How Literatures Begin: Chinese.

Here’s the start of the first chapter in How Literatures Begin (see this post), “Chinese,” by Martin Kern:

To think about the beginning of Chinese literature raises a simple question: which beginning? The one in high antiquity? The one around 200 BCE, following the initial formation of the empire, when China’s “first poet” Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 BCE) came into view as the model that has since been embraced by public intellectuals and literati for more than two millennia? The medieval period, from, roughly, the third through the ninth century, that gave us “classical Chinese poetry”? The early twentieth century with its conspicuous break with tradition and the promotion of modern, vernacular literature in response to both the collapse of the empire and the full experience of foreign—Japanese and “Western”—literature? Sometime in between, when particular genres came to flourish, such as Chinese theater and opera under Mongol rule (1279–1368) or the Chinese novel soon thereafter? All these are legitimate choices, some perhaps slightly more so than others. They can be based on language, literary forms, political institutions, exposure to the world beyond China, the concept of modernity, and other factors. What follows is an essay on antiquity: the time that is at once discontinuous with all later periods and yet its constant point of reference.

Mythologies of Writing and Orality

For most ancient traditions, the modern notion of “literature” does not map well onto the nature, purposes, functions, aesthetics, and social practices involved in the creation and exchange of texts. In pre-imperial China, the term wen originated as broadly denoting “cultural patterns,” including those of textile ornament, musical melodies, the various formal aspects of ritual performances or any other aesthetic forms; it also was often used to refer to ancestors as “cultured” or “accomplished.” It was only over the course of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) that the idea of “literature”—at that point just one of the many forms of aesthetic expression—was gradually privileged above all others to the extent that wen, together with its extension wenzhang (patterned brilliance), came to refer primarily to the well-developed written text. In other words, there was no early Chinese term for “literature” until wen, perhaps some fifteen centuries after its first appearance, began to be used primarily in that sense.

When labeled as wen or wenzhang, early Chinese texts comprise genres that we recognize as “poetry,” “prose,” or a combination of both, also including compositions in the service of political communication and administration. Cao Pi (187–226), the first emperor of the Wei dynasty (220–65) after the collapse of the Han, called wenzhang “the great business in organizing the state” and listed petitions and discussions, letters and discourses, inscriptions and dirges, and songs and poetic expositions as its principal genres—all of them as forms of public discourse. In short, the production and consumption of Chinese writing in antiquity—from its first evidence in the thirteenth century BCE well through the end of the Han dynasty in the third century CE—was always social and political. Whether in the service of the state or in opposition and deliberate distance to it, ancient Chinese literature was not regarded as a private or primarily personal affair. Early discussions of writing were devoted to cosmological, moral, and political concerns.

Literature (as opposed to utilitarian writing narrowly conceived) emerged first during the Western Zhou dynasty (ca. 1046–771 BCE) and developed from there over the long centuries of Chinese political division. […] Around 120 CE, a learned scholar at the Han imperial court, Xu Shen (ca. 55–ca. 149), composed the postface to his Explanation of Simple Graphs and Analysis of Composite Characters (Shuowen jiezi), the first comprehensive dictionary of more than ten thousand Chinese graphs. In the postface, he relied on a much earlier (fourth-century BCE) mythological account of how the sages had created the foundations of civilization. Xu, however, now focused on the invention of writing […]

Xu’s mythological narrative is correct in one important respect: the creation of Chinese graphs is one of but a handful of instances in human history where writing was invented independent of any known influence from the outside—and so the beginning of Chinese literature is monocultural and monolingual. But neither writing nor literature were nearly as old as was imagined in Xu’s time, nor did they emerge hand in hand. […]

Before turning to artifacts of literary writing, something must be said about the prehistory of literature before writing, or rather, the absence of any evidence for such a prehistory in ancient China. In contrast to, say, Greece, India, or Mesopotamia, there is no trace of a grand Chinese narrative or epic that may first have existed orally before finally being committed to writing, nor can we point to an early culture of song that preceded the arrival of writing and was then continued in written form. This does not mean that such things did not exist; in China just as everywhere else, people would have told their stories and sung their songs long before they knew or cared about how to write them. But none of these songs and stories is visible in the early documented stages of Chinese writing. Instead, the known traces of mythical narratives—all of them small fragments and often contradictory—that point to the dawn of history postdate the emergence of writing by several centuries and hence may not reflect that ancient oral culture at all.

The literary teleology from orality to writing, perhaps still a valid paradigm elsewhere, thus does not apply to early China. Nothing in the historical or archaeological record suggests such an idealizing linearity or the beginning of literature “with the common people.” There is a body of short songs that, with their charming simplicity, sincerity, and imagery, appear to reflect the daily joys, worries, and utterances of the common, presumably illiterate folk: the 160 “Airs of the States” included in the Classic of Poetry (Shijing). Already by Han times, legend had it that the ancient kings had dispatched messengers to the “lanes and alleys” to collect the ditties of the commoners in order to learn about their sentiments and well-being, and hence about the condition of the polity. Yet this legend was perhaps an invention in the service of court scholars themselves: songs thus collected were by definition innocent and truthful; they appeared spontaneously like natural omens and could be deployed for political critique.

The second time this paradigm of ancient folk songs became important was in the twentieth century, in the wake of the collapse of the empire in 1912 and the emergence of the modern Chinese nation-state. Here, not unlike in Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) imagination about German folk songs, the ancient “Airs” were re imagined as the original language of the common people. Yet whether during the Han dynasty or in the twentieth century, the valorization of ancient Chinese folk song was but an ideological construction.

I imagine Bathrobe and others already know this stuff, but I’m finding it instructive.