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Getting over the Walls of Discourse: “Character Fetishization” in Chinese Studies

Authors:
  • The Compleat Wordsmith / 老馬文通

Abstract

Debates on the nature of the Chinese writing system, particularly whether Chinese characters may or may not legitimately be called “ideographs,” continue to bedevil Chinese studies. This paper considers examples of what are referred to as “discourses of character fetishization,” whereby an inordinate status is discursively created for Chinese characters in the interpretation of Chinese language, thought, and culture. The author endeavors to analyze and critique the presuppositions and implications of such discourses, with the aim of defusing the passions that have been aroused by this issue, and showing the way toward a more comprehensive and grounded understanding of the nature of Chinese characters, both as a writing system and in relation to Chinese culture and thought.
Getting over the Walls of Discourse:
Character Fetishizationin Chinese Studies
EDWARD MCDONALD
Debates on the nature of the Chinese writing system, particularly whether
Chinese characters may or may not legitimately be called ideographs,continue
to bedevil Chinese studies. This paper considers examples of what are referred to
as discourses of character fetishization,whereby an inordinate status is
discursively created for Chinese characters in the interpretation of Chinese
language, thought, and culture. The author endeavors to analyze and critique
the presuppositions and implications of such discourses, with the aim of defusing
the passions that have been aroused by this issue, and showing the way toward a
more comprehensive and grounded understanding of the nature of Chinese char-
acters, both as a writing system and in relation to Chinese culture and thought.
IN HIS ACADEMIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY written late in his career, founder and patron
saint of the modern Area Studies movement(Honey 2001, 269) John
K. Fairbank commented rather acerbically on the expectations for new China
scholars at the beginning of his career:
If I had been properly trained, I could never have put together the com-
bination of approaches I made to China. Language training would have
taken all my time. So would thesis research in a well-developed field.
I would never have had time for first-hand areaexperience through
casual travel. My combination of approaches was possible only because
I was entirely on my own, not under anyones direction. (quoted in
Honey 2001, 270)
Such a heroic, pioneering stance is much less of an option in todays more highly
professionalized academic scene than it was in the 1930s when Fairbank was
starting out. But the pull between proper trainingand area experiencecon-
tinues to be a difficult one to negotiate for Asian studies scholarsnot to mention
the related tensions between linguistic facility and disciplinary groundedness and
between research focus and institutional setting.
One of the problems is that such divisions, as well as stemming from indis-
pensable but contradictory requirements of the academic process itself, always
Edward McDonald (e.mcdonald@auckland.ac.nz) is Lecturer in Chinese in the School of Asian Studies at the
University of Auckland.
The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 68, No. 4 (November) 2009: 11891213.
© The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2009 doi:10.1017/S0021911809990763
have histories, histories in which later reforms tend to overlay rather than replace
earlier paradigms. In the China field in which Fairbank worked, I would posit at
least three overlapping divisions that are still current: between the old-
fashionedsinology and the area studies that replacedit (and that is now
becoming old-fashionedin its turn); between the philological, text-based
approach characteristic of sinology and the social science methodologies that
supersededit (with a like disclaimer); and between what could be broadly
characterized as a humanisticapproach to the Chinese language and the scien-
tificlinguistic methodologies that exist in uneasy cohabitation with it.
In all three cases, it is the attitude toward the Chinese language, particularly
in its canonical classicalwritten form, that serves as the touchstone for self-
identification and the drawing of academic boundary lines. So how does the
classical Chinese written language work? Is it, as claimed, for example, by a well-
known and influential pair of philosophers (Ames and Rosemont 1999, 28990),
unique being sharply distinct not only from all other non-Sinitic languages
but from spoken Chinese as well (ancient and modern)? Or does it, as asserted
in the most closely argued treatment of the origins of Chinese writing in recent
years (Boltz 1994), operate in exactly the same way as all other historically
attested writing systems, such as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs,
or the recently deciphered Mayan writing system?
Such arguments tend to center around the notion of ideograph(also called
ideogram)that is, a written symbol that represents an ideaand whether or
not that term may legitimately be applied to Chinese characters. Debates on the
ideographhave a long history, going back in the United States at least to Peter
S. du Ponceau (1838), who was reacting to notions widely held in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century European scholarship by minds of the stature of
Francis Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz. The notion of ideograph has proved of
limited use in understanding how Sumerian cuneiform worked, even less so
for Egyptian hieroglyphs, and has been actively misleading in delaying for
some decades the successful decipherment of Mayan writing (see Coe 1992).
However, in Chinese studies and related fields, this term and the conceptions
of Chinese writing lying behind it still have many adherents.
The most recent extended treatment of the case for the ideograph is an
article by philosopher Chad Hansen that appeared in the Journal of Asian
Studies (JAS) entitled Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas(1993a).
Hansen had previously argued that the disagreement over whether the correct
term for characterizing Chinese characters should be ideographor the linguists
suggested alternative logograph”—the latter term first put forward by Du
Ponceau in his 1838 monographwas a distinction without a difference, com-
menting that he found it hard to understand the passion and intensity of their
[i.e., the linguists] arguments on the choice of a word to denote a range of
languages that includes exactly one!(1983, 179). The main thrust of Hansens
arguments and comparable claims by other scholars will be dealt with in the
1190 Edward McDonald
body of this paper. But what is intriguing, and somewhat disturbing as far as the
field of Chinese studies is concerned, is the highly negative reaction that
Hansens article provoked.
In the correspondence column of the following issue of the journal, linguist
J. Marshall Unger expressed surprise that JAS had seen fit to publish Hansens
article, classing its central claim”—that Chinese characters are ideograms”—
as on a par with scientific creationismas a serious explanation (1993, 949).
In reply, Hansen recommended Ungers earlier article on the notion of ideo-
gram(Unger 1990) to readers interested in pursuing the case of those he
dubbed the prohibitionists,defined as those who urge us to avoid the word
ideographentirelyeither as an oxymoron or as a scientifically falsified
theory(Hansen 1993a, 375). Hansen went on to reflect that Ungers article
and his reply to Hansen vividly illustrate how different the perspectives, assump-
tions and methods of our respective disciplines are.Quoting Zhuangzi to identify
the paradox of the whole debate as [i]f someone of your persuasion decides,
being already of your persuasion, how can he decide?(Hansen 1993b, 954),
he applauded JAS for its role in helping the mixed scholarly communityof
an interdisciplinary field such as Asian studies to face what he termed this kind
of Zhuangzi situation(955).
