Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West

ALTHOUGH THE academic study of Chinese-Western literary relations is a relatively new concern in this country,¹ recent decades have witnessed steady and remarkable growth in this field of scholarly endeavor. A glance at the Asian Studies Professional Review, published periodically by the Association for Asian Studies, reveals how far the United States outdistances foreign centers of higher learning in the size and variety of academic programs as well as in the sheer quantity of doctoral dissertations devoted to Asian materials and related subjects. And though size and volume in themselves do not ensure quality, the increment of funds by governmental and private agencies, the improvement of language training on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and the greater opportunities for travel occasioned by the recent turn of political events in Asia (most especially with respect to China) may portend unprecedented proliferation of academic programs. It is in such a context of vigorous expansion that we need to make some assessment of the more specific issues related to the comparative study of Oriental and Western literatures. In the words of Claudio Guillén, “Today the consideration of poetic theory with regard to both Eastern and Western writing—to civilizations between which no genetic relations have existed—is a central desideratum of comparative literature studies.”² The cogency of this statement by Guillén manifests itself not only in the immediate identification of the most formidable problem inherent in the study of East-West literary relations—the absence of genetic relations—but also in the recognition of the urgent need for greater methodological precision. The guiding assumptions underlying much of the scholarly work on Western materials may require modification and supplementation if the comparatist is to sail safely through what must be perennially his Scylla and Charybdis: the adequate appreciation of national, cultural, and historical characteristics on the one hand, and of alien matter for significant and illuminating comparison on the other.

The comparative study of Western literature has always been undertaken with the tacit assumption that such a body of literature comes from a common stock of related languages, histories, and cultures. If, as Herbert Weisinger and Georges Joyaux have pointed out in the introduction to their translation of René Etiemble’s book, it is true that Horace’s use of Greek examples to arrive at the definition of tragedy marked the beginning of comparative literature,³ then Horace’s counsels to his readers in the final sections of the Ars poetica may also have introduced the problem of literary source and influence, a problem that has since been one of the staples in comparative scholarship. Horace had a developed sense of the great tradition (aut famam sequere, l.119), in which the exemplaria Graeca (l.268) would constitute the font both of wisdom and of art for the writers of his own time and tongue (304–326). This elevation of the Greeks to a place of normative eminence in Horace’s aesthetics further implies not only the desire to imitate the Greek experience, but also the intelligibility of that experience to an educated Roman.

Modern comparatists are working with literary materials of far greater scope and diversity than the Romans, but “the grounds for comparison” are usually erected on continuities of a linguistic or cultural order in the West. However different the languages, divergent the artistic forms, and disparate the temporal epochs from which the works originated, the alert mind and trained hand of the comparatist are able to discern the inventive transformation of sources, the unsuspected presence of intermediaries, the growth or attenuation of a literary genre, the distant migration of themes and topoi, and the mutable “fortunes” of various mythical and historical figures. To quote Pichois/Rousseau’s definition:

Beyond textual, linguistic, and historical associations, how shall we determine what belongs to the same tradition? The answer to this question, at least according to one comparatist, is to be found in locating what he calls “les grands thèmes de la littérature européenne,”⁵ the focal myths and legends that have fecundated countless individual works of literature. For Raymond Trousson, the themes of Oedipus, Prometheus, or Faust, with their distended sets of literary variations, deserve careful attention not only because they form an indispensable part of Western literary history; but also because they have the capacity to function as a kind of cultural universal, a Jungian Gestalt, a paradigm for certain kinds of our common human experience:

I hasten to point out that Asian and Western literatures are not altogether unrelated, particularly in those works written after the Renaissance, when commerce began to flourish between the two hemispheres. Europe’s discovery of China was not confined to the alluring rewards of trade or to its admiration for the sagacity of that country’s philosophers and the organizational excellence of her political institutions. As A. O. Lovejoy showed in his seminal essay of 1933,⁷ that discovery had notable consequences at an early date also for the development of aesthetics and for the history of taste in Western Europe. The monumental Bibliotheca Sinica of Henri Cordier, first published in the late nineteenth century and revised and enlarged in the early decades of the twentieth, was followed by the equally massive China in Western Literature, compiled by Yuan Tongli (Yüan T’ung-li) and published in 1958. Both works should delight any student interested in tracing any phase of Chinese influence on Western writings both discursive and imaginative. They should also convince any skeptic, by the sheer weight of bibliographical evidence, about the vital role that China has played, to paraphrase the title of a multivolume study, in the making of modern Europe.⁸

