Qian Zhongshu as a comparatist

The name of Qian Zhongshu (or Ch’ien Chung-shu in the Wade-Giles system) should have been familiar to literary scholars in the international communities. He was made an honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America in 1985, but compared with the other MLA honorary members of the same year – Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette, Wolfgang Iser, and Robert Weimann – Qian Zhongshu remains largely unknown in the West except in a small circle of Sinologists. Qian’s scholarship belongs not just to China studies, however, but is truly comparative and global, with extensive references to world literature and culture. “His knowledge of Chinese literature, of the Western tradition, and of world literature is immense (Sa connaissance de la littérature chinoise, du patrimoine occidental, de la littérature universelle, est prodigieuse),” says Pierre Rickmans in Le Monde as early as 1983. “There is no one like Qian Zhongshu today in China, not even in the world (Qian Zhongshu n’a pas son pareil aujourd’hui en Chine et même dans le monde)” (Rickmans 1983: 15). But not until 1998 do we have Ronald Egan’s selected English translation of Qian’s major work, Guan zhui bian or Limited Views, and so far there has been very little critical assessment of Qian’s scholarship to give it the credit and appreciation it deserves. Now that we are embracing a truly global concept of world literature beyond the familiar grounds of the European tradition, we should know what a great comparatist and humanist Qian Zhongshu was and how exemplary and significant his works are for anyone interested in world literature and East-West comparative studies. Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) may be said to represent the best of humanistic scho-

larship in twentieth-century China, a scholarship deeply entrenched in the tradition of more than three thousand years of Chinese culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, profoundly influenced by the culture of the West. This is already discernible in his family background and upbringing. He was born into an intellectual family in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, where his father was a well-known scholar of traditional Chinese literature who gave him a solid training in classical Chinese; the high schools he went to were established by Episcopal missionaries, where he gained an excellent command of English. After China’s defeat in the Opium Wars in the late nineteenth century, most Chinese painfully realized that the world was no longer the

traditional Sinocentric “all under heaven,” in which China stood at the centre and the rest were peripheries of less cultured barbarians; instead, they found a much larger and completely different world, in which the presence of Western powers posed a threat to be reckoned with, but also a model to emulate and learn from. Translation of Western works thus emerged at the turn of the century as an important intellectual activity. Yan Fu (1854-1921), who studied at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England, in the late 1870s, became most influential for his translation of major works on European political and social theory. Equally significant and influential were Lin Shu’s (1852-1924) translations of more than 180 European and American novels into classical Chinese, even though Lin himself knew no foreign language and had to work with collaborators knowledgeable in the originals. As a school boy, Qian Zhongshu ravenously read dozens of those novels, which

he described many years later as his “great discovery at the age of eleven or twelve” that led him to a completely new world outside the familiar world of traditional Chinese literature. In reading Lin’s translations, says Qian, “I came to know that Western novels could be so fascinating! I was never tired of reading Rider Haggard, Dickens, Washington Irving, Scott, and Swift time and again. If I had any conscious motivations for learning English at the time, one of them was that one day I could indulge myself in reading all the adventure stories by Haggard and other writers” (Qian 1985: 70). Interestingly, translation aroused his desire for the original. “Translation is meant to save people the trouble of learning foreign languages and reading the originals,” says Qian, “but all of a sudden it may change to tempt some to learn foreign languages and read works in the original. It may stir their curiosity and make them long for the original, as if whetting their appetite with a tasty morsel without satisfying their hunger and craving.” Goethe, in his Maximen und Reflexionen, he goes on to add, “compared translators rather impolitely to lowly and pushy matchmakers (Übersetzer sind als geschäftige Kuppler anzusehen),” who “show a half-concealed beauty (eine halbverschleierte Schöne) of the original, leaving readers desperate to see the beauty in their fevered imagination” (Qian 1985: 68-69). Translation, he argues, may “entice” readers to the original, and that was what Lin Shu’s translation did to him. Qian Zhongshu studied English at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Exeter Col-

lege, Oxford, where he earned his B. Litt. degree in 1937 with a thesis on China in the English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He went on to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne for another year before returning to China in 1938. By that time, the Japanese had invaded China and occupied Shanghai and much of the northern territories. Qian could hardly find a peaceful environment for his scholarly pursuits during the Sino-Japanese war and then the civil war between the Kuomingtang and the Communists, but he managed to teach in several universities and started to publish. Written on the Margins of Life, a collection of essays, came out in 1941, followed by Men, Beasts, and Ghosts, a collection of short stories, in 1946, and Fortress Besieged, his only novel, in 1947, considered by many as the finest modern Chinese fiction, as C.T. Hsia remarks, “for its delightful portrayal of contemporary manners, its comic exuberance, and its tragic insight” (Hsia 1971: 434). While those literary works were written in the modern vernacular, Qian published a book of criticism in classical Chinese, Tan yi lu or Discourses on the Art of Literature, in 1948. It is an early example of his scholarship that draws on incredibly rich

