REVIEWS
Nalan Xingde, intriguingly a Manchu—just as
some of the best qu poets of the Mongol Yuan
dynasty were non-Chinese immigrants—is the
most well known of all Qing c/-poets. David
McCraw provides a general introduction to
them, then deals with the life and c/-works of
each in turn, and rounds off with thoughtful
reflections on them collectively.
This is a most enjoyable book. The author
has the delicate humour, without which much of
Chinese literature can hardly be understood,
and a fine, proud and creative command of
English. He eschews any jargonistic overload-
ing, and, like his mentor James Liu, clearly
studies literature because he is fond of it,
another vital quality for the appreciation of it.
Vast sweeps of time and of political, geographi-
cal and personal complexity are dealt with in a
deft manner, and with a lightness that only
assists sharp definition. The often mind-
boggling lives of the poets are vividly intro-
duced, with a sage wariness of assuming auto-
matic close connexion between lives and works,
and their poetry is translated sensitively and
appropriately, avoiding the mechanical
dictionarese of so much Western and modern
Chinese translation. I would doubt whether one
can make a general rule of even trying to stick to
the original form of poetry when translating,
but gestures towards it can usually be helpful, as
the author's maintenance of line and sub-line
definitions certainly are. Likewise, I am not sure
how minutely one should attempt to remain
faithful to the style of the original, feeling myself
that such endeavours are subordinate, though
allied, to the question of meaning, which has
primacy. Here again, the examples of translation
seem to well accord with this principle. Rhyme is
sometimes used, but as it pleases, not with break-
neck insistence. Notes on allusions and analyses
of contents are economical and informative, and
quite the opposite of burdensome. Perhaps more
stress could be placed on the close connexions of
at least some of the poets with the professional
singing and acting world. My own feeling is that
ci in particular need to be sung for their full
savouring, as recent musical reconstructions
seem to bear out. While the popularity of ci
during the early Qing was indeed closely connec-
ted with the genre's suitability as a subtle and
discreet medium in dangerous times, it was also a
result of the antiquarian and critical revival
evinced by mid and late Ming scholarship. That
revival applied principally to drama, fiction and
qu literature, but no doubt prepared the general
ground for the re-adoption of other ancient
styles, qu for instance frequently being then
referred to as ' ci'.
Books like this are contributing greatly to the
opening up of the rich neglected treasures of
Chinese literature, ensuring that our picture of
it will soon be incomparably fuller than in the
past and thereby radically different.
WILLIAM DOLBY
ROBERT ENO: The Confucian creation
of Heaven: philosophy and the
defense of ritual mastery. (SUNY
Series in Chinese Philosophy and
Culture.) xi, 349 pp. Albany, N.Y.:
167
State University of New-York
Press, 1990. $59.50 (paper $19.95).
We have in the volume under review a very
dense, complex, but powerfully-argued book
that makes compulsive, although far from easy,
reading and provides plenty of food for
thought.
Contrary to what might have been expected
from the title, Heaven (referred to throughout
the book as Tien) is not the central object of
this study—which lies elsewhere—it merely
helps to reveal it. The reflexion on the disparity
of the various, and often contradictory, inter-
pretations of T'ien in early Confucian texts only
serves as a means to work out methodology
aimed at unveiling what for Eno constitutes the
core of Confucian philosophy: sagehood based
on the cultivation of li jjjj|, ritual.
All this is expounded in detail in the introduc-
tion, where the notion of T'ien, first elaborated
under Chou by the Confucians or Ruists (to use
Eno's neologism which is, in fact, closer to the
Chinese usage), is seen as representing a touch-
stone to test ' whether early Confucianism was
truly a philosophy, or merely a well-rationalized
cultural point of view' (p. 3). However, Eno
hastens to add, T'ien is not a key-term in early
Confucianism, but precisely because of its
relatively peripheral position it forces us to
' redirect our attention' and resort to a new
methodology.
