The Pleasures of the Familiar in Literature

     I have been reading Cooper's The Spy, enjoying it, and wondering why. Cooper is certainly vulnerable to criticism yet even D. H. Lawrence whose scorn could be withering devoted two chapters to him (as he did to Hawthorne and Melville) and declared he loved the Leatherstocking books dearly. [1] Writers like Cooper and Scott (his most significant model) are sometimes today dismissed as children's authors, though it would be an odd twenty-first century child who would relish their prose. Other popular novelists such as Dickens can rise to true greatness through capacious imagination, sophisticated imagery, and melodious rhetoric. Even the rapidly produced best-sellers of Trollope are richer by far and, for all the author's acceptance of received ideas, develop more complex characters (though the scene be fuzzed by genial rose-colored glasses). What motive, then, beyond literary history and American nationality, attracts me to this author whose very writing career is said to be accidental?
     Quite clearly Cooper's heroes are unalloyed in their heroism, his damsels fainting and compassionate, his villains irredeemable. The descriptions of nature are conventional and workmanlike, but, for all the desire to establish a distinctly American literature, never very individualized or memorable. His themes are utterly reductive. I would readily agree that the ambiguous and the mysterious define a particular realm for literature inaccessible to other forms of discourse, and that one function of art is to unsettle preconceptions and to suggest new insight. Innovation and novelty are surely essential to the development of fiction over time, and a beauty that makes the reader weak in the knees is a characteristic of the highest prose.
     Yet these qualities are characteristic of only a portion of worthy fiction. Though the Romantic era and the Modernists celebrate novelty, art also seeks to transmit a culture's matured ideas, its preconceptions, if you will. For most readers a competence in a recognizable style is preferable to idiosyncrasy and obscurity. Familiarity is more appealing than originality which may strike the consumer as nothing but gratuitous obscurity. For millennia oral narrative was predominantly of the "conservative" sort, understood by everybody, and this remained true until very recent times in folk stories, religious stories, and legends. Under contemporary capitalist conditions most people consume mass art in movies, television shows, best-selling novels, comic books and the like, all of them highly conventional forms. Surely hundreds of Americans could retell the story of Breaking Bad for one who might know about Harvey Birch, the double agent of the American Revolution. Yet the fan of HBO and the admirer of Cooper have a great deal in common despite their separation in time. The student of literature, in particular the literary theoretician, can ill afford to ignore the bulk of fiction to focus only on the elite transgressors and code-breakers.
     Lawrence was typical of many artists since the Romantic era in his rejection of the typical. To him the social consensus is inevitably a lie. Thus to him Cooper is that thing despicable because conformist and conventional, a “gentleman.” He describes Cooper's work as “a wish-fulfilment” and the author as “a correct, clock- work man,” who “stayed very safe inside the old skin.” Lawrence, of course, was a Modern, one of those whose entire program is rebellious and contrarian. Such values are neither the whole of art nor necessarily characteristic of the finest works.
     A great many texts confirm readers' expectations not because of the audience's lesser intellectual powers but because in this way they fulfill a function of art at least as important as the criticism of assumptions, the laying bare of contradictions, irrationalities, and mysteries, and the forging of new literary techniques. Indeed, the concentration of prestige on works that strive for the new and contentiously condemn the ordinary has led to the marginalization of literature itself in contemporary society. Though I am a lifelong admirer of Rimbaud, Pound, and the Dadaists, I realize that they are grouped around one end of the spectrum and that literature as a whole comprehends the entire range from conventional to unconventional. If Cooper has a low reputation among such of the Mandarins as have not specialized in the study of his work, the fact is due to the fact that his work is located rather far toward the less currently fashionable side of the spectrum.
     There is a pleasure to hearing the relation of what one already thinks one knows. All works are a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the more conventional are more clear and easily read, their comparative predictability and simplicity requiring less mental work. Just as in relation to physical exercise, one would scarcely care for either constant languor or constant exertion. The traveler may relish new sights and contacts, but most people prefer those the friends and scenes they have seen countless times best of all, and in all eras the most widely read works have relied heavily on convention.
     Furthermore, there is an unquestionable aesthetic pleasure in iteration itself. One may be delighted by the unexpected, but in life and in art, the deep pleasures of the familiar are far more common. Listeners prefer mediocre musical works with repetitions, themes and variations, to the most sophisticated modern non-repeating compositions. People applaud the mere appearance of a favorite character in television situation comedies because they know what will follow. In a sense they are cheering for their own competence. Popular art, oral narrative, religious ritual, and the like all appeal specifically because of their familiarity. We never entirely lose the child's welcoming reception of the words "once upon a time." It is a promise of what will follow including, in modern times at least, a satisfying happy ending, implying that all is right with the world. Lawrence would have sneered.
     The pleasure in formal iteration is paralleled by a similar pleasure in having one's opinions confirmed by a story’s themes. The values and worldview of a culture are codified and transmitted through art that stresses what many have in common. In oral cultures through Homer stories regularly suggest the ideas on which all agree. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of this fact is n religious scriptures, accepted as absolutely true and taught to every successive generation.
     Though associating with those of similar views is a universal habit, its opposite occurs as well in modern culture: the enjoyment of peculiar or perverse ideas which the reader does not in fact share. This taste is the basis of the popularity of the antihero in the modern era and the celebration of bizarre yet talented artists such as Artaud and Burroughs.
     Even if one does not share the author's opinions, the mere fact of encountering easily decoded values persists. A non-Christian may read George Herbert or even Aquinas and enjoy knowing an odd doctrine such as the Trinity without in the least believing in its truth. I love decoding familiar iconography in Christian and Hindu more than encountering enigmas. Though my values are not those of Dr. Johnson, I savor his sympathetically.
     What does this mean in practice? Cooper's prose style, though it displays the elaborate syntax and lengthy periods characteristic of the educated Latinate mode of the day, has very few figures of speech apart from a few so conventional as to be barely perceptible. His writing has, in fact, little individuality; indeed, a unique or unexpected turn of phrase would be out of place.
     Characters have few traits, but those few are constantly repeated. This Wharton père is invariably concerned about his estate and, secondarily, about his daughters. The girls' lovers are exemplars of honor, manliness, and courtesy. Caesar is always the loyal servant except for those occasions when he is rattled or superstitious. Birch is never mentioned without making a point of his enigmatic behavior. One learns nothing new or surprising about any following an initial appearance.
     In terms of theme, as well, Cooper could hardly be simpler. The American revolutionaries are in the right, and Frances is more acute than her sister for her partisanship. Yet British and Americans alike may be honorable, may be in fact “gentlemen,” though it is the higher classes that possess most virtues in either case. The Cowboys and Skinners and Nancy Haynes are fair examples of the meanness of society's lower ranks.
     Clever and rich as it may be, few people are likely ever to read Finnegan's Wake, whereas the more mildly innovative Portrait of the Artist will always find readers, recreational as well as academic. The disparity does not arise from the public's laziness, nor is the more elite work necessarily of higher value. Indeed, it is only though convention that many of the ends of literature are obtainable. If Cooper is to a considerable degree an imitator of earlier models, he is no different from artists of all times and places. The stigma attached to convention has been so magnified in the last few hundred years that it has come to seem self-evident and natural. Oral and popular literature have enjoyed a resurgence of serious consideration in recent decades. Perhaps the time has come to reconsider the second-rate status assigned to writers like Cooper.



