Book: "Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters" (2)

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

View from the UMD Library

Over two weeks after I got through the first part of Huters' first chapter, I finally return to the second part, "Initial attempts at innovation." I hope this means that the stress of my multiple movements over the past stretch of time has finally begun to settle down. 

In this section, Huters provides a ridiculously wide-ranging overview of "reformulations" of the Confucian tradition in the wake of the Taiping rebellion. He surveys the literary theory of:

• Zeng Guofan, who thought new fields like economics could be adequately addressed by clutching ever more to Confucian texts and the principles therein. That didn't work because it only continues the futile effort to make the Chinese language perform functions that it can at best describe, but Zeng and his conservative contemporaries refused to see that. 
• Liang Qichao, who at least understood that a renewal of language itself was called for, but entertained unrealistic hopes for prose fiction to perform a range of surgeries on a needy society -- it seems Liang's achievement in the end is little more than an adaptation of conservative Confucianism to a faulty model of fiction. 
• Zhang Binglin, who went further than previous writers to investigate what the Chinese language was, and made important philological discoveries (he coined wenxue as a term). But when his investigation verged on a basic denial of the principle that language is purely performative, he took only half measures that fed into the basic proposition of the "national essence" movement: we are Chinese, and have been a long time. Interrogation of the propositions of Chineseness would have amounted to a negation of half of more of Confucian principles, and so this retreat is understandable. 
• Zhang Xuecheng came up with a metatextual method that reduced all writing to historical scholarship; this influenced Lu Xun in his first story, "Diary of a Madman," but is not adequately covered by Huters here. (Not that he hasn't already read more in this chapter than I may have in my whole dissertation!)
• Liu Shipei separated the aesthetic sensibility of the Chinese language from any issues of content, thus running into the problem that Walter Pater faced, that literature has little purpose other than to "withdraw the thoughts for a little while from the mere machinery of life."
• Wang Guowei, following the emphasis on grand unity of human aims elucidated in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, wrote literary criticism that hacked away at Confucian principles more thoroughly than any previous writer, but could not come up with any but abstract ways to inherit the tradition, and was further doubly bound by the pessimism of Schopenhauer's outlook and his own culture's crisis.

Further reading:

1.  Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1966) On Walter Pater, p. 167, as well as an important insight into conservatism, p. 166: "The idea of culture is a general reaction to a general and major change in the conditions of our common life. . . . Particular change will modify an habitual discipline, shift an habitual action. General change, when it has worked itself clear, drives us back on our general designs, which we have to learn to look at again, and as a whole. The working-out of the idea of culture is a slow reach again for control."
2. Charlotte Furth in Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium (1972), on the "national essence" movement.
3. Prusek, "Subjectivism and Individualism in Modern Chinese Literature" (1957)
4. Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber, (1972)
5. 人間詞話 by Wang Guowei, translated by Ching-I Tu (Taipei Chung-hwa, 1972)
6. Review Hu Shi's "Eight Don'ts"
7. Return to Fish and Culler on signs and language...review Jonathan Swift on the subject.