Book: "Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters" (4))

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

Chapter 3, "Qian Zhongshu's Literary Criticism, Linking Past and Present," illuminates my next paper, suggests multiple courses on Chinese literary history and theory, encourages my ideas about paths to classical Chinese poetry, and reassures me that the Chinese tradition and Chinese literature are worthwhile subjects for a lifetime of study. In short, the chapter works for me.

The opening biography of Qian Zhongshu is most helpful for its introduction to Qian Jibo -- Huters read Jibo's 1935 autobiography, and infers that the unabashed conservativism of the father had the multiple effects to be expected of what was once called, in English, "breeding:" good memory, capacity for work, tendency toward contempt in others, and, most important of all, a deep appreciation of tradition.

Huters' overview of Zhongshu's early literary criticism reminds us that sometimes very young men develop voices and insights that surpass intellects much their senior. A review of Zhou Zuoren's Yuanliu lectures demolishes the professor's dichotomy between the expressive (言志) and the didactic (載道) in the Chinese tradition, and identifies in Zhou's love of the late Ming essayists a nostalgia misplaced to embarrassing degree. Qian's own reflections (and perhaps we must not discount his background, the strict hand of the father) lead him a restrictive formalism and a hence a general pessimism regarding the potential of literature for social change -- nay, say even a pessimism regarding social change, full stop: "...the success of a revolution in fact is the failure of a revolution in theory." (157)

Another review that traces the origins of the "familiar style" 家常體 is less pessimistic to the degree that   the Chinese tradition can be remolded to fit the modern sensibility -- Huters here and in many other places uses the word "plastic" to describe this feature of familiar style.

Lake Superior from UM Duluth Library, Sept. 21, 2011

Among the values that Huters is able to implicitly read into still other reviews, as in one of the poetry collection 落日頌, is a vague sense of communality and mysticism, the latter of which, according to Huters, spurred Qian towards new forms of narrative (161). "...[H]is essays and fiction are probably the most successful efforts in modern Chinese literature to simultaneously point out and transcend the limitations imposed by traditional epistemology on representational prose...." (162) Crucial to this critical and story-telling turn is a kind of candor that allows no satisfaction, a candor that requires "the courage," which Qian ascribed to Wu Mi, "to face his own contradictions and deal with them, unlike the other self-satisfied men of his generation."(quoting a letter...to Huters?)

A more complex section follows, in which Huters introduces Tan yi lu, Qian's war-era critical essays. The first essay cajoles readers to see poetry as independent of historicism with a neat appeal to all literature as being of either "Tang" or "Song" type. The argument against historicism is, in Huters' view, a sophisticated elucidation of the performative content of Chinese literature in contradistinction from the modernist attempts to set up constative logic. "Better than saying 'ancient poetry is history' would be to say that 'ancient history is poetry.'" (176, quoting Qian in translation)

Qian had to find some way in which to discuss the predominant writers and critics of the literary tradition and to somehow reconcile the force of their ideas and their long existence with his denial of their validity, without breaking himself off completely from the tradition that they represented. A precarious balance of forces, all in all, and perhaps too much of a load for ordinary expository prose to bear. (180)...Tan yi lu comes close to overcoming this limitation: it succeeds in overcoming many of the evils of neo-Confucian literary criticism and goes far to stretch the resources of, at least, the literary language in the direction of a viable mode of self-expression, but if finally cannot do anything to provide the representational elements needed for a new literature. (182)

...the new literature in spite of foreign debts contracted and foreign influences submitted, is at its best as homemade, as racy, as the Old Literature. l’influence ne crée rien : elle éveille. (183) [the French quotes Gide's "The Influence of Literature on Society"]

A final segment introduces a positive-themed overview of the Chinese tradition published in the Chinese Year Book of 1944-45, which apparently has notes on the function of satire in Chinese:

There is no novel of pure humor in Chinese, but a good deal of social satire..., but the Chinese satirists glide off the surface and never probe into the essential rottenness of human nature. They accept the traditional values, social and moral, believe what they regard as unfortunate backsliding from probity and decorum. They lack that clear-sighted and dry-eyed misanthropy which understands that "the best of men are but men at the best." Just as the Chinese dramatists have no sense of "tragic justice," so the Chinese satirists also lack that terrible saeva indignatio which like fire can purify the filth it touches.  (185, quoting Qian's own English)

 The Latin phrase above is on the grave of Jonathan Swift: See an article titled "The Uses of Saeva Indignatio"]