20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

How texts survive. Some considerations on text structure... 81not exactly offer abundant space to write on. They require more space thanpaper books for storing the same amount of text, and certainly their storagecost per text unit must have been higher than that of paper. In addition,literacy was limited to a small segment of society; writing is assumed tohave been much more an aide-memoire than a medium to record detailedreflections and thorough deliberations.Communication FunctionThe rigid formal structure of the “Art of War” has essentially twoaspects. It is provides an outline both for memorizing as well as teachingpurposes, indicating that the text was deeply rooted in an oral tradition 5 .This outline structure has the additional benefit of making the text robustagainst (unintentional) rewording by copyists as well as editing. However,these positive aspects come at a price. Even early in its history, thephilological challenges found in the “Art of War” required comments andexegesis for teaching and understanding the text, as we can see from CaoCao's comments. A text like “Vom Kriege” by Clausewitz lends itself mucheasier to by read by the individual officer or general whereas the “Art ofWar” thrives best in a collective setting of teachers and students.Textual StructuresThe text of the “Art of War” is structured to a degree that it rather lookslike the outline for a text than the text itself. Its most prominent features arelists (enumerated, ordered and unordered), logical statements in the natureof syllogisms and polysyllogisms, and parallel structures, occasionallysupported by rhymes. Unlike a modern outline, however, the formatting ofthe text does not necessarily reflect these structural components but ratherprefers to present the text in a completely linear fashion even where thestructural properties are self-evident. Perhaps, to the Chinese educatedreader and target audience, these structures were indeed so obvious that itwas not necessary to waste precious bamboo stripes or paper for indicatingthese sctructures by appropriate layout. Yet it is a pity that in modern timeswhere white space is so much less expensive even modern-day editions ofthe “Art of War” (including Chinese texts and translations) pay so little5The Art of War. Sun Zi's Military Methods. 2007. Translated by Victor H.Mair. New York: Columbia University Press. Victor Mair devotes a whole chapter ofthe introduction of his translation to the oral nature of the text, referring to the standardopening of each chapter: “Sunzi says”, as well as to the frequence of grammatical particleslike 故 gu which he compares in four ancient military texts (Introduction: 31). Yet Mairdoes not go so far as to fully reflect is findings in the typesetting of the text.