. 42. Liu, Xie, Wenxin diaolong [Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], p. 102. 43. Ming Dong Gu, “Patterns of Tao: The Birth of Chinese Writing and Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 74.2 (Spring 2016), pp. 151. 44. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie in drei Vorlesungsnarchschriften 1837–1842 (Munich, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996). 45. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, English is from Vincent Shin’s translation, p. 9. 46. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 448. 47. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, English is from Vincent Shin’s translation, pp. 9–10. 48. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 453. 49. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, English is from Vincent Shin’s translation, p. 1. 50. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, English is from Vincent Shin’s translation, p. 9. 51. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, English translation is mine. 52. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 448. 53. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 448. 54. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, English is from Vincent Shin’s translation, p. 12. 55. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, English is from Vincent Shin’s translation, p. 12. 56. See Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, tr. and comp. Wing-tsit Chan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 203.

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57. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 448. 58. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 449. 59. Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, p. 98. English translation is mine. 60. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 446. 61. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 453. 62. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 457. 63. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 455. 64. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841) (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989). 65. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 456. 66. Slightly adapted form Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 227. 67. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 451. 68. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 449. 69. Quoted from Zhongguo meixue shi ziliao xuanbian (Selected Materials on the History of Chinese Aesthetics) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), vol. 1, p. 175. 70. Quoted from Zhongguo meixue shi ziliao xuanbian, vol. 2, p. 36. 71. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 448. 72. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 453. 73. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” pp. 448–449. 74. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 453. 75. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 448. 76. Schelling (1797), Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science, translated by E. E. Harris and P. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 42. 77. See Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, p. 183. 78. Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 270. 79. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 453. 80. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. Graff, trans. Weber, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 236. 81. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 449. 82. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” pp. 449–450. 83. William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor Books, 1984), p. 490. 84. Quoted from Vincent Shih’s translation, p. 349. 85. Sikong Tu, “Ershisi shipin”(Twenty-Four Grades of Poetry), in Lidai shihua (Poetic Talks through the Dynasties), pp. 40–41. 86. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 455. 87. Ming Dong Gu, “Suggestiveness in Chinese Literary Thought: Symphony of Metaphysics and Aesthetics,” Philosophy East & West, vol. 53, no. 4 (2003), pp. 490–513.

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88. Longinus, On the Sublime, VIII, 3, in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (San Diego and New York: HBJ, 1971), p. 80. 89. Quoted from D. C. Lau’s translation. See Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, p. 94. 90. Liji zhengyi [The Corrent Meanings of the Record of Rites], juan 37, 300c, Shisanjing zhushu (Thirteen Classics Annotated) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), p. 1528. 91. Schelling, “On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature,” p. 450.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion: Toward World Criticism and Global Aesthetics

In his “Discourse on Literature,” the ancient Chinese statesman and critic Cao Pi made a sagacious observation nearly two centuries ago: “Literature/ writing is the same at the roots, but differs in its branches.”1 In his reasoning, he astutely compares literature in general to a tree and individual literary works to its branches. In spite of their different genres, all literary works share the same roots. In conceptual terms, Cao Pi’s concept of “roots” is the human faculty that generates aesthetic feelings and consciousness, while his term for “branches” refers to the cultural and aesthetic experiences and expressions in literature and art. I may extend Cao Pi’s analogy regarding literature to the compatibility of aesthetic feelings and thought in the Chinese and Western traditions. The two traditions may differ in their ways of conception and display some distinctive forms and features, but they are essentially the same at the roots, sharing the same human faculty and similar human experience. The root cause for the compatibility lies in the fact that in spite of the differences in history, language, writing, and representation, we are all human beings endowed with the same human faculty for perceiving, conceiving, representing, and interpreting the world. Because the same human faculty provides the common denominator, all traditions have developed similar aesthetic ideas and consciousness despite the differences in each tradition’s terms, concepts, categories, and aesthetic systems. My comparative studies of Chinese and Western language, literature, criticism, aesthetics, and metaphysics have © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6_10

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not only reconfirmed Cao Pi’s vision but also given us the impetus to move further forward. In the introduction, my professed aim was to bring about meaningful dialogues between the two cultural traditions and lay a conceptual basis for a bridge across the aesthetic divide. Having examined a series of dichotomies in Chinese and Western aesthetic thought, I have produced enough critical and theoretical evidence to affirm that in spite of the cultural and linguistic differences, the Chinese and Western traditions share so much commonality in critical theory, aesthetic thought, and metaphysical conception and reasoning. And the in-depth two-way dialogues between the two traditions have given me enough courage to reflect on the possibility of world criticism and global aesthetics and assess the relevance and value of the humanistic paradigm of fusion in this concluding part. Globalization has shrunk the world into a global village. The global village is in need of world theory and global aesthetics. In the introduction of the book, I have mentioned James J. Y. Liu’s vision for universal theory of literature.2 Now, with the global movement of resources and knowledge made possible by the exponential expansion of telecommunications and the large amount of intellectual achievements in the field of literature, art, criticism, and aesthetics, what Liu had envisioned nearly half a century ago is no longer naïve and utopian. In many ways, we are in a much more advantageous position to realize the vision of world criticism and global aesthetics. The realization of the vision, however, depends on long-term concerted efforts by thinkers and scholars from different cultural traditions who ought to come out of their cultural pigeonholes and self-­ consciously go out of their ways to learn from each other’s aesthetic thought and engage in meaningful interlocutions and conversations. Due to Western hegemony and the power of European theory, the cultural exchanges between the West and Rest have been characterized by a general trend of one-way flow. This is especially true of Chinese academia. Like other non-Western, third-world, and developing countries, China is at the receiving end of Western ideas and models in nearly all areas of human and social sciences. Since the introduction of Western aesthetics, especially postmodern theories, modern Chinese theoretical discourse has suffered from what some scholars have dubbed “aphasia”: in the confrontation between the East and West, Chinese scholarly discourse has been so Westernized that the time-honored Chinese system of literary theory and aesthetics has practically lost its voice. In a way, almost all contemporary

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Chinese discourse may be viewed as a de facto branch of Western discourse. This is true of scholarship ranging from literary studies, political theory, social theory, to economic theory and models of social development. In spite of repeated calls by Chinese and Western scholars for genuine two-way dialogues between Chinese and Western literary theories, most of the attempts at dialogues have ended up in pseudo-dialogues, or disguised Western monologues. In the field of literary criticism and aesthetics, there are several time-­ honored traditions: the European, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Arabic, and others. Despite the migration of theory across continents, aesthetic thought of the major cultural traditions has remained largely isolated from each other. In the introduction to this book, I have highly praised the innovative move made by editors of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism to include non-Western theorists in the anthology, but we must admit that the inclusion is not only limited but also leaves selected materials self-contained in separate pigeonholes. The editors are clearly aware of this problem and have made laudable efforts in the headnotes to relate ideas and views of non-Western traditions to those in the Western tradition. In a broader context, some comparative scholars have done substantial work in fusing aesthetic thought in Chinese and Western traditions. They include James J. Y. Liu, Anthony C. Yu, Wai-lim Yip, Stephen Owen, Pauline Yu, Kang-I Sun Chang, Haun Saussy, Longxi Zhang, Wang Ning, David Porter, Martin Powers, Eric Hayot, David Wang, and others. In terms of direct dialogues between Western and non-Western theory of literature, I am especially gratified to see the appearance of a book Thinking Literature across Continents coauthored by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller.3 Ghosh and Miller are two scholars who come from entirely different cultural backgrounds: India and America. In a way, I may say that they represent the Eastern and Western literary traditions, respectively. Their book was originally meant to confront the decline of literature in society and literary studies in academia across the world, but as they constantly use ideas, terms, concepts, and literary works from both Western and Eastern traditions including India, China, and Japan, the two scholars have set a fine example in making efforts to move toward world criticism through dialogues. According to the information supplied by the book, their scholarly exchanges are intended as dialogues in the true sense of the word, which were carried on for 15 years. And the dialogues between them may be understood as representing two voices from the Eastern and Western literary traditions. On the surface, one of the achievements of

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Ghosh’s and Miller’s book is their convincing and eloquent reaffirmation of the importance and necessity of literature in the age of globalization and telecommunications. But in my opinion, another admirable achievement that may easily escape our attention is the dialogue itself and its salutary effects in relating Western and non-Western literary thought. In a way, I may say that the book represents, among other things, a successful effort to fuse the literary and critical dimensions. Unlike most studies that usually focus on the intellectual data of one tradition while paying superficial attention to materials from other traditions, this study is a genuine two-way dialogue, because the two authors made use of critical theories from a broad spectrum of traditions with references to a wide range of non-Western thinkers, theorists, and aestheticians. For example, a random look would include these Chinese theorists and creative artists from the ancient to modern times: Laozi, Zhuangzi, Confucius, Mencius, Gu Kaizhi, Lu Ji, Tao Qian, Liu Xie, Kong Yingda, Jiang Kui, Wang Fuzhi, Yan Yu, Yang Wanli, Wu Cheng’en, and others among ancient Chinese thinkers and artists, and James J.  Y. Liu, Liu Dianjue, Rey Chou, Longxi Zhang, Wai-Lim Yip, Michelle Yeh, Ming Dong Gu, and others among modern scholars. It is rare to see a book that makes references to so many Chinese thinkers and scholars. It is still rarer to see a book in which Chinese concepts like Tao, Zen, you (being), wu (non-being), pu (unadorned), etc. and Indian concepts like sahita (united together), sahitya (literature), sadhana (means to let go of ego), kriya (action), aucitya (propriety), etc. interact with Western metaphysical and poetic concepts. Most importantly, the references to non-Western theorists and concepts are not mere name-droppings. The authors conduct in-depth comparisons and analyses to bring out cross-cultural insights. The book is truly a case in which the aesthetic horizons of different traditions are fused in a meaningful way. I hope, with the intensification of globalization and telecommunications, such dialogues as undertaken by Miller and Ghosh will be more and more common in the field of literature and art. Among the great traditions of critical theory and aesthetics in the world, the Indian, Chinese, and Western traditions are perhaps the three most sophisticated ones. In the field of literature and art, however, when scholars talk about theory and aesthetics, they would always affix an ethnic epithet to the Indian and Chinese tradition with the implicit understanding that those critical and aesthetic ideas are culture-specific and parochial, having no general and transcultural aesthetic values. The epithets of

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“general,” “transcultural,” and “universal” are only reserved for the Western tradition. Indeed, when Western theory and aesthetics are discussed, they are understood to be general and universal in nature and function, because the epithet “Western” is not attached to books that only contain Western aesthetic thought. This is duly reflected in the conditions of anthologies of theory and criticism compiled in the world. Critical Theory since Plato, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (first edition), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies), Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics, etc.4 are just a few prominent examples. Although they exclusively anthologize works of Western theorists and aestheticians, the titles assigned to them sound as though these were comprehensive anthologies of world theory and global aesthetics. It is for this reason that I consider it a most laudable act for editors of Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism to include non-­ Western theorists and aestheticians in the later editions. In our long-term endeavor to effect the fusion of aesthetic horizons, we need to abandon the existent models of comparative studies, be it oppositional, differential, or affinity based, because they arise more from reactions against Western-centrism and hegemonic discourse or responses to cultural universalism, cultural relativism, and ethnocentrism than the genuine desire to fuse disparate aesthetic feelings from diverse traditions into a global aesthetics. The humanistic paradigm of fusion employed in this study may need reconception and improvement, but it is proposed on the common denominator of the human faculty with unlimited capabilities and derives its strengths from infinite varieties of shared cultural experiences. Whatever deficiency it may have, at least, it may serve as an inspiration for scholars of literature, arts, and humanities to propose better models for and new approaches to world criticism, world aesthetics, and global theory. Conceived as a project to put the paradigm of fusion into practice, my book is intended as a modest act to change the existent Western-centric and ethnocentric status quo of comparative thought, literature, and theory and to bring about a true fusion of aesthetic visions. What I have done is, of course, only a small step in that direction. And through it, I hope to make a very modest contribution to the eventual advent of world theory and global aesthetics. To what modest extent my book has achieved its intended purpose is to be judged by the reader, but I firmly believe that so long as we are determined to carry out more and better two-way dialogues between different traditions of theory and

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aesthetics, eventually there will be a day when the vision of world criticism and global aesthetics comes true.