If the consciousness of Asia has been steadily assimilated into Western literary experience (and no one familiar with the writings of Pound, Claudel, Malraux, Hesse, Brecht, and Gary Snyder, to name some obvious examples of our own era, can fail to recognize this process), the impact of the West upon Eastern letters is no less profound. The indebtedness of such modern masters of Japanese literature as Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kawabata Yasunari, Dazai Osamu, Endō Shūsaku, and Mishima Yukio to their Western mentors has been studied by scholars both East and West.⁹ Similarly, the experimentation with Western ideas, techniques, and forms by Chinese writers has not gone unnoticed. From Benjamin Schwartz’s masterly account of Yan Fu, one of modern China’s most provocative social philosophers and vanguard translators, through the definitive history of modern Chinese fiction by C. T. Hsia, the comprehensive study of the novelist Ba Jin (Pa Chin) by Olga Lang, the careful examination of Guo Moruo’s (Kuo Mo-jo) early years by David Roy, to the scholiastic but brilliantly perceptive criticism of the neglected lyrics (ci poems) of Wang Guowei by Zhou Cezong (Chow Tse-tsung), the able account of Cao Yu’s (Ts’ao Yü) discipleship to O’Neill and Chekhov by Joseph S. M. Lau, and the splendid survey of contemporary Chinese verse by Julia Lin, we have a growing collection of scholarly writings that no serious student of East-West literary relations can afford to ignore.¹⁰ Moreover, the deeper significance in the study of literary influence lies not merely in the recognition that every creative artist has a relation to past artists within his own cultural tradition. “The struggle of genius with Genius,” to use a phrase of Geoffrey Hartman, frequently reveals a spatial as well as a temporal dimension; and thus geography, no less than history, should always be an important matter for consideration in comparative literature.

The foregoing selective catalog concerns only modern literature; but what of the literature belonging to more ancient periods, which is to a great extent still inaccessible to Westerners because of the language barrier? The great paucity in the translations of Chinese texts into English is pitiful indeed. A fairly representative collection of the classic philosophic works is available; and in the case of the Daodejing, we may even have an overabundance. With respect to explicitly literary materials, however, we have but a fraction of the entire tradition rendered into satisfactory English, and even this small group of writings is hardly representative. In the province of prose fiction, for example, there are collections of shorter works both ancient and modern, but of the six classic novels dating from the Ming-Qing periods, which are acknowledged to be the most important landmarks of the genre (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, The Water Margin [or All Men Are Brothers], Jin Ping Mei, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Scholars), but until recently, none has received the loving care Dorothy Sayers lavished on Dante, Lowe-Porter on Thomas Mann, or Lattimore on the Homeric poems. The editions we had earlier in English are either strongly abridged (e.g., The Journey to the West, titled Monkey in Arthur Waley’s version), or cast in language that hardly does justice to the original style (e.g., The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Brewitt-Taylor). Furthermore, most translators seem eager to excise the large amount of poetry built into the narrative, so that the very form of these novels is basically distorted. And one looks in vain for the kind of informative critical annotations that frequently adorn and elucidate modern editions of a Chaucerian or Miltonic text. We have good reason to believe that work has already begun on the Xiyouji (The Journey to the West), and to rejoice that the first volume of the Hong-loumeng (The Dream of the Red Chamber), newly translated by David Hawkes, is now published; but the gap here remains appalling.

In the area of classical Chinese verse, the horizon is no less gloomy: a handful of anthologies exist alongside several editions of the most famous individual works, such as the Book of Odes and the Chuci (Songs of the South) and selective translations of the best-known individual poets, such as Tao Qian, Xie Lingyun, Li Bo, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Bo Juyi, Li Shangyin, and Su Dongbo. But as one recalls that the 900 sections of the Quan Tang shi (Complete Tang Poems) encompass over 48,000 shi poems by some 2,200 authors, and that this collection accounts for the output of only one dynastic era, one realizes that even the tip of the iceberg is barely in view. And what of that other genre of classic Chinese verse, named ci, which has made the following Song dynasty justly famous? This equally massive body of literature is virtually untouched, and this negligence cannot but impose a severe limitation, for the Western student, not only on the Chinese lyric tradition but also on the popular drama and vernacular fiction that flourished in subsequent centuries. A knowledge of the prosody, the metrics, the primary metaphors and symbols, and the most common historical allusions is a necessary requisite for understanding the character and function of verse, which is itself one of the most important formal features in these later genres.

