CHAPTER 1

Transparent Language

Origin Myths and Early Modern Aspirations of Recovery

At the end of the sixteenth century, in an era in which things were not always what they seemed and words often proved unreliable or deceptive, individuals in China and Europe expressed the sentiment that language had somehow strayed from its source, that meaning was increasingly difficult to convey precisely, and that ambiguity was infecting communication. Correspondingly, the relationship between language and the objects and ideas it signified came under intense scrutiny. Examining Li Zhi’s views on the associations among language, authenticity, and ethics, and comparing his opinions to the attitudes of several prominent contemporaries in Europe and China reveals the existence of parallel yet distinct conservative currents in language theory: on opposite ends of the Eurasian continent, intellectuals strove to rediscover and restore a mythic, transparent language. The perception that this language had been lost would color their own diction and behavior, and it would heighten their awareness of the increasingly challenging task of interpreting the more opaque and unreliable forms of communication surrounding them.

In China, the project of seeking to rediscover this primordial language was closely associated with imitation of classical texts, a longstanding practice in both China and Europe. Whereas the Chinese literary establishment heralded imitation of ancient texts as a means to enhance scholars’ literary style and to facilitate their ethical maturation, Li and several of his Chinese compatriots opposed imitation. Slavish imitation, they maintained, actually hampered individual self-expression and inhibited moral growth. Moreover, Li added, mimicking often led to acts of imposture and hypocrisy, which he decried. In an era of social pretense and increasing class mobility, Li particularly criticized contemporary Confucian officials who verbally portrayed themselves as paragons of virtue. But, Li claimed, unlike the sage authors of classical texts, whom they claimed to resemble, the imitators cultivated only a veneer of virtue. They simulated only enough virtue to promote their reputation and advance their career, and for this reason Li, who often touted his own keen powers of discernment, judged that their imitations lacked substance.

Li’s hard-hitting critique of these self-styled Confucians attacked the problem of deceptive language on two levels simultaneously: it pointed out the gulf between what they said about themselves and what they actually did. That is, it highlighted the discrepancy between their moralizing words and their self-interested actions, and it also illustrated the divide between their words and the objects or ideas to which these words referred. In both cases, regardless of whether the discrepancies Li noticed arose deliberately or inadvertently, he condemned all gaps between words and their referents. Indeed his writings depict him as the antithesis of these hypocritical, superficial scholars. Unlike them, he claims, he clearly and honestly manifests his genuine feelings.

Several of Li’s arguments against literary imitation correlate closely to opinions expressed by contemporary Europeans, even though the reasons prompting sixteenth-century Europeans to engage in literary imitation, their definitions of what it entailed, and the ethical values they attached to it all differed from Chinese attitudes toward the same issues. For Li, the desire to restore the seamless correspondence between language and its referents may be traced to myths concerning the natural origins of the Chinese writing system. It also contains an ethical imperative stemming from the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names (zhengming). A different, biblically inspired theory of the origins of language animated sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European intellectuals’ impulse to purify their languages or return to a primordial ur-tongue. Nonetheless, spurred by aspirations similar to their Chinese contemporaries, Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596), Francis Bacon, John Webb (1611–1672), and other Europeans struck out in quest of a perfect idiom, a pure, transparent means of communication freed from the ambiguity and deceit so prevalent in the early modern period. Ironically, their search led them to the Chinese language, whose ideographic script seemed to them to ensure its incontrovertible authenticity.

Unfortunately, the Chinese language could offer no solution to Europe’s linguistic tribulations. As Li was well aware, the meanings of Chinese characters could alter over time and be deliberately manipulated. And Chinese words, like European words, could take on a variety of different meanings concurrently and could be deployed strategically for rhetorical effect. Thus, had the European language theorists of the turn of the seventeenth century had access to and been able to decipher Li’s writings, they might have been astounded to discover that, far from exemplifying the clear signification they erroneously attributed to the Chinese language, Li’s texts and those of some of his Chinese contemporaries registered distress over the slipperiness of signification and the unreliability of words in early modern China—problems uncannily akin to those troubling European thinkers of the same era. Studying the concurrent perceptions in Europe and China that language had been uprooted from its solid foundation in the real-world objects to which it referred provides a basis from which to understand the culture of bluff pervasive in the early modern period.

AN AGE OF IMITATION

By the end of the sixteenth century in China, and even earlier in Europe, imitation of classical texts had become so rigid and formulaic that it garnered open ridicule. Li Zhi displayed nothing but scorn for the “dimwitted disciples” who blindly copied out the transmitted words of the sages, and he exhibited contempt for the phony Confucian scholars who peppered their discourses with phrases culled from orthodox texts they scarcely understood.¹ Similarly in Europe, Erasmus and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (ca. 1469–1533), among others, mocked self-styled “Ciceronians,” who imitated the diction of the great Roman orator by patching together speeches that were technically perfect but devoid of originality or genuine feeling.

In China, the vogue for imitating classical texts was associated with the Return to Antiquity Movement (Fugu pai), which dominated literary circles in the mid-sixteenth century and promoted the full adoption of ancient literary genres and archaic diction. Adherents to this conservative movement maintained that by imitating archaic literary style students would internalize the ethical principles that suffused the core texts of the Confucian tradition.² Even supporters of Wang Yangming’s more progressive School of the Mind (Xinxue pai) agreed that studying and imitating ancient texts helped students to develop the rudiments of literary style and, more importantly, ethical character.³ Since, according to Wang, every person had the potential to become a sage, studies of this nature were particularly valuable for they provided the means by which individuals could cultivate and exhibit their innate ethical sensibility.

As early as the first third of the sixteenth century, however, even many proponents of the Return to Antiquity Movement came to recognize that the movement’s heavy emphasis on technical proficiency in literary imitation was producing sterile writing, devoid of either ethical clout or emotional candor. One of the leaders of the movement, Li Mengyang (1475–1531), cautioned that in his day “poetry grounded in emotions had become rare, but that which was artfully phrased was plentiful.”⁴ Others complained that what passed as poetry in their era was nothing more than words strung together.

