Imagine a narrow path paved with blocks of granite, leading from checkered rice-fields spreading to the horizon in three directions into some foothills whose nearby summits mask loftier peaks beyond. The path is so narrow that one expects it to peter out among the rocks, and there are no signposts to indicate that it leads anywhere in particular; but now and then we come upon sheer walls of rock on which, blurred by the rain of centuries, have been chiseled poems in huge characters faithfully modeled on the calligraphy of bygone scholars famed for their skillful brushstrokes.
—BLOFELD, FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO RED PINE’S COLD MOUNTAIN
After reading Cold Mountain, Red Pine’s collection of translations of Han Shan’s poetry in the early to mid-1980s,1 the American minimalist painter Brice Marden set about creating a series of paintings that marked a sea change from the geometric minimalism he is usually known for. In a series of paintings entitled Cold Mountain Series (Han Shan), Marden offers us a purely visual representation of Han Shan’s poems. The character-like forms in his paintings are not Chinese characters, but their non-semantic shadows. These forms undulate in and out of focus, as if peering out from behind moving cloudbanks. The paintings are beautiful; they reveal the artist’s deep commitment to his material and a desire to find a visual form that suggests both the natural setting of Cold Mountain (characters climbing like vines across the canvas’s rock face) and the emptiness he sees animating Han Shan’s poems. In several pieces of the Han Shan series, Marden enacts this emptying by scraping the paint off some of the lines, and in others by painting over them with paint the same color as the canvas, giving the effect that the character-like forms are passing into and out of being. Fluid lines appear and disappear as if the canvas were undifferentiated Mind, and the character-like forms, empty of referential meanings, appear as thoughts on the verge of cognition.
When Marden opened Red Pine’s translations of the poet Han Shan, he entered into the intertextual world of a romantic transpacific imaginary (not so unlike the one we witness in Tony Barnstone’s translation with which I began this study). By traveling into John Blofeld’s description
FIGURE E.1. Brice Marden, Cold Mountain Series, Zen Study 3 (Early State). 1990. Etching and lift ground aquatint, printed in black plate: 20 11/16 x 27 3/16”; sheet: 27 3/8 x 35 1/4”. Publisher: the artist, New York. Printer: Jennifer Melby, New York. Edition: 3. Linda Barth Goldstein Fund. (432.1990) Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. © 2009 Brice Marden / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
of Cold Mountain in the book’s preface, he also entered into a major transpacific thoroughfare of American poetics as well. Even though Blofeld had not himself been to Cold Mountain in person, he opens before Marden a landscape of orientalized/exoticized beauty and mystery.2 Over several pages, Blofeld enthusiastically pulls his reader into thick forests, by rustling animals and gushing rivers, limpid streams, and across bridges with names like “Bridge to the Sea of Clouds.” Here Marden is hurriedly passed by Daoist monks, who climb the high walls “undulating like a dragon’s back with the contours of the ground” without laboring for breath before finally reaching the temple where the reader is met by “smiling mystics offering us a place to rest and dinner composed from mountain fare.” It is in this strange “Orient” that Marden found inspiration for his paintings; it is here he encountered the “sheer walls of rock on which, blurred by the rain of centuries,” ancient poems were chiseled. Perhaps Marden’s own transpacific imaginary is chiseled into those same imagined stones.
Marden’s paintings are translations that proceed through mimicry, yet translators can only mimic what they believe to be “on the other side.” Like so many of the translators we have discussed, Marden’s translations mimic the visual content of the calligraphic originals as well as the particular epistemology he sees animating the poetry itself. His paintings are nearly a perfect embodiment of Wai-lim Yip’s poetics of emptiness, since the Chinese poem (or the suggestion of one) finally reveals Yip’s language of pure transparency. Language has “moved out of the way” to let nature reveal itself without “epistemological elaborations.” The poem, no longer burdened by thoughts or sounds, becomes its own referent; the signifiers are finally one with their signifieds (or at least the paintings seem to offer this).
Marden’s paintings are also an interesting cognate of Gary Snyder’s poetic vision, or visionary poetics. If the work of Chinese poets like Han Shan is, as Gary Snyder argues, to see “the world without any prism of language, and to bring that seeing into language,” Marden has taken us a step closer to the nirvanic perspective so often apophatically gestured to by Han Shan himself. No longer burdened by language, the onlooker is free to “see” what lies beyond it. And apparently behind the paint lies emptiness. In a sense, Marden’s Han Shan paintings are a fitting place to conclude this project since they seem to form a pool at the end of the streams described by both Yip and Snyder. In the course of this work, I have endeavored to presence some of the bends and disturbances along the way. Principal among these disturbances is this stream’s elision of cosmological formalism, its distrust and disinterest in Chinese poetry’s nuanced prosodic textures, its intricate yet bold soundings. Yet if Marden’s paintings are the telos of a major stream of American poetics of emptiness, then the stream has, in an important sense, left the sound of poetry behind.
