Epilogue

SINCE THIS BOOK is intended to be an open-ended enquiry, the interpretive process itself being conceived of as an open-ended spiral, there can be no real conclusion. Nonetheless, it may be useful to recapitulate a few points made in the preceding pages, and to clarify my position regarding certain questions that have recently been raised by some scholars about a “common poetics.” Further, I wish to discuss briefly the relation between “interlingual criticism” and “comparative literature,” and to indicate tentative plans for future work. In this way, the autobiographical note struck in the introduction may find an echo toward the end.

The conceptual framework suggested in the first chapter, illustrated (however inadequately) by the tetradic circle provides, I hope, a paradigm by which any theory of literature or poetics can be analyzed. It also serves as a reminder that one should keep in mind all four elements involved in a literary work of art, namely, world, author, work, and reader. Such a reminder may be necessary in view of recent trends toward reader-oriented theories of literature and poetics, which are welcome reactions against earlier tendencies to regard the literary work of art as an isolated object and to treat a literary text as if it were fixed once for all; yet, in discussing readers’ responses to a literary work of art one should not forget that the work could not have come into being without an author and that the author could not have existed in a vacuum but must have lived in a world, which must have something in common with the reader’s world. To read a poem is not to discover an object, but to have an intersubjective experience, and in order to have a valid intersubjective experience one needs to know something about the author’s cultural world. This attitude does not lead to positive historicism or total historical relativism, but to an awareness of both the author’s and the reader’s own historicity, an awareness that should, paradoxically, enable one to transcend historical and cultural barriers and to plunge imaginatively into another world. That is all I mean by “transhistoricism” and “transculturism”: not the attainment of some universal and transcendent realm above all historical periods and human cultures, but the crossing of boundaries, just as “Trans World Airlines” does not transport us to some supraterrestrial sphere but simply allows us to cross geographical and political boundaries.

The above remarks betray my sympathy with Etièmble, who has been criticized for his belief in “invariables littéraires” by D. W. Fokkema in the latter’s article “New Strategies in the Comparative Study of Literature and Their Application to Contemporary Chinese Literature.”¹ Even though certain artistic elements in a literary work may not be received as such by certain readers in a given society at a given moment in history, this should not prevent us from attempting to identify them and see if they are to be found in works belonging to more than one age, or culture, or society. A search for such artistic elements and aesthetic effects could lead to a genuinely comparative poetics, if not a common poetics.

A. Owen Aldridge, both in his article “East-West Relations: Universal Literature, Yes; Common Poetics, No”² and in his introduction to the volume China and the West: Comparative Literature Studies,³ offers some sobering thoughts on the indiscriminate application of modern Western critical methods to Chinese literature, and argues against the possibility of a common poetics by pointing out that Western criticism is not monolithic. Likewise, André Lefevere deplores the current situation in Western criticism: “What we witness is not the development of a scientific discipline, but a battle between conflicting ideologies.”⁴ With these sentiments I heartily agree, and when I speak of a “synthesis of Chinese and Western theories of literature,” of course I do not mean a grand synthesis of all Chinese and Western theories, but only one of some elements of certain Chinese theories and some elements of certain Western ones.

The reason why I advocate synthesis rather than pluralism or eclecticism, as does Aldridge, who believes that “it is possible both to consider critical pluralism superior to dogmatic absolutism and to admit the value of eclecticism, both as an abstract principle and as a critical approach,”⁵ is that I believe that consistency is one of the five cardinal virtues to which a critic should aspire (the other four being breadth, depth, rigor, and originality). One cannot, for instance, be a structuralist one moment and a phenomenologist the next. As far as an individual critic’s work is concerned, synthesis is not only desirable but necessary. Even where all critics are concerned, pluralism should not be equated with the abandonment of all standards and the misguided application of the principle of democracy to intellectual endeavors, to the effect that all theories of literature and all critical approaches are created equal. Some current Western critical methods are of dubious value when applied to Chinese literature and contain an inherent danger of not seeing the tree for the woods, or in other words, of not seeing the unique qualities of a literary work of art but only seeing the common thematic, generic, or structural features it shares with other works in the same language or in other languages. My wish to search for artistic and aesthetic qualities that transcend linguistic, cultural, and historical barriers has not blinded me to this danger.

Next, I should like to clarify what I believe to be the relation between “interlingual criticism” and “comparative literature.” When I wrote, “The application of modern Western approaches to Chinese literature implicitly involves a comparative dimension,”⁶ I did so not to defend such applications as a legitimate branch of comparative literature, as Aldridge thought, but rather to hint at the fact that as soon as one uses such Western terms as “metaphor,” “motif,” “genre,” or even “poetry,” one is implicitly comparing Chinese literature with Western literature and raising the question whether these terms have the same meanings when applied to Chinese works. Thus, anyone who writes in one language about literature that it is written in another language is perforce a comparativist to some extent. Indeed, one might say that some are born comparativists, some achieve comparativity, and some have comparativity thrust upon them. As an interlingual critic, I am less concerned about the question whether interlingual criticism should be accepted as part of comparative literature than the question whether comparativists should pay more attention to problems of interlingual criticism, instead of assuming that one can discuss literature without taking into due consideration the language in which the work concerned is written and the language in which oneself is writing. I can see no way for anyone writing in English about Chinese literature to avoid asking comparative questions. Even the use of the word “literature” itself begs the question: is what we call “literature” in English the same as what is called wen in Chinese? The question cannot be solved, as some critics think, by saying that “literature” is simply what a community decides to treat as such, for the question immediately arises as to who constitutes the community that decides what literature is. In dealing with traditional Chinese writings, are we talking about the community of the author’s own time, or contemporary Chinese readers, or contemporary Western readers? Even in a single society, such as the contemporary society in the U.S.A., how should we define the literary community: the literary establishment of the East Coast, or professors of literature, or the editors and readers of such popular magazines as Time and Reader’s Digest, all of whom have rather different notions as to what “literature” is? Every interlingual critic has to try to answer the question for himself.

I should further emphasize that when I mentioned the “tacit assumptions that comparable features and qualities exist between Chinese and Western literatures and that comparable standards are applicable to both,”⁷ I certainly did not intend to endorse such assumptions but to question them. In fact, the present book is largely a result of this questioning. On the other hand, inveterate optimist that I am, I still think it possible to explore common areas between Chinese and Western poetry and poetics.

One such area that I am currently interested in is the poetics of paradox, by which I do not mean Cleanth Brooks’s well-known theory that the language of paradox is the language of poetry, but rather the poetics based on the paradox of language: it is the indispensable medium of artistic expression for the poet, yet poets for centuries, both in China and in the West, have complained that ultimate reality cannot be fully expressed in language. This paradox of language is further compounded by the paradox of art, which is both more real and less real than reality. And when it comes to literary criticism, yet another paradox is involved: the literary critic, unlike the music critic or art critic, has to use the same medium, language, as the artist whom he dares to criticize, thus suffering from the same limitations of the medium itself, as the poet and critic Lu Ji realized over sixteen centuries ago. However, I must not anticipate my next book.