Introduction

Writing from his château in Dordogne before 1580, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) characterized the era in which he lived as an “unruly age.”¹ His words were truer than even he suspected. Thousands of miles away, the Chinese prose writer Zhang Dai (1597–1679) looked back on the same period and likewise remembered it as a time when everything was “chaotic,” “topsy-turvy,” and “jumbled” in the years preceding the collapse of the Ming dynasty.² The writings of the maverick thinker and intellectual provocateur Li Zhi (1527–1602) exemplify many of the contradictions of the period. A trenchant social critic, he relentlessly exposed the hypocrisy and deception he found rife among his contemporaries. Yet his opinions, which he disseminated in voluminous publications, paradoxically also contributed to the unruliness of the era. In essays and letters, occasional poetry, and commentaries on texts spanning the Confucian classics, Buddhist and Daoist religious and philosophical works, histories, and popular fiction and drama, he promulgated his iconoclastic and unorthodox views, publishing them in volumes with deliberately provocative titles like A Book to Burn (Fenshu) and A Book to Keep (Hidden) (Cangshu).³ These writings, coupled with the author’s flamboyant personality and eccentric behavior, earned him a reputation as one of the most controversial and incisive thinkers of his day.

In 1602, the imperial censor Zhang Wenda (fl. 1600) submitted a memorial to the throne denouncing Li Zhi for disseminating works that contained “outrageous and transgressive judgments” that “violated the norms of propriety” and “threw men’s minds into confusion.”⁴ Zhang’s words came on the heels of a popular outcry against Li Zhi. In 1600, protesting his unorthodox writings and the potentially deleterious effect they might have on public morality, his detractors set fire to the monastery where he was living and desecrated the gravesite he had prepared for himself. Two years later, the Wanli emperor issued a proclamation calling for Li’s arrest and ordering the destruction of all his writings along with the wooden blocks for printing them. Li Zhi was apprehended in Tongzhou and clapped in prison, where, at the age of seventy-five, he committed suicide by slitting his own throat. But the death of the author could not halt the spread of his writings or restrain his fame. News of his dramatic death and incendiary ideas boosted book sales, and contemporary accounts attest that his writings, although banned, continued to circulate widely throughout the empire, both in accurate editions and in a great many spurious and pirated copies. Reports of this remarkable author’s writings and his sudden death even traveled to Europe.⁵

Li’s texts captivated his contemporaries’ imagination. Numerous readers averred that his writings dazzled them and “opened eyes that had been shut since antiquity.”⁶ The boldness and originality with which he dared to buck interpretative conventions astounded them. He defended historical figures who had been reviled for centuries by orthodox Confucians, and condemned those the tradition had revered. Moreover, his own writings emboldened readers to question time-honored judgments rooted in tradition and authoritative precedent and to reinterpret both past and present in light of their own knowledge and experience.

Strong-willed and opinionated, Li embraced contradiction and reveled in self-dramatization. An outspoken opponent of the corruption and duplicity he deemed rampant in the contemporary Confucian, or Ru,⁷ civil bureaucracy, he nonetheless viewed himself as an avid defender of the core principles of Confucian philosophy as exemplified by the sage himself. He spent the better part of his adult life employed in the civil bureaucracy and, in addition to serving as prefect of Yao’an in the southwestern province of Yunnan, held reputable positions in both of the Ming capitals, Nanjing and Beijing. His years in official service, however, were fraught with difficulties;⁸ he found fault in and quarreled with his superiors and at the age of fifty-four, when he would have been eligible for a promotion, abruptly abandoned his position.⁹ In 1588, he retired to an unlicensed Buddhist monastery on Dragon Lake (Longhu), some thirty li from the closest city of Macheng in Huguang, modern-day Hubei province.¹⁰ There he devoted his days to study; shaved off his hair, seemingly in conformity with Buddhist practice, but grew a long and incongruous beard; and strictly observed the morning and evening monastic rituals but profaned the premises by consorting with widows and refusing to abstain from eating meat.¹¹ It was from this mountain retreat that Li authored his most notorious works, including his most scathing attacks on the contemporary culture of officialdom, which he deemed hypocritical and corrupt to the core.

