送窮文
Han Yu, "Sending Off Poverty" (送窮文, Sòng Qióng Wén)
Four times now you have watched the machine work. A thing turned up where it did not belong; Han Yu named it, charged it, and dispatched it — killed the owl, relocated the crocodile and the fever, each according to what it was. The apparatus has never once failed. Name, sort, dispatch: it runs, and the noxious thing goes.
This time it does not go.
That is the first thing to know about the last text, and it is why I have saved it for last. In Sending Off Poverty, Han Yu runs the whole machine one final time — the fullest, most elaborate performance of it in the entire corpus — and at the end the thing he is trying to expel refuses to leave, argues its case, wins the argument, and stays. The expulsion fails. And it fails on purpose: Han Yu built a text whose whole point is that this particular demon cannot, and should not, be driven out. After four dispatches that work, here is one designed to break down — and the breakdown is the most human and the most searching thing in the book. To understand why the machine fails here, and why its failure is a kind of triumph, is to understand what the whole apparatus was finally for.
The target this time is not an animal or a fever. It is poverty — the poverty of a scholar, Han Yu's own, the condition of a brilliant man who cannot get ahead in the world. And Han Yu personifies it, as the apparatus always personifies its targets, but he personifies it into five demons rather than one: the Poverty of Wit, the Poverty of Learning, the Poverty of Letters, the Poverty of Fate, and the Poverty of Friendship. Five poverty-demons, who between them have haunted him his whole life and kept him poor.
Notice already how far we have come from the owl. The owl was named in a single word that was also its death sentence. These five are named with care, each given a character, a personality, a case to plead. The machine's front end — the naming — has swelled into a whole dramatis personae. And that swelling is the tell: when a text gives its demons names and voices and arguments, it is preparing to let them answer back. The owl could not answer; it could only fall. These five are going to talk.
Han Yu opens by staging the expulsion with tremendous ceremony — the fullest send-off ritual in the whole book, and he lays it on thick, because the elaborateness is part of the joke. On the last day of the first month — the day the rite belongs to, and one he takes care to call auspicious — he has his servant tie together a willow-branch cart and bind a boat of straw, load them with dried provisions, yoke an ox and raise a sail — a whole little vehicle to carry the demons away. Then he bows three times to the poverty-demons and addresses them with elaborate courtesy: I hear you have a date of departure; I have made you a boat and a cart and packed you provisions; the day is auspicious and good for travel in all four directions; eat a bowl of food, drink a cup, take your friends and companions, leave the old and go to the new — off you go, racing the wind, faster than lightning. You will have no cause to linger, and I will have the merit of sending you off in style. Have you any mind to go?
It is beautifully done, and it is entirely the language of the crocodile dispatch turned courtly. There is the pact language — a date set, provisions offered, a route mapped. There is even the crocodile's own image: the demons could travel faster than lightning, racing the wind, exactly as the crocodile could reach the sea between dawn and dusk. Han Yu is running the relocation-machine — the send-the-thing-to-its-proper-place operation you watched on the fever — with every courtesy the form allows. He is sending poverty away, politely, with a packed lunch and a following wind.
And then the demons answer.
This is where the text does what no text before it in the book has done. Han Yu holds his breath and listens, and out of the silence comes a voice — faint, then clear — and one of the poverty-demons speaks. And what it says demolishes him.
You and I have lived together forty years and more, the demon says. When you were a child, I did not think you a fool. You studied, you farmed, you sought office and a name — and I followed you in everything, never changing from the first. When the door-gods scolded and shooed at us, I swallowed the shame and clung to you anyway; my heart was never anywhere else. When you were exiled to the hot, steaming wastes of the south, and a hundred other ghosts bullied you, it was I — I alone — who stayed and kept you. Four years at the university, breakfast on pickles and supper on salt — only I stood by you when everyone else found you distasteful. From beginning to end I never once turned my back on you. And now, on what grounds have you heard that I should go? Someone must have slandered me to you.
Read that, and feel the machine break. The demon is not a monster. The demon is faithful. It has stood by Han Yu through poverty, exile, scorn, and hunger — the one companion who never left when everyone else did. And it delivers the killing line, the one that turns the whole apparatus inside out: If you can name us fully, it says, then you may be called a sage; and once our true condition is exposed, how would we dare not withdraw? The demon invokes the naming-rule — the very rule the whole book runs on. Name us correctly, it concedes, and we will go. It grants the machine its own logic. It says: use your instrument on us; if you can truly name what we are, we will leave. And it dares him to do it.
So Han Yu names them. And here the text delivers its masterstroke, because the naming — the move that has expelled everything else in the book — becomes, when he actually performs it, the reason he keeps them.
He names the five. The Poverty of Wit: upright and unbending, hating the round and loving the square, ashamed to cheat, unable to bear doing harm. The Poverty of Learning: disdaining mere technique and reputation, digging out the hidden and the subtle, holding the very trigger of the numinous. The Poverty of Letters: mastering no single marketable skill, all strange and singular, useless to the age, writing only to please himself. The Poverty of Fate: his shadow at odds with his form, ugly of face but lovely of heart, always last to the profit and first to the blame. The Poverty of Friendship: grinding flesh and bone, pouring out heart and liver for others, standing on tiptoe to serve them — and set among enemies for his trouble.
Look at what he has just named. Every single one of these is a virtue in excess. Too honest to cheat. Too deep to be practical. Too original to be useful. Too principled to prosper. Too loyal to be safe. He set out to expose his five demons as the shameful things keeping him down — and when he actually names them, correctly, in full, what stands revealed is that they are the best of him. The five poverties are the five excesses of a man too good for the world he lives in. Naming them was supposed to be the act that dispatched them. Instead, naming them correctly reveals that they cannot be dispatched, because to dispatch them would be to dispatch his own integrity, his own depth, his own art, his own principle, his own loyalty. The instrument works perfectly — he names them exactly — and its perfect operation produces the opposite of expulsion. The truer the naming, the more impossible the sending-off. He has named himself.
And this is the turn the whole book has been building toward, so let me set it down as plainly as I can. In every chapter until now, naming a thing correctly was the first step to getting rid of it. Here, naming a thing correctly is the first step to keeping it forever. The apparatus does not fail because it is weak. It fails because it works — because when you turn the naming-machine on your own soul and run it honestly, what it names is not a demon to be expelled but a self to be embraced. The machine meets the one thing it cannot dispatch: a truth about who you are. And a truth about who you are, correctly named, does not leave. It sits down at your table.
The demons do not merely refuse to go. They make Han Yu an offer, and it is the offer that turns the whole grim comedy into something like grace. Stay with us, they say in effect — keep your wit and your learning and your letters and your fate and your loyalty, keep all five of your ruinous excesses — and though we will keep you poor, we will make your name last a hundred generations. A man lives one age — and how long is that? We will set up your name, and for a hundred generations it will not wear away.
That is the bargain at the bottom of the book, and Han Yu takes it. The title says Sending Off Poverty, but the text, as readers have understood it ever since, performs the opposite: it is Keeping Poverty. He runs the entire expulsion machine, in its fullest and most ceremonious form, precisely in order to arrive at the discovery that this is the one thing he must not expel — that the poverty which ruined him worldly is the same poverty that will make him immortal, because it is only the name for his refusal to be less than he is. The five demons are the price of the name that outlasts a hundred generations. He pays it. And watch what he does with the transport he built. He hangs his head and his spirit goes out of him; he raises his hands and gives thanks; he burns the cart and the boat — both of them, the willow cart and the straw boat, the whole apparatus of sending-off — and only then does he usher the demons to the seat of honor. He does not merely let them stay. He destroys the means of ever sending them away again, and thanks them, and seats them above himself. That is not surrender. It is a man shutting the door behind a decision.
And here the machine reveals its final possibility, the one the owl and the crocodile and the fever could only gesture at. There is a disposal beyond killing, beyond relocating, beyond sending home. There is keeping. The last and highest thing the apparatus can do with a thing out of place is to discover that it was never out of place at all — that it belongs, that it is you, that the correct response to it is not expulsion but recognition. The owl was killed because it could not answer. The crocodile was relocated because it could answer and chose to leave. The fever was sent home because it was a noble soul in the wrong station. And the poverties are kept — because when the naming-machine is turned honestly on the self, it names the things that must never be sent away. Kill, relocate, send home, keep: the four dispositions, and the last one is the one that turns the whole apparatus from a weapon into a mirror.
I have arranged this book so that you would arrive here, and now I can tell you why.
The four dispatches before this one all pointed outward — at an owl on the roof, a crocodile in the river, a fever in a stranger's blood, all of them things to be cleared from the world so that order could be maintained. They were the machine doing its public work: naming the noxious, sorting it, driving it out, keeping the human world in its proper accordance. And that work is real, and this book has taken it seriously, and it has also, I hope, let you see clearly what that work quietly accomplished — how the clearing of a river could complete the reconquest of a province, how the naming of a fever could carry the authority of the classics, how the whole apparatus of expulsion was also an apparatus of order, and order is never innocent.
But the machine's last performance turns inward, and it fails, and in failing it shows you what the machine was always, underneath, about. It was about a man with a brush, deciding what belongs and what does not — and the deepest question that man can ask the machine is not what shall I drive out of the world? but what shall I keep of myself? Han Yu spent his life naming things and sending them where they belonged. At the end he turned the instrument on his own poverty and discovered the one thing that could not be sent anywhere, because it was him — his integrity, his depth, his uselessness, his bad luck, his fatal loyalty, the whole ruinous excellent truth of who he was. And he kept it. He let the machine fail, and the failure was the most honest thing he ever did with it.
That is why the book ends here. Because a book about the apparatus of naming and sorting and dispatching would not be finished, would not be true, if it ended with the machine only winning. It has to end with the machine meeting the thing it cannot dispatch, and bowing to it. The poverties are that thing. They are where the instrument, turned on its master, names him truly and lets him stay himself.
There remains only me — the brush that wrote all five of these, and has narrated them to you, and is nearly at the end of both its work and its story. Turn the page, and let me set down the brush.
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