Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy (review)

Like no other text, Liu Yiqing's (403-444) Shishuo xinyu (A new account of tales of the world) reproduces the rarefied atmosphere of the late Eastern Han and Wei-Jin (150-420) salons in which sophisticated people demonstrated their worth through witty and sharp exchanges with each other. Students of early medieval China have constantly plumbed this work's rich and voluminous anecdotes for insights into the values and lives of this period's elite, yet rarely do we think about the book's overall purpose or the function of its thirty-six categories of classification. By undertaking the first book-length analysis of this seminal work's context and goals, Nanxiu Qian has done us all a great service. As if that was not enough, she also examines its literary legacy, in the form of thirty-five imitative works, which date from the Tang all the way to the twentieth century. On the basis of its vast scope and prodigious effort alone, this work is worthy of applause. Yet, it is precisely its ambition to cover so much territory that causes her argument to come up short in many places.

Qian's basic contention is that the Shishuo xinyu is an objective and comprehensive study of human character that endeavors to display the unique personalities, or the "authentic selves," of the 626 figures that appear within it. Each of the thirty-six chapters represents a different behavioral trait. Thus, by placing the same character in many different chapters, the author reveals separate aspects of his or her personality. Also, by placing the characters in dramatic confrontations with each other, the author highlights their different traits, thereby indicating what is unique to each. As for the text's enduring popularity, it is because literati of succeeding ages who were dissatisfied with the status quo found the Shishuo xinyu's emphasis on refinement, sophistication, freedom, and iconoclasm to be both refreshing and useful for their own self-fashioning.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, which is comprised of three chapters, examines the practice of character appraisal, which set the conditions for the creation of the Shishuo xinyu. Part 2, which contains two chapters, focuses on the categories that the text uses to characterize the protagonists in its tales and the precise methods by which it conveys their unique selves. Part 3, the longest, with five chapters, charts the text's legacy by surveying its later imitations.

Chapter 1 begins by examining the history of character appraisal, a practice in which an elite evaluator would orally sum up an elite "evaluatee's inner qualities in response to the outer world" (p. 25). Qian shows how, in the Eastern Han, this practice went from a means of recommending qualified men for office based on Confucian criteria to, in the Wei-Jin period, a private practice in which members of the elite would judge each other on the degree to which they revealed their true selves. Chapter 2 portrays the Wei-Jin spirit that infuses the Shishuo xinyu. Due to the elite's growing self-awareness and the influence of xuanxue (study of the mysteries) metaphysics, people strove to be unique and to have others recognize their uniqueness. This led them to question Confucian categories and search for subtler ways to classify the multitude of personality types. This search is what motivated the writing of the Shishuo xinyu. In chapter 3, Qian argues that traditional bibliographers placed this work in the catchall category of xiaoshuo ("minor persuasions") merely because they had no other place to put it. Their difficulty stemmed from the fact that it was a work like no other; thus, Qian believes it belonged to a genre all its own, which is now known as Shishuo ti (works with the Shishuo xinyu framework).

Qian hits her stride in the two chapters that...