CHAPTER 2

The Rhetoric of Bluff

Paradox, Irony, and Self-Contradiction

Despite Li Zhi’s stated commitment to clear and transparent language, his writings teem with instances of self-contradiction, ambiguity, irony, and paradox. He repeatedly demonstrates the pitfalls of representation but rarely if ever proposes concrete solutions to these problems. A discrepancy opens up between Li’s discursive endorsement of the rectification of language and the strongly paradoxical flavor of his prose. Throughout his texts he often expresses mutually incompatible opinions and portrays himself in irreconcilable ways. These self-contradictions, produced by his slippery use of language and by gaps between his words and actions, emerge both in comparisons between his texts and in individual works.

The tendency to baffle and unsettle readers has been identified as a quintessential feature of early modern European texts. Barbara Bowen, a scholar of French Renaissance literature, has traced the source of the perplexities these texts provoke in readers to rhetorical features such as paradox, irony, and self-contradiction, which abound in European literature of the period. Focusing on the effects of these and related figures of speech—the fact that they all generate ambiguity and indeterminacy—she classifies them under the broad term “bluff.” The flexibility and open-endedness of this concept renders it useful for establishing the grounds on which to compare Li Zhi’s writings to works from both contemporary China and early modern Europe.¹ Like diverse symptoms of the same disease, bluff in its multifarious guises pervades the literature of these early modern societies.

Just as the physical world in which Li lived challenged and sometimes entirely thwarted individuals’ powers of discernment—for instance, their ability to decipher the meanings of sartorial, numismatic, and textual signs—so too do the contradictions, paradoxes, and ironic statements characteristic of Li’s books and many other works of early modern literature disconcert readers and hamper their ability to interpret texts reliably. Thus the rhetorical features associated with bluff may be seen as manifestations of the material uncertainties widespread throughout early modern societies.

This chapter, however, centers on the rhetorical features of Li’s writings. I begin by examining a single case in which Li’s texts put forth assertions that contradict actions he performed and statements he made elsewhere in his literary corpus. In two letters composed within months of one another in 1588, Li implies both that he is and is not a “heretic,” a traitor to Confucian orthodoxy.² Studying these discrepant accounts provides an initial glimpse of Li’s propensity to undercut his own assertions and to render readers unsure how to construe his words.

If Li truly advocated the rectification of language, why do his writings ring with so many contradictions? Does the bluffing that pervades his texts cast doubt upon his assertions that his works exhibit unmediated self-expression? Do his numerous self-contradictions oppose and ultimately undermine his stated advocacy of precise language? If not, what accounts for the inconsistencies between the style and the content of his writings? Could it be that because the rhetorical bluffing characteristic of his prose resonates with the contradictions of the day, it paradoxically attests to the authenticity of his works? In a contradictory world, perhaps contradictory statements constitute the most accurate expressions of truth. By endorsing incompatible viewpoints and generating doubt as to his true opinions, Li created texts that rhetorically resembled the turbulent state of signification in his society. And the homology between the rhetorical structure of his texts and the social and economic contexts in which they were written raised readers’ awareness of the paradoxes everywhere present in the early modern world.

A RECTIFIED HERETIC

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of Li’s unsuccessful attempt to rectify language involves his effort to shape contemporaries’ perceptions of him. As a member of the literati class and a participant in the civil bureaucracy for over twenty years, he frequently alluded to his Confucian background and occasionally referred to himself and like-minded thinkers as “us Confucians.”³ He even self-importantly compared himself favorably to Confucius’s most accomplished student, Yan Hui, the classical embodiment of true discipleship. And yet in a letter to his young follower Zeng Jiquan (n.d.), written in the latter half of 1588, Li ruefully observed, “Most people with no insight regard me as a heretic.”⁴

The misalignment between Li’s characterization of himself as a Confucian scholar and the name applied to him by others—heretic—troubled him, for it constituted, to his mind, a breach of rectified language. In a letter written to his close friend Jiao Hong several months earlier, in late spring of the same year, Li feigned to mend this gap: “Common people and the entire group of phony Scholars of the Way view me as a heretic. I say it would be better truly to become a heretic so that that group will not give me an empty name. How about it? I’ve already left home [to study Buddhism]; these things are all I have left. So why would I cherish them rather than use them as a means to live up to the name [I’ve been called]?”⁵ The letter to Zeng Jiquan, cited earlier, articulates almost verbatim the same sentiments and, significantly, the same rationale. Li states, “[Because] people with no insight regard me as a heretic . . . I’ve decided to become a heretic in order to live up to the title those morons bestowed upon me.”⁶ The quoted passages from these two letters evince Li’s dedication to the mission of restoring the bond between words and actuality, an aspiration he shared with certain European Renaissance language theorists. And the reason he provides is as important as the goal itself: he claims that he sought to become a heretic almost out of a sense of duty—so as to prevent a situation in which name and reality would not align.

Yet a layer of irony emerges when we realize that the chronology of Li’s narrative is faulty. By the time he composed the letter to Jiao Hong, he had already forfeited his place in Confucian officialdom by resigning his post as prefect of Yao’an. Hoping to pursue a life of monastic study, unencumbered by familial obligations, he had sent his wife and daughter away permanently to live in Fujian, more than a thousand miles away. And in doing so, he had reneged on his role as husband and father.⁷ Additionally, he had for several years been embroiled in a contentious correspondence with Geng Dingxiang (ca. 1524–1597), a Confucian official of national renown and elder brother to Li’s recently deceased friend Geng Dingli. Li’s affection for Geng Dingli had been so strong that upon retirement from his position as prefect of Yao’an, Li had taken up residence in the Geng household, where he had lived for several years. Yet following the death of his friend, Li’s relations with Geng Dingxiang had taken a turn for the worse. In a series of open letters to Geng Dingxiang, Li hurled accusations that this leading Confucian official was arrogant, blind, and hypocritical. These letters, which circulated widely in manuscript and later in print, proved deeply embarrassing to Geng and seriously tarnished his reputation.⁸ Thus by the time Li’s critics in Confucian officialdom began to refer to him as a heretic, our author had already violated four of the five cardinal Confucian bonds: he had exhibited his disinterest in continuing to serve as a loyal official to his ruler, abdicated his responsibilities as both a husband and a father, and arguably betrayed his friend. The derogatory appellation of “heretic,” therefore, did not precede but rather followed from Li’s deviant behavior.

