Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Front matter

LI ZHI AND CULTURES OF EARLY MODERNITY

Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Introduction

. Transparent Language: Origin Myths and

Early Modern Aspirations of Recovery

. The Rhetoric of Bluff: Paradox, Irony, and Self-Contradiction

. Sartorial Signs and Li Zhi’s Paradoxical Appearance . Money and Li Zhi’s Economies of Rhetoric . Dubious Books and Definitive Editions

. Provoking or Persuading Readers? Li Zhi and the Incitement of Critical Judgment

Notes

Glossary of Chinese Characters Bibliography

153 197 203 233

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For a long time, I was unsure how to write this book. I wanted it to be as broadly and boldly comparative as works by Anthony Grafton, Zhang Longxi, David Porter, Timothy Brook, Richard Vinograd, and Kenneth Pomeranz. Yet my material seemed so vast and disparate—so utterly unruly—that I despaired of ever being able to contain or organize it. “Why not just write a tidy little monograph on Li Zhi, and leave Europe out of it?” I thought. But a casual comment by Timothy Brook decisively tipped the scales in favor of comparison. My comparative studies have benefited enormously from the guidance of my teachers, especially the late Anthony C. Yu. Judith T. Zeitlin shared with me her deep knowledge of Chinese literature and at times also her well-founded reservations about comparative projects. He Yuming and Jacob Eyferth provided sinological guidance, and many years earlier Angela Zito introduced me to the serious study of Chinese texts. Philippe Desan generously lent his encyclopedic mastery of all things Montaigne-related. And Sherri Wolf laid the foundation by introducing me to Montaigne in her Lit Hum class. Richard Strier, Kathy Eden, Hannah Gray, Joshua Scodel, and Jean Howard each contributed to my understanding of Renaissance literature, history, and philosophy. And Joshua Scodel earned my enduring gratitude by rescuing this project at a critical juncture. Lee Behnke, Shadi Bartsch, and Lisa Mignone, each in very different ways, furthered my ongoing study of Latin. And Jonathan Lear and James Conant taught a course on Kierkegaard that contributed to this book in subtle, methodological ways that they will probably never know.

Most important, Woody Howard fortified me with the tenacity to just keep going. The book has benefited tremendously from opportunities to test out my developing ideas at conferences and invited lectures. Early drafts viii Acknowledgments of several chapters were presented at the following conferences and venues: Coin of the Realm (Harvard, 2014), The Book in East Asia, (Oberlin, 2013), Reading, Textual Production, and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Pennsylvania State University, 2013), Writings, Virtue, and the Social World: Li Zhi and 16th-Century China (University of Chicago, 2013), the International Comparative Literature Association (Paris, 2013), the Association for Asian Studies (Chicago, 2009), the American Comparative Literature Association (Long Beach, 2008), and the Harvard Humanities Seminar (2011). I extend thanks to all those who included me in these scholarly exchanges, challenged my ideas, and provided suggestions and bibliographical leads. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for the University of Washington Press, along with the many librarians who assisted me at the University of Chicago, Harvard and Brown universities, Academia Sinica, the Library of Congress, Middlebury College, and Macalester College. Especially deserving of credit are Connie Karlen and Katy Witzig of Macalester College, who worked tirelessly to secure hard-to-find resources for me. Colleen Mullarkey of the University of Chicago, too, contributed to this project in countless meticulous ways that only the best librarians can. Her cheerful face always brought a smile to mine. I am particularly indebted to David Porter, who provided unflagging support throughout this book’s (seemingly endless) process of composition and revision, and to Haun Saussy, who likewise nurtured the development of this book. A version of chapter six appeared in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (2013), where it benefited greatly from his broad cultural knowledge and editorial expertise.

