The Prose Style of Fan Yeh

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Harvard-Yenching Institute

The Prose Style of Fan YehAuthor(s): Ronald C. EganReviewed work(s):Source: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Dec., 1979), pp. 339-401Published by: Harvard-Yenching InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2718855.

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The Prose Style of Fan YehRONALD C. EGANHarvard University

Q OMETIME during the first three weeks of A.D. 446, while in-iJ carceratedand awaiting execution for his part in a plot to deposeEmperor Wen of the Sung dynasty, Fan Yeh -O, the author ofHou HanshuX.X@, wrote the following letter to his nephews:'Now that I have come to grief because of my recklessnessand dissent, what morecan I say? You would all be quite justified in rejecting me as a criminal. I am,of course, mindful of my lifelong conduct, but you can determine that for your-selves. However, as for my innate abilities and how I interpret what is in mymind, these things you may not yet fully understand.In my youth I was lazy in my studies and matured late. I was over thirty beforeI discovered my true inclinations.2 From that time on, however, I began to

I am heavily indebted to Dr. Achilles Fang for introducing me to the prose of Fan Yehseveral years ago and for weeding many errors out from my translations. Professor JamesR. Hightower has also made several suggestions that have greatly improved this article.1 The letter is found in Fan Yeh's biography in Sungshu69.1829-31; there is a slightlydifferent version in Nan shih33.854-55. (All references to the dynastic histories are to thePeking, Chung-hua shu-chii edition. The chuiannumber precedes the period and thepage number follows it.)Fan Yeh was born in 398 into a family that had traditions of distinguished governmentservice and scholarship. His grandfather, Fan Ning M (339-401), wrote what was laterto become the standard commentary on Ku-liangchuan;his uncle, Fan Hung-chih -M4LZ,was an Erudite at the Imperial Academy during the Chin dynasty; and his father, FanT'ai : (355-428), rose to the prestigious position of General of Chariots and Cavalry(Chui-chi chiang-chiin ) During the early years of the Sung dynasty, whichdisplaced the Chin in 420, Fan Yeh served as a military officer under Liu Yi-k'ang J*,

339


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340 RONALD C. EGANimprove myself, and though now I am getting old, I intend to go on. From timeto time I have insights, for what they are worth, yet I have been unable to expressthem fully.I was never fond of studying commentaries. My disposition is coarse and whenI tax my brain even a little bit I feel sick inside. Furthermore, my tongue is noteloquent or agile and so I have never excelled at conversation. Whatever learningI have I acquired from within myself. My writing gradually improved, but mytalents are limited and my thoughts come with difficulty, so that among thecompositions I have managed to complete, few are satisfactory.I never wanted to become a mere literary embellisher. In writing, there is thedanger that the substance will be overshadowed by the outward appearanceand that the sentiment will be cramped by ornamentation, that literary conven-tions will hamper the writer's purport and that rhythm will distort his thoughts.Although occasionally there are competent writers, most do not avoid thesehazards, making their work just like the craftsmen'spaintings, which have no realvalue. I have always believed that in expressing oneself thought should be madeprimary and words should merely be used to convey the thought. When thoughtis primary then the purport will naturally show through, and when words areused merely to convey the thought the language will not run wild. Having graspedthis principle, then one can gather fragrant blossoms and strike bronze gongsand stone chimes. Under these conditions, the thousand kinds of sense and senti-ment will emerge coherently at every turn. Believing that I really discern the secret

Prince of P'eng-ch'eng, and by 432 he had been appointed to a high post in the Depart-ment of Functionaries. During that year, however, Fan Yeh committed the indiscretionof getting drunk on the eve of the burial of Liu Yi-k'ang's mother, throwing open thewindows of his apartments, and making fun of the dirges that were being sung throughthe night. For this, he was demoted to the post of Grand Administrator (T'ai-shou %;t)of Hsiian-ch'eng R , in modern Anhwei. It was during the five or six years he occupiedthis post that Fan Yeh, his official career at the capital interrupted, compiled his Hou Hanshu. Later, towards the end of the decade of the 430's, Fan Yeh received the first of a seriesof promotions that eventually restored him to the court, where he seems to have been afavorite of the Emperor and was eventually appointed Commander of the ImperialGuard on the Left (Tso wei chiang-chun ) and Supplier to the Heir Apparant(T'ai-tzu chan-shih ; ). However, in 445 he helped to organize a plot to installhis old patron, Liu Yi-k'ang (Emperor Wen's younger brother) on the throne, and whenthe plot was leaked he was arrested. After approximately three weeks of incarceration,during which time the Emperor personally investigated the case, Fan Yeh was publiclyexecuted on January 23, 446, together with three of his sons and other conspirators. (Foradditional biographical information see the Sungshunotice on Fan Yeh. Also, for the dateof his death see Sung shu 5.93, and regarding the chronological discrepancy about theyear of his demotion to the post at Hsuan-ch'eng see Hou Han shu, p. ii and Sung shu69.1832. Another biographical sketch can be found in Hans Bielenstein, "The Restora-tion of The Han Dynasty." BMFEA. 26 r19541. 14-15.)

2 The Nan shih text has the variant shangfit "what I esteemed" for hsiang[i] "inclina-tions."


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 341of these matters, I have told it to others, but most were unable to appreciate whatI said: perhaps because they look at things differently.All men can distinguish musical sounds and pitches; this is as it should be. Whata pity that most writers of the past and present have failed to grasp this, and thatthose who have grasped it have not understood the essence of the matter. Myopinion can be backed up with concrete proof and is not idle talk. Among today'syoung men, Hsieh Chuang [421-66] is the most gifted in this regard. His wordsare not constricted by conventional prosody.My thoughts have no fixed formula and are able to flow around any obstacle,always finding the right balance. And I have still never done full justice to myinnate abilities. Most of my writings were of an official nature, hence they lackedthe lingering flavor that goes beyond the matter at hand, a fact I deeply regret.That is why I never sought to become known as a writer. I never had anything todo with historical writing, always feeling that it was simply beyond me.However, when I wrote my History of the Later Han I came to discover theprinciples of historical writing. Now, when I examine the historical narrativesand critiques from ancient times down to the present, there are few that I findsatisfactory. Pan Ku [32-92] is the most renowned historian, but since he couldonly do as he saw fit, having no ancient precedents, he cannot be compared withlater historians. His appended Eulogies are not acceptable to our common sense,and it is only his Treatises that are commendable. But in these his erudition cannotbe matched and his organization is glorious.

The Disquisitions in my various biographies embody my painstaking thoughtand deep purport. I made the language terse because I wanted to restrict theflavor in each of them. But as for the Introductions and Disquisitionsin my chaptersfrom the one on scrupulous officials down to those on the six barbarian tribes,3in those my brush gallops away unbridled. They are the most original writings inthis world. Here and there they do not pale before the piece "The Faults of theCh'in,"4 and when I set them alongside those that Pan Ku wrote they are farfrom being a source of shame.I wanted to write various Treatises, to complement all those that Pan Ku wrote.Though they need not be so detailed, still they should enable one to see everythingat a glance. I also wanted to write critiques on various matters within each chapterso as to pass judgment on the right and wrong of the age. My good intentions werenever fulfilled.5

3 That is, the last fifteen of Fan Yeh's chapters of Biographies, each of which is devotedto a particular group of persons (e.g., scrupulous officials, harsh officials, eunuchs, scholars,men of letters, etc.). Actually, only eight of the chapters have both an Introduction and aDisquisition; the others lack one or both of the essays.4 "Kuo Ch'in" f, the famous opening essay in Chia Yi's I (201-169 B.C.) Hsinshu. The first half of his essay was anthologized in Wenhsaanunder the title "Kuo Ch'inlun" ; for an English translation of the Wen hsu2anelection see that by BurtonWatson in Anthologyof ChineseLiterature, d. Cyril Birch (New York: Grove Press, 1965),pp. 46-48.6 The Treatises that are now found in Hou Han shu are from Ssu-ma Piao's J


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342 RONALD C. EGANThe Eulogies contain my supreme thinking: not a single word is wasted, andthey are full of unexpected turns, all aiming at the same goal though in differentstyles. I myself hardly know how to praise them. When this work circulates, I amconvinced that there will be those who really appreciate it. In the Annals and

Biographies proper, my plan was simply to give a general sketch of events. Still,they fully evidence my painstaking effort. Never since antiquity has there beensuch a grand plan matched with such careful deliberation as in this work of mine.I only fear that contemporaries will not do justice to my book. Many of themvenerate ancient writings while belittling modern ones, and that is why I havenow given free rein to my feelings and indulged in reckless talk.In music I am better at playing than at listening, but I regret to say that whatI excel at is not the classically correct style. However, once one reaches masterywhat is the difference? The reality and enjoyment of such a state can never befully expressed in words. There is no way of accounting for the source of thethought that lingers after the string falls silent or the sound that remains after thereverberation has ceased. Even at its most meager, the flavor is infinite. I havetried to teach my method of playing to others, but neither among the gentry or thecommoners is there anyone who can come close to it. It is sure to die with me.Though my calligraphy has some slight interest, my brush movement is clumsyand awkward. I have always been embarrassedby my reputation as a calligrapher.This letter, which ends so abruptly, is strikingforits arroganttone

(thoughthe arrogance s sometimestemperedwith a poseof humility,as in the last sentence). Fan Yeh claims to be a man who has learnedeverything on his own rather than from books or conversations, aman who trusts nothing but his own intuition and who scorns con-ventions, such as prosodic rules for writing or the classical style inmusic.6Furthermore,he finds fault with contemporaries and evenwith venerated ancients. Predictably enough, Fan Yeh has beenstrongly censured through the centuries for the attitudes expressed(240-306) Hsu Han shu an*, a work no longer extant. Ssu-ma Piao's Treatises haveregularly circulated together with Fan Yeh's work since the 11th century (see Bielenstein,pp. 16-17). Incidentally, the reason there is a discrepancy of thirty in the chiiannumbersof the Biographies in various editions of Hou Han shu is that some editions, such as thePeking, Chung-hua shu-chii edition, print the thirty chidan f Treatises at the end of thework, while other editions, such as the Palace edition, print the Treatises in the traditionalplace, before the Biographies.