Yet the reputation for unruliness, once earned, inspired Li to engage in ever more provocative acts so as to continue to merit the moniker.⁹ In late summer 1588, after writing to Jiao Hong and before writing to Zeng Jiquan, Li performed an act so abhorrent to orthodox Confucians that it soon became the cornerstone of his reputation as a heretic: he shaved the hair from his head.¹⁰ By removing his hair, Li departed radically from Confucian doctrine, which requires that the body be kept intact and that hair be neither shaven nor shorn. Li undertook this action voluntarily, fully cognizant of the strong negative reactions it would provoke among contemporary Confucians. It is ironic that a man who compared himself to Confucius’s most outstanding disciple could bring himself to do such a deed. And yet the rationale Li articulates in the two letters studied here is clear: he wanted his identity to conform to the name by which he was known.

A second layer of irony surfaces when we consider that the very notion of a “rectified heretic” is itself a contradiction in terms. Since the rectification of names is a central tenet of Confucian thought, a true apostate from Confucian tradition would very likely reject the basic premise that names could or should be rectified. Certainly neither Buddhist nor Daoist thought endorses this view. But in his writings Li seems intent on proving that words, actions, and intentions must indeed be brought into alignment. Thus although his actions explicitly violated Confucian norms, his stated and restated goal was to foster a state of zhengming in which his behavior and his title would mutually reinforce one another.

Li’s adherence to these contradictory positions resulted in a paradox. Was he a heretic posing as an orthodox Confucian? Or a Confucian posturing as a heretic? In either case, his contradictory claim to be a rectified heretic calls into question his earlier assertions, discussed in the previous chapter, that his writings transparently manifested his true emotions. It further casts doubt on his commitment to the project of establishing language as a clear and reliable medium of communication. Indeed, instead of exemplifying the consistent and precise use of language, Li’s self-portrayal as a rectified heretic illustrates the early modern problem that the meanings of words seemed to be growing increasingly indeterminate.

THE RHETORIC OF BLUFF: CONTRADICTION, IRONY, PARADOX

Li’s contradictory assertions regarding his status as a “rectified heretic” constitute just one instance of his penchant for undermining his own claims. His writings display numerous examples in which his words and actions conflict with one another, in which he makes irreconcilable statements in diverse writings, and in which he advocates incompatible positions within a single text. Yet all of these self-contradictions differ fundamentally from the acts of deliberate, self-interested deception Li accused contemporary Confucians of perpetrating. According to Li, the phony Confucians of his day crafted webs of false words designed expressly to win them money, accolades, promotions, or prestige. Their verbal tricks were calculated to enrich themselves. By contrast, Li’s own self-contradictions, we have reason to believe, never stemmed from the desire to protect himself from censure or scandal, much less to seek or acquire material gain. Instead, they constituted instances of rhetorical bluff.

As a term of literary analysis, “bluff” does not entail duping readers, simply “disconcerting” them.¹¹ Bowen explains that this umbrella category encompasses a range of rhetorical means used to draw implied readers’ attention to or heighten their awareness of the artifice and pitfalls of representation. She writes that instances of bluff “demolish [readers’] card-houses of idées recues and expressions toutes faites[;] they astonish and shock us . . . [and] leave us puzzled.”¹² Bluff may involve the use of self-contradiction, metatheatricality, self-referentiality, paradox, and enigma; it may refer to juxtaposing incongruous styles or themes, or using identical terms to refer to incompatible ideas. In other words, the essence of this concept lies not in the particularity of individual rhetorical elements but rather in their shared function, which is to generate ambiguity. The breadth of this category is its strength, for it may be used to facilitate comparisons among far-flung works that take readers off-guard and prompt—and at times even compel—them to revise their previously held views.

Although the full range of strategies of bluff at play in early modern Chinese and European texts is too vast to be detailed in its entirety, it is helpful to examine the histories and etymologies of certain salient Chinese and European terms, such as the words for contradiction, irony, and paradox. This exploration will enrich our understanding of the associations these terms carried in their local cultural contexts and reveal conceptual commonalities and discrepancies among them. Moreover, it will provide the basis from which to compare Li’s fascination with the unreliability of language and the ostentatious self-contradictions everywhere present in his writings to the pervasive tone of irony present in works of contemporary Chinese fiction and the sustained wordplay, exaggeration, distortion, and polysemy characteristic of early modern European texts.¹³

A considerable number of Li’s writings, no less than his contemporaries’, conform to Aristotle’s definition of contradiction, for they exemplify “opposition[s] that, of [their] own nature, exclude . . . compromise.”¹⁴ As such, these works additionally resonate with the English and romance language etymology of the word “contradiction,” which derives from the Latin contra dicere, literally “speaking against.” If a self-contradiction therefore entails speaking both for and against the same proposition, Li Zhi’s affirmation and simultaneous denial that he is a heretic illustrates this point. As Bowen notes, the clash between such incompatible positions bewilders readers and compromises their ability to construct a unified, coherent meaning from such texts.

The etymology of the Chinese word for contradiction, maodun, accords with and amplifies this Western understanding of contradiction. Composed of the graphs for spear (矛 mao) and shield (盾 dun), the word maodun derives from an anecdote related by the legalist philosopher Han Feizi (d. 233 BCE): “In the state of Chu, there was a man who sold shields and spears. He used to advertise his shields by saying ‘My shields are so strong that nothing can puncture them.’ He similarly advertised his spears by saying ‘My spears are so sharp that there is nothing they cannot pierce.’ Someone once asked ‘What would happen if I were to use your spear against your shield?’ The salesman was dumbfounded.”¹⁵ The client’s confusion and the salesman’s flummoxed reaction illustrate the irreconcilability of the contradiction. And the fact that the passage provides no resolution marks it as a consummate example of bluff. The salesman is so disconcerted by the client’s question that he is unable to respond. The query punctures his pretense and leaves him speechless.