Notes 1. Cao Pi, “Discourse on Literture,” in Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan (Selections of Chinese Literary Theory), vol. 1, p. 158. 2. James J.Y.  Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 2. 3. Ranjan Ghosh and J.  Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature across Continents (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016). 4. See Hazard Adam, ed., Critical Theory since Plato (San Diego and New York: HBJ, 1971); Vincent Leitch et  al., eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, first edition (New York: Norton, 2001); Steven M.  Kahn and Aron Meskin, Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), Joseph J. Tanke and Colin McQuillan, eds., The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2012); Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology, 3rd edition (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

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Index1

A Abrams, M. H., 167, 173, 188, 193, 194n4, 196n25, 197n45, 199n85, 201, 271, 273–277, 279, 282, 290, 303n5, 304n32 Abrams’s categorization, 188 Absolute dichotomy, 241 Abstraction, 299 Abstract thinking, 107 Adams, Hazard, 44, 266n22, 314n4 Adam’s naming of animals, 45 Adequate interpretation, 16 Aestheticians, 272, 313 Aesthetics, 1, 2, 4–8, 10, 12, 15, 77, 126, 201, 237, 252, 265, 272, 280, 281, 286, 297, 309–314 agendas, 24 conceptions, 252 conceptions of art, 239

condition, 261, 263 consciousness, 3, 271, 274 creations, 299 discourses, 11 divide, 10–12, 310 experiences, 309 feelings, 309, 313 form, 302 gap, 131 grounding, 286 horizons, 1, 10, 23, 25, 87, 313 ideal, 15, 237, 238, 240, 242, 244, 246, 262–264, 297 ideal of the divine, 15 ideas, 301 issues, 16 openness, 301, 302 principle, 280, 297 suggestiveness, 302 systems, 250, 251, 309

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. D. Gu, Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics, Chinese Literature and Culture in the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73730-6

333

334 

INDEX

Aesthetics (cont.) theories, 5, 173, 185, 188, 272, 301 thesis, 237 thought, 15, 180, 181, 194, 227, 237, 262, 271, 272, 274–277, 279, 280, 282, 288, 296, 298, 300–302, 310, 311 traditions, 16, 272 values, 312 Affects, 264, 301–302 Affinities, 16, 17, 279, 287 Africa, 1 Agenda, 110 Agent, 116 Age of Enlightenment, 238 Algebraic signs, 29 Algorithm, 151 Allegory, 127n48 Allusion, 162n45 Alphabet, 41, 42, 58, 59, 78, 284 alphabetization, 86 languages, 12, 13, 24, 27, 29–32, 34, 36–38, 43, 58, 61, 62, 70, 77 letters, 43, 66, 121 notation, 38 representations, 37 sign, 44 symbols, 77 systems, 37 turn, 38 word, 67 writings, 70, 75, 82, 85 writing signs, 82 writing systems, 61 Alternative paradigms, 10 Ambivalence, 19n23 America, 311 Ames, Roger, 9, 18n22 Analects of Confucius, 245 Analogical predication, 142 Analogical thinking, 106, 107 Analogies, 263

Analogous association, 149 Analogy, 65, 104, 106, 109, 111, 113, 125, 134, 141–143, 148, 212, 238, 273, 274, 279, 282, 295, 309 Analytic thinking, 8, 157 Anatomy, 294 Ancient Chinese, 26 Ancient Greeks, 293 Ancient semiotics, 84 Ancient writing systems, 36 Annals, 56n49 Anthologies of theory and criticism, 313 Anthropological theory, 4 Antinomy, 149 Antithesis, 4 Aphasia, 78, 310 Aphrodite, 281 Apotheosis, 297 Appellation, 45 Aquinas, Thomas, 242, 243, 266n20 Arabia, 1 Arabic, 311 Arbitrariness of linguistic signs, 47 Arbitrary linguistic signs, 44 Arbitrary nature, 81 Arbitrary nature of the sign, 79 Arbitrary representation, 64 Archetype, 127n48, 281, 282, 289 Architecture, 287 Arch paradigm, 5, 6, 8–10 Ares, 135 Arias, 261 Aristotelian, 202 analogy, 142 analysis, 125 conception, 113 concept of imitation, 216 concept of metaphor, 113 concept of mimesis, 171, 177, 182, 203 mimetic theory, 243

 INDEX 

probability, 225 representation, 169 sense, 285 theory of imitation, 224 theory of mimesis, 275 universals, 204 view, 191, 229 way, 242 Aristotle, 46, 56n52, 62, 88n15, 98, 108, 113, 122, 134–136, 140, 160n8, 171, 173, 186, 191, 194n3, 197n45, 204, 206, 216, 217, 222, 228, 229, 230n16, 242, 244, 256, 266n17, 271, 274, 275 artistic ideals, 188, 281 celebrated notions, 134 conception of metaphor, 135 empirical artistic Ideal, 189 empirical Ideal, 281 formula, 143 idea of mimesis, 179, 190, 228 idea of probability, 222, 227 insight, 135 mimetic conception of poetry, 190 mimetic theory, 228 optimistic view, 242 Poetics, 167, 193, 204 reconception, 191 Arts, 4–6, 10, 12, 13, 194, 204, 229, 237, 242, 244, 250, 256, 260, 261, 264, 273–275, 279–281, 283, 285, 289, 291, 292, 294–299, 301, 302, 310, 312, 313 criticism, 237, 275 of expression, 273 of fiction, 225 forms, 275 of imitation, 225 object, 263 of painting, 244 theorist, 296

335

as unconscious creation, 15 work, 294, 301 Artfulness, 210 Artifice, 9 Artist, 264, 265, 276, 283, 289–293, 296 creation, 15, 237–265, 276, 302 creativity, 238, 255 as a deity, 250–262 divine, 263 as god, 265 ideal, 169, 179, 264 imitation, 188, 191, 193, 228, 241, 281, 283 mind, 260 representation, 238–240, 245, 296 Assimilation, 140 Association, 100, 115, 135 Aucitya (propriety), 312 Auerbach, Eric, 171, 194n5 Aura, 263 Author, 277, 278 Authorial intention, 278 Axial Age, 19n22 B Bacon, Francis, 29, 54n18 Bao Shi (Fu Xi), 173 Barthes, Roland, 52, 138, 158, 162n34, 164n75 Basis of metaphor, 97 Beauty, 3, 7, 144, 198n64, 258, 281, 289, 291, 295–297, 302 beautiful, 295 beautiful images, 284 of form, 295 Being, 23, 281 Belief, 299 Benveniste, Émile, 52 Berkeley, George, 50, 56n62 Berkeley’s conclusion, 50

336 

INDEX

Berkeley’s idealism, 50 Bi, 98, 105, 108, 109, 137–139, 145–147, 149, 152, 155, 156 Bi (comparison), 96 Bi (metaphor), 139 Bias, 9 Bible, 29 Biblical story, 44 Bifa ji (Methods of Painting Strokes), 205 Binary oppositions, 5, 9, 48, 51, 151, 168, 299 Biographia Literaria, 110, 286 Bipolar complementary, 299 Birch, Cyril, 128n61 Bi-xing, 14, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 141, 142, 154, 157–159, 290 Bi-xing images, 153 Biyu, 96 Bizhen (close to the real), 225 Blake, William, 271, 300, 306n83 Bloomfield, Leonard, 62, 88n16 Boileau, Nicolas, 182, 197n62 Boltz, William, 26, 40, 41, 53n11 Boodberg, Peter, 27, 53n15, 59, 79, 88n6 Book of Changes, 97, 107, 170, 173–175, 213, 215, 247–249, 267n37, 284, 290, 291 Book of Songs, 110, 121, 136, 141, 143, 156, 161n31, 245, 274, 275 Bopp, F., 27 Borderline sign, 86 Bosanquet, Bernard, 3–6, 17n6, 271, 303n1 Boyu (comprehensive metaphor), 126 Bridge, 29, 244, 279 Broca’s aphasia, 90n60 Brogan, T.V. F., 198n71 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 98, 149, 162n43 Buck, David, 4, 17n8

Buddhist, 125 Buddhist view, 285 Burns, Robert, 111, 119, 139 Bush, George W. (President), 159 C Cai, Zongxiang, 199n94, 232n69 Cai (talent), 283 Caiqi (inborn talent), 277 Calligraphy, 181, 193, 296 Cang Jie, 36, 42, 63–65, 71, 72, 89n24, 175, 179, 213 Canonical cosmogonies, 251 Cantonese, 41 Cantos, 284 Cao Pi (187–226 AD), 255, 271, 277, 278, 282, 304n13, 304n30, 309, 314n1 Cao Xueqin, 273 Cao Zhi (192–232), 254, 255, 268n69 Carpenter Qing, 257 Cartesian separation, 122 Cassirer, Ernest, 27 Ceative consciousness, 283 Centrality of mimesis, 167, 237 Champallion, 35 Chang, K. C., 9, 18n22 Chang, Kang-I Sun, 311 Character fetishization, 60 Character-making, 31 Characters, 29, 40, 66, 73 Chaves, Jonathan, 19n23 Chen Liangyun, 191, 199n83, 209, 231n26, 247, 267n48 Chen Shih-hsiang, 9, 161n25, 272, 303n3 Chen Wangdao, 130n109 Chen Weizhan, 89n22 Chentuo bi (complementary metaphor), 126 Chicken–egg question, 34

 INDEX 

China, 1–4, 9, 10, 18n22, 29, 40, 168, 171, 177, 201, 227, 271, 273, 274, 311 China and England: the Preindustrial Struggle for Justice in Word and Image, 10 New China, 39 West divide, 279 and West studies, 4, 11, 12 Chinese, 6, 33, 168, 281 academia, 11 aesthetics, 2, 7, 8, 64, 272, 285, 287 aesthetic thought, 182, 185, 193, 227, 237, 286 aesthetic tradition, 11 and Greek ways, 171 and Japanese art, 3 and Western aesthetics, 11 and Western aesthetic thought, 15, 16, 271 and Western conceptions of language, 39 and Western languages, 23, 28 and Western linguists, 33 and Western mimesis, 227, 228 and Western mimetic theories, 230 and Western poetics, 14, 114, 252 and Western thought, 8, 25 and Western traditions, 10, 15–17, 23, 25, 274 and Western writings, 61 and Western writing symbols, 53 art, 10, 193, 296 as a universal language, 29 bi, 107, 108, 110, 112 calligraphy, 75 characters, 28–32, 36, 37, 40, 43, 62, 65, 67, 70, 76–78, 81, 82, 85, 175, 193, 284 civilization, 8, 35 critical discourse, 14

337

critical thought, 2 criticism, 202 cultural legacies, 10 definition of poetry, 276 dictionary, 173 divine, 250, 265 fiction, 223 grammar, 33 history, 7 idea of imitation, 182 idea of natural growth, 192 ideas of mimesis, 168 ideograms, 120 ideograph, 25 ideographism, 61 imagination, 136 immanentist view of bi, 106 language, 5, 12, 34, 37, 39, 44, 62, 85 language and literature, 24 language and writing, 23, 25 language development, 32 language philosophy, 27 language system, 33 legends, 102 linguistics, 32, 48, 51 linguistic sign, 79, 86 linguists, 39 literary theory, 114, 172, 207 literary thought, 14, 192, 202, 224, 226 literature and art, 23 logic, 52 lyric poetry, 208 metaphor, 14, 97, 100, 104, 112, 113, 119, 126, 133, 136, 137 metaphor in poetry, 131 metaphysical theory, 202 metaphysical thinking, 62 metaphysics, 47, 277, 286 mimesis, 218 mimetic theory, 14, 15, 204, 229