To those familiar with the long roll call of sinological literature on this topic, the
argumentsand the rhetoric on bothsides carried a depressing air of déjà vu. Almost
sixty years before, mostly in the pages of the journal Toung Pao, a debate between
historian Herrlee Glessner Creel and linguist Peter A. Boodberg had rehearsed very
similar opposing views. Boodberg, in responding to Creels opening article On the
Nature of Chinese Ideography(1936), drew the battle lines very clearly, in a foot-
note used as one of the epigraphs to Hansens 1993 article:
Apart from the authors impossible thesis, one must deplore the general
tendency manifest throughout his article (and, alas, too prominently
figuring in Sinological research on this continent) of insisting that the
Chinese in the development of their writing, as in the evolution of
many other of their cultural complexes, followed some mysterious
esoteric principles that set them apart from the rest of the human
race. (1937, 33031 n. 2)
In response, Creel expressed puzzlement that there should, in fact, be any dis-
agreement between them, calling on Boodbergs article, as well as earlier work
by Bernhard Karlgren, in support of his claim that anciently as nowthe
symbols of the Chinese writing system corresponded to sounds having so little
variety that the meaning could be made clear only with the help of ideographs
(1938, 267). Creel nevertheless acknowledged his surprisethat Boodberg saw
his own work as opposing rather than confirmingthis ideographic hypothesis
(1938, 27172), remarking with a dry wit,
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1191
Yet from repeated mention of my name in his paper in connection with
adverse criticism, and his reference to my works as most ineffectual,
impossible thesis,and utterly phantastic theory,it is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that he conceives himself as disagreeing with me.
(1938, 272; footnotes omitted)
A reader coming to these debates for the first time may justly wonder why
differences of opinion on the substantive issues involved have been rehearsed
again and again without seeming to reach resolution. Why is it that the ideogra-
phersand the prohibitionists,to use the terms of the Hansen-Unger debate, or
the epigraphistsand the phoneticians,in those of the Creel-Boodberg
debate, seem unable to reach agreement? What is it about the term ideograph
that arouses such passions? Why are there always so clearly two sides with such
deep-rooted differences? And what does this say about the makeup of Chinese
studies, or, as Hansen implies, about the interdisciplinary field of Asian studies
more generally? And what indeed might possibly be the use of reopening this
whole can of worms once again?
A recent paper by David Lurie examines what he dubs the Critique of the
Ideographic Myth,”“an intervention by linguists into the broader discourses of
Asian Studies(2006, 265). In his view, the crux of the debate lies in a disciplinary
turf war whereby [l]inguistics lays claim to special scientific forms of knowledge
but struggles with both humanistic and social scientific disciplines for auth-
ority over language(26566). An attempt to dissolve this cross-disciplinary
impasse is made in Bob Hodge and Kam Louies application of the insights of cul-
tural studies to Chinese studies, The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture
(1998), a book written in large part in order to take on the deep-seated ideologies
relating to the study of China such as those involved in the ideograph debate.
Hodge and Louie set out from a useful distinction between Sinology and
what they call Sinologism. Sinology,as they point out, is now more commonly
known in English-speaking circles as Chinese studies”—although, like the
broader Asian studies,it is normally considered to be an interdisciplinary
field rather than the disciplinethey characterize it as being. Sinologism,in
contrast, they define as a branch of orientalism’” (cf. Said 1978), a set of knowl-
edges and assumptions about the study of China(1998, 13). Their definition of
this ismis worth quoting, as it identifies many of the tendencies that have
vitiated the long-running debates about the nature of the Chinese language:
[T]he China constructed by Sinologism is not simply a Western inven-
tion. The key assumptions of Sinologism are partial truths, which
makes it especially important to address them and disentangle them
from the forms in which they are packaged in classic Sinology. Sinologism
takes major tendencies within Chinese culture and turns them into absol-
ute values, essential truths about Chineseness or sinicity: an ideology
1192 Edward McDonald
above dispute, not a set of provisional, contested hypotheses and gener-
alisations in need themselves of further examination and enquiry. (13)
Hodge and Louie go on to critique the complex of values commonly associated
with the Chinese language in popular discourse, identifying an ideology of
languagewhose most important assumption is that there is only one form of
the Chinese language, with different methods of encoding it(75). They
suggest a classification that would replace the notion of a single Chinese
languageby an ordered setof different forms of Chinese,whereby the
upper term of each division is taken to possess more social valuethan its
lower counterpart, and likewise more leftward sets take precedence over those
to the right (76):
This is not to be regarded as an objective descriptive typology, but rather as
a classification laden with ideological values(Hodge and Louie 1998, 76). Such
a schema provides a useful way of thinking through the ideologies attached to the
Chinese writing system, one that could easily be extended into looking at other
languages that have traditionally used or still use Chinese characters in their
writing systems. All such ideological schemas grow out of actual usage at particu-
lar historical periods: in other words, they are based on historically and applica-
tionally contingent understandings of the nature of Chinese characters as a
writing system, understandings that cannot merely be dismissed as mistaken.
The intellectual justification of such classifications, one not clearly articulated
even by Hodge and Louie, is the same as that at issue in the debates cited
earlier: whether Chinese characters exist as a meaningful system separately
from their relationship to any particular form of a language. This is not just an
intellectual claim about the nature of Chinese characters and, by implication,
writing systems in general, but an ideological stance that conforms to Hodge
and Louies definition of Sinologism.
The positive answer to this claim, I would suggest, ascribes a false indepen-
dence to Chinese characters as, in effect, a language in themselves, a claim based
on arguments about the nature of their construction as written forms. In this
paper, I will put forward the opposing claim that, in actual usage, Chinese char-
acters are and always have been interpreted in relation to a particular language,
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1193
and in this function, the principles of a characters composition are irrelevant to
its interpretation. In other words, once Chinese characters become used as
elements of a script in order to represent a particular language, their interpret-
ation is determined by their connection to specific units of that language, not
by any inherentmeaning they may seem to possess in themselves.
The issues here are not simply complex in themselves, but highly ideologi-
cally loaded within Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, as the
exchanges cited earlier show very clearly. What I will attempt in this article is
an examination of various discourses within Chinese studies exhibiting the par-
ticular form of Sinologism that I have dubbed character fetishization (
hànzì cho
¯ngbàizhu
ˇ)that is, an exaggerated status given to Chinese char-
acters in the interpretation of Chinese language, thought, and culture. This status
is used to buttress ideological claims about the Chinese language that basically
come down to positing the uniqueness of the Chinese worldview and its incom-
mensurable differences from a supposed Western worldview. Such claims have
deep historical roots, and are inseparable not only from the kinds of cross-cultural
ideological constructs identified by Edward Said in the misrepresentation of the
Eastby the Westas Orientalism,but also from the reverse process, more
recently dubbed Occidentalism(Buruma and Margalit 2004).
The notion of character fetishization is not intended for use as an identity labelI
see no point in branding some scholars as fetishistsand others as anti-fetishists”—
but rather aims to characterize a discursive process, the creation of a kind of unique-
nessfor the Chinese situation that both operates through and reinforces a series of
half truths. Both sides of the debates cited earlier, it seems to me, have at times
become trapped in discourses of character fetishization, whether they are defending
or attacking its main positions, to the detriment of our understanding of the substan-
tive issues involved, as well as to the harmony of the field.
