Key Words
literary archeology, the third relation, material exchange, “the Six
Confucian Classics are all histories”, recovery of material objects
Zhejun Zhang is a professor in the School of Chinese Language and
Literature in Beijing Normal University and his research focus is the
comparative literature studies in East Asia. Majoring in literature and
cultural exchanges in East Asia, Zhang is the first Ph.D. graduated from
the Institute for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in Beijing
University, the first institute for academic studies on comparative
literature in China founded in 1985. In this review article, I will
locate the trajectory of development of the notion of literary
archeology and the third relation of comparative literature, compared to
influence and parallel ones, expounded by him in his newly published
book The Third Notion of
Comparative Literature: the Possibility of Literary Archeology(2016). Though the concept is
groundbreaking and innovative, it has already been conceived by him more
than a decade ago. In “Chinese School and Comparative Literature of the
New Century”, Zhang (2000) has pointed out the importance of the
objectiveness of research of comparative literature as a key criterion
for establishing the Chinese school of comparative literature, a
prospect envisaged by his mentor, Shaodang Yan, director of the
Institute for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in Beijing
University. He also stressed that empirical studies in traditional
Chinese literature should be added a theoretical dimension. The same
year also witnessed the publication of another paper of his, “Is the
Age of Empirical Studies of Comparative Literature Gone”. In this
paper, he rectified the false charge that the studies of the rapport de
faits, the “foreign trade” labelled sarcastically by Rene Wellek, are
mere recording of the receptions and impacts of authors and thus boast
of little academic value, claiming that empirical studies concerning the
bilateral relations of the literary works between two countries involve
the studies of impact as well as the studies of the transfiguration and
transformation of the elements from the original literary works in the
new ones. Such studies, therefore, are not totally empirical but also
contain subjects who conduct the changes, i.e., the authors. The impact
factors should not be separated from the creation factors by them. This
is very similar to the combination of argumentation and textual
criticism in traditional Chinese literary studies.
All these stances can be reflected in this tour de force of his. It can
be regarded as the quintessence of the ideas of Zhang on the Chinese
style of comparative literature for many years. He unequivocally
indicated the interrelationships among his major works. InIntroduction to the Comparative Literature in East
Asia (2004), there is a chapter
on the image of Japan and South Korea in Chinese literature. In the same
year, he developed this chapter into another book, Studies on the
Image of Japan in Ancient Chinese Literature (2004). While writing this
book, he found Japanese material objects a major concern for most of the
ancient Chinese scholars, so he mentioned these objects in each chapter
of the book as an important media for the ancient Chinese to get to know
Japan. From that time on, he showed his interest to the studies of
matters in Chinese and Japanese literature and thus he published one of
his most significant books, The
Image of Willow: The Material Exchange and the Ancient Chinese and
Japanese Literature (2011), a
lengthy elaboration on the image of poplar and willow in more than five
hundred of ancient Chinese and Japanese poems. He recalled his original
plan of writing matters exported from Japan to China and China to Japan
and the matters to be covered consist of four different types, poplar
and willow, tiger, elephant and backgammon. Due to limited time and
enormous labor required for searching the materials, he had to choose
just one of them and left the rest of the three for his latest book,The Third Notion of Comparative Literature . By the time he tried
to construct his own theory, therefore, he has already accumulated
countless substantial evidence to support his argument after dealing
with enough case studies. A hindsight of the emergence of the concept of
literary archeology which spans almost his entire academic career by far
manifests professor Zhang’s ambition to renovate Chinese comparative
literature studies, for which he was nominated as the “Yangtse
Scholar” in 2016, a highest honorary title for a researcher in China at
present.
