The Global Novel: a literature podcast

Chinese Strange Writings of "The Six Dynasties" (222-589AD)

June 30, 2022 Robert Ford Campany; Claire Hennessy
The Global Novel: a literature podcast
Chinese Strange Writings of "The Six Dynasties" (222-589AD)
Show Notes Transcript

Are ghost stories real? And why do people write and read ghost stories in early medieval China? Prof. Robert Ford Campany, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of Humanities, from department of East Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University will shed light on a distinctive Chinese narrative genre called "zhiguai"(志怪) or Chinese strange writings. Prof. Campany is among the first group of scholars to systematically trace, study and theorize this Chinese narrative genre.

Recommended readings:
Robert Ford Campany, A Garden of Marvels: Tales of Wonder from Early Medieval China, University of Hawaii Press, 2015. (primary text)
Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China, University of Hawaii Press, 2012.
To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents, University of California Press, 2002.
Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China, State University of New York Press, 1996.
Judith T. Zeitlin, "xiaoshuo" in Franco Marretti ed. The Novel, Vol.1

For aficionados of Classical Chinese language:
中國古代志怪小說選一
中國古代志怪小說選二

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Transcript

C:Once upon the time, there was a man living in Nan-yang(南陽), his name was Song Dingbo. At the time when Dingbo was a young man, he had ever met a ghost when he was walking on the night of a day.

When the ghost came, Dingbo asked "Who's it?"

The ghost answered "I am a ghost, and who art thou?"

Dingbo lied to him and said "I am a ghost, too."

The ghost asked "Where art thou going to?"

Dingbo answered "I'm going to the town of Wan(宛)."

The ghost said "I'm going to the town of Wan, too."

So they fared together, after they had walked some miles, the ghost said "Faring on foot is too slow, we may bear each other on our own backs one after the other when faring, is it good for us to bear each other on our backs one after the other?"

Dingbo answered "That's good."

So they started to bear each other on their backs one after the other, at first, the ghost bore Dingbo on his back, the ghost said "I found that thou art too heavy, maybe thou art not a ghost."

Dingbo answered, "I'm a new ghost, so my body is still heavy."

Then it's Dingbo's time to bear the ghost, Dingbo found that the ghost had almost no weight. After they had borne each other on their backs one after the other for some time, Dingbo asked "I am a new ghost, so I don't really know what a ghost may fear."

The ghost answered, "We ghosts only fear spits."

When they were faring, they met a stream, Dingbo let the ghost go first, and the ghost didn't make any din, however, when Dingbo went through the stream, he made a lot of dins, so the ghost asked "why didst thou make so many dins?"

Dingbo answered "I'm a ghost that only died lately, so I am not good at going through water, don't think too much."

When they were near the town of Wan, Dingbo put the ghost on his shoulder fastly, holding the ghost tightly, and the ghost shouted loudly, begging Dingbo to put him down, but Dingbo didn't follow his begging.

After they had reached the town of Wan, Dingbo put the ghost down onto the ground, and the ghost became a sheep. Fearing that the sheep, which had once been a ghost, would become something else, Dingbo spitted on the sheep, then he sold it for one thousand and five hundred gelds and left.


C: This is a story called “Dingbo the ghost-seller” written in classical Chinese by Eastern Jin historian Gan Bao. The story is well known to Chinese people, most of whom came across the text in their junior high school years when they were roughly the same age as Ganbao’s protagonist Dingbo, whose bravery and wisdom are as inspiring as they were entertaining to young minds. Thanks for tuning in to the Global Novel. With us today is Dr. Robert Ford Campany, who is among the first group of scholars in the world to systematically trace, study and theorize a distinctive narrative genre in early medieval China called Zhiguai, or Chinese strange writings. Prof. Campany is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of Humanities and he currently teaches History of Chinese religions in late classical and early medieval China at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of several pivotal textbooks in East Asian studies such as Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China published in 1996 and A Garden of Marvels: Tales of Wonder from Early Medieval China, published quite recently, in 2015, among his other important works on the subject. Welcome to the show Rob.

R: Thank you.

C: Shall we begin with the context? Could you tell us who wrote these anomaly stories and why they did it? 

