Unexpected Affinities: Reading Across Cultures (review)

This is a wide-ranging book, written in a lively and accessible style, by a formidable scholar of cross-cultural comparative literature. As Zhang rightfully laments, today's academic world is far more comfortable with literary critics who adhere to the shibboleth of the absoluteness of cultural difference than with those who see connections between cultures, especially between cultures as different as China and the West. Zhang Longxi, in contrast, argues that "the point of reading across cultures is to reach a truly global vision of human creativity" because "only from such a broad perspective can we fully appreciate literary works and forms in all their diversities, and appreciate them not as isolated monads sealed off from one another, but as expressions of themes and ideas that are deeply connected, even though manifested in different languages and cultures" (p. 37). In the field of literary and cultural studies in our deeply historicizing academy these days, almost universally wary of universalism, Zhang's claim is both heterodox and welcome.

Unexpected Affinities is based upon a series of Alexander Lectures Zhang delivered at the University of Toronto in 2005. On the one hand, the theme of Zhang's lectures—a vision of unity behind appearances of multiplicity—is true to the tradition of Northrop Frye, the Canadian critic who taught at the University of Toronto and whose archetypal approach to literary criticism saw all of literature as participating in a single grand vision, or system. On the other hand, Zhang's contribution is atypical of the Alexander Lectures, as he is the first critic from Asia to deliver them. As broad as was Frye's vision in elaborating his paradigm of archetypal criticism, the Canadian critic made no mention of any of the great classics of Asian literature.

Chapter 1, "The Fallacy of Cultural Incommensurability," convincingly argues that East and West are not incommensurable opposites, that there are a great variety of opinions on many topics expressed in each of these two traditions, and that some figures from the East have more in common with their Western counterparts than they do with many of their fellow Easterners. One of these opinions expressed by some in both the Far East and the West is that East and West are incommensurable opposites. The fact that the case for incommensurability finds expression in both China and the West, Zhang argues, paradoxically invalidates that very case, since this contention is put forward by both Chinese and Western thinkers. In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the great comparatist E. R. Curtius, in arguing for the importance of seeing European literature as a whole, likened his own approach to taking an aerial photograph of the landscape he explores (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask [New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1953], p. ix). Zhang chooses the image of standing back from a canvas (which he adapts from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961], p. 140) or high up on a ladder in order to gain an appropriate perspective on the abundant variety of the world's literary texts.

Chapter 2, "'Faire une perle d'une l'arme': Reading Across Cultures," finds striking, remarkably detailed similarities in the way Chinese and Western European poets viewed their poems as oysters' pearls—things of beauty that are, in fact, produced, like the oyster's pearl, as a by-product of considerable discomfort and suffering. These affinities are indeed unexpected and, therefore, striking. Readers might, however, find less arresting and original the similarities Zhang finds between Eastern and Western views of life as a journey.

In his famous essay "Plato's Pharmacy," Jacques Derrida showed how Plato used the word pharmakon to refer both to poison and to cure. In chapter 3, "'Within the infant rind of this weak flower': The Ambivalence of Poison and Medicine," Zhang extends and broadens Derrida's enquiry, finding this precise ambivalence not only in Western writers...