Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

Conclusion

151 Conclusion It is an enlightening experience to read letters from early medieval China at a time when the modes of personal communication are going through changes whose magnitude and ramifications are not yet foreseeable . Paper and ink are largely abandoned, as is the rest of the material culture of letter writing, to be replaced by the completely different material culture that enables digital communication; the time lag between writing, reading, and responding to a written message has shrunk from months, weeks, or days to seconds; epistolary conventions have all but dissolved and are in the process of transforming into new languages of correspondence. As these changes and their consequences for individuals, small networks, and society as a whole are passionately debated in the public sphere, one keeps encountering important topics explored in this book in unexpected contexts and on surprising occasions. Although the majority of current discussions of media change lack any historical perspective extending beyond the past century, the problems that are discussed nowadays are astonishingly similar to those faced in early medieval letters. Even if the counterpart of face-to-face communication is no longer seen in letter writing but appears in various types of computer mediated communication , which involves all sorts of new questions, basic problems of written communication have unmistakably remained the same: the effective engagement of an absent addressee (who can no longer be sure that he or she alone is addressed);1 the convincing presentation of oneself (which involves coping with unprecedented freedom in the choice of a persona);2 the tension between face-to-face and digital Conclusion 152 modes of communication (accompanied by anxieties about the fragmentation of society, since the former seems to be losing ground);3 and the possibilities and limitations of the medium itself (which allows new distortions of the underlying communicative framework). While the mode of exchange does make a difference, core parameters of written communication remain intact even in e-mails and text messages. This essential awareness of basic questions of correspondence that we all share, along with basic epistolary skills, also affects the study of ancient Chinese letters. Reading them, we immediately recognize them for what they are and grasp their potential, but we are also easily disconcerted by unfamiliar conventions that make it difficult to unlock the wealth of information they hold. Modern readers may find themselves excluded from personal letters, especially if they are hundreds of years removed from the cultural, familial, and individual worlds that once occasioned these written exchanges. Some of the obstacles to fully comprehending and appreciating early medieval epistolary texts were created by the letter writers themselves, either inadvertently, because the particular directedness of a letter tends to exclude non-intended readers from fully understanding a message in all its implications, or deliberately, because the authors wanted to shield their messages from unauthorized eyes. These obstacles to sharing the correspondents’ “universe of discourse,” to use Qian Zhongshu’s words again, may forever withstand our efforts. But with some persistence, obstacles caused by a lack of familiarity with epistolary culture and conventions of the time can be overcome. They are at the center of this book, which seeks to make Chinese epistolary culture fully visible in its potential and Chinese letters more accessible for future research and appreciation. The amount of material witnesses left behind from more than two millennia of Chinese written communication is enormous. Personal letters alone represent an impressively voluminous and multifaceted source that remains to be explored. It promises not only participation in past personal exchanges from a wide variety of relationships but also, since letters are unlimited in their subject matter, a wealth of information about all kinds of subjects: language, history, philosophy , religion, everyday life, psychology, medicine, trade, law, and so forth. What is most important, however, is to keep the connection between these two aspects in mind: the personal exchange and the factual information it contains. Conclusion 153 The potential of letters as important complementary sources in so many fields of inquiry could only be hinted at in this book, which is, after all, focused on the literary workings of epistolarity, especially its rhetorical potential and its ability to inscribe not only the writer but also the addressee in a text and therefore to be a unique reflection of personal relationships. That many letters came down to us in the more or less “de-epistolarized” form their editors gave them does...