The concept of piercing or puncturing figures prominently in several Chinese words that describe bluffing techniques that appear frequently in Li’s writings. The modern Chinese words fengci and fanfeng, commonly used to translate the English words “irony,” “satire,” and “sarcasm,” allude explicitly to this action. The graph feng means “to ridicule or criticize,” fan means “to oppose or reverse,” and ci means “to pierce or puncture.” At root the rhetorical strategies of fanfeng and fengci entail opposing or reversing conflicting points of view so as to puncture or pierce a façade or to ridicule and critique an existing opinion.¹⁶

The notion that rhetoric can pierce through pretense or expose hypocrisy was well established by the sixteenth century. An anonymous colophon to the sixteenth-century erotic novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei), for instance, asserts that the author used “allegory to puncture [contemporary targets].”¹⁷ Similar allusions to pricking and deflating by rhetorical means may be found at least as far back as Han dynasty criticism of the Classic of Poetry. What these devices share is their fundamentally destructive or critical character. In this way, they diverge sharply from the idealistic project of rectifying names. For, if rectifying names entails striving against all odds to restore or reestablish parity between words and things, techniques like puncturing, critiquing, opposing, and reversing simply expose problems. They suggest no remedies.¹⁸

The essentially negative quality of these rhetorical forms resonates with the etymology of the word “irony,” which derives from the Greek root eironëia, meaning “interrogation.”¹⁹ Irony consists of contrasting the surface meaning of a word or statement with its deeper import. As such, it embodies a kind of contradiction, for, to return to Aristotle, it presents readers with “an opposition that . . . excludes compromise.”²⁰ Contradictions of this sort instill doubt about the correspondence between what is said and what is meant. They therefore prompt readers to wonder which layer of meaning to privilege and whether to construe statements literally or in the reverse sense.²¹ By raising—and significantly not answering—such questions, ironic statements leave readers perplexed, suspended among contending possibilities. For this reason, like the Chinese techniques of poking and puncturing, they exert the destabilizing effect of bluff.²²

Another type of puzzling statement that resists resolution is the Chan paradox, a rhetorical element with which Li Zhi was familiar. Paradoxes and logical non sequiturs appear regularly at the end of “public cases” (gong’an; Japanese pronunciation: kōan), brief dialogues that record students’ questions and their masters’ often illogical replies. By responding in statements that defy ordinary logic, the masters hoped to catapult students into a state of enlightenment or transcendence, free of the limitations of referential language.²³ The masters’ paradoxical comments never reveal the truth; they simply prompt students (or readers of these recorded dialogues) to discover truth for themselves. In this sense, these enigmatic pronouncements accord with a statement by Li Zhi’s near contemporary, the English poet John Donne (1572–1631), who declared that paradoxes are “alarms to truth.”²⁴ Donne’s metaphor accentuates the catalytic function of paradox: like an alarm, the contradiction inherent in every paradox jolts the reader or listener awake from his habitual somnolence or complacence and propels him into a state of heightened awareness.²⁵

Certainly the structure and genre of Li’s writings differ greatly from those of Chan gong’an literature. Li Zhi was no Chan master; he proudly declared himself “unwilling to serve as teacher for even a single day.”²⁶ Nonetheless, he did at times sternly admonish the monks living at the Temple of the Flourishing Buddha, and it is even reported that he brought about one monk’s enlightenment by speaking to him through a Chan paradox.²⁷ More important, the flagrant self-contradictions that abound in his writings, as well as the discrepancies between his personal comportment and his verbal accounts of his actions, bear comparison to Chan paradoxes in that they goad readers to question the categories through which they habitually interpret the world. Further, they expose the pitfalls and limitations of all forms of representation. As the examples below illustrate, Li’s pervasive deployment of the rhetoric of bluff connected him, without his knowing it, to authors and artists scattered across the early modern world. The disconcerting effects these texts elicited attest to the works’ participation in an early modern aesthetic.

LI’S BLUFFING IN COMPARATIVE CONTEXT: SELF-APPRAISAL, MISLEADING TITLES, AND COY PREFACES

The early modern period was rife with instances of rhetorical bluff, yet the precise manner in which this bluffing took place varied in local contexts. How, then, do Li Zhi’s writings exemplify this characteristic feature of early modernity? What do they share with contemporaneous Chinese and European sources? And what sets Li’s uses of rhetorical bluff apart? The following three case studies, Li’s “Self-Appraisal” (Zi zan) and the authorial prefaces to A Book to Keep (Hidden) and A Book to Burn, illustrate the rhetorical means by which his texts bluff their readers. Each case study begins with a close reading of an individual text and examines the rhetorical methods by which it disconcerts the reader, undermines his expectations, or strains his credulity. Next, the interpretations place Li’s works in a wider early modern context and investigate their bearing on his assertions that his texts are faithful expressions of his heartfelt sentiments.

Self-Appraisal

Among the most self-contradictory of all of Li Zhi’s writings is a literary self-portrait written in 1588 and titled “Self-Appraisal.” As a piece of autobiographical writing, this essay demonstrates Li’s ability to adopt a layered perspective. As in any self-portrayal, the author plays the roles of both the writing subject and the object of inquiry.²⁸ And because both of these positions are to some extent fictionalized, readers who encounter this piece must also consider a third perspective, that of the historical author. Brief and pithy, the text is worth quoting in its entirety:

He was by nature narrow-minded and he appeared arrogant. His words were vulgar, and his mind wild. His behavior was impulsive, and his friends few, but when he got together with them he treated them affectionately. When interacting with people, he took pleasure in seeking out their faults; he did not delight in their strong suits. When he hated people, he cut them off and sought to harm them all his life. His ambition was to be warm and well-fed, but he called himself a Bo Yi and a Shu Qi.²⁹ His character was fundamentally that of the man of Qi,³⁰ but he claimed that his belly was filled with the Dao and that he drank of virtue. Clearly he was the type who would not lightly give anything away, and yet he made excuses for himself by saying he was like Yi Yin.³¹ He would not even pluck one single hair to give to another, but then he complained that Yang Zhu was a thief of benevolence.³² His actions violated the way of the ten thousand things, and the words he spoke conflicted with the feelings in his heart. This is the sort of person he was. The people in the village all hated him. In ancient times Zigong asked Confucius: “What if all the people in the village hate a person?”³³ The master said: “One cannot judge him yet.” As for this reclusive scholar, perhaps one can?³⁴

The text presents Li as a man of many contradictions. It compares him to Bo Yi and Shu Qi, paragons of Confucian virtue who, according to Sima Qian, opted to starve to death rather than eat grain produced in a state whose ruler they deemed immoral. Yet at the same time, the text asserts that Li valued material comforts. It portrays him as claiming to be virtuous and “filled with the Dao” when in fact he resembled the depraved man of Qi. According to Mencius, this scoundrel tricked his wife and his concubine by bringing them luxury foods and telling them that these tasty morsels had been offered to him as gifts from government officers, when in fact he had stolen the food from gravesites, rendering it taboo to eat.³⁵