Although much work remains to be done, therefore, on the fundamental level of translation, it is gratifying to observe that important advances are being made on the level of interpretation and criticism. Over the past two decades, the movement designed to enhance the application of Western critical concepts and categories to traditional Chinese literature has been gaining momentum; such a tendency promises some of the most exciting developments in comparative literature. Undoubtedly, this movement had its beginning earlier in the twentieth century, when Chinese literary scholars came under the influence of Western theories; but continuous and more systematic probings in various crucial areas only rarely occurred until after World War II. This is not to say, of course, that established Western sinologists such as Arthur Waley, James Hightower, Burton Watson, Patrick Hanan, A. C. Graham, and Jaroslav Prošek did not often present telling points of comparison with literary materials of other lands. But their interests are, or were, not consciously or primarily comparative. Since the late 1940s, however, the large number of Chinese scholars emigrating to the West has made it inevitable that their approach to literary study would be affected by the ideas and methods of their colleagues in the larger scholarly community. In addition to the concern for textual, philological, and historical investigations emphasized in traditional Chinese literary scholarship, they became increasingly aware of the formalists’ preoccupation with poetic structure or the new critics’ attention to the semantic principle. To their more distinctive critical vocabularies of gediao (conformity to rule and pattern), xingling (intuitive genius), qixiang (stylistic vitality and form), and yasu (elegance or vulgarity in style and language) were soon added such newer terms as irony, paradox, plot, character, image, and symbol.

For those whose literary credo demands a more vigorously circumscribed procedure in criticism, this kind of development is apt to elicit a good deal of skepticism. However, it should be pointed out that the use of the more peculiarly Western critical concepts and categories in the study of Chinese literature is, in principle, no more inappropriate than the classical scholar’s use of modern techniques and methods for his study of ancient materials. Witness the kind of “new-critical” exposition of Sophoclean imagery in Antigone, by R. F. Goheen, or the detailed exegesis of the sea-Aphrodite metaphor in Euripides’ Hippolytus, by Charles P. Segal.¹¹ Since, by now, it is a commonplace of literary theory that not even the writing of literary history can avoid the act of evaluation,¹² and that no interpretation can be made in a conceptual vacuum, the hermeneutical question that a student of literature must pose for himself cannot be restricted to how a Chinese poem shall be judged by indigenous norms. Certainly the problems of historical and cultural contexts, of linguistic and generic particularities, and of intended audience and effects must be considered, but a serious critic has every right to ask whether novel means may be found and applied in each instance, so that the work of verbal art may be more fully understood and appreciated.

It is in the light of these considerations that one can be immensely grateful for the pioneering effort and contribution of a scholar like Chen Shixiang (Ch’en Shih-hsiang), late professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Berkeley. The work of Chen is the happiest embodiment of the sinological scholarship of a specialist nourished and enriched by a broad knowledge of Western literature and poetics. His essay “Shijian he lüdu zai Zhongguo shi zhong zhi shiyi zuoyong” (The Poetic Signification of Time and Scansion in Chinese Poetry), for example, has demonstrated how a firm grasp of Western prosody and metrics can be invaluable for the examination of classical Chinese verse.¹³ Similarly, his essay “Zhi yu Gesture,” which is a highly original and provocative interpretation of Lu Ji’s concept of rhetoric with the help of Kenneth Burke’s, offers illuminating comparison between the ancient (261–303) and the modern theorists.¹⁴ In this area of Chinese literary theory and poetics, which again is characterized by a severe lack of translations and the absence of any systematic treatment in Western languages, the several essays by Chen have opened up new territories for further exploration.¹⁵

Chen was not alone in his endeavor. The widely acclaimed Art of Chinese Poetry, by James J. Y. Liu,¹⁶ provides not only a concise introduction to the subject but also a succinct review of the major schools in Chinese poetic theory compared with their Western analogues. In his translation and study of Li Shangyin, Liu was also among the first to apply the word “baroque” to this body of densely textured and luxuriantly ornamented verse, and to show how this descriptive designation of a period style gains new depth and meaning from the celebrated ambiguity in the Chinese poet.¹⁷