Li’s writings attracted a wide readership not only because of his eccentric and unconventional behavior and the directness, incisiveness, and startling originality of his critiques but also because of the literary character of his writings. Composed in a sparkling style, his texts positively teem with self-contradiction, irony, and paradox, techniques to which I refer collectively as bluff.¹² Throughout his works, he disconcertingly juxtaposes earthy analogies with erudite allusions to antiquity and exhibits his virtuosic inventiveness and sardonic wit. By cultivating a rhetorical style that invites readers to question the veracity, authority, and reliability of his own texts, Li matches his prose style to the content of his writings—his critique of the prevalent social ills of deception and hypocrisy. Thus the very process of reading his works prompts readers to experience in textual form some of the uncertainties accessory to life in the early modern world in which they lived.

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

These fears were grounded in practical realities. In China and Europe alike, counterfeit coins passed frequently for legal tender, and prices rose and fell unpredictably. In China, membership in the civil bureaucracy, which had once been strictly regulated by the examination system, widened to permit the purchase of official titles, and in Europe, noble titles and ecclesiastical offices also came up for sale. Commoners masqueraded as gentlemen, and the boundaries demarcating social classes grew increasingly permeable.¹³ On coastal shores from Lisbon to Xiamen and Li’s natal Quanzhou, foreign traders hawked exotic wares, while in China Catholic missionaries, including Li’s acquaintance Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), preached doctrines never before heard. In Europe and China increasing numbers of printed books, many of dubious credibility, disseminated a tangle of facts, opinions, rumors, and beliefs. In daily life and in books, individuals of the period were assaulted by unreliable appearances, conflicting truth-claims, deception, pretense, and fraud. These circumstances challenged contemporaries to distinguish between surface appearances and the often discrepant realities below and to discriminate fact from fanciful exaggeration and outright lies.

Comparative early modern historians have identified a host of large-scale social and economic phenomena equally characteristic of China and Europe in this period.¹⁴ These independent though interrelated phenomena, which have been called “horizontal continuities,” included urbanization, rapid commercialization, improved technologies of navigation and printing, higher rates of book production, and increased social mobility.¹⁵ Together these factors contributed to creating a situation in which monetary counterfeiting, impersonation, and book piracy flourished, and signs became increasingly difficult to decipher: the garments a person wore no longer necessarily denoted his social class, nor did an author’s name printed on a book cover ensure that the contents of that book were composed by him. For Li, the most distressing of these phenomena was the tendency of contemporary government officials to dissemble virtue.

Independently, scholars of China and Europe have argued that in the regions they study concern over instabilities in the social and economic spheres seeped into general anxiety about deception, both literal and metaphorical.¹⁶ Contemporaries worried not only about the fluctuating value of money and the unsteady meaning of clothing; the truth of words and statements also came to be seen in economic terms. Just as the value of a coin rises and falls depending on the degree of people’s confidence in it, so too did it seem to some contemporaries that the values and meanings of words inflated and deflated as people gained or lost confidence in them. Li’s writings exhibit many of these concerns. They demonstrate his disturbing recognition that an idea—even a lie—can become true if enough people believe it, and likewise, a proven fact, once popularly discredited, can become false. Taking Li Zhi’s life and writings as its focal point, this book explores early modern Chinese and European fascination with the mutability and malleability of truth and the growing sense that individuals must judge and appraise emerging situations for themselves. Li’s struggles with questions of authenticity and falsification find parallels in contemporary works of literature, philosophy, and art, both Chinese and European. And as such, they signal Li’s writings’ participation in an early modern cultural ethos characterized by pervasive doubt.