These inconsistencies take on a distinctly negative moral valence: Li is depicted as a liar and a hypocrite, whose words, actions, and intentions do not properly align for “the words he spoke contradicted the feelings in his heart.” By professing to be a liar, Li unconsciously rehearses the famous paradox attributed to Epimenides of Crete: “All Cretans are liars.” This paradox involves the logical contradiction “If A, then not-A.” If Epimenides, being a Cretan, lies when he says “All Cretans are liars,” then the phrase “All Cretans are liars” must be true. Thus by telling the truth, Epimenides has disproved his own thesis, that all Cretans (including himself) are liars. Paraphrasing this paradox, Li Zhi’s French contemporary Montaigne states, “If you say ‘I lie,’ but in fact you’re telling the truth, you’re actually lying.”³⁶ Conversely, if Epimenides’s statement “All Cretans are liars” is false—if in fact, some Cretans speak the truth—then he has still contradicted his premise, rendering his initial statement once again false. The paradox cannot be avoided.

Li’s “Self-Appraisal” raises similar questions: if it is true that Li’s words undercut his genuine feelings, then the truth of all claims in the “Self-Appraisal” must be reevaluated, including the claim “the words he spoke conflicted with the feelings in his heart.” But questioning the veracity of this sentence opens up the possibility that the words he spoke did not conflict with the feelings in his heart; perhaps his words faithfully and accurately manifested the author’s emotions, as he so often claims in other essays. In this latter case, the sentence itself is a lie. Thus Li’s “Self-Appraisal” bluffs readers by confronting them with an irreducible logical conundrum.³⁷

The text seems to support the hypothesis that the Li depicted in the passage is indeed a liar. After all, he boastfully compares himself to Bo Yi and Shu Qi, even though he craves material well-being. Li the character is thus cast in a negative light because the text exposes his lack of self-knowledge, or worse, his eagerness to deceive others by exaggerating his own righteousness—a failing the historical Li repeatedly associated with phony contemporary Confucians. The allusions to the man of Qi, Yi Yin, and Yang Zhu further reinforce this point: the Li in the portrait is woefully conceited and attempts to mask his many deficiencies with pretentious and misleading allusions to classical antiquity. What makes him even more objectionable is that, despite his blindness to his own failings, he takes delight in seeking out the faults of others.

Yet oddly, as a piece of writing, “Self-Appraisal” fails to exemplify any of the character flaws for which it castigates its subject. If the Li in the portrait is characterized as arrogant, self-satisfied, and hypocritical, the Li creating this verbal likeness reveals himself as anything but. Instead of covering over his moral deficiencies—as would a man who called himself a Bo Yi or a Shu Qi but desired to be well fed—the narrator of this piece boldly exposes “his” deficiencies to the scrutiny of readers. A gulf thus opens up between readers’ firsthand experience of Li the narrator and their secondhand understanding of Li the character: while the latter perpetrates outright deception, the former simply engages in rhetorical bluff. In other words, the Li nested within the representation may be a hypocrite, but the Li narrating the account demonstrates (perhaps excessive) humility by obsessively and publicly excoriating the character he identifies as himself.

And yet it would be rash to conflate the authorial persona with the historical Li Zhi. For, as the literary scholar Wai-yee Li has pointed out, the narrator of this piece speaks from a vantage point that mimics that of the detractors of the historical Li Zhi, men who may well have accused the author of exhibiting flaws similar to those the narrator attributes to the character. Moreover, it was a commonplace for Ming scholars to portray themselves in writing as peculiar, eccentric, defiant, or uncompromising, as if casting themselves as nonconformists enhanced their aura of authenticity or reputation for virtue. Indeed, as Wai-yee Li has suggested, Li’s exaggeratedly self-critical style both here and in the case of his status as a rectified heretic exhibits a certain “conventional unconventionality” characteristic of the period.³⁸ For example, Li Zhi’s acquaintance Xu Wei describes himself in a tomb inscription as “worthless and lazy, but straightforward,” boasts of his tendency to undress in public, and proudly announces that many “people thought ill of him.”³⁹ In the context of Ming scholars’ propensity to exaggerate their peculiarities, Li’s decision to depict himself as irascible and inconsistent ought not to be seen as a revelation of the true character flaws of the historical Li Zhi but rather as simply another mask, a stereotypical, fictionalized image of an eccentric and, ironically, a bid for authenticity.

Because of the incongruities among the layers of Li Zhi’s narrative, neither Li the character nor Li the narrator fully inspires readers’ confidence. Like the weapons salesman in Han Feizi’s parable, who brags about his impenetrable shields and his spears that can penetrate anything, Li the author displays two incompatible images of himself: one as a humble narrator, the other as an objectionable, hypocritical character. These conflicting personae, the one tucked inside the other, dependent upon it and yet at odds with it, perfectly embody the concept of bluff. Their juxtaposition raises questions about the veracity of both. For it is as inconceivable that one man could simultaneously exhibit sincere humility and hypocrisy as it is that a spear could penetrate anything and a shield could be impenetrable. Thus readers are left dumbfounded, just like the potential client in the parable.

The uncertainty this passage generates calls to mind a host of perceptual tricks and situations of mistaken identity pervasive in literary and visual arts of the period, both Chinese and Western. Li’s textual reduplication of himself evokes a favorite strategy employed by the magic monkey Sun Wukong, hero of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West (Xiyou ji). When confronting a ferocious adversary, Sun plucks several hairs from his hirsute, simian arm and blows on them to transform them into an army of virtual selves. The enemy, unable to distinguish among these identical-looking monkeys or determine which is the real Sun Wukong, is confounded and soon overpowered.⁴⁰ Sun’s self-multiplication, like that of Li Zhi, raises questions about the singularity of identity and the reliability of representation. But unlike Li’s account of himself, which ends without resolving the tensions among the plurality of authorial identities it conjures, the identity of the real Sun Wukong is confirmed and the confusion dispelled.

