4

The Critic as Interpreter

THE IMPORTANCE of interlingual interpretation can hardly be exaggerated. A moment’s reflection will make one realize that some, if not most, of the world’s most influential books, such as the Bible, Buddhist sutras, the Confucian Canon, and the works of Marx, Lenin, Freud, and Mao, have been known to innumerable readers only through translations and interlingual interpretations. With regard to purely literary works, all modern studies of classical and medieval European literature are written in languages other than those in which the works studied were written. And how many English-speaking readers are able to read Homer, Dante, Goethe, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Camus, to mention but a few, all in the original languages? Yet these authors undoubtedly form part of the literary consciousness and experience of every literate reader whose native language is English. In recent years, many readers have also become aware of, if not familiar with, such masterpieces of Asian literature as The Tale of Genji and Dream of the Red Chamber (more accurately, A Red Mansion Dream, also known as The Story of the Stone). As far as Chinese poetry is concerned, it is too optimistic to hope that the majority of English-speaking readers will ever learn to read Chinese; therefore, interpretations in English of Chinese poetry will continue to be needed. Indeed, demands for such interpretations will increase if interest in things Chinese continues to grow. Now, interpretation is, of course, a critic’s main task. Some would even say that it is his only task, but, as I have indicated before, interpretation necessarily entails evaluation, and a critic has to undertake both tasks. However, in the present chapter we shall concern ourselves only with some problems of interpretation that a critic writing in English about Chinese poetry has to face.

The problems of interpretation facing an intralingual critic are formidable enough; they become doubly so for the interlingual critic, since to the problems due to differences between historical periods are added those due to cultural and linguistic differences. The interlingual critic has to make a decision as to what basic attitude he should take toward such differences, and the decision will determine the kind of interpretation that he will offer. It is not an easy decision to make, for even within a single cultural and literary tradition there can be conflicting schools of hermeneutics. In the Western tradition, as Peter Szondi demonstrated, there was a conflict between the historico-philological and the allegorical schools of hermeneutics.¹ In China, a similar conflict existed during the Qing (Ch’ing) period (1644-1911) between the so-called Han and Song (Sung) schools of Confucian scholarship, the former emphasizing philology and textual criticism, the latter philosophical and often allegorical interpretation. In recent times, various schools of criticism, such as the Freudian and the archetypal, can be considered modern variations of the allegorical school. Marxist criticism presents something of a paradox: to the extent that Marxist critics interpret literary works by referring to the socioeconomic and political environments in which these were produced, their interpretations are historicist, yet when Marxist critics adopt a normative attitude toward the literature of the past, they are antihistoricist, as D. W. Fokkema has pointed out.² In fact, the choice that the critic has to make is not a simple one between historicism and its antithesis, but one among several possible attitudes, for there are various alternatives to historicism: presentism, historical relativism, perspectivism, and transhistoricism. With regard to the interpretation of Chinese literature, the critic has a similar set of attitudes to choose from: Sinocentrism, Eurocentrism, cultural relativism, cultural perspectivism, and transculturism. By the way, I am avoiding the term “cultural chauvinism” or “ethnocentrism,” so that the critic’s own cultural and ethnic identity need not be called into question.

The problem about historicism and its various alternatives is complicated by two factors: first, there is some confusion in terminology, and second, disputes about historicism involve both interpretation and evaluation. With regard to terminology, “historicism” is confused with “historical relativism.” For instance, Erich Auerbach, in defending historicism and criticizing René Wellek, used the two terms interchangeably, and, what is more surprising, apparently equated both with “perspectivism” when he wrote, “it is wrong to believe that historical relativism or perspectivism makes us incapable of evaluating and judging the work of art, that it leads to arbitrary eclecticism. . . . Historicism is not eclecticism. . . .”³ Yet it was against the very “perspectivism” espoused by Wellek that Auerbach was arguing! Wellek in his rejoinder to Auerbach likewise made no distinction between “historicism” and “historical relativism.”⁴ Let us attempt to clarify these and the other terms mentioned above and consider the attitudes these terms denote. Since we are at present concerned only with interpretation and not with evaluation, we shall limit our discussion to the former.