Undertaking to compare works from China and Europe in this period is a risky proposition. Ming China covered a wide expanse of territory, and not all regions were equally affected by the social and economic conditions of early modernity. Nor certainly did all countries in Europe exhibit similar characteristics or respond to social and economic pressures in identical ways. Throughout this book, I aim to acknowledge these differences and the cultural particularities they exemplify, while at the same time not losing sight of the epochal character of the early modern.¹⁷

The periodization “early modern” has been subjected to sharp and impassioned critique, and the term itself is admittedly marred by its own implicit teleology.¹⁸ For the purposes of this book, I am concerned neither with the earliness of the early modern nor with its claim to incipient modernity. I might just as well have adopted the term “historical cosmopolitanism,”¹⁹ since for me the heuristic utility of the term “early modern” lies primarily in its ability to provide a ground on which contemporaneous Asian and European phenomena may stand with equally firm footing.²⁰ The term “early modernities” is also helpful, as it honors the plurality of manifestations of temporally synchronous though geographically disparate phenomena. More important for my ends, the concept of early modernities challenges entrenched habits of mind that comprehend cultural phenomena as exclusively significant—or at least primarily significant—within the confines of the nations in which they took form. Central to this book’s method are questions of whether and to what extent global or transnational processes may affect, resonate with, or illuminate the study of culturally particular works.

In taking seriously issues of synchronicity and commensurability, I neither deny nor diminish the value of national histories. On the contrary, I draw heavily on the work of historians and literary scholars of China and Europe and hope to supplement and complement the regional narratives they have produced. The arguments developed in this book rely upon research focused on Li’s roles in various local Chinese contexts, his engagement with late Ming syncretism, Confucian official culture, historiography, drama and fiction commentary, and more.²¹ Yet my goal as a comparatist is, as David Porter writes in the introduction to Comparative Early Modernities, “to read creatively between and across . . . boundaries [and in so doing] to lessen [the exclusivity of] their hold on our categorical mappings, and to invite a more fluid and capacious conception of a range of cultural trajectories past and present.”²²

In an essay advocating the importance of transcultural comparisons as a corrective for exclusively national-based narratives of literary and intellectual history, Walter Cohen calls for the study of Eurasian literatures, including those of India, Southeast Asia, Russia, Europe, and the Far East. He even goes so far as to argue that privileging national literary histories may obscure or distort vital transregional connections.²³ From this perspective, the focus in the present volume merely on China and Europe may seem narrow. Before making claims about cultural early modernity one might wish to inquire whether themes and rhetorical patterns similar to those I have observed in China and Europe appear with equal frequency and resonate as strongly in Japanese, Southeast Asian, Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal culture of the same period. Such inquiries are admirable and worthwhile; however, the present study is limited by my knowledge and linguistic abilities to works of literature, art, and philosophy from the major sites of origin and destination on the maritime trade routes that were gaining ascendancy at the turn of the seventeenth century. Comparison of these nodal points will, I hope, provide the basis on which other scholars may conduct further, more wider-ranging studies.

If the geographical scope of texts examined in this volume raises methodological questions, so may the wide range of genres studied here. Li Zhi himself experimented with a great many genres, both philosophical and literary. An incomplete list of these includes essays, letters, prefaces, colophons, obituaries, treatises, poetry, and commentaries on fiction, drama, history, and classical and religious texts. To these we must add the even greater number of works about which Li wrote and the fact that throughout this volume I have on many occasions taken the liberty of comparing Li’s writings to works of which he had no knowledge. I have undertaken such comparisons in the hope and with the conviction that by examining and comparing diverse cultural products, we in the twenty-first century may gain insight into features of the early modern world that may have eluded the comprehension or cognizance of contemporaries in the sixteenth century.

In recent years, historical arguments in favor of early modernities have begun to percolate into the disciplines of literary and art history. Studies have been conducted on the importation of Asian objects and their use in European societies and on Chinese artists’ adaptation of Western techniques including chiaroscuro, perspective, and trompe l’oeil.²⁴ Timothy Brook’s study of Vermeer, for example, highlights ways in which, through that artist’s oeuvre, viewers glimpse facets of the emerging world economy: the mass production in China of porcelain for export and its connoisseurship and enthusiastic reinscription in paintings produced at the opposite end of the Eurasian continent.²⁵ Yet the majority of these studies have centered on what have been called “interconnections” or rapports de fait, material links between the production and consumption of objects from geographically disparate corners of the early modern world.

