Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts

by Zhongshu Qian

  Literature must be destroyed, but there is actually no harm in rewarding writers—rewarding those who turn away from the profession of writing. Pope would often speak in metrical rhythms (lisp in numbers), and Bai Juyi was able at birth to distinguish one character from another: incurable though they may be, born writers of this sort all in all amount to but a small minority in their profession.11 Ordinary writers, in all frankness, do not actually relish literature, nor are they particularly talented at writing it. In their diversions with literature, they resemble those young women of good family in old novels who become prostitutes, it is said, due to circumstances beyond their control and the lack of any viable alternative. As long as there was an opportunity to escape from this fiery hell, not one of these talents in the making would hesitate to abandon his books and throw away his pens, switch professions, and turn over a new leaf. Literature is a profession of ill fortune and gloomy spirits, where prospects are among the bleakest anywhere, hunger and cold dog one’s steps, and sickness is one’s constant companion.12 We have all heard of “literati beggars” [wengai], but there has not ever been a term for scholars manqués in other disciplines, such as “scientist beggar,” “engineer beggar,” “lawyer beggar,” or “business-executive beggar.” As for the most foolish and stupid of people, were it not for the fact that they had no other path to follow, they certainly would not have been willing to churn out any poetry, fiction, or whatnot. Because of this, it is not only the ordinary bystander who feels contempt for literature and writers; even writers themselves are plagued with an inferiority complex, for they are utterly deficient in either a belief in literature or a reverence for it. For example, the bona fide writer Yang Xiong once proclaimed, in his Rules of Composition, “To the carving of insects or the engraving of seals, the stout man does not put his hand.”13 Obviously, he would rather be a stout fellow than a writer.14 Because of this, we have noticed a peculiar phenomenon: in general, scholars unanimously strike a bold pose and an imposing manner, lavishing praise upon their particular special field and declaring that they believe in it 120 percent. Harboring ulterior motives, writers alone meet rudeness with an obsequious smile and endure unending shame; even if they occasionally indulge in braggadocio during discussions of the literature of “national crisis,” “propaganda weaponry,” and so on, the effect is nothing more than pounding a waterlogged leather drum, with only muffled sounds audible from the most vigorous drumbeating.

  Goethe was once reviled for not having written patriotic poetry, and thus in his Conversations with Eckermann (Gespraceche [sic] mit Eckermann) complained bitterly that he had not been a soldier, nor had ever gone to the front line—how could he have roared battle cries or written martial songs while seated in his study (Kriegslieder schreiben und in Zimmer siteenl [sic])?15 Yet under present-day circumstances favorable to the creation of heroes, a minority of writers are able to discourse on military strategy, hold forth on political theory, and send their reports up to the leadership; failing that, they appoint themselves instructors of the populace, upon whom they bestow their advice. Such skillful and artistic persons should not and will not just bury their talents in literature. As long as there are opportunities for them to make a change, they can abandon literature and the arts without further ado and make their living some other way.16

  In his “Defence of Poetry,” Shelley argues that poets are the legislators (Legislator) of mankind. Carlisle, in his essay “The Worship of Heroes,” claims that writers can be considered heroes. The sole desire of these present-day writers of special mettle is to assume the mantle of a hero, and they hope to become legislators or something else along those lines. If they were to go so far as to style themselves heroes or legislators, they could not avoid seeming megalomaniacal. Yet as far as the desire to be a legislator or hero goes, this is nothing other than the will to get ahead in the world. The will to get ahead in the world is something that ought to be rewarded. A person who has the will to get ahead in the world feels dissatisfaction or shame for his position in real life. In understanding shame one approaches the embodiment of courage. Courage is to be rewarded, and how much more so during an age such as this!

  In brief, we should destroy literature and yet reward writers—reward them for ceasing to be writers, for having nothing to do with literature.