Discourses of character fetishization will be explored in this paper in relation
to two of the three broad fields of humanistic studies in China that many sinol-
ogists have traditionally moved acrossliterature (wén), history (shı
˘), and
philosophy (zhé)using two main examples: the literary theorizing of James
Liu, and the linguistic philosophizing of Chad Hansen. My characterization of
the work of these scholars in such -izingterms is not intended to sound pejora-
tive, but rather to stress the discursive, process-like nature of their separate
theoretical and descriptive enterprises. In seeking to untangle the complex
issues involved, I will call on foundational work by Ferdinand de Saussure and
C. S. Peirce in relation to the nature of language and sign systems, as well insights
of scholars coming from within Chinese studies such as George A. Kennedy, A. C.
Graham, and William G. Boltz, all of whom provide ways of thinking through the
relevant descriptive and theoretical challenges.
An additional exploration of these discourses, which would seem to have con-
gealed into rigid positions on both sides of the ideographdebates, will be given
by one further example: the work of Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., in a
1194 Edward McDonald
recent translation of that seminal philosophical, historical, and literary text, the
Analects of Confucius (Ames and Rosemont 1999). I will concentrate particularly
on how Ames and Rosemont define key philosophical terms through the struc-
ture of the characters that represent them, and will show how this kind of argu-
ment from charactersis in fact unnecessary, and that the genuine insights they
show into the nature of these terms are by their own arguments actually based on
the evidence of the text rather than on the writing system as such.
The current study shares similar aims with Haun Saussys monograph Great
Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (which the title of
this paper glances at)a fascinating exploration of the career of China as an
object of knowledge(2001, 1) that traces ideas about the Chinese language in
the West from the pioneering reports of the Jesuits in the late sixteenth
century up to contemporary postmodernismas well as nicely complementing
Luries examination of the Critique of the Ideographic Mythreferred to
earlier. Here I take a more focused linguistic point of view than either of these
scholars, trying to bring together insights from various sources within and
beyond Chinese studies in order to provide a more rounded picture of the
puzzle of the ideograph,various aspects of which, it seems to me, have been
neglected by both sides in the debates. Although it should be obvious that I do
believe many of the current understandings about Chinese characters to be mis-
taken, my overall intention is not to reinforce hostility between two camps,but
rather to suggest ways in which the passions of the debate can be defused, and
the relevant issues understood from a more comprehensive point of view.
A dispassionate examination of this debate, which to outsiders may seem like
just so much hot air and spilled ink, is valuable for both Chinese studies and the
broader field of Asian studies for at least two reasons. First, it suggests that such
issues can become so divisive within a field partly because scholars on both sides
areoften without realizing itarguing about different things, caught up in mis-
understandings that have deep historical roots and that can persist through suc-
cessive scholarly generations. Second, it shows how such debates can become a
site for disciplinary anxieties over what is or should be the purpose of a whole
scholarly enterprise, and since language is one of the key determiners separating
area studies from the more mainstreamdisciplines, this is an issue with broad
resonances for the field of Asian studies as a whole.
THE FOUNDATION STONE OF THE DEBATE:CHARACTERS REAL
[I]t is the use of China, and the kingdoms of the High Levant, to write in
characters real, which express neither letters nor words in gross, but
things or notions; insomuch as countries and provinces, which under-
stand not one anothers language, can nevertheless read one anothers
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1195
writings, because the characters are accepted more generally than the
languages do extend; and therefore they have a vast multitude of charac-
ters, as many, I suppose, as radical words.
Francis Bacon (1605, 8283)
One of the loci classici of myths about the Chinese written language can be
found in the works of English philosopher Francis Bacon. This foundational myth
of Sinologism is the idea that so appealed to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
scholars such as Bacon and Leibniz, watching with alarm the decline of Latin as
the common language of scholarship in Europe, that Chinese represented a sort
of universal language. This claim contains at least two half truths, each of which is
taken up in different ways by two recent scholars. Philosopher Chad Hansen
characterizes the written language as follows:
Written Chinese has no alphabet. Each character has a one-syllable pro-
nunciation. The character was viewed as the basic unit of language and
was the natural focus of interest for anyone who was literate in ancient
China. The characters provided a shared mode of communication
among the different Chinese languages since it did not represent any par-
ticular pronunciation. Thus, as in China today, people speak different
languages but write and read the same.
[Hansens endnote:] Chinese language in archaic times, as at present,
differed not only in pronunciation but in grammar and idiom. These
differences tended to show up as discernible differences in written
style. (1983, 47, 179)
The first half-truth, as expressed by Hansen, is that in traditional China, as in
China today, people speak different languages but write and read the same.’”
Even Hansens scare quotes around the same,referring us to an endnote, do
not really soften his claim in any significant way, recognizing merely discernible
differences in written style.This seeming concession disguises the raw fact that
in modern Chinese, the written language is a register of one particular Chinese
language,that is, Mandarin. A Cantonese speaker, for example, when learning
the standard written form, is obliged to learn a new language, admittedly one
related to his or her own (see Bauer 1988), but with significant differences in
vocabulary and grammar, alongside the perhaps more obvious differences in pro-
nunciation concealed by the non-phonemic writing system. The situation in
imperial China was, if anything, more stark, where the written standard, now
known as wenyanwen,orwritten language,was based on none of the contem-
porary spoken languages, but rather was what Karlgren characterizes as a syn-
cretic dialect(1926, 31) based on a group of written texts of the period
around 300 BCE, whose mastery required a long period of education for the
elite class who could afford it. The modern written standard, baihuawen,orver-
nacular language,has also been heavily influenced by this earlier standard in
1196 Edward McDonald
phraseology and, to a certain extent, in grammar. Thus the advantages of this sup-
posed universal language,even if its range has shrunk from Baconscountries
and provincesto HansensChina today,would appear to be severely circum-
scribed ones.
The second half truth persists in a form perhaps even closer to Bacons orig-
inal formulation of Chinese written symbols as characters real, which express
neither letters nor words in gross, but Things or Notions,as shown in the follow-
ing statement by literary theorist James Liu:
[A]lthough traditional Chinese etymology postulates six scripts(liushu)
two of these concern variant forms and phonetic loans, so that actually
there are only four kinds of characters: simple pictograms, simple ideo-
grams, composite ideograms, and composite phonograms. These charac-
ters are not arbitrary signs representing what Saussure calls the
sound-images of words,as are the letters of a phonetic script. In the
terminology of C. S. Peirce, the simple pictograms are icons, because
they resemble their referents. For example, the simple pictogram
(ancient form ) is an icon for the sun; it is not a sign representing
the sound of the word ri whose archaic pronunciation has been recon-
structed as niet.
(Liu 1988, 1617)
Lius claim that the simple pictograms are icons, because they resemble their
referentsis, after all, surely much the same as Bacons notion of characters
real,that is, symbols or descriptions of reality, a description that Liu simply
dresses up in modern semiotic terminology. This, together with Lius related
claim that characters are not arbitrary signs as are the letters of a phonetic
script,takes some disentangling, and shows how complex the issues involved
are, as well as how careful we need to be in our formulations.
