Nonnegligible Literary/Cultural Differences Beside Literary/Cultural Universals

I much admire Patrick Hogan’s work, marked by broad and interdisciplinary horizons, insightful exploration, psychological focus, emotional emphasis, and prolific publications. The outline of his academic autobiography in the target essay sheds light not only on his concern with literary and cultural universals but also on his research characteristics as such. Patrick’s target essay is thought-provoking, dialectic, and well-balanced, arguing for the existence of literary and cultural universals while also taking into account various differences that exist among literatures and cultures. The latter, however, to Patrick, is only a matter of degree or frequency, or a matter of people’s attitudes or judgments, not essential differences. While subscribing to Patrick’s view on literary/cultural universals on the whole, I would like to direct attention to some differences between Chinese and Western literatures/cultures that are quite essential.A simple example that Patrick offers to illustrate literary universals is “the idea that standard poetic line length is guided, cross-culturally, by the limitations of working memory,” and so on. “(1) Standard poetic line length is five to seven words cross-culturally. (2) Working memory has a limit of five to nine words. (3) Standard poetic line length fits well into working memory” (248).But in traditional and modern Chinese poetry, a poetic line often goes beyond nine words (for modern poetry, see Geng Lin 15–34). The reason rests with the peculiarity of the Chinese language. Chinese words (characters) are almost invariably monosyllabic, and traditional Chinese poetry only contains monosyllabic words. Moreover, as distinct from Western poetry, in Chinese poetry as in prose fiction, there is no space among words and, after punctuation was used, no space among words and punctuations. The question arises: If words are put together without any space among them, how can they be easily intelligible? As we know, as distinct from alphabetic Western languages, Chinese words or characters are pictographic, ideographic, and pictophonetic in nature, and readers have no difficulty in distinguishing among such words when they are put together without any space in between. Given the abovementioned characteristics of the Chinese language, a fourteen-word Chinese poetic line is usually shorter than a seven-word English poetic line with disyllabic, trisyllabic, and even quadrisyllable words, as well as spaces among words and after punctuations.I will focus on a major type of traditional Chinese poetry, namely, “seven-word regulated poetry” (七言律诗). In such a poem, each basic meaning unit has seven words or characters, and there are altogether eight such units. In Chinese, the unit is called “句,” which, if literally translated, is “sentence,” but actually, it is not a sentence but a clause. Every two such clauses form a sentence and a poetic line, punctuated with a comma after the first clause and a full stop after the second in modern publications. It should be noted that the line division is graphological only in modern times. In its ancient original form, there is no punctuation and no graphological line division, and readers would divide the poem into lines only mentally, a division based on rhyme. More specifically, “the length of a poetic line [in such an ancient poem] is precisely the distance from one end rhyme to the next end rhyme” (Geng Lin 67–68).In a “seven-word regulated poem,” the third, fifth, and seventh clauses are always not in rhyme, and the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth ones are always in rhyme. Since a regulated poem is a rhymed verse with the same line length, the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth clauses are, respectively, the latter parts of the poetic lines, to constitute a four-line rhymed verse, each line with two clauses and fourteen words/characters (Wang 18–23).Two things are worth noting. First, prior to the Tang Dynasty, Chinese literature did have some seven-word (nonregulated) ancient poems (七言古诗) in which each line only contains one seven-word unit as such, and all the seven-word lines are in end rhyme (Wang 22). But since the Tang Dynasty when “seven-word regulated poetry” reached maturity and became a major poetic form, each line invariably has two clauses with fourteen words, and only every other clause—the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth—is in rhyme (often with the exception of the first and second clauses that often rhyme with each other—only an internal rhyme, a rhyme that bears the influence of the ancient nonregulated seven-word poems) (Wang 22; Ge, “Transformation”). Second, some people in China, including compilers of contemporary Chinese–English dictionaries, fail to distinguish between a seven-word basic meaning unit (“句”) and a poetic line. Thus, they mistake the “seven-word regulated poem” (which has eight seven-word units as such) as having eight poetic lines, each line with seven words, disregarding the fact that the third, fifth, and seventh clauses are not in rhyme. In The Cream of Regulated Verse in the Tang Dynasty, Donghua Lin has selected more than one hundred “seven-word regulated poems,” which invariably have four lines, each with fourteen words (see also Wang 18–23; Ge, Artistry 220–69).Interestingly, of the eight clauses in the “seven-word regulated poem,” every two clauses constitute not only a line but also a couplet (一联), and the four lines are, respectively, called “head couplet,” “chin