(no subject)
There is an old Chinese tale called “The Royal Bridegroom” about a princess who discovers some shocking news about her new husband. It is a fairly well-known tale and perhaps you’ve heard it. The bridegroom tells his new bride a story for their first toast: about a man who, in Henry-esque style, demands a boy-child of his wife, and tells her that death awaits her if she fails. The woman has a daughter and, panicked, sends the good news to her husband: they have a son. The woman dresses the child as a boy, bathes the child herself always, and manages to keep the secret. The child, now a young wo-man, excels in the royal exams and begins to attract attention. The aristocracy begins to throw their daughters at him, but the mother, fearful, turns all offers away. Finally, the emperor himself offers his sister’s hand in marriage, an offer not to be refused, and the princess and the wo-man are wed. What, the bridegroom asks, would you do in that princess’s situation, knowing that the penalty for impersonating a man in the royal court is death? Of course, the princess says (seeing the test in the question), I would go to my brother and see that the marriage was dissolved and the poor girl was forgiven. Do you promise this is your true and honest answer? the bridegroom asks. The princess answers, Of course.
You can see where I’m going with this. The bridegroom reveals that he is that poor girl, forced to act the role of a man these many years and married off against his will. The princess is thrown into a rage, and tells him...er, her...that the princess will see her put to death for the shame and humiliation she has caused. The bridegroom reminds her of her promise, and the princess is suddenly brought up short and has to reconsider. True to her promise, she vows to go to her brother the next day and plead for the bridegroom to be forgiven.
The next day, the unhappily married couple appear at the emperor’s court, and the princess begs the emperor to listen to a story she has heard. Indulging her, the emperor listens as the princess faithfully retells the bridegroom’s story, ending with the couple begging forgiveness at the emperor’s feet. Well then, the princess asks, what would you do if you were that emperor? I am a fair and just emperor, after all, the emperor answers, and so indeed I would forgive the poor girl, dissolve the marriage, and even see that the girl was taken into my own house. The princess exacts a promise from the emperor and then reveals the truth. This time it is the emperor who rages and orders his guards to seize the woman. The princess throws herself at his feet and begs him to remember his promise. Quickly backpedalling, the emperor tells all the subjects watching that he was merely showing them how an unjust emperor would act. Indeed, he says, I being a fair and just emperor order the girl released and forgiven, and I shall take her into my own house as sister. The happy ending is that soon the princess and her new sister were married in a grand wedding to two noble men.
2.
Very well, how should we approach a story like this? It is entertaining, to be sure. There are the sort of reversals that excite us, and the gender-bending makes us smile. So it is, like any good story, entertainment. Let us not stop here this time, though. Let’s see what happens if we try pushing a bit further along the path of this story, even if the way gets a bit more difficult. There is the gender-bending, after all. Perhaps it is a very early tale of feminism. There is, after all, the fact that a woman does equally well on the royal exams, and that she excels above all the men around her (we’re talking China here, so millions of men). She does well enough as a man to catch the eye of the emperor and win the princess as her bride. There definitely seems to be some acknowledgement that women can succeed in the “province” of men.
An early feminist tale, then. Are we satisfied? Let us remain malcontents just a little longer. What does the story actually say? After all, thus far we’ve merely taken pieces here and there, fitting them into a ready-made theory. The story itself...actually, the story says nothing. It is incomplete. It has no ending: the bridegroom ends with a question, and the princess passes that question on to the emperor when she takes over the story. Questions generally elicit an answer. So perhaps the point of the story is how we answer the question. The question is: what would you do? There is a girl who has broken the law, impersonating a man, but against her will, and ultimately it is her father who is at fault, even though he doesn’t even know she is a girl and has broken the law. Both the princess and the emperor answer that the girl should not be held accountable. It seems unlikely that the story is trying to tell us that if we ever encounter a woman masquerading as a man against her will we should not sentence her to death. This isn’t the kind of realization many of us are going to find useful in our daily lives. So trying to put it more generally: if someone breaks the law, the just thing to do is to look at the circumstances first-the letter of the law should not be applied blindly, but rather applied as specific circumstances warrant. Justice, then, lies in the particular.
