Great Walls of Discourse, and Other Adventures in Cultural China.

• Author: Bryant, Daniel
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Great Walls of Discourse, and Other Adventures in Cultural China. By HAUN SAUSSY. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 212. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2002. Pp. 289, illus. $45 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

I recall having been told as a child that the Chinese did everything backward. This news amounted to an irresistible inspiration to adopt what we would now call an innovative lifestyle. I announced that I was going to live like the Chinese henceforth and that my first experiment along these lines would be to sleep with my head under the bedclothes and my feet on the pillow, which was about the most egregious form of doing things backward that my infant imagination could supply. The resulting headache drove my sinophilia underground, not to emerge again until university, but the episode, though unpublished, may nonetheless fall within the scope of the issues that Haun Saussy explores in this thoughtful and wide-ranging book.

A passage in the introduction provides the necessary clue to what the book is about: "It happens that the marker 'Chinese' is applied or grasped in various ways. These ways are a part of my subject, not the answer to its questions; the question is 'How does "Chinese" come to have a specific value in this situation?' and not 'What are the properly, characteristically Chinese features of this situation?'" (p. 12). In short, the author is not interested in whether the Chinese do everything backward or not, but very much interested in why people would not only conclude that they do, but would then go on to act on this conclusion. The author's targets include essentialism and polar thinking, two maladies as endemic to occasions of "China" and "the West" talking about each other as malaria to tropical swamps. His question is, in effect: what is it that has led so many Western interpreters of China (and Chinese interpreters of the West) to advance such large and often ludicrous theories about their subject? His underlying concern, which remains only implicit through much of the book, is with the real defeats and miseries visited upon innocent bystanders, most of them Chinese, as consequences of the theories.

The first case considered, in chapter two, is a curious account of Europe, and in particular of the role of printing in enforcing orthodoxy, written by Yang T'ing-yun [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the late-Ming Christian convert. Coached by Matteo Ricci, Yang described a society in which printing, being an extremely expensive technology, was entirely controlled by a body of sagely men who permitted only properly edifying books to emerge from the press. As the author points out, this highly idiosyncratic picture reflects the urgent needs both of Ricci and his fellow Jesuits for a seventeenth-century Europe in which the Reformation had never occurred and of Yang and his fellow partisans of the Tung-lin faction for a China in which the authority of the literati had never been reduced by the descent of the imperial court into corruption and by the spread hither and yon by cheap private printing of the heterodox ideas of hsin-hsueh. Ricci needed to paint a picture of a society run by sages, to lure his potential converts eventually to be persuaded by the doctrines of those sages; Yang needed the example of a faraway land in which virtue ruled, to rally his troops for the fight against eunuch power and "Crazy Zen" doctrines. In Yang's European fantasy (the Index Purgatorius is not mentioned, since to admit the bare threatened existence of bad books would break the spell), marginal men like Ricci and Yang alike could find the vehicle necessary to preserve their dreams. The author uses this instance to argue that a "universal culture" is unlikely to be in the offing in our day for the simple reason that communication between cultures requires translation and that what results is not a transparent set of equivalences, but rather the outcome of multiple mismatches and ad hoc compromises determined not by 'facts' but by the needs of the people doing the translation.

The third chapter is the longest and perhaps the most difficult in the book. It is concerned with the Chinese script; not with its history or primarily with its...