Such a method of investigating classical Chinese verse is also apparent in recent essays by Zhao Ye Jiaying (Chao Yeh Chia-ying), Eugene Eoyang, and Gao Yougong (Kao Yu-kung) and Mei Zulin (Tsu-lin).¹⁸ Particularly from the lengthy monographs of the latter two authors, who have recourse not only to the meticulous research on meter, tonal patterns, and rhyme schemes done by Chinese specialists¹⁹ but also to the “linguistic criticism” associated with Empson, Richards, Frye, and Donald Davie, we may garner new and profound insights into the structure, the function, and the vitality of Tang poetic language. Similarly, Eoyang’s essay goes greatly beyond such previous efforts in comparing Western and Chinese nature poetry (those of J. D. Frodsham, James W. Miller and Richard Mather, for example). By demonstrating how the image of the solitary boat in Tang verse consistently exemplifies its “metaphoric accommodation of both natural phenomena and human emotions,” Eoyang is able to indicate not only the characteristic difference in the Eastern manner of externalizing man, of representing the self and its harmony with nature, but also how this difference is accentuated by the formal and linguistic peculiarities of Chinese lyrics. And in C. H. Wang’s compellingly argued and elegantly crafted study of the formative tropes in the Li sao and The Faerie Queene, we have, in fact, a model piece of comparative scholarship on two poems originating in completely unrelated cultures and separated by nearly 2,000 years.²⁰ His painstaking inspection of the sartorial emblems that serve so strategically to develop the quest motif in both poems has not merely disclosed remarkable stylistic and structural parallels between these works belonging to completely disparate traditions, but also given fresh insight into the working of the poets’ minds.

Turning from poetry to the study of traditional Chinese fiction, we may also perceive noteworthy developments. After the publication of James Liu’s The Chinese Knight Errant,²¹ the comparative study of the hero in the novel can no longer disregard the Chinese variant, and any discussion of the form and function of the novel and their social implications must take into account C. T. Hsia’s masterful presentation of the Chinese tradition.²² The history of Chinese vernacular fiction is intimately linked to nearly a millennium of oral tradition, having its beginning with Buddhist preaching in the Tang period and receiving formal modifications and amplifications by the secular entertainers and storytellers throughout the medieval centuries. Though scholars have long adopted the Parry-Lord technique for analyzing the language of oral compositions and have applied it to the study of biblical, Anglo-Saxon, Old French, Spanish, and certain kinds of non-Western literatures,²³ it is only recently that they have employed this method for canvassing specifically Chinese and Japanese materials.²⁴ Scholarly writings on these materials are necessarily more tentative and less numerous than those attending to Homeric verse or the modern epics of Yugoslavia. But as more information on the social and cultural conditions of oral performance in medieval China becomes available, this is likely to be one of the most crucial areas of comparative study. The likelihood that there was among the Chinese storytellers (such as the epic singers of Tibet) widespread literacy and strong attachment to written texts should provide the basis for interesting comparisons with oral traditions in the West.

There are other areas of promise, too. Few would deny that comparative literature studies in the West have been enormously enriched by the treatments of the so-called postfigurative transformations of various historical or mythical persons such as Prometheus, Ulysses, Jesus, Faust, and Don Juan.²⁵ This kind of literary metamorphosis of a well-known and well-beloved figure of myth or history also occurs frequently in China, and it would appear that the numerous fictive accounts of Bao Gong, Guan Yu, Yue Fei, Mulian, and the bodhisattva Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara) might well be looked at in this manner.²⁶ Since rhetorical criticism is now in the ascendant in much of Western literary studies, it is not improper to suggest that the Chinese speculations about the relation between eloquentia and sapientia, which began with the classical philosophers, continued through later Buddhist apologists and translators,²⁷ and received further refinement in the writings of Qing theorists like Yong Fanggang, Fang Dongshu, Liu Dakui, and Yao Nai, may add significant dimensions to the discussion. With regard to literature’s relation to other disciplines, there is an abundance of scholarly works on the intimate association of Chinese poetry with painting and calligraphy, but the study of its relation to music is still at an early stage.²⁸ Traditional Chinese lyric poetry and drama contain vast elements of music, and there are certain literary theories that have made use of musical principles. The former requires the sort of thorough and knowledgeable analysis that has distinguished the scholarship of John H. Long in the United States and Jean Jacquot in France on Elizabethan drama, while the latter may worthily be compared with the Western critical tradition that began with Plato and Aristotle but was greatly stimulated by the writings of such later theorists as Thomas Campion, Joachim Burmeister, Charles Avison, Jean Chastellux, and Jules Combarieu.

Finally, though China has no poet with an explicit religious commitment and concern comparable to the stature of a Dante, Milton, Donne, or T. S. Eliot, the immense terrain of Chinese literature has been irrigated and fertilized deeply by the powerful forces of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Scholars such as Auerbach, Robertson, de Rougemont, Trinkaus, and Abrams have made lasting contributions toward revealing how the Western religious traditions have shaped, ordered, and transformed the artistic forms and styles of certain epochs. Long stretches of China’s Geistesgeschichte, however, still wait for Western scrutiny and exploration.²⁹ Few of us today, I suppose, would disagree with Weisinger and Joyaux that verbal art, “considered in all its aspects, is … a profoundly social phenomenon: it is men calling to each other across the gulfs of separation in which they are enisled, and it is the role of comparative literature to sharpen our ears to this call.” My hope, then, is that the present essay will make us a bit more alert to the continuous beckoning of the East.