Over time, criticisms of this kind multiplied, and by Li’s generation many scholars and artists had come to revile the Return to Antiquity Movement as a program that advocated only restrictive, servile imitation. The painter and playwright Xu Wei (1521–1593), for example, acerbically analogized the popular writers of his day to “birds mimicking human speech” and accused them of manufacturing false emotions.⁵ Li’s close friend Jiao Hong (1541–1620) equally scoffed, “I don’t recognize contemporary writing. What are [authors] even talking about? Is it the Dao? Is it virtue? Is it accomplishments? They disdain the substance of literature, but preposterously write for the sake of writing. Those who live in enclosed spaces point to images of vast territories and oceans, while those who have no roof over their heads brag about entertaining lavishly. Not only do [such texts] fail to disguise their lack of substance, but what they do express is just smoke and mirrors.”⁶ Jiao Hong’s comments register his disapproval of contemporary writings, which he feels have forfeited their grounding in the author’s personal experience. They thus suffer from a lack of authenticity. Li’s acquaintance Yuan Zongdao (1560–1600) expressed similar views:

Today, most writers are superficial. They have never engaged in serious study, nor do they harbor in their hearts any [original] ideas. But when they discover that among the ancients there were those who “established an everlasting reputation,” and those who became famous on account of their literary talents, they too conceive the desire to pick up a brush, spread out a piece of paper, and enter the business of trafficking in words so as to garner praise. Since they want to write great works but have no ideas of their own, what recourse do they have but to borrow phrases from Zuo Qiuming and Sima Qian⁷—like begging and stealing piss and shit? If one were to rub out all the archaisms and clichéd expressions in their writings, one would end up with nothing more than a blank sheet of paper!⁸

These condemnations of imitative writings seem to blend aesthetic and ethical concerns. Highlighting the latter, Jiao Hong declared, “What in ancient times would have been considered pillaging is now the rule.”⁹ Even Wang Shizhen (1526–1590), one of the Second Seven Masters of the Return to Antiquity Movement, concurred: “Plagiarizing and imitation,” he opined, “are a great defect in poetry.”¹⁰ These authors held that stitching together pastiches of older works was not only unoriginal but actually immoral since it constituted an act of usurpation. By passing off someone else’s work as one’s own, they implied, a writer falsified his talents and laid claim to aesthetic abilities—and more importantly, ethical virtues—he did not necessarily possess. Perhaps the most scathing attack on such behavior came from Jiang Yingke (1553–1605), who quipped, “Any poet who cannot come up with his own approach, and who obsequiously limits himself to the poem titles and themes established in the past, calling this ‘returning to antiquity’ is truly a louse living in somebody else’s pants!”¹¹ The vast majority of these late Ming critiques of literary imitation—and indeed a great many others—find analogues in Pico della Mirandola’s epistolary correspondence with the most famous Ciceronian of the age, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547).¹² Similar instances may be cited in Erasmus’s extremely popular satirical dialogue The Ciceronian, published in 1528. This text pokes fun at a pretentious fictitious scholar named Nosoponus, who adheres so closely to Ciceronian style in his composition of Latin speeches that he dares not even deploy a single conjugated verb form that does not appear in Cicero’s opera omnia. Throughout the dialogue, Bulephorus, the porte-parole for Erasmus, compares Nosoponus’s imitation of Cicero to that of an ape, a “lying mirror,” and a person hiding behind a mask.¹³ Bulephorus asks how anyone can “acquire the name of Ciceronian, that is, of a man who speaks in the best possible way, if he talks about subjects he does not thoroughly understand [and] in which his feelings are not involved?” “Such a person,” Bulephorus admonishes, “makes no secret of his determination to reproduce his model, and so who will believe he speaks with sincerity? And what kind of approbation will he get in the end? Only the sort acquired by those people who write patchwork poems—who possibly give pleasure, but only for a short while and only if one has nothing better to do; and they neither impart information, nor stir the emotions, nor rouse to action.” Bulephorus further castigates “ignorant pupils and bad sons”—a phrase reminiscent of Li’s “dimwitted disciples”—for putting on airs, trying to impress others by their borrowed erudition, and attempting to earn a reputation they do not deserve. Such imitation, he charges, amounts to “a form of imposture,” a “conjuring trick” in which one does not express oneself but appears in the guise of somebody else.¹⁴

The similarities among these near-contemporaneous Chinese and European denunciations of excessive imitation are plain to see, yet these examples obscure substantive differences between the cultures of literary imitation in Europe and China during Li’s lifetime. In China the primary mode of written communication remained the classical language (literary Sinitic or classical Chinese), whereas in Europe vernacular languages were on the rise.¹⁵ To be sure, in China lowbrow genres such as novels and drama often featured vernacular language, but these texts did not usually imitate classical models. Rather, it was the more reputable Chinese genres such as poetry and examination essays (bagu wen), composed in the classical language, that could and did repeat verbatim the words of the model texts on which they were based. In Europe, by contrast, although Latin scholarship persisted well into the eighteenth century, the strong position of vernacular languages meant that imitation more often involved considerable adaptation. Indeed, a major component of Renaissance European literary imitation consisted in recasting in national vernaculars works originally composed in Latin and Greek. For example, in the Défense et illustration de la langue française, a programmatic treatise outlining techniques for “enriching” the French language, Joachim Du Bellay (ca. 1522–1560) explicitly recommends this technique of adaptation, which had no direct corollary in early modern China.¹⁶

A second major difference between the cultures of literary imitation in China and Europe was ideological. Ever since its establishment as the state ideology in the Han dynasty, Confucianism had maintained its central position in Chinese thought, despite variations in ritual practice and textual interpretation over successive dynasties. This situation enabled early modern Chinese intellectuals to experience a sense of continuity with their past, which in turn inspired confidence that by imitating ancient texts they could plausibly cultivate in themselves the same ethical values embodied by the sages of their tradition. In Europe, where Christianity had supplanted the pagan religions of ancient Greece and Rome, the situation was rather different and required scholars to contend with the problem of reconciling their Christian faith—be it Protestant or Catholic—with their desire to immerse themselves in the cultures and literatures of classical antiquity.¹⁷ In illustration of this, Erasmus’s Bulephorus repeatedly addresses the thorny issue of how to read classical texts correctly so as to benefit from their literary style without becoming contaminated by unchristian thoughts.

Li’s writings highlight yet a third salient difference between early modern Chinese and European cultures of literary imitation, namely, the existence in China of the imperial examination system.¹⁸ The scale and scope of this vast, nationally centralized institution, which defined the lives and careers of the upper echelons of Chinese male society, had no parallel anywhere in Europe. To prepare for these examinations, young men memorized the Confucian classics and the full corpus of orthodox commentaries by the Song scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200). Additionally, they strove to master the literary form of the eight-legged examination essay, a structure of paired antithetical arguments so rigid that one modern scholar has referred to it as more of a “grid” than a true literary genre.¹⁹ Students writing such essays were discouraged from developing their own critical views and instead encouraged to “speak on behalf of the [ancient] sages” (wei shengren li yan), a practice that often meant regurgitating memorized texts.

