Open question, here at home: what the
oldest piece of Chinese literature?
Geomancy texts like the "I Ching" were assumed to go back to the second
millennium B.C. The writings of Confucius and Laozi and the Hundred Schools of
Thought and the classic military texts of Sun Zi happen as early as the seventh century B.C. The “Classics of Poetry” shi jing (a.k.a. the “Book of Odes”) was
from the 11th to the 7th century B.C. But a heroic tale like “The Romance of Three
Kingdoms” doesn’t take place till the 3rd century A.D. and is
written down in the form we know, during the Ming Dynasty roughly eleven
hundred years later. What is the oldest
Chinese literature in the form of a heroic tale? Similarly, what is the oldest example of oral
story telling in China, that is eventually written down and survives till this
day?
Christmas tree trimmed,
lunch eaten, my wife and I kicked it around the Chinese and English web,
respectively for about ten minutes each and came up short. My older daughter contributed by groaning
audibly when she heard the “Shi Jing” mentioned. I suppose I should be happy that the her
Chinese school is leaving its mark. My
wife then groaned as well, that she wasn’t going to research this tangent all day long. I am left to dig around myself. I’m sure there are folk tales and creation
myths and fairy tales that could all be identified. But what is the oldest heroic tale. Surely it can’t start with "The Three Kingdoms."
What were the stories people listened to in the town squares during the
Han Dynasty or before? Were there bards in ancient Qufu?
I’ve retreated from
the kitchen table and keyed up some tunes to accompany me as I organize some
thoughts on this. Today we’ve got
another on my list of jazz bass players to learn more about: the sublime Oscar Pettiford is thumping along
in the ears. “Oscar Pettiford Modern
Quintet 1954” is the disc. There’s a
lovely Quincy Jones song, long before the days of "Thriller", called: “Golden
Touch” that features Oscar predominantly. The mix is turned down and the acoustic double bass can
assert itself above all. The head is perky and
positive in an urban ‘gee-wiz it’s 1954’ sort of way and then descends briefly
to this melancholy minor hook that gets me every time. I’ve played it five times in a row now.
I’m on this
question of literature from the mists of Chinese history, as I just finished
“The World of Odysseus” by M. I. Finley today.
A friend had recommended it a while back and it is a portal back to my
Greco/Turkic travels with my daughters from over the summer. Finley takes time to explore the bardic
tradition and its necessary mnemonics like “Rose Colored Dawn” and "pale-eyed Athene" as distinct from
the requirements or judgments of written literature. The story, he claims and was later proven to
be correct on, is not a great indicator of historical events, customs or
material goods that actually existed 1170 BC.
But rather, despite all the factual inaccuracies that bardic narration
for 500 years necessarily involves, the narrative’s logic and detail help to transmit some of the “social
institutions and values” out from the Greco Dark Ages. And we are treated to chapters exploring
things like “wealth and labor”, “household, kin and community,” “morals and
values.”
So whether or not
there was a Trojan war or the sacking of some place called Ilium, we can peer
through the mist of the eight century written text to understand something of
how people interacted, and what they believed.
So what is the Chinese equivalent to the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"?
Oracle bones from which divinations were drawn are extant from the
second millennium B.C. (Cuneiform and
Akadian Language from which “The Tale of Gilgimesh” is derived, have fully
written texts as far back as 2500 B.C.)
But and poetry and philosophical texts and texts of strategy begin to
blossom around the same time as Homer and Hesiod. But not, (that I can find with limited time
on a Sunday,) literature or more to the point, heroic tales. What is the oldest heroic tale in Chinese
civilization?
And this relates to
something I’ve written about before here at our DustyBrine confluence of salt
and silt, the relative absence of a tradition of oratory in Chinese
civilization. When I’d made that
comparison in the past I was thinking of say Cicero persuading the other
senators of the wisdom of his argument, through the spoken word. But if we think of the bardic tradition and
how elemental it was to classical Greek and then Roman and hence Western
thought, it casts the tradition back far further and plants it somewhere closer
to the corner stone.
Did Chinese people
tell stories orally through the ages? Of
course they did. Most Chinese people weren’t
literate and information at the village or township level must have been
communicated this way. And it isn’t hard
to find examples of that that go back a thousand years, which narrate the
exploits of Liu Bei and Zhang Fei. But
given the majesty and continuous trajectory of Chinese written history,
dynastic history going back as it does to the legendary Fuxi around 3000 B.C,
where are the epics? Do Confucius or
Mencius who write about the rites, have anything to say about story
telling? Surely someone was standing on
the corner square there in Qufu when the sage walked around town, telling a
tale of heroic exploits to some portion of the population that was bored on a Sunday. They must have had story tellers, even
if they were only kvetching, and complaining, 篝火狐鸣[1] . What were their stories?
Tomorrow I’ll mention a bit more
about the native New Yorker, Sir Moses, (a.k.a. M. I. Finley) the author of the "The World of Odysseus" and his unlikely migration from the Big Apple to traitor, to knighthood. If anyone has ancient epics or Chinese
traditions of oratory I should know about going back beyond the Han, please
enter em’ below.
[1] gōuhuǒhúmíng: to tell fox
ghost stories around a bonfire and incite rebellion / an uprising is afoot
(idiom)
No comments:
Post a Comment