338 

INDEX

Chinese (cont.) monism, 185 mythology, 253, 255 nonmetaphoricity, 13, 121 nonmimesis, 6, 168 nonmimetic view of literature, 185 notions of the linguistic sign, 44 parable, 258 philologist, 46 philology, 32 philosophy, 6, 187, 213, 214 philosophy of language, 13, 46 poetic form, 75 poetics, 105, 108, 110, 121, 136, 137, 208–216 poetry, 96–99, 132, 137, 139, 146, 152 religion, 8 science, 7 script, 27, 41, 174 script as ideographic, 31 semiotics, 52 sophistry, 52 speech, 41 system of writing, 29, 30, 41 theories of the sign, 77 theory of imitation, 225 theory of mimesis, 185 theory of semiotics, 49 theory of the sign, 53 thinking, 49 thought, 7, 8, 11, 185, 286 tradition, 8, 273, 274, 278, 285, 296, 312 worldview, 60 writing, 5, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33–42, 57, 58, 61, 69, 79, 83, 86, 176, 193, 284 writing as an ideographic system, 29 writing symbols, 71, 174 writing system, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 43, 64, 74, 82 writing system (wen), 175

written character, 65 written sign, 24, 69, 78, 79, 87 Chinoiseries, 286 Chow, Rey, 5, 17n10, 168, 172, 195n7 Chu, Kwang-Tsien (Zhu Guangqian), 17n13, 303n2 Chuanshen (the divine spirit), 257 Chuanshen (transmitting the spirit), 225 Chuqiu fanlu (The Profuse Dews of the Spring and Autumn Annals), 45 Ci (roughly word), 42 Ci (writings), 285 Ci-poetry, 219 Civilization, 18n22, 59 Class, 17 Classics, 33, 182, 214 Chinese, 32, 33 Chinese aesthetics, 7 Chinese and vernacular Chinese, 32 Chinese language, 134 Chinese poetry, 97, 115, 136 Chinese text, 40 rhetoric, 133 Cleveland, John, 114 Cognition, 50, 68, 134, 160n7, 287 Cognitive model, 145 Cognitive psychology, 81 Cognitive science, 146 Coleridge, S. T., 110, 111, 125, 277–279, 286 Coleridge’s philosophy, 125 Collage, 86 Colonialism, 3, 18n21 Combination, 151 Comedy, 204 Commensurability, 279 Commonality, 16, 17, 263, 310 Common conception, 265 Common denominator, 17, 43, 309, 313

 INDEX 

Common ground, 8, 10, 13, 43, 44, 57, 131, 146–148, 160, 187, 263, 286 Common ground in aesthetic thought, 16 Common grounds, 11, 280 Common language, 39 Communication, 28, 74 Comparative literature, 10 Comparative studies, 7, 11, 12, 313 Comparison, 2, 57, 136, 139, 141, 145, 148, 150, 271 Compatibilities, 4, 15, 23, 105, 109, 112, 136, 265, 272, 301, 309 Complementarity, 299 Complementary bipolarity, 107 Composition, 259 Compound graphs, 64 Computer science, 87 Conceits, 102, 115 Conception, 134 of the artist, 252 of bi, 105 of the indexical signs, 73 of metaphor, 104–106 and uses of metaphor, 13, 98, 131 Concept-script theory, 29 Conceptual divide, 24, 80, 87 Conceptual models, 250 Conceptual thinking, 131, 211 Concretion, 299 Condensation, 80, 150, 151, 156 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 26, 120 Conditions of imitation, 207 Confucian, 125 Confucian canon, 170 Confucian disparagement, 222 Confucianism, 7, 254 Confucian view, 285 Confucius, 44, 208, 248, 252, 291, 312 Connoisseur, 263, 264

339

Connotations, 78, 140, 148, 205, 206, 284, 287 Conscious creations, 293 Conscious imitation, 181 Consciousness, 7, 15, 184, 284, 289, 309 Conscious representation, 208 Conscious signifier, 158 Consensus, 201 Consideration of representability, 151 Contemplation, 289, 292 Content, 278, 296 Contiguity, 111, 138, 150 Contiguous association, 149 Contrast, 150, 273 Contrastive paradigm, 11 Contrastive thinking, 272 Controversies, 10, 13, 25, 26, 39, 57, 58, 61–63 Conventions, 46 Copy, 177, 212 Cornerstone of Chinese linguistics, 47 Cornerstone of Chinese semiotics, 51 Correlation, 83, 146 Correlative cosmology, 121 Correlative thinking, 8, 124, 298 Correspondence between signifier and signified, 45 Cosmogony, 19n23, 251 Cosmology, 8, 19n23, 106, 119, 121–123 Cosmos, 185 Course In General Linguistics, 24, 79 Cowley, Abraham, 114, 116 Craftsmanship, 210, 242 Creations, 124, 134, 156, 260, 261, 265, 273, 281, 283, 292 of artistic work, 237 of arts, 289, 292 creationist model, 250, 251 God, 8, 185, 255, 256 myth, 239 of writing symbols, 63

340 

INDEX

Creativity, 198n76, 265, 282 being, 260 consciousness, 261 deity, 252, 260 energy, 300 force, 296 god, 243, 262 imagination, 265 inspiration, 254 matrix, 146 mind, 261 nature, 302 power, 264, 293 science, 297 spirit, 292, 300 totality, 263 Creator, 244, 259 Creel, Herrlee, 27, 53n15, 59, 79, 88n5 Criticisms, 1, 5, 80, 128n66, 160n15, 197n61, 272–274, 309, 310 critical, 95 critical analysis, 275 critical discourse, 273, 276 critical principle, 189 A Critical Reconsideration of the View of ‘Chinese Lyrical Tradition,’ 303n4 critical theories, 2, 8, 275, 310, 312 critical thinking, 239, 273 critical thought, 275 critical traditions, 274, 275 Critique, 57, 195n8 Cross-cultural studies, 13 Crusade, 159 Culler, Jonathan, 98, 132, 160n1 Culture, 18n21 chauvinism, 8 conventions, 100 experiences, 313 invention, 14 legacy, 6, 10

relativism, 4, 8, 313 traditions, 2, 10, 14, 296 universalism, 8, 313 D Daemonic thinking, 15, 238, 261, 264 Dai Wei-jun, 162n42 Damrosch, David, 1, 17n1 Dan (courage), 283 Dance, 275 Dao, 124, 174, 177–180, 183, 187, 188, 191, 202, 211, 214, 229, 248, 281, 282, 285, 286, 288, 290, 293, 297, 298, 302 Dao (or Taiji), 124 Dao (Tao), 107, 287 Dao as nature, 287 Daode jing, 287 Daode jing (The Way and Its Virtue), 298 Daode jing (The Classic of the Way and Its Power), 177 Daoism, 177 Daoist metaphysics, 302 Daoist thought, 125 Daoxin (the mind of the Dao), 283 Darwin’s theory of evolution, 251 De Man, Paul, 138, 160n15, 182, 198n65 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 24 Dead metaphors, 159 Debasement of Chinese language, 58 Debates, 10, 25, 27, 35, 52, 53n4, 58, 61, 96 Deceptive resemblance, 122 Deconstruction, 134, 299 analysis, 134 criticism, 299 tendency, 299 Deferral, 157 Definition, 276 Definition of indices, 73

 INDEX 

Definition of poetry, 274, 276 DeFrancis, John, 26, 53n10 Deity, 243, 250 Dennis, John, 271, 276, 303n10 Denomination, 134 Denotations, 78, 284, 287 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 27, 28, 52, 54n16, 59, 62, 81, 86, 88n9, 98, 106, 120, 129n85, 146, 147, 156, 162n36, 271, 299, 306n80 différance, 147 idea, 147 language philosophy, 146 theory of différance, 147 Descartes, René, 299 Designation of signs, 44 Desires, 155, 181 Diagram of the Yellow River, 63 Diagrams, 72, 82, 214 Dialectical dualism, 241 Dialectical opposition, 51 Dialectical relationship, 52, 295, 296 Dialectics, 294–301 Dialects, 36, 37 Dialogic relationship, 16 Dialogue, 10, 11, 13, 188, 230, 279, 310–312 Dialogue on aesthetics, 279 Diaphor, 141 Dichotomies, 5–9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 271, 310 Dichotomous paradigm, 272 Dichotomous views, 99 Dichotomy, 13, 96–104, 112, 121–123, 126, 131, 168, 171, 195n8, 208, 229, 240, 242, 297 between metaphor and metonymy, 138 on metaphor, 124 Dickinson, Emily, 101 Diction, 211, 300 Dictionary, 83, 174

341

Dictum, 50, 296 Didacticism, 122 Différance, 147, 157, 162n35 Difference, 2, 4–6, 8–10, 16, 23, 24, 67, 71, 80, 81, 86, 97, 98, 101, 103, 105–108, 110–112, 119, 123, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141, 143, 146–148, 152, 155–157, 160, 163n53, 168, 171, 172, 178, 185, 189, 190, 194, 218–220, 225, 228, 257, 260, 263, 264, 273, 275, 280, 289, 309 Difference between Chinese and European writings, 26 Differential paradigm, 8 Digital communications, 11 Dionysus, 135, 243 Discourse, 52 Discourse analysis, 134, 146 Discourse presentation, 146 Disjunction, 106, 176–181 Disparity, 105, 110, 112 Displacement, 80, 150, 151, 156, 163n53 A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, 30 Dissociation of sensibilities, 284 Distinct dichotomy, 241 Divide, 1–17, 39, 53 Divination, 175, 189, 238 Divine, the, 15, 178, 185–189, 202, 237–250, 254–256, 258–260, 262–265, 281, 282, 291–293, 295 in art, 239, 244, 256, 258, 263 assistance, 259 beings, 8, 265 creation, 15, 239, 240 creativity, 293 Dao, 178, 215 dimension, 204 essence, 282

342 

INDEX

Divine, the (cont.) idea, 282 ideal, 244 inspiration, 242 luminosity, 174, 246, 249, 260, 261, 291 madness, 15, 238, 241, 243, 256, 264, 275, 293 model, 204 model of cosmogony, 252 in nature, 292 One, 280 order, 262, 263 powers, 248–250, 259, 260 principle, 188, 289 quality, 239 realm, 263 skills, 257 spirit, 239, 262, 264 thinking, 15, 237–265 truths, 243 Divinity, 185, 238, 252, 253, 281, 293 Division, 48, 251 Dong Zhongshu, 45, 56n49 Donne, John, 114, 116 Drama, 15, 180, 189–192, 206, 208, 216–219, 227–229, 273, 275 art, 219 criticism, 216–222 imitation, 221 poetry, 217 Dream, 80, 163n52, 253 distortion, 80 dream-content, 163n53 A Dream of Red Mansions, 274 dream-thoughts, 163n52 dream-work, 163n53 formation, 87 of Heaven, 100, 101 images, 80 interpretation, 151

language, 150 scene, 80 Dryden, John, 182 Du Fu, 114, 208, 217, 259, 260 Du Ponceau, Peter S., 30, 31, 34, 35, 40–42, 54n19 Dualisms, 177, 285, 297, 299 Duality, 176–181, 281, 282, 298, 299 Duality of transcendence and immanence, 177 E Earl Miner, 189, 199n87 East, 1, 3, 4, 10, 192, 229, 311 aesthetic feelings, 3 art, 3 art and aesthetics, 3 consciousness of beauty, 3 traditions, 3, 311 and West, 16, 310 and Western art , 4 Economic theory, 311 Economy of representation, 64 Effects, 301–302 Ego, 96 Egyptian hieroglyphics, 35, 36, 120, 284 Eight trigrams, 63, 173, 174, 176, 213, 291 Eisenstein, S. M., 77, 86, 87 Ekstroem, Martin Svensson, 19n23, 121, 123, 129n91 Eliot, T.S., 115, 117, 118, 128n70, 155, 157, 164n70 Eliotian conceits, 117 Eliot’s “objective correlative,” 156 Elucidations of Characters and Words, 64 Empedocles, 135 Empirical exposition, 8 Empiricism, 8, 254

 INDEX 

Empiricist philosophy, 244 Energy, 294 English, 117 English Metaphysical poets, 103, 114 English poetry, 114 English romanticism, 286 English tradition, 279 Entelechy, 251 Entering the divine, 15, 239, 262–264 Entity, 146, 188, 251 Epic, 120, 189, 190, 204, 217, 227, 228, 275 Epic poetry, 217 Epiphor, 141 Epistemic divide, 12 Epistemic ground, 286 Epistemological basis, 7 Epistemological conditions of representation, 210 Epistemological divide, 12 Epistemological foundation, 290 Epistemology, 7, 15, 106, 122, 286, 299, 301 Epistemology of imitation, 206 Equality, 146 Equivalence, 138, 145, 146, 152 Eric Hayot, 311 Essay on the Origin of Languages, 120 Essence, 7, 32, 48, 62, 74, 76, 120, 146, 152, 156, 181, 186, 187, 193, 205, 206, 213, 218, 241–243, 245, 256, 263, 264, 277, 281, 282, 289, 291, 292, 294–301 of things, 242, 291 Eternal idea, 289, 297 Ethics, 7, 19n22 Ethnicity, 17, 121 Ethnocentric criticism, 12 Ethnocentric status quo, 313 Ethnocentrism, 8, 313 Etymology, 108

