33.1116, Review: Ling & Literature; Philosophy of Language; Sociolinguistics: Meyer (2021)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-1116. Mon Mar 28 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.1116, Review: Ling & Literature; Philosophy of Language; Sociolinguistics: Meyer (2021)

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Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2022 21:38:08
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Documentation and Argument in Early China

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36760997


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-3025.html

AUTHOR: Dirk  Meyer
TITLE: Documentation and Argument in Early China
SUBTITLE: The Shàngshū 尚書 (Venerated Documents) and the Shū Traditions
SERIES TITLE: Library of Sinology
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

SUMMARY

The ‘Shang Shu’ or ‘Shu Jing’ (or just ‘Shu’ for short), commonly called in
English “Book of Documents”, on which see e.g. Shaughnessy (1993), is one of
the two earliest monuments of Chinese literature.  (The other is the Shi Jing
or “Book of Odes”, on which see e.g. Loewe 1993a, Sampson 2020.)  The Shu in
its canonical form consists of a collection of several dozen historical
records, predominantly speeches by kings or military leaders.  It is clear
that some chapters relate to periods far earlier than when the chapters were
written, and Shaughnessy tells us that about half of the Shu is now accepted
to be a forgery dating from as late as the fourth century A.D.  But 28 or 29
chapters are believed to have been written in the Zhou dynasty (1040–403
B.C.), several of these perhaps as early as the regency of the Duke of Zhou
(1038 B.C. onwards).  (Equivalences between Chinese and Western dates before
the ninth century B.C. are debatable; dates in this review follow the
proposals of David Nivison 1999.)

Dirk Meyer is Oxford University’s “Associate Professor” (their new term for
Reader) in Chinese Philosophy.  In this book he sets out to establish what
role the texts collected in the Shu played in Chinese intellectual life in the
Zhou dynasty and later.  In modern times, the Shu has been seen as a single
fixed document, but Meyer compares it to the Bible, which was originally seen
as more a library than a single book, and a library whose contents could vary
to some extent.  The Shu was originally a genre of documents rather than a
specific set of documents, and it was a genre which came to be seen as a kind
of guarantee of the validity of the political discourses it was used to
express.

This point of view has become considerably more cogent since the discovery by
archaeologists from the 1990s onwards of numerous early Chinese manuscripts
which often deploy wording also found in the canonical Shu texts in order to
argue for positions that may be rather different, or very different, from the
positions argued in those canonical texts.  Much of Meyer’s book examines
various examples of these “new” documents to show how speeches of the kind
recorded in the Shu “served as the source material for the development of a
wide range of sociophilosophical arguments, with different groups using them
as suited their needs”.  (I do not attempt to give a chapter-by-chapter
breakdown of the contents of Meyer’s book, because that would largely consist
of listing the Shu chapters and variant texts covered in successive chapters
of the book under review, which would mean little to most Linguist List
readers.)  For instance, Meyer compares the canonical Shu text “Gu ming” with
the newly-discovered text “*Bao xun” (the asterisk indicates that the title is
a modern invention).  In “Gu ming”, King Cheng, fearing he is near death,
presents his son to the court as heir to the throne (the son succeeded as King
Kang in 1005 B.C.), emphasizing the legitimacy of his own and his son’s
descent from the father-and-son founders of the Zhou dynasty, Kings Wen and
Wu.  “*Bao xun” on the other hand comprises a speech by Wen to Wu, urging him
to be worthy of Heaven’s mandate when he receives it.  (Wen rebelled against
the previous, Shang dynasty, but died before his rebellion succeeded – he is
called “King” by courtesy because his son Wu did defeat the Shang and took
over the kingship.)  The political implications of the two discourses are in a
sense opposite, “Gu ming” stressing the importance of legitimate succession in
an ancestral line while “*Bao xun” justifies the highly controversial violent
ouster of a wicked ruler and replacement by a new ruling clan.  Yet parts of
the two texts are identical, with respect both to overall structure and to
individual pieces of wording, for instance the respective fathers are both
described as ritually washing their faces, using the same rare word for
“wash”.  Shu became “a literary performance which textualises antiquity in a
prescribed manner … [and] thus became a tool of legitimacy, allowing groups to
articulate even unorthodox positions with ancient backing in the debate about
ruler–subject relations and good rule”.

