Transformations

     I suppose we must accept the physicists’ telling us that everything is drifting toward a meaningless entropy, but that is the long long view and provides all the more reason to feel pleasure at finding within the ineluctable galactic tides eroding ordered patterns now and then contrary eddies within which little miracles of creation occur.  Floating with the current and struggling always as we do, against breakdown, dissolution, and the horrid odors of decay, we welcome the solace of something that, instead of simply rotting, mutates, or, better still, we rejoice at what seems a creation ex nihilo.  Surely William James, the pioneering investigator of mysticism and revelation, had something similar in mind when he recovered from despair with a new determination: “I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world.”  The individual may be doomed to lose but surely that fact only makes resistance more heroic.  Each of us is Achilles, striving to do great deeds while under an unappealable death sentence. 

    One need be neither a philosopher nor a warrior, though, to delight in transformation.  What young child is not charmed upon learning how a wormlike caterpillar can shut itself up in a chrysalis and, after a bit of thought, emerge a fairylike butterfly?  Perhaps others, like me, had a chemistry set in elementary school years with a booklet of experiments designed less to teach scientific principles than to miraculously turn a clear liquid bright blue when a white powder was stirred in and then red with another additive.  I recall as well watching with the same quantum of amazement (though over a longer time span) an intensely green shoot venture out from the inside of a bean, then grow and curl and bask in  the sun and eventually make a hundred more beans. 

      Once these phenomena become routine, we manufacture new marvels woven wholly of imagination.  Stage magicians make theater of such wonder for children and adults alike as they produce silk handkerchiefs out of thin air or saw a person in two only to restore her a moment later with a flourish.  Similar spectacles accompany those we consider more or less holy whose miracles are to believers their surest bona fides.  (Their acts most safely remain well in the past to avoid the scrutiny that has marred the reputation of recent practitioners such as the late Sai Baba who liked to materialize wristwatches, coins, and ash for his devotees in a formula I suspect was dependent on their level of donations who in retrospect seems more an adept in prestidigitation than miracles.)

     Fictional metamorphoses like Apuleius’ Golden Ass or the Monkey King’s Journey to the West, at once amusing and profound, point toward spiritual enlightenment, while Ovid’s brilliantly retold tales of mythic changes is a virtual encyclopedia of permutations, but equally astonishing phenomena have shaped the world and continue to take place daily. 

     We smile when we read that Aristotle thought that oysters emerged from slime in a process of spontaneous generation, but, of course, life did at first appear from nonliving components.  The family tree of all plants and animals began about four billion years ago, though there remains a good deal of controversy about the details.  Surely the story the scientists tell is as weird, poetic, and profound as the versions in Genesis and Hesiod’s Theogony. 

     A miracle occurs daily as well when life fuels its survival with food, which is always organic.  Life lives exclusively on life, even for vegans.  What we eat is broken down until in the series of reactions called the Krebs cycle sugar is metabolized and becomes available as energy.  Inert matter is thereby brought to life and transformed into action, and the process is taking place right now.

     The most momentous transformation can only be the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, the starting point of everything.  As mysterious and mythic as creation by fiat, the physicists say the universe sprang into being where once was nothing, not even, it seems, time.  If this event seems remote and speculative, it is equaled countless times  in the present era by the quantum fluctuations that, even in a vacuum, generate virtual particles in pairs which, after arising out of nothing, almost instantly annihilate each other.  Whatever the physicists say, I would like to think that positive and negative charges in the cosmos,  matter and anti-matter as well, are precisely equal and thus combined add up to precisely nothing?  The universe is a void, sufficiently bored with its emptiness to play at pendulum swings between existence and non-existence.  It sounds like a science that Nargarjuna would have understood two millennia ago. 

     Though the fact is counter-intuitive, solidity is the illusion, flux the rule.  Matter never ceases transforming from one form to another.  People may feel uneasy about their bodies’ physical dissolution, but our present form is merely a moment in the dance of the elements, which briefly resulted in the formation of this particular sensitive burden of human flesh with the ability to contemplate itself.  Presto change o!  Our cells are constantly sloughing off and being replaced by fresh recruits. 

     In social life as well as biological, we are repeatedly rechristened in new roles.  During each stressful change we protect ourselves with ritual: birth, death, puberty, marriage, even the acquisition of academic degrees, every change requires the blessing of a ceremony.  One may try to cling to a handful of the river of time, but the water passes through our fingers and heads quietly downstream without recognizing our silly anxiety and we are carried too and know that in the end we all will arrive at the river’s mouth where we will rejoin the wine-dark seas.  No need to hustle; no need to hesitate. 

    We admire without ever attaining the enlightened views of Heraclitus who tells us that the cosmos “rests by changing” and that “all things are a-flowin” (though that latter phrase is not attributed to him until a thousand years after his death).  Had they not lived on opposite sides of the globe, the old Ephesian might have embraced Laozi whose sages contemplated the cosmos with neither illusion nor distress.

   

By attaining the height of abstraction we gain fullness of rest. 

All the ten thousand things arise, and I see them return.

Now they bloom in bloom but each one homeward returneth to its root.

Returning to the root means rest.

It signifies the return according to destiny.

Return according to destiny means the eternal.

Knowing the eternal means enlightenment.

 

 

 

 

The line from William James is part of his journal entry for April 30, 1870.  See The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott.

 

Heraclitus’ most famous aphorism first appeared in Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle though Plato had put a very similar phrase in  his mouth in  the Cratylus.  The lines from Laozi are from poem 16 in the 1913 translation by D. T. Suzuki and Paul, Carus.

Derangements of Love in Two Early French Folk Songs

 

    These poems are most readily available in the Geoffrey Brereton’s Penguin Book of French Verse, vol. 2.  The texts appended to the essay are from that source.  The English here is my own, meant (like the glosses provided by Brereton) only to facilitate reference to the French originals.

