Chiang Hsun's 6 Talks on Solitude 蔣勳之孤獨六講. 2

I already mentioned in my comments to one of the bloggers that Chiang Hsun is a good story teller but not a very organized writer. Maybe that's because he is basically an artist and not a philosopher. Therefore trying to summarize what he wrote about in the second chapter of his book on solitude is not an easy task. It's a bit like trying to reduce to words how a piece of music feels like. No matter how good the writer may be, music just can't be completely transcribed into words. So it is with Chiang's writing. But I shall do my best.

He starts off with his experience as a writer writing a novel. He says that whenever he is writing a novel, he will not read books of literature or other novels but only other types of books so as to get a new angle on some familiar emotions eg. books on human or animal physiology. He used this method in writing his 熱死鸚鵡 and 舌頭考 . To him, the greatest pleasure a writer gets when he writes a novel is that he can explore hitherto unexplored territory by linking knowledge from very disparate fields. That is because whether in the east or the west, novels do not fall within the relevant cultural mainstreams and can thereby escape surveillance by the defenders of cultural orthodoxy e.g  Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢),  Legend of the Lakeside (水滸傳,),  Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義), Travelogue of the Journey to the West (西遊記) and Marquez's 100 years of Solitude (百年孤寂 ).

Whilst writing 舌頭考, he observed how people moved their tongue when they spoke. He discovered that different languages would make use of the mouth and the tongue in different ways and many people could not distinguish between the d and t sound, the b and p sound and could not pronounce the gutteral "r" sound in French. and further that because their phonetic system is relatively simple, the Japanese have particular difficulties in speaking foreign languages. In addition, he learned that when we hear a language we do not understand, we tend to listen to it as if it were music.

He also discovered that one of the reasons why people quarrel is that they are using the same language! If we do not speak in completely the same language, the chances of quarrels will be reduced! He cites the example of listening to the conversation between one of his Chinese students and his Japanese wife: they spoke mainly English but sometimes used Chinese and sometimesJapanese words. He found the relationship most cordial perhaps as a result of the two not completely understanding each other.

To him, another reason why language can become a source of misunderstanding is that one side of the conversation simply does not really "want" to "listen". It is not a question of whether the parties can understand the language or not having a common language eg. in talk shows and "call in"  programs where everybody wants to speak and nobody wants to listen and the talk show host cuts the participants short. In such a case, the speaker will feel that he is a voice in the wilderness.

He also discovers that sometimes a speaker has no listener because of the cultural or political prejudice of his listeners. eg. people having different political ideology will often refuse to listen to what exactly it is that their political opponents are saying because of the listener's own doctrinal political prejudice. An analogoous source of prejudice is established academic convention eg. whether there is proper index, proper references to the relevant thesis in the viva voce examination for the defence of one's thesis, and not the creativity or innovativeness of one's ideas. The emphasis is placed on the external form rather the contents.

Finally he thinks that in China, the Confucian tradition has never placed any great weight upon accuracy of one's expression. To the Confucians, skilful talk and expressivity of tone are frowned upon as not conforming to the virtue of "benevolence" (巧言令色, 鮮矣仁). Because of this injunction, Chinese people seldom express any emotion when they talk. Their speech  therefore becomes relatively dull and colorless.

In addition, in Chinese society, children are not encouraged to talk in front of strangers for fear of their saying something which may be offensive to their guests because they might say things inappropriate to their social status or social role. As a result, Chinese people are not very good speech makers. It is completely different in the West. From the time of the Greeks, logic and rhetoric have always been greatly valued and that is why foreign politicians are such skilful speech makers compared to our legislators. Confucius emphasizes internal values rather than external expression. He advises his student to listen to a man but to observe what he does. (聽其言 觀其行).

However, he says that it is not entirely true that Chinese people never thought about logic eg. the Nominalists (名家) had their" White horse is not a horse" (白馬非馬) doctrine. But since they did not conform to Confucian principles and values, very little of their works survived. By contrast, in the West, semiologists meticulously study the structure of a language and advocate the idea that before we examine the contents of words, we need first to ask whether the proper language is employed. For this reason, people in the West have very strict rules as to what is logical and what is not. But in Chinese society, the rules governing the language use are very loose. Hence it is often not clear what exactly one means when one uses certain words. But ChuangTsu 莊子 also appears fully aware of linguistic logic as evidenced by his discussion with Wai Tzu  (惠子) on whether a fish is happy. To WaiTsu's子非魚, 安知魚之樂 , ChuangTzu replies 子非我 ,安知我在不知魚之樂.  But this aspect of the language has never been emphasized or valued in Chinese society. To Chiang, becasue Confucian civilization does not pay attention to the accuracy in their use of words and  Confucian language may be thus be regarded more as a poetic or a spiritual language.