6 In addition to his reputation as a writer (see note 8 below), Fan Yeh was also knownfor his musical talent. His biography relates the following anecdote:He played thep'i-p'awell and couldcomposenew tunes. The Emperorwanted to hear him performand subtlyalluded to his desire on several occasions, but Yeh pretendedhe did not understandand would not play for him. Once, when the Emperorwas enjoyinghimselfat a feast,he turnedto Yeh and said,"I want to sing a song. You accompanyme." Yehdid as commanded,but as soonas the Emperorstopped singing,Yeh stopped playing. (Sungshu 69.1830)


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 343in this letter, particularly for his criticism of Pan Ku.7 However, ifwe refrain from dismissing Fan Yeh outright for his arrogance andremind ourselves of the high standing of his writing (as evidencedby the praise ancient and modern critics have for it,8 and the factsthat his Hou Han shu completely supplanted several earlier historiesof the Later Han9 and that more of his historical essays were selectedinto Wen hsuan than were those by any other historian),0 this lettertakes on considerable interest as an acknowledged master's state-ment about his own writing.

Naturally, we cannot simply accept Fan Yeh's evaluation of hiswriting. Writers are frequently poor judges of their own work;besides, Fan Yeh's remarks are too vague to be a satisfactory

7See, for example, the comments of Hung Mai # (1123-1202), Jung-chai ui-piVWN (Kuo-hsuihi-pen s'ung-shu d.), 15.142-43; Ch'en Chen-sun &jw (ft. 1234), Chih-chaishu-lu chieh-t'i ,S ffl (Kuo-hsuehhi-pen s'ung-shu d.) 4.92; and Chu Ho-ling*%Wp (1606-83), Yii-anhsiao-chijJJ4 (Ssu-k'uch'uan-shu d. [Taipei: CommercialPress, 1973] 4th Series, vol. 385), 13.6a-7b.

8 The nineteenth-century scholar and parallel prose writer, Li Tz'u-ming _;V (1830-94) had especially high praise for Fan Yeh, saying that he was the best historian since theHan dynasty, and that his Introductions and Disquisitions are superior even to those bySsu-ma Ch'ien, Pan Ku, and Ch'en Shou (see Yuieh-man'ang tu shu chi LW Mff[Peking: Chung-hua shu-chiu, 1963], pp. 185-87). Earlier praise for Fan Yeh's literaryskill can be found in Shihp'in *n, where Chung Hung go (469-518) quotes a con-temporary opinion that the only persons who really understood the matter of tonalharmony in writing were Fan Yeh and Hsieh Chuang Sf; (421-66) (see Shihp'in chugnt [Taipei: K'ai-ming shu-tien, 1973], p. 9). Liu Chih-chi tIJriW (661-721) alsospeaks highly of Fan Yeh's historical essays (see Shih-t'ung t'ung-shih_tM [HongKong: T'ai-p'ing shu-chui, 1961], p. 53). In this century, Tai Fan-yii W has com-mended the literary merits of Fan Yeh's prose in hisFan Yeh u ch'i Hou HanshurpeAA& (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1939), pp. 1, 52-54.9 There were at least seven comprehensive histories of the Later Han, and a dozen orso works of limited scope, by the beginning of the fifth century. (For a complete listingsee Bielenstein, pp. 10-13.) In addition to these earlier works, Liu Yi-ch'ing fDn(403-44) and Hsiao Tzu-hsien :f.-h (489-537) each wrote an additional Hou Han shu,but these two were eclipsed by Fan Yeh's work and later disappeared altogether(Bielenstein, p. 16).10Fan Yeh dominates the shih-lunP "Disquisitions from the Histories" section ofWenhsiuan,where he is represented by four essays as compared with two by Kan Pao

yf (ft. ca. 320), two by Shen Yueh &it (441-513), and one by Pan Ku. The large num-ber of Fan Yeh selections is particularly impressive when one remembers that the fieldof choice was larger by several times when Wenhsiian was compiled, in the early sixthcentury, than it would be now, since only a fraction of pre-T'ang historical writing hasbeen preserved. Fan Yeh's essays in Wen hsuanare: the Introductions to the chapters onempresses, eunuchs, and recluses, and the Disquisition on the twenty-eight generals of theRestoration.


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344 RONALD C. EGANdescription of his style. Still, the letter is important for the pictureit gives of a man who takes great pride in the literary qualities ofhis prose. Here is a historian who seems to value aptness and powerof expression over factual accuracy or moralistic instructiveness.(Thus, this letter makes a nice contrast with that written by Ssu-maCh'ien to Jen An five and one-half centuries earlier, in which thathistorian's pretensions are didactic and historiographical rather thanliterary.)"', Moreover, some of the points Fan Yeh makes in his letterhelp to orient us as we begin the attempt to characterize his writing.

One such point is his insistence on giving priority to thought overornamentation. Fan Yeh is not the first writer to criticize excessively"ornamental" writing. Yang Hsiung A* (53 B.C.-A.D. 18), WangCh'ung TIE (b. 27), and Chih Yu VA (d. ca. 312) all spoke outagainst embellishedfu Mt writing.12 However, there is some differ-ence between Fan Yeh's criticism and that by earlier writers. Theearlier critics disapproved of what they considered to be the frivo-lous purpose of fu, and their objections are closely tied to theircommitment to moralistic, Confucian writing. Fan Yeh's criticismis not directed against a particular genre of writing but against acertain style of writing that was prevalent in his time. Thus, whatFan Yeh advocates is not a change in the purpose and method ofsome writing, but a new approach to writing in general.

Fan Yeh's criticism of writing in which the outward appearanceis given precedence over the substance is, of course, criticism ofcontemporary parallel prose (p'ien-t'i wen Jiq"3). Fan Yeh livedduring an age in which parallel prose was emerging as the standardmode for all nonnarrative prose. Not only was the range of parallelprose widening, the mode itself was becoming increasingly stylized:its diction was growing more allusive and studied, and conventions

11 The letter is found in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's biography in Han shu 62.2725-36. It has beentranslated by James R. Hightower in Anthologyof ChineseLiterature, p. 95-102.12 For Yang Hsiung's criticism offu see Yang-tzua-yen (SPTK ed.), 2. la-b (cf. DavidR. Knechtges, The Han Rhapsody Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976], pp. 94-97). For Wang Ch'ung's views see Lunheng chi chieh(Peking: Ku-chi ch'u-pan she, 1957ed.), "Yi-wen p'ien," pp. 412-13, "Ting-hsien p'ien," p. 546, and "Tzu-chi p'ien," pp.584-85 (tr. Alfred Forke, Lun-heng [New York: Paragon Book Gallery, 1962 reprint],

II, 279, 145-46, and i, 72, respectively). For Chih Yu see the surviving fragments ofhis Wen-chang iu-piehchi eIJA (Collection f Writingby Genres) n Yen K'o-chiun'sCh'uanChinwen gS; 77.8a.


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 345were evolving regarding its sounds (that is, its prosody, rhyme, andphonetic tones) .13 A reading of the more mannered parallel prosepieces of Fan Yeh's day makes it easy to understand what he ob-jected to and why his criticism was echoed by others.14 However,the terms in which his argument is cast may be slightly misleading.Fan Yeh's conception of how to write seems to be based on an as-sumption, common in the ancient world, that words are funda-mentally distinct from the ideas they express, that language issimply a vehicle used in the service of a higher entity, thought.According to this assumption, it is possible to abuse the vehicle andthus fail to express any meaning. A modern critic would probablywant to put it somewhat differently. He would insist on the closeconnection between language and meaning, and say that althoughit is certainly possible to use language awkwardly, thus conveyingmisleading or irrelevant meanings, it is unlikely that anyone who

13 On the general development of parallel prose through the fourth and fifth centuriessee Wang Yao, "Hsui, Yu yii p'ien-t'i" ("Hsii Ling, Yu Hsin, and Parallel Prose"), inhis Chung-kuwen-hsiieh-shihun chi (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsiieh ch'u-pan she, 1956),pp. 158-63; and Liu Lin-sheng lijT, Chung-kuo 'ien-wenshih (Shanghai: CommercialPress, 1937), pp. 26-60.14 Hsiao Tzu-hsien f (488-537) notes the harmful effects of prolix diction, theexcessive use of parallelism and ancient expressions, and startling or gaudy diction inhis analysis of contemporary writing styles that is appended to the chapter on men ofletters in his Nan Ch'i shu52.908:Contemporaryiterature, or all itsmany practitioners, an more or lessbe divided into three mainstyles. In the firststyle,expressions leisurelyand drawnout, anddiction is rich and wide ranging.Although this style may achieve intricatelyresplendentpatterns,it is really too roundabout. Itis suitablefor diversionat palace feasts,but shouldnot be taken as a standard. It has the incurablemaladiesof carelessness nd torpidity.Its refinementand decorummay be commendable,but itsexcesses are unacceptable.The origin of this style can be traced to Hsieh Ling-yun [385-433].The secondstyle weavesallusions ogetherandmatchesreferences f the sametype, not admittinganylinewithout a parallel.Althoughthe erudition husdisplayedmayhavetruemerit,the conven-tion soon becomes restrictive. Some writers rely completely on phrasesborrowed from ancientwritingsto express today's sentiments; they twist and stretch the meanings, determined to usenothing but paired lines. Because they concentrateonly on ancient precedents,they lose all theessence and color of written expression.As for the origin of this style, although the poems on thefive classicsby Fu Hsien [239-94] and the indirectcriticismsby Ying Chu [190-252] do not fullymanifest t, they can be taken as its model.In the thirdstyle, thesinging s startlingand the tune is daring and fast. The elaborate ntaglioand inordinategorgeousness umbfoundand dazzle the mind. It is like the redsand purplesof thecolor spectrumor the Cheng and Wei songsof the musical repertoire.This style is the heritageof Pao Chao [d. 466].In addition to the above, both Liu Hsieh's Wen-hsin iao-lung and Chung Hung's Shihp'in contain many disparaging remarks about writing that puts greater emphasis onoutward appearances (whether diction or prosody) than substance; see notes 40, 53, and54 below.