 

     The drama of human sexual love is subject to endless variation in expressions of the immense power of the human erotic dynamo.  Every individual probably experiences a great variety of identities and relations with a single beloved over a course of time. In general, perversions and fetishes develop from a single-minded concentration on what might engage an ordinary lover for a moment every now and then.  For instance, while exclusive BDSM tastes are rare, doubtless everyone has momentarily experienced the wish to overmaster another, to gratify a drive for power rather than sensual pleasure, to indulge a selfish rather than a thoughtful impulse.  By the dictate of nature herself, the boundary of such play is death. 

     Such an extreme dialectic between love and death, today the stuff of tabloids and films, was often expressed in ballad-type songs.  Two early French folk songs, first recorded from the fifteenth century, may be juxtaposed to form a diptych illustrating variations of the theme that might be called love gone awry, distinguished from such harmonious conflations of love and death as Wagner’s Liebestod in which to die is called höchste Lust (highest desire or delight).  This mystical transport was associated by Wagner, who had been led by Schopenhauer to India, with a longing for nirvana. [1]  In “La Blanche Biche” (“The White Doe”) and in “Renaud le tuer des femmes” (“Renaud the Killer of Women”) love and death are joined in more sinister fashion.  In the first, the woman proves a victim, while in the second she triumphs over her would-be attacker.

     The lady in “La Blanche Biche” at times becomes a white doe and in that form is hunted and killed by her brother Renaud.  The story is akin to countless tales of human to animal transformation, many of which feature a magic deer.  These include the white deer upon which Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty rode and the thousand-years-old animal of Emperor Xuanzong.   Lenape, Chickasaw, and other native American groups told stories of supernatural white deer.  Yet today in the Ozarks people speak of Snawfus, the ominous white deer.  Among contemporary evocations of the power of such animals, I am just now thirty miles from a shopping center called White Deer Plaza [2] and I understand that the character of Gus on the Netflix series Sweet Tooth, is a deer-human hybrid, though not white.

     Celtic analogies are far closer to the song’s French roots.  The Celtic god Cernunnos was depicted as a man with the antlers of a deer; indeed, his very named derives from “the horned one.”  Oisin’s mother Sadhbh was transformed into a doe by Fer Doirich for refusing his advances.  Oisin’s own name means little deer.  According to Chretien De Troyes' Erec et Enide, King Arthur’s court conducted an annual hunt after a white stag.  David I of Scotland, while violating taboo by hunting on the feast of the Holy Cross, has a vision of that same cross between a white stag’s antlers seen by Sts. Eustace and Hubert.  In Marie de France’s Guigemar the knight of the title kills a white doe and is placed under a spell which may be undone only when he as entered an unselfish love relationship. 

     The beauty of white deer and the rarity of their appearance suggested that such animals signaled an intersection of human and divine realms, and these contacts are depicted as dangerous as often as they are exalting.  “La Blanche Biche” ends with a horrible display of the lady literally turned inside out, dismembered and displayed in the kitchen and described in a macabre manner by the victim herself. 

 

Ma tête est dans le plat

et mon coeur aux chevilles

Mon sang est repandu

par toute la cuisine

Et sur less noirs charbons

mes pauvres os y grillent.

 

(My head is in the dish

and my heart on pegs.

My blood is spilled

throughout the kitchen

And on the black coals

my poor bones are roasting.)

 

      Underlying this hideous spectacle is very likely a coded horror story of incest.  In danger from the hunt the woman would be naturally frightened, but she describes herself rather as “angry” and apparently deeply ashamed: "J'ai bien grande ire en moi, et n'ose vous le dire." (“I am filled with anger and dare not tell you why.”)  She complains that her brother Renaud is “le pire” (“the worst”).  His assault on her is not inadvertent.  The implied incestuous rape is symbolically enacted as his hunting and butchering of her body. 

     This implication is reinforced by numerous parallels in other songs, particularly those from Scotland.  Thus in “The Bonnie Hind” a young man, long away at sea, unknowingly has sex with his sister who, when she discovers their relationship, commits suicide, causing him to laments the loss of his “bonnie hind.”  The man’s name is even Randal, corresponding to the French Renaud. [3]  Just as in the ancient story of Oedipus, this song of the people depicts the most monstrous transgression imaginable, and the oblique ballad dialogue of “La Blanche Biche” makes the crime seem so very dreadful that it may only be  only suggested. 

     The representation of the woman’s sexuality as a white doe implies a quasi-divine character but at the same time a vulnerability.  The song is in a way like a sensational pulp fiction story with the popular appeal of its sex and violence, ultimately resembling Grand Guignol or a contemporary horror movie in the extremely graphic final stanza.  Listeners [4] or readers might be in turn thrilled by the image of the doe’s beauty, moved by her defenselessness, and shocked by her death.

     In “Renaud le tuer des femmes” another Renaud, as wicked as the first, meets quite a different end.  The handsome but sinister lover carries off the fair lady and, when she says she is hungry, shocks her by saying that she may eat her own hand and drink her own blood.  He threatens her with death, saying he has already done away with thirteen women.  Preparing it seems to die, she, asks him for the sake of propriety to turn away as she disrobes, and he, with a delicacy surprising in a killer, does, allowing her to turn the tables, catch him unawares, and toss him into the pond to his death.

     The song is one of a large family of very similar narratives, distributed across Europe [5].   In “May Colvin” and some versions of “the Outlandish Knight” the woman escapes by the same ruse as in “Renaud le tuer des femmes,” while in “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight” and “The Gowans Sae Gae” she convinces him to “sit down a while, lay your head on my knee” and then employs a sleep charm.  “The Water o Wearie's Well” has her asking for a kiss and then grabbing him, while in “The Outlandish Knight” she asks him to cut down the shoreside nettles for fear they would sully her body.  In some Danish variants she strategically distracts her antagonist by asking him to remove his mantle to avoid spattering it with blood or offers to delouse him. [6] 

     In each of these it is the lady’s own wit and courage that save her life, while in Perrault’s version of “Blue Beard” the wife’s siblings rescue her.  This retelling is thought to be influenced by accounts of Breton king Conomor the Accursed [7] whose wife and victim Tryphine requires the aid of St. Gildas to return to life.  This denial of agency to the woman is hardly incidental.  While the contemporary reader will doubtless see the narrative as a heroic story of a strong and wily woman, Perrault extracted quite a different “moralité,” helpfully appended for the reader’s edification.

