A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography.

• Author: Nienhauser, Jr., William H.
• Position: Book Review

By DAVID SCHABERG. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 205. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2001. Pp. xvi + 503. $50.

This is an exhausting and exhaustive book. The "past" that David Schaberg is concerned with is the Spring and Autumn era. The "patterning" he finds in the literary features of the two great sources to the "history" of that period--the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu. In a series of eight essays divided into two main parts--Speeches and Narratives (in a sense, the yen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and shi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of ancient Chinese scribes)--Schaberg argues that "Speeches ... provide the intellectual armature for historical narrative and allow the views of the historiographers to emerge in articulation with historical particulars. Narratives ... set the state for speeches ... [and] ... also assert the existence of a world in which Confucian values, expressed in a Confucian rhetoric, make for predictions that are canny, criticisms that are just, and policies that are successful" (p. 12).

It would seem that Schaberg has read and no doubt re-read Zuozhuan and Guoyu in an attempt to make sense of their approach in the context of early Chinese historiography. The book he has written is as rich as the texts themselves and a summary is not easy. Nevertheless, let me try. The book begins with a carefully written Introduction. If readers find time for nothing else, they should read this section. Schaberg's descriptions of the two works certainly rival the entries in Michael Loewe's Early Chinese Texts; witness the following paragraph on the Zuozhuan:

The Zuozhuan is a collection of anecdotes and exegetical comments related to the Chunqiu, a terse chronicle of events in the state of Lu and associated states during the years 722 through 479 B.C.E. In its current form, the Zuozhuan, like the chronicle, is organized around the years of the reigns of the twelve dukes who ruled Lu during that period. For each year the compilers give several anecdotes and comments, for the most part maintaining chronological order on the level of seasons, months, and days. The anecdotes concern all the major northern states of the period, as well as such southern states as Chu, Wu, and Yue. At just under 200,000 characters, the Zuozhuan is by far the longest of all pre-Qin texts. As early as the second century B.C.E., legend held, quite implausibly, that the work had been written by Zuo Qiuming, a contemporary of Confucius (p. 5). (1) Schaberg is under no illusions about recreating Spring and Autumn "as it really was." He admits that with regard to the history of this era, "the facts will always be just out of reach, [so] that no representation will quite do them justice, and ... a work will sometimes look more honest when it strains against its own conventions of depictions" (p. 11). Such is the book at hand.

Part I, "Speech and Patterns," focuses on the Guoyu. The four chapters in this part, "The Rhetoric of Good Order," "Wen and the Meaning of Verbal Art," "Intelligibility in the Extrahuman World," and "Order in the Human World" are strung on the Confucian leitmotif of li [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which Schaberg renders "ritual propriety" and finds in the pronouncements of the many speakers he aptly cites and accurately translates here. Schaberg also establishes a paradigm of early Chinese rhetoric (utilizing the work of Ulrich Unger and others) which is not dissimilar to early Western concepts in some aspects (the three types of speeches, for example, are found to be deliberative, forensic or predictive, and epideictic in both cultures, with deliberative by far the favorite in early China). The featured character of this first part is the...