1. The first Conference on Oriental-Western Literary and Cultural Relations was held at Indiana University in 1954 and the second in 1958. See Horst Frenz and G. L. Anderson, eds., Indiana University Conference on Oriental-Western Literary Relations, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, no. 13 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), and Horst Frenz, ed., Asia and the Humanities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959).

10. Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 1917–1957 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961); Olga Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); David Tod Roy, Kuo Mo-jo: The Early Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Chow Tse-tsung, Lun Wang Guowei renjian ci (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, 1972); Joseph S. M. Lau, Ts’ao Yü: The Reluctant Disciple of Chekhov and O’Neill; A Study in Literary Influence (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1970); Julia C. Lin, Modern Chinese Poetry: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972).

15. Chen Shih-hsiang, “In Search of the Beginnings of Chinese Literary Criticism,” in Semitic and Oriental Studies, ed. Walter J. Fischel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), pp. 45–63; Chen Shih-hsiang, “The Shih-Ching: Its Generic Significance in Chinese Literary History and Poetics,” Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the Research Institute for History and Philology, Academia Sinica) 39 (1969), part 1:371–413.

18. Chia-ying Yeh Chao, “Wu Wen-ying’s Tz’u: A Modern View,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 29 (1969): 53–92; Tsu-lin Mei and Yu-kung Kao, “Tu Fu’s ‘Autumn Meditations’: An Exercise in Linguistic Criticism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 44–80; Tsu-lin Mei and Yu-kung Kao, “Syntax, Diction, and Imagery in T’ang Poetry,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 31 (1971): 51–136; Eugene Eoyang, “The Solitary Boat: Images of Self in Chinese Nature Poetry,” Journal of Asian Studies 32 (1973): 593–622.

23. For pertinent bibliography, see Anthony C. Yu, Parnassus Revisited: Modern Critical Essays on the Epic Tradition (Chicago: American Library Association, 1973), pp. 21–22; for Spanish literature, see Edmund de Chasca, El arte juglaresco en el “Cantar de Mío Cid” (Madrid: Gredos, 1972), pp. 331–382, and Franklin M. Waltman, “Formulaic Expression and Unity of Authorship in the Poema de Mío Cid,” Hispania 56 (1973): 569–578.

24. Hans H. Frankel, “The Formulaic Language of the Chinese Ballad ‘Southeast Fly the Peacocks,’” Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the Research Institute for History and Philology, Academia Sinica) 39 (1969), part 2:219–242; Earl Miner, “Formulas: Japanese and Western Evidence Compared,” in Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Nikola Banašević (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1969), pp. 405–418; Eugene Eoyang, “Word of Mouth: Oral Storytelling in the Pien-wen” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1971); C. H. Wang, The Bell and the Drum: A Study of the “Shih-Ching” as Formulaic Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Mention should also be made of CHINOPERL (Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature) and its publications, which are devoted to studying all the related topics in this area.

25. See, for example, Charles Dédéyan, Le thème de Faust dans la littérature européenne, 6 vols. (Paris: Minard, 1954–1967); Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959); W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963); Raymond Trousson, Le thème de Prométhée dans la littérature européenne, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1964); Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

29. A beginning in this direction has been made by Liu Cunren [Tsun-yan], Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese Novels, vol. 1, The Authorship of the Feng Shen Yen I (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1962). See also Chang Zhongyuan [Chung-yuan], Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry (New York: Julian Press, 1963). [Author’s note: The situation now in the early twenty-first century is quite different that when this essay was first published. Although monographic studies in this category are too numerous to cite, the following Chinese publications in a series on Literature and Religion (Wenxue yu zongjiao xilie) are too significant to be ignored: Huang Ziping, ed., Zhongguo xiaoshuo yu zongjiao (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1998); Kuang Jianxing, ed., Zhongguo shige yu zongjiao (Hong Kong: Zhongua shuju, 1999); Zhu Yaowei, ed., Zhongguo zuojia yu zongjiao (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2001); Liu Chuhua, ed., Tangdai wenxue yu zongjiao (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2004); Ge Xiaoyin, ed., Han-Wei liuchao wenxue yu zongjiao (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2005).]