射訓狐
Han Yu, "Shooting the Xunhu" (射訓狐, Shè Xùnhú)
You have met me; now meet the work. The four chapters after this one are the demon-expulsions proper — the pieces where Han Yu takes something that has turned up where it should not be and does something about it — and I have arranged them so that you watch the machine in its simplest form first and its strangest form last. The owl is the simple form. It is short, it is fierce, and it runs the whole operation — name, charge, dispatch — with no negotiation and no mercy, straight through to a killing. Everything the crocodile does at length and the poverties do inside-out, the owl does plainly, in a single furious rush of twenty-two lines. Learn it here where it is bare, and you will recognize it everywhere after.
A word first about what kind of bird this is, because the title itself is doing work. The creature is a xunhu (訓狐) — a night-bird, an owl of ill omen, the sort of bird that in the Chinese tradition carries bad luck the way a black cat is said to in the West, only worse: a bird associated with death, with the unclean, with the wrong hours. Han Yu did not invent that reputation; he inherited it and used it. And I should say plainly, before we go further, that no owl was harmed in the writing of this book, and that the real screech-owls of the world are fine and useful creatures who eat the mice that would otherwise eat the grain. Han Yu's owl is not really a bird. It is a stand-in — for a kind of person, a kind of nuisance, a kind of malign presence that fouls a household and will not be reasoned with. Read it as a fable and you will read it rightly. But read it closely, because the fable is where the machine shows its gears.
Here is the shape of it in plain English, so you have the arc before we walk it. A bird flies by night, and its name is Xunhu. It is vicious and sly and pleased with itself, and it calls out its own name in the dark. It comes on the black nights and settles on my roof, loud and coarse and afraid of nothing. It works a hundred evils; it gathers ghosts and summons monsters to its side; it rattles the very brackets and rafters of the house until the plaster falls. A mother clutching her child is afraid to come to the table; how could she spare a thought to guard the chicks in the coop? And here the poem turns and reflects: heaven and earth are great in their virtue, I know, and hatch even an evil creature like this and tend it tirelessly. To let it be would not, I suppose, bring instant harm — the Dipper's handle swings round toward the southwest, the season turns, and such things pass in their time. But who could say this festering evil is not getting worse? It means to rush the very sun. It presses on through the night-watches, its foul breath thickening, and there is no hope of relief even for a moment. So — it cannot be helped — I go to shoot it. I watch for you, bird, my two eyes wide and glaring. The owl starts in terror and falls from the beam, the snakes flee down their holes, and one man cuts the neck through, and the whole brood of chicks withers dead.
That is the poem. Now watch what it is made of.
The machine begins, as it always begins, with a name. The very first line hands it to you: there is a bird that flies by night, and its name is Xunhu. Existence, then name. Before anything can be done to the bird, the bird must be identified — pinned to a word — and the poem spends its first breath doing exactly that. This is the same first move you watched Han Yu make on me, when he gave a rabbit a genealogy before he did anything else with it. Name the thing; establish what it is; and only then act. You will see it again on the crocodile, whose letter opens by stating precisely what a crocodile is and where it stands in the order of things. Naming is not a preliminary to the operation. Naming is the first stroke of the operation.
And there is a small marvel folded into the name from the very first line. Han Yu says the bird brags out its own name for a call — and this is literally true of the creature, whose night-cry was heard by Chinese ears as the sound of its own name. The owl, in other words, names itself. It announces in the dark exactly what it is. For a book whose whole argument is that naming a thing is the first act of mastering it, there is something almost too neat in an opening bird that saves everyone the trouble and names itself aloud — and names itself, as we will see, with a word that is also a death-sentence.
And this particular name is worth pausing on, because it tells you the bird is already condemned by its own reputation. The Xunhu is not a neutral creature that Han Yu must argue into guilt. It arrives guilty — the name carries the verdict. There is a lovely, terrible economy in this, and it reaches its full force only at the very end of the poem, so hold the thought: in Chinese, one of the words for this ill-omened owl is xiāo (梟), and xiāo is not only the bird's name. It is also a verb. To xiāo someone is to behead them and hang the head up on public display — the punishment for the worst criminals, the severed head on the city wall. The bird's name is the sentence passed on it. We will come back to that when the stroke falls.