1. References to Lawrence are to his masterful and entertaining Studies in Classic American Literature which, for all its foibles, I find to be virtually always on the mark.

2. The spy of the title is an exception. In his case, though, he is presumed to have only mercenary ends, and it is precisely the unlikeliness of his heroism that allows his subterfuge to succeed. George Washington who appears disguised and then overshadows the action like a deity is no perfect because his social status is so high.

Epiphanies in Dubliners

I concur with the conventional literary historians who credit Chekhov and Joyce for developing the modern short story that does not rely on highly dramatic events but finds greater meaning in the depiction of something that looks like a typical tranche de vie. The stories in Joyce’s Dubliners not only lack remarkable characters and highly dramatic incidents, they are written in a finely crafted but generally ordinary, slightly elevated style mixed with colloquial dialogue with none of the idiosyncrasies of Ulysses (not to mention Finnegan’s Wake).

One might justify the presentation of open-ended narratives of what could pass for “ordinary” people by simply noting that a life is defined more by its mundane, oft-repeated routines than by the few dramatic intrusions of drama such as combat or crime. Yet this approach is not what Joyce had in mind. His own rationale was based on his ill-defined notion of “epiphanies,” or revelatory moments which may occur either during life crises or during days that seem outwardly unremarkable.

Joyce’s concept of epiphanies recurs in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake, as well as in a list he kept of such moments, but the fullest exposition occurs in Stephen Hero. There Stephen tells his friend Cranly that the artist must be ever watchful for “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” To him the “spiritual eye’s is always “groping” “to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised.” With his Thomistic training, Stephen identifies “claritas” which is “quidditas” with the moment of epiphany. [1] The “thing which it is,” the whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.”

In this form the epiphany could be suggested by anything at all, just as Zen masters identify the Buddha indifferently with a staff, a flower, a hedge, or a shit-stick. Yet often readers discount the incidental details and seek an epiphany in a story’s climax (though the conflict may be primarily a psychomachia). Thus, to some a Joycean epiphany is a moment of unusual insight or realization, the turning point, perhaps, of a life. Even this second definition has two forms depending on whether the insight occurs for the character or for the reader.

Yet the notes in fact labeled “Epiphanies” and eventually published with Joyce’s Poems and Shorter Writings, while they are clearly raw material for his fiction [2], fit none of these three definitions well. Most of the moments he recorded in his list labeled are to some extent vague and confused, fragmentary and obscure, seemingly a far remove from claritas. Though Joyce made use of many of these brief notes to enhance his fiction’s verisimilitude, none indicate any revelation to the people observed.

This range of possible definitions might, however, all be suggested by stories in Dubliners. For a majority of the narratives, the characters experience no clear self-realization. Little occurs in “The Sisters.” The story is centered not in Father Flynn’s death itself but in the tone of unease, paralysis, and corruption. Surely the boys’ experience in “An Encounter,” while it doubtless struck them as odd, made little impact. “Araby” likewise might be a day little differing from the average in the protagonist’s life. Frustration over the bazaar seems only too routine to the protagonist. This daily repeated disappointment is in fact the theme. Nothing will change. “After the Race” is fundamentally a sketch of the absurdity of Jimmy’s social climbing. The dawning of the day is accompanied by no new realization on Jimmy’s part. For him even his remorse is already discounted, part of the price he will pay for what seems to him classy company. The two very unchivalric young men of "Two Gallants" are surely acting as they habitually do. The evening is representative rather than exceptional. In “Clay” the loveless Maria who sings “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” is unchanged in her pitiful isolation, the church being her only solace against death. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” describes habitually time-serving political operatives for whom this election is little different from those past and yet to come. The struggle of “A Mother” describes what is surely habitual behavior for Mrs. Kearny. In all of these, as in Becket, the lack of movement is the point. It is the very absence of an epiphany from the point of view of the characters that is significant. The reader may see their paralysis plainly, but for the participants the narrated episodes bring nothing new either in circumstances or in self-consciousness.

In others the story does retain something of a traditional narrative arc, including a dramatic crisis though still often without suggesting much potential of insight for the main characters. “The Boarding House,” for instance, represents a competition of venality, in which Mrs. Mooney ‘s self-interest wins out over Mr. Doran’s irresponsibility as Polly sits by passively. There is a decisive moment, albeit just after the story ends, implying a lifelong marriage marred from the start, but there is no indication that the view of any of the characters is broader or more accurate as a result. “A Little Cloud” depicts Chandler’s fecklessness, too shy to read poetry to his wife, and his envy of his more successful literary friend Gallaher. He does seem to have some measure of self-realization at the end when, Byron even having failed him in his attempt to kindle warmth from his wife and he bursts into tears at the end. Farrington in “Counterparts” seems as though he may have “hit bottom,” though the reader cannot tell whether this descent may have been repeated often in the past. At any rate the wretched clerk seems as gripped by his self-destructive patterns at the end as at the start. In “A Painful Case” Duffy nurses “unacted desire,” holding back from an affair only to regret it when his would-be lover dies, perhaps a suicide. Here one might guess that his reflections lead to some sort of reevaluation, though whether it is to be productive remains uncertain. The intervention of Kernan’s friends to bring him to a retreat in “Grace” carries no guarantee of change and the glimpse the reader has of it provides little basis for hope. The likeliest case for an epiphany in the sense of an awakening to self-knowledge is perhaps the poignant tale of "Eveline." When the title character falls back in fear and fails to follow her suitor abroad, she may perhaps know herself better, though only in defeat.