Cases of temporarily doubled or mistaken identity also frequently appear in drama of the period, since the medium of theater lends itself to questioning the permeable boundary between fantasy and reality.⁴¹ As Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It and Xu Wei’s Mulan in an opera of the same title observe, “Everything . . . is an illusion after all”⁴² and “all the world’s a stage.”⁴³ Tang Xianzu’s popular drama The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting), written in 1598, for instance, portrays a father forced to confront the “strange” (qiguai) appearance of a young woman who claims to be—and indeed is—his deceased daughter, returned to life. Denying the possibility that she could have been resurrected, the father concludes that although the young woman resembles his daughter in every respect, she can be nothing more than “a false impersonation by some fair-featured harpy or seductive fox-spirit.”⁴⁴ He therefore refuses to recognize her or consent to her marriage. A dispute then ensues over the girl’s identity: is she human or ghost, real or impostor? The question is referred to the emperor himself for adjudication. And here, as in The Journey to the West, the truth will out: the play ends with the solid reestablishment of the girl’s identity.⁴⁵

Significantly, in both of these cases it is individual characters within the fictional world—not the audience—who experience confusion over who is who. The same could be said of the several plays by Shakespeare whose plots turn on mistaken identity, among them Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Although characters on stage experience doubt over other characters’ identity, this lack of clarity is confined to the fictional world and functions for the audience as a source of dramatic irony. The audience does not share the characters’ bewilderment; rather it looks on, amused. This is emphatically not what happens at the end of Li’s “Self-Appraisal.” The short essay ends inconclusively and leaves readers distinctly discomfited. The narrator allows discordant images of Li to coexist in tension with one another. The result is a sense of unease that extends beyond the printed page and directly affects readers.

Perhaps a more suitable analogy to Li Zhi’s discrepant selfportrayals, then, may be found in the visual work of a Chinese artist deeply influenced by Li’s writings. Chen Hongshou’s (1598–1652) “Venerating Antiquity” playing cards, created shortly after the fall of the Ming, take their cue from a set of playing cards titled “Counting Money,” which were produced during Li’s lifetime. The “Venerating Antiquity” playing cards are decorated with portraits of historical figures, classified into suits based on their attitudes toward and experiences involving money. The highest suit of cards represents individuals who worshipped money, while the lowest suit illustrates men of modest means. In her study of these cards, art historian Tamara Heimarck Bentley has observed that a remarkably large number of the portraits of historical figures physically resemble the artist: they share his bushy eyebrows and slanted eyes.⁴⁶ Chen depicts himself both as the wealthy and shrewd official Fan Li (Spring and Autumn pd.), a member of the highest suit of cards, and as the penniless poet Tao Qian (365–427), a member of the lowest suit.⁴⁷ By portraying himself in these incompatible guises—as a lover of money and as an impoverished scholar—Bentley observes, Chen raises questions about his own identity. Moreover, Chen’s cards, like Li’s verbal self-portrayal and unlike the dramatic and fictional works mentioned above, resist resolving these tensions. Instead they allow mutually conflicting aspects of the autobiographical subject to exist side by side.

Chen Hongshou’s playing cards arguably showcase divergent aspects of their subject’s personality, but unlike Li’s “Self-Appraisal,” these discordant self-portrayals all occupy a single plane of representation. They can be juxtaposed, but not nested inside one another. Li’s text, on the other hand, consists of onion-like layers of representation. In this respect, his essay may be said to resemble the visual technique of mise-en-abîme, in which an image contains within it a smaller version of itself. Richard Vinograd has identified this technique as characteristic of the early modern period.⁴⁸ Analyzing similarities between Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (Figure 2.01) and the Chinese printmaker Min Qiji’s (1580–after 1661) highly original, “metapictorial” illustrations of The Romance of the Western Chamber (Xixiang ji) (Figure 2.02), Vinograd focuses on the ways in which both works deploy mirroring, storied framing devices, and trompe l’oeil techniques to create impossible spaces that puzzle viewers and accentuate the artifice of representation. The easel, with its back to the viewer in Velázquez’s painting, suggests that it—not the painting viewers actually see—is the real portrait. And images of the rolled-up, three-dimensional edges of a hand scroll, printed onto the flat surface of Min Qiji’s album leaf illustrations, along with the distorted perspective of the round window in the center of the image, raise further questions about framing: where does the representation end and the world outside begin?⁴⁹

Figure 2.01. Diego Rodriguez Velázquez (Spanish, 1599–1660), Las Meninas, or The Family of Felipe IV, ca. 1656. Oil on canvas, 3.18 x 2.76 m. Museo del Prado. Photo credit: Art Resource.

These visual conundrums find literary corollaries in early modern texts that interrogate the boundaries between representation and reality. Among such texts, the contemporary novel Don Quixote stands out because, by incessantly calling attention to—and undermining—its own authenticity, this text, like Li’s “Self-Appraisal,” erodes readers’ confidence in their ability to disentangle truth from fiction. Throughout the novel, the narrator habitually reassures readers of the veracity of his “history,” yet the text crawls with internal contradictions and self-conscious allusions to its own inaccuracies. For instance, in the prologue, the narrator introduces the novel as his child, “born of [his] own brain.” But he subsequently backs away from this claim, calling the text merely his “step-child.” More strikingly, in one chapter the text breaks off abruptly. A battle is interrupted, the combatants’ weapons poised midair. The narrator calmly explains this rupture by alluding to a hitherto unmentioned source text, which he suddenly claims is incomplete. What follows is a lengthy and overtly fictional discursus on the pitfalls of textual transmission. The novel, the narrator now states, derives from a flawed translation of an incomplete manuscript, scrawled in Arabic—a language he does not know—and discovered by chance in a marketplace in Toledo.⁵⁰ As the layers of nested narrative become increasingly convoluted, readers grow increasingly perplexed. Their bafflement reaches new heights when the fictional characters refer nonchalantly to an author named Miguel de Cervantes. These self-referential loops in the narrative cause readers to lose their bearings and to doubt the authenticity of the text before their eyes.

Figure 2.02. Min Qiji (Zhejiang province, Chinese, fl. 1640), “The Beautiful Yingying Writes a Letter.” Illustration 18 of the album The Western Chamber, ca. 1640. Print, 25.5 x 32.2 cm. Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst. Photo credit: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln.

