Symptoms of an Unruly Age: Li Zhi and the Cultures of Early Modernity by Rivi Handler-Spitz (review)

Before the present decade, the famed Ming-dynasty-era scholar and iconoclast Li Zhi (1527–1602) had not been the subject of a full-length book in English, and translations of his works were scattered across readers, collections, and articles. Over the last several years, however, scholars working on Chinese literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have brought welcome change to this unfortunate state of affairs. Rivi Handler-Spitz's Symptoms of an Unruly Age sets Li Zhi in contrast to modern thinkers in Western Europe in insightful, unexpected ways, and offers an approach that complements Pauline Lee's Li Zhi: Confucianism and the Virtue of Desire (Albany: State University New York Press, 2012), which places Li's work in the context of late imperial Confucian thought and literature. Symptoms of an Unruly Age is best read alongside another new Li Zhi book in English, A Book to Burn and to Keep (Hidden) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), a selection of translations edited by Handler-Spitz, Pauline Lee, and Haun Saussy.

Handler-Spitz's introduction sets the book in dialogue with comparative studies of the early modern world. As in recent works such as Ning Ma's The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), Symptoms of an Unruly Age argues that large-scale, parallel developments in societies and economies of China, Europe, and other regions led to similar concerns emerging in literary writing from very different places, languages, and contexts. The first chapter, on "Transparent Language," examines Li Zhi's condemnation of imitation and fakery in the context of both the late Ming and early modern Europe. The key point in Handler-Spitz's discussion for me was that the grousing about imitation and excess in Chinese letters amounted to more than what Stephen Owen has called "reactionary reform," where writers create and advocate new styles in the name of pursuing ancient practices and standards. Even when he called for a "rectification of names" (zhengming), Li Zhi was also grappling with concerns about the transformation of language that vexed writers in the Renaissance and inspired philologists such as Guillaume Postel (1510–81).

Chapter 2 takes on the problem of Li Zhi's deliberately self-contradictory styles of writing and self-presentation. Borrowing from the work of Barbara Bowen, a scholar of the French Renaissance, Handler-Spitz argues that Li Zhi's writings often engage in "bluff," a practice that is marked by "paradox, irony, and self-contradiction" and that "generates ambiguity and indeterminacy" (44) that can puzzle readers and force them to question received ideas. This chapter places Li Zhi's erudite and irreverent "Self-Appraisal" (zi zan) from A Book to Burn (Fen shu), which strings together a dizzying set of contradictory statements about Li's character, in dialogue with works such as the preface to Rabelais's Gargantua and Montaigne's notice "To the Reader" at the beginning of his Essays. All of these texts send mixed signals about their authors and their intentions that can work to unsettle readers: this bluff, Handler-Spitz concludes, offers an index of the "tempestuous state of signification" (68) in societies that were undergoing rapid changes in how writers made texts and claimed authority for their work.

Chapter 3 takes up the question of Li's physical appearance and personal conduct. In 1588, Li shaved his head—both a violation of Confucian norms and an acceptance of Buddhist standards of appearance—but retained the long beard and robes that were the sartorial trappings of a Confucian scholar. Li's self-styling can be read in at least two ways: first, as a complex expression of identity that rejected artifice in writing and personal conduct, and second, as a response to the blurring of identities caused by the erosion of sumptuary laws during...