In preparing for these examinations, scholars of Li’s day were assisted by the flourishing print industry of the late Ming, which made available abundant affordable volumes of model examination essays. These texts gained such popularity by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that some scholars feared students were abandoning the classics entirely and only poring over the study guides.²⁰ These concerns seem to have had some merit. In 1595 and again in 1616 scandals erupted when reports leaked out that scholars had passed the exams on the strength of essays they had copied verbatim from commercially printed study manuals.²¹ Li joked about engaging in such behavior himself. Although the depth of erudition evident throughout his corpus makes clear that he took no scholarly shortcuts, an autobiographical essay he wrote around 1578 describes his state of mind prior to sitting for the examinations: “This [exam] is just play-acting, for which plagiarizing and superficial reading constitute adequate preparation. How could even the examiners be thoroughly conversant with every facet of the sage Confucius’ teachings?”²² Li’s sarcastic statement attests to the prevalence of rote imitation and to his conviction that even the examiners themselves possessed imperfect mastery of the classics.

But Li reserves his most scathing attacks on the culture of imitation fostered by the examination system for his frequently cited essay “On the Childlike Mind.” Here he mocks contemporaries who study ancient Confucian texts merely in the hope of appearing scholarly, knowledgeable, and even virtuous. But because their learning is not rooted in any deep understanding or authentic feeling, they produce nothing but “artificial words” and “artificial deeds,” which their everyday actions betray rather than reinforce. Li denounces such behavior, arguing that words and deeds must mutually reflect and strengthen one another.²³ Anyone who fails to recognize this and instead seeks to cram his head full of borrowed opinions risks actually damaging his innate faculty of aesthetic and ethical judgment, which Li terms the “childlike mind” (tongxin).²⁴ He writes, “Impressions and sensations, crowding in through the ears and eyes, come to dominate the inner life and suppress the childlike mind. Then words and ideas learned from without come to dominate, and suppress the childlike mind. . . . Once the childlike mind has been vanquished, its expression in language can only be indirect and superficial; its action in governing will be without deep roots, its writing style will be weak.”²⁵ Criticisms of this kind were far from unusual among late Ming adherents to Wang Yangming’s School of the Mind, the most radical branch of which, the Taizhou school (Taizhou pai), Li was affiliated with. Such critiques were not infrequently paired with threats that students who failed to preserve their creativity would never amount to much, even if they did manage to pass the imperial examinations.²⁶

Although European contemporaries were spared the grueling experience of having to conform to the rules incumbent upon imperial examinees, Erasmus’s Bulephorus would likely have understood and agreed with all of the above arguments. Like Li, this character extolled the value of speaking “from the heart” and, whenever necessary, adapting the words of the ancients to fit one’s individual temperament and contemporary circumstances.²⁷ “Minds differ,” he instructs the dullard Nosoponus, and “the mirror [of imitation] will lie unless it reflects the true born image of the mind.”²⁸ Bulephorus therefore encourages Nosoponus—and by extension all would-be imitators—not to be limited by the texts they copy but rather to seek to “surpass” them by applying them to new circumstances.²⁹ As I argue in chapter six, Li fully embraced this attitude toward reading, and even imparted it to some of his more astute late Ming readers.

If rote imitation risked robbing students of their creativity, it also raised the threat of social imposture, which in China was exacerbated not only by the frequent violations of sumptuary laws but also by changes to the imperial examination system. In theory at least, the examination system ensured that only the most learned and capable men could enter the government. The years of rigorous study required for passing these exams were designed to mold young men’s character and instill in them the righteousness requisite for engaging in government service. In 1451, however, admission to the Imperial Academy came up for sale. And this “back door” entry into officialdom expanded so rapidly that by the mid-sixteenth century over 40 percent of students enrolled at the Imperial Academy had bought their way in.³⁰ Needless to say, the notion that individuals could now accede to office simply on the basis of wealth—not virtue—greatly discomfited many contemporaries.³¹ Li Zhi, who had passed the prefectural and provincial examinations purely by dint of his own industry, was a particularly harsh critic of such upstart colleagues. Repeatedly throughout his writings, he rebuked any official who placed career and reputation ahead of ethical and orderly administration of the state.

Li unstintingly voiced his repugnance for individuals who, in his words, “[desire] riches, but put on an affected appearance, use cunning words, and pretend to be unwilling [to accept office].” “They deploy this method because they think it is the ladder that will lead them to honor. And they select virtuous, benevolent, and righteous deeds with which to cover up their true motives.”³² Li observed, “People of [this] generation lack sincere aspirations; they have sunk into dejection and filth. That’s why they say yes when they mean no; their words may be pure, but their actions are tainted.” He continued, “I have yet to encounter a single person who actually exemplifies [through his actions] fondness for loftiness or cleanliness.”³³ In another text, Li exposed the duplicity of the “countless people who . . . night and day, without a pause, in great halls and before large audiences, . . . sycophantically wait upon the wealthy and powerful, in order to garner a moment’s attention. In dark rooms they perform servile deeds, hoping to enjoy an instant of glory. Everybody,” this letter grandiosely concludes, “[behaves this way] all the time.”³⁴ Li’s remarks indiscriminately blend attacks on the gulf between contemporary officials’ virtuous veneers and their venal motivations with critiques of their imprecise and misleading use of language.

Similar conflations occurred in Europe in this period and were abetted, at least in part, by the sale of noble and ecclesiastical titles, the weakening of the nobility, and the concomitant rise of the urban bourgeoisie. For instance, in a treatise on literary imitation, the Italian humanist Celio Calcagnini (1479–1541) confessed to being “amazed” that “the more corruptly a person speaks, the more advancement and praise he receives from the public and the higher the salary he is thought to deserve.”³⁵ However, what distinguishes these European accounts from Li’s attacks on careerist Confucian officials is that Li, more so than his European contemporaries, regards the bumbling imitations of “dimwitted disciples,” the calculated verbal deceptions of self-promoting bureaucrats, and the hypocritical actions of the latter group as interconnected.

To Li engaging in hollow discourses on subjects foreign to one’s own experience is just as deplorable as rushing about intent on securing a vacuous reputation for virtue, lying about one’s moral accomplishments, or posturing as a Confucian official. He therefore condemns all of these behaviors equally. And in his writings he portrays himself as the antithesis of the posers who perpetrate these transgressions. Unlike them, he avers, he pays no heed to his material well-being, writes only when truly moved, and expresses only authentic sentiments.

CHINESE SOURCES OF AUTHENTIC LITERATURE

Li believed that, unlike contemporary writings, which he deemed pretentious and unoriginal, true literature must flow freely from the heart and reveal the author’s sincere emotions and genuine ethical convictions. To Li, what mattered was less a work’s topic or content, be it factual or fanciful, than its groundedness in authentic sentiment. Like his friend Jiao Hong, who insisted that “elegant wording is not the most crucial aspect of literature,” Li based his assessment of all genres—and indeed his definition of good writing—on the single criterion of emotional authenticity.³⁶ Fiction, philosophy, or history—Li approved of any work that he judged sprang directly from the author’s heart. In evidence of this, he states in an essay on literary criticism that “those who are truly able to write” do not begin with the conscious intention to create literature, much less to reap material benefit from their writing. Rather,

their bosoms are filled with . . . indescribable and wondrous events. In their throats are . . . things that they desire to spit out but dare not. On the tip of their tongues . . . they have countless things they wish to say but no one to whom to express them. They store up these feelings to the bursting point until, after a long time, their propensity [to be expressed] cannot be stopped. [Then], as soon as such writers see a scene that arouses their feelings or encounter something that catches their eye and sets them sighing, they snatch a winecup and drown their accumulated burdens. They pour out the grievances in their heart, and for thousands of years after, people are moved by their ill fortune.³⁷

The phrase Li uses to sum up this outpouring of emotion is “They are unable to stop themselves.” Loss of control is axiomatic to his conception of artistic creation, for it testifies to the work’s emotional authenticity. Elsewhere, for example, he affirms, “An author is one who, when his emotions stir within him, cannot refrain from pursuing his aspirations, or when his feelings animate him, cannot slow the flow of words rushing out of him.”³⁸ Thus unlike those whom Li derides as imitators, who craft and polish the form of their writings, giving little thought to ethical content or emotional clout, Li elevates emotional authenticity over formal perfection.

For Li, the defining characteristic of outstanding literature is its ability to convey sincere emotion. His preface to the contemporary vernacular novel Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan) cites several examples of this type of superior writing, beginning with the Historical Records (Shiji) of the Han imperial historian Sima Qian and culminating with contemporary Ming fiction. Drawing implicitly on the Confucian idea that individuals vent their righteous indignation through poetry, Li writes, “The Imperial Historian [Sima Qian] said: The Difficulties of Persuasion and Solitary Resentment were written because a virtuous sage [Han Feizi, the author of these texts] was angry. From this perspective, the virtuous sages of antiquity did not write unless they were [morally] outraged. To write when one is not angry is like shivering when one is not cold or like groaning when one is not sick. Even if people do write [when they are not angry], why would anyone want to read their works? Outlaws of the Marsh was written because the author was outraged.”³⁹ The visceral language of this passage palpably conveys the intimate relationship Li posits between signifier and signified: a freezing body shivers just as a tortured soul groans. These expressions of heartfelt indignation, like the untutored outpourings of the childlike mind, arise involuntarily. Subject neither to cognition nor to aesthetic molding, they simply manifest emotion.

The belief that artistic expression arises—or ought to arise—directly from emotional experience has deep roots in the history of Chinese literary thought and found numerous advocates among Li’s contemporaries. The “Great Preface” to the Classic of Poetry (Shijing)—arguably the most authoritative surviving piece of ancient Chinese literary criticism—states, “The affections are stirred within and take on form in words.”⁴⁰ Here poetic self-expression is depicted as what literary scholar Stephen Owen calls a process of “entelechy”: emotions once contained inside the recesses of the poet’s mind become outwardly manifested in poetically patterned language. Borrowing the terminology of the nineteenth-century semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, we might characterize the relationship between such emotions and the signs that manifest them as indexical, since this bond is governed by contiguity or causality. Thus, according to this theory of self-expression, language—especially poetic language—is understood as the externalized residue (or record) of internal emotions.⁴¹

As Owen and Pauline Yu have each argued, this ancient Chinese understanding of the origins of literary creation differs sharply from the Western concept of poetry.⁴² Etymologically, the very word “poetry,” which derives from the Greek poiein, meaning “to make,” posits a conscious effort on the part of the author or artist—an act of deliberate shaping, often in imitation of either life or previously existing art. Thus whereas the Chinese theory sketched out above casts literature as an involuntary outgrowth of nature and therefore potentially free of contamination by any type of imitation at all, the Western understanding yokes poetry ineluctably to the process of imitation, mimesis.⁴³

The authors and artists of the late Ming placed a high premium on this involuntary self-expression—or at least on the myth of this involuntary self-expression.⁴⁴ Channeling the Song dynasty poet Su Xun (1009–1066), Li praised “writing so effortless it moves like wind over water.”⁴⁵ And paintings by Li’s contemporary Xu Wei, whose anti-imitative literary criticism was mentioned earlier, often exhibit a blotchy, spattered quality, which seems to testify to the painter’s inebriation or incomplete self-control: the loose, erratic brushwork suggests that these works may have been executed in moments of creative fury.⁴⁶ Perhaps inspired by such works of visual art, the playwright Tang Xianzu (1550–1616) compared human creativity to winds and waters that cannot be reined in: “They burst in through locked doors and overtake riverbanks.”⁴⁷ They “come when one is in a trance and involve no [conscious] deliberation.”⁴⁸ In a similar vein, the poet Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) admired his younger brother Yuan Zhongdao, remarking, “When his emotion encountered the right environment, he could write a thousand words in a moment, like water pouring eastward [into the sea].”⁴⁹ And Li’s “intellectual heir,” the prolific fiction, poetry, and drama commentator Jin Shengtan (1608–1661), compared poetry to the “sudden outcry from the human heart.”⁵⁰ These comments evince a shared conception of the artist as a conduit for artistic expression rather than as a conscious or deliberate craftsman.⁵¹

For his part, Li Zhi not only affirms that good writing must flow naturally from raw emotion; he actually denies that it could originate from any other source. He regards the emotional basis of a piece of writing as the guarantor of its quality and authenticity, an infallible touchstone by which readers may differentiate between genuine works of art and superficial imitations.⁵² In typically ironic fashion, however, Li expresses this idea in metaphors (shivering and groaning) that are themselves clichés in the history of Chinese literature.

