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

• Author: 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...