Chinese Ghost Stories (2 page)

But if he was a man of lurid imaginings he was also a nineteenth century intellectual. Critics have noted that he came of age in Dublin, when Yates, Sheridan and Bram Stoker revived interest in Irish mythologies.
7
Nor were they alone in their interests. British writers—Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, William Morris, and popular writers such as J.M. Barrie and later, J.R.R. Tolkien—were enthralled as well. They staked out myth in its various forms, from medieval epic and ancient ballad, to Arthurian romance, Celtic mythologies and Persian legend.
8
It was something of a club, in fact; for as exotic as Hearn’s experiments were, they were familiar to the connoisseur. Hearn himself wrote a letter to Keats concerning Keats’s poem about fairy legend, “Host of the Air.”
9
And one critic compared one of the tales in this book—“The Story of Ming Yi”—to Keats’s treatment of the Lamia myth.
10
Hearn was part of an informal circle of Victorian writers who retrieved the mythic from outside the orthodoxies of the age.

And thus he landed in the world of this small collection of tales,
Chinese Ghost Stories
[a.k.a.
Some Chinese Ghosts
]. Like other Victorians, Hearn was dedicated to the exotic. He wished to create a “weird beauty,” citing the expression of his intellectual ally, Sir Walter Scott. With this collection Hearn took an early step in his eastward explorations.
11
This literary landscape is clearly for him an exotic world; the tales have the feel of an experiment, bookish in style, arch in language, based on material he referred to as “curious.” For unlike the reportage of New Orleans life, and the accounts of folk practice he will ultimately write in Japan, he was a world away from his subject. Two of the tales are extraordinary fusions: “The Tradition of the Tea Plant” mixes oracular meditative prayer with a Gothic sexual encounter. “The Tale of the Porcelain God” blends filial piety with European notions of the madness of genius.

It is not surprising he was experimenting on the margins, however. From his outpost in New Orleans gaining knowledge of “Chinese ghosts” would have been perplexing. He had his “tolerably extensive library of exotic poetry and legend;”
12
but it could hardly have been very extensive. These were early days, when even the romanization system was not stabilized. Early Sinology tended to follow hard on the establishment of foreign trade and colonial outposts, with the Dutch and French most active. Hearn—fluent in French—could use the translations of romantic fiction and accounts of ceramic artisans by Stanislas Julien and Hervey Saint-Denis; and he located an account of the Taiping rebellion by the early Jesuit Missionary, Pere D’Entrecolles. Harper’s Bazaar supplied him with another of his sources. This popular magazine published the early work of the translator Herbert Giles, then in China, just beginning his career. Hearn in these tales is like them, hard at work: the intrepid explorer.

Hearn attempted to colonize the sounds of Chinese stories as well. Remarkably, he included in the tales transliterations of Chinese syllables: lines of poetry, lines of scripture, lists of ceramic types, song lines, multiple phases, etc. These sounds could only be read as noise, for it is only in his notes that he provides translations. But this was part of his high experiment, for his readers’ benefit, whether they liked it or not. “Why should people not be forcibly introduced to foreign words?” he retorted pedantically.
13
He argued further that, with the sounds themselves, the reader could sense: “the whispering of words, the rustling of the procession of letters,… the raging and racketing and rioting of words.” Not that he was alone in this fascination. J. R. R. Tolkien found an incantatory charm in the orality of Faerie destinations. “ ‘The bridge to Platform 4’ is—to me—” said Tolkien, “less interesting than ‘Bifrøst guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn.’ ”
14
These intellectuals sent out their literary roots into a Library of Babel.

Experiments aside, however, these tales were not just from the laboratory. Hearn loved Chinese ghosts. Four of his Chinese ghost stories detail personal sacrifice and the deep sense of pious awe for ancestors, family and emperor. Ancestral voices became increasingly of interest to Hearn. He observed later when he lived in Japan:

     In this nineteenth century the Occidental family is almost disintegrated.… The Oriental family means not only parents and their blood-kindred, but grandparents and their kindred, and great-grandparents, and all the dead behind them. This idea of the family .… may extend, as in Japan, to many groups and sub-groups of living families,… to the whole nation as one great family: a feeling much deeper than what we call patriotism. As a religious emotion the feeling is infinitely extended to all the past.…
15

As exotic and distant as they were, these ghosts had for Hearn a personal resonance: “The mystery of the universe is now weighing upon us,” claimed Hearn,

     and it is especially a ghostly mystery.… That is why I say that all great art has something ghostly in it. It touches something within us which relates to infinity.
16

In 1890 Hearn landed in Japan. He married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of an old samurai family and, per custom, he was adopted by his wife’s family. They had three sons and a daughter and all lived together, three generations under one roof. He taught English literature and dedicated the last fourteen years of his life to essays, folktale and fiction;
Kwaidan
,
Stories and Studies of Strange Things
is his most famous. In these stories he shed the voice of bookish foreigner, for he was among his subjects. No longer confined to his library for sources, he had family rituals, ancestral ghosts and local demons spread out before him. His accounts became direct and simple, suggesting not the Irish intellectual, but the Irish story-teller.
17
The narrator for these tales is the fresh persona of a charmed innocent, an alarmed believer, a boy.

