Words Well Put
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who was seen as a civilizing force in the face of a barbarian threat. If Sima Daozi understood the full import of Xie Zhong’s remark (the
narrative gives no indication either way), the quip, far from alien-
ating his affections, would instead have formed a bond of implicit
understanding between two men of similar cultural competence.
They could both chuckle conspiratorially in sharing their private
joke, as the ignorant guests looked on with blank gazes. If Sima
Daozi did not fully understand the remark, he would have remained
blissfully unaware that he had been insulted at all, much like poor
Qing Feng in the Zuo Tradition, who did not even realize he was
being told to drop dead through a poetic offering from the Poems.
The anecdote is not about making Sima look bad so much as
making Xie look good. The actual content of the allusion and its
moral implications are not at stake here; it is the gesture itself that is being held up for admiration. By demonstrating his command of
Traditional knowledge and his ability to deploy it artfully, Xie
stands out as a man worthy of serving the prince, and, even more
important in terms of posterity, as a man worthy of notation in the
pages of Topical Tales. Later generations of readers (with the help of Liu Jun whispering in their ear) can share in the joke and admire
Xie’s wit. The dividing line is not drawn between the one who
fashions the barb and the one who is (wittingly) pierced by it—they
are playing in the same game, after all—but between those who
understand the rules of the game and those who do not. This sense
of play when it comes to demonstrating competence in Traditional
knowledge is the hallmark of Topical Tales and is even read back into the points of origin of such knowledge.
As was noted above, Xie Zhong’s allusion relies upon knowledge
derived from two commentaries on the Mao edition of the Poems
that were included in an Eastern Han work by Zheng Xuan, called
Zheng’s Annotation of the Mao Poems, indicating that the commen-
taries had become an integral part of the Traditional knowledge
surrounding the Poems. By the end of the Han, Zheng Xuan had
been canonized as a custodian and transmitter of Traditional
knowledge. The following apocryphal anecdote about Zheng
Xuan’s household appears in chapter 4, “Letters and Scholarship,”
of Topical Tales:
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Playing the Game
127
Even the slaves of Zheng Xuan’s household all read books. One time he set a task for a female slave, but she did not meet his expectations. He was about to beat her, when she started trying to explain herself. Zheng Xuan became furious and had someone drag her through the mire. Shortly after, another female slave came by and asked her,
“Why are you out here in the mire?” 27
She replied,
“When I went and complained,
I met with his anger.” 28 (4.3)
鄭玄家奴婢皆讀書。嘗使一婢。不稱旨。將撻之。方自陳說。玄怒。使
人曳箸泥中。須臾。復有一婢來。問曰。
胡為乎泥中
答曰。
薄言往愬
逢彼之怒
This anecdote, surely invented long after Zheng Xuan’s time, reads
like a joke: “Zheng Xuan’s household was so literate that even the slaves chanted poetry!” Here again is the juxtaposition of humor,
violence, and poetic competence—somewhat jarring to modern
sensibilities—that appears so frequently in the pages of Topical Tales.
The unfortunate female slave was threatened with a beating and
dragged through a bog, and yet maintains the aplomb to respond
appropriately with an apt citation from the Poems when teased by another slave. The humor in the anecdote derives from the ironic
portrayal of society’s basest and least educated members as highly
proficient in elite practices—a more sophisticated form of dressing
up chimpanzees in suits and teaching them to ride bicycles. 29 The danger of exploiting the dominated for the amusement of the
dominant, however, is that it can reflect poorly on the dominant.
—————
27. A line from “No Use” 式微 (Mao #36).
28. A quotation from “Cypress-wood Boat” 柏舟 (Mao #26).
29. There is also a story, cited by Bai Juyi 白居易 in his annotation of his poem
“A Pair of Parrots” 雙鸚鵡, about one of Zheng Xuan’s oxen being able to scratch out Chinese characters on the wall with its horns. (Cited by Yu Jiaxi in his annotations of this entry in Shishuo xinyu.)
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128
Playing the Game
In this anecdote, Zheng Xuan—a scholar-exegete who naturally
wields symbolic power—is the sole source of brutal physical vio-
lence, while his slaves—instruments of physical labor—appear
highly proficient in the very sorts of knowledge that he produces.
The lines they chant are chosen because the words fit the situation at
hand, but their context in the Poems also evokes a subtext (or extratext) that speaks pointedly to the unequal power relations be-
tween the female slaves and their male master.