I would like to further trace the gradual formation of his ideas in the
above-mentioned books. In Introduction to the Comparative
Literature in East Asia , he summarizes the merits of interpretation of
Japanese culture by Zunxian Huang, a famous scholar in Qing dynasty,
which lie in three aspects: objective, historical, free from the idea of
Chinese cultural superiority over Japan. By historical he means that
cultural phenomenon can only be understood within a certain historical
background and their developmental process in history should also be
considered. These principles became his own guidelines for research in
the future. Meanwhile, this book established a framework for his later
research by acknowledging the multiplicity and homogeneity of the
literature in East Asia. Countries like China and Japan share much in
common in their culture and literature but they also differ in some
ways. And most importantly, Chinese culture has a huge impact on Japan
and South Korea with a lot of cultural exchanges in history. The bookStudies on the Image of Japan in Ancient Chinese Literaturehighlighted these cultural exchanges by examining the Sino-Japanese
relationships in different historical periods, before Tang dynasty, Tang
dynasty, Song dynasty, Yuan dynasty, Ming dynasty, Qing dynasty, etc.,
among which Tang dynasty is the most important period because of the
constant cultural exchanges led by Kentoshi, a possible media through
which poplar and willow were brought to Japan.
It’s just these cultural exchanges mostly through material objects that
aroused his attention when he engaged in the research on the
relationships between ancient Chinese and Japanese literature and found
that this kind of material exchange constitutes the third relation that
underlies the poems of both China and Japan which makes them so similar.
This similarity may be wrongly confirmed as caused by the relation of
influence but actually it’ not because no evidence can be gathered to
consolidate the direct influence of one poem on another and it should be
attributed to the matters described in the two poems which connect the
two countries as a natural outcome of cultural exchanges in history.
This is not the parallel relation, either. Zhang’s discovery of the
third relation gave birth toThe Image of Willow in which
various types of the third relations are discussed.
Zhang’s exposition of these different manifestations of the third
relations constitutes a panorama of the history of the vicissitudes of
the cultural implications of willow ever since its introduction in Japan
from China. It became widely accepted and planted all over the island.
Concomitantly, the perceptions of it was also imported in the process,
for example, fetishism of it as a symbol of life and vitality or
personal freedom and obligation, aesthetic appreciation of it as the
paradigm of feminine beauty, and its religious function of exorcism,
etc. Zhang recorded all these variations in The Image of Willow ,
which makes the whole book appear as a historiography of ideas
comparable to Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being . Zhang’s
representation of the history of the cultural exchange of willow between
the two countries does share much in common with Lovejoy’s description
of the history of ideas. It’s both synchronic and diachronic. It’s a
“historical synthesis” or “conglomerate” (Lovejoy 16) in the sense
that it’s composed of a variety of “the manifestations of specific
unit-ideas in the collective thought of large groups of persons” (19).
For examples, judging from the location of the plantation of willow, it
can be classified as cemetery willow, courtyard willow, gate willow,
brothel exit willow, etc. Each of them bears a certain kind of cultural
implication which acts as a unit-idea in the whole system of the
conception of willow. Within a certain historical period, each unit-idea
prevailed in people’s everyday life. Yet the differences between the two
approach are also apparent. Zhang’s study on people’s perception of
willow is determined by the physical properties of willow and thus is
unlikely to “degenerate into a species of merely imaginative historical
generalization” (21). The peculiarity of willow as a tree species
constitutes the condition of people’s imagination of it. For example,
its vitality generated the life worship of it. Its gracefulness and
limpness naturally aroused the association of women.
Thanks to Zhang’s investigation on the introduction and dissemination of
the Chinese cultural implications of willow in Japan, the third
relation, which laid hidden behind the comparable literary works of the
two countries, can be distinguished from the impact factor. In a sense,
the third relation is caused by the influence of one poet upon another.
But this influence is not achieved through the medium of literary works
but rather the cultural implications of the matter described in the
poems. In The Image of Willow , it’s always the Japanese poets who
were influenced by Chinese ones in regard to the aesthetic or religious
perceptions of willow. There are also some particular cases in which the
third relation is entangled with the relation of influence.
