The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

From Dreamscapes to Theatricality

Ling Hon Lam

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547581
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call "emotion-realm" ( qingjing ).

Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

CHAPTER ONE

Winds, Dreams, Theater

A Genealogy of Emotion-Realms

1. QING OF SOURCE UNKNOWN

“Out of qing forms the dream; out of the dream forms drama.”¹ Thus spake the playwright Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550–1616), whose The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭, 1598) did more than any other work to define the cult of qing (emotion, passion, sentiment, affection, love) at the turn of the seventeenth century. Based on a short tale about Du Liniang 杜麗娘, who dies dreaming about a lover she never met and then revives thanks to her ineradicable passion, the play has gained unrivaled fame for celebrating the power of emotion to transcend life and death. According to the genesis of drama laid out by the playwright himself, however, emotion and dreams are not just themes or leitmotifs of the play, but are its origins in the most profound sense. Drama can be traced all the way to the innermost part of the human psyche where emotion resides, with the dream as the intermediate inner “stage” on which intangible emotions take visual form for the mind’s eye and serve as prototypes for theatrical performance.

This genesis’s implications for our understanding of Chinese literary history and of the history of emotion are intertwined. For the former, modern scholars regard drama as deriving from the grand tradition of lyricism at the core of Chinese culture—a tradition allegedly predicated on expressing the emotive interior rather than mimicking external actions.² For the latter, since emotion is understood as the interior awaiting expression, our modern account of emotion in traditional China can only be a story of suppression and emancipation. Tang Xianzu is thus often portrayed as the liberator of qing from a conservative ethos, and modern critics love to cite the playwright’s defense of his romantic plays, in which he allegedly contrasts himself with his Neo-Confucian mentor Luo Rufang 羅汝芳 (1515–1588): “What the Master advocates is [morally sanctioned] nature (xing 性); what I advocate is emotion (qing).”³ Our understanding of emotion and its historical unfolding has affected the way we appreciate Chinese drama, and vice versa; both spring from the premise about a continual exteriorization of the interior.

But that genesis can be cast in a different light. In his foreword to The Peony Pavilion, Tang Xianzu writes: “Qing, of source unknown, runs ever deeper. The living may die of it, and the dead may come back alive.”⁴ Instead of presuming that emotion is the inner origin of dreams and drama, the playwright throws into question the locus of emotion from the very beginning. Does this “unknown” simply refer to some yet-to-be-identified stimuli from material reality, so that emotional reactions still count as something within us? Or, more radically, does it refer to a certain exteriority that is irreducible to matter (since Liniang is affected by a dream without connection to any object of desire) or fantasy (otherwise, we can no longer talk about a “source unknown”)? If emotion is no longer presumed to be interior, how should we make sense of the genealogy from qing to dreams and to drama, with the meaning of each and every term in it radically reconsidered?

2. UNDER THE WEATHER

The same complication can be found in Pan Zhiheng’s 潘之恆 (1556–1622) reflection on a performance of The Peony Pavilion: “Only those capable of being infatuated are capable of having passion (qing); only those capable of having passion are capable of portraying the passion.”⁵ At first glance, Pan can be understood as saying that even acting entails expressing the “true self” based on one’s own emotional experience.⁶ Such a reading has to presume that qing quintessentially originates in the self and hence underwrites the self’s truthfulness. Yet “the trajectory of passion” (qing zhi suo zhi 情之所之), as Pan traces it, lies less in the self than in the uncharted beyond: “It is not known where it begins, where it ends, from what it separates, with what it rejoins. Somewhere between being and nonbeing, faraway and nearby, existence and extinction, this is where it must go, but it is not known why it is so.”⁷ Uncanny and unbound, this inscrutable notion of qing complicates the classical view that emotion is anchored in the heart, stirred up inside, and emitted from within.

