CHAPTER 6

Provoking or Persuading Readers?

Li Zhi and the Incitement of Critical Judgment

An avid and omnivorous reader as well as an acerbic critic, Li Zhi was one of China’s most incisive and provocative interpreters of his generation. His comments on all manner of texts consistently opposed conventional views and overturned orthodox judgments. In considering his practice as a reader, his theory of reading, and the responses his works elicited from contemporary readers, two major questions arise. These are, first, whether meaning is fixed, determinate, and singular, or flexible, subjective, and open-ended. In other words, does the true meaning of a text reside deep within it, waiting to be extracted by a perceptive reader, or is meaning constructed—and sometimes willfully imposed—by subjective, independent-minded readers? The second question, related to the first, is whether Li’s adversarial commentary and eccentric interpretations functioned persuasively or provocatively. Did his judgments on the texts on which he commented inspire their first readers to trust his opinions as true, or did they goad readers to follow his example and come up with their own original ideas?

The meaning of a text can never be reduced simply to the author’s intention or the reader’s interpretation; it is necessarily produced in the dynamic interaction between the two.¹ Nonetheless, authors may, and often do, attempt, through rhetoric, to control the meaning of their works or, conversely, to delegate to readers the responsibility of making sense of their writings.² What is perplexing about Li’s texts is that they do both. When describing his own method of reading, he sometimes claims to be able to penetrate to the core of a text he has read and expose its latent meaning, while at other times he denies that doing so is even possible. Li’s contradictory attitudes, which perplexed his initial readers, signal his participation in a trend perceptible in both early modern China and Europe in which some bold readers gradually liberated themselves from authoritative interpretations and began to trust themselves to arrive at their own conclusions.

The preface writers to Another Book to Burn consistently clung to the more conservative view, grounded in Confucian hermeneutics, that textual meaning was firmly anchored in the author’s intentions and that the role of the editor was to persuade readers of the authenticity of his edition. At times Li valorizes the notion that textual meaning is determinate. He boasts, for instance, that his superior vision allows him to perceive nuances of meaning hidden from more obtuse readers. His sparkling fresh commentaries on texts of all kinds may be understood to corroborate this view: by bringing to light unnoticed aspects of the source texts, they demonstrated his unerring insight and positioned themselves—and him—as credible sources of authority.

For this reason, they have been seen as prefiguring the inventive and unconventional fiction and drama commentaries of Jin Shengtan and other late imperial commentators on popular culture. These commentators, it has been argued, deployed an arsenal of rhetorical strategies aimed to convince readers of the acuity of their readings and to shore up their authority as reliable “brokers of meaning.”³ To the suggestion that their floridly subjective interpretations might have been designed, on the contrary, to provoke readers to develop their own views, the literary scholar Martin Huang cautions, “Despite all the seeming . . . advocacy for the ‘reader,’ the traditional commentators [such as Jin] were ultimately concerned with ‘the correct reading’ or ‘the control of meaning.’ They would have certainly shunned the ‘non-hierarchical’ idea that each reader is entitled to his own reading.”⁴ These remarks suggest that Li, like Jin, may never have questioned the premise that texts possess a stable, durative meaning. Even though his own judgments bucked all convention, some late Ming readers interpreted Li’s writings as purveyors of sound judgments to be absorbed and accepted. And even more readers worried lest others, less discriminating than they, might assent to his views uncritically.

Yet to emphasize Li’s attempts to control the meaning of the texts on which he commented or to convince readers to endorse his outlandish judgments risks overlooking a more important aspect of his writing. On several occasions Li explicitly undermines the notion that meaning inheres in texts. He contradicts the assertion that a reader’s task is to drill down and reveal authorial intentions. On the contrary, he opines that the meaning of a text is forever expanding as each successive reader negotiates his own relationship with the work. This attitude resembles what literary theorist Robert Scholes refers to as “centrifugal reading,” for it releases readers from the “centripetal” task of attempting to reconstruct authorial intentions.⁵ Instead it encourages each reader to approach the text playfully, perhaps even irreverently, always mindful that future readers may disagree with his interpretations.

Understood in this light, Li’s peculiar judgments on the textual tradition on which he was reared are best regarded not as dogmas for readers to accept but as catalysts that incite them to follow his example by exercising their own critical faculties. Surviving comments of late Ming and early Qing readers of Li’s books demonstrate that quite a few of them rose to meet this challenge. Emboldened by the bravura with which Li himself reversed canonical judgments, these readers turned the same methods against Li’s writings and questioned the validity of his pronouncements.

Independent-minded readers, even cheeky ones, have always existed, but the early modern period provided a particularly fertile ground in which they could develop their subjective, appropriative strategies of reading and give free rein to their interpretive agency. Surrounded by misleading appearances and unstable linguistic, sartorial, numismatic, and bibliographic signs, growing numbers of readers began to recognize that textual meaning was not monolithic but open to interpretation—indeed manipulation. Under these conditions, the idea that meaning could be pinned to a single, unchanging point of view such as a traditional gloss putatively transmitting the author’s intent became increasingly untenable, and readers accordingly took upon themselves the responsibility for passing contingent, subjective judgments on the texts they encountered. Although on some level Li still yearned for a stable system of signification (illustrated in chapter one, as well as in his endorsements of the centrality of authorial intentions), his extravagantly inconsistent, bluff-laden texts exemplify his bold attempts to cope with a changing reality. By daring to impose meaning on the world around him, Li produced writings that echo texts composed by increasingly self-assured readers from across early modern Europe.

Li’s books managed to dislodge some contemporary Chinese readers from their habitually compliant, author-centered manner of reading, and impelled them to develop new strategies for making sense. However, this fact does not imply that Li consciously intended to produce this effect, nor that all or even most of his readers responded in this way. Some readers approached Li’s volumes as reverentially as they did orthodox commentaries on canonical works. Nonetheless, in an era of increasingly indeterminate meaning, the ability to assess critically for oneself signs of all varieties was swiftly gaining importance, while the habit of relying on others’ fixed judgments was growing ever more dangerous. The fact that Li’s works sparked controversy over how best to interpret them marks them—along with clothing, money, and book editions—as manifestations of the troubled state of signification in early modernity. Yet by using rhetoric that prompted some readers to hone their powers of personal judgment, Li’s texts served not only as symptoms of an unruly age but as strategies for addressing and perhaps even overcoming these symptoms.

LI ZHI AS A READER

Li pored over books throughout his life and consecrated his retirement to quiet study. In the preface to his poem “On the Joy of Reading” (Du shu le), composed in 1596 in the seclusion of his monastic retreat at the Cloister of the Flourishing Buddha, he avers, “From my early days to my old age, I have . . . devoted myself single-mindedly to reading.”⁶ He even describes reading as the single pleasure remaining to this solitary septuagenarian:

If I pack up the books on my shelf,

Where will I find my happiness?

