The Third Notion of Comparative Literature: The Possibility of Literary Archeology by Zhejun Zhang (review)

Zhejun Zhang proposes a grand new perspective to the study of comparative literature in the book. As the title manifests, it features the third notion compared to the traditional paradigm of influence studies and parallel ones. It is based upon the exchange of certain matters and the ideas derived from them between two countries in ancient times, in Zhang's case, China and Japan. While this exchange of matters and ideas took place in the real world, it was recorded by the poets of the two countries and thus presented in their poems. Seemingly, therefore, the similarities of the descriptions of the matters and ideas in the poems in China and Japan might be attributed to the influence of the Chinese poets upon the Japanese ones or otherwise. Yet they were caused by the cultural exchange between the two countries instead of the imitation or borrowing in the literary senses. This relationship that underlies the literary works of the two interrelated cultures is called the third relation in comparative literature studies by the author.

Zhang defines the discipline that aims at uncovering and confirming the third relation as literary archeology. He accomplishes the construction of this new theoretical paradigm in five chapters. In Chapter 1, he confines the object of study for literary archeology to the matters described in the poems and other historical documents in ancient China and Japan. Literary archeology is comparable to archeology in that they both seek to retrieve the historical truths with historical materials to corroborate the findings. But unlike archeology, literary archeology cannot make use of any substantial and tangible matters. Rather, it can only probe into the matters mentioned in the literary works to reproduce the factual life in history in the two countries compared. After that, the literary works should be reread in light of the recovered facts to arrive at a correct interpretation and be examined in a transnational perspective. Specifically, the relationships between these works in the countries concerned should be confirmed as the third type as mentioned earlier. Zhang also differentiates literary archeology from other related disciplines, such as thingology and natural history.

The matters in literary archeology boast of several characteristics. First, they fall into certain species. Sometimes they are surreal yet closely associated with their counterparts in reality. The features of the species as well as their affiliation with the literary representation of them are the major concerns of it. Second, the matters should be quite common in the daily lives of the ancient people. Third, the generation, evolution and aesthetics of the image of the matters in literature are essential to literary archeology. Finally, to extract the material facts from the literary works by distinguishing them from the fictional imagination is its major objective.

Chapter 2 provides the justification for literary archeology since the validity of the descriptions of the matters in poems is determined by the generic feature of them within the literary tradition of China and Japan. The historicization of poetry qualifies its descriptions as reliable and trustworthy presentation of reality. The key to this mingling of genres lies in the poetical tradition of the two countries recapitulated by Xuecheng Zhang (1738–1801) with his famous slogan, "the six major Confucian classics are all history." Among these classics, The Book of Songs, an anthology of poems, is also history, which means poems as a whole can be viewed as history.

The slogan, primarily targeting at the indistinguishableness between Confucian classics and history, contains an undertone of the homogeneity of poetry and history. At a deeper level, the six Confucian classics are all decrees and regulations for administering a state, which deservedly constitute a part of Chinese history. The Book of Songs, one of such official regulations, therefore, is also history. There is also an important implication in this idea which is borrowed by the author, that is, the mutual verification of the standard historical narratives and...