By “historicism” I refer to the attitude that in order to interpret a literary work one must mentally go back to the age in which it was written, and that a work must be interpreted in relation to its historical environment and in terms of the intellectual climate or Zeitgeist of its own time.⁵ There are some critics, both Chinese and Western, who hold such a historicist attitude. While I can sympathize with their annoyance at anachronisms, false etymologies, and wilful or unwitting distortions of Chinese poetry, and while I share their exasperation at English-speaking readers who prefer their Confucius Pounded, compounded, and confounded, I cannot agree with the historicists all the way, even though my earlier suggestion that in reading one should suspend one’s own normal assumptions and beliefs and adopt those of the author or speaker may have led the reader to expect me to be in favor of historicism. Where I differ from the historicists should become clear as our discussion proceeds.

When historicism is applied to the interpretation of Chinese poetry, it naturally becomes concomitant with one form of Sinocentrism. According to this historicist-Sinocentric attitude, we must interpret a poem as the author’s contemporary readers presumably would have interpreted it. This leads to several difficulties. In the first place, it is notorious in literary history, Chinese or Western, that an author may be misunderstood by his contemporaries and better understood by posterity. Second, it is questionable whether one can really read a poem as the author’s contemporaries would have. At least one cannot prove that this is the way they would have read it. Of course, no one denies the necessity of relevant historical knowledge. As Wellek pointed out, no reputable New Critic ever rejected historical knowledge, even though they were antihistoricist.⁶ However, to know about a historical period is not the same as having the consciousness of a person who lived in that period. When I said that one should suspend one’s own assumptions and beliefs and adopt the author’s or speaker’s, I did not mean that one should stay in that situation. The momentary suspension is necessary for understanding, but is not sufficient for interpretation. Now, any reader acquainted with hermeneutics would immediately sense the presence of the hermeneutical circle, which I shall deal with later. For the present, let me reiterate that we need historical knowledge and imagination to enter the world created by the author in his work, but having done so we need to come back to our own world. Even such an avowed historicist as Roy Harvey Pearce recognized that the world realized for us by a literary work is not the real past world that existed but a possible world that could have existed.⁷

Diametrically opposed to historicism is “presentism” or “presenticentrism,”⁸ according to which a literary work should be interpreted from the point of view of the present. Applied to Chinese poetry, presentism can be concomitant either with Sinocentrism or with Eurocentrism. Presentist-Sinocentrism is aptly summed up by the dictum “Let the past serve the present, let the foreign serve the Chinese” (gu wei jin yong, yang wei zhong yong). This also leads to some difficulties. Even if we are willing to accept anachronisms and distortions, and follow our colleagues in China, we cannot always be sure what the current orthodox interpretation of a work may be, or what it will be tomorrow, since orthodox interpretations may change overnight. For example, during the Anti-Confucius campaign, Li Shangyin was praised as an anti-Confucian Legalist. Now that this campaign is over, presumably Li Shangyin need no longer be called a Legalist.

When presentism is concomitant with Eurocentrism, then Chinese literature is interpreted from a modern Western point of view, and in terms of Western genres, conventions, and literary movements. Although few critics have openly proclaimed this attitude, as J. D. Frodsham did,⁹ many have, consciously or otherwise, adopted it in practice, when they have used such terms as “comedy,” “plot,” or “romanticism.” It is this attitude that led critics to deplore the absence of epic and tragedy in Chinese and to lament the “limitations of Chinese fiction.” Underlying this attitude is the assumption that the same categories, norms, and conventions apply to both Western and Chinese literature, and that both may therefore be interpreted the same way. Hence we find Freudian, archetypal, and semiotic interpretations of Chinese poetry. I am not totally opposed to the application of modern Western critical methods to Chinese poetry; after all, I was one of the first to try it. What I am pleading for is a judicious examination of the degree of applicability of any critical method to Chinese poetry, as well as it’s potential fruitfulness. It is possible to write a long analysis of a Chinese poem without making any factual errors but without shedding any light on it either. Also, terminology should be carefully examined before being applied to Chinese literature. For instance, what are sometimes called “archetypes” have not been demonstrated to be universal in all human cultures, but only common in Chinese literature; they should therefore be called cultural constants or common topoi rather than “archetypes.”

