The Poetics of Uncertainty in Early Chinese Literature
by Andrew Jones
When the history minded scholars of early China came upon an unbelievable event or when their hero seemed to have done something unspeakable, they had recourse to the intervention of spirit forces. These forces could be used to make the strange believable and the wrong right. (1) But this was not a measure to apply constantly. Spirit power was perceived as having real and divinely mandated lineages to the social world, and it was considered impolitic to manipulate these ---at least not in a public or an official way ---for then the status of the Emperor was at stake. (2)
Spirit forces appear in official literature almost solely to camouflage or explain abnormalities or to induce or reduce the Emperor's right to rule. They were also used when necessary to help solve historical problems. These powers were invoked in private works to create a gamut of situations which often had only the most tenuous links to history as officially viewed or life as commonly known. The seemingly irregular powers of spirits were used in unofficial literature as the model and the mechanism of plot and character development. This, however, was not something to boast about. To the typical scholar it was tantamount to disrespect for the past and the existing powers: indeed, it was considered equivalent to mendacity. (3)
While the official in public used spirit forces as a means to create a credible story when there was no other evidence or only incredible evidence, the private author applied the same cosmic functions to convey the incredible whether it was readily believable or not. (4) What was presented by critics as disagreeable about this application was that unrestrained depictions of the world showed that beneath the apparently harmonious movement of life there existed an uncontrollable and uncertain power. And such an understanding could rarely be the guiding principle of any official, at least not publicly.
"The primal force of the human patterns (ren wen zhi yuan) emanates from the Grand Force (taiji)."(5) By this the literary critic Liu Xie (ca. 465-522) expects the reader to understand that human creations originate as resonant articulations of the complex energy systems of nature. He also implies that the fundamental means of creation was the adaptation of natural patterns: bird tracks become Chinese characters. (6) This adaptation procedure followed the guidelines of an established cosmology that was used to understand how things were created and how they changed.
The Chinese conceived of the dynamics of nature in terms of a system of energies moving in cyclical phases. The primary cycle was typically represented by the revolving binary forces yin and yang, or the many images they evoke, such as cloudy and sunny or supple and stiff. Their central role is expressed in an appendix to the Yi jing (Book of Changes): "The stiff and the supple urge each other on and produce change and transformation."(7) Such changes occur within five interconnecting phasal constructions (water, fire, wood, metal, and earth) that represent the cyclical meta-patterns of all things.
One of the most significant characteristics of this general system is that the binary forces were not an irreconcilable duality but a reciprocating coordination of forces. When the extreme form of one side developed it had to become its opposite.(8) Such reciprocation demands that the ever-changing, relative relationships of things be considered as the basic condition for determining their values.(9) No one thing could be isolated from another. The more allusive examples of how distant phenomena interrelated were a source of contemplative pleasure and stimulating prophecy for generations of Chinese.(10) To cite one example of the latter type,
When mountains silently move of themselves, everywhere under heaven will have war and its strife: the foundations of states will be destroyed.(11)
When something stimulates, whatever it stimulates responds in an affective manner to the stimulus. In the proofs cited for the above prophecy, the stimuli for the moving mountains were corrupt rulers. In addition. neither space nor time could restrain this relationship of stimulus (gan) with affective response (ying).(12)
Along with greater and more detailed phasal forms, the categories mentioned above were used to predict, catalog. and analyze the regularities and irregularities of nature. They also served as the model for how to reproduce natural and imagined phenomena in alchemical and other technical exercises and in literary creations.(13)
They were the media between the patterns of nature and humanity. The fundamental application of this system in literature was in the use of gan-ying. New developments in a story may appear to come from nowhere but they are actually affective responses to some element, present or latent, of the preceding scene. While a story usually starts with historical data, it proceeds according to how this data was changed by spiritual forces. Hence, changes occur with or without explicit causality and regardless of any orderly linear sequence, but they always exist within a cyclical pattern of changes.(14) As in the system for nature, these changes form according to their origin from primal energy ("transformation," hua), their formation of complete alternating cycles ("changes," bian), or whether they represent both of the above ("permutation," bianhua).(15)
The application of these energetic patterns has caused much difficulty for a clear appreciation of Chinese literature in the West.(16) Andrew Plaks has defined the problem by noting that the "forward thrust" of actor and scene in Western literature contrasts with the "numerous overlapping cycles of recurrence" in Chinese fiction.(17) The operation of the cycles is especially evident in early Chinese stories. The seemingly erratic elements appear there clearly as signs of the transmutation of the world. Actor and scene shift and form uncertainly, for priming the neat cycles on which they are based was a raging chaos of energy, and it did not recognize any familiar, linear progression.