Pointedly ignoring this fact, however, Li sets out to persuade readers that his own writings express just such unmediated, authentic emotion. In a biographical essay on his close friend Geng Dingli (d. 1584), Li avers that Dingli never requested or expected that Li would compose such a tribute. Li undertook the project on his own initiative simply because he “truly could not bear not to compose the biography for Dingli.”⁵³ Li’s explanation of the process by which he came to write it alludes to his being overwhelmed by an insuppressible urge. According to his account, he could not resist the powerful emotions that drove him to put brush to paper. In another letter, Li even more dramatically analogizes his writing to a natural and irrepressible bodily urge. To his friend Deng Lincai (juren 1561) he writes, “I have vomited the blood of my liver and gall to give you for your judgment.”⁵⁴ This phrase characterizes Li’s writing as an involuntary spasm. Metaphorically his words transform into drops of blood and bile that, like splashes of ink on Xu Wei’s paintings, splatter inelegantly across the page.⁵⁵

Many sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century readers appreciated the immediacy of Li’s writings. Jiang Yingke, for instance, opined that Li’s “emotions were authentic and his diction was authentic. Every single sentence flowed from his innermost feelings.”⁵⁶ Wang Benke, who meticulously collated and edited Li’s posthumously published Another Book to Burn, affirmed that “in disgorging [his emotions, Li] was like a man who chokes and cannot keep his food down.”⁵⁷ Yuan Zhongdao too expressed the opinion that “If [Li Zhi] had something to say, it had to come out.” He further asserted, “Guided by his feelings [Li was] . . . quick to say whatever came into his mind. . . . His writing style was not predictable. Brilliant and inimitable, it sprang from his own feelings. . . . When he had ground his ink and spread out the paper, he would throw open his clothing, give a shout, and go to work like a hare darting out of the way of a swooping falcon.”⁵⁸ These statements testify to the fact that readers willingly accepted Li’s claims that his writings issued from the heart. And like Li, they considered the indexical relationship between Li’s powerful emotions and the writings he produced under their sway proof of the writings’ authenticity, candor, and aesthetic value.

TRANSPARENT LANGUAGE IN CHINA: MYTHICAL ORIGINS AND THE RECTIFICATION OF NAMES

The conception of literature as the external manifestation of an author’s genuine feelings corresponds with long-held beliefs about the inception of the Chinese language. Just as the “Great Preface” to the Classic of Poetry posits an indexical relationship between an author’s emotional state and the songs, poetry, or other culturally patterned artifacts to which it gives rise, so do the mythic accounts of the origins of Chinese writing impute a direct correspondence between real-world phenomena and the verbal signs used to denote them. And just as Li opined that in his day the relationship between individuals’ feelings, their ethical convictions, their actions, and their words had become tainted by imitation and outright deception, so too did he observe that the correspondence between words and their referents—a relationship he, like many of his contemporaries, believed ought to be transparent—was growing increasingly tenuous or murky and difficult to decipher. Whether this pollution of the meanings of words occurred deliberately or inadvertently was not Li’s chief concern. Rather, he endeavored to point out the ethical consequences that could arise when the present-day meanings of words deviated from their etymological and phenomenological roots.

According to lore, the graphs of the Chinese language bear an intrinsic relationship to the real-world objects they denote. The myth of the origin of Chinese writing focuses on the legendary figure of Cang Jie, who, in at least one version of the story, possessed four eyes, symbolic of his keen powers of perception.⁵⁹ In the account that appears in the preface to the Han dynasty etymological dictionary Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters (Shuowen jiezi), Cang Jie, the scribe of the Yellow Emperor, invented writing after having “observ[ed] the traces left by the feet and paws of birds and beasts, [and] understood that they could be differentiated by their distinctive principles.”⁶⁰ This narrative links the shapes of Chinese characters directly to the natural phenomena from which they derive. Like footprints, a paradigmatic example of Peirce’s indexical sign, the characters Cang Jie is said to have created pointed to the essential properties of the objects to which they referred. In this way, they resembled the eight trigrams of the Book of Changes (Yijing), which, also according to legend, came into being when the ancient ruler Pao Xi “observed” (guan) patterns in heaven, on earth, and on the bodies of birds and beasts.⁶¹ Together these two etiological myths reinforce the notion that Chinese writing was grounded in—rather than imposed arbitrarily upon—natural phenomena.⁶²

Many centuries later, in the late Ming dynasty, however, Li ruefully observed that maintaining this natural connection between words and their referents was becoming increasingly difficult. His writings draw attention to a kind of semiotic slippage or erosion occurring around him, a process by which words were gradually becoming unhinged from the objects they had once designated. He alludes nostalgically to a bygone era when spoken words, like their written equivalents, possessed clear, precise referents. He notices, for instance, that in his own day, the word “disciple” (dizi) no longer referred to truly outstanding students, as it had putatively done in the time of Confucius. Li avers that only Confucius’s most outstanding disciple, Yan Hui, embodied the essence of discipleship, and so, after his untimely death, the word “disciple” permanently lost its referent. He further explains, “The love of learning died out with the death of Yan. So although the word ‘disciple’ persisted, there was no longer the actuality of any true disciple.”⁶³ Over time, the meaning of this word grew to encompass a wide array of less worthy students, and during this process of expansion, ambiguity and imprecision increased. Indeed, by the late Ming, this word was even being used synonymously with the term piaoke to refer to “whoremongers” and denizens of brothels!⁶⁴

Li observes a similarly distressing slippage in the use of the word “friend.” In an essay titled “On Friendship” (Pengyou pian), he remarks that the relationships his contemporaries regard as friendship have, in fact, very little to do with the true essence of friendship as practiced by the ancients. Sidestepping any discussion of the graphic origins of the two Chinese characters that make up this word, he simply muses that, as in the case of the word “disciple,” common parlance has distended the meaning of this word beyond its proper bounds. Li’s own view, grounded in long-standing Confucian precedent, is that true friendship must be lodged in trust and constituted by an ethical and emotional bond between gentlemen of virtue, companions in study, who deeply understand one another and goad one another to pursue righteousness.⁶⁵ Yet in recent times, Li notes with dismay, the word “friend” (pengyou) has come to connote all sorts of profit-driven associations. Many contemporaries even mistake abject gratitude for friendship and erroneously regard the senior officials who promoted them on the civil service examinations as intimate friends.⁶⁶ Li maintains that by expanding the semantic range of the word “friend” these contemporaries have diluted the concept of friendship and warped the word’s original meaning.