R: Sure. The writers or compilers and I think actually we are better to think of them as compilers of these narratives. I don't know of any who were never compiled by women, they were learned men, often scholar officials, all of them really scholar officials of one rank or another. Some of them a significant subset. We're worked in the history office, the history Bureau of the imperial government. So what that meant is really just that they had access to a lot of old records of various things. And they seem to have sifted through those records to sort of call out and compile narratives of the sort that they were interested in compiling. So that's, that's why we have them.

C: In your first monograph, called, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China, you mentioned these anomalous accounts belong to a less seriously taken umbrella genre called “xiaoshuo,” which means “petty talk,” or “small story,” or contents that are deemed less important if they are not poetry, philosophical narratives or historical prose, and this had been the situation in China up until May the 4th literary movement in the year 1919 that basically changed everything. You mentioned in your work that while these authors were keenly aware of the alien contents and nature of their accounts,  they nevertheless managed to negotiate with the more “serious” literary canon of China at that time, and in doing so, legitimized the status of these texts — and that’s why we are able to read and appreciate them today. How did authors and readers of the anomaly accounts negotiate this periphery and “otherness” with their literary, religious and ideological center at the time? What kind of discourse did they use to defend the status of their works?

R: Yeah, that's an excellent question. They use a number of strategies. So first of all, it's interesting, you can tell from the surviving prefaces to these works, that they were keenly aware that there was some disapproval of even making written records of the source. And so they responded to these anticipated objections and criticisms in a number of interesting ways. One of which was to just point out, you know, hey, there are some stories like this in works that everyone considers, you know, quite legitimate and important. Even though Confucius was famously on the record in the Analects, as saying, you know, that gwy or odd, anomalous phenomena, were one of the categories of things that he declined to discuss. Nevertheless, you can find, you know, stories of ghosts and ghostly retribution, and such things in plenty of old historical accounts. But more interesting, a couple of other were a couple of other strategies. One was to sort of say, well, yeah, we concede you know, that these writings really aren't terribly important. They're not the most important sort of thing that people should write or read. Nevertheless, we put them forward, because they may have tidbits that can be useful for readers. And the idea there is, you know, you may wonder useful for what, and I think the answer is always useful for self cultivation of some sort of moral intellectual formation. To me the most interesting and telling justification, which to me goes to the heart of what this genre of texts was created to do was that a number of these compilers pointed to ancient precedents in which the ruler would do a number of things, number one, send out basically, court agents, you could think of them really as spies, or you could think of them as sort of a pre modern precursor to like opinion, poll takers. And this, you know, we don't know if early rulers actually did this. But the idea was, the story was that they would send out these people, and or sometimes even the ruler himself, would go out incognito. And they would sort of go into the markets, and listen to what people were talking about on the streets of cities and villages. They would collect children's songs and rhymes, you know, poems that they would hear. And they were sort of trying to get the pulse of the nation, and the mindset of the people that they were trying to govern, so that for one thing to sort of watch out for omens and portents, but in a larger sense, just I think, to know, who are these people they were governing and what were they interested in? So there were music bureau. So there was, again, in theory in ancient the really ancient government, like of the Zhou era, there had been a music Bureau and one of the functions of that office was to go out among the people and collect folk songs and bring them back into court and record them and sometimes perform them at court for the members of the court not just the ruler but everyone there. There's there's this idea of there's an interest in collecting local and regional oddities that are you know, noteworthy human nature. You know, we're interested in things that stand out things that are different from the norm, things that are unusual, rare, striking. And so there was keen interest in this and things like you know, spices, edible substances of various kinds, minerals, gems and jewels. And then of course stories too. Then one other ancient bit of legend that I'll mention and then this is kind of a long answer. But so you the great Wright was a legendary ruler  of old times who had gone around and stemmed the great flood. China, like other ancient cultures had has had a bunch of flood myths. And you were a kind of proto engineer who went around and sort of fixed this problem by channeling the waters away, building dikes and dams were necessary. And one of the things he did in his travels around all of the nine provinces, was that he observed all of the strange creatures distinctive to each area. And he, I don't know if he had someone draw them or what but he had, he had pictures of them inscribed on bronze vessels, as a kind of, I don't know, a warning or a record for the people. It's unclear what, you know, what, what the purpose of that would have been. But clearly, that had something to do with World ordering. So there's this idea, you know, that the periphery out there is a bit funky, it's a bit strange, but it's also part of the realm and so you have to get a handle on it. So if you picture people in the center, the ideological center, not necessarily the geographical center, kind of looking out at a strange and challenging world. This genre of texts, I think, in part was justified as part of the effort to do that.