The notion of a sign, in the terminology of Peirce most commonly in use,
divides into three main types: icons, which resemble their referents; indexes or
indices, which are spatially or causally contiguous to their referents; and
symbols, which are related only by convention to their referents (Peirce
193158, 2.275). Saussure, although using slightly different terminology (1916,
68)for Saussure, symbolwas roughly equivalent to Peircesindex,while
Peircessymbolcorresponds to Saussuressign”—claimed that linguistic
signs were mainly of the third type: symbols. However, in order to characterize
their essential nature, he chose the term arbitraire,afalse friendthat is com-
monly and misleadingly translated as arbitrary.In fact, as with many concepts in
the new intellectual territory being mapped out by Saussure, this term collapses
two distinctions into one: his arbitraire does not equate to English arbitrary,
with its connotations of meaningless or reasonless, but rather to conventional
on the one hand, and unmotivatedon the other.
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1197
All three types of sign are conventional: that is, they are established within
and only interpretable by a particular community of sign users. However,
among these three types, icons and indices are motivated because they have an
independent connection to their referents, while symbols are unmotivated
because their only connection to their referents is the social convention that
links them. If we are talking about ordinary signs such as road signs or warning
signs, we can easily find examples of all three kinds: the icon of a car on a high-
angled line that denotes a steep ascent or descent; the index of a jagged lightning
bolt that refers to electricity; or the symbol of a circle with a line across it (often
superimposed on an icon or index) that means no . …” The relationship here is
between the sign and its referent, a feature of the experiential world that is not
necessarily mediated through language, although of course it may be. Such signs
may thus be used across different language communities, but precisely because
they are not linked to a particular language, they are limited to easily recognizable
features of the experiential world or those that have a close link to material action.
However, as soon as language becomes involved in sign interpretation, some-
thing that allows a much wider range of meanings to be expressed, the relation-
ship between sign and referent becomes transformed into a relationship between
the sign and a unit of the language. To take one of Lius examples, the circle with a
dot, which he says is an icon for the sun: it is doubtless true that those who
initially devised this character did so on the basis of the iconic relationship
between its shape and that of the sun. But as soon as this picture came to be
used as a graphthat is, a visual form that is part of a writing systemin
order to function as part of that writing system, it must represent some unit of
a language. In other words, it must refer in the first instance not to the outside
world, but rather to a particular sound-shape and/or word-shape.
This is a complex point that requires further probing. First of all, how do we
know that this character means the sun? Precisely because in modern Man-
darin, it has the reading,as the traditional phraseology would have it, , one
of whose meanings is sun.This is not the secondary fact that Liu implies it
to be, but rather is crucial to the signs interpretation. If for the moment we
accept Lius logic, we would have the following equivalence between sign and
referent:
is in an iconic relationship with that bright circular object in the day-
light sky.
Alongside this, there is in fact another meaning that attaches to the graph ,
a meaning that appears in the earliest texts, that of day.This would give us the
further equivalence between sign and referent:
is in an indexical relationship with the period of time it takes for that
bright circular object to cross the daylight sky.
1198 Edward McDonald
You will note that in each case, the referent has deliberately been expressed using
a clumsy paraphrase in order to bring out the paradox of Lius argument: that in
providing the interpretation of this sign, he unhesitatingly uses an actual word of
a language. In this case, of course, because he is writing for an English-speaking
readership, he does not use any form of Chinese or other languages that have tra-
ditionally used Chinese characters, but rather the linguistically and culturally very
distant English, a language for which the iconic referent sunis appropriate, but
in which the indexical referent daycorresponds to an entirely different word.
So where does this leave Lius argument?
We can avoid such apparent paradoxes by recognizing that , unlike our road
sign examples, was from its earliest uses linked to an actual word of a language,
the archaic Chineseword that Liu gives as niet, borrowed into Japanese as nichi
(its on or soundreading), with the graph also linked to the native Japanese word
hi (its kun or interpretationreading), and so on with its Korean and Vietnamese
analogues. Such an argument was also put forward by Boodberg in his critique of
Creels ideographic interpretation of Chinese characters:
Signs used in writing, however ambiguous, stylized, or symbolic, rep-
resent words. If we associate with a graph several related words,
unable to determine which of them it is supposed to represent exactly,
this does not mean that the graph represents the ideaor concept
behind those words. Linguistic science deals first and last with the
word, its only reality. The disembodied wordwhich is generally what
is meant by ideaor conceptdoes not exist for the linguist. (1937,
332 n. 5)
This may seem to be, on the one hand, an instance of a linguist unilaterally
drawing his own academic boundary lines, and on the other, simply pushing
the problem further on into the realms of philosophyif a word does not rep-
resent an idea,then how can it possibly have any meaning?and indeed,
Creel criticizes it on both these grounds.
There are two trajectories along which we need to resolve this impasse: the
nature of the reading process, and the nature of linguistic meaning. First, giving a
readingto a Chinese character, using the traditional phraseology of sinology,
simultaneously does two things: it identifies how that graph is to be read out in
connected text, and it identifies the word or word element to which that graph
corresponds. In technical linguistic terminology, Chinese characters as graphs
correspond both to the smallest unit of sound that can be comfortably pro-
nounced in isolation, the syllable, and also in most cases to the smallest meaning-
ful combination of speech sounds, the morpheme. In Old Chinese (also called
Archaic Chinese,as in Lius usage), the stage of the language when the
writing system was devised, the majority of morphemes corresponded to single
syllables and, at the same time, to independently functioning wordsthus the
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1199
monosyllabictag often applied to Chinese. It was this double characteristic that
allowed the system to work as well as it did, because each written character could
be interpreted as both a spoken syllable and a grammatical word. There were also
at this stage of the language some instances in which a morpheme corresponded
to more than one syllable, something far more common in modern Chinese, but
the way the writing system dealt with this situation, as we will see, in fact provides
further confirmation for this claim.
However, when this system was borrowed for other languages, it could not
work, except with major modifications, for languages such as Korean and Japa-
nese that did not share this syllable = morpheme = word feature, and even for
languages such as Vietnamese that did. The speakers of these languages, as we
have seen, adopted two basic strategies in order to adapt Chinese characters to
their own use: they borrowed the word along with its graph, modifying its pro-
nunciation to the phonology of the borrowing language, as in the niet >nichi
example earlier; alternatively, they used the graph to represent a native word, a
word either of similar meaning to the Chinese original (as in the Japanese
example of the kunreading of as hi), or of similar sound (as in the
example of the characters whose simplified forms eventually gave rise to the Japa-
nese syllabary, the kana: e.g., Ch. shì,Jp. se). In either case, the transfer was
made from a word or word element in one language to a word or word element in
the other: at no stage did the process take place directly through ideas.
This is a claim that may seem absurd to those non-linguistsand a fair number
of linguists as well!for whom meaningand ideaare synonyms. In order to
justify it, we must to move on to our second trajectory of explanationthe
nature of linguistic meaning. The traditional view in the European tradition stem-
ming from Aristotle is that the elements of a language are only meaningful insofar
as they are symbols for ideas, and that while these symbols may differ from
language to language, the underlying ideas are the same for all humankind
(Cook 1938, 115). Saussures radical move was to replace this absolute notion of
idea with the relative notion of meaning or significationas a relationship
between concept and sound (1916, 104), and to argue that each language
defines its own ideasthrough a mutual delimitation of concept and sound. The
implication of Saussures position is that there are in fact no preexisting ideas to
which words, or graphs, may attach themselvesthere are only sounds and con-
cepts mutually delimited into meanings. Thus the concepts that any language
expresses are precisely those for which it possesses delimited phonic expressions.
