Authorship and Text-making in Early China

Hanmo Zhang

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501505195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Authorship
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is a timely response to a rather urgent call to seek an updated methodology in rereading and reappraising early Chinese texts in light of newly discovered early writings. For a long time, the concept of authorship in the formation and transmission of early Chinese texts has been misunderstood. The nominal author who should mainly function as a guide to text formation and interpretation is considered retrospectively as the originator and writer of the text. This book illustrates that although some notions about the text as the author's property began to appear in some Eastern Han texts, a strict correlation between the author and the text results from later conceptions of literary history. Before the modern era, there existed a conceptual gap between an author and a writer. A pre-modern Chinese text could have had both an author and a writer, or even multiple authors and multiple writers. This work is the first study addressing these issues by more systematically emphasizing the connection of the text, the author, and the religious and sociopolitical settings in which these issues were embedded. It is expected to constitute a palpable contribution to Chinese studies and the discipline of philology in general

1Text, Author, and the Function of Authorship

Two questions run throughout this work. The first examines the impact of authorship on the interpretation of texts. The second examines the concept of authorship as concretely related to textual formation and transmission in early China. Now, we must first review our understanding of several fundamental concepts related to this discussion: What was a text in early China? What was an author in early China? What distinguishes an early Chinese text and an early Chinese author from their modern forms and meanings? Why does authorship matter, and how does its study stand as meaningful viewed from the perspective of Chinese text history? Our understanding of these concepts provides a common vocabulary for the main discussion of this work. We begin with a general understanding of writing’s significance in early China and the formation of early Chinese texts that differed from present-day book writing.

1.1A Text in Early China

Thanks to archaeological discoveries, especially those occurring in the latter half of the 20th century, we now have a glimpse of the physical forms of Warring States and Early Han texts.24 Most of the excavated early Chinese “books” are written on bamboo or wooden slips or silk cloths.25 Paper might have been made and used in the time when some of the excavated texts were produced, but either because it was not the primary writing material or due to its easily perishable nature, we do not have any evidence indicating that early Chinese texts were written on paper.26 In many cases, the materials used for writing offer telling information about the social status and personal wealth of those who had access to writings. For example, Michael Nylan infers that writings found in early tombs functioned as items for public display.27 Although the presence of writings in tombs does not necessarily reveal whether or not the tomb occupants could read, the overall high social status of those in whose tombs writings have been found at least indicates that they were major consumers, if not readers, of various writing products. Understanding the interaction of the patron, the author, the scribe, and the text, as well as the interpretation of the text, therefore necessarily requires consideration of this context.

Most early Chinese texts did not have titles. The titles we now have for transmitted early texts, even among the most well-known, such as the Changes, the Documents, and the Odes, originally were and should continue to be viewed as textual categories under which multiple textual units were able to be grouped together rather than as titles of the unified texts we see today.28 Other texts simply used the names of the given authors, as seen demonstrated by texts entitled after the names of the masters of teaching lineages. These writings are known as Masters Literature or Masters Writings (zishu 子書).29 In either case, the titles are the result of later editorial efforts to group and categorize texts. Their contents, however, could comprise a wide range of materials, which we may speculate partly stem from an oral tradition gradually subsumed by writing. As content that could have been originally performed and transmitted orally began to coalesce into written form, that content became the inherited texts that were analyzed as traditional literature. If, as we see in the Masters Writings, the projected authors were originally textual categories functioning as book titles, the traditional hermeneutics emphasizing authorial intent has to be reconsidered. In other words, if the attributed author turns out to be a set of text attributes, as Stephen Owen proposes,30 the position of the author in relation to the text as generally understood is vacated. This inevitably leads to the nullification of authorial intent and finally, that of the entire traditional hermeneutics resting upon that authorial intent. Nevertheless, compilers and editors who finalized the written products we now regard as literature filled this vacated position during the long process of text formation. The recognition of the compiler’s or editor’s role in early Chinese text formation is crucial for our understanding of the concept of author and authorship in early China. The author-oriented traditional hermeneutics may still be a valid approach to understanding the texts, but the compilers and editors must fill the author’s place, as they were the ones who did perform a role in text-making. Even if authors contributed to the process of text-making, their intent, defined by the historical moment at which a piece of literature was originally conceived, became unidentifiable by the time the long process of text compiling and editing was complete. To summarize, understanding early Chinese authorship necessitates a full consideration of the position of compilers and editors in traditional hermeneutics, as they may have projected their own intent into their textual amalgams seen through the pieces of texts they selected, categorized, edited, arranged, and rearranged.

Archaeological evidence suggests that early Chinese texts circulated mainly as short units.31 For most newly discovered manuscripts, they each look more like short chapters in comparison with received multi-chapter volumes that are appropriately labeled as books in our contemporary understanding of the term. This point, previously raised by scholars working on transmitted texts, has now been validated by archaeological finds. Short writings did not always have titles in their early forms, and when they did, their titles were often composed of a few (as we see in the Analects) characters from the introductory sentence. 32 Brief, anonymous, and often untitled, these textual units awaited compilers and editors to adopt and assemble them into larger units in which they became meaningful by being placed together with other pieces. This process of textual formation and transmission was one of constant construction, alteration, and reconstruction of meaning.33 The writing of postfaces, for example, developed as a witness to this process, and, from an interpretive perspective, was obviously associated with the construction, stabilization, and transmission of meaning and authority.