C:As the name suggests, “Zhiguai” is a unique Chinese genre, and it is often translated into “Chinese strange writings”. In recent years, how genres are translated into English has become an increasingly vexed issue for scholars of world literature. And I think it is obvious here that the name “zhiguai,” a combination of two words, with each bearing a polysemy,  resists an ideal translation. Since “Guai” does not merely convey the meaning of ” the strange,” “the anomalous,” and “the unfathomable;” it also means “monsters” and “ghosts,” or things related with those, as in the Chinese 怪物, 怪獸,or even 妖怪. “Guai” itself clearly registers a thing-ification,which always signifies the other non-human self; whereas “zhi,” as you mentioned in your monograph, means “to record” or “to account.” right? 

R: So zhiguai just really means records, or, you know, as a verb to give an account of something. And so, the word isn't terribly rich in you know, associations.

C: but why were these things written down? why the form of account was needed?

R: Well, I would say, I guess, the functions? In other words, what's the purpose? What's the point of writing all this stuff down? So in my field, there's a lot of people who had worked on this genre of texts, tended to treat them as as literature naturally. I mean, obviously, they are literature. The problem with that, though, is this is my own perspective. Of course, the stories are often entertaining, everyone likes, you know, ghost stories and stories of demons, things that are spooky and strange, I think there's again, a kind of inherent human interest in these kinds of areas of narrative and areas of concern. And so if you read, for example, one ghost story, you may say, Oh, that was, that was kind of interesting. You know, it's, it's a nice way to pass time, it's a diversion. And I'm sure that many people in pre modern China, you know, I always tell my students, you have to picture a world before electric lighting, before electronic media, even books were not easy to access. And once the sun went down, you know, what were people going to do? Well, one of the things they did was they told a lot of stories. And we even have mentioned and when we get up to the Tang Dynasty, there's interesting little passages about, say, for example, you picture a scenario where a bunch of strangers are traveling together on a boat, down a river somewhere. At night, there would be like a drinking game. And everyone, you'd sort of go around the room and everyone around the deck of the boat, I guess, and everyone had to share a story. And people would sort of vote thumbs up or thumbs down on whether the story was strange enough. And if it wasn't Strange enough, you had to take a drink, you know, so. So of course, there was just a lot of social interest in these kinds of narratives. But here's the thing, if you read one of these stories, you may say, oh, yeah, that was a nice, interesting little story. But if you read every single one of the stories of this genre that have survived into modern times, and one time I tried to count them and I got something around 4000. That's a really, really rough count. But anyhow, there's a lot of you ask yourself, Okay, why? Why were there so many. And then if you actually plot them, you track what the stories are about, I prepared a kind of scholar sometimes call it a motif index, you just make notes about it and keep records of like, you know, plot summaries of every ghost story, you put it in a certain category. And then maybe there's two subcategories where, I don't know. And one say the ghost is coming to punish the living parties for some perceived wrongdoing. And so that's like a subcategory of ghost stories and things like that. And if you sort of map all of that out, what I realized, I think, is that you get a sort of world picture, this was an effort, I think, the reason why some of these compilations were so big is that people were trying to get a fix on the patterns of the actions of normally unseen beings. So that's one way to put it, to sort of map the cosmos to map the universe and to try to track you know, so if ghosts are real, well, let's say if ghosts aren't real, then it's odd that they're all the stories circulating of people's encounters with them. If they are real, what do they want? What did they do? And so, you know, it's not scientific, of course, but it's a kind of proto scientific, it's a quest for knowledge, I would say. So people were trying to, I think, track enough cases to demonstrate or to explore whether there might be patterns of regularity. This becomes clearest in there were there's a sort of sub group in this genre that were Buddhist, so called Miracle tales. So here you had people who were already, you know, Buddhist devotees of one level or another, both monks and lay persons, monks and nuns, and lay persons. And they were clearly interested in there were lots of in Buddhist scriptures, sutras, all kinds of promises of what believers what practitioners could expect to happen in their lives if they did certain practices. And then you read the compilations of miracle stories. And those stories are clearly bearing out. They're proving the promises made in the scriptures. So it's a kind of evidential project, to collect evidence that yes, what the Scriptures say is actually happening now on Chinese soil may be happening to people that, you know, all of the people mentioned in those accounts are historical individuals, we have, you know, lots of mentions of them in other genres of works dynastic histories, for starters. So I think it was a some extent, an attempt to sort of chart the universe and that's why I used the term cosmography to define what I think this genre was trying to do. All of that said, of course, the stories are still entertaining. My only point is that entertainment is not the only thing we can imagine the compilers of the stories as having been trying to achieve.