My work on Li Zhi differs methodologically from those efforts, for the correspondences I aim to unveil between the form and content of this author’s texts and the form and content of contemporary works of art and literature both within and beyond China entail few if any direct, transregional material connections. While the writings I analyze each address and respond to local material conditions, which in turn echo local conditions elsewhere in the Indra’s web of early modernity,²⁶ I am chiefly concerned with what historian Joseph Fletcher would call “parallel developments” or what literary theorists Alfred Aldridge and Zhang Longxi might classify as “affinities,” that is, “resemblances in style, structure, mood, or idea” among works produced contemporaneously.²⁷ The balanced emphasis on matters of form (“style” and “structure”) and content (“idea”) highlights the interdependence of these features and constitutes a linchpin of my analysis. For despite the many differences both within and among Chinese and European artistic and literary styles in this period, I perceive a common set of salient formal elements that correspond to the shared thematic content and socioeconomic contexts described earlier. These formal features include a predilection for verbal self-contradiction, paradox, and irony;²⁸ the adoption of an array of incompatible perspectives; an obsession with the processes and pitfalls of representation; and a tendency to create “doubled,” storied, or “second-order representations.”²⁹ This constellation of intertwined forms and ideas was inextricably connected to the shared nexus of challenges—economic, social, philosophical, and psychological—facing developing early modern societies and their constituents.

Although in many cases Li Zhi was not aware of the transcultural ramifications of what and how he was writing, his texts nonetheless evince his efforts to grapple with the local manifestations of global problems. In form as much as in content, his texts and others of their ilk both reenact and respond to the crises of their day. In this respect, they corroborate a central tenet of classical Confucian poetics, namely that texts arise organically in response to specific historical conditions. This theory posits that an author’s environment elicits from him emotions that find synecdochic expression in literature.³⁰ My reading of Li Zhi’s texts grows out of this mode of interpretation: Li’s works, I argue, display his own psychic state and simultaneously, like microcosms, enable readers to imagine—or even experience—how it may have felt to inhabit the unstable social world of the late Ming.

The metaphor of art and literature as symptomatic of society’s ills has transcultural currency and appears frequently in writings of the period. In the preface to A Book to Burn, Li declares his intention to point out the intractable illnesses of his contemporaries. And elsewhere he refers to society as in need of healing.³¹ This notion of the arts as symptomatic of problems facing the social milieus in which they were created meshes with indigenous Chinese interpretations that cast literature as an organic outgrowth of historical circumstance. Moreover, just as diverse individuals or populations infected with strands of the same disease may exhibit different symptoms, the works of literature and art analyzed here display a range of instantiations of and responses to the challenges of early modernity. My project is not to impose identity upon the symptoms I discover but rather to recognize the family resemblances they may share.³² For I hope to show that whereas previous scholarship diagnosed the artistic “symptoms” arising in China and Europe in this period as evidence of different diseases, they may in fact have shared an etiology—a consanguinity—that renders their comparison instructive. Moreover, just as an epidemiologist learns most about a disease by assembling and comparing a wide array of case studies, so too do I hope that comparative analysis of the many aesthetic dimensions of cultural early modernity will yield a more nuanced understanding than would a tightly focused investigation of Li Zhi alone.

But how can I be sure, in analyzing the many and varied symptoms I have identified, that they are, as I claim, variants of a common illness and not in fact expressions of discrete diseases? Infected as I necessarily am by my own cultural background, education, and assumptions, might I not be guilty of imposing my own Western categories upon the Chinese material, and in so doing might I too fail to respect “the otherness of the other”?³³ These concerns acquire a certain urgency when we observe that the core issues of this study—anxieties produced by the perception that signs were losing their ability to represent the world adequately and reliably—have for decades been considered emblematic, defining features of the European Renaissance. In attempting to demonstrate that the preoccupation with representation and misrepresentation is characteristic of more than the European Renaissance alone, am I not guilty of foisting Western analytical categories on Chinese texts? And is there not arrogance and even cultural chauvinism in assuming that these terms and concepts can meaningfully be applied to works of Chinese literature, philosophy, and art?