couplet,” “neck couplet,” and “tail couplet.” The two clauses of the “chin couplet” and “the neck couplet” are required to match each other both in sound and in sense, with the matching words in the same part of speech and following a given tonal pattern, such as:As we can see, the tones of the two clauses in the chin couplet and the neck couplet are strictly opposed to each other. This is a peculiar feature of the Chinese regulated verse. Indeed, only Chinese words have four tones—one flat and three oblique ones. And since the words in traditional Chinese poetry are invariably monosyllabic, there can be a very neat pattern of tonal contrast. Moreover, no matter how many strokes a Chinese character/word has, it is always a flat block of the same length with all other characters. Indeed, the body of a Chinese seven-word regulated poem is highly symmetrical like the following (with an X representing a Chinese word/character as a flat block):Such peculiar Chinese poetic regularity and symmetry (made possible by invariably monosyllabic pictographic, ideographic, and pictophonetic words as flat blocks) with a fixed patten of tonal variation generate a unique kind of visual and acoustic beauty that can arouse an aesthetic pleasure and produce an emotional impact not shared by poetry in other cultures.A notable feature of Chinese is that it is free from verbal tense indicators. In this language, that is to say, there is no “backshift” in tense when the mode of speech shifts from a direct to an indirect one, nor is the subordinating conjunction “that” used in indirect speech. So, except for the personal pronoun, which is often left out in Chinese, a language characterized by frequent subject and determiner omission, there can be no perceivable linguistic difference between the indirect mode and the type of free direct mode that is only free from quotation marks, for example:Such a peculiar mode of speech, one that is ambiguous between direct and indirect forms, requires a new name which I consider proper to call “blend.” In Chinese, “blend” is not only frequent in occurrence, but also rich in variety. It mainly falls into three kinds: the blend of indirect and free indirect discourse—free from quotation marks (see the previous example); the blend of free indirect and free direct discourse; and the blend of narrative report/free indirect/free direct discourse (see Shen, “Transference”). As space is limited, I’ll offer only one more example:If we take the mode in (2) to be free direct, we can access the protagonist’s original thoughts with all its immediacy and without any narratorial interference. As an alternative, if we take the mode to be free indirect, we can hear the dual voice of the protagonist and the narrator. In the latter case, readers can sense in the narrator’s voice not only strong sympathy but also concern and anxiousness, which invite readers’ similar response, adding to the effect of empathy, as well as strengthening the sense of suspense. No matter which kind of blend is concerned, in translating into English, the translator has to specify the tense into either the past tense or the present tense and the person either into the first/second person or the third person (see the detailed discussion in Shen “Transference”).Not only do such peculiar Chinese presentational modes present a challenge to universal narrative poetics, the peculiarity of the Chinese language also renders inapplicable Saussure’s theory of the sign, a theory that is taken to be of universal relevance. Marked by Western phonocentrism, Saussure refers to the written form of a word as “the written image of a vocal sign” (24), only considering the sound image to be essential. In his assertion that “the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image” (66), the written image is left out of consideration. But in Chinese, where an ideogram on average has more than five homophones, many with more than ten or twenty homophones and some even with more than eighty homophones (for instance, the sound /yì/), we simply cannot talk about decontextualized monosyllabic spoken signs at all. Indeed, in Chinese, the graphic form constitutes the sole distinctive linguistic identity of a decontextualized monosyllabic Chinese sign (for a detailed discussion, see Shen, “Travelling”).If we compare early Chinese novels in the vernacular with eighteenth-century English fiction, we will find a notable difference: The Chinese ones are invariably in third-person narration, while the English novels are not only in third-person, but also in first-person narration, such as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. The exclusive use of third-person narration in early Chinese novels in the vernacular is to be accounted for by the fact that this genre developed directly from storytellers’ scripts. Because of the face-to-face contact between the storyteller and the audience, oral narration does not accommodate first-person narration. Although written Chinese vernacular fiction later separated from the oral tradition, and first-person narration is also used in this genre, the difference in types of narration among early Chinese novels in the vernacular and early Western novels is a matter of kind, not just of degree.As pointed out by Patrick, basic generic story prototypes (at the deep structural levels) are indeed shared by literatures in different cultures, and basic human emotional and ethical responses are quite similar across cultures, but linguistic, literary, and cultural differences such as those discussed in this essay are not to be neglected.