343

Eugene Ouyang, 126n3 Eurocentric hegemony, 8–9 Eurocentrism, 9 Europe, 2 aesthetic thought, 286 alphabetic languages, 33 art, 3 culture, 7 imaginative constructions of China, 25 languages, 31, 40, 57 Romanticism, 279 theory, 310 tradition, 279 understanding, 28 writing as a phonographic system, 29 writings, 83 Exegeses, 272, 275 Exigency, 299 Existing paradigms, 11 Ex nihilo, 122 Ex nihilo creation, 5, 9 Exotic vision, 26 Expression, 7, 14, 208, 272–274, 276, 278, 284, 291, 294, 296, 297, 299, 300 expressionism, 12, 274, 290–294 expressionist theory, 275 expressive conception of poetry, 228 expressive theories, 167, 218, 228 expressive theory of literature, 290 Extended metaphor, 102 External grammar, 32 F Faithful representation, 208, 218, 224 Fallacy, 35 Fan Wen, 206 Fan Yuanshi, 208 Fancy, 219

344 

INDEX

Fantasy, 53n10, 254 Far East, 39 Father Cibot, 29 Fei, Faye Chunfang, 199n93 “Fenggu” (literally the wind and bone of writing), 294 Feng Menglong, 223, 226 Feng Youlan, 9, 186, 187, 199n80 Feng Shengli, 83, 91n72 Fenollosa, Ernest, 24, 26, 27, 53n6, 59, 75, 86, 193, 199n95 Fertility, 144 Fetishism, 60 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 292, 306n64 Fictions, 15, 167, 180, 191, 192, 204, 206, 208, 216, 222, 223, 229, 252, 273, 274 criticism, 222–227 fictionality, 5, 97, 198n75, 226, 227 truth, 226 truthfulness, 226 Figurative language, 119, 120, 122 Figurative tropes, 9 Figure of speech, 96, 121 Figures of speech, 98, 149 Final xing, 146 First Emperor, 36 First language, 35 Firstness of the icon, 65 First-order imitation, 218 First principle, 124, 293 Fisk, Craig, 196n23, 230n5 Five tastes, 302 Flavor, 302 Fludernik, Monika, 129n82, 161n33, 164n79 Forms, 178, 186, 207, 213, 258, 265, 278, 281, 284, 289, 291, 294–302 formal and spiritual resemblance, 225 formal exposition, 146 formal imitation, 205, 206

formal predication, 136, 140 formal presentation, 151 formal resemblance, 205, 206, 208, 212, 296, 297, 300 forming principle, 281 formlessness, 302 Formula, 118 Formulaic composition, 142 Formulation, 138 Foundations, 15, 31, 48 Foundations of China, 185 Four techniques of dream representation, 80 Frank Lentricchia, 198n70 Frederic Mote, 198n73 Freeman, Donald C., 161n33 Freeman, Margaret H., 161n33 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 78, 80, 87, 91n62, 91n69, 146, 149–151, 163n52, 238 concept of condensation, 151 concept of displacement, 151 dichotomy, 80 idea of “rebus,” 156 psychoanalysis, 138 theory, 147 Frye, Northrop, 171, 265, 269n91 Fu, 156 exposition, 146 exposition or presentation, 146 presentation, 152 rhyme-prose, 191, 206, 207 Fu Xi, 63, 173, 174, 179, 249 imitation, 213 invention, 213 invention of the eight trigrams, 174 Fuller, Michael, 203, 230n11 Full representation, 210 Functions of the brain, 78 Fusion, 16, 262, 264, 287 of aesthetic horizons, 11, 16, 201 of aesthetic visions, 313

 INDEX 

of critical horizons, 16 of horizons, 16, 53 of linguistic horizons, 25 of philosophy and art, 285 Fu-style poetry, 192 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 16, 19n26, 194n5 Gao Heng, 174 Gap, 11, 13, 24, 25, 33, 65, 69, 70, 272, 274 between Chinese and Western writing systems, 24 between Chinese characters and alphabetic writings, 41 between classical and vernacular Chinese, 32 between sense and reference, 132 Gaudier, Henri, 86 Ge Zhaoguang, 175, 196n38 Géfin, László K., 305n39 Generality, 300 General principle, 300 Genesis, 180, 184, 219 Gennette, Gérard, 138, 160n16 Genres, 75, 137, 190, 206, 309 Genuine dialogues, 12 Genze, Luo, 196n30 Geometry, 287, 288 Gestalt, 87 Ghosh, Ranjan, 311, 312, 314n3 Gilbert, Allan H., 128n66 Global aesthetics, 1, 2, 12, 309–314 Globalization, 1, 4, 11, 310, 312 Global theory, 313 Global village, 310 God, 34, 83, 106, 124, 176–178, 185–189, 204, 238, 240–248, 250–256, 258–260, 265, 275, 281, 282, 284, 292, 293

345

of art, 245 couch, 187 creation, 171, 194, 203, 240, 292 goddess, 253, 254, 268n67 goddess of River Xiang, 259 goddess of the river, 255 godlike, 261 of poetry, 245 of thunder, 247 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 15, 125, 261 Gongsun Long, 44, 48–52, 56n59, 186, 187, 199n81 discourse, 51, 52 thesis, 186 Goodness, 7, 292 Grace, 293, 297, 301 Graham, A. C., 9, 18n22 Grammar, 32, 162n43 Grammatology, 54n16, 129n85 Granet, Marcel, 9, 18n22, 33, 142, 161n24 Graphs, 42, 72, 76 conception, 84 formation, 71 graphemes, 42 graph-making methods, 176 graph-making principles, 71–75 notation, 28 principles, 80, 84, 86 quality, 62 GRE analogy, 143 Great Trinity, 289 Great Trinity (heaven, earth, and man), 214 Great Ultimate, 213, 289, 291 Grecian art, 302 Greco-Roman and Judaic-Christian traditions, 43 Greco-Roman conception, 255 Greco-Roman Judaic-Christian West, 172

346 

INDEX

Greece/Greeks, 7, 245, 255 aesthetic thought, 3, 275 art, 302 and Chinese philosophers, 187 conception, 252 culture, 189 epic, 190, 228, 275 invention, 7 logos, 35 mimesis, 203, 204 mythology, 238, 247 thinkers, 46, 242 thought, 119, 201, 238, 281 tradition, 253, 281 Ground, 134, 139, 145, 158 Grounding of Art, 286–302 Growth, 181 Gu Hongming, 9 Gu Jiegang, 161n22 Gu Kaizhi, 205, 225, 239, 271, 296, 312 Gu Ming Dong, 55n28, 88n13, 129n101, 160n13, 304n15, 305n43, 306n87, 312 Guan Yu, 253 Guan Zhong, 266n35 Guangyun (Comprehensive Collection of Rhymes), 84 Guanzi, 63, 246, 271, 281, 282, 304n28 Guhua pinlu (Records of Ancient Paintings), 205 Guiding theory, 71 Guo Moruo, 35 H Hall, David, 9, 18n22 Halle, M., 162n50 Halliwell, Stephen, 167, 169, 194, 194n1, 195n11, 199n96, 230n1 Hamilton, Edith, 247, 265n1, 267n44

Han Kangbo, 187, 246 Hannas, William, 60, 88n10 Hansen, Chad, 27, 53n14, 89n25 Haoran, Meng, 104 Harbsmeier, Christoph, 84, 88n21, 91n74 conclusion, 85 Harmony, 245, 297 Hawkes, Terence, 124, 125, 130n103, 138 He Li (poem), 133 He Zhizhang, 116 Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 9, 18n22, 26, 27, 57, 58, 88n4, 286–287 Hegemonic discourse, 5, 313 Hegemony, 36, 273 Heidegger, Martin, 23, 98, 123, 129n99, 182, 271, 280, 304n22 Helen, 281 Heng, Gao, 196n32 Heraclitus, 123, 280 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 9, 287 Hermeneutic openness, 301 Hermeneutic space, 141, 151, 159 Hermeneutic theory, 16 Hetu, 63 Hexagram images, 107, 176, 209, 291 Hexagrams, 65, 107, 175, 179, 207, 248, 289, 291 Hexagram statements, 107, 290 Hidden metonymy, 153 Hierarchies, 9, 32, 58, 299 Hieroglyphics, 284 language, 35 symbol, 30 writing, 58 Hinakana, 78 History, 4, 309 artifact, 16 historicity, 16 History of Aesthetics, 3

 INDEX 

of ideas, mimesis, 169 of thought, 58 Hogan, Parrick C., 18n21 Höldelin, 182 Holistic thinking, 157 Hollow image, 293 Homer, 238 Homophone, 43 Horace, 274 Horizons, 16, 126 Horizons of Chinese and Western languages, 43 Horizons of representation, 229 Hu Qiguang, 46, 48, 56n53 Hu Shi, 9 Huang, Shouqi, 196n33 Hugo, Victor, 152 Huiyi (grasp-meaning), 72 Huiyi-wen, 77 Humanities, 4, 10, 11, 313 cognition, 50 conception, 50 creations, 287, 289 designation, 51 experience, 17, 309 faculty, 17, 309, 313 humanistic paradigm of fusion, 16, 313 humanly constructed nature of language and writing, 25 human spirit, 254 mind, 188 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 26, 30, 37, 38, 54n20 linguistic study of Chinese, 37 speculations, 39 Humphreys, H., 27 Huntington, Samuel P., 17n12 thesis, 6 Husserl, Edmund, 299 Hymns, 261

347

I Icons, 60, 72, 74–77, 81 feature of Chinese written sign, 85 functions, 75 iconic, 74 iconicity, 169, 173, 174, 209 iconographic writing, 58 iconolatory, 54n15 representation, 71, 75, 176 signs, 72, 78, 174 Ideas, 124, 173, 178, 186, 188, 204, 258, 282, 284, 289, 291, 292, 295–297, 301, 302 of the arbitrary designation of the sign, 46 of beauty, 258 of the divine, 204 of imitation, 170, 171, 189 of mimesis, 14 vital, 300 Ideograms, 29, 35 ideogrammic method, 86, 91n79, 284 idiogrammic method, 77 Ideographs, 26, 27, 35, 41, 46, 58, 59, 66 and alphabetic writing, 26 concept, 39 conception, 40 conception of Chinese, 40 development, 36 fantasy, 26 Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, 25, 53n7 ideographic, 28 ideographism, 61 ideography, 54n15 language, 13, 26, 30, 63 nature, 85; of Chinese writing, 13, 40, 41, 58; of the Chinese written sign, 43

348 

INDEX

Ideographs (cont.) and pictographic view of Chinese writing, 30 primacy, 63 representation, 65, 120 sign, 44, 86 system, 24, 27, 29, 40 system of writing, 24 view, 27, 28, 30, 35, 59, 60, 79; of Chinese, 26, 30; of Chinese writing, 28, 34, 35 and visual primacy, 43 writing, 58 Ideological beliefs, 9 Illusions, 121, 129n92 Illustration, 69 Image, 19n24, 67–69, 97–102, 111, 136, 141, 148, 152, 167, 169, 174, 176, 179, 181, 208, 209, 229, 241, 260, 263, 264, 281, 284, 292, 300, 302 correspondence, 107 imagistic, 74 imitation, 205–208, 216 representations, 120, 206, 208–210, 212 Imagery, 243 Images (xiang), 173 Imagination, 17, 83, 102, 103, 116, 135, 136, 140, 142, 143, 145, 160n7, 179, 237, 253, 255, 262, 276, 278, 302 comparison, 145 representation, 179 space, 262, 264 thinking, 261, 262, 264 Imitations, 7, 14, 45, 71, 79, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175–182, 184, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 202, 204–210, 212–215, 225, 227–229, 240, 242, 244, 273, 275, 280, 281, 290, 291, 294, 299

of actions and events, 191 of the Dao, 214, 215 of the Idea, 191, 215 of ideas, 206 imitator, 278 of life, 223 of nature, 244 of objects, 181 and semantic nature of Chinese writing, 42 of tangible objects, 215 of the universe, 175 Immanence, 169, 172, 177, 194, 204, 243, 282, 297, 298 Immanentism, 106 Immanentist worldliness, 9 Immanent transcendence, 285 Immanent truth, 98 Imperialism, 9 Implied analogy, 141 Implied predication, 144 “In A Station of the Metro,” 141 Incommensurability, 15, 16 Incompatibility, 4–7, 105, 110, 112, 136, 271 Index, 76, 77, 81 functions, 75 nature, 75 representation, 72, 75 signs, 73, 78, 81 India, 1, 18n21, 311 concepts, 312 culture, 9 Indian, 3, 6, 311, 312 Indices, 72, 75, 77 Individuality, 288 Individual mind, 282 Infinitude, 302 Infinity, 302 Inflectional language, 59 Influential theory, 137 Inspirations, 86, 237, 242, 253, 292, 294