It would be a shame to think that these silent, carved rocks, or the paintings they have inspired, represent the telos of the transpacific imaginary, however. I do not simply mean to emphasize the hypermimetic silence of the paintings, but also the limitations of Blofeld’s imaginative universe that, at least in part, inspired them. What may have struck Blofeld and his readers as sublimity in his description of Han Shan now strikes us as reified surfaces complicit in the othering of Asian cultural discourses into romantic caricatures. Even if Yip’s and Snyder’s desire to reach outside language is haunted by the success of Marden’s paintings, their poetics cannot be reduced to Blofeld’s Han Shan. While Orientalism, in Said’s pejorative sense, is, and will likely remain, an important element of the transpacific imaginary, it is my hope that this book’s attendance to the wide scope, historical depth, aesthetic complexity, and theoretical rigor of the heterocultural productions discussed, reveals not the thin caricatures of distant otherness but the multiphasic transformations of East Asian philosophy and poetics in twentieth-century American poetry.
The Orientalism of Blofeld’s transpacific imaginary serves as a common example of why the Buddho-Daoist elements of American poetry and poetics have not been taken seriously, and I would argue lends support to Rey Chow’s current skepticism toward “the economy of idealized otherness.”3 Chow charged that because of the obstinate anti-theoretical methods of Area Studies, the present idealization of “otherness,” popular in cultural studies more generally, presents us with a danger, because a turn toward non-Western cultures “espoused in the name of cultural studies could easily be used to refuse and replace rather than strengthen the theoretical modes of inquiry.” As Chow sarcastically asserted, “Now we can go back to the study of indigenous cultures and forget all about ‘Western theory’!”4 For Chow and others, Transpacific Studies must first and foremost remain squarely within the methodological priorities and practices of Western literary criticism, rather than Area Studies, which is reflected in Rob Wilson’s important charge to bring theoretical attention to “new cultural voices and undertheorized works struggling to emerge across troubled sites of cultural production.”5 I see this practice (and the desire that fuels it) as both extremely positive and ultimately helpful, yet there is another voice growing within (Cross-)Cultural Studies, a theoretically informed group of scholars who, nevertheless, question the rise of critical theory as a global standard of scholarly production and wonder if non-Western epistemological and hermeneutic systems may have a part to play in contemporary criticism.
Toward the end of his book Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and ‘The Mystic East,’ a text that employs a largely Foucaultian reading of Western Indology, Richard King disrupted his own privileged use of critical theory throughout his study to pose a provocative question:
Why should theorists be limited by the Western framing of this debate? Consider, for instance, the example of Buddhist philosophy. In ancient Buddhist thought there has been no postulation of an all-powerful deity nor of an immortal soul constituting our real and essential identity. The spat between the Church and the secular humanists did not occur. In contrast, Buddhist philosophy and practice is grounded upon a realization of the impermanent (anitya) and fluctuating nature of the self (pratityasamutpada) of all sentient beings as impermanent, multifaceted and “relational” processes.6
King goes on to argue that such a disruption “is motivated on my part by a concern to transgress the limits set up by the lacunae in much contemporary postcolonial theorization—as if the European framings of the debate were the only options available to the postcolonial critic.” And he concludes, “The introduction of a variety of indigenous epistemic traditions is, in my view, the single most important step that postcolonial studies can take if it is to look beyond the Eurocentric foundations of its theories and contest the epistemic violence of the colonial encounter.”7 While I find King’s argument very compelling as well, the problem with this gesture, and others like it, is that they usually come before or after a study that does not enact this “break” with Western theory in the slightest. King is, I believe, on to something, but his gesture remains just that.
Furthermore, Chow worries that suggestions made by scholars like King may lead critics to return to essentializing forms of nativism, and she has good reason to worry. There is little value in simply endorsing, for instance, a Sinocentric episteme over a Eurocentric one, since such structures of knowledge are inherently invested in state ideology (and undergird ethnic, cultural, or racial notions of superiority). With the dramatic rise of guoxue (“state studies,” or the studies of Chinese classics) among the business and political classes in China, for instance, we see a shift from Marxist to Confucian rhetorical idioms beginning to take place.8 And while this might have been appealing to the Tel Quel, who after their return from China in the mid-1970s lamented that “China is fully imbricated in an economic and political model that the West already knows,”9 there is little doubt that Confucian ideology will offer the kind of “other logic” of which they dreamed. Instead, as we enter this “Pacific Era,” the Chinese state’s embrace of classical Chinese philosophy and aesthetics (which Sollers identified as being apposite with the French avant-garde’s poststructuralist agenda) has been reintroduced as a function of state ideology, showcased during the stunning Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing (where there was not a single reference to Mao or the proletariat, but a headlong embrace of classical history, literature, aesthetics, and ritual). There is little doubt that elements of China’s classical rhetoric and aesthetics will be repurposed to support PRC’s state ideology, which will complicate its status as a “countercultural logic” in the Western poetic imagination due to its non-Western origins. Clearly, the heterocultural nature of the transpacific imaginaries discussed in this work have, within their historical contexts, succeeded in challenging traditional Western metaphysics, yet I would argue that future transformations of the poetics of emptiness will need to adapt to these changing geopolitical trends to remain relevant.
