The Ghosts of Things
Les fantômes de choses
物之精怪
Résumés
This essay explores a central concept in our understanding of a ghost, taken both literally and metaphorically as the animation of someone dead and lifeless, and places it in a larger context, namely the enlivenment of inanimate objects. The essay briefly traces the basic genres and techniques through which things are given voice and human identity in Chinese literary history: the riddle, the ode on things, and the object-biography. I then show how certain Tang dynasty tales of shape-shifting implements incorporated these genres as building blocks to bring these objects to life. A close reading of these stories suggests that there is an uncanny residue of the secret posthumous world of things that the solution to the object’s identity revealed at the end cannot entirely dispel. Many of these tales revolve around broken, worn-out, and abandoned utensils. The essay argues that by virtue of having no further use-value in the human world, such implements are effectively “dead,” which is one reason they can haunt like ghosts. Even when an object in one of these tales survives intact, it can be seen as a fragmentary relic of a vanished past, and again in this way possesses a ghostly potential to haunt.
Cet essai s’attache à explorer une notion consubstantielle à la
nature du fantôme, qui, à la fois métaphoriquement et littéralement,
est une chose inerte qui s’anime ou se ranime, en replaçant le
phénomène spectral dans le contexte plus large des histoires d’objets
inanimés capables de prendre vie.
Nous commençons par retracer
brièvement l’histoire générique et stylistique de textes de la
littérature chinoise où des objets se voient prêter identité ou voix:
les contes-devinettes, les poèmes dédiés aux choses, et les
biographies d’objets.
Nous montrons ensuite comment certains
contes de la dynastie des Tang emploient ces matériaux pour bâtir des
récits où l’on voit des objets capables de se métamorphoser et de
s’animer. Une lecture attentive de ces récits suggère que, au terme
des histoires, la révélation de l’identité réelle de l’objet
métamorphosé ne dissipe pas totalement le résidu d’étrangeté qui
entoure les aspects mystérieux de la vie posthume des choses. Beaucoup
de ces contes ont en effet pour protagonistes des ustensiles cassés,
usés, ou délaissés. Nous montrons que ces objets de la vie
quotidienne, en ayant perdu toute valeur d’usage dans la sphère
d’activité humaine, sont, à leur façon, « morts », et que c’est pour
cette raison même qu’ils sont capables de nous hanter à la façon de
spectres. Même s’il arrive que l’un des objets évoqués dans ces contes
soit intact, c’est qu’il peut alors être envisagé comme relique isolée
d’un passé révolu, et, en cela encore, être investi de la capacité
proprement fantomatique à exercer une hantise.
本文考察“鬼”的意义中的一个核心概念,即在实际和隐喻两个方面使已死或无生气之人重活,同时将这一概念置于一个更广大的语境之下,思考如何为任何无生命之物赋予生命。本文简要地追溯隐语、咏物诗以及物之传记这三种在中国文学史上使物件发声、并使之具有人格的基本文学体裁和手段。随之通过对一些唐代传奇的具体讨论,来说明它们如何分别将这些文体融入文本之中,为变形之物赋予生命。对这些传奇故事的细读表明,物件在其“死后的世界”中仍残存着某种神秘的东西,即使物的本形在故事最后被揭示出来也无法驱散。这些故事多围绕着破损、报废或是被遗弃的用具展开。本文认为,正是因为这些器物在人类世界再无利用价值,它们实际上的“死亡”使其得以像鬼一样出没于人间。即便这些故事中的某些器物在现实世界中被完好保存下来,它们仍可以被视作是已消逝的往昔的遗物,因而也就具有了一种能够如鬼一般游荡的潜能。
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : fantômes, objets inanimés, théorie des objets, choses, récits chinois, chuanqi, devinettes, énigmes, ustensiles bouddhiques, lampes
Keywords : ghosts, inanimate objects, Chinese tales, riddle, thing theory, Buddhist paraphernalia, lamps
Texte intégral
1This essay1 emerges out of an effort to bring together two longstanding research interests of mine – the study of ghosts and the study of the relationship between material culture and literature. It is part of a larger project called “The Literary Life of Things”, which attempts to sketch a broad history of the principal strategies and genres for animating the inanimate in the Chinese literary tradition. This project is inspired in part by developments in social and cultural anthropology over the past thirty years, which have had a great influence on literary and cultural historians, including in the East Asian field. Anthropologists had long recognized that under certain circumstances objects, especially precious objects, could be strongly anthropomorphized and accorded individual names, gender, personalities, life histories and volition.2 But it was Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume The Social Life of Things (1987), particularly Ivan Koptyff’s contribution, “The Cultural Biography of Things”, which ushered in a new phase of interdisciplinary studies focused on investigating the “lives” and “movement” of inanimate objects in human culture and society. The slippage inherent in applying a methodological approach like biography, which clearly derives from literary genre and metaphor, has rankled some anthropologists. As Christopher Steiner complained in 2001, “In their zeal to explore the social identity of material culture, many authors have attributed too much power to the ‘things’ themselves… The point is not that ‘things’ are any more animated than we used to believe, but rather that they are infinitely malleable to the shifting and contested meanings constructed for them through human agency.”3
2My aim in the larger project is precisely to see how literature attributes “power to things themselves” by taking the metaphor of enlivenment literally. I have long been fascinated by the paradox that for an inanimate object to be fully anthropomorphized and animated, it must somehow “die”. In a previous essay, I investigated a seventeenth-century piece entitled “Funerary Elegy for the Beauty in the Painting” (Ji huashang meiren wen 祭畫上美人文), whose author, Wang Zhuo 王晫, laid claim to the fantasy of a portrait of a woman coming to life by commemorating the “death” of the painting, in this case its incineration in a fire. “Only in the destruction of the painting’s material form”, I argued, “can the analogy to a living woman with a body subject to mortality be complete.”4 In earlier work on a seventeenth-century tale from Pu Songling’s 蒲松齡 Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異) on the intense mutual love between a rock connoisseur and a fantastic rock named “Mr Ethereal Stone” (Shi Qingxu 石清虛), I similarly argued that the only way for an inanimate rock to gain full humanity is to “die”. After the death of the connoisseur, the rock in the story destroys its material value by smashing itself into pieces. Only through this act of suicidal self-sacrifice can the rock’s remains lie forever buried with its beloved friend in their mutual grave.5
3In what follows I examine a small cluster of Tang dynasty “tales of the marvelous” (chuanqi 傳奇) about the shape-shifting spirits of inanimate things that manifest themselves in human form. Such spirits fall under the broad category of “ghosts” (gui 鬼) in Chinese usage, which covers a far wider spectrum of supernatural beings than simply the spirits of the dead. Particularly interesting is how these quotidian objects acquire not only human appearance but also human voice in a way that emphasizes their thingness rather than their personhood. By incorporating other literary genres for personifying objects into the narrative, these tales provide an excellent jumping-off point to explore a genealogy of the important forms for animating the inanimate in medieval Chinese literature. This essay will cover three of these forms: the riddle-tale, the ode on things, and the object-biography.