"The Dead" I believe to be in a class by itself, since it is longer, more complex, and concludes with a substantial interior monologue and a bravura rhetorical flourish. Gabriel, unlike most of the characters in Dubliners is clearly processing his thoughts, seeking equilibrium in the face of his wife’s lost love for another, while retaining generosity toward her, unlike most of the petty or weak characters of the other stories. In this story the main character and the reader find weighty meaning in events that, to a casual observer or outside of a work of literature), might seem unexceptional.

Yet surely for most readers to overwhelming impact of Dubliners has little to do with individual psychology or anyone’s insights. The strongest effect of the book is its tone. Virtually all of the characters are weak, selfish, incompetent, blinkered, depressed, caught in a meaningless repetition of activities that fails to exercise their abilities or humanity. The oppressive weight of the church and the British government merely add new layers to the purgatorial existence they have built for themselves. Joyce’s tone would be nihilistic in its lack of values were it not so deeply sympathetic to the city of the damned the reader encounters in Dubliners. The Magi were greeted with a glorious epiphany, but for Joyce that Christian confidence is lost, and the twentieth century epiphanies he offers are ragged epigones and hardly epiphanies at all.



1. Though there was no direct influence, this notion is strikingly similar to the ”haeccittas” Gerard Manley Hopkins derived from Duns Scotus. Another parallel is Aldous Huxley’s report of his experience on mescaline of what, following Meister Eckhart’s usage, he calls “Istigkeit” or “Is-ness.”

2. See Ilaria Natali, “A Portrait of James Joyce’s Epiphanies as a Source Text,” Humanicus #6, 2011.

Every Reader's Hopkins

This is the seventh in my series meant to introduce or reintroduce major poets through presenting a few of their best-known works with some details of their lives but without footnotes.


     Much poetry today in the USA is written in vernacular conversational American English. Recoiling with horror from rhetoric which had long been the science of the artful use of language, writers seek to sound like the guy next door. Those who employ highly stylized, “artificial” language are viewed with suspicion, though more thoroughly dehumanized word collections are acceptable in avant-garde contexts. Yet poetry has always been, among other things, about beautiful, melodious language, artfully distinguished from everyday usage. And few writers could construct verbal music like Gerard Manley Hopkins. His sprung rhythm worked quite wonderfully for him (though imitators fail) and his orthodox Catholicism glitters with sufficient mysticism to make it not just universal but exciting.
     Born to an affluent, educated, and pious High Church Anglican family, Hopkins admired the pre-Raphaelites and studied art. Yet spirituality claimed always his first allegiance. Even in secondary school he pursued experiments in asceticism, on one occasion consuming no drink until he collapsed. While a classics student at Oxford he met Newman and converted to Roman Catholicism, eventually becoming a Jesuit.
     Acceptance of Roman Catholic orthodoxy did not bring him resolution and the study of Ignatian discernment left him still conflicted. His poetry reflects his lifelong ambivalence, passionately embracing life yet feeling that self-denial is inherently superior. This contradiction led him to give up poetry for Lent, to destroy much of his poetry when he was ordained (declaring that he meant to write no more except by order of his superiors, and to ask that his largely unpublished body of work be burned after his death. The contradiction between his delight in the world and his aspiration to leave the physical behind reached crisis in his homosexuality, most clearly expressed in his youthful infatuation with Digby Dolben whom he had met at Eton.
     One concept through which Hopkins sought to harmonize his joyful celebration of the creation with his taste for self-denial was “inscape,” a notion he derived from Duns Scotus' haecceity or “thisness.” Hopkins would have agreed with the author of the Gospel of Thomas whose Christ says “Split the stick and I am there” (not to mention Zen practitioners and others to whom a gaze sufficiently deep into any object will lead to the divine).
     In “Pied Beauty,” a shortened (or curtal) sonnet, Hopkins focuses not on the unity but the variety in which he finds the numinous. His afflatus carries the reader with ease through his idiosyncratic syntax and insistent alliteration.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

     Yet his sense of the presence of the divine did not bring Hopkins serenity. Toward the end of his rather short life, he suffered from ill health, his duties that seemed sometimes onerous, and he found himself living in a sort of exile in Dublin. Combined with his lifelong depressive tendency and the fierce inner conflicts in which it manifested, he experienced what since St. John of the Cross has been called “the dark night of the soul.” His “terrible sonnets” or “sonnets of desolation,” dramatize the suffering he felt at his failure to connect with God. He tastes the mood of the damned and confesses the “selfyeast” of original sin. The deity is “away;” his worst “scourge” is simply “to be.”

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.


     Hopkins was doubtless strikingly original, but few today feel as his first editor Robert Bridges did, a need to apologize for the poet’s “Oddity” and “Obscurity.” One need not enter into Hopkin’s elaborately devised and even more meticulously executed ideas on meter, derived in part from his knowledge of Old English and Classical poets, to relish his lines as pure sensual experiences. Stylistically unique they may remain, but their abstruseness generally vanishes with reading out loud while their music is thereby intensified.
     The accent marks in “Spring and Fall” might seem mannered and recherché at first, but they lead the read to such melody that their role is clear to most readers.


Spring and Fall
to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

     Though this poem has little of the wondrously inventive descriptive imagery of “Pied Beauty” (apart from “wanwood leafmeal”), it has instead the eloquent elegance and simple profundity of sentiments like this passionate couplet:

Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder.

     And the concluding two lines are sufficiently pregnant that Christianity itself might be largely reconstructed as a commentary. Though Hopkins himself may have felt self-indulgent in his art and insufficiently devout in his spiritual practice, to most readers his work is profoundly satisfying in both its aesthetics and religion. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his racking himself with doubt, his work is outstanding in conveying the jouissance of both the pure beauty of sound and the mystical celebration of the world.

