The Uses of Literature: Responding to Challenges

From Shelton Walsmith's studio; photo by John Pack. Ten points if you can figure out how I got to this image from my theme.

As I was saying to my teacher JM last week, I think the reason my Fulbright application was unsuccessful was that I did not sufficiently explain, even to myself, the reasons for doing literature and the humanities. It was almost a good thing to have suffered that failure if it drives me to re-think what I'm doing and why.

As with "My Archive," this will be an entry that gets tagged and updated. It's clear to me that the main way for me to improve my writing next is to really push myself to go back to older writings, often one-shot comments on single topics, to improve them and connect them up with other things. My new outlining tool, checkvist.com, should make connections a bit more likely to happen as well.

So here's the new pattern I'm interesting in applying: first the outline of my reasoning so far, and then behind the cut, an immediate attempt to write out at least the main ideas contained in the outline, if not a complete write-up of the outline.

• Chapter 0: The Uses of Literature: Responding to Challenges
  • 1. Compare subject to subject
    • The Postmodern Subject, for example
    • But why does it matter in a changing world?
  • 2. Show the social and political climate
    • Encouraging "civil society," for example
    • pointing out our vulnerability if we become too "infantile" : towards moral purpose.
    • pointing out the rise of conservative politics -- Berlant
  • 3. Share and compare artistic techniques
    • "Appeal" as a main question
      • Chaves:
      • Stanley Fish: Art has no practical use; that's its use
  • 4. Other sources: Perry Link 2000, Calvino 1986, Engel 1973, Felski 2008

Literature is a craft that reveals. Its main use value in the larger world of philosophy, the humanities, and the issues of the day seems to me to be concentrated in the revelatory power of literature: it shows us who we are. It exposes the human condition. It can give us guidance regarding the challenges we face.

To my present thinking, this revelatory power works on two levels that are connected in complex ways: first the individual, and then the scales larger than that of individual: society, nation, race, gender.

Literature reveals individuals: speaking, performing subjects whose experiences, memories and motivations have both differences and points in common between our own. So we read about these individuals to enrich our own sense of ourselves and others around us, as individuals. Are feelings and activities are described. Are fears and desires, as well. The main building block of this kind of writing is individual experience, real or imagined, realist or allegorical. In Tang Xiaobing's work on Wang Anyi, for example, the subject Wang Anyi is compared directly to the subject Julia Kristeva to argue that reading Wang Anyi would inform our sense of the postmodern subject generally while at the same time beginning to include China in the conversation.

On larger scales, literature can be used to show the social and political climate of a place and time. Translations of Turgenev into Korean are part of a story that shows the growth of the early Korean state, the differences from Japan, and the characteristic understanding of all Korean people as proletariat, for example. In Chinese literature and art, we examine the best that is available to consider its potential for developing (or at least calling for) civil society. Similarly, Lauren Berlant defined the concept of the "infantile citizen" in American cultural politics in order to diagnose a selfishness and thoughtlessness that she clearly believes is infecting us. Both this and the Chinese example reveal moral and political agenda to literary criticism: we don't just "take the temperature" of our social structures, we give a diagnoses and treatment plan, even if it is implicit (and in Berlant it is often explicit).

After this consideration, a worry begins to develop that the revelatory power of literature may overlook craft, which is the central interest of many who write about art and literature. The concept of appeal often enters the discussion, as it does when Chaves introduces his book on Mei Yao-chen. Though Mei is not famous in China, Chaves avers, we should not worry about that. We should only worry whether he is a poet that might have some "appeal" to English readers.

Beyond "appeal," I seem to remember that writers like Stanley Fish often say that literature has no use value, and this is its use. They might decry my focus on the revelatory power as a misconstruing of literature's use, which is not to tell me the spirit of the age, but to communicate only the artful imaginings of its producer. I must revisit this argument before I disbelieve it entirely.

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Classical Chinese: Rouzer, Lesson 1

Liu Xiang 劉向, Archivist and Collector.

Rouzer, Paul. A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2007. It's clear enough now that for my teaching and even my PhD work, I need better classical chops. I'm beginning at the beginning -- back to my teacher's basic textbook.

I have a recurring dream that I have to go back to elementary school, because it turns out I didn't actually finish some crucial credits. It's not entirely a nightmare, because I always imagine that I would do quite well in grade school, seeing as how I spell and write sentences at or above my grade level. Reading this book from the beginning, I get that feeling again. The first few lessons at least are quite easy, but of course they are also rabbit holes as well -- practically any line of classical Chinese, no matter how short or seemingly insignificant, seems capable of supplying adventures of the literary and linguistic kind.

