More than a century after Rudyard Kipling's notorious ballad, the hollow, metageographic markers “East” and “West” persist as keywords of the contemporary imagination. The endurance of these signposts and the presumed literary incommensurability of Chinese and Western traditions form the backdrop of Zhang Longxi's two most recent works, which argue for the essential “connectedness of literature East and West.” Zhang accounts for a thoroughly misguided denial of Chinese abstraction and arbitrariness—both necessary for the separation of signifier and signified that characterize Western writing and literature—as the result of a romanticized view of Chinese writing as entirely different from European writing. Thus, many mistakenly assume that the literary artifacts of East and West are fundamentally dissimilar and their cultures incompatible. The works under review disabuse the reader of this presumption in an ambitiously broad reflection on canons, their interpretation, the politics of that interpretation, and the moral responsibility of the reader.

Both Allegoresis and Unexpected Affinities (a volume produced from Zhang's 2005 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto) make an incontrovertible case for the nonhermetic reading of culture, language, and the expansive life of the literary text, while placing literary critics, sinologists, and educated readers of classical and modern literature on notice that the complacency of the modern age's relativism must be relinquished for engagement with the other—a critical comparative literary engagement that overcomes the theoretical limitations of New Criticism, poststructuralism, and New Historicism.

The latter volume of lectures provides several controlled experiments with “reading across cultures,” wherein the manifold literary functioning of the images of the finger and the moon (pp. 32–37), the sphere (pp. 95–122), and the pearl (pp. 44–56) in prose and poetry or the recurrence in Western literature and medieval Chinese works of the dialectical alchemy of poison and medicine (pp. 63–89) unite the literary imagination of one distant place with another, and prepare us “to reach a truly global vision of human creativity” (p. 37). Such discovery of common themes or analogous sentiments that can bring the language of Shakespeare's Cymbeline close to that of Tao Yuanming's “Twelve Miscellaneous Poems” affirms their deep connection: “literature takes all aspects of life as its object of representation” (p. 35). Zhang's grander ambition is to demonstrate how a critical cross-cultural reflection is propadeutic to deeper human understanding.

Zhang demonstrates that allegoresis, which he defines as a “mode of interpretation that builds up a total structure of meaning in contradistinction to the literal sense, but not to its exclusion” (p. 120), is translatable in language and concept across East and West. Zhang's method varies little, from the first chapter, in which the allegorical properties of sacred literature and commentary in the West are explored in juxtaposition with the commentarial tradition surrounding the Book of Odes (Shijing), through the fifth, a comparative study of literary production and interpretation in sixteenth-century England, its reception by late twentieth-century critics, and the tortured maps of political misreading of literature during the Cultural Revolution. Each instance of an acclaimed figurative double in Western tradition is brought alongside an analogical practice in a Chinese literary artifact presumed to lie beyond allegory.

Marshaling evidence from a variety of texts, both canonical and noncanonical (Song of Songs, Shijing, Talmud, Aeneid, Summa Theologica, “Peach Blossom Spring,” Datong Shu, Communist Manifesto, Shi ji, Zhuzi yulei, Of Grammatology, Truth and Method, Taiping jing, Aristotle's Poetics, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Zhuangzi, and Zuo zhuan, among others), he plots the many points of a tropic arc of texts and allegoresis that inscribes the world's literature:

Therefore, the critical challenge to a meaningful translatability is met by establishing the conceptual equivalency of allegory, a symbolic mode much disputed within Chinese literary studies. Mindful of the common scholarly contention that Chinese poetry is not allegorical and, owing to this unique figurative absence, beyond comparison with other great literature, Zhang makes this “problem” the premise—“Allegory, a trope that many consider to be quintessentially Greek and Western, becomes a suitable test of the probability of cross-cultural knowledge … Whether allegory can be translated not only linguistically but also conceptually across the gap of cultural differences, will be the main problem” (p. 2).

Nevertheless, this objective is only part of a much greater concern with the moral necessity of cultural engagement through literature, a reiteration of the advice of E. M. Forster, “to only connect,” and leads to an invigorating hope. Namely, through the understanding we obtain by knowing ourselves and others as sharers of imaginative reason, “we may do it better in the future as we build a more open, tolerant, and humane society respectful of individual rights as well as collective interests, a society that combines the best of the visions of hope and the political wisdom of the East and the West” (p. 213).

Zhang discloses, in one way, the illogic of China's essential otherness, its literary and unallegorical singularity, by demonstrating that what Western interpreters have long held true of their literary canon is no less true of the Chinese canon. Upon close inspection, it turns out that China was never the outlier but rather the semblable of the West, as in the case of allegory of the Book of Odes and the allegoresis of its many readings by centuries of loyal commentators. In China, as in all cultures, written words do not always mean what they say. The literal text does not stand alone but refers beyond itself, becomes allegorical, and obtains critical value as well as vulnerability. Throughout, Zhang confronts the vulnerability of allegoresis to political interpretation, wherein the literal text is overwhelmed by a coercive reading dictated by extraneous considerations.

The comparative analysis of Song of Songs and the Book of Odes (pp. 62–125) explores the exegetical difficulties posed by the reconciliation of the explicit erotic language of the former text with the spiritual demands of the biblical canon within which it is enclosed. Song of Songs is customarily included in Jewish sacred texts as a testament to the love binding God and Israel. In this respect, the literal text is appropriated allegorically. Thus, Zhang points out, unambiguous lines such as “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies” (Songs 4:5), literally are bound against themselves in Midrash Rabbah, where the breasts are read as symbols of Moses and Aaron, because the brothers are the beauty and ornament of Israel, just as the breasts are the beauty and ornament of a woman.

Turning to the Book of Odes, Zhang states that the commentarial prefaces to the poems do not really provide historical contextualizations but are better understood as allegories and perhaps even forced readings, particularly in the “Guo feng” section, where the reader encounters erotic poetry canonically read as allusive political commentary on court intrigue. Insisting on a less ideological reading, Zhang demonstrates that we are dealing with allegorical, canonical texts, and with allegorical readings by latter-day exegetes, operating under cultural or political rules of reading. Therefore, by bringing Chinese allegorical practice alongside that found in Patristics, Midrash, or medieval commentary, he opens a much wider space to interpret Chinese literature. Rejecting the conventional “forced reading” restores the erotic allusions of poems, while awakening the prospect of another level of allegory when one considers that the language of the erotic passages suggests that these “poems” might just as well reveal evidence of China's “shamanic substrate.”

Here his efforts are directed at something more than the denunciation of scholarly habit or the correction of either essentialism or relativism as modern strategies of cultural incomprehension. Zhang is making a bolder claim, one repeated in his Alexander Lectures, that literature is a singular vehicle of human creativity. It is unique in its capacity to convey strong moral, philosophical, and universal truths, making it more effective than history, philosophy, and religion. Literature, and thus allegory and allegoresis, is universal, but it is the manifold ways in which the moral stirrings of the human heart move across the pages of the world's literature that a real prize is caught by the attentive reader: “the point of reading across cultures is to reach a truly global vision of human creativity, and only from such a broad perspective can we fully appreciate literary works and forms in all their diversities as expressions of themes and ideas that are deeply connected, even though manifested in different languages and cultures” (Unexpected Affinities, p. 37).

In the end, this vision, drawn from multiple readings of the texts and commentaries of peoples East and West, defeats the philosophical justification for cultural separateness. Interpretation, whether across the border of cultures or of the foreign country of an earlier time, requires engagement. With engagement comes responsibility to get things right, to do no harm to the literal text as one seeks the other meaning that it indicates, even when to do so may place author and reader alike at considerable political risk.