The Paraklausithyron Blues

     Paraklausithyron, a “lament by the door,” is a topos in classical Greek and Latin poetry. Though a great deal of variation is apparent even in ancient examples, the typical early paraklausithyron in Asclepiades, Callimachus, Tibullus, and Horace was the complaint of a would-be lover, shut out from his beloved, often garlanded and drunk from a komos earlier in the evening. [1] Shorn of these specific cultural details, the motif of the exclusus amator is universal. Most love poetry speaks of love-longing, not of fulfilled desire. The literal dramatic situation of a man lingering outside the door of his love-object occurs in fact, and the frustrated wish to enter vividly expresses is a wish for emotional or intimate access. The convention appears in medieval Occitan poetry and modern American popular song. A particularly rich vein of paraklausithroi emerges from the distinctly American love poetry of the blues.
     An analysis of the use of the paraklausithyron in blues lyrics has two significant implications. First, the wide distribution of the trope demonstrates the fact that many literary conventions from genre to specific devices such as rhetorical figures or images have arisen world-wide, even when no avenue of influence is plausible. People have hit upon the same verbal technologies to express the same human feelings.
     Secondly, like all literary conventions, the paraklausithyron is far from static. It is in fact highly dynamic, transforming instantly into a panoply of possibilities. Indeed, in the earliest recorded use of the word [2], it is used to challenge Greek gender assumptions by asking why a female lover might not demonstrate “the height of a passionate affection” with such a song no less than a man. Plutarch’s question might be followed by another asking why the voice might not come from within, and a third suggesting that the voice might be either accepting or rejecting the other’s love. With this simple schema, three bipolar oppositions generate eight possibilities [3] based on the male/female, inside/outside, acceptance/rejection dualities.
     As a matter of fact, virtually all of the theoretical possibilities in this array are found in early blues. [4] The locus classicus must be Perry Bradford’s 1928 “Keep A Knockin’ an You Can’t Get In” though enough earlier analogues exist to label the song traditional [5]. In this most popular group of versions the speaker is within, refusing access to the knocker. In several early versions including the popular recording by Louis Jordan (1939), the speaker refuses the caller admission due to being occupied with another lover. In Little Richard’s very popular 1957 cover, he therefore suggests “come back tomorrow night and try again.”
     This is hardly the only form the paraklausithyron assumes in the blues. The male speaker inside may, as in the instances cited above, reject the woman as he does also in Marshall Owens “Try Me One More Time” (1932), Kokomo Arnold’s “Busy Bootin’” (1935) or “Your Ways and Actions” (1938) or Big Bill Broonzy’s “Skoodle Do Do” (1930). On the other hand, he may receive the knocker with open arms as in Smoky Harrison’s “Iggly Oggly” (1929) or Sammy Hill’s “Needin’ My Woman Blues” (1929).
     The persona inside is female and may reject the man outside as in Anna Bell’s “Every Woman Blues” (1928). A woman in the same position may also welcome him as in Ethel Waters’ “Memphis Man” (1923) or Huddie Ledbetter’s “My Friend Blind Lemon” (1935). A woman outside is rejected in Lil Green’s “I’m Wasting My Time on You” (1942).
     Many other variations may arise from the same convention. In Lonnie Clark’s “Broke Down Engine” (1929) the speaker complains in spite of being with his lover as his “yellow woman” knocks, causing him to exhort his companion to greater efforts on his behalf. In Blind Willy McTell’s 1931 version of the same song the speaker is knocking and this is merely one of a series of details indicating his depression. In “Hurry and Bring It Back Home” by Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) 1928 the knock at the door brings him the news of his lover’s departure. The list of variations is limited only by how tightly one defines the convention.
     The blues use the same resources as other poetry and often resorts to similar conventions. The laments of a frustrated lover, excluded by his beloved have resounded around the globe and through the centuries. Just as language depends on a tension between what one has heard said by others and the unique content of every specific statement, poetry likewise is always a product of earlier poetry, though every utterance is new. The paraklausithyron was effectively employed by many artists who would have found nothing but mumbo-jumbo in the term just as Classicists would be unfamiliar with portions of the rural Southern vocabulary. Yet the early blues singers deployed the resources of language with a subtlety and expressive power equaling that of any Roman elegist, Provençal troubadour, or Elizabethan sonneteer.



1. See Asclepiades GP 11 HE = AP 564, Callimachus 64, Ovid Amores 1.6, Catallus 67, Horace Odes 3.10 and 3.26, Tibullus 1.2, Propertius 1.16, Ovid Amores 1.6.

2. Plutarch, Amatorius 8.

3. This is, of course, two to the third power.

4. For the most part I used again the excellent concordance of pre-war blues lyrics posted by Michael Taft at http://www.dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/framconc.htm.

5. This song, recorded by James “Boodle It” Wiggins enjoyed considerable popularity though other versions, including one by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band were recorded at about the same time. Earlier versions existed such as Miller and Lile’s “You Can’t Come in” (1921), Sylvester Weaver’s “I’m Busy and You Can’t Come In” (1924) and Irene Gibbons “You Can’t Come In” (1924). Stuart Berg Flexner cites a 1912 “Bawdyhouse Blues“ with the words “I hear you knockin', but you can't come in/ I got an all-night trick again.” (Listening To America, New York: Simon and Shuster: 1982, p. 454). Including the later variant titled “I Hear You Knockin’” attributed to Bartholomew and King, the song was recorded by many artists including Mississippi John Hurt, Louis Jordan, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and The Everly Brothers.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”

