Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe by Daniel Leonhard Purdy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe by Daniel Leonhard Purdy John Pizer Daniel Leonhard Purdy. Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021, 405 pp. Most in-depth engagements with Goethe's world literature paradigm acknowledge his comments on Chinese poetic works in his conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann and tend to approve of his mention of the ancient roots of Chinese civilization and their well-developed culture at a time when, in Goethe's telling, Europe was populated largely by primitive hordes. Goethe is praised for this nod toward Chinese aesthetic refinement at a time (the first half of the nineteenth century) of increasing racism and incipient imperialism, leading to conflicts such as the Opium Wars that still have negative reverberations today. Daniel Purdy's Chinese Sympathies takes a much deeper dive into the European/Chinese interactions that began with Marco Polo's travels and culminated in Goethe's profoundly intercultural "Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten." Purdy draws on such contemporary critical domains as affect theory, the dynamics of media networks, comparative cosmopolitanism, and actor-network theory to elucidate the interactive evolution of East/West cultural, religious, and trade exchanges from early modernism through the Age of Goethe. Although a more developed elucidation of these various theoretical discourses would have been helpful for those readers not conversant with them, Purdy is adroit in drawing upon them to cogently elucidate a rather novel but convincing take on Goethe's Weltliteratur paradigm. Many readers remain familiar with Goethe's views on this paradigm largely through the aphorisms and discursive snippets gathered by Fritz Strich in the still widely cited appendix to his study Goethe und die Weltliteratur (1946), which steers readers toward insights into Goethe's focus on how transnational and transcultural interactions furthered the development of science, the book trade, and the cosmopolitan holistic breadth of individual national literatures through the emerging of world literary interchanges fueled through transnational communication networks. Purdy, in contrast, focuses on how Goethe drew on his ability to sympathetically identify with elite Chinese culture and poetry to enrich and enhance his own creative literary production. Despite his admirable adumbration of the networks enabling and culminating in Goethe's Chinese turn, the world literature paradigm emerges in Purdy's reading as a largely private affair, a spur to the interiority that drove Goethe's late poetic output. Weary late in his life of the court politics in Weimar that demanded so much of his time and energy as a ducal privy councilor, Goethe, as Purdy elegantly shows, came to identify closely with the Ming-era Mandarins, who also had to negotiate and balance their political duties with their drive to cultivate their art and poetry. My focus in this review up to now has been on the last chapters of Chinese Sympathies because this is where Purdy most extensively engages with Goethe and will thus be of most interest to readers of the Goethe Yearbook, but a brief overview of the book in its entirety is in order, for its earlier chapters provide the historical background culminating in Goethe's productive sympathetic immersion into Chinese culture. The first chapter focuses on Marco Polo's obsession in the late thirteenth century, when he engaged in his travels through China, with information channels in that empire, from messenger relay networks dominated by Mongols to the constant shuttling of couriers to and from the emperor's court, the complex, opaque character of which leads Purdy to excurses on power and communication networks as explored in works by Kafka and Wieland. Purdy [End Page 201] articulates the pioneering work of Polo in establishing relations with the imperial court. His efforts laid the foundations for the creation of missionary networks by the Jesuits beginning in 1582 and first established by the Italian priest Matteo Ricci. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on these Jesuit missionary networks and on the Jesuits' efforts to win China for Christianity by cultivating alliances with highly placed Confucians and playing that religion off against Buddhism. The Jesuits' rather convoluted attempts to show the affiliation between Confucianism and Catholicism...