  Translated by Philip F. Williams

  NOTES

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  1. Qian is punning here on the dual meanings of ben —“origins” and “book”—suggesting that since he forgot about the original copies of his books (yuanben) that Chen Mengxiong had sent him, he could be said to have “forgotten his origins” (wangben).

  PREFACE

  1. The 1941 edition reads: “They possess the laziness—that is, nonchalance—of the man of culture, so they browse . . .” Changed in the 1983 edition.

  THE DEVIL PAYS A NIGHTTIME VISIT TO MR. QIAN ZHONGSHU

  1. A banquet consisting of vegetarian dishes and a ritual sacrifice to the spirit of the departed are traditional features of Chinese memorial events and commemorations held on the hundredth day after or on a later anniversary of a family member’s death.

  2. A pun on the idiom “luster lent to a humble house” (pengbi zenghui ), a polite expression said by a host in thanks for a guest’s visit.

  3. The phrase re zhong lengxue means “to keep one’s cool.”

  4. The 1941 edition reads: “Whenever they wanted to write an autobiography they would find they had no ‘self ’ to write about, so they gratify themselves by rendering an ideal likeness that they wouldn’t recognize even if they saw it in the mirror.” Changed in the 1983 edition.

  5. Literally, “sprained foot,” here used punningly.

  6. A punning use of the idiom “a chain of ghost talk” (guihua lianpian )—that is, a pack of lies or nonsense.

  7. A play on the common expression “to be drinking the northwest wind” (he xibei feng )—that is, to have nothing to eat.

  WINDOWS

  1. In the 1941 edition, Qian refers to “difference in worldview” (yuzhou guan ) rather than “fundamental difference.” Changed in the 1983 edition.

  2. Tao Yuanming (Tao Qian [365–427]) is one of the most famous pre-Tang poets, whose eremitic lifestyle and poems about idyllic pastoral life earned him the epithet “Poet of the Fields.”

  3. Emperor Xi (Fuxi shangren or Fu Xi shi ) is one of the legendary Three Emperors of high antiquity (the others being Yao and Shun ), who taught the people how to fish and hunt and presided over one of the golden ages of early Chinese civilization.

  4. The name of an old county in what is now Jiangxi province. In the 1941 edition, Qian identifies Tao’s hometown as Pengze county, which is in the same region.

  5. Alfred de Musset (1810–1857) was a French playwright, novelist, and poet. The passage from his play À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles (1832), alluded to here, reads:

  C’est dans les nuits d’été, sur une mince échelle,

  Une épée à la main, un manteau sur les yeux,

  Qu’une enfant de quinze ans rêve ses amoureux.

  Avant de se montrer, il faut leur apparaître.

  Le père ouvre la porte au matériel époux,

  Mais toujours l’idéal entre par la fenêtre.

  [Lovers, to any lass not yet sixteen,

  Climb up a ladder on a summer night,

  Sword in their hand, cloak veiling them from sight;

  You must appear, rather than just be seen.

  Dad lets a fleshy bridegroom in the door,

  But through the window comes the fair ideal.]

  Translation from Twelve Plays by Alfred de Musset, trans. Francine Giguère, E. H. Blackmore, and A. H. Blackmore (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2001), 36.

  6. Gottfried Keller (1819–1890) was a German poet. The first stanza of his poem “Abendlied” reads, in the German original and in English translation:

  Augen, meine lieben Fensterlein,

  Gebt mir schon so lange holden Sc
hein,

  Lasset freundlich Bild um Bild herein

  Einmal werdet ihr verdunkelt sein!

  [Eyes, my windows, my fond delight,

  Giving me a lifetime’s cherished light,

  Letting pictures in, so kind, so right,

  Darkness lies in wait for you, and night.]

  Translation adapted from Robert M. Browning, ed., German Poetry from 1750 to 1900 (New York: Continuum, 1984), 249.