Only in the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.) did ancient texts begin to
“solidify” into canonical books.  Earlier, the Shu genre may have been oral as
much as written; some manuscripts make heavy use of punctuation marks, which
seem intended to help in declaiming them aloud.  Meyer shows that part of the
solidification process involved texts becoming more “literary”.  For instance,
he discusses another pair of Shu-genre texts which both relate to the
accession to the throne of the man we met above as King Cheng.  Soon after Wu
defeated the Shang king, he died, leaving as heir a son who was traditionally
supposed to have been a young child; his uncle the Duke of Zhou took over as
regent for this new King Cheng.  The legitimacy of this move was highly
questionable (particularly since it is now believed that Cheng may in reality
have been in his twenties), the obvious suspicion being that the Duke intended
to supplant his nephew as king.  But in fact the Duke had consulted the
spirits about whether he would be justified in taking temporary power, and
took the precaution of storing a record of their positive response in a
casket, which much later Cheng opened in response to his suspicions.  In one
of the texts compared by Meyer, bare facts are recounted with little sense of
narrative development, but the text which became part of the canonical Shang
Shu uses storytelling art to build up suspense in the reader’s mind and
finally resolve it.

Before solidification had run its course, not all categories of the elements
which reappear in different text versions were equally stable.  The wording of
a speech was relatively fixed, but a speech might be put in the mouth of
different speakers even in variant texts purporting to describe the same
historical event.  Texts embodying more complex patterns of argument were
relatively likely to alter.  And as literary culture became more
sophisticated, texts ceased to focus almost exclusively on the words and deeds
of the king, in favour of treating the king as just one of many actors. 
Narration increased, while direct speech “is reduced to a bare minimum (or
disappears entirely)” … “shifts in the perspective of a narrator enable the
portrayal of an ‘extended event’, covering a lengthy period of time.”

In the light of all this, Meyer suggests, “forgery” may be a misleading way of
thinking about the later Shu chapters; arguably their creators were simply
continuing the same activity by which earlier chapters had been produced.  And
Meyer points out that this same activity continues today.  He quotes a 2014
speech by President Xi Jinping in which Xi deployed quotations from the Shu
and other classic writings to justify the rule of the Chinese Communist Party,
taking from the Shu a phrase ‘min wei bang ben’, “the people are the
roots/basis of the state”.  For reasons to be discussed below, Meyer sees Xi’s
use of this quotation as distorting what the phrase meant in its original
context – but he suggests that this re-use of old wording for new purposes is
how Shu texts always were constructed.

EVALUATION

Meyer’s book is certainly a valuable addition to the scholarly literature on
early Chinese culture.  When the resources available for studying this subject
have been so vastly expanded in our own generation by the manuscripts newly
unearthed by archaeologists, studies like this which digest some of the new
material and make it accessible to Western students are to be welcomed with
open arms.

However, I only fully appreciated the value of Meyer’s book while reading its
later chapters.  Regrettably to my mind, earlier chapters require the reader
to wade through a great deal of discussion couched in the vocabulary of
literary theory, which Meyer uses to explain his aims in writing the book. 
The area called “theory” in literature departments strikes me as a deeply
dubious enterprise (Sampson 1989), which appears to heap up technical
terminology in a pastiche of empirical science while discussing topics to
which the scientific method does not apply.  My heart sinks when I try to make
sense of a passage like the following remark of Meyer’s:

“The term ‘intertextuality’ was first used in print by Julia Kristeva in 1969
in the collection of her articles in ‘Recherches pour une sémanalyse’. 
Observing Bakhtin’s discussion of dialogism, but also on Saussure’s ideas
about the ways a sign derives its meaning within the structure of a text,
Kristeva does not consider text as something static but as ‘a dynamic site in
which relational processes and practices are the focus of analysis’ (Alfaro
1996: 269).  This implies that meaning is always mediated through certain
‘codes’.”

(The fact that the obscure ideas are all quoted from other academics is
typical of Meyer’s treatment of literary theory:  his use of it is always via
concepts developed by others, not by himself.)  My working assumption is that
whatever sense there is in passages like this could have been expressed more
straightforwardly without using “theoretical” terminology, and that it would
then be seen to amount to less than the high-flown language suggests (and add
little to what Meyer is telling us about the Shu).  
Apart from his reliance on overblown theoretical concepts, I should have
preferred Meyer to exercise a more critical attitude vis-à-vis the work of
other scholars who discuss straightforwardly factual issues.  One example
relates to the Shu quotation in Xi Jinping’s speech mentioned above.  Meyer
does not make it very explicit why he feels President Xi distorted the
original sense of the phrase, but part of his point relates to the word ‘min’,
usually translated “people” or “the common people” (as in modern Chinese
‘Renmin Gongheguo’, “People’s Republic”).  In the Book of Documents, the
phrase occurs in a passage which runs:  “Our great ancestor taught us:  the
people (‘min’) should be brought close, they should not be put down; the
people are the roots of the state, if the roots are solid the state is
tranquil”.  However, Meyer, following Crone (2016), claims that the original
meaning of ‘min’ was specifically the inhabitants, including rulers (or
particularly the rulers), of territories other than the Zhou ancestral
homeland, over which the Zhou kings now exercised hegemony.  Crone claims that
only in the Warring States period did ‘min’ come to mean “the common people”
in general.  If so, then the Shu passage might have meant something like “If
you want a peaceful kingdom, don’t treat the conquered nations as helots but
as equals of your own people” – which will not have been how Xi Jinping
intended his quotation to be taken.