Historical relativism, as I understand it, refers to the attitude that there can be no absolute criteria for validity in interpretation and that each age can interpret a literary work in its own terms and from its own point of view. Historical relativism differs from both historicism and presentism in that it does not claim privileged status for the interpretation of any given age. When this attitude is applied to interlingual and intercultural interpretation, then it can be called cultural relativism. This concept of cultural relativism is not quite the same as D. W. Fokkema’s, which is more concerned with evaluation than interpretation and will therefore be discussed in the next chapter. Meanwhile, I wish to point out that although historical relativism is preferable to dogmatic historicism or presentism, it is still not satisfactory, for its amounts to saying, “Your guess is as good as mine,” in which case all interpretations are equally valid or invalid. Indeed, the extreme form of relativism is what E. D. Hirsch has called “cognitive atheism,”¹⁰ according to which no one can really understand the past, and all interpretations are “fiction” in disguise. This suicidal attitude, fashionable though it may be in certain circles, is clearly untenable, as suggested by the very fact that those who hold such an attitude still bother to write, just as the fact that Sartre bothered to write the play Huis Clos to show the impossibility of interpersonal communication belies the thesis of the play.

Next we shall consider “perspectivism,” which is the name given by René Wellek to his belief that in interpreting a literary work one should refer to the values of its own time as well as those of all subsequent periods.¹¹ Wellek has argued against historicism in these terms: “Asking us to interpret Hamlet only in terms of what the very hypothetical views of Shakespeare or his audience were is asking us to forget three hundred years of history. It prohibits us to use the insights of a Goethe or a Coleridge, it impoverishes a work which has attracted and accumulated meanings in the course of history.”¹² This is admirably said. However, as D. W. Fokkema realized, perspectivism assumes a linear development of literature in a given culture but will raise problems if applied to intercultural interpretation.¹³ Theoretically, we could develop a kind of “cultural perspectivism,” which would take into account not only what native critics have said about a literary work but also what non-native critics have said. As a matter of fact, something of this sort has been practiced for some time; I refer to the fact that some Western scholars of Chinese literature have relied heavily on the opinions of Japanese scholars, so much so that a Chinese critic writing in English about Chinese literature will be taken to task for failing to mention all the Japanese works on the subject, although it seems unlikely that if an American or English critic were to write in Chinese about Shakespeare he would be taken to task for failing to mention A. W. Schlegel, W. H. Clemen, M. M. Morozov, and Jan Kott. Anyway, unless and until we have works on Chinese literature in all the major languages of the world, it is unrealistic to speak of cultural perspectivism.

In the light of the above discussion, I see no alternative to transhistoricism and transculturism, by which I do not mean the discovery of absolute and unchanging principles but the search for common denominators, namely, literary features, qualities, functions, and effects that transcend historical and cultural differences. Such common denominators must exist, for otherwise no interpretation would be possible. My belief in the possibility of transhistorical and transcultural interpretation is ultimately based on the simple fact that all authors and readers are human beings who inhabit the same planet earth. To deny the possibility of transhistorical and transcultural interpretation is to be content with living in an isolated here and now, cut off from history and the rest of humanity.

Although Wellek did not use the terms “transhistoricism” and “transculturism,” his basic stand appears similar, for he declares:

There is a common humanity which makes every art remote in time and place, and originally serving functions quite different from aesthetic contemplation, accessible and enjoyable to us. We have risen above the limitations of traditional Western taste—the parochialism and relativism of such taste—into a realm if not of absolute then of universal art.¹⁴

One can further argue that transhistorical and transcultural interpretation is possible because, as Paul Ricoeur has shown, once discourse is written down, it transcends the original dialogical situation and acquires a certain degree of semantic autonomy and is therefore intelligible to any competent reader.¹⁵ This statement does not contradict the suggestion I made in chapter 2 that the reader “re-means” what the author meant, because there is a dialectic relation between authorial meaning and textual meaning (or between “utterer’s meaning” and “utterance’s meaning” in Ricoeur’s terminology), and between langue and parole.¹⁶ The textual meaning is the result of the author’s act of meaning, since it is the author who chooses the words and puts them together in a particular way. But as soon as the words are written, they function in relation to each other as part of the system of the language as a whole (langue), and the author cannot arbitrarily make words mean whatever he wishes, pace Humpty Dumpty. Thus a competent reader, relying on his knowledge of the language as langue, can understand the textual meaning, thereby repeating the author’s act of meaning as parole.