We seem to have stepped outside of our story, however, and by entering the answer we’ve stepped into the larger story that tells our story. Obviously, we were always going to have to deal with the complete context if we really want to continue on our path. So what happens when we look at the larger story, where the princess and the emperor answer our question? Both answers are the same, and when the truth is discovered, their reactions are also the same. Yet surprisingly-or perhaps not so surprisingly-their answers and their reactions are not the same. They meet the real situation with anger and humiliation, which were not at all present in their answer to the hypothetical question posed by the story. Only when they are reminded of their hypothetical answer are they able to bring their real reaction into accord with their imagined reaction. This is something new, then: the actions we say we would make in answer to a story are different than the actions we will take when confronted with that situation. Moreover, the answer we give to the story is somehow to be preferred. Why? What is added or subtracted from the story that makes it superior to the real-life situation? Shouldn’t the reality in all cases be preferred to the imitation, as Plato suggested?
There is one thing we’ve remarked in the reaction that wasn’t present in the answer: emotion. The reaction was based on their anger at being humiliated. So what was the answer to the story based on? Rather than emotion, their answer was based on contemplation, reflection, and as we said before, they made their decision based on justice. Personal considerations were set aside as irrelevant to the question. Now we’ve come to a very interesting place, and we can almost say for certain that as entertaining as the tale is, it is not meant to be read as mere entertainment.
Have we reached the end of the story, then? It is a short and apparently simple story, so if we rest here after having gained so much ground, no one will judge us for it. However, I’m not sure we’ve quite answered our question. Do we really know what the tale is about? Not just the story within the story, but the overall tale: do we know what question this story is asking? We have discovered a very interesting answer to an interesting question, but perhaps we should press on just a little further. Let us pause a moment and take stock. Perhaps we can try a technique that I’ve had much success with over the years. It is nothing particularly exciting; we all used this technique on a thousand high school English assignments. Let’s simply try to outline the story and look beneath the flesh at its skeleton. Perhaps our outline should look a little like this:
I. Wedding Toast
A. Story
1. Question: what would you do?
2. Answer: forgive
B. Revelation
1. What she does: becomes enraged and tells the bridegroom s/he will be put to death
2. Bridegroom reminds her of her promise: she forgives the bridegroom
II. Emperor’s Ceremony
A. Story
1. Question: what would you do?
2. Answer: forgive
B. Revelation
1. What he does: becomes enraged and sentences the bridegroom to death
2. Princess reminds him of his promise: he forgives the bridegroom
What do we notice? We notice the symmetry immediately, of course. The two identical situations presented to us; the opposition between hypothetical (would) and actual (does). We also notice an odder feature: a certain irrelevance of character. Who tells the story appears to be unimportant, and the symmetry of action in the two parts of the story by different agents seem to reduce the characters to mere placeholders, ciphers which allow each and any of us to fill their place, like the “Everyman” in medieval morality plays. Let us ask, then, another high school English question: Who is the main character of this story? We have the mother and father of the bridegroom, but since they are only in the story within the story, since they have only a second-hand existence, so to speak, we can discount them. The bridegroom, the princess, and the emperor seem to be our serious competitors, and it is the princess’s point of view we get, though the narration is third-person. Perhaps the princess is our most obvious choice. Yet we already saw that the characters are more like symbols than people, and the action doesn’t really affect the princess that much. After all, it is the bridegroom’s life at stake. Looking at our outline, the bridegroom, too, seems to be a very small part of our story. Who is it that dominates our outline, then?
Let us make a jump, a leap of inspiration, and broaden our question rather daringly. What is it that dominates our outline? The story. Not the bridegroom, but his story takes the place of honor in both parts of our tale. Suddenly, our path has taken a rather strange turn-but let us continue and see where it leads. The story, then, has been named our main character. The tale is a story about a story. What does the story ask of us? Taking a page from Aristotle, let us look for the action in this tale. For that, we must look to our main character-the story. What does the story do? The story does only one thing: it speaks a question. We dare not stop here, for where we seem to be most thoroughly tangled, we are often closest to a clearing. In fact, we may have already discovered our question without realizing it.
We seem to have been running around in circles. Have we gotten nowhere then? Many paths lead in circles, however, and this does not mean they go nowhere. We have been asking what this tale of ours, “The Royal Bridegroom,” asks. Now we have discovered another, truly surprising, question: What does the story ask of us? Perhaps we are asking the same question in different ways. We have been too close all this time, and as we work our way further from the story’s heart, we seem to see more clearly. As we venture further, we always risk losing our way, but let us take that risk and move just a bit further off and see if the big picture comes into focus. We have two stories: the tale itself, and the story it tells. The story within the story asks a question. The tale also seems to be asking us a question. What does the story do? We asked this question as our own, but I think we may have been merely echoing a question we had already heard asked. I think the tale itself asked this question, and when we stumbled onto it we mistakenly took it to be our own. Why do we want to know what the story does? Just as we did before, we need to take a step back. The question the story asks is pointless-we will almost certainly never be in the position of the princess, nor the emperor. Yet taken generally, we discover a practical principle. So perhaps we need to make our question more general again. What do stories do?