The riddle-tale
4Riddle-tales, or “riddling tales”, the term coined by Sarah M. Allen, who has analyzed this kind of story most extensively, constitute “a small but distinct minority of the surviving corpus” of Tang dynasty tales, and were written mainly in the late eighth to ninth centuries.6 These narratives follow a common plot type. An unsuspecting traveler is stuck for the night in an uninhabited place where he encounters some mysterious strangers. The next morning he realizes that the “people” he had encountered were really the “spirit essence” (jingguai 精怪) or “demon avatar” (yaoguai 妖怪) of objects, animals or plants that had assumed human form. Stories of this type are primarily riddles: the outlandish garb of the strangers and the poems they recite are clues to each thing’s identity.
5We begin with one exemplary tale of this sort classified under the “miscellaneous implements” (za qiyong 雜器用) section of the “Spirit Essence” chapters in “Wide Gleanings from the Taiping Era” (Taiping guangji 太平廣記), the Northern Song imperial encyclopedia compiled between 971 and 972. The tale is set in the year 762–763, during the devastation of the An Lushan 安祿山 rebellion, in which a traveler takes refuge one night in an abandoned village. From his hiding spot, he spies four strangely clad men emerge in the moonlight and covertly observes them as they enjoy a convivial soiree together. “Tonight feels like autumn”, he overhears one of them say. “Why don’t we take advantage of the lovely weather to compose some lines to expound on the affairs of our daily life?
6The first man was tall and chanted the following couplet:
Silk from Qi, voile from Lu, white as the driven snow.
The song I make is clear and high, the sound carries far.
7The second man, dressed all in black, was a short, coarse sort of fellow. The couplet he chanted went:
As fine guests meet on a clear, lovely night,
I hold the candle that so brightly glows.
8The third man was wearing a tattered, light brown outfit and was also short and coarse-looking. His couplet went:
Clear and cool, the font awaits drawing on the morn.
A rope of mulberry fiber keeps pulling me in and out.
The last man was again clad in black. He chanted:
On burning wood, bloated with water, I suffer endless torment.
To fill the mouths and bellies of others is my constant toil.
9It went on like this almost till dawn. The next morning when the traveler went to take a look at the spot where the men had gathered, the story goes: “All he found was an old laundry beater, a lamp stand, a bucket and broken kettle. Only then did he realize that the four men were what these things had transformed themselves into.”7
10As riddles go, these are far from clever. The couplets that the discarded implements recite involve little to none of the paradox or wordplay found in the best riddles. The exception is a double entendre in the kettle’s first line: “to suffer endless torment” (jian’ao 煎熬), whose literal meaning is “to boil and simmer”. Nor is the verse, as poetry, particularly distinguished. The riddles are meant to be straightforward and easily guessed; lest the reader be in doubt, the physical descriptions of the men furnish additional clues as to the shape, stature and color of the things they embody.
11The ease with which the riddle of a thing-demon’s identity can be solved is one of the traits that distinguishes these tales of the marvelous from the entries on spirit essences found in a Tang dynasty demonography such as “Diagrams of the White Marsh” (Baize tu 白澤圖). This demonography lists various kinds of spirits of everyday places and things, which are described as appearing in animal or human shape; in the latter case, specifications about dress, stature, age or gender are provided. For example, the first entry reads: “The spirit of the outhouse is named Yi. He wears blue-green clothing and carries a white staff. If you know his name and call him by it, then he will go away. If you don’t know his name, you will die.”8 Other entries include the spirit essence of jade (a substance proverbial for its whiteness in China), which takes the form of a beautiful woman wearing blue-green clothes, the spirit of water looking like a “swarthy little boy with red eyes”, and the spirit of an old gate manifesting itself as a dwarf. The key to gaining power over the demon and exorcising it is to be able to correctly recognize and name it. In these cases, however, there is no logical link of resemblances to enable someone to infer the identity of the demon without specialist occult knowledge. Such is emphatically not the case with the riddle-tale where the look of the thing-demon is clearly related to its identity, especially when poems or other set literary pieces are recited to enhance the process of revealing while seemingly disguising the object’s true form.
