Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, “are not just one symbol system out of many, one of the innumerable possibilities to externalize and dramatize what humans think. . . . They do not just stand for something . . .

  they do something. . . . [Animals] are symbols with a life of their own.”3

  Animal Fables and Beast Epics

  While oral traditions of animal tales show a remarkable degree of similarity all over the world, the distinct traditions of written literature have treated animal tales each in their own way. Ancient Egypt and the ancient Near East had highly developed animals tales, and many of them eventually found their way into the corpus of Aesopian fables that made its way from Greek literature into Latin verse and prose, and from there passed through many adaptations

  into the modern languages of Europe.4 Another genre that contributed to

  the later developments of European animal literature was the bestiary, a

  description of animals that ascribed specific virtues and vices to each kind of creature, whether mythical or real. Fables and bestiaries tended to be short and pithy, but Hellenistic literature also knew the beast epic, in which animals engaged each other in battle in the manner of the Homeric epics. The only

  fully preserved work in this genre from the classical period is the Batrachomyomachia, on the war of the frogs and the mice. It is very likely that this work was preceded by an epic account of the battle of the mice against the

  weasels (or cats), but while only fragments of this Hellenistic work have been preserved, the story of the war of the rats against the cats remained popular in the visual arts of medieval Europe and beyond and was repeatedly adapted in long narrative poems in the Middle Eastern world. We have versions in

  Arabic, Byzantine Greek, and Turkish, each in literary genres native to these languages. The best known of these Middle Eastern works is the Persian

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  (ca. 1300–ca. 1360). In this narrative poem of nearly two hundred lines a cruel cat established himself as lord of the mice by a false display of great piety; when the mice eventually rebel they are defeated despite an initial victory.5

  The tradition of extended animal tales in verse also survived in the West,

  where the Latin tradition culminated in the Ysengrimus of the twelfth century.6 In this mock epic the wolf is repeatedly the victim of the dirty tricks and superior eloquence of the smaller fox. The fox in turn would become the central character of the medieval vernacular traditions of beast epic in French, German, and Dutch and their multiple later transformations down to the

  twentieth century.7 Medieval Persian literature, which like its medieval European counterparts knew a vibrant tradition of epic poetry, produced its

  own stellar beast epic in The Conference of Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar (twelfth century), in which thirty birds assemble for a pilgrimage to the Simurgh,

  telling each other stories on the way.8 Perhaps inspired by the rhetorical pro-ficiency of the animals in beast epics, medieval Europe also witnessed a

  flourishing literature of debates between birds, with its best-known examples the anonymous The Owl and the Nightingale and Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules.9

  South Asia is yet another region that has produced a great number of

  animal tales.10 In the written tradition these tales were first of all adapted as fables. The most famous of these fable collections was the Panchatantra, which may have reached its present shape more or less between the second and the

  sixth centuries. In contrast to the collections of Aesopian fables, the Panchatantra, which claims to be a mirror for princes, organizes its tales within a frame story, as is common in Indian story collections through the ages.11 The Panchatantra enjoyed a great popularity wherever Sanskrit was the language of culture, so beyond South Asia also in medieval Southeast Asia. It was

  adapted into Persian, too, by the middle of the sixth century, from which

  language it was translated into Arabic and Syriac, eventually in subsequent adaptations also reaching medieval Europe.12 The South Asian animal tales

  also were adapted as jataka, tales on the former lives of the Buddha Sakya-muni. Nearly five hundred jataka are included in the Buddhist canon, two hundred of which are animal tales. In such adaptations, the tale is followed by a section in which one of the noble animals in the story is identified as the Buddha in an earlier existence, while the other animals are identified as earlier incarnations of his relatives, disciples, or enemies.13 But while South Asia has a rich tradition of epic, it did not witness the rise of a tradition of beast epic, if we define a beast epic as a narrative poem of epic length in which the main characters are animals acting and speaking like human beings. One of

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  South Asia’s classic epics is of course the Ramayana, which features in one of its sections the monkey king Hanuman, but the majority of this epic’s

  cast consists of humans. Moreover, apes are one of the kinds of animals that obviously straddle the border between animal and human because of their

  remarkable similarity to humans and their uncanny ability to imitate human

  behavior. Another such animal (quite popular in Indian traditional narrative) is the parrot, because of its ability to speak (or at least to mimic human

  speech).

  The Scandal of Talking Beasts

  The Chinese oral tradition of animal tales is as rich as any other tradition in the world. This is amply borne out by the tales that have been collected in several waves over the course of the twentieth century.14 But throughout its long history of more than three millennia the written tradition of Chinese

  literature has been quite inhospitable to animal tales, especially to tales that showcase speaking animals. This is at first sight rather surprising because the Chinese tradition knows no myth that clearly separates animals from

  humans and appoints man as the lord of all creation, as is found in Genesis.

  In early Chinese accounts of the origin of human civilization, mankind starts to distinguish itself from animals only when the early sages teach their fellow human beings the social norms of communal life as well as the techniques

  of warfare, communication, and agriculture. Chinese philosophers are also

  quite willing to credit animals as tiny as insects and worms with human

  emotions, virtues, and vices.15 If human beings were influenced by the virtue of the reigning sage, so were animals. The staunch Confucian Han Yu (768–

  824) not only wrote a congratulatory essay for his patron when his cat nursed both its own kittens and those of another cat, explaining the cat’s behavior to have been inspired by his patron’s virtue, but later in his career, while serving as prefect of Chaozhou, was also believed to have induced the dangerous alligators that were harming the region he administered to leave by his own virtue.16

  The tendency to credit animals with sentiments only became stronger in

  the centuries following the introduction of Buddhism into China in the first century CE. In order to explain the working of karma, Chinese Buddhism

  credited each living being with a single indestructible soul ( shen) that remains the same through endless cycles of reincarnation; it would also stress the

  virtue of vegetarianism by highlighting the belief that any animal one might want to consume could very well be the reincarnation of an ancestor, quite

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  possibly one’s own father or mother. This of course contrasts starkly with

  Christian theology, which adamantly denied a soul to animals. Also, rein-

  carnation was not the only process of transformation that crossed the

  borderline of species or kind. From ancient times, many kinds of animals

  were believed in China to originate through transformation from other kinds of animals, and some kinds of animals were believed to change seasonally

  into other kinds (and back). Once the belief became more widespread that

  human beings can turn themselves into gods or immortals, their animals

  were welcome to accompany them to their celestial abodes. From the begin-

  ning of the first millennium, we also encounter increasingly the notion that animals, plants, and things, if old enough, through strenuous exercise can

  achieve the ability to take on human shape and in that guise can speed up

  their process of transformation. This seems to leave the ability to talk as the main distinguishing trait of humans. This is clearly illustrated in a famous tale of the Tang dynasty (618–906) in which a lover of fish in a dream is turned into a fish: when caught and about to be sliced and served to his friends, he desperately tries to cry out to them for help, but while they see the fish move its lips, they don’t hear a word.17 A talking animal cannot but be a creature of fiction, a blatant denial of plausibility.

  Ever since the beginning of the first millennium, Chinese poetics has

  insisted on truth as the hallmark of literature. This could be the truth of observable fact in historical writings, the truth of the ways and norms for social ethics and self-cultivation in philosophical and religious writings, or the truth of the emotions expressed by an individual author in essays or poems. In Confucian thought, which dominated the public writings of the

  cultural elite during the two millennia of imperial China, the highest truth is not a supernatural revelation, but is inherent in the actual events of nature and history, and so can be known by attentive observation. If a Western

  author is allowed to revel in fantasy because of the abyss between divine

  revelation and human speculation, Confucian poetics cannot accept fantasy

  and fiction, because these can only be false and misleading, and works of

  fantasy and fiction will be the more dangerous the more attractive they are.18

  If stories were not verifiable, authors went to great lengths to persuade

  their readers that they were plausible and that the narrated events could have been observed by a third party. In any narrative the emphasis is therefore on the actions and words of the characters; the inner life is often only expressed in the poems they produce. Authors of tales, short stories, and vernacular

  novels will indeed go to great length to maintain the verisimilitude of their narratives. Few will present their works as fiction, and all of them will make This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:26 UTC

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  every effort to present the events described as if these could have been

  observed by outsiders. And while the Western tradition of realist fiction of the eighteenth century and beyond increasingly came to focus on the mental

  life of its characters, Chinese fiction up to the late nineteenth century deliberately avoided forays into this inherently unknowable inner world.19

  If the description of the inner thoughts of the characters of one’s own

  creation already would invite the criticism of absurd fantasy, the blatant

  implausibility of talking animals would have done so even more. As a result the most numerous kinds of animal stories in the Chinese literary tradition are those in which an animal has taken on human shape and in that guise

  interacts with individual men or women or with human society at large. In

  such stories, the transformed animals are as eloquent as any human being.

  Animals usually take on human shape in these tales not for the fun of it but in order to have sexual intercourse with a human counterpart and, while

  doing so, rob their human partner of his or her vital essence. They do so hoping to speed up their own process of transformation into true humans and,

  beyond that, true immortals. If in ancient Greek mythology the gods often

  raped the objects of their love in the shape of a bull or a swan, the Chinese of imperial times, both male and female, were haunted by the fear of being

  seduced by animals in human shape. In the simplest of these Chinese stories, the victims die; in more complicated versions, an outsider concludes that the human party is haunted by a demonic force and succeeds in saving the victim by forcing the animal to revert to its original shape; in still more complicated variations, a first exorcist (a Daoist priest or a Buddhist monk) fails to exorcise the demon, which is later exorcised by a representative of the competing

  teaching, and if both priest and monk fail in their mission, a Confucian

  scholar may succeed because of his superior virtue and sincerity. The greatest master of this genre of tales was Pu Songling (1640–1715), who in his Strange Stories from Make­Do Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi) not only portrayed some beasts that in human shape set out to cannibalize their human partners but also

  presented many animals (especially vixen) that took on human shape for a

  variety of other reasons and as loving partners did their best to support and assist their human counterparts, creating a quite different frisson in his readers.20 When animals assume human shape, they usually take on the guise of

  a generic handsome young man or a beautiful woman, but in the tale of the

  Five Rats disturbing the Eastern Capital, which is first known from sixteenth-century versions, these animals take on the features of specific individuals: whereas the first rat takes on the shape of a young woman’s husband in order to seduce her, the other rats take on the shape of the judge and even the

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  emperor to free him (the rats display their original shape only when the Buddha’s own cat is brought down to earth and confronts them).21

  In the sixteenth-century vernacular novel The Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), which describes the many adventures of the holy monk Xuanzang (600–

  664) on his pilgrimage from China to the Western Paradise, many of the

  dangers that threaten him and his companions are animals in human guise.22

  All these animals are especially eager to swallow or bed Xuanzang because

  the holy monk has not spilled a single drop of vital energy (semen) in his

  present life and in his previous seven incarnations. These animals include, for instance, the Old Mouse Demon, who in chapters 80–83 makes her home

  in the Bottomless Cave and captures the monk in order to sleep with him.

  Throughout these chapters she is described as a seductive young woman, and

  she, too, only manifests her original shape at the very end. In each of these encounters with voracious animals, Xuanzang is saved in the nick of time by his acolytes, Monkey (Sun Wukong) and Pigsy (Zhu Bajie). Both of them

  have a long history of self-cultivation, and though their facial features still betray their origins, they otherwise (except for their supernatural powers) behave very much like humans in their int
eractions with their master, with

  each other, and with the societies they encounter on their road. Sun Wukong has often been compared to Hanuman, but while the latter plays a role in only one section of the Ramayana, Sun Wukong plays a central role throughout The Journey to the West. If any work in the Chinese tradition merits to be called a beast epic, it may well be this hundred-chapter novel, but if so, it is very much a beast epic with Chinese characteristics, not so much because it is

  written in prose, but because its animal characters appear most of the time in human guise (onstage Sun Wukong is allowed to display far more of his

  monkey traits than he is on the page).23

  The lack of hospitality toward talking animals in traditional Chinese lit-

  erature is also shown in China’s reaction to the literary traditions of animal tales from South Asia. Despite the intensive direct and indirect cultural contacts between the Chinese world and South Asia during the first millennium, the Panchatantra was never translated into Chinese in premodern times. Only a few stories that are found in that collection made their way to East Asia, one assumes by oral channels, at different moments in time.24 When Chinese

  translated Indian fables they selected fables that featured human protago-

  nists, stories that could have happened and, if so, could have been observed by an outsider.25 The same phenomenon can be discerned in the Chinese

  reaction to the Aesopian fables that were translated by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century and by other Westerners in the nineteenth—the

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  first Chinese editor of a selection of Aesopian fables showed a clear preference for fables without talking animals.26 As part of the Buddhist scriptural tradition the jataka tales were piously translated into Chinese, but one is surprised to see how few of these animal tales escaped from the confines of the Buddhist canon to be taken up in Chinese literature at large.27 One of the rare jataka tales that eventually would make it into Chinese popular literature was the tale of the loquacious but filial parrot, which became quite widespread from the fifteenth century onward, also because it was associated with the pious parrot that was commonly shown on pictures of the immensely popular bodhisattva Guanyin in her female manifestation. Even though most versions of