The classical methodology of previous
authors sought some unified concept of T'ien
beneath a variety of aspects and expressions
encountered in the texts. But it is precisely the
discrepancy and inconsistency of theoretical
statements that redirects Eno's attention
towards the notion that ' the core of early
Confucianism may have lain outside Confucian
theory' (p. 6), making of T'ien an ' extra-
theoretical interest', the idea being to reinte-
grate the notion of practice into Ruism, hitherto
mainly considered from its theoretical angle (i.e.
through the scrutiny of texts). According to
Eno, one should picture Ruism as a community
of men characterized by ritual activity rather
than as a mere body of doctrine, which makes it
impossible to conceive of it as a philosophical
enterprise in the Western sense.
The purported ' programme' of Eno's book
is, therefore, to ' abandon any effort to look for
a consistent referential meaning of the term
" t'ien"—any stable image or concept that
could provide a dictionary-style gloss for the
term in each text—and determine instead to
look for coherence in the instrumental relation
that Ruist statements about T'ien may have
borne to the preservation and growth of the
school's practical core' (p. 11). The actual focus
of this study is the ideal of Sagehood which is
the bedrock of Ruist certainty, binding together
the whole Ruist perspective.
Part I, entitled ' Setting the ritual stage',
encompasses Ruism in its earliest developments
and recounts the particular historical circum-
stances behind the emergence of ritual as a
philosophical focus in the Ruist school: ' Con-
fucius' turn to ritual li was directly related to the
discrediting of a belief in an omnipotent and
omnibenevolent power guaranteeing social
order—T'ien. The rise of // as a cardinal value
168 REVIEWS
can be seen as a function of the fall of T'ien'
(p. 19).
Eno begins his characterization of the Ruist
school by rejecting the widely accepted notion
that it was a group of political activists, and
replacing it with the picture of a ' brotherhood '
devoted to ritual practice. The idea will recur as
a leitmotiv throughout the book that Ruism
was not a political ideology (it was not an
ideology at all), but rather a form of ' political
idealism'. Eno adduces to his point the fact that
there is no record of Ruists actually occupying
political positions during the whole Warring
States period. According to him, the Ruists
should be seen not as a political group, but as a
social entity of a new kind, entirely committed
to an educational programme, with a syllabus
rooted in practices of self-ritualization. Eno's
point is to flesh out Ruism so as to present it,
not in the guise of an ideology, but as a living
reality, an actual way of life. This is a most
valuable undertaking indeed, but one cannot
help noticing that, significantly enough, Eno at
this point hardly ever mentions the term chiin-
tzu ^ ^f-, which after all does include the two
integrated dimensions of ritual-ethical principle
and political commitment. In note 42, p. 219,
Eno discusses terminological distinctions to be
made between such terms as sheng-jen f § /^ ,
rendered as ' Sage', and chiin-tzu, which he
chooses to leave untranslated and which he
gives the impression of dismissing altogether
when he adds:' However, when we interpret the
sense of the texts, we will use " Sage " to denote
the prescriptive ideal regardless of which term
may be used in the original text.'
The whole point of denying that the Ruists
destined themselves for political commitment is
to drive home the idea that they were dedicated
to // instead. But the problem was first to
legitimize it: li did not constitute a universal
ethical principle or body of principles, it was a
mere collection of culturally specific codes
associated with a specific dynasty. The Ruists',
and in the first place Confucius's, tour de force
was to a d o p t ' as fundamental a particular and
relative form of behavior' (p. 38) and to
legitimize it in the process. The religious and
social dimensions of li had disappeared with the
Western Chou, and its aesthetic dimension was
not sufficient to legitimize it; so //, in the Ruist
context, came to be grounded in the educational
' claim that mastery of ritual and ritual style
transformed a person into a perfect being: a
Sage ' (p. 41). In other words, // came to find its
legitimacy as a cardinal principle of value in the
universal ideal of sagehood. This ideal is
described by Eno in ch. iii as a ' practical
totalism', expressed in Confucius's Analects in
terms ofjen fZ . Eno defines his own notion of
' practical totalism' as ' the Ruist belief in a
personal ideal who not only understands the
meaning of every phenomenon in the universe,
but also can respond to phenomena with perfect
appropriateness.' In this respect, it is hard to see
why such a notion of totalism should imply ' a
closed notion of human perfection' or ' envi-
sion human perfection in a single mold ' (?).