 

 

La curiosité, malgré tous ses attraits,

Coüte souvent bien des regrets ;

On en voit tous les jours mille exemples paraítre.

C’est, n’en déplaise au sexe, un plaisir bien léger;

Dès qu’on le prend, il cesse d’ètre,

Et toujours il coüte trop cher.

 

(Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, very often brings regret.  One sees a thousand examples every day.  It is, with all due respect to the sex, a very slight pleasure which, when one takes it, ceases to be, and costs too much every time.) 

 

 

Perrault continues under the title “autre moralité”:

 

 

Pour peu qu'on ait l'esprit sensé,

Et que du Monde on sache le grimoire,

On voit bientôt que cette histoire

Est un conte du temps passé;

II n’est plus d’époux si terrible,

Ni qui demande l’impossible,

Füt-il malcontent et jaloux,

Près de sa femme on le voit filer doux ;

Et de quelque couleur que sa barbe puisse ètre,

On a peine à juger qui des deux est le maítre.

 

(If one looks at this grim story with a sensible attitude, you will instantly see that it is a story of days gone by.   There is no spouse who would ask the impossible of his wife, nor would he be so jealous and malcontent.  Whatever color his beard may be, it is hard to tell who is the master between the two.) 

 

 

     For Perrault the lesson of the story is not that a young woman must look beyond wealth in selecting a lover and must respond to danger with energy and enterprise, but rather that “curiosity” and, presumably, disobedience, to which women are particularly inclined, leads to problems.  Unsatisfied with the statement of this surprising inference, Perrault then enlarges upon it by implying disapproval of the lessening of patriarchal authority in marriage.  The terrible beard, the symbol of maleness, has lost its power. [8]  

     Yet more than three hundred years later the monster of sexism has retained disproportionate, even murderous, force.  While lacking both the playful farce of fabliaux and the earnest aspirations of courtly love, these songs depict a far darker erotic derangement in which sensuality has become lethal aggression.  Both narratives might remind a modern reader of newspaper headlines, since domestic violence remains commonplace world-wide.  The immense libidinal energy, when blocked, does not vanish, but rather surges with new and sometimes violent expression.  Stories in song of brutal attacks on women occasioned by incest, rape, adultery, or simply an extra-marital affair are not only entertaining for their sensationalism; they are also based on lived experience.  These early French folk songs represent two possible outcomes: in one the woman is consumed, while in the other she survives.  In each the explosive destructive force of machismo provides a dramatic and sinister antagonist. 

 

 

 

1.  Peter Bassett, “The Use of Buddhist and Hindu Concepts in Wagner's Stage Works,” The Wagnerian,  January 1, 2014.

 

2.  Mme. d’Aulnoy included a version of the white hind story with a happier ending in her book of fairy tales.  The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, dating from the eleventh century, is an extraordinary survival in which villagers yet today dance brandishing reindeer antlers along with a number of other characters including Maid Marian, a fool, and a hobby horse.  St Nicholas, of course, drives a team of reindeer.  

 

3.  Other Scots songs on the theme of incest include “Lizie Wan,” “Babylon,” “The King's Dochter Lady Jean,” and “Sheath and Knife.”

 

4.  The song has often been recorded by French (by Tri Yann, for instance) and Canadian performers (including Michel Faubert). 

 

 5.  The story is classified as 312 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index.

6.  See Holger Olof Nygard, “Narrative Change in the European Tradition of the ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight’," The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 65, No. 255 (Jan. - Mar., 1952) for a survey of Scandinavian variants.  Among the many other variations of the story are “Tam Lin” where the man threatens extortion or rape but not murder, he turns out to be an enchanted man whom the lady frees from  his thralldom to the fairy queen.   “Johnny Sands” is a late comic epigone in which the trick leading to death is played by a long-suffering husband ridding himself of a termagant wife.

7.  The story appears in Alain Bouchard, Grands Chroniques de Bretaigne (1532).

8.  Unlikely as it seems, this interpretation remained dominant.  In 1808 an anonymous retelling was published as Bluebeard, or the Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience.

The Elasticity of Myth in “La Llorona”

The texts of “La Llorona” in versions sung by Chavela Vargas and Angela Anguilar follow the essay.


     In Guadalalajara a week ago, enjoying the Day of the Dead festivities which included numerous stages in the plazas with a variety of musical, dance, and theatrical productions, often featuring local amateurs, I halted my promenade at the sound of a young girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, with a big voice, singing a powerful and passionate version of the classic “La Llorona.” Dressed casually, without makeup of either the glamour or skull-face variety, she captured her audience with the power of the old familiar song.
     The ranchera “La Llorona” is extremely popular in Mexico. It has been recorded many times by popular singers and continues to circulate in folk performance. Also widely known in the American Southwest, its soulful tune is as well perhaps the Spanish-language song most familiar to English speakers after “La Cucaracha” and “Cielito Lindo.” Those innocent of its language may have heard the tune in Julie Taymor’s popular film Frida and their children will remember it from the Disney studio’s Coco.
     A dramatic performance enacting La Llorona is annually presented on Mexico City’s Lake Xochimilco in a production that advertises itself with the line “our nation was born from the tears of La Llorona.” [1] In Paz’s seminal The Labyrinth of Solitude La Llorona is an intermediate figure between the perfection of Mary, the immaculate mater dolorosa, and the treachery of la Malinche, Cortés’ Aztec mistress and translator. In the first identity she is the “long-suffering” Mexican mother celebrated on Mother’s Day, while in the second she is not so much wicked as chingata, “screwed.” Paz declares that all Mexicans are “hijos de la Chingada,” adding “when we shout this cry on the fifteenth of September, the anniversary of our independence, we affirm ourselves in front of, against and in spite of the ‘others.’”
     The story of La Ilorona appears in many forms and with widely varying implications. Its roots in pre-Columbian legend and its parallels around the world are extensive and significant, but not the present focus. The plot elements most commonly included may be briefly summarized. La Llorona is fundamentally the woman who has had the worst experience imaginable. Her lover, with whom she has borne children, is unfaithful to her. Often the two are racially distinguishable, with the woman an india or mestiza and the man whiter. In fury, the woman drowns her children and then, falling into despair at this act, she compounds her sin by committing suicide. She has lost salvation as well as romantic and maternal love. For her monstrous crimes, she is condemned to weep and search for her children, often snatching those who are not her own. If she is a bogeyman to the little ones, she is said also to be a siren who exacts her insatiable revenge against men by luring them to destruction through her beauty and pitiable cries.
     Even that basic narrative, which is subject to a great deal of variation in the songs, stories, poems, plays, and films of La LLorona, may generate a markedly broad range of thematic territory. A simple list of those most prominent tensions and conflicts her story evokes would have to include the following.


