Reviews
Isolating the JwangdzHarold D Roth. A Companion to Angus C Graham's Chuang Tzu. Hawaii 2003
The following was posted to the WSW list on 14 September 2003.
In 1951 there appeared the Lattimore translation of Homer's Iliad (by Richmond, brother of Owen), which quickly won a high place in general reader esteem. In 1976, that reader esteem being still high, Malcolm Willcock published A Companion to the Iliad, which was a companion specifically to the Lattimore translation; its notes did not duplicate Lattimore's translation, and even reconsidered certain discussible points in that translation. Willcock's book was a great pleasure and a wonderful success. Some of us have spent the quarter century since then in waiting for the appearance of a parallel Companion to the Odyssey, making our own annotations meanwhile in the margins of our Lattimore Odyssey.
The Companion
Readers who have been hoping for comparable delights from Hal Roth's Companion to Angus C Graham's Chuang Tzu (Hawaii 2003) are in for a disappointment when it clunks in their mailbox. The book is not a new commentary based on the Graham translation. It is a collection of Graham's own notes to that translation and several of his articles on the subject, all previously published in various places, with a "Colophon" by Roth and a concluding Bibliography: The Writings of Angus C Graham. This is obviously a pietistic exercise (Roth's credentials as a Grahamite are explained by the publisher on a final unnumbered page), but it takes its stand for Graham's reputation in a curious place: his Jwangdz translation. A good many scholars are prepared to grant lasting importance to Graham's Mwodz work, his Gungsun Lungdz work, and his Lyedz work, but they stop short, in some embarrassment, at his Jwangdz. The Roth position, evidently, is that all of the Graham battlements are to be defended, and that all of the Graham positions are true. Especially the Jwangdz.
Let it be noted in extenuation that Graham himself, at the end of his working life, took somewhat that view. In his work on the Jwangdz, he explicitly abandons the methods that had served him well with the Mwodz (which were based on a model of broken bamboo strips). He adopts instead the idea that, given an originally coherent order of material, some intervening editor has produced a mess by transferring certain stories or sermons to other locations. It was then left to Graham to reverse that disordering, by relocating those sections to their original positions. The sections, it should be emphasized, are not such fragments as physical damage might have produced, but literarily integral sentences and paragraphs. What might have been the motive for the original disarrangement of this material (a sort of negative anthologizing) is never addressed, and would seem difficult for anyone else to supply. The hopeful reader thus goes effectively "uncompanioned" in this sensitive and troublesome area, first by Graham himself, and now also by Roth.
The Challenge
The Graham presumptions include a firm if undiscussed notion that Jwangdz wrote what are now called the Inner Chapters, JZ 1-7. In a note on Jwangdz Editions (WSWG Note 113, 30 Oct 1996; forthcoming in Warring States Papers), I pointed out that the "Inner" division has no standing, and indeed no existence, earlier than the post-Han commentator Gwo Syang. The Han Shu Palace Library catalogue (from the end of the 01st century) does not recognize it, and no writer who quotes the text, from Sywndz through the Analects and the Lw-shr Chun/Chyou to the Shr Ji (the latter representing learned impressions as of the beginning of the 01st century), inclusive, either mentions that division or privileges those seven chapters in any way. On the contrary, all these sources quote predominantly from non-Inner chapters. The Shr Ji in particular firmly ascribes to Jwangdz's authorship several of the higher-numbered chapters, including some that will impress recent scholars as certainly late, and probably extraneous, in the Jwangdz, but none of the Inner chapters.
It might be thought that the separateness of the Inner chapters, though it has no historical standing, can nevertheless be demonstrated analytically. Graham's article How Much of the Jwangdz Did Jwangdz Write, earlier reprinted, and reprinted here yet again, purports to do this. But in fact the article simply assumes it. All its time is spent on the subsidiary question, How Much ELSE of the Jwangdz Did Jwangdz Write? In WSWG Note 114 (24 Dec 1996, precirculated before, and presented at, the WSWG 8 Conference; forthcoming in Warring States Papers) I pointed out that Graham's more than a hundred word and phrase usages, which were assembled as touchstones of Jwangdzian authorial character against which to evaulate the remaining text, if they are applied (as Graham does not apply them) to the Inner chapters themselves, actually show that the Inner chapters are not stylistically coherent, and cannot be by one author, whether Jwang Jou or anybody else.