When the first slave comes along and sees the second slave lying
in the bog, she quotes the final line of a selection from the Poems
entitled “No Use” 式微:
It’s no use, it’s no use,
why not return;
if it were not for the lord’s sake,
why be out here in the dew.
It’s no use, it’s no use,
why not return;
if it were not for the lord’s person,
why be out here in the mire? 30
The “Lesser Preface” to this song explains it thus: “‘No Use’ is about
the Marquis of Li staying in Wei and his officers exhorting him to
return home” 式微。黎侯寓于衛。其臣勸以歸也. The Marquis of
Li took refuge in the state of Wei after being driven from his own
state by the Di 狄 barbarians. Zheng Xuan, in his own annotation of
the poem’s second couplet, paraphrases it as “If we were without a
ruler, then why would we stay in this place?” 我若無君。何為處
此乎. He glosses it as “The officers’ repeated and urgent remon-
stration of their ruler” 臣又極諫之辭. 31 In essence, the poem comprises the words of inferiors speaking against being in an undesirable
place because of their superior. The first slave’s citation of this poem hardly poses an innocent question; it implies that the second slave
must be in the mud because of her master and that she would rather
be back home but for his wishes. In asking her question through this
—————
30. Karlgren, Book of Odes, p. 23.
31. Ruan Yuan, Shisan jing, vol. 2, p. 305.
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129
citation, the first slave is expressing her solidarity with the second
by speaking in language already loaded with connotations critical of
&nb
sp; actions taken by a superior.
The second slave’s response is even more pointed, as she quotes
from the second stanza of “Cypress-wood Boat” 柏舟:
Drifting is that cypress-wood boat,
drifting is its floating;
I am wide awake and do not sleep,
as if I had a painful grief;
but it is not that I have no wine,
to amuse and divert myself.
My heart is not a mirror,
you cannot scrutinize it;
true, I have elder and younger brothers,
but I cannot rely on them;
when I go and complain,
I meet with their anger.
My heart is not a stone,
you cannot turn it;
my heart is not a mat,
you cannot roll it;
my dignified demeanor has been perfect,
you cannot measure it.
My grieved heart is pained,
I am hated by all the petty ones;
I have met with suffering in plenty,
I have received insults not a little;
in the quietude I brood over it,
awake I knock and beat my breast.
Oh sun, oh moon,
why are you eclipsed from time to time?
The grief of the heart is like an unwashed dress;
in the quietude I brood over it,
but I cannot rush up and fly away. 32
—————
32. Mao #26. Karlgren, Book of Odes, pp. 15–16.
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Playing the Game
The “Lesser Preface” starts out by stating, “‘Cypress-wood Boat’ is
about a humane person being mistreated,” and goes on to read the
piece in more explicitly political terms: “During the reign of Duke
Qing of Wei, humane men were mistreated while petty men were at
his side.” Zheng Xuan concurs with this political interpretation,
reading the poem as the plaint of a worthy officer who is unappre-
ciated by his ruler (figured as “brothers” in the poem) and maligned
by jealous rivals (“all the petty ones”). This political interpretation is just one of many possible interpretations. Later scholars and modern readers are more likely to read this poem as the plaint of a
woman being forced by her brothers into a marriage she detests.
Read thusly, the poem becomes a perfect vehicle for a woman to
lament her inability to determine her own destiny when faced with
unfair treatment at the hands of male superiors. 33 Thus, the slave shows herself to be poetically competent on two levels. First, she
knows the Poems well enough to be able to choose an apt im-
promptu citation. Second, her application of the citation to her own
circumstances ends up generating a “reading” that fits the text more
naturally and seems less forced than her master’s own annotations.
The first couplet of the stanza from which the slave quotes reads
“My heart is not a mirror, / you cannot scrutinize it.” It is a cele-
brated line from the Poems, and while the slave did not quote it directly, it is certainly heard in the background of any citation from
this poem. As with so many lines in the Poems, this couplet is open to interpretation. On the face of it, it seems to be saying, “I do not
lay bare my feelings for anybody to scrutinize.” 34 The tacit presence of this couplet asserts the slave’s own interiority, independent of her
master’s wishes. The narrative of the anecdote relates that Zheng
Xuan threatened to beat the slave because “she did not meet his
expectations” and that when she attempted to “explain herself,” to
give an indication of what she was thinking, he had her dragged
through the mire. The slave is meant to be a physical extension of
—————
33. In one entry of Topical Tales (19.18), a daughter successfully wins the right not to remarry when she refers to her household as “ruined and in trouble” 殄瘁, a compound found in the fifth stanza of Mao #264.