12Since riddles are so important in understanding literary strategies for animating things, it is worth considering what may be the earliest Chinese definition of the riddle. It appears in the first systematic Chinese treatise on literary composition, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍), written by Liu Xie 劉勰 in the sixth century CE. Liu Xie devotes one chapter to “Jokes and Enigmas” (xieyin 諧隱), which includes the following definition: “A riddle is a piece of writing so circuitous that it leads people into a maze. Some riddles are based on the structure of written graphs, and some on the image and form of objects.”9 It is a common strategy in ancient Chinese works to define a word in terms of its homophone and the component parts of a graph, though these etymologies are often false. Maze and riddle are homophones, while the graph for riddle (mi 謎) is formed from the graph for “maze” (mi 迷) plus the graph for “word” (言). Explained in this way, the graph for riddle is itself the answer to a potential riddle.
13The personified things in the tale we began with – the tall, thumping laundry beater, the squat, soot-stained lamp stand, the dumpy wooden bucket, and the fire-blackened kettle – are clearly based on “the image and form of objects”. But even the human protagonist turns out to be a word riddle of sorts. The graphs that spell out his name (and which furnish the story’s title) are a transparent pun – Yuan Wuyou 元無有 means “Non-Existent from the Start” – which thus immediately tips off the alert reader that what follows is nothing but a fictional game. As such, this tale nicely lives up to Liu Xie’s condemnation of the literary riddle as a trivial mutation of the moral enigma wielded by writers in antiquity: “Observe how in their use of enigma … the ancients didn’t indulge in childish burlesques, aiming at thigh-slapping merriment!”10
Odes on things
14Modern scholars have pointed out that such Tang dynasty riddle-tales are indebted to the quintessential lyric genre for writing on objects, the “ode on things” (yongwu shi 詠物詩).11 This literary subgenre coalesced in the medieval courts of the Southern Dynasties (5th c. CE), but it had in turn developed out of the lengthy “prose-poem” or “rhapsody” (fu 賦) of the Han imperial court (2nd c. BCE).12 David Knechtges has neatly encapsulated the grandeur of early imperial aesthetics in form, subject matter and rhetoric in the title of his article “Have You Not Seen the Beauty of the Large?” a line he borrows from Sima Xiangru’s 司馬相如 famous “Prose-Poem on the Imperial Park” (Shanglin fu 上林賦), which enumerates the cosmological riches of the Han emperor Wu’s gigantic park.13 Knechtges traces the historical process through which, in form and scope, the long descriptive prose-poem was reduced in size, first becoming a “little prose-poem” (xiao fu 小賦) and then shrinking into an eight- or four-line lyric poem on a “diminutive thing”.14 He gives the example of a quatrain by the Liao dynasty prince Xiao Yi 蕭繹 (6th c.) to index this transformation:
They touch people but seem not to be hot,
They gather in the grass but surprisingly there is no smoke.
Coming near, they become dim under the lamp;
They flit back and forth burning bright in the rain.15
15“Rather than cataloguing the attributes of a firefly as a fu [prose-poem] writer would do”, Knechtges observes, “Xiao Yi indicates the topic by subtle hints and suggestions almost in the manner of a riddle” (italics mine).16 For us moderns, it is helpful to envision this process in cinematic terms, from a panoramic panning shot (the grand prose-poem) to a medium shot (the little prose-poem) to an extreme close-up (the ode on things). This close-up effect – the contraction of vision to zooming in on a single small object, often from the poet’s immediate surroundings, to create a miniature world for it from hints and allusions – lies at the heart of the “ode on things”.
16During the Southern Dynasties, composing verse became a group social activity at court salons.17 Many of the surviving odes on things from this period are thought to have been composed extemporaneously as part of a literary contest on an assigned theme. Although the objects depicted in such odes can be drawn from nature, most often they are manufactured, so that even everyday utilitarian things – candles, screens, mirror stands, reclining desks – are cast as luxury items in this court setting, described in suitably ornamental language. The resulting verses were composed and chanted at such banquets, with listeners guessing the identity of the thing being described. The specific titles giving the solutions to the riddles were not added until after the game was over.18 Most of the poems from such competitions are now broken up into collections of individual poets, and the occasions difficult to reconstruct, but a few are still evident as sets. Take, for example, the sequence “Together We Write Poems, Each on an Object Seen from Our Seats at the Feast” (Tong yong zuoshang suojian wu 同詠坐上所見物).19 Here is the poet Xie Tiao’s 謝脁 (464–499) contribution:
I was born at a Dawn and Twilight Pond,
Where the setting sun shone on my uneven array.
Flat shoals were covered over by pollia,
On dark islands selinea wrested place.
Then you gathered me in time by the skirtful,
Who raise a gold chalice to the Throne of Jade.
My only wish is to be swept by your silk gown,
Don’t let a pale dust pile up on me.20
17The mystery item here – the mat – was woven out of rushes or bamboo, could be patterned and dyed, and was ubiquitous in this period before the introduction of the chair to China. Mats were spread on the ground or on raised platforms as seats, covered couches and beds, and delineated performance space for musicians and dancers. In one recorded case from the Southern Dynasties, “a delicately patterned mat” was even awarded as a prize to the champion of a literary competition, who promptly sat upon it before it was physically wrested away by the next winner.21 As is typical of the genre, the mat in Xie Tiao’s ode on things is given a life history, in which it is “born” (sheng 生 – the same word also means “to grow”) in nature, imbued with cosmic forces of light and dark, earth and water, growing amid fragrant river plants. (Both names of these plants – “pollia” and “selinea” – are literary allusions to early poems from Songs of the South (Chu ci 楚辭), which are canonically read as a self-allegory of the poet Qu Yuan 屈原.)22 The raw materials of the mat – the pondside rushes – are then gathered by a girl – the “you” (jun 君) addressed in the poem. The mat’s fabrication is not depicted but simply implied by its transportation (and elevation) to the jeweled banquet hall at court. There the rustic skirt of the gatherer gives way to the silk gown of the palace maid or dancer, whose touch the personified mat yearns to re-experience.
