Asia Institute Seminar December 29, 2011 Interview with Haun Saussy University Professor of Comparative Literature University Of

Asia Institute Seminar December 29, 2011 Interview with Haun Saussy University Professor of Comparative Literature University of Chicago Professor Haun Saussy is a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, has been named University Professor of Comparative Literature in the Division of the Humanities and the College at the University of Chicago. One of the few figures with a deep understanding of both the Western classical and Eastern tradition, who has advanced arguments for a new global approach to comparative literature. Professor Saussy is the 17th person ever to hold the title of University Professor at University of Chicago, an honor given to distinguished scholars. Saussy's first book, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford University Press, 1993), discussed the tradition of commentary that has grown up around the early Chinese poetry collection Shijing (known in English as the Book of Songs). His most recent book is Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), an account of the ways of knowing and describing specific to China scholarship. He received his B.A. (Greek and Comparative Literature) from Duke University in 1981. He received his M.Phil and Ph.D from Yale University in Comparative Literature. Saussy was previously Assistant Professor (1990-95) and Associate Professor (1995-97) at University of California, Los Angeles. He was Associate Professor, Full Professor, and chairman of the comparative literature department at Stanford University, prior to joining the Yale faculty in 2004. Emanuel Pastreich: We both began in Nashville, Tennessee, and we both had fathers involved in music. Asia was not anywhere around us at the beginning. If anything, our families were very deeply committed to the Western classical tradition. And yet ultimately Asia would become central in both of our lives. In my case, there was a Chinese restaurant near our home in Saint Louis that we would go to regularly. It was quite intriguing to me even then as I wrestled with chopsticks, suggesting another tradition out there. More important was my move to San Francisco in high school. From that time forward I had a significant number of Chinese American friends. Although I did not actually learn Chinese, I did start to think about the culture. Interestingly, Robert Campbell, who now teaches at the department of comparative literature at University of Tokyo (where I received my M.A.), also went to Lowell High School. Robert Campbell is the 1 only American I know who writes academic papers at a high level of sophistication in Japanese. Haun Saussy: Like you, I was always aware of the existence of Asia, which, for Americans of our generation, put us somewhat ahead of the game. I grew up in a town where the nearest thing to an Asian environment was the one Cantonese restaurant. I would stand near the kitchen door listening to the cooks argue: what was that, was that a language, I wondered. When I took Greek later, I noticed that, somehow, the Japanese phonetic inventory was similar to the Greek, with its long “o” and “e” distinct from short “o” and “e,” but I did not have the time to follow up on that observation as an undergraduate. At one point I wrote an undergraduate essay comparing Lu Ji's "Wen fu" (which I read in the translation by E. R. Hughes) with the Greek literary critic Longinus’ writings on the sublime. So I was ready by then to take the plunge. The opportunity finally arose when I was in Paris studying linguistics and obsessed by François Cheng's book on Chinese poetic writing. It always seemed to me a good experimental method, to test concepts that were familiar to me by comparing them with concepts other people were using in other languages. It worked for Greek and English and it only got better when I added Chinese to the mix. Emanuel Pastreich: We both started out seeped in the Western tradition, and then plunged into the Chinese tradition. Of course you did a much more careful survey of the Western tradition than I did. We must admit that there were challenges from the beginning. Could we make a meaningful connection between East and West? Could the East Asian tradition be taken seriously by our peers in the United States when it lacks certain markers of high seriousness required by so many Western intellectuals? Now major geopolitical shifts have led many to rethink those points, but we are still in a world in which Newton or Darwin have a universal status that no one in China, Japan or Korea has. Why is that? Haun Saussy: It's hard to make any generalization from people so exceptional as Newton and Darwin. But they lived in a time when very few countries possessed much of a scientific establishment, and they were connected to most of their peers through the intellectual networks that existed at the time. Further, they were lucky to come along at a time when a great deal of information had been gathered in their fields, and the need for a big theory was felt but not satisfied. Both of them offered a few singularly valuable insights. We don't know who the next Newtons and Darwins will be, or which field will they work in. It seems that genetics, neurobiology, and physics are accumulating a lot of results that so far resist elegant analysis, and whoever in those fields finds a way to make the results cohere with a new pattern of thinking will be the new Newton. These three fields are being cultivated in all parts of the globe, with intense communication among researchers everywhere, so the likelihood of the next big figure in genetics, say, being a non-Euro-American is pretty high. Science has become a perfectly cosmopolitan domain. In most labs I know in the United States, you'll find more foreigners, at every level of authority, than you'll find in most foreign-language departments, proportionally speaking! In some ways, the natural sciences have built the world society that the rest of us have been dreaming 2 about for centuries. Emanuel Pastreich: But the question for us would be, was there something in the Western tradition that was unique, say in establishing a universal structure for inquiry that will serve as the platform for all investigation from here on out? Or could it be that geopolitical shifts will revise our perception of the world, our basic schemata of inquiry to a degree to which the aspects of the Asian tradition which could serve as a universal standard will return to that position? Haun Saussy: I do think there are universal structures for inquiry: processes of testing the accuracy of statements, judging the fairness of social arrangements and so on. And if they work for most or all human beings, then it doesn't matter so much where they originated. Any tradition will have some parts that feel very provincial, mixed in with the parts that promise to extend more generally. And of course it's the interpreter who sifts out the universal (or promising-to-be- universal) from the rest. When I read, for example, the Mahabharata with my students, a text that I'm incapable of appreciating in the original, I spend a lot of time painting in the background, but I do this so that we can concentrate on the conflicts and issues that step out of the background and seem to address us more or less directly as human beings. Emanuel Pastreich: In a sense, we are led by our work on East Asia to understand something about ourselves. In a sense even the simplest forms of Asian studies are inherently comparative, even if they do not draw attention to that aspect. As T. S. Eliot once wrote, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Haun Saussy: I often wonder whether the Western tradition looks very much like a tradition when seen from an Asian cultural point of view. Nobody in Western Europe could read Homer or Aeschylus for a millennium or so (between 500 - 1500 AD), and now those writers are among the central authors in any modern account of the "Western tradition"! You can't imagine such a massive blank space in the Chinese tradition. Texts were lost in China too, of course, and texts were forged—and sometimes forged texts took the place of more authentic texts. Yet in China, if a text was deemed important, it remained important for critics, writers and librarians, and was constantly reevaluated and renewed within the ongoing cultural conversation, through reference, reinterpretation, revision and adaptation. From that point of view, the Europeans look like cultural fumblers. The other useful thing about constantly thinking about the West from a non-Western perspective is that it reminds us how chancy everything is. There's an inbuilt tendency in people to think that the history of the world ineluctably leads to them. We tend to make the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement seem like inevitable products of the Western march of progress. That argument is powerful if you want to be a famous historian or critic, although it may not make you a good one. Reflecting on another historical tradition that took other pathways helps to break down that tendency. Emanuel Pastreich: If we talk about something like "world literature" we are assuming that there is a general 3 phenomenon called "literature" that can be found everywhere. And yet, although we all started looking for that universal experience that ties all men together, in fact we find it extremely difficult to actually nail down such a universal.

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