While Li’s self-description is less elaborate, the paradoxes and contradictions it exhibits elicit a similar effect: they inhibit readers from taking the text at face value. For no matter how readers construe his “Self-Appraisal,” they can derive no logically consistent meaning from it. By puzzling the reader as to what he means and whether he is telling the truth when he claims he isn’t, Li confounds the prospective reader and stimulates him to reflect not only on the nature of his identity but also on the very possibility of accurate representation in an era of unreliable signs. Thus the form of Li’s writings, his refusal to offer solid answers, exemplifies the early modern aesthetic of bluff. Paradoxically, Li’s inability to reduce his experience or his depiction of himself to a simple, coherent narrative heightens the authenticity of his prose, even as it disconcerts readers.

Misleading Titles, Coy Prefaces

If “Self-Appraisal” bluffs readers by causing them to doubt the veracity of Li’s conflicting narratives, authorial prefaces to his two major literary collections, A Book to Burn and A Book to Keep (Hidden) go one step further. They extend the bluff into the real-world relationships between text and author, text and reader, and reader and author. These prefaces confront readers with a set of paradoxical claims both about the ways in which the historical author treated his writings and about his expectations regarding readers’ interactions with his books. By demanding action on the part of readers yet providing inconsistent indications of what sorts of action are required, these texts create a reading experience that both resembles and accentuates the difficulty of negotiating one’s way in the early modern world of shifting and unstable signs.

As noted earlier, the title of Li’s immensely popular Book to Keep (Hidden) puns on the word cang, which can be translated as either “to safeguard, store up, collect,” or even “hoard,” on the one hand, or “to hide, conceal, or sequester” on the other.⁵¹ In an unmarked context, the title phrase could refer simply to book collecting, a favorite pastime among late Ming literati. Thus an unsuspecting reader might bring to such a volume expectations akin to what a modern reader might bring to Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” But a savvier reader would spot the pun lurking in the title. Indeed, this title seems deliberately crafted to pique readers’ interest, since in the saturated book market of the late Ming, authors often used eye-catching titles to attract readers’ attention. Pitting two divergent meanings of the word cang against one another, the title stimulates readers to consider whether the book conveys wisdom worthy of being preserved for posterity, or transmits frivolities—or worse, dangerous or reprehensible ideas that ought to be kept out of sight. An authorial preface invites readers to consider all of these possibilities:

It is titled A Book to Keep (Hidden). And why A Book to Keep (Hidden)? Because this book can only [constitute] personal pleasure; it must not be shown to other people. This is why I’ve called it A Book to Keep (Hidden). There’s nothing I can do if one or two busybody friends incessantly seek to read it. How could I stop them? But I say by way of warning: if it is to be read, all of you will read it in your own manner; you must not use Confucius’ “authoritative edition” as the standard by which to dole out praise and blame.⁵²

From the outset, the preface calls into question the relationship between author and reader. What does the former expect of the latter? And by reading even these several lines of the preface, has the reader already violated the author’s expectations? The line “this book can only [constitute] personal pleasure” is ambiguous: whose personal pleasure? If we interpret this line to mean that the book was written solely for the author’s own private enjoyment—an assertion Li repeats elsewhere in his writings—then any reader’s attempt to engage with this text might constitute an intrusion. Indeed, a preface to the same volume, composed by Li’s friend Liu Dongxing (1538–1601) in 1599, recounts a conversation between Li and Liu that corroborates this claim. Liu reports:

The gentleman was constantly occupied with books. All day long he would copy them out and annotate them for himself, singing praises and evaluating them for himself. He was unwilling to show anyone [what he wrote]. Considering his behavior peculiar, I [Liu Dongxing] asked him about it, and the gentleman replied: “When I was at loose ends in Yunnan, I had nothing to do but befriend the ancients. . . . I arrived at interpretations that differ substantially from those of the past. How could I dare to discuss them with anyone? So I simply wrote down my opinions and hid them away, waiting for [the right reader, who might appear] a hundred thousand generations hence.”⁵³

A preface to the same work by another of Li’s friends, the distinguished Confucian official Mei Guozhen (1542–1605), articulates a similar rationale: “Knowing he was out of sync with his generation, Li Zhi averred ‘I’ll just jot down [my thoughts] and hide [this book] for the time being until, one hundred thousand generations from now, it will [finally] find an appreciative reader.’”⁵⁴ These statements lend credence to the notion that Li intended A Book to Keep (Hidden) to be kept private and not read—at least for several hundred years! Additionally, although Li began work on this text in 1582 and completed a draft by roughly 1588 or 1589, he delayed publication for at least ten years.⁵⁵ Li further emphasizes his desire that the book be kept out of sight when he writes in his authorial preface, “There’s nothing I can do if one or two busybody friends incessantly seek to read it. How could I stop them?” These lines underscore the author’s reluctance to share his writings. It seems it was only with resignation and no little trepidation that he acquiesced to the insistent requests of curious would-be readers.

Yet a letter Li wrote to Jiao Hong in 1588 casts some doubt on this assertion. Here Li may be seen actively inviting Jiao to read his writings: “Please allow me to explain: as for Li Zhi’s Book to Keep (Hidden), I only copied it out once. I am submitting it to be read by a special person [namely, you]. . . . A Book to Keep (Hidden) should be shut away and made secret. But you may still enjoy its arguments discreetly. And I would like to discuss them with someone who understands me. That is why I’m submitting the manuscript to you.”⁵⁶ Later in the same letter, Li writes, “It would be absolutely inappropriate for you to allow ordinary, unrefined people [su shi] to see it.” This passage calls into question the idea that Li viewed all contemporary readers as equally demanding and intrusive “busybodies” and sought to prevent his manuscripts from circulating in any form. Rather, it portrays Jiao as an exceptionally sensitive reader, whose opinions Li valued and actively solicited.

But was Jiao really so exceptional? There is evidence to suggest that during the several years Li spent writing A Book to Keep (Hidden), portions of the manuscript circulated among a circle of his acquaintances, if not more widely.⁵⁷ Thus even before the book was published in 1599, the readership of this text extended beyond the “one or two” individuals to whom Li’s preface alludes. In fact, the authorial preface acknowledges this wider readership when Li declares, “All of you [zhu jun] will read it in your own manner.” Additionally, in a 1597 letter to Geng Dinglih (b. 1541), the younger brother of Geng Dingxiang and Geng Dingli, Li articulates far grander aspirations for his book’s readership. He writes, “This book of mine conveys timeless [strategies for] peaceful governance; it should be introduced into the emperor’s own classroom and used as a means to select scholars on the imperial examinations; it is not mere babble!”⁵⁸ These hopes explicitly contradict his statements that the book must be kept tightly under wraps.

