Literary openness: A bridge across the divide between Chinese and western literary thought

ALL TOO OFTEN modern Chinese literary theory has suffered from what some scholars have called "aphasia": in the confrontation between the East and West, Chinese theoretical discourse has been so Westernized that the time-honored Chinese system of literary theory has practically lost its voice. In a recent study of traditional Chinese literary theory, one scholar laments: "In literary creation, criticism, and appreciation some concepts and categories of ancient Chinese literary theory still have a certain amount of life, but Chinese literary theory as a theoretical system has ceased to exist" (Sun 1). To some extent, contemporary Chinese theory might even be viewed as a de facto branch of Western literary thought. In spite of repeated calls by Chinese and Western scholars for genuine dialogues between Chinese and Western literary theories, most such attempts have ended up in pseudo-dialogues, or disguised Western monologues.

The reasons for such a disconcerting situation are many, but one major reason is the "pervasive influence of the relativist paradigm that tends to construct a rigid and absolute dichotomy between the East and West" (Zhang, Mighty Opposites 14). In the comparative study of Chinese and Western literary theories, the Chinese system of literary thought and its Western counterpart are typically perceived to be so different that what we have been undertaking is not so much a "comparative poetics" as a "contrastive" one. To be sure, the divide between Chinese and Western systems is not simply a figment of the contemporary critical imagination: the differences are many and demand as complete an account as possible. But unless we are able to locate some valid theoretical common grounds and, especially, a large amount of raw analytic data common to both traditions, the divide will continue to widen, and genuine, meaningful dialogue will remain difficult, if not impossible. In this essay, I attempt to carve out a common area of inquiry that may offer a perspective from which Chinese and Western literary thought can be examined through their similarities rather than their differences. The common area I intend to delineate covers a large amount of theoretical data centering on the idea of literary openness.

The Rise of Literary Openness in China

To speak of a literary text as "open" is to assert that it is not an enclosure of words whose messages are finite and limited, but a hermeneutic space whose verbal signs are capable of generating unlimited interpretations. It means that a literary text has no "correct" interpretation, or has multiple interpretations. This theoretical concept is perhaps most often associated with Umberto Eco's Opera aperta (Open Work), published in 1962, but in the Chinese tradition the idea can be traced back to high antiquity, where it emerged from two major sources: metaphysical inquiries into the universe and interpretive practices applied to canonical texts.

In the metaphysical inquiry into literary openness, the Chinese tradition had an earlier start than the West. As early as the fourth century B.C., there appeared in the appended verbalizations to the Yijing, also known as the Zhouyi or Book of Changes, a famous saying, which has since become a household word for rationalizing different interpretations of the same text or phenomenon: "[In the interpretation of the Dao,] a benevolent person who sees it will say that it is benevolent; a wise person who sees it will say that it is wise" (Shisanjing zhushu 78). In the second century B.C., the Chinese Confucian thinker Dong Zhongshu (c. 179-c. 104 B.C.) articulated the dictum "Shi wu da gu" ("[The Book of] Poetry has no constant [or thorough-going] interpretation," Chunqiu fanlu, juan 3, 9a). Although this dictum initially referred specifically to the exegesis of the Book of Poetry (or Book of Songs in Waley's popular translation), it was later extended to all poetry. Thus, Shen Deqian (1673-1769), a famous scholar of the Qing dynasty, suggested that all poetry is an open hermeneutic space amenable to what contemporary literary theory calls reader response criticism:

The words of ancient poets contain within themselves unlimited implications. When posterity reads them, they will come to different understandings, depending upon their dispositions, which may be shallow or deep, high or low . . . This is what Master Dong had in mind when he said: "[The Book of] Poetry has no constant interpretation." Commentaries, annotations, and interpretations are all posterity's views from different quarters and corners. (Shen 1)

In critical practice, openness in Chinese tradition emerged from critical blindness rather than conscious insight. In Blindness and Insight, Paul de Man examines some influential theorists and critics and finds in their works a gap between their statements about the nature of literature and the results of their practical criticism. Paradoxically, de Man argues, their critical blindness to these gaps is what frequently gave rise to their most fascinating insights into literature, art, culture, and hermeneutics (102-41). The same may be said of the emergence of literary openness in the critical discourse of traditional Chinese thinkers and scholars. Although in their statements about some canonical texts, they often viewed the text as an enclosure of words that contain the original intentions of the author and declared that it is the task of a commentator to ferret out those intentions, their actual commentaries not only fragmented the text but also implied that it was an open hermeneutic space. The Shijing (Book of Songs) hermeneutic tradition is a case in point. While attempting to discover the original intentions that were supposed to reside in the poems in the collection, the commentaries in fact led to a multiplicity of interpretations that effectively open up the poems to different and even conflicting interpretations. Take the first poem of the Shijing, "Guanju," for example. There are, according to my incomplete statistics, eight major interpretations and many more minor readings within the commentaries: the poem has been construed to be about heaven and earth, individuals and society, government and politics, mores and morality, family relations and human relations, customs and habits, physical passion and spiritual sublimation, eulogy and satire, to mention only the most important interpretations available. Moreover, the interpretations are not always compatible with each other. In fact, some directly conflict and contradict each other. The poem-like many other poems in the anthology-is for all practical purposes "open."