Return to Dragon Mountain by Spence Jonathan D

Author:Spence, Jonathan D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group

CHAPTER SIX

OVER THE EDGE

In a world where men such as Rufang and Sanshu were identified primarily by their specialized functions, how did Zhang Dai fare? Poorly, in his own sardonic estimation, as he analyzed himself in later life, using the third-person form to distance himself further from his own center. “Zhang Dai worked away at his books, but got nowhere,” wrote Zhang. “He studied swordsmanship, but got nowhere; he tried to follow the norms of good conduct, and got nowhere; he tried to be a writer and got nowhere; he studied magical arts and studied Buddhism, he studied agriculture and studied horticulture, but all to no avail. He let the world call him a squanderer, a good-for-nothing, a stubborn commoner, a low-grade scholar, a somnambulist, a long-dead demon.” How you interpreted all that was up to you, Zhang Dai explained, for he knew full well that this character was a sea of paradoxes, which he himself lacked the skill or insight to disentangle: “If you wanted to call him rich and well-born, then you could go ahead. If you wanted to call him poor and lowly, that was fine, too. If you wanted to call him wise, that was fine, but it was also fine if you called him an imbecile. You could call him aggressive and competitive, or call him gentle and weak. You could call him anxious and impatient, too, or else call him lazy and disrespectful.”

On the subject of writing, at least, the self-denigratory list of failures was at best a half-truth. For from the moment that he had begun writing his first book of Profiles in the early 1620s, Zhang Dai seemed to take pleasure in pursuing several writing projects at once. From 1628 onward, he was collecting the material and writing the draft for his history of the Ming dynasty as it had manifested itself up to that date in fifteen reigns. He was developing the idea of giving a structure to the rubrics under which to organize essential human knowledge for the riders of the night ferry. He was expanding on his teenage readings of the Four Books and developing a series of his own commentaries to help students comprehend the text in its full richness—clearly, he anticipated that his own comments would be intensely personal, thus sustaining both grandfather’s and his own expressed contempt for the orthodox and unimaginative commentaries that passed for “received wisdom” in the examination halls. And he was playing with another idea for historical writing, one that he believed would bring a deeper level of meaning to our knowledge of the past. This was the filling in of Historical Gaps, as he titled the work, so as to create a deeper and more evocative level of the past than currently surviving records could provide.

Zhang Dai framed his discussion in broad terms. Historians of olden days, he wrote, faced similar problems to those faced by historians of his own time. If an event had been deeply troubling, one could simply leave it out altogether; the more such gaps there were, the easier it became to add one more.

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