1. maternal love
2. male/female power relations in general
3. sexual love
4. fidelity to the church
5. racial inequality
6. national identity
7. the use of violence
8. fear of the female


     Other possibilities lurk within the same material. For instance in recent decades horror movies such as American Michael Chaves' The Curse of La Llorona have reduced La Llorona to a monster ultimately destroyed by the hero. [2] While the popular cinema represented one group of reactions to the story, scholarly journals produced another, often featuring feminist revisions. [3]
     Yet surely the context in which the story most belongs is neither the movie theater nor the university library, but within the family, either as a cautionary figure with which to frighten (and thrill) the young or in songs, either on recordings or performed by amateurs influenced by those same recordings. An examination of two versions of the song, one by senior diva Chavela Vargas, originally from Costa Rica, a longtime street singer and reputed lover of Frida Kahlo and the second by Angela Anguilar, a teenager born in Los Angeles, will suggest the elasticity of the La Llorona myth and a remarkable thematic elasticity born of underdetermination.
     As in most original texts bearing mythic material, “La Llorona” in both Vargas’ and Anguilar’s versions proceeds with oblique references rather than a linear narrative. Vargas opens by intensifying the complaint of betrayal by adding the issue of racial identity to that of gender. In a turn reminiscent of the Song of Solomon, [4] she says she is called “el negro,” while she herself adds “negro pero cariñoso,” thus projecting a suspicious or hostile social set [5] and asserting her own value. (The word “pero,” of course, acknowledges that a swarthy complexion is regarded as a deficiency.) With the liquid sounds of her name ringing in the background like the continuous soft wail of suffering humanity, La Llorona is pitched on the restless seas of love, her position imperiled by the envy of others and her vulnerable position as a woman and as a person (in some sense) of color.
     She lingers luxuriously, the listener may think, even seductively, on her appeal in the second verse in which a parallel self-description; she is “picante pero sabroso” “como el chile verde.” Here the woman draws on the archaic association of females with the vegetative earth, identifying herself with a favored New World food. The definitions of picante range from a simple “tasty,” through “hot spicy,” to “racy” and “naughty,” adding a note of adventure and danger, deepened as before, by the plangent word “Llorona,” breaking repeatedly on the shore of every verse.
     Verse three delivers on that promise of danger with an opening cri de coeur from the depths “ay de mí,” succeeded by the liquid sounds of the river water washing over a sinking object “llorona, llorona, llorona,” and then the chilling request, “lévame al río.” No longer offering herself as an exotic love object, she is consumed with sorrow and either seeking her drowned children in the river or wishing to end her own days there. On the other hand, though, she may, like the Sirens, a number of medieval faeries, or the faux-folk Lorelei be luring some man to his doom in the waters of dissolution.
     The speaker has turned suddenly from seduction to pathetic appeal. Her spectral cold intensifies her despair and devastation as she pitiably requests the favor of a blanket as though just a bit of warmth could relieve her. ”Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona,/ porque me muero de frío.” Having by her acts exiled herself from romantic, parental, and divine love, she can do little but wail.
     This touching plea is then reinforced by the central image of the song. The singer cannot say why, but the very flowers of the cemetery seem to be weeping with her as they sway in the breeze. The entire world is mourning.


No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando


     Following this poignant example of the pathetic fallacy which enwraps everything in the singer’s grief, Vargas then decrescendos with the repetition of the verses about the river and the rebozo. In the whole of the song the listener has heard nothing about any of the events of the story: the unfaithfulness of the lover, the death of the children, and the suicide of the mother. The emotion itself is foregrounded, naked of circumstance, yet traces remain, for those competent in the myth, of each of the themes inherent in the plot.
     A generation of two later Anguilar’s recording of “La Llorona” provides evidence of the song’s perennial popularity, and its words are largely, though not wholly, the same as Vargas’s. Her youthful voice, like that of the child I heard in the Guadalajara plaza, suggests that the harrowing experience of La Llorona is part of the prudential instruction that women must understand as they attain maturity. While Vargas’s version is, except for the repeated “llorona,” spoken by La Llorona herself, Anguilar’s assumes the voice of the man, admiring the lady as she leaves church. His appreciation for her beauty, amounting almost to the glory of the Virgin, is, with delicate taste, attributed to her huipil (the use of the indigenous term for the garment emphasizes the woman’s identity as an Indio). The association with the divine is reinforced by his confidence that “la virgen te creí,” (“the Virgin believes you”) and the need for the Virgin’s sympathy – the horrific murders of her children – is only heightened in drama for being unstated.
     With the heartfelt exclamation “ay de mí” Anguilar then evokes the weeping flowers, in her lyrics, not said to be in the churchyard, but rather “campo lirio” (“a field of lilies”) again recalling the Song of Songs. [6] In the tones of a Troubadour declaring the laws of love, the next verse equates love and suffering, paradoxically suggesting by the use of the term “martirio” (“martyrdom”) that her passion and pain have a penitential or redemptive quality.
     The description of the flowers which seem to weep as they are blown in the wind of fate and the request to go to the river and to be covered by a rebozo follow in very nearly the same words as in the earlier version of the song. Yet in a curious oscillation, since the persona had been the man from the start of Anguilar’s rendition, it seems now unclear who is suffering the cold and seeking as a last resort the waters of dissolution. The rebozo is, after all, a woman’s garment. Is the man villain or victim? Is the woman a traitor or the one betrayed? The formal dance of the figuration makes all of these possibilities available without insisting on any.
     More broadly, the performed versions support all the potential themes, and their signification is the more exact and precise for its economy. The mention of a few concrete specifics, when delivered with the power and depth of Vargas, Anguilar, or the anonymous young heiress of tradition I heard in Guadalajara, is sufficient to trigger access to profound emotion with psychological, religious, and political reverberations spreading ever outward.
     The glimpse of a woman’s garment, the swaying of flowers in a breeze, such details are here not atoms in the random drift of quotidian life, but rather the entry points into a mythic and visionary system built to order and interpret experience. On this framework are displayed and tested such axes of struggle as that between lovers or between an individual and the state. The story of La Llorona reflects the capacity for violence in humankind. But the most enduringly memorable sound of all is the sobbing of La Llorona, a lament at once for self, for family, for community, a complaint in the end at the all-but-impossible demands of simply being alive. We all weep together.



