Book: "Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters" (5)

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

Chapter 4, "Creative Work" presents a neat exposition of the problems of prose style and the reasons for studying such problems via a fascinating set of theoretical readings, and ending with a short reading of "Lu Xun style" and the story "Kong Yiji" as a meditation on the problems of the Chinese language and the crisis in Chinese culture. That's just the chapter opener!

Section two presents, first, a reading of Qian Zhongshu's 1937 essay "Tan jiao you" (Discussing friendship) that illumines his careful, yet playful approach to prose style, including especially the key term che dan, or che dan fa, which Huters coins to describe Qian's deliberate underpinning of strong propositions. This important gesture is at work, explains Huters, throughout the essays in 寫在人生邊.

"Discussing friendship's" prose is also marked by parallelism and substitution, such as: "In lovers although one wants new ones to maintain interest, in friends one still considers old ones best." Furthermore, the last sentence of the paragraph composes a trope that is constantly to reappear: after steadfastly holding to the superiority of friends over lovers through so many sentences, Qian summarizes by saging, "this of course, cannot be generalized, it depends on what sort of friends you have." This sort of paradoxical construction is also characteristic of seventeenth-century European prose; as Fish analyzes a similar construction of Bacon's:

if anything is being clarified here, it is the extent to which the confidently proferred pronouncement of the first sentence does not hold up under close scrutiny; and, moreover, the reader's experience of that clarification is somewhat chastening, since it involves the debunking of something he had accepted without question.[Quoting from Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature

This device, which I shall call the che dan fa 扯淡法 (nonsense or "making light" method, so called becase Qian the fictional narrator often has one of his characters end a tense scene by che-dan, or making a joke out of the situation) is only the sure marker of a transition in the essays. It signals not a logical transition within a developing theme, but simply the wrapping up of one discussion so that a new one can be broached. It often equilibrates two contrasting features of one issue, in mimicry of the traditional essay. But unlike the traditional essay, the equilibration in this case is purely negative: the two features are equated only in the sense that neither is left standing.

Huters subsequent commentary on this collection takes the form of a thick translation of the 6th such essay -- would that I had seen this passage years ago, and so given myself a proper passage to imitate. (If I am a graduate professor in the future, I shall instruct students at the beginning of their programs to break down relevant PhD dissertations, as I have done here, so late in my PhD career.).

A final section to this 70-page chapter gives short readings of Qian's four stories in Humans, Beasts, Ghosts. I remember that Edward Gunn, in his review of the book version of the dissertation, said Huters underplays the positives in the stories; this, I suppose is where my paper finds room to exist. Barely!