Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

Introduction

3 Introduction Voices a myriad of years old are presented, responses from a thousand of miles away are incited. —l i u x i e , The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong) Having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s, in a country where telephones were rare, I learned to consider mail as something that may hold great importance for my life. I vividly recall letters I received— longed for or arriving out of the blue—as well as letters I wrote myself, whether effortlessly or taking great pains. Unlike the e-mails and text messages that have come to replace this form of written communication since the early 1990s, letters are first of all material objects of a distinctive character and with a distinctive transportation history, having passed through many hands. We may fold and unfold them, flatten them and turn them over; we may crumple them or tear them up but also bundle and keep them. Messages that reach us electronically travel with great speed across great distances, although a certain characteristic time lag remains. Easy enough to read and answer, they are cumbersome to collect and store. To search through them in a file after a few years have passed is much less satisfying than to rummage through stacks of envelopes and sheets of rustling paper in different textures, sizes, and colors, bearing different handwritings in all kinds of tints, along with sketches, scrawls, stickers, and stamps. If they are old enough, letters may be faded, smell funny, and easily fall apart, stimulating our memories and imaginations through all the senses. So even if, in a way, we keep on writing “letters” and receiving “mail,” probably with greater frequency than ever before in human history, it is not surprising that we prefer to call these electronic and largely dematerialized pieces of writing “texts” and “messages,” thus emphasizing Introduction 4 a difference between two forms of written communication that we obviously feel to be significant. This most recent media change and its cultural implications have been studied extensively during the past two decades. Depending on a scholar’s general outlook, the appraisals of this transformation differ widely: it may be either characterized dismissively as a cultural decline or embraced as a promising new development.1 Whatever stand one may take on this issue, it is beyond doubt that the deficits of the new means of written communication—especially the loss of the material and sensual dimension of a letter but also the neglect of traditional epistolary conventions—are counterbalanced by considerable gains. Among these are the enhanced informality and dialogicity of written communication, which appear chiefly to be functions of the greater speed of transmission, as well as the development of a whole new world of words, phrases, complex symbols (such as emoticons), and distinct conventions that are peculiar to e-mails, text messages, and other forms of electronic communication.2 This media change is part of a longer process that has led to the almost complete abandonment of letters, one of the earliest-known types of written communication. In the West, the process started in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the typewriter, the telegraph, and the telephone dealt severe blows to the use of handwriting and all written communication.3 From the beginning, this change triggered not only general concern about the supposed decline of letter writing as a key constituent of any society’s communicative practice and literary culture but also scholarly interest of a rather nostalgic turn, often triggered by the particular materiality of traditional letters, which carry a broad spectrum of personal and historical marks, from the individuality of the handwriting to the various traces left by postal transmission. Just as letters themselves live on a handful of topoi—lamenting separation, concern for the recipient, letters as insufficient substitutes for face-to-face conversation , and so forth—so apparently does Western epistolary research, whose most conspicuous common topos is the decline of letter writing . The end of epistolary culture has long been predicted and has been rediscovered and reaffirmed time and again. One of the earliest such voices in Europe was that of Georg Steinhausen who in 1889 already assumed the end of epistolary history. In 1962, Theodor W. Adorno declared, in a preface to a letter collection originally edited by Walter Benjamin in 1936, that history had passed its Introduction 5 judgment on letters as...