1. Though the phrase is quoted a good many times on the internet, I was unable to locate its source prior to the History Today article titled “The Wailing Woman” by Amy Fuller dated October 31, 2017.

2. This describes the treatment in the American film The Terror of La Llorona by Eric Elias Flores, released in 2019. Other film versions include Peón’s 1933 Mexican version La LLorona, the 1961 Mexican film The Curse of the Crying Woman by Rafael Baledón, and a Guatemalan La Llorona in 2019 by Jayro Bustamante.

3. One sample of such work is Jacqueline Doyle, “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’" Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1996), pp. 53-70.

4. “I am black, but comely.” Song of Songs I:5. In the thicket of Jewish and Christian commentary on this passage, the color is sometimes thought to suggest that the bride is Pharoah’s daughter or, alternatively and in contrast, that she has rustic origins. Symbolically the darkness has been associated with sin or physicality and with Israel’s condition in the wilderness.

5. Similar to Catullus 5 with the censure expected from the “senum severiorum” or Troubadour songs with their hostile and gossipy “jealous ones.”

6. Song of Songs, 2, 1–2. The plant in the second verse, is rendered as “lily” in many translations, including the King James, though the identification of the plant, which here seems to be red, has been disputed. Due to a close association with Mary, the white lily, the Lilium candidum has since the Middle Ages been popularly known as the Madonna lily.



Chavela Vargas 1961

Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso
Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso

Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso
Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío

No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío


Angela Anguilar 2018

Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.
Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.

Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.
Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.

El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.
El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.

No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.
No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.

Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.
Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.

Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.
Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.

Korinna and the Choral Lyric

     In our era both the composition and the consumption of poetry are often conceived as solitary activities. Since the Romantics the cultivation of individual sensibility of both writer and reader has seemed the primary aesthetic goal, yet in fact this assumption has been dominant only in recent literary history, apart from the fact that it is less than wholly accurate in any era. The greatest share of human cultural production has aimed at expressing shared values, community sentiment, received ideas, and satisfying commonplaces. In thematic terms, liturgies, folk song and story, as well as patriotic and sentimental texts and the productions of mass culture such as popular television, all are primarily aimed at reinforcing attitudes – moods and tones as well as specific beliefs – already accepted by the audience. From the Golddiggers of 1933 to the latest Bollywood extravaganza, in Broadway, Las Vegas shows, and on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera we continue to relish the spectacle of groups of attractive young dancers who speak with one voice.
     The care expended on such events in antiquity is dramatically attested by an account preserved by Athenaeus of the Spartan Hyakinthia.

 

But the middle day of the three days there is a variety-filled [poikilē] spectacle [theā] and a great and notable gathering of all [panēguris]. Boys wearing girtup khitons play the lyre, sweeping all the strings with the plectrum as they sing the god in the anapaestic rhythm and at a high pitch. Others pass through the viewing area [theatron] on finely ornamented horses. Massed choruses [khoroi] of young men now enter and sing some of the epichoric songs, while dancers mixed in with them perform the ancient dance movements to the pipe [aulos] and the singing. Next maidens enter, some riding in richly adorned wicker carts, while others make their competitive procession in chariots yoked with mules. And the entire city is astir, rejoicing at the spectacle [theōria]. On this day they sacrifice an abundance of animal victims, and the citizens feast all their acquaintances and their own slaves. And no one is left out of the sacrifice [thusia], and what happens is that the city is emptied for the spectacle [thea]. [1]

     Clearly, choral song was central to the celebrations of the divine hero in an observance so joyful and universal that both helots and foreigners were welcome to join citizens to participate.
     Something of the character of their verses may be inferred from the few scattered remains of the Boeotian poet Korinna. She specifically declares that her role is to sing, not of her own inmost thoughts, but of “the brave deeds of heroes and heroines.” (664) She pays homage to Terpsichore (“delight in dancing”) as her particular muse, emphasizing not only the movement that should accompany her words, but also their collective character. She defines her audience as “Tanagra’s white-robed daughters,” but also more broadly declares that choral lyric provides the occasion for the entire city to rejoice. (655) Her story of the contest between the mountains Helikon and Kithaeron reflects the public poetic competitions so familiar to the ancient Greeks. (654)
     Such social observances allowed the community to celebrate specifically what it held in common: in particular the myths that made sense of the cosmos. The dancing of the choric troupes expressed in their patterned loveliness a greater beauty and a more sublime order and reassured every individual that all was not merely well, all was marvelous and wonderful. In a story significant if not factual, Korinna is said to have rebuked Pindar for insufficient use of myths, to her “the proper business of poetry.” [3]
     Choral lyrics, indeed, are the source of tragic drama, both chronologically according to Aristotle and thematically. Meaning is so concentrated in the mythic discourse of the choral passages that they can often be read as a short version of the play, though many modern readers find the interactions of individual characters, in particular the stichomythia, more dramatic. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the chorus regards itself as the physical sign and even the very guarantor of cosmic order, asking, if injustice is allowed to flourish, “why then would we dance together?” [2] Conversely, the beautiful dancing reflects that all is well and reassures the community that it is not threatened.
     In this way choral lyrics like Korinna’s define and reinforce the group’s collective assumptions in a way characteristic of religious liturgies, folk stories, television situation comedies, and other popular and mass art forms. The modern reader is likely to privilege the more apparently individualistic emotions of monody from Arkhilokhos or Sappho, but in antiquity her fellow countrymen felt sufficient regard for Korinna’s choral works that they built a statue of her in her hometown and included a painting of her in the gymnasium. [4] Indeed our own culture’s most significant images may likewise be enshrined in the most popular of arts as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and others observed. When one makes Romantic assumptions foregrounding innovation, one turns away from the bulk of human cultural production.
     I knew an excellent critic, one if the best, who insisted that the point of literature was to challenge preconceptions, to indicate cracks, ambiguities, ambivalence, and contradiction in received ideas, and he was not wrong, but his view, I believe, was incomplete. The opposite function, the reinforcement of what one’s consumers already believe is an equal, indeed complementary, role of art. Neither enjoys supremacy.