18The mat is animated not solely by being imprinted with a past but through prosopopeia, by being granted a voice to speak with. This was something distinctly new at this moment in Chinese literature. As Cynthia Chennault observes: “The possibility of direct address by the object begins only in the fifth century.”23 Her main argument, however, is that such literary games were an expression of court politics at the time and that the poems produced should be interpreted allegorically in terms of the courtier-poet seeking to win the favor of his prince. If so, in the above poem, the mat/courtier is pleading for attention from the palace lady/ruler: “Don’t let a pale dust pile upon me”, and let me fall into disuse. Read in this light (not an unreasonable one, given the strong allegorical tradition in Chinese poetry), the object is unmasked as mere metaphor, its material substance negated, a simple screen for the poet himself24.
19If we now return briefly to the Tang tale we began with, we find that the story replicates the performative mode of group composition as well as the poetic content of the “ode on things”. But now, espied by the human spectator in the abandoned building, the riddles are chanted by the “riddle-creatures” themselves.25 The courtly milieu with its elegant furnishings has vanished, to be replaced by its parodic inverse: a rural hamlet littered with a pile of junk. (In another variant on the story, the riddle-creatures are even more debased and include a broom and a fly as a result of the traveler having spent the night next to an old outhouse).26 In the fate of these discarded and obsolete utensils, the palace mat’s fear of being covered with dust in Xie Tiao’s ode on things has literally come true. No longer a surrogate for the poet and emptied of self-allegory, the thing is revealed to have been disguised as a man, rather than the reverse.
20The description of the implement in human drag only enhances its thingness once the masquerade is lifted. This comes out particularly well in yet another variant on the story. Here, a tall, thin man with a yellowish face covered with open sores is unmasked as a broken bamboo flute, while his companion, a short, plump man with wispy, drooping side locks is exposed as a balding whisk-broom made of millet stalks.27 The fact of being broken or worn out – a feature shared by many of the miscellaneous utensils in these stories – underscores the irrevocable materiality of the object-spirits, their dead substance rather than their sentience. This is one reason why the answers to the riddles in these tales have the “kicking a rock” force of a punch line to a joke, or to return to Liu Xie’s disapproving formulation, “the thigh-slapping merriment of a childish burlesque”.
21And yet, there is another sense in which these objects that have outlived their usefulness may partake of something like the aura of the ruin and the ruin’s ghostly associations. Having once been used and discarded by human hands, these homely, everyday objects point to the absence of their past users. In this sense they are like ghosts, the uncanny traces or vestiges of the men and women who once lived at the site. The tale “Yuan Wuyou” is set unobtrusively in the aftermath of the An Lushan Rebellion, suggesting that the villagers fled or were killed during the war. This point is not belabored in what is basically a playful story; and in fact most riddle-tales about objects provide no explanation whatsoever for the deserted nature of their locale. But a concealed history of violence may also help us understand why many – though not all – of the implements in these stories are broken, tattered or damaged.28 As utensils with no further use-value in the human world, these objects are effectively “dead”, which is also why they can haunt. And this metaphorical resemblance to human corpses is in part what prompts the human protagonist in the tale of the broken flute and balding broom to bury these implements rather than “harm” them any further.29 (To be fair, this “humane” ending is only one possibility in such tales – it is more common to burn, smash, extinguish or otherwise utterly destroy the material substance of demonic objects to prevent any further manifestations).
The object-biography
22Some accounts of the Tang riddle-tale’s genealogy also acknowledge another crucial literary cousin: the short biography of a thing, written in the style of an official biography, the basic unit of Chinese historiography.30 Herbert Franke, who has written best on this species of writing, calls it the “descriptive pseudo-biography”.31 Since Chinese tales of the marvelous also borrow the historical biography form, and the word for tale and biography (zhuan 傳) is the same, making it impossible to tell from a title alone whether the subject of a biography is fictional or real, I believe “object-biography” is clearer. The main strategy of the “object-biography” is to conceal the true identity of its subject beneath a welter of erudite allusions to create an intricate sequence of double entendres. In this respect, the object-biography is not only a parody but an elaborate, extended literary riddle, incomprehensible if you do not know the answer in advance, and requiring copious annotation (especially for the modern reader), even if you do.
23It is generally acknowledged that personification is a literary device sparsely used in the Chinese tradition, especially in the case of abstract ideas, which, in Franke’s words, “are almost never represented as such in an anthropomorphic way, [but] only indirectly by exemplary figures”.32 It is highly debatable whether Franke is correct to chalk this up to inherent features of the Chinese language but he is certainly right that since all Chinese personal and family names have a substantive meaning (redenden Namen or “significant names”), and potentially any graph could be freely chosen as a personal name, word play on names is quite prevalent in the Chinese literary tradition. As Franke asserts: “Here, then, was a possibility to incarnate and personify ideas and non-human realities by giving them a name.”33 We have already seen this tendency at work in our opening riddle-tale, where the protagonist’s family name “Yuan” means “origin”, or “from the start”, while his personal name “Wuyou” means “non-existent” or “fictional”. (Indeed, fiction and fictionality are often simply denoted by redenden Namen taken from early prose-poems, such as “Sir Nonsuch” [Zi xu 子虛], or “Mr Non-Existent” [Wuyou xiansheng 烏有先生].34)
24The composition of an entire descriptive biography of an object to go along with a punned name began with the famous Tang dynasty scholar-official and author Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824). His “Biography of Mao Ying” (Maoying zhuan 毛穎傳), where the character mao means “hair” or “fur”, and the character ying means “point” or “tip”, is really an abstruse essay on the writing-brush. The brush’s name (which William R. Nienhauser, whose English translation is cited below, renders as “Fur Point”) derives from the fact that the best writing-brushes in Han Yu’s time were made from rabbit hair. The biography begins, as most good historical biographies do, with the geographic origin and genealogy of its subject:
Fur Point was a native of Central Mountain [site renowned for producing the finest rabbit hair]. His patriarch, Bright Sight [metonym for the rabbit from the Book of Rites] aided Yu [the legendary tamer of floods] in bringing order to the lands of the East, and he had some success in nourishing the myriad things, thus he was enfeoffed within the lands of Mau [卯, the astrological signifier of the rabbit, which was one of the twelve zodiac animals, which was also linked with the East, and a homonym for Mao].35 (My glosses provided in italics.)