C: Translating “otherness” doesn’t just embody the physical ways in which these texts were taken down, whether they were materials transcribed and collected from folk accounts or geographical research completed by these authors or from some other sources, it can also mean (and this is what you call in your monograph) the advancing of these writings, or the rhetorical strategies adopted by their authors in order to legitimize these writings. There are two enlightening quotes in your first monograph that struck a philosophical chord in me and I’m sure with many others too, that are useful in contemplating the rhetorics of “otherness.” One of them is from Guo Pu’s Preface to Shanhaijing Commentary, “What the world calls “anomalous” it does not know by virtue of what it is anomalous; what the world calls “non-anomalous” it does not know by virtue of what it is non-anomalous. How is this so? Things are not intrinsically anomalous; they wait upon a self and only then are “anomalous.” “Anomalousness” is therefore located in a self; it is not things themselves that are anomalous.” And the other is from Jonathan Z. Smith: “Otherness” is not a descriptive category. ... It is a political and linguistic project, a matter of rhetoric and judgment.”  Drawn from these two quotes, could you shed some light on the rhetorics, or narrative strategies these authors used in advancing their works? I know there is a lot to cover, but perhaps you could make a summary and offer one to two examples here?

R: So if you mean narrative strategies well, so there's the attempts to legitimate the genre. And we've already talked about what, what those attempts involved. But here's another thing, I think maybe this is what you have in mind in your question. It's interesting, because they don't just throw some weird thing at you. And leave it at that. Instead, they paint a picture of ordinary life in this world, someone is going about doing something that is commonplace and ordinary, and, you know, therefore boring and culturally expected and normal. And then something weird happens. And then so and then the story pivots to, you know, what is the weird thing. And there you get a sort of tight description of what happened, what it looked like, what it sounded like, how people responded, and then how the story sort of turned out. But my point is that there's always a kind of table set of ordinariness, that then sets the stage for the interruption by that of that ordinary scenario by something unusual. And that is, in effect, how this genre of storytelling works. So it's very much Michel de Certeau. You know, it's like, it's sort of like the the genre of the fantastic. So it's not just a gallery of weird stuff. It's weird stuff that has intrude intruded into ordinary stuff. And it's the contrast between the two to the interruption, the change, of course, that's really at the heart of the genre. Now, there's also an additional step in certain narratives, again, particularly the Buddhist ones, at least, those are the ones that I have in mind at the moment when I'm in and what I'm about to say, there's a different possible difference of interpretation. So okay, this weird thing happened, what does it mean? Or what caused it? And there, there might have been alternative explanations of what had generated this anomalous moment. And often, the Buddhist narratives in particular, will mention something to head that off. And so for example, just one one case that comes to mind to memory. Several stories were suture copies, you know, so these were copies of extremely sacred valued religious objects, artifacts, you know, copies of the Buddha's word, they were in a building that burned, and they survived. And you might say, Okay, well, maybe other things survived. So what's the big deal, and then there would be like an additional line as if responding to head off that possible line of inquiry, where the, you know, the story says, Only the Buddhist sutras were preserved from the fire, everything else in the place was completely burned up. 

C: Just as you have helped us to understand, one of the reasons for the genre “zhiguai” to exist is because it aligns with the early medieval world-view, one that seeks to control and contain incidents unknown and unexplainable to human knowledge at the time. And I think this argument also stands valid with Shiji, for example, when Sima Qian wrote on the Xiongnu people as the peripheral foreigner, he portrayed them as the Yin element opposed to the Yang and central rulership of Han Wu Ti. And it is this kind of imperial cosmopolitanism that endorsed these anomaly recordings to survive. On the other hand, you also wrote that there were emperors in ancient China who would covertly support the production of such writings just for the sake of reading them for fun. Since we can also find such a reading pleasure in many historiographies such as Shi Ji and Zuo Zhuan, should “zhiguai” be considered as literary texts or historical texts? Or to quote your expression, if they are neither “fiction” nor “disinterested” historiographies, then what are they? 

