Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China:

Patterns of Literary Circulation by Alexander Beecroft

(review)

Nicholas Morrow Williams

China Review International, Volume 19, Number 1, 2012, pp. 45-52 (Review)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cri.2012.0017

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/537364

Access provided at 9 Apr 2019 21:26 GMT from University of Hawaii @ Manoa
Reviews

Alexander Beecroft. Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and

China: Patterns of Literary Circulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010. ix, 328 pp. Hardcover $85.00, isbn 978-0-521-19431-0.

This book is a rare foray into comparative literature in its boldest form, an exami-
nation of two mutually isolated literatures. Though for most scholars the challenges
of approaching simultaneously two cultures so far removed as ancient Greece and
China seem insurmountable, the potential rewards are also great. In the field of
Homeric epic, in fact, a comparative approach famously bore fruit in the oral-
formulaic theory of Parry and Lord, who used the compositional methods of living
Yugoslavian bards as evidence in the analysis of the Homeric epic. Not coinciden-
tally, Beecroft draws considerably on the insights of this theory ( particularly as
presented in more recent scholarship by Gregory Nagy and others), and so by
authorship refers not so much to the original composition of a work, of which we
often have meager factual evidence, as its later performance, transmission, and
circulation.
In the practice this means that in the Greek half of the book Beecroft is inter-
ested primarily in biographical narratives about authors, while in the Chinese half
he is interested primarily in the quotation and interpretation of Shijing poems. In
the Greek case, Beecroft criticizes the habit of modern scholars to denigrate these
narratives for their biographical fallacy ( presuming that all the contents of a
literary work must directly inscribe facts of the author’s life) and terms this habit
the “reverse biographical fallacy” ( p. 2). In place of the reverse biographical fallacy,
he argues, we ought to read these narratives as a kind of “implied poetics” ( p. 2) or
“implicit poetics” ( p. 26), that indirectly offer us various proposals about the
significance of a poem, rather than merely criticizing the sources for historical
inaccuracy.
Beecroft’s presentation of both concepts is a clear and helpful contribution to
literary scholarship. It is surely correct to find in these biographical narratives
critical perspectives on the uses of literature, which are as important as the more
famous statements of explicit poetic theory that tend to dominate scholarly
© 2013 by University ­discourse. Moreover, this is exactly the kind of issue for which the comparative
of Hawai‘i Press approach ought to be useful. Just as Parry, Lord, and later adherents made use of
living evidence to gain a better understanding of the principles behind the
Homeric epic, Beecroft can make use of the Chinese tradition, in some respects
more fully documented than that of ancient Greece, to test some of his hypotheses.
46  China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012

However, this sort of direct inference is rare in the book. The conceptual
framework is comparative and intended to apply to both Chinese and Greek
sources separately, but there are few cases where Beecroft makes an explicit
­comparison; when he does, it tends to be at quite a high level of abstraction. This
caution about direct comparisons leads to one possible limitation of the book, that
the individual chapters in the Greek and Chinese sections of the book (three of
each) essentially stand alone as essays in classics and sinology, respectively. There
is also an introduction, a conclusion, and one comparative chapter, which do
present the case for looking at Greece and China together. Beecroft mentions, for
example, “the particular appropriateness of these two literatures to revealing the
shifting of relationships between literatures and their political/social environments
over the longue durée” ( p. 5). In practice, though, the main justification becomes a
methodological one: the use of narratives about authorship as a kind of implicit
poetics to supplement explicit statements of literary criticism. This methodology
does seem very reasonable, but reliance on it as the comparative element also
raises the question of whether the sources deserve to be compared on their own
terms.
Overall, the book is a thoroughly researched and innovative study, in which
close readings of Greek and Chinese sources are placed in a dense conceptual
framework, but it also suffers from some serious limitations, particularly in the
treatment of Chinese sources. Though this review will focus on the Chinese half
of this book, all of these points have implications for the comparative framework
as well. It is not sufficient for the universal to encompass the particular, but the
particular must also intimate the universal.
Perhaps the most original feature of the book is Beecroft’s attempt to place
literary developments in both Greece and China, indeed throughout the world,
within a sixfold scheme: epichoric, panchoric, cosmopolitan, vernacular, national,
and global (only the first three being relevant for the period under consideration).
Here “epichoric” is a synonym for “local,” which Nagy uses in contradistinction to
Panhellenic. This is a distinction of immediate concern in the study of Greek
poetry (forms of the word “Panhellenic” occur in the Iliad and other early texts),
but transporting it whole cloth to ancient China seems of limited value. Beecroft
goes so far as to coin the word “Panhuaxia” and, thence, to distinguish in Chinese
materials epichoric and Panhuaxia strata. This usage is not wrong so much as
beside the point, as is the use of “cosmopolitan” to refer to the ideology of Han
empire.1 On the other hand, in both cultures there was a parallel transformation,
in which texts of local origin became classics venerated throughout a broad region,
so the overly ambitious theoretical scheme does not lead the author too far
astray.
The first chapter, “Explicit Poetics in Greece and China,” is a subtle and con-
vincing comparison of the primary discussions of poetry by Aristotle and Plato
 Reviews  47

