Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy

Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy DAVID PORTER Plates and tea wares have made us better acquainted with the Chinese than we are with any other distant people. — Robert Southey, Letters from England (1807) From the time Jesuit missionaries began sending back reports on Chinese culture at the end of the sixteenth century, the European attitude towards China gradually evolved from the fairy-tale fascination with distant images of unimaginable grandeur, wealth, and strangeness evoked by the romances of Marco Polo and John de Mandeville into an informed curiosity about an increasingly variegated geographic and cultural entity. Scholarly interest peaked in the late seventeenth century with panegyrics—inspired by the Jesuits —on the wisdom of Confucian ethics and government and protracted speculations on the origins of the Chinese people and language.1 European interpreters of the signs and emblems of Chinese culture—linguistic, theological , political—often, in this period, ascribed to them a groundedness and authenticity derived from their great antiquity and supposedly unchanging nature. Philologists and language reformers from Bacon and Wilkins to Leibniz and Swift, for example, found in the ancient, non-alphabetic script of the Chinese living evidence of the perfectibility of language and the possi27 28 / PORTER bility of grounding it on universally valid, rational foundations.2 Followers of Matteo Ricci and his policy of accommodationism, meanwhile, claimed to find evidence of divine revelation in the classical Confucian canon and argued strenuously for the essential compatibility of its religious precepts with those of the Catholic Church.3 During a period of intense conflict and upheaval at home, such interpretations of Chinese culture provided Europeans with reassuring images of the possibility of stability and legitimacy in the troubled realms of language, religion, and government. A second wave of interest in things Chinese, this time focused primarily on the aesthetic offerings and consumer goods of the Far East, followed in the eighteenth century. Imports of Chinese porcelains, lacquerware, furniture , and wall hangings had risen steadily since the mid-seventeenth century, and the new, strikingly exotic design motifs they brought with them stimulated the growth not only of domestic porcelain manufactures but of an entire industry of designers and producers of chinoiserie from the Beauvais tapestries to Chippendale furniture and the "Chinese" temples and pagodas of the English landscape garden. In England especially, the "Chinese taste" reached heights of popularity unmatched in any other era before or since. Extravagant spectacles featuring Chinese costumes and ornaments drew crowds to the theaters. Chinese plays were adapted and widely performed. A craze for chinoiserie furnishings and architecture transformed sitting rooms and gardens across the country and fueled the flames of Classicist satire on the degradation of contemporary taste.4 The collectors and consumers of the vast quantities of Chinese or Chinese -inspired porcelain, wallpapers, lacquerware, silk and furnishings that circulated through all of Europe in the eighteenth century remained generally oblivious of the ambitions of an earlier generation of missionaries and philologists to "know" China, to render legible its vast universe of endlessly perplexing signs. Rather than approaching China as a cultural terrain to be mapped and mastered through a paroxysm of heroic hermeneutics, the majority were content simply to enjoy a delicious surrender to the unremitting exoticism of total illegibility. To luxuriate in a flow of unmeaning Eastern signs, to bask in the glow of one's own projected fantasies, such were the pleasures afforded by China's arrival in the marketplace of contemporary taste. Chinoiserie, in other words, was an aesthetic of the ineluctably foreign, a glamorization of the unknown and unknowable for its own sake. If the philologists ' approach to language in China had entailed an excavation of the deep structure of hieroglyphic writing, the consumerist response to "the Chinese taste" in housewares and garden architecture was a celebration of superficies , a fixation on the glossy sheen of the porcelain vase and the surface Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy / 29 play of images in the willow-pattern worlds it conjured up for the viewer's eye. China became in chinoiserie a flimsy fantasy of doll-like lovers, children , monkeys and fishermen lolling about in pleasure gardens graced by eternal spring. There was no substance to such a vision...