 INDEX 

of gods, 237 inspired metaphor or metonymic metaphor, 14, 131 Instinct of imitation, 173, 176 Intellect, 169, 280–282, 284 Intellectual hegemony, 8 Intellectual principle, 281, 283 Intellectual truths, 243 Intelligence, 288 Intention, 244 Intentionality, 16 Internal grammar, 32 International communication, 39 Internationalization of literature, 1 Interpretant, 150 Interpretation, 16, 17, 73, 78, 87, 107, 134, 136, 143, 148, 150, 157 Interpretation of Dreams, 80, 150 Intriguing irony, 256 Intuition, 8 Intuitive signs, 82 Ion, 202, 256 Irony, 8, 193, 255 J Jakobson, Roman, 63, 88n20, 98, 137, 138, 146, 149–152, 156, 160n14, 162n44, 162n48, 163n51 theory, 138 James J. Y. Liu, 170, 174 Japan, 1, 3, 40, 78, 311 alphabets, 78 Japanese, 28, 31, 40, 311 language, 37 writing, 37 writing system, 78 Jiajie (loan-borrowing), 72 Jiang Kui, 312 Jiao Ran, 98 Jiaoran Shi, 256, 268n73

349

Jieyu, 139 Jieyu (borrowed metaphor), 125 Jin Hao (fl. 920), 205 Jing Hao, 231n18 Jiyun (Collection of Rhymes), 84 Johnson, Mark (Dr.), 95, 114, 115, 121, 126n1, 138, 243 Johnson, Samuel, 98, 299 Journal of Asian Studies, 4, 60 Joy of gods, 254 Judaic-Christian concept of God, 287 Judaic-Christian sense, 281 Judgment, 301 Jullien, François, 119, 129n83, 171, 196n22 Justice, 19n24 Juxtaposign, 75–78 Juxtaposition, 76, 77, 80, 107, 114, 136, 141, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151 K Kahn, Steven M., 314n4 Kant, Immanuel, 81 theory, 81 Karlgren, Bernhard, 79, 91n66 Katakana, 78 Keightly, David, 9, 18n22 Kenner, Hugh, 91n79 Kenning, 100 Kinds of imitation, 215 Kircher, Athanase, 27 Klang, 80 Knoblock, John, 56n51 Kong Anguo, 210 Kong Yinda, 108, 156, 312 Kongzi, 266n30, 266n31 Korea, 40 Koreans, 28, 31, 40 Kristeva, Julia, 52, 89n26 Kriya (action), 312 Kung-sun Lung, 187

350 

INDEX

L Lacan, Jacques, 52, 68, 80, 89n33, 138, 146–152, 154, 158, 162n38, 163n56 algorithms, 155 conception, 158 re-conception, 158 Lakoff, George, 95, 121, 126n1, 138, 164n78 Lalita Pandit, 18n21 Lamp, 272–279 Language, 4, 5, 7, 10–13, 23, 42, 95, 193, 289, 309 of arithmetic, 288 function, 83–85 Language and Logic, 91n74 philosophy, 13, 44, 52, 55n30, 57, 61, 62, 87, 119 system, 25, 33, 38, 82 taught by God, 34 theories, 13, 23, 38 use, 134 and writing, 12 Lao Zi, 177 Laokoon, 169 Laozi, 197n48, 271, 287, 298, 302, 312 Laozi (fl. sixth century BC), 208 idea, 187 words, 187 Latin, 39 Latin America, 1 Lau, D. C., 307n89 Law, 292 of literary creation, 260 of nature, 285 of probability, 227 Lawrence, D. H., 224, 233n71 Legacy, 28, 29 Legends, 63, 64, 88n22, 173, 176, 254 Leibniz, G. W., 9, 18n22, 26, 27, 34, 83

Leitch, Vincent, 1, 17n3, 314n4 Lesser, Ruth, 90n59 Lesser creations, 252 Lesser God, 243 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 169 Lewis, Wyndham, 86 idea of vorticism, 87 Lexigraph, 42 Li (principle), 283 Li Bai, 115, 117, 127n33, 140, 158, 159, 161n19 Li He, 100, 101, 103, 115–117 poem, 101 Li Jian, 271, 279, 304n18 Li Shangyin, 115, 117, 118 Li Xin, 208, 231n29 Li Yu, 111, 117 Li Zehou, 254, 268n68 Li Zixiong, 303n4 Li Zongmeng, 98 Liang Qichao, 9, 274 Liang Shi, 17n11, 196n24, 230n6 Liang Shumin, 9 Liang Tingdan, 221, 232n65 Liang Yin, 247 Lianguan bi (chain metaphor), 126 Lianxiang bi (associational metaphor), 126 Lidai ming hua ji (Records of Famous Paintings through the Dynasties), 176, 182 Life-like imitation, 225 Life’s truth, 226 Limitation, 206 Lin Donghai, 130n111 Lingering taste, 302 Lingua franca, 39 Linguist, 32, 36, 49 Linguistics, 32, 45–47, 49, 52, 53n1, 78, 79, 81, 87, 138, 146, 160n14, 164n73 analysis, 85 arbitrariness, 46

 INDEX 

aspects of cognition, conception, and representation, 49 bases, 12 bridge, 39, 40 burden, 58 controversy, 58–61 correspondence, 44 debates, 57 designations, 46 designations by agreement and conventions, 45 differences, 13, 310 divide, 13, 26, 43, 53, 57–87 entity, 41 gap, 25, 28–33, 39–43, 61 idea of arbitrary designation, 45 insights, 47 legacy, 29 Linguistic Investigation of Aphasia: Studies of Disorders of Communication, 90n59 mechanism, 43, 59 phenomena, 48 picture, 45 potentiality, 51 representation, 34 science, 24 sign, 13, 24, 29, 43, 44, 46–48, 52, 53, 57, 61, 66–68, 70–71, 78, 86, 87, 150 Sinologism, 60 study, 49 symbols, 26 syntagms, 76 theories of alphabetic language, 44 theorist, 61 theory, 30, 47, 58, 150 turn, 23 variability, 37 Linguists, 49 Literal fidelity, 9 Literal mimesis, 169

351

Literature, 4–6, 10–13, 184, 194, 215, 282, 289–291, 294, 298, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314n2 analysis, 14 and art, 277, 279 creation, 95, 184, 211, 254, 283, 285, 286, 293 creativity, 253, 278, 282 criticism, 2, 138, 311 expressions, 294 form, 171, 216, 298 Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, 177, 249 of Nature, 216 pneuma, 278 representation, 207 studies, 311 theory, 275, 310 thought, 15, 229, 259 traditions, 311 Liu Dakui, 271, 282, 304n31 Liu Dianjue, 312 Liu Hsieh, 128n52 Liu, James, J. Y., 2, 17n4, 176, 195n15, 201, 202, 230n2, 311, 312, 314n2 Liu Shipei, 70, 89n28 Liu Xie, 15, 44, 98, 108–110, 142, 145, 161n26, 170, 171, 178–181, 184, 188–190, 192, 197n49, 206, 207, 211–215, 231n27, 238, 249, 261, 262, 264, 269n88, 271, 278, 280–283, 285–298, 300, 305n36, 306n59, 312 conception, 215 discourse, 183, 214, 285 dual conception, 184, 216 dual idea, 281 Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, 206 poetics, 179, 215 system, 211

352 

INDEX

Liu Zhiji, 217, 218, 232n54 Liu Zhiji’s idea of mimesis, 218 “Liufa” (the Six Methods of Painting), 205 Living form, 295 Living principle, 291 Logician, 51 Logocentric Western metaphysical tradition, 59 Logocentrism, 31, 79 Logos, 63, 106, 123, 124, 178, 280 Longinus, 113, 271, 274, 277, 279, 301, 304n14, 304n19, 307n88 Lu Ji (261–303), 210, 231n35, 262, 269n89, 271, 278, 312 Wenfu (Rhyme-Prose on Literature), 210 Lukács, Georg, 194n5 Luminosity, 263 Lundbaek, 55n32 Luo Genze, 173 Luo Guanzhong, 223 “Luoshen fu” (Rhyming Prose on the Goddess of River Luo), 254 Luoshu, 63 Lyrics, 120, 207, 277 expression, 7, 12, 138, 168, 171, 191, 229, 271–302 expressionism, 275 and expressive conceptions of literature, 279 poems, 275 poetry, 75, 138, 189–191, 204–208, 217–220, 227–229, 275 thought, 279 tradition, 273 M Ma Jianzhong, 33 Ma Zhiyuan’s (1250?–1324?), 191

Ma Xulun, 73, 74, 76, 90n49 Macrocosm, 175 Mainstream, 180 Makaryk, Irena R., 195n12 Mandarin Chinese, 41, 42 Man’s conscious creativity, 289 Mao Chang, 98 Mao Heng, 98, 108, 121 Mapping, 134, 139, 145, 157 Mapping process, 145 Marvel, Andrew, 153 Marx, Karl, 252, 292 Mason, W. A., 27, 87n2 Material representation, 243 Mathematical symbols, 30 McDonald, Edward, 60, 88n11 McLaughlin, Thomas, 198n70 McQuillan, Colin, 314n4 Meaningful dialogue, 25 Mechanism, 76 Media, 206 Medium, 34, 242 Mei Yingzuo, 84 Mémores concernant les Chinois, 30 Mencius (371 BC–289 BC), 246, 266n36, 271, 282, 312 Meng Chenshun, 220 Meng Chenxun (fl. 1663), 219 Meng Hua, 36, 55n38 Menzi, 304n29 Meskin, Aron, 314n4 Metalanguage, 156 Metaphors, 5, 7, 12–14, 68, 76, 95–100, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 116–119, 121, 125, 126, 127n34, 131–133, 135, 137–139, 143, 145, 146, 149–152, 154–159, 161n33, 162n43, 164n78, 252, 273, 290, 302 approach, 133 daring, 113, 114

 INDEX 

metaphoricity, 96–104, 121, 159 metonymy, 137 process, 143 relationship, 144 strange, 115 substitution, 99 thinking, 133, 157 Truth, 97, 98 in Western poetry, 101 Metaphysics, 4–6, 10–12, 15, 119, 133, 285, 286, 298, 299, 302 conceptions, 251, 310 the Dao, 286 of dialectics, 49 discourse, 246 foundation of metaphor, 119 of metaphor, 99 metaphysicians, 299 mimesis, 169 poets, 115, 117, 157 of presence, 299 principle, 293 sophistry, 50, 52 thinking, 62, 83, 246 thought, 44 Method of imitation, 176 Methodologies, 12 Metonymy, 12, 14, 69, 97, 100, 131, 132, 137, 138, 143, 146, 149–152, 154–157, 290 connection, 154 contiguity, 99 displacement, 154 metaphor, 14, 137 Mibi (riddle metaphor), 126 Microcosm, 175 Middle xing, 146 Mill, John Stuart, 279 Miller, J. Hillis, 311, 314n3 Miller, Roy Andrew, 44, 55n47, 55n48, 312 Millet, Jean-Francois (1814–1875), 70

353

Mimêsis, 183 Mimesis, 5, 12, 14, 15, 167–170, 172, 174, 177, 180, 189–191, 194, 194n1, 201–204, 217, 228, 272–274 art, 241 creation, 180, 211, 215 genesis, 229 idea, 212 instinct, 172–176 mimeticism, 177, 201, 271–302 nature of drama, 220, 222 poetry, 275 principle, 193, 208, 222 representation, 272 school of aesthetic thought, 275 Mimetic theory, 14, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 177, 180, 185, 189, 190, 193, 194, 201, 202, 204–206, 208, 210, 227, 229, 237, 258, 281 in art, 14 of fiction, 224 trend, 212 view of literature, 229 view of literature and art, 15 Min Ouyang, 18n14 Min Ze, 231n24 Mind, 123, 260, 262, 273, 275, 276, 282, 289–291, 298 Mind of literature (wenxin), 283 The mind of the Dao, 283 Miner, Earl, 227, 233n78 Ming (name), 48 Mingyu (transparent metaphor), 125 Minor deity, 252, 265 Miracle, 295 The Mirror and the Lamp, 303n8 Mirrors, 104, 194, 206, 241, 263, 272–279, 282 Mitchell, W. J. T., 67–69, 80, 89n30, 198n70