with that of the Mao preface to the Shijing and related texts. Beecroft finds a
similarity in understandings of poetry and performance in the two traditions: just
as mimesis begins as a dramatic reenactment of a scene, then gradually becomes a
mere textual representation, so the practice of fu shi 賦詩, “presenting a poem,”
allows for free performance but is replaced in the Han by increasing focus more on
textual composition. Beecroft distinguishes subtly but carefully between the usages
of particular authors, building up a clear picture of how composition and perfor-
mance were seen as interrelated, overlapping processes in both Greece and China.
His suggestion of how shu 述 functions similarly to Greek mimesis is particularly
insightful, and throughout he shows clearly how Greek and Chinese theories of
poetry are more similar than they often appear in modern discussions, particularly
when implicit poetics is taken into consideration.
One oversight in translation, while not posing a direct obstacle to his argu-
ments, does indicate some limitations to them. Intending to show that the mean-
ing of fu had shifted clearly to “authorship” in the Han dynasty, Beecroft quotes the
line from Sima Qian’s (145–86 b.c.e.) letter to Ren An: 屈原放逐，乃賦離騷, and
translates “Qu Yuan was exiled, and so he recited (in the sense of composed)
Encountering Sorrow” ( p. 56).2 Then in his analysis, Beecroft makes clear that he
understands fu 賦 here to mean specifically “composed,” based on Sima Qian’s
overall portrait of Qu Yuan, and in particular the related passage in his biography
of Qu Yuan, which relates that Qu Yuan “composed the ‘Li sao’ ” 作離騷.3 Inciden-
tally, he fails to mention the very similar passage in Sima Qian’s autobiographical
postface to the Shi ji, with the variant zhu 著, also “composed.”4 More importantly,
the variant in Sima Qian’s letter, the earliest text of which is preserved in Ban Gu’s
Han shu, could easily bear the alternate interpretation of “composed the fu poem
‘Li sao,’ ” since the fu by Sima Qian’s time, and even more by Ban Gu’s, was a
well-established genre, with the “Li sao” and other poems of the Chuci generally
seen as its source and inspiration. In fact, in the five pages Beecroft devotes to the
word fu, culminating in the consideration of Sima Qian’s usage, he pays hardly any
notice to the literary genre, which is mischaracterized as “a particularly spectacular
form of prose-poem, popular in the Western Han” ( p. 53), twelve words containing
two half-truths and an error.5 All this is rather tangential to Beecroft’s main argu-
ment, but it does seem like a lost opportunity, since he spends so much of the book
discussing Han sources ( principally the Mao commentary to the Shijing), all the
while overlooking the fascinating discourse in that period surrounding the poetic
tradition of the fu. I would point, in particular, to the enormously rich representa-
tion of authorship and performance within the Han fu.6 It may be that no concep-
tion of authorship mentioned in this book is as sophisticated as that exemplified in
the works of the Han fu poets.
Beecroft’s one-sided focus on the Shijing, on the Chinese side, contrasts with
his expansive treatment of Greek genres on the other. The second through fourth
48  China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012

