Flower in the Mirror and Moon in the Water: The Problem of Chinese Allegory Revisited

Abstract

"In the context of the rise of deconstructive criticism, it may not be a mere coincidence that from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, a series of articles and books in Sinology (comparative literature) demonstrated a preoccupation with rhetoric, paying special attention to the Chinese concept of metaphor and allegory. The Western sense of allegory/metaphor, as these articles and books invariably suggest (Saussy 24), is absent from Chinese poetics and its literature. To quote Andrew Plaks’s description of this difference between East and West, “Representatives of the Chinese and European traditions are accorded a particular privilege of neat, even antipodal, contrast” (vii). While the Western sense of allegory/metaphor implies disjunction ... its Chinese counterpart embodies a totalizing...coherent whole. Pre-established, historical, and organic, the Chinese allegory/metaphor is a synecdoch, not the substitution. Given the milieu of deconstruction’s remarks on language-the demystification of symbol/concept on the one hand and the corresponding rehabilitation of metaphor/allegory on the other-this series of books and articles, now in hindsight over thirty years later, seems an interesting phenomenon that deserves further examination."