Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts

by Zhongshu Qian

  8. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell’s authorized translation of Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) Le Rire, is available at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/laemc10.txt.

  9. In the 1939 and 1941 editions of this essay, Qian does not cite Jia Baoyu but instead writes: “Put another way, humor, like woman, is made of water.” Changed in the 1983 edition. The first mention of Jia Baoyu’s theory on woman’s “watery” nature appears in chap. 2 of the classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber. See Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, vol. 1, The Golden Days, trans. David Hawkes (London: Penguin, 1973), 76.

  10. The 1939 and 1941 editions of this essay include the following German example here: “For instance, the preface to Jean Paul Richter’s [1763–1825] humorous novel Quintus Fixlein describes humor as an airtight, uniform worldview. Yet even the Germans appreciated that such a view would result in humor’s annihilation: a paper on German humor presented at the September 13, 1846, Literary Forum (Blatter fur Literarische Unterhalttung [sic]) long ago criticized Richter for going against common sense.”

  11. The use of the term dashi (master) is a clear stab at Lin Yutang (1895–1976), founder of the humor magazine Analects Fortnightly (Lunyu banyuekan ), who at the time was popularly celebrated as the “Master of Humor” (youmo dashi ). The 1939 and 1941 editions read: “. . . a master of the advanced sort who is a leader of youth.”

  12. “Silvery laughter” usually refers to laughter with a melodious, rippling quality. Here, Qian ironically imbues the term with a profit motive.

  13. “In books there are roomfuls of gold” and “In books there are jade-white beauties” (shu zhong ziyou huangjin wu, shu zhong ziyou yan ru yu ) are two lines from “Encouragement for Study” (Li xue pian , or “A Poem to Encourage Study” [Quan xue shi ]), a poem by Zhen Zong (968–1022), the third emperor of the Song dynasty. Taken together, they formed a cliché that was used to exhort young scholars to study for the civil service examination in imperial China, the implication being that success in scholarship would lead to a government position and thus wealth and women.

  EATING

  1. Chi fan (eating rice), a generic Chinese term for eating a meal, is used in this essay in its most literal sense.

  2. A similar quibble about “eating rice” versus “eating dishes” appears in a comedy of manners written in 1943 by Qian’s wife, Yang Jiang. See Yang Jiang , Chengxin ruyi (As Your Heart Desires), in Yang Jiang zuopin jingxuan: xiao shuo, xiju (Selected Works by Yang Jiang: Stories and Plays) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2004), 188.

  3. Aulus Persius Flaccus (ca. 32–ca. 62) was a Roman poet and satirist. The translation is from François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 2006), 831–34. Qian does not refer to Persius by name in the 1941 or 1983 editions, but just as “a Roman poet.” In the 1941 edition, the quote in Latin appears as “Venter laritor ingeni.”

  4. The correct citation is Pantagruel, book 4, chap. 57. Screech notes in his introduction to this chapter, “In the Prologue to his Satires, Persius calls the Belly the world’s ‘Master of Arts and Dispenser of Genius.’ All the earthly arts, crafts and accomplishments of men and beasts derive from him. Rabelais develops that theme” (Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 831). The original French text appears only in the 1941 edition.

  5. Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680–1747).

  6. In the 1941 edition, we need only “women” (nüren ) to press us with wine, not “beauties” (jiaren ) and “lovelies” (liren ).

  7. Lu Zhishen , the dog-meat-loving “Flowery Monk,” is one of the bandit-heroes of The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan ), also known as The Marshes of Mount Liang, a popular novel from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). After becoming a monk, Lu promptly breaks his vows to abstain from meat and wine and goes on a drunken rampage. This mildly vulgar colloquial expression (the niao in dan chu niao lai can also be interpreted as “penis” [diao]), which appears in chap. 4, is alternatively rendered as “This bloody horrible taste in my mouth!” in Shi Nai’an, The Broken Seals: Part One of “The Marshes of Mount Liang,” trans. John Dent-Young and Alex Dent-Young (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994), 95. In the 1941 edition, Qian attributes this phrase to another Water Margin bandit, Li Kui.

