Parallelism in the Hanvueng: A Zhuang Verse Epic from West-Central Guangxi in Southern China

Introduction¹

Parallelism is ubiquitous in Zhuang poetry and song and hence also occurs in ritual texts and a range of oral genres. Curiously, this salient fact has generally escaped the notice of scholars writing on the subject of Zhuang poetics. Discussion has generally been concentrated on line length, rhyming patterns, and stanzaic structures as found in Zhuang traditional song genres.²

This essay looks specifically at the phenomenon of parallelism in one particular ritual text from west-central Guangxi. The Hanvueng is a long verse narrative that is recited at rituals intended to deal with cases of unnatural death and serious family quarrels, especially fraternal feuds. The plot involves an old king and his son by his first wife, Hanvueng. After his wife dies, the king remarries a widow from a commoner family, who brings a son with her. She and her son, Covueng, then set out to disenfranchise Hanvueng and drive him out. Hanvueng goes into exile, but the old king becomes ill and has him recalled. The struggle continues when Covueng attempts to kill Hanvueng while the two are hunting. He finally succeeds in having Hanvueng sent down a well to search for water, and then murders him. After his death Hanvueng flies into the sky and establishes a realm there, from which he rains pestilence down upon his former domain. Covueng sends an eagle and a crow up to the sky to resolve his dispute with Hanvueng. In the end Covueng retains the earthly domain, but pays an annual rent to Hanvueng in the sky.

Meng Yuanyao and I have recently published an annotated edition of a Hanvueng manuscript (Holm and Meng 2015). With a total length of 1,536 lines, this text is quite long for a Zhuang vernacular ritual text. In some ways it provides a reasonably close parallel in form and content to the forms of epic poetry discussed elsewhere in this volume. It also serves as a useful platform for analysis because the manuscript is undamaged (there are no missing lines), the plot line is clear, and any difficulties in interpretation have either been resolved or at least fully explored in an extensive set of textual and ethnographic notes accompanying the text in the published edition.³

In this essay I deal specifically with the question of parallelism. In the book parallelism is discussed from time to time as pertinent in particular contexts (see the Subject Index of Holm and Meng 2015 for details) but the present essay was written subsequently and uncovers newer aspects of the topic. The book, of course, presents much more cultural and linguistic background information. Owing to limitations of space, I give only an abbreviated presentation here. The Zhuang language examples in this essay are given in Zhuangwen, the official Chinese transcription system for Zhuang. Zhuangwen allows readers familiar with Chinese to access a wide range of dictionaries and reference materials on the Zhuang language.⁴

The present contribution has a primarily empirical focus, based on one particular ritual text from the Zhuang-speaking highlands of western Guangxi in southern China. My aim here is to present a typology of the various kinds of parallelistic patterning found in this text, to serve as a basis for wider comparative work in the future. Currently in international scholarship, parallelism in the oral cultures of the Tai people of southern China is almost completely unknown, with the exception, perhaps, of Catherine Ingram's work on the "big song" traditions among the Kam (Dong) in Guizhou and Hunan provinces (Ingram 2012). For the Zhuang, a much larger group, there is a more or less complete blank, so I begin with a description of the basic facts on Zhuang song culture.

My discussion of parallelism here is based on a close philological analysis, but it is important to highlight the fact that in ritual context and in its continuing presence in Zhuang village society, this text is recited by vernacular priests and is performed orally in an actual ritual, with an audience that includes the priests themselves, family members, and other villagers. Without these...