Clearly, A Book to Keep (Hidden) was never addressed simply to a singular, intimate reader, much less composed exclusively for the author’s own amusement. Li sought the work’s publication, and by publishing it, he targeted a national, anonymous readership. The discrepancy between his lively involvement in the promotion of his book and the intimate rhetoric evident in the authorial preface establishes from the outset an ironic tone that is amplified in his conflicting insinuations that the book’s contents are at once triflingly insignificant, appropriate only for “personal pleasure”; vitally important and deserving of the emperor’s attention; and threatening enough to warrant keeping them out of sight of those whom they might contaminate or offend.

The authorial preface to A Book to Burn, likely published in 1590, contains many of the same bluffing strategies present in this preface to A Book to Keep (Hidden). However, it is unclear which preface was composed first. A Book to Burn was published close to a decade before A Book to Keep (Hidden), yet the preface to the former work alludes to the existence of the latter. Thus it is possible that Li Zhi may have drafted the preface to A Book to Keep (Hidden) before he wrote the preface to A Book to Burn. Regardless of the chronology of composition, the preface to A Book to Burn provides insight into the question of whether Li deemed the contents of A Book to Keep (Hidden) serious, trifling, or dangerous. At the same time the preface to A Book to Burn complicates the issue of the intended readership of A Book to Keep (Hidden). The preface to A Book to Burn opens, “I have written four books. The first is called A Book to Keep (Hidden). It records several thousands of years of good and bad deeds from ancient times to the present. It is not easy for common people with eyes of flesh to read, so I intended [at first] to hide it.⁵⁹ I meant for it to be hidden in a mountain to await someone of a later generation, a Ziyun to come.”⁶⁰ Unlike the authorial preface to A Book to Keep (Hidden), this preface insists upon the ethical value of that volume. It further confirms that A Book to Keep (Hidden) is not merely diversionary reading; it is a serious, didactic work. Thus the preface to A Book to Burn affirms that A Book to Keep (Hidden) should be kept out of sight not because it is of little value but rather because it contains wisdom so profound that it risks being misunderstood by ordinary, undiscriminating readers, readers with “eyes of flesh.” It demands a reader as insightful as Ziyun.

The mention of Ziyun alludes to a story involving Sima Qian, the father of Chinese historiography. Fearing that his comprehensive history of China, the Historical Records (Shiji), might be misconstrued by the undiscriminating readers of his own era, Sima Qian vowed to “hide” his work away and “store it in a famous mountain” (cang zhu ming shan) to await a suitably perceptive reader.⁶¹ This reader turned out to be Ziyun. Thus by invoking Ziyun, Li Zhi tacitly compares himself to Sima Qian, and by extension places himself in a long and illustrious tradition of virtuous, misunderstood scholars stretching back at least as far as the third century BCE poet Qu Yuan. Like these unfortunate, unappreciated scholars and poets of yore, Li Zhi implies, he pours his genuine emotions onto the page, but few if any of his contemporaries grasp the import of his words. The analogy between the Historical Records and A Book to Keep (Hidden) further bolsters the latter text’s bid to authenticity, for when Li contends that “the virtuous sages of antiquity did not write unless they were [morally] outraged,” he is quoting the sentiments of Sima Qian.⁶² However, this grandiose comparison, far from hiding the book, serves instead to advertise it.

And yet this self-aggrandizing analogy is laced with irony. For the text of A Book to Keep (Hidden) draws heavily on The Left Scribe’s Record of Deeds and Personalities through the Ages (Lidai shi ji zuobian), a work by the Ming literatus Tang Shunzhi (1507–1560), which in turn reproduces nearly verbatim large sections of Sima Qian’s Historical Records along with excerpts culled from other historical writings.⁶³ Thus A Book to Keep (Hidden) follows in direct line of succession from the ultracanonical first comprehensive history of China. Yet throughout his book, Li Zhi continually reverses Sima Qian’s time-honored judgments on historical figures and events. Li provocatively praises individuals whom Sima Qian excoriated and reviles those whom he extolled. Indeed, it was Li’s highly idiosyncratic interpretations and their potential to subvert orthodox judgments that ignited the rage of the imperial censor Zhang Wenda and spurred him to submit to the emperor a memorial impeaching Li Zhi and recommending the destruction of his books. Thus Li’s comparison of himself to Sima Qian, an author whose writings he unrelentingly punctured and critiqued, must be read as largely ironic. But where does this interpretation leave the reader? Surely we are to be distinguished from those blind, fleshy-eyed readers who lacked all powers of discernment. But ought we to envision ourselves as latter-day Ziyuns, readers of exceptional insight? Are readers being flattered or mocked, invited to read or cautioned to keep their distance?

If the allusion to Ziyun is meant to flatter the reader by comparing him to one of the most insightful readers in Chinese history, one may rightly doubt how committed Li really was to hiding A Book to Keep (Hidden) or, for that matter, to burning A Book to Burn. And yet the authorial preface to the latter text insists that readers should literally incinerate the book: “[In] A Book to Burn . . . my words get right to the point and criticize the intractable errors of today’s scholars. Since I get right to the heart of their terminal illnesses, they certainly will wish to kill me. So I want this book to be burned. I mean that it should be burned and abandoned; it must not be allowed to remain.”⁶⁴ If the preface to A Book to Keep (Hidden) conveys Li’s hope that his writings will merely be concealed, the preface to A Book to Burn expresses the more violent—and indeed prophetic—wish that the work be totally destroyed. In 1602, the Wanli emperor, responding to Zhang Wenda’s memorial, issued an edict ordering the destruction of all Li’s writings along with the wooden blocks used for printing them.⁶⁵ When Li composed his preface, he surely could not have foreseen these events. In fact, his letters attest that he actively sought the publication of this book. In the preface to A Book to Burn he even announces that the wood blocks for printing the volume have already been carved.⁶⁶ This preface, then, raises questions similar to those posed by the preface to A Book to Keep (Hidden): if the author knew his books were being published—if he wanted them to be published—why did he incite readers to ignore or destroy them? The discrepancy between the author’s calls for his books’ destruction and the active role he took in their distribution constitutes an act of bluff, for it generates grave doubts about the sincerity of Li’s words.