Grants from the Dolores Zohrab Leibmann Foundation, the China Times Foundation, the Blakemore Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University all helped fund the research for this book. Most significantly, a grant from Academia Sinica enabled me to spend a year in Taiwan, where I found a welcoming community of scholars, including Li Sher-hsiueh, Li Miaw-fen, Yang Chin-lung, Wang Ayling, Liao Chiao-hung, Peng Hsiao-yen, Chiang Chiu-hua, and Wang Fansen. Perhaps the scholar at Sinica whose work has most deeply influenced my own is Wu Jenshu. I am especially grateful for his generously discussing with me the ideas in chapter four and providing me with essential bibliographical materials. During that research year, Liu Chiung-yun, Aiwen Wang, Harrison Huang, Richard Jean So, and Anatoly Detwyler were my

Acknowledgments ix constant companions, with whom I shared copious quantities of mango bing, expat hamburgers, and many long, intense conversations.

This book would not have been possible in its current form had it not been for the experience of coediting and cotranslating selections from Li Zhi’s writings for the volume A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden). For five years, Haun Saussy, Pauline C. Lee, and I lived intimately with Li Zhi’s texts, exchanging hundreds of draft translations and working closely with dedicated contributors Timothy Brook, Timothy Billings, Chen Huiying, Drew Dixon, Jennifer Eichman, Martin Huang, Thomas Kelly, David Lebovitz, and Yan Zinan. This experience introduced me to portions of Li Zhi’s corpus unknown to me at the time and enabled me to comprehend the author’s style in new ways. In improving the quality of my own translations for that volume, I am especially grateful to Haun Saussy, Xu Peng, Zhang Ying, and Liu Chiung-yun, as well as to my teachers in Taiwan, Chen Yizhen, Zhu Jinghua, Yang Ningyuan, Chen Liyuan, and most especially Chou Chang-chen. My very first Chinese teacher, Meng Yuann-yuann, holds a special place in my heart, for it was she who set me on the path of studying Chinese. Her uncompromisingly high standards continue to inspire me.

As coeditor of the forthcoming volume of collected essays tentatively titled The Objectionable Li Zhi, I have also benefited tremendously by reading the work of Wai-yee Li, Maram Epstein, Kai-wing Chow, Robert Hegel, Zhang Ying, Martin Huang, Timothy Brook, Robert Batchelor, Tai Ching-hsien, Lii Miaw-fen, and Pauline C. Lee. Their scholarship has allowed me to see aspects of Li’s literary corpus and its significance that had previously eluded me. It has been a privilege to work with Haun Saussy and Pauline C. Lee on editing that volume and organizing the conference that generated it.

The present volume also grows out of experiences in the classroom. Preparing for and coteaching the course The Confusions of Pleasure at Middlebury College with Stephen Whiteman opened up a world of interdisciplinary insights and brought me into contact with art historical scholarship I would not have found on my own. Stephen’s depth of knowledge, questing mind, and cheerful, can-do attitude made our collaboration invaluable. Conversations that began in that class have seeped subtly into these pages. Discussions with students in other classes too, especially Ancient Poetics: China and the Greco-Roman World as well as Opulence and Decadence: China, Europe, and the Early Modern World have shaped the contours of this book.

x Acknowledgments

Macalester College and the Twin Cities have provided me with the supportive environment and intellectual freedom I’ve needed to complete this book. For these I want especially to thank Satoko Suzuki, Yang Xin, Arthur Mitchell, Patricia Anderson, Jin Stone, Wang Fang, Lan Sijia, and Katie Scott, as well as Jim Laine and Chuen-Fung Wong of Macalester College. The University of Minnesota’s Classical Chinese Reading Group, directed by the intrepid Ann Waltner, has devoted hours to checking many of the translations that appear in this book. Its members include Lars Christensen, Gao Ruchen, Jiang Yuanxin, Jin Hui-han, Li Kan, Katie Ryor, Zhu Tianxiao, and Karil Kucera. Li Yuhang also provided valuable help with translation.