Refreshing my spirit, enjoying myself

For me lies precisely in nothing but this.⁷

Li’s devotion to reading, especially in his final years, attracted his contemporaries’ attention. Liu Dongxing reported that “the gentleman was constantly occupied with books. All day long he would copy them out and annotate them for himself,” and Jiang Yihua (fl. Wanli period) confirmed that Li “read day and night, summer and winter, never ceasing.”⁸

Always curious, Li perused books of every genre. As Jiang Yihua attests, “All his life he read widely in [Confucian] documents and histories. . . . He also was familiar with Buddhist scriptures and classics on divination.”⁹ Yuan Zhongdao’s biography of Li corroborates this account, stating that Li’s reading included “tales of the Daoist immortals, Buddhist religious works, the Li sao, the historical writings of Sima Qian and Ban Gu, the poetry of Tao Qian, Xie Lingyun, Liu Zongyuan, and Du Fu, as well as the more remarkable among fictional writings and dramas by famous Song and Yuan playwrights.”¹⁰ Yet for Li, reading was no passive enterprise. He read actively, even aggressively, with brush in hand, and, in the words of Jiang Yihua, “his critical comments never ceased.”¹¹ Although I am not aware of any extant manuscripts that preserve Li’s marginalia, he reportedly adorned his volumes with copious comments. Yuan Zhongdao writes, “On snow-white paper, with red annotations, [his] neatly ordered characters marched down the page between precise margins, original ideas constantly bursting forth.”¹² These statements demonstrate Li’s passion for reading and point to the critical attention he lavished on the texts he studied.

Li made no secret of his eclectic tastes or his penchant for sharp critique. He is credited with having published annotated editions of both canonical texts and works of lowbrow fiction and drama. And his name is associated with incisive commentaries on everything from orthodox Confucian texts such as The Four Books and The Book of Changes to Sunzi’s Art of War, the Buddhist Record of Causes and Effects (Yinguo lu), and popular literature such as The Romance of the Western Chamber and Outlaws of the Marsh. Although, as noted in the previous chapter, many of these annotated editions are likely apocryphal, there is no doubt that for Li analyzing, dissecting, and recording his opinions on what he read—not merely absorbing the ideas passively—were fundamental to his practice of reading.¹³

Li’s interpretive practices often accentuated “oppositional reading” (fandu), a strategy that the literary scholar Yang Yucheng defines as “a kind of reading against the grain, the most striking aspect of which is its ironic, mocking character.”¹⁴ Li regularly recast the meanings of well-known phrases, radically reappraised the ethical status of historical figures, and overturned orthodox judgments. Yet the motive underlying these virtuosic interpretive moves proved difficult for some readers to discern. Did Li conceive of his works as presenting readers with conclusive, binding, and irrefutable judgments, or did he expect the unprecedented opinions he voiced to stimulate readers’ doubt? In his authorial preface to the first part of A Book to Keep (Hidden), Li dispassionately acknowledges several possibilities:

It would be fine for one to say that the judgments of right and wrong presented here are just the views of one person—me, Li Zhuowu. And it would also be fine for one to say that they are the collective judgments of millions upon millions of generations of great sages and worthies. It would be fine for one to say that I have overturned the judgments of right and wrong established through millions of generations, and then [in turn] for one to overturn my judgments of right and wrong. But it would also be fine for one to put one’s trust in my judgments.¹⁵

In this passage, Li elaborates several incompatible ways readers may approach his writings; these range from the most passive, reverent acceptance of his claims to far more aggressive techniques. Yet despite the incongruences among these stances, Li seems to value them all equally, judging them all “fine” (ke). The conflicting responses he imagines his books may elicit from readers foreshadow the very real debates that would ensue in the late Ming and early Qing as the first historical readers struggled to figure out how best to construe the meaning of his texts. Yet before analyzing contemporaries’ reactions to Li’s works, I will examine the contradictory postures Li himself adopted toward the works he read, as well as the steps he took to incline readers to accept his judgments and the measures he used to induce them to reject them.

PENETRATING VISION

Li’s preface to the poem “On the Joy of Reading” details the many advantages he enjoyed, which enabled him produce such astute interpretations of all he read: his eyes, his disposition, his feelings, and most important his insight and his audacity. His emphasis on these last two faculties hints at his endorsement of Confucian hermeneutics, according to which a discerning reader must probe the text before his eyes, seeking to discover latent traces of the author’s intent. In the passage below, Li does not question the basic validity of this paradigm of reading; rather, he claims to possess such extraordinary insight that he can perceive textual subtleties that would elude less attentive readers. His own acute observations, he maintains, lead him to draw conclusions that boldly depart from established norms. He explains:

My insight is a blessing, for when I look into a book I can see the person who wrote it, and moreover I can see the state of that person’s whole being. Of course, a great many writers since antiquity have read books and commented on the affairs of the world. Some of them see the visage; some of them see the body covered with skin; some of them see the blood vessels; and some of them see the muscles and bones. But the bones are as far as anyone ever goes. And although some of these scholars claim to have burrowed into the internal organs, in fact they have not even penetrated the bones. This [ability to see straight into the marrow of the author’s bones] is what I consider to be the foremost of my blessings.

My audacity is a blessing, for those who were envied and admired in earlier ages so much that they are regarded as worthies, I myself have mostly regarded as fakes. I have mostly regarded them as old-fashioned, worthless, and useless. Yet those who have been despised, abandoned, reviled, and spit upon, I truly believe could be entrusted with our country, our families, and ourselves as individuals. My sense of what is right and wrong, as in this instance, gravely transgresses what people in earlier ages used to think—so what could I do without audacity? This is the next most important of what I call my blessings from heaven.¹⁶

If texts manifest their author’s aspirations or intent (zhi), then reading becomes a process of following the author’s words back to their source. As Mencius states, “We use our understanding to trace [the meaning of a text] back to what was [originally] in the writer’s mind—this is how to grasp it.”¹⁷ Or, as Liu Xie elaborates in his fifth-century treatise on literary criticism, “The reader opens the text in order to enter the feelings [of the author].”¹⁸ Although texts cannot “mis-manifest” their author’s intent, a gap always separates the fullness of the author’s pre-articulated feelings from the necessarily incomplete expression of these feelings in words. As the “Appended Sayings” (Xi ci zhuan) to the Book of Changes states, “What is written does not give full expression to what is said; what is said does not give full expression to the concept in the mind.”¹⁹ Thus the more adept or “insightful” the reader, the more nimbly he will traverse this gulf and accurately reconstruct the author’s intended meaning. The understanding that the reader must strive to reconstitute authorial intent prevailed throughout late imperial times.²⁰

Li’s assertion “When I look into a book I can see the person who wrote it, and moreover I can see the state of that person’s whole being” corresponds to this understanding of reading as decipherment. The difference he posits between his own interpretive skills and those of other people is one of degree, not kind. And since the notion that an adept reader would conjure an image of the author in his mind’s eye was widespread in both sixteenth-century China and Europe, the method of reading Li describes conforms to a model familiar to contemporary readers.²¹ Li asserts that what distinguishes him from other readers is nothing more than the penetrating vision he claims to possess. His insight, he avows, enables him to see more deeply than anyone else into the metaphorical “bodies” of the texts he studies, and therefore to grasp their true, intended meaning. As he arrogantly declares elsewhere, “When it comes to reading Confucian texts . . . truly no one is more skilled than [I,] Master Zhuowu!”²² Guided by his powerful vision, Li proclaims, he arrives at judgments that “transgress” (li) the interpretations of people whose views are more limited than his own.