It’s noteworthy that Zhang has discovered that these implications would
not remain unchanged in Japan as the recipient. They would undergo a lot
of variations and transformations especially when they interplayed with
the local cultural notions. Zhang has gone to great length to trace
these evolutions of the notions concerning willow which literally became
a major focus of literary archeology. They also serve to enrich the
definition of the third relation in that the relationship was not a
simple learning, reception, and emulation formula yet it involved many
subversions and transfigurations. For example, willow was transformed
from a sacred tree expelling evil spirits in China into a demonizing
symbol, either a hiding place for ghosts or becoming ghosts itself in
Japan. And in China, it was a symbol of authority and social status but
later in Japan its implication incorporated the personality of Yuanming
Tao, the famous Chinese poet and hermit in Eastern Jin Dynasty and thus
generated a Taoist ideal political aspiration which both emphasizes
personal freedom and obligation. The association of willow with gender
also experienced a change from the powerful masculine symbol to the
impotent and fragile feminine one across the two countries. All these
complicated variations make the confirmation of the third relation very
difficult because it takes large amount of historical materials and
poems to certify the original implication of willow reflected in Chinese
poems as the sender and the changed one in Japanese poems as the
receiver. Zhang’s unravelling of these entanglements which has almost
been forgotten and not recorded in standard historiography is the major
part of his argument. It’s just this certification which can be traced
to the tradition of textual research in China that makes the approach of
literary archeology boast of considerable academic significance since it
serves to retrieve the lost historical truth concerning the cultural
exchanges between the two countries.
The discovery and classification of the various types of third relations
are of vital importance to the proposal of literary archeology. The
methodology and core idea of this newly established discipline are both
contained in them. Zhang’s investigation of the time and space of the
matter appeared in the poems is a crucial strategy in the certification
of the third relation. Moreover, literary works, poems in particular,
are the carrier of the cultural exchanges. Specifically, the exchange of
matter would bring about the exchange of ideas concerning it, and these
ideas would be accepted and emulated by the poets of the recipient
country. Then the ideas would be embodied in their poems, which formed
an interesting and detectable connection with the poems of sender
country.
The Image of Willow , a project with immensely ample evidence,
laid a solid foundation for the
theoretical construction of The
Third Notion of Comparative Literature by Zhang. Literary archeology,
as suggested metaphorically in the book, is just the excavation of the
layers of archeological sites through the recovery of the matters and
ideas among the countless poems and other literary works in ancient
times in the related countries where cultural exchanges used to be
frequently occurring. What distinguishes it from archeology is that
these layers of archeological sites are the world in which people dwelt.
The literary works recorded the exchanges of matters and ideas in the
different living worlds constituted by the two countries. Therefore, the
authentication of the messages in these literary works conveying signs
of exchanges is crucial to the effectiveness of literary archeology.
Zhejun Zhang employed the slogan of
Xuecheng Zhang, an outstanding
historian in Qing dynasty,
“the
Six Confucian Classics (not written by Confucius but sorted out by him)
are all histories”, to validate the material descriptions of the
ancient Chinese and Japanese literary works, especially poems. This
claim is sufficiently grounded in the tradition of ancient Chinese
literature, history, and philosophy, which is characterized by a hazy
boundary among them. Literature is viewed as history, so Book of
Songs is also history. Many great scholars in ancient China held
similar viewpoint as Xuecheng Zhang before him. The history recorded in
literary works, however, is different from the one in official history
compilations. It’s mainly composed of histories of people’s everyday
life which boast of unique academic value with abundant details. These
detailed recordings of the daily life of the common mass can’t be found
in standard history books and chronicles which usually aim to narrate
the vicissitudes of the politics. That’s why Xuecheng Zhang thought thatBook of Songs is a useful complement to the official history
books. He also proposed that the literary and historical works can be
mutually corroborated. This important idea has been borrowed by Zhejun
Zhang and employed in the analysis of literary archeology. He adds that
literary archeology is not just a study on the history of people’s life
but also on the history of matters as well as landscapes. This means
that through the analysis of the poems with the aid of history works
lost matters and disappeared landscapes can be recovered and moreover,
existing matters and landscape paintings can be used in this recovering
endeavor too. In The Image of Willow , he has collected numerous
paintings from China and Japan as illustrations to strengthen his
argument. This approach has naturally lead to a conclusion that runs
contrary to common sense that historical background is just a footnote
to literary studies. Instead, it now becomes the subject of research
with the history of the landscapes consisted of material facts
foregrounded in the poetic text. In Zhang’s words, footnote containing
the information of matters or places can become an article or even a
book (Zhang, The Third Notion284). This kind of study in the form of footnote also derived from the
literary tradition in ancient China.