354 

INDEX

Models, 177, 212, 217, 250, 310, 311 of cosmogony, 251, 252 for metaphor, 158 of metaphor, 14 Mode of artistic expression, 290–291 of expression, 136 of imitation, 220, 284 of representation, 14, 284 of thinking, 271 Modernism, 290 poetry, 141 poets, 114, 117 Modern linguistics, 46, 52 Modern linguistic theories of the sign, 49 Modes of imitation, 216 Modes of thinking, 132, 251, 274 Modes of thinking and expression, 11 Modi, 48 “Moni” (Imitation), 217 Monism, 124 Monograms, 38 Monographs, 38 Monolithic hypothesis of language, 62 Montage, 86, 87 Montesquieu, Baron de, 9 Moral truth, 285 Morphemes, 24, 42 Morris, 3 Mote, Fredrick, 9, 18n22 Mother Nature, 249 Motive for metaphor, 99 Mozi, 44, 56n57 Mozi (Writings of Master Modi), 48 Mu (imitate), 222 Mudanting (the Peony Pavilion), 221 Multivalence, 301 Murry, John Middleton, 98 Muses, 238, 245, 247, 255, 256 Music, 47, 204, 275, 287 Musical pattern, 288

Mutation of signified into signifier, 52 Mythologies, 162n34 Mythology, 247, 286, 292 Myths, 26, 63, 88n22 Myths about the Chinese Language, 88n8 N Names, 45, 46 Naming, 47 Narration, 206, 217, 228, 229 Narrative, 275 fiction, 217 forms, 218 imitation, 225 literature, 224 poems, 208 poetry, 191, 228, 273 representation, 216, 273 National origin, 17 Natural correspondence, 45 between names and objects, 47 between names and things, 44, 47 between sounds and meaning, 47 in cosmology, 44 Natural growth, 123, 180, 184, 215, 229 Natural growth of literature, 213 Natural images, 142 Naturalism, 204 Naturalistic rise of literature and art, 287 Natural language, 34 Natural model, 251 Natural religion, 285 Nature, 12, 23, 45, 72, 74, 78, 108, 138, 142, 143, 167, 170, 173, 176–179, 181–184, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 202, 204, 213, 222, 226, 238, 243, 244, 246, 249, 250, 256, 258–260, 264,

 INDEX 

265, 277, 278, 280–283, 285–289, 291–293, 295–299, 301 Chinese characters, 26, 85 Chinese language, 12, 28, 30 Chinese language and writing, 43 Chinese language and writing in relation, 25 Chinese writing, 26, 37, 58, 81–83 creativity, 288 the divine, 264 drama, 221 European languages, 28 fiction, 223 and function of literature, 285 language, 45, 47 language and writing, 28 unconscious activity, 289 unconscious creativity, 289 of writing, 27 Needham, Joseph, 9, 18n22, 91n74 Nengzhi (signifier), 48, 49 Neo-classical, 273 idea, 182 imitation, 169 period, 182 theories, 202 Neo-Platonism, 279 aesthetician Plotinus’s, 182 conception, 250, 265 neuroscience, 78, 87 new-Platonic idea, 244 philosopher, 280 New Science, 35, 238 “Ni” (imitate), 209 Nodal point, 151, 155 No fixed correspondence between names and realities, 46 Nomenclature, 48 Nonarbitrary representation, 65 Non-European traditions, 279 Nonmetaphoricity, 96, 98, 123 Non-metaphoric use of language, 132

355

Nonmimesis, 5, 168 of Chinese literature, 168 Nonmimetic literary theory, 172 Nonmimetic view of Chinese literature, 186 Nonmimetic view of literature, 185 Nonmimetic views, 171, 203, 208 Non-reality, 51 Non-referent, 51 Non-signifier, 50 Non-truth, 51, 52 Non-Western literary thought, 312 Non-Western theorists, 313 Non-Western traditions, 6 Northern and Southern Drama, 221 Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1, 311 Novels, 217, 226 O Objective correlative, 155 Objective divine, 261–264 Objective essence, 262 Objective representation, 292 Object referent, 51 Objects, 35, 48, 49, 52, 97, 132, 136, 142, 143, 148, 154, 169, 181, 192, 193, 205–207, 209–211, 214–216, 218, 219, 225, 228, 242, 260, 262–264, 290, 300 Obscure poems, 114 Obvious metaphor, 153 Occidentals, 28 Odyssey, 217, 238 Of Grammatology, 91n71 Old style Chinese, 30 One, 280, 281, 283 One (Dao), 281 Onomatopoeia, 46 On the Relation of the Plastic Art to Nature, 306n57 On the Sublime, 307n88

356 

INDEX

Ontology, 15, 106, 286, 301 affinity, 105, 112, 286 of art, 279–286 conditions of literature, 184, 216; spontaneous growth, 211 correspondence, 106 disjunction, 170 dualism, 177 or epistemological basis of mimesis, 169 and epistemological ground, 271 of imitation, 206 Open form, 302 Oppositions, 8–10, 143 between concept and the material aspects of linguistic sign, 48 dichotomy, 26 oppositional, 16 paradigm, 5, 9, 10, 12, 105 Optical analogy, 282 Oral language, 40 Orders of imitation, 240 Organism, 279 form, 278 idealism, 279 organicism, 106, 124, 125 unity, 278, 279 Organizing principle, 84 Orient, 271 aesthetic knowledge, 3 approach, 60 art, 3 languages, 120 mysticism, 271 strain, 59 tradition, 3 Orientations, 59 Origin, 129n87, 171, 175, 277, 297 of art, 275, 276 of the Chinese writing, 63–66 energy, 294

idea, 285 of literary creation, 278 of literature, 275, 291 taste, 302 of the written sign, 63 Other, 30 Ouyang Jian, 47, 48, 56n55 Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), 259, 268n80 Overt predication, 141 Owen, Stephen, 97–99, 106, 126n8, 132, 133, 160n3, 170, 179, 183, 195n17, 203, 230n7, 251, 252, 267n58, 311 P Painter, 259, 296 Paintings, 70–72, 176, 181, 191, 193, 205, 218, 228, 276, 296 Painting theories, 225 Pantheism, 293 Parable, 258 Paradigm, 4, 9, 17, 98, 139, 277 association, 78 function, 26 of fusion, 16–17, 310, 313 shift, 12, 16 Paradox, 19n23, 129n91 Parallelism, 298 Particulars, 299 Passion, 276 Patterns, 42, 64, 120, 171, 207, 214, 289, 291 of the Dao, 290 Peach Blossom Fan, 222 Peirce, C. S., 65, 70, 72–76, 89n38, 150 icon, 85 index, 68 semiotic theory, 264 signs, 76 theory, 71, 75

 INDEX 

theory of the sign, 71, 75 triad, 74, 77 Perception, 134, 263, 264 Perfect forms, 281 Perfection, 294 Persona, 149 Personal, 244 Personal God, 185, 240, 264, 265, 281, 287, 292 of creation, 239 Perspectives, 25, 52, 104, 211 Phaedrus, 125 The Phenomenology of History, 88n4 Philology, 54n25, 56n56 philologist, 35, 44 Philosophy, 6, 7, 18n15, 18n22, 44, 53, 162n36, 193, 298 approach, 132 of art, 3 of the East, 58 foundation, 291 language, 23, 43, 298 philosopher, 47 philosopher of language, 49–50 thought, 48 of writing, 43–53 Phonetics, 42, 64 dimension, 36 phonemes, 24, 38, 42, 81 principle, 84 signs, 46, 66, 67, 69, 71, 87 system, 24, 27, 81 system of writing, 24, 27, 39, 41 writings, 58, 59, 81 Phonocentrism, 30–33, 36, 39, 41, 42, 61, 62, 85 of alphabetic languages, 39 belief, 31 and logocentric views of writing, 28 nature of Western writing, 13 theories, 43 view, 85

357

Phonographs, 35, 43 emphasis, 62 language, 63 nature, 85 phonogram, 76 phonographic, 28 photographic images, 71 Photos, 72 Physical resemblances, 209 Physiology, 295 Pictograms, 26, 46, 59, 65, 69, 70 Pictographs, 42, 64 imitation, 71 language, 26 origin, 86 origins of the characters, 83 pictographic, 27 principle, 70 quality, 39 script, 150–151 writing, 58 Pictorial nature, 24 Pictorial representation, 38, 70, 120 Pictorial turn, 86 Pictorial writings, 74 Picture-like characters, 59 Picture of the Luo River, 63 Picture/word divide, 71–75, 78–80 Pinyin, 39 Plaks, Andrew, 127n48, 171, 195n21, 217, 232n53 Plastic art, 292, 294 Plato, 15, 62, 114, 125, 173, 176, 185–187, 191, 194n2, 196n26, 197n45, 198n79, 202, 204, 206, 228, 229, 230n15, 238, 240–242, 256, 260, 263, 264, 265n2, 266n10, 273, 275, 291, 293, 297, 299, 301 absolute dichotomy, 242 and Aristotle’s conceptions of imitation, 206

358 

INDEX

Plato (cont.) conception, 215, 216 conception of God’s making, 185 conception of imitation, 206 conception of mimesis, 185 derogative view of imitation, 186 Dialogues, 204 divine Idea, 281 divine possession, 256, 264 fable, 186 first principle, 178 idea of divine inspirations, 238 idea of Form, 244 idea of poetic inspirations, 243 Idea or Form, 174 Ideas, 178, 186, 188, 189, 281 Republic, 167 theory of imitation, 191, 228 view, 242 view of art, 214 Platonism, 258, 279, 282 belief, 258 conception, 188 copying of ideal forms, 169 critique, 170 devaluation of art, 243 dichotomy, 242 division, 121 duality, 178 Idea, 177–179, 202, 203, 250, 265, 291 ideal Forms, 204 idea of divine inspiration, 256, 258, 292 idea of mimesis, 171 ideas, 187 imitation, 179 imitation of the Idea, 213 mimesis, 174 mimesis of the Idea, 216 Platonist, 125 sense, 65

tripartite mimetic structure, 177 view, 191, 229 Plotinus, 189, 198n64, 242, 271, 279–284, 286, 301, 304n21, 304n33 discourse, 280 intellectual principle, 283, 286 Pneuma, 205, 253, 259, 282, 295 Poetry, 13–15, 120, 138, 156, 180, 181, 203, 217, 220, 245, 256, 257, 259, 274, 275, 292, 296 art, 239 Chinese, 144 composition, 254, 255, 260 concepts, 312 creations, 145, 180, 246, 252, 261, 264 criticism, 181 exposition, 146 expression, 14, 136 Fancy, 120 genesis, 245 image, 154, 157 imagination, 148 imitation, 182, 225 language, 120, 152 method, 14 mimesis, 205 mind, 273 mode, 290 representation, 59, 120, 134 Poetics, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 63, 95, 96, 105, 106, 109, 120, 137, 146, 152, 164n73, 167, 173, 180, 189–193, 204, 228, 239, 242, 271, 275 Poetics Today, 118 Poetic theories, 4, 277, 284 Poet’s spirit, 262 Political theory, 10, 311 Politics, 4 Polysemy, 301

 INDEX 

Pope, Alexander, 182, 183, 197n61, 218, 232n55, 243 Porter, David, 25, 53n7, 311 Positivism, 279 Postcolonialism, 9, 60 Postmodernism, 290 Post-Platonic aestheticians, 280 Post-structuralist linguistic theory, 51 Pound, Ezra, 24, 26, 27, 59, 75, 77, 86, 87, 115, 137, 141, 161n20, 271, 284 idea of “Image,” 156 The Pound Era, 91n79 Power, 264, 300 Power of nature, 288 Powers, Martin, 10, 19n24, 311 Preconceived interpretation, 100 Predicated assimilation, 143 Predicated comparison, 141 Predication, 134, 139–141, 144, 157, 158 Predication theory, 143 Predicative assimilation, 134, 135, 140 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 303n11 Preminger, Alex, 198n71 Pre-Platonic period, 169 Presence, 299 Presentation, 158 Primacy of sound, 41 Primal God, 256 Primal maker of arts, 255 Primal power, 287 Primal wisdom, 283 Primary signs, 81 Primitive art, 254 Primitive theory, 193 Principle of imitation, 176, 215 Principles, 78–80, 83–86, 138, 140, 151, 152, 156, 168, 169, 172, 174–178, 180, 184, 188, 191, 211, 213–215, 218, 221, 229, 246, 291, 293, 297