1. Gregory Nagy,”Transformations of Choral Lyric Traditions in the Context of Athenian State Theater,” Arion 3 (1994/5) 41–55. Also available at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Transformations_of_Choral_Lyric_Traditions.1995.

2. Oedipus Tyrannos, 896 “εἰ γὰρ αἱ τοιαίδε πράξεις τίμιαι, τί δεῖ με χορεύειν;”

3. From Plutarch’s Moralia, Κατὰ τί ἔνδοξοι Αθηναῖοι (On the Glory of the Athenians or De Gloria Atheniensium) “ In what were the Athenians famous?, ", 347-8. Plutarch goes on to tell how Pindar earned a further criticism by then composing lines with too many mythic references, a complaint that has been alleged against him by more recent critics as well. Plato notes as well that poetry’s foundation in myth which is to say in falsity is a sign of poetry’s removal from reality.

4. Description of Greece 9.22.3

Wharton’s Undine

     “Undine.” The reader is given pause at the very first word of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. The name of the leading lady seems unlikely indeed for the child of vulgar Kansas parents, though throughout the nineteenth century the legendary Undine had been the subject of numerous paintings and poems, particularly popular among the pre-Raphaelites. [1]
     Despite links to ancient water nymphs such as naiads and nereids and the Latin name from unda (wave), the figure of Undine is not ancient, but is original with Paracelsus. He posited “spiritual” beings associated with each of the four elements invisible to the ordinary observer. Water is the realm of the undine who can acquire a soul only by attracting a human lover. Thus she is associated with promiscuous self-interested sexual activity and sometimes conflated with malicious seductresses such as sirens.
     Wharton identifies her character Undine Spragg, as “a variation on the eternal feminine.” The obvious application of this universally distributed negative archetype of woman to Undine arises from her willingness to use her extraordinary beauty cynically in pursuit of her own selfish ends, thus ruining her husband Ralph, battering her next husband, and failing to satisfy Elmer who was her first and last.
     Undine is entirely unredeemed by the book’s end. When reminded of his one-time step-father in France Paul bursts into uncontrollable sobs, and Elmer consoles him by saying, “Is it because your mother hadn’t time for you? Well, she’s like that, you know, and you and I just have to lump it.” Though his arms are “firm and friendly,” Elmer cannot help thinking in terms of money. He thoughtlessly refers to the Marquis’ poverty which had allowed him to buy the family tapestries and then comforts the crying child by assuring him “you’ll be the richest boy in America.”
     In comfort and security, Undine remains unsatisfied. “She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, as though there were other things she might want if she knew about them.” By the novel’s last lines, the vague discontent has coalesced about the wish to be the wife of an ambassador. She is a classic addict, who always lusts for more.
     If the nouveaux riches of her day seemed conscienceless and impossibly vulgar, one can only imagine what she would make of today’s America, led by Donald Trump, an utterly tasteless and ignorant buffoon whose idea of beauty is a golden toilet when it is not his own face. In the novel the descent from a version of higher culture to the mass commodified version is signified by the explanation of Undine’s out-of-the-way name – it is the brand of hair product marketed by her father, the foundation of the family fortune. The reader imagines her seeking through marriage to rid herself of her surname, so abrupt and unmusical.
     Thus Undine is, like many modern versions of myths, bathetic, an epigone, ironic in its suggestions of true art, beauty, and intellectual pursuits. Virtually all the characters are narrowly self-interested, without real values. The artist Popple is no less commercially focused than the Wall Street speculators; Mrs. Heeny is a mere appendage of her wealthy clients. Even de Chelles, the genuine aristocrat possessing the attitudes of his class by birthright, who is tender with his unfortunate stepson, seems hidebound, as much out of step with humane considerations as the others if less venal. And he, too, is broken by the modern age, forced at last to sell his Louis XV tapestries.
     The closest approach to an exception is Ralph Marvell, who regularly tries to act with integrity, but who is, in spite of America’s youth, as much an etiolated representative of an order whose time has passed as the marquis. His utter unfitness for work, complicated by vague aesthetic tendencies, may seem attractive enough, especially because he has such a generous heart, but his suicide indicates his crippling neuroses. It is as though wholesome decency has itself rotted.
     Still, Undine is in some respects, no less charged with powerful energy than the sirens who sang to Odysseus. Her sexual allure is all but irresistible. The men she selects she gets, no less than if she had been Circe. The results of her machinations are as severe as if they had been divine visitations: Ralph’s suicide and Paul’s depression foremost. Wharton seems to insist on the seriousness of her characters’ affairs in spite of their short and narrow sight. Aphrodite, or Kama, or whoever among the myriad goddesses is indeed manifested in Undine Spragg of Apex, Kansas.
     Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country strikes me as Gustave Flaubert in the process of becoming Henry James, though Wharton lacked the stylistic mastery of either. While Flaubert set about to transform, as though alchemically, the banality of Emma Bovary into the pure gold of fine art, and James in the end anticipated Proust in his detailing the velleities of highly self-conscious characters, Wharton renders Undine Spragg as simultaneously powerful and unconscious, mired in her commonness. While she shares Emma Bovary’s ambitious restlessness as well as her shallow selfishness -- Flaubert described his characters as “completely commonplace” mediocrities -- he then rendered this consideration irrelevant by his ascent to an ideal of form and the perfection of le mot juste. [2] Lacking that lofty refuge Wharton‘s novel retains its satiric focus on the monstrous development of American capitalism, a process which, despite being slowed by the New Deal and the civil rights struggle, has since continued apace.
     Yet Wharton was anything but a radical. A true reactionary in her harking back to an imagined earlier era, she resembles Trollope in her implied belief in the righteousness of an order of nobility whose time has passed. She sees not only the faults of the new and tasteless ruling class; she sees as well the faults of Mrs. Astor’s New York 400 and the European nobility. In the morass of competing egotisms she suggests that life is livable with a certain unthinking observation of the rules ornamented with a sheen of art. It may be a makeshift strategy, but it represents one way of coping with the predicament of retaining some humanity in a society governed by cash in which water spirits have become gold-diggers.