To be sure, applying to Chinese texts terms and concepts originally developed to analyze Western literature or history has rightfully garnered criticism. The historian Lynn Struve scoffs at what she calls “we-too-ism,” the habit widespread among Chinese and Western scholars alike of zeroing in on features characteristic of a certain period of Western history or literature and then systematically seeking (and uncannily always finding!) corollaries in Chinese history of a corresponding or earlier period.³⁴ This type of scholarship frequently gives rise to a tedious matching game in which isolated features of individual texts are lined up and tallied, irrespective of their discrepant meanings in dissimilar cultural contexts.³⁵ We-too-ist arguments are often driven by the desire to solve problems like the Needham question, to wit: Why did the scientific revolution not happen in China?³⁶ Yet framing discussions in terms of China’s lack, its failure to meet predetermined benchmarks of European modernity, tends to frustrate efforts to arrive at nuanced conclusions. It is not difficult, then, to fault the we-too-ists for ignoring indigenous categories and attempting bullishly to make alien cultures conform to their own procrustean bed of preset epistemological categories.

But is there any alternative? How can we avoid committing the offense of reducing “other” to “self”?³⁷ Is such an aspiration even feasible? And should our answers to this question differ depending on what sort of “others” we are considering? In an essay on the writing of history, R. G. Collingwood idealistically argues that the task of the historian is to “rethink for himself” the thoughts that occurred in the minds of individuals from the past. Indeed, he maintains, our only access to historical knowledge occurs through this kind of mental redoubling, the possibility of which he never seriously doubts. Rather, it seems evident to him that the moderns can, with minimal difficulty, reproduce the mind-sets of individuals from antiquity. He writes, “If the discovery of Pythagoras concerning the square of the hypotenuse is a thought which we to-day can think for ourselves, a thought that constitutes a permanent addition to mathematical knowledge, [then] the discovery of Augustus that a monarchy could be grafted upon the Republican constitution of Rome . . . is equally a thought which the student of Roman history can think for himself, a permanent addition to political ideas.”³⁸ A bold conclusion! But Collingwood’s imaginary student of Roman history is presumably of Western descent and familiar with the concepts of monarchy and republican democracy. What if one were to envision a student from a culture in which these institutions either do not exist at all or carry radically different associations? Would he or she too be able to conjure an identical thought?

Collingwood acknowledges the problem: “So far as the historian brings to bear on the [subject of his investigation] all the powers of his own mind and all his knowledge . . . , [his endeavor] is not a passive surrender to the spell of another’s mind; it is a labour of active and therefore critical thinking. The historian not only reenacts past thought, he reenacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in reenacting it, criticizes it, forms his own judgment of its value, corrects . . . it.”³⁹ But on what grounds does he form his own judgment? On what basis dare he try to “correct” it? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that we have no criteria for judging foreign cultures because taking our own culture as a standard entails breaching the rules of objectivity, whereas adopting an outsider’s viewpoint requires abandoning our own cultural norms.⁴⁰ Lévi-Strauss’s statement applies equally to historical studies such as those Collingwood’s hypothetical student may have undertaken—studies confined to a single geographical area or intellectual tradition—and to intercultural comparisons. The philosophical implications of this statement even extend to contemporary interactions. For one might well ask on what basis we presume to be able to grasp the meaning of words spoken to us by our contemporary interlocutors. They too contain seeds of difference. If identity between speaker or author and listener or reader is a prerequisite for communication or interpretation, we may as well fall silent. For this reason, perhaps, comparative literature has been declared an impossible, utopian discipline.⁴¹