Chinese and European textual sources for comparisons, intertextual connections, and mutual illuminations. Discourses on the Art of Literature appears to be a fairly traditional book, as it is

written in classical Chinese and follows the traditional form of shi hua (remarks on poetry) or bi ji (written notes), in which fairly short entries are loosely put together without a particular order or consistent argument. But actually it is a completely new book in modern scholarship, for no traditional book has ever had such a wide range of reference to situate Chinese literature in the context of world literature, with quotations not just in Chinese, but in five or six European languages. In reaching out to the West, Qian Zhongshu consciously positions himself in an intellectual genealogy that dates back to the late sixteenth century, when Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and the other Jesuit missionaries came to China and started the intellectual contacts between China and Europe. The neo-Confucian thinker Lu Xiangshan (1139-92) famously said that “there are sages emerging from the eastern sea with the same mind and principles; and there are sages emerging from the western sea with the same mind and principles” (Lu 1992:317). Because of the universalistic idea articulated here with reference to “the eastern sea” and “the western sea,” these words have often been cited to justify the acceptance of new ideas from the West ever since Ricci’s time. Qian Zhongshu is alluding to these words when he declares, in the preface to the Discourses, that “from the eastern sea to the western sea, the minds and principles are the same; in the teachings of the south and the north, the way and the means are not separate” (Qian 1984: 1). This effectively lays down the foundation of East-West comparative studies buttressed by a traditional philosophical argument, thereby demonstrating that in assimilating ideas from the West, Chinese scholars follow an intellectual genealogy of their own, rather than just acting upon a desire to emulate the West. The Discourses contains discussions of Chinese poetry since the Tang and the Song

dynasties, often through a dialogue of classical Chinese texts with those in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Latin. For example, it is a conventional view among Chinese historians that different genres arise and develop in different dynasties, and thus poetry became perfected in the Tang, ci or lyric poetry emerged in the Song, followed by the rise of drama in the Yuan and Ming, etc. Qian Zhongshu criticizes such a view for its simplification of complex historical continuities and transformations, and he concludes that “the way literature evolves and develops is nothing but taking what was not literary to be literary, and taking what was prosaic to be poetic. What used to be considered not suitable for literature is admitted as stuff for literature, and what used to be considered vulgar expressions are taken to be materials for the weaving of an elegant text” (Qian 1984: 29-30). The great Tang writer Han Yu (768-824) is particularly noted for turning phrases fit for prose into innovative poetic expressions. In discussing Han Yu’s use of prose in poetry, Qian opens the question up, relat-

ing it to a more general discussion of world literature. He points out the same tendency in William Wordsworth, who in his preface to Lyrical Ballads dismissed “poetic diction” in favor of ordinary language; in Victor Hugo, who in his preface to Les Orientales argued that anything can be a suitable literary subject (Tout est sujet); and in Friedrich Schlegel, who in Athenäumfragmente, no. 116, considered poetry as

the culmination of all forms, “a progressive universal poetry (eine progressive Universalpoesie).” Then, as a rule in all literary histories, Qian reminds us with Victor Schklovsky that “New forms are simply canonization of inferior genres” (Qian 1984: 34-35). By putting Han Yu in comparison with Wordsworth, Hugo, and Schlegel, and by referring to Schklovsky’s theoretical summing-up, Qian Zhongshu makes it clear that the development of literary genres and the changing concept of literature is a process of constant expansion, the assimilation of elements of prose into poetry, and the integration of what was considered non-literary into the sphere of literature. What, within the limits of Chinese literature, is taken to be a particular feature, even a feature of a particular writer, is thus better understood as an exemplification of a general tendency in world literature, even of a rule or principle in the history of literature. It is worth noting that Qian Zhongshu cited Schklovsky in 1948, some twenty

