Letters

Fighting Family

I love Books and Culture. I watched the movie The Fighter last night (thinking I might preach on the film), and then discovered a very thoughtful review in B&C this morning [Crystal Downing, “Fighting Family,” March/April]. Perfect.

While I greatly appreciated Crystal Downing’s systematic exegesis of this modern-day parable (discerning the workings of familial hegemony in a classic redemption tale), I walked away with a different take. To me, The Fighter is about a love that loves even the unlovable. That Micky would choose to continue to love a family as toxic as his was truly amazing (as a viewer, I felt a visceral disdain toward Dicky and his mother). And to then, through Micky’s love, find my heart evenging toward these despicable characters; that totally upended me. Micky’s unconditional love allowed me to see his family’s lovableness. It also freed his family to love him back in a more healthy way. Who knew such a love existed?

On the Way

A couple of remarks on the Taoteching [Laurance Wieder, “On the Way,” March/April]. The text of the Taoteching is multi-authored and comes from the 3rd century BC. That means many things. Lao-Tzu didn’t write the Taoteching in the 6th century bc, and Confucius didn’t seek him out; moreover, Lao-tzu, which means “Old Master,” very likely didn’t even exist. Lao-tzu, assuming he existed, is not the only sage to speak in prose. The Shijing, one of the Five Confucian Classics, is a collection of poetry (and canonical poetry at that) and substantially predates the Taoteching. Finally, while the Taoteching is concerned with self-cultivation, it is not so much concerned with self-defense. Its earliest commentators took it to be primarily concerned with statecraft.

John Wilson replies:

Kelly Clark’s portfolio includes Chinese philosophy—faithful readers of B&C may recall his essay-review “Confucian Hermeneutics” in the September/October 2006 issue—and he has spent a good deal of time in China building connections with scholars there. I hope we’ll see him again in our pages before too long.

Robert G. Henricks introduced Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New Documents Found at Guodian (Columbia Univ. Press, 2000) with a quotation from 1963: “Few controversies in modern Chinese history have lasted longer and involved more scholars than that concerning Lao Tzu, the man, and Lao Tzu, the book. It has lasted for forty years, engaged dozens of debaters, and produced half a million words. And the battle is still continuing, both in China and in the West.”

Henricks was writing under the impetus of important discoveries of manuscripts in a tomb at Mawangdui in 1973 and, especially, in a tomb at Guodian in 1993. These discoveries have inspired new “genetic” studies of the text of the Taoteching, and have bolstered the arguments of scholars who date the work to the 3rd century BC, although Henricks, writing in 1999, noted that “in China, within the past decade, there has been a remarkable reversion in scholarly writings to the traditional view.” Whether that remains true today, a decade later, now that more of the 1993 findings from the bamboo slip manuscripts at Guodian have been analyzed, I don’t know. Red Pine, whose translation occasioned Larry Wieder’s piece, mentions the ongoing discussion about the origins of the Taoteching but adds that he prefers not to address it, even as he welcomes the new variants to consider.

As Larry Wieder explains, Red Pine takes his account of Lao-tzu (as he styles the name) from the historian Ssu-ma Chi’en (Sima Qian), who was born in the middle decades of the second century bc and lived into the following century. “Of late,” Red Pine writes, “it has become popular, if not de rigueur, to debunk his account of Lao-tzu,” but Red Pine is not convinced; “certainly,” he says, Ssu-ma Chi’en “had more documents at his disposal than we now possess.” Kelly Clark, on the other hand, says that Lao-tzu “very likely didn’t even exist.” Some of his fellow scholars are more dogmatic. In Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), Harold D. Roth writes, “We now know that Lao Tzu is a purely legendary figure with no solid historical basis.”

But do “we” really know this? What does seem clear is that the text known as the Taoteching evolved over time, like the Pentateuch, like the Iliad and the Odyssey. That is separable from the question of whether there was ever a Lao-tzu—a person, not “a purely legendary figure”—who played a part in the composition of the work we hold in our hands today, the complex history of which scholars are doing their best to trace. And it will not be surprising if, in the 22nd century, men and women continue to speak of Lao-tzu as we continue today to speak of Homer.

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