Trinidadian Smut

     The word smut generally carries nasty associations. Apart from referring to pornography in a belittling tone, it denotes filthy ruined grain. Yet in the sunny Caribbean, in Trinidad and Tobago at any rate, smut refers to a genre of calypso (and some soca) which, like the hokum songs of the blues, celebrates sexuality in a cheerful, good-humored, even innocent way. Calypso, like many blues, country music, and reggae songs foregrounds the lyrics and, while calypso songs may comment on politics, food prices, or cricket, they often portray the relations of men and women with clever and high-spirited double entendre. Far from the love-longing so prominent in much love poetry from antiquity to the present and from China to southern France, these songs celebrate physicality with joy and wit.
     In the oeuvre of the Mighty Sparrow one finds the classic “Big Bamboo,” [1] a sort of phallic paean enriched with gleeful nonsense syllables, richly humorous symbolic manipulation, and the peculiar inclusion of the line “working for the Yankee dollar,” presumably as a counterpoised reality principle balancing the deeply satisfying bamboo of the title. Among the songs mentioning “cock” in the title are Sparrow’s “More Cock” and “Benwood Dick,” Lord Raburn’s “Cock and Pull It,” and Crazy’s “One Foot Cock.”
     Women’s genitals, too, receive praise in "Bag ah Sugar Down Dey," “Saltfish,” and “When It Bald, It Better.” In the Duke of Iron’s tune “Miss Constance” the eponymous lady boasts, “I may be small, and yet/I can take on any runner when the track gets wet." The actual suffering of poverty is temporarily obscured when Sparrow sings “Sell the Pussy,” urging his girlfriend to the street to earn money for food. The slang usage of pussy enables a list of other songs as well: Sparrow’s “Ah Fraid Pussy Bite Me,” Lord Kitchener’s “My Pussin,” Calypso Rose’s “My Little Pussy,” Lord Blakie’s “Hold the Pussy,” and Lord Brynner’s “Roslyn Pussy” among them. Calypso also contributes to the widespread motif of songs which play with the suggestive possibilities of describing a tattooed lady [2] with the Sparrow’s relentlessly physical song about the woman who has his image on her backside: “She Sits on Me.” The hazards of intimacy result in Lloyd Simmons warning about the problem of “Hair in Your Teeth.”
     Though a good number of smut songs are quite straightforward, depending only on the affective dynamo of sexuality to insure their energy, the finest tunes are those in which the lyrics are developed with ingenuity and originality. Among these I would count Lord Kitchener’s “Muriel and de Bug” [3] which recounts how the bug must have been “very intelligent to find that area” while never hinting at the actual sensations associated with bedbugs. Similarly George Symonette’s “Don’t Touch Me Tomato” [4] sketches a market lady altogether in control of her inventory and irritated at the customer “hard as a coconut” who keeps poking and squeezing without being able to make up his mind. Lord Melody and Sir Lancelot’s “Shame and Scandal in the Family” ignores any possible suffering that might be associated with real world extra-marital philandering with its deftly turned plot [5] and effective punch line. The amused listener accepts as natural the assumption that everyone is likely to be sleeping around. Even mortality is lightly treated in Lord Intruder’s “Jumbie Jamborie” [6] in which the speaker’s principal fear at witnessing the rising of the dead is a certain amorous deceased female. Intruder manages to include lines commenting on such current topics as Brigitte Bardot and the threat of nuclear holocaust.
     But the specter of the undead and the threat of Armageddon cannot alter the buoyant tone of the music, its infectious danceable rhythms, and its humorous, self-mocking jocularity. The relations between the sexes may at times be rocky and all sorts of misery can intrude on human lives, but there will always be a party beckoning at which all is played for laughs. Just as tragedy by embodying true horror in beautifully metrical lines worked out with every sort of poetic device can enable people to continue living, so in comedy everything becomes a well-turned jest and the rhyme guarantees that no one is ever really hurt, and Buster Keaton and the Roadrunner and Inspector Clouseau will reenter the fray in spite of having repeatedly made fools of themselves.
     And they will hardly be deterred by tropical moralists such as the author of an article titled “Soca Music and Moral Decadence” [7] to whom “immorality and public sexual vulgarity have surpassed the nadir of their bottomless pit.” While “back in the day” “’smut’ in Calypso was respectful of and to women” and featured “a serious, message-oriented story-line.” As an example of the more wholesome fare popular a generation ago, the writer cites the Mighty Sparrow’s “Mae Mae,” a song in which the persona meets a “girl” and they immediately proceed to sexual activity. After a heated encounter, “Sparrow humbly and respectfully suggests that Mae Mae should take the remainder of the rum and give it to her ‘man’ when she got home.” This, to the critic of contemporary immorality, is an example of “civilized, respectful, moralized and enjoyable ‘smut.’” To this Caribbean Cato the woman in Lord Kitchener’s “Sugar Bum Bum” is treated “with utmost respect and human dignity.” [8]
     If even its critics are reluctant to condemn Trinidadian smut, its fans are nothing less than fervent in its support, feeling, perhaps, intuitively, that to dance to these tunes is to dance to the rhythms of life. Quite willing to leave to other genres the mysteries, tangles, suffering and ambiguity of male-female relations, the fan of this bright and bouncing music revels for a time in an Edenic innocence where one may dance with delight, glorying in the fundamental facts of human biology.




1. See Klaus de Albuquerque, “ In Search of the Big Bamboo,” Transition No. 77 (1998), pp. 48-57 for a survey of the myth of the “big bamboo” said to be possessed by those of African ancestry.

2. Such songs include Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” sung by Groucho Marx in At the Circus as well as the “The Tattooed Lady” popularized by the Kingston Trio. The last sounds like a music hall song (even without the singers’ use of comic English accents), but this “Tattooed Lady” seems to have folk origins in Arkansas or Missouri though it has been collected from British sailors as well. (Might it have been a vaudeville or medicine show number?)

3. Irwin Chusid, the veteran collector and broadcaster of smut calypso as well as other genres of music, used Muriel’s Treasure as the title for one of his shows on WFMU. The “Bedbug Song” was also recorded by the Mighty Panther, Lord Invader, and others.

4. Covered not only by Calypso Mama but also by Josephine Baker.

5. Bested, perhaps, only by Latham and Jaffe’s novelty tune “I’m My Own Grandpa.”

6. Often called “Zombie Jamboree” or “Back to Back and Belly to Belly,” the song was covered by many artists, notably by Harry Belafonte and by the Kingston Trio. The song was originally worked out in an improvisatory performance.

7. By university lecturer Kwame Nantambu in the March 25, 2008 Trinidad and Tobago News Blog at http://www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog/?p=477.

8. Indeed this professor is far from alone in his indulgent attitude toward what might seem to some sexist or unseemly. The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian for February 28, 2014 reports another scholar, this time described as a feminist, celebrating “the social value of Sparrow’s oeuvre.” As a personal testament, she recalls the liberating effect of Sparrow’s performance of “raunchy” songs when he performed at her high school. Another unlikely fan is the Nation of Islam’s Minister Louis Farrakhan, once a calypsonian with the sobriquet The Charmer, who not long ago praised the ingenuity of rap poetry, comparing it to calypso, and proceeded to begin improvising with a broad grin supported by the inherent joie de vivre of the genre.