Perhaps-just perhaps-we’ve discovered the answer we’ve been searching for all this time: the story asks a question, and that question is: what do stories do? Like the princess and the emperor, we should not stop here, however. We should try to answer the question we’ve been asked. In fact, I rather expect in the course of our wandering we’ve already answered this question, too. Forgetting the content of both our stories, we are left only with questions. Each story asks a question. The answer, then, seems to be that what stories do is ask questions. The tale is not quite finished with us yet: why do stories ask questions? This question, too, we’ve already answered. In the story about the bridegroom, the question allowed us to make the right choice. We could make that choice because we could think clearly, without emotion clouding our judgment. This judgment made prior to really encountering the situation allowed them to overcome their initial reaction and actually make that right choice when they were confronted with it.
We can stop here, without risking overstepping our bounds as readers. We have followed the text about as far as it is willing to go. But seeing as we’ve come so far from the stance of art as mere entertainment, let us risk a little more. The more we venture, the more we stand to gain. We left the common sense interpretation behind for the theoretical method, then dropped that and discovered an even more fruitful path by following Luther and applying the historical-grammatical method. Let us take one bend further and see if we can actually think through the text. Let’s see if we can’t complete its thought.
We dare to outpace our tale only because it is incomplete and, with all that it has given us, it still doesn’t satisfy. The problem is, the tale’s answer still leaves us asking about the tale itself. If stories are supposed to allow us to face situations better by working them out beforehand...how do we apply this answer to the tale itself? After all, if we’re working out a general principle, it must work for all stories. Or must we limit our revelation to a class of stories, a class that does not include the tale itself? If we stop here, it seems we must. Perhaps we have not quite reached an answer that suffices. What is it that the questions in the stories allow us to do? Let us review what we said before about the story within the story:
The question allowed us to make the right choice. We could make that choice because we could think clearly, without emotion clouding our judgment.
Does the overall tale allow us to make the right choice? Or any choice? It seems that the most our story can do is give us a better idea how to read stories. The tale asks a question, and a practical question at that, but it is not the sort of question that leads directly to a choice between actions in the same way. It would be an abuse of metaphor to extend our judgment of the bridegroom’s story to the tale as a whole. Indeed, the idea that we as readers need to question how we think about stories in order to think about stories without emotion clouding our judgment-that sort of conclusion is not only circular, but utterly laughable. Besides the existence of a question, is there anything at all in common between these two stories? Because we could think clearly. Here’s something. Let’s cut out the fat:
The question allowed us...[to] think clearly.
Yes, the more we look at this sentence, the more it seems evident that it can easily apply to either story. Now we are thinking this very thing: not only is the story allowing us to think it, but it is also allowing us right this moment to outthink it. We are well beyond the story now. Not only that, but we are not going to let fear make us turn back. There is something rather liberating here, in this feeling that perhaps we are beginning to think. The story allows us to think. Perhaps even the question is really irrelevant in the end, and all we truly need is the story to speak, whether interrogatively or not. Moreover, it allows us to think clearly. What is it we said before? “Where we seem to be most thoroughly tangled, we are often closest to a clearing.” Clearly. A clearing. We seem to have arrived at that clearing, or we are at least on the verge of it, perhaps with one foot in, hesitating to leave the safety of the path. We have let the story lead us here, by listening very closely to what it says. Yet where are we? What is this clearing? What has been cleared? What is missing in this place that was with us before, all the way here?
Thoughts. Our path all the way along was marked by thoughts, one leading to another. To get here, we were forced to clear all those thoughts and get them out of the way. We were able to begin thinking, and we have discovered one thing further, here on the verge: the clearing is silent. Thinking happens in the silence. All our words, we use them only to use them up, and in getting rid of them, we find-behind the theories-beneath the clutter of thoughts, between the clamor of words-we find we are still capable of thinking. Even if we have only begun to learn how to do it.
Let us rest here a moment. In silence.