Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (review)

This book continues the project Zhang Longxi began in The Tao and the Logos (1992) and made explicit in Mighty Opposites (1999): to assert, against those who would argue for the incommensurability of cultures, that whatever differences appear through the lens of anthropological or literary hermeneutics do not cut one kind from another. "I will argue," he writes in the introductory chapter, "that the belief in the possibility of common knowledge and cross-cultural understanding, in the availability of conceptual tools for the interpretation of human behavior across the boundaries of language, geography, culture, and time, can indeed come from a genuine appreciation of the equal capabilities of different individuals, peoples, and nations" (11). As in Mighty Opposites, where a distinction between the "identical" and the "equal" grounded in explicitly Heideggerean terms allowed Zhang to insist on the possibility of cross-cultural comparison based on a universalist egalitarianism, Allegoresis aims to undermine the "cultural relativists" who would insist, sometimes from a sense of superiority, sometimes from a desire to protect others from misunderstanding, that no hermeneutic that does not emerge from a given epistemological "inside" can ever fully grasp the structures, habits, meanings, or values of that interiority, much less its obscene and wondrous hopes and possibilities.

Readers from Chinese studies will recognize in the book's title a reference to the decades-long debate over the "problem" of metaphor in Chinese literature, a debate more or less settled for me, a non-sinologist, by Haun Saussy's The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1995). The related claim that Chinese literature does not have allegories, and is thus not susceptible to allegorical interpretations (aka "allegoresis") has nonetheless been remarkably hard to bury, and it claws its way out of the grave one more time in Zhang's first few chapters. He dispatches it with a number of vigorous blows from the hermeneutic shovel, moving back and forth between hypercanonical works from a number of traditions—the biblical Song of Songs and the Confucian Shi jing [Book of Poetry] in chapter 2, utopias like More's and Zamyatin's, and the early twentieth-century work of Kang Youwei in chapter 4. (The admirable range of Zhang's references generates for me one small quibble: why subtitle the book "Reading Canonical Literature, East and West," when all the "Eastern" literature is Chinese, and the boundaries of the "West" are so expansive—is the Song of Songs really "Western," or did it become so, and is this a difference worth remarking?) In general, Zhang's procedure is to begin with a recognizably "allegorical" work from the "Western" tradition, to present the history of its reading and interpretation, and then to follow up with texts from the Chinese tradition, which prove in each case to be not only amenable to an allegorical reading (which would suggest that serious critical effort can find allegory anywhere), but in fact to have consistently been subject to allegorical readings by the very people who were not supposed to believe in or have allegory in the first place.

Layered over Zhang's interest in the question of allegoresis are a series of comments that attempt to parse the general and situational ethics of allegorical reading, and indeed of literary critical interpretation more generally. These occur often enough, and in enough crucial places, to establish a sort of shadow thesis behind the book. This second thesis appears most prominently at the beginning of the book's third chapter, when Zhang tells the story of the powerful prime minister Zhao Gao, who in the third century B.C.E. brought a stag into the court and announced to the emperor that it was a horse. Zhao Gao's naming the animal as he saw fit tested the emperor's power and the loyalties of his court. His dislocation of the stag's "literal" meaning made interpretation an allegory of his domination, a domination that became profoundly literal when those who agreed with the emperor...