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346 RONALD C. EGANwrites in a grammatically correct manner will fail to convey somemeaning. Likewise, as long as the connotations and nuances ("thelingering flavor that goes beyond the matter at hand") are felt tobe relevant and to fill out the sense, then the texture of the writingmay be very dense and the language bespeak great self-conscious-ness on the author's part without the writing being merely orna-mental. 15 This modification of Fan Yeh's underlying theory isimportant to bear in mind, because if we subsequently think of theissue involved as that of "ornamental, frivolous writing" versus"plain, meaningful writing," we shall be quite unable to explainwhat makes Fan Yeh's prose innovative and interesting. For althoughFan Yeh eschews the mannerisms of his contemporaries, his stylecould never be characterized as "plain."

Judging from his letter, Fan Yeh takes the most pride in thosesections of his history that are not the mere narration of events;that is, in the hsiu)$ Introductions, lun Wm isquisitions, and tsan XEulogies, which contain his summaries of major developments andhis evaluations of policies. Since these are the sections in whichFan Yeh is the 1-east bound by the obligation to report factualdetails, and speaks most clearly in his own voice, it is not surprisingthat they are his particular pride and have the greatest literaryinterest of any part of the history. In what follows, I shall firstdiscuss the characteristics of these stylistically elevated sections(excluding the Eulogies, which are a type of poetry),16 then go onto comment on the style of the more mundane narrative prosethat makes up the bulk of the history.

Fan Yeh's historical essays are, first of all, tightly organized. Theopening paragraph of the Introduction to the biographies of harshofficials is typical:The Han dynasty inherited the violent ways of the Warring States period and hadgreat numbers of unruly and lawless people. Those bent on aggrandizement

15 See the thoughtful analysis of the relationship between style and meaning by W. K.Wimsatt: The ProseStyle of SamuelJohnson Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972 reprint),pp. 9-14.16 Fan Yeh's tsan% Eulogies are written in alternately rhymed four-character lines andare normally between four and twelve lines long. They roughly correspond to the shu3that are contained in the last chapter of Han shu. Fan Yeh's tsanthus bear no resemblanceto the tsan in Han shu, which are short prose essays found at the end of each chapter (andare the formal model for Fan Yeh's lun S Disquisitions).


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 347tyrannized provinces and counties, while local strong-men dominated the villages.Furthermore, the jurisdiction of each magistrate was vast and the populationlarge. Therefore, officials who governed the people had to take all power into theirown hands and act with authority: in extirpating evildoers and their families theywould first carry out the executions and only later send reports to their superiors.They acted harshly on their own impulses, cultivating an inflexible bearing.They disregarded the masses and followed their own will, flaunting their un-predictable craftiness. It went to the extent that strict laws were wantonly applied,and there were more scapegoats than could ever be listed. Thus there were suchcases as the pile of bones that filled the pit and the blood that flowed for tenmiles.17 Wang Wen-shu had subordinates who were known as tigers with caps,18and Yen Yen-nien was called "king of the butchers"19-were such characteriza-tions unwarranted? Yet those who crushed the mighty and bridled the ducalministers, never flinching even when their own necks might have been cut, were,after all, heroic men.20The first three sentences describe the general conditions that officialsconfronted at the beginning of the Han dynasty, the next three sen-tences report the way the officials reacted, the next three sentencestell of the excesses that the policy of harshness led to, citing specificexamples, and then the paragraph ends on a positive note, with asentence that softens the censure in what precedes. The paragraphis a balanced, carefully thought out statement on these cruel buteffective men.

Fan Yeh's brief Disquisition on eunuchs shows similar attentionto careful exposition:Ever since antiquity, the perishing of a dynasty and consequent extinction of itssacrificial offerings have always come as the culmination of a gradual process.The Hsia, Shang, and Chou dynasties brought on their calamities because of theirwomen favorites, the Ch'in dynasty ruined itself through extravagance andcruelty, the Former Han reign came to an end owing to Imperial in-laws, andthe Later Han was toppled on account of eunuchs, Now, the causes of suchcatastrophes have long been discussed by historians, but the case of the fatal"crack" originating with eunuchs may yet bear some comment.

17 See Han shu 90.3673 and 90.3656, respectively (referred to by Li Hsien * [651-84], under whose supervision the T'ang Hou Han shu commentary was compiled).18 For the biography of Wang Wen-shu see Han shu 90.3655-58.19 For the biography of Yen Yen-nien see Han shu 90.3667-72.20 Hou Han shu 77.2487. In this passage and those translated below I have followed thetext of the Chung-hua shu-chu edition and adopted its textual emendations, most ofwhich are made in accordance with changes suggested in Wang Hsien-ch'ien's Hou Hanshuchi-chieh.


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348 RONALD C. EGANThe fact of the matter is that the corporeal mutilation of eunuchs makes themdefective human beings: their name and fame have no way to reflect gloriouslyupon their family, and their flesh and blood can never be passed on to an heir.Their evils are not detected even after scrutiny, and their propinquity to the ruler

wins them his trust. Furthermore, in time they become steeped in court affairsandacquire expertise in formal precedents and usages. Hence young rulers dependupon their dutiful and proven service, and regent Empresses rely upon them topromulgate decrees; sovereigns consult them without any suspicion and becomeintimate with them because of their pleasing mien.To be sure, there were truly loyal and fair-minded eunuchs who through theirresourcefulness managed to correct wrongdoing. On the other hand, there werealso those who, gifted with agile minds and glib tongues, used clever displays toconfound the truth. Then there were those who rode along on the praises given tofaithful and upright officials whom they had recommended as young men. It isnot that the eunuchs simply indulged their evil nature and stopped only after theyhad committed cruel and wild acts.But the perverse among them walked side by side with the honest ones, theirappearance at odds with their real disposition. It is little wonder that they wereable to confuse and delude witless and young rulers, blinding their vision anddeafening their hearing. Once their trickery and the advantage thusgained becameextensive, with the ranksof their cohorts and followersincreasing daily, then when-ever outspoken ministers tried to protest they would be sure to leak the matterbefore the protestations were formally made; and when the Imperial in-laws werestirred up, the occasion was just right for them to open the crack for usurpationand seizure of power. It was thus that faithful and worthy men were outwitted,and the altars of earth and grain were demolished and became ruins. The Bookof Changes ays, "Treading on hoarfrost, it gradually turns to solid ice," meaningthat the process is a lengthy one. Now, when we trace the true causes of thedynasty's fall, it surely is not something that came about in one day or night.21Here, in addition to presenting a well-ordered and progressively morecomplex and qualified explanation of what the eunuchs were likeand how they managed to usurp power, the author uses phrasesfrom a classical source to frame his essay and to lend it even morecohesion. The phrase "the culmination of a gradual process" at theend of the first sentence is taken from the Wen-yen Commentaryon the second hexagram in the Bookof Changes. The wording isslightly different in Fan Yeh's essay and the grammar conspicuouslyodd.)22 Aside from this phrase, which bears directly on the theme

21 Hou Han shu 78.2537-38.22 The Hou Hanshuphrase is: i; t; ,, Cf. the Bookof Changes hrase: At : :Xf-, (Chou [Harvard-Yenching concordance], p. 4a).


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 349of the essay, there is no other phrase drawn from a classical sourceuntil the end of the essay. There, by way of recapitulating the themeof gradual process, the author first gives an explicit quotation fromthe same Book of Changes hexagram,23 and then, in the final line,uses the phrase "in one day or night," which is the phrase thatimmediately precedes the one used at the beginning of the essay inthe Wen-yen Commentary.

Fan Yeh's essays are thus characterized by meticulous structuringand the expression of strong, well-considered opinions. He consis-tently addresses important matters, relating the subject of a particularchapter to larger events, and refrains from oversimplifying (by noting,for example, the real contributions made by such groups as theharsh officials and eunuchs as well as the harm they did). But thereis more to these essays than the careful exposition of a reasoned pointof view. The language itself is rich and engaging. It draws attentionto itself, much as language does in poetry, being full of nuances ofmeaning and sentiment that fill out the opinion being expressed.It is the essays' literary interest that is their most distinctive mark.

Several characteristics of the language help to account for itsinterest. First, there is the tailoring of sense to rhythm (the qualitythat suffers most in translation). Intelligent use of rhythm can im-prove writing by clarifying the precise weight of individual wordsand by binding certain of them more closely together. It has beenpointed out how much a poem loses when paraphrased in prose, oreven when its words are unaltered but are printed out in paragraphform.24 What is lost is the pleasing and clarifying effect of a steadybeat.Grammatical parallelism goes hand in hand with metricalregularity in the Chinese prose of Fan Yeh's age (a type of prosethat takes its name, p'ien-t'i wen, from its conspicuous use of paral-lelism). The juxtaposition of grammatically matching phrases, whicheither make related affirmations or which stand in antithetical rela-tionship to each other, can result in a stronger statement than can

23Chou , p. 3b.24 See Archibald MacLeish, Poetryand Experience(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960),pp. 11-12; and Hugh Kenner, TheArt of Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,1959), pp. 71-72.


