| DATE: | Friday-Saturday, September 28-29, 2007 |
|---|---|
| PLACE: | Seaborg Room, The Faculty Club, UC Berkeley Note: This location is not wheelchair accessible |
| FORMAT: | Conference |
| SPONSORS: | Center for Chinese Studies East Asian Languages and Cultures Townsend Center |
How does the play of the hidden and the manifest contribute to the construction of meaning in traditional China? The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures brings together scholars from the fields of traditional Chinese literature, philosophy, art, history, and Buddhism for two days of panels and discussion on the craft and cultural significance of hiddenness in traditional Chinese culture.
The Yi-Yan Paradigm and Early Chinese Theories of Literary Creation
Cai Zong-qi, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The triad of yi, xiang, yan constitutes the onto-epistemological paradigm established by Wang Bi (226-249). Beginning with Lu Ji (261-303), Chinese critics have sought to understand the process of literary creation in terms of a transformation of what is "hidden" (the insubstantial authorial yi), often through the intermediary of xiang (images), into what is "tangible" (yan, words of a finished work). Exploiting the explanations of the genesis and import of the yi and xiang, as well as their dynamic interplay, and thus formulated richly diverse theories of literary creation. Major texts of literary criticism from the Six Dynasties, Tang-Song, and Ming-Qing periods will be discussed.
"The Disarrayed Peaks Conceal an Old Monastery": Poeticized Pictorial Conception in Northern Song
Eugene Wang, Harvard University
A contest for students of painting sponsored by the Northern Song court included a well-known test topic. Students were asked to picture a poetic line: "the disarrayed hills hide an old monastery." The wining composition shows a banner post peeping behind mountain ridges. The episode is often cited as an innocuous example of pictorial ingenuity in visualizing poetic thought. The question of why the old monastery is to be "hidden" and why the hiddenness amounted to a favored theme for painting has rarely been addressed. It will be demonstrated that the formal configurations of concealment in Northern Song landscape painting, motivated by the much-touted "suggestive hiddenness" (cangyi), are in fact codifications of cultural values resulting from a set of historical dynamics and circumstantial contingencies. The paper is a study of the mechanism of unruly historical circumstances translating into formal schemes, involving decisions about what is to be hidden and shown.
Synecdoche of the Imaginary
Stephen Owen, Harvard University
In this paper I would like to begin by the peculiar association in Chinese poetry between scenes in mist and the "poetic." I will argue that mist disrupts a visually continuous ground, making phenomena in a scene synecdoches of some whole. Given the visual vocabulary of "figure" and "ground," I would like to go on to talk about the role of this peculiar form of synecdoche as the sublation of ground, often invoked as fragmentation, dissolution, and historical loss.
Reading Wang Wei's "Wang River Collection" Again: The Use of the Character Fu
Wendy Swartz, Columbia University
This paper discusses questions of visual perception and cognition in Wang Wei's 王維 (699 or 701-759 or 761) Wang River Collection 輞川集. It delves into these questions through an examination of Wang Wei's use of the character "fu" 復 (again). This character appears in five of the twenty quatrains, signifying either the workings of a cycle or repetition of action. This perception of repetition provides remarkable insight into Wang Wei's understanding of the world he sees.
Anonymity and Hiddenness in Medieval Chinese Biography
Alan Berkowitz, Swarthmore College
In the mid fifth century, Yuan Shu compiled a work called "Accounts of Genuine Reclusion" that included biographical accounts only of "men inreclusion since antiquity who had left their traces without leaving behindtheir names," men renowned for their acts or their writings, but who remained anonymous except for a descriptive sobriquet. Not long after, RuanXiaoxu headed his tripartite "Accounts of Lofty Reclusion" with stories of men who, similarly, were remembered for their preeminent words and conduct but whose names had not survived. For the compilers of the accounts, these men ostensibly were truly hidden men, as opposed to hidden worthies with names whose traces clearly were the spoor of their unhidden lives. Moreover, the biographical sections on reclusion in several of the early medieval and medieval dynastic histories, as well as the "Accounts of High-minded Men" by Huangfu Mi, Ji Kang, and others all contain goodly numbers of biographies of individuals who have earned a lasting reputation anonymously. Similarly, any number of anonymous recluses are encountered fortuitously in historical and belletristic literature whose wise comments eclipse their more formal identities. And what of the facetious anonymity of such famous examples of autofictography as "Mr. Five Willows" or "The Man Without a Name"? In the way that jade-like virtue may be hidden but not diminished beneath a rustic cloak, anonymity and "hiddenness" clearly do not obfuscate a jewel of worthiness, and rather enhance it instead. Further, in some ways anonymity may even functionally open the possibilty of generality and universality in place of confined specificity and limited applicability. This essay will explore various aspects of the rhetoric of hiddenness in the biographical tradition of early medieval and medieval China.