25The first part of the biography continues to riff on allusions to the rabbit until reaching the age of the First Qin Emperor, when his general Meng Tian 蒙恬 (d.210 BCE), the historical figure conventionally credited as the inventor of the writing-brush, takes Fur Point captive on an imperial hunt. The emperor then enfeoffs him as “Baron of Tube City” [affixes the rabbit-hair tip to a handle], and appoints him “Officer Fit-for-Composition” (Zhongshu ling 中書令 or Zhongshu jun 中書君), until one day the emperor notices that Fur Point is starting to go bald and dismisses him from his post. And that is the end of Fur Point’s official career, who has literally “worn himself out in service”. After his retirement to Tube City, his descendants [the common writing-brush] multiply and spread all over the land.
26Just as the object-biography begins with a remote genealogy, so too does it end with future descendants, in this sense situating the object within a broader historical arc, and enhancing the evolutionary analogy to living creatures, which are propagated through the succession of the generations. The object-biography, like the ode on things, teeters constantly between the general and specific, between all mats and writing-brushes and this mat and this brush. The trick that the object-biography plays by narrativizing the thing in question is to seem to be presenting the life history of a distinct individual, but the riddle solution always flattens the specific back into the general. In this sense the object-biography resists animating its subject, which, as in the riddle-tale itself, is always transformed back into inert matter at the end (the mat, the writing-brush).36
27Han Yu’s essay sparked a long-lasting vogue for object-biographies, which were still being composed and published as late as the nineteenth century. What most concerns us here is that the object-biography form was incorporated into at least one Tang riddle-tale to be recited by the riddle-creature itself. This tale, “Yang Zhen” (楊禎), is longer and more complicated than the ones discussed so for, in part because it superimposes the object-riddle structure onto another common plot type, the classic romance between a mortal man and a supernatural woman.37 In such romances, a man away from home for some reason encounters a mysterious woman. He embarks upon an affair with her, only to discover at the end that she is not human. In this particular story, the eponymous scholar, who is staying in an abandoned Buddhist temple,38 sees a beautiful woman clad in crimson walking in the grounds night after night and mournfully singing the same song over and over. When he asks who she is, she sings a second song in reply.
This golden hall cannot withstand the autumn,
The stone building grows chill in slanting moonlight.
Who is there that will attend to me,
And lift the curtain to mourn my lonely shadow?
28The simple solution to this riddle, reinforced by the red of the lady’s dress, is a lamp. The song, though still ambiguous, provides solid clues to her identity – the moonlight chill references nighttime, when lamps are lit, and the last couplet in particular recalls many Southern Dynasties “odes on things” devoted to candles and lamps, which light the curtained beds of cold and lonely ladies silhouetted within.39
29The song is a blatant lure and a tease that poses two questions to the scholar. To the first, overt one, “Who is there that will remedy my loneliness?”, he certainly understands that the correct answer is “him”. But it is the song’s other, covert question, the riddle “Who am I?”, that really ensnares him. He understands enough to know that this is a question of identity, but she easily refutes his first two guesses, that she is a ghost or a fox-spirit.
30The conundrum here is that she is no ordinary lamp, but an everlasting lamp that formed part of the ritual paraphernalia of a chuang 幢, a kind of stone pillar engraved with a Buddhist dharani inscription that had a recess or niche towards the top in which an oil lamp could be placed.40 Furthermore, the lamp in the tale belongs not to just any generic chuang, but to one said to have been commissioned by the Tang emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 (r.712-756) and his most favored concubine Lady Yang 楊貴妃, upon a private sortie to this very temple. The temple itself is Stone Jar Temple 石甕寺, described in the story as having been constructed out of building materials left over from the Palace of Lasting Life, the famous site where the couple had pledged their troth in the halcyon days before Lady Yang’s death and the emperor’s abdication during the An Lushan Rebellion. The complex identity of this artifact may be why the lady in crimson is compelled to recount a lengthy object-biography before taking the scholar to bed. She begins with her genealogy. The close imitation of Han Yu’s biography of the writing-brush will be obvious.41
I am a descendant of the Flint-Man clan [the ancient sage king Sui-ren 燧人, the inventor of fire, whose name includes the radical for fire (huo火)]. My founding ancestor’s shining deeds [gong lie 功烈, the graph “lie” includes four dots, another form of the radical for fire] brought benefit to mankind. He therefore took command in Bing-ding [in the celestial stem reckoning system, the designation correlating to the element fire] and pacified the lands of the South [the direction correlating to fire in the Five Phases system]. By virtue of his charismatic power, he then reigned as king over Shennong [often equated with the Flame Emperor Yandi 炎帝, one of the three legendary emperors of pre-dynastic China, whose name is written with two graphs for fire]42 and the Tao-tang tribe [Tao 陶 means both “flaming” and “fired pottery”]. My distant ancestor Avoids-Nothing [Wuji 無忌, the personal name of the Prince of Wei, 3rd c. BCE] was so fierce and hot-tempered that no one could draw close to him. He was subsequently captured by the White Marsh clan [Baize 白澤, also the name of a legendary beast, demon and protective spirit, but here implying the pacification of fire by water] but nowadays has gained some repute among woodcutter lads and herd boys [who still resort to campfires]. (My glosses provided in italics.)