359

Print culture, 10 Prior models, 204, 281 Privileged imitation, 181 Process of creation, 251 Pronunciation, 76 Proposed fusion paradigm, 16 Prose, 138, 208, 259, 276 Prototype, 300 Pseudo-dialogues, 311 Psychic juxtaposition, 150, 151 Psychoanalysis, 163n52 Psycholinguistics, 13, 134 process, 145 theories, 149 theorization, 156 theory, 155 transformation, 156 Psychology, 87, 146 Psychology of Tragedy, 6, 17n13 Pu (unadorned), 312 Puett, Michael, 19n23, 198n74 Punctuation, 162n38 Q Qi (object), 178, 277, 282, 293 Qi (pneuma), 282 Qi (vital energy, material force), 277 Qian Zhongshu, 114–116, 128n69 Qin Shihuang, 36 Qing (condition), 283 Qingzhao, 117 Quaint metaphors, 114 Quasi-colonial discourse, 60 Quintessence, 188 Quintessential pneuma, 248, 265 Qulü (The Principles of Drama), 192, 219 Quyu (literally, twisted metaphor), 126 Quyu (tortuous metaphor), 115

360 

INDEX

R Race, 17, 121, 238 Racism, 9 Radical words, 29 Rationale, 45, 81, 109, 131, 134, 157, 188, 194, 208, 209, 225–227, 237, 245, 248, 249, 261, 285 Rationale of signification and representation, 52 Rational principle, 281 Realism, 167, 204 fiction, 138 imitation, 272 mode, 212 Realistic representation, 206 Reality, 51, 151 Reason, 169, 298 Reason-principle, 280 Rebus, 76, 78, 80, 87 Rectification of Names, 46 Reference, 51 Referents, 49–52 Refined arts, 273 Reflections, 287, 301 Refreshing metaphors, 102 Relationships, 49, 99, 104, 107, 120, 121, 124, 137, 140, 141, 143–150, 153–158, 177, 181, 191, 205, 209, 224, 226, 238, 239, 241, 247, 249, 250, 253, 254, 260, 261, 263, 264, 296, 300 Relativism, 4, 17n8 relative thinking, 298 relativist thinking, 298 relativity, 298 Religion, 292 Renaissance, 23, 28, 29, 203, 282, 293 aestheticians, 282 Platonism, 282 Representability, 151 Representation of life, 223

Representations, 7, 12, 14, 17, 50–52, 64, 67, 69, 74, 75, 77, 81, 83, 100, 151, 167, 169, 171, 179, 181–184, 191–194, 198n70, 201, 203, 204, 206–209, 220, 227, 229, 237, 242, 250, 258, 260, 263, 264, 272, 280, 283–285, 292, 296, 297, 309 Repression, 158, 276 Republic, 173, 204 Resemblance, 42, 64, 73, 74, 135, 155, 169, 170, 205, 213, 291 Revelation, 296 Revolution of Fiction, 274 Rey Chou, 312 Reynolds, Joshua, 242, 244, 258, 266n27, 268n76, 299–300 Rhetoric, 12, 126, 133, 160n6 analysis, 139 approach, 139–146 and philosophical approaches, 132 representation, 69, 134, 151 study, 14, 131 Rhyme prose, 207, 253, 254, 268n67 Rhythm, 278 Richards, I. A., 134, 137, 139, 159, 160n6, 164n77 schema, 145 tenor, 145 Richardson, W. J., 123, 129n100 Ricoeur, Paul, 98, 134–138, 140, 160n7, 161n28, 194n5 conception, 142 insight, 142 predication theory, 140 Right principles, 294 Rise of literature, 254 Rivkin, Julie, 314n4 Roetz, Heiner, 19n22 Romanization, 39 Romanize Chinese characters, 39 Romanticism, 125, 273, 275, 290 art, 125

 INDEX 

Bildung, 182 conception, 273 concept of poetry, 276 criticism, 273 expressive theory, 190 poetry, 276 theory, 275, 277 tradition, 274, 279 “Rong” (outward appearance), 209 Rosemont, Henry, 33, 54n27 Rossetti, Christina G., 159, 164n80 Rousseau, J.-J., 26, 27, 58, 88n3, 120, 129n84, 299 Rushen (entering the divine), 257, 263 Russell, Bertrand, 9 Ryan, Michael, 314n4 Ryukyu, 40 S Sadhana (means to let go of ego), 312 Sahita (united together), 312 Sahitya (literature), 312 Sao (southern song), 206 Sasamura, S., 90n59 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 24, 26, 29, 46, 48, 49, 53n1, 56n50, 61, 66–68, 70, 71, 74, 79, 88n14, 146, 147, 150, 151, 158, 162n38 binary opposition, 48 claim, 67 diagram, 66, 67 idea of the arbitrariness of linguistic sign, 46 linguistics, 49 linguistic theory, 146, 151 model, 67, 68 model of the sign, 158 structural linguistics, 138 symbol, 74 theory, 46, 70, 71, 79–80 theory of arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, 48

361

theory of the sign, 75 Saussy, Haun, 19n23, 26, 53n9, 126n3, 195n6, 203, 230n12, 311 Scaliger, J. C., 98, 238, 243, 244, 255, 265n3, 268n70 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1775–1854), 271, 279, 286–302, 305n44, 306n60 Schiller, J.C.F., 125 Schlegel, Friedrich, 27, 125 Schleicher, A., 27 Scholes, Robert, 199n89, 233n79 Schwartz, Benjamin, 9, 18n22 Science and Civilisation in China, 88n21 Sciences, 23, 61, 238, 297 Script, 41, 62 Sculptures, 72, 292 Seboek, T.A., 162n44 Secondary imitation, 181–184 Secondary revision, 151 Second deity, 238, 255 Selection, 150 Self, 261 Semantic dictionaries, 84 Semantic nature of Chinese characters, 37 Semantics, 32 Semantic unit, 42 Semblance of, 184 Semiology, 61, 160n15 Semiotics, 13, 43, 52, 61, 78, 85, 134, 146 analysis, 61, 81 exercise, 52 function, 65 notion of the mutation between signifier and signified, 52 semiosis, 264 theories, 61, 79, 81 understanding of the slippery nature of the sign, 52

362 

INDEX

Sensationalism, 279 Sense, 33 Sense of vision, 28 Separation between script and speech, 41 Serruys, P. L. M., 62, 88n18 Servile imitation, 294 Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, 47 Sexism, 9 Shakespeare, William, 221, 243 Shakespearean sonnet, 101 Shangshu (Book of Documents), 210 Shao Yong (1011–1077), 249 Shape, 33, 48 Shelley, Percey B., 279 Shen Jifei (fl. 1636), 221 Shen Nong (the Divine Farmer), 63 Shen Yue (441–513 AD), 206, 231n21 Shen, 187, 188 Shen (divinity), 187, 188, 245, 247 Shen (the divine or essence), 177, 178, 281, 282 Shenli, 189 Shenli (divine principle), 178, 188, 189, 280, 282, 283, 293 Shensi (spiritual resemblance), 218, 261, 264 Shi Nai’an, 223 Shi (be), 140 Shi (event), 283 Shi (learning), 283 Shi (object), 48 Shih-hsiang Chen, 142 Shijing, 141, 142 Shi Ming (Elucidation of Names), 44 Shi poetry, 207, 219 Shitong (General Principles of History), 217 Shu (writing), 42, 64 Shuangguan bi (punning metaphor), 126

Shuihu zhuan (the Water Margin), 222, 223, 225 Shujing (Book of Document), 266n32 Shuowen jiezi (Elucidations of Characters and Words), 42, 64, 83, 173, 247 Shuowen jiezi (Explication of Characters and Words), 32 Sidney, Philip, 98, 242–244, 266n25 Signatum, 44 Sign combinations, 76 Signification, 26, 49, 51, 52, 68, 74, 77, 81, 143, 148, 151, 152, 154, 156, 158, 162n38, 264 Signified (tenor), 146 Signifieds, 48–52, 66–68, 79, 108, 143, 146, 151, 154, 158, 159, 162n38, 173 Signifier (vehicle), 146 Signifiers, 48–52, 66–68, 108, 143, 146, 151–154, 158–160, 162n38, 173 sliding of the signifier on the chain of signification, 52 Signifying chain, 80, 153, 160 Signifying value, 73 Sign model, 159, 160 Signs, 24, 35, 47, 61, 66, 69, 71–75, 82, 87, 143, 146, 150, 151, 158, 174 system, 75, 81, 83 theories, 66–71 Signums, 44 Sikong Tu (837–908), 108, 260, 268n83 Sikong Tu (c.720–790), 300 Silverman, Kaja, 90n47 Sima Qian, 232n63 Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), 221 Similarities, 16, 108, 116, 138, 140, 150, 152, 187, 218, 257, 264

 INDEX 

Similes, 97, 118, 119, 121, 137, 295 Sinic world, 39 Sinological circles, 85 Sinologism, 60 Sinologism in Language Philosophy: A Critique of the Controversy over Chinese Language, 88n13 Sinologists, 26, 27, 39, 60, 81, 119–121 Six graphic principles, 80 Six principles, 71, 79 Social theory, 311 Song Yu (c. 290 BC–c. 223 BC), 253, 268n67 Songs, 261 Sophistry, 51 Soul, 288, 292–294, 296, 297, 301 Soul of Nature, 292, 297 Sounds, 33, 40, 48, 65, 81, 83, 180 Sounds in linguistic signification, 47 Source of art, 237, 292, 293 of creativity, 293 domain, 134, 145, 157 source-target model, 145 Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 306n77 Space, 67, 156, 157 Special use of language, 132 Speculative theory, 3 Speech, 31, 33–35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 47, 62, 120 Spinoza, Baruch de, 157 Spirits, 192, 213, 214, 218, 220, 223, 245, 248, 254–256, 262, 276, 278, 281, 285, 288, 291, 292, 294–297 being, 288 of the Dao, 285 essence, 193, 240–241, 260, 262, 265, 292–294 likeness, 296

363

of Nature, 291, 294–297 resemblance, 205, 225, 296 spirituality, 281, 289, 294 truths, 243 Spivak, Gayatri, 81 Spoken, 42 Spoken Chinese, 31 Spoken language, 30, 31, 33, 36 Spontaneous creation, 277 Spontaneous genesis, 285 Spontaneous growth, 213, 228 Standardization of Chinese writing system, 36 Sternberg, Meir, 169, 173, 195n14 Stevens, Wallace, 113 Stock phrase, 142 The Story of the Stone, 274 Strabo, 35 Strange conceits, 114 Structural form, 278 Structural linguistics, 62, 63 Style, 126, 160n14, 207, 298 Su Shi, 271, 296 Subjective and objective divine, 261, 263 Subjective divine, 261–264 Subjective perception, 262 Subjective spirit, 262 Subject matter, 190, 219, 228 Subjects, 48, 52, 118, 146, 151, 162n38, 170, 172, 181, 182, 191, 192, 218, 229, 260, 263, 290 The sublime, 279 Sublimity, 118, 277, 279 Substances, 52, 283, 284 Substitution, 100, 134, 150 Substitution tropes, 132 Suggestion, 83 Suggestiveness, 225, 301, 302 Suozhi (signified), 48, 49 Supernatural powers, 265

364 

INDEX

Supreme art, 250 Supreme Being, 247 Supreme creations: qiaoduo tiangong, 259 Supreme God, 253 Supreme painting, 239 Syllables, 42 Symbiosis, 180 Symbiosis of natural growth and imitation, 180 Symbolism, 150, 207, 250, 290 functions, 75 language, 35 markings, 35 presentation, 190, 228 representation, 65, 75 signs, 77, 78 symbolized, 65 symbolizer, 65 Symbols, 38, 65, 67, 72, 74, 76, 77, 81, 87, 89n37, 154, 176, 291 Symphony Suggestiveness in Chinese Literary Thought: Symphony of Metaphysics and Aesthetics, 306n87 Symptom, 155 Synecdoche, 69, 132, 133 approach, 133 representation, 137 Synonymity, 149 Syntactic predication, 136 Syntagmatic associations, 78 Syntax, 126, 139, 151 Synthesis, 141 Systems, 24, 36, 63 of signs, 37 of writing, 69 T Tang Lan, 32, 54n25 Tang Xianzu, 221

Tang Yuming, 89n22 Tanke, Joseph J., 314n4 Tao, 202, 312 Tao Qian, 312 Taoism, 7 Target domain, 134, 145, 157 Tastes, 218, 302 Telecommunications, 1, 71, 312 Teleology, 251 Tenet, 296 Tenors, 103, 108, 109, 111, 116, 134, 139–141, 143, 146–149, 157–159 tenor-vehicle model, 143 Tensions, 103, 105–107, 110–112, 135, 136 Text, 16 Texture, 116 Theme, 24, 212 Theological differences, 263 Theophrastus, 113 Theorems, 283 Theory, 31, 272, 273, 312, 313, 314n4 of art, 286 discourse, 11 of fiction, 223 of imitation, 174 of linguistics, 68 of literature, 2, 170, 202 of mimesis, 274 of painting, 229 of pneuma, 277 of representation, 180 theorizations, 8, 11 Theory of Semiotic Representation, 55n38 Thinking, 8 Thought, 6, 10, 119, 309, 313 Thought-content, 163n53 Tiandu Waichen (fl. 1584), 222 Time, 156, 157 Tong, Q. S., 88n8 Topic of metaphor, 95