chapters of the book cover, in turn, epic, lyric, and “authorship between epic and
lyric” ( p. 144), respectively. The second chapter reads the Lives of Homer as offering
differing accounts of the history of Homeric poetry. For instance, an identification
of Homer’s birthplace may naturally be understood as an assertion of local pride,
while other lives may offer specific accounts about the transmission and recension
of epic poetry. Similarly, in the third chapter, he focuses on accounts of the lives of
the lyric poets Terpander, Alcman, and Sappho. In each case, he provides a plau-
sible, if admittedly speculative, justification for that account that evades the reverse
biographical fallacy. There is an interesting discussion of a bizarre story about
Sappho in Herodotus and its possible significance as a comment on the relation-
ship between history and poetry, fiction making and truth. Perhaps most memo-
rable of the Greek chapters is the fourth on the famous Palinode by Stesi­chorus,
retracting his own claim in an earlier poem that Helen had never been abducted
and taken to Troy. Supplying a new interpretation of an Oxyrhynchus papyrus that
mentions two different Palinodes by Stesichorus, Beecroft argues that the Palinode
may have been a performance genre with countless possible realizations, not just
one or two poems, which would conveniently resolve a number of contradictions
in the sources (though Occam’s razor would cause some to prefer a solution that
does not require so many hypothetical poems beyond our extant ones).
Toward the end of the fourth chapter, Beecroft formulates one component of
his thesis in an economical way: “Genealogy becomes a metonymic system by
which the relationships between literary genres can be understood” ( p. 169). In
other words, features of poets’ biographies, such as genealogy, should be under-
stood as abstract schemes representing relations between genres and indicating
their relative value. The utility of this kind of approach for the study of Chinese
poetry is manifest. There is a temptation for a modern scholar simply to ignore the
anecdotes in the Mao commentary or biographical accounts of Qu Yuan on the
basis of the reverse biographical fallacy; we speculate that these accounts have
been composed to fit the evidence of the poem and have no greater historical
weight. Beecroft reminds us that they can be valuable historical evidence of another
kind, if we read them with the proper appreciation of their original motives.
In the fifth to seventh chapters, Beecroft applies the theoretical and method-
ological framework developed in the first half of the book to Chinese texts.
­Beecroft is highly familiar with the secondary scholarship in English on early
China and also provides passable translations of primary sources. A general
weakness of these chapters, though, is that Beecroft is relatively unfamiliar with
modern Chinese scholarship, which might have helped him to focus his analyses
more clearly within the textual tradition. One does wish there were a recent
scholarly translation of the Shijing to which he (or anyone else) might refer instead.
It is an embarrassment to Western sinology that no one has recently built upon the
splendid foundation of Legge, Waley, and Karlgren.
 Reviews  49

The last three chapters only rarely even mention authorship per se, but instead
are focused on the performance, quotation, and interpretation of the Shijing in
Warring States and Han China. The three chapters cover a diverse set of topics, as
shown by their titles: “Death and Lingerie: Cosmopolitan and Panhuaxia Readings
of the Airs of the States,” “Summit at Fei: The Poetics of Diplomacy in the Zuo-
zhuan,” and “The Politics of Dancing: The Great King Wu Dance and the Hymns of
Zhou.” The first title is quite misleading, since the fifth chapter is really about how
indexical readings of the Shijing (i.e., identifying poems with particular historical
events) came to replace more performative ones. This chapter makes a satisfying use
of Aristotle’s definition of mimesis as houtos ekeinos (“this is that”), showing how
historical analysis and textual interpretation reinforce one another in the quota-
tion of the Shijing ( pp. 195–197). This is the kind of original reading, grounded
in a comparative perspective, of which one wishes there were even more in the
book.
“Summit at Fei” likewise analyzes the Shijing quotations used in the diplo-
matic summit held in the thirteenth year of Duke Wen at Fei 棐. Beecroft argues
that the quotation of these poems should be described as “an open and flexible
language, with plenty of room for ambiguity, irony, and deception” ( p. 239).
­Perhaps in order to demonstrate that this claim is not so obvious as to go without
saying, he chooses to frame it as a rebuttal of François Jullien’s interpretation of the
same texts, which Beecroft presents as a claim that meaning is entirely fixed and
stable therein.7 I would question whether this accurately describes Jullien’s position
in general, but in any case, in elaborating this critique, Beecroft makes a spectacu-
lar error: he criticizes Jullien for applying a Mencius quotation inappropriately,
when, in fact, Jullien is citing the Chunqiu shihua 春秋詩話 by Lao Xiaoyu 勞孝輿
(1697–1746), and it is Lao who employs the Mencius quotation in question (leaving
aside the fundamental problem that the phrase bu yan er yu 不言而喻 is not really
a quotation, just a commonplace idiom). Beecroft then exacerbates this error by
claiming that Jullien’s argument is of a kind especially inappropriate for “non-­
Chinese Sinologists” ( p. 213) to make, since it plays into Orientalist tropes. Bee-
croft might have profited from reading other passages of the same book, as when
Jullien points out that “D’une façon générale, ce qui conditionne cet art de la
citation, et rend possible son usage rhétorique, est que les poèmes ne sont jamais
citès, à l’occasion des entrevues diplomatiques, en fonction de ce qui serait leur
sens propre. Celui qui « cite » ne prétend pas interpréter la signification originelle
du poème, ne songe même pas à en proposer une lecture particulière.”8 This
passage suggests how much Jullien also appreciates the subtlety of the “art of
quotation,” and, moreover, it would have been a useful corrective to Beecroft’s
methodology, which relies on comparing the quotation of poems by Warring
States diplomats and Han commentarial traditions as if the two had similar intent.
In any case, the attempted rebuttal of Jullien via identity politics (“non-Chinese”)
50  China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012