The title for this book, as well as its guiding metaphor, was inspired by a remark by Catherine Vance Yeh, for which Iam immensely grateful. Robert Hegel and Joseph Allen also deserve credit for persistently encouraging me to complete the manuscript and for graciously introducing me to my editor, Lorri Hagman. Her expert editorial guidance, along with that of Tim Roberts and Judith Hoover, enhanced the book’s clarity and accuracy.

Karin Vélez and Alexis Peri took time during hectic semesters and hot summers to read and meticulously comment on the entire manuscript, providing equal measures of constructive criticism and praise. Zhang Ying and Suyoung Son were my most demanding readers. When drafts passed muster with them, I felt certain I was on the right track. Cynthia Brokaw kindly read an early draft of the manuscript and offered extremely incisive and helpful criticism, and Ann Waltner and Nathan Vedal supplied comments on more polished drafts. Oded Rabinovitch, living up to his name, could always be counted on for much-needed encouragement as well as pointed critique.

Throughout the long process of writing and revising this manuscript, friends near and far have lifted my spirits. They include many of the people mentioned above, as well as Suzanne Jung Angell, Anya Bernstein, Jeannie Britton, Marcella F. Ellis, Rachel Freeman, James Grimmelmann, Jeehee Hong, Irene Hsiao, Einor Keinan- Segev, Emma Kipley-Ogman, Julia Orell, Willard Kasoff, Margaret Litvin, Andrea Mihlebach, Louisa Stein, George Streeter, Rochelle Pereira, Brigid Vance, and Xu Dongfeng. Robert Schine patiently tolerated my stubborn refusal to take a break—ever—not even on the most beautiful summer days. He uncannily knew when to provide a nudge of encouragement, when to insist on a much-needed walk or swim, and when simply to leave me to my work. For his

Acknowledgments xi steadfast support in this and countless other endeavors I am enormously grateful.

Finally, my family has nourished me from the earliest age, instilling in me a deep and abiding love of Western literature and the arts, while at the same time fostering my increasingly intense explorations of Chinese culture. Their lives combine bold originality with the disciplined, principled, and relentless pursuit of excellence. They have consistently buoyed my confidence, encouraged my creativity, and simply expected me to finish this book.

NOTE ON NAMES AND TRANSLATIONS

Throughout the text, I have referred to late Ming figures by their given names (ming). However, in his letters Li Zhi frequently refers to his contemporaries by alternative appellations, such as style names and sobriquets (zi and hao). In most cases, these alternative names are recorded in the titles of Li’s letters. However, where they are not evident in the titles, I have supplied this information in the notes. Readers seeking additional information should consult the extremely detailed footnotes to Zhang Jianye’s Li Zhi quanji zhu (LZOJZ). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

xiii

Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Introduction

Writing from his chateau in Dordogne before 1580, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) characterized the era in which he lived as an “unruly age.”! His words were truer than even he suspected. Thousands of miles away, the Chinese prose writer Zhang Dai (1597-1679) looked back on the same period and likewise remembered it as a time when everything was “chaotic,” “topsy-turvy,” and “jumbled” in the years preceding the collapse of the Ming dynasty. The writings of the maverick thinker and intellectual provocateur Li Zhi (1527-1602) exemplify many of the contradictions of the period. A trenchant social critic, he relentlessly exposed the hypocrisy and deception he found rife among his contemporaries. Yet his opinions, which he disseminated in voluminous publications, paradoxically also contributed to the unruliness of the era. In essays and letters, occasional poetry, and commentaries on texts spanning the Confucian classics, Buddhist and Daoist religious and philosophical works, histories, and popular fiction and drama, he promulgated his iconoclastic and unorthodox views, publishing them in volumes with deliberately provocative titles like A Book to Burn (Fenshu) and A Book to Keep (Hidden) (Cangshu).* These writings, coupled with the author’s flamboyant personality and eccentric behavior, earned him a reputation as one of the most controversial and incisive thinkers of his day.

