Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 2, August 2007
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Gu, Ming Dong, Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing, A Route to Hermeneutics and Open Poetics; Albany, NY; State University of New York Press; 2005; 334 pp.; $US 24.95 Paperback
Reviewed by
This original and ambitious book is a work of focused scholarship on a subject that may seem esoteric to readers without a general awareness of Chinese cultural traditions and at least a passing ability to read Chinese.
Prof. Gu neatly summarizes his thesis in the conclusion of the book: (263)
My study has confirmed the assumption proposed in the introduction: Chinese hermeneutic theories have traversed a road of development from exegetic closure to interpretive openness similar to that of Western hermeneutic theories. It, however, reveals that the Chinese hermeneutic tradition arrives at that destination through a somewhat different route. While Western hermeneutic openness arises from conceptual inquiries into the nature and function of reading and interpretation, stimulated by the advancement of modern theories in linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, representation and communication, the Chinese counterpart comes into being as a result of aesthetic concerns with suggestiveness in literature and art, metaphysical meditations on the inadequacy of language for representation and communication, the mismatch between critical precept and critical practice, and a self-conscious use of Chinese language’s properties for multiple implications.
Some doubt lingers in my mind as to whether or not Prof. Gu has in fact, confirmed all his initial assumptions. However, without doubt he has traced out an extremely fascinating picture of two traditions arriving at the same attitudes as described in different terms. His depiction of the history of Chinese hermeneutics focuses primarily on two major texts with sources lost in history: The Zhouyi (I Ching) or Book of Changes and the Shijing or Book of Songs. His description of the history of reading these texts is redolent of a tradition of literary analysis dating from roughly 370 BC that is both rich and contentious. The two major characters who frame the initial debate between these polar approaches to hermeneutic openness are Mencius on the deterministic/intentionalist side and Zhuangzi on the side of indeterminacy. At issue was no less than whether or not words can adequately convey ideas. As one might expect, this question is not resolved unequivocally, and because the authors of these great works are misted in prehistory and their intentions lost, indeterminacy prevails.
The book is organized in four parts. The first is concerned with meta-theory including a brief survey of early Chinese thinking about hermeneutics, especially the hermeneutic openness demanded by the aesthetic category of ‘suggestiveness’. Within this category we are introduced to a series of qualities that are required of good poetry. Yiyin is lingering sound, Yiwei is lingering taste, Bujin zhiyi is endless meaning incorporated in the ideas of multi-valence and polysemy, Hunxu is subtle reserve, manifested by unlimited semiosis, and Wu is translated as ontological non-being, found in what he calls ‘self-generative suggestiveness’. Yanwai zhi yi are meanings beyond the expressed words, xianwai zhi yin is sound off the string, xiangwai zhi xiang are images beyond the image. These ideas are illustrated with specific poetic examples – using both Chinese characters and English translations along with a history of the critical dialogue surrounding them.
The second part is concerned with interpretations of the I Ching and its hermeneutics - known as the Zhouyi. Strictly speaking The I Ching is not a work of poetry, but its intentional openness makes it a very appropriate subject for the study of hermeneutics. In addition to being a tool for divination, Prof. Gu maintains that it is, as well, a system of representation, an ur-language if you will. Here, trigrams are considered the basic units, two of which, one on top of the other together make up the ‘characters’ in the representational scheme – the hexagrams with which users of the I Ching are familiar. (88) “The text proper of the Zhouyi consists of guanxing (the hexagram images) and guaci (hexagram and line statements). The hexagram images constitute a system of symbols, while the hexagram and line statements form another system of linguistic signs.” Each trigram has a name, an image and a symbolic meaning, and when combined into hexagrams, the potential for representation, or signification multiplies.
He specifies the seductive power of the Zhouyi: (111)
First it is a network woven with both visual and verbal signs. Second, the symbolism of a sign is polysemously designated. Third, the signs relate to each other in indeterminate relationships, on multiple levels. Fourth, the network is amenable to different but often equally valid interpretative strategies. Last but not least, the system has a tolerant quality that permits new views to be assimilated into its new components. All these factors allow the book to become an open system of representation, which provides inexhaustible opportunities for new interpretations.
The writing of the scholar Wang Bi on The ‘elucidation of images’ (mingxian) and the meanings they can generate independent of words, along with a comparison with the work of the semioticians Saussure, and Lacan occupy the final chapter on I Ching hermeneutics. However, an ambiguity in Prof. Gu’s use of the term ‘image’ made the implications of this section a bit obscure.