is inappropriate in itself, and doubly so given Beecroft’s own misrepresentation of

both Jullien’s argument and its Chinese sources.
Unfortunately, the seventh chapter also opens with an inaccurate descrip-
tion of another scholar’s work, when Beecroft implies ( p. 240) that C. H. Wang’s
hypothetical Weniad was drawn from the “Zhou Song” 周頌 section of the
­Shijing and not the “Da ya” 大雅 (there is an ambiguous “some of the poems”
here that should have been caught in the editing process). The bulk of this chapter,
though, consists of solid comparisons of readings of the “Zhou Song.” These are
difficult poems, highly significant for our understanding of the earliest period of
Chinese literature and culture, and definitely deserve more of the close readings
Beecroft offers here. However, the discussion occasionally gets bogged down in
comparison of commentators, and Beecroft tends to end up picking whatever
interpretation is most convenient to his argument, often overestimating our
knowledge of what these poems meant before the Han.9 In any case, to ground a
theory of China’s development from a panchoric to a cosmopolitan stage on the
difference between glosses by the Mao commentary and by Ma Ruichen seems a
bit farfetched.
I have focused on some problematic questions of detail within the last two
chapters, but these by no means nullify the value of Beecroft’s book as a thought-
provoking treatment of its subject. The single thought it provokes most intensely in
this reader is that the nature of authorship in early China is more multidimensional
than Beecroft’s presentation suggests. For example, Beecroft approaches problems
of authorship with the term “scene of authorship” ( p. 18), which seems a fitting way
to describe many of the narratives of authorship he presents, though much less
appropriate for the Chinese sources than the Greek ones. The lives of the poets
may often function primarily as a way of presenting the drama of authorship,
giving some special justification for the value and identity of a work. In a lengthy
footnote ( p. 18 n. 30), Beecroft explains that he is borrowing the term from
­Derrida’s essay “Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” but in spite of the fundamental
importance of this concept and Derrida’s treatment of it to Beecroft’s argument,
this is the only explicit appearance of Derrida or Freud in the book. Yet a number
of the issues developed in the book seem almost to cry out for a Freudian or
Derridean reading: the psychological tensions concealed by a simple narrative of
authorship, the myriad gaps and omissions that are created by each new account of
origins. Beecroft makes an excellent case that the author is “a dramatization of the
social forces concentrated on poetry” and that “[s]cenes of authorship are not
biographical narratives; they are rather places in which conflicting ideas about
literature are dramatized” ( p. 18 n. 30). But this depersonalized and nonpsycho-
logical approach makes some of the sources read more like contributions to an
ACLA panel than myths of human expression.
Thus, Beecroft does not give quite enough attention, for my taste, to the
mythic significance of Stesichorus’s blinding, for instance. More important for his
 Reviews  51

overall argument, though, is his failure to discuss the most prominent examples of
the explicit poetics of authorship in early China. He quotes in full Mao 204, which
concludes “A gentleman composed this song / To tell of his sorrow” 君子作歌，
維以告哀, but hardly devotes any analysis to this telling statement ( pp. 219–222).
Or, as we have seen, he refers to Sima Qian’s statement about previous authors, but
quotes only a single clause about Qu Yuan, neglecting the full context. Yet this is a
passionate defense of a particular theory that authorship originates in suffering:10

昔 Long ago
西伯拘羑里 The Earl of the West was imprisoned at Youli,
演周易 and elaborated on the Changes of Zhou;
孔子戹陳蔡 Confucius, undone in Chen and Cai,
作春秋 composed the Spring and Autumn Annals;
屈原放逐 Qu Yuan, exiled,
著離騷 wrote Encountering Sorrow;
左丘失明 Zuo Qiu lost his sight,
厥有國語 and there was the Accounts of the States;
孫子臏腳 Sunzi had his feet amputated,
而論兵法 and discoursed on the Art of War;
不韋遷蜀 Buwei was exiled to Shu,
世傳呂覽 and the world passed on his Observations of Master Lü
韓非囚秦 Han Fei, imprisoned in Qin, [wrote]
說難孤憤 “Persuasion’s Difficulty” and “Solitary Indignation”;
詩三百篇 And the three hundred Songs
大抵賢聖發 Were mostly composed by worthies and sages out of
憤之所為作也   their indignation.

