Gede yue Zhongguo [Goethe and China] (review)

Goethe Yearbook 269 not know German, but offers on the whole a flawed and rather pedestrian treatment of Goethe's novel. His study will leave English-speaking readers better informed but probably still puzzled as to what about this novel has fascinated so many and why it has been accorded such a prominent place in the German canon. University of California, Santa Cruz Loisa Nygaard Yang, Wuneng, Gede yue Zhongguo [Goethe and China]. Beijing: Sanlian, 1991. 239 pp. This first book written by a mainland Chinese scholar on the subject of Goethe in China is divided into two parts—information on China available to Goethe in Part I, then the impact of Goethe in China in Part II. Yang claims no originality in the first part of the book and is only summarizing published works on Goethe and China. In fact, he relies heavily on doctoral dissertations on the image of China in German Literature by Ursula Aurich (1935) and Ed. Horst von Tscharner (1939). Yang seems not to have checked the reliability of these studies and clearly did not read Tscharner's review of Aurich's thesis, which laments its many inaccuracies. Yang also repeats the claim, now known to be false, that Goethe learned Chinese calligraphy from Klapproth, whom he describes as a sinologist but who did not know Chinese. The methodology used by Tscharner and Aurich—which Yang adopts— is hopelessly outdated and Yang adds little information to what is provided by them. Regarding Goethe's reading on China, for example, he spends half a paragraph on du Halde's monumental Description. . . de la Chine, although this is only one of the 44 works on China that Goethe borrowed from the Weimar library, some others of which Yang should also have consulted . He was in Germany with a Humboldt Fellowship, after all, and had access to sources and secondary materials. Except for du Halde's tome, Yang mentions only that Goethe checked out Marco Polo's travels several times. Yang has little knowledge of Goethe and his time. For instance, he notes Beutler's observation that the young Goethe, through his reading of Rousseau, might have come upon a book containing excerpts from Chinese Confucian classics. However, Yang does not seem to know that Rousseau used Confucian China to demonstrate his thesis about the way culture corrupts . From the young Goethe's admiration for Rousseau and the latter's doctrine of nature Yang might have inferred that in his early years Goethe could not have liked China, Chinoiserie or the Rococo very much. Goethe called everything pertaining to the Chinese fashion Schnickschnack. The first part must be faulted not only in minor details, but also in matters of importance. During Goethe's time the Chinese "relations" of the Jesuits could not be ignored. Both Aurich and Tscharner mention them. In 270 Book Reviews the eighteenth century, the figurists, who argued that the coming of Christ was pre-figured in Chinese classical canons, dominated the transmission of Chinese culture to Europe, but Yang gives no indication that he knows figurism at all. Yet without knowing figurism one cannot explain why only Confucian Classics were accessible in Europe and why the knowledge of Chinese culture was skewed as a result. If the Taoist canons had been known at that time, Rousseau would not have condemned China, and the young Goethe would have taken a stronger interest in that distant culture. The fragment Elpenor, which is modelled after a Yuan Play and a Chinese novella, shows that Goethe was interested in China in later life. Yang asserts that Goethe regretted never having completed the play, but the fact is that Goethe agreed with Schiller's view that this work involved a "misappropriation of subject matter." Yang's explanation for the "elective affinity" between Weimar Classicism and Confucianism is that Goethe was limited by his capitalist outlook, therefore attracted to Chinese feudalist— i.e. Confucian—values. In the first part of Yang's study we are led to believe that in Germany Goethe is now "simply called" the "Confucius of Weimar"—one of Yang's chapter titles. A certain Hans Ewers, who is not a Goethe scholar, seems to have been...