5

The Critic as Arbiter

BY “ARBITER” here I do not mean arbiter elegantiae but one who makes value judgments on literary works. As already suggested in the introduction, interpretation necessarily entails evaluation, because the cognition of a work of art always involves value judgment, as theorists from Kant to Wellek and Hirsch have pointed out. Since I have neither the competence nor the inclination to discuss problems of axiology on the theoretical level, I shall simply try to answer the practical question: by what, and whose, criteria should an interlingual critic evaluate a Chinese poem? By the author’s own, if these are known? By those of the author’s contemporaries? By those of later Chinese critics? And if so, which ones? By those of our contemporaries in China? By those of some school of modern Western criticism? And if so, which? The critic can choose from the same set of possible attitudes as mentioned in the preceding chapter, but there is no need to go over all of them again one by one, for the arguments advanced against historicism, presentism, Sinocentrism, Eurocentrism, and extreme relativism with regard to interpretation can also apply to evaluation. However, there is one attitude, the kind of cultural relativism advocated by D. W. Fokkema, that deserves some consideration. Fokkema defined “cultural relativism” as follows:

by cultural relativism one might understand an approach, which interprets the literary-historical phenomena of a certain period within a certain cultural area and evaluates them on the basis of the norms and against the background of that period and that cultural area, and which further compares the different value systems underlying the various periods and cultural areas.¹

This is certainly an unobjectionable attitude, but one cannot help wondering what happens after the critic has compared the different value systems. Would he not have to choose among them? And how would the knowledge that these different value systems are relative help him in dealing with an individual work or author? I am afraid that, as Wellek put it, “there is simply no way of avoiding judgment by us, by myself.”² However, this does not mean that all value judgments are purely subjective and arbitrary. It is possible, I believe, to aim at transcultural and transhistorical evaluation, which does not mean the establishment and application of any single, universal, absolute, and inflexible criterion or set of criteria, but the search for poetically valuable qualities that are not limited to any particular language, or culture, or period. And by “poetically valuable qualities” I do not mean anything as vague as “organic unity,” or “significant form,” or “tension,” but qualities that can be demonstrated as contributing to the success of the work as a whole. I should further make clear that I am using the term “poetically valuable qualities” to include both what Ingarden calls “artistic value qualities” and “aesthetic value qualities.” Ingarden makes a distinction between “artistic value” and “aesthetic value”: the former “is something which arises in the work of art itself and has its existential ground in that”; the latter “is something which manifests itself only in the aesthetic object and at a particular moment which determines the character of the whole.”³ As examples of artistic value qualities, he mentions such qualities as “clarity” and “order,” and as examples of aesthetic value qualities, he mentions “pathetic,” “sublime,” “witty,” “interesting,” “boring,” and others.⁴ Although I recognize the validity of the distinction between “artistic values” and “aesthetic values” and that between “artistic value qualities” and “aesthetic value qualities” in theory, I am not maintaining the distinction in practice, for the following reasons.