Part II proposes to trace the conception of
T'ien throughout the three fundamental texts of
early Confucianism, the Analects, the Mencius
and the Hsiin Tzu, not as an 'intellectual
artifact', but as a rhetorical instrument with a
specific legitimizing function in the vaster
project of providing //' with a philosophically
acceptable grounding. That function was com-
plex, since ' T'ien was required to authenticate
both of the disjoined moieties of Ruist doctrine
and practice: ritual self-cultivation and political
withdrawal', which eventually yielded a
' bifurcated portrait of T'ien ' (p. 75).
T'ien in the Analects is thus described as
endowed with a double role: a prescriptive one,
in which T'ien is viewed as a model for Sagely
totalism, and a descriptive one, in which T'ien
opens up the perspective of a teleological plan,
Sagehood being itself the bridge over the
prescriptive/descriptive gap. But for Confucius
himself Eno insists that T'ien had no significant
function. He expends a good deal of energy
trying to dismiss Confucius's references to T'ien
in terms of his agnosticism. I tend to believe,
however, that the sense of the sacred inherent in
religious thought was not altogether obliterated
in the Analects, but simply transferred onto
ritualistic thought.
In the following chapter, devoted to the
Mencius, Eno argues that the role of T'ien in
Mencius's political doctrines and career is little
more than ' a convenient rhetorical device'
(p. 106), whereas it does play an effective role in
his theory of human nature as a theoretical
substitute for //. The attacks from Taoist and
chiefly Mohist quarters were directed particu-
larly against Ruism's weak point from the
theoretical viewpoint: li, ' as a pillar of Sage-
hood ', was too particularistic, too relative in its
association with one specific dynasty. Mencius
was thus led to bring the debate onto the
theoretical level and to select T'ien as the basis
for Ruist totalism. In his discourse on human
nature (hsing ^ ), which, Eno argues, is in fact
a discourse on li, Mencius set up a whole
strategy, making use of T'ien as a means of
universalizing the value of // by incorporating it
into the totalistic notion of hsing which, in this
respect, tended to replace the jen of the
Analects. In the dialectical relation between
hsing ' human nature' and ming fit ' personal
decree', Mencius managed to reconcile the
prescriptive and descriptive dimensions of
Tien.
The chapter on the Hsiin-tzu is based on the
same assumption, namely, t h a t ' the authors of
those texts did not discuss T'ien out of abstract
theoretical interest, but because they were
anxious to use traditional notions about T'ien
to rationalize their commitment to ritual and
self-ritualization' (p. 131). The authors of the
Hsiin-tzu had to confront the specific challenge
of naturalism and to ' legitimize non-natural //'
in the face of the growing authority of Nature in
the late Chou philosophies' (p. 138). It is in this
light that one should perceive, beneath the
variety of subjects tackled in the Hsiin-tzu, a
single, unifying, basic theme: the justification of
// as a fundamental human value and, at the
same time, as an extension of natural processes.
This twofold aspect accounts for the twofold
conception of T'ien in the T'ien lun chapter: on
the one hand, a non-purposive, non-normative,
i.e. naturalistic conception; on the other, a
normative, typically Confucian, if not Mencian
 REVIEWS
conception. The two theories, Eno acknow-
ledges, 'are fundamentally contradictory, but
they are consistent in that both are designed to
counter the devaluation of non-natural // by
contemporary naturalisms' (p. 165). Eno's
analysis is fine and convincing on many points; I
would only take exception to his use of the term
' evil' to translate hsing o ^ ^ ' human
nature is bad', and hsiung [X| on pp. 162 and
199.
Sagehood, Eno concludes, is then the
dominant issue of early Ruism, both as an
' exceptional basis' and in its ' synthetic form '
(p. 171), since Eno characterizes Ruism as
' quintessential^ a synthetic philosophy', not
based on logic but on an educational design, the
central theme of which is self-cultivation
through li. That unifying thread is experiential
rather than theoretical, since it is a matter of
' ritual skill mastery', as Eno has it. The key to
Ruist Sagehood, and consequently the meaning
of T'ien, is to be looked for, not so much in
what is said in the texts, but in a living
experience of an aesthetic order that calls for the
dance metaphor.
