Narratives of Portents, Anomalies, and Fangshu in the In Search of the Supernatural and Official Histories

Abstract

By analyzing the connection, association, and intertextuality between the In Search of the Supernatural and relevant literary genres, this article restores the historical and cultural contexts of the book to grasp its textual nature. At the time of its compilation, the In Search of the Supernatural gathered and integrated a wide range of narrative conventions and writing modes of zhiguai (tales of the strange) drawn from the Official Histories, Miscellaneous Biographies, Master Texts, and Xiaoshuo (minor talk), thereby forming a multi-faceted textual nature. The In Search of the Supernatural, and Official Histories, especially the “Treatise on the Five Elements” and the “Biographies of Fangshu Practitioners” therein, drew materials from one another. This practice typically reflects the narrative styles of portents and anomalies as well as writing modes about fangshu (divinatory and occult arts). Furthermore, it is associated with the discourse on portents and anomalies, and the shushu (calculative and mantic arts), which was taken as a social knowledge system at that time. With the evolution of the discourse on portents and anomalies and the culture of shushu, as well as the development of narrative concepts of Official Histories, people in the Song Dynasty began to take the In Search of the Supernatural as a kind of zhiguai, which was separate from political culture.

Keywords

In Search of the Supernatural / Official Histories / narrative of portents and anomalies / writing about fangshu / zhiguai xiaoshuo

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Higher Education Press