In the first place, certain qualities that are relevant to artistic values, such as “clarity,” “obscurity,” “simplicity,” and “complexity,” are by no means universally positive qualities but may be either positive or negative in value, depending on the work in which they are present and the part they play in it. Second, it is difficult to draw a strict line between “artistic value qualities” and “aesthetic value qualities” in practice. For example, if, in talking about a poem, we say, “the tonal pattern is perfect,” or “this is a false rhyme,” we are talking about its “artistic value qualities,” but as soon as we say, “the tonal pattern has an exhilarating effect,” we are talking about its “aesthetic value qualities.” Furthermore, aesthetic value qualities such as “interesting” and “boring” can have no objective criteria: what is “boring” to some readers may be “exciting” to others. Basically, the distinction between “artistic values” and “aesthetic values” and that between “artistic value qualities” and “aesthetic value qualities” are derived from the distinction between “work of art” and “aesthetic object.” The former exists independently of any observer, although in a potential state, whereas the latter only comes into existence when perceived by an observer. The distinction is necessary for analytical purposes, but in practice it is difficult to talk about a poem as a “work of art” without at the same time talking about it as an “aesthetic object,” since one can only know the poem qua “work of art” through one’s own concretization of it qua “aesthetic object,” However, I realize that it is possible to recognize the artistic value qualities of a work without liking it. In this connection it is useful to consider Mikel Dufrenne’s distinction between “taste” and “tastes.” According to Dufrenne, to have “taste” means “to possess the capacity of judgment which is beyond prejudice and partisanship,” whereas to have “tastes” means to have arbitrary preferences.⁵ To avoid confusion, perhaps we can write the former with a capital T as “Taste,” and the latter as “tastes,” or call the former “discrimination” and the latter “preference.” I would not go as far as Dufrenne, who asserted that “to have taste is to have no tastes,”⁶ for surely even the most discriminating critic is still entitled to have his personal preferences. To me the distinction between “Taste” and “tastes” is that the former refers to the ability to distinguish between what is good and what is bad among things of the same kind, and the latter refers to preference of one kind of thing to another. Take cuisine as an illustration. One cannot argue whether Chinese cuisine or French cuisine is superior, and one has every right to prefer either, but a gourmet should be able to distinguish between superior and inferior Chinese cooking or between superior and inferior French cooking. What is more, between superior Chinese cuisine and superior French cuisine there are qualities in common, which can be discussed in terms of balance, temperature, timing, texture, and so on, and there are qualities that are desirable irrespective of the style of cooking: for example, meat should be tender rather than tough, deep fried food should be crisp rather than soggy, soup should be either hot or cold rather than lukewarm, and so on. A critic of poetry should have Taste, but this does not stop him having personal tastes. He should be able to recognize artistic values even if he does not enjoy them personally. It is comparable to recognizing a person’s physical beauty without feeling sexually attracted.

One should also realize that the artistic and aesthetic values of a poem are not to be confused with its possible emotional impact on a reader. The critic should describe qualities that are artistically and aesthetically valuable in a poem, not his own mental state induced by reading it. To say that a poem is “deeply moving” or that “it moved me to tears” is not to prove its artistic and aesthetic excellence, since one can be moved to tears by a child’s scribbles saying “I miss you,” which does not prove that the child has written a good poem. Nor is it sufficient to recognize, as R. G. Collingwood pointed out, that a work of art expresses emotions rather than arouses them,⁷ for there are other effective ways of expressing emotions than artistic ones. To kiss someone is perhaps a more effective way of expressing one’s love than to write a love poem, and to slap someone on the face is at least as effective a way of expressing one’s anger as writing a satire. When we say that a poem is “moving” or that it makes us feel certain emotions such as anger or pity, what we really mean is that it makes us feel as if we were experiencing such emotions, or, in other words, it makes us imagine that we are undergoing such emotions. To fail to distinguish between actually experiencing certain emotions and imagining them is to behave like the legendary old lady who, while watching the final scene of Hamlet, loudly warned the Prince that Laertes’ sword was poisoned.

Two other qualities that have often been taken as universal criteria for poetic excellence but in fact cannot be so taken are “originality” and “sincerity.” Modern critics, both Western ones and Chinese ones influenced by Western literary criticism, are especially prone to use the former as a criterion, and Chinese critics rooted in traditional criticism are especially prone to use the latter. Let us consider “originality” first.

To begin with, “originality” should not be confused with “creativity.” The former means doing something that has never been done before or doing it in a way that has never been done before, whereas the latter means producing something that did not exist before. Thus, if I write a poem that is not identical with any previously existing poem, then my poem is “creative,” even if the words, images, rhythms, and so on in the poem are quite conventional and not original. Modern critics tend to regard “originality” in the sense of “novelty” as a sure indication of artistic excellence, under the mistaken notion that only what is “original” is truly “creative.” In fact, originality is not synonymous with excellence. It is perfectly possible to produce something totally original but artistically and aesthetically valueless. For instance, I could write a line that nobody has written before, such as shan shan shan shan shan (“mountain, mountain, mountain, mountain, mountain”), which would be truly original, but would it be good poetry? Of course, such a line could become good poetry if given an appropriate context, like Shakespeare’s “No, no, no, no” or “Never, never, never, never, never” in King Lear, but that is not the point at issue.