In 1602, the imperial censor Zhang Wenda (fl. 1600) submitted a memorial to the throne denouncing Li Zhi for disseminating works that contained “outrageous and transgressive judgments” that “violated the norms of propriety” and “threw men’s minds into confusion.”* Zhang’s words came on the heels of a popular outcry against Li Zhi. In 1600, protesting his unorthodox writings and the potentially deleterious effect they might have on public morality, his detractors set fire to the monastery where he was living and desecrated the gravesite he had prepared for himself. Two years later, the Wanli emperor issued a proclamation calling for Li’s arrest and ordering the destruction of all his writings along with the wooden blocks for printing them. Li Zhi was apprehended in Tongzhou and clapped in prison, where, at the age of seventy-five, he committed suicide by slitting his own throat. But the death of the author could not halt the spread of his writings or restrain his fame. News of his dramatic death and incendiary ideas boosted book sales, and contemporary accounts attest that his writings, although banned, continued to circulate widely throughout the empire, both in accurate editions and in a great many spurious and pirated copies. Reports of this remarkable author’s writings and his sudden death even traveled to Europe.”

Li’s texts captivated his contemporaries’ imagination. Numerous readers averred that his writings dazzled them and “opened eyes that had been shut since antiquity.”° The boldness and originality with which he dared to buck interpretative conventions astounded them. He defended historical figures who had been reviled for centuries by orthodox Confucians, and condemned those the tradition had revered. Moreover, his own writings emboldened readers to question time-honored judgments rooted in tradition and authoritative precedent and to reinterpret both past and present in light of their own knowledge and experience.

Strong-willed and opinionated, Li embraced contradiction and reveled in self-dramatization. An outspoken opponent of the corruption and duplicity he deemed rampant in the contemporary Confucian, or Ru,’ civil bureaucracy, he nonetheless viewed himself as an avid defender of the core principles of Confucian philosophy as exemplified by the sage himself. He spent the better part of his adult life employed in the civil bureaucracy and, in addition to serving as prefect of Yao’an in the southwestern province of Yunnan, held reputable positions in both of the Ming capitals, Nanjing and Beijing. His years in official service, however, were fraught with difficulties; he found fault in and quarreled with his superiors and at the age of fifty-four, when he would have been eligible for a promotion, abruptly abandoned his position.’ In 1588, he retired to an unlicensed Buddhist monastery on Dragon Lake (Longhu), some thirty /i from the closest city of Macheng in Huguang, modern-day Hubei province. There he devoted his days to study; shaved off his hair, seemingly in conformity with Buddhist practice, but grew a long and incongruous beard; and strictly observed the morning and evening monastic rituals but profaned the premises by consorting with widows and refusing to abstain from eating meat.!! It was from this mountain retreat that Li authored his most notorious works, including his most scathing attacks on the contemporary culture of officialdom, which he deemed hypocritical and corrupt to the core.

Li’s writings attracted a wide readership not only because of his eccentric and unconventional behavior and the directness, incisiveness, and startling originality of his critiques but also because of the literary character of his writings. Composed in a sparkling style, his texts positively teem with self-contradiction, irony, and paradox, techniques to which I refer collectively as bluff.!* Throughout his works, he disconcertingly juxtaposes earthy analogies with erudite allusions to antiquity and exhibits his virtuosic inventiveness and sardonic wit. By cultivating a rhetorical style that invites readers to question the veracity, authority, and reliability of his own texts, Li matches his prose style to the content of his writings—his critique of the prevalent social ills of deception and hypocrisy. Thus the very process of reading his works prompts readers to experience in textual form some of the uncertainties accessory to life in the early modern world in which they lived.

