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Hans Frankel, the Gentle Revolutionary

Those who know Hans Frankel personally might describe him as a quiet, somewhat shy, and scholarly man. The adjective "revolutionary" might not come immediately to mind. Yet revolutions are often started by the "quiet, somewhat shy, and scholarly." Revolutions have a life of their own: they take off in unexpected directions, sometimes go to excess, and always leave a nostalgia for the prerevolutionary world in their wake. Revolutions often disquiet the very people who begin them. Their consequences mingle the good and the bad, and it is impossible to find the right scales to weigh the gains against the losses. Yet for intellectual life to remain vital, they do seem sometimes necessary. The decade of the 1960s was a turning point in the study of Chinese literature. Chinese literature was then still very much a part of "Sinology," understood not as the philological and historical learning that is the basis of working with any Chinese texts, but as a separate field in its own right, with its own history, its own direction, and its own standards. Scholars of Chinese literature might talk enthusiastically to their counterparts in European and American literature, but intellectually they were in a separate world. Hans Frankel came to Yale with the conviction that the discipline be "Chinese literature," part of and answerable to a larger community of literary scholars. His students were taught that the "field" in which they worked was made up not only of the important Sinologists, but also of the major theorists and critics in European and American literature. This was not the somewhat facile call for "comparative literature" that was also heard at the time, but rather a different sense of the context in which Chinese literature itself was to be studied. This was before literary criticism, particularly at Yale, began its wild roller-coaster ride; and there was, as yet, no sense of opposition between responsible philology and critical reflection. Frankel required a kind of close reading in which those two concerns -philology and critical reflection-could never be separated one from the other.