To come back to the example of ,sun,the most economical explanation is
not, pace Liu, that it is an icon, nor in the meaning dayan index, but rather that it
is a graph for the word whose reading in modern Chinese is , whose Old Chinese
form had those two meanings (and likewise for its Korean, Japanese, and Vietna-
mese analogues). If we look at how it is actually used in connected discourse, this is
perfectly clear. It appears in such combinations as rìluò,sun fallsunset,shí,
sun eatsolar eclipse,dì sa
¯nrì,number three daythe third day,is
1200 Edward McDonald
reduplicated to give rìrì,every daydaily,and so on. All of these functions are
features not of the character but of the morpheme ,in Boodbergsterms,of
the word functioning in a particular language. Trying to argue from the nature
of the character to the meaning of the word is thus putting the cart before the
horse: despite recent Western theoretical arguments about the priority of
writing over speech that have been eagerly seized upon by certain sinologists
(see the discussion of Derrida later), the Chinese writing system, like all writing
systems, is a representation of the spoken language, not vice versa.
The linguist George A. Kennedy, in his introduction to working with classical
Chinese texts, describes these complex relationships with characteristic care and
precision:
The units of Chinese writing are called graphs. The sounds attached to a
graph are called its readings. The reading or readings may vary greatly
with the dialect of the reader, and the phonetic representation of that
reading will vary greatly again according to the system of romanization
used. In this Guide each graph introduced is provided with the conven-
tional reading given in the work itself, spelled in capital letters. This gives
a maximum of general information about the sound for that graph. In the
space following, the student will insert the proper reading in the dialect
of his choice, and in the system of romanization preferred by him.
Graphs through their readings represent syllables of speech that are
words or parts of words. These should be written with lower-case
letters. When the student has filled in a reading for his dialect, he has
represented a morpheme in his dialect. This morpheme can then be
defined by one or more English equivalents enclosed in single quotation
marks. The morphemes in the Chinese name of the work, in accord-
ance with the above, are entered as
1ZI [cí] N a phrase, a word
2HOJ [hăi] N sea
(Kennedy 1953, 12)
Note that Kennedy does not once refer to the graphic shape of the characters,
though he is careful to stress the range of pronunciations that can be attached
to them. Kennedy thus emphasizes the sound connections of the characters
while in effect dismissing as irrelevant the graphic features that have caused
the most excitement among Chinese and Western scholars.
CHALLENGING ORIENTALISM:CRITIQUING THE LOGOCENTRIC OCCIDENTAL
Western philosophers, with their logocentric bias, have usually regarded
Chinese written characters as arbitrary signs. Even Saussure, who
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1201
recognized that the Chinese written system is not phonetic, still thought
that each written character was a sign that represented a spoken word.
This opinion is demonstrably incorrect and also contradicts traditional
Chinese views .In general, whereas Western thinkers concerned with
the nature of language conceived of writing as a representation of
spoken language, which was in turn conceived of as an intermediary
between the world and human beings, the Chinese saw a direct relation-
ship between writing and the world, without the necessary intermediacy
of spoken language. It is therefore misleading to call Chinese characters
logograms or logographs, as some scholars do, apart from the fact that it
sometimes requires two characters to write one word.
James Liu (1988, 1718)
Both Liu and Hansen broaden their critique of Western misconceptionsof
the nature of Chinese characters into an attack on the Western conceptions of
language that lie behind them. Liu bolsters his attack on Saussure by using
Jacques Derridas (1974) critique of the whole tradition of Western philosophy as
logocentric.If we read Saussure with an understanding of the context in which
he was writing (see useful commentaries by Harris 1987; Thibault 1997), it
becomes clear that Derridas attack on Saussure for the sin of logocentrism,the
fetishization of language, in the particular form of phonocentrism,the fetishiza-
tion of speech over writing, is a strategic and out-of-context distortion of Saussures
views. Certainly it is possible to argue that Saussure had not completely thought
through his views on the relationship between the spoken and written forms of
language, but to replace a supposed priority of speech with a priority of writing
does not look like progress; in the Chinese context, it plays right into the existing
misconceptions about the nature of Chinese characters already identified earlier.
We need to be careful here to draw a distinction between what is shown by a
careful linguistic analysis of the Chinese language and its writing systemmost
of which analyses, of course, ultimately derive from traditional Chinese scholar-
shipand more fanciful ideas about the language also current in the Chinese
tradition. It is no real contradiction, nor, in such a culturally loaded area as
language should it seem surprising, to note that from the earliest major work
on the Chinese writing system, Xu ShensShuo
¯wén Jie
ˇ(100 CE), hardnosed ana-
lyses and fanciful mythmaking have existed side by side. In the Shuo
¯wén,asitis
usually abbreviated, Xu Shen put forward a classification of six principles of char-
acter formation, the so-called liùshu
¯, of which various versions had been in exist-
ence since at least a century before Xu Shens time. In his study of the origins and
development of the Chinese writing system, Boltz points out that Xusliùshu
¯
should be regarded not as an explanation of how the characters were originally
derived, but rather of how they were to be understood in terms of current
(Han dynasty) useor even, more speculatively, as a set of instructions for
how new characters should be derived (Boltz 1994, 143, 147).
1202 Edward McDonald
In fact, Xus listing of then-current characters shows clearly that it was only a
minority of characters that fell into the categories that have so excited the imagin-
ations of latter-day sinologists. These character types, translated by Liu as simple
pictograms, and simple and composite ideograms(in Xus terms, xiàngxíng,
imitate shape;zhı
˘shì,indicate thing; and huìyì,combine meanings), have
from the Shuo
¯wén onward occupied the least space in the character dictionaries,
the majority falling into the category that Liu translates as composite phono-
grams(xíngshe
¯ng,form [and] sound), where one part of the character is
another character used exclusively for its sound value.
It is worthwhile briefly exploring the principles on which the composite pho-
nogramswere formed, a principle that finds almost exact equivalents in histori-
cally comparable writing forms such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian
cuneiform (Boltz 1994, chap. 3). The key here is one of the categories of charac-
ters that Liu, very significantly, dismisses as irrelevant: the phonetic loan,or
jia
ˇjiè (borrowing). The principle of use of this category is a simple one, and
again is closely related to one of the characteristics of Old Chinese. Although,
as Karlgren points out, Chinese already at a very early stage lost its faculty of
forming new words by means of derivative affixes(1926, 31), it still showed rem-
nants of this morphological process in the form of alternations, as a result of some
earlier process of affixing, in doublets such as chuán,to pass on,and zhuàn,
that which is passed oncommentary, biography,and cháng,long,and
zha
ˇng,to become longto grow.Because in most cases the context would
make clear which word was intended, the most economical principle was to
write both with the same character, a strategy that continues to this day with
the chuán/zhuàn and cháng/zha
ˇng doublets.