Yet if we are to engage in scholarship at all, or even in conversation with other human beings, we must find strategies for releasing ourselves from such nihilistic arguments, which lead us ultimately to lonely solipsism. We must, as Confucius urges in a rather different context, “recognize the impossibility of the endeavor, yet undertake it anyway.”⁴² But how? Hans-Georg Gadamer avers that “alienness and its overcoming” are at the crux of the hermeneutic endeavor.⁴³ Taking Gadamer’s “overcoming” as inspiration, we must find ways to acknowledge difference while at the same time attempting to bridge it through empathy and creativity. As Zhang Longxi writes, “East-West comparative studies cannot simply be a matter of application of Western theory or critical methodology to Eastern texts but must be based on theoretical issues that are common and shared by Chinese and Western traditions in different but comparable manifestations.”⁴⁴ Criticism of this sort necessitates balancing categories of native and foreign, ancient and modern, self and other.

In undertaking scholarship of this nature, it is necessary to acknowledge one’s own subjectivity as a critic, as well as the historical contingency of any argument one makes. One must additionally relinquish the utopian desire to “restore” philologically or reconstruct accurately the lost “original” meaning(s) of a text.⁴⁵ As Stanley Fish writes, the job of the critic is to make sense, to construct meaning actively from inert texts.⁴⁶ While Fish’s polemical stance has been criticized for its presentist orientation and the activist role it accords to readers, his idea remains compelling because it acknowledges the unavoidable fact that all readers necessarily enter into this meaning-making activity; there is simply no pulling meaning out of a text without simultaneously reading meaning into it. The two stand counterpoised in ineluctable, irresolvable tension. For this reason no interpretation in any humanist field is ever conclusive. The process of semiosis yields only more signs, each one of which will in turn give rise to further signs in a process of endless proliferation.⁴⁷

With these arguments in mind, I unapologetically embrace the subjectivity and contingency of the interpretations I propose in this book. It is not my contention that Li Zhi viewed himself as an early modern figure. He didn’t. And he certainly had no knowledge of any of the European authors to whom I compare him (Ricci excepted). Yet our historical distance of more than four hundred years enables us to perceive and illuminate connections that contemporaries would not have been able to recognize.

The notion that readers may discover in texts meanings that lie beyond those the authors consciously intended was by no means alien to Li Zhi, the late Ming, or European early modernity. As He Yuming has recently argued, in China “hucksterish” (baifan), “generative” reading flourished in this period, as readers of miscellanies, joke books, and other popular genres were encouraged to draw on their knowledge of a wide range of texts, both highbrow and low-, and to recombine or juxtapose elements of them in novel ways, often for comic effect.⁴⁸ Li Zhi was at the vanguard of this trend in experimenting with “appropriative” reading practices. Along with his predecessor He Xinyin (1517–1579) and others, he was responsible for pioneering many such strategies of reading: quoting out of context, deliberately misreading, and insisting upon literal interpretations of passages traditionally taken figuratively. His hermeneutic methods privilege the subjectivity and creativity of readers over the quest for elusive authorial intentions. Thus although I have endeavored not to subject his writings to interpretations that intentionally distort or to read his writings in the deliberatively manipulative manner in which, as we shall see, he habitually read the works of other authors, I do see a certain affinity between the methodology of comparison I propose here and the practices that He Yuming posits as characteristic of reading in the late Ming. At that time, reading often entailed resourcefully “finding or establishing previously unexpected connections among far-flung sources.”⁴⁹

TEXTUAL COMPOSITION, ORGANIZATION, AND PUBLICATION HISTORY

A Book to Burn is an assemblage formed of disparate texts composed over many years and republished at intervals in different states of (in)completion. The book, like most Chinese collectanea of the period, has a miscellaneous quality. The entries are arranged loosely by genre, with letters occupying the first two fascicles (juan), essays and other short prose pieces the third, writings on history the fourth, and poetry the fifth and sixth. However within these large groupings, the entries exhibit no discernible organization and may be browsed or read in any order.⁵⁰