Despite his efforts to give flesh to what he
calls the Ruist community, Eno's book appears
to be ponderously academic. But one should
acknowledge that the point he makes is force-
fully argued, so much so that one sometimes has
an impression of parti pris, which leads Eno to
force the facts slightly so as to make them fit his
initial scheme (see e.g. pp. 135, 168, and p. 296,
n. 10). Misprints are few, but some misspellings
are curiously systematic (e.g. occurrances,
anomoly, discrepency, inexhaustable, perfect-
able, and the like). But these tiny flaws should
not lead one to overlook a most valuable,
thought-provoking book, that sheds an authen-
tically new light on the field of Confucian
studies.
ANNE CHENG
WILLIAM A. LYELL (tr.): Lu Xun,
Diary of a madman and other stories.
1, 389 pp. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1990. $40 (paper
$18.95).
When a scholar with as many years of ' Lu
Xun study' behind him as William A. Lyell
translates the work of this foremost figure of
modern Chinese literature, we are perhaps justi-
fied in expecting something rather superior. In achieves the not insignificant feat of supplying
this case we are not disappointed.
The book under review is a rendering into
American English of Lu Xun's first short story,
'Remembrances of the past', and of all the
stories in the two collections Nahan and
Panghuang (here translated as Cheering from the in the stories to the lives of other famous sons of
sidelines and Wondering where to turn). Into his Lu Xun's home town, Shaoxing, and to less
translations Lyell has instilled the colour and
life of the original in a way rarely achieved by
translators of modern Chinese fiction. He
rejects the flat, literal and often distancing
approach to which readers of Chinese literature
in translation have inevitably become
accustomed, to produce texts which are immedi-
ately accessible to both specialist and general
reader alike. Lyell is able to combine fidelity to the supernatural, the morbid attractions of the
169
the spirit of the original text with a lively, often
colloquial American English which brings out
in a striking manner the Gogolian exuberance
and eccentricity of Lu Xun's style. This is
especially appropriate in the representation of
peasant dialogue. His rendering o f Ah Q—The
real story ' is perhaps the piece de resistance in
this regard, full of earthy colour and hyperbole.
He is also particularly successful in conveying,
by means of italics and rhyme, Lu Xun's use of
classical quotation and allusion, providing con-
siderable insight into the way in which the
classical past has its own life within a Lu Xun
text.
Further insight is provided into recurring
themes, Lu Xun's use of language, contempor-
ary historical background and so on, by the
translator's copious footnotes. Lyell draws
fruitfully on his own intimate knowledge of the
stories to supply even the specialist reader with
tidbits which enhance the reading experience.
However, this experience could be somewhat
marred by the sheer quantity of the notes, a
good number of which are aimed at the general
reader. By casting his net so widely, Lyell risks
either inundating the general reader with an
over-abundance of specialist information or
irritating the specialist with a surfeit of
unnecessary explanation. There is also a
tendency to duplicate information contained in
the introduction or in other notes.
The present work is a personal representation
of the fictional writings of Lu Xun which at
times assumes the role of a re-representation to
readers of Lu Xun in English translation. A
notable achievement is the sensitive re-trans-
lation of titles, particularly those of the collec-
tions themselves (Nahan and Panghuang).
In Cheering from the sidelines Lyell effects a
subtle shift of emphasis away from the idea,
reinforced by decades of idolization, that Lu
Xun assumed a leadership role in his so-called
'call to arms'.
' I couldn't resist cheering now and then from
the sidelines so as to console those brave
warriors still charging through the fields of
loneliness, and to encourage them to ride on.'
(From the preface to Cheering from the
sidelines, Lyell, p. 28.)
In the same way, Wondering where to turn
conveys a greater sense of directionlessness and
vacillation than 'Wandering'. This personal
interpretation is also apparent in the useful
introduction which accompanies the trans-
lations. A biographical sketch is provided which
interesting extra details to an oft-told tale. Even
the famous ' lantern-slide incident' is enhanced
by the addition of local background colour.
Notes on the stories are also provided. An
attractive feature is the illumination of allusions
well-known anecdotes from Lu Xun's personal
life.
These introductory notes prove disappoint-
ing, however, in their general reflection of the
stance taken in Lyell's Lu Hsu'n 's vision of reality
(Berkeley, 1976). In particular, no mention is
made of the ' power of darkness ' in Lu Xun's
work. The horror of cannibalism, the power of