Li’s keen vision, he maintains, sets him apart from contemporaries, whom he repeatedly characterizes as failing to use their eyes. In the excerpt below, composed in 1588, he hints that whereas he boldly dares to trust in his own eyesight and therefore scrutinizes original texts directly, less perspicacious readers rely excessively on the insights of others and comply too readily with received tradition. They timidly and docilely mouth authoritative interpretations that, with each successive generation, stray further and further from the original text and its authorial intent. For this reason, such readers attain only a superficial or skewed understanding of the meaning of the texts at hand. In an essay nominally addressing the incongruous presence of a Confucian statue in a Buddhist monastery, he writes:

The Confucians of antiquity interpreted Confucius conjecturally; our fathers and teachers recited these conjectures and passed them down, and young children listen to them as if blind and deaf [i.e., incapable of interpreting the texts for themselves]. When ten thousand mouths all utter the same phrase, none can counter what is said; when for a thousand years there is only a single standard, no one can come to understand the world for himself. Nobody says, “I merely chant the words of Confucius.” Instead they claim, “I understand Confucius himself.” . . . So today, although people possess eyes, nobody uses them.²³

Li asserts that the reason other readers’ understanding lags behind his is not that those individuals lack the eyes to discern authorial intentions, but rather that they have been trained not to use this organ. Contrasting himself with these cowards, Li insinuates that whereas they do not examine the source texts for themselves, he boldly pierces through accrued layers of commentary to reveal the pure, true meaning below.

IMPOSING SUBJECTIVE MEANING

The conception of reading as a search for authorial intent clashes with the view, expressed elsewhere in Li’s writings, that authors’ intentions cannot be known, and therefore that readers should freely establish their own views of the meanings of texts. Perhaps expanding on the notion that incisive reading demands audacity, Li even suggests that commenting on existing texts is as an agonistic enterprise, a contest for control over meaning in which skilled readers struggle to wrest authority away from authors and to assert their own interpretive independence. Casting himself as one such remarkably tactical reader, Li writes, “When ordinary people write, they begin from the outside and attack inwards; when I write, I start from the inside and attack outwards. Having infiltrated the enemy’s moat, I eat their grain and command their troops; then, when I level my attack, I leave them utterly devastated.”²⁴ Although this passage avoids explicit mention of the act of reading, it seems nonetheless to illuminate the aggression Li associates with this act. If Mencius encouraged readers to develop empathy for the author’s point of view, the theory of reading Li suggests here posits an antagonistic or perhaps parasitic relationship between readers and the texts or authors they take as their subject matter. Opportunistically regarding the words and ideas lodged inside source texts as so much ammunition stored up inside an enemy stronghold, Li describes how he sneaks into these battlements and redeploys the stockpiled resources to serve his own end. Reading of this sort aims to strengthen the individual reader’s interpretation at the expense of the original text or its author’s intent. It thus resembles what Michel de Certeau describes as “reading as poaching,” for it deemphasizes authorial intentions and licenses the reader to manipulate textual meaning at will.²⁵

This strategy of reading may be understood in the context of Li’s contention, best expressed in his essay “On the Childlike Mind,” that the self-styled Confucian readers of his generation had become so mired in uncomprehendingly repeating orthodox interpretations of classical texts that they had lost the ability to think for themselves. Their training in rote memorization, he challenged, “obstructed” (zhang) their faculty of moral and aesthetic judgment, their all-important “childlike mind.”²⁶ Or, as he declared in his authorial preface to the first section of A Book to Keep (Hidden), ever since Confucianism was established as the state ideology in the Han dynasty, “every single person [had] accepted Confucius’ views on right and wrong; so there [had] been no [independent] judgments of right or wrong.”²⁷ Li’s theory of antagonistic reading may be understood as an attempt to counteract the sclerotic effects of this rigid adherence to orthodoxy and to promote a looser, more pluralistic, and more flexible method of interpretation. At stake here is not the issue of refining one’s powers of vision so as to perceive more clearly the singular, correct meaning that resides within a text. Rather, it is a question of releasing readers from the obligation to seek such bounded meaning in the first place. As he states in the same preface, “There is no fixed standard for people’s judgments of right and wrong.”²⁸

A letter Li wrote in 1584 or 1585 to his intellectual sparring partner, the high-ranking Confucian official Geng Dingxiang, crystallizes the point that readers must do more than simply seek authorial intentions; they must read in a manner consonant with their own nature:

When heaven produces a person, it has the use value of one person; it is not the case that we must wait and obtain [moral rectitude] from Confucius. If we had to wait and obtain it from Confucius, then a thousand years ago, before the time of Confucius, did people not get the chance to be [ethical]? . . . Confucius never once taught people to study Confucius. If Confucius had taught people to study Confucius, then why, when Yan Hui asked him about benevolence did he say: “To act benevolently is to follow yourself” and not “to act benevolently is to follow other people”? Why did he say “the learning of the ancients is: study for your own edification”? And why did he also say “The gentleman seeks [the Way] in himself”?²⁹

These statements, which resonate strongly with the Neo-Confucian concept of “learning for oneself” (zide) and echo Wang Yangming’s teaching that each individual has the potential to become a sage, imply that readers need not aim exclusively to reconstruct authorial intentions. Instead Li’s remarks illustrate his advocacy of the opinion that readers ought to cultivate the ability to assert their own opinions critically.³⁰

Li not only questioned the desirability of reading with the goal of seeking authorial intentions; he also expressed reservations about the practical feasibility of this endeavor. His essay “On the Childlike Mind” casts doubt on the textual authenticity of the classics and, echoing late Ming concerns about the inauthenticity of book editions, insinuates that in some cases these revered ancient texts may turn out to be forgeries. If so, then even the most careful examination of these writings could yield no insight into the minds of the sages. He writes:

As for the Six Classics, the Analects, and the Mencius, if they are not words of overdone reverence from official historians, they are phrases of bloated praise from loyal subjects. If not one or the other, then they are what misguided followers and dimwitted disciples wrote down of what they recall their teacher said. What they wrote had a beginning, but was missing an ending; or the followers remembered the conclusion, but forgot the introduction. These disciples put down in writing whatever they happened to see. Later scholars did not scrutinize these writings. They simply declared that these words came directly from the mouths of sages and decided to establish them as great classics. Who knows whether more than half these writings are not words from the mouths of sages?³¹

Elsewhere too Li cautions against “hastily issuing praise and blame based on [judgments gleaned from] ‘authoritative texts.’”³² Together these statements exhibit Li’s severe doubt whether the classics truly provide access to authorial intentions. Corroborating this view, a preface written by his acquaintance Liu Dongxing quotes Li as asserting that the ancients “harbored in their hearts many aspirations we [moderns] can never know.”³³ This audacious statement underscores Li’s belief in the fundamental alterity of readers and authors.

Acknowledging that reading a text could not necessarily provide any insight into the thought process of its author, Li is reported to have pragmatically announced, “There are many marvelous uses to which one may put the writings [of the ancients].”³⁴ The word “uses” (zuoyong) carries particular weight because it accentuates the contrast between Li’s view of reading articulated here—namely that readers may creatively appropriate the words of the ancients and bend them to their own ends—and the more traditional view expressed above, namely that readers must strive to uncover the singular correct, though sometimes imperfectly revealed intentions of the author. In a biography of Li, Yuan Zhongdao further remarked upon Li’s propensity to twist ancient texts to his own ends: “He particularly loved to read history and had great insight into the marvelous uses [zuoyong] to which [historical works could be put].”³⁵

Even if the intentions of the ancients could be known, Li asserts, all things change, and so the judgments of the sages may no longer prove relevant in the present: “What was right yesterday is wrong today, and tomorrow it is once again right.” So “even if Confucius were to be reborn again in these times, I am not sure what kinds of judgments of right and wrong he would make.”³⁶ These statements, reminiscent of Buddhist notions of impermanence and Daoist ideas of continual flux, accentuate the impossibility of arriving at any lasting judgment anchored in authoritative precedent. Rather, they correspond to the shifting state of signification in the early modern period.

CONTEXTS FOR SUBJECTIVE READING: CHINA AND EUROPE

If Li sporadically championed the view that the meanings of texts, even canonical texts, are not fixed but open-ended, he was certainly not alone in holding this opinion. Across China and throughout early modern Europe, sophisticated readers were attaining higher levels of autonomy and slowly beginning to put forth bold, individualistic and at times radically idiosyncratic interpretations of the texts that captivated their attention. According to European historians Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “All [students] of early modern culture . . . acknowledge that early modern readers did not passively receive but rather actively reinterpreted their texts.”³⁷ Humanists were known to read “pen in hand, causing the margins of texts . . . to overflow with personal reflections, marks manifesting the reader’s personal appropriation.”³⁸ Not infrequently, these remarks took on an adversarial, even pugnacious tone, and consequently, as another Renaissance scholar has remarked, in this period “meaning became a variable corresponding to each individual act of reading, not a fixed message.”³⁹

This emergent, early modern understanding of the reader’s role vis-à-vis the text contrasted with long-standing views of texts as purveyors of timeless wisdom.⁴⁰ Citing the medieval European practice of reading aloud rather than silently, Mary J. Carruthers has pointed out the close connection between monastic reading (lectio) and meditation (meditatio).⁴¹ By pronouncing each word with his own breath (anima), religious readers in Europe aspired to reanimate sacred texts and thereby gain access to their divine source of inspiration. In this context, reading required suspending one’s subjectivity and entering into spiritual communion with the author, and this quest for authorial intention may be seen to mirror Mencius’s idea of “tracing [the meaning of a text] back to what was [originally] in the writer’s mind.”⁴²

However, during the early modern period, as books became more readily available and the practice of reading more widespread in both Europe and China, readers began to approach texts more critically. Growing numbers of European readers, no longer content to restrict their comments to summaries, cross-references, synopses, or glosses—notes intended to elucidate the text’s “original” meaning—adopted an increasingly adversarial tone toward texts. Some even vigorously defended their subjective and appropriative habits of reading.⁴³ Montaigne, for instance, affirmed that “an able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.”⁴⁴ Like Li, Montaigne immodestly applauded his own prodigious powers of interpretation, proclaiming, “I have discovered in Livy a hundred things that another man has not read in him . . . and perhaps which the author never put there.”⁴⁵ These remarks echo Li’s invocation of the “many marvelous uses” to which he put the classical texts of his own tradition. Both men’s comments resonate with those of Jin Shengtan, who, in his notes on the popular drama The Romance of the Western Chamber (Xixiang ji), remarked, “The text of The Western Chamber bearing my commentary is my text; it is no longer the old Western Chamber.” Jin continued, “The Western Chamber is not a work written by an individual named Wang Shifu alone; when I read it carefully, it becomes a work of my own creation.”⁴⁶ These comments evince the tendency of avant-garde early modern readers to co-create the texts they read.⁴⁷

The notion that the most adept readers would press beyond authorial intentions and bring their own experiences to bear upon the texts they read received corroboration from Li’s contemporary Xu Wei. In his “Preface on Poetry” (Shuo shi xu), Xu praised readers who interpreted texts in ways that directly contradicted the author’s intentions. He even explicitly granted readers permission to deviate from orthodox interpretations and implied that doing so would yield results superior to those that could be achieved by cleaving to authorized interpretations. Anchoring his ideas in his own personal reading experience, Xu wrote, “I once read Cao Cao’s explication of Sunzi’s Art of War in thirteen chapters, as well as Li Jing and Tang Taizong’s discussions of [the same text]. Many of their interpretations did not accord with Sunzi’s original intentions. In discussing military strategy, the two men based their interpretations on their own daily experience, which they [then] applied to offensive and defensive strategies. These readers’ accomplishments surpassed those of Sunzi. From this we can tell that not everything written in books can be known to us, and [consequently] that one need not interpret texts in the orthodox manner.”⁴⁸ Xu’s emphasis on readers’ ability to make sense of texts for themselves supports Montaigne’s, Li’s, and Jin’s view that readers should deploy texts to their own creative ends.