Lesson 1: A Few Proverbs

知命者不怨天，知己者不怨人

He who knows Fate does not complain to Heaven; he who knows himself does not complain to men.

禍生於欲得，福生於自禁；聖人以心導耳目，小人以耳目導心。

Bad fortune is born of the desire for gain; good fortune is born of self restriction. The sage uses the mind to guide ear and eye; the inferior person uses ear and eye to guide the mind.

為善者天報以德，為不善者天報以禍。

Those who are good, Heaven repays with inner virtue; those who are not good, Heaven repays with bad fortune.

A Few Notes:

Proverb 1

知命者不怨天，知己者不怨人

He who knows Fate does not complain to Heaven; he who knows himself does not complain to men.

The term yuan 怨, which I translate here as the simple verb "complain," is also sometimes translated as "rancor," and refers to the deep indignation of a person who has not got what they want -- the classic example is the Confucian whose king will not listen to his advice. Yuan-rancor is a fraught concept because it demands expression but can only remain honorable if it is not whining. Hence the virtuous trait yuan'er bu nu 怨而不怒, to have rancor without complaint. This proverb perhaps gives us more clarification of yuan-rancor: its expression as a frustrating song to Heaven must mean that the singer does not "know" Fate; that is to say, he is not resigned to the workings of Fate, but has a strong desire to establish his own will.

In the second statement, whining is suspicious activity because there is the distinct possibility that the truly knowledgeable person would know to blame only himself. I could imagine arguing that a person of true understanding could at all times see that the decisions they have made have got them to this imperiled state, and so that person would not blame anyone else for his problems.

One sort of wants to link these statements together: on the one hand, you should not blame Heaven since Fate is fickle and everything crashes down at some point anyway. And on the other hand, you are most likely a big factor in any bad situation that arises in your life, so you should not whine about yourself too much. There is a strong sense of "shut up or put up," of learning to simply bear adversity in good form, without whining.

Proverb 3:

為善者天報以德，為不善者天報以禍。

Those who are good, Heaven repays with inner virtue; those who are not good, Heaven repays with bad fortune.

As we saw in the second proverb, "bad fortune" 禍 is more likely to be opposed with good fortune, but here it is paired with de, one of those rich philosophical terms whose meaning has been the subject of conversation for thousands of years. I haven't read Benjamin Hoff's book The Te of Piglet yet, but this proverb gives me a sudden desire to do so, because I think Hoff may have been on the right track by associating De (="Te") with the smallness, modesty, and general self-abnegation of Piglet. Hoff's message, I presume, is that we should all be a little like Piglet. Reading liberally, we might have it that in this proverb, the term shan 善, "good," describes the basic motivation to improve the self in an honest way, and the Chinese opinion is that the virtues of smallness, modesty and more generally the ability to adjust to the situation at hand will be the result of this basic good motive.

A little context:

The Shuo yuan 說苑, or "Garden of sayings," is a first-century BCE compilation by the great archivista Liu Xiang. To Liu Xiang, working hard every day in the Han Imperial Library, the work must have been like so many files that I have created to store little stories, images, sayings -- snippets, really -- that don't seem to go anywhere else but somehow seem to the reader who encounters them that they should not be lost, that they have some utility, either as wisdom or as records, but always because they bring the past back to life.

If you go over to The Chinese Text Project, a tremendous undertaking by Donald Sturgeon (thanks, Mr. Sturgeon!) you can see the entire text of the "Garden." You will see first of all that it is divided into twenty sections; all of these proverbs come from the 16th section, titled Tan cong 談叢, or "Grove of conversation." This metaphor of a garden, which contains little "groves," seemed whimsical to me at one point, and then quaint later, but Pauline Yu points out that it is actually a sophisticated design principle:

...[I]n fact, in the Chinese tradition if a large collection of works by more than one author is not called a "grove of letters" (wen lin 文林), then it will more than likely be named some variety of "literary garden" (wen yuan 文苑). Anthologies, indeed, are in many respects very much like gardens, for they are usually carefully designed, with individual works or plants selected and ordered according to a particular scheme or sequence. (from "Charting the Landscape of Chinese Poetry")

I unfortunately do not know much about the "Garden of sayings," and so won't go into the possible schemes and sequences in it here -- though I really feel like doing that right now rather than working on my dissertation.

