Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity

Rivi Handler-Spitz

• Editorial: University of Washington Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295741970
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia cinese

Symptoms of an Unruly Age compares the writings of Li Zhi (1527–1602) and his late-Ming compatriots to texts composed by their European contemporaries, including Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Emphasizing aesthetic patterns that transcend national boundaries, Rivi Handler-Spitz explores these works as culturally distinct responses to similar social and economic tensions affecting early modern cultures on both ends of Eurasia.

The paradoxes, ironies, and self-contradictions that pervade these works are symptomatic of the hypocrisy, social posturing, and counterfeiting that afflicted both Chinese and European societies at the turn of the seventeenth century. Symptoms of an Unruly Age shows us that these texts, produced thousands of miles away from one another, each constitute cultural manifestations of early modernity.

The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

CHAPTER 1

Transparent Language

Origin Myths and Early Modern Aspirations of Recovery

At the end of the sixteenth century, in an era in which things were not always what they seemed and words often proved unreliable or deceptive, individuals in China and Europe expressed the sentiment that language had somehow strayed from its source, that meaning was increasingly difficult to convey precisely, and that ambiguity was infecting communication. Correspondingly, the relationship between language and the objects and ideas it signified came under intense scrutiny. Examining Li Zhi’s views on the associations among language, authenticity, and ethics, and comparing his opinions to the attitudes of several prominent contemporaries in Europe and China reveals the existence of parallel yet distinct conservative currents in language theory: on opposite ends of the Eurasian continent, intellectuals strove to rediscover and restore a mythic, transparent language. The perception that this language had been lost would color their own diction and behavior, and it would heighten their awareness of the increasingly challenging task of interpreting the more opaque and unreliable forms of communication surrounding them.

In China, the project of seeking to rediscover this primordial language was closely associated with imitation of classical texts, a longstanding practice in both China and Europe. Whereas the Chinese literary establishment heralded imitation of ancient texts as a means to enhance scholars’ literary style and to facilitate their ethical maturation, Li and several of his Chinese compatriots opposed imitation. Slavish imitation, they maintained, actually hampered individual self-expression and inhibited moral growth. Moreover, Li added, mimicking often led to acts of imposture and hypocrisy, which he decried. In an era of social pretense and increasing class mobility, Li particularly criticized contemporary Confucian officials who verbally portrayed themselves as paragons of virtue. But, Li claimed, unlike the sage authors of classical texts, whom they claimed to resemble, the imitators cultivated only a veneer of virtue. They simulated only enough virtue to promote their reputation and advance their career, and for this reason Li, who often touted his own keen powers of discernment, judged that their imitations lacked substance.

Li’s hard-hitting critique of these self-styled Confucians attacked the problem of deceptive language on two levels simultaneously: it pointed out the gulf between what they said about themselves and what they actually did. That is, it highlighted the discrepancy between their moralizing words and their self-interested actions, and it also illustrated the divide between their words and the objects or ideas to which these words referred. In both cases, regardless of whether the discrepancies Li noticed arose deliberately or inadvertently, he condemned all gaps between words and their referents. Indeed his writings depict him as the antithesis of these hypocritical, superficial scholars. Unlike them, he claims, he clearly and honestly manifests his genuine feelings.

Several of Li’s arguments against literary imitation correlate closely to opinions expressed by contemporary Europeans, even though the reasons prompting sixteenth-century Europeans to engage in literary imitation, their definitions of what it entailed, and the ethical values they attached to it all differed from Chinese attitudes toward the same issues. For Li, the desire to restore the seamless correspondence between language and its referents may be traced to myths concerning the natural origins of the Chinese writing system. It also contains an ethical imperative stemming from the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names (zhengming). A different, biblically inspired theory of the origins of language animated sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European intellectuals’ impulse to purify their languages or return to a primordial ur-tongue. Nonetheless, spurred by aspirations similar to their Chinese contemporaries, Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596), Francis Bacon, John Webb (1611–1672), and other Europeans struck out in quest of a perfect idiom, a pure, transparent means of communication freed from the ambiguity and deceit so prevalent in the early modern period. Ironically, their search led them to the Chinese language, whose ideographic script seemed to them to ensure its incontrovertible authenticity.