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350 RONALD C. EGANbe achieved in any free paraphrase of the same lines. Such paral-lelism is particularly effective in Chinese, since it allows the writerto express himself in forceful language that is often so terse that itwould be ambiguous were it not for the matching member of theparallel construction, which clarifies the grammar. Surely, this isone of the reasons parallelism became such an important elementin Chinese poetry, along with metrical regularity.

Prose that is highly rhythmic and full of parallel constructions isformally closer to poetry than is less constricted prose in whichthese features rarely occur, and its potential for some types of poeticeffect is correspondingly greater. On the other hand, the dangersof these formal characteristics are not inconsiderable. It is all tooeasy for the writer who uses them to become slave to their tyranny.The forcefulness and clarity of parallel constructions and a steadybeat can so mesmerize the writer that he begins to use them inplaces where they are detrimental to the sense required by the con-text; or they may assert themselves to the extent that they dominatethe entire composition, depriving it of the spontaneity of unexpectedturns and altered rhythms that are essential to most exposition.Thus, Liu Hsieh VJ (d. ca. 523) warned, "If there are no irregu-larities in your expression, if your writing lacks variation and goeson and on in parallel units, you will put your reader to sleep."25In his letter, Fan Yeh shows that he is well aware of the pitfallsof these formal conventions: "In writing, there is the danger that thesubstance will be overshadowed by the outward appearance and thatthe sentiment will be cramped by ornamentation; that literaryconventions will hamper the writer's purport and that rhythm willdistort his thoughts." Although Fan Yeh's expository prose is heavilyinfluenced by the vogue of the parallel mode during his day, ingeneral he succeeds in avoiding its dangers while exploiting the ex-pressive potentials of the conventions to the full.

Grammatical parallelism is put to a variety of uses in Fan Yeh'shistorical essays. (All the examples given below are taken from thesix essays that are translated as an appendix to this paper, or from thepassages translated above. The reader is referred in each example

25 Wen-hsin iao-lungchu-ting,ed. Chang Li-chai (Taipei: Cheng-chung shu-chii, 1967),p. 352.


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 351to the page on which the example occurs in the fill translation.)It may be used to specify coordinate aspects of a particular event orsituation:

The jurisdiction of each magistrate was vast and the population large (p. 347).

[Eunuchs'] name and fame have no way to reflect gloriously upon their family,and their flesh and blood can never be passed on to an heir (p. 348).

It was thus that faithful and worthy men were outwitted, and the altars of earthand grain were demolished and became ruins (p. 348).It may be used antithetically, to help to order a general argument,clarifying distinct alternatives:

If august Imperial grace is given only to a few, then the sovereign will easily makethe mistake of favoring the incompetent. However, if everyone is treated with ab-solute fairness, then the sovereign will widen the road along which able men canbe recruited for office (p. 401).It may be used, for emphasis, in an antithetical statement thataffirms one thing while denying its opposite:P-t 4 P, ,L% t a.... they only concerned themselves with expedients of the day, and had nothought for far-reaching policies of statesmanship (p. 393).Or in a statement that contrasts different types of persons or situa-tions:

Those who compromised themselves and bent to the eunuchs' demands wonprominence and Imperial favor for their clans to the third degree, while those whoremained true to their convictions and went against the eunuchs' desires broughton the extirpation of their families to the fifth degree (pp. 385-86).

Fan Yeh tends to save parallel constructions for those cases inwhich it is appropriate and meaningful to analyze the matter at hand


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352 RONALD C. EGANinto two distinct elements. There are some particularly skillful uses:

The court advisors, trying to give counsel, had no means to influence decisionsmade within the inner-palace curtains; and the Empress Dowager, as she issueddecrees and proclamations on the Emperor's behalf, never emerged from behindthe doors to the women's quarters (p. 385).Here, the topic is the separation of the Empress Dowager from thecourt advisors and how the eunuchs intermediated. The passageaccurately analyzes the policymaking process into two steps:advisors offering up their counsel, and the ruler handing downdecisions. Since in this case the ruler was a woman, the court officialscould not have direct contact with her, hence both steps of theprocess required intermediaries. Therefore, as the passage concludes,"[The Empress Dowager] could not but use eunuchs, entrustingthem with all state orders."ASVIM %3VOKBut the perverse among them walked side by side with the honest ones, their ap-pearance at odds with their real disposition (p. 348).This sentence describes the eunuchs by means of two pairs ofopposites: chenhsiehAS, the honest versus the perverse eunuchs,and ch'ing mao ;rS, the appearance versus the real nature of theperverse eunuchs. The two pairs are related but not redundant,moreover both pairs are essential to the larger argument, which at-tempts to explain how such an evil group of men rose to politicalprominence by noting that there were some good men among themand that the others managed to keep their wickedness concealed.

What Fan Yeh generally avoids is contrived parallelism; that is,parallelism which results from padding a statement so that it comesout in parallel phrases even though the sense does not require thematching. The most common methods of such padding are to saythe same thing twice and to provide two illustrations or examplesof something. Kan Pao's T (f. ca. 320) Chin-chisung-lunIRMS"Comprehensive Disquisition on the History of the Chin Dynasty,"which precedes Fan Yeh's Disquisitions in Wenhsuan,s full of paddedparallel constructions:


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 353fTA*.%,1 01-V,A)J1


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354 RONALD C. EGAN[The people] took delight in his life and mourned his death.B+XT -v, "'Ast.Officials carefully observed the rituals, while the commoners exerted themselvesto the utmost.28Or, the writer may let himself be forced into making false dis-tinctions:ORA, Rk|% 50-MR&MR.Morality was substantial in each dwelling, and wickedness vanished from eachheart.29Kan Pao might just as well have said that morality was substantialin each heart and that wickedness vanished from each dwelling. Thisis simply imprecise writing.

Of course, no extended piece of formal Six Dynasties prose, in-cluding Fan Yeh's essays, is completely free of such blemishes.Parallel constructions that consist of illustrative examples areespecially common, and they are not felt to be a lapse when usedsparingly and in contrast to other kinds of statements. However,when the above types of parallelisms begin to equal or outnumberthe more legitimate kinds that are rooted in meaning rather than inprosodic convention (as they do in Kan Pao's "ComprehensiveDisquisition"), then the prose becomes, at best, loose and rhetorical;at the worst, such writing is sapped of exactness and intensity. Twolonger passages from Kan Pao's Disquisition are translated below.The first describes how the sage kings of antiquity ruled:According themselves with Heaven, the sage rulers received its mandate; re-sponding to the people, they united them in their loyalty. Then they establishedrituals and regulations to keep them in order, and determined punishments andpenalties to overawe them; they cautioned them about good and evil behavior toinstruct them, and expounded on the causes of good and bad fortune to teachthem; they sought out discerning men to govern them, and developed their ownbeneficence to the full to preserve their allegiance. Thus, the people came tounderstand the Way: they took delight in their ruler's life and mourned his death;they found pleasure in his teaching and comfort in his customs. Officials carefullyobserved the rituals, while the commoners exerted themselves to the utmost.Morality was substantial in each dwelling, and wickedness vanished from each

28 Wenhsiuan49.1Oa and 49. 1Ob.29 Wenhsian 49.1Ob.


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 355heart. Hence, the people would lay down their lives in a national crisis, and wouldnot seek to protect themselves at the expense of duty. How could they ever havethought of waving their arms and shouting to each other, banding together toviolate the law and initiate rebellion ?30The second passage describes the social and political malaise at theend of the Western Chin dynasty:The court had few true and principled officials, and the hamlets had a scarcity ofingenuous elders. Moresbecame depraved, and the standards of pride and shamebecame dislodged. Scholars took Chuang-tzu and Lao-tzu as their orthodoxy andrejected the Confucian classics; clever talkers fashioned arguments out of vacuouswords and scorned all values; in their personal lives, men took indulgence inwickedness to be the right way and considered integrity and trustworthiness to benarrow; those who served in the bureaucracy strove after personal gain anddespised rectitude; and those who held high office devoted themselves to staringinto space and laughed at diligence.Thus the three ducal ministers were dubbed "know-nothings"3' and courtcounsel was known as "empty chatter." Liu Sung spoke out repeatedly on thetrue way of government, and Fu Hsien continuously tried to correct wrong-doing,32 but they were denigrated as lowly clerks; meanwhile, those who sup-ported themselves with empty actions and gave themselves over to thoughtlessnessall achieved renown throughout the empire. As for the examples set by King Wen,who never took time to eat until sunset, and Chung-shan Fu,33who did not restfrom his toil morning or evening, everyone scoffed at them, considering them tobe as worthless as dirt and a source of shame.34The overall tone of Kan Pao's essay is unmistakably different fromthat of Fan Yeh's essays, and much of the differencecan be tracedto Fan Yeh's more restrainedand deliberate use of parallelism.Although Fan Yeh avoids contrived parallelism, he does notsacrifice the steady rhythm of the parallel style. He does write incouplets, which normally consist of two four-character lines, but

30 Wenhsiian49. 1Oa-b.31 Mine is only one of several possible understandings of the troublesome term hsiao-chi #kL; see the note on the expression by Obi Koichi , Monzen C;, ZenshakuKambun aikei ; Vol. 31 (Tokyo: Shiueisha, 1976), p. 614.32 Liu Sung (ft. ca. 275) and Fu Hsien (239-94) have biographies in Chin hu 46 and 47,respectively.33 For the legendary industriousness of King Wen and Chung-shan Fu, both of theChou dynasty, see Shangshu, "Wu-i," pars. 9-11 (Bernhard Karlgren, tr., The Book ofDocumentsrpt. Goteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1950, from BMFEA, Vol. 22],p. 58), and Shih chingode no. 260 (Karlgren, The Book of Odes[rpt. Goteborg, 1950, fromBMFEA, Vols. 16-17], pp. 228-30).34 Wenhsiian49.14a-15a.