My belief in the possibility of transhistorical and transcultural interpretation is further confirmed from an unexpected quarter: Hans Robert Jauss, writing on “The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature,” remarks that consciousness of the otherness of the world of medieval literature cannot in itself be the absolute goal of understanding, and continues: “In passing through the surprise of otherness, its possible meaning for us must be sought: the question of a significance which reaches further historically, which surpasses the original communicative situation, must be posed.”¹⁷ If the world of medieval European literature seems “other” to a modern Western reader, how much more so must be the world of classical Chinese poetry! Yet despite this otherness, Chinese poetry can be made meaningful and significant to a modern Western reader, and it is the task of the interlingual critic as interpreter to do so.

Some of the various attitudes mentioned above can be reconciled to some extent if we recognize two stages of interpretation: the first stage mainly concerned with the explication of the “meaning” of a poem, the second with the demonstration of “significance.” Although I do not agree with E. D. Hirsch that “meaning” is an intentional object, I still think the distinction between “meaning” and “significance” as summed up by him a useful one: “Meaning is that which is represented by a text: it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sequence of signs; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning, and a person, or a conception, or indeed anything imaginable.”¹⁸ In his earlier book, Validity in Interpretation, Hirsch limited the concern of “interpretation” strictly to “meaning,” while relegating the concern with “significance” to what he then called “criticism,” but in his later book, The Aims of Interpretation, he appears to have accepted the concern with significance as part of interpretation, for he writes,

The public side of interpretation—the ars explicandi—is obviously not a monolithic enterprise. It includes not only what biblical scholars have called interpretatio, but also what they have traditionally called applicatio (significance). Interpretation includes both functions whenever it answers both the question, What does this text mean?, and also the question, What use or value does it have: how is its meaning applied to me, to us, in our particular situation? . . . The chief value of interpretation is found in this applicatio, not in pure interpretatio alone.¹⁹

My “first stage” of interpretation, then, corresponds to interpretatio, and my “second stage” to applicatio. In interpreting a Chinese poem, during the first stage of interpretation, the interlingual critic is concerned with explaining what he believes the author meant by the words of the poem. To do so he needs all the historical and philological knowledge he can get, for he has to explain not only the semantic, syntactic, prosodic, rhetorical, and stylistic features of the poem but also historical and literary allusions and cultural backgrounds. He has to show how a poet, who had to take into account not only linguistic rules but also literary conventions, performed his individual act of meaning and creating. Of course, a poet may transcend linguistic and literary conventions, but he cannot totally ignore them. It is the critic’s task to demonstrate how a poet has observed, or modified, or transcended the linguistic and literary conventions of his day to create an imaginary world in a linguistic structure. Further, the critic needs to display this world in all its “otherness” to his own reader, and to do this he needs to be familiar with the cultural world in which the world of the poem was born. I hope that by now it is clear that I am not antihistorical or ahistorical, but simply wish to go a step beyond historicism.

On the other hand, the critic also needs to show his reader how, in spite of its apparent “otherness,” the world of a Chinese poem does have something in common with the reader’s own world. It is the critic’s duty to point out and enlarge the area of intersection between the world of the poem and that of the reader; for I believe that we read poetry in order to understand better the world we live in and to enrich our lives, but we do not live in order to read poetry. The modern Western reader of Chinese poetry, whether in the original or in translation, should be made aware that Chinese poetry is not an exotic object, of antiquarian interest only, but something alive that has important things to say to him about the world in which he lives. Unlike some Western Sinologists who apparently think that classical Chinese poetry should be treated like King Tut’s treasures, to be kept in a museum and admired from a distance but not touched, I wish Chinese poetry to be read, handled, and loved as a living presence.