R: Right? I think that they are historical records that were compiled, to both to be entertaining reading, but also to show how the invisible normally invisible elements of the cosmos operate. Local gods. So there's a certain there was a certain kind of pattern of interaction with local Gods you go to the temple, you present an offering, you make a request. And then if the request is fulfilled, you often go back and make a another or offering us a sort of thank you or you, you go to the temple, you make a pledge, the your request is granted, or in your eyes, and then you go back to the temple to fulfill your pledge. So there are stories where someone does this, but they don't fulfill their pledge, they just ignore the God. Or they try to pass off, I'm thinking of a story where the guy promises silver, you know, silver ingots, and then the God comes through. And what he supplies to the God then is actually like ordinary bricks covered in tin foil, hoping that the God won't notice that they're not real silver. And this man pays a terrible price for his, his, his breaking his promise. So I think that they are, they are interested historiographies in that they are like, I think any history, geography, they're interested in trying to show how the world is and how it works, and to reveal patterns implicit in what otherwise might look like a confusing barrage of disconnected events and phenomena.

C: This is gonna sound silly, but I’ve been meaning to ask while I read these anomaly accounts: should they be taken as real? For example, should we think of the ghost accounts by Gan Bao as real since they are called “accounts,” rather than “fiction” ? 

R: Right? How we, as a modern reader want to approach these accounts? I guess that's, I always, you know, students sometimes try to buttonhole me and say, Do you actually believe that these things happened? And I'm like, Well, I don't have a dog in that hunt. I've never observed such phenomena. But I, I think that human beings, we like to sort of pin everything down. And we think that we know everything. And in fact, I think we're just living in a kind of grand mystery. And we really don't understand, we don't even understand ourselves, the human mind, does not understand the human mind. Right. So I, to me, that's open. But I can tell you, but I can tell you this, that I'm certain that these accounts were meant to be taken by contemporary readers, as accounts of events, they were not meant as what we now in the modern world consider to be fiction. These were not like proto, Stephen King's, you know, holding up in a studio somewhere, and spinning out entertaining stories that they hoped would sell a lot of copies. There were records of events that were purported to have happened in the world.

C: I’m also wondering what kind of classical language they were written in? Do they read like people’s daily spoken language at the time? 

R: No, there they were, they are written in a kind of, it's very much historians, prose, it's not particularly elegant. It's not poetry, it's not metered or rhyme. There's, you know, and the compilers are quite explicit about that. They don't intend for this to be, but on the other hand, it's classical Chinese. And there is no attempt or very little attempt, I guess, I should say, to mimic the patterns of oral speech at the time. The exceptions might include a few little particles that are dropped in like there might have been a way for example of asking a question in a certain region in a particular century. And you might get stories where that pattern of speech seems to be implied in the way that the question is marked in the written account. But for the most part, this was kind of common, ordinary classical Chinese that would not have been intelligible, except to people who could read.

C: Before I let you go, Rob, could you share a word or two on why zhiguai stories are important for modern readers to read?

R: I find them important to read because they did to me were something that people in an ancient time and place spent a lot of time making and reading and circulating. When you think about a manuscript culture. Every single copy of every single text was a handmade artifact, there was a lot of personnel hours involved in the making of such such objects, right in the world. There is no printing yet not to mention electronic media. So what that tells me is these accounts were important to people. And it's important to me to study the human past, my own culture and other cultures. Well, I don't even know what my own culture is anymore. I guess I would say, I'm an American of the 21st century, but I'm also there's parts of me that are a Chinese person like of the fourth century of the Common Era. If that doesn't sound too presumptuous, I hope it's not. You know, that I think there is a common humanity that we can recognize when we study old things. And if we lose sight of that at think that as a species, we're in a lot of trouble because human culture is Marshall Sahlins, the great anthropologist at the University of Chicago once wrote, culture is the human nature. Culture has a history. And cultures are not all the same. If we don't study past cultures that we don't study other cultures, we're flying blind, it seems to me as human beings.

C:That’s such an enlightening conversation, Rob. Thanks again for coming to the show! 

R: Thank you.

C: if you like this episode, you can show your support by donating through theglobalnovel.com/donate so we can keep making academic education in literature accessible to more and more listeners of the world.