The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West.

Saussy, Haun

By Zhang Longxi. Post-contemporary Interventions. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. Pp. xix + 238. $16.95 (paper).

"Let your speech be imprinted with silence, and your silence with good timing," said old Solon of Athens. Zhang Longxi is a student of significant silences. As an interpreter of the Chinese, English, French, and German traditions of philosophical poetry, he has his work cut out for him. The Tao and the Logos develops a coherent view of comparative hermeneutics in four chapters, each devoted to a broad theme or area of controversy and ranging freely across several national literatures.

Zhang is quite conscious of walking in the footsteps of Qian Zhongshu, James J. Y. Liu, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, and Hans-Georg Gadamer; indeed his reconsiderations of some of these critics' best-known readings are among the most enjoyable parts of this delightful book.

Zhang's closing chapter pleads "for the recognition of the shared, the common, and the same in the literary and critical traditions of the East and the West beyond their cultural and historical differences" (p. 191). Some will find this program utopian. For comparatists, however, the discovery of samenesses is always more challenging than that of differences. Differences are inscribed in texts and their histories, while their similarities have to be created anew by every comparatist for every project. To interpret Little Red Riding Hood correctly, one must command an extensive knowledge of European kinship relations, lycanthropy, village settlement patterns, and so forth; and to interpret in all their specificity texts from different traditions and see them as reflecting on one another, one must ignore a truly massive sum of information. Zhang knows that the specific, the thematic, and the implicit always interfere with efficient comparison. And so, in a move Zhuangzi himself would have appreciated, Zhang elects, in the first of two core chapters, to write about the constitutive role of silence in writing. This athematic style of reading begins with what is undeniably common--twentieth-century American silences do sound very much like seventh-century Chinese silences--and yet leads to a consideration of what is different: for there are an indefinite number of ways of dropping into silence, building around it, or fending it off. The reading of silence leads through the language of mysticism, Shakespeare's overweening undercutting of conventional rhetoric, the romantic sublime, the antipoetics of Taoism, the aesthetics of suggestive implication, the Mallarmean horror before the blank page, Rilke's poetics of transfiguration, and Eliot's "raids on the inarticulate"--to give an idea of the cornucopia of references this slim but highly-charged book contains. In a particularly brilliant move, the book's last chapter returns to this topic, suggesting that the unsaid in texts is simply that whereby they are literary: it reveals their necessarily schematic structure, instantiating the "spots of indeterminacy" that must be concretized in a reader's imagination (pp. 164-65).

One organizing principle of Zhang's discussion of silence is the opposition between "helpless, passive silence" and meaningful, active silence" (p. 129). Zhang accuses Jacques Derrida, for instance, of misreading Mallarme's mute "Mimique" as one when it should have been the other. Denida reads the prose sketch as "exemplifying the impossibility of meaning" thanks to the presence in it of self-reflexive blancs, or blanks: "eventually, Derrida's reading leads to the total erasure of meaning." But for Zhang, "the blank at the center of the text for Mallarme simply means the evocation of something out of nothing.... Silence, for Mallarme, does not mean the negation of language," rather "the magic power of language to evoke and create things otherwise nonexistent and inaccessible" (pp. 100-101, 108). Whatever clarity this distinction affords (and as a representation of Derrida's argument in "La double seance" it is far too schematic to my mind), by the end of the chapter it has been "pulled up again" like Wittgenstein's famous ladder. "Eventually, the limitation and the suggestiveness of language must be seen not as contradictory but as complementary to each other, for they are the two sides of the same symbolic function" (pp. 128-29). And of the four or five poets cited by Zhang in this chapter, none but has an eloquent way of complaining about the impossibility of utterance. Why then was Derrida's reading of the "blank" so objectionable, if linguistic negativity always furnishes an ambitious poet an obstacle to overcome? Zhang suggests that he prefers silence "in a frame of music and words" (p. 129). But an already framed silence is hardly linguistic negativity, rather a poetic topos. Derrida's blank is blanker, and thus gives future poets more work to do.

Deconstructive criticism gets little sympathy from Zhang. It is the object of repeated exaggerations: "De Man does not seem to differentiate the rhetorical in general from the acoustic in particular" (p. 95); "Derrida rejects meaning" (p. 104); "deconstruction takes a resolutely antihermeneutical stance and ignores the question of meaning altogether" (p. 145); and so forth. The curious reader will have to go elsewhere to learn about deconstruction, or indeed about semiotics, for Zhang's account of "meaning" is resolutely referential and representational (pp. 93, 95, 99).

This book has been written for a cosmopolitan audience, rather than for the monocular sinologist. But some of Zhang's technical points are new and valuable. For example, Zhuangzi's ideal conversational partner is here translated as "a man who will forget words" (p. 30) rather than the more usual "a man who has forgotten words." With this slight touch Zhang has greatly improved the logic of the passage, as well as making more transparent the use of the allusion in Tao Qian's "Drinking Wine, No. 5": "There is a true meaning in all of these, But when I try to explain, I forget my words" (pp. 124-26). Tao could sensibly claim to be the sort of person "who will forget words," but hardly one "who has forgotten words."

China specialists will probably be puzzled to find Zhuzi jicheng cited as "Collection of Classics," since the distinction between jing and zi, between "classics" and the various "masters," is so deeply rooted in the bibliographical traditions of China. More pernicious for the uninitiated is the translation of Dong Zhongshu's celebrated formula, shi wu da gu, as "[The Book of] Poetry has no direct interpretation," especially since this is followed by the statement that "Dong Zhongshu ... thereby justifies and sets up the ground for allegorical interpretation of ancient verse in terms of Confucian ethical and political philosophy" (p. 196). Indirect or unliteral interpretations of the Book of Poetry were current generations before Dong, and in any case da here cannot mean "direct." In the immediate context of the remark (Chunqiu fanlu, ch. 5, "Jinghua"), the word means "consistent, applicable to all contexts": "For the Poetry," Dong admits, "there are no uniformly valid word-glosses; for the Changes, no unchanging prognostications; for the Spring and Autumn Chronicles, no constant evaluations." On the Western side, too, there are some minor flaws. Devoted readers of Paul Valery's prose works will be surprised to hear that he was "not a systematic theorist with a complete set of aesthetic principles" (p. 180), and it is a pity that Rilke's poetry should always be reduced to gesturing at the reader through the wordy, inflated, and sentimental translations of Stephen Mitchell.