A similar technique is recommended, although in jest, in Cervantes’s authorial preface to Don Quixote. This work features a conversation between the fictitious authorial persona and his trusted friend, who advises him to embellish the novel with quotations collected from assorted authoritative, classical texts. By suggesting that the quotations be used ornamentally without regard for their original context or their authors’ intentions, the friend legitimates the practice of readers-turned-writers appropriating whatever snippets of existing texts assist them in bolstering their own arguments. “With a pinch of Latin here and a pinch of Latin there,” the friend nudges, “[readers] might even think you’re a scholar, which isn’t a bad reputation.”⁴⁹ Montaigne is known to have practiced similar techniques. He delighted in mischievously quoting out of context and even deliberately cutting and splicing passages, twisting them to carry meanings in his text contrary to those they had conveyed in their original contexts.⁵⁰

A raft of analogous techniques began appearing at the turn of the seventeenth century in lowbrow genres of Chinese literature such as drama, vernacular fiction, joke books, and drinking manuals. As Shang Wei and He Yuming have analyzed, authors of texts in these unofficial genres undertook increasingly wild experiments in “hucksterish” (baifan) modes of reading that included extracting well-known phrases from canonical or other texts and juxtaposing them with vulgar material so as to generate new and often deeply subversive meanings.⁵¹ For instance the satirical novel The Plum in the Golden Vase several times quotes an excerpt from the opening line of the Confucian Analects: “To study and often review, there is no greater pleasure than this!” The phrase “there is no greater pleasure than this,” wrenched from its original context and inserted into the pages of this erotic novel, takes on a series of hilariously ironic new meanings. In one unforgettable passage it describes the voyeuristic frisson that lascivious Buddhist monks experience when they overhear the sounds of adulterous fornication.⁵² By dislodging this ultracanonical line from its original context, the anonymous author of the vernacular novel exhibited his utter disregard for authorial intentions and exemplified a radical and new, freewheeling attitude toward classical texts. As Li recommended, he treated the canonical text merely as raw material to be used in the manner that pleased him.

Thus in early modern Europe and China there was a growing understanding, especially among the cognoscenti, that meaning did not inhere in texts themselves, nor did it reside in some elusive concept of authorial intention. It was plural and malleable, not singular or rigid. And each reader had the right—perhaps even the responsibility—to amplify the meaning of the texts he encountered by bringing his own ideas, experiences, and judgments to bear upon them. In China personal expression of this nature was confined to unofficial genres such as those in which Li wrote, since official genres, including examination essays, still demanded strict adherence to canonical interpretations of the classics. Li’s commentaries, however, unbound by such dictates, freely voiced his own idiosyncratic interpretations and arguably even encouraged readers to develop their own critical faculties.

LI ZHI’S INTERPRETATIONS: PENETRATING TO THE CORE OR IMPOSING SUBJECTIVE MEANING?

Many of Li’s comments studied below seem to illustrate the centrifugal conception of textual meaning developing in this period and to affirm the proposition that the reader is free to impose or create significance at will. The examples presented here concern three types of unconventional readings evident in A Book to Keep (Hidden), Commentaries on the Four Books (Sishu ping), and Outline of History with Critical Comments (Shigang pingyao), texts on which contemporary readers recorded their views.⁵³ In these volumes Li recasts the meanings of individual words, reevaluates the status of entire genres, and reappraises the ethical character of historical personages. In examining his responses to what he read, I inquire whether the interpretive strategies he deploys emphasize his creativity as a reader and provoke readers to sharpen their own powers of personal judgment or accentuate Li’s putatively penetrating vision and therefore compel readers to assent to his ready-made judgments.

As a commentator, Li was known for investing familiar words and phrases with unexpected meanings. For example, his interpretation of the well-known line from the poet Tao Qian’s (365–427) autobiographical sketch “Mr. Five Willows” (Wu liu xiansheng zhuan) provides an eccentric gloss on the phrase “I do not seek to understand deeply” (bu qiu shen jie). This phrase had historically been interpreted as a self-effacing remark made by the erudite poet, who claimed neither to have sought nor to have attained deep understanding. But Li virtuosically turned the established interpretation on its head: “Since antiquity, one of the people who have most excelled at studying is Tao [Qian]. Why is this? It’s because he ‘loved to study but did not seek to understand deeply.’ Now in studying, ‘understanding’ is fine. And there’s not even anything wrong with ‘understanding deeply,’ but one must not ‘seek to understand deeply.’”⁵⁴ By emphasizing the word “seek” (qiu) and insisting that one may indeed attain deep understanding without deliberately seeking it, Li creatively endowed the phrase with an unexpected meaning. This strategy is reminiscent of the technique, discussed in chapter four, of revaluing the term “worthies” (xianzhe); in each case Li disrupts the reader’s conventional, unreflective understanding of a word.

Readings like this reveal Li’s indebtedness to the political radical He Xinyin, who notoriously reinterpreted the following line from the Analects: “The Master condemned four attitudes: he condemned having personal opinions, he condemned insisting on certainty, he condemned being stubborn, and he condemned being egotistical.”⁵⁵ Unlike any reader before him, He deviously construed the passage to mean “The Master condemned four attitudes: not having personal opinions, not insisting on certainty, not being stubborn, and not being egotistical.”⁵⁶ In slanting the passage this way, He cleverly justified his own methodology of asserting an individual opinion and set a powerful precedent for the irreverent interpretations for which Li Zhi would later become famous.

Yet unconventional as both Li’s and He’s interpretations were, and much as they may have shocked conservative contemporaries, both readings conformed to classical Chinese grammar. They could be considered wrong only insofar as they violated exegetical convention. And the grammatical plausibility of these readings is the source of their power. For one may construe these interpretations either as exemplifying the readers’ playful, opportunistic (centrifugal) appropriation of the text—Li’s and He’s deliberate imposition of meaning upon it—or as expressing the readers’ sincere belief that they have discovered a deep substratum of meaning that, although obscured by layers of traditional interpretation, nevertheless resides within the text. The former appears the more convincing interpretation by far. Nevertheless, a sizable number of early modern readers expressed concern that their contemporaries would unreflectingly adopt the latter position and accept Li’s judgments as true.