31Then follows a short account of the spread of Buddhism from India to China and how her fourteenth-generation ancestor was enfeoffed as “Duke of Everlasting Brightness” (Changming gong 长明公) in the service of promulgating the faith.43 She then finally comes to her own genesis. She was granted the title “Lady of Western Brightness” (Ximing furen 西明夫人) and, at Lady Yang’s behest, brought to the temple to balance “a lonely chuang without a partner” on the eastern side of the shrine.44 “There I was gifted with oil of amber to moisten my skin and set within a curtain of coral beads to protect my body”, she tells him coyly. The strong Chinese expectation of visual and ritual symmetry and the habit of dividing a pair into yin and yang, male and female, help account for the lamp’s feminine gender in the story. The lamp’s identity as a ritual object left over from the reign of Emperor Xuanzong and the strong imprint of Lady Yang’s sympathetic identification with the lamp turns it into her surrogate. This ghostly residue helps explain why the lamp haunts the man in the temple (which is itself a “leftover” from the former regime created from leftover stones), assuming human form night after night to re-find love with a human partner.
32Unable to solve the riddle of her identity even after all these hints, the obtuse scholar continues his liaison with her (in ghostly, but also lamp-like fashion, she appears at night and leaves at dawn). Finally, his family gets wind that he is having an affair, and dispatches his former wet-nurse to the temple to find out what is going on. The nurse hides herself beneath a Buddhist altar at the shrine and waits till daybreak. “Sure enough, she saw something emerge from a crack and enter the west chuang: it turned out to be a lamp, bright and sparkling.”45 Once revealed in its true form, the thing-spirit proves easy to exorcise: all the nurse has to do is pounce on the lamp and blow it out.
33This abrupt ending deserves some further consideration. Daniel Tiffany, who has written eloquently on the poetics of the riddle in the European context, suggests that “[w]e should understand the riddle as a kind of binding spell that may be broken by a single word … that is, by solving the riddle.”46 Catching the lamp, in flagrante delicto, as it were, breaks the spell here. For thing-spirits, like other demons, lose their power once their material form is exposed and they can be named. Naming, in this sense, is what really kills an anthropomorphized object and lays its ghost to rest. But the abruptness of the ending in this particular tale is also a comic turn, extinguishing in one fell swoop any lingering excess of meaning or feeling in the story that does not fit neatly into the riddle-tale structure: the lamp as “relic”, the ghostly associations of the temple with Lady Yang, laments for the past in the aftermath of the An Lushan Rebellion, the Buddhist associations of the lamp as a metaphor for enlightenment, the miracle-working properties of the chuang stone pillar. We are instantly back to Liu Xie’s “thigh-slapping merriment of a childish burlesque” when a lamp is revealed to be a lamp and nothing more.
Conclusion
34This essay has tried to explore a central concept in our understanding of a ghost, taken both literally and metaphorically as the animation of something dead and lifeless, and to place it in a larger context, namely that of the enlivenment of inanimate objects. We took a detour through Chinese literary history to set out some basic literary genres and techniques through which things were given voice and human identity, namely the riddle, the ode on things and the object-biography, and then observed how certain Tang tales of the marvelous incorporated these genres as buildings blocks to bring various implements to life. My analysis has emphasized the riddle, as something that always reveals while disguising, to be key. The same riddling logic and even structure is at work in many ghost tales, in which clues are planted as to the identity of the enigmatic person (or persons) that appear(s) to a human protagonist. As in the case of the lamp lady, the answer to the riddle is much more quickly apparent to the reader than to the human protagonist.
35In several of the Tang object-riddle stories, there is an uncanny residue of the secret posthumous world of things that the solution of the conundrum at the end cannot entirely dispel. The broken or worn-out utensils in such tales partly fit the category of what Fabio Rombanelli calls “exhausted objects”, or “old commodities that have exhausted their functionality”, in his fascinating study of Buddhist memorial rituals for “sanctioning the demise” of inanimate possessions in contemporary Japan.47 By virtue of being “exhausted”, of having no further use-value in the human world, the abandoned implements in the Tang tales are effectively “dead”, which is why they can haunt like ghosts. Even when an object survives intact, as part of an architectural structure or ritual paraphernalia, as in the story of the everlasting lamp, it becomes de facto a fragmentary relic of a vanished past, and again in this way possesses a ghostly potential to haunt the living.
Notes de bas de page
1 For their help with sources and discussions on this topic with me, I am deeply grateful to Sarah M. Allen, Xiaofei Tian, Tamara Chin, Cynthia Chennault, Donald Harper and Paul Copp. I would also like to thank Sophie Volpp, Lynn Festa and Nicholas Paige for comments on an earlier version of this essay presented at a Mellon workshop on literature and things at the University of California, Berkeley in 2013.
2 See Tilley Christopher et al., eds., 2006, Handboook of Material Culture, London: Sage Publications, especially Tilley Christopher, “Objectification”, pp. 60–73 and Hoskins Janet, “Agency, Biography, and Objects”, pp. 74–85.
3 Steiner Christopher, 2001, “Rights of Passage: On the Liminal Identity of Art in the Border Zone”, in Fred Myers, ed., The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, p. 210; cited in Hoskins Janet, 2006, “Agency, Biography, and Objects”, p. 75. Author’s italics.
4 Zeitlin Judith T., 2005, “The Life and Death of the Image: Ghosts and Portraits in Chinese Literature”, in Wu Hung and Katherine Tsiang, eds., Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center Publications, pp. 229–256.
5 Zeitlin Judith T., 1993, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 74–88; Zeitlin Judith T., 1999, “The Secret History of Rocks: Objects and Collecting in the Ming and Qing Imagination”, Orientations (May 1999), pp. 40–47.
6 Allen Sarah M., 2014, Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center Publications, p. 166. My deep thanks to Sarah Allen for help in locating such stories and for sharing her manuscript with me before it was published.