Section 16, "Grove of conversation," has 74 short texts, all of which seem to be proverbs or long paragraphs of proverbs. Paul takes his first proverb from entry 22, which is the longest of them all:

無不為者，無不能成也；無不欲者，無不能得也。眾正之積，福無不及也；眾邪之積，禍無不逮也。力勝貧，謹勝禍，慎勝害，戒勝災。為善者天報以德，為不善者 天報以禍。君子得時如水，小人得時如火。謗道己者，心之罪也；尊賢己者，心之力也。心之得，萬物不足為也；心之失，獨心不能守也。子不孝，非吾子也；交不 信，非吾友也。食其口而百節肥，灌其本而枝葉茂；本傷者枝槁，根深者末厚。為善者得道，為惡者失道。惡語不出口，苟言不留耳；務偽不長，喜虛不久。義士不 欺心，廉士不妄取；以財為草，以身為寶。慈仁少小，恭敬耆老。犬吠不驚，命曰金城；常避危殆，命曰不悔。富必念貧，壯必念老，年雖幼少，慮之必早。夫有禮 者相為死，無禮者亦相為死；貴不與驕期，驕自來；驕不與亡期，亡自至。踒人日夜願一起，盲人不忘視。知者始於悟，終於諧；愚者始於樂，終於哀。高山仰止， 景行行止，力雖不能，心必務為。慎終如始，常以為戒；戰戰慄慄，日慎其事。聖人之正，莫如安靜；賢者之治，故與眾異。

All of the statements here seem to be proverbs, though there a fun and interesting variation in their quality. I'm out of time right now, but I will make an exercise out of translating each of these little proverbs in turn. To begin:

無不為者，無不能成也；無不欲者，無不能得也。

He who has nothing that he does not do has nothing he cannot complete; he who has nothing he does not want has nothing he cannot obtain.

He who tries it all can finish it all; he who desires it all can get it all.

The first translation is an effort to represent the literal meaning of the Chinese, which applies double negatives and nominalization to achieve a Yoda-like effect of wisdom. In the second, I try to rewrite it as a proverb more congenial to Western standards (suggestions eagerly accepted).

This first proverb seems a little unwise, doesn't it? Unless I've made some major mistake (quite possible), it seems to recommend that we should be infinitely ambitious and greedy. I suppose it was intended to be spoken to lazy boys who are too self-satisfied, but still, I can't imagine ever using this proverb.

More to come!
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Chinese Dissidents List

Gao Zhisheng, via the Guardian

Around Christmas last year Liu Xiaobo made headlines when he was given a heavy prison sentence; essentially his only crime was to help write and distribute the "Charter '08." I remember at the time that Wei Jingsheng, the famous Democracy wall activist now exiled in the USA, spoke on Liu's behalf before news media, showing inter-dissident solidarity.

Now another human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, is making some waves for a strange story of disappearance -- or perhaps he was in custody the whole time? The British press in particular seems to enjoy the opportunity to make Chinese security bureaucrats look evil:

China says missing lawyer is 'where he should be'

Foreign ministry official hints leading human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng is in custody after he disappeared nearly a year ago.

I'll be honest, the debate over human rights in China has never been my favorite subject. But that's because I was not looking at it from a literary perspective. Portraits of dissidents have a long tradition in all cultures, and particularly get a lot of attention in English-language coverage of China.

So here I'll leave a list of dissidents and interesting texts about dissidents -- I'm not sure what if anything I'll do with that yet. My larger goal is to create knowledge banks sort of like old-school note cards to come back to. I notice that so far in this blog I have not come back to things very often, but I want that to change.
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Blog to Read: Song of a Reformed Headhunter

http://jeeleong.blogspot.com; Jee Leong Koh

A young Singaporean literati's blog; I'd like to read through this one end to beginning. The recent post on Singapore lit looks really interesting.

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Snapshots from the Canon

Jung, "Psychology and Literature" (1930, 1984 in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature)

Working with a Chinese edition, Professor Zhao finds a saying of Croce here, which I back-translate as "All real history is a history of the present" 一切真歷史都是當代史. (Or, "Every true history is contemporary history.")

More snippets:



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Outlining C.T. Hsia (1/2)

I've gone back to that ur-text explaining modern Chinese literature to English readers, C.T. Hsia's A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. Here are a few authors that might be worth considering to understand the position of biography and autobiography in the turbulent 20th century.

Ye Shaojun

"Ye Shaojun's preoccupation with educational problems finally led him to write in 1928 a novel which is more or less autobiographical, Ni Huanzhi."