Afloat on the Ocean of Words

     Every artist in every medium is in effect shouting out “Look at me! Turn to me from all other phenomena!” And consumers of art collaborate with the considerable ego implied by this cry. Certainly in literature, whatever the theme, the author is always the hero. The critics, indeed, all readers, acknowledge sufficient value in the writer’s moves to follow every decision recorded on the page with careful attention. The creative artist’s abilities are fetishized, often considered mystically resistant to analysis and attributed to talent or inspiration. Yet at times the figure of the author can seem suddenly a specter, an insubstantial illusion shimmering even as it threatens to vanish altogether.
     If the proposition sounds incredible, that is because one if the most persistent of our Romantic received values is the celebration of individual Genius. Though that word is not attested in the sense of exalted intellectual power until the late eighteenth century this use seems now only natural. The nascent Romantic Edward Young celebrates the “man of genius” for his originality, comparing him to the less impressive imitator. According to Young only such an innovator “raises his structure by means invisible.” For him and for many today the genius “partakes of something divine” since “genius is the god within.” [1] In his best-seller titled Genius Harold Bloom refers with approval to Emerson’s description of genius using the very same phrase “the god within.” Bloom begins his book with the “unique” “supreme” genius of Shakespeare which he defines as evident from the poet’s “universality,” “the pervasive illusion (is it illusion?) that he has peopled a world, remarkably like what we take to be our own, with men, women, and children preternaturally natural.” The concluding oxymoron epitomizes the broader paradox that the individual most marked off from the rest of us has somehow earned that singularity by his ability to represent the lives of all.
     Yet prior to the Romantic era the successful artist was more often regarded as the best trained, likely the one who had spent an apprenticeship emulating the work if a master and the models of earlier eras. Thus according to Winckelmann “the only way for us to become great, and indeed, inimitable – if this is possible – is by imitating the ancients.” [2] Here again the neat confidence of the formulation is offset by the self-contradiction. Only by imitation do we get free of imitation, that is, become inimitable. Little wonder that the great art historian felt moved to include the qualification “if this is possible.”
     In more recent decades advanced thinkers have questioned the concept of the autonomous god-like creative author. A couple of generations ago Barthes declared “The Death of the Author” [3], citing Mallarmé as a predecessor and claiming that every "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," that every work is "eternally written here and now," and that the “meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader,” and not the writer at all. At about the same time, Foucault asked “What is an Author?,” [4] noting, as though it were an established fact, that “criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance –or death - of the author some time ago” and concluding with the question “what difference does it make who is speaking?” The case against what might be called the authority of the author by these two and their fellow travelers is weakened by the fact that they mean to displace the artist as the creative fountainhead only to step into the same role themselves as enlightened post-modern critics, juggling conundrums for the amusement of their less celebrated peers or cracking the whip and exasperating their more commonsensical critics into growls and roars. Few readers are likely to be willing to trade Shakespeare for Derrida.
     Long before the rise of deconstruction and allied theories, though, the artist’s status had been discounted or questioned. Most early poets and sculptors were anonymous. Homer does not emerge as an individual. Only after a certain date do we begin to see ancient Greek ceramic artists sign their work. We have no clue as to exactly which caryatids of the Erechtheum were crafted by Socrates’ father. Even in the Middle Ages anonymity is the rule in early lyrics and stained glass. In traditional societies the local carver is rarely celebrated as a “genius,” but rather is regarded as a craftsman like a carpenter or a potter. Folk songs and fairy tales are generally not attributed as original work by the person from whom they are collected. After all, according to the Grimm brothers’ dictum, the people as a whole compose (“das Volk dichtet”).
     Indeed, who can name the author of the myth of Oedipus? Sophocles certainly, though Aeschylus and Euripedes both wrote lost plays on the same theme. But Oedipus appears as well in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Homer and as the tragedians had doubtless learned the story orally in childhood. It was the common possession of the Greek people. Though the view that authorship of folk works was in some mysterious way “collective” was championed by Francis Gummere among others, it had steadily lost favor and was finally supplanted by the careful and innovative work of Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. [5]
     What Parry and Lord found was that the singers of epics in the Balkans in the 1930s were able to improvise oral poetry by using a set inventory of phrases, formulae, and lines, most of which were common to many “authors,” but that their performances varied widely in quality and content, even between successive recitations of the same piece by the same singer. The poet might say, and might in fact think that he is exactly reproducing his own version or the version of his mentor, but the texts invariably showed pervasive and significant differences. Though working in a genre in a way collective, some performers were talented and others pedestrian. The audience and the occasion always influenced the poem.
    The insights of Parry and Lord allowed for the first time an understanding of previously obscure characteristics of Homer as well as proving useful in the study of Beowulf, Pentecostal preachers, blues, and other oral forms. These works are demonstrably shaped by an entire community and a tradition though any individual work is also the product of the skill and vision of an individual. Just as art regularly both questions and affirms received ideas, it can only arise from a social consensus but through a single subjectivity.
     That dialectic is evident though less marked in non-oral work as well. Every writer shapes work in part with audience in mind. Each uses phrases, images, and conventions (sometimes twisting or altering them) learned from earlier texts. The concepts that populate a particular vision of reality are based on those borrowed from others. Even opposing sides of issues in a given era are generally founded on the same basic vocabulary and assumptions. The assumptions of one’s own era are virtually invisible, while those of earlier periods are more easily discerned. [6]
     The notion of genius is fostered by the supposed opposition of tradition and innovation in literary production. In all periods art is produced by crafting altered versions of the inherited templates. While during many earlier eras past masterpieces provided the model the artist could aspire to equal, for two hundred years novelty has been privileged. The radical has been admired. Yet in fact the author who defies, opposes, or omits a recognizable convention makes use of it just as much as the one who repeats it. Each use of convention – in any of these ways -- allows for the more efficient expression of information. A writer who rebels against an established trope or other device by defying it is governed by the same code as the writer who employs it. No inherent value accompanies either use of conventions or defiance of them.
     The themes in literature and the language people use to express them evolve over the centuries with their own dynamic, finding expression through the agency of people active in each era. Thus one might say that Doctor Johnson, rather than being the author of his poetry, is himself written by the eighteenth century English Zeitgeist while James Joyce is an inevitable product of the altered intellectual atmosphere over a hundred and fifty years later. Just as the leopard’s fur appears in a spotted pattern without conscious planning and the clouds assume a particular aspect in every moment of the day, people’s writing is generated by the entire population of thinking humans in a grand polyphonic symphony continuing now for thousands of years. [7]
     Of course, the secondary symbolic elaboration of literature only intensifies the opposition inherent in all language. One can only make use of words and phrases which a listener or reader can understand. Every utterance is based on earlier listening experiences, yet each combines the pre-existing elements in a new way. A wholly original composition could only be meaningless gibberish. On the other hand a work that exactly repeats an earlier one like Borges’ Pierre Menard whose “translation” of Don Quixote exactly reproduces the original might seem equally otiose, but Borges insists to his readers that Menard’s Quixote is “almost infinitely richer” as it includes the new author’s own experiences. Surely he was only saying in a whimsical way that meaning accumulates, that a Horatian ode today is more meaningful than when it was written, though its increase in significance has nothing to do with Horace.
    Borges’ playful fancy resembles T. S. Eliot’s celebrated insight about the whole of literary history changing with every new work. To Eliot “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it . . .the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.” After complaining about the modern tendency to privilege “those aspects of [the poet’s] work in which he least resembles anyone else,” he insists on the contrary that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” but rather that “his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” [8]
     Finally, and perhaps most destructive to the myth of the semi-divine author, literature cannot be said to occur until the text is received by a listener or reader. Barthes was quite right in locating the consumer’s interaction with the text as the moment when significance arises. Thus the reader may well be said to be the actual composer of the work. Though some texts are comparatively rich in possibilities or may arrive already well-plowed with a history of past readings, the mere words are barren until they are read. In a sense they provide only potential arenas for constructing meaning; they cannot deliver it ready-made.
     The problematics of authorship are then rather complex. The causes of literary works must be shared it seems by the writer (who might be called the “efficient cause”) with the uses of language that the writer has heard or read, the assumptions of the era of its composition, and the literary tradition preceding (and, later, following) its date. Add to these the interpretations, reactions, and allusions of others, all dynamically evolving from the work’s first appearance onwards, inevitably compounded by misunderstandings, the imprecision inherent in all language, and the data lost to noise in every transmission. Where then can the author be located?
     Perhaps the choice between the multiple authors responsible for the text is a problem better transcended than solved. The identity in Buddhism between viewing the world as reality and as illusion or in Hinduism between the individual and the Whole may provide a model for that between the writer and the entire corpus of human words. [9] This link may provide the base for the scent of the divine which underlay the intuition of Young and Bloom when they imagine “the god within.” Hovering above the alternatives, the reader may embrace both or neither or may select the one with the greatest heuristic value in a given analysis.
     As readers we float atop the ocean of words, each text a whitecap, briefly rising and then sinking into the vast body of language beneath, leaving it ever so slightly changed. From the perspective of an individual the whole is never in sight and one cannot even take exhaustive account of the waters in which one paddles, yet in every human society people engage artful language in a vigorous and ever-new interchange which by dint of constant effort keeps us for a time buoyant. Our babble goes on, though we know in the end that we and our words with us will fail and fall into the general ferment not to vanish but to suffer a sea change and later return reshuffled and refreshed.