Interestingly, one of the most important facets of the poetics of emptiness that has kept it relevant to the present moment is perhaps the same thing that has kept it marginalized in literary criticism: its messiness—its decidedly unfixed, heterocultural nature. Buddhologists and sinologists, interested in the “primary texts,” have not taken a great interest in what I have called the “transformations” of the “transpacific imaginary,” which by still other names might be called the “distortions” of the “lay American dabbler” or some other dismissive marker. While I believe good scholarship should engage in compulsory self-reflexive analysis of how its political and ideological, even methodological, investments frame non-Western cultural discourses, this scholarly agenda is not the ultimate goal of the heterocultural poetry and poetics explored in this work. The texts read in this book willfully (and otherwise) interfuse and transform multiple cultural discourses in the hope of producing heterocultural idioms different from both the East Asian and Western discourses they draw upon and contribute to; they embrace poetics as a third space of cultural production—a tertium quid, to borrow a term favored by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
In light of this different intellectual and cultural agenda, I do not believe that we can dismiss the particular historical manifestations of the poetics of emptiness for the transhistorical/cultural brush with which they are often formulated. After all, the East Asian aggregates of American poetics will always be meaningful, regardless of the historical rigor of their articulation. The question is whether literary criticism will take up the challenge of engaging the multifarious, heterogeneous cultural discourses that condition these complex cultural productions. In this sense, what the work of Ernest Fenollosa, Gary Snyder, Wai-lim Yip, or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha makes accessible, a polymorphous and unstable transpacific imaginary, is perhaps more important than what they “distort or misrepresent” in a strict scholarly sense. While I believe that criticism must be able to address distortions made by both poets/translators and critics if they perpetuate systemic misrepresentations, it is just as important to note the metaphysical fiction that underlies notions of interlingual semantic fidelity itself. As Lydia Liu passionately argues following Jorge Borges, “It is the business of this industry [bilingual dictionaries] to make sure that one understands ‘that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.’”10 Liu uses the examples of non-synonymous “translations,” like the English word “self,” or “individual,” and the so-called Chinese “equivalents” ji, wo, ziwo, to underscore the very real incompatibility of the conceptual framework each term depends on for its meaning.11 Therefore, it is important to track the transformations of meanings across linguistic (and cultural) systems but foolhardy to search for exact equivalents. In this light, one may be able to glimpse one of the more progressive elements of heterocultural poetry and poetics: it seeks to find new forms of perception, not equivalent ones.
Setting the metacritical context of this debate aside, there remains a practical question I am not sure Chow, King, or others have presenced: namely, how is one to “read” heterocultural texts animated by various cultural and epistemic discourses if one’s interpretive frame is not “literate” in the discourses conditioning the text? Can the theorizing Chow and Wilson wish to bring to their “undertheorized” transpacific texts respond to the heterocultural discourses that inform them? At a practical level, how does a critic engage a term like “emptiness,” with its heterogeneous signification across multiple epistemic and ontological traditions, as it appears in cultural productions as varied as those of Gary Snyder and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha? Interestingly, it may well have been Ezra Pound, in his Cantos, who has offered (or forced upon us) one of the best solutions to this quandary. As a poem that “contains history,” the Cantos might be more generatively described as an intertext constructed out of far more languages, historical, mythical, and literary allusions, etc., than those his readers might bring to the text. Therefore, his readers are forced to investigate clues and follow leads, acquire new languages, and familiarize themselves with previously unknown (and/or ignored) texts in order to “read” the poem at all. Following this basic methodology, the poetics of emptiness under discussion here is an invitation to become more generous, curious, and ambitious readers than we might be without it. As I have mentioned earlier, heterocultural poetry offers readers the opportunity to develop reading frames as hybrid as the texts being read. Of course, this is an invitation to become other than what we were before interacting with them and is no small endeavor.
Given the need to expand beyond our habitual hermeneutic horizons, I did not see sufficient reasons to adopt Rey Chow’s rejection of Asian studies as a repository for metacritical concepts (and historical/cultural contextual information) that we may need to attend to the heterocultural dimensions of this work. Yet the impetus of this work is not guided by the sole desire to include non-Western epistemic traditions in contemporary literary criticism either. As I believe this study has made very clear, Asian philosophical and aesthetic traditions are already interfused within American literary discourses, so it is up to critics to learn how to engage these heterocultural conditions, not to idealize them or lament the difficulty or impossibility of their introduction from a mythic “outside.” It is my hope that this work will not defend Western theory from the “nativist” barbarians at the gate, or gesture fancifully to epistemological systems beyond it. After all, there is no gate, just as there is not something beyond it waiting to save Western scholarship from its provinciality. The outside is already here, in our poetry.