If longstanding Chinese calligraphic practice privileged the “stroke” above all, Pauthier and Legrand’s divisible type sought to usurp that position on behalf of the “radical.” The very concept of the “radical” as these Frenchmen imagined it, however, was a fictional one, invented by foreign observers of China in their attempts to draw mental equivalents between familiar linguistic concepts in Indo-European languages and the language they encountered in China. In the Chinese context, the bushou—what foreigners often translated as “radical”—was fundamentally a taxonomic concept more faithfully translated as “classifier” or “chapter heading,” referring to the sectional divisions of Chinese lexicons and dictionaries. While bushou themselves did correspond structurally to the characters so classified, nevertheless bushou were never regarded as the generative “roots” or “radices” that grew into such characters. Their place was a taxonomic or perhaps etymological one, used to organize and subsequently locate characters within textual sources, but not a compositional or typographic one. Delving into manuals and guides to Chinese calligraphy, one would be hard-pressed to find any descriptions of Chinese composition that portrayed it as an act of assembling radicals, the way that French and English handwriting manuals might explain the act of composing words as the sequential inscription of their constituent letters. In divisible type printing, however, this was precisely how the radical would be made to work: as the productive root or radix of the Chinese character, one that grew and produced semantic varieties and variations in the same way as in inflectional or agglutinative languages. As a productive force, then, they could be harnessed: they could be made to produce, not haphazardly but rationally and efficiently, as a kind of scientific forestry of language.
Divisible type departed from calligraphic practices in a second, vitally important way, as well. By setting their “radicals” on fixed metal pieces, and then building characters out of these metal pieces, Pauthier and Legrand inverted the classic relationship between part and whole in Chinese orthography. In all other forms of Chinese inscription, whether manuscript, movable type, woodblock, or otherwise, it was the compositional coherence, integrity, and beauty of the character as a whole that governed the ways in which any given component of that character was to be articulated, assessed, or valued. For Legrand and Pauthier, however, the material conditions of divisible type depended upon precisely the opposite relationship between part and whole. Fixed on metal sorts, the components of divisible type were numb and unresponsive, stubbornly maintaining fixed postures no matter their shifting contexts. Exhibiting none of the versatility of the hand-drawn stroke, Legrand and Pauthier’s modules inverted the dynamics of Chinese script, subordinating the logic of the character to that of its elemental units.
From the outset, then, Legrand and Pauthier had set for themselves a challenging, and arguably impossible, task: to produce characters that upheld Chinese calligraphic standards, while at the same time producing such characters using principles that themselves violated, or at the very least dramatically departed from, those very aesthetic standards. For Pauthier and Legrand, this tension between modular rationality and aesthetic composition manifested itself in the Chinese font they ended up creating. Most basically, Pauthier and Legrand did not cut up or divide all of the Chinese characters they could have, and in principle should have. Instead, they categorized their characters into two broad rubrics: what one observer at the time termed “typographically divisible” versus “typographically indivisible” characters—characters that could be cut up, and those that could not.35 Through their research, Legrand and Pauthier settled upon a font composed of approximately 3,000 elements in all, part of which was dedicated to divisible type components, but with another sizable portion dedicated to conventional, full-body Chinese characters.
Why such mercy and restraint? When confronted with Chinese characters that lay motionless on the operating table, what force or presence stayed our surgeons’ hands? When a character was said to be “divisible” or “indivisible,” who or what was making such claims? As we see with the characters liu (流), hai (海), and dang (蕩), three criteria determined whether a given character would be dissolved into component parts—as in the case of liu and hai (figures 2.3 and 2.4)—or left intact and treated as a full-body font—as with dang (figure 2.5). First, the shape of a divisible character had to be susceptible to a clean, two-part split, along either a straight horizontal or vertical seam. Building up a character out of three or more components, while in theory possible, was avoided by Pauthier and Legrand, presumably because of the added complexity such a procedure would have entailed. In the case of the first two characters, such a division was possible, with the water radical (氵) being separable from liu (㐬) and mei (每), respectively. By contrast, the character dang was not amenable to such a clean division, not at least with respect to the water radical. To have factored out the water radical in dang would have required the creation of either a cumbersome tripartite division of the character into a water radical, a grass radical (艹), and the residual yi (易), or an even more awkward L-shape containing the grass radical and yi together. It was deemed more economical simply to leave dang intact.
2.3 Character liu in divisible type
2.4 Character hai in divisible type
2.5 Character dang in full-body type
The second criterion pertained to the relative frequency of each module. In our earlier example of dang, it is clear that, while a vertical separation of the water radical would have been too cumbersome, a horizontal separation of the uppermost grass radical was feasible. This would have divided the character into two parts: the grass radical and the residual character tang (湯 “soup”). It can be surmised that the reason such a division was not made was because there was no advantage to doing so. Unlike the modules liu and mei above, each of which appears in many other characters in precisely that position and scale, a tang/“soup” module would have been relatively useless. A module tang of this scale and proportion would not be usable in practically any other character. Once again, it was simply more advantageous to leave the character dang intact.
