Where the Lines Meet: Parallelism in Chinese and Western Literatures

Abstract

It is virtually impossible for any critical description of classical Chinese literature, whether prose or poetry, to avoid drawing attention to one of its most obtrusive aesthetic features: the tendency of the texts of the tradition to fall sooner or later into steady rhythms of parallel constructions. This feature has been cited by many recent critics as a central structural principle of composition, and has been brought forward as a key to reading and interpretation.1 It can even be stretched, in a sense I will try to explore below, to apply to the more diffuse linguistic structures of fiction and drama. Viewed from the perspective of comparative literary study, of course, this aspect of Chinese stylistics is in no way unique to that tradition. In the West, the notion of parallelism is primarily associated with the rhetoric of classical antiquity. There is no lack of examples in the Greek and Latin classics that to one degree or another exhibit a pattern of parallel constructions-although never as frequently or as rigorously as the Chinese examples to be considered below. In such Western rhetorical treatises as Aristotle's Rhetoric, Cicero's De Partitione Oratoria, Quintilian's De Institutione Oratoria, and others, the use of parallel sequences is duly noted, albeit never emphasized;2 and in more recent times, Eduard Norden devoted a small section of his Die Antike Kunstprosa to a very broad review of parallelism in both classical and folk literature.3 In similar fashion, instances of loosely parallel lines of verse can be observed in other ancient literatures as well, for example Sanskrit and Arabic, to name the most obvious.4