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356 RONALD C. EGANoften settles for metrical parallelism rather than grammaticalparallelism.There are many types of such couplets:#MI?,? W.The troops in Ping and Liang sustained the heaviest casualties (pp. 390-91).

Although from time to time truly loyal officials appeared at the court, in the endthey were all driven away (p. 385).1ffiW6r, iEb .

. . . but because they hesitated and failed to act, they met death and defeat (p.387).&*'ML'r9, %AMO&During the Yung-ch'u period, all the barbarians arose in swarms (p. 390).The two lines of the first couplet above can be analyzed as subject/predicate. The secondcouplet consistsof a concessive clause followedby the main clause. The third presentsa cause in the first line andits effect in the second. And the fourth is an adverbial clause fol-lowed by a full sentence.Where it would be awkward to expressthe sense in two metricallyequivalent lines, the normal rhythm is violated. Still, some attemptis usually made to preserve a semblance of the standard beat:

The court advisors, fearing further decline in military strength, desired to negotiatewhatever settlement they could (p. 391).Here, the long first line ends with a four-characterobjective phrasewhich, when matched with the following line, recovers some ofthe feeling of the normal rhythm, helping to compensate for themetrical irregularity.Occasionally, Fan Yeh presents lines that may at first appear tobe grammatically parallel but which in fact are not:f0'ffi;tg2, CStf... relying on their absolute probity that could brook no evil to justify their cruelferocity (p. 381).


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 357

... wanting to cultivate the same friendly relations with us that Hu-han hadformerly enjoyed, in order to prevent attacks upon his people by the barbariansfurther north (p. 395).This is formal parallelism: the lines are metrically equivalent andthe feeling of parallelismis enhanced by the correspondence n word-class, but the lines neither share a relationship to a third line thatmakes them parallel nor do they stand as grammatically matchingindependent statements.Elsewhere, one finds a large number of couplets in which gram-matical parallelism is not maintained where it might have been:IMPiI TkAM.With shining majesty, he commissioned generals, and military banners filled thesky like stars (p. 394).

Then they called out the warriors who were hiding in the mountains, signalinga muster with their shrill whistling (p. 390).The first couplet above describes Emperor Wu's marshalling oftroops to do battle agains the Hsiung-nu, and the second describesthe western barbarians' rallying to rebellion. They are the kinds ofstatements in which one would expect grammatical parallelism, butthe author chooses to avoid it, using the second line of each oupletto relate an interesting image rather than to fill out the grammaticalpattern.The couplet is thus the basic unit of Fan Yeh's expository prose,though of course the balanced rhythm of the couplet is occasionallybroken by an unpaired line. (This happens most often at the begin-ning or the end of a paragraph and is a prosodic signal of a shift inthe line of thought.) But what is distinctive about Fan Yeh's ex-pository prose is the care with which grammatical parallelism withinthe couplet is used. The number of couplets that are merely metri-cally parallel is high,35 and when grammatical parallelism is

35 By my count, roughly 40 percent of the couplets in the essays translated at the endof this paper are metrically parallel and 60 percent are grammatically parallel. Thepercentage of couplets that are merely metrically parallel in Kan Pao's "Comprehensive


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358 RONALD C. EGANemployed it is done so meaningfully. During an age in whichgrammatical parallelism was becoming little more than a formalconvention, Fan Yeh uses it as an expressive device.

The ultimate result is a prose in which there is a steady metricalbeat overlaid with a texture of meaning that alternates betweenparallel and nonparallel statement, with the few formally parallelcouplets falling somewhere in between the two main types. Thetype of couplet used in any particular place depends entirely on thekind of sense required by the context: Fan Yeh resorts to metricalparallelism whenever grammatical parallelism would cramp thesense. This flexibility is evidently Fan Yeh's response to the dangerthat "literary conventions will hamper the writer's purport" (ashe wrote to his nephews).

As for Fan Yeh's diction, the abundance of binomes can hardlygo unnoticed. It can partly be explained by the fact that the proseis predominantly written in four-character phrases; however, FanYeh does more with the binomes than merely use them to satisfythe metrical convention.

Although one can readily enough find binomes in Fan Yeh's writ-ing that have a long history of usage, the real mark of his diction isthe large number of new binomes he coins:NWIANPS,ZWOM.RMINkE,A ttworle, RMZ&VE,PA9Kt1ffP1CWt S SkNiT'Sw, it~Using the pretext of this criticism, the eunuchs went on to indict many membersof the league of scholars and to slander and smear one man after another. Even-tually, not a single person of high repute escaped disaster and injury.Tou Wu and Ho Chin, who were high-ranking ministers and Imperial in-laws,drew support from the entire empire's murmuring and rancor and had the powerof the age's mightiest heroes behind them; but because they hesitated and failedto act, they met death and defeat (pp. 386-87).One cannot be absolutely certain that Fan Yeh was the first to use

Disquisition" is considerably lower, about 20 percent, and it is even lower in Lu Chi'sg (261-303) "Disquisition on the Causes of the Fall" (see p. 365 below), about 15per cent. Furthermore, in these two Disquisitions, the couplets that are not grammaticallyparallel tend to be clustered together in paragraphs that virtually abandon the parallelmode to provide factual information, and both essays contain long passages in which itis difficult to find a single couplet that does not exhibit grammatical parallelism.


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 359any particular binome. In trying to find earlier instances of thebinomes underlined in the passage above, and those referred to inthe following pages, I have checked Morohashi's Dai Kan-wajiten,P'ei-wen yun-fu, and the Wen hsiian concordance. A more thoroughsearch might turn up precedents for some of the binomes in earlierwell-known texts; or, as seems more likely, they may occur in textswritten between the third and early fifth centuries that are no longerextant or are little known and hence not cited by Morohashi orquoted in P'ei-wenyun-fu. Nevertheless, the overwhelming impressionFan Yeh's diction gives is one of novelty, and that would hardly bediminished by the elimination of a few of the apparently newbinomes from the list.Occasionally, Fan Yeh joins synonyms together (e.g., li-pei t).In such cases, the creation of the binome owes more to prosodythan to anything else. But his more characteristic procedure is tobring two words together that have quite different, if related,meanings: wu jan S "to slander, to dye"-a verb that is usedfiguratively is appended to one used literally; hsiaoyfianW,o "clamor,rancor"-the first noun relates to the sensory world and the secondto the psychological one; i liu E- "to doubt, to tarry"-a mentalstate and a physical condition, both of which are involved in"hesitation," are brought together.Fan Yeh's binomes do not always combine different spheres ofaction or existence as these three do. Often, they simply namediscrete actions or qualities, as t'ien-pai PO "to die and be defeated"does in the passage above ("death" referring to the men themselvesand "defeat" to their scheme). Other examples include:

As for those he slaughtered or wounded in ambush ... (p. 392)The first two verbs ("to trap, to assail") are sequential, and thesecond two ("to slaughter, to wound") are coordinate.

... it earned them the lasting favor and trust of the sovereign (p. 385).Not only is the pairing ("to favor, to confirm") unique, the causativeusage adds to the interest.


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360 RONALD C. EGAN

The perverse among them walked side by side with the hpnest ones ... (p. 348)Here, the antonyms are not what one would expect. ChenA "truth-ful" implies its opposite, wei fi (or chia fK) "false," but the authorwishes to emphasize the eunuchs' evil nature in this phrase, savingthe idea of their deceit for the next phrase (f tugk). Likewise,hsieh 9 "perverse" implies and would normally be paired with itsopposite, cheng IE "right, orthodox," but this word could hardly beapplied to a eunuch, and so the author chooses a word that simplydescribes their good behavior.

A similar tendency towards novel diction is evident in the adverb/verb and the adjective/noun combination: hsiung kuei *M "heroicplans" (p. 391), fen sang . "to die in frustration" (p. 392), ch'ilieh *BIJ"arrayed like chess pieces" (p. 386), t'ungsha iR "torturousexecutions" (p. 381), kuo hsi N> "fissures in the realm" (p. 389),and wei tuan 90r "to act with authority" (p. 347). However, thereis a clear preference for binomes in which the two words are co-ordinate rather than the first subordinate to the second. There areeven instances in which a more common subordinate compoundseems to have been deliberately avoided by reversing the order ofthe two words:

you ruin your goodwill and long-standing friendship (p. 400).Chiu en SV,k "long-standing goodwill" would have been perfectlyacceptable here, but the author opts instead for two equally weightedqualities. A similar choice is found in the line ABU-A&b quotedabove, in which the author does not modify the actual manifestationwith the psychological state (i.e., "angry murmuring"), but presentsthe two coordinately.The cultivation of this novel diction with its heavy reliance uponcoordinate binomes results in phrases that seem to be coiled like somany springs under the pressure of all the meaning compressed intothem. The phrases expand outward as the reader encounters them,often in unexpected directions. There are also other characteristicsof the writing that contribute to this dense texture of meaning.When to specify a subject or an antecedent would extend a phrase


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 361beyond the standard length, then the subject or antecedent isoften omitted. Note, for example, the unmarked changes in thefollowing phrases:

---A* . * SPr[Those who] compromised themselves and bent to [the eunuchs'] demands ...while [those who] remained true to their convictions and went against [theeunuchs'] desires. . . (pp. 385-86)*,rhg*NAV, PPWAX4Zr.[Rulers] scrutinize but do not detect [the eunuchs'] evils, and as [the eunuchs]serve they readily win [the ruler's] trust (p. 348).Elsewhere, nominal clauses are pared down to the attributes of theprincipal noun:

They were able to confuse and delude witless and young [rulers] (p. 348).

... managed all the weighty and far-reaching [affairs of the realm]36 (p. 385).Or, verbs that are normally transitive are deprived of their directobjects:

. .. Imperial prestige no longer carried out [to the barbarians] (p. 391).

... and rooted out all traces [of the eunuchs] (p. 387).Regarding the first example, compare the Han shu passage: M-*k;,)9r_M=A,AV LAS "The feudal lords' fiefs bordered on each other;they encircled the realm on three sides and extended abroad to thenorthern and southern barbarian lands."37 For the second, in whichshan-i .3 is followed by an adverbial qualifier rather than a direct

36For the use of wan-chiM as a verb see the sentence: T#p{r ;J* ;"When Your Majesty first acceded to the throne, you were yet unable to manage all theaffairs of state." (HouHan shu78.2526)37Han shu 14.394.


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362 RONALD C. EGANobject, compare the Tso chuan ine: 3k Jj;fti b "You uprooted ourcrops. 38The last characteristic that contributes to the density of meaningis the packing of two distinct, if related, statements into a singlefour-character phrase:

[The Emperor] bore all the Shan-yui's nsults, knowing full well the difficulty hecould cause . .. (p. 395)

... whose positions were high and whose relationship with the Imperial Housewas close ... (p. 387)

They spied on each other and took advantage of every opportunity they detected(p. 396).Of course, if this kind of thing were done too frequently, the writingwould simply be too dense to follow.

The abundance of various kinds of figures of speech and imagesis another characteristic that marks Fan Yeh's expository prose andthat contributes to its literary interest. Several of the two-charactercompounds cited above contain figures of speech; other examples,constructed on a somewhat larger scale, include:

. . . their renown dashed beyond the four seas (p. 389).

... writing prolix commentaries and boring into inaccessible crannies (p. 388).ItA&S, JA .... such a rotten morsel would infect all around it, and there would be no wayto check the infection's spread (p. 391).v*,%m b.,

38 Tsochuan Harvard-Yenching concordance), p. 235, lines 4-5 (tr. Legge, TheChineseClassics,v, 382b).


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 363When the scraping and breaking of the edifice came to its own end ... (p. 389)

Converging like clouds and scattering like birds ... (p. 396)

... [the invaders] chewed and swallowed the sacrificial offerings (p. 398).Such use of figures of speech in prose is not unprecedented, butFan Yeh tends to avoid hyperbolic figures, which are so commonin earlier writing. Of course, when he says that certain leaders'

renown "dashed beyond the four seas" he is exaggerating both thespeed and the extent of the spread of their fame, and when he saysthat scholars "bored into inaccessible crannies" he is amplifyingtheir zeal and unreasonableness.Nevertheless, such statements arenot as hyperbolic as Kan Pao's observation that the rebels whobrought about the fall of the Western Chin dynasty "tamed theempire as if they were herding sheep, and captured Lo-yang andCh'ang-an as if picking up a stray item along the road,"39 or LuChi's & (261-303) remark that when Chin attacked the stateof Wu "city walls and moats did not even provide the protectionof a bamboo fence; mountains and rivers were not even as advan-tageous as a ditch or mound" (see p. 365 below). In Fan Yeh's state-ments it is the figures of speech that are striking rather than theimplicit claim behind the figures.But what is most characteristic about Fan Yeh's use of imagesis that most of them have at least an element of literal truth andmany of them are not metaphorical at all. He delights in describingmatters in concrete terms. Thus rather than say "as soon as hos-tilities began," he writes "as soon as drumsticksand armor weretaken up" (p. 390); rather than "the Hsiung-nu attacked," hewrites "they made their arrows whistle and kicked up the dust"(p. 394); instead of "once the eunuchs seized all authority," weread "once they had the royal insignia in their hands and theImperial decrees on their lips" (p. 385); and instead of reportingthat certain generals remained loyal and tractable, we are toldthat they prostrated themselves at the feet of the sovereign and

39 A passage from his "Comprehensive Disquisition," Wen hsiian49.8b.


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364 RONALD C. EGANobeyed summary summonses (p. 389). Such use of synecdoche andconcrete imagery owes much to poetry. So too does the relatedpractice of filling statements out with vivid detail, such as the ob-servationthat as Emperor Kuang-wu's generals requested permissionto lead campaigns against the Hsiung-nu they all "stamped theirfeet and flailed their arms . . . (p. 395). Many such details are notessential, but they add to the appeal of the writing.Having said this much about Fan Yeh's diction and use ofimagery, it must be noted that to some extent these characteristicsreflect a period rather than just an individual style. Fan Yeh wasnot the only writer of his time who consciously sought to extend theresources and heighten the elegance of the language. It is evidentthat writing styles changed considerably between the first and thesixth centuries, and that the vocabulary increased substantially,even if the rate and causes of the changes are little understood.Surely, the development of a richer and more sophisticated vo-cabulary was related to the ever increasing split between thewritten and spoken languages during those centuries. As the ex-pectation that writing bear some resemblance to speech grew fainter,writers were freed to explore all the potentials of a written languagethat had so many historical layers and whose lexical elements couldso readily be fused to form new compounds. Furthermore, FanYeh's generation is often singled out as one that made especiallylarge strides in the use of studied and intricately wrought diction inboth prose and poetry.40But even after we make allowances for his time, there are stilltwo points that help to distinguishFan Yeh fromhis contemporaries.The first is that Fan Yeh did his part in the literary exploration of

40 Commenting on writing in general, Hsiao Tzu-hsien (488-537) traces the origins ofthe tendency to use intricate and prolix language and the tendency to use gaudy andstartling diction to writers of Fan Yeh's generation (see the translation of his analysis innote 14 above). Likewise, Liu Hsieh (d. ca. 523) says about the history of poetry:At the beginning of the Sung dynasty,there was a changein literarystyle. Taoistthemesdeclinedand poetry concerned with mountains and rivers increased. Compositionswere adorned withstringsofparallelcoupletsthatextended to onehundredwords,and writers trove to comeupwithsingle marvelous ines.They expressed hemselvesby describing he outwardappearanceof thingsin exhaustive detail, and in their language they chased after innovation,cudgling their brains.Indeed, these are the very qualities that writers are bent on today. (Wen-hsin tiao-lung chu-ting,pp. 48-49)For the related remarks of Chung Hung see note 53 below.


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 365his age while writing expository (and, as we shall see below, evennarrative) prose. Naturally, it was in poetry (including thefu) thatattention to the use of words was greatest. In prose, such attention ismost in evidence in descriptive, eulogistic, or exhortatory parallelprose pieces. Of course, before Fan Yeh there had been someattempts to extend the use of innovative and elevated diction intothe realm of expository prose, but the results are quite different fromwhat Fan Yeh achieved. See, for example, the following passagefrom Lu Chi's "Pien wang lun" htr ("Disquisition on the Causesof the Fall"), written about the demise of Lu Chi's native state ofWu:The Wei, relying on the prestige accumulated through repeated victories, led amillion troops to launch boats at Teng-sai and conquer the people along thesouthern bank of the Han River. With ten thousand flying oars, they coursed downthe river like soaring dragons, with a thousand crack cavalry squads, they stalkedacross the plains like tigers. Strategists packed the command tent, while valorousgenerals rode chariot to chariot: they were filled with the desire to swallow thelands along the Yangtse and with the ambition of vanquishing the entire world....Then, in the final years [of the Wu state], when all the meritorious lords haddied, the people intended to scatter like tiles and the Imperial House had cracksin it like those in a mound about to crumble. The realm's divine signs and mandatewaned, reflecting the change, and the royal Chin armies set forth, responding tothe course of events. The Wu soldiers deserted their ranks, and the people fledfrom their villages. City walls and moats did not even provide the protection of abamboo fence; mountains and rivers were not even as advantageous as a ditch ormound. Although the attackers did not have such weapons as Kung-shu's cloud-ladder,4' or such devastating schemes as Chih-po's flooding,42and although theydid not build huts while they beseiged the capital as the Lord of Ch'u did,43orhave as huge an army as the state of Yen did when it fought west of the Chi

41 For the cloud-ladder of Kung-shu Pan, made for the purpose of attacking the capitalof Sung, see Mo-tzu (Harvard-Yenching concordance), p. 93, line 1. (Li Shan, Wenhsiuan53.25a)

42 In 453 B.C., when the Chin minister Chih Po attacked Chao Hsien-tzu at Chih-yang,he diverted the waters of the Fan River to flood the city; see Shihchi 43.1975. (Li Shan,Wenhsiuan 3.25a)43 In 594 c.C.,King Chuang of Ch'u secured the state of Sung's submission to him when,

after besieging Sung's capital for several months without success, he adopted his chari-oteer's advice and had his men build huts outside the city to show that they had nointention of giving up the siege and returning home; see Tso chuan,p. 203 (tr. Legge,TheChineseClassics,v, 328a). (Li Shan, Wenhsiian53.25a)