During the second stage of interpretation, it is legitimate, I think, to use modern terminology, of which the original author had no knowledge. This does not constitute anachronism, of which I have been accused, for it is one thing to attribute to an ancient author ideas and beliefs that he could not possibly have entertained, but quite another to describe in one’s own terms what he wrote. For instance, it would be anachronistic to say that Du Fu had “democratic” or “antifeudal” ideas, for even though he expressed indignation at social injustice and political corruption, he did not question the whole political system under which he lived. However, it would not be anachronistic to say that Li He expressed feelings that we would now characterize as “paranoiac,” even though he could not have known the term, just as it would not be anachronistic to say Sima Xiangru suffered from diabetes, even though he could not have known the term. If we had to interpret an ancient author in the terminology of his own time, then we would have to describe the measurements of a Zhou bronze vessel not in centimeters or inches but in Zhou chi. As a matter of fact, interpretation by its very nature entails “translating” (even if in the same language) an author’s terms into different terms. Otherwise all interpretations would be either impossible or tautological. I once heard (from whom I cannot recall) that when T. S. Eliot was asked what he meant by “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree,” he replied by simply repeating the line. Now Eliot the poet had the privilege to do so, but Eliot the critic could hardly have, let alone any critic who is not also a major poet in his own right.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I hasten to add that in justifying the use of modern terminology in the interpretation of classical Chinese poetry, I am not condoning the practice of reading into Chinese poems wildly improbable ideas and ubiquitous Freudian symbols. Freudian interpretations, often based on false etymology and farfetched associations of ideas, tell us more about the obsessions of the interpreters than the texts they are supposed to interpret. The same is true, to a lesser extent perhaps, of allegorical interpretations. I do not deny that there was an allegorical tradition in Confucian hermeneutics, or that Chinese poets sometimes did write allegorically, but it is absurd to interpret every poem as political or moral allegory. Even if a poet did have an allegorical meaning in mind, we can still interpret the significance of the poem in universal and symbolic terms rather than local and allegorical terms. Or, to borrow Dante’s terminology, we may interpret a poem on the allegorical (i.e., worldly symbolic) level or the anagogical (i.e., other-worldly) level, rather than on the tropological (i.e., personal and moral) level. For example, Li Shangyin’s famous couplet

has been interpreted allegorically as a prophetic reference to the fall of the Tang dynasty. Apart from the question whether the poet really was a political prophet, it is surely permissible to read the couplet as an expression of universal truths: that the awareness that something beautiful will soon vanish heightens one’s perception of its beauty and one’s enjoyment of it, that the extreme of joy leads to sorrow, that all beauty is transient in this world. This reading does not necessarily exclude the allegorical one but extends the significance of the poem.²²

Both Freudian interpretations and allegorical ones, either separately or together, are often combined with the biographical approach to literature, with the result that every literary work of art is reduced to a roman à clef. Much ingenuity and labor have been squandered on some Chinese literary works, notably Li Shangyin’s ambiguous poems and the novel A Red Mansion Dream, with regard to the possible identities of the supposed prototypes of the persons mentioned in these works, just as in the West much ingenuity and labor have been squandered on the identity of the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets and that of the mysterious lover in Emily Dickinson’s poems. In their eagerness to identify every person or even object in a literary work with an actual historical person, critics inclined to the biographical and allegorical modes of interpretation are apt to forget that they are dealing with literary works of art and that even in the case of a roman à clef its literary merits, if any, do not depend on the identities of the prototypes of its fictitious characters. Fascinating as it may be, literary detection has little to offer to literary interpretation and remains outside the scope of literary criticism.

It is not my intention to suggest that there is only one single correct approach to Chinese poetry, or one single correct method of interpretation, for I am well aware that the mode of interpretation often depends on the nature of the work to be interpreted. Neither is it my intention to launch a systematic attack on any particular school of criticism or interpretation. Nonetheless, it remains a fact that some approaches to literature and some methods of interpretation are less valid and less fruitful than others. I simply wish to point out some of the more egregious dangers of misinterpretation.