1. Conjectures on Original Composition (1759).

2. Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and the Sculpture of the Greeks (1755).

3. Originally published as “La mort de l'auteur” (punning on Le Morte d'Arthur) in Aspen 5-6, 1967, reprinted in Image-Music-Text in 1977.

4. A talk originally given in 1969, the essay appears in Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127.

5. See Milman Parry, "The Making of Homeric Verse." The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 and Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

6. The forgeries of Han van Meegeren, for instance, which fooled many connoisseurs and experts when they were new now can be seen to have obvious affinities with the styles of the nineteen-thirties.

7. A clear parallel exists with certain technological developments, such as the invention of automobiles, motion pictures, or nuclear weapons in which a number of researchers all but simultaneously develop what is fundamentally the same idea. The invention of the electric light need be attributed neither to the inexorable processes of impersonal history nor to Edison’s singular genius.

8. The concept of a sort of super-organism of literature resembles the Gaia hypothesis advanced during the 1970s. See James Lovelock’s popularization Gaia: A new look at life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2005) and Lynn Margulis’ The Symbiotic Planet (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

9. Perhaps the best initial texts for these views are Nagarjuna for Buddhism and Gaudapada for Hinduism.

Tang Stories

     A popularizer of Chinese culture notes that the Chinese are generally regarded as “humanistic, non-religious, and non-spiritual.” [1] Indeed the national sage Confucius sounds as though he has scant regard for the imagination when says with pride that he transmits without creating. [2] Apart from the very worldly and prudential counsels of the national sage, one finds the mercilessly pared-down preaching of Zen which contrasts so dramatically with the florid mythological tendency of Buddhism in Tibet. Reading even the highly fanciful Zhuang Zhou it seems clear that all the magic is metaphor and that the fundamental basis of philosophic Daoism involves nothing supernatural. Yet the traveler in China will find putatively Buddhist temples animated by no end of representations of semi-divine characters having nothing to do with Buddha, many so lovely and frolicsome or so fierce and menacing that they seem to belong more in fairy tales than in myths.
      Similarly, Chinese fiction seems to arise from a combination of factual historical chronicles and narratives full of marvels of the sort represented today by horror and science fiction stories. Some date the first flowering of Chinese fiction to the same era most celebrated for lyric poetry, the Tang. In his groundbreaking history of Chinese fiction Lu Xun proposed the name chuanqi for Tang Dynasty short stories in Classical Chinese in which the most fantastic events are presented with realistic frames in setting and time, with the narrator frequently claiming either personal or second-hand experience of their truth. [3]
     Apart from this pretense of veracity (familiar to readers of Defoe, Swift, and even Samuel Richardson) the stories share the appetite for the marvelous one would expect from the generic name which might be translated "tales of strange events." Many are didactic with more or less explicit moral or philosophical themes. One of the earliest and most widely available collections of such stories in English translation is Tang Dynasty Stories. [4]
     Virtually all of these tales are concerned, often centrally, with the main character’s twists of fate while possessed by romantic love. This may seem surprising, given that for Confucius ren, often translated virtue, altruism, or humanity, but sometimes as love, focuses on filial piety and defense of family as a whole. [5] Marriages were thus arranged by senior relatives and “romantic” behavior (as in ancient Greece) often relegated to relations with courtesans or extra-marital lovers.
     Yet in the Tang Dynasty Stories, the supernatural is generally associated with women and even on the “natural’ register of experience, men are often totally infatuated after only a first glimpse of a female beauty. As in the literary worlds of ancient Greece and the European Middle Ages, the Tang lover appears possessed by a potent force beyond his control.
     In Shen Jiji”s “Ren the Fox Fairy,” the first story of the collection, the beloved is a fox fairy (huxian). [6] Though such beings may be malevolent, in this story Ren, whom Zheng had encountered by chance while traveling, becomes his exceedingly loyal wife. Her fidelity and obedience become her undoing, however, when her husband, ridiculing her “superstition,” insists on bringing her on a trip she knows will be fatal. Passing a pack of hunting dogs, she reverts to fox form and is torn to pieces. In a lovely and poignant image, her clothes are left on the ground like a discarded cicada shell. Her fidelity is praised (“few women nowadays are equal to this!”) and Zheng is criticized for simply appreciating her beauty without inquiring more deeply into her nature. Her name is the same character as the Confucian word for virtue, humanity, or charity. As a paragon of faithfulness, Ren recalls heroines such as Sita in the Ramayana or the Griselda of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale.”
     This story is exemplary for the collection, and presumably the genre, as a whole. Supernatural women of various sorts appear in one narration after another often causing the hero to fall utterly in love with her after a first sight. [7] In five of the stories [8] the woman is in fact a supernatural being, while in most of the others she is diminished though only to the level of a noble.