His best source for stories was his wife, Setsu. She described her role as Hearn’s informant:

     When I tell him stories I always told him at first the mere skeleton of the story. If it is interesting, he puts it down in his note-book and makes me repeat and repeat several times. He instantly becomes exceedingly serious; the color of his face changes; his eyes wear the look of fearful enthusiasm. His face gradually changed pale; his eyes were fixed; I felt a sudden awe. When I finished the narrative he… asked me several questions regarding the situations, actions, etc., involved in the story.… ‘What do you think of the sound of “
geta
” (clopping of footsteps) at that time? How was the night? I think so and so. What do you think?’ etc. Thus he consulted me about various things besides the original story.… If anyone happened to see us talking from outside, he would surely think that we were mad.
18

Footnote:

1
Beongcheon Yu,
An Ape of Gods: The Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn
, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1964, p. 100.

2
Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p. 177.

3
Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p. 176.

4
Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p 174–5.

5
Paul Murray, p. 25.

6
W. K. McNeil, “Lafcadio Hearn, American Folklorist,”
Journal of American Folklore
, Vol. 91, Oct–Dec. p. 949.

7
Paul Murray,
Lafcadio Hearn: A Fantastic Journey, The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn,
Japan Library, Folkstone, Kent, 1993, p. 31–33.

8
Also see Paul Murray, pp. 32–33 for discussion of contemporaneous interest in folklore and legend.

9
Paul Murray, p. 34.

10
Paul Murray, p. 82.

11
His first collection of non-European material was
Stray Leaves from Strange Literature
,
published in 1884—also while he was in New Orleans.

12
Beongcheon Yu, p. 292.

13
Letter to Chamberlain, in Jonathan Cott,
Wandering Ghost
, p. 372.

14
J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,”
Tree and Leaf
, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p. 62.

15
Lafcadio Hearn, “Some Thoughts About Ancestor Worship,”
Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life
, p. 290.

16
Jonathan Cott, p. 345.

17
Sukehiro Hirakawa, “Introduction: Lafcadio Hearn: Towards an Irish Interpretation: in Paul Murray, pp. 5–8.

18
W. K. McNeil, “Lafcadio Hearn, American Folklorist,”
Journal of American Folklore
, vol. 91, No. 362, Oct–Dec. p 962.

Victoria Cass
Baltimore, Maryland

 
The Soul of the Great Bell

She hath spoken, and her words still resound in his ears.

HAO QIU ZHUAN: c.ix.

T
HE WATER-CLOCK marks the hour in the Da Zhongsi—in the Tower of the Great Bell: now the mallet is lifted to smite the lips of the metal monster—the vast lips inscribed with Buddhist texts from the sacred
Fahua jing
,
from the chapters of the holy
Lingyan jing!
Hear the great bell responding! How mighty her voice, though tongueless!
GE-AI!
All the little dragons on the high-tilted eaves of the green roofs shiver to the tips of their gilded tails under that deep wave of sound; all the porcelain gargoyles tremble on their carven perches; all the hundred little bells of the pagodas quiver with desire to speak.
GE-AI!
All the green-and-gold tiles of the temple are vibrating; the wooden goldfish above them are writhing against the sky; the uplifted finger of Fo shakes high over the heads of the worshippers through the blue fog of incense!
GE-AI!
What a thunder tone was that! All the lacquered goblins on the palace cornices wriggle their fire-colored tongues! And after each huge shock, how wondrous the multiple echo and the great golden moan and, at last, the sudden sibilant sobbing in the ears when the immense tone faints away in broken whispers of silver—as though a woman should whisper, “
Xie!
” Even so the great bell hath sounded every day for well-nigh five hundred years—
Ge-ai:
first with stupendous clang, then with immeasurable moan of gold, then with silver murmuring of
“Xie!”
And there is not a child in all the many-colored ways of the old Chinese city who does not know the story of the great bell, who cannot tell you why the great bell says
Ge-ai
and
Xie!

Now, this is the story of the great bell in the Da Zhongsi, as the same is related in the
Baixiaodu shou,
written by the learned Yu Baochen, of the City of Guanzhoufu.

Nearly five hundred years ago the Celestially August, the Son of Heaven, Yongluo, of the “Illustrious,” or Ming, dynasty, commanded the worthy official Guanyu that he should have a bell made of such size that the sound thereof might be heard for one hundred
li.
19
And he further ordained that the voice of the bell should be strengthened with brass, and deepened with gold, and sweetened with silver; and that the face and the great lips of it should be graven with blessed sayings from the sacred books, and that it should be suspended in the center of the imperial capital, to sound through all the many-colored ways of the city of Beijing.

Therefore the worthy mandarin Guanyu assembled the master-molders and the renowned bellsmiths of the empire, and all men of great repute and cunning in foundry work; and they measured the materials for the alloy, and treated them skillfully, and prepared the molds, the fires, the instruments, and the monstrous melting-pot for fusing the metal. And they labored exceedingly, like giants—neglecting only rest and sleep and the comforts of life; toiling both night and day in obedience to Guanyu, and striving in all things to do the behest of the Son of Heaven.

But when the metal had been cast, and the earthen mold separated from the glowing casting, it was discovered that, despite their great labor and ceaseless care, the result was void of worth; for the metals had rebelled one against the other—the gold had scorned alliance with the brass, the silver would not mingle with the molten iron. Therefore the molds had to be once more prepared, and the fires rekindled, and the metal re-melted, and all the work tediously and toilsomely repeated. The Son of Heaven heard, and was angry, but spoke nothing.

A second time the bell was cast, and the result was even worse. Still the metals obstinately refused to blend one with the other; and there was no uniformity in the bell, and the sides of it were cracked and fissured, and the lips of it were slagged and split asunder; so that all the labor had to be repeated even a third time, to the great dismay of Guanyu. And when the Son of Heaven heard these things, he was angrier than before; and sent his messenger to Guanyu with a letter, written upon lemon-colored silk, and sealed with the seal of the Dragon, containing these words: