The Perils of Scholarly Inquisition: A Response to Professor Eoyang's Review Article

In our profession of literary studies, reviews are an indispensable procedure to promote the profession and to render a useful service to the public. A reviewer has the moral responsibility to the author and, more importantly, a professional obligation to the reader. Being unfair to an author may, at most, ruin that person's career, but to review a book in terms of one's predilections and prejudices will surely mislead readers and hinder the advancement of learning. As we have observed once in a while, a willful distortion of a book under review in terms of a hidden agenda may poison the spirit of scholarship. For this reason, responsible reviewers always take extraordinary caution in their reviews to guard against the perils of careless misreadings. Prof. Eugene Eoyang is a scholar for whom I used to have high respect, but I am sorry to say that his review of my book, Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing: A Route to Hermeneutics and Open Poetics¹ displays such a disregard for professionalism that I am obliged to write a response to set the record straight.

In this response, I will let facts speak and show with hard evidence how careless Prof. Eoyang can be, and how his carelessness gradually evolves into willful distortions. In his review, he points out some typos and wrong translations. Altogether, he identified 7. When I attempted to mark those places in my book for future correction, to my chagrin, I found out that 3 of them are not typos or wrong renderings. He thought that "concord" on p. 103 should be "accord," but he did not realize that it is a word in a passage that I quoted directly from Waley's authoritative translation, the Analects of Confucius.² He thought that my translation of the Chinese concept wuji as 'the Non-ultimate' on p. 72 and 74 is "the exact opposite of the original. Wuji means 'without limit,' whereas 'the non-ultimate' means the quotidian, the ordinary."³ I don't want to comment on his quaint elucidation of the 'non-ultimate,' but once again he did not realize that the expression appears in a direct quotation taken from an authoritative translation of Chinese thought.⁴ When this kind of incredible carelessness appears in a review, can anyone expect the reviewer to write a fair and responsible review? Indeed, after reading the whole article, I was wondering whether he was reviewing my book or someone else's book.

Let me begin with the larger issues of conceptual framework and thesis in my book, of which he makes the most scathing criticism and with which the bulk of his review is concerned. My book studies the theory and practice of literary openness in Chinese hermeneutic tradition in relation to its Western counterpart. He correctly points out that Eco's The Open Work (1989) is a point of departure for my inquiry and goes on to devote a whole passage to give an incomplete summary of Eco's idea of open work. Based on his partial summary, he pronounces his judgment that "so many of [Gu's] fundamental misreadings and misunderstandings stem from this work."⁵ According to him, a fundamental flaw of my book is to read Mencius' writing, his theory of reading, and the Chinese tradition of reading in terms of a misreading of Eco's idea of open work. In order to be fair to Prof. Eoyang, I need to quote his indictment in full:

It would be an intellectual contortion of the most outlandish ingenuity to read the Mencius as a text that places values and dogma in question. And it is silly to think that any interpretation of the Mencius is equal to any other, or that Mencius would have sanctioned such semantic chaos. In no text of the Mencius does the author invite the reader to "collaborate" in the making of the meaning of what Mencius said. And to suggest that Mencius, or any other traditional Chinese writer, would have approved the egalitarianism of the postmodernist liberalism...