Second, as T. S. Eliot remarked, “in poetry there is no such thing as complete originality owing nothing to the past.”⁸ This is particularly true with regard to classical Chinese poetry, which has had a long tradition and has been written by poets deeply conscious of that tradition, even if some of them rebelled against it. In classical Chinese poetry, we cannot expect to find absolute originality, but originality of a kind that I have elsewhere called “kaleidoscopic,”⁹ in the sense that the words, phrases, images, and the like in a poem may be conventional, but the pattern that emerges from the way the poet has combined them is different from any previously existing one.

Traditional Chinese poets and critics had different opinions about originality. Some advocated originality and warned against clichés. To mention the two most famous examples: Du Fu wrote, “If my words do not astonish people, I would not stop even after death,”¹⁰ and Han Yu wrote, “Stale words must be removed.”¹¹ Among later critics, Zhao Yi (1727-1814) praised Du Fu, Han Yu, and other poets for their originality in syntax, verse form, or prosody, and emphasized novelty instead of imitation of ancient poets.¹² In contrast, poets and critics whom I have called “archaists,” such as Huang Tingjian (1045-1105), advocated imitating earlier poets and observing prosodic rules.¹³ Actually, the disputes between the archaists and their opponents often centered on the question of individuality rather than originality. Those who opposed archaism, such as the Yuan brothers of the Gongan School, namely, Yuan Zongdao (1560-1600), Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610), and Yuan Zhongdao (1570-1623), insisted that one should express one’s own personality in writing and speak with one’s own voice, rather than that one should write in a totally original manner.¹⁴ Once we realize the distinction between “originality” and “individuality,” we shall no longer feel obliged to regard the former as a sine qua non of good poetry or to consider the lack of originality as equivalent to the absence of individuality. I do not mean that originality is of no importance in the evaluation of poetry, only that it is not an absolute criterion.

If an “original” poem is not necessarily a good one, by the same token a poem that is “imitative” or “derivative” is not ipso facto a bad one, but should be judged on its own merits, whether the poet was consciously imitating an earlier poet or unconsciously “echoing” an earlier one. Consider the following poem:

This poem was included by Li Bi (1159-1222)¹⁵ in his annotated edition of the collected poems of Wang Anshi (1021-86) and accepted as Wang’s work by later editors and commentators.¹⁶ However, in 1957 Qian Zhongshu (Ch’ien Chung-shu), in the introduction to his Annotated Selections of Song Poetry (Song shi xuanzhu), pointed out that the poem was really by the Buddhist monk Xianzhong, and Wang only inscribed it on a wall.¹⁷ Li Bi also pointed out the similarity of this poem to another poem by He Zhu (1063-1120) and quoted an apocryphal anecdote about Wang’s supposed admiration of He’s poem. But Qian Zhongshu argued that He Zhu’s poem in question was written three years after he had lamented Wang Anshi’s death, so Wang could not possibly have seen it.¹⁸ On the other hand, since we are not certain that He Zhu knew the poem by Monk Xianzhong, we shall not discuss the question whether the former was influenced by the latter. Instead, we shall compare Xianzhong’s poem with a much earlier one, by Wang Wei:

It should be explained that “whistle” (xiao) is associated with Taoist breath-control exercises and does not have the same connotations as the word “whistle” does in modern English, and that the word xiang, which sometimes means “mutually,” here simply indicates that the verb zhao (“shine”) has an unidentified object.