Hiding Through Revelations in Late Imperial Romantic Memoirs
Wai-yee Li, Harvard University
Historians and literary scholars in search of records of private life in late imperial China have often turned to the literature of remembrance that men wrote about the women they loved. Some prominent examples include Li Yu's (1611-ca. 1680) memoir of his two concubines, Mao Xiang's (1611-93) Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Studio, Yu Huai's (1616-96) Records of Travels in Wu, Shen Fu's (1763-ca. 1808) Six Records of a Floating Life, Chen Peizhi's (1794-1826) Reminiscences of Xiangwan lou, and Jiang Tan's (d. 1862) Remembrances Under the Autumn Lamp. These memoirs purport to reveal the authors' personal feelings and their attempts to find meanings beyond public roles as scholar or official. However, self-revelations also follow conventions of idealizing the beloved and of fashioning a romantic or moral self image. I will discuss the boundaries of reticence in this genre of writings.
Women in the Tower: "Nineteen Old Poems" and the Poetics of Un/concealment
Xiaofei Tian, Harvard University
This paper examines a group of anonymous poems dated to the second century and known as "Nineteen Old Poems." Although The Classic of Poetry and the Songs of Chu are commonly regarded as the fountainhead of Chinese literature, "Nineteen Old Poems" in many ways constitute the true origin of classical Chinese poetry in terms of form, topic, motif, and imagery. Apparently straightforward and transparent, this group of poems tantalizes with a protean quality: reading closely, we realize that we are often at a loss as to who is speaking what to whom. This impression is confirmed by late imperial Chinese critics' extremely diversified and often conflicting interpretations of these deceptively simple little poems. Many signs seem to point to a narrative fullness just underneath the linguistic surface; elliptical words and phrases serve as indexes of hidden stories. But just as we think we have deciphered the covert messages, other hermeneutic possibilities creep up and make a mess of everything. In the end, it turns out that the gesture of ellipsis in "Nineteen Old Poems" points to nothing but the principle of hiddenness itself. How do the poems do this, and why? What are the possible consequences for the later development of classical Chinese poetry? These are the questions I attempt to answer in this paper.
Secret Histories and Social Networks
Jack W. Chen, University of California, Los Angeles
The concept of gossip may be understood in terms of the circulation of private information through a public network. At the same time, however, the information that circulates is cannot be entirely private, nor can the network be entirely public. Both are defined in terms of the other: that is, the circulation of information is what defines the network, and the network is that gives meaning to the information. Though this may seem to be tautology, one might say that the information is significant only to the extent that it circulates within a network that understands the significance of the information.
In the following paper, I will discuss these theoretical concerns through an examination of the life of Li Yi, a Tang official and poet. I will begin by discussing Li Yi's biographies as they are related in the two Tang histories. There, passing reference is made to a youthful problem that delayed his progress up the social ladder, but nothing further is said about what this problem was. One must instead turn to a chuanqi entitled "Huo Xiaoyu zhuan," which explains that a romantic episode in Li Yi's life gave rise to a lifelong paranoia and jealousy - the problem hinted at in his official biographies.