Obviously, Zhejun Zhang has employed Xuecheng Zhang’s point that “the
Six Confucian Classics are all histories” as the theoretical foundation
of literary archeology. In fact, there are many different
interpretations of this doctrine, the generally acknowledged of which is
that Xuecheng Zhang proposed this idea in order to challenge Zhen Dai,
another influential Confucian scholar in Qing Dynasty, who upheld that
the Six Confucian Classics are the carrier of Tao. Although Zhejun
Zhang’s explanation of this slogan which mainly aims at elucidating the
relationship of history and literature in ancient China is somewhat
superficial compared to Xuecheng Zhang’s original intention, it’s quite
useful to verify the effectiveness of the literary works in ancient
China as the recorder of history.
To further emphasize that the goal of poetry is to record historical
events and material facts, Zhejun
Zhang reinterprets the concept in the famous slogan concerning ancient
Chinese poetry, “Poetry is to express one’s aspirations”. Rather, he
proposes that poetry is to record things. In this sense, poetry assumes
the same function as diary. He then deals with this journalizing feature
of Chinese poetry in three aspects: title; line; preface, postscript or
footnote. He argues that these three parts of a poem can all fulfill the
function of a diary, that is, to record things. And the reason why poem
has to be diary-like in ancient China is not only due to its primary
concern mentioned above but also because of the belated and immature
development of the genre of diary. Diary originated in the Tang dynasty
and flourished in the Ming and Qing dynasty while poetry, as the most
significant literary genre in ancient China, boasts of a much longer
history. Moreover, diary is written daily but poem is improvised and
real time. Therefore, when writing a diary one has to recall what has
happened for the day yet poets are able to record everything they are
witnessing immediately on the spot.
Juyi Bai is the representative
figure of such kind of poet. Japanese poetry, influenced by the Chinese
one and especially Juyi Bai, is also like diary. It should be noted that
both Chinese and Japanese poetry are not monolithic in regard to their
contents. There are realistic parts as well as symbolized, fabricated,
and exaggerated parts. Zhejun Zhang points out that to distinguish these
two different kinds of contents in poetry is crucial to the
effectiveness of literary archeology because they are often mixed
together. He cited Xuecheng Zhang’s differentiation of literature and
history that the former can only be used as historical materials after
the fabricated contents are eliminated and the realistic ones are
retained. And his own research experiences show that he can make full
use of these two parts in poetry which are considered the primary source
of historical materials by him (Zhang, The Third Notion 116).
This point can be further evidenced by two other interesting examples.
First is the saying of “there’s a poem to prove this” in novels and
dramas. Zhejun Zhang attributes this to the foremost proving power of
poetry (Zhang, The Third Notion 141). Second is the practice of
the imperial exams in ancient China in which the attendees’ knowledge of
poem and prose were mandatorily tested despite the fact that they were
supposed to be officials after passing the exam. The reason for this
practice is that poem and prose would provide them with multiple
precedents of history and politics in society which will enhance their
governing capabilities.