The process by which Li published and republished his writings is not fully known.⁵¹ However, we can say that he added to his literary creations repeatedly throughout his life and did not consider publication a culminating act. Neither the original manuscript of A Book to Burn nor the first printed edition is extant, and scholars are still debating what these documents may have contained, in what year the first edition may have been published, and from what years the several extant Ming editions may date.⁵² What is clear, however, is that the book was in circulation before 1592 and that it was reprinted in several different forms during the late Ming.⁵³ We also know that whether or not Li succeeded in having the book reprinted before his death, he unquestionably strove to attain this goal.⁵⁴ Moreover, as statements scattered through the text attest, he added to his work over the course of many years. Following his death, his friend Wang Benke (fl. 1594) gathered his unpublished additions, organized them according to the same principles that governed the early editions, and in 1618 published them as Another Book to Burn (Xu fenshu). Like A Book to Burn, this collection contains a motley assortment of short pieces in several genres.

If A Book to Burn took shape gradually through a complex and multipartite process, so did Li’s other major opus, A Book to Keep (Hidden), the title of which puns on the meaning of the word cang, which calls to mind both storing away valuables for safekeeping and sequestering indiscreet or shameful materials so as to keep them from the public eye. A Book to Keep (Hidden) is a work of history modeled on the writings of the Ming literatus Tang Shunzhi (1507–1560), which in turn draws liberally on the ultracanonical historical biographies of the Han historian Sima Qian (145?–86 BCE).⁵⁵ Throughout the text, Li presents the biographies of historical figures and offers adversarial commentary that opposes the canonical, Confucian interpretations. Although he completed a draft of the book by 1588–1589, he continued to revise and amend it for over a decade until its first publication in 1599.⁵⁶ However, editing did not end upon the book’s publication. After his death, his friends gathered together the many additions he had made subsequent to the book’s initial publication and republished the volume under the title Another Book to Keep (Hidden) (Xu cangshu) in 1609. Like A Book to Keep (Hidden), Another Book to Keep (Hidden) contains biographies of historical personages thematically arranged.

The practice of revising and republishing one’s work was by no means unique to Li or late Ming China. Scores of Renaissance writers, including Erasmus (d. 1536), Bodin (1530–1596), Ronsard (1524–1585), Montaigne, and Bacon (1561–1626) came out with updated second and sometimes third editions of their writings. These subsequent publications, encouraged in part by the proliferation of printing houses and the increase in commerce, were often expansions of the original texts, and their covers advertised their status as such. Thus in this period publication was not viewed as the conclusive act we often consider it today; rather it was deemed a provisional step in the long and complex history of a text.⁵⁷ And revision did not necessarily mean smoothing out inconsistencies or eliminating errors; it often entailed the insertion of fresher material that would coexist side by side with earlier, sometimes contradictory statements.

Similar attitudes prevailed in late Ming China, where it was common practice for literati to revise, expand, comment on, and reprint their own writings and those of others.⁵⁸ This process took place both during an author’s life and, as we have seen, often beyond it. Thus, whatever form the initial publication of A Book to Burn may have taken, we can safely infer that Li Zhi probably viewed the first edition merely as one instantiation of the text, not as a definitive version. And as his writings grew and changed over many years, they came to embody more and more richly anomalous inconsistencies and discrepancies.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter one, “Transparent Language: Origin Myths and Early Modern Aspirations of Recovery,” focuses on Li’s endorsement of the conservative view that when a language operates smoothly it should clearly manifest the author’s state of mind. A keen observer of the linguistic and behavioral habits of his peers, Li was distressed to discover among them the pervasive practice of hypocrisy and the widespread misuse of words. Alluding to early Confucian myths about the origin of language and European Renaissance beliefs in a primordial, pure, transparent semiotic system, the chapter demonstrates that like many of his European contemporaries, Li criticized the semiotic instability surrounding him and yearned for the restitution of a more reliable mode of communication.