Going past this, Taeko in an AAS Conference presentation in 2002, showed that the few words on the Graham list that do tend to link the Inner chapters with each other, overwhelmingly link what she had previously shown (WSWG Notes 108-111, 8 Sept - 11 Oct 1996) are late layers within those chapters. The clear message of this pattern is that these JZ chapters are growth texts, which began by being relatively diverse, and which only acquired the sort of vocabulary links with which Graham is concerned at a later point in their evolution. That is, the Inner chapters converged over time. They were not originally identical in viewpoint, and thus presumably also not in authorship. Any seeming identity which they may now display is in part an artifact of their previous evolution. It is an achieved rather than an original similarity.
If these observations about the diversity of the Inner Chapters cannot be countered, and so far no one has done so, they together demolish the Graham position, and require that such merits as Graham's individual observations may possess should now be reinterpreted in terms of a quite different paradigm for the text as a whole, and for its single chapters.
The Response
One would expect that a special publication devoted to the Graham Jwangdz thesis, and explicitly taking note of subsequent scholarship, would feel a need to deal with the above results. The Roth book does not do so. Though Roth regularly received the mailings of WSWG Notes as they were issued, and attended several of its conferences, including some at which an accretional view of individual Inner Chapters was presented and discussed, and though he is not in principle opposed to reporting WSWG conferences (Andy Meyer's contribution to the WSWG 11th Conference, held in October 1998, is duly cited in the Colophon), and though he was the official discussant for the AAS panel of March 2002 at which Taeko's Inner Chapter synthesis was expounded (and though he cites Andy Meyer's paper which was presented at that same panel), he treats all these contrary points as though they simply did not exist. In a merely pietistic publication, the omission of contrary material would doubtless be permissible. Whether it is also permissible in a work of purported scholarship, with the specific announced mission of viewing the Graham thesis "in the context of new research" (Editor's Preface, p3), is perhaps another question, with perhaps a different answer.
One later position of which Roth does take extensive note is Liu Xiaogan's Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters (Michigan 1994). Though some disagreement is expressed with Liu on particular points (namely, the points at which he diverges from Graham), the work is on the whole seen as supporting the Graham position. As indeed it does, in part by assuming, as Graham assumes, that the Inner chapters are a valid division of the work, and that they can without argument be assumed to be the work of Jwangdz. My WSWG Note 115 (25 Dec 1996), duly shared with Roth, and C J Fraser's review of Liu's work in Asian Philosophy v7 #2 (1997), which Roth may be presumed to have seen if he is in the habit of reading anything at all in the professional literature, both point to arithmetical and logical fallacies in Liu's argument. That note, and that review, are conspicuously absent from the discussion in Roth's Colophon.
Reader Reaction
In these ways the Graham thesis is systematically protected from criticism, and the Liu book, which is evidently regarded as substantially supporting that thesis, is also thoroughly protected from criticism, in Roth's Companion. The resulting edifice will doubtless seem, and is doubtless meant to seem, imposing and well buttressed to the general reader. Specialist readers, who know what is going on in the field, will be aware that the presumptions are unsound, the edifice is shaky, and the buttressing is worm-eaten. They will consign the whole effort, with a sachet of lavender and a sigh of appropriate regret, to a dresser drawer in the guest room.
And then, hopefully, they will take up for serious attention the text of "Jwangdz," in which there still remain many attractively unsolved problems, suitable for the tyro and the expert alike, provided only that they are concerned to find the answer, rather than to shelter some fond presumption of their own..
E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst3 Oct 2003 / Contact The Project / Exit to Publications