This doublet principle also extended to words that were morphologically
unrelated but had similar pronunciations. Many of the more abstract or gramma-
tical words in Old Chinese were represented by these sorts of phonetic loans: the
character for jı
¯,basket,, was borrowed for the pronoun ,his/her/its/their;
zhı
¯,go,, for the subordinative particle zhı
¯“… ’s, of. …”;lái,wheat,, for
lái,come,and so on. Numbers of such characters were later confirmed in their
borrowed senses, with the original words represented by a variant of the original
character expandedby the addition of a semantic determinative: thus jı
¯,
basket,with the bamboodeterminative , and lái,wheatwith the
grassdeterminative .
What is significant here is the extent to which the phonological characteristics
of the language were utilized from the very beginning in devising written forms.
The use of sound in devising characters goes beyond even such well-known cases,
affecting even the huìyì type of character (Liuscompound ideograms), whose
construction is traditionally thought to have no direct relationship to their pro-
nunciation at all (Boltz 1994, chap. 23; Boodberg 1937). Boltz states his own
position very strongly: at no time did any of the graphs that were invented
stand for ideas directly; they always primarily represented the sounds of a
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1203
language, and meaning only as it was associated with those sounds(1994, 59)a
nice reversal of Lius priorities! The key to Boltzs argument is the existence of
two types of character variation in the early script. The first is the familiar
jia
ˇjiè or borrowingdiscussed earlier, characterized by Boltz as a paronomastic
method, that is, using an established graphto stand for a semantically unre-
lated but phonetically similar or identical word(Boltz 1994, 61). Alongside
this type of variation, where the sound was similar or constant but the
meaning changed, was another kindnot recognized as one of the liùshu
¯and
largely disguised by subsequent developments in the writing systemthat
Boltz dubs parasemantic, where a particular graph may be used to write a
second word the meaning of which is readily suggested by the depictive
quality of the graph itself(62).
Take the character : according to Boltz, this was originally used paronomas-
tically not only to represent the word ko
˘u,mouth,but also the semantically
related word míng,to call, to name.In the first case, the process of jia
ˇjiè bor-
rowingis still clearly recognizable in the contemporary script, with ko
˘u,
mouth,used as a phonetic in characters such as kòu,button up, buckle,
with the semantic determinative /sho
˘u,hand,and kou,to knock,with
the semantic determinative, now obsolete as an independent character, of a kneel-
ing man. In the second case, the original character has itself been supplemented
with the phonetic determinative to give míng,call, name,where the pho-
netic is an abbreviated form of míng,bright,the original character also used
parasemantically to represent related words such as míng,bird call,with
nia
ˇo,bird,as the semantic determinative, and mìng,orderwith the semantic
determinative lìng,order.
The significance of this for the ideograph debate is that such analyses
largely dispose of the huìyì composite ideogramcategory as an independent
typealthough I remain less convinced than Boltz that all cases can be explained
this way. Such a reinterpretation would grievously undercut many discourses of
character fetishization, since this is the very category on which the creators of
such accounts are most wont to spread themselves, even willy-nilly dragging
many xíngshe
¯ng composite phonogramsinto that class. Boltz again puts the
matter quite bluntly:
There is no way a character can be inventedby putting together con-
stituent elements none of which is intended to have any phonetic func-
tion. When characters occur with two or more constituent parts, and
none appears to be phonophoric [i.e., sound-bearing,”“phonetic], we
must assume that there is a phonetic element in the character some-
where that we have not yet uncovered. As a rule, we cannot but
insist that phonetic-lesscharacters simply do not exist. (1994: 72)
[Boltzs footnote:] Many of the classiccases of this kind of thing
characters constituted of two or more elements allegedly based only on
1204 Edward McDonald
the meaning of the elements, not the soundare, after careful analysis,
explicable as phonetic compounds.
If Boltzs argument is accepted, it has the effect of demonstrating that Chinese
characters do not, after all, constitute a special case, because they clearly followed
the same principles as all the other writing systems in the world.
THE TWO HEAVYWEIGHT CONTENDERS:IDEOGRAPHVERSUS LOGOGRAPH
The characterisation of Chinese as pictographic or ideographic is under
nearly constant attack from Chinese linguists who seem to prefer the term
logographic. It is hard to understand the passion and intensity of their
arguments on the choice of a word to denote a range of languages that
includes exactly one! In any case, we need not find any way to resolve
the issue. What is important for the present argument is that Chinese
themselves view their own written language as conventional represen-
tations of the semantic content, that is, pictures or diagrams.
Chad Hansen (1983, 179 n. 25)
In the quotation given at the beginning of the previous section, Liu claims
that it is misleading to call Chinese characters logograms or logographssince
they do not in fact represent words; while in the foregoing quotation, Hansen
seems irritated by the insistence of Chinese linguistson preferring the word
logographicover pictographicor ideographic,though it is unclear
whether he is referring to the language or its script. Presumably unaware of
the clear historical parallels of the Chinese writing system with those of Egypt
and Sumer, he remarks dismissively, It is hard to understand the passion and
intensity of their arguments on the choice of a word to denote a range of
languages that includes exactly one!He then states sweepingly, What is impor-
tant for the present argument is that the Chinese themselves view their own
written language as conventional representations of the semantic content, that
is, pictures or diagrams.These Chinese themselvesapparently do not
include Xu Shen, whose liùshu
¯,six character types,would thus effectively be
reduced to sa
¯nshu
¯,three character types”—that is, in Lius renderings, only pic-
tograms, simple ideograms, and composite ideograms. This seems to be replacing
the supposed phonocentrism of Western linguists with a serious case of phono-
phobia, by refusing to acknowledge that sound plays any part in the formation
of Chinese characters at all.
Further evidence that sound has always played a crucial role in the interpret-
ation of Chinese characters comes in two essays by Kennedy: The Monosyllabic
Myth(1951) and The Butterfly Case(1955). Kennedy notes a surprising fact
about the graphs for the names of insects in Chinese as far back as we can trace:
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1205
that none of them are pictograms. This would seem, on the face of it, an inexplic-
able fact: surely insects are among those features of the natural world that would
most easily lend themselves to being represented by pictograms? Well, the other
surprising fact noted by Kennedy is that, in all of these cases, the names of insects
have two syllables. Thus, in their modern Mandarin forms, zhı
¯zhu
¯,spider,
xı
¯shuài,cricket,húdié,butterfly,and so on. Now this type of fact, dismissed
by Liu as a side issue—“apart from the fact that it sometimes requires two char-
acters to write one word”—is immensely significant, because it provides a nega-
tive confirmation of the principle that works for the majority of words in Chinese:
that is, the equation of one syllable = one morpheme. To return to Lius original
example, why could the word ,sun, day,be represented by what looks like an
icon of the sun? Precisely because this morpheme had only one syllable, and
therefore could be easily read out from a single character as such. And so why
could the word zhı
¯zhu
¯,spidernot be represented by an icon of the insect?