Unfortunately, the Chinese language could offer no solution to Europe’s linguistic tribulations. As Li was well aware, the meanings of Chinese characters could alter over time and be deliberately manipulated. And Chinese words, like European words, could take on a variety of different meanings concurrently and could be deployed strategically for rhetorical effect. Thus, had the European language theorists of the turn of the seventeenth century had access to and been able to decipher Li’s writings, they might have been astounded to discover that, far from exemplifying the clear signification they erroneously attributed to the Chinese language, Li’s texts and those of some of his Chinese contemporaries registered distress over the slipperiness of signification and the unreliability of words in early modern China—problems uncannily akin to those troubling European thinkers of the same era. Studying the concurrent perceptions in Europe and China that language had been uprooted from its solid foundation in the real-world objects to which it referred provides a basis from which to understand the culture of bluff pervasive in the early modern period.

AN AGE OF IMITATION

By the end of the sixteenth century in China, and even earlier in Europe, imitation of classical texts had become so rigid and formulaic that it garnered open ridicule. Li Zhi displayed nothing but scorn for the “dimwitted disciples” who blindly copied out the transmitted words of the sages, and he exhibited contempt for the phony Confucian scholars who peppered their discourses with phrases culled from orthodox texts they scarcely understood.¹ Similarly in Europe, Erasmus and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (ca. 1469–1533), among others, mocked self-styled “Ciceronians,” who imitated the diction of the great Roman orator by patching together speeches that were technically perfect but devoid of originality or genuine feeling.

In China, the vogue for imitating classical texts was associated with the Return to Antiquity Movement (Fugu pai), which dominated literary circles in the mid-sixteenth century and promoted the full adoption of ancient literary genres and archaic diction. Adherents to this conservative movement maintained that by imitating archaic literary style students would internalize the ethical principles that suffused the core texts of the Confucian tradition.² Even supporters of Wang Yangming’s more progressive School of the Mind (Xinxue pai) agreed that studying and imitating ancient texts helped students to develop the rudiments of literary style and, more importantly, ethical character.³ Since, according to Wang, every person had the potential to become a sage, studies of this nature were particularly valuable for they provided the means by which individuals could cultivate and exhibit their innate ethical sensibility.

As early as the first third of the sixteenth century, however, even many proponents of the Return to Antiquity Movement came to recognize that the movement’s heavy emphasis on technical proficiency in literary imitation was producing sterile writing, devoid of either ethical clout or emotional candor. One of the leaders of the movement, Li Mengyang (1475–1531), cautioned that in his day “poetry grounded in emotions had become rare, but that which was artfully phrased was plentiful.”⁴ Others complained that what passed as poetry in their era was nothing more than words strung together.

Over time, criticisms of this kind multiplied, and by Li’s generation many scholars and artists had come to revile the Return to Antiquity Movement as a program that advocated only restrictive, servile imitation. The painter and playwright Xu Wei (1521–1593), for example, acerbically analogized the popular writers of his day to “birds mimicking human speech” and accused them of manufacturing false emotions.⁵ Li’s close friend Jiao Hong (1541–1620) equally scoffed, “I don’t recognize contemporary writing. What are [authors] even talking about? Is it the Dao? Is it virtue? Is it accomplishments? They disdain the substance of literature, but preposterously write for the sake of writing. Those who live in enclosed spaces point to images of vast territories and oceans, while those who have no roof over their heads brag about entertaining lavishly. Not only do [such texts] fail to disguise their lack of substance, but what they do express is just smoke and mirrors.”⁶ Jiao Hong’s comments register his disapproval of contemporary writings, which he feels have forfeited their grounding in the author’s personal experience. They thus suffer from a lack of authenticity. Li’s acquaintance Yuan Zongdao (1560–1600) expressed similar views:

Today, most writers are superficial. They have never engaged in serious study, nor do they harbor in their hearts any [original] ideas. But when they discover that among the ancients there were those who “established an everlasting reputation,” and those who became famous on account of their literary talents, they too conceive the desire to pick up a brush, spread out a piece of paper, and enter the business of trafficking in words so as to garner praise. Since they want to write great works but have no ideas of their own, what recourse do they have but to borrow phrases from Zuo Qiuming and Sima Qian⁷—like begging and stealing piss and shit? If one were to rub out all the archaisms and clichéd expressions in their writings, one would end up with nothing more than a blank sheet of paper!⁸

These condemnations of imitative writings seem to blend aesthetic and ethical concerns. Highlighting the latter, Jiao Hong declared, “What in ancient times would have been considered pillaging is now the rule.”⁹ Even Wang Shizhen (1526–1590), one of the Second Seven Masters of the Return to Antiquity Movement, concurred: “Plagiarizing and imitation,” he opined, “are a great defect in poetry.”¹⁰ These authors held that stitching together pastiches of older works was not only unoriginal but actually immoral since it constituted an act of usurpation. By passing off someone else’s work as one’s own, they implied, a writer falsified his talents and laid claim to aesthetic abilities—and more importantly, ethical virtues—he did not necessarily possess. Perhaps the most scathing attack on such behavior came from Jiang Yingke (1553–1605), who quipped, “Any poet who cannot come up with his own approach, and who obsequiously limits himself to the poem titles and themes established in the past, calling this ‘returning to antiquity’ is truly a louse living in somebody else’s pants!”¹¹ The vast majority of these late Ming critiques of literary imitation—and indeed a great many others—find analogues in Pico della Mirandola’s epistolary correspondence with the most famous Ciceronian of the age, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547).¹² Similar instances may be cited in Erasmus’s extremely popular satirical dialogue The Ciceronian, published in 1528. This text pokes fun at a pretentious fictitious scholar named Nosoponus, who adheres so closely to Ciceronian style in his composition of Latin speeches that he dares not even deploy a single conjugated verb form that does not appear in Cicero’s opera omnia. Throughout the dialogue, Bulephorus, the porte-parole for Erasmus, compares Nosoponus’s imitation of Cicero to that of an ape, a “lying mirror,” and a person hiding behind a mask.¹³ Bulephorus asks how anyone can “acquire the name of Ciceronian, that is, of a man who speaks in the best possible way, if he talks about subjects he does not thoroughly understand [and] in which his feelings are not involved?” “Such a person,” Bulephorus admonishes, “makes no secret of his determination to reproduce his model, and so who will believe he speaks with sincerity? And what kind of approbation will he get in the end? Only the sort acquired by those people who write patchwork poems—who possibly give pleasure, but only for a short while and only if one has nothing better to do; and they neither impart information, nor stir the emotions, nor rouse to action.” Bulephorus further castigates “ignorant pupils and bad sons”—a phrase reminiscent of Li’s “dimwitted disciples”—for putting on airs, trying to impress others by their borrowed erudition, and attempting to earn a reputation they do not deserve. Such imitation, he charges, amounts to “a form of imposture,” a “conjuring trick” in which one does not express oneself but appears in the guise of somebody else.¹⁴

The similarities among these near-contemporaneous Chinese and European denunciations of excessive imitation are plain to see, yet these examples obscure substantive differences between the cultures of literary imitation in Europe and China during Li’s lifetime. In China the primary mode of written communication remained the classical language (literary Sinitic or classical Chinese), whereas in Europe vernacular languages were on the rise.¹⁵ To be sure, in China lowbrow genres such as novels and drama often featured vernacular language, but these texts did not usually imitate classical models. Rather, it was the more reputable Chinese genres such as poetry and examination essays (bagu wen), composed in the classical language, that could and did repeat verbatim the words of the model texts on which they were based. In Europe, by contrast, although Latin scholarship persisted well into the eighteenth century, the strong position of vernacular languages meant that imitation more often involve...