Conclusion Frames, Edges, Escape Codes: 窅然喪其天下焉‎

ji yun’s experiences of exile—personal and vicarious—only confirmed his attachment to the center. Rejoicing to see Peking opera and examination textbooks arrive in the Xinjiang oases, exulting in the Torghuts’ return from Russian durance, he versified in various forms the incorporation of the margins into the center, the principle of imperial “centrality and commonality.” As far as Ji Yun could know (he died in 1805), the process of expansion had not come anywhere near its limits. Xinjiang was a live frontier. The Qing would continue to claim, lose, and reclaim new territories in Central Asia until the 1880s.¹Close During those years, a new front of foreign troubles opened on the southeast coast, as British and French fleets extorted concessions and moved northward. As a result, the primary referent of the word xi 西 (“the West”) in Chinese swerved from being the arid territories where the Silk Road once ran to being the lands where ladies wore hoop skirts, cheese was eaten, and the art of mechanized killing progressed most rapidly. One of Ji Yun’s successors in Xinjiang exile was Lin Zexu 林則徐, the imperial commissioner who had attempted to bring the British opium merchants under the law.

Between Ji Yun and Lin Zexu runs a boundary. It is the boundary between a triumphant and a defensive China, between China as center and China as margin, between a China that cared little for translations and one that depended anxiously on them.

Ji Yun’s world was packed with cultural and linguistic difference. But that diversity had no value to him—it was diversity in the sense of not yet being assimilated. And the world that Lin Zexu was one of the first in China to ascertain was organized around cultural and linguistic differences of another kind. The task of recovering a multilingual premodern Asia involves chipping away at two totalizing world pictures: the familiar one of East-West polarity, and the older one of Chinese imperial centrality.²Close

The goal of comparative study, it seems to me, is finding counterexamples, edges and bits of texture that fall somewhat out of frame. They enable us to see the frame as a frame. They are escape codes that get us out of the “Full Screen” attention economy of a world picture. Thanks to them, no world picture can ever be enough.

“One curious thing about the ontological problem,” W. V. O. Quine once said snappily, “is its simplicity.” It holds in three short words: “What is there?”³Close I would add that only one more word is needed to state the comparative problem: “What else is there?”

What is there? Primarily and obviously, there is a world order or a world picture. For those who live in it, is the world. Fine; what else is there?

“What else?”—that is, what exceptions, what trespasses, what areas not covered by any category, what wildernesses or shadows beyond the horizon of present vision? We cannot know anything unless we know what it is not (an insight voiced by Spinoza and Saussure, among others).⁴Close “What is China?”—a question many have asked. If it is permitted to answer a question with a question, I would suggest asking, “China, as opposed to what?” In other words, what China has been or how it has been variously realized is certainly part of the answer, but another indispensable part will involve what it has not been: a catalog that must include nomadic-pastoral peoples, Miao, Yi, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols, Japanese, kings of Goguryeo, and the like, who for one reason or another could not be considered Chinese. Their specific ways of not being Chinese are each part of the perimeter of Chinese civilization. So are the expedients whereby the representatives of that civilization have variously excluded, included, subordinated, or assimilated them.

The capacity to create and live among works of literature has long been central to Chinese self-understanding. The “civilizing process” separates, to use the traditional vocabulary, into facets of wen 文 and wu 武, the arts of governance and spiritual cultivation on the inside and the techniques of war on the outside. Being sited on a border, translation participates in both of those correlated registers of identity management. Since they involve, by definition, the subordination of alien peoples, empires demand translation, but most frequently they use it and forget it. Translations permit the assimilation of what will become imperial cultural heritage and leave on the other side of the border what will be considered “barbarian.” Civilizations each manufacture their own barbarians.⁵Close

One of the ironies of comparative literary history at the scale I am proposing here is that a genre extolled as indispensable to the founding of civilization in one cultural system represents unassimilable barbarism in another. I return, for diagnostic purposes, to the “epic question.” The heroic verse epic, a form of verbal art that surrounds China on three sides but awakened little or no interest within it, is one sign that tells us where the non-Chinese culture zone begins.⁶Close No ancient Greek could imagine that Homer would count as barbaric: it was rather the lack of familiarity with Homer that defined the barbaroi. Nonrecognition of this kind marks a sharp border. Not much hybridity can be expected to occur across such a wall. But subtler regional and temporal distinctions allow for livelier interchanges and variants. With their dependence on functional analysis of constituents of language, on the one hand, and their analogy to the aural patternings of music, on the other, verse forms mark and cross borders—borders that do not necessarily coincide with national or linguistic ones. Another premodern cosmopolitan literary region could be drawn from the occurrence of types of long-form fiction (a question muddled by teleologies of the “rise of the novel,” which too often relegate xiaoshuo, monogatari, and the like to the unrewarding role of “precursors”).⁷Close Other literary isoglosses must await discovery.⁸Close It is an advance in the understanding of culture to be able to draw as closely as possible the exact lines across which historical Dorothys have transited and paused to say, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Or those across which historical Sternes have gazed and pronounced: “They order, said I, this matter better in France.”⁹Close

