Final 1

 

27b-28m [30]. Given how devoted Shun is to his family, it is curious that his family should wish to kill him.  What could his family’s motivation be?  Perhaps, motivation is the wrong word.  We’re simply told that his father is obstinate, his stepmother is mean, and his stepbrother is haughty.  Could it be that, while his family’s actions (kill Shun!) work against their self-interests, his family can’t be or do anything else?  Perhaps, their actions/motivations don’t even matter because, despite how they may treat Shun, somehow the “filial chain” is not broken.  How so?  Shun’s actions (whether not being there when his family members try to hurt him or being there when they need help) seem to effect the filial relation’s repair even as the father’s/step-mother’s/step-brother’s weaken or break that relation (if they do).  Perhaps, I should not even assume that Shun’s family actually weaken the filial relation.  In fact, Shun’s actions and attitude toward his family appear to meet the standard of filial piety: Shun follows the way of the son and the brother, so their family unit continues.  And doesn’t this family drama help me to see what Shun is good at: the impeccable and uncanny timing of his presences and absences?     Directing my attention to the function of Shun’s timeliness may be significant inasmuch as it supplements a spatialized image of order.  An image of spatialized order:  SQ’s description of Yü’s land re-zoning as encircling bands around the son of heaven’s city (32t-32m).  Each zone has its own name, a name that identifies its function or relationship to the son of heaven’s city.   Place a king who is trustworthy at the center of this image, and then imagine how the king’s character radiates from the center to its surrounding environs (ministers, fathers, sons…) and back again to the center.  “Ah, the world was then greatly ordered” (32m).  How can Shun’s timeliness be mapped onto such a vision of order?  Does Shun pop in and out?  Multiple centers? Or should I imagine "order" as something that takes shape as it lives?

87b [Qin].  Scholars who only ridicule the Qin are trying to eat with their ears. What other sustenance might SQ’s history provide?   And for what organ? We can identify sustenance with a particular corpus (the “Annals of Qin”)—a collection of not just what is said but what is written.  We can also identify sustenance with what we can do with the written record.    For example, we might organize our corpus in a particular way:  SQ identifies a beginning and end (X to Y); SQ creates a “chronological table” of events.  Then, SQ’s historical magic/medicine happens:  the “chronological table” is also “a period of 270 years in all” and a record of “the beginnings of success and failure as they have been reported.” In three quick steps, SQ identifies 3 stages in his brand of historical thinking:  (A)”chronological table”—aggregating source material to create a representation of events as a series in relative time (before/while/after); (B)”a period”--mapping the “chronological table” onto a countable number of time units (“270 years”); (C)the use of A and B to see the shape of success/failure once we can identify the beginning of success/failure.   How do we see A-C in SQ?  The identification of “firsts” may be enabled by A (see pp. 6m, 7b, 8t, 8m).  Example of B:  The bundle of events presented at 22b-23t (last indented para. on 22) is organized by countable years.  But there’s something more interesting at work, here, which points me toward how I might find an example of C.  At first blush, 22b-23t is an expression of B, a lump of unrelated events, an example of how/why the Qin reading (for some) is frustrating/unengaging.  But isn’t there a whiff of C in this passage, at least a general sense of success-unto-death that runs through this paragraph, just a hint of a pattern (at least the boundaries of a pattern) on which a historical evaluation might be grounded? I could be looking in the wrong place for C.  Perhaps, C is not so much SQ's project as the project he assigns to the “future gentleman” whom he imagines perusing his record.