These complications do not so much break with the classical view of emotion as underscore a much broader horizon of emotion within ancient sources. The unbound nature of qing is already suggested in the “Great Preface” by the related trope of “winds” or “airs” (feng 風). Before mentioning that “affections are stirred within [the heart]” (qing dong yu zhong 情動於中), the “Great Preface” gives us what precedes the stirred heart, namely, the encompassing atmosphere, the pervasive “winds” that stir things up (feng yi dong zhi 風以動之).⁸ Qing is therefore a trembling sphere in which a continuum of motion brings things in sync with one another, with the heart being no more than one of the relay stations. This discourse of winds is traceable to “the discovery of the body in the Fourth Century B.C.,” in which the body was first regarded as a composition “constituted from a series of ever more refined vital energies—qi 氣, jing 精, and shen 神” from the outside world, and hence the program of self-cultivation was placed “within an overarching vision of a dynamic cosmos.”⁹ But the flip side of this cosmological order is that the body, itself never a self-contained substance, is constantly open to being harmed by the same energies. Saturating every corner and penetrating all thresholds, the winds from the second century BCE on came to be seen as a pathological agent of either malady (in medical discourse) or melancholy (in sentimental lyrics).¹⁰ Just as the otherwise self-enclosed body is diffused by the currents of air permeating its porous surfaces, the melancholic feeling is not an inner state of mind but an enveloping “mood” or atmosphere in which we find ourselves. Disclosing emotion as a spatial structure or sphere, the topos of winds is an emotion-realm organized around the dimension of embedment. Simply put, the human subject is embedded in the mood, not the other way around. More precisely, the subject does not exist prior to or independent of the embedment; rather, to borrow Ben Anderson’s discussion of the “affective atmosphere,” the embedding winds embody a “spatiality of sphere,” “occurring beyond, around, and alongside the formation of subjectivity.”¹¹ It is this “occurring beyond, around, and alongside” that constitutes the “embedment” dimension of winds.

This “embedment” dimension harbors the primordial experience of the exteriority of emotion, which is intimately felt in daily life and yet often misrecognized as external causality. We need to differentiate the exteriority of emotion from two versions of exogenous determinism. The first version draws on the traditional notion of “external things” (waiwu 外物) inciting emotional responses (ying 應) which can further be understood in terms of the ancient cosmology of “correspondence” or gan ying 感應 (literally, “to be affected and respond”). In Chinese poetics—some scholars thus argue—poetry is deemed spontaneous and involuntary as emotional feedback; under the sway of external stimuli, poetic composition allegedly circumvents the deliberation of the human subject.¹² And yet, in positing emotion as a response to the external world, this view still adopts a communication model that presupposes a subject whose interiority is initially separate from that world. Seen from this perspective, “The Great Preface” would just conform to an “established paradigm of inner and outer” by delineating the “boundaries” between human psyche and its environment. Emotional expression, in its supposedly “perfect correspondence” to the world, would remain a psychological topic only.¹³

The second and more recent version of exogenous determinism, which should be differentiated from the exteriority of emotion, stresses social and cultural processes through which emotions are experienced, articulated, categorized, and distributed. Such sociocultural interpretations have been deployed to critique the Western reduction of emotion to biological phenomena contra rationality.¹⁴ Paradoxically, this approach, along with the breakdown of the feeling/thinking dichotomy, serves to extend rather than displace the majesty of the interior, usually in the name of cognitive psychology. Emotional experience is now regarded as an “overlearned cognitive habit,” acquired through concentrated attention and motivated training with “deep goal relevance” in a social environment.¹⁵ Cognitive studies have opened up emotion to historical investigation,¹⁶ but it privileges interiorization as the essential structure of emotion. Given that emotion allows us to achieve intended purposes, it is one step away from the claim that (even without knowing it) we make our own decisions and judgments about how we feel;¹⁷ emotion thus becomes the ultimate assertion of self-sovereignty.¹⁸

By contrast, an approach premised on the “exteriority of emotion”—by which I mean a spatial structure that allows us to be outside in the world getting along with one another, as instanced by daily references to atmospheres we have generally discussed in the prologue—sidesteps the issue of causal relationships between exterior and interior and hence avoids the reterritorization of interiority. The ancient Chinese topos of winds illustrates this in a historically specific way. The embedding winds traverse not only individuals and communities but also all categorical divisions (source and target, purpose and outcome, input and feedback, vehicle and content) required to articulate causality. In the Han exegesis, feng is at once (1) poetry that winds give rise to (hence a major poetic genre called feng or “Airs”), (2) the oral delivery (variably written as feng 諷) by which poetry is transported, (3) the practical functions of political admonition (feng ci 諷刺) and custom transformation (feng jiao 風教 or feng hua 風化) that poetry carries out, and (4) the ethos (feng su 風俗) that poetry edifies and transforms.¹⁹ Short-circuiting input and feedback and permeating its own medium and effects, the cosmological force named winds therefore does not figure as an extrinsic “cause” but renders causality as such only secondary.

This topos of winds outlives antiquity and remains a prominent stratum that underlies the understanding of emotion in early modern China. In the words of the classical tale collection History of Emotion (Qingshi 情史, 1630s) compiled by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–1646):...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Weather and Landscape
• 1. Winds, Dreams, Theater: A Genealogy of Emotion-Realms
• 2. The Heart Beside Itself: A Genealogy of Morals
• 3. What Is Wrong with The Wrong Career?: A Genealogy of Playgrounds
• 4. “Not Even Close to Emotion”: A Genealogy of Knowledge
• 5. Time-Space Is Emotion
• Notes
• Index