Zhang devotes a whole chapter to summarize the fundamentals of the third
relation by the theorization of the concrete expositions in The
Image of Willow . The basic objective of literary archeology is to
restore the living world through the discovery of the fragments of
material history in a multitude of literary works in the two countries
with a lot of cultural exchanges. As the research goes on, these
fragments will form a complete picture of the original condition of the
matter in history. The difference between the third relation and the
relation of influence lies in that the sender and receiver of the former
is the living world and it’s a kind of a diachronic exchange. It’s also
different from the parallel relation since the latter is based on
similarities of the living worlds in which there are no exchanges of
matters and ideas. These exchanges of matters and ideas are the media of
the third relation. Literary works are the vehicle that recorded these
exchanges. Once the matters and ideas become a universal subject matter
in many literary works in the two countries, the exchanges of them and
the third relation can be confirmed.
The research of literary archeology
on the third relation, Zhang argues,
is a process starting from the individual cases to the universal ones.
When a certain material object appears frequently at the same time and
place mentioned in several poems, it deserves critical attention. First,
one has to confirm whether the material object is factual or not. Then
it has to be frequently occurring at the same or approximate time and
place depicted in other poems by the same poet or other ones. For
example, Lin Yang, Yuxi Liu and another anonymous poet, all wrote about
the willow in Hua E Pavilion, a building in Xingqing Palace in Tang
dynasty. To take a step further, when the material object repeatedly
occurs in different time and place and especially across different
countries, it will probably become a subject of study for the third
relation and literary archeology. Zhang also stresses the importance of
systematic and taxonomic recovery of the material objects. For instance,
gate willow and courtyard willow should fall into different categories;
willow in China is a subsystem and in Japan another one, the two forming
a whole system. All in all, Such an approach to literature, as Zhang’s
case studies have demonstrated, is thoroughly empirical as the
researcher needs to find as much as possible relevant literary works and
other materials to support his thesis.
The Image of Willow andThe Third Notion of Comparative Literature are the two most
important books for the proposal of the notion of literary archeology.
Besides, Zhang’s other works also provided many useful materials and
examples for his argument in The Third Notion of Comparative
Literature . For example, Kōjirō Yoshikawa’s comments on Yaochen Mei’s
poem, which comes from the book,Studies on Kōjirō Yoshikawa is mentioned to explain the issue of
the recovery of history and the image of Japan in Chinese literature;
“Juyi Bai”, a Noh or Nogaku, which is from the
book, Japanese Noh with
Chinese Themes (2005), is used to illustrate the realistic feature of
poetry. It’s not an exaggerated claim, therefore, as Zhang admits that
literary archeology is the result yielded by the research on material
facts in literature for almost his entire
career (Zhang, The Third
Notion 402).
In the present era in China when the
subjectivity studies of literature
remain the mainstream, Zhang’s proposal of the study of material objects
seems to be outmoded. He has been advocating the scientific approach to
literature all his life and his relentless efforts finally aroused the
attention of his peers and got its due rewards. He also believes that
the tradition of the ancient Chinese literature should be revived and
revitalized. The significance of literary archeology or the third
relation to comparative literature, according to him, lies in its
solution of the puzzling problems and correction of the mistake of
oversimplification in the literary relationships between two countries,
i.e., regarding all kinds of literary exchanges as the relations of
influence. What’s more, the scope of study of comparative literature is
expanded as the living world is included in the study of literary
archeology which may not be just limited to ancient literature but could
be applied to modern literature, too. In a word, Zhang’s approach to
establishing a literary theory which is based on the attempt to
returning to the literary tradition of China may not be the same as Ning
Wang expected, that is, to mix Western theory with local elements and to
reform and reconstruct it while engaging in a dialogue with it, but he
did achieve the heterogeneity and unique value (Wang,Internationalization 115) and the “modernization of ancient
Chinese literary theory” (Wang, Validity 67) that Wang has
envisioned for the Chinese literary theorist.