In addition to reinterpreting the meanings of individual words like “seek” (qiu), Li also reappraised the value of entire genres. During the late Ming, the proliferation of books resulted in what book historian Kai-wing Chow has described as an erosion of the authority of the Confucian classics. Classical texts came to vie for consumers’ attention with fiction, drama, joke books, travel guides, and handbooks on prognostication.⁵⁷ During this period some Chinese intellectuals even began to view vernacular fiction and drama, genres previously scorned as the lowest forms of literature, as acceptable substitutes for the classics. While certainly not the sole advocate of the radical view that leveled the hierarchy of genres, Li lustily supported it.⁵⁸ In one essay, he writes, “Poetry need not be sought in the ancient Classic of Poetry and Anthology; prose need not be modeled on the age before the empire arose. The artistic mind broke out in the Six Dynasties to create recent-style verse; it broke out again in Tang tales of the fantastic; again in the Yuan to make libretti and zaju opera; again in our time to make the Romance of the Western Chamber and the Outlaws of the Marsh, and the masters of the essay form. . . . What need do I have of the Six Classics, Confucius and Mencius?”⁵⁹ Here and elsewhere in his writings, Li extolled the ethical value of popular literature, placing it on a par with the greatest Confucian classics. He claimed that the Yuan dynasty opera The Pavilion for Worshiping the Moon (Bai yue ting ji) “should awaken in [readers’] minds thoughts of righteous [Confucian] relationships among brothers, sisters, husbands and wives.” And he insisted that although the protagonists of this opera violate Confucian ritual propriety—they elope—the play nonetheless exemplified the “acme of chastity and rectitude.”⁶⁰ He further lauded the contemporary novel Outlaws of the Marsh on the grounds that it promoted loyalty and justice, even though its heroes were bandits. So compelling was the moral message Li imputed to this latter work that he declared that rulers who aspired to govern justly “[could] not afford not to read it.”⁶¹ Perhaps most striking of all, Li praised the contemporary drama The Story of Red Duster (Hong fu zhuan), a tale of illicit romance and elopement. Drawing on Confucius’s pronouncement that the Classic of Poetry “stirs” readers, inspires them to “make observations,” causes them to “join together” in fellowship, and provides them with the means by which to “express grievances,” Li proclaimed, “Who says that chuanqi [wonder-plays] do not possess the ability to ‘stir’ people, to inspire them to ‘make observations,’ to ‘join together,’ and to ‘express grievances’? Amid eating and drinking, banquets and entertainments, we are often moved by feelings of righteousness. Contemporary entertainments are just like those of antiquity; I hope we may regard them no differently!”⁶² By equating vulgar contemporary entertainment to the most revered texts of the Confucian canon, Li toppled the classics from their pedestal and called into question the system of values undergirding the traditional hierarchy of genres. Yet again, one may imagine readers struggling to ascertain whether his interpretations reflect his genuine conviction that he has unveiled the true essence of these genres or exemplify his impish delight in reversing accepted interpretations simply to prod readers to do the same.

More than any other technique, the strategy of oppositional reading in Li’s repertoire that perplexed contemporary readers was his method of analyzing history. An enthusiastic reader of history, Li was by some accounts “one of the finest historians of the Ming.”⁶³ The fifth fascicle of A Book to Burn, the third fascicle of Another Book to Burn, and the entirety of A Book to Keep (Hidden), Another Book to Keep (Hidden), and An Outline of History with Critical Commentary record Li’s unconventional opinions on the lives and careers of historical personages. The boldness with which Li attacked accepted judgments and the originality of his opinions was not lost on contemporary readers. In a preface to A Book to Keep (Hidden), Mei Guozhen remarked, “He judged everything on the basis of his own opinions, regardless of whether they accorded with the received judgments of Confucian scholars.”⁶⁴ And in a preface to Li’s Outline of History with Critical Commentary, Wu Congxian (Ming, n.d.) observed, “In expressing whatever was on his mind, he did not flee from [those who wielded] the halberds of power, and he certainly was not [intimidated by] old books! Indeed, he maintained that agreeing with [the authors of antiquity] in what was right did not prevent him from having his own views on what was wrong, and agreeing with them on what was wrong did not prevent him from having his own views on what was right.”⁶⁵ The question of how Li’s audacious interpretations of history conditioned readers’ interactions with his own writings is the subject of the following section.

DOCTRINAL VERSUS METHODOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS AMONG LI’S FIRST READERS

Whatever their position, contemporary readers responded vehemently to Li’s writings, especially his comments on history. The imperial censor Zhang Wenda, whose 1602 memorial denouncing Li prompted the emperor to order the destruction of Li’s entire literary corpus, feared that readers, trained since their youth to read docilely, would unquestioningly espouse Li’s unorthodox beliefs and even imitate his uncouth behavior. Zhang worried lest readers model themselves on Li and take his interpretations as doctrinal truth. These concerns, while undoubtedly exaggerated, did have some basis in fact. However, what Zhang’s memorial did not take into account was another, more sophisticated class of readers who focused not on the veracity of Li’s individual judgments per se but rather on their subjective, centrifugal tenor. Inspired by Li’s style of interpretation, these readers appropriated his critical methods and exposed his writings to critiques as disruptive and irreverent as those he had leveled at the works he analyzed.

Zhang condemned Li for perpetrating “outrageous and transgressive judgments” that threatened to contaminate unsuspecting readers. His memorial of impeachment cites a litany of historical figures censured by the Confucian historiographic traditional whom Li intrepidly reinterpreted in a positive light. Zhang writes, “In [his] books, [Li] considers Lü Buwei and Li Yuan wise counselors, Li Si shrewd, and Feng Dao an official who possessed the moral fiber of a recluse; he estimates that Zhuo Wenjun excelled in choosing an outstanding mate and finds laughable Sima Guang’s assertion that Sang Hongyang deceived Emperor Wu of Han; he deems Qin Shihuang the greatest emperor of all time, and he maintains that Confucius’ judgments need not be considered standard.⁶⁶ Such outrageous and transgressive judgments are too numerous to count. The majority of them violate norms of propriety, so the books must be destroyed.”⁶⁷ Zhang’s account of Li’s judgments is factually accurate: Li did indeed praise the individuals Zhang claims he did. But more relevant for our purposes are the conclusions Zhang draws concerning the potential effects of reading Li’s writings or witnessing his eccentric behavior. Zhang suspects that significant numbers of readers may lack the discrimination necessary to view Li’s writings in a critical light. As evidence, his memorial cites “young men [who] took delight in [Li’s] unrestrained wildness and goaded one another to follow suit. They knew no shame and behaved like beasts, openly stealing money and violating other people’s wives and daughters. Recently gentry officials have been clasping talismans and reciting the name of the Buddha; they prostrate themselves before monks and hold rosaries in their hands, all in an attempt to abide by the [Buddhist] prohibitions. Such people, who know not how to respect Confucian household instructions but instead indulge their obsession with Buddhist teachings and monks, are becoming increasingly numerous.”⁶⁸ Apart from illustrating Zhang’s pejorative views toward popular Buddhism, these remarks demonstrate that he envisioned a population of trusting and gullible readers much like the “dimwitted disciples” whom Li so harshly rebuked. Such readers, whose critical faculties had presumably been irremediably “obstructed” (zhang) by too much rote memorization, Zhang implies, would be inclined to believe and repeat whatever they read. Certainly, as the examples below demonstrate, more than one reader did indeed assent unquestioningly to Li’s unconventional judgments, just as Zhang had predicted. Yet whether significant numbers of readers fell into this camp remains uncertain.