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366 RONALD C. EGANRiver,44still their attack was less than twelve days old when the state altars of Wuwere destroyed. Even though there were some loyal subjects who did their all,and some distinguished generals who died for their realm, it was all to no avail.45Although this is a Disquisition, it achieves its effects by piling uphyperbolic images and amassing references to ancient history. Thewriting is reminiscent of the marvelously rhetorical "The Faults ofthe Ch'in" by Chia Yi WA (201-169 B.C.), and is compared to thatpiece by Liu Hsieh (d. ca. 523).46 However, the diction has littleof the exactness that Fan Yeh's does, and evidences less attentionthan his to the placement of individual words.The second point is that while Fan Yeh is at one with his con-temporaries in striving for innovative language, his innovationsshow some distinctive tendencies. For one thing, Fan Yeh preferstocoin new expressionsrather than cull old ones out of ancient writingsand press them into service. The latter practice was one of theprincipal ways that Six Dynasties writers cultivated refined andnovel diction (often altering the original sense of the adopted ex-pressions). A reading of the Wen hsuan selections of the parallel prosepieces by Yen Yen-chih MM-5, 384-456), one of the leading parallelprose writers of Fan Yeh's generation,47 shows his penchant fordoing this. Thanks to the painstaking exegesis by Li Shan W* (d.689) and subsequent Wen hsiuancommentators, it is clear that thereare few lines in Yen Yen-chih's compositions that do not containat least one expression taken from an earlier and well-known text.Of course, such appropriationof notable expressions (or even entirelines) can be a legitimate method of enriching the meaning of one'swriting. See, for example, Yen's use of the phrase ting ting tJr in aline that describesthe founding of the Sung dynasty in his "Preface

44 In 284 B.C., a general of the state of Yen, Yiieh Yi, led the combined armies of Yen,Chao, Ch'u, Han, and Wei in an invasion of Ch'i, defeating the Ch'i army on the westernside of the Chi River; see Shihchi 80.2428. (Li Shan, Wenhsiian53.25a)45 Wenhsuian 3.2 1b-25a and Lu Shih-hengwen-chi(SPTK ed.), 10.3a-4b.46 Wen-hsin iao-lungchu-ting,pp. 185-86. For Chia Yi's essay, see note 4 above.47 In his day, Yen Yen-chih's reputation as a writer was matched only by that ofHsieh Ling-yu (see Shen Yiieh's jtNi [441-513] evaluation, Sungshu76.1778-79). Hsiehwas considered the finest poet, and Yen the best parallel prose writer. Modern authoritiesstill consider Yen's parallel prose to be among the finest of the age; see Liu Lin-sheng,pp. 52-53, and Chang Jen-ch'ing = Chung-kuo'ien-wenfa-chan hih (Taipei: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1970), ii, 332-36.


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 367to Poems Written on the Third Day of the Third Month By theCh'ii River": AgkEA1p "The Founding Emperor [Emperor Wu,r. 420-22] established the tripods through his sagely martial deeds."48The expression ting ting is taken from a famous Tso chuanspeech aboutthe founding of the Chou dynasty.49 According to that speech, theestablishment of the ancient tripods at Chia-ju by King Ch'eng ofthe Chou symbolized the transference of the Mandate of Heavenfrom the Shang dynasty to the Chou, and with the tripod's establish-ment came the prognostication that the Chou would reign for overseven hundred years. Yen Yen-chih's use of the phrase in his lineabout the founding of the Sung, which had occurred a mere fifteenyears before the "Preface" was written, implies that it was an eventcomparable to the founding of the Chou, and that the Sung wasdestined to rival the Chou in glory and longevity.50 (It should benoted that the poems written on this occasion and Yen's "Preface"were composed at the request of Emperor Wen [r. 424-53], EmperorWu's son.) However, often the original context of such appropriatedexpressions does not add nearly so much to the sense of the passagein which it is inserted. Thus, when a few lines later Yen Yen-chihuses a four-character phrase from Tso Ssu's ;AJ, (d. ca. 306) "Rhap-sody on the Wu Capital" to report that barbarians came to pay theirrespects to the Emperor from all directions,5' and when he sub-

48 "San yiieh san jih Ch'u shui shih hsii" - E 7JC.? Wenksiian46.6a-b.49 Tso chuan,p. 182:

In antiquity,when the Hsia dynastyhad moral power,the distantregionssent picturesof theirsupernatural reatures o the capital and presentedmetal as tribute to the nine provincial lords.Tripods were then cast, with pictures of thosecreatureson them; thus all such things were fullyrepresented o that the peoplemightknowaboutthe supernatural nd malevolentbeings. Hence-forth, when the peoplewent into marshesand mountains,theycouldwithstandunnaturalthings,and the water and land demonswere unable to confrontthem. In thisway, the lowly were har-monized with the high-ranking,and all enjoyedHeaven's blessing.Later, when King Cliiehruledbenightedly, he tripodsweretransferredo the ShangHouseandremainedwith it for six hundredyears. But when King Chou of the Shang presidedwith violence and tyranny, the tripods weretransferred o the Chou dyansty.When the ruler'smoral power is commendable and brilliant,then the tripods,howeversmall they may seem, are heavy [andcannotbe moved]. Butwhen theruler reverts o benightednessandwantonconduct,thenhowever arge the tripodsmay seem, theyprove to be light. Heaven blessesbrilliant moralpower and now has a place in which the tripodsmay be kept [the Chou House]. King Ch'eng of the Chou established he tripods [ting ting] atChia-ju, and divined that the dynasty should last for thirty reigns, over seven hundred years:it is the decreeof Heaven. (Cf.Legge, TheChineselassics, , 293b andBernhardKarlgren, "Glosseson the Tsochuan," MFEA, 41, [1969], nos. 269-74.)

50 The comparison with the Chou becomes explicit a few lines later.51 Yen's use of the phrase (V**) is found in Wenhsiian46.6b. For Tso Ssu's earlieruse, in his "Wu tu fu" g*gg, see Wenhsiian5.14b (the Hu K'o-chia text has A for P).


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368 RONALD C. EGANsequently uses a four-character Shangshuphrase to say "when theEmperor issued warnings and gave commands,"52 since the originalcontexts of these phrase have little bearing on Yen's use of them, thereader concludes that Yen adopts them merely to give his writingan air of formality and respectability, and to display his erudition.One is not surprised to find that Chung Hung NO (469-518) singlesYen Yen-chih out as one who was particularly fond of using allu-sions, noting how it made his writing "constricted" (chu-shu'p3*),and goes on to observe that he set the temper of his times.53

Another contemporary trend that Fan Yeh avoided was the useof novel turns of phrase in which the richness and ingenuity of thepresentation draw at least as much attention as the sense of what isbeing said. Pao Chao f (d. 466) is one of the writers with whomcritics commonly associate this trait." It can be illustrated with twoshort passages from one of Pao Chao's most well-known parallelprose pieces, "A Letter to My Younger Sister, Written UponAscending Ta-lei Cliff":To the south, the piled-up mountains in a myriad shapes contentiously strive torise above each other: consuming the hued clouds and drinking the sunlight, theyeach have their turn as supreme lord.The waters' huge waves hit the sky and their tall billows splash the sun. They spit

52 Shangshu,"Chiung ming," par. 2 (Legge, tr., The ChineseClassics, n, 585):53 Chung Hung was of course criticizing Yen's poetry, but the same trait is also evidentin his parallel prose. Chung Hung's remarks occur in the second of his three prefaces andin his notice on Yen:

The finest lineswritten from ancient times down to the present are mostly free of patchingsandborrowings;rather,they result fromthe writer'sdirectpursuit of his subject.However,YenYen-chihandHsiehChuangwereespeciallyprolix anddense n their useof allusion,and theyset the temperof theirtimes.Hence, duringthe Ta-mingand T'ai-shihperiods[457-64,465-71] writing virtuallybecamea copy-bookexercise. (Shih 'in chu,p. 7)[Yen] is alsofond of using allusions,whichmake his writingeven more constricted.Althoughhegoesagainstwhat is gracefuland untrammeled,his is a talent forthe documentary,elevatedstyle.Someoneof lesstalent, however,would findhimselfboggeddown. (Shihp'inchu,pp. 25-26).(Here, and in note 54 below, I have drawn upon the translation of all but the last p'inof Shih p'in done by J. T. Wixted [in his unpubl. Univ. of Oxford Ph.D. thesis, "TheLiterary Criticism of Yuan Hao-wen," 1976], making some modifications.)

54 See Hsiao Tzu-hsien's critique, translated in note 14 above. Chung Hung's notice onPao Chao contains similar remarks: "However, he set great store on ingenious descrip-tions and did not shy away from daring and risky phrasing; this did injury to his resonanceand correctness." (Shihp'in chu,p. 27)


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 369forth a hundred rivers and innundate ten thousand valleys. Their fine mist neverdissipates: a gilded caldron boiling.55When Pao Chao chooses to write this way he does so skillfully andachieves great effects. However, such writing represents a certain toneand use of language that Fan Yeh does not cultivate. As noted above,Fan Yeh prefers synecdoche to metaphor and literal statement tohyperbole.

To be sure, the fact that Fan Yeh was not writing eulogistic orexhortatory prose (as found in funerary pieces or court writings)helps to explain why he did not fill his compositions with expressionsthat had a venerable history of usage, and the fact that he was notwriting scenic descriptions helps to account for the absence ofingenious turns of phrase. Nevertheless, the inherent danger in boththese traits, that they will dominate the writing to the point wherethe author seems merely to be seeking to impress the reader ratherthan to present something to him-this danger is something thatFan Yeh was evidently sensitive to and consciously tried to avoid.Thus, in his letter Fan Yeh disparages writing in which "the sub-stance is overshadowed by the outward appearance," and in hisown writing, while he does not revert to a plain style, he avoidsthe excesses of contemporary trends. Likewise, in his letter Fan Yehinsists on making thought primary, and one of the distinctivecharacteristics of his writing is how much meaning he packs intoa single phrase.

