Percy's China books, in which he displays an increasingly skeptical attitude toward the cultural claims of China, show how his aesthetic and national revaluation of English oral literature germinated in a complex reading of Chinese literature that ser ...
Percy's China books, in which he displays an increasingly skeptical attitude toward the cultural claims of China, show how his aesthetic and national revaluation of English oral literature germinated in a complex reading of Chinese literature that served as both model and foil. This study argues that Percy's notion of English orality, and his argument that English orality can have textual remains, were based on a contrastive understanding of Chinese characters as having no affinity with Chinese orality. In contrast, Percy understood English as a language in which the vital connection between orality and textuality had been preserved. Percy's complex argument was that in the English case (unlike the Chinese case), oral tradition had been preserved through the ages, albeit in the fragile form of textual fragments and remains. Percy interpreted these remains primarily as cultural artifacts, but in effect introduced a powerful new aesthetic of the artless, even "barbarous," native, oral, "antique" English past. This paper argues that this new aesthetic grew out of a contrastive understanding of Chinese culture as artificial, overly cultivated, primarily textual, disconnected with the langauge of the people, and inimical to literature. Without any knowledge of the Chinese language, and armed only with a deeply ambivalent fascination with China, Percy prepared _Hau Kiou Chooan_ and _Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese_ for a popular English readership, justifying the Chinese novel, for instance, precisely "not as a piece to be admired for the beauties of its composition, but as a curious specimen of Chinese literature" and as "a faithful picture of Chinese manners." This editorializing strategy is one that he replicates in his claim that the _Reliques_ collects English ballads "not as labours of art, but as effusions of nature" and as "the barbarous productions of unpolished ages" that "display the peculiar manners and customs of former ages". By estranging the native past as barbarous and foreign, Percy in effect introduces a new aesthetic of the rustic and the popular, now made an antique, historical, native "relic" of the nation. The valorization of the ballad, which is continuous with the rise of Romanticism, needs to be understood in this larger cultural context in which the English struggled to valorize their cultural past in the face of the grand claims made for Chinese culture.