The synopsis of The Collected Writings of Li Wenling [i.e., Li Zhi] preserved in the catalogue of the massive Qing dynasty Four Treasuries compendium (Siku quanshu zongmu) asserts that Li’s writings “dazzled” (ying) those who encountered them and that “petty Confucian scholars in local schools respected and pliantly placed their trust in [his words].”⁶⁹ However, Li’s close friend Jiao Hong opposed claims that readers docilely assented to Li’s judgments. Jiao opined that “many people considered [Li’s] statements far-fetched” because “people do not generally trust words they’re unaccustomed to hearing.”⁷⁰ A synopsis of Upon Arrival at the Lake (Chutanji) included in the catalogue of the Four Treasuries lends credence to Jiao’s view. It characterizes Li’s opinions as “bizarre and perverse” and claims that “even people of limited literacy knew that his ideas were absurd.”⁷¹

The view that late Ming readers were more likely to believe than to doubt what they read—an opinion that, remarkably, Zhang and Li shared—ironically finds stronger corroboration in contemporaries’ reactions to Zhang’s own writings than in their responses to any text by Li. As soon as Zhang’s memorial of impeachment began to circulate widely, several literati reiterated his accusations verbatim. The insouciance with which contemporary writers echoed Zhang’s words attests to the malleability of texts in this period and the fact that ideas of intellectual property were still at an embryonic stage of development. One who loudly denounced Li Zhi in phrases lifted almost directly from Zhang’s memorial was Jiang Yihua. He wrote:

[Li] specialized in converting bad into good and black into white. By temperament, he did not follow other people’s estimations of beauty and ugliness, and his judgments were more than adequate to convey this view. He wrote A Book to Keep (Hidden), a work in thirty fascicles, in which he wantonly and wildly meted out praise and blame. For example, he regarded Lü Buwei as a wise counselor, Li Si as shrewd, and Qin Shihuang as the greatest emperor of all time. He considered Feng Dao a court recluse insofar as he served successive dynasties; he maintained that by eloping, Zhuo Wenjun found her rightful place; and he held that Zhao Bao and Wang Ling were matricides. More importantly, he believed that Confucius’ judgments did not need to be followed. As soon as this book was published, a great many people fond of heretical ideas marveled at it.⁷²

Along with several other contemporary readers, Jiang borrowed freely from Zhang’s diction to pile condemnations on Li and to excoriate him for his unorthodox judgments. They claimed he was “behaving eccentrically and deceiving the multitudes” and fretted that his “heretical ideas” might infect either themselves or others.⁷³ Noting the way people “madly flocked around [Li],” Gu Xiancheng sighed with resignation, “I don’t know how many people he has [already] misled.”⁷⁴ Meanwhile Jiang, jealously guarding his own ideological purity, opted not to acquire a copy of Li’s writings lest they “contaminate [his] bookshelf!”⁷⁵ These authors all shared the concern that by uncritically accepting Li’s judgments as valid, readers might defile their minds.

One reader whose reaction to Li’s writings would likely have confirmed these scholars’ worst suspicions is Wang Benke, whose editorial preface to Another Book to Burn was introduced in the previous chapter. Wang’s preface contains the following effusive and thoroughly uncritical approbation of Li’s writings:

Simply by pointing his finger [Li] leveled criticism powerful enough to guide the judgment of ten thousand generations; indeed, his every grunt bore a connection to the ethical teachings of ten thousand generations. Whether conveying derisive laughter or angry rebukes, each work of his was a masterpiece. His language was exceedingly truthful, and his diction astonished the heavens and shook the earth;⁷⁶ it could make the deaf hear, the blind see, the dreaming wake, the drunk sober, the sick arise, the dead revive, the fidgety calm, and the noisy settle down; it could make those with icy innards hot and those with inflamed organs cold; it could make those who were “hemmed in by pickets and pegs”⁷⁷ tear out those “pickets and pegs,” and make those who were stubbornly unyielding bow their heads in admiration and respect.⁷⁸

In his preface Wang presents himself as a discriminating reader and expresses concern that other readers may lack his perspicacity—his ability to differentiate between authentic and spurious editions of Li’s writings. However, Wang’s unreserved, indeed virtually fanatical endorsement of Li’s every judgment—his every grunt!—testifies to the remarkably uncritical manner in which he consumed Li’s ideas. That Wang chose to repeat Li’s metaphor of vision underscores this point. Wang’s assertion that Li’s writings “could make . . . the blind see” calls to mind Li’s own boastful claim to possess powerfully acute eyesight. It seems that Wang accepted this statement as fact and concluded that, since Li’s keen vision enabled him to discover the core meaning of texts, his judgments deserved to be trusted and absolutely affirmed.

While Wang’s praise for Li’s writings is by far the most flamboyant I have encountered, the metaphors he used appear frequently in other late Ming and early Qing comments on Li’s books. Many readers avowed that Li’s texts opened their eyes, hearts, minds, and in some cases also their mouths. Some said that they admired Li on account of his daringly original judgments.⁷⁹ Yet it is often difficult to tell whether these readers approved of Li’s bold conclusions in the same superficial, “blind,” or gullible manner in which they might have assented to orthodox readings of canonical texts or, on the contrary, recognized in Li a model of how to cultivate their own independent judgments.

Perhaps the reader who expressed the most intense interest in the reactions Li’s texts were likely to generate both in his own day and in the future was the author’s close friend Jiao Hong, who supervised the printing of A Book to Keep (Hidden).⁸⁰ As noted earlier, unlike the imperial censor Zhang Wenda, who claimed that Li’s texts were already attracting a cult following, Jiao maintained that contemporaries resisted assenting to Li’s views and considered them too peculiar to be appealing. Yet all the same, Jiao worried that in time, as Li’s writings became more widely available and the novelty of his odd judgments wore off, readers would eventually accept them. This, he pronounced, would be a travesty. In his preface to A Book to Keep (Hidden), Jiao wrote, “I know that the gentleman’s works will certainly be transmitted. And in time scholars will become accustomed to his writings. Moreover, they will use them as mirrors [for reflecting right and wrong], as [scales for] weighing [good and bad], and as millfoil and turtle shells [for prognosticating about the future]. What’s more, I know that scholars of future generations will not doubt [Li’s judgments]. But this is not what the gentleman wanted.”⁸¹ Jiao agreed with Zhang insofar as he noted the inadvisability of uncritically imbibing Li’s judgments, yet the two provided different rationales. Whereas Zhang feared the potentially morally corrupting influence of Li’s writings, Jiao objected to assenting to Li’s judgments on the basis of authorial intention: “This is not what the gentleman wanted.” Echoing Jiao’s nonmoralistic concerns, the Hanlin academician Chen Renxi (1581–1636) added the following words of caution: “The readers of the world who take delight in singing [Li’s] works out loud, those who have a fondness for Li’s [writings], are precisely those who do them a disservice. Indeed, to put one’s trust in Li’s judgments simply because one loves his writings is as wrong as to seek to suppress his writings simply because one does not endorse his judgments.”⁸² Jiao’s and Chen’s analyses exhibit their perception that the kernel of Li’s writings lies not in his particular findings but in his method of subjecting all texts to his personal judgment and accepting nothing on authority.⁸³ And Jiao, for one, was convinced that some readers were capable of understanding this strategy, embracing it, and even deploying it. He affirmed, “There are readers capable of picking through his assertions and completely overturning established views, denying what the gentleman affirmed; Li would have been delighted with such readers and felt as if they had ‘appeared with astonishing speed.’”⁸⁴