Because it had two syllables, and thus could only be represented by two other
existing characters with similar sounds, in this case zhı
¯,know,and zhu
¯,
cinnibar,used simply for their sound value, with the addition of an insect
determinative to each, thus .
Nonetheless, it could be claimed that what scholars such as Liu and Hansen
are arguing for is simply an acknowledgment of traditional Chinese views about
the nature of the characters. It is true, as Kennedy points out, that certain fea-
tures of the script do lend themselves to mythmaking of this sort: as in the
case of the Chinese scholar who indulged in false etymologizingwith regard
to the word xı
¯shuài,cricket,inventing two separate insects on the basis of
the two separate characters, and remarking gravely that the crics eat the
stems while the kets eat the leaves(Kennedy 1951, 116). I think we should
be skeptical as to whether the traditional Chinese viewswere in fact as Liu rep-
resents them, at least across the board; what scholars such as Liu and Hansen fail
to do, however, is draw a distinction between describing and mythmaking, either
in their sources or in their own work.
Moreover, these misunderstandings about the nature of Chinese characters
are not simply confined to describing how the language works, they are used
as a basis for all sorts of larger philosophical claims. For example, in the main
passage to which the foregoing footnote is appended (Hansen 1983, 47),
Hansen draws what seems a plausible distinction between a model of language
based on reflections on our ability to master an inflected phonemic language,
presumably Greek as the mother language of Western philosophy, and what
we would come up with if our model of language were non-phonemic, that is,
pictographicor ideographic.’” On the face of it, Hansen here is comparing
apples and pears: inflectedrefers to a type of language such as Latin or
Greek, which appears in a familiar, if not quite satisfactory, typology alongside
isolating(Chinese or Vietnamese), agglutinative(Korean or Japanese), and
so on, while pictographicand ideographicrefer to principles of composition
1206 Edward McDonald
of written symbols, principles that, as we have seen, apply in the case of hiero-
glyphs and cuneiform as well as Chinese characters.
But in the case of phonemicand non-phonemic,Hansen is comparing
apples and non-apples: there is no such thing as a non-phonemiclanguage
all human languages contain phonemes, that is, distinctive speech sounds that
can be put together into meaningful combinations. What Hansen is presumably
trying to get at is a distinction between a phonemic writing system, such as the
alphabetic script used to write Greek or English, where (combinations of)
graphs represent single phonemes, and a syllabic/morphemic script such as
Chinese, where the graphs represent single syllables (combinations of phonemes)
that are, in most if not all cases, also morphemes (meaningful combinations of
phonemes). If we accept, as I have argued, that the principles of a characters
composition are irrelevant to its interpretation as a unit of written language,
the function of pictographic or ideographic characters is completely comparable
to that of phonetic loans or composite phonograms in this regard.
The work of fellow philosopher A. C. Graham lays several of Liu and
Hansens bugbears to rest:
Classical Chinese is a language of mainly monosyllabic words, each syllable
with its own written character, organised by word-order and the placing
and function of grammatical particles. The script is not, as used to be sup-
posed, ideographic; different monosyllabic words, however near they
approach synonymity, are written with different graphs, and particles
like other words have their own graphs. The combination of graphic
wealth with phonetic poverty has the result that the etymology of a
word and its relation to similar sounding monosyllables is displayed in
the structure of the graph rather than of the vocable. (1989, 389)
Graham accounts for the downgrading of sound in favor of meaning on the part
of scholars such as Liu and Hansen, insofar as it derives from traditional Chinese
thinking on language, by noting that the combination of graphic wealth [in the
character] with phonetic poverty [in the syllable]explains why Chinese scholars
are apt to draw conclusions about the nature of the language from the structure
of the graph, forgetting that it is the underlying meaning of the syllable/mor-
pheme that is responsible for any insights character shape may give us.
The grand claims of Lius and HansensSinologism”—though of course, I am
not presuming to characterize all or even most of their work as suchcontrasted
with the careful and nuanced explanations of Kennedys and GrahamsSinology,
show very well how difficult for Chinese studies are the problems of understanding
the Chinese language. On the one hand, the facts themselves are complex and not
easy to get right; on the other, there is what often seems like a compulsion not to be
interested in establishing facts, but rather in perpetuating myths. Both Liu and
Hansen are quite legitimately concerned to combat what they see as distorted
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1207
Western views of Chinese language and thought, but in their anxiety to redress the
balance, they fall into the trap of what has been referred to in relation to Chinese
scholars as reactive relativism(McDonald 2002), by trying to show that Chinese
is everything that Western languages are not.
But whatever the specific motivation of scholars like Liu and Hansen within
and beyond Chinese studies for putting forward their points of view, their argu-
ments are able to draw on a whole reservoir of character fetishization discourse
that has become, to some extent, the common sense of the field. Furthermore,
because scholars critiquing these tendencies, such as Boodberg and Kennedy,
and more recently John DeFrancis (1984, 1989) and J. Marshall Unger (2004),
have tended to take a dismissive, if not polemical, tone toward such arguments,
the effect of the ensuing debates seems to have been largely one of drawing battle
lines between the linguists and the non-linguists within the field. Rather than
adding yet another name to this long and dismal list, I would like to end the
present discussion on a more positive note by carrying out an analysis of one
recent work calling on the kinds of arguments identified here and showing
that, on its own terms, it does not need to argue from the nature of the characters
in order to successfully make its points about the meaning of the text.
ASITE FOR RECONCILIATION:TRUSTINGTHE EVIDENCE OF THE TEXT
Xin, which we have translated as making good on ones word,has been
described by Ezra Pound, following his teacher Ernest Fenellosa, as a
picture of a man standing by his word.No small number of scholars
have excoriated Pound for his philological flights of fancy, but every
Sinologist must analyze this particular character in the same way: the
character for person,, stands to the left of the character for speak-
ingor words,.Modern research has shown that the Shuowen is mis-
taken in classifying xin under the huiyi ideographic compound
category of Chinese graphs; ren is almost surely the phonetic in xin.
But the excellence of the philological detective work on this graph in no
way invalidates the importance of the fact that every reader of the Ana-
lects confronts visually personstanding by wordsor speech.
Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (1999, 53)
Ames and Rosemontsphilosophical translationof the Analects spends some
time, as do many such translations, giving a glossary of the key philosophical terms
used in the work, and how they should be understood and thus rendered into
English. Their explanation of the character xìn,trust,just quoted, shows
them siding very strongly with the ideographicinterpretation of Chinese charac-
ters. The twists and turns of this passage show Ames and Rosemont determined to
have their rhetorical cake and eat it. Phrases such as every sinologist must analyze
1208 Edward McDonald
this particular character in the same wayare immediately contradicted when they
go on to specifically mention sinologists who have analyzed it quite differently, as a
phoneticcompound. And as for their sweeping claim that every reader of the Ana-
lects confronts visuallythe character in the way they have analyzed it, if this
interpretation is in fact the case for contemporary readers of Chinese, there
should surely be some psycholinguistic evidence they can call upon to support
this contention (Ames and Rosemont cite no such evidence).