In Part Three, on the hermeneutics of the Shijing, Prof. Gu leans heavily on the idea of ‘aporia’ in his analysis of the Guanju, the first of the poems in the Shijing. Aporia is described (158) as a “puzzle, a question for discussion, or a state of perplexity”, and can also mean a metaphor or a paradox used symbolically. This term becomes especially useful in legitimizing the indeterminacy that has thoroughly conditioned the hermeneutics of the Shijing since it is unclear who, or how many authors of the Shijing there were, making their intentions and their setting in history equally obscure. He then uses the text of the Guanju as a platform for further discussions of textual and extra-textual indeterminacy.
Prof. Gu follows his analysis of the Guanju with an equally close set of readings of poem 129, the Jianjia, which (188) “may be considered the first menglong shi (opaque poem) in Chinese history.” The poem’s opacity has to do with the indeterminacy of ‘subject positions’ or perspectives a reader may take, in parsing the poem. In this section Prof. Gu’s discussion assumes a knowledge of particular and peculiar characteristics of Chinese. (198) “In Chinese philology, there are some fundamental principles of exegesis. Two of them are: “to seek meaning through the shape of a word” and “to seek meanings through the sound of a word.” However, I found that, similar to the ambiguity around the term ‘image’ in relation to the I Ching, there is an assumption that the reader will be familiar with the implications of sound-shape relationships in a language that is not only highly homophonic, but in which the relationship between the shape of a word and the sound of a word present an utterly different situation than in alphabetic languages. Once again, unfamiliarity with the fundamental nature of the language makes the intricacies of Prof. Gu’s argument daunting for the non Chinese-literate.
Part Four was, for me, the real payoff. Whereas Part One meticulously depicted the background of and prerequisites for hermeneutics with an almost maddening attention to shades of meaning and implication, this last part of the book is almost mystical in its projections for an open hermeneutics. Some of his topics include: The “Eye” of Openness, Symbiosis of Opposite Aesthetic Feelings, and The Soul of Openness. He discusses the relationship between dream images and the imagery and syntax of Chinese poetry in a truly fascinating way. But it’s in his description of a work of “palindromic verse” (227) by Su Hui, where he draws comparisons between Chinese poetry and twentieth century serial music, that his insights have an especially crisp feel of original thought, and gives, for my money, the most useful bridging of Eastern and Western traditions. The fact that the poem can be read left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top, as well as diagonally, means that the initial two hundred poems of eight hundred characters can yield potential discreet poems numbering in the thousands. He connects this potential to Boulez’s idea that serial thought (as in serial music) (229) “creates the objects that it needs and the form necessary for their organization each time it has occasion to express itself.” Prof. Gu relates this, in Chinese (233) to “an undeclared “rule”: every word can be combined with every other word in a discourse so long as the combinations make sense in a certain context.” This opens a very rich discussion of ambiguous relationships, dream imagery, and the potentials of multi-valence and polysemy inherent in the iconic nature of Chinese characters.
These relationships, while beautifully drawn highlight my major frustration with the book. As a Chinese illiterate, who is nonetheless fascinated with the morphology of Chinese characters, and extremely taken by the graphic potentials of poems in which, for instance, every line has the same number of characters, I felt left out of major truths Prof. Gu obviously possesses and which underlie any appreciation of his thesis. Although this book has a specific scholarly audience, I feel that its potential to contribute to the wider field of comparative literature and philosophy of language warrants an introductory discussion of salient points of relationship and divergence between Chinese and alphabetic languages, as well as an in depth discussion of the graphic (as distinct from the semantic) morphology of the Chinese character. Perhaps this “lay person’s edition” would also be a tad less finely reasoned, so that readability trumps the defensive redundancy of scholarship.
My doubts about whether or not he confirms his stated goals are twofold. The first is trivial: Where he claims “Chinese hermeneutic theories have traversed a road of development from exegetic closure to interpretive openness” it seems that he begins with a description of a very early scholar (Zhuangzi) whose ideas of hermeneutic openness border on anarchy. And second, in claiming to show that this progression is “similar to that of Western hermeneutic theories” he has raised more questions and problems in my mind, especially in his discussions of Heidegger, Husserl and Freud than shown clear parallels.
On the other hand, the side by side juxtaposition of phrases and entire poems in English and Chinese forced a close reading and memorizing (short term) of many individual characters simply in order to follow an argument. To this end, a Chinese-English glossary of key terms would have been at least useful, and, if thoughtfully integrated, could be potentially instrumental in making this book and its intricate arguments more widely accessible.