The passage contains narratives of authorship for key works in the literary tradi-
tion up to Sima Qian’s time, building up a theory that could be read as explicitly
opposed to cultural identity: here it is only when the writer is rejected by his
culture that he finds his voice. Beecroft would have done well to include more of
the explicit points of view that conflict with his own narrative, rather than expend-
ing so much effort on philological cruxes in Shijing interpretation.11
I should make one final remark on the formatting of the book. Beecroft often
ignores the original metrical divisions of his poetic texts, combining separate
Chinese lines in his English translations of Shijing poems. For instance, he trans-
forms Mao 285, originally consisting of seven four-character lines, into an English
quatrain ( p. 247) and combines stanzas of Mao 204 ( pp. 219–220). Of course, the
original Chinese texts do not have line breaks per se, but it is so customary to
indicate rhythmical divisions with English line breaks that Beecroft’s choice here is
perplexing. His translations are not prose glosses, since they usually have line
breaks; the line breaks simply do not follow the rhythmical divisions of the origi-
nal poems as they do in other English translations of Chinese poetry. Greek poetry
on occasion suffers the same fate (e.g., p. 139). This suggests an indifference to
the poetry itself which seems inappropriate for a work of this kind. In the final
 52  China Review International: Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012

analysis, I do not see any way for authorship to exist without authors, nor poets
without poems.

Nicholas Morrow Williams

Nicholas Morrow Williams is currently a research assistant professor at the Mr.

Simon Suen and Mrs. Mary Suen Sino-Humanitas Institute, Hong Kong Baptist
University.

Notes 1.  Note that Sheldon Pollock, cited as the source for the usage of “cosmopolitan,” explicitly
differentiates the Roman or Han cases from his Sanskrit cosmopolis, “a universalism that never
objectified, let alone enforced, its universalism.” See The Language of the Gods in the World of
Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006), p. 12.
2.  Han shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 62.2735.
3.  Shi ji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003), 84.2482.
4.  Shi ji 130.3300. For more on this passage, see David R. Knechtges, “‘Key Words,’ Autho-
rial Intent, and Interpretation: Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles,
and Reviews 30 (2008): 75–84.
5.  (1) Many early fu are not spectacular but introspective and gloomy; (2) the fu is primarily
a verse form, although some fu contain prose introductions or transitions (which have nothing in
common with a prose poem); and (3) it remained popular long after the Western Han.
6.  For a good overview, see Obi Kōichi 小尾郊一, “Kan dai no jifu to sono gorakusei — 
mondōtai to kakū jimbutsu” 漢代の辞賦とその娯楽性――問答体と架空人物, in Shinjitsu to
kyokō — Rikuchō bungaku 真実と虚構――六朝文学 (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1994), pp. 1–30.
7.  Specifically, the fourth chapter, “Par Citations interposées,” of Le Détour et l’accés:
Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1995).
8.  “In general, what determines this art of quotation and enables its rhetorical function is
the fact that, in these diplomatic exchanges, the poems are never quoted in their original sense.
The one who ‘quotes’ makes no claim to be explained the original meaning of the poem, nor even
to be proposing a particular reading of it” [my translation], ibid., p. 105.
9.  Our state of knowledge is in flux here, but one useful study that has come out recently
(too late for this book) is Chen Zhi 陳致, “Cong ‘Zhou Song’ yu jinwen zhong chengyu de
yunyong lai kan gu geshi zhi yongyun ji siyan shiti de xingcheng” 從周頌與金文中成語的運用
來看古歌詩之用韻及四言詩體的形, in Kua xueke shiye xia de Shijing yanjiu 跨學科視野下的
詩經研究, ed. Chen Zhi (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2010), pp. 17–59.
10.  Shiji 130.3300. I have arranged the line breaks to reflect the parallel structure and
rhythm of the text.
11.  It is true that Sima Qian lived in the Western Han, and so, perhaps, postdates the scope
of “early China” in Beecroft’s title; but much of the book concerns the nearly contemporaneous
Mao commentary.