In many excavated texts, scholars have identified a fair number of passages with parallel counterparts in the received textual traditions, a phenomenon also suggesting that transmitted texts are the result of generations of editing. Even the transmitted materials themselves contain traces, sometimes identified as later additions, of how freely compilers and editors stitched passages from various sources.34 Such vestiges of the process of textual formation and transmission can generally be used to identify the different traditions contributing to the received text. They may also reflect certain affinities to other texts sharing similar passages. We can examine how similar passages are deployed in different textual contexts to recognize different teaching traditions at work in the production of a text, as well as how compilers reinterpreted certain schools of thought.

One final note, in contrast to the function of many modern books, early Chinese texts were more than just a medium for transmitting knowledge. As previously discussed, early Chinese writings have primarily been uncovered in the tombs of high-ranking officials, nobles, and social elite.35 Since the literacy of tomb occupants cannot be attested, we do not know for certain whether the writings found therein belonged to the collections they acquired and read when they were alive. But in considering the texts in their burial context, these writings, like other luxury objects, could have constituted part of the assembly of “spiritual articles (mingqi 明器)” for the purpose of public display, as suggested by Michael Nylan.36 Moreover, we ought not to neglect the fact that large-scale production and consumption of texts accompanied the change in religious mentality and practice from the Eastern Zhou period onward. Both tomb structure and its furnishing began to embrace the (in many aspects unprecedented) idea of the afterworld as an extension of the mundane world; thus, they aim to pacify the dead and separate them from the living.37 In this context, the increased consumption of writings cannot simply be a coincidence, and the religious function of early Chinese writing needs to be taken into consideration when examining early Chinese textual formation and transmission.

This brief introduction to text formation, format, and transmission in early China relies primarily on the belief that “forms affect meaning.”38 We may infer that even in the murky era of oral tradition, the meaning of a certain narrative changed with where, when, how, and by whom it was told.39 The meanings of written passages were no less volatile than orally transmitted information, as writings were constantly being reread, remade, and reedited throughout their long history of transmission. This phenomenon of book culture, called the “Sociology of Texts” by Donald McKenzie, highlights the human presence in texts and exposes the “human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption.”40 Human interaction is observable at many points during the long process of text formation, as texts are made and remade. These points of interaction include those times when a scribe wrote down what he heard; when teaching circles adopted and further crafted piecemeal written passages to satisfy their own needs; when compilers and editors read, reread, arranged, and categorized their collections of written texts; and when transmitted texts were reformatted and supplemented with commentaries, annotations, and corrections. In this process, even errors and interpolations were introduced into the texts, and now may resist alteration and stubbornly cry for interpretation. The “history of the book,” argues McKenzie eloquently, “must be a history of misreadings,” for “[e]very society rewrites its past, every reader rewrites its texts, and if they have any continuing life at all, at some point every printer redesigns them.”41

If a meaning is a function of a particular form and new meanings are the functions of new forms, the study of the textual forms—text formation and transmission in the history of early Chinese writing—helps elicit the meanings contained in those early writings. Over the length of this monograph, the meanings and significance of early Chinese writings will be explored through the concept of authorship and its relation to textual formation and transmission. McKenzie points out that few authors are indifferent to how their works are presented and received; in one way or another, authors express their concerns in this regard.42

Yet I shall explore a different dimension of authorship. It is simultaneously associated with and differentiated from issues of authorial intent; it has little to do with, but often touches upon, the “intentional fallacy” as famously raised by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley but dramatically deconstructed by Donald McKenzie.43 As previously discussed, the position of the author in most texts before the Western Han was virtually vacated and replaced by compilers and editors. But a compiler was a compiler, and an editor, an editor: did authorship mean anything at all to early Chinese? In the sections that follow, we examine the concepts of the author and authorship in early China, and the role each played in the formation and transmission of early texts.

1.2Authorship

Although considered a divine being by Romantics, sentenced to death by Roland Barthes, and claimed to have been resurrected by Burke and Irwin,44 today, the meaning behind the term “author” seems fairly straightforward. It conventionally denotes the creator and the owner of a piece of work (or a piece of text, as is the case in this study). The author’s work is both his intellectual and economic property; the author receives credit and acclaim, as well as responsibility for his product.45 Following this understanding of the author, authorship naturally encompasses a set of attributes possessed by an author. The idea that the literary author is tied to the origin of the text persists in spite of the strong influence of late twentieth-century literary theory seeking to remove the author from his position as the creator of the text. Just as a conventional definition of an author prevails in the West, so it has in contemporary China.

The conventional definition of the author clearly bears the birthmark of literary commodification with its obvious emphasis on ownership and origination.46 Accordingly, Barthes, Foucault, and others consider the author as a recent cultura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Text, Author, and the Function of Authorship
• 2 The Author as Cultural Hero: The Yellow Emperor, the Symbolic Author
• 3 The Author as the Head of a Teaching Lineage: Confucius, the Quotable Author
• 4 The Author as a Patron: Prince of Huainan, the Owner-Author
• 5 The Author as an Individual Writer: Sima Qian, the Presented Author
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index