7 “Yuan Wuyou” 元無有 in Li Fang, Taiping guangji, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, juan 369, pp. 2937–2938. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this essay are mine. I have also consulted a Ming edition of the tale in Li Fuyan 李復言, Xu Youguai lu, 續幽怪錄, a reprint of a Song edition in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu 四庫全書存目叢書, 1995, Ji’nan: Qilu shushe, p. 471. On this story, see also Allen., 2014, Shifting Stories, pp. 192–194.
8 Baize tu, excerpted in Daoshi, Fayuan zhulin 法苑珠林, juan 45, p. 644. My thanks to Don Harper for sharing unpublished work with me in which he discusses this demonology.
9 Based on Victor Yu-cheng Shih’s translation in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, 1983, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, Chapter 15, pp. 162–163, with my modification.
10 Based on Shih’s translation in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, with my modification. The praiseworthy “enigmas of the ancients” include the five prose-poems (fu 賦) in Xunzi 荀子, Book 26, which consist of “riddles on ritual, principles, wisdom, clouds, silkworms, and needles” respectively. See Knoblock John, 1994, Xunzi: A Translation and Study, 3 vols., Stanford: Stanford University Press, iii, p. 189.
11 See Li Pengfei 李鹏飞, 2004, Tangdai feixieshi xiaoshuo zhi leixing yanjiu 唐代非写实小说之类型研究 (A study of forms of non-realist Tang fiction), Beijing: Peking University Press, Chapter 1, which calls riddle tales “spirit-essence riddle-enigma stories” (諧隱隐精怪小說). See also Wang Meng’ou, 1983, Tangren xiaoshuo jiaoshi, Vol. 1, pp. 383–384; Li Jianguo, 1993, Tang Wudai zhiguai chuanqi xulu, Vol. 1, pp. 414–415; and Allen Sarah M., 2014, Shifting Stories, p. 192.
12 The earliest extant piece of yongwu literature is “In Praise of the Plum” (Li song 李頌), a bamboo slip manuscript from the state of Chu, now in the Shanghai Museum. Shanghai bowuguan, 2011, Vol. 8, pp. 227–246. My thanks to Don Harper for this information.
13 Knechtges David R., 2002, “‘Have You Not Seen the Beauty of the Large?’: An Inquiry into Early Chinese Aesthetics”, Wenxue wenhua yu shi bian 3, p. 62.
14 Divorced from a court context, the long prose-poem persisted as a standard literary genre for the multifaceted description of things from culture or nature.
15 Ouyang, Yiwen leiju, juan 97, p. 1658, trans. Knechtges David R., 2002, “‘Have You Not Seen the Beauty of the Large?’”, p. 63.
16 Knechtges David R., 2002, “‘Have You Not Seen the Beauty of the Large?’”, p. 63. For a more detailed account of this evolution from the prose-poem (fu) to the ode on things to yongwu shi , see Chou Chao-ming, 1986, “Hsieh T’iao and the Transformation of Five-Character Poetry”, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, Chapter 4. On the yongwu fu, see also Kong Xurong, 2005, “Fu Xuan’s (217-278) Rhapsodies on Objects”, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
17 Chou Chao-ming, 1986, “Hsieh T’iao”, p. 187.
18 Chennault Cynthia L., 2003, “Odes on Objects and Patronage in the Early Qi”, in Paul W. Kroll and David R. Knechtges, eds., Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History, in Honor of Donald Holzman and Richard B. Mather, Provo, Utah: Tang Studies Society, p. 335.
19 Other similar titles in Xie Tiao’s works include “Together We Write Poems on Musical Instruments” and “Together We Write Poems on Implements and Treasures”.
20 Trans. Chennault Cynthia L., 2003, “Odes on Objects,” p. 340. The effect is to “ornament” the poem both by including allusions and by the rare and fragrant nature of the plants.
21 Included in an anecdote about Wang Chi 王摛 in Li Yanshou 李延壽, 1983, Nan shi, juan 49, p. 1213. Translated in Chou Chao-ming, 1986, “Hsieh T’iao”, p. 201.
22 “Pollia” comes from “The Nine Songs” (Jiuge 九歌), “selinea” from “Encountering Sorrow” (Li Sao 離騷). See Chennault Cynthia L., 2003, p. 340, n. 16.
23 Chennault Cynthia L., 2003, “Odes on Objects”, p. 338, n. 12.
24 For a less allegorical reading of this couplet, see Anne Birrell’s translation in Songs from a Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry, 1982, London: George Allen & Unwin, p. 219: “All I desire is silken dress caresses / Nor would I mind a powdering of white dust”. In this case, the “white dust” would refer to the palace lady’s powder.
25 For this phrase, see Williamson Craig, 1982, A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle Songs, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 41; cited in Tiffany Daniel, 2004, “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity”, in Bill Brown, ed., Things, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 79.
26 “Teng Tingjun” 騰庭俊 (from Xuanguai lu) in Li Fang, Taiping Guangji, juan 474, pp. 3905–3906. For an excellent close reading of this tale, see Allen Sarah M., 2014, Shifting Stories, Chapter 4, pp. 182–185.
27 “Yao Kangcheng” 姚康成 (from Lingguai ji 靈怪集) in Taiping guangji, juan 371, p. 2948; see Allen Sarah M., 2014, Shifting Stories, Chapter 4, n. 36. This type of broom is still in use in China today.
28 These include a mirror covered with the green patina of age, which is retrieved from a well. Other broken, damaged, or unusable items that haunt included in the “Miscellaneous Utensils” section in Taiping guangji are a four-legged cauldron missing a foot, a wooden spoon, a cart wheel, a leather bag, and an old wine vat. Such signs of damage also serve to register the age of the objects, since great age confers power and may be one criterion for trees and animals becoming “spirit essences”.