So far we have not yet faced the problem of the hermeneutical circle, which can be described in terms of the interrelation between “understanding” and “explanation,” or in terms of that between “parts” and “whole.” To put it as simply as possible: in order to understand a text, one must explain it, yet in order to explain it, one must understand it. Alternatively, one can only understand the whole text from its constituent parts, yet the parts only make sense as parts of the whole. This seemingly vicious circle, as Hirsch and Ricoeur have shown, is in fact breakable. The dialectic between understanding and explanation has been summed up by Ricoeur in these words:

I propose to describe this dialectic first as a move from understanding to explaining and then as a move from explanation to comprehension. The first time, understanding will be a naive grasping of the meaning of the text as a whole. The second time, comprehension will be a sophisticated mode of understanding, supported by explanatory procedures.²³

To put it slightly differently, as I suggested in chapter 1, the hermeneutical circle can be turned into an open-ended spiral of infinite reinterpretations, for we can continue to modify and refine the initial understanding with new knowledge gained from explanatory procedures. Whether we adopt this metaphor of the spiral or use the term that Hirsch borrowed from Jean Piaget, “corrigible schemata,”²⁴ the interpretive process remains the same, and when a critic is reasonably satisfied with the level of understanding he has reached, he may share it with his readers, without claiming that what he offers is the definitive interpretation.

How the hermeneutical spiral, if I may now so term it, operates with regard to the interpretation of classical Chinese poetry can be easily illustrated. In reading Chinese poetry in traditional editions, which are unpunctuated and in which poems are not printed in separate lines but as whole texts, it is quite possible, even for an experienced reader, to make a mistake about the meter of the poem, such as mistaking a heptasyllabic poem for a pentasyllabic one. Take one of Du Fu’s lesser-known poems, entitled

Su Duan Xue Fu yan jian Xue Hua zui ge.²⁵

Even the title causes some problems. At first sight it appears to mean, “At Su Duan’s and Xue Fu’s banquet, note to Xue Hua, drunken song,” or, in other words, “At a banquet given by Su Duan and Xue Fu, I send this drunken song in lieu of a note to Xue Hua.” However, when we read the text of the poem, we encounter these lines:

Now it seems that it was Xue Hua who wrote a drunken song at the banquet, so that the title should be understood to mean, “A poetic note to Xue Hua, who wrote a drunken song at the banquet given by Su Duan and Xue Fu.” Yet the possibility that the present poem is another “drunken song” that Du Fu wrote after the banquet and then sent to Xue Hua, as one commentator suggested,²⁶ cannot be excluded, so that the title can also be taken to mean, “A drunken song sent in lieu of a note to Xue Hua [who also wrote a drunken song] at the banquet given by Su Duan and Xue Fu.” So much for the title. When we come to the text of the poem itself, it is quite possible to take the first five syllables as a line:

More freely, “In literature, there is a spiritual communion,” which makes good sense. But when one goes on to the next five syllables,

they do not make good sense. So one goes back to the beginning and takes the first seven syllables as a line:

and realizes that this means, “In literary compositions, there is spirit; in communion [or friendship] there is a Way.” The next seven syllables make a satisfactory second line:

One now realizes that the characters duan and fu are the personal names of the two hosts mentioned in the title (rather than words meaning “proper” and “again”), and that the second line means, “Duan and Fu have obtained these, and so enjoyed early fame.” In the light of this, the first line now appears not to be a general statement but a compliment to Duan and Fu and should be understood as, “In their literary compositions, there is spirit; in making friends, they have the Way.” Thus, we have arrived at a better understanding than the initial one.

In reading lyrical meters (ci), which have highly complex tone patterns and rhyme schemes, unless one is familiar with the metrical pattern named after a musical tune, one can only form a general understanding by following the syntax and rhymes. It is only with the help of a manual of lyrical meters (cipu) that one can arrive at a more definite understanding. Yet the compilers of such manuals only established the “standard” patterns inductively from extant specimens and not deductively from a priori knowledge of the actual musical tunes. This is another illustration of the hermeneutical spiral, of the dialectic between understanding and explanation.

To conclude this chapter: I believe that the interlingual critic of Chinese poetry should aspire to be transhistorical and transcultural, without minimizing the historical and cultural differences between Chinese poetry and Western poetry. He should demonstrate both the similarity of the world of a Chinese poem to the reader’s world and its alterity, for it is the similarity that enables the reader to share the world of the poem, and it is the alterity that enables him to extend his own world. The critic should not, in his search for archetypes, symbols, structural patterns, and what not, lose sight of the unique world of each poem, which is the concrete embodiment of some universal human experience or abstract idea, but should try to see how the unique world of the poem emerges from its unique linguistic structure. Furthermore, he should show not only what a Chinese poem is like but also why it is worth reading. This leads to the question of evaluation, with which the next chapter will be concerned.