The trouble with this is that Crone’s claim is implausible.  I see that Joern
Grundmann (2017) disagrees with it, and I find it incredible.  Crone discusses
principally inscriptions on ritual bronzes, which are a genre of their own,
and for all I know ‘min’ may have had a special sense there – just as, in
English, the basic sense of “left” is a direction in physical space but in
political writing it standardly means “socialist”.  But the word often occurs
in the people-in-general sense in the Book of Odes, which long antedates the
Warring States.  Consider Ode 234, in which a man bewails the rigours of army
life, saying “Woe, we’re on military service – we alone have to live as
non-people (‘fei min’).  We aren’t water-buffaloes or tigers, yet we must trek
through this desolate wilderness.”  The poet was surely not complaining about
not being treated as a member of one of the non-Zhou subject nations.  (It is
true, as Meyer has pointed out, that all early Chinese literature had to be
reconstructed, from memory or otherwise, after the third-century-B.C. Burning
of the Books, and when words had changed meaning perhaps new words were
sometimes substituted.  But that can hardly have happened in Ode 234, because
‘min’ occurs there in a rhyming position.)  Meyer is of course entitled to
find Crone convincing.  But while he accepts Crone’s idea uncritically in his
closing pages, earlier in the book Meyer has taken for granted that ‘min’ did
mean the common people (his term is “commonfolk”), in various Shu passages
which would be hard to construe Crone’s way.  Together with his reliance on
dubious literary theorizing, this gives the curious impression that Meyer
assumes that any idea which has made it into print must be treated as valid
even when he knows it is wrong.

There are other problems with the volume.  Many graphs in the newly-discovered
manuscripts are non-standard and hence not found in Chinese printing fonts, so
are reproduced photographically; but they are printed black on dark grey, and
in most cases quite illegible.  It should not have been difficult to increase
the contrast using a photo-processing application, but this has not been done.
 Page 209 refers to a Figure which seems to be missing.  Quotations from
manuscripts use symbols such as curly brackets and daggers which are not
explained (perhaps they are standard among epigraphy specialists?)  There are
many oddities of English, usually trivial but which occasionally impede
understanding; on p. 213 many readers, particularly if they cannot read the
Chinese original, might be fazed by the translated passage “The king commanded
his craftsmen to make a liking [of that image], and had him searched by among
people in the domain for a handsome reward”.  (“Liking” should read “likeness”
[of a man seen by the king in a dream], and “searched by among” should be
“searched for by/among” – Chinese ‘yu’ could mean either of the latter.)

It is frustrating for the reader that when Meyer’s bibliography lists multiple
publications by one author (sometimes there is almost a pageful of such
items), they appear in random order rather than date sequence, and the authors
are not always alphabetized correctly.  Again, word-processing software makes
it easy to get these things right, so when they have been neglected it becomes
natural to wonder how much care has been taken with less easily checkable
material in the book.

Nevertheless, Meyer’s book is a worthwhile contribution to our knowledge of
the intellectual world of early China.

REFERENCES

Crone, T.  2016.  “The semantic change of the word ‘min’ in texts of the
Eastern Zhou Period (771–221 B.C.)”  Asiatische Studien 70.675–99.
Grundmann, J.P.  2017.  “The term ‘min’ as a political concept in Western Zhou
thought”.  Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-i Academy of Sinology 4.111–35.
Loewe, M.  1993a.  “Shih ching”.  In Loewe (1993b), pp. 415–23.
Loewe, M., ed.  1993b.  Early Chinese Texts: a bibliographical guide.  Society
for the Study of Ancient China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University
of California.
Nivison, D.  1999.  “The key to the chronology of the Three Dynasties: the
‘modern text’ Bamboo Annals”.  Sino-Platonic Papers no. 93.  Online at
<www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp093_bamboo_annals.pdf>.
Sampson, G.R.  1989.  “That strange realm called theory”.  Critical Review
3.93–104.  Online at <www.grsampson.net/ATsr.pdf>.
Sampson, G.R.  2020.  Voices from Early China: the ‘Odes’ demystified. 
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Newcastle-upon-Tyne).
Shaughnessy, E.  1993.  “Shang shu (Shu ching)”.  In Loewe (1993b), pp.
376–89.
Sobel, A., and J. Bricmont.  1997.  Impostures intellectuelles.  Odile Jacob
(Paris).  An English translation is available as Intellectual Impostures,
Profile Books, 1998.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University, and
his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics and partly in Informatics,
with intervals in industrial research. After retiring as professor emeritus
from Sussex University in 2009, he spent several years as Research Fellow at
the University of South Africa. He has published contributions to most areas
of Linguistics, as well as to other subjects. His latest book is ''Voices from
Early China'' (2020).





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