 INDEX 

Totality, 251, 262–264 Traditions, 2, 8, 11, 15, 58, 168, 172, 180, 182, 194, 204, 244, 252, 279–281, 301 Tragedy, 6, 204 Trager, George L., 62, 88n17 Transcendence, 5, 18n22, 65, 169, 172, 194, 204, 243, 282, 297, 298 idea, 189, 202, 301 immanence, 279–286, 300 metaphysics, 79 order, 26 principle, 124, 179 reality, 170 signified, 106 spirituality, 9 The transcendental, 290 transcendental Dao, 178 transcendental-immanentist view, 301 transcendentalism, 91n79 Transference, 134, 135 Translation, 134, 265n9 Triad, 281, 283 Trigrams, 64 Trinity, 297 Tropes, 96, 99, 132, 137, 157 True wisdom, 283 Truth, 7, 49, 51, 52, 106, 172, 241, 243, 291 Tsu-lin Mei, 162n45 Tu Wei-ming, 9 Twenty Four Forms of Poetry, 260 Two-way dialogues, 11, 311–313 U Ultimate aesthetic ideal, 239, 260 Ultimate gods, 260 Ultimate maker of arts, 255 Ultimate Supreme, 106 Ulyssess, 217

365

Unconscious, 138, 146, 287, 288 creation, 238, 242, 289 creation of art, 275 creativity, 264, 287–289, 293 signified, 158 source, 292 Undercurrent, 180 Underdeveloped language, 58 Unexpected Affinities: Reading Across Cultures, 10 Unity, 296, 297, 299 of form, 297 of men and gods, 254 Universalism, 17n8 aesthetic ideal, 15 of metaphor, 131 of mimesis, 14 nature, 14 of phonocentrism, 31 quality, 302 theory, 310 theory of art, 6 thought, 14 universality, 125–126, 173–176, 300 universals, 299 values, 10, 11 writing system, 29 written language, 28 Untruth, 49 Uses of metaphor, 96, 103 Utopian, 28, 29 V Value, 6, 34 Variations, 16 Variations of images, 101 Vehicles, 103, 108, 109, 111, 116, 134, 139–141, 143, 145, 147–149, 157–160, 169 Verbal art, 222, 294 Verbal image, 69

366 

INDEX

Verbal representation, 64 Verisimilitude, 205, 208, 221, 223 Vernacular, 33 Chinese, 32, 33 language, 35 Verse, 208 Via philosophia, 132, 133, 143 Via rhetorica, 132, 133 Vico, Giambattista, 26, 34, 35, 55n33, 120, 133, 137, 151, 152, 160n5, 163n55, 238, 265n4 Vietnam, 40 Vietnamese, 28, 31 Views, 301 Vigor, 295 Vincent Shih, 231n36 Visible spirit, 298 Vision, 2, 262, 310 arts, 75, 170, 205, 239 primacy, 40, 83–85 primary, 85 quality, 32 representation, 62, 64, 67, 68, 86 representation of ideas, 38 resemblance, 109 and semantic primacy of the Chinese scripts, 46 sign, 67, 85 signifiers, 71 of world criticism, 314 Voegelin, C. F., 62, 88n19 Void, 285 Voltaire, 9 Vorticism, 86, 91n79 W Wai-Lim Yip, 96, 99, 126n4, 311, 312 Wang Bi (226–249 AD), 199n84, 209, 267n38 Wang Ching-chih, 162n41 Wang Ching-hsien, 142, 161n27

Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692 AD), 181, 217, 312 Wang Jide (?–1623 AD), 192, 219, 232n59 Wang, David, 311 Wang Huaiyi, 303n4 Wang Ning, 311 Warburton, William, 120, 129n89 Warren, Robert Penn, 123 Water Margin, 225, 226 Way of thinking, 238 Webb, John, 34, 55n31 Weber, Max, 9, 18n22 Wei Hong (c. 25–57), 98, 271, 274, 276 Wellek, René, 123 Wen, 42, 64–66, 75, 87, 170, 172, 175, 195n16, 260, 284–287, 298 character or ideograph, 43 of the Dao (pattern of the Dao), 190, 282, 285, 286, 297, 298, 300 graph, 42 ‘literature’, 106 literature, writing, 277 marking, writing, 65 Wenqi (literary pneuma or patterned pneuma), 277, 279, 282 Wenxin diaolong (Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), 170, 211, 280 Wernicke’s aphasia, 91n61 West, 1, 3, 4, 6–10, 14, 44, 65, 108, 117, 168, 170, 182, 189, 192, 201, 203, 218, 227, 229, 238, 250, 252, 254, 265, 273–275, 301 Western, 311 aesthetic ideas, 11 aesthetics, 7, 8, 11, 14, 167, 272, 310 aesthetic thought, 14, 167, 185, 189, 193, 290, 313

 INDEX 

art, 2, 5 civilization, 8 conception of metaphor, 13, 95, 113, 122 cultures, 9 discourses, 11 dualism, 185 epic, 208 grammar, 33 hegemony, 310 idea of mimetic genesis, 192 ideology, 9 imitation/representation, 168 languages, 13, 42 linguistics, 43 linguistic theory, 31, 32 literary thought, 201, 228, 312 literary traditions, 311 Logos, 281 lyricism, 273 metaphorical thinking, 121 metaphoricity, 13 metaphors, 14, 96, 97, 99, 101, 104, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 119, 126, 133, 140 metaphysics, 62, 299 mimesis, 6, 168 mimetic theory, 15, 202, 228 mimetic theory of arts, 185 monologues, 311 mythology, 247 myths, 59 notion of divine inspiration, 245 philosophy, 299 phonocentrism, 61, 62 poetics, 14, 98, 105, 168 poetry, 96, 99, 118 prejudice, 27 responses to China, 26 sign, 25 superiority, 9 theories of language, 13

367

theories of the sign, 71, 77 theorists, 313 theory, 313 theory of the sign, 72 thinkers, 255 thinking, 113 thought, 8, 123, 124 traditions, 8, 272, 273, 301, 309, 311–313 transcendental conception of metaphor, 106 tropes, 137 Western-centric, 1, 313 Western-centrism, 4, 313 Western-style philosophy, 6 worldview, 8, 60 writing systems, 72 What Is Language, 33 Wheelwright, Philip, 119, 139, 161n18 Wilkins, John, 27 Williams, William Carlos, 137 William’s “total metaphor,” 156 Winckelman, Johann J., 302 Wisdom, 238, 283, 284 Wisdom of the artist, 283 Wit, 302 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 23, 30, 54n21, 65, 69, 89n27 Wordsworth, William, 98, 190, 199n88, 228, 271, 275–277, 279, 301 Work of art, 292, 295 World aesthetics, 313 World criticism, 1, 2, 309–314 World literature, 1 The world of art, 216 World of Ideas, 203, 204 World of Nature, 216 World’s languages, 24 World theory, 1, 2, 310, 313 Worldviews, 121 Writer’s mind, 261

368 

INDEX

Writing as absence, 31 Writing graphs, 64 Writings, 5, 12, 24, 31, 33, 35, 38, 64, 66, 179, 289, 290, 309 Writing symbols, 12, 34, 37, 42, 61, 63, 70, 175 Writing systems, 28–30, 34–37, 59, 61, 66, 71, 75, 81, 284 Writing Systems, 53n12, 55n42 Written Character, 53n6 Written characters, 36 Written signs, 13, 24, 25, 43, 46, 61, 66, 71, 74, 79, 85 Written symbols, 31, 42, 75 Wu (non-being), 312 Wu (object), 49 Wu Cheng’en, 312 Wu Daozi, 225 Wu Dashou, 259, 268n82 Wu Mingjiang, 49 “Wuwei” (no taste), 302 Wuwei (tastelessness), 302 X Xi Kang, 47, 48, 56n54 “Xiang” (to draw the image), 209 Xiangxing (imitate-shape), 72 “Xiao” (imitation), 214 Xiaowu (imitating things), 225 Xicizhuan (Appendixes to the Book of Changes, ca. fourth century BC), 174, 175, 187, 207, 209, 246–249, 267n37 Xie He (fl. 490), 205 Xie Zhen, 268n74 Xie Zheng (1495–1575 AD), 181, 257 Xiling Sanren, 192 Xing (literally, stimulus), 98, 136–138, 142, 143, 145–147, 149, 152, 153, 155–157

Xing (metaphor with metonymy), 139, 140 “Xing” (shape), 209 Xing complex, 155 Xing example, 143, 147 Xing image, 148 Xingsheng (shape-and-sound), 72 Xingsi (formal resemblance), 218 Xing with bi, 155 Xing without bi, 155 Xingxiang (formal image), 210 Xu Shen (58–147 BCE), 42, 55n45, 64, 71–74, 76, 83, 84, 89n23, 173–176, 196n28, 196n40, 267n45, 305n41 dictionary, 84, 85 principle, 84 Xu Tongqiang, 33, 55n29 Xuanjiu (original or mysterious wine), 302 Xunzi (c. 313 BC–c. 238 BC), 36, 44, 46, 47, 56n51, 188, 199n86 arbitrary view of linguistic designation, 47 balanced view, 47 Y Yan Can, 155 Yan Fu, 9 Yan Yu, 239, 263, 264, 265n7, 269n90, 312 Yang Dong, 303n4 Yang Shuda, 247, 267n46 Yang Wanli, 312 Yang Xiong, 85 Ye Lang, 7, 8, 18n16, 195n9, 226, 233n76 Ye Xie (1627–1703 AD), 183, 184, 198n67, 216, 232n48, 260, 261, 268n84, 271, 282, 283, 305n37 poetics, 183, 184

 INDEX 

theorizing, 184 view, 184 Ye Zhou (fl. 1594–1625), 223–227 theory of imitation, 225 Yeh, Michelle, 105–108, 112, 122, 127n38, 312 Yellow Emperor, 175, 196n39 Yi (Book of Changes), 249 Yi (the Change), 248, 249 Yijing (idea-realm), 7, 225 Yin and yang, 107, 174, 187, 189, 246, 277 Yingdai bi (metaphor within a metaphor), 126 Yingyu (hidden metaphor), 125 Yiwei (lingering taste), 302 Yixiang (idea-image), 210, 225 Yong, Ren, 19n23, 185, 198n75 You (being), 312 Young, Edward, 218, 232n57 Yu, Anthony C., 311 Yu, Pauline, 98, 103–105, 112, 122, 125, 126n15, 129n93, 132, 133, 160n2, 170, 195n18, 203, 230n8, 311 Yu (analogy), 96 Yuan drama, 220 Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610 AD), 182, 198n66 Yuanshi (The Origin of Poetry), 183, 216 “Yueji” (Records of Music), 302 Yuhuang Dadi (the Great Jade Emperor), 253 Yu-kung Kao, 162n45, 273 Z Zang Moxun (?–1621), 220, 232n62 Zen, 312 Zeus, 238, 247 Zhang Dainian, 267n54

369

Zhang Guanfu, 303n4 Zhang, Longxi, 4, 10, 19n25, 57, 87n1, 126n3, 311, 312 The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics East and West, 87n1 Zhang Shanwen, 196n33 Zhang Yanyuan (815–875 AD), 176, 197n43 Zhang Zao, 182, 183 Zheng Xuan, 98, 108 Zheng Qiao (1103–1162 AD), 176, 197n42 Zheng Qiao (1104–1160), 70, 71, 79, 89n39 Zhi Yu, 98, 100 Zhi (referent), 49 Zhishi (indicate-condition), 72 Zhong Kui, 253 Zhong Rong (468–c. 518 AD), 98, 108, 128n51, 206, 231n22 Zhou Shengya, 130n110 Zhou Zhengfu, 142, 161n23 Zhouyi (the Book of Changes), 124, 174, 175 Zhu Guangqian, 2, 6, 9, 17n5, 17n13, 271 Zhu Xi, 98, 108, 148, 155, 162n40, 164n71 Zhuangzi (369–286 BC), 122, 197n51, 208–209, 238, 257, 265n5, 268n75, 271, 286, 290, 298, 299, 312 parable, 258 writing, 298 Zhuanzhu (interchangeable notation), 72 Zi, 42, 64 Zi (character), 42 Zuozhuan (Zuo Qiuming’s Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals), 209