  7. The 1941 edition reads: “. . . which is why Huang Shangu said that the eyes move when the heart is moved and Mencius . . .” Cut in the 1983 edition. Huang Shangu (Huang Tingjian [1045–1105]) was a Northern Song poet and calligrapher. The quoted phrase is attributed to him in the anonymous Song dynasty work Daoshan Clear Talk (Daoshan qinghua ).

  8. In his entry for April 5, 1830, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) as saying:

  It always seems to me as if I am to serve strangers as an object for strict examination, and as if with their armed glances they would penetrate my most secret thoughts and spy out every wrinkle of my old face. But while they thus endeavor to make acquaintance, they destroy all fair equality between us, as they prevent me from compensating myself by making theirs. For what do I gain from a man into whose eyes I cannot look when he is speaking, and the mirror of whose soul is veiled by glasses that dazzle me?”

  Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford, ed. J. K. Moorhead (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1998), 368.

  9. The 1941 edition reads: “. . . left open all day.” Changed in the 1983 edition.

  ON HAPPINESS

  1. Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863), a Romantic poet and dramatist, rose to literary prominence following the French Revolution and was in his later years elected to the Académie française. His highly regarded Journal was published posthumously in 1867.

  2. The second half of this parallel couplet reads: “When lonely we lament that it’s too long” (jimo hen geng chang ). The locus classicus of this idiom is found in act 3 of Luo Guanzhong’s (ca. 1330–ca. 1400) zaju play The Wind-Cloud Meeting (Fengyun hui ), an edition of which may be found in Xuxiu siku quanshu (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002), 1763:193.

  3. Journey to the West, chap. 4.

  4. Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang (Youyang zazu ) is a major Tang dynasty (618–907) collection of “tales of the strange” (zhiguai ) and other miscellany compiled in the mid-ninth century by the literatus Duan Chengshi (ca. 803–863). Divided into thirty juan (twenty in the original work; ten in an encore), the work contains over twelve hundred entries, including stories about supernatural creatures, legends about bandits and knight-errants, and notes on pharmacopeia and natural phenomena.

  5. Broad Collection of Anomalies (Guangyi ji ) is a twenty-juan collection of zhiguai stories from the mid-Tang dynasty. Approximately 280 items from this work are reproduced in the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era (Taiping guangji ), an important Song dynasty (960–1279) collection of about seven thousand stories selected from over three hundred books published between the Han (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) and Song dynasties.

  6. In the story, which is also found in the Taiping guangji, a five-hundred-year-old male foxdemon is possessing the duke’s daughter. The duke summons Adjutant Cui, who punishes the demon by beating him with a peach branch, which reduces the demon’s supernatural powers to the point where he can become human. The demon repents, becomes human, and ends up marrying the duke’s daughter.

  7. The 1941 edition reads: “. . . a square circle, static movement, or the thinking masses.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

  8. The line is drawn from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) Faust, part 1 (first published in 1808). A translation by Bayard Taylor is available at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext02/faust10.txt. In the 1941 edition, Qian refers to blink-of-an-eye time as Augenblick.

  9. John Stuart Mill (1773–1836), Utilitarianism, chap. 2. The quoted phrases appear in English in the 1941 edition.

  10. In the 1941 edition, these two sentences read: “Should you kill someone for money but be genuinely happy, your state of mind will be more tranquil than that of an ascetic moralist. Thus, having a clean conscience and having no conscience at all are effectively the same.”

  11. Nevi’im (Prophets [Xianzhi shu ]) is the second of three major parts of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), the other two being the Torah (Teachings) and Ketuvim (Writings). The story of Solomon is found in 1 Kings 1–2. It is unclear why Qian credits Solomon as being its author. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) was a major symbolist poet and critic of fin-de-siècle Paris. The earliest manuscript of the poem “Brise marine” is dated 1865.

  12. Su Dongpo is the sobriquet of Su Shi (1037–1101), a major poet of the Song dynasty. The couplet is from the poem “Touring the Patriarchal Stupa Monastery While Ill” (Bing zhong you Zutayuan ).