1. Artists who represented her include Eduard Steinbrück, John William Waterhouse, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Arthur Rackham. Poets who used the Undine story include Aloysius Bertrand, Henry Van Dyke, Antoinette de Coursey Patterson, and Kenneth Slessor.

2. Letter to Louise Colet, September 19, 1852.

Journey to the North

I use Wade-Giles romanization following the practice of Gary Seaman’s Journey to the North (Berkeley: University of California, 1987). The self-indulgent digression on Modern Library Giants has, I am aware, little excuse. I might argue that biblio-nostalgia is the more useful as books are ever more eclipsed.


     It is a curiosity of literature that, whereas early European works of fiction masqueraded as fact [1], in Chinese fiction overtly fantastic elements play an important role. There is, nonetheless, a continuum from the recording of precise details of everyday life in The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P’ing Mei) or the Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng) to utterly implausible tales such as the Journey to the West (Hsi Yu Ki or Monkey, in Waley’s version) with material drawn from fanciful folktales. The anonymous Journey to the North (Pei Yu Chi) translated by Gary Seaman falls clearly into the latter category. Though Seaman includes an “ethnohistorical analysis,” his work rewards the common reader as well as the specialist, with its stories of marvels staged around the borderline of the divine and human realms.
     Just as in the West, the novel in Chinese has had a long path to literary respectability. Written in vernacular rather than literary language and often arising from oral narratives, until the twentieth century, fiction could not aspire to the prestige of poetry. [2] Still, for the reader fatigued with the pellucid nature images and intricate intertextuality of Chinese poetry and the terrifically challenging conundrums of the Zen masters, Ming and Ching fiction continues to offer first-rate entertainment, whether from a realism that reminds the Western reader of Balzac or a fantastic imagination something like the world of the Odyssey.
     I myself have always felt a particular kinship with a broad range of the old Chinese poets and storytellers. [3] Reading Chuang Tzu or Wang Wei I have the illusion that the cultural and temporal distance between me and these old worthies has vanished. As a child I read Joseph Gaer’s How the Great Religions Began and the Life book The World’s Great Religions, which allowed my belated sensibility to glimpse now and then a numinous glow in spite of my rejection of my culture’s Christianity. While fascinated by the theater and complexity of Indian myth and the powerful hammerblows of the Buddha’s story, I felt at once most at home with Lao Tzu. In that grand period of inexpensive classics, I soon progressed to certain Dover reprints of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series and to a Modern Library giant, Lin Yutang’s The Wisdom of China and India.
      (The Modern Library giants, for many years of my youth, cost $2.95. Lin’s book had almost eleven hundred pages. Could there have been a better bargain? I value still my copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essayes and a complete Donne and Blake bound up together, as are Keats and Shelley – what dizzying riches! I have others as well. A copy of Ulysses, once a close companion, now unread for decades, a complete Lewis Carroll which served me and two younger generations to date, complete novels and selected tales of Hawthorne, but Lin’s is the one to which I have returned more often than any other. It was in this most accessible form that I first encountered the Vedas, the Ramayana, Shen Fu’s Floating Life, and even Lu Xun [or Lusin as he is called here].)
     Grateful as I must be to Lin (and to Waley and Pound and D. T. Suzuki, among others), as a popular work, the volume is at times, reductive, even misleading. In introducing the Chinese texts in his anthology, Lin notes the influence of the social Confucian “religion” and comments that China is generally regarded as “human, rational, and easily understandable,” more pointedly, “non-mystical.” [4] Lin does differ from this supposed consensus in several ways, but in fact Chinese writing of every era except the most recent has gloried in a vast body of fanciful supernaturalism.
     Though philosophical Taoism may well seem a sort of “natural religion” even when borne aloft by a certain afflatus, popular Taoism has always offered magicians, alchemy, divination, and an elaborate cast of supernatural beings. Zen (chan in Chinese) may itself face life straight on, offering the most austere of practices, but in China it became conflated with Pure Land Amidism (Jìngtǔzōng) which imagines access through the recitation of a spell to a fabulous realm with all sorts of exotic divinities, flora and fauna. Much Chinese fiction consists of stories of sorcerers, ghosts, gods, fairies, and semi-divine figures of all sorts [5] and even the histories commonly feature interventions from heaven and other fantastic explanations. While it is difficult to determine to what extent author and audience accepted these marvels literally, [6] they contribute whimsy, entertainment, and metaphorical value. Surely such fanciful tales have a good deal in common with the horror and science fiction films of today.
     The Journey to the West (Pei-yu chi), an anonymous novel published in its current form in the early 17th century, [7] originally appeared as one of a set of four journey narratives, one for each direction. [8] The book contains wonders enough for any fantasy film fan. Not only amazing transformations, but the most peculiar self-confrontations insist that even one’s own ego, the last retreat against the skeptic, may be questioned, divided, and exploded. The human reincarnation of the heavenly ruler, the Jade Emperor, practices austerities with such assiduity that he fails to notice when his guts are removed. His stomach becomes an independently acting turtle demon and his intestines a snake demon. (112) His meditations are so effective that the Emperor promotes him in a bureaucratic interoffice memo to “the ranks of Heavenly officials.” [9] Conquering his own innards, he makes them his generals in the service of order and virtue.