     Three of the stories in this collection have themes other than male/female relations. In Li Gongzuo’s “Governor of the Southern Tributary State” Chunyu Fen, passed out from drinking, spends an entire career in a mysterious land which he finds upon waking to have been a single afternoon in the kingdom of ants. The narrator assures the reader he has confirmed the details of the story from Chunyu himself and has relayed his story as a reminder of the insubstantiality of worldly glory. Slyly evading direct reference to people, the author notes, “If even the mysteries of ants are so unfathomable, what then of the changes caused by big beasts in the hills and woods.” [9]
     In Li Fuyan’s “The Spendthrift and the Alchemist” the potentially disruptive power of affection appears in another form. The wastrel Du Zichun eventually gains prosperity through a magic helper. Following the dictates of this advisor, he remains silent while enduring many trials including being transformed into a woman. He is about to become an immortal when he sees his child killed and cannot resist calling out. The magician laments that, having conquered all the other passions, he could not rise above love.
     Whereas both of these anomalies could be considered Daoist themes with their reminders of the vanity of ambition and the pitfalls of desire, the final tale in the volume, “The White Monkey,” in which Ouyang’s wife is abducted and impregnated, seems to rely on fantasy alone for its appeal. Lu Xun is of the opinion that it was meant to insult a specific family, claiming its prominence could be traced to a monster in the family tree. [10]
     In most of these Tang stories, though, the most accessible implications of these themes include the power of eros expressed in the projection onto female figures, the significance of fidelity in love relations, and at times the conflict of power relations and passions. Daoist themes questioning desire appear as well. The stories indulge a strong preference for the marvelous and the unlikely in both the inclusion of supernatural elements and coincidence while at the same time regularly framing the narrations with details of time and place and specific identity in pursuit of verisimilitude. Arising from earlier anecdotes illustrating philosophical teachings, legendary annals, and leading toward the highly episodic structure of Chinese novels, these chuanqi paralleled the development of the vernacular bianwen during the Tang.
     As in Europe fictional narratives were not valued as were philosophical or poetic writing, allowing the authors of these short stories imaginative license in style, theme, and plot. They shed light on the universal taste for the marvelous and on the origins of fiction in legend and elaborated anecdote. In theme they suggest the prodigious power of sexual desire with its concomitant pleasures even while suggesting the vanity and peril of love. Though they were written during a time in which marriage was often arranged on the basis of financial and familial strategies, the stories prominently feature immediate attachment and passionate love while also valuing fidelity. As forerunners of the “four great Chinese novels,” Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber, these tales provide ta necessary foundation, apart from their own value as divertissements, curios, and psychological sketches.



1. Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of China and India. In this marvelous Modern Library Giant (over a thousand pages for $2.95 when I acquired it) I read for the first time many texts to which I returned in mature years. Lin in fact dissents in part after noting this commonplace.

2. Analects VII, 1.

3. During the Ming Dynasty many chuanqi were made the basis for operas. See Lu Hsun [Xun], A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964). During the same period a different genre, the bianwen or “transformation texts,” were composed in the vernacular by literate storytellers who were not classically educated. These often combined poetry and prose. Their content, originally Buddhist in character, came to include a variety of material.

4. Trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang intro. by Zheng Zhenduo, Panda Books edition 1986 originally published as The Dragon King’s Daughter (Foreign Languages Press, 1962). Gladys Yang, who had been raised in China by missionaries, became the first Oxford graduate in Chinese. She married fellow student Yang Xianyi and the couple returned to China as supporters of the revolution. In 1968 they were accused of being “class enemies” and both were imprisoned for four years before being sent to remote factory farms as laborers.

5. See Analects XII. Similarly Bollywood films, produced for an audience for whom arranged marriages remain the norm, unfailingly celebrate romantic love.

6. Huxian (fox spirits) or húli jīng (fox immortals) are common in Chinese legend. The latter term is used today to refer to a woman who seduces a married man. Similar figures appear in Japanese and Korean narratives with the names kitsune and kumiho. Such fox fairies may be blamed by traditional medical practitioners treating cases of koro.

7. This motif appears clearly in seven of the thirteen stories in the book: “ Ren the Fox Fairy,” “The Dragon King’s Daughter,” “Prince Huo’s Daughter,” “Story of a Singsong Girl,” “Wushuang the Peerless,”” The Kunlun Slave,” and “The Jade Mortar and Pestle."

8. “Ren the Fox Fairy,” “The Dragon King’s Daughter,” “The General’s Daughter,” “The Jade Mortar and Pestle,” and “The Prince’s Tomb.” In addition in “Prince Huo’s Daughter” the principal female character is metaphorically called “a fairy has come down to earth” and in “The Spendthrift and the Alchemist” the main character is transformed into a woman.

9. The poetic skepticism of “Governor of the Southern Tributary State” is similar to that of Shen Jiji’s “The World Inside a Pillow,” a celebrated story whose author is represented by a different story in this collection.

10. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, 87.