Readers who open Beyond Sinology expecting a critique of Chinese studies may be surprised to discover that the title means “considering writing as more than just a sign system” (p. 215). The book explores the use of Chinese characters in a variety of media. The introduction, “Script Politics,” discusses the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, in which acrobats dramatized the history of Chinese characters for international audiences. Bachner then discusses the early language reformers who believed that characters were obsolete. In fact, because the “mediality of characters” adapts to computers, “Chinese writing has rid itself of the burden of the oral principle” (p. 11).
Chapter 1, “Corpographies,” considers “Death and the Sinograph.” According to Bachner, a “strange strain of necrophilia” attracted early language reformers (p. 23). The chapter draws parallels with the French literary theory of “the necrotic process” of language. For Jacques Derrida, for example, the character is a silent “other.” Roger Chartier deplores “the extreme violence inherent in writing” (p. 46). To Jacques Lacan, characters symbolize “an absence,” like the “‘symbolically castrated penis as Phallus’” (p. 32). Nihilism also inspires Chinese artist Zhang Huan to film himself naked on a toilet, covered with flies; or to paint his face black with characters (p. 40).
Chapter 2, “Iconographies,” examines how notions of characters as pictures have electrified artists. From the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein to imagist poets like Ezra Pound and contemporary poets in Taiwan and Malaysia, this simplified vision is “freeing the Chinese writing system from any burden of cultural essence” (p. 68). The chapter includes imagist poems from contemporary Taiwan, one typeset in the shape of a water buffalo. “War Symphony” by Chen Li uses just four characters: “Soldier” (bing 兵) repeats in rows, separated by the sounds of bullets (ping 乒 and pang 乓), and “grave mounds” (qiu 丘) cover the bottom of the page.
Chapter 3, “Sonographies, proposes that a “Muteness Envy” plays on characters, trying to eliminate links to speech. A San Francisco billboard for Qingdao beer, for example, features a line of characters that Americans cannot read. Silent characters are also crucial for the deaf hero of Hou Hsiao-hsien's film City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989). A young Taiwanese man survives the massacre of February 28, 1947, when troops from the Chinese mainland murdered tens of thousands of residents of Taiwan. He cannot speak, but writes his testimony. Bachner concludes that “muteness, tied to the particular economy of the Chinese language,” mediates cultural multiplicity. “Muteness envy,” she holds, is more paradoxical than “castration envy” (pp. 103–4).
A “Sinographic Glossolalia” section considers “a strange connection between the scream and writing” (p. 114). Chapter 4, “Allographies,” explores alternative uses for characters, including “crypto-Chinese” and “the scripting of alterity” (p. 130). Freud, for example, considered characters as a code for dream interpretation. Modern poets play on characters as “savage” tattoos from primordial Malaysia and Taiwan. Some use punctuation marks to symbolize “anal penetration” (pp. 160–62).
Chapter 5, “Technographies,” considers computers and texting. One poem inserts pictures of cats, chickens, and pianos where readers expect the word “to resemble” (xiang 象). This character is a rebus pronunciation, descended from the same character, also pronounced xiang, with the polysemous meaning “elephant” (p. 195).
The final chapter, “Beyond Sinology,” considers international impacts. The Shanghai waterfront, for example, may soon feature a skyscraper shaped like the character for “person” (ren人), as designed by Danish architects.
Beyond Sinology offers stimulating examples, especially in its selection of poems. Bachner stresses that most characters contain pronunciation cues. Yet the analysis never mentions the pun for “ping pong ball” (ping pang qiu 乒乓球), the foundation of the poem “War Symphony.” Beijing used “ping pong diplomacy” with the United States to wrest diplomatic recognition away from Taipei. Beyond Sinology makes daring comparisons between European imagists and contemporary poets. Further perspectives on how early twentieth-century Europeans “imagined characters” are well explored by Christopher Bush in Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, and Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Beyond Sinology directs its focus mainly to French theory and Taiwanese poets. Some readers will wonder why mainland poets are excluded and why dialect characters are not discussed.Footnote 1
“The complex connections between speech and writing remain a theoretical wasteland” in Bachner's view (p. 115). Social science readers may be frustrated that she omits perspectives from research on this topic over the last 100 years. Experiments show that Chinese readers rely primarily on the phonetic sub-elements of characters, ignoring the semantic radicals. Surprisingly, Chinese readers use almost precisely the same brain areas as do readers of Japanese kana and kanji, and readers of alphabetic languages.Footnote 2 The oral principle is not “a burden” but rather the “visible speech” that underlies all writing. Even texting in Chinese depends on phonetic input.