     Chen Wu is repeatedly characterized as a sort of intermediary between heaven and earth. In one version [10] he is a reformed sinner, a butcher who attracts the attention of Kuan Yin when he wraps his cleaver in his own bowels before tossing it to ensure that it is not used for slaughter in the future. In the Journey to the North he appears as the Jade Emperor, a heavenly ruler who nonetheless willfully descends to a human consciousness since he covets a beautiful plaything. At times his celestial form communicates with his human one. (109) Despite his superhuman status, he not only may be tempted; he can also be injured (132). The same is true of other figures. Kuan Yü, for example, though an immortal, still studies sutras to continue on the road to enlightenment. (134-5)
     Furthermore, the book’s translator, an anthropologist, seeks at length to demonstrate that the text is a transcription of spirit voices delivered through a shamanic medium. Whether this be in fact true or not, the book confines itself for the most part to Amazing Stories [11], while there is little of revelation or moral exhortation. The primary focus, judging from internal evidence and much of Seaman’s own contemporary findings, is to establish the bona fides of Chen Wu, the true warrior, a deity also called the Emperor of the Dark Heavens (Hsüan-t’ien Shang-ti), worshipped at Wu-tang Shan in Hupei Province and in a great many other temples. His authority is manifested in episodes resembling other superheroes, vanquishing one foe after another, while occasionally lapsing into weakness himself and slipping through his own error some rungs down the karmic ladder. He continues to climb, though, and his setbacks doubtless only endear a divinity to the fallible human, while his every triumph is a sort of plaintive wish for similar success on the more contested earthly field.
     The notion that narrative arises when the divine and the mundane mix is symbolically represented in a number of Chinese novels. For instance, the text of the Dream of the Red Chamber is supposed to be transcribed from a divine stone descended to earth to enter human form, and Water Margin’s hundred and eight heroes are onetime demonic overlords, now repentant and reborn as virtuous outlaws. Sun Wukong in Journey to the West is repeatedly exiled from celestial realms only to be readmitted until his ordeal-filled quest to fetch scriptures if finally successful. As in the Hebrew scriptures, it is when the divine and the human interact that action follows. Before the Fall, Eden must have been altogether uneventful.
     If one is to accept Seaman’s theory of the ritual role of the story, Chen Wu is a sort of culture hero/savior/granter of wishes, a wonder-working yet accessible deity not unlike Jesus. He is said to have subdued the malign forces just as he had defeated the barbarians (112), even if the latter campaign seems more to do with worldly goals than with enlightenment. Despite the rarified air of frothy fairy fancies, the hero returns to the human-centered Confucian values of filial piety and just rule. (86)
     In one of the most striking images of the book Chen Wu, in the role of the Venerable Teacher who has abdicated rule to pursue meditation in the mountains, encounters an old woman rubbing an iron pole on a boulder with the aim of wearing it down to an embroidery needle (102). Next an old man “pecking” at a cliff with an awl, intending to construct a canal tells his that “the heart is harder than stone.” (103) He persists in his work. The image encapsulates the vision of the virtual impossibility of achievement in the human realm while insisting on the value of constant striving, the continual if never wholly successful effort to exert one’s will in the face of what Marvell called “the iron gates of life.”
     The reader of this volume appreciates Wu Cheng-en’s Journey to the West all the more for its clear focus throughout on enlightenment and its consistently scintillating humor. Though the Journey to the North is a markedly less satisfying narrative, it shares to some extent Wu’s delight in wonders and his absolute confidence in the rightness of the cosmos. Here Taoism is a wondrous intersection of philosophy, superstition, and a delightfully whimsical play of imagination.
     Yet the book amounts to something more eloquent and poignant than entertainment. For me the current popular cult practice Seaman studied in which Chen Wu is yet today the goal of pilgrimages, the patron of exorcisms, the prophetic voice that continues to speak through the mouths of possessed shamans is more significant than any of the cult’s details. The story’s simple reinforcing fables, so repetitively iterated, constitute a sort of entertainment that reinforces cult practices and social attitudes through a simple sympathetic magic. Our hero wins, and thus we all win. Retributive justice prevails in spite of upheavals and struggles. As in any superhero story, the end is never really in doubt. Surely the people Seaman accompanied on pilgrimages to temples of Chen Wu in Taiwan were seeking similar reassurance. If such supernatural reassurance escapes the contemporary reader, he can still appreciate the deeply human yearning behind such a wildly fabulous story, and join with Chen Wu’s devotees in relishing a ripping tale.



1. All the epistolary novels include this pretense of lived reality as do works like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and many others.

2. Lu Hsun’s A Brief History of Chinese Fiction provides a detailed historical account.

3. Lao-Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Lieh Tzu remain for me the wisest sages. I count a small group of Tang Dynasty Buddhist poets among the world’s greatest. I find in the Transmission of the Lamp (Ching-te Ch'uan teng lu) the most profound sublimity. The appeal of Confucius and Szu-ma Chien continues to elude me.

4. See page 567, though in his introduction to “Chinese Tales” (937) he notes that “Chinese literature abounds in tales of ghosts, goblins, fox spirits, genii, and double personalities.”

5. Ling kuai is the genre of specifically supernatural narratives.

6. The same problem, of course, exists in European texts. While Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod are likely to have been religious “fundamentalists” in this sense, what of Euripedes, Plato, or Ovid?

7. Yü Hsiang-tou was apparently the editor and publisher, the source of several interpolations. See Seaman’s introduction, also published as “The Divine Authorship of Pei-yu chi [Journey to the North]” in the Journal of Asian Studies, XLV, 3 (May 1986), 483-497.

8. Ssu-yu chi, the four journeys. Among them is a version of the story of Monkey, the Journey to the West.

9. p. 109.

10. See Seaman’s introduction, page 2.

11. Amazing Stories was the pioneering pulp magazine first published by Hugo Gernsback in 1926.