  8. Literally, “leprous elephant” (laixiang ). Pigs (shi ) and elephants (xiang ) occupied the same imaginative category in ancient China, hence the incorporation of the former character into the latter. In this context, the linking of “leper” and “elephant” seems to suggest that a boar can hardly be elevated to the status of an elephant; thus “leper elephant” is an inferior or a denigrated version of an elephant. Thanks to Shang Wei for this interpretation.

  9. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646–1716) notion of preestablished harmony is a theory of causation holding that all entities have been designed by God to “harmonize” with one another. As entities (including mind, body, and other substances) have only a causal relationship with themselves, they do not actually physically affect one another, and their “interactions” merely realize a pattern preestablished by God. The original term appears only in the 1941 edition.

  10. Shang , jue , zheng , and yu are four of the five tones in the traditional Chinese tonal scale.

  11. Shao is the name of the music of Shun , one of the legendary rulers of Chinese antiquity. The effect of music on Confucius is recorded in The Analects, book 7, chap. 13.

  12. Adapted from James Legge’s translation of The Doctrine of the Mean, chap. 1, line 4, which reads in full: “While there are no stirrings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy, the mind may be said to be in the state of EQUILIBRIUM. When those feelings have been stirred, and they act in their due degree, there ensues what may be called the state of HARMONY. This EQUILIBRIUM is the great root from which grow all the human actings in the world, and this HARMONY is the universal path which they should all pursue” (The Four Books [Shanghai: Chinese Book Company, 1930], 350 [emphasis in original]).

  13. That is, requiring a sensitive hand.

  14. Before the invention of paper, the Chinese wrote on vertical strips of bamboo, which were then tied together into books. When unearthed from tombs hundreds or thousands of years later, the bamboo strips often would be out of order because the strings holding them together had rotted away.

  15. Alexandre-Balthasar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière’s (1758–1838) eight-volume Almanach des gourmands (The Gourmand’s Almanac) was published between 1803 and 1812.

  16. Zhu Bajie , one of Monkey’s traveling companions in Journey to the West, is an anthropomorphic pig who personifies human corporeal desires, particularly gluttony.

  READING AESOP’S FABLES

  1. The Three Dynasties are the Xia (ca. 2070–ca. 1600 B.C.E.), Shang (ca. 1600–1046 B.C.E.), and Zhou (1122–256 B.C.E.). While recorded in the Records of the Grand Historian (second–first century B.C.E.), the Xia dynasty is considered by some scholars to be semimythical, and its dates are subject to debate.

  2. The fable is better known today as “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” though in the Greek original and subsequent Latin version the grasshopper is a cicada. (Qian uses the term cuzhi , which refers to the xishuai [cricket].)

  3. Qian uses the term jinhua (evolve), but the story in fact concerns transmigration, and of a Muse-poet turning into an insect rather than vice versa. Translators differ as to whether this insect is a cicada or a grasshopper. In one English translation of Phaedrus (360 B.C.E.), Socrates tells Phaedrus:

  A lover of music like yourself ought surely to have heard the story of the grasshoppers, who are said to have been human beings in an age before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared they were ravished with delight; and singing always, never thought of eating and drinking, until at last in their forgetfulness they died. And now they live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the Muses make to them—they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour of their birth are always
singing, and never eating or drinking; and when they die they go and inform the Muses in heaven who honors them on earth.

  Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html. For an analysis of this passage, which has cicadas instead of grasshoppers, see Rory B. Egan, “Cicada in Ancient Greece,” Cultural Entomology Digest 3 (1994), http://www.insects.org/ced3/cicada_ancgrcult.html.

  4. The 1983 edition added the clause “and critics and scholars writing research theses.”

  5. The 1941 edition reads: “Dogs and their ilk have no business looking in a mirror!”

  6. The Chinese idiom “looking at the sky from the bottom of a well” refers to someone with a narrow field of vision. Qian touches on this theme frequently in his criticism of contemporary critics, his references to his own learning, and his observations about humans’ limited capacity for wisdom and knowledge. The title of Qian’s critical magnum opus, Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters (Guanzhuibian [literally, The Tube and Awl Collection]), for example, “alludes to the ancient saying ‘using a tube to scan the sky or an awl to measure the depth of the earth’” (zhuizhi guankui )—a hyperbolically modest self-appraisal of Qian’s breadth of knowledge (Ronald Egan, “Introduction,” in Qian Zhongshu, Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters, trans. Ronald Egan [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 14).

