Theory and Me: Part I
 

I tend to read everything I can find about topics of interest of me. The poets of the Chinese Han and Wei dynasties are among my favorites, so when I saw Christopher Leigh Connery’s book The Empire of the Text (which inter alia covers the literary culture of that time) I bought it. But I didn’t like the book and couldn't finish it, so I decided to use this opportunity to articulate my feelings about Theory, rather than just muttering and grumbling as per usual. (People tell me that Theory is passé and nothing to worry about any more, but in my opinion it isn't passé enough yet.)

The ideal audience for Connery’s book would be someone who is able to read English and Chinese, who has studied the history and literature of the Han and Wei, and who is pretty well on top of theory. I score something like 2.4 out of three, but this book was too theory-heavy for me. I’m not sure that the methodological and theoretical passages could have been of much use to anyone – they’re too sketchy and basic to be very valuable for someone who is sophisticated about methodology, but for the same reason they would not be very helpful for someone ignorant of methodology. They seem like defensive writing, proving to people in the biz that the author has all his theoretical ducks in a row.

I suspect that there are only a few dozen people in the world capable of giving this book a better reading than mine, and what I especially fear is that the book will become a canned version of China for theory people, allowing them to pretend that they know what they’re talking about when they don't. Connery actually cites two books which do just that -- Kristeva and Barthes spent a couple weeks each in China and Japan respectively, and they came back to write fluffy books which were mostly just their impressions of the Oriental vibes, with little substantive content.

What is this book “about”?  Well, it’s not “about” “Chinese” “literature”. It especially discusses changes in the self-definition of the Chinese elite and in the way they looked at what we call “literature”. The poetic forms which were so highly valued by later Chinese and by Western translators did not, during the Han period at least, have the importance that was later given to them.

But above all, this book seems to be about theory. Meta-statements, methodological discussions, and scare quotes stud the book like speed bumps. The book is remarkably argumentative, but one of the author’s rules is that since his intervention (he uses no scare quotes on this term) attempts to replace the standard ways of talking about the era and about Chinese culture in general, he should therefore make no reference to, and use no concepts from, any of the standard interpretations except when he is refuting them.

As a result, the reader learns little about the collapse of the Han and of Han Confucianism, Cao Cao’s unorthodox and perilous rise to power, or the lives and the works of the poets of the time. Since this era and its literature (especially the Wei poets) have not been well-covered in the English-language literature so far, non-Sinological readers will be somewhat at a loss reading  this book -- Connery is providing a revisionist view to an audience which is mostly unfamiliar with the received view.  It would have been far better for the first substantial book in English discussing the literary world of Wei to have been more basic and inclusive. (Connery includes no Chinese texts, and only two translations of different versions of a single unexceptional poem.)

Theory is a jealous master, and Connery tends to slight the a-theoretical authors who have written about the origins of shi poetry. Diény’s Aux Origines de la Poesie Classique en Chine and Birrell’s Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China are not even listed in the bibliography, and their works which are listed are not discussed. He does mention Owen’s Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, but  Connery ignores his most interesting points, limiting himself to the claim that that Owen is guilty of the subjective fallacy and the communication fallacy. Connery takes a lawyer’s attitude toward the question of the possible oral, folkish or non-elite antecedents of shi poetry, demanding that “minimum standards of evidence” be met. This amounts to begging the question, since the kinds of records he demands do not exist at all, one way or another -- and even if they did, written records of oral poetry would no longer be oral any more. (On orality Connery seems to have relied on Finnegan’s meticulously confusing Oral Poetry).

The payoff from all this is slight. Anyone involved in the field at all already knew that the poetry of this time was socially produced at group events. How this proves that nothing subjective was expressed in these poems is not made clear, and the fact that a focus on subjectivity is characteristic of XIXc bourgeois criticism is pretty much irrelevant to the Chinese criticism of a thousand or more years earlier. (Furthermore, this sounds like "Tradition and the individual talent" all over again). Connery’s stress on the bureaucratic nature of most Chinese “writing” of this time is valid and interesting, but I think that he takes the formal and official denigration and subordination of shi poetry too much at face value. (The Chinese official histories are famous for leaving out the things we would most want to know, while recording formalistic trivia and state fictions in enormous detail.)

Connery also misses some juicy stuff that he might have liked. For example Cao Cao, the warlord who presided over this era, was the grandson of a eunuch; it would seem that queer studies should have something to say about that. Connery also missed the avant-garde Confucians Kong Rong and Mi Heng, the first of whom was executed for sarcasm and impudence, and the second of whom once made his point in an argument by stripping himself naked while in attendance at one of Cao Cao's court functions. (Yes, Mi Heng also was eventually executed -- but not by Cao Cao, and not for that).

I doubt that Connery is really the problem here. I imagine him chained to his carrel, pale and wan, flinching in fear every time he hears the door open, terrified that his dissertation adviser might catch him doing something bad. Connery has certainly done his homework, and we can hope for good work from  him if he ever reaches free soil.

“Liberating potential” is supposedly crucial to theory, but in fact theory, like any other methodology in the methodologized university, was imposed on a generation of scholars from above by standard bureaucratic processes -- chiefly the establishment of objective standards and procedures for the control of hiring, firing, and promotion.  It would be interesting to see Connery apply the tools he has used to analyze text formation within the Chinese bureaucratized elite to the rules for text formation in the bureaucratized academic world of today.

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Bibliography

Birrell, Anne, Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China, Hawaii, 1988.

Birrell, Anne, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, Penguin, 1982.

Cao Zhi (George Kent, tr.), Worlds of Dust and Jade, Philosophical Library, 1969.

Dieny, Jean-Pierre, Aux Origines de la Poesie Classique en Chine, Brill, 1968.

Dieny, Jean-Pierre, Les Poemes de Cao Cao, Paris, 2000.

Dieny, Les Dix-neufs Poemes Anciens, P.U.F., Paris, 1963.

Dunn, Hugh, Cao Zhi, New World Press, 1983.

Goodman, H.L., Ts'ao P'i Transcendant, Scripta Serica, 1998.

Owen, Stephen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, Wisconsin, 1985.

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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