Jiao’s inkling that such readers did indeed exist is corroborated by critical responses recorded in some contemporary essays and prefaces, as well as in the margins of at least one late Ming edition of Li’s texts.⁸⁵ The flood of oppositional, “Li Zhi–style” commentaries on fiction and drama that would proliferate in the decades following Li’s death further confirms this hunch. Just as Li furiously annotated the texts he read, refusing to accept any doctrine—not even the words of Confucius—on the strength of authority alone, so too did the authors of these comments judge Li’s statements and those of other writers according to their own subjective criteria. In his preface to Li’s Outline of History with Critical Commentary, Wu Congxian wrote, “Each person has his own views on right and wrong, and I too have my own views on right and wrong.”⁸⁶ And the early Qing scholar Li Zhonghuang (n.d.) judiciously asserted that “A Book to Keep (Hidden) was biased in some regards but fair in others.”⁸⁷ Even Yuan Zhongdao, who ultimately agreed with Li Zhi’s judgments on many matters, granted that “at times he . . . can be unbalanced in his judgments.”⁸⁸ Unlike Wang Benke, who indiscriminately lavished praise on every aspect of Li’s work, these readers exercised their independent judgment and subjected Li’s commentaries to level-headed critique.

Ironically, even the Qing-era literatus Wang Hongzhuan (1622–1702), who scathingly attacked Li’s judgments, did so in a manner reminiscent of Li’s personal style. Wang wrote, “[Having] investigated [Li’s] behavior and critically examined the positions he held, [I have concluded that] he appears to have been an unscrupulous lout.”⁸⁹ Wang’s vehement censure echoes Li’s often emphatic tone, and the words “investigate” (kao) and “examine” (cha) evince Wang’s independent assessment of Li’s character. Although investigation and examination, methods of textual analysis that figured prominently in the evidential scholarship (kaozheng xue) movement that was gaining ascendancy during Wang’s lifetime, are far less radical than the oppositional reading strategies for which Li was famous, Li approved of any interpretive strategy that liberated readers to form their own views. His essay “On the Childlike Mind” accuses contemporary Confucians for failing to “critically examine” (cha) the writings of antiquity and for blindly trusting in received texts, hearsay, and authority.⁹⁰ By ridiculing readers who lack critical judgment, Li implicitly calls upon readers to develop this skill. And Wang, despite his negative evaluation of Li, arguably heeded this call. Thus Wang Hongzhuan’s engagement with Li’s writings contrasts starkly with that of Wang Benke, for while the latter assented to all of Li’s judgments, but in doing so overlooked his critical methodology, the former found fault with Li’s judgments but adopted a critical stance of which Li would likely have been proud.

Perhaps the most striking example of a reader who understood and applied the critical methods Li endorsed was the annotator of a high-quality late Ming printed edition of A Book to Burn currently housed in the Library of Congress (Figure 6.01). In this volume Li’s original text occupies the main register and the commentator supplies observations and occasionally adversarial critique in the upper register in red ink. More than once the reader comments, “This argument comes out of nowhere!” (cong wu ci lun).⁹¹ Remarks like this simultaneously exhibit the reader/annotator’s admiration for Li’s ingenuity as an interpreter and his critical distance from the conclusions Li draws. As such, these comments exhibit the reader’s reluctance simply to accept Li’s pronouncements on any subject.

Figure 6.01. Li Zhi, Fenshu (A Book to Burn). Ming Wanli woodblock edition with “emphatic punctuation” marks added in red to the right of many words and critical remarks printed in red on the upper register of the page. Library of Congress, Asian Division, Chinese Collection, VK276 L643. Photo by the author.

In addition to the defiant tone of the commentary, another feature of this edition worthy of notice is the sparseness of the commentary and the comfortable, roomy distance between it and the main text. The spaciousness of the page layout may be construed as inviting readers to make their own comments on this already commented-upon text. Indeed, one could argue that the amount of blank space on the page called out for further commentary: the commentator demonstrated through his remarks how one critically minded reader might reply to the text and left plenty of space in which subsequent readers could continue this task.⁹² Thus the commented-upon edition both responded to Li’s initial appeal to readers to engage with his text and also renewed this call, welcoming later generations of readers to do the same.

CONCLUSION

The strategies of bluff everywhere apparent in Li’s texts register his embeddedness in the complex and tangled structures of signification in the early modern world. Like so many other signs in this period—sartorial, numismatic, and bibliographical—Li’s writings resisted and continue to resist straightforward interpretation. His boast of possessing acute vision shows that to some extent he still clung to a longstanding hermeneutic tradition anchored in the premise of stable, determinate meaning. Meanwhile, his assertion of the impossibility of discerning authorial intentions associates him with the growing early modern awareness of the fluidity and instability of meaning. To the extent that his writings illustrate the unreliability of words and surface appearances, they mirror the material conditions of the day. Merely to survive under such circumstances one needed to develop the ability to judge shifting situations for oneself, independently of past authorities.

Accordingly, discernment becomes not merely a central theme in Li’s writings but a real and practical challenge to every reader. For the complicated rhetorical structure of his writings and the copious and irreconcilable contradictions they present offer no clear path for interpretation. Neither Li’s practice as a reader and commentator nor his paradoxical statements on the nature of interpretation provide readers with guidance on how to approach his works. Instead they jolt and disconcert readers, unsettling their assumptions and disrupting their ingrained habits of reading. Although it is likely that, whether fans or opponents, some readers remained impervious to these bumps and jolts and continued to approach his writings in the same receptive, author-centered manner they had learned as children, more astute readers put Li’s books to use as whetstones for honing their personal judgment. By subjecting his works to incisive critiques, these intrepid readers demonstrated their understanding that Li’s books were not merely symptoms manifesting the increasingly unreliable state of signification in the early modern world; they were also prescriptions for coping with the contemporary epidemic of semiotic instability.