Once named, the bird is charged, and the charge is a piling-up. Watch the verbs stack: it is vicious, it is sly, it is boastful; it settles, it shrieks, it fears nothing; it works a hundred evils, it gathers ghosts and summons monsters, it rattles the house to pieces. Han Yu builds the indictment by accumulation, one crime laid on the next without pause, the grammar itself hurrying — and this is worth a note for the reader learning to hear classical verse, because the technique is not decoration. The stacking of parallel charges is how a poem convicts. Each clause is another item entered against the accused. By the time the mother is clutching her child in fear, the bird has been found guilty many times over, and no one has had to say the word "guilty," because the accumulation has done it.
There is a real escalation buried in the charge, too, and it is the poem's sharpest stroke. It would be one thing for a nuisance bird to foul a roof. But Han Yu's owl means to rush the sun — to make an assault on Xihe's raven, the bird of the sun itself, the light. The nuisance turns cosmic. The bird is no longer merely dirtying one household; it is pressing against the order of day and night, thickening the dark, encroaching on the light's own territory. This is a move you should mark, because it is how the apparatus justifies escalation. A local nuisance can be tolerated; an assault on the cosmic order cannot. By raising the owl's crime from "fouls my roof" to "attacks the sun," Han Yu raises the permitted response from "shoo it away" to "kill it." The punishment is about to fit a very large crime indeed.
And now the poem does something I want you to see clearly, because it is easy to miss in the rush to the kill, and because it is the moral heart of the piece. Right in the middle, Han Yu hesitates. He stops and considers letting the bird live.
The lines are these: heaven and earth are vast in their virtue, and hatch even this evil creature and tend it without tiring. The verb Han Yu chooses there is worth a moment — it is luǎn (卵), the word for an egg, pressed into service as a verb: to egg a thing, to brood it into being, to let it hatch and indulge it into the world. The cosmos, he is saying, is the kind of vast patient thing that will egg even a monster — sit on it, warm it, let it come to be. It is a strange and tender word to use of a creature he is about to shoot, and that strangeness is the point: the speaker is reminding himself how much forbearance the great order extends, even to the vile. To let it be would not bring instant harm — and here comes the poem's hardest line, and its most beautiful — the Dipper's handle swings round toward the southwest, and the season turns. The thought is this: the cosmos is patient; it nourishes even the vile; and things pass in their own time. The great ladle of stars wheels overhead, the seasons come round, and perhaps a festering evil, left alone, simply runs its course and ends. Why not let the turning heavens do the work? Why pick up the bow at all?
I want to dwell on that Dipper line, because it is the poem's deepest and its most demanding, and it opens onto something that runs under this whole book. The Dipper — the seven bright stars of the Great Bear — was the one fixed clock of the ancient sky. Its handle swings around the pole through the year, and where the handle points tells the season: the old formula — it is in the Heguanzi — runs that when the handle points east it is spring for all the world, south and it is summer, west and it is autumn, north and it is winter. So "the handle swings toward the southwest" is not idle scene-painting. It is a way of saying the season is turning, time is passing, the great order is doing what it does. The verb Han Yu uses for what the handle does — zhǔ (拄) — is a physical word, to prop or lean or come to rest against, as a staff braces against the ground; the handle swings round and props against the southwest corner of the sky. I will confess that I read a good deal into that verb — the image of the turning cosmos coming to rest, of a thing arriving at its proper place in the round of the year — and you should take that as my enthusiasm and not yet as settled fact; the plain sense, the one you can stand on, is that the Dipper marks the season, and that the season, left alone, turns. What matters for the poem is the argument the line carries: the heavens are patient and self-correcting, so perhaps the bird needs no shooting.
It is a genuine hesitation, and Han Yu means it. He is not a cruel man reaching for a bow; he is a man who has considered mercy, considered the patience of the cosmos, considered letting be — and then rejected it. Because the next line turns: but who could say this festering evil is not getting worse? (The line is contested — the phrase I am reading as harboring a criminal, tíng jiān, is read otherwise by some, and I flag it rather than smooth it.) The patience of heaven is real, but this evil will not wait for the seasons; it is escalating now, tonight, rushing the sun, and to wait is to let it win. The hesitation is overruled, and it is overruled by the escalation we just watched being built. The bird has made itself into the kind of thing that cannot be left to the turning of the Dipper. And so the bow comes up.
That hesitation-and-overruling is the poem's moral machinery, and it is worth carrying forward, because it is what keeps the killing from being mere savagery. Han Yu shows you that he considered the alternative. The dispatch is not thoughtless; it is judged. Whether you find the judgment just is another matter — and you may not, and the poem half-invites you not to. But the machine, even at its most furious, pauses to weigh mercy before it refuses it.
Then the killing, and it is fast. It cannot be helped — the phrase is almost a sigh, the officer's regretful "there is no other way" — I go to shoot it. And the hunter's eyes go wide, watching, glaring into the dark: I watch for you, bird, my two eyes wide and staring. And then, in a single line, it is done. The owl starts in terror and falls from the beam; the snakes flee down their holes; one man cuts the neck through, and the whole brood of chicks withers dead.
Notice that the disposal is force, pure and undiluted, and notice what that means by contrast with what is coming. The crocodile, in the next chapter, will be given a letter and three days' grace and a chance to leave of its own accord — a whole diplomacy of expulsion. The owl gets none of that. There is no summons, no deadline, no offer of relocation. There is a bow and an arrow and a cut throat. This is the barest form of the dispatch: the thing is named, charged, and destroyed, with no intermediate step. I have put the owl first precisely so that you feel this bareness, because everything the later texts add — the deadline, the negotiation, the offer of a way out — will register as a softening of what you see here. The owl establishes the floor. Force is the simplest disposal, and here it is, unmixed.
And do not pass over the snake, because it is doing more than filling out a line. A snake appears nowhere earlier in the poem; it turns up only here, at the kill, fleeing down its hole in the same breath that the owl falls from the beam. Why? Recall the charge from the middle of the poem: the owl gathers ghosts and marshals demons, whips them into a faction of its own. The bird was a ringleader. So the snake is not scenery — it is a confederate, one of the marshaled following, and its flight at the moment of the owl's death is a piece of evidence: strike the head, and the body scatters. Han Yu even marks the difference in their fates with two precise verbs. The owl falls — duò (墮), struck, downward, it does not get away. The snake flees — zǒu (走), sideways, escaping, it does. The ringleader is destroyed; the followers merely bolt. Kill the one who organized the faction, and the faction dissolves of its own accord. It is a small, cold lesson in how the apparatus thinks: find the head, name the head, take the head, and the rest disperse without a second arrow.
And now the name comes back to collect its debt. Remember xiāo (梟), the word that is both the owl's name and the verb for a criminal's beheading-and-display. Look at the line where the bird dies: xiāo starts in terror and falls from the beam. The graph that names the bird is the graph that names its execution. When the neck is cut in the next breath, the poem is only doing what the bird's own name has said all along. The sentence was written into the creature's name from the first line; the arrow merely carries it out. That is as economical as language gets — a name that contains its own death-sentence — and it is the gem of this poem, the thing to carry away from it. In the world these texts describe, to name a thing correctly is very nearly to have already done to it what must be done. The naming and the dispatching are, in the end, almost the same act. The owl's whole tragedy is spelled in the one word that is its name.
Let me add one plain thing, since the poem ends on a cut throat and a dead brood, and I would not want the fierceness to be the only thing you take from it. The withered chicks are hard to read — Han Yu spares nothing, not even the young — and he means them to be hard. The poem is not pretending that destroying a thing root and branch is gentle. It is showing you the machine at full and merciless power, precisely so that you will notice, in the chapters to come, when the machine chooses not to use that power — when it relocates instead of kills, or keeps instead of expels. The owl is the extreme against which the mercy of the other texts becomes visible. Han Yu could always kill. That he usually does something else is the whole interest of what follows.
So: you have watched the operation in its simplest and hardest form. A thing was named, and the name convicted it. It was charged, and the charges piled until they justified the worst. A moment of mercy was weighed against the patience of the turning heavens, and refused, because the evil would not wait. And then it was destroyed, utterly, the name carrying out its own sentence. Name, charge, dispatch — with the bow.
Next comes a patient you cannot simply shoot: one too large, too old, and too much a sovereign in its own right to be dropped from a beam with a single arrow. Next comes the crocodile — and with it, the letter.
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