Chapter two, “Rhetorical Bluff: Paradox, Irony, and Self-Contradiction,” traces an opposing current in Li’s thought: his open-armed embrace of linguistic inconsistencies such as paradoxes, irony, and self-contradictions puzzles and disconcerts readers. Although the widespread use of these sleights of hand has been deemed a quintessential feature of European Renaissance literature, I argue that such techniques were also widely in use in the visual and literary arts in China and therefore ought to be considered paradigmatic of the early modern period more generally. More importantly, paradoxical language itself may paradoxically be considered the truest or most accurate mode of expression in cultures in which the meanings of signs are constantly fluctuating.

The next three chapters examine particular instances of Li’s behavior and use of language as they relate to core spheres of material life and semiotic activity in the early modern period: dress codes, economic conditions, and publishing. Chapter three, “Sartorial Signs and Li Zhi’s Paradoxical Appearance,” scrutinizes Li’s peculiar personal self-presentation. Having resigned from the Confucian bureaucracy, Li took up residence in a Buddhist monastery and shaved his head. However, he continued to wear Confucian robes of office. The incongruous figure he cut, as well as the contradictory verbal explanations he provided for choosing to adopt this look baffled his contemporaries and challenged their ingrained habits of interpretation. Studying the sartorial conventions of the late Ming, their ideological implications, and their parallels to vestimentary norms in early modern Europe provides insight into the stakes of Li’s decision to present himself in this incongruous manner. Here, as in chapter two, I argue that Li’s embrace of bluff and his deviation from the expected dress code functioned ironically as a bid for authenticity.

Chapter four, “Money and Li Zhi’s Economies of Rhetoric,” situates Li’s writings in the complex economic and monetary contexts of the late Ming, in which financial transactions were conducted through such diverse monetary instruments as barter, unminted lumps of silver, and a wide array of coins: foreign, domestic, ancient, contemporary, legitimate, and counterfeited. My claim here is that when the value of commodities—and even money itself—is considered unreliable and subject to unpredictable change, these conditions may affect literary style. A great deal has been written about the economic metaphors that suffuse monumental works of early modern European literature. This chapter extends those arguments to examine analogies between Li’s idiosyncratic use of language and his advocacy of contradictory positions on the one hand, and on the other, the daily economic uncertainties facing him and his contemporaries.

Chapter five, “Dubious Books and Definitive Editions,” pivots away from Li to address the flourishing print culture of the early modern period. Just as societies in this era were home to diverse currencies whose values fluctuated in time and space and whose authenticity was always in question, this period also witnessed the proliferation of real and forged books on all manner of subjects. Here I compare readers’ concerns about the reliability of book editions in early modern China and Europe and chart the rhetorical strategies through which the editors and preface writers of two posthumously published volumes, Li’s Another Book to Burn and Montaigne’s Essays, strove to position their editions as valid and authentic. The several prefaces to these texts, printed within twenty-five years of one another in China and France, evince their editors’ strenuous attempts to combat readers’ fears of fraudulence and to convince them of the unassailable accuracy of these editions.

The final chapter, “Provoking or Persuading Readers? Li Zhi and the Incitement of Critical Judgment,” tackles the question of how contemporary readers interpreted Li’s bluff-laden texts. Focusing on Li’s incendiary judgments of historical figures, I interrogate whether late Ming readers were inclined to take Li’s assertions at face value and place their trust in them or whether contemporary readers were inspired by Li’s provocative assertions to cultivate their own critical sensibilities and arrive at their own conclusions. Examining Li’s contradictory statements on the role of the reader, the interpretive strategies with which he approached his own reading matter, and numerous accounts of late Ming and early Qing readers’ responses to his texts reveals that although Li may not have consciously intended to spark readers to develop their powers of critical judgment, his texts did indeed serve this purpose. As such, they participated in an early modern trend toward weaning readers from their habitual dependence on ancient sources of authority and fostering readers’ confidence in their ability to judge shifting situations for themselves. This skill would serve them well under conditions of both material and verbal indeterminacy.