Conclusion Thinking Through Authors, Readers, and Desire

Abstract

Questions of authorship are fundamental to a culture’s perception of self and other. Writing in the later half of the nineteenth century, Rudolf von Gottschall (1832–1909) filtered his understanding of classical Chinese authorship through relatively newly conceived European authorial norms: “The [imperial] Conservatory of Music was the work-shop where the talents of the monarchy were convened in order to collectively satisfy the needs of the Chinese stage.… Apart from the verses of a few principal playwrights such as those of Ma Zhiyuan and Guan Hanqing, all other [plays] were products of plagiarism that resulted from the pilfering of the works of older dramatists.”¹ As von Gottschall vociferously derided early Chinese song-drama, one senses that he was still giddy with the eighteenth-century discovery of a seemingly universal individual author. In theory at least, this new author was no longer dependent on a transcendent God for inspiration, a worldly ruler for patronage, a contemporaneous community of readers for validation, nor on tradition as a measure of craftsmanship. Instead, such an author relied on the institution of copyright, an interiorized imagination and an aesthetics of distinctiveness to leave his or occasionally her indelibly original and handsomely remunerated mark in the world of letters.²