To Chiang, language has two innate tendencies, running in opposite directions. At one pole, it may develop into legal language with great precision and as far as possible without any ambiguity but at the other pole, it may develop into poetic language, full of ambiguities. International treaties and international law is written in French because the French have the strictest rules about the use of words. But, to him, Chinese is the least precise but one of the most beautiful poetic  languages in the world . For this reason no one say that 六法全書 is beautiful but everyone says that 詩經  is beautiful. However to the Confucians, what is most important is 仁義道德, not law. That's why in 論語, there is a story of Confucius disapproving a child informing the officials that his father has stolen a cow against the law. The law seeks to reduce the possible meaning of words so that only one is left. Here I don't think he is entirely right. 義 certainly means justice and justice implies law. Because Chinese language is imprecise, our laws are imprecise. That is why it is possible that someone like 嵇康 at 40 could be charged with something like "上不臣天子, 不事王侯, 輕時傲世, 無益如今, 有敗於俗" and executed. I agree that the Chinese language can be a very poetic language because our words often do not have any clear meanings and because their meanings are not clear, that leaves a great deal of room for the reader's imagination to do its work for him. He can fill in the blanks for himself according to his own personality and experience.

Chiang says that he is undecided whether language should be precise or imprecise. If language is so precise that there are no further possibility of what the words can possibly mean, then to him, language will have lost its flexibility and if so, a great deal of limitation will be placed upon the use of language as an instrument for the expression of feelings. He notes that in novels and other literary works, there are numerous possibilities of the meanings of words being subjected to subversion. Often words will mean exactly the opposite of their literal or surface meaning. I think this observation is correct but it is a false dichotomy. Words can have different meanings in different contexts. We do not expect words in a poem to have the kind of precision as the same word in a legal text. In fact the poet plays around with the meanings of words. He stretches the meaning of words and exploits their inherent ambiguity to their utmost limit for the purpose of going beyond their literal meaning from something precise to something imprecise, something much more vague, to suggest something greater towards the direction of the infinite. 

To Chiang, the original purpose of language is communication: to express thoughts and  ideas. We first form our ideas and then design a form to fit those ideas but today, we are so fluent in our use of language that sometimes we have completely forgotten that words are supposed to mean something definite, some precise idea. Often our words have become meaningless forms, as if it were just a kind of mechanical, ritualistic language in a funeral, emphasing its sonic qualities more than its denotative qualities. He therefoe urges us to be aware of the mechanization of our own use of words as mere formulas, prayers and to return to the source of language and words ie. its meaning, not just its form.

To Chiang, it is essential that from time to time, we subject language and words to subversion:  otherwise, language will become fossilized and will lose its vitality. He says that the Koan literature (公案文學 )of the Sung dynastic is such a subversion of language and he regards it as marking the beginning of our modern vernacular literary movement (白話文學). This is the indirect result of the importation and development of Buddhism into China. By the Tang dynasty, Buddhist thoughts had fossilized into formulas and concepts and the spirit of compassion and humanity had become lost in words and the recitiation of the Heart Sutra ran the risk of being something entirely ritualistic without regard to its true meaning and the spirit of emptiness or the void but the spirit is gone: the feeling for what is at its heart is gone. Therefore an illiterate woodcutter in the kitchen responsible for cooking rice for the other monks of the monastery, the 6th generation patriarch of Buddhism Hui Neng (惠能) started a revolution: buddhism without words, or Zen. Zen Buddhism places the emphasis on understanding by action, by practice, by living. Hui Neng thought that instead of helping us to understand what is important, words may serve to cause confusion, misunderstanding and may lead us astray. He reduces Budddhism to Koan, examples that illustrate the operation of the principles of Buddhism in concrete contexts. He won over another monk Shenxiu 神秀, who wrote"The body is the bodhi tree, the heart is like a mirror on a shelf, they must be cleaned at all times, don't let them gather dust "(身是菩提樹, 心如明鏡台, 時時勤拂拭, 莫使惹塵埃 ) but Hui Neng replied " the bodhi has never been a tree, the mirror is not its shelf, there has never been anything, how could the dust gather?". ("菩提本無樹, 明鏡亦非台, 本來無一物, 何處惹塵埃") and was made head abbot of the monastery. He started a not only a revolution of religious tradition, he also started a linguistic revolution in China. The linguistic revolution is ironically started by someone who does not know how to read and write!