34. Karlgren, Book of Odes, p. 16, note b.
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131
the master, animated by his wishes. The master will not tolerate the
slave having a mind of her own—to do so would acknowledge the
barbarity of enslaving the body and mind of another. He must
forcibly quash her expression of interiority, but in the end it will
make itself known through the conduit sanctioned by Tradition:
the Poems.
Zheng Xuan, in his commentary on the poem, glosses the line
“My heart is not a mirror” as follows:
When a mirror is used to observe the outward form of something, one can
only discern its shape and color but is unable to ascertain its truth or falsity.
The phrase “My heart is not like this mirror” means when it comes to good and evil, that is, the inner and outer qualities of other men, my heart is able to discern and ascertain them. 35
鑒之察形但知方圓白黑。不能度其真偽。我心非如是鑒。我於眾人之善
惡外內。心度知之。
This reading posits the heart not merely as the passive residence of
one’s interior qualities, but as an active instrument used to judge the
interior qualities of others. The heart/mind, properly used, allows
one to “read” external evidence critically rather than simply re-
flecting it, to ascertain the moral quality of another based on their
words and behavior. This gloss on the nature of the heart takes on
deeply ironic undertones when considered in conjunction with this
anecdote about Zheng Xuan’s mistreatment of his slave, for it is
precisely Zheng Xuan’s refusal to use his mental faculties critically
that leads to his rage and the slave’s violent punishment. He did not
take the time to hear the slave’s explanation or to ascertain the
quality of her character. Her subsequent citation of “Cypress-wood
Boat”—a witty application of felicitous words on the face of it— can
be read as a tacit indictment of her master’s moral deficiencies. The
originator(s) of this narrative may not have explicitly intended such
an indictment, but it is there nonetheless. The potential for envi-
sioning—even in ironic terms—the use of Traditional knowledge
against the very people who would act as its custodians teaches an
—————
35. Ruan Yuan, Shisan jing, vol. 2, p. 296.
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Playing the Game
important lesson about cultural competence: a monopoly on it is
never secure because it belongs to whoever practices it.
The narratives of Topical Tales are constantly attempting to show that the symbolic power derived from cultural competence can
compete with, and even be victorious over, the crude forms of
power derived from violence. In the anecdotes cited so far, there has
always been one party who appears more brutish—Cao Pi, General
Yu, Prince Sima and his audience—and one party who appears more
cultured—Cao Zhi, Sun Fang, Xie Zhong—with the latter al
ways
coming off better than the former. In this anecdote about Zheng
Xuan’s household it is the man of culture who acts like a brute and
the lowly slaves who appear cultured. The punished slave may not
have been able to avoid or forestall the violence she suffered by dint
of her poetic competence, but this is not because of a deficiency in
her competence so much as an inability to plead her case properly
due to her low station. To even attempt to speak to her master di-
rectly provoked such rage in him that she was summarily dragged
off for punishment. However, the narrator gives her the last laugh
by recording her apt citation from the Poems. Though unable to
gain control of the confrontation with her master’s violence, she did
manage to control the way it would be perceived and remembered
after the fact. For the duration of the narrative, at least, the reader is on her side. Her handling of the aftermath of her punishment did
not change her status as a slave during her lifetime, but it did ensure
that her experience would be recorded and transmitted (albeit
without reference to her name) in the pages of Topical Tales.
In all likelihood it did not happen, this poetic encounter between
master and slave. But someone wished it had happened. The ironic inversion of the brutish scholar and his cultured slave infuses the
anecdote with its humor, but it teaches another lesson: namely, that
the symbolic power derived from cultural competence can be
wielded by anyone to negotiate the unequal power relations that
determine their place in the social hierarchy. The Traditionalist
courtier of the Eastern Zhou may be executed by his king for his
remonstration, but he is remembered for the competence with
which he made it, and is vindicated by the events of history. The
slave may be punished by a Traditionalist scholar, but she is re-
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133
membered for the competence with which she uses the scholar’s
own tools to respond to his violence. It does not matter who occu-
pies the position of superior—benighted ruler or enraged scholar. It
does not matter who occupies the position of inferior—learned