The most important rule—the one that Pauthier and Legrand clearly felt could never be violated—was that the “bones” of a character could never be broken. It was impermissible to cut through a stroke and set its fragments on separate metal sorts. While a small conceptual leap might have led these Frenchmen away from the idea of combining “radicals” to that of combining asemantic graphemes—for example, forming the character yi (一 “one”) through the combination of two half-length dash-shaped marks (--)—this was a step they were clearly unwilling to make. Not unlike Cook Ding and his ox, speaking to King Wen via the Zhuangzi, Pauthier and Legrand strived to follow the “natural makeup” of the character body, to “strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are.” As with the butcher’s blade, when passing his scalpel through the spaces between the strokes, “even places where tendons attach to bones give no resistance, never mind the larger bones!”36
Having partitioned their font into these two broad categories of divisible and indivisible, Legrand and Pauthier composed their partial-body and full-body fonts in markedly different ways, as exemplified in the examples of liu, hai, and dang. In the character liu (figure 2.3), we discover a wide space separating the water radical on the left from the remainder of the character body. Although small in terms of absolute size, this micrometric, interstitial void was sufficient to hermetically seal the water radical within a completely autonomous zone. The same hermetic seal is found in the character hai. Each of these characters was clearly produced using divisible type, each of them splayed out owing to an artificial injection of space. In the full-body character dang, however, we see that the third stroke of the water radical sweeps boldly up and into the adjoining region, creating the type of coherent interpenetration so valued within calligraphic composition. In the divisible type characters liu and hai, by co
ntrast, the constituent parts again do not venture into each other’s zones. They are completely divided along an imaginary y-axis, creating a character that, in calligraphic parlance, might be considered “lazy” or “loose.”
The same discrepancy can be detected in a comparison between the characters ran (然) (figure 2.6) and wu (無) (figure 2.7)—both composed using the fire radical (灬), but with ran being composed using divisible type, and wu composed as a full-body character.
2.6 Character ran in divisible type
2.7 Character wu in full-body type
Ran splayed open, its upper and lower halves separated by a distance that, while small in absolute terms, was altogether cavernous. The fire within ran was decidedly bolder than that of wu, precisely because, once again, the method of divisible type depended upon the absolute boundedness of its modules. Space was not an inherent enemy of the calligrapher, of course: calligraphers had always had at their disposal the playful enlargement of space, and even distortions of the character body. For Legrand, however, space was not an option but a necessity: it alone made possible the rationalized modularity that set their printing method apart from all others. A further survey of the font reveals the same pattern. Whenever Pauthier and Legrand created full-body fonts, they took pains to forge characters à la chinoise. When creating partial-body fonts, however, the imperatives of their system dictated that modules be kept absolutely separate. At its inception, combinatorialism was characterized by a paradox in which the tiny spaces between radicals were something the system depended upon and depended upon negating.
Here, then, was the second mode by which foreigners in the nineteenth century reconceptualized Chinese script as a “puzzle,” a mode that put forth a strikingly different vision of Chinese writing than the common usage approach of Staunton, Gamble, and others. By harnessing “radicals and primitives” as the quasi-alphabetic, ontological elements of Chinese writing, it promised a phenomenal, forty-fold reduction in the size of a complete Chinese font, from tens of thousands of sorts to somewhere in the order of two thousand. What is more, the combinatorial approach offered the promise of a unified technology of Chinese inscription. Unlike the common usage system, in which infrequently used Chinese characters would be ostracized from the communitas of the machine, divisible type printing offered the possibility of welcoming all characters within the collective embrace of a single system of textual production—provided that some underwent dismemberment.
Gaining a measure of popularity and momentum over the course of the nineteenth century, divisible type prompted publishers and printers in Europe, the United States, and in missionary-cum-colonial outposts to set out on their own scientific dissections and dismemberments of Chinese characters. In 1834, Samuel Dyer was reported to be carrying out a similar divisible type project at the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca.37 In 1844, the Chinese Mission of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church published a specimen list of 3,041 type based on the principle of divisible type.38 Divisible type printing was later picked up and developed further by Auguste Beyerhaus of Germany. Praised as “one of the most remarkable typographical displays” at an exhibition of industry and applied sciences, Beyerhaus’s “Berlin Font” contained 4,130 Chinese type pieces in all: 2,711 complete characters, 1,290 2/3-sized partial characters, and 109 1/3-sized partial characters. Meanwhile, just as the puzzle of common usage gave rise to new Chinese fonts, and just as these common usage fonts found their way into new Chinese-language publications, so too was the puzzle of divisible type enrolled into the world of printing. In 1834, Julius Heinrich Klaproth’s edited translation of the Nipon o daï itsi ran or Annales des empereurs du Japon was produced using Legrand’s divisible type method, as was Klaproth’s 1836 republication of Foe Koue Ki or Relation des royaumes bouddhiques.39
As we will examine in the following chapter, the combinatorial approach to Chinese technolinguistics persisted into the twentieth century, forming a potent counterdiscourse to the more dominant puzzle of common usage. Just as inventors and engineers would go on to develop experimental Chinese typewriters based on the common usage approach to puzzling Chinese, so too would other engineers attempt to develop Chinese typewriters premised on the divisible type concept of “spelling” Chinese characters.