This gnawing sense of doubt is heightened by a further equivocal remark in the authorial preface: “What was to have been burned is no longer to be burned, and what was to have been hidden is no longer to be hidden.”⁶⁷ Poised on the threshold between the paratext and the text proper, these words both beckon and withhold. They seem on one level to imply that Li has finally overcome whatever reservations he once had about his texts being widely read. Yet on another, they reify these concerns by obsessively repeating them.

What, then, is the desired relationship between reader and author? Are these texts meant to be perused, discarded, or secreted away? The books’ titles themselves invite ambiguity. A Book to Burn, which may also be construed as an imperative, Burn This Book, assails the reader with a stark decision: Should he obediently incinerate the volume as the title exhorts—and as Li Si, the advisor to one of Li Zhi’s heroes, China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang, would have recommended—or should he disobey this command and read it? Either choice entails a violation, for he who burns the book breaks the implicit “pact” between reader and text; but he who reads it transgresses the explicit order stated in the book’s title.⁶⁸ The convoluted rhetoric of the prefaces further amplifies these contradictions.

The coy style and tortured ambivalence of Li’s authorial prefaces set them apart from many other late Ming authorial prefaces, in which authors more typically belittle their own scholarly achievements and beg the reader’s pardon for any potential errors or omissions. However, comparable examples may be cited from early modern Europe. Authorial prefaces by Rabelais and Montaigne resemble Li’s in that they too establish ambivalent, uncomfortable, and at times even hostile relations among authors, readers, and books. The preface to Rabelais’s Gargantua, composed in 1534, features a fictitious narrator, Alcofribas Nasier, who seems to lean off the page and enter directly into the reader’s space. He tauntingly addresses his anonymous readership as “high and mighty guzzlers” and individuals afflicted with venereal diseases.⁶⁹ These insults combine with a complex series of analogies and allusions designed to draw readers in. Alcofribas self-importantly insinuates that his book contains hidden within it the wisdom of Socrates and that readers must not be fooled by its humble appearance. Instead, they should grapple with the text tenaciously like dogs gnawing on a bone. They should “crack it open” and suck out its “nourishing marrow.”⁷⁰ But paradoxically this invitation is retracted almost as soon as it is issued, for Alcofribas immediately denies that the book is anything other than “charming nonsense” produced by his “cheesy brain.”⁷¹ Among the strategies of bluff present in this preface, we may notice parallels to Li’s suggestion that the contents of A Book to Burn are both trivial and weighty.

Li’s tacit comparison of himself to Sima Qian also echoes Rabelais’s invocation of Socrates. Undoubtedly the Greek philosopher and the Chinese historian occupied different positions in their respective cultural histories, but both were revered as authoritative figures from antiquity. So by allying themselves with these towering cultural icons, both sixteenth-century authors were attempting to bolster the authority of their own texts. Additionally, both prefaces teeter on the brink between fiction and reality and establish an ambivalent push-and-pull relationship between the reader and the authorial persona: mingling flattery with insults, they simultaneously lure prospective readers in and thrust them out.

Perhaps even more suitable for comparison is the brief introduction “To the Reader,” which precedes Montaigne’s Essays. Like Li’s preface, it declares that the author wrote the Essays only as a form of personal amusement and did not intend it to be read. But Montaigne, like Li, undercuts this position by making a pretense of addressing his reader directly, in the second person. What’s more, although he employs the intimate, informal pronoun tu rather than vous and affirms that the book should serve as nothing more than a memento mori for his “relatives and friends, so that when they have lost [him] they [might] . . . recover some features of [his] habits and temperament,” historical documentation affirms that he endorsed the book’s dissemination to a wide and anonymous readership, and even likely participated in the publication process.⁷² Thus Montaigne, like Li, engages readers in a coy exchange that seems to invite them into the text and simultaneously to ward them off. Montaigne even quips at his implied reader, “You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure time on so frivolous and vain a subject. So farewell!”⁷³

This closing line—which is paradoxically also an opening—raises questions akin to those generated by Li’s prefaces. Do the authors genuinely doubt the worthiness of their subject matter? Or are their warnings simply ruses designed deliberately to attract readers’ attention? No conclusive answer to these questions can be reached. And it is this open-endedness, this resistance to definitive interpretation, that so provokes and delights readers. What Li’s prefaces share with these European prefaces, then, is the deployment of paradox and self-contradiction to confound and provoke readers, and ultimately to spark their interest. From the very outset, these texts inform readers that they are not what they appear to be. Because of this, they alert readers that some utterances should be taken with a grain of salt, others swallowed whole, but these particular texts never direct readers how to ingest—let alone digest—even one line.

Throughout his writings Li Zhi denounces guile and condemns anyone who would intentionally misrepresent himself in order to deceive others. He claims that words, deeds, and intentions should dovetail smoothly with one another and that his own writings exemplify such stable, transparent signification. The origins of these sentiments lie deep in the Confucian concept of zhengming, the rectification of names, which posits the existence of an intrinsic bond between correct language and ethical conduct. Verbal deceptions of the kind Li observes—and decries—among the Confucians of his day create ambiguity, which threatens to blur categories and undermine the social order.

Yet his prose is saturated with contradictions, ironies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies—examples of rhetorical bluff. Thus despite Li’s insistence upon his own openness and honesty, his texts present neither a consistent nor a coherent worldview. The author’s convoluted and disconcerting style links his writings to an aesthetic of indeterminacy evident in writings from early modern China and Europe. Despite the widely divergent religious and philosophical traditions of these cultures, the literature and arts of both places playfully tangle truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. That Li’s texts so strongly exemplify this tendency casts doubt upon the author’s self-proclaimed adherence to transparent signification. And this in turn leaves us to wonder why an author who claims to endorse transparent manifestation of emotion would engage in bluff at all. Why not express himself directly, in straightforward language? Why not say precisely what he means?

Like many of his contemporaries, Li Zhi was infected by the rapid and unpredictable changes taking place throughout the early modern world. For this reason the rhetorical bluffing symptomatic of the age may be understood as an indexical sign, a manifestation of the tempestuous state of signification in early modern societies. By allowing contradictory layers of meaning to proliferate in his book, by fluctuating among discrepant viewpoints, and by adopting framing techniques that obscure his own opinions, Li’s writings illustrate the difficulty of deciphering meaning under these circumstances. And yet his texts are no mere mirror of society, un-self-consciously reflecting the semiotic turmoil of the day. They are the works of a consummate commentator: through the rhetoric of bluff, Li both mingled in the general melee and simultaneously responded to and honestly critiqued it.