It is obvious that even the title of Monk Xianzhong’s poem is reminiscent of Wang Wei’s,²⁰ and this could hardly be a coincidence, since Wang’s poem has always been extremely well known. However, I believe that Xianzhong was not copying Wang Wei in a mechanical fashion, nor was he trying to forget, and make his reader forget, Wang Wei’s poem. He was writing his own poem with Wang Wei’s poem at the back of his mind, and he knew that when his reader should recall Wang’s poem, which he almost inevitably would, it would add a further dimension to the present poem, not diminish it. If Xianzhong’s poem is less satisfactory than Wang Wei’s, it is not because it is imitative or derivative, but because it is less concise and less free from self-consciousness. Compare the last lines of the two poems: whereas Wang Wei simply says, “The bright moon comes to shine on one,” Xianzhong says, “I myself [or “naturally,” the word zi meaning both “self” and “naturally”] have the spring wind to sweep the door for [me].” The use of the words zi and wei (“for”) suggests a self-conscious relationship with Nature, whereas Wang Wei’s poem presents a world in which Self is totally absorbed in Nature. One can argue that a totally unselfconscious attitude to Nature is not necessarily the most desirable attitude, but that is not the point at issue. The point is that Xianzhong was presumably trying to present the same kind of world and attitude to Nature that Wang Wei did, and was less successful. Another poet with a different attitude to Nature should, of course, be judged on other grounds.

While we are still on the subject of originality, I may add that the question of originality or innovation assumes greater importance when we are assessing a poet’s position in literary history than when we are evaluating his poetry synchronically against the works of other poets of different periods. A poet like Shen Yue (441-513), who initiated prosodic rules that led to the establishment of Regulated Verse, is obviously more important in literary history than as a poet in his own right, side by side with the major Tang poets. This is but another confirmation of the distinction between literary history and literary criticism. However, I certainly do not wish to divorce literary criticism from literary history or scholarship. In fact, I think the separation of “literary criticism” from “literary scholarship” is unfortunate, since a critic without scholarship is a dilettante, and a scholar without critical discernment is a hack. All I wish to suggest is that one should be aware of which role one is playing at a given moment.

To turn to “sincerity”: this has often been used as a criterion for evaluating poetry by critics who hold expressive views of literature, both Chinese and Western, both ancient and modern. Two underlying assumptions can be discerned here: first, that emotional impact is equivalent to poetic excellence, and second, that in order to produce the emotional impact, the author must feel the emotion himself. The first assumption we have already seen to be untrue. The second assumption, which in Western criticism was neatly summed up by Horace’s formulation “si vis me flere, dolendum est / Primum ipsi tibi” (“If you would have me weep, you must first show grief yourself”) and echoed by others, as M. H. Abrams has shown,²¹ is actually no more tenable than the first assumption. For one thing, we have no independent sources of information to prove or disprove whether a poet really felt the emotion that he professes to feel in a poem. Even when we do have what may seem to be independent sources of information, such as the poet’s own letters and journals or those of his relatives and friends, these still cannot be used as evidence of his sincerity or insincerity. The letter from Li Shangyin to his future patron that I quoted in chapter 2 can help us understand the poem written about the same time,²² but cannot prove the poet’s sincerity in the poem, for he could have been just as insincere in the letter as in the poem. To use a Western example: the case of Pushkin mentioned by Victor Erlich is instructive.²³ While idealizing a certain Mrs. K. in a poem, Pushkin was writing about her in almost obscene terms in a letter to a friend; yet the letter does not necessarily prove that the poem is insincere, only that Pushkin was following different conventions when writing in different genres. Similarly, when Ouyang Xiu (1007-72) wrote official history or formal essays on political and philosophical subjects, he adopted a high moral tone, but when he wrote lyrics (ci), he adopted a romantic and at times even erotic tone.²⁴ This does not prove that he was either a moral hypocrite or an insincere lover; he was simply playing different roles. The fact is that when we say that a poet is “sincere,” we really mean that he is convincing, which only goes to show how good a writer he is, just as the would-be dreamer I invented in chapter 1 is convincing to the extent of his ability to describe his dream. Thus, to use sincerity of emotion as a criterion for poetic excellence is to put the cart before the horse, for it is artistic skill that produces the impression of sincerity, not sincerity that produces artistic excellence.

