Literature was the pre-eminent art form in ancient China. To be versed in classic literature, and to be able to compose in its various forms, were pre-requisites for success in the imperial examinations that chose the state's leading functionaries. And to be highly literate guaranteed wealth, luxury and immense prestige.
Whether this was really a good thing is a question that lurks behind this massive new compilation. Few things could be less modish in academic circles these days than people being privileged because of their closeness to an inherited literary canon. And yet in writing a history of literature in Chinese this is precisely the situation you are confronted with. Is the whole thing to be thrown out as corrupt and a bad example in our democratic times? If not, then what is the line to take?
One of the available maneuvers is to argue for the importance of marginal influences impinging on the central, Confucian state. This Professor Mair duly does in his introduction. Non-Han elements were not so much absorbed into a central, quintessentially Chinese, tradition, he argues, but rather transformed it over and over again. Mair gives as an example the horse, originating from the societies of the "barbarian" nomads, but quickly becoming central to Chinese culture, symbolism, and daily life.
Of course this is an example of the old paradox of an image that can equally well be seen as white on black or black on white, depending on how you choose to look at it.
The old fashion was to talk of China endlessly absorbing outside influences, the new is to talk of outside influences endlessly transforming China. The reality is probably that the two are one and the same. But the fashion is to give precedence to the margins rather than the center, just as in the US academics are busy writing studies of Native or African Americans rather than of the whites, and in the UK looking at the contributions of Irish, Scots and Welsh, rather than the numerically greatly superior English.
Mair is also very much in the contemporary mode in emphasizing diversity rather than unity, stressing the multiplicity of China's ethnicities, folk-lores and doctrines at the same time as he points to the enormous variety over the centuries of its literary styles, genres and rhetorical stances. It's surely through no personal whim that the book is dedicated to "the people of China -- be they Han or non-Han, literate or illiterate. They have all contributed, each in his or her own way, to making Chinese civilization what it is today."
That "his or her" is also significant. Gender studies make their appearance here too, and the work of "previously overlooked" women writers is given a special chapter. Whether they really were "overlooked," even in the West, is another matter. The Californian poet Kenneth Rexroth, for instance, together with Ling Chung, published a translated selection entitled The Orchid Boat: Women Poets of China, as long ago as 1972, as well as the complete poetry of the 12th century female poet Li Ch'ing-chao (as is mentioned here) in 1979.
The enthusiasm for diversity is encouraged by the book having a wide range of contributors -- over 40 in total. The volume has been six years in the making, and claims to be the only overview of the entire history of Chinese literature now in print. Even so, it's something that most readers will probably want to refer to rather than read from cover to cover.
Taiwan's modern literature is fortunate in having an excellent section devoted to it by the late German scholar Helmut Martin (who did postdoctoral research at National Taiwan University, as well as being for a time a research professor at Taipei's National Library). His familiarity with the local scene can be illustrated by this sentence: "As Taiwan opened up increasingly in the 1980s, an all-pervading popular literature, which was influenced particularly by the United States and Japan and was consistent with a noisy, volatile television culture, eventually created books that were commercially successful."
Another sentence perhaps also highlights his perceptiveness about Taiwan, albeit more controversially: "These positions ["Taiwan consciousness" and "China consciousness"] appear so irreconcilable that no compromise seems likely or even conceivable." (Of course, either of these excerpts may have been penned by Professor Mair who admits to having "added portions to" most of the book's 55 chapters).
Additionally, in her chapter on modern poetry, Michelle Yeh of the University of California (Davis) gives more space to Taiwan's poets than she does to the mainland's. Yeh was a guest of Taipei City for its International Poetry Festival in September 2001.
This book is essentially a product of Western research. Most of the contributors are Western scholars, and the great majority of items in the 48-page "Suggestions for Further Reading" are by a non-Chinese authors. In the discussion of Tu Fu in the chapter "Poetry of the T'ang Dynasty" there are even comparisons with the English poets John Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The writers in this book are surely right to keep in mind the vastness of Chinese history when considering its literature. The Tang dynasty itself, traditionally seen as embodying the finest flowering of Chinese lyric poetry, in fact lasted very nearly 300 years.
All in all, this vast and weighty volume attempts to demonstrate that Chinese literature, rather than being (as has sometimes been thought) effete, exotic and monotonous, is in reality abundant, vibrant and multifarious. It's a book that looks certain to hold its own as the leader in its field for some time to come.
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