The notion that the Chinese language, whether written or spoken, had become unmoored from its origins in natural phenomena was shared by many of Li’s Chinese contemporaries. The words they used on a daily basis, they felt, had shed much of their intrinsic, etymological affinity to the objects they had once designated and, in taking on new meanings, had strayed far from their roots. The chasm opening up between the basic meanings of words and the miscellaneous definitions they had accrued by the end of the sixteenth century stimulated anxiety and concern, for as Bruce Rusk has argued, they believed that flawed etymologies could distort, obscure, or even pervert interpretations of the classics. In an effort to prevent such distortions, a number of Ming scholars during the Jiajing reign (1522–1566) undertook to compile paleographic dictionaries aimed at recovering, to the greatest extent possible, the sources of Chinese characters.⁶⁷

Others contented themselves simply with remarking upon the discrepancies they observed. The renowned Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who met Li on three occasions and exchanged poetry and gifts with him, pointed out in his treatise on memory, Mnemonic Techniques of the West (Xiguo jifa), “As the distance from antiquity increases, characters mutate from their original forms and the natural writing of times past [comes to be considered] strange.”⁶⁸ Ricci further commented upon the fluctuation in the meanings of words. In his discourse On Friendship (Jiaoyou lun), which, like Mnemonic Techniques of the West, was published in Chinese, he observes, “Among the ancients, friend was a venerated name, but today we put it up for sale and make it comparable to a commodity.”⁶⁹ Ricci’s comments are of particular interest because they resonate strongly with observations made by his fellow Europeans, discussed below, and also by his Chinese contemporaries.

A generation earlier, the well-respected poet and literary critic He Jingming (1483–1521) regretted that the word “teacher,” like the word “friend,” had wandered from its original, ancient meaning: “the word persists,” he affirmed, “but the substance has been lost.”⁷⁰ And Xu Wei lamented that the word “poetry” too had shed its meaning on account of contemporary poets’ excessive reliance on imitation.⁷¹ Writing in the generation after Li Zhi’s death, Jin Shengtan also remarked upon the arbitrariness of language, declaring, “I do not know what an ‘ink stone’ is, but since everyone else calls it an ink stone, I can call it an ink stone too.”⁷² These sentiments contrast what things have come to be called with what contemporaries felt they truly were or ought to be. They thus highlight discrepancies between the meanings words had come to have by the late Ming and their putatively lost, original essences.

Contemporary anxieties about the indeterminacy of language resonate with the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names (zhengming), the locus classicus of which is Analects 12.11: “The ruler rules; the minister ministers; the father fathers; the son sons.”⁷³ Here Confucius teaches that in an ideal society only he who behaves as a ruler merits the title of ruler; no discrepancy between words and their referents is permitted. The rhetorical structure of the passage—with its paired repetitions of nouns and verbs—emphasizes the congruency the Master posits between words and the actions and responsibilities they denote. Guaranteeing the etymological purity of words and their indexical relationship to their referents was key to the project of rectifying language, but equally important if not more so were the ethical and political aspects of this doctrine.

The political and ethical connotations of zhengming are evident in the homophony between the word zheng 正, meaning “straight” or “upright” and carrying the sense of moral integrity, and zheng 政, “to govern.” Thus the rectification of names means the “straightening” or “putting in order” of names. It may also be translated as “governing names,” “governing by means of names,” or “bringing about a state in which names are properly governed.”⁷⁴ In the following statement, Confucius outlines what he believes to be the disastrous political consequences of failing to rectify names:

When words are not correct, what is said will not sound reasonable, when what is said does not sound reasonable, affairs will not culminate in success; when affairs do not culminate in success, rites and music will not flourish; when rites and music do not flourish, punishments will not fit the crimes; when punishments do not fit the crimes, the common people will not know where to put hand and foot. Thus when the gentleman names something, the name is sure to be usable in speech, and when he says something this is sure to be practicable. The thing about the gentleman is that he is anything but casual where speech is concerned.⁷⁵

From the negative scenario Confucius sketches—i.e. what happens when names are not rectified—we may infer the positive implications of rectifying names: what is said may indeed be reasonable, and affairs have a chance of culminating in success. In other words, this passage implies that without precise and accurate language, the ethical and political welfare of the state will be in peril. That Confucius deems correct language a sine qua non for just governance is further emphasized in his assertion that, if entrusted with affairs of state, his first act would be to rectify language.⁷⁶ Xunzi too places great emphasis on this concept. He states, “When the king sets about regulating names, if the names and the realities to which they apply are made fixed and clear so that he can carry out the [Dao] and communicate his intentions to others, then he may guide the people with circumspection and unify them.”⁷⁷

Although fundamentally the rectification of names addresses the correspondence between a person’s title and the actions or role appropriate for him to perform in society, this concept is malleable enough to have been used to elucidate—by analogy—relationships between other sorts of signs and referents. Consider, for instance, Confucius’s saying “If a gu does not fulfill its function as a gu, what kind of a gu is it after all? What kind of a gu is it after all?”⁷⁸ The Qing commentator Mao Qiling (1623–1716) interprets this perplexing dictum as follows: “Gu is the name of a wine vessel which can contain two sheng. The meaning of gu is ‘in small quantity.’ In ancient times, a measure of three sheng of wine was considered just right, five sheng excessive and two sheng a moderate quantity. Vessels were manufactured accordingly. Hence when making vessels and giving names, the meaning is based on something. . . . Now although the vessel is called a gu, it is frequently used to drink large quantities.”⁷⁹ According to Mao, although the signifier—the word gu—remained in circulation unchanged, its relation to its signified changed over time as drinking habits became increasingly immoderate. Whereas the word gu initially indicated a small vessel, it both retained this original sense and simultaneously broadened to take on new meanings. The term thus mutated from precision to ambiguity, as the words “disciple” and “friend” did in the late Ming. As John Makeham argues, it is this heightened ambiguity, and the moral degeneracy it implies, that prompted Confucius to remark with scorn, “What kind of a gu is it after all? What kind of a gu is it after all?” As we have seen, ambiguities of this nature vexed Li, who insisted that, to the greatest extent possible, individual words must seamlessly correspond to the objects they designate, just as entire writings must manifest their author’s sincere emotions.

