What Once Had Meaning: Ritual in Early Chinese Texts
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2024
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Abstract
The rituals of the past are elusive things, and often our primary sources for understanding ancient rituals are the literary texts that describe or reference them. But what happens to a ritual when it becomes a literary subject? Can we “recreate” a ritual from literary sources in the same way we might recreate an ancient battle, or accounting practices? Or is there something about ritual gestures that gets lost in even the most careful description – a moment where a ritual gesture is turned, irrevocably, into a trope? This dissertation offers readings of a select number of ritual motifs as represented in Early and Medieval Chinese literature. But it does not tell a story of loss, or voice a lament over what was and is no more. The “loss” of the ritualistic in the literary is equally an “opening-up” of a literary text to something that it cannot otherwise represent. The dissertation, then, is a series of readings aimed at the “mysteries” that these ritual motifs and tropes open up in select texts. What once had meaning will have meaning again: only it will be a different meaning, the result of being put to different uses.
The dissertation begins with two introductory chapters. The first of these states the author’s “positionality,” or how the author has attempted to position himself in relation to the texts discussed in the main body of the work, and provides a brief outline of the dissertation to follow. The second introductory chapter, its “Theoretical Orientation,” argues that “literature” and “ritual” should be understood as two distinct modes of thinking, or realms of experience, and that this is what makes the phenomenon of ritual tropes and themes in literature endlessly interesting.
Following these introductions are 7 chapters, and one brief interlude, examining ritual gestures and themes in select texts. Chapter 3 (“Lords of the She Altar”) examines the ritual role of rats in China, and suggests that they might play a more significant (and intimate) role in rituals than previously noticed. Chapter 4 (“The Logic of Imitation”) argues for the centrality of the concept of “imitation” (one understanding of the character fa 法) in the Han dynasty philosopher, poet and scholar Yang Xiong’s text Fayan 法言, and that this in turn helps us understanding his thinking about ritual (and empire). The Interlude (“Distraction”) consists of a brief reading of one poem in the Nine Songs (Jiuge 九歌), and suggests that distraction might sometimes constitute a sacred task. Chapter 5 (“The Dregs of Ritual”) begins by arguing that biographies as a literary genre in early and Medieval China tend to blur the distinction between ritual and punishment, and that this tells us something about biography as a literary genre. It then goes on to read Guo Pu’s biography in the Jinshu against some of his surviving works, and suggest that Guo Pu was himself suspicious of biographical knowledge. Chapter 6 (“Ritual Questions”) looks at ritual matters questioned in the Tianwen, and suggests that questioning itself might be a kind of ritual. Chapter 7 (“The Negative Ritual”) examines the representation of hunting practices in Han dynasty fu, the Mu tianzi zhuan and various other texts. It postulates that hunting in early Imperial China can be understood both as a symbol of excess and also as an act of symbol-creation, and that this resulted in hunting’s contentious position in the ruling ideology’s ritual canon. Chapter 8 (“A Kind of Witchcraft”) compares the theme of reclusion as found in several Shangqing 上清 Daoist scriptures, and the biographies and writings of recluses (yinzhe 隱者, “those who would be hidden”). It argues that both Shangqing adepts and recluses can be understood as ritually hiding themselves away from society, but that this gesture is different for each figure, and points to a different understanding of the self. Chapter 9 (“On the Uses of Corpses”) muses on the curious role “corpses” may have played in Western Zhou ritual practices through readings of Bronze inscriptions and canonical texts like the Shijing.
The conclusion reaffirms that the literary and the ritualistic are two separate activities that have long made (and continue to make) creative and dynamic use of each other. The seemingly inevitable, yet never complete, crossover of these two provides us with objects worthy of our continued attention and reflection.
A brief Postscript (“On the Ontology of the Taotie”) offers some thoughts on the perpetually elusive “animal mask” patterns found on many bronzes from the Shang dynasty.
Each of the chapters in the main body of the text is meant to stand on its own. They are not culminating steps in a single argument, but readings aimed at pointing out aspects of a ritual act, gesture or theme that escapes the world of the text(s) in question.
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Asian literature, Literature, Chinese Literature, Chinese Philosophy, Literary Theory, Ritual
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375 pages
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