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Historiography, Ethnography, and Narrative Regulation

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Historiography, Ethnography, and Narrative Regulation Chapter 3 Competition: Historiography, Ethnography, and Narrative Regulation I stare into the black lenses. He goes on. “A reasonable inference is that the wooden slips contain messages passed between yourself and other parties, we do not know when. It remains for you to explain what the messages say and who the other parties were.” —J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians ike the prose- poetic fu, historiography became a medium through L which Han writers challenged or reformulated the classical ideal of tributary empire. In the paradigm enshrined in the Book of Documents (“Tribute of Yu”), the ruler’s foreign and domestic subjects symbolically enacted the hierarchical po liti cal order through the annual exchange of material tribute. While the fu was embroiled in the Han politics of things (e.g., related to lavish spending, tribute, exotica), historiography introduced a new politics of persons. Both ancient and modern scholars have understood Han historiography as a way of introducing new dis- cursive subjects into Chinese literature. Th ose groups perceived by clas- sicists to pose the greatest threat to the Han dynasty tributary order— commercial profi teers at home and the enemy Xiongnu confederacy abroad— were identifi ed as new types of people through historiography’s innovative style of sustained historical, geo graph i cal, cultural, and bio- graphical description. Th is chapter re- examines the repre sen ta tion of these occupants of Han frontiers and markets in the Han dynasty’s two historiographies: Sima Qian’s Shiji, composed before and during Emperor 144 Genres Wu’s activist reign in the Former Han period; and Ban Gu’s Hanshu, composed during the po liti cal establishment of classicism in the Later Han period.1 As addressed in chapters 1 and 2, classical scholars traditionally as- sumed that literary works had a moral or po liti cal function. In this context historiography became particularly associated with the task of giving “praise and blame” (bao bian ⿓㊧) to the lives and actions of those it recorded. Th us the historiographic act was ideally another tributary transaction, part of the transmission as well as the historical repre sen ta tion of the ideal world order. Th e Hanshu praised— and self- consciously adopted— the Shiji’s new literary format, which comprised Basic Annals, Treatises, Tables, Hereditary Houses, and Accounts. Th e Hanshu also copied long passages from the Shiji, leading some scholars, ancient and modern, to treat certain chapters of the Shiji and Hanshu as more or less interchangeable. Other critics have, however, drawn atten- tion to the Hanshu’s explicit criticism of the Shiji’s ideology, especially concerning the latter’s approach to classicism and commerce. Th is chap- ter explores diff erences in the literary patterning of ideology in these two works. It argues that the Shiji’s use of ambiguous meta phors, authorial comments, and competing narrative perspectives disengages the histo- riographic act from the normative Zhou order. Within the China (or Central States) of the Shiji the businessperson (the “commodity pro- ducer” huo zhi ㊜ᥙ) replaces the state as the moral center of the market; at the frontiers, the Han envoys rather than the Xiongnu require regula- tion. Although the Shiji’s “Account of the Xiongnu” (Xiongnu liezhuan 1. As discussed in the introduction, the Shiji and Hanshu were composite texts and the Shiji has a particularly fraught transmission history. Th e convention adopted here will be to take Sima Qian as the author of the Shiji (with his father, Sima Tan); and to take Ban Gu as the author of the Hanshu (with his father Ban Biao ῎၀ [3– 54 ce], his sister Ban Zhao, and others as co- authors). When examining the Shiji’s postface and end comments to individual chapters of the Shiji and Hanshu— all of which take on an authorial voice— the main aim here will be to reconstruct the text’s authorial persona (e.g., the “Grand Astrologer” constructed from the authorial comments that follow ,(ᘀ] at the end of Shiji chaptersذthe Grand Astrologer says” [Tai shi gong yue ஷ߯“ rather to provide a historical biography of individual authors. One might in this way approach Chu Shaosun’s early additions to the Shiji from the fi rst century bce (al- though generally not discussed in my book) not as inauthentic writings to be dismissed, but rather as distinct fi rst-century BCE texts in themselves..
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