  7. The 1941 edition reads: “If he were an enterprising fox he would say this to himself—akin to the common saying ‘Other people’s wives always seem preferable.’ If he were a conservative fox, he would say this to others—those who cling most strongly to their position are invariably those who are complaining that things are not up to snuff and threatening to resign.” Changed in the 1983 edition.

  ON MORAL INSTRUCTION

  1. The 1939 and 1941 editions have an additional sentence here: “Of course, unless you’re the sort to share your lover, you’d never share your towel or toothbrush with friends.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

  2. The idiom “to preserve one’s purity” (jieshen zihao ) is usually taken to mean to preserve one’s moral integrity by isolating oneself from evil influences.

  3. The Liaozhai zhiyi , translated by John Minford as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (London: Penguin, 2006), was written by the Shandong literatus Pu Songling (1640–1715). It is considered the preeminent collection of ghost stories from imperial China and is, in Minford’s opinion, “the supreme work of fiction in the classical Chinese language” (i).

  4. A phrase from Jonathan Swift’s (1667–1745) letter to Alexander Pope (1668–1744) of September 29, 1725: “Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”

  5. The 1939 and 1941 editions have additional sentences here: “Like Dante, they’re halfway across the bridge of life, but they have no way to pen a Divine Comedy: they seem to be too old to start love affairs or take up arms to defend their nation, but too young to become vegetarian Buddhist monks; they’d write literature but seem to have exhausted their talent; they’d become researchers but unfortunately they lack the training. By this point, what can they do but pen moralizing essays?” Cut in the 1983 edition.

  6. Here Qian humorously transliterates T. S. Eliot’s name as “Loves profit and despises morality” (Aili e’de ).

  7. The 1939 and 1941 editions have an additional sentence here: “Even I don’t necessarily consider literary creation any more valuable than moralizing.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

  8. The 1939 and 1941 editions have an additional sentence here: “The vituperative revulsion that many people express toward hypocrisy can only be likened to the reaction of a monkey looking in the mirror who doesn’t recognize his own ugly reflection.” Cut in the 1983 edition.

  9. “Maxims Withdrawn by the Author” is the final section in François de La Rochefoucauld’s (1613–1680) Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1665). The French title appears in Qian’s original essay. The English translation is adapted from La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1982), 118. Tancock’s translation refers to “philosophers” and “Seneca”; Qian’s text specifies “moralists” (daoxuejia ) and “Sénéque” [sic]. As Qian specifies in the 1939, 1941, and 2001 editions (but not in the 1983 edition), the quote appears in section 589.

  10. Wang Yangming (1472–1528) was one of the most prominent neo-Confucian philosophers of the Ming dynasty. This line can be found in Wang Yangming, Chuanxi lu , annot. Ye Jun (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1965), 274.

  11. Literally, “not wanting face,” a pun on the literal meaning of the expression.

  12. Hamlet’s actual line is “God / has given you one face, and you make yourselves / another” (Hamlet, act 3, scene 1).

  13. The 1939 and 1941 editions read: “That said, cosmology, like all arts, is subject to a wide-ranging hierarchy. As the preface to the Roman poet Martial put it: ‘Some are extremely good, some are extremely bad, and some are extremely mediocre.’” Changed in the 1983 edition.

  A PREJUDICE

  1. The earliest version of this essay appeared as the third installment of the series “Cold Room Jottings” (Lengwu suibi ), Criticism Today (Jinri pinglun ) 1, no. 14 (April 2, 1939).

  2. Lines 121–23 of canto 27: “O me dolente! come mi riscossi / Quando mi prese, dicendomi; Forse / Tu non pensavi ch’io loico fossi!” [“O wretched me! How I started when he seized me, saying to me: ‘Maybe thou didst not consider that I was a logician!’”] (Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: The Inferno, trans. John A. Carlyle [New York: Harper, 1851], 289–90).