Huanghu *** was a primal generating state that fostered regular and irregular forms of life without inherent valuation.(18) It was thought that this primal energy could not be delineated because it had no order: "The image without an image, / It is known as the primal generator (huanghu)."(19) From huanghu comes the energies called "essence" (jing) and "pneuma" (qi) that give form to observable life. Qi had a particularly important role in aesthetics: as the impetus of yin and yang, qi was a qualification for balance, for the "hard" and "soft" and the "cloudy" and "clear" aspects of a work.(20) However, there was long recognized another energy that "could not be fathomed by yin and yang."(21) Manifestations of this energy, which do not form but which are agents of change, were called "wandering spirits" (you hun).(22) Many commentators to Xi ci zhuan (The Great Appendix) note that when the accumulation of a thing reaches its extreme (ji), it is scattered -- the 'spirit wanders' -- and hence the form of a thing changes: "the living changes to the dead, the successful changes to the defeated, and things that have not died take on a different form (yi lei)."(23) Positive and negative manifestations of this energy are wrought in stories to make the impossible seem possible, the wrong right, and the forgotten remembered. They were used to
create explanations for the unexplainable, and they were used to create and sustain the value of a thing when common prejudice suggested otherwise. Indeed, according to an appendix to the Yi jing, it was through the "wandering spirit" that "we know the conditions of ghosts and spirits."(24) In Chinese stories, as well as in many early sciences. this energy was physically manifested to show ghosts and dreams and conceptually manifested in abstract forms of manner and mode of development. As the Ming dynasty dream specialist, Chen Shiyuan, noted "Dreams are the wanderings of spirits that are a mirror of foreknowledge." (Meng zhe shen zhi you zhi lai zhi jing yeh.)(25) Stories are similar to dreams in that in stories action develops as if controlled by "wandering spirits," and with the same organizing effects as such spirits were supposed to have on life itself.(26) If the order of a series of events in history was not clear, manifestations of the "wandering spirit" were used to create a naturally irregular pattern of development, or if the means were not appropriate to the end, ghosts were introduced to induce the reader to believe a primal, unknowable, yet not immoral, pattern of development. Through this mechanism, human, irregular patterns could be fashioned into imaginary patterns that seem normal for nature.
One of the most important of the devices used to bring out the primal energy huanghu was its adverbial relative hu ("suddenly"),(27) a word that precisely expresses the manner of the transformations the "wandering spirit" induced.(28) As a general concept employed in both poetry and prose, hu signifies the engagement of discrete cycles and signals the kind of unpredictable response characteristic of spirit manipulations. The way a story or an idea develops after a "suddenly" -- and, to a lesser extent, after related words, such as xuyu ("instantly"), yanran ("suddenly"), or shuhu ("suddenly") -- almost invariably indicates that an ostensibly natural but not necessarily historical change has occurred.(29) In other words, hu notifies us that although an unusual, unbelievable, or spiritual change is being or has been enacted, yet the result of the change may be acceptable on cosmological grounds. For example, in one of the earliest local gazetteers, Chang Qu's early-fourth-century Hua-Yang guo zhi (Record of the Territories of Hua-Yang), a book that is basically orthodox in form and content, we find the following story:
Yongchang county in ancient times was the state of Ai-lao. Ai-lao is the name of a mountain. In the beginning there was just one woman, whose name was Sand Pot. She stayed below the mountain, where she lived on her fishing. Suddenly (hu) she touched a sunken log. From the stimulus (gan) she became pregnant, and after ten months she gave birth to a boy. After ten children, the sunken log transformed (hua) into a dragon....(30)
Here one can see quite clearly that the contact of a mundane life cycle with a primal life-giving cycle alters "history" considerably. The fact that it happened "suddenly" and therefore without the need of accumulating evidence or even historic precedent gives credence to the incredible.(31)
To a degree the use of "suddenly" and related concepts in Chinese prose corresponds to the use of "Once upon a time" in Western children's literature. "By itself," says Karla Kuskin, this phrase "is sufficient to place the reader somewhere in the magical past that serves as the landscape of a story."(32) The basic difference between the two concepts is that "suddenly" allows for the reader's acceptance of the regular transformations of the historical and natural possibilities of the story. The following typically short story may serve as a good illustration.
During the Yixi period (405-418), a serving maid named Lan in the Xu family of Donghai suddenly (hu) became weak, and pale. But she paid more attention to her appearance than usual. The family kept a secret watch on her and saw a broom go from its corner to the maid's bed. When they burned the broom, the serving maid recovered.(33)
Here one can see how suddenly" makes a disjunction between the historical introduction, which mimics the official history style, and the fantastic main action of the story. With the word "suddenly" a complete ontological process is subsumed, where a historical type of reality is transformed into a unique situation which may at least be acceptable on cosmological grounds.
* * *
Although the "Emperor's Chinese" (wang yan) was anything but prosaic, it was used in a rather unilateral and regenerative way, one inclined more to prescription and mnemonics than creation.(34) It was commonly thought that the best way for the present was to be found only in the classics written by the "First Sages" of the golden past; it was only those ancients and those adhering strictly to the old Path who could produce works of pristine quality. Those who paid attention to the seemingly less constant and peculiar affairs could only compose aberrations, distorting the drive to moral purity.(35) In a similar vein, there was often a predisposition to understand the cosmology as a normative order. For this reason, Joseph Needham considered the Yi Jing a "stupendous filing system" justifying the bureaucratic tendency of the Chinese state.(36) A similar bias developed in orthodox literary circles, where the disruptive potential of the primal energy -- the sudden intersection of different cycles -- was ignored unless made unavoidable by problems of a historical or a moral nature.
This normalization of an otherwise dynamic system helps account for what J. Prusek has called the "segmented progress" of Chinese narrative which is built according to hierarchical steps of social, historical, and natural categories.(37) The regenerative order is also an important element of fu ("rhyme-prose") where the technique of enumerating things at best follows a spatially articulated sequence within which things are counted out in categories.(38)
And yet there were writers who directly tapped the power of huanghu. They did this by using the notion "suddenly" and other manifestations of the "wandering spirit," such as ghosts and dreams to change the unidimensional structure of their stories. In contrast to orthodox literature, the order of private tales is frequently disrupted to make the reader conceive a cosmic order, one based in the energetic cosmos of the spectres and on the wit of the writer. Where the vision of the past presented in tales with canonical ties "must be taken as the absolute truth,"(39) readers of tales built on the nexus of huanghu move through the text in a relatively non-historical, imaginative way. Nature, not history, forms the impetus for early Chinese "recordings of wonders" (zhiguai), as these tales were called.(40)