As with common usage, however, the puzzle of combinatorialism would also be haunted by its own internal tensions. In London, Legrand was awarded a prize for the “general excellence of his types” for his Chinese font, praised for rendering character-based Chinese script compatible and commensurable with European typography.40 Offering a measure of criticism, however, one reviewer commented: “The form of some of the characters is a little stiff, and disproportionate, owing partly to inexperience, and partly to the attempt which the French have made, to split and combine the elements of various characters, so as to prevent the necessity of cutting a new punch for each separate symbol; but on the whole they are exceedingly neat and handsome.”41 If common usage was beset by an irresolvable politics of presence and absence—of determining over and over again what parts of the Chinese language were to be included or excluded—the combinatorial approach would be beset by a politics of aesthetics. In their attempt to revolutionize Chinese movable type, but without upsetting the delicate compositional balance of those Chinese characters produced using this revolutionary method, practitioners of divisible type had made themselves the servant of two masters, neither of whom could be served loyally.
The Politics of Plaintext: Surrogacy, Semiotic Sovereignty, and the Chinese Telegraph Code
During the early 1860s, the appeal of divisible type extended outside the worlds of printing and typography, and into the novel arena of telegraphy. In particular, yet another eccentric Parisian in our story was drawn to the work of his compatriots, seeing in Pauthier and Legrand’s method an untapped potential that had eluded even its inventors. While his fellow Frenchmen were bedeviled by the tiny yet evident empty spaces upon which the system of divisible type printing relied, this man realized that the method could be exploited within the framework of telegraphy without inheriting this vexed politics of beauty.
In an 1862 essay, De la transmission télégraphique des caractères chinois, Pierre Henri Stanislas d’Escayrac de Lauture proposed a system of Chinese telegraphic transmission based on the principles of divisible type.42 Transporting Pauthier and Legrand’s method to the world of wire, electricity, and code, Escayrac de Lauture explained:
The question is simpler for telegraphic transmission than for typography. In consequence of the diversity of forms, which, according to its position, the same character radical or phonetic may receive, Marcellin Legrand must have engraved 4,220 different types. Telegraphy, considering the elements, without taking into account the appearance assigned to them in writing on account of their association, need only occupy itself with about 1,400 characters. By means of these 1,400 characters, the whole Chinese language may be transmitted.43
To transmit the character shuo (說, signifying “to speak”), for example, Escayrac de Lauture’s method involved sending a series of ciphers that indicated, not the character itself, but the components out of which the character was built: in this case, the modules yan (言, signifying “language”) and dui (兑, signifying “exchange”) (figure 2.8). Upon deciphering these modules, the recipient would have the necessary criteria by which to retrieve the intended character: composed of the modules yan and dui, the one possible candidate was shuo. The same operation could be carried out for other characters, such as the transmission of hai (海 “sea”) via the transmission of the water radical (氵) and the character radical mei (每). There would be no need to assemble or combine these radicals in a material or physical way, as in divisible type printing—the reconstitution of these Chinese characters would happen in the mind of the recipient.
2.8 Transmission strategy using the Escayrac de Lauture system
Here we encounter the third mode of puzzling Chinese—what we term “surro
gacy.” Although inspired by divisible type, and although harnessing the very same Chinese character modules that Pauthier and Legrand had engraved and fashioned in metal, Escayrac de Lauture no longer concerned himself with metal pieces or their physical reassembly. This may have been the puzzle of combinatorialism, but not of surrogacy. Chinese characters and radicals remained the fundamental substrate of the language for Escayrac de Lauture, as in common usage and divisible type, but they were not to be manipulated directly. Instead, they were to be sequestered to “off-site” locations—such as a telegraph code book—and then “retrieved” by means of agreed-upon transmission protocols. It was these codes and protocols that constituted the primary concern for Escayrac de Lauture and the jigsaw pieces in the surrogacy puzzle—not Chinese characters themselves. The puzzle of surrogacy was the puzzle of metadata.
Escayrac de Lauture was born in Paris in 1826. An explorer, scholar, and writer, he studied at the college of the Oratoriens at Juilly, where his capacity for language became evident. In 1844, he entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an attaché, serving the state in the punitive expedition against Madagascar, coordinated with the British. His career and travels over the next decade would take him to Spain, Portugal, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and finally China. In 1859, Escayrac de Lauture formed part of the Anglo-French expedition to China dispatched after the outbreak of the Second Opium War. Three years later, evidently inspired by his time in China, he composed his piece on the Chinese language and its place within the emerging telegraphic world.44
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