According to Chiang, the origin of this method of preaching and teaching Buddhism by example and practice is the Buddha himself, when he gave a flower to his first disciple Saputta 迦葉 and his first disciple just smiled. No words were used, merely an action and a facial expression. 達摩 was the monk who brought the meditation tradition to China from India. He faced the wall in meditation for 9 years. Meditation helps our thoughts to settle down and when we are silent, when we do not use words, ideas will arise inside our heart or mind. In meditation, we do not seek to communicate with others. We seek to communicate with ourselves. The Catholics too, have their own tradition called "retreat" and "withdrawal" for contemplation of the words of Jesus Christ and of our relationship with God and with our fellow man. There is similar revolution in the Western religious tradition. It was started by St. Francis of Assisi. He reduced the difficult to understand Latin into vernacular songs and chants during the Italian Renassiance, in the same manner that Buddhist language was changed by Hui Neng into vernacular language of daily life and also into literary revolution e.g 指月錄 and 景德傳燈錄.

He then talks about how langauge may be used in two ways, to deliberately not to communicate in a context where what is said is intended to communicate something wholly different from the surface meaning of words (eg. when we are asked something by some one whom we do not wish to reply to, we simply give a superficial reply so that the other will understand that we do not really wish to communicate with him/her at all ) and then to use apparently meaningless ritualistic words e.g "good morning", "Have you had lunch/dinner?" etc. to communicate a meaning beyond the literal meaning . To me, this is the kind of use of language which Nathalie Sarraute talks about in her "Conversation et sous-conversation" ( Conversation and sub-conversation) in her L' ere du soupçon (Age of Suspicion), something like what we mean when we tell people to read between the lines or if I may stretch or extend the metaphor a little bit, to hear between the different tonalities. Therefore language can be used imaginatively, creatively to serve some extra-linguistic purpose and strictly denotative function, to express our pleasure or displeasure. Good  literature often does this.

Then Chiang notes that the meaning of words may change with our tone of voice so that the same word pronounced differently may mean something entirely different. We need to pay attention not only to what is being said, but how it is being said: tone of voice, the facial expression, and our body language. Often when we talk, we seldom talk directly about how we really feel inside of ourselves because we may be afraid to expose our true feelings out of a fear of being ridiculed or being hurt. Therefore we often speak through a mask, in a disguised language.

Chiang thinks that the meaning of words will also change according to the context in time, space, people, roles and circumstances and do not have any absolute meaning and must always be interpreted in context and not out of context, otherwise languge will serve only to miscommunicate and become an obstacle instead of an aid to communication.

In addition, to a certain extent, language can also be a game, a game of disguise and to different degrees, even the form of one language may be transformed from one into that of another e.g Helen Heller invented the Braille and sign language in subsititution of the ordinary written word..

Fianlly he thinks that language may serve as a secret link between one person and another. He cites the example of Romain Roland's book on photographic esthetic Chamber of Light (明室) where he describes how after her mother's death, he found a photograph of her mother at age 5 , something of which he was completely ignorant of until that moment. It was the discovery of this photograph which led him to explore the meaning and values of images.

To Chiang, language is at the same time both precise and misleading but paradioxically the best literature is that which creates the greatest ambiguity within the greatest precision. Therefore to him, the solitude of language occurs when it does not communicate. But it is precisely when language fails to communicate that it has the greatest possibility of communication., ie. when it ceases to carry its habitual, conventional meaning.

As I mentioned in my previous blog. Chiang's contribution to our understanding of the solitude of language or words is not in originating the ideas and concepts but in its application to the context of Chinese culture and civilization. His stength is not the originality of the initial concepts themselves which I believe echoes those by Roland Barthès, Ferninand de Saussure, Naom Chomsky and Nathalie Sarraute but in the originality in his application of those concepts in a context we can understand: the context of Chinse culture. To that extent, it is educational. Education is to some extent the application of analogy to a new context: the educator teaches by relating something we are familiar with to something similar but with which we are not familiar.