29 “Yao Kangcheng”, Taiping guangji, juan 371, p. 2948. The protagonist explains that having enjoyed a convivial evening with these things, he could not bear to harm them.
30 Li Pengfei 李鵬飛, 2004, Tangdai feixieshi xiaoshuo zhi leixing yanjiu 唐代非寫實小說之類型研究, Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, pp. 62–63.
31 Franke Herbert, 1974, “Literary Parody in Traditional Chinese Literature: Descriptive Pseudo-Biographies”, Oriens Extremus, 21, p. 24.
32 Franke Herbert, 1974, “Literary Parody in Traditional Chinese Literature”, p. 23.
33 Franke Herbert, 1974, “Literary Parody in Traditional Chinese Literature”, p. 23.
34 These are the names of two fictional envoys in the prologue to Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 “Prose-Poem on the Imperial Park” (Zixu fu 子虛賦).
35 Based with modification on William H. Nienhauser Jr.,’s translation in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, 1994, ed. Victor Mair, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 746–751. For the original, see Han Yu, Han Changling wenji, juan 85, pp. 66–69.
36 In “Cui Hui” 崔毀, from Xuanshi zhi 宣室志, the riddle-creature itself (a tiny boy with flowing locks and clad in brown) turns out to be a writing brush. See Taiping guangji, juan 370, pp. 2940–2941.
37 “Yang Zhen” 楊禎, from Muyi lu 慕異錄, in Li Fang, Taiping guangji, Vol. 373, pp. 2963–2964.
38 Within the temple complex, he is staying in the hall consecrated to the worship of the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī.
39 See Xiaofei Tian’s discussion in Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang, 2007, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center Publications, pp. 221–249, where she draws attention both to lamps and candles as Buddhist metaphors for the brevity of human life, and to the association of lamps and candles with the poetic trope of the lonely woman in her bed chamber. Compare the Lady in Red’s song with Xie Tiao’s “Ode on the Candle” (trans. Tian, p. 222):
Beneath the apricot beams,
guests have not yet dispersed,
The radiance of the Cinnamon
Palace will sink into darkness soon.
Its colors dimmed within
the light curtain,
It lowers its light over an ornamented
lute.
Back and forth, the silhouette of a cloud
hairdo,
Glimmering, gold on window tracery.
I feel resentful
that on a night of autumn moon,
You should leave me behind in
the dark shades of a secluded chamber.
40 Chuang was originally a translation of the Sanskrit term for “tubular curtain”, and it continued to refer to a textile banner as well as to a stone pillar, both of which could flank a Buddha or Bodhisattva tableau inside a temple hall. It is possible that the chuang in this tale is a variation of a “lantern chuang” (deng chuang 燈幢). For an extant Tang example, see Zhu and Zhu, 2006, “Guanyu Bohai shi dengchuang”, pp. 10–18). This type of chuang, however, was ordinarily placed outdoors, and is thought to be a variant of a “sutra chuang” (jingchuang 經幢), or “lantern stand” (dengtai 燈台). For an extant Tang example of a Buddhist stone “lantern stand”, see Lin Wei-ching, 2014, Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 112–113. My thanks to Paul Copp and Wei-cheng Lin for their help in identifying this object.
41 This sort of object-biography is also akin to a later genre of technological writing, which Martina Siebert has termed “the origins of things” (物原) in her “Making Technology History,” 2012, in Dagmar Schäfer, ed., Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, Leiden and Boston: Brill, p. 254. Siebert (pp. 269–70) cites an entry on “fire” in a late twelfth-century work by Luo Mi 羅泌, which bears a distinct resemblance to the lamp lady’s narrative of her genealogy: “Sui [the mythical “Emperor Flint” 燧帝] made fire; Shennong relied on it to establish pottery and metal casting. Xuanyuan [i.e. the Yellow Emperor] made (relying in turn on metal smelting) needles and scissors… .”
42 The debate continues today whether Shennong and the Flame Emperor (炎帝) were one and the same legendary figure.
43 He was enfeoffed by the Ming Emperor of the Han when Buddhism was introduced to China, but then was suffocated to death (“snuffed out”) during a period of Buddhist persecution.
44 The lamp lady’s placement to the west might be inspired by the Daoist goddess Queen Mother of the West, who was paired with a divine husband called King Father of the East.
45 “Yang Zhen”, in Li Fang, Taiping guangji, vol. 373, p. 2964.
46 Tiffany Daniel, 2009, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 71.
47 Rombanelli Fabio, 2007, Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 216. The complex practices and histories that Rombanelli analyzes lie beyond the scope of this essay, but his nuanced discussion of late medieval and early modern Japanese literary and visual sources about inanimate objects that turn into ghosts and haunt the living is highly suggestive.
Auteur
-
Judith T. Zeitlin (蔡九迪)
University of Chicago 芝加哥大学

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Fantômes dans l'Extrême-Orient d'hier et d'aujourd'hui - Tome 1
Marie Laureillard et Vincent Durand-Dastès
2017
Fantômes dans l'Extrême-Orient d'hier et d'aujourd'hui - Tome 2
Marie Laureillard et Vincent Durand-Dastès
2017
La marche de Cao Bằng
La Cour et les gardiens de frontière, des origines aux conséquences de la réforme de Minh Mạng
Thị Hải Nguyễn
2018
Le piège de l'orgueil
Un projet républicain en Orient au XVIIIe siècle
Satenig Batwagan Toufanian
2018
Les institutions de l'amour : cour, amour, mariage
Enquêtes anthropologiques en Asie et dans l'océan Indien
Catherine Capdeville-Zeng et Delphine Ortis (dir.)
2018
Le livre sur les calculs effectués avec des bâtonnets
Un manuscrit du – iie siècle excavé à Zhangjiashan
Rémi Anicotte
2019