Lessons from the Empire of Writing

Acad. Quest. (2012) 25:125–143 DOI 10.1007/s12129-012-9273-z WHY STUDY ISLAM, INDIA, AND CHINA Lessons from the Empire of Writing Cordell D. K. Yee Published online: 5 February 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 One of the reasons often advanced for the study of Western civilization is its history of scientific and technical prowess. Advances in science and technology have resulted in the many conveniences of modern life: air travel, automobiles, and smart phones, to name just a few. These are fruits of the Baconian project, which emphasized observation and measurement in the study of nature as part of an endeavor to “establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the whole universe.”1 Bacon identified three inventions that separated the ancients from the moderns: the magnetic compass, gunpowder, and printing.2 Of interest here is the last, which has been the object of considerable scholarly attention during the past few decades. The advent of printing has been credited with initiating a revolution that resulted in increased literacy, an enlarged market for books and other publications, and an increased flow of news, information, and knowledge. In short, printing helped to lay the foundations for the development of modern democratic polities, so much so that freedom of the press is held to be fundamental to democracy. It so happens that printing appeared first in China, as well as the other two inventions Bacon cites. China has its own heritage of technical prowess. Paper, which was crucial for the development of printing in the West, was also invented in China. Without paper, the print revolution would have at least been delayed. It is not my purpose, however, to match invention against invention, though at some level it is useful for us in the West to be aware of 1Francis Bacon, Novum Organum with Other Parts of the Great Instauration (1620), trans. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), book 1, Aphorism 129. 2Bacon, Novum Organum, book 1, Aphorism 129. Cordell D. K. Yee is a generalist who has written on Chinese and Western topics. He teaches across the curriculum in the Great Books Program at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD 21401; [email protected]. 126 Yee such a list of inventions—if only to prevent the study of Western civilization from lapsing into an exercise in self-congratulation. My interest initially lies in the response in China to the advent of printing. A print revolution in the Western mode did not occur. Consideration of this nonevent will lead to what lies near the heart of Chinese civilization and to what I think we gain from the study of China. An Inverted History of Printing My colleague Eva Brann once remarked that in her reading what held true in China was often an “inversion” of what held true in the West. Such a characterization seems apt for a civilization often regarded in the popular imagination as geographically antipodal to the United States. In the West, the modern was marked by the ascendancy of the mathematical and physical sciences over the humanistic disciplines. In China, the inverse was true, even after the appearance of Bacon’s three modern inventions. Humanistic disciplines held more prestige than the mathematical and technical. The history of printing in China seems to be another one of those inversions: democratization in the West versus its inverse in China. Some would protest that a print culture similar to that of the West developed in China. There was a book trade. The availability of printed texts increased opportunity for literacy and pursuit of the literati life with its promise of official position, power, and economic security; and there was considerable social mobility. Thus, the Western pattern can be seen in imperial China, so that the Western turns out to have been universal after all. All the similarities, however, do not hide the halting democratization of China, even given its impressive economic progress over the last few decades. So before turning China into a variation on Western civilization, one should stop to consider the important ways in which textual production in imperial China differed from that in Western societies. Printing was not necessarily an agent of change; it seems to have been an agent of stability. In Western cultures, print letterforms became divorced from manuscript forms, as letterforms were adapted to movable type. The distinction is embedded in the English language: even typographic letterforms written by hand are referred to as print. The process of printing in imperial China remained closely tied to manuscript production. Production of the printed page began with a manuscript copy, which was placed face down on a Lessons from the Empire of Writing 127 woodblock. Portions of the block under uninked portions of the manuscript were carved out, resulting in a mirror image of the manuscript. Manuscript forms of characters were thus also print forms. The printing process with woodblocks might appear cumbersome. Each page required a new carving. A block, if carved on front and back, could be used for the print runs of two separate leaves. In contrast, after each setting, movable type could be reused over and over. Movable type was invented in China in the eleventh century, about four hundred years before Gutenberg, but for most printers in traditional China it was too costly: type would have to be made for thousands of characters in the Chinese language, not just for a hundred or so as for English. The process of woodblock printing could have been simplified if it had not been so reliant on a manuscript copy. The forms of Chinese characters had changed earlier when the writing brush replaced stylus and graver as the main writing implement. So, it is not difficult to imagine that the strokes of characters could have been altered to allow them to be carved directly into the wood, obviating the need to hire a copyist to transcribe the text to be printed. Such a transformation in the written language, however, did not occur, despite the economic advantage it might have brought. Independent of the printing process, the brush was still an important means of making copies of texts, even for publication. Thus, even after the invention of printing, paper, and movable type, imperial China’s age of print seems to have been at bottom an age of manuscript. Much to the frustration of historians seeking economic, technological, and material causes for the movement of history, Chinese history did not move in the way Western history did. At least part of the reason was aesthetic: the brush was and still is more powerful than print. Print versus Manuscript For much of China’s history, from around the ninth to the twentieth century, mastery of the art of writing was considered among, if not the highest, intellectual and artistic achievements. Calligraphy, poetry, and painting together comprised the “three perfections.” The three were often united in the same work of art. Such integration was in line with the injunction of the Daodejing to “return to the uncarved block” an image of simplicity, integrity, and polypotency. 128 Yee The ability to read and write afforded opportunity for economic and social advancement. But the valuation placed on handwriting went well beyond its social and economic benefits. In the modern West, literacy often affords similar benefits, but calligraphy is considered a minor art at best, and handwriting seems to be losing its place in elementary education. Perhaps even more perplexing to Western sensibilities is that what is arguably the greatest work in the Chinese artistic tradition, Wang Xizhi’s Lanting xu (Preface to the Orchid Pavilion collection, 353), maintains its reputation even though no one has seen it for centuries. This calligraphic work disappeared in the seventh century, reportedly buried with an emperor. Absence of the original has not been regarded as a bar to appraisal or evaluation. This aesthetics of absence is made possible in part by the importance of copying in the tradition. Students preparing for the life of the literate elite spent years copying out classic texts and models of calligraphy. As a result, they knew many texts by heart (an inversion of what Socrates says in the Phaedrus about the threat of writing to memory). This discipline may also help to account for the continued importance of handwritten texts, long after the advent of printing. Although learning the art of writing seems to involve much rote memorization, practice of the art in China affords opportunity for expressiveness and freedom, qualities not usually associated with manuscript culture in the West, such as in medieval Europe. After all, we in the modern West left behind manuscript culture and whatever we think it stood for centuries ago. As a way of getting at the power of handwriting in China, I present print and manuscript versions of two poems. The manuscript copies of the poems do not respect line divisions. That is, the ends of the lines on the manuscripts do not necessarily correspond to the ends of lines of verse. The manuscript copies are read vertically from right to left. Traditionally, printed texts do not observe line breaks either, and are read vertically from right to left. As a concession to modern printing practices (and the limitations of my word processing program), the printed texts are presented so as to be read horizontally from left to right. For ease of reading and to make clearer the verse form, line breaks are preserved. Each line of verse is followed by a transcription of the line in Pinyin transliteration—to give some notion of the pronunciation3—a word-for-word gloss, and a rough translation.

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