However, in a different context, Ames and Rosemont show that they do not
need to call on discourses of character fetishization to justify their understanding
of the text. This can clearly be seen in their discussion of the key semantic field of
changein classical Chinese, based on their interpretation of the passage from
the Analects translated by James Legge as If for three years he does not alter
from the way of his father, he may be called filial,but by themselves as
A person who for three years refrains from reforming the ways of his late
father can be called a filial son(Ames and Rosemont 1999, 280). Their justification
for this interpretation is given in an explanation that is worth quoting at length:
The emphasis in this passage as we understand it is on reforming the ways
of the father only after having fully embodied and understood them, and
then only with due deliberation. Our translation implies that the son
must first honor the ritual traditions seriously, but must then reappropri-
ate them for himself, and in the course of time, attune them to make
them appropriate to his own particular circumstances.
Philology will not entirely settle the matter, for gai has been conven-
tionally rendered to change,”“to alter,”“to correct,”“to amendor to
reform,and the negative wu can thus equally be linked to gai as does
not alter,”“makes no change,or refrains from reforming.We hedge
and say philology will not [sic]not entirelydecide the case because
translating gai as changein this instance is within the semantic toler-
ance, although it might not be sufficiently specific to convey the intended
meaning. That is, changeis very real in the eventfulworld of classical
China, and hence is expressed in many different ways, gai being only one
of them. A translation of this passage needs to distinguish among several
different senses: 1) bian is to change gradually across time, 2) yi is to
change one thing for another, 3) hua is to transform utterly where A
becomes B, 4) qian is to change from one place to another, and 5)
gai is to correct or reform or improve on xon the basis of some
other standard or model y. (1999, 28081)
Ames and Rosemonts interpretation here is an exemplary instance of traditional
philological exegesis, whether of the European or Chinese stripe, as well as, dare
I say it, of a social semiotic analysis of the Hodge and Louie kind. It is semiotic, in
the sense introduced and strongly insisted on by Saussure, that words only have
meanings in contrast to each other (Saussure 1916, 10720): it is therefore
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1209
impossible to understand the particular force of gai in Chinese without knowing
the other terms with which it is in contrast. It is social because it extends the
semiotic explication toward an understanding of the society that Confucius was
describing or envisaging: in terms of Ames and Rosemonts own explanation, in
the way that philosophy gives us access to different worldswith which we
can come to terms(1999, 315). Furthermore, we can note that here, in contrast
to the earlier example quoted, the translators make absolutely no reference to the
form of the relevant characters: a character-based inductiveexplanation is
simply not necessary.
This suggests more generally that Ames and Rosemont are gilding the lily in
calling on character-based analyses in other contexts. If their explanations are
grounded in a detailed understanding of the text, and the system of terms
defined and contrasted therein, then there is simply no necessity for them to
go any further. And given their uneasiness in the face of conflicting evidence,
as shown in the case of xin , it would seem that their dependence on what
has here been dubbed a discourse of character fetishizationhas more to do
with their predetermination to see the classical Chinese written languageas
unique(Ames and Rosemont 1999, 289), using a term that, like the earlier
use of inscrutablefor China itself (cf. Hansen 1983, 13), would seem to have
become almost indexical for the Chinese language.
The notion of an inscrutable Chinaand its contribution to Western thinking
has been subjected to trenchant critique in a recent article by Rey Chow in which
she points out how Derrida, through the misunderstood notion of Chinese
writing in his early work, casts Chinese writing as the metaphor for difference
from Western phonocentrism(2001, 70). She broadens her critique of what
may seem merely an intellectual gambit on the part of an iconoclastic Western
philosopher into a conclusion with implications for the sorts of discourses exam-
ined here, as well as for the broader fields of Chinese studies and Asian studies:
Translated into the context of high theory and philosophy, inscrutable
Chineseis no longer simply the enigmatic exterior of the oriental but
also an entire language and culture reduced to (sur)face, image and
ideogram. The face of the Chinese person and the face of Chinese
writing thus converge in what must now be seen as a composite verbal
stereotypethe other facethat stigmatizes another culture as at once
corporeally and linguistically intractable. (72)
Applying Chows critique to the discourses of character fetishization examined in
this paper, the paradox emerges that such discourses stem not from philosophers
like Derrida or poets like Pound (Fenellosa and Pound 1920), whose relative ignor-
ance of the Chinese language allows them to reshape it in their own desired or
required image,but rather from scholars like Hansen, Liu, Ames, and Rosemont,
who have dedicated their professional lives to learning about and trying to come to
1210 Edward McDonald
grips with the genuine differences between homeand the other.Even would-be
iconoclasts like Hodge and Louie, in their own analyses, end up reproducing the
very ideology they are attempting to deconstruct, reaffirming the centrality of
Chinese characters as semantic primes that determineand controlall
other meanings expressible in the language(McDonald 2000, 216).
It is this paradox that brings us back to the importance of identifying and
critiquing both the discursive processes and underlying premises of character
fetishization in Chinese studies. As noted at the beginning of the essay, this
term is not intended for use as an identity label, nor as a slur to discredit par-
ticular scholars. All of the scholars critiqued in this essay have made valid and
substantive contributions to their different areas of Chinese studies, but their
partial dependence on discourses of character fetishization has had the effect
of drawing a line beyond which critical discussion cannot proceed: to repeat
Hodge and Louies formulationone that, ironically, also applies to their
own worksuch a dependence takes major tendencies within Chinese
culture and turns them into absolute values not a set of provisional,
contested hypotheses and generalisations in need themselves of further exam-
ination and enquiry(1998, 13).
Zhan Xuzuo and Zhu Liangzhi (1995) trace the historical process by which
Chinese characters, to quote the English subtitle of their article, have been used
to verify beliefs and ideologiesthroughout the history of the traditional
Chinese polity. It is this very role of verificationthat some scholars in Chinese
studies see as a continuing one for Chinese characters, a role that allows their pro-
moters to preserve the notions of inscrutabilityand uniquenessthat have been
an inherent part of Western sinology since its beginnings. If we can understand the
substantive issues involved in how Chinese characters work, as this paper has tried
to do, a crucial question still remains. Will there be the willingness within the field,
among the linguists, the philosophers, the historians, the literary theorists, and
everyone else, to discard the exaggerated status ascribed to the characters both
positively and negatively and see cultural China as distinctiverather than
unique,as interpretablerather than inscrutable? This paper has tried to
suggest some of the ways out of the current intellectual standoff, but ultimately
the question is one that only the field as a whole can decide.
Acknowledgments
An initial version of this paper was presented at the International Convention of Asia
Scholars hosted by the National University of Singapore in 2003 in a panel organized by
James St. Andre. Later versions benefited greatly from comments by Daniel Kane, Victor
Mair, Jane Orton, David Kelly, Judith Farquhar, Gao Yihong, He Wei, Qian Jun, and the
Peking University Linguistics Circle. I would also like to thank the four anonymous
reviewers for JAS for their cogent criticism, and former JAS editor Kenneth
M. George, whose suggestions were both enlightening and supportive.
Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1211
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Getting over the Walls of Discourse 1213
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