years before Russian Formalism and Schklovsky became well known among Western literary scholars. Qian was extremely well read and had an acute sense of what was new and important in the world of literature and criticism, but just as he was reaching the prime of his creativity as a writer and critic, the political situation in China changed, and for several decades incessant campaigns against intellectuals and increasingly tight ideological controls under Mao’s rule made it impossible for him to continue writing. He was not the only one, however. Shen Congwen (1902-88), one of the best and most prolific writers in modern China, who had published dozens of novels and short stories and cut a very prominent figure in the 1930s and the 1940s, suddenly stopped writing and never published a single work of fiction after 1949. Those who did write in Mao’s China were constantly subjected to critique, humiliation, and even worse treatment. From the 1950s till the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1977, Qian Zhongshu kept a very low profile and published almost nothing. In more than thirty years, as he told this author in a private communication, “of all the planned works, not one out of ten was completed” (Zhang 2004: 223). Such was the condition for most intellectuals in Mao’s China. In post-Mao China, however, things changed dramatically. In 1979, Limited Views,

Qian’s magnum opus written under difficult conditions during the Cultural Revolution, was published and won immediate critical acclaim. Fortress Besieged was republished in 1980 and made into a successful television serial in 1990, which made Qian Zhongshu a household name in China far beyond intellectual circles. The second and enlarged edition of Discourses on the Art of Literature was published in 1984, and the Collection of Seven Essays came out in 1985. Qian Zhongshu was “rediscovered” and became the object of a wave of “Qian studies.” Forty years after his return to China from Europe, he was allowed to join Chinese delegations and visited America (1979) and Japan (1980), and was made a Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1982. As he wrote to this author in a letter dated 28 June 1982, to be placed in such an office was something he “never dreamed of,” which he described in a self-mocking tone, deliberately misquoting Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, II.v): “Some are born mandarins, some become mandarins, some have mandarinate thrust upon them” (Zhang 2004: 231). Fame and prestige came to him in his old age, but Qian Zhongshu stubbornly

refused to be lionized. He urged his readers not to make Fortress Besieged the subject of critical studies, and turned down invitations to interviews or television

appearances. As his wife, Yang Jiang, recalled in her memoir, he even told an English lady rather bluntly, when she telephoned to request an interview: “If you ate an egg and thought it was good, why do you have to see the hen that laid the egg?” (Yang 1987: 102). What he wanted was time, to be left alone and do his work, for the five volumes of the Limited Views are only part of a much larger work he had planned, which, unfortunately, he never had time enough to bring to completion. Qian Zhongshu passed away in December 1998, and his unfinished manuscripts and notes were later published in their original, unedited form as facsimile reproductions. Despite its modest title, Limited Views is an ambitious work commenting on

Chinese classics in relation to various Western texts. It is written in classical Chinese, like the earlier Discourses, but on a much larger scale and covers not only literature, but also philosophy, history, philology, psychology, linguistics, and many other subjects. It evinces the author’s encyclopedic knowledge and offers an excellent model for Chinese-Western comparative studies. The very first entry, a commentary on the meaning of yi in the title of the great Chinese classic Yi jing (or I Ching, often translated as the Book of Changes), lays a new foundation for East-West comparative studies. Qian begins by quoting an ancient book and observes that the Han-dynasty commentator Zheng Xuan (127-200) explained that “the word yi has one name but three meanings: first, ‘easy,’ second, ‘change,’ and third, ‘not change.’” Of the three meanings, two are contradictory. He then cites other Confucian and Buddhist books to show that several other words, such as shi or poetry, lun as in Lun yu or the Confucian Analects, wang or king, and ying or response, all have different and sometimes contradictory meanings. Then, he turns the discussion of Chinese semantics to a wider context and says:

Hegel once denigrated our language and thought it unfit for philosophizing (Wissenschaft der Logik, Reclams “Universal-Bibliothek”, I, 19); while he praised the German language as suitable for expressing the subtlety of metaphysical meanings, as exemplified by the word Aufheben that contains in one and the same word two contradictory meanings (ein und desselbe Wort für zwei entgegengesetzte Bestimmungen), which, he claimed, not even Latin has a word to match in depth and subtlety (Ibid., 124-25). We need not blame Hegel for his ignorance of the Chinese language; neither should we be surprised at his careless high-sounding argument based on such ignorance, for that is not uncommon with those learned master-savants; but as scholars we do feel it a shame that he has turned what is the same in minds and principles from the eastern sea to the western sea into the proverbial incomparable apples and oranges.