The Ruling Mind: Persuasion and the Origins of Chinese Psychology
David Schaberg, UCLA
As object of obedience, of observation, of persuasion, of cure, and of efforts at control and manipulation, the ruler is a commanding presence in the texts of preimperial and early imperial China. It is from the practical challenges of persuasion that the first sustained analyses of the ruler's psyche emerge, bringing with them theories of inborn faculties, the emotions, motives, and compulsive behavior. Because of the difficulties of reaching it, conceptualizing it and working upon it, the ruler's mind is a hidden object par excellence. The Mengzi, both in its direct theorization of human nature (xing 性) and in its display of rhetorical cunning, implies the existence of a sophisticated model of the mind; this model, I will argue, owes more than is usually recognized to an original analysis of the ruler's mind, and in some respects imposes the model of the ruler's psyche on all others. The Han Feizi develops an extraordinarily complex of the ruler's mind, with its motives and contradictory pretensions, and proposes a system of control that is in no small measure designed to protect the ruler himself and his polity from the effects of his desires. The Zhuangzi and associated texts present the ruler's mind as complicated by emotional ailments, but curable. Finally, the Laozi and texts that echo its strategies imply that to cure the ruler's mind is to pacify the world itself. With this synthesis, so influential in the early decades of the Han, an early tradition of psychological thought finds a lasting place in the political philosophy of the empire.
Beliefs about Social Seeing: Hiddenness and Visibility in the Classical Era in China
Michael Nylan, UC Berkeley
For the past year, I have been exploring the prevailing theories about seeing, visualizing, and thinking that dominated three quite different societies, those of classical China; classical Greece; and twenty-first century America. For the conference, I would like to limit my remarks generally to the social contexts for beliefs about seeing in early China and, more specifically, to the social advantages and disadvantages attached to the concepts of hiddenness and visibility. Noting that the social valences of the word wei changed dramatically over the course of Zhanguo, Qin, and Han, I construct a tentative historical hypothesis incorporating several observations: first, that by late Zhanguo, the received texts display an acute fear that anyone desiring to become the cynosure of all eyes may come to be viewed instead with the sort of contempt that stems from over-exposure to prying eyes; second, that the older aristocratic notion that elites were to display visible and visually arresting exemplary models for the benefit of their inferiors (moral or social) competed, in the early empires, with the newer notion that elite persons and activities will be valued to the extent that they are kept from view; and third, that conflicts over the reigning paradigms of viewing produced in both visual and verbal rhetoric attempts to balance hiddenness and visibility, producing an impressively authoritative, yet expressively opaque stance that eventually would serve as reigning paradigm for governing elites in the post-Han period.
Manifesting Sagely Knowledge: Commentarial Strategies in Chinese Late Antiquity
Michael Puett, Harvard University
This paper will explore the commentarial strategies that developed over the course of the Han and Wei periods for reading the pre-Han texts attributed to sages. One of the key moves in these commentaries involved the attempt to draw out for a non-sagely audience the hidden insights contained in sagely writings. I will analyze why these concerns for making manifest the hidden teachings of the sages arose, discuss the different strategies that were created to draw out the hidden insights, and explore the implications of these strategies.
Ershisi shipin and its World of Deferred Meaning
Paula Varsano, UC Berkeley
Among the writings that comprise the corpus of traditional Chinese literary theory, few rival the Ershisi shipin (Twenty-four categories of poetry) for its ability to compel - or even provoke - readers to confront the aesthetic effects and epistemological implications of the rhetorical foregrounding of hiddenness. By what means does the author engage readers in a seemingly irresolvable dance between disclosure and hiddenness; and, more importantly, to what purpose? What is the essence of the knowledge that is being transmitted, and why must it be conveyed in this manner? Years after its (debatable) date of initial circulation, several Ming and Qing authors, Yuan Mei the most renowned among them, chose to imitate, explicate and expand upon this work - careful all the while to avoid, somehow, doing violence to its essential hiddenness. In doing so, they only beg the question of the play between the apprehensible and hidden aspects of such a work. This paper will examine the workings and significance of the rhetoric of hiddenness in the Ershisi shipin, and situate it in relation to some of the major works of premodern literary theory.
The Puzzle of the Transparent Chinese Body
Shigehisa Kuriyama, Harvard University
Western anatomical illustrations have long urged us to see the human body as an opaque and dense realm of buried secrets, which must be painstakingly exposed, layer by layer, through dissection. But charts of the viscera in traditional China offer a strikingly different view. Here the body appears completely transparent, and the wuzang liufu are pictured without the slightest hint of hiddenness - as if we had only to look to see them, as if the spleen, and liver, and gall bladder were as plainly visible as a person's eyes, and nose, and mouth. As if to oppose visible surface and concealed interior made no sense.
How should we interpret this contrast between opaque and transparent bodies? What does it suggest about the comparative metaphysics of hiddenness? I propose to relate these questions to a theme that historians of medicine have previously ignored. I mean the comparative history of excrement.
Chinese Images Inside Out: Concealed Contents, Secluded Statues, and Revealed Religion
James Robson, University of Michigan
In this paper I reflect on the topic of "hiddenness" in Chinese culture through a consideration of a curious collection of religious statuary from the Hunan region. These statues, which have been produced from the Ming Dynasty (1368-164) to the present, allow for a critical engagement with the issue of "hiddenness" from two main perspectives. In the first part of the paper I discuss how all of these statues contain a small niche carved into their backs where various things are hidden. The statues are filled with a variety of objects including a medicinal packet [yaobao 藥包], desiccated animals and insects, coins or paper money, small pieces of lead or jewelry, talismans [fu 符], and a document called a "consecration certificate" [yizhi 意旨]. The "consecration certificate" is perhaps the most important object since it allows us to move from the invisible realm of the statue's inner recesses to the visible realm of social and religious practice. Why were things hidden in these statues? What are the hidden meanings of their contents? What can their dark inner recesses tell us about previously occluded aspects of Chinese religious practice? In the second part of the paper I shift the discussion to a different sense of "hiddenness" by considering why these images have been hidden from public view and why they have remained invisible in scholarship on Chinese religions and religious imagery. Why, for example, were these images relegated to the dark storage rooms of museums without further study or examination? In order to try and answer those questions I reflect on the ways that the long legacies of idolatry and iconoclasm have conditioned the reception of these small statues.
Absence and Presence: The Great Wall in Chinese Art
Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Yale University
This paper explores how the Great Wall has been visualized in China. It starts with the modern fascination with the Great Wall as a spectacular landmark among European and Chinese painters. It proceeds with the contemporary reflection on the Great Wall as an intriguing heritage in the avant-garde movement. In contrast with modern and contemporary trends, this paper then focuses on the absence of the Great Wall in the Han dynasty, discussing how the Great Wall is "hidden" in a visual program that stresses the cultural boundary between the agricultural society and the nomadic world.
Hiddenness and Materiality in Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber)
Sophie Volpp, UC Berkeley
Within the canon of pre-modern fiction, no text so deeply engages the rhetoric of hiddenness as Honglou meng. Honglou meng's concern with hiddenness has most often been treated in terms of the novel's relation to allegory, an approach that resonates with the commentarial tradition's emphasis on homonyms and puns, since Honglou meng's earliest reception fundamental to an understanding of how this novel produces meaning. A consequence of the emphasis on decoding encouraged by the commentarial tradition, however, is that it allows the reader to read through the materiality of objects represented in the text, and to allow the significance of objects to remain hidden. In this paper, I ask the following questions: What sort of relation does the novel propose between the lyrical aesthetic and the material world? How does the mode of reading encouraged by Honglou meng commentaries efface the material elements suggested by the text? What happens when we re-introduce the effaced materiality of objects mentioned in the text? I engage in a reading of a scene from Chapter 41 in which Liu laolao walks through a mirror with a trap door, a device that the text notes is of western origin, into Baoyu's bedroom. That the mirror is of western origin suggests to the Zhang Xinzhi commentary a connection with Lin Daiyu, whose father's name is "Ruhai" (like the seas). I pursue a reading based on the commentary that examines the ways in which the mirror's capacity to reflect speaks to the novel's primary concerns with illusion and disenchantment, and then introduce the cultural history of such illusionistic devices of western origin, to see if our reading of the text might change when the materiality of objects is re-introduced.
