Lectures (3d)—Scholarship

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Lectures à la fleur."
Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five

[a] Managed pasts RF

Beloit College Mortar Board

26 October 2011
Part Four of Five

I had a whole passel of questions now that I was finding my own way with the Comprehensive Mirror, the book that started me down the path to scholarship. Only a few of them, I was beginning to notice, had been anticipated by scholars in either China or the West. It started with "Why are Liu Bei (good!) and Cao Cao (bad!) treated so differently, even humanely (with positive qualities and flaws side-by-side) in Sima Guang's text? It moved on to the very moment when my entire academic career was set. I regard this as the continental divide in my life between "student" and "scholar." And, before we go any further, let me emphasize that no particularly "lofty" qualities should be associated with the latter. It is just what we do when we move down the path of learning. It happens to everyone who keeps learning—a little like crossing the street...and never being able to turn back.

Thomas Wolfe might have had this part right, at least if "home" means "naming the capitals."

[b] All too RF

And just to reinforce the message, I will admit to deep misunderstanding of this matter when I was in college. During my first year, a political science professor referred to himself as an "intellectual." Even then, I understood completely that he meant that he got paid to think, write, and teach. Still, I could not believe that someone would say such a thing. Even though I knew it to be as matter-of-fact as the "crossing the street" example, above, I was scandalized. It was, to my mind, a little like referring to oneself as "pretty" or "smart" or "striking." I could not get my newly post-adolescent head around the idea that "intellectuals" and "scholars" are just people in a certain line of work. Matter-of-fact. Punch the ol' time clock and start readin'. It didn't make sense to my fiercely (and naively) democratic way of thinking. For me, the professor who called himself "an intellectual" was a little like Napoleon crowning himself emperor. Immodest.

Well, I got over it. You should, too. Being a "scholar" is just a particular habitus in the field of knowledge production. Ask Pierre Bourdieu, a rural French boy who just happened to spend his life being a "scholar," even as he reviled colleagues who thought they were particularly special for researching and writing.

O.k., now that we are over that, let's get back to the book. I was told that the Comprehensive Mirror was one of the world's great works of history, even one of the first truly "objective" historical narratives. One article mentioned that it was "scientific." Even then, I had enough background to prick my ears and be at least a little wary. "Objective?"..."Scientific?...History? You can't be serious とおもいました.* Nonetheless, I had no idea what would come next. I opened the book.

[c] Portentous RF

And then I saw the dragon.

Yes, there it was—a dragon writhing in a rural well. On the pages of one of the world's greatest historical texts, a dragon lay—constricted and frustrated—in a well outside of Ningling. The emperor "identified" with it, feeling that it spoke to his own imperial frustrations.

Every significant path that my career has taken comes back to this point. What were dragons, of all things, doing on the pages of one of the world's greatest histories? And it was not only once (as I would learn) and not only dragons. The pages of this monumental historical narrative are filled with hail as large as hens' eggs, mysterious portents, and leaping white fish. If only, by chance, I had turned to a passage on troop movements during a famous battle (also in the text, I should note), I might have missed all of this and been an untiring "objectivisit," tracing the battle lines of the third century. This path not taken would have been not unlike the one traveled by a senior scholar in Chinese studies who, during my first presentation of these matters to a scholarly audience (the Association for Asian Studies Conference in 1991), asked: 

Is it not possible that the text actually refers to a very large salamander?

[d] Business booking RF

I mangled my answer, not finding it possible to believe (even then) that a great scholar would cling so tightly to the hanging ladder of "reality," fearing even a little metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche...or even a spot of allusion. Because, by that time, I had already spent several years (since my first dragon-sighting...and citing), I had forgotten that much of the world is not terribly comfortable with the realms of "reality" and "fantastical" commingling like waste paper and empty plastic bottles. That dragon set my scholarly path, and all of my questions have emerged, in one way or another, from asking what the heck it was doing there (in the text, if not necessarily the well).

From there, it was a short, two-decade ride to the interpretation of the same text—the Comprehensive Mirror—as a work of eleventh century managerial literature. This was even less welcome among my scholarly peers. Let me assure you that in "scholarly" circles the interpretation of dragons, hens' eggs, and leaping white fish is a good deal more welcome than someone who calls a magisterial work of historical writing a work of management. What? Is Rob LaFleur saying that the Comprehensive Mirror was a business book—a complex combination, in classical Chinese, of The Fifth Discipline, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?

Well, yes. That is what he is saying.

It had occurred to me as I spent more and more time (years, really) with this 10,000 page text that many of my colleagues have misinterpreted it, and often quite badly at that. It began to occur to me that the misapprehension had a great deal to do with antiquated and somewhat hieratic notions of what is scholarly—(the "record of the past")—and what is merely demotic (management and self-help). But it did not take much research (I had discovered this even reading the translation in college, twenty-five years ago) to realize that Sima Guang and his contemporaries understood that the record of the past and management were all of a piece. Why did my peers fail to notice this? I suspect that it is because many can't quite see how the same book might be studied in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Harvard Business Review...or even in National Geographic and Forbes.

[e] Cross RF

Scholarship is wide-ranging and ever-changing. It is also just something that learners do. They can't help it. They "cross the street" one day by asking just one more question that changes everything. Suddenly, the entire world looks different, and they can't find their way back to "just learning"—merely memorizing the capitals in the vast world of information—ever again.

As for me, I crossed that metaphorical street—arm in epidermal scale—with a coiled dragon...many, many years ago.

NEXT
We'll wrap things up by returning to questions of scholarship as new knowledge and as a way of life.

*I thought to myself.

Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five