STEPHEN OWEN

We cannot help but be struck by the quest of Carolivia Herron's poets to
discover the "parent word," the word of origin. It is part of the problem-
atic history of our own civilization that these Afro-American poets be-
come interesting in precisely the way that they are interesting: there is a
suspicion abroad that their love of their original word is the love of a word
not their own, not the word of their own origins, as if it were someone
else's word misappropriated -- "unacknowledged and unaccepted" in Her-
ron's words. Yet we may be far too complacent about other versions of this
project: we find that, every time we press the quest to its limit the original
word can never be our own, never recreated, appropriated, or even
grasped. The more we loved the word, the more it finally eluded us
somewhere. The early philologists did not realize this; but the history of
the discipline has made it obvious: the certainties of the last century are
too often this century's quaint anecdotes, proving to us once again how
much wiser we are than our forebears. If philology has a present and a
future, it must involve some mature humor about the helplessness of its
passion.

I mean this in a very pragmatic and untheoretical way. And to illustrate
I would like to offer a few words in praise of the philological sophistication
of my own field, traditional Chinese literature, where, already in the
seventeenth century, modern philological research was developing out of
traditional exegetical practices (basic philological procedures can be

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