Bing Xin

Bing Xin is an interesting case -- her position as an elder figure with a childlike mind makes me think of her as a forerunner of Yang Jiang. But C.T. Hsia does not find much worth noting here; commenting on her late story "The West Wind" he says it is "again about loneliness, indicating her inability to develop further." Maybe I need a second opinion?

Su Xuelin, esp. The Bitter Heart (1929, autobiographical novel)

Su Xuelin has gotten more attention in recent years. Hsia barely mentions this, but it might be worth an overview, at least.

Ling Shuhua

Hsia has a very high opinion of Ling Shuhua -- "unlike Bing Xin, she early manifested a more adult sensibility and psychological acumen." Her stories sound worthwhile, but I'm very curious now about her English-language autobiography, Ancient Melodies (1953), which I started but did not finish last year.

Guo Moruo

Nobody likes Guo Moruo, least of all C.T. Hsia, but the man was morbidly interested in autobiography (see volumes 6-9 of his Works (1959)). That there might be something of interest somewhere in there is partly confirmed by some very revealing letters to a friend, which Hsia quotes at length, pp. 98-100. Also note that Guo translated Goethe's Travels of Young Werther -- I wonder how influential this book has been in China.

Yu Dafu

Now here is a really interesting case. Commenting on "Sinking" and other stories, Hsia has that "one notices a kindness and ultimate decency on the part of the autobiographical hero, staying well within the bounds of Confucian propriety." I think this is definitely worth pursuing in more detail. It's interesting that Hsia sees Yu Dafu's career as falling into three stages: a passionate young person, a lackadaisical self-centered middle age, and finally, in a later career that includes books like Footprints Here and There, Yu Dafu takes on some of the persona of a "Taoist recluse;" he "shows a strong affinity with the older travel literature and reasserts his literary importance."

Shen Congwen

Hsia likes him even more than Yu Dafu -- and who wouldn't, he's a more versatile talent with no less an egotism. Hsia says of his work, like Lao She's that it "defies translation;" I now mean to take Hsia's challenge. First off, it will be necessary to see what has been translated into English, beginning with the volume The Chinese Earth. (It's about time I read Jeffrey Kinkley's book, as well.)

Ding Ling

Ding Ling may truly be "a bad writer,"(p. 276), but I think her vision of herself as a public, service-seeking, striving-for-martyrdom sort of identity is definitely worth representing. If not Ding Ling, then perhaps Xie Bingying. This is a vast subject that Hsia barely touches on, because in his anti-Communist mind, one need not spend time on what are "essentially exercises in propaganda clichés." I think that without contradicting this statement in anyway, we will need to find something to help us understand the identity formation revolutionary women (I'm looking at you, Amy Dooling.)
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Remembering Helmut Martin

Martin, Helmut, and Jeffrey Kinkley, tr. and eds. Modern Chinese Writers : Self-Portrayals. Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992.

Sometimes a scholar can aggravate me to no end because they seem blind to something that I can see plainly, and yet I still would admit that I reaped ample rewards for reading them carefully. Helmut Martin is a good example with his introduction to Modern Chinese Writers : Self-Portrayals:

Helmut Martin (d. 1999 in Taiwan)

The repercussions after June 1989 prove that China had not really advanced beyond the stage of mere preconditions for creative freedom. Any literary historian of the period must still concentrate largely on the struggle between the writers' demands for autonomy and the constraints imposed on them by the prevailing cultural policy -- instead of exclusively following literary developments.

I don't agree. I think that above all, it is to literary developments that have to attend to understand what the Chinese readership is doing. Specifically literary techniques, like irony, express worlds of critique and mental action that Martin is unwilling or unable to appreciate. If Martin honestly thought that literature of the 1980s was nothing more than hackish "scar literature" or "cheap entertainment fiction," he is sadly mistaken, as work on Wang Shuo, Yu Hua, or Yang Jiang will show (note: this list under construction). No wonder critic C.D. Alison Bailey says that in Martin's list writers , "A sense of irony is a rare commodity as are modesty and an internationalist standpoint." This may be partly China's fault, but Martin's own stubborn focus on political dissidents also leaves us with this bias.

Apparently Martin resided in Taiwan and often published in Chinese (I'll just bet he was friends Yu Guangzhong). The link above to a few memorials dedicated him contains an immense amount of disturbing and touching information. It's a fitting memoir to a man who accomplished so much in the humanities, and was apparently a true teacher, despite suffering from chronic depression that eventually seems to have led him to commit suicide. I can't help but want to picture myself memorialized like this, with speeches from my Taiwanese friends, who will call me (in Taiwanese) a true friend of Taiwan.
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