Like any universalizing civilization, Chinese civilization is reluctant to define its limits from the inside. Contact with incomprehensible languages, unrecognizable letters, unacceptable customs, and disloyal vassals is necessary to reveal them. Translation and cultural mediation are often called on to smooth the edges. Failures to translate—whether absence of translations, nontranslations, or unsuccessful translations—instruct us about boundaries; they break the frame. And even the Chinese literary code, with its infinite subtlety and vast resources, has limits; it is important to find these. So in these pages the translations that have mediated between the China of the time and what was not China, and often mediated non-China right into China, have been the object of our attention. Translation, of course, is not the whole story: the practices of cultural supremacy include as well such actions as migration, conquest, policy making, censorship, name changing, and the creation of specious knowledge.

While tracing the spatial and temporal boundaries of Chinese civilization, we were also reminded of the limits of other proposed world systems. To generalize somewhat, exclusionary concepts with a basis in teleologies of group identity create, or worse, motivate zones of ignorance or monolingualism. The word “world” often denotes, misleadingly, an area surrounded by such zones—zones of obscurity or mystery, if you will. The people in a world may cooperate in its boundary construction and maintenance. An invisible barrier, because unacknowledged, is more effective than a wall that all can see (even, as legend has it, from the moon).

Not everyone in a world accepts its totality. There will always be inquisitive or temperamentally metaphysical subjects who cannot agree that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.”¹⁰Close Thus the picture of worlding I have just drawn may strike some as overly cynical. But at least it takes the problem of horizons seriously.

It is the reward of comparison, but also its first step, to be able to chart such horizons and propose alternatives to self-evident truths.

Practitioners of literary comparison used to sort themselves into separate tribes: the historicists and the typologists. Historicists searched for demonstrable textual links—signs of influence—between authors and works. (Does Proust mention Dostoevsky? If so, how did he become aware of the earlier author?) Typologists looked for similarities between authors and works, regardless of era, language, and attested influences (can À la recherche du temps perdu and Honglou meng 紅樓夢 [Dream of the Red Chamber] be subordinated to a wider category of “the autobiographical novel”?).¹¹Close Both practices break frames: they show that the author is not a self-contained, autonomous source of meaning, that any work is at least partially built out of other works, that no national literary tradition is an island. And the effects are (I think) wholly salutary. Some may worry that typological comparison across cultural units leads to a fatuous universalism (“and so we see that Man everywhere has been led to discover Truths and create works of Beauty”). If the polemic with self-contained models of culture is kept up, it can be less fatuous.

By showing the often conflicted, always changing, sometimes submerged history of relations between Chinese culture and those on its borders, we dissolve several existing frames and open up a field of investigation. This book has mainly worked the border—it has beat the bounds—from the inside, from within the traditions conveyed in the Chinese written language, but a complementary and much larger study would explore the other sides of the perimeter in their own terms, and the terms they set for their dialogue with their own outsides: Asian literary history as an interrelated “world.”¹²Close “World literature” does not begin with Goethe, does not necessarily assimilate outlying territories into a European norm, does not lead to “us.” Exploring worlds of literary art, for example (but only for example) in Asia, over the whole history of recorded culture gives us more than a few opportunities to break frames.¹³Close

Zoom, a wordless picture book, leads us through a series of perceptions and framings.¹⁴Close A coral-red surface with speckles and scalloped edges proves, when the page is turned, to have been the comb of a rooster being inspected by two children leaning on a windowsill. The children, at the turning of the next page, are in a farmhouse, which (turn the page) sits in a field amid bits of wall and cars. But inexplicably huge fingers dangle over part of that field: turn the page and the mystery is resolved—the farm is a toy farm and a bored-looking girl is setting pieces into it. Why are there big fragments of letters in the top left-hand corner? Because the girl is only a photograph on the cover of a toy catalog, which, with another turn of the page, we discover to be hanging from the listless hands of a boy sitting on a porch chair on the deck of a cruise ship, which, two or three more turns of the page inform us, is an image in an advertisement affixed to the side of a New York city bus in traffic, which (page turn) a Navajo elder is observing on a small television, which scene (page turn) figures on a stamp on an envelope, which. … With each reframing (or, as we say in my profession, “contextualization”), we observers step into a slightly larger reality that includes the preceding reality only to disavow it as a mere representation of a reality, which is exactly what will happen to the frame we are currently accepting as reality as soon as we turn the next page. Readers attentive to their own mental states can feel the click and switch between reality and representation, between empathy and objectification, whether they choose to flip the pages forward or backward. As long as nesting and unnesting of contexts is possible, comparison (before/after, inside/outside, real/unreal) can occur. A context is a relay from one context to another, well beyond the number nine fixed by the early documents of Chinese diplomatic translation. Zoom ends with a starry sky seen from space, and Earth an indistinguishable dot: the ultimate context? On reaching that page, we are definitely seeing all things as one, and not comparing anymore.