  3. The 1939 “Cold Room Jottings” version of this sentence refers to “jottings in a cold room”; all subsequent versions read “jottings in the margins of life.”

  4. A reference to the saying “When mosquitoes are numerous, thunderstorms begin” (wen duo leiyu xia ).

  5. The translation is based on Burton Watson’s rendering of tianlai (piping of Heaven), in Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 31–45.

  6. Tang Geng (Tang Zixi [1070–1120]) was a poet of the Northern Song dynasty.

  7. The couplet appears in part 2, book 3, poem 5 of The Book of Poems. The translation is adapted from James Legge’s version, in The Chinese Classics, vol. 4, The She King (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 290.

  8. Family Instructions of Master Yan (Yanshi jia xun ), written by Yan Zhitui (531–591) in the last years of his life, is a seven-volume classic from the Northern and Southern dynasties (386–589) covering a wide range of topics, from ethics and morality to writing, art, Buddhism, phonology, and historiography. The line quoted is from the Southern dynasty poet Wang Ji’s (dates unknown) poem “Entering Ruoye Stream” (Ru Ruoye xi ).

  9. Qian uses the poem title as given, which should be “To Jane—The Recollection.” The sentence about Shelley does not appear in the 1939 “Cold Room Jottings” version but appears in all subsequent versions.

  10. Dante, Inferno, canto 1, “Parafrasi.”

  11. In the 1939 and 1941 editions of this essay, this sentence contains more specific attributions: “It let Thomas Carlyle [Kalai’er ] hear the ‘still small voice’ in his heart, and let Annette von Droste-Hülshoff detect the faint sound of grass growing.” The expression “still small voice” has a long history in Western religion and philosophy, tracing back to the Bible (1 Kings 19:11–12). Its first use referring specifically to the conscience appears in the poet William Cowper’s (1731–1800) The Task (1784): “The STILL SMALL VOICE is wanted. He must speak, / Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect; / Who calls for things that are not, and they come” (The Task [New York: Carter, 1878], 199). Carlyle mentions a “small still voice” in a letter to Matthew Allen of October 8, 1820: “The mob [is an] obtuse animal, and if amid this flourish of royal drums and trumpets, intermingled with the universal crash of weavers’ treadles and a boundless hurlyburly, the
‘small still voice’ should fail to attract much notice, you must not be disheartened” (The Carlyle Letters Online, http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/full/1/1/lt-18201008-TC-MAL-01?#FN6).

  12. The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing , third century B.C.E.–second century C.E.) tells stories of 204 mythical creatures from eighteen regions in the early Chinese cosmological landscape. See The Classic of Mountains and Seas, trans. Anne Birrell (London: Penguin, 1999). The “commoner who punishes Heaven” (xingtian zhi min ), also known as “Form Sky” (xingtian ), is distinguished physically by having a face on his chest and stomach and no head.

  13. Shou dang qi chong is an idiom meaning “to bear the brunt” or “to be the first to suffer disaster.” Here, Qian plays on the double meaning of shou (first, head), so that the phrase also means “to be struck on the head.”

  14. The 1939 and 1941 editions read: “Second, you will hope that your neighbor will transform into the ideal primary school student of Lamb’s memoir The Christ’s Hospital of Five and Thirty Years Ago, with a body that stops at the waist and two wings growing out of its back, so that he can fly around and not need legs and feet for walking.”

  15. Sun Bin (ca. 380–316 B.C.E.) was a military strategist from the state of Qi who lived during the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.E.). He is thought to have been a descendant of Suntzu, the author of The Art of War (Sunzi bingfa ). Although a brilliant strategist, he was betrayed by a minister in the kingdom of Wei, which resulted in Sun’s mutilation by having his legs cut off at the knees. Despite this ignominy, Sun went on to serve two sovereigns of his home state of Qi who launched successful military campaigns against Wei. The story of Sun Bin can be found in Sun Bin: The Art of Warfare: A Translation of the Classic Chinese Work of Philosophy and Strategy, trans. D. C. Lau and Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 4–16. The 1939 “Cold Room Jottings” version of this sentence ends at “no consideration to your head”; all subsequent versions include the Rodenbach reference.