After praising his own Introductions, Disquisitions, and Eulogiesin the highest terms, Fan Yeh goes on in his letter to remark abouthis Annals and Biographies, almost as an afterthought, that in themhe planned "simply to give a general sketch of events." His onlyclaim for them is that they "fully evidence my painstaking effort."Although at first it might be surprising that Fan Yeh seems to takethe least pride in those sections that constitute the bulk of his work,actually his attitude is only natural. Fan Yeh lived fully two cen-

55Pao Ts'an-chuinhi chu , ed. Ch'ien Chung-lien (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsiieh ch'u-pan she, 1958), pp. 37, 39. (The letter is also included, with more thoroughannotation, in Wei ChinNan-peich'ao wen-hsuieh-shihs'ao-k'ao zu-liao, ed. Faculty of theDepartment of Chinese Literature, Peking University [Hong Kong: Hung-chih shu-chii,n.d.], pp. 524-32.)


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370 RONALD C. EGANturies after the fall of the dynasty whose history he wrote, hence forall of the factual detail that makes up the Annals and Biographieshe was completely dependent upon the several earlier histories ofthe period.56 His writing of the Annals and Biographies must havebeen largely a mechanical task, one that consisted of compilingdocuments and anecdotes from his array of sources, deciding betweenconflicting versions of events, and arranging the material intocoherent chapters. It was only in the nonnarrative sections that hecould give free rein to his own opinions of events and to his literaryskills.

Nevertheless, Fan Yeh's narrative prose is not without interest. Itis clear that he often rephrased the sources he drew upon, and heprobably wrote many passages, especially speeches, from scratch.57The overall impression his narrative prose makes is different fromthat of earlier histories or, for that matter, of any earlier writing.The language is more carefully chosen, the diction being denser andmore interesting and the rhythms stronger and more effectivelyused; hence the flavor of what is "beyond the matter at hand"lingers longer. To say this much is to say that certain qualities ofFan Yeh's more self-conscious expository prose carry over into hisnarrative prose, though since the narrative prose is burdened witha heavy requirement of factual information as well as the weight ofearlier versions, it is inevitably more cumbrous and less gracefulthan the expository prose.

One way to shed light on the distinctive qualities of Fan Yeh'snarrative prose is to compare certain of his passages with theirapparent sources in the earlier histories of the Later Han. See, forexample, how Fan Yeh's version of what a certain Li Ch'ung 2qsays to his mother when he divorces his wife differs from the cor-responding speech in Tung-kuanHan chi AM# (a history writtenduring the Later Han) :58

56See note 9 above.57 In his discussion of speeches in Hou Han shu, Bielenstein gives several examples of

speeches that must have been fabricated by the historian (pp. 49-60). In addition, Nait6Torajir6 7 points out that a comparison of certain documents quoted both inSan kuochihand in Hou Han shu shows that Fan Yeh rewrote the documents to improvetheir literary style (Shinashigakushi, rev. ed. [Tokyo: Shimizu K6bund6], pp. 184-85).58 Tung-kuanHan chi, the most important source for Fan Yeh's Hou Han shu, was animperially commissioned history of the Later Han that was begun under the direction


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 371ft*IbA)ff TN_P*Af,B 104_;. &et4zA ."This wife has urged that she and I live apart from you. She is unfit to perform theancestral sacrifices, and with your permission I want to divorce her." Then heyelled at his wife and drove her from his home. (Tung-kuanHan chi 19.13b)k*1M>R,ffti&;MMfR. XtF-a .MOMA-4, A-16PI- . am*_M4_. IN3.WS ."This wife does not act properly and has urged me to abandon my mother andolder brother. She deserves to be driven out." Then he yelled at his wife andchased her out the door. She departed with tears in her eyes. Everyone presentwas startled and fell silent. Shortly, the feast ended and the guests dispersed. (HouHan shu81.2684)Aside from the greater amount of detail in the Hou Han shuversion,its wording is more interesting and not as flat as in the Tung-kuanHan chi version. The compounds li-chien#IN, ch'ien-ch'ih -, chu-ling A+, hsien-t'i , and ching-suVW all appear to be novel.The following parallel passages are taken from the Tung-kuan anchi and the Hou Han shubiographiesof Chou Yu )AI*W:*RW4 0 F. 40K9 0AP18gA.His family was poor and he had nothing to support himself with. He was reducedto making bricks to provide himself with food. (Tung-kuanHan chi 19.13a)0MR4419M. tff i18 .Yu was scrupulous and uncorrupted, and had no private assets. He was often re-duced to making bricks in order to provide for himself. (HouHan shu77.2494)Fan Yeh eliminates the somewhat awkwardredundancy of tzu-shan8 a and tzu-chi hih S *RA n the earlierversion, and he adds a detailin the opening clause that helps to fill out the description, doingso in a characteristicway. Of course the fact that Yu had no privateassetsis related to the moral qualities named in the first compound(the implication being that as an officialhe refusedto accept bribes),

of Pan Ku and others and was supplemented three successive times during the secondcentury. The work was lost some time during the Yuan dynasty. The portion that survivestoday (roughly one-sixth of the original) was compiled by the Ssu-k'uch'uian-shuditorsfrom quotations in various works. (See Bielenstein, pp. 10-11, and the SKCS Cataloguenotice.) All references are to the SKCS ed. (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1975), pieh-chi,Vol. 107.


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372 RONALD C. EGANbut Fan Yeh does not markthe relationshipexplicitly, being contentsimply to juxtapose the two compounds and let the reader surmisethe connection.

Fan Yeh does not hesitate to use emphatic flourishes where hedeems them appropriate (here, the earlier version is from the HsiHanshuMg of Ssu-ma Piao 1 [240-306]) 59

The Prefectof the Imperial Secretariat and the Palace Regular Attendant, Wu Fu,Ts'ao Chieh, and others, seized all power and authority. (HsuiHan shu 5.1Ob)

At that time, the Palace Regular Attendants, Wang Fu, Ts'ao Chieh, and others,treacherouslyand oppressively flaunted their power, convulsing the Imperial courtand those outside it. (HouHan shu77.2499)Elsewhere, Fan Yeh is simply more precise (in this and subsequentexamples,the earlier versionsarefromthe HouHanchi*4 of YuanHung At [320-76]) :60

~ .He gave credit for beneficial policies to his subordinates, and whenever there wassomething bad he held himself responsible. (HouHan chi25.297)APIVMN, *;LMT, )JARAR, 914AIM.When his undertakings were successfuland proved to be beneficial he would givethe credit to his subordinates, but when evil omens appeared he held himselfresponsible. (HouHan shu 25.887)Yuan Hung probably uses his expressionpu shan/T2- with naturaldisastersor portents in mind (it is really too much to say that theofficial blamed himself if one of his subordinates did somethingwrong), but he fails to make the sense clear, as Fan Yeh does in hisversion.

59The surviving fragments of Ssu-ma Piao's Hsu Han shu (excluding the Treatises, forwhich see note 5 above) were collected together, along with those of six other historiesof the Later Han, by Wang Wen-t'ai IIIfCE; n his Ch'i chia Hou Han shu tG M.@References are to the 1882 edition.

60 Yuan Hung's Hou Han chi, an annalistic history of the Later Han, is the only one ofFan Yeh's sources that has been preserved intact (probably because it was the onlyannalistic history of the period). References are to the Kuo-hsilehhi-pen s'ung-shu dition.


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PROSE STYLE OF FAN YEH 373In addition to his careful choice of words,FanYeh showssensitivityto the expressivepotentials of rhythm. He tends to write in coupletsthat consist of two four-characterlines:,

In his dealings with others, if his values were not shared by the other person, hewould not associate with him no matter how wealthy and high-ranking he was.But if the other's actions bespoke a disposition similar to his own, then he wouldesteem the other person no matter how impoverished or humble he might be.(HouHan chi 24.291)FfiXT43 2 C,1,/I PMOn" ,PA, &*T111r63.As for those he befriended, he made sure that they were of one mind with him. Ifthe other person did not share his preferences, then he would not seek to associatewith him no matter how wealthy and high-ranking he was. But if the other's dis-position was similar to his own, then he would not allow his inclination towardsthe other to be affected by whatever poverty or humble position the other foundhimself in. (HouHan shu57.1842)Not only does Fan Yeh provide a metrically parallel match for thefirst line, making a couplet, in the two couplets that follow he makesthe correspondencesbetween the couplets more exact (he does notmatch a single characterverb with a compound verb as Yuan Hungdoes), hence the feeling of parallelismand rhythm is stronger in FanYeh's version. Furthermore, Fan Yeh makes an effort to keep thetwo lines within each couplet the same length. If the unstressedpu's f are not counted, each couplet has metrically equal lines.Relatively unimportant words, such as the grammatical particlesui M and the pronominal object chihZ, are omitted to facilitatethis metrical pairing. Compare the following:

A loyal minister strives to do away with treacherous ones, and thus ensures thatgoodness will prevail. (HouHan chi 22.261)

A loyal minister does away with treacherous ones, thus the royal way is unsullied.(HouHan shu 67.2204)


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374 RONALD C. EGANFan Yeh's ch'ing N makes a nice contrast to the preceding chienA,and he makes the contrast stronger by eliminating the unnecessarywords so that the two lines are metrically parallel.

When the earlier version has a dangling, unpaired phrase at theend of a statement, Fan Yeh generally either gives it a match orcuts it out altogether:

"Precisely what have you plotted to do? Tell me the entire truth." (Hou Han chi22.262)

"Precisely what is it that you plan to do, those of you who have plotted andbanded together? Tell me the entire truth, without concealing or glossing overanything." (HouHan shu67.2205)

A*I*A9 SS-0 S1~klffi"I will soon determine the truth about those whom I haven't yet investigated, thusdoing away with all the evil ones." (HouHan chi 22.261)A*1*99 tv-S."I will soon proceed to determine the truth about those whom I haven't yet in-vestigated." (HouHan shu67.2204)In both these examples, the earlier version ends with a weak phrasethat is something of an afterthought. Fan Yeh expands the first oneinto an antithetical sentence (the binomeyin-shih Oi is typ