We have seen that qualities that may seem to be poetically valuable, such as clarity and complexity, are not necessarily so. Conversely, qualities that may seem to be neutral may turn out to be axiologically relevant. For example, it would be absurd to claim that a pentasyllabic Quatrain is necessarily superior to a heptasyllabic one, yet in the case of Wang Wei’s poem compared with Monk Xianzhong’s, the fact that the former is a pentasyllabic Quatrain and therefore more concise and implicit, whereas the latter is a heptasyllabic one and therefore less concise and more explicit, is not irrelevant to the relative poetic values of the two poems. To give another example: one cannot attach positive poetic values to any particular phonemes or combination of phonemes, but when a poet uses a sequence of words that combine certain phonemes with certain semantic and syntactic structures, the result is highly relevant to the question of the poem’s artistic and aesthetic values.

The above discussions should not lead to the conclusion that there can be no criterion or guideline in evaluating poetry, for though we cannot single out any one quality as the universal criterion for excellence in poetry, we can still, following the general conception of poetry described in chapter 1, identify and analyze qualities that contribute to the poem’s success as a poem, or in other words, qualities that help the poem fulfil its artistic function. It is possible to demonstrate how the linguistic structure of a poem enables it to yield a unique world and to satisfy our creative impulse vicariously. This means we can evaluate a poem not according to some arbitrary and rigid criteria but according to a general guideline based on the conception of poetry as the overlapping of linguistic structure and artistic function, the latter being conceived of as extension of reality through the creation (on the author’s part) and re-creation (on the reader’s part) of imaginary worlds, and satisfaction of the creative impulse for both author and reader.

It should be obvious that this conception of poetry does not limit “poetic” values to strictly aesthetic ones, since “extension of reality” is considered an essential part of the artistic function of poetry. In asking how far a poem extends the reader’s perception of reality and what kind of world it yields, we are raising questions of extra-aesthetic values. The world of a poem may be happy or sad, pleasant or horrible, but it cannot be considered valuable if it is trivial or superficial, and as soon as we talk about “triviality” or “superficiality,” we are talking about extra-aesthetic values. Nonetheless, aesthetic values and extra-aesthetic values should not be confused. Even a dogmatic critic committed to a certain ideology must admit that two literary works that are equally sound in ideology may not be equally good as literature, and the superiority of the one over the other can only be attributed to superior artistic/aesthetic values. As a human being, every reader or critic has the right to object to a poem on moral, political, social, or personal grounds, but no right to say it is a bad poem on the same grounds, just as a man has the right to refuse to have sexual relations with a beautiful woman because he knows she has V.D., but no right to say she is not beautiful because of it.

To return from the ridiculous to the sublime or at least serious: it may be true that, as E. D. Hirsch has argued, the so-called intrinsic study of literature is really the aesthetic study of literature and no more intrinsic to the nature of literature than any other approach.²⁵ However, I still think, as does Hirsch himself, that this is the most fruitful and rewarding approach, because it focuses on the literary work itself, without necessarily neglecting its relations to the world, the author, and the reader, whereas some other approaches tend to lead the reader further and further away from the literary work and more and more into realms of sweeping generalizations about anthropology, psychology, history, linguistics, and what not. To be sure, these are all valuable academic disciplines and branches of human knowledge, but if one is primarily interested in one of these, why should one choose to be a literary critic?

It is perhaps necessary to reaffirm one’s belief in the value of literature and that of literary criticism, when there is so much trendish talk about “deconstructioning” literary texts, about the nonexistence of literature, and about the impossibility of interpretaion. Even such an acute critic as George Steiner, whom I greatly admire and with whose views I generally agree, in his recent article “Critic/Reader,” while arguing against current negative trends, gratuitously emphasizes the “parasitic” nature of criticism because it is ontologically posterior to art.²⁶ There is no need to do so, for if criticism is parasitic because it is ontologically posterior to art, then zoology is parasitic because it is ontologically posterior to animals. And the fact that literary critics do not know, or cannot agree about, what exactly literature is should be no more cause for despair than that biologists do not know, or cannot agree about, what exactly life is, and physicists do not know, or cannot agree about, what exactly the physical universe is. However, whereas physicists can happily argue about “quarks” and “gluons” among themselves, literary critics who indulge in their own critical “metalanguages,” which are in fact nothing but jargon (or at most “sublanguages,” since they still follow the linguistic rules of some “natural language”), will soon find few, if any, willing to listen.