  13. Danlu is the style name (zi ) of Wang Zhuo (b. 1636), an early Qing dynasty biji writer from what is now Hangzhou. A “New Tales of This Age” for Today (Jin Shi shuo ) is a collection of anecdotes about prominent men of letters from Wang’s time, modeled after the great fifth-century work New Tales of This Age (Shi shuo xin yu ). The line from Jin Shi shuo appears in the “Sayings” (Yanyu ) section of juan 2.

  14. Novalis is the pen name of Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg (1772–1801), a philosopher and author of the early German Romantic movement. Like Qian, he was a man of encyclopedic learning who exhibited an appreciation of the fragment as a form of literature and criticism. The 1941 edition reproduces Novalis’s line about the schoolmarm: “Ein Erzieherin zur Ruhe.”

  15. The Belgian symbolist poet and novelist Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898) published eight collections of poetry and four novels during his lifetime. The reference to épuration can be found in the opening poem in part 4 (“Les Malades aux fenêtres”) of Les Vies encloses (1896), which was published near the end of his life.

  16. Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680–1747) was a member of the Hamburg senate and one of the first German poets to include religious interpretations of natural phenomena in his poetry.

  ON LAUGHTER

  1. The term maixiao , usually translated as “selling smiles,” has pejorative connotations of insincerity and is most often associated with courtesans, prostitutes, and singsong girls, the last who may clarify to clients that “I sell smiles but not my body” (maixiao bu maishen ).

  2. The earliest version of this essay appeared in the series “Cold Room Jottings” (Lengwu suibi ) published in the Kunming literary magazine Criticism Today (Jinri pinglun ) 1, no. 22 (May 24, 1939). The title phrase shuoxiao carries two additional meanings besides “On Laughter”: (1) telling jokes or funny stories, and, most literally, (2) talking and laughing.

  3. Jizhuang is the style name (zi ) of Liu Xianting (1648–1695), a scholar from the early Qing dynasty. Guangyang zaji is an important collection of “jottings” (biji ) spanning various historical, legal, administrative, geographical, agricultural, medical, and artistic topics.

  4. In the 1939 “Cold Room Jottings” and 1941 Kaiming editions of this essay, Qian credits this claim to Rabelais: “Rabelais appears to have been the first to use laughter to distinguish man from beast. In the opening chapter of Gargantua et Pantagruel he writes, ‘rire est le propre de l’homme’ [laughter is man’s distinguishing feature].” Changed in the 1983 edition. Aristotle’s claim in fact appears in a different book: On the Parts of Animals (De Partibus Animalium, ca. 350 B.C.E.), 3.10. A translation by William Ogle is available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/Aristotle/parts/book3.html.

  5. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s (1840–1922) sonnet “Laughter and Death” reads:

  There is no laughter in the natural world

  Of beast or fish or bird, though no sad doubt

  Of their futurity to them unfurled

  Has dared to check the mirth-compelling shout.

  The lion roars his solemn thunder out

  T
o the sleeping woods. The eagle screams her cry.

  Even the lark must strain a serious throat

  To hurl his blest defiance at the sky.

  Fear, anger, jealousy, have found a voice.

  Love’s pain or rapture the brute bosoms swell.

  Nature has symbols for her nobler joys,

  Her nobler sorrows. Who had dared foretell

  That only man, by some sad mockery,

  Should learn to laugh who learns that he must die?

  6. In the 1939 and 1941 editions, Qian is more physiologically specific and mentions the “muscles” of the face and throat.

  7. Dongfang Shuo (154–93 B.C.E.) was a famous Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) courtier and wit. “The Eastern Wastelands” is the first of nine sections in The Classic of the Divine and the Strange (Shenyi jing ), a short work about marvels and wonders. Duke Dongwang, for instance, is described as being “ten feet tall, white-haired, shaped like a man with a bird’s face and a tiger’s tail.”