Li never voyaged beyond the borders of the Ming Empire, yet the rhetorical strategies prevalent in his works, along with the axial role of judgment and discrimination in his writings, link him to a world of ideas and aesthetic conventions far wider than the boundaries of the Ming state. Adjudicating between authenticity and falsity was a core concern common to far-flung regions of the early modern world. Culturally specific manifestations of this problem as well as a variety of responses to it cropped up concurrently and with equal force on opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass. In diverse forms, they pervade Chinese literature, philosophy, and visual arts of this period no less thoroughly than they suffuse cultural products of the European Renaissance. Motivating this sustained engagement with themes of judgment and discernment was the shared perception in both China and Europe that appearances and reality had become radically out of joint and the lurking suspicion that signs, both lexical and graphic, had lost their ability to transmit meaning in a stable, reliable manner.

These fears were grounded in practical realities. In China and Europe alike, counterfeit coins passed frequently for legal tender, and prices rose and fell unpredictably. In China, membership in the civil bureaucracy, which had once been strictly regulated by the examination system, widened to permit the purchase of official titles, and in Europe, noble titles and ecclesiastical offices also came up for sale. Commoners masqueraded as gentlemen, and the boundaries demarcating social classes grew increasingly permeable." On coastal shores from Lisbon to Xiamen and Li’s natal Quanzhou, foreign traders hawked exotic wares, while in China Catholic missionaries, including Li’s acquaintance Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), preached doctrines never before heard. In Europe and China increasing numbers of printed books, many of dubious credibility, disseminated a tangle of facts, opinions, rumors, and beliefs. In daily life and in books, individuals of the period were assaulted by unreliable appearances, conflicting truth-claims, deception, pretense, and fraud. These circumstances challenged contemporaries to distinguish between surface appearances and the often discrepant realities below and to discriminate fact from fanciful exaggeration and outright lies.

Comparative early modern historians have identified a host of large-scale social and economic phenomena equally characteristic of China and Europe in this period. These independent though interrelated phenomena, which have been called “horizontal continuities,” included urbanization, rapid commercialization, improved technologies of navigation and printing, higher rates of book production, and increased social mobility.! Together these factors contributed to creating a situation in which monetary counterfeiting, impersonation, and book piracy flourished, and signs became increasingly difficult to decipher: the garments a person wore no longer necessarily denoted his social class, nor did an author’s name printed on a book cover ensure that the contents of that book were composed by him. For Li, the most distressing of these phenomena was the tendency of contemporary government officials to dissemble virtue.

Independently, scholars of China and Europe have argued that in the regions they study concern over instabilities in the social and economic spheres seeped into general anxiety about deception, both literal and metaphorical.!* Contemporaries worried not only about the fluctuating value of money and the unsteady meaning of clothing; the truth of words and statements also came to be seen in economic terms. Just as the value of a coin rises and falls depending on the degree of people’s confidence in it, so too did it seem to some contemporaries that the values and meanings of words inflated and deflated as people gained or lost confidence in them. Li’s writings exhibit many of these concerns. They demonstrate his disturbing recognition that an idea— even a lie—can become true if enough people believe it, and likewise, a proven fact, once popularly discredited, can become false. Taking Li Zhi’s life and writings as its focal point, this book explores early modern Chinese and European fascination with the mutability and malleability of truth and the growing sense that individuals must judge and appraise emerging situations for themselves. Li’s struggles with questions of authenticity and falsification find parallels in contemporary works of literature, philosophy, and art, both Chinese and European. And as such, they signal Li’s writings’ participation in an early modern cultural ethos characterized by pervasive doubt.

Undertaking to compare works from China and Europe in this period is a risky proposition. Ming China covered a wide expanse of territory, and not all regions were equally affected by the social and economic conditions of early modernity. Nor certainly did all countries in Europe exhibit similar characteristics or respond to social and economic pressures in identical ways. Throughout this book, I aim to acknowledge these differences and the cultural particularities they exemplify, while at the same time not losing sight of the epochal character of the early modern.”

The periodization “early modern” has been subjected to sharp and impassioned critique, and the term itself is admittedly marred by its own implicit teleology.'® For the purposes of this book, I am concerned neither with the earliness of the early modern nor with its claim to incipient modernity. I might just as well have adopted the term “historical cosmopolitanism,”!’ since for me the heuristic utility of the term “early modern” lies primarily in its ability to provide a ground on which contemporaneous Asian and European phenomena may stand with equally firm footing.*° The term “early modernities” is also helpful, as it honors the plurality of manifestations of temporally synchronous though geographically disparate phenomena. More important for my ends, the concept of early modernities challenges entrenched habits of mind that comprehend cultural phenomena as exclusively significant—or at least primarily significant—within the confines of the nations in which they took form. Central to this book’s method are questions of whether and to what extent global or transnational processes may affect, resonate with, or illuminate the study of culturally particular works.

In taking seriously issues of synchronicity and commensurability, I neither deny nor diminish the value of national histories. On the contrary, I draw heavily on the work of historians and literary scholars of China and Europe and hope to supplement and complement the regional narratives they have produced. The arguments developed in this book rely upon research focused on Li’s roles in various local Chinese contexts, his engagement with late Ming syncretism, Confucian official culture, historiography, drama and fiction commentary, and more.”! Yet my goal as a comparatist is, as David Porter writes in the introduction to Comparative Early Modernities, “to read creatively between and across . . . boundaries [and in so doing] to lessen [the exclusivity of] their hold on our categorical mappings, and to invite a more fluid and capacious conception of a range of cultural trajectories past and present.”??

In an essay advocating the importance of transcultural comparisons as a corrective for exclusively national-based narratives of literary and intellectual history, Walter Cohen calls for the study of Eurasian literatures, including those of India, Southeast Asia, Russia, Europe, and the Far East. He even goes so far as to argue that privileging national literary histories may obscure or distort vital transregional connections.” From this perspective, the focus in the present volume merely on China and Europe may seem narrow. Before making claims about cultural early modernity one might wish to inquire whether themes and rhetorical patterns similar to those I have observed in China and Europe appear with equal frequency and resonate as strongly in Japanese, Southeast Asian, Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal culture of the same period. Such inquiries are admirable and worthwhile; however, the present study is limited by my knowledge and linguistic abilities to works of literature, art, and philosophy from the major sites of origin and destination on the maritime trade routes that were gaining ascendancy at the turn of the seventeenth century. Comparison of these nodal points will, I hope, provide the basis on which other scholars may conduct further, more wider-ranging studies.

If the geographical scope of texts examined in this volume raises methodological questions, so may the wide range of genres studied here. Li Zhi himself experimented with a great many genres, both philosophical and literary. An incomplete list of these includes essays, letters, prefaces, colophons, obituaries, treatises, poetry, and commentaries on fiction, drama, history, and classical and religious texts. To these we must add the even greater number of works about which

Li wrote and the fact that throughout this volume I have on many occasions taken the liberty of comparing Li’s writings to works of which he had no knowledge. I have undertaken such comparisons in the hope and with the conviction that by examining and comparing diverse cultural products, we in the twenty-first century may gain insight into features of the early modern world that may have eluded the comprehension or cognizance of contemporaries in the sixteenth century.

In recent years, historical arguments in favor of early modernities have begun to percolate into the disciplines of literary and art history. Studies have been conducted on the importation of Asian objects and their use in European societies and on Chinese artists’ adaptation of Western techniques including chiaroscuro, perspective, and trompe Poeil.24 Timothy Brook’s study of Vermeer, for example, highlights ways in which, through that artist’s oeuvre, viewers glimpse facets of the emerging world economy: the mass production in China of porcelain for export and its connoisseurship and enthusiastic reinscription in paintings produced at the opposite end of the Eurasian continent.” Yet the majority of these studies have centered on what have been called “interconnections” or rapports de fait, material links between the production and consumption of objects from geographically disparate corners of the early modern world.

My work on Li Zhi differs methodologically from those efforts, for the correspondences I aim to unveil between the form and content of this author’s texts and the form and content of contemporary works of art and literature both within and beyond China entail few if any direct, transregional material connections. While the writings I analyze each address and respond to local material conditions, which in turn echo local conditions elsewhere in the Indra’s web of early modernity,” I am chiefly concerned with what historian Joseph Fletcher would call “parallel developments” or what literary theorists Alfred Aldridge and Zhang Longxi might classify as “affinities,” that is, “resemblances in style, structure, mood, or idea” among works produced contemporaneously.”” The balanced emphasis on matters of form (“style” and “structure”) and content (“idea”) highlights the interdependence of these features and constitutes a linchpin of my analysis. For despite the many differences both within and among Chinese and European artistic and literary styles in this period, I perceive a common set of salient formal elements that correspond to the shared thematic content and socioeconomic contexts described earlier. These formal features include a predilection for verbal self-contradiction, paradox, and irony;? the adoption of an array of incompatible perspectives; an obsession with the processes and pitfalls of representation; and a tendency to create “doubled,” storied, or “second-order representations.””’ This constellation of intertwined forms and ideas was inextricably connected to the shared nexus of challenges—economic, social, philosophical, and psychological— facing developing early modern societies and their constituents.

Although in many cases Li Zhi was not aware of the transcultural ramifications of what and how he was writing, his texts nonetheless evince his efforts to grapple with the local manifestations of global problems. In form as much as in content, his texts and others of their ilk both reenact and respond to the crises of their day. In this respect, they corroborate a central tenet of classical Confucian poetics, namely that texts arise organically in response to specific historical conditions. This theory posits that an author’s environment elicits from him emotions that find synecdochic expression in literature.*° My reading of Li Zhi’s texts grows out of this mode of interpretation: Li’s works, I argue, display his own psychic state and simultaneously, like microcosms, enable readers to imagine—or even experience— how it may have felt to inhabit the unstable social world of the late Ming.

The metaphor of art and literature as symptomatic of society’s ills has transcultural currency and appears frequently in writings of the period. In the preface to A Book to Burn, Li declares his intention to point out the intractable illnesses of his contemporaries. And elsewhere he refers to society as in need of healing.*! This notion of the arts as symptomatic of problems facing the social milieus in which they were created meshes with indigenous Chinese interpretations that cast literature as an organic outgrowth of historical circumstance. Moreover, just as diverse individuals or populations infected with strands of the same disease may exhibit different symptoms, the works of literature and art analyzed here display a range of instantiations of and responses to the challenges of early modernity. My project is not to impose identity upon the symptoms I discover but rather to recognize the family resemblances they may share.” For I hope to show that whereas previous scholarship diagnosed the artistic “symptoms” arising in China and Europe in this period as evidence of different diseases, they may in fact have shared an etiology—a consanguinity—that renders their comparison instructive. Moreover,

Introduction Ti just as an epidemiologist learns most about a disease by assembling and comparing a wide array of case studies, so too do I hope that comparative analysis of the many aesthetic dimensions of cultural early modernity will yield a more nuanced understanding than would a tightly focused investigation of Li Zhi alone.

But how can I be sure, in analyzing the many and varied symptoms I have identified, that they are, as I claim, variants of a common illness and not in fact expressions of discrete diseases? Infected as I necessarily am by my own cultural background, education, and assumptions, might I not be guilty of imposing my own Western categories upon the Chinese material, and in so doing might I too fail to respect “the otherness of the other”??? These concerns acquire a certain urgency when we observe that the core issues of this study— anxieties produced by the perception that signs were losing their ability to represent the world adequately and reliably—have for decades been considered emblematic, defining features of the European Renaissance. In attempting to demonstrate that the preoccupation with representation and misrepresentation is characteristic of more than the European Renaissance alone, am I not guilty of foisting Western analytical categories on Chinese texts? And is there not arrogance and even cultural chauvinism in assuming that these terms and concepts can meaningfully be applied to works of Chinese literature, philosophy, and art?