answering questions

Harvard University Asia Center

Chapter Title: Conclusion

Book Title: Alien Kind Book Subtitle: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative Book Author(s): Rania Huntington Published by: Harvard University Asia Center. (2003) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tfjcmj.13

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~!

Conclusion

My title, "Alien Kind," alludes to foxes as both an alien species and a peculiar category. As Ji Yun so memorably affirmed, that peculiarity lies in their liminal position. Other cultures feel the same need for a "middle" category of alien, but the exact parameters of liminality dif- fer. The important axes of middleness are morality, power, and prox- imity. The "middle people" are neither inherently benign nor in- nately malign; rather, they are morally ambivalent. They have powers that humans do not, but these powers are finite and are balanced by weaknesses. Since their habitat intersects at least partially with our own, they brush against humans much more often than creatures en- sconced in entirely separate worlds. In this Conclusion, I compare foxes to some of these other "middle people" in order to throw Chi- nese concepts of the alien and the human into sharper relief and to return to the question of the relationship between species of super- natural beings and the genres in which they are depicted.

Because of the wealth of material and the parallel complications of folklore collection and literary adaptation, I will compare foxes pri- marily to Western European (mostly German, English, and Irish) fairies and elemental spirits. The following discussion is guilty of oversimplification, since it conflates different periods of European fairylore and Chinese foxlore, although the range in time, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century, remains roughly paral- lel. Fairies share a great many roles with late imperial foxes: the household protective spirit, often providing favors in exchange for a

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Conclusion

humble offering of food, like the English brownie or Scandinavian

tomte; the mischievous kobold, who torments households; the fatal

lover; and the grateful supernatural creature. Some plots, such as the

tale of a midwife summoned to an unearthly household in the middle

of the night to deliver a child, are virtually identical in the two tradi-

tions.1 I do not think these tales are direcdy related; rather, these

parallel niches suggest that distinct societies have similar chinks in

the familiar, where the alien can approach. Not only are there paral-

lels in the narrative niches these species fill, but there are parallels in the explanations of their place in the universe.

EXPLAINING THE MIDDLE SPECIES:

PARACELSUS AND JI YUN

Particularly striking parallels with Ji Yun's attempts to rationalize the difficult in-between position of foxes are found in Liber de nymphis,

sylphis, pygmalis, et salamandris by the fifteenth-century German phi-

losopher Paracelsus. His "in-between" figures are the spirits of the

four elements: nymphs for water, sylphs for air, pygmies for earth,

and salamanders for fire. To a certain extent, he was a defender of

these creatures and endeavored to delineate their differences from

both demons and human beings. Because he derived his concept of

these creatures by applying logical principles to received folk mate- rial, from the outset his task, as well as his sympathetic stance, was very similar to Ji Yun's.

Like Ji Yun, Paracelsus also felt that he had to justify writing

about marvels; he argued that marvels are more worthy of description

than the court, for they are the works of God as opposed to the

works of men. The pretext that one can use the bizarre to observe the

· wonders of God's creation is not unlike Ji's claim that one can exam-

ine universal principle through the strange just as well as through the

I. Examples for foxes include "Hu taitai" i!if.j:;t:;t, in Xu Kun, Liuya waibian (1793 ed.)juan 12; and "Baita si"B~~' in Li Qingchen, Zuicha zhiguai, 3.365. The

parallels suggest that for both cultures, midwifes were liminal creatures themselves,

summoned to serve in households of varying social status; and childbirth was a

charmed moment, when the worlds could mix.

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Conclusion

ordinary. For both men, an apparently peripheral topic of dubious morality is central to a universal moral project.

According to Paracelsus, the elemental spirits fall between men and ghosts. Their flesh is different from man's, in that it is not solid and can pass through matter; but they are like human beings in that they eat, drink, and bear children, as ghosts do not. They are a mix of ghost and human, like two colors mixed together or a sweet and sour flavor. 2 They are, however, neither ghost nor human. Since they have no soul, when they die, they are like animals, extinguished for- ever. Paracelsus compared them to apes, the closest animals to hu- mans, but in general they are above the animals. "Thus they are peo- ple, but die with the animals, change with the ghosts, and eat and drink with men. . . . Their customs and gestures are human, as are their speaking and appearance, and all their virtues, the better and the cruder, the subtler and the grosser." They cross two of the same borderlines, between man and ghost and man and beast, that Ji sketched in his introduction to the fox. Like foxes, they resemble human beings as closely as possible. Paracelsus also emphasized their internal variety just as Ji Yun's various fox spokesmen did. "They are smart and rich, understanding, poor, or foolish, like we descendants of Adam: they are made in our image just as we are made in the im- age of God."3

Paracelsus explained the stories of romances between humans and elves or nymphs using the same logic: they (apparently exclusively the females) strive to unite with men just as men strive to unite with God. This justification seems to share the desperate quality of a vixen's pursuit of a human lover and a human self. As we have seen in the discussion ofYingning and Undine, in both cultures alien fe- males can become almost human through matrimony. As is true for

2. Paracelsus. Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris, p. 13-14. All translations from the German are my own. Cf. Kirk, The Secret Commonwealthes of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, p. I; Kirk places the fairies between men and angels.

3· Paracelsus, Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris, p. 15. Note how the Western comparison has three levels, the other, man, and God, whereas the Chinese has only two, man and the other. This fits well with distinctions made be- tween Chinese and Western allegory; in the Chinese case there is not an essential comparison between the human world and the divine. See Plaks, Archetype and Alle- gory in Dream of the Red Chamber.

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Conclusion

foxes in most cases, the children they bear men are human, with hu- man souls; sometimes even the mothers win souls through their ties to men.4 Paracelsus defended the integrity of these relationships: a man married to a spirit should remain loyal to her.

5 But unlike Ji, who refused to focus on the romance with an alien woman exclu- sively, Paracelsus enshrined it at the heart of his explanation of the spec1es.

The most obvious difference between the two traditions is the ab- solute division in the West between the possession and the lack of a soul. On that question there can be no in-between for Paracelsus, al- though these creatures are as close as conceivable to a borderline case. Although they have human understanding, they need not fol- low God because they have no soul. Ji could not ~dmit such a moral exemption. The soul allows Paracelsus to put a final limitation on the elemental spirits' imitation of humanity, since all of their other at- tainments are rendered meaningless by this one missing quality. It is this limitation that gives them their meaning: they prove to humans how we have been favored with the gift of a soul. The fact they can- not become human reminds us that we in turn cannot become gods.

6

This general case, which highlights both our privilege and our limi- tation, sets off the special case of the fairy bride, who is like us in her passionate aspiration to transcend her origins.

The Chinese tradition has no such absolute answer to the ques- tion of what makes men unique. Buddhist ideas of reincarnation serve to blur the boundaries between species; the afterlife becomes the point at which men and beast can be confused, not distinguished. In Daoist visions, humans themselves can effectively change species to become transcendents. Yet although the boundaries of humanity seem on the surface less clearly drawn in the Chinese case, they are not entirely permeable. Foxes reincarnated as humans are used, pri- marily in vernacular fiction, as a device to explain exceptional sexual appetites, as is the case for Hede in Zhaoyang qushi, or extraordinary desire for revenge, as in Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, and not as a means of considering the boundaries of humanity. The human fallen to fox

4· Paracelsus, Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris, p. 24. 5· Ibid., p. 3I. 6. Ibid., p. r6.

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Conclusion 327

form, regaining human form again after centuries of work, is more co:mmon: but in this case, the human story, narrated by the fox, gives an elevated justification to typical fox actions, be it an attempt to pass oneself off as human in a community of monks or a sexual liaison? Species identity in former lives provides motivation, but it does not reshape identity in this life. As for Daoist advancement, allowing foxes to skip over humanity altogether and become xian sidesteps the issue of whether foxes can become truly human.

The question of whether the boundary between humanity and the other can dissolve is the fundamental tension in Qing zhiguai: the marvelous has become so common, so close, and so familiar, with the demon lover becoming the good housewife, that the distinction is on the verge of dissolving even though it cannot be allowed to dissolve. The fox, ever the confounding in-between, is the embodiment of this problem. Despite what appears to be a dramatic difference between species defined by the presence or the absence of a soul, with death as the moment of truth, as opposed to species defined by the wheel of rebirth and the ladder of cultivation, the rhetorical uses of the self- improving fox are similar to the double meaning of the elemental spirits: the diligent fox, starting in a burrow and aspiring to the heav- ens, reminds us of human striving, human superiority, and human limitation.

Paracelsus' analysis brings us back to the questions of theory and practice discussed in Chapter 2. Cultural differences dictate a differ- ent relationship between theory and practice for Paracelsus, or for Robert Kirk (ca. r65r-92), the author of The Secret Commonwealthes of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, than for Chinese authors. The first sys- tematic theories on the middle people in the European context are to a greater or lesser extent responding to the theorizing of demonology and explanations of witchcraft. Both Paracelsus and Kirk are setting fairies or elementals apart from demons, already an object of organ- ized attention, and the men who have commerce of various sorts with them apart from witches. There are two reasons for this focused attention. First, weird and sinister species reflect more critically on a single omnipotent creator than they do on a system of natural

7· On the link between the transformed fox and repentance, see Heine, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text, pp. r66-75.

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Conclusion

principle, a factor that compelled the Europeans to provide more sys-

tematic explanations. Second, ties between humans and inhuman be-

ings were more threatening to the European social order, which cre-

ated important judicial genres for perceiving the supernatural, such as

confessions of witchcraft, and theorizing on the nature and limita-

tions of the crime; these were much less common in China. 8

Just as Paracelsus systematized received lore, so his theorizing,

centuries later, inspired authors of the literary fairy tale. From the

Chinese perspective, this would be as if Ji Yun's unified fox theories

came first and Pu Songling's romances later. Additionally, there is a

crucial difference in the publishing climate and perceptions of his-

torical change. "When Fouque, about fifty years Ji Yun's junior, read

Paracelsus, he perceived a far greater cultural gap in the four hundred

years that had elapsed thanJi Yun did when he read Hong Mai, who

predated him by six centuries. Fouque was inspired to reinterpret

Paracelsus' ideas to fit his own times; Ji believed he was working in

Hong Mai's tradition, albeit after an interruption of generic devi-

ance. In Chinese terms, most European histories of the literary fairy

tale begin in the last century of the Ming, without the sense of a ge-

neric history stretching back a millennium.

HUMAN AND ANIMAL, NATURE AND CULTURE

One obvious difference between foxes and European fairies is that

between an ambitious quadruped and a (or several) humanoid spe-

cies. Many subspecies of fairies can take animal shape or have some

physical attributes of animals, but they are not seen as animals them-

selves. This is related to another glaring difference: in Europe people

can descend to animal form through illness or curse, whereas in East

Asia animals more often assume human form. 9 This seems related to

the lower status of animals in Europe based on the insurmountable

boundary of the soul. In the European context, human shape is

something humans can lose (although the demonologists argue that

8. In the Chinese case, it is sorcery with human perpetrators, especially in organ-

ized groups, that is more threatening than any interference of ghosts or demons it-

self; see Kuhn, Sou/stealers, pp. 94-rr8. 9· The exception would seem to be the selkies or swan maidens, but still their

animal shape is viewed as clothing, concealing a human shape within.

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Conclusion

this is a demonic illusion, and that shapes never really change) but not something animals can gain, even as an illusion. The beings clos- est to humanity are primarily given hominid forms. Other than the exceptional case of the fairy bride, descent is of more interest than ascent. In East Asia, the vector of ascent is crucial, whether it is genuine ascent or trickery honed with advancing age. With animals available as the closest aliens to the human, the parallel hominid races (like the sometimes hominid Wutong, who at least are not clearly identified with a single animal species) fill fewer supernatural niches.10

Paradoxically, however, it is the European fairies, not the Chinese foxes, who are seen as representatives of wild nature as opposed to human culture. This difference is founded on different understand- ings of nature and culture, which, to overgeneralize crudely, were separate and opposed spheres to a greater degree in Europe than they were in China. The difference is determined by a romantic attitude toward nature that gives accounts of fairies from the nineteenth cen- tury on elegiac perspective, as signs of a natural world that was be- coming lost to contemporary urban man. 11 In some of the Victorian interpretations of fairies, the gap between fairies as the embodiment of nature, as opposed to man, is made even clearer by emphasizing their connections to plants and even inanimate elements rather than to animals.

A concept of "elemental beings" requires a concept of fixed ele- ments, which both form the substance of the sylphs and like and provide their habitat. Humans alone are mixed beings. The Chinese conception of elements as phases does not provide a similar, stable bestiary. Foxes are clearly identified with yin, but even that is rela- tive; this identification is not nearly as strong for them as it is for ghosts. Foxes are not entirely different from us either in habitat or in substance.

The stronger tie between fairies and wild nature is determined by their habitat: only the domestic spirits, like brownies, are primarily imagined indoors. The others are creatures of woods and fairy

ro. This is less true in Japan, where the more active roles are given to the hu- manoid tengu and kappa; see Figal, Civilization and Monsters, pp. 83-83, 144-45.

II. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, p. IO.

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330 Conclusion

mounds. And all of them are primarily rural; they do not move into

cities as the foxes do, although in both cultures gardens can be tran-

sitional spaces. In the Victorian era, it was left to poltergeists to

be urban. As we have seen, the late imperial fox traveled far from its animal

roots. Such foxes are called chusheng tf1:_, "animals," only in insults, usually by exorcists asking how a beast could have the gall to violate

the order of the universe. When they refer to themselves, they some-

times use the term yilei. 12 Yilei, while more polite than "animal," is

still an expression of distance: the true lover or friend of a fox does

not regard his companion as of an alien kind, and the fox uses the

term when imploring a human not to be estranged. 13 As the discus-

sion in the previous chapters has shown, the animal body of the fox

holds a different position in different parts of the fox tradition:

glimpsing a hairy shape is part of coexisting with a haunting fox, but

the fox body is not depicted in the images used in fox worship, and

in long tales of intimate relations with foxes, it is used sparingly, to

introduce moments of transition or revelation. The body of the beast

is not indispensable in any case. By late imperial times, foxes were more closely related to human

culture than to anything outside it. This is not to say that there were

no anecdotes placing foxes in the woods and wilderness, but the ma-

jority of stories placed them closer to human setdement. Ji Yun made

the tie between foxes becoming monsters and Chinese culture overt

when he observed that the foxes of Xinjiang do not become mon-

sters. The project of self-improvement must be something they

learned from men. 14 Those foxes that are the least cultured and the

least human, the dark forms pressing down on sleeping humans or

the ones clattering about in the rafters, are explained as being either

responses to human flaws or creatures at the earliest stage of progress

and civilization. What is most important here, once again, is transi-

tion: foxes are always in the process of attaining culture. The stories

never hint of an independent existence, with the foxes burrowing

12. Qingfeng says ftilei :lf:~, "not of the same kind," instead; see "Qingfeng,"

LZ, 1.112-18. 13. YWCT, 16.948, story 97· 14. YWCT, 6.263-64, story 264.

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Conclusion 331

in the ground or hunting mice out of our sight; the foxes speak only of an anthropomorphized world of family and residence in various places. A simulacrum of human culture has become their only identity.

With fairies, there is more emphasis on their independent world, with its trappings of royalty. Moreover, fairies steal human beings to live with them in that world. Although men sometimes reside with the foxes, lingering in their glamorous mansions, there are only households, rather than an entire fairyland. Those who have al- ready risen to become xian have a separate world, with its caves and peaks, more like the European fairyland, but most often the xian en- ters narrative by falling to this world for a liaison with a human. But, more important, the man who lingers with the vixen in her home does not stay permanently. The fox comes to her lover where he or she is more often than it takes him or her away; and when the en- counter with the other proves fatal, the human dies in his own home.

The idea of the changeling child, so central to English fairylore, is absent in China.15 The sickly child is explained instead as a ghost, reborn to collect a debt. With reincarnation, strangers can be directly born in one's household without any need for abduction and re- placement. Although in older stories foxes occasionally substitute for family members, that theme had waned in popularity by late imperial times. More important, the fear in those stories was of false family members indistinguishable from the true, rather than of children or others who were obviously made strange. In late imperial China, it was the clever concubine, the fortuitously forward lover, or the lodg- ers in the next room who were suspected of being strange. Although in both cultures, ties, especially sexual ties, with another world were a way to explain physical and psychiatric afflictions in the young men and women of a family, the difference between the human who has "been away" and the one who remains at home, possessed by an alien force, is significant.

15. On the changeling, see Strange and Secret Peoples, chap. 2, pp. 59-87.

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332 Conclusion

MIDDLENESS IN AUTHORITY AND MORALITY

Moral middleness in the European context is between two fixed points on a spectrum, with devils at one end and angels at the other; this establishes man in the middle and forces other peoples to be a secondary middle. To be between xian and yao, however, is to be be- tween two paths rather than between two points. To some degree, humans can also choose these two paths, to refine themselves or to become sorcerers or rebels, but only a small minority go in either di- rection. Foxes are between these two paths in the sense that they can choose either one, not because they have a third path.

"When European conceptions deny that fairies or elemental spirits have a soul, they create the possibility of an amoral but sentient spe- cies. Fairies can be a way of contemplating moral aliens, who do not share our sense of good and evil. Without the soul, fairies have ca- prices rather than emotions and only ape human passions.

16 Chris- tian ideas situate individual moral choice and moral justice in the soul; moral obligations apply only to those with souls. But the Chi- nese system makes no such exclusions, since systems of moral justice must apply to all beings.17 Interest in the moral alien can blend at- traction with revulsion, especially when contemplating the amoral female. The Chinese case shares some of this as well: Yingning and Xiaocui are thought experiments, attempts to see how a woman who differed radically from the expectations for her sex could act as a wife.

In narrative practice, the fox can also seem to represent caprice without explicable human feelings or motivations, especially in cases of haunting or predatory sex. But once Chinese authors move out of individual anecdote to explanation, and thus from popular, shared narrative to intellectualizing, they are interested in two contradictory

I6. Ibid., p. !2. 17. A Yuewei caotang anecdote describes a fox on trial in the infernal courts for

killing his grandfather. One infernal official argues that animals should be judged by standards different from those applied to human beings; a second replies that since foxes are not like other animals, those who have improved themselves should be judged by human standards. A third argues that filial piety can be expected even of animals. See YWCT7.3II-I2, story 21.

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Conclusion 333

moral possibilities: either foxes are inherently morally inferior, re- pelled by good and attracted by evil; or they have the same moral choices as men. The one thing they cannot be is amoral. However, these possibilities also have their counterparts in the European ar- guments: Kirk envisioned the peoples of his "secret common- wealthes" as having the same range of virtues and vices as ourselves; yet at the same time they do the most harm to the barbarous and are defeated by Christian piety.18

Popular experience of foxes-their depredations, inscrutable appa- ritions, willful gifts, and harsh revenge-does create an impression of amoral torment. Perhaps on the ground, relations with the nearest alien were not very different in early modern China or Europe. Ac- tual experience is the closest to chaos; narrative gives it shape, and explanation imposes a further level of order. Raw chaos seems the least culturally specific; it was in elite explanation that differences emerge.

Talk of moral middle ground evokes the image of the trickster of international folklore studies. The middle people and the trickster are not necessarily the same thing, although they overlap. The idea of the trickster has been defined by examples from folktales and myths, stories set in another plane of reality or another time, as op- posed to the middle people who are most common in legends and re- side on the margins of our world. The trickster is usually an individ- ual (even if there is more than one, it is Coyote with a capital C, rather than coyotes). An entire tricky species is a different problem. Border-crossing and ambivalence are shared, but the difference is in the ordinariness of the middle people: borders keep being crossed, and the middle people beat a regular, if not predictable, path through our houses. Lewis Hyde's point about the male gender of nearly ail tricksters is also relevant here.19 A species in which both males and females cross boundaries, but each in distinct ways that usually keep the boundary between male and female clear, has a different struc- tural function than a single male border-crosser: these are the

r8. Kirk, The Secret Commonwealthes of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, p. 73· 19. Hyde, Trickster Made This World, pp. 333-43. I agree with Hyde's selection of

Sun Wukong as the Chinese representative of tricksters.

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334 Conclusion

tricksters who provide a certain necessary element of chaos in a stable world rather than the single individual who remakes the world.20

GENRE AND SPECIES: FOLKLORE, DEMONOLOGY,

LITERARY FAIRY TALES

Both the fox and the fairy are unorthodox, standing at the edges of the greater moral order of their respective universes. The difference between them is shaped, among other things, by the forms in which intellectual attention was paid to the unorthodox in their respective societies, which brings us back to the issue of genre. We have already seen the correlation between species and genre in the Chinese con- text: foxes dominate the classical tale, have a more marginal presence in the vernacular novel, and are almost absent in chuanqi drama. Any argument based on this correlation risks tautology: Are foxes most common in the classical tale because of their nature, or do they seem the way they are because of the genre that records them? I argue that species and genre are interdependent, with each shaping the other.

In looking at the relations of genre and species cross-culturally, I find the following distinctions useful: the difference between large and small stories; between stories set in other worlds and those set in this one; and between stories narrated as personal experience, as ex- perience of named friends, and those held at a greater distance. Gen- erally, the stories closest to personal experience are smaller tales, al- though not all small stories are close to personal experience. Different species find their ideal habitats at different points along this spectrum. Foxes thrive best in small, individual stories, which in China take the form of the classical tale, although they play their part in the larger stories of vernacular fiction. They are residents chiefly of this world and can be as close as personal experience or as distant as a nameless man at the end of a previous dynasty, the entire range of the classical tale itself.

In comparison, fairy tales or Marchen are tales of another world, held at a distance, and legends are tales of this world, sometimes closer to the teller. The creatures that resemble foxes the most, the sometimes mischievous, sometimes helpful, kobolds, are found in

zo. Ibid., p. r88.

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Conclusion 335

legends and written records, rather than Marchen. 21 In comparison with fairies, foxes are more like the regionally specific figures of legend than the beautiful but vague figures blessing cradles in the Miirchen.

When foxes do appear in vernacular fiction, they are seldom cen- tral characters. Rather, they serve a functional role in a larger story: they are a source of demonic deception, but as in the Daji cycle or Sanjiao kaimi, the backstory of the fox provides an explanation for re- venge or lust, or fox gratitude temporarily provides supernatural pro- tection, as in Qixia wuyi -!:::;{~Ii.~ (Seven gallants and five heroes; r889). (The exception is Huli quanyuan.) Foxes' acts of deception, possession, seduction, revenge, and reward do not make the entire narrative by themselves. The larger roles are usually reserved for ex- ceptional beings who are individuals, further from common experi- ence: the monkey Sun Wukong or even the white snake Bai Niangzi, who are never subsumed into their species the way a vixen is primar- ily a vixen. When a vixen becomes an individual, her audience is one appreciative lover or one fortunate or afflicted household.

In discussing narrative, I have neglected the obvious statement that, unlike xian and fairies who are subjects of poetry, foxes are pri- marily the subject of prose. Mter the Tang, when foxes were used as an image of deception, fox poems are rare. In contrast, xian and fair- ies are subjects of poetry. Although there are stories in which foxes compose poetry, such as Hu Shuzhen's cycle, these are scattered ex- amples, and the poems make almost no reference to vulpine origins. There is no established tradition or set of imagery, as there is for the poetry of ghosts. This suggests that encounters with foxes are in some way a prosaic, in the sense of ordinary, experience. Poetry about vixen lovers uses the language of romance with a goddess, and from vixen lovers the language of the longing woman. The animal identity of the friend or lover is unpoetic, and the perspective of that alien species is not imagined clearly enough for poetry, in contrast to the once human ghost longing for life.

Partially as a consequence of the circumstances of folklore collec- tion-folklorists collected someone else's lore, which was about to be

2!. On kobold, see Muller and Wunderlich, Diimonen, Monster, Fabelwese,

P·370.

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Conclusion

lost-fairies always seem to be drawing away from us. Carol Silver argues that departure is inherent to the nature of the species.

22 Fair- ies are native to a habitat threatened with loss as soon as men begin to cultivate it. The fox and the zhiguai, on the other hand, are not going anywhere. The men who collected zhiguai were collecting their own lore, and although individual stories might be lost, it was unthinkable that this kind of story itself might die out. Although the individual vixen departs, her species fills an ecological niche very similar to the starlings, Canada geese, and raccoons that thrive in American suburbia, stealing our garbage and roosting in our yards. Human habitat suits them very well.

The fox was not, within the timeframe of this book, the subject of systematic study in China, as the fairies were in England in the Vic- torian era. 23 Even Ji's theorizing is always in the context of narrative; narrative is never pressed into the service of treatises. Theoretical arguments about the supernatural do not take foxes as a central sub- ject but focus instead on ghosts or human practices like divination and geomancy.24 Perhaps the fox was too close and alive in contem- porary conversation to become a subject of argument. I have already discussed the relation of this theoretical bent to the systematizing compulsions of demonology. What the Victorians and their contem- poraries and predecessors in Qing China shared was the urge for documentation and voluminous publication of narrative and experience.

The Chinese case shows that the literary fantasy does not require distance from its creatures. The stuff of "ordinary'' extraordinary ex- perience, the thunks in the next room and the small space set aside for the fox, are part of the furniture of the truly extraordinary cases, the complex relationships with foxes. This overlap anchors weird ex- perience and fantasy to each other: every abandoned room carries the possibility of marvel. But whereas the marvelous, qi, tends to shim- mer in the distance, it is the weird, guai, that occasionally infests one's own garden or closets.

22. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, pp. 185-212. See also Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, p. 210.

23. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, p. 4· 24. See the survey in Chan, The Discourse of Foxes and Ghosts, pp. 79-94.

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Conclusion 337

Silver argues that the popularizing of fairies in moralistic and sac- charine children's literature helped to bring about the fall of the tra- dition. As fairies lost their ambiguity, their power and attraction dwindled.25 One can draw a parallel with the Guangxu-era fox romance, in which the vixen has lost her ambivalence and, in losing her ties to sex, often finds her claims to passion dulled as well. Satia- tion of desire becomes routine, and the strange becomes ordinary in the sense of market saturation. Yet precisely because the fox of close- hand experience was not going anywhere, the loss of ambivalence in one branch of the fox tradition did not dictate loss of ambivalence in the whole. Xu Feng'en §lf*,lgf,, in a collection published in 1879, in- cluded-alongside a tale of a vixen as both lover and schoolmistress, good at eight-legged essays; and another of a man who requests a vixen lover and is rewarded with nine partners of both sexes,26 until he nearly dies of debauchery; both illustrations of a late, self- conscious stage of the fox romance-an account of his own experi- ence in a very different tone. He had gotten used to the footsteps of the fox transcendent who lived upstairs in the official residence in Zhejiang where he was temporarily lodging while grading exams. There had been one tense moment when a dog killed a fox, but he and his colleagues averted that disaster by burning incense and ask- ing the foxes not to take their anger out on people. In the comment appended to this story, he related how one night his friends had been joking with him, since he was young and lodging alone, about the amorous ghosts and vixens recorded in books, just as young Sang's friends had joked with him in Liaozhals "Lianxiang." That night when he went to bed, a beautiful woman appeared. Terrified, he apologized for his friends' joking words, insisting he meant no disre- spect. She vanished, but he could not think of the episode without the hair on the back of his neck standing up straight?7 In contrast to his unnamed characters who long for a fox, he is terrified of the pos- sibility. This vision is linked to reading and conversation, as opposed

25. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, pp. 186-89. 26. "Gu chuluan" tiM~ and ''Wuxiang mou taishi" .li~~*7,;:9:, in Xu

Feng'en, Lantiaoguan waishi 3.4Ib and 6.12b, respectively. 27. "Zhejiang xueshi shu hu" #Jf¥I~~~m\, in ibid., 4.44b.

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Conclusion

3· Japanese fox from Dianshizhai huabao

to the more immediate experience of foxes weeping for one of their own, but both reveal that the fox, when close at hand, had not lost its potential for threat. Whether this represents an account of experi- ence or a parody of the suggestible Liaozhai reader, Xu chose to por- tray himself as a man who can coexist with foxes without assuming that they are benign.

Foxes as a presence in daily life and in narrative do eventually fade away, without entirely vanishing. The process of that fading is be- yond the scope of this book. Foxes continue to appear in the pages of the newspaper Shenbao and the pictorial Dianshizhai huabao into the 1890s, and the odd fox story still attracts the attention of figures as important to modern literature as Lin Shu and Wu Jianren. When Qinghai leichao m~!1Jl~tJ> (Categorized Qing fiction), published in 1916, keeps the fox stories in a group but places them within the lar-

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Conclusion 339

ger category mixin ~{§, "superstition," this is a significant moment, with the genre intact, at least in retrospect, but one of its determi- nant topics renamed. The zhiguai and the fox tale had existed in the uneasily shared space between the supernatural ideas of their upper- class authors and those of their other informants and subjects. When the elite adopted new standards, strange tales were no longer poten- tially shared yiwen ~00, "reports of the strange," but someone else's mixin, and a shared language was lost.2

8 Gerald Figal has argued that in Meiji Japan theorizing on monsters was central to the moderniz- ing project, as some parts of the supernatural were eliminated and others were made central to the Japanese spirit.29 In China, in con- trast, foxes and their kin were more unequivocally seen as backward.

HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN ALIENS

The overlap between the nonhuman alien and the human alien dif- fers from culture to culture. In her work on fairies in Victorian con- sciousness, Silver examines the meaning of ideas about fairies in both ethnic and gender terms. As we have seen, gendered meanings of foxes were much more important than ethnic meanings. In both cultures, women themselves already straddled the boundary of humanity. During the witchcraft scares in early modern Europe, the demonological and judicial literature's interest in sexual relations be- tween the human and the inhuman is the opposite of the Chinese case: women's ties with devils received more attention than men's re- lations with succubi. But in the Romantic and Victorian literature on fairies, the gender distribution is much more like the Chinese case, with focus on the fairy bride or !a belle dame sans merci.

30 I believe this

shift has to do with a shift in genre, from the regulation of social threats in judicial writings to the narration of individual experience in fictional accounts, which is closer to the world of zhiguai and chuanqi.

28. On the use of the term mixin in constructing nongmin, as opposed to elite, identity, see Dorfman, "The Spirits of Reform."

29. See Figal, Civilization and Monsters, p. 15. 30. See Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, pp. 89-n9, q8-83.

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340 Conclusion

The conflation of ethnic others and the alien species seems more important in Victorian England than in Qing China.

31 I do not think that the ethnic implication of hu, "fox," as a pun for hu iiF.I, "northern barbarian," is alive in the Ming and Qing as it was in the Tang,32 other than in a loose association of foxes with the north. At most, perhaps there is a parallel in the tales of literary fox friends to the relations between Han and Manchu men of similar status: one knew that the other was supposed to be distinct, yet they shared all the same elite cultural references and amusements. In the late Qing, there are occasional moments when foreignness and foxiness are overlaid: an anecdote in the pictorial Dianshizhai huabao about a Japanese fox opens, "In the world seductive women are called 'foxes,' because they are good at beguiling men. If a 'foxy' person can already beguile a man, how much more can a real fox, let alone a foreign fox?"33 On an unnamed Japanese island known for its population of foxes, a Chinese traveler comes on shore desperate for something to eat. A beautiful woman invites him to her place for a meal. He fol- lows her eagerly until the sound ofWestern troops doing military ex- ercises nearby alarms her. As she flees, she reveals her true form as a fox. In the illustration, there seem to be a conflation of markers of ethnic identity and species identity as her obi and her tail are con- founded. A simple tale of exorcism is reframed with international content. In another late Qing tale, a seductive vixen is clearly West- ernized in dress, and she advises her lover to convert to Christianity to relieve his poverty.34 But these remain momentary coincidences of different kinds of strangeness, rather than a sustained way of think- ing about the alien.

However, the hope of advance, through study and proximity to humanity, has implications about sinification and inclusion. There are still limits to assimilation: a fox is never entirely human, and those who come closest are granted that status only as corpses. To phrase the question in ethnic terms: Does a "cooked" savage ever be- come well done enough that he dissolves into the mass of Han Chi-

31. See ibid., pp. 43-50, 117-47. 32. See Kang, "The Fox and the Barbarian." 33· "Yaohu xianmei" ~m\li:k~, in Dianshizhai huabao, Zi r (z.r) 7, 56. 34· "Bai laochang" B~~, in Xuan Ding, Yeyu qiudeng lu, 4.140.

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--------------------------------.

Conclusion 34I

nese? But the very question is a paradox: any story which recorded that transition would of necessity still preserve the label of "alien," at least in the beginning. Total assimilation, the barbarian who was no longer a barbarian, or the fox who was no longer a fox, could happen only outside of the narrative frame. Narrative instead traces an as- ymptotic approach. Although literary expectations of foxes as an en- tirely human-seeming species became routine, assimilation remained a matter for individuals: even in the late Qing, there remains an in- exhaustible supply of unrefined foxes who are mysteries in a small sense-the noise in the attic.

FOX AND SOCIETY, FOX AND LITERATURE

To return to the Chinese case, what does the fox have to teach us about Chinese society in late imperial times? Fox haunting and the resident fox showed us that the home was a focus of intense atten- tion, but at the same time there was a sense of a highly mobile, tran- sient society. The competitive market in women clearly had a signifi- cant impact on the imaginary cosmos by creating a great need for women outside that market. Foxes were a means to think about all of women's roles other than the reproductive: they could either be de- pleting, barren sexual partners, the women one seeks out for enter- tainment, or they could provide for all of a man's other needs but let another woman bear the children.

35 Social mobility, which many argue is a distinguishing feature oflate imperial society, was accepted in the fox story as a constant. Conversations about foxes' mobility

seemed to serve to reassure humans that mobility is, in the end, inseparable from virtuous hard work, although wicked foxes drama-

tize the possibility of immoral, parasitic advance. The fox as a spirit of wealth dealt with similar anxieties about profit unrelated to production.

Interest in the horrible and monstrous is often read as a symptom of social discontent and instability.

36 How, then, is one to interpret interest in the alien in modes other than horror? Foxes were shown

35· See Bray, Technology and Gender, pp. 358-68. 36. C£ the concern in Japan with bakumatsu bakemono, "the late Edo monstros-

ity''; Figal, Civilization and Monsters, pp. 21-37-

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342 Conclusion

enduring the vicissitudes of history together with humans: chaste vixens sacrificed themselves when the Ming fell and again to the Taipings;37 they fled human rebellions at least as often as they were involved in them; at least one late Qing vixen was addicted to opium/8 and another dressed herself in imported fabrics. Rather than being a sign of anxiety about cultural change, foxes were a reas- surance of cultural adaptability. Where they survive, we will, too. Foxes played out the great fantasies of satiation of desire and a just universe, but at the same time they filled an equally important appe- tite for the small, quotidian mischance or wonder. In the end, from an upper-class perspective at least, they were less frightening than other human beings.

TALKING ABOUT THE ALIEN

The different faces the fox shows in the classical tale and in the ver- nacular novel suggest that more comparisons between genres would be highly fruitful. Rather than simply tracing relationships of sources and variant versions, we need to pay attention to the ways in which different genres allow exploration of different ideas and issues. Gen- res that have been relatively neglected, like biji, much drama, espe- cially regional drama, baojuan :If~ (precious scrolls), and tanci 5~BRJ (plucking rhymes) would provide rich sources. Relations between genres as distinct ways of talking and thinking in constant inter- change with one another are not restricted to a simple division of popular and elite. Some of the most interesting discoveries are likely to occur in the places where genres cross and in the gaps be- tween them.

As for those genres that have been central to this project, Tak- hung Leo Chan closes his book by arguing that applying standards other than the aesthetic to Chinese literature will allow scholars to take on not only zhiguai but the vast oceans of biji.39 I would second this. These genres contain a vast treasurehouse of the small stories of

37· "Lie hu zhuan" ?.!HJJlft:, in Zhang Chao, Yu chu xinzhi 10.193; and Baiyi ju- shi, Hutianlu, xia, 46b-47a.

38. Xu Qiuzhai, Wenjian yici, in B]XSDG, 12: 2.7a. 39· Chan, The Discourse of Foxes and Ghosts, p. 250.

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Conclusion 343

the late imperial tradition, including the popular, the whimsical, the personal, and the petty, which has barely been touched. Although the fox has provided a valuable glimpse into this world, in a future project I hope to go beyond a single topic and examine these works as a whole.

This discussion of foxes has revealed not so much the outer limits of the human imagination of the alien, as perhaps the inner limits, habits, and patterns of that imagination. Unlike contemporary au- thors of science fiction, the zhiguai authors did not deliberately set out to test those limits with the invention of species.40 The fox in human form is a particular kind of alien: it is assumed that the alien, for good or ill, has placed us at the center, and the strange comes in a form that looks like us. The fox has two poles in the relatively known, a four-footed animal and a human shape; the strangeness lies in the link between the two.

Even in contemporary American and European science fiction, however, it is only the more literary end of the genre (like Stanislaw Lem's Solaris) which endeavors to test these boundaries.41 Popular science fiction provides us with either monstrous ciphers, familiar as threats, or aliens much closer to ourselves. The former are often modeled on terrestrial non-mammalian species, either insects or rep- tiles; the latter come to us, like the fairies or the foxes, as humanoid bipeds.

As with the foxes, the contemporary popular tradition is obsessed with aliens who strive to become human: the heart of each successive Star Trek series had a creature striving toward, or struggling with, humanity. However, the pole opposite the human is the machine, not monster or animal, and the key to becoming human is emotion and release, rather than discipline or effort.

In the contemporary popular tradition, we are interested in both the alien that more purely represents some quality, be it logic or valor, than we do, and the one who is even more indeterminate and suspended between realms than we are. This same two possibilities were contained in the middle people, whether fairies or foxes. Either the mixed nature of the middle people is set up as a contrast to

40. Benford, "Effing the Ineffable," pp. 13-25. 4!. Ibid., P· I4.

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344 Conclusion

human purity, or humans themselves are the true mixed and middle beings. Foxes are both simpler than we are, and more indeterminate: they can focus on ascent, or lust, or mischief, to the exclusion of all other interests, but at the same time, they linger between categories.

Since he had the opening word, I give the last word again to Ji Yun. At the end of a story of a servant's wife seduced by a fox, who confounded all her husband's efforts to put a stop to it, Ji closed on a speculative note. It appeared the fox was able to change the shapes of other things with his tricks.

The Song Confucians urged us to investigate things, but with matters like

this, how can one extrapolate from principle? My father often said that

when foxes live in a tomb and give it the illusory guise of a house and

rooms, people see it as real, but what do the foxes see? Foxes have their fur

and skin and transform it into rouge and mascara; people see it as real, but

what do the foxes themselves see? And moreover, what does a fox see when

it looks at another fox's illusion? There really is nowhere to start investigat- . h' 42 mgt 1s.

Between the tomb and the red pelt and all the trappings of human fantasy was a third possibility, the true mystery of the perspective of the fox, the point where reason was exhausted. As much as he

excelled at explaining the strange, Ji Yun gestured here toward his culture's limits in imagining the alien.

42. YWCT, 5.231, story 233·

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