Makeham is quick to point out that “the problem of the [slipperiness of the meaning of the word] gu [cannot] be divorced from . . . a breakdown in people’s performing their proper social roles; rather [it should be] seen [as] indicative of just such a breakdown.”⁸⁰ In other words, only in a society in which rulers fail to behave as rulers (or disciples disciples) could there be a gu that does not perform its function as a gu. The mismatch between the words for objects or roles and the objects or roles themselves, Li would concur, attests to the chaotic and unruly state signification.

Recognizing the ways Confucian thought casts the degradation of language as indicative of social breakdown, we can begin to appreciate the urgency with which Li sought on many occasions to address this problem.⁸¹ From his perspective, halting the insidious slippage that was preventing words from unambiguously designating their referents—as well as the deliberate manipulations that resulted in similar consequences—was essential to restoring the social order. To some extent, Li’s advocacy of linguistic transparency runs parallel to and resembles discussions of signification emanating from Renaissance Europe, where linguists and philologists at the turn of the seventeenth century were also registering distress over the gulf they perceived opening up between signs and their referents. Like their Chinese contemporaries in late Ming China, these European scholars aspired to correct linguistic imprecisions and to institute a clearer and more transparent form of language. Independently of the concept of zhengming, they surmised that bridging this gap might bring about a harmonious society. And although these utopian language theories on opposite ends of Eurasia failed for different reasons, thinkers in both regions shared the idealistic notion that reforming language might provide a salve for curing the verbal deceptions symptomatic of early modernity.

THE RECTIFICATION OF NAMES AND EUROPEAN LANGUAGE THEORY

As Li and his Chinese compatriots were wringing their hands over the perversions and distortions of the Chinese language as it was spoken and written in their day, contemporaries in Europe were evincing similar dissatisfaction with the imperfections of their many vernacular tongues. They shared the perception that signification had lapsed from an originary, transparent mode and become increasingly misleading and imprecise. This notion, the ethical implications of which I have traced in China to the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names, had equally deep, although different and culturally specific roots in the philosophical and religious traditions of western Europe. Europe had its own myths of a pristine, original language in which words had conveyed meaning in a precise, unambiguous manner. Mankind’s first language in the Garden of Eden was understood to have been based on natural correspondences between the identity of things and the names by which they were known.⁸² Michel Foucault describes the situation in these terms: “In its original form, when it was given to men by God himself, language was an absolutely certain and transparent sign for things, because it resembled them. The names of things were lodged in the things they designated, just as strength is written in the body of the lion, regality in the eye of the eagle [etc.].”⁸³ The relationship between linguistic signs and referents is posited as rooted in perfect identity: Adam, the story implies, calls the lion “lion” because some mystical essence binds the sound of this word to the majestic beast it designates.⁸⁴ As Bruce Rusk rightly points out, whereas early modern Europeans tended to focus on the sounds of language, their Chinese contemporaries paid close attention to both sonic and visual properties. Despite this difference in emphasis, the biblical narrative portrays Adam in a role analogous to that of Cang Jie and Pao Xi. Just as these mythological Chinese figures reportedly based the shapes of the trigrams and the forms of Chinese characters on patterns already existing in nature, so too did Adam merely ratify inherent (nonarbitrary) relationships between signs and referents. Indeed, according to Renaissance interpretations of the Bible, not only did the names Adam conferred upon the animals—and by extension all the words of the Edenic language—dovetail seamlessly with the things they designated, but the whole of creation constituted one perfect interlocking sign system manifesting God’s majesty, the “book of nature,” which Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) described as “that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the Eyes of all.”⁸⁵

Unfortunately, however, as in the case of the Chinese legends examined earlier, this putatively transparent first language, in which meaning inhered in each and every word, did not endure. Genesis tells of a cataclysmic shift that occurred at Babel when God confounded men’s tongues as punishment for having arrogantly attempted to build a tower so tall it reached the heavens.⁸⁶ From that point on, the pure language of Eden was shattered, its pieces purportedly scattered into the seventy-two languages of the world.⁸⁷

By the end of the sixteenth century, Foucault argues, Europeans began to exhibit cognizance of—and in many cases fascination with—the arbitrariness and conventionality of their many languages. Undoubtedly the rising prominence of vernacular languages called attention to the diversity of human tongues. And earlier in the sixteenth century, the publication of books like Erasmus’s trilingual Bible heightened this awareness by raising thorny philological and doctrinal questions concerning the translation of scripture. If, expressed variously in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the words of the Bible took on different valences, where exactly did God’s truth ultimately reside? While Europeans struggled to make sense of these vexing questions, missionary activity and flourishing trade relations with Asia and the New World introduced scores of foreign words into the vocabularies of European languages, greatly broadening Europeans’ linguistic horizons.⁸⁸ These factors contributed to the widespread recognition that, unlike the mythical, transparent Edenic language, the modern languages of Europe were incapable of transmitting meaning in a unitary, unambiguous manner. They had changed with use and become contaminated by the deliberate or accidental admixture of foreign elements. Moreover, each language possessed only shards or fragments of the original, Edenic language.

The resultant arbitrariness of language attracted commentary from across Europe. Shakespeare’s Juliet famously asks, “What’s in a name?,” and answers, “A rose by any other word would smell as sweet.”⁸⁹ And in an essay on glory, Montaigne makes a similar point, which echoes Jin Shengtan’s remark on the word “inkstone”: “There is the name and there is the thing. The name is a sound which designates and signifies the thing; the name is not a part of the thing or of the substance, it is an extraneous piece attached to the thing, and outside of it.”⁹⁰ Elsewhere he observes, “Our disputes are purely verbal. I ask what is ‘nature,’ ‘pleasure,’ ‘circle,’ ‘substitution.’ The question is one of words, and is answered in the same way. ‘A stone is a body.’ But if you pressed on: ‘And what is a body?’—‘Substance.’—‘And what is substance?’ and so on.”⁹¹ Statements such as these illustrate Europeans’ growing awareness of the discrepancy between the words they habitually used and the essence of the things to which these words referred. Such comments also highlight the perceived difficulty, if not the utter impossibility, of ever achieving clear, unimpeded signification.

But if Montaigne and Shakespeare were content to describe dispassionately the gulf they observed separating signifiers from their referents, other sixteenth-century Europeans urged their contemporaries to endeavor to remedy the situation. In worrying that the reigning indeterminacy of language might lead not only to imprecision but also to ethical depravity, Europeans such as Geofroy Tory (1480–1533) more closely resembled Chinese contemporaries like Li Zhi. In his authorial preface to the Champ Fleury, a treatise on language and typography, Tory points an accusing finger at “men who divert themselves by striving to corrupt and disfigure” the French language.⁹² Their actions, he chides, not only hamper communication but also reflect poorly on their authors’ moral character, since it is the duty of good men to speak clearly and honestly.⁹³ Tory writes:

O devoted lovers of well-formed letters, would God that some noble heart would occupy itself in establishing and ordering by rule our French language! By this means many thousands of men would strive . . . to make use of good, honest words. If it is not so established and ordered, we will find that from fifty years to fifty years the French language will be in large part changed for the worse. The language of to-day is changed in numberless ways from the language as it was fifty years since, or thereabout. . . . One could find tens of thousands of . . . words and phrases abandoned & changed. . . . I find, further, that there is another kind of men who corrupt our language even more. They are the Innovators and Coiners of new words. . . . Those persons who coin [words] are incapable of sound reasoning. However, if our tongue were duly conformed to rule, and polished, such ordure could be ejected. Therefore, I pray you, let us all enhearten one another, and bestir ourselves to purify it.⁹⁴

Underlying the notion that a language could be purified—or better yet, that the Edenic language itself could be recovered and restored—was the belief that sparks of this original language still inhered in the various languages of the world. The ultimate task, then, was to identify where precisely these fragments lay hidden and, by bringing them together, to reconstruct the language of Adam.⁹⁵ In some cases this project of restoring perfect signification even coincided with the utopian aspiration of bringing an end to religious and political discord.⁹⁶ For the hope was that if the universal language could be rediscovered, the will of God would be revealed, and peace would reign on earth.

The notion that by rectifying the use of language one could bring about order and social harmony echoes the logic underlying the Confucian doctrine of zhengming. Yet the manner in which European language theorists pursued this goal as well as the conclusions they reached differed greatly from Li’s advocacy of the rectification of language in Ming China. Neither Li nor his European contemporaries succeeded in restoring pure signification, but Li differed from his European contemporaries in that, unlike them, he regarded the rectification of language not merely as a utopian project—a distant desideratum—but as a feasible goal and a practical guide to ethical conduct. His commitment to this principle is evident in his reluctance to conform to common parlance, his adamant desire to live up to the (often derogatory) names applied to him, and his insistence upon behaving in ways that accorded with his beliefs. These eccentric behaviors bolstered his reputation as a “heretical” figure and led to misunderstandings and even outright hostilities between himself, his peers, and his superiors. By contrast, few if any Europeans interested in analogous problems incurred ill consequences for their commitment to restoring the Edenic language. For them, this quest was primarily an intellectual pursuit, albeit one with ethical ramifications.

Throughout the sixteenth century, European philologists pored over obscure lexicons, seeking to unearth, through studies in comparative philology, traces of the primordial lingua humana. By midcentury Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) in France and Theodor Bibliander (1505–1564) and Konrad Gesner (1516–1565) in Switzerland had each undertaken major projects aimed at classifying and systematically comparing the languages of the world.⁹⁷ Meanwhile accounts of the Chinese language began to seep into Europe. The Dominican friar Gaspar da Cruz (ca. 1520–1570), who traveled to China in the mid-sixteenth century, reported that the written language of that nation was composed of “a great multitude of characters, signifying each thing by a character.”⁹⁸ And the Florentine humanist merchant Filippo Sassetti (1540–1588), who traveled to India, opined that Chinese characters each represented a distinct concept.⁹⁹ Juan González de Mendoza (1545–1618), in his highly influential Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China, concurred, stating that “one figure or character unto them doth signify one thing.”¹⁰⁰ Francis Bacon would later repeat this claim in his Advancement of Learning.¹⁰¹ Miraculously, Chinese characters seemed to possess the ability to convey meaning to speakers of diverse languages. The putatively universal validity of this system of signification, along with the “natural” relationship between its graphs and the objects to which they referred, captivated the imagination of Europeans in pursuit of a perfect language. David Porter explains how “a European audience obsessively concerned by the spreading lawlessness of speech” fell under the thrall of “a fixed and unequivocal correspondence between words and the meanings they are taken to represent.”¹⁰² Thus in 1586, the French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère declared Chinese a sacred language whose symbols constituted a “shorthand” for nature, and less than a century later, the Englishman John Webb argued in his Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language that Chinese was, in fact, the lost Edenic language.¹⁰³

Looking east to China, these European language theorists believed they had found in the Chinese language a solution to the problem of linguistic instability vexing Europe. To them, the purportedly intrinsic relationship between signifier and signified in written Chinese promised a degree of authenticity and semiotic stability lacking in the languages of Europe. Bacon, for instance, opined that Chinese characters embodied a certain “reality” because, unlike European languages, they expressed “neither letters nor words . . . but things or notions [themselves].”¹⁰⁴ Moreover, many European language theorists assumed (erroneously) that the shapes of Chinese characters had been preserved, unaltered, for millennia and therefore attributed to this language a primordial purity not entirely unlike the purity Li Zhi and many of his Chinese contemporaries (as well as Ricci) believed had once characterized ancient Chinese, but which their own contemporary discourse no longer exemplified. Ignorant of the historicity of the Chinese language, Webb interpreted Chinese as the repository of an unadulterated, prelapsarian truth.

The European aspiration to restore the correspondence between signs and referents bears comparison to the Chinese project of zhengming in that sixteenth-century Chinese and Europeans shared the perception that they were each living in an era of debased signification, imposture, and groundless imitation. Many on both ends of the Eurasian continent believed that the forms of Chinese characters had originally been inspired by nature and therefore that they possessed the ability to convey meaning in a nonarbitrary way. Additionally, they shared the ambition to restore this “natural” signification in the hope of taming the linguistic chaos of the day and bringing about an era of social harmony. Where Li and other sinophone observers of the Chinese language differed from these purely European-trained language theorists, however, was in their insight into the mutability of the Chinese language over time. Unlike the Europeans discussed above, Li recognized that in diverse contexts the same Chinese graphs had the ability to acquire new referents, and in various contexts the same words might take on radically diverse meanings.

But although Li arguably exhibited even greater zeal for the endeavor of stabilizing language than did many European linguists, his writings bristle with flamboyant uses of irony, contradiction, and paradox, which seem to undercut his repeated assertions that words should signify transparently. The unacknowledged gaps between Li’s stated theory of language and his practice as an author make it difficult to interpret his pronouncements on the rectification of language. Yet, as the following chapter argues, his embrace of verbal self-contradiction paradoxically attests to the authenticity of his writings and signals his participation in a widespread early modern ethos of indeterminacy.