“The Outlows of the Marsh”

.Space, landscape, travel. The space of transcendents as represented in transcendent  traditions, or of the “rivers and lakes” in “martial arts” traditions, is often represented as  invisibly (except for insiders) overlapping with the world as experienced by ordinary mortals.  One set of questions relates 

to the kinds of travel that make it possible for someone to pass  from the ordinary world of mortal humans into the world of transcendents (or of 

jianghu heroes).  The representation of travel in space in the Shuihu zhuan alternates between purely 

formulaic  and elliptical handling (as in “when they were hungry they ate, and when they were thirsty they drank,” etc., to pass over a multi -day journey) to very heightened scene  descriptions, particularly in the lead in to a major incident