The Internal and the External: A Comparison of the Artistic Use of Natural Imagery in English Romantic and Chinese Classic Poetry (review)

Reviews 65 Zuoya Cao. The Internal and the External: A Comparison oftheArtistic Use ofNatural Imagery in English Romantic and Chinese Classic Poetry. Asian Thought and Culture, vol. 32. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 163 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-8204-3815-4. This mechanical little book sets out to disprove an assertion ofthe late Paul de Man that "the merging of the internal and the external can never be reached in poetic language." A revised 1993 dissertation from Pennsylvania State University, Zuoya Cao's monograph recalls an earlier, pre-Derrida era when comparative literature could be a rather uncomplicated business: compare and contrast a handful of carefully chosen poems from two disparate literary traditions, chronicle their "similarities" and "differences," and then account for these discoveries by recourse to the literary history and theory of each tradition. Professor Cao follows this old formula closely. For students of Chinese poetry, the saving grace ofher exercise is its focus on natural imagery, certainly a central issue in the Chinese poetic tradition. The work is divided into four chapters. Chapters 1 and 2, "The Use ofNatural Scenery" (pp. 7-42) and "The Use ofNatural Objects" (pp. 43-77), compare, respectively, how the two traditions employ, first, complex landscape descriptions and then individual flora and fauna. These chapters rely on a carefully contrived series of comparisons, each between one Western and one Chinese poem. Despite the promise ofthe title, the corpus ofpoetry subject to comparison is actually quite small. "English Romantic" is confined to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge; and despite the definition of "Chinese Classic Poetry" as T'ang and Sung "lyrics" (p. 1), the Chinese poems chosen for comparison are limited to the shih poetry ofWang Wei, Tu Fu, and Li Po and the tz'u poetry of Su Shih. The entire work does not cite a single Sung dynasty shih poem. Virtually all the poems in these first two chapters are well-known anthology chestnuts—the opening pair being Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Wang Wei's "Mt. Chung-nan" (Chung-nan shan f^^fLLI). In short, Zuoya Cao has severely constricted the parameters ofboth traditions, confining herselfto rather late and rather middlebrow conceptions of these traditions. These opening chapters do not really compare "English Romantic and Chinese Classic Poetry" but rather pit Three Hundred T'ang Poems against Palgrave's Golden Treasury. Obviously, any consideration of the discursive quality of Sung shih poetry or exploration into the lesser-© 1999 by University ^0Vm byways ofEnglish Romantic poetrywould havevastlycomplicated ProfesofHawai 'i Press„ , . sor Cao s task. Within the narrow confines ofthis chosen corpus, her conclusions are focused and predictable. Both traditions employ natural imagery (the "external") to 66 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 express the poet's feelings (the "internal"). But the Romantics are more likely to turn the natural object into a symbol for imaginative meditation, to intellectualize the object into a subjective mental construct, and this process in turn deflects interest away from the physical reality ofthe object itself. However, for the Chinese poet, the physical object "always remains concrete," and "Chinese poets often create a fusion ofnatural scene and feeling where objective and subjective worlds are united in one artistic world" (p. 40). These conclusions are hardly revelations and have been expressed in some detail elsewhere—badly, I have previously argued— by Pauline Yu, whom Zuoya Cao cites, and—much better—by François Jullien, whom she does not cite.1 If Cao's theoretical conclusions are predictable, her exegesis of specific Chinese poems is largely correct and sometimes insightful. Her readings, however, appear as univocal and sui generis. Poetic texts, for Cao, are static, with only one perennial meaning. When quoting Chinese poems, she provides a Chinese text in simplified characters, followed always by another scholars' previously published translation in brackets, which is then footnoted. Her Chinese texts, therefore, are referenced not by citation to any traditional or modern Chinese editions ofthe poets' works but by citation to previous English translations. Thus, textual problems, ofwhich there are many even in the few poems